skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Tepid interest, apparently. I think the market might be saturated or people might be using their phones instead of portable media players. Everyone I've talked to has had a relatively positive experience with their zune. I have a first gen 30GB model that I got used that's still alive and kicking. I don't purchase music through their store but the Zune was the right price at the right time and I've never really been too concerned about what the cool kids with their iPods thought of my slightly clunky Zune. It plays music, it takes a beating and its cheap.
I imagine the Rails plugin is more flexible. But can one apply weights with the Shopify add on?
RC1 has been very stable for me so far, no crashes or instabilities even with beta addons (Firebug). Upgraded from 3.6 about a week ago.

Looks like Mozilla taking their time with this release wasn't completely unjustified. I just hope the overall quality won't decrease when they start to shorten their release cycles.
The Perils of Not Having Twins: A Paradox
I can only see the main and sub-headlines and the picture. But I don't see anything factually incorrect about it.
This sort of API is not RESTful at all, regardless of whether the method name is in the HTTP header or a form variable. It's still an application-specific protocol that requires out-of-band knowledge to use. REST resources are supposed to be self-describing, which doesn't make much sense for an API like this. RPC is what is required here, so just tunnel RPC over HTTP in whatever way is most practical. And don't call it REST.

If you want a bucket of cold water over the head on this topic:
http://roy.gbiv.com/untangled/2008/rest-apis-must-be-hyperte...
So now they got foreclosure on their hands?
Quit your bitching JBJ! Instead of wearing dirty, threadbare headphones in order to "get lost" in music chosen solely on the basis of van-transposed cover art, now I can decide that I want an album from an obscure Norwegian band with 27 fans and I can download it to my phone from anywhere on earth--and I'll pay half the price of a vinyl.

Don't get me wrong, I love record shops. But I love iTunes and AmazonMP3 too. And while changes to the music industry have hurt a lot of good people, Jon Bon Jovi is not one of them.
Radiation for beginners
And striving for accuracy and consulting domain experts is a bad thing since when?

And if significant technological differences doesn't interest you, here's a political one: People have actually been evacuated, even though the Japanese government claimed no risk at the time of doing so. Even if these people lose their homes and farms, and no-one can return to the region for 50 years, they still have their lives and health.
Resharper for Visual Studio (a refactoring tool) uses Antlr to parse the C# code.
Show HN: BulletinBurst - A lean online press office
I've been working on this (mostly) myself for quite a while. It's a lean online press office, where companies can post their latest press releases or news together with 140 character max titles, which will be listed on the main page by latest as well as by category.

The vision is to cut out the barrage of spam that feature journalists get in the mailboxes by offering them a portal (with RSS feeds) to access releases from (or at least be one of the options). On the other side of the coin, it's a way to get exposure for your company/brand/product and some SEO-fu with it.

It's not the prettiest of things yet and does have issues, but if I don't ship now, I might never.

Check it out http://www.bulletinburst.com

Also, there's a South African version - http://www.bulletinburst.co.za with a different design.

Suggestions page is here: http://www.bulletinburst.com/vote/suggestions.php
First, the word you're thinking of is "demonstrating," not "proving." But let's get to the big stuff.

Since we are being snarky, what's with "Mr. Stallman"? Is he your high school math teacher?
Hardlinks are only useful if you have files which are unmodified. Tarsnap (and I assume ddar) will take advantage when part of a file is unmodified.
Any unusual signage or anything around there? I used to live within driving distance to a State penitentiary in the US. It was out in the middle of nowhere (at the time), surrounded by farmland. On all 4 roads that marked the border around it were numerous signs, "Do Not Pick Up Hitchhikers!"
Do you think its reasonable for me to have a preference for operating in Canada? My server is currently in the USA but I do know that once there is traction(profit) ill move it to Canada and keep it here.
http://www.bulletinburst.com

South African version - http://www.bulletinburst.co.za with a different design.

Suggestions page: http://www.bulletinburst.com/vote/suggestions.php
The idea is that you put together the few macros that you need and then the book is mostly tag-free.
IDK you can find the source to the TeXbook on CTAN, see if it seems too noisy to you (I don't remember).
I'd find more in-depth analysis of your startups mistakes interesting. I think that insight would be valuable.
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ijc.22037/full

"Models predict that by 2065 about 16,000 (95% UI 3,400–72,000) cases of thyroid cancer and 25,000 (95% UI 11,000–59,000) cases of other cancers may be expected due to radiation from the accident, whereas several hundred million cancer cases are expected from other causes. Although these estimates are subject to considerable uncertainty, they provide an indication of the order of magnitude of the possible impact of the Chernobyl accident. It is unlikely that the cancer burden from the largest radiological accident to date could be detected by monitoring national cancer statistics. Indeed, results of analyses of time trends in cancer incidence and mortality in Europe do not, at present, indicate any increase in cancer rates—other than of thyroid cancer in the most contaminated regions—that can be clearly attributed to radiation from the Chernobyl accident."
Good point. Another technique I use is to send unrelated items in separate emails. People tend to use the inbox as a todo list, so getting 3 short emails is easier to manage than one long email. Once you act on one, you archive it and move to the next.
you are probably correct. the article just mentioned the BIOS. i looked around and could not find specific mention of the microcode in the laptop's specs :http://libreplanet.org/wiki/Group:Hardware/Freest#Lemote_Yee...
or on Stallman's page : http://stallman.org/stallman-computing.html
or in this FSF paper page on free hardware:
http://www.fsf.org/resources/hw/how_hardware_vendors_can_hel...
How I Landed a Job at a Hot Startup
Actually, that's not true. ReST was developed in parallel with HTTP 1.1. It used the basics from HTTP 1.0 to express some of the new ideas. You can read about the original idea in Fielding's disertation here: http://www.ics.uci.edu/~fielding/pubs/dissertation/rest_arch...

If it were an extraction of anything, it wouldn't have been HTTP but existing ideas in scaling web architectures in general at the time.
Depends on which way you're counting.
No need to let your Canadian status be a barrier to making the application. I know of at least one Toronto-based team that landed funding last cycle.
I don't have any specific features in mind, really. Being on OSX, I can't opt out of Safari. Chrome is my main browser because it feels fast, and rarely causes me pain. Safari is my backup. I just don't have a need for a third browser, and the first two slots are taken. One by default, and one because it's a great piece of software.
23 Questions You Should Ask When Building Your Marketing Strategy
That's an awkward one. Much as it would be nice to be on other platforms, I really want to build an app that I want to use daily and has a great user experience. I wouldn't be so keen on building for a platform I don't use. The JSON feed format is pretty basic, so maybe someone else could provide a Linux client with similar features.
In the Gulf of Mexico alone, two oil drilling operations have resulted in nearly apocalyptic disasters in the last thirty years and it's nuclear power that's the problem?

Nuclear power is far from flawless, but it does have a better track record.

Japan's reactors have, so far, survived the worst earthquake in recorded history and a tsunami that's wiped out a good chunk of the coast. That's a spectacular success.
I saw the original article posted here yesterday, but seems to have disappeared. I came across this statement in Wadhwa's article "...and recipients of the startup visa will not be allowed to stay in the U.S. permanently unless they do..." Hmm that doesn't really make a lot of sense. I was reading the article carefully to see what the path to citizenship would look like. Does the bill specify a path?
I never saw one in the wild, neither in SF nor Seattle.
I think it died because from the beginning the perception was like getting the Dodge Neon instead of the Honda Civic. Also with iTunes in the national lexicon, who wanted to be left out? "Thanks for the iTunes gift card, Grandma. Maybe we can spend it at the Zune Marketplace."
what the hell is the point of this post ? The guy just watched it chernobyl on TV. the crappy title sounds like he was near chernobyl.

this is nothing but link baiting. this should be downvoted.
regular expressions (ala cs) are equiv to finite state machines. regular expressions can't count or match ()'s. ragel allows you to mix in code within the state machine, so it is actually far, far more powerful than a finite state machine.

in http, handling things like 'Content-Length: %d' and then reading a subsequent length is a little harder. as is handling transfer-chunked encoding. http is quite fiendish in places :-)

these are 'data dependent' - the parse stream contains information (i.e length) on the subsequent tokens - although some regexps have back references, these aren't common place in parsing tools/formalisms like LR,LL,LALR,CFG or PEGs.

my point is simply that a lot of the parsing drama of late has revolved around the simple task of parsing a language, rather than parsing network protocols.

there is a larger class of parsing problems that are still to be tackled.
One time FDR was meeting with some activists who felt really strongly about an issue, but the status quo had dug in and it didn't look easy to affect the change.

He told them: "I agree with you, I want to do it, now make me do it."

In the current environment, Fox News is one half of the discourse and CNN is the other half, while the pundits split the difference in the name of "balance". If you want change, get active, make him do it. We all live here.
considering a choice between wasting your life (very productive between half and 1/3rd of it) under a bad boss or making [technology] history and gaining valuable experience under Jobs ...

Hm-m... Why am i not working under Jobs? :)
"Mr. Tetuan said there are currently 32 Mark 1 boiling water reactors operating safely around the globe. “There has never been a breach of a Mark 1 containment system,” he said."

As the containment system is stressed only in case of failure of all other systems, it didn't happen before. His 0 defect statistic is not really accurate.
Chomsky is the first name mentioned in that article.
notably: lpeg uses backtracking over packrat parsing
I used to work for a Framemaker competitor, Interleaf, which was better at long documents and customizable in Lisp to boot. The longest document i participated working on was 30,000 pages and was successfully published on schedule. But Interleaf is not available now in any meaningful way.

I hate trying to produce anything longer than a couple of pages in Word and get predictable results. But it is often the required document standard in academia those days.

Fortunately I discovered Scrivener, albeit not available on Linux. But I find it a great writing tool without having to code in TeX, which just isn't something i want to do anymore. :)
The author must be one of those people who believes the Earth is better off without people in general.
Correction: It's not an imminent meltdown.

It's an ongoing meltdown.
And someone, I think maybe Marc Andreessen, said Google wouldn't have become Google without Altavista's management flying it into the side of a cliff at the right time.
I always hated this thing, I think mostly just because of the name- Something about it is just so contrived, so "board room" it just pained me to hear it.
I was not near Chernobyl. My father was.... I've edited the article so it makes sense now. No linkbait meant...
I found it interesting to read.
one point..

Survived as a non functioning power plant cutting back Japan's electric supply by 20% is not exactly an ideal or wining solution..its like laws once one is passed it is very hard to 'decommission' not useful ones..
Show HN: Interactive video player in Javascript/HTML5
Finally got a pet project of mine online:

http://www.cacophonyjs.com/
http://github.com/jbroadway/cacophony

And a basic demo video:

http://www.cacophonyjs.com/examples/demo.html

It's an interactive video player in Javascript using overlapping HTML5 video and canvas elements, a timeline, and a series of plugins to render visual effects or handle various forms of interactivity.

Interactive elements can be mouse-based or text input, pulling data in from external sources, and saving input from viewers to change aspects of the video over time.

I'm working on a video with this as an art project with a friend, but hoped that in releasing the player other artists can use it to make even better effects and things I never would have thought of.

(Note: Obviously inspired by http://thewildernessdowntown.com/ although I've been playing with some of the underlying elements for a while before that. They did show me what's possible and get me motivated to follow through! :)
I believe you are incorrect. From the 1.1 spec:

"The Accept request-header can be used to specify certain media types which are acceptable for the response."

Similar to how when you access some linked data URLs you can specify rdf/xml or rdf/n3 in the Accept header to receive the same data in a specific format.

It's not used to specify whether you want a picture of someone or their contact information all from the same URL.
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Representational_State_Transfer

Those are not REST because they are not resource-based.

Correct REST:

http://blah.com/widget/:id - GET, PUT, POST, DELETE

How does that fit with your /rdio/4E7?q=1 ? Where's the resource? What is the id? What is q anyway?

You can pass parameters with a ? in REST... for example, you might do

GET http://blah.com/resource/123?format=xml

But there's still a clearly identified resource which the GET is performed on.

Sure, technically, by stretching things a bit, you could claim that /rdio?q=1&s=63-8 is a REST GET request for resource id "63-8".

And, technically, you'd be right, much like technically, this is valid C: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/18642/what-is-the-most-un...

But just because it's valid doesn't mean it's in any way good. Those are horrible examples. So no, those URLs could not "just as well" be those nasty examples you give. They could, much more poorly, be those examples, and still be technically valid. By the same reasoning, "Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo" is just as good english as Shakespeare.
I think you have BWR/PWR he wrong way round in the first point
Many APIs simply specify that the encoding is constant (always UTF-8) so this is not an issue. And many HTTP libraries simply handle the content encoding transparently.

The challenge is some HTTP library APIs commonly used for developing clients offer the following interface:
- GET $URL

If you are lucky, then it might also support POST and offer a second parameter for the request body. If are really lucky, there is a way to specify arbitrary methods, but this is fairly rare.
"That the janitors were cleaning the building with bare hands and wet rags the next day."

Are you sure they weren't licking the floors clean with their tongues?

So here you have two memes popular on HN: USSR was teh suck, and Japan is filled with disciplined professionals with a code of honor prepared to fight Godzilla. No wonder this crap gets modded up.

Next time it would be nice to have an analysis of the nuclear regulations in the USSR then and Japan today, and a case study of how they were followed and what happened.
Clickable links:

http://www.cacophonyjs.com/
http://github.com/jbroadway/cacophony

Basic demo video:

http://www.cacophonyjs.com/examples/demo.html
I always loved the logo - it's very clever. In five years nobody will remember the Zune and he can just say he liked the design. :-)
Ruby belongs in the list you gave as well, I think, but they all have tradeoffs, just in terms of the convenience of using first-class functions in them. Ruby's block syntax (|x,y| x * y) is a lot more convenient than the more verbose "function" syntax of JS and Lua for expressing inline functions (Lua: function (x,y) return x*y end), pretty comparable to something like Haskell. However, Ruby requires you to use either coroutine-style yield syntax or the call() method to actually invoke a function value, while JavaScript and Lua let you write parentheses after the value's name, in the same way that you would call any other function.

For first-class functions to be convenient, minimally you need a terse syntax for in-line functions, the ability to call function values as you would normal functions, and closures. (this last, fortunately, all of the above support) I'd argue that language support for currying is also extremely valuable and difficult to live without, because it greatly increases the situations in which a given function is useful. It's frustrating to me that mainstream "scripting" languages like JS, Lua, and Ruby can't get all of these aspects right - I hope for pattern matching and ADTs in a mainstream language, too, but I'm still waiting for a good implementation of first-class functions to arrive!
There's a compelling argument here: that nuclear power should be used in the hands of those who can handle it. Imagine if this happened in Iran. Or in North Korea. There are parallels, are there not?

As for your dismissive tone - you don't seem to see that an interesting discussion may come of this. (Which I've just started - see above). This submission shouldn't be downvoted. Your comment, on the other hand ...
I completely agree from a pure REST perspective, but if you want developers to be able to quickly get up to speed with your API, requiring them to know the finer points of HTTP and how to manipulate headers within their clients is asking a lot.
Was just about to comment the Zune guy must feel awfully stupid right now.
"The most unpopular color for women is orange."

And here we have one explanation for the discrepancy between the number of male and female applicants to Y-Combinator.
Re: Mark I,

An important perspective that's missing from this discussion is the fact that the fear of nuclear power has kept older reactors in operation longer than they should/would have been, due to lack of replacement by newer designs.
agreed. The American dream should be about opportunity and hard work. Not specific material gain. There are too many distortionary government programs that encourage home ownership when in fact owning a home can be a disasterous financial decision.

Hopefully minimum downpayments will be raised and things like mortgage interest tax deductions will be phased out.
I just launched it a few days ago, gimme some time :) also pass along stories please!
First off, the title is very misleading. How exactly did this 9-year-old "ex-USSR citizen" witness Chernobyl?

the firefighters were never even told it was a nuclear reactor

Huh? Were they blindfolded when they went out on the response call? There were a lot of uninformed rumors, and and I don't see any evidence that they were not OP's father's primary sources.

From reading interviews with the firemen who first arrived at the scene (I believe all of them died from radiation poisoning within months of the accident), it was clear that they knew where they were going. They certainly did not expect it to be as bad as it was, but it was their actions and heroism that prevented a much larger catastrophe than what the world has witnessed.

If you read Russian or are willing to suffer through automated translation, take a look at this Chernobyl expose from 1989: http://lib.ru/MEMUARY/CHERNOBYL/medvedev.txt
It quotes a lot of first-person accounts and adds a unique human side to dry statistics and technical discussion available elsewhere.
37signals racing
Oauth, OpenID, Facebook Connect: Authentication Design Best Practices
I'm sorry, but poor (almost non-existent) communication between TEPCO, Japan Government and IAEA regarding the condition at Fukushima 1 I've witnessed in the last few days make it look exactly like USSR where I was born too.

Japanese people don't seem to be informed much better than we were when the cloud from Chernobyl passed over us (Baltic states). It took workers at Swedish nuclear plants (and today USS Ronald Reagan personnel near the Japanese coast) to notify the World that something bad was happening.
What sucks about the iPad 2
I consulted Wikipedia about the design of german light water reactors. Bor is used in addition to water. It enables regulation of the power (in some limits). Makes sense to do that. I don't know if this is done in Japan too. It could explain, why the reaction does not stop after the water is gone.
For Data Crunchers, a Glittering Prize
Thanks for the catch. I had BWR/PWR reversed in the first sentence, which ended up contradicting the rest :)
Acid: A Debugger Built From A Language (1994)
I know someone with the Blackberry logo tattooed on their hand. Even though Blackberry's are still being made, I think that it's worse than that Zune tattoo.
I've worked with APIs that return XML containing one node, which contains escaped XML. So when I read something like this it doesn't seem that bad.
True, those aren't exactly the harshest critiques.
It's in at #9 ? #9 on Amazon's list isn't bad at all.
Cassini Saturn Fly-By Video
Google AdMob Adds Windows Phone 7 SDK, HTML5 & Tablet Support For iOS & Android
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_disaster#Fire_contain... - "not even have known that the accident was anything more than a regular electrical fire: "We didn't know it was the reactor. No one had told us.""
well, for one thing, one of its modes is to launch a background thread to perform a user-specified operation while it is being displayed. not something a control should be doing.
TellFi (YC W11) is Canada’s Answer to Google Voice:
rsync with --link-dest will store each version of a file separately, including parts that are the same. It also won't hard link files in different areas of the tree that are the same, storing them multiple times also. Nor will it relink files that disappear and reappear, or change and then change back.

I wouldn't really call it deduped storage at all. The optimisation it does do might well be sufficient for your needs though.
Seconded. AsciiDoc is enough like writing a plain-text e-mail that everything but the writing just falls away.

For a little more control, you can feed the generated DocBook to something like Remko's DocBook kit (https://github.com/remko/docbook-kit), which downloads and runs the various document processors for converting to PDF in stages--with gnarly XML config files available for each stage. This can be helpful for trying to match a specific conference template, for instance.
How to Switch from an Android Phone to the iPhone
It sounds like a deliberate decision to try to filter out some of the noise, but, yeah, it does seem kind of anti-social or selfish.
Tldr summary: deliberate practice for expert performance
I wasn't aware that either of these quests for universals have been a failure.
My friend did a relatively recent music thesis about universals.

I'm not in either field, but a belief in universal "deep structure" has helped me learn both language + music stuff. Even if they don't exist, I'm going to stick with what helps me :D