skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Thanks for replying. I agree that publishing in-progress is an easier sell to a technical book author or a business book author (or any non-fiction author, frankly) than to a novelist. This is especially true since in a non-fiction book where the subject matter is changing so fast, publishing in-progress is the best way to avoid your words being obsolete when read.

However, for a fiction author, publishing in-progress has its merits too. First, given the number of writers in the world, it's a mathematical certainty that there's a really good story that exists only on some author's laptop right now, and all that s/he has to show for it is rejection letters. (Or the author could be so shy that they haven't even submitted it to anyone yet.) Lean publishing on Leanpub could help this author get their work out there and overcome the fear of publishing. (It would be really cool if one day Leanpub enables some great work of literature to be discovered...)

But publishing is special. Even if you've been creating lots of previews and have no interested readers, the first time you click the publish button and make your book available for purchase it is a scary thing to do. (This is a lot more so than tweeting or blogging.) I was even nervous clicking publish on my in-progress manifesto book, and I'm the cofounder of Leanpub! I think this is because most authors (myself included) have a deep respect for books and publishing. Saying that your words are worth reading is one thing, saying that they constitute a book worth reading is a big deal.

That said, we believe that the Lean Startup principles do apply to books, and that releasing more often can create a better work. Publishing in-progress can give authors some of the feedback that really good editors can provide. With my first book, I actually got really good feedback both from readers when I self-published and from my technical editor once I signed with a publisher after the first book version was done. But frankly, the reader feedback was more important: a reader found a security bug in my code, I got to ask my readers how important they thought REST would be to them (this was many years ago), etc, etc. Now, most readers gave me no feedback. This is expected. But the level of feedback I got from the most engaged readers was superior to what I would have gotten from even a good development editor. (The technical depth of these readers was equal to that of the technical reviewers, who are only typically engaged near the end of a technical book's development.)

Finally, publishing in-progress has another advantage: it helps avoid writer's block. This is because once you get in the habit of publishing, it removes the fear from it and just leaves the endorphin rush. This is similar to how continuous deployment in lean startups works, or how regular exercise at the gym works. Lean publishing makes releasing new versions a habit, and habits are powerful things...
That is such a beautiful strategy. I truly hope it doesn't come down to that for Grooveshark (I love them), but from a purely strategic point of view for the record labels, that move would be amazing.
I think "muksah" might actually be closer than parve, in this context.
The long and lonesome journey of solo entrepreneurship
Long-time Hacker News lurker. Guessing this hits home for at least a couple people here.
I'm not talking about methodology, I'm talking about the interviewer coming up with a problem that would require an algorithm to be designed, whose task it is the interviewees to solve. However, if the interviewer themselves doesn't know algorithms enough to come up with a decent problem....
Kaete: A small (~2 kb minified) JavaScript templating language
What the Copycat Saw: Creative Theft in Mobile and Social Games
zaarly
Exactly, what should be left to the states, and what to the EU? IP regulation, for example, look to me like something that should definitely be euro-wide.
In 1917 Lenin said that every cook should be able to run a state.

In 2012 a mayor would write code. That's what the mankind achieved.
I like this concept a lot. NoFouls.com does something similar for basketball, but the regular games are never on there. It's always some guy trying to get a game by his house, emailing everybody in the city who is nowhere close to him. Hopefully this works out better. It's tough because most guys only know the times for one court. And so you'd need a lot of those guys to signup and post. However, there are some that make the rounds, getting those people as curators would be ideal. One guy I knew who did that went around recruiting for hoopitup tournaments to get the best teams and win $10k :).
Just curious: why SWT over Swing? (I've read that Java 6 included some Swing performance improvements.)
Detroit Lions vs New Orleans Saints live stream
watch here Detroit Lions vs New Orleans Saints
Match schedule:
NFL Postseason
Date: SAT, JAN 7 2012
TIME : 8:00 PM (ET)
Playoffs - Wild-Card Weekend
TV: NBC
watch and enjoy Detroit Lions vs New Orleans Saints live streaming
and also watch NFL full season live streaming online here.
I also wanted to moan about other services missing my favorite songs but I checked wiki [1]. Perhaps when you go through the list you'll find your 'foreign' bands as well :)

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Music_streaming_service#On-dema...
I will let him know. how do you go about appealing the decision?
Yeah, you're right. Enough with the tennis. I think there's equal merit with what you're saying and what Ed is saying. We're trying to answer a question that doesn't really have a right answer. Add to that the fact that there are so many ways to evaluate how much youve improved or how you stack up that maybe we should focus instead on how not to measure these things.

I've been so tired that I'm prone to losing my train of though half way through writing so hopefully my last comment wasn't totally incomprehensible.
Well, is writing code the new literacy? Most people in the west can read and write at some level, even if they never write a novel. The future might be like that with code - there are signs of it, where knowing how to write a little script or a SQL query can make a huge difference in plenty of different fields
Though you will make more, you will be on the hook for 100% of payroll taxes rather than 50% as in a normal W2 relationship. It is also a lot easier to get let go.
Review/comment design concepts online & post yours too
yeah that could definitely be a way of doing it; solely depends on the community. I think the idea might have been also to get leagues up and running with the tool as an organizational tool for games and practices and team discussion.
This may be a solution further down the road but our code at the minute changes literally daily and it would be counter productive to have to test every deployment against previous versions

We actually discussed this very point in work today, I still class our product, 2 years down the line, to be in beta. We are actively working towards a version 1, if you will.

We could revisit at a later point and probably will but the time it would take to document all db changes and create a version every day would far outweigh the benefits.

Distributing to other peoples data centers comes with it's own host of issues as well, we would have to charge for a maintenance contract for 1. We would need to bring on a customer service team to support people. At the minute, bug fixes can come straight to developers via our technical director as we can deploy straight away. We would need a team to asses what their setup is, if they have everything needed installed etc etc.

Deployment to our own servers helps us and the customer a lot, we don't charge a lot for hosting, our uptime last year was over 99.97% and bug fixes and functionality are rolled out on a daily basis without interaction from the customer.

We did a massive project recently that the customer ended up deployment on their own $5 hosting company, turned out the company didn't support what we needed and we ended up coding around the road blocks. Ended up costing the customer more.
I've always thought of them as a place where you go to get books. Those other things are nice, but secondary.
We plan on deploying PHP 5.3 to Rackspace Cloud Sites before the end of March. If you have any questions, please email help at rackspace dot com.
It seems to me like that question may be purely "polite".

It's OK to be and act confident. It's also OK to be nice and respectful at the same time.
What happens when the Kindle Fire costs $0?
After driving across the US this past summer (and finding myself in some not so nice areas), I thought of this exact same thing.
The whole point is that you can get away with terrible devices if you have the right content. Have you tried using those receivers you get if you want pay-TV? They are all terrible.
Ozzie using Microsoft’s SharePoint Team Website for Cocomo.com
http://learncodethehardway.org/
You should be careful here:

I bet you work from home too sometimes, so deduct a %age of your rent and utilities.

This is usually a big red flag for IRS audits. It's my understanding you have to have a dedicated area just for work. So lounging on your couch wouldn't count. A corner desk or separate office is fine I think.
Not arguing with the importance of some of those techniques, but just a word of caution that the document hasn't been updated since 2008.
not news
Learning From The Masters: Level Design In The Legend Of Zelda
The reason is that intuitiveness doesn't matter, it's how useful the language is after you're familiar with it that matters.
The Minimum Viable Partnership model
Ask HN: Got new hardware. Want to run vm's. What shim should I use?
Hi All,

I just got some brand spanking new HP hardware. Was wondering what the community would suggest I use if I want to run linux virtual machines. Which hypervisor/shim whatever should I use? I may pay Citrix or VMware in the future but am looking for something to run now on this machine for development purposes.

Links and war stories please. Thank you!
no not strange given iPad's rise compared to iphone and android phones...so far devices to counter that are Samsung Galaxy Tab and Kindlefire with a future nexus table mid 2012.
As someone with zero programming skills, I find the course pretty frustrating for a complete beginner (not sure the segment you're targeting tbh).

I like the concept of in-browser coding as it removes the set-up barrier for noobs like myself, who struggled with setting up Python on Windows!

It would be great if there are better instructions as to what one needs to do. The tips aren't really tips when the info provided are essential to progress. It's pretty daunting for a beginner to go through the github page when I only need a couple of lines on the key need-to-knows for that particular level.

I echo gerggerg and trun's suggestion of step-by-step animation as the output failures leaves me none the wiser as to what went wrong as it's gibberish to me just now.
I was also hoping to see some mathematical insight that allowed them to prove the minimal sudoku problem. The problem with a brute force solution is that it only applies to the 9x9 sudoku. It would be interesting to see what the limit is for larger sudokus and what correlations there are between their dimensions and their minimal number of clues.
[Indeed](http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/EmacsImplementations). And [this](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emacs#Other_forks_and_clones).

That said, I wonder about the possibility of taking an Emacs written in some other language and adding an Elisp interpreter to it such that it could make use of all the existing Emacs elisp out there.
The BBC (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/7071611.stm) tells me there are 17 million families in the UK. 99*17 million = 1.7B.

So, if Apple wants AppleTV adoption in the UK, it'd be cheaper for them to just mail every household in the UK a free Apple TV.
Tax law doesn't allow this for engineers though - you can't be a 1 man consulting shop with a single employer. Most large tech firms hire contractors through third party consulting shops specifically to get around this.
What happens when Amazon sells 10mil kindle fires that cost $200 to produce for $0? Well, they lose $2 bil. Given that their annual operating income is only $1.4B or so, I don't think this is ever going to happen.
Well, it's not that weird for Bloomberg. He did after all build his considerable fortune on a tech company (which has been in existence since 1981, longer than most tech companies)
Onsite SEO is essentially good web design and content strategy, any developer worth his salt will produce a site that already ticks all the boxes.

All the work is in producing great, relevant content and then link building.
I had an older nokia phone that i could do that with over bluetooth, but it would usually fail to recognize the certificates unless put on to it by the nokia software rather than standard obex.
The problem with multi-threading in emacs isn't a lack of libraries to support threads, as CL would supply, but rather the complexities of synchronization of a large existing codebase, which porting to CL would have no effect.
And we will likely never get there. A good place to start reasoning about programming languages is the philosophy of language. Frege, Hume, Wittgenstein, Searle are some interesting figures in this space. Many language philosophers believe there are some basics of language that everyone grasps, and the particulars of a language evolve from necessity. Fortunately there is little agreement on what these basic elements are. This is what makes it interesting.

"Evidence-based programming languages" won't solve anything by finding natural-language equivalents for difficult syntax. What natural language will these equivalents be created in? English, Japanese, Arabic? All languages? Will Japanese programmers share their code with English programmers by means of a Babel fish?

The idea of a poorly designed language is nonsense. All languages that exist or have existed were designed precisely for what and when they were needed.

At its core programming is about appropriate abstraction. To be widely useful the programming language's wheels should tread lightly, just touching the road. If there's too much abstraction, there's no friction and you go nowhere. With too little abstraction you're pegged to the ground and expend enormous amounts of energy to go anywhere.
..using blue gum trees, bicycle parts, and materials collected in a local scrapyard[1]

my problem was that i didn't have much money to buy parts to construct the windmill. over time, i found materials that had been discarded by other farmers or by the nearby tobacco plantations. and i bought a few parts with money i scraped together[2]

he's also invented a solar-powered water pump, written a book, spoken at TED, been featured in a museum exhibit, and matriculated to Dartmouth.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Kamkwamba
[2] http://movingwindmills.org/img/Diagram_storypage1.jpg
Ignore SEO. Go Accessibility
>Oddly enough, though, I tried to get my fiance to use it for wedding planning. She claims it makes no sense :)

I'm pretty tech-savvy and it was intimidating at first. There is a lot going on. The first thing I think when I see my Boards page is "Everything is nested." You have options inside of cards inside of boards inside of a board-box. Then click on a card and you have comments and votes and links and activities. Everything has its own 1px box-shadow which sections things in my head I don't think should be sectioned; for instance, comments inside of cards look like they should be clickable because of how every link has the same border and box-shadow. The description, however, has no such border but is the same size font as the "Edit this description" link, which makes that block have no focus.

It's a great service, though— kind of like a big to-do list. Considering they just released it a couple months ago, the UI is great even with those gripes. I just think it was trying to be a little too nondescript. (I'm probably going to catch some flack for this here, but...) I would have liked to see the boards look like cork boards and the cards look like cards pinned to them. It would have been easier to understand the workflow a bit better.
Social networking for iPhone - Just people.
Custom check-ins for Facebook Places
Then why can you turn most of these devices back on after takeoff?

Also, if that were the case, they should ban babies too - they can be way way more irritating than the average phone ringtone.
I'd much prefer to have all of elisp in my editor than all of Java. The existing elisp libraries are much better suited for an editing environment than Java.
So in our ever-digital world, we forget that these nice digital technologies have analog underpinnings. Cellular radio signals these days are digital, but that digital signal is on top of an analog signal.

iPads and other non-cellular devices have CPUs and CPUs have clocks, which an analog guy would properly identify as a Radio which is transmitting. Non-cellular devices also increasingly have Wi-fi, which is a digital technology on top of an analog radio signal. So an iPad, for example, has at least two radios.

So an all-metal airplane with on the order of a hundred folks, each with 2*n transmitting radios contains measurable radio frequency signal.

So what frequency is this radiation?

Well, in a non-linear environment (another analog deal), the result is the sum and difference of all the signals, pairwise. So can an analog-enlignened person honestly say that this mash of radio-frequency energy does not expose the cockpit avionics to possible spurious signal?

If you don't think that is a potential problem, I would rather drive you in my car than fly with you.

Now regarding cellular phones, it is the FCC that issues this regulation, not the FAA. Why would they be interested in that? Well, since cellular telephone communication is line of sight, do the math on how many more cells you and your concealed cellphone are trying to capture at 1000 feet or higher? Could be an entire city's worth.

Stewardesses are not generally tested for their knowledge of RF propagation or RF interference, so focusing your anger on them is not productive.

And yes, the iPhone or droid is a marvelous piece of technology, but owning one does not make you immune to the facts of the analog world.
I was wondering if that was a statement on Baltimore :-) So if you're in the bayshore (a pretty rough part of SF) and you ask for directions does it simply say 'shelter in place'? Or maybe 'call for an escort'?

I totally agree with the sentiment that this isn't a patent any more than patenting a TV that doesn't tune in Adult channels, oh wait, damn.
As a contractor, I'm ready to name numbers. I charge ~$125/hour for Rails or iOS Contracting, depending on commute and anticipated length of engagement. - aaron.blohowiak@gmail.com

The contractor - client relationship is quite different from employee - employer, so there is usually little negotiating involved.
I've been wanting something like this for my city for a long time.

The only problem for me is getting my not so tech savvy community to find/use this.
Google fined, required to change unfavorable search results by French court
seo pages can't be found by google.

meta!
I hope these keys are fake... https://github.com/myusuf3/courtside/blob/master/courtside/k...
Hi, this is our first startup that we started 6 months ago. Would love to see what you think!
Firing Your Clients And Some Lessons Learned.
Documentation isn't the issue.

Learning the correct amount, type, and depth of documentation that is fruitful is key.

In this case, prototyping seems obvious to do when you know how it should be, or a starting trajectory. When you don't, and/or there is management/design by committee, I'm sure there's other large problems besides IA documents.

Documentation exists in two forms:

- for those operationally familiar with a system.

- for those not familiar with a system.

I almost like having two sets of documentation, a high level quick-guide and a deep down exploration in the same document. Part of it is as much design as is necessary to explain things. Simple things don't need oodles of diagrams. You better believe complex things, once figured out benefit from them.

Documentation also exists to capture the intellectual capital of your organization. It may not be referenced or used, but as an organization matures past 5 years of being in it's current way of business, or grows larger than 10-15 people; true, impactful turnover becomes a real issue.
Survey Shows More Play On Mobile, Less On Consoles
Most Excel users never enter a formula. They use Excel when they need a table. The gridlines are the most important feature of Excel, not recalc.

Joel is exaggerating for effect. Yes, many spreadsheets are static lists. But how far would a spreadsheet product get without formulas? As soon as you wanted to add prices to your grocery list, you'd be stuck.

His critique of Improv is interesting. (Steve Jobs adored Improv for years btw.) He's saying that by imposing more structure on the free-form grid, Improv lost the ad hoc users.

The free-form grid is the most important thing about spreadsheets. But interactivity (formulas/recalc) is part of that, even when you're not using it.
Try it again. I was just able to access the pdf.
You hear the quote "never give the first number" thrown around a lot and while it's sometimes good advice, it's not always the best option. There are times where setting the anchor is a very valid approach to hitting an upper bound.

The most important aspect of negotiations is power. He who has more power will always have the upper hand in negotiations. This is usually where someone suggests reading the art of war, and that suggestion is generally pretty damn good.

Power is defined pretty loosely as anything from data, supply, demand, urgency and beyond can be considered part of the equation. I'd start by doing some research to get a range of how much someone with the same background is currently making in the particular field. The caveat here is that you want to ask the person who just changed jobs and not the person who've been working at the same place for 20 years (I guarantee they'll be underpaid).

One last point I want to make is that average negotiators always assume that the two parties will meet near the middle. Use that towards your advantage as bait.
Here's a mirror: http://blog.notdot.net.nyud.net/2012/01/Damn-Cool-Algorithms...
reddit on GAE would have no options

This is not true at all. It's very easy to run a hybrid with parts of your application in other parts of the cloud. I do this. There's even a remote API stub so you have direct access to the full suite of GAE APIs from servers in EC2 or whatnot.

There are certainly limitations to what you can run inside of GAE, but there's almost always a good way to work around it while preserving the benefits of scalability, multi-datacenter reliability, etc. I'm not saying it's for everyone, but it's great for most common web applications.
Not necessarily... The vast majority of emacs is written in elisp, and the amount of instructions written in C is actually rather small, It's been a while, but on the order of a few hundred too a few thousand.

Once you were to rewrite the elisp interpreter, and other calls from C into JavaScript, in theory, running emacs in you're browser isn't actually that absurd.
Code Wars: PHP vs Ruby vs Python - which is best?