skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Binocular coordination of the eyes during reading
>"Dawkins has contributed interesting, novel, scientific & philosophical points to the discussion over the years"

Certainly! I think his biology writing is terrific. I've certainly learned a lot from the man. "The Ancestor's Tale" is one of my top five favorite books of all time.

On the other hand, his religious writing is essentially what you find on atheism.reddit.com. Nuance? You won't get it from this man on this topic. It's us vs. them, and "them" are controlled by an evil mind-virus, so it's not even worth listening to their opinion.
I'm using GitHub. It may occasionally be down, but they have a really innovative new server architecture, and once they've ironed out the problems (which I believe they've almost done), it should be as stable as a rock. Plus, it's git so you have a full clone of the repository that you can work with even while it's down.
Judging from the sheer volume of replies you've made to every HN thread on the subject, one has to wonder if you have a dog in the fight.
Ask HN: review my webapp, tunemiser.com
The site and the idea are really simple: find the best price for digital music. Right now only Amazon and iTunes are supported.

When I started out, Amazon would have the cheapest price for some songs/albums while iTunes would be cheaper for others. Recently, Amazon seems to be the same price or cheaper for everything, at least in the US stores.

The site is hosted for free on Heroku, so it's actually profitable (for a very very small quantity of 'profitable') =)

It ain't the prettiest (any designers out there willing to give it a go?) but it works. Lemme know what you guys think. Would you use it? If not, would anything convince you to use it?

http://tunemiser.com/
How to collaborate with a large team of others. We had group projects, sure, but they were small enough that usually one or sometimes two guys would do all the coding and everybody else would just fuck around.

The stuff you have to learn to effectively collaborate -- including task estimation, task splitting, source-management, communicating progress effectively, knowing when to ask for help, and more -- is basically what you spend the first year or two of your working career learning.

I don't know if it can be effectively taught in an academic context, but I really wish it had been. It's a timeless skill that transcends the actual technology used to get it done.
Personally I think that the logo itself looks more professional. However those bright blue buttons are too much. The old gray buttons were more attractive.

The sidebar, however, is impeccable. The instant and available filtering options are incredibly useful.

Edit:

I just noticed something fascinating. The old Google linked from the SERP through a proxy link which redirected to the actual result. The new Google links directly from the SERP to the result. In other words you can now copy a link from the SERP and have it be the actual address of the result, not just the address of a Google redirect to the result.
My dad used to run a company that was contracted to program defensive missiles

Sounds to me like there's probably classified information there, in which case step #1 is probably to phone the government and ask them what they want done.
Duplicate - originally linked here http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=966888
First, congratulations on being offered the opportunity to talk to your peers. I would echo many of the comments here to go outside academia and CS and focus on what you have learned by coding for pay and pleasure.

How to build your personal online coder reputation, begin contributing to the community (open source, blogging) - focus on what you personally have done/not done and your experiences good and bad with sharing and collaborating. And what's it like starting? or working at a startup

My point here is focus on experiences that have made you learn. Come in as peers who have been out in the external-college real world and tell them about the real world (calibrate their expectations)

I think most of the students are expecting a standard tech briefing, and I challenge you to switch it up on them. Promise some soup du jour tech topic but change it to talking about the real business world (change it after audience is seated so you get the students who probably would have skipped a real-world/business topic oriented lecture).

One of the most valuable lectures I've ever crashed was one for Ch.Eng seniors on how to get the job you really, really want. I directly respect the impact of that lecture with giving me enough real knowledge to apprach interviewing with confidence.
Heh. I disagree with you on both counts. Guess it goes to show how varying individual tastes are.

I like the blue buttons. They're very playful, which is what Google wants. I also like that they don't look like ordinary OS X buttons on the Mac anymore. They're tasteful blues, not particularly tacky. I also like the border colors of the search bar.

However, the sidebar seems cluttered to me. The design seems cramped, and I hate the whitespace between the highlighted option and the 1px blue bar on the right. Something also seems off with the top/bottom padding vs. the font size on those buttons. Overall the site feels more cramped and less quietly useful than early Google with its single row of links.

I agree with you on the logo, though. I also like where the "About 128,000,000 results (0.35 seconds)" is positioned, as well as the Advanced Search placement. So half really good, half bleh.
Hacking Google Trends for 5-yo girl with rare brain cancer
I had to paste the code into the google search field to get this to work in Firefox. If anybody is having trouble getting this to work with the address field, try that.

----

I kind of feel bad for google that they got stuck with a semi-crappy logo. That they'll always have to work with it.
Speaking as someone who used to have a TS clearance, it's unlikely that they contain any classified info if they were sitting around at the guy's house. But the info could be sensitive, or it could possibly (unlikely) have been classified after the fact, so the advice is probably sound.
10 Ways to Reuse or Recycle Floppy Disks: http://planetgreen.discovery.com/tech-transport/reuse-recycl...

#1 on the list is send them to Greendisk, a company that takes disks and all other kinds of stuff too, including the magnetic tape.
The site linked too is fugly, but it was the only story on Google News related to this. I actually found this story by glancing at Google Hot Trends, where this girl's name is currently #2. Just thought it was an interesting idea.
Social design is just one dimension of the social graph
This is a very interesting project...I'm surprised it hasn't generated more discussion on HN. I can only hope you succeed with your goals...the fact that you're 100% compatible with hg is really impressive. I hope Git is up next. I will definitely be introducing this our team this week. Thanks.
Erlang's style was very strongly influenced by Prolog, and in Prolog code, it's quite common to see e.g. "X1 = X + 1", but having X2, X3, etc. as well is rare - there's usually not a succession of modified versions of a variable in the same function (clause), because it's a sign that you could break things up better. The same is true in Erlang - code with several such variables is written with a strong Java accent (or whatever), not in idiomatic Erlang.
I'd like to know as well - seriously.
Where do you find the historical data and the data feeds to start building such a system though?
Agreed, it's too fast and confusing.
Tony Arcieri (creator of Reia) just created a branch called Neotoma:

http://github.com/tarcieri/reia/tree/neotoma

So it looks like he might have changed his mind since this blog post.
To everyone who doesn't know: #prgmr channel on Freenode

I was once contacted about an old ticket and asked by Will if it was solved, since it was solved on their IRC channel (and was not marked as solved maybe). It shows that they make sure they respond to all the tickets. Really sweet of them to do it.

I agree with mahmud. Same here friend, I've been that "walking PR agent" for prgmr ever since I started out with them.

Besides Prgmr is for those who like the real raw stuff - bare bones VPS with shell access.

The SLA is always something you don't want to read with any hosts :P Coz it includes all the bells and whistles they say they would provide you if they go down,and that would sound like they would go down :)

There were 3 reasons why I use Prgmr:
1.) They support Paypal (yes, I cannot use a credit card since I'm not yet eligible to have one in my country)
2.) The pricing is great
3.) They have this small 128mb pkg on which I can develop and test my app. So when launching I can upgrade my plan. Thus saving me a few dollars which might sum up to one more month's payment when I launch :)
Part of the problem is the way science is funded. I am sure you have heard about "publish or perish". There is a lot of competition in science for grants. I have seen obvious cases of freeriding on someone else's hard work and not crediting them for the data for example, and if you are not listed as co-author or at least shown as the person where the data came from, then it is harder to get your next round of funding.

Also I see examples of people being hesitant to publish their data, as data collection is often the hard and lengthy process, and then people are afraid that someone else is going to scoop you on that discovery in your data. This means that people end up being cautious about releasing their data.

Now, I am not defending this behaviour, but I can understand what is happening. Personally I think that science grants should come with requirements for publishing raw data and methods completely openly.
Don't forget to try bustaname.com when looking for an available domain. I've gotten lots of good domains on there over the years.
Indeed, The Invention of Lying by Ricky Gervais makes the case that religion wouldn't exist at all in a world without liars and peddlers of false hope. That seems pretty damn blasphemous to me.
In their print work, the artists remove the bevel and drop shadow from the logo and it looks 10x better:

http://www.aaronsw.com/2002/flatgooglelogo
I use it for closed source work, but I consider it mostly a backup repo. It costs me $7 a month and I feel I get enough value from the many other projects I track to make it pay for itself as a one-stop interface.
The new logo looks great. I've been using http://go.infinise.com/ in place of Google for a while because it looks cleaner. Google has approximated this UI much better.
Magnetic monopoles produced in lab--or, at least, their equivalent
+1 for each of these.

My university's CS & Soft Eng courses had them, but they were bullet points in the curriculum that the lecturers were neither interested in nor competent with.

So, source control meant "use RCS on your local machine for one assignment (individual, not group work.)"

Automatic testing meant writing some scripts that produced specified predictable results, for the lecturers to run the assignments against. No result verification, no structure, no test design, definitely no TDD.

Continuous integration was simply missing, although this was seven or eight years ago so I guess it was a newish concept back then.
ASP.Net Repeater [ VB .Net Tutorial ]
Fun!

Thanks. Maybe they'll take them off my hands or something.

Thanks for the responses.
I think teaching them half-assed like this is even worse than not teaching them at all. Students' initial impressions are that version control is a waste of time and that testing is pointless busywork, best done at the end.

It seems like those attitudes can persist well into many working programmers' careers.
i have two linodes, one for high bandwidth (v2d7c.sheepserver.net) and one for low (electricsheep.org and scottdraves.com etc). the admin tools are awesome, there is hardly any (if any) downtime, performance is great, and prices are low. two thumbs up.
The question then becomes: which approach does a better / more accurate / more useful job of explaining the world?
Religious people don't necessarily see that as a goal.
If she had used her real name, instead of the pseudonym, in this salon.com article her books would sell better.
Atheism is more loaded & prone to dumb attacks & dumb counter attacks. So sure, his pure biology writings are less baity then his atheism writing. However, he has contributed to the atheism discussion in the same way.

Much of it stems from his work on evolution by natural selection as a metaphysical (rather then a biological) theory, a definitely worthwhile "philosophy of science" contribution to the atheism debate.

This allows you to take fluff level stuff (eg Seth Godin, "ideavirus") & put it in to a serious framework, the subject of this article. Memes, Memoplexes, whatever is to organism as meme is to gene (is there a word for this?) It also gives you a framework for evolution as an example of non-god creation. This has to me been a real eye opener. If you want a modern contributor to the discussion who has contributed tangibly, Richard Dawkins is one of the top candidates.

This article is not just mindless, it uses provocative (and perhaps shrill) analogies, but it is argued.

The subject of this article is an area where Dawkins has made more novel contributions & is more qualified than "Ancestor's Tale," which is not based (according to me recollection) on his own work and is written intentionally as a popular science book.

In my opinion, you either you exclude the whole topic as inherently shrill or you admit Dawkins.

#Now we are the ones being shrill.

[edit] I don't want to sound like too much of a fan. I am not advocating that Dawkins be unchallenged. I am advocating that he has earned a hearing. There is all sorts of stuff in this article I am not satisfied with. EG "4 Is Science a Virus"
There are lots of examples, if you look around - but I'm not sure how many of them were successful, as I haven't looked for data on that.

John Dies at the End was originally published in a serial form online, though it has since been taken offline. It's been published, and is going into its ... second printing, I think, soon. From what I've heard, the fanbase is quite devoted (at one point, copies were sold for >$100 because of how hard it was to get them - the first printing was fairly small).

Ichor Falls, a blog collecting short stories about the titular town, and the weird stuff going on around it, has a book - though that's recent enough that I don't know if it's successful.

I also recall a zombie novel, which was published in serial form online before being published in physical form. Quite good, as I remember. Might have been called Empire - the plot synopsis fits what I remember, but the online serial version doesn't seem to be available any more. Once again, I don't know if it's what you would call successful.

... actually, what's the definition of successful? I would say that it's simply being published, after already been released online for free and building up a fanbase; however, I expect that most others would tie it to sales, or the amount of money the author gets from it.
> However, current tastes and sensitivities make it highly unlikely that a comedy group would even attempt making a film like Brian today.

Dogma?
If you divide the sticker price of my college education by the number of class hours, the implication is that one hour of instruction costs about $80. In the harsh light of that fact, I would still have paid a few hundred bucks to learn CVS or SVN in college rather than learning bad habits. My first two jobs programming (academic and quasi-academic) didn't use source control, and I kept my bad habits until I got into industry and was dragged kicking and screaming into professionalism. I think source control should be taught starting the first day of CS101. If the exact tool changes in 5 years, oh well, you can learn the new tool. But it should be an automatic, instantaneous, ingrained part of your process from day one. (Ditto IDEs and basic Unix system administration.)

Four courses that have been worth substantially more than $80 an hour to me: Japanese, Technical Writing, AI (mostly because it really should have been called Introduction To Scripting Languages), and (weirdly enough) my single course on assembly. That was entirely due to a twenty minute discussion with my professor that had an effect on me, the general gist of which was "Any performance problem can be solved by caching, if you do it right." I haven't programmed a single line of assembly in my professional career but every time a performance problem comes up I cache and the problem goes away. (And is replaced by a cache expiration problem.)
> If you want to learn how to be a coder,

> go to DeVry, or read some O'Reilly books

> and hack away. Your career will be mercifully

> short and uneventful.

What a condescending thing to say.

I went to art school.

My career has been going strong for 15+ years.
While Dawkins has some good points, I don't think attacking religion is a way to go, it leads to hatred and tribalism (us vs. them). The better way is to educate people better and let them decide what to believe in.

In Denmark where I live there is little belief in God and religion isn't that important for people - - this hasn't been done by attacking religion, or presenting religion as a virus, but by educating people better. Denmark is filled with churches, but almost nobody visits them regularly.
very concerned that they were caught

I don't think this is it. There is a system for exposing confidential correspondence to the public; it's called a trial. If there is reasonable suspicion that fraud is going on (and lying about your data to get more research money is fraud), then charges can be filed, and the internal emails can be legally obtained. (Or, a condition of receiving research money can be that all your emails must be made public.) Some Random Hackers breaking into private computer systems, though, is not acceptable, no matter how noble the goal. Some judicial oversight is necessary to protect the researchers. (Even criminals deserve privacy.)
Slicehost goes down 20%? I was aware of the 10% payment credit for paying max(monthly_bill * 6, 240) in advance, which works out to be a 9.1% discount. Is there an option I'm missing? I wouldn't mind putting a few hundred in my pocket over the next year.
Open Source as a Model for Business Is Elusive
Interesting but opinionated and dated. "Wage slavery" became an acceptable and necessary trade-off after the move from an industrial to service economy. This was possible in the US due to the rise in immigrant population (population boom of cities) and the automation of agriculture.
I live in canada and it's working fine for me :P
2 things:

1 - didn't work for me when (using firefox 3.5.5)

2 - I have to say that the screenshots look impressive with left-hand column, but in reality the interface will also have a right-hand column for advertisements, which will clutter the interface considerably.
You wouldn't. Moving the goalpost is a fallacy, though given your complete inability to do original research I doubt you could ever find that out on your own. This thread started because you asked for unreasonable evidence in response to a post that said "They are proven to be unreliable over a signifcant period, and we don't know if or how often that's also true of the past." (emphasis mine).

This is a clear claim that climate science researchers have not done basic statistics when presenting new models. This claim has been substantiated by nothing except you requesting more and more detailed analysis from non-experts, which you discount every time we provide it because you assert that you would only listen to an expert.

Ironically, you are actually failing to respect the authority of experts, because the discussion is fundamentally an accusation that experts are failing to do basic statistics. You are accusing us of not being experts so you can't listen to us in the defense of the experts you're attacking by proxy.

I seriously fucking doubt you understood any of this. But it doesn't matter, I won't return. I have no tolerance for people who argue by asking questions and petulantly demanding unreasonable proof while providing absolutely nothing of their own.

Thanks for ruining hacker news.
Bookmarked. Your app is awesome.

The very first thing I'd do is find an alternative to the "hammer time" animation, as much as I love that animation.

Have a background with a darker border behind the iTunes price, similar to your Amazon price. Make it light blue.

I would try to get three colors at the top. Definitely choose a good background color/gradient to apply at the top, to accent the tunemiser text. This is to draw the attention away from the fact that hard text is not anti-aliased.

Get to work on a logo, and good luck!
Psalm 19:1-3
Calling Twitter’s bluff
> easy introductions to various things.

right on! imho, one of the main points of a diverse undergraduate education is to give you exposure to introductory-level courses in lots of different fields. it's unreasonable to imagine that you can master a field just by taking a few undergrad courses in it, but that's not the point of those courses. that's why i think that general-education and non-technical elective courses are such important parts of the curriculum, even though they don't directly teach you anything applicable in your future job
Dawkins' definition of virality seems to be ever-shifting. At the end he defines science as a meme but not a virus by saying that virus requires "spread me" to be baked into it.

If this is the case, however, then "mystery is a virtue" is not viral as he claims earlier. Neither is wearing baseball caps backwards, for that matter.

Additionally, most scientific organizations and universities include an element of spreading their methods, so they too have a "viral" component.

When Dawkins claims that the fact that "the selective forces that scrutinize scientific ideas are not arbitrary and capricious" makes it non-viral, I get the sneaking feeling that whether or not something is a virus depends heavily on how Dawkins feels about it.
If you want to learn how to be a coder, go to DeVry

It's worth noting that neither a DeVry "degree" or a Computer Science degree will make you a programmer. If you just get the DeVry education, you will know what functions you can call in the Java core library. If you just get a CS degree, you will know what B+ trees are. But neither of those alone get you a working database management system; that requires excellent coding skill, and an excellent understanding of the underlying mathematics. "The real world" requires that you have both sets of skills; only having half the education will make you less than half the programmer.

I think this is a wider problem in our field; the "academics" don't want to admit that the "industrial" aspect of programming is important, and the practitioners don't want to admit that the academics are quite-often onto some very good ideas. Turns out that both sides are important. The practitioner doesn't want to waste time reinventing simple concepts (which is why we have code organization techniques that were popular in academia long before they were popular in industry), and the academic doesn't want to reinvent industry (turns out that knowing about automatic testing and source control make writing your new researchy programming language a whole lot easier).

So it's clear that to be an effective programmer, you need to be well-versed in both the practical and academic aspects of the field. Dismissing the practical aspects by saying they are a waste of time and that some dude from a trade school can handle them for you is ... short-sighted.

(Oh, and if Perl is a "dinosaur technology", Java, C++, and C are "pre-life self-replicating molecule" technologies. Just sayin'.)
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=967237