skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
yes, quite right... maybe I should go and lie down somewhere...

But hey, at 75% efficiency at a half year's work at that rate I could probably afford it...
Most of the smart meters aren't billing rated currently. Also the meter's don't control how much electricity is generated.

As far as device control goes most of them only turn on and off simple switches. The only area that is of concern is running people's furnaces or air conditioning too much. Lots of vendors are moving away from directly controlling the temperature and just focusing on controlling energy usage.
What I haven't seen anybody acknowledge yet is that "critics" includes everyone who tiredly mourns comment quality. Everyone.

Depressingly, HN would rather front page an article about personal growth than admit that maybe, just maybe, all of this meta bitching is setting the tone. That's from the top down and I partially, and with respect, blame pg for carrying the flag of comments suck -- instead of taking an opportunity to turn common sentiment around.
Programming Contests, Algorithms, and the Real World Steven Skiena
What about NYC seedstart, alphalabs, or betaspring? The latter two are part of the tech stars network, so I am curious what people think.
It is the same reason I am commenting less and less.
I trust you know what you are doing. I'd like to warn others to be careful of what is removed, especially if you didn't put it there. The price is stability.
Very interesting/exciting/hopefully-not-terrifying news as I'm currently developing a video workflow tool for the Mac, for a contract client.
Disturbing:
"SoundHound and ShopSaavy transmit your fine GPS coordinates whenever you make a request to them."
Ask HN:  can I have 20 upvotes to do a salary poll?
I think we're all waiting for an anonymous salary poll, and am happy to do it if my throwaway account can get 20 karma.
Meet Duolingo, Google’s Next Acquisition Target; Learn A Language, Help The Web
No HTC Desire HD?
Rather than avoid deduplication (which is technically sound and benefits everyone), perhaps the solution to this is to make it impossible for DropBox itself to know who owns which files.

E.g. right now I assume a dropbox user owns a list of file ids with some metadata (e.g. that user's name for those files). If follows that if the government decides file XYZ is illegal then anyone with XYZ in their list is in trouble.

The user account could keep track of the total size of all the user's files and use arithmetic to keep it up-to-date, but not actually store the size of individual files except when they are "looked at".

So then the user's password (say) which is not itself stored is used to unlock stuff in the user's file table on a per request basis -- i.e. the actual file ids are only computed as needed. The actual mechanism doesn't need to be terribly secure, it just needs to be deniable. In other words without the user's password we simply cannot unambiguously determine which files are his or hers.
Nice, but I bet I'm not the only one in the USA who would also appreciate a hint as to which networks/technologies the phones are compatible with.
True. There could also be some kind of Xobni/Plaxo/etc. tie-in here to connect email addresses or phone numbers to mailing addresses.
Again, mazes and Towers of Hanoi are neat, but still not exactly what you'd call problems with real-world applicability. There must be some out there -- some types of parsers, perhaps? Are there any matrix operations which are best done recursively?

I just think that recursion falls into the category of things that professors think are neat rather than the category of things that are useful to students. Some students will love that kind of thing, others will wonder what the hell the point is.
I think software makers have just decided they don't like decimal points anymore. It has little to do with development pace and everything to do with what they feel like calling something.

How many other things are overhyped? AT&T's 4G, somehow much better than 3G? iTunes version 10, despite having the features of an iTunes 4? There are no rules, so no marketer follows any.
While this won't help the OP, I think it might be valuable for some others here, particularly those with kids.

I have one year left in my undergraduate degree. My parents paid for the whole thing, including a semester in Europe.

Since I was old enough to understand my parents have made "the deal" very clear to me. My university education was promised, but it wasn't free. Whether I had children or not, it was my responsibility to pay for at least one young person to have a higher education.

It turns out this was a real gift. My life has at least one very real goal post. It contributed to my decision to choose a degree which would give me some marketable skills and it serves as a very tangible motivation to be financially responsible- I'm just a steward of the opportunity that was given to me.

I plan on making this expectation just as explicit with my kids and maybe some of you will as well. It may help keep your grandkids out of the OP's situation.

Edit: Maybe this will help the OP. Imagine helping your kids avoid your situation, you don't have to pay for all of it, but if you work your way out of this you will be able to help them. Think a few generations out from yourself, it could be the extra motivation you need to grind your way out of this.
DreamIt Ventures started in Philly and is launching in NYC this Summer. They take applicants for both startups as well as hackers interested in being matched up with a startup (Somewhat like being a Techstars "Hackstar")
Isn't public income considered to be the cause of inflating CEO pay?
When I first started using foursquare it was neat but I didn't get the appeal. Then I grabbed my first mayorship and for a few months, I checked in religiously. Recently, checking in to places has become a chore. I still do check in when I remember to, but it's not a priority any more.
Meta posts and comments may be boring, but based on pretty close observation I don't think they're setting the tone. I fear it is nothing so exciting. The most likely explanation is simply that HN is reverting to the mean for forums.
A better way to say it is:

"Four times per hour, every hour on the 6th minute, the 21st minute, the 36th minute and 51st minute."

If I'm not mistaken, media temple just wants to back up 4 times per hour and to keep from getting slammed at the quarters, they randomize a bit the defaults they hand out.
I liked the presentation, she clearly knows CSS well, but do count me amongst those that did not buy in to her theory. I've seen plenty of horrific stylesheets and seen some that over time turn into incomprehensible messes, but I didn't see in this presentation any real connection from follow best practices, result in unmaintainable CSS. It just doesn't follow. That some coder come-lately can get in there and instead of adapting a stylesheet intelligently just starts throwing random hooks here and there and bam! suddenly we have another mess...? it happens, too often. Can that in any way be ameliorated by not following best practices to begin with? by not doing semantic markup? how? makes no sense.
In my first year programming course, our prof spent 10-15 minutes at most talking about recursion. I was already familiar with it, but my classmates (mostly non-CS majors) had no problems understanding the concept. Since that experience I'm always slightly amused when I hear people saying that teaching basics of recursion is hard.

Perhaps it isn't taught properly? When you're just starting out with it, there really isn't much to teach though.
I dislike this change.
The Human Brain Atlas
Robotics Merit Badge Gets Real: Geeks Unite
Government spending as a percentage of GDP per country

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_spending#Government_...
That's what everyone is looking for .
Well, that's not a true statement. Can you point out what wording implies that? If it really is unclear, we'll change it.

The note "Important: phones may change from one category to another when manufacturers and carriers release updates." refers to obtaining root access on a new phone.
If you're running a custom build, it's highly unlikely (read impossible) for a carrier update to be applied over your device. If you are running a rooted carrier build, you may end up with an OTA applied over your build that removes your root access.

Motorola has apparently rolled out silent updates that kill root. This is why they are in the "poor" category.

http://www.androidpolice.com/2011/04/12/happening-now-droid-...
OK. In all seriousness, my personal preference is a tool that would a)let me tag every connection, feed, and post arbitrarily, b)display the most common connections/posts/tags/posts-from-connection-tagged-x easily, c) let me specify tag groupings via drag-and-drop and command-line regex, d) handle all logins without jacking my privacy.

I'll pay you zero dollars for it, but I'll let you show me relevant ads on alternate Thursday. You in?
I get No instance for (Monad ((->) [a])) -am I missing some module include?
Standing my ground.

Common sentiment is now comments are declining in quality. Wherever that came from, that's now parroted fairly often and is undoubtedly planted in the back of everybody's head as they go about their business. That cannibalizes some comments, because people now think "am I contributing to a decline?". That makes people more inclined to snark, to discourage others from adding to the decline. This is the exact sort of thing I watch happen all day long in the comments now.

Take one recent example. Someone quoted a highlight from a linked article because it was humorous, and you could have missed it[1]. They presented no original thought on it themselves, they simply quoted it verbatim. Some asshole came along and berated him for it, as if he'd committed some kind of grievous sin. The fact is, I enjoyed the quote in question, and I upvoted him because I'm glad somebody else noticed. Worse comments have happened, but now there's such a fixation with "quality" that people are starting to up the snark. Which adds to the very problem we're trying to fix. Look at that entire thread.

The rub is that rather than focus on opportunities for improving going forward, this community has an inane fascination with returning to the way things were. Your thread was too late, I'm afraid, as the negativity has accelerated any decline that exists.

You're dead-on; HN is reverting to the mean. This navelgazing lament about the times that were is setting the pace for the future evolution of HN, though. The high-karma users have spent so much time wondering how to get back to the past -- a now completely unattainable goal due to growth, I'm sorry -- that there has been immeasurable lost opportunity on focusing on where to go from here.

I'm not sure that technological improvements are going to fix it, either. Even if the negative trend is as pronounced as believed (and I don't think it is), acknowledging it and spending countless comments focusing on it has cost precious time in reversing it.

Rather than embracing the inevitable evolution, understanding it, and finding ways to make the evolution more positive, we've established blood-curdling fear at the mere prospect of evolution. Now, that glacial evolution is sliding along on a trail of fear instead of a trail of positive outlook.

[1]: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2437486
I think freelancing is a quicker way to get established and reach a high value if you can swing the social and project management aspects. Especially early on, your value increases enormously with each deliverable product you produce. Freelancing allows you to build a portfolio quickly, and you'll be able to point others to jobs you've completed. Successful jobs also inevitably lead to referrals and you can raise your rate on every new contract as your portfolio improves and you become more valuable.

Working for a salary, you can easily get stuck on projects that aren't portfolio-worthy, don't teach you anything that useful, and which you only have a small hand in anyway. And naturally it's comparatively much harder to get pay increases. One solid project that impresses people can take you from charging $50 to $100 an hour as a freelancer overnight. Try convincing your boss to double your salary after 3 months just because you've been shipping good code.

As for breaking in, talk to as many people as you can. Go to meetups, talks, events, whatever is happening, in both the programming AND (very importantly) business/entrepreneurship categories. Just chat and share ideas. If you're confident and you've got brains, people will recognize it, and you'll soon need to beat offers away with a stick. The first gig is the hardest to get because you have nothing to point to in your portfolio. Do this one for free if you have to, or build things on your own. Whatever it takes to get something finished that you can use to prove your competence.
Scientists Develop Brain-Computer Interface for Cell Phones
Dutch Government To Outlaw File-Sharing
Passkey - the best DVD & Blu-ray decrypter
Passkey, the best DVD & Blu-ray decrypter for any DVD/Blu-ray disc, offers the powerful software to remove all known DVD & Blu-ray protections on the fly to let you use other software to access movie content to play, copy, clone, burn, rip, convert, etc.
Yes, yes, sure, in the greater sense of things everything is dead or dying. However, I think it's a bit silly to write off a phenomenon, market, or product while it's still in the explosive growth stage. I personally don't like foursquare but it seems to be going even strong as ever, which is all the more impressive after having weathered some rather strong competition (such as facebook).
Except that adjacent vertical margins collapse on each other, so the space is the larger of the 2 margin values not the sum.

more info: http://reference.sitepoint.com/css/collapsingmargins

This is not true of padding (unless you count a bug in IE8 where percentage-based padding-bottom collapses on the margin-bottom)
Given the quantity of android devices this list is depressingly short. Guess i'm gonna be hanging onto the old n1 for a while.
There are many reasons why a new team member might be needed urgently...
Idea: track the upvotes/downvotes/flags of users and compare them to your upvotes/downvotes/flags (and maybe other respected users). If there are striking similarities, take a closer look. If things still look good (observe comments, submissions), you've identified at least a few potential moderators.

(Also, since I'm sure anyone commenting on the state of HN will have their account scrutinized, my first account is nearly 2 years old, and I've been looking at HN for around 3 years total.)
Yes, exactly, recursive descent parsers are what they sound like. I'm not very up on other types of parsers, but this is the kind I learned about, and I would say they are very intuitive.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recursive_descent_parser
HN needs anon comments. I have specific questions, but not ones I want my name on =)
> To scroll a window in Windows, the window needs to have focus.

Katmouse http://ehiti.de/katmouse/
Ouch...

edit maybe if you implemented to spec...
Not that disturbing. They ask for these permissions when you install them.
> But that's not only what SE about. It's also about taking all the various algos, data structures and design patterns in a system, and pulling them together on time, on spec and on budget.

Unfortunately, no-one has yet worked out how to do that reliably and repeatably, which is why "software engineering" isn't.

Then again, "computer science" isn't either.

If we're going to have a sensible discussion about splitting theoretical/mathematical courses from practical/applied ones, perhaps we should start by completely removing the misleading terms CS and SE from the debate.
That your last parenthetical is necessary to have an opinion about the direction here is telling, to say the least.
In Silicon Valley, is it expected that you'll negotiate an offer? If so, by how much? In general in Detroit, offers are final (clearly a generalization, but true of big co's).
Show HN: A Y Combinator for Objective-C
Long shot here, but do you happen to teach at a certain engineering school in Philadelphia?

I think I had a CS prof who introduced recursion with this phrase, and it sounds like the class schedule matches up...
A better language (that compiles to CSS) won't solve the problems presented in the slide. I have to admit, my CSS tends to get ugly over time simply because the cascading and specificity rules in CSS so are complicated. And sass and less don't change that, they just make it easier to repeat yourself when it is required.
Commas, Refactoring, and Learning How to Program
Is it just me or does it appear that Lorne Michaels (page 7) is playing Snood on his computer? https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Snood_%28vide...
There's no shortage of moderators. The question is what to have them do. Are you suggesting all comments should be approved by moderators before becoming visible? I've considered variants of that, e.g. for new accounts.
I was thinking more about prohibition-style rebellion
I've been standing for about two months now. The thing to keep in mind is that yes, it's an improvement over sitting for 8 hours straight, but not a "cure", or something that somehow will save us from the health-related problems of sitting for too long, if all we do now is just stand, also for too long.

Anyway, it's been mostly good for me but I've made adjustments. After a couple of times in which I worked for 12-14 hrs in a day, standing the whole time, mostly with locked knees and not really moving much, one morning I was surprised to look down and see my ankles swollen a bit. I ended up buying a cheap wooden stool, not comfortable for more than 20-30 minutes, so I can now take breaks from standing, sit for a little while then naturally gravitate back to the standing position once that becomes uncomfortable. The stool also conveniently has rests where I can put a leg or foot, then switch, etc. I was probably lucky to find one that is the right height so when I sit I retain the same vertical position in relation to the desk.
Because it gives the user "plausible deniability" in case RIAA/MPAA serves him a notice.
If it helps - people complain, then they leave. You won't have to endure it much longer, I'm sure.
If comments "seem worse," then in what way are they worse? That may help find an answer.

My general hypothesis is that you can improve comment quality by giving users more metrics than just an upvote or downvote.

For example, consider the following:

Some people are saying there's a lot more negativity around here. I think that's true. Also, I've found that if someone is negative towards me in a way that seems personal, I get defensive and have to work hard to not respond in kind (and sometimes I respond in a mean way anyways). Sometimes these kinds of arguments get a lot of upvotes, because lots of people take one side or the other, and new people get drawn in.

One way to deal with this particular problem would be to treat comments that are "mean" differently from comments that just aren't interesting or insightful or correct.

For example, you could just cut off, or gray out, any comment thread that becomes "mean," thus diverting attention from it; people already involved would be able to continue if they want, knowing nobody else will probably look at it, and new people won't get drawn in. How you detect when a thread becomes "mean" is not easy, but maybe you could have a "mean" button/flag. A person clicks the "mean" flag to vote the thread as mean, but their vote's power is weighted against their karma, and then there is a threshhold that, if reached, actually designates the thread as "mean" and greys it out or whatnot.

Now, the point of this comment is not actually the specific "meanness" example, but the hypothesis I laid out at the beginning of the comment.

I mean, hell, you could try a bunch of different metrics. Just create a little "metrics bar" that allows users to vote on various things (like "meanness," etc.) and rotate a few different options through over time just to see which ones help or give interesting data. Keep the normal voting much more prominent, though, and make this metrics bar less prominent, so that it can be ignored and doesn't impact the UX much for those not interested.
Ironically, the topmost article in the screenshot in his blog post[0] was lauded as "the perfect Hacker News article" in the most upvoted comment.

0: http://hackerne.ws/item?id=2419347
Great blog post from the perspective of an educated enthusiast feeling their way around and trying to take advantage of new hardware to solve old problems.

For those that are interested in the intersection of databases and ssd's take a look at http://rethinkdb.com/ . They have been covered here before, http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1235545 .
I was once a huge contributor at deals.woot! After awhile, though, I started to notice the decline in the quality of posts, as more and more users filtered in. I remember being extremely annoyed by corporate accounts that spammed the "fresh" page with worthless "deals". It seemed like deals.woot! was reaching it's eternal September...

But new users might have also blamed the crappy atmosphere on me--that bitching old guy with the superiority complex is everything that's wrong with deals.woot! We need to get rid of people like him!

We know which side we're on. Deals.woot! went one way and I went the other. HN is heading in one direction... and if you don't like it, I'm sorry to say that you may not be able to change it.

Disclaimer: I just want to clarify that I am one of those stupid HN noobs.
Thanks for the explanation I'll add it to the post. Although I still feel like a bone head for thinking it was 11 years.
The value you bring to the organisation is often beyond your control. You may be allocated to a profitable project or "on the bench" if the work has temporarily dried up.

Not many employees would be happy taking a salary cut if their skillset becames less valuable (for whatever reason
).

There are so many variations and possible complications I don't think there is a fair "solution" to the salary disclosure question.

Different approaches work at different times for different organisations.
Your comment is ironic given the comment that you started with.

I am speaking from the perspective of improving HN, so I'm startled (should I be?) to find that the first reply is an admitting that the community will eventually split apart.
Hotel Santiago Chile | Hotel InterContinental Santiago
I've worked with these in my current company. We had to provide integrations from our product to UCS (still in alpha stages). It's a mixed bag of feelings working with these beasts. They are quite complex to work with but their integration API is simple and consistent.
"Windows goes even further: you can click through a link or button on a non-focused window."

This is a interaction design mistake. On Windows, if you click inside an unfocused window you can perform an action otherwise unintended, Mac OS X's way and Haiku's (www.haiku-os.org) is correct. Interestingly Firefox follows the Mac way, but on at least Windows Chrome does not, and if you happen to unintentionally select the close tab button, you're tab close and if you're in Incognito mode, you lose that tab because there is no history.
You are surely correct. That is not the angle I had in mind. More of a 'school loans should not be thought of as a fountain of magical money -- you'll have to pay it back. Think hard about it' kind of perspective. It is possible to scale back your social life to work a bit and/or remember choice in school to keep the price in check. Or give thought to your major and prospect for paying it back with a typical career track. Or (probably as a side note (unfortunately?) when talking with permission of a high school counselor) taking up a trade that does not require as much formal schooling...
So did she ever end up making 120k?