skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Which library ? which language? If it is ruby/rails I can point you in the right direction. mail me at manu@manu-j.com
I just invested in decaf; I am hoping to trick myself into self-control.
Why use any pattern? Let me enter the phone number in a way I got used to it and deal with it.
He needs to take a look at this one:
"Does Code Decay? Assessing the Evidence from Change Management Data"

http://nisla05.niss.org/technicalreports/tr81.pdf

The answer is "yes", except if you undertake extraordinarily rare "perfective maintenance". Mostly, managers Just Want It Done Fast, so perfective maintenance never ever gets done, leading to devolving code.
At the local Fry's (in Austin), there is a section of HDMI cables by the TVs and DVD/Blu-ray players. Cheapest in that section is about $20-$25 as you mention. However, over on the other side of the store, near the computer components, there is a section full of cables (coax, etc.). They have HDMI cables over there too - for ~$10 or so. I guess in some stores you just have to know where to look.
Drops of modern wisdom for entrepreneurs
Ubiquitous computing: ZigBee enabled underwear
Traakr's take on Shoes of Prey story
what benefits does this new syntax have for previous users of sass?

Single line declarations are a huge one.
Sure, but the design of a web form is hardly a standard.
"This is training for permanent underclasses, people who are to be deprived forever of finding the center of their own special genius. And it is training shaken loose from its original logic: to regulate the poor."

Having taught unruly 7th graders, I can tell you that the 6 things he teaches are necessary to control a large number of children. And yes, you need to control them, because otherwise the parents will sue you.

The unsolvable problem is that in this day and age, both parents work. It used to be that the mother would take care of the kids, but now they have to be passed off to a third party, who necessarily must take care of several times the number of children found in the average American home.

What kids really need- and do best with- is individual attention. There's no way to get that kind of attention with both parents in the workforce; the numbers just don't work out.

That's your real problem.
The Reason to buy a really expensive HDMI Cable.

There is only one "good" (dubious) reason to by a really expensive cable, and that is for range. There is a performance differences between the cheap and gold cables, due to the different conductivities. However over short distance this isn't observable, as the receiver will correctly interpret the digital signal even though there is no noise on the line, this is the beauty of digital signals. It is there or it isn't, and with decent ECC on the line, which I'm assuming HDMI has, even with a fair bit of degradation it wont be an issue.

However as you extend the cable the signal with degrade at a different rate depending on the quality of the cable, and eventually you will reach a distance where the digital signal even with ECC is lost, and it will no longer work. With a higher quality cable this range is greater, (we are talking of ranges in the 10's -> 100's of meters), certainly no issue for a normal TV setup, and you would have to question why you even needed such a long cable to start with, move your source/receiver closer to each other.

The only other factor which might show up is the sensitivity and power of the transceivers, and you might find a cable of 100m works on some gear and not on others, but if you do you really are using the wrong tool for the job, go buy a optical repeater :)

I'm guessing on distances here, but you get the idea, I use to work in high frequency data transmission systems, and have no idea of the detailed specs of HDMI but should give you an idea.
It was not my company and I had nothing to do with the purchase of the software. Also, if that $400k piece of software is unique and gives the company a tremendous competitive advantage, who cares if it's only compatible with Lynx? Not every app has to work everywhere. It has to be stable within its own system requirements.
Probably the best approach is not using any pattern at all. The less you force your users into something that will not work most of the times, the best. I always struggle to input information even in forms designed specifically for my country.

Just let people enter numbers with all the spaces and the dashes the wish. After all, if a human will ever need a phone number, he will be able to read it in any form. If these characters are a problem for you to store, simply strip them. The routine to do this takes the same effort to write as the one to check the input.
Dual Class Computing: Geeks vs. Moms
ErrantX, I don't think slides are a problem. They are simply one more medium teachers may use to communicate knowledge. Now, they are certainly not a replacement for actual textbooks, but they do have their uses.

I do think you hit on a very important topic, although indirectly. You state that the subjects are boring. I've had my share of bad teachers in all different levels of school (I'm a graduate student right now). The problem is not that the subjects are boring. The problem is that you have teachers that either have no interest in teaching the subject, or you have teachers that don't know how to teach the subject. I spend most of my time studying financial mathematics, but the most interesting class I ever took was one on American History in high school. Everyday was a brand new story, something intensely interesting. I certainly learned my American History, as I got a 5 on the AP test way back in the day. I also have to give credit to the same teacher for giving me a deep respect for all of history.
Ask HN: ODBC driver using websockets?
Does a javascript ODBC driver exist that works over websockets? If not, is it feasible?

I'd like to be able to send queries to an SQL database directly from the browser, with no proxy.
which HDMI doesn't do.
For phone numbers, this library might help: http://code.google.com/p/libphonenumber/
I don't get it. I mean, sure, the technology is cool. They have some kind of spatial tree with temporal information added to individual nodes so they can detect nearby bumps. I find that somewhat interesting (but there are more interesting problems abound).

But as an actual application, what? Maybe it's just because I don't have a phone. I don't see how it's much easier than just scrolling through a contacts list-- which, by the way, you can do anywhere, not just when you're next to the person-- or pulling out your wallet and giving the person the money as cash (which is usually how I've done it / seen it done-- and where there has been paypal involved, it's always been when we weren't next to each other). I could maybe see it being used as some kind of replacement for debit/credit cards, which are annoying. Simply nodding your phone towards a kiosk/reader would seem easier, even including the time it takes to start up the app and so on (then again, there is a reason I have to enter my PIN-- however, I could do this in line with the phone...). But, I can't imagine that ever happening (magstripe readers won a long time ago). What's so great about this?
HDMI doesn't do error correction for video.
Good question. Unless there's some table valid phone number patterns corresponding to various regions, the best you can do might be to check for dashes, digits, dots, and parenthesis. Maybe also check that it doesn't exceed some arbitrary but generous length, too. (Ugly, I know.)
I rid myself of a 6+ cup a day habit by switching over to tea (well, yerba mate at the moment, which I suppose is technically (and oddly) a kind of holly).

I still drink quite a bit of tea, but the accumulated caffeine intake is much less. It's a possibly reasonable way of tricking the psychological dependence into submission.
Data sifted from Facebook wiped after legal threats
i smell something burning...
I'm not sure who's the intended audience of this. It is called an Introduction to Virtual Memory that is aimed at C programmers.

How many C programmers are out there that do not know how VM works?
Dot RB, work portfolio for Ruby programmers
Are you a Ruby developer for hire? Or one who needs a place to put your portfolio. This is a new Ruby developer community for just those things.
This is a great list, but I especially like #1. Any time I see a job ad that wants "1-3 years experience with x" I groan.
There's a cost/benefit analysis to be done. People do make mistakes, and checking their submission against common patterns will save you lost sales.

As suggested in a comment on a rant I wrote a few years ago, one strategy is to 'validate' against something reasonable, but instead of rejecting anything that fails, ask the user to confirm that they really do want something unexpected.

I'm not sure that 'reasonable' would be for an international phone number, but whatever you pick based on the country they choose, let them override your validation.
These syntax changes move Sass closer to things web developers are familiar with.

I believe renaming !variable to $variable is more intuitive for most web developers.

Also I've made the mistake multiple times of forgetting to use an equal sign rather than a colon.

These weren't show stoppers but they added extra complexity to an elegant solution.

I'm excited about the new changes.
It's more complicated than that, obviously. If the constraints exist because they provide some absolute value, then they're not so bad. For example, neither of us can fly by our own power, but that's a constraint associated with being human instead of another animal, which has some obvious benefits.

Everything worth doing imposes constraints-- working, raising a family. The question is whether those are constraints that add value for you or for someone else. For example, if you choose only to take 2 weeks of vacation per year because you're very interested in seeing the results of a project you're working on, the constraint is paid off by the benefit. If you can't take serious vacation because your company won't allow it, but you could easily do so otherwise with no serious compromise to your work, it's a constraint that is of no benefit to you-- only to someone else.
My first reaction on reading the title is that you don't need to work for anyone in order to work for free for experience. Just work on some project of your own. What you want is to work for free in exchange for mentoring.
This article reminds me of when I tried to use Weebly. Weebly is like the iPad of the website-building world ^-^.
Duplicate of an item just posted (well 14 further forward on the "new" list). Plus the poster has editorialised the link text - not the HN way.
It is, but it took them a couple years to get there after Sun's first GA release. Of course, it likely requires an IBM JVM, at least if you want support.
I've got a collection of some decent domain names in case anyone's looking. Also interested to hear from anyone else who's got some premium domains in exchange for cash/equity. Here goes:

- techlayer.com
- marketglue.com
- mailcake.com
- morewhite.com
- loventure.com
- extrau.com
- worxo.com
- yotso.com
- unetiq.com
- iludi.com
- identicli.com
- valuemypad.com
"On paper these were strong selling points.."

I don't think this is a good example. Shoe "technology" is bullshit. The technology doesn't even look good on paper because everyone knows it's just stuff that's used to justify the bloated price of Nike runners. Aesthetics and build quality are all people want from shoes.

Now for technology - not just software - most people don't have a good way to judge all the stuff they don't understand. So features work as a selling point. Nobody wants to spend money on something that may turn out to be not good enough later. Feature lists tap into that fear/purchase hesitation.
"When almost nothing will work on IE6, I hope that would encourage the "standard" to be updated."

I also have to use IE6 at work. The problem is that the folks in charge say "Our entire intranet works in IE6. It may (or may not) work entirely in other things." So by their standard "everything" already works.
Absolutely, I'm working on an MMO, and the complexity/flexibility of the AMQP protocol has been a god send.

However, I do agree that its concepts are somewhat convoluted for a new user, it took me quite a bit of digging to get the basics of what an exchange/queue was and what bindings mean, etc.

However, 0MQ looks attractive but simply doesn't have what's needed for a complex project that spans languages, platforms, and usages beyond the basic pub-sub.

I would compare both protocols as XML vs. JSON, whereas XML may be tedious but it's absolutely necessary for some cases, specially where tight specifications are needed.
Yeah. Since no start-up in its right mind would pay $20K/CPU or whatever for Websphere, there's no opportunity loss for IBM to give it away. And, the successful companies will face a switching cost three years from now if they don't want to pay hundreds of thousands to IBM.
Debunking the Erlang and Haskell hype for servers
Totally true. HDMI takes many steps to try to reduce errors to a reasonable rate. In practice, this rate is usually low enough to ignore, even with cheap cables.

I was just making the point that there is indeed a progressive degradation in image quality with increasing error rate, even in HDMI.
Is the Cube really one of the two "Tech's two greatest albatrosses"? Aside from the mentioned similarity - both products are brought up when someone wants to take a swipe at a new product of the respective company - is the Cube really a failure on the same level as Bob?
Actually it did work. It just didn't work perfectly.

A lot of people really would read the FAQ and not ask questions. I did that, and so did many others. So adding a question to a FAQ would reduce the frequency of the question, but not eliminate the occurrence.

But then there was the second, bigger, benefit. Which is that when people asked that question people could just said "Read the FAQ" rather than laboriously typing up the answer. Which saved work answering the question, and served to point other people to the FAQ.
Dear Non-American Website User:

You do not live in the United States of America. You think all American website owners are the same. And then you decide it might just be a good idea to lump the 95.4% who know what they're doing with those who don't. But you know, most American website owners are no more alike that most American <anything>.

The moment you whine about the few to the many in a blog, two things do happen:

- you irritate the people who know what they're doing

- you don't reach the people you should

If you don't like something about an American website, tell them, not the rest of us. That way, you're more likely to actually accomplish something. Which is, after all, the American way.
It can happen within countries too. Most UK websites will require you to enter a "county". That's fine in England, because England is divided in to lots of counties (e.g. Essex, Hertfordshire, Oxfordshire etc.). However, Scotland does not have counties any more. They were abolished before I was even born and replaced with regions. It might sound nit-picking, but it's one of these things that adds to the chip on our shoulder that suggests folk in Engerland don't really care what is going on in the rest of the UK (I don't know how Wales and N.I. are organised).
Most web developers might consider it a non-problem[1]. I, for one, prefer that information that ought to be private stay that way.

[1] Maybe. Or not. I doubt either of us has evidence one way or the other.
Outsourcing on Elance- how to get amazing people for $5 more.
German supercomputer simulates quantum computer
For me, the addiction gets really bad about every six months or so. So I go through a week of zombified detox and terrible headaches... and then I start all over again.
OK - perhaps dumb question - but what is the problem with AJAX and a web service to return the SQL query results in (say) JSON format? It is pretty simple and works very well.

The concept of an ODBC driver being run directly from Javascript if not to something like a "sandboxed" instance of SQLight is a bit worrying on security grounds.
There are no ads on that blog. So not sure why pageviews matter, maybe the author just wanted to take a break.
Is your credit card data being held hostage?
Murali Vijay Proved Chennai Super Kings is Phoenix
It depends what you mean - if you only mean "learn JavaScript" in the sense of learning the language itself, then no, jQuery doesn't change a thing, you've still got to figure out your way around the (rather minimalistic, esp. given the lack of significant standard libraries) language.

But if you mean "learn JavaScript" in the pre-jQuery sense, then what you really mean is "accumulate encyclopedic knowledge of all sorts of browser dependent bullshit that constantly thwarts every attempt to write clean, reusable code that actually works." In that case, jQuery (and other similar libs, of course) really does change the game. You can get pretty damn far without ever knowing a thing about the various incompatibilities; this, IMO, is one of the best things about the new sets of Javascript tools out there, they really are starting to bring us towards the point where you can just write clean code that does what it's supposed to, without working around bugs (features?) in other people's code.
The Chinese economic system [is] inherently unstable
Simplicity in a product can make or break functionality. I think the folks at http://bu.mp are awesome ;-D
Where in the World is My iPad?
What's the Acer Revo's power draw?
Awesome! Paypal's "original" (Confinity) business was to allow you to "beam" payments between mobile devices. This closes the loop nicely.
I'll just say I agree with some of the points mentioned in the article, but here are some my additions:

Always have segmented goals. For instance, I have a few for the next 6 months (learn a couple new programming languages, hit the gym 5 days a week, get a faster time on my 5000 meter run), and always focus on them; they will change, some times you'll pick up a new 6 month goal, or it may extend to another segment, but always have a short time span where you are improving yourself and your skills in some way, always.

Then have focus on the 2 to 5 year goal span, where you are slowly acquiring a larger set of skills sets that work in tandem to meet a more complex goal set. For instance, getting a side project profitable and running. Doing this could include a series of 6 months goals that work together to reach that 2 year goal (getting more unix admin experience, finishing your nth business/marketing book, creating a network of partner and commercial relationships).

Then you always have a set of goals that you want to reach 10 or 20 years from now, that are a solid mix of personal and professional ambitions that you know are attainable if you plan ahead.

Everything takes time, and the worst thing you can do is wasting it by not focusing on what needs to be done now in order to move to the next stage in life.

Not to mention doing all of this while maintaining a good spirit, sane mind, physical fitness, and personal fulfillment.

It's all possible, but you have to keep your eye on the prize, watch out for pitfalls, and don't let minor setbacks derail your ultimate ambitions. It's all incremental. You can't do everything at once, otherwise you set yourself up for failure. You must work slowly, realizing those progressions, and building on them until you're living the dream.
A couple years ago, I saw it was possible to download and run Firefox in a corporate environment without admin rights (downloading and unzipping the zip archive, then just starting the exe without any installation).

Not sure if this still works, but here's an old thread from when it seemed to work: http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?f=38&t=27113...
This reminds me of the original PayPal idea (paying a friend via Palm Pilot in person).
OLPC and Pixel Qi sign cross license agreement for screen technology
Ridiculously innovative? Hasn't Bump Technologies offered something similar for nearly a year?
In a related bit of cleverness I've heard that the JVM doesn't actually put NULL checks in it's generated ASM, instead it installs a SIGSEGV handler that catchs the null pointer exception and does the right thing.
China: Crunch Time (An Inherently Unstable Economic System)
AppsXL.com BETA
I wish the title of this submission had been better. I'd have read it much sooner.

I've taken to calling iPad-esque ideas "Internet Appliance" (I'm sure I got that from somewhere else and I doubt it's original). I think the article misses one important point though - businesses. As far as consumer products I don't see my mom (metaphor) buying a standard desktop PC again assuming similar devices to the iPad come from other makers. Businesses, OTOH, I expect to continue to use traditional PCs for many years to come. People who work in front of PCs need lots of screen real-estate even those doing accounting-and these businesses have tons of legacy SW that it took them years to migrate to new systems (many of them still haven't).

This will be a boon to geeks. As businesses hold onto the traditional computers we will all benefit and continue to get much of our hardware fairly cheaply.
Ask HN: Where to buy a desktop PC?
Any suggestions for online retailers to buy high quality desktop pcs from?
But still a lot less dangerous than most of the other "nootropic" drugs people people were discussing on HN the other day: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1211959
Ask HN: I need a brainstorm on how to collect several thousand quality RSS feeds
Google and Bing aren't doing right by me. All I'm finding are crappy SEO optimized sites. As you might surmise, there's a lot of web scraping and natural language processing in my near future, but I need a corpus of decent RSS feeds to start scraping.

What I'm looking for is a way to collect several thousand decent economic and financial news RSS feeds for my startup, Newsley.com.

Aside from gathering these by hand, has anyone found a great directory of RSS feeds? (If you have a list of a whole lot of economic and financial feeds in your Google Reader account, export the list, email it to me. I'll buy you beer or your beverage of choice. )

Alternatively, I'd love to hear a brainstorm or suggestions on where to find collections of RSS feeds. or ways in which a bunch of RSS feeds could be gathered.

Suggestions?
Top Entrepreneur Movies to Watch
"The genius of the iPad is that it cannot get things like viruses."

safari can certainly be compromised, but even with the sandboxing that claim seems like a stretch
Sorry, I didn't see the other submission. Other times I've submitted a dupe the software just links me to the existing submission.

The original title was "Twitter! Curse your sudden but inevitable betrayal!" which gives no clue to what the article is actually about... so I used the title from the URL instead.

Yes, I added "Geeks vs Moms" because one of the lines from the article is:
"We're heading toward two classes of computers: one for people like me, and one for people like my Mom."
Plenty. In fact many get irate when you explain to them that thier nice "close to the metal" language is actualy doesnt talk directly to the memory, it has to go through a (albeit hardware assisted) transform moderated by a couple layers of stuff. The whole point of VM is to keep the illusion of working directly with memory/hw, because it is useful sometimes.
As a Javascript developer, I totally agree. Something that is easier for beginners doesn't imply it's not useful for seasoned professionals though.
I think being international is a standard of sorts. Eg:

- handling international times (say, Feb 1 2007 rather than 01/02/07 or 02/01/07)

- allowing people to enter their normal phone numbers and addresses

- knowing that United Kingdom is preferred for addressing and Great Britain is not.