skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Wow, I had no idea that Emacs had commands specifically for navigating around the pages delimited by the form-feed character.

Going to see if I can find an Emacs mode that does the right thing in syntax highlighting the pages appropriately.
Unfortunately, I do seriously think the truth percentage is quite significant or I actually wouldn't have posted it. Grade inflation at lower levels of education have different forces in play, but at the higher end it is my serious opinion that it is mostly the colleges/universities giving the customers what they want. Calling it bribery is a bit sarcastic, but even ten years ago I could see professors on low-level classes struggling against grading fairly vs. the knowledge that if they did they would actually be overruled by higher levels of the organization over concerns about monetary implications. (On the positive, I did see one mass-flunking for cheating on a computer science 101 course, though, and it stood.)
"Didn't, like, everyone do this back in the day?"

I don't know about everyone, but back when things were a lot more electro-mechanical and the laws far less Draconian it was much easier for the techno-curious to hack around with
stuff. Used to be able to do switch-hook dialing from ATM phones, for example. Very amusing.

Side comment: A friend of mine told me today that he recently fixed his dormant Philips DVD player when he learned it was a matter of replacing a capacitor. I told him it sounds like an Onion headline; "Area man repairs own DVD player."
How the hell is this on the frontpage of HN? There is zero content in that article. It literally describes the colors and textual information contained in a screenshot of twitter's homepage.
Mountain View, CA. (Mailing address at http://www.khanacademy.org/about/the-team)
Did it take from October to raise $375,000? was that with a single guy on it dedicated or part time fund raising?
Unless the intent was:

Writing clear sentences.

and then 'concise' was added. As if to mean:

Writing clear (concise) sentences.
I'm not sure that's a mistake. Substitute _forgettable_ for _legitimate_ or _trustworthy_ and I bet we're honing in on the idea here. With tv news outlets constantly referring viewers to random tweets, and twitter's undeniable impact on the way information gets around on the internet, I see the home-page shift as a bit of a visual indication that the service isn't just for geeks and kids, anymore.
Am I missing something, or does this article basically say: within the domain of self-taught and c-educated programmers, there are groupings with various levels of theoretical and practical skill?

It seems it wouldn't be a stretch to say that, "cs-educated programmers" aren't even really identifiable by trait, since course selections made by both the university department and the student can change the curriculum unpredictably. The same could be said for "self-taught;" in my experience, half the people in cs-related math or theory classes just read the book and don't bother to attend class anyway.
I think 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 years would be a pretty usable amount of up time.
Why does it need location permission to display the camera roll? I don't want to give it location permission...
People on HN have this weird distinction where if your an engineer you stay an engineer. In the real world, most career structures involve coming in a engineer and then progressing into management. A lot the skills used for management such as negation skills just come with age anyway.
Background thread - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2412218
Anonymous Gets Serious, Attacks Sony Employees
That's like saying making a star go supernova is a great way to generate energy for an advanced civilization — there are some huge leaps in logic in making sweeping assumptions of that scale. It would be like someone in the Victorian era predicting that we'll farm whales for their oil...
8 Outrageous Executive Perks
Apple rumored to unveil revamped Final Cut Pro on April 12
Nothing kills your interest in a subject like taking it as a class and getting grades.

Maybe if you have a terrible teacher. The good teachers did nothing but enhance my interest in a particular subject.
That ONE problem about computers
I don't find solutions that are limited in success and are ill-adapted to the problem set to be "elegant", but maybe I'm nitpicking.
Agreed. Indeed, if you follow the concept of Matrioshka shells or brains (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matrioshka_brain), when energy is released as heat after computation another layer sitting outside the previous one takes advantage of the heat to power further computation. By placing enough shells going outward, you effectively release very little energy. Possibly less than or equal to the CMB.
Sesame Street Game Turns Kinect Into Sensitivity Trainer
Twitter gets its tax break, now what about everyone else?
Non-relativistically speaking (danger will robinson!), the photons emitted by the radiator have a huge gravitational potential associated with them. You're free, I believe, to extract that energy through a heat engine if you like, but I'm not sure the how feasible or efficient it would be.

I'm totally ignorant on the GR front; where's RobotRollCall?
Oh man, I had this "brilliant" idea to make SteadyCam free to try, by inserting a watermark in the demo mode and limiting recording time to 15 seconds. The full version can be unlocked via in-app purchase.

That was the theory, anyway. In practice this has created a lot of confusion as to whether the app is free or not (spoiler: it's not). I'm trying to fix that by making it more clear on startup that you're in demo mode.

If you guys have better suggestions, I'd love to hear them :)
The black hole is colder than the average temperature of space. Computation costs less at low temperatures, because temperature is defined as the ratio between the change in the energy and the change in the entropy of a system.
You can already get this with Google Apps for Business, for $50 a user (which would meet the guy's criteria):

http://www.google.com/apps/intl/en/business/index.html

With a 99.9% uptime SLA:

http://www.google.com/apps/intl/en/terms/premier_terms.html

and

http://www.google.com/apps/intl/en/terms/sla.html
Facebook Data Center: If if won't run ARM, what will it run?
Google Chrome to warn of malicious Windows executables
The Bank of Facebook: Currency, Identity, Reputation
Shpigler the Shark gives advice to Mark Zuckerberg
I'm disappointed by the lack of discussion regarding the Simplates concept. It does for webapp code organisation what Python's whitespace does for code layout.

This means that from the outset, you get more maintainable webapps even it starts out as a one file hack. That should more than compensate for having to figure out how to enter an obscure character into your code in your editor/IDE of choice.
Microsoft's first Window 8 tablet app spotted
Are you kidding? Middle Management are often the first to go. They produce no real work, they just provide less work for upper management.
Phone That Can Search The Internet & Display Ads Patented; Everyone Sued
Ask HN: Best economy VPS hosting in Europe?
Hi,
I am looking for a economic VPS hosting plan to try and test some of my applications for sometime. Maybe after I start to generate some revenue or become sure of my priority apps, I would consider a little higher-end options. I have never bought a VPS plan before. My requirements are: run most standard servers like web, mail, FTP, SSH, DNS and apps like Wiki, mailing list, and other custom servers in python and java. Some of these Java/Python servers would be running for a long time (weeks). How much RAM, CPU etc on a VPS do you recommend?

I found out that VPS hosting in Europe is considerably cheaper than in the US- is it also worth going for? Some of them don't have very good English-language support, but I might be able to deal with it, given that I am convinced about the advantages (and terms and conditions :)

I have seen some comparision here [http://meshfields.de/host-europe-godaddy-hetzner-rackspace/] but still feel that I don't have enough information to decide. Please help me choose from among these (most of these have ~10 euro per month plans):

* 1 and 1

* hosteurope.de

* hetzner.de

* server4you.de

* strato.de

* serverloft
Evolving the word processor
GE does not build its entire business plan on tax avoidance.
I think science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke said it best "Any sufficiently advanced technology will indistinguishable from magic." I paraphrased so don't hurt me if I didn't get it word for word. I have to agree with him that any civilization that was advanced as the essay speculates, would seem like real magic to our relatively young civilization.
I think the maths-in-programming topic is a bit of a distraction. To be blunt, general programming doesn't need any university-level mathematics at all, assuming a decent pre-university maths education. On the other hand, specialist programming in mathematical fields typically needs specialist mathematics of at least masters level, which surely no CS undergrad course is going to cover because not even good maths undergrad courses do.
I wonder if black holes might be usable as cosmic-scale batteries. Suppose your civ was preparing to settle in for long-term survival into the super distant future. You might not need high amounts of energy, just a low constant supply for incredibly long amounts of time. You could drop a good percentage of a galaxy's mass into a black hole, then use the evaporated Hawking radiation over cosmological time scales to power your civ.

Suppose that the entities living inside this civ are simulations. A second to us might be tens of thousands of years to them, because their hardware processing runs very slowly because of the low amounts of available energy.
I don’t completely get what Marco is trying to say. IMAP is not exclusive to FastMail (which is is a great service). Gmail has it too. And POP3 of course.

Most of the time I use Gmail from its web interface. The few times I had problems with the webif, I launched my desktop client and used that.

As for using your own domain name, well, life is short. I can’t be bothered with all the small things.
That's how Apple's SDK works. Existing photos in the camera roll might be annotated with location information. So for security reasons 3rd party apps need location permission to access the camera roll.

SteadyCam does not collect any location information. We respect your privacy, the HAL 9000 icon notwithstanding ;)
> Gmail does have IMAP, but it’s extremely unreliable and buggy.

That's never been my experience at all. I've used Gmail via Thunderbird (mostly for Enigmail) for years with very very few problems. It occasionally chokes when sending large attachments, but it always works on the second try.
>What is wrong with Google Apps? $50 per user per year with SLA

The article isn't a plea to pay for gmail, which you probably inferred from reading the title or first paragraph.
nope, the uber just took a really long time to show up. :)

we moved out to silicon valley (from Boston) in December, and had the round spoken for within a month. we just took our time doing the paperwork and announcement.
One. GE didn't.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ac/20110326/bs_ac/8148778_new_york_t...

Two. Amazon didn't either.

It's been the same story for ages with catalog orders, phone orders, or any other intrastate commerce. States either 1) looked the other way, because the sales weren't large enough to bother with, or 2) passed laws making the state residents responsible for tracking their sales and paying the appropriate tax, not the business.

Two things changed. The Internet became a Big Deal, and the volume of sales became large enough to get legislator's attention for how they could get their hand in to the flow of money. Then, Amazon actually started doing business inside of these states in the form of affiliate programs and warehouses. It is on these two points that the fight is being contested, which state governments claim absolves them of the long standing taxation between states issue, and makes Amazon liable for sales tax revenue.

They didn't intentionally build their model around dodging taxes. That was the law of the land. Don't like it? Change the law.
It would be interesting to see a breakdown by major and industry. For instance, how many computer science majors do unpaid internships? How many film studies graduates?

One of the best things about a CS major is that it enables you to enter the workforce in a high-value way. Some people would argue that it limits you later, that you become a technical resource without a business background, but I disagree completely. You get incredible exposure to business through software projects. And if you don't (ie., they hide their programmers off in a cubicle farm somewhere), it's probably not the kind of company you'd want to be working for anyway (nor is it a company likely to be producing good software).

I don't want to be too hard on college students/grads who are struggling, and I find the trend toward paying for work experience to be kind of disturbing. But can we expect students to make an effort to acquire skills that employers will pay for?
If the designers are united
Weebly [W07] hiring a System Administrator - Top 100 Quantcast network
Weebly is hiring a System Administrator to help run our global network across multiple datacenters. We're looking for someone who loves infrastructure and is insanely passionate about uptime.

You'll be instrumental in running a network that is:

One of the largest 100 networks in the US (according to Quantcast); receives many hundred million pageviews per month, from tens of millions of unique visitors; managed by you and our CTO, all the way from the BGP peers to the individual app servers; datacenter redundant in near real-time

You must:

Share on-call responsibility; have a car; be familiar with datacenter operations and best practices; know your way around a LAMP stack; have a solid understanding of the Linux operating system; be able to use performance analysis to fine-tune systems; have a strong understanding of Linux security, system hardening, and vulnerability assessment; be very familiar with networking concepts and troubleshooting

Your responsibilities will include:

Managing a large number of servers (100+) across multiple datacenters; handling physical server installation, cabling, and inventory; building and maintaining a stable dev environment for package testing and deployment; supporting the mail infrastructure (sendmail, pmta); supporting and expanding our internal monitoring infrastructure (cacti, nagios, etc.); performing routine security audits; applying security updates at regular intervals

Ideally, you'll:

Be able to solve problems quickly and automate processes; be able to get a lot done; be willing to work hard for a huge upside; contribute to a fun working environment; be willing to learn new skills

You'll be able to:

Have a meaningful impact on the company's future, and share in the rewards accordingly; run a network that impacts tens of millions of people; work in a fun, fast paced start-up environment; be on a smart team that gets a lot done

Perks:

- Competitive salary

- Stock options

- Employer-paid health care

- Employer match of retirement contribution up to the maximum allowed by law

- Company credit card

- Multiple large monitors, Aeron chair

- Free food, drinks & snacks at the office (including all lunches & dinners)

- Gym membership

- Only 1 meeting per week

Must be willing to relocate to or near San Francisco, CA.

To apply, send your resume, recent projects, and anything else interesting about you to jobs@weebly.com.
This was actually explained in the article, which is about cooling things down close to absolute zero. I haven't thought about this enough to see if it makes sense, but the claim is that:

It's not too difficult to cool a system down to the temperature of the cosmic background radiation. All you need to do is build a radiator in interstellar space with a very large surface area, and connect it with the system you're trying to cool with some high thermal-conductance material.

However, even at the cosmic background temperature of T=3K, erasing a bit still costs a minimum of kTln 2 = 2.87e-23 J. What is needed is a way to efficiently cool a system down to near absolute zero. I think the only way
to do it is with black holes.
I thought this was gimicky at first but then installed it and went back to the HN homepage and...I'm blown away. This is really REALLY great and solves a problem people have been rehashing for a long, long time -- kudos!
True, but in fairness to bitskits, the author goes on to talk about paying to use FastMail as an alternative to Gmail. Yet, he doesn't provide any comparative uptime data to show that FastMail is objectively better.

As for being able to own your data and store local backups, you can do that with Gmail POP, or with Gmail IMAP and an email client that'll store messages locally.

(The author's argument that Gmail IMAP is buggy, is one anecdote; I can provide my own anecdote to the contrary. Again, we'd need some data to prove that FastMail is better.)
Maybe it is, but to the rest of us (read: "to me") it sounds pretty condescending.
The theoretical limit for your thermal efficiency is going to be based on the temperature of whatever you are cooling and the temperature of the environment you exhaust the waste heat into. Minimizing the latter is what he seems to be talking about here.

Since these equipment cannot
operate with perfect efficiency, they will need to eliminate waste heat.

Who says it has to operate at perfect efficiency? I would imagine that any slight improvement you get by incorporating a black hole into your cooling system (however the hell that would work) would be negated by the fact that a cooling system that involves a black hole is probably a bit expensive.
It also looks like twitter switched to Old Twitter. Temporary? I was always an apologist for New Twitter (it adds features! most people don't leave it open!) but after New Twitter for a few months being dunked back into OT feels so much better.
> * GL_COLOR_BIT should be GL_COLOR_BUFFER_BIT. This may be a change which occurred between the version the author used and the version I pulled today.

Fixed.

> Doesn't really mention which OGL libraries are needed.

Cmake is amazing :D
Its a way of making sure the power stays with the powerful.
I don't quite understand the marketing magic that the term "SLA" has over people. Are there SLAs that cover my actual losses due to downtime? Perhaps they exist, but I've never seen them

If my customers can't email me for a week, I assure you that a partial refund on the fee from my email provider is not going to make things right.
But assuming your radiator is going to be hot anyway (we've got a Dyson sphere to produce all this problematic energy, right?) then surely it's not that big a deal?

Still, it gets me thinking science-fictionally. Are there any stories where aliens invade the Earth just to use it as a heatsink? Travelling around from star to star, dumping all your waste heat into whatever planets you can find -- sounds like a great lifestyle.
High-Performance Web Applications in Haskell
It would be like someone in the Victorian era predicting that we'll farm whales for their oil...

That actually sounds like a pretty cool idea. Would it be possible to keep whales alive on land indefinitely?
I got to meet Brian recently on a trip out to SF, and he's a great guy - very straight forward and self-aware. He's already done this cross-country speaking tour and been quite involved in the scene. I'll be interested to see them progress.

I feel like the only thing keeping other kids from doing this earlier is knowing that they actually can. This shit should be on MTV or Nick Network by now... ;-)
If your blackhole is spinning, you can use its magnetic field as a source of energy. Eventually you will have robbed it of its spin, but that will take ... some time.
Having done this a few times with mysql-to-mysql moves across datacenters theres a couple things I would like to mention.

I dont know what Amazon RDS is like replaying binary logs but in mysql 5.0 I faced a bug where temporary table creation statements were being ignored. This was a huge problem from us and at the time could not find a work around. Here is the related mysql bug http://bugs.mysql.com/bug.php?id=35583

While this move has successfully worked for the author I hope if you ever do a database move you'll do a test run first. I've experience numerous bugs in mysql replication and replaying binary logs due to temporary tables, duplicate keys due to different auto insert ids and procs/trigs/funcs causing some havoc.
What?? That's absolutely ridiculous.The order form made no mention of this. I'm going to cancel my order now. I've looked past the hardware faults and other issues but not being upfront on the overall price is just disrespectful.
I've always been suspicious of the ethics of pirated music and I sincerely want to know how people who pirate music justify it. From my perspective, a musician put forth a lot of effort and cost into creating a piece of music. At that point, I consider that the musician owns what they have created and can choose whether to keep their music to themselves or share it with the wider world. From my point of view it is the musician who gets to decide what they want to do with their work: sell it through a record label, sell it independently, give it away for free. As a consumer of the music I don't think it's in my place to make the choice for the musician about what they want to do with their work. Is there something I'm missing? Am I framing it the wrong way? Or am I right in thinking that people who pirate music are unilaterally making the decision for the original musicians on how their work should be distributed?
There's a lot of energy to be had simply in pushing black holes around 'til they crash into each other.
I would think that the school you attended would be an important factor in the equation. And also what level of education that you received.
the website is wildly out of date... are they still doing it?
We're trying it a bit differently this time by posting a job listing with commenting abilities (as opposed to the usual YC listing that points to a jobs page, no comments).

Feel free to ask us any questions here!
I read statistics that it was the most violent city in Europe. During my 2 years there I didn't really see that side of the city- if you know what neighborhoods to avoid (like most other big cities) you'll be OK. I loved Glasgow- it has a great night life, interesting museums, great parks, wonderful people but the worst weather I've ever seen ;). After living in Glasgow, Edinburgh (granted I only spent 2 days there) seemed like "Disneyland Scotland"- very touristy and seemed a bit fake.
80 Startups Rejected From NYC Job Fair Launch Rival Gathering
Tough he makes some valid points, I don't think that having just his one app makes for a valid argument.

How were the apps marketed differently on each platform?

What are the release dates for each platform?

Here is a link to the iTunes web entry for the product http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/plane-finder-free/id361273585...
They won't be actual whales — we'll use their genetics "or something like that"
This is the old debate of whether CS should stand for Computer Science ( chips / signals / digital electronics ) or Computing Science ( algorithms / language design ).