Hacker News Reader

Looks like it's been changed. Points seems to be always null through the API now.

edit: just removed from the search. still here: http://api.thriftdb.com/api.hnsearch.com/items/2619811-02e34...

expect to be gone soon.

Exactly.

How do I find this comment through the API? How do I find its replies?

Comment scores are back! (in a convoluted way, through the API). I can see that at this time that the top comment of this page currently (tptacek's) has 58 points:

http://api.thriftdb.com/api.hnsearch.com/items/_search?filte...

lton Carbonite vs. Dropbox - The Economics of Carbonite (or Lack Thereof)

You just got a new customer.

lton Carbonite vs. Dropbox - The Economics of Carbonite (or Lack Thereof)

Do you know if Backblaze has similar limitations? I cancelled Mozy due to their pricing changes and I'm looking for a replacement.

lton Top Programming Fonts

I've been using Anonymous Pro: http://www.ms-studio.com/FontSales/anonymouspro.html mentioned in a followup to that article: http://hivelogic.com/articles/anonymous-pro-programming-mono...

lton Standing in the beam line of a neutrino detector

Reminds of an article I have seen here before:

Several physicists weigh in on what would happen if you were to place your hand in the proton stream of the Large Hadron Collider at CERN.

http://kottke.org/10/09/putting-your-hand-in-the-large-hadro...

lton Important languages to learn to understand different approaches and concepts

Nice! Actual problem list:

http://uva.onlinejudge.org/index.php?option=com_onlinejudge&...

(not sure if they are the ones from the book, but they are linked from there)

lton Important languages to learn to understand different approaches and concepts

What has that to do with anything? Why assume a stereotypical cave-dwelling nerd because he is interested on different programming languges?

lton Hacker News Analysis

I believe your understanding is right, recently being a month, provided it's the exact same URL. Popular news are usually submitted from different sources so there are actual duplicates. I agree that it's certainly not easy to automate the classification.

The Coding Horror example is a very good one. Jeff write very atemporal stories, I'm pretty sure that happens intentionally. It's not unusual to see one of his posts from several years ago pop in the front page every now and then. Same with Joel's. It may be inspired by a recent event, but the lesson is meant to stand.

I think a good heuristic would be: given a random, highly voted story from the archives, would it get upvoted if reposted today?

lton Hacker News Analysis

I've been thinking lately about running some analysis of my own, but couldn't find a data dump and didn't feel like scraping. Why has the dump been pulled?

I'm thinking of classifying entries as temporal/atemporal. Temporal are industry news, press releases, rumors and alike. Atemporal are reference materials, essays, howtos, analysis, links to libraries/frameworks/products.

Essentially, I feel that while temporal entries provide a more immediate reward and larger discussions, atemporal tend to be more technical, more interesting, have more valuable discussions, and overall are what sets HN apart of other places. I'd rather see a front page full of erlang stories than pieces about what Apple has just announced (I'm pretty sure I'll see these in many different places).

A good balance is probably ideal: a few most interesting breaking stories, and the most thought-provoking atemporal materials users have ran into lately. The perceived decline of the front page and comment quality could be attributed to a shift in this balance towards temporal stories.

As to how to classify, I'd start as marking stories with multiple duplicates in a short period of time as temporal, and the ones with duplicates spread apart over long periods as atemporal, and go from there.

lton [dead]

Looks fake. I made up a name and it happily gave me an email address. Recent searches look fabricated too.

Honeypot for business contacts/HN users?

lton VMware launches Node.js, Rails and Spring PaaS

On the iOS you can scroll textareas and iframes using two fingers. I imagine it should be possible on Android too.

lton Why Learning Prolog Can Make You a Better Programmer

It is practically impossible to teach good programming to students that have had a prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration.

The use of COBOL cripples the mind; its teaching should, therefore, be regarded as a criminal offence.

-- Dijkstra

http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD04xx/EW...

lton Apple removes "Gay Cure" app from iTunes

Extremely relevant: http://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=2164

lton Deaths per unit of energy for various sources

If Itaipu [1] bursts, it's said that it would flood and destroy a large part of Argentina. In the past, argentinians were worried that it could be used as a weapon against them.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Itaipu_Dam

lton [dead]

Yes, it's possible. See project HiJack:

http://eecs.umich.edu/~prabal/projects/hijack/

lton [dead]

The odds of it being real are not looking too good.

Apart of all the handwaving on how the override work, there's many others technical issues with it. For example, videos played from the camera roll wouldn't be outputted to the audio jack.

lton So you think you own your Twitter name?

The contact info in your profile is a gmail address. If google decides to wipe your account and give that username to someone else, do you think it's wrong? How's it different?

lton Kill Blackboard

I could have used some context in that page. For a moment I was thinking it was referencing actual black boards sarcasticaly.

lton Rid yourself of long email threads with micromobs

A few of them, yes. The rest are newly-created accounts and others (like billshander) are around 3 month old but with shady comment history.

Interesting.

Edit: I suppose the occam's razor explanation is that someone emailed (or twitted) the link around asking for people to show them some support in here, instead of an intricate botting conspiracy.

lton Should I abandon VB.Net?

I know, I'm from the real world too. It's a perfectly valid argument - there's a vast amount of C# samples and examples out there. It's also pretty much directly mapable to VB.NET given they share a runtime and type system, so it only really matters if you really don't want to make the effort to understand the code you are pasting.

It just striked me as a not so good priority to have when evaluating your choices for that particular decision.

lton Should I abandon VB.Net?

It's sad that one of the arguments in favor of C# is that it makes copy-paste programming easier.

lton Poll: If I asked, would you send me your "Saved Stories"?

If PG would add a checkbox to our profiles to make the saved history public, I'd check it.

lton Tell me why I suck

There's also the fact that there's multiple candidates for one position. You might have been a good choice, but someone else had more experience, or another diferential.

lton Startup Suicide -- Rewriting the Code

Good luck in your next project.

lton The CIA Meets MIT

Everything2 is older than wikipedia, and has always been like that.

lton Honeybees are found to interact with Quantum fields

Susprisingly well explained for something that involves math, biology and physics.

Made me laugh:

The flag manifold, she notes, in addition to providing mathematicians with pure joy, also happens to be useful to physicists (...)

lton Meld - a great visual diff and merge tool for linux

I love Beyond Compare: http://www.scootersoftware.com/

Even though it's commercial I gladly payed for it. It's really fast, does a great job on aligning automatically, easily lets me isolate blocks or do manual align, has rules for comparing files, and I could go on.

lton The day I woke up without arms and legs. [Lessons from a startup failure]

Note this is from 2008. His about page says:

2010 | MAR I’m officially out of bankruptcy

Which sounds like he's come around of losing the US$18mil he mentions in that article.

His about page is really impressive. Lots of failures and lots of sucesses. He definitely doesn't give up.