skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's fun to imagine that somewhere sometime a scrawny geek told a chiseled-jaw pilot "Go away or I will replace you with a very small shell script"

That may have been my late father's fantasy. He was the lead engineer at Boeing Military for much of the B-52's avionics. He was not a man much given to resentments and anger, but he strongly disliked USAF pilots, and it was clear the other engineers did as well. They apparently are quite the prima donnas, and arrogant in the extreme.

This engineers vs. pilots trope goes back to the days of the space program. Tom Wolfe talked about it in _The Right Stuff_.
I guess lispers would be able to learn some japanese from this.
Rickroll virus targets iPhones
I think you overestimate the ability of the average person to understand the mathematics of risk.
The Secret? Is this a joke?
I threw something like this together in python some time ago:
http://bitbucket.org/statictype/code/src/tip/pylisp/

Not as elegant though.
Startups != Tech for most of the world.
Unit Testing as the Last Resort for Code Verification
I use what I know best, PHP. It's not the language that builds a good site, its the person. I'd learn RoR if I thought it'd make a difference, but I don't think it would.
Barring Strong AI, the ultimate command to fire will remain under human (remote) control.

Navigation also requires a radio signal (unless you can shrink the mechanical inertial guidance system used in submarines to a flyable size; this is not only difficult but would likely raise the cost of the drones to heights extraordinary even by US military standards.)
Do Make Say Think works wonders for me.
and also Egberto Gismonti.
Why do you think it would work like that? The model would probably be the IRA and gang warfare, not defined territory and set piece battles...
Web Developers Can’t Sell. Sorry.
Most US newspapers also haven't been long on the analysis, history and erudition that lets us make wise choices. And they were conspicuously quiet about a lot of significant questions during the Bush years. Who can you trust? I tuned into The Guardian a lot.

In that sense, US papers made their own bad situation worse. They chose poorly. Too damn bad - for us all.

My reaction to Twitter being mentioned in the same paragraph as journalism is that we're in trouble. Any evolutionary biologist will tell you that the facts aren't part of the social provinces.
Counter examples of conflicts between US allies:

1) Falkland's war between Argentina and Great Britain in 1982.
2) Greco-Turkish war in Cypress.
3) Indian-Pakistani wars (although this example is stretching it, as US influence in India is quite low)
4) The First and Second Cod War
5) The Turbot War
Yes but someone can easily make a browser extension that kills it for them.

Or use firebug and inject javascript into the page.

I think people stopped embedding videos and started using third party tools because it makes it easier. Third party tools will always make it easier. No need to worry about bandwidth, file space, etc (even if the cost of these items are going down). And as long as these tools make it easier, these tools will probably want control of their players and will want to put ads in them.
Ask HN: What do you use for tracking your users?
I use ClickHeat, GetClicky and Google Analytics. I dont really like the fact that you have to wait an entire day for Google analytics to "swallow" the data.
I'm always fascinated about how we see one of these articles every month or two.

You don't have a business until you have an organization. Get a contract in place. Determine ownership before even 1 second of time is dedicated to the undertaking.

It's really not that hard.
Nothing about MythBusters™, just some handwringing about the boundaries of open and proprietary of possible interest to android followers.
Never trust a hippy

My two worst business experiences have been with ostentatiously 'spiritual' people. It's not that they're insincere in their beliefs, it's just a lot easier for them to deceive themselves that the selfish things they do have justifications in them somewhere.

Give me a straightforward 'coin-operated machine' (as an old partner described himself) any day, you can at least trust them to behave as advertised.
Ha I actually had a similar take. The story started very nicely like a good startup story should and in my mind i thought here is possibly another good story about the pitfalls of doing startups that one can learn from. Then got to the secret part and it kind of just completely vaporized that notion and the story became how a sucker got suckered. but the real downside was that he didn't even get suckered out of that much. he did some prototyping, almost partnered up and then decided they were not a good fit. it's not like the couple and his friend made it so no other yoga apps can be made.
The extended warranty for my Mac payed itself in no time. 160 € on ebay (10 percent of the laptop price), and I already got two batteries, one keyboard, three disc drives, one logic board and one display replaced for free because of it.

Pretty much everything broke (except, and that really is funny, the hard drive). But I guess I’m not really the normal case or else Apple couldn’t be profitable. Well, I'm happy with my MBP, but I certainly wouldn’t be if I had no extended warranty.

And it’s heart wrecking horrors like my MBP repair story (that would be really stressful if you have no warranty and are relatively relaxing if you have one) that get people to buy those warranties.
Nice link.

Frustrating to have to login to ACM to read McCarthys - 'A micro-manual for LISP - not the whole truth'

Thankfully, found this hidden away at [pdf d/l link] :
http://www.ee.ryerson.ca/~elf/pub/misc/micromanualLISP.pdf
Too old to start an IT career (C# programming or whatever) at age 50?
I'd really like to know if it's too late to start in the IT field and make good of it. I want to eventually become a consultant for the rest of my life of past age 75. Am I going to be in a tough field to get into if I get a graduate degree in computer science or learn for certifications in a graduate school called SetFocus?
Oh, My, Internet Archive just caught up in a huge way! Props.
"Does anything in Arrington's background make him better suited to cover technology than a journalism graduate?"

Demonstrably yes. The entire J-school educated mainstream media has had the opportunity to do the story that Arrington has done, and yet they have failed. He has done the work that they have not, and done it well. By those credentials, among his other work, he has proven his suitability to cover technology.

Blogs are not yet a replacement for all of mainstream media, but that is to be expected. Blogs are young, and profitable blogs younger yet (5-10 years at best), whereas the mainstream media is still a multibillion dollar centuries old institution. The fact that blogs are any competition whatsoever to the mainstream media is a shocking condemnation of the current state of mainstream journalism.
I'm skeptical about how much of the decision can really be called self-regulating and how much really has to do with Facebook. Since Arrington (a high-profile blogger) called Zynga (a high-profile app developer) out on violating the Facebook TOS, Facebook likely would have intervened if Zynga didn't act first.
How horrible for you.

It just shows that you have to choose your partners extremely carefully, and you must write up legal contracts that will back up your agreement.

More importantly, don't partner with anyone you don't know and trust already.
NoTube semantic television project
Hrrrmmm. I typed in clickheat.com into my browser and was surprised that you used that site - of course, I then googled 'clickheat' and noticed an sf.net project... I presume you use that one.

On a serious note, I'd never heard of clickheat before - sounds sort of like http://code.google.com/p/image-tempest/, which was discussed on HN recently.
Nearly pointless correction: when they sank their first vessel at Coral Sea – that was the first direct battle between carriers, not the first sinking of an opposing vessel. They did a bang up job at Pearl Harbor if nothing else.
image-tempest discussion: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=928282
Is less always more?
Good in-store salespeople also master the art of looking slightly surprised and/or disappointed when you decline the extended warranty, the implication being "Oh dear, Sir cannot afford the extended warranty, Sir is not quite as magnificent as I estimated him to be."

The disappointment, however, is genuine as as the article points out the warranty is about 80% pure profit.
These would be useful in something like the Closure Compiler http://code.google.com/closure/compiler/. Most seem like too much of a micro-optimization to use in real code though (especially given that they may change over time).
There was a bit of research done on this back in the 60s using children and marshmallows. The kids that could resist the marshmallows tended to grow up as successes. The ability to resist instant gratification as a kid seemed to correlate more highly with future success than did IQ, Grades, University, SATs, GREs etc.

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/05/18/090518fa_fact_...
http://www.eatmedaily.com/2009/09/psychological-experiments-...
Java String Concatenation and Performance
Mainstream media is certainly not dying - the real killer of newspapers is and has always been TV. People seem absurdly blind to this now that the internet is dealing that last 2 HP of damage.
One way to market this thing, for commercial planes, might be to tout the sheer impossibility of hijack...
It often seems to me that emotional evaluation frequently amounts to shallow, parallel processing. For example "feelings" based on previous experience which you can't necessarily immediately deeply analyse and explain, but typically encompasses an enormously broad set of circumstances you've experienced in the past. When we hear a line like "I'll create a gui in visual basic, see if I can track an IP address" we don't immediately have an impartial, rational response as to why that doesn't make any sense, the shallow emotional response kicks in first and you roll your eyes and groan.

If you then needed to explain in detail and in a logical way why that response was provoked, you can, but it's not what's at the immediate cognitive surface of the response. Take a far more complex example that just leaves you feeling kinda vaguely uneasy at first glance (spacetime is quantized) and I think that better illustrates what I'm getting at.

Rational, logical evaluation on the other hand is a deep, focused analysis which can't quickly account for every little thing you've ever experienced, and often initially leaves you with the nagging feeling that "you're missing some little thing".

The constant attempt to link intuition to emotion is probably based around the fact that people don't have deep objective reality based models of the universe as a general rule, so it's very difficult for them to be able to imagine the kind of person who does.

On the other hand, it's not that hard to understand that there are intuitive patterns to human emotion, even amongst those that have trouble grasping those intuitive patterns, thus the two become linked in the minds of the majority.
> My reaction to Twitter being mentioned in the same paragraph as journalism is that we're in trouble. Any evolutionary biologist will tell you that the facts aren't part of the social provinces.

They aren't by default, I agree. I don't think we'll ever have a world of fact-checkers and I'm glad we never will.

But I think it's likely that we'll see groups of passionate writers who strive for accuracy in their writing, not because it's an organization but because it's their individual style. Just like the world of tech blogging has led to these ecospheres, where there's the TechCrunch/Mashable crowd and then the Gruber/Kottke/Mann crowd, and each one has a different approach that different sorts of people like.
China's graduate glut grows
Most of the soundscapes from WildSanctuary (http://bit.ly/2IHocS) have a pretty amazing effect on my productivity.
For general analytics I use Mint (http://haveamint.com/), it costs $30 (one time fee) per site, but I think it's worth it for the nice UI. They also have lots of great plugins.

I've also been using Mixpanel (http://mixpanel.com/) for tracking more nitty-gritty user actions.
"This dude even got his black belt from a man trained by Chuck Norris"

He got his black belt from a man trained by Chuck Norris? Wow! That's like, so impressive. Amazing. That must mean he IS Chuck Norris.

More seriously, yes, stay away from those uber-charismatic types, and trust your gut! Never do a deal with someone if it smells fishy or doesn't seem to add up. Your gut is your best weapon.
Oh the UI is awesome. I was reading(on Shaun Inman's blog) that he is inspired by geometric relationships, that's basically how he drew the logo for Mint and Fever.
Sweet!

I'm hacking together a perl script right now using the Mechanical Turk API.

It's automatically spliting up the mp3 files, generating the html forms, and loading them into MTurk.

I'm going to use a 2x coverage for each chunk and see what happens.

This is a brilliant idea. Thank you for the suggestion! I can't believe it didn't occur to me before -- and we are _very_ heavy users of AWS.
IT yes, programmer no. Look at .net, PHP, etc.
You can't please everyone. If you try, you will eventually leave yourself open to manipulation.

A lesson best learned as early as possible.

I call it a win.
Wait for old age! As you age your ability to focus closely gets worse (the eye muscles weaken) but your distance vision generally doesn't change much.
> 1? Did you mean an int?

1

> Float?

1.0f

> Double?

1.0

> 8 bits? 16?

Those would actually need the type.

> 32?

1

> 64?

1ll

> signed?

1

> unsigned?

1u

C copiler already does that "inference" when you pass an attribute into a function - so why not when you declare the variable?
My Comment to Joshua:

I appreciate what you're saying here, but I think you're mischaracterizing the point of both of our articles. Neither of us proposed our mockups as comprehensive redesigns or attempted to address anything past the basic visuals. I wanted to buy shoes, and I found it to be a really frustrating experience, so I said something.

If the door to a retail store is hard to open and you complain about it, does it make you an arrogant prick for failing to think through all the potential reasons for the problem? Maybe the company handyman only comes every two weeks. Maybe there's a mountain of paperwork required before any repairs can be made. Maybe the staff needs approval from management. Does that make your frustration with the door situation any less relevant? It definitely makes you empathize with the staff, and speaks volumes about the company's ineffective management, but that doesn't change the fact that the door is really hard to open, and this is a problem for you as well as other customers. Understanding the context is important, but it doesn't make our critiques any less relevant.

You argue that, "it’s easy to 'design' when you’re unencumbered by things like metrics, creative direction, business acumen, sales experience, actual functionality". Of course, but think about all the companies that manage to get it right. Huge, lumbering corporations like Amazon, JetBlue, and Virgin all manage to pull off great user experience despite facing the same challenges. Why shouldn't Zappos and American Airlines be held to the same standard?

I found the Zappos website insanely frustrating to use, so I spent an evening identifying some of the problems I spotted and added a mockup to clarify. Yes, I was a little inflammatory, but the overarching message was a positive one. I wasn't trying to tell them how to sell shoes or reinvent their business - my article was intended to show how a few simple changes overtop of the existing website could help make it easier to use. Blurry images have nothing to do with metrics, business acumen, or sales experience. If this helped push them towards making their website easier to use in any way, then I'm happy.

I feel awful for any designer who has to deal with Dilbertian management and bureaucracy, and I agree with the previous commenter - our frustration should have been primarily directed at the management team at either company. That still doesn't change the fact that there are designers responsible for crafting the pixels, and the pixels show a general lack of care. This might be due to the culture of the company, poor direction, or a myriad of other factors, but it doesn't make the work itself any less sloppy.

I'll be the first to admit that I'm a brash 23-year-old, but I'd rather say something and risk looking like an asshole than continue to patronize a company that doesn't care about their customer experience.

-Andrew
Your comment (and its upmods) is why, my friend, even the most educated and interesting Americans sound like incoherent cavemen when it comes to discussions about finally having a health care in this country: here we tend to look at each other as consumers and customers first, and human beings - second. What an unfortunate cultural difference, to say the least...

I have no idea where this sudden drop comes from. Do you really have to be born somewhere else to clearly see the difference between healthcare and food? You don't charge people who are scared, in pain or unconscious. It's like urinating in public or having sex with your sister: does it need to be explained why you don't do that?
trust your gut
That's exactly my point. It's a gamble - how likely is it any of the new search-based start-ups will overtake Google? - but it could pay off.
I can promise I wasn't being arrogant. The title was just meant to catch eyes and only targeted at Ruby devs.
Kerja Sambilan Di Rumah - Home
I would never tell a salesperson he/she can't code just because he/she is a salesperson.

That would be a foolish over-generalization.
I think she's right. But she's not saying anything 100 other posts haven't tried to pound into our heads.
Ask HN: What do you do if someone has your startup's twitter name?
So we have just discovered that someone else already has "our" twitter name ( http://twitter.com/splitthebill ) !

Bad planning we know, but what would you do? Ask the current owner if you can have it? Use an abbreviation? Something else?
BTW we launched our alpha today: http://blog.split-the-bill.com/its-alive-45
The suggestions below are solid:

R
Python + matplotlib

I've used and been impressed by both. Starlight and Palantir may fit your needs, but those tend closer to enterprise applications -- I get the sense you're searching for something lighter.

Some more suggestions:

DAVIX [D] A live CD distribution containing lots of visualization tools, from capture to parsing to presentation.

SecViz and their "graph exchange" [0] -- lots of pictures of various datasets, usually with details of how it was produced.

Personally, I found most packages too restrictive and fell back on Processing: http://processing.org A project out of the MIT Media Lab, it's a generic graphics framework you can (among other things) produce 2D time series graphs in. It's still tedious, but tedium is traded for control.

Some of my projects in Processing:

http://jjguy.com/som/ - Self Organizing Maps

http://jjguy.com/life/ - Conway's Game of Life

I don't have a great time series write-up posted, but I've been working with Robert May's population model recently. [1] You can find the source at [2] and example output image at [3].

[D] http://secviz.org/content/the-davix-live-cd

[0] http://secviz.org/category/image-galleries/graph-exchange

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logistic_function#In_ecology:_m...

[2] http://jjguy.com/populationModel.pde

[3] http://jjguy.com/normal.png
Wow, you're right:
http://www.w3.org/TR/css3-selectors/#child-combinators

It also reminds me of HAML (discussed recently):
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=925573

Looking at one aspect: The idea of abstracting the verbosity of HTML/XML by just stating the element name once (instead of both open and close tags) is not new. Many people have implemented this idea, but it doesn't seem to catch on. It could be that that very verbosity is a significant factor in the success of HTML and XML (both have widespread adoption).

SGML (the common ancestor of both HTML and XML) allowed a "</>" close tag, which goes part-way towards reducing verbosity, but it was deliberately omitted from HTML and XML. Both have been much more successful than SGML. Though it's hard to know what impact that particular omission had, greater abstraction is harder to read for newcomers, and therefore probably decreases adoptability...

Perhaps it's the Abstraction vs. Verbosity being played out in another forum e.g. Lisp abstraction being more powerful but Java verbosity being more popular.
Do you have a trademark on the name? If you do, contact twitter and they will give it to you (I worked for a company that did this). Even if you don't, it's worth a try contacting twitter since the account seems inactive.
Now that we know someone can take down the power grid (for real, not only in Matrix), I wonder what the response from various governments will be:

- actually isolating the critical systems from the internet, or

- ISP-level and backbone monitoring and suing everyone who tries to use nmap...

unfortunately I've got bad feelings about this.
They'd have to be pretty goddamn stup...
She doesn't sound the least bit sorry.
Uncertain. Definitely not a programmer.
Umm, I started to read this, but got distracted by the link to xkcd...
I would agree, I am a sales person learning to code, but my coding skills will never be great because that is not my focus. My focus is sales and marketing. In the same way a developer can learn a little bit of sales and do an OK job at it, but will never be great, because that is not their focus. Now if a developer were to stop most of his coding and immersing himself in sales, he could pick it up with time, in the same way I could pick up coding. But that would be a waste of time for the both of us because we have already invested in the skills we have. Not that we shouldn't learn a little bit of the other side, that is very important. But focus on what your good at.
You may have meant 分かります or even perhaps 解ります but 判ります is closer to "to know" in the sense of judgement, as in "It is a handy to have a dictionary around when you don't know which of the homonyms is the most correct usage." (It is perhaps easier to remember if you know the word 判断 already.)

(Are you perhaps writing on Linux? Word to the wise: the Microsoft IDE typically presents alternatives in the order of most commonly used, which is helpful for language learners because typically they don't know obscure, error-prone usages like that. Most IDEs I've used in Linux present words in an order I can't even begin to comprehend -- I mean, come on, who would predict 名護や to be what the user probably intended over 名古屋？ This means on a Microsoft IDE you can usually just hit space bar and the thing that comes up will probably be the word you know and meant, but for other IDEs you need to be able to pick the word out from the alternatives or, alternatively, read the inline usage notes and choose appropriately.)
Well, you choose the offer provider, who then chooses the offers. Unless you're going to have someone watching the offers 24x7 there's never going to be any fool proof quality guarantee. I would think at Zynga's scale though such a guard would be worth the expense.
Well, they choose the offer provider, who then chooses the offers. Unless you're going to have someone watching the offers 24x7 there's never going to be any fool proof quality guarantee. I would think at Zynga's scale though such a guard would be worth the expense.
As for Analytics: You can see the current day's traffic by extending the view period to include today's date. By default it only displays up to the previous day, but you can usually extend it to include today's date.
Displaying your Twitter status with PHP