skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Its perfectly ok. A lot of times others have already ran into the particular problem and already solved it. You need to understand the solution, just don't blindly accept some random solution found on the internet. If you do this, then your code will get ugly fast and you will not know what it is doing. But there is nothing wrong with finding a solution, studying it, understanding it, and then using it in your own code.
Palm Introduces Some Features of webOS 2.0
HP Collaborates with Hynix to Bring the Memristor to Market
On OCaml, http://ocaml.janestreet.com/ might interest the OP.
It makes product products you can spend your money money on.
Google Reader has "sort by magic", which basically does that by ordering posts by how much it thinks you want to read them.
I'm amazed and a bit saddened whenever I hear sentiments like this. These days more than ever.

The thing is, every single bit of code you write depends on something else that you DIDN'T write. Everything. No exceptions.

And the thing about stuff you didn't write is that you end up making assumptions about it - often without even realising. Sometimes the assumption is simply that the code works. Sometimes, some of your assumptions will be wrong.

Debuggers help you check your assumptions. They're a very useful tool for this - more so than many people who say "I prefer printf" realise.

I apologise if you're not in that category, but did you know that many debuggers have a way to print a message (without stopping) whenever the program hits a certain line? Just like printf, only it doesn't have to be built in to your code ahead of time.

There are times when a debugger isn't the right tool for the job, but it's always better to make an informed choice.
" ... all these ruby testing fads "

What makes something a fad or not?
It gets significantly less silly when you look at code that is meant to be aligned, and isn't in a variable-width font.
Don't know if it still does it but ClearContext use to provide this exact solution for Outlook. It prioritized your Inbox based people and e-mails that you haven't responded to yet.

http://www.clearcontext.com/user_guide/contacts.html

The product seems to have chased off into GTD-land, but the sort of the Inbox was really useful.
Depending on what you're looking for, you may want to get in touch with either Joshua Porter ( http://bokardo.com/services/ ), or Joe Baz ( http://www.abovethefolddesign.com/ ).
"Ruby programs are somewhat cumbersome"

How so?
Startup ideas are like kittens, I'm giving 'em away
Metalua, Nemerle, Boo (and even Perl to some extent) ... among other languages have support for compile time macros / interacting with the compiler's pipeline.

Here's the LINQ syntax built as a Nemerle macro ... http://code.google.com/p/nemerle/source/browse/#svn/nemerle/...

Where a query looks like this ...

def res = linq <# from c in customers where c.City == "London" #>;

Of course, it requires a prefix "linq" + the actual code to be delimited ... but that's not a requirement, as that macro could've been built to look exactly as the C# equivalent (the current form being chosen to prevent ambiguities both for the compiler and the programmer).

Here's MooseX-Declare, which introduces completely new syntax in Perl ... http://search.cpan.org/dist/MooseX-Declare/lib/MooseX/Declar...

So the argument that you need Lisp-like syntax for adding syntax to a language without storing it in strings or through pre-processing ... is bullshit.

The only difference between a language like Nemerle and Lisp is that in Lisp a macro is easier to write, while in Nemerle you need some knowledge about the compiler's parser / AST and pipeline.

But having easy-to-write macros ... I'm not sure it's such a good thing ... and in Nemerle you're not limited in the kind of syntax you can add to the language. In fact Nemerle is a simple core language where many of the useful things in it are built as macros.
Well I have a small garden but try and get maximum yield from it. I've got Chives, Onions, Spring onions, basil, oregano, Thyme, and Rosemary. I have lettuce, tomatoes,zucchini,snowpeas and broccoloi, and celery. I have a small mandarin tree that yields by the bucketfull. In my planning I'm pulling out some decorative trees and replacing with a banana patch and I'm experimenting with pineapples.

I would estimate it's mostly been a money pit - the yields have been nowhere near enough to justify the time or money. For me it's a chance to do something real (I work from home) and a great learning opportunity for the kids.

The other thing not to forget is growing flowers. They're much easier and you can have fresh flowers inside the house for a very small outlay, or just keep them in the garden and enjoy.
That's community, not tech innovation.
This is an awesome idea. Any plans top allow custom indexing plugins? I'd like to be able to index different services and also to deal with special file formats.

I'd also like to be able to search from Emacs, I've signed up for the API so I'll see if I can make that one happen myself :)
When everybody claiming it's the next big thing decides six months later that it's too cumbersome and complicated and must immediately be replaced with the next shiny new thing. The ruby community seems to suffer from an acute case of magpie syndrome.
Pathetic Buyouts: Companies That Sold For Pennies
Sure, but digg (like most social media companies) has always been more about innovation on the social side than on the technical side. The actual technical meat behind digg or twitter isn't what made them successful; finding a way to make themselves the center of certain kinds of culture is.
To be fair, he'd always planned this to be temporary. In his podcast with Tim Ferris just a couple of weeks ago, he said he'd be stepping down pretty soon.
one of my pet peeves . . .

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1603891
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1603799
It's interesting that they were caught and are being sued. My impression is that this happens all the time in hardware, for example: companies are often using somewhat shady means to get early copies of competitors' prototypes to do teardowns on. Obviously they don't just go to their competitor, identify themselves honestly, and ask to buy a copy. It's usually via front companies, or via contacts at legitimate companies who'll get dev samples legitimately but slip you one, or via side deals with Taiwanese or Chinese fabs, who'll set one aside for you. AFAIK that almost never gets caught/prosecuted.
Python and ruby give you nothing in terms of direct memory manipulation. I read this as a request for a cleaner, more beautiful C. I sort of like that idea, but I actually think C is wonderful and it doesn't need to be cleaned up (maybe a couple things like safe macros).

The one thing I can't fix in my head is how to do pointers and real, full-control memory manipulation (and all the fantastic benefits associated with that) and include closures and anonymous functions at the same time (which I think would be the most important addition to C).

I agree with you though, that a preprocessor isn't necessary for a good language, in fact, the only reason CPP exists is because C isn't good enough by itself. A LISP-like macro system in C would be fantastic, but what it would really mean and look like, I can't quite imagine.
reminds me of http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1648065 :)
I have absolutely no desire to give anyone else access to my email, and I'd hazard a guess that this is the case for many other users as well. I do want the ability to send mail as another person (I have some 10-odd email accounts), but Gmail already handles that.

While this new feature may not be useful for corporate users, that doesn't mean it's not useful for users in general.
Similar here. Second inbox is mailing lists, third is "other crap" - newsletters, email from Facebook, etc. - the kind of thing that I want to have available, but don't want to see most of the time.
Ask HN: What is your SHA Strategy?
In NYC, my experience with unlicensed cabs at airports is limited, but every time they did try to take advantage.

However, I had much more experience with unlicensed cabs in Washington Heights (north end of Manhattan, where licensed cabs refuse to cruise around to get business) and I never remember anyone trying to rip me off. Much of the time this wasn't with calling any specific company, just flagging down (illegally) whichever car was passing.

I think there's just too much money to be made from unsuspecting tourists at NYC airports.
I'm not sure any of those sites are more innovative than Digg. I do think that you're right though that ultimately MySpace was doomed by its own community, which is similar to Digg. It's a catch-22 really, do you decide to turn your back on your current community to grow?
The article cites a number of cases of police defending their initial conclusions long after they've been discredited.

Is this a case of police still believing their initial assumptions (or reluctance to countenance the possibility they might have condemned an innocent man), or are they simply trying to protect themselves from potential lawsuits by not conceding a thing?
I've been thinking about doing this for a while -- this thread (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1649211) convinced me to put up my MVP and see where this goes.

Would love any feedback I can get!
Does anyone on HN use any of these hashing functions? Or sticking to SHA2 family till SHA3 finalist is announced is your strategy? Or do you simply not care at all and use SHA1 or MD5 because it's easy?
You'd be hugely popular at the co-founders meetup (http://www.meetup.com/Co-Founders-Wanted-Meetup/)

The real question is how would you choose who to work with? How do you separate the fake biz people from the genuine ones?

Here's the beginning of an answer: pitch your idea. Let the business person tell you how to change it to make it better. Then decide if that advice is sound or not.

PS: a business person who tells you your idea is great and offers no improvement is just a consultant trying to steal your money.
Likewise, but I always go back to Dina.

http://www.donationcoder.com/Software/Jibz/Dina
any idea on pricing?
IIRC, this graphic was actually mentioned in the Reddit discussion. The op didn't seem to think it was 'spammy' per se, but it is clearly lacking in demonstrable value (that is, vs simple text)
Facebook did, or at least turned its side, when it opened the site to everyone instead of just college students.
"... Google seriously suck at accounts!" agreed.
I've got that book, too. :) (And I recommend it to people all the time...)

I'm thinking something like Lua's C API, both because I know it well and because its design does a particularly good job of bridging C and a dynamically-typed language.
This was more of the discussion I was looking to have. Thanks! Will check it out and read through everyone else's thoughts.
i'm using terminator as my terminal which lets me split my terminal windows.

As my programming editor I use vim with nerdtree and bunch of other plugins.

Ubuntu is my distro.
Umm, RIM is providing to India exactly what they have to many other countries. So you are probably excluding a large part of the world from your list of places fit for you to live. The agreement covers "consumer Blackberry services". Presumably, corporate Blackberry emails are encrypted using a customer-generated key and hence RIM can't decrypt those.

FWIW, I am happy to see such snooping by governments. If this is what it takes for mass adoption of encryption, then so be it.

Your points about corruption in India are on the mark. I disagree that "few are willing ...". I see signs of change and renewal all the time. Change isn't fast enough though.
> Lisps conveniently sidestep the whole issue by refusing to have ANY syntax.

I'm not sure why people repeat that, but Lisp has syntax ...

In the same way Xml, Yaml, Json have syntax ... plus it has operators that do stuff, like: quote / eval / for defining methods / for defining macros.

Sure, a serialization format for what are basically syntax-trees is lighter than for a language that requires a LALR parser ... but you have to limit yourself to that serialization format in your DSLs.
Show HN: Startup ideas are like kittens, I'm giving 'em away
Hey guys,

In the vein of "ideas are worthless, execution is everything", I created a new blog to post all of my random startup ideas that I'll never find time to execute. If somebody wants to run with an idea, I'm all for it, but I'm mostly hoping to generate discussion.

It's at: http://almoststartup.com

A number of people have created similar blogs, so I figured I might as well throw in my 2 cents too.

The first idea is for a site that I call Oregato. It's a repository for conference & presentation videos, slides, & notes, along with services for conference organizers. You can read the first post here: http://almoststartup.com/oregato-a-repository-for-conference-and-prese

Cheers!
Funding a Mexican Startup
Hi there. I founded a Mexican ecommerce/marketplace startup that caters to the US market. We launched 3 months ago and are seeing a bit of traction (around 25-40 accounts are created daily, and around 40-60 items are listed for sale daily). I Haven´t implemented a business model yet (I got an idea and hope to have it ready in the next 60 days). I am very close to Tucson/Phoenix, Az, and I have flights from my city to SF. Based on the scarce details, you think there is a chance that an angel investor would be interested in investing money in my startup? I think an advantage could be that operational cost are substantially lower over here. My startup could survive a year with 30-40K.

Thanks!
I believe I saw a diagram once of one's internals in both postures. The squatted one looked more "natural" or at least less... "tangled". I had no luck finding that picture to share though. Can anyone assist?
There's a de-facto standard bytecode and virtual machine design for byte-compiled Prolog, known as the Warren Abstract Machine. There are links concerning it and derived designs here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1649138

Also, wamcc (http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.45.1...) compiles Prolog to C.
Top Four Successful Independent Restaurant Tips - Info Barrel
That's really quite something. I had lost count around 2006 (youtube) but, wow!, so many acquisitions I never even heard of happened before 2006. I wish we could see a similar graph of the products that Google developed on its own. Would it look this long and prestigious or is Google just a gobbler of smaller companies after all?
very cool to have the pro feature ready from the start, rather than the someday we will figure out how to make money approach. lots of value for the business user there.
I'm so sad that Google lags on deploying these features to the apps accounts. I'd love a "Give me all Gmail features, when they happen" option for my Google apps account. But, don't even get me started on how effed up the integration with all of that is. I want michael@whalesalad.com to be my google ID, not some random gmail address I had to create. UGH.
Fluid (http://fluidapp.com, Mac only) is a tool that lets you run web apps in their own desktop app wrapper. This can help with notifications but can't overcome the drag+drop or performance issues. Plus, it takes a much more advanced user to actually set this sort of thing up.

Google Chrome can also make application shortcuts (Windows and Linux only): http://www.google.com/support/chrome/bin/answer.py?hl=en&...
People don't really like unselfish colleagues
Now if they only allowed us to downvote stories, instead of relying upon tags such as "slashvertisement", "dupe", and whatever we tag those ridiculously-overhyped headlines...
What search engine does WebOS ship with as default?

Also, as a followup, what mapping program does WebOS ship with?
One of these sites just needs to install a sliding bar at the top. All the way to the left is Failblog pictures. All the way to the right is academic articles. Build this.
A bug is classified as Critical based on how much access/damage the an attack could create, not based on how it would affect customers. It is possible to have a critical vulnerability that you can expect very few customers to see.
News the laxative industry doesn't want you to hear!
I think it's more accurate to say that Lisp has a metasyntax rather than a syntax. Each special form and macro, including user-written macros, has its own syntax; but all of these syntax are layered on top of the standard metasyntax.
I feel this tuition bubble is one of the primary drivers behind the healthcare mess. The still exploding cost of healthcare is so driven by the very high cost of healthcare services (office visits in the US are typically 5 to 10 times more expensive than in Europe for instance). Regardless of the role of insurance, this cost has two primary drivers: providers malpractice insurance and highly indebted doctors, nurses and other healthcare personnel who require salaries that are out of this world to stay afloat because of their student loans.
the links in the footer and the domain name support your theory.
Is the source image a fake? You can see it inverted back by hitting "command+option+control+8" on your mac.
A Story of O(racle)
just signed up and had the same experience, would have much preferred being told that the system is not ready before I logged into one of my social accounts.
I'm sure the option was on the table to "hold off" but in disaster-mode (which is what this is) one of the board's functions is to restore shareholder faith.

They aren't going to do that by sitting around, so decisive action was taken. As another poster in this thread noted, the search was already on for potential CEO candidates to replace Rose - that process probably got expedited to avoid a further downward spiral.

The problems with V4 are nothing to do with technology or audience fit etc etc, it's bigger than that - it's a management issue. Management launched a buggy product that nobody wanted. And management just got replaced.
To your issues:

1) Yeah, organization is crazy. I think the method comparison is a bit unfair though. In theory, each step should be easily identifiable (like a method) but this is rarely the case given that most steps have complex regex matching (sometimes for grammatical niceness - e.g. (a vs. an), sometimes for other crazy town reasons). This makes not only automated indexing difficult (RubyMine tries...) but trying to keep hundreds of steps in your head is pretty hard. Especially one's you probably didn't write.

The cool thing about steak is that helpers and "reusable steps" are actually just methods! Hello ctags :D

b) Our case was:

And the user "212-555-1234" should receive a text with:
| Some "double quoted" and 'single quoted' text |

Definitely possible in cucumber, but I prefer a string equality assertion:

text.should == "..." (you have to do this anyway in the step_definition)

c) Ben Maeby's email_spec is awesome and provides some steps for clicking on links in email. I still use the library in steak (just the raw rspec matchers though).

The trouble is you have a url:

http://coolsite.org/something/abcde22424aw3324234

The matcher provided says:

I click on the link "Link Title or URL". Since the token is random every time (unless you stub it, which is kinda out of the spirit of acceptance testing, but that's another debate) it's hard to say "Click on the link with the big ass token in it".

You can definitely write a step like:

And I visit the account confirmation link

Again, a matter of preference for abstracting the step with one-time use, highly coupled text to code vs. a comment and the code together. The actual mechanics are the same in both systems, it's just that cucumber hides them in a one-time use step away from the actual feature whereas the steak is inline.

d) Similar to the above, the catch all step can work in cucumber. Though, in a few scenarios, it's desirable to run only specific jobs or more often in our case, to check if jobs are scheduled in a specific way. It avoids the weird scenario of writing a step definition like "And I run only the blah jobs" or "And a blah job should be scheduled with ...". Ideally the job system would be decoupled entirely from the acceptance test, but we can't all do cool stuff like this all the time: http://corner.squareup.com/2010/08/cucumber-and-resque.html
Prith Banerjee, HP's senior VP of research at HP Labs gave a talk about the memristor at HPtech 2010 back in June. He did mention quite a bit of the information that was in the article linked, except of course the purchase of Hynix. This is very exciting technology, hopefully it comes out in a positive manner that allows the adoption in to many new (and existing) technologies. Our planet could be improved with this technology if handled correctly.
I believe you are describing the technology behind http://www.newspond.com/ -- without the existence of user-manipulated weight (up/down vote).
Facebook, YouTube Used As Weapons In Kashmir Fight
Internet Scammers: Radu Mateescu
I think you're confused by the word "reasonable." GP post is using it in the sense of "a plausible hypothesis", which it is -- it is plausible that people who care about their careers to the exclusion of all else (e.g., ideals) will advance farther and faster. Whether it is correct is a separate issue -- that is where the statistics and data come in.

Actually, "on average, all ants are red" is a good counterexample for plausibility -- talking about a universal truth that applies "on average" is not logical even at a casual glance, therefore it is not reasonable.
I don't understand why you can't do everything yourself, or at least learn or try or why can't you sell it to customers or vc's. I am like you a single founder on techside, and I am very much trying to put my self out of my comfort zone, by talking to people, attending more events, and public speaking.
What I look for in a co founder is they had a previous startup/s or has successfully raised money in the past. And really believes in the idea. In the beginning of any tech startup, most of what needs to be done will fall on your shoulders.
"SELECT Person FROM Age ..." .. Let's just that it's not SQLs fault if you run into problems here.
This is old news, he submitted his resignation to Reddit a few days ago. (/I know I know, old joke, mod me down.)
You can't sell your degree, so the price won't crash like it would after a normal bubble. But I expect we'll see an accelerating decline the number of people starting college over the next 10-20 years, during which time the price may drop on real terms and some schools will probably have to close.
"If they claim they have a degree from that university from then on, they would be charged with fraud."

Then, one just would claim one haD a degree from that university. I don't think it would be feasible to outlaw all ways one could leak thatbonformation.
Ask HN: What is a good % of active users?
I'm trying to gauge the acceptance of my startup by looking at the percentage of active users (out of all users that have signed up so far).

Ideally, I'd like to compare my numbers with those of other startups.

But I can't seem to find any such information. Evernote seems to be the most open when it comes to this type of stats, still I could not find active vs. signed-up.

I do expect it to be low, as the site has been under heavy beta testing, but I need a baseline to make a better judgment.

Any insight is welcome!

For the curious: The startup is Feedlooks.com
Sometimes it's magpie syndrome, sometimes it's born out of a real need or deficiency in real systems. Kaizen (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaizen) is a theme I see on a lot of good ruby teams. People should always be looking to improve things but for real reasons, not for novelty. It's a fine line to draw sometimes, but in my opinion, steak eliminates a lot of the pain of cucumber by using tools my team already knows. Seems like a win to me.
Not yet. I think it needs to be comparable to Clicky, Chartbeat, etc but I'm still working the numbers on costs, internal processes, etc.