skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If things are configured correctly, and you have an oracle to produce the answers that would be generated if you were running locally, then it can work. A lot of the common stuff works pretty well, a lot of people's code fails miserably too.
New post says Syrian 'Gay Girl' blogger is a hoax
Text to WordPress in One Easy Step (Mac)
OK -- I wasn't looking at this clearly. In case there are others like me:

* the scope of *p is only global. My comment re: scope is just Wrong.
* there is never a call to someinitialization() *execpt* via the assert. If no assert() is called, the Bad Value prevails; if the assert() is called, it resets *p.

I feel a bit foolish, but found it easy to misread this at first glance. If anybody else didn't get it initially, hopefully this helps :P

I thought there was deeper magic, but it's really just programming flow, and knowing good practices re: assert() (or anything that has side effects).
What are the advantages?

We avoided it due to the many bugs we've seen reported with it and 3D acceleration.
So before building each package the board PXE boots and installs the OS onto the USB-attached hard drive? That seems inefficient. Why not use an overlay filesystem and just throw away the changes after each build? Is there even a need for local storage, or could the nodes run off an NFS export?
I don't think development level has much to do with work hours. The obvious example is America, the US is one of the most developed countries in the world, yet Americans work really insane hours. Japan would be another example.
The Audi e-tron Spyder at Le Mans
The 79th running of the 24 Hours of Le Mans will be held on Saturday and Sunday, June 11 and 12, 2011. In the run-up to the race, the “LeMans vers le futur” demonstration drives will take place for the second time since 2010.
Netflix instant selection is too limiting. Also, I wish it were better organized. But all in all a great product. I am seriously considering canceling my cable and replacing it with Hulu or Netflix. Charter wouldn't have a questionnaire like this that's for sure.
I sure hope this doesn't mean a move away from release formalism.

Github -- due in large part to complex social cues around encouraging public forking in a top-level namespace -- seems to encourage the assumption that developers will track git and add their own local patches, resulting in a significant decrease in upstream-interest in producing stable, formal, documented, tested, trustable releases and release builds.
This post may garner some down-vote for being non-rigorous, but I will offer my opinion on Scala so far. I accept it's good points readily enough when they are presented in list form, but when I read the language and try to reason in it, I just don't like it.
Scala just doesn't feel like where I want to go. I do not want to embrace endless complexity in the form of hard-coded language features layered onto the language. XML literals instead of macros???? Please, I say. I have decided that Clojure will take the place in my dev life that Java and C# have occupied for the last 12 years.
I hope that is the right decision.
Check out Demo Duck (http://www.demoduck.com) or Brad Chmielewski (http://www.digitalhitchhiker.com/blog/?page_id=2).
Scala definitely needs more people like Bruce Eckel to start explaining it. I understood several concepts from this article that have eluded me so far because every other article I found descended in to abstract concepts of language or type theory without explaining what the practical uses of things were.

Unfortunately I think it may have missed it's peak opportunity to catch on because of this kind of problem - and a chronically buggy and unstable Eclipse plugin - but we'll see.
Apple's cloud conundrum
For his next project, he will store a chest inside a chest!
I think Google's going after data (profiting on ads), commoditizing automotive, transport, energy, medical, computer hardware, telecommunications, software, and social.
Interesting. This is a common perception but not an easily justified one. A macro-system a-la Lisp (or Nemerle) could easily replace compiler plugins, and there is an active compiler plugin community so extensions to the compiler are desirable. As someone who writes in Scala every day for a living and have used the built-in XML support here and there I do not consider Scala syntax to be complex, but the XML support is ~eh~.

Despite limitations and warts it's a pretty nice language to code in on a daily basis if you're going to code on the JVM. Macros would definitely enhance Scala's productivity. If you don't like them don't use them. Certainly doesn't mean that others could not put such a tool to good use.
Ask HN: What cities in the US have a growing startup/entrepreneur community?
We're looking to start bringing our Entrepreneurs Unpluggd (http://www.entrepreneursunpluggd.com) events to other cities soon and I've been surprised at the cities that have amazing growing entrepreneur startup scenes (Indianapolis, Kansas City, Des Moines, to name a few). I'm curious what else is out there.

Does your city/area have a growing startup/entrepreneur scene/community? Where?
How many hours a day do you devote to tracking? What do you do about prepared food that you didn't prepare? Do you bring weight scales? How deep in detail do you go into your tracking?
The Trouble with Checked Exceptions [2003]
When was the last time you were hired to do prolog?

I have always longed to be paid to work in prolog since I was introduced to it in college.
Backward-looking API ToS vs. forwarding-looking API usage
I can't find the link or remember the name of the service, but a few days ago I saw a website for a company that allows you to easily create a "cloud backend" for your mobile application.

I've tried every search term I can think of but can't find it. Maybe someone else has seen it?
Operation Doorbell reveals mystery ringer
A really interesting melange. This is a Spanish guy, using Japanese metalworking techniques, and Imperial measurement units... (They use metric in Japan and Spain, don't they?)

For the purists: using modern technologies is OK, as long as you're fully aware of the alternative. There's no enlightenment in using a stone tool for days to achieve what a powered tool does in minutes.
Managing open source projects is difficult, and I too hope the quality and sensibility of releases doesn't degrade. But, Github might make the process more social, and easier to manage. More local patches could translate to more upstream patches.
Ask HN: Freedcamp or something else for project management?
My nonprofit corporation's office manager is continually finding out about new online services, and recently suggested using Freedcamp for our project management. I have previously used Basecamp by 37signals for this organization and for another organization. What's your recommendation? What features should I look for in an organization with a lot of remote working (few face-to-face meetings) and a growing online client base?
> Being a knight no longer conveys the right to carry a sword

Come to America. Open/concealed carry is legal for every sane and non-felonious adult in many areas, gentleman and commoner alike.
Oprah To Host New Show
I only have one complaint about Clojure. It is very unfortunately named. Closures, the programming construct, and Clojure are too similar sounding.

If I could rename Clojure and GIMP I'd do so in a heartbeat.
Conan O'Brien's Commencement Address to Dartmouth College
Nemerle already does it: http://nemerle.org/macros.html, so does Template Haskell: http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Template_Haskell
There are schools that do offer this. A quick Google search showed a few. I'm a firm believer in doing business without MBA (personal opinion)
If a hacker can steal your user database they as-likely-as-not have access to your reversible encryption keys.

On top of that it's bad form to mail a user their plaintext password back to them.. I don't need my password crossing third-party networks and SMTP servers in plaintext.
1. Anything which solves problem for businesses, which can include programming. Do not, do not, do not assume that being a programming demigod is required to be a high-class consultant or that is even your primary source of value.

There are any number of folks who consult on things on HN, on everything from optimizing warehouse processes to pen testing Java web applications with obscure wire protocols to SEOing websites for software companies. The common thread among those who make a lot of money is that their customers trust them to make them shedloads of money or avoid equivalent losses.

2) I once read an interview with a wealth management professional on the secret to getting rich off regular labor, and his answer was interesting: "Transactional work for rich people." To elaborate, if you're essentially getting paid a portion of the transaction, you want to work for people whose transactions are huge. Given that it takes virtually the same amount of work to sell a $2 million house and a $200,000 house, get the 7% off the pricier house. Given that it takes essentially the same amount of work to write a SEO strategy for a company that has $20 million a year in revenue and one that has $20,000 a year in revenue, do it for the bigger company.

I get consulting gigs primarily because folks ask me to consult for them. They typically know me from some combination of my blog, my Internet participation at watering holes like HN, or offline networking. (Conferences and HN meetups have been very good to me, and I enjoy the heck out of them.)

By the way: I know this is probably blow-your-mind territory right now, but I wish somebody would have told me when I was a college freshman since it would have saved several years: $100 is not a high consulting rate. People substantially less talented than you command multiples of it, for a variety of reasons. For example, the day after you graduate, you could be billed out at $300 / hour by one of the large consulting firms like McKinsey. That's probably a pathological example, but if you nail what McKinsey nails (giving clients the feeling that corporate money spent on them will ensure their personal career goals), you can also command rates that are substantially in excess of the numbers you are currently contemplating.
I about fell out of my chair. Everybody in NLP has been so busy trying to learn statistical grammars from corpora that they've forgotten prolog. Amazing.
Another high profile cyber attack. If I am not mistaken, Russia used cyber warfare to subdue Estomia. http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2007/may/17/topstories3.russ...

This is the direction of modern warfare.
The Triangle area, North Carolina... Durham / Raleigh / RTP / Chapel Hill.
calling this one 40 processor machine is much like calling a 42u rack filled with dells an 80 processor machine.
Short answer: no
Other than rogaine, hair implants, a couple of other drugs and turning off your testosterone production, what else is there in hair loss research?
This really is a candid interview of Bill. A good one to understand Bill informally. I really respect the guy.
The point of the Netflix prize was to improve something Netflix already understood well and was getting diminishing returns for its research dollar. The Netflix Prize was able to attract serious interest from legitimate academics and engineers because the problem was refined to the point where it was legitimately very hard.

ZipCar doesn't even offer one-way car trips. I'm sure it could do them with adjustments to inventory, management, and pricing. Traditional car rentals are evidence there is a model that works. But ZipCar needs start one-way car trips, much less get to the point where it has reached diminishing returns on its research investment, before it can expect worthwhile contributions from crowd sourcing.
Fisher Capital Management World News: New heating equipment
WATERVILLE, Maine — The installation of cutting-edge equipment at the Maine Children’s Home for Little Wanderers is being counted as the latest triumph in Efficiency Maine’s quest to reduce the state’s reliance on foreign oil.
There are JavaScript UI libs that handle the HTML/CSS for you like ExtJS. You'd still need to at least supply a single HTML file that just loads the js files though, but that hardly requires knowing HTML/CSS. After that the whole presentation layer is pretty much defined with JS and JSON.

That's in theory though -- in practice I wouldn't expect to get very far before not knowing html and css became a significant hurdle while developing a web app.

Anyway, these days I wouldn't even suggest building web apps as a starting point for someone's programming related career; it's just too big of a mess of languages, frameworks, and libraries. I think just about any academic curriculum aimed at application development starts off with basic console applications, works up to GUI apps, and then goes to the web. By then hopefully you see some patterns emerge that make learning new tech easier on you.

Then again, ironically, I did start to learn programming via the web through PHP, so I guess it can be done. The thing that helped me was that I already had a few years of experience working with static HTML, and I understood the problems PHP was trying to solve and felt the need for a solution myself. This was in the late 90s or early 2000s though, things were still a lot simpler back then than they are now. Websites didn't absolutely depend on JavaScript, you didn't have to know anything about AJAX, seeing CSS was fancy since having style information in your html was still common.

I don't know, if I think about learning all of it at once from scratch these days I want to vomit and have a seizure. So yeah, to answer the OPs question, I guess I do see how the benefits of unifying and abstracting a lot of the pieces out might be useful.
New Look and Feel for the Netflix Website
I think the problem is that they want to apply a sales tax to anyone that is referred to Amazon /worldwide/ by a Connecticut referrer. That is why Amazon argues that it is unconstitutional. If it were simply taxing Connecticut consumers it would be similarly complicated, but I think there is more constitutional grounds for this. I'd have to check.

It's not like Amazon is going to pull out of the state.
As pointed out in the article: because it has a separate ISO code.
Why Google Is Shutting Down The Google Translate API
Zipcar's hourly pricing is so low because the rental for these extra 'waiting' hours is built in. If you are driving at 60 miles per hour and the car gives 20 miles per gallon, the cost of driving for one hour is over $10 at current gas prices. Zipcar's hourly rentals don't cost much more than $10.

Your idea of using cars others have parked locally is a good one, although I wonder how many people rent zipcars for 7-10 hours and park it for 5-8. It would be almost certainly cheaper to rent by the day from Enterprise et al if you did that.
According to http://blog.makezine.com/archive/2010/11/building-a-telegrap... the materials still exist, at least in sufficient amounts to build a simple telegraph.
Can't hurt to try both. I think there are definitely pros and cons to each, but the only way you're going to truly discover what works for you is to give each environment a try.
Notes on Lion (UI, UX and some thinking out loud)
Totally not (technically) breaking the NDA.
It's interesting to see that most comments here focus on justifying Facebook's importance, rather than questioning the other half of the argument: are FB's employees really that brilliant?

It just seems that what they're doing is not that hard, compared to what people do in other engineering disciplines.
Ecologically Inspired - Water Conservation, Recycling
Maps with Google fusion tables: http://slug.aeminium.org/software/debian/
There have been two mentioned on HN recently: zStack and StackMob (the latter is run by a friend and former coworker of mine.)

Ironically, zStack has the OP listed as their only reference customer. Er, guess that's not working out so well?
EcoFactor - a personalized solution for managing residential energy use.
Mini-FAQ on iOS updates, Reading List, iCloud
Is it just me or does this smell like a great social media job by Car2Go.com?
Why Angels Should be BEGGING to Mentor at an Accelerator
Great premise but disappointed with the article's incredibly superficial approach and examination.
I don't fully expect you to see this, as there are 40+ comments ahead of me, but I hope I can help you out a bit.

I'm a lot like you, I've messed with C#, Python, Ruby, C, C++, Javascript, and several more. I know the syntax of them well-enough, but I don't actually know them that well. I learned Python somewhat through a class back in 2007 (College for Kids at DVC). I learned C# last year because I liked the drag-and-drop GUI editor with Visual Studio. I sat in at a lower-division class last summer at UCDavis (ECS30) that taught the beginnings of C. The summer before that I went to a summer camp that taught the basics of C++. All of these different experiences taught me different programming languages, but I find the best way to learn is by making something that you want to make.

I'm making something that let's students find out what their homework is online, do it, turn it in, and check their grades; all while making the teacher's job easier. This is teaching me faster and more than I have ever learned from any class. If you want something interesting this summer to learn on then feel free to email me jarred@jantire.com
If I may ask, what are the best features of the Atlantic (from what do you derive the most value)? I am thinking about a subscription.
A minor heresy: most valuable programming involves a lot more gluing together libraries than it involves classical algorithms. You can go years in industry without ever seeing anything more complex than a hash table, and you don't even need to know why hash tables work, really. (And sorting? Sorting gets done by calling list.sort(), not by coding a merge sort.)

1) The way to go from "dabbling" to "proficient" is to ship software. It doesn't have to be amazing software. Entire industries are built on very non-amazing software. You will learn more from writing and supporting 1 real application than you will from a hundred tutorials.

You are, from the perspective of 99% of people in the world, a magician. Other people solve their problems by hand, by paper, by process, etc. You can conjure demons, speak arcane words to them, and the problems just go away. Find someone with a problem that they think is a Really Big Deal because they are not on speaking terms with any demons. Speak to demons for them. Get their money. You'll learn a lot from the process -- in particular, how little speaking to demons is actually required of a demon-speaker.

2) Study CS in college. Study something else, too. Your career prospects will not be dominated by your programming ability. Restated for emphasis: your career prospects will not be dominated by your programming ability. If you get really good at one hard thing plus programming, you're pretty much set for life (if that is your goal), since the intersection of the sets "can do This Particular Hard Thing" and "can program" will be only a handful of people.

3) The really useful engineering classes are the ones that teach you how to interact with other people, in particular, how to interact with people who are not engineers. People who are not engineers control most decisions you want made in your favor. Look for courses like Technical Writing or Communication For Geeks or whatever and make a special effort to take those versus learning e.g. how to build microcomputers out of NAND gates.
It often is cheaper to rent by the day from companies like Budget, but zipcar is incredibly convenient. In DC, I have 5 locations within 4 blocks. The major car rental companies are all 1 cab ride away.
Facebook users drop in the US and Canada
very, very interesting. Thanks for the link - in case anyone else is wondering, this (a google tech talk) is totally worth the time.
This brings me back about 8 years when I was learning similar things in the wake of the dot com crash. I will go ahead and say that further learning of languages and whatnot at your age is not necessary. If it's fun, go for it. But being well rounded by exposing yourself to things outside of technology will help flex your idea muscle (brain). Steeping yourself in tech is not the best way to come up with ideas. When I want ideas, I walk around and pay attention to how the people around me use technology and how they could better use it. Just chatting with people will help greatly. Soft skills will help you in life just as much as hard skills. Attempting to learn the sum of a college education from 15-18 is going to be harder than with the help of profs/TAs, you will miss things, and you may find yourself bored once in college (I did). So unless your goal is to be the obnoxious kid in the front row who knows all the material already, or if your goal is to do undergrad research (a better one), I wouldn't worry so much.

Once something cool does hit you, you'll find building it easier and more fun than any work or learning exercise.
> Closures, the programming construct, and Clojure are too similar sounding.

They sound identical, in fact, when Clojure is pronounced properly.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clojure
Here's a first pass at auto-discovering topics in that text using LDA (Latent Dirichlet Allocation) in R: http://opani.com/ryan/sarah-palin-email-topics/148845806827/

The biggest deficiency now is the stopwords list is not working 100% so mundane topics are creeping in. I'll have limited time to play with it in the next few days, so feel free to make some cool discoveries. :)
How does distcc insteract with link time optimization?
You have a horizontal scrollbar. Here's the problem: some of your lines have too many spaces at the beginning. If you start a line with (I think) four spaces, it becomes <code> formatted, which kills word wrapping (hence, no linebreaks). So, you should remove the spaces.
There's XAML, which brings it down to just three languages (Batch, XAML, and C#), but I would not recommend Silverlight for web applications at the moment.
This strikes me as particularly eco-unfriendly. All that shipping has a high carbon footprint, and nearly everyone in an urban area has nearby recycling firms who love to get their hands on lots of electronics. In fact, eyeing my garage right now and thinking that perhaps I should make another run next weekend.
Considering that by 2015 iOS will be on all (remaining) us carriers by then, I seriously doubt it. Unless Apple shows up with an Etselesque iPhone 5, it's highly unlikely that Apple will be seriously affected by windows phones.
I see their numbers. How can I trust them? Mostly I see a lot of stuff trying to sell to you their service but I don't see how they actually collect their data.
Yeah, I'd be very surprised if Microsoft ever managed to branch out from only making BASIC interpreters.
Lemonade stand
Teaching children about charity can start with a lemonade stand that's run for fun and charity. At Lemons to Lemonade you'll find great lemonade recipes, banners, and signs to help it easy to build a lemonade stand. Select your preferred charitable organization to donate the proceeds. Support great causes, help your kids learn about business and charity, and have fun -- all with a simple glass of lemonade!
Perhaps what's most galling is that, without users creating good content (users like the original @towerbridge) twitter would be nearly worthless.

"You ride on their network for free" as if users were leeching off of content twitter itself had made, when it's possible to just as easily argue that it's twitter who is leeching off of its users.

Musicians will often credit their "fans" as vital (e.g. [1]). Great music is still great even if only heard by a few people, making the fans impact at best indirect. Yet in the case of social networks, users and their participation are all the network has, period.

[1] http://www.celebuzz.com/2011-03-07/demi-lovato-tells-fans-i-...