skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I am delighted that Thunderbolt isn't reusing the USB plug form-factor. Early rumors showed Light Peak plugs that were the standard rectangular USB shape with fiber optic channels blended in: http://www.macrumors.com/2011/02/19/apple-to-introduce-light...

The outer rectangular, doubly symmetrical shape of USB is a usability nightmare! You know what I'm talking about. Good riddance.
Sort of, yes. I'll shoot you an email in the next few days if that's OK - and thanks for replying.
If they're still raising VC, I'd still qualify them as a startup.
The media often glamorizes successful founders and makes their paths seem easier than they actually were.

- Jessica Livingston (@foundersatwork)

http://startupquote.com/post/3485274715
Sweet Sleep for MyBlogLog; a Yahoo Service That Could Have Changed the World
I don't think PHP is that good of a language to use for a glue from frontend to backend. Compared with Perl, Python, and Ruby, PHP is missing a number of important features; ability to serve multiple requests in the same OS thread (coroutines / events), ability to abstract the database in an OO way (do they even have prepared statements yet?), and so on. Its JSON parser is also slow, and JSON is how browsers and servers communicate now.

Anyway, not buying it. PHP's asset is "you get MySQL and templating for free in pages served by Apache", but most web apps don't use MySQL, templating, or Apache these days.
You can't just get them from JAE, you have to license the male plug thru Apple and it's a big process. And Apple lets no one but Apple use the female 30 pin plug.
The real story here, IMO is not that the internet creates more engaged citizens, but that being interested in something encourages civic engagement. [edit: not to say the internet doesn't increase engagement, it certainly does, but that's an obvious and uninteresting conclusion]

The idea seems to be to compare civic participation that's driven by [social v political v interest] factors and, from what I can tell, it appears that people who have hobbies and use the internet to build community around their interests are more likely to foster a stronger community in the physical world, whereas people who participate online out of political motivations tend to only increase political participation (e.g. campaign involvement.)

From the study: "Among all the predictors included, parental involvement, strength of ideology,
college student status, and political interest were found to be strong and
consistent predictors of increased politically driven online participation.
Particularly strong, however, was interest-driven participation (B = .59, p <
.001). The entry of interest-based participation in Model 2 accounted for an
additional 19.1% (= 48.2%–29.1%) of explained variance in politically driven
participation." [http://ypp.dmlcentral.net/sites/all/files/publications/Onlin...]
Does anyone else find the number + word naming strategy annoying? I am referring to people naming websites similar to 37signals
I'm just figuring it all out as I go for now. There are certainly more things I want to add and I'll try to do so as I get a better understanding of helpful features. Price drop is certainly something I'll consider in the near future.

This was a weekend thing so I can't wait till I have some more free time to tinker with it.

If you have any other suggestions they are always welcome.

Thanks for your input!
I work in IT for a very large school district, and I have this argument all the time. Aiming for 4 9s or more is just a waste of money. Sure having the gradebook or scheduling app down sucks, but it doesn't matter at a school.

Can the teacher still teach if the systems go down? Yes.
open-ended question answering systems have been around for many years. there are stacks of research papers written about them, watson is an improvement.
Interesting. You can always

$ open Library

to open it in a Finder window.
Facebook just raised $1.5 billion on a reputed valuation of $50 billion.

At what point do you stop calling something a startup?
I just started using the CodeIgniter framework. It has a small footprint and doesn't try to include the kitchen sink (which is one of the reasons I stayed away from frameworks for so long).
First Look: Inside Apple's fast new Thunderbolt port on MacBook Pros
IDE support is certainly a major problem with Scala development right now, but it's not the biggest one. By far the biggest problem is how incredibly slow the Scala compiler is. My project has a whopping 10 Scala files. To recompile them after a one line change takes something on the order of 26 seconds.

It is possible to reduce this time down to 4 or 5 seconds using fsc (the Scala daemon compiler), but getting fsc to work reliably with Maven is a problem I haven't solved yet. Even 4 or 5 seconds for a one line change to a project with 10 files is just wrong. What, are we back in 1992?
Although I've switched from Firefox + Firebug to Chrome + Web Inspector for dev, I still missed Firebug. Mostly because of CSS editing.

Considering that Chrome already had a huge speed advantage (and Firebug only made Firefox worse), these updates are just an added bonus.
If you enjoyed and/or upvoted this post, then the answer is "never."
I stick with PHP because I've always viewed it as a "C++ for the web". C++ was the first language I wrote useful application with so it was familiar.
Versions and Resume look cool, but Launchpad? Do people really need a full view of all the (dozens) of apps they have installed? I thought we were getting away from that with Quicksilver and other 'find as you type' tools.

Launchpad seems like Program Manager from the olden days of Windows.
I wonder how much trashing of the L1/2/3 these passes do. How often, how bad.
I've worked from home 100% of the time for the last 6 years and haven't even met most of the people I work with in person. Your company culture really has to support it, and it's going to be tough if other people are not already doing it.

Most likely you won't start 100%, or even be able to get 100%. Get one or two days in the middle of the week to avoid the impression you're trying to get long weekends. Promote the extra time from not commuting, energy/green savings, etc.. There are lots of suggestions out there on convincing your boss.

Finally, remember that it doesn't work well for everyone. Some people don't self-direct well without the office environment, miss the social aspect and so forth.
Full screen apps! I've been waiting for this since the DOS days.
I have had 7 force reboots before (usually while I'm in game), but there is an option to disable that 'feature'.
What Should Watson Do Now?
Guilt Is Not Enough to Stop Students From Texting in Class
Of course you can. Why not? ;)
AOL To Restructure Media Group Around Huffington Post – Internal Email
This is now implemented across Midgard, Drupal, WordPress, TYPO3 and other systems. Seems it was a well-timed idea :-)
I am pretty strongly affected by the environment that I'm in, so this post really hits home for me, but there's a conflict I can't resolve about always being the worst x in your collective noun:

Why would a collective that is better than you, which probably subscribes to this moderately common notion, hire you?

I guess Harpo had the same problem.
Ok, "moving from fiat currency to gold-backed currency" is crazy. "Disbanding the federal reserve" is crazy. It would involve massively reducing the money supply and liquidity for the overall economy, and destroy the current counter-cyclical levers we have to lower/raise interests rates when we want to either stimulate the economy or cool down inflation. Take a look at the extreme boom/bust cycle from the late 19th century if you want to see what happens without those levers. There's a reason they went to fiat currency in the first place, and it wasn't, "I'm a liberal caricature and I want to do this to increase government control". It's because the gold standard wasn't adequate to the job. Let alone that there's no way to get from here to there in the modern world where the entire G20 has fiat currencies.

The gold standard is a position of "I don't care what's been proven to work in the real world or what's possible to actually accomplish, I care about what I find emotionally satisfying".

EDIT: Regarding civil discussions, you might consider chilling out on the ad hom attacks yourself. You've called me uninformed multiple times while misinterpreting my comments to mean something that I don't see any possible way to construe from what I said. Bringing Chinese actions from the 1950s and 60s into a discussion of "modern china's" propensity for militarism above, as if anyone would consider maoist China the same thing as the current regime, and implying that I had no idea such events happened.
The serious, formal, and somber text on sites like this ("after you pass...on...into death!") makes me wonder if there's a market for a snarky site that will do the same thing, but present itself in a more amusing, ironic sort of way.

Gawker or 4chan aficionados may want a Gawker- or 4-chan styled service, after all.
Yes, as I recall the GPG developers unfortunately think it would be a bad idea, security-wise: http://www.gnupg.org/faq/GnuPG-FAQ.html#cant-we-have-a-gpg-l...
IPhoto Places key to Apple's embrace of social networking
Inspired by HN: Beta signups open, local social news site run on Node.js/MongoDB
Yes, the article repeats examples of the fundamental attribution error then draws some conclusions about it. However, the subject matter is the founders of the testing moment, and their failure to achieve their goals.

Again, the only interesting part of the article is highly political which is basically stating "be nice to the proles before they eat you". Aka, it belongs on reddit, not here.

If it makes you guys lay off, I agree with the blog post, I just don't think it belongs HERE.
By "we" do you mean the geeks that read HN and write code, or their typical consumer?

I have never seen my mom type to find a file she was looking for, let alone launch an app. Every single person I know that isn't in technology or consider themselves technically competent uses and explores their computer solely with the mouse. Even editing a word she just typed, my mom would leave the keyboard, mouse over the previous word's characters, and then retype it.
I meant backup as in having someone else available to do the work when you're on vacation, sick, etc. You don't have that solo. You're right that it might be better, but as I stated - depends on many factors.
Two years ago, I was gung ho about Twitter. Now, I feel there is way too much noise. But Tweet every 30-60 minutes? That's a lot. (I realize the author of the post owns a auto-tweeting service) From a business engagement perspective, I can see how it'd be useful.

What do you actively use Twitter for?
Room 77 helps you find the best hotel room
Programming Competition Sites: TopCoder, CodeChef, Project Euler

For Jobs: Quora (http://www.quora.com/challenges), Facebook (http://www.facebook.com/careers/puzzles.php)
Of all the places I've worked as an employee, I've always been around people smarter than me. I never found it difficult to find them. Maybe this is because I'm not very smart! :-) I like to think it's because I looked for them. Even if they weren't in my direct group of peers, they were somewhere in the company and easy to associate with. Without fail, if I became the top person in my group, it was time to move up or move out.

The only real time I've had a problem with this is when consulting. I usually WAS the expert, or at least perceived expert, and had difficulty finding people to work with that could elevate me to the next level. The easy solution to this is to go to local meetups with people who share your passion.
How do you handle eye fatigue
Lately my eyes have been getting fatigued after looking at a computer screen. I'm a developer and sit in front of a computer for at least 10 hours a day, more if I can. My eyes haven't ever given me a problem until now, and it's a major problem. I'm not able to look at a computer screen for more than 15 seconds until I have to take a break. Here are some remedies I've found on the internet:

* Special UV eye glasses

* Visine drops

* 20-20-20. Every 20 minutes, focus on an object 20 feet away for 20 seconds.

* Don't forget to blink

So far blinking more has helped, I've been doing the focus trick, but way more often than 20 minutes. I haven't bought Visine or the special UV glasses.

I don't have and don't need glasses or contacts. I sit in a naturally lit office, with a 23(?)" LCD monitor.

Got any other ideas?
I feel like many developers are using RoR and Python simply because it's 'cool'. The old, reliable languages are boring. I also don't like the fact that many frameworks out there abstract layers away and make it so you don't really know what's going on underneath. This makes it easy to say you are a developer (because you can make something) when you are just mashing frameworks together.

I've also been using PHP for the last 10 years and have never had problems scaling or writing good code.
$59 desktops a reality now
Rocky Mountain Tech Trifecta
Feel free to ask any questions or give any comments. Feedback is greatly appreciated.
When I was a TA in college I gave similar advice to my students: If you are the best person in your study group, you are in the wrong study group. Now, the problem is, on a purely meritocratic level, the better study groups do not want to have you because you are slowing them down. You gotta bring something else to the table so they let you in. What that special something is, everybody has to figure that out for himself. I can't help you with that.

I am definitely seeing lots of parallels to work and other aspects of life here.
I'm not sure going down the Scheme->List->Clojure path is the right way to go. First, I don't really know Clojure. But I do think Scheme to Lisp was more painful for me than I think it should have been. I also learned Scheme from SICP, but going to Lisp it seems like I tripped over every little thing.

Things like funcall had me banging my head -- as I didn't even realize that it was something that should be different.

If your goal is to learn Lisp, I'd just go straight to Lisp.

Again, I don't know Clojure, so I don't know if learning Lisp first is really necessary, but if it is, then skip Scheme.

Also, don't do all the exercises in SICP unless you feel like doing so. Some require domain knowledge that you frankly just don't need if your desire to learn these languages is web dev.

Someone needs to do a SICP: The Web Dev Edition
I assume that since it's mostly industrial, they don't have a thousand hits a day, etc., form random web gawkers looking to buy a doodle for their home?
I totally agree with you about the problem with "go-with-the-flow" rating systems. You should not simply be able to perform well by picking highly rated stocks. This is one of the problems we're trying to solve.

Our rating system actually has an internal pricing mechanism which is designed to drive the ratings toward zero and prevent piling on behavior. If you just follow the crowd you won't do well as a real investor and you won't score well on our site.

Judging by the feedback we've been getting that's not nearly as obvious as it needs to be and we're trying to figure out how to best show that.
Ever try to buy a car mount for an iPhone? :) Mine came with about 10 different plastic snap-on mounting brackets. Apple could give a crap about the third party accessory market.

The big issue with replacing any iOS connectors with desktop standard connectors is power. Thunderbolt specifies 10W of power; USB specifies 2.5W; the Camera Connection Kit only supplies 0.5W. I doubt that Apple is going to ship anything that provides much more power than that.
Anybody notice how it shares the name with HTC's 'ThunderBolt' 4G phone being released, and how it looks like both Intel and HTC have trademarks on the word?
Which kind of Basic? Visual Basic .NET?
And Finder, of course...
I miss serial ports.
Block-level full disk encryption would be a huge win, eliminating dependence on PGP, which is pretty close to abandonware at Symantec (a recent 10.5 dot release corrupted PGP WDE drives, for instance). Presumably, if it's cool enough to have a brand name at Apple, it'll also gracefully handle hibernation, which no FDE currently does.

Fingers crossed!
Nope. They have all been TN so far. Just better quality TNs. I've been wishing for an IPS on a Macbook for years. Looks like this update didn't bring any change to that matter.
Bendable Microchips: The World's First Organic Microprocessor Is Unveiled
While this conversation is a bit meta: I feel politics and religion are ones that should be kept off HN.

People tend to be less rigorous, more entrenched and less able to truly debate about these things than 95% of things we could talk about. This leads to people we may meet one day, try to give money to, try to get money from, try to make a business with, exhibiting some ideas we disagree with, with no useful or easy way to come to a synthesis.

Just like I don't get in large political discussion at work except for bills that specifically effect us in the small (i.e. the 1099 for vendors you spend $600 or more at part of the new health care legislation), I don't want to see them here, and feel they're off topic as they're not particularly any more apropos to us than members of the larger population.

Do I think the new government venture funding goes here? Yes. As it's on topic and relevant in the small to us.

Do I think a discussion of abortion law goes here, even if it has interesting tech in the article? Not in a billion years.
Apple and Intel introduce super fast Thunderbolt Technology
I'm a developer as well and used to have this same problem. Now I make sure to blink more often and I use eye drops, either red eye or dry eye (both work fine) and I also switched to a matte screened monitor. I had a glossy one before and after I switched them up, the problem started going away.
The key I find with my mid 2010 17 is to manually force intel graphics. Several web browsers and plugins seem to invoke the NVidia discrete chip which sucks power.
I'm not from an EE background, but I would imagine that the questions I like to ask would also apply to you to help gauge a possible employer.

1) What's your day like?
2) What would you say are some of the biggest challenges you face today?
3) ( Maybe this is more IT oriented ) How does work come in? by Project? Ticketing system?
[PHP lacks] ability to abstract the database in an OO way

I would dispute that this is a requirement for a good language. Object/relational impedance mismatch is a well known issue. It doesn't matter in some apps, but it does in others. The ability to do database queries by means other than manipulating SQL as strings is kind of useful though.

most web apps don't use MySQL, templating, or Apache these days

There's some syntactic ambiguity in this statement. Are you saying that most web apps don't use any of those anymore? I think even in the world of brand new web startups, you'll find a majority using at least one of those.
What about "when you actually have something to say"?
I really can't tell if this is meant to be facetious or not.
I forgot to mention earlier, the main dictionary database (GCIDE) will contain ~120,000 headwords. An example implementation can be seen here:

http://www.TheEnglishDictionary.org
The actual headline is much more appropriate. We chose to raise money to grow more quickly and to not have to rely on going public to get funds. We could have continued with less funding (low-cost) but chose not to, so no its not the end of low cost startups, we chose this route :)
98% uptime is equivalent to being down for an entire week every year, or half an hour every day.

The article contrasted Wal-Mart (massive e-commerce operation) with things like Delicious/Technorati (casual services, usually free to use). It conveniently glossed over the middle ground, where 37 Signals' applications and many others live.

FWIW, I did look into using some of 37 Signals' services for my small businesses. They failed my assessment on several counts and we found other solutions. But judging by their blog posts etc, they seem to be proud of several of the things that caused me to look elsewhere. As long as their marketing is good enough to maintain their business success regardless of any technical merit, I suppose I can't argue with their commercial position and I assume they accept that people like me will never use them.
Cause of the Decline Effect
Just for the record (since I have recently stumbled upon and read up on the BCPL stuff): Martin Richards web site at the University of Cambridge contains valuable resources on BCPL (http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mr10/index.html), including (relatively) recently updated manuals.
Personally, I've found Dell's next day onsite service very impressive. BUT the laptop in question needed such service so often that I would never buy another Dell without evidence of a major change in their operations.

(Not to mention that at one point their online service guys told me our harddrive was not salvageable and recommended reformatting it. I ignored them and less than 12 hours later had backed up the entire drive using a Linux Live CD.)
Or cmd-shift-G and type ~/Library
I got my account back! Someone at Facebook evidently saw this, and (1) updated the blog post and (2) brought my account back to life. Thank you!

However, unless this was a general fix, it looks like other developers are still stranded:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2258827
Any reports from HN users who have done the upgrade?
- we stopped going after consumers at least a year ago, virally refers to how we are growing our business and enterprise accounts which largely has been word of mouth and referrals.
The lost art of pickpockets
When did tweeting become a chore that had to be done at some specific time and number of times?

Are people really judging people on how often they tweet? If you have insightful things to say, or are contributing with new and interesting posts then it should not matter about how often you tweet.

The bigger the water hose != better the twitter account

In terms of too much noise, you can always filter users and content with lists. I am sure twitter is working hard on allowing users to create streams off their raging rivers.
Hi Jon, yeah, "every 30-60 minutes" is quite a lot, however the option for every 2-3 hours that Ben Hanna analysed is easier to keep up with maybe. Agreed, as for the business perspective a high number of tweets will definitely be handy for a business.
Haha, we really try to distinguish our service Buffer from all auto-tweeting services. With Buffer your tweets are simply delayed for a few hours, you still write your own tweets, we just try to make it easier to tweet consistently. Hope you get around to try it and see for yourself. :)
Especially if you get a list price discount (negotiated for small business, big employer, association, government, military) the apple upgrade price is below market price, at least for the 512.
Does anything post if you remove your relationship status rather than change it to something else?
This is why I'm not a fan of Buffer. They're taking the "Twitter" out of "Twitter".
I always like to say that you could beat somebody with a x41 over the head and then continue working. Sometime ago a friend of mine actually had to use his X41 to defend himself. He did just that and it worked just fine for some more months until it died from an unrelated problem.
I doubt it, PCIe (apparently the main underlying protocol) isn't a common feature of ARM SoC systems.