skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> The argument that any given political story is "something that hackers would find interesting" and not "just politics" is as old as the site. There is also an infinite number of arrangement of cat pictures that satisfy the literal definition of "interesting to hackers".

That is a bit of a red herring.

We geeks have pretty much addressed the technical challenge of "infinite number of arrangement of cat pictures" and have delivered. It is hardly an urgency, at this point. You wanna see cat pictures? I'm sure there are an equally infinite number of image sites, and various frameworks for creating yet even more.

Today, as technologists, we are very likely to find ourselves employed by financial institutions, security services, military, various "social" big brother platforms, and, corporate media. We are, each and everyone, enablers, for better or for worse.

To discuss larger, relevant, sociopolitical matter and events here on HN, with a focus on the tech dimension, is not merely an 'idle interest' for the subset of us that do very much care if it is "for better or worse".

[edit/ps: to be clear, I am addressing the OP's general remark and not this specific article.]
For lesson 7, question 4 [It's time to make your own! Let's do what we did before and bring i down from 2 to 0. This time, fill in the conditions in the for loop using what you learned before.], when I run into infinite loop, my browser gets stuck.

Just of curiosity, I would like to know whether that event affects the server badly, if I keep my browser open?
Thanks, any ideas on specific use cases where scraping is used actively in mobile apps.
SEEKING WORK - Remote

I have built these:

http://dragon.ws1.erdiscovery.com/JAMUI/#yourjam

http://www.ibm.com/ibm100/us/en/

http://www-949.ibm.com/social/watson/

http://www-949.ibm.com/social/lotusphere/

And have an IOS app in the app store (also available in the Android store):

http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/quick-reference-for-ibm-syste...

This is my linkedIn profile:

http://www.linkedin.com/in/kentonsmeltzer

I am proficient in JavaScript / HTML / CSS, Objective-C, Java I have done C# in the past, I have worked with all the major databases. I have over 16 years in the industry focused in web and mobile. Contact details are in my profile.
James Pennebaker wrote about this in "The Secret Life of Pronouns". It was a good book released late last year.

He also does twitter stream analysis using his research and you can find that here --> http://analyzewords.com

People might dismiss it as tripe, but after you've read some of his assertions and look over your own emails you'll probably believe it makes a bit of sense.
thanks for the question. we're running everything client side, so it's only your browser that's getting stuck. we're working on a fix for this too!
Reducing Code Nesting
You're going to have security holes with every piece of software, though it is true some software is more secure than others.

I personally view having security updates as a plus - it shows that the WordPress team (open source community) supports their software. The fact that WordPress is running on 70 million plus websites [1], about 15% of the web [2], means that if a security hole is found, it will be fixed, and it can be fixed by anyone without having to wait for a limited amount of employees of a particular company to write the patch (one of the benefits of open source).

What you do get from Tumblr, though, is the fact that a 3rd party is responsible for keeping your website up and keeping it fast - you basically trade ownership of your website's software for a 3rd-party guarantee. This also means that if Tumblr is down or is hacked or you want to customize something beyond the theme, you are dependent on Tumblr...

So, while each may have its own use-case (Tumblr is great for the following/reblogging stuff), the fact that WordPress is regularly updated is not a reason to avoid using it as a platform.

[1] http://en.wordpress.com/stats/
[2] http://wordpress.org/news/2011/08/state-of-the-word/
Looks really nice. Good job.
Seems my poor intel gpu doesn't work well with webgl. I got really narrow z-culling, every 3d flipped text disappear behind a cute intersection triangle, but that's off topic; I didn't know prezzi, and seeing this kind of things live is refreshingly fun.
Dont you know about Rust? If you do why is it not on the list?
Convergence: Replacing Certificate Authorities
The way undo works in emacs is better than standard CUA behavior for two reasons:
1. It doesn't lose history.
2. You can undo within a selection.

However, there's room for improvement. In particular, there's packages that turn undo history into a tree.
http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/UndoTree
Look at Dylan, stuff started happening again.

http://opendylan.org/
Let's hope this isn't auction poisonning like the hp touchpad auctions.
that's really strange....I'm using chromium on Linux, and i see no performance penalty as you described...
Uken Games in downtown Toronto

Uken is looking for talented developers and designers to help us build mobile games in HTML5 and push what is possible in a browser.

We are a profitable startup (~25 employees) experiencing massive growth, with over 100,000 players a day across iPhone, iPad, Android, BlackBerry and Facebook.

More info at http://uken.com/jobs
I used to think exactly like this -- that coding well required some inherent differences in thought structure -- but not since I really started watching the progress of those I taught. As you learn, you're not just picking up information, the way you think changes. I'm now quite convinced that effectively everyone can pick up these odd thought processes, whether they're the ones required for programming, reverse-engineering, or otherwise; it just may take more work for some.
In some professional service firms, this situation is called "starting working at-risk". Depending on the deal size, this often requires obtaining approval up the chain so that somebody can evaluate and ideally limit the risk involved.

I completely agree with this sentiment; sometimes starting work at-risk is a sign of good faith and goes a long way to establishing trust. Just make sure that there is a follow-up plan along the lines of "I'm working at-risk for X days. If the contract isn't signed by then, or if I've reached the first small milestone/chapter/deliverable, I stop work."

Except, in this case, it seems the OP actually had a signed contract (half way through his timeline) but Apress still refused to cough up the payment that they obligated themselves to pay. That just sucks.
Except, supermodels don't eat.
Plus, in the UK the cops aren't generally armed with anything more than a club. So they have to use their heads a bit more.

I attended riot-control training in the Marines: from the way things look on teevee the cops are doing pretty much what we trained to do.

Guns are out[1]. Clubs, chemical agents, are in. Using your head is the order of the day.

Because it only takes one guy not using his head, throwing a CS grenade into the crowd, upwind from your lines, to ruin your whole day.

[1] Let me (slightly) expand on the guns thing and Marines. We _had_ rifles in the Marines, but doctrine and training had us running around without ammunition, or with ammunition kept in pouches, and only allowed to be used with permission of a commissioned officer.
Avenue of the stars seems like a really bad location to me. Poor access via public transit and awful commute times.
I don't think the issue is dynamic pricing but the app's UI. If it said "We'll be charging you $50 for this trip" instead of "The rate will be 6.5x than normal", users would not have taken the ride.

If the UI was right, the prices wouldn't have increased to more than $50 per mile since demand would have likely decreased when the rate was about $20 per mile.
I wasn't talking just about riot situations, U.S. police look sort of like this (especially where I am in Arizona) all the time, except without the masks.
Note that ergoemacs is not the same thing as CUA mode. Ergoemacs is more about ergonomic efficiency than about mimicking windows. CUA mode is a separate mode already built into emacs.

I used ergoemacs keybindings for a year or so. They are pretty slick, and definitely more ergonomically efficient than emacs default keybindings. However, many modes are designed around emacs default keybindings, and I eventually decided it was too much work tweaking every mode I used to conform to the ergoemacs setup.

If you stick to emacs core modes which are already customized, it's probably a good choice.
I love how it starts, definitely caught me off-guard!
Sadly not surprising.
Totally love it. I was searching for iOS address book style scrolling (fixed headings for a context). This would help.
Ask HN: What's Better? Generalist or Specialist
Agreed, I am all for reform but we need to outsmart them, from what I've read lately it seems online activity, like that of Reddit, has effected more change than the in-person protests. The problem is that change won't happen overnight, its a gradual process to awaken more and more people to whats actually going on and get each person to do their small part to help change things.
The general public's problem with dynamic pricing for highly scarce goods and captive market (stuck in the city) is that it makes for extremely bad feelings.

The phrase "Price gouging" comes to mind. Even when dynamic pricing is available, as long as people are stuck, they will feel resentment.

Another example is when there are hurricanes or floods. Shops could charge "market pricing" for bottled water, but this only generates ill-will. What shops do is to ration the supplies so that all those who need bottled water get some.

The problem with cabs is you can't implement rationing. Furthermore, supply is always going to be tight even if all the limousines came out in full force. It is one of those once-a-year spike in demand.

The airline industry solves this problem by offering advance bookings. The benefits of advance booking is that it incorporates some kind of price signal so that people can decide whether they wish to travel or not. However, it will take considerable cultural change for people to modify their discretionary going-out based on fares alone.
http://eee.asus.com/eeepad/transformer-prime/features/
Yeah, that could be clearer. What initially struck me, before I'd finished reading the article, was the impending sense of post hoc ergo propter hoc. So my response, at that point, was to invert the relationship between copying and pecking order: a) "pecking order is an effect of copying" vs. b) "copying is an effect of pecking order."

If b) is the case then it makes sense to frame the issue as "The way people copy each other's linguistic style reveals their pecking order." But if a) is the case then the article's conclusion is tautological. Of course you're right that that doesn't stop us from taking it as a direct measure of power or influence, since they're still strongly correlated. I was just thinking of it more as a measure of linguistic reserves [1].

[1] http://goo.gl/NOUwo (Sorry to use a link shortener, but it's a long Google Books URL.)
> Does anyone know historically how C13 got to mean "C+E+G+B♭+D+F+A" rather than "C+E+G+B♭+A", which if you consider things only symbolically, seems more likely?

Changing the question to C11 to simplify: a possible answer (take it with a grain of salt) is that C11 got to mean "C+E+G+B♭+D+F" because in classical harmony you can't just stick a 11th there without the 7th and 9th. The 11th interval (C to upper F) is dissonant; not as much as the 4th, but still dissonant. However, it is consonant with the 7th and 9th. That is, B♭ to F is a 5th, and D to F is a 3rd, or simply: B♭-D-F is a triad.

The question now is, why do books say C11 means "C+E+G+B♭+D+F" but in practice it's often voiced as "C+E+G+B♭+F"? I think the simple answer is that in some traditions (like jazz) people are OK with that dissonance; and in some harmonical contexts (when the function of the chord is such and such; say jaylevvit's comment), we can omit such and such notes because the chord still "works". If you doubt, play several voicings. The "proof" is in the sound.

(but honestly I'm not fully convinced by that answer. In particular I dislike the notational mess).
At first I thought this was a fancy but somewhat useless tool but I have found a use for it. I develop (or debug) a lot of Facebook applications and exceeding the max-width of the iframes Facebook uses will expose the scroll bar. Finding the specific element isn't always easy because it could be padding, margin, border etc taking it over the edge rather than just width and height. Tilt allows you to see instantly where the overflow is happening and cuts a lot of time out of those particular issues.
Definitely this.

It may be counter-productive to over-analyse these things too, at least beyond a point.

I ran myself into a bit of a dead end with jazz piano trying to be ever more inventive when it comes to harmony. I probably thought about it too much. The result was that I ended up pursuing it to its conclusion as far as my abilities went and then feeling like I had nothing left to do but flog a dead horse with the same improvisational tricks. Then I got tired and rusty.

(Any tips from musician hacker types here on how to get past this kind of 'improvisor's block' ?)

I guess my advice with hindsight would be: trying to get better by being cleverer with harmony hits a dead end. Instead try to get to a point where you can feel harmony in a textural way. Theory can help with that, but a little of it goes a long way, try to get as much as you can just from playing and listening. Watch out though as it's easy to get stuck in a feedback loop doing that which converges on a local optimum that bores you. Seek input into the loop which is outside your improvisatory comfort zone. And not necessarily in the sense of technically harder -- just different.

The best stuff I've been able to play has been when I'm in a state of mind when I'm able to play texturally without thinking very much about what I'm playing, but it's quite rare these days.
Every men all need to have a charming mens wrist watch
Today, the watch is no longer at the time of the tool, you can also wearing watch to enhance their charm, and it's also reflecting their fashion sense. Technology combined with innovative ideas and aesthetics, the field lay the majesty of Watch for Male, this moment, extremely elegant men's watch with the male model to highlight the charm, so you and I share a common well-being in the passage of time in every minute.
Hadn't heard of Markdown until now. I can always be convinced to try something new, but Scrivener was incredibly simple. I can edit and submit an updated version to the Kindle store in 5 minutes (video of that here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=puv9zCwrex4 ).

My formatting isn't anything incredible, so if Leanpub could put together a quality conversion I'd consider checking them out.
Well, I'm assuming by convention that the 7th is flattened, as the notation "C7" does.
Google facing antitrust investigation
The article mostly talks about structural words. The real breakthrough is that they provide a lot of clues into our very being. We can predict lying, age, gender, and power using them. For those interested in this it would be worth checking out The Secret Life of Pronouns[1]

Your second paragraph talks about being able to notice these things in meetings. Penbrooke's research[1] shows that our brains ignore structural words. So it's pretty impossible to take advantage of this particular research.

However, I think there are a few things you can do.

1. You're first paragraph about "inside jokes" is spot on. When I was in college it was pretty common to to get what were called "Dorm Floor" shirts. The front had some slogan or name on them and the back had quotes from your dorm floor. When we went to create ours there were three of us who dominated the floor quotes. So they made a limit for how many quotes a person could have. Most of these quotes were essentially inside jokes.

If you want to know where you stand in a group it's pretty easy to test this using inside jokes. Can you start something? If they respect you they will pick up your inside joke.

2.When I was in college, I took a lot of discussion based classes related to political theory. I noticed my self picking up the mannerisms of a kid in my class. I then realized that others were too. This was a huge eye opening experience for me. I realized that mannerism and the way we speak is organic and if we can record it's evolution it tells us something about how power and society works.

The down side of this is that in a meeting you don't see the birth of the mannerism so you don't know who the decision makers are. You also can't mentally process the structural words, so I don't think there's much advantage there.

[1]http://secretlifeofpronouns.com/
Tumblr had 42 hours of downtime in 2011 alone - http://allthingsd.com/20111215/tumblr-had-42-hours-of-downti....
> Destroying bits is so darn easy, that people do it too much.

Really? This is only the third time I've heard of it happening intentionally in at least as many years. (the other two being whytheluckystiff.net and diveintomark.org). It doesn't seem like it happens very often at all.
I briefly thought about starting a business like this a couple years ago.

During this thought exercise I came to the conclusion that an embedded GPS would be essential to maintain security.

Another idea would be making your social network your security system, by only allowing rentals to people within two degrees of separation on a social networking site.
Really? That's the best analogy you could come up with? It's more like a newspaper printing advertisements that there will be stolen radios for sale or prostitutes behind the Walmart on Saturday.
Blogger in Draft - http://bloggerindraft.blogspot.com/
http://draft.blogger.com
Here's a golang blog post about doozer: http://blog.golang.org/2011/04/go-at-heroku.html
SEEKING FREELANCER - Remote
Please check our job opening in this link http://blog.inbed.me/2011/12/28/job-opening-web-designer-fre...

Thanks a lot!
GymPact (Start-Up Chile 2011) Launches
With Hi-Gear Closing, Here's my contact with the CTO
San Francisco, CA (SOMA). Full time.

Stealth - consumer web and mobile

--

We recently closed funding (unannounced) from well-known investors. This is an opportunity to join at the earliest stages and help shape product/culture.

Do you find yourself using Google to navigate websites that you commonly use, or end up with many browser tabs trying to accomplish some task? We're innovating along how people interact with online services and designing a new web-based experience that allows users to accomplish tasks in a more usable, efficient, and social manner.

In addition to great generalist engineers, we are actively hiring front-end developers and mobile (iOS/Android) developers.

We work mainly with Javascript (jquery and node.js) and HTML5.

Curious? Contact [my username] at alum.mit.edu. And yes, we have hired from these threads in the past!
Disclosure: before the whole completely ignoring me after these brief tests to show that I'm qualified thing; Dan Gailey was a very nice person and the reason I view HackerNews daily.
Are there any companies out there that try to predict these price hikes and recommend the best time for you to do something?

As in, "I noticed that you're asking for a cab. If I were you, I wouldn't be in a hurry, ask again in about half an hour and you'll get a much better deal." "I see you're at a bar. You should probably hop into a cab sometime soon, the prices are about to soar."

Bonus points if you can use multiple sources at once. "I know that you heard hotels in Houston are going to be expensive next week so you rescheduled your trip for next month, but if you go to these restaurants and use this deal for car rentals, you'll end up saving money overall by going next week."

Obviously we're a few years away from those kind of recommendations, but is anybody working on the core idea of predicting when it's best to use a given service?
Ipad Case
Ipad Case
I was surprised by the founder spending time in his letter to users talking positively about other players in the space (RelayRides, GetAround) and why their car sharing models should still work.

He didn't have to do this, but it struck me as a nice and unexpected gesture.
my guideline is to make things happen with as few lines as possible.
Actually I second this. In addition, you could make your own projects and keep using ASP classic.

I have personally had more ASP classic in my life than I wanted to, but aside from its age and possibly dwindling support, there's no reason you couldn't make a game or app that you wanted, target to a mobile platform and slowly learn ASP.Net or another language in the meantime.

I highly recommend Python, FWIW. I tried jumping from classic ASP to Perl, C and Ruby, but none of them stuck until I found Python, so at least from my perspective, it's an easy transition from ASP to Python. Your mileage may vary.
Ask HN: Tools for deploying combined/minifed js/css
What are your favorite tools to automate incorporating combined and minified css and js into your html when you deploy projects?
Ask, and forget about search
What you think about it?
I can predict what will happen next New Year Eve. Riders will hedge against Uber's unpredictable price inflation by demanding the ability to lock in a lower price several days or hours in advance. This "feature" is available now, it's called a limousine service.
A huge thing people forget with WordPress is that most .org-powered sites are on shared hosting. Simple little bugs make it easy to hack an average WP site, but just setting things up right can solve a ton of issues. I'd recommend the digwp.com security recommendations. The book has better info but is pricey.