skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I did an Ignite talk last month about wearable computers:

http://www.vimeo.com/13163175
Thanks for all the feedback, we started selling a bunch of apps just after the first of the month, so it looks like it won't be until the end of next month until we get paid. Oh boy, that is going to be a liquidity problem...

Thanks again everyone.
For those who insinuate that the posts are getting flagged, here is data from my Analytics for the past two months, for visitors referred from Hacker News (from random links in comments on other submissions):

Visits: 109

Pages/Visit: 3.18

Bounce Rate: 40.37%

Average Time on Site: 3:48

HN readers seem to like the site just fine. HN appears to have a filter that makes articles from this site dead upon submission.
Ok I think this post was intended to make me feel stupid. Why do we need macros in javascript? I use it all the time for you know, paid work so please explain to me the benefit.
Why would women date you at 40 when they could go for the "younger, hotter" model?
there is still a 48 hour window for transactions to be returned because of insufficient funds. and same day ACH will only be supported by a small subset of banks (and none of the big ones, at least for a long while)
I honestly think students study less because we can get away with it. We can study less get a little above average on tests and with grading on a curve you can get a decent grade.

Add to that a lot of students have a lot of fun alternatives to do with that extra time, ie party, hang out with friends, try to get girls, pursue other hobbies and passions.
the network is based upon nightly batch file exchange. it's a terrible system for 2010. but it was not bad for its time, and hard to change the system implemented by thousands of banks.

also, there is a risk component of it. holding transactions for longer decreases risk.
tldr: "Fallacy"

Slightly longer version: some dude published a book which said that eating meat is bad. This article says said book is largely BS. So go eat some meat.

My opinion: Complete BS outweighs good science by a factor of several thousand to one, when it comes to nutrition. There's no particularly strong evidence that one diet is significant better than any other, so as long as you're not fat or malnourished you're probably doing 90% as well as you possibly could be. So relax and stop reading fifteen-thousand-word articles debunking the statistics in some diet book.
Just because you can use Emacs for everything doesn't mean you should. I use Emacs solely for editing code. I use MacIrssi/Xchat/Opera for IRC, a web browser (Opera, Chrome, Firefox ... anything at all) for browsing the web, GMail for email, Adium/Empathy for IM. I don't even run eshell; I prefer running multiple Terminal.apps/gnome-terminals.

You don't have to use Emacs just because rockstars use it. I know awesome people who run Windows and use Notepad++.
macros cannot implement the whole proposal. but still some kind of macro system may be a worthwhile addition to, say, the closure compiler
Distributed Teams are Stagnant Teams
Auto Parts
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The two coolest are:

http://www.veer.com/products/merchdetail.aspx?image=VPR00054... - which is for the font-a-holics and shows Helvetica on the side in Light, Regular, Bold and Black (get it?)

http://www.coroflot.com/public/individual_file.asp?sort_by=1... - which includes a shaped key and hole to make sure nobody can steal your cup unless they enjoy a lap full of coffee (and who doesn't?)
No, it's unethical unless you have hard data showing that one group wouldn't be poorly served by that division.

(Or rather, that neither group would be)
I ended up being there for first Thursday this month! Sadly I was feeling mopey and anti-social, so I really didn't take advantage of the opportunity.

It's weird, I saw the best show of my life at Dante's (Extra Action Marching Band) but I've now been back four times and have never been tempted back in. It always just seems like trashy bar bands?
Seconded. Great site.

I haven't used any other dating sites, so I have no proper basis for comparison, but I've been very satisfied with the site, from matching system, search options, etc.

Bottom line: I ended up meeting my current girlfriend there and things are going very, very well with her. Anecdotal evidence, yes, but I hope it complements the nuggets of awesomeness you'll find on OKTrends (http://blog.okcupid.com).
I imagine the idea is to have it better integrated with the Clojure language, especially Clojures concurrency mechanisms.

I see that that Aleph implements Ring, so you can use it with a bunch of existing Clojure web frameworks, such as Compojure.
An interview with Michael Lopp
I get the distinct impression he doesn't work at Apple anymore. Anyone know when that changed?
I voted you up, purely for the irony.
It would be pretty sad if someone used the immune cloud to distribute a virus. I wouldn't want to live in a world where I had to trust AVG anti-virus with my health.
I agree completely. I'm basically cribbing from my reply to a different comment, but the spoiled kids aren't the ones whose parents never punished them; the spoiled kids are the ones whose parents made it look like the real boundaries didn't exist. (Replacing the toys they carelessly or intentionally broke, giving in to tantrums, etc.)

Sometimes these people also explain why their children shouldn't do something, and people see the "discipline through understanding" crowd as part of this, but saying "don't do this" while sending the message that nothing changes is completely different from saying "When you do that to people they don't want to do nice things for you anymore. We're not going to the Zoo today anymore."
The title should say Arrington becomes an Anybot.
Australian Web filter shelved during review - still considered 'when' not 'if'
For every bad experience like Elon's you will find around .7 good ones. Statistically, anyways.
The truth about cold water
I just started running about 14 weeks ago. I'm 26, 27 in October. I just ran my first half marathon (13.1 miles), and I'm aiming to run 30 miles when I turn 30. I'd like to do it in a respectable time too.
Basically it is an intelligent and well-written PR piece. Something to learn from.
Meditate! You will be happier, calmer and more focused. There are many meditations out there - be promiscuous and try out as many as you can. You will then be able to figure out what works best for you.
There's a transcript underneath the video. The site design has room for improvement, but it works fine with readability.

Flag: infoq = with transcript
I am not a lawyer, but my understanding is that entering into a common law marriage typically only happens if you "intend" to be married. For example, cohabitation alone is, generally, not enough to create a common law marriage.
It's already pretty easy to do metaprogramming in JavaScript (as in use code to modify/create code) and it already supports both apply form and (the uglier) eval form so I don't really see what this brings to the table.

Been looking a little at clojure lately, both defmacro and the homoiconicity part of lisp is really powerful, but not very simple, compared to how you do metaprogramming in JavaScript.

So interesting post, but I don't think JavaScript needs more obscurity or the complexity of macros.
I want one. It sounds pretty fly.
Android Gaining Momentum, Apple and RIM lose
I think it's added to SmartFilter, I noticed that news.ycombinator.com was blocked at work yesterday. news.ycombinator.net works though.
Agreed, keep writing code.

My biggest mistake was not starting a company sooner. I started my first company my last semester in college and decided to keep on an entrepreneurial path.

It was pretty tough in that situation. I didn't have the same disposable income all my corporate friends had. I wish I started a company three years earlier when I was a freshmen. No need to wait four years to write code and start a company, I would practice by building code you can use to make a profit. These small sites can potentially be building blocks for your future endeavors. You can even use them to attain datasets you'll want to use later on.
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For who?

The whole point of autotools is that it allows you to have a different configuration for every system the software is built on. However, this is a very undesirable property for modern software; instead, we want our builds to be exactly repeatable. If you download my software and build it, the results should be bit-for-bit identical to the results I get. If they're not, then how do you know if your build is correct?

It is funny how most software today is auto-customized using autotools and then a package maintainer for the software for some OS comes in and un-does all that auto-customization to get repeatable results. It would be much better to just assume there's going to be a package manager configuring everything exactly as he wants it, and avoid autotools completely.
I don't know about regulations, but I've heard some horror stories from a friend of mine who works for a major bank. Most of the efforts his department has made -- toward rethinking and redesigning online banking -- have been thwarted by office politics.
Clearly autoconf isn't so unremittingly horrible that he doesn't use it in Varnish :)

autoconf is a bit of a Faustian bargain though - it promises a quick and easy solution to the labour-intensive and mindlessly boring task of managing all the microscopic differences between (and within!) Unix variants. Unfortunately it brings its own complexity, fragility and bugs along with it. It also encourages a programming style best described as "#ifdef hell" which is just poison to good maintainability.
I remember the first time I installed the ODE dynamics library on a Windows machine. "What do you mean, I need GNU Make?" Then the configurator ran, or rather tried to, and my jaw just hung open for the rest of the afternoon.

At that point I understood why Microsoft still has a positive balance sheet.
Bring back random signatures!!!!
I picked up a plain white mug from a Le Creuset outlet store a couple years ago. It may not look like much, but you could tie a rope to the handle and use it as a handy melee weapon, it's so solid.
Oh wow, it's bigger than that... well, only 9566 words in that article, but the past 7 articles are also about that study.

Final count: 9566 + 1335 + 1816 + 863 + 2252 + 2203 + 387 = 18422 words (by wc -w's opinion).
The Swinging Pendulum Between Distribution and Monetization
Yeah, I would have put HN at least 10x faster. ;)
Either that or it's a clever move to make the country more productive.
If you take a moment to pause the "ra ra shish koom ba" cheerleading, it's worth contemplating what manner of content this site would have that would've caused this.
Get internships. These will help remind you why you're in school, and give you great mentorship opportunities. I've learned just as much if not more from internships as I have from my CS classes (although the knowledge tends to be of a more practical, rather than theoretical, nature).

If you're really lucky, in your time in undergrad, you'll be able to already have experience working at some of the most innovative companies.
Producing a different configuration for every system is not the whole point of autotools. Rather, autotools is generally used as a way to configure semi-standard-but-implementation-specific functionality across different platforms, such as locating <stat.h> or determining the platform's word size.

It also gives users a familiar way to optionally enable features at build time, such as choosing between MySQL and PostgreSQL support, as opposed to requiring the user to edit some Makefiles and twiddle some #define's manually.
You don't need a full time SysAdmin (much less two) until you have a /lot/ of hardware. Until then, you can get reasonably good contract SysAdmins for $100/hr to do your hardware stuff if you can't handle it. (your average independent hardware guy will contract out closer to $40-$70/hr, if you get him or her direct.)

Really, from what I've seen, most of the "cloud" providers only replace your hardware guy; you still need a SysAdmin (or a developer who can handle SysAdmin type stuff, which is probably what you want unless you are an infrastructure provider.)

It's like anything else; If you know the market and know what you are doing, you can save a lot of money by doing or supervising parts of it yourself. If you don't know what you are doing... well, sometimes it's best to find the person with the best reputation you can find and pay full price. I know I'm that way with accounting and legal services; I overpay because I don't know enough about the field to do or supervise any of the work myself.

But, I think that if you spend significant amounts of money on server infrastructure, it's probably worth your time to learn enough to get a better deal on things like contract labor.
First, caveat: this is for C++.

I wrote a major part of a complex build system in autoconf[1,2]. I gotta say, just about ANYTHING would be better. There's no abstraction; at no point can you forget you're writing m4sugar (implemented on top of m4) that is writing bourne shell code. There's no indication if you screw up in subtle ways except an sh parse error when you run configure. I've had to run configure with sh -x more times than I can count. EVERY SINGLE autoconf release changes the interface, and there's no reasonable way to detect the autoconf version to work around it. Every autoconf release requires hours of tinkering. Autoconf 2.65 changed the quoting rules for m4_upper and m4_lower; making those work reliably on old and new versions is obnoxious.

I've spent many, many hours working on autoconf code. I consider myself an expert at it. And yet, I'm willing to throw it all away and replace it with ANY build system that isn't a pile of junk. I just haven't found one yet :(

The only ones that rise above the noise are scons, waf, and cmake. (No, I'm not using jam/bjam or ant. DIAF.) CMake does most of what I want, except they invented a completely idiotic new programming language. Waf and CMake both provide me with a system to make a build system instead of a build system itself (screw that). SCons reinvents make... poorly and slowly. Of these, only cmake handles windows without forcing me to sit in front of a windows machine for hours. (Autoconf, obviously, falls over hardcore on windows unless you set up a Unixy build environment on it. Not The Point.)

Anyway, that was a cathartic rant. (No, but seriously. I'm up for more suggestions, or you can try to convince me that my opinions of the above tools are wrong. I really do want to switch away, I just haven't found anything that's a big enough improvement to justify it.)

1) http://github.com/visionworkbench/visionworkbench/tree/maste...

2) http://github.com/visionworkbench/visionworkbench/blob/maste...
you have a good point but we have no idea which areas are affected by the antibody. If Africa has a majority of strains that are cured, then I'm sure they could stem the spread of the disease in more developed areas. I don't think that belief is widespread outside of africa, or at least I wasn't aware of it.
Clearly autoconf isn't so unremittingly horrible that he doesn't use it in Varnish :)

Autocrap is horrible in two ways: First, it's horrible to work with; and second, it's responsible for making any attempt to avoid it horribly painful.

If autocrap didn't exist, people would write operating systems without so many gratuitous incompatibilities. What possible excuse is there for the fact that many linux distributions need a special compiler flag in order to support files greater than 4 GB?
Facebook to close its Gift Shop
The social network announced Thursday that its Gift Shop--the feature it launched in 2007 that allows users to send personalized items to friends on the network--will close on August 1 to allow it to focus on improving other features. Gifts that users receive before that date will continue to appear on their pages, and users will still be able to use third-party applications to send and receive greeting cards and other items.
Apps on SD Card: The Details
Wow. Absolutely incredible. How annoying Arrington is, I mean. The robot's pretty neat too.
such as locating <stat.h>

POSIX says that it's <sys/stat.h>. Problem solved.

determining the platform's word size

sizeof(size_t). Problem solved.
Ask HN: Is there such a thing as typesetting consultants for the web?
And if so, where can I find one? For instance, I have a great visual design that I'm happy with, but when I try to design how the header and opening text areas are set, I come up with a half baked framing that looks less than professional and undermines the rest of my design.

I know there are tons of designers, are there any that only focus on typesetting, or would take a small project like that?
IPad Video Converter for Mac to Convert various videos for your iPad
iPad Video Converter for Mac is a professional Mac video to iPad converter that enables you to convert all popular video and audio formats to iPad compatible Video Mp4, MOV, M4V, Mp3, M4A, AAC, WAV. With easy-to-use editing functions like trim, crop, merge etc., you can watch your favorite videos on your iPad with ease.

iPad Video Converter for Mac is one of the best iPad video converters that enable you to convert almost any video format for enjoying on your iPad on Mac OS X.
Getting Amarok running in Ubuntu 10.04
Germany officials launch legal action against Facebook
Microsoft Attempting to Take on Hadoop with the Dryad Project
A moderate view on why Kurzweil, Brin, Page, and Gates are all wrong
Well I certainly can't say the same.

I don't know about you but I find it very, very hard to actually learn something (rather than read about it once on Wikipedia) that isn't programming related, computer related or job related, unless I'm forced to sit down and study it every week (as in school).
Adobe Flash is Going 3D
The LtU crowd knows Dave Herman from his academic PLT work and his standardization work on EcmaScript. I believe he also is or was a contributing editor on LtU.

http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/dherman/
First let me say that as a long time Schemer, and one who did his graduate work on the semantics of macros, I am quite positively disposed towards macros. In theory, I think it'd be great for JavaScript to develop a macro system.

That said, macros are much harder to design, and much less well understood, than modules. Worse, macros in the context of a dynamically loaded global scope (e.g., JavaScript's global object) are a complete mess. The Scheme community is actually quite divided over this issue. Some portions of the Scheme community favor a much more dynamic semantics for macros, more in the Lisp tradition; others favor building macros on top of a more compilation-friendly semantics -- often, not coincidentally, built on top of a static module system. As an example, I'd recommend looking into the Racket programming language (formerly known as PLT Scheme), which has a built-in module system fairly similar to the one we've designed for Harmony -- and which leverages this module system to support one of the most powerful macro systems in the history of programming languages.

Next, one of the central aims of the module system design is to correct some of the past mistakes in JavaScript's scoping semantics. These are things that can't just be desugared away by simple macros. They require actual changes to the way whole JS programs are compiled and executed.

Finally, I'll add that it's easy to write a few code snippets on your blog and pretend it's a design, but it's nowhere near what is required to see a design all the way through. It's not even enough for the introductory text of a proposal. But if you have serious proposals to make, I'd encourage you to join es-discuss and make positive, substantive contributions to the conversation. However, I should warn you that well-designed macro systems are still very much the stuff of research.
Nice ghoulish article … very fitting for the season and impressivly damn interesting.That was awesome! Probably one of the more interesting reads in awhile.

http://www.stocktrains.com
Rate my app: HealCam, like chatroulette only "sicker" 
HealCam is a medical version of chatroulette. On the site people can connect with other patients with the same disease by using simple drop down menus (present choices:Diabetes, Weight Loss & Dieting, Depression, Cancer, Pregnancy and Childbirth, and Heart Disease).

We think that HealCam is the first fully themed chatroullette clone, at least for the medical field. Please check us out and let me know. Thank you, people!
That's why I've always maintained that Java is a scripting language ;)
Can we move toward electronic roads on the cheap?
What if traffic lights used wi-fi or radio to broadcast their decisions? Could cars use that data to arrive at lights just in time to catch the green? Could they talk back and actually vote on when the light changes?

Could cars use GPS, suspension sensors and wi-fi to report where the potholes are?

There's work being done on enabling cars to travel closer together and reduce the amount of drag that most cars have to overcome, but isn't there lower risk, low hanging fruit to pick?

Can you think of any creative ways to deploy the great technologies we have now to make concrete more efficient?
What I really gained from high school was not so much learning what I wanted to learn, but learning a bunch of things that I, a priori, didn't want to learn.

I was a math and science geek as a kid, and given the choice I would have studied only that in high school. Fortunately for me I wasn't given that choice and was also made to study stuff like literature, which has greatly enriched my life and widened my horizons. High school wasn't (and shouldn't be) so much about learning you favorite subject as opening your eyes to other areas of knowledge outside your passion, so that when you do choose your specialization you do so with a better knowledge as to what is out there.
And every one of them is focused on generating cash in their business. The road they’ve chosen is a longer, harder road with a lower chance of success but a much higher reward (think Michael Dell, Bill Gates, Larry Ellison) if they succeed.

Wait, so generating cash in your business has a lower chance of success than getting acquired? Maybe it's because I'm not on the west coast, but I know at least 20X more people with cashflow-positive companies than people whose companies have been acquired.

Or maybe he just means they have a lower chance of becoming as successful as Dell and Gates and Ellison, than others have of being acquired. But he seems to imply that if these people don't generate as much cash as those super-companies, that they've somehow failed.

...which reminds me of the thread on here not long ago on when exactly a startup can be considered successful: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1383566
What's the worst job you've had outside technology?
What's the 'worst' job you've had outside of technology, and did you enjoy it more or less than what you do now?