skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: What are the most informative startup talks/videos?
Looking to create a long list of informative startup vidoes to watch when having launch and dinner. Be great if you could share a link to your favorite startup talks/videos!
Not mine! I've got a story that my college buddies continue to tease me about, almost a decade later.

I was doing a test where we needed to write some computer code on paper. Somewhere in this code was a point that called for multiplication. No big deal. I drew my dot that I'd been taught in all of my math classes and continued on with the test.

When we got the results back, I noticed that he had marked me off for this particular part. Thinking that he had mistaken my dot for a decimal rather than a multiplication sign, I waited until after the class was over and approached him to let him know that I knew the right thing to do and was conveying it with my dot. Apparently he was looking for an asterisk to be drawn. I brought up that it was the same thing, but he would hear none of it. Out of seemingly nowhere he had become infuriated with the fact that I'd questioned him and started repeatedly asking "Will it compile? Will it compile?!" before eventually adding "Minus 10! Thank you Mr. Rose!" A whole letter grade on a test lost because I drew a dot rather than an asterisk. Oh well. At least my friends enjoy laughing it up.
There are two things that make it less of an issue with Desktops/Laptops.

1. There aren't really that many native ratios. Realistically, you're looking at 4:3 for CRT's, 5:4 for non-widescreen LCD's, and 16:9 or 16:10 for widescreen LCD's. So that's not as bad when creating a full-screen application, because you can also letterbox the 16:10 to 16:9 for full 1080p video.

At this point, if I were a developer, I wouldn't even care about 4:3 resolutions, and just have 5:4 and 16:9.

2. Desktops and laptops, in general, have a lot more pixels to deal with, and are usually farther away from the user's face, so there is a bit more leeway when scaling your UI.
"This application will be able to:

Read Tweets from your timeline.
See who you follow.

"

You know what? Fuck that.

If you don't want to handle auth, use something that you won't use to spy on me, like https://browserid.org/

Otherwise, forget it.
This is an article in The Atlantic - In Focus series. The author is Alan Taylor, who created the Big Picture series over at Boston.com. He's famous for his photojournalism. Some forms of journalism aren't intended to inform you with words so much as they are to bring you there.
Any idea how/why this page breaks ⌘-N? Any idea how to turn it off?
We've been using Stripe at MixRank, and refreshing how easy it was to set up. This is how easy accepting payments _should_ be. The team is excellent too; they've been extremely helpful so far.
> Well, I've practiced at a number of meditation centers in the U.S. and Asia, and I've certainly heard plenty of stories of what happens when psychologically unstable people come to do an intense period of practice...

The rest of us haven't. What do the stories say?
While it is not new news in the sense that the artificial leaf has been mentioned before, this MIT press release is based off of a new Science paper from the Nocera lab where, in contrast to the previous papers, this "leaf" does both hydrogen and oxygen generation in the same device. So the breakthrough here is that a tandem PV was used (to supply the necessary voltage for splitting water) and both hydrogen and oxygen evolution catalysts were integrated with the PV.

The previous news had early versions of the device that used only a single junction PV. Thus, some external potential had to be applied for catalysis. Also, the device only had the oxygen evolving catalyst and relied on a buffer solution to supply the H+ ions. Therefore, the earlier versions of the device could not split water by itself when dropped into water.

This new device can.
October 2011 Keymando Plugin Contest - $100 to the Winner
Ever heard of Delaware LLC? No need to live there, and you'll be able to use Stripe. All that will cost you less than private healthcare in the US.

You'll find investors. But they all sleep together, and don't compete.

What about the success stories? Radian6, BeyondTheRack, etc. There won't be as much, our economy is 1/10 of the size.

I agree Canadian entrepreneurs have lower chances of getting multi-million VC rounds, but that doesn't necessarily mean lesser chances overall.

You need to change your mindset. It's all the naysayers that push Canadian startups to sell lower.
Could someone clarify this: the post says that the servers are in _our_ Data Center in NY and OR. I have always thought that DCs host 100s to 100,000 machines! Is this a colo?

EDIT: What is the typical network utilization for such web-services?
Count the bits. A picture is worth a thousand words.
There was time, when desktops had 640x480, 800x600 and 1024x768 (heck, the currently most sold 1366x768 is not that different), which is similar to today's smartphones. They had also much bigger diagonal/lower dpi, so there was actually less leeway and every pixel counted.
Interesting to see one of these Architecture blog posts for a site running on the .Net framework.

Does 9.5-10 Million hits a day make them the largest .Net backed site?
The JavaScript Comma Operator: bringing perl-esque side-effects to your code since....wait, has this thing always been an available operator? Whatever. The JavaScript Comma Operator: bringing perl-esque side effects to your code since it's introduction. There. Ahem.
I'm told they last. With some brands you pay for the label, but with others you're paying for quality. For example, if you buy a pair of $300 shoes from Allen Edmonds and treat them properly you can expect to get 20 years out of them. The concept of disposable clothes is fairly new, and there are still a handful of companies who want to sell you a shirt that lasts.
yes, we are in two colo's one in Oregon and one in NYC
I just want to say that I subscribed to the newsletter, and it's great. Unfortunately it didn't cure my HN addiction; it simply allows me to keep up to date for those unfortunate days (working abroad, or else) when I missed some threads.

Actually, the "Classic" section even makes it worse, because it brings you to read old threads you missed years ago, or had forgotten.

My advice: HN newsletter is fantastic, go subscribe now! but don't expect it to free you from your procrastination, it will get you even more addicted :)
Currently you can save a replayable session and get a unique link, but this is public. We do have plans to remember history locally (either just as command history or a full-blown session) in the future. The initial relevant issue is at https://github.com/replit/repl.it/issues/15.
If this post is describing an example that's trying to disprove that, it's failed.
How to stop a second Great Depression
California and Bust : Michael Lewis
"Women own about 40 percent of the private businesses in the United States, according to the Center for Women's Business Research"

Okay, can the women's groups stop complaining then? Or does this number need to be 100% before they will stop complaining about "disparity" and "inequality".
Of course, there's always Hacker News Daily, an automatically generated list (RSS available) of the top HN stories:

http://www.daemonology.net/hn-daily/

I particularly like the one aspect of non-repeating entries,

"The 10 highest-rated articles on Hacker News on September 29, 2011 which have not appeared on any previous Hacker News Daily are:"

On an unrelated and related note, while I appreciate the effort that goes into a hand-picked newsletter, I also accept that I might end up getting sucked into a cool example of technology. The solution isn't a newsletter or even a condensed RSS feed -- the fix is self-control (which can come in different forms and is typically a mix of motivation, guilt, and software).
What the hell does twitter integration have to do with an exposé on a language framework... sorry but nope looks like some sort of scraping scam to me.... remove the twitter oauth and I'll revisit it.
Sorry, was actually holding it for you since I saw you resign from slashdot. Email the address in the profile and I'll turn it over to you.
Congratulations! I hope no Basho employees were injured in the last couple days of what, reading between the lines, sounded like a hard fought battle!

I'm about to dig in and read the release notes, upgrade etc, but I've been keeping up with the betas, so here's my early thoughts on Riak 1.0.

With 1.0 Basho has really started to separate from the pack.

I think secondary indexes are very well implemented and while they can be expanded feature wise over the years, as an %80 solution they are a no brainer-- and pack the double whammy of cutting developer time, and by efficiently reducing scope of Map/Request processing they can also boost performance.

I think the real sleeper hit, though, is riak_pipe. This moves Riak from just being a "database" or even a "batch processing system" into a realtime platform. I think in 3 years, this will be seen as the feature that put the elbow in Riak's growth. I'm hoping to have high level support for riak pipe in Nirvana when its released, and can't wait to start using it. Once again, I think you've saved me a couple months of work.

I know a lot of work was done on supporting new backends, specifically, LevelDB, and consolidating/unifying the existing ones (like merging ETS and Cache into the new RAM backend.) I think a blog post on each of the backends and when best to use them would be very useful (though this might be covered in the new docs.)

And Search Integration. I think this is the first NoSQL solution with built in, scalable, full text search.

Before, if you'd decided to go NoSQL, you kinda had to decide which architecture worked best for you and hope they had the features you wanted. I chose Riak because, I believe, it has the best architecture for the class of problems I'm solving... but now it also has a very complete set of features. I'm not sure if any of the competition is as complete out of the box, but even if they are, Riak should be in a lot more evaluations than it has been in the past.

Further, everything is so elegantly engineered that you've built an exceedingly attractive platform for us developers.

Bravo, and thank you very much!
Masters in Education Chicago
I love this talk from the creator of Ruby on Rails (DHH) about the Fortune 5000000 (from 2008): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0CDXJ6bMkMY
even more excitingly, destructuring has been moved into the draft ECMAScript 6 spec:

http://wiki.ecmascript.org/doku.php?id=harmony:destructuring
Doesn't work for me... I'm guessing it requires webgl, which chrome won't do on my video-card.
Or strike a deal with GitHub or SourceForge to transfer the projects to them (although that would only cover Developer and DocsWell).
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FREE Manchester United vs Norwich City Live Stream  Online Game 1.10.2011
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This adds a whole other dimension to Parse for me. Core Data is useful, but incredibly annoying to deal with at times (migrations etc.), I've been waiting for the Parse guys to replace Core Data, and it looks like they've done it.
>"The big question will is: how long will the Kindle Fire last?"

I'm not convinced that question has much relevance regarding the Fire because it has little relevance in regards to Amazon. If the Fire2 comes out next February, Amazon will still see it as just another device upon which they can sell content and their customers will see it as little more than the latest "super Kindle."

Unlike HP, Amazon can make money with content and has the experience to do so (One might even argue that they are in a far better position to make money with content than even Apple given Amazon's relationships with content providers and the extent of Amazon's cloud infrastructure). Of course, one might argue otherwise as well.

However, Amazon has a history of investing for the long haul and a more powerful consumer oriented tablet is certainly consistent with that history.
Doesn't code signing give any advantage to Chrome? If an executable and all its dependent libraries are signed by trusted party MSE ought to be able to lower its aggression level a bit. How likely is that a Google signed Chrome exe could be injected or rewritten with malicious code without invalidating the signature? That coupled with some white listing and these type of things should never happen.
Flask 0.8 released
Particle Debris (wk. ending 9/30) Take it on the Chin
Personally, I think it is some kind of attempt to show that the Tea Party does not have a monopoly on insanity.
Microsoft Makes Another Major Update to Academic Search Database
I have been trying to understand why German politicians are willing to throw so much money at this problem, clearly against the will of the majority of the electorate. Here is the best theory I can come up with: Germany relies on exports. They need countries which buy them - having everybody use the same currency benefits trade. But more importantly, banks of strong countries like Germany, France are lending money to the fiscally weak countries so that they can import the goods they produce. This benefits their industries. However, why would the banks take on credit when they can be quite sure that these countries will default sooner or later? Well, there has to be some guarantee/assumption that they will be bailed out by the central bank/governments. And of course this happened.

So German banks and the export industry, the two entities with the biggest lobbies, get subsidized with tax money. The weak countries won't ever develop their industries and become competitive.

What is your view?
That's how the rich get richer, Germany is in a realistic position to create it's own currency. Germany has better leverage over the situation than the Irish, hence they pay less.
A screenshot for those who don't want to give out their twitter: http://cl.ly/0j2m0Y1K3M0m3T2p0I3C/o

It's pretty nifty, on the left side you can edit your files (at the bottom is a dropdown to switch between them), the right side automatically reloads.
Amazon retroactively replaces Reamde, repelled readers revolt
Another option is http://hndigest.com where you get the daily HN summary in an email. It has more items than Hacker News Daily.
>Sure they would stand to sell more apps, but I think Amazon is most interesting in selling books and being a player in the streaming media game. The cell phone, with its small screen, isn't well-suited for those.

The smaller screen isn't ideal as a tablet for most media but people still do use it. The phone is the main way most people have access to the web.

I'm not making the case for a WebOS acquisition, just an Amazon phone. It just seems like there is a hole in Amazon's product offerings if a phone isn't available.
IBM becomes second most valuable company in the world, beats Microsoft
If he had been, he wouldn't have needed a donation drive to pay for college.
On the US Economic Situation
It's somewhat fascinating to see how Apple, Amazon, Google, etc. are taking over traditional publishing businesses with their platforms.

Why were traditional publishers blind to the fact that technology would replace them if they did not act? Or, if they were not blind of this fact, what prevented them from producing or investing in the new technologies themselves? What is it that makes old companies so slow to react to shifts in technology?

There is some kind of inherent advantage that tech companies seem to possess: regardless of their original market, they tend to be capable of adapting to significant market changes, sometimes with the effect of consuming old markets.
Scalability, in Graphical Form, Analyzed
here's a beta code for the first 50 HN readers -- 'hacker' (no quotes)
Why can't we still kill the local login

If LDAP ever goes down you might want to retain the ability to login to your box.

I ran into a problem similar to this on a recent DR exercise.

Active Directory (an LDAPish service) was down. Was going to be down for a while. If I could get into my three Windows hosts I could re-jigger the service account for $APP from the AD user to a local account, start things up.

I couldn't login to the servers: my .admin account was in AD. No one had any idea what the local administrator account could be. We were just .. stuck .. until AD came up.

I could have booted the system a rescue disk (linux) and edited the SAM to change the password. Didn't happen then for complicated reasons. And one shouldn't have to resort to heroic methods to get local access back.

And can you imagine doing that for hundreds of hosts?
The importance of Trust in teams.
Nasdaq states that their system has 4 nine's:
http://www.nasdaqtrader.com/trader.aspx?id=tradingusequities
Chris Dixon on Amazon
Course papers for Berkeley's Natural Language Processing class
Add to that Foursquare, GroupMe, Spotify. Maybe it's not fair to include Google apps, but YouTube, GMail, and the current incarnation of the Market app are great.
I agree. Consider these two things:

1) Verizon has twice as many subscribers as Canada's population. The US is a way bigger market.

2) Generally people aren't as excited about your ideas as they are in SF or NYC. People here seem to be way more receptive to innovation.

That being said, Canada has a great education system and there are a lot of smart motherfuckers. Too bad the immigration situation kind of sucks for founders.

Disclosure: I am Canadian
First Look at Windows Simulator [Visual Studio]
Firm Offers to Buy Full Tilt Poker, Make Players Whole
[PIC] Your Idea is Unoriginal
Just to transfer solar energy to hydrogen, but there will be additional loss when converting to electricity, so it's way less efficient than conventional solar cells.
It was more about the parent's post SGI nostalgia.

It's all nice, but my machine's power adapter is 60W. That's its maximal theoretical output. (okay, with 90% efficiency that's 67W). It typically uses 20W to 40W depending on the load.

Plus, it auto-sleeps. Then it consumes just about 1W. Talk about efficiency.
It's hard to tell as at the same time of purchasing I upgraded to Lion, but I went from being able to code in a coffee shop for around 4 hours with the 2010 MBA to around 2.5 hours with the new i7 MBA 11.
I'll give you a hint: 90% of Americans probably couldn't find Greece on a map, and of the 10% who could, 90% wouldn't know what the word "eurozone" meant.
Google Zeitgeist - Some great videos
>how do you know you have a bug if you can't test the code in a computer?

Exactly. The idea with paper is that you need to get to the point where you go knowing what you're doing. If, like you said in the OP this is just for quizzes/tests, paper is a good way for a professor to see what you know when you sat down for a test, not what you were able to massage into compiling during the exam period. In 4 years of college, I the vast majority (all?) of my tests, exams, quizzes were on paper unless it was a project to do at home. For the most part, on-paper tests are about showing you understand the concept at hand, not that you dot every I and cross every T. If one of the concepts a test is going to test you on is that you have semicolons at the end of lines, you're going to get docked for it on that one, but every test after that it will be at worst a tiny deduction. They know what writing code on paper is like, just show them what they're looking for, and you'll be good.

>Our practice classes don't have computers on the classroom

This is what concerns me. Are you saying you don't have computers during you lecture, or is this a lab-type period where you're still working on paper?
> why don't ... use tabs instead of spaces for indentation?

http://www.jwz.org/doc/tabs-vs-spaces.html
Windows + Ubuntu + CentOS ... I'm curious to know how the OS selection was made and specifically why the HAProxy servers are Ubuntu and the Redis servers are CentOS. Do your admins work on all three OSs?
From reading the comments, it appears that the article is, at the very least, slightly misleading as customers have the option not to replace their version.
This is pretty normal. Microsoft itself even endorses this: The .NET Framework has a installation framework built into it (analogous to Java WebStart) called ClickOnce. It's a framework that doesn't require administrator access to install programs, but if you do that then you can't install programs to Program Files. So it installs the apps on a per-user basis to AppData.
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Just a heads up if you are looking to dive right in: The client libraries still lag behind Riak itself, so it might be a while before you get all the goodness unless you plan to roll your own.
Report: Could Amazon Snatch Up HP Palm and its flailing WebOS?
To my understanding, the German version of the law that was passed says:

The guarantees are basically possible, but they are still optional.

Whatever the ESFS contract says, and whatever the EFSF Bureaucrats might decide: before any real money flows from Germany to Greece, the German parliament (or a parl. committee) will have to approve this a second time.
This reminds me of Vonnegut's Ice-nine, but in the inverse. Drop one in the ocean and watch it disappear in a puff of gas.

"Science is magic that works." -- obligatory quote from Cat's Cradle
I believe the mainstream view is that Germany is willing to do this because having weak countries like Greece and Portugal share the same country weakens the euro, making Germany's exports better priced.

If Germany was to revert to the Deutsche Mark, or a Euro made up of strong European economies (for example, Scandinavia, Germany, Low Countries, Austria) their currency would appreciate and hurt exports and industry.

German politicians simply think the cost of bailing out Greece will be less than the cost of a strong currency.
Banks to Make Customers Pay Fee for Using Debit Cards
nytimes:Banks to Make Customers Pay Fee for Using Debit Cards
URDU SEX STORIES: A Married Virgin Lady (in english)
F8 and "Occupy Wall Street" - Sept. in a comic
What strings should the EU place on Microsoft buying Skype?
The EU will announce approval, denial, conditions, concerns, and the path forward for Microsoft buying Skype the first week of October 2011. What conditions in the public interest would you like to see Europe impose on Microsoft? What terms would be bad policy?
Yeah. Actually, it looks like there is mention in the literature (Simon Wills Drugs of abuse, 2nd Ed, 2005)[1] of vitamin C in fruit juice, or Ammonium Chloride to acidify urine to promote sequestration and removal of amphetamine metabolites.

I'm not sure if/how that translates to other drugs like Psilocybin, but it does raise some interesting questions.
Do you by any chance have a source regarding the original
"enhances the experience" statement? (for my own curiosity really - I'm not saying that you're wrong or misinformed)

[1] http://books.google.com/books?id=_m7gPani5D4C&lpg=PA124&...
Bored? Try Doodling To Keep The Brain On Task
Still, screen resolution is one of the most important details. Up there with battery life.