skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You'll learn something, additional career opportunities (maybe) and improved prestige among the developer community (guaranteed) come to mind.

It never hurts to have more than one language in your quiver. If you're looking for work and are having a hard time finding a PHP gig that suits your fancy, having some other language dialed to the point you can code in it professionally increases your odds of finding (and keeping) a job.

Of course, I make a good living coding PHP for high end websites, and have been for years now. I just don't talk a whole lot about the language that pays the bills since invariably mentioning PHP is your primary language leads to a torrent of hot air from other developers who use "cooler" languages. Personally, I think it's all bullshit and if folks want to play "cool kid" with their language of choice, that's fine, but don't expect me to play along.

Fun fact: the highest paid programmer I've met to date coded exclusively in COBOL. Think monster 1099 rates consulting on legacy mainframe code overhauls.
Polo lacoste
Also really not a fan of "no bullshit".
Yea I understand you aren't pushing to the graph. The point was that until I actually see/feel/use/fall in love with it (well, not that far) I am very hesitant against sharing about the app in order to get an invite. That's probably just a personal thing.
I'm obviously biased, but I'd like to think that even though we're the smaller player, being one of the only 100% free, browser based services that actually has the on-demand features is a big win for us here. Unless everybody is quick to download Spotify or pay up for Rhapsody, Earbits has one of the lowest barriers to entry.
You could always follow the old-fashion method of keeping a journal. Maybe modernise it a bit and have a digital one with, wait for it, images and videos!

I love keeping a journal and have done so for a fair few years quite diligently and before that, on and off. I have friends who have journals from their grandparents and some even further back.
Another great example of money trumping public safety is red light cameras, it's well known that the best way to reduce intersection fatalities is to increase the time length of the amber light. However if you take the average amber length of a red light camera intersection it is below the average length of non-red light camera intersections.
They do. Went to 2009 and Facebook highlighted when I became friends with her. Sigh.
Eastern Europe schooling US, western Europe on fast broadband
Off topic but unsure where to post:

How do I reach facebook with a security problem that I don't want to post publicly? Is there an email address or can someone contact me? (email in profile)
The World of Tomorrow - 1981 school text book
Pick up Release IT (http://amzn.com/0978739213) from the Pragmatic guys. While many of the examples and stories are based on Java webapps there is something in there regardless of which platform you are building atop.

Oh, and don't ever establish a blocking connection without a timeout or some other mechanism to abort it.
Maybe the neutrinos that appeared 3 hours before the event are from another event altogether (one that occurred even further away, whose light particles haven't even reached us yet)?
I thought this was very well written and clear. These authors bring up a very valid point. Not really sure if the web can reinvent itself. Java applets and Flash both failed along the same lines. Maybe the web (and HTTP) is only good for relaying information and rich experiences will always be native. It doesn't have to be that way, it just is.
A small chrome extension I've written by digging through the way facebook loads ticker updates: lets you check the feed without having to visit facebook.

All completed in 24 hours -- started by learning how to write a chrome extension, pretty printing and reading fb javascript, lots of hit and trials to find out what worked and what didn't -- and finally releasing it on the app store.

Slightly better screenshot here: http://explog.in/blog/2011/09/22/Chromicker/
It's like a captcha. You have no idea how many spammers and scammers want to attack Facebook users and their data via trojan horse apps. Srsly. For a taste, here's a paper by the FB security team:

http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/ldg/a10-stein.p...
> sacrificial lamb

Scapegoat, in the vernacular. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scapegoating : a she-goat with a silver bracelet hung from her neck was driven forth into the wasteland ...

They'll make it gold, and probably spare the sex change ...
I'm sure I have said similar things before when teaching students. I have no problem with these concepts because I've dealt with them for years.

What I mean when I say such things is that I have a mental model of the student's current understanding. That mental model is based off of what I have taught them, and the understanding they have demonstrated through questions and assignments. When I try to think about this concept with just those tools, I think it may be difficult to understand.

I always try to build a bridge from their current mental model (or, more accurately, my mental model of their mental model) to the mental model required to understand this new concept. If I have difficulty building that bridge, then I think it is a "tricky concept" for them.
Entrepreneurs shouldn't overly use buzzwords to describe the business. "We have a cloud-enabled, big data, social graph platform..."

This is a pet peeve of mine -- what if they do? I've had several reactions of that kind, as if the founders in the case started a company looking for the buzzwords.
I think the suggestion is we've mis-measured c, and it should be redefined as the speed these Neutrinos are reaching (if it's a constant maximum)
CAINE 2.5 – do you still use Backtrack?
These are VERY specific series of guesses. Names being mentioned, scenerios being played out.
Selecting the optimal programming language
This looks to tactfully aim to do what Beacon clumsily tried to do years ago: capture/publish as much user activity as automatically as possible. The timing is great, too: integration with these new streaming music sites might be the use case that really sells this to the public. As last.fm and turntable.fm have shown, music listening can be so naturally social that auto-publishing should be popular.
I reached out to Oliver and he got back with the perfect response really.

What is the worse case scenario if I were to be accepted:

A shed load of investment on the best possible terms you could find and one of the strongest networks around.

A good point made was to remain open to finding a co founder, after all things will get done much faster.

Thanks for the connection pg.
Google's "Future of javascript" internal doc
Yes, but you can bet that any manager that was about to plunk down a large amount of money for HP stuff with a sense of continuity is now looking at the competition.

The kind of boat-rocking that HP is engaging in is every corporate buyers nightmare and will cause a lot of sleepless nights in the houses of people procuring their enterprise product line.
Google+ reportedly passes 43 million users
Do you seriously think that the Autonomy purchase was made autonomously from board approval? (no pun intended)
All the reports seem to indicate it was a culture thing that caused tons of infighting and excess bloat in the ranks. People would have 6 different bosses on a project or no one knew who was responsible for anything. This is what I've gathered from all the blogs.
One thing that hasn't been mentioned yet is the quality of the video. The length, dynamism and content were all perfect! Nice one.
People try so hard to find excuses why some people can't understand some concepts, such as pointers. It's all an attempt to avoid just admitting that some people aren't capable.

I've spent much time tutoring people on various subjects, programming, physics, math. And the fact is there are just some people who can't grasp certain concepts. From my observations I think the culprit is a poor ability to integrate information into a single mental model. I've seen this many times. Someone can understand concept A, B, C in isolation, but when you try to guide them into combining the three to solve a problem they break down.

I think this really goes to the heart of intelligence. More intelligent people can integrate more information at a single time. This is probably related to working memory (there isn't a single place in your head where working memory functions, but its spread out). Tough concepts like pointers exemplify this. You need to understand the memory model, accessing a memory location, using that info to index back into the memory array, and how the syntax of the language supports these actions.

Analogies can help as it reduces the amount of info you have to hold in your head, but its not a replacement for understanding what it actually is. I think its time to admit that there is an intelligence barrier to some concepts that some people don't cross.
And that the C language spec is either broken or to unspecific.
Yes, perhaps I should have front-loaded that sentence with "Despite more than ten years' worth of evidence to the contrary..."
http://www.facebook.com/whitehat
Ask HN: Is my project worth pursuing?
I've been working on a project: localbeer.me - for just over a year (on and off). It started off with the idea of finding 'beer brewed near me'. The idea is if you are in a strange city you can pull up the site and find some locally brewed beer. There are many beer/brewery databases, but the foundation of my idea is that it geolocates you, and the brewery, and lots of cool things can happen because of that geolocation. Now I'm branching out into geolocated brewery news and even geolocated brewery tweets.

Traffic is at about 20 visits per day, and I'm about 1/3 through the massive data entry project of entering every brewery and beer in north america (then, the world) and I'm having serious doubts as to whether it's worth continuing. Pretty soon, I'll have to start spending money on graphic design, promotion and better servers. I'm not ready to start promoting the site until the brewery database has more data, but that's going to take months - months I could be working on some other project.

So I'm asking for HN's honest opinion. Graphics design and Data completeness aside, do you see some nugget of value in this project? What would you do if this was dumped in your lap? What have you done when you've been faced with a similar decision?
I hope this is tongue in cheek as it's clear from both AP and BBC that this is not a sensationalist release. Also note that the false alarm discovery of the Higgs in CERN this year was not an official release and rather the actions of a rogue researcher.
Ask HN: Has YC ever accepted an ecommerce startup?
Web retail is my industry, and I am fully aware of how unsexy it is compared to the plethora of mobile, social, and saas startups that have been the mainstay of YC's selections.

That said, it's also a very profitable industry, and there's no reason that a YC-funded ecommerce company can't be wildly successful. Yet, as far as I can tell by reviewing yclist.com, they have never accepted one. Am I blind, am I missing something, or is there something fundamental about the web retail model that YC absolutely hates?
Stallman: Android evil, Apple and Microsoft worse
Agreed, I'm not suggesting it's a particularly compelling option to deliberately falsify data for a court, but it could affect whether or not the court can consider GPS data to be sufficiently accurate - ie. even if the data is legitimate, how can the court know that's the case?
You can place me into a third camp: the skeptics who think posting your stuff is irrelevant to hiring, since most companies don't check Github/SO. Also note that the information asymmetry you mention:

The entire "github/Stack Overflow/your portfolio/the web/Work for Pie is the new resume" movement is about the information asymmetry that plagues the job market. Employers want to hire awesome people! Job seekers want great jobs!

is only solved for employers whenever we share info online. Employees are still in the dark regarding whether a company is a good fit. The act of publishing my code online does zero to help me understand a company's culture--it only solves the above asymmetry for companies.
I'll be there with the camera again, need get better at the photography somehow.

More Photogenic Nerds Please.
1 1/10 (less actually) the users of Facebook. Still, impressive as long as the growth continues.
In case you aren't in the Washington state area, there are other meetups around the world.

http://www.meetup.com/find/?keywords=Hacker+News&mcId=z9...
It is hard to even think about what they could do to salvage their reputation at this point. The board (Whitman included) collectively falling on their swords as a mea culpa would leave HP rudderless (but that may not even be worse than the kind of shockwaves that it has undergone in the the last years).

Right now there are a number of very tough decision to be made and none of those are good. Either the former CEOs decisions will stand and then someone without that vision will have to implement them, the former CEOs decisions will be rescinded (it looks like they will stand for now) or there will be some magical third option.

For the moment the best thing about HP is that they are still selling ink, toner cartridges and enterprise gear and I wouldn't bet too long on the latter (see above).

You simply can't run a company like this, even a very big one. Employees, customers and 'the channel' want to see stability.
Ask HN: I'm building a social media search engine, what's easier?
I'm building a search engine that only searches news sites, prominent blogs and forums, Twitter and facebook.

It works a bit similar to Google Alerts: you enter a query and you get notifications as new results are found.

The tool will be used in an existing social media monitoring software.

For twitter and facebook, i'd just use their APIs.

For the sites, What I have in mind at the moment are:

* Use a service like Spinn3r: the problem here is my servers don't have all the bandwidth to handle their stream and their service are too expensive for me at the moment.

* Use Yahoo BOSS: from reading their Terms of service, it's not clear if you're allowed to store the search results (I don't have a lawyer around to help interpret this)

* Build an RSS crawler: this will take the longest but at least I'd have control over which domains to search.

What would you recommend? is there another alternative I'm ignoring?
There's nothing wrong with using a programming based on some factors but the author never explains why these factors matters. Sure, they might seem intuitively right but how can we know that they are really relevant?

By the way, Listing 5 is why I love Python: not only does it have far fewer LOC, but it's actually more readable then the other examples, especially with Java, where there's just so much scaffolding going on.
I'm behind this. I'm one of those people that believe an unjust law should be ignored. Its clear that in this instance there is a legitimate reason to ignore this law and a (bad) reason to enforce it (money). However, what baffles me is when there doesn't even seem to be any benefit, and in fact is major liabilities to keeping an unjust law for no real reason other than principle, the example i'm referring to being the "war on drugs".

Sadly, civil disobedience doesn't work any more, remember, if you break the law, hell even if you just disagree with it, you're not a patriot, you're a traitor.
6 ways to get a better deal
The simple fact of having dumped the old CEO could at least lend a bit of credibility to reversing course on WebOS. Not a lot, to be sure, but definitely a nonzero amount, unlike the present state of WebOS.
Facebook is moving further and further from the "young and cool" demographic.
Super happy to be a sponsor!
Enumerating some of the ways to screw things up may be helpful in that it allows a reasonably intelligent reader to intuit the underlying connections and apply that intuition to a broader set of coding circumstances.
F8 Keynote "Streamlined" for click navigation, quick viewing
Um... not so sure I should click on that link. Anyone else brave enough?
Light is not that fast. In the time it takes for a photon to travel between your computer screen and your eyes, modern CPUs will be able to execute many instructions.
Ebay hasn't been an auction site really ever. Today the vast majority of listings have turned it into a ghetto version of Amazon where you can get tons of awful Chinese junk with "Buy it Now" as your only option. For the few people that actually do forgo the direct pricing option, the vast majority set the reserve at the price they'd list it on Craigslist for (basically fair market value) and hope to get extra money for no reason.

The auction format only really existed for vehicle sales in my experience. Even there dealers have killed the functionality by butting out all the private sellers. I wish there was some online option that only allowed private sellers, even Craigslist is succumbing to the same disease.
It's definitely a stupid url, but the site is entirely SFW.
I remember when they were first announced, they talked about some pretty whiz-bang features, such as using your phone's mic to determine where in a room you were relative to where another Color user was (in conjunction with the phone's GPS) so that you could algorithmically see the photos that were closest to you and that were likely taken by people near you.

Not that that sounds technologically unfeasible, but they made it sound like a current feature. The fact that their $41 million in funding is now basically an aggregation of Facebook photos plus FaceTime seems to indicate that it was complete vaporware.
I just deleted my account without downloading anything. I just dont see any value in tht stuff...
Hey Pawn - did that person think, "oh you just need to go build it and everything will be fine?"

If so, I completely understand why it didn't get past round 1.

Speaking of video games - play anything good lately?
I wouldn't say I'm trying to pander or write what they want to hear, because even if I succeeded and managed to do that not being honest to who we are, and what we want to do would take away from any potential experience with the program. I'm just looking for tips to more or less say more things with less words. There's just so much I want to say, obviously I don't expect the people reading the applications to read a novel, but with the briefness of each section we feel like it only really scratches the surface of who we are and what our idea really is. I guess what my question is, is what are tips to being able to express more in fewer words.
Quantum Bogosort
Frog Design's Arbicamatic 1000
Graphs, Permutations, Characters, and Logspace
At the risk of making a serious quesiton out of this...

Suppose one of your not-so-tech-savvy mates asks you to set up and host a straightforward blogging solution for him. No bells and whistles needed. Which open-source solution would you reach for first, and why?
Facebook is Ready for Your New Closeup. Are You?
But equating decrease in velocity with "slowing down" would be confusing for most laypeople, at least.

Nobody would say that they slowed down if they increased their speed as they went through a turn.
I'm a daily MR reader, so I like them, but this is classic Libertarian exercise in manipulative framing. Gasoline consumption does, in fact, increase non-linearly with speed at highway speeds. Police departments do have to pay their officers salaries. He could just as easily have written it this way:
- the real cost of gasoline is about $10/G. when you count pollution, military expenditures to protect supply, etc.
- Big Government and lying politicians bring that down to $4 to curry favor with voters
- that means voters drive bigger cars faster than they otherwise would
- that leads to an ethos of unlimited speed
- all of the above leads to highway casualties
- drivers who try to drive responsibly risk being run over by maniacs driving 4K lb behemoths at 80 mph.

Note that the above does not represent my views, but it fits the evidence as well as Tabarrok's take.
Private Eye has a good piece here on the self-aggrandising nature of Assange:

http://www.private-eye.co.uk/sections.php?section_link=stree...

Wikileaks has become his personal toy - he's long given up the original mission of what was a worthy organisation.
Census: Recession Turning Young Adults Into Lost Generation
The article in the NYT today reported that the board fully supported the decisions he had made but didn't like the way he was communicating the changes inside and out of the company. Whether or not that is the real reason they fired him is anyones guess I suppose.
The BBC reported earlier in the week that he received £500,000 as an advance, and later wanted to cancel the contract but had, by that point, spent the money (and didn't intend to repay it).

The reference to that amount has been removed since - I don't know why. Either way, if the above is true it's laughable that he should have any complaint. Enjoy your half a million (and royalties - they are honouring the contract you signed).
I doubt YC would turn down a Bezos. I think you've built amazing businesses with Ties.com and Scarves.com. Apply to YC. Keep kicking ass anyway.
Happy to have you as a sponsor!
All your interwebs are belong to Facebook
The inversion example only inverts the R channel, then uses the uninverted R value for G and B...
Thanks! You still need to send me some of those pictures though!
I'm an employee of Microsoft in the Valley. when I leave work at 6:15, there are maybe 15 people left at their desks in the section of the floor I work on (which has about 150 desks in it.) I know multiple people who show up around 11 and leave by 6.

Microsoft is hardly the worst offender in this metropolitan area, much less the industry.
Was done years ago in Denmark http://ashoka.org/fellow/thorkil-sonne
Doubt this. Layoffs within the WebOS division were announced three days ago, and are underway this week:

http://allthingsd.com/20110919/layoffs-at-hps-palm-division/
"certain freedom that they have in not knowing what's already been "proven" not to work"

Agree. This in fact is actually one of the things that allows younger people to take a chance and succeed whether it be in their parents business or in something they've never done before. Bringing younger people in is not all about younger people having more energy. It's also not being jaded and clouded by things that "simply won't work".

In other words knowing to much can be a disadvantage.

Having started a business out of college in something that I knew absolutely nothing about and being laughed at by competitors I experienced this firsthand.

When I started the second business although what I learned was a help it also hindered me. I knew how difficult things were (and I had something to loose as well..)