skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've been to Vienna, and the public transportation there is great.

I was 12 when I first went there to visit family, and I went everywhere by myself (not 9 as the original, but still younger than the US parents would like).

As a tourist I found the way that the destinations were announced over speakers extremely useful, and every stop had maps of the public transportation, timetables, etc.

I'd say it's very likely a 9 year old local would have no problem whatsoever, and I wouldn't find it irresponsible (even less so in today's cell phone age).
ASK HN:i know the pdf spec and the swf spec what can i do with it?
Hi
as part of my job i learned the Pdf spec and also the swf spec i can create them with low level tools i created .
what useful product i can build with this knowledge ?
free and open source . that will help people
That homemade submarine leaks (there's a youtube video and the guy says "don't worry about it")

I don't think that kind of error will be so forgiving in space?
Although we don't have major publishers signed up (they're welcome!) work uploaded to http://fifobooks.com is immediately available world wide.
> every byte of RAM was precious as was every CPU instruction.

What I wouldn't give to infuse that sense in to present day programmers. (writing this on a box with 12G ram, pretty much maxed out).
All three of us had worked together at a previous company.

I think this is important. One time, I started a company with someone I had not previously worked with, and that was a mistake.

People's professional working style can be very different from their non-professional leisure style, which is why I think it's critical to have previously spent time with your cofounder in a work environment.

However, that's just me. Ultimately, finding a cofounder is like finding a spouse - there's no universal, prescriptive formula short of "meet a lot of people".
The linked answers are confusing the concepts of competitiveness and difficulty. The IIT-JEE is very competitive. There are millions of students competing for thousands of seats. That alone doesn't make the exam difficult. It just makes it competitive.
On a) - cool is very subjective, so perhaps there's no point in even mentioning it. It depends on the person you ask.

On point b) - Facebook is focusing on making it's services more useful to business, at the detriment of it's core users. Facebook became popular in Harvard because you could scope out that cute undergrad you spotted around campus. The people in your network were tied to your friends and classmates in the real world. The more Facebook grows, the more it devalues it's definition of 'friend' (Facebook's definition of friend that is. Having 300 Mafia Wars friends might make me spend more time on Facebook for a while - increasing Facebook's stickiness, hence it's value to brand advertisers, but it doesn't mean I'll ever have a meaningful interaction with the members of my "Mafia").

Do I want to get notifications every time a 'friend' of mine 'likes' Xbox Live? No. That's not a real interaction - it's just spam. Do I want a notification every time a friend of mine logs into their account in a Starbucks (this is how I'd imagine their location-based feature working)? No. Of course I don't. I want my social network to only give me message that aren't auto-generated, i.e. those that are real messages from real people. Like HN comments.

I think Facebook has forgotten about what made it popular in the first place, and now because of it's size and self-sustaining growth, will implement features that are useless to it's core user base. There will be no telltale indicators (at least externally) of this growing dissatisfaction because any attrition of it's user base will be compensated by new, incoming users. And of course many people who don't like the service will hang around because they don't want to be out of the loop.

What I envision as the ideal would be social networks to emulate email and SMS. I can send a Gmail email to my Hotmail based friend. If I don't like Gmail, I can switch email providers and take my contacts with me. Social networks should organise in 'tribes'. You associate with whatever tribe you feel describes you best. Tribes can interact with each other. If I don't like my tribe (perhaps because it's becoming MySpace-like) I can move easily to another. There could be a tribe that appeals to HN type users, and another for 12 year old girls, and another for retirees. Each have their own identity and values. What I'm describing is an open protocol for social networks, which forces "tribes" (individual networks) to compete on how good they are, rather than how many of your friends are on that particular network. This will keep them honest as they can't depend on user lock-in. In an ideal world, Diaspora and Facebook would be on an open protocol and users could switch easily and painlessly.
> Brute Force was surprisingly performant, enough that picking a string searching algorithm becomes an engineering tradeoff. It found a sentence fragment at the end of Moby Dick within 8ms, 7 times slower than Boyer-Moore.

I think that line of thinking is actually symptomatic of producing the kind of software that eats up our present day powerhouses and makes them dog slow.
Instant messenger for website
Flashcoms is US based Software Company that provides modern and well-tuned range of flash-, php-based applications to power your web site or online community and give an opportunity for real-time text messaging and streaming audio/video communication between users.
I have your comment taped over my monitor :)
I met my co-founder through an IRC chat room specialising on the topic. He was the only other one still there until 4am. After our initial meeting to check out his personality and make sure he wasn't a maniac, I had another meeting with him where I asked him a bunch of technical questions. I did the same thing with three or four other people, it was obvious by his reaction to my process we were going to get along well.
Why do people get all defensive when it's Apple making a mistake? Even if you what you wrote is accurate, Apple is at fault here because Read It Later does require an account to sync the lists, and only needs a username/password to create an account. That's barely any personal information.

It's extremely defensive fanboys like you that muddy the debate. 'OMG people are raging on poor poor Apple, must defend and downvote!'
I've been using Chrome for the last 2 months, and today was told Firefox wasn't working with a wordpress blog I have to administer... since when does firefox have problems viewing things? I thought that was IE's job.
That's why I was asking: Checking it out from home and my office showed two different meetups in my region. Either a coincidence or a clever technical trick to get people to participate.
I also view blog posts much like publications, but the comments on a blog post are not part of the publication. Or, they don't have to be.

It's not clear to me what metric is being sought, if it's not interestingness.
Process and Procedure Essay Delineates Accurate Steps to Accomplish a mission
Process and Procedure Essay must provide complete details, with every step in carrying out a specific task. Completeness, order of doing different steps and clarity are the most important aspects of the process and procedure essay. Here are some more instructions.
Yes, the article should prove causation precisely because it has nothing to do with the point of the article.
The article is about the correlation, not the causation.
I don't get this logic that because every social network before fb died so will fb. We have to agree that fb understood the social networking landscape a lot more than all other previous players. My guess is fb will not rule the web but it is here to stay for a long long time
The End of Management (Why Managers Should Act Like Venture Capitalists)
Is Cloud Computing or SaaS a wonder drug with nasty side effects?
You could build (probably yet another) pdf/swf fuzzer to check for bugs in the implementation of the rendering engine.
Daniel Kahneman: The Riddle of Experience Versus Memory
That's a great idea. That would be a good service, too, if you can get the trust thing (someone else hires your key employees) right.
All true only if organizational default url becomes their fb fan page and that is not likely to happen
well i meant something fun for the common people
I suppose that the author of this malware was prepared to accept imposing financial costs on their victims. After all, it's only money, right?

I wonder how they feel now that people have died as a result of their law-breaking.
Because you can prototype more easily, then implement what you're happy with in C.

It's funny, for some language communities (i.e. Java) being "self-hosted" is a big deal. I can't speak for Ruby but in the Python world, we simply don't consider it a major issue.
Obituary: the bookcase
Or possibly because a vision that's not concrete doesn't mean much (too easy to overlook important stuff).
Welcome to love to live green
It really is fun and fulling to make easy, green choices in every day life. Because these little changes, made by lots of people, can result in cleaner water, air,
healthier food, and a lot of positive changes for all of us. Basically, a cleaner, greener, happier, healthier world! And you! Visit http://lovetolivegreen.com for more details.
Or rather, compared to a server log file that hasn't been properly rotated. I wrote a program a while back to incrementally parse a daily log file which was never rotated. It got say that it would take twenty minutes for for the program to just skip the lines that had been parsed previously. When those who had the power to do so started rotating the file, things speed up tremendously.
This is the part of the obituary that I found the most powerful:

Though inventing filled his working hours, Mr. Gundlach was enthralled with canoeing, hiking, skiing — activities he pursued avidly most of his lifetime. When he was in his 50s, feeling the need for a new hobby, he took up windsurfing. He also made sure to be home from work in time to play ball or build a bicycle jump, his children recalled.

“He had what we would call today a work-life balance,” said Eric Gundlach. “He was the kind of man who left work behind.”
I remember reading this article while back: "Traffic jam mystery solved by mathematicians".
http://www.physorg.com/news117283969.html

So now when I'm in a jam, I just slow down instead of engaging the speedup, break pattern. Haven't looked behind me though to see if I had any effect on the traffic behind me.
Well, the version of this I did in C for the shop I was at about 10 years ago had a "memcmp"-like interface. Just pass in a pointer to the start of the bytes (int, asciiz, unicode if you will) and the length.

I also dynamically allocated the key/pointer arrays within each node so that while it was sparsely populated, it was only big enough to hold the largest byte defined in that node (e.g. - 'A' = (char) 65, so byte positions 0 to 65 would be present, but not 66 to 255 until needed.

I was nice to see the impression of my coworkers when a bunch of qsort() / bsearch() code was replaced with this. We could afford the memory, and the speedup was fairly impressive.
Video chat service Chatroulette goes offline, updated version to launch tomorrow
Another Jupiter impact event (Aug 20).
and that was it :)
There are benefits to both approaches.

An external program communicating over pipes can let the OS handle buffering, run on another process core, be swapped out for another program that speaks the same protocol (perhaps in a faster language), won't crash the whole system, etc.

A program running as a library subroutine has a bit less overhead, and can use more context (library-native data structures, rather than piped text), but this is also usually more language-specific. Working within a "full environment" language like Smalltalk has a lot of advantages, but it also needs comprehensive libraries for your problem domain, or you're back to using external programs.

There's an insightful aside about this in Joe Armstrong's _Programming Erlang_, in the chapter about ports - Erlang code can load foreign code as linked-in libraries, but a buggy library will make the whole system unstable in a way that code running in a foreign process and communicating via message passing will not. He argues for running code in an external process (a "port") by default.

Of course, having a comprehensive (but low-level) library in C with wrappers in higher-level languages is an option. High-level languages' type systems / object models can be very different, though, and it takes experience to translate a C API to feel native to Python/Lua/Ruby/etc.

It also works to structure a program as a C library, but provide a small standalone program which gives it a command line interface. SQLite and Lua are good examples of the latter approach.
It depends, I won't argue with 1, but I change between Dvorak and Qwerty constantly (I sometimes run a different layout for my IDE and one for my laptop).

And I doubt there is a better layout for programming than programmers dvorak.
Ambitious software/business for building iphone/android apps
Not sure what the article is referring to there? As far as I know you would have to amend the objects protos or overwrite the setSlot message (which := is an alias for) to change this behaviour.

The documentation clearly states for forward that: If an object doesn't respond to a message, it will invoke its "forward" method if it has one.
Yup, probably my fault from when I posted it.

If someone with editing privileges comes along, please fix it.
Ask HN: How to design this site?
I want to start development on a small side-project and the back-end developer said that it'd be easier for him to go about it if he had a front-end design to work from. The designer was supposed to come up with something and still hasn't so I'm taking matters into my own hands.

I know this is somewhat of a cheat/shortcut but I'm no designer myself. I want a site that's highly minimalistic and looks something like http://yanismarkin.ru/en

My question is, where can I find tutorials for something like this, or similar templates that I can modify?

N.B. By the time the project goes live, there will be a proper design to it, I just need something to get us started. Thanks.
I (still) think that message passing is a vastly undervalued mechanism. Erlang is a really interesting language by the way, I wished I had more time to devote to learning it.
How many years do they need to keep it open to break even? How many years is the expected lifetime of the facilty?

Or the biggest question ... how many teachers could have been kept on payroll if they hadn't built it?
I've been thinking about switching to Colemak but the fact that I use Vim daily has kept me from seriously considering it.

While I certainly can remap some keys in Vim, I'm not sure if that's such a good idea in the long run. Some keys, such as h,j,k and l are no-brainers - those should be remapped. But what about w, b and e? When I'm using those keys it's all muscle memory, but should I really change w to y (word to yank)?

Do I want to spend my time learning a new keyboard layout AND relearning how to use Vim? Ultimately I've decided that Qwerty is good enough for me. I don't have RSI and I can type at a max speed of over 90 wpm (I probably average in the 70s for "real world" typing).
You don't have a god given right to develop for the iphone anymore than you have one to develop for an xbox, a wii, or your in-dash nav system.

Nobody has to support you.

If this shit outrages you, your life is going to be very miserable, for no reason. Though it does seem that you keep the outrage down by being DEEPLY hypocritical about which things bother you, so that's a start.
He doesn't say why in the short one (I haven't watched the long one). Late mergers are definitely bad in some situations - for example, when they are merging into a slow-moving turnoff lane, blocking a whole lane of ongoing traffic.
Ask HN: Where am I needed?
I am a developer with a fair amount of capital that I could invest into the startup "scene". Any advice as to which angle I should take?

1) Invest my money into an existing startup.
2) Invest my time as a developer into a startup for limited $$ and live off of my savings.
3) Start up something of my own and invest either my money, time or both...

This list could go on forever and I am just not sure enough about anything to make a jump fowards....please advise...
How can you reject C and fart apps in the same rant? One is a serious technological breakthrough, the other is a mockery of technology.

The OpenBSD guys have a point when they are critical of much of the new-fangled technology. When a significant percentage of power consumption and band-width are used for fart apps and Farmville, you have to wonder if that is a wise use of the technology.

Edit: Clarified C's place in technology.
Inflight magazine with a difference
I'm not sure if you really got the point of the article: The wave happens because everyone wants to be {X} behind the person in front (usually because they desperately want to block anyone else getting between them and {X}). If you can enforce (for lack of a better word) a constant speed, people can maintain that {X} distance without constant accelerating and braking -- just by coasting at a constant speed.

>Even if he's successful in removing the "wave", it's just by decreasing the average speed of traffic.

How would it decrease the average speed in any practical way? Secondly, it would dramatically reduce the energy consumption of the waves (accelerating and braking constantly) and wear and tear on vehicles. The net benefit of optimizing highway traffic -- in real environmental and economic benefits -- is significant.

>Please don't try this in the left lane.

The left lane has no meaning during congestion. There is no "passing" when the highway is clogged. And yes, this is actually the law in many places. One of the biggest causes of highway inefficiency are the self-important (but usually going nowhere) people who pretend that by driving aggressively, they should be allowed through the congestion.
The poster of the parent comment is a published iPhone developer with substantial experience in delivering games and custom apps.

http://synisma.com/iphone.html
Ask HN: I need a social support service (recommendation)
I need a recommendation for a customer service tool / social support service. What I am looking for is a place for customers to go to help themselves (FAQ + search) and to be able to give input on how we can improve (like UserVoice). What I don’t want is a traditional type forum. I really like Get Satisfaction but I am looking for alternatives. I was considering something like Stack Exchange but would need to find someone who offers a clone. I thought someone here may have some advice or know of a new startup that is doing something in this area.
I've found that using X11's highlight + middle-click paste has drastically reduced just about all of my reliance on using shortcuts for copy/paste, at least in any application that requires me to keep my hand on the mouse (like a browser) rather than keeping both hands on the keyboard (like Vim).
Proposed Redesign of the Dropbox Homepage
The fact that computers use instructions in our universe?

Seriously, if you don't understand what he's basing his claim on, it's because you don't understand the Boyer-Moore algorithm. If you know how Boyer-Moore works, the reason is obvious. Instead of snarkily replying, why don't you take the same amount of time to read the wikipedia article on Boyer-Moore and see why brute force may be faster in some cases.

(Since you've already shown yourself to be lazy, however, I'll explain it: Boyer-Moore constructs two alphabet-sized integer arrays based on the "needle" you're looking for; if your haystack is smaller than twice your alphabet size, and it frequently is, then Boyer-Moore is practically guaranteed to take more time than brute force.)
The offering here in Europe is abysmal though. iBooks is just guthenberg (in NL at least) and most kindle ebooks go for between 10 and 20 euro. 20 euro for an ebook. So actually, there is some room for improvement ;)
The benefits to me are all based around comfort. If using Dvorak isn't more comfortable for you in everyday usage, then there's no reason IMO to stick with it.
Riding Out Future Quakes (Bay Area)
I've never thought of it as a market failure and certainly never framed the holy war as ultimately signaling economics beliefs. It's just a marginally lower local optima with a gargantuan switching cost. The benefits of having a standard layout far outweigh the costs of using a less optimal layout. On the other hand, it would take an Act of Government to make something else the standard (e.g. the DoD buying millions of Dvorak keyboards) and that is a typical symptom of market failure.
I would very much like it to be the other way around. If I buy a dead-tree book, give me the ebook along with it.

I like reading books for their bookiness and the way I can quickly reference them by walking up to my bookcase and pulling one out. However, if I want to read on the go, I don't want to drag along a big hardcover book when my iPhone is perfectly capable.
meta-question: why do scrrr's comments appear as [dead] ?
I think js10k limits entries to those only readable in UTF-8 which, I believe, a PNG (compressed or uncompressed) does not meet.
A Different Way of Ranking Colleges
It's easy. Just start looking at objective reporting and stop being a knee-jerk retard.
> it's better to change it.

Or just give attribution and copy the license. Mozilla licenses their assets CC BY-SA http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/
Have you noticed the SELL rating just applied to RIM? The endless analysts pointing out that RIMs lockhold has largely disappeared?

I don't need to point out specific examples because they're pervasive.
Some of my favourites:

// somedev1 - 6/7/02 Adding temporary tracking of Login screen
// somedev2 - 5/22/07 Temporary my ass

//When I wrote this, only God and I understood what I was doing
//Now, God only knows

Exception up = new Exception("Something is really wrong.");
throw up; //ha ha
But you do acknowledge that you are a user in those networks, correct? You check those sites, and by reading (even without active commenting) you are a participant. Some people project themselves, others observe, that was how social interactions had always been.
Tell HN: Idea: Flashcrowds as a service
Go to a site, enter a location and a time, how many people you want in your flashcrowd, and what they should do, and how much you pay them. SMS's are sent out to participants. Flashcrowd happens. Payments get made. Perfect for evil marketers.
s/author of this malware/person that decided to run critical safety equipment on a network connected OS known to be vulnerable to many many viruses from many many vectors/

s/law-breaking/incompetence/

Spanair crash - Windows Malware implicated

BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill - Windows BSOD implicated

Incompetence and penny pinching
Boyer-Moore is a great algorithm, but it's for fixed-string searching. grep, in the general case, handles regular expression searching. Is there some way to extend Boyer-Moore to regular expressions that I'm unaware of? Or is GNU grep's use of Boyer-Moore limited to when the search string is just a literal?
Moving on: "Linchpin will be the last book I publish in a traditional way"
Appack - app catalog done right