skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If you really know what you're doing, you can just not buy the book at all, or substitute it for a better, cheaper book.

Somewhere around multivariable calculus, the math/CS building at my college was being remodeled, and professors were dumping books they no longer wanted into a pile in the hall. I was having a challenging time with some of the calculus material, so I rooted around the free books until I found one that I could understand better. The exercises were all the same basic sorts of things, so ultimately it really didn't matter which book I used, just so long as I got through the material.

The professor asked me later why I wasn't writing down the exercise numbers he was assigning as homework any more, and I explained I was using a different book. He didn't seem surprised.
Yes more so than Smalltalk. While both have unary and keyword messages, the messages in the Cocoa APIs are generally much more verbose than their Smalltalk analogues. Compare insertObject:atIndex: from NSMutableArray with at:put: from Smalltalk's Array, OrderedCollection, and Dictionary.

Also, Smalltalk has binary messages (with which arithmetic is implemented), which allows for the creation of useful shortcuts like "," for collection concatenation and "@" for point creation. Smalltalk has precedence levels associated with its message syntax; Objective-C doesn't, hence [the [bracket soup]]. Smalltalk also has an extremely concise block closure syntax and no need for header and object files or special function/class declaration syntax.
There was a time when Apple's ability to ship a new OS every 1.5 years was touted as one if proudest accomplishments. MS was insulted for years over their inability to ship a new version of Windows.
The analysis is not a prescription for how a state "should" be run. It's a way to measure the cost of labor against the capital you would need to use to start a business.

Guaranteed-issue states have higher health insurance costs.
One seems to be a way of throwing some loose change at an idea you think might be neat. The other is a carefully developed way of identifying and assisting projects that have a good chance of developing into profitable businesses.

Losing sight of the fact that someone has to actually make money from these things at some point is precisely what gives you internet bubbles. From everything I've read about YC it's all about focusing down to build something that someone wants to buy. That's a world away from accepting donations from people who think something cool might come of it.
I'd say the inverse of what you're saying is true. It's natural for small states that want to attract business to create policies that are friendly to new enterprises.

California is such a mess in large part because it has so many successful companies that are stuck here.
Interesting: http://opendata.mit.edu/~opendata/www/index.php?title=OpenDa...

Initially, the data appears to be behind lock and key, but the XML formatted data is available. Is that information intentionally locked away and the XML a leak? Or is everything protected by default, so to speak?

This would be a great starting point for data, but MIT is one school probably least in need of such a new scheduler tool :-)
Adblock. :-p
im drawing a blank (its late), but don't worry about us. What would you like to see built?
Yes, shindig is just the reference implementation. Oh yes, and http://code.google.com/p/partuza/ is a sample PHP social site based on OpenSocial using shindig.
To Catch a Predator - Guy makes a break for it
This is really a brilliant article

http://www.beadedqueen.com/
All of these work, sometimes. Especially the last one.
HTC gets help from troll in patent fight with Apple
Should you be trying to pick stocks?
Consider that a friend, acquaintance or employee might have seen the ad and mentioned it to them. That'd reduce the waiting time.
If you want to see an interesting perspective on education in America, I highly recommend watching Bill Gate's TED talk (start at the 8 minute mark):

http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/bill_gates_unplugged.html

In summary, currently teachers are not held accountable for the quality of their teaching due to the way their contracts are structured. Also, formulas for teacher's pay reward experience and extra education, even though both have been shown to be unrelated to teaching quality.

Simply throwing more money at the problem will not help, we need to rethink the current system.
This annoyed the hell out of me, when I had to get a HP for work. It had to be HP, so there were 20 different models.

What is the point of 20 different models?

Sure, I understand screen size, but everything else if configurable, from HDD size, to Ram. All the processors are fast enough for development work, as far as I am concerned.

This is one area where Apple got it right. 5 different types of laptop.
Prosecutors Ask if 8 Banks Duped Rating Agencies
I always find it hard to organize my reading (for most part technical reading). Do you think a service can help there? Like I can keep a track of books and papers I want to read and also get ideas from other people based on what I am currently reading/learning.
Aside from the personal consultations, experience, expertise, and connections that YC offers over Kickstarter (which are all vastly important), I suspect it is much more difficult to raise funding through crowd funding than through angels & VCs, relatively speaking.

There's also the question of whether or not they'll know how to most effectively use that funding. Consultation from experienced people like those at YC would help there too.

Diaspora is an edge case. All the press they've gotten have catapulted their popularity enough to raise this amount. And more power to them too; they have a valiant goal and I hope they can execute on it well.

But I wouldn't try to raise funding for a for-profit startup through crowd funding, unless perhaps your startup has an apparent, believable, and widely-desired benefit to society. I'd love to be proven wrong, but this argument only has a sample size of 1 so far.
Oh, you shouldn’t underestimate the ability of companies to make even the simplest of product line ups confusing :)

Try and buy a Kenwood food mixer. They basically only have three or so models, all with numbers in their names.
I going to go with yes - although "duped" should probably be replaced with "incentivized" or "bullied"
The Perfect Social Voting System
great phrase you had there: "mean time between self-googling"

I propose that as a new measure of narcissism in the Age of the Web.

A: So what's your MTBSG?

B: 5 minutes.

A: Dude get some sunlight.
Difficult for the situation to change, if your unions are anything like ours in Australia.

In NSW, they recently introduced a website that displays the score of standardized tests, not at the student level but at the school level. There wass a huge uproar by teachers, suddenly everyone can see how well they do, they and their schools can be examined.

Due to this, they have come very close to striking at times, lots of complaints about not being able to teach properly, at having to "teach to the tests". There is some truth to this, but it is also a way out for the bad teachers.

There needs to be some mechanism for recognising and removing bad teachers. The system is setup at the moment almost as a teacher retirement plan, once you get in, you can't get out.
Fair taxes is an oxymoron.

A flat tax is more fair than a progressive one. But it would be more fair with a head-tax aka. poll-tax. Everyone pays the same amount.
Free Mac play testing before releasing the entire platform?
I honestly believe the best way forwards is a moving economy and low minimum wage. So that the average homeless-by-choice person sees the benefits of holding down a regular job at minimum wage vs being homeless by definition. This has to be combined with affordable accomodation and transport. I really think it has to be more carrot-led rather than stick-forced, though. A certain amount of enforcement of no-sleeping is required, though, particularly in a place like Hawaii where nobody is going to die from exposure or freeze to death. Otherwise tourists are going to stop visiting and Hawaii as a whole would suffer from less income.
Personally, I just wish somebody would start offering the iPhone, or any smartphone, on prepaid. Until then I'm sticking with my twenty-buck LG with the broken front screen.
Am I the only one who reads posts like this and wonders why people make merging/pushing/pulling with Git so complicated? It's really not that hard. Sure there are plenty of esoteric and strange things you can do with Git but I have seen devs go from zero knowledge to using the basics in no time. Some never have to go beyond the add, commit, push, pull and merge commands (with their respective switches) and work quite happily. Sure they aren't Git experts by any means but they are able to get their work done and the tool is just as transparent to their workflow as any other SCM tool.
One of my biggest regrets was giving into fear when the market tipped down in 08 / 09 and not scooping up equities that would likely return to paying out dividends (I wrote my senior thesis on this investment concept, after all).

I heard it a hundred times on the trading floor but it now very much rings true: "Buy into Fear and Sell into Greed"
Ask HN: what would be in your ultimate information manager?
I'm building a web-based information manager.

Basically, I got fed up of not being able to find important pieces of information, when I needed them. So I'm building a web app (still in closed beta) around the idea that I should be able to store anything to do with my life (notes-to-self, ideas, to-do's, bookmarks, and, eventually, pdfs, photos, music etc). And then I should be able to find any of my stored info, in about the time it takes to do a Google search.

So this is what I've come up with:

* A windows explorer-like layout.

* Search-as-you-type

* Quick creation of notes and folders.

* Nested labels: any note or folder you create, can be in multiple parent folders. So you can use a hierarchy-like structure to store your data, or a flat label-like structure, or a combination of the two, depending on your mood, etc.

But, I was wondering: what kinds of features would you like to see in your ultimate information manager? iPhone app? A calendar? GMail plugin...?
That'd be a great answer to YC's application question "Please tell us about the time you most successfully hacked some (non-computer) system to your advantage."

Granted it still involved a computer, but I'm sure they'd agree it was a great example.
Does anyone else feel that SAP has a monopoly on enterprise software?
British exam board removes C and PHP from Comp-Sci A-Levels
Any recommendations for fleshed out languages/tools that can export to ObjC (ignoring 3.3.1 for now), Java, and C#?

I suppose the easiest version is a Blub that does only what they all can easily do language-wise and mobile-API-wise.

edit: HA http://xmlvm.org/overview/ I just tasted some throw-up.
> What is the point of 20 different models?

It's much more interesting than that: out of the 20 models, 12 won't run X decently, 8 will take 2 minutes to boot, 4 random models will be very fast and everything will work out of the box. You won't be able to identify any pattern.

In the next revision of the lineup, the 4 that work well will be another random subset of the batch. Again, nobody will be able to see a clear pattern.

Rinse and repeat.

My previous Dell was absolutely Linux-proof. This one runs it perfectly well. It's however, slower than my netbook for everything but disk IO. This one has a Core 2 Duo. The netbook has an Atom z270.

I really want to to away with this overly complex PC compatibles. If hardware vendors insist on using x86 processors, fine, but we no longer need, or want, to boot MS-DOS 1.0 unless under a hardware emulator.
Yeah, Ubisoft used a Reloaded crack for Rainbow 6: Vegas 2. :)
Cross-boroughs I suspect there is little correlation - you are right - but I was referring to cross-band. The context is a comparison of marginal tax rates, so the issue is: in this particular place, how much does earning an extra pound(gross) put in my pocket?' (if the comparison isnt between particular places, then I could just as well compare compare the UK to Nevada income tax - none). I would be very surprised if there isn't a strong correlation within a borough between income and band (i.e. people with higher incomes live in more valuable houses). Of course, any individual can choose to be an exception to that, but on average within a borough, those earning more pay more council tax.

So pick any particular borough in the UK that you want for the comparison, but then ask 'in this borough, do those on high incomes pay more council tax, on average?' If the answer is 'yes', then that is effectively part of your marginal tax rate, albeit indirect.
From what little I've read on the subject, I take it the model will be something like WordPress or Status.Net or Jabber/XMPP — some people will download the tarball and install it on their own system, but most people will just sign up with a central provider - wordpress.com, identi.ca, Google Talk. As long as the two groups can interact more-or-less seamlessly (unlike, say, LiveJournal where the code is available but running your own instance cuts you off from the main network), that's all we need.
Apple figured out how to make high profit margin on a niche business. That's great, but they aren't exactly dominating the laptop or desktop market, not even close.
Not sure why you were down modded. I'm pretty curious myself.

(fc.exe = filecompare)
Camera shutter speed synchronized with helicopter blade frequency
amazon.com, shelfari.com, anobii.com?
> Git's user interface isn't perfect, but you're not going to get the "Mac of DVCSs" either. There's a reason for the complexity, doing stuff like merging together the work of three people is inherently complex.

This is a limitation of your imagination. You can write a DVCS that's easy to use and intuitive. Git has an absolutely terrible UI, it borders on idiotic.

One example of a DVCS with a good design and UI is a Bazaar. Sortof like the Mac a few years ago, no one uses it, but I wouldn't be surprised if it eventually gains in popularity. I see two things holding it back right now:

- Launchpad is terrible and needs to be at least as good as Github.

- In concert with having a terrible "hub", Bazaar has a small community of users.

To gain users, it will need to out-innovate like Apple did. That means on all fronts, not just bzr itself but the community, marketing, and the websites that support it.
While I'm sorry to see C go, I can't see any possible reason why a high-school level computing course should allow eight different languages.
>and what have they done to earn it?

Mostly they have made expensive labor contracts with public sector unions who in turn control the elections.

And by the way, despite the high tax burden California is still close to bankruptcy. They need more. Costs a lot to keep those unions fed.

The politically correct thing to believe is that California's budget woes are caused by those evil right-wingers who have prevented the state from collecting even more taxes. Heh.
You're right - property taxes (which I forgot about) probably outweigh council taxes.

But regarding the correlation, I find it very hard to believe that within a borough, those with higher income dont on average pay more council tax, no matter your two exceptions ;) (see my other comment)
It used to be true that Sybase stored procs can by converted to MS-SQL with not much effort, but I guess over the years they've drifted apart quite a bit?
The code doesn't even have to be that old - in my indie game company, my partner and I often run into issues just moving code between my machine and his. Things like compiler versions, C++ library versioning issues, third party libraries. I never understood before why big businesses' IT departments are so conservative about upgrading and changing systems, until one day as I was spending my whole weekend fixing problems caused by (needlessly) upgrading to the latest version of GCC I had the epiphany, "You know, this was avoidable."
Our startup (based in Seattle) was looking at ways to help analyze the performance of teachers. It turns out that the unions lobbied for legislation in Washington that forbids such software from being installed in the schools.

The unions don't want mediocre teachers to be found out. It's really a crappy situation and really took us by surprise.
There's no need to have absolute karma points or additional incentives.

We just need an intelligent collaborative filter that weighs articles relative to you. That will give users an incentive to vote as they wish (rather than vote for what one thinks others think good).

Pandora News anyone?
Here's one of the more popular CMU schedulers: https://scheduleman.org/
Ask HN: Interest in launching your own mini-TED conference?
Hey - I'm Yongho, part of the TEDx team of TED Conferences. If you are familiar with TEDtalks and the TED conference, TEDx is a program for hosting your own local TED-like events. (more at http://www.ted.com/tedx) HN is a community of entrepreneurs and innovators, but I'm curious - how familiar are you with the TEDx program? Have you heard about it? Have you attended a TEDx event? What have you heard about them?

What questions do you have about TEDx (whether or not you are a host)? Feel free to ask questions. I feel HN is the right community to ask these questions to and I really value your feedback!
No. The commercial titles may suck. Linux is just fine as a gaming platform.
Policy is getting more and more irrational over time. It's hard to discern any rational or ideological motivation behind much of it nowadays. It'll probably get worse before it gets better.
My wife would like an iPad/iPhone app for tracking baby milestones. When is the first time she rolls over, smiles, holds her head up, makes eye contact, etc. Keep a centralized (anonymous) database so we can compare to the average stats of the other users.

She's downloaded several apps so far, paid $4 for one, $6 for another. They were all unusably bad. I wish there was a return policy for apps.
> So, can anyone do a diff of the binaries? :)

Probably not easily. SecureROM and similar do full file encryption, so you'd have to crack it yourself and then diff.

I'd like to believe #3, but I'm guessing someone needed to "get it done today", googled up a nocd, and went home early.
They're on the right track, but they need to make it 100% compatible with the Twitter API, not just 95%. Client developers must be able to simply replace "twitter.com" with some other endpoint and have everything work.

This would allow all the client developers (who now suddenly find themselves competing with Twitter Inc) to immediately rally their users to a new social graph.
The point is to give users a reason to vote on stories other than for "that warm feeling of communal good".

If you aren't convicted about the destination of an article, then you won't vote. Karma makes HN game-like.

Its about making content that other people like, not content that a few people have filtered for.
It suffers from the same issues that the federal government does: democracy doesn't scale. The larger the task of governing, the harder it is, the more room for graft and waste, rent-seeking and inefficiency.

The US is the largest economy in the world and last I checked California is the 5th. Places like Sweden have higher taxes, but they also have a much more manageable task of governance and more efficient public sectors. You put some tax money into the Swedish government and you might get some valuable services out of it. You give some to Uncle Sam or Uncle Arnold, and it is disappearing in some corporate/union/special interest pocket through some thousand-page bill.
More signs point to quantum entanglement in biology
Luckily anyone smart enough to figure out the existence of the dead zone is smart enough to be making well over $40K anyway.
I had the same issue and found Evernote. It now fills the roles you mention (well, I would't put music or photos in it as I use iTunes/Spotify and iPhoto/Flickr for those, but you could). So, perhaps I'll just say what about Evernote makes it awesome for me, and what, in a new thing, could make me switch..

I use and need a reasonably flat-form environment with tagging. I don't care for folders, hierarchies, or whatever, because I'm too impatient and have a bad memory for structure. I just want to throw stuff in and have it use tags or similar to figure out my intent. When it's time to get stuff out, I'd rather type in a query than go digging through folders, for instance (the Google vs Dmoz/ODP approach).

Separate to tagging, though, I want to also search all content Google style, but with tags and filetypes having extra "weight." So if I search "pdf gasoline receipt", I want PDF files tagged with "receipt" and containing the word "gasoline" to come up higher than, say, the text of this comment (if I archived it.) Evernote doesn't quite get this right, but it's OK.

I almost don't care about the layout as I don't want to live in the app. I want to do two things: get info in and get info out. Other than that, I don't want to see anything. So I have it globally hotkeyed and then do one of those two things.

A very important matter is that I can create notes easily without getting bitched at constantly that I've "forgotten" to fill out a field or whatever. Evernote gets this right. Once I click "New Note", I can tab through title, tags, and then I'm in content. There I can drag whatever I like, type what I want, and it's indexed. It needs to be as simple, yet flexible, as possible.

Lastly, and Evernote gets this very wrong.. I don't want an information manager changing my info! Evernote's rich text editor keeps screwing up my formatting and fonts.. even on "plain text" stuff. I wish they could just let me have a totally plain text view without any of the rich stuff.

Oh, and make it sync somewhere - preferably through the file system so I can use Dropbox to sync it across computers myself. In fact, if you did that (and recommended users use Dropbox), then you solve the backup issue too and could use Dropbox's affiliates thing ;-)
Me too. And yeah, you are most likely right (on both accounts). But I couldn't help but throw in the speculation. :)
That IS the sole purpose of business.

That's the cynical view of this age. If you study history, you'll find that business was considered something that was supposed to benefit society and business owners. Society, the social good, came first.
> meaning half the country is working just to support the other half.

What? That's not at all what it means.
What were the apps she already downloaded? Is there a market for baby-related iphone apps?
This could be interesting, in that i've recently started dabbling in making iApps, and i've recently started being a dad.
Strange,

These people are getting obscene amounts of money that

a)a very small proportion of web is going to use

b)is going to be built by 4 guys who presumably can live off there computers but can now afford there own office space or something and live like kings.
I think more than just "being found out" unions also have to tell there members that they are doing something for them. Teaching jobs are already really good (except perhaps for the pay, but that is constrained by government budget). So the unions can tell their members that they will always go to bat for them, even though it is almost completely unnecessary for a competent teacher.
What silly nonsense that chart is. I've done "advanced photo editing" and "edit/mix music" on CPUs so underpowered they wouldn't show up in the cheapest netbooks today. There isn't a processor being sold that couldn't convert CDs to MP3s as quickly as the CD drive can rip the music off, and at reasonably quality too. A good chunk of the "black" level is really the GPU's work, too.

How quickly we forget what a gigahertz can really do. (Or even 250MHz.)