skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I had a stack of books that I felt were relevant on the new developer's desk the first day they showed up. The exact stack depends on what you are doing specifically, I started from the Joel List: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/navLinks/fog0000000262.html

Each week during our 1-on-1 I would review various concepts from each of the books and suggest reading for the following week. It was the best way I found to 1) get them up to speed on best practices and my expectations 2) help them see that my suggestions were (generally) founded on data.
PubSubHubbub + WebSockets + Gowalla + GoogleMaps
Agreed. I can't help but think that the article has an arrogant undertone to it. There are plenty of startups who do just fine without VC 'support'.
Periods. Not a cure for sentence fragments.
Rabbi uses formspring.me to answer questions from congregants
You know, I'd like a clear definition on what exactly each "generation" of wireless technology means. From what I've read, everyone seems to have their own definition for what constitutes a generational change in wireless technology, which signals to me that this these labels are that much more marketing fluff (like Comcast's "SpeedBoost").

I'd be okay with them structuring their marketing like this for user looking for a quick shorthand if they actually wrote down what those shorthand terms meant. However, they're not actually doing that. Worse yet, they're going back and revising the boundaries between generations so that only the latest technology is at the latest generation. When EDGE was introduced, it was marketed as 3G. These days, its considered "2.75G," whatever that means.

How can I know what the difference is between 3G and 4G when the differences between generations aren't clearly explained and are subject to historical revision?
You got it :)

Thanks, it sounds really interesting by the way, I hope that you follow through on it, I'll definitely participate (with a bot, that's the fun bit I think).
I don’t disagree with you in general, I just think that the whole process of the paper ballot is not tamper proof. It is much more tamper proof than voting machines, sure, but not wholly immune.

I think the statement ‘The paper ballot process is practically tamper proof’ is essentially correct and as such don’t think that the statement of the Chief Election Commissioner with regard to voting machines in itself is incriminating. All I want to say is that saying something is ‘practically tamper proof’ is a meaningful statement.
Pamela Anderson: Why I'm doing pantomime
In-memory databases do make sense for some things if you can: a. easily dump data as code and b. construct good key-value maps.

Incidentally, doesn't HN run as a stoarray?
A civil suit can still be filed, and hopefully they'll get massive amounts $$$ activity like this needs to be stopped.
OpenGL ES Tutorial for Android
Only in Massachusetts (settled case law) and Illinois (where the law was rewritten to make this crystal clear, however it hasn't yet been tested in the courts). The executive side of Maryland is split on this (charges are being brought at the local level while the state AG says it's bunk) and it hasn't been tested in the courts there.

In other states where this (too) frequently happens like Pennsylvania the locals get reliably slapped down when they try it.
App/Website that tracks and lists new and existing web apps?
Is there an app out there that lists all the new apps coming out and perhaps allows you to see the ones most relevant to you by interest etc. The general reason for the question is that i get the feeling i'm missing a lot of apps out there that i could potentially use.
This will rapidly turn into some bizarre form of performance art. You're going to run out of colors pretty quickly.

The instructions get obscured by the user list, at least on my Linux version of Chrome.
Why isn't govt offering software development services?
I just finished this. It took me about 5 hours in all. A good way to spend a Sunday afternoon I suppose.

I have a good knowledge of Python and have worked with Ruby in the past on a little Rails project of my own. I had forgotten anything I knew though. Yesterday, I don't think I would've been able to write a foobaz in ruby without looking for help online. This proved to be a welcome refresher. It's also a great way to compare and contrast Python and Ruby. I really like Python's philosophy and maybe solving all these ruby koans has made me appreciate Python's simplicity and predictability a bit more.

I wouldn't recommend this to a beginner however. While I think I now have a pretty good idea of what the language can do, there were no whys or recommendations about all these features. Maybe it would be a good starting point for someone coming from a similar language (like Python), before moving on to a good Ruby book.
I don't have Windows, but use KeePassX and KeePassDroid to share the password DB between Linux and my Android phone (via Dropbox) and it works great.
I know Wikipedia is user editable, but not all readers with knowledge do add/edit/remove. And that's exactly what I wish.
Am I the only one here who finds the dailywtf sometimes extremely depressing?!

My feeling about DailyWTF is similar to visiting an art exhibition with paintings done by an unguided community class. The whole thing is clearly driven by a fundamental need to create something, and many of the exhibited works demonstrate an intoxicating thrill of getting something finished... But at the same time they make it clear why that thrill alone isn't a good enough reason for the work to be shown in public.
The technology reporting in Forbes, an area they think is very important, is so wretched that I stopped subscribing to them after a couple or so years. The usual "if they're this off on something I know well, what about the rest?"

And that was before they provided a platform for one or more of the mindless pro-SCO Group types.
Unless you're doing http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Front_running you cannot make significant money via stock markets.
Panoramic night view of Victoria Harbour with Symphony of Light
Proposal: A new kind of blog comment system
Also useful is WPKG: http://wpkg.org/ Though it isn't exactly the same idea (more related to multiple workstations).
i can see how you can take the post in that way.

but i didn't mean it that way.

i'm just concerned that there isn't as much capital around to fund all of these companies in the follow on rounds
It appears I was incorrect. Thank you. As I thought about it I couldn't recreate the issue I recalled having -- it may have resulted from using a buggy xml parser and/or a misunderstanding of the specification. But I should clarify, I am a huge proponent of namespaces -- I think they're great, I'd just prefer them to be declared at the start of the document.
How big is your code base?
I'm curious, is there historical evidence of whether short-term copyright protection (14 years) allowed greater innovation in society than no copyright, or the current artist life + 70 (no doubt)? In an ideal legal system, what would be the best approach to copyright?
I find it interesting to compare how I use Skype with how I use a regular phone. With skype, I always IM the person first (usually just saying "skype?") to see if they're available for a discussion. With regular phones, I'm used to just calling.

The skype approach seems far more preferable. My guess is that as SMS/IM/VOIP becomes more ubiquitous the standard etiquette will be to ask before calling.
The author says: "I think this expanding birthrate is a great thing"

I think it's the dot-com bubble all over again. But this time, it's coinciding with a worldwide economic depression, market saturation and shrinking venture capital. Therefore, it does not bode well for the copy-cat startups and investors.

Alot of the big venture raised were from the heydays of 1999-2001, when the funds had 10 year lifespan. Those are expiring now/soon. Recently, venture fund raising is down 50% from last quarter, close to 2009 lows. http://venturebeat.com/2010/08/11/vc-portfolios-improve-in-q.... So venture is definitely shrinking.

Although startups nowadays require less capital, there are also fewer (niche) markets to go into these days, as those have already been filled up. So startups have to compete for the same niche market. Look at ycombinator's 3 (!!) social mail plugin companies (rapportive, xobni, etacts) (in pg's defense, those company founders chose to pivot and cannibalize the same market) And look at techstar/ycombinator/funded institues: They have alot of overlapping generic startups.

And with platforms becoming ever so dominant (twitter, facebook, google), startups can't compete in the same massive market.

So there will be lots of startup death as funds run dry and economy gets worse. As dave mcclure recently pronounced, "90% of you will fail". But the important thing is to know that, and to hunker down and focus on surviving.
So the non-diplomaed one is currently studying, working with dad without being registered as a worker or doing some stuff on-line or off-line that may be bringing some bucks for him??

Another thing the graph doesn't take in consideration is that as a non-diplomaed, you can afford to be jobless or work pretty much anything; however, as a college graduate with loans, you probably can't.

I think this is a larger topic/problem is to be just shortened in one graph.
GNOME’s SeedKit gets public release, HTML/JS/CSS in desktop apps
According to a BBC survey, 80% of the population live on 20 rupees (25p) a day in India i.e. with a $500 million investment politicians can buy their votes.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/6946800.stm
Given that you're looking for "functional independence", I don't understand why you'd want it to run on the same profile. Share your bookmarks and history between them with Firefox Sync, and tailor your selection of add-ons to the types of content you'll be viewing with each one.
Study Abroad: Study in Singapore | Graduate Scholarships : Deadline Nov 15, 2010
> How do you quote code?

Double indent with spaces

I always figured that the Y combinator was mostly theoretical, when I came across a little javascript memoization demo using the Y combinator a while ago I changed my mind on that.

Very interesting stuff this, especially because it seems to have some really neat side effects (pun intended), such as making some of the most naive code run in linear time.
> But I should clarify, I am a huge proponent of namespaces -- I think they're great

They're nice, but generally misimplemented, misunderstood and misused.

> I'd just prefer them to be declared at the start of the document.

I'm not sure why. It's nicer when you have to read the document yourself for sure (but then again, XML is rarely actually nice to read), but when mechanically processing it it shouldn't be relevant: just use each node as a (ns, name) pair where ns is the namespace's URI (not its alias) and name is the localname. In that case, what does early declaration bring to the equation?
All the most innovative wireless technology gets deployed in Asia. Mobile operator features (like cellphone payments), mobile phone features, and network capabilities are on the whole about a decade behind in the US.

The big thing about Yota in Russia is the lack of download caps. That is unusual for Russian ISPs and a source of many complaints.

But holy shit, read the comments on the Economist. Is everyone there a troll or a moron?
I've never heard of him, until now.
The headline is a really dumb conclusion to draw. What happened is that the prosecutor (ie. the US Attorney) declined to prosecute. They have the autonomy to do that. The school district managed to levy enough political influence to convince the prosecutor to look the other way.

The conclusion to draw is that justice in the US is up for sale. Another US Attorney successfully prosecuted a the principals of a seafood wholesaler, and imprisoned them for 8 years for importing lobsters in plastic bags instead of cardboard boxes. (True story: http://www.economist.com/node/16640389/comments?page=2)
The goal of a post on etiquette, IS to change the behavior of others.

As much as i dislike Arrington, he's absolutely correct on this. And as the comment above notes, this is just as applicable for communication on IRC as it is for Skype (well save for the video bit).

As Arrington's posts are applicable to basically every IM protocol, i'm confused as to how you think Arrington's (and my) "gripes would be easily fixed by matching [...] usage [...] to [the] issues/requirements for them".

This is basically a spam filtering problem, and you're blaming the guy getting spammed.
It's been proven trivial to mess with electronic voting machines, so that statement is patent nonsense.

The security (I use the term lightly) of electronic voting relies on not having knowledge about the system.
me too.. expecting how we shd do, if nil == a, instead of if a == nil and those kinda stuff!
> Does any one remember the problems Clinton had finding a Federal judge who hadn't accidentally broken the law about withholding taxes for child care workers.

That's a bad example as that law is well documented in the tax returns.

My parents knew about that tax and paid it. However, it remind them that the ruling class thinks that taxes are for the little people.
Thanks - I've made the user list scroll. I do need some more colours, but as soon as I add more, they become pretty indistinguishable or too light. Still looking for a good set of hex values :)
JunkDNA and dogas suggest that the taxes are high while the level of service is low. That suggests the problem isn't lack of revenue, but inefficiency due to bureaucracy, corruption, ineffective management or the like. It is almost never a solution to throw money at such a situation.
This is one reason why I always use parens on my method calls. Some rubyists find it cluttering, yeah, but I think it makes reading code easier.

The other one to watch out for is precedence of {} vs do; end. Example:

> x = [1,2].map do |i| i*2; end
=> [2, 4]
> puts [1,2].map do |i| i*2; end
1
2
=> nil
> puts [1,2].map { |i| i*2}
2
4
=> nil
More colors won't help anyway - people can only distinguish so many colors before the distinctions become meaningless.

This is a great opportunity to try to visualize the info in a different way that takes advantage of the noise rather than being smothered by it. What that way is, I have no idea.
What round? In a small startup you don't have rounds. You are ramen profitable in your first year which is generally not more than $5K-$30K per month (depending on the size) and then you stay alive, you don't get huge or big or massive and generally you don't care. $5-10K per month is good salary for a (co-)founder.

These small startups funded by their customers after 3 months to 1 year, after a year if they are not ramen profitable then it's generally end of the game. In the long term it gets bigger and in which case you are already big which means either someone is going to acquire you or you can fund yourself and keep getting bigger and bigger.

I understand that some startups need load of money and stuff but many don't.
http://www.feedmyapp.com
You can taste anything in that way by bubbling it through your teeth - I do it with wine when tasting, but also sometimes with beer, cordials, etc - it enhances the flavour. No need for a straw.
What about the people who dropped out of college hoping to be the next Bill Gates or Richard Branson and failed? These guys are now part of the statistics shown on the graph.

Bill Gates was successful and dropped out of college. He was also hard working and curious. Does that mean that everybody else who's hard working and curious will be as successful without a diploma? I wouldn't bet on it.

Also, having a desire to be in the right place at the right time doesn't guarantee that you'll do just that.

I agree that having a diploma is not what is going to make you successful. But at least, it gives you better odds to beat economic troubles, which is the point of the article.
This has been the worst pun-thread ever.
By PhotoToMac Transfer Your iPhone Pictures
Free Speech, Religious Freedom Face Off Nationwide
I used Koans when I first started out. Loved it. Still use it occasionally for reference.
To win the game I think the most interesting deception I could engage in is to engage in fixed patterns that can be readily discerned by the entity while making sure that I don't display world knowledge readily.

For example, we could be having a chat and on purpose I would make sure that I start to loop the same argument in different words again and again for different stimuli. I will make the deception look like I am trying to look smart while being painfully limited. I would also make sure that I always bring up less than 10 topics up for conversation so that it sounds like I am stuck in a loop. On the other hand I'll make sure that I appear to know nothing at all about pop culture while pretending to shift the conversation.

If I were a bot creator though I would make sure that I had as complex interactions as possible. I would use limited code base so I sound like a human pretending to be a bot, but then I would attach emotional weights and allow random, unpredictable behavior to come through. So, that feeling of complexity is felt by the entity.
Not everyone can be ramen profitable in their first year. I think his point is that people assume it's easy to get to profitability and end up out of cash when they don't get there right away.
The kind of throttling you're talking about here is something these "statusphere" products need to get better at. I don't necessarily want to unfollow someone, or unfriend them, or whatever the local idiom is. I just want to see less, and preferably just the best stuff. I need something like those huge mixer boards with a slider for each source, which I can tune to adjust the overall info mix.
Not Being Racist Is A Constant Process Of Unlearning And Re-Evaluating.
That's just tuning parameters, there's nothing groundbreaking there. The title should be something more like:

Proposal: Sane defaults for blog commenting system

Still, commenting (if at all) should be very specific to character of the site commented upon. Like, for example, do you enable replying and threading? That's something that's very dependant on community dynamic.

Personally I think you should leave commenting and discussion for more ‘local’ communities — like Facebook, Reddit, Twitter, etc. Internet's just too big to aggregate all people's opinions on your site. And you can gain some more visiblity that way, too.
Agreed. It's why we've tried to be careful with lambda/hash/call syntax in CoffeeScript, especially where some of it is optional, and can be left out. For example:

x = [1, 2].map (i) -> i * 2

... is without optional parens.

x = [1, 2].map((i) -> i * 2)

... is with them.

configure start: 10, end: 25

... is the syntax for calling a method and passing an implicit hash -- and with the optional braces and parens added, it's closer to JavaScript...

configure({start: 10, end: 25})
This removes any real incentive to comment on an article as well as any use comments may provide (as they aren't going to be viewed when the largest traffic occurs but rather when people are looking through archives or revisiting old posts).
Kindle Collections for pdf files
http://bit.ly/9dQZbe

A simple script for handling collections of pdf files on the Amazon Kindle.

The Kindle is a great reading device, unfortunately so far it is rather painful to use it for a large collection of documents - for example when dealing with many research papers.

Assuming that the documents are pdf files and that they are properly named and stored in a meaningful directory structure, this script will generate a collection for every folder that contains pdfs. The name of a collection is the relative path starting from the `document/` folder. Existing collections are not changed, new collections are created if they didn't exist before and new documents are added to collections that existed before. Uses python version 2.6 (only because of the `json` package).

As Amazon doesn't seem to support this functionality yet, this is a hack which also requires that the Kindle be restarted to update the system. This is quite annoying, but there doesn't seem to be another way until Amazon releases its `Kindle Development Kit`. At which point this script will hopefully become obsolete.

Usage

$python2.6 KindleForResearch.py [kindle mount point]

Note that if the script is saved in the root folder of the Kindle (e.g. /Volumes/Kindle), the mount point is not necessary.

Please feel free to use and extend the script in any way you want. If you already have a valued collection of collections, it might also be a good idea to backup this file before you give this a try.
I know a lot of people who graduated from 2007, 2008, 2009 and 2010 with zero job prospects. The more experienced people are getting the jobs, understandably.
An aside: While in high-school, I was suspended for broadcasting a web cam from the classroom on to my personal blog. I only ever turned it on during class. The teacher thought I may have been spying on her.
Did you just read his moderation guidelines? The actual proposal is further down on the page. I'm not aware on any blog using that approach, so I'm not sure what you mean by "well-followed".
I don't think strict 14 year copyright was in effect anywhere where industrialized printing and reproduction was also extant.

On the other hand, there have been documented instances where simply ignoring copyright led to economic boom. There have been plenty of recent articles on that.
Funny, but not at all surprising. I don't think I've ever read anything on Twitter. I can't imagine why anybody ever would.

What is the use case where a human being would ever actually read a piece of text coming from Twitter? The only one I can think that of is searching for one's own product name to see if anybody is writing about it. Is there another reason I'm missing?
You've missed his (meaning the quoted guy's) point. Imagine that the graph showed unemployment amongst African-Americans, women or any other group under-represented in congress. They won't solve the problem becuase they're insulated enough from it to either not know it's a problem or simply not care.
Maybe some people think the space bar and the Enter/Return key "do the same thing" so they push the one that's most convenient?
Library:

Check this out: http://www.sean.co.uk/a/webdesign/javascript_gamelib/javascr...

Forum:

Also check out http://www.gamedev.net/community/forums/forum.asp?forum_id=5...

which is a great place to start for web game development. This crowd has historically come from desktop C++ gaming with DirectX and OpenGL but have great niches for technical aspects, technology, and open forum.
Keeping the backends themselves outside of the Django project is definitely the right move. This allows each of them to evolve at their own (probably faster) pace independently of the Django project which keeps a strict schedule of backward compatibility.

A similar approach is used by Andrew Godwin to keep the South DB migrations project moving forward quickly. It could be merged into Django itself, but it is better outside.
If your incentive for commenting is to be seen by others rather than provide feedback to the author, you're exactly the kind of commenter he wasn't interested in seeing:

"I know some people think that blogs are conversations, but I don't. I think they're publications. And I think the role of comments is to add value to the posts. If you want to rebut a post, then you can create your own blog and post your rebuttal there."
Those are anecdotal. Statistically take everyone without a degree, and everyone with. Check the unemployment rate in one group and compare it with the other. If you want to focus on one particular field (say software engineers) look if the percentages with and without a degree in that field are equal than the overall population, or more skewed toward one group or the other.

For every Bill Gates there are millions of people cleaning toilets and working at McDonald's.