skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Eric Floehr on his startup ForecastWatch.com (Python, weather forecast accuracy)
I absolutely love not having comment scores.
> Though, I'd suggest you pick a shorter domain name if this is meant to be used on phones.

Yeah, you definitely should consider a shorter domain name. Peru has a TLD for .pe if you want to shave a few characters off with http://infostri.pe. It looks like the shorter option of http://stri.pe is already taken.
I understand the logic behind the solution and it makes full sense to me. What I still struggle with is: what specific piece of information is being passed by the foreigner. I get that it is "everyone knows everything" but for n > 1 everyone already knew the specific fact that was being communicated. What is special about the announcement that drives it? It seems like it is actually "the timer starts now!"
Lessons from mobile web design
Mobile development is all the rage, and the interactive industry is in great turmoil as countless tablets and smartphones come to market. Mobile app development gets most of the attention, while the mobile web somewhat quietly creeps along. But the mobile web is making progress every day as more and more developers launch mobile-optimized interfaces. The great thing about the mobile web is that it is fundamentally built with all of the same tools used in traditional web design and development.
How is someone practicing 6 hours a day, 6 days a week for 6 years with the intention of going pro not a "real athlete working hard for many years?"

That's what I don't understand about all the negative replies in this thread. What defines a "real athlete" if it's not a whole lot of hard work? How does quantifying the effort make it less real?
Definition of "fanboy"
Ask HN: What are your side projects?
Hey all,

My name is Kevin and I write for BostInnovation, a Boston-based innovation publication.

I am organizing a piece about interesting side projects.

If you are currently working on a side project and would like to be consider for inclusion in the piece, please leave a brief description of your side project(s), a link (if you have one) as well as the best method to contact you if follow-up is required.

Thanks!

EDIT: here is the URL to BostInnovation: http://bostinnovation.com/. Here is the URL to our programming section: http://bostinnovation.com/tag/programming/

EDIT (x2): I loosely define a side project as something you work on but you do not spend most of your time doing so. The focus of the side project is of no concern to me just yet. If there is a way to group the responses by type of side project, I will probably do so in subsequent pieces. (ex, "Gaming-based side projects" or "Javascript-based side projects".)
vim => emacs
layered window manager => tiled window manager
mouse => no mouse
no wife => wife
music career => programming career
inactive => active

Best thing I did for my health was to get a bike and get into sports. The first thing I got into was martial arts. Now I rock climb, run, and cycle. Nothing gets the brain going like a good work out. I never look back.

Emacs was a big paradigm shift that took many months too.

Update: thought of a couple other things...
Comment scores are not supposed to show which comments people agree with. They are supposed to show which are the good comments, which are the comments that are worth reading.
Suppose instead of being 900 brown eyed people there are X brown eyed people.

Suppose X is one, then the brown eyed person appears to be stuck, all the blue eyed people are dead so he knows he doesn't have blue eyes, but he can't determine what colour his eyes are (are they brown?, are they green?).

If X is two then we're left with two people after all the blues are dead. Each one can see a brown eyed person, but again, this doesn't help them determine what colour their own eyes are. Again, why can they not be green?

The case for X>2 seems similar to the case for X=2, there's no magical point at which they can suddenly all say 'I don't have green eyes, I must have brown eyes'

With all respect, I think you are underestimating the problem. :)
On the iPad, the up and down arrows are close together. when I upvoted a comment, I couldnt be sure I hit the correct arrow.
Or losing half the fields due to a validation error, which then creates other validation errors when you re-submit. "Oops! Your password contains illegal characters. Please select a new password. (submit) Oops! Please select a state from the dropdown menu."
I experience this from time to time. Sometimes(TM), a single undo in the now-empty field makes all the text reappear. I've recovered many an overly long forum post this way. Try it.
The cynical in me attributes this presence of Java in enterprisey applications to the huge piles of documentation, flows, UML diagrams, the piles of servers, ESBs and Oracle databases, along with the priesthoods that keep all that in place and up to date.

Reading that pile of documentation and interviewing the hordes that tend to the application are much more work than it would take to write a more modern version of whatever that does with 1000 lines of Perl (or Ruby, or Lisp, or Python, or Erlang, or Haskell).

It's not as much as Java did something right, but more like we did too much around it.

Disclaimer: I am currently struggling with a web application that's little more than a CRUD, but done with what I call "framework bingo" on top of a complicated network of servers, with dedicated Mule feeding Elastic Search servers where a simple CRUD (even the one that comes free with Django apps) feeding a static file system would offer better throughput and easier troubleshooting than the huge pile we see there.
- Look at compete.com traffic estimates

- Extrapolate

- Make assumptions based on extrapolation

- Write sensationalist headline
I think it is foolish to write off all Eastern European developers (and those from South America, Asia, etc) as code bodgers who slap skins onto Drupel.

Sorry, I must have not articulated my point well, my post was not meant as a critique of Eastern European or Asian developers.

It was more a critique of the quality of projects on those sites as well as the expectations on those sites. It makes the economies of scale only viable to slap together projects and even at a slap together pace, you have to be bidding from a cost of living standard below most of the west. Sure there are some gems on those sites but you have to weed through a lot of crap to find them, most freelancers find it easier to get gigs through their network as opposed to weeding through these sites.

That being said, two of my best developers are from Romania and earn the same as US freelancers, a good developer is worth their weight in gold no matter where they are from.
I think some aspects of Scala make it like Perl, the write only language.
I agree with you, it is more work now, but I think I've noticed at least one advantage. This is not always the case, but some comments usually end up getting voted very high, and they take away views from newer comments which may also be very good.

It's also the same with 'famous' posters, they suck up all the attention, partly because of who they are and partly because their score count quickly racks up to the detriment of some of the lesser known peoples comments.

The way it is now I read everything, which is probably giving me a better overview of opinion.
Direkt link to relevant specs

http://code.google.com/speed/webp/
http://code.google.com/speed/webp/docs/riff_container.html
What real value can a checkin service potentially provide? (Serious question) I think there are a few things: deals from local businesses, meeting new people, interaction coordination.

Deals are booming now. Groupon and LS are huge and do manage to provide me with value. I think Groupon's upcoming mobile offering is brilliant. The likes of foursquare can use this model successfully as well.

Meeting new people is always a tough one, but it is what people want. Give someine a way to make new friends through your service in real life in a safe way and you'll strike gold.

Interaction coordination is probably the most interesting thing I can think of. Imagine communities organizing events by using foursquare. You get invites. You check in. You pay for the event from your phone. You monitor long distance races by the participants' checkins. You participate in live events virtually by having your name flash on a giant screen. At a town fair you are randomly assigned a person and if you find them within a time limit and check in together you get a prize. A giant game of assasin based on checkins.

The checkin itself is just a tool. Playing with a hammer is fun at first but unless you have something to nail it will get boring.
You're judging a book by its cover. Why not try them out before you criticise?

Also, today's teens are tomorrow's free-spending twenty-somethings, so their preferences can be quite relevant for many businesses.
US police increasingly peeping at e-mail, instant messages
Interesting lock screen on the new HTC Sensation
Thanks for the clarification -- that makes sense. Given amazon's 1-year-free offer and its excellent documentation, I'd still use an EC2 instance for this purpose.
Right. That makes more sense. But none of these are CS issues - as you say they're engineering ones. Some self-healing conflict resolver otoh is probably closer to a cs problem.
The specific information which was not known and is known after the foreigner's speech is that
"everyone knows that everyone knows that everyone knows that (repeated n or more times) there are people with blue eyes."
This was known only up to n-1 repetitions. To infer this new statement, the islanders have to be aware that the others are listening, they understand, they know that everyone understands, etc. etc.
Funny. I've worked at a place that grew up and moved from Java to Ruby, and I've worked at a place that grew up and moved from Java to Python. I've never worked at a place that moved from anything -to- Java, and I've been in the field since 1994.
It's not just that "well, Silicon Valley is just weird and they all buy Apple stuff", tech enthusiasts are very likely to have Macs also due to the peer pressure. It's almost uncool to have anything else...

Personally I use Windows 7 and don't see myself switching unless MS does something stupid (e.g the activation that called home on each bootup).
Recursion is harder in some languages than others (e.g. python--a commonly recommended beginner language--where recursion is deliberately broken)
I scope, you scope, we all scope for NoScope JS style element injection quirks
...so I (personally) wouldn't choose it for this kind of application, where you expect it to be there all the time, not just when it happens to be cheap.

It's not very difficult to set up a script to spin up an on-demand instance if your spot instance gets nuked. Or to just buy another spot instance at a higher price.

https://github.com/boto/
Craigslist worked for me. There's a huge amount of garbage on CL, but I found a remote contracting dev job that turned into salaried gig.
Land Surveyors
Control Surveys - Land and Building Surveys, Limerick.
Imho they have lost to Scala before they even started. And from my experience with Hibernate, Gavin King used to be this arrogant "you are doing it wrong" type who never really listened to anybody (or at least he worked hard to maintain that impression).
Suppose X is one, then the brown eyed person appears to be stuck

Yes, the problem specifically doesn't work if the number of people with an eye colour is below a certain amount.

The case for X>2 seems similar to the case for X=2, there's no magical point at which they can suddenly all say

In a scenario where there is, say, just brown and green (regardless of whether they know this or not), then X>3 is enough.

Where X=3 or less there is not enough information to go on (you successfully point out the flaws) and they could conceivably be any other eye colour. But above that you know it is impossible for there to be an individual who can see only one or two browns, therefore it can be inferred properly.

One of the main problems comes from the explanation of the issue which involves the suggestion that you recurse the problem back to X=1, this is inaccurate because there is always a known absolute minimum people that could have brown eyes (n, the brown eyed people you can see) and a known minimum number that any one person could see (n - 1). So long as for a brown eyed person (n - 1) > 2 the the inference is possible.

Remember; it does not matter what alternative eye colour they might be (and whether they can see it or not). Only that they are either brown or not brown. The logical inference is based on what the others must be seeing.

Try jotting it down and then reasoning it out as an individual in the tribe. Once it clicks it will seem simple :)
Q&A: Open source electronics pioneer Limor Fried on the DIY revolution
HTML-man: the future protector of consistency
Data sorting dances
> please use {} or []

How about a Pascal-ish:

(List of Integer) l = new List();
A little fun with Github's repo API
Kevin, you should probably search HN for "rate" (from "rate my ...") and for "show" (from "Show HN: ...") to discover recent projects. Also, if you could be a bit more clear on your definition of "side project" versus front, back, top, bottom or any other type of project, it might prove helpful (i.e. are you looking for startup projects? hobby projects? ...).
Find and hear your IP with morse code
Mermaids Beautiful Desktop Pictures & Free Mermaids Desktop Backgrounds
Mermaid are mystical aquatic creatures of the sea with upper head like humans and half below like that of fishes. Find here Mermaids Desktop Pictures for your Nokia mobile phone, Apple Touch Phones, Ipads, iPods, Tablet PC. Beautiful mermaids photos, some say are figment of imaginaiton and no such creatures exists but some are of the opinion that they really do and are not just mystical creatures of oceans. So You can find here beautiful mermaid desktop wallpapers, pictures and photos of true mermaids that you can download for your computer desktop decoration.
I have no idea, I thought it was a valid point and probably something I should have mentioned
I never really understood why they launched the chrome web store so early. At lanuch it would have needed awesome webgl-enabled games to be truely successful. But after skimming through it for a few days, I totally lost interest in it.
I wish this person had been more specific with respect to the specific problems with calendaring. The ones raised in this article look reasonably straightforward to me. "Thousands of machines, each one run by a human, most of whom are probably illiterate in computer skills and pretty much randomly clicking here and there willy-nilly" is pretty much the internet, right?
I don't necessarily agree, but Microsoft's vision is also "looking backwards". They saw game consoles, made their own, and now it makes them money.

It's great to predict the future by inventing it, but there's plenty of money to be made in improving existing technology.
>"Most people can't even run a marathon, much less do so in under 3 hours."

// Most people don't try.

I think that most healthy people could walk (you said "run") a marathon if they desired to. even if you walked for 2 miles an hour and had a 10 minute break that would be 17 hours of effort. 3mph is the usually quoted walking speed.

Perhaps I'm wrong.
You can feel the lags from Europe browsing into it.. Other than that, good job!
>Companies that do this deserve no loyalty.

No company deserves "loyalty". You need to get that dinosaur of a concept out of your thought process. We're free market entities now. We act completely within our own interest and the "invisible hand" makes sure everything turns out alright in the end. [1] Loyalty is for family and friends.

[1] Of course your own interest isn't a simple amount question. If another company offers me 5k/yr more I wouldn't drop what I'm doing at the current company and move for that. My reputation is part of my market value so I have to avoid angering my "customers" as much as possible (within reason, but the best choice is to just not take customers that will likely end up hating you later). Ideally, when I leave they'll all hope I come back some day.
You're right, if nothing else, I have learned a LOT about biz relationships through this.

I've always wondered why equity is traditionally hammered out in advance. You never know who's going to actually contribute work.

Instead it'd be cool to treat it like contract work, agree on each person's 'rate' in advance, log your hours, and then after a year / whatever 'vesting' period, the equity is allocated based on invested value. You could still have problems where somebody was incompetent but put in lots of hours, but it seems so much cleaner than cliffs / pre-allocated guesses as to contribution.

You should own the company based on what you contribute in reality, not what you thought you might contribute on day 0.
“We’ll just block all of EC2” seems not only excessively broad but, well, lazy.

Well, yeah. It's a Windows application, and lazy is the name of the game on Windows.
"NSS Labs recently tested half a dozen network firewalls to evaluate security weaknesses, and all but one of them was found not to be vulnerable"

What does this say I don't even
Drinking sugar => Water
Thanks. That was very helpful. Its easy to see but somehow hard to believe that this applies to 4 people as well (now everyone can see 3 blue eyed people) etc.
The scores told you only which comments were popular not which comments were worth reading. So it's no great loss for me. Personally I would go whole hog and remove the usernames so we wouldn't have to deal with the celebrity poster fixation.

I know this didn't quite work out like it was supposed to for the *chan boards but the idea appeals to me.
> Microsoft seem to keep their habit of adding proprietary prefixes and stuff, but on the other hand, so does webkit and firefox too. Let me just say it sucks.

This is actually recommended practice for vendors supporting CSS properties which aren't yet standardised or passing testing against the relevant standard.

It is supposed to help prevent the situation where one vendor's implementation of a property becomes the de facto standard simply because it is the first one implemented.

> At the moment it still looks pretty lame I'd say.

They only released IE9 one month ago. What are you comparing it to? Is there some other browser development team that has achieved more in a single month of development?

I think it's great that Microsoft continues to be open and put their previews out frequently for testing and feedback. Rather than throw meaningless words around like "lame" and "sucks", how about some suggestions on what they should do differently?
an [x] button to get rid of the edit form - for don't save, or don't create (ideally with undo, but "are you sure" is good too)? maybe?
From the article

>'Dan spent last month in St. Petersburg because winters are winters in the Pacific Northwest. "If I could become a professional golfer," he said one afternoon, "the world is literally open to any options for anybody."'

// The world is 'open to any options for anybody' who can write a novel book, do a lecture and has $100,000 USD to fall back on whilst they train for their new venture ...

If he's done the experiment first, then written the book and done the lectures it would have a greater validity IMO.
Thats exactly what I meant to say.

Too bad the sarcasm in the first sentence is lost on you.
> New Zealand => Australia

From where in NZ did you leave and where in Oz did you end up? What were the improvements you found? Do you think you would've found them moving to some country other than Australia?

Curious. :)
Startups: Don't just collect my email address
Find a second-story window and jump out of it. If, in the next hour, you aren't in the hospital or morgue, CONGRATULATIONS!!! you're now into Parkour!.
> started playing a new sport I love

What was the sport?
Two best decisions I've ever made

1) working for a bigco -> startup

2) single -> married with a kid

It took me a while to come to these 2 points but I've never looked back.
wasn't this obvious from the beginning? And the same would happen to RockMelt as well.
> hard shell reinforced briefcase

Do you have a link to what you have? What were the benefits to the change (particularly from laptop backpack)?
I don't see the need for yet another thread discussing comment scores.
Not sure I agree with the word "common". "Expensive" would be better.

Who would use security software that doesn't ship with the source code, anyway? How can you trust something that you can't even see?
Too bad alpha channel support is not part of the WebP spec yet (although it's promised). That would have the potential to truly make it a JPEG killer.

Currently, PNG24 is the only (browser supported) image format that supports transparency, but the files can be huge.

The only advantage over JPEG currently is that the files are somewhat smaller for the same quality. Yes, that's nice, but not enough to displace an heavily ingrained format with 20 years of use.
thanks jcr, will do.

As opposed to a front project or a back project, a side project is one that someone works on outside of their main job/project. A main job/project is one that someone puts most of their time into.

Does this help?
I refer you to Virginia Heffernan's recent column:

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/04/09/miss-g-a-cas...

In it, she ponders why new pastimes like the internet and video games are treated as addictions when someone uses them heavily, but older forms like opera, reading, etc are considered somehow more worthy passions and therefore not addictions if someone is a heavy "user".

Would you have written the same comment if the article was about an opera-goer being really upset at not being allowed into the theater because a new anti-ticket-counterfeiting system had mistakenly flagged theirs as fake, when they had bought it outright?

I didn't downvote you btw, but just wanted to point out that it's something to think about.
I competed then coached the ACM contest at my last university. Out of the really solid competitors I worked with, one is a pretty well-respected Microsoft MVP, consultant, speaker and author. Another founded an open-source company and regularly appeared on tech news sites a couple years ago. I've lost track of a couple others, which tells me that they're probably stuck in line-of-business app hell ("COBOL programs" in the article).

Before Top Coder, to me the most famous ACM competitor was Ian Goldberg, who has done some noteworthy things in his career: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ian_Goldberg

Programming contests are a fun diversion and a tool to sharpen your skills.
It’s not really one month of development. This would have been 6 months of development by two thirds of the team while the rest worked on IE9 polish bugs.
Tell that to Zynga and Blizzard. Social games (which Foursquare would fall under) have a very long-lasting grip on people.
Catching software pirates the fun way
What I've noticed is that I get a lot more upvotes on snarky comments, since people can't already see that I have a ton of upvotes.

No complaints, as I'm good at snark.
Listening to others => Believing in me
I'm surprised that people are scraping their content via bots, given that it's licensed under CC and freely available to download. (http://blog.stackoverflow.com/category/cc-wiki-dump/)
Twitter
soy un chico de 33 años de gran canaria (españa) llamado abián andrés
Hasn't Google Calendar solved this?
It looks like you're saying "Windows is greater [for me] than Linux" but I suspect you were miscopying the OP's use of "=>"?

> => =>
> Why is calendaring hard? Well, [...] the product requirements [...] some sort of ridiculous amount of distributed systems hackery around timeliness of updates, heterogenous network, consistency, graceful exception handling, and node availability semantics.

I'm sure Facebook, Google, Apple or Twitter can do that.