jkeisling/hacker-news-corpus-2007-2022 huggingface dataset:
My Soapbox Advice to the OWS Movement and then some
http://blogmaverick.com/2011/10/14/my-soapbox-advice-to-the-ows-movement-and-then-some/
FTA: "Crazy ? Maybe, maybe not. What happened to the price of homes when the mortgage loan bubble popped ? They plummeted. If the size of student loans are capped at a low level, you know what will happen to the price of going to a college or university ? It will plummet. Colleges and universities will have to completely rethink what they are, what purpose they serve and who their customers will be. Will some go out of business ? Absolutely. That is real world. Will the quality of education suffer ? Given that TAs will still work for cheap, I doubt it.

Now some might argue that limiting student loans will limit the ability of lower income students to go to better schools. I say nonsense on two fronts. The only thing that allowing students to graduate with 50k , 80k or even more debt does is assure they will stay low income for a long, long time after they graduate ! The 2nd improvement will be that smart students will find the schools that adapt to the new rules and offer the best education they can afford. Just as they do now, but without loading up on debt.

The beauty of capitalism is that people like me will figure out new and better ways to create and operate for profit universities that educate as well or better as today’s state institutions, AND I have no doubt that the state colleges and universities will figure out how to adapt to the new world of limited student loans as well.

Finally, the impact on the overall economy will be ENORMOUS. There is more student loan debt than credit card debt outstanding today. By relieving this burden at graduation, students will be able to participate in the economy"

http://blogmaverick.com/2011/10/14/my-soapbox-advice-to-the-ows-movement-and-then-some/
Ask HN: Designing a Parenscript alternative
Several projects already exist which compile established dialects of Lisp into JavaScript, including Parenscript [1], Scriptjure [2], Scheme2Js [3] and ArcScript [4]. I'm trying to determine if there'd be value in creating a new little Lisp dialect specifically designed for compiling into JavaScript. The goal would be to end up with something like CoffeeScript [5], only s-expression based so that Lisp-style macros could be supported.

I've started designing the language following this general process:

1. Imagine what JavaScript would look like if it were composed of s-expressions rather than C-style syntax

2. Permit irregularities where it would be a convenience boon to everyday JavaScript coding

I will post example code in the comment thread, and feedback is very welcome. Do you think this project has potential, and would you consider using it? Do you have any advice about writing or hosting the compiler?

---

[1] http://common-lisp.net/project/parenscript/

[2] https://github.com/arohner/scriptjure

[3] http://www-sop.inria.fr/indes/scheme2js/

[4] http://evanrmurphy.com:8080/arc2js

[5] http://jashkenas.github.com/coffee-script/
Ask HN: Please Review my Web App
http://nobadgift.com/
This is a project that some friends of mine are working on and I'd like to help them get some feedback outside of their immediate circle.
Live feed of the BTC Economy
http://www.api.bitcoinbulletin.com/?p=11
This live feed pulls from sources across the web to show everything you can buy in the BTC Economy
Tetris Company sues VC-funded OMGPOP
http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=22815
Interesting story about IP in video games. I remember there was a discussion here and on gamedev I believe especially about tetris - how you could make a game and just call it something else than tris in the name and you'd be ok. Apparently not, even though OMGPOPs version from the screenshots looks like a blatant ripoff.
Ask HN:  Should CS university grads be unemployable due to lack of initiative?
Given the amount of self-teaching that can be done nowadays, doesn't it make more sense for software companies to prefer self-taught applicants over university grads?
Ask HN: hosted service for building dashboards?
We're looking for a tool to build a dashboard that can collect and present different types of data (sales numbers, technical numbers, uptime, indexed pages in google or anything else) for internal use.

If it's hosted and user-friendly would be a +. This is definitely something a startup like ours can pay some money for. A startup opportunity, if any of you don't have a kick-ass solution out there somewhere already!
Bernard Madoff’s Courtroom Confession About His Ponzi Scheme
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601170&refer=special_report&sid=aPIRfDAqvRy8
This is clearly a reason greed is not that good.
Unusual control structures cause us all to slow down a little.
http://www.goplexian.com/2010/01/unusual-control-structures-cause-us-all.html
Maybe I'm tired, but I had one of those moments today where something seemed to make a lot of sense and you just had to tell someone about it. So here you go.
Show HN: Custom Keylabels for Your Custom Keyboard Layouts
https://kapd.au
Hey HN,

This is a bit of a weekend project that I'm currently trying out. When I'm changing the layout of my moonlander, I wish there was a way to change the labels of the keys as well.

So I thought about making some label stickers that sit over the key, and after some experimentation I'm pretty happy with the results, however I need a few other "keyboard buddies" to make it economical.

So I'm introducing https://kapd.au as a way for people to download the same template I used, and send it to me to get it printed out. I run in batches of 8 and while atm the prices are a little high, they can come down significantly if I get a few orders and verify the demand first.

Let me know what you think and please feel free to send it to any people you know who have custom keyboards and layouts!
Software Architects Need More Respect: Hacker Culture Is Overdone 
http://bernardlunn.wordpress.com/2011/05/03/software-architects-need-more-respect-hacker-culture-is-overdone/
Some people would say that I am not qualified to write about software development as I have never written a line of code in my life. But I have spent over 30 years working with some great developers on a wide range of projects and I have seen what works and what does not work.

A few years ago the art of architecting systems for scalability and extensibility started to get a bad press. I think Joel Spolsky was the first to coin the phrase “architecture astronauts“, to describe those who were always designing layers of abstraction but forgetting to deliver code that actually did anything. Then we got the lean start up movement, focusing on the constant iteration that the web enables.

This led to the hacker culture, oriented to “just do it” speed. “Hacker” used to be a term of abuse, but like “punk” it was adopted by those accused as a badge of pride.

That is all good stuff, but methinks it has gone too far. We now see too many systems where the original system has to be totally thrown away. That may be OK if you raised $ gazillions and can now compete with Google and Facebook for a big team of really great engineers. But for most startups, it is not possible. So most startups limp along with the original system. The upshot is:

Hosting bills that really start to bite into cash flow.
Systems that crash too often; a few of these and your users have clicked away to a rival. Yes, we persevered through Twitter fail whales, but is your service really that addictive?
New features take way too long. You either release fast or put in some QA and testing process to avoid brand-killing crashes.
It does not need to be like that. The best developers can do both. They create a scalable and extensible architecture AND deliver quick feature iterations. Sometimes you cannot get one person who can do both – it is rare. One team I worked with solved this by having a 4 person team where:

1 person hacked demos, in the full knowledge that the code would thrown away. He was awesome at this and in full synch with his colleague who:
created the architecture AND the working code. 35 years later, the system is still being used.
2 people who did the ancilliary stuff like testing, documentation and so on. Great surgeons have a team, same is true with great engineers.
I think the problem may be with the pure architect model. No engineer likes being told “here is a perfect architecture, just code it as per that spec”. Going back to the house analogy, we need more architectural engineers who create designs that they know will work and they prove that they work by writing the code.
Ask HN: Time to pull the plug?
I launched Govit.com in 2008. It's an eGov site. You vote on Legislation, and votes are sent to government representatives.

It got press, but no real traction (3k-15k visits/mo).

Is there any opportunity here? Any ideas to keep out of deadpool? Or is it time to man-up and pull the plug?
Reminder: Post Startup School Distributed Open House Happening Now
http://maps.google.com/maps/ms?msid=215628409610962086871.0004b0279e5085205064a&msa=0&ll=37.653383,-122.242126&spn=0.935042,1.562805
Come visit any of us in the SF-Bay area!

Addmired 555 Hamilton Ave, Palo Alto.

Aerofs 639 High St, Palo Alto.

Airbnb 99 Rhode Island St, Second Floor, San Francisco.

Comprehend Systems 235 Alma St, Palo Alto.

Dropbox 760 Market St, Suite 1150, San Francisco.

Greplin 300 Brannan St, Suite 501, San Francisco.

Heyzap 251 Kearney St, Third Floor, San Francisco.

Justin.tv/TwitchTV 23 Geary St, Suite 800, San Francisco.

Scribd 539 Bryant St, San Francisco.

Stripe 522 Ramona St, Palo Alto.

WePay 455 Portage Ave, Suite B, Palo Alto.
Ask HN: Are all YC startups encouraged to get acquired?
What is the path to liquidity you're encouraged to take as a YC startup? Are you ever encouraged to build for the long haul and create something profitable that pays investors dividends? Is it assumed that all YC startups will be acquired and is that where the emphasis is placed? Is there any focus on building revenue and keeping costs down, or is the focus on growth and future funding rounds? Is the option of not raising future rounds but rather self funding through revenue discussed much?

I'm genuinely curious about the state of startup incubators. Thanks.
TechStars Takeaways: Top Twelve Startup Tips
http://coloradostartups.com/2007/10/01/techstars-takeaways-top-twelve-startup-tips/#_
IXve recently been sitting on a beach doing essentially three things. Drinking beachy drinks, reading, and reflecting on how I spent my summer. One of my takeaways from TechStars is that going through it allows a company to evolve in three months as much as a typical startup evolves in two years.
Propublica: Revealed: The NSA’s Secret Campaign...
https://www.propublica.org/article/the-nsas-secret-campaign-to-crack-undermine-internet-encryption
does anyone know what technologies were censored out of the article?
NSA reportedly intercepting laptops purchased online to install spy malware
http://www.theverge.com/2013/12/29/5253226/nsa-cia-fbi-laptop-usb-plant-spy
NSA reportedly intercepting laptops purchased online to install spy malware
"Tube" Blender-animated film launches fundraising campaign
http://slashdot.org/submission/2025173/tube-blender-animated-film-launches-kickstarter
Bassam Kurdali's free culture 3D animation, "Tube" is nearing the final stages of production. After directing the first of the Blender Institutes "Open Movie Projects", Elephants Dream, Bassam wanted to prove that free software like Blender and PiTiVi are usable for independent filmmakers and that producing free cultural works can be a sustainable living too. The team has just launched a Kickstarter campaign to raise funds for the project and if the goal is met then we should see the final release in 7 months!
Show HN: Get conversational practice in over 20 languages by talking to an AI
https://talk.quazel.com/chat/try
Hi everyone,

Let me introduce you to Quazel, where we want to enable people to talk their way to fluency.

We have all tried various language learning apps and tools, however, one aspect of language learning current services are really bad at is conversational practice. You might get a chat-like interface, but in the end, the conversation partner will only respond with a predefined "if the users say X I say Y".

With Quazel that's completely different. In completely dynamic and unscripted conversation you can talk about pretty much anything you want. For example, you can try ordering food at a restaurant and even hold a philosophical discussion with Socrates. Additionally, you can analyze the grammar of your responses or use hints to help you out when you get stuck.

We want to change how languages are learned from a grammar-centric approach to a more natural, conversation-focused one.
Plain and simple: Net neutrality is hypocrisy
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703395204576023452250748540.html
Don't believe politicians? Take it from techies:

http://scripting.com/stories/2010/12/19/netNeutralityIsHypocrisy.html
The Ecuadorian Library: Or Three Years After 'The Blast Shack' by Bruce Sterling
https://medium.com/geek-empire-1/a1ebd2b4a0e5
Back in distant, halcyon 2010, I was asked to write something about Wikileaks and its Cablegate scandal. So, I wrote a rather melancholy essay about how things seemed to me to be going — dreadfully, painfully, like some leaden and ancient Greek tragedy. ...I no longer feel that leaden discontent and those grave misgivings that I felt in 2010. The situation now is frankly exhilarating. It no longer has that look-and-feel of the Edgar Allen Poe House of Usher. This scene is straight outta Nikolai Gogol.
Live demo of Asana, a new product from Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz
http://asana.com/2011/02/asana-demo-vision-talk/
The actual product demo begins at 11:20.

Might have to wait a bit for the clip to load as Vimeo doesn't allow you to play from an arbitrary point of the video.
Ask HN: Using Google Voice Number for your startup?
I'm getting ready to setup a number for my startup and wondering if people are finding Google Voice reliable and of high enough quality to use as their main number.

We'd like to start contacting some rather large companies to sell our product and we want a convenient way to relay around our business number to cell phones or other connections as needed.

Any advice on setting up a business number for a small startup is appreciated..
Review of Let over Lambda by Doug Hoyte
http://john.freml.in/review-let-over-lambda
This book for some reason was ignored from the discussion (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1052858) yesterday about the Lisp fingerprint reader. I think more people should read it.
RFC: Django 1.0 roadmap and timeline
http://groups.google.com/group/django-developers/browse_thread/thread/5ce124e7526dad
"This is a call for comments on the proposed Django 1.0 roadmap and schedule. "
Introducing: Django-IDE
https://github.com/mcerdeira/django-ide
A web based IDE for django projects.
Automatic Redis Failover for Ruby
https://github.com/ryanlecompte/redis_failover
I just released redis_failover, a new Ruby gem that provides automatic Redis failover support for Ruby. From the project README:

Redis Failover attempts to provides a full automatic master/slave failover solution for Ruby. Redis does not provide an automatic failover capability when configured for master/slave replication. When the master node dies, a new master must be manually brought online and assigned as the slave's new master. This manual switch-over is not desirable in high traffic sites where Redis is a critical part of the overall architecture. The existing standard Redis client for Ruby also only supports configuration for a single Redis server. When using master/slave replication, it is desirable to have all writes go to the master, and all reads go to one of the N configured slaves.

This gem attempts to address both the server and client problems. A redis failover server runs as a background daemon and monitors all of your configured master/slave nodes. When the server starts up, it automatically discovers who is the master and who are the slaves. Watchers are setup for each of the redis nodes. As soon as a node is detected as being offline, it will be moved to an "unreachable" state. If the node that went offline was the master, then one of the slaves will be promoted as the new master. All existing slaves will be automatically reconfigured to point to the new master for replication. All nodes marked as unreachable will be periodically checked to see if they have been brought back online. If so, the newly reachable nodes will be configured as slaves and brought back into the list of live servers. Note that detection of a node going down should be nearly instantaneous, since the mechanism used to keep tabs on a node is via a blocking Redis BLPOP call (no polling). This call fails nearly immediately when the node actually goes offline.

This gem provides a RedisFailover::Client wrapper that is master/slave aware. The client is configured with a single host/port pair that points to redis failover server. The client will automatically connect to the server to find out the current state of the world (i.e., who's the current master and who are the current slaves). The client also acts as a load balancer in that it will automatically dispatch Redis read operations to one of N slaves, and Redis write operations to the master. If it fails to communicate with any node, it will go back and ask the server for the current list of available servers, and then optionally retry the operation.
Young entrepreneur Martin Schaedel (23) dies in plane crash
http://www.alleyinsider.com/2009/1/the-internet-says-goodbye-to-a-friend-martin-schaedel
Martin you will be missed. You where to young and too good to leave this planet so soon.
Jukebox - your democratic music player
https://github.com/lociii/jukebox
If you like Zach Holman's play (https://github.com/holman/play) but don't like Ruby (like me) check out Jukebox.
Ask HN: When to give up on dreams?
I made a similar thread a week ago but realize that it was far too long and unrelatable. To keep things short, I’m currently a very difficult 5-year math & CS program in a small European country. My main goal with attending this program was to get into machine learning-research as I feel I have the interest, aptitude and the field still having massive potential. Unfortunately, the workload is very high, and I’ve lost much of my interest for pure mathematics which the first three years mostly consist of. This makes the 60h/week required to maintain a decent GPA much more difficult. In addition to this, the program is basically unknown internationally despite being very competitive, so I feel like my chances of landing a PhD position at a good US school is quite low even if I feel like I have the talent.

On the flip side I can switch to a top medical school here (top 10 worldwide). I find medicine to be as interesting as mathematics while the workload being significantly lower. Getting a PhD position seems way easier too as it’s way more well known internationally. Simultaneously I can work as a physician or a software engineer if all else fails. By choosing this path though, I’d be giving up on my dreams in machine learning and not living up to my potential.
Only 8+ Years of Rails Experience Required
http://jobs.37signals.com/jobs/10823
Guess they're only willing to hire DHH
Who needs funding when you have creativity?
http://blog.mixergy.com/my-financials/
Awesome and inspiring look at how Andrew Warner bookstrapped his first company, Bradford and Reed into a multi billion dollar engine. Andrew is candid, creative and sharp!
Ask HN: open source Posterous-style email validation? 
Does anyone know of an open source library for validating email headers a la Posterous? I think their model strikes a great balance between usability and security, and wonder if there's anything out there that would facilitate building a similar feature into a homebrew web app.
GitHub Is Down - Storage Availability: Experiencing Problems 
https://github.com/
(https://status.github.com/)
How do you keep yourself disciplined when you are freelancing at home?
http://paralyzed.se/2009/08/22/how-do-you-keep-yourself-disciplined-when-you-are-freelancing-at-home/
When you are freelancing at home you don’t have fixed hours and you don’t have anyone shouting at you when you aren’t working. In other words it’s really easy to slack off. So what can you do to keep yourself disciplined and focused? Here are 7 tips to help you to keep yourself disciplined.
A hilariously bad phone interview with Google
http://www.mkrecny.com/?p=76
http://viewtext.org/article?url=http://www.mkrecny.com/?p=76
Mandelbrot set discovered in 13th century by Benedictine monk
http://www.raygirvan.co.uk/apoth/udo.htm
Also see:

http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/WhosCounting/story?id=98615
Ready, Set, Go
http://www.engineyard.com/blog/2009/ready-set-go/
Google recently publicly released their new programming language, Go. I’ve known about this for some time, having worked for the big G while it was in development, although not directly involved.

Google has plenty of special purpose languages, but this is the first general purpose language to come out of Mountain View. That fact alone makes it quite interesting. Add to it that some of the original C and UNIX people are involved, and it becomes something that requires investigation.

What’s it for, you ask?
Weak U.S. 5-year debt auction raises worries
http://www.reuters.com/article/marketsNews/idUSN2949944020090729
I wonder which day will be the day the fat man eats a mint and blows up
Emacs, naked
http://bzg.fr/emacs-strip-tease.html
Configure GNU Emacs (24.3 or above) to avoid distraction.
OSQA - Free, Open Source Question & Answers System
http://blogupstairs.com/open-source/osqa-free-open-source-questions-answer-system/
OSQA is the free, open source Q&A system, OSQA site is more than just an FAQ page, it is a full-featured Q&A community. Users earn points which are called “karma points” and badges for useful participation, and everyone in the community wins.
Ask HN: Please share your experience teaching your kids to program
Hi HN!

My son recently turned 7yo and I have successfully got him interested in programming. We started about half a year ago playing Minecraft and building more and more complicated automated machines. Recently I have added some robots that can be programmed in Scratch and now we have also started writing some simple games in Scratch.

I am not just trying to teach him programming but also show that with a bit of organization and working little bit each day you can achieve pretty huge results. So we created a very simple version of a game. I have then created a document where we are maintaining a listing of functionality we want to add. We then take them one by one, discuss how it can be added to the game and then tick off once it is done.

For Christmas he asked for some programming books ("how to make complicated Minecraft machines, how to write complicated commands and how to make mods").

We plan to do some more complicated robots and also make our own fun mods for Minecraft (as soon as I figure out how to hook up Scratch to recent version of it).

I am trying to not spend too much time on any given day (about 1,5h every day currently) so that ends up still wanting to do more.

I am also doing large part of coding myself and we switch who sits by the editor when he says he knows how to do something. I am trying to keep him enthusiastic by showing constant progress which I think is more important than that he actually does everything by himself.

I have 20 years of development experience so generally programming is not an issue for me.

Please, share your experiences, things that you have tested with your kids that did or did not work. Any tips you have personally tested.