skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
RAD compiles your ruby code to arduino programs everytime you want to run it.

This arduino gem is a load-once-and-play thing. You load the provided arduino.pde file to the board and use the gem to talk to the Arduino to perform actions like set/get pin states etc. So then instead of writing programs, burning them to the board and testing them, you could just fire up irb on your console and start prototyping your stuff or write a ruby script.

P.S: if I can get my hands on bluetooth-bee or arduino wifi shields, I plan to make the same thing possible on those connections too. Right now the board has to be connected via the serial port.
If you think that stuff doesn't taste like total crap, you are kidding yourself. In the last two years my wife and I moved from Portland (where you can get healthy tasty restaurant food) to the Bay Area (where you can't) and so we started cooking at home all the time.

Anything that isn't a home cooked meal tastes like industrial crap to me (even most restaurants). Once you have tasted sauteed greens, rice and home-roasted chicken, all those prepared foods you thought were normal will reveal themselves to you as suddenly not even worth the category "food".
Interesting concept bicycle design by Bradford Waugh
I wrote about this when the N1 came out; what it came down to was that fit and finish were significant issues (why won't apps move aside when re-arranging them on the screen?), but for me, the dealbreaker was that you really can't take advantage of Android without buying into the whole Google ecosystem, and I'd recently opted out of the Google ecosystem.

I use my phone as an extension of my computer, not a portal into the cloud, so the metaphor was never a good fit for me. I certainly think that there were plenty of good things about the N1 and Froyo (although I hated that stupid trackball, the notifications and maps on Froyo were enormously better then their equivalents on iOS), and if you're not already locked into a way of interacting with your phone, that there's not a lot of functional daylight between vanilla Android and iOS at this point.

I am curious to see what WP7 turns into. They have some wiggle room and may just surprise.

EDIT: On the off chance anybody's interested:

http://homonculus.net/tags/phones.html
I find it useful for two things:

I use it for digitizing sketches when I'm out of the house (I use my iPhone more than a laptop when I'm out). Tracing is an inexact (lossy) process so I appreciate the tight feedback loop of drawing/tracing.

I use it at home too (instead of Live Trace) since it handles photos better. Live Trace really expects even lighting to get usable results (scanner is the easiest way) whereas I've designed this specifically to handle photos from the iPhone's camera. I don't have (or want) a scanner so the photograph->sync->place->trace->repeat process I was going through with Illustrator got a bit tedious. That's not where the idea of the app came from but what I had in mind when I designed it.
Yes.

I've been playing with a g1 for quite some time (got it in september). Did a bit of development with it (nothing I'd ever release to the public, unfortunately). I did get quite a bit used to it. I had it rooted and was running android 2.2 on it, which was rather fast.

Then, I got an iphone 4 for christmas and holy shit, this is a much better experience. My only complaint about the iphone is that the bar you swipe to unlock the phone is lower than what I'm used to. Low enough that if I'm not looking at the phone, I'll still have my thumb high enough to miss the bar completely.
Got to spend money to make money.

Hmm, wait that isn't right...
You know, this sounds truthy, but as much packaged food as the supermarket does sell, just by store volume, it seems like most people are still cooking. The meat section at my local Safeway-affiliate is, for instance, larger than the frozen meal section.
It was inspiring to see Foursquare make it to the mainstream.

Also, Heroku. But I'm unsure about the future after the acquisition. Hopefully they'll stick around and continue to rock!
http://boog.me

Disposable email accounts.

Give any email@boog.me and go check your inbox for the email you need, then forget about it. We take care of all the spam they will send you. Keep your real inbox spam free!
Is it just me, or are there more women in the technology workforce in these pictures than there are in most technology workplaces today? Is this a regression in society?
Canonical has a number of remote positions open:
http://webapps.ubuntu.com/employment/
awesome, can't wait to get my print copy!
Just a small note, SO puts all of its content under a Creative Commons license[1][2], which they are (in my non-lawyerly opinion) following.

Now, this doesn't mean that filtering them wouldn't be useful to you, since at first glance it appears they're solely a duplicate. Just pointing out that they're not actually doing anything wrong, and they're (probably) not scraping.[3]

SO has specifically said that this is okay.[4]

1: http://wiki.creativecommons.org/Case_Studies/StackOverflow.c...

2: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5/

3: http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2009/06/stack-overflow-creativ...

4: http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2009/06/attribution-required/
schneier has more on that:
http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2009/07/another_new_ae...
HackerMonthly should offer a yearly magazine subscription. This would allow HM to batch order from Magcloud and pass on cheaper shipping to the subscriber.
Digg is hiring on-site in San Francisco (Potrero hill) for frontend and backend developers, with a preference for people who work all the way up and down the stack. We're willing to take chances on newer developers who seem like a good fit, and also want veteran engineers who will to come in and challenge our assumptions and shake things up.

We're working at a scale where performance and data storage decisions start to matter. We're working with a modern stack (Redis, Python, PHP, RabbitMQ, gevent, Hive, etc), and the team we've put together is truly fantastic. 2010 was a topsy turvy year for us, but setbacks build character, and there are many reasons to be excited about where we are going. :)

Job specs are at jobs.digg.com , and feel free to send questions/resumes my way at wlarson@digg.com . If you're interested but concerned about the press or trajectory of Digg, definitely send an email my way, and I will send some of my optimism your way!
San Francisco

You: First and foremost, a talented hacker. Secondly, PHP/MySQL experience or mobile experience.

Us: Life360. We are turning mobile phones into the ultimate family safety devices.

Contact: alex@life360.com

Cheers.
Khan Introduction to VC Investing and Startups
I like this because it clearly shows just how horribly bad web technologies really are. I used to say the web turned your computer into an IBM 3070 with a 386 under the hood.

Now I'll say the web turns your computer into an IBM 3070 with a TRS-80 under the hood.
Beyond books and music... I don't.

Too many products without reviews. No control for the reviews.

Example... the HP CP4025 appears to be good (I have a HP Z800 workstation so thought it was worth checking HP for the hell of it)... yet I haven't found a balanced and comparable review for it. I'd like to see it set against other small office printers and to see the average cost per print.

It's on Amazon twice:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Color-LaserJet-Enterprise-CP4025n-10...

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Color-LaserJet-Enterprise-CP4025dn-1...

But no reviews.

I'd like Google to take my search terms and help me find stuff... you know, that "sort the world's data" thing, to make sense of my terms and show me the results I'm looking for.

Google isn't working for me. Amazon isn't working for me. It takes hours and hours of searching in circles to research even the most basic purchasing decision.
Ah, that's awesome. Congrats on releasing some sweet code!
What about JSR-310?
I see bits like any other resource that gets piped to your home. It would be disgusting if some could pay extra to siphon off water, electricity or gas at the expense of others. There would be riots if access to water was subject to how much you could pay.

The talk of "special services" is just a ruse: ultimately every service is the same, ie data. The only consideration should be the maximisation of bandwidth in a democratic way: equal access. The only people that would benefit from tiering would be the incumbents; those that generate the most traffic. This will further increase the centralisation of content and money more so that it is now. The only "innovation" needs to be laying cables and pushing the laws of physics.

A slight aside: I find it particularly galling to
Btw we should do this the first day of every month to give some exposure to all projects developed by HN members.
I will cosign 100%. NYC office is in a great location (located a block east from Union Sq) and has awesome people in it!
NYC - Tinychat is looking for a hardcore server admin. We use nginx, apache, php, mysql and other linux junk.
This would be a senior position, so expertise is required.

jobs@tinychat.com - pay/equity based on experience.
None of Google's ranking decisions are concerned with revenue from AdSense. Period.
Nice one.

There's a similar project in Haskell, by the way, called gitit: http://gitit.johnmacfarlane.net/
(Off-topic) On the last screenshot in Ubuntu section, the guy had accidentally photoed his own credit card, laying near CR48, with number and expiry date almost clearly readable. I don't know whenever this is secure (his bank may disallow CNP transactions), but, maybe, someone should notify him about this.
Zing - A JVM for virtualized x86 platforms with pauseless GC
> What about all the dead people who come back to life thanks to medical intervention?

Then they weren't really dead.

> This is an outdated perspective. Loads of people now living were once dead.

Maybe if you're using an outdated definition of death. By death I mean brain death, from which there is no recovery by definition ("the irreversible end of all brain activity").

The cessation of breathing etc. is no longer a useful definition of "death" precisely because of the "coming back to life" you describe:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death#Problems_of_definition

> Dead things become alive through natural processes. But to be alive you first have to be dead.

The dead things are not "you" in any useful sense of the word. Yes I know it's the same atoms, but "you" are not just your atoms. "You" are an emergent pattern of thoughts and memories, which cannot begin to emerge until your brain develops.

Sure, you can take the cosmological approach that we are all connected, all things are one etc., but in practice, once your definition of "you" no longer distinguishes "you" from "not you", it's no longer a useful word.

> Your superset theorem of meaning is probably a rationalization of some deep emotional bias that has roots in your genes and early childhood environment.

Sure, I clearly stated it was just my opinion. All opinions have roots in genes and experiences. But the experience of arguing with you has thus far failed to change my opinion, it's merely persuaded me that you use very different definitions for words than I do ;)
> SO has specifically said that this is okay.

It doesn't look like Jeff is that okay with it, especially when it comes at the cost of Stack Overflow's own ranking:

Sorry, this is absolutely necessary, otherwise we get demolished by scrapers using our own content in Google ranking. – This is from a question about Stack Overflow's SEO strategy:

http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/71906/first-tag-in-t...
Thank you Steve! :)
http://musicmenu.heroku.com/

I created and launched MusicMenu in the last few days of December, it's just a little weekend project.

You design a three course menu of music for others to listen to.
Also is VertexDB - small graph database. It's written in C, uses Tokyo Cabinet for storing data. Simple http filesystem-like interface. The general advantage - links, that allow to make graph structures on database level.

https://github.com/stevedekorte/vertexdb
Yelp is hiring engineers, sys admins, product managers and more --- http://www.yelp.com/careers (+ h1b sponsorships)
OSX, following the betas. WebGL is a very different, very new environment, though. Its speed depends on a lot aside from the JS engine.

edit:

Most of my testing involves jQuery DOM manipulation, and benchmarking some DOM-free, stratght JS utility code / mini-libraries I've written, and one moderately-large one in the works. Because that's what I'm writing. Real benchmarks trump more scientifical benchmarks, for my purposes. YMMV, absolutely, these are just my outcomes.

For a specific case, changing a callback-based array iteration to a for loop, totalled after 10,000 empty operations (making it do something and accounting for that code showed almost no difference):

Chrome 9: <1ms difference
5ms average after change
On FF4b7: 15ms difference
15ms average after change (note that this means it was ~30ms before, a full 6x slower than Chrome)
On FF3: 40ms difference
51ms average after change
If there was a blacklist option, then one could subscribe to a blacklist maintainer like one does for Firefox Adblock -- that would be really, really nice.

I am actually suprised there is no Labs application for this, unless there is a business case against it.
If date and timezone related code seems simple/easy to you then you're using libraries! It's messy and easy to mess up!
If this is the worst, you must not have read very many :)

This is basically a nice collection of the arguments of the anti-global-warming crowd, not that well structured or anything but worth flipping through the slides at least.

I LOL'd at page 77, the trend-graph of seawater rise projections.

I doubt there is the evidence to support the twin claims that 1) a program of some sort could change the temperature trend and 2) humans would benefit from changing it.

I suspect that to the extent that humans have changed global trends, a large portion of it has to do with water vapor from our vast increase in agricultural irrigation and diversion. It is probably not possible to address that without starving a lot of people.

In fact, I think that inspite of any warming effect, we probably should be increasing the amount of water diversion and storage. If the water that is currently washing away whole towns in Australia could be stored somewhere or diverted into the desert, the payoff in world food prices and economy would be large. Those are the types of huge projects that typically can only be done by national or even international organizations, and if everyone is meeting in Copenhagen or whereever to discuss huge amounts of international money, that's what they should be talking about.
We do have that: http://hackermonthly.com/subscribe.html

Annual print subscription costs $88 plus international shipping at $10/issue ($3.45 cheaper than MagCloud).
I think it's a bit language-specific. For example, many websites that offer Japanese <-> English lookup use the free EDICT: http://www.csse.monash.edu.au/~jwb/j_edict.html

You could also check out the list of free dictionaries included with a translation app like Lingoes and see if the source data files are available: http://www.lingoes.net/en/dictionary/index.html

The Vicon series of dictionaries covers a lot of languages, but I have no idea where they come from. You may also need some logic on a per-language basis if you want to consider conjugation, plurals, etc., since these dictionary files don't list all alternative forms.
Yes. Since the question was regarding introduction to computers and not programming necessarily, I think this response is relevant. I can't locate the article but I recall reading that girls were much more interested in using computer tools to generate content, while it was the boys (or adult males) that were more often providing (writing) the tools. Not to generalize to all individuals, but empowering her with the tools to create content (e.g., GIMP or Google Sites) may be a strategic move.
Seattle, WA - SEOmoz is hiring a product manager with mad wireframing/product design skills - http://seattle.craigslist.org/see/sof/2120238146.html

We're also hiring engineers - http://seattle.craigslist.org/see/sof/2091255814.html
I think that depends on the growth of the data people want to store. I don’t think the storage needs of many homes grows faster than about 4GB per year (1000 photos or 80 music albums [0]), at least if nobody in that particular home is a video enthusiast or an avid PC gamer. A 160GB SSD or even a 120GB SSD would last such a home many years, probably much longer than the lifetime of the drive.

I recently de-cluttered my parents’ PC and can say with authority that their storage needs didn’t grow by more than a gigabyte in the last year. I have the suspicion that many of those 1TB drives they build in cheap PCs these days are mostly empty.

[0] Especially photos seem to me to be the one thing that really demands additional storage and that nearly everyone uses. Documents usually only take up a few hundred megabyte.
The Trouble With Liberty
G1? That would be like iPhone 1G prototype! The phone was too weak hardware wise. The difference between newer Android phones like the Galaxy S or G2 and iPhone has greatly narrowed to the point where it is mostly an individual preference / needs for specific features that dictate if you will buy one or the other.
Books are kept, usually. Magazines are a far greater waste of paper - though that said, most paper is from farmed wood nowadays.
Good point. I'll clarify: Safari, WebKit nightlies, and Chrome perform very similarly in many cases, and tend to be faster than anyone else.
http://vbseed.com/

Relaunched vBulletin Skins website
I sympathize, but this can be the difference between flying around in your own jet or just paying off your mortgage.

Of course, whether that shot at 10^8 wealth is worth the hassle versus "just" 10^6 wealth is a personal choice.
I just created a blekko account after reading this article (good job TC! It works this time.)

They seriously need to hire a capable UX person. The logged-in interface is full of problems:

* Twitter-like status update. I believe this has nothing to do with search.

* Form with 10+ fields on creating a slashtag. You cannot possibly expect me to enter all domain names I could think of into that tiny <textarea>?

* I finally created /python but I have no idea how to improve or update the slashtag. I cannot update that slashtag from search results page.

Overall, very frustrating experience.
Can anyone share their experiences with this? My understanding is that the TN will let someone with a CS degree take a "Computer System Analyst" job, but you have to show that the job consists of requirements analysis and architecture rather than coding.

Is this true in practice? Have any hackers here worked on TN visas?
I have done this as well, but I'm a little concerned that the 500gb drive no longer has the sudden motion sensor. I'm thinking about swapping the two drives, but don't know if I'll end up running into hibernate issues or not.
We've got a development opening for a full time position at my startup, Bloom Health.

http://gobloomhealth.com/jobs/software-engineer

Bloom Health is a VC funded startup with about 20 employees (including 5 developers currently).

Our offices are in downtown Minneapolis and are connected to the skyway. 100% remote working isn't an option currently, but we're flexible enough that working from home a day or two a week isn't a problem.

We develop on macbook pros with external monitors, and deploy our solution on Amazon's EC2 platform. Smart and fun people drinking free soda and working with groovy and grails, continuous integration, test coverage metrics, user stories, distributed version control, etc. All the things you'd want and expect in a startup, plus a business model that actually has a shot at paying off as an added perk.
hubless wheels are stupid.
I don't know which Lua you're used to, but as of 5.1, it's incredibly fast; I may be benchmarking the wrong things (the big one I tried was finding the first 2,000,000 primes by trial division, which should lend itself well to hotspot optimizations). Either way, though, I'd still argue that a VM (JVM and Lua were just a couple of examples of VMs that are fast, used in real applications, and are readily jailable) is the ideal solution.
How do you know this / did you learn this?

I'm constantly trying to counteract know-it-all syndrome. Studying other fields where I'm not an expert has been very eye-opening, but examples like your post are even more interesting.
Same specs here. Still having issues with it even after the firmware patch though. If it sleeps after idle, it almost never wakes up. Have to do a forced reboot. I do all of my development work over ssh, so it's never really a problem - I haven't lost work it yet. Nevertheless it is kind of annoying (though the quick boot time helps mitigate that somewhat).
A good, if slightly out there, analogy would be Pepsi or some other company using its unfair financial position to use existing infrastructure to pipe its product instead of water. In this case the absurdity would be apparent, but when it comes to the internet there seems to be a lack of knowledge (especially in the aged political class) of how it should and does operate.

There is work being done on an alternative internet which would be free for all. Each home would be a node, with the capacity to be a cache, a destination or a bridge, achieved by leveraging wireless routers to create a mass mesh network. http://netsukuku.freaknet.org/?pag=home
I am finding the CNN articles less interesting than what I like to see here on HN. This particular title reminds me of a somewhat sarcastic basketball coach's retort to a reporter who asked "How did you win, coach?" he replied "by scoring more points".

From the article Facebook is only "beating" Google if we limit the playing field to the Web. and from earlier in the article Let's begin by admitting that the Hitwise data doesn't represent the whole truth.

So it isn't even clear that they scored more points.
Austin, TX; on-site.

We're looking for experienced developers to join our team at The Texas Tribune. We're a non-profit, online news organization that covers state politics and policy in Texas. State and local governments spend more money than the federal government in America, yet far less attention is paid to what's going on outside of D.C. We aim to fix that.

We're currently working on improving and open-sourcing our CMS to allow other similar organizations to get off the ground much more quickly. We also build data apps that help our readers visualize, browse, and search through various data that the government puts out[1]. It's fun, fulfilling, and well-compensated work.

If you're interested, email me at nbabalola@texastribune.org. Include GitHub and HN usernames if you have them.

[1] Some examples:

Government Employee Salaries: http://www.texastribune.org/library/data/government-employee...

Prison Inmates: http://www.texastribune.org/library/data/government-employee...

Elected Officials: http://www.texastribune.org/directory/
I would be interested in knowing this also
Groupon (Chicago or Palo Alto) wants to hire 25 devs in January 2011.

Great developers. We develop in Rails but we'd rather hire a smart, motivated, skilled developer and teach them Rails than hire any Rails dev and hope they turn out to be awesome. Lots of problems to solve in data mining, personalization, scaling, business support tools, etc. My first month here I released code supported millions of dollars of deals.

Good coding practices, weekly releases, code reviews, pair programming as needed, MacBook Pros + Cinema monitor for all devs, etc. Full benefits, real (not startup-sized) salaries.

Contact peterc@groupon.com with any questions and I can connect you to the right people.
I am hiring remote programmers with advanced programming skills in Java, Ruby, Javascript and jQuery.

http://www.e-ui.com/who-we-are/careers/