skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Good idea. I would like to note that if you can play the drums on Rock Band, you can play the real drums. It's just a 5 piece electronic drum kit, and I believe there's even a hack to let you use it to compose music on a computer now.
I've been tying my shoelaces like this for the last six years. It is definitely worth the investment, if only because you spend less boring time tying your shoelaces.
我还是喜欢英文。
The referenced flamewars from comp.lang.lisp are, once again, priceless. I can't for the love of God understand that community.
If you aren't necessarily focused on tying hardware controllers to a software app (which limits you to MIDI stuff), you might consider one of the basic programmable microcontrollers, like the Parallax BASIC Stamp:

http://www.parallax.com/

It is designed to be easily plugged into devices, gives you a simple programming language, and a way to interface with a computer. I bet you can snag one on Ebay for cheap.
BASc in EE from University of Toronto (in 3 months) -- already into my first startup
vancouver or san diego. both little bigger, but both fit the 'livable' bill
Master in Applied Computer Science from the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (Brussels, Belgium).
That an update to the SDK/contest is a few weeks late is not the hand waving that they originally came out with - they had their facts completely wrong, as the 'update' stuff shows.
I wish I could play with their technology, too bad Google is hoarding it.
How do you make the whole thing transactional? I don't mean file persistence (you can do that every once in a while) but the whole application. Manual thread synchronization?
Have you looked at Munich, while visiting the Android Developers Workshop?
How about Brighton, UK?

It's pretty small (around 250k people).

It's by the sea.

It's pretty hilly (For England)

It's an hour from London.

It's very hacker friendly - we have:

2 Universities:

http://www.brighton.ac.uk

http://www.sussex.ac.uk

A thriving geek/entrepreneur community:

http://www.brightongirlgeekdinners.co.uk/

http://www.brightoncodingdojo.co.uk/

http://fivepoundapp.com/meetup/10/

http://www.opencoffeesussex.com/ (Sometimes open beer and open juice meetups too)

http://brighton-ruby.org/

http://www.brightonfarm.com/ (Freelancers meetup)

http://upcoming.yahoo.com/event/419779/ (Geek Wine Thing)

http://www.businessbricks.co.uk/

Great places to work either in startups or as freelancers:

http://www.sinc.co.uk/ (Sussex Innovation Centre)

http://www.werkshop.org.uk/

http://www.brightonnewmedia.com/

Great events:

http://www.barcampbrighton.org/

http://2008.dconstruct.org/

http://widgetygoodness.com/

Some big companies too:

http://upcoming.yahoo.com/event/401666/ (Linden Labs)

Plus a couple of games companies - Climax, NCSoft
http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/digitalcontent/2007/11/club_peng...

Plus it's a really relaxed and friendly place to be, more pubs/bars than days in the year (really) and the famous North and South Laines shopping areas for people who don't really enjoy the mall. Oh and some people call it BrightonCisco (http://presencelabs.com/2007/03/07/brightoncisco/).

There are many other reasons to be here and I'm sorry to any one if i've missed something really important out.

Kev
That would be a problem for those of us that don't code but hopefully still have something to contribute.

Maybe an IQ test? Or better a recommendation from a user with a certain karma before you can start posting.
Interesting math links
Interesting math papers and webpage widgets. Also check out the link to dynamical systems at the bottom of the page.
Modu Revealed
FriendFeed: Ex-Googlers Create Social Network Experience Using Feeds
Based on my limited exposure to different languages, there seem to be different thought patterns inherent in each language. I'm wondering if you notice this, and if you yourself capable of a wider range of thought patterns than those who can only speak a single language.
Working on my degree now. Two more years to completion, suposing I ever attend the classes. I live in Brazil so the name of the University is probably meaningless to you all.
Absolutely. I'm very involved as an organizer & I still do workshops, etc. I make maybe $500 a year off of the work I do as an artist, which is great, but also clearly demonstrates why programming is the more prosperous carer path. Fortunately, I really, really enjoy programming & I've been able to use it to benefit the arts community I work with.
MS, Google and Other Big Names Throw Their Weight Behind OpenID
also: python -c "from __future__ import braces"
Google Docs allows you to create custom polls
Startup Plans to Solve Online Identity Theft, But Does Anyone Care?
Чему вы рады? :)
Լիսպը փայլուն է։
Charlottesville, Virginia.

Lots of great outdoorsy things to do, great university, great cost-of-living, great quality-of-life, and fairly-easy access to Washington DC if you want to do the huge city stuff. (Plus there are things that DC has that you're just not going to find anywhere else) UVA has a huge medical college with all kinds of biotech. There is some startup activity in the area, but as you mention, you'll be taking a hit from places like SF.
Won't work for me at least till py3k and is a good example of Python not leading.

$ cat > foo.py
# -*- coding: <utf-8> -*-
# even with the above character encoding
def ô():
return "ô"
$ python foo.py
File "foo.py", line 3
SyntaxError: Non-ASCII character 'xc3' in file foo.py on line 3, but no
encoding declared; see http://www.python.org/peps/pep-0263.html

Nothing you can do about this at the moment as python up till 2.5 is ascii only for strings [0] unless source code encoding is added. It gets worse. Support for "non ascii identifiers" (shown with the bug above) outlined in PEP 3131 is SF, not SA. [1], [2]

Q Do people use Unicode identifiers in their source code?

[0] BDFL made this as a design choice to default to ascii.

[1] http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-3131/

[2] http://www.python.org/dev/peps/
Automatic writing
UStream.tv negotiating $50 million sale to Microsoft
Is there another kind of money?
That's a hell of a product splash video on their website @ http://www.modumobile.com/

Looks like a neat concept as well. 2008 is surely going to be the year of the mobile. More and more web apps, utility services, and platforms (Google Android) are being built with the mobile paradigm in mind.
Charlottesville is great but may be a little smaller than your target city. It has a little biotech spun off from UVa. The downtown mall is a great little area with a nice pedestrian mall.
Twemes is a Twitter Meme that’s Actually Helpful
Yeah, Palo Alto and Stanford are very bike friendly and very expensive :/ I got around for most of my first year on bike.
Don't forget the brilliant SussexDigital that brings much of this together: http://www.sussexdigital.com

... and groups like http://www.wiredsussex.com, http://www.projectbrighton.com and http://www.inuda.net (I'm the founder of that one)

.. oh and the weather today is amazing! : http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/brighton/clusters/beach-pi...
The cond macro, for example. It had all those gratuitous parentheses [...] I wouldn't be surprised if someone had already discovered the Arc trick of collapsing if and cond into one operator

That's done among others by metalua. In AST view, an if-then-elseif-end statement is seen as:

`If{ cond1, block1,
cond2, block2,
...
condn, blockn,
default_block }

Qi also did a great job of cleaning up a lispy syntax. Too bad it hasn't got macros...
Perl has fairly decent utf8 support, off by default:

use utf8;

allows source to be written in utf8 (string literals, function+variable names etc).

Filehandles aren't utf8 by default, but can be put into utf8 mode with the 'binmode' function. (You can go further, and tag filehandles with pretty much any charset encoding and you'll get the Right Thing happening with reads and writes).

Other data sources (db handles etc) generally have some API to control this too.

As a convenience -CIO option to perl puts stdin and stdout into utf8.

Defaulting to off is just the price of back-compatability. Not sure what the plan is for perl6 in this regard.
Fon.com

Yahoo! Pipes

Wikipedia

Powerset (touted as the Google search killer)
no ..... no he hasn't
Hmm, how long is a piece of string. It's a difficult question to answer. Why not ask your peers? If you trust them and they trust you they will be honest and you will learn. If you don't trust them leave.

For fun you can look at http://projecteuler.net/. Project Euler poses a series of problems for you to solve using a language of your choice. Of course you'll need to get your peers to do it as well but the different approaches to each problem can be very revealing. You can learn a lot about your abilities by reading the comments in the forums which are unlocked when you complete a task.

As a side note remember that the power of most programmers is unlocked within a team. Some 'lesser' programmers shine within a team and fail on their own. The reverse is true also. I know many excellent programmers that are near useless inside teams of non-programmers and a few that can't work with anyone.
It’s Sad Not Make the Beta Cut
Here's a third vote for Providence. I'm moved here a couple of years ago from NYC largely because it has so much potential to be an startup/hacker hub. I'm very involved in two initiatives at the center of the city's info-tech/digital media scene.
www.rinexus.com
www.providencegeeks.com
Feel free to drop a line if you like.
"... 2008 Startup School April 19 ..."

Has anyone ever thought to invite "John McCarthy" to talk?
And all the flamers owe PG, and Patrick a big, "Uh.... Sorry, Dude. My bad."
How many legs do you have?
Malicious programs hit new high
Staying safe without anti-virus
Facebook says hola to Spanish amigos
Obama agrees to two more debates with Clinton
"Green" robot self-propels through sea
Mysterious Seated Liberty Dollar Sold for over $1 Million
Stanford Coins and Bullion company sold the extremely rare 1870-S Seated Liberty Dollar Eliasberg Specimen.
High-tech tool cought mystery killer virus
A previously unknown virus killed 3 women who transplanted organs from an Australian donor.
Ebay Sellers Revolt, Proving Again That Internet Users Don't Get Strikes
I find that this has a big impact on the local demographics. One of the reasons I was so happy to return to Padova in 2000 is that it just feels more 'real' to me. There are rich people, poor people, and everything in between. Lots of old people, but plenty of young people and families as well.

The bay area, unless you're rich, seems to be more about "get in, make money, get out". We're a bit weary of moving, and would like to stay somewhere for a little while.
Michael Eisner fantasizes about end to writer's strike on CNBC
What's the right quality metric?
Are Men Really More Competitive Than Women?
Can Web-based worlds teach us about the real one?
The book titles mentioned in the article seem to be really facts oriented. The act of listing facts is the easiest part of writing anything, in my opinion. I would like to see a machine that could put something together like an Isaacson's biography on Einstein. List the facts of his life but then also draw out the way in which they interplayed with the world politics to lead him down the path he took.

Or maybe, I'm completely mistaken and all we need is to somehow better model this in the machine's database.
I don't see any mention of free-seating, where people are not assigned seat numbers in advance. As this is the method which the cheapest airlines appear to use, where time/cost pressure is at a maximum, I suspect that it does well in practice so I'm disappointed that the author did not consider it.
The Years of Experience Myth
* crickets *
Agreed. But I was thinking more of dealing with the interesting runtime and caching issues that interpreters run into.

You hit neat stuff like call overhead of the base language.
MIT^3

Depending on who you ask, I was either trained as a rocket scientist or a propellor head.
MSc in Civil Engineering. Always worked as a computer programmer, never as a civil eng..
I'll never understand why asians type all in question marks. It must be some kind of unary system.
That sounds cool indeed.

I don't have the time to play in a band and I always look for ways to keep my jam session at home as interesting as possible.

There is also a lack for easily available music without the guitar track in decent quality. If they are going to fill this gap they 'll be my best friends soon.
10 Years Ago Today: 24 Hours in Cyberspace
I'm guessing that very few people here on news.yc are qualified to compose the Cobol Challenge: the problem for which Cobol is uniquely qualified to provide the elegant solution.

Of course, the budget and the legacy code will have to be a very explicit part of that problem.

Meanwhile, this Erlang Challenge only tends to emphasize my impression -- which is just a stereotype, really -- that Erlang is certainly not the hundred-year language: it's a special-purpose language that is brilliant at a narrow class of problem. I'm convinced that, if I have some process that I want to spread across half a million processor cores, I should ask my company's Erlang guru to work on it (because, come on, if you can afford half a million processor cores you can afford at least one Erlang guru). What I'm not yet convinced of is that a world with N programmers who work in general-purpose languages needs more than (0.005)N Erlang gurus.

The challenge of the Erlang advocate is not to convince me, over and over, that Erlang wins its class; the challenge is to convince me that Erlang's class of problem is so important to my life that I should study Erlang rather than vascular surgery, or television repair, or other obscure technical skills that I don't know that much about.
Check This Out:  A $6 Million Home Movie Theater
I came into C# by way of C/C++, so I had a slight advantage. That being said, I found the .NET base class library very easy to pick up because of IntelliSense in Visual Studio. You don't really need to know the entire BCL to program in C#, though. I've used it for years and I still don't know every single piece. (That's another reason why I said to avoid the MS certification materials like the plague; they just teach the BCL and not really the language fundamentals.)

I think C# teaches the fundamentals of programming pretty readily -- variables, types, functions, loops, objects, etc. Because dynamic languages are vastly more expressive, those concepts aren't as readily obvious. C# also masks some of the more difficult concepts from C-family languages, like pointers and memory allocation, meaning you can get your app running without saying "what the hell is a segmentation fault?" :)

Because the OP said he/she was working with a .NET/Java programmer, and asking about .NET, I naturally inferred that the project was written in .NET. I think it's even MORE difficult to learn a language (say Python) and then try to translate the abstract concepts into .NET-speak. Experienced programmers can hop between languages, but I recall trying to do that with GW-BASIC and C when I knew GW-BASIC and was learning C, and it was a royal pain.

(That may have something to do with the level of functionality available in GW-BASIC vs. C, but I digress... :)

Generally speaking, though, I would suggest Python as a good language to learn when starting out. I wouldn't, on the other hand, suggest Ruby as a language for people who haven't programmed before. When you consider the basic language features you need to learn in order to grasp the language, C# is much simpler than Ruby.

Before you flame me to a crisp, I'm not saying C# or Python are BETTER than Ruby. Ruby is an amazing tool once you grasp its complexities (and it's my new favorite language). I've got to think it'd be difficult for a newcomer to pick up things like blocks, dynamic dispatch, mutable types, hash parameters without braces, etc.
Face value: Disruption of service
Of internet cafés and power cuts
CREATIVE STARTUP PEOPLE (Number 2 of a series) : Do you what they have?
Paging Tufte! This site needs some sparklines!

Though I admit that adding data to the display would detract from its extremely elegant design. Maybe the charts-and-graphs version belongs on its own site, "wastwitterdown.com".
My name is Daniël. Not sure though if writing that wasn't possible before...
Southwest captured an entire industry. This was one of the major reasons. That's the difference between "research" and "practice".
Here's a video of how Parker does it:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=SkS5PkHQphY

The writing is mostly VB Word macros, but impressing still.
BS on CS (Concentration: Machine Learning and Computational Logic) from GA Tech. Currently working as a Python (30%) and Lisp (70%) programmer for a startup.
Ann Arbor, MI
Should I contact VCs financing my competitors?
This is the kind of hack you can really appreciate.
What gloucester does your username refer to?
Putting Java on Your Flash Drive
The Ultimate Programming Language
What is REST, anyway?
Doesn't work. It says "No" but Twiter is always down.
Everything A Django Developer Needs To Create Logins
CloudBook poised to give the Asus Eee PC a run for its money
Do storm - find idea, solution, answer in you subconsciousness.
Python for Bash scripters: A well-kept secret
Ruby Cheat Sheets
Bach also fathered 20 children.
First experiment with Arc at Will.Whim
Court Finds That Trolls Can Remain Anonymous
Thank god! Now I can make a more informed choice as to which candidate to support based on his (or her!) interpretations of relevant policy matters.
Rails 5 times faster with this patch
Martin Fowler: Cheaper Talent Hypothesis
Да просто...
How to Setup Parallels Virtualization Software in Ubuntu
I live in Ann Arbor, MI, and I love it there. It's got the University of Michigan. It's economy is dominated by education, high tech, and biotechnology, according to Wikipedia.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ann_Arbor,_Michigan

According to Forbes, Ann Arbor is the third smartest city in the US, behind Boulder, CO, and Bethesda, MD, but just ahead of Cambridge, MA.
http://www.annarborspark.org/about-us/newsroom/ann-arbor-nam...

If you really want a great city to live in, though, especially for kids, Plymouth Township, MI (this is actually where I'm living right now) was rated the 37th Best Place to Live by Money Magazine, in part due to its great school system.
http://money.cnn.com/galleries/2007/moneymag/0707/gallery.BP...

Employment Review Magazine rated Ann Arbor the 10th best city in the nation to live and work in June 2002. It also earned the number 10 spot in The Princeton Review ranking of the best college towns in the nation in September 2001. Additionally in 2001, American Style Magazine named Ann Arbor the 22nd best Arts Destination in the nation.

Of course, then again, you've also got sites like these for a good counterpoint.
http://www.annarborisoverrated.com/
Floating data Centers: The Ocean As Watercooler
pg made this point in one of his essays - but his conclusion was that since it's impossible to measure productivity, the more productive hackers should create startups where they will be rewarded for their superior skills.
I've been using Ian's Secure Knot from the same site for a few years now, after my slippery-shoelace problem reached such crisis proportions that I preferred to spend an hour Googling for, and learning, a better knot, than having to keep retying my shoelaces.

The new knot has never once accidentally come undone, and is about as quick to tie and untie as the Standard Knot -- maybe even a little faster.
This is very true, assuming you have someone willing to learn. I did a summer internship with Motorola once and did not know a thing about programming for phones or their environment. I was fortunate to have a professor who believed in me and was able to help me get the job. By the end of the summer I had put together demos that were front line booths at LinuxWorld and CTIA that year.

I encourage students that come to our lab to take on projects that involve skills outside of their comfort zone. I think it is important to broaden your skill set but it is more important to be comfortable with not knowing exactly how to do something and figuring it out anyway.
How about Northampton, MA? I've never lived there, but I've been there many times and love the town. UMass and Amherst are right down the street, Boston's only an hour away (depending on traffic), good restaurants, great music scene, plenty of biotech (depending on your willingness to travel).

There's also Middletown, CT and New Haven, CT, both of which I've lived in. Middletown's a neat small city with Wesleyan University in town and a cool small downtown, classic New England. Anywhere in the Connecticut outback is a likely spot for some biotech, Bayer and others are big in the state.

New Haven was really ugly 15 years ago but now it's largely an awesome residential city; you want to live in the "grad ghetto" with all the Yalies. Cheap housing, great restaurants, cool up-and-coming atmosphere. I loved the year I spent there. The downside is schools - if you have kids you should send them to private school.

I don't know about the biotech scene, but I love visiting Portland, ME. Anybody able to speak to that city? Another great medium-sized New England town.
Google Plays to Microsoft's Weaknesses
GPS Determines Car's Speed Limit
Agreed, if you serialize the closure and append it to the URL, you solve the problem. I actually proposed this fix over in the Arcforum yesterday: http://www.arclanguage.com/item?id=1760

But if you keep the closure on the server, whether memcached or on disk, you still have the problem that you have to keep storing a growing amount of closures forever.
eBay to ban negative seller views
OK, agreed, I took your "hint" to indicate that you believed the problem could be solved by cookie-based sessions.
When I read this I was laughing. But the Guardian is not The Onion so...
It's from Hamlet. I chose the name because it's somewhat sui generis and thus not too many people will be using it as a user name.
Is this the place for this?
B.A. Philosophy, Politics, and Economics (PPE)- Claremont McKenna (small lib arts college in SoCal); non-hacker, but man do I wish I could hack...

My partners are:

BA PPE & CS, Claremont McKenna
BA Economics & CS, Claremont McKenna
With iPhone, 'Security' Is Code for 'Control'
So what's wrong with all these smartphones?
Exception Handling in Running a Business
XHTML 2 vs HTML 5
Robert Scoble's section on the new Fast Company website
How many employees does Google have?
It's difficult for me to recommend a "Hello World" type introduction to electronics and microcontrollers, since I had 4 years of learning it in a university (obviously the budget is quite a bit different). I would say find some hobby you are interested in that uses LED's and switches, and find a tutorial on how to build that component. What you will find is that depending on the application, a simple button can be a lot more involved than you may expect.

For instance, if you played guitar, you could learn to make a footswitch that has LED's to tell you what channel you're on. But in this case, you'd have to look up the specs for your amp to see what type of resistance and impedance (if any) the amp expects from that channel. Furthermore, does it expect an active high or an active low signal, do you need to involve any BJT's (bi-polar junction transistors are common in simple electronics) or FET's?

Anyway, I'll not get into too much depth, because depending on what you're trying to accomplish, this may be overkill. That said, once you start building, Digikey is your friend!

http://www.digikey.com/

Also, I hate to promote this book, because I really disliked the professor that wrote this (seriously, one of my least favorite classes ever), but his book really does answer any possible electronics question you'll probably ever have (though, again, it's probably a bit overkill).

http://www.amazon.com/Electromagnetic-Compatibility-Handbook...

If you have any specific questions during your project, feel free to give me a shout. Admittedly, microcontrollers aren't my specialty, but I am an ME/EE.