skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Sorry, I should have made myself more clear: Oil is the most useful thing for driving vehicles. Apart from that, we have good substitutes for all other energy use cases, like generating electricity.

Coal and nuclear power can last for quite some time. See `Sustainable Energy without the hot air' for some numbers. (It's available online.)

We don't have the necessary capacity of say nuclear reactors ready at the moment. But that's an inconvenience of a few years at most. (Thanks for the link!)

There may be peak oil, but no reason for peak energy.
Does anyone know why C calls like 'strcpy' and 'strcat' are the opposite of this?

strcat(target, source)
strcpy(target, source)

But, in SH...

cp source target

I feel like these things were developed around the same time, by the same community. I've always wondered if there was a reason for the different perspective.
a copy points to the original (for an instant anyway) the same way that a link points to the original:

cp original copy

ln -s original link
those logos are better than what I can do.

Perhaps I should start a site called really horrible logos. I will guarantee all logos will look like a 2 year old on something did them.
"The largest public works project undertaken in the state in 50 years"

The sheer size and scope of the thing will make it vulnerable to corruption. The costs are probably understated.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Dig

It's sad that you can't really have public works without that sort of overhead.
https://github.com/blog/760-the-tree-slider
An analyst role at a financial technology firm, fresh out of college. Not an engineering role. Need a smart candidate that is willing to take on a lot of responsibility early-on.
While I don't doubt racket means less lines of code, if I rewrote one of my older c++ projects in c++, I think I could cut down at least half of the code. Maybe more depending on the project. Rewrites have hindsight that you didn't have the first time.
Banks are not in the business of startups. Angels and VCs are. Small business loans for a startup are very unlikely, and only really occur when the Small Business Administration gives the bank federal assistance.

Additionally, betting on being profitable in the short term is not a good bet.
Brilliant - you have my * gratitude.
So basically if you help wikileaks you'll be DDOSd by the (presumably) government. If you cut them off you'll be DDOSd by other parties.

The only solution is to have nothing to do with them. Not exactly an optimum solution - I'd much rather be cut off and constantly find new hosts than have people afraid to have anything at all to do with me.

These attacks are not helping wikileaks.
Visa is under DDoS attack
Getting "An error occurred while processing your request." error at visa.com right now. I wonder if their payment gateways will suffer like mastercard's did.
Nag, its not that easy to move from normal django to gae. A better way to do heroku-for-django would be do do heroku for django, instead of a complicated gae translation. Using gae you are limited and reliant on Google
Actually I just didn't didn't realize I was logged into this account.
Gah, finally. People would judge racket because of how DrRacket looked. Not anymore.
I had an error yesterday evening. Worked the second try, so I thought nothing of it. Knowing that CC sites are under attack now...
Dup from days ago:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1974192
I agree with bartonfink's questions. The exact questions to ask depend largely on the role for which you are interviewing, as well as the interviewee's background. The best questions tend to be open-ended, behavioral, and relevant.

Open-ended meaning they shouldn't end with a Yes or No answer. They should lead to a longer discussion that allows you to ask follow-on questions, probe deeper into their thinking, and arrive to the core influencers of their past decisions.

Behavioral questions assume that past performance is the best predictor of future performance. Therefore, ask them about previous situations and how they specifically dealt with them. There's less chance a candidate will answer with a generic & good-sounding answer this way.

Relevance goes back to bartonfink's questions. Asking a programmer about his favorite accounting methods is as good as asking a chef whether he prefers Ruby or Python.

But in case you're just looking for general, all-purpose questions, here are three of my favorites:

* How do you personally define and measure success?

* What are you doing to improve yourself, physically, mentally, or spiritually?

* In what kind of work environment do you do your best work?

In case it helps, I have seven more in a blog post (don't mean to be spammy or SEO slimy; nofollows takes care of that):

http://bizthoughts.mikelee.org/ten-great-interview-questions...
Unfiltered Criticism
We should probably have made this a requirement. I'll push a change now :) Also, thank you for the kind words on this. We think it is an important part of the responsibilities for this post at Path.
Just like the American "could care less" is the same as the British "couldn't care less". Two nations divided by a common language as someone is supposed to have said.
Meet iFan wind-powered iPhone charger
Can someone summarize how magnetism is a relativistic effect?
This is actually a decent wage in Brazil. When I lived there (15 years ago) minimum wage was equivalent to $100 a month.
Generation Y: We All Want to Be Young (by Box 1824)
Keep trying, I'm sure it will load eventually...
There was some ancient DOS "e-book" software I had as a young kid that had something like this (e.g. Find "Jacob" within 32 words or 6 verses of "Esau"); finally I know how to do the same thing with the web.
Nah, I don't need to relearn JavaScript because I already know it quite well.
I should start learning jQuery though. Maybe even node.js
I feel engineers are born, not made, so if you don't have it in your blood, you are probably better off just picking and choosing a few good CS courses, or maybe getting a minor. It also depends on the school. Many schools have pretty lame CS programs and you're better off taking a finance class or an HCI class vs. filling out your electives with dumbed down "software engineering" curricula or boring "data structures III" classes. I switched my major to math because the first couple CS courses I took were duds and it hasn't hurt my career.

It depends on your personality, but personally I think HCI makes for a better career these days. The product managers I know make more money than engineers, work banker's hours, and don't have to deal with the stress of putting out fires or getting replaced by younger versions of themselves at age 35. You do have to go to more meetings, though.
I suspect strcat and strcpy were parameterized as such to match memcpy.

Why memcpy was parameterized in that order, I am not certain.
I got the hat. Don't know if its cool, but I like it.
VISA Website Crashes As Operation Payback Targets Credit Card Processor
It is never just you. An important lesson I learned while programming.
I still don't have access. I emailed someone, got no response, so I gave up on it.
Probably in order to be consistent with assignment.
Could you give a little more detail on how this works. The cedexis website mentions tags that need to be placed on a website. I'm assuming javascript recording the time it takes to load resources. Is this correct? Is there more to it?
Yep. http://twitter.com/anonops/status/12613087077072896
I find it ironic (somewhat in the vein of Alanis) that a company built to derive their income from the sales of software actively combats the idea that other companies deserve to do exactly that.
Very elegant algorithm, and nicely visualized, too. Closely related to the Voronoi Diagram is the Delaunay Triangulation: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delaunay_triangulation

"For modeling terrain or other objects given a set of sample points, the Delaunay triangulation gives a nice set of triangles to use as polygons in the model. In particular, the Delaunay triangulation avoids narrow triangles (as they have large circumcircles compared to their area)."
This is a confirmed target of "Operation Payback," a 4chan/Anonymous attack against those who have opposed Wikileaks.

The primary targets include MasterCard (which was hit earlier today) and Visa, who refused to process donations to Wikileaks. The Swedish Prosecution authority is apparently also on the list.

Although these types of DDoS attacks (they are using the Low Orbit Ion Cannon tool available at https://github.com/NewEraCracker/LOIC/ ) do not affect cardholder data, it will render legitimate users completely unable to login to their merchant accounts.
I think the moral here applies to more than just dealing with big companies, but anything in general. Persistence can pay off big time.

Quick example: I interviewed with a company back in August and was told I'd hear from them in a week. I didn't so I began emailing the CEO (who I'd interviewed with) at least once a week for almost three months (never got a yes/no, so I kept "checking in"). Because I kept myself on the radar and kept pursuing it, when something finally opened up, I got the job and was told that they admired my persistence. Don't be afraid of annoying people -- if the answer isn't final yet, keep trying.
At least for me, it's because I say in my head "link $FOO to $BAR", which must be typed "ln -s $BAR $FOO".
I've always used complex numbers as a mnemonic: real + imaginary, a + bi (obviously the file is real and the softlink is "imaginary").

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complex_number
Its like a black hole in my mind. Every single time I screw this up. I've.... just had to learn to live with deleting my first crappy link. :)
My mneumonic is that in "ln" the "n" comes second, and n is for "name" so the name of the symlink comes second. But I still have to think about it every time...
Possibly for consistency with functions that take varargs, e.g. sprintf
The real/imaginary concept is exactly what I use too. I sort of recall being able to use the real/imaginary concept with other Unix commands as well, but I can't recall which ones off the top of my head.
Here is the scenario: you have google apps account that you use for all your stuff and you sync it with your android device to access email, contacts and such. This is account A.
Then you realize the market won't work, so you sync the regular google account, account B.

Now, you have the hassle of having to deal with multiple account on your phone, but is not too bad. It comes bad when you discover that if reset your phone and sign in only with account A or only with account B or even in the wrong order (B, A), all the apps you bought are simply gone.

Yes, the market sucks that much.
This thought often goes through my mind when people ask me "how did you do that?" If they were Google, and interested in acquiring me, I would be less guarded in answering the question though. Companies would get a pretty bad reputation very quickly if they were in the business of stealing peoples' ideas.
Thank you for the kind words here as well. We put a lot of thought into this one. More to come.
I really, really don't understand how can this happen if www.visa.com is Akamaized.
Yes they completely busted them see this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-4TgCU1CWYo
"could care less" is actually wrong -- it literally means that you do actually care about the thing in question.
You are correct, you need to add a javascript tag, which pulls the same object from multiple CDN's.

Please go to http://www.lemonde.fr/ -- do a view-source, search for "radar", and you will see our javascript. You can also use firebug to get a sense of what's going on.

Please send me an email if you need more info: prakash@cedexis.com
AskHN: NoSQL with full text search - which is better CouchDB or MongoDB?
Starting a new project soon and wanting to use a JSON data store. Full text search is going to be very important. We can do without it, or with lesser full text search functionality, in the short term, but full text search will be critical later on.

So which is better given such a requirement - MongoDB or CouchDB? Which is likely to deliver the better integrated full text solution, and when?

Can anyone share their experiences with FTS and either of these data stores?
Consider me interested.
Absolutely yes, provided they can do the job I need, and can demonstrate that they can do the job I need.

The job I need is adding value to the company, usually by programming.

Of the programmers I've hired, less than half have degrees in computing. It's interesting seeing the interactions between them, and seeing that each brings something useful to the discussions. When I interview, I'm looking for someone who can program in any relevant language, not just the ones we use, but who has an interest in a range of topics within computing, including a passing acquaintance with more than one language, more than one paradigm, and more than one context.

Can you write working code?
i wonder why your proxy is blocking it. anyone else getting site errors I should be aware of?
I actually might enjoy that. I don't particularly dig companies who try to force everything to be "social" inside the office.

There is a time for that, sure, but getting peace and quiet to get in the hacking mindset is more important to me.
4 flavors of the mighty dollar
Anonymous has taken down visa.com
The problem you will find with small business loans, SBA especially, is that you can't get approved for one without revenue, or an asset that you are purchasing.

You could check out a non-traditional source for financing like http://www.lendingclub.com , but even that maxes out at 25K and is personally guaranteed (rate depends on mostly your credit score). (disclosure: I did some consulting for them a few years ago)

Bottom line: Small business loans aren't for startups, they are for established businesses.
From http://wikileaks.ch/mirrors:

Should that perhaps read http://wikileaks.ch/mirrors.html ?
The movie "We All Want to Be Young" is the outcome of several studies developed by BOX1824 in the past 5 years. BOX1824 is a Brazilian research company specialized in behavioral sciences and consumer trends.

Never in History a generation had so many representatives (2.3 billion) and so much buying power when compared to their parents when they were young.
"I want to make a symbolic <link> to this <source>"

"I want to copy this <source> to this <destination>"

vs.

"I want this <source> to be accessible via this <link>"
Hobo too.
Jesus, those icons are gorgeous. Bigger versions here:

http://simplegeo.com/products/

Reminds me of the new Disqus graphics - looks like 3D is the new gradient.
I actually would be surprised if Dropbox exited via IPO. I think their offering fits in with a lot of large companies profiles. Dropbox could easily fit into a portfolio of Google, Microsoft, even Cisco.

explaining Cisco - Cisco seems to be trying to break into the "Digital Home" market with things like FlipVideo and some other video services. Dropbox would make a great cloud storage play for media services.
Jeeze - DOM manipulation is not the newest idea in the world, and not everything created has to be patented, what's wrong with you people?
What's Missing in the NoSQL Space?
viral/discount/link juice - Offer a $5 discount for anyone who tweets/blogs your site
The channel API really isn't that great. Unlike WebSockets, it's not a bidirectional socket and since it uses http requests to send data to the server, the latency great. It's much better than polling, but still not great. You can't reuse channel client IDs so broadcasting a message to all subscribers requires you to keep track of things on the datastore yourself, not terrible, but it could have been made better.
0 to n ........
AnonOps calling Mastercard
Don't worry about all that, run with what you have now. Spend your time on real customers.
Pretty cool. I work in search quality at Google, and this is a pretty decent overview of the more universal tricks I've picked up from people on the job, as well as a lot of things I didn't know. MinHashing in particular is one of my favorites.

Also, if you like this, I'm trying to collect resources of this quality in this subreddit: http://www.reddit.com/r/learnit
You stand almost zero chance of getting a small business loan, possibly only if you offer a personal guarantee to back it up (meaning you personally are liable to repay the loan).

Given the vast majority of startups that either fail to gain decent revenue, or just outright fail to launch, I'd have to say that you'd be crazy to offer a personal backing to loan vs. giving up some share of the company to an investor.

No offense, but if you're even asking about this, you probably don't want to be considering the loan route.
Because Akamai may have a limit too.
The reputation system is independent of the tagging. So a big site lets you earn reputation in one category and spend it trolling another. Conversely splitting into too many sites means that reputation in a category that spans sites has to be earned twice which risks deterring experts.
It's a shame that this list doesn't properly differentiate between the terms they claim to have coined, and all the rest.

Some are specifically highlighted as being coined or not coined by Variety, and the rest are just left ambiguous.
It might mean you're not working at a high enough level of abstraction. If a task takes, say, 5 minutes, then it's pretty easy to get it done without distraction. If it takes considerably longer (and it's not very novel) then you're more likely to succumb. So, one thing you can do is try to develop better abstractions (either by learning to use or build better tools).

In short, you want to put an upper bound on the amount of time you spend discovering and a lower bound on the amount of time you spend producing. So I suggest using your science dalliance to learn how to make your engineering efforts take less time. When the engineering time is suitably bounded, then you can use you broaden the scientific exploration a bit.
Regarding Everydns.net, the impression I got was they withdrew their service not because of any specific disagreement with Wikileaks, but because it was negatively impacting their other customers (if 10,000 people kept requesting Wikileaks, the 20-30 other people trying to request other sites had to wait a lot longer). I'd agree with them on this one.
Bonus points for going outside of the stock resume and trying something new.

I really like that you're thinking out of the box - that gets noticed - but a lot of what you're forcing into the resume format should be in your cover letter: your objective, the tag cloud, and the icon-centered text at the top.

That said, I can't read this. Keep in mind that in a lot of places you may be applying a non-technical person may be reading the resume, so having it built in a certain way can work against you.

Rand's has a great article (http://bit.ly/hd7fRt) on resumes and their function that can help focus you.
I thought this was going to be a joke like the 12V battery hack: http://www.metacafe.com/watch/773138/12_volt_battery_hack_yo...

Turns out its real and very useful!
I have been waiting for this forever.
compared to the traffic the servers are seeing from the bots, the single requests of curious people is pretty negligible.
I used to face the same issue with my Kindle and bought an iPad, because of how frustrating I found this, and am quite happy with the Kindle app on it.

Very smart of Amazon to hedge themselves on the hardware so cleanly.

Sharing my story not to diss the device, but in case anyone else is having the same predicament and considering jumping.
Cassandra .7 keeps track of it for you as well.
Isn't this more about how good Cairo and Pango are, rather than C++ vs. Scheme?
American TV Shows "Agents of Influence" in Saudi Arabia
From: http://hacks.mozilla.org/2010/12/websockets-disabled-in-fire...

"Once we have a version of the protocol that we feel is secure and stable, we will include it in a release of Firefox – even a minor update release."
I can't think of a single BigCo client we have that doesn't put every one of its users behind a transparent proxy. Some of them cache, but all of them inspect, parse, and route HTTP.

You're right that most enterprises would never be OK with "allow arbitrary outbound socket connections", but most of the people building WebSockets applications don't want arbitrary outbound sockets; they just want an HTTP connection with finer-grained control over I/O.
A company called SoftFacade does our icon work. http://wow.softfacade.com/
And I did say the same thing, not two hours ago!
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1983568
David Chang's Momofuku embraces constraints
Not true. Firefox has auto updates, and will be pushing websockets the moment it gets fixed. Firefox also has the best record for turnout time on security fixes (many being released two days after report), so I doubt that will be slow.

From: http://hacks.mozilla.org/2010/12/websockets-disabled-in-fire...

"Once we have a version of the protocol that we feel is secure and stable, we will include it in a release of Firefox – even a minor update release."
What Software Developers Watch on TV
That's because they were done by the same people, take a look at their 'portfolio' on Dribbble - it's really impressive: http://dribbble.com/softfacade

Side note to HNers, if you're in need of great design then I'd recommend perusing Dribbble. I've found a few freelancers there that have done some amazing work.

Full size can be seen here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/softfacade/5244241757
I think Josh's point was to not wait for them to fly you out, but to fly out yourself. As rokhayakebe noted, say you'll be in town in two weeks and set up a meeting. Perhaps Google has streamlined the process to fly you out, but it still isn't as easy as "Great, check in at the front desk on Wednesday at 2PM". If meeting is a much bigger deal to you than who you're meeting with you need to do what you can to make it easy for who you're meeting with.
Facebook Upgrades Its Mobile Privacy Dashboard
It's similar to all the file I/O functions that always have the file descriptor first (fprintf etc). These are the heart of Unix. Remember the Unix philosophy: Everything is a file.*

* for a slightly smaller definition of everything than in Plan9
Being wrong doesn't stop people using it.

They could care less if it's wrong ;p
Hands on with Google's Chrome Web Store
The first example is one of personal privacy, I think the other two are legitimate examples.
Can You Hear Me Now? Wireless 4G Competition Heats Up
Gateway Timeout
I agree that definitions are important, but most people's definitions of terrorism involve something going boom. I'm not as interested in coming up with my own definition as I am in using the terms and definitions that are least likely to be misinterpreted by the largest number of people.

That in itself is a loaded topic... trying to redefine a term is usually either a losing battle (because people won't listen), or an underhanded strategy (because people won't notice). We don't always have the luxury of attaching a glossary to a conversation ;)
While meat cleaver sounds way cooler, just some scissors will work just fine.
Whenever I asked around on academic circles about this, the ipad was the consensus. The kindle DX does an ok job according to the people I talked to, but the slow page turning drove people crazy when trying to understand a complicated paper referencing previous math/diagrams.

I really wish the academic world wasn't standardized around formats that only work for print. There are some LaTeX->html converters out there, that could presumably be used to make epub, but I have no idea how well they work.
Take a power nap via the command line
Slow Coffee and Why It Matters
A better example of phrases that mean different things on either side of the Atlantic is what it means to "table" a proposal. In the US it means "kill it", but in the UK it means "bring it up". If an American says "could care less", they're just being incorrect. ;)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Table_%28verb%29