skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Convert DOC/DOCX, XLS/XLSX, PPTX, PDF, MPP & VSD Files to Images
Aspose.Total for .NET is a suite of Aspose products that allows users to convert Microsoft Office documents as well as other file formats into images in their .NET applications without using Microsoft Office or other application software to be installed on the development machine. In this post, we are going to discuss about all the articles we have written on how to convert various formats to images. You can convert Microsoft Word (DOC/DOCX), Microsoft Excel (XLS/XLSX), and Microsoft Powerpoint (PPT/PPTX) documents to images using Aspose.Words for .NET, Aspose.Cells for .NET, and Aspose.Slides for .NET respectively.
Word documents can be easily converted to multipage TIFF image using Aspose.Words for .NET. It also provides the facility to render shapes as images separately from the document itself. In addition to that, you can save the document pages to other image formats using the Document.Save method and providing an appropriate SaveFormat.
Celeri.js: CLI Library for Node.js
Earn Extra Income from Freelance Bookkeeping Jobs from Home
Affiliate resurrection review
Don't Buy Affiliate Resurrection serirously
Why Silicon Valley Is Running Scared From Health Care
The monthly "Who's Hiring" threads here on HN are great resources for internships.
Please write a proper one and submit it. I'll sign it and delete the links to mine.

Mine was never really meant to "the" petition for this. It was me fooling with the system and when I realized I'd clicked one page too far, I ran with it.
Ruby on PaaS: TorqueBox Now Available On Red Hat OpenShift PaaS
I have to admit I haven't noticed the bias. What is it?
Yahoo News Gets Integrated With Facebook
Moncler Schal
Is it just me or has TechCrunch become FacebookCrunch?
Mitigating Dumb Technical Risk - The Yahoo iPhone Fantasy Football.
Video marketing
Ask HN: Development on a 13" air?
Basically I'm looking to get a new laptop and for the longest time I've been contemplating getting an air. Why? Because they're extremely portable and especially light (my current gateway laptop's weight is 6lbs).

Are airs suited for development? The only thing I can think of is that maybe the 13" screen will be too small since the specs on the new models are quite impressive.

From home I'll be working on a desktop anyway, but this will be something to bring to hackernests and school.
"First of all, let’s clarify what the NASA budget is. Do you realize that the $850 billion dollar bailout, that sum of money is greater than the entire 50-year running budget of NASA? -Neil deGrasse Tyson"
http://wp.me/p1bnM2-qW
claiming what? who?
I tried to sell my website, Lifemall.com, on eBay however unfortunately it turned out to be a wasted exercise. Similarly, I also used Flippa but again no sale. Can anyone suggest another venue for selling a website?

(On a related note, if you're interested in acquiring Lifemall - a nice clean, django marketplace and community, email me)
This needs Dwolla.com support.
Mysterious ‘Nazca Lines’ ruins discovered in Saudi desert
Flash Player 11 Privacy and Security Updates
0.002% faster.
Really? That's great. A shame the new owner didn't maintain the affiliate program, he's throwing away money.
Thanks for the post! I just modded this to work with twilio -- sweet!

Additionally, if you don't want to pay for SMS you could send an email to your cell number.
I worked with the Windows QA of XBox for a while and it was totally awesome to have super detailed information on bugs, where they occured and how often, with core dumps and stacks in case of crashes.

Users and bosses thinks they have done more than their duty when they said you that "it doesn't work", "nothing work" without more details. You have to run after them to get more context and detailed information.

I love QA.
It looks like the Slideshare Flash embed is causing it, since it's the only one I opened and almost got my MBP flying.
I really think you could have something cool here if you focus on the aspect of sharing and discovering new content - Maybe a bit of a weird comment from someone who avoids facebook and twitter, but I'd say a huge benefit to your users would simply be providing ways for them to quickly get their stories read by new people.

In other words, users should be able to opt-in stories into a public feed of new stories, or stories by tag/type, so that others can come along and browse by recent or tag and find new content relevant to their interests. Clearly, things should also be able to be private, and likely should be private by default.

If the service had that, and didn't require me to use Facebook/Twitter, I'd consider signing up and putting up some of my own content, as one of my biggest hurdles has always been getting what I've written in front of a wider audience of readers, for the purpose of getting a more diverse collection of critiques.

Hope you keep at it!
I agree with article greatly especially when this happens:

Consider this real example I heard a while back from some MBA students – “Let me introduce our newest tool, which we developed from ‘mashup’ technology, made popular by Facebook and MySpace.” This entry line, as well as a long presentation which followed, was missing not only the translation to receiver priorities, but also assumed that the executive had the same background and view of the world as the presenters.

Although many VC's are intelligent and have a good grasp in the industry they are playing in, its best to keep things simple and straight to the point.
It is more than a business plan. I have been reading Eric Ries's The Lean startup, and I find that the ideas shown there are more focused as defining a process to deal with uncertainty in startups using scientific methods. It is amazing!.

It definitely helps your business plan, but I think it goes beyond just the business plan, it actually provides a process to align and direct your startup to success.
College tuition kills innovation, and here’s how
Eric Ries: Missing The Bullseye Made The Lean Startup
This just isn't true. I have Crohn's disease, have never let my coverage lapse, and I cannot buy individual health insurance at any price. I am an otherwise healthy, non-smoking, exercising 31 year old male.
For startups you usually don't have enough people to have QA team. Therefore you have to take a more lean approach: Build Quality In.

On the other hand, when you are building your MVP, progress is not built features, but validated learning. So QA tasks takes more of an approach of building measuring tools (which have to be done by the people building the MVP).

Even on a later stage startup, QA takes a whole new role, specially when you start doing continuous deployment and start developing immune systems. These can get quite complicated (think of Netflix Chaos Monkey[1]), and having a dedicated team can be beneficial.

What we don't need is a 20th century waterfallish QA. But ensuring the quality of a product[2] has never been more important.

[1] http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2011/04/working-with-the-ch...

[2] http://www.ashmaurya.com/2011/06/your-product-is-not-the-pro...
This looks extremely insecure and dangerous to me. All you need is for a user to click anywhere or interact with anything on your page and you then have full access to their computer, given that you include a native plugin in your extension. Even if you couldn't include native plugins in extensions, you would still have full control of the browser, including hiding the extension uninstall link in chrome://extensions/ and keylogging every page.

Edit: Nevermind, apparently it prompts the user before installation, unlike the Chrome web store.
BEAST beating SSL & TLS: What You Can do to be Secured
Well done. Didn't know that was a WP thing.
> it creates jobs and develops technological breakthroughs that benefit everyone.

That's a testable statement. Though the more interesting statement would be: It creates more jobs than other things we could do with the many, and develops more beneficial technology.

(My guess is that those stronger version aren't true.)
Interesting article, convinced me to just buy the PDF book "Dynamic Web Development with Seaside" to support the developers and authors. Hopefully this article will be expanded with future articles to cover more personal experience with Seaside.

It took me a long time to get into Smalltalk. In the early 1980s, my local Xerox Special Informations Systems sales/support guy let me use it on my 1108 Lisp Machine for a while, and I did not get it. Long story short, it took me about 15 years to get comfortable with Smalltalk since I only tried it sporadically.

Unfortunately, my customers always seem to want to use mainstream platforms like Java/JSP/Tomcat/Java EE6/Rails, etc. For personal projects Seaside makes a lot of sense to me. Seaside is easy to deploy also (I wrote a blog abut this a few years ago, and you can find better sources on the web).
Is this really an appropriate post? I don't know what Shen is, I find no explanation here, and I am required to enter a username and password to find out more.

(I don't get all the nuances of HN; it's an honest question.)
The JS code just prompts an install dialog (controlled by Chrome), so I don't see the security concern.
Public’s Thoughts on New Facebook Design
This is one of the difficulties of Just In Time manufacturing
What open platform? Diaspora is a joke at this point.
Rails is Obsolete (But So's Everything Else)
According to announcements made by Alex at the end of the conf, videos will trickle out slowly but surely on infoq. He hoped the first would be available in a few weeks.

It is definitely worth watching and I suspect worth re-watching many times.
"buy into their own bullshit"? You're putting words into the author's mouth.

What has the author said about intuition? That it is unsuitable for answering scientific questions. The author hasn't said it's bad for decision-making, nor that it has no place in generating questions. Just that it is poor for providing rigorous answers
Great product that keeps getting better and better. Glad to hear that it's supporting you properly.
Thanks a lot for the reply. Tips like this go a long way obviously. :)
Make every "bit" count
IANAL, but just because your terms say the service may not be used for illegal things it doesn't mean you can't also be culpable.

If I purchase stolen goods from a thief, I might be breaking the law even if the thief has signed a contract swearing the goods aren't stolen.
I do this. I use http://www.flickr.com/creativecommons/by-2.0/ to search for CC licensed photos.

It's pretty useful when I'm looking for pictures to illustrate a blog post, or to put on my slides for a presentation (I prefer pictures to text).
Right now it's all done manually. I experimented with CMU Sphinx II when I started but results were poor. The main problem was actually the recording quality, eg. background noises, people talking over each other etc. I plan to revisit it once again and try. Maybe things have improved.
I recall Chamath Palihapitiya also figured somewhat prominently in the Beacon saga. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook_Beacon#Privacy_concern...

Edit: I see the FA has been edited, now referring to him as "AOL Guy"
Yahoo Sports has a free API. They currently do not have a commercial license option. I use it myself and I hope other fantasy sites follow their lead.

Learn more here: http://developer.yahoo.com/fantasysports/
Free course: How to buy ads for your startup w/ founder of MixRank (YC S11)
The author's other posts about smalltalk can be found at http://futuremint.com/?tag=smalltalk

The most recent post, which won't show up at the last link because it isn't tagged, is http://futuremint.com/once-again-enjoying-ruby
Between the impressive language and a rather offputting website, I really want to learn more but at the same time am afraid to. On one hand, the type system is interesting and the work put into improving Lisp is visible; at the same time, I can't find any publications or explanations of the type system, his intro for Lisp programmers doesn't address macros, and he seems intent on selling me copies of his book on Qi before I even properly learn to use it. Neither can I find example code. So basically, if there was an argument to be made about programmers not understanding marketing, now would be a time to make it.
http://jng.imagine27.com/articles/2011-09-23-063927_shen_kl_...
Maybe you're not as clear a communicator as you think.
This is an "AI Koan" that I've read before. I love all of these, and it's nice to hear that there's some truth to (at least one of) them. http://www.science.uva.nl/~mes/jargon/s/someaikoans.html
When I travel or feel like hacking somewhere besides my desk, I work on an 11" air with an i7. The screen size is tight if you spend a lot of time in IDEs (for me, eclipse and xcode). When I'm able to work in emacs, I have more than enough room.

The only other thing really worth considering is RAM. If you are a web developer I suspect this isn't too much of an issue. I find that running xcode and eclipse together produces some swapping.

Surprisingly, I noticed a ton of airs at strange loop earlier this week, so they seem to be doing ok with hacker crowd.
This seems like such a backwards way to address the actual shortcomings of the Chrome Web Store.

They can add features like this all day, but it doesn't fix the fact that they haven't improved the actual Chrome Web Store enough to make developers or shoppers want to use it.

Especially regarding GAMES

If you open the Chrome Web Store. Go to Games, all you get are the featured games.

They have categories, but you can't BROWSE them. All you get to do is look at the top 5 they've chosen.

What's the point in putting an app in the Chrome Web Store, or even developing for it if you will NEVER get found. What's the point in looking there for new stuff if you won't be able to browse and find it????

People browse for games. There should be a "More" button next to each category. If users could browse through games, it would be worth developing games for the Chrome Web Store.
If I had been actually writing with the intention of publishing, it might have looked something more like this. So here's my suggestion for new language, rip it apart!

"Direct the US Patent Office to Cease Issuing Software Patents

The US Patent system is badly broken with respect to software patents. Patents are being issued to companies for “inventions” that are, in fact, common knowledge included in any introductory software textbook. The result is that the large software corporations are buying up reams of patents and using them to bully small, innovative companies out of business or into paying ridiculous licensing fees.

Quite apart from encouraging innovation, patents are now stifling it.

The software industry is one of the few industries still strong in America. Even in a time of recession, there are not enough computer programmers to fill all the available positions. Startup companies are forming and growing readily. But if every line of code written brings with it a potential violation of someone else's intellectual property, this will cease to be the case.

To solve this problem, we petition the Obama Administration to direct the Patent office to cease issuing software patents and to void all existing software patents. With these two steps, those of us in the software industry can stop worrying about mutually assured patent destruction and get back to doing what we do best."

Revision 2
Some examples using Qi

http://jng.imagine27.com/articles/2011-07-06-164206_purely_f...

http://jng.imagine27.com/articles/2011-06-28-141124_purely_f...

http://jng.imagine27.com/articles/2011-03-14-084257_happy_pi...
Given the high profile and sweeping consequences of their work, this attitude is giving science a black eye.

First of all, "climate science" != "science as a whole".

Second, if any scientific field ends up in the crosshairs of a well-funded politically motivated movement working against it at any cost, then it will become hostile towards skeptics and eventually start stonewalling them. This happened in biology re: critics of evolution (in the anti-evolution camps there are tons of complaints about censorship, refusal to address criticisms, provide data, share models and code, etc.), and whereas it's always possible to address criticisms, the other side is always willing to spend more money to poke new "holes" in the theory, and you'll just never win.

"Skeptics" like to portray the ultimate goal of science as if it's to continually try to poke holes in existing theories, because progress is made when theories are disproven. But that's not science. Science is when you mix a desire to poke holes in theories with a reasonable threshold of acceptance, a willingness to step back and say "Okay, we've spent a lot of energy coming up with arguments as to why this is wrong, and they've been addressed satisfactorily, so this is probably right, let's see if this takes us anywhere new rather than getting stuck arguing the point".

Climate skeptics lack the willingness, even in theory, to accept that enough is enough - I don't believe for one moment that there is, even in principle, any piece of evidence that would lessen the amount of criticism against AGW. I don't believe they would give in because we've already seen that no amount of evidence reduced the amount of anti-evolution noise, and it's by and large the same sources of funding and political motivation that's behind both movements.

Now, it very well may be the case that climate scientists also lack the willingness to admit that they're wrong (actually, I think this is pretty likely), in which case they're not doing science, either, and that's bad. I'm totally in agreement there.

But they're taking exactly the approach to the skeptics that they would (and arguably, should) be taking if they were doing proper science. So the way they deal with skeptics is not a point of evidence either for or against the honesty of their scientific investigations, it's merely an inevitable result of the politicization of their field.
I agree entirely with this.

It also seemed very poorly written and ill-considered. If I were interviewing this person for a job I'd be very put off by the tone, the solecisms, and the lack of clarity.
Avi Bryant’s Presentations
The slideshow: http://www.slideshare.net/rick446/realtime-analytics-using-m...

The video: http://blip.tv/rick-copeland/realtime-analytics-using-mongod...
google reader is google's own product. what is your point with that?
The equivalence of logistic regression and maximum entropy models
Eh, there's a difference between testing code you just wrote, and actual QA. I know my code, and I'll be testing for specific things, and I'll know what not to do. Our QA guy has no idea what I just did - so he's likely to uncover things I didn't think to check for.
I was just going to write that when I read your comment... :D I guess we all look to do that. To create value while living your life.
Yeah, but some people can just be dumb all they like. I used the software for my own sites for a while before making my own ruby/rack CMS but I wasn't an affiliate.

I ended up going that route to stop trying to frankenstein WordPress into doing things it wasn't meant to do. WPReviewSite did help me get started though :)
Is it appropriate? I wish it weren't, but there's little room in the title to explain Shen (and then it would be "the successor to the Qi language", and one cannot leave post descriptions. But a username/password aren't necessary; I don't know what you clicked.
If your business expenses are higher because you're buying chainsaws, then you're putting less money in your 30% "forbidden" bucket. It's a wash.
I disagree; I think the analogy is apt.

You lack the resource to grow your business, so you borrow someone else's and operate at their whim.

Contracts aside, the sharecropper's entire livelihood could be undermined on the whim of the landowner. Someone else has power over your ability to produce.
That's my plan, too. I think it's a pretty decent machine, but of course it depends on your development environment. I think it'll be quite fine for me with VS 2010.
You forgot a highly likely explanation:

- Some engineer somewhere is in the early experimental phase of assessing the quad-core XP processor, before even an ounce of strategic analysis or product design occurs.
The author doesn't write it off: "Gut-feelings and common sense are not enough; they may get us somewhere, but not always to the truth."
The creator o Seaside, Avi Bryant[1], talked about this on a great presentation: Rails is Obsolete (But So's Everything Else)[4].

Which has many of the points of an earlier talk: Django is obsolete (but so is everything else)[5]

[1] http://www.quora.com/Avi-Bryant
Also creator and founder of Smallthought Systems, which was later sold to twitter[2], one of the core developers of Maglev (a Ruby implemented in Smalltalk), Monticello version control system, and many other cool stuff[3]

[2] http://blog.twitter.com/2010/06/more-than-dabbling.html

[3] http://blog.redtexture.net/2010/10/30/avi-bryants-presentati...

[4] http://confreaks.net/videos/359-gogaruco2010-rails-is-obsole...

[5] http://python.mirocommunity.org/video/1186/djangocon-2009-dj...
That example doesn't really apply since the law is explicit about stolen property, which this case has nothing to do with.
I find curious that they first state this:

"As stated in our terms of service and privacy policy our service is not to be used for illegal activity, and as a legitimate company we will cooperate with law enforcement if we receive a court order"

And then this:

"In 2005 we setup HMA primarily as a way to bypass censorship of the world-wide-web whether this be on a government or a corporate/localized scale."

If censorship is government driven, it means that the law prohibits you to see some things. If you still do it, you get arrested because you are breaking the law. This is an illegal activity and they should cooperate with law enforcement, as stated in the first point.

So, how do they decide what is illegal but permitted and what is not? If they allow some illegal behavior and not some other, they are actually judging the morality of an act, and not if it respect laws.
I like my 13" MBP. It's an older model, so I don't know the screen res off hand, but if you can upgrade for more pixels that'd be good. Some IDEs get cluttery without enough pixels. What I've got is fine though.

Like pashields I'm crunched for RAM so go on Newegg and buy the max you can put in that machine.
If you were big enough to be a threat, then you have a pretty good problem on your hands. Yes your platform host might throw you under the bus, but I'm betting you could turn it around.
ObjC Blocks Triple Entendre
Beaverton Restaurant and Cafe
Google+ hangouts for Facebook, Twitter and the rest of the world
I came in here to ask exactly that. They explicitly "forbid" illegal activity and then immediately promote their service as a way of breaking other countries' laws.
MongoDB's map reduce is pretty janky, although it's slightly less janky in MongoDB 2.0. I'm not convinced that their home grown m/r is a better option.

They mentioned the "global javascript interpreter lock", which may be slightly inaccurate, but it's true that you can only run one m/r job per mongod instance at a time. It's relatively easy to get around that, though, since you can have replica sets and run jobs on the slave members. You can even have small replica set instances that only do m/r.

There are a couple of other problems, one is that Mongo writes map output into a temporary collection. There's also entirely too much BSON <-> Javascript converting going on. Mongo 2 addresses some of this with the JS Only flag, but it's limited to something like half a million inputs at a time: http://www.mongodb.org/display/DOCS/MapReduce#MapReduce-jsMo...

If I ran into intractable map reduce problems with MongoDB, I'd probably just jump to Riak or something. My guess is that they'll continue to improve things in Mongo land at roughly the same pace as I run into problems, though.