skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Interesting. Is this the first time a big tech company is offering startup funds or is there any other such instances previously?

Also, Did anyone know the reasons behind why they choice i.e South Africa for the pilot program?
Edit: Hasty reply before completing the FAQ! Checked 'Why Cape Town'. :)
The problem with C0 (it's "C-naught", not "C-not") is that it is a toy language used for the compilers class which has somehow made it down into the intro curriculum. It is not useful in the real world; absolutely no one outside of CMU uses it. It is useful only as a stepping stone for C -- at which point, why not just teach C, and keep to a "safer" subset for a while? A couple weeks "transition" to get used to malloc and gdb and NULL pointers and segmentation faults etc is not nearly enough.
Khan academy's real competitor
Not particularly for teams:

"The Magic is doing really well this season,"
"The Heat is doing really well this season,"
(there are no non-plural NFL teams...)

Band names fare better:
"The Who was awesome if somewhat cheesy."
"Radiohead was awesome if somewhat cheesy."
The entire risk in alcoholism is that you won't be able to stop drinking once you start. It isn't a disease where a single glass of wine damages you. Avoiding the wine isn't an irrational act; it's the most sensible form of risk mitigation available.
Me replying to me own comment, and because I've just seen that he's posted an Update linking to an UN study, here's a link to a book written on the effects of Chernobyl which presents a much bigger number:

http://books.google.com/books?id=g34tNlYOB3AC&lpg=PA186&...

I can tell you that in the case of my country, Romania, the numbers are probably even higher because of a lot of mis-reporting (voluntary or not), or just plain stupidity from the doctors when it came to diagnosing (just fyi, we had close to 7,000 kids "accidentally" infected with HIV at at the end of the '80s).
Didn't mean to misinterpret your comment.

I see how you're upset that "your" tax money is being given to someone else to start a business, but its probably worth noting that only some excrutiatingly small % of your taxes are going to this.

I think that other governments can and should learn from experiments like the one in Romania. But from a policy perspective, it seems like a somewhat reasonable way to spur new company creation.
Hanlon's Razor?
http://www.google.co.za/intl/en/umbono/faq.html

"Cape Town is in the process of positioning itself as a hub for innovation and technology, as evidenced by: the Cape IT Initiative, the Bandwidth Barn, the presence of a growing tech industry in Cape Town and Stellenbosch, strong University computer science programs (UCT Stellenbosch, UWC, CPUT, etc), and the formation of the Silicon Cape network. We feel that all of these factors are key to the development of a sustainable, entrepreneurial environment in the technology sector." - FAQ 17.
Not sure why they didn't choose Silicon Roundabout...
... you seriously think that .xxx will stop trick sites like lemonparty and goatse? I am gobsmacked.
I'm a Vim guy, been using Vim for the better part of the last 8 years, kept trying other stuff and ended up back at Vim every time. Figure I will just stick with it this time :)
Um, actually the constitutional status of Wales is a murky topic, and even if that were to be cleared up unambiguously, how do you compare statuses across constitutions?
Tuvalu is an actual country (which is why it gets a cctld). Catalonia is an administrative division of Spain.

If Catalonia has its own TLD, why not California or Maine? If it's a català tld, why doesn't brezhoneg get one? Or cymraeg? Or võru, saami, euskara, söl'ring, cemhuî or ajië?
Great timing given the att acquisition of t-mobile, was just wondering if a nexus like phone would still have a carrier to call home.
I don't regularly anymore, but until a few months ago my main portable coffee-shop machine was an old 12" Powerbook G4, which was a lot snappier with js turned off, especially on a few sites whose dynamic versions were slow as molasses, like Slashdot. Probably close to a worst case for js, because not only was the machine slow and low on RAM, but browsers use old fall-back js engines on PPC.

I also use 'links' from a terminal on occasion. It's gotten increasingly hard to use, but mostly due to layout issues rather than js, afaict.
You can get rid of the "wide character" warning with the -CS switch.

As you demonstrate correctly, you need to tell Perl about the encoding of your script (and thus the literals in your script). `use utf8;` or at the command line `-Mutf8` does that.
Why not use the buit-in keyboard-UI in the iPad?
First of all, this will be very hard. Japanese is quite different from pretty much any language you're likely to know, and not only do you want to learn it, but you want to do it without actually being able to practice speaking.

That said, I learned passable Italian (again, similar to languages I already knew) through a combination of self-study and visiting the country. My advice would be to start directly with the hard stuff: studying the grammar rules and memorizing tables of word forms. Of course, the language is more than just the rules, but at least for me it worked fairly well to memorize the rules, internalize them, and then be able to use them in conversation. Hopefully, you've already learned a foreign language, so you know what this process entails. Most books tend to be oriented towards classroom study, so you have to look around in order to find that works well for self-study.

Once you've learned enough to know how to use a dictionary, take a news article and translate it word for word. After about an hour, congratulations, you've just read and understood an article in Japanese. Now go back to studying grammar. Maybe using Google translate and looking at the Japanese text and the translation side by side would be just as good, but I worry it would become too easy to understand.

Much later, once you can understand spoken text, watch movies with movies in Japanese with subtitles. Don't kid yourself and think you'll get much out of this if you haven't already built up a base of grammar and vocabulary, but it's useful for learning colloquial expression and for seeing immediately how the Japanese will phrase things differently from the subtitle language.

Oh, and one other thing: learn the International Phonetic Alphabet. A book will try to guide you through the language's sounds by relating them to your native language, but this can be a crutch because sounds never match up quite right. Start following linkes from the Wikipedia page on Japanese phonology. It's a bit intimidating, but you can start with the sounds which are common to languages you already know and then come back to the more complicated ones later.

As others here have observed, at some point, you need to communicate with actual native speakers. Maybe you can find someone in Japan who wants to learn Spanish (or English?) and you can exchange emails. And, of course, if you're serious, you should someday visit Japan, which will give you lots of opportunities to speak Japanese.
Yeah, but the point is freedom right? And I don't see much freedom behind Big Co's servers.

There is still hope however with the FreedomBox: it's a server, which means free software by default, and it's personal, which means it is more likely to free the user.
Note that the contaminated milk thing is also radiological exposure (to iodine radionuclides taken up by cows). It is a consequence of Chernobyl. But it was an easily avoidable exposure. The subtext of that story is, even in crisis, sensible mitigation procedures can control the damage.

There's nothing anybody can say to make Chernobyl not be a terrible disaster. But we can (and did) learn from it.
Interesting idea, but it presumes that our current recession is caused by insufficient liquidity.

Most of the evidence suggests that the liquidity-induced portion of our recession is over (AD/production/etc have recovered). Our high unemployment appears to be caused mainly by the fact that many workers produce little of value and it is hard for such workers to find jobs.
Multi-column text using CSS3
CSS3 offers a new way to arrange text content using the Multi-column CSS3 module. This CSS3 feature will help you fit your text into columns without extra markup like div floats or extra table markup.
Doesn't this reduce our available address space? What about all the sites that currently have three different entities at their .com, .net and .org addresses? What happens to ubuntu.com and ubuntu.org, two different groups? Where we are now, getting rid of TLDs would cause immense unnecessary conflict.
People in the US don't need to fear either event, and yet they covered the nuke crisis almost to the exclusion of the tsunami. Is the point the article makes.
Murder, medicine and the first blood transfusions
Federal student loan consolidation plans for the student
There are many benefits to students who consolidate their student loans. By consolidating their student loans students can ensure that their loans are paid to one particular person without fail, there is a range of payback methods and it is free of charge.
But then, you'd be more dependent on working infrastructure, which is a major problem in the 3rd world. Mobile is a better fit than cloud to get started, and will provide the economic incentive for better infrastructure. The market will then shift naturally to cloud.
Weather Underground Tries Crowdsourcing Data Collection
Maybe the timing was just wrong? The browsers are fast enough now and users, including developers, are much more comfortable with web apps.
The best way to learn a language is to go to the place they speak it, and fall in love with somebody. Seriously, dating a native speaker, and having them commit to speaking to you in their language.

If you're willing to move, and emerse yourself, learning a language only takes a couple months. It's extreme, but unlink almost all other ways of teaching a language, it works.
Активия – вкусно удоволствие
Активия - Съдържа микс от зърнени култури и плодове: пшеница, ечемик, овес, и стафиди. Всичко това е комбинирано с неустоимия вкус на парченца ягоди.
Guide to starting a business (not necessarily web)
Topic is misleading. This is a 20% project from one of the Google engineers (which the article says, but still uses the misleading title).
I don't know how WP7 is going to turn out in the consumer space, but once MS releases a deployment mechanism for the enterprise, I think it'll really take off. There are so many .net developers out there working a corporate job that WP7 become the obvious choice for when you need to outfit your 10,000 insurance claim adjustors with a phone.

I'd love to see it take off in the consumer space because it has such great tooling, but I don't think it'll have the same market share as iOS or Android.
The Democratization of Entrepreneurship
JQuery and Javascript Coding Examples and Best Practices
JQuery Waypoints
Google Voice Blog post: http://googlevoiceblog.blogspot.com/2011/03/sprint-integrate...
What is the latest news with Plan 9? I thought the development stopped?
Most of the good candidates I have interviewed prepare a lot for interviews already so I doubt this helps them much. All of the bad candidates I have interviewed do no prep work at all so this won't help them either.
I don't think that's really a good comparison of what happened with Kali, battle.net etc. (there was actually another one before Kali but I can't remember it's name).

It's more like a great indy iPhone app that increases the value of the phone and even becomes one of the reasons people are buying the phone. Then Apple decides to build the same functionality right into the phone making the app obsolete. That's a much better analogy.

Now I'm not against Apple doing that at all. In fact I think it's a no-brainer, and failing to do it would be disappointing. It's just a shame that the little indy guys who created that market for them get shut out. Toss them a couple million bucks or something you know?
My Problem With Klout Scores: Beyonce Gets a 50 - Without Ever Sending A Tweet
Great story. Thanks for taking the time to write up the story.
It's definitely something they should be focusing on.
Immersion. Listen to Japanese music all the time, watch lots of Japanese things (all kinds of things). Just hearing the language will help, even though it all sounds like gibberish. Your brain will start to sort out the sounds and accents by itself, though it won't be that fast. As a Spanish-speaker, you already have a lead on English-speakers with the accent, since the vowels are the same.

Decide what your goal is. Do you want to be conversational in spoken Japanese? Do you want to be able to read/write well? What's your target level? Situations? Learning business Japanese is very different from learning everyday Japanese.

Get a textbook you like and stick with it. Study at least an hour everyday. Find CDs you can mimic. Use Skype and find people in Japan you can chat with -- there are plenty of people who will love to do a language exchange with you. Skype was a godsend for me in college; when I was in my second year of Japanese, I spent hours every day on Skype finding people in Skype Me mode and just chatting.

Don't be afraid to look stuff up online. If you want to look something up in Japanese, do it, and then see what you can read. Write down what you can't, learn it, and then you have a context to put it in to help you remember better.

The only really solid tip I have is to learn your katakana and hiragana now. Brute-force it with flashcards and learn them in a week or two. Romaji won't get you anywhere; it's hard for people to separate romaji from their native language (if it uses the Roman alphabet).

Best of luck!
Scott
eh, there exist plenty of things that are nice and shiny.

I can take pidgin and OTR and with about three minutes worth of "You should click here", have it set up easily enough that even a complete non techy can use it.

The problem is 1) It requires installation and 2) People don't know it exists. (Strangely enough, once it's installed i've never had anybody move back, mostly as pidgin is a fair amount nicer to use then MSN)
Not that I agree with them, but it is a Q/A site which I see as the bare minimum for being compared to the stack exchange sites.
The URL contains 'RDL04', so I'd guess 2004. Looks like it was presented at this workshop: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.67.5...
Thanks; my self-esteem was getting crushed for a bit there, as a non-recipient of unwanted messages from recruiters.
Can somebody who has used both Akshell and Cloud9 IDE post a brief comparison?
Doesn't that argue for .trek as well?
In a similar vein, people should check out Ares SDK from Palm for WebOS. It is an entirely browser based IDE for creating apps for WebOS, which are also written using their Javascript/HTML/CSS based APIs.

edit: https://ares.palm.com/Ares/about.html
Have you checked out Simple Mobile (http://www.mysimplemobile.com )? Cheap, but the CS gets horrible marks.
How human eggs woo sperm
Has YC ever funded a company with a Black founder?
I ask this question of out sheer curiosity. Some people may ask "Why does it matter?" Well, it's a well known fact that there are a disproportionate amount of blacks in technology and it gets even worse when it comes to programming. I can imagine the numbers get even more grim when it comes to black programmers in startups. I live in Metro Atlanta and have attended programming meetups, Big Nerd Ranch, attended meetings for companies wanting to join the ATDC (an incubator of sorts) and I'm often the ONLY black guy in the room. Even with PYCON in town, there still aren't a whole lot of people that look like ME. I applied to YC in 2007, WAAAAY before I was ready and was just wondering if anyone that looks like ME has EVER made it.
Teaching to the Text Message
Arielle Kebbel Hot Wallpapers, Arielle Kebbel Sexy Pics
I don't get that from the article at all. The article mostly seems apologism for nuclear power, and neatly sidesteps how such a disaster can make large areas uninhabitable. When you're the size of Russia, losing an area like Chernobyl is barely a scratch. When you're the size of Japan, with people squished in everywhere, there is no space to lose.
Is there even a network compatible with Sprint's "4G" up here?
It looks like the UI uses an editable div. I believe that editable divs do not trigger the built in keyboard on an iPhone, and there's no way to force it to do so.
LENOVO 3000 C200 8922 Battery - LENOVO 3000 C200 8922 Laptop Battery 4400mAh
I think this is a good point. Right now YC avoids using social proof as an evaluation tool. They look at the team's ability to work together, that they can ship, and their idea. As YC grows they need to make sure they don't look at who recommends them, how much influence they have, if they're famous.

They can get a %50 success rate, because they have developed a model of evaluating. As the value of getting in to YC increases, the ability to game the model does as well. Every blog post which tells you how to apply, shifts the companies accepted towards those who are able to win at that game.

Every applicant who goes in to that interview knowing it's not a presentation, but a demo followed by 10 minutes of rapid fire questions / brainstorming, has a big advantage. Every applicant who can get current or former YC founders to review their application has an advantage. Every applicant who spends time reading each and every 'applying to YC' blog post, has an advantage.

The big question is, are those advantages things which correlate with being a good startup founder. In some cases yes, in some no.

This is the real signal to noise problem that YC faces. Not that there might be 2000 startups applying each cycle, but that applicants learn how the theater works. They know the game, and are actors which present the perfect YC application. Then YC has to figure out, are these guys and gals really good at what they do, or are they telling me the story I want to hear.

That said, i bet even with the noise, YC has a better way of evaluating the potential future of startups than the 'who else invested, who's the advisors' model many angels use.
Bootstrap.less
No, it's DisplayPort.
This seems to have some issues. I tried many different connections and none worked! I tried a direct connection as well. Apart from that, I suggest including a "text message" in the search bar to inform users what they can enter. I had a question - "Instead of entering a username, can I enter "Sales at Amazon" and will your system get my connections at Amazon?" - didn't know where to look for. Also a small change - Move logout link to top with FAQ, About as the linkedin alert masks it. Finally, consider providing cross connection through linkedin and facebook. That would be useful. Otherwise this would just be another implementation of Facebook connect.
What women want, or not.
There is something strange in this story.

Despite the double opt-in nature of mailing list
subscription, it may not have been clear enough
that ebook == mailing list.

Perhaps some of the people didn't want to subscribe to the mailing list after all,
I think "XOR Swap" sums up my opinion on most Tech Interview Questions.

The only question I would ever ask about the XOR Swap trick would probably be "Give 3 reasons never to use this" (assuming you are in a language as least as high level as C).
Isn't the other major problem that "promoted tweets" simply take people to a stream of tweets with that hashtag, which could include smart competitors?

I'd assume it isn't that difficult to write a bot that autoposts with that hashtag each time a "trending topic" vaguely relevant to their area of business shows up. Certainly not compared with the SEO dance.

And if spammers are optimising their ads better than you..
That is actually what the letter to users does- http://www.theie9countdown.com/ie-users-info
They likely won't take away your plan (and if they tried you'd have the ability to terminate your contract). All carriers have a policy of grandfathering in existing plans when they change theirs (as they did, for example, when they eliminated unlimited data last year). Of course that means you can't get a new phone or change a plan details without submitting to the new terms. If you're willing to live with that, it can be beneficial. Some people are on 5 year old plans and paying $10 or less for unlimited data. Carriers know this, and put up with it because they know the vast majority of their customers are going to re-up the contract regularly.
Already discussed. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2319667
Could you apply Creative Commons the letter you wrote at http://www.theie9countdown.com/ie-users-info? I'm sure there are more than a few people out there who'd like to use it.
I thought that might be the case, but I figured I had already hit my limit on parenthetical phrases, so I didn't bother investigating.
Google needs to go ahead and buy Sprint.
This is really cool. Your docs are well put together, and simple. It looks like you put a decent amount of time into them, which I really appreciate. Too many apps write the docs as an after-thought just before launch.
Isn't it strange that there is no official transcription for Arab names?

Chinese, Japanese and Korean used to have a transcription by language (i.e. a transcription for the English language, another one for the french), but that got standardized, and now there is only one transcription for each word (except of course names that became really common: Peking in English, Pékin in French, Beijing in the now official pinyin transcription). Is it because the Arab language is separated in so many countries without a centralised system to "manage" the language?
Yes and no.

Yes, on any sort of small network, you can be instantly MITM'd with basically no protection.

No, in that on any sort of large scale traffic it becomes impractical to filter, ie. with modest hardware you can trawl through http at say 10Gbps, it's basically impossible to MITM at that sort of speed without much greater hardware requirements.

Imo, having a self signed certificate simply appear to be http, ie. no "secure" icon, no locks, etc. would be a good middle ground.
"HTTP is an abstraction of Berkeley Sockets."

Wait, what? HTTP is a protocol that can run on Berkeley sockets, certainly.
Also, I could not find a link to delete my account. I think that's important.
Technology allows lawyer to have rich life and private practice
Is this a Stackexchange site? Or a separate unaffiliated site that's, er, heavily influenced by Stackoverflow's ui?
Developing and Deploying ASP.NET MVC Applications On Ubuntu with Mono & nginx
Solution: Don't use SEAM or the frameworkey aspects of Spring.

It's so easy to embed a Jetty web server in Java and just solve your problem from the basics, I'm always astonished at the work that goes into getting these frameworks to do the job for you.
You were right ;) I'll write a blog post about it once things calm down a bit.
TimeSolv - WorkSolv Case Studies
SSL locks identity with encryption to prevent MITM attacks.
The best data visualisation I've ever seen
I submitted half a dozen edits after the deadline, fixing stuff i found while re-reading the application. Now they've shifted it around so it says "The application deadline for this cycle has passed. You can still submit a late application, though the chances of getting funded are lower."

I suspect the real close was at around midnight, not 8pm.
I'm not sure I agree with the premise of the post. At this point, do most major cities (e.g. Lagos, Cairo, Kinshasa, Durban, etc.) even have infrastructure to support smartphones? Last I heard, 3G infrastructure was pretty spotty outside of select areas of Johannesburg.

Given that, wouldn't it be in Google's interest to hold off on pushing Android in Africa until said infrastructure is built?
If you can find a few million who spend most of their time in the cultural group of trekkies, then yeah.

But still, deregulation and all. Domains will stop mattering somewhen soon. Search engines are important.