skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think 'great is simple' applies to programming too. The reason I learned BASIC at school was because there were computers lying around which all had the same BASIC pre-installed on ROM. They switched on in less than a second.

Nowadays, apart from a few web-based 'try it out' pages, learning a language usually requires installing it and several other packages and getting everything to work together and with your OS. This is hard, especially for beginners. In the meantime, you're using your computer for other important things.

If I could buy a pad with the major languages and text editors pre-installed, or even just with one language and one editor, I would. It would be separate from my browsing pad. Which would be separate from my gaming pad. Etc.

Hopefully pads will continue to get thinner and cheaper because they will be a lot of them lying around the house by 2020.
> When I get that old, I want people to see me first and my age second, not the other way around.

Good luck.
You're probably right that the form I suggested isn't quite right - it was off the cuff.

Still, I think the design needs to reflect the problems people are trying to solve. Given the sample questions you listed, the form currently on the site is still backwards - running from particular products back towards uses.

Here's an idea: have you considered pushing the expertise out to the site community instead of having to hard-code it? I'm thinking of something like a stackoverflow for cycling. That way the site will respond directly to the precise questions that users have, rather than trying to force-map the 'typical' question into a form at all.
Transistor devices had been around for years at that point; we were already making transistor computers.

Also, electrolytic caps are pretty easy to replace--they're big, clearly labelled, and it's not like the functionality has changed (a 100 uF capacitor is still a 100 uF capacitor).
I think we need to view maxklein's blog posts through the prism of what he's setting out to achieve. He has mentioned a few times that he's in a "notoriety building" phase (my words, not his) with a view to exploiting that at a later date.

Right now he's generating buzz around his personal brand so that when he does have something he really wants to shout about he'll have people ready to listen.

I'm not saying there's anything wrong with this approach as such - but keeping it in mind does temper my expectations when I read one of his articles. It's less "I wonder if I'll learn anything new/interesting" than "I wonder how he's going to draw a reaction with this"
Banksimple
I'm not sure I consider any freely available framework to be. That's the reason I wrote my own TBH :/
would you mind elaborating on this with an example? this sounds truly amazing, but I don't see quite how it's possible.
It boils down to Quality vs Quantity.

The idea and reality some people can be rich without developing something of value (as defined in the blog post) is offensive on a very primal level to most people. It just doesn't seem right and fair to most folks.
You're right...I edited the title to be more specific.

Also, from what I read on some other sites about this "hack", I believe it's related to the fact that (some|all) of Panasonic's flat-screen TV's run Linux now. It also doesn't work on all of their models, just a few specific ones.
So they just degrade once opened and don't end up in the Pacific Gyre ?
0) Trusted Computing.

More seriously, their design is so good that even their "Trusted Computing" scheme is invisible to most people. This is scary.
As an interesting counterpoint, Paul Tyma has a really excellent presentation on how NIO in Java actually allows considerably less throughput than thread-per-connection and has a much more complicated programming model:

http://paultyma.blogspot.com/2008/03/writing-java-multithrea...

I've written a fair amount of asynchronous network code in my time, and it really is more difficult to write and debug - developers are generally used to being able to see a linear flow in their code. Event driven code in general IMO is much harder to follow and reason about than linear code. In my current project we have a fully asynchronous multiplexing network component - I'm about to replace it with a simpler, synchronous model because both the client code and the code of the component itself will be much simpler. Even if I take a performance hit the easier maintenance and fewer bugs will be worth it.
I love xkcdsucks: http://xkcdsucks.blogspot.com/
Use your computer as a Bluetooth speakerphone
* Click Start -> Control Panel -> Hardware and Sound -> Bluetooth Devices. (In Windows Vista OS, you might be prompted for Administrative credentials.)
* On the Devices tab, click Add to add your mobile phone and then follow the wizard steps.
* On your Mobile phone, enable Hands-free connection with your computer with enabling Bluetooth ON. (For details on using Bluetooth on your mobile phone, please read the documentation of your cell phone.)
* Now, click Audio tab where you see your mobile phone in the list.
* Click Telephony Audio Gateway service and then click Connect. When you are finished with the call, click Disconnect.
Intresting
The thing that most struck me was the issue of him being your friend and your wanting to keep that relationship.

Given all that you've said, I'd expect at best a moderate success where you keep that friendship, with serious success (maybe) possible only at the cost of the friendship.

As for your putative future SO, perhaps finding one during the crucible of a startup will be more likely to work out in the long term than finding one now and then learning she can't deal with the stresses of a startup later (it sure sounds like you like them and want to do them).

Final note: In America, there's not much in the way of job security for real. I gather that's really starting to happen in Japan with the advent of this Great Recession. So you might be over-valuing your current position (not much you can do about the perception of your culture and family, that sort of thing lags reality).

But everything I follow about Japan suggest that you need to be thinking out of the box for the long term ... if not this startup, perhaps another.

Good luck.
I like the heading. lol
Easy Full Screen Background Images w/ jQuery
Rails Plugin Authors: Toward a Better Future
f() { return x; }
g() { x=1; return f(); }

f() returns x it inherits from g(). A spectacular way to shoot yourself in the foot.
I feel like we're talking at right angles. Your central point seems to be that most people will never build software like this. That's totally true, no contest.

However, I think it's still an interesting topic, and a significant minority can learn something useful.

There should be room for both perspectives here.
Toyota: how Britain's textile industry helped seed the world's largest carmaker
The annoying thing to me, as a guy who works on the compiler side of things, is that transformation of linear synchronous code to continuation-passing style (CPS) suitable for asynchronous code can be done mechanically by the compiler. There isn't a technical reason why it needs to be as hard as it is; lots of details to get right, especially when inter-operating with stack-oriented languages, etc., but in principle it's very possible.
If you have green threads, and you wrap calls that may block such that they redirect to your own scheduler, you can simply save the green thread context, initiate an async call, and when the async call completes you can restore the thread and reschedule it.

Your scheduler may be as simple as a bunch of threads using work-stealing queues to grab jobs; a job is scheduled by adding it to a queue.
Ask HN: Education level of successful tech founders?
What is the average highest level of education attained by those who have sold their technology-based companies for a personal gain of $10+ million?

Inspired by the Reddit AMA posted yesterday (man sold startup for $20 million, has Bachelor's degree), I began wondering how I could realistically do the same. As a college student, a very immediate issue is graduate school - to go or not to go? Naturally there are other factors, but I'm really wondering about statistics: how often do founders at each level of education succeed impressively but repeatably?

This seems like the kind of statistic that would interest the HN community, but I could not find a similar submission.
I remember this too -- saw it on reddit, had a title that had something to do with elephant's memory or something to that. Anyone know exactly what this was?

Edit: found it! melancholy elephants: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melancholy_Elephants
50 years is definitely excessive. One can argue that for very successful authors/artists it can provide income for heirs. In most cases it only benefits publishers. 30 years sounds like a reasonable period for me.
It stinks that we'll have to wait 2 months for the RTM version, but honestly, I don't mind waiting if that means Microsoft has the time to make more small improvements on a tool that I'll be using nearly-daily for the next 2-3 years.
without giving the game away of course, could you possibly explain the kind of features yours has that others are lacking? I'm working on 2 different web frameworks currently, 1 a long standing one and another "start from scratch" project. I'd love to include the meat of the real needed features the current popular frameworks are missing.
What Email Looked Like in 2009 in Numbers
Probably not a popular opinion but at the end of the day this comes down to google having no idea how to deliver a final product to customers. They have a company and business model based on releasing half baked free software early, calling it beta for a very long time, and iterating over it until it's really shiny.

Delivering somone a product they paid for is not one of Google's core competencies. I also don't think supporting an end user that expects functionality to be mostly flawless (A cell phone is an appliance these days) is really one of their core competencies. That being said they release amazing products and are doing great things with Android... But, the complaints are far fewer when you give something away for free as opposed to when people pay for it.
how would you manage to figure out the order of execution for an arbitrary set of events firing when the program is defined as a direct linear series of operations? surely the paradigm is so vastly different that getting a compiler to figure it out would be impossible?
As someone very familiar with the underlying software of current generation HDTVs I can tell you almost all of them have similar menus / editable hex interfaces allowing users to change things they probably oughtn't to change.

As someone else noted; Most all of the 'top end' LCD model are running custom Linux kernels under the hood.
Stimulus funds for high-speed Internet access tangled up
Bloomberg: Microsoft Outpaces Apple in Customer Satisfaction
> Few days back there was someone here who told us that he was getting as much as 1 thousand dollars EVERYDAY by developing many small apps for the iPhone and selling those.

I believe that was Max (the original article author). Was it not?
The points about board games and the device being easily shared are nice observations.

Using the device for board games would save on storage, solve the problem of missing pieces, and save time setting up, all while maintaining the immediacy of sitting around the table with a friend or three.

Chess and Risk strike me as particularly well suited to be played on the iPad.
Can we edit the title to not be so emo?
9d95c450c3a375a6d3f952b4b13b9f17
Most people don't even know what "Trusted Computing" is, leave alone why would they should be scared by that.

Frankly, I am a bit tired of "open is good, closed is bad" rubberstamping without putting much effort into thinking why is that and is it always the case.
Reminds me "Four legs good, two legs bad" from the Animal Farm.
The Page Space Wars, a cyber war for territory in Googles index
agreed, doesn't waiting for request to finish completely before sending response imply synchronous not async?
Products, with costs, used for web presence for a district council
that sounds really cool, thanks, I think I'll have to learn Erlang cause of this comment :)
A few problems with this rosy analysis:

1. Mississauga's vast, low-density road system, built in a non-stop sprawlathon over the past 40 years, is aging and will soon require heavy-duty maintenance costs. Without development charges to pay for this (the city is now built out), the current municipal funding model has a pretty abrupt time limit.

2. Mississauga would not enjoy as high a ratio of commercial to residential property tax revenues as it does were it not nestled right next to Pearson International Airport. So much for the unregulated free market. Given that airport-related development is peaking with global oil production rates, this economic gravy train is about to run dry.

3. Mississauga achieves its positive municipal cash flow by aggressively scrimping on public amenities and infrastructure. Toronto and Hamilton bear most of the regional burden of poverty (and their struggling municipal finances reflect this imbalance), but the lack of public transit in Mississauga will start to put the squeeze on tha 'city' as oil prices become more volatile over the next several years.

In all, Mississauga is heading toward a perfect storm of rising infrastructure costs, falling industrial revenues, and curtailed driving as a replacement for a real urban transportation system.
How many of these emails were of the type "SomeJerk has tagged a photo of you on Facebook!" or "xXx-linkinpark92-xXx has responded to your comment on Youtube"?
I hope they improve performance further because VS 2010 slows down doing basic things on my machine which I originally intended to be a gaming machine.
Some shots of these "exciting new menus" would be nice. I'm always interested in free functionality hacks, but without any info as to what that functionality might be, the stakes are a just a little too high.
If I add up all of the 5 minute long "killing time while waiting to pick up my daughter" types of browsing sessions that I do on my phone (a Droid :-) I bet it would easily add up to the amount of time I spend with my netbook on my lap.
I wish I hadn't wasted my time clicking on that.
And yet we buy pet rocks.
From the support issue, I'm not surprised. Take the example of the 3G issues people were experiencing. Someone would call T-Mobile and T-Mobile would say they know nothing about the phone, call HTC. HTC would say that it's a service issue, so you have to call T-Mobile.

Meanwhile Google's only support mechanism is a public forum, which isn't really support at all.
Nasuni launches encrypted, multi-cloud, versioned virtual NAS
That's interesting. I'll need to noodle on it some more.
Hn-api: a simple, ad-hoc Python API for Hacker News
Thank you, I couldn't remember the title.

Here it is if anybody want to read it:

http://www.baen.com/chapters/W200011/0671319744___1.htm

It is strange the way in which a random quote stays in our mind for years, I still remembered the following almost verbatim.

"Artists have been deluding themselves for centuries with the notion that they create.

In fact they do nothing of the sort.

They discover.

Inherent in the nature of reality are a number of combinations of musical tones that will be perceived as pleasing by a human central nervous system.

For millennia we have been discovering them, implicit in the universe—and telling ourselves that we `created' them.

To create implies infinite possibility, to discover implies finite possibility.

As a species I think we will react poorly to having our noses rubbed in the fact that we are discoverers and not creators."
I think most people look forward to being on the phone with a customer service rep just about as much as Google looks forward to maintaing the call center they're working in, but consumers need somewhere to go with their questions, especially when they've just shelled out a lot of money for something.

One could argue that Google should have offered this from the start, but we need to remember this a new space for them, and the fact that they identified a flaw and corrected it is a more important (and more interesting) lesson.
In case you don't know it, jQuery is a javascript framework for website use that's fantastic. It makes heavy use of event/async style, and so would be a great way to get used to it. I learned about async programming through enough use of jQuery in websites. Take a look at http://docs.jquery.com/Tutorials:How_jQuery_Works for a start at it.
Mississauga Transit has a current active bus fleet of around 410 buses. - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mississauga_Transit#Bus_fleet
Hmmm; MIT has very explicit rules, often per course, on how much and what sort of collaboration is allowed in doing problem sets and projects (see the bottom of these for some examples which seem to be representative of their various departments: http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/Electrical-Engineering-and-Compute... http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/Chemistry/5-112Fall-2005/Syllabus/... http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/Mathematics/18-02Spring-2006/Sylla... http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/Physics/8-04Spring-2006/Syllabus/i...).

I suppose there might be some courses where you just can't discuss a problem with a fellow classmate or student, but I would never take one of those.
unfortunately, (ctrl-t)n yields news.bbc.co.uk for me.
I think I should state this a bit clearer - I don't know SEO, I've not done SEO marketing or generate pages or all that stuff. I have no idea how it works.

I make money with iphone + developer tools + web tool + code repackaging. I can follow the $1 principle using those and it works.

Of course, I started with $1 goal, but they are all making far more than that.

SEO stuff is just too competitive, I am not smart enough to go battle against people with years of experience. My next moves are going to be facebook, smaller social network apps. Then I'll face video and add-on tools for iphone.

Assuming niche sites is about SEO is thinking small. I specifically mentioned examples and said to build software around it, not to go make a landing page style stuff.

The journey towards 400 projects will give you the insight you need to make a lot of money. It's the journey that makes the difference, not the goal.
Call me pessimistic but that IF is not such a small one imho.
In Python, that is what gevent does.
Here's an example: http://bitbucket.org/denis/gevent/src/tip/examples/concurren...
Dalvik "Turbo" VM claims 3x performance (for android apps)
He wasn't saying "Yeah right Americans hate the French", the real point is that most of the audience for that commercial is not going to study in Paris and may never leave North America--trans-oceanic flights aren't cheap.

However, the commercial was "cute" and it definitely got the awww factor from the women present when it came on. Tip to advertisers: wedding proposals and babies make all the girls I know completely lose it, so way to go Google.
No game developer suddenly realises that their customers really want a different kind of product altogether.

Probably because they realize that their customers always want a different kind of product altogether. I've read a customer review of Dragon Age where the person thought it was terrible because it wasn't a first person shooter.

Imagine developing a billing system and having your customers complain because it wasn't a good word processing application.
Best run that with some delays in there or you will definitely hit the velocity checks and you'll find your IP banned.
Why is this kind of data ever going to be useful? People have 200+ friends on their friends lists but only a handful of those are meaningful and the rest of those links are just about facebook values in the same way that capitalism is about the acquisition of money. So I'm a little afraid about people using this data to generate social "insight".
Abby's Blog: A Blog From Dad
The depth of knowledge on HN will never cease to amaze me.
I think you completely set people on the wrong track with your 'owl' site example.
This is very similar to the philosophical implications that all mathematics are out there and we are just discovering them. In this light one can always use the example of the infinite monkeys typing random characters and producing all the works of Shakespeare. If you do the Maths though you will need more time than the predicted life-span of our Universe.

Thanks for the link though very interesting.
Just to clarify this - I am working on a big project that I want to release end of the year. For the project to work, I need to get the word out to a lot of people. So I am making an effort to write stuff that is useful and interesting to people so that they will pay attention when I make my announcement.

In the past I announced stuff and it died in the grave of silence - this time I want to make sure that I can get the word out.

Sure, I could do all that without actually saying that I am doing this, but I want people to opt-in, pay attention even though they know what I am doing, and not because I am pretending to be a sage business man just to later spam them. I'm clear and upfront about it - I'll give you good information on the few things I know, in return when I announce my project, go try it out, be a beta tester or something.

My current small projects are just stepping stones, and this is the path I have chosen to break into the big time. I tried it the other way - building soemthing and then announcing it - didn't work. Now I'm trying it by first building an audience, and then releasing software.
I would have thought this was a no-brainer. Anyone out there know specific firms doing this?
I got that from Patrick! He gave that example, so I used it also.
Why Google won’t give Twitter or Facebook a buzz cut tomorrow
I hear you -- in fact, I think I'll put something in the readme about that.
maybe you can, to some extent, exploit the nature of software? i'm thinking about how i have learnt, and how that ties in to the points you list above, and one obvious connection is that you are automatically guided to "highly granular areas for improvement" if you continuously refactor and revise (polish) you code.

typically, to learn a new language, i solve a problem. the result of solving that problem is a chunk of code and it's usually a bit of a mess. you can use the mess to help identify what needs to be refactored. this then guides you towards learning more about the language, because often the mess is a direct result of not using the tool well.

note that what you're exploiting here is the fact that it's a lot easier to identify "a mess" than it is is to identify a gap in your understanding of the language; identifying the mess helps guide you to the gap.

at a higher level, the conclusion here is that you have not finished learning once you've written some code in a new language. in fact, you are just starting. it's only through repeated (obsessive?) polishing of the code that you achieve a deep understanding of the language.

(and i think this also applies to languages you know pretty well - i use python at work, and have used it for years, but i am currently working on the fourth major revision of my lepl parser library and am still learning as i rewrite particular aspects).