skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: I'm collecting learning resources - care to share some ?
I'm looking for learning resources I could add to one of my sites (in profile if interested).

I already found the following ones (reading HN):

http://learnyouahaskell.com/

http://learnyousomeerlang.com/

http://eloquentjavascript.net/

Would you have more similar sites to suggest ? (around programming, data processing, web design ...)

Thanks!
Overall, reasonably close on many of the predictions. Some of the speech-to-text and automated readers aren't prevalent yet, but Google's Nexus One and the Intel Reader are introducing those technologies into the mainstream right now. He certainly nailed some of Apple's products like the iPhone and MacBook Air with SSD storage.
Yeah, I saw the old version. It looked like a not-particularly-unique music-based social network, so I always bounced from the homepage.

I don't care about games, points, hearts, enthusiasts, community, or any of that -- I want good music playing in the background while I do other things.

IMO this new redesign is both unique and more accessible. If it's about music the music should be front-and-center, no? Sometimes you have to cannibalize your users to reach a larger audience.

I know I'm probably going to go to T61 every day, now. I've already bought two albums based off of what I found there, and before the redesign it was totally uninteresting to me.
Sometimes I do... I give my self breaks, I also be sure to not watch television and read books often. It helps.

Even when you are off the grid, you can still get 24/7 high-speed internet with bi-directional satellite!
Does it really cost $5000 to create a single wafer? It's just exposure, putting it into differenth baths etc. Should be fairly inexpensive, not?
No, tax deductions simply make home ownership competitive with rental companies, who can also deduct their interest expense.
With all the stories out there about similar fiascos, why wouldn't they withdraw funds on a daily basis?
Drexler Sayeth:

Contrary to popular opinion, diamond synthesis seems almost irrelevant to progress toward advanced nanosystems. At the current stage or research, it is both difficult and unnecessary.

The current view is that we're ready to start work on a first generation of nanoassembly tools using designed proteins for tooltips and DNA scaffolds for programmable, atomically precise structure. The trouble is that it doesn't look like a first generation of molecular manufacturing tools are just around the corner, so the research isn't getting done.

http://metamodern.com/2008/12/27/toward-advanced-nanosystems...
Cool, does that mean the copyright laws will be as loosely applied as the constitution?
I'd call this a fruit of this kind of DNS abuse. Yeah, OK, it looks nice, x.usesthis.com or whatever it is, but it forces you to make a new DNS lookup for each page, instead of using cached www.usesthis.com/something. And, as we can see, you can even make the address invalid. It's quite sad. :-/
What is PA short for?
I'd say Chris Wanstrath (GitHub cofounder, http://defunkt.github.com/projects.html) is when it comes to hacking on awesome OSS projects. Rip, hurl, some cool emacs scripts, hub, repl, and plenty more.
my best mentors are people who happened to be a little ahead of me and were mature enough to embrace openness. or they were people tons ahead of me specifically looking to mentor. the one thing they all had in common was not viewing me as any less capable or able, just less experienced.

i'm as interested in answers to your questions as you are...cus i don't know have i've found mentors. lucky. it helps to be open yourself and respect what others can teach or share.
I think the Japanese knife is at one pole of the fundamental user interface dilemma: to what extent do you cater to common actions at the expense of expert actions? The Japanese knife says that any concession made to one specific use will unacceptably hinder other uses.

The German knife is specialized for one particular hand position. In a way, it is actually prescriptive and restrictive: if you try to use it a different way than expected, you will have an inferior experience. The designers (hopefully) studied usage and decided that they could optimize for the common case without hindering other cases too much, thereby getting a better result. It doesn't matter if uncommon cases are a little awkward.

It's just common sense that the optimum design will reject the do-nothing approach and provide some kind of non-use-agnostic tweak. However, ten years of software development work have given me much more appreciation for the assumption embodied in the Japanese knife. It's pessimistic and will never be the best (except in the eyes of design gurus who never actually use stuff) but by god it will never stop you from doing what you want.
1989? Damn I feel old, and I'm 27.
Find someone you trust to execute on it and share it with them.

I've done this and had this done to me; it's one of the two principle forms of social capital in Silicon Valley (the other being introductions).

Odds are someone else is already doing this or will be doing it within 3-4 months, if it's really a BIG IDEA. Every "great idea" I've come up with in the last two years was launched by someone else inside 6 months (not always first).
I don't know Mr. Wanstrath specifically, but it really isn't about hacking awesome OSS projects. It's about feel and attitude. _why was footloose, insane, and absolutely fun.
Almost nobody builds Chromium without trivially linking in ffmpeg.

In the real world, Chromium supports every damn codec and container format. All of them. Safari has identical support with Perian installed, and Opera does too with gst-ffmpeg.

The official Chrome supports Theora, Vorbis, H.264, AAC, MP3, and WAV in all reasonable container formats. Mozilla only supports Theora and Vorbis in ogm containers, plus WAV/RIFF for <audio>.
They are staying anonymous by passing everything through an intermediary overseas nonprofit.

Keeping It Real Shady.
Buying a Google Nexus One Unlocked is a Terrible Experience
I think this is the first calacanis note I've read that didn't mention his Tesla.
Can anyone comment on how effective the common AV packages are at preventing being infected by Torpig and similar know attacks, and once infected, how effective at removing the infection?
If one is to believe psychologist Peter Lovatt, three factors influence how confidently an individual moves on the dance floor -- and how attractive the other gender finds the performance. Those factors are age, gender and genes.

Age, Gender and Genes? That really narrows it down, now doesn't it. Reading on, testosterone is what influences how big your dancing movements are, which makes sense.
per annum (i.e. per year)
3. Jeremy McAnally ( Mr. Neighborly's Humble Little Ruby Book: http://www.humblelittlerubybook.com/book/ ) ( http://www.jeremymcanally.com/ )

4. Marijn Haverbeke (Eloquent Javascript: http://eloquentjavascript.net/ ) ( http://marijn.haverbeke.nl/ )

5. Young Zed Shaw ( http://www.zedshaw.com/ ) ( Older Zed Shaw is just a little bit less out there )

And a few more can be found on Bonus500's Twitter Follow list.
You don't make leaps like that with "usability testing".

Despite a few obligatory niggles the design is a masterpiece, obviously coming straight out of the heads and hands of a few (or even a single) gifted individuals.
This actually isn't that hard to do if they just request it.

I use Paypal for selling my software product and had my account manager setup "auto sweep" where the funds are automatically withdrawn each night.
No, it's not possible to do it via XUL and NPAPI.

You would have to fork both Gecko and XULRunner.
Yes, they can build some really ugly websites, but some very elegant ones as well. It's puzzling.

My theory is that Japanese (and Chinese) readers process a web site differently from readers of word-based languages, such as English. Japanese readers do a lot more 'scanning' than we do.

It would be interesting to see a usability study of one of those Japanese sites that records how the user actually processes the page.
Internet Website Directories: pointing to malicious sites
Surely you're not saying that being labeled a Nazi and being called gay should evoke a similar, combative response?
Web content that is invalid according to one or more standards? Surely you must be joking.
Ack! You're right!
I was thinking more of a Schrodinger's cat like scenario. Lock him in a room with 10 bombs. Give him his device and tell him that 9 are filled with c4 and one with spaghetti noodles, well cooked. He will be released when he chooses the fake and presses the detonate button. (In reality, all will be filled with tasty pasta.)

How long will it take him to emerge?
Holding the negotiations in secret does not prove that they’re acting one way or another. All secret negotiations have underhanded motives; these negotiations are secret; therefore, these negotiations have underhanded motives? The first proposition is quite an assumption. I can see why they wouldn’t want to include you in the negotiations.

The representatives of the people in this process are the democratically elected Senators who must ratify the non-secret finished treaty.
Exactly. Also, for many people, it's not the $5 or $50, it's that they were really looking forward to using the product because they wake up tired every morning. That to me is the issue, the trivial amount of money customers paid up front is not.
I understood that a different way--

Those reviews sound like any other game review. I think he's saying the reviews should have been harsher.
I've spent thousands on dance instruction from hip-hop to salsa to ballroom.

In my opinion, if you have confidence on the dance floor -that will make you look pretty good because confidence is attractive. It takes courage to dance in public, especially freestyle.

When you have possess skill in tandem with confidence to put yourself out there, that is what makes awesome dancers. For hip-hop, that means hitting the off beats. Skill + Confidence.

Many of the best dancers I know have that combination. Dancing. It's not about looks. It's not solely moves. It's about being with the moment. It's about owning the floor.

When you take dancing lessons, you learn steps and
you learn steps and you learn steps. It can go on
for a long time. And then one day, you just learn
to dance, and it is so different.

- Bill Austin
Scala is definitely one of the better functional languages for Java. (It's OO implementation is not that great, however.)

I am left with a few questsions:

Monoid was used as an example, but does Scala's type system support instances like:

instance (Monoid a, Monoid b) => Monoid (a,b) where
mempty = (mempty, mempty)
...

In this case, a mempty tuple is created by creating a mempty "a" and then a mempty "b". If you think about it, this is obvious, but the question is whether Scala's type system knows what "a" and "b" are at the right time, so it can delegate to the right "other" mempty.

(I ask, because I wrote a Haskell-style data structure module for Perl, but it is missing Monoid for this reason. We would know the types after mempty ran, but we can't run it without knowing the types. If only you could fold time back on itself...)

Also, they use the word "forAll" to describe type signatures; are higher-rank types allowable?
Hostile for species and classes, maybe (and I’m quite sure no individual survived a megayear yet), still not hostile for life in general :)
Tuition-free University Gains a Following
Ask HN: Real Posting Middleman Service?
Looking for a multi-point posting service that just wants to be a middleman, not a content host.

I'm looking for a service that would enable me, from a single point, post messages to my blog, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and other such services without hijacking the link-backs like Posterous.com does. Posterous has an agenda of getting me to switch my blog to their service and get users to view all updates and post there, but that's not in the cards for me or a number of my colleagues. We're willing to pay a modest monthly fee to get this service.

For instance, the base premise of posting everywhere would function as posterious does but with links pointing to the destination, not back to the service. However, the service can still have it's own page, but where posterious would show your blog posting or images, etc, this service would just display the link, or a paragraph in the case of a blog, followed by a link to the actual source. Essentially serving as a directory back to the respective services.

Essentially is there a service out there that just wants to be a middleman and doesn't have aspirations to be a blog or content hub?
Whoever came up with this email should employ the George Costanza tactic - take your instincts, and do (write) the opposite.
How could you tell who paid and who didn't?
WakeMate Delays Initial Shipment, Makes Moves To Appease Upset Customers
Since 2004, Mozilla has had baked-in support for automatically installing Flash on the first encounter if the plugin is not found. A nice little yellow infobar pops down (a brilliant UI innovation), prompting you to install it with a few clicks, even without root access on both Windows and Linux.

They've also recently implemented automatic update checking for Flash. Since it's their biggest security hole, they throw up a big nasty "update now" warning on launch if you're using a known-vulnerable version.

Mozilla initially distributed the Flash binaries under license themselves via addons.mozilla.org -- I'm not sure if they still do so.

Flash is shitty, nonredistributable, closed-source, restricted-platform, proprietary, and patented but they're willing to go to great lengths to help their users use it. Why not do the same thing for ffmpeg, which is merely patented?
I would say this guy qualifies as a hacker. And a damn successful one.
Possible. But no one will know/care it's GNU.
Pretty true indeed - as long as the mad man DOES something. As far as Stallman goes, he coded emacs (along with other people, afaik), gave a name to a movement - and lived ever after on complaining, criticizing other people and complaining some more. If we'd depend on this crazy dude for progress, we'd all be using "fully open-source" inferior hardware produced by kids in China. Oh, and most of us would be jobless too, since NO ONE PAYS A DIME FOR FREE SOFTWARE!
Talk about progress...
DPL-EVD3000+ ADVANCED HANDHELD EXPLOSIVES TRACE PARTICULATE / VAPOUR DETECTOR
I agree, but only in situations where that party can harm you again or repeatedly in the same way (e.g. the government, monopolies, polluters). If you can throw a chargeback on some vendor you don't have to patronize ever again (or just accept a small monetary loss), it's worth it if it saves you wasting a ton of precious time.
This really has nothing to do with the Nexus One, or even Google Voice. It's simply a restriction T-Mobile places on the kind of account he has. Yeah, welcome to cell-phone service in the US. (I'm shocked we even have GSM providers here at all.)

Personally, I think this problem falls completely outside the scope of Google. He wants people calling a non-Google Voice number to get to his Google Voice voicemail. This is a feature that has to be provided by the network, because it needs to work when your phone is off. T-Mobile does not provide this feature unless you pay them money. He doesn't want to pay them money, so he doesn't get the feature.

It's an annoying arbitrary limitation (because T-Mobile's network supports this just fine; call my "real" T-Mobile number and you get my Google Voice voicemail), but it's not Google's fault. It's just how cell phone service works in the US; it's based around subsidized devices or really cheap featureless devices. Nobody has a featureful unsubsidized smartphone, so it's not a case that the providers handle. They disable features on the cheap subsidized phones because they want to upsell you to a subsidized phone, guaranteeing revenue for 2 years.

Anyway, if the author is setting up a new number for this phone, he can avoid the whole problem by only telling the new number to Google. Everyone else can call his Google Voice number directly, and then it doesn't matter where his real voicemail forwards to. (I stopped telling everyone my real number about 6 months ago, and now it gets no calls.)

Sadly, short of moving to another country, I don't think there's any way the author can get what he wants. (AT&T doesn't even allow the possibility of data use unless you have a multi-year contract.)

Edit: Since the author makes the inevitable iPhone comparison, it's worth pointing out that "Buying an unlocked iPhone is an impossible experience."
Not only Facebook, every corporations.
When to fire the founders
How can HFT serve any purpose other than front-running a trade that was about to happen anyway? Is there any other reason latency matters? The correct allocation of society's resources did not actually change within those few milliseconds, so their profits can only come from exploiting some flaw in the way the market clears.
The author mentions that you still need a contract if you supply the device - is this true? I thought the whole point of the Even More Plus plan was to provide monthly service without a contract.
Once infected, forget about it.

I've been infected by viruses three times. Twice were before this year, and it takes some quick work, but both times it was no real challenge to stabilize my machine, so beyond feeling really stupid for a few hours, it ended up being kind of fun.

In November, though, I infected my machine again. Three days later, it was still phoning home to Russia and the Ukraine. There was literally nothing I could do - even Malwarebytes and the like would clean it up only to a certain extent, and the viruses were still embedded in the system software. Finally I just gave up and bought a new machine so I could start from scratch, only pulling data from the old machine.

A good AV won't let you get infected - you still shouldn't allow actions that look fishy or unexpected, but at least you're in control. But once you're infected, the botnet can respond in realtime to what you're trying to do to stop it. And they're better than you are at it.

I'm not saying it's impossible to clean up a machine that's fallen into their hands - but I am saying that even with some past success in this under my belt, I was unable to do it in any amount of time that was justified (even in terms of fun).
Perhaps if you don't know Haskell, Scala, or any computer science beyond "trees"...
It is utterly cool. I love it, botnets and spam and all. I just wish I had the time to spend with it instead of earning a living.
It sounds like his trouble is with T-Mobile not supporting voicemail forwarding on FlexPlay plans, not anything to do with the Nexus One or even any unlocked phone.

It sucks, but T-Mobile not supporting call forwarding on FlexPlay plans isn't exactly a secret, he could have easily found this out before buying the phone (or before contacting support):

http://support.t-mobile.com/doc/tm23888.xml
Who here is happy about "psychics" taking people's money? Certainly not me.
I don't think many customers are "upset", per se. This is a fun-to-try, completely non-essential product at this point, and hardware is hard to make, especially for a startup. Delays are forgivable. So while I'll certainly give it a shot when it finally ships, I wonder if wearing a WakeMate may just train me to keep very still towards the morning hours of my sleep?
This may be just me being impatient, but I often hit the Google cache if the site isn't down, but just responding slowly at the moment. It's a nice convenience factor when I'm looking for something quickly.

As such, it annoys me when sites disable the caching; if a site with no cached version takes more than a couple seconds to respond, I generally go elsewhere and will probably retain a negative impression of the site.

I also note that neither of his two reasons for blocking caching have anything to do with improving the user's experience.

On the other hand, I'm not the target audience for most sites, so it probably doesn't matter much.
Ask HN: Is it unethical to sell scraped 'people data'?
Consider hCard on Web pages as a source. Would it be unethical to scrape and sell the data people put out there?

What about email addresses? I'm curious about how people feel.
Technically, ogg, ogm, ogv, and oga all follow RFC 3533 and can legitimately be called the same file format, namely ogg. The only difference between all those extensions the codecs used; Xiph intentionally left the definition of how to map a given codec into ogg up to the codec.
Automate any GUI using screenshots
I was thinking that I'd be able to buy a Nexus One and just seamlessly use Google Voice w/o having all the messy forwarding, etc. I guess not.
Some of the interesting parts of botnets have commercial or research value.

As an example... I find it very difficult, in general, to install software onto multiple Windows machines. Different versions of DLLs, differing Windows features, differing filesystem layout, etc. The botnet control system seems to reliably install on all sorts of machines, without needing 3 restarts and without asking lots of dumb questsions.

Making installing real programs this easy and reliable would be quite nice.
Yeah, talked with them and told me the same. Shipping will be starting like at th end of february, BUT free LIFETIME premium!

Even if premium was 5$/month, you could save over 700$ in 5 years, not to tell in a lifetime.
I could not be happier with the outcome of this situation. Big props to the WakeMate team for straightening things out.
Don't tell people your phone's real number. Then you won't have to forward those calls.
Right, but how do you measure "confidence" or "owning the floor"?
This is really strange. None of the browsers on my machine can access this URL. But

dig _why.usesthis.com

returns the correct info.

According to Wikipedia, the use of underscores in hostnames is illegal, but many implementations ignore this. Anyway, the interview is mirrored here: http://viewsourcecode.org/why/#7
Except causation != correlation?
You won't be able to do that with any phone on any carrier--the network has to be involved for voicemail. If your device is off or unreachable it needs to know where to send the call. T-Mobile does forwarding just fine on the normal plans though.
Sweet, that worked out well. Thanks, WakeMate!
Agree. I wasn't even upset, and now I get "all future premium software features" for free. I will be downright happy to part with the remaining 90% of the purchase price.
This stuff is really cool. One of my college professors, Rajit Manohar, was one of the guys who did a lot of the major research into async VLSI in the 90s. He and a few of his colleagues founded a company in San Jose (Achronix) that designs and builds async FPGAs.

It's an amazingly different way of thinking about computing. Generally async designs take up more physical die space (because of things like dual-rail logic), but the power savings can be pretty significant since you're not running a clock... basically the logic runs as fast or as slow as it needs to, and doesn't do much of anything when idle.

I took a class where we designed and did a little layout for some CPU-subset blocks. It was fun, but often very challenging. At least at the time, there weren't many (any?) good test/validation tools. A friend of mine has been working on one for the past 8 years or so (http://www.csl.cornell.edu/~fang/hackt/), first as a part of his PhD thesis, later as a part of his job.

It's been years since I've touched this stuff... if I'd continued down the EE path (like many others, I switched to software post-college) I'd (ideally) be doing async stuff now.
Rube Goldberg would be proud.

(Sometimes you should take a step back and ask yourself, "is looking for pictures on the screen really the best way to do this"? The example they show on the main page is a one-line "ifconfig" invocation, for example.)