skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Finish your current project.
Nice Hack!
Dear Phil, your law is misstated
Another idea is to market to teachers. Scan in homework, grade/annotate on the computer, and send results to student and parents. Then, teachers wouldn't have to lug all that paper around, parents are involved in the feedback loop, 9 month sales window, doesn't require institutional commitments (any teacher could use it).
And once again my brain fails to correctly parse the word Go until it has read the headline three times.

It must be some kind of world record: I have gotten exactly two characters into this language and already I'm demoralized by its user experience. ;)
It being consistent with PHP is pretty much the same thing as being inconsistent.
"And such is the supreme folly of man that he labours so as to labour no more, and life flies from him while he forever hopes to enjoy the goods which he has acquired at the price of great labour."
- Leonardo da Vinci

Figure out how to build your startup while maintaining a normal lifestyle. Working 15 hours a day isn't sustainable, nor is it desirable.
Here's an idea: in the USA, university student-athletes are typically supported by an army of tutors, perhaps the athletic dept. would be interested in something like this to streamline review of student writing.

Though as you note, I'm not seeing a lot here that wouldn't work just as well over email, perhaps backed with a simple issue-tracking system of some sort.

Edit: "You" in the prior paragraph is addressing Mr. Ruffles.
Worth pointing out that a week or so after this article was written the jquery mobile beta was released:

http://jquerymobile.com/blog/2011/06/20/jquery-mobile-beta-1...

I think the specific bugs he's highlighted are fixed, certainly on the platforms we're testing on.
I don't know what he exactly meant, but there are certainly several shades of that, like there are (sometimes, obscure and subtle) differences between the meanings¹ of "bashing some lines together", "coding", "programming", "software engineering" and "computer science research".

"Scripting" feels like a relatively small coding task, to automate (frequently, to prevent repetitive routine work) of operating some complex software system by quickly defining high-level behavior required to preform the job. But this "definition" is vague, could be applied to "non-scripting" as well, and, moreover, I somehow doubt there could be any precise definition what "scripting" is.

____

1) I'm not a native English speaker, so this is just how I perceive things.
The Biggest Challenge of Google+: How to Persuade Non-Techie Friends to Join?
High definition, streaming video platform of planet Earth
afaik store is where you also just store things, while market or bazaar is where you sell them, not free...

app store are too general words to forbid people use them
This appears to be the case with the current Congress. Canada, Singapore, Costa Rica and Switzerland are looking better and better.
Commercial flights are cost-competitive with driving or just about any other form of travel over distances greater than several hundred miles. Tens of millions of people fly per year. An average ticket for a cross-continental trip is extremely affordable even for people in the lowest quintile of incomes. By what definitions has flying not become cheaper in the last 50 years?

As far as manned spaceflight, it's certainly fundamentally more difficult than air travel but that doesn't explain the lack of progress the last 5 decades have seen under NASA leadership. Indeed, we're already seeing the first fruits of a properly open and competitive launch industry, something that hasn't generally been possible for most of the last half century, and it is already beginning to revolutionize manned spaceflight. In the next 50 years if the industry keeps advancing they will have developed streamlined mass produced launch vehicles (Iridium proved that such a thing was possible for satellites, at massive cost savings), single stage to orbit vehicles, and truly reusable launch vehicles, all of which will ultimately bring manned spaceflight into the reach of ordinary folks.
Find if it is already been done. If you find it - contact the developer and figure out how you can help. If you don't find it, keep looking and start asking if other people have heard of it. If you still don't find it, take a couple days off and then start looking again.

Only after you've searched 3 times and couldn't find it - start your new project.

The internet would be a better place if people were 50% as excited to contribute to an existing project as they are starting a new one.
Your point is technically valid but irrelevant in practice. The compressed tar is surprisingly small and you can stream it to S3 if you really want to shave off megabytes.

But more importantly, you don't care. This will give you 3 orders of magnitude better write throughput with 2 hours of work. The savings in engineering time alone will buy you 1000x the ram you wasted!

With that kind of achievement, my advice would be leave over-optimization for later and buy yourself a drink :)
This conversation is regarding asocial network where your name is always public.
Interesting. What's the site, and is the original Clojure source before -> js transformation published somewhere?
Yea I definitely think that's an option. I really like the idea of getting the community to collaborate on it too though.
Without need for the configs:

git push -u origin master
I've never heard of jekyll but I'll definitely look into it thanks :)
This was posted a bunch of times

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2431869

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2386584

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2669432
Perhaps some of the confusion comes from stories at the time that shuttle crews started carrying 486 (IIRC) laptops to "augment" the guidance computers. I dont think they were used in flight control, more likely for other routine tasks.
I just found out about jekyll too, very interesting. If anybody else is curious https://github.com/mojombo/jekyll/wiki
The trick of course would be to have a roving robot army that pillaged like Attila.
ok, Im in, Thanks to whomever invited me!
Watch'New Cowboys & Aliens Trailer Takes Us Inside The Alien Lair"online
Watch'New Cowboys & Aliens Trailer Takes Us Inside The Alien Lair"online
But Absolution is the experience of fear that he can barely understand
ok, im in, thanks to whomever invited me!
I would pay for that! The amount of paper that my kids bring home from school every day is staggering. If I could go online and see scans of all their work (along with all the school newsletters, PTO flyers, lunch menus, etc.) that would be wonderful.

Of course you'd need to figure out how to make it easy for the teacher to scan/upload of stacks of different sized, often folded/wrinkled paper.
> Writing something hackers think is cool != value

unless your customers would be hackers (i am telling this to myself, to reassure myself)
I think this may be somewhat true. I've bought over 150 books now on Amazon, and have only returned 1. That 1 was a Packt Publishing book which had a fantastical description, but after I spent an hour leafing through it, it turned out they had literally copy and pasted 1/4 of the material from drupal.org. Thus, I returned it "not as described". However, this was prior to Kindle.

As to your last point, I would have agreed, until Kindle came out, in which case with most books I can now get a free preview, which is usually enough to evaluate if a book is worth purchasing.
Weinre is buggy, but it works well enough, and the web inspector does have breakpoints for Javascript. As someone who's spent way more time in web inspector than XCode, I'd say it's easier to debug, but still less powerful than XCode's tools, especially when analyzing performance and timing issues.
Interesting idea. Instead of a Word document you might want to consider writing the book in plain text, HTML or LaTeX. This will make it a lot easier to merge in changes from other contributors.
Good Idea. I'll do that now.
Stanford's intro CS sequence is CS106A, CS106B, CS107, and CS108.

106A is taught it Java. (It was taught in C until 2004. It's nice to be able to teach for-loops without also having to explain pointers.)

106B is taught in C++.

107 is now the first introduction CS students get to C and Unix. While 106B focuses on basic algorithms and learning to use abstractions, 107 goes into the guts of low-level C.

108 is on OOP and is taught in Java.

Higher level classes are either in C++ (all the systems classes) or Java (e.g., Natural Langauge Processing).
This gets problematic when you encounter a site which dislikes your generated password. It just tells that the password is either too long or complex ("N chars max or can't contain '/' character"), or too short or simple ("must contain numbers", and this exact generated one didn't).

Handling such exceptions is somehow unpleasant.
The current book narrative is very naive. The answer to the question "What Are the Elements of A Successful Startup?" is hardly in the idea alone.

This is a common pitfall that plagues most developers who want to become entrepreneurs.

The idea is only one among several important factors that lead startups to success: timing, competitive advantage, finding the right product-market fit, identifying customer acquisition channels, devising creative ways to get the word out (aka viral loop), testing hypotheses early on, etc.

The number of startups with awesome ideas that have failed because their founders ignored all other variables is too large to ignore. Of course you don't hear about those as much, because (surprise surprise) the media feeds off success stories.

Please don't help propagate the idea myth.
Sorry! I fell down the rabbit hole of Internet surfing and totally botched the link - I'd found this entry from your delicious bookmark: http://www.delicious.com/search?p=summer+flounders&chk=&...

Back then I was actively monitoring the delicious bookmark for reddit.com and your note had made me chuckle.
This article makes it sound like laissez-faire capitalism is the problem, and yet simultaneously places blame on Goldman Sachs, which happens to have intimate, corrupt ties with the Federal Reserve and and the US government. I think the problem is actually not capitalism, but government, because government is corrupted by special interests (like Goldman Sachs) and thus the law is heavily abused for the good of those who have done the most corrupting at the expense of everyone else.

I believe the more fundamental problem is that there even exist central institutions with enormous amounts of power, like the Federal Reserve or the US government. Even if such institutions start out benevolent, they will inevitably be corrupted, because the temptation is so great. The only way to remove the corruption is to decentralize everything that gets corrupted, making corruption impossible. Consider that democracy is an example of decentralization. Bitcoin, the web, and the internet are further examples.
Why was he arrested?
Basically everything this guy wants is at odds with my own desires for a social network. Facebook's previously countless virality loopholes were what almost turned it into some bizarro version of MySpace, with polluted News Feeds and endless wall requests to send people coins and sheep. If G+ goes down this path, I will certainly not follow.
Maybe I didn't communicate this clearly enough in the copy of the site, but my aim isn't to solely concentrate on ideas. The aim of the text will be to find common patterns between successful startups in their ideas as well as their execution that can be applied to other projects. I hope that clears things up a little bit.
What database to use with an erlang social network?
So, whats the best database to use for a social network running on erlang code? there will be lots of realtime data streams and it needs to be highly scalable, ie, were talking hundreds of millions rather than a million or two, i think im right in looking at NoSQL databases but there are so many and so many different data types catered for its hard to know what will work best,. would a mixture of different databases for different tasks work or should i just stick to one?

Thanks for listening!
Losing the auction is more a failure of partnership than anything else. The Apple team included MS, Sony, RIM, Ericsson, and EMC, while the Google only teamed up with Intel. Where were all the Android partners?

There are enough companies with high enough stakes in Android (Google, Motorola, Samsung .. etc) that if they pooled patients for their common defense, they would make MUCH less inviting targets. Heck, isn't this what MS has been saying they would do with Linux for years? Doesn't this legal precedent concern the corporations that are dependent on Linux (which is probably a large majority of tech companies today) ?
Nicely done video, but I think it gets the story wrong. The bubble is not illogical to start with. Thanks to currency controls most people have no way to invest outside China. The Shanghai stock market meanwhile has huge problems with adverse selection (bad companies pay to list -- successful companies list in Hong Kong or the United States).

There are no property taxes in most of China, so people with money park it in real estate. And developers keep building these assets because they're insulated from loss in any case. If you're connected you can get zero/low cost loans. And local governments are complicit because they make money "selling" the land and don't have alternate income sources.

So no-one really cares if someone builds a massive complex and it doesn't sell: the government and developers are covered by the bank, and the bank is covered by the Central Government. This is just a distributional game in which China pays for infrastructure by using public policy to inflate bank earnings and then banks approve questionable local projects. And sometimes these things make a lot of money, so it isn't as if they're taking a hit on every single complex.
It's not a matter of IDEs having to "catch up". C and C++ weren't designed with the constraint that they had to be highly amenable to static analysis, so there's quite simply less that automated refactoring tools can know they can safely change without breaking anything.
Yes. They can't compel you to give them the means to open it (e.g. tell them the combination), but you can be forced to open it for them.
No, actual persistent headers and footers are still not possible with the beta. They are possible with the experimental scrollview element. Personally, I find jquery mobile to be fairly useless without the scrollview element. Sencha touch has a scrollview, but the author doesn't mention that the only reason sencha touch has had any success is that it's scope is more narrow than jquery mobile's -- sencha only works on webkit browsers. Creating a scrollview element in a webkit browser is a fairly trivial task. Creating a scrollview that will work on a windows phone is more difficult, and this kind of problem is whats hindering jquery mobile's progress, but getting it right will ensure that jquery mobile will be the dominant mobile framework come 6 months from now.
Personally I had my best exam results when I did exactly that, I wrote as much as I could for each historical exam question. I would research from book, lecture notes etc.

However, I wouldn't pay for this service when my lecturers and teaching assistants would do this for free and as they were the ones setting the exams I would prefer their advice than that of an unknown person.
First off, I have personally seen, as justincormack describes, compiled Go as it currently exists being roughly comparable to Java, as it currently exists. I haven't burned much time looking around, but I was unable to find what version of Go they were using, or even what compiler for it (there are two major ones, with dramatic performance differences). Furthermore, it is a fact that Go at it's current maturity does little real optimization. Regardless of how "commonplace" languages beating Java may or may not be, Go should stand a very solid chance of doing it, provided it continues to see love.

anyway,

Java also loses handily on startup times, and only wins in runtime speeds against statically typed languages compiling to native code that lack the same tier of backing. Notice that one of the languages that beats Java is C++, possibly the single ugliest language in actual use. Practically a worse case scenario for a language developer but I don't think there has ever been a point in history which it doesn't cream Java. Hobbyist languages, which I would classify most of the languages on that list as (well, the ones that are even commonly compiled to native code in the first place...) will rarely compete with mature enterprise backed languages, but when you weight by funding, compiled languages clean house. Continued development of systems such as LLVM which blur the distinction between the two will only serve to improve the situation.

aside:
I find their Fortran statistic suspect as well. In my professional experience a well designed Fortran program will kick C's ass nearly every time. At least in scientific computing applications anyway.
Agreed. Better to go out and find the zeitgeist than to wait for it to come to you. For a first failure without mentorship I would actually consider this a pretty fast one. :)
App Stop.
the best pizza i ever had was tuna (somewhere in italy, years ago).
Marketing Infoproducts?
There are countless self-proclaimed millionaires selling their internet marketing courses that promise to make you at least 6 figures a year. Does anyone on HN have experience making and selling info products. Does it work? Is it worth the effort? Any tips?
I have been writing a Web app using Weblocks, and I have been very pleasantly surprised at the breadth and depth of the libraries available for the purpose. I would go so far as to say that the Common Lisp library problem has been solved, at least as far as writing Web apps is concerned. Here are the highlights of the packages on which my app directly or indirectly depends:

CLSQL: database interface (I'm using PostgreSQL)
Weblocks: widget-oriented app framework with AJAX
Hunchentoot: web server
CL+SSL: SSL foreign interface layer
Babel: charset conversion
PURI: Portable URI library
CL-JSON
CL-WHO: HTML generation
CL-PPCRE: regular expressions
CL-OAUTH: OAuth implementation
Drakma: HTTP client
CL-SMTP: programmatically send email
Monkeylib-bcrypt: bcrypt foreign function interface

And almost all of these (and many more I haven't listed) are easily downloaded and installed with Quicklisp.
>And who writes out example exam questions anyway?

As a maths/physics student (though I did various other courses too) I pored over past papers, in part as an indicator of the papers to come (though they always caught one out) and in part for practice at recapitulating proofs and writing answers under time pressure. I certainly didn't spend the course working toward the exam but it would be silly not to attempt past papers on a course that has run unchanged for previous years.

Most of our papers had example answers with them though.
that was cool for a saturday afternoon. extra points for creative packaging.
Develop Social News Feeds Wiki-style With Esfeed
Completely missing from your postmortem (from which I learned a lot and for which I am very grateful) is the fact that the service you offer, to judge from the demo alone, is frankly not very good. Perhaps your analytics show that few visitors bothered to look at the demo, so maybe the point is moot, but I think the demo is awful, and if I wanted to take over this business, I would completely redo it, or remove it altogether (sometimes it’s better not to show the product!).

I’m not talking about the implementation, which is great. I’m talking about the actual advice given in the demo, which you are offering as an example of the kind of thing students should be willing to pay for. The first comment is, essentially, use “and” instead of “&.” The second is, in effect, “make this bit a separate paragraph, and tie it in better.” And so on. The advice is generic or, when concrete (as in the case of “use and”), banal. There is very little of it. And there is very little of value in it. And since it’s a bit of a struggle to read the handwritten text of the sample essay, it’s even harder to tell if the generic advice is relevant--except in the case of the advice given for the conclusion, which is so general as to be universally applicable, which is not to say it is good advice.

I got a sense from your postmortem that you in part want to blame your lack of success on students not being interested enough in their own studies to pay for your service. I’ve taught thousands of students, so I know well how few are willing to write out practice exams, and how few of those are willing to seek out feedback. But a very small percentage of a very large number can surely translate to a modestly profitable business (especially, in this case, if you had plans to expand into the huge American market and into the college essay review business, which is what my crummy site is trying to do). God knows it’s hard to get students engaged, but the ones who visited your site were looking for something, and I don’t think they found something worth paying for.
Experiments in Web Activities [intents], App Discovery
Impresion en Papel Fotográfico - Perú con la Impresora Canon IP2700
Naw, tons of EE's know enough C to not have to do assembler, but don't get C++ at all. Lots of other people know C because they do extensions for their preferred language. Lastly people know enough C++ to know they don't know C++ well enough to release software in it.
Give the empty apartments to poor folk. You solve the high income inequality and property bubble at the same time ;)
Looks great. Has anyone compared this and the google maps api? I'm working on a GIS project and we're going to do some stuff in js for the web so I'm very curious.
I'm getting a "Forbidden: you don't have permission to access" error on this link.
Discussed (briefly) before at http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2548927
Cool, I thought I'd give you a heads-up. Too many programmers make that mistake, so when I saw an idea-centered narrative in your .docx a red flag came up.
C++ is vastly different from C. I know C, yet I don't know C++.
I don't care about micro benchmarks, I care about real programs. When is the last time any real user said "Yeah I think I'm gonna go home tonight and fire up the N-body problem on the PS3". Write a video game in java and then tell me that it's on par with statically typed languages compiled to native code in terms of performance.

Also, this language shootout doesn't use optimized compilers for a bunch of languages like C#/F#. Also for C/C++, ICC is much faster than gcc. I would hazard a guess that there are many more than 4 language implementations that are much faster than java for real programs that allocate memory.

The fact that Go is on par with java after a couple years is impressive. It took java ~20 years to get to that point.
The furthest I will generally go is black and white mockups in Balsamiq. If the backend is a little more complex, we may begin planning schemas and algorithms, but rarely much further than this.

By secured and signed, I do mean a signed order for a license, to be delivered at a future date, generally with a discount or longer term to compensate for my clients risk. The delivery date, scope, seats, license term and cheque cutting dates are always pre-defined. Quite often, I'll extend a discount for a downpayment so that the company has some instant cashflow.

I didn't practice this in my first startup, but have since. It's not easy, but always worthwhile in the end, and helps accelerate through that awkward early growth stage, and means while development is going on, I can pitch us with a legitimate client backing.

To clarify: I am almost exclusively in B2B software.
Here's a more readable version:

https://gist.github.com/1073922