skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't really see this as having much effect on Java at all. I see a lot of nerd rage at Oracle for how they've managed Java so far (including from me - I think Elison is a douche) but face it - nerds ain't the target market for Java. Nerds have hated Java from the outset - it's not cool enough, it doesn't have whizzy features from functional programming, it's too slow, it's too corporate, it's too hyped.

Well, now over a decade later and a tonne of real work has been done by real companies with Java. By people who don't give a shit about whether it's buzzword compliant or 'free as in speech'.

Nerds getting their knickers in a twist about freedom or whether you can write 'hello world' in 20 less characters, or whether you can implement currying in Java are just not the target market for Java and quite frankly, outside a very small cloistered world, they're not really an important market, either.

One day, Java will be superceeded, and I expect that it will be something akin to Gosu - kinda like Java, Java compatable but 'better' enough in some way to make people want to move - much like the C to C++ transition happened: people can keep their existing investments and codebases, but start doing new stuff in a way which adds some value. I don't think such a language exists yet - Gosu doesn't offer enough I think. But one day,
Ooh nice site - I tried googling around to see if there were any other sites that did it but didn't find your site before I built mine. I'll definitely take a poke around and see what I can learn though :)
You know, Nginx did come out of a Russian web conglomerate that owns a newspaper over there…
This has been Snap.com 's competitive advantage for years. I suppose Google gave them enough of a head start for them to make something of it if they were going to. Theirs is certainly more mature though. And they have a JS include you can place on your site to enable this sort of image preview on all external links.

Theirs customizes the preview type depending on the content. For example, links to stock information shows a little quote and graph preview.
There's new appetite for peddlers of cheap eats
The domain was unregistered. I owe @sharkseo a MASSIVE thank you for spotting the domain and tipping me off.

I contacted 7books.net and 7books.com along the way - I'll write a follow up post talking about that experience at some point.

Thanks for the links - I've already looked at them to check they didn't do exactly what I do but will definitely have a proper play around. There's also librarything which I'm a member of.

Books ftw!
hmmm... maybe thats the upside of a masters degree. You have that "come to jebus" moment the day after you graduate, but without all the nasty research and writing.
An Open Letter to Wired Magazine: We're breaking up
Interesting article on concept of "White labelling" of food stuffs. Anyone know of software/web app examples of this? ~ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White-label_product via http://jontangerine.com/log/2009/12/introducing-analog

Who is the "Richelieu" of software?
I don't think Z-bo speaks for everyone at LtU. His or her comments often strike me as a bit troll-ish.
Hey - I'm at pubcon right now!! Come say hi! My email is on the 7bks site or twitter me or something. Small world :)

Oh - and nice site.
Hang on a second. Let's look at the full quote and then think for a minute.

>Meanwhile Uncle Sam pours hundreds of millions in grants and loan guarantees into half-baked "green" startups, an industrial policy tailor-made to attract charlatans and losers. Why are we content... allowing Washington to replace the judgment of millions of private investors with the whims of a handful of bureaucrats trying to score political points playing with taxpayers' money?

That's a better version of the quote.

The government could have a different policy. Leg #1: Tax the hell out of carbon emissions (since the price of energy doesn't include the harm of carbon emission). They could even lower other taxes and write poor Grandma a check. Behavior would change and any idea that will save energy will find investors. This is not enough though: Leg #2 Pay people to sequester carbon, as long as it can be verified scientifically. Nobody would undertake this activity without subsidy.

Under this policy what role is there for government officials to decide what is the best technical means to reduce carbon emissions? Not much. Would it be less effective than current policy? I think it would be more effective.

Why don't we have this policy? Two reasons: Government wants to be handing out the checks--one by one. They always opt for the solution which empowers them. It's human nature.

The other reason: Voters. We all keep hanging on the dream of a technological fix coming out of nowhere at no cost. No price tomorrow is too high to pay for comfort today. Part of our sick values that promote consumption as the cure for every economic ill. I'll trust the voters more after they detox.
Airbnb Raises Cash to Expand Budget-Travel Service
Yeah, but it does make it easier and more accessible to those who don't hack with OpenCV every day. One could also argue that one can always build digital components from scratch instead of using something like an Arduino.
Why wd you want a job at google anyway?
AirBnB raises funding, launches iPhone app
Really loved that post.

Especially the quote "The casual ones end up having casual talent and merely casual lives."
Of note is that someone finally made the UITabBar very pretty.
Thanks Zachster - some of those are definitely on my road map. I wanted to launch early though so as soon as I was partially happy with it I set it live. I can add those features later.

The ajax thing is definitely a strong priority - but I need to learn how to do ajax first and I think it's pretty hard...!
I've been a Boxee user for a long time, and I was SO excited about the Boxee box. I was about to click "Pre-order", and at the last second I thought "Wait, what's the size of the hard drive?.."

And that's all she wrote. I cannot believe they didn't put a hard drive in there. For me, that completely kills the purpose of this thing ...
I watched these episodes as a kid when they were shown on CBS the first time.

After about 10 spins or so it became obvious (or so I thought at the time) that he was waiting for a certain corner-corner-this.square combination to come up and then it would always stop on the $+spin square. There was nothing musical in there at all.
You should be able to do that with a normal webcam, since you don't need depth information. I've thought of that too; I think there will be a similar interface when heads-up displays in glasses become viable.
This is very good - uploading large files is a PITA. Now all we need is a Flash client we can add to a website, and we'll have a reliable way for website users to upload huge files.
"Do not expect the teachers to teach you."

I am all about teaching yourself and internal thirst for knowledge, but this is a bit depressing.
360iDev GameJam: Working game prototype in 13 hours
I'm going to create a site called 1book.com where you post your top favourite book :)
Question the TSA at your own Risk
Has anyone used something like this: http://piwik.org/docs/javascript-tracking/
The Kinect isn't a game console. It's possible that they are selling it at a lost, but not likely. That said, Nintendo doesn't sell game consoles at a loss (at least they didn't with the Wii). I think that by 'typically' you mean that Microsoft and Sony do it. I have no idea if Sega or ATARI ever did that for their consoles.
Crocodile tears are vastly more effective.
Hey thanks, I'm not at pubcon, i just like doing cool things with data. pubcontweets is a small part of a larger product i'm working on.
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 released today
Get High-Value Startup Jobs, Delivered to Your Inbox
An Interview with Neven Mrgan of Panic Inc.
Used to watch the show with my Grandma a lot as a kid, and very often people who know the answer (you can generally tell based on their confidence, and the fact that they never buy a vowel) will keep spinning in order to make more money.
Did you learn Python first?

or did you learn it as your learned google's app engine?
Gestures to browse ...ummmmm... email from bed???
Recommendation Letters Cost Women Jobs
I looked at, I'd like to use it but I couldn't find the price, what will it cost?
Mortgage Calculator (and Amortization Charts) with R
Learned it as I went along. I was completely new to both app engine and python when I started. The beginners guide on app engine (link in blog post) guides you through everything you need really
Google gives 10% raise across the board
> Human eyes are much less sensitive to details in blue compared to green and red

IIRC our strength with green is why many night-vision systems use only green. It has other benefits such as not killing your night vision, but when you take the darkness of the night and remove the red and blue components, you can see better. Once again, IIRC.
HN thread on Google previews: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1892152
Using ajax with either the amazon or google books api is definitely on my roadmap. I don't (yet!) know how to code ajax though. Also - i'm unconvinced about book covers. Most book covers are actually pretty uninteresting so I'm not a big fan of them. Still, I definitely want to make certain things more visual.
welcome to the world of running public facing internet services. and early onset heart disease.
Not surprising coming from AirBnB, but this app looks very, very polished.

It doesn't look much but the customization of all these standard UI elements (e.g. UITabBar as mentioned by sudont) makes a difference in the end. I would say especially in their market where I have seen websites with more than dubious interfaces.
There may be confounding variables, making my comment hyperbolic. However, I once had a quickness of wit and a clarity of memory that I just don't any more.
Thanks vidar - I'm blown away by all the positive feedback :)

It's been a fun few weeks, I hope my post encourages others to follow in my steps!
Ah, I misunderstood. I thought he was intending to call C from Python by calling Lua from Python and then C from Lua. Still, calling C from Python is trivial with ctypes. Most people do not realize how easy it is:

from ctypes import CDLL
libc = CDLL("libc.so.6")
libc.printf("boo")
I've been a programmer of one sort or another for close to 30 years. Personal life?
Amazon Defends Sale Of Pedophile How-To Guide
If you are not much of a fan of ruby, you can also sign-up for a regular account at http://indextank.com/pricing, it's free for the first month.
That seems like intellectual laziness.
Consider consulting part time?
I'd encourage you to put them live before you finish them! 7books isn't finished at all, this is just the beginning but all this feedback and testing is what shapes the future of the site. I learned the "publish fast" concept from HN and I strongly recommend it.
Does Your Name Spell Success?
Streamo.tv
Starts at 25 a month. Check out the pricing tab.
Perhaps because a lower percentage of women are inherently interested in technology than men? Why is this never considered??

Is it because the author is often biased since they are usually female? It almost seems like she assumes that because SHE is interested in technology that there MUST be women that are also interested in technology at an equal rate as men are.
The Internet as a metaphor for God?
I'm actually in the same situation. I'd like to give it a try for the development of a back end server for a realtime game.

Does anyone have any experience with this in Go?
Thanks! Yes I definitely want feedback on the coding. I'm hungry to learn more and that's why I put the code on github. My email add is on the site - please let me know what I'm doing wrong :)
There is text of the memo at BI: http://www.businessinsider.com/google-bonus-and-raise-2010-1...
That's not the add-on though, that's the regular api service.
The Kinect isn't a game console, yes. It is still a significant piece of hardware though, and there is quite a bundle of technology inside it. Just because it is an "Add On" device does not mean they priced it as a single use device. From what I've heard it requires its own developers kit additional to the standard kits sold now, and is unique to the way Microsoft usually deals with developer extras. It sounds like they are investing in this taking off and the licensing of game studios, and the sales of those games, to subsidize the product in some degree.

To answer the second question, I know the Dreamcast was sold at a loss. The Nintendo 64 and GameCube were as well, but Nintendo decided that the Wii could be a success if they tried something new instead of trying to be bigger and better.
I wrote a Pomodoro Webapp not too long ago ..

http://www.tomato-timer.com

if you use chrome, it has desktop notifications .. and I added a start/stop to timer..
check out this documentary -
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0390632/

These guys can anagram stuff like crazy, but don't know what most of the words they use even mean.
Trivia: DXT compression (the texture compression used in virtually all modern games) uses a 5:6:5 format for end channels giving the green channel the extra bit of precision, for exactly this reason.
His TED talk gives an interesting perspective on Global Warming, and how we should be thinking about it. ~17mins, worth the time.

http://www.ted.com/talks/bjorn_lomborg_sets_global_prioritie...

I watched it awhile ago. The argument I remember is something along these lines. The worst case scenario of global warming is that sea levels rise some level by 2100. The most pessimistic financial projections for the people living in the affected areas in 2100 is that they will be equivalent to middle-class Americans once the sea levels rise. Thus, we should consider the fact that global warming efforts right now are essentially going toward helping middle class Americans, whereas there are other far more pressing issues facing the poorest of the poor in the world right now. Since we have limited resources in the world and we aren't going to work on every issue, we need to set priorities on what we will work on. Long story short, global warming doesn't make the cut.
So far, it's been one of the goddamndest annoying things I've ever seen on the serp.
I am not sure I understand what he is saying. All the "results" that he is talking about are the interpreted inputs for the application to process.

So for," What is seven hundred and forty four as a number? ", the interpreted input is a NumberQ function taking the main part "seven hundred and forty four as a number" and evaluating whether it is a number or not. The real result is true.

The zoologist one has already been talked about. The rest other than the 7th digit question are all false.

There are many different choices for the inputs, for example with the colour question

The 2nd colour in purple, yellow, arm, white and blue is?

There seems to be some popularity going on.
The first choice as input is yellow and the second choice is blue. To further test replacing yellow with black leads to blue as the first choice.
Then again even if you were to use the interpreted inputs you would have to determine the syntax for wolfram which last time I checked is not available and is basically a guess the syntax game.

http://webapps.stackexchange.com/q/1322/40

If someone would care to enlighten me on how this could actually work I would greatly appreciate it, otherwise this method does not seem like it will work. Nice creativity though.
The Mind Bender - Play The Mind Bender online at Y3 Games
Magic! In this game it's all about the telekinesis! jump, run and move objects to get on.
Minestrone Soup Recipe
When it's proprietary hardware it's fair to call it a hack I think.
I don't think this is a very convincing argument. I don't think there have been many examples of people building games for the PC using the Wii controller. I suspect that the same goes for the Kinect. The vast majority of people buying this will be people buying it for the XBOX, with a small proportion of geeks using the open source driver for interests sake, but not the sole purpose of buying it.
> * If avoiding third party spammers is the reason not to share email address, then it follows that Google should disallow the contacts api. This would be unfortunate

No that doesn't follow because on Google Contacts I give you my email address. On Facebook I "friend" you, which doesn't really even necessarily mean I'm your friend. I don't want you then to be able to automatically export my email to third parties.

> * Google could provide google UIDs instead of emails when downloading contacts. This is theoretically and practically enough to reconstruct the social graph as well. Every company could use their own UID for downloads instead of emails. I do not think it would be practical to reconstruct a social graph across companies however. This is a greedy strategy that would cause inefficiencies and prevent innovation in my opinion.

Google Contacts is for storing emails you've collected. Facebook is for friending people and I just happened to have to provide my email when signing up... oh just like about every other site on the web.
Congratulations to everyone who figured it out, and especially to Glenn from Alaska who was the first to email me with the correct answer, and wins $50. In his words:

"The ball makes an infinite number of progressively smaller bounces in a finite amount of time, and then proceeds to slide (roll?) along the ground at a constant speed."

I was just looking for "infinite number of bounces in a finite amount of time/distance".

I think it's a nice puzzle, because it illustrates Zeno's 'paradox', with a simple model of an everyday occurrence. The answer makes sense, but it is not obvious unless you understand limits. I thought of this puzzle while playing with a pool cue, you can really hear/feel them bouncing faster and faster.
There are also some screencasts scattered around the Heroku blog. For example, I was just using their screencast on New Relic and the queue depth:

http://blog.heroku.com/archives/2010/3/8/heroku_casts_queue_...

I also recently used another screencast for setting up a Sinatra app. It's incredibly simple, go figure:

http://twilio.heroku.com/

Very helpful. The Heroku docs also have a lot of information about the Heroku specific stuff that you might want to read about (like dynos and the backlog).
Firefox 4 for Mac OS X: Under the Hood
Interesting implementation detail: the images are XHR'd in with a json wrapped data URI. Try to right click on an image and share it.

Other notable notes: they don't render flash in the previews and they let the hovers cover up the right-hand ads.
I'm beginning to miss Marissa Mayer's axe on things on the main search page. I think Google's primary advantage for a while now has been cleanliness of results (as the difference in relevance between search engines has slimmed); they're opening themselves up to a competitor with a better design/flow by continuing to cram these "useful" items in.
Pedophilia Book on Amazon Sparks Outrage
My experience has been that although the topics needed are covered in high school physics and math (limits), most people did not get it right.
Amazon patents bad gift defense system
I agree that the Go example code looks ugly, although much of that for me is simply from their ideas on capitalization. Of special note from my perspective is that their biggest attempt to clean up syntax, by adopting a JS-esque automatic insertion of most semicolons, has backfired: it doesn't make anything prettier, it's either a wash or a slight loss with respect to obviousness of code, and it introduces a few opportunities for bugs. Perl of all languages did a better job at this goal by just making the terminator of the last element of a block or list optional.

I appreciate their maintenance of an end delimiter to blocks that is vertically aligned with the start of the block, although they could have gotten a bigger win imo by going with the ALGOL/Ruby style 'end' rather than the C style curly brace (and in doing so freed up curly braces to unambiguously be used for something else).
Smartphones Ruin Concerts
Showing off the upcoming devices from AMD
It's nice that they've done this, because it makes powerful data operations available to non-programmers. I'll be sticking with my Unix command line tools, though.
Piwik is pretty great, nice for being free. You can definitely install that and write up a script to attach to their api, it's pretty easy to use.

Please please please host your analytics on a completely different server though. Analytics is a heavy duty operation, and should be no where near your app code.

Don't write it yourself, piwik has done all of the heavy lifting for you, don't reinvent the wheel at this stage.
IndexTank (ours) got added in this round as well. Thanks Heroku team, we are stoked.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1891907
ARM shows off new high end GPU
Places I visited on my free half-day after Google I/O:

- Cable Car Museum: http://www.cablecarmuseum.org/museum.html . You can stand within a few feet of the generators and wheels that power the whole system, it's a brilliant 19th century hack. (And of course ride the cars).

- Musée Mécanique: http://www.museemecaniquesf.com/ . Huge collection of playable vintage-to-modern arcade machines.

- Coit Tower: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coit_Tower. Fantastic views and murals.
Lomborg's basic position is "Global warming is real - it is man-made and it is an important problem. But it is not the end of the world."
Which is crap. Most of Bangladesh is only a few metres above sea level, ditto for some of India and Pakistan, the South Pacific islands, etc. Most human settlement is either near a river or the ocean.
Even a 1/10 hit rate is sufficient. You get 10 questions from the website, return the results and one of them leads to your spam comment being posted. You then repeat that process thousands of times.
Android Market Action
Did you really just use the words "Flash client" and "reliable" in the same sentence?
The real news here is the CreateScheduledTask[] and related functions.

"...I could use an infinite loop, but that would lock my Mathematica completely. I might want to run overnight computations at the same time, or have other events happen periodically, so instead I program a scheduled interrupt (another new capability) that will suspend any running Mathematica program, run this command, and then return to the program."

Mathematica hasn't previously had a way to manage a long-running process by itself. For a long time this would have been accomplished by calling Mathematica kernel from another program using a linking library. Not very difficult but it still would have been another step. Now it's built in. Cool.
thesixtyone (YC 09) explores a new direction on iPad
Heh - indeed :)
"Don't view getting a job as failing. "

I was actually going to post this exact same advice. Getting a job is not failing. You graduated college so obviously you place some value in having a structured environment to learn. If done carefully, a good job can provide you with a whole new set of skills (and contacts) that may prove invaluable, in much the same way college did - only you are getting paid for it and building up that independence. On top of that, you can still work on your project - it is not one or the other.

Also, I actually believe that learning how to release is very important. A good job will teach you that skill. How do you decide what is the "minimum" set of features? How do you decide which bugs have to be fixed and which can be ignored for now? How do you decide when a feature is "complete"? How do you balance the need for a new release yesterday versus the need to address issues and add value. These are all things that it sounds like you are having trouble with - and a good job will show you how other people make these decisions, which you can then apply to your own project.