skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
What this really indicates is that teachers need to be paid more, and the working environment improved. Then the profession will become more attractive to talented who are currently choosing other careers.
Is it possible to gain a thorough appreciation for the benefits and technical implementation of a project like Node.js without being knee-deep in the scalable web app universe? Nothing I have written has needed to handle more than, oh, six requests per eon yet, so I have never felt the constraints of "synchronous, I/O-bound" software development.

I put "synchronous, I/O-bound" in scare quotes because I don't really grok what it means. Sure, I can talk the talk and mumble a few buzzwords under my breath, but when it really comes down to it, I have only a cursory understanding of what "event driven," "asynchronous" or, Hell, even "single threaded" means. I've read the Wikipedia pages and made it to "Hello world" with a few of these concepts, but I feel like I'm really missing a huge chunk of very important knowledge & experience.

What kind of project can I work on that would go down this road? Are there any good books, physical or electronic? Or am I doomed to be disconnected from this universe of experience until one of my crappy web projects gets Digged and I learn through trial by fire? I just know there's more to this than "asynchronous method calls will not block method calls that come after them."

EDIT: I noticed that someone downvoted this--I'd be extremely interested to know why. Am I missing something incredibly obvious?
Trust them to do what, precisely? Give it away for free, when they change your security settings to "public" by default, while doing a good job at preventing people from hacking in to get almost identical information?
They were promoted by both majority parties not as stimulating the economy, but of saving it from otherwise certain collapse.

They are also government spending which the NYT article claims hasn't happened. The exact statement in the article is:

"Here’s what you need to know: The whole story is a myth. There never was a big expansion of government spending."
http://jasonlbaptiste.com/startups/how-to-succeed-like-apple...
hey you can go through this article, I personally use it as my management guideline.
Thomas Sowell actually has an answer to that question. Africa's pattern of navigable rivers is much different from Europe's. In fact, Africa hardly has navigable rivers that reach the sea without going over waterfalls. The barriers to internal transportation in Africa inherently limited the development of trade routes, which limited much of the rest of the development of "civilization" as it was known in the Near East and Europe (or, for that matter, in China). Different geography led to different cultural developments. African people are plenty smart, but they don't have the same environment for building large trade networks that Europeans had at a much earlier period of history.
Why is Perl knowledge a requirement? I've been writing Perl in my new job since June and almost the entire team of 10 (myself included) knew no Perl before joining.

Check that your candidates know how to develop software, make sure they are comfortable with functional programming so they don't break anything, and give them a couple books (programming perl & higher order perl) to read for a week after joining.
Ask HN: How to plan the optimal route for a moving van?
This might be a bit weird for HN, but I thought it posed a good hacker challenge :)

I'm moving from Phoenix, AZ to Seattle, WA next week. I'm driving my own 24' moving van (with car in-tow).

I'm trying to figure out what the optimal route is for this van. I want to minimize elevation changes, exposure to inclement weather, and overall driving pressure (e.g. narrow/fewer lanes, road curvature, etc).

There are the 3 primary routes one could take to make this trip:

1. I-5. (via Los Angeles) (http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&source=s_q&hl=en&geocode=Fblh_gEdy-JR-SnLeaFQ7RIrhzGsG0o1-MdpjA%3BFX77WwIdaji3-CnBgh2LcQODgDEp8DhLJVAWYw%3BFcJp1gIdWVy1-ClVM-iTLBCQVDGa1URpRmUlEA&q=phoenix,+az+to+seattle,+wa&sll=40.446947,-117.246094&sspn=20.730412,46.538086&ie=UTF8&ll=40.513799,-117.202148&spn=20.710218,46.538086&t=h&z=5&saddr=phoenix,+az&daddr=39.5825903,-122.210198+to:seattle,+wa&via=1) I've done this drive at least half a dozen times (in a car). Things are fine (if boring) until Northern California and Oregon, when you really start to get into a lot of elevation changes. And in northern Oregon (Portland area), I inevitably seem to get caught in a combo of rain + chewed up highway that I don't think I'd like to navigate very much in a 24' truck with car in tow.

2. I-84. (via Salt Lake City) (http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&source=s_q&hl=en&geocode=Fblh_gEdy-JR-SnLeaFQ7RIrhzGsG0o1-MdpjA%3BFcm_bQId53NU-Skb8Pps3_RShzG650FYs2ragw%3BFcJp1gIdWVy1-ClVM-iTLBCQVDGa1URpRmUlEA&q=phoenix,+az+to+seattle,+wa&sll=37.0625,-95.677068&sspn=43.037246,93.076172&ie=UTF8&ll=40.446947,-117.246094&spn=20.730412,46.538086&t=h&z=5&saddr=phoenix,+az&daddr=40.7469536,-111.9058178+to:seattle,+wa&via=1) I've done this drive once in a car in the opposite direction. It felt flatter than drive #1, but you'd never know it judging by the terrain the route takes you over. So maybe it was my imagination?

3. US-93 and I-84 (via Las Vegas) (http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&source=s_q&hl=en&geocode=Fblh_gEdy-JR-SnLeaFQ7RIrhzGsG0o1-MdpjA%3BFcJp1gIdWVy1-ClVM-iTLBCQVDGa1URpRmUlEA&q=phoenix,+az+to+seattle,+wa&sll=40.513799,-117.202148&sspn=20.710218,46.538086&ie=UTF8&t=h&z=5&saddr=phoenix,+az&daddr=seattle,+wa) Never done this route before. It's the default suggested Google route.

So does anyone have any heuristics or insight into what the best route for this 24' truck would be?
Yeah, I hadn't made it to that part yet, when I wrote my comment. It confused the bejeezus out of me, actually; every time I made it to one of the interstitial images with the juvenile captions, I kept thinking I had accidentally alt-tabbed to some 14-year-old's Counterstrike fansite or something. The cognitive dissonance was nontrivial.
On HN we obey the 2nd law of thermodynamics
Develop business through article writing
ArticleMe is your marketplace to buy and sell professional written content for your blog, website, or publication.We provide a secure environment where buyers can inspect the content, check the quality, and insure that it is unique while securing payment for the service provided.
You can't disprove a statistical assertion with a single counterexample. Kudos to Jeanne Bamberger, but she's not, by herself, statistically significant.

I'm not saying that your conclusions are wrong, but "one of my best professors was a woman" is a very weak argument.
I am pretty interested in the potential for multiplayer game servers written in Node.js. Most every post about Node that I have seen seems to focus on it as a web server/web app platform... but it's not. Using JavaScript for the game on the client side (and I don't mean in a browser) would make it that much better.
Oops, you're right. Dan Savage. blush
UGG Classic Tall boots
Do you have an estimate of how many hours per month it takes to organize?

If it was reasonable I would definitely be interested in doing it, and I would be happy to affiliated with the official 'franchise'!
I'd alternate going to my dentist and my girlfriend's dentist. My dentist always wanted to replace some of my fillings. My girlfriend's dentist never mentioned it. Once I even asked before the exam if my fillings needed to be replaced, telling her that another dentist said a few were bad. The final verdict: I was fine. I never went back to my dentist.
And yet, to this day, people remember what they thought he said, rather than what he actually said. Weird, isn't it?
Rather impressive, and congrats on the partnerships!

I would really try to showcase the features through a user narrative (this is a novel writing app after all!) and lots of screenshots of novels in progress with the app.

Also, photos of the people in the testimonials lend credibility. Faces sell after all...
It may be the "early adopter" effect. In some cases, over 95% of (self-reporting) early adopters might be male. http://blog.mozilla.com/metrics/2010/08/26/who-are-our-firef...

Anyway, here's one "female" who uses foursquare: http://twitter.com/#!/Snubs/status/26996595662 :-)
Jack Namer vCard
Ask HN: Experienced Programmers Interested in Trading Systems
A trader here that has spent the past few years developing automated modeling solutions. I know how to code too.

I want to see if there any interest from 1-2 people that have an interest in building software for exploiting short-term (~1 trade per day per strategy, not HF) market movements over futures and stocks.

Design is done. I could use some help with implementation. Just wanted to see if there's any interest.

Serious inquiries only from highly experienced programmers who have some background knowledge in the markets.

email is anony304 at gmail.com
The idea about voting isn't to select a "best" hack each night, its to say "take some time to find a better hack". That way if someone does get through the pre-screening you have a way to say, "take a couple weeks to think about your next Tell."

Granted the nation wide voting idea kinda gives the wrong impression on that part. I still think it'd be a good idea to keep videos somewhere.

Granted it was mostly just hand waving on how to keep the non-hacker attendees from overwhelming the hacker presenters.
Initial login impressions:

First of all, log me in right away when I sign up. I was confused that I just got redirected back and didn't notice the green text telling me it worked.

I like that you don't ask me too much information. However, I personally prefer to use my email to log in. That has the added benefit of you only having to ask me two things at signup time: my email, and a password (no password confirm). If I forget my password, I just reset it later with my email.

I would definitely highlight that litlift.com is a tool to help you write a book, but not where you actually go to write a book. I was confused for a bit what the "description" was under my new book, I thought that's where you expected me to type my novel (in hindsight, this was dumb of me).

It's very cool though. I think if I were to write a novel, this type of approach would fit my engineering brain better.
I see your point. But I would say maximize your utility but even that is questionable. As Daniel Bernoulli (St. Petersburg Paradox) showed, the concept of expected value to the real world is not straightforward.

Short of it is: I don't agree. Those other situations are not the same event as this and even often completely unrelated. You cant lump them into the same space and claim positive expectation on their value.
E Turbines: Combining Wind Energy with the Open Road
Yeah... it's kind of like putting two dozen pictures of human faces next to each other and saying, "Look! They're different, but they're all clearly human faces!"

I mean--that is kind of amazing, but I think it has more to do with faces--and bats--being symbols than well-designed logos.
How is "curing aging" necessarily going to help? If, tomorrow, we magically doubled everyone's life expectancy, the age distribution of the population would remain exactly the same. The X axis (time) would just be twice as long.

There might be a short-term blip of excess births as we all get used to the new equilibrium. That is sort of how we ended up with an excess of old people today. But since the magic that doubled our life expectancy probably didn't also double our food, oil, and fresh water supplies, we'd soon see birthrates drop to maintain equilibrium.

But why settle for doubling? Why not make humans immortals? Oops! Now you have abolished children! Sell that Toys R' Us stock.

Or is the idea that our Philosopher's Stone will enable us all to live the healthy lives of twenty-year-olds up to age 150, at which point everything collapses at once and we die in one instant, like the wonderful one-hoss shay? Um, good luck with that.

In summary: changing the nature of life expectancy will change the nature of our demographic weirdness, but is unlikely to produce anything less complicated.
The problem here, I think, is that the problem as stated only works out if having $0 dollars is no better than having -$200.

I don't think this is the common case, but there are cases where that makes sense, for instance if keeping a license enables you to keep a job that will allow you to easily pay off the debt, or, if you multiplied the numbers by 1000, and assumed the poor person was willing to declare bankruptcy. In that case, you might have a point; Really, I think this is why buying a house at a time of obvious volatility is such a good deal, assuming you have no other assets. If prices go up, you have put 5% down on an asset that is appreciating quickly. In the up market, housing was appreciating at north of 10% a year; that's 10% of the total home value, of which you maybe put down 5%. If prices go down? you walk.

The question, in that case, is how much does declaring bankruptcy cost? I mean, you have the up front lawyer costs... then you have the problems associated with having bad credit. but I can see many cases where taking the gamble would make sense.
Relaxed, cool guys are more desirable
Here are links to two in-progress fun ones (use Chrome for these), as well as some bits of their source code that are worth reading through...

Lazeroids:

http://www.lazeroids.com

http://github.com/gerad/lazeroids-node/blob/master/lazeroids...

Orona:

http://stephank.github.com/orona/bolo.html

http://github.com/stephank/orona/blob/master/src/objects/tan...

... those are in-browser, of course, but a lot of that logic isn't browser-specific.
Steam engines—powered predominantly by coal, but also by natural gas, nuclear materials, and other fuels—generate 90 percent of all U.S. electricity. But though they have been refined over the centuries, most are still clanking, hissing, exhaust-spewing machines that rely on moving parts, and so are relatively inefficient and prone to mechanical breakdown.

Do steam turbines really clank? (I can believe in the hissing part.)
For Linux there is Mono for Linux and it has a pretty liberal license, a mix of MIT/X11, LGPL, GPL and MPL[1].

[1] http://mono-project.com/License
Thank you for giving some sane advice, instead of peddling the magical "single source/multiplatform" promise.
One of the reasons I got tired of Reddit was people claiming to be persecuted by the Hivemind. Here's a thought experiment. Suppose you had said that you firmly believe that women will be dramatically underrepresented in cooking, teaching, and the military, if selection for those things is based on merit.

This is different from what you said; it implies that women are, on average, not as good at those things as men. For whatever reason. You seemed to be saying that there's such a huge difference between men and women in those fields that women might as well not even try, except for really exceptional cases -- a much less defensible statement.

A question for everybody: how would you have reacted to the statement above? Personally, I would have attacked it for rashly generalizing from a small sample without proper controls, but not for thinking Damned Thoughts.
Yes -- that's what someone who's on the ball does, using a short-term/reasonably-priced source of extra funds to avoid late fees.

The theory of the 'guardian angel' service is that it handles things even when you forget. It presupposes that there's some way to give the service total visibility into your imminent payment deadlines -- of course right now that doesn't exist, and the businesses that rely on late fees for their margin may not want it to.

But this might be an appropriate area for an industry consortium or even regulation to create a clearinghouse. If you're about to fine someone $X for an amount due up to $Y, you have to broadcast it on some confidential national clearinghouse an hour before assessment, allowing a contracted representative of the target to settle it on their behalf. If you do this, your fine is considered reasonable and customary; if you don't, it's presumed to be trickery and held to a higher standard.

I agree it's farfetched. But when we're talking contrived scenarios where people living hand-to-mouth should play roulette, the imagination wanders!
Mono is able to run Java code side-by-side with .NET as well as having Java and .NET object interoperate with each other. This is done with IKVM (http://www.ikvm.net) the Java VM implementation that runs on top of .NET and Mono.

From http://mono-project.com/Java
Definitely makes you think about opportunity cost in terms of CS: spend time writing an efficient algorithm or just bust out the ole brute force. Surprisingly, brute force works really well with the excess performance we all have sitting around...

...until you have several hundred users hitting your server running that brute force algorithm. Sigh.
Also http://hnrecap.com - you can get the day/week/months top stories in one visit.
Facebook Made More Dangerous To Lose Your Phone
learning a little about libev and epoll is a good starting place.
Would you please make a product of your method? I would like to be your customer.
I was just checking out their other site, decafsucks.com. They have a pretty slick "scroll to the bottom to auto-load more content" feature like Slashdot.

What's cool is that everything (tabs, ajax paging) is done via the anchor in the URL, for example #list=highest&page=3.

Does anyone know of a jQuery or Rails plugin that automates this task? Seems like a fairly generalizable thing to implement once and just reuse.
Your pool is colder than ambient because the top surface is constantly evaporating, leaving behind the slower moving molecules.

Sounds like a way to save on air conditioning costs to me. Put a heat exchanger to the pool and heat your pool while cooling your house.
You can make some common assumptions:

1) There are (or will be) 2 founders that are prepared to dedicate years to the venture

2) They're able to convince an investor to put money in (otherwise valuation won't matter).

To me that's enough to justify the ballpark valuations I gave. You don't need to know their specific market, product, or anything else.
This is awesome. I like the integration with Instapaper. Lately I have been using Instrapaper alot.

Thanks :)
Ask HN: Video feed of startup school 2010 talks?
Most YC events are now live streamed on Justin.TV. I think this leads to extremely low quality video feeds and incomprehensible audio. (Please see the last year's video archive). Given that a large number of people who apply for the startup school are not selected to attend it I hope that there is some way that YC could provide a higher quality video feed.
Why an anonymous account? This looks shady.
Created a group to discuss starting up local Hack and Tells: http://groups.google.com/group/hack-and-tell-orgs
In theory, you could use the same code provided you wrote it so that it would work independent of it's environment. Realistically, because server-side JavaScript and Node in particular is still new, most people haven't done that. For instance, on the client-side you're probably using XMLHttpRequest to pull in data via a web service. On the server side, you'd likely be fetching that data locally using a server-side library written for node. In that regard, you wouldn't be using the "same" code. However, you could (again, in theory) reuse domain objects and even libraries like YUI or jQuery to load, parse and traverse HTML as well as do server-side event handling as the YUI team has recently demonstrated. http://www.yuiblog.com/blog/2010/04/09/node-js-yui-3-dom-man... - There is a video that goes with that somewhere and I think it was linked on HN recently as well.

OT: Can someone refresh my memory on how to emphasize something on HN?
Please, don't apologize--if you hadn't reposted it, I wouldn't have seen it just now, and my mind would not currently be blown!
Yeah, that's what I had in mind. I just don't know where to start. It seems like an obvious idea so it's probably not patentable. But I guess if I came up with a specific implementation then maybe that would be?

I still have no idea how to get someone to manufacture it, or to mass produce and market it myself.
Microsoft issues its biggest-ever security fix
There's the no procrast settings, or alternatively there is your hosts file (C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc\hosts on windows). I added the following line to mine:

127.0.0.1 news.ycombinator.com

That means that if I open a browser and try to come here I get nothing. If I really want to visit here I need to open up the hosts file and comment out that line, which is slightly painful because you have to get administrator privileges to edit it. I find that the extra effort involved is enough to stop the mindless "I'm bored, I know, I'll check HN" kind of time wasting and make me realise I should be doing something productive.
I think that's called a continent.
First, I bet in my case neither one of us was really being pushed to the limit. two suburban white kids trying to become slightly less fat? not exactly running for our lives, you know? So it probably has more to do with will and pain tolerance than anything else.

weird, so I thought that the statistics backed up my anecdotes, but at least for pain tolerance, apparently the studies seem to show that men can tolerate more pain... which seems really weird to me. (Have you ever seen a woman give birth? I watched all five of my siblings being born, without any sort of anesthesia. I'm pretty sure that would kill me, or, at least, deter me from having more children.)

So yeah, the first couple pages of google results seem to show that you're right and I'm wrong, though, so eh, whatever. I guess I'm just a wuss.
My recollection is that Patti Schmidt ran a more rigidly structured ship: 1 hour of broad and relatively palatable stuff, 1 hour artist profile, and then 2 hours of miscellanea, with the final hour often being the really out-there installation stuff. Even when that last hour was unlistenable chin-stroking stuff, though, I still greatly appreciated that a show that would play it existed on the dial.

But yes, things were much simpler then. The demise of BNW seems to have coincided with the transition to satellite / podcasts / streaming for the CBC, at which point I can only assume that navigating licensing issues got a great deal more difficult. Even the single archival clip of BNW that CBC offers for streaming, from 1984, bears the notice Due to copyright issues, there are no songs in this clip.. That's just dismal.
Good points. I was hoping to come up with something easier to use than a cover, and possibly cheaper.
If it is legal and you can do it to make money, someone will. Why not these guys?

You are hoping the millions of software engineer out there don't produce something like this?

That is not going to happen. What you should be thinking of is ways to counteract such things. You can't just write code without sanitizing the input and don't expect somebody not test that you did. The same reasoning apply here, you should start thinking of profitable counter measures to render these guys useless.

[Side note: Just couple days ago someone reports a meeting between Microsoft and Adobe and Adobe stocks shot up 13%. This is one benefit of knowing where celebrity are located. But if you don't like it draw up your defense strategy.]