skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think I've just found my new news site. My only issue is the way the sharing links work- I browse a bit from my phone and iPad, and neither like mouseovers much. Works great though!
I have that, but where would I send it out? Here it is for reference: http://daytaapp.com/
Is there any context you can give about the project our environment in which you'll be working? And, why only Ruby vs .NET?
> In one case we got a 573KB 24-bit PNG down to a
> 49KB JPEG with a 4KB PNG alpha-mask!

I somehow don't think that the cost of using two requests vs just one really matters with that kind of size difference (unless you're serving high-latency customers on satellite internet or something).
Most open source companies that make money either have a commercial version or commercial projects based on the free software.
Why is Emacs used by everyone interviewed in Coders At Work?
That's a good observation: that humour online is mainly about showing off rather than bonding, like offline.
ReadWriteWeb (tips@readwriteweb) - email us and we will definitely take a look.
We are all geeks now.

This is sort of like the disappearance of the "jet set" as air travel became a commodity. People no longer dressed up to go on a flight, jobs involving flying all over were no longer so glamorous, and socializing on a plane or in an airport wasn't as fascinating.

But the huge benefit is what happens when so many have access to the power only a few had before.

So now that "everyone" is a geek, being a geek is not that distinctive anymore. But as the technology is a lot closer to people's lives, the impact of the alpha geek has become much larger.
Why on earth would inflation hit the US?

Leaving aside the oh-shit-we-are-all-fucked scenarios (ie, collapse of trust in the US currency or maybe another 70's era oil shock) what on earth could cause inflation at the moment?

Sure, your interest rates are low, but domestic demand levels are so low that everyone are desperately cutting prices to try and create some demand. Combine that with very high unemployment and it's simply not a high inflation environment.

I'd be more worried about deflation than inflation at the moment.
If someone were to implement this with vi keybindings, and/or Zen Coding macros, then it'd be truly noteworthy.
A DIY Telepresence Robot
As soon as there is a non-PayPal option I am there. I know why this is currently the only option, but maybe someone from one of the many subscription-billing startups that haunt HN should send Marco and email and offer him a deal... :)
If you program the way I do, it's certainly an experimental science!
eh, I might be talked into driving people around. I'm local to the area (my office is maybe 50 yards from the hacker dojo.) and I have a 7 seat minivan.
Let's add that regardless of what anyone says about how "great" programmers are n times more productive than mediocre programmers that productivity is not the number one driving force behind these job descriptions. Business people want bang for their buck, and they seem more informed by (non-existent) wunderkind genius teenager and movie hacker stereotypes than any kind of reality based measure. Budgeting concerns are where it's at.

One has to wonder how much the ranks of computer science programs everywhere would swell if the other half of this supposed rock star equation were present. Orgies, copious narcotics, groupies, press coverage, and throngs of adoring fans? For an office job? Shit yeah, I'll learn everything von Neumann ever day-dreamed about. Worst case scenario I can take my girlfriend out to the beach and write her a little PHP script that outputs a screed indicating my level of interest (over HTTP), right?
It looks fine to me. What browser/OS combination are you using?
uh, normal humans can't visit most of that.

also, OSH is like home depot. not sure why that's interesting.
Twilight Cell Phone Skins
That is only 45 pages. The full book is larger, if you look at the table of contents you'll see that this is incomplete.
Like the Tech page a lot and the idea in general.

Some thoughts/suggestions:

- Change the font. Really distracting.

- Like the simplicity and little splash of color provided by the favicons.

- Agree with photon_off on the popup menu. It also overlaps with its headline.

- I'd make the 'shared by' column more subtle (e.g., gray text instead) so the headlines jump out more.

- Add some padding between it and the headline as the longer headlines run right into it.

- A more visual way of representing the 'shared by' column might be nicer as well. It's not clear it matters to me exactly how many people shared an article but getting a sense of one headline vs. the others seems valuable.

- Totally a personal preference for me, but how repetitive "People" is in the 'shared by' column distracts me; the fact that it's a capital 'P' does too. :)

Nice work though. I can see this becoming a nice browser home page if you add some more customizability around the sources and their ordering.
Great list, thank you for compiling this for the rest of us
:( So sad
You’re a Bad Programmer, Really?
But it's forever a superset of C. Not a bad thing, but that shouldn't be the only option.
Thank you for sharing it. Gives me more encouragement for future projects.
Scoble's short summary doesn't do justice to Leland Stanford's extremely interesting life - he lived in an age when the phrase "conflict of interest" didn't exist. He wasn't just Vice President of the Central Pacific Railroad - he was also governor of California! So you can imagine that he had some say in which California railroad would eventually link up to help form the Pacific Railroad!
i'd argue that almost everything done online (posting to twitter, writing a blog, and yes posting comments here, updating facebook) is done primarily to show off, garner attention, feel important, show people how gosh darn smart you are, etc.

anybody who disagrees with this just wants even more attention.
Chasing Fox
A comments section for the stories would be cool too. Make it like HN. It feels so lonely without community feedback.
True, it's even harder if, you're an entrepreneur telling the whole truth while competing against a larger, slower, yet much more established organization that's completely lying and comes off looking better in the process.
I'm not sure the two things are mutually exclusive. Being a "computing adult" doesn't mean that you don't enjoy tinkering.

The kind of stuff that you mention, like building a carputer, is something that I'd do for fun, not because I really wanted a way to play MP3s.
That would certainly be beyond the break even point. :) In that case it's definitely another tool to keep in the back pocket in case needed.

(Somehow I missed that line in the article by focusing in on the code.)
Lessons from the Haystack Affair
Thanks, excellent feedback. I'll do all of this. Also, I do plan on adding some more customization options.
I'm planning on adding a custom iOS interface. I just haven't had a chance yet. Soon though!
http://liberationtechnology.stanford.edu/ has lots of good programs.
Thanks for your suggestions! I figured a web app wouldn't be ideal for our needs. Our challenge is that we have to transmit and process up to 12 leads at a time. Most of the products out there today are only using a few ECG leads. We also have to design and build the the actual device that will transmit from the body. It looks like a native Windows app is usually the standard for software in this field of work. Thanks!
As the database grows i'll definitely look into adding time-based views. I added Seattle because that's where I live, but I'm planning on adding some customization features so you could make it regional.
This is one thing I neglected to address in my piece due to lack of space. It's not a difference of kind but of magnitude. Offline humor also serves many of the same operational purposes that online does but they are not solely comprised of them.
I'm definitely planning on adding customization features.
I would assume the OP means corporate compared to noisebridge. Now, I've never been to the place but I hear it is even less formal than the dojo.

If the dojo is corporate, though, I'm a CEO.
I'll move back to helvetica or lucida grande when I move it onto a proper grid. For data, I'm screen scraping facebook's recommendations iframe source for different domains.

I'll see about better grouping and definitely will change the popup menu. Thanks for the feedback!
Lava = Libre Java?
Don’t wait for the check: TabbedOut raises $2.05M
399 to 1 ratio in transport to fuel costs? Is this for real or hyperbole?
What is Value? Part 1
The Social Network's Women Aren't Prizes, They're props
Me too :) http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1473897

Granted, Apple has a lot of engineering to do before they turn all these disparate parts into a coherent, battle-tested runtime on the order of .NET or the JVM. But it will be interesting to see how this evolves...
It's fairly easy to criticize something that somebody did, but it's usually a lot harder to do better.

From what I understand about how Daniel put this together, he wrote some software to create these lists, he did not try to add his own 'value judgement' to what got on there or not.

Presumably he could have done a better job, but that goes for any piece of software, so instead of saying that 'we could do a better job' try to be specific and indicate which books you think belonged there and which did not (and maybe why?) that way Daniel has something that he can use to try to figure out if he can improve things.

There have been many attempts at 'crowdsourcing a list of relevant books' but none that I've seen got longer term traction and I'm really happy that someone is willing to invest the time and the effort in to making this happen.

First versions almost always suck, now let's see how to make it much better than what it is today without diminishing the contribution in a way that reads as though you think Daniel intends to score 'big bucks' from this somehow.
Or you could just read Chapter 4 of SICP: http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/full-text/book/book-Z-H-25.html..., the first edition of which was published 26 years ago.
Interactive film experiment using HTML5 and google streetview
oh sorry i don't think i made my point clear. i didn't mean to say that primarily-male gyms were misogynist. i was referencing the supposedly misogynist frat parties portrayed in the movie and saying that an equivalent form of sexism might be an all-women's gym (or social club) where men were treated like sex objects. one of the parents said something to the effect of "heh heh men would like being treated like that", to which i responded, "ummm, not really". ok this is silly and off-topic by now :)
well, we have all the equipment and a few snobs; my master plan to get others to roast beans for me daily and keep coffee on tap has largely failed, but we do have most of the equipment (we've got an espresso machine but no milk steamer... that's about all we're missing.)
You cannot,IMO. Even if you outsource to a sub-contractor in a country with a strong IP regime it is probably not worth your time,money and effort to pursue infringement. The best way to protect your IP with sub-contractors is to not give them access to your IP.
It's important to note that during each "nerd phase" that the author cites there were also other technologies being developed that simply never exploded. That doesn't mean that nerds weren't toying with them.

That same concept applies today. There are tons and tons of startups out there with plenty of alpha geeks playing with each. Some will inevitably take off while others won't. Regardless, the alpha geeks will not serve as an indicator of what will go mainstream as the alpha geeks will play with everything.

> In those days, it was really easy to see where consumer technology was going. You could just look at the nerds and know that’s what you’d probably look like in 2-5 years.

I heavily disagree with that statement. No one knew that the internet (or any other example the author cites) was going to be THAT big. Let's look to more modern times... No one in 2007 was watching the "nerds" play on Twitter and thinking to themselves: "that's what I'm going to be doing 2-5 years from now."

Ultimately, this post is indirectly asking what's going to be the next big thing. That's a question that only time - and not the nerds or alpha geeks - can answer.
Exactly.

Well, that and I'm sick of everything in the goddamned world being a subscription service now. Can't you do it like Pandora and make a big, obvious, ONE TIME PAYMENT, WILL NOT RENEW option?

Or better yet, just give me an empty box so I can pay you a few years worth of "subscription" at once and not think about it again. I'm sick of having a million monthly charges on my credit card.

Take my money, please.
From Geek to Chic: a decade of smartphone evolution
A List of Useful Tools for Startups
Awesome. tweets
But then something strange happened. Lots of people switched to Apple laptops. But the nerds didn’t move on. My nerdiest programmer friends use the same computer as my wife.

No? He circulates in a different universe to mine where it feels more like a 50/40/10 Mac/Lin/Win mix among the "nerdy programmer" group.
When I clicked on the link I was thinking that it was the Mac app I had read about a while ago...and I couldn't think of the name! Thanks for jogging my memory.
If internet access is enough to declare yourself a 'geek' then we're not there yet, only ~29% of the world now has internet access:

http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats.htm

If just having a cell phone counts then we're there at least for the majority of the population, apparently we now have 5 billion cell phone subscriptions.

http://cellphones.org/blog/interesting-stats-on-cell-phones/
Rails 3: First Impressions from a Veteran Ruby on Rails Guy
Perhaps the nerds will in fact take root and be the only ones still running a full "desktop" OS in the coming future.

I like iOS but I do not want my primary computer to go that simplified route.
Being a geek / hacker at heart is not about using the latest whizbang gadget. It is also not about using the newest medium of communication or hanging out in the places tech journalists write about in exquisite detail. It is about mastering one field and using the experience gained from it to jumpstart into the next one. The problem is that it is often impossible to tell what will be the new thing of today that we will fondly look back on tomorrow.

Some may say today it is Twitter streams or Facebook walls or they may say it is the startup culture like we have here on HN but nobody knows. It could be something as benign as upvoting only thoughtful comments here on HN instead of funny ones like on reddit/fark/digg that could bring about a long-lasting effect on the future of open discussion on the Internet. We could be the guys that beat Eternal September while sharing our code and ideas with others. We don't have to phreak or use IRC to be considered true geeks. We could use the same tools as our moms (I'm using an iPad right now, I got one for my mom too) and still be doing very different things. She plays Farmville while I'm trying to create apps that help the disabled.

The fact that our tools have matured to the level of flexibility and stability that both hackers and their moms can use them is something to be proud of, no despair. After all, I use the same faucets as my mom and the same washing machines. 60 years ago the geeks made their own electronic devices. Oh and we still do that too. Check out the Arduino forums.
A few fun notes about Bucks (I worked there in my last years in school and the first few years afterwards)

Jamis's son Tyler won The Amazing Race. When Tyler was graduating high school he wanted to go to Stanford but was having trouble getting in so Jamis rented a billboard on 101 to pump him to the admissions folks (he ended up at UCSC) http://tylermacniven.com/ Tyler is an interesting guy in his own right.

One year the Village Pub in Woodside was being remodeled so on April 1st Jamis put a "future home of the Woodside Hooters" sign (with the real Hooters logo) on the outside. The town freaked out (you have to know the town of Woodside to appreciate this)

Jamis put together the Sand Hill Road Sandbox Derby one year. The rules were pretty much just that your vehicle needed to be gravity powered and had to have brakes. They then lined the sides of Sand Hill with hay bales and sent these home made contraptions down it. The winner was built by some sort of NASA team and looked like an extended tear drop - it flew. Last I checked it was still on the wall at Bucks. Other entries was one made out of bread by Le Boulanger and one made out of a bed including boxspring and mattress with bicycle wheels (which almost won)

Bucks' walls are covered with different collected pieces of crap on the walls. Some are real and some are bullshit (The broken James McEnroe racket from Wimbledon is a Billy Jean King model racket?). In the back by the restroom there's a reply from the USSR on an inquiry from Jamis on purchasing Lenin's body . Jamis's wife Margret wanted a new car one year and had to keep a special account off the books so Jamis wouldn't spend her car money on something like an actual Cosmonaut space suit ($30,000 - its on the ceiling).
Sounds like a still picture version of a Flip Video camera.
Chillax..
remove the .h/.m split

The header/@interface is more there for you than the compiler. That is, you don't have to have the @implementation and the @interface in separate files. One way is to use the @class declaration to say that the class will exist at run-time and the compiler doesn't have to worry about the lack of a header. Another way is to #import the .m directly.

There are two issues that come up with the first method: A warning when you use the class about it and methods/dot-syntax accessors possibly not existing and problems if you want to subclass a class. There's probably a compiler flag to suppress the warnings for the former problem and class_setSuperclass for the latter. Even if it is deprecated.

For the second method, you'll need to do some trickery to prevent duplicate symbols. Its solvable, but the exact details escapes me at the moment.

Anyway, here's a quick sample project to show the first way in action: http://thisismyinter.net/misc/hn/Lone.zip.

If you guessed that its a giant hack either way, you'd be right!

Add namespaces

This is tricker than you'd think, mostly due to the C heritage it has. We'll probably be stuck with class prefixes for a long time. At least they makes classes Googleable.
Are you looking for domestic or overseas production? Either way, and in particular for overseas production, you may need to find an intermediary, someone who deals with a number of factories and can find the right one for your product.
Indeed, but I'm not sure one pun rescues the whole thing.
He notes at the end to ignore maker culture but why not consider that as possible to reach the masses? With things like the Arduino and 3D printers making hacking easier and easier, maybe non-nerds will start (return to) building things.
What's the advantage of that over a delicious tag "read_later", that i've been using for years?

delicious work on all browsers (natively), iphone, android.

well, not for epub readers without a one line cron job on my desktop... but again, it works with android :)
"From there to here, from here to there, funny things are everywhere!"

I have been introduced to this masterpiece by reading some of the books to my daughter and it's a real delight, apparently as much for her than it is for me.

I wish I had these books where I grew up.
Many Linux desktop applications use Python as an extension language, and many Linux desktop applets are written in Python. Find one that interests you and take a look at the bug list.

Another idea is to take a look at the projects on accepted into the Google Summer Of Code and see if any have projects that weren't accepted.
What are you hoping to achieve there? Attract investors? Find employees? Get some publicity? Stumble upon some people who are getting married, or have friends that are? Who goes to these things?

What if you had a little case of business cards and as someone walked nearby, you complimented their shirt, tie, whatever and then got down on one knee, opened the card case and said "Will you Marrily me?" Then after their laugh or puzzled response, get up, deliver your one-line description/personal story (e.g., "I quit my day-job to start an online tool for people getting married.") and give them a few cards. Ask them to pass them on to any friends they have who are engaged or dating.

Something like that anyway.

Might be good practice because you're probably better off going to a wedding expo or doing deals with leaving your promo cards with related businesses (cake companies, dress companies, etc).
This is an excellent suggestion. Other suggestions: read the wikipedia articles on Simple LR and General LR parsers; google "python descriptor" and read the top results.
Well, they did say this was for the "forward bases" (read, bases located inside enemy controlled or sympathetic areas). Keep in mind that they also said that for every 24 convoys, they lost on average 1 person. There were probably at least 1 injured for each killed (maybe many injured for each killed). Ignoring any death benefits, how much do you think it costs to keep a marine in a hospital (after airlifting them back to the states or elsewhere in the western world) for a few months and pay for lifetime visits to the VA? 399 to 1 sounds conservative.
Yep, but that article goes on to say:

The only real solution is to combine lossy JPEG storage of the image with lossless storage of a transparency mask using some other algorithm.

Which is exactly what the OP has done.
Nothing To Install launched
I'll admit HN is where I kill a lot of my time online, right after blogs...
This is a fantastic idea. Sorry you didn't get more feedback.
You're right when you think about it - royal does have a double meaning of 'real' - as in 'what a royal pain in the ass'.
Sitting more than 6hrs/day increases likelihood of premature death
Your main computer will not run iOS till you can build iOS from within iOS. When that is possible, iOS can be considered a full desktop. Till then, you will need an OS that can build iOS.
Was the refund automatic? I am quite sure I paid the $5 but don't recall seeing a refund. Maybe I got it but I'd love to know where to look ...
The biggest change is the improvement of devices, platforms, development tools and distribution. The bar for playing with new tech has lowered significantly, in effect shifting the line of "alpha geek" further and further into developer territory. It used to take a pretty determined geek mindset just to get things like mp3s working, whereas now it doesn't take much at all to bring some new idea to the consumer market in a reasonably usable form. In other words tech is no longer geeky in general.
You would think they would have just suspended any new revenue share pages. So they go people writing for them under the pretense of residual income, got the content and had it updated for them then removed any benefit for the content producer.

One things for sure, the already bad quality of mahalo will get even worse when these writers who were motivated to maintain quality articles by residual income are gone.
Sorry to be a n00b, what is, "What didn't help is that you posted it as 'self post', so one without a link (those are penalized)?"
Smartphones, syncing your facebook, twitter, foursquare, etc in an automated way. Using the latest iphone / android app. 4g phones / usb modems / portable wifi points. Going without home internet. Setting up permanent "windows" between offices or houses located in different states / countries using always on video calls. Using robots to telecommute. Building self replicating desktop 3d printers. Using their smartphones to control their home automation. Building wearable computers. Buying 3d televisions. Putting solar arrays on their roofs.

I've barely scratched the surface.
Objective-C: To retain delegates or not.