skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
People might be interested to know that this story is indicative of a sea change in astronomy. It has become apparent that there is a lot of variability in the nighttime sky, and we now have the technical means to discover lots of new things.

One major factor in this change has been the advent of wide-angle surveys, that repeat often enough to find variable sources like SN's, blazars, asteroids, lensing events, etc., while they're still interesting. The Palomar Transient Factory (http://www.astro.caltech.edu/ptf/) is the one mentioned in the article, but there are many others. They automatically detect and post events in a standard XML format for anyone (including robotic telescopes) to scoop up (e.g., http://www.skyalert.org/events/all/2/).

One of the largest, LSST, is now being designed, and its data volume will prove to be a huge engineering/computer science challenge (http://www.lsst.org/lsst/science/petascale).

There's a sophisticated and multifaceted image processing pipeline to detect the changes in sources, to automatically extract photometric parameters, and to pass these parameters on to a classifier to separate the events into types of interest to various communities (the SN folks could care less about asteroids).
I'll rephrase that - excuses to avoid saying "we're on the chopping block". Though in general I still stand by the term - there's no content in the paragraph before that statement. It's essentially "it's a good product, the cloud and OS-driven search killed us" - in what way is that not merely an attempt to avoid users' wrath?

As to uses, it's still much faster than Windows' search in my experience. And has fewer errors - I've had 'results' from Windows' search that were incorrect since 3 days ago, with a computer that was on > 12 hours per day.
Dunning-Kruger, hello?
Just tonight I had to work on a code base that I initially wrote about five years ago. This is a working product that's been rock-solid for the client. Still though, at one point, I really hated the code.

Nevertheless, I've been able to extend bits and bobs of it over the years without major headache or breakage. And tonight I had to write a simple related utility program. I was able to grab various classes out of the code and just use them, or re-purpose them with little effort.

Are there issues with the code? Hell yes. I'm always learning as a programmer and I'm much better now than I was then. Does that mean the code was crap? It feels kind of hard to say this, but no it wasn't crap. It did the job and it hasn't been a maintenance nightmare.

So when you look at code you wrote 6 years/months/weeks/days/hours/minutes ago and think, that's total crap! Don't beat yourself up over it. It just means that #1 you care and #2 you have learned something between then and now.

Oh, and after looking at the first line of nirvana's post, I thought about it and realized I wrote my first bits of code about 30 years ago too.
There are a couple of things that chrome do and other browsers do not. If you are really interested, its possible to do in other browsers by changing a few values, I was simply too lazy.
Gitorious exists just fine doing that, they make money off support and consulting, same way most other FOSS projects that make money do it.

http://gitorious.com/
Rodimus Prime (Masterpiece) Review
1st time I was naive didn't get all the details and ended up getting screwed, was also a really good exit. was hired as first engineer.

2nd time was a little more than a quarterly bonus at last corporate job, so yeah wasn't much. was 2nd engineer hired.

I know its anti karma saying this but working at startups suck.

edit- I see people putting 18 / 20k and is probably good depending on what area you live in but for perspective my last quarter bonus was 10k.
Roughly, SICP:Computer Science::HTDP:Software Craftsmanship/Engineering
If you just want "the internet" and a few basics like a word processor then it doesn't matter much.

Windows has Microsoft Office, which is going to trump any non-specialized options you can get on Linux. It also has a large library of commercial software and it is the only OS which is a significant contender for gaming.

For developers and "power users":

* If you want to get a bit deeper, it's easier on Windows.

* If you want to get a lot deeper, it's easier on Linux.
Kickstarter for filmmakers? That sounds promising.

I've read of many promising films that never get made because they can't get funding. For example, Tom Hanks owns the movie rights to Arthur C. Clarke's 2061, MGM owns 3001's, and Morgan Freeman owns Rendezvous with Rama's. And who knows who owns Neuromancer.

As for downloads, some torrent sites offer "fast, direct downloads" for a fee. Someone is making money from bittorrent users and it's not Hollywood (but there's nothing stopping them).
My suggestion was not a joke, they can add some extra to the product.
I don't think it'd go to that extreme. Sure, the ads would be outdated, but the brands are still there.

You're still exposed to the Apple brand, and are reminded that they've been (hypothetically) awesome since 1997 and beyond. You're still exposed to McDonald's and might head out for a Big Mac (I suspect that'll stay on forever).

Maybe Volkswagens will get better in ten year's time ;-)
Data storage system using 5 dimensions
facintating posibilities.
No, the best idea will be to insert those ads dynamically when you download the torrent.
Why not just provide streaming versions for free, and insert new ads whenever they feel like it. It could even be like a website where a Person could find lots of different streaming video programs. I would use that in a heartbeat.
Gamers rocking Mario all weekend for Child's Play
> 1st time I was naive didn't get all the details and ended up getting screwed

What details is one meant to know?
| Considering we don't have great definition of consciousness

Yes, you will not be able to "define" consciousness. However, you can point to it, so others can get it. It is on the basis of that discovery of consciousness that we can say it is independent. And yes, modern/western science has it backwards. Consciousness does not depend on the brain or body, these are events in consciousness.

A simple book that can help you get it is The Power of Now by Tolle. Science assumes that consciousness depends on the brain, we often take these assumptions to be facts.
When my current company (~200 employee startup) got acquired about 5 years ago my internal stock was translated into about 20k.

We then had a 10k payout for staying an additional year.

Considering everyone assumed that our internal stock would never be worth anything, I was fairly pleased overall.
The relation of electric locks / doors and the Sabbath
I remember being completely blown away in undergraduate physics classes by how much of the world can be exactly and precisely explained by various subject areas of physics (kinematics, gas laws, thermodynamics, etc.) Then at some point I ran in to a wall with quantum mechanics and particle physics where I had to throw up my hands. I was contemplating going to graduate school for a masters in physics but I decided against it. It's vexing that there are such disparities within the subject (not that there aren't in others as well, but Physics seems especially afflicted).
Find your perfect sewing machine
Better article:

http://news.sciencemag.org/sciencenow/2011/08/electronic-ski...

Abstract of paper, + full text if you have access.

http://www.sciencemag.org/content/333/6044/838.abstract
皙肤泉祛痘
Enterprise rent a car
We are a car rental agency in Nis. Currently in its offer at attractive prices
We offer cars from the Volkswagen family. Cars have gasoline engines from 1.2 liters to
provide extremely low power costs to be more economical.
Soon in our offer and find the car or cars from LUX category.
We offer you, except you can rent a car and his driver who speaks English.
People will pay money for convenience and speed. Media companies good delivery fast high-quality downloads with an easy one-click process. Joe User doesn't want to deal with slow downloads of torrents with unknown quality, sharing their bandwidth and possibly exposing themselves to malware.
TROUBLE FREE AUTO TRANSPORT
You get an offer of X shares or options. What is often carefully left unsaid is how many shares exist. Also left unsaid are what rights you have, once you start vesting, to know about the financials of the company.
Beware of taxes! If you exercise at least 1 full year (366 days) before the company sells you pay capital gains tax (currently 15%) instead of full income tax (could be ~35%). I did not exercise my options early. Consequently, I coughed up over one-third of my cash to Uncle Sam in the form of taxes & withholding.
SICP is more for college level students with some high level mathematics background (basic calculus) and tackles computer science ideas directly.
HTDP (at least the first edition http://www.htdp.org/ ) was intended for beginners without as much math background except for algebra.
I actually prefer HTDP over SICP as an introductory text in computer programming and the Scheme language in particular.
It's a great read in how to approach programming problems. I was actually exposed to designing with contracts through this text before I was ever exposed to Eiffel. And it's approach to teaching recursion was very gentle and practical. While SICP is great in ideas and prose, it is in some ways too abstract. HTDP is more grounded and covers those details that SICP assumed you'd have. No harm in reading both though.
The reason 140 was chosen had to do with SMS limits 160 chars). A 140 character limit left enough slack to allow metadata to be sent.
UI isn't the problem. The problem is that free is significantly more attractive than even $0.01 and always will be; this has been shown through studies such as this:

http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.164...
Wow from the sound of it all, sounds like staying at a wall st job with a decent pay/bonus is better than joining a startup, except for the possibility of working on something kick-ass.
Or you get get inundated with ads from the next Pets.com...
What does Facebook Blocker do that Ghostery (combined with AdBlock Plus) doesn't? Are these redundant extensions?
+1 I was on VS as well for a while and this is very true. Accessibility, and localization were a big deal because they were a relatively small investment and opened up big markets: other countries and U.S. Government.
Cloud computing: the triple fallacy
No. However I would pay for content if the bandwidth to stream it was included in the price. Here in Australia most broadband is metered. Globally, most 3G and 4G bandwidth is metered. I'd much rather stream something in HD that I can watch immediately rather than torrent a lower quality version because I don't want to blow my data allowance.
1. [2001]

2. What he's up to these days: http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/philg/

3. One specific is helping with patent litigation (see comments at http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/philg/2011/08/16/anyone-have-a-...)
Babbage and Tennyson
California Professor Leads a Methamphetamine Ring, the Police Say
Akamai thrives in the spirit of its lost founder
How would that work? They dynamically make a new version each time someone wants to download it from the "official source"? Would this be the same version over the entire day? The entire week? What if I wanted to download an old episode of Seinfeld, would I get current ads, or ads from 1996? Would the "official source" still have to be able to upload each episode? If not, you run the risk of having multiple versions of current shows (this week's ads and last week's ads) in the wild. And you lose the ability to have people who downloaded it last week help with distribution.

I think that the best solution is to have a container that automatically inserts ads at the appropriate times. In this case though, the task will be making sure someone doesn't just remove the ads from the container. This is a similar problem with DVRs, but since this would all be automated, there is a greater risk.
Desperately seeking software companion.. enquire within…
Fun and sensitive question! Taxes certainly bite big time, especially on on an acquisition where its paid out as a bonus.

Longest engineer at the company when the acquisition happened, exit was around ~200k, pre-tax.
Man Boobs / Gynecomastia Treatment
My Saturday Project - Disassembling a HTC EVO 4G Android Phone
Hot News, Current Affairs, Daily Gossip News
I'm in the same boat as you, but I just dove in head first last week. My current project requires that I know whether a TV is powered or not. Even after using all the Google-fu I know, I wasn't able to find an off-the-shelf current sensor that was network or usb accessible. I decided to build my own. It's Arduino based with a current sensor on a separate breakout board. I was soldering connectors on to the breakout board and accidentally left the heat on way too long. Two tiny surface mount resistors fell off. It took 20 minutes, but I managed to solder both of them back on. The board even worked afterwards!

That was last weekend. This weekend I now have 2 of these things built and my soldering skills have improved immensely.

You're smart. You'll figure it out.
I heard about these guys after seeing this site:

http://aduni.org/

Learned lots of useful things for my theory of computation class.
Identi.ca microblogging social media
Here's an explanation I wrote about how I handled my mail: http://twelvemonthsofsummer.com/get-mail-on-the-road

I lived in it full time for about a year, inspired by Tynan's posts on the subject. However, I've now gone overseas to Bali and left my Winnie parked in Maryland. It's actually quite a bit cheaper to live here and the internet still works fine :) Have you written up anything about your travels?
Are you pointing out that this is what they are saying, or do you believe that? The worst thing that could happen before is that Facebook would change their CI and the button would be outdated, looking dated. Now the button looks crappy from the start.
> Because, fundamentally, most people aren't assholes.

I think that the concept is that piracy is a symptom of a broken market, not the cause of a broken market.

If something costs more than someone thinks it is worth, or they have difficulty obtaining it in an 'easy enough' manner, they will revert to piracy. However, if something is available at an appropriate price point with easy access, then piracy will diminish (down to people who only think that everything should be free).

As far as the 'donate what you want' concept, Panera Bread has a few locations that are like this [1]. I can't remember the details, but I think that it all ended up evening out. They would give you a suggested cost, and you paid what you wanted/could.

[1] http://www.usatoday.com/money/industries/food/2011-05-16-pan...
YC's big offerings are advice, investor connections, and press attention. My guess is that the outcome of YC companies can be summarized as something like:

product execution * market opportunity * utilization of YC offerings

Dropbox and Airbnb are A+, A+, A+. Everyone else is some lower grade in at least one area.
Let me help you get started:

http://www.findinglisp.com
> Also, this is faster than just torrenting the shows at similar quality. (maybe a few days, regardless of the show compared between a day and more than a week, depending on the popularity of the show)

Is it? In my experience, most DVD/Blu-ray rips of TV show boxsets are released online before their retail date because an employee at a Wal-Mart somewhere grabs a copy and sources it to a scene group.

As for the actual download time, I'd say it's faster than ripping the DVDs as well, not to mention the hassle of inserting/removing 5+ DVDs is just annoying.
to add to this, distribute your worker processes onto multiple machines. That way if you lose a machine, your queue will still process jobs (albeit slightly crippled).
Jewish law does not allow the manipulation of electricity on the Sabbath, so a Jew would not be allowed to operate an electric lock, or make an electric door open (on purpose).

A Jew can leave lights on, or set things on timers before the Sabbath, but can not do anything with electricity on the Sabbath.
Congrats to the Github team for this. I'd say it's a pretty huge endorsement, regardless of whether Linus intended it that way or not.
愛上查美樂
I'm not sure I buy the network effects argument. It makes sense for repositories for open projects, but for private repositories I don't see where network effects come into play.
That would also make it drastically easier for the playing software to skip them entirely though.
Body Lift Kits
I'd rather just use UUIDs. They can be linear or non-linear and have basically zero chance of collision when generated by independent sources -- no central ID-granting service required.

I also find it laughable that these schemes talk about AES being 'expensive' and then produce pure-PHP alternatives. On a modern CPU AES absolutely flies compared to instantiating a PHP object and calling a method on it.
You have to elaborate on this. So options you get are different from the options that can exit? 1st engineer typically get 1-3% of the company, and if there is a clause that can prevent you from getting those shares on exit even though they were vested, joining a startup loses a lot of luster.
Since following this link, and the link from it to Altucher's blog, I've read quite a few of his blogposts. And every post on his blog is better than this article, and most of them are great reading. But relatively few of them are straightforward entreporn advice of the type HN so loves.
my last quarter bonus was 10k.

Quarterly? So ~$40k/year in bonuses? You must either be at a company really generous with the bonuses, or making one heck of a salary.
0. 1st employee. 1.6%. Not much left of the company. Was also taking cut in salary.
As I gather, start-ups have always been that way. Only people who really stand a chance of making it big are the founders and the investors; as a regular-Joe employee you make competitive compensation on a good day, so you should really be there because you like the work, not because you want big money.
So employees complain about options being worth squat.

And founders/managers complain about not being able to hire talent.

I believe that's referred to as a "market disconnect."
Ask HN: I want to remap my Capslock, any good idea?
Caps lock is a key I hardly ever used, and it's taking humongous space on my keyboard. This is not efficient, this is not good. I hate it.
I'm considering remap it to another function or key, any good ideas?
All I can think of right now is Escape.
Evening dresses on sale
Hacker News Cool Apps
2nd developer, $1.4M in an IPO after 8 years. Took what I considered to be a reduced (around 75%) salary for the first 3 years. The first 5 or so developers probably all got something in the same range or more. The company is not particularly famous; most on HN will not have heard of it.

I understand that the good outcome was partly due to years of draining work and even more so due to very good luck.

Many developers are undervalued by employers, but shares can work out. It's worth taking the time to learn what percentage stake you're getting (if you ask and the employer doesn't tell you, walk away) and doing your own assessment of the possibilities and risks for the company.
Government & consulting projects generally require the code and the use of the code to be fully documented. I'm actually looking forward to that part of it more than the software if it is any good.
The Antarctic in the middle of a blizzard is pretty damn exciting if you're living it; pretty damn boring if you're watching it on a 7" screen, because it looks like White, and that's about it.

There are many things worth doing that aren't a risk to your life, but as I see it the Antarctic is not one of them.
can you provide any sources please?
I worked at Akamai as a contractor for a few months after they first started. Danny used to come by and kick the desks of the developers I was working with to "wake them up". He was kind of like a rowdy older brother type. He seemed like a decent guy though, it was really a shock to hear he died on 9/11. I've heard some theories that one of those hijackers on that flight had a gun and I believe it, I honestly don't think they could've stopped him otherwise.
Donald Knuth and Software Patents
Convenience comes into play so you only have to deal with one interface to manage all your projects.
Take a look at https://github.com/dziegler/django-create-project & maybe collaborate?
Looked at from the point of view of for-pay hosted storage, Github is astoundingly expensive. I have 94 megabytes of git repositories at work. Github would want $100/month to host that.

If their software was all available and open source, I could host their software and my repositories on an $11/month Rackspace virtual machine, and still have about 7 gigabytes left over (or more realistically just stick it on a vhost on some machine I've already got on the internet and host it essentially for free).

This is the brilliance of Github. They have found a way to sell storage at several orders of magnitude over the going rate--all because they have coupled it with some attractive proprietary software. Their value is entirely in that proprietary software.
You can link to comments, but you have to go source-diving for the containing div's ID; it doesn't appear to be exposed in the interface anywhere:

https://plus.google.com/102150693225130002912/posts/PVZDD2N3...

Edit: I take it back. It's completely screwed. There's a # in the ID, and it though it works when you add the fragment to the URL in the address bar while you're viewing the page, visiting the link afresh makes it explode.

Nice work, chaps. :-|
Either way, they still have half the problem already solved.
A funny thing that's missing from this article is the payment aspect. It's my understanding that the 7-Eleven delivery system in Taiwan also handles payment — in effect, 7-Eleven acts as an escrow agent for Ruten, accepting both the goods and the cash before releasing either to the other party.

It seems like not having to use credit cards (with the attendant risks of credit card theft, identity fraud, false fraud alarms canceling your purchase, etc., not to mention cutting out people who don't have one) or PayPal could be a huge benefit. Less so for buying from Amazon, though, than for buying from eBay sellers.
No, you're absolutely right that counting by codepoints penalizes some languages. The surrogates I know best are simple, European ones: accents, for example. The normalization twitter uses according to other posters in this thread (the recommended one from the Unicode standards organization, Form C) always uses the multi-codepoint form when possible, for compatibility reasons. That's why it baffles me if they count by codepoint and not character!
You work at a startup because you believe in the mission, want to have a bigger impact, your co-workers rock and you want to KNOW how to start one someday. The exit is the gamble for gravy.
Thanks for helping out!

Teagueduino will run the code anytime it has power over USB -- communication is only needed while programming/debugging. With a USB battery backup, you can run self-contained projects.
http://www.amazon.com/5000mAh-External-Motorola-Blackberry-N...

We've also been thinking about integration of wireless. It quickly makes things more complex and expensive (unfortunate for beginners and education/schools), but enables lots of cool projects (especially vehicles and remote automation). In the meantime, you should be able to use a wireless USB cable setup if you want to remotely program/play with it:
http://www.amazon.com/Cables-Go-29570-TruLink-Wireless/dp/B0...
You mean Gestapo, not SS.
wouldn't commenting be even worse on it? commenting reveals an 'identity' and 'source' poll could be ran with 'only if you actually participated'.

They both have same problem of misrepresentation but at least the latter is easier to visualize.