skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I read about Sprite in IEEE Spectrum and love the concept. http://spectrum.ieee.org/aerospace/satellites/exploring-spac...

That said, where are technical specifications? What microcontroller are they using? What is the range of the wireless radio?

Will we be able to program the Sprite ourselves? Can we add more physical sensors at our own expense? If so, is there a weight-limit?

Edit: KickStarter has some of the answers after all:

With a donation of $300 or more, you will be sponsoring the launch of a single Sprite which you can call your own. You'll be able to name it and specify the short message (for example, your initials) that it will transmit. You'll also be able to see its position updated on KickSat.org as it flies over a network of amateur ground stations.

For a donation of $1000 or more, you can request a Sprite development kit, including a fully functioning Sprite with all schematics, source code, and programming tools so that you can write your own flight code. You'll also receive a step-by-step guide explaining how to receive and deconvolve the radio signals from the spacecraft if you want to set up your own ground station in addition to using the KickSat.org mission control website.
Thinking about Kayak Trips
HN as CRM :)
This seems like it would teach kids meaningless (to them) terms and concepts they aren't ready to understand yet.

It'd be more interesting if it brought programming challenges into the context of the daily life a child but it seems to just define things as is. For example, the travelling salesman section just defined what a traveling salesman problem is.
Erlang web framework
Ask HN: is Chromebook dead?
I quite liked the first Chromebooks, both conceptually and in practice. I was hoping there would be a lot of new Chromebooks coming out, but it doesn't look like that. Is the Chromebook in practice dead?
There's only one set of Rob Pikes and Ken Thompsons on this planet :-/
Are you defending people (or perhaps friends or family of people) who use IE6? You have absolutely no case there.
ps: what I liked about it: "no" OS to get viruses etc., boot up in a few seconds, 3G connectivity on the go, clean UI, fast even with a cheap machine, nothing local (reminds me of nothing shared architecture for servers).
Crowdsourcing elegance
> Well to be fair, the language it is replacing for the most part works

They clearly disagree, since instead of taking part of cleanup/improvement efforts (e.g. Harmony) they decided to build a brand new language from scratch.

> Here I think is where Dart hopes to excel -- make a JS-like replacement that supports a better runtime and tools story.

I fail to see why that would happen, from what I've seen so far there's little in Dart which is a significant improvement for runtimes. And as far as tooling goes... well Google's history means they're unlikely to be those handling that, who's going to build tooling for Dart, and why would they have any reason to make that investment instead of improving their JS support further, or adding CoffeeScript support?
Excellent tutorial! I am going to use this menu for one of my websites.
Is there even a single piece of his you can cite in support of this? Seems mindless to attack the man as a partisan hack considering he is one of the more critical voices attacking the Obama administration for its lack of fiscal policy and ongoing banking bailouts.
I haven't used PowerShell (since I don't use Windows), but when using the Unix shell interactively every so often I find myself in a situation where the data is too complex for a shell command to be able to process it, or else running into some corner case of missing functionality. Usually I end up piping into python -c, but that ends up pretty gross... if PowerShell isn't the answer, what is?

I wonder how far you could get by sort of plopping PowerShell onto the Unix shell and supporting both structured and text data.

(Incidentally, one such corner case is summing a list of numbers - this sounds like it should be a short command, but actually requires a complicated command line using awk.)
Measure Java Performance – Sampling or Instrumentation?
Personally I don't even have the tolerance for braces. You're already indicating blocks via indentation.

- Requiring a redundant mechanism to mark blocks

- Possible introducing situations where code looks differently than how it executes

is all very mid-90s. python was the first to fix this, but yaml and coffescript do to. In particular, Dart will have to compete with mindshare from .coffee, so at least should be better than that.
Do you mind elaborating on the hackish parts of the ClojureScript workflow? It's alpha software at the moment, but we can always use some feedback.
Nice idea! Where I work, agile is very successful in the development teams, but interaction with Ops is a constant source of frustration.

Implementing something like this in my organisation would involve a real culture shift, but I can really see the value of the idea. Thanks for that.
Difference Engine: Programmed Nonsense (software patents)
Depends on the dominant culture/... in 1000 years. History is written by the victors.
Netflix kills Qwikster plans, backtracks on DVD separation
When I first got onto the Internet, nearly every page I came across had a little image at the bottom saying "Best Viewed in Netscape Navigator". Since I was using Netscape, everything worked fine and I didn't care. Some time later, I began to see images saying "Best viewed in Internet Explorer". Everything still worked fine, so I still didn't care... but as time went on, more of those images popped up, and the pages they appeared on began to look much, much scrappier in Netscape than they did in Explorer. While most of them still worked, more or less, Explorer made a noticeable improvement.

So, three cheers to Explorer for defeating Netscape and improving client-side development for everybody, right? Find a web-developer who still has to work with IE6 and ask them what they think.

Right now, Dart is freely-licensed and available to everybody, but who can contribute to it? Who will be allowed to veto compatibility-breaking changes? What happens if Apple announces some new hardware platform, and then Google coincidentally decides that supporting that platform in the Dart VM is no longer a priority, refuses to accept patches for it, and later refactorings happen to make it very difficult to maintain outside the official tree? What if the Dart VM becomes strategically important like Android, and current releases are only available to approved partners?

Sure, it's very unlikely that all those things would happen, and fairly unlikely that even one of them would: up until now, Google has stuck pretty close to the "do no evil" thing. But if we stick with openly, collaboratively created technologies, those things are impossible, and "impossible" is better than "unlikely" in my book.

If Dart were some kind of server-side thing Google wanted to use to increase the responsiveness of their sites, or something else internal to their systems, I wouldn't care — they're allowed to do whatever they want in the privacy of their own servers. It's only because the value proposition of Dart is "give Google an inherent advantage of control over the Web, and in exchange you will get shiny things" that I'm concerned. There'll always be more shiny things, but (so far) there's only one Web.
> Have you seen ES.next? [...] I want to see [...] class declarations

Uh... like this? http://brendaneich.com/brendaneich_content/uploads/CapitolJS...
DWP signs fifth large deal with HP
I am currently using toggl (http://www.toggl.com). I am not using it for billing nor for monitoring employees, but for monitoring how I spend time. The purpose is to balance work between my several projects on which I work concurrently, and also to avoid procrastination and wasting time on distractions.

I spent a lot of time (pun intended), i.e. about half a day, on searching a time tracker that would fit my needs. I was not interested in features related to billing clients, and thus I found too expensive the services that seem to be most popular, like Harvest, whose pricing starts at $12 per month if one works on more than 2 projects. I would not pay more than $1 per month for a simple time tracking service. I needed a web application / service, as opposed to client software, since I work on multiple computers. Also, the ideal service that I was looking for would have an Android app such that I could track time when I'm not using a computer.

Toggl does all of these within the free plan, however it is somehow buggy - the Android app, the desktop app and the web service do not synchronize well and I am kind of forced to use just the web service through a browser.

I would be interested to find out about other apps that would do the job.
Shop Nike SB Dunk High, Nike Dunk High Premium Online
Unfortunately, there is no type inference system (that I know of) that can handle types that programmers use in dynamically typed languages on a daily basis. For example, consider the Django admin property 'list_filter' [1] or the Clojure metaprogramming functions 'proxy' [2] and 'defrecord' [3].

[1] https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/ref/contrib/admin/#dja...
[2] http://clojure.github.com/clojure/clojure.core-api.html#cloj...
[3] http://clojure.github.com/clojure/clojure.core-api.html#cloj...
AMD stock inside trader in fight over cash gains
Build A Terrain Engine For Video Game Development
Yes, of course. Nothing is wrong with using Fabric. It's a clear step above trying to use shell scripts to manage your servers and deployments. But what I am seeing across several comments is that tools like Puppet and Chef are clearly misunderstood by many developers. As a sysadmin myself, I would say that there is definitely a larger picture to the use of Puppet/Chef than what developers are looking for, and thus something like Fabric is much more suitable.
Netflix Abandons Plan to Rent DVDs on Qwikster
American Economists Share Nobel Prize
Open-source Arduino (water) sprinkler valve controller
I'm finding Youtube great for listening to music. It has a bunch of features I never used for video, that I do now for audio like playlists.

When active listening I love the serendipity of listening to a song and having 10 semi-random choices to jump to, plus the ability to read the comments and find out about covers or other versions or other artists to check out, definitely the best place to find new music even if it's not ideal for syncing with iPods.

I've also got it hooked up to XBMC so that I can route the playlists through my home theatre setup.
UK cloud startup wins £60m funding
I don't see the link between a touchscreen and what you've written (or are these use cases for a keyboard?)
Not sure if sarcasm or zealotry.
Netflix kills Qwikster, keeping DVDs and streaming on same url
Good news, maybe they won't try creating an other crappy language.
Netflix reverts from Qwikster split
If you assume you have the right/knowledge to tell ME how to use MY RHEL, you assume wrong.
Shopping centre photo prompts Terror Act confiscation threat
Here's a little valid Ascii art program with Dart

main() { var _ = 1;
;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;
;; ;;
;; ( (){ }() ) ;;
;; (_ ^_^ _) ;;
;; {; _|_ ;} ;;
;; ;;
;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;
}

http://try-dart-lang.appspot.com/s/y8YO
thanks for the feedback :) I've already been blamed for UI almost by everyone, so I'm absolutely going to look for ways to make it better :D Indication for actions is a good idea, I'll think about it, thanks :)
And how much slaves are working for you? Nicely done HTML5 survey.
Erlang style actor model and OO? I can just say awesome!
The possibilities are endless.
There's kind-of a gap between accepting all external feedback (C++) and dismissing all of it (Go) don't you think?
While it's tremendously fun to go through and learn, I question whether she would be a better programmer.

For the first half, the boy is making all the right decisions. He's not taking changes and using little compiler tricks to do things. He's not being clever. (For the second half, they appear to deliberately make him stupid. I'm not sure why.)

She, on the other hand, has a lot more tools in her toolbox. At the very least, she'll be tempted to use them. And if anyone else is working on the code, they'd better know those tools as well as she does. That's a dangerous situation.

Of course, it depends on what they're working on. If they're working with Carmack on his new 3D engine, she's the obvious choice. He would never keep up to Carmack.
There's an real conflict between static typing and eval() or reflection.

eval() is shown to be usable in a static typing environment by some of Don Stewart's papers, though it does take more effort on the language implementors' side.

Reflection is achieved in Haskell, for example, using reflective type-classes (such as Typeable and Data).
Netflix kills Qwikster
I'm pretty sure the OP is wrong, Nexus One is built to Google's spec and if the carrier added an undeleteable Facebook app it is because Google gave it the go-ahead.

If not, what is the point of buying the Nexus phones? It's Google's flagship stock Android, isn't it?
I can't open the website on my iPhone. I hope that's not a karmic hint on the interoperability of the language.
>>The amount he gained is important because it will vastly affect his sentence. The figure given by the prosecution could lead to a more than 20 year jail sentence, which Rajaratnam’s lawyers have already described as being effectively a “death sentence” for the trader.<<

He should not have done the crime then.
Over 100 arrested in massive ID theft bust
How critical is the Adobe AIR technology to the functioning of this app?

I'm not sure if it is a good thing to rely on since it seems to be laggy and Linux support was discontinued: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_Integrated_Runtime#cite_n...
Do you have a specific criticism of Linq, or suggestions to how it could have been designed better?
I use classes in Coffeescript, but avoid 'this' bugs by knowing that:

- JQuery examples like to abuse 'this'.

- I should always, explictly provide the event as a parameter in the callback.

So '@' is always the object, and 'event' is whatever started the method.
Nice looking site, but I dont understand what Raven does. As an example here is the explanation for the Smart Bar feature:

"Raven uses a technique called "site specific browsing" to create a dedicated browser instance for certain websites and their features. It debuts with the most widely used websites including Google+, Facebook, Twitter and Quora. Within each app Raven provides yet another instance for key features. This provides a whole new level of multitasking within a single window. The Smart Bar unifies navigation across many different websites allowing access to features quickly, without effort and with little instruction."

I have no clue what this means. This clearly needs to be dumbed down to be understandable by average users.
Strange creatures saying nonsensical strange words ? They will love it. I know I would have as a child.
Very nice app, tried it out on Kubuntu 11.04 without problems. The streams run pretty fast for me, so that's a plus.

Hopefully you'll work a bit on the user interface, as others have mentioned. Good luck!
That depends entirely on the browser.
> eclipse

Oh. :-(
As I'm reading through the tutorial, it seems to me that it doesn't even have optional static typing. The tutorial claims:

> Types can help you write and maintain your code, but they don't change how Dart programs behave.

That, in my opinion, is not a type system, it's a documentation system. Writing

String a = 1;

should crash the program/produce a runtime error in a language with (optional) static type system. In Dart, in only produces a compile time warning.
HN's edit form is no better. Pressing Tab after editing a comment takes you to the "help" link in Chrome.
Agreed.

It's interesting how culture arcs between similar practices. Prior to the 20th century (and likely prior to the 1940s) in the U.S., children often did large amounts of work. There was a period of "kids being kids" as we enjoyed prosperity (and a move away from factories and farms), but we seem to be swinging back in the direction of "kids as workers," albeit for different reasons.
Pretty disappointed with the lack of risk with this. Conceptually seemed like something with a ton of potential, but the minute I saw the tutorial shoehorning the worst of Java and JavaScript into something new, it was a non starter for me...better being insulated writing CoffeeScript a layer up and waiting for a compiler.

Things I've noticed so far that I don't like: get/set proliferation, semicolons, braces, positional args, var for instance vars, int/num dinostyle pseudo-primitives.

It seems like they tried to do some cool things, but failed in execution. Like "Greeter.withPrefix(this.prefix);" one-line constructor definition .. where this.prefix is a "shortcut that assigns the parameter's value to the instance variable prefix". Eliminate needless code.. but instead of using a dedicated symbol to call attention to the sugar, they used "this." WTF.. did they specifically want to kill scanability.

Things I've noticed so far that I like: using "_" as a prefix to enforce encapsulation.

Enforcing naming conventions as syntax seems at least somewhat python inspired in the sense of bringing the whitespace is significant design to naming is significant.. wish there had been more of that.

If someone other than Google were doing this it would be dead in the water already.
...he's just not successful at it.

Could you specify the metrics by which Stallman is not successful (esp. compared to Jobs)?

If you imply some kind of comparison involving Apple's revenues/market cap/corporate success - that's not quite right as an approach.

Unless you compare such values with the overall economic effect of the GNU/FreeSoftware/OSS tools, compilers, whole Unix-like OS-es that have been freely available (also evolving during that time) for more than two decades. All this is something which empowered millions (companies, startups, individuals) and Stallman simply chose not to cash on commercial success because of his firm beliefs.

I doubt Apple and Jobs would win at such a comparison. (I say this with all the respect for the great marketer and technology visionary that Jobs was.)
Fire and Ice. Silk and Chrome. SPDY and HTTP.
Hello Fogus. What an honor! I loved your book ;)

Well, I am certainly not complaining, I think it is mostly just that it needs to be compiled to javascript and that you need to have the right dependencies in place. If you are compiling from the command line it takes a long time (I know this is caused by the jvm startup time, but it still is a little annoying). I know there are workarounds such as cljs-watch but setting everything up right definitely takes some time. The browser-based Repl is awesome but sometimes breaks, I don't always understand why. I do think there could be some improvements in terms of tutorials but those will surely come (I might write one...)

So if you are using it on a daily basis then all of this probably doesn't matter but it does take a bit to get started. And I think to some part this reflects the fact that, well, Javascript was not really intended to be a platform to be compiled against, it is just used that way because it is the only platform in the browser.
Did not know about set and dict comprehensions - very nifty.
Yes, it requires a wide-screen monitor. I don't think I can answer the other question as I don't see any value in it. Turning loops and so on into a giant, inflexible (unless you want two wide-screen monitors) daisy-chain of methods does not improve the readability or maintainability of code. It also encourages programmers to perform actions that should otherwise be in "repository" classes, in inappropriate places.

The from item in blah syntax is just SQL rearranged, and SQL isn't as expressive as programming language constructs, so why try to emulate it?

It encourages you to write the grain of salt statement I mentioned earlier, which requires programmers to read through and understand the implementation of what you are doing, instead of it being embodied in a meaningful method and called. Of course you could just wrap that in a method, and slowly grow the line to 2-3 wide-screen monitors as you add more conditions.

The more tools you add to the core of a language, the more of a monstrosity of a kitchen sink it becomes (c#/.NET). Now you can loop over a list in 6 different ways! Hooray! That is why Dart looks good - a few basic concepts that can be used to build things suited to a particular problem.
Netflix cancels Qwikster Idea. Netflix as confused as HP?
it's done completely using actionscript 3 and adobe flex. if you remove all stuff like file downloads you can run it in browser, but for it to work as a desktop app air is a must.
What if I offered you an ISP that did these things (NX redirecting, clickstream tracking, ad swapping, affiliate redirection) but made it explicit with a 20% reduction in your monthly bill? 30%? 50%?

Most people don't care about these things - it's evil because it is done by stealth.
thanks for feedback. will do my best :)
Poll: Are you happy?
definition:

enjoying or showing or marked by joy or pleasure

(Princeton's Wordnet)
On the death of Jobs and the FSF
A roundup of collaborative feedback software
“A little Jargon doesn’t look like much. Some people even keep them as pets. But they form packs, and they are very dangerous.”

It's probably one of those children's book that grown-ups love. As a child, you might feel a little betrayed once you grow up and learn it's "just about programming".
From what I've read it doesn't matter too much, it seems like:

1) they'll read through applications
2) if the application looks promising look at the video
3) if the video isn't bad look at the demo

I'm guessing that most of the time they look at the demo they've already mostly decided whether to interview you or not.

(If you don't have any past proof of being able to build things, etc. it might be more important though)

I've seen several people say that when they were at the interview stage the YC partners mostly ignored the demo and focused on questioning.
Google have recently launched their first retail store in the UK (really it's just a store within a big PC World store) to sell the Chromebook:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/google/8800002/Worlds-...

So I don't think it's dead, but it does need a big push to get it going again.

I love the hardware and the price isn't bad for what it actually has inside it (cheaper netbooks lack an SSD, screen quality, etc), but I'm not sure what I'd actually use one for.
Either give me a brand new browser VM with a brand new modern language that is supported by all browsers or don't bother. If my code will be translated to Javascript I rather write it in Javascript and control it myself.

I'll happily adopt a new browser language if it offers me benefits that I don't get from Javascript, but I really don't get the new trend of compile to Javascript languages.
OK.

Netflix really doesn't know what it's doing.
All of this has really made me loose a lot of faith in reed and the gang. I honestly never thought the price hike was that big of a deal, as I exclusively streamed for a long time anyway. The several week delay between uproar and action just makes them seem confused and slow.
Oddly enough, if in-browser Java had "won", we'd already have such a thing.
Addresspush.com interview: "The vision: a dead simple contact information hub"