skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm going through them now and again there are quite a few applications where there's no obvious connection to news.YC or startups. If you got rejected, please just find someway to let me know that you are in fact connected to the community.

There were nearly 100 applications, so it's possible that in a case or two I just missed some piece of info -- again, just reapply and send me a message.
Facebook Live Feed Kills Twitter & FriendFeed
The central theme of this book, to me: programming should be fun. Have fun.

The Poignant Guide is how I learned Ruby and remains my favorite technical book. If you're at all curious about Ruby as a language, spend some time reading the first few pages (or just browse the comics). There's much more to Ruby than Rails - if you've no interest in web dev, or just want to hack around, you will be right at home.
Try GNU Smalltalk.

http://smalltalk.gnu.org/
Nice work. Of course I can't tell the difference, because all that anyone's seen is a photo of your prototype. I think I made a fair assumption.

Thanks for weighing in with a comment though, and as I said before, please do prove me wrong!
I agree that they are the "cutting edge of common sense but you would be surprised at the number of sites that violate the first five (which I believe are key for B2B firms).

1/Make it easy to verify the accuracy of the information on your site.

2/Show that there's a real organization behind your site.

3/Highlight the expertise in your organization and in the content and services you provide.

4/Show that honest and trustworthy people stand behind your site.

5/Make it easy to contact you.
Start leaning from the guy right now:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UzxYlbK2c7E

Stanford class on machine learning by Andrew Ng, 20 lectures.
In my experience, no one really cares which companies you worked for unless they've heard of them. Well-known companies a plus. Failed ones are neutral, at worst.
Human geography is mapped in the genes
3 Awesome Sites for Stumbling Across the Best of the Web
Separate from hospitals, we have private practice doctors. I'm not sure what space there is for startups on the needs of doctors. Obviously someone could likely make a lot of money if they could centralize billing and invoices in a manner better than HMOs, but I'm not sure what you would do.

Depending on the practise, I believe there is plenty of room for something that can make a doctor's life easier. Perhaps some way of organising information and programs easier in a more logical manner?

I know my doctor has a desktop that is literally full with icons of various programs and resource links etc and I'm sure there are many others out there that are probably in the same boat that could benefit from something better. His particular practise serves most of its resource information off a central server so that all of the doctors that work there can access that information.

Just throwing some quick ideas out there, what about a Digg-like site for medical professionals? Something that automatically scrapes/submits information from various medical journal sites online so that medical professionals can work out relevancy for themselves?

Offtopic point: I have a very good relationship with my doctor and we've often talked about technology before in my past visits as that is one of his other hobbies, so I made sure to consult with him when I came up with my idea to see if he thought it was a viable solution to the problem we are tackling, so yeah - there is definitely room.
Python whitespace is a great shibboleth for screening out people who don't agree with the core philosophy of "one and only one obvious way to do something". You could argue that philosophy is the language's defining feature.

If there's any real barrier to Python adoption, it's the lack of a language-specific fad like Java applets or Rails to push it into a wider audience.
Yeah, I have actually. That was 32 years ago, when you could etch boards at home and mount thru-hole DIP components in your shed. No idea if Woz etched the boards himself, but ferric chloride was always cheaper than LSD.

Sorry, but computers in 2008 are significantly more challenging to produce from scratch.

My assumptions when I made my assertion that this isn't something that can be done at a kitchen table:

- A design for a $200 touch screen web tablet is pretty much going to require a custom PCB.

- The design of that board would more than likely be a repackaged and licensed board from the cpu/chipset manufacturer, and it's not something you do in a hobbyist's workspace - you need CAD.

- You would likely not even design it yourself, you'd spec the physical, heat and electrical goals to the manufacturer and have them do it.

- Even if they were working from engineering samples and rigged up bits of gear hooked together with wire-wrap wire, proper low power and low cost components require exotic connectors and/or exotic soldering, and they just aren't available without commercial agreements.

- I assume they're going to need a processor architecture other than x86 to meet the price point (i think an Intel Atom or a Via + chipset would be approaching $50 in commercial quantities) - and I doubt anything off the shelf is going to do what they want it to.

Having said all that, some kind of mini-itx board with an atom or via processor, or a gumstix or something - and a discrete (say usb?) touch screen and lcd on an LVDS would approximate hardware-wise what they'd be likely to be building.
Way too frickin' long. Got to 27, and saw a grand old table. Yeah, like I'm filling that one out.
Living with Aspergers
My Tax Dollars and Your Ignorance | SlashBe
7:41 PM EST :oooooh. LOOK at him scraaammbbbling to change terminology and entire sections in his post. I wish I could have saved the page from cache so people could really see the author's point in all this.

To those who missed the action: the author has gone from exclusively and falsely blaming one person from his team to taking a generic stance. Probably after reading all of this and realizing things don't make sense..

This is exactly the kind of stuff I had to put up for 5 months.

awesome. Anyway, that's enough of the drama. I'm out.
Unless you can sandbox them. Which you can't with gems, or admittedly with any other package manager I know of.
is old & obnoxiously twee
About | A Mom's Life
Thoughts about IM and Social networking: MSN Messenger and Facebook
I wanted to share with you some of my feelings about the way Microsoft is responding to Facebook and social networking in general. MS tried to put some efforts in social networking (i.e. the recent investment in Facebook), but there is a question I've always asked myself: why isn't MS taking advantage of what it already has? I mean MSN messenger and all its user base. MSN Messenger is probably the most used IM network worldwide and despites the fact it is truly a social networks, it is still used as pure IM application and nothing more. Windows Live Spaces is an effort to provide more services, but honestly, not comparable to Facebook. The concept of facebook applications developed by third-parties and beacons (things that made the success of facebook) could easily be implemented in MSN messenger by using the current user base data. And one of the great things here is the fact I wouldn't even have to use the web to use the service, because i can rely on my IM client installed on my machine. Think about receiving becaons or using small applications (like Facebook third-party developed applications) directly on the desktop, without even opening the web browser. Think about being able to do everything that I can do on Facebook today, but directly from my IM client!

Another note: Facebook has just introduced instant messaging. Here they are providing IM as an add-on features of the social network, because they found out the two things marry each other very well. Why isn't Microsoft marrying the existing infrastructure and user base of IM with a social networking platform similar to Facebook?

What do you think of it?
Matteo
I completely agree - theres only so many ways one can "connect" with another individual and keep up with their day to day lives.

Twitter, Facebook, Myspace, YouTube, ad nauseum.

I think it's great to see more people try and tackle problems that have scope in the real world beyond satisfying some teen's "social life"
A general, vague statement followed by an anecdote does not a news story make. It's just noise.

A study, with details on how the study was done and comparisons to previous studies/measurements? Different animal entirely.

Think about it this way. It would not be hard, using the same standards of journalism, to write another true story with the opposite conclusion.
In fact... the vista implementation is far superior.

Get Vista, it sucks less than XP unless your hardware isn't supported.
“Hack” the beta
That's funny. I have a really hard time taking anyone seriously who fails to realize the massive shortcomings of C++ as a language.
Tips on successfully managing people
Ah, it was from the cutting and the pasting of the actual post. Here's the link to the post.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=252996

The site that sells the touch screen says "down for maintenance" right now though...

I also liked the idea of using an eeePC and using a $60 touch overlay that one can get easily on ebay. Google "touch screen eeepc". Many people have made some very nice looking modifications in this regard.
I don't think so. Twitter has evolved into a communication tool that doubles as an alert system for some uses. Live feed is less voluntary, since it's automatically recording and publishing what you're doing. The appeal isn't JUST being having updates on what's going on, it's letting people interact with your actions, to collaborate from multiple mediums. LiveFeed seems limited to what you do on Facebook, Twitter lets users define their own activity, and FriendFeed scrapes everything.

Where's the appeal, then? I think saying this will "kill" anything is incredibly premature.
They easiest way to answer all your questions is that Microsoft, with an aprox 1.6% stake in Facebook (going by the $15/16 Billion valuation), does not have significant control or influence on Facebook.

That's the accounting answer.
Coverflow using javascript
Bootstrapping your sales force
Objects are a big pile of fail
"Regular" small businesses are screwed on the more general evils of taxes and workplace regulation. These are minor issues at startups that have bigger issues to take care of - but they are major issues for any other small business.

An educated workforce would appear without the government. Private roads and dark fiber are tenable infrastructure alternatives.

Enforcement of contracts is one of the two things I'd like government to take care of. That and punishment of violent crimes.

I agree that arguing about the ideal form of government is a bit of a waste. The solutions have been clear to me for years.
As almost always, the comments are the best part.
No!

The Apple Dialog has the same information repeated FOUR times.

#1 Do you want to save the changes you made in the document "test doc"

#2 Your changes will be lost if you don't save them.

#3 Don't Save

#4 Save

FOUR times I am told what I'm doing, "Saving". Yeah, each iteration has a little more information added to it. "Saving what document?" "Saving is important why?" "What is the alternative to saving?" Thanks for the slowly unfolding tutorial there...

Okay. Listen, the MSFT dialog works like this. It's a boolean. It's very short and simple: The answer is "yes" or "no". The user gets used to this yes/no format.

Save? yes/no

Print? yes/no [<-- doesn't really exist]

Restore settings? yes/no

The consistency of this reduces one's need to actually read-and-process-and-understand what are extremely simple questions inherently.
Is Sarah Palin's youngest child really her grandchild?
I've used Ruby for quite a while. I don't use Rails, and I haven't touched a web application in a long time. I've used it for system scripts, GUI applications (JRuby), game development, data processing, automation of MS Office applications, testing, prototyping, distributed build and deploy scripts, middleware, etc. I use Ruby for anything and everything I can think of programming unless I need to get closer to the hardware or integrate with something written in a different language.

Ruby can be used and will be used anywhere that Python can. They're both great languages, but I prefer Ruby for a few small reasons that Yegge seems to cover.

It's understandable that you might have this confusion, though, since if you're not a Ruby user it's easy to get the impression that Rails is the programming language. I constantly have to educate people about that ("Repeat after me: Rails is not a programming language"). Sometimes I wish Rails wasn't so popular, because I believe Ruby can stand on its own. I'm tired of conversations like this:

"Have you heard of Ruby?"

"No."

"Okay, have you heard of Rails?"

"Oh, Rails! That's what you're talking about!"

"No, that is not what I'm talking about."

I get this from the standard folks who never venture outside of their C++/Java/C# pens, and they've heard of Python only because of Google (tip for language evangelists: a hot and trendy company does more for your language than a killer app).

I would expect, however, that people who use Python would realize that Ruby stands right beside it as a similarly beautiful and productive dynamic language. In this I am constantly disappointed. Maybe it's a sign that Ruby is losing the popularity contest and will fade away to the sidelines. There are too many clueless people who pick up Python and love it and swear by the gods that there is no language like it, even though their experience with languages is summed up with C++, Java, and now Python. It's the language that ropes in all the clueless people that eventually wins. Congrats to my Python brothas.
The key is consistency, in OS X cancel always reverses the last action without side effects. I find the OS X way much more clear. Microsoft agrees, see Windows Vista.
Sprouts game
Needlepoint Crafts by the Needlepoint Queen
I agree. But signups for Twitter would decrease if Facebook had SMS updates of filtered news feed content. They can do a lot more.
Building a website API with Django
Golfing the Extraction of IP Addresses from ifconfig
Same. I'm willing to spend five minutes not thirty.

If there are that many questions then they don't know what they are asking for and have no clue what to do with the data.
Anyone here having much success with Drupal? Some guys I worked with tried it on a client project last year, and it seemed like it took then longer to hack modules than it would have to have build it from scratch. Is there just a high learning curve?
Some of these articles were originally part of an internal Amazon blog. Apparently Amazon did indeed have tens of millions of lines of C++, and the point of Stevey's rants was to point out that they were doing it wrong.

Those were also the days when any respectable application was written in C++. Stevey's other mission was to make it OK to say that C++ sucks without getting looks from everyone like you'd just slapped your mother.

These days, sensible people just post a link to the C++ FQA Lite and get on with writing useful code. There's less of a need to fight the machine.

In yet another article, presumably more recent, Stevey mentions that after losing faith in Java he started writing everything in Jython. The Ruby craze came later, and these days it's all about JavaScript/Rhino. But each blog rant focuses on the flavor of the week. Point being, these posts aren't "essays", they're propaganda. They're a reasonably well-informed programmer's way of blasting one opinion at a time onto a readership that's already fairly saturated with other kinds of hype -- no room for nuance; Language X is the Next Big Language, repeated for page after page. The language comparisons are just a trampoline for that message.
Question #1 should be: Do you have an hour?
Actually, you can with gems. It will happily install to ~/gems or some other place.
I love that recipes is always used as a way of explaining how useful consumer technology is. I think Apple Lisa had an ad with a women using it in the kitchen.

You'd think that recipes present our biggest problem needing a technological fix.

BTW: I agree that if it's cheap, easy & nice, there'll be all sort of uses for it.
"... a working template that they could use to base Stack Overflow on: Usenet. Usenet has been around for almost 30 years now, and newsgroups like comp.lang.c++ are still active and full of experts discussing a wide variety of topics. But no, Jeff and Joel would rather make an Ajaxy shithole with no reason to draw true experts in. ..."

It's not great to see an example of the Nerd bully at work. Anonymous, negative and probably wrong.

This is a bogus article. Why? Well firstly you can't gauge the writer? Who has written this? They have an opinion but everyone has opinions. So what is the meat of the writers idea:

"Usenet is an active hive of technical
users who know all the right answers"

Usenet is an example of a broken model. Sure you can ask a question and get an answer. You might get 50. So how do you work out who's is right and the best? Force of personality? Discussion? By the time you have followed this discussion the noise/sig has diluted the answer possibly for the person who asked the question. What about others who ask the same question 5 years down the line? Where is the knowledge trapped? How are the experts identified? What you get is a unfocused threaded discussion arguing the merits of proposed solutions punctuated by the random Star Trek pun or maybe a lame Simpsons joke.

The ideas behind Stack Overflow are worth looking at. Forget who is doing it. Don't like Joel or Atwood, Fine. But finding answers to specific questions, finding good answers, evaluating responders and filtering the best results and preserving them is a worthy idea. The filtering of information and building the reputations of users who contribute is proving to be a real problem. Something to look at a bit closer.

The questions and answers might be crap at the moment. But maintaining that an archaic system is the best way to do things is making a statement about the writer.
Interesting post. I agree with this, and I see at work often. The blind leading the blind, especially when you have new people in the team comming in. A smart newcomer will eventually realise the advice they are getting is not good, and move on to somebody else.

"What would be the best algorithm for finding a number that occurs only once in a list which has all other numbers occurring exactly twice.
So, in the list of integers (lets take it as an array) each integer repeats exactly twice, except one. To find that one, what is the best algorithm."

I want the hacker community to answer this question (which seems more like a typical interview question). Ideas?
Isn't the real issue here product labeling?

If an ISP wants to offer access to only wikipedia for 2 bucks a month why should there be a law against that? So long as they don't market their product as "Internet access" I see nothing wrong.
I have an old keyboardless Viewsonic Tablet PC, the only thing is is missing is a good tablet-centric browser user interface.

Being older, it's kind of heavy, but it has a lot of ports so the 802.11b isn't a problem, I can always put in a new card. It's not the hardware that's the limiting factor, but the OS and UI. Hopefully, this project will get enough people excited that we'll actually see some innovation in the tablet browser UI.
I'm afraid I have to agree with jayz's dead comment: "obnoxiously twee" is a pretty good description of this guy's writing style.

I'm sure some people like it, but I'm not one of them.
Developing Creative Momentum (IV): Worthy Projects
In case people were wondering, you can submit when ever you wish. I got through as much as I could afford to and left the rest blank. It still takes it.
Practice Makes Perfect (release often explained in a cartoon)
It's great to see a company recognize that it is in a certain industry that is meant to provide SOLUTIONS, rather than trying to protect its (eventually, in this case) outdated business of selling tools to do things the "old way". This is how you remain relevant as technology advances, not kicking and screaming as your industry attempts to pull you into the future.

It's like when oil companies realize they're in the energy business not the Black Gold, Texas Tea business; and when record companies realize they're in the entertainment business, not the plastic disc business. Oops. Scratch that last one.
I must admit that I didn't understand his XOR solution. Can someone explain it?
I think this H316 tops that quite nicely:
http://www.old-computers.com/museum/computer.asp?c=927

Not only does it store recipes, it has an integrated cutting board!
Suppose x = 0 and your list is [1,2,3,2,1]. If you xor 'x' with every number in your list then x = 1^2^3^2^1, which is the same as x = (1^1)^(2^2)^3 = 0^0^3 = 3. So, x=3 is the number that wasn't repeated. This works because a^b = b^a and a^a = 0.
Agreed. This is not a laptop. It needs to be a distinct creature.

If this takes off it can have some sort of keyboard down the track. But only after the users figure out what it's for. And the keyboard is probably not central to that.
Can Blockbuster be saved?
Lenovo won't refund the Windows fee without an NDA
First thing that came to mind for me (just assuming there was needed a practical way to do it) was the following (translated into Python):

# associative array / dict / hash
store = {}
for elem in inputlist:
if elem in store:
del store[elem]
else:
store[elem] = True
# return the only key left
return store.keys()[0]

Now that I've looked at the post, the XOR approach is quite efficient and a more fun answer.
Iterate through the list bitwise-XORing the numbers together into an accumulator. Because x ^ x = 0, and x ^ 0 = x, and ^ is commutative (x ^ y = y ^ x), the final value in the accumulator for a list like [x, y, y, x, z] is:

x ^ y ^ y ^ x ^ z
= x ^ x ^ y ^ y ^ z
= 0 ^ 0 ^ z
= z
Here's an example in python:

>>> import random, operator
>>> nums = (range(5)*2)
>>> random.shuffle(nums)
>>> nums.pop()
1
>>> nums
[0, 4, 0, 3, 2, 4, 3, 1, 2]
>>> reduce(operator.xor, nums)
1
Wow. This guy really hates Jeff Atwood.

Must be flattering to have someone go to so much trouble just to troll you. Nicely done, Jeff.
Whenever I hear about whether doing this or that counts for/against you on your resume, I'm reminded of this:

This is very important, so I want to say it as clearly as I can:
FUCK. THAT. SHIT.

http://xkcd.com/137/
My Naive Attempt at Making an Artificial Being
Live demonstration of the copter: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0JL04JJjocc
Please excuse the spelling and grammatical mistakes in the document. It was written many ages ago, when I was 13-14 years old.
Facebook is also a walled garden. To have access to the feed you have to sign up and be a friend of the person. With Twitter, the default is to have a public feed.
How about figuring it out by reading the answers and analyzing them?

Using my brain to critically assess what people tell me has always worked for me, and I usually -- for any nontrivial problem -- end up combining the ideas from all the (correct) answers. As for finding them later, I find searchable archives work wonders for that.