skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
An aside reminder to everyone whose system shows spare CPU and bottlenecked IO: are you compressing everything you could?

It can be hard to get over the sense that always compressing and decompressing everything that goes to disk is wasteful. But available CPU cycles left unused are marginally free and can't be stored us for use after the moment passes. They should be "wasted" to achieve even a slight improvement in overall throughput.
I think as the author of the piece writes that the 'there is more than one way to do it' has something to do with that. As for the first and third points, they were about perl, not about Ruby, Java and C++. Sure, there are other languages where you see the same kind of behaviour, but the 'perl' gurus that I've had the non-pleasure of working with over the past couple of years were without exception detrimental to my view of perl.

I know it shouldn't matter but if every guy you run in to that tries to ram a certain language down your throat is basically viewing their code as a means to achieve job security then that doesn't really help.

As we're speaking I'm still busy disentangling some perl one of these guys wrote, it's the biggest mess you've ever seen. Perl certainly gives you a lot of rope to hang yourself with.

In perl you not only have to contend many times with ugly code, on top of that it might be written in a way that is completely alien from the way you would write it.
Censoring contradictions
Do you have any reasonable supporting argument for that statement?

This reads close to: "iPhone takes it way too far. Phones are for calling people, not surfing the web and running applications"
12 Creative Passport Covers 
Some are beautifully designed, some extremely durable, some quite hilarious.
Like this:
http://github.com/chriseppstein/compass/tree/master/lib/comp...

Many of the CSS3 attributes are here today in the form of vendor prefixes. But there are subtle vendor differences and you have to duplicate each property several times. It's tedious.

But compass provides a consistent API across all the browsers and it's available today.
There's a large glut of "this new service is like foursquare" submissions over the past few days.
Jeff Vogel Indie Game Developer releases new RPG (Mac Only For the Moment)
Very impressed by the date handling. I entered Thursday to Saturday and it figured out what I meant.

However, I can't make it understand ranges further in the future. For example, I'm going to All Tomorrow's Parties from 11th Dec to 13th Dec and I can't make Plancast understand that.
The Economics of Climate Change
You're not what we call an "early adopter".
The IPCC report is a political document. It uses results that support its position and ignores everything else. The entire book "The Deniers" is a collection of complaints by scientists that the IPCC twisted their results to support its agenda. Ironically, nearly all of the scientists still "believe" in global warming, they just think THEIR work was misused.
Spanish startup is making an android phone
Cosmetic Suegery
We currently use it with our clients, and we haven't had any problems with it.

From the client side, when you invite someone, they get sent a link with a url in, that automatically logs them into the image, and it's one click image commenting in exactly the same manner as the designers side. They also get emailed when new notes get added by you, with a link in each email so they can go to the proof.

If we have any issues with clients, we'll be the first ones looking to update the UI...without the clients, it's pretty much a useless tool after all.
What the police think matters on the scale of hours, days, weeks -- because even if the courts decide otherwise, practically, the remedy is likely to be limited to the return of the equipment, with no penalties for the police. (The pattern of abuse would have to be egregious, or damages very tangible, for courts or legislatures to rule otherwise.)
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Although this succeeds in eliminating 90% of the search space for a 2x2 grid (and even then I think your sums are slightly wrong) this doesn't even dent the 17x17 case. The 2x2 square in the top left of that only has 23 (or fewer) configurations, but now you can probably no longer permute the colors. The savings are irrelevant in the larger cases.

Besides, to some extent you are preempting the problem. You've counted the number of colorings of the 2x2 grid and found there to be only a small number. The evidence suggests that the number of colorings of the 17x17 grid is either 1 or 0 (up to permutation of colors), but that doesn't mean the search is trivial.

I may not have expressed that clearly, but I hope I've conveyed the point.
Those are situations where scientists hire professionals to do the programming, so that supports joe_the_users's point.
Seriously? Documentation on the front page of Hacker News? This is some dry stuff. I guess I should just be thankful it's not yet another review of the Go language.
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By hand??? As opposed to what exactly? Isn't most code written by hand?
> In perl you not only have to contend many times with ugly code, on top of that it might be written in a way that is completely alien from the way you would write it.

After seeing code which used files on disk because the author either didn't understand or trust arrays, I've come to the conclusion that code not designed and written and tested specifically with maintainability in mind will quickly become a big ball of mud, independent of language.

Perhaps certain languages offer syntactic tricks for obfuscation and cleverness in the small, but the mindset that prefers cleverness over maintainability will always be able to perpetuate great evils throughout a codebase.
> If you want a cup of approximately coffee-shaped liquid in the morning, Starbucks is great because it's the same coffee anywhere.

Which really is the point of branding in the first place.
What I meant is that some ideas are very expensive and time consuming to turn into products, even if you work like hell to make sure you build something as minimal as possible. If you're working on an idea like that, and you believe that you can't truly iterate until you release, then these ideas are less iterable. Of course you can try and test the idea against the market before you build the product - talk to customers, create focus groups, do dummy advertising to gauge customer response, but you can't really know until you build the product.

For example, we're building a very high performance database. This type of software, even in its minimal conception, takes at least a year to build (at best). We talk to customers as much as we can, and we've adjusted our direction according to their feedback, but we can't iterate on this in the same way as the web guys can. We can't release a slightly different version every week and see what happens, we have no choice but to collect requirements, make the best judgements we can, and build according to those judgements. If, after a year or two of building, we find out that our product doesn't sell, we will have spent a lot of time and money at that point, and our options will be very limited. We can't easily switch direction because the software is so complex to build, and we can't do many incremental releases because the deployment process to customer sites is very time consuming. If you have a suggestion on how to iterate this type of project, I'm all ears :)
That is a nice implementation indeed. It makes me want to be able to cdr '() in scheme.
Both Red Gate and the angel investor were asked for permission before these articles were published.
My favourite quote from the Rocket Lab website (talking about a rocket powered dragster):

The rocket engine has been fully built but we haven't yet had the opportunity to build a suitable vehicle... or find a driver willing to endure acceleration of up to 420 km per hour in five seconds.

Awesome :D
As opposed to using Ragel, as you'd have known if you'd read the link.
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It's the hackyness of what's documented. Embed a Turing complete language in HTML, then run it when the page is requested from an embedded HTTP server.

What's not to love? It's either a stroke of genius or an amusingly inappropriate implementation of an embedded scripting language.
Maybe Chandra (the other CEO) has been told that he must go ahead and dump TechCrunch, despite the fact that Chandra knows it's impossible.

He can a) tell his shareholders to shove it, or b) get Arrington to tell the shareholders for him.

That's my guess.
Funny story, turns out I forgot to commit our latest date_parser before Thanksgiving break and then accidentally over-wrote it with the one from the repository because I thought it would be the most up to date.

So, the current date parser has some bugs that were caught and fixed and then lost. The good news is I have re-fixed most of all those bugs and I just tested "11th Dec to 13th Dec" and it parsed it correctly. The new parser should be pushed live in a day or so.
Joi Ito has another view on this:

http://joi.ito.com/weblog/2009/04/15/followup-to-my.html
Let's debate whether it is expected behavior or not.

I propose that there is no other way for Analytics to handle subdomains than what you describe, because there is no way for Analytics to be certain that domain.com and sub.domain.com belong to the same site.

Of course, an option to inform Analytics of this fact would be nice, but out of the box I really don't see how it could work differently.
We have been going back and forth on how to do this, the problem is we really don't want to clutter the simpleness of "what, when, where" with lots of other dialog boxes, so we are trying to find the best way to integrate advanced functionality like privacy and still remain simple.
100 Killer iTunes Feeds for Serious Science Geeks
You can find lectures, videos and interviews on all types of scientific subjects, from computer science to engineering to life sciences to physics. Here are 100 killer iTunes feeds for serious science geeks.
Additional functionality for Google Chrome's Developer Tools
Seconded. That's how signup should be done.
"But in this decade, according to one of the leaked documents, the total shot up to £11.8 million,"

Holy shit, ELEVEN MILLION POUNDS??? They must be criminals. Nobody makes that much money legally.

Just think how many weather stations, researchers and assistents you could buy for that. Oh wait...

But yeah, research involves a lot of politics.
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As far as I know the code to do exactly this is:

pageTracker._setDomainName(".example.com");

Warning, warning: when you start playing with Google Analytics you will quickly learn that it is Enterprise software: built to be infinitely customizable using massive amounts of work to just short of your actual needs but no farther, and filled full of sharp edges to cut yourself on.

That said, it is a very impressive piece of software in a lot of ways. (My internal analytics are a lot more useful to me, but my heart aches for how easy it is to dig into arbitrary things in GA.)
The HTTP interface on VLC is not new - what would be interesting is to find the reasons for them doing it this way.

As a product VLC is really good.
Reading that article I was actually shocked at how little money was being spent studying climate change.

Meanwhile, being a "skeptic" is good money these days:

http://tinyurl.com/22go3n

http://tinyurl.com/yzgojux

http://tinyurl.com/2kzqd7

http://tinyurl.com/2ozbrc

http://tinyurl.com/yhealhs

http://tinyurl.com/mrmb9j

http://tinyurl.com/yfq5tam

http://tinyurl.com/yhuhceh

http://tinyurl.com/yf8pekp

(not spam, all links relevant in terms of providing some balance)
This is expected (and documented) behaviour - GA won't correctly track subdomains out of the box, as even though the (uncustomized) GA has subdomain-accessible cookies, the user id depends on a hash of the hostname (less any 'www.') (thats the first section of the utma cookie). This can be fixed by either turning off the hostname-hash-in-id, or setting the cookie-domain/hashed-hostname (but turning off the hostname-hash-in-id will then require setting the cookie-domain such that the subdomains & main domain can touch the GA cookies, as by default this doesn't strip the leading www. from the cookie domain).

The doco is pretty good, but you need to verify what's really happening, so Firebug's Net panel is really useful (but don't try and read the latest GA javascript unless you need a migraine for some reason).
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61 Free Apps We're Most Thankful For ?
The title is "I've implemented a new HTTP/1.1 request and response parser by hand"

My question was, how do you implement a new HTTP/1.1 request and response parser if it's not by hand. Isn't most code written using hands?

I've written one too... big whoop.

Meh anyway...
Stopped reading at "sliding keyboard"
choice!
Yes, that's it exactly.

https://www.google.com/support/googleanalytics/bin/answer.py...

That's the relevant page in the support area.

My mistake, I should have realized their default is set to treat subdomains as different sites because that is probably a more common use case.
There's no need for URL shorteners here
Maybe because everything speaks HTTP, so it's a good protocol for doing remote control? Or you could build a custom controller interface trivially, which could be accessed from a remote control (iPod touch?) on your local network?
Bugs in the software flash the message "Something's out there"
I agree with the article that any global policies have to be very well-founded since they involve very large sums of money, but these research grants? It's pocket change.

My guess is that at the bottom of this there's actual data that shows worrying trends that the involved scientists think are important to continue doing research on, and that some of them fudged it, exaggerated a bit, and polished it a bit to make it easier to "sell" it to the politicians in charge of handing out the grant money.

But that there's some sort of malicious conspiracy to fool then entire world that everything is going to hell? For what's practically pocket change that pays the salaries of a large group of scientists? No, that makes no sense.

And what have they spent the research money on? Hookers and blow? Of course not, it's been spent on climate research and taking us closer to understanding what's happening and what, if anything, we can do about it. Spin-off effects of this is that money has been going into research projects for cleaner energy, more efficient energy use, alternatives to fossil fuel, and all these things are undeniably good.

The media hype, that I could live without, and the Copenhagen Climate Conference is becoming I don't know what, but I hope that cooler heads prevail and that actual non-fudged data and science is used there, because there is of course a lot of that, just because the leak showed one instance of bad data, it doesn't mean that the entire thing is bad.
Build Robust Solutions for Web Applications using Spring with Hibernate
I was involved in a similar project ten years ago. At the time we had no problems getting to ca. $500 with a 10.9" LCD/touch combo, obviously otherwise with very modest specs (a NS x86 clone, 32MB RAM, 16MB flash) but enough to get Opera running on a stripped down Linux with a number of other apps. Sourcing a reasonably priced touch screen was definitively not what killed that project.

I'd be very surprised if $300 would've been impossible today, even with a larger screen, though of course that depends on the rest of the specs. Especially given the specs of my new $500 laptop. Sure, it lacks a touch layer, but its also spec'ed far higher than you'd need for a pad like this.
Kids Should Get Moving to Avoid Obesity
I'm not sure how secret that sauce is. Declaring bankruptcy in one form or another is common throughout the world.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bankrupcy#In_individual_countri...
Why would someone want to re-invent ColdFusion 1.0, only 15 years late?

If they'd invented a smooth and tight DSL for doing video control, I'd be impressed, but this has the feel of someone getting excited about RPN and looking for a way to crowbar it into the product. Something relevant (and really cool!) for VLC to do with a build-in web-server would be one-click serving of a H.264 stream directly in a player (sniffing for a HTML5 video-tag, otherwise serving a flash-player). But no, we get RPN and a syntax that'd make a 1999 ASP developer cringe.

For the record: VLC is amazing, and one of my first installs on pretty much any computer. I routinely stick it on friends' Windows machines, only to hear them rave about it a few weeks later, because they never have to troll around for codecs.
I think in the future they should probably only award prizes to things that actually exist, on sale.
There was a similar article based on (I think) the Mac chrome bug tracker. Basically Gears stopped working and the Google developer said, in the future they were supporting native HTML5.

This shouldn't be a surprise as in the past they've said Gears is just a way to get HTML5 into browsers that wouldn't otherwise support it.
I quite liked

"Thanks to Android you will enjoy a practical mainframe, extremely supple and efficient."

"Besides, all ONE handsets are “friendly developer”."

Surely they could have found an english speaker to proof read it?
Keyboards really seem to be polarizing smartphone users these day. I am not very fond of sliding keyboards, but some of my friends would never consider buying a phone without a "full" keyboard...
How the Digital Economy bill is trying to kill open Wi-Fi networks
I've had the opposite experience with Tries v. Hash tables. Though that could be a result of the Trie implementation. Dual array tries have really impressive lookup times, especially compared to the naive implementation... Insertion is pretty bad though. (Though that can be mitigated: http://www.gongcaichun.info/PPT/21.pdf)
Simple PHP JS loader
How do people do hardware startups?
My shoelaces cross over each other four times in each shoe. Using the different directions of crossing, that's eight undetectable bits. You can do a lot with eight bits.
Twitter Style Load More Results with jQuery and Ajax.
1. raise lots of money
2. talk to taiwanese ODM (HTC, Asus, Inventek, etc.)
Virtual Infrastructure in Cloud Computing Just Passes the Buck
... if you tell Plenty of Fish you want to date blond
nonsmokers but spend all your time gawking at
nicotine-addled brunettes, the program will adjust

Of course, if your business model was affiliate links to other sites, when they didn't find what they wanted on your site, such an algorithm would also be good;
Ask HN: Clojure as a first progamming language?
Hey everyone,

Thanks for taking the time to read. I’m interested in trying out Clojure for my first programming language--at least, the first programming language in which I intend to commit myself to becoming proficient. This might make more sense if I give a bit of background on my situation.

I have minimal experience (a couple college courses) with Java and C++, and I’ve tinkered with HTML, PHP, et al. on my own time. For a while, I’ve been intent on picking a language to learn for web application development, since got the startup itch. But being the person I am, I had to survey all the possible options first, since this is my first programming language we’re talking about. That wouldn’t matter to a lot of people, and maybe it shouldn’t to anyone, but I feel there’s a chance an experienced programmer has a certain connection with his/her "native" programming language, and if so, I want to choose a language worthy of that--none of this Java/C++ nonsense.

So after a few months of general web information gathering, I found and became intrigued by the ideas and concepts behind the Lisp family of languages. Being a math guy myself, I felt Lisp might be a more natural fit for my mind, that I might have a stronger natural connection with the language than I would with anything else.
That said, of all the Lisps, I’m leaning toward Clojure at the moment due to its many features which make it far more ideal than most Lisps for say, web applications--which are what I intend to code once I’ve achieved the level of skill necessary.

With all that in mind, what do the readers of HN think about choosing Clojure for a first language? Are there any reasons I may want to consider going in a different direction? How necessary is it to be proficient with, for example, Common Lisp or Scheme, before picking up Clojure, for somebody whose mind hasn’t been molded to think in terms of C or Python or Java or whatever?

Thanks again for reading. I appreciate any and all responses.
Google selling Ice Cones in India :O
I get the feeling that the entire purpose of the CRU email leak is to create FUD leading up to Copenhagen. What exactly was the motive of this anonymous whistleblower? If the person who leaked these emails had the best interest of climate research in mind why were they conveniently leaked right before Copenhagen? I do not believe this leak was done in the interests of clarity because I believe the timing of this leak was significant to the whistleblower. I do hope this leak leads to more openness in climate research. But I don't think openness was the motive of the leaker.

I also doubt any analysis of these emails and their conclusions so close after the leak. It will take time and analysis to understand how the supposed infractions and rigged data actually affected the dialogue surrounding climate change. It's not enough to say someone fudged data. What we need to see is how that fudged data affected the actual debate over the climate's change. And that analysis should take longer than a week.
"full" keyboard is negated by the fact you need a pin to press the keys. Or have miniature fingers. (IMHO)
$429 USD. It's really just an HTC Dream (T-Mobile G1), how are they different?
Fring Brings Free Video Calling To The iPhone, Nokia Smartphones
Using Perl to scrape the web
The complicated truth behind scientific findings
Great: "Designed in order to meet every user's needs". They might as well have said "Not designed"
Couldery Shouldery [August, 2009]
Hmmm... depends if they wanted it released to other audiences are not.
The distinction being made here is not technical but conceptual. Data is what we care about, meta data is how we reference what we care about.

Really, the difference is between "data we can parse" and "data we can't parse (quickly) or isn't even there." At least, thats what I think he means.
Product lessons from The Hudsucker Proxy [video]
From idea to adoption: pricing, naming, early adoption, it's all covered!

(Features real tubes.)
If only there was some organization on the other side that could afford that sort of money. They'd easily be able to get scientists to produce the results they wanted.
Well the specs say that the program must "calculate the 10 most common words". The disqualified program doesn't really calculate the 10 most common words– it simply outputs the answer.
Ebook Competitor with a 26" Display [video]