skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm always fascinated by the lack of "space" like exploration projects for the ocean. Seemingly closer access, as if not difficult technical problems, but with greater access to actual resources. Thoughts as to why?

http://oceanexplorer.noaa.gov/

Meh link:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/george-spyros/colbert-report-d...
One of the biggest issues facing the oceans is a lack of awareness. You can't see what goes on in the ocean the same way you see what happens in a forest or in an African savanna. So people don't know that we waste 54 billion pounds of fish every year while 8 million people die of starvation. They don't know that every single fishery will have entirely collapse by 2048. Or that 90 percent of all large predators in the oceans are gone. And if people could see that. If people could see the amount of waste and destruction in the oceans they wouldn't stand for it for a second.

It should be noted however that perviously Dr. Ballard has, in the process of drumming up enthusiasm for increased funding and interest in ocean exploration, touched on the rich bounty of resources yet to be tapped beneath the sea floor. As always, the needs of man and nature are not mutually exclusive should we choose. Balance between the amazing scientific and educational benefits often described by Ballard and the interests of commerce can be achieved if we keep our eye on the prize.

http://roastedpinebark.hubpages.com/hub/Ocean-Exploration-Ne...
“The ocean is home to the greatest diversity of the planet. It’s still ironic that there are more footprints on the moon than there are on the bottom of the sea, and we’re only 7 miles away,” says biologist Sylvia Earle (Marino). Ocean exploration does not receive the amount of funding that it should, especially compared to the space program.

http://www.thespacereview.com/article/1202/1
Answers me a bit:
It is common for books on undersea exploration to include a throwaway comment about how we know far more about the surface of the Moon than the bottom of the ocean, or how more people have been into space, or on the Moon, than have reached the bottom of the sea. These comparisons are often not terribly accurate. Every year thousands of sailors travel under the oceans in military submarines, thousands of commercial divers work on pipelines, cables and oil rigs, thousands of hobbyists engage in recreational diving, and hundreds of researchers travel to great depths in the interests of science. Robots regularly venture where humans do not. What is usually fueling these claims is jealousy, or more politely, professional envy: the United States spends billions of dollars exploring space every year, and far less money exploring beneath the sea.

There are many similarities between deep sea exploration and space exploration, and also some important differences. Deep sea exploration has existed for nearly twice as long as space exploration, and followed a different path. But the differences are diminishing and the two endeavors are starting to look more and more like each other. More importantly, deep ocean exploration is having a major effect upon space exploration.
Interest and Motivation are the most important aspects of success.
I think your metaphor is slightly off. You're not just complaining about "trolling the internet", but more about trolling homo sapiens via its vulnerability to the two minute hate virus.

This exploit, most famously described by Orwell, is constantly used by folks of all persuasion to sway, motivate, manipulate, accumulate public opinion and to distract through the use of a two minute flash hate.

Sometimes best described by this image: http://songwroter.com/igod/ThisIsAnOutrage2.jpg

It is indeed a shame that on the cusp of 2012, this exploit has still not been closed.
SourceTree is definitely an awesome value and combined with the comamnd-line, is a great way to wrap your head around git.

Some may like GitX (L) -- free and open-source. http://gitx.laullon.com/
Blog Post - iPhone Photo Apps
"everything touched by shared_ptr needs to be under the shared_ptr regime or carefully bridged to it"

Well, yes. That's sort of the point. You can write old-style C++, or your can write modern C++, but the library designers are trying to make you think carefully when you're doing both, because that is a source of memory lifecycle bugs. Using the boost (now standard) pointers universally tends to dramatically reduce the chances of memory-related bugs in C++ code.

Not using shared_ptr is a code smell. Sometimes you have to do it, but if you're avoiding the use of the smart pointer classes in blue sky code, you're doing something wrong.
I definitely remember standardized test questions such as identifying what the shadow of an object should look like, what rotations of various shapes would look like, etc. But there were usually only a few of these. I don't specifically recall if any were on the SAT but definitely were on some of the tests I took in middle and high school.
The Most Important Lesson
Air Jordan 4 Doernbecher Superman
In this article, "value" means "perform standardized testing for". In that sense, we don't value much at all, because even the things we test for ("verbal", "math") we reduce to some inane blather for the purposes of testing.

From a larger viewpoint, what does this author think we do for football players? Do we not "value" them? In large part, what the players do is the "spatial intelligence" of the article. Do we not "value" airplane pilots? Same thing there.
In Lua:

function Y(f)
local function g(...) return f(g,...) end
return g
end

print(Y(function(rec,x)
if x < 2 then
return 1
else
return x * rec(x-1)
end
end)(5))
I'm only supporting IE8 and above now. The numbers for IE6 and IE7 are too small to care about anymore. At least for my demographic.
Yah, this is all super topical.
Advice needed- Address Correction and Segmentation Service
I am planning to start a SAAS business that will help e-commerce sites validate USA customer addresses. Our product is code complete and I get ~20 millisecond speed per address. I have tested with a lot of real address data and I am very close to Google Map's matches (~95%).<p>See the idea draft here: http://www.shatam.com/fixaddress.html<p>I am bouncing this idea in this forum. I am based in a small town in India and I don't want to spend money on hosting and data engineers prematurely.<p>Thanks
Google's Zeitgeist 2011 Video might spark Issues
Shoulda used Forth. It'd be fairly easy to go from assembler to an ultra bare bones Forth, and that could be built up to work like Pascal, until it looks like Pascal-written-backwards. Then write the compiler in that, and the translation and bootstrap would be trivial.
Hi there,

Perhaps you could add this to the list of TAP Producers in testanything.org. Here's the link for the Shell producers entry.

http://testanything.org/wiki/index.php/TAP_Producers#SH_.2F_...

There are two other tools that produce TAP in Shell there, but I haven't used any of them. Before going to sleep I decided give it a try to use Bats in Jenkins. Here's the result:

http://www.kinoshita.eti.br/2011/12/30/testing-shell-code-an...

Thanks for sharing.

Cheers, Bruno P. Kinoshita
Anyone care to elaborate on the evils of boost::bind? Maybe from experience?

I used boost::bind and boost::function in VC6 code of all places and I thought that the resulting code turned out to be pretty decent (I think newer compilers let you use slightly less verbose syntax), and I really liked having the functionality of being able to pre-bind certain arguments. For example, I had a menu item click handler that I was able to bind a call to a unary method, but with different parameters. I thought the resulting code was simpler overall (and easier to refactor).
With the ability to limit class action lawsuits, cell phone companies are going to keep trying to push the limits of what the market will allow. The FCC and bad PR are the primary weapons left to fight abuses like these.

"The U.S. Supreme Court has handed corporations a major victory. By a 5-4 vote, the court ruled Wednesday that companies can enforce contracts that bar consumers and employees from banding together to bring class action suits.

Ever read that long cell phone contract you signed when you enrolled for service? Well, look again. It likely has a provision requiring all disputes to be resolved by arbitration and barring consumers from banding together in a class action. Your credit card agreement, your cable agreement and maybe even your employment agreement have similar clauses"

http://www.npr.org/2011/04/28/135785797/supreme-court-impose...
28C3 - Datamining for hackers
Plagiarism & propaganda: the two evil anti-patterns of the written word. Those who don't understand the strengths, weaknesses and subtle tricks and traps of human language and communication are doomed to be victimized by those who do.
My friend calls this the Lazy Tax
You know what would be cool?

If you built an automated scraper that would pick up "stealth" sites (i.e. LaunchRock pages) from various tech publications, Twitter, Facebook when the founders send out links to their friends and family.

Your script checks everyday if those sites are still stealth. The day those sites go unstealth, you put them into a browsable pile.

What you get is a fun site where, on any given day, you can browse through the newest of the new products unveiling on the web without having to rely on tech publications to break them.

.

This was an exercise of a theory I'm working on that helps you generate good ideas. I've been thinking of writing a blog post about this. For now, here are the core ingredients used to make this idea good.

.

The emotive elements used:

- The joy when browsing through Show HN posts.

- Getting rid of the pain of having to keep current with tech blogs.

- Eliminates frustration knowing that tech blogs report only on a small number of products.

- Illicit joy of discovering sites before they are meant to go fully public.

- Meritocratic feel of evaluating each site directly.

- No need to divulge personal email.

.

Key UI elements you can use to magnify the joy:

- Very simple and straightforward keybind that lets you flick through recent "launched" site screenshot. (Using some of the wonderful website screenshot apps here.)

- Ability to take a look at a detailed chart of all the sites under monitoring / # of days in "stealth" / some metric of hype, popularity. Allow sorting by each of those modes.

.

Launch Plan:

- Just release the daily viewer and a simple chart of all the monitored sites. Post on HN in a week.

- Become a new "habit" time waster site for startup founders to browse through everyday.

- Easy monetization of tech audience traffic.

Let me know how it goes!
Speed as a competitive advantage, and set-based design for startups
Seriously mis-titled, since it's nowhere even close to the "Entire Wikipedia" – it's a tiny subset of the English-language Wikipedia from what I can tell.
If I were you, I would start messing around with Javascript first. Yes, there are MANY weird things about Javascript. But, the nicest thing about it (for you) is that all you need to start programming with it is a web browser!

Codecademy also has some great simple Javascript tutorials. All you need to worry about now is learning the basics, and the core concepts you learn in Javascript will apply to almost every other language you learn.
Damn you Safari. Damn you to hell.
I came here to say exactly the same thing... so, here's my other piece of advice: Think about very good managers that you've had; what was it that made them good managers? Try to emulate that (for me it was the weekly 1:1).
VPN's don't use TCP because having a reliable protocol with retransmission inside another reliable protocol with retransmission can cause lots of extra traffic when a packet is dropped and the data gets retransmitted multiple times, once from each of the protocols.
What do you think of the note taking on the Kindle? I've never been one to write in books so It's hard for me to say how well it works.
first and formost, learn something. don't waste too much time trying to find the "correct" language to learn. Here are three options:

-If you are interested in reading SICP, then learn scheme
-If you want something that is a good prereq for C++, learn C
-If you want a simple and very useful language, learn Python. You'll probably keep using it in the future
I can't second this. Too many people spend time trying to find the best way to do something. This is only possible when you understand the domain. Until then, move fast and break things!
http://www.wpi.edu/ , just a small sized tech school in the Northeast US.
I remember when you announced some months back, wasn't it a paid application? Great work either way.
I remember writing a "trojan horse" essay in secondary school, but in my case the target was my history teacher. I had noticed there's little correlation between the effort I put into my assignments and the grades I got--they were always good-ish. So one time I wrote an essay, not just with factual errors, but filled with blatant nonsense. This passed with a good grade too, so it was time to escalate the issue.
Don't express appreciation, show appreciation. What do I mean?

Express appreciation: Hi Jane, I really appreciate that you worked until midnight to get rid of that bug.

Show appreciation: Hi Jane, I looked through the code - and you've really improved it by replacing that buggy lookup with a hash function.

Anybody can do the first and it does not take time or effort. The second shows that you've taken some interest and taken the trouble to understand what they've done.
http://www.magno.me/startup-e-italia-qualcosa-si-inizia-a-mu... Here you can find a quite critical point of view from one of the best italian entrepreneurs and business angel.
Is written in italian for the italians who always criticize the italian venture capitalists, accusing them that they miss some good startups. But venture capitalists in this country are moving and growing, although there are still many gaps about seed capital. Also, the new Italian government has introduced measures to promote venture capital.
By the way, You're hacker enough to translate this post!
had a look at the code (specifically version 1.0). a couple of comments.

first it's not bad! much better code than when i was your age.

second, you have a huge assumption, i think, at line 73 where your code has "repo_age = int(time.time()) - first_commit_time". this assumes that the repository has seen edits recently, but think about a repository that has been dormant for a few months. the score of any bugfix will go down but there's no reason for it to: did bugs get fixed - and less "hot" - when the repo was dormant? no. what you need to do is to find the total timespan of the repository, looking at the min and max times of the commits, then base your scores on that.

keep up the good work!
Could hypersonic flight become a reality? ~ Daily World News
Good work getting a political article up to the front page.
A lot of staffing firms are suing former employee's over such.

On my own research, you are "safer" if you never allow the company to pay for premium options, you had the LN account prior to employment, and honor your non-compete post-employment.

All very tricky. I no longer use my LN for staffing to avoid this.
http://takethisjobnshoveitblog.com/2010/06/01/employee-sued-...

http://dailyblogma.com/featured/employers-battle-workers-lin...
In Minnesota, the IT staffing firm TEKsystems Inc. is suing three former employees and their new employer for allegedly violating non-competition, non-solicitation and non-disclosure agreements. What did the employees do? They continued to use their LinkedIn accounts, which they had set up while working at TEKsystems, after they had left the company. The lawsuit alleges the employees used LinkedIn to communicate with TEKsystems clients and contractors in violation of their departure agreements.

http://thenextweb.com/socialmedia/2011/12/30/think-going-aft...

A former Sr contract recruiter with Microsoft was told she had to give up her LN account by their HR department (cannot find at the moment) after leaving she told them no, given she already had the LN account.
I think parse is great... but seriously all your data with them???... and even if they give you back your data, can we make sense of it to write our own library? I just feel that it probably takes equal time (or may be little more) to write your own backend. Plenty of sample code out there, I wrote it in php and mysql even without any prior experience in php. And dont you have to learn parse platform to get it going in first place? then why not just write our own backend?
I was mostly thinking of your first version, where antimatter is really more of a battery. We would create it from some energy source at the launch site and use it as the most efficient rocket fuel of all time.

Most of my thoughts on anti-matter (though of course I am totally unqualified in every regard) is that the biggest problem with rockets these days is fuel efficiency. We are wasting most of the energy of putting something into space because most of the weight we put into space is actually the weight of the fuel and engine. A minority of the weight of the rocket on the ground is the actual payload intended for space.

There are, to my mind, three competing emerging technologies that could solve the mass-weight ratio problem. They all involve kissing chemical rockets goodbye.

1) Nuclear

2) Anti-matter

3) Energy-beaming technology.

I feel that number 1 gets too much attention.

Obviously, if we ever want to get to other stars, we will have to get to other planets first. But I think once we get a solar-system wide economy our options will be much wider.

I also feel that making predictions about what the human race is capable of in, say, 10,000 years of technological development is silly. Even if you look 200 years back at what people predicted about what we would be capable of now you see wild inaccuracies.

I think that anti-matter could work for an interstellar rocket though. Consider what would happen if we built a factory that could convert 90% of the solar energy hitting the planet mercury into antimatter fuel. I bet that you could create an interstellar rocket from that.

Maybe we'll never be able to do it. But I wouldn't count your chickens just yet.
can someone explain the reason why this concern is unwarranted?
Dr. Ron Paul is Not a Racist | Compassion AD [video]
Unfortunately I can't see any formulas correctly and the tables are quirky. Example: http://offline-wiki.googlecode.com/git/app.html?Permeability...
Huh. I've never been a fan of Safari and I knew it was missing somethings but "Damn you [Safari] to hell" for not supporting a quite new File API in HTML5. Huh.
This has little to do with C++.
You can switch to a larger subset in the settings but it is a still somewhat mistitled
If there would have been spatial tests in school, I might have thought of it as work. And if I had thought so I might not have played with my mechanic Lego's all afternoons.

But it would bee good to test spatial ability when applying to university level mechanics..
Thanks. That should really be the link instead of a 5 year old O'Reilly advertisement...
On startup transparency
Oberon – The Overlooked Jewel
This 2012, Facebook Going release Facebook Instant messenger
Github logins are now supported on pythonpackages.com
Five Resolutions for Aspiring Leaders
No. If I download a few hundred 5GB files through Cloudfront and mark them by setting a Cache-Control header of 1 year, Amazon is not keeping that stuff at the edge. The rate at which things are prematurely purged is a key variable in differentiating CDNs. The fact that people (apparently, such as yourself, despite the dismissive tone you took in your comment) don't understand stuff like this is what Amazon counts on, and is why they are getting as many clients as they do.
The files are hosted by Google Code: http://code.google.com/p/offline-wiki/downloads/list
Dude, I looked you up & you're coconuter. I've been following your adventures in the Philippines for a while. I didn't know you worked with Terence.

I met Terence here in the Bay Area and I had lunch with Terence when I was in Manila last May.
I thought of using jsmath or mathjax but they're too big.
The Clang build shipped (called "LLVM Compiler" in Xcode) is also buggy: it has issues with some floating point operations on armv6 (edit: I think; it might only be THUMB, or THUMB and armv6) builds (for the iPhone). There isn't a non-LLVM GCC build for the iPhone anymore, however, so you'll probably have to choose between this bug and the floating point one when building for iPhone.
Also COM scripting on Windows (and presumably Applescript on the Mac).

Sure there's a lot of special keyword magic involved, but nothing will get people more excited about programming than seeing how they can easily automate their routine tasks to make their life easier - that's what programming is supposed to be about anyway.
The GP is correct.

As one who has worked in the trenches as a mail admin (small potatoes, granted: a few small clients and a couple of small hosting companies), my observation has been than customers bitch way more about the MX servers which reject mail from our servers than the amount of spam in their own in-boxes. They don't give a shit that the recipient is rejecting legitimate mail -- they blame us for their problems. All because some asshat with a copy of TheBat! signed up and managed to send out a couple hundred "Russian bride" spams before we were alerted and nuked the account. I could probably fund a semester of college for some random kid with the time I've been paid to waste on de-listing and convincing idiot admins that one of their customers really wants to get mail from one of mine.

Sure, 99.9% of email hitting the typical in-bound relay is spam, but CPU, RAM, and disk I/O are cheap. Do per-inbox statistical filtering and let the user decide what spam is. Better yet, let client-side filters do the work. Do you think any person would stand to allow a US Postal carrier decide what was junk mail and then not deliver it? People just need to buck up and put in a little of their own effort.

I haven't used an RBL (even if its just one in a battery of weighted tests, such as with Spam Assassin) due to my loathing for the vigilante nature of the RBL scene as a whole. If you operate an RBL -- fuck you. If you are an admin that rejects mail based solely on being listed in RBLs, then fuck you, too. I know I sound like an asshole myself here, but the existence of RBLs has caused me and various mail end-users way more pain than any spammer has.

Bitter? Nah.

As a mail admin, I want to throw SMTP out the window. It wasn't spammers that killed the protocol, but rather the growth of use of RBLs.

Rant aside, I do have a question to contribute to the discussion: Has one of the larger RBLs ever listed one of the huge mail providers (Gmail, MSN/Hotmail, Yahoo?) for any length of time? I know I've gotten spams and scams from all three.
Your second idea has already been done, to a certain degree.
http://www.hindawi.com/journals/wcn/2005/930810/abs/ is one example of a (highly miniaturised) sensor network that communicates with a corner-cube retroreflector returning modulated laser light back to the base-station. It has no active comms emission.
Thanks for your comment!

About your concern: I too think it's strange but they put it clearly in their blog post:

"The timestamp used in the equation is normalized from 0 to 1, where 0 is the earliest point in the code base, and 1 is now (where now is when the algorithm was run)."

I could do `repo_age = commits[0]["time"] - commits[-1]["time"]` but I'd like to stick to what the blog post says.