jkeisling/hacker-news-corpus-2007-2022 huggingface dataset:
Haiti – Bringing clean water to those that need it most
http://www.indiegogo.com/projects/haiti-bringing-clean-water-to-those-that-need-it-most/x/6567634
Our mission and our goal is to bring clean water to Haiti and save the lives of thousands of children who are dying everyday from contaminated water. Without clean water, Port-au-Prince and the surrounding areas will continue to see the spread of bacterial diseases such as cholera, typhoid fever or the parasites that cause amoebic dysentery. People will not only continue to get sick they will continue to die. Even 4 years after the earthquake and 2 years after Hurricane Sandy, Haiti continues to see a staggering number of deaths amongst children. 80% of the deaths from this contaminated water are children under the age of 5 years old. The future of Haiti will cease to exist if the children continue to die. http://www.indiegogo.com/projects/haiti-bringing-clean-water-to-those-that-need-it-most/x/6567634
WebRTConf
https://tito.io/&yet/webrtconf-2013
Our company, &yet, put on RealtimeConf and RedisConf and we do a lot of realtime-focused consulting using a variety of technologies.

We've been playing with WebRTC for a year. We have a lot of friends doing interesting things with it.

Seems like it's gaining a ton of steam, so we've decided to host a one-day conference on WebRTC the day before RealtimeConf (and the day after RedisConf) in Portland this October.

We're going to be looking for some great talks and demos and we'll announce a call for speakers in the next month or so.

If you've been playing with WebRTC or are building a product that uses it, it would be great to have you there!
Help me. My job killed my enthusiasm.
I used to love programming and creating and even impressing others with what I could create out of nothing, while in college.
I joined my first job a year ago. I hated my project, hated the team, hated the api. But I could not identify the problem so I did not quit. I then spent a year coding stuff I hated till I quit recently. I can no longer feel any burning desire to make anything. I started four pet projects in one month and left them all in the middle.

I see wonderful people in HN; people who have created startups, money, value and I want to do what they have done. But I can't feel that it matters. I have a job that pays me well. Why should I do more? I'm terrified that I've lost my answer to that question.

I want to feel the adrenaline but I have forgotten how to get there. Why should I do anything worthy?
Ask HN: Free weights, do you use them?
I have two 10kg dumbbells that I use to keep up my fitness since moving to the city from the family farm, but I'm not sure if I'm using them correctly or if they're even the right equipment. Does anyone on HN have some experience with free weights? Maybe post schedules, favorite techniques or blow apart any misconceptions I/others might have?
Ask HN: What have you always wanted to know about getting PR?
I'm hosting a panel of journalists, agencies and founders who've had success in pitching their startups to press this upcoming Wednesday in NYC (http://plancast.com/p/2oyi) and I'm looking to hear from startups the parts of getting PR they always wanted to know. List your questions below and we'll answer them on Wednesday!
Drawscript - Illustrator plugin turns shapes into code: C++, Obj-C, JS
http://drawscri.pt
Drawscript is an extension for Adobe® Illustrator. It generates a graphics code from vector shapes in realtime. OBJ-C iOS, C++ OpenFrameworks, JavaScript HTML5 Canvas, Processing, ActionScript 3, JSON or raw bezier points for custom usage.
Love with Weed
http://www.lovewithweed.com/
Great weed for a green cause.
Show HN: PhrasePump: Learn Languages by Listening to Tatoeba Sentences
https://www.languagereactor.com/phrasepump
Link: https://www.languagereactor.com/phrasepump

About a year ago Me and Og started to make a flashcard function for 'Language Learning with Netflix'/Language Reactor, as exporting to Anki was a bit of a painful process for users. During development, some opportunities presented themselves:

Why teach a word with a single saved sentence, when you can vary the sentence every session?

Isn't sound the primary medium of language? Let's make it a big listening practice.

Why do I have to go looking to words to save? Let the software suggest what to learn.

It's called PhrasePump because it relentlessly firehoses phrases at you. If you are happy to be thrown in the pool at the deep end, it actually makes a pretty nice way to start to learn a language. The tool knows about word frequencies, but it's completely grammar-deaf. All tenses are thrown at you from the beginning. But brains are quite good at picking out patterns, learning this way is quite exciting.

Sentences are read using the latest neural TTS. Items are scheduled using an advanced library, 'Ebisu'. You can use it to study about 40 languages, with any translation language. Words you learn are highlighted when you watch Netflix/Youtube (integrated with Language Reactor extension). It's free to use, but if you pay the cashcash, you can star specific phrases to review again and change the order in which you learn words. Free is fine though. It's a website, no app yet.

It's intended for desktop browsers, but actually Og patched up the code this evening so it's useable on mobile.
Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner…To Save Our Company
http://founderdating.com/comingtodinner/
The true story of how the Get Satisfaction co-founders saved their company from utter demise over a dinner with friends.
Show HN: OpenAI for Coda – AI right in your doc alongside your existing tools
https://coda.io/@coda/openai-for-coda
Hi HN! I’m Spencer, a software engineer and creative technologist. I care about making tools that empower people’s creative agency, automate busy work, and imagine alternative futures. I work at Coda on the Pack ecosystem but built this in my spare time while tinkering on how to make AI more accessible.

Over the past few months, I’ve been blown away by the capabilities the community has demonstrated with GPT-3 and DALL-E. But as mind expanding and powerful as they are, these possibilities have often required access to tools that are expensive, require in-depth technical expertise, or don’t integrate into your existing tools and workflows.

I wanted to see how this power could be opened to everyone—not just engineers and AI enthusiasts—by bringing OpenAI into an endlessly customizable tool like Coda. So when OpenAI released its GPT-3 and DALL-E APIs, I set out to create an environment where anyone could leverage this capability for their own and team’s needs and have it work seamlessly with their existing data and services.

The result is this OpenAI Pack for Coda. It provides building blocks for you to leverage GPT-3 and DALL-E with your data the way you want, so you can build off the existing Coda integration ecosystem to simply add on OpenAI’s power to the tools and workflows you use now (like Slack, Zoom, etc.)

Here’s a few ways I’ve already used the OpenAI Pack to automate busywork and augment my creativity:

* Synthesize raw meeting notes, long Slack threads, and Zoom transcripts into a tl;dr and automatically send it out in an email.

* Brainstorm with my team and auto-generate new ideas to riff on the most popular ideas.

* Fill out a story Mad Libs to imagine a story premise and generate a corresponding image..

This is only the beginning of what you can do, and all the source code is open source and available under the MIT License so would welcome contributions :)

Play around with the pack and the starter template playground (linked above). I’m excited to see where the community takes this and would love to hear how you’d use it.
Wakoopa, Frengo, Squidoo: Are Stupid Startup Names Hurting Silicon Valley?
http://blog.wired.com/business/2007/09/wakoopa-frengo-.html
The search for a unique corporate name and identity may be backfiring in the Silicon Valley, according to an amusing article in last week's Los Angeles Times. Wakoopa, Frengo, Squidoo or Meebo all might be acceptable on an individual basis. But when every startup in the Valley begins opting for whimsy (and a non-stop barrage of vowels) over, well, making sense, the results can be less than desirable.
Facebook Hacker Cup = Resounding Failure
http://www.quora.com/Andrew-Brown-2/Facebook-Hacker-Cup-Resounding-Failure
Although I successfully solved all three problems and submitted the results, it was a horrible experience. Facebook got it all wrong. A mismanaged programming competition.
Oracle Product
Yet Another Review/Rate My Startup Request
http://luminotes.com/
I've been working on this product (with some unrelated consulting on the side) for nearly a year. Just to head off some obvious comments, here are a few things to keep in mind:

Web browser support for the web-based product itself is fairly restricted. So no Safari, and no Opera. Yet.

I realize the product is a little general-purpose, and that makes a unique selling proposition more difficult to craft. I also realize that you kind folks on HN are not the target market.

I'm trying to build a sustainable business, so I'm not interested in tips for attracting investors/buyers.

If you must say a comment along the lines of, "I don't see how this is any different than all the other wiki / notebook / word processor software out there," then please at least read some of the tour or try the demo first. If it's still not clear, then obviously I need to improve my explanation of the product.

So, what do you think? My main goal at this point is to improve traffic and build a larger customer base. I have a handful of paying customers now, but not nearly "enough". Part of the problem might be that convincing consumers (rather than businesses) to pay a recurring fee is a tough sell.

Anyway, thanks in advance.
Ask HN: Is there a fun way to learn Java?
I'm a CS student and my Java skills aren't nearly as solid as they should be. Even at a top University it was a class that wasn't very well taught.

Learning web languages (Ruby in particular) is very easy to get into due to the fun tutorials available. I'm tempted to learn Ruby and hope it also enhances my Java/general programming knowledge.

Before I learn yet another language, is there a fun way to learn Java better (OOP concepts in particular)? I saw the Play! framework and thought that might be quite fun to try out, but doubt it will enhance my actual Java knowledge.
Tell HN: I'm writing the European version of Founders at Work
Being inspired by Jessica Livingston's "Founders at Work", I've begun
working on a book that will tell the stories of the most successful tech founders in Europe: how they started, what were the challenges they faced, what lessons they learned and so on.

If you're asking yourself who these founders are, let me name a few of the companies they built: Skype, last.fm, Bebo, lastminute.com, MySQL, MoneyBookers, Spotify, PollDaddy, Yandex and others.

I'm planning to self-publish it and use Amazon's CreateSpace (.com) as a distribution channel and for on-demand printing.

===

I'd appreciate any thoughts you might have on this that you would like to share. If you'd rather do it in private, feel free to email me at filipcte@gmail.com.

I believe there's a huge interest for this book and I hope it will inspire young entrepreneurs as much as Founders at Work has inspired people.

Thanks!
Paying Per Action instead of Per Click in Google Adwords
http://successfulsoftware.net/2009/07/07/a-test-of-cost-per-action-cpa-vs-cost-per-click-cpc-in-google-adwords/
A test comparing real world results of Cost Per Action (CPA) vs Cost Per Click (CPC) in Google Adwords.
Ask HN: How much do you reveal to candidates about internal problems?
Suppose your company is growing fast and you need to hire more developers. A candidate comes along and asks all kinds of question about tests and documentation and all that boring stuff. You know there are some pretty serious deficiencies, but you don't want to scare away the candidate. On the other hand, nobody likes to be subject to a bait-and-switch.

So how much should you reveal as a technical interviewer when the candidate decides to be the one asking the questions, and is there a good way to go about it?
Https enabled by default for logged-in users on Wikimedia sites
https://blog.wikimedia.org/2013/08/28/https-default-logged-in-users-wikimedia-sites/
tl;dr HTTPS is now mandatory for logged-in users on Wikipedia and other projects, except in China and Iran where HTTPS can be blocked.
Show HN: I made a simple webapp to store your ideas.
http://ideab.in/
It's dead simple. There's no fancy interface. Basic features are gone. That's all on purpose.

If you're like me, you're always writing down ideas on pieces of paper. My webapp is like that, but for the internet. Let me know if you find it useful.
Best Practices of Touch Screen Interface Design
http://www.voltagecreative.com/blog/2008/05/best-practices-of-touch-screen-interface-design/
A collection of lessons learned (and a few ignored for the sake of aesthetics) while designing and research the design of a Mobile Safari (iPhone/iPod Touch) web app.
Show HN: Thread-Parallel Decompression and Random Access to Gzip Files (Pragzip)
https://github.com/mxmlnkn/pragzip
Hello HN,

I'm very excited to have finished a gzip decoder that can speed up decompression using threads. On my Ryzen 3900X, I measured a 8x speedup over standard gzip, reaching 1.6 GB/s for a synthetic file with a consistent compression ratio of 1.3.

A functional decompressor like this is kind of a first, that's why I am excited. Pragzip implements the two-staged decompression idea put forward with pugz, which unfortunately only works with gzipped text files not arbitrary files and has many more limitations. I think my main contribution over pugz might be a fast (~10 MB/s) data-agnostic deflate block finder, which might btw also be used to rescue corrupted gzip files). Note that pigz does compress files in parallel but it effectively is not able to decompress not even their own produced files in parallel.

You can try out pragzip via PyPI or by building the C++ pragzip tool from source:

python3 -m pip install --user pragzip
pragzip --version # 0.2.0

Here is a quick comparison with a very Huffman-intensive workload tested on a 12-core Ryzen 3900X:

base64 /dev/urandom | head -c $(( 4 * 1024 * 1024 * 1024 )) > 4GiB
gzip 4GiB # compresses to a 3.1 GiB large file called 4GiB.gz

time gzip -d -c 4GiB.gz | wc -c # real ~21.6 s (~200 MB/s)
time pigz -d -c 4GiB.gz | wc -c # real ~12.9 s (~332 MB/s)
time pragzip -P 0 -d -c 4GiB.gz | wc -c # real ~2.7 s (~1.6 GB/s decompression bandwidth)

I have unit tests for files produced with gzip, bgzip, igzip, pigz, Python's gzip, and python-pgzip. It should therefore work for any "normal" gzip file and is feature-complete but needs a lot of testing and polishing. Note that it is very memory-intensive depending on the archive's compression factor and of course the number of cores being used. This will be subject to further improvements.

Bug reports, feature requests, or anything else are very welcome!
Ask HN: What to do when ghosted halfway through an interview process
I'm interviewing at a company I'm very excited about. The interview process has 3 steps: traditional screening/culture fit call with a recruiter, technical challenge with an engineer and then an onsite.

I've passed the two initial steps with flying colors (or so I though). The recruiter call was great and he verbally confirmed that he enjoyed the talk and would move forward my application. The technical challenge was good as well; I completed it in maybe 1/3 of the total available time and had good rapport with the engineer.

This was two weeks ago. The recruiter had initially said that he would definitively answer any emails I sent his way. I have sent two: one last week, one today. I have received nothing in response.

This isn't my first time doing an interview and I'm not new at the industry (this is a throwaway account). I'm wondering if maybe the engineering team is just taking longer than usual to convene and make a decision, maybe holiday schedules or something, but still I feel I should have received at least a ping back from the recruiter. I would definitively expect this if I had had poor performance, but that wasn't the case so I'm a bit aghast about how things are panning out.
Do you think you know web2py? Try again (version 1.56 is out)
http://mdp.cti.depaul.edu/
Lots of new features... runs on Jython and IronPython. Includes Role Based Access Control and RESTful CRUD. Runs on Google App Engine.
Why did Microsoft make Windows 8 hard to Power Off?
http://ux.stackexchange.com/questions/25687/why-did-microsoft-make-windows-8-hard-to-power-off
http://ux.stackexchange.com/q/25687/4679
Ask HN: Heroku or VPS?
Here are a few considerations...I am just learning programming and am bootstrapping. My app will be accepting file uploads. I am a fairly quick learner - e.g. just learnt Rails 6 months ago and am about 90% complete with the app (despite doing everything myself including product decisions and UI/UX development).

I would like to be able to backup all user uploaded files in at least 2 (preferrably 3) CDNs/Hosts. I am getting familiar with the command-line on OS X, but running my own VPS would definitely be an initially steep learning curve.

Especially getting the regular 'Rails' support software installed and configured properly (i.e. Passenger, Nginx, Capistrano, etc.).

I also am not flush with cash, given that I am bootstrapping.

I would love to hear pros and cons for both - given my situation.
Ask HN: Scala technology stack?
I'm doing some research to define the technology stack I'll be using in my next project.

I have a Java background, but I'm interested in expanding my horizons and use the best tools available.

I've played with Groovy and Python, and they are nice, but I've also read about performance of these languages and there is ample margin for improvement.

Now I'm learning Scala, which I read is very fast regarding performance (comparable to Java), is very powerful due to its syntax and functional programming/object hybrid nature, and
is much more expressive than Java (scala code tends to be 1/3 than Java code).

But I need to decide other important tools.

For templating I'm fascinated by Haml and Sass used in the Ruby world, so I'd like to try Scalate with Scaml templates.

For ORM, I've found SQueryl which looks very promising, but I've also found others such as Scala-query, Querulous or Circumflex-ORM.

For build engine I'm looking at Gradle. I've read about SBT (Simple build tool for Scala) but Gradle looks more powerful.

For web framework I'm looking at the Java framework Play, which is Scala friendly, and brzy (which seems promising but according to the autor "As of right now, brzy is not ready for production use.").
Also Circumflex Web Framework and Scalatra, inspired by Ruby-esque Sinatra, and many others listed in this thread
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1488412/what-scala-web-frameworks-are-available.

I'm looking for a lightweight web framework easy to configure and setup, without XML configurations, fast and scalable. When I was playing with Groovy I was interested in Grails, for example.

So, a possible choice would be Play (or Scalatra) framework, with Scalate Scaml templates, Squeryl and Gradle. Any suggestions or comments on frameworks/tools for scala?
7 Reasons Why Microsoft is Doomed
http://www.askreamaor.com/microsoft-and-windows/reasons-why-microsoft-is-doomed/
Not this year, not next year... but soon - almost certainly by the next decade.
Pivot.js
http://rjackson.github.io/pivot.js/
JavaScript pivot table lib I just used for a project: works fine.
Personal Fabrication for Dummies: 10 technologies shaping the future 
http://replicatorinc.com/blog/
This post provides video demonstrations of 10 personal fabrication technologies that could shape the future. These machines combined with software enable people to create anything they can imagine, increase choices for customers, and help the environment in the process. Learn what they can do and what others have done with them.
Clustrix as a Document Store: Blending SQL and JSON Documents 
http://sergeitsar.blogspot.com/2011/02/clustrix-as-document-store-blending-sql.html
Many responses to my previous post claimed that my comparisons to MongoDB were unfair because MongoDB is a "document store" and Clustrix is a SQL RDBMS. Somehow that distinction made almost any comparison invalid. In response, I spent my weekend coding up a prototype document store interface for Clustrix to demonstrate that a different data model is not in itself an architectural differentiator.
Help UCincinnati keep its CS dept
http://csisimportant.blogspot.com/
Hi HN,

This is a very recent event, and I'd appreciate it if you can share your thoughts on this matter.

http://twitter.com/#!/csisimportant
http://csisimportant.blogspot.com/
Show HN: Wavvy – web-based audio editor (Audacity port)
https://wavvy.app/
I originally developed a WASM port of wxWidgets for https://dj.app/. When it came time to open source wxWidgets-wasm, I decided to port another complex app as a test case, and Audacity seemed like the obvious choice. In the process, I also needed to write a new host API for PortAudio for playback and recording in the browser.

https://github.com/ahilss/wxWidgets-wasm

https://github.com/ahilss/portaudio-wasm

https://github.com/ahilss/wavvy
Winer decides to turn off blog comments
http://scripting.com/stories/2012/02/19/noComment.html
This is the post that put him over the edge:

http://scripting.com/images/2012/02/19/somePeopleAreVeryVeryDim.gif
Live Coverage of Blackout on ProtestSOPA.com
http://protestsopa.com/
Check it out!
Ask HN: How to travel cheaply?
I'm in a position where I can make a living with just myself and my laptop. With no limitations besides ATMs and internet access, I'd like to avoid the "nesting syndrome" that most people my age (25) seem to acquire and go see if there's some other place that I'd prefer to be. There's really no part of the world that doesn't interest me, but my potential travel companions are much less gainfully employed and we need to get around for a lot less than the prices I'm seeing on international flights.

I'm looking for peoples' ideas and experiences in traveling on a significantly reduced budget and avoiding typical tourist traps. Also, any ideas on local employment would also be great as I would not like to support my fellow travelers financially.
Hackbright Academy Turns Women Into Developers In 10 Weeks
http://techcrunch.com/2012/12/09/hackbright-academy/
It’s probably too early to talk about how many of the recent graduates actually get jobs, but co-founder David J. Phillips (who also co-founded location startup Banjo) shared some earlier data. Eight out of 12 students in Hackbright’s first class, were looking for immediate employment, he said, and all eight of them got offers from companies like New Relic, Survey Monkey, Cisco, and Bump.
Rackspace releases new high performance Cloud Servers
http://www.rackspace.com/cloud/servers/
40 Gb/s net
SSDs
up to 120 GB RAM
App Engine 1.6.3 Released
http://googleappengine.blogspot.com.au/2012/02/app-engine-163-released.html
This release has plenty of exciting changes to keep you busy on your extra day this year.
Ask HN: Non-technical people – what brings you to HN?
I'm in grad school studying to be a Speech-Language Pathologist. Never written a line of code in my life. But I'm on HN because I am interested in a lot of the things you guys are talking about - especially natural language processing, speech recognition, augmented reality/MR, and bioethics related to technology. A big emerging area in my field is in using AAC (Augmented and Alternative Communication) technology to help those with disabilities communicate. There is a ton of opportunity for innovation in that area, and reading HN gives me great ideas and inspiration.

Just curious how many people are out there lurking for similar reasons as me - trying to apply cool new ideas in tech to innovate in other fields.