skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Any interest in this API as a service?
I put this together to use for a couple of personal projects and thought I'd see if there's any interest in something like this as a pay service.

It's essentially a hosted REST-like API for job scheduling - give it a cron expression or a single time in the future and it notifies the application by HTTP/S callback at the appropriate moment(s). You can provide an arbitrary payload to be delivered along with the callback containing identifying state.

I'm using it mostly for scheduling test executions and user lifecycle management, but I imagine it could be useful for quite a bit more.

So, is there any demand for this? If so, perhaps I'll take part in the launch-in-November push going on now.

I threw together a document on the API with more details - comments welcome!

http://job-scheduler.info/
Ask HN:Math Books
Hello HN,

I recently finshed reading stroud's and john bird's engineering mathematics.but i want to continue to read as much as math books possible.(not sure what the motive is!!)
I'am really curious to know your personal list .Please list a whole bunch of math books that you've read and interested in. it's ok to list right from elementary to the most advanced mathematics under the sun.(also include physics right from elementary to advanced).
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You probably have too-small a screen or too small letters on your screen, though for what it's worth there really i no ergonomic way to use a laptop that doesn't involve at least one of an external keyboard or screen. Increase your font sizes, and you may not feel the need to lean in so much. (And/or see an eye doc.)

And working at home (or in a startup you run, I guess) means you can do things to help your health and productivity even if they might seem ridiculous, like take naps and walk while you type. Yet another reason I don't see myself ever having a 'normal' job again. (And most people seem to think my treadmill desk is pretty cool, fwiw.)
New York City area, NY, USA. Manhattan is outrageous but the surrounding area is cheaper. I live comfortably with few compromises at $2800/month.

Rent: $1500 for half a 1300ft^2 apartment. You can easily get much cheaper than this.
Food: $300/month for expensive organic groceries
Restaurants: $40/person at mid-tier restaurants, $20/person at lower end but nice places.
Utilities: $150/electricity, $120/cable/phone/internet(15mbps)
Transportation: $2/subway, $90/monthly pass
Insurance: $250/month for health, $50/month for dental

Salary varies widely. I think $60k for college grads up to $150k for senior people. Double it if you work in finance. Roughly 30-40% goes to taxes and stuff. Lots of hipsters working as waiters live happily here, so it's possible to get by on very little.
The other day I read about a few indigenous tribes in Madhya Pradesh that were developing their own scripts for writing, each just a little different from the next.

We might be taking this Be Indian Buy Indian thing too far.
Let me take the flak: No.

Why? Well - unless you have a very specific reason [1] it seems to me that LFS is too much time invested for not enough return. As others commented, you can go a long way with a source based distribution. Learning a different distribution's way to do things might already be pretty interesting (and arguably more useful: You'll probably never hit a LFS system in real use that needs fixing, but you might stumble upon a solaris/freebsd machine or even just a heap of Suse/RedHat/Debian/Slackware machines) and challenging. Start with that!

LFS is a purely academic thing for me. You follow the guide, just to end up with a system that is really nothing for daily use (or - needs too much work).

All the above assumes that your definition of a linux poweruser is someone that understands the darkest secrets of the OS. Which - is not exactly necessary. I know plenty of users that I'd consider power users because they focus on things they actually need (and improve those, get better at those), not things that somehow make this possible.

Cue the car analogy:
A race driver would be a power user for me, I don't require that he can build a race car from scratch..

[1]: Some reasons I could imagine to change the answer to a yes:

1) You want to really build your own distribution for an embedded device and don't like openembedded

2) You are (or plan to) a system administrator and want to learn more underlying details for your job.

3) You plan to get into system-level programming/contribution and want to understand the status quo first.
Entrepreneur Survival Guide – Be Part Of The Solution
Explain xkcd : It's cause you're dumb
There are a lot of misconceptions about CommonJS modules in the browser. You've touched on most of them.

Of course you need a loader or packaging script, any module system that wants to handle dependencies will. Script tags are inadequate for anything except the simplest cases.

You can load your modules asynchronously, even though the main "require()" API is synchronous. Simply load the modules and their dependencies up front before executing them. This is what we've been doing for years in the Objective-J loader, and several CommonJS browser loaders already do it.

Also, I believe "require.async(id, callback)" is part of the spec now too, and they're working on an "async module definition" spec, which allows loading in script tags with minimal boilerplate ("require.def(id, function() { /module/ })")
Introducing KiokuJS at Joose (Javascript persistence layer)
The making of Acorde | I love typography, the typography and fonts blog
Marty McFly’s Actual Movie Sneakers for Sale: $15,000
From what I understand he only had to re-implement the canvas calls in the game engine.
"I of course had to make some changes to the engine, but the game source code is exactly the same as for the web version."
i write my ideas down, but mostly to get them out of my head. or, more accurately, less in my head. i am often 'distracted' / overwhelmed by them. putting them on paper (well, textedit to be precise) makes it easier for me to let go of them.
It's good to be able to switch positions. You can get an (expensive) desk that easily adjusts height, or a drafting stool so you can sit at your standing desk, or two desks. I found that I did tire of standing, but getting one of those comfort mats for standing helped, and adding the treadmill so I can walk or stand helped more (and has made it much easier for me to lose weight, I believe).
I heart rebase, but I haven't figure out how to keep a remote branch in synch, I rebase and when I try to push to the remote branch it fails, I sometimes end up just creating a new local & remote branch :/
My current point of view: If you have a large base of Java developers who don't or can't switch to JavaScript, GWT is a good choice.
BTW you will also need a framework for your "complex front-end logic" JavaScript code. If you don't go for GWT you should look for good MVC JavaScript framework: Ext.JS, Cappuccino, Sproutcore, Sammy.JS ...
PlayStation purpura.
Good point. Maybe we should stop thinking of Lexus and Acura as luxury brands.

Real luxury brands are the ones those of us in the middle class can't even consider buying. Maybach. Bentley. Rolls Royce. Bugatti. I could drive a Lexus today if I wanted. Even a BMW. I don't think I'll ever have enough money to blow on a Rolls.
While everyone else is mucking about with a new blog...we're years ahead in the marketing war.

So, we should "tell [our] story" but we'll really just be "mucking about"?
Wow, My FIRST Yahoo Widget got 1000+ downloads
If this should ever go public there will sure as hell be an abstraction layer that translates API calls to canvas or OpenGL ES, respectively
I love me a good arithmetic/algebra review -- but in the end, I am not qualified to rub elbows with the geniuses of Mensa, as I lack the essential requisite domain-specific kitten/mitten training.

References aside, I certifiably lack enough legit brains to step to Mensa's gatekeepers. But now I'm curious -- has anyone got any anecdotes of Mensa gatherings that defied stereotypes? Such as for example those alluded to in Mr. Onstad's synopsis of Mensa here: http://achewood.com/index.php?date=03222005
I care. I actually want to try one out and hopefully get rid of my android phone.

I must admit though, I'm mostly excited to write mobile apps in C# and use XNA.
Ask HN:Anyone interested in decompilers?
Hi,
I worked on a very basic C decompiler during my undergrad. Somehow I moved on to other stuff and left the project. Today I was just browsing through my old code and came across it and all the reference material I collected for it.
Now I again feel the urge to restart my project (I hope the urge stays long enough :P ).
Just wanted to know if there are any fellow HNers interested in decompiler stuff .
I assume you mean divide-and-conquer the feature branch history into segments, and merge a segment at a time into master? That can work well.

Unfortunately, often the reason you have a long-lived branch is because it's some stop-the-world change (e.g. "refactor data model") which is pretty much all-or-nothing.

Of course it's always possible with enough discipline to turn a stop-the-world change into a series of incremental steps, and usually it's well worth that effort (for risk management etc) - but sometimes that's not feasible.
but nobody from the outside can see what you are talking about.

How do we know you're not piping everything to Israel? Or worse, Google?
even I am a full time employee (but m a Fresh Graduate). I have been seriously giving a thought on starting something of my own or at least deploy some application on apps engine and throw it for review on HN. I work on Java. Currently located at Cornell University, working on Semantic Web Application. Interested in Information retrieval and Machine Learning. Currently working on Semantic search and developing a small hobby application of entity finder. Can I be of help to anyone ? or anyone wants to work together towards some idea/application ? I struggle to take out some time for hobby projects with all day packed with project and assignments ( I have taken some additional courses in Comp. Sci here) but still there is this constant urge to do something more interesting and throw it out to people.
Agree (the intern was hypothetical, but agree that long-lived branches are usually symptoms of human rather than tooling problems). However these things happen, and if you are in a hole, it's nice if your tools let you dig yourself out :)
You misunderstand the meaning of test, the UPS tests itself periodically as part of its normal operation. In this case, if it fails the test it takes your servers with it.

I imagine the test is to ensure the accuracy of the battery runtime prediction, it transfers your load off line power and onto the inverter & batteries. Unfortunately something happens that causes the UPS to shut down or pause rather than immediately switch back to line power.
Often the only evidence is that your servers power-cycled unexpectedly, sometimes the UPS actually switches off entirely during the test, however.
I could believe this. I feel like most of my discomfort just comes from sitting in the same position over a certain stretch of time, maybe an hour or two.
I can't really tell how JSBuild works because the docs aren't very helpful and I don't feel like diving into the code right now, but I can tell you RequireJS only supports modules in one of the wrapped "transport" / "async module definition" formats, NOT all CommonJS modules. The author is very opinionated about this so I wouldn't expect that to change any time soon.

Yabble does support unwrapped modules, so you might want to take a look at that: http://github.com/jbrantly/yabble
My biggest beef with local storage is the seemingly arbitrary 5MB storage limit. I understand that you have to set a limit somewhere, but why so little?

I've already hit this limit when trying to do long-term caching of server-side data in one web app. It's 2010, why can't we have 100MB of storage per domain?
237 Techcrunch stories - a break down
Ok, I am in too!
I do sit like this on an aeron chair, leaned back as far as it can go. I almost never have back issues, but in this position (exactly like the far right picture in the article) my neck eventually starts to ache.

Good for back, bad for neck...
I actually prefer having two ancestors, because you can analyse different kinds of change in isolation. If your branch was to add a new widget to the UI, and there's a regression I'm trying to find in the backend data munging code, it's better if I can trivially ignore all the changes from the new-ui-widget branch, because I know that's very unlikely to have broken the data munging. That's harder to do if you've linearised the history.
Shocking results for Germany. Know where that is coming from...
But once you have done a bit there it is quiet straight forward.
So let me know if I can help anybody doing business or starting a company in Germany.
eh, the old car issue aside (I fail to see how working on older cars is easier than newer cars... quite the opposite, really. the newer stuff is full of computerized diagnostics. I mean, the computer won't solve all your problems, but good god, have you ever tried to rebuild a carburetor? adjusting the 'richness' of your fuel air blend? oh yes I like the computer, and the OBD system.) it really is a straight time for money play. For the basic stuff, it's pretty easy to get to the point where it takes you as long as the mechanic will charge you for (most mechanics charge 'book rate' - e.g. how much time the book says a task will take rather than how much time it takes them. It's not too difficult to get up to that speed.)

So really, for any given car, if you work on it yourself, you shouldn't be spending much more time than what the shop would charge you for the same work, and, uh, like I said, $90/hr post-tax isn't something most of us sneeze at. (Of course, if you can sneeze at that, good for you!)

that said, right now I'm taking my vehicle to a professional. the thing is, sure, the car only needs something once every 6 months, if you don't count oil changes (which I usually take in, just 'cause it's worth twenty bucks to not deal with the oil) - the thing is, where I am now, maintaining a garage would cost me more than just paying to take my car in. So yeah, it doesn't always make sense.
4 Things Video Games Teach Us About Motivating People
Summary: Yesterday's predictions for tomorrow's world.

Sorry, but "legacy support" is a pretty weak leg to stand on for future success. Right now, we're watching companies (even large ones) moving away from a monolithic approach to software and marching toward an a la carte future. Not everyone is going to make this leap -- there will always be dinosaurs that linger on past their time -- but the future is small. Small companies providing tools that talk to each other and share information.
There's a lot of interest in the mobile and JavaScript communities for a JavaScript engine you can distribute on iOS. Games are one thing, but with this you could take cross-platform, natively packaged web apps to a whole new level.
The Era Of the Uber-Smartphone Is Here
Optimizing ASP.Net
Sort of like an even more native Titanium Appcelerator? < http://appcelerator.com >
The Four Steps to the Epiphany by steve Blank is pretty good at guiding you through the customer development process.
"Refresh this page a couple of times if the above link fails to load the first time." - This gives me great confidence and I can't wait to give them my credit card number.
Microsoft launches Windows Phone 7 smartphones
Yes, topic specific hashtags would be possible. However, I think the chance of a channel becoming active enough to become interesting is bigger when it's targeted to an existing community. Like HN.

Thanks for the notification suggestion, will think about that!
Maybe next someone will write a competing implementation and call it Turbolisp...
Deploying Clojure Services with Crane
Check if one string is a rotation of another string
git push --force remote local-branch-name:remote-branch-name

(or if local-branch-name and remote-branch-name are the same:)

git push --force remote branch-name

(N.B. if there's a chance that anyone else is working on the same branch, then think twice before doing --force, because you may spoil their afternoon. Read 'git help push' for more info.)
May not help, but based on this (even though it is a few years old):
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/193896/whats-a-good-c-dec...

You may want to look at joining up with these guys (this looks fairly interesting):
http://boomerang.sourceforge.net/

Or these guys:
http://www.hex-rays.com/decompiler.shtml

(btw- I am more into Java decompiling (as a user). For Java, I've used Jad but it looks like there are a few others: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/31353/is-jad-the-best-jav... and a number of people like JD: http://java.decompiler.free.fr/ )
Can I have URL of your service?
So far I only reimplemented those Canvas API functions needed for the game; the most important one being .drawImage().

What I mean by "reimplement", is providing a .drawImage function for JavaScript that works in the same way as it does in the browser, but uses OpenGL-ES behind the scenes. This reimplementation is done in native Objective C.

The changes I had to make to Impact (the "HTML5" engine) are concerned with the loading of images, scaling, input and getting a reference to the canvas element and its drawing context. But I guess I could provide a dummy "document" and "getElementById" function, so that you can just write some JavaScript using Canvas and run it in the browser and on the iPhone unchanged.

Note that this whole idea isn't exactly new:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0UN2iYrZmEY
Rate my startup: Product Place Me
APC is the Cisco/IBM/Microsoft of UPS's - nobody got fired for buying one.

That said, you can get the same quality for cheaper, but UPS's have a network effect - you don't want to have to install multiple shutdown software versions that work in different ways on all your equipment.

Also there's a lot of equipment out there (RAID frames, etc) that will only speak the APC protocol over a DB-9 serial link, unfortunately...
More Twitter Fueled Social TV Coming to the Big Screen
:-) We're mostly a Java shop and I'm a "middle" manager, so I can easily play dumb. "I just read magazines about this computer stuff!"
If your goal is improving your UNIX knowledge: it may help, or it may not. Back in the days when LFS was new, I saw lots of people trying it, but who didn't learn much along the way since they would just literally paste the commands from the LFS book. If you use it like that, it is just a way to waste your time, and leave you with an unmanageable Linux system.

What may be more interesting is to try one of the minimalistic BSDs (NetBSD or OpenBSD). You will likely learn far more, e.g. that many GNU-isms that you may have gotten accustomed to are not UNIX-isms. You'll be able to build your own customized NetBSD systems using the excellent build infrastructure. You can play with some of the nice packet filters (ipf/pf). Or spend time fixing pkgsrc ports that fail ;).
Or, if you're not VC-funded, just start small and grow organically by word of mouth, if it's truly a good idea? Rather than try to hit a home run at launch? That also gives you more time to ramp up for demand, as you learn how to do it.

That's certainly the approach I plan to take...
Well, if your aim is to understand the basics of OS by engaging with its code then you can try "Pintos". It was designed to introduce undergraduates to concepts in operating system design and implementation by requiring them to implement significant portions of a real operating system, including thread and memory management and file system access.
1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pintos
2. http://www.stanford.edu/class/cs140/projects/pintos/pintos_1...
That article seemed incredibly long for something that failed to tell me even a single thing about the phone, aside from it "looking great" or something. Come on.

Though in a way, it almost doesn't matter. Microsoft has to offer the features of iPhone and Android to even be taken seriously, so we have to assume that is just there. What they really need can't be seen through promising text and screenshots, anyway: they really need polish.

Microsoft has been notoriously bad about leaving all kinds of holes in their products, so that they look OK on stage but end up feeling clunky as hell. If they are to have a chance this time, it is important that their phones feel simple and logical; and, dare I say it, they should even be a joy to use. Microsoft will never earn my respect until they can prove that they get this, and deliver it.
The speedup is substantial, at least in this case. Biolab Disaster has to draw lots of small 8x8 pixel squares (about 500 for each frame) to produce the background map - which seems to be awfully slow in the iOS browser.

Running in the browser, I had about 10 frames per second as noted in my previous blog post: http://www.phoboslab.org/log/2010/09/biolab-disaster
Heh, you don't. Never trust anyone on the internet. If you are interested I can throw my code onto github, but that won't convince anyone that I'm not running a modified version. Also, I run this on a virtual server that is across the country from me. I can't see it. I don't know who has access to the physical server. Heck, I don't even trust it THAT much. Your best bet is to use FireGPG while communicating through this thing, which makes the whole thing useless.

Then again, you have my word for it: I am not knowingly piping your conversations anywhere. I don't log them. I don't care. I'm not Google and can't possibly make a profit on it.
Tons of people prefer the Microsoft environment.

Neither Google nor Apple have offered many of these people what they want in a dev environment. Apple's required an odd language up until very recently, and even the C# language you can write to doesn't do many of the things they're used to doing C# in.

Android's development resources are capable, but Eclipse is a far cry from Visual Studio...

I assume tons of people will flock to the Win7 Phones unless they are just horrible once they get going.

Many game companies can target this platform much more easily than the iPhone/Android handsets as it also works off XNA.
Secret asp.net performance hack
Exactly, or like PhoneGap. For example, you could write an Appcelerator or PhoneGap app and call into native code from a JavaScript bridge. Right now, each native API needs to be explicitly wrapped by Appcelerator or PhoneGap.
In the poem, the kittens find their mittens, so shouldn't the answer be 0.
Riding out the storm - How to save a sinking ship
So I am. But this thing was an exercise in using Node.js, not a way to make a buck, so T&C were not on my initial TODO list. As for privacy, see my original comment: the data is not logged. The rest is up to you.
Crowdsourced programing a new trend in TV?
I am wondering how they can integrate Twitter and other social network input even closer.
What are your thoughts?
What can I do better? No one is using the site.
Apple has a similar problem in some ways to what Windows had: Windows developed as a GUI layer on top of DOS. DOS and early Windows were single user operating systems. All the multi-user stuff that has come to Windows since has felt tacked on. *nix on the other hand was built from the ground up as a multi-user OS.

The iPad is less elegant in this scenario. I believe this highlights Apple's philosophy that the iPad is a personal computing device more than anything else. So rather than creating a complicated multi-user system, they opted for simplicity.

On a side note: your calendar and mail problem can probably be solved by using restrictions to put passwords on those apps, which you should probably have anyway if the content is sensitive.
Ask HN: How do you go about managing your beta tests?
Say you've got a new version of your app coming out, but before you release you want to run a beta test to make sure there are no last minute bugs or usability problems.

What tools do you use? Are there any you'd recommend?