skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
United States Code repo. Tree visualization to show which laws stem from preceding laws stemming from the Constitution.
I'd love to see an IDE that actively taught keyboard shortcuts as you used it. For instance, let's say you used the mouse to click a save-icon or use the File menu to save a file. I'd like to see the IDE pop up an alert, change some text or otherwise inform the user that "Hey - control-S is the keyboard shortcut to do what you just did."

Basically, I want the IDE to actively guide me towards more productive ways to use it instead of just making me refer to a help file or discover those ways on my own. I saw something like this on a presenter's laptop at a conference once a long time ago, and the brilliance of it didn't strike me until later on.
... And it's very easy to just impersonate the GoogleBot by using its User-Agent.
Developing products for the mass market requires a lot of grunt work, and even with a totally dedicated technical team, still needs somebody or -bodies to compel them to do some of the boring things, fix the unfixable bugs that actually affect non-technical users, etc.

So, while I guess I can imagine this working (and me loving) for products geared toward a highly technical, somewhat forgiving customer base, I don't see this as a workable for anything truly consumer-focused.
He seems to have chosen the sign purposely for its mistakes, yet he makes one of those same mistakes in his opening paragraph.
No problem. These things can do precision landing so there's no reason they couldn't juice themselves back up in shifts.
Or maybe normal people today simply have expectations in keeping with modern technology? I'm sure modern Excel jockeys are fully capable of slogging through one of those assembly language manuals for dozens of hours. I think they could also calculate radicals to five significant figures using pen-and-paper algorithms, 19th-century style. Or till their own fields using oxen, 18th-century style. That these are all "unthinkable" today doesn't mean humans have suddenly become stupider and weaker (the opposite is true); it means they're immensely labor-consuming tasks which no longer serve a purpose, and to perform them would be an astonishing waste of effort.
As a Dev who worked on finance industry apps, you can get Dev buyin. However, if your motivating them based on selling the company then you should do that otherwise your devs will leave in droves.

The main thing you need to show devs is that people are using their code. Nothing is more depressing for a Dev than code that doesn't ship, followed only by code that people don't use.
Ronald Jenkees 3rd CD Teaser
That's really tricky. I've been in exactly that situation; several years ago we started our first startup whilst cofounder was still doing his finals. So having experienced that plus currently experiencing YC, I think your hesitation is justified, lol. :D
Poll: Have you ever applied for YC funding?
I'd assume only a small fraction of the community would have applied before, but who knows?
Well, if you hold a patent that does not mean you will build, enhance or use your patented stuff but it only prevents others from using it! I am completely against it.
This is confusing:

OPEN INTERNET RESEARCH CHALLENGE
...
Both published and unpublished papers will be accepted.
Published research papers need to have been published
after January 2007. Both published and unpublished papers
are limited to 20 pages (11 point font).

and...

ENTER THE RESEARCH CATEGORY
Submissions in the research paper category shall be ...
..
Papers need to have been peer-reviewed by a recognized
scientific conference or journal and must have been
published after January 2007. Papers can be uploaded in
either PDF or Word format. There are no page limits for
research papers.

EDIT: I presume that it should have been:

Papers (that have been published) need to have been
peer-reviewed by a recognized[..]
A lot of important questions and issues have been raised by other commenters, but here's one I didn't really see...

Is there a way to see if there are any cars in a particular location? My second question while viewing the site was "is this available near me?" Your eligibility page answered that, as I'm not in the U.S., but if I was, I'd probably still want to know before handing over my Facebook info, and certainly before handing over my driver's license info.

I realize theft risk means you probably don't want to map every car to non-signed-in users like Zipcar can, but something like "number of vehicles within 5/10 km of zip code 90210" would be useful.

In fact, I only found out you're only in California from a discussion/support topic. That seems like something that should go somewhere prominent and upfront.
this is just the motivational kick i needed to get back to finishing my prototype, thanks pg!
So the model is to be that people good at making art should not make money for making art. They should make money from ancillary things? That doesn't seem like a very good way to things.

If programmers were paid that we we would get no pay for writing good working code. To get paid we'd have to man the support lines and would be paid based on the feedback we get from the people calling for help. Anyone here willing to ask their employer to switch to that model?
Twice. Their loss, twice.

Edit:
You guys below are taking "their loss" too seriously lol. Is it really their loss? Who knows. Do I think it's their loss? Sure.
The problem is, since I can do less (with a drm protected ebook), I would expect to to pay a lot less.
It's all rather confusing and complex (and reads a bit like an episode of connections), but the gist is this:

To gain access to a website and get an account, you need to supply your social security number as a convenient unique identifier. This is all so that if you do something bad, like commit fraud, or distribute child porn or whatever, the authorities can figure out who did it (I know, I know, there's an entire debate about why using your SSN like this is a bad idea). In the States, the government goes through all kinds of gyrations to ensure separation of interests to protect personal privacy. The same level of privacy protection simply doesn't exist in South Korea. To my understanding, this SSN gathering requirement is required by law.

Further complicating matters, encrypted communications (via web browser) are mandated by law to use an ancient ancient activeX control (like 1998 ancient) implementing an encryption standard called SEED. Why this is is one of those funny historic happenstances. In the late 90's South Korea's internet buildout was booming and the necessity for encrypted communications (for things like online purchasing) was seen as imminently necessary. If I recall, the U.S. was not allowing export of 128-bit encryption technology, and the exportable 40-bit SSL was considered not secure enough. So the South Korean government, in the interest of promoting online business, brought KISA (their NSA) in to develop a homegrown 128-bit encryption system.

SEED was then implemented as an ActiveX control for IE6 and a plugin Netscape and the use of this system was enshrined in law.

As you can imagine, the wheels of government turn incredibly slowly, even in Korea, so lawmakers have never really updated this law. Once Netscape went away, all that was left was IE and thus the stubborn persistence of IE6 to this day.

As you can guess this has left most Koreans with huge security vulnerabilities on their machines, and outdated browser (who's inadequacies they try to fix with Flash) and myriad other problems.

Fortunately, this may all end soon as there's growing momentum for the government to take another look at the law and bring South Korea's internet users into the 21st century.

TL;DR version:
If you want to use an online service in South Korea, you have to make an account, and to make an account you need to use your SSN, and since you don't want to transmit all that in the clear, you want to encrypt that number, and since you want to encrypt it you have to use SEED, and since SEED only exists as an ActiveX control, you are stuck with IE6.

Some more reading on it

http://seoulspace.co.kr/2010/03/09/ie6-no-more-not-in-korea/ (the comments are great)
http://www.koreatimes.co.kr/www/news/biz/2009/09/123_52401.h...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SEED
http://www.anythingbutipod.com/forum/showthread.php?t=60225

(sorry if I got some details wrong, this is just what I happen to recall, but should nail down the important points)
Ask HN: Review my winter break project (statusdot - hosted website status pages)
Hi HN!

Eli Fox-Epstein (elitheeli here) and I decided that we should build something this week, so we built Statusdot (http://statusdot.com). It's a service to provide status pages for websites (similar to status.github.com or status.37signals.com).

https://statusdot.com

It's pretty basic right now: You set up a CNAME pointing at statusdot.us for (for your 'status' subdomain), so you can access the site by going to status.yourdomain.com. You give us a URL, we do a GET request every 5, 10, 15, 30, or 90 minutes. If that request doesn't come back with a 200 response or doesn't contain a string you specify, we consider it down. We display that information on a status page, along with your twitter account and status messages you can post. (We also send you an SMS message when your site goes down.)

We've got a few more features and a ton more polish left to do, but we wanted to soft-launch to get some feedback, so right now it's free for a couple of weeks. (After that we're planning to start charging monthly.)

We'd love any feedback you can give. Would you use it? If not, why not? Is there anything we could add that would make it more useful for you?

Thanks!
Engineered chickens can't pass on flu
Hopefully, PG feels the same way. If I had his email, I could tell him all about and we would decide how best to proceed in this exceptional case.
You are no doubt aware of the rapid change in CPU, RAM, network, pricing.

Surely this works to the advantage of potential FB competitors, as much as it benefits FB as they grow.
I'd also like to thank everyone in advance for feedback. In exchange, here's a clickable link: http://statusdot.com
Even processor agnostic programs will run poorly on a GPU. GPUs are about doing very basic tasks very quickly. CPUs can do more but are slower. Most computer programs take advantage of the extra features in a GPU and would not be able to run on a GPU.
Linking me to the methodology used to create that graphic might be a nice start. At least enough to simply suggest it just wasn't pulled out of somebodies ass...
Woah.. He's been quiet for a pretty long time. Nice to see him being back with great tunes.
How much nutmeg or hydraulic fluid is kept in bank vaults and has served the purpose of "money" for thousands of years?

Really, your comment is ... not very useful.
I've often thought in similar terms... and I think everyone has a different story here.

I used to write some simple software (we're talking some ASM and some BASIC here, with some C and Pascal - no OOP or design patterns or fancy stuff.... I was young, it was a while ago). At some point I took some digital electronics course, and at some point during that course, when we moved from transistors to discrete logic ICs to Intel 8080 trainer boards programmed in Octal - something clicked. I got it. I couldn't necessarily go out and build you a CPU - but I get it.
Networking too.. I get it, down to the electronics, the modulation, the analogic/digital circuitry. I get it enough to understand what's on both sides.

So where's my magic? I may not understand the hellishly complex details in anything past the 486, with all the pipelining and caching and whatnot, but I get it enough to know what it's about. There's no magic - I know I could go study (probably for a good long while) and understand it better.

So now there's no more magic (I never really felt there was, I knew I could always pick up a book and figure it out) - but there is discovery. It's the software patterns, the network protocols. It's complex systems and emergent behaviour. It's the interface between humanity and computers. I get the internet (and local networking, and network stacks) down to the bits - I love it when I find a mysterious network behaviour that I can't seem to grok in my head - because I know that either I'm being fed faulty information, or my mental model is wrong (which means I might learn something - which is always good). I love an especially frustrating problem.

As a generalist - a lot of that knowledge goes unused. I get how SSDs work (I'm using one now) - I've had a decent career, and there are tons of avenues I could take if I need a hobby.. because it's all interesting. But there's no magic.

TL;DR: The only magic left is human behaviour.
Maybe the market is different for non-technical internships. I have no particular insight into that. But for a top CS or engineering student, I seriously doubt this would be an enticing offer.

Addendum: I'm really not trying to needlessly antagonize you, but I think your point about cash compensation isn't very sound, because it neglects the equity a full-time employee would receive to offset the below-market salary.
> I'd highly suggest reading Drive by Daniel Pink.

This video shows Daniel Pink delivering an 18-minute presentation at TED on the same topic: http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_pink_on_motivation.html
Wow, the article and the embedded ABC video are embarrassing to even look at. It makes me lose faith in journalism.

1. No where is it mentioned that Bubble Ball only surpassed the
*free* version of Angry Birds on the top *free* app chart. The
article even links to the paid version of Angry Birds, saying
that it was "de-throned" (spelled wrong); this is not true.
2. They call him a "tween" in the video. He's 14 (four*teen*) years old.
3. The video says he would have made $2 million if he had charged
$1.00 for the app (which isn't even in possible) - I hate to break
it, but I'm not sure if even a 1000 of them would have still
downloaded the *Wake Up the Box* clone.

Come on journalism!
Same with me - I ended up changing out the processor and installing a 5mb hard disk that cost $500 and sounded like a jet engine when it booted.
Did you submit the same application both times? Was it platomic?
The key quote: "It is also very intimidating to take classes where it seems like most people know all the material already and have been programming since middle school or earlier..."

The key to getting more females in CS is to expose them to programming in middle school or earlier.

Jean put her finger on why recruiting females for CS at the college level is so difficult: if they are starting programming in college (or even high school) when most of the class has been programming for years, they are way behind on the learning curve and have a daunting task to catch up.
I just put my site here, it looks like a great start. Getting some more data in future would be interesting, like how much time it's taking to load the pages and show that on a graph.
adding some good starting points:

http://eloquentjavascript.net/contents.html

http://code.google.com/edu/submissions/html-css-javascript/#...

https://developer.mozilla.org/en/JavaScript

and for further reading,

http://ejohn.org/apps/learn/

http://fixingthesejquery.com/ (not necessarily jQuery specific)
From Being Boo'ed at The Apollo to Triple Platinum
They All Boo’ed When She Sang on Stage, But When She Went Triple Platinum… that amazing story of Lauryn Hill.
Perlunya Web Komunitas Event Organizer
Perlunya Web Komunitas Event Organizer, sebagai sarana komunikasi dan berbagi informasi serta berdiskusi para penyedia jasa event organizer di Indonesia.
How Much Does a Single Search Cost Google?
The same article, posted on the author's homepage, hit HN about a month ago. There are some pretty good comments there as well. Check it out. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1999010

I will say that, as I'm preparing for grad school, this sort of writing is incredibly helpful. If anyone else is considering writing a piece like this, I encourage you to do so.
I just started using MongoDB in a Python project; it shares a lot of the advantages (vs. SQL) mentioned in this presentation -- there's a natural mapping between the BSON in MongoDB and Python dicts.

What are the pros & cons of Redis compared to MongoDB?
Googlers Expose Sketchy SEO Company
That's interesting. I'm not sure exactly how critical the absolute size of SCADA security in 2006 is in the question of evaluating the magnitude of the coincidence. It almost seems like something @alexhutton's could plug into one of his Bayesian models.
Why sad? Javascript is a great language, way ahead of it's time. Don't confuse browser DOM compatibility disasters for Javascript fail.
Ask HN: How much should you spend on a great domain name? 
For a startup or individual looking to launch a new site, how much are you willing to spend on the domain name? $10? $100? $1000? More?
I'm a fan of: http://blog.jolieodell.com/2010/09/07/women-in-tech/
Yep, although it was originally called SWFStats.

Now I'm tracking 10 billion events a month in real time, and I'm armed with tons of awesome users, some friends and an increasingly solid strategy for capturing a few more markets. :)
"If only RAM would get cheaper, I could build Facebook!"

:)
There's an answer to this question somewhere in YC's FAQ, and the answer is yes and no. They do accept international candidates, but you'll have to figure out all the visa issues by yourself. They are not employers and won't provide any documents. But since what they require is that you stay in SV for the 3 months cycle, this shouldn't be a problem with a regular tourist visa. (Things can get complicated afterwards, though, if you want to stay longer)
Really well written article. I'm not a female, but I resonate with a lot of her points, especially:

They can say something so simple as "Oh don't you know that command?" but in an inadvertently condescending voice that makes you feel like you're the only person who doesn't know it. As someone just testing out the CS waters, that type of experience in every class can be very daunting.

In general, computer science tends to be a major where people go into college with a lot of prior-knowledge and I have seen this discourage many people from majoring in it.
Arbor, Mug, I, Ristretto
More on the topic: http://www.localconspiracy.com/2010/08/get-up-stand-up.html (Full disclosure - I wrote that. I've been using a stand-up desk for 9 months now. I'll never switch to sitting down again!)
[The professor] once told me that even though the females are fairly quiet, and the boys in the class showed off a lot, when it came down to projects and exams, the female average was often higher

At his confirmation hearing, when Greenspan was asked why Townsend-Greenspan employed so many women (> 50%, compared to about 5% in finance at the time), he replied that since he valued women as much as men, but other firms didn't, he could get better work for the same money by hiring women. Are there any software companies doing the same thing today, and if not, why not?
I agree with Mz that the most likely long term users aren't necessarily success stories. I think it's reasonable to expect that you're going to have significant churn.

When someone stops using the site regularly after achieving their goal, though, they are still very valuable to you. Find a way to follow up with those folks each 6 or 12 months and you can hopefully gather data to prove that your model works. The people that have been the most successful may very well want to talk about it.

Being able to say "5000 people have used Skinnyo to meet their weight goals and kept the weight off for 12 months" in big letters on the front page could help your conversion rate, and may even help current members stick with it.
Google says WebM plug-ins coming to Safari and IE9
You've missed the most important two words of that quote: "seems like". She goes on:

"Something that frustrates me about the field of computer science is that there are a lot of jerks who think that just because they've "mastered" some programming language or know some obscure unix commands, they are gods and you are nothing."

And frankly, that's the level at which a typical CS freshman is operating. Lots of knowledge about "coding"...very little knowledge about anything else. The playing field is much more level than it initially seems, but because the CS 101 classes are mostly about writing toy code it's easy for prior coding knowledge to be intimidating. In my own undergrad CS program, the CS101 hotshots fared no better, on average, than the kids who came in with no experience at all. In fact, a few of the loudest initial braggarts were the most spectacular flameouts, and about an equal number of the no-prior-experience kids ended up the honors graduates.

Universities could do a lot to combat this problem -- it might be a good idea to let the high-school coding jocks place out of the first CS classes. Alternatively, making first-year classes more about math and less about code would probably put 99% of all incoming students on an even playing field.
Will watch but don't think I'm the guy to build it.
It's best to prove there's market demand for your product before investing in the domain name. A great domain name can do a lot for a service, but it's not going to make a site successful if the site has little else going for it. Also, if you discover that you need to pivot your offering, you don't want to have a domain name that locks you in to your old hypothesis.

If you're looking for a number, if I really believe a domain has potential and it's currently available, I'll drop the $10 to snag the domain. If the domain is currently held by someone else and the expiration is coming up, I mark it on my calendar and check back later. If the domain is being held, has been held for a while, and doesn't look like it's coming up for air in the near term, I move on.
Why Graduate School
"It's no secret that females in Computer Science, both in academia and industry, are scarce... currently sitting at about 12% to 20%."

I wonder how much of the gender discrepancy in CS can be objectively attributed to personality differences. Populations who participate in certain logical activities have rare personality traits (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=946249, http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/viewmessage.php?topic_id=112...) which are far more common in men than women.

If this is the case, is it possible that direct attempts to "increase the number of women in CS" are misguided?
The difference between a 14yr old and older devs, the older devs would have tried to monetize it (ads in the app).

Although I haven't played his app, does he have any ads? I'm assuming not after watching the video. Sounds like a pretty smart kid.
You could let the user designate a charity and get friends to pledge donations if the user meets their goal. A smaller charitable gift may go a longer way psychologically for some folks, and it may be easier for them to get their friends to pledge as well.

Then, when you go to eat the bowl of ice-cream or skip your workout, you think: do I really want to screw the panda bears/starving children/cancer sufferers?
I was surprised to notice no-one had
yet implemented web based touch and
gesture recognition (for mobiles)
to this degree

iGesture is a jQuery plugin. It was discussed here on HN a while back, it extends work done on another library called jgesture:

https://github.com/raganwald/iGesture

(This is blatant huffery and puffery, of course!)
I don't think the opportunity to do that even exists. I haven't heard female engineers complaining that they can't get jobs. The problem is there there are so few looking for the jobs in the first place.
There are plenty of good domain names you can build into great brand names once you build an awesome service. You could pick up a potentially awesome domain name right now for only $4.95 at NetFirms. Just use promo code PROMO495. And no I am not affiliated with NetFirms in any way. Just thought I would help. :)