skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Could you expand on this please? I'm one of those geeks that keeps pushing bedtime back. (Right now I'm waking up around 9pm and going to sleep around 1-2pm. By mid-to-late week I'll probably be back to a regular 8am-midnight.
I think what's needed most at the moment is an easy way for US dollars to be exchanged for Bitcoin. This was easy enough when Mt Gox was accepting Paypal.

However, now that Paypal has suspended Mt Gox's account, anyone wanting to work with that exchange now has to jump through additional hoops by opening up a Dwolla or Liberty Reserve account. Personally, I found these sites to be rather shady looking.
I'd settle for even being able to sleep at regular intervals. I have a habit of staying up until I'm tired and waking up when I can't sleep anymore. As a result, I may stay up all day for several days and then stay up all night for several days. Or for several days, I may sleep twice during 24hrs, in completely random periods. I just don't do well with the concept of "well, it's 10pm, so that means it's time to get into bed".
I don't agree with your argument. The purpose of all programming languages and tools is to abstract away lower level behavior—not to make people lazier or dumber, but to make them more productive. Sure, it's never bad to know more about the lower levels, but that doesn't mean higher levels of abstraction are "dumbing down" things.

Programming is about solving problems, and if someone else has already solved a problem in a generalized and reusable way, at the end of the day you haven't created value by insisting on recreating that solution yourself. Please note that I'm referring to getting things done, specifically in industry; I'm not arguing that also understanding the lower levels is a bad thing. For example, I would love to thoroughly understand x86 assembly, and it would probably make me a better programmer (it couldn't hurt), but that doesn't mean I would refuse to use a high level language.

Being "reliant" on jQuery and its plugins isn't a bad thing if you're a web programmer that will always be able to use those tools. You can always go down another level and call someone "reliant." If you use pure JavaScript, then you're "reliant" on the browser's implementation. If you wrote the browser's JavaScript implementation in C++, you're "reliant" on the C++ compiler. Perhaps by the end of the day you're an x86 assembly expert, but now you're "reliant" on the assembler until you memorize the bit strings of all the hundreds of instruction.
How significant an issue is it how old these books are? The Django Book is from 2007 and predates even Django version 1.0, and the "in progress" second edition on the website has its last update in March 2009. Practical Django Projects is from 2008. Do these books have enough special sauce relative to up-to-date Django 1.3 documentation and tutorials to be worthwhile?
I understand Python gets some mileage in the financial industry, particularly by quant/analyst types. I'm aware that NumPy and matplotlib see a lot of action - are there other open source packages that get a lot of traction? Are there contributions from companies that find their way back into the larger open source ecosystem?

I came to suggest that as an aid to your learning you could focus your attention on using, evaluating, and writing Python packages related to finance. There doesn't seem to be a lot out there: http://pypi.python.org/pypi?%3Aaction=search&term=financ...

Examining packages like this where you already have a handle on what the code is supposed to be doing might be a good way to consume a lot of (hopefully some good, and probably a lot of not so good) Python code. Regardless of if you find a local mentor, contributing to or writing your own open source packages should prove to be a very valuable experience. Perhaps you could even start a package or set of general packages related to finance. Sort of like what SciPy is to NumPy. (FiPy?)
Out of curiosity… Why would someone use a locally modified WebCore in iOS?
The network effect is the big thing. Free Skype-to-Skype calling is a powerful incentive.

Of course, ultimately exploiting that will depend on people using Skype as their primary way to make calls. And somehow keeping other means of communication from supplanting the phone call.

And since 2010 has been referred to as the year we stopped talking to each other, this investment still may not work out. Even the most basic calling plans give most people way more minutes than they can use.

Will heavy users and international callers spend enough to make it work? Or will international calls one day be as seamlessly made as domestic ones?
True, but that can be overcome by another function that just gives you an address to put a new item. You would say, for example:

*(int *)vector_expand(v) = 2;
A comment from a related article makes me question the competence of the people making this proposal.

From someone who was present at a meeting discussing this:

“This decision, apparently still potential, is a permanent statement of the University about the future of Computer Science. The impression conveyed in the meeting with the Provost and Dean was that we had reached the End of History. Now that everyone has a computer and a spreadsheet and a wordprocessor, the contribution of computing to the life of the mind has been exhausted. I do not write this sarcastically. This was the sense of the meeting.”

http://www.geekwire.com/2011/western-washington-university-c...
What he received by email was spam, plain and simple.

And the despicable way they handle signups speaks for itself. I would never have gotten as far as he did because I know that anyone who does that is scamming me. There's no other reason to do it. If people actually liked the service, they wouldn't need to twist your arm to get you to sign up.
Dwolla looks shady? Seriously? http://www.dwolla.com

Incidentally, they are FDIC and NCUA insured:
http://www.dwolla.org/help/dwolla-deposits-are-protected-by-...
That sounds like segmented sleep. You're channeling your ancestors.

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/19/opinion/19ekirch.html
I could see this being really useful if it could message a javascript event bus. Maybe use it for deciding when to synch browser data with server data or to modulate the messaging between different users browsers. The statelessness of http creates many timing related problems.

On a side note: when is one of these big companies going to release a really advanced "jquery for webkit" that forgets about the browser incompatibilities and focuses on building a virtual operating system in the browser? Google, Apple, Netflix? Anyone?
Well, I thought this was clear, interesting, and relevant. Thank you.
Life expectancy is going up due to a variety of factors: better trauma care, better vaccination regimes, better sanitation, better nutrition, some better treatments (some amazingly so).

Nevertheless, a large fraction of medical screens and procedures does not improve average life expectancy when people actually try to measure their impact. Intensive end-of-life care does not improve life expectancy when similarly measured.

In terms of citations, see http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=161308 at least for the end-of-life effects. Also see http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2010/11/lies-dam... and http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa1000678 and http://www.overcomingbias.com/2010/06/beware-active-placebos... and http://papers.nber.org/papers/W16011 and the RAND health insurance study. For a start, at least.
Ricky Taylor
This is a prime example of how not to attract new users.

On another note, wouldn't a site like this have a significant problem where the only people with enough motivation to make a post on a website like this would be someone who has a chip on their shoulder? The same problem exists with the doctor and teacher review websites.
Ben is a venture capitalist.. flipping is what he does for a living.

Edit: Down-votes or not, please keep in mind that the business model of a venture capitalist is to make an investment and sell it at a future time for a profit. There seems to be a negative connotation around the term "flip", but the reality is that there is significant risk to being a "flipper." Horowitz took an enormous risk and he was rewarded for his "flip".
I haven't checked out Liberty Reserve, but I have a Dwolla account and it is pretty non-shady.
This guy got really lucky and he's hoping no one will notice.
Yeah my option is an annual lease, they can only change the rent @ the end of the lease (that's why the minimum when they go above the max is 1 year - basically you always have @ least a year at a predictable rate).
For the small benefit of making timeout calls slightly prettier, I incur the small-but-probably-net-greater risk that there is some bug, subtle or otherwise, in this code, along with a motley assortment of other issues I usually gloss over but start being significant when we're talking about such small benefits, like adding a dependency and having to worry about the licensing situation. (Even just having to worry about something that turns out to be "public domain" is something to judge.) Net net I'd personally judge it a loss; YMMV, no sarcasm. I would generally analyze any NIH solution that solves such a small problem in the same way. It is, perhaps, one place where NIH is appropriate.
really shitty of them to do this.
Instead you've wasted it on a depreciating asset that only requires repairs, costs taxes every year, and isn't likely to appreciate in value for the next 3-4 years.

I'm not sure you understand the difference between a depreciating asset and an appreciating asset. With very few exceptions, a car is a depreciating asset. It's worth less tomorrow than it is today. A house (with few exceptions) is not a depreciating asset. With the singular exception of 2007-2010, home prices tend to rise.

Also, I'm sorry to say, unless your definition of "conservative instement" includes a money printing machine, no conservative investment vehicle since the end of 2008 has broken even 3%, and 5% since 2007 let alone 6%.

http://www.fhlbdm.com/rg_history.htm
If you take a melatonin tablet about half an hour before what you want your bedtime to be, then by the time bedtime rolls along, you should be sleepy enough to get to sleep quickly. At least, that has been my experience, and the experience that others typically report.

This is very useful if you're someone whose bedtime tends to be pushed gradually back because you're not ready to sleep yet -- the easy act of taking a pill can make it less difficult to go to sleep at a consistent time. It can also be useful in periodically resetting your bedtime, by going to bed a few hours earlier.

This may or may not help you, though. You have a pretty high rate of bedtime drift. Could you elaborate on how it happens? Do you just not feel tired when you should? If that's the case, then melatonin might help. Other things you could try include:

1. Use something like f.lux to make your monitor use lower-energy colors at night. Melatonin production is photosensitive, so artificial lights with a lot of blue (such as LCD backlights) can throw that out of whack if they hit your retinas.

2. Exercise vigorously every day, in the evenings. Even if this doesn't help with sleep, it's a good idea, so why not?

And in general, when trying to figure something like this out, it can help to keep logs so you have some data you can analyze later, to see what's working and what isn't. Good luck.
why doesnt it support roman numerals? this is unacceptable!
The B&M markup on cables and adapters bothers me enough that I'll eat the downtime and buy from Monoprice or Newegg. For the price of one HDMI at Walmart, I was able to get HDMI, optical, and a display port->HDMI adapter from Monoprice.
Another way to look at this question is: If it didn't exist should we create it?
The problem with this is the search terms are pretty difficult to get right and requires a lot of sifting. Some studies concern themselves with studying "sleep deprivation" as in total sleep deprivation (see the sibling comment in this thread talking about rats).

In reality, you (and me) are looking for long-term effects of sleep deprivation, where deprivation = 5-6 hours regularly, 4 or less occasionally. Unfortunately, you can't just Google that. Anyone know of any articles that target this bracket of sleep deprivation (and not something more extreme)?
I was excited about this, not for a different way of notating time, but because setTimeout and setInterval make me hate life trying to deal with it's idiosyncrasies. Maybe I'm not that great at JavaScript or I had worse resources available, but last time I tried to use them, it was a very frustrating experience.
Here is a good answer to your question: http://www.quora.com/Django/Is-it-O-K-to-read-Django-beginne....
Philipp Rösler is Vice-Chancellor, not Chancellor. He probably won't become Prime Minister unless he changes parties since the FDP is too small.
Comments on news articles are dead, perhaps, but were they ever really alive? Comments on smaller blogs seem to be doing just fine.
During my first year of university while I was running a start up our of dorm room (modest success) and doing a full course load I was running on four hours of sleep a night and an hour afternoon's nap just before supper.

That experience taught me something very important, sleep is crucial. When you are tired you get tunnel vision and all you want to do is complete your task. The long term effects of this on your start up is that you loose the edge to be innovative while trying to solve problems.
use a javascript message train instead!
I could use your argument to describe pretty much any modern compiler or framework. "It is extremely hard to write a fast, reliable Java SDK that generates good error messages.", for example.

It took years to GCC to arrive where it is because it contained A LOT of legacy code that have been accumulating since its first versions with C++ support. GCC is a compiler that evolved little by little through long years, and many features were added with little design, to fix punctual problems, which made it difficult to converge to a clean implementation.

Clang, on the other hand, had a good deal of proper design to write a clean, robust compiler. The fact that clang reached where it is in such a short time compared with GCC is a good evidence that it is possible to write a good C++ compiler with nice performance and error reporting if you employ good engineering efforts.
Let me say that we just moved into a rental unit and the landlord is pretty dang carpy. He is too cheap to pay a qualified person to fix anything. Stuff is falling apart all over. He resents us for asking for simple repairs that cost less than a tenth of what we paid to move in. He calls the neighbors to try and get them to do it for free, and if they won't do it, he comes over on the weekend to try and fix it himself (usually failing, always doing a "ghetto fabulous" job).

We are on the verge of asserting my state's statutory process to compel the landlord to fix things because he is too cheap to use a qualified repair person, even on complex or potentially dangerous tasks like the gas stove, and even when there will be a long lag time on repairs if he doesn't.

My advice is that if you're going to be a landlord, get familiar with some of the maintenance companies in your area and don't be too cheap to call them out. I have been following this discussion with some interest, but I really believe any position, renter, owner, or landlord, can make sense in the correct set of circumstances. You just have to think things through and do it the right way, and it will save everyone involved a lot of headache.
No, I have read it in its integrity the first time it came around, a few years ago. Please, stop judging people.
Ask HN: How do I grow the user base of my "creepy" photo-searching Facebook app?
The Background:

I guess it started out as an arguably pretty creepy personal project - I wanted to browse photos of kids (alright, mostly girls) at school who I wasn't Facebook friends with.

I'm talking about those people who are in your extended social circles and friends with some of your friends, but whom you haven't formally met or hung out with. You know who they are, they probably know who you are, but you're not "friends" so it might be weird if you added them on Facebook.

I realized that while I couldn't view these people's Facebook profile pages, in many cases I could actually see a lot of their photos in our mutual friends' albums. The task of finding those photos was often daunting (e.g. 50 mutual friends, avg 8 albums/friend, avg 30 photos/album), so I built an app to do it for me.

I've since put it together in a somewhat presentable/user-friendly fashion and released it to the public. Given a target user, the app searches your mutual friends' albums and aggregates all photos of the target user and shows you a breakdown of which photos were found through each specific mutual friend.

Most of the reactions I've gotten have been along the lines of "sooo creepy", which I can understand, but I also think there is some social value to being able to see how you/your friends are connected to others through photo albums - so far that's been a tough sell though.

The Problem:

I really think this is something that a lot of people want, but no one knows about it. I've posted on some college forums and spread the word through my own social network, but that only goes so far.

Given the "creepy" nature of the application, I haven't been able to come up with any social features within the app that might result in organic user growth. I made it so you have to "Like" the app if you want to see past the first few photo results, which I think is starting to get it out there but not at anywhere near the level I'd like.

Right now I have 1,000 monthly active users and I am reaching out to HN to see if anyone has any ideas or advice that I can use to boost that number as much as possible.

Would really appreciate your thoughts. Thanks for reading.

EDIT: here is a demo video I made http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=09klp_Lw6w8
This is cool but only a toy. I do look forward to a more elaborate version. Maybe an api where you can just feed tracks right in the browser.

Check out http://audiotool.com for a very advanced electronic music composer online.
On Open Education
I have found valuable resources on Open Education, some on the url, but also not so valuable. -Your opinion?
Again the operator overloading thing.

Yes, it's true. && might do something different than you might expect if you're a C programmer. If you're a C++ programmer, then you know somebody might have overloaded the && operator. Yes, they could do it in some weird and unexpected way. Just like somebody can declare a weird and unexpected macro in C.

Yes, people who define C++ classes you use can screw you with dangerous or incorrect behavior, like throwing exceptions from destructors. Just like people who write C libraries can screw you with dangerous or incorrect behavior.

auto_ptr is not useless. At least, I assume it's good for something. Who knows? If not, who cares? boost::shared_ptr is "poor man's garbage collection," not auto_ptr. If you cite the documented behavior of a type as a huge and unwelcome surprise, then gosh, I know exactly how to avoid surprises like that: read the freaking documentation before you use the type.

Oh, and again with the "I can't tell what this code does." Here's a crazy scenario in C: call a function. Do you know what the code does? No, you don't. How awful! Unless you look at the function you just called, or maybe just glance at its documentation.

Half of these criticisms of C++ boil down to, "It's okay for functions to have unknown behavior that I have to learn about before using them, because I'm used to that, but it's not okay for types to have any kind of unknown behavior, because I'm used to C, where that is not the case."
That's not a conservative option for someone in the US, as it leaves you exposed to forex risk.
>>Why not have the phone talk to the lock through the local wifi?

The easy way to do this was susceptible to a number of different attacks so we disabled it. The hard way is being sorted out.

>>Is that what you are talking about here?

Sort of. If you buy the equipment, it's yours to hack...this includes expanding functionality to support eccentric authentication mechanisms. I'll post some stuff to our blog in the coming weeks to give you an idea.
For anyone who is a good self learner and wants to acquire this knowledge, i'd highly recommend the Chartered Financial Analyst (CFA) curriculum, which, as an added benefit, is a (the?) globally recognized financial qualification. The material is excellent and it's not very expensive to take the exam. Assuming you don't plan to get into investment banking, just do the first year which is about 2 months intensive study (+- some factor depending on your base knowledge). It's a very efficient way to acquire this information. http://cfainstitute.org/
Note that in the text I wrote:

> one solution to x that satisfies said equation is given by:

Which is in agreement with the mathematical equation given above it.
I can't agree with this. The basis of it all doesn't make sense:

> Were Google to buy Skype ... they’d build a brilliant Skype client right into the DNA of Android

Google has had loads of opportunity to build VOIP functions into Android and has dragged their feet all the way. They already have a a voice chat service and it has no presence in Android (edit: yes, just now they released video chat, but only for a tiny percentage of phones). The latest versions have some SIP functions but it's clearly been kept obtuse enough to prevent any mass consumer take up. Google is heavily constrained by needing not to offend the carriers. The idea that they would en masse integrate something that would destroy their business models is delusional.
>Best Buy's business model is to overcharge people for peripherals like cables and warranties.

Yea. I have known this for a while now. The real question is, what is the alternative?

Update: here is an article I just found:

http://www.contentmatters.info/content_matters/2011/03/are-s...
This Wall-E PC Casemod Does Everything Save Compact the Trash - Gizmodo
How would both proposals allow for infinite scale though?

It seems like the machines can eventually learn to emulate human moderation, but a website like PBS may get 500+ comments. The user would immediately get overwhelmed at 50+ comments or more (guess). For example, on Reddit, people are learning to avoid posting if a thread has more than 200 posts because their highest-level post would be useless.
This is how I learned Emacs, LaTeX and Linux. It works, but only if you enjoy the process of everything being broken always.
Like everything involving money and the media - it's a scam.

We've been paying these people a tax on blank cds since forever, but they still call it piracy to put mp3s on them. After they got paid.

The corkscrew mind at work.
Yeah, MIDI is pretty big and nasty, but most likely the key missing link is user adoption of a non-binary (plain text) format. See also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extensible_Music_Format_(XMF)
Also would mean that spammers would create multiple accounts while the 'good poster' typically only wants one.

Scenario; Spammers can then upvote each other in a circlejerk while the good poster is downvoted heavily.
How has 900-1200mg/day worked out for you? I considered it a lot when I was doing 500-600mg/day.
Head of IMF in Custody for Alleged Sexual Assault
OpenID, Facebook Connect and Twitter Login. There's some more if you log out and look at the log in options on this website.