skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've been struggling with this one for a while, and finally realized that it's just an easy way of avoiding getting my hands dirty and a form of procrastination. There's really nothing bad that can come out of designing and building an app from start to finish, even if you're the only one whoever uses it. I finally dove into my first full app and if nothing else it's a great hobby and gives me something to look forward to after work.

That being said, I'm still of the thought that an identical clone isn't something worth sinking hundreds of hours into; I think you need at least SOMETHING that is different (if only just a bit). Example: After a recent 2 week cross country road trip, I created a quick and dirty travel log to track our adventure on our web comic site. When we got back, I planned to implement this as a web app, but discovered Everlater, which does EXACTLY what I wanted to write (even down to the exact target markets and usages..). Reading their development blog felt like they were stealing the thoughts out of my head, so when it gets to that point I think finding another idea is best.

Ideas are a dime a dozen - if you need help, just use this list http://www.sixmonthmba.com/2009/02/999ideas.html.
IE is Being Mean to Me [video]
Signup for Get Glue
They link to Quantcast in the blog post, but its a bit hard to see because its part of the headline:

http://www.quantcast.com/p-19UtqE8ngoZbM
> Do you agree?

I think we should discuss it to make sure we're on the same page. I booked 313 for the afternoon.
I guess they can't say unless you sign an NDA...
Apple "Tablet" & Chrome OS are Meaningless- Phone is the Future of Computing
Yeah, that's where it happens the most. I think someone should do something about it.
Blah blah blah... he can harp on the lecture system all he wants, but at the end of the day you need a couple things for "success": 1) a motivated student, 2) an interested, accessible instructor.
IPhone Web App Debate Continues: Pie Guy
Smashing Network Logo and Badge Design Process
After the last couple of PPK articles about native-apps vs webapps, I think this was a great example of a webapp that works well even in offline mode by using the local storage manifest.

It even addresses some of the issues I raised in a comment yesterday about my webapp development frustrations by dealing with them client-side (in javascript) instead of server-side like I was doing.

Yesterday's comment: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=959587
Wikipedia 'loses' 49,000 editors
I read other things than realclimate.org. I'm surprised, given the now proven non-impartiality of that website, that you would cite them.

Anyway, I hope you'll visit this site. It's pretty good. I have others, so tell me if this doesn't answer your questions better than I did.

http://www.geocraft.com/WVFossils/ice_ages.html
Let's apply some logic: the seed can not be very random, otherwise one could just use the seed generator instead of the random generator.
I'd love to see Apple come out with a game console. I don't know if it would destroy 360/PS3 per say, but I think the Wii would be an easy target.
Alternatively, Consolas is really good (and free), especially on Windows with ClearType turned on. Looks pretty good to me at large sizes.

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=22e...
the entire debate is moot. even if we are causing global warming and the worst case scenarios are true, the way we're going about curbing it is out of fantasy land, not engineering and economic fact.
No scientist of any kind ever publishes his/her source code, as far as I am aware.
This also plagues local sci-fi fandom. I always hear about the cool new idea that person is never going to finish or even start.

The thing is the person got the some attention and endorphine rush from said attention.

Why go though the actual work?
Concentrate on Writing with OMMWriter
Let's put that to a vote for the agenda for the next meeting.
Where do you get your numbers from? I'm curious, since they seem to be at least an order of magnitude off from sources that come up in naive searches. (E.g. the 9-26% figure cited in Wikipedia for the percent of greenhouse effect due to CO2, including water vapour.)

I'm not making any economic recommendations; I'm just someone who doesn't know very much, who is trying to find, say as an impartial Martian might, what the best interpretation of facts are given the available data.
Prospective employers (or their agents) often contact people who are not actively looking for work. And sometimes those people end up accepting offers even though they weren't actively looking. I got my current job that way.

The data on skillsets (resume info) is what the prospective employer is looking for. Whether or not the person who posted it is "actively looking" is not so relevant.
Sure, every time I see a classic meeting, the meeting is about how everything sucks or how we could do if only (put anything here)

Instead, when we (developers) have our mourning scrum meeting, we just need 5 minutes to discuss what to do for the day.

Shit can happen, and sometimes a meeting is really necessary, but from my experience it doesn't justify the real cost of it in most cases (number of people multiplied for their hourly rates)
http://www.here.am

http://www.rickyvanveen.com

http://superamit.tumblr.com

http://jakelodwick.tumblr.com
Ask HN: What do you use to track twitter activity?
Do you use tweetdeck or something else?
I can't believe FastCompany quoted joshu from here as well. A stupid blog post from mashable using that comment is ridiculous but excusable, but FC?

I wonder if they asked him if they could use that quote...

One of the Valley's recent poster boys for this phenomenon is Joshua Schachter, who sold his social bookmarking service Delicious to Yahoo in 2005 for a reported $30 million. This summer, on an online discussion board, he told a commenter that Yahoo has "killed a lot of good startups, wasted a lot of engineers' time, etc." In summation, he added, "I wish I hadn't sold [Delicious] to them."
It's only $8... why not just buy it? Even if you never use it, you're not out much.
Still have pagers where I work. We (developers) share one and rotate it around the team (each person has it for a week) for application support. As far as I can tell, it's better than any of the alternatives.
LinkedIn co-founder sees IPO likely, but not soon
While there have been countless important geometric and mathematical insights applied to/developed in computer vision in the last decade, it's really the rapidly increasing computational power available on commodity hardware that has made many advances in real time vision possible.

During the four years I was doing my PhD [in real time vision, a couple years ahead of Qi Pan in the same group], the amount of useful image processing and linear algebra/geometry that could be computed in 33 ms jumped dramatically.

The computer vision community is collectively realizing that techniques that were always mathematically and statistically sound, but considered too expensive for online processing, can now feasibly be incorporated into real time and interactive systems.

There are fewer rather than more 'tricks' now, and more straightforward representations of the underlying mathematical and probabilistic structures. This is a good thing.

Likewise, real-time reconstruction techniques appropriate for desktops in 2004 can now run very well on embedded platforms.

It's an exciting time for computer vision, as the set of feasible applications is exploding.
Yes, but part of the draw of software in general is that one vendor can theoretically serve the entire market, whereas a car dealership can only serve a given area.
"Now"? Isn't this old news? I've been using Google for OpenID for ages (measured in internet time). Or am I missing something?
Welcome New Twitter User. Now Get Lost
$18 for the stencil + $8 for the pad... $26 could make your day. What are you waiting for?
Someone actually just posted the llvm development mailing list with a backend they wrote for LLVM so that it can generate JVM bytecode (in the same way in generates x86, PPC, etc.) and it uses this lib, cool stuff.
Which required a URL that everyone used (https://www.google.com/accounts/o8/id). This uses your Google Profile URL (e.g. http://www.google.com/profiles/johnsheehan) as the signin URL. Someone with more intimate knowledge of OpenID can feel free to explain the technical names for these things.
As I write today, I'm referencing the following sites that a quick Google search turned up. I'm frustrated that I can't find another one I like, but this one is very good.

http://www.geocraft.com/WVFossils/greenhouse_data.html

For one thing, the wiki article (which, again, is quoting realclimate.org, so is already tainted) is giving you a number of how much total contribution CO2 has on earth's greenhouse effect. It's not telling you how much effect _man-made_ CO2 is having, which is obviously less, as even they would admit that CO2 is not purely made my humans.
Isn't that the point of Fuck-You Money? Being able to say things like that without caring who quotes you out of context? :-)
The Benefits of Pissing People Off
it seems like an easy decision to me.

get out as soon as you get your FU money. Once you have the FU money, you can afford to continue gambling with startups.

The web is littered with thousands of startups that were once "hot", you gotta quit while you are ahead.
Spin-based electronics gets boost
Gotta give them credit for not copying anyone else.

I can think of all sorts of uses, and the ones involving disreputable commerce (i.e. porn delivery) should provide enough revenue in the short term so that the clean ones can take root.
>Tense is surprisingly difficult to nail down in English.

I'm blaming it on whoever misplaced most of our inflections and our case system like 800 years ago. Old English was a cool language.
The problem comes if you choose the wrong niche and become overspecialized for that niche. It could be that at first that niche does just fine, but after some number of years some technological shift might occur that would render your very specialized skills obsolete. That's the danger.

Not saying that finding a niche is a bad thing, but you have to be flexible enough such that you can find another at short notice if need be.
It's plain common-sense that a big increase in one of the inputs to the climate has a good chance of causing disruptive change.

It is rarely noted (but undisputed) that the baseline climate response is logarithmic in carbon dioxide concentration (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Svante_Arrhenius#Greenhouse_eff...). Since, absent feedback effects, exponential increases in CO2 levels lead to linear temperature changes, it's likely that common sense is not a reliable guide.
Speaking only for myself (as someone who consistently scores on the far end of T), viewing it as a spectrum of F<->T makes a great deal of intuitive sense, and directly mirrors my personal observations. Just as I tend to quickly write off very emotional people as irrational, I suspect someone leaning strongly toward F would similarly write me off as a heartless bastard.

From your perspective, as someone sitting mid-way between the two, I can appreciate how that distinction might not seem as clear-cut. It's something I hadn't considered before; thank you for that.
Aside from the font you chooce, make sure to have ClearType on with Windows or Anti-aliasing on with OS X :)
>> plain common-sense

in non-linear models with feedback is often times incorrect.
Help request: How to find programmers for a startup
Thanks for the reply. You are right, of course. My last sentence came out sounding downright stupid :) Tricking someone might work temporarily, but not in the long term.

I meant something more along the lines of how difficult it is to present one's work in the best light. For example, one employer might see a diverse set of past projects as creative, while another would think the applicant doesn't focus enough on one specific area.
Tell PG: Duplicate posts
It looks like some posts are getting listed twice.

For example:

IKEA's brilliant Facebook campaign : http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=961325

Wakemate (YC S09) helps you kiss groggy mornings goodbye : http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=960163
I hate articles like this with a passion. It makes everyone think you'll just get acquired easily. Let's start building companies for the long term. Stop building shit that you just want to get rid of. IPOs are really complicated beasts, but I like them as an exit option, because the company keeps going. Could you imagine if facebook sold to yahoo? Holy shit, I cannot even fathom that outcome.
HN Bug?
Currently items 5 and 6 on the front page are identical apart from the number of points ...

5. IKEA's brilliant Facebook campaign (cnet.com)
75 points by oneplusone 5 hours ago | 12 comments

6. IKEA's brilliant Facebook campaign (cnet.com)
71 points by oneplusone 5 hours ago | 12 comments

And now more are appearing.
Finding engineers/programmers seems to be a real problem for potential entrepreneurs.

I thought I might try and write up some of my experiences - I plan to post this to a whole bunch of the London start up lists where the worst offenders hang out. If you have any suggestions for improvements I would appreciate them.

Thanks!
Nobody seems to be mentioning that a major source for climate research has made a shameful mockery of the scientific process. Regardless of whether their conclusions are right or wrong, they are doctoring numbers to fit their desired conclusions and sidelining scientists who raise doubts.

As scientists and engineers this should disgust us. The sanctity of the scientific process is a much bigger deal than climate change. It embodies all our technological decisions and it cannot be tainted.

It would be as if the supreme court was burying evidence to convict people they thought were guilty. It's wrong. Even if we think it achieves the right result. Once you lose faith in the system, it ceases to be useful.
No one is even remotely close to speculating that.
Looks like a wonderful walk, or dreadful depending on what else one wants to achieve in life.

I do enjoy wandering, but keep my walks local. I consistently travel on foot 70-110 miles per week (higher in summer) ~4000miles per year. It's nice being able to control one's route and very relaxing. These forced paths across the unknown require great planning and cost (not working for a year wouldn't sit well with me).
This is a massive improvement over the old way of doing this -- use a $LANG compiler targeting 32-bit MIPS and then emulate that processor in Java (not too hard as the memory models match up).
Are SaaS offerings less reliable than on premise systems?
I am trying to find the connection with Philip Greenspun and Gregory Clark who wrote the book in question. Are they the same person and Gregory is his pen name?
A big difference between "climate science" and other sciences is that other sciences make predictions and perform tests. The duty of the scientist is to bend over backwards telling you all the ways that their results may be flawed.

Also, climate scientists have strong incentive for there to be AGW. If it turns out AGW isn't happening then most will be out of work, and their expertise will be deemed relatively useless.
Dupuyer Montana wool shop finds success in cyberspace
AutoAuth, DOM Inspector, Feed Sidebar, Firebug, FireFound, Links Like This, OPML Support, ScribeFire, Tab History, TubeStop, TwitterBar, URL Fixer, and YouTube Comment Snob.

Of course, I'm biased towards most of these, because I'm the author of all but DOM Inspector, Firebug, and Tab History.
also Erlang is now on Github (official repo) : http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=961462
It's a common anecdote. Where do you think fish out of water comes from? You may be skeptical about the biking but it's a fact, I work with these people :)

In an ideal world height is directly related to strength obviously. Weightlifters spend 5-10+ years training, are genetically gifted for strength, maxed-out muscular potential. Swimmers aren't what I would call ideal candidates for this!

Also, read graph D. Swimmers are typically taller and have less cross sectional area than other athletes, which shows in their poor non-water fitness assessments (read the lit if you are interested). Gymnasts are shorter (170ish+-10) and have more cross sectional area for their size. I've worked with many sub elite gymnasts who went almost directly into national rankings in many sports (e.g. cycling, weightlifting, football, american football, track and field disciplines).

Influence of sports background on leg muscle coordination in vertical jumps:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12712802?ordinalpos=1&...

The book "sports talent" has some interesting tidbits for you as well.

Anyway, this has gone on long enough - let's agree to disagree :)

Anyway, let's agree to disagree.
Why Google Will Buy Milo.com
corporate work spaces always bothered me this way. i don't have any trouble focusing and working on stuff. in fact, i only started using hacker news (let's face it, it's procrastination) when i started working at a company after college.

it drained my moral to see others goofying off at work, and to feel my own self tired at, say, 3, but hanging around until 5 just to blend in. you can bet when i got home i didn't want to work, whereas when i contract or work on my own projects i'll happily go play tennis at 3 and then work in the evening once i've settled down.
would an increase in CO2 from 313ppm to 383ppm over 50 years worry you?

No, but an increase from 313,000ppb to 383,000ppb would scare the crap out of me. Look how much bigger and impressive my numbers are than yours?!

Sorry, I couldn't resist. You really are talking ppm here, so keep in mind the number of 0's to the right of the decimal point before getting too concerned. That's not to say that in some systems, ppm increases are not concerning. However, your point was "it looks like a lot", and that's not valid, without actual perspective on how much a 1 ppm increase will effect the system.
> mightn't the earth work better when it is warmer? - yters

The majority of history has seen a warmer earth. Warmer means life-friendly. I just worry that we fail the transition.

The planet earth is currently in the middle of an ice age. At regular intervals polar ice caps expand, causing widespread glaciation and causing widespread devastation to the planet's ecosystems.

An argument for global warming: http://timtyler.org/end_the_ice_age/
"Doesn't the idea that there are thirty million piano-playing Chinese children imply that there is also a massive impending expansion in total addressible worldwide market?"

How many top piano players do you really need in the world? Especially a world where music is so easy to reproduce and distribute. When it comes to cello players, there's only one YoYo Ma - how many other notable cello players can you name?

"though it is not, as my little sister will tell you, for law school grads"

Your little sister may want to rethink that. There was an article in the local paper here a few weeks back about how recent college grads are having a tough time finding work. One of the people profiled graduated from a fairly well respected local law school back in the Spring and has yet to find anything. She said that she and many of her former classmates are now on food stamps.
Of course the downside to this attitude is that after years of just building every application you want regardless you end up with a half dozen semi-adopted apps that you need to manage hahaha...
Jquery vs mootools: my initial thoughts
NSFW spam, in case anyone was unsure (flagged).
I'd really like to use my Google Profile on my own domain name like profile.myname.com.
I suspect the folks at CRU are keeping quiet in the hopes that the media, the people funding them and policy makers will ignore it. So far, that seems like a pretty reasonable hope:

Here is the media completely ignoring the issue of data deletion, utterly shitty code and scientific misconduct: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/21/science/earth/21climate.ht...

Here is a policy maker ignoring it: http://www.nytimes.com/cwire/2009/11/25/25climatewire-obama-...
The site url is http://beaverslide.com/
Introducing WebROaR v0.2.3: Ruby Application Server
I am really intrigued what the redacted ##magic marker'd##-out line could be...

PRINCE OF PERSIA--Cheat Key Version
August 27, 1989

??? Enable cheat keys

With cheat keys enabled:
[Return] Disable cheat keys
SKIP Skip to next level (up to Level 12)
################################## (Redacted!)
TINA Go the end of level 12
R Restore full strength
BOOST Boost max strength (origstrength) by 1
Z Reduce guard to 1 unit of strength
ZAP Zap guard (he drops dead)
Women Who Want to Want
Try delegation. http://www.windley.com/archives/2007/02/using_openid_delegat...
What if your name is really Billy?
Interesting. When the download came through, it said it had code that fixed the camera focus problem. Odd.
A minor tweak to your search to fix the false positives: http://www.google.com/codesearch?q=[^\w]int\%28random\.rando...
I think the comment by Teleco Dweeb: http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2009/11/virtual_mafia_... , makes this post worthwhile.
Another point I'd add/emphasize is: don't treat engineers as stupid. This includes downplaying complexity and the amount of work involved, but also not being serious about the business side of things.

The worst thing to say is "Just build it, and let me worry about selling it", or "Everyone will be excited about this, trust me". To an engineer this just sounds like you haven't done any actual work yet, besides thinking of the idea, and you are unlikely to do anything, ever. If you expect a coder to build something for you, have a plan of work that you will contribute (even though it will change).

Also: "Anyone who hasn't spent a whole night awake writing blog posts, calling Japanese leads and obsessing over traffic numbers will probably view the product as the most important thing in the enterprise."

Should it be "will probably not view the product..."? And what about partnerships a being bad thing to mention? This would be helpful to me too, to know more about what to watch for :)
Spoken German has even fewer tenses. You have the present tense, which you use for talking about present and future events, and the perfect, used for talking about the past. That covers at least 95% of all uses.
The idea of 30 million piano-playing Chinese isn't important because we need piano players. It's important because the fact that someone can take piano lessons implies a certain level of economic status beyond day-to-day survival. It implies a growing middle and upper class. Those implications lead to the conclusion of much larger markets, which leads to the idea of more wealth creation resulting from people filling those markets.