skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Good article but I don't think it's the whole story. Works well for maths, probably, where in my experience everything is obfuscated by a) lack of any practical real-life application for most people and b) non-verbal symbolic representations of concepts.

With programming you very likely do want to apply the stuff you're learning to 'real life' problems, and you're going to be expressing all your efforts in a programming language with familiar keywords (and just a few symbols/operators). Here the problem is not intuiting what the purpose is - it's easy to explain what Ajax calls are supposed to do, for instance, but actually implementing them is quite bitty. You need to set up a sort of chain of connections between multiple points, and not until you've learnt all the details of this process, can you tuck it all away neatly under one abstraction and free up brain cycles to deal with higher problems. I find more and more that when I learn a new corner of programming, there's just inevitably going to be a certain number of hours of faffing about learning the details before it 'clicks.' You feel stupid for a week or so, the boom You Know Kung-Fu, like it was easy all along.

Having said that some students just really struggle with basic concepts like 'variables' and need to make sure they intuitively grasp them. But that's about passing, not getting straight As.
I like this list. Might be a good idea for new companies to start by answering these questions first. And then can build collateral out of those answers.
Booth babes might be offensive, but I don't think they're equally offensive to men and women. Women can feel threatened or devalued in that kind of environment.
Glycemic load is a measure which attempts to address this problem.

Glycemic index measures the glucose response to consuming a fixed amount of carbohydrate. Since different foods contain different amounts of carbohydrate, the amount of food consumed is not constant. To consume 50g of carbohydrate, you can eat 100g of white bread...or 600g of carrots.

Glycemic load adjusts the glycemic index of a food according to portion size: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glycemic_load
Show HN: My latest Y Combinator application
Probably by realizing the person ultimately able to determine success is the one in the mirror.
There are quite a few names for it depending on the "tone of conversation":

http://xkcd.com/243/
GPL does nothing to prevent you from selling software. Look what Sleepycat did. Just GPL your code, and put an enterprise-grade price tag on a non-GPL commercial license.

The only people affected by the GPL are people who want to sell software they didn't write. It's hard for me to get worked up about that: the overwhelming majority of all commercial software is more restrictive.
Wow. Thank you too! I even upvoted your comment because it's such a beautiful illustration of my original point. If rauljara still wonders what's there for me to be offended about, let him wonder no more.

Seriously though. If your ultimate goal is to make others stop being offensive, I'm not sure offensiveness is the best tool for the job.
I really think we should build the community first using one of the many tools out there before we start investing time into building something custom. Perhaps we can even use something like basecamp/campfire or talkerapp (I'm willing to pay for the initial costs personally).

The community is the important part but I think something as simple as a Google Group would be enough to prove that it's a community that will be worth being part of. Just my 2c.
I don't worry about this so much, on the basis that my entire Evernote database is synced to every computer I use, in a form which can be exported. I'd love to switch to Google Docs, but I worry about keeping data solely in the cloud.
Same reason I prefer Dropbox over WebDav as found in iDisk.
Video showing it in action http://www.snapkeys.com/en/home

Seems pretty interesting.
You can also get 3D printers, eg https://github.com/hacklabto/Hacklab-RepRap
Early admission has nothing to do with having a diploma. All undergraduate and graduate programs let you apply before you have finished the previous level because the application and acceptance process takes more than the time between schools.

In cases where diplomas are required, the acceptance letter will always contain language stating that they will retract your acceptance if your grades drop an unacceptable amount or you don't finish the degree you're working on. Then most schools require you to submit another set of transcripts, proof of graduation, etc. before you officially enroll.
Facebook Test Mines Real-Time Conversations for Ad Targeting
GPL is moderately less free than BSD/MIT.

GPL is significantly more free than closed-source commercial.

Two groups of people are negatively impacted by the GPL.

First, people who want to ship closed-source versions of code they didn't write in exchange for money, against the will of the package author. Hard to feel sorry for these people.

Second, people with BSD/MIT/Apache licensed open source project who want to make it possible for other people to ship closed-source versions of their code for money. A valid concern, but a pragmatic one, not an ideological one. BSD gives away "too much"; GPL holds back "too much". There's no happy medium.

Let's take the ideological cast off this ("freedom", "commercial", "semantic games"). The issue here is simple and practical.
An Attempt at Better HTML/CSS Teaching
I'm for django/pinax .. built from scratch, though there is a lot of functionality we can already use from pinax. Sign me up if you go this route.
In my original post, which Trapani cites, someone asks me this same question.

So [women] have to be spoonfed? What makes them so goddamn important if they haven’t proven they’re willing to contribute? I have actually tutored many people before, but if they don’t express an interest to learn and willingness to contribute I am not going to waste my time on them.

The problem isn't that women need special treatment to be accepted. The problem is that open source projects are not accepting of anyone who isn't a male programmer.

That is, open source projects are sexist, because their members are sexist. They explicitly treat women worse than men. They also explicitly treat non-programmers worse than programmers. What's worse is they think they are too smart to be sexist or unwelcoming, so that behavior goes unchecked.

A normal community would include instructive socialization. From my original article, "Hi, welcome to the community, here's a housewarming present, here's how things work, we could really use some help over here and I'd love to show you how to work on it, but anything you want to do, feel free and I'll be here to answer and questions and walk you through every process until you feel comfortable."

This is the process that ThinkUp espouses, which almost all other open source projects lack.
I was trying to say that it's easy for people to imagine their own use cases for todo lists. Everyone already knows how to apply a todo list to their own life.
I guess fraud combined with the oppression of fellow humans is probably what pisses people off about this app.
I was using Pinax, but I just moved my apps over to a vanilla 1.3 install.

Pinax has some cool stuff, but I gotta be honest, I found it a little tough on a newbie. Maybe I just choose poorly on my starter project, but it took me a while to understand how Pinax uses templates and how the media handling works. And it turns out that I'm actually rather particular about my templates and how I want my tagging to work. It also wasn't always clear how Pinax deviates from a regular install, so it made just that much harder to ask for help or reference other tutorials.

When Pinax comes out for 1.3 I'll definitely take another look. I certainly don't intend to build my own account creation & verification & user profile app, when it's got what looks like a very nice one.
As a general principle, I think the software platform should be off-the-shelf if possible - to contain costs and management resources. That said, the platform needs to do everything the group requires without too much tweaking.Maybe we could take the open-source remnants of Google Wave and build a customization from there?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BusyBox#GPL_lawsuits

> The case was settled with release of the Monsoon version of the source and payment of an undisclosed amount of money...

> The Xterasys case [ed: separate case] was settled on December 17 for release of source code used and an undisclosed payment.

(I'm not including cases that were settled with a stipulation of "active compliance".)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GPL#The_GPL_in_court

> Cisco settled the case six months later agreeing ... to make source code of FSF programs freely available on its website.

Granted, that last one doesn't sound all that bad.

Given that the GPL does compel the release of source code for derivative works, and given that one of the FSF's tactics in lawsuit settlements is to ask for the release of source code, let's not go misapplying the FUD label, OK?

edit: I don't mean that to sound snarky. Rather, I'd like to see less "Bah, that's just FUD", and more explanation and clarity when responding to people's concerns about the GPL.
Use existing tools and as (if) the idea gains traction then consider building tools meeting it's specific needs. There's momentum here, capitalize on it by getting people engaged as opposed to spending a month or two building out a site. You may not have the momentum a month from now!

How about stack exchange? There exists one for onStartups that's pretty good. I'm not suggesting using their community but there's probably a ton we could learn by looking at their questions and answers.
I personally use BetterTouchTool (http://www.boastr.de/). It has basically the same functionality as Cinch and then some (maximize, auto-resize to split views, move windows across spaces/monitors), but it's (a) free and (b) also lets you define custom touch gestures to activate them (and any other actions you want) with a MacBook trackpad / Magic Mouse / Magic Trackpad.
Maybe Samsung is barely making any money with those prices in an attempt to compete in the tablet market.
I don't think many lawyers say that. You're still exposed to lawsuits from the robber's family. With lawsuits, when there's a will, there's a way.
We have the killer Che Guevara bopping around as a pop culture icon. Anything can happen.
You certainly have the right to think and say whatever you like.
Agree with grace 100%.

Also signing NDAs might turn people away. I would try to be as casual and organic with this as possible to start with.
I tested evernote for a bit but I never really liked it, but I really couldn't tell you why. I finally ended up using both catch (previously 3banana) and springpad. There's a lot of overlapping features between the two, but I ended up using both because I find catch better for general note taking and springpad better for lists and similar.
You're right, and, in addition to being the creator of this vacuum (which I designed in a few hours), I'm a core developer of the hacklab-reprap (https://github.com/hacklabto/Hacklab-RepRap; you can see my last update on it at http://christopherolah.wordpress.com/2011/01/24/hacklab-repr... ). Unfortunately, I can't focus on that 24/7 and occasionally work on other projects...
Japan: Before and After earthquake - Bing Maps
And I was! Can't believe I made HN!
Well, you could write your own, but you'd have to have users authenticate the application. In my opinion, this isn't much different than twitter, since both actions would require two clicks:

facebook: click your custom widget -> facebook prompt -> perform action

twitter: click your custom widget -> twitter prompt -> perform action

(Or just do like I do, and change the size of the iframe to 450x20)
I completely agree with graceyang that the community is the important part. While it would be nice to have a custom tool, that adds months to the startup process full of debating how the tool should be made and what it should do.
I enjoyed the article but I'd like to applaud you for submitting the mobile version of the article. It was a far better experience than the desktop version which I did click through to for comparison.
هاري هوديني
Women Rock, And 4 other things I learned from the Star Trek Animated series
Mention @somebody. They're notified.
"the city's rise isn't being widely reported."

Where is the evidence of its rise?

I'm honestly curious. I plan to buy a plot of land, maybe a house, somewhere in the next year or two, and Detroit has been in consideration because of its incredibly low prices (I don't plan to live there full-time; I live in a motorhome and travel, but it'd be nice to have a plot that I own and know I can always go park on for as long as I like if I feel like settling somewhere for a month or two). Detroit has a cool history, in terms of music. But, it also seems to be a bad investment, right now...no matter how cheap something is, it can always go lower, and Detroit seems to still be trending downward.
Chris Dixon discusses rising startup valuations & potential startup bubble
As a big fan of Google Wave, I like this idea a lot. Although if I remember correctly it had huge performance issues with waves that had many concurrent users. That might take a little too much tweaking to fix for it to be worth it.
"You keep saying this as if you believe that writing unit tests automatically means you've written good code"

Actually he didn't state there was a causal link between writing unit tests and writing good code. In fact, if you look closely, you see that there is a full stop in between those two statements, they are in different sentences!

I'd happily believe that someone who writes good code can also write good unit tests.

I'd also strongly assert the negative of that. Someone who writes bad code cannot possibly write good unit tests, because unit tests are code.

Everything else you say I agree with 110%. Good names for code entities: yes, indeed. Taking some time up front and thinking about the design and how it will fit together... yes, a thousand times yes.

However, the last bit about it taking longer to do this than just cranking something out I (and I think the person to whom you are replying) would disagree with except in the most trivial cases.

If what you are doing can be done by banging out a perl one-liner, by all means do that and move on. Except that of coruse if you ever need to debug it or maintain it there is a higher cost involved. For all code, as soon as you start debugging it you start reaping the rewards of doing it properly. For non-trivial code, those costs will rapidly outweigh the initial savings of just banging something out.
It is indeed. Now if only Google Accounts would integrate with Google Accounts, everything would be spiffing.

</cheapshot>
Very fair considerations. I think it is easy, as a programmer, to think of refactoring only in terms of cost, and to ignore risk. That is a mistake.

My own rules to keep myself honest in that regard are these:

- Never rewrite anything you don't completely understand.

- Never rewrite anything beyond what you would have had to touch to get the job done anyway.

- Never rewrite anything just because it bugs you. Have a compelling, practical, immediate reason why fixing it will save you time right now.

And my way of work certainly reflects my environment. I do a lot of work on code for which there aren't test cases, aren't requirements, aren't other developers looking at it, and isn't even a very high probability that it worked as intended the first time. In some cases, I'm even the sole arbiter of what "works right" means.

Certainly, the higher the quality of the code, and the more other people--developers or otherwise--depend on it, the more lightly one should tread.
The mere fact that you ask this question is usually an indicator that you should go with existing solutions. If you had a compelling reason in mind not to use off-the-shelf solutions, you'd not bother asking, and if you don't have a compelling reason in mind, why bother? This is obviously not always true, but is rather a general rule, but it's a good one to keep in mind.
First off, I LOVE the idea. I think serial entrepreneurs like myself NEED this and it will grow into a thriving community of benevolent contributors (and hopefully less flaming)

while I think it would be great to see it built from scratch putting it all in the hands of one person seems to be asking too much, then comes the question of who does the upkeep, who fixes the outages etc.

I think Open Source is probably the best way see this project through

Why not just start a git repository on github (private) and start a group on a site like fridge to discuss what's going on/have the beginnings of the community while we all work on it together.

Anyone who forks the project and submits accepted code gets some sort of badge in their profile along with credit for helping and being a "founding member" so to speak.

Open a WePay group for the SG so donations can be accepted for server costs, hardware etc.

I think ultimately this can be a passionate community of people who do lots of good, who knows what can grow out of an idea like this. Let's take the time to do it right and make sure all who come can receive sound advice from seasoned professionals in a manner which is better for all parties

Zach
How about using the trackpoint for anything accurate? Surely it falls down?
(and by 'accurate' I mean Photoshop/Illustrator, for example)
What this also means is that YC adds/gets 35x value (w/ assumption $17k for 6%) out of the door.
> AT COCA-COLA, Dunn was obsessed with per capita consumption. "Per capita was my mantra," he says. But as he neared the end of his time there, he began to feel conflicted. It was still his job to sell more Coke. But people were drinking a lot of Coke. He talked to his father about it. "If you've got a per capita of three, four, five" -- 500 Cokes a year -- "that's fine. But there are places in the United States where you have per capitas of 1,000. I can't get my head around somebody drinking 1,000 Cokes a year," Dunn says. "This was before obesity had become as prevalent. But it was pretty clear that's where the world was going. And certainly sugar soft drinks had a direct role in that."

Reminds me of a David Foster Wallace aside:

> "On the surface of the problem, television is responsible for our rate of its consumption only in that it's become so terribly successful at its acknowledged job of ensuring prodigious amounts of watching. Its social accountability seems sort of like that of designers of military weapons: unculpable right up until they get a little too good at their job."
I say focus on the structure of the "program", then take specific votes on the details. Do you want levels of members to roughly correspond with Y-Combinator's classes/timeline? The statuses could be: Applied (need social validation to get it), Level 1 (approximately 1 month into Y-Com), Level 2 (mo 2), Level 3, Alumni.

I definitely say use off the shelf software wherever possible. I also think there needs to be some kind of "voting off the island" type situation. Maybe of a given group that starts, only x-percentage can finish. Part of Y-combinator's appeal is that it selects positively for good companies. If it is completely open, you will loose some of this.

I agree that you will need some kind of identification walls in order to make people comfortable working within it, and to make it special. My company, signnow, has a product notarynow that I would gladly donate our service to solidly identify people, if you like.
I reckon make use of existing software first. Manual curation should be ok initially, if necessary. Automate and build as needed in the future.
I'd have to disagree too.

I just applied this year, and was incredibly pleased to get accepted. (woo!)

The thing is, my grades weren't stellar. Don't get me wrong, they were great, and I was ~15th in my class-- but people had better. Similarly, I only had a 2010 on the SATs after taking it twice. (To be fair though, I did have good AP scores)

Yet, with all that, I was the only one in my class to get in, out of 6. That group included the valedictorian, and saledictorian--heck, I was the only person not in the top 5%. And, I've been the first person to get in from my school in at least the last 7 years.

And, for what it's worth, my extracurriculars were relatively flat: only one language (French), no instruments, no athletics, no arts.
Cifs is implemented at a lower level in the stack than Samba; the primary upshot of this from my perspective is that you can only export a files in a single file system using cifs. If you have one file system mounted on a path within another, or symlinks that cross file systems, they will appear as empty directories or broken files, respectively. Given that a major reason for using ZFS is the ease with which you can use multiple file systems with different configurations all drawing from the same storage pool, this is a pretty severe drawback.
Being covered in a blog/website/magazine/paper etc is a privilege, not a right. Just because you’ve created a fantastic new [insert item here], doesn’t mean it has to be covered.

When approaching, think about the benefits of your [insert item here] brings to the users.

Geek tl;dr does it get someone laid, make their life better, bring comfort, protect themselves or loved ones, Save them time (time is $$$) etc.

People are selfish, they want to know how [insert item here] benefits them in some way. They alas do not care about you. They want to know how it benefits them.

I know at first it may seem obvious how your [insert item here] will obviously do [insert benefit/s here] but people don’t always ‘get it’. You must spell it out to them.

When approaching people to write/talk about your [insert item here], you only get a small percentage of someone’s time/day. So you must speak the benefits of your [insert item here] and quick to grab their attention.
Father of Mac OS X Bertrand Serlet Leaves Apple
the theft? or making the guy who stole your laptop look like a fool?
Disagree, analogies do have a place in this discussion in placing similar situation out of context for comparative reasoning. I highly doubt you'd be giving away any land you purchased. Judging someone aggressively for doing something that had good intentions, probably has less of a place in a discussion--especially when its belaboring.

I'd much rather see a domain in the hands of a potential developer than an explicit domainer.

Now I'll probably lose karma over this one, but its worth it.
I was going to make the same basic point. I think people on the outside will look at things like this and say "dying" when things are mostly moving across 8 mile. "Detroit" [e.g. Metro Detroit] is very spread out and this is just a trend, like you say, that has been happening since the 60s.

Being spread out, there are many great places to live that happen to be outside of the city limits. It's not as if all of those people are leaving the area entirely (although that is happening to some extent, too).
A bigger problem may be licenses to other people's patents. Suppose Apple distributes Samba, and suppose someone NOT Apple owns a patent that Samba infringers. That party sues Apple, and it becomes clear to Apple that they are going to lose. Let's also assume Apple's Samba has some changes, so it is not 100% identical to the upstream.

It looks like GPLv3 only gives Apple the option of stopping distributing Samba, or of finding a way to get a patent license that covers everyone who obtains a copy of Samba that can be traced back to Apple. The latter could get very expensive.