skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That was part of a rumor that was started as a result of hearing rumblings of library support for the Kindle.

There was another big thing that happened, 11,000 public libraries using Overdrive get to lend books to Kindle users now.

I think the above rumor, and the recent support of the Kindle with Overdrive enabled libraries are one and the same.

That said, I don't see Libraries disappearing anytime soon. If these are different rumors, then let's take the rumor that free lending of books via Amazon Prime. I read somewhere (it may be in that article) that it may be a back catalog of older books. Classics and things. Public Libraries using Overdrive have some selection of newer books that Amazon Prime would then not be lending users.

That means if you're interested in newer books, well, your only option is to purchase the book (digital or dead tree) or borrow it from the local library (digital or dead tree). Since Amazon wouldn't be lending newer releases.
Abstracting away the specific content about algorithms, these suggestions are helpful for any kind of technical oral exam, e.g. qualifying exams in grad school. The more clearly you can communicate your thought process to your interviewers, the more accurately they can assess your work.
I thought "cool" . Then got to 0:42 secs and turned the noise off.
I've been thinking about adding something like Visor, and I haven't come up with anything yet.

I've only used Windows (XP) seriously for a few months of work, and I agree that it felt like the stone age.

As much as I can see the need for something better on Windows, I no longer use Windows (gladly, too), and I don't own any PCs. Almost all of the hardware that I have easy access to is using Mac OS X these days.

My code is GPL however; so if someone has the drive to actually produce a terminal on Windows, they might find mine useful as a reference. After all, I've implemented fairly complicated things like an XTerm, VT100, VT220, etc. and a UTF-8 decoder, and you wouldn't want to start those from scratch.
Search makes no money at all. But adsense does.

Adsense relatively makes little since they pay most to site-owners, whatever they call the ads on Google make the money. After 11 years has, Google has what, other than search?
Who is comparable to Tim O'Reilly in the music industry?
If you're countryX and want to bring down everything, hacking sites like mysql, apache, kernel and the likes would do the most damage
How open source got its groove back
I'm willing to believe that the ideal candidate is a fixed point under your operator, but I think it's going to be tricky to prove convergence :)
Sorry, I should have been more specific: I understand the rules of Big O complexity, which you aptly summarized; the part I'm really curious about is "From there, you can pretty much combine these rules to analyze many algorithms." It's not that the concepts are mysterious to me, but that making them a part of my learning habits has not come naturally.
The original article is much more about end-user SaaS type cloud experiences than the IaaS or PaaS services you're mentioning. The nature of SaaS is that it is directly facing the end-user. IaaS or PaaS services are more B2B style and so the customer and the end-user are not the same.

The different nature of the SaaS beast doesn't mean that IaaS or PaaS systems are any less vulnerable to things going wrong (see the EBS outage earlier this year). But Iaas and PaaS providers are more vulnerable to customer loss if APIs change (due to the instantaneous breakage) than SaaS providers are if UIs change.
Life on the Edge: 7 of the World's Most Fascinating Border Towns
USA Today hacked by Script Kiddies on Twitter
Did you read the "my budget..." bit? I don't pay $80/year for Prime membership when I barely spend $80-100/year and use the free super-saver shipping. Paying an extra $80/year is a total waste of money for me because I don't require my books in 2 days (they get here almost that fast, however).

In addition, I still like the feeling of holding a REAL book. It lacks the search features I love, yes, but it's simpler to reference without hogging system resources, taking another device, or having to continually switch between monitors/desktops.
A long time ago I left a comment on the macromate's blog voicing my "anger" when TM2 was announced to be "Intel-only" or "Leopard-only" or something like that.

I was angry because I felt that forcing their loyal and paid users to buy another OS or, gasp, a new machine just to run their software - a code editor - was not very cool.

Other enthusiastic users mocked me for not wanting progress.

Ultimately I bought the latest OS I could run on my ageing G5, hoping TM2 would show up soon. But it didn't.

In the mean time I switched to Vim AND to Linux after what? 15 years of Mac. After nearly a full year I'm already more productive with it than I ever was with textMate.

Ho! I will definetly download the alpha/beta like I did for Coda, Espresso, Vico, Sublime Text 2.

TM2 has to be really awesome for me to look around for my license and make me come back.
Importance of good research vs hackers
I wanted to implement the sleep sort algorithm, but I can't use

VA = [4, 2, 5, 7];
for(x=0; x<VA.length; x++) {
var y = VA[x];
setTimeout('console.log(' + y + ')', y*1000);
}

it tells me I can't use "var". And when I remove that I get some syntax error.
Any nice alternative way to implement a sleep sort in coffescript?
My prediction is that Facebook will be acquiring Spotify within 6 months. Makes sense for both parties, and last I checked, Sean Parker is a shareholder in both.
How IKEA Transformed Home Furnishing
Here's an interview with the knifemaker in their next episode: http://www.chow.com/food-news/55121/obsessives-knifemaker/ Definitely looking forward to this series!
When I read the first letter I carelessly didn't check the header and assumed that it was the "UK government response..." that you spoke of. I thought, wow, someone in our government is really switched on. They've cross referenced their letter, they are aware of the history of the subject and they understand why Britain is so woefully behind in this area. And moreover, they are reaching out to computing experts (albeit ones that contacted them first) to help with the project and meet with them in person. Awesome.

Then I read the second letter and recognised the unimaginative, bureaucratic style that British people have come to love and cherish. "Oh, how can I get rid of this person and make them someone else's problem."

Internationally, attitudes towards programming in academic circles are finally changing. There is right at this moment a real sea-change in the air. I don't know if that is due to Veovodsky's work on a new "Univalent Foundations for Mathematics" or whether people are just waking up to how much work it actually takes to bring academic computing work up to industry standards. But there is a change.

Unfortunately I am yet to see evidence of it in Britain, however. Students still remain woefully underprepared in this area and don't seem to develop a natural affinity for programming except in extremely rare cases. And the academic attitude to computing is still very standoffish on the whole.
5 Best Things about Outsourcing work to Freelancers
But I just met 'er!
The standard reference (in the "That's what MIT uses" sense) is Introduction to Algorithms[1], as you probably know. It is a wonderful book and I have a copy that is wearing of because I use it so much.

As for "outside of a classroom setting", the best book I can recommend is "The Algorithm Design Manual" [2]. It is worth its weight in gold. Very user friendly, as I never though an algorithms book could be. It contains dense material, but at the same time reading it feels like reading a good fiction book. I first heard of it while reading Steve Yegge's post "get that job at google"[3], bought a copy and, wow, what an amazing book.

[1] http://mitpress.mit.edu/algorithms/
[2] http://www.algorist.com/
[3] http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2008/03/get-that-job-at-goog...
Google & The Israel Museum Put Dead Sea Scrolls Online
Facebook has had the option of scaling the iPhone app to the iPad resolution and releasing it with feature parity for probably at least a year.

This is not to say that your conclusion is incorrect, but unless something significant has changed with Three20 since the last time I used it, it isn't super-usable on iPad.
I was excited about Opera Unite because it did make setting up a small webserver really easy for end users. Unfortunately slow residential upload speeds, lack of a must-have app to run on it, and Opera's small user-base mean that it didn't go anywhere.

The responses to Opera's marketing also indicated that a lot of people didn't understand what a server was. It launched about the same time as Google Wave, and both products had marketing campaigns which emphasized how easy each product made communicating with friends. As a result, many of the comments I saw on forums were people asking if the products functioned identically.

I feel that if it had launched with a peer to peer social networking application that synced messages and photos between friends, it might have been significantly more popular.
Signing in to Windows 8 with a Windows Live ID
Even after controlling for ethnicity and income there are quite big geographical variations. White people in the upper mid-west are a lot healthier and long lived than whites elsewhere, for example.

Comparing an extremely heterogeneous country like America to ethnically monolithic countries like Finland or Japan is always an error.
I think there is a solution to this on the iPad and Windows 8 (Metro UI).
Original discussion: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3026580
My mistake. I must have missed that.

The version of the story that is told on Kenneth Cole's website is still worth checking out.
YC NYC Challenge: Hack your way to the top
Dreamweaver 3 -> BBEdit -> TextMate -> MacVim/Vim
I think it would serve the web well if Google bought Flash from Adobe and simply integrated an ActionScript 3.0 rendering engine into WebKit as an alternative language to Javascript.
Theoretically, fine-grained targeted advertising is the money. To get to that fine grain, you need lots of Stasi-like data. That's the tough part, unless you're FB. The other half (algorithms) can be continually iterated and improved by throwing math/CS/physics PhDs at the problem.
Yep. They're betting on Facebook and that might cost them. Business is about taking risks and the job of the people at the top is to assess those risks, and they're usually in a better position to do so than anyone else.
Done: http://ycnyc-challenge.herokuapp.com/hackers/1
From my point of view, full-access pipes are the problem. Asymmetric connections, bandwidth caps, incoming port filtering, etc are all de rigueur for large fixed line ISPs these days. This is especially true in North America. The mobile connectivity picture here is even worse.

Demand can be generated, if you do it correctly. The hardware is less of a challenge if you do the distributed computing on several layers at once. Apple has shown us the way on UI/UX, as has science fiction literature for decades now.

We'll never get completely away from client-server (especially with mobile computing), and that needs to be part of the design. But we have seen the power of peer to peer networks, and even some kind of proxy network between the p2p base and mobile clients could be done in a non-evil way.
Sean Parker must have slipped some Rohypnol in their drinks.
Facebook can create a demographic profile of its users by observing (spying) on users' browsing behavior. Advertisers will pay more for targeted demographics, e.g. women over 40 who read Martha Stewart and travel often.
To be clear, Wikipedia is really just a jumping off point. You can only put so much information on a topic into a Wikipedia article.

You really start learning when you read the references, and have 5 or 6 browser windows open with web searches to things that either interested you and weren't referenced, or to terms that you didn't understand.

>That meshes with my empirical experience that the best way to learn is to "play".

It has actually been shown in educational studies that this is one of the best ways to learn; so social science seems to match up with your experience as well.
Linus Torvalds's Lessons on Software Development Management
This is Where Entrepreneurship is Heading...
Moleskines, Commonplace Books, and Blogs
I don't agree with "but it barely runs under Lion" - I use it daily for several hours and it almost never crashes.
How Men Think With Their Heads (And Not the Ones on Their Shoulders)
Your comment made me laugh, but in seriousness, FB might be causing people to spend more time than they used to online, so that 200% number is, in a certain sense, not implausible.
The AJAX content loads were slow, the action buttons were too small and easy to hit by mistake, and I don't recall pinching and zooming being smooth either.
How about the obvious thing, which is to look at the curriculum of undergrad and grad level algorithms courses, pick up some textbooks, and learn it on your own? Flashcards won't help, because it's not a problem of memorization. You need to own the knowledge that lookup in a balanced binary tree is a logarithmic operation.
Finally Business Planning Software for Mac...
Speaker Deck is open to the public
Why your bussiness model sucks
I can't improve on this:

http://everythingsysadmin.com/2011/06/avoid-using-the-term-c...
What does "Go to anything" offer versus TextMate / ST2's Command-T file jump feature? As far as I can tell the two do exactly the same thing.
Gotcha gotcha. I couldn't agree more.
Root access to MySQL.com sold for $3k - now serving malware
For any UW students out there he's from University of Waterloo Velocity.
I, too, have felt the irritation of seeing a service that worked exactly the way I liked it changed. It can be annoying but I don't see any way to escape this, aside from writing your own web apps.
I have paid for TM1 before I got the feeling that it is unmaintained. But I still use TM 1 for 90% of my daily writing work (mostly source code and TeX documents) - I still love it.
For anyone trying to buy "The Algorithm Design Manual" (or at least add it to their Amazon wish-list with a dreamy sigh), It seems like the "correct" version is here:

http://www.amazon.com/Algorithm-Design-Manual-Steven-Skiena/...

I was a bit flummoxed at first because algorist.com doesn't tell you how to buy the thing, and the Kindle edition appears to be out of date (based on the first edition, obsoleted by the second edition from 2010).
higher resolution than google's maps of israel!
LCD allows Amazon to sell video content (and possibly games and apps) in addition to books. There's no way that the Kindle Tablet was gonna be anything else.

However, I'd be shocked if they scrapped their highly successful e-ink Kindle, so worry not. (I also prefer e-ink; my Nook Touch is one of the best products I've ever owned.)
I was at a university library in St. Louis and was surprised to find shelves and shelves and shelves of books pertaining to the history of railroads. I had no idea that so many volumes had been written on this topic; I seriously doubt that all of these (possibly even any of these) are available as Kindle ebooks.

For that matter, many of the books in my own personal collection are still in print as paper books, but not available as ebooks.

I'm not sure how public libraries will continue to survive, but I'm not entirely sure how they are surviving now. It seems to me that the biggest chunk of their business is lending recent pop fiction novels and providing free internet access. But the point is, there is still lots of information ostensibly accessible in libraries that is not available on the Kindle. It'd be a shame if that information just vanished because people could get their pop fiction for free from Amazon.

But maybe that's the difference between public libraries and university / research libraries. Perhaps the two should merge, with the university libraries (which are funded and needed by the universities) also servicing the general public. The library at Cornell College operates this way.
My question on the first four is, where the heck are you shopping? Those are terrible prices. Are those really representative of what you see on a regular basis?

Avocados supposedly hit "record" prices of $2.50 each this summer [0]. I get 3 loaves of whole grain bread for $5 at my local grocer. Frozen broccoli is 3-4 pounds for $5 [1]. Low cal tortillas can get up near $5, I guess, if you get the fancy ones in a 10 or 12 pack.

Here are a few other things you can get for $5 (all taken from my local grocery ad [2]):

- 20 pounds of potatoes

- 3.5 pounds of frozen chicken breasts

- 3 pounds of ham

- 5+ pounds of produce: tomatoes, carrots, pineapples, squash, etc.

- 15 cans of store brand condensed soup

It seems to me like, if you're looking to feed the family, your $5 goes a lot more on this list than it does on the dollar menu. A pound of ham, a pound of squash and tomatoes, and a 10 pound bag of potatoes seems like a lot more food than two burgers, two fries, and a tiny salad. It seems to me like, if you can't do better than the dollar menu for feeding your family, you must suck at shopping [3]. Do you think "sucking at shopping" is really what fuels this meme?

[0] http://www.thepacker.com/fruit-vegetable-news/Avocado-demand...

[1] http://www.ers.usda.gov/Data/FruitVegetableCosts/ has some fantastic data

[2] http://www.benewsjournal.com/Kent%27s%20Ads/Kent%27sBRIGHAM0... -- as for cost of living, prices out here are higher than they were in Seattle. Housing is cheap, but groceries are not.

[3] one of my friends who was on government assistance really did suck at shopping. I once went with him and convinced him to replace 10 pounds of meat (of the 20 in his cart) with a big bag of potatoes, as well as bulk carrots and such. At the end of the month, he was delighted that he still had food and had a little money left over.
I found that Ack.vim wasn't as essential as AckMate was. I changed my grepprg and grepformat and was able to get ack working with vim when I called :grep
Yes it is a summary of it. I think it is a good bullet point summary. That is why I added it. It summarizes it nicely.

It does point to the original article.
Back in the days at PARC, that was "IXeroxable".
1800GetThin
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It's funny that you mention Amazon, as they are updating their website UI when I feel that the old one is perfectly fine, but what can I say? It is their website.
FerroSlider - a jQuery plugin for custom-positioned slides
s/Lunch/Launch/

Isn't that the intended usage? See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Far_Out_Space_Nuts
We used to also build our own computers and amateur radio sets. Now we buy them. Are we losing anything? Probably. Have we gained anything? Probably. Does this article ask a lot of rhetorical questions? Yes.
>Nothing will display if there is an infinite loop.

Did someone solve the halting problem while I wasn't looking?
Captains license, STCW
I don't notice those conflicts in my implementation, but then again I'm not using Apple's text view. Every "normal" text field on the Mac (which I believe at least Apple's Terminal is using) has built-in Emacs-like bindings; I think that's why you see a conflict.

I do have the concept of toggling context with macros; e.g. you can define up to 12 actions at a time, mapped to almost any key combinations, and choose between as many sets of 12 as you want.

I also work around potential key mapping issues by having floating keypad windows. For example, if for some reason control-A doesn't work from the keyboard, it's always possible to "click" a button that will produce a control-A. (This was very useful in the old days in programs like "pine" that had redefined control-C among other things.)
What makes Basecamp "cloud"? There's a material difference between software delivered as a service and ephemeral IT infrastructure (cloud computing).
Over is not Translucency
>I'll worry about the time my code takes once it's notieably slow.

the Dunning-Kruger is exactly about ability to notice

>If everything I write runs in a fraction of a second,

where are different fractions of a second out there. Some are slow, some aren't. One either knows which are which or he doesn't.

>why would I waste my brain optimizing it to make it faster, when all I'd achieve is introduce tricky bugs.

that is one of the main points where effective implementation knowledge [incl. algorithms] comes to play. Typical "blackmail" in the industry - if performance then bugs.

>Coding is an engineering discipline: it's all about tradeoffs. Bugs and reliability. Performance. I know to focus on what is important to get a working product.

man, you sound like a typical PM when schedule is pressing and the things are started to be pushed out of release, and a pile of slow sh!t is released as result.
Two sites come to mind:

Hubski is like HN, but with a wider range of topics covered
and there are usually great articles across the front page. It is not necessarily humanities-centric, though

http://www.hubski.com/all

The second site is Arts and Letters Daily, which is focused entirely on the arts and humanities, but lacks a comment section. It really just serves as a broadsheet linking to articles of note. Still, a quality resource.

http://www.aldaily.com/
I think this is very cool.

One piece of feedback from how I would use this type of tool: Once I set my logotext, which I found not to be a problem, I would love to just jam on the down arrow on my keyboard to cycle through all. It sort of worked because it would open the last select used. but then it be pretty cool for my uses at least.
Eero Saarinen Tulip Marble Table
Hash sort is surprisingly fast:

for x in [0 ... VA.length]
ind = VA.get(x)-1
VA.swap(x, ind + VA.length)
for x in [0 ... VA.length]
VA.swap(x, x + VA.length)
How a leading tech school tripled female enrollment in CS, eng, and sciences
The good thing is that most operations on most data-structures (as well as many of the more common algorithms) don't require solving recurrence equations to determine their asymptotic growth, usually our intuition based on counting tends to be pretty close.

Sketch out your basic data structures on a piece of paper, then just use your finger to trace out how you could do insert, delete, search, etc you can usually tell if something is taking O(lg n), O(n), O(n lg n), etc just by counting the steps you take. After you're comfortable with this, sketch it in your head. You can't forget something that you understand.

The point is that if figuring what out Big O is seems like something you have to memorize to recall quickly, then you very likely don't really understand the underlying data structure/algorithm (and as such you rightfully should do poorly on algorithms interviews). Take the time to make sure you really understand what's going on, and everything else should fall into place.
I've been doing this exact same thing to learn. I read an interview question that asked how to sort a linked list. I tried implementing it on my own. Later I looked online to see other implementations and compared with my version. I was a little bummed to see my solution wasn't ideal but it only made me dig deeper.

Later on I found some Stanford lectures, particularly Programming Abstractions by Julie Zelenski (around lecture 14). After watching that lecture I was able to classify my linked list sorting attempt as a selection sort. I was pretty excited that I wrote a selection sort without even knowing what kind of sorting I was doing. I have yet to use my newly acquired knowledge at work but I'm now confident I can spot certain sorting algorithms and I'm much more aware of when to use each.

If anyone is aware of any other resources like books, online tutorials or videos I would love to hear about them!