skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: I'm a designer who knows no programming. What should I learn?
Hi, I'm a new web designer/developer who decided to create his own project. But I don't know how to program ( other than a little bit of Python and some PHP). What should I learn to finish my project?
Prototypes of JavaScript Globalization & Math, String, and Number extensions
There's a Thumbs.db file in the iOS Sources... scared
The same reason that pizza is now a vegetable, they only want to tackle topics that are backed by their donating special interests. We need to fight back against those corporations that are supporting this bill.
What am I supposed to see? I just see the new version of Google Groups.
Facebook finds that 4.74 degrees of separation is closer to the truth
The Importance of Real Money Gambling Websites
Really? It's clear that open source projects can produce excellent quality software. It's also clear that proprietary software can be excellent quality. Both can also produce garbage.

If you have evidence that open source can produce generally better quality software, or is consistently better for the same kinds of problem, I would like to see it presented.
Been doing something similar myself - Germany, China, North Korea, drove across America and launched a startup.. loving life!

Great post!
Running into this type of problem finally convinced me to set up a catch-all for my domain. I'm no longer registering as pavel.lishin+example@example.com, but as example@lishin.org.
Nice post! How much did the around the world ticket cost?
SemiAccurate got the story wrong and blames the issue on GF pushing back their SHP process. They don't mention the move to TSMC and they claim there will be a follow-up in months.
Black friday furniture sale 2011
I've had it badly. Written a post about it: http://romansnitko.posterous.com/how-i-cured-tendonitis
Thing that cured it like magic was a couple of immobilization splints (scroll to the bottom to see pics).
Google has a serious quality problem. Check out the link to the Google Groups page...

1.) Does not scroll with the mouse wheel unless you are in 'certain areas' of the page (aka broken).
2.) They are using Frames, like this is 1999
3.) Instead of easy-to-read button names, they are icons of unknown purpose.
4.) Why all the wasted white space?

Google is a bunch of college smart alecs... you see that in the tone of their posts. But sites like Google Groups are garbage.
This is a waste of time. Syslog is the standard for logging on *nix. You will bork everything if you replace it with something incompatible. Everybody knows this. So whatever you replace it with must be Syslog compatible. If that's the case ... there are numerous alternatives to choose from. Like rsyslog. Which is already standard on RHEL, nevermind Fedora. Rsyslog has this nifty feature where you can immediately transfer all logs via TCP or UDP to another host. Hacking problem solved. Stop fixing things that aren't broken.
Forget Shopping: Friday, Nov. 25, Is Update Your Parents' Browser Day
How was the firewall in China? Did it inhibit work at all?
What are you seeking in a co-founder?
> I did not realize there were this many clueless idiots

You didn't?
Why do you think we need to make the switch to IPV6?
I wonder how hard it would be to modify TeX (or kpathsea, whatever) to load its libraries out of a single compressed tarball or fast database of some kind. Seeing as TeX libraries are text files, I do find it surprising that they don't compress better. Is it mostly the fonts and documentation taking up all that space?
Zappos Founder Nick Swinmurn's New Startup RNKD
Twilight Breaking Dawn Wedding Pictures
First look at EXOdesk
Well, HN isn't solely about startups and programming.

I mainly think it's interesting from a social engineering / human-hacking perspective, and from a self-improvement angle.
As there is an app[1] that allows to run Lua code typed by the user, the most likely changed their policy about interpreting code.

[1] Codify: http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/codify/id439571171?mt=8
Heroku launches SQL database as a service
Heroku Postgres: SQL Database-as-a-Service
It seems this guy doesn't account for "bureaucratic overhead" that is involved in dealing with any large client: You already mentioned the need for lots and lots of meetings and doing the translations, there is also writing up a proposal and some reports, drawing up contracts and sub-contracts, doing usability testing and ensuring compliance with applicable federal regulations.

And there is probably a lot of other stuff involved that I don't know about. And lets not forget some overhead to pay for the office and some profit.

It probably ends up being a few hundred man hours once you account for everything.

So yeah - it could most likely be cheaper or better, but the pitchfork attitude is probably going too far.
What type of startup are you most sick of?
I'll go first: Daily deals and restaurant loyalty programs.
should have shipped with custom password. Assuming the sysadmin could read.
If this means that syslog-ng is in the way in, great!
Check out this RFI from IRS for JAVA Open Source. It makes no sense why they would want a team to consolidate all the open source libraries they want rather than just going out and getting those libraries.

https://www.fbo.gov/index?s=opportunity&mode=form&id...
Ask HN:  Who are the visionaries when it comes to technology and politics?
I'm doing research on how technology is changing politics and society, and I'm putting together a list of people to talk to. I'm interested in people from all fields - technology, politics, sociology etc. who have deep insight into the topic. I am thinking Votizen, Americans Elect, Twitter in Tahrir, government transparency and so on.
The Umbrella Man
Grooveshark is about to be sued into oblivion by Universal Music Group
Just because you make something "binary" does not mean it is inherently secure. As pointed out elsewhere, syslogd is a pretty reliable, simple and flexible foundational piece of infrastructure. Changing this with something un-tested and not entirely understood would, imho, be a Very Bad Thing(TM).
Came here to say this. The only viable strategy is to do as much as you can to apease them, while gently moving the industry towards innovative music products. Its their content, they have the right to do what they want with it (as frustrating as it may be). Can't give them the finger and expect them to work with you/not sue you later.
Where does that slide come from? Is the rest of the deck available?
Email behavior around the holidays…
Xobni has released our 2nd annual survey results on email behavior around the holidays… and it ain’t pretty if you’re a believer in disconnecting over the holidays. Overall, the percentage of people checking and receiving email was shockingly similar to last year’s results, leading us to believe this is a very valid representation of email behavior over the holidays.
Precisely, I wouldn't try to get involved in a government contract for less then $100k, even if the final result was to produce a single document, because you're going to spend so much of your budget just navigating the waters.
Cryptography allows you to verify that somebody who does not possess your private key did not modify the file. A hacker on the same system as a syslogger has the private key of the syslogger. They can "simply" (for varying values of simply) replay the logs again, only with whatever events they want filtered out or modified, and it will pass the crypto checks just fine. You have to offload your logs somewhere else, at which point the whole encryption in the logs themselves are sort of redundant.

Managing keys in this case isn't just "highly non-trivial", it's flat out impossible.
The peculiar thing about programmers is that they're the one profession that can easily work remotely and travel, and yet they're the one profession that doesn't.

I believe that the ease with which one "can easily work remotely and travel" is affected far more by life situation than by profession. Modern technology has made it just as easy for non-programming electronic workers to do this, too.

"Life situation" is another matter. Just a few of the things that make it difficult for some people to do this:

- marriage
- children
- spouse's job
- pets
- caring for elderly parents/others
- community commitments
- financial responsibilities (mortgage, etc.)

As one who is tethered to his home and family, I thank you, Alex, for allowing me to live vicariously through your year for the past 5 minutes. The stories were interesting and the pictures were beautiful.

</BackToRegressionTestNumber127BeforeThePhoneRingsAgainAndTheCatNeedsFed>
I didn't present any argument. I just made a statement, without presenting (here) any supporting evidence.

Yes, I realize most people won't agree with the statement.

My hope is that by providing it as food for thought, some people may thinking about it and decide that they agree, or may at least be more open to the idea when it comes up in some other context.

Isn't it intellectually dishonest for you to call someone intellectually dishonest, when you don't know all the relevant causal factors? (Answer: no, it's just a mistake.)
Go to Germany and American drivers are super reckless.
I get the sentiment and I'm glad youve found your passion but I most definitely see that you're right when you say you know nothing of depression and the startup community.

Not to knock you at all but depression is one of those things that you can only "get" if you've experienced it. Like sex or love or being a billionaire. It's almost indescribable. I've been to the depths of it and back.

Imagine the worst sadness you've ever felt in your entire life. Multiply that by 2. Then add in a feeling of loneliness. The kind of loneliness where you feel like a man with no home, no family, no friends, and strangers hate you. Then your own mind turns against you. All logic is gone and your inner voice is on an infinite loop telling you that there is no way out, things always have and always will be this way, that you are not exactly worthless but worth less than any person you know including strangers on the street (yeah, that includes the homeless and destitute). Now that you imagine feeling this way you also must imagine taking every ounce of energy you have and throwing it away. You have no energy, you're constantly tired, and your body even aches as if you were sick at times! The worst part of all is that these negative thoughts and feelings feed on each other, digging you deeper and deeper into depression.

People in that state will do anything they can to make it stop. Drug abuse/self medication is very common along with suicide. When you're depressed you can't see that there's a way to gradually make your life better so you reach for instant gratification. The instant gratification only leads to more problems. It's such a vicious cycle that you just wouldn't believe.

So I'm a person who's been affected by deep depression and it's consequences and I'm also just about to reach my first anniversary of being in business. Startup depression has hit me hard twice in this past year (most likely because I'm more prone to it).

So after my long rambling rant I'll get to the point: there are no easy answers but one thing that will help out people suffering from this is just to talk about it publicly. There are far more people suffering than we know about. Whenever I see a post on startup depression I have the exact opposite reaction to when I see yet another post about how someone loves Emacs. I think "thank god! I'm not the only one!". Just talking about it is a big relief to people because they know they're not alone and can learn or help each other. There will never be enough posts about startup depression. Ever.
In the last year Groups has had pretty significant work done on improvements. A complete new AJAX based design, better moderation controls for forum owners, and even Q&A features that are being tested in some Google Support forums.
Down Payment Assistance: How Does a Gift Work When Buying a Home?
There are some problems with the search engine, if i search by "Bogota" there is no result from my city... and it give me exactly the same results if i write "Colombia".

Maybe you should use the Google API:
http://goo.gl/H5cGY
> and Hacker News jumps on that like starving dogs on Alpo.

I couldn't help but note that the title contains Useless Android Application, although the article indicates that the total cost of $200,000 was spent on Android, iPhone and BB (not completed) versions.

I won't go as far as calling it linkbait, but if I ever wrote an article about an app I didn't like and it was available on Android, I now know a way to get more traffic if I were to submit to HN.
E-Cig Saves Money
I've often wondered if speeding tickets and the like are the reason for the general decline in positive opinion of the police. (I've done no research on this whatsoever–anyone have any pointers to interesting materials?) But it seems that the police were, once upon a time, the friendly man on the corner keeping you safe, and now they are the guy with flashing lights who will pull you over. Somehow I expect that change in opinion has cost the police far more than they realize.

(Of course, past positive perception of police could be a myth, too: I've not been around long enough to know.)
I'm sorry you dislike my tone. But do you disagree with any of the factual claims I made? If so, which one?

From your comment, it sounds as if pills motivated you to try CBT, and then you lifted yourself out of it (via fun or other methods). I.e., you underwent the exact process I described - pills make you happier short term, therapist taught you to solve your own problems long term.

I'm also glad that you've also discovered CBT is an enjoyable hobby.

Depression is an illness just like addiction or diabetes. I mention addiction because that's another one people like to write off as a moral failing or something that just isn't a real illness.

Why do you feel that being an illness and being a moral failing are mutually exclusive?

Try reading the lesswrong link I posted. The gist of it is that the label "disease" describes a collection of heterogeneous objects, and drawing implications by analogy to some objects in the collection (e.g. cancer) can give misleading results when applied to other objects in the collection (e.g., drug addiction).

Similarly, this claim is an example of the same logical fallacy: "A penguin is a bird, just like a pigeon, therefore it can fly."
Never thought about it that way, but you are right, a system so vital and critical should never be left for 1 human to deal with, reminds me of missile systems where you need 2 keys and Passphrase's, did they ever resolved this? I'm guessing no.
How many users/customers we talk to each week. The higher that number gets, the more momentum we feel and the less we feel like we are lost in the woods.
I'll kick things off - Kahlil Byrd, CEO of Americans Elect
Reading this brings back memory of SCIP.
Lessons learned from launching first app
I disagree. A lot of these old *nix tools are showing their age and could use a refresh based on known deficiencies. Creating new tools won't harm the old ones so I don't see a problem.
The irony would be that whatever legislated change the government would make to publicly "fix" this problem would in reality just add another step with another form to the process.
Not to mention that Journal will depend on systemd which is Linux-only :D
Yeah the same happens within any large organization - universities are one example I am familiar with. If you get a large grant from NIH or NSF or whoever, you don't have any incentive to minimize expenses because you don't benefit in any way from spending less than your budget.

So typically people will order the most expensive things that can fit within the budget or even buy stuff they don't need just to spend all the money.

This does strike me as often wasteful but I don't see an easy fix.
These test results are all crap. The author obviously didn't run the test multiple times. Do that and you'll get wildly different results.

For example...

* Firefox 11 Nightly: 142, 419, 433, 447

* Firefox 8: 160, 897, 121, 793

* Chrome dev: 110, 87, 69, 111

* Opera was consistently ~90

(none of these are scientific, just quick runs with other tabs open on a computer that's doing other stuff too)

A single run is not an effective way to compare these things. Anybody writing articles about JS benchmarks should know that by now.
The accessibility requirements definitely make it harder to create apps that are as slick as what you can find in the private sector.

Another reason may be lack of market forces...
I was actually just going to mention this. With all of the in-bundle resource differences required for two iPhone resolutions, different .xibs for iPad, etc, we're talking about much more than 6 hours worth of work here.

The source code (for iOS, at least) is also pretty clean and decently commented for what it is.

$96k is still outrageous, but for work-for-hire it's off by a factor of 2-5 rather than a factor of 10.

Nevertheless, it's crap. The quality of the constructed software is irrelevant because the feature set is a no-op. It's a graphical front end for a NOAA web service that returns temperature and humidity. If the public isn't living and breathing the content of that NOAA web service, maybe it's because there's no graphical tool to access it, but maybe it's because they have 50,000 other ways to determine temperature and humidity at their current location. Like, say, existing in a conscious state at their current location.
It sucked. I set up a personal VPN before I left, but even then, the connectivity there is really spotty. Wouldn't recommend it. It's only really good for getting email, responding offline, then reconnecting to send it.
Voip Communication
Google's current 'openess' reminds me slightly of the early OSX days and Darwin being open source etc.
Did you look at the source code? At all? it took two minutes to find a bug in the application just messing around with it. The application is supposed to display warnings if your temperature or relative humidity is outside of acceptable ranges. However if you use the get current or get max buttons, it skips these warnings and calculates the Heat Index anyways, displaying a value it shouldn't be providing with no warning.
Fixing this is trickier than it sounds. Some games wait for onWindowFocusChanged() instead of onResume(), which works pretty well on Gingerbread. But on Honeycomb and higher, onWindowFocusChanged() is sent when certain foreground windows — like, ironically, the volume control display window — take focus. The result is that when the user changes the volume, all of the sound is muted. Not the developer’s original intent!

Waiting for onResume() and onFocusChanged() seems like a possible fix, and it works pretty well in a large number of cases. But even this approach has its Achilles’ heel. If the device falls asleep on its own, or if the user locks the phone and then immediately unlocks it, your app may not receive any focus changed messages at all.

This doesn't give me a lot of confidence in the framework decisions being made by the android team.
The sad thing about this whole deal is that Grooveshark is awesome! Nevermind the fact that a simple Firefox plugin lets you download the MP3 for each song that you listen to for free...

In retrospect, it's only a matter of time before the labels go all Napster on their ass.
How to RTFM
Since the competition would be for finished apps, it wouldn't matter.
Does Consistency in Cassandra require client clocks to be in perfect sync?

Y u no vector clocks?
Plan 9 has an extra permission for files; "append." When set, this means programs are only allowed to append text to the end of the file. Both simplifying logging (just open the file and write) and making it more secure (no arbitrary writes.)

I wonder if Lennart and Kay would accept a solution that simple...
Monetize consumption thru transfer spending
Honestly, the hardest thing about running a company is that you have to be a cynical bastard and a rosy-cheeked optimist at the same time. Juggling those two paradigms of viewing the world is harder than anything else I've ever done.

Improving your product almost requires cynicism, since you have to view what isn't good enough; but you have to be able to stay optimistic and know you're going to get "there" someday. Otherwise, you get depressed and feel massively alone.

That is the dichotomy.
List of Schools
The bit I really don't like is that it enforces systemd - and it sounds like it's part of it. I think one of the strengths of Unix/Linux is the architecture of many simple tools, each doing one job well, and one job only - which this sounds like it violates? Ick.
> Creating new tools won't harm the old ones

Except when they become the default tool despite known deficiencies the previous ones didn't have.
Agreed. Vundle is amazing. I'm using it my vimrc (https://github.com/mutewinter/dot_vim/blob/master/vimrc#L18).
Announcing Heroku Postgres
New E-Cig Safety Concerns
LiveWriters - Writers in Motion
Alternatively, don't include background music in your game. I am usually listening to my own music anyway.
an event aggregator in Backbone:

var vent = _.extend({}, Backbone.Events);

done.

see also http://lostechies.com/derickbailey/2011/07/19/references-rou... for more info on using it, and http://lostechies.com/derickbailey/2011/11/17/introduction-t... for more info on creating larger apps w/ backbone
But what does Israel has to do with affairs of her surrounding countries?
Why are we to blame for acts of Egyptian and Syrian authorities against their own people?

If ever, the UN and all of the Western World is the douche - why do they let it go on?

Did you ever ask yourself why the US and Europe got involved with Lybia's violent protests, and still remain completely silent about whatever is going on in Syria and Egypt?

This is hypocrisy at its best (worst?).
I am not a cypherpunk, but can/should we differentiate between 1. encouraging those running OpenSSL/TLS servers to use a. sane defaults that allow forward secrecy and b. ephemeral TLS session ticket keys, 2. using Google's in-house EC cipher implementations and 3. doing 1. and 2.?

We could do 1. only and still reap some benefit, correct?
From the article:

"The test lens was powered remotely using a 5-millimetre-long antenna printed on the lens to receive gigahertz-range radio-frequency energy from a transmitter placed ten centimetres from the rabbit's eye. "

I'm a pretty rational person and I have no problem holding a cell phone up to my head, but this scares me.
New Relic Supports Python
Totally, that's why there are hardly any apps for iOS, and the paying market is such a fraction of that on Android.
My page also shows Linus.
Tide Shifts on Web Start-Ups
One advantage of custom ROMs is that they can get away with shipping light or stripped down versions of things a lot easier than Google could. If you're using a ROM that doesn't come from Google you aren't as surprised that you aren't getting the full Google experience. The other thing custom ROMs can do is ship with a requirement that 'you must have a 1Gig or larger μSD card inserted and that it must be formatted ext4'.

This makes me hopeful that us Nexus One owners will soon be able to experience the Ice Cream Sandwich tastiness even though our phones are crippled with only 512MB of core flash.
This kind of nauseus bloat is a big factor why I'm trying to stay away from iOS and Android development. So many projects out there could be much more quickly, cheaply and freedomly (my word) done as a simple web app or even as pure static HTML website in some cases. So much foolishness, hype and hipstering going on.
Minneapolis Target store's new checkout system 'test' raises customer hackles