skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You know what? You're right, and I apologize. You have a fair point.

What made me react the way I did was the tone of your reply. I understand now that you were responding with a real and constructive solution, but the hate it was couched in made me read it as hate responding to hate.

I guess my question is: if you really believe he's just a hater, why respond at all? Do you imagine you'll change his position or behavior?
Google's profit margins greatly exceeded expectations for the last quarter[1]. In response they are shutting down Code Search?

[1]http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/14/technology/google-reports-...
I read somewhere that the US may actually accidentally come close to its Kyoto targets because of the recession. So yes. Nuclear as your argument may be, you are probably correct. =P
Five Stars is looking for generalists to join our small (5) core dev team
Why you want to join us

. Solving incredibly hard technology problems, some examples:

- Cross-platform Python software and GUI that works in
Windows 95/98/2000+, Linux, OS X
- Auto-updating our software remotely, across previously
mentioned platforms, and in Python
- Hooking and interfacing into an USB hardware plugin
across multiple platforms

. Company is growing incredibly fast

- Last month's user growth was 100%
- Last month's client growth was 50%
- Last month's employee growth was 25%

. We're fun

- High-energy, young, talented group of employees
- Weekly Friday happy hours, beer pong tournaments,
Super Smash (OG and Melee) sessions
- We're just down-to-earth good people. Simple as that.

What we need in a good fit

. Smarts

- Math/Physics backgrounds are a plus (we've got 2)
- Can understand complex idea/concepts/technology very
quickly
- Fast learner

. Hacker

- We hand you an outdated piece of hardware and you can
figure out how to make it play nicely with our platform
- Must have an appreciation for elegant solutions
- Be okay working on front-end, back-end, or software

. Independent

- We want to hand you ownership of the product
- You have to execute on that ownership
- No micromanagement

. Chill

- Can work well under stress
- Can be slightly OCD but not anal-retentive
- No yelling

More about us

. Technology stack

- Python, Python, Python (primarily 2.5 and 2.6)
- Django web framework
- PostgreSQL
- qtPython, wxPython

. Dev Team

- 5 members
- 3 Cal, 1 UPenn, 1 German
(Hamburg University, Regensburg University)
- 2 Math B.A.s, 1 Physics B.A., 3 CS B.S.s,
1 Materials Science B.S., 1 Finance B.S.,
1 Economics B.A., 1 Physics Ph.D.

. Corporate

- Raised $2.5mn from top-tier VCs and angels
- Located in Mountain View, CA
- 24 employees, 2 co-founders
- Bay Area's leading loyalty program

To apply, email with your resume and a paragraph about yourself to hckrjobs@gmail.com
A surprise? A large chunk of the iPhone is made by Samsung, their most direct competitor: http://www.economist.com/node/21525685

What would be exciting is if the lens were made by Nikon, Canon, Leica, or another high end lens specialist, which would truly mark the beginning of the end for point and shoots.
Yeah, combined with the above comment, I think this is a good idea. This was actually my initial thought (but with 2 friends) early on, but I wanted to experiment with the idea of only having a paid version because I believe paid apps get more usage (I might be crazy here).
"...the only thing standing in the way of Microsoft’s ascendency is price when compared to similarly outfitted Android and iOS models"

Uh, author just kind of threw that in there, unsupported. You could have said the same thing about Apple back in about 1997, but it wouldn't have been true, either.
NEW Computer Choppers Macbook Pro 24-Carat
Are there actual reports of unreliable SSDs that are not anecdotal? I have yet to see any evidence that they are worse than HDDs. That doesn't mean it isn't out there but I haven't seen any "reports" that are more than anecdotal FUD.

In the consumer space HDDs have a pretty poor track record.
Would totally buy if there was an e-book version.
If you are a good programmer you ought to know math and statistic.

I would suggest trying to learn biology or chemistry like anyone going for a degree in either or both. Look into what books and other publications they read. Or just go back to school and add a squishy degree to your CS degree. Or do the equivalent of that on your own.

I would say that is way better than Bioinformatics for Dummies.
I used to fill out Chegg mturk requests for reviews while talking on the phone. They were way overpriced and nobody was paying attention to quality.
I'm going through Beggining iPhone 4 Development from Apress right now and it's a great resource.
NCBI is pretty good (i'd say definitive) resource (and time sink :).

For example http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK20260/ or http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/education/ or just http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/
Does anyone have any thoughts on how this might affect the future of LibreOffice?

I have to say that I'm very happy with LibreOffice at the moment and probably won't be moving any time soon, but I think the OpenOffice name still has more recognition, at least among the less technical crowd.
I thought the comment to "put your money where your mouth is" was interesting, given that Peter Thiel has done exactly that: funded programs that provide alternatives to college. Not the end all solution, but between his money and the time he has spent bringing the debate into the national light its hard to say he isn't doing exactly that.
So, here is my challenge to you: Why don’t you put your
money and energy behind your convictions?

First, Thiel is already doing this with 20 Under 20. Second, Founders Fund just led a $33M round for Knewton [0], which is doing adaptive education.

Third, the extent to which the beneficiaries of usurious student loans now find themselves on the back foot is amusing. "First they laugh at you, then they fight you..."

Wadhwa has realized that he can't simply shame the critics of higher ed into silence (as he's attempted for the last few years [1]), so now he's saying:

"We can now make education affordable and pervasive."

I don't think Wadhwa understands what this means. It means things like ai-class.org, ml-class.org, and db-class.org replacing large lecture classes. It means companies doing a lot more stuff like MCSE, and a lot less stuff like paying for people to do two years of an MBA. It means coworking spaces like biocurious at $150/month [2] replacing the expensive (and inaccessible) university labs.

Most of all, it means obsolescing the higher ed business model of charging $60,000 per year [3].

In other words, while it's refreshing to hear people in higher ed finally start to acknowledge that the benefits they provide need to be greater than their costs, they don't understand that the solution involves the end of college as we know it.

How could it be otherwise when there is now a six-order-of-magnitude gap between the cost of watching a Khan Academy video ($0) and the cost of dozing through the same content in a Harvard lecture hall ($250,000)?

[0] http://techcrunch.com/2011/10/13/founders-fund-33-million-le...

[1] http://techcrunch.com/2010/09/25/students-stay-in-school/

[2] http://biocurious.org

[3] http://www.admissions.college.harvard.edu/financial_aid/cost...
Would this help in any way? http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/collaboration/focus/cs/w...
How the iPhone 4S Will Change Mobile Gaming
It's a shame they didn't offer msprintf(), which would use malloc(), and asprintf(), which would use alloca(), for cases where you only want a temporary string without heap usage/fragmentation overhead.
Keep in mind that Wikimedia is managing a lot of community volunteers as well as their direct employees. The travel expenses may include paying for some of their volunteers to visit them, for instance.
I’m not saying they don’t help users. I bought a Tablet PC and liked it.
The global write lock, while important, is probably the most over-written-about and misunderstood issue. The writelock is only held while the db is actually in the middle of an write and tends to only be held for a very brief period (about 10s-100s of microseconds or less) at a time. For example, it is never held across multiple user actions and therefore is closer to a latch than a lock in common RDBMS terminology. The main cases where this caused issues for users are when some data we needed wasn't already in memory so we went to disk to fetch it (~10ms rather than 10us). One of the major improvements to 2.0 was a framework to yield the lock to allow other work while going to disk that is used in the places where this was seen most frequently in production. 2.2 will plug this in more places with the goal to never hold the lock when going to disk. This work is of course in parallel to work to move to DB, collection, and possibly extent-level locking replacing the global lock in almost all cases.

As for safe-mode, the waiting that it does is always outside of the lock. It uses a cached datastructure that is protected by a secondary mutex so that it never has to interact with the global dbMutex. If you choose to wait for replication or journalling of your writes, that will block the connection and therefore your client thread so single-threaded tests will show much worse performance with the db mostly idle. If you use more client threads or asynchronous I/O connections you should see roughly identical throughput in aggregate (see mongostat) although much higher latencies compared with not waiting.

If you have any questions about this feel free to shoot me an email. Replace the _ with an @ and add a .com to my user name.
Just as a word of warning, Redis 2.2 cannot read rdb or aof files created by 2.4 (meaning I'm pretty sure 2.2 can't be a slave of 2.4. So, if you have a fail over scenario, you might be forced to upgrade your master to 2.4.
Even if there isn't any federal requirement for an IRB, it probably isn't a bad idea to have some sort of oversight. You don't want someone doing something stupid there. You also need to make sure that there are some safety standards to be followed (autoclaving biohazard waste, or limiting work to BSL-1, for example).

Another example: you don't want someone sequencing a person's genome without approval. (It's probably not as big of a risk here as it would be to a place like 23andme, but they should still probably try to cover themselves).

Edit: It looks like they've had some of these same discussions on their mailing list: http://groups.google.com/group/biocurious/browse_thread/thre...
Don't hand over anything. Take a copy of your employment agreement to a lawyer before you say another word about this to your employer.
Stanford Unveils NYC Campus
does sleep work on it ?
...So, here is my challenge to you: Why don’t you put your money and energy behind your convictions?...

I am just another internet commenter, so take what I say with a grain of salt. All I'm doing is repeating what I've read and heard.

But if I had a nickel for every time somebody suggested that you could start with the end goal in mind, then somehow invent your way there, I'd have several dollars.

The more general your investment strategy, the more likely you will find something that works. So at the most general, say some kind of web app or service, you still have only a 1-in-10 or 1-in-20 chance of hitting anything. And that's with all the other variables stacked your way.

This isn't a magic trick. Just because Thiel has done so well in many areas doesn't mean you can point him at a random problem and expect something useful. If you're a guy who wants to fund new startups in solar-powered mobile education, good luck! You're going to need it. You've already constrained yourself to unimaginably high odds without even getting started.

I used to see this same kind of reasoning applied to landing on the moon. For years, whenever there was a tough problem, some yahoo would come out of the woodwork and say something like "If we could put a man on the moon, surely we can do X" And you could put whatever you wanted into X.

As it turns out, there are a lot of Xes which we cannot solve, no matter how many men walked on the moon. And looking back, even putting them on the moon was a lot tougher than we thought. We managed to work out the tech and lost the will to continue the mission. Not all impossible obstacles are technology-related.</rant>

I'm sure the author meant well, and his call for folks to help out education is a good one. We need all the help we can get. That kind of rhetoric is just a pet peeve of mine.
It's true that there is a much greater diversity of Android handsets than there are iOS or Windows Phone handsets. You can read that as a feature or a bug.

I, for one, would never simply tell anyone to just get the cheapest Mac Mini at the Apple Store. If someone is coming to me for advice, it's because they want my informed opinion, and my advice is going to be considered in the light of their needs.

If you're saying that you're simply tired of having to think about things like that, then, sure, Android is too hard. I disagree that that's a problem with Android.
I'm far from a heavy Apple user (with only a MacMini, iPhone, iPad, and an AppleTV... I only really use their gear for communications and entertainment), so the only major problems I had were with migrating MobileMe to iCloud, and the whole confusion over having two Apple IDs. The iCloud setup was rather un-Apple-ey complex, but nothing most tech-inclined people couldn't get through. (Which was part of the problem.)

Was the iCloud setup any easier for folks that didn't have a .Mac or MobileMe account to migrate?
Is SCADA the New Low Hanging Hacker Fruit?
What? I never said I used that logic.
One thing you don't note in your post (but made a big difference for us) is that 2.4 uses jemalloc. This reduced memory fragmentation for us by around 25%.
The Grand Map - commentary on compelling images on Google maps.
I wonder if there are some unintended intricacies involving licenses that need to be addressed.

For example, GPL lets you do lots of things privately but restricts your ability to distribute. And there is a good deal of useful GPL glue out there (Octave, R, etc). Sometimes it might be expedient to just use FastICA rather than limit yourself to what's available and what the GPL might allow you to distribute. This gets really murky because the FSF is not really clear at all about what constitutes a derived work in scripting languages (which are distinct because source and executable are indistinguishable--the FSF (i.e. the advice you get from licensing@) plays pretty loose with this, choosing to draw the line on a somewhat arbitrary in a case-by-case manner).

Or maybe academic publication automatically qualifies as a fair use exception?
webos user here. App switching, do you mean the card system ? I think its terrible in comparison to holding down the home button on any android. Hold down the home button and it shows you all the recent apps.
We (Bump) have found two bugs in Redis and both times we've worked closely with Salvatore and had them fixed in less than 48 hours. He's a great programmer who really cares about the product.
This looks like a circlejerk to me.

To summarize: You are a single "founder" who got an "investment" from a single person you pitched to, because he's almost like family.

No offence, but what you're describing is not a startup but more of a project you had and didn't complete. It just sounds that way.
A University allows you to explore your interested in a nice structured manner, allowing you to get feedback from respected professionals and though leaders in different fields.

How much third-party subsidy should any one person get to enjoy those advantages? What criteria should be applied to deciding which persons get to enjoy subsidies for that advantage from funds paid by taxpayers, including poor taxpayers with no hope of attending college?
And so as a publicly owned, regulated, billion dollar corporation, it no longer make sense to commit unmeasured resources to support unmeasurable benefits.

What's the point of making a billion dollars if it doesn't let you work on interesting things that don't offer any obvious immediate payoffs?
Dennis Ritchie Memorial very_large[];

or

space* dennis_ritchie[]; // array of pointers to space
I built my first app from scratch almost entirely using Learn iPhone Programming (http://learningiphoneprogramming.com) by Alasdair Allan. Highly recommended.
Don't forget Ping!

On his podcast Hypercritical, John Siracusa has talked about how this just isn't a core competency of Apple's. From what I understand, Apple's datacenters are full of servers managed by Microsoft and others.

It looks like they're fully committed to the cloud now, so I would imagine they're putting a lot of resources behind this initiative, but I would also imagine that this is going to be pretty painful for a few years.
The best way to get the best publicity is to have an incredible product that people need to hear about.

But failing that or having a less revolutionary product, I would highly recommend blogging, whatever your start-up you must have interesting insights and tips about your industry that you could share.

If your not committed to regular, high quality blogging and for many founders that doesn't fit into their skill-sets then think about creating one time big research reports that would shake the industry or provide some highly valuable new information.

Blogging and reports are perfect for a start-up because there is virtually no cash cost, so if your bootstrapping or just playing it smart then these are my top two.
Instead requiring all of your friends install the app why not have people add friends by email/cell number. Then on the backend determine if they have an account if they have an account send it through the app otherwise they can just send an email/sms.
Have you ever folded it?
There's pros and cons to both systems; it's merely a preference of mine after having a mixture of both Android and webOS devices for a couple of years now.
You left out some important information.

Are they trying to force you to give them your home-made/side project as they believe they are entitled to the software due to your employment? Or, are they interesting in purchasing the product?
Right, and that's why I think "gamification" will be a fad. Eventually people will see through transparent attempts to lead them by the nose through otherwise completely unengaging content and will move on to something more compelling.

Sure, designers will continue to include game mechanics to enhance engagement, it just won't be this crazy concept that everyone obsesses about. It'll just be a tool you can use sometime if the situation seems right.

And I disagree about stackoverflow on both counts. I believe it is fun, and that competition is a nonessential component to the sites success. Some people do thrive on competition, others do not. The core of stackoverflow is the dialogue between askers and answerers. Maybe say "rewarding" instead of "fun." The scores and rules are a nice enhancement to the core experience-- they facilitate public recognition, sorting and organization, among other things. There has been competition and recognition on Wikipedia for a long time, and they have made no overt attempt to "gamify".

Another important thing that the stackoverflow game mechanics do is guide users to functionality they might not know about. What you call "driving" users I would call "leading." Hardcore completionist, achievement-oriented, and competitive users are, of course, driven. The rest, however, are not, and to them features like "badges" just bring attention to the wide variety of ways the site can be engaging. The FAQ is well-written and very useful. The "analytical" badge merely helps draw a little extra attention to it. vBulletin has a boilerplate FAQ that probably no one has read in years since it's the same on every single forum that uses the software.
Answer StackOverflow question on how to noSync data on iOS5, extra $200 reward
thanks for the feedback. you're not alone with that concern and it's something we thought a lot about in designing our infrastructure. we approached the problem in a few ways. 1) building as much of our technology on top of existing open source software. that way if you choose to move to a new product, your data is compatible and the transition will be much simpler. 2) making much of the infrastructure component based, so that you don't need to use everything all at one. you'll be able to slowly migrate data from existing services into our infrastructure. 3) your data will always be your own and exportable for you if you so choose. Backyard came out of our own experience at different startups. we spent valuable early engineering cycles setting up infrastructure, much of the time just recreating something that many other people had already built. so we understand the concerns about entrusting core pieces of a technology stack to a thrid-party. we plan on working closely with our users to help adress those concerns.
Really. Really? You think that is the plan?
I'd have thought a single line of cameras along an American football would work 'better' for that, a sort of scan system¹ ...

¹ - realistically the scan would have to operate too quickly to make a proper scan.
When you're experimenting with bioinformatics (specifically in R), are there sample data sets you can run queries on? What have you been using?
As I've seen him do all too often before, here Wadhwa writes with too little analysis of the situation he is commenting on. Right now, there is a status quo of HUGE subsidies for higher education. Higher education is second only to K-12 education as a line item in the budget of my state and other states. When billions of dollars extracted from taxpayers--including taxpayers who have no prospect of ever attending college--are injected into the current system, it is little wonder that some people have trouble imagining any different system, and most people who try to set up alternatives to the system are doomed to failure. "The endowments of schools and colleges have necessarily diminished more or less the necessity of application in the teachers. Their subsistence, so far as it arises from their salaries, is evidently derived from a fund altogether independent of their success and reputation in their particular professions." -- Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations, Book V, Part 3, Article II (1776)
"In modern times [as contrasted with ancient times] the diligence of public teachers is more or less corrupted by the circumstances which render them more or less independent of their success and reputation in their particular professions. Their salaries, too, put the private teacher, who would pretend to come into competition with them, in the same state with a merchant who attempts to trade without a bounty in competition with those who trade with a considerable one. . . . The privileges of graduation, besides, are in many countries . . . obtained only by attending the lectures of the public teachers. . . . The endowment of schools and colleges have, in this manner, not only corrupted the diligence of public teachers, but have rendered it almost impossible to have any good private ones." -- Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations, Book V, Part 3, Article II (1776)
Hey jamesgagan, I feel your pain. I found the same thing when I started iOS development a few years ago: plenty of tutorials on how to restyle a specific widget, but not many resources on how a real-world application should be structured as a whole.

I've got a few iOS apps under my belt and I feel like I could have something to offer in this area. Feel like Skyping for a half hour or so? I'd love to help talk through your architecture. My email is in my profile.
Yippie! Try to look at them as a "first customer". Good job!
The thing that immediately comes to mind is "Sagan", though more from the image of the dishes reminding me of "Contact" than from anything else.
IOS 5 GUI PSD (iPhone 4S)
My mind was never blown by using it.