skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Book Manufacturers instead of worrying about what this might do to the book industry, it'll help if they think how to make it an advantge to us. Tweaking always helps:)
The print edition will probably be in mailboxes Tuesday or Wednesday depending on where you live, and is probably already on news stands. But it's common practice with print magazines.

I feel like this question is asked every time something from the New Yorker is posted to HN, and I feel old every time, even though I'm in my twenties.
Having learned object orientation with Smalltalk/V, I never quite liked C++ (to the point of procrastinating for 8 years before really touching it). It felt just wrong.

Objective-C was always attractive (I like C), but its close association with NeXT and Apple (and corresponding little support from other platforms) always puts me off.
Poor Old Daggy | Bizcovering
Is there a process of iterative refinement for any of these books?

Perhaps a useful idea would be some kind of version control system; allowing people to fix errors, trim needless fluff, and improve examples.

This could be funded by schools and by philanthropic grants.
Actually, free software as defined by the FSF is any software licensed such that you can use it, modify the source, redistribute it, and redistribute changed copies of it.

See http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html and the (long) list of free software licenses http://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html
"....i think everyone who truly pays attention will know by now that MongoDB is the next MySQL."

You are joking again?
RBS and Natwest online banking systems pulled down by systems upgrade
Innovation is not the same as invention. It's an extremely common misconception, but they are different things. Tweaking is far more analogous to innovating than innovating is to inventing. From the Oxford English Dictionary definition of innovate;

To bring in (something new) the first time; to introduce as new; to bring in or introduce novelties; to make changes in something established; to introduce innovations. Sometimes const. on or upon (also with indirect passive).

Whereas invent;

To come upon, find; to find out, discover; to find out or produce by mental activity; to devise, contrive; to plan, plot; to compose as a work of imagination or literary art; to treat in the way of literary or artistic composition; to devise something false or fictitious; to fabricate, feign, ‘make up’; to originate, introduce, or bring into use formally or by authority; to found, establish, institute, appoint.

and tweak;

An act of tweaking; a sharp wringing pull; a twitch, a pluck; a small modification or adjustment made to improve the efficiency of a mechanism. colloq.
Do you have any suggestions for learning emacs? I know that that 23.3 manual is online, but I don't see anything for 24.0. Does it make sense to just use 23.3 and get used to that, then move to 24?
I like C. I really like Smalltalk. But Objective-C really doesn't do OO well enough for me to enjoy dealing with it.
So for just two or three hours work per month, I can get all my books for free (up to $20 worth).

Where do I sign up?
> First year university physics courses often review a substantial amount of high-school material to correct fundamental mistakes in students understanding of the basics.

Partly this is because physics is hard and people use analogy or simplified models. These are fine for high-school understanding, but more advanced students need correct understanding.
Apple's next move, courtesy of Siri
I tried MacRuby once a few months ago (https://github.com/tilltheis/fullscreenclock) and I have to tell you the Cocoa parts lacked some essential features (like correct syncing of Ruby and Cocoa setters).
But the nice thing about it is that you can intermix Obj-C and Ruby code freely to write the low level parts of your app in C/Obj-C if you want to. There is even a bridge between C/Obj-C and Ruby which enables you to call native functions from your Ruby code.
I have NoScript and get this message:

This site requires JavaScript.
You can still visit a non-dynamic version of this blog.

With a link to: http://biomesplus.blogspot.com/?v=0

Works perfectly.
I agree. A search function would also be great, both so you can find people if you have a lot and so you can sort of "reverse the stream" and find people based on recollections ("Who's that guy I met last week who ran in the Boston Marathon?").
> preferably without needing at least three machines

if you don't have such redundancy your data is not safe, no matter what database engine you are running.
Yeah, yeah, sure...

Since a writing class I took was probably one of my favorite courses in college, I used to hold writers in high regard as creative people.

Not anymore. For example, what Gladwell just wrote simply illustrates that he has no knowledge whatsoever of how creative process works. For one, all creativity is tweaking. Einstein obtained his relativity theory by basically iteratively tweaking known theories and some others until they looked good enough and fit the observed facts. Not trying to diminish what Einstein did in any way -- very few people if any at the time would have been able to tweak just the right equations. In addition, that iterative tweaking Einstein did required a helluva lot of thinking, something Gladwell surely didn't bother with.

Getting back to Gladwell -- I hope it is clear now that what one ends up with is a world-famous writer who doesn't understand creativity yet manages to write with an "intellectual" voice and publish in The New Yorker.

This is very troubling.

Barely any visual artist or sculptor or architect or even a musician one could name would fall into the category of those who don't understand how creative process works. Yet writers routinely do fall into that category. Not all writers, I'm sure -- I bet Shakespeare knew a few things about creative process that he could teach even Jobs. Yet a disturbingly large proportion of writers -- like 80% of them have no idea what they are talking about when they are talking about creativity.

Only goes to show that one doesn't necessarily need to be creative to speak or write well -- it is enough to serve as a relatively dumb medium through which a fixed language (invented by someone else) passes through.
That is correct. The only difference a GPL license would make is that Growl would be forced to release the source code for any version that they sell. And that they wouldn't be able to sell it through the App Store.
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Anglo American propose IT overhaul to optimise £3.2bn De Beers takeover
Nba 2k12 Skill Points
mgw, tried to contact you directly via your HN profile, that's nearly what I'm building, if you're interested please leave your email at https://ronomon.com and I will get in touch when it's ready for more beta testers.
From what you describe that does sound like the system we have always been under. I.e if you want to advance your position, and you need money to do so, you best find somebody who has them and make yourself useful to them.
I found a simple method that works really well: ask the student to invent their own language syntax on paper. We start with a simple language that can draw on screen, and proceed from there. I'm noticing that Students naturally discover many of the issues and tricks that they would otherwise have to "study" (such as flow of execution, nesting, variables)

I occasionally teach at schools in NY, and this semester my students "invented" the smalltalk syntax. It was heartwarming to witness.
Go for your big projec. Siri's success has prooved that working on an interesting and deep problems will have its rewards.
Ask HN: NoSQL / Distributed File System with Broadcast, Map Reduce, etc
I am looking for a distributed file system or similar on which I can build distributed image processing (for astronomy). Some distributed file / batch processing systems exist in academia, but I was wondering if there was any way to use recent NoSQL work. A typical process involves a small number of calibration files that would need to be broadcast to all nodes (these files are as large as each image); a step in which multiple files can then be processed in parallel; finally a "reduce" that combines those into a single result. For efficiency I would prefer memory mapped files (binary blobs) that can be mutated. In addition, I need to be able to write "jobs" that can call out to GPUs (so would prefer C but could use, say PyOpenCL). Any pointers appreciated (thanks).
The Blackberry's Preserve - Stanley Bing
Even more so, 112 is the only number you can dial on a GSM while the keypad is locked.
Loads of cool new things, but not many changes in the areas that a introductory book would cover I think. Or am I wrong?
Capital gains aren't exceptional in this. If I buy a car, a house or anything else I'll be taxed when I sell it again.
Currently running Emacs with Vimpulse. Best of both worlds or crazy franken-editor? I've not decided yet :)
I mostly agree with the points made in this article (I grew up on 8 and 16 bit Nintendo), but still I wonder if the majority of the folks at that conference are actually iOS game devs? Would not be surprised at all, the low barrier for entry and high potential for profitability compared to PC and console game dev seems much greater on iOS nowadays.
This is going to sound like a 99% rant, however this article perfectly demonstrates a scenario where tax-avoidance benefits few at the expense of the greater populace.

To quote the article: "a company's obligation to its shareholders is to try to minimise its taxes and all costs, but to do so legally"

Let's talk about who those share holders are: In tech companies the largest percentage of shares usually belong to the founders or the investors. Meaning that the tax minimisation is directly profiting few, and in some cases a single individual.

Regular persons do not have the financial clout to either purchase shares, even in low volumes which would see so little of the avoided-tax-returned-as-profits. Similarly small companies don't have sufficient funding to set up elaborate tax minimisation schemes, effectively forcing them to bear the brunt and be less competitive.

Governments deprived from tax income then turn to the population to bolster their coffers, and often to remain popular the tax rate is kept lower than required - which means cutting back on programs which benefit the greater good. We've seen some pretty ridiculous examples of how underfunded the education sector is becoming. (Somewhat hypocritical when the education sector is responsible for creating the skilled individuals that fuel these companies.)

Stopping international loopholes is incredibly difficult, however there is still plenty that can be done to entice companies to not start them in the first place. Incentive rates could be introduced which allow companies (especially smaller ones) to take advantage of a lower rate in exchange for certain business restrictions that limit these sorts of activities.
Craig Mp3 Player
Microsoft came up with the term "shared source" to describe "you can look at the source but you have no rights to modify or redistribute it."
Sniper Spy Review: How to Spot Cheating Using SniperSpy
In response to PostgreSQL's custom index types, taking a quick look at the API, I don't see a way of telling GiST indexes which entries need to be updated when a row's parent id is changed.

Consequently I don't believe there is a reasonable way to index this because there is no way to ensure the indexes are current and so you don't have a good way of testing that a row is in a path on the tree other than building the tree with recursive subqueries.

The thing is, unless you have a system which is aware of hierarchical relationships between the rows (which by definition is outside the relational model), you have no way of handling this gracefully. So here you have lots of reads, I really think dedicated hierarchical systems will win for hierarchical data.

Of course this wouldn't necessarily mean you couldn't store everything in the RDBMS and periodically export it to the hierarchical store.....
If that is the case, then you would expect to be able to make more money by starting your own business, because you start to reap all the rewards (and take on more of the risk).

My theory? Well somebody has to pay for all the useless people (Washington employes a ton of them and so do nearly all large companies in the world).
Simple, live markdown editor
123 Facts About This World
How to Enable HTTPS for Facebook Security
...someone working with troubled kids from poor backgrounds, who manages to raise their standardised test scores from an F to a C...

Such a teacher will receive a very high score according to most modern Value Added Modelling assessments (such as the one the article complains about).

In fact, it's the teachers of upper middle class kids who are hurt the most by VAM. If the VAM predictor says your student average should be 95/100, it's hard for your students to beat that by a significant margin.
There's some HN discussion about the new release:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2059909
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1181589

And another link I found helpful:

http://batsov.com/Emacs/2011/08/19/a-peek-at-emacs24.html

But yes, your plan is a good one. Start by running

C-h t

to get the native tutorial, then ramp up from there. I'm afraid I don't know many good online tutorials as I work with Emacs power users, but Stack Overflow has always been quite helpful for learning Elisp.
Most Powerful Personal Development Tool?
Google tests ‘Sources’, delivers background information for search results
So here's where I'm coming from: Putting food on the table as a result of your work is satisfying and a source of pride. Not being able to do it is shameful. This is a fundamental dynamic.

While it's good that there's a safety net so slip-ups and bad luck won't put you in the street and kill your children, institutionalising that dynamic (effectively removing it) will have catastrophic effects on the values of society.

These concerns are not crack-pot libertarian wet dreams, they were raised even by social democrats when the Nordic social democratic welfare states were designed. Britain has talked about anti-social behaviour and broken society for years (it's not just something David Cameron invented with his good-on-paper/WTF-IRL-"Big Society") - don't have that kind of language for it in Denmark, but the same dynamics are present.
NEW GOOGLE ALGORITHM CHANGE WILL IMPACT 35% OF ALL SEARCHES
I think this is one of the most important ideas being explored right now and could not only save families but also become a giant incubator for new research. (It may also require moving to a new form of government, such as a Direct Democracy, to implement.)

It's an idea whose time has come.
Ah, and here is where you and I differ quite substantially in our opinions. Schools, school boards, books, and basically everything but parents and the quality of their parenting, comprise "education" to me, at least the "education" which society should tackle when they talk about education.

The problem you speak of is a deficient family rearing environment. That can be addressed by programs like The Boys and Girls Club, YMCAs, and similar, but educators should not think it's their responsibility to overcome deficient parenting -- that's dangerous.
I would suggest just getting emacs 24. If you are on OSX you can build the emacs head using homebrew. There's some cool stuff in 24 like the emacs package manager (package.el) etc.

Once you have emacs 24 ready to go, it's a good idea to take a look at the emacs starter kit: https://github.com/technomancy/emacs-starter-kit

There's also a pretty good peepcode screencast on emacs, its a bit old, but gives a good overview of a lot of the basics.

Once you feel like delving deeper, your best bet is to snoop around on emacswiki.org
They've paid a lot of attention to defaults, pretty much for the exclusive benefit of newbies.
Insightful article. Also explains why techCrunch NEEDED Mike Butcher here - Mike Arrington owes money here, apparently.
Jack Abramoff: The lobbyist's playbook
If you want to develop for iOS you have to use a Mac.
>it's simply using a loophole to avoid U.S taxation on income earned from non-US sources

Income earned from non-US sources on US soil or outside of it? The thing that infuriates me about my home country is that they think I owe taxes on money I've earned while living in a totally different country. What stops, say, Russia from deciding I owe them taxes too?
Benefits Of Weightlifting Shoes
How to build a successful start-up team
I'm not an expert in CS (not even close), but to me it looks like there is very little crust on Apple technologies.

There is some, but not nearly as much as say what's in win32. This lack of 'crust' can be attributed to SJ's personality. He had no problems dropping something he didn't think worked. This led to headaches for 3rd parties, and is one of the primary reasons enterprise stayed away from Apple (along with no roadmaps).

How can you lead if you don't understand fully the field.

It's not so much that you need to understand every in and out of the field. What you need to understand is effort level required develop something[1], and when you're clearly getting BSed. How much technical knowledge you need to do those two things is the hard part to figure out.

[1] I once had a manager ask me why a change was going to take so long because she thought "it's just and if/then statement."
Swedish tech has its ABBA moment
Linux is written almost entirely by employees of for-profit companies: http://lwn.net/Articles/451243/

Many core Python contributors including Guido are employed by companies like Google to work on it.

Mozilla is, technically, an exception: almost everyone is employed by the Mozilla corporation, a non-profit by virtue of its lucrative search deal with Google. Few projects have that luxury.
>Emacs is a great platform. Its only weakness is as a text editor. :)

It has a text editor? I thought it was just a text adventure game!
Of all of the things to celebrate in Steve Jobs I'm not sure this is the best one. If anything its the easiest to mis-construe. Can you imagine how many people exist that are like Steve Jobs except without being able to "know good stuff"? And how hellish those people are? shudders

Acting like this is super risky, if you don't get it right then everyone hates you and you don't have results.
Although I use VIM pretty much exclusively and haven't really used EMACS in a while, I have been impressed with LaTeX mode in EMACS and wish that was the way things worked in VIM.

My guess is that you get some areas where it is a crazy franken-editor and some areas where it may actually be pretty cool.
Insanely Great Asshole
I think Job's approach to development goes something like this:

1. Build a talented team.
2. Keep it small.
3. Give them time.
4. Keep them focused on the end goal not the internals of the project.
5. Cut all non essential features.
Save the Nature by Forestry Investment
Ask HN: Where can I find the Omnioso version of DHH's Startup School Talk?
As always, when looking for inspiration, I watch DHH's "How to make money online" talk at startup school

I watch the Omnioso version because how it sits perfectly; side-by-side with the slides.

Today I went looking for the video and cannot find it. The YouTube alternative does not have the slides and the Justin.TV version is of really poor quality.

Is there a place I can find the Omnioso version? Did anyone of you download it?
I don't see why I would use this over just the normal contacts in iOS, or just notes. Why is there a PIN code? It's not like it's a banking app. Why no photos?
But you can write a great deal of useful code that never does any manual memory management.
Boeing Dreamliner experiences severe automated landing system failure
I did spend afternoons getting servers back online - it certainly beats praying to God for the restoration of your service in a timely manner.
I'm pretty sure there are many designers and engineers within Apple that we should be more thankful to and had more direct involvement with the creation of the products.
The Tax Haven That's Stealing From Your Government
Joanne Wilson: Interview IV - RealAcad Mondays
I strongly wonder how many US firms understand EU data laws... Isn't there a campaign against a small company called Facebook and their disregard for our laws?
GM Is About To Move 100,000 Employees To Google Apps
25 Top Companies for Leaders
Apple doles out $60 Million in Stock grants to executives
Whether they (MS/Apple) paid for the idea is irrelevant when one is bashing the other for no imagination. In the Xerox scenario they both took what they saw from someone else and built on it. In that context Gates is right.
These sort of tax haven arrangements are commonplace with almost all multinationals, which basically means almost all non-SME corporates these days.

There's a very good book on the subject, which is pretty shocking even if you work in finance (but not offshore tax accountancy or law):

"Treasure Islands: Tax Havens and the Men Who Stole the World"

http://www.amazon.com/Treasure-Islands-Havens-Stole-World/dp...
I see where you are headed but that is bad logic. It is like saying your car may catch on fire anytime or a meteorite can strike so why bother also wearing a seat belt?

Sorry you cannot possibly defend un-acknowledged writes as a default setting on a product that calls itself a database. Saying you need 3 machines anyway.

By coming up with more arguments and excuses as a defense for this design you are actually making the product you are defending look worse.
Fake Documents that Alarm if Opened
Yes, they do. Who do you think contributes to the Linux kernel everyday, only individual hackers all over the world pushing FL/OSS ? The vast majority of the contributors are big-tech-co affiliated who come from places like Red Hat, Intel, IBM, Novell, Oracle, AMD, Google, and more. Individuals and those not wishing to state their affiliation/place-of-work are only about 18% of the contributors to Linux.

Btw, this is part of the issue some people have with Ubuntu, in that it makes no contributions upstream to the kernel like Red Hat, Novell and others do. A Red Hat Greg DeKoenigsberg even said on OSNews once that "Canonical is a marketing organization masquerading as an engineering organization."[1]

Python's father Guido van Rossum and other core contributor are employed by Google and other big tech companies to work on Python.

Mozilla is mostly by Mozilla people, however it's basically alive because of the funding and ad deals it has with Google. Without that, it couldn't continue.

[1] http://www.osnews.com/story/23636/Who_Really_Contributes_the...
I like O'Reilly as much as the next guy, but promoting this sale doesn't strike me as something that should make HN.
Besides the inline manual that emacs has in itself. I recommend you to start using the Emacs Starter Kit [1].

Try to read the source and understand what it's doing. You will learn how to configure emacs, and the basics of elisp.

[1] https://github.com/technomancy/emacs-starter-kit
FIGnition: a £20, educational, DIY 8-bit computer (running Forth)
I learned emacs from the version of this book available in 1999. I don't think much of what I learned is hopelessly obsolete. Basics are basics.

I felt the book was a nice overview, both covering the basic terms and techniques and giving a tour of important features like dired and in-emacs shells. You'll want to augment by reading other online sources (there was no emacswiki in 1999, that I knew of) but the book is probably still worth the money. This is emacs. You'll appreciate having more than one tour guide, because the world is big and everyone knows one part better than others.
I don't interpret it primarily as promoting O'Reilly; I think the intention is to tip developers off to discounted, DRM-free educational resources.