skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
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Unable to find a blog or news post so far.
Reading code on a computer can be tedious, and only a few relics like TeX are available in print. Fortunately, two recent innovations make reading recent code much more pleasant: Github and the iPad. Try it some time.
How to stochastically calculate pi using R and Amazon's EMR (video)
Elegance is in the eye of the beholder. I found your first version easier to grasp.
Yes, it is software development. It actually started when I was working at IBM. I asked if I could go part-time, and they said yes, offering 57K for 30 hours a week.

I was also talking to some startups, and told them about the offer I had, asking them to beat it by offering 60K for less hours. One of them agreed, and I worked for them for 2 years.

I followed that model for a few more years, working mostly with service-based companies who were willing to bill me out for part-time work.
Not sure why this is downvoted... a bit of trolling, but in general it's right. If Apple starts selling a large range of devices that just complement the laptops and phones, without making a good product in itself -- people are going to end up with a lot of gadgets. It's fun for a rich customer (I've got a music player, video player, phone, communicator, web browser device...), not so fun for a typical customer (I've got a choice between a hard to use laptop, or one or two easy to use devices).

Many of us are geeks here and buy gadgets just because they're shiny and new. But many normal people would rather get an easy to use laptop instead, or a "laptopised" dockable ipad.
It all depends what you want to do. "Exploratory data analysis" means a lot of different things. If the data is already in a relational database then I just stick with SQL. You can do a lot with it and a rapid visualization tool to help make sense of it. Try something like Tableau http://www.tableausoftware.com/
They're typically doing it as art, and the mystery and wingnut reaction is all a part of that. Then there's the prosecution for criminal damage :)
I was referring to slate devices in general, although I'm sure the iPad will remain the sexiest of the bunch for quite a while.
Scaling Twitter Applications Without Blinking - Apigee & Heroku
Simple, yet powerful, email migration tool
Looking at the responses, I'd say here isn't a bad place, though it would be problematic if there were too many posts like this. Somebody created http://hnhackers.com/ to solve your problem.

I could probably commit some time. zak.wilson@gmail.com
Your question doesn't make sense unless you give some examples of what you want to get out of the data.
Gulf Disaster Is Now Nation's Worst Offshore Oil Spill
Turning a form into a multistep process with jQuery
That's good advice in small doses, but when someone is perpetually in anguish you'd be much better off helping them solve that than giving them unlimited wine.
I'm currently free, I'm a rails/php developer and badass designer. Here are some things I did last week(though this was design =/)

http://imgur.com/KRbNx.jpg

http://imgur.com/w8S4A.jpg

http://imgur.com/DlHDb.jpg

http://imgur.com/qfhbv.jpg

http://imgur.com/KedPg.jpg

lets get in touch, hajrice@gmail.com
Short-term T-bills, then?

http://www.treasurydirect.gov/indiv/products/prod_tbills_gla...
There is no such thing as an SL development environment, SL is a runtime and VS and Expression are the primary development environments. Semantics aside though, I just dont see it. Developing an SL runtime is not an easy task, it would take a large team at the very least a year to put one together. I could buy a situation where MSFT hands over the SL runtime source to Apple who then takes it over as part of some long term agreement to guarantee SL apps run on all Apple devices but that is about it.
Nerds. With guns.

All snarky humor aside, the purpose here is to have a military commander to point the finger at if and when the nation has a crippling attack on internet infrastructure. When that happens, he'll be the guy getting lots of money.

I agree that it is a bit of a power grab, but the Air Force has been looking for more elbow room for a while. We don't need a lot of B-2 bombers to find OBL. The real question is how to determine if they are doing a good job or not? It's kind of an important thing to know. Especially if you spending a lot of money.

So I support some kind of planning/organization, but I'm not sure an entire command should have been created.

There are some very interesting things going on in the cyber warfare arena. I've seen enough to know it is a risk. We need to pay somebody to keep an eye on it and prepare for contingencies.

I'm just not happy with the Air Force. Something about the match of that agency with that mission doesn't sit well with me. I see lots of expensive cyber warfare computer infrastructure in the near future. I'd rather see DoD do some kind of SecDef skunkworks project sub rosa with some of the incredible tech companies in the states than set up a command. This is time for maximum impact, not structure. You guys have any idea what kind of BS goes with a command? It's the wrong move with the wrong guys.
I don't think so. Their stated objective is to change the world's social networking platform. Not start a lifestyle business or pet project. If they had gone into it with a hobbyist's approach 170,000 users is success.
My top tweets in a JavaScript include
Credit ratings are BS. It's as if we didn't learn anything from watching the disaster that occurred when the world believed AAA-rated MBSs were sound investments. Don't let someone else tell you what investments are "safe".
Not that I disagree, but the analogy seems flawed.

Your analysis is flawed. See below.

the reason many people thought the iPad would fail is that it's less capable than its seeming competition.

Yes, but the smart money is on the capabilities of the iPad increasing over time. (In fact, we already know this to be true.)

Also note that the consumer-relevant increase in capabilities in cars and airplanes have been quantitative in specific metrics. (More reliable, able to go farther, faster, more efficiently.) The decrease in capability for the iPad was qualitative in terms of tweak-ability, flexibility, and accommodation of user expertise. Those are not the qualities that appeal to the mainstream user.

I'm sure a lot of people complained when automatics came out, because they're less flexible. (You can't push-start them, you can't easily rock them out of ditches, and there's less flexibility in terms of using compression braking.) The flexibility isn't what consumers really cared about.
Because it is one thing to limit the finances when I am single... But after getting married and having kids, I am no longer just limiting myself -- I am restricting the resources that I can offer the children.

I could not afford private schools or college, I would need to watch my money on clothes and food, and we would have to live in a smaller home.

All of this could still be OK. They aren't even old enough for those things to be issues yet. But it is difficult to ramp up a stable income overnight, so I decided to go back to trying to maximize my income, to give us more choices in the future, as the kids grow up.

And we may still do public school or homeschooling, and may still live to the 60K budget. Time will tell, but I think having the choices available to us is wise.
http://techcrunch.com/2010/05/23/facebook-questions/
There's a front page?
PCB business card
"Roughly $35,000 for what he describes as a trivial amount of work each month, while he was holding down a job as a salaryman.

Now that's he's gone full-time, there's no doubt in my mind that his revenues will be prodigious."

The app took him a few hours to make (I seem to remember this on from JoS). I think the service he has now was created by freelancers he hired (which is a smart move for someone without a lot of time to work on their business). The development of the app was trivial, but the amount of time and effort he has put into marketing is not.

Even working full time for 5 years, if you are marketing it every day (which he was), you should be able to get a better ROI than this.

My feeling is that the reason he isn't making that much money is because the market for such an application isn't that large. I see that he is also coming out with other services/products, which is further proof that he is moving on to bigger and better things. He probably should have done this a few years ago.

Even so, success isn't based on what you could possibly do in the future, it's what you have already achieved. My main point still stands: he made some money, but should not be considered a commercial success.
FCC says consumers are 'bill shocked'
Here's a link to Adm. Allen's talk with NPR referenced in the article. http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2010/05/there_are_indica...
The investors would call it successful when there's a solid and positive exit.
The 37signals homepage back in 2002
Ask HN: How do I sell some code that I wrote
A few years ago I quit my day job and started using my savings to build a product mostly aimed at companies. For some reason or another I had to stop doing that after only managing a (minor) sell.

I still have all the source for the product, and over the years I'm always thinking of getting back to it, but for one reason or other I have never done it. This piece of code works very good, but the web frontend needs some work to expose all the info of the backend and some cosmetics changes.

So my question is: How could I go to find someone interested in buying this code ?

There are a few companies already in this market space so I know there's a need for this sort of product, and my code could be used to maybe add extra capabilities to an existing product.
There is no such thing as an SL development environment, SL is a runtime and VS and Expression are the primary development environments.

Sorry, should've used a plural.

Developing an SL runtime is not an easy task, it would take a large team at the very least a year to put one together.

Not true if there's cooperation from the MS development team. There would be compelling reasons for such cooperation. Flash is Silverlight's incumbent competition, after all.
Ask HN: Which Non-Macbook notebook would you recommend?
Hey All,

Need recommendations for a Non-Macbook notebook with these 2 chief requirements:

1. Longest battery uptime.
2. Excellent build quality.

Appreciate all the help I can get.

PS: I've got nothing against the Macbooks, its just that I live in LinuxLand and I'm in love with Ubuntu 10.04.
"With the technology, the military could strike anywhere on planet within an hour or less"

Even at 4000 miles at out it wouldn't it still take up to 3 hours to get anywhere on the planet (24900 mile circumference)?
This experience about mimics mine with the iPad. The first two weeks or so I couldn't put it down, and now it's just kind of something that I have on my coffee table.

I still find it very useful - I can now just "hand a web page" to my wife, it's great for having around in the living room for random web surfing on the couch, and yes, reading the news or doing a crossword while having a beer on my back patio.

I still can't type properly on the thing to save my life. I didn't realize just how awkward it is. I need to set it on a flat surface and type on it like a regular keyboard, and if I'm going to do that I'd prefer a laptop.
Ask for money, you get Advice. Ask for Advice you might get Money
I doubt the iPad has an Ingress Protection rating suitable for most industrial applications.
But the sales figures are not bearing out your latter claim, nor are the reactions of my "normal" friends or family.
I agree, and though I don't have and don't want an iPad, I can see where we cross a line where the iPad does just enough to make it a good multi-use device so we aren't buying devices again and again.

At the same time, this is why I always thought that we don't need another device, just a better way to output our smartphones to a larger screen.
super cool.....
This stuff is pretty basic. They mention using Percona MySQL on a cluster of dedicated servers... but they didn't even concatenate their CSS. Low-hanging fruit.
Precisely. Hire a financial advisor and they will manage EVERYTHING for you from start to finish.
But many normal people would rather get an easy to use laptop instead, or a "laptopised" dockable ipad

Based on my empirical experience since my iPad was delivered April 3, most "normal" people want an iPad but are having trouble justifying the expense.

I think iPads will be the gift this Christmas. About 80% of my friends are planning to get one then.
The very first thing I'd do is talk with a good accountant or tax lawyer. Ideally you'd have done this prior to selling the company, and maybe you did and the 5m is after taxes.

In any case, if it were me, I'd put $1m into an inflation protected security like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treasury_security#TIPS. That gives you enough money to cover yourself if things go otherwise awry.

I'd decide where I wanted to live and buy a house that I could see myself living in for 10 - 20 years for cash. Probably wouldn't spend more than 2m on that, perhaps quite a bit less.

I'd put the rest into a money market fund for the time being--low return, but very low risk, and I'd take 18-24 months to travel and see the world and figure out what I want to do with the rest of my life.

Figure that you hit the jackpot--you'll never really need to work, other than to stave off boredom--take a little time and determine how you want to spend the rest of your life. Don't worry about missing current opportunities--there will be more, especially for someone who's already had a successful exit.
Fast JavaScript and Audio: Speech Synthesis in Your Browser
You have my whole sympathy. Upvoted.
Which is why I offer Simon as a counterpoint.

Simon believed that there is more than simple arithmetic (as Bartlett calls it) when it comes to growth. You have to throw something like technology into the mix, which is difficult to predict.

The Simon-Erlich bet is a good, real-world illustration of their disagreements.
I did have parents, who had a lawyer and a banker ;)
I had the same thought. You would have to be passed a list I guess but then that kind of changes the problem.
Minimalist Connoisseurs
Seems simple enough (formatted a little funny due to comment quirks):

void condense_by_removing(char *z_terminated, char char_to_remove) {

int i;
int write_index = 0;

for (i = 0; i < strlen(z_terminated); i++) {
if (z_terminated[i] == char_to_remove) {
continue;
}

z_terminated[write_index] = z_terminated[i];
write_index++;
}

z_terminated[write_index] = '\0';
}
Self promotion here, we built http://pick.im for just this purpose... Check it out and let me know how you like it?
yes it is an awesome device and i am loving it.
Mention this interaction and I will get you in. http://pick.im/request/invite
TL;DR: Reading web formatted text reduces our attention span [http://twitter.com], comprehension [http://reddit.com], and data retention [http://google.com] just by having embedded links.
I have heard good things about System76:

http://www.system76.com/index.php?cPath=28

A bit pricey, but apparently superb build quality.
Apple just frustrates me as a company (which is probably a silly reason not to want an iPad, I suppose)...

There are the ridiculous app store policies (which is a HUGE problem) but there are also little things. For instance, have you ever tried to use an iPhone in bed? I keep mine sitting next to my pillow so that I can listen to music while I fall asleep...

Doing this is a huge pain in the butt. If you turn the thing sideways to change songs, it goes into the oh-so-useless "cover flow" interface. If I'm browsing the web, the phone decides that it should rotate the screen for me...

These things are fixed...but only if you void your warrant and jailbreak it...why? Honestly, the only thing I can come up with is that it is some stupid power trip by the folks at apple... "Bah! We designed it that way and we're never wrong!" JUST EFFING FIX THIS GUYS! It's a very very common problem.

I was traveling last week...my laptop's battery needs very badly to be replaced (only holds about a half hour of charge anymore), so I decided to transfer some podcasts to my phone so I could listen to them on the plane...now, this isn't as simple as most of the blackberries I've ever owned (the blackberries, if you're not aware, simply get mounted as an external storage device...copy and paste MP3s to it and it will happily play them for you), but firing up iTunes should be too much a problem, right?

Wrong. iTunes refuses to add songs to the device unless I erase everything on it and "sync" it to my laptop. WTF? Apple, this is completely unnecessary! So I lose everything on my iPhone in order to listen to a couple of podcasts? What the hell, Apple.

Okay, howabout email syncing? 4 times an hour at the most. Seriously? The phone is absolutely capable of more than this! So it will hurt the battery a bit more, I don't care! Warn me about it when I select "check email 1 time per minute".

Don't even get me started on Google voice (which I use as my primary phone number and voicemail)...

And then there is flash...

Oh, and howabout the newest version of their iPod? You cannot disable having album artwork take over half of your screen? Why the hell not?! These just seems like more power-tripping my Apple/Jobs.

I've played with the iPad (while I was waiting in the apple store for three hours for my appointment with the "genius bar"), it seems...kindof neat I guess? But apple leaves such a sour taste in my mouth from the experiences I've had with the iPhone that I cannot imagine myself ever buying one.
I'm not trying to troll, I just have an ongoing concern when I read articles like this.

Another way to look at it is, I've been convinced by marketing and countless articles on HN telling me how amazing this new gadget is that I went and bought one.

Now I need to find a place it fits in my life and convince myself it's something I didn't know I needed and that I didn't waste my money.

I've only owned it for a week but I'm sure that a year from now I'll still love it because it's a great product, not because it's new and shiny.
I believe that they haven't intentionally changed privacy settings, but in the frequent privacy overhauls it's inevitable that they break stuff and throw people's data out to the world. They need to stop thinking about innovating and thinking about how to stabilize. Facebook was perfect from a user perspective... 3 years ago. Innovation is at this point antithetical to the social web. It's why Craigslist, despite a no-frills interface, remains dominant.

Stability and user control are primary. Facebook is unstable (in the sense that its interface changes every other month) to the point of being completely uncontrollable by the user.
Ask HN: Best tech/internet startup podcasts on iTunes?
Any suggestions on the best tech/internet startup podcasts on itunes?
Well, if removing privacy isn't an attempt to monetize then I have to wonder, what are they doing to monetize? ;)
The screen is just glass, and there's no keyboard for little things to get stuck into. I use mine in the kitchen all the time. If a little something splashes onto it, I just wipe it off with a soft towel. Much better then a dedicated kitchen computer.
I for one don't understand why it needs both? Wouldn't it be a lot simpler to use only one or the other?
Deborah Tannen (the linguist and author of "The Argument Culture") tells a story about how bringing in lawyers to write up an informal agreement derailed it completely.

Some companies, however, referred the matter to their attorneys so a contract could be written. In no case where attorneys became involved-- mine as well as theirs-- could we reach an agreement on working together... The adversarial nature of the legal process had polarized us beyond repair.

https://www9.georgetown.edu/faculty/tannend/argsake.htm
The draconian app store policies alone are reason enough for me. I wouldn't try to downplay that.

Other limitations Apple puts on their devices come in second. I'm a very technical person. I would be happier having another gadget with Linux on it.
Rosary Beads
My Holy Rosary offers gold rosary, silver rosary, Swarovski rosary or any kind of rosary.
In Portland, OR, which has a similar homeless problem to SF's, I learned to always include "sorry" when I turned them down, as when I did so, they almost never were rude to me in response. When I didn't say "sorry," I could never be sure what to expect.
Here's a sincere question.. to whom does this matter?

On the technicals, AAPL seems overpriced at this level. PE ratio approaching twice MSFTs.

But a small number of people are really trying to turn this into some sort of horse race, and I don't get why?
It's definitely an interesting correlation. As a child, I can remember coping with irrational fears (monsters, strangers, hurricanes, etc) by imagining and rationalizing (thinking of ways they could be possible) super powers and protective tools (like force fields and stuff) while lying in bed trying to go to sleep. I've always been a little bit embarrassed about it, but after reading the article, it makes perfect sense.

I kind of feel like video games were a tool for coping with being the nerdy kid. If you're a kid who has good spatial relation skills, but lacks physical ability, video games are a great outlet for exercising those skills. Before the days of online multiplayer, these skills were honed in face-to-face match-ups against friends. Owning all your friends at Golden Eye, strangely enough, got you some street cred with the cool kids.
If I am reading his blog posts properly (and I believe I am), the time he put into marketing was also trivial.

Of course, he chose a small market. He was basically monetizing some spare time. And there's no doubt that he'll be more ambitious in the future, now that he has more time to spend on these projects.

I consider making $35,000/year in a few hours a week to be a "commercial success." Especially, since the kind of work he is doing is easily repeatable in other niches.
I think this is real for a number of reasons.

First it's a win-win for both sides.

Apple needs some positive publicity to help calm the ruckus over 3.3.1 changes, plus all the noise Adobe caused. They also would like to start calming any rumblings from the DOJ that are starting to tremble. This helps on all fronts.

Microsoft needs a positive win that says to the world, 'hey we are still relavent!', the mobile train might have left the station, but we're onboard!'. Also, this will certainly kick-up the VS2010 adoption rate, which will net MS a pretty penny too.

June 7th is right around the corner, so we'll know soon enough but this rings true to me.
(yes)

edit: no seriously it said stop at first, and the bbc ninja edited it
The Evolution of Online Gaming