skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Re-launching after a year of work. I'd love your feedback, good or bad.
Durham is definitely one the fastest growing startup hubs in America. ReverbNation.com, where I work is here and it's awesome, we're also hiring :)
There is an underlying demographic issue here. Startups tend to cater to people who have already made a lifestyle choice to embrace pervasive technology in their lives.

I am likely an outlier on HN, in that I consciously do not use technology for my "life". I go home to my kids, we play in the backyard, we go on walks, we mow the lawn, we play board games, and read books.

So do you want to know the 2 startups that DO help me?

1) Mint.com - I do need financial management, and I love mint.com for that.

2) ServiceMagic.com - I spend 5 minutes online, and within a couple hours have someone doing home maintenance work for me. THAT simplifies my life.

So whose life are you really trying to improve? Mobile hipsters? Or working folk? The problems are very different.
2nd-ing the rumor from James. Launchbox is supposedly changing course to invest in post-incubator, pre-Series A companies.
Do some research on where your skills or interests are concentrated, then visit/vacation in some of those places.

At the same time, research requirements for working immigration in the places you would want to move to.
For you.

Which is great and fine, no one is saying facebook doesn't serve a lot of needs, but for some events, the current setup doesn't work and for them, it does matter.
Which makes it a bad metaphor, Apple's behavior is not abusive. We may not like it but Apple only wants a cut of the revenue they think they help generate. There is nothing in my developers agreement that will lead me to believe that Apple loves me so much and won't enact restrictions to my activity as an ios developer to increase their own profits. Our only recourse is to stop developing for Apple's app store.
That's a valid point. It'll be an interesting case study, if it does indeed meet with some success. However, there are already other Android based tablets out there (Best Buy/CompUSA) which have had lackluster sales. Are they really banking on distribution channel being the key differrentiator? (yes, I know... WebOS too)
Great info, but a clarification of my comment may be in order: I wasn't talking about the "sciences" vs "humanities" divide (which is huge), but a divide that goes deeply within humanities itself, which is much more of a left/right divide (hence the "leftist" wording in the original article).
To me, the scariest part was:

U.S. solicitor general, which represents the federal government, filed a brief in support of i4i, saying that the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office should not be second-guessed by a jury.

The Patent and Trademark Office absolutely should be second-guessed by a jury. Judges and juries are the only sanity-check the whole system has at this point!
More about the Durham, NC start-up scene here: http://www.downtowndurhamstartups.com/
It might be relevant because it's going to run on desktops too. That means you get webos in both places - it's a word people will have to remember.
I took a COBOL class in college and I actually applied for a summer internship at US Steel working on COBOL.
Luckily, I didn't not get that job.
Looking back, I'm so glad I didn't, my life would have been so different.
The hardest part of learning COBOL for me was the spacing.
Comments had to start with a '*' in column 7 and are the rest of the line.
Labels had to start in column 8.
Statements have to start in column 12 of later.
It was not a fun language to program in.

If they were really desperate for COBOL programmers we would see job posts
offering $200k for COBOL programmers.
Volta is the one on here I'm most interested in checking out when it's up. They are doing AB testing for outbound phone.
Squirrel Nest
No, this is the taste of upcoming medical problems.
From the article:

"When Hotz broke into Sony's network so that he could play PlayStation 2 games on the PlayStation 3 console, he was committing a crime, but it wasn't one that hurt Sony in any significant way."

What utter drivel. Hotz never did any such thing. The Atlantic needs to get some fact checkers.
TLDR: this problem has been solved 30 years ago by people
who actually use typed languages.

You have no idea who Gilad Bracha is, do you? In the face of people like him, a bit more modesty is appropriate. You may want to consider that maybe he isn't so obviously wrong, because he knows his subject matter very well.
At this price, why would I want this instead of iPad? (serious question)

Some possible answers: keyboard, open for hacking on, not locked into App Store, cloud storage for everything, throw-away and restore on new system immediately.

Anything else? Am I missing something?

If not, I don't see this being a hit.

Keyboard - you can buy keyboard for iPad

Open for hacking on - I'd want a real computer to do hacking on.

Not locked into App Store - On iPad, you can use the web just as you will on Chromebook... except on Chromebook, you don't get all the apps that have already been built.

Cloud storage for everything & throw-away and restore on new system immediately - iCloud?
I'm no mathematician and I was able to easily understand the premise and follow most of the reasoning (some Scala idiosyncrasies went above my head at the last step where he adds syntactic sugar).

The proof is as basic as can be. If it helps, you can substitute types with sets, "being a subtype" with "being included in", imagine Venn diagrams and procede from there visually.

Edit: see the first half of this article for an illustration of what I mean.

http://www.ams.org/feature-column/fcarc-venn "Topolgy of Venn Diagrams"
For the two people on here who haven't already seen this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBnniua6-oM

Professor Lustig makes a compelling argument that too much fructose and lack of fiber in our diets is the major contributing factor in the obesity epidemic.
Bugherd, last time I used it, did a js embed widget for website/design changes/feedback. May have changed, but it was a neat idea then.
As the comment there says, this is fake.
Your about me doesn't load at all here btw (FF4 osx)
Business ideas: proving ideas are a dime a dosen
If that was the entirety of the post, I'd say you would be correct. However, given that the point was defending the utility of Microsoft software against pure FOSS-inclined folk, I'd say it is pointless to downvote simply because the person in question (myself) referred to Microsoft as M$FT in the same posting. In fact, it is a bit like your behavior before -- did you downvote someone for misspelling Jimmy Hendrix's last name in an otherwise good post?
Small markets doesn't seem to explain it. Germany alone has the world's fourth-largest GDP, which sounds like a pie worth slicing. Despite this, Russia, whose GDP is less than half as large, has a bigger (iirc) tech industry than Germany. I think the latter explanation -- market restrictions -- is more likely, and research spending probably contributes as well.
The ruling is likely correct in that the change should come from Congress, but the change needs to come. Patent trolls are leeching off small devs now and software innovation has just become a minefield.
Free app for memorizing Ruby on Rails terminal commands
We created a little app to help devs internalize Rails terminal commands. You can get it free on iTunes here (http://bit.ly/j9WJda) or study it on the web here (http://bit.ly/mJK5IK). Let me know what you think!
Totally false title for a totally cool website
Agreed, of that list I signed up for them and then was already using Tout.

I love A/B testing websites, why not sales calls?
The author answers the question himself in this paragraph:

> Just think of any progressive education professor who inveighs against most academic work in K-12 schools, describes academic work that involves a little memorization and practice as drill and kill, wants the world to institute unschooling and the project method en masse, has nothing but the purest P.C. contempt for the Western canon, advocates for vocational education for all but those who are truly, personally enthusiastic about academics, wants academic education to be as collaborative as possible rather than requiring students to read books, which are irrelevant to the fast-changing daily lives of students, and channeling Foucault rails against the hegemony of science and other experts. Well, such a person I would describe as an anti-intellectual intellectual. The person might well write perfectly-crafted articles with scholarly apparatus, read classics in her field, and so forth. It’s just that her opinions are unfortunately hostile to students getting knowledge (in my opinion).
"It's so ridiculous theyre essentially patenting generic syntaxes for representing documents that anybody "skilled in the art" would come up with in 5 minutes."
now - sure
but then? - apparently not as extensive litigation demonstrated.
And that 'non-obvious' nature back then - that's kinda the point, hindsight effect is a powerful thing
Fitty grand for teh fast & furious
About the immigration, I filed for a german citizenship. I don't know if it is going to be accepted, but with the documentation I've sent this is hard not to succeed.

And I will visit some places on my next vacations.. but I'm not sure about the reception I'm going to have. Any tips on where to go / how to contact the companies?
Weren't Google IO attendees supposed to be getting one of these on/before launch? I've heard nothing. Anyone else?
I feel the same way. Recently I've been studying up on humanitarian and developmental aid. I'm new that field and I've heard a lot of criticism about how "aid doesn't work" and so on. I recently learned about the Poverty Action Lab [1] which focuses on using data to discover what "works" in aid.

Fwiw here are four books on my reading list:

* Making Aid Work & Poor Economics by Abhijit V. Banerjee

* More Than Good Intentions: How a New Economics Is Helping to Solve Global Poverty by Dean Karlan

* Despite Good Intentions: Why Development Assistance to the Third World Has Failed by Thomas W. Dichter

* The Red Market: On the Trail of the World's Organ Brokers, Bone Thieves, Blood Farmers, and Child Traffickers

Some outstanding questions I have:

* I've read there is a "negative correlation with success" when many of the major international aid organizations get involved (world bank, etc) [2]. Is this because they only take on really hard problems or is it because the organizations actually make the situation worse?

* Everyone is going gaga over micro-credit. Is it really helpful for getting folks out of poverty or are we just bringing america's bad debt habits to the third world?

* What can I do to help reduce human suffering in the world? (e.g. How can I end human trafficking, provide clean water, protect ethnic groups from genocide [rwanda etc.])?

[1] http://www.povertyactionlab.org/

[2] http://www.globallawbooks.org/reviews/detail.asp?id=234
I was always exposed to the Wright brothers as a successful example of the fail fast approach. Obviously the risk factors of "just shipping" are different to most software but my point is that they didn't get to success just by thinking about it. They built things that they expected to fail so that they could learn from them and iteratively made their way to flight.
Congratulations, sir, you win a prize! You have discovered a sentence of meaningless bullshit in a mainstream technical publication that purports to understand technology. This is an incredibly rare event and you deserve recognition!
I already have mine.
self reply. Did HN ever parse markdown or am I delusional?
"A little about me" section renders pretty small on Opera. I couldn't actually read much without squinting. I would suggest, making the text less paragraph-y and more bullets?
Fennecomb: Firefox Tablet UI – First Look
How this work, some ads claims to increase Twitter followers or Facebook fans?
Am seeing some ads that some businesses claim they can increase twitter followers or facebook fans? How this works? Are they are scam?
But why do you want to work at FF?

If you spent time creating this site, you would want at least to tell them why you want to work with them.
i thought that was the point of scaffolds. i hear people say things like "but don't use them in production", but all it does is generate some boilerplate code for me to shape into what i need.
How many folks manually enter in an email pswd on their smartphones?

If any of the tools you mention were readily doable today, I fear we'd be so deep in trouble, no canary would help.
It's important if one of the goals of the TouchPad is to rejuvenate the WebOS brand so they can market it for notebooks and other non-tablet/phone devices in the future.
or we can call ourselves the new-new-tea-party
Since your probably checking here, might as well ask. Any plans for an API, so I can build a web app of some sort, send image data and user over to your site for payment, and have you send out their creation?
The entire success of Khan Academy rests on providing simple quick introductions to different topics. If Khan made the videos longer or went into more details the students would get bored and it might as well be a History channel documentary or a NOVA science show (fun for certain people but unlikely to capture the interest of many 8th graders).

As to this specific video I actually thought it was very good - precisely because of Khan's conversational breezy style that managed to keep my interest even though I was quite familiar with these events. A longer lecture would have me closing the tab pretty quick and I imagine the same reaction from the target audience.

Lastly, Khan Academy videos in their current form are probably not going to replace the entire educational system, but if you want to get a quick introduction to a certain topic they seem to be effective. For example I just watched this video a few minutes ago and approximately doubled my knowledge of diabetes: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rPLjSY00JlE and I would guess some of the viewers have similar increases in their knowledge in other topics. THAT is where Khan Academy currently excels and it is a perfectly worthwhile contribution.
Very nicely done (viewing in Safari).

Best part was the ninja star throw. Totally caught me off-guard :-)

EDIT: didn't see very much fee-fighters info in there though. Just a quick sentence at the end. Perhaps this was used for multiple companies? Not a bad idea, but I'd be looking for more directed job-search info if I were the hiring party.
If Microsoft stole trade secrets or violated copyright or broke a contract, Microsoft should be sued on those grounds, not on a bogus patent.
For an example of the Culture Wars, just scroll back on the front page to the "Dangerous Mr. Khan" article.

As far as the Sokal affair goes, it may or may not have done an excellent job of discrediting people, processes, institutions, writing styles, academic subculture ... but it did and could not touch any ideas.

In fact, you could even say that the Sokal hoax was an excellent validation/demonstration of many postmodern ideas, albeit at the expense of the same people teaching and regurgitating them.
There are two completely different conclusions that I would draw from his facts:

1) Most bugs are in code. But it might not be your code. Your code layers itself on top of many other layers of code that are outside of your control. Learning to deal with that will make a difference in your work.

2) Know how everything works. I am always hocked at people who claim to be web developers who don't even understand how an HTTP request/response works, much less what your browser does with the results. It is one of my interview questions for tech folk - I ask them to explain to me exactly what happens on the server when a browser sends it a request. Few people can give much detail here. Most can only give a generic explanation of the actions taken, if that.
This is what Yammer does as well; employees can all use the service but if the company wants admin privileges the have to pay.
Iteration and hard work did help the Wright brothers, but so did building a wind tunnel and their knowledge of aerodynamics. "Just do it" is not enough.
Google in hot water over chromebook name
It really depends. I don't use scaffolding if I would just replace it anyway. But: I do find it convenient for apps where I don't want to write (and therefore re-invent) data display views, like activescaffold provides (or used to provide?).
Not really. In fact it makes a large swathe of speculative litigation to invalidate patents rather less likely so you can rest easy. :)
Is the site down? Maybe not, http://www.downforeveryoneorjustme.com/www.inboxalarm.com says it's just me...
Transcription of a BoF with w3c, Google rep, and others on schema.org
In many ways this makes sense. Many of the people running these COBOL companies are going to be retiring soon, creating a huge demand for COBOL programmers.

But on the other hand I haven't seen any job advertisements for COBOL programmers in years. Where is all this demand for COBOL engineers?
Read the first example. Easy to understand, even if you don't know much scala, yes?

Now read the final code. Can you really make heads or tails of that without reading his whole post? Imagine if the whole program was as arcane as that.

Someone else will have to maintain that code eventually, and without his magic post to clarify it, it's insanely hard to read. I would end up writing tests to determine exactly what it did and didn't do, then rewrite it from scratch so I (and everyone after me) could read it.
This article, and much of the reporting on this case, is very confused as to what it's actually about.

The case actually has to do with a feature called "custom XML" which was introduced in Office 2003 (I think?) and basically allows databinding between Office docs and XML files with some custom schema. You have some data represented in XML, and it shows up in a Word doc presented in a certain way. Then you can edit the Word doc through the Word interface, and the data in the XML will match your changes. So the idea is to let you use Office as an editor for structured data. I dunno how well it worked in practice.

The actual patent claim was over some detail of how the databinding relationship was represented in the file format.
This has nothing to do with the XML formats introduced in Office 2007 (.docx etc.)
This conversation took place yesterday at SemTech 2011. Ivan Hermann is with w3c. Kavi Goel is a product manager at Google who is on the Rich Snippets team. Others are identified in the document.
The title of this link is confusing. The place referenced is the American Underground. It's not actually subterranean or below ground. Confusing to an outsider.
AKA dictator abhors war, vows to fight to death to protect viewpoint.
It makes perfect sense now that they have Newsstand in iOS 5.
Netflix, Amazon Kindle, SaaS apps and what-have-you can do what they want subscription-wise and still provide immense value to the platform, while magazines and newspapers will want to be part of Newsstand and will give Apple their 30% without much of a fuss. Everybody wins.
The Anonymous group will attack to the systems of general elections
The Anonymous group will attack to the systems of general election of Turkey on Sunday. Their reason is a web filter that Turkish government is going to run over all the Internet activity of Turkey. With this filter the government can be able to filter and censor any information without the permit from law. They just will be able to do any censorship.
I am totally against it, but attacking the voting system is not the right way to protest in my opinion. This means attacking democracy, and that will not solve any problem at all.
You know - scaffolding is what attracted many people to Rails in the first place. Well, not scaffolding per se, but the idea that it takes care of boilerplate for you.

I'm getting the feeling that Rails is bloated.
Wasn't that kid interviewed recently as part of a team working on a two day hacker competition or something? I think it got posted on HN.
I very much like my CR-48, but it is not as much a necessity as a netbook is.
I've seen them work, but it didn't for me.
I agree. It's time we (as "computer people") stopped putting the onus on the users to figure out "our way", and start taking some responsibility to build solutions that work without a scientific or engineering degree to understand.
as far as I can recall NesC and TinyOS has been going hand in hand. I believe one of the issues in advancing NesC is finishing TEPs for TinyOS
All of these tools are available. Also, recall that most mail clients will use STARTTLS opportunistically, i.e. will not encrypt stuff if you MITM them. The better ones may not send the login in the clear, but an attacker can still read mail - or steal the authenticated connection (this is more tricky, and pretty much requires being on the same network.)

Seriously, most online security works only because the competent people have better things to do.
The problem is, once such an online service is well known, the hackers could just blacklist the host name(s) to the service so no alerting messages are sent. I think this is something that would have to live on the actual Gmail servers so it is not detectable from the client-side.
I posted a detailed critique elsewhere but I wanted to mention here that I have left my Cr48 open and on in the kitchen for three weeks now, parked in front of a barstool. Google's CloudPrint is configured. We still walk right past the Cr48 and sit down at the 27" iMac in the living room to look up recipes on Chrome and print them to the same printer. I don't see the selling point of "the cloud" saving this product. Which makes me a little sad. Why don't we use it?
what about cases where the functionality you need is such basic CRUD that scaffolding speeds up your workflow?

i can write scaffolding from scratch, but i appreciate it as a useful boilerplate for when i'm fleshing out an initial iteration. i can't tell if "i never scaffold" is just vogue or if there really are no use-cases for it if you want to claim proficiency.

the code it generates seems pretty basic, trivial, and even idiomatic. (not a fan of the view code, though)
You can "apt-get install open-cobol" for free.

It's still COBOL, but, at least, it doesn't come with Micro Focus.
hey @arfank - we haven't announced any plans around doing this, but we think it'd be cool. Drop me a note at matt@sincerely.com and let me know what you'd like to do.
1) Who says that this is meant for production code? It is first and foremost a demonstration of the power and flexibility of the Scala type system.

2) I wouldn't mind actually using it in production if the library was written as a litterate program including the whole blog post. Once you wrap your head around the concept, the code becomes clear (and is so simple that you can understand it doesn't have any bug to be fixed anyway)
I know of one company that, instead of retraining their employees, did their website in COBOL.
That's what VPN is for.
http://jobsearch.monsterindia.com/searchresult.html?fts=cobo...

Infosys / Patni / TCS etc work on quite a few COBOL projects.
What's disappointing is they didn't notify users.
Google never said when the emails would go out.
It's not only not a good idea to use private APIs, if you do so you've failed. You're a bad developer. It's like writing file handling code that assumes all operations always succeed. There's a reason private APIs are private. They will change. Your app will crash. It's not a matter of if, it's a matter of when.
They claim that because it’s what Apple CFO Oppenheimer said in February during a shareholder meeting: “We run the App Store just a little over break-even.”

Apple makes money by selling hardware with good margins. The App Store and the Music Store help them sell more hardware.
How simple brands should be - Steve Jobs
MockFlow Chart simplifies decision making