skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Sounds like a lot of the pain points that Peter Armstrong and I ran into when writing our books, and that we're trying to solve on Leanpub (http://leanpub.com).

It's free to sign up, you write your book in Markdown and we convert it into PDF, epub and mobi for you. We pay you 90% - $0.50 for sales on our site.

You can put it on the iBookstore and Kindle store yourself (or be patient for a few weeks and we'll do that and provide an ISBN for you as well...).

If you've already written your book in HTML, we can convert it to Markdown for you automatically -- throw your HTML files into a Dropbox folder and click a button on Leanpub.

As for technical editors, our approach is to publish early (before you're done the book, preferably before you've written 100 pages) and have your readers function as development editors.

It's not a complete solution (yet), but I think we would have saved you tons of pain.

Drop me a line (scott@leanpub.com) if you have any questions.
This "issue" with the GPL is ridiculous. "Complying with the law is annoying and expensive, why would anyone bother?"

Replace "GPL" with "OSHA" or "child labor laws" and the stupidity of this argument becomes readily apparent. You are licensed to use the software given certain conditions are met. You meet the conditions or you do not use the software. Gaining a competitive edge is no justification for breaking your contract.

Start a media streaming service that just pirates everything; non-compliance would be a huge advantage there.
If it was just Savage that was offended, Savage's campaign would have gone exactly nowhere.
No, just ironic.
First, please, don't get me wrong because I am absolutely against his anti-gay policies myself.

From what I've read, the site which has given Santorum a meaning have made the demand that he stops talking negatively about homosexuals. If he does, the site will go away. This makes me think, even though I somehow think he deserves it: Isn't this essentially against free speech? Forcing someone to censor their opinions through non-violent troublemaking?

I probably didn't manage to phrase that well-enough to please anyone, but at least I've voiced my concerns.
Google's algorithm takes into account the timeliness of events. So despite his recent success, people are probably still looking up the word, rather than the person (and on a large enough scale to overcome the timeliness weighting).
You think Savage is the only motivated public figure with a large, hyper-engaged following?
Agree. I am currently hiring in Shanghai and even though the salary my company offers is way above market average (it even surpasses the average in Singapore), but I am still having a _very_ hard time to find experienced candidates with more than 5 years of software engineering experience. No, my coding questions are straight forward and no tricks embedded. I do ask some open-ended engineering questions, just to see if a candidate can narrow down the solution space by posing assumptions.
Pay Attention and Give a Shit
> I'm more bewildered to why no tablets seem to have multi-user functionality.

That's the first thing I wondered about when Apple released the ipad: from the start, this looked like a family/eminently shareable device (and within a month you had reports of it being used as a shared family device, picked and left on the living room table for quick sessions of browsing or game), it felt weird that all the tablets were single-user, and the more time passes the weirder it is.
Interesting behavioral study. However, the Scientific American authors make the conclusions appear a lot more concrete than they actually are.

Previously, researches have found that fluoxetine (Prozac) actually suppresses neuronal growth in vitro:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20377614

Fluoxetine treatment is often associated with an increase in BDNF (Brain-derived neurotrophic factor), a protein which encourages the development of new synapses in the brain areas responsible for higher-order thinking and other functions. At first glance this sounds great, as the Scientific American authors concluded. However, other researches, such as those in the study I linked above, hypothesize that this increase in BDNF and neuronal growth may actually be due to neuronal insult from fluoxetine. In other words, the increase in plasticity and new cell growth might be a healing response from the brain following damage caused by fluoxetine.

Furthermore, fluoxetine is an older SSRI with effects and receptor affinities that extend beyond the serotonin system. When using fluoxetine for research, caution must be taken to separate the effects on the serotonin system from the effects of other functions of fluoxetine. Without further study, we can't know if these effects apply to all SSRIs, or just fluoxetine.

I should also note: All of this is great for future R&D of next-generation anti-depressants, but it should not be used by anyone when determining a treatment path. Despite the study I linked above, to my knowledge we haven't seen any deleterious effects on memory or cognition due to SSRI treatment in the general population. The bottom line is that we don't know why or how SSRIs work (despite what the drug company marketing department wants you to believe), but they are effective for many people. And combined with therapy, the rate of remission improves even more.
Thanks for correcting my errors.
I worry that our focus on disruptive ideas is hurting entrepreneurship.
You keep using that word 'shortage'. I do not think it means what you think it means.

There is no such thing as a shortage in a free market. It's an oxymoron.
Kodak Teeters on the Brink
With Prozac being one of the more mild antidepressants, one must imagine the results from even more refined drugs produced in recent decades. I also wonder how the mood stabilizers with antidepressant effects would intersect here.

But, remember that anxiety is one of the most common side effects of Prozac and similar drugs. Perhaps for every patient positively affected you have another who's anxiety is actually amplified.

Edit: Why downvote? This is both factual and informed by my anecdotal experience...
Meh, this is just pro-pharma propaganda. Dozens of drugs increase brain plasticity, but you don't hear Eli Lilly funding journal articles saying that everyone should smoke weed or drop acid in combination with therapy. What exactly is so special about Prozac? Absolutely nothing.
They would, but you'd be a bit more obvious: walking around with a surgical mask isn't really discreet.
Machinist or high school math teacher.
> Oh, I'm sorry, you wanted instantaneous user switching? That's a smidgen harder than the 40-year-old solutions :)

These OS have been able to run multiple concurrent user sessions for 40 years, and fast user switching has been a feature of all desktop OS since Windows 9x went the way of the dodo.

There are specific issues (core services of these systems are probably — sadly — coded with the idea that a single user is running), but nothing which should be hard to fix.
In whose 'literary' eyes is 1984 a minor work? It's an important piece in the 20th C. literary canon.

And you've completely discounted the post-modern literature of post-WWII, including Nabokov (!), DeLillo, Franzen, Morrison. Them's fighting words.
I'm almost convinced at this point if somebody simply built a facebook like interface, and used email as the messaging protocol, but didn't display it like an email, more like a FB conversation (as opposed to a threaded or gmail-like conversation view), that it would be used. There's not really much that's offered by alternate messaging solutions that email can't do if it existing in the right sort of framework:

1) Person-to-person? Check

2) Person-to-group? Check

3) Group-to-group? Check

4) Group-to-person? Check

5) Multimedia? Check

6) Fancy formatting? Check

7) Attached files? Check

8) Near real-time? Check (most of the time)

9) Deliver Fault tolerant? Check

10) Federated/distributed? Check

Why everybody seems to want to reinvent email is beyond me. About the only thing that FB or G+ offer is the storage of a server-side contact list so I don't have to remember their email address and the use of a white-list for sender/receivers so I don't get spam. Offer the same with email and a decent web interface and you've basically recreated any "modern" social network, except it'll be built on a time-tested, robust protocol that's already ubiquitous across the internet and already has billions of users.

edit I guess what I'm saying is that it's the application layer (server and client side) in the email equation that needs most of the rework, not the protocol layers.
Back in the old days, my young friend, we had these awesome devices called modems. They translated digital data to sounds (and back) for transmission across telephone lines. I'm sure you can find a picture and complete technical details somewhere.
Anyone who says it's easy either hasn't written a book or they're referring to getting the finished product into the Kindle store.

Everything else (writing/editing/marketing) takes serious effort that most people aren't willing to do.

It's almost like learning an instrument. Anyone can do it and everyone wants to, but it's only a small percentage of people who will actually commit to it.
What program did you write the books in, and would Markdown have worked for you as a writing option?

I'm asking since I'm doing customer development for my startup Leanpub, and we're trying to solve this exact problem. As an author, you shouldn't need to pay for PDF, MOBI or EPUB conversion, a storefront, blog theme, etc. You should only need to write the words -- and do your promotion on Twitter, of course.

My cofounder Scott posted above in this thread. Please feel free to email either of us if you have any questions; I'm peter@leanpub.com.
The article suggests that Uber subsidize the price on NYE. Given that the price is set by demand, that doesn't make any sense. However much Uber or Amex subsidizes the price, there are still X people that want rides and Y < X rides available, and the amount you the rider have to pay to win the auction is the same.

The anger came because Uber didn't do a good job of setting expectations. Their customers expected that they could get a ride anytime, even NYE, if they were willing to pay a certain premium over what a cab would cost. But the premium on NYE was much larger than the customers (rightly or not) expected. If Uber had done a better job of managing expectations, they wouldn't have angry customers.
People generally think the Great Wall is pretty cool, and also that it was effective and did good things.
If this Video does not make you want to TRAVEL Incarcerate yourself
He'll never mop that up.
Absolutely. Keep in mind that the OP is coming from a Ruby background and TFA targets people more familiar with high-level interpreted languages than with C/C++.

BTW, I think though I cannot be sure that both the GCC and MSVC std::string implementations use this optimization in release mode, but I gotta dash and don't have time to verify this fact, so take it with a grain of salt, if you will.
Nope. But his worked and became a legitimate neologism. That's how language works.
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Heh. I would have gone with "Ruby Optimizations: Why short strings are an order of magnitude faster" or something.
Your argument is that google should kowtow to power?

No thanks.
As to the noise and data corruption:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Error_Control_Coding#Data_stora...
When it's competing against a completely legitimate neologism?

Certainly.
If I have time this weekend I will pop the battery on my macbook and do an erlang compile on an encrypted sparse image both on the rotational drive and the ssd. I'll report back on how much energy was consumed for (encrypted,non-encrypted) x (ssd,rotational)

batteries derate rapidly as the current draw goes up. They are not linear. For my own edification it would be nice to know what kind of energy hit encryption takes on both storage mediums.
The thing is, the pagerank should not matter. What you want when you search the internet is a relevant result, regardless of its pagerank.
If the system relies too much in the pagerank to determine whether a site is relevant to your search terms or not, well, yes, the system is broken.
+= is not append

str += append_str

is the equivalent to:

str.dup << append_str

That is, it copies the string and then appends to the copy. Benchmarking the speed of a true append is difficult because in order to preserve the original string in the benchmark you must dup it anyhow (done here outside of the bench.report block). However, the bigger the strings get, the more pronounced the advantage of appending is.

user system total real
add 2 0.260000 0.000000 0.260000 ( 0.263414)
join 2 0.320000 0.000000 0.320000 ( 0.325341)
append 2 0.230000 0.010000 0.240000 ( 0.235669)

add 3 0.500000 0.000000 0.500000 ( 0.497219)
join 3 0.840000 0.020000 0.860000 ( 0.866401)
append 3 0.260000 0.010000 0.270000 ( 0.268676)

add 4 0.360000 0.040000 0.400000 ( 0.397778)
join 4 0.970000 0.030000 1.000000 ( 0.997321)
append 4 0.280000 0.000000 0.280000 ( 0.281020)

add 5 0.460000 0.000000 0.460000 ( 0.454780)
join 5 0.910000 0.030000 0.940000 ( 0.946600)
append 5 0.330000 0.000000 0.330000 ( 0.336214)

Code: https://gist.github.com/1563290
I disagree that sales is a menial task.

If it were, there would be a small difference between the best salespeople and the worst. Everything I've seen suggest the variance is bigger in sales than it is in programming.
Correct!

http://www.taxesforexpats.com/expat-tax-advice/citizenship-s...

If you move back to say Australia there are still negative tax consequences in so far as some Australian tax strategies that are quite beneficial will have those benefits negated when the US tax system is brought into account.

This will vary from individual to individual so seek a professional tax agents advise for your situation.
The world is full of businesses who ignore legal requirements because they think the risk of prosecution is low and the benefits are worthwhile. Software isn't a special case. What's unusual in this case is that Google's happily making money off the companies breaking the law and doesn't seem to care.
Learning Smalltalk
I wouldn't call it "forcing" Santorum to censor his opinions, as far as I know he hasn't done so.
It's hard to tell what all he's including but: art adds up fast; chuck in a professional editor, layout if you don't know how to do it yourself, web design if you don't know how to do it, advertising.

A couple grand isn't any where near the "screwed" mark.
Be careful. Anxiety is a common side effect only at the beginning of SSRI treatment. Once serotonin receptors down-regulate to accommodate the new levels of extra-cellular serotonin, steady-state is reached and the anxiety usually abates.

Unfortunately, this causes many patients to abandon treatment before the the therapeutic value is apparent. This is one of the biggest obstacles in treating depression.

Of course, there are always exceptions. However, most of the time you will find that those who complain about SSRIs inducing anxiety did not actually wait long enough for the effects to become apparent.

Also, your suggestion that Prozac is one of the more mild SSRIs is completely backwards. Prozac is one of the earliest SSRIs and has a rather broad spectrum of receptor affinities. Newer SSRIs are more selective and have better side-effect profiles. Escitalopram is the gold standard here.
Fair warning: this page loads ten flash videos that made my browser crawl for about 15 seconds(latest Chrome on Lion)
I wonder what percentile he represents for income earned among independent Android developers. I would guess somewhere near the top, but I'd be happy to be wrong.
Dan Savage didn't just make this change on Google, he actually made the change on the English language as a whole. Santorum is the only name for the substance, and there are large groups of people who are aware of the neologism but do are not (or were not) aware of the person or the history of the term. Santorum is just as valid as any other neologism that's been around and alive for the better part of a decade.

The point is, the Google bomb isn't the only "artifact" of Dan Savage's campaign. If this association were something that only existed in Google's SERPs I would be more inclined to agree with your point, but it's not. Google is not the only thing, and arguably not even the biggest or most important thing, that was affected. The association with the term is real, for a very real and meaningful sense of the word "real."

Now, I will agree that the association is over-valued due to the Google-bombing, and most users this month are better served by politician than the term in the results page right now, but that's an issue of poorly-ranked results, rather than artificially-constructed results, which is qualitatively less troubling.
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The CopyHackers books are amazing, both content and design. Just curious, how did promoting your book through AppSumo work out? Or how did it compare to the initial launch on HN?
Hm? How come? `or` is short-circuiting in the sense that when we have `a() or b()`, b() is only called if a() returns something falsy. Where would the issue arise?

Sure, abusing or in this way might seem hackish, but I feel like it's a net win for readability.
There are several lisp dialects. Some of them have even been used for comercial games. Common lisp and clojure(the two most popular dialects) can be used to write pretty much any kind of software. But as a first language, I don't know. Scheme(the third most popular lisp) was my second language, and i had no trouble with it, but i already had a year of python under my belt. i'd say learn python, ruby or javascript first.
It does seem to make sense that increasing the ability to learn new behaviors would be beneficial if one was experiencing a food shortage.
They probably make it a pain because they don't want you to spend the next decade making money here and sending it back to the mother country.
This was a great insight:

Motivation is in the mind; follow-through is in the practice. Motivation is conceptual; follow-through is practical. In fact, the solution to a motivation problem is the exact opposite of the solution to a follow through problem. The mind is essential to motivation. But with follow through, it's the mind that gets in the way.

...

Here's the key: if you want to follow through on something, stop thinking.
A friend of mine implemented the GA-generated game Yavalath for Android. You can find it on Android Market at https://market.android.com/details?id=boardgamer.yavalath.

Yavalath has surprising depth, but it is no BattleField 3.

It is nice to see BoardGameGeek listed on HN.
Amazon only pays $17 out of $50, since when? I thought the common knowledge was Amazon pays 70% the full retail price to the authors of e-books.
Sure, but my point was that it's not a one-way exchange of value. The sales staff may be paid less, but they get lower risk in return. Whether they like that is up to them.
I doubt there are many with several apps past the 100k downloads mark. Still, it's encouraging to see that it's possible to hit those numbers with relatively simple apps.
What are the good technical reasons? Quick, give a canned 1min response ...See I thought so. There are good technical reasons but I would probably not mention this in a 3 minute tv interview where I couldn't expand
The 100 Device Wall
In what ways is this so different from many instances of political satire and parody throughout history?
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I strongly doubt that apple is going to make 300+ DPI screens 10+ inches across. I could always be wrong, but it seems like the amount of horsepower it would take just to draw the screen would destroy battery life. Maybe some super high end, three prong "Cinema Display", but definitely not a mobile device.
Chaquetas de Jean
> so they aren't really increasing their risk by that much.

The rate of commission is not where the risk lies. Commissions are, from a short-term perspective, risk-free for the business. If the sales staff don't sell, you pay them less; the risk of divergence between revenue and expenses is lessened. The incidence of risk is pushed onto the sales staff.

If expenses are fixed but revenue is variable, then you face higher risk as a business.

In this case Fog Creek are taking the incidence of downside risk on themselves; in exchange for the loss of upside risk they will pay higher fixed wages.
10 Must-Have Features for Every Virtualization Backup,Disaster Recovery Solution
10 Must-Have Features for Every Virtualization Backup and Disaster Recovery Solution
I just had a look at leanpub for a friend whos about to start writing a book, it looks fantastic! I love the idea of writing markdown files into a dropbox folder, that sounds like a workflow made in heaven to me.
Just like Obama pissed off Rush Limbaugh so the current health care reform law (which is well over 50% republican originated ideas), is called Obamacare?

Yeah, it happens.
The problem of assigning a "fun value" to a game is an active area of research. Julian Togelius and Georgios Yannakakis are some of the big names looking at this topic right now.

One approach is to use tried-and-true statistical techniques to build models from user feedback. Often a player will be provided two variations of a game and asked which one was more fun. This input, combined with various other factors (how did the player perform? how many enemies were there in each version?) help construct some sort of classifier to automatically evaluate new game variations.

An alternate approach, which I explored during my Master's research on the topic, was to analyze existing levels in commercially released videogames to construct a model of fun from that, as opposed to considering subjective human feedback. I chose to analyse Super Mario Brothers. It turns out you can see a very characteristic pattern in how the difficult portions of the levels are arranged. This pattern of difficulty takes the form of a rhythmic interplay of difficult and easier portions, and can be nicely described in terms of Flow and the Yerkes-Dodson law. We used this a criterion for evaluating automatically generated levels as a part of a larger system.

The applications of this are pretty wide. Perhaps we could automatically evaluate web page interactions according to a certain model of fun to engage users? Perhaps we can detect when people are not having fun and automatically generate alternate designs?
We really need to do a better job arguing this case. This is about justice vs. injustice, not jobs in tech vs. jobs in movies/tv.

Here's the analogy I tweeted a couple weeks ago: "SOPA is the equivalent of allowing Disney to shut down a restaurant because a customer drew Mickey Mouse on a napkin."

I think anyone can recognize the injustice in that.
They're attempting to create a new word as part of a smear campaign. I don't see how attempting to use Rick Santorum's last name as the name for a sex act could be divorced from the idea that it's attempting to sully his name or how other people think of him when they hear his name.

edit: I misread this:

> I also think that your description of the smear
> campaign as an attempt to game Google is misleading.

thinking that you were claiming that it wasn't a smear campaign. My apologies.
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Thanks! The whole Copy Hackers endeavor is still going really well --- and it's super-fun.

The AppSumo promo blew my mind. But nothing will ever compare to what happened on HN... probably because I feel so much gratitude toward this particular community. :)