skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Maybe Amazon has 5,000 laptop bags with no straps.
New $10M X Prize Announced for Solution to Gulf Oil Spill Crisis
Given your Java experience, you should consider learning JavaScript, jQuery or Dojo Toolkit and JAX-RS. Learn to write JSON services with JAX-RS and to use a client side JavaScript framework to make calls to those services and render the UI. Throw away, JSP, Struts, Tiles and all the other cruft. Use pure CSS, HTML and Javascript to build your UI. With JAX-RS It is as rapid as ROR or Django or any of the other "rapid" frameworks and is drop dead simple.

The reason you want to do this, is because then you know how to build web UI's without any non-W3C technologies. What this allows you to do is take the same front-end and back it with services in any language. So you can start to write JSON services in python, PHP, Ruby or whatever language you want to learn without having to rewrite your UI. This will allow you to try different languages without having to invest heavily in learning large web frameworks. You can write one service in Java and the next in python, the next in Ruby. This will allow you to evaluate which one feels right to you.

After doing this your UI skills are portable across any stack you come across because you have removed the UI from server side stacks.

As for the server side languages for web, PHP is the most popular by a large margin. It is unfortunate given that it is such a poorly designed language, if you are in it for the gigs then learn PHP.

Python would probably be the second most popular (if you exclude Java/JSP and .NET / ASP) and is more rewarding if you are looking for something that has good job prospects with an elegant language.

Ruby would probably come right after the first two, there are jobs and it is a well designed language, worth learning if you want to go that way.
lkmg: What in the characterization of leadership here sounds like clinical depression? I really didn't pick that up. However, one can point to leaders, among them military leaders, who showed what now perhaps would be diagnosed as bouts of depression--Lincoln, Grant, Sherman, Marlborough come to mind.

Wasn't this posted before?
Here's my question. This really feels like a platform wars flashback to Mac v. PC, and the coming numerical advantages to Android combined with the fact that it's arguably on or close to the same level of iPhone for performance, usability, etc (or is getting close) really do make it seem inevitable that it should swallow whole much of the smartphone market.

Question next. If Android : PC :: iPhone : Mac, where does that put Apple? I'm not convinced that that will be the case, since Apple's margins will shrink once it moves past exclusivity and, all things aside, smartphone prices remain quite high; I don't imagine that there will be a serious need to have the kind of per-unit pricing differentials seen on say, a PC laptop vs. a Macbook.
What teenage is going to be able to pay $70 a month? Their parents who are living off unemployment? If there are teenagers and parents fitting such bills they are doing so via a reburfished iphone for $50 and then paying the $70. Though AT&T for 200MB and 450minutes now costs $55 a month.

They launched this too early; wait til voice/data prices drop even further to reach this demo. Though to me it's still not an iPhone or an Android and all the cool kids will have one of those.
If just the folks reading this forum were to write a snailmail letter to their congressman it would likely have a significant effect. The value of a non-form/non-crazy-rant letter is something like ntimes greater than an email, n being somewhere over 50.
who'll is a really really awkward word...any other domain options while it's still early?
Of course, this is hoping for democracy in a system that doesn’t yet require such freedom

Surely nobody expects "democracy" from a privately owned app store. Clarity and good faith, yes. Agreements should be explicit and transparent between the involved parties, and that is really the relationship developers have with the app store, not democratic rule.
To me, this isn't really RIP... it's just, die, die, go away please, but learn from the mistake. That's my biggest fear; a certain, big $x amount was spent on this, and after folding it into the wash of profits, the important take-aways could very easily be missed.
I'm ok with having a distributed team; in an ideal world we'd be able to get together physically more than we do. But if there's an amazing talent in Seattle or someplace else really far from where I live I'm not going to let geographic separation keep me from working with that person.

But...I definitely don't have it all figured out for sure...half the time I feel like that xckd strip where the guy freaks out as he's signing his mortgage loan because he still thinks about how cool it would be to be Batman.
Sorry if I'm missing the obvious but what company do u work for? I'll put 1k on that bet!
Or better yet, why not just learn everything you know from Fox News?
My impression of the top colleges way back when I was applying was that they all said they valued depth over breadth. Eg near-perfect academic record, top test scores, and unusual commitment to or accomplishment in just a few activities.

However, anecdotal experience later made me question the reality of that, and suspect admissions officers are still overly impressed by teens who sleep four hours a night and have 10 or 12 relatively shallow extracurriculars that require little more than the ability to manage lots of busywork and multitasking.

Which of course is what most of the corporate workforce has become - lots of 'managers' schedules'. Coincidence?
Apple's secrecy might be responsible for the new iPhone's reception issues
DNS Root Name Servers 101 (the basics)
Yeah, but that's not exactly "stretching it's capabilities."

Ultimately labels are just conveniences. Anybody can call themselves a Hacker if they want to, even if they don't even know Ctrl+S. But the rest of the world is free to acknowledge or ignore their self-label. Personally I'm quite happy with that state of affairs. The last thing I'd want is a Bureau of Hackers that you have to fill out 3 forms, in triplicate and pay a "filing fee" to every year, in order to be called a Hacker. :-)
Flying car production rolls forward
I first read this as, "Microsoft's Firefox Sync client submitted to the Apple App Store" and thought to myself, "wow, here in 2010, how things have changed..."

:) I look forward to seeing the day that this (hopefully) gets approved, even though I'm not an iOS user.
Ask HN: What movies inspire you?
What movies get you pumped and inspire productivity?
The only things the WWII era Japanese have going for them as cool villains (and there are many) have to do with Japanese culture, Bushido being primary amongst these. What the Germans did in real life sounds a lot like CV items from James Bond and comic book villains.
I looked into github for our company a while ago, but since we deal with quite a lot of consultancy work where we offer collaborator access to clients (for their own changes, issue tracking, etc), it was going to be prohibitively expensive to afford a plan which got everyone the necessary account.

In contrast, having unlimited users, even with a fairly small set of repos, is a very valuable offering, and I might reconsider it in favour of our current redmine setup, which doesn't offer nearly as many useful features.

At $25, which is only £16 or so, it's pretty much on-par with the VPS we're hosting our current repos on.
You can put it right next to your Apple Pippin.
It's an in-memory hash store that is persisted to the disk when possible. Sort of like memcached that can survive restarts and is suitable for long-term storage.
Why do I have to download it if it's web based? Can't I just use it?
Well, I'll take this time to pimp my little free book on learning Python:

http://learnpythonthehardway.org/

It's a book that teaches programming assuming no programming knowledge, and is organized into exercises you do one per week or faster if you want. It's basically a book you'd read before you try any of the others, teaching you the stuff that other programmers forgot they learned.
Yeah, I know, our conversation about read performance at the cost of data integrity being OK was about MyISAM (which doesn't have great concurrent write performance due to the table-level locking).
This makes me want to search on YouTube for one of those Hitler bunker videos criticizing Star Wars.
Am I the only one who was horrified by the typesetting of that document? It made it impossible to read.
Basically, if you have a technical degree (I think HR drops that requirement if you have 20 years experience)

Perhaps this is part of why you're having so much trouble...do you really think that the equivalent of a 4-year "technical degree" (of any kind?) is two decades of experience? I bet there are scores of people out there who have only several years of solid technical experience who know way more about getting shit done than the average recent grad. Just my .02
You can use it as a general computing environment.

> However, it makes no sense when you start development to try to guess what calls you might end up using.

I agree. That's why you will be using libraries to duplicate what your OS did for you. The Exokernel guys call this a library OS. Libraries are already quite good at providing abstractions.

The difference to a conventional architecture is, that the kernel only provides secure multiplexing between application on the same machine. But the abstractions from the hardware are provided by some libraries. It's easier to experiment with libraries than with operating systems.

The MIT-Exokernel-Operating-System page (http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/exo.html) explains this in more detail. If you look at the first picture, and replace `Exokernel' with `hypervisor', you get modern virtualisation.
It's a vicious cycle. Next time there's a new Microsoft product people will be more wary of buying in ("Is it worth the risk? What if they scrap it like the Kin?"), leading to fewer sales, making another failure more likely.
I think Google doesn't retain nearly enough control over the platform -- why the hell are they licensing their "Google Experience" apps to handset manufacturers that ship devices with ancient versions of the OS using hacked-together private drivers and never releasing software updates? Why even let them ship the app store if your own flagship applications in it will be masked due to incompatibility?
Sounds plausible, but surely there would have been some on-site tests without the rubber shields? It still seems like epic fail to let something like that through.
Solitude and isolation. Dwelling on problems for long periods of time. Not being satisfied with life as usual. Preferring to think before (or instead of) acting. Taking a long time to complete a seemingly simple task, because you can see the full ramifications of the task and how difficult it really is. Concern with the abstract and the illusionary/visionary instead of the immediate. Some of the attitude towards focus and concentration, although that varies.

In short, I think that depression can be somewhat characterized as a sensitivity to, or inability to filter out, certain perceptions, especially abstract concerns. What the author is advocating seems to be a conscious effort to seek those perceptions. My opinions are, of course, biased by my own experiences.
How to play guitar
That's a shame. And I agree. I guess the author should provide translations in C or Java or whatever along with his examples as far as possible. I understand his Haskell examples, but that's preaching to the choir.

I read a blog post were somebody re-implemented some examples of Haskell concepts in C. I can't remember the URL, but searching for "Monads in C" or "Monads in Java" etc brings up some interesting posts. E.g. http://blog.tmorris.net/maybe-monad-in-java/
This is basically exactly what I was going to say. I'm currently spending a week far from home base wind and kite surfing. Once in the morning and once in the afternoon, I answer customer questions/suggestions, and after dinner I spend 4 or 5 hours fixing bugs and working on implementing something.

It feels a lot more like vacation than work.
Is Python pre-compilation just compiling to bytecode as in .pyc files, or is it compiling to native code?
Exokernels: http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/exo.html

Though sadly this page is from 1998. But there are some people who are still working on Exokernels. You can meet them here at HN.
The Apple design and development process is sort of the quintessential anti-committee process. It's somewhat autocratic, authoritarian, cohesive, focused, and very decisive. Cringe as we might want to, this is what makes Apple so great at creating fantastic, successful products. It's a daunting (but not impossible) task to compete with this with an open process.
http://www.scribd.com/vacuum?url=http://hackermonthly.com/ha...
Knuth's earthshaking announcement
Fingers crossed that this means one day I will be able to buy things on woot and have them shipped with Prime.
Blackviper's OS Tweaks
Arduino on Film Printed Circuit
Unless it was a significant amount for the company, or they were already raising a round, my guess is most would decline.

Definitely a reasonable thing to ask about. Any employee that wants to dump his savings into the company is probably going to be pretty committed.
I'm such a pedant when it comes to commercials, but wifi on an iPod Touch in your Prius?
From the CEO's email:

...we’re geeked about the opportunities to tap into that knowledge and those resources, especially on the technology side.
Proven hedge: In 03 i bought a <5 yr old boat at a great price - a Marina repossession. Had 5 summers of fun on the water with friends/family returning to work after each weekend fully refreshed and ill bet more productive. I sold my boat in 08 for 90% purchase price. Technically depreciation, second hand values and rising demand matched my initial purchase discount but for me it wasn't about real cash gains, it was the best life investment I made. In summary id advise invest in your life, buy something that makes you smile, make your dough through your work, and leave hedging to dull finance guys.
Robyn / Killing Me - music video written in code
So, TeXML?

Yeah, didn't see that one coming.
The video is written entirely in code, and feeds in content from fans via Twitter. The beginning of the video features words from the song, in which Robyn sings about the various vices that are killing her.
Edit: Knuth is messing with twitter on purpose.
http://yfrog.com/1qpplvj

--

TeXML already exists. This must be a joke. Besides, look at the guy's other posts:

http://mobile.twitter.com/jeyjey

"jeyjey Also no escape sequences, menu driven, and speech recognize. Named iTeX."
Amazon seems like the perfect company. Woot sells random stuff; what company is more likely to have lots of extra random stuff sitting around than Amazon?
Thanks for the info. The only successful software that I could think of was the XNU kernel (Mac OS X) but it is not a fork even though it borrows heavily from FreeBSD for POSIX compatibility.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XNU
Indeed. I thought, "Seriously? XML?" then saw your comment.
>You can look at the market and see if you could form a Red Hat around BSD.

I don't really see how monetizing from BSD/MIT source code would be different than monetizing from GPL code.

>Call me back when you get funded.

I am sure Apple, Microsoft and Adobe make more money than Red Hat . So again what is your point? Not everything in this life is about money.

>And that's precisely why stuff like BtrFS is not BSD-licensed.

And that's precisely why FreeBSD folk have ZFS and Linux folk don't.

>Because the following week, Microsoft would launch their new and improved next-generation NTFS.

ZFS porting from OpenSolaris to FreeBSD hasn't been easy. What makes you think that porting another modern and complex file system from Linux to Windows would be easy for Microsoft? And anyways it would be awesome that we could get native read/write on Windows partitions from Linux.

>many pieces of BSD software end up inside proprietary software, and nobody knows exactly how those wheels were modified.

>>Developers know what they're getting into
I took my share of Greyhound trips from Ottawa to Toronto, because it was cheaper than VIA Rail was. The last straw was when the bus that I was to take from Toronto to where I live left two hours early, leaving me stranded in Toronto at 6 AM after taking a 5 hour bus ride from Ottawa. Thank God for GO Transit.

What I really hate about them is that they have a schedule, but not really. They constantly sell more tickets than there are seats on the bus. The good part about this is that since your ticket isn't connected to a bus, you can take one any time on that day. But then of course 200 people try to get on an 80 person bus. It's a terrible mess.

To make matters worse, none of the other bus companies in Southern Ontario actually go to Ottawa, so its Greyhound or nothing.

So now I only take the train. It is always a pleasant trip. Definitely worth the price.
Megabus, for example, only travels between about 6 or 7 cities in eastern Ontario and Quebec.

That makes Megabus the Southwest of Canadian bus service.
I've worked on a few projects that seemed extremely stupid at the developer level, but were financially successful (despite being stupid).

Microsoft has a lot of weight so maybe they thought they would have some leverage for a certain demographic. Though they would have had to sell a _lot_ of Kin's to break even on their investment (if rumors around Redmond are true).
Are data dumps available?
If you don't need 100% reach, have a look at xauth source:
http://github.com/xauth/xauth

They use a central domain and window.postMessage to make a secure but shared storage.
Heh. Yes, in the very early days of Canonical I chatted with Mark about the possibility of working there and that intention to closely hold some of the software I'd be working on was one of the red flags for me. In my view, it was partly because Canonical went down that path that GNU Arch got forked and horked (mainly by Canonical employees).
Seeing as how the article really wasn't that long, I think maybe ethan was pointing out that the best way to avoid information overload is to not read every post about information overload. Of course I could be giving him way more credit...
fake!
We're not living in caves, definitions of fair should include upward mobility.

Are we talking absolute upward mobility, or relative upward mobility? If absolute, then we already have that. If relative, that's impossible...not everyone can be simultaneously relatively upwardly mobile :)
Not for me. I can jump into something I understood at any point of my "education" and find my way around it with pleasure.
I am still learning Haskell but I thought things like foldl' and Iteratees allow you to use strict evaluation when it is appropriate.
Only two attendees, I guess that means good odds for free swag?
Ask HN: How much money am I losing by sticking with Google Checkout?
On my web site the only payment option is Google Checkout.
I know that it's better to give users more payment options, but of course it would require additional development effort if I do proper integration.
That time could be spent on developing features relevant to the core business (for example "search alerts").
So I'm trying to figure out how high the priority of smooth payment integration should be?

Payment alternative should probably be on-site payment with something like PayPal Payments Pro as a backend.
If you have better idea -- please let me know.

I also considered Chargify.com and Recurly.com, but it does not look like they add much value and their services do not address the most painful part of Credit Card processing: dealing with credit card fraud.
Besides, it looks they do not support Google Checkout.

To put my question in context:
1) Web site: www.postjobfree.com
2) Paid service: access to resume contact information (+ some other features that are not as important at this moment).
3) Subscription: $20/month.
Google Checkout supports recurrent payments, and as far as I know PayPal Payments Pro supports it as well.
4) Current number of subscriptions ~100 and slowly growing.
5) Current monthly traffic ~165700 visitors/month http://www.quantcast.com/postjobfree.com
These are free visitors. Only very few of them are paid users.

So, the question is -- is it appropriate time to work on adding another payment option or is it better to focus on other things for now?
Just curious. Would my robot land me a job? Not that I'm looking at the moment, but any company that accepts robots as resumes is worth remembering...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uMZkd8YMgzw
Movies don't inspire productivity in me. They make me lazy. They get me in dreamland. A good book might inspire me to work. A book that inspires productivity in me consistently is Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance. Every time i feel stuck, i just reread the chapter on gumption traps and go on with my work.
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Danger_%28company%29 for a bit more info.

When the left on life support back end data loss occurred we heard a lot about how terribly clueless the management of Project Pink was and how terribly unhappy the assimilated into Pink Danger employees were.

Disaster was expected, predicted, etc., the interesting question as others have noted is why did Microsoft take so long, spend so much money to realize it.
Good message, good content, but that was some dry presentation.

I suppose the problem with every graduation speech is that it's some knowledgeable wise person up there talking essentially down to a bunch of life newbies down here. That is so rarely going to be interesting.
Some of these do LA->SF too since there's no good train option for that. It's retarded to take Greyhound because the Chinatown buses will go direct.
I work in a .NET environment. I am learning F# in my spare time with hopes of being able to write part of the app in F#. It may not be an entirely realistic hope, but at least that hope is there with F#.
This is a seriously great article.

One thing bothers me, though. This description of what a leader is, doesn't it fit Kurtz exactly? I can't help feeling that this is only part of the story; that we need something more than leadership alone.
He is kidding right? iTex?
Setting aside fool.com's slide into arbitrary pop-wall street drivel on the level of Jim Cramer, my main concern about investing in Tesla at this point is the competition. Nissan is going to have it's Leaf all electric vehicle out very soon, and not far behind is the Chevy Volt - both vehicles significantly under cut the Model S in price and will be on the market sooner.

They had an OK if under whelming run with the Tesla Roadster, and I applaud Elon Musk for beating the majors to market with an all electric highway going car - but to bet the company on a luxury electric vehicle is very very dangerous. Something to consider is the recent cool response that Lexus' 200h received compared to the Prius.

I will be watching from the side lines on Tesla whether they sink or swim. If people interested in the electric and alternative fuel vehicle sector, I'd recommend looking into Cummins Inc (CMI) - a company which is actually making good money in this sector, growing nicely - and may be off your radar.
A quick check with Google indicates she still had her (or a) job as of spring this year.

Many managers' core competency is shifting or escaping blame; in this case Microsoft was palpably panicked over the prospect that the disaster would reflect on Azure and their general cloud competency and tried to cast blame on anyone other than themselves and all the non-MS technology Danger was using. Firing her would have put the lie to that.
Ooh, the suspense is killing me. This is almost as exciting as when Opera reinvented the web.
Not exactly TeX, but LaTeX 3 is basically the Perl 6 of that world and has been under development for a loooong time: http://www.latex-project.org/latex3.html