skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"everyone in the room, their phones ring as part of the prototype, and literally people would applaud that, saying that was amazing."

It's actually a funny thing: you can do a bunch* of stuff with software but when you start doing things that go outside computers and websites, people start to think it's magical. If you make a phone ring, or if you receive a text, or if you turn lights on and off, basically if you act on physical things that people don't mentally connect with computers, magic happens.

* well, at least, a bunch. Probably more.
Google Code Blog: Google URL Shortener gets an API
Ugh. I'm trying to not sound cliched/lame. I hope you're wrong.
Literate Programming (and why Docco isn't enough)
It may not be a bad idea to borrow old tape-drive ideas for modern technologies - I mean, hard drives are ever slower compared to cache or RAM, and they are faster at linear seeks (like tapes) than random-access. Hard drives are the new tape?
The second is cheeky, the first is correct. If their revenues are what they are widely accepted to be, they have beaten Compaq's record as the fastest company to $1 billion in revenues (and done it profitably -- I could easily build a $1 billion company quicker by selling $100 bills for $50).
Very impressive... simple-looking but so polished... Amazing job, congratulations!
From what I can tell, most if not all of the new Sandy Bridge based Core iX processors will.
During the Dark Ages, one of the lone voices for scientific inquiry? The Pope.
Clearly garage hackers are not their primary concern, and it's a strawman argument to imply thats what I was saying.
And I wouldn't rub your face in it anyway.

Funny, you certainly had no problem rubbing your offensive, misguided views about minority students in my face.

They said they didn't lower the "academic" criteria- i.e. test scores and GPA- for minority students. They do that at some schools. I wouldn't know about MIT.

They don't do that at any schools in the United States, actually ... at least not at any in compliance with Federal law.
I'm a contributor to the Changelog: http://thechangelog.com/

We use a couple of different things to hear about new stuff, but it's largely just keeping our ears open and bookmarking things.
You could create a honeypot netbook and take it with you to places like Starbucks and just leave it out when you go to the bathroom,etc.
Pro tip: Go straight for ECMAScript 5, don't waste your time on 3. With CL-JavaScript (http://marijnhaverbeke.nl/cl-javascript) we also thought 3 would be easier, but now we regret our decision:

- The ECMA5 document is (slightly) easier to read.

- Most 'extra' ECMA5 features can be added later, piecemeal, so initial development doesn't have to be more complicated.

- People will want ECMA5 eventually anyway.

- It is a waste of time to work through two ugly standards when one would have sufficed.
The math software I use is Mathematica (Home Ed), Sage, Octave, R, and TeXShop. All open source except for Mathematica.

Mathematica has a few advantages. The input notation can look more like traditional mathematics: adjacency instead of * for multiplication, superscript instead of ^ for exponentiation, fraction notation. I think that cuts down on errors. Variables are symbolic in Mathematica by default. The Mathematica language is something of a defacto standard and WolframAlpha understands it to a certain extent, so you have access for free if you have internet. WolframAlpha mobile gives you CAS on your phone.

That said, an open source version of Mathematica is desirable and Sage should be supported. I keep a table of equivalences at http://hyperpolyglot.org/math to try to lessen the mental burden of using two equivalent products.
I agree with you, Jess. Georgetown (where I did my undergrad) isn't on the same level as CalTech or Princeton, but it's still supposed to be pretty good, and I honestly wasn't that impressed with the student body on the whole. There were, as expected, a lot of precocious wannabe-Senators...but there were also a lot of, for want of a better term, dumb jocks, and also a lot of people who were selected entirely for skin color and who didn't really have the academic qualifications to be there. There was even a program to teach these students remedial English during the summer before their freshman year - an explicit admission that they weren't qualified.

Honestly, I felt like it cheapened my degree.
It doesn't matter whether our theories are right or not.

The facts are

1) Google search results are full of spam.

2) Many of the spam sites have been reported (I reported a few myself) and blogged/written about for years.

What can one conclude from that? I think there are 2 possible explanations

1) It's not in Google's financial interests

2) Google is failing at filtering spam

I doubt it's true, because simply banning the top 1000 spammy domains would cut more than 99% of the search spam. It's something that an intern can do.

If Google wants a pure algorithmic solution instead, well, good luck to them. I think until AI is smarter than humans, such solution doesn't exist. Spammers can always find loopholes in algorithms.
Don't know about 2015, but it is indeed very 2011 (you might need to find a place to shoehorn redis too, tho)!
Prey actually does it as part of their reports on stolen laptops: http://preyproject.com/

Probably not with PhotoBooth though :)
(a) Who cares?

(b) See (a).
Isn't that exactly what "AT&T might be horrible for you, but it works just fine for me" means?

And let's not even get into the attain vs obtain debate.
I've been thinking about it, and this may not be it. It sounds like he already has a relationship with this publisher for domestic publishing.
Anyone who is already in the card payments market can answer yes to those questions. And they have the advantage of already having the back end payment processing heavy lifting AND existing relationships with real customers.

Sure, none of the existing players wanted to get into this space and be disrupted - or perhaps even able to come up with this creative alternative mechanism for taking benefits.

But we're now seeing them take notice, switch gears and offer rival services. I'm hoping Square does well, but I think they face some stiff competition.
I just kept thinking of this: http://xkcd.com/747/
I am waiting for the day that a potential candidate "fundraises" using the Kickstarter method -- e.g. "If I can raise a $1MM warchest by X date, I'll run."
That's amazing! Fantastic gift idea.
It really needs publicity.
Except far more accurate IMHO. Alright sure you could be a rockstar developer (you could be a rockstar anything I guess), but being a expert programmer has nothing do with being a 'ninja'. They're just geeky terms that stuck.

A hustler, on the other hand, is exactly what business people must be in a startup. Far from having a well defined role, you must do whatever it takes to make it happen (whatever 'it' may be). Further, a hustler must operate outside the status quo whether they're in a startup or on the streets. While most programmers I know hate the ninja and rockstar labels, I find hustler to be quite endearing.
Founders and prior investors cashing out some chips.
If there were no academic differences between the regular student body and minorities or athletes people wouldn't make those "offensive" generalizations.

Oh really? I suppose it's unlikely that peoples' prejudices could cause them to make inaccurate generalizations about the world around them. And do go on about the differences between the minorites and the "regular students".

He was using those words to demonstrate why using different academic criteria for different groups of students was problematic.

The assumption being that this is actually happening to a significant degree. The SCOTUS has set down fairly strict rules governing affirmative action in admissions processes, including forbidding quotas and rigid point-systems that benefit minorities.
I agree largely with this post. I'm tired of hearing the same arguments the author has. This technology we use is hardly infallible and as programmers and system administrators of these systems the defects should be obvious! Yet somehow people still think that the "clueless users" are to blame for these "defects."

Sure, we all know the saying about assumptions. But why are we at a point where it's cool to use a data persistance layer that assumes it doesn't have to live up to any of those assumptions? It's why we have things like ACID, the LSB, etc. Contracts about how these systems should work for the end user.

It's hard to get all that stuff right off the bat, sure. But losing the entire database when a few bytes land in the wrong place? Yikes. Hardly something I'd trust real data to.

This stuff can always get better. Of course the solution as pointed out is tried and true. Glad to see that the developers aren't covering their ears...
The fob battery does die fairly often (replace it once/twice a year?).

My car has no visible physical locks - there's a small notch under the drivers door handle you can pop off a piece of the handle using the fob, and then there is a physical lock you can get into the car with (no way to open the trunk until you turn the car on).

I've had to do this a few times :)

Like I said, you can still use the key to start the car, but if the battery is dead, you have to hold it up to the start button.
I used sage quite often when studying. I think many people today learn the one or the other programming language quite early, so it becomes natural to them, and an open source mathematical system like sage which extends their understanding of programming with mathematical/symbolic ideas is more powerful and way easier to adapt than those proprietory systems.
Rough startup year for Envolve
That is pretty impressive to me, since it is 40,000 new users and not existing users.
As a follow-up, in the late '70s, Caltech changed the admissions policies to go from application review by one professor to review by a committee of three. The % of women in the next class jumped by about 3x from one year to the next, from about 5% or so. Admissions is done completely differently today, but I still find that to be an interesting anecdote.
According to Alexa there are three social network sites in the top 10 sites in Russia [1]:

vkontakte.ru 3
odnoklassniki.ru 8
facebook.com 10

[1]: http://www.alexa.com/topsites/countries/RU
I couldn't find an uncompressed version of your source on your site. Are you planning on releasing the JS source, or at least telling us a little more about the nitty-gritty of how this is done? I assume it's some sort of well-decorated Perlin noise generator, but I'm not too familiar with how those are made.
For those projects I just ran backups of the file system. Linode does it for $5/month.

If your data was worth anything you'd also be using replication in which case the single server durability point becomes moot.
Because MongoDB is webscale.

http://www.xtranormal.com/watch/6995033/
Why would anyone? If they clearly hate school it seems like a mistake to try to entice them -- and an acceptance to CalTech may place undue pressure on them from family.

I'd reject with a note, "This student may excel, but not in a university setting".
Great idea! Congratulations on the launch.
Oh yeah, HR is ridiculous. For example at my company, if your appraisal says you "meet expectations" that's not good enough; you are expected to exceed expectations. The paradox of this obviously eludes whoever is responsible for it.

At appraisal time, you pick 3 cow-orkers to give you "feedback". Everyone stitches this up with their mates; if you tried to be honest - because no-one's perfect - you'd effectively be punished by having the lowest score of your peers!
To sum up:

In games like WoW, you can win through sheer playtime and repetition.

In real life, such as school, you must apply intelligence.

There are many guilds in WoW who beat a boss by mindlessly throwing themselves at it over and over until, by luck, they win.

This approach is not desired by the university.
It is wrong, if not dangerous, to evaluate universities by abstract metrics such as research or academic performance.

I fail to guess in what sense research and academic performance are somehow "abstract metrics" while non-academic diversity isn't. You may dispute their effectiveness but SAT/GPA scores, number of peer-reviewed publications, million dollars in grants, etc. are certainly less abstract than the color of your skin or the word on the street about the school you attended.
Best part:

Leeroy Jenkins 0pts.

LOL

[ref] https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Leeroy_Jenkin...
Undo is really the only thing I think it's missing too. Absolutely love the site… beautiful work, guys!
Are USC's 114 national championships any less of an achievement than Caltech's 31 Nobel Prizes?
RNA Game 'EteRNA' Lets Players Help Find a Biological Prize
Ah but that assumes that grades being awarded correlates to knowledge or understanding. All through uni I would do really well in assignments as I would actually love learning and doing the stuff. Come exams and it was one huge cram session. Pretty silly to see your entire grade hinge so much one pointless and worse out dated activity.

After a while we just realised uni was just another "tickbox" for the next step - work. Only after you get a job would you realise the total discontinuity between uni (or the different modes of learning) and reality.
I applied to CMU with a 3.8 cumulative (at a school where AP classes were worth 5.0), 740 math SAT, and 670 English SAT. I was accepted into the school of computer science, after submitting my application in a big red envelope that said "Athletics Department" on it (I was a football player).

Now, I'm a second semester senior with a 3.6 cumulative, I've TAed 5 classes, done 3-4 semesters of systems research, and accepted a job at Facebook (it was between them and Google).

If Caltech would have rejected me (I didn't apply) for being a "dumb jock," more power to them -- it might even be a worthwhile heuristic. I think CMU made the right choice though.
I will probably set up a blog and write up some posts on the experience of making it sometime soon. :-)
Tor was pretty bad for web browsing - latency and pages requiring multiple resources meant that pages took forever to render. But how much is being transfered or rendered with chat? Not very much. IRC is usable even over atrocious connections. I rather imagine that textual chat over Tor would work fine.

and I say this as someone who ran a Tor relay on his Xbox to get 1 hop out of the way
Magnetic cards will surely be around for a long time, but the second NFC comes out on the iPhone 5 (or 6), which Apple has hired a lot of NFC engineers for, I think it will be the thing to have for all merchants. And many do already - my BofA card has an embedded rfid which I have used at a lot of places with non swipe readers. They have been widely used in Japan for the last decade.

My point is the playing field will be much more open, because it will be only a software solution, not a hardware+software solution which has more barriers to market - There could essentially be a Visa merchant app that accepts payments from other phones.
Overview of Mass Animal Deaths - Google Maps
First you say I used the phrase affirmative action when anyone could see that I didn't.

And then you say that I have offensive and misguided views about minority students when I have not professed any views about minority students.

I don't think I'm being overly inventive when I say you seem rather inventive.
Looks like a nice library - the only problem is the name. I appreciate that "analemma" is an astronomical term, but unfortunately it also sounds like the name of an adult film actress.
>"Land rush. There may only be room for one coupon site in the minds of people"

I agree this is a likely explanation, but is there any evidence this is the case? I can understand that limitation for a social network, and even for a search engine, but not as much for coupons. I don't care if my dead tree coupons come from several sources, would I care about coupons that show up in my email?

I can see two areas of competition, anyway - geography and industry. I suspect targeted coupon sites will always have a fighting chance against more generic ones (Groupon is probably trying to be both, of course).
Wow, that is an amazing year. Congrats on making such great progress in the face of adversity.
Not really. Here in the UK "the poor" have satellite TV, free healthcare, smoke 40 cigarettes a day, and pay someone else to cook their food.

What does it matter that "the rich" go to the opera and smoke cigars and eat at fancy restaurants instead of the kebab shop? How does any of the latter take anything away from the former?
The funny thing is that from a Linux user's perspective, Google was simply providing a workaround for what should have been the OS's job. On Linux, Firefox's auto-updates are disabled so that the OS can handle that instead.

This is probably the best solution, as it gives you the most control over updates, and applies to all software system-wide. You're not forced to install updates at any time, and you can disable the notifications if you want.
OMG, if I didn’t have to do all this bullshit work, I’d so much more productive

I am not sure this is a line you want to add in a job post.
And then you say that I have offensive and misguided views about minority students when I have not professed any views about minority students.

Sure you have, scare quotes and all. From your comment:

The point was that the stereotype is formed quite strongly because those groups do exist on campus .... If there were no academic differences between the regular student body and minorities or athletes people wouldn't make those "offensive" generalizations.
It's probably this: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/3d/Twm_en.pn...

The "probably" up there makes me sad; I miss my Linux desktops.
Skype signs up over 1 million users in one day
In general I look daily on sites like HN and bookmark everything that looks interesting.<br>
Then if I need some tool for something important, I always Google if there is something new in this area, just to make sure I don't miss it.<br />
When I was developing websites with RoR I was very active at the RoR mailing list(Ruby on Rails: Talk). Mostly helping out other people, but following lots of discussions and reading answers, when I found a question interesting, that I couldn't answer myself.<br />
So for example, when we got into serious trouble with full text search with Ferret, I knew already, that many others had changed to Sphinx and no problems with it. Took me one day to change the project and make the search work as expected.<br />
And of course on that mailing list you can ask others, very experienced RoR developers about specific tools they use for certain areas. But mostly somebody who wrote something new, announced this already there, mostly starting a discussion about pros and contras of his solution.<br />
Steve Jobs to join Murdoch to unveil iPad paper
Great Idea, may need a little bit of fine tuning
ok updated demo now has bookmarkable Ajax REST support :) with even ctrl+click opening new window!
Darwin's media: Surviving the info-glut
Would like to see this for other communities, but what community matches SF in number of startups?
I don't know about that. I would love to have an extension that made the omnibar a lot more like firefox's awesomebar (good indexing, can search for key phrases for title of article and the such) but to my knowledge that's pretty much impossible because of the javascript limitation (I hope I'm wrong here, not really sure).

I just wish google was a bit more subtle about wishing people search on google again when looking for previously viewed sites.
The way I prefer to do it in gnome-terminal and konsole (both can do it) is to set up sessions that have the color info in the session for the terminal, and the command to start the session is an ssh command. In konsole, theoretically, you can bind this to a keystroke but there is a long-standing issue with that where it can't seem to persist across restarts, and has weird problems sticking even within a session. But when it works it's convenient, especially when combined with SSH's ControlMaster.
How is that misguided or offensive? It's simply a fact that if you lower academic standards for athletes, then the stereotype will be that the athletes are of lower academic caliber. Because they are. It was a statement of fact. I suppose the truth can be offensive...
I wonder if a similar effect is responsible for the little stalagmites that occasionally grow in my ice cube tray. (Yes, stalagmites. No, there is no moisture source above the tray.)
I worry that news is a crappy business to get into and near.
Sweet that you shared that link using secure.wikimedia.org. I'm glad that others are using HTTPS where they can!
I suppose the truth can be offensive...

Except that it's not the truth ... no schools do that for minority students. It's a strawman.
If you're 100% serious about this and "nothing left over" means you can still afford to then travel. Seriously. The cost of living in, say, South-East Asia isn't high. And your core customer base is sitting in the computer room in a hostel somewhere, looking for things to do and looking to share their experiences with others. Probably a carefully placed sticker will catch their eye. Or they'll be chatting to you at about all the places they've visited anyway. Maybe the hostel themselves will be so pleased at being listed on your website they'll stick up a "rated on QTripper.com" sign in reception. Don't underestimate the power of offline marketing.

Of course the cheap way to start off is going door to door in all the hostels in your own home city, assuming people travel there.

In terms of beefing up content, which apart from facts and figures your site currently lacks, checkout Wikitravel (CC-sharealike licensed) as a possible source for data if you haven't already. Even if it's just a temporary solution to your lack of content in many parts of the world it's a solution to the chicken-and-egg problem I think you're struggling with. Wikitravel bootstrapped by starting their country pages off with Wikipedia articles, incidentally.

To get more money coming in, improve your deal titles - "Lightweight travel laptop at bargain price" probably works better that "Acer modelnumber...." which just looks like a generic irrelevant ad. Have you looked at programs like Hostelworld. Can't imagine the commissions being huge - but it's establishing the usefulness of your site as a hub for useful travel links some of which happen to pay you.

Encourage and incentivise signup. Is your "Sign Up" button to QT-ly clever for its own good? Low signup rates suggest maybe. It's not really clear what you get for filling in all these boxes, especially when you can leave comments without it, and there are no calls to action to encourage you to "get your own travel ranking" or "recommend your favourite restaraunts in Prague" on the relevant sub-pages when I might want to register

Love it or loathe it, Facebook Connect seems to be the way forward for this sort of thing too, so that Bob can tell your site visitors and all 300 of his friends he's just found a really sweet hostel in Kota Kinablu. Probably one or two of the friends met him in the hostel back in Kuching and are doing a bit of travelling themselves...

I may have rambled on a bit here but I did consider doing something similar in the past.
Myspace to lay off over half of staff tomorrow
Maybe the game has changed by the time the 5¼-inch floppy becamse popular - or maybe it was just different where I'm from (Israel) from the Netherlands - but I don't think I've even seen more than maybe 10 pieces of legal, original packed software (except in stores) until the time CDs (which for a while were significantly harder to copy) started replacing floppies.
Which mobile platform should you build your apps for?
Thank you! Which parts do you think need fine tuning?
Foodspotting Thinks It's Ready to Blow Up
pushState() / twitter-like Ajax REST-ful Url's now added!
Google Can't Find Paris