skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
agreed! hn is not for Hello World and this sure qualifies.
Ask HN: Weekend Project Suggestions/Review
Hello everyone,

How is everyone doing? Weekend is almost here, so kind of excited. Though, not sure if weekends are any different for most hackers, eh?

The thing is I want to spend my time this weekend building a web-app. But I don't want to work on something useless. I was wondering what do you guys think about having a hulu like service for programing screencasts, not just related on pure languages but also like learning Photoshop, WordPress blogs and what not. There are tons of these screencasts out there available freely but I think it would be nice to have it aggregated at one place with a clean UI. I know there are kinda related services out there, but most are paid and the free ones are just...Or maybe I haven't found the right one yet.

So, back to the question. Do you think it's worth it to spend my weekend on it? Would you use it? I think I should be able to build a functional prototype pretty easily in a weekend.

I would also love to hear if you have any ideas you want to give away for a weekend project :)

Thanks!
Being Scientific: Fasifiability, Empirical Tests, and Reproducibility
I bought a Kindle recently even though I have an iPad. I enjoy the Kindle far more. I also don't mind taking it with me on the train because if something happens to it then I didn't just lose something super expensive-just fairly expensive.

It's also nice that I don't get distracted playing "Plants vs. Zombies" or "We Rule" on it when I intend to be reading.
Notes:

The data is relational

I don't want to host my own server, because that just isn't my strong point.
And keep a cheat sheet of the ones you've found really useful.
No it doesn't - developer took the time to make a game and no matter what people will do this time was spent ("destroyed").
We could argue that copying games destroys industry, but that's just word play (likewise computers destroyed the industry of abacus makers and it was not theft).
Anyway - pirating is wrong, because you do sth with other peoples work, that they don't want you to, why should we make it more evil by comparing it to thef I can't understand.
This is excellent advice. I usually mentally add on (and cleared transferring to another account.)
My dad recently bought a Nook (pre price drop) and one of the reasons he went for it over the Kindle was the wi-fi only version; he didn't need or want 3G. At $150, these things are going to start popping up everywhere.
I did it with my eating and workout habits and lost over 40Kg :) It really feels good not to be an obese :)
I believe he put in the comments that the author is now a professor. So I'm assuming he is teaching English or something related to his PHD
Just don't confuse happiness with pleasure. Sometimes what will give you the most happiness you won't find pleasurable at all to do.
Thank you for the links, although I already know the basics of FP(or Haskell at least, good enough to solve most of the Project Euler problems I've been able to do with OO) and at this moment Haskell seems to be the best tool for learning FP for me so Im going to stick with it :-). And if I know one FP-language really well would't it be just like with procedural programming languages, trivial to pick up a new language?

What Im after is a full understanding of what happens "under the hood", I've read some articles about lambda calculus, higher order functions, monads etc. but I get lost in all the math and abstract thinking.
Twitter from the command line in Python
With customization, every pain point of yours can be addressed; but maybe that's the problem that makes people "fall back" on IDEs.
Beg HN: Share some ideas.
I'm finishing my masters degree in computer science and I don't want to work from 9-5 in a boring company or from 9-11 in a consulting company.

I want to have my own startup but I don't have any good ideas! All I have is ideas for small web applications but not enough to make a living out of that nor to reject the offers I have.

So, can you please share some ideas with me? If you don't want to say them in public, please contact me at t57435 gmail.

Thank you!
Is there an example of AST manipulation?
"Basically this means I can't work full-time on this as I generally have only an hour or so a night to dedicate to the company."

I'm not sure that 1 hour per day is sufficient to achieve anything at all. You're better off just enjoying college and not worry about startups until you have your priorities in line, i.e. decide whether doing a startup is really for you.
You _can_ remove the AT&T apps if you root the phone.

http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=712546

http://forum.cyanogenmod.com/topic/3319-stock-apps-that-can-...

http://forum.cyanogenmod.com/topic/1950-galaxy-s-has-been-ro...

I'm very close to switching from an iPhone 3G to the Galaxy S (captivate), so I'm glad to see someone confirming what I thought would be my impression: not so smooth but more functionality. Not sure if I should wait a few months though for an Android 3.0 lineup.
Speaking of dvorak, I use dvorak and that's one reason I haven't entertained the idea of switching to vim. If I understand correctly, vim assumes qwerty.
Nice read, I have written a post about it:

http://chegra.posterous.com/you-only-need-one
Python Paste, mod_proxy, and SSL
I've heard that okcupid is an excellent way of meeting new people you actually like -- from friends that use it like this. My short time on there seems to corroborate this.
Anatomy of Bad User Experience
I found the old version more amusing:

"Google does search. Google does not do horoscopes, financial advice or chat. ... Google's entire staff is dedicated to creating the perfect search engine and work tirelessly toward that goal."

http://web.archive.org/web/20040603020634/http://www.google....

Oops!
> Sales numbers are generally legit. We really dont do anything that would mess with those.

via my brother at Nielsen, who whould happily tell me if the numbers were bull.
Hmm for some reason my motions don't work with [ { ( or b/B. I can't seem to find a reason for this. " works though.

Edit: seems actual jump selection can be finicky.
C# single linq expression raytracer using Y-combinator [2007]
That is impressive. Congratulations.
Thanks so much everyone. Perl 6 has already greatly aided my professional development as excellent features are ported into Perl 5.

I don't know what Perl 6's future will be; I have high hopes. But it's already moved me forward.
I don't think so. It's not uncommon to run Oracle on Solaris + SUN hardware. Not a large market but one with high profit margins. Why would Oracle want to kill a cash cow?
Could you elaborate on the "funding out of nowhere" story? Sounds like an interesting anecdote at first sight :-)
Apple Magic Trackpad: The Beginning of the End for Mac OS X
Ha, the truth is you can murder as many people you want, as long as it happens far away so that the average consumer can forget all about it.

If not the chocolate companies would have had to stop by coca from farms with child slaves, and people would have to stop visiting trafficked prostitutes. Hint: they won't.
Higher-Level versus Higher-Order Abstraction
Difficult Clients Are Still Your Clients | Joanna Ciolek
same for me, It affords little distraction,ideal for reading a book. The weight of a paperback (as opposed to my ipad, which is more like a hardcover) and in natural light the reading is a pleasure.

I have the Kindle App on the ipad as well, it doesn't afford the same pleasure or ease.
Funny Pictures
You can easily download alternate keymaps that adapt it to dvorak. Vim assumes qwerty, and thus things like the movement keys are remapped; but it doesn't really matter where the majority of the keys are. Most of vim's key layout is semantic rather than positional.
37Signals themselves readily admit that charging B2C consumers is hard, which is why they shifted their business to focus almost only on B2B products. I don't think they've ever said charging casual users works. They're whole thing is that the best market for web businesses is the "Fortune 5 million" of small businesses who will actually pay for stuff.

I don't see what the point of your post is. 37s already concedes these facts as part of their philosophy.
When I saw the new price point, I actually briefly considered buying a $139 model so I could loan the whole Kindle (and my whole electronic library) to a friend...

Then again, I bought a paperback book yesterday specifically because I knew I would be reading it and passing it on. This really is the biggest sore point for e-readers.
Congress Rethinks Its Ban on Internet Gambling
> Do they refuse applications according to some publicised rule set ?

Yes. The Android Market Developer Distribution Agreement, here: http://www.android.com/us/developer-distribution-agreement.h.... Section 4.3 in particular.
If you're male, check for possible signs of testicular cancer regularly. If you're female, check for possible signs of breast cancer regularly
A photo can say 1000 words - even in silence
http://coutequecoute.blogspot.com/2009/04/harold-whittles-he...

I remembered this picture from a Life Magazine year book. Did a bit of a search and found it. Priceless!

The boy's face says it all.
YouTube to increase upload limit from 10 to 15 minutes
An interesting twist to this, although technically not what he stated were the objectives, are tools like Phonegap and Titanium: you write HTML and JS that gets wrapped up in webkit and it works like a "real" Android (and iPhone) app. But as I said, nowhere near as low level as he wanted.

There is also a Ruby-based project but I can't remember its name.
"Most of the luxuries and many of the so-called comforts of life are not only not indispensable, but positive hindrances to the elevation of mankind." - Henry David Thoreau
I'd rather go for a fennec.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eXp9RyBzsSI
I just moved from Glasgow to Geneva to work at CERN (a particle physics lab) for 2 months.

It's been much more difficult than I expected, and I was apprehensive to begin with!

However, when things are uncomfortable I tend to fret for a while and then, eventually, take control of my situation. Sometimes you need to go through that period of discomfort to regain control of your life which has seemingly slipped from your grasp without your noticing it.

I regularly leave my home city to work abroad for months at a time. Sometimes it's fantastic. And sometimes (rarely) it becomes a mess.

When it goes well, it's great. New experiences and new people give you a whole new perspective on life. And if it doesn't go great, then it's probably simple enough to go back to your comfort zone and truly appreciate what you have. If it's not easy to go back - was it really your comfort zone?
DB2 Express-C download size reduced by 44%
This is a common misconception. There are SOME niceties in VIM that make more sense in qwerty (i.e hjkl for up, down, left, right respectively) but most shortcuts are NOT keyboard layout dependent. VIM's shortcuts are mostly mneumonics. For example, if you wanted to "delete a word", you would enter dw. In my head I think dw, not home-row+middle+left-hand, ring-finger+left-hand+top-row. Don't let this qwerty/dvorak be an excuse. Just do it. ;)
Is that John Lithgow narrating?
If you're a man, consider switching to the traditional wet shaving.
http://www.youtube.com/user/mantic59

It will make your mornings so much more enjoyable and give you a precious moment of self-care and contemplation every (other) day.
I have quit three times now for more than a year each time. I have a really addictive personality so it is all or nothing with me. When I start back up I am quickly back to a pack a day in no time. I have quit twice with patches and most recently with a prescription drug called Champix or Chantix. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Varenicline) They all work, the key is once I have quit, I can't have just one cigarette, or else I am back (all or nothing).

Just pick a method and don't let you talk yourself into having just one. After I turned 22 I realized it was about time for longterm damage to start and it wasn't socially cool anymore at that age.

Good luck!
No matter what you do, and how well you do things, there will always be people that is negative about you and what you did. Learn to selectively ignore such unconstructive critics.
Actually the market would probably bear more unevenly. I am sure there are some teachers which could probably command higher salaries, and some that are protected by the union and couldn't.
I have found that I can go learn and forget entire ways of using vim for years at a stretch. I've given up on trying to learn all of it, and instead just go into "deep vim mode" every 6 months or so, and (re)learn about a lot of stuff and adjust my vimming for current workflow optimization.
On a related note: it's better to ask for forgiveness than to ask for permission.
Hate's a strong word, but yes, having a budget for such things in the past, a vendor coming in with an unpackaged app (or some horrible custom non RPM/deb packaging format), with no init scripts, no syslog support, and sales staff who don't understand the bog-standard RHEL or SLES platform to the point where you have to help them with their presentation, can and will guarantee no sale.
Thanks for the replies.
The top post is claiming something that is not true. The responses are pointing out that the claim is bullshit, but they are not making claims of their own.

Suppose I were to claim that Sasvari owes me one trillion dollars, based on no reliable evidence whatsoever, and Sasvari were to deny it, pointing out the lack of evidence. Are both sides in this scenario equally "religious" in their stances?
Here in Germany we add half of this years world's photovoltaic solar panel production. Much of that is installed by small consumers, houses, farms, factories. This gets us away from the huge expensive centralized energy production. Panel by panel.

A new nuclear power plant has not been built in he last twenty years and is not planned.

Thus we can concentrate on bringing the price of renewable energy down.

The new reactors that are under construction in Finland and France are both much more expensive than planned and are coming years late. France also has to invest several hundred million Euros per reactor to keep them running. They haven't done much for those - a full fifty reactors. Here in Germany we need to spend some ten more more billion Euros on closing old East German reactors and for cleaning up an experimental storage site for nuclear waste. That experiment has failed. Spectacularly. Billions and billions that could have been invested in clean and renewable energy.
I think this is a great idea. Do you intend to spider the web (or use YouTube's API) for existing ones and archive them in addition to allowing people to upload their own?

For bonus points, if you could create a speech-to-text version of each of the screencasts and then index that text and make it searchable on your site, then it'll really be easy to find a screencast that somebody is interested in. For example, I'd search "merging layers" and you could find me the corresponding Photoshop screencast that happened to show how to merge layers.

Let us know how it goes once it's up.
Well, I actually disabled the menus and toolbars. I came from using Textpad for about 10 years, so I had some very particular ideas about how my editor should behave. I basically removed a lot of the gui chrome, installed tabbar (puts tabs on top), installed cua (cope+paste and selection works as in Windows) mode and then wrote a mode that makes the cursor move around like it does in Textpad. And a bunch of minor tweaks as well. I have used most of this setup for about 4 years now.

I'm pretty much entirely lost in a vanilla emacs installation.
Ask HN: Where and how do you find entrepreneurial backend hackers?
For last 2-3 months I've been trying to get someone on the board as a co-founder who is good or atleast interested in areas like data-mining/information retrieval/Hadoop etc. I've talked to atleast 15 people during that period, but didn't find any success yet. I've tried LinkedIn, Meetup Events, Conferences, etc, but didn't find the right person.

Most of the people I met, were from either business or frontend (UI design) background. I only met handful of data-mining/hadoop guys. The ones with I talked to were either happy about their current jobs or they already have some project going on in the part-time (with no commercial interest), so they can't commit to join startup.

So where do I find backend hackers who are passionate about data-mining, information retrieval, hadoop, etc. and are entrepreneurial and want to start a startup? And how shall I get them on the board? Please advice.
The dingo must have already been at least somewhat domesticated when it was brought to Australia (4-12,000 years ago, later than the first humans) because nobody is going to cross a 50 km strait in a canoe/raft/boat with a wild dog.

Presumably they went wild again afterwards, but it must be easier to re-domesticate a dog that was domesticated a few thousand years ago than to domesticate an entirely new species.
I'd love to use Javascript to code for Android.
Is there a "Try Perl 6" on the web yet? Google is failing me and I'd love to paste one of the grammar examples into a textbox and start playing it; especially since I don't see Windows binaries linked from the article.
Yes. You'll have better chance selling a new paradigm (cloud based, no clients to deploy, no individual mail server mattering) than a opened version of the old paradigm (which is still controlled by the proprietary vendor).
It's the simplest and least convoluted interpretation. On that note:

"Make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler."
--Albert Einstein
Agreed, but I think the parent is saying MS won't execute.
Great thread.

Heres mine :

Look after your mentors. Anyone who takes time to give you guidance, help or advice, go far out of your way to display your appreciation.

If they have children, buy them presents. If they like wine, ask a wine expert for help, and buy them a great bottle of wine.

People so rarely do this that you will absolutely make their day.
Are Some VCs On Too Many Boards And Stretched Too Thin?
Good point, I hadn't thought of that.

Was it brought there or did it raft there by itself ?

(that's not a joke, plenty of animals have been involuntarily moved between continents on makeshift rafts)

The dingo is a fascinating creature.
One of the coolest things I do with my kindle is send my instapaper articles to it. It costs $0.15 per send (not per article), but it is great to have a bunch of really good, long form articles available.

As an example, I read this great article about Lincoln the other night:
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/print/2005/10/lincoln-ap...

There is no way I would read that on a computer.
Yeah, you might be right... I probably need to talk to more laymen. :-)

Maybe I should have said "managers with a decent technical background" instead.
There's a point where diminishing returns sets in. My guess is that anything over 140k a year would result in the same, if not, lower test scores. Read the first chapter of Dan Ariely's book: The Upside of Irrationality. Like so many best selling authors, he's simply taking research and dumbing it down for everyone else to consume.
Mark Cuban to talk VC with RTP entrepreneurs
I don't read slashdot anymore. Do you?
Fluency with box and pointer diagrams and the environment model of computation (from chapters 2 & 3 of SICP) will allow you to understand the workings of any applicative order programming language.
Atomiq is awesome! Could you make it work with PHP files (.php, .class, .inc)?
It probably depends on your stack. TFA's author is a Rails developer, like myself. I've used Rad Rails, the eclipse based Rails IDE, and I just find myself less productive in it than vim + a handful of terminals.

I really tried to like Rad Rails, but I it just felt like overkill, and the interface was too complicated. Besides adding a breakpoint to a rails app is as simple as adding the line 'debugger' to it. No big deal.

I've heard that for Java the situation is reversed, but I'm not a Java programmer so I couldn't say if there's anything to that.
And now I'm thinking of working abroad. Are there any European company or startup looking for a senior Linux system administrator here?
I don't want to imply that I'm at a higher level of Emacs proficiency than you (It's not at all that simple. http://www.bemroses.net/images/curves.jpg )

But once you get past sqrt(15i*π)/2 emacs mastery, you stop using the menus and start using M-x with tab completion. There's a standard naming scheme, and usually local commands are prefixed with the mode name. And in any case, there are generally far more than fit on the menu anyway.
Downloaded it for a quick experiment. Points I've noticed so far:

* It needs perl5 to build.

* Hello World still works.

* Perl can now compete with Java for slow startup.

* One of my pet perl hates, the inability to write "sub foo($a, $b, $c) {" is fixed.
Writing books and giving talks is really easy. It's just that most don't have the guts to put themselves out there.

Or more generally: you can stand out by doing what others are afraid to do.
Science.newsriver.org
There's an explanation of the Y-combinator (with examples in C#) linked from this article at

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/madst/archive/2007/05/11/recursive-l...

It's not easy to follow, but thought others might be interested.
“Nothing in this world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful people with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent. The slogan "press on" has solved and always will solve the problems of the human race”
- Calvin Coolidge
I really wish we had the same policy here in the UK. Here it's extremely rare to see a solar panel anywhere, and it seems highly likely that new nuclear (fission) reactors will be built in the near future.
ReadPrint getting sold
Just saw this on the Flippa homepage.
I'm not a Ubuntu hater, but wrt to "Credit Where Credit Is Due", I was recently at the Ubuntu homepage:

http://www.ubuntu.com/

NO mention of "linux" or "GNU" anywhere on the page. Click on the "How Can It Be Free?" link, and no mention of GNU or the GPL.

In fact the reasons they give are "1. It's Open Source" and "2. It's Managed and Funded by Canonical". Open Source is a side-effect of Free as in Freedom, a concept that Canonical is agnostic about. And I'm not sure what point 2 means.

I can understand not wanting to turn people off with scary-sounding words, but even Mac like to tout the "rock solid unix foundation" on which OSX is built.
Just a couple of random thoughts:

Is there a Hadoop User's Group in your area? Or any other Meetup / User's Group on any related topics? Ask there.

Is there a university nearby? Do they have a compsci program? Find a professor who teaches data-mining or information retrieval and ask him/her for leads?

Try the hadoop / weka / mahout / lucene / etc. mailing lists?

You might also post something on Hackers News. ;-) Seriously, how about some info on where you are and exactly what you're looking for. The chances that somebody who posts here will be interested probably aren't half bad.

There are also a couple of sub-reddits you might find it worthwile to checkout, like /r/machinelearning, /r/datamining, /r/hadoop, etc.

Good luck!
It's a fully functional browser that loads from the app, yes. All developers have this at their disposal. This isn't a problem precisely because apps rarely need to "leave" to display a browser. One just comes in modally, displays the content of a page, and that's that. If you were using a Twitter client that yanked you out of Twitter to show a site, you were using a bad client.
Their stock seems to be doing well. It's above pre-recession levels.

http://preview.tinyurl.com/27yrkwp (Google Finance)
Oh, that reminds me...