skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Business card printing
High quality notecard printing from CopyCraft.com : Notepad is a tool-printing Notepads impressive marketing and corporate identity branding. Can you think of another product you can buy at low cost and give to their preferred customers used as much as a notebook?
One of the arguments I'm seeing here is that people shouldn't have such high expectations because it's a $200 device. You don't really want the reputation of releasing a device that's cheap because it's crappy, rather than cheap because it's limited.

From a customer's point of view, for $200 they expect a smaller screen, less storage, less features, less ability to run the latest games. They do not expect less fit and finish. See the car industry for an example. You expect less bells and whistles from a Toyota Corolla than you do from a Lexus, less power and less luxurious materials, etc, but you don't expect that the dash will have large gaps in it, the steering will be unreliable, etc.
I like the cut of your jib, however: I believe APL actually exposes you to an even higher(est) order of abstraction which makes you truly confront the meat of the problem space/algorithm v.s. allowing for a few sessions of syntax abstraction before you get down to business. Believe me I LOVE lisp, but I also recognize that many times I enjoy it because it allows me to create these amazingly succinct domain specific languages before ever "getting to work". When I attempt to write/think something in APL I find myself actually just pondering the problem. It was the language in which I realized math was my true (and neglected) love.

Also: http://archive.vector.org.uk/art10500180 - great article on array languages for lisp programmers.
2011's biggest science stories, and why they'll be back in 2012
Ask HN: What makes a good job description?
Doing some research for my next project. What I am looking for are opinions from both sides of the desk. Please feel free to add things not listed, to rank things, and to just comment freely.

If you are looking for a job, what do you find to be the most important part of a job description?

If you are a hiring manager, what do you find to be the key elements of what you are trying to communicate to a prospective employee? And what do you find to be the most effective way of triggering a good response?

Some things that seem to go in most postings
Specific skills needed
Location
Salary
Company personality
Environment
Benefits
Posted by recruiter or actual company
Etc...

Thanks!
Rule #42 of Deployment: Never rely on any external resources.

This isn't just to prevent getting caught with your paints down when a developer deletes a repo from a hard-coded URL. PyPI itself is known to go down more than [insert NSFW comment here]. You can either keep a local hard-copy of dependencies in your repo (ugly), or run an internal PyPI server using something like Chishop (which is now called djangopypi) [1].

Best-practices rant aside, thanks lincolnq for providing a backup fork of the project. And thanks Facebook for deleting a resource that developers have become reliant on without any notice whatsoever. Although that really shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone that's had the displeasure of using their excuse for an API.

[1] https://github.com/benliles/djangopypi
An example: Project Thor / "Rods from God": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinetic_bombardment
Twitter has established itself as the social PR tool on the web. Any brand on the web that wants to signal effort and understanding of the game must have a Twitter account with daily updates.

The value for marketers is clear. It's an inexpensive way to build organic traction.

The value for individual users, who are the product, is less clear. Twitter is immensely noisy, and is becoming more noisy as it's use as a PR tool increases. It's not clear to me why, overall, it's worth it for people to read their Twitter feeds. I certainly don't read mine, I just push out a tweet a day to signal I'm trendy.

For example, Fred Wilson's Twitter updates are links to his blog posts plus some (for me) out of context public messages to people I don't know, ie. junk (for me). I might as well unsubscribe and add his RSS to Google Reader and save myself the noise. Just did.
Introducing filer.js
You're in the AZ area? Interesting.

Yeah, Scottsdale.

Also interesting is that I had no idea that Maker Bench existed, even though it's practically within walking distance.

MakerBench seems to do a poor job of promoting itself. I think their RSS feed, for example, used to be filled with posts from assorted other sites (e.g. make.com) such that I gave up on it as being to noisey. It looks to be more focused now so I re-subbed

A few user groups meet there, too, such as the Android dev group.

My AZ Hackers group had been meeting up in Scottsdale but attendance faded to zero after a few months. I've thought about reviving it down at MakerBench but got distracted with work.

Anyways I'll have to write to namecheap about getting the name approved for transfer.
How will we know if any company won't flip flop again, or support something like this in the future?
That's why I always fork important libraries that my application relies on especially Facebook SDKs as most of them need some tuning to work in the first place (!). Yes, it takes some efforts to keep the library up to date, but it also avoid any broken changes introduced to your deployment without warnings.
Given Christoforo's spelling issues, it might not be easy to google.
FreeBSD telnetd code execution vulnerability
My point wasn't at all to say there was a situation that warranted that kind of treatment; As I mentioned, the guy from Ocean took the cake in terms of idiocy. He was out of line no matter what the customer was saying. He also has a terrible command of the written language, and should be removed from any customer facing position, immediately, for several obvious reasons.

My point was, this customer could have cooled off, collected himself, and written a much more intelligent complaint letter. He came off sounding like a hurt child, and then trumpeted how he was taking this to the internet, as though the internet was his domain, where he would prevail (and he most likely will - and should, considering how much of a shmuck this PR guy is).

I just don't think either one of them came out looking very intelligent, or like they handled themselves like an adult. In this case, his complaint is a legitimate one, and he should be entitled to proper recourse.

All I'm saying is, I'd be embarrassed to let that particular email be my letter to the world.
Linking directly to the Git repo can lead to bad things, this being one of them. Ruby has rubygems, a managed version-ed dependency system that is one layer removed from source control. Does python have a system like Rubygems?
I'm trying to understand why Facebook would delete the SDK without any type of notice or deprecation. Was it possibly a mistake of some sort?
Sweden Turns Its Twitter Account Over to the Great Unwashed
I agree. I'd want to see some statement about why they've been removed from this list. As of right now, this "press release" doesn't say anything interesting, and seems to have a "grudging" tone.

Additionally, Before I changed my mind about them I'd need to see some statement that shows they understand their users concerns about SOPA and are not just flopping from an unpopular viewpoint. Sadly, I suspect the honest answer to be that they're stance is costing them money.

Way too little, far too late IMO...
Just to add data to the discussion;

I kicked off migration of my only 3 GoDaddy domains to namecheap last night. One .net, one .com and one .cc domain. None had any kind of whois protection or anonymisation.

The .net and .com migrations went very quickly and smoothly. Within two hours I had the confirmation e-mails from both namecheap and GoDaddy, and within 4 hours the migration was complete.

The .cc domain took a little longer, as when I started the move with namecheap it didn't seem to want an EPP code for a .cc domain, but then later changed its mind and asked me to enter one. I entered the code within 2 hours, and 8 hours later the migration was complete.

GoDaddy's goodbye was actually pretty professional;

===================================================================
SORRY TO SEE YOU GO. WE'LL ALWAYS WELCOME YOU BACK.
===================================================================

Dear Colm MacCarthaigh,

We're sorry you transferred your domain name(s) away from GoDaddy.com.
We are committed to providing quality services and products and hope
that we met your needs.

If you feel your transfer was in error, or if you have changed your
mind, please contact our 24/7 sales department at (480) 505-8877.
They'll assist you in transferring your domain name(s) back to us.*
Keep in mind that we continue to offer low prices and $7.49 transfer
rates on some domains.

Sincerely,
Go Daddy

P.S. Visit GoDaddy.com (http://www.godaddy.com/default.aspx?prog_id=GoDaddy&isc=gdbba1365)
and SAVE 15%* off your order of $50 or more. Just use source code
gdbba1365 when you check out to get your special savings. Start
shopping now at GoDaddy.com or order by phone at (480) 505-8821.

*Please note that ICANN's Transfer Policy may prevent you from
transferring your domain name within 60-days of a transfer.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
*Not applicable to ICANN fees, taxes, shipping and handling, sale
priced domains and transfers, bulk domains and transfers, premium
domains, Sunrise/Landrush domain registrations and pre-registrations,
memberships or maintenance plans, additional disk space and bandwidth
renewals, additional email addresses, Search Engine Visibility
advertising budget, Managed Hosting, custom page layouts, brand identity
services, Go Daddy branded merchandise or gift cards. Discount
reflected in your shopping cart - cannot be used in conjunction
with any other offer, discount or promotion, or in connection with
special partnership discount programs. After the initial purchase term,
discounted products purchased with special offer discounts will renew
at the then-current renewal list price.

Copyright (C) 2011 Go Daddy All rights reserved.
Dibbles 2: Winter Woes
Under pressure: raising Venice above water (using... water?)
Do elite US colleges choose personality over IQ?
Exclusive Collection of Garden Supplies for Garden Enthusiasts
Actually, wait... he renamed it to @OceanStratagy! Yup, that last A is no typo!

http://twitter.com/OceanStratagy

And then someone else registered @OceanStrategy with the correct spelling:

https://twitter.com/#!/OceanStrategy
Or a mobile app like godaddy does? I like searching for available domains on my phone sometimes and godaddy's app does that well. Does anyone know of any alternative iPhone apps for searching for available domains?
It's not your Congresscritter who's doing a bad job, it's everyone else's.
While I would be very suspicious of how accurate any one accusation is, especially if they were trying it in court, I do think that some of the materials look very much like things that Congressional staffers would be interested in.

So if I assume it's only 50% accurate or whatever, I can certainly still believe that there's filesharing going on over there.
No, I mean that I tend to buy those more expensive items more often now, because they offer additional quality or convenience which is now worthwhile to me. I also tend to shop at more expensive stores, since they tend to have better stuff and be closer to me.
I don't think it's what he was talking about, but Amazon also has their 'Prime' service which means free 2-day deliver on every item in their warehouses.

For me, that means I'm -way- more likely to buy from Amazon than anyone else, because it's both free and 2-day delivery. Yes, I pay $80 per year for the privilege, but that's still way cheaper than what I used to pay for shipping before Prime, and I always chose the 5-7 day option.
"Hey, we don't have time to update the Python SDK, what should we do?"

"Just delete it."
The protest wouldn't work if there was confusion on where to go. I assume a large reason people went to go daddy was because of the recognition. People knew (or at least assumed due to its wide use) they were a trustworthy source. Without the movement designating an alternative, there'd probably be a lot less traction since people might want to spend more time gaining confidence in a new company.
These days you're virtually guaranteed a disapproval of nearly 50% on the day you step into office.

(warning: oversimplification ahead, but I think it's a reasonable model to start with)

With the subtlety of the political chess match, the parties first choose polarized candidates in primaries. That's because it's generally the party hardcore who vote in primaries, not the moderates. Then in the general election, they play capture the centrist vote. When they're both at top form, the election margins are going to be razor thin.

Because the candidates were chosen in such a polarizing manner, they will largely be toxic to those on the other side of our imaginary single left-right dimension of political discourse.

(of course, this breaks down in gerrymandered districts where the political machine has ensured a safe seat)

EDIT: Now, factor in the typical model for marketing most high-profile candidates (at least this is how it seems to me). It seems that most people don't have the opportunity to vote for candidates they like anymore. Instead they're frightened by the bogeyman on the other side. "If you don't vote for the guy from our party, look at who's going to get the post instead -- and that will tilt the majority in Congress toward that other party of anti-Americans". The result, I submit, is that most people despise the guy from the other major party, but they don't like the one they did vote for, either. So it's not hard to push that disapproval rating even farther.
> make sure you are happy with their full price for renewals - because you will NEVER get a discount for renewing

This comment is flat wrong.

I have a couple hundred domains with NameCheap. I always get a discount on renewal.

No, you can't just Google "Namecheap Coupon %thismonth%" but you can hop on chat, ask politely, and be given one. It's not the same full discount, but it's a discount nonetheless, and takes but a few seconds.

The problem with expecting to pay the same for renewals as the initial term is that the annual rates are raised to the registrars, so their costs go up year to year, leaving pennies per domain at the rates you pay Namecheap and eventually putting them in the red if the rate to you didn't rise.
How does a startup ever become a business if it doesn't make money, at least to cover itself?
Microsoft: 5 things to look for in 2012
PyPI is the index;
The "ruby gem" equivalent is the "python egg" (not exactly equivalent, but close enough for this discussion)
And pip and easy_install are the management system.

It's surprising how little known these things are - compared to e.g. Ruby Gems, CPAN, CTAN, CRAN and npm.
Here's another article on setting up Django on EC2 -- but using NGinx and uWSGI: http://posterous.adambard.com/start-to-finish-serving-mysql-...
Do you really need a spoiler alert on a young-adult novel that has been out for 26 years?
29 Prime(TM) Relaunches Prime Marketing Platform(TM)
Their success with DRM has emboldened them. They think they vote for DRM-ish laws now, and that will be okay as well.

Nevermind that this won't work, either. They're going to do it anyhow, and to hell with who gets hurt.
Physics. Attacker gets arbitrary mass (reactant, etc) and time to accelerate. Defender needs same mass/time to decelerate... after discovering the attack.

Note that you could literally prep an attack for millennia which would be discovered a matter of hours prior to ending a civilization.

Physics makes for sucky narratives. Good thing it also makes for a vast, dead, boring universe.
Mmapped files are typically quicker than lots of fseeking and read()ing and write()ing because they avoid the non-trivial syscall overhead. This has been a very big driver in the adoption of mmapped files, even those not backed by disk.
In all cases, it will read better than shadowing would have.

You are going against the consensus established by ALGOL and Scheme (and used by most languages in the functional camp since then) here. That's your prerogative of course, but personally I'd be wary of design choices that go against established wisdom.

With "var", the above code could allow "someVariable" to refer to three different things, each for slightly different sections of the above chunk of code.

Yes, but that's not an issue, as it is easy to check (by looking at the code section in isolation) which of the three bindings an identifier refers to - which is, for me, the definition of lexical, static scope.
Ask HN: What is the best developer conference talk you saw in 2011?
What is the best developer conference talk you saw (in person or on video) in 2011? What taught you or inspired you the most?
Why we moved away from the cloud
Yes. We have the cheese shop: http://pypi.python.org/pypi

There's a few command-line programs to access it from, the most popular right now being "pip".
The sad thing is not that she didn't "go through the proper channels," the sad thing about this story is that the passengers in line behind her were more worried about missing their flights and started to yell at her to quit holding up the line.

I would love to see something like this happen, then every passenger after her refuse the scanner and recite the 4th amendment while being pat-down. Sadly, this will never happen, as 90% of those in line probably don't even know what the 4th amendment is, much less have the words memorized.
Things I Learned About Blogging
Please. Your comment isn't helpful or productive; I am simply referring to an argument rather than rehashing it myself, as you can see from the follow up thread. If you want, you can follow that thread and learn some good philosophy. It would certainly be more enlightening than a smug link to a logical fallacy site.
It really depends on the task. For an embedded device with a UI, where memory is at a premium, reference counting is probably the way to go.

But for pure throughput, especially on a multiprocessor machine, you really want to go with tracing garbage collector. In a multiprocessor system you have to keep caches coherent, and writes to the reference count have the effect of invalidating remote cache lines, increasing coherency traffic, etc.
You are correct; the federal government is rotten.

In any conflict, there are multiple sides, otherwise the conflict wouldn't exist. If the TSA had been designed with the intent of finding ways of protecting us while at the same time ensuring that the protective measures don't violate our constitutional rights, we wouldn't be having this conversation. If the TSA had been staffed with competent, compassionate human beings, there would be no conflict.

You and I may view things in terms or right or wrong, but bureaucrats don't. The government is rotten because we keep electing rotten people to rule over us. Isolated efforts to fight the TSA will do far less than an organized political movement.

People need to organize and take action as a collective. Just look at what happened to godaddy and you can begin to understand.
Gregory Evan's Blog Sites Ripping Contents from InfoSec Blogs
That's easy : Simple made easy by Rich Hickey
"US living wage" isn't very useful. A living wage in Manhattan is an integer multiple of a living wage in Montana.
I have a small project in the works, specifically for a service that has existing client apps on iOS and Android, but is lacking a WP7 client.
I would say AirBNB is one of the most mocked and misunderstood companies in the last couple years and it's a great example of a breakout success. A whole lot of people thought nobody would invite strangers into their house.
Sorry, what I had in mind was the Work Breakdown Structure advocated in the "traditional" (PMI/Pmbok), and the lowest divisions as "bricks", or the agile approach of separating a project into User Stories.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Work_breakdown_structure

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_story

It's not what you were talking about.

Your points at the end of the article are pretty similar to what I was taught in a short agile project management seminar this week, if it helps :)
AFAIK, heap and stack are still in the same "area of memory;" the discipline of separating the two is still enforced (or not) by the operating system. The heap-grows-up, stack-grows-down convention is still common on (32-bit, maybe 64-bit?) x86 too.
The Champion of Painkillers
Debugging 8.6 Billion Miles From Earth
A relativistic speeds, having airbags is not a free pass. Great, it hit your atmosphere and disintegrated. Now your atmosphere hits you.
Strangeloop - great speakers (including my favorite keynote in years by Rich Hickey http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Simple-Made-Easy) and great variety (https://thestrangeloop.com/sessions). I'm also happy that all of the presentations will (eventually) be available on the web (https://thestrangeloop.com/news/strange-loop-2011-video-sche...).

I'll definitely be attending in 2012.
Whenever I was missing a pen I was buying 10 or 20 cheapest ones and allowed them to dissipate around in my environment so that whenever I needed a pen, finding one would take me few seconds at most. It required no forethought and no organisation. Inefficiency due to low cost was negligible.
Good question. She hasn't used an iPad so I can't fairly compare to that. The Fire's touch motions were tough for me though too at times so I'm assuming she would have an easier time with an iPad. That might not be a fair assumption though. Next time I see her I'll have her try an iPad.
I don't think you would try to slow down approaching meteorites to zero speed, only deflect them a little so that they miss the planet. The further away you catch it, the less energy it takes (I assume, didn't do the maths).
The linked article seems to mention re-entry friction as a problem yet-to-be-solved:

The system would also have to cope with atmospheric heating from re-entry, which could melt the weapon.

Then there's the question of whether or not heat is truly the most immediate issue. NASA and USAF had to actually fly an airplace near and past the speed of sound to see how the properties of the atmosphere changed when compressed. Is it logical to hypothesize that similar changes may be encountered as speed continues to increase?
Reference counting as in Objective C may be a happy medium for now, but that won't last. As the underlying hardware and VMs in mobile devices continue to improve, the need for developers to spend extra time on memory management will be seen as more and more of an unnecessary burden.
Video for "Simple Made Easy" from Strange Loop: http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Simple-Made-Easy