skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Apologies for lack displaying my lack of knowledge regarding Canadian politics, but what why would it be "spectacularly weird" for the Senate to wield their power, when groups with power nearly always wield it? What holds them back from doing so? As an American, it is very odd to hear that a body exists with power technically equivalent to our (very powerful) Senate, but with lifetime appointments, and yet they do nothing, and are not taken seriously.
Just finished Snow Crash (Neal Stephenson). About 100 pages into the Wind-Up Bird Chronicles (Haruki Murakami). Next is The Invention of Morel (Adolfo Bioy Casares).

I find that reading recharges my creative thinking. I used to think it was purely relaxation, but now consider it as essential as sleeping / eating well.
One of my coworkers has one of those Ship It awards. It's... pretty sad.
"I'm thinking about breaking up anyway, and I don't feel like spending a bunch of money on a Christmas gift."
Ask HN: What's your favorite way to learn something new?
I'm sure many HN'ers would describe themselves as life-long learners. What's your favorite way to go about learning something new? How do you choose the next thing you'd like to learn? Once you've picked a topic, what's your preferred process/method for learning it?
The disappearing spoon - Sam Kean
Most popular SaaS business Apps during October
That's not exactly what he said. He said that touch surfaces want to be horizontal.

Here's my (purely speculative) take:

Fullscreen apps in OS X are a transitional component. Future Macs are going to be dual mode. Remember the patent Apple filed with an iMac that converted from vertical to horizontal (1)? So imagine you've got an iMac on your desk. You're working away in OS X as you always would with a mouse and keyboard. You pull your iMac toward you and it pivots to a horizontal orientation. Sensors in the hinge signal the app to switch to fullscreen mode and you begin using the app through a touch interface using your fingers. When you're done, you return the display to the vertical position and move back to your mouse and keyboard.

My level of certainty isn't terribly high here, because I think there are ergonomic challenges to a pivoting touch screen device that sits on a desk. When using my iPad, the ideal position is definitively not at desk height. The device needs to be very, very close to you in order to avoid the fatigue associated with reaching. A pivoting iMac is still going to require some reach.

I'm also realistic about the fact that not every patent Apple files makes it to production. It's just some idle pondering.

1 - http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/apple/7961480/Apple-fi...
Agreed. There's only so much skilled labor available for this kind of thing.

This is exactly why I'm focusing on Python lately. Ruby is a great language but I don't want to be pigeon-holed as a web guy forever. I've already done over 10 years of web dev and I'd like to try out a couple of new problem domains before I kick the bucket.
Critical Analysis Essay on Learn To Create A Rational Impact
Critical analysis essays are written to reflect suggestions and arguments on a subject. Analyzing can be done on just about anything. With proper knowledge of how to analyze will enable students to write an excellent essay on the subject being analyzed.
How to build a mobile website:
1.) Open website in a mobile browser.
Four Hour Work Week: http://www.fourhourworkweek.com

and re-reading

How to Live on 24 Hours a Day by Arnold Bennett: http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/2274

Loving them both - excellent books.
Heart of Darkness... an amazing read (and short!)
A book that should be on everyone's list!
[video] Amazing Timelapse Montage
Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami

Histoire d'O by Pauline Réage

My Life in Art by Constantin Stanislavski (This one seems to be taking me forever, even though it's entertaining. Biographies are not really my thing.)
St Leon by William Godwin
Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation
His speeches may be weird, but he has an eloquence and a rhetorical flair which seem most at odds with any experience I have had with stroke-sufferers, admittedly not a lot.

Well, I guess I disagree with how implausible it sounds. I suppose not too many foundations are offering billions for anyone who asks, obligation free. Then again, I do wonder what a lot of the money is doing around the world. There are hundreds of individuals and organisations capable of making the offers referenced in the speech. It just doesn't immediately ring of "CRAZY" to me.
you might say that Perl's lack of (obvious, first-pass) readability is a two-headed dog from hell:

- it's a (very) good thing, in that there's -a- -lot- of expressive power hiding in those corner cases (esp list v. scalar context). in fact perl is nearly unique in the degree to which it embraces, rather than seeks to quash the potential for nuance and flexibility to be found in the various eddies and whirlpools that lie "between" non-whitespace elements of code. this is something that goes to the deepest intellectual roots of the language (to be more like the way the human brain thinks, rather than the way machines think).

- it's a (very) bad thing, in that the same "power" for expressiveness just represents little more than an endless stream of banana peels to most first time users (understandably sending many of them running into the arms of the other major dynamic programming languages). and that it just makes it too damn easy to write (barely) functional, pothole-laden frontline scripts (such that Perl is partly responsible for "scripting" being such a dirty word, in many quarters).

another aspect people don't like to talk about its nearly coprophilic fondness for not just nuanced and context-sensitive, but intentionally obtuse syntax (the impossible to remember "special" variables such as $[, $;, $' etc being probably the worst examples).

this also (sadly) has a lot to do with the community's deference to the aesthetics of its original authors (and is also plenty understandable, given the extent to which unabashed ugliness -- as personified by makefiles, shell languages and macro-laden C and C++ -- ruled the day at the time).

unfortunately it also blinds a lot of Perl folk to the fact that beloved muse just happens to look awful darn cluttery (or worse) to many reasonably intelligent people who come from more "modern" programming backgrounds (or who at least came onto the scene comparatively recently).
You think that's bad? A year of daycare in NYC for a 1 year old costs about $24K. What's sad is the childcare FSA is indexed to the cost of living (it's only 5K).
My point is simply this: now you're trying to convince sensible people of two things they've been trained not to believe. First, that something that has been a controlled substance for decades should be open to commerce in California, and second, that the basis of our drunk driving laws are unsound and should be in effect repealed starting with that controlled substance.

A campaign to repeal blood alcohol limits would almost certainly fail in every US state, so its attachment to this bill seems like a horrible overreach.
I would write:

if the_result_of_this_function(on_this_arg) == 10 \
and this_overly_descriptive_boolean:
do_stuff()

Indenting the second line of the if statement would, at first glance, indicate that it's part of the block instead. Then again, it depends. If it was the header of a def statement, I would follow the PEP, e.g.

def __init__(self, width, height,
color='black', emphasis=None, highlight=0):

On a side note, I once did the "Art & Logic challenge" [http://www.artlogic.com/] and they use guidelines that apply to several languages, e.g. you would use the same formatting style for C++ and for Python, if at all possible. Much of it flies in the face of PEP 8.
Passed by a conservative SCOTUS no less

Of course. States' rights are very important when a state wants to make it mandatory to pray before attending school, but less important when a state wants to make it legal to grow and vaporize certain plants. I mean, c'mon, someone might enjoy smoking pot, and we can't allow that. The Bible says that anything enjoyable is wrong, and it's the duty of the Supreme Court to enforce that.

This differs slightly from the wording in the Constitution, but who cares, those mofos are dead...
TED appears to be down. Here's the same (I think) video on youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rrkrvAUbU9Y
Regarding 'Outlining CSS', there's also a risk of breaking sites that depend on the specificity rules of CSS[1].

I think this should be added to the risks list for this filter[2]. Does anyone know how to ping Google about such things?

[1] http://www.molly.com/2005/10/06/css2-and-css21-specificity-c...
[2] http://code.google.com/speed/page-speed/docs/filter-css-outl...
Why Oracle Wants LibreOffice to Succeed
> It's funny how people use a lot of modern, often expensive, technology just to imitate effect of a 20yr old camera you can buy for like $50.

I think it's funny how you've already forgotten just how expensive it was to have film developed and printed.

The camera may cost you $50. The three good photos you get out of your roll of film will cost you $5-$10, and the photo CD with digital versions will cost you an extra couple bucks.
Smart Pricing by Raju & Zhang
I am reading the same book myself. I highly recommend this series (The Wheel of Time). IMHO it makes the Lord of The Rings seem like a child's book (and don't get me wrong I love the LotR !).
It's not _all_ like that. Skip it and keep going. The most important stuff is in plain English.
I would use this to quickly test any possible enhancements could be done to site in order to improve performance, but later - turn it off and implement everything in code.
James Cameron Tells Hollywood To Stop Making Trash 3D Movies
Hmm...both good points. Touche.
So you do care a little bit, then?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=om7O0MFkmpw
Did it work? what feedback did you get?
Rereading "The Killer Angels" by Michael Shaara - a novelization of Battle of Gettysburg. This is the perfect book for people who love American history, character-driven novels, and old maps (every dozen pages or so he includes maps that mark the progress of the Union and Rebel forces as they gain or lose ground in the Battle, which are, simply put, just awesome). Very interesting portrayal of Robert E. Lee - the Old Man - who was essentially revered as a god by both sides, but made some critical tactical errors here. Had also never heard of Joshua Chamberlain - the college professor from Maine - who became famous for his brave defense of the hill called Little Round Top. The Battle of Gettysburg is another example of those historical events that everybody thinks they know about, but really don't or have entirely forgotten- and Shaara brings it back to life.
Currently reading A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson. So far, it's a really charming history of science (and well, everything else), starting from the Big Bang. Bryson has never let me down before.

I just finished Shadow Divers by Robert Kurson. That was an intense book! If you like deep sea adventure or anything U-boat, it's a worthy read.
The Initial Question—How To Write Dissertation?
A common question for students assigned the writing of the dissertation and for students, who are yet to write one, is how to write it. This is an important document which needs to be written in exactly the right manner, in order to confer the much coveted degree.
My point was that if prop 19 had passed, then if after a few years bad thi8ngs didn't happen as a result of it, then that fact would change the tone of the debate on cannabis legalisation, leading to a big majority being in favour of people being in favour of it. When that happened, it'd be time to tweak the law to change some of the bad parts of it (because no law is perfect).
IBM vs. Oracle: What Larry Ellison Didn’t Learn from Steve Jobs or 1960s IBM
Apprenticeships are definitely a good way to learn. In Deschooling Society, Ivan Illich talks about the need for learning that is built-in to the world.

He's very practical, and suggests that people get lifetime education credits from the government that would pay for employers that offer apprenticeships and learning in their workplaces.
Good to Great - Jim Collins

Consider The Lobster - David Foster Wallace
Why would you avoid a market a 10 year old can easily be successful? Web development is a pretty big market to say the least. There's many small businesses who need a wordpress install with a few pages, and others need a their own CMS that integrates with special API's, the market is huge. I was salaried and wrote maintainable code that's still used today at 17, and generalizing an entire market isn't very constructive.
Former Prime Minister.
There's no money in Canada - raising funding is like praying to the Gods. Consequently, you get a lot of smaller businesses, as opposed to the uniquely American model of the get-big-fast startup (see: Google, Amazon, etc).

There's also the issue of talent drain and pay. I'm currently south of the border working for double what my going rate is in Canada. Most of the people I went to university with are also here (as in the USA).

Yes, for the people not familiar with Canadian software, double. I'd like to be closer to home and live in a more progressive society, but it's a 50% pay cut to do so.

I continue to struggle to understand why things are this bad. How is that a mere hop across the border can easily double one's pay? What prevents Canadian companies from being compensation-competitive with American ones?

Part of it is the distinct lack of "real" engineering jobs. A lot of work I've seen either belongs to the thoroughly disreputable gaming industry, or working as Java monkeys pounding on keyboards... neither option appeals to most top talent.

The other part is the culture of satellites - much of the software work I've found in Canada is at satellite offices of American companies, and having worked at one before, it seems that it's less "satellite office" and more "place full of cheaper people so we don't have to pay Californians to do the menial stuff".

But still, what's with the lack of high-paying software gigs in Canada?
Is customer service a cost center?
The time I hacked my high school
I was reading Heart of Darkness but took a break from it to read PostgreSQL 9.0 High Performance.
Vanity Fair by Thackeray. A bunch of David Grann essays from The New Yorker (on Instapaper; I'll buy copies of his book later).
Is there a *nix programmer who doesn't know this? This article is hardly worthwhile to anyone vaguely competent.
Yeah, but is the average conservative (or liberal or just plain "voter") an expert in political science or philosophy? You ever talked to an undecided voter 24 hours before election day?

Whether or not those guys are stupid (and I agree that they are), they certainly have a constituency and are representative of a big chunk of the Republican party. Heck, anytime a Republican politician says anything bad about Limbaugh they wind up apologizing for it.
Ad networks are a particular culprit. For many (banner) ad networks, HTTP requests get bounced around so many servers that it can really slow things down.
The Foundation Series is my favourite sci-fi series, followed by Rendezvous at Rama.

Currently reading the 33 Strategies of War by Robert Greene (Author of the Art of Seduction). I quite enjoy the way he writes, it's filled with historical examples and the sidebars on each page are filled with quotes from all the ages. Similar style to "Think and Grow Rich"

Summary here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_33_Strategies_of_War
Starting with Git: Cheat Sheet
Additionally, poorly structured career ladders can to lead to "Promotion Until Incompetence", where people are repeatedly promoted until they are unable to warrant another promotion. Thus, everyone is stuck at a level of mild incompetence.
County Zero by William Gibson

Working my way through the "Sprawl trilogy" :)

Also, Clean Code: A Handbook of Agile Software Craftsmanship by Robert C. Martin.
The first photograph of a person
I really enjoyed Solar, and really anything from Ian McEwan. Ammaniti is good fun too. But currently I'm reading mostly books for classes; Combinatorial Optimization by Papadimitriou and Spivak's Calculus on Manifolds, Solid State Physics, Introduction to Linear Analysis, Measure and Integration Theory, Lectures on the Coupling Method, Particles and Nuclei etc...
Not to diminish the value of the article (which seems well written and probably useful to some), but do these really count as "tricks"? That seems analogous to calling variable assignment a C programming "trick".
My point was that having a computer running 24/7 at home to use as a secure proxy when you are out in the field is a bit wasteful. The technical solution was fine - though I can't see many non-techies getting their heads around this. Why the down vote - pffffh.
I was in a place that decided to give out bonuses to my team (consisting of 3 members and a leader) in the following way:

1. Allocate fixed amount to give out per team

2. Have team leader's manager determine how that pie would be shared between team leader and us 3 team members.

3. NOT have 360° feedback

4. Incorporate team leader feedback on team's performance into this decision

I'm not sure what type of HR schmuck thought up that scheme. About a month after 'self evaluation', we were called into 1-1 meetings with the TL, who told us each separately how disappointing our performance had been, and the usual spiel about 'taking initiative' and 'stepping up' and 'moving to the next level'.

Shortly after that we found out the three of us had received 0% each of the pie allotted to our team as a bonus. And the team leader had waltzed away with ALL of it.

That's right: an allegedly disappointing team who'd failed to achieve any of its goals was compensated for by a super-human team leader who had somehow magically overcome all our shortcomings to over-achieve so much, that even the organisation-wide "curve" was left by the wayside to reward such awesomeness.
Not really, it's a fraction of the basic functionality of bash, which is not to be learned from a mosaic of random blogposts, but from something more complete. If you want something "more special", try, for example, Unix Power Tools book.
This is all pretty basic stuff. One thing that always bites me is trying to use sudo to redirect to a protected file. This doesn't work, because the shell is doing the redirection, not sudo:

sudo cat ~/something.txt | grep 'hello' > ~someoneelse/result.txt

You can get around this by using sudo to run a new shell that does the redirection:

sudo sh -c "cat ~/something.txt | grep 'hello' > ~someoneelse/result.txt"
From a user perspective, I find it pretty useful. Any hints about revenue model behind it?

Good luck handling the grand opening onslaught.
It looks like the 'Optimize Images' filter rewrites a different file name for the optimized image:

Before: <img src="images/BikeCrashIcn.png" alt="Bike Crash">

After: <img src="images/images/ic.HASH.x,BikeCrashIcn,p.png" alt="Bike Crash">

If you get significant search traffic from Google or Bing Image Search you'll probably want to disable this filter.
The Tao te Ching – Lao Tzu. Classic and calming.

Also Design Patterns in Ruby, which is rather entertaining for a programming book.
Don DeLillo - "Underworld"

Kind of slow to get going, but absolutely fascinating and real characters.

Next up: Murakami - "Norwegian Wood"
Discrete Mathematics and its Applications by Rosen, Kenneth H.

The most interesting math book I've read as a computer programmer. It covers graph theory, combinatorics, boolean algebra, trees, complexity theory, etc. I already knew a good chunk of this, but this book let me connect many dots and discover real life applications of mathematical concepts.
Ask HN: We're developing an Android game. Should we start promoting it?
I've teamed up with two developers and one artist and we are now developing an Android game together. The skill-level in our group is very high so I assume the game will be of high quality, also.

Through reading HN I've come to the realization that proper marketing is at least 50% of the effort if we want our game (or any other product for that matter) to be a success. So should we start now?

I thought about what we could do. We could start a blog where we write about the progress, but I am not sure if this would be that interesting for anyone. After all its just a couple of guys writing Java-code and the graphics are currently just blocks in 3 different colors.

Should we just relax and finish coding until we release the game and then worry about marketing? There's an interesting comment about that here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1527365

Or is it time to act now? If yes, how?

Also: Does it make sense to start looking for a game-publisher?

Thank you for any suggestions!
Definitely a solid defeat, I dunno if I'd conclude that that means it'll be harder next time, though. Look at gay marriage initiatives, a series of defeats in state after state, but getting a little closer most of the time until they wound up passing in a lot of places (except CA, heh).

A 45% showing makes it a definitively non-fringe opinion and moves the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overton_window
I Am a Strange Loop - Douglas Hofstadter
* The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

* A Guide to the Good Life: The Anicent Art of Stoic Joy

* Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality

About the last, I typically abhor fanfic, and I admit, I started reading this one in a fit of ironic pique. However, it's actually quite damned good. Reimagine the world of Harry Potter if Harry grew up in a happy, rationalist houehold and was an exceptionally bright young scientist. When inducted into Hogwarts, he swears he will use his scientific training to learn the Rules Of Magic in a fashion that no wizard before has ever done, because no wizard before has HAD the scientific background he's had.

The author is well-versed on physics, math, psychology, philosophy, and many other scientific pursuits, and manages to wrap them all up in an entertaining-as-hell story that is on chapter 56 and still going strong.

Here, let me save you a Google search:

http://www.fanfiction.net/s/5782108/1/Harry_Potter_and_the_M...
The idea of home schooling is great, that you can avoid the somewhat crazy regimented rote learning education system we still have but it's important to realize that socializing (and learning social skills) is a big part of school, a big part I think home schooled kids miss out on.
Guessing nationality from names is always risky, but I don't think the author is American :-)
My company, stealth web-scale database company, is developing a web-scale database to help web-scale companies solve their problems with web-scale data... our secret sauce is our web-scale database.
Read Hitchhikers Guide. Again. Priceless.

"The Timetraveller's Wife" will make you think.
Cool. Anyone know if something like this exists for .NET? Otherwise it might be good for my first open source contribution :)