skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There's also this spectacular database of what causes and cures cancer (as reported by the DM):

http://kill-or-cure.heroku.com/

(also applies to reply below... and has been linked already! oops)
Home Alarm
Has Apple mentioned anything about Mac OS support?
... And people who don't speak English so well.

Moreover if his customers truly prefer the phone, he could make giving the phone number optional and people would still give it out.
>loisheyf

Still a work in progress, I guess.
>> So, Larry Page wants to own Google and Akamai, he's already got plenty of google stock and a bag of money, and he's decided to buy shares in the other company.

There is a pretty significant difference between Google buying Akamai with it's money and Larry Page buying it with his.
They would if they were an early stage startup and just got their first big order.
"Java assumes memory is cheap at many levels. And usually, it's right."

I would say it's usually wrong. Imagine how much ram you'd need if all of your GUI apps were on the JVM. Imagine how much ram you'd need if '$ cat blah.txt | grep "something" | uniq | sort' were all JVM processes. Etc, etc, etc.

It seems to only be right for long lived server side processes that have enough load to make it a benefit.
Be-prepared for the worst. They are some specific groups which do good work, and have good management. If you luck out, you can have fun working at Amazon but if you end up getting into painful groups with extreme operational load or bad management - just keep your head down, slog it out, suck up to your boss. You will end-up learning a ton by being at Amazon, if you are just out of school. It will help you immensely in your next job search.
Share the love?? Good god, children, please give me more to go on than that. Where will my hard-earned money go to? Given your code output, I'd rather my cash didn't end up feeding you guys -- plenty of people work day jobs while working on their startup dreams, and there's no reason why you four can't.

Please, please -- never ask for money without delivering something that people feel is worth paying for. It might bring you in a few bucks now, but you are likely to lose goodwill and build an image of desperation.

Take my advice -- find real jobs, and let the community build Diaspora* by itself if it wants to. I don't mean to be harsh, but your skills are not essential to the project. Know when to cut loose -- you can still be involved with your beloved codebase, but for heaven's sake, get a real job before you all starve!
What drives me? Fear.

I fear I am unable to work for others with extremely limited freedoms.
Shazam'd
Hands-on with Amazon Locker, now working
I'm talking about the stated policies of both PRC and ROC governments. The last time there were noises from the ROC side about changing this policy, PRC announced missile tests and military exercises, the US deployed a few aircraft carriers, and everyone decided to live with the status quo after all.

Maybe most Taiwanese people think Taiwan should be an independent country (despite electing the Chinese Nationalist Party to a majority). But by matter of policy and law, it simply isn't. And no one seems willing to change the status quo.
The gap can be filled by customer being a little more honest about what they purchase out of state.
That odd experience sounds like most human interaction outside of the web. With the added context, I guess you lose objectivity, but gain a sense of community.
Non-UK readers are missing a hell of a lot when it comes to the Daily Mail and the Express. Not even Fox News could top it.

Give it a few weeks and Princess Diana will be found alive on G+.
That depends on the credit-granting policies of the institutions you attend and the field that you want to work in. I'm not saying it isn't possible, just that it is not as simple as people suggest. As long as there is an excess of supply in the labor market, hiring is going to favor the status quo.
Cannae Drive: new space-propulsion method?
The Diaspora team published their financials awhile back. They weren't insane; they spent on some stuff I thought was silly, but they also paid themselves a pittance. The easy snark to supply here would be to say "what happened to the $200k", but that's easy to shoot down.

The reason you shouldn't give these people money is that they are very unlikely to succeed, and none of their published strategy makes a particularly compelling case for how this tiny team is going to make a dent in a space that Google and Apple are having trouble securing traction in.

One could make the observation that Diaspora is clearly a labor of love, and that to the extent that it is going to be important, it's going to be important with or without your money.
> Accessibility to zero means you have no product at all, whereas dialing Security to zero can still get you a reasonably successful product such as the Playstation Network.

I'm hoping that was a joke. Having the government investigate you for divulging sensitive customer data disqualifies you from being "usable".
This article itself is outrageous. First, I highly doubt that you can claim 99%. Second, what right do you have to declare what is ethical and what is not ethical? Has Monsanto done any harm to you in any way or intervened in your personal affairs? You might as well become a religious zealot.
MyBB Registration Spam and How to Stop It
I like Business Insider's speculation that this is all part of a giant end run around the cable companies.
> if they leave and you think that this will create negative value you can make a killing by shorting the stock.

No you can't. Even if it turns out to be a disaster, it will only impact Google's stock price by roughly 5%. $5B is just noise in Google's market cap.
This is just a throwaway account and not the one under my real name. I've been reading Hacker News since before it was even called that. My "real name" account is over 4 years old.
This sounds an awful lot like "we don't feel like getting real jobs, so give us money to continue building a non-viable product".

Considering they blew through a couple hundred thousand and have little show for it -- I wonder how much money would now be required to create something viable? Only once they figure that out should go to the community or find investors.
The bad thing is bashing without trying to understanding the problem they are trying to solve and the audience they are targeting.
> I thought that depression was the result of a chemical imbalance.

Lots of credulous suckers think that. Might turn out to be true eventually, but for now, we just don't know: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chemical_imbalance
Max Levchin's Lessons Learned As A Young Entrepreneur
Unless I'm mistaken, the root of this entire thing is the PRESS RELEASE -- very basic rule is that you don't promote something regarding your company if it's going to be received negatively by a significant # of people. So this was a really bad PR decision compounded by another PR error in the company commenting on the effect of original bad decision. They should just accept that there was a mistake made (by either them or their PR company), not try to defend it -- take your lumps, learn from it and move on.
You're assuming I'm not the potential employee. :)
The only thing that could make this better is if the arrow keys still worked for scrolling (Firefox 7).
Error 3200, while upgrading iOS 5
> One of the things that hampers C is its string processing.

That's not a language, but a library issue. String handling in C is only as sucky as the library you're using...
Builds are almost always CPU bound. If you're looking at a large C++ project, overwhelmingly so.
Do you happen to know about iPad/iPad2?
At the time, grocery stores would cash your paycheck for you without taking any fees. I usually bought a few groceries, signed the check over to the store, and got the difference back in cash. This was 5 or 6 years ago, not sure if it's still do-able. No harm in asking though.

Check cashing places are of the devil, and a great way to prolong your financial trouble. If possible, try finding a friend or family member willing to cash your checks for you instead.
I have yet to figure out how Diaspora couldn't reliably, quickly, and cheaply be implemented on top of XMPP (with maybe a protocol extension for rich profiles).

It's ultimately about delivering bits over the network and we have solved that problem and implemented our solution in free software already.

XMPP allows for friends, distributed registration, link-local access, basic profiles, broadcasts, multimedia, and extensibility to add app-specific goodies.

Diaspora only serves to acknowledge that Facebook is necessary, when what we should be doing is using existing tech to show it isn't.
please do not upvote this, I don't want to get a free AD about my idea in the site I want to replace.

Also I love this community, I think the problem is the fact that there is a conflict of interest here that I don't like, and in general is a privately owned stuff.

Will try to follow up via twitter as here is not the right place IMHO.
I'm 25 now and can say that even in 5 years, life gets better. Your brain develops more and you'll probably find your emotions swinging less violently. I had a lot of depression and anxiety issues at that time and have very few now...I'm still an intense person, but am doing well mentally...

But yeah, being broke at that age can feel really hopeless, even though it's not...you just gotta put in the work to get yourself out of it....

Good on you for quitting, that job sounded terrible...just hang in there and get any job!

Also, keep a journal, and you'll be amazed to look back at all this intense shit later, it'll all seem so ok and you'll wonder why you stressed so much.
I agree. I think giving a bunch college students a lot of money to make the "perfect" social network, does not bode well. Money has to come when you have built, shipped and performed so people can actually gauge the utility of what you make. The accountability is just not there.

I think something like this also does not bode well for kickstarter in general. I know a number of people (musicians, artists) etc. who have raised money but have not come out with anything in over six months.
I had the fortunate opportunity to present to Bezos once. That guy is sharp as a tack - asked some very tough, but fair questions, all of which suggested he got what we were presenting and grokked at least the bulk of the technology underlying it. It was not at all a "uh huh that's nice go do it" scenario at all, and I was pleasantly surprised.

He may not write code, but I think it would be a mistake to claim he isn't a technologist.

If the rest of the company's management had half the managerial competence of Jeff Bezos, I'd run back to that company with arms wide open.
Yes, but a vote is a vote. Why people vote the way they do is irrelevant. Certainly, it's hard to get people to count business ethics as an economic factor, but clearly some do. My supermarket is full of products touting themselves as cruelty-free, or additive-free etc., and the number only seems to be growing. It's a slow process, but nowadays sustainability counts for a lot more with consumers than it used to do.
Fake Netflix Android App Stealing Your Information
You get crappy URLs with closures; no other web framework provides ugly URLs like that -- but if they did -- they could do it with the same amount of effort. But routing in rails is specifically designed to separate URL presentation from the underlying action.

Hell, you can get routing for free in PHP if you just name your files like: comment.php, topic.php, upvote.php, downvote.php, etc.
Ask HN: Why hasn't anyone written an open-source Siri clone in Haskell?
I was just thinking that this would be something that Haskell could do really well.
sigh My poor iPhone 3G and I are completely left out.

I did update OSX to make use of the new iCloud but its really no use unless you have an i-device with iCloud. I use Pages.app and was hoping I could make use of the iCloud storage feature but it appears I HAVE to have its equivalent Pages app for iOS to activate it.

:(
Robert W. Galvin, Who Led Motorola Into the Modern Age, Dies at 89
Yes, but he's a popular journalist, who frequently makes some interesting observations about the IT/tech industry business.

The entertainment and discussion value today, though, is that he is indeed full of crap this time. Not saying you're wrong about his subject knowledge, just why people are reading it.
Ask HN: How to learn Engineering, Electronics, or prototyping a big project?
I've read just a couple threads like this but I'm wanting to expand beyond them a bit. I know the books people recommend, I have my physics and calc fundamentals, I know limited basic components, I solder well, and I have done a few Arduino projects with display out.

But say I had a huge project I wanted to prototype: a new type of e-reader, automated kitchen, a robotic steering helper on a car (or gokart), or a mini-segway, all of which integrate with a mobile...

Besides reading academic circuits and engineering books what would be the next step for me to work towards a bigger project like that?

How do I learn what chips to select, how they work together, and how to start planning the circuit design?
Likely, most of those threads are HTTP request handlers. Try to let ab loose on your application and watch it's memory usage. I'm pretty sure you won't see any significant increase.
Game metrics without players
Radio Show | Mary Johnson
Down here in Brighton a shitload of Python/Django is also happening, too :)
Sigh. I don't understand the "submitting too fast" error. But the advice to create a second username on a proxy worked :P
DART is not the product of some 16 year old hacker with a thin skin, DART is the product of a company worth $200 billion dollars and that company has enough market share to make something like DART something I have to deal with. If a 16 year old hacker came up with DART it would only succeed on it's merits, when a $200 billion dollar company invents something like this they use that money to shove this language down your throat.

Just because Google hired James Gosling doesn't mean they need to put him back to work recreating Java.

If the VM is exposed and we can compile whatever language down to DART VM byte code I'm all for it, if DART means programming in DART then I will shout from the rooftops how much it sucks in hopes I never have to deal with it.
I kind of agree. They are at a stage, where their treatment of developers doesn't matter much. Walmart treats it employees miserably but they are doing quite well, and rakes ginormous profits. The way a company treats its employees says a lot about management. Amazon's top level management is super sharp. They are not idiots. It is not like they don't get it. The fact is they don't give a shit. As long as you are a success story, no-one really cares. If it ain't broken don't fix it. If there is an objective way to measure developer happiness across all top tech-companies, I wouldn't be surprised if Amazon ends up dead last.
Agree, but Apple has also always appealed to artists/lovers of the arts, and post-return-of-Jobs Apple translated that into the iPod and iTunes/iTunes Store, the latter of which is filled with things like reviews and ads of sorts, or at least digital movie posters and album covers. So I wouldn't be surprised if Siri/Apple found some non-annoying way to turn you on to new movies/music.
Not to mention that Seattle is a depressing place to begin with...
Then they would be lynched.
The problem is that most teachers are not particularly skilled. A lot of curricula are not that good.

So, really the question is something like "are you one of the best 1000 teachers in North America?"

If not, you're gone in 10 years, and that's a good thing (for students).

EDIT> I've been thinking about this a lot recently. It's a huge problem for society. Software is leverage. We don't need as many people working, but we still structure our society so that people need to work. More and more technology means that if you're not one of the best in your field you don't matter. So, how do you eat?
When Pigs Play in Poo
Economy grew LESS 1 pct. rate this spring
EBay’s X.commerce and Facebook team up, recognize social as commerce gold
Google not acquiring Akamai
I would counter by pointing out that while that is true, the sorts of programmers who might use Node.js are dwarfed by the armies of incompetent untrained PHP developers out there. The HN crowd doesn't really give you a good window into reality in this case.

I also don't think that languages should worry about becoming "mainstream" for exactly that reason...
> We don't need teachers anymore

This is a common fantasy among technologists (and a common fear of teachers) when confronted with educational technology. But it won't happen in our lifetimes. It will not be possible to replace teachers with technology until we discover true artificial intelligence.

Educational technology, correctly applied, can be a force multiplier for teachers. So it may mean we can teach more students with fewer teachers. But it also means that access to education will increase (which may cause demand for education to increase).

One way or another, someone will always need to be available to answer students' questions. Books, videos, and clever programs running in web browsers simply can't do that.
The Speaker (Or: why the iPhone's speaker is on the bottom of the phone)
Ever wonder why the iPhone's speaker is on the bottom of the phone?
They're not equivalent in the same way that pigs and mud are not equivalent.
> The reason this comment thread is a worrying sign for HN is that you didn't use to have to think like a PR person here.

So, companies shouldn't spin, but people commenting here should?

That's not what you mean, I'm sure. But I'm pretty sure you can see how it would be easy to say the same thing you just said with the roles of company and commenter reversed and it would make the same amount of sense.
Google didn't write DART, Google employees did. Maybe they should have known better, I don't know--I have not looked into DART at all. I recently released a project that had been funded by the US Government, but that doesn't mean it didn't suck when people trashed it in comments.
Just now found out that "no college hires" in Silk team. That sucks! College hires are high on energy and enthusiasm. I don't know why teams would not want college hires :(
The trick is to be polite and say HOW should we contact you? You prefer email? Okay, email please. And you prefer phone? Okay, phone number please.

And never, never put a "required" validation on something like a phone number that someone simply may not have at all.
"The reason this comment thread is a worrying sign for HN is that you didn't use to have to think like a PR person here."

A couple of things.

Why are we talking about the "PR issue"? I offered Cloudant an alternative reality where, if they insisted on being evil, that their evil doings be kept in the closet. It makes wise business sense if you're going to accept money from anyone under the sun. That has nothing to do with thinking like a PR person, nor does it have anything to do with having this article spun or censored. You seem to think this deal is ok, so I tried to provide a solution that suited your own interests.

However, it is perhaps ironic that by spinning your own comments to focus on these PR irrelevancies, you have successfully avoided providing any significant contribution. Worse yet, was the "PR spin" of yours by comparing Cloudant's strategic and "fundamentally business shaping" partnership with Monsanto to someone selling a car or a computer... I guess though that's not PR talk, that's politician talk. Expert level diversion.

Monsanto is a disgusting, despicable, horrible company of the worst variety. Should we give Cloudant a pass for dealing with these people because you have a vested interest? I will happily leave HN forever if you think that is the case.

Google started their company with the motto "Do No Evil." Ethics have a substantial place in business practice, so I don't see why they shouldn't have a place on HN.
GM to produce all-electric Chevy Spark
The filleritem.com website is a very simple tool to search for items of a certain price on Amazon. The purpose is to help select an item to fill the gap in the shopping cart to qualify for free shipping. There is no reason for Google to ban this site. What we MAY have here is an abuse of power by Google.
Apsis Films: DIY Ring Light – WreathLight
I don’t fully understand the business of Cloudant to be honest...

Why would anyone read past this point? Why is this on hacker news? The reaction to Cloudant's post is shocking.

Cloudant deals in hosting lots of data. They just got a client that trusts them with huge amounts of data. That is why the press release and story are reasonable. Everything else is knee-jerk politics.
Many people learn with no teacher at all. From books, for example. Teachers are helpful, but certainly not necessary for learning.
Seems like only people in Seattle, and Ex-Amazonians have a clue about working for Amazon. Don't be surprised if HN trolls down-vote your comments out of sheer ignorace.
Congrats to our downstairs neighbors!
This rocks. I've been looking for a better way of job hunting in specific areas. Are you planning on a mobile friendly version in the future? I would love to help! miles.matthias at gmail :)
Being able to level criticisms at anyone within the company is one of Google's great cultural strengths. At no point would you ever be fired for having an opinion and expressing it loudly. A long rant to all of engineering CC'd to Larry Page is pretty common and often unleashes many centi-threads of discussion.
Steve Yegg's Platform Rant (Copy)
Russian footage of 'Yeti' hair emerges
T-Mobile wont let me not have voicemail even if I offer to continue paying for it and not employ it. I just dont want it on. I never check it and I'm unclear why we must absolutely have to have it... I am not hearing impaired.
"now you know that Monsanto is hated. I mean deeply hated by people around the world"

Go downtown and grab 20 random people. Ask them "what are your opinions on Monsanto?" I'd be willing to wager the most common response would be sone form of "who?" or "I don't know"
It also doesn't show any updates for me on my iPhone that is running the latest iOS 5 beta.
It's been 2005 since I worked on ASPX.NET & C#, but this was a different kind of Evil than stuff like Struts. JSP/servlet setup isn't too bad, but even more clumsy slow stuff typically gets piled on top.

Rails is cool, though. But it's not what feeds the kids out here in Sacramento. At least not yet.
Because Sony decided to add a mandatory arbitration clause to get around the lawsuits resulting from the disclosure of 100,000,000+ names, addresses and credit cards.
http://www.gamepolitics.com/2011/09/15/sony-adds-mandatory-a...
While you are at it, I could use a space shuttle made from legos.
Having lots of issues upgrading Xcode and iPhoto through the Mac app store. Just hangs. I thought it might be because my mini needed another restart after getting the lion update, but that didn't help either. Now since I tried to update them, the Mac app store is showing them as updated even though they aren't. No idea how I fix that...
The relevant portion of the article:
In Settings > General > Keyboard you can now specify Shortcuts. Shortcuts are simply text macros: you enter a short phrase (btw, omg, etc.) and the iOS 5 input editor (SMSes, emails) will automatically expand those short phrases into full sentences. Whether this will prevent kids from typing in txtspk is another question entirely.
Any free trade involves an increase in value on both sides by definition. Cloudant takes the money and provides something that Monsanto values more than that money. If they didn't get that then they wouldn't be buying.