skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Just look at the conference as a few days of hanging out with like minded people. Just have fun.

My conference knowledge is limited to three years of PyCon, the annual Python conference, but maybe it's helpful...

* Sit in the front row. You paid to be there, you probably traveled to be there, and you probably came because you wanted to learn something. Sitting in the back posting on HN is easy, but get up front and suck the brains out of the speaker. I like to write notes with pen/paper and save my laptop for later.

* If you liked a talk, go up and thank the speaker. Introduce yourself, maybe ask a quick question, then let them get on their way. You might have just found an interesting person to have dinner with when there's 500 random people in the hotel lobby trying to figure out where to eat.

* If no talks interest you in the given time slot, go roam around the hallways, the expo room, or grab a cup of coffee. See what people are up to -- everyone's there with a common set of knowledge/problems. I've learned a ton just from introducing myself to the other guy getting a cup of coffee and end up finding out he also works in the same field, doing the same stuff, we both know each other's companies, but we're solving our problems in totally different ways. Rather than killing time on the web for 30 minutes until the next talk, I just made another acquaintance to grab a beer with, and he made me think about what I'm doing at work.

* If there are development sprints, stick around and hack with people. At PyCon I believe we had 400 people the first day, and it was some of the most fun of the whole conference.
What's to say you can't just walk into pretty much any university and sit in on their lectures?
Waypoints – Execute Function on Scroll With jQuery
For those downvoting me, take a close look at the v8bench score, which is inverted.

Chrome is smoking Firefox. It's more than twice as fast.

Try it yourself:

http://v8.googlecode.com/svn/data/benchmarks/v6/run.html
Haha, anonymous will be all over this shortly.
For mass adoption, yes.

However, with the advent of cheap VPS hosting, most of the people willing to try a new language/framework before it hits Drupal/Django/Rails momentum are perfectly capable of deploying sites. Everybody has a VPS nowadays, right?

Having a Heroku-equivalent or being built into shared hosting doesn't happen until you're nearly to critical mass.
>But consider: even a mildly avid Library Guy might visit once a week. Add a couple of thousand of that type, and we've covered 25% of the visits with 6000 people. 25% are using the internet. The other half? Declining.

>Sorry, that just slipped out. Didn't mean to ruin your day with more facts.

Those aren't facts. Those are numbers you just made up.
I think some humans are biological robots with no free will, all actions pre-programmed. Babies, the severely retarded, people who read horoscopes... particularly the latter.
> I wouldn't believe 100% in those statements.

Why not? What makes you think this is a lie?
I'm sick of people trying to promote the boardgame scene by bashing one of the games that I've watched people enjoy the shit out of, and is the perennial whipping boy around some nerdy quarters. The main barriers keeping modern games like Carcassone and Settlers from general appeal are the medieval trappings like knights, kings, castles, and dragons, and when those are missing, spaceships. At least, that's major barrier I have to overcome when I pull out one of the things. I have better luck getting people to play Acquire, even though bookkeeping is a barrier.

>Approach your average American and say you enjoy board games. I guarantee you, nine times out of ten, you’ll get a response something like: “You mean like Monopoly?” (And the other ten percent will challenge you to a game of Ticket to Ride or Carcassonne.)

He's got this wrong by at least two orders of magnitude. I can find 1000 people who LOVE Monopoly before one that has even heard of Carcassone.

It's a Mensa/BoardGameGeek delusion that people are as disgusted with games of chance as they are. People LOVE dice. Remember, people LOVE casinos. People may not love being dominated during an entire game, but people sure love dominating for an entire game, and if you play enough games, you get your turn. And contrary to popular Mensa/BGG belief, more people have completed a dozen games of Monopoly than have ever seen the front of a Settlers box.
Umm no, journalism, real active journalism are the true shields. After the internet was cutoff in Egypt this non-Egyptian could only talk with my other non-Egyptian friends about what was going on. But I knew exactly what was going due to the journalists on the ground (S/O english.aljazeera.net) who had access to satellite relays.
Those are orders of magnitude easier to test.
there are things we know we know, and there are things we know we don't know then there are things we don't know we don't know ...
Um, actually, taken from the Alaska stats page I referenced in this thread.

Or do you deny anybody uses the library once a week? How are they returning their books to avoid late fees? Or do they borrow just once or twice a year, return them a week later, and never return?

The defence of libraries HAS to presuppose Somebody is borrowing the dang books, right?
Viewing RSS in a browser is broken, here's the fix
Climate Data (and Code) for Citizen Scientists
It's hard to argue with the logic of that approach. Classrooms aren't always logical places though. Consider factors like student movement between classes, courses and programs designed to move students to the workforce rather than complete school, parental pressure on students and teachers to place students into unrealistic pathways, and so on.

I suppose you could factor all that into the model, though I'd question the feasibility of doing so.

I'd also argue that grades aren't the only important factor in schooling. Building social skills, discipline, time management, helping to realize goals... All ways in which good teachers can influence students, and only some of them reflect in neat packages like test scores.

Edit: I'd like to clarify that in my previous post I mentioned getting more difficult classes sometimes as the luck of the draw. I didn't mean low ability classes. I meant classes with students with serious behavioral issues, students with learning disabilities and so on. These will very often negatively impact the learning outcomes of the entire class, and is something you very rarely if ever have to deal with in top end classes.
Oh, if only this were true. In fact, the exact opposite is a serious concern for the spread of the internet in the third world.

A key characteristic used in defining genocide is the use of popular media to carry out orders. I don't mean the use of propaganda, but the use of new media forms to carry out orders of genocide. In Rwanda and Bosnia radio was used to this effect.

Unfortunately I can't find it now but there was an article (either in the Atlantic or economist) suggesting this idea.
Texas Man Admits to Hacking into NASA Servers
> Let's not overplay this. Twitter and Facebook played a part in what happened, but in both countries the internet was either shut down or heavily restricted during the key phases of the uprising.

The fact that governments shut down the net is evidence IN FAVOUR of the net's importance in revolutions.

> The thing which stopped the worst abuses of power against the people was the presence of the global media in countries where the west had significant financial and political interests.

Not really. The West has significant interests in China and Libya, but that didn't prevent the Tiananmen Sq massacre, or Gaddafi's recent massacres.

The most important factor is whether the army will fire on the people. They refused to obey orders to in Egypt, and Mubarak's rule was no longer viable.
We use Bugzilla, but the non-techs in the company think it's too techy. Although it can get daunting with so many options, and I've even seen it used as a trouble ticketing system(!), it serves our purpose (bug tracking, of course).
Any particular reason that it's harder? With Passenger, the workflow is seemingly identical.

(That said, I use nginx/unicorn)
I would not be a Rubyist if it wasn't for Rails. Well, maybe I would have eventually gotten around to learning it. But I learned Rails before I learned Ruby...
Worked for my company (UK) a few years ago once I'd sent a paper letter to Mountain View and waited a few weeks. Since then no ads now appear against our company name. Not sure how they handle it these days but I made an argument that our competitor was "passing off" their products as ours. What you're talking about sounds like libel.
Is this a flaw in github? It has this nice compact list of people at the top; there's no way to join it without spamming a comment?
My main problem with multitasking on iOS is that there isn't a good startup service implementation -- so for example if I restart my phone and don't open Google Voice at least once, I won't get push messages from it.

However, one of the reasons the platform performs well (esp. with battery life) is that the OS can kill a background process at will, and apps expect that and are usually designed to handle that gracefully. Hopefully there's more work coming to make this less of a trade off, especially as new phone versions have more resources.
Erdos' Combinatorial Geometry Problem Solved
Anyone attending that conference could have decided to be "Anonymous". Isn't that the way the organization works?
Wanted: Hotter Servers With Energy 'Gas Pedals'
Same here.

MySQL was a viable option for us -- in fact, it beat Oracle in just about every benchmark we could dream of. Sure, it didn't have referential integrity, but we didn't need it.

Also, we were using Apache with a few scripts, no need for vignette or any other weird stuff.

Things are getting cheaper, but they were always reasonably cheap if you knew what you were doing, AND didn't try to follow buzzwords or have full ACID properties for your instant messaging status updates.
In my family, the chance element of Monopoly mitigates the fact that it is unbalanced - because it's a different 1 or 2 people every time.

I'm not sure how Trivial Pursuit, Scrabble and Dominoes fall into that category for your family... are you usually playing with an imbalanced family? Half young children and half adult or something?
AWS Launches CloudFormation
It's been archived - here's the link to this incident in the archive:

http://liveservice.londonstockexchangegroup.com/en/incidents...
Have you tried contacting the competitor and asking them nicely to stop? In my experience with this sort of thing, a polite call or email is most effective. If you email, make sure that what you wrote won't be embarrassing if they publish your email.

If they are intransigent, explain that you understand but, just so they know, you will be pursuing a Tit for Tat strategy: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tit_for_tat Communication really helps when you're tit-for-tatting, so contacting them will help on that front. If you are all relatively small, there are no antitrust issues at all.

If you are nervous about contacting them, you can pursue a tit for tat strategy anyway. To make it clear what you're doing, use the exact same copy that they do. If you want to be really direct, write a message to them in the ad copy.

In any case, you said they're bigger than you, so you'll actually get more leads from doing this than they get from keywords on your brand.
When you play online, it limits you to X rolls or Y times past GO, and then whoever has the highest net worth wins. It is a much faster game, and it makes betting on it a lot of fun. Of course, the game is solved so it's almost pure gambling unless your opponent doesn't know how to play.

Risk was my favourite board game though, ainec.
The auction phase that's already in the official rules, but that most people skip, goes a long way towards answering most of your critiques.
Ahhm.

In the good old days, (1998), no one used Java on the server side. Java Applets were still not dead, and Java on the server was still not really born.

Apache SSI and perl were kings. AOLServer+tcl was probably the best available (though only known and used by a small group).

Java? We're not talking about the same 1998
I agree, but I am disappointed that the keyboard on my IBM Thinkpad T40 is significantly better than the one on my Lenovo T60. The T60's just seems flimsier, somehow.
We all love farmers in our group - fighting to join up those fields to try and swing the game in the final few tile placements is really fun. :-)
IBM's Watson Boosts Global Supercomputing Effort
Flavorize.com Looking For $1 Million To Build “Pandora For Food”
SO is designed so that google is their home page. Joel Spolsky talked about that, year or two ago, in one of episodes of SO podcast.
Show HN: yet another snow indicator
I started to build a Facebook killer.
I pivoted to an Etsy clone, then I pivoted 17 more times, and came up with this...
Redmine is simply the best
Future Simple Raises $1.1 Million To Further Simplify The Life Of SMBs
Sometimes it really amazes me just how far out of touch with the mainstream people in the FP community can be. Any concept that the elite struggle with as much as monads simply has no place in the working programmer's toolbox. Haskell is a wonderful research language. It and its ilk will never be bread & butter.
Change majors. Try business or liberal arts. Have fun with it and learn some things outside of computers, which you seem to have down already.
Monopoly is a terrible game, but the fact that it keeps selling is a testament to the power of branding and sales channels.

The average game store in the U.S. is a Toyrsus. Toysrus carries dozens of board games from exactly two different companies: Hasbro and Mattel. Toyrsus carries basically zero board games from any other companies. Hasbro and Mattel have figured out that if you offer parents the same games they knew as a kid, they'll buy them; and if you offer games with the same characters as TV shows, the kids will want them. And so that is what is in the stores.

There are a tremendous number of good board games in the world. These are not offered for sale at Toysrus, and therefore do not have any significant sales in the USA.

The existence of Monopoly and the fact that this crummy game continues to be offered for sale is a demonstration of the power of monopoly in the board games industry.
Creative Commons’ Branding Confusion
i'd like to hear more about customer acquisition (ie getting users); especially from YC startups.
Considering they're rolling it out via the app store, does this mean the current preview doesn't actually contain a new kernel, just user space enhancements?
How to draw viewers into Web Video - lessons from porn
I decided to learn it by writing a lexer for it in Lisp. Few pages into the spec I saw its objects are printed #<like this>. I was learning both Lisp and Ruby at the time, so I dismissed it as a Lisp with perl-syntax. That was in 2000 :-)

Never bothered to learn it still.
Google activating 300,000 Android phones per day
Only Python, these days.

In very rare cases (when it's simply a sequential list of commands) I still use shell scripts, but I try to replace them with Python programs as soon as any logic, text/data processing or sane error handling is needed.
"These fat and lazy morons..." Can we avoid juvenile attacks like these, please? C'mon, this is HN, not Kindergarten.
The same could be said originally for generics and lambdas which have become increasingly common elements of programming. Complex ideas can yield powerfully simple and useful implementations.
what's the problem with using the jquery selector? i mean you can always just assign objects to a variable like:

var elemt = $('#elementID')

and then you can call something like elemt.hide() or whatever.
The Challenges Of Being “RV Profitable”
Yes, Django has spurred a very large number of "new to Python" hackers. I was stunned by the number of "we got into python because of Django" people at Djangocon and PyCon in 2010.
Web Developer at YC W2010 Startup
When the Internet Nearly Fractured, and How It Could Happen Again
They're rolling out the installer via the App Store. The Snow Leopard installer was able to run without having to boot off the install media, so presumably Lion's beta installer is doing the same thing.
Even simpler: did telephones stop the genocide of WWII?
As an Arab (Egyptian), what amazes me is the audacity of the leaders. The refusal to grant any wishes to the people, the sense of entitlement and "owning" the country, and the absolute ignorance most live in after believing in their own lies.

Corruption is one thing. But, having an estimated networth between $40-70 billion while 40% of your population lives on less than $2/day is just disgusting. Does the standard of living really change that much from the first billion to the tenth? Or, from the tenth to the fiftieth?

It's despicable. This was a long time coming; a few decades of holding back the people and that dam finally burst.
My favorite style of marketing is when your users market your app for you. NOT in the way you might think (not through referral programs, emailing friends, etc.) rather that they're encouraged to share their profile, page, website, etc., because it will benefit them directly. In turn it benefits you, but it starts with benefiting them.

What's an example? KickStarter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Foursquare, etc., are all examples of this. Another is Carbonmade. Artists must share their portfolio (e.g. http://colerise.carbonmade.com/) with their friends, recruiters, etc., to get benefit from it and in turn those friends (usually other artists) see the Carbonmade link at the bottom of the portfolio, click it, and can then sign up for their own. It sets off a viral chain.

Side note: We're seeing nearly as many referrals from Facebook as we are from Google, because people are sharing their portfolios on Facebook as their homepage. Screenshot: http://cl.ly/0a372w1T3y3G1s2U3337 And look at StumbleUpon's comeback!
The sensible behavior is to install the documentation., so no .gemrc is necessary (to get sensible behavior).
There are a couple of comments in this vein already, but I still feel compelled to clamor against such an unreflective regurgitation of the word "success." That so many commenters are diving headlong into this cesspool by applying back-of-the-envelope statistical analysis and makeshift sociology to establish some mythic threshhold for entry into this elite is dismaying and speaks to a serious cultural void in the community. We might as well start whipping out the rulers and unzipping our pants right now.
> I would not be a Rubyist if it wasn't for Rails. Well, maybe I would have eventually gotten around to learning it. But I learned Rails before I learned Ruby...

You're not the only one in that boat. Ruby is a great language in its own right — but with Perl & Python being so widely available, it really did need a killer app (Rails) to spur adoption.

I learnt Ruby because I was interested in Rails — I don't think I would have ever bothered (beyond a little dabbling) otherwise. It's not so much that I don't like to check out new languages, but having a pragmatic reason to do so helps significantly.
If you say that you're using Ruby 1.9 then not wanting to be quarrelsome that's good enough for me to accept that you are using Ruby 1.9.

And I'll grant that you're part of the community on your say so.

But being "part of the community" doesn't magically enfuse you with knowledge about what proportion of the community is using what version of Ruby. To be educated about that is to count the numbers.
I very well might be able to help with Accenture expenses. If you are comfortable, email me at knitcap444@gmail.com. Hope that is in line with etiquette around here. If not, ignore me.
Ask HN: Finding Team Members
I've developed a few ideas that I think I'm nearly ready to launch in some form or other. However both of them need some tweaking on the technical side of things. Not being a hardcore dev or a brilliant designer I've been looking for people to work with.

I know you guys work in some pretty kick ass teams, so I was wondering where did you meet each other if you weren't hired into the team. How did the business guy meet the developer? I'm desperate to get my ideas off the ground but far from anything for a budget finding people to just work on idea is difficult.
I like launchpad's "This bug also affects me" link. Maybe github could implement something similar.
> I wouldn't be surprised if the vast majority of Wikipedia users don't know, and don't care, about Wikipedia politics

If they don't care about the "politics", they shouldn't complain if the direction chosen by the project does not suit them.
I definitely agree. If given a control panel in a foreign language with three symbols from left to right and then shown a series of graphics representing sparse/denseness I would certainly see identifying the three options as low, middle, high rather than low, unknown, high. So for identifying a conscious uncertainty in primates this experiment is lacking.
As an aside, if negative interactions concern you, it's probably a good idea to keep away from Diplomacy. There have been fist fights in my group of friends over that game.
Well it just so happens that I think ØMQ and Mongrel 2 are to praise here. Yes, having a thin wrapper around Mongrel's backend api helps as well, but you can't compare it to Symfony or Zend unless it's run tested with all features of a regular application. Db, Auth, Sessions etc.

edit: same goes to tests on symfony's site. We've been using Symfony since pre 1.0 days and you'll be lucky to hit 25% of these request rates once you use most of the common features.
Eternal September: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September
Wasn't Photon the QNX GUI stack?

edit: yes http://www.qnx.com/products/hmi/photon.html
This. Universities are full of interesting departments teaching all kinds of fascinating subjects. I really regret not taking more advantage of this fact when I was at University. Don't be scared to leave your department and see what else is on offer. Who knows you might just stumble on an idea in some unexpected corner of academia that will turn out to be more influential to your future than any CS course you take. See for example the story about Steve Jobs taking a calligraphy class while at school.
Chrome isn't an incompatible browser, though; it's just not on that list of "recommended browsers" so they still wouldn't see this page.

To get to this page, they'd need to fire up Netscape or a version of IE they don't support or something like that.
Presumably Apple will bring out a giant iPad at some point, or Microsoft will bring out a cheaper Surface.
I was thinking of the unavailability of cheap shared web hosting (which I guess actually only justifies the 'dearer' part). And I may be out of date on that too...
That's the entire point of this discussion. A large body of Rubyists think that the sensible behavior is to _not_ install the documentation.

I google far more often than I ri.
"If the abuses are really bad, you'd no doubt attract a lot of other disgruntled employees who'd prefer to work for a better company."

So uh, that'd pretty much be like a union, right? A group of people effectively saying that they won't work under certain conditions? ;)

I suspect we'll fundamentally disagree on the first point about parents voting with their feet/wallets, since that kinda describes the private school system, and I'm a firm believer in the same education being available to everyone (freely, if possible, and cheaply if not).
I'd say it's a sensible default that happens to be broken in this case. ;)