skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's true that most people are in school because they have to be, but in what other subject are standards and expectations so low? Most of my Spanish classes had a nudge nudge wink wink aspect to them: the teacher didn't expect us to learn much and we didn't either. But that was definitely not the case in all the other subjects I did. Maybe other school systems were different, but I've never gotten that impression.

When schools (and universities) moot the idea of phasing out foreign language instruction, I think that's more than a little sad, but in a world of limited resources to be spread across instruction of many subjects and limited genuine interest, it may well be the best choice pragmatically.
A dumb idea does dumb shit, film at 11.
Ask HN: Solving chicken and egg problem
How do you solve chicken-and-egg problem especially for web 2.0 apps requiring hard traction (and many users) to function (e.g. date site, marketplace, etc)?

I have an idea for a collaborative/shared marketplace for a niche product (think airbnb, but for other niche) and is currently building a prototype, but is confused on how to get the very early user for the site to function. I know how user #1 experience is crucial and how del.ico.us was started as a personal bookmarking site, but how does airbnb, craiglist, and many social site gain traction?

Many thanks for the help.
Maybe they meant a wifi stick; I know people who use these to connect to other wifi hotspots from work.
I can't think of a better way to make him feel better about the situation than allowing him to personally cash in on it.</sarcasm>

This guy is working hard to earn back the trust and respect of his peers, whom he undoubtedly feels he let down in a big way. Lufthansa will never hear from him.
It's amazing how many companies still don't get it.

You made a very public mistake -- apologize, wholeheartedly and genuinely, and accept responsibility. That's it!

Making it seem like it's not a big deal makes it come off defensive, unprofessional, and like an excuse..

Now is not that time for that -- use the mitigating details in a follow-up post that highlights your progress and what you've implemented to ensure it never happens again. Don't do it now.
News organisations are nothing but filters - a lot of stuff happens, and they're supposed to be a lens on to what's important ("people died!")... Which unfortunately has to include what people want to know ("Paris Hilton got a dog!").
After looking at the archives I'd have to say it's pretty tame ^_^.
If you are implying that the mining towns caused the current prosperity, it is a non sequitor.
Portable Firefox with Tor, or something like that.

http://www.torproject.org/torbrowser/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portable_Tor
This type of debt slavery is not like the slavery of the blacks. For example the owner was forbidden from any kind of corporal punishment, the slaves ate exactly the same food as the owner, and their beds had to be at least as good as those of the owner.

You couldn't leave, and the owner got to choose your wife for you (if you were not already married), so it was not the same as freedom, but it also was not the same type of slavery you are probably thinking about.

There was a whole procedure a slave had to go through if he voluntarily chose to stay after 7 years - not something you would expect if it was the severe punishment you are thinking of.

There was also a concept of war slaves, which was different from debt slavery.
He's likely arguing against any non-Functional Language. "Purely functional" Lisp has no statements, side-effects, etc, for instance.
Check out Strategy Letter II: Chicken and Egg Problems by Joel Spolsky. It has some good thoughts on the problem.

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000054.html
Lesser known? The only Asimov stories I'm cognizant of having read are The Last Question and The Last Answer.
Facebook Like Connection Tax
Facebook rebrands the Internet
>Another SEC accountant attempted to access porn sites 16,000 times in a single month.

Honestly sounds like a computer worm. 16k accesses is 800 per working day, a little fishy sounding.
Over here: http://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/buzqt/imagine_yo...
Yep. Snapz Pro X let's you hide the mouse cursor.

SimFinder code is on also github; http://github.com/atebits/SimFinger
Adding Extension Methods to PHP
Why are they suggesting using a browser 9 months out of date?
Maybe you can set Tomato to vary the router radio's power output :)
There's a mention of another, funnier website, but it seems to be down... ah, here it is, the same website but on another host and with some differences: http://web.archive.org/web/19990204043929/http://www.cs.bc.e...
Fair use option added for YouTube takedown notices.
Did you read their response?

They published the "DESCRIPTION". They did not know that sometimes banks put full credit card numbers in that field.

Personally, I'd be angry at the banks for doing something so stupid. Do you think your bank should ever give out your credit card number in such a stupid way?

>> "publishing credit card numbers is about the worst thing you can do when dealing with people's financial credentials."

True enough. But that's not the full story of what happened. They published the transactions description as given to them by the bank.

FWIW, I have never used their service, and have no ulterior motive to defend them. I just hate over-reactionary mob mentality at work.
Ah, thanks. Can anyone point me to a reference on entering special characters in HN URLs and comments? If I had entered the URL properly, this would have been presented to me before I posted the link.
> Say what you will about python 3, but at least it exists and has been released.

Yeah, and nobody is upgrading because it doesn't give you much incentive unless you enjoy breaking backwards compatibility. It has also been in development for at least 5 years.

I don't get why people get version numbers so literally. Perl6 is a new language inspired by Perl5. Python 3 is just a minor enhancement that happens to break backwards-compatibility. The two are not comparable.
How the volcano eruption exposed the vulnerability of the global supply chain
For me, Windows, OS X, and Ubuntu all suck. They try to do stuff to "help me", get it wrong, and then make me do more work as a result.

I've fucked over my Debian unstable system more times than I can count over the last 10 years... but it's never annoyed me much. On the other hand, my Windows, OS X, and Ubuntu machine annoy the living fuck out of me every time they say "updates installed, you must restart".

I guess I hate sitting down to use a computer and having it tell me, "sorry, I did stuff without your asking, now you need to clean up the mess". I still haven't fixed the nvidia driver on my Thinkpad with Unbuntu. I tried, failed, and just put the machine in a closet somewhere. It worked a few times, but now I can't get it to work, and I don't know what steps to take. Everything is so magical, and all I can do is be helpless.

With Debian, I make the mess myself, so when I have to clean it up, I am already in the mood. (And of course, the nvidia driver works perfectly. Yeah, I had to build it with module-assistant. But that always works! Every step in the process exists for a good and logical reason -- there is no magic. And magic is what makes me mad.)
Same in Windows. Neither the Canvas or SVG render methods work in webkit browsers.
Parallel Universe Radio
Free online radio for all
wow thanks. I'm reading it now.

edit: i've done reading it and it seems that the solution is to provide some sort of backward compatibility so you would have a user base or (software base) on day 1. so essentially if i want to start a date site, i should flirt with random girls on the street on behalf on requests from the internet as a backward compatibility?
They obviously haven't figured out how to effectively monetize the site, which IMHO makes accusations that they are trying to get companies to 'subscribe' all the more plausible.
"[E]ver since Google said they would 'Do no evil', people have been calling any company that does anything they don't like evil."

You haven't been on the Internet long, have you?
Until there is Instapaper support, I think I'll keep using http://icombinator.net/ in Safari, which lets me add articles to Instapaper.

I'll be watching this app, though, as it does look nice.
You have your desktop and your laptop; now get your webtop
No, he's probably arguing in favor of expressions (i.e. stuff that returns values). Smalltalk has expressions everywhere, with control blocks being just closures passed to methods on objects ...

a < b
ifTrue: [^'A is less than B']
ifFalse: [^'A is greater or equal to B']

> "Purely functional" Lisp has no statements, side-effects, etc, for instance.

Such a Lisp also has no users.
(I don't mean to be argumentative, I think it's a question many developers wrestle with) When I wrote "he", I meant the fictional guy saying "I'm a PHP coder". Obviously it would be better and more true to say something like "software developer" instead of locking to a particular technology, but I'm not sure how he could further convey his value in a job description.

("Founder" is actually a good example - it can apply to Steve Jobs as well as a lot of HN users, the value each is creating is wildly different)
68xx and 8051 might be old-school, but you can also synthesize those cores inside an FPGA. That's pretty useful and avoids paying licensing fees for some of the newer stuff.
I like Bruce Schneier's response:

"Privacy protects us from abuses by those in power, even if we're doing nothing wrong at the time of surveillance.

"We do nothing wrong when we make love or go to the bathroom. We are not deliberately hiding anything when we seek out private places for reflection or conversation. We keep private journals, sing in the privacy of the shower, and write letters to secret lovers and then burn them. Privacy is a basic human need."

Snipped from: http://www.schneier.com/essay-114.html
So write a Python implementation which includes a machine-executable copy of the standard grammar, and see if it catches on.
1. hack your iPhone's case

2. sell it to some blog

3. ?????

4. PROFIT!!!!
Yes and no. After all, the SEC is chartered for the purpose of regulating. What would you have them do instead?
If you can let me know what threads it crashes on, that would be really helpful. I have suspicions that it's actually an issue with the parser, not memory.
For Tech Entrepreneurs, Sentiments Not Fit for Twitter
He really hates windows, not computers. I do, too, and stopped using windows in 2002, all for the better.
thanks! let me know how it goes.
I've completed a lot of projects with 8051 derivatives in the past (Dallas and Atmel mostly), but I am designing new projects with ARM Cortex-M3 chips from NXP. More speed, more memory, more peripherals, better watts/MHz, and decent free tools.

The bigger chips have dropped far enough in price that 8-bit uCs have almost lost their only advantage besides code compatibility with old firmware. I did recently use a $2 8-bit PIC when cost was the prime concern.
PyDev is truly impressive. For small tasks I prefer Spyder from http://code.google.com/p/spyderlib/ though. It's truly light weight and easy to use for small tasks.
I was also being somewhat facetious. The article opens with this:

I had planned on reviewing the iPad in my next post...

Another iPad review from a random blogger? Really? This isn't a Twitter attitude, it's an attitude of "nobody really gives two cents about your opinion". And yet, here I am typing this. The internet is hard.
http://books.google.ca/books?id=1SfpTbDV81UC&pg=PA8&...
Wow, that's ugly.
It's not the Gates, it's the bars
Should unemployment benefits last longer than 99 weeks?
Slightly melodramatic. No one will care tomorrow. We'll all be on to being outraged by something else.
Is there anything like SimFinger for Android , at least a fake overlay of android phones?
This is wonderful. The web will be very cool soon.
depends; if they are counting each http request, that probably reasonable.
That's part of it, but he also talks about how fragile hardware is, how cumbersome RAID is, and other things hardly specific to Windows.
I think the vital quote from Frank's notice is "I fully expect that this new job will deepen my understanding of real world Python coding and make my Jython work more productive."

With this in mind, wouldn't his move away from Jython full time actually make it better (ie infuse new ideas) so we might get 2.6 comparability sometime down the line?
Sharing details of things you've purchased is immediately monetizable. If they can get users using it, it's trivial to make it insanely profitable.

I can see it catching on with kids definitely.
That graph has been on the page since before any class action lawsuits were filed.
Nexus One learns a new trick, Wireless N
True, but not every cell in your body has the same DNA either. Mutations happen with every cell replication.
Interesting IQ Test by Yale University
Hi, We are thinking about the same issue. Hence http://www.techcelerate.org/apr10workshop. Let us know if anyone fancy joining via video link?
Does anybody how it works if you order several kits - can every test person still get their own account? Looking to share the order with friends to save shipping costs.
After these two comments:

Not bad, but probably not enough to save the planet.

and

...also look for guidance from the patron saint of right-wing fundamentalists, Rush Limbaugh

I decided that the piece isn't interested in any objective analysis.

I'd like to offer an additional explanation for the phenomenon that doesn't seem to be considered: the distributed flyers revealed to those Republicans that the high-and-mighty Democrats talked a good game about conservation, but were actually burning more power than those GOPers. Now convinced that the environmentalists are hypocrites, they say "screw it".
So on the balance of comments here I decided to give it a whirl. Posting this from the app, looks pretty good so far.
"It would add the cost of one disk, which is around $30-$50 these days."

Plus the RAID card, if their working in hardware. Nice one's aren't cheap, and they're bulky for something being put in a laptop.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.aspx?Submit=ENE...
But that does not necessarily mean it is legit. Until the class action did we not think Yelp was totally legit?
'Don't forget in the UK the vast majority of purchases are Chip+PIN only, so a credit card number is only really useful for making online purchases from other countries, which are usually scrutinized far more by banks.'

It's true. A friend of mine moved to Canada from the UK with tickets bought on her card, changed her credit card's billing address to Vancouver, and called the card issuer to let them know she would be moving.

Immediately after she made her first purchase in Canada, they put a hold on her card. She had to call back to get the hold released, but it was put back on as soon as she made another purchase. This continued until she got a new (Canadian) card.

It's too bad the banks in the UK don't scrutinize themselves.
Notifo (YC W10) now lets you send notifications to yourself
I'd actually be happy if people started randomly cloning me. Increased reproductive success and I didn't even have to do anything!
I left out the ARMs since they appear to be a bit on the expensive side (the ones I'm looking at cost about $4 in not so large quantities), and the ones I looked at didn't have much in the way of UARTs, ADC and IOs. I'll have another look though; I found some cheaper ones with a quick search on digikey.

As for the 8051 family, that's what I've been working with in the last two projects - and I'd like to find a better alternative. Both in terms of hardware (the number of page selectors needed to cram all those registers into 128/255 bytes of address space is just wrong) and software (I've used IAR and Keil, and neither feels like it's evolved too much since 2002).
Ask HN: Best place for business cards?
I'm looking to order business cards for personal (freelance) use without breaking the bank. I just need something simple — my custom logo and contact information. Can any of you share your experiences?

So far I've found moo.com. They seem to get pretty good reviews, and their cards look to be of high quality.
Washington state has a law specifically addressing this. If you're not a threat to public safety, a police officer can give you a verbal warning and offer you a ride home. He may not arrest or otherwise compel you. If he deems you to be a threat to public safety, he can compel you to accept a ride home, and he can confiscate your bicycle -- but you must be allowed to pick it up, without financial penalty, within 30 days.
Mozilla is not a corporation, it's a non-profit foundation: http://www.mozilla.org/foundation/
It's only 'not that hard' if you know that the numbers are going to be there. Perhaps the Blippy folk have never seen or heard of a credit card company that puts the card number in the description field. I certainly haven't. Have you?

It seems like a ridiculous idea, and while it makes sense in some corner cases, I'm not surprised that they missed something that was only a problem for four users ever.

Perhaps what we should be doing here is asking why Google kept a cache of months-old HTML instead of updating their cache instead?
The SEC just released two embarrassing reports: the porn report and the Stanford report. Just before releasing those reports, they made a press release about a high profile case which appears to be extremely weak.

You are right; the timing of these press releases does suggest we are being manipulated.
I read their response. Their response is precisely why this is a big deal. They should have known that credit card numbers might have been in the description field - anyone who deals with bank feeds with any regularity would know that.

Banks and merchants have been doing stupid things for decades; but what they haven't been doing is publishing those details for all to see.

One would hope that Blippy had done some due-diligence and had some concepts about the kind of data they'd be dealing with when they decided to take transaction feeds and publish them. They've clearly figured that out now.

My point was that it didn't seem like they were treating this as something truly serious.

It's not the bank's fault because that wasn't meant to be public information when they built their system. It wasn't the consumer's fault (any more than signing up for a questionable service) because they aren't supposed to know the details of what's inside a transaction feed. By default, it's Blippy's fault because they should have known better.

Nobody is asking them to fall on their sword over this; but it would have been nice to get some indication that they thought it was a big deal.
Absolutely, that would requre a ton of work to upgrade. Looking through that page is precisely what convinced me the moratorium is a practical thing for the language. But most changes there aren't semantic, either. I'm talking about changes to the language, not the implementation, changes like the "with" statement, like new packages, not changes like how site-packages works.

Maybe my point was a little on the subtle side: being able to implement changes to a language's syntax and semantics without doing it again for each and every implementation is a better solution to one problem the moratorium is solving.
I'm a marketing guy not a dev guy. I went back to college at 38 to study Internet Marketing and get a degree to verify much of what I've learned on my own the last 5 years(Hurricane Katrina changed my life direction radically, in a good way). I want to partner with a dev guy and create a great startup but there just aren't that many here in my hometown, New Orleans.

I've seen so many good ideas languish because no one knew how to market them. Its a shame too because it is incredibly cheap today(in money, not time) to mount a great campaign to get your product seen. I hope that I can go to Boulder Startup Week, network with bright developers, and find someone to partner and build a company with.

This would also be the best way for me to convince my wife to consider moving to Boulder.
I guess it depends on what kind of person you are. I'm pretty comfortable with applying probability to my daily life, so it wouldn't bother me at all.
On the iPhone, at least, "two spaces" autosubstitutes to "two spaces and a period after the last word.
And no implementations.
"I would end up burned for witchcraft."
Nah, Kurzweil would have come to your rescue. ;)
Real Programmers
That was a trillion dollar Oops!
Would Google be interested in a 32/16 bit only platform like the ARM for servers?
A RAID card is totally unnecessary. Software RAID is orders of magnitude faster than any disk it is going to be managing.
We aren't talking RAID 0+5 for your credit card processing database. We're talking RAID 1 so that when your disk dies from all the soda you spill on it, you don't lose your porn stash.

I use 3-way software RAID 1 for my homedir, and I don't regret it at all. It automatically fixes bad sectors when they occur (since the other disk has the correct data), and reads are 3x faster than they otherwise would be. And two disks can fail (and have), and I don't lose any data. It's great. For the cost of an extra disk, I would recommend the setup to anyone.
Two feature requests:

1. Let me pull down the reply field to see the comment I'm replying to. Having to reply blind is frustrating.

2. Figure out how to make it so that I can select text from comments.

Instapaper support would be nice, but not immediately necessary for me.
>> "it would have been nice to get some indication that they thought it was a big deal."

It could have been a big deal, if it had affected more than 4 beta users, or if they hadn't noticed and hadn't fixed it.

I'd rather base level of outrage on what happened rather than what could have happened. Obviously you take all precautions you can possibly think of, but shit happens.
The apology is signed by the Co-Founder. What am I missing?

"Thank you for reading.
Philip Kaplan, co-founder"
next project for you -> make this a firefox / chrome / IE extension that auto-generates fake email aliases into any sign-up / login email field, and some way to track what's been done to with the fake emails you used.
I suspect the real reason was just that Apple thinks there are already enough clocks in the App Store, and even if this one is better than some of the existing clocks, booting one of them to make way for it isn't feasible. In other words, the feature that it lacks is a sufficiently early submit date.
Oni Rocket: Stratifying JavaScript on the server side
While from a technical standpoint I find these 360° videos really interesting but from fromt the standpoint of a person just watching, I find them frustrating. I feel, that no matter what way I'm facing, I'll miss out on something happening in another direction and that I'd have to watch the video many times in order to get the full experience. Does anyone else feel that way?
> But then again, you could probably code up Stack Overflow in a weekend, couldn't you?

Thanks for playing.
I've had it crash on the more "popular" iPad threads recently, where there've been ~193 comments. I'm not sure how much you'd be able to do with this given how HN sends the data.
I think you absolutely have a point, but it would be better stated that "So long as he remains employed at Apple, Lufthansa will never hear from him."
The Foundation owns the Corporation. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Corporation Still, I see what you mean - Mozilla doesn't generally act as a business would.
Maybe the two pieces can be combined?
A partial explanation for this phenomenon I have seen is that not all votes count. I haven't heard an exact reasoning on which votes do count or why votes might not be counted.