skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
As someone who has been a "contractor who ignores all the political bullshit", my personal observation is that it is the contractors who are actually good at navigating the political bullshit (win friends and influence people and all that jazz) tend to be the ones who get top dollar and have continuous employment. Whereas the contractors who are merely extraordinarily good at programming tend to have a lot of downtime in between short engagements.

Some people think that if you have social skills you can't be a 'real' hacker, but often sales skills and good presentation are a force multiplier for a contractor with good technical skills.
At my office, it has nothing to do with parenthesis and everything to do with the fact that a new person can be pointed to http://docs.djangoproject.com/en/1.3/ and told to get started. Done. They can learn it all on their own.

In all these lamentations about LISP not being top-dog I never see anyone point to a tutorial to bootstrap a project for a beginner.

The first google result for lisp web framework points to http://common-lisp.net/project/cl-weblocks/ which points to a Trac site for documentation which points to http://weblocks.viridian-project.de/ and under documentation you can get a link to the early draft of the guide at http://viridian-project.de/~sky/user-guide.stx.html

And once you finally arrive at the destination, there isn't a complete set of documentation. The project actually looks pretty cool, but how could I rationalise trying to learn off a set of incomplete docs? Or recommending it in a professional environment?

EDIT: And looking over the comments here, the only links offsite is someone complaining about pricing and someone else offering up some git projects where someone is currently translating a project into english. Pretty fucking pompous to say non-Lispers are scared of parens.
IEEE's cloud portability project: A fool's errand?
I think it's great to encourage designers to be founders. The arguments against commodification of design (i.e. crowdsourcing) usually include that it "devalues design."

I think more designers should take advantage of the incredible value they can create – practically for free – by being entrepreneurs instead; instead of worrying about clients that "don't understand the value of good design."
Why mobile app success is more than just download numbers
Your post is stupid :D
I was teaching one of my good friend C way back in undergrad(1999). After explaining him about loops among other stuff...i asked him to print something in loop. And this is what he wrote

For(i=1 to 10)
{then print i;
}
Today my friend is working as a techie ....senior mgr at his new company!
I'm sure they've done a lot of tests, but running servers in an environment with 65% humidity just doesn't sound good for them.
Ask HN: iOS app icon / UI designers available?
Icon will involve a face. Having trouble finding a designer with necessary skill set.

Send me an email for more info if interested.

Thanks!
IEEE launches pioneering cloud computing initiative
Poll: How do you read your news?
Hi HN'ers,

I'm trying to figure out how you pick up news online on an average day. Is it through means of link aggregates like HN, Reddit, Alltop, etc., through feed burner or is it through actual news publishers. Let me know by answering this poll.
Alltop
News publications (Techcrunch, WSJ, Mashable, etc.)
Stumble Upon,
Combination of a few of these
They will send all the emails at once "something this evening CA time".

source:
https://convore.com/yc-s11-apps/high-school-students-that-ap...
Even if integrating desktop, tablet, and phone in a way that has never been envisioned is a good idea at all (and I can't say). I feel that Windows 8 will either be way too soon to do it well, or they will way take too long to ship Windows 8. We haven't even got one proven good iteration of anything Windows on phone or tablet yet.
I'd ditch that green header image you are using. It looks washed out on my machine. Love the concept though. I had to write auto-scheduling software for a call center in college so something like this would probably have broad appeal.
In gcc this would not give a stack overflow error.
Apple Blows us Away with Smart Bezel Details
Sure, a value must be rooted in another concept, ie. it must be a value to someone (ultimately they'd judge it in the context of does it improve their life, although a whole chain of other values may be necessary to reach that point), but so in turn must value judgements such as 'good' or 'bad' be in the context of value. (Which was my original point.)

For instance we have images of far away galaxies that don't exist anymore, you certainly cannot sell one of them and they have no value to us - so it would be ridiculous to talk about faraway nonexistant galaxies being good or bad.
great thing is that Google has enough gravitational mass to move world in such direction without many years delay of negotiations inside protocol specification committee.

Once everybody is onboard, when the license fee will be requested?
Sadly, all the assembler I know is from fighting Core Wars.
Inside look into the building of the Open Compute Project [video]
It certainly works on current versions of iOS, and works great on ipad too. What version of iphone software are you using?
Kinect is awesome, but as I said here:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2420579

They bought Kinect from another company – the hard work of getting approvals and resources and everything else to start on it had already been done outside of Microsoft.

It's definitely an impressive bit of tech, but would it have been possible were its genesis subject to the byzantine internal politics of Microsoft? I dunno. I wouldn't put money on it.

As to WP7, it's actually more of an indictment of Microsoft than it is a credit to them. Consider how much of a clusterfuck their mobile strategy has been for the last four years. It took them forever to get their bureaucratic shit together and actually ship something that resembled a next generation smartphone, and once they did, they did a piss-poor job supporting and improving the platform, despite the very high standard set by both Google and Apple for the same. It's a perfect example of their inability to execute or respond to changes in their industry.
iOS is based on OS X though, but anyway the technical distinction is irrelevant to my point.

The point is that Apple integration is very tight across devices, in a way that must be very appealing to Microsoft from a business perspective.

But Microsoft has it's own strengths, such as catering to the support and feature needs of the enterprise. In a way it mirrors Apple's strategy of targeting the high-end consumer market, Microsoft targets the highest-end software market, period.
Office is also legitimately innovative. Love it or hate it, the whole "ribbon" thing was a big deal.
StackOverflow Around the World
The article makes a point of MS being focused too much on itself, and I wholeheartedly agree. One of the things I was praised for was knowing what the rest of the tech world was doing (I worked on VS).

I have to admit that I find this odd for a few reasons:

1) VS is one of the best products MS ships. And its probably best in industry.

2) VS has done a fair bit of really good work in the past few years. The work in C# has definitely been ahead of its peers in the industry. The debugger continuously seems to get better. And even where it plays catch up, like ASP.NET MVC, its doing so rapid and smartly.

3) VS is where it seems like there are a lot of people who look outside the company. I've never met Scott Hanselman, but he seems like the type of person who could rattle off every open source project in existence.

4) Scott Guthrie seems pretty visionary and he's in VS isn't he?

I'm not doubting any of what you said, but it seems like VS is the one place in MS that I'd tell the rest of the company to look for inspiration -- although as an insider it appears otherwise.
Communication materials were: Overcoming Fear of Public Speaking
>> This is not the place for a political discussion.

Your post is still politically loaded. Israel attacks on Gaza are as 'controversial' as evolution, global warming and tobacco causing cancer.
Okay, but why does it benefit Facebook's bottom line (and Google's!) to open-source that stuff? Wouldn't they be better off if their competitors had to pay those higher costs? It's not as if they have substantial computation-service providers they're buying from, or data-center-oriented companies they're selling to.
I'd be very interested in hearing from someone with more experience in running their own hardware what portions (if any) of what Facebook has announced today is applicable at the small scale of say having a couple of co-located racks in some datacenter. Maybe the base server designs?
This is a great web page, but I think it's borderline irresponsible to keep using this gimmick:

curl get.pow.cx | sh

for installation. Yes, it's easy and slick. Yes, you'd have to read the code itself to make sure Pow didn't own your machine up after a secure install. Yes, you can just read the shell script. But 0.0001% of people playing with Pow will do that. Why make things easier for attackers at all?

This is an idea that I think started with Ximian back in 2000 and I think we're ready for it to die. It'd be neat if the authors of Pow were cool enough to strike it from their (otherwise amazing) front page.

(I'd also be happier if the thread where the guy explains how Pow works and what it's components are were voted higher than this comment.)
I don't understand how this is any different from running the application after you install it by whatever other method. Your shell doesn't have some higher level of access than most other software.
I agree... I suspect if it is a good idea it will be too soon to do it well. And in five years Apple will do it well. That's the story of the MS product pipeline. Do something five years too early to do it well -- get stuck in the decisions made at that point in time and can't come back and realize that the decisions of five years ago no long apply.
+1 to the non-existent poll entry that says:

"I know C thoroughly, though I barely ever use it these days. I used it for so long and during such a formative period of my overall programming career that I can read/write C code with virtually no spin-up time even though I find myself touching C code very rarely. Oh, and btw, when I find myself coding C on a nix box, I am still amused at how I have muscle memory for all those old emacs commands I also haven't used regularly in about a decade though I wouldn't be able to tell you what they are without doing some keyboard mime exercises."

Yeah, well, I guess that is a bit too long to be a poll entry.
Some sort of graphical representation of hours covered would be awesome and I don't see it. That's the hardest thing about scheduling people in public service, making sure there's alway (x) people there. Maybe create a graphical representation of coverage. Also support lunches because that's important for the scheduler to know.
I've heard that there might be cheap apartments in Tai Po, and even saw it on the map, but I have no clue how long it takes to get to civilization from there.

Anyway.. Are your friends wealthy, or just.. silly, for paying that kind of rents? :p
He improved every future discussion in which parfe participates.
Another example would be on the developer tools side. Things like C# 4.0, Linq, Entity Framework, ASP.NET MVC.

Not all of the their developer stuff is great (I actually had a MSFT PM to apologize to me for the unit-testing stuff built into Visual Studio) but I can't imagine life without Linq.
Any large scale service already adopted such practices, may be not to the same degree. All large players buy custom hardware with specific tweaks to be more energy (read cost) efficient.
IDG to Invest "Hundreds of Millions of Dollars" in Witkey Website Zhubajie
CE=Communicate Everywhere, was not a good name either
I've begun to wonder lately if all of the money they've spent on "innovative technologies" shouldn't be counted as marketing expense for their core products.

I mean they're not going to convince many people to buy Office for the first time with advertising. People buy Office because it's what you do when you have a PC.

On the other hand by spending money to appear to be a cutting edge technical company they can more easily justify (sell) to their business customers the need for another round of version upgrades.
This is a great talent acquisition play.
That’s a great start! I have faith in the concept rolling downwards from the top VCs into the minds of the rest. As founders we’re already a paranoid bunch, having one less (huge) thing to worry about is a breath of fresh air, allowing us to focus on the company.
Demoday is going great, dont miss the 2nd half!
The last such place I worked was in a relay service call center. It was right smack in the middle of your retail/food service to office/cubicle continuum.

But yes, "organization" would work nicely for both. Also: "team".
Using a wireless router
wireless routers allow you to use wireless internet fro the comfort and you couch kitchen or bathroom. This article shows you how to use a wireless router
The Mathematics of IT Simplification
This looks really good - just interesting people talking about the interesting things they're doing. I also like how they seem to have chosen quite a few entrepreneurs outside of the SV hype cycle in addition to the usual suspects like Harj Taggar, Drew Houston etc.

I also think that this project is a pretty awesome way for the two filmmakers to market their startup http://www.kinwins.com!
Why is this bad? I get why it seems offensive, but how is running a random shell script from some host any different than running some random software downloaded and installed from the same host? Anything malicious that the shell script could do could also be done by the software itself once installed, no? If they're from the same official source, why should one be considered more trustworthy than the other?

EDIT: Okay, I see it's because of the use of sudo. But graphical installers often require the root/administrator password, and could be equally destructive.
Pow uses an interesting trick to get the *.dev urls resolving to localhost: it adds /etc/resolver/dev which acts as a resolv.conf for the .dev domain, and points to the nameserver at 127.0.0.1 port 20560. The Pow server binds to that port and acts like a nameserver for .dev domains.
Always nice to hear from a listener! Will definitely look into making the results clearer :)
Perhaps what is required here is a re-examination of the fundamental goals of what we refer to as "education." Is the purpose of school to teach a set of curriculum or to inculcate the habits necessary to become courageous explorers of the world and inventors of our own destinies? Montessori is just one alternative, but now, in a time of rapid change, is the time to begin and support multiple experiments. We need to explore the full range of functional pedagogies and see what new ways of teaching and learning can be developed. Looking for one "best" context or approach for learning is probably never going to work - the fundamental assumption is wrong.

An educational monoculture suffers the same vulnerabilities that a biological monoculture does. We should foster a diversity of approaches, supporting the sharing of techniques, approaches, and contexts.

This is why we are starting a new K-12 school, based on some new ideas (Tinkering School, and A Curious Summer) and incorporating some really old ideas (apprenticeship and mastery). We call it Brightworks (http://sfbrightworks.org). Have a look at our approach, share your ideas, join us at the edge of innovation in education.
Thanks, fixing the sign up tab index issue. I hadn't planned on opening it up outside of the US yet but you convinced me. Deploying that now, thanks!
I don't like SPDY. It's trying to solve a transport problem at the application level. Plus it seems to be quite complex.

I'd love to see Google promote a transport protocol like SCTP[1], and do HTTP over SCTP instead. If Google pushed SCTP a little bit, we might see it pop on Linux and Windows within a few years.

[1]:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stream_Control_Transmission_Pro...
HeliOS helps schoolkids and challenges developers
gem install passenger

passenger start

no preference panes to install. No Apache configuration files to update. And Passenger eliminates the need to edit /etc/hosts. To get a Rack app running, just type a single command.
'patio11 HN-famously claims to have bootstrapped BCC to the point where it more than replaced his FT wage by spending 5 hours a week.

You can't do that with any given business idea; you have to pick a business idea that is amenable to the approach. But that's not saying much; even with a 7 figure A round, you still have to pick a target you stand a chance against. YC isn't funding a lot of Google killers, either.
Hey Tom-

The installation process is short and fully documented: http://get.pow.cx/

The web site and manual encourage you to read it.

I think it's far more transparent than, say, an OS X Installer package.
They are hoping that the same philosophies which apply to open source software will benefit Facebook providing open source hardware. They mention a few goals they have during the talk. Mainly that they hope people will offer criticism and help them improve the technology. Facebook's core competency is not hardware so any improvements to the hardware sector directly benefit Facebook's bottom-line.
> Members of that community must realize that or they wouldn't be bringing in people from outside.

Interestingly enough, SPARK is sponsoring an event tonight in Boston, trying to convince U of M alumni to move back to Ann Arbor. I think that shows a lot of initiative.

_________________________

Here's the event promo:

Exciting new technologies are emerging, venture capital is flowing, big names are arriving, and promising new businesses are beginning. And life? It’s even better than you remember it. If you need a place to breathe again, a place to live again, a place to call home again…opportunity is knocking. And it’s pure Michigan.

Join UM alumni and Michigan economic development organizations us for a networking reception and the opportunity to learn about Michigan’s thriving IT & Life Science sectors. On the fence about returning? This is your opportunity to connect with employers and other professionals who want you back.

Speakers include; Dr. Andrew Chu Vice President of Marketing, A123 Systems www.a123systems.com and Sara Curtis Director of Product Management, Llamasoft www.llamasoft.com .
Moresociety is the "Pandora for People". Early invitations available.
Excel is a thing of beauty. But let's be real:

When you've got other companies bringing home billions in revenue on product categories that did not even exist five years ago, it's tough to be impressed that Microsoft gave a facelift to a product that was new in the early 90's.
I'm not going to claim that Microsoft isn't too insular (it is) and I live and work in Seattle on purpose, so I'm a little biased about this, but I don't think it's just about the location. Besides Amazon being a huge presence, more and more established tech companies are opening development offices here (Google, Facebook, Zynga) just to take advantage of the talent that's here. Not to mention the fairly healthy startup culture that feeds from and back into the beast in Redmond.

Leadership, culture, and politics are all much bigger problems than geography.
His local indices are usually one letter (i, j, k), his local counters are usually one letter (m, n). His accumulators are sometimes one letter - much like math expressions.

He gives a more descriptive names to variables that live for more than a 10 lines or code or so.

And that's way more of a joy than reading a Java sourceful of "indexThatGoesSourceThe2ndArray"
What's the definition of a designer?

I am a recent CS grad who is making an HTML5 Canvas games site in my spare time. I'm doing everything myself so it is taking a long time.

I have never used Ruby or Rails before this project. I only recently learned Canvas and Javascript.

I have however done site design before and done art all my life. I am probably going to end up doing the layout of my site as well as all the artwork for (at least) the first game.

Am I a designer?
Great to see this initiative! American companies are usually much too tardy with internationalization. And amazing to see that the Swedes are so active on StackOverflow.

And I applaud the Stack Exchange team for being so sensible in choosing which languages to serve first. Japanese and Korean seem good choices, but the French and the Germans really prefer to communicate in their own language too.
You conveniently omitted the step where you get an app running.

And upgrading Passenger requires you to install a gem, then run a command, copy and paste a bunch of text into your Apache config file, and restart Apache.
Not really. It was a typo. I hope you aren't so distracted by a spurious apostrophe that it would detract from a discussion.
Report Shows Energy Infrastructure Susceptible to Attack
1) I agree. It's probably one of the best IDE's out there and C# is undoubtedly a fantastic language.

2) In what ways is C# ahead of its peers in the industry? I think Async is a great step forward, but it's been in other languages for a while now.

3) He could and he has no impact on VS whatsoever. Scott is essentially a community PM. He talks for a living about stuff. He's a great guy and he's done some good on the web side, but he has no influence on the core of VS.

4) He's actually on the platform, not VS, though he does take a lot of interest in the core component itself. I like ScottGu a lot, I've worked with him a couple of times, but he's driving something very specific (.NET framework and its components).

MS is quite good at building platforms and not nearly as good at building interfaces. A big part of what I did before I left was prove that most people don't understand how to use VS. Moreover, there's a lot you don't see - all of the failed attempts to do things even more amazing than async. While VS itself seems like a model citizen, I would argue that's because it started out as the conglomeration of fairly strong original products and hasn't needed to move too far from where it started to be "best in industry."
I too had this same thought.

The only thing I could come up with is that, anyone implementing these at scale (fb's competitors) has already committed substantial dollar amounts to existing infrastructure.

To leverage the minor improvements in design that will come of this, they would have to start by rolling out new facebook style racks/data centers.

Whereas, for facebook any design improvements would be easier to implement on a larger scale.

Either that or they are just do-gooders, which I highly doubt.
I don't know about the rest of you but I didn't expect the packaging to be any better. Let's be honest, while the packaging will be nice to see when the product arrives, after that one initial time it probably doesn't serve much of a purpose. Plus this is a hardware start-up. I'm working at one and our packaging is actually the same, except instead of the WakeMate we obviously have our product. As far as I'm concerned I'd rather have a startup spend all of it's time and resources into the product they are building, because that's what will matter in the end anyway, since the first few thousand users will be early adopters and plain geeks who won't be interested with the box anyway. I mean it's not like the Apple I was a sexy beast or anything. When you get to version 2.0 or get a bigger cash stash, then you switch to fancy packaging.

I also hate it when people say they rarely dreams, but that's just a pet peeve of mine. You always do, you just don't remember it. As a matter of fact you have multiple dreams a night. It's in fact quite great if you are able to perform lucid dreaming, as that gives you a bit more time to think about whatever issues you are dealing with.
The successful ones often are.