skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Start with smaller chunks. I'm 22 years old now and I have next to no programming skills, but I want to learn it. I was using computers since 12 but hadn't coded something real until now, so I tell myself all the time that I'm not meant to program, that I suck at programming etc., but I keep going and I re-discover the fun in it from time to time. The more you keep at it, the better you get.

Start with programming small apps you'd like to use, get on StackOverflow and ask all the questions that come to your mind, built bigger things, fail, start again, talk to other programmers, learn, build bigger things, fail again, build again, repeat until success.
I feel that the OP misunderstands TeX's virtues: it is a very powerful typesetting system whose macro system happens to be Turing complete. Typesetting is the hard problem and TeX has solved it so well that most people wanting to build a text-driven typesetting system has built on top of TeX rather than trying to replicate it. This is especially true for typesetting equations.

If you try to use TeX as a programming language, you're going to be disappointed, as the OP seems to have been. The macros work well enough for saving typing by making simple substitutions, which is what most people use them for. But using them for anything more complicated is a bit of a black art. Somewhere I read that Leslie Lamport wrote out LaTeX in pseudo-code first and then translated it into macros. Knuth was impressed by what Lamport was able to do with a system which was not meant to be a general-purpose programming language.

In the end, I think Knuth was correct to make TeX's input focused on document entry and not on programming. I've never used it, but LuaTeX seems interesting because I think it's better to use an external language for programming rather than one embedded in a document layout format.
The core algorithms are pretty creaky as well. Knuth did a brilliant job coming up with efficient algorithms that could do a fairly good job at breaking lines/paragraphs/pages and could handle book-length documents even on 70s-era hardware, but they've had minimal improvement since then. Figure placement in particular is pretty bad, especially for two-column, relatively short conference papers, which is currently a frequent TeX use case. And all of those things are really hard to exercise any control over, with black-magic parameters that often don't have obvious effects ("goddammit, why won't it put the figure at the top of page 5?!").

LuaTeX does seem to be experimenting with some improvements in these areas though.
Well, I'd say it's a fantastic idea... if you make a good product. If you make a third rate product however, it's suicide.
Fukushima is a triumph for nuke power: Build more reactors now
"We're the AngelList for Developers"

Ok, so now, instead of trying to figure out what one company does, I have to figure out what two companies do!
I'm quite sure flow-based static analysis can be done for Tex, the question is how expensive it is to perform and how useful the results are.

With respect to catcode-changing code, you can model its possible execution paths: while you can construct example Tex code where you can't infer anything past this point without having complete information from before, in practice with, say a package, you do have example documents which the package is meant to work with, and you can use that in the static analysis.

I've thought about this a fair bit, at least in the context of typical Plain Tex, but not written much code. I should try and enough time for a proof of concept: there's a lot that could be built on it.
Redis Sharding
would just running iptables on the instance suffice?
Aluminium smelters might be better placed somewhere with abundant power from sources like Hydro or Geothermal sources.

Or you could mine New York garbage and make diesel out of that.
There is an evacuation zone of 20 km around the plant, and people between 20 and 30 km advised to not go out. The radiations around the plant are now definitely dangerous, but those are far far above the ones seen in Tokyo.

Right now, from what I can read from Japanese news, and assuming the numbers given by the authority are accurate, there is no danger in Tokyo - 20 x normal is still below what's considered dangerous. What worrying about those numbers are not the number themselves, but what it means if the situation in the plants worsen - and I think people don't really know.

The Japanese gvt announced a couple of hours ago that every region in Japan will regularly update measure of radioactivity, which suggest that they don't try to hide too much, although I would not read too much into it either.
Ducts: bi-directional mount channels
How is this getting upvoted? It reads like an entry in the Atlas Shrugged essay contest.
Don't you think it's kind of inappropriate to respond to a serious accusation with a marketing statement about the technical architecture of your site?

I mean, sure, before reading this I thought Etsy was cool because of the continuous deployment thing, but now I think two things:

1. perhaps continuous deployment leads to launching features without thinking about their consequences for long enough;
2. Etsy's team is more interested in thumping its chest about continuous deployment than owning up to a serious mistake.
I'm also a music theorist and educator. I'm interested in your perspective on whether it is a good idea to try to introduce students to the acoustic/mathematical derivation of the scale. To provide context for non-technical readers, the physical basis of harmonic intervals is integer ratios of frequencies, and European tempered tuning systems create scales and chords as a pragmatic adjustment of mathematically pure tuning to the necessity of using a finite number of predetermined pitches for instruments such as the piano.

I am still unsure as to whether the deeper understanding of scales, chords, keys, tuning, and temperament is something I should push to make students study and understand. Many students have a negative reaction to even the simplest math, but other students get a lot of benefit from understanding exactly how and why a given set of pitches fit together to form chords and scales. In the context of group instruction, deciding how much time to devote to this material is a dilemma for me.
> When was the last time Microsoft did anything like that?

As recently as last year. They claimed to have 30,000 engineers working on cloud services, which is not what I would consider a has-been market.
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Photos "pet white cat"
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BASE Engineering Has Been a Leader in Wireless Technology
BASE Engineering is a world leader in developing radio remote control technology. Our wireless dead man system utilizes spread-spectrum, frequency-hopping radio technology that virtually eliminates interference.
Random Thoughts on Good Programmers and Good Code
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Introduce preliminary:This is a breeding reptiles are popular worldwide. Maximum length is 2 meters large.
searchyc.com + [patio11 salaryman] for anecdotes, but the short answer is "No, it is absolutely not the case that the hours make Japan more productive."
I don't have any insight at that level of abstraction. Figure placement like a bunch of other things has required me to hack around to get my desired result. Is there any newer research on these algorithms that could make it better given much better hardware?

As for LuaTex I wasn't able to find any examples of actual markup written in it. I would expect that for the actual markup you'd want a language with a bigger and more flexible grammar so you could build DSLs. Ruby seems particularly good at that kind of stuff, but I'm biased there.
From TUAW and AppleInsider citing a poll made by Piper Jaffray.

http://www.tuaw.com/2011/03/14/70-percent-of-ipad-2-buyers-a...

http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/11/03/13/apple_attracts...
Amazon VPC Adds Virtual Networking and Internet Access Capabilities
Hacked Indian Site
This is Warnign For Indian Hacker Stop This War other Wise Pakistani Hacker Fuck
I think this is an area where the government should mostly help by 1) getting out of the way 2) funding basic research and education, and 3) fixing the health care fuckup so that it's not absolutely insane for many people to leave the protective cover of the health insurance they get at a big company. Trying to spend 100K at a time is probably not going to do much in the long term.
I completely agree with the diversification part, putting much of your portfolio in correlated risks does not need to be rewarded by an efficient market.

On the other hand out of the money put options have a limited upside.

Japan has had a crap economy for a generation, and this disaster may result on them being on a whole new course with massive upside.
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Hacked Indian Site
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To be fair, it was almost at a 10 year low before the earthquake, and is barely lower now than it was in August.
The GDP of the entire US is only $14 trillion. The entire world's GDP is $58 trillion. Even if Limewire somehow dominated the entire world and took everything for a year, it still couldn't pay!
> with the phone [...] lines down

and

> hundreds of people were swarming into Apple stores to watch the news on USTREAM and contact their families via Twitter, Facebook, and email.

Why is the internet at the apple store up when apparently the phonelines are down?
quote from table in the article

>Table 2: Symptoms associated with acute radiation exposure

>(dose for one day)

> Dose : 0-0.25Sv. Symptom : none . Outcome : - .

I was not referrign to any regulation, which is understandably way below the danger zone, but about the actual risks. hence the 10000 number.

These figures refer to "acute exposure", and may be different from prolonged exposure. Not sure about that, or about how prolonged the japanese exposure turns out to be.
[Update. I'm slightly more educated than I was a few hours ago.]

I've found two reports that outline ways to migrate to renewables. They are sobering, but actually achievable.

A common thread among those who create actual concrete plans for running on renewable energy is this: We must use less energy to have our energy needs met by renewable sources.

(Their projections do account for the growth of newly industrialized nations, so it's not double-trouble.)

Some of the use-less-energy changes we would notice (how we get the food that reaches our table), and other changes we could integrate and not notice at all (lots of energy escapes buildings for no good reason, and that could change with different process + design becoming more dominant).

A cool part is that they don't see higher cost as long-term issue (that renewable energy is only temporarily expensive because it's uncommon and used in small doses).

Another kinda optimistic thing is that parts of the world that are still becoming "industrialized" have somewhat of an advantage (as they do with leapfrogging any kind of tech generation), and in some cases are being born with more renewable systems to begin with.

I completely understand those who overlook renewable sources because of the amount of energy we currently use is more than we can produce with them. It's not a dumb conclusion. But after going over these reports, I don't think using less energy is any more of an imposition than changing any other kind of infrastructure, and in many cases is stuff we're moving towards anyway.

http://getsatisfaction.com/wwf/topics/debate_the_energy_repo...
http://assets.panda.org/downloads/101223_energy_report_final... [pdf, pdf, pdf! i warned you]
http://www.greenpeace.org/er-ship/Global/international/publi... [pdf]
I recently had a short-term stay at a place which had a piano. It seemed like a waste to let it just sit there, so I did a bit o' googling and found this site: http://www.pianobychords.com/

The information on music theory is similar to the post - but it also shows you how to play a few common songs. If you follow the fingering guide and play the same chords with both hands it sounds damn great! I thought only the guitar had that "pick it up, learn a couple of chords and you're good to go..." attitude!

One of the songs on the site was "Let It Be". I remembered that that song was in the Axis Of Awesome song "Four Chords" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qHBVnMf2t7w - now I know how to play hundreds of party-friendly songs on the piano. Damn satisfying for an outlay of just a few hours practice!
Twitter using Gamification to increase followers
Before I forget: yes, hand-editing XML is no fun. I did this for years when writing the 'Slackware Basics' book. It is tedious and annoying, even with the excellent nxml-mode for emacs.

For Natural Language Processing for the Working Programmer, we use the <oXygen/> XML editor, which really takes the pain out of writing DocBook documentation. It provides WYSIWYG mode that also renders inline or xincluded XML, such as SVG and MathML. I rarely switch back to the non-WYSIWYG mode, unless I want to reorder some elements quickly.
Did you find the Maven??
I'm sorry to inform you that you're in the unfortunate 99,99999% of the world's population.
I remember buffet saying in some interview that Japan makes great products and has a great economy but they don't make great companies, from the investor's perspective.
Yeah. Very impressive on FF4/Windows 7.
Show me numbers, please.

Calculate, how many lives are already saved and will be saved in future by nuclear reactors in comparison to other sources of energy. Calculate how many lives will be lost in worstests scenarios. Multiple number by probability and sum up.

For example:

* nuclear reactor can save 1000 lives per year in 100 years of it life with 0.9999 probability;

* in worstest case, with 0.0001 probability, it can kill 10000 humans per year in 1000 years.

Result: 1000⋅100⋅0,9999 + −10000⋅1000⋅0,0001 = 98,99E3

0,0001 probability is too optimistic - we already have Chernobyl and few other smaller nuclear disasters while number of nuclear stations is much smaller than 1K.
Edit: You know what, just disregard my first comment. It's mostly me being bitter and isn't productive at all. The solution is to have the projects work better together, not whine about who deserves the most credit.

I apologize, you're right. I actually went back to look at it and it was all non-VLC people misrepresenting FFmpeg and VLC.

Then, the UI/UX part of VLC is around 1/30th of the VLC codebase (not counting external libraries) and most of the code is demuxers, decoders, protocol handlers (all custom), video outputs, video filter, clock, audio filters and libraries wrapper (not only libavcodec).

I didn't mean to say that VLC doesn't do anything important, I just felt that FFmpeg gets less credit than it deserves because it is less user-facing.

As to the codebase and FFMpeg contributions: I actually have a patch sitting around that makes substantial bug fixes and improvements to the OS X VLC. Part of this was a result of my work in FFMpeg improving crash and corruption resilience. I wouldn't have worked on this if I didn't feel that VLC is a good project, so I apologize if you thought my comment misrepresented the project or the developers. It was simply meant to express a general frustration at the lack of recognition of FFMpeg developers.
Because we are politically powerless. This the wage for an entry-level programmer/engineer at $36,667: $30k/year salary and $20k "investment."

In contrast, the American Medical Association (AMA) restricts the number of medical schools to keep doctors' wages high.

As to why not business majors:
1. Nobody has spent decades building a propaganda base for "business major shortage"
2. Many more donors / politicians have a business major in the family to protect; relatively few have personal experience with a mysterious "STEM graduate."
"Lose" is relative I suppose - Flickr has a hard lock on much of the photographic community. FB Photos is still limited to vacation photos, wild nights out, etc. There's not a great deal of hard photography going on there - a photographer's social graph is inevitably a lot of non-photogs, and Flickr's ability to discover and participate across vast social graphs is powerful for photographers. FB's limitation of requiring social graph adjacency for most levels of participation is a liability for this use case.

So sure, SmugMug and FB are destroying Flickr as a tool for Joe Average's image uploads, but as a photographic community I honestly don't think it's doing so badly. From a monetization standpoint it's not a bad bet - you would have a hard time selling a Flickr Pro account to the average FB user. But $20/yr. as a ticket price for a ludicrous number of amateur to professional photographers? No brainer.
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Lisp provides exactly that: functions are lists (primary data structure of the language) of expressions (in VM's instructions) and you have direct access to VM's memory cells (conses, [1]). You can generate and change functions at runtime. For example, inject tracing code. Actually, at least in some implementations, all functions are created dynamically, except for a few core functions (implemented with C, d'oh).

And how `new' it is? 1958. Oh dear.

Re: ``C is more Harvard than von Neumann architecture''. Hardly; C is architecture agnostic. You can compile it for a Harvard PIC as well as for von Neumann CPU.

It may seem functions are execute-only, but on common CPUs you can treat them as data as well: read and modify (modulo memory protection).
And the other way around too -- you can load a bunch of bytes from a DLL, resolve symbols to obtain pointers and use the pointers to execute the loaded bytes as functions.

--

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cons
At Chernobyl, this actually happened inside the containment vessel and the resulting explosion ruptured the vessel, leading to a serious release of core radioactives – though this has had basically zero effect on the world in general nor even much impact on the area around Chernobyl.

Even just as a matter of rhetoric and persuasion, I think trying to argue that Chernobyl wasn't all that bad isn't the route you want to go in reassuring people.
2) is factually incorrect:
http://www.urban.org/publications/411562.html

Or visit an Engineering Society of Detroit career fair.
I was figuratively speaking. In Python it'd be less lines than C, but still a substantial project.
Oh damn... These figures refer to acute radioation poisoning, i.e. what happens when radiation is so intense that it directly kills so many of your cells that your body can't cope.

Even if at 0.25 Sv none of that happens, you still have a very actual, massively increased risk of cancer and genetic defects in future children. To declare "no health issues", you most definitely want to stay several orders of magnitude below that (there is always and increased risk of cancer and birth defects, but at some point it gets lost in the noise).

I really don't want to sound condescending, but you should not issue statements here if you don't know such fundamental aspects.
People here in Japan like to go to radium hot springs. Yes, that radium that your parents had your basement tested for. Apparently they think it's good for you to get a little radiation:

http://metropolis.co.jp/features/feature/searching-for-a-cur...

I wouldn't go to it... I think It's crazy. There's probably a good opportunity for research.
It's good at what it does. We need useful layers on top of it.

We need a simple, hot-key friendly outliner that persists to something very much like docbook. Then you'd transform to TeX when you need something printed, and to html if you want the same content on the web, and to some sort of braile engine if you want blind people to interact with it.

A major obstacle to better document production is the WYSIWYG is a bad but strong meme.
Deaths per TWh for all energy sources: Rooftop solar power relatively dangerous
Unfortunately, the wind is going to turn towards Tokyo later today.
Dropbox-one million files saved every 15 minutes
Agreed. It is nice, however, to read coverage of the event that's devoid of sensationalism.
Good point. I kinda like the one that goes:
"We are what we speak".
If I don`t have something nice and encouraging to say, then I just don`t anything. I give my best to accomplish this.
My HTC Desire does allow that, which phone do you use?
Does GoDaddy register domains you search?
Hi,

Some time ago, I did a few tests on GoDaddy on available domain names and after some creative options, I came up with one that I liked.

I then compared the name with some other options against my targeted market and it turned out really popular. During the survey period, I checked the name a couple of times on GoDaddy to make sure it's still available. So when I today go to purchase the domain, hear hear, it is already taken. And WHOIS it if not GoDaddy owned company Domain's By Proxy?

Is this just a coincindence?
Why I still use TeX? First of all, it still compiles my documents and samples from 1998. Try that in any other equally sophisticated system.

Second, it is the only system where I can expect a constant error rate. No feature is "done in no time", but can be solved in a rather constant time using Google and some TeX knowledge. In other systems, I am usually lost, because most of the stuff has not been tried or is not intended.

Also, it is actually quite fast in batch usage.

If you want to have a look at what can be done with TeX, have a look at the PGF documentation.

Also, don't mistake TeX with LaTeX, there are other TeX environments around that are better in certain regards.
He Who Pays The Piper Must Know The Tune
Bluetooth profile support can be locked down by manufacturers, my HTC Desire lacks lots of Bluetooth profiles that could/should be supported. Too bad, but that's what happens with Google's Android strategy I guess.

I can add and remove Google accounts whenever I want, in Accounts & Sync. I have two accounts linked, one private and one business, and that works really well in all apps.

AFAIK, the only bug I've been bitten by is that I had to remove a file on the SD Card named "smdl2tmp1.asec" because updates of apps stored on the SD Card stopped working after an update, which of course is unforgivable. And still not fixed. Seems to be on phones from several manufacturers, but only on a few percent if that.
Ask HN: Help me build my idea?
I'm a Communication Design professional with over 9 years of experience, running a young design firm in New Delhi, India. I've been wishing to start a website (a startup rather) for a long time. It's called 7dow - a platform for professionals to share knowledge.

I've much of the design ready and am looking for a programmer who can help me bring this idea to life. I tried hiring some people but it just didn't work out. I'd like to work with someone who could add value rather than just doing things as stated. So HN seems to be most logical place to pitch in.

This is essentially a platform to share micro-level experiences of people involved in professional activity such as job, business etc.
Forums/websites I've studied: Linkedin, ryze, freelancer, elance, twitter and facebook.

The site is here: http://www.7dow.com/
And here are a few designs for the same:
http://7dow.com/design/pu-ft-basic.jpg
http://7dow.com/design/pu-basic.jpg