skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
One way is to figure out what topic the person who is of interest to you is passionate about, get them to start talking to you about it and attentively listen to them while asking for clarification or interjecting with thoughtful comments every now and then. Put yourself in the famous person's shoes. Probably everyone who approaches them can't stop talking about themselves. Make yourself stand out by not trying to make an impression but instead being genuinely interested in what the person has to say. People like talking about themselves, especially famous people. They like people who they can talk about themselves to. Chances are that at some point they'll ask you about yourself. That would be your time to shine and say your piece. Since they like you, they're more likely to care about what you have to say. Good luck! ;)
Of course... but that's more work than typing "svn up" on production and lots of developers don't taking deployment strategies nearly as seriously as they should.
Certainly not, but the fact that the OP is aware of it means he's on the right track.

Of course, someone asking this particular question will find TAOCP way the hell over his head, as I can attest.

But the fact that he shows a tendency even at this early stage to dig down to the fundamental underlying knowledge of the field, instead of simply being satisfied with Visual Blub.NET, shows he's on the right track.

I'd wager he'll eventually read and reread most of what are considered the best books in the field, and become an above-average developer at worst.
This is wishful thinking on your part. I know it's cool to hate on MySQL, but it's too big now for Oracle to kill. It has too large of an installed base, too much mindshare, and too strong of a community to be killed by anything Oracle does.

If Oracle were to stop developing, supporting, and licensing MySQL today it would not stop MySQL. There would still be Percona, Facebook, Google, Monty Program, Drizzle, and a large ecosystem of others supporting, patching, releasing, and blogging about it.

Love it or hate it, it's probably not going anywhere soon.
Xbox Kinect Accelerometer & Motor Hacked
KinectMan writes "First test of controlling the Kinect from a PC. Outlook looks good for other sensors of the device."

Johny 5 is alive!
You can use the appropriate special character instead of the entity. Like this.
I think a code iceberg is actually a symptom of either working at too low a level, or relying on a library with missing/broken features. You see libfoo, and you think "great! I'll use that to implement foobar-ization functionality!" but then, after playing with it for a bit, you realize that foobar-ization actually requires you to do all sorts of crazy things with the output of libfoo before you can use it in XYZApp.

Now, you can put all those crazy foobar-izing things into XYZApp, and that'll work—but they should really either go into libfoo itself, or into a new library (libfoobarize) that uses libfoo.

This is the case with the example in the article: DuckDuckGo shouldn't be parsing Wikipedia to make its own abstracts. MediaWiki already creates abstracts—they're just bad abstracts. The correct thing to do, since MediaWiki is just a regular ol' FOSS project, is to write a patch that makes MediaWiki spit out good abstracts, that are actually trivial to use in DuckDuckGo. Or, even better, if you know MediaWiki cares about having good abstracts, just submit it as an issue to their tracker and let them do it for you. In other words, repeat the programmer's litany to stave off NIH: "It's not my job. I shall buy, not build. 80% of the features at 20% of the cost. Don't ask a question, send a message. No god-objects. Encapsulate, encapsulate, encapsulate."

Note that, of course, there are cases where there really is no libfoo—but then you're doing something totally new, and you can tell the client right up-front "no one's ever done this before, so we have to schedule time for R&D before we can even tell you how much time this feature will take."

There is also the case where the only libfoo/libfoobarize is a proprietary one used by the people you're trying to steal market-share from by implementing this feature, in which case you can tell your client "we know it's possible, but we don't know how long it took them to build it. What we do know is that no one else has yet copied them, which means that foobar-ization isn't trivial. It'll probably take a while."
I remember last year watching the clock tick from 1:59 AM to 1:00 AM during a marathon coding session. For some reason, it's way more amusing than it should be.

How does one refer to the two hours labeled as 1-2AM? Is there an official way to do it, or just "first|second 1:30AM"? Of course, you could break out the POSIX timestamps...

I keep conjuring this mental image of a Law & Order case were the murder somehow gets off clean because he abused the ambiguity.
Quick thoughts:

- I don't like the color. Red feels like you're screaming at me.

- Something about the form on the left side feels goofy. Have you considered switching the form on the left and the image on the right?

- What's up with your headline? The "W" and "2" are larger than the rest of the letters.

- Logo?

- GMBHnews does not even begin to hint at what your site does, unless I'm missing something. It actually makes me think your site does something completely different (news content provider?) than it actually does.

- Buttons/links in footer are all kinds of messed up.

- The overall design is actually significantly better than many I've come across recently, but could still use some major work.

Hope this helps.
What you think about this article? Good or Bad or inappropriate!
Not at all, I kinda see where you're coming from. But the flaw in your reasoning is that we're not yet at the point where you can jack the kung fu program into Neo's cerebral cortex like they did in the Matrix.

You can actually learn anything for free today -- assuming that your time is worthless. You might not be able to learn it well or very quickly, but you can certainly learn it for free.

CodeLesson's biggest competitor is Google. Google can get you all the information you need about how to do pretty much anything -- bake a soufflé, sire a baby, write a compiler. But it won't tell you where to look for the information you want, it won't tell you exactly what you don't yet know, it won't evaluate your work, it won't tell you when you've learned enough to do what you want, and it won't validate what you've learned. That's where a human instructor comes in.

If you think that paying to take a course is expensive, then great -- read the online text for free and get what you can out of that. That's what it's there for. But taking a class is really about getting access to the knowledge and experience of an instructor. That's what people pay for.
I look at this study and think "If this effect was real, it would change the world as we know it. It would definitely win the Nobel prize, and once understood could almost certainly be harnessed to produce almost infinite riches."

This doesn't in and of itself affect the probability that it's a true effect, but why would you publish this study based on such a limited single trial if you truly believed you had discovered such a world changing thing? Wouldn't you at least run a second trial to confirm? Wouldn't you drop everything you were doing to try to firm it up so solidly that no rational person could doubt that you had just changed history?

This leaves me to conclude that even the original author does not believe it to be true. For if he believes he's made a discovery of this magnitude and is still standing up in front of Psych 101 courses giving the same lecture he's given for the last 20 years instead of pursuing this with every ounce of his being, he would be a fool. I do not believe he could be so large a fool, ergo, the effect is merely a statistical mirage.
My guess is that it has to do with the discount Amazon offers for Subscribe & Save and the fact that diaper and coffee needs are easy to predict. Those are two things that you don't want to run out of, so it's worth buying in bulk.
There's really so much to do that you can't do it in two weeks, but be sure to explore as much as you can. Careful with the food, though, some of it may not be so great for your stomach.
You're probably thinking of the Sokal Hoax (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair), where Alan Sokal basically made up a nonsense paper and submitted it to a literary journal and got it accepted.

To me, the hoax illustrates the real reason why the "literary culture" has declined so. Its not due to any diminishing of Americans' literary sensibilities, but rather due to the literary world's increasing insularity and elitism. Today the world of "high literature" is so self-referential and abstract as to require a degree in literature to simply comprehend why any given work is good or bad. Most people rightly don't want to put in that kind of effort.
Some areas have a dotted line for administrative borders.

For example, Kashmir: http://goo.gl/maps/y58a
Project Euler is nice because Lisp (Common Lisp anyway) is good at dealing with large numbers. It's also reasonably fast.
Startups Ain't Always Pretty (And That's Normal)
Captured: America in Color from 1939-1943
Why are all the posts on HN about programming languages and dissecting programs so important?
pull the int out of the array and shift/mask it to get the byte

The problem is, you would have to be prepared to do this anytime you're dereferencing a byte pointer. You wouldn't know at compile time whether the pointer points into byte-organized or word-organized memory.

You're right about structs, too.
I agree that we do need to do better at conveying what our courses are like. We'll do more in the near future to make that happen -- a guided tour on codelesson.com is one obvious and easy thing we have planned.

Another thing we're planning are free courses -- our first one (on programming the Etsy API) will take place in December. Taking a free course might be a good entree to what CodeLesson is about if you're unsure as to whether it's for you or not.
Current drop.io links work just fine. They just took away the ability to create new ones with a free account.

The reason he's encountering dead links is because drop.io drops are specifically designed to expire. You pick an expiration date when you create a drop. It's a feature. The service was not meant for long-term storage or distribution. Using it this way was a mistake.
You're welcome. I hope it makes for an interesting curiosity -- I'm not sure it can be much more at this point :-)
"You should follow me on twitter" on super bold red. Always lame sounding.
You get really good ideas by learning a lot and cross referencing little groups of knowledge. My advice would be to build something solved already (for example a voting based photo site, maybe with tags) while you learn, learn, learn. You won't come up with any good finance/law/science/whatever related startups if you're not immersed with the material.

Also, now that you are in college I recommend taking 5 or 10 hours a term figuring out how to maximize your marks per course given the least amount of work/inputs. Highest time ROI you will ever come by.
> Do you really feel that "legalising" addictive and physical-dependence-causing "cocaine" will lead to a lesser burden on the collective society than the situation now?

I do. We only have on case so far : Portugal. And it looks pretty good, which, of course, flies in the face of the our government's War On Drugs(tm) propaganda.

We also have the case of US Prohibition Era, where prohibiting the substance made it worse, as people still consumed it, but just kept dying because government agents poisoned the supply. It also let criminals gangs flourish as the whole industry moved underground.
I've very excited to see India from a tourist perspective.

From a business perspective, I'm a little leery. I've read too many articles on the bureaucracy and corruption that makes running a business tough, even for the locals.
hmm, I always figured it was fulfilment companies that got picked up by Amazon. If you can move volume, and have loyalty, Amazon wants to know how.
I thought it was actually gold stored in some southeast-asian vault.
Ask HN: Any good math jokes?
I'm trying to come up with a good math joke for our math team t-shirts. Last year we had "Know you limits, don't drink and derive." The shirt included a fuzzy graph.

I'm thinking about using an xkcd comic if the author gives me permission, but the images are somewhat small for t-shirts, so I might have to throw my own together anyways.

Got any good ideas?
I can really only speak for Mumbai, as I've visited Delhi only as a tourist myself a handful of times.

The charm of Mumbai is on the streets. The street food, the markets, walking on Marine Drive etc. If you let me know when you're coming and some way to contact you, I'd love to grab a drink and show you a few interesting places in the city.
ok, lesson learned:

Don't make humorous comments; you can't get modded +5 (funny) on here. Instead, you get downvoted.
People only hold Google to those standards because Google positions themselves as a champion of openness and user's rights.

As you point out, these standards may not be entirely realistic for a for-profit company operating in a very competitive space.

Google therefore must either take the risk that their standards will actually make them into a stronger company, or gradually compromise them for competitive advantage.

The problem with the compromise approach is that it undermines trust even more than if they'd never held themselves to such high standards in the first place, and that's where the backlash comes from.
Great Tower Defense Game on Canvas
Good point. She was one of the rare candidates who can actually afford to take on the two parties as an independent.
So clearly we should poison everyone's coffee with lead. We have lots of our fellow citizens hopelessly addicted to this terrible substance. They cannot function without it. Clearly the only way out is to poison the coffee.

Then, while we are at it, let's add some mercury to cigarettes, and put maybe put arsenic in fast food hamburgers.
Ðe irony… : Error establishing a database connection
When will Stewart Brand admit he was wrong?
Why did the chicken cross the Möbius strip?

To get to the same side.
Cooks Illustrated is home to some of the best science writing of any periodical.

My wife has also had spectacular success with the Vodka pie crust, and just loves telling people about how it works.
Hmm, I see a few posts defending this move because of tax implications, putting the cost at $65,000,000 if he waits around for the 20% tax bite.

Seems like a pretty big bet that the value of MSFT won't increase by... eh... 70 cents?
Yeah good discussion, I wish you well also. Anyway time for bed, but definitely go check out some of Grof's work. He seems to be really interested in reincarnation, which to me seems a step beyond psi in terms of plausibility. You almost couldn't have reincarnation without psi, or at least whatever underlying mechanism was powering it.
We called it bitcoins and it is a Neal Stephenson plot device.
I still don't see what the problem is - you know the type of memory array you're referencing into (int, byte, whatever), you know the type of pointer you're dereferencing (byte). So is the problem going to be that it will be slow? In portable CL, yes, but there's always ways to get at the implementation's array-accessing internals and fake type-displaced arrays (esp. if you have control over the internals, as this hypothetical project would).
I wanted to hack on Sumatra, and actually downloaded MuPDF, but, Mu only builds with Visual C++, and VCExpress wouldn't install on Windows XP for some unknown reason :-|

I did the same thing you're doing with Sumatra and Foxit, but usually I just take copious notes, specially to forward references. Then make a second pass at the document using my notes as guide.
Were it not the case that contemporary politicians essentially can't win without spending millions of dollars, I'd agree with you hands down.

But as it is, either they're billionaires that fund themselves, or they get funded by Wall Street, Telecoms, Big Oil, Tech, Defense Industry, other billionaires, etc.

I think I'm more comfortable with a billionaire spending his own money, than a non-billionaire completely in the pocket of some particular industry.

At least with the former, the payoff they're looking for could alternately be fame, love, legacy, or simply because being in government is the one thing they haven't done yet (besides maybe going to space).

With the latter, the payoff will certainly be shaping the laws in their favor, sometimes at the expense of the country or overall economy.
You don't need a scientific test to see that french fries don't rot, just look between the seat cushions in my car. I'm almost positive there is one in their from when I was in high school...
> First, this assumes you've got a fresh install of Ubuntu 10.04 (But any version around that should work).

Do we really need to be so specific to learn ruby ?
Microsoft took a different approach in the 90's and ended up shackled by governments; I'm not so sure Google's shareholders would ignore that in their profitability calculations regarding the different approaches.
Blekko, a new search engine slashes the web.
Get it up and checkout https://github.com/vinsol/Launching-Soon while you are at it; I've been meaning to use this, or a similar gem, on my next project. Don't spend a lot of time on it, which is were the gem comes in, you'll be wanting to take it down ASAP.

SEO, audience building, and email gathering are key here. If you don't have a blog, start one, and just chat about things in the space. Comment on other people's blogs too, don't run around self-promoting at this point. Starting an app at day 0 with 20 followers is about a bazillion times easier than having none.
Google University: Exploring Computational Thinking
For what it's worth, I used Hunch as the "decision engine" on a graduate project. While we had to use the old (very limited) API, Hunch was an incredibly useful matchmaking tool. The way they can parse a profile from fbook or twitter and make accurate predictions about tastes could be incredibly powerful.
>I'm getting really tired of cleaning up relational disasters.

mysql dying won't fix that. i've seen plenty of disasters in other databases.
Don't rush. You have a lot of time to figure it out. Just pick one idea you have now, try to launch it, learn something along the way, if it is not going to work out, move on. Sometimes I regret that at your age, I am too hungry to be success early, and that really doesn't help much.
Why was 6 afraid of 7?

Because 7 8 9!

(7 ate 9)
That saddens me. I've never done anything serious on the web, but I'm building a project for the first time now and I've been procrastinating a lot by learning the best ways to do everything. The fact that so many people just do a half-assed job and stay employed, while I've been out of work so long (hence the aforementioned project, actually, since I'm hoping to use it as leverage to find someone willing to give me cash bi-weekly).. like I said, it saddens me.
Send me a shout on Twitter?
I flew every week for last 3 years. So here are my truths from trenches

- Avoid seats in the middle. Period. Exception - exit row or front row seats

- Select seats which do not have seats in front

- Do careful consideration before taking emergency exit seats. The door is more than 50 pounds. You need to unlatch it , twist-turn to get the door inside or throw it out.

- Do not take seats beyond the half way of the plane. The more you go behind, more you hear engine noise and longer it takes to disembark

- Avoid seats near toilets. You need to put up with stink or people standing in your legroom

- Take aisle seats if the wheels-2-wheels time is more than 3 hours

- For frequent flyers - note down the sun direction if you are taking window seat. It will help you choose left window seat or right window seat. You do not want to face the sun all the way during the flight. You selected window seat for a view, it is stupid to close down the windows.

- If flying red eye, choose window seat because you can rest your head against the window.
This is Dvorak, of course, but still it seems wrong to me to buy a company just to get employees. If they made a viable business, then maybe it is worth integrating that business as a feature on facebook, or whatever.

I can't fault the employees for getting a spectacular "signing bonus" but it really seems a shame to shut down services like this.

When magazines go out of business, they sell their subscription lists to another magazine. So you get "sorry, Popular electronics is no longer publishing, but the rest of your subscription will be filled by Popular mechanics".

Seems the least facebook could do.
A pet-peeve of mine. I don't want new vim users trying "vi" and having an awful experience ("how do I undo more than once??"), assuming it's not an alias for vim.
I enjoyed this: "The fastest racecar can’t move if the gas-cap gets stuck; your product is only as good as its worst component." It reminds me of Dave McClure's "something in your product sucks, find it, kill it" (paraphrased).
For those not familiar with The Waste Land, it's a ten page or so poem about the decay of knowledge and purpose in modern life (circa 1920s). It's regarded as one of the first/founding works of literary 'modernism.' Interestingly, a large portion of its text consists of fragments of other works, and it's littered with countless subtle references/allusions to other things. Drawing meaning from it requires investigation of these links; you need to follow the trail.

The person who made this website is a software engineer, without any university qualifications or formal education in literary analysis. It's also one of the best resources about this poem you can find - and there are literally thousands of books and papers to compete with. The hypertext format didn't exist when The Waste Land was written, but its a perfect fit.
A Comparison of Scalable NoSQL DataStores [pdf]
Very true. It's also one of the only languages out there to let you inspect functions' source code, which means you can implement full-blown Lisp macros in it using eval(). Given its popularity and the runtime performance of V8, I think this makes it the ultimate language for the next decade.
A very real and sad start up story
This is the most ridiculous concept in the digital age. If it's being recorded by a computer, it can be copied. Hell, if it can be seen, it can be illicitly recorded. When you can buy tiny cameras from ThinkGeek that fit in the bridge of your glasses and can record VGA video for hours on a single battery charge, you can forget about pictures not being "saved".

And when the job is looking at naked pictures all day, what do you expect? I mean, who do you think seriously is seeking that sort of job in the first place?
Kind of a tool .... but i feel bad for him!
It's different because Paypal can't issue money, but Listia can.
Cool. I've been accomplishing the same thing by using Jaxer in my application and it works pretty well. I have a canvas based drawing app on top of a background image and the composite image can be downloaded by the user. I transfer the drawing to the server side, render, composite, and return the output. Works on IE (with excanvas) as well.
How about just getting rid of downvotes? I see very little spam on HN, but I see a lot of thoughtful posts that swing widely as people upvote them an then they get power-downvoted by voting groups for being "politically incorrect".

For every off topic, or one-liner response that gets downvoted, I see several useful responses being punished by people who simply disagree and don't have the integrity to illuminate their disagreement with a response.
typeface.js?
If you do it in groups, you'd better be discrete.

(Related: Analysts do it continuously, and almost everywhere.)
About heart disease --- are there any simple things I can do now (when I'm 22) that will save my life when I'm 60, 70, 80, 90?