skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've been using the Pomodoro Technique for a while, and it's proven to be a really great tool.

In fact, I liked it so much, I decided to build my next webapp around it. We're still working on it, but a beta should be out in a few weeks. Sign up for it here: http://www.pomodoroplanner.com
Since it's a video, could somebody post a short summary?
Programming languages are about manipulating concepts. Give that Lua code to someone who doesn't have the necessary concepts (views, regexp-based routing, framework, dynamic websites, ...) and he'll be lost.

This rant just shows that the mighty Zed doesn't have the necessary concepts (and neither do I) to understand the Arc bit.

Edit: and obviously, reading the docs would help in this regard.
I found flask's documentation quite well-written in this regard.

For example, they provide insights at how to grow your application's structure in several ways: http://flask.pocoo.org/docs/becomingbig/, http://flask.pocoo.org/docs/patterns/packages/ and http://flask.pocoo.org/docs/patterns/appfactories/.

Generally speaking, http://flask.pocoo.org/docs/patterns/ gives a good overview of things to explore in Flask.

Edit: I elaborated a bit more. Please note that I'm not advocating anything, just giving my opinion on their documentation.
+1 for the Asus UL30. Impresive battery life and a nice screen.
UDP seems like a really bad idea for a filesharing solution.
Cool hack. I really like what I've seen of Lua so far. It would be great to see it become more viable for web work.

I think Zed's right that web applications are more and more constructed in terms of interfaces than pages.
Becoming a theoretical physicist was one of my aspirations after reading Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time (understood half of it, give or take) and being good at Physics in high school. Really appreciate the effort to categorise every steps and resources necessary to attempt this field.

But at the same time this is starting to seem daunting... how long would it take to go through all this material on a part-time basis? Well, my original plan was to do it after I semi-retire.
Amazing high resolution wallpapers #2
As the previous post of amazing wallpapers, this is a great collection Amazing high resolution wallpapers, improve your creativity, and prettify your screen :) .
Well, this morning after reading this I threw together a script in 5 secs to do this for me.

I'm using OS X and like everyone this means I have Growl installed for various applications. I figured that it should be easy enough to announce my times using that.

Looked around, found the commandline tool growlnotify and 5 seconds later...

#!/bin/sh

while true; do
sleep $((30*60))
growlnotify -swn Timer -m Playtime! Timer
sleep $((30*60))
growlnotify -swn Timer -m Worktime! Timer
done

...was born.
Yes. As the other poster argued, a tree needs some kind of ordering (like Hashtables need the keys to be hashable). But trees also give you a persistent data structure. Most hashtables including Python's dict are ephemeral, i.e. not copy-on-write.
I guess the average value per customer is much higher for wow players than bank customers?

No. Cost of customer acquisition for a single credit card is roughly the same as WoW lifetime value (both in the vicinity of $250).

Lifetime value for a middle class bank customer depends on their product mix. On the low end, low three figures per year for a checking account which generates few fees. On the high end, well, suffice it to say middle class families are very lucrative indeed. (If you run $20k through your credit card a year, with an average balance in the $2k region, and you have a home loan and car loan, and... run some numbers for what your parents probably pay every year for banking services.)
Security theatre, and like security theatre at airports it masks the reality that in all probability nothing of substance is actually happening.

And of course we trust all of these people to get it right and for nothing to slip through the cracks. The threat is as much about what happened in the past as what happens now. What guarantees are there that some employee didn't make their own copy of the data and take it offsite? What about backups?
Indeed, I’m going through the docs as we speak and I’m impressed by the quality of the docs and the examples provided are interesting. Thanks for reminding me about Flask.
Uncloseting Drama and Fag Hags: Berfrois Interviews Nick Salvato | berfrois
I agree. Though what it gets compiled down to depends on the compilation strategy. If your compiler is smart enough, and your use of functions as variables / function pointers is weak [1] enough, your functions may, say, just get inlined into a big case-statement-like construct.

[1] In the sense of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strength_reduction
Did I miss something happening to yahoo? http://au.search.yahoo.com/search?p=yahoo+search&fr=yfp-... Yahoo search still up?
which reflected the light from Venus...
Whatever. I got it sorted out so go bother someone else.
Why You Haven't Launched
Or the `Either` monad, or union types/ADT in general, `Maybe` is just a pretty basic application of those.
Mind you, I was programming Basic when I was 7, but I left it behind for years. I went back to school for software engineering when I was 33. I've been working as an ER/Critical Care nurse for 18 years.

I'm currently bootstrapping a search engine for economic/financial news at http://Newsley.com. (alpha of search is here: http://newsley.com/search )
Study: Cloud computing for business uses less energy
Surely, that's his point, putting an ambiguity into a variable name is just asking for trouble, choose a better name.
I use http://e.ggtimer.com/30%20minutes

Or http://e.ggtimer.com/pomodoro for a full 25/5 cycle
"What's the solution for you companies desperate to hire?"

How about looking abroad? I know, it's fraught with perils, but as someone from "abroad" from the U.S. point of view, it needn't be that bad.

And your dollars will go a LONG way in hiring top talent (of course, you need someone local or whom you trust to choose the top talent. 90% of the local programmers are crappy too!).
The article explicitly says that that isn't true (on page 2):

"It was thought that Google engineers used some of Project Harmony's code for the project, but the ASF has subsequently debunked this notion."
Øredev 2010 - JVM Bytecode for Dummies
UDP is more easier to penetrate a firewall, IMHO...
The engineer shortage will spread. It's hitting SV and NYC first, but give it a year or two, and you'll see it as well.
Natural sugars from fruit are very different from High Fructose Corn Syrup (not Sugar, unless you're outside of North America), so I don't think you're comparing the right things here.
It'll be interesting to follow this up to see how engineers solve (or not) HR problems.
My version of this is: When we achieve X, money is a by-product ;)
Google Surprises Employees with a Bonus and a Raise
I agree that the paragraphs about tables driven programs and function pointers are the best part. You can read "Combining data­driven programs with function pointers leads to an astonishingly expressive way of working, a way that, in my experience, has often led to pleasant surprises." as much as an endorsement of functional languages than the endorsement of OO-like techniques it was meant to.

Though C is not really adequate to do Lisp-like programming. Because you can't capture free variables with C function pointers. Of course you can get around this restriction with lambda lifting [1], but why would you want to do the job of the compiler?

As an example, it is quite hard to encode function composition in C, i.e. write a function that takes two function and returns their composition. Or the same specification in (non-idiomatic [2]) Haskell:

composition :: (b -> c) -> (a -> b) -> a -> c
composition f g =
let h a = f (g a)
in h

I don't know of any way to make up new functions / function pointers in C at runtime.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lambda_lifting
[2] Idiomatic would be

composition :: (b -> c) -> (a -> b) -> a -> c
composition f g a = f (g a)

but that's harder to understand for a C programmer who's not familiar with currying. Of course Haskell also has composition as a build-in.

Or in Scheme (sorry, I am getting carried away with this):

(define ((composition f g) a)
(f (g a)))
Charging applicants for applying to jobs is illegal in most countries.
"Bwahaahahaa. No."

Enriching a conversation with your knowledge would be enough, feeling the need to belittle as well could happily be left on slashdot.
"Love is War" is my favourite http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0dYk5Plhl9Y
I guess the OP is also a googler so knows the pain point exactly!
Sure, in theory, separating content from presentation is a
good idea. In practice, using CSS for layout is confusing,
error-prone, and brittle, and that's before you even take
browser bugs and incompatibilities into account.

In practice it is even greater idea. Sure you can go ahead and have all your layout in tables, then go ahead and create several different versions of your site just to take care of phones, tablets and like. Or you can employ css media queries.
Sure, learning CSS (and, alas, browser quirks) takes time, but it pays off. And frankly it it much easier today than it was back when IE5 was still relevant.

The other funny thing is that some native applications are using HTML and CSS for UI :)
Search engine optimization 'poisoning' way up this year
Clingy Lexicals: Closures in perl
Ouch. I use Word as well, now that I'm an Architect. Thank you very much.

Actually, a lot of my initial work is still done in vi, and I'm always on the lookout for good software that will let me describe my diagrams in vi and automatically generate the graphics. Does anyone know a good addon to graphviz for creating flowcharts and sequence diagrams?
If "battle for talent" is focused on a battlefield being fought by large, enterprise companies vs. startups and more risk-adverse organizations, sure. I'm not convinced that people who opt for Google/Facebook are the right people for young companies look to take big risks with potential (vs. guaranteed) rewards.
John Baez rocks. In general. All of his stuff is great and his writing style will cheer you up when you feel like you need to go back to freshman calculus.

I read some of his pieces on Lie algebras and A-D-E classifications. Very helpful.
That's security through obscurity. All existing techniques have been attacked (eg. keyloggers now take screenshots to defeat the silly pull-down menu "security"), so it's only a matter of time before they start capturing USB output and using it to attack the account in real time.

What's wrong with a key fob displaying numbers with no physical connection to the computer?

Edit: The first UK retail bank to offer this as standard would definitely get my custom. I'm quite serious about that. Also drop "VerifiedByVisa" nonsense at the same time and replace it with similar real security.
Jacksonville process server
Managing Facebook Like. Or not.
A modified list of Alexander Stefanov's list: http://www.trillia.com/online-math/index.html
Java is the new COBOL, how anyone could think it is a good idea to write anything in it is beyond me.
It's an amazing goal and you should definitely give it a try. My advice is start at the beginning and see how you get on. After a while you'll probably be further along than you realise.

Also, it depends on how much you really want to understand. If you want to be at the level of taking exam papers in all the material, then you would need to study a lot. If you just want a broad (but mathematical) introduction to the topics, you can go much faster.

To make things ultra-exciting, you can try and generate computer experiments around the material you're reading. Build a differential equation solver, use some Python libraries to visualise a pendulum swing, etc. It really makes it come alive and gives you a far better understanding of what is really happening.
If it's really that much of a problem why haven't you tried sleeping pills? I use them occasionally and they definately help, but they don't knock you out. If you're drinking alcohol to put yourself to sleep you're incapacitating yourself anyway.

Edit: and exercise can't hurt either. It only takes 30 minutes to go for a good jog and is something doctors always recommend.
Also maybe put the authors in the link text to avoid having to click through? Titles really don't help distinguish between these books.
Get 'Road to Reality' -- massive 1400 page book which builds up from basic algebra all the way to string theory. Unfortunately, it is still sitting unread on my book shelf. Completing that book is one of the must-do activities in my life!
Watch it Later: Radbox is TiVo for Online Videos
Hey there.
Like many others, I lived in Thailand for a number of months, boxing. I don't have too much advice regards the housing.

I do however have some advice regarding your time there. Be very aware that no matter where you go, you will be perceived as well off. You will (seriously) be batting women away left right and centre. Very pretty women who see you as their ticket out of there.

If you do gain a girlfriend, don't be surprised that your money will go nowhere as far as you had hoped. Scooters, money for family, eating out more - all will make their way into your life very quickly.

It's easy to say it will never happen to you - you don't have to go looking for a partner out there. They will find you and persue you. For Western men, this can be a huge change from the generally more entitled women of the West.
Please excuse my asumptions that you are interested in females - I don't know if the same is true for Thai men.
Er... Whose problems are you trying to solve? Job-seekers or recruiters?
Cry myself to sleep.
False dichotomy. It's possible to write readable and non-repetitive code. People do it every day without macro magic.
Billing hourly - a followup.
Two Indian projects get $100,000 grant each from Gates Foundation
Contacts Out of Facebook
I hope you mean fired.
The ambiguity isn't in the name on its own "God is nowhere". It is in the combination of that name, and a bad naming convention.

If you had a naming convention which prohibits vowels, then the identifier "shrt" is ambiguous because it could be "short" or "shirt". That doesn't mean that "short" is a bad name for an identifier.
Have you tried increasing the salary offering, or advertising the position on the website itself?
I use umlgraph: http://www.umlgraph.org/download.html

It's standalone though and not an add-on to graphviz.
Branding Agency Tampa
The branding agency is working with the aim of satisfying all their clients by providing the most appropriate service thereby helping them to gain success in their venture.
Does somebody want to explain to me what the hell this is doing on the front page of HN?

Technology related? Nope. Cool life-hack? Nope. Startup? Nope. Tech news? Nope.

Of interest to hackers? Sure, if by "interest" you mean belittling people for their culture, getting into mindless politics, and/or starting a flame war.
Have a look at dating sites, there's much more innovation going on in that space, and they're essentially having to deal with exactly the same matching problem.

However one of the big issues with innovating in this space is that HR departments are generally quite conservative so it's hard to sell innovative products to them (look at the difficulty SnapTalent had with their initial product).

You'll probably have more luck selling to third party recruiters who are more risk tolerant.

There's about a dozen companies currently doing the whole social network recruiting thing, but none of them has serious traction, and I'm not personally convinced it's a model that will work.

I'm working on this problem by building a niche job site, it's not hugely innovative technically, but it should help with the relevance problem and also be traditional enough to appeal to HR departments.

One of the other ideas I had in this space was building a platform for matching recruiters to candidates, so recruiters could send targeted messages to candidates matching a set criteria (+using game mechanic techniques to stop spamming). If you want to talk more about this idea feel free to drop me a message.
Point 4 WEB BROWSERS SUCK (OR: UI DESIGN IN HTML IS IMPOSSIBLE) made my day:

If you have good front-end web programmer/designers, you probably aren't paying them enough.
Imagine being a highly educated garbage man, except about one third of the smelly garbage
cans you encounter abruptly try to kill you, and can only be defeated by frantically (but precisely!)
shouting garbage-can-dependent arcane incantations like:
.quux {
width: 500px;
padding: 50px;
voice-family: "\"}\"";
voice-family: inherit;
width: 400px;
}
html>body .quux{
width: 400px;
}
Ia! Ia! Tantek Fhtagn!
Why Windows Phone 7’s first day sales numbers don’t matter
I upvoted you, and yes, it is a farce.
I agree. It's not even a remotely interesting article. Flagged.
90% Answers (and when they're wrong)
You're right, this is the same technology used for the Gorillaz tour a few years back. In that case, some very talented, real musicians were hiding their wrinkles and gray hair behind the screens.
One problem with this approach is that recruitment agencies are paranoid about control of their CV databases, those CVs are one of the main assets of the company and they go to great lengths to restrict access to them.

Opening those databases up to third parties might be a risk many of them are unwilling to take.
Looks great.....but there doesn't seem to be anything similar for windows.

Selective blocking of the web (HN, reddit) would be important.
This is a before-webinno gathering where food is the primary consideration. Do you have a bar in mind that serves good food?
learned my lesson... any attempt at humor loses karma lol
I am graduating this December and I am divided in between moving to the Bay Area vs. working in NY. Is it better for my career to stay around technology companies or is it better to burn harder in a financial company?
FWIW, I didn't find it that way at all, and I'm usually pretty sensitive to that.
Great advice, but two caveats:

1. Employers are often focused on hiring very specific skills sets. Having fixed a C++ bug in Chromium should impress them, but if they need a Django expert they still see you as a novice. It can be hard to present yourself as a well-rounded candidate if all your experience is with one project.

2. In a couple of interviews I've had, I've noticed a distinct bias towards valuing paid work more than open source contributions. It's often hard to get interviewers to understand that something I've done for free is on the same scale (or greater) than things I've been paid for.
Normally i hate sites that play music but this was kinda funny. Slightly juvenile but ye know, not bad.
You must tell us the album names.
Oh, well, where I am, almost noone has a credit card (the monthly billable kind with juicy revenue for the banks), and the only money my bank makes off of me comes from what they can get from the money floating in my accounts. Oh, and my bank's online security is better than wow's, so my perspective is pretty different.

Anyway, with those numbers, then I guess the profits from being a bank is so much higher and the actual fraud so much lower that they can afford to not care about it as much as Blizzard.
I cannot say I found that amusing. Perhaps it is too early for a good laugh.
The procrastination point is quite an obvious one. By way of cutting down on my HN time (as I don't play WoW), I've started using the pomodoro technique (http://www.pomodorotechnique.com/) to keep me focused on one thing at a time. So far it seems to be working quite well and I'm cutting down on my distractions.

What do other HN'ers use here to cut down on distractions and interruptions?
How to Install Android on iPhone 3G and 2G Using Bootlace 2.1
Hunting the Miracle of Motivation
Two things.

One is that these books are not computing hardware. If you buy them used and take care of them they won't depreciate quickly. Just sell them a couple years later. If you find you need them again several years after that, Abe Books/Amazon will find them for you again.

The other is: Theoretical physics is hard, evil hard for most people. Don't handicap yourself with crappy tools. The difference between a lousy book [1] and a great book may be hundreds of hours, it may be frustration with the material that makes you want to cry, or it may be the difference between learning the material and hitting an impenetrable wall.

I should also warn you that I and my colleagues in physics routinely found that we had to sample a dozen highly-rated books in a given subfield before we found the one that gave us the insight into our particular problems. I picked up that many books on semiconductor optics - and my better-read colleagues tried many, many more papers than that - before finding Coldren and Corzine, which is a revelatory text. (And, for all I know, out of print now. The hell of becoming a world expert in something is that you wind up being part of a global audience that would fit in one or two buses.)

---

[1] For you, at a particular time in your career, for a particular set of things you are trying to learn. Every book is is lousy to someone. The fact that there is no one-size-fits-all standard for books is just another reason why your physics education is going to require a bit of trial and error, fueled by a bit of cash.
With a litte context a 56k modem would take over 70 seconds to load the page (if nothing have been cached, like landing on it the first time).

As a blackberry user, I probably would have thought the site was broken :)
DAILY RUMORS: Watch Formula 1 Abu Dhabi Grand Prix Live Streaming Online
I've found the biggest distraction from getting a product launched so far is contracting.

Although it has meant I've got the cash now, so I'm bringing a guy on part-time through summer.
Is this another Cuil trying to follow Google or is it looking to do something different like Wolfram Alpha and Duck Duck Go?

Personally I still use Google for 90% of my day to day searching, but I'm trying harder to use Duck Duck Go where I can.
There are paid keyword research tools and stuff like that. you can even 'buy' top keyword list.

Oh wow, that's another high paying keyword (just look at the ads):
http://www.google.co.in/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&...
Running Shells in Emacs: An Overview
Samsung Galaxy Tab’s Gorilla Glass can stop (BB) bullets
Battle of the Business Cards
Ask HN: Sutherland's Sketchpad for linux?
Is there something similar to Ivan Sutherland's legendary Sketchpad available for linux, or even an online javascript based version?
Something which combines object recognition and the constraints management.
I could only find the geometric constraint solving tools as the closest approximation.
Short version: He went through a lot of prep, but in the end what mattered most was the quality of his sleep. (As opposed to quantity of sleep and eating habits.)

I'm not quite sure I believe it matters more than eating well enough, but good sleep can make a huge difference in your life.
There's quite a complex set of processes behind the way HM Government systems are managed. They can't just throw backups away, they have to prove that they've been disposed of in-line with HMG policy.

As for guarantees, there are no more than there would be that someone at Google hasn't done that, but what HMG does have is a fairly strong vetting standard, that these people will be under.
I was contemplating moving to the US to join a startup, but getting a visa is pretty hard, isn't it? I can get a 3 month traveler's/business visa. Then there are work permits, etc, right?

So currently, I'm just working on my own project.
My apologies, that was out of line.
Should your next mobile OS update cost you?
New Service Brings Single Click Checkout to Android
Wow, a government getting rid of an intrusive system? I never thought I'd see the day.

Next week we're going to hear that they are taking down all the CCTV cameras!
We All Want to Be Young (A great documentary about trends & youth)