skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've glanced at it, but a language that sells itself as a Ruby-like language for the Erlang VM doesn't appeal to me. I really like Erlang, but don't care for Ruby. (In the procedural/OO/scripting niche, I strongly prefer Lua.)

I'll check it out again, though. If nothing else, it's an example of a real compiler written in Erlang, which is interesting in itself.
What's the startup scene in Vancouver like?
check out carecloud.com
Gmail learns to prioritize your inbox -- automatically
Nanocrystals to shrink (again) flash memory sizes
I see the benefits for Mahalo 100% but for the average business who doesn't make money spotting trends but instead from optimizing their site conversions it falls short of helping. Don't just show the user real-time data, show them real-time improvements they can make, now that would be cool.
Crazy talk - greens are so freaking easy to grow! You don't need to go crazy, just buy a couple bags of cheap soil, mound it up on whatever shit dirt you have, surround it with some rocks and water every other day. Water in the morning while you drink the coffee, takes a few minutes.

Way way way cheaper than the store - I am not detracting from my work or life in any way when I stand outside and water my (large) garden for thirty minutes while drinking coffee. Actually, it's one of the best ways I can think of to wake up.
Ugh, don't get me started on SF cabbies. They are not only licensed but regulated by price. They also pretend to not know where anything is and will drive around to find your destination, hiking cab fares up accordingly. And, because you may not know the lay of the land (and can't understand their likely intentionally-thick foreign accents), you can't exactly tell them where to go. I had one that claimed to not know the best way to Coit Tower from the Ferry Building, so _he asked me_. Seriously.

It's a big rip-off and I am thankful whenever I visit SF to have a zipcard. Now I only pay BART to get me from SFO to (near) our vacation rental. If ubercab can provide fares without that runaround, I'm all for it.
>In terms of just money, it's far cheaper to grow your own food

Not necessarily - thats the point of the article
Even in just cost of seeds and fertilizer you can't grow wheat more cheaply than iowa or saskatchewan.
CSS3 Playground lets you experiment with new CSS features and generates code
I asked Steiner how I can tell if I can use a seed again. "It says on the package 'one-use seed' if it's been genetically modified," he says.

I sometimes wonder if we've gone too far with these genetic modifications.
> The balance between freedom and government protection has always been tenuous. After 9/11 we have certainly seen a tipping toward the latter.

Have we? All I've seen is a reduction in freedom.
Yes I expressed myself wrong, they must use OpenGL. I assume they have different rendering engines as the paper I linked to mentions an option for software-OpenGL (MESA-like). Also my 'OpenGL is emulated on top of DirectX' is wrong it seems from re-reading that paper, I misremembered.
I need this to be integrated with the filters they already have.

For example, when my dad forwards me every joke that's ever been forwarded to him over the last 24 hours, I don't want them cluttering up my important emails. However, if he actually writes something (rare, but occasionally happens), than that's important. Integrating this with the filters would allow me to use the FWD: and FW: subject line tags to segregate his important vs his non-important emails.
Worms (diesel + websockets)
Online teaching platform Udemy raises $1M, still too cool for school
Also of note, Kindle's will be available at all Staples locations this fall. There goes the Nook advantage of being able to try before you buy.

http://www.crunchgear.com/2010/08/31/staples-kindle/
Sorry, http://www.clickpass.com/

Although, I suppose that's indicative of part of Clickpass' adoption problem - their functionality is pretty prominent right on the HN login / signup page and many people here still don't know who they are.
What activities do you recommend to "just start" marketing?
Terminal and Emacs on OS X. 21" ASUS monitor and a late 2007 Macbook Pro. Firefox, Chrome, and Safari open all the time.
Outlook searches within attachments. GMail doesn't.
http://img.ly/zY3

this is my home setup. unfortunately the big screen is best used only for reference, otherwise it strains my neck.
Delphi XE
http://bit.ly/dpG5Og
Finding a buffer overrun is much easier with a debugger; if you have a deterministic test case, all you need to do is find the address of the corrupted memory (any point after you notice it's gone bad will do), then restart, set up a hardware breakpoint for that address, and continue: usually no more than a modification or two will do the trick.

And if there's too many modifications, a different trick will do. Change the breakpoint to a counted breakpoint with a nice high count, then run until the corruption occurs, then check the pass count on the breakpoint. You can then set the count on the breakpoint to the exact value needed to stop at the corruption, like stepping back in time (i.e. the famous "who modified this variable last" debugger feature).
We don't need a complex web application. We need a decent-looking website that describes the company, the products, possibly using rich content. A contact form, an integrated blog would also be nice.

But we need something more than a basic wordpress theme really. They look too primitive. So it comes down to adding a bit of your own design, but if you go for a fully custom design than it comes down to project managing and building a whole website. Therefore I am considering a website builder to be a solution that is somewhere inbetween.
I wonder if(when) the real scans get to that same resolution the public will be informed.
Took me a bit to figure out how to control it. Had to force it to show the 'directional bubbles'. Not an intuitive name.

The game seems to play okay. Not really compelling gameplay.
Women in Technology: Is There a Gender Divide? - The Daily Beast
Interesting how a link about politics (this is about politics, not technology) makes it to the top of HN...
This post can answer far more completely than I can:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1565375

Vancouver gets a nod from pg as one of the best places to do a startup outside of the US.

I only recently moved here, so I am not very involved in the local scene, although I would like to start meeting people.
How Rackspace Cloud can kill your startup if you host servers on it
Good to know about growing on the fire escape. Before growing herbs I had no idea that there were so many varieties of mint: spearmint, orange, chocolate, pineapple. Will you bring the mint indoors during the winter or let go dormant and come back next spring/summer?
I have a couple issues with Steak:

1. It seems to take something that's already pretty straightfoward (RSpec) and just adds a couple keywords.

2. You're writing code when you should be describing features. Trying to remember where to put an underscore or what should be a symbol makes it harder to focus on describing the feature.

3. It greek to any non-developer. If you tried e-mailing this to a product owner or a user they would ask why you're sending code samples.

I know you addressed #3 in your blog post but why did you decide to use Steak over RSpec alone? Do you have any issue ramping up new developers with the Steak syntax?
What is the physical keyboard good for?

I understand the need for keyboard on smartphones where you might want to browse, type text, ssh or whatever... But what's its purpose on a reader?

UPDATE: Thanks for quick response. I really haven't thought of this, these uses make the device better than I thought. I really wish Amazon will start selling these devices here in Russia (and in 100+ other countries as well) so I can wholeheartedly recommend it. Meanwhile, the local market is owned by Chinese knock-offs sold for $300, while Amazon, Barnes&Noble and Sony don't seem to be interested.
http://appdelegateinc.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/de...
I think for it as a standalone service, it is perhaps overpriced. However I think of it instead as subsidizing many other things on the Xbox, including its original manufacture, continued R&D, patches to the system, and community management.

The voice + matchmaking experience is pretty nice, moreso since it is tied into a long-term identity system. There isn't a good parallel solution for free on the PC for that that has such strong integration (yet).

I was under the impression that servers were hosted by Microsoft (or someone), which is why you can't play Halo 2 anymore. They aren't dedicated ones that you pay for otherwise, but they are dedicated from my understanding.

Consoles are tradeoffs between ease of use, consistent user experience and power. Microsoft works really hard to make it an easy, consistent user experience. Sure you don't get all the modding power, ability to customize your servers, but on the flip side it is very easy to use. It works for most people most of the time.
This may not be what you want, but some months ago there was some news about a USB stick video camera. It didn't have much of the way in controls, and it only recorded at 480 or 640, but it was quite inexpensive -- $20?

When I saw your post title, I first thought of the "blow it up" kind of demolition. And that a few of these USB stick cameras could capture that action for pretty cheap (if you could find them, afterward; maybe also harden them or their setting enough to ensure survival of the memory and USB interface).
In a functioning constitutional republic we would not first be asking what Amendments prohibit government power, but rather by what constitutionally-delegated power does the government assert its authority to act. Alas we've spent the better part of two centuries carving out an ever-widening reading of Federal power.

There are those who are perfectly willing to read into the Interstate Commerce Clause the power to mandate individuals purchase health insurance. There are those who are perfectly willing to read into the Interstate Commerce Clause the power to forbid purely intrastate sale of otherwise legal drugs. How sadly humorous that these two groups, likely opposed in most political issues, can agree on near-limitless Federal power, and in so doing they have left us with only "penumbras and emanations" as defense.
Palm puts webOS 2.0 SDK into limited release starting today
Free, as in Fear
I use it to write quick notes/thoughts inside the book as I'm reading -- new ideas, questions I have, follow-ups, etc (amazon stores the location of the note). It's much slower than pencil, but the benefit is that it's synced to the cloud, and you can actually find your notes afterwards (how often do you go through the margins of old books?).
"Additionally, There is absolutely no reason any ebook should cost more than $10 when the hardcover is available for $16-$20."

The price is what the market will bear, period.

As to manufacturing costs, the cost of producing a hardcover book and a mass-market paperback are negligible, the prices of those editions are not set based on cost of production but on time of availability.

Book pricing is fundamentally broken right now. And the vast majority of authors do not make a reasonable income from their work. Books are priced as commodities, the same as you might see prices for fruit or vegetables in the supermarket. The way that authors make the most money is by milking high demand for their books from the early buyers through hardcover sales. This is why the hardcover comes out first at a higher price, because there's a lot more profit built into the earliest release. But readers would find it unfair if the paperback edition came out first and cost 2x as much as normal paperbacks for the first several months. The perception of value of hardbacks offsets this feeling, even though the price of hardback editions usually falls down to only a few dollars more than the paperback after a while. Much the same as 1st class / coach class on airplanes, the higher paying customers help subsidize the lower paying customers.

However, there is no hardback/paperback differentiator in eBooks. If the eBook price is lowered a few dollars relative to the paperback and eBooks become the dominant form of book then authors and publishers are faced with a crisis, the inability to make a profit on books. Keeping eBook prices close to paperback books helps solve the problem somewhat because the lower cost of production allows for a higher profit margin, though not as high as for hardbacks.

Ultimately, it's not the wad of pressed wood pulp that readers value, per se, but the content itself, so there is a reasonable justification that the paperback price should be the price floor for any edition of the book, regardless of media. So far this seems to have held, as today's eBook pricing still results in very lively sales.

It remains to be seen what the ultimate answer is to this crisis, but it's important to recognize the seriousness of it.
Rate My Startup: The Last Coder - Gamifying your IDE
Our startup idea is to create a plug-in for Eclipse that encourages you to improve your code by turning programming into a game.

Extract a method? 5 points.
Fix a compiler warning? 10 points.
Write a unit test? 25 points.
Write 50 unit tests? Earn the "Greener Pass-tures" badge.
Earn 1,000 points? Level-up!
Join a team and compete with your peers.
You get the idea...

If you're interested in playing, sign up for the private beta.

http://www.thelastcoder.com
I think HNers generally disagree with your statement:

This new feature GMail have announced is trivial and unimportant compared to many other features they could release.

The gmail team is not known for adding trivial or unimportant features. They probably deserve more credit than you are giving them.

Also, I'm not sure how delegation and folder sharing are related to email. Perhaps you could elaborate?
God, NMCI was terrible. Send in the Marines! We'll have this figured out by the weekend.
When you're debugging code you didn't write, and you don't have time to read and understand that half a million lines because you need to ship in one week, and you have 2 hours to fix the bug, the debugger can come in handy.

Personally, I'm fond of configurable logging, but I'm not under any illusions; logs are like freeze-dried debug sessions with less features. Logs verbose enough to contain the relevant information can also get borderline unwieldy and time-consuming to generate and process. The compiler I work with, when hosted in the IDE, could easily produce over 100GB of log output on a complex project test case, so I usually try and keep it down to 1..2GB or so, but that often leaves out the incriminating evidence, so it takes some back and forth... And the reason I'm using log files at all is often because debugging itself gets unwieldy on large test cases.
I miss Kathy's blogging.
If You Think Your Company Needs A CFO, Think Again
Could you elaborate? I'd love to see what you did, what worked, and what didn't. Did you have a website set up? Is it still up?
A) Tomatoes are a must grow and pretty simple. The taste of a tomato that never touches refrigeration is almost a different fruit. Easy to grow in a 5 gallon bucket on your deck or wherever.

B) Carrots are my favorite fresh. I can't believe they said there wasn't much of a difference between store bought and garden bought. Although I have noticed that I have gotten a few exceptional carrots at time. It may be that their such a durable vegetable buyers can be negligent and leave them sitting around for ages.

C) Asparagus plants take a while to establish but are easier than growing a fruit tree! Key is to plant them correctly and to lime the hell out of them every fall / spring. They thrive under the right soil conditions.

And on the foraging front, Mushroom Foraging is actually pretty simple for a few location dependent varieties. Chicken of the woods or Sulfur Shelf is blooming all over the place this time of year in New England. Hen of The Woods is also bloomer, although not as easy to spot.

My favorite grow-your own was Giant Shiitake's from Fungi Perfect. Buy spores online (30$), find a suitable tree(30$ or free) and a days of work to get started. Water in droughts and you will get tons of mushrooms twice a year for 2-3 years. I had 3 fruiting logs and I would get 6" deep in a grocery bag of portabello sized mushrooms! This was one of my more satisfying hobbies, although the logs died in a drought last summer =(

http://fungi.com/plugs/plugs.html
You can buy books directly on the kindle, at the very least it makes it easier to search for books by author or title.
And I think the sound for HN should be

"Another Visitor. Stay a while. Stay FOREVERRRR"
That's awesome how it shows the comments and code side-by-side. The only downside is that I have to describe the functionality while I'm writing code instead of beforehand. Thanks, adorton.
Is anyone else more worried about radiation exposure from these things than their privacy?
I think the spirit of the post is right on, but I'm not a fan of the example given. That's the kind of code that scares people away from lisp. Which isn't to say it's bad code, but it's not nearly intuitive enough to use as an example.
It's my default monospaced font as well. I've tried Inconsolata, Terminus, Anonymous (Pro), etc. and though I could happily use most of them I find monofur to be easy on my eyes, clear, and just a little Art Deco in feel if not in history. Using it was a whim that's stuck with me for several years and I'm happy I stumbled across it. It's spread to a few friends via the "what the heck is that", "eh, might as well try it", "this is really nice!" cycle.
Your understanding of the issue is a bit superficial.

1) MLB has been increasingly profitable for 10+ years now. Economically, there is nothing wrong with the game.

2) The Dodgers are 4th in club value, and 4th in revenue. Not sure where your numbers are from. http://www.forbes.com/lists/2010/33/baseball-valuations-10_T...

Now that we've dismissed the economic concerns, let's look at the other stuff.

Parity: baseball has much more parity than any of the other major sports in the USA. From a Peter Gammons article in 2009:
"In those 30 years, 20 different teams have won World Series titles, and it would likely be 21 without the 1994 strike that cost the sport’s best team -- the Montreal Expos -- a chance to win it all. In those 30 years, 14 different teams have won the Super Bowl, 13 have won the Stanley Cup, nine have won the NBA championship."

Yes, the Yankees recent dominance is tiresome to everyone who doesn't worship satan. But the Mets aren't exactly doing well, even with #2 revenue numbers.

Finally, you simply state that baseball should implement a salary cap, like it's easy to do. The MLB players association is one of the strongest unions in the world. There's no way they could implement a cap. And, as a rabid consumer of advanced baseball analysis, I don't think the evidence suggests that they should.

I'm sorry if my reply seems harsh -- I'm not venting at you. Rather, I'm venting at ESPN and nearly every sportscaster that seems to have 3 very incorrect presumptions: 1) baseball is in decline because 2) there's no parity and 3) no salary cap.

All three are dead wrong.
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One in four lap dancers has a degree, new research has shown.
Forget Newsweek. Mathematically objective quality of life index rates USA #2
How much longer until Steak gets a nifty DSL so it looks like Cucumber again, maybe they'll call it Zucchini this time.

Ruby seems to be playing with fire a little bit here, similar to the insanity that happened with Java and XML.

Java programs can't handle some edge case, program becomes configurable with XML, huge win. Then XML goes way too far, people start disliking XML, Java falls from grace.

Ruby programs are somewhat cumbersome, but Ruby, being fairly awesome, allows you to define a DSL. People write DSLs that make tasks easier, huge win. Then there are too many DSLs, people get tired of trying to figure out _another_ (groan) new DSL to do something they now know how to do in ruby.

Both start with this simple idea, flavor of the month type thing, that in the beginning is a huge win. After a while though both burn out. I think the saving grace for ruby is that people will just reimplement the DSL as a more straightforward ruby library.
Lately I've been following an approach that I suppose you could call "strict duck-checking in danger zones." I define a very lightweight "contract checker" and drop it into the beginning of methods that make a lot of assumptions about their arguments. For example, in a ruby app that wants certain keys in the dictionary you give to it:

class MethodContractException < StandardError
end

class Expecter

def initialize(suspect)
@suspect = suspect
end

def has_all_keys(keys)
missing_keys = keys.reject { |key| @suspect.has_key? key }

if !missing_keys.empty?
raise MethodContractException, "Method contract violated: "\
"#{@suspect.keys.inspect} should contain "\
"#{missing_keys.inspect}."
end

true
end

end

def expect(suspect)
Expecter.new(suspect)
end

class Widget

REQUIRED_SPECS = [:splines, :cogs, :thingamabobs]

def reticulate(dct_spec)
expect(dct_spec).has_all_keys(REQUIRED_SPECS)

@dct_spec = dct_spec
process(dct_spec)
end

end

Though, it may be better to encapsulate this kind of contract by creating a WidgetSpec class that demands each spec in the form of arguments to its constructor, and simply checking that the argument supplied to Widget::reticulate() is an instance of WidgetSpec. That is probably one of the few instances where instance checking is sensible; in other situations, using respond_to?() is preferable, because we are only concerned as to whether the object we are given can :quack, not that it is an instance of a Duck.

For everything else, I try to follow Joel Spolsky's advice on making wrong code look wrong: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/Wrong.html
My strategy for dealing with all these ruby testing fads is to just keep on plugging away with good old Test::Unit and avoid the churn all together. It takes about two minutes to teach somebody how to read asserts and then you're done.
Thanks - we're in Casablanca. Only downside is our internet went down for four hours this afternoon, so I missed this entire discussion!
During his day, Edison would take time out by himself and relax in a chair or on a sofa. Invariably he would be working on a new invention and seeking creative solutions to the problem he was dealing with. He knew that if her could get into that "twilight state" between being awake and being asleep, he could access the pure creative genius of his subconscious mind.

To prevent himself from crossing all the way over the "genius gap" into deep sleep, he would nap with his hand propped up on his elbow while he clutched a handful of ball-bearings. Then he would just drift off to sleep, knowing that his subconscious mind would take up the challenge of his problem and provide a solution. As soon as he went into too deep a sleep, his hand would drop and the ball-bearings would spill noisily on the floor, waking him up again. He'd then write down whatever was in his mind.

Taken from: http://www.wilywalnut.com/Thomas-Edison-Power-Napping.html