skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Small world. I actually worked on some of the content for the Inventor's Kit guide. When you read "You want orange, you want teal, you want aubergine!" that's me. :)

Happy to receive feedback on the guide as you work through it.

I was introduced to the Arduino nearly four years ago and actually earn income now from Physical Computing related teaching, writing and project development.

Creating tangible things and escaping the world of the purely virtual is really fun. (I write as I'm surrounded by a soldering iron and a bunch of XBee related components. :) )

(I was actually planning to submit the original of the following video but DEFCON's taken them down for some reason. But...if you're interested in a security-slanted introduction to the Arduino you might be interested in this session I co-presented at DEFCON18 this year about the Arduino: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XotF9FyiAZc )

If you get the chance to play with some of this stuff, do it!

[Oh, and, that whole flashing LED buzz is an interesting phenomenon and it continues as you gain experience--except instead of signifying you've got everything installed okay it might mean your signal has reached the satellite and returned back again. :D ]
Good point - reminds me of the ridiculous amount of money Yahoo was making back in the early days of internet, probably not going to be sustainable.
> In poor communities I've seen it's sometimes the case that shopping at an actual grocery store can be a two or three hour round trip due to bus schedules while the corner store is a five minute walk.

These are usually called "food deserts".
I'm using a similar approach in a node.js module if you'd like to try it. http://github.com/stagas/chaos stores the data in files using the sha1 hash key like you do, you could easily implement an http api layer on top of it. I get about 2k writes/s and 4k reads/s on a regular hd, and 40k-60k writes/reads per second on a ssd.
I agree with both you. The thing is, we don't need to appeal to a sense of balance. It's good practice to write tests for the things we change. But, in every code base under version control, we have data. We can make this empirical. Start aggressively writing tests for the hotspots.
My red-green colour blindness doesn't affect me on most Web sites. Sometimes the designer decides to make all links dark red (indistinguishable from black for me) and removes the underlines. Now, that really is annoying! I suppose I should just use a custom stylesheet to override those cases.
Seems pretty obvious to me: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inventive_step_and_non-obviousn...
Well, if we had a parliamentary system in the US, maybe we could have libertarians here too :)
i agree -
It costs tens (or hundreds) of thousands of dollars to sue someone residing in another country... That's if you can even find a lawyer to take the case against someone in a third world country.

If you feel you owe him more, give him what you think he is worth to buy him out. If you think you owe him nothing, then cut off communication from him.

He has to sue you in your country of residence so until you start hearing from local courts, I wouldn't worry.
Don't ask your friends and family. most of them, I assume, don't understand the field. Ask people who understand. Go to an entrepreneurship meetup, such as the HN meetups in various cities, and talk to those people. They'll understand what you're saying, and challenge your business/tech assumptions and decisions.
I find it helpful to be able to pop up a pane alongside emacs to do shell stuff. I realize you can do it in emacs but this way I can be certain my existing emacs buffers aren't going to be shuffled in any way. It's always nice to have options, even if there are multiple ways to do the same thing.
Landing Fortune 500 Clients, Increasing Revenue 600% – With Mari Luangrath
Asynchronous Programming in C# 5.0 part two: Whence await?
If you don't agree with them (and I'm using the royal "you" here), then why are libertarians lining up across the country to support these loonies?

Maybe you're ok, but libertarians in general? Part and parcel of the tea party this year.
Huh? That quote doesn't say that returns are bimodal at all. Saying that "practically all the returns are concentrated in a few big successes" is consistent with a power law distribution. And saying that angels can "win battles" implies that some companies are successful without bringing huge returns.
I'm also a few chapters into The Elements of Computing Systems, and I also think it's excellent so far :)

I'm posting my project solutions to my github account, fwiw: http://github.com/happy4crazy/elements_of_computing_systems
Thrilled that this is #1 for now. HN "Hackers" need to realize that the physical world exists beyond the console.
The screenshots are from an unfinished ugly prototype. I thought I blur them, otherwise ppl would have seen them and said they look terrible. Before I finalize the application I wanted to get some feedback first.

It probably was the wrong choice, I will post the original screenshots with the next deploy.
You can replicate this delightful experience with:

*A normal breadboard and circuit components

*Matlab with DAQ Toolbox included (not all versions have this toolbox)

*An analog to digital converter, such as a National Instruments USB-6008
This reflects what the HN community represent, and we are certainly not all hackers. Entrepreneurs? Perhaps. Notice a lot of VCs got pretty high up on the list.
Emacs. It's the one I still go to for an awful lot of text based work.

(Eclipse has managed to win me over for Java development now.)
The Most Popular Design Blogs by Twitter Followers and Facebook Fans
Today we release a new infographic, this time based on our own research. There are a ton of roundups & lists with popular design & development blogs. So we made a different classification of these blogs – by social media popularity.
The article mentions it in the third paragraph:

If you want to go slower, smaller, and cheaper, you can pick up a consumer-grade, 80GB OCZ PCIe SSD card from Amazon for $300 and change, but you'll get only 540MB/s read and 450MB/s write.
Well, this is the same guy who wrote "The Secret To Getting on the HN Front Page".
Well, the innate coolness of physical hacking may be old news too you at the Replicator blog. :-) But vast numbers of software hackers have a secret love of hacking around with real hardware and micro-controllers, and we don't do it as much as we'd like.

Ryan's post captures this emotion perfectly. I didn't vote for it, but I'm not surprised to see it at the top of Hacker News. There's some value in capturing widely-shared emotions succinctly.
Personally, I consider fixing test size to basically be an anti-pattern. You're sacrificing UX for design (which while it can be good business is never Good.)
Arduinos are a ton of fun, myself and a couple other startup/web dev/hackers I know have gotten into them recently.

Warning: Shameless plug ahead

http://blog.tomgraft.com/tag/arduino/
It's reassuring to know that you wait until you're employed by somebody else before violating your previous employer's privacy policies.
You theoretically shouldn't even have to be a computer scientist. A standard mathematical education ought to teach you that for any given base, the only numbers that can be represented in that base exactly are numbers where the prime factorization of the denominator contains only prime numbers that are also contained in the prime factorization of the base itself, or is simply 1 for integers. Base 10 has 2 and 5. .2 is 1/5, so it's precise. .5 is 1/2, so it's precise. 1/12 has 2 2s in it, which works, and a 3, which doesn't, so 1/12 is recurring.

But prime factorization seems to be taught for almost superstitious reasons, as some sort of math trick rather than a fundamental aspect of understanding numbers at even the most basic of levels, with neither students nor teachers nor the curriculum writers really understanding why this is in the lesson plan, so, yeah, I suppose you have to be some sort of super expert genius to swiftly realize that 1/3 can't be represented in a base-2 number. But it shouldn't be that way.
We shouldn't underestimate the value of feel good metrics, though. Feeling good is important :-)

I like to measure code coverage for changed code within a rolling time window, say 6 months. If people are writing tests for all they change, you rapidly get close to 100%. This gets past the issue that in many large code bases, you could probably write tests for ten years straight, end up writing lots of tests for code that doesn't change, and still not get close to 100%.
Agreed. But, I think it makes for a fun discussion.
If you still have an interest in telephony you might want to look at http://www.rowetel.com/blog/ and his work on the Mesh Potato http://www.villagetelco.org/about/mesh-potato/.

It's an open source hardware project to create an easily deployed developing world "village telephony" system.

Some really good content.
I'm confused - isn't this the wrong graph? Shouldn't we be looking at a histogram showing return multiple on the x axis and # of companies in that group on the Y?

Or, alternatively, return decile on the x, and total return value on the Y - this would probably end up looking somewhat bimodal, right?
The main reason unit tests are useful: catching regression bugs.
Facebook MySQL Scaling Talk - Nov 2
http://zachaysan.tumblr.com/post/1431828646/paul-graham-is-r...
Um, that's quite the oversight. Seriously, look at it. http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/peekabootranny/id383095603?mt...

It was last updated Oct 7; no idea how long before that it existed. They've had plenty of time to notice this. With that in mind, I can't think of it as anything other than an endorsement.

Also, not saying you're making this up, but do you have a citation for the tax breaks over benefits thing? I'd never heard anything about Apple's Q?LGBT[A-Z]* policy, and I'm curious.
I remember reading that and wondering how many people follow it. Today, after watching yet another of my more technical submissions sink without trace, I start to wonder whether I should game the system in the ways he suggests. After all, it would demonstrate and make use of the knowledge I've gained from being here here a while, and perhaps it would give my submissions a fighting chance among yet another submission telling us China has a new supercomputer.
Beat me to it:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1847466
I agree that it's a sensible behavior -- I've always wondered why the 'px' unit even exists if it scales just like everything else. That said, what does the CSS standard say?
I knew this was coming..
Design and Research
It's technical/mathematical rather than news, but there's this one:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1846682
Perhaps the most surprising thing about most of us who grew up with the ARPAnet then Internet was just how much we took it for granted, never thinking a thing about it, especially not its commercial potential. It was just the air one breathed with mail, ftp, etc. (this is all pre-web), part of the fabric of life.

(I think Gates admitted to the same problem in his famous "we've gotta catch up with the Internet" memo.)

I remember doing some Lisp Machine consulting at HP Labs in the early 80's (I had become an idiot savant about MIT Chaosnet integration with DEC-20's while working for the MIT EECS dept), bumping into Len Bosak (then of Stanford) and hearing about his plans to start up a router company (Cisco), and being honestly baffled as to who (outside of a few military/industrial complex companies like HP) would buy a router? (I think it surprised Bosak as well.)
I'm pretty damn color blind, but luckily I've never experienced a website colored in such a way that it's been a major inconvenience. I do frequently hear misconceptions about color blindness though ("so you see in black and white?").
The Value of ‘Pro’ v. ‘Lite’ in the App Store
Viewing Python 3.2 as the successor to Python 2.7
Video: Apple's Vision for Education from 1995, Including Tablet Computing
I remember reading that Java has one difference from IEEE754 that might bite somebody once in a while: floating point modulo. But I can't find a reference

Seems like other delta's (e.g. how many NaN's are implemented) don't much matter.

http://java.sun.com/docs/books/jvms/second_edition/html/Conc...
This list was generated organically, rather than handed down from on high. It is not a decree to unfollow anyone not on the list, but rather an opportunity to see a list of people on twitter that other intelligent people with similar interests follow.
>I find it a crime to write code that I know won't work, just to write a more comprehensive test and then rewriting it, wasting a ton of time.

I don't remember this being in TDD. Could you expand on this? I remember the rule that you write the simplest code that will pass the test and no more, but I don't recall that causing any rewrite per se.
India's 'untouchables' to build temple to 'Goddess of the English language'
They may be anticipating that the payoff from ads is about to decrease, so they're willing to trade short-term publicity (and an increased chance of acquisition) for the long-term risk of increased competition.
Not your fault people vote it up. It's certainly far more on topic than a lot of things that get submitted, so you can't be faulted for submitting it.
I understand your point here, but it's really hard where I live to even reach those. I live in an island in the mediterranean, called Crete, and travelling by airplane to go to such meetups isn't something I can afford, and developers living here don't really care more than doing a website in Joomla for a hotel or so. I've tried talking to them also but in vain. So the Internet is my only real connection at the moment with these kinds of things. I feel like I have so much creativity and really want to build things, but I'm alone here and feel like nobody understands me in real life.
You're right, this used to be "the way" to make text that didn't scale on zoom, back when IE6 was king. But now that Firefox, Safari, and all the cool kids have pretty much standardized full-page-zoom instead of page-layout-zoom, I guess the IE team is being stubborn about moving to the new way of doing things.

On a related note, I still haven't seen any full-viewport HTML5 apps that don't break terribly on zoom in some/all browsers. It really is a terribly tricky behavior to understand, and probably the least consistently implemented.
Trapped Mars Rover Finds Evidence of Subsurface Water
When you have high-quality documentation available to the public, you don't need specially trained engineers. Apple's secrecy creates an artificial scarcity which they can capitalize on.
Why not end-user? They hate dealing with your for changes more than you hate dealing with them...
Dup, more discussion here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1837109
That's just plain irrational.
I'm pretty sure this used to be the 'right way' of doing things: use 'px' when the text shouldn't be resizable (apart from via page zoom) and 'em' when it should be resizable.

I speculate that the other browsers opted to make 'px' text resizable because a large number of sites use 'px' text, perhaps inadvertently due to lack of accessibility testing. So for these sites it's more user-friendly to make 'px' text resizable, than forcing the user to zoom the whole page.
I can reccommend http://hackaday.com for DIY-hardware based fun. Ryan is right, the purchase of an arduino will spell the end of what little free time HN users have left :)
How I'm Bootstrapping a Startup While Raising Three Kids
Initially, but if they can get enough volume to start differentiating price based on features, a substantial market will show up for people who like the idea of not paying for things they don't want.
> Intel, Dell, IBM, EMC, and a host of other component makers and
> OEMs have announced a partnership aimed at developing a standard
> interface for PCIe-hosted solid-state disks

And this is how a company like OCZ can beat the big guys. Why use the high-latency PCIe at all? SSDs are several orders of magnitude faster than other I/O.
They mention between "600 and 800 million ad impressions a month", 60% of which "for third-party mobile ads". Using a 700 million average, that's 420 million impressions used for third party ads, which generated $500,000 in revues.

This amounts to an average $1.19 CPM, which sounds very very high for in-game advertisement. Mochiads in flash games are usually in the $0.1-0.2 CPM range.

Can the iPhone market really command such a high premium or is there something specific to Backflip Studio's games that I'm missing?
> This really needs to be on CNN and such for people to actually think about it.

People see starving children on CNN and they think "Oh, how awful!" Then they turn off the TV, eat dinner, and go on with their lives.

Further, the media as a whole runs so many scare articles to increase views, I think the public is jaded. How is the common man supposed to tell the difference between articles about the threat of bedbugs and the very real threat of this sort of identify theft?
> what's the incentive to play a clone?

The funny thing I noticed when I played the free version previously is that the developer actually manages to tell a story during the game and has little bits of humour in it. These things make a difference.

(The storyline includes traveling around the world playing competitively and when you return your waste basket is covered in country flag stickers. Then there's the audio feedback when you throw paper outside the screen.)
I've played online (a few weeks ago) and there did seem to be problems with the server due to periodic GC causing massive lag and disconnections every so often.
Earache or toothache. Probably not speaking, just moving his/her jaw.
IPhone/Android User statistics
Is anyone aware of where I can find iPhone and android data detailing the numbers of users by city and state? I need to pinpoint a specific market and be able to view the total number of users in that specific city by device.
Never violate an agreement -- verbal or otherwise -- on the basis that the other guy won't sue you because of the expense. Ever heard the term "ambulance chaser"? Well, they exist in civil litigation circles as well. My company is currently being sued by an attorney working on contingency, and it sucks hard. He's even gone so far as to name all of the shareholders personally in the suit. Here's the thing that sucks the most: any time you're sued, you must defend yourself, and that costs money. The guy suing us is doing so at no cost (contingency), but we're footing the bill to defend ourselves. Because of the state he's suing us in, we can't come back after them for legal fees. So, right now we're burning through $7k-$10k a month on a bullshit lawsuit.

NEVER assume someone won't sue you. In our case, the agreement in question was signed by one partner under the representation of a completely separate corporation, without the knowledge of any of the other shareholders. It doesn't get any more far fetched than that. If we don't defend ourselves, the judgement is awarded by default and the plaintiff gains all kinds of ability to levy liens, garnish wages, and a host of other bullshit. Basically, it's like running a marathon with a ball and chain strapped to both legs. It's the last thing you need as a startup. Find a way to reach an agreement and get past it.
Read Beyond the Headers
Creepy Facebook adds friend stalker tool
The hacker news world of prep school kids that turn down $200K/yr junior investment banking jobs to work on their Facebook gaming startups sort of warps this perspective.

There's something that strikes me as odd about this statement; I didn't realize we were all supposed to be prep school kids with the option of having $200k/yr junior investment banking jobs.
This would be more interesting if you added one more column, dividing the number of HN followers by the total number of followers. @Shitmydadsays has 1.8 million followers, but the people ahead and behind that account on this list each have <30K followers. Clearly, those accounts (@al3x and @dhh) are more Hacker Newsy.
I've found when you're trying to control how web pages print out (never easy to do correctly across every browser), fixing text size in px without the ability to resize it by the client is a good thing.
Trademarks and patents for startups
Trademarks for start-ups promotion started on October 12, 2010:

http://www.pinskylaw.ca/News/news.htm

Patents for start-ups promotion started on October 25, 2010:

http://www.pinskylaw.ca/News/patents_for_startups.htm
Pointed to by "The Hundred-Year Language:" http://www.paulgraham.com/hundred.html

and points to "Taste for Makers:" http://www.paulgraham.com/taste.html

See also http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1811518
Ask HN: What charts javascript library to use?
I'm building a Django app and I'd like to use a javascript library for the charts, is it the best way to put graphics in django aplications?. I need simple types of charts: pie and bar(with negatives).

I began to use jqplot but I'm having some problems with some options.

I'd like to find a library with pretty nice and colorful charts and compatible with the majority of the principal browsers(ie,firefox,chrome).
Well, it's being brought to their attention, let's see what happens. I predict it will be pulled. I don't agree they endorse what's in their store.

I have a policy of doing up my fly. If I walk around all day with it down, I am not endorsing nudity. I may not have noticed. Once someone brings it to my attention, if I leave it down, we have an interesting question. Until then, it's an oversight.

Endorsing it would be a statement from Apple suggesting it is acceptable material. Until then... We have wheels turning. I am in favour of bringing it to light and reminding Apple about their own policies. I am in favour of criticizing the App Store process as bing error-prone. But I wouldn't say they endorse this app, I would say they endorse an imperfect approval system that relies on individual judgment calls that must inevitably cause a small number of apps in compliance with the terms and conditions to be denied access to the store and a small number of apps that are in violation of the terms and conditions to be allowed into the store until someone points out the error.

I don't have the exact link, it may have been this incident from 1993:

http://articles.latimes.com/1993-12-01/business/fi-62768_1_w...

My recollection is that Apple was given the "compromise" option of denying same-sex benefits to employees in the jurisdiction in question but turned that down and decided to locate elsewhere.

Update: Another link http://www.qrd.org/qrd/usa/texas/1993/Texas.County.denies.Ap...
I think we desperately need something like subreddits so that people can self organize into groups where they create and consume information to their liking.
I'm curious, if they don't use PCIe, what interface would they use?
Trademarks for start-ups promotion started on October 12, 2010:

http://www.pinskylaw.ca/News/news.htm

Patents for start-ups promotion started on October 25, 2010:

http://www.pinskylaw.ca/News/patents_for_startups.htm
Dup: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1846215

Having said that, it got one point and no comments.
I agree about Clojure's rough edges. I'm a beginner, and when something goes wrong it is very opaque to me what happened. That said, I do enjoy the language--especially the baked-in data structures.
I wish phone carriers would focus on getting permanent 3G to places less remote and where people live and use phones.
No access from office, have stored for reading later.
I also found some great XMPP/jabber bases services I'm going to explore.
Would browser zoom be under the purview of the CSS standard?