skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I grew up in Berlin, starting a few months after I was born up until the summer between the fifth and sixth grades. When we moved back to the states, I was completely shocked at how the cities felt, because they didn't feel anything like Berlin. Since Berlin was the only city I really knew well, I had naively assumed that all cities were like Berlin; it took me a while to realize that Berlin was the exception, not the normal case.

But there were places in America that reminded me of Berlin: places right on the line between "large town" and "small city." Not exactly like Berlin, but a very similar feel.

Of course, all of this was from the perspective of an eleven/twelve-year-old, so I could have been missing a lot of stuff that an adult would have noticed. Also, for almost the entire time I lived there, the wall was up and I would imagine that things have changed significantly since then. We left after the wall came down but not long enough after for things to have changed significantly yet--the summer before official re-unification, IIRC.
Age verification
Indeed. Even though I know I'll eventually transition to Objective-C, I was wondering if learning MacRuby first would tender down the learning curve by easing me into how Apple development works by leveraging my existing knowledge.

What do you think?
There's a certain prestige attached to some very famous, expensive private schools (called public schools in England alone, never quite worked out why). The number of Eton graduates running the country comes up a lot, for example.

But other than that, no one really.
I mostly agree, but it's quite possible that you taught your students better than a professor would have. One of my best math teachers in college was a grad student close to finishing his PhD, and I like to think I did a good job with my students.
It's philosophically problematic to say that one theory can be truer than another if they both explain the same facts and yield the same predictions. This would mean that there is a notion of truth which cant be verified or falsified experimentally, which really opens the door for all kinds of metaphysics.
The Art of Cold Emailing is Core to Revenue Development
RubyCocoa is severely out-of-date. MacRuby is its replacement.
I don't see how the app store changed it all.

I've got both a Galaxy S with Android 2.3 and an iPhone 3GS and I do use a lot of apps, but I knew about the existence of every one of them from -- the WEB.

I mostly search for brands (I'm sure a lot of people do), like Skype, Facebook, Flickr or Angry Birds. For my Android I couldn't find an official Flickr client, therefore I haven't installed one, preferring to use the web interface instead.

That's not to say that I haven't discovered apps through the app store, but their usage was less than a single day. And when I searched for a number blacklister for my Android, I had to search the web to find a reliable one, as there are at least a dozen in Google's app store with big ratings that don't work properly and none in iTunes (through the web I found out that I have to jailbreak my iPhone).

Really, the app store is good for providing a payments system and maybe getting some inspiration from available reviews when in doubt, but the reviews are kind of unreliable as devs found ways to spam or workaround bad reviews (like uploading the app under a slightly different name). It's terrible for finding stuff and it's useless for finding out what's possible/allowed.
I'd figure out how to make it look higher end. It's nice, but it feels like a low-end site, imo. See http://www.saksfifthavenue.com for how a high end clothing store looks. Good luck!
> It's not just the rents but also the law of tenancy. Germany's laws are tenant-friendly, whereas British laws are -- from what I've read -- landlord-friendly.

Not sure it actually matters. Zürich is probably as tenant-friendly as Berlin, but the rent is as high or higher than London. I think what matters more is the state of the market: Berlin still have lots of real estate available (vs 0.07% of vacant apartments in Zurich).
Students will all be able to talk to you but people who went to school in East Germany before the '90s will most likely not have learned English. Due to the fact that most adults never used English outside of school and have never used it afterwards they, too, will be unable to speak English.
It's baffling to me why Apple does this. Magazines and newspapers are troubled enough as it is, and the ipad could help those who prefer to read only once a month. How much does Apple make by this 30% rule? Do they need that money? Is it worth the negative press / publishers leaving iOS?
Pohl: Could you quote an offending passage that claims that the purpose of undefined behavior is for speed?

Me: How a-bout, "Undefined behavior exists in C-based languages because the designers of C wanted it to be an extremely efficient low-level programming language."*??

Seems pretty clear. You don't necessarily need the literal term "purpose" here - the term "because" in this passage implies purpose (http://blog.llvm.org/2011/05/what-every-c-programmer-should-... - yes, that's first article, sorry).
If you read his notes, he finds that OWL as it currently exists is too cumbersome for his needs.
Did you use an ontology or some kind of "manifest" to bootstrap hierarchical relations between tags?

I'm thinking about splitting Tagsistant into a client and a server to provide a multiuser environment, and probably some ontological foundations are required to coherently organize tagging coming from different users.
What If Drivers Were Hired Like Programmers?
You're flat wrong about the variations. German dialects are almost like completely different languages. I grew up in Berlin, and we vacationed in Austria and Switzerland on a few occasions. I spoke fluent German (I attended German public schools) but when the natives were speaking their dialects to each other I didn't have a clue what they were saying. They would switch to "Hochdeutsch" when speaking to non-locals. The Austrian and Swiss dialects are probably the most extreme cases. Other regions have "dialects" that are really closer to accents with a few local phrases thrown in (kind of like New England).
http://ocw.mit.edu among others:

Education is free.
Certification is expensive.
For iOS, MacRuby is unfortunately not an option, as it would require garbage collection. However, for writing OS X software, MacRuby works great (we just shipped an app with it in the App Store - http://briquetteapp.com - and it has definitely been a joy to work with).

Unfortunately, it doesn't really make the learning curve any less intense. While Objective-C's syntax and style are somewhat difficult, the real challenge to Mac/iOS programming is having a working knowledge of the Cocoa API. MacRuby simply acts as a bridge between Ruby and Cocoa, meaning you need to know exactly the same amount about API methods no matter the programming language you choose.

Reading the currently available MacRuby book is a great idea - http://ofps.oreilly.com/titles/9781449380373/. If you find yourself confused by the concepts, you should try learning Objective-C and Cocoa first (I learned with http://www.amazon.com/Cocoa-Programming-Mac-OS-3rd/dp/032150...). It is certainly possible to dive in with MacRuby! Just remember that it's not 1.0 yet, and could present technical difficulties in unexpected ways. Otherwise, it's super fun!
Deploying a Multi-Environment PHP Site with Git
Show HN: Hacker News Reader for the iPad
Since I got an iPad I was looking for a better Hacker News reading experience than the one you can get using the web version. On the iPhone I use the ihackernews.com web app (and soon going to try news.yc). It's decent for the iPhone, but it doesn't scale good on the iPad. To my surprise, when I checked there was no decent iPad app for HN (i.e. lacking ability to comment or vote, no readability support and more).

I anyway wanted to give a try to iPad development, and was looking for an interesting project to work on. Making HN reader app seemed as a good candidate. Over the last weekend I started working on the app.

The app will be ready for beta by the end of this week (sign up here: http://bit.ly/kCp6XL) and released as open source (http://github.com/arikfr/hnhd) and to the App Store by the mid of June.

Screenshots and more information can be found in the intro post: http://hnhd.posterous.com/introducing-hacker-news-reader-for-the-ipad

Will appreciate feedback, beta testers and ideas for a name.

THANKS!
Reminds me of WinFS (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WinFS)
Not to mention the issue that in many US states the enforcement of misclassification laws are on the rise and the penalties are stiff. So unless you can make a good case why a contractor should not be an employee--the main allowed reason being they're performing a task outside of your business's competency--don't outsource to a contractor based in your own state.
Don't you guys see that she's writing for other women – and anyone else that's encountered some form of ugly discrimination?

She spends most of her post describing what's it like to be on the receiving end, and more importantly, what she's done to deal with it.
If they have nothing to bring to the start-up then why hire them at all?

However if they have skills that other team members don't have they could be a valuable addition. The right time to hire them is when you realise the level of value they would bring is at least 2x upwards of their salary.
Meet This 14-Year-Old Self Taught Hacker
There are various variations in Germany alone not to mention Austria and Switzerland and even for native speakers they can be almost impossible to understand.

The proper spelling is the least of your worries if you want to learn German.
That's the the thing really though isn't it. It's YOUR degree. Who are you to say that someone made the wrong choice? I have liberal arts and a music degree. I'm now a self-taught web developer earning good money, building a start-up and paying my student loan (interest free because I stayed in New Zealand) off. My arts education helped with my general understanding and comprehension of the world and I credit it for making it easier for me to pick up development.

I'm so sick of the belittling of the humanities by commerce and science. We're all needed, if there's any elephant in the room robbing people of value there, to me it is commerce. I studied some marketing while I was at uni as well, and it felt like I was no longer at university but at some parallel universe on my campus where suddenly creative thinking was discouraged, intellectual creativity was discouraged and you'd succeed if you submitted answers the lecturers wanted to hear.

NOTE: I'm also educated enough in research methods to know that my anecdotal proof is not conclusive, however I find that in NZ, the people who I meet who generally seem like they're less intelligent are the ones with business degrees. It's the science and humanities grads who are the ones who seem smarter and more motivated. There's even a successful business person here (bob jones) who refuses to hire commerce grads and insists on hiring humanities and science grads because he believes they're more suited (once trained) to coping with a complex business environment..
I think that if you hit a situation where you want to create something, but lackthe expertise or time in house, it is perfectly reasonable to outsource. Sometimes "good enough" is the best way to go for a startup. I think you should have the expectation that at some point you will have to completely redo it (although that is a risk with any development). The cost of repeated work is often worth the value of iteration and speed.
Too bad he didn't get into any of the stuff that really makes C# nicer than Java, in my opinion: lambda expressions and closures, LINQ, expression trees, dynamic typing, type inference, P/Invoke vs JNI.

Also the event / delegate thing makes C# really nice for GUI stuff.
What's the technology behind the site? Great design as well... how did you get to be a coder and a designer at the same time?
The fact that the CPU is high on one CPU suggests that to me all interrupts from the NIC are going to just the one CPU (generally default on Linux). An 8 core ec2 machine has lots of total CPU, but individual cores are not that fast.

Change the interrupt cpu affinity to split network interrupts over multiple cores. See:

http://www.cs.uwaterloo.ca/~brecht/servers/apic/SMP-affinity.txt
Feedback on my "Beyond Comment Threads" proposal?
The Knight Foundation/Mozilla 'Beyond Comment Threads' proposal has come up a couple of times already on HN -- http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2547607 and http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2532371 were the previous discussions

This my submission ... feedback welcome! The deadline's tonight, so I can still incorporate some changes.
Android dev tutorial: into into reading SOAP webservices
That's a great point you make.

We're working on ways to improve the filming process so the final product is the highest quality.

Thanks for your suggestion. We appreciate it : )
Alas I'm still 90% coder, 10% designer. The current site is the third iteration of the layout.

If I wasn't too stingy to pay a designer, I would :)
> But what can they do?

Make FaceTime talk to Skype?
You should check if you have a listen queue overflow and syncache buckets overflow in netstat -s.

For FreeBSD you should also check if there are packet drops in sysctl net.inet.ip.intr_queue_drops
Curiously, a recent study found that evening exposure to LED monitors specifically affected sleep.

Here the original paper: http://jap.physiology.org/content/early/2011/03/10/japplphys...
German dialects are not as grossly different as let's say Nigerian English vs British English. Most people who speak dialectical german can speak normal german, but a british english speaker cannot switch to nigerian english or jamaican english.

German is diverse are as many languages, but English and French are far more diverse.
Baylor School To Require All Students To Use The IPad In 2012
Thanks for your response! Briquette looks great :)

All things considered, it seems like MacRuby might make it's way onto iOS in the future (http://iflipbits.com/post/1101983568/macruby-soon-on-ios, although that's 8 months old, so I'm not really counting on it for now).

Yes, I figured that out after researching enough about obj-c, cocoa, and macruby. That's why I wondered if learning MacRuby first would ease me into the process by taking away a layer of difficulty (obj-c). Then after I get the hang of it, I could transition to objective-c, maybe through one of PeepCode's screencasts, "Objective-C for Rubyists".
Don't agree at all, having lived 4 years in Germany. Certainly it's cheap, dirty cheap compared to London; certainly it has a good, creative vibe; certainly it's a awesome city. But that's all.

Facts I learnt in 4 years in Germany:

- it's very difficult to conduct business in Germany (with German customers) if you aren't fluent in German. And while people correctly says it's not difficult to pick up some German, proficiency requires at least 9 months of full time study

- taxes are prohibitive

- setting up a Gmbh it's expensive, and requires a lot of paperwork. The mini, entrepreneur-friendly UG (aka mini-Gmbh) it's a laughable joke, just political propaganda with so many limitations (number of founders, need to save 25% of profits to build the reserve fund, ...) that's hardly usable for a startup

- tax authorities are, as a matter of fact, going after (I'd like to say, persecuting) contractors, especially those coming from abroad or working for foreign companies. I have a dozen of stories of people asked to pay undue VAT, or asked to provide proofs that their employer are conducting business legitimately in Germany, asked to explain why some months they didn't earn any salary, ...
>There's a certain prestige attached to some very famous, expensive private schools (called public schools in England alone, never quite worked out why). The number of Eton graduates running the country comes up a lot, for example.

That exists here in America too. Harvard and Yale account for quite a lot of our top executive and judicial branch posts. Most famously, every one of the 9 members of the Supreme Court is either from Harvard Law School or Yale Law School. In their own way, Harvard and Yale are America's Eton - where future leaders go to hobnob with other future leaders.
Actually his design feels higher end than that saks-fifth-avanue website.
and android.
OAuth 2 for Android Apps
Won't irqbalance do this?
The Fallacy of The Bare Minimum
I like the idea of paid, high-quality Windows software, but I have to agree with you that it's a difficult thing to make work. Trillian makes a very high-quality, and very Windows-y (in a good way!) IM client, and tried to go the free/paid route, but recently ended up adding ads to their free version, presumably because the paid version didn't make enough money for them to be profitable.

I do however, expect that as Apple becomes less and less of a computer for geeks (of various types) and more and more of a mainstream competitor to Windows PCs that it will suffer from more of the problems you outline. I've noticed that my non-techy, but Mac-owning friends don't perceive the different between Mac and Windows software in the same way that I do, and many of them also do a lot more piracy than I do. (I don't really pirate software except for Photoshop, primarily out of laziness.)
Open Source Lawmaking
Ask HN: Could the back-end language influence the success of a Web startup?
Let's assume we have two (or more) versions of a given Web application written in different programming languages--no bugs or difference as far as the user is concerned.

Would one version be more prone to success over another one?
Haha! Congrats :)
The states with some of the longest holidays (e.g. France (30 days per year), Germany (24 days per year)) are the economically strongest states in the EU. It's France and Germany that can afford to bail out the countries with less working time, e.g. Ireland (20 days), Greece (20 days), Portugal (22 days).

(for the record 20 days is the legal minimum under the European Working Time Directive)
If the demand for a good increases relative to the supply, the price will increase, which will reduce demand.

That only applies for normal goods. For luxury goods, an increase in price acts as a signal indicating increased quality. These goods (and I count a college diploma as one) act as status symbols, indicating the superior wealth and social status of their possessors. In this case, an increase in price only serves to amplify the signaling function of these goods, and can engender increased quantity demanded.

In other words, the demand curve for a college education is non-linear. On at least some segment of the curve, quantity demanded increases as price increases. We are in one of those segments right now.
Lost at C?  Forth May Be the Answer
OT: when will stack exchange stop? whats next? a web site dedicated to question about buttering a slice of bread only?
and, last but not least: excellent multi platform capabilities! think aix, solaris and the like. you name it!
As a speaker of both English and German, and a dabbler in the other Romantic languages, I find German impossible to learn. I've taken years of classes and am still no good at it.

Its grammar is really close to ancient Greek, but that makes learning it no easier. Greek has three genders also, but you can usually tell the gender from the noun's suffix. In German, you have to learn the article with the word. It is one of the hardest languages I've met.
Ask PG: Is something staving off the decline of HN?
The quality of the site seems to have risen significantly over the past week. Is this the result of inspired tinkering, or just a random upswing? I was hoping to read through the recent commits to news.arc, but I wasn't able to find a public repository of the Arc code.
It's definitely possible to start with MacRuby. It just requires a little more overhead to translate Cocoa documentation into methods that work with MacRuby (not to mention the occasional one that doesn't work right...).

As a Rubyist, there's definitely some differences (named parameters, for instance), but you get the hang of it pretty quick. As a Cocoa developer, debugging with MacRuby has issues, as Xcode doesn't always know about the right symbols since it's not compiled (but this is getting better!).

Use the MacRuby book, and learn to love Xcode's documentation, and you should be good to go. If you do have issues, email the macruby-devel mailing list or visit #macruby - the community is super friendly and happy to help!

re iOS: I'm really hoping. With MacRuby shipping by default with Lion, iOS 5 will hopefully follow suit this summer.
I would take a page from Google's play-book and feed them well. Good food has health benefits, it's a bonding experience, and lots of people really don't cook well or do a good job taking care of themselves. Taking care of them in this manner can be good for the bottom line.

My current supervisor buys us lunch when she wants us to work through lunch because we are behind. I think she's got the right idea. It doesn't necessarily have to be "free food" per se the way Google does it but anything you can do to help your people eat well is going to be a good thing.
just a hypothesis. accept() triggers a context switch. Context switches involves MMU commands, and can be slower in xen if it is being emulated in software (type2 hypervisor). This is much slower than a native OS doing a context switch and the MMU operations are executed at the CPU level.
Why Startups Require Passion
Have to disagree, there is nothing inherently "simple" or "complex" about the world. As humans, with limited reasoning capacity, we tend towards simple representations because they are easy to reason about. So we have to choose our theories to be as brief as possible, but not briefer. There is also an aesthetic element in simple solutions, they are just more beautiful (or maybe we define beauty by the power of its simplicity)
> There are good reasons IMHO for writing a small networked C server doing this

Right, because:

https://github.com/cloudera/flume

https://github.com/facebook/scribe/wiki

http://sna-projects.com/kafka/

http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=syslogd&sektion...

... don't exist?

(Formulation courtesy of abhay, plug for Kafka mine)
Actually I think the people in charge are just that ignorant. They looked at the data in front of them and it looked like terrorism. They aren't clever enough to see the truth.

• Wierd chemicals they don't understand that could be used for explosives? - check
• Seemingly anti-social activities? - check
• Filming weak points in security? - check
• Was voted most likely to be a terrorist in high school? - check

Hey this is a text book terrorist!

I would have understood if he was detained. Maybe even for a week or two before given an apology and maybe a "what were you thinking?" But this is ridiculous. It's obvious that they totally boned this up. They should drop the charges pronto and issue an apology, and hope it ends there.
and then HR sends a bunch of kids with skates that doesn't even have drivers licenses.

and the hiring manager hires the one that reads the same car magazine as him because "he had to pick one on that hiring cycle"

can't wait to work only at the start up...