skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I work at an awesome start-up (iPhase3, my main income while I figure out where I want to take my own startup) and the only way I got here was because I knew someone that worked here.

Networking is definitely a big thing, and being in the right place at the right time. I liked the idea, and it allowed me to do what I love most, work on back-end high availability systems.
Human Brain Atlas
I'm excited and impressed by it mainly because I did think of it and started implementing it, thinking to develop it as a desktop interface, or possibly a cad program interface. Lots of linear algebra involved...

However, I stopped mainly because at the time (about 3-4 years ago) my webcam and opencv introduced a delay that was unacceptable and caused visual jarring in a small application (I think I was using a window of 320x240 or so).

I've also seen a demo done in flash by MrDoob of Three.js fame (IIRC), so it's been done by several people. I haven't really seen a useful implementation yet, so this is getting more interesting with these smaller, higher spec integrated devices...
Those emacs style editing commands actually came from TECO in the 70s. Crazy that those editing commands are hardwired into my brain nearly 40 years later.
Perhaps by making a country wide, federal sales tax, at a single percentage and that applies to everything - kind of like an Australian GST or European VAT?

Well, not quite like the Australian GST since that doesn't apply to fresh unprocessed food and a few other things.

And not quite like the European VAT since that applies at different rates in different countries.

Perhaps the USA could be a leader in something again. A simple GST/VAT that's applied evenly and is uncomplicated.
A couple other pointers.

1) Always tin the tip before soldering and tin it again before you put the soldering iron in the stand. This prevents oxidation of the tip.

2) Put some flux on the joint before soldering or desoldering. Always use a flux made for electronics, not the kind used for plumbing.

3) If the tip of the iron gets too much oxidation on it, you can generally restore the tip (do this when the tip is cold) by putting a bit of ammonia-based brass or silver polish on it and scrubbing it a bit with some steel wool and then wiping with a clean rag.

4) Whenever working with wire leads, tin the wires first before setting up the joint.
Really this is the best option, head to China teach English make some $$ then head to Australia, Canada or wherever and start a new life.
Cool story. My question is, if you were going to do the same thing, what skill would you try and master?
Well, news from 2009. Not surprising as this has been well known for years.
You can also look up anyones name from a phone number, and anyones address from a name ;)
A 2:40 time isn't terrible - even at the Olympic level: http://www.iaaf.org/oly08/results/eventCode=3659/bydisciplin...

(Of course, most of these guys had to do better than 2:40 to qualify, but still..)
Emphasis on "simple Google". Put a bit more effort into your research and you'll find:

"... and requires a debtor to prove:
(1) That the debtor cannot maintain, based on current income and expenses, a minimal standard of living for the debtor and dependents if forced to pay off student loans; (2) that additional circumstances exist indicating that this state of affairs is likely to persist for a significant portion of the repayment period of the student loans; and (3) that the debtor has made good faith efforts to repay the loans."

Now, compare that with the poster's narrative and you'll find that the advice is flawed and worthy of downvoting, not upvoting. To be specific, he's been able to hold jobs that produced enough funds to invest into a entrepreneurial effort and he's made no effort to repay the loans.
Apple Announces Final Cut Pro X
Why are you even interviewing if you can't afford to hire someone who asks for a reasonable salary comparable to your existing developers?
Could Flip Have Survived On Its Own?
The real take away use supply and demand to your advantage.

They took a supply of MIT programmers who weren't in demand and leveraged it. I think this is a huge take away for startups trying to get attention online. Imagine you post your startup related to food (http://www.housefed.com) on HN. No big deal; another will be along later.

However, imagine you post a food startup to a foodies forum! Bam, you have a huge demand of interest and limited supply of technology improving food. You've just found where you are in more demand and you can provide the supply side.
Where in that list do you see CSS animations? I'm old and have difficulty with my eyes sometimes.
That still seems to be open to attack. Force all meters to low-power mode to cause a "blackout", or perhaps fast cycle power modes in attempt to hurt poorly made equipment.
Taxes that are applied evenly and are uncomplicated are not something the United States specializes in.
Another Way to View the "Decline" of HN
First, I wouldn't focus too much on the total amount, instead work out what you need to make per month, per week and per day and you'll arrive at an achievable non-astronomical sum. Focus on that. Stay in the present.

Second, let go of guilt&pity when/if it arises - it's destructive, along with any thoughts or opinions that condemn whatever got you in the situation you are. Ask better questions, like 'how is this a good thing and what is going well?' and 'what can I do better today?'. You can clear your debt with the same force you created it: compound effects over time. It's all about making small forward steps, every single day.

check out wealth dynamics to get some different ideas about mindset & money.
I love the guerilla tactic of repeatedly pitching to random students at MIT lunch counters. Recruiting is hard, but persistence is essential.
Kids in high school need to hear this story: go speak to them in assembly. I am sure if you made a few phone calls to counselors, they'd welcome you with open arms. You might not get paid (but, hell, you might) but you'd be doing a service to those kids.

Would people in the education system (even just at high school) tolerate someone coming in and telling the kids how it really is and how a university education isn't the be-all and end-all of life? Certainly no visitor to my high school ever said that and the teachers were flat out disappointed if you expressed any inclination to not at least aim to go to university..
"Rockstar" RoR Developers Needed in Northern VA
Currently hiring four Ruby on Rails Developers to work with our team to build the core of our application. While we can't discuss the application publicly, we can tell you that it's an exciting, challenging and growing product in an open source environment. Email me: lwarren@tekmasters.com for more information.
The API Economy–Webinar
Commodore 64: Welcome Back, Old Friend
Did an MS in CS ;-)

MIT OCW

http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/electrical-engineering-and-comput...

First start on the OCW course work. The terminology, basic algos, etc. are an important base to build - so you are able to build on other work, and not reinvent the basics.

Large scale distributed systems are HARD problems to solve.

The only way you can learn is to start by coding up the simple problems and getting to the bigger problems.

If you're a masochist, join someplace where they need to debug and maintain high scale distributed systems. The day you start solving multi-system deadlocks & data integrity you're getting there :)

And read
http://eferm.com/implementing-durability-for-in-memory-datab...
to get an idea of how to concurrency affects everything!

Books & Pubs

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed_computing#Reference...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_important_publications_...

[edited formatting]
Compare this to Atlas
http://www.2sidesdesignstudio.com/2009/11/atlas-overview-xco...

Maqetta needs to do some design upfront if they are going to garner any excitement.
That was for taxes, not student loan debt.
I really can't see this working. $150K in debt for a guy who has a degree, no dependents and nothing stopping him from getting (at least) an average-paying job doesn't sound like some kind of crippling debt. He just needs to pull his finger out and go get that damn job instead of keeping on plunging money into an apparently-unprofitable business.

Forget "the power of the student loan industry", how would you feel if you'd lent somebody $150,000 to get an education and they refused to pay it back on the grounds that "aw man, I don't wanna get a job..."
yes, I have tried this briefly in the past, from what people tell me, it's very hard to be declared as undue hardship, you practically have to have disabilities. thank you for the advice
correction: foursquare is up to 7 million users, I spoke to dennis a week or two ago. pretty impressive by comparison, I think Facebook had 6 million at their year 2 mark.
This is why digital signatures were invented.

Here in Australia an opposition leader was undone by a faked email (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OzCar_affair).
I made a gcode render in three.js last summer and although three.js worked as advertised it's canvas rendering was by no means optimized.
It was quite slow for complex geometry so the whole fall-back to canvas strategy won't be terribly useful for any even moderately 3d intense applications.. And then there's Firefox, oh the horrors of canvas's performance in Firefox 3.x.

CloudSCAD gets away with it AFAIK because generally OpenSCAD is not generating overly complicated models. However once you convert those polygons into stacks of infill and perimeter lines (a la gcode) you really begin to see the limits of three.js's canvas rendering setup.

Heres an example of rendering 2d gcode (simple enough that it doesn't crash most PCs in Chrome or FF4):
http://www.d1plo1d.com/cad_canvas/examples/gcode_canvas.html (same controls as emc2 axis)

src: https://github.com/D1plo1d/CadCanvas

TL;DR: canvas support can be horrifically laggy but otherwise three.js is good things.
I've found that talking about grossing a figure up to cover taxes can be a good way to get your feet wet with negotiating.
11 Legal Ways on How to Pay No Taxes
I think the main fault of recursion is that students end up with "stack overflow". The JVM and C++ also don't have tail recursion. Performance is really the biggest perception difficulty. Would also help if students learned about inductive proofs in mathematics earlier on.
It's funny how many JS-related projects choose nondescript names like this. Off the top of my head: "processing", "underscore", "node", "backbone", "mylibrary", and (maybe the one that started it all) "prototype". I caught myself doing it after I named one of my js libraries "coordinate".
I'm not suggesting "three.js" is a bad name--it's simple, and I'll probably remember it. It's just an interesting naming trend.
The BS Bubble | Hack Education
I'd like to hear more about this. I was under the impression that student loan debt couldn't be relieved due to bankruptcy and there weren't any options like this.

It sounds like a free pass, and that makes me think this isn't any longer true. My search for a solution was always relegated to seeking out a way to change loan terms or consolidate so that I was paying less over a longer time.

At 40% of my income to student loans for a period of 20 years, I expect I won't be able to save any income or afford to have a child until I'm... eh, 45 or so. If there's actually a free pass, I'd take it.
Part of the issue is that saving an article/site for later perusal is the same as upvoting it. Ideally the two actions could be separated.
Taxes that are applied evenly and are uncomplicated are not something taxes specialize in.
Texas Questions Value of Academic Research
You're going to have to tell us more about your situation - where are you, what sort of company is it, and what is your general experience in software?
I wrote a thesis proposal that came from the opposite direction. If the unit of distribution is a virtual image, why bother to aim for cross-OS portability in your application architecture? Might as well design as though you have a machine to yourself because virtually you do.
I get the feeling that the website only applies to people who sign up in Australia. You should make it more clear that is for Australian residents only.

It's a pretty cool idea though.
Thanks for pointing out cling. Unfortunately they don't say which version of Clang/LLVM they build against. Their patches only seem to apply cleanly to version 2.8. But unfortunately it doesn't build for me. I also tried building it against 2.7 and 2.9 for good measure, but no cigar.
Desi Girls Danc in room
One caveat for the "join the military" idea. Be VERY careful with what you negotiate with the recruitment office, and be VERY careful with the exact terms your enlistment contract specifies.

I have a good friend who enlisted for a number of reasons after college, and managed to negotiate something like a $60k payment against the principal of his student loans in exchange for his enlistment. Most of these deals don't apply to the principal, and as a result a lot of money winds up as interest which doesn't do the enlistee as much good.

After boot camp, my friend was recommended for immediate OCS and received a commission. This meant he was no longer "enlisted" and the Army considered this as a violation of his contract, so they refused to pay down his loans. After a protracted legal struggle, he wound up getting discharged, but it wasn't easy for him at all and wound up costing him quite a bit of time he's not going to get back.

I know that the plural of anecdote isn't data, but I think there's still a valuable lesson to be learned from this, and I'd hate to see someone else lose years on a false promise.
Or NativeClient. Ironically it contains several runtimes although "Native" in this case means non-web programming languages for the client-side. Remember the HTML component is a runtime.
I can certainly attest to the "strengthening" argument.

I had been working standing for about 6 months after a back injury. No matter what I did it hurt for the first month or so, but eventually I got used to it.

I just got home from 3 months working in Sydney at a sitting desk, and now I'm back almost to square one. It's amazing how quickly you lose conditioning just by not standing all day.

As with anything, movement is the important part, not the standing part.

And 100% do not wear shoes if you're working standing. Your body is smarter than shoe designers. In time your body get's back to working they way it was designed (or evolved) to work.
Actually, I've had some back and forth with Amazon over the past few hours. Their current policy is "the developer shouldn't been penalized for issues outside of their core binary."

In my case Amazon is going to approve the app without modification while they work out the kinks in the approval process.

Some argue that the deviceid is a security risk and Greystripe shouldn't be using it to track impressions.

But advertisers should be able to send their customers to whatever app store they choose. Especially since they're not beholden to Amazon's T&Cs.

I doubt that Amazon wants to eliminate Greystripe/Admob/Millennial, etc. from their app store, so my guess is they just need a better way to vet urls that end up in non-Amazon app stores.
Funny how the article knocks Hunch as a startup that never works, then, in their own recommended article they link to at the bottom, call it a "Hot NYC startup you need to watch" http://www.businessinsider.com/the-25-new-york-city-startups...
I don't think that teachers are telling students recursion is hard. I think that through observations, good teachers who have taught for many years have seen that many, many students will just never get recursion. And that's the basis of teachers saying that recursion is hard.
In Florida, we have FPL On Call[1], a smart meter program that allows the power company to turn off your A/C, heating, water heater, or pool pump. I suspect that if my A/C got cut off in the middle of summer, I'd probably just use the pool 8)

But yeah, the fast cycling would probably break something.

[1]: http://www.fpl.com/residential/energy_saving/programs/oncall...
I'm not understanding the downside?

If the post is offtopic/noise why is -4 a magic threshold? If that threshold can be justified why not incorporate it into HN as policy? If it's just to protect egoes, then HN can just secretly use something like a log scale or some other relationship when displaying karma to users.

If voting patterns are more independent of a post's current karma, the measurement should be less biased. The same is true for positive karma--I often don't bother vote up comments that already have relatively "high" karma.
Good question on this one. I'm not sure.

My understanding was that Amazon was concerned more with equitable pricing across app stores. i.e., you can't sell the app for $0.99 with Google and $1.99 with Amazon.

But in truth I haven't gone through the TOS with a fine tooth comb. Do you have a reference to that section?
Yes... the key is sending in the estimated payments. If you fall behind or (worse) wait until the end of the year, you'll be stuck with a huge tax liability.
The emotionally charged nature of the article was presumably intended to provoke a sense of outrage/injustice in readers, however it only made me feel pity for the author. He shows signs of being an addict--one whose life has become so narrow that such interruptions in game playing take on monumental importance.

"..spent my free time this past weekend needlessly trapped in troubleshooting hell." You're damn right, it was needless. Here's an idea: when something doesn't work, chill the fuck out. Do something else with your time while the problem is resolved.

"Malicious neglect"? Really? Only an addict could become convinced of that.
0. Call the debt collectors and begin managing your debt in a responsible fashion.

1. Go get a job. Ditch your company. It's not going to be profitable soon (or you wouldn't have posted). Make sure your job is in a city where you can afford to live and pay it off.

2. Find an apartment with 4-5 other people. It is a pain, but is cheap.

3. Kill your lifestyle. Don't eat out, don't buy music, don't go to Starbucks. Don't buy things new.

4. Work like a dog. Take two jobs if you can sustain it. Not everyone can.

\begin{rant}
This sort of thing is the poster child for why humanities degrees are stupid for the vast majority of people. The OP would have been better served by being an electrician or plumber, then going into $150K in debt for a house.

It is sheer blinking idiocy not to do a cost/benefit analysis of your major decisions. There is no shame in not going to college, so long as you have a trade. All educators need to be aware of that.
\end{rant}
The Apple LaserWriter is an interesting product. The existence of affordable, full graphic laser printers created the market that Apple would dominate, but it wasn't important to Apple to own the laser printer market itself. Corporate inertia took some time to realize that and let the printer companies fight to the bottom.

Nine years later Apple repeated with digital cameras. Digital cameras were expensive and not widely marketed in 1994[1], three years later after the QuickTake 100 had put a stake in the ground for price and brought digital cameras in front of people's eyes Apple was irrelevant in the then huge market and exited (under the newly returned Steve Jobs' axe). This was a win for Apple's Macintosh platform which at the time was perceived as superior for "graphic things".

In an alternate universe, where Apple decided to make their money on iTunes sales, the iPod could have gone the same way, the problem being that "reselling other people's music" doesn't provide enough to differentiate your experience to your users.

EOM

[1] I was looking at disrupting the MLS at the time. We ultimately decided that their business practices were too formidable, but a $700 640x480 camera would have kicked the snot out of the messy little black and white photos MLS used at the time.
...which is the case with most game theoretical situations.

You don't get to choose the world you live in, you only get to choose the choices you make. If you want to move from one world to another, you have to figure out how to get the rest of the world to make those choices.
I would argue that the inclusion of Applesoft BASIC in the Apple ][ line was the most beneficial thing to happen to the tech field in the 80s. Perhaps at the time it was simply a way to get traction from homebrew hobbyists. But the impact was immense. Spending nights on end in front of green text to type in "Home Computing" programs was the first steps taken by the many of the greatest programmers I've ever worked with.

Newer tech products are designed to be consumable only. They are media devices, ends to themselves and no longer tools of exploration. They do a great job at making peoples lives more enjoyable, but its with regret I see kids unable to begin unlocking how they work simply by typing in 10 PRINT "HELLO"; 20 GOTO 10.
An important disclosure is that i am a friend of the founder, but to get the discussion rolling a few things he needs to fix is:

-To add a Blog to the site.

-To fix up the prizes page as it doesnt present well.

-To redo the homepage as it is not perfectly clear what the website is doing.

I think its a great idea though so I wish him all the best and I signed up as well. I'd better win though.
See the work of Travis Goodspeed
http://travisgoodspeed.blogspot.com/2010/03/smartgrid-skunkw...
I just finished created a PHP PECL extension for CityHash. Email me if you'd like to beta-test it before I submit it to the PECL dev list.
Woah there, wait just one minute. Facebook had 5.5 million active users after two years [1]. Foursquare has 7 million registered accounts [2]. I shouldn't have to explain how different those two metrics are.

[1] http://www.facebook.com/press/info.php?timeline (active user defined as having visited in the last 30 days)

[2] http://techcrunch.com/2011/02/21/foursquare-closing-in-on-7-...
While I agree it's pretty glaring, in practice it seems pretty unsafe to use Enums along with persistent storage - as soon as the Intern comes along and adds a new enum value in the middle of the set, that column is now corrupted for all new values.
Ask HN: which angel programs are worthwhile besides YC and Techstars NYC?
I feel sorry for everyone who thinks Hacker News is a good place to start OS flamewars.
Clojure: State Management
Yes, there are some solutions in those fields. I am not certain how much they apply if you start late. But they need to be seriously investigated by the OP.
In the sense of using the platforms' libraries and APIs, then Chrome is not native (especially some of the UI as Javascript is not native in any sense) because it comes bundled with its own runtime as well as the WebKit runtime. But in terms of systems languages they are using yes that is native.
I also thought Foursquare was a fad. Who cares if you checked in there? Who cares if you're the mayor?

I actually have one LBS idea that for me would be really useful, I'd love to have it, and thinking about building it. However I'm slammed with other stuff right now and I'm loathe to switch to Yet Another Shiny Thing rather than build up an existing project further.

(Credentials: I wrote the original Postabon/Signpost iPhone app (a deals LBS startup now backed by Google Ventures), and the iPhone app for a different and more recent AR/ecommerce LBS startup that's currently in stealth.)
Addict? It seems to me that he's merely someone extremely passionate about something.

This is also a case of one of the worst DRM-related fears coming to fruition. You no longer have (legal) access to a product you purchased. You're now essentially licencing games from the publisher and they get to decide when that licencing expires.