skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm going to the Realtime Club dinner in London this month, where Simon Peyton Jones is talking about (the lack of good) IT teaching in schools.

When I was in school (in the UK) we were taught BASIC programming on BBC Micros, and I spent my computer classes writing vertical scrolling racing games and what not. Today, you're taught how to make spreadsheets and powerpoint decks, by teachers who typically know far less than the kids.

So yes, I agree with the sentiment in the article. Would be great to see actual programming classes taught to school kids (only to those that want them though!).
One world, one currency - could the bitcoin solve all our problems?
5 Easy Automated Income Streams
Who Else Wants A PROVEN Internet Business with 5 Easy Automated Income Streams?
The 3 labels Venkat gave to these types of people were intended to be funny.
OK, so a poor child in a libertarian society would only receive care if his parents could afford to pay for it at a private hospital, or if he happened to have access to a theoretical charity hospital that a theoretical philanthropist may or may not have chartered.

You can't get around the fact that the basic tenets of libertarianism rank the right for the rich to live in luxury above the right of poor people to obtain basic needs.
> Anonymous is just a label for people who are fed up with the government.

Anonymous is just a label for naive college kids lashing out at authority, a cliche as old as time.
So how is this different from an array?
I think his questions aren't meant to signify an offer expertise but rather say this base level of knowledge and data should be available whether you're on a shared hosting account or run your own Tier IV center. He's not suggesting a rearchitecture, he's just suggesting know the environment. Decisions are wishy-washy without evidence.
Are you solving a NASA problem or a LEGO problem?
Why a down vote on this? It's not spammy!
I think the OP is making a good point but direct profits or revenues wasn't the lead motivation for Google to go full throttle with Android and then the $12.5B MMI deal... it was that this way:

With Android, Google accelerated/is accelerating the pace of smartphone adoption (more smartphone = more internets = more Google = more Ads) and at the same time putting their services in front of the smartphone vendors for a undisclosed, but possibly tiny, fee per device. Enabling Google Search as default but not requiring it (as it's been the case of many Android smartphones with Bing by default in the US).

Note1: Android is free. Google Core-Android-Apps are not: Gmail, Market, and so on

Note2: Maybe even the fee is not a monetary one. It could be the option of selling the smartphone as a 'Android' phone (with is trademarked), using the Android logo, etc.
There are practical concerns in terms of content filtering. By using profanity you're cutting off some section of the internet. Whether that's a concern or whether it should be that way are secondary discussions.
I believe he meant to say something along the lines of "Why is the S2 only just become available in the US now"?

Which is obviously because your Government lets the Telecom Providers bribe them in order to screw the US public just that little bit extra :p
The guy just finished reading that chapter of SICP? ^_^
Putting Android into more consumer electronics devices can be another option. TV might be the tip of the iceberg.
It's the "we had to give it a way for free" part that you should rethink. People like us are way to quick to price low/free because that's what we'd pay for the service. Not at all what your target customers are willing to pay however.

"Double your price":
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1639712
Couldn't agree more. I work in A/V services and we use Amazon for HDMI cabling. Often we have needs for 50, 100, and 200 ft HDMI cables, and Amazon is by far the best bargain. We use them multiple times, and they take wear and tear like a champ.

Another point just on HDMI in general: people sometimes wonder if a 200+ ft HDMI will lose picture or audio quality -- it doesn't. At least with these Amazon cable, they're still as clear as always.
this is complete link bait
Google wants Internet in everything. That's the only thing i'm 100% confident about them.
Here's my newest workflow which hasn't totally solved the problem yet substantially helps.

Each morning I wake up, do the dad thing, have a bowl of cereal (food is important) and try my hardest to sort my email on the laptop/phone before heading into my office. Inbox zero is something to be proud of when you can keep it up. When I say sort my day, i mean not only email but take the bigger tasks of the day and block them into my schedule around phone calls, lunch and all. This gives me a clear overview of ONLY what im concerned of for one day, and is very liberating when you've got more than 3-4 things on your plate at any given time.

I start my day by leaving my calendar up on my laptop/device on my desk and focus in 1.5hr chunks on projects at a time. If I have to bump something I will, but try my hardest to stay super focused for that block of time. This means I do not send email from my work machine while in that 1.5hr block (productivity move) nor do I pick up the phone. Voicemail is there for a reason and i can send from my laptop on the side quickly if it's important but code/work stays visible all the time to help me get back into it quicker.

5-10 mins before that 1.5 hr block is over (changes daily of course) I notate where im at and stop working. That's a hard thing when you're on a roll, but it's key to feeling better about focusing. Spend 15 mins to get caught up on email or anything I missed and the last 15 to get up, get a drink, walk outside, etc.

I'm a week into this new routine and it's helped a lot. I stil have the fatigue of having too much with not enough time, but teamed with a whiteboard for the macro level, I really enjoy the day-by-day structure and feel much more accomplished by dinner.
Well, Search Is Google's Castle, Everything Else Is A Moat[1]

[1] http://techcrunch.com/2011/03/25/search-googles-castle-moat/
Nice thing about post-it notes is that I can easily steal one from the boss's desk when he starts talking about "Can you please fix A, B, C, D, and do some research on E". If I don't write them down right there and then, I'll never remember all five items.
While I pay nowhere near this much, and we're not nearly as popular, I still like his solutions. Why? I like to sleep. I'd rather pay 2x as much for a reliable host for a solution that works than that I'm up at 3am fixing stuff.
I've always had trouble finishing projects, no matter if it's for school, work or hobby. When I run out of interesting problems, I just stop caring.

The easiest way I'm able to finish things is by working with others. People I care about, and who in turn cares about getting the work done. I.e. caring by proxy. [1]

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirror_neuron
I'm in A/V services, so we'll use and reuse 50-200ft stretches of HDMI, and the Amazon HDMIs are top notch. Of course, we're not the typical user of HDMI, but FWIW, they are pretty solid.
Animation Magazine &#8211; Free Newsletter
Hire someone to answer the emails, create a waiting list and increase your prices.
A bit more detail about ActiveX. What really brought pressure on non-IE browsers targeting Windows was not just ActiveX's support for scripting the plugin from the page's JS -- again that was missing from the NPAPI.

The big pressure started when Microsoft dropped NPAPI altogether. See http://web.archive.org/web/20071016233843/http://www.meer.ne... (September 4, 2001).

Fast forward to today. I'm told that the next Android release, Ice Cream Sandwich, will drop NPAPI support -- this time in favor of Pepper. ActiveX, ActiveG.

Vertical lock-in from plugin to browser to OS to hardware. The 90s -- if not the 80s pre-commodity-PC -- are back.
I don't know if they do this or not, but they could make an api like google offering developers a platform to make apps and features connected to the site. If I were yahoo I would call out to developers and use my name to attract them.

Google has laid claim to so must virtual real-estate by being the number one place where developers put all their work for free at that! Google has laid the way for yahoo why don't they just start copying some of those things. Us developers have helped google get huge and most of it was free. Look at chrome with all of it's extensions and apps. They offer a platform to develop give us "free space" with appengine then we code away giving them more power with every key stroke.

Now we have the "cloud", the one holding the most data has the most power. If I were yahoo I would get into the cloud game. People won't leave your site if you possess all of there music and other information.

I digress with, have people thought about what cloud computing will do long term. I'm not saying that these companies are out to get us, well they're out to get our money. But, don't I think they're plan anything malicious. However, anyone can be hack even google (China).

Some people are just not informed enough to not put personal information in these clouds. With data mining these companies will be able to infiltrate our personal lives so much more then we imagine.

Anyway I will stop, and don't get me wrong I love google that was not bash but more of a passionate thought.

So, if I were yahoo, I would build a cloud, develop an api, attract developers, and maybe create a news site ran by users.
Agree partly to TC on this.Search is the real big one but Google can't depend on the one trick for too long. Their growth has sort of stalled in the last few years.
BBMShirts - BBM Social network brought to life via scannable BBMShirts
I'm not a lawyer but...

Colbert and John Stewart do it all the time and I doubt they ask for permission for every single little clip. It would count as 'fair use'.

http://www.orbitdownloader.com/

Use Orbit Downloader, it rips everything, I've been using it for a year or two now, it's amazing. Open up Grab++ within Orbit, reload the page and the video will show up in Grab++, select it, hit download and it's yours.
It's probably a template. Someone read it, and picked "template-name-conflict-XYZ" to respond with.
Thanks, I had seen Jekyll but this looks like Jekyll plus sensible defaults for a website with all the bells and whistles. My personal site has no bells, and I can't whistle too well. :-)
Tell HN: Looking back and seeing improvements can really make your day
My cofounder and I started building our first iphone project about 8 weeks ago with no prior experience in objective C or photoshop. Our goal was 10 weeks (following Y combinator's model). Even though we gave ourselves 10 weeks, we really wanted to attend TCDisrupt in SF and it was a letdown and discouraging when we couldn't make the deadline.

Starting to feel stressed and a little burned out, I looked back 8 weeks ago. It's those moments when you look back and realize how much you've improved can really make your day.

Just thought I'd share and hope I could make someone else's day as well. Give yourselves a pat on the back because we're constantly furthering ourselves just by being part of the startup community.

Before and after: http://grooovy.me/beforeafter.png

edit: fixed typo
Did you mean to compute the cost/user? If so, that comes out to a little over 13c/month. Still, that comes to $1.60/year, meaning that a user would start to cost money right around the end of the 6th year of usage (assuming hosting costs don't go down).

But if they're not paying for archival, are they really the folks who are causing the high hosting costs? As other have speculated, it would seem that the archival service might be the major reason that hosting is so expensive.
keep in mind he said active users, there's probably a number of inactive users who paid the initial fee but now don't add to server workload.
Do we need to mention that it's a redditor? This is a useful resource, so it should be submitted to HN, but the title needs editing.
It's strange that we see Asian brands as copy-cats all the time. Copy-cats just copy but a lot of upcoming Asian brand are improving. I think this is why Steve Jobs was inspired by Sony: making improvements.

But I have to admit there are also a lot of useless copy-cat products on the market (not only in Asia). Those 'brands' will not survive because they won't offer an improvement.
George Bush’s Brother Is ‘Tweeting’ In Chinese On Weibo
If it's anything like my Galaxy S in recent firmware updates, it doesn't act in the same way that the unnecessary task killing apps do, it only lets you close things that are actually active and using CPU, not ones that have been suspended in the background by android. It's come in handy on a number of occasions, mainly because it shows when an app has gone nuts and lets you kill it.
Theoretically some time around January, but that's what they said with 23, which was released in March. It's been in feature freeze since the beginning of July though.
Using Firefox Web Console it's possible to obtain all the fetched URLs. The one containing the video was: http://ht.cdn.turner.com/cnn/big//us/2011/09/07/bts-msnbc-pe...

I don't have a generic way of extracting this information from any site, but looking at those network sources that are used is always a good place to start. Using extensions such as Flashblock will let you control when you're going to start downloading, and there will be fewer URLs to look through.
Note the date. Typically people submit joke RFCs on April 1st.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/April_Fools%27_Day_RFC

Also, RFCs are not terribly heavyweight technical documents. They're essentially memos, not ISO standards. Any (demonstrably competent) person can submit a RFC, and if it becomes popular, then the idea enters the standards track, and new, better RFCs are issued based on it.
Utter tripe.
The Diet Solution Program Recipes
Let Samsung ruin the international version with that silly iPhone-wannabe button layout, but I appreciate T-Mobile and the other US carriers not letting them get away with it here.
Always is a long time, but who knows, China was the richest country in the world until around 1810. We still have 20 years until China really starts getting an ageing population. Africa has a long way to go still, so there is plenty of coming up. Default and devaluation help for price competition too.

In a world of equal wages, there are still going to be local specialisms though. Not sure that it is fair to characterise that the richer countries make cooler stuff. Apple and Dell both make their products in China. Japan makes cool stuff that is only popular locally. Cultures have different attitudes to cool. There will still be diversity.
I'm glad to hear it's better than the SGS1 model (especially GPS). However, having been burnt once (I own the SGS1), I'm certainly not going to let it happen again. My next phone will not be a Samsung handset.
He's probably referring to people who purposely whack mail boxes with baseball bats out car windows.

So presumably drunk highschool football players.
I'm doing it wrong and need help: App Extensibility in Ruby
Isn't it more appropriate to think of bitcoin as an investment or money market security? I mean, bitcoin has some of the features required of a monetary unit, but its rapid fluctuations in value really make it a speculative investment.

Unless bitcoin becomes mainstream and gets enough volume to smooth out these dips and valleys, who would ever use bitcoin as a money replacement?
Maybe. Probably, though people asking for billions of dollars can hardly be considered disinterested observers.

The question really isn't "will it work?", but rather "when, how much will it cost to develop, and (most importantly) will commercial power production via fusion ever be cheaper than the alternatives?"

I see no indication tokomaks will ever be commercially viable, even if they can be made to work. The up-front cost to construct a plant will be ruinous under the rosiest of scenarios. It would probably be cheaper to fake base load power with solar cells backed by lead-acid batteries.

And laser ignition? Who knows? I would like to see someone ask these guys "Okay, assume all the technical problem are resolved the way you expect, how much is it going to cost to build a commercial power production plant?"
Ask HN: Anybody using Facebook email?
Some time ago, not sure when exactly, Facebook announced that they are going to give emails to everyone. It was big news at the time. It was supposed to change everything. I have not heard or read anything about this for quite some time. Anybody using it? Is it changing a world that I am not aware of? Or is this a Google Buzz moment for Facebook?
I'm glad I finally know why the iOS browser is so much smoother than Android devices. I've been trying to figure that out for years. Good to hear that Google and the device makers are making headway. That scrolling looked very smooth on the GS2.
Yeah like that, I really wanted one till I read the reviews. If they could do it properly (I.E. make it bright and accurate) it has the potential to be really cool but maybe keep it on the drawing board for a few more years.
I recommend anyone who is interested in investing read some of the good books on the subject. The millionaire next door, or the wealthy barber are fine. Buffetology is good if you're fairly new, while Timothy Vicks "Invest like Warren Buffett" or any of this other books about Buffett are better.

Don't get your advice from newspaper articles, which are generally written by reporters, like this one. The massive spending our government is doing, along with the terrible shape that many states and municipalities are in, make holding %50 of your money in bonds more risky than "conventional wisdom" assumes.

The events in the real estate market alone should be a wake up call that conventional wisdom ("real estate never goes down") is not always right, you have to do your homework and use judgement.

Also, not a big fan of the TV and radio financial gurus. Generally they give excellent advice when it comes to getting out of debt and getting your spending under control, but terrible advice when it comes to actually investing, generally because they are advising the lowest common denominator (not smart people like the ones reading this forum.)

I've been investing personally for about 20 years, and what I learned was that my returns were %100 a result of discipline and rationality, not the state of the market. The best discipline is to invest only when you know what your return is going to be beforehand. IF you're guessing, you're gambling. If you understand the risk well enough to calculate it, then you'll do much better. And if you don't, or can't understand the risks, then stay out until you do. Some of my most profitable investment periods were the ones where I pulled out because the markets were not acting as I expected, and in doing so, I avoided the losses my strategy would have otherwise given me.

Failing to lose %50, and then making %25 the next year is a %100 return compared to losing the %50 and then making %25 from the smaller base. (EG: You have $100 on the sidelines, then earn $25, giving you $125, verses, losing $50, then earning $12.50 giving you $62.50.)
Anger courses
Here's an interesting partial implementation (no delete):

https://github.com/yairchu/red-black-tree/blob/master/RedBla...

The AVL has a fuller implementation:

https://github.com/yairchu/red-black-tree/blob/master/AvlTre...

It's significantly more complex, but it gives a type-level/compile-time guarantee that the RB tree invariants are kept, which is nice.
You might be interested in the Walk Score Transit API. In addition to surfacing a "transit score" for a given area, it also provides a simple RESTful way to get stops and routes at a given lat/lon:

http://www.walkscore.com/professional/public-transit-api.php

The Walk Score API is built on top of the GTFS Data Exchange web site and APIs. GTFSDE is a clearinghouse for the latest GTFS data worldwide:

http://www.gtfs-data-exchange.com/

(Note that raw GTFS from agencies is often quite buggy -- the Walk Score API does a ton of work to clean it up and fix errors.)

Finally, the City Go Round web site and API surfaces apps that make use of transit (and other local) data:

http://www.citygoround.org/

Hope these are interesting for you!
That game is hilarious!
Dear Steven,

try using the link provided in the post, as it is actually compatible with Lion. I installed it on Lion and it worked perfectly. Please let me know how that goes!
Pardon, I was actually spouting what Gruber said!
With Apologies to John Gruber
Google buying out T-Mobile is a nice thought by the way.
I think that Haskell's standard library implementation of a binary search tree (Data.Map) had long had a balancing bug...

It probably doesn't anymore, but I guess it probably makes it a practical win to get type-level guarantees.

Also, guarantees about correctness are easier to get from tools like QuickCheck. Balance errors will be harder to spot.
I don't know anything about your setup and architecture but do remember, pinboard was one of the sites that was swooped up in the RAID that got instapaper and a few others.

Instapaper stayed up because the server taken was only a slave. Pinboard had some of their main hardware taken, and while things did slow down, they too stayed up. Half, maybe more of those hosting fees could be servers that do nothing at all but sit around and wait for a RAID.

Would you still be able to build out a hypothetical system as you mention and be able to handle one data center effectively disappearing? Or does that mean taking your information and essentially doubling it, to have a second backup source?
Bookmarked. I like the idea, and where you're going with your first post. I literally stopped reading daring fireball because of the politics posts.
London is getting sane after a start when they didnt get it. http://www.tfl.gov.uk/businessandpartners/syndication/defaul...

There is a lot of data, producing a coherent model across different places will be hard, for a comprehensive model.
It seems that your issue is not that you are easily distracted or undisciplined, but you are lacking the drive to work. You should try thinking about what you are working for. Are you working to support your family? Build something that will change the world? If you don't have something to work for, then it's no surprise that you are not motivated.

If I'm wrong and you are just easily distracted, then consider getting rescue time. I used a similar iPhone app to condition myself to work for most of the day. After a few weeks I would feel not feel accomplished if I didn't see in my reporting that I worked for the allotted period that day.
Huge problem: as soon as Bitcoin gets any mainstream success, numerous other Bitcoin-like systems will spring up, thus negating the premise of one currency.

In the arena of competing Bitcoin-like systems, those built by governments will win, because governments decide what is acceptable for paying taxes.
Lots of good comments I think, but before considering all those options, I think the first thing you should try is to push yourself in the "zone" [1]. To me entering the zone can be hard sometimes - my brain is inventing all sorts of distractions, why it does that is still a mystery to me since I love my job - but it's not that hard: I just need to force myself to get in the zone, and I do that by ignoring my desires and by getting started with my tasks. Once I get started, very quickly I'm in the zone, and it's quite easy, natural and mostly enjoyable to stay inside the zone, as long as I avoid interruptions (short breaks every hour or so are good, as long as they are mental rest, like lying down and/or watching the clouds, short breaks are not a good time to read hacker news).

If this fails for you, then it could be a multitude of reasons, and you should consider some of the options recommended here (maybe change your job?).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_(psychology)