skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
For those of you who dont have FB or dont want to login:

Time
Saturday, November 13 at 12:00pm - November 14 at 12:00pm
Location	WePay HQ
455 Portage Ave Ste B
Palo Alto, CA
Created By
Sophie Monroe, Bill Clerico
More Info	Join us for our first ever 24 hour hackathon!

WePay founders will be holding a start up workshop for tips on how to start your own company. Rasmus Lerdorf will be available to help you with the WePay API as well as any of your PHP questions.

It's going to be 24 hours full of hacking, food, music and awesome prizes in the awesome new WePay HQ (we have an Oasis, no big deal.) What more could you ask for?

We'll have an IRC channel setup, and maybe some sort of video stream, if you'd like to participate remotely. Stay tuned.

See you there!
Facebook's Local Deal Platform: Starbucks Already Advertising Against It
Unicorn - GitHub
"what they’ve done is set up three screens, in a triangular pattern"

Triangular pattern doesn't say very much. Is this supposed to mean that the trick will work iff the screens are not collinear?
I'm from MN and my family still lives in and around Minneapolis. It's a great area, if you can handle the winter.

The main con for a hacker is that the tech scene is grim. The jobs are very boring and the salaries in general are pretty bad. In addition, the jobs that do exist are usually really out in the burbs. Every so often I go through the motions of creating a cost of living spreadsheet and even with the cheaper cost of housing, when I factor in car ownership and utilities I still seem to come out behind with the lower salaries. On the other hand, the bar seems to be pretty low for getting a home loan. I have a college friend who is an unemployed music instructor who "owns" a home in Powderhorn, and the person who cuts my hair in Brooklyn actually lives in Northeast and makes enough to money cutting hair 5 days a month in Brooklyn to cover her mortgage.

I don't agree that MPLS has great nightlife but there is a much better local music scene than any other place I've ever lived. The reason is that you can afford to rent a house with a basement in which to practice your drum kit on a drummer's salary. I also would not say there is great public transportation. The bike friendliness is awesome, though.

It's a little odd to put the whole north midwest into one group, each of those towns are hundreds of miles apart from each other. The culture can be quite different. I never felt MPLS had much in common with Chicago, for example.
Remind HN: Yayquery is awesome. OSS projects should pay attention.
Hi there HN folks.

A new episode of Yayquery, a video podcast about Jquery, was recently released.

And it hit me.

"Sheesh, these folks do a good job. Anybody involved in open source... or any kind of community... should take notes."

Aside from being a great way to keep up with worldwide Jquery events + news + releases, it is extremely clever and funny.

I have no affiliation with it, or with Jquery actually. But I just think it's a great model for OSS peeps of all types: be friendly, be helpful, be a window in your community for outsiders

We lurk before be download

http://yayquery.com
The article didn't paraphrase, it quoted him directly: "Since 1920, the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women—two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians—have rendered the notion of 'capitalist democracy' into an oxymoron."
I don't have to restart regularly, but I can agree that it's slower than iOS 3.x, sure. The typing lag is indeed the worst; it was horrid on 4.0 and is occasionally laggy still.

I can't figure out why it seemingly wasn't tested on the old hardware though. Maybe it was just with the bare install? It just seems uncharacteristic.
+1 for MinneBar (one of the largest BarCamps in the world) and RUM. These events helped change my career.
TeX was designed to work on computers of the late 1970's. It seems pretty reasonable to think that algorithms that were practical to execute then can be carried out more or less instantaneously on machines available today. If you think you can pull off a port, by all means try.
USC and UCLA have fine CS depts.

What about Caltech?
Awesome suggestions.
In many countries, simply posting an article against the government / regime as I might do could put me at risk of persecution. If I ever turn my phone on at all, I am adding to my location history in these systems. These systems operate by tracking _everyone_ who uses a cell phone, and movement history is recorded for everyone by default.

The people committing surveillance have access to information about my family, friends, favorite restaurant, places of business, whether I have ever masturbated in a public rest-room, the hours of the day when I am awake, and when and how I travel; and the same information is available for every other mobile phone user.

Oh - he drives to work on the freeway and parks his car here, so let's put a bomb in it. I feel it's not an acceptable risk to publish or allow people, especially government agencies, to view my location history. Some people do already give this information to Google and/or Apple. I'm not too paranoid but I think they must be ignorant or crazy to do that.

In the last ten years, our governments (Australia, UK and USA) have committed acts of war which I strongly oppose. If military conscription were introduced again, I would not cooperate. I don't want the authorities - which may not always be benevolent - to have such a very great power over me which comes from knowing my every move and my every contact.
Me too! high five
Has anyone found/done any benchmarks showing what performance impact running mod_pagespeed will have on your /server/?

I'm all for optimizing the crap out of page serving, but if this is going to double our Apache load, a) I'd like to know about it ahead of time and b) it might be worth just applying optimizations by hand.
I didn't apply this time around, for several reasons which aren't really important. Otherwise, I'd have definitely included it... you know, to show others how it's done.
Seattle reminds me of London. Sure the weather sucks and it is raining all the time, but the people make up for it by being awesome to each other. People in sunny cities tend to be dicks[1]

Some of my fav cities in the world are those I least expected to be awesome.

[1] not a scientific study but exhibit A: Los Angeles
I think it's great that the government are trying to catalyse stuff, but it'd be fantastic if they would scatter some money OUTSIDE OF BLOODY LONDON.
The ultimate goal of technology is to make human lives better; more comfortable, easier, safer, securer, etc.

I think Maslow's hierarchy of needs might help define the priority of invention (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslows_hierarchy_of_needs).

The ultimate step in this hierarchy is "self-actualization", whatever that is. Once we satisfy our social, biological needs, (easy cheap food, plentiful resources) we can work on technology to "self-actualize". This technology and process could fundamentally change the meaning of being human.
While it's funny to write a bot, at the same time you're right. It's not worth arguing with those people who just want to be mislead, and probably not worth writing a bot for it either.

The problem is, arguments don't lead to insight. If those people could be swayed by rational arguments, they wouldn't be "climate skeptics" in the first place.

So I think the pragmatic approach would be to understand your enemy before you try to engage.
Are you a government bureaucrat desperate to leaven all the recent talk of cutbacks and austerity with a touch of high-tech fairy dust? Enjoy the idea of hobnobbing with exciting personalities like Steve Ballmer and Mark Hurd? Follow my simple guide and your country can also enjoy the limitless prosperity and social harmony with which the technology industry has blessed California!

First, you'll need a name. It has to start with the word 'Silicon', even if the only silicon that will be present comes stamped with the Intel logo. Next, choose a geographic feature. Unfortunately, the best geographic features have already been claimed. May I suggest "Silicon Muskeg"?

Now, if you visit the actual Silicon Valley, you will see a lot of office buildings. Ample supply of office space is the reason Silicon Valley is a success. So, the first thing you're going to need is a nice big, empty space to build offices. Lots of them. Try to find an economically depressed area, far from the places educated workers live (cheap!) and miles from public transit. Make sure this area is zoned so that only large, expensive cubicle farms and parking lots will be built, as this is the most efficient use of space. No services are necessary, as the people working here can simply drive into the city if they require food or drink.

Also, it is vital that your new offices be supplied with fiber-optic Internet service. Rare and difficult as this may be to provide, Internet service is what separates your mind-bending city of the future from the primitive hovels your country's technology industry now inhabits.

No replica of Silicon Valley would be complete without tenants! And so, your final task is to fill these offices with the industries that define the dynamism and forward-thinking spirit of Silicon Valley: IBM, Microsoft, Intel, and Dell! Don't waste your time on small fry: Fortune 500 only, please. It matters not if your new offices are filled with call centers and rebate-processing facilities, because the very soul of technology will leach from the telephones and TPS reports, permeating the landscape with the pure essence of innovation.

So huzzah, dear bureaucrat, and godspeed!
The tech scene isn't grim, I would say it's bad but getting better. I recently got a job at a fairly young company doing pretty exciting and interesting stuff. It's not quite as fresh as a startup but is much better than Target or 3M or any other behemoth. You're right though, the commutes are tricky since the metro area is pretty big and the jobs are spread out everywhere.

Nitelife, music scene, etc. are all criteria I pulled from Joe's article. I'm not particularly into the "bar scene", but I do know that entertainment (theater, music, etc.) is top notch.

I agree that bunching all of these cities together is kind of dodgy, but I get the feeling that most everyone that writes posts like Joe's are from the edges of the country and I personally would love to see the middle of the country represented more here. So I grouped the entire middle together. :)
Excellent discussion. Here are danah's recommendations to the attendees (technologists, entrepreneurs, policy makers):

1) Provide tools that allow people to make wise decisions;
2) Offer control and transparency around data and information flows;
3) Emphasize opt-in over opt-out models;
4) Focus on curtailing usage, not collection.
Art of SEO by Rand Fishkin, Eric Enge, et al - the bible.
SEO in an Hour a Day - better on planning, etc.
Forthcoming Danny Dover book will be good
Marketing in the Age of Google has some good stuff on searcher intent.
The best training resource is SEOBook by Aaron Wall. That guy is the best in the business.
The bottom row for long-term projects is brilliant. Not so much for tracking things to do for them, but just to be a visual reminder of which side projects are actually important.

I've got easily a dozen medium-sized ideas that I'm rather indecisive about which should get my time on any given night. Actually coming up with a list of them, even without priorities, would be a huge boon. As I re-remember ideas I can easily assess if I should just scrap the idea (already have enough "good" projects) or if it's good enough to bump something else. Keep 3 or 4 ideas tops stickied and stay focused on them.

I dare say I'll try that as soon as I remember where my post-its are.
Barbara Boxer and the 'Star Wars' Sabotage
You can sit on your high horse forever if you want, but altruism only works when everyone is altruistic. Do you really expect technically competent people to work in an environment where free thought and initiative is punished and bureaucratic nonsense is everywhere...while being paid a third (or less!) of what they would be paid in the industry? That's the choice potential teachers like me face. Personally, I would love to teach, but the pain just isn't worth it. The choice seems like a no-brainer.

Going into teaching would be stupid because (1) I'd be miserable if I had to fight the bureucracy (2) said bureocracy would prevent me from having the full impact I could have as an instructor and (3) I wouldn't be anywhere near properly compensated. Is that much pain really worth the joy of making a small difference? You're selling yourself short to a stupid and old-fashioned system.

Perhaps changing this would be possible if there was some parallel school system that was completely private and received support from the government in addition to fees from students/parents. Ironically, this is the system we currently have i Norway, but the creation of new private schools is in practice outlawed by the government..severely restricting the possible avenues of teaching and probably limiting the wages of the teachers who want to work there.
Putting in a vote for ChucK.
You don't walk around barefoot on the first day of a new job, you need to break people in

I agree. And I'm sure Feynman would have agreed... until he got excited about something, at which point he would have completely forgotten.
(clickable)
http://yayquery.com
Samsung Galaxy S becomes first Wi-Fi Direct certified handset
I didn't mean to imply that I was condoning the author's actions. Perhaps I misinterpreted, but I was responding to the parent comment's decrying of the author's actions due to the perception that the author justified their actions through the belief that their opinion was superior (specifically parent's remark about requiring omniscience to justify the action)?

It does raise the question of whether the means justify the end. As people in this thread have noted
( http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1867043, http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1867162), that this technique may be more effective than a more neutral route. But again, I'm not condoning anything.
I'm not sure I've ever seen one that lets you sign before the cashier is done scanning. Wouldn't that defeat the whole premise of signing "I agree to pay the amount above in full"?

You can do everything up to that point - 'what type of card is this', etc... And many places are going signature-free below a certain transaction size, so I suppose all interactions can be handled in those cases before the 'total' key is hit.
"The C Programming Language" is 20+ years old, 270 pages, and still retails for $67.

length != price != quality
I still contend that a businessman does not have the right to hire or more importantly fire someone based on lifestyle choices. So again a recreational drug uses can be fired because he feels he has the right to intervene in someones personal affairs. What about a drinker? what about a skydiver? Lets take it further what about a homosexual? oh no that would be wrong. OK what about a swinger (they are high risk sexual lifestyle)?

The fact remains whether the law allows it or not, if an employer discriminates against people based on personal choices made in their personal life they are an asshat.

While they may have the authority they do not have the right. To think you do is self-serving and narrow minded. I respect the personal freedoms of the individual far more than I do the personal freedoms of a business, because when it gets down to brass tacks, it is the people that are the reason that he is in business in the first place. Both the ones that consume his service and provide the back of labor that got him there. I love how business owners feel that they have become the masters. It is the reason for the term corporate slavery.
PaySimple has an API. I think Shopify uses it.
The longer it takes me to load your page, the less likely I will ever see it (because I back out to my previous page) or will ever come back to it (because of the bad experience).
I'm not sure he said that. I think if anything, he made the strongest case for Portland.

I think he does sell San Francisco a bit short in the beer department. While the city itself isn't known to produce a huge amount of widely known brews, there are a couple good breweries in the city limits. Additionally, some of the best beers in the world are all made within a half-day drive of San Francisco (Russian River, nuff said).
Dang, I'd love R, C, or ChucK. That is a tough choice.
All I have is a four word title... I don't really have an incentive to login to facebook.

Plus sometimes it's really inconvenient on a mobile device.

Better: link to web page, Twitter, or blog post.

Best: link to above and title "WePay and DailyBooth Hackathon - Nov. 13 - 14"
Simple Command Line Time Tracker in Ruby
Added CalTech now. It's much smaller than USC or UCLA. And I know several programmers from USC and UCLA but not CalTech. So that's why I didn't think of it at first.
Honestly, this sounds like the problems at any largish engineering company. At least the nice thing about Google is that they're openly discussing it, and sort of scientifically at that. At other companies, you just resign yourself to politics being more than 50% of the equation, and the company slowly goes to hell in between increasingly rare and brief spurts of innovation.
You don't have to go to college if you are self-motivated. I actually think it's detrimental because it fills the time and gives you an excuse for being lazy. "Oh but I'm going to school already, I don't have time to hack together X with all my schoolwork!".

My unqualified advice: learn machine learning/AI. MIT OpenCourseware has good lecture notes and I believe Stanford's ML course has free lecture videos. These were the most interesting parts of my undergrad experience (and very practical too)
My city doesn't suck (Houghton, Michigan). Granted it isn't startup world... But we do have a good University that brings in the nerds.

And it's awesome because it isn't too big (only around 7,000), and it's been listed as one of the 100 best small towns in America. It's for hackers like me that don't like lots of people and like to be outdoors a lot (and don't mind 250 inches of snow a year!).

The city has many beautiful remnants of the copper boom and it is well kept up. Homeless aren't a problem because you just can't survive the winter without a home.
Do you know who Dave Hyatt is?

He invented XUL, contributed to Gecko, wrote the initial version of Chimera (now Camino, one of the first real embeddings of Gecko), started the Firefox project, and started WebKit

He had a pretty fucking good idea of the pros and cons of Gecko when he decided not to use it again.
Archiving in UIs
The SEO landscape does change quickly, but books are a good way to understand the theory in a nice "from the beginning" way (blogs are sort of hard for this). Rand Fishkin heads up SEOmoz.org and co-wrote the "Art of SEO" book so you won't go wrong using both resources. Even after a few years of learning SEO, I still found some value in reading the book. SEO's one of those things that it sounds simple and makes sense when you first read it, but it takes a bit of repetition and application before the nuances start to stick.
Spatial Lucene Example in Scala
When It's OK to Recline on a Crowded Flight...
Ask HN: Can you help me increase the conversion rate on my website?
http://www.organicchemistrynotes.com/

I sell a 29 page organic chemistry study guide.

I get around 250 visitors a month, mainly from search engines. The price used to be $20, i just lowered it to $10. Usually just get around 1-2 sales a month.

Would appreciate your thoughts. It is my first ecommerce website.
You have to do it regularly. :) It sucks at first.
So always be in the other one... ;-)
It seems you're correct. A quick search is giving me nothing to disagree with you.

That being said: My understanding was that the many-line system worked better primarily because of the potential for a lot of lost time between the server saying "Can I help whose next" and the order actually starting. This time is obviously hugely dependent on factors such as floor layout, space around the registers, customers familiarity with the system, etc. The idea was that if you have one line for multiple registers (a la Wendy's) than when the second register opened up the next customer in line had to notice, go to the register, probably walk around the person ordering at the first register, and then start ordering. Whereas in the multi-line system (a la McDonald's) the next customer in line will likely be focusing on the register in front of them ready to take the one step forward when their time comes. These factors can certainly be minimized but in stores that are busy/crowded/not well laid out it they can make a noticeable difference. That's my $.02 anyways.
Agreed. RBI's large response time is a good thing: it was one of the factors that allowed some insulation from the '08 crisis. It's not so much fun when it comes to deposit rates though :)
I'm reminded of a quote from The Princess Bride: "Life is pain....Anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something."

Technologists are the ones selling you something.

To be slightly less glib, what I mean to say is that technology solves life's problems, and because those problems evolve as rapidly as we do, the march of technology will never cease. Did the inventor of the wheel anticipate the auto mechanic? Probably not. But from some primal, proto-hacker-like mentality, he probably knew he was creating as many problems as he was solving. And that's the beauty of solving problems. I know my solution is good when it solves the problem at hand. I know my solution is great when it paves the way to tackle even bigger problems.
One queue minimizes the average wait time - it's the fairest and fastest system. Any CS person should know this, it's pretty basic.

Say we have 100 people and 10 servers. Everyone takes 1 minute to process, except one guy who needs 10 minutes.

With 10 queues and the long taking guy ahead of 9 other people he's blocking all those for 10 minutes. Total processing time 19 minutes.
With 1 queue and the long taking guy first (blocking 1 counter for 10 minutes) total processing time is 11 Minutes.

Another way to look at it is that with one queue, everyone gets the minimum possible wait time. In the many queues case you get that only occasionally. You could optimize the many queues so they're just as efficient as the one single queue but you'd have to know everyone's processing time in advance - impossible in a real world setting.
People who think that San Francisco weather is terrible are typically from places like Los Angeles (where I'm from) or other places that equate excruciating heat with nice weather. I actually like the cold and rain, and it only lasts for a few months. Put on a dang sweater and man up.

It's worth noting here that it was 80 degrees in San Francisco today. In November.
I'd never buy from that site!
You can improve everything but let's start with:
1)Tagline that triggers emotional response. Think "Master organic chemistry for College Dudes" v/s "Ace your College Chemistry"
2)You don't have enough proof to prove that you not fake. 1 Testimonial sounds so lame.
3)I hardly know what's in there. Provide a sample page? Include a video?
4)Sell benefits not features.
5)Get better graphics.

There is much more but you can get started with this.
Cambridge, Mass is definitely a nerd mecca. There's a lot of technology and startup action over here. And it's a wonderful city to live in (very walkable, nice architecture, low crime, clean, diverse).
The home computer industry was most likely a sub-million dollar industry when Jobs and Woz started, so it was certainly a bit easier to disrupt...add color to an inexpensive computer and voila... instant disruption!

But I like your moxie! :-)
Mungunkhuyag
Quite untrue. In fact in yesterday's election the citizens of San Francisco voted themselves several new taxes including a $10/vehicle registration fee to pay for street upkeep.