skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I fully recognize that Git/hub is not ideal for this use case, and actually considered trying to build a service around exactly this, but decided it would be too much of an undertaking as a side project, and I'd rather just get the music out there instead.

Also the main reason I used github is the ease of forking, and strong community behind it.
Should've made a note-- I upgraded to a paid account shortly after posting this. You're absolutely right.
Yep, it's not a perfect solution. Hopefully somebody makes something a little better suited to this in the future :-)
Basic economics should be a mandatory lesson at school

But if it were, and voters and taxpayers actually entered adult life with a sound knowledge of economics, they would demand that the school system be radically restructured, which is why I don't think that this will happen.

"The education system is a formalised, bureaucratic organisational structure and, like any bureaucratic organisational structure, it strives for maximum autonomy from external pressures as its cardinal principle of survival. While ostensibly devoted to the education of children, teachers, school administrators and local education officers must nevertheless regard parents acting on behalf of children as a force to be kept at bay because parental pressures in effect threaten the autonomy of the educational system. . . . I would hold that the stupefying conservatism of the educational system and its utter disdain of non-professional opinion is such that nothing less than a radical shake-up of the financing mechanism will do much to promote parental power." -- Mark Blaug, "Education Vouchers--It All Depends on What You Mean," in Economics of Privatization, J. Le Grand & R. Robinson, ed. (1985)

After edit: Mark Blaug is quoted here in large part because years ago a public schoolteacher suggested that I read his writings on the economics of education. I discovered the quotation above back then. Blaug is one of the leading economists of education in the world, one of the founders of human capital theory, and an interesting example of an economist who has changed his ideological position over time as he gained more life experience and did more research.

http://clubtroppo.com.au/2009/05/07/the-remarkable-career-of...

http://www.neaydinonat.com/blog/?p=712

http://www.bookrags.com/tandf/blaug-mark-1927-tf/
In first-world countries, most calculations value human lives in the millions of dollars. A bit less for infants and elderly, a bit more for young adults.

http://squid314.livejournal.com/260949.html explains the math pretty well:

Contrary to popular belief, you can put a dollar value on human life. That dollar value is $5.8 million. Denying this leads to terrible consequences. Let me explain.

We can do the same sort of thing with the environment. Of course, people get outraged if you frame it the wrong way, since they don't like trading "sacred values" for secular ones. (http://faculty.haas.berkeley.edu/tetlock/Vita/Philip%20Tetlo...)
Creating A Cool CSS3 Button Shortcode For WordPress
Step by step tutorial showing you how to create a cool CSS3 download button shortcode for WordPress.
I'm anxiously awaiting the existence of a better solution, unfortunately I had to make do with the best option currently available.
A guide to testing in django (part 1)
There is a difference between needing something and finding something useful.
The US Government Keeps Harassing a UW Researcher Who Speaks for WikiLeaks
It's ridiculously overpriced, but the value added is very good.

The first phrase makes the second less likely to be true.

On the basis of international comparisons, including comparisons with a country outside the United States I have lived in for two three-year stays, I don't think K-12 schooling in the United States offers good value added or good value for the price paid by taxpayers.

http://www.oecd.org/dataoecd/45/48/37864432.pdf

http://www.oecd.org/dataoecd/54/12/46643496.pdf

After edit:

http://www.hks.harvard.edu/pepg/PDF/Papers/PEPG10-19_Hanushe...

Many of the comparisons of United States population subgroups to populations of other countries ignore the serious issue of underperformance of United States schools in serving students from the most advantaged subgroups. The least advantaged subgroups of United States students can't be used as an excuse for lousy performance of the whole national non-system when that non-system also underperforms for the children of college graduates and for children of "white" families and children in the wealthiest neighborhoods.
On LWN, a user pointed out that text analysis tools show that some Groklaw articles were definitely written by male authors and others definitely by female authors:
http://lwn.net/Articles/437741/

This is yet another clear indication that "PJ" was just an avatar.
No.

>Remember when WordPress was criticized for being “just a simple blogging platform”?

Have WordPress really ever been called that? The admin/settings interface is ridiculous.
Why your Content marketign fails
A trillion years ago, I had to get 50 Lisp machines speaking in an SNA network to American Express' IBM mainframes. The programmers of two companies got our network engineers together, and we designed a protocol to minimize network overhead and still be all robust, fast, reliable, recoverable....

American Express mainframes were available for our use six months down the road, at 2am and for 2 hours. Once a month. They didn't have (or offer us) any sort of testing environment. We went live at 2am for two hours and could debug our code after that offline. At least that was the common Amex procedure.

So I wanted to build our half of the protocol, plus a simulator of their half the protocol.

What I ended up doing was creating a DSL for describing the finite state machine at the heart of our protocol. Allowing the user (me) to easily specify the parameters of each state and associate them with behavior. Timeouts, transitions, actions to take, error conditions, etc.

(def-state ...)

Upon doing that my simulator basically fell out trivially, and we could test the network, test our responses, inject errors, all sorts of fun things.

It's 2am at Amex and we're going live and many people at Amex dislike our crazy group with our non-IBM machines and they'd love to see us fail. And guess what? It doesn't work. American Express' mainframe code implementation of or protocol is just wrong and not what we agreed to.

Eh whatever. It took 30 minutes to confirm there was a problem, another 30 minutes to figure out what the erroneous state implementations were doing, and then instead of going back to cry at our hotel, I just changed our protocol to match theirs, and ... it worked.

Not as exciting as saving the Apollo moon landing, but it's my story.

So I was able to "think like a language designer", and I created a language very specific to our needs in Lisp. Describe a communications protocol and decorate the states with the constraints and behavior you need.

And at 2am, it was very nice to be able to "think like a finite state machine" developer, and just focus directly on re-arranging the states and their transitions and be confident the underlying machinery would deal with the rest.

fwiw.
Great point. I think that my simplistic example is just that, simplistic. A better solution for huge collections would be to memoize the retrieval of the $() obj with something like

var memd = {},
getMem = function(obj){
var o;
if(memd[obj]){
o = memd[obj];
}else{
o = memd[obj] = $(obj);
}
return o;
};

and call that function instead of calling $() while inside of an event handler (I havent tested this code, but the concept is straight forward)
It's important to distinguish C++ expertise from that of other languages. C++ is so large (and with C++0x will be larger still) that any expert you do meet will know at best a large portion of some subset of the language. And this is fine.

The most important skill is general problem solving, and for this a variety of tools is helpful. So in the C++ world, focus on a few language features that are most different from one another. Make sure you know basically how templates work, but don't fret if you've never seen a specialization or any of the 44 corner cases that are unsupported or undefined. Learn at least common STL containers like vectors, sets and maps, and learn basic_string. Expose yourself to at least one algorithm like fill_n(), and recognize how it is different for vectors versus C arrays. Learn ostringstream. Use namespaces, and learn about the "using" keyword. Learn the basics of classes, constructors and destructors, and the RAII technique. Master all of this before exploring the messes that are inheritance and exception handling.
I agree 100% with your comment. I think it was incredibly frustrating going through college in classes where people were there just since it is a requirement for basic jobs today. University should not be forced upon these people who want a four year party away from their parents... let it be for people who want to do something more focused than a general education.

The mandatory college experience has to be stopped or I fear the race to the bottom of higher education much like what has happened in the K-12 education.
We put a project up on Kickstarter back in February and got a ton of press, but it failed. http://kck.st/eSx2KR

That being said, you should absolutely put your idea up on Kickstarter.

You'll never know someone's true opinions about your product until you ask them to take out their credit card. And because you're so close to the work, you have no idea what's actually important to customers. So at the very least Kickstarter is a great way to get customer feedback. If it fails you can always launch again at no cost to you or your backers.

My biggest piece of advice is to keep the pledge tiers simple. We threw in other products because we couldn't offer a 'special edition' of the Classics. Bad idea. A special edition isn't necessary and we just made it confusing for potential backers.

We also priced the Classics way too high, but given our manufacturing situation at the time that's what we had to do. So the con is our project failed, but the silver lining is that people came out and told us what they wanted the price to be. It also brought a bunch of manufacturers and distributors directly to us.

Email me anthony[at]joystickers[dot]com if you have any specific questions you'd like answered.

Good luck!
Must Watch:The Startup Kids, A Documentary About Startup Founders
التسجيل الصوتي للرئيس المصري السابق حسني مبارك علي قناة العربيه الاحد 10/4/2011
Has anyone ever looked at the internals of WP? You'll find all of the worst practices known in PHP development (which I find to be a bad practice all it's own). Maybe it's bias, but I can't imagine people who write such poor code being able to compete with a startup that actually uses technology competently (which may or may not be Tumblr).

In this case the question is more about whether Tumblr serves a specific need better than WP and not apparently about technical superiority. Still, again, if you can infer anything about the minds behind WP from the code they write then these guys are creating an app that was cutting-edge innovative maybe ten years ago. For God's sake they don't even have a proper separation of logic from presentation.
Oden's new "Extreme" portion
Though I mostly agree, I sincerely hate this, and this isn't the first time I've seen it:

> but I can't imagine people who write such poor code being able to compete with a startup that actually uses technology competently

It's a pretty big jump from coding quality to inability to run a startup. You're assuming it's the same people, for one, and history has shown us that code quality has nothing to do with startup success. In this specific case, doesn't Wordpress contribute useful high-scalability software back to the community? I'm drawing a blank but I seem to remember something like that.
He emphasized on the vision. Great craftsmanship follows.
So any use of software patents is unduly "exclusionary [and] anticompetitive", especially when applied to commercial users of open-source software?

I hadn't really picked up a strong "they're all wrong" vibe from what I've seen of your coverage of the smartphone mess.
My takeaway from this is that the goal of data analysis is, above all, insight. This insight could come from eyeballing the data or visualizing it the right way, or it could come from applying sophisticated mathematical techniques. Sometimes it's very useful to notice that a particular mathematical technique might naturally apply, but you have to be careful that it is well justified with regard to getting the right insight, and not just pattern matching a technique/problem pair that you've seen before.
Protei, Open Hardware Oil Spill Cleaning Sailing Robot
Not so sure about that... Git would let you do something like this, and if the tracks are separately stored, you could pick and choose commits, and fork, branch, merge, etc.

git branch newleadsinger

git commit -m "added new main vocal track"

git commit -m "trying new drum track"

git commit -m "guitar track moved up a key"

git commit -m "more cowbell"

git commit -m "less cowbell"

git commit -m "deleted cowbell track"

git commit -m "added echo to vocal track"
For the most part, I agree with the general sentiments in this thread (this is abuse of github), but the ability to change already distributed music is a great idea.

It would be really cool to open your music software and be able to listen to the artist's newest iteration of a song (like while it's being written or polished during studio time). You could follow the entire evolution of an album from birth to release. Or you could browse the various remixes and changes that others create. It would be a world wide jam that could extend for weeks or months that anyone could enjoy as either an audience member or a participant.
The creators of GWT faced the same problem, and they have addressed it by making some shrewd choices.

The first such choice was to support a strictly static subset of Java - one that eliminates reflection - so that the compiler can prove exactly which lines of code will be used in the application, and aggressively eliminate those that are not. The compiler does this by building a graph rooted at the entry point and following method calls. For example, if your GWT application uses the ArrayList class, but it never uses its remove() method, then the code for remove() is not included in the resulting JavaScript output. They refer to this as the "pay as you go" design philosophy.

Other minification techniques are used in addition to this, but the most impact comes from choosing a strict static subset of the source language.

The next choice that the creators of GWT made was to make the compiler aware of a special method GWT.runAsync(). When the compiler encounters this method in the aforementioned graph, it knows that it can break the javascript into pieces, so that code on the far side of that call is loaded lazily when it is encountered, as opposed to in the initial bundle. This "developer guided code splitting" saves the user from having to wait for a 5 megabyte download when they only need to wait for 1 megabyte, etc.

There's no reason that Emscripten cannot use these techniques, other than an unwillingness to make the hard choice of sacrificing some expressiveness in the source language.
Reprap seems like a neat idea, but it's not yet capable of making stuff that I'd want. It's low-res, and doesn't print metal. If and when it does these things, I think it'll be worth talking about. So maybe it's like the Apple I was back in 1976. The Shapeways printer the article talks about does cost something on the order of a 1970s minicomputer...

The reason I'm skeptical about Reprap is that it's not a business, but they're trying to make hardware. So I'm not sure that they'll ever achieve their goals before a startup does it first and better. Apple had a lot of money, and they used plenty of it to create the Mac, which was the first desktop computer that had the interface and capabilities that most people really wanted (easy desktop publishing, for example.)
Ungraceful degradation on major websites
I would love to know if Kayak is one of those "you push to production on your first day" kind of places.

The intersection of those two practices (the 7 day recruitment and hit-the-ground-running) could make for some amazing team velocity improvements.
> Have WordPress really ever been called that?

Yes it has. When compared to drupal and the like, people used to say it only did one thing (blogging) and did it well. I think this is still true.
Is that $300K their collective annual tuition or the amount paid for the credit hours for the course?
It should also be pointed out that two observers moving at different speeds would not agree on how far away the black hole is.
I agree, C# is awesome developer experience in terms of the IDE, but the rest of .Net ecosystem has never really materialized.
No, ItsNat is not a silver bullet, it has a focus in some problems and just solves some problems.

Disclaimer: I'm the author of this tool.
Nice presentation, I am not sure about most people here but I started using jQuery because the documentation was excellent, easy to navigate, with lots of examples. Hence trying it out was simple and I got hooked.

At that time IMO the other libraries apart from YUI, did not seem to have everything in place to learn how to use them quickly. I was put off YUI at the time because it seemed incredibly verbose, this has since been improved.

Also I think a distinction can be made between using jQuery and using the widget factory which does allow for more modular maintainable code.
That's true, but you also can't, in general, churn out physics or mathematics PhDs from anything that can realistically be called a four-year undergraduate program.
I don't want to appear snarky, but as you admit yourself ("I dont have any data on it") you don't know if creating a jQuery object is expensive or not (to be fair, I don't know either) - so why all the extra complexity if you don't know whether the thing you are trying to avoid (creating instance of jQuery during event handlers) actually causes problems or not?
It is not just this, each time they do something stupid a few people learn how to download and hide their tracks and it is not like they are going to go and buy it if it later becomes available legally.

Heck, in Denmark you can't buy a single video on iTunes, not even old out of date stuff or even public domain videos.

I wonder how many people learned to pirate based on that? At the very least they are loosing revenue (especially since this stuff isn't something people will actually find in a normal store) most likely they are training future pirates.
it would be a good match if we had a language to describe the music.
somebody must be working in that space right?

/me is ignorant of such things
The big deal about RepRap isn't so much what it can do but the fact that it is:

1) Low cost

2) Open source

3) Self-replicating

These attributes make it a lot more economically accessible to people who wouldn't otherwise be in a position to learn about and use this technology.

It could allow a bootstrapping hardware startup to produce their first product prototype. The economic value that could result is immense.

Just because RepRap doesn't meet your needs doesn't mean it's not worth talking about.
Perfect timing: a bug that only shows up in the first 250ms of a day
Did you mean "shift" instead of select? That's the only way I could get it to work.
Of course, $11 in Fukushima-ken likely gets you more than the same in Tokyo. Ignoring this simple fact comes off as dishonest to me.
Blah, yeah. Maybe we should add a select key to keyboards (kidding)
Convert JSON to a Unix-friendly line-based format
Rainmaking via developer communities
There's at least one way to express musical notation in LaTeX. But there's more to it than that...
You're now trying, not for the first time in this discussion, quite desperately to pretend not to understand what I say.

You previously just phrased my 3rd option differently to artifically create a 4th option.

Now you don't take into account that I explained 3 different approaches: grant a free license, grant a FRAND license, and prohibit any implementation of the patented invention only to foreclose competition, which is exactly what IBM (a monopolist in the context we're discussing) tried. Fortunately, the European Commission is investigating IBM for suspected violations of EU competition law.
I'd argue that it's a good thing to use an algorithm that is efficient in and of itself. (And perhaps a language which invites the use of such an algorithm.)
"It doesn’t take much. But it takes more than nothing." - excellent way of putting it.
Show HN: Startup Weekend Project: under development NOW
> jQuery as commonly used leads, in my personal experience, to hard-to-maintain programs.

People using jQuery improperly is not something wrong with jQuery. jQuery is perfectly fine for large web applications, you just need to organize your code properly, with something like a MVC and ORM layer.
>The productivity of virtually every job in the country depends in part on the employee's ability to use a computer.

Don't you think that's somewhat of an overstatement?
Agile Web Development With Rails simply cannot be oversold. The first editon of this book was pivotal for me - I just didn't know things could be that way. It should be recommended as a general horizon broadening book to any programmer, web or otherwise.
Our company cannot get their ads to work - the quality is horrendous vs. AdWords/MSN.
There are over two thousand four year colleges in the US. Saying we have (random number) 80 of the top 200 colleges in the world doesn't mean the system as a whole is producing adequate results.

Performance metrics should always be stated/calculated to reflect efficiency.
Finishing the ORM seems to be the biggest deal right now, you can have a look at the roadmap (http://rad-dev.org/lithium/wiki/about/roadmap).

The links you are looking for:

• documentation (javadoc-style): http://lithify.me/docs

• drafts (book-like): http://dev.lithify.me/drafts/source/en

• community: irc://irc.freenode.net/#li3

They are hard to find, I agree.
Chrome does indeed jump way down the page on load. No idea what possible "technique" this would be other than "weird out the reader."
Yes, I think you're absolutely right. What the publisher is doing, and Ariely agreeing with is known as Value Pricing: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Value-based_pricing.

It's a great way to make sure you optimize your short term profits. And yes, your customer feels ripped off by it as prices as well they should as you have just siphoned off their economic value.

Bye bye customer relationship!
Well the concept of observation and causality would be broken/meaningless because this would imply an infinite speed of light. Hence there would be no limit to the speed with which information could be transmitted. We would have much more interesting things to worry about, like if and how we could exist.
I bet there is a strong correlation between Data (the character) and a programmer.

seems a tad cliched, don't you think? i'd bet that most people wouldn't want to self-associate with an emotionless android
If you're having problems with JVM startup time, there are things like Nailgun that can solve that for you: http://www.martiansoftware.com/nailgun/