skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Oh where do I start with this one hehehe.

SR&ED: I've said this before and I'm going to say this once again. It attracts fishy investors, clueless businessmen, lame business models (clone of X social networking site), and a sense of false success.

Immigrants: no, it's not their fault. But they're trying to survive. So when everyone is trying to survive, basic needs must be fulfilled first (food, house, clothes).

Supply > Demand in HR: People want to move to Vancouver (even people from the East Coast) to enjoy life. But the demand of jobs aren't that many. So you get people from everywhere who probably have 10 years of experience coming to Vancouver.

Supply > Demand in Products: Not too many people are willing to buy software or services. Probably because they don't care or they don't need it or because they want to save money to survive (immigrants).

Enjoy Life: Laziness. Get it done by 5, I want to go skiing/fishing/hiking. Forget unit-test.

Government Oriented: They rule around here. You know how it is with the government contracts and deals and whatnot. Man, even Government own and run online gambling website (http://www.playnow.com)

As you've said it before: disreputable gaming industry. Tons of online gambling companies based in Vancouver. I don't see the rate to go down at anytime soon, especially when our municipal just open its own. (see above).

Politics: due to fierce competition (survival) and/or laziness, politics is all time high. Ability to get things done go down significantly. Guess what's the hottest job in Vancouver? Business Analyst. Guess what they do (mostly)?

All these things created an unhealthy cycle. Suddenly people don't want to be an engineer or a developer. They all want to go to the managerial position.

One other choice is to move East to Toronto. There's better chance there, albeit not superb, but still way better than the West coast.
Nice job. Wikipedia has a page dedicated to amateur mathematicians who made contributions to the field. It should be an encouragement to anyone who takes their interest spuriously.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_amateur_mathematicians
Per Sanderson's twitter/fb they are now going to release an ebook in February as a compromise (Sanderson was pushing for same-day release, Harriet wanted the year wait). As for myself, I have the hardcover to match the rest of the series on the shelf, but I'll be reading the pirated copy that will undoubtably hit IRC today or tomorrow.
Ethics Question re: ToS for a Penny Auction Site
I have recently gotten interested in a penny auction site, name withheld because I am likely violating their ToS.

All those low prices! All those people spending for bids! It piqued my interest.

So, I wrote a python script to pull some data automatically for history of bids. Then, I added some more. And some more.

Now, it keeps track of how many people are competing, and bids at the last possible second only when someone else might win, and it's very unlikely that anyone else will step in and reset the counter.

A recent auction I lost (I stepped out when the item went over my budget): the winner spent over $1,500 in bids by my estimate. I spent like $12.

So, HN, is this ethical? What should I do with this code? It's unlikely the Penny Auction site will be able to ban it without significant re-architecting. Heck, you could write it into a Chrome extension and it would be almost impossible to deal with programmatically.

I'm torn between enjoying getting cheap items now and then, open sourcing it, and getting in touch with the company to see what they think.

Advice welcomed!
While I approve of finding a way to get your foot in the door for lunch sales, the soon abusing of it really turned me off. Too much like politics really. Other clubs or the school itself could have used that money.
Yep, I love that one too.

In case you (or others) don't know, the movie Gettysburg is based on The Killer Angels, with the same focus on Lee and Chamberlain. It's very long, but good -- much was filmed on site, and Pickett's Charge is done in real-time. Harrowing stuff.

Also, let me plug the battlefield itself -- I just visited a couple of weekends ago for the first time as an adult. If you've read about it or seen the movie, it's a fantastic place to see. Unlike some Civil War battlefields, standing there really makes it clear -- you can look down from the top of Little Round Top, and you can look across the field of Pickett's Charge from both directions.
Fractals Everywhere by Michael Barnsley. It's a mathematics textbook, but very approachable. It could stand to be more rigorous but I'm finding it needs very little supplementary material. I've made it through metric spaces, affine transformations, and dynamical systems. Looking forward to Julia sets and Mandelbrot sets.

Fractals. They're pretty awesome.
Learn you a Haskell: Zippers
That, and he runs a "startup" that is a glorified content scraper.
Or turning it into a weekend project, and launching it as a service, that could be another possibility.
I am listening to it at the moment and I love it (Audible) 9 chapters in.
I realized I only enjoy software if I'm building what I want to build or something that interests me.

You know what? It's called work because it isn't fun. Most people do a day job to pay the bills. It's part of being a grown-up and it comes with commitments and responsibilities that yeah, sort of suck a lot of the time. Even if you're lucky enough to do something you love for a living (and I am) it isn't passionate enthusiasm all of the time.

If you can contract on the side with projects you're passionate about or build your own projects, that's how a lot of people stay engaged with the work. If you don't want to be a software developer at all, though, college seems like a good option only if you're going back to find a new area you're genuinely enthusiastic about.
You can set email notifications up, so you don't need a mobile device or a desktop application.
Do More Faster by David Cohen and Brad Feld

Beginning iPhone 3 Development: Exploring the iPhone SDK by David Mark and Jeff LaMarche
The thing about all this check-in deals is that it solves mostly the first problem - customer acquisition. Loyalty deals are great for customer retention, but for that part of the puzzle, I'm wondering why businesses would, and seem to want to, rely on an intermediary to manage the relationships. Allowing Facebook or any other site to be a key part in managing loyalty seems like one step away of losing all customers (or at least the data of them).
Facebook Makes Signing Into Mobile Apps Incredibly Easy
S4: Yahoo's just open-sourced distributed stream processing platform
Ogilvy: Muslim Futurism and Islamic Branding
An excellent hack that left a bad taste in my mouth.
are you fuckin stuck in the 1800s?
When someone asks "why?" to something, I almost always think "Why not?" Is there a good reason you shouldn't play with Ruby, Scala or Python on Android? If so, why not PHP?
I was hoping to be reading "Land of Lisp", but just got a note from Amazon (UK) said they wont have stock to deliver until December 17th!
Are you sure? In Britain billion always means 10^9 these days; it may have been different decades ago.
The Other Location Shoe Drops: Facebook Deals. Will It Discount Rivals?
Thanks for taking the time to make this excellent comment. The original submission was excessively light on content, but your comment made the whole thing worthwhile. I also agree 100% with the value of a similar book by YC-related people.

Do you have an affiliate link I can buy the book through instead of using the blog's?
They had me at "As a matter of core philosophy, we invest in companies not stages. We want to be in business with the best entrepreneurs going after the biggest markets and we do not care whether they need seed money, venture money or growth money."
burnt out at 19? You're gonna be a crisp by the time you're 30. Sorry not be more constructive, but I only have limited resources.
You could inject the analytic script after the page has loaded instead of having it part of it.
Would someone please teach the children to optimize images...
3-D Telepresence Becoming Reality
I'm under the impression that this hack didn't really mean other clubs got less money. On the contrary, it seems to me that thanks to his actions (which resulted on the restrictions for all clubs being softened) caused all of the clubs to make more money with increasing lunch sales.
If the Nook is any indication of how this will work (and judging by how the game has been played with price drops / wifi versions so far, I think it is) the lending will be "once and only once". The details for the Nook lending feature are here: http://www.barnesandnoble.com/nook/container/standard_bothna... with the relevant answer under FAQ #2. Don't get me wrong; I think some day we will get full lending abilities on these devices, but this will probably be a baby step moment. Publishers probably think that if lending worked like real books, no one would ever buy one, so they will prevent it for now.
I'll start this off disclaiming that I've used PHP for a long time now and I like it. However, I don't understand why PHP should be beaten into a form it was never meant to be in.

I do like the logo though.
Richard Branson's early autobiography - Losing My Virginity
I just finished House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski.

A fictional story told, in part, from the perspective of a tattoo parlor apprentice living in Los Angeles, who stumbles upon a monograph of a documentary film, authored by the late, blind neighbor of a friend, about a family who moves into a house in Virginia that is ≈ ¼" bigger on the inside than it is on the outside.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_of_Leaves
I wouldn't call this an abuse. It made it so all the clubs where making more money, so everyone was really profiting from this.
More like Wall Street. Generate excessive leverage and let the government bail you out via taxpayers.
* The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger (audiobook)

* Darkly Dreaming Dexter by Jeff Lindsay (kindle)

* Erlang Programming by Francesco Cesarini (rereading mostly because of the excellent exercises)
Re-reading the A Song of Ice and Fire series by George R. R. Martin. Best fantasy series of all time. Read it even if you're not a fantasy buff.
Put script tags at the end of the body, not in the header. If you still have a problem, dynamically add the script tags after the page has already loaded and displayed.
People Are Natural Improvisers: Why Creative Workaround Matters
It's nice to see GitHub jumping to show action in regards to FireSheep and SSL security, and being able to implement something quickly.

I wish other sites were able to follow suit.
Get to know Membase - new NoSQL database from memcached developers
Save The Words: navigate esoteric words [flash]
I remember the time I "hacked" my school library's computers. I changed the homepage on the browsers to my Geocities blog (this was almost 15 years ago). Later that day I was pulled from class by a security guard. In the library was most of campus security and most of the administrative staff. They were sure that I had put my blog on their servers and destroyed their website. They even had some teacher from the computer lab who couldn't seem to figure it out. Once I showed them how to change the homepage back (there was a tense moment when their server took forever to respond) they stopped threatening to have me arrested and made me sit quietly at a table until the period was over.
What all does that involve, and how was it different pre-9/11? You can't pack a bunch of fluids in your carry-on, so you have to get little travel things - that's not worth 7 extra hours.
Twitter Promoted Tweets Come to Google
Great, thank you! Reported here:

http://groups.google.com/group/mod-pagespeed-discuss/t/6bdf2...
Absolutely. I mostly use Perl, so I feel I can speak most accurately when being specific.
I didn't see it mentioned in the blog post, but in the press conference Z said they are not monetizing deals yet, and have no short term plans to.

EDIT: I removed a point saying I didn't think these would be more interesting than what Yelp does until they start to monetize. I think that's too strong a statement.
Excellent book. Dan Ariely just released a new one, The Upside of Irrationality. It's on my to-read list.
Places is still a better deal for advertisers and retailers than it is for my friends, and deals is another step in the direction of empowering them (advertisers and retailers).

You can check yourself in anywhere, tag your friends (whether they're there or not), and see where others are checking in. But I want to use Places to meet up with people, to organize events, to see where my friends' favorite places are. It's just not very good for that.

And it still reeks of poor design -- enough people checking in at your house will force it to be a public location, and there is no process to privatize it again.

It just feels scummy, like much of Facebook.
Even a lot of the "Take OUR country back" folks — who are not anything close to the majority of conservatives — resent the government telling them what plants they can grow and what they can do with them. The fact that this happens to coincide with something hippies enjoy is subordinate to the fact that the ban on pot represents the government sticking its nose into free commerce and their individual liberty.
Video: Get up and running on Membase in minutes
Brooklyn Beta: A smaller, smarter and better web conference
There's a similar free service for online writing: http://timecert.org/

It's by http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=pelle
Except that they have such a huge existing userbase compared to Yelp (both in terms of end-users and businesses who are aware of them, and likely use Facebook themselves already).
Free Electric Vehicle Parking at The World's Greenest Parking Facility
but then mc.co.uk is just a holding page...
There are very few books that redefine the way people view the world. This book is one of them. It is one of those books we all get assigned in high school and then think we have read due to its ubiquity, but never really read. We should.
The True Size of Africa (infographic)
I highly recommend The Paleo Solution.

Without any doubt I can say it has radically changed my life for the better.

Robb Wolf's podcasts are also packed with great information if you haven't dug into those yet.
Costs and reach. The costs for a single business to implement something like this would be, I imagine, prohibitive. Their is also the issue of reach. Facebook presents a platform that business can build on that people really use. Facebook has users. A lot of users.

To implement the same system for a business, they'd have to deploy their own hardware and software, and then reach out to customers to use their special set up. Sitting on top of Facebook essentially gives them all of this without a problem. Most places can't do what Facebook is providing for them.

So now users have a reason to "Place" themselves at a business, and businesses have a reason to link into the system. A "Place" by a user gives them exposure to the users friends.

Consider also that this isn't the only means a business can use for loyalty. Business still have other means to go for customer retention.
cross reference cost/quality for various popular products on the penny auction with eBay and sell what you can.
I bet yelp has more queries per unit of time of people looking for places to go shop/eat/drink.
Building a More Social Mobile Platform
Once you've finished that, you may enjoy The Profit, by Kehlog Albran (http://www.angelfire.com/on2/mikemcclellan/theprofit.html)
Is this definitely against the ToS? My feeling is that this was bound to happen. This is analogous to ebay sniping services, no? Even if they don't like it happening, I would be surprised if this didn't become fairly commonplace. Worst case scenario (though IANAL so I don't know if there could possibly be any legal action taken) is that your IP / account gets banned for violating the ToS.

As a thought exercise, can this really hurt their business? As you mentioned, $1500+ was spent in bids alone. Even if you won, only the other person lost, not the auction site. Now when everyone starts doing this, everyone uses this software to bid up to their budget, and we're back to square one. So long as people have competitive budgets, bidding just continues as normal.
I once gave away mini gumball machines filled with M&Ms. My booth was pretty packed. The industry was almost entirely comprised of middle aged, middle class people with families, so they took them home for the kids (perhaps half empty).

Personally, I always like a spare pen, but everyone gives them away, and I can't tell you the name of the company whose pen I last picked up.
It warns you about checking into at private locations. While I agree that they should have the ability to differentiate between public and private places, Facebook does have a pretty big warning about this. If people are checking your house, they are the ones explicitly saying it's a public place.
The students who bought the food at the lunch sales most likely did not care what their money was going to. This was not like paying taxes, it was getting restaurant food at a markup at your high school. I'm sure that those who actually thought about where the money for their food was going were few and far between.

The end-result of this hack was that the student government opened up selling outside food at lunch time more often for more clubs than previously allowed.

I see this as good for everyone involved, with the possible exception perhaps of the poor kids.
I feel like this should best be handled by outside apps rather than the FB platform itself.

Edit: Perhaps I should offer the disclaimer that my suite of Facebook tools (fanbldr.com) will eventually include some Places-linked features.
Actually - good point.

Historically Next/OpenStep ran on Windows and there were always rumours that Cocoa for Windows (aka Yellowbox) would be released. And there was GNUStep, which was an independent open-source clone of OpenStep. I wonder if they have maintained Yellowbox in the same way as they maintained the Intel version of Mac OSX?

Meanwhile, Apple's Windows UI strategy with iTunes is to mimic the Mac as much as possible - presumably to try and ease things for people if/when they switch.

But the net effect is that their Windows software is just awful - proof that one UI to rule them all doesn't work.
Love that series so much. Cant wait for the show to come out on HBO.
I did some googling and can't find any current applications for Venn diagrams. Are there any?
Definitely! There is more due deligence that needs to happen before you finally begin the execution but out of tens of ideas one may have which one should you pick to even discuss with the potential customers is what I was getting at.
Discovery in Salamanders Could Lead to Human Limb Regeneration
Just want to second ASHNE by Bryson. This is one of those books that you see in a lot of people's backpacks when you travel to hostels - meaning that when you cannot carry tons of stuff, people choose this book...Thought-provoking and interesting.
Awesome. I'm a huge fan of Stross. "Missile Gap" was my favorite story in that collection.

"Accelerando" is his best novel by far, IMO. Check it out if you haven't already.
Has anyone tried running VirtualBox (or other virtualization software) on the 11" Air? If so what was the experience like?

I'd like to get one, but that question has stayed my hand so far.

I'd like to be able to run a virtualized Ubuntu instance and am wondering what effect the processor speed would have.

I'd spring for the 4GB Ram but there's nothing I can do about the processor speed.
Read this one a few months ago. Thought it was OK, but I hear the sequels, in particular "Chasm City," are a little better. I'll probably check it out in the next month or two.
Documentation makes YUI seem far more complicated than it is. For example, I recently needed a slider widget. Compare the documentation:
http://jqueryui.com/demos/slider/
http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/3/slider/

Like many web devs I am not an expert in javascript. I just want to copy/paste some "codes" to get my slider. By the time I get to the point of needing detailed background documentation on a widget, a generic jQuery widget has been sitting in my prototype for a couple of weeks.
Just finished with:

- (AIMA) Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach

- Javascript : The Good Parts

Starting on:

- Building iPhone Apps with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript: Making App Store Apps Without Objective-C or Cocoa
Just started Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs. It's been years since I last touched scheme.

Just finished Refactoring in Ruby by Wake & Rutherford (a quick read, but had some good tips), and Perdido Street Station by China Miéville (fantastic).
I think saying could instead of couldn't was part of the joke.
Hiring is difficult and time consuming, what you really want is a re-org (which are all too frequent at big software dev. corporations).
Good point about the mailing list. At this point though, it seems that just finding a way to deal with the multitude of forkers is the biggest issue. That might be a mailing list or it might be a shoutout on github asking for information.

I'm not too keen on a big structure off the bat when you don't know what the reason for the forking is. Then again with google groups it's really not that big of an issue to set one up.

And I'm fully aware that people have done this for the longest time without github but right now, github is where the "community" lives. It would be unwise to go shunting the community around to some new thing without first establishing what the community is.
Where to begin...

1. Employment in the US is (for the most part) at-will. Employers can fire you for having a bad haircut. This is a good thing: it lowers the barriers to starting new companies and taking on new employees.

2. In virtually every situation in which people are given protections beyond "at-will", the harms have overwhelmed the benefits (see: teachers, auto workers, municipal employees).

3. The very few exceptions to this practice mostly involve unconscionable discrimination: specifically and literally, race, color, gender, national origin, and religion. To these 5 protected classes we should add "pot smoker"?

4. To many employers, "protected class" is code for "excuse to get sued". Termination is already a minefield simply because of racial and gender politics. I'd argue that ending racial and gender discrimination makes the hazards worth it, but even as a legalization advocate I can't argue that ending pot discrimination is worth a dime to society.

5. It gets worse because in addition to the fact that every other state criminalized cannabis, huge companies operating out of those states (notable examples: the federal government, almost every major bank) have drug-free work policies that would overnight have become unlawful in CA.

6. California's "lawful activity outside the workplace" thing appears to be a CA quirk.

7. That quirk isn't settled in case law and may only apply to cases where companies try to suppress political speech or invade privacy.

8. It seems batshit crazy to me that I can, as a CA employer, fire someone for having a bad haircut, but I can't fire that person for being nationally televised for marching in support of Nazism. Let's not pretend that particular law was well-thought-out.

I can bring this discussion back to earth real quickly though. The problem is simply this: we're having a huge and tangled discussion involving discrimination, at-will employment, freedom of association, contract law, and so on. Meanwhile, tens of thousands of people are imprisoned because of marijuana criminalization. Many of them are now going to remain imprisoned for a longer period of time because the advocates of this measure overreached and tried to pass a "marijuana anti-discrimination act" instead of a "marijuana decriminalization act".
How Hard Is It To Store A Petabyte For A Century?
Twitter Has Started Inserting Advertisements in Users Timelines