skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I had no idea that printing something like "\x1b[2J\x1b[H" can clear the screen - with a bit of googling I found out that this is not that unusual a command, but it still took a little reading to figure it out! [1]

Looks like the rest of the code is for generating the donut. Quite a bit of math involved - too much for a sunday morning to look into and attempt to decipher!

[1] http://www.codeguru.com/forum/archive/index.php/t-311110.htm... explains it quite well:

Those are so-called ANSI terminal escape sequences - there is a whole list of them. Hex 1B is the escape character, the characters after that determine the action (clearing the screen, changin text color, moving the cursor etc.) Well, and "[2J" is the sequence for clearing the screen.
In the a whirlwind of broken analogies and broken precedent, one question seems to be largely missing: what grants the federal government the power to compel someone to assist in their own prosecution?

The 4th Amendment, via the warrant provision, grants the power to search places and seize persons or things. It does not grant the power to compel individuals to open their doors or put on their manacles.

The 5th states in part: "nor shall [any person] be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself". Many act as if the existence of a specific prohibition is a grant of power in every other area.

Alexander Hamilton's objections in Federalist No. 84 seem quite prescient:

I go further, and affirm that bills of rights, in the sense and to the extent in which they are contended for, are not only unnecessary in the proposed Constitution, but would even be dangerous. They would contain various exceptions to powers not granted; and, on this very account, would afford a colorable pretext to claim more than were granted. For why declare that things shall not be done which there is no power to do? Why, for instance, should it be said that the liberty of the press shall not be restrained, when no power is given by which restrictions may be imposed? I will not contend that such a provision would confer a regulating power; but it is evident that it would furnish, to men disposed to usurp, a plausible pretense for claiming that power.

The great unintended consequence of modern constitutional arguments has been to change the perception of the federal government from one defined by a closed set of powers, into one defined by a closed set of prohibitions.
It sounds like high school policy debates teach the opposite of rational thought. Authority is a useful heuristic for finding truth, but a good argument (which can in principle come from anyone) overrides authority. Here's a good post explaining the concept: http://lesswrong.com/lw/lx/argument_screens_off_authority/
Ask HN: Good resources on the Business / Legal side of a UK Startup
Having read a number of articles on how start ups come about I've decided to knock up some code and get something on line soon. I have a few big ideas, but reading these articles has suggested to me it's best to start with something simple and quick, learn a few lessons from that, and then pursue my real ambitions. However, I'm anxious about one thing - once I start making money from a site, do I become a business / do I have to contact someone to request a self assessment tax form (even if I only make a couple of pounds from the venture) / what are my legal responsibilities?

I'm guessing there are lots of people in my situation all over the world, and each country will have its own rules and regulations around this sort of thing. I'm based in the UK, so am particularly interested in the rules there, but if you know of good resources for other countries, please post those also, as there's bound to be a few others in my position dotted around the globe who can benefit.

Thanks in advance,

JB
I'd like to just note here that numpty@gmail.com isn't my correspondent's real email address. (I wasn't expecting a blog entry to go viral, and didn't check whether numpty@... is taken; it may be banned -- it's a mild insult -- but please don't go sending any mail that way on my account.)
I'm not much of a fan of downvoting, but I suspect it was downvoted because trying to make this in to a "Rails rocks!" thread is pointless. That may not have been your intent, but it would have gone that way.

"I believe that using it you would have developed the app faster."

"Faster" than what? Using a fairly well-established PHP MVC framework with a large community and presumable decent PHP knowledge under his belt? Just because he knew Rails doesn't mean he doesn't know how to be productive in PHP. I'd also further add that Rails in 2008 is a far cry from where it is today. Hosting for PHP was a far better story than Rails in 2008, just to point to one facet.

There was nothing in the OP story that pointed to the tech choice having been a factor in the demise of the project. In fact, the whole point is that focusing on tech at the expense of finding paying customers is a surefire recipe for failure.

Bringing up the tech is not useful, which is probably the reason for the downvote.
I don't think this article is fatalistic any more than an environmentalist thinks our planet is going to hell or any other activist thinks there is a very serious issue that needs attention.

Mark Sigal provides a lot of food for thought. Though a lot of Americans feel that we're in a serious repression or depression, the complexities of the financial crisis make it difficult for many people to even begin to understand or support a proper solution. With so many of our brightest grads being sucked directly into Wall Street firms, it's not surprising that the convoluted and opaque characteristics of risky financial instruments would cause the average and even above-average citizen to have difficulty knowing how to vote for an effective fix.

We're better off for having talented writers, journalists, and filmmakers do their utmost to discuss these topics.
If you're looking for a complete javascript mapping library, I'd stick with openlayers for now. In the future though, I hope leaflet takes off and offers some competition
New York artist investigated over Apple Store spyware project
Am I missing something here ? We do this using screen/screen -x
Does Journalism need its own Silicon Valley?
The need for good vocational schools for programmers
I have the same issues with Intuit mobile and desktop apps.
Former GM exec, Bob Lutz: Fire the MBAs and let the engineers run the show
I believe RPython to be a proper subset of Python, and PyPy is written in RPython.

You need to bootstrap off CPython to compile the compiler, of course!
I've updated the code to be even more readable, and as an aside, made it more optimal.

sin(A) and sin(B) were being computed repeatedly in the most inner of inner loops, which I pulled out, because A and B don't change in the middle. sin(j) and cos(j) was being computed for every i, even though j wasn't changing. And the intensity was being computed even if the pixel was going to appear beyond the buffer (or wasn't going to appear at all because of a closer pixel in the z buffer).

I also refactored parts of it, and gave names to some constants which you can tweak for fun. DELTA_I can be increased without apparent detriment to image quality. I can't think of good names for the two constants in the middle of the code though: 2 and 5. Are those the minor and major radius of the donut?
That's way too little an amount.
At my university (Oxford University) in the first year they teach Haskell in the first term, Oberon in the second and finally Java in the third term.
Good question. I suppose I could ask, but I get the impression that in both of those parks I might need to find something outside the park. I thought about getting an outdoor antenna, putting it outside my hotel window, and pointing it in the general direction of the park, but not sure that would be useful when you are talking miles and not necessarily line of site.
T-Sports Online ทีสปอร์ตออนไลน์ T-Sports ดูบอลไทยลีก
Why does Google show that 2^1000 = 1.07150861 × 10^301?
Law prof: "Apple's enforcement campaign over the term 'App Store' is ridiculous"
Try Phonm Penh (Cambodia). You can buy an apartment for $30k in a premium location. If you can't afford to buy, you can rent something decent for $60 a week or less. Food is about a third to half the price of what you're used to paying. Western standard places that are great to work in are springing up quickly now. Very friendly place. A lot of people speak English. Many of them have an entrepreneurial mindset (and run or dream of running some sort of small business). If you've got an interesting enough resume and want to check it out, feel free to ping me and I'll show you around (and depending on the state of the renovations you can stay one of my spare rooms).
If the buyer is in the lock-picking business, and the seller is in the lead-gen business, who is likely to get a better deal?
Yes, I think many of us would like to hear that one even if it's followed by the usual punchline:

1) Start with $4mm

2) Drink $60 worth of scotch

3) End up with $2mm

:-)
Dude, I'm gonna have to decipher that one too??
It sounds like high school policy debates teach the opposite of rational thought

It's always been so. Socrates' greatest enemy wasn't Aristophanes. They were the Sophists - teachers who would teach debating skills with no regard for truth. This kind of "debate" and the worldview behind it is the most insidious kind of cynicism.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sophism
Another aspect of playing the game unfortunately. There is some give and take I have to accept with playing-to-win and playing-for-education. First, studies are very hesitant with their results (and justifiably so, because they are just one study). The unifying analysis of one author is thus much more persuasive. Much more importantly in my experience, its really hard for me to read excerpts from a study to someone because the material is far more technical and harder to understand for a listening audience.

edited for clarity.
The HMRC is a decent starting place http://www.hmrc.gov.uk/startingup/, you may also find http://www.businesslink.gov.uk useful. In addition you should check with an accountant (perhaps someone you know).
Interactive Ajax Data Management with Codeigniter
Ask HN: Internet Marketing Gurus
There are many self-proclaimed millionaire Internet Marketing gurus. Does anyone have any experience or success marketing info-products like ebooks and video tutorials?
Ask HN: I need a G+ invite
Can someone please send me an invite! My username at gmail.com.
Re: repeatedly computing sin(A)/sin(B)/etc: I don't remember why I did that, as it was five years ago, but it was probably intentional just to move code around so it fit within the shape. Or it was an oversight.

IIRC, yes, 5 and 2 are the major and minor radii, meaning 5 is the radius of the ring at the center of the donut (a torus of thickness 0, as it were) and 2 is the thickness -- the radius of the circle extruded around the central ring.
As a consultant you have to give advice with the knowledge you have, you should ask the questions to get as big a picture as you can. If based on your experience you see someone sticking the bean up their nose you should point it out, you are getting paid for your experience. There isn't a way of knowing if there are unknown unknowns so you do the best you can, just try to be humble and open minded as much as you can, even if this is the 100th time you've seen this being done and you're pretty sure of the outcome.
The "any changes that we felt were needed" part is what gives me pause. $500 for a couple week's simple coding work isn't bad for a student, but expecting development support atop that is highway robbery.
It's easy if you are consulting, just step aside. What if it's your boss who want to stick beans up his nose (constantly)?
This is mostly what happens.

Additionally, these new apartment complexes are often build in "new areas" of the bigger cities, to grow the city. China is trying hard to reach a level of urbanization comparable to the west, so they need to "grow their cities" somewhat aggressively.

I have lived in two of those newly build complexes myself. First there is not much around, roads, maybe a supermarket and a few stores. The local gov't or the developer offer the shop owners rent-free for a year or two to get them to set up their stores in the new area, because there are almost no people yet. But two or three years later, the apartments are mostly filled (either rented or sold) and the shops are paying rent too, new supermarket have arrived, and suddenly the area has become part of the city center.

Same goes for big roads. In the southern part of the town I live in, there is a huge road grid (6 lane roads, etc) already build, but there is only grassland. Come back in five to ten years, and it will be inner city area. Smart to finish the roads before it is crowded.
<ESC>[H ("home") moves the cursor to the upper-left hand corner, so I initially clear the screen and then use "home" to do the animation.

An alternative method to animate ascii stuff, used in the Yahoo logo, is just to cursor-up 25 lines (or whatever) with <ESC>[25A between frames. That way it doesn't have to clear the screen and you can see your command history, etc.
It's weird that you claim to make predictions about what will succeed and what will not while simultaneously deriding an industry segment you claim to avoid.

What makes you an expert, and can you share this insight with us? I, one for, would benefit greatly as I would no longer have to spend hours dissecting UI's, measuring user behavior, satisfaction, engagement level and repetition fatigue; not to mention actually doing the work of designing, building, deploying and maintaining applications that enable people to share and communicate without, you know, being dragged into it by their friends.

With your methodology I could perhaps save myself a lot of trouble and just focus on my hobbies. Like drinking.
Help with SMPP and an SMS API
FAQ with key questions on how to connect to Nexmo SMS API and SMPP
I haven't tried dojo Mobile in a project, but the demos on their website are either extremely slow or not functional on my duel core android phone.
Everything you say is true, you need to practice to get good.

The hardware, everything I mentioned and one or several mics (or a guitar amp), is still only about $3k to get started. SM58s (great for guitar cabs and ok for rock vocals) are used all over the place, they cost $99. An introductory condenser, like an SM81 (acoustic guitar, drum overheads, most acoustic instruments, some vocals), is about $300. If your voice is what you want to showcase, spend $1000 on a Nuemann TLM103 (my college roommate had one of these). $1000 is about the cost of a guitar amp and a guitar to get started.

This equipment will not make you rich, but it will give you access to the tools you need to learn the craft. I'm contrasting to a time (the 60s) when you needed half a million dollars just to put a sound on tape. Putting a sound on 'tape' these days doesn't even cost anything, the technology is everywhere.

Edit: To more specifically address your post, yes you're right, the talent is still the "hard part" of making music. My point was that if you have the talent, recording it is not as expensive as it once was.
Yeah, Google wants no part of those sketchy, third-part crap apps in their ecosystem.

http://techcrunch.com/2010/07/10/google-secretly-invested-10...
What would a 'Church Management System' do? Have you been to http://www.monkdevelopment.com ?

A large number of HN users are based in Silicon Valley and the surrounding area, which is well known for being largely non-religious. That said, I am a software engineer who is a Christian and spent last summer in the Bay Area, so don't let statistics discourage you. I met plenty of other Christian software engineers while I was out there. Most of them have full-time jobs at well-known tech companies. I don't know if any of them use HN.

Depending on how many software engineers are in your area, it may be more efficient to ask people at church if they are entrepreneurial software engineers than to ask HN users if they are Christians.
got u
For C#/F# I'd suggest using the Microsoft compilers/JIT as that's a more realistic usage of C#/F#. I realize that the MSFT implementation doesn't work on Linux.

Languages aren't faster or slower, only implementations are. Look at the performance of the CINT implementation of C.

It's conceivable that on some future computing platform Ruby would be faster than C. (Eg. On a Symbolics LISP machine LISP is probably faster than C)
Me too! Email in my profile.
33 projects that make developing django apps awesome
"Software company dedicated to helping parents of chronically ill children research treatment decisions sued for billions for patent infringement."

This actually happens, only replace "software company" with
"pharmaceutical company". Johnson & Johnson and similar pharmaceutical companies makes it very hard for people to get cheap medicines by greedily enforcing their patents, which are more legitimate compared to most software patents. These pharmaceutical also lobbied and were rewarded with laws(masked as safety precautions,) that prevents the importation of cheaper medicine from Canada. Let's face it, this "protection racket" is a billion dollar scam that's only going to end by infiltrating the powers that be. When all the major players: Google, Apple, Microsoft, Sony, Sun, and Oracle decide that this nonsense must stop and copyright laws are sufficient, the protection racket will end. They have the money and influence to make the change.
Depends on the city. In the city I live in, apartments cost the same as in Germany, but with worse quality. But prices go down drastically in the countryside (because nobody wants to live there).
It's inspired from Structure Synth ( http://structuresynth.sourceforge.net/ ) and runs in any modern browser that supports CSS3 transforms. With a little bit of effort, you can design some pretty interesting things.
Photos - eko
Church Management System (ChMS) refers to a database system to track member/visitor information, donations, volunteer efforts, etc.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church_management_software#Chur...
Why not use numpty@example.com instead?
Great Firewall? Use a VPN, easy. (I'm doing it for many years).

Sanya is not an island, its a city on the island of Hainan.

Infrastructure in China is very good, especially train lines.
Wow, that was quick! HN rocks! Thanks KM!
Would it not work if they did what Henry Ford was doing. Price them so the workers can buy them? That way the money stays in your pockets while the workers enjoy a better life? Win-Win.
I created and sold an info product by doing webinars to a niche audience. It can definitely be done.
Well, since you seem to have signed up to HN just for this (and have done an admirable job already)... I'm afraid so.
You're working on a startup? Then you should have more than $500 to invest in your product. Offer a humane hourly rate ($15/hr for a student programmer? Probably), and you might get what you want.
How much did you make if you don't mind me asking and how did you build your audience?
>> There are no property taxes in most of China, so people with money park it in real estate.

There are now in Shanghai, Beijing and a few other major cities. That's quite new and started just this year.
Thanks Chris.

If I manage to get a large subscriber base for this simpler service, it will definitely make sense to add a shop for re-ordering single items.

Honestly, at this point I don't have evidence of how the Pocky will survive the mail, but the box is cardboard and seems to me strong enough to survive. Upgrading packaging would require changing from Japan Post to something like FedEx if I still want the packages to arrive directly at subscriber's homes. I guess I could offer it as an option, but subscription would cost around triple the current price for the pricier postage.

My occupation is trying stuff like this on the internets. So far it has worked pretty well. Yes I have a camera like that, what did you have in mind?
I agree, the "any changes that we felt were needed" part made me laugh.
Beets: the music geek's media organizer
Although there are some standout exceptions the hacker community is obsessed with credentials.

Most of the job listings I see, on a daily basis call for a computer science degree, and its almost never qualified with (or equivalent experience).

This is a recent phenomenon and I have a feeling it has to do with the glut of comp-sci graduates that got stuffed in the pipeline since the first dot com bubble. Now they are mostly just hiring their own kind to perpetuate an artificial scarcity and keep their value up.

I miss the days when I could work, and learn, alongside a motley crew of developers from all kinds of backgrounds, and the cream, not the credentialed, would rise to the top.
There is common sense, there is common decency, and there is the Law. As you must know, the law sometimes isn't sensible nor decent.

I think everyone here agree about the humane thing to do here: never ever force someone to either (i) incriminate herself, (ii) lying under oath, or (iii) risk contempt of court. Similarly, probably everyone here agree about the sensible attitude towards passwords: never force anyone to give hers.

But the letter of the Law isn't the same. And I think Boredguy8 was talking about the Law.
That's a good point. I'm not aware of any rules I am breaking, I do hope I wouldn't get instadeported over a disagreement. If this becomes more popular I would start studying the formalities more.
I sold each copy for $199 and I did it by doing webinars for the target audience. I contacted people that ran webinars (they often want guest speakers) I would do a presentation and then sell copies after.

A lot of people wanted me to do other consulting work for them as well.
> It's sad that we don't seem to train young people to assess ideas themselves rather than trust in things like degrees ...

It is impossible (for now) to develop enough expertise in every subject you may ever encounter to be able to assess the fundamentals of that subject on your own. Thus, expertise is used as a reasonable signal when sorting out "correct" ideas from "incorrect" ideas. (I would point out that the still-often-requested return of points displays on HN comments usually alludes to this: people asking for it say they want it because it helps them sort out what's "good" from what's not.)

> But I think there's a big caveat here in that "numpty@gmail.com" doesn't seem like the sharpest tool in the shed.

The most that we could conclude from the correspondence is that he is either intellectually lazy -- either temporarily, possibly as a result of a deadline, or more long term -- or that he is behaving as a result of his educational environment. There is no way to determine his intelligence from this tiny little exchange, which invalidates the rest of your comment.

One of the worst things that a "smart" person can do is look for evidence of stupidity in the people around them.
Jambox, simply the smallest, best sounding wireless speaker and speakerphone
If someone would be generous enough to send one my way ;-)

My username@gmail.com