skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: What web technologies should a web virgin learn?
I want to build dynamic web apps.

So far I have gone through web tutorials (w3 schools) of HTML, CSS, jQuery and score about 75% at the end of each tutorial. I'm now going to go through AJAX and SQL tutorials on the same site. Next I'm going to try Michael Hartl's Rails tutorial.

Say I become 65 or 70% competient with the above technologies (while being slow to build), am I ready to build dynamic web apps, or should I add something to my to-learn list? Are there any holes or gaps in my plan? I also want my apps to look nice and feel fast.

I used to know C++ fairly well about 5 years ago. No coding ever since.

To get an idea what I'm trying to build think something like a simple groupon-esq featured online college application tool (so you can apply for multiple colleges/scholarships/funds at the same time).a
<snarky>Those jerks at Microsoft who have the nerve to charge for things at every major release...</snarky>
Just as all roads in the enterprise lead to email clients, all roads in daily deals lead to loyalty programs. Forgive me for being blunt, but Groupon's move into loyalty programs was basically inevitable, if you really think about their business model. In fact, every merchant-middle-man-operation of any kind will eventually adopt (or join) a loyalty program. That's why you see them at grocery stores, pharmacies, credit card companies, online retailers, etc., etc., etc.
This is the second comment I've come across in this thread. At first I would tend to agree, but let's consider that the "suits" probably have jobs. And if they were at YCNYC they obviously have more interest in startup culture than the million or so suits who did not come.

Part of hacker culture is judging someone by ideas, which is why we're known for the t-shirt and shorts attire. But I don't think it's fair nor helpful to judge someone by their attire at a post-work event.

We know gobs and gobs of NYC's tech talent works in the financial services industry. I'm happy to see the diversity, even if I got a few pitches from folks looking for a l33t technical co-founder.
Not exactly but it's one thing that was on the todo list; so now I don't need to implement that :)

vimhero would be a single player game for practicing constantly progressing challenges; of course, the idea might just not work.
The posts like yours are the ones that actually create confusion around this term, because their authors are confused on what the Turing completeness is themselves, and so they spread their confusion on the others.

No, tests and loops are not what make computational stuff Turing complete -- nondeterministic finite automatons have both of them, and yet they're very weak computationally. I/O (assuming that's what you mean by write) is not even relevant. What matters the most is _memory_, and more importantly, _infinite, easily accessible_ memory. Nondeterministic finite automata have only finite amount of memory available, and thus they are very constrained on what they can compute. Nondeterministic pushdown automata, in spite of having infinite amount of memory available, don't have an easy access to it, and so, being stronger than finite automata, they're still weaker than Turing machines. But as soon as you add a second stack to a pushdown automaton, it suddenly becomes Turing complete. Hell, you can do it even with 6 integer variables instead of 2 stacks (I recall from my computation theory course that 3 integer variables are enough to encode a stack, so 6 will give you two stacks. Maybe you can go down even to 5 or 4). However, you absolutely require infinite memory, because, for sane definitions of "memory", every device with finite amount of memory (for instance, x86 PC) will not be able to compute anything more than deterministic finite automaton. From this point of view, all our computers are able to do is to match its input to a long and hairy regular expression. I hope that it will help some people realize how irrelevant is Turing completeness notion when it's used with regard to real life stuff.
On the last page of the report it mentions many people working on it, but unaware of the final product, but with the team being rewarded. It also mentions a codeword to decrypt source information that they'll release should the team be threatened. As the team met with the company, the company may well have identified them by now, or narrowed it down.

Add:

The team obviously (re)branded themselves Anonymous to take any heat off their own identities or firm, whilst also giving the report a publicity boost within the context of the newly setup http://anonanalytics.com/ - they also have some technical know-how to encrypt the data: that may have come from more conventional Anon members. Also, being part of Anonymous may scare the target firm's executives into not retaliating - that's smart.
Yes... I thought before posting because it might be outdated soon, and probably I shouldn't have posted.

When I did the search, there were 4 results, one of them was a NUDE girls in sex position. Big WTF. Not sure if Google curates image search somehow... but they probably do, because the content is not there anymore.
Show HN: My first iPhone app - Air Controller
Why not? I don't learn anything from seeing the username of whoever posted "+1".
Shell rings
"Smooth delivery is overrated."

Agreed, though it depends on your audience and your message.

John Carmack is the most awkward public speaker I've ever seen and also one of the people whom I most enjoying listening to.
Chance meetings are wonderful. But when you have an opportunity as rare as this one, why fall back upon chance when you can facilitate? When you can do more, you should.

For instance, what if the color coding was expanded upon and added to the invite application? Each individual could place themselves in the category that describes them the best and then know at the time of the event the people they should be talking to rather than wandering around hoping their next chance meeting is the one that makes the difference.
That may be true for the Mac, but the vast majority of users were on Windows. And on Windows, IE would have won the browser wars on its own merits without Microsoft's dirty tricks. As the GP said - IE3 was better than Netscape 3 and IE4 was streets ahead. Netscape 4 was the worst release of a major browser that I've seen.
Notifications from your Android phone on your KDE desktop
Pakistani girls in bikini shoing latest fashion
Sometimes I think that access to all the literature and success stories prevents more of this kind of tinkerers to appear in this day and age. If you can see it on Youtube you don't have to do it yourself to still your curiosity. It's like the bazillion cooking shows on TV that for the most part fails to actually make more people cook their own food.
My bad. I'm new to the east coast (been here a little over a year) and PG said something like this was YC's first NYC event at YCNYC, so I reached an incorrect conclusion. Should have said something like this was their first time back in awhile I suppose.
I feel the title here is misleading as it suggests that Google is investing in developing some sort of solar systems with this specific $75 million. But reading the article, we see they are actually investing in funding a bank (finance company) which will be offering loans with interest for PV rooftop installations, for which they will receive payments with interest from the homeowners purchasing said systems at full cost. So they are investing in the same way that Chase invests in credit card debt by offering people credit cards, or that GM finance invests in cars by offering auto loans.

The claim that the monthly loan payments will be "often less than paying for energy from the grid" is certainly false and I'd be willing to bet money that it will not be established that people are generating solar energy for less than the cost of buying it off the grid.

Finally, if one was really interested in green technology, either installing a roof top solar hot water heater and/or a geothermal heat pump will save more energy than a rooftop residential PV installation will generate, but at a much lower cost.
I disagree. The paragraphs were comprehensible and held together by subject matter. I had no trouble reading them.
It is my opinion:

Zynga is thought pollution.
This is easy to fix. You just need to hook Jenkins up to a real rocket launcher, rather than this: https://github.com/codedance/Retaliation

You can even keep most of the readme intact :)
Tizen: Open source Intel/Linux Foundation-backed mobile/device OS
my co-founder in my current startup has one. he is an australian and was making 150k/year out of college, but hated it. moved to eastern europe, made a staff management system and makes 1k/month now (like 6-8 months into it), but that is enough to live and travel all around europe and the U.S with a few hours a month of work.
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Oliver Wyman Interview
Collaborate to capture life's big & small moments
I was in a similar boat about 4 months ago...I said 'fuck it' and just started coding. I've never regretted it.

Sure, you'll make mistakes. You'll get stuck. You might have to throw away 3000 lines of code and start over, like I did. But the fastest (and best) way I've ever learned is by working on a project I was passionate about.
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If you are looking for quality laptop skins and covers then you can have them from Wrappz.com. They provide a huge range of covers for the laptops and hundreds of other devices.
True that!but lets hope!
To be fair, originally I had them in one paragraph, then edited them.
Princeton bans academics from handing copyright to journal publishers
Wouldn't it convey that you are not on an https site?
Awesome, I'll definitely check the book out.
Thank you...this is awesome!
Google wants to buy solar panels for your house
That's because the release is closer to 4.3 than 7. Faster, smaller changes rather than slower, bigger ones.
think of an idea from your area of expertise. ex: a restaurant owner develops software to helps his/her restaurant
Yeah, I thought this would start to happen:

http://www.reddit.com/r/Cyberpunk/comments/gdy7s/the_book_xp...
Ask HN: Browser for individual websites?
Is there a browser that allows you to log in to Facebook in one window (or tab), to Google+ in another, to Twitter in another, etc, such that those windows or tabs have individual/isolated sets of cookies, so that you can browse the web in another window or tab and not have these websites track you?

If such a browser does not exist, would it be relatively easy to modify Firefox or Chrome source code to make it behave this way?
I feel like I am a jack-of-all trades type of person too. Many people say that is a disadvantage, but I recently read an article on entrepreneur.com about some famous guru saying a CEO of a startup needs to be good at a lot of things instead of great at one thing. Made me feel a lot better....
It's not a novel idea, RewardsNetwork awards miles for dining with merchants they have signed up http://skymiles.rewardsnetwork.com/

UPromise has had a similar program tracking not just restaurants, but all sorts of shopping venues http://www.upromise.com/welcome

American Express will also track your Amex purchases and assign loyalty rewards based on their Link, Like, Love Facebook promotion https://www.facebook.com/americanexpress

Are you not okay with an idea? Or not okay with Groupon, Inc. being another company to implement this fairly commoditized loyalty program?
Basketball
Our Basketball clothing is specially designed which regulates the body temperature levels of basketball players to keep them dry and focused on basketball hoop for a slam dunk. We support basketball fans by offering them basketball jersey’s and basketball shorts to show which team they root for.
Why is it their best product? Applying an idea at scale is strategic, not necessarily innovative. For example:

- Bloomspot's $40M raise and accompanying shift in focus (http://www.bloomspot.com/media/assets/Bloomspot_Marketing_Ki...)

- Swipely, Offermatic, etc.

- GRS, a vendor of this data (http://www.grsgroup.com/)

- Also, dozens of similar ideas such as Amex using FB data: http://www.forbes.com/sites/moneybuilder/2011/07/20/link-lik...

The pricing on this is not particularly attractive to merchants, especially small ones.
If you're looking for product suggestions, Snap Circuits for the budding hacker child are great.

http://www.amazon.com/Elenco-SC-750-Snap-Circuits-Extreme/dp...
Dropbox made it so I don't even think about it. My files are just where I need them. That is the amazing part: make it so that you don't see it, but it is always there.

I think they have a pretty broad-base and google entering the market validates the business model. Though, their prices might drop a bit.
Isn't NYC the one city where you'd expect to see a lot of people in suits? Maybe they just got off work. Maybe their suit is your t-shirt you know?
Software that lacks a good uninstaller is always suspect, to me. It makes me smile to know that this is all that's necessary to remove RVM:

> rvm implode

How's rbenv for uninstallation? I'm familiar-enough with rvm that I know I can restore absolutely everything from scratch with a couple config options and a while for compilation - I'm more than happy to spend that to experiment as long as rbenv has a similar panic-button.
Did anyone get the speech on video?
Your example is horrid. Tips are in no way a signal to the chef.

In fact, you're "supposed" to tip about the same for a poorly cooked meal as a good one so as to avoid unreasonably short-changing your server who had nothing to do with the quality.

Tips are merely how restaurants get away with lying about their prices. They don't pay their employees minimum wage knowing you'll be gullible enough to pay the unannounced post-bill markup without a fuss.
Just curious, why downvote. is anecdotal evidence frowned upon here? Or only opinionated, argumentative positions welcome??
Free startup tools: An easy way for founders to set the terms
Black Friday Kitchen Best Deals Best Sales 2011.
Thanks for the suggestion, that would go great in a kids section.
Thanks for providing that link, it's been really difficult in the past to find hard data with actual numbers from real installations.

To clarify, as your total cost including everything $15k or $30k, I see both numbers in your post, and was that the actual prices, or were there subsidies as well?
“Tizen” is Intel and Samsung’s answer to Android
I can see both sides of the coin. I understand that a lot of people may have bought TextMate because they were told the update to 2.0 would be free (otherwise they may have waited). However, with as big as TextMate is and how a guy with little or no team was able to create it, he can't possibly afford to offer it to free for the thousands of people who bought the original one.

I think it would be perfectly fair to offer a discounted price to those who bought TextMate 1.0 (as opposed to free). That's a pretty fair thing to do IMHO. Many others said it, but if you are shelling out all the big bucks to buy a Mac, spending a few more bucks on an outstanding piece of software. It is a good way to show your support to the developer and make him continue sending out updates.

Just imagine the scenario where he does offer it for free, makes virtually no profit, and then ends up quitting support for TextMate 2 (as in making bug fixes, features, etc) because he can't afford to just live off of doing that. We all lose in that scenario.

I'm a student with lots of debt, but I will buy TextMate 2 full price because it's a good investment. Even if he does offer it for free, it would be a great gesture to buy it anyway or at least open up a donation thing for him.

Can't wait for its release!
agree 100%.
I can't speak as a big Zynga user (indeed, I don't play their games at all) but my wife is a total addict. Zynga's games, as far as I can tell, and certainly the older games, don't make much use of capabilities that Flash offers over plain old HTML4 + JavaScript. So, in essence they picked Flash because it _might_ have let them make interesting games with what was at the time a ubiquitous engine, but in fact they made rather uninteresting games that could have been done without it, and this has cost them dearly.
Malayalam renders perfectly on Firefox (7.0) for me on Ubuntu (11.04). Though I have found some minor glitches on Chromium (13.0).
What's new? Most of your favorite plugins stopped working. Wait, that's not really that new anymore, nevermind.

It seems like they have a lot of work to do before they're able to match Chrome's super-smooth version bumps.
My main problem with macports has been that it occasionally does not play nicely with manual source-installs, or any other package manager. And damn near everything needs sudo.

Everything I've needed has been available in homebrew, and more up-to-date and better isolated and hasn't collided with anything yet. I haven't used it as long as I've used macports, but so far it has been a far more pleasant experience. And incomparably faster - I swear, macports has a sleep() call in every operation. Very much recommended if you haven't tried it, and it cleans up nicely too - you just delete its single folder.
Google is its own biggest threat
Hi there, we just had a huge spike in traffic (more than 1M bugs) so we exceeded our quotas. We just tripled them to be sure it won't happen any time soon. We ll keep an eye on it. Thanks for the interest
Can you expand on why you think that is? (not arguing, just curious as to your reasoning)
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Course materials for Stanford CS240h, "Functional Systems in Haskell" on Github
Agreed (also agree with another post at this level).

It seems like a clever "nit" to pick but the only thing you need to add to "turing complete" is "able to address memory in a reasonable way" (or "not sandboxed from memory") and you get everything the author is complaining about and you're back to square one (i.e. the language is "turing complete and has memory access".

How do I print? I stick stuff in the right places in memory and set the program counter. How do I draw graphics? I stick stuff in the right place in memory and set the program counter.
Happy Halloween 3rd Wave--Childrens Halloween Costumes
I thought the free upgrades forever deal for Minecraft was great. I only rarely get to game and if I had to upgrade every six months to play with everyone else it'd be prohibitive.

It's a big obligation that the maker of Textmate and Notch of Minecraft took on but founders do sillier things (look at the deals VCs cut) for funding.
My CFLs haven't lasted very long since production of most of them shifted to China. They last a year or two, which is a bit longer than the bulbs they replace, but not much. There's no place to dispose of them safely though so they are just stacking up in boxes for now. I found with the warranties that you have to ship the bulbs back at your own expense to an address, which because of the weight of the ceramic base costs more than the bulb did originally. This means in practice they don't really have a warranty, so you did the right thing throwing the warranty packaging out.
All you needed to do was look at the Windows APIs back then and see just how much stealing took place. Apple saw Xerox's product, asked questions, and then built something cheaper and better. Microsoft got special access under the hood and then built something cheaper and worse.
It's still being done - see e.g. http://www.muddywatersresearch.com - and there's no reason an outfit like that couldn't publish a report as Anonymous...
WE WANT TEXTMATE FOR WINDOWS ABSOLUTELY
on first look, I'm pretty sure Justin has flattered PG. :D
> The team obviously (re)branded themselves Anonymous to take any heat off their own identities [...]

That's all I did when I joined various anti-Scientology protests. It's not like anyone is an official member.

> Also, being part of Anonymous may scare the target firm's executives into not retaliating - that's smart.

It is. Attacking them will look like attacking Wikileaks and will only strengthen Anonymous's cred, legal and otherwise.
I want to do solar power but I am terrified that as soon as I buy it it will immediately become outdated.

Here's some advice I got earlier: http://www.jig.com/need/solar-power-for-my-house-near-los-al...

Still haven't done anything. Any advice?
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It's really well established that home solar PV installations are currently substantially more expensive in dollars per kilowatt hour than grid energy.

I was following through some of Google's references and eventually found a graph without units perhaps explaining their reasoning behind this claim. It shows the cost of grid electricity undergoing massive exponential hockey stick growth from 2020 to 2030. So, if that happens, and you have a fixed percent 20 year mortgage on these panels, then sure, you might end up doing great compared to the suckers paying $100 a kilowatt hour (or whatever their exact number is since the y axis is not labelled) in 2030. On the other hand, an analysis that simply shows such apocalyptic increases in the cost of energy and considers no other factors is overly simplistic since in such an end times scenario mass-starvation, cannibalism, revolution, and the overthrow of the government would be likely accompanied by this situation and those homeowners with PV panels who did not have their own private armies and weapons stash would have long been dispatched and robbed of their valuable panels by those who do.
That article was a little lite on details, does anyone have any idea how groupon will get the details about when you spend money at the merchant? Obviously it's not from the banks, so they must have a deal with merchants. But that deal would require them to modify their point of sale software to support phoning home to groupon. That seems like a tall order for places which have, say, an old filemaker database holding their sales records.

As an aside: Would a merchant really want to turn over all its sales data to groupon?
Browser speed tests - lifehacker
Ah bummer, I thought that was funny.

For what it's worth I agree. It just sounds like the OP couldn't find anything big to complain about, so picked on Paul's style rather than the substance of his talk.
It's not a "big" scene, but it's a decent one. We're located in Orange County, and there are quite a few media-focused tech shops in LA proper.

You are at a bit of a disadvantage in that employers who require ass-in-seat time will necessitate driving the hell that is known as the 91. Perhaps you should consider making the short move toward the coast. Not all the way, bit a tad closer couldn't hurt.

As for your skillset, your preferred web stack has a high impedance mismatch from what we use, but we're always happy to talk to smart people. Contact info is in my profile.
It's a small price to pay when making all the users happy.
Xerox ran these great ads many years ago which simply asked questions like "who invented the laserprinter" followed by Japanese music then "no, it was Xerox" and so on. It ended with the tagline "Xerox. The others can only copy." It's sad that Xerox was able to fund such innovative work but couldn't figure out how to capitalize on it.

In a sense you can view Apple as having been the company that saw Xerox's ideas, figured out what to do with them, and turned them into a series of revolutionary products.

I'm not saying Apple stole Xerox's ideas (far from it -- a whole bunch of their ideas were published in Scientific American and could have been used by anyone to create the Newton, the iPhone, and the iPad).

And it's worth mentioning that Microsoft Word, which along with Excel arguably made Microsoft what it is today, was in essence built on Xerox's ideas about word-processing (Charles Simonyi came to Microsoft from Xerox).

Xerox had ideas. Apple (and Microsoft) executed them brilliantly.

My apologies for rambling.