skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
By the end of 1998, Google had an index of about 60 million pages

Sounds like a marvelous challenge. Anyone have other similar "technological frontier then, high-school science fair project now" type challenges? OPer notes BioCurious as one. A major factor in education is walking kids thru a subject from basic principles to state-of-the-art, recreating historical milestones along the way.
Ask HN: Is the "commitment form" suitable for startups?
When I used to work at a large software company in the past, there was an obligation of filling out Commitment Form every month or so.

Basically what it includes is, short descriptions of which tasks are you going to do in this period, details and accountabilities, related milestones and due dates in a tabular format.

After that period finishes, every employee used to have a one-to-one meeting with his/her manager and evaluate which ones are completed and which ones had problems achieving. This was also a way of officially keeping records of the progress done by an employee.

Do you recommend this technique for performance measurement in a small (bootstrapped, 2-5 people, "working remotely") internet startup? Are there any internet startups applying similar concepts as far as you know?
Yeah, totally true. That still doesn't make it easy for an unknown to come in an topple and established brand. That said, Google did it.. :)
You can even point domains at these, so that GitHub hosts your content but it's all under your domain name.
You want dirty toilets? That's not very inviting or pleasant..
It'd be great if when I double-check a domains availability and it comes back negative, it turns red and is removed from future searches.
Agreed. It's sad to see this article so highly voted when there's a (slightly) better version already on the front page.
I routinely look into my customers' data and didn't really have second thoughts about it.

I even automated process of looking into customer's data. The main goal is to catch spam and scam and delete such accounts.

May be it's specific of my business (job board), but isn't scam and spam is risk in any business to at least a certain extent?
Lazy lists in prolog
Have you never written a server application?
Matcha Green Tea Powder | Breakaway Matcha
Sure, for some of the things that may be true. However, he doesn't have a basement full of junk, kitchen cupboards full of slowly perishing food, or a car etc.; things that most people do and could do fine without. Whether or not this all balances out as an overall plus, I cannot fathom.

As I said - he isn't doing it perfectly, but he is doing some of it better. The main problem seems to be it is being oversold by him/the media.
A pile of servers and a special algorithm. Now that the algorithm is published, rather than yet-to-be-invented, it would be very possible. So "Dad's credit card and a few late nights reading papers".
tl;dr version: Computers and disks are a lot cheaper now.

Basically the article boils down to this, what counted as a 'cluster' in 1998 is a single system in 2008, what used to take hundreds of disk drives to store, you can store on 1 today.

Not particularly deep, but useful to think about from time to time. There is a quote, perhaps apocryphal, which says

"There are two ways to solve a problem that would take 1000 computers 10 years to solve. One is to buy a 1000 computers and start crunching the numbers, the other is party for 9 years, use as much of the money as you need to buy the best computer you can at the end of the 9th year, and compute the answer in one day."

The idea that computers get more powerful every year, and that in 10 years they will be more than 1000x more powerful than the ones you would have started with so one can solve the same problem.

Of course they haven't been getting as powerful as quickly as they once were, but the amount of data you can store per disk has continued to outperform.

The point is that if you are designing for the long haul (say 10 yrs from now) you can probably assume a much more powerful compute base and a lot more data storage.
Display Picasa photos (Pharo Smalltalk)
Wikipedia blackout discussion
I work for a small start-up in a completely non-technical role. I have no programming ability and previously had no desire, but since I've started working here I've had the desire to learn some.

Until Codecamedy came along it was probably just going to be a project I continuously put off until something else changed to make it happen. But now I'm signed up to get the Code Year emails, it's something I'll probably remember to do from week to week.

Anyway, back to the usability. I agree with the author that it's easy to make mistakes and feel confused with learning to code on Codecademy. But from what I've gathered so far it's easy to make mistakes and feel confused with learning to code, period.

Programming involves a lot of testing, of trial and error, to come to the right answer, or more relevantly; a better answer. Codeademy is giving people the opportunity to ease into that sense of trial and error, but it needs to be there nonetheless, because that is the reality of programming.

If you make a mistake, such as typing with a close bracket quote, and then you get an error message, what you do from there is probably a good signal of whether you should continue learning to code. If that happens to you five times, and you keep thinking "huh, why did that happen?" and then continue working on it until you figure it out, there's a good chance you have the sort of insatiable quest for understanding that you probably need to be a programmer. On the other hand, if you give up after a few tries, then it's likely that you don't have that same need to understand the logic behind it.

Codecademy is obviously trying to bring programming to a wider audience, but it shouldn't simplify it to the point where it's not giving a realistic picture of the very nature of programming. You can choose to take the stairs over diving in; but you still gotta get in the pool.
That's everyone I know practically. What exactly are you trying to say.
As a side note, the author has a very beautiful color scheme on the screenshot. I suspect the Solarized scheme.
Nehemiah Scudder for President
Agreed, but I dont think TC writers know the definition of those words.

Remember - they are "evangelists" "bloggers" and "technologists" not journalists.
BPM Lives on...
teehan+lax's Android PSD template is definitely worth grabbing too:
http://www.teehanlax.com/downloads/android-gui-psd-high-dens...
I very much agree with this. But I still think that if someone types in 2+3 at that second exercise, the program should compute it properly and not error out :)
Offer HN: TravelsLikeThis.com
I'm not much of a coder, so when I tried to create a companion site to usesthis.com (with the assistance of the creator), it was tough. In the end, I couldn't fully figure out the technical aspects of running the site (namely how to get my host to cooperate). So I'm offering up this project.

The idea is simple- a sister site to usesthis.com- travelslikethis.com where you can learn how people travel (all the travel tips), where they go/have been, and what they bring.

I wouldn't mind taking another stab at running the site if some of the .htaccess/subdomain stuff is figured out (Dreamhost doesn't seem to support the way The Setup uses subdomains per each post).

If you think you'd want to work with me, let me know. If not, but you would be interested in taking on the project yourself, let me know and I'll transfer the domain to you.
If these non-programmers are using Git and adding Gemfiles and such, is adding a dozen line gemspec to the repository that big a deal? And if it is, couldn't you fill out most of the gemspec automatically using a command line script?
Erm... JSON is pure text - so not much of an innovation in truth - I can store it in SQLight right now.
From the perspective of a f/t telecommuting programmer - a commitment form sounds awful. We usually have a few short meetings each week to review what's being worked on, and to bring up any new tasks. When you have a team as small as you're describing, you'd really function better from less overhead and less micromanagement.

That said, if you're in a situation where most tasks tend to take under a week, you could probably effectively use a ticket/bug system to keep track of what needs to be done.
Ask HN: When to disclose RSI in applying for a new job?
Hey everyone,

First time posting here, so please be gentle!

tl;dr - I have RSI in my forearms and wrists. I get flare ups that slow me down, but on average it is manageable. I am looking for a new job. When/how do I let my prospective employer know?

About ten years ago I injured my wrists and forearms really bad. It was so bad that I couldn't open a door without excruciating pain. I was working only 10 hours a week at the time, so somehow i hung onto my job and after a year was able to up my hours to 25/week. About 5-6 years ago, I was healed enough that I could actually type pretty normally, but I stayed part time until about 8 months ago. Going full time has worked out ok.

I get flare ups now and then that slow me down to the point where I will consciously try to avoid typing as much as practical. It usually takes 2-3 days for the flare up to subside, but can be up to several weeks. At my current job I telecommute, and have several hour+ meetings (ie: no typing), and some days there's just not a lot of work to do, so it has been really easy. The problem is I am bored out of my mind, and unhappy at work--I've been stagnating for a couple years now. I've been itching to find a new job, but I'm worried that when I find one, it'll wind up being too much for me, and then I'll be out of luck and unemployed with a family to provide for.

Even with these concerns, I'm unhappy enough at my current job that I have started looking, and already have some phone screens scheduled this week. At what point do I need to bring up my RSI issues to my prospective employer? Has anyone gone through a similar experience?

Thanks!

ps - I'm having a flare up right now, so forgive me if I am not very vocal in the comments.
Surely they are, but not for Android 4.0.
So... did it load fast? Was the content readable, selectable and natively scrollable? Did I break any of your regular habits, like 'back' or 'open in new tab' or copy/pasting links? Did you get a good sense of the site's contents and purpose from your first visit? Does everything remain accessible if you turn off JavaScript?

It's like everyone assumes nobody but them knows how to make websites.
I've been meaning to ask someone this: do you mean that your return (if you receive a return) would be an additional $20, or that you are taxed as though you made $20 less? Sorry if this is elementary or too off-topic.
Ask HN: HN G+ circle is blowing up my gchat
I mean, I love y'all, but there's about 200 ppl in my chat list right now.
I think what he's saying that some programmers have shifted to dynamic languages for productivity as faster processors have made the use of statically-typed languages less critical. He foresees a similar shift away from lock-based concurrency models due to the increased number of cores.

He may be right about the move away from the threads&locks popularized in the 1990's, but I agree with you that it's not such a great analogy.
You might be interested in postgresql's hstore: http://www.postgresql.org/docs/9.0/static/hstore.html

It's a key-value store that allows querying, which is what I think you are lamenting in your comment. Here's a bit more about how to query and index with hstore: http://lwn.net/Articles/406385/. It's pretty simple and doesn't have anywhere near the number of querying possibilities that MongoDB has, but it can be used for on-the-fly column names (similar to JSON). You can only query on the root node's children, unlike the open-ended possibilities in NoSQL.
The government solution to a problem
Unlikely. Page and Brin had an absolute grip on linear algebra. I studied the same thing in U, but never dug in deep enough. I recognize what they did afterward, but didn't persue it enough at the time, particularly Eigenvalues.

A 14 year-old implementing Pagerank in 1998 would have to be Reed Richards.
OK, here's a hint: we're talking about where to host besides Heroku because of Heroku's 76hr outage last Spring...
I thought making as many checks as possibly static instead of dynamic generally made things faster, maybe it's worded backwards?
What is the defining characteristic of a local variable?
I've pledged I'll donate if they protest SOPA and I'll keep my promise. I hope everyone else who has pledged will do the same.
If Microsoft made their own hardware, this comparison might be more apt. Nobody's complaining you can't run Linux on 360 out of the box.
Those huge steerable dishes are for talking to deep space - like the Voyager probes.

For LEO satellites like the one we are talking about you don't need anything like that. Think about the dishes you see for satellite TV - they are tiny. That's all you need - and those talk to GEO, which is much farther.

You don't need radar either - the orbit is well known from when it flies over your main base. Radar doesn't have the ability to detect spin and orientation anyway, for that you use a large optical telescope - which again, you don't need permission to use.

As for the military satellites, those are routinely cataloged and tracked by amateurs (with optical telescopes), the US doesn't do anything to stop them. It wishes it could, but it can't, so doesn't try.
The Lies Of NBCUniversal's Rick Cotton About SOPA/PIPA
These edgy attention-grabbing titles are getting a bit too strong in my opinion.
I think the cumulative value of all the resources ever paid for by many subsistence farmers or others considered "poor" on a world scale probably wouldn't add up to the cost of the MacBook Pro in Andrew's laptop. I believe his demands on infrastructure may be a little more too. So are mine.

Of course Andrew's claim to minimalism is only relative to most people in the developed world. But there are tens of thousands of twentysomethings from developed countries travelling the world for extended periods of time with a similar amount of luggage (Most of us spend a bit more on clothes and a bit less on laptops; guess it depends on whether you prefer the inconvenience of laundry or Windows!) It seems to be as mandatory as national service for youthful Australians (and a mandatory experience after national service for Israelis). The secret about life on the road being fun got out a while ago.

It's not Andrew's fault, of course, if news coverage tries to turn him into some sort of innovator he's perhaps never claimed to be.
I think you're missing the point. With this feature you'll be able to write a query that returns a JSON string of the results, possible as a field in a larger result set. It also validates that the JSON parses on the way in.
That's not even close to what he's saying - I thought that was actually a rhetorical weakness, to tell the truth.

What he's saying is that the existence of the cloud and library advances such as MapReduce and APIs mean that the bar is lowered, when writing new software, to an extent it's hard even to comprehend.

Every time I get a module from CPAN I still get a shiver down my spine, remembering trying to do new and interesting things in the 80's and early 90's and every single time ending up trying to build a lathe to build a grinder to grind a chisel to hack out my reinvented wheel.
The commodity components used to assemble a tablet are vastly less expensive than they would be if not used by so many other manufacturers.

Where's the Raspberry Pi of tablets?
what if I want the word "tv" in my domain...?
That's not the point. The right to bear arms is part of the founding document that had to be written for the colonies to even sign the Constitution. Without every right in the Bill of Rights, we would never have been a nation.

It doesn't matter if the rest of the world doesn't have this right. What matters is that we do, and any prohibition of it is evidence that the government is overstepping its bounds and performing unconstitutional acts by restricting us in ways explicitly disallowed.
Facebook IPO Hitting in Late May
Google Honors Martin Luther King Jr. Day With "I Have A Dream" Logo
I'm so happy to see this progress in the mainstream's view of programming skill. My dream is that some day coding will be like driving a car: pretty much everyone can do it for their daily needs, and those interested can take it to a professional level. You want to access your banking activity in a certain way? It's not (won't be) a big deal to just write a little code to do it your way. Same thing for lifestyle tracking, photo management, everything changes when everyone has the ability to do things their own personal way.

At the same time we can do our part to make that real. We can start with more novice-friendly frameworks, better documentation for things that already exist, and maybe even more specialized languages that are geared towards casual coders.
programming is the literacy of our generation. like reading and writing was for our grandparents.
10 Search & Social Resolutions For A Very Mobile 2012
You make the guy sound like Pol Pot rather than a dude who just lives out of a suit case.

Your post is at least keeping with the theme that has been prevalent over the past few days, HN is just mean now.
The Boredom Manifesto
'And if you'd wanted to use a hash table, if you even knew what a hash table was, you'd have to write your own.'

BSD's hash table code has been around since probably longer than the author has been alive.

Here is the FreeBSD version, it's very compact and works quite well: http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/cvsweb.cgi/src/lib/libc/db/hash/h...
I want to do intersections of polygons - think "what neighborhoods have overlap with this political district." Many systems seem to have one but not the other, i.e. "store points, query by polygon", or "store polygons, query by point(and maybe radius)".

Storing polygons is probably key - if there's a query-by-radius or bounding box I can make an enclosing circle for my query and then do my own intersection tests with my query polygon.
Nick Clegg plans more employee ownership
This is an excellent example of link bait
People Lie More in Emails than Face to Face
SOPA is dead.
Congress ready to drop Sopa vote after White House says it would not support legislation that threatens openness of internet
Real Madrid vs Barcelona today on Wednesday 01/18/2012 King's Cup Spain
She already sold the company (to investors). If she didnt want to sell the company she should have bootstrapped.
Oh, that is very intersting, thanks!

I'm (quite happily) tied to Postgres because I'm using PostGIS, but the ability to add freeform data to a location would be ideal. Looks like I may already have a solution here.
I do frequent high end restaurants and clubs. But not being "acceptable in society" leading to "never wearing them" is quite different from not being acceptable in a high end restaurant or club.
Apple to Amazon: This Means War | Particle Debris
"[congressperson], i'm relieved that you and your colleagues agree with me that SOPA is not in americans best interests. I'd like to thank your for listening to the opinions of your constituents instead of bowing to pressure from lobbyists. I know that hollywood will continue to push for more legislation like this in the future, and i'm grateful to have a representative in congress that will continue to fight for my rights." blah blah blah...

call your congressperson, let them know that you we've won (even if we really haven't) and that we're still watching, we aren't going to forget, and that they can't pass this when we're not looking. This is a big win for us, because everybody likes friendly phone calls more than they do angry yelling. SOPA being shelved allows us to continue to push our message, but from a friendlier perspective that makes us easier to listen to.

the shutdowns still need to happen. people need to be know what kind of legislation the entertainment industry is trying to pass and we need to be ready to fight against it next time it comes up. if wikipedia shuts down tomorrow, it sets a precedent so that next time this issue comes up people already know the consequences.
You've failed to consider tons of other applications. What about AI programs like Watson? Also, scientific computing isn't always of the "embarrassingly parallel" sort.
Which startup should I go to?
I'm a student at Hyper Island (http://www.hyperisland.com/) in Sweden and I'm going on an internship after the summer holidays. I really want to go to startup in the San Francisco area but I'm a bit unsure which one I want to go to.

I really love what Nest.com, Stripe.com, SquareUp.com and Pinterest.com are doing. They are solving real problems and seem to have a lot of talented people with them.

Where would you go if you where in my situation?

Thanks in advance to all the amazing HN-people.

Holger
HolgerE.dk
If all non-US citizens that use the English Wikipedia had US citizen friends they could engage politically, US politics would look vastly different already.
Obviously in this kind of situation we (Zappos customers like myself) need to change any re-used passwords since the stolen unsalted hashes :( can be cracked. However, I have no idea which of several passwords I used at Zappos! I would normally just try logging in with each of them, but since you've reset all passwords, it looks like I won't be able to. Is there any chance of helping with this? I need to make sure it wasn't a password I use on any important sites (or derived from such a password).

I'm looking for the data dump right now, in case it was posted publicly--that's probably the only way I'll be able to answer my question since I doubt Zappos will cooperate :(

As someone who was just bit by the Stratfor data loss, this is the second month in a row. Fortunately my Stratfor password was worthless, but I had my credit card stolen and used to pay for video games. And now my email and street address are public information.
Agreed 1000% percent. It's the journey, not the destination.
On the plus.google.com page, wait for the little chat box to load in the lower-left. Click the tiny gray down-arrow next to the word "Chat" and click "Privacy settings". Pick "Custom" from the menu, and then only choose the circles you want to show up in chat.
Hey,

I added an option to double check its availability on the registration dialog.
A Weekend with Z Shell
Chat%20bubbles%20at%20the%20tables%3F%20Now%20we're%20talking%20%3AD
State of the Stack 2011 (a message from your CEO)
Starbucks doesn't print a receipt unless you want one, and you are welcome to bring & fill your own mug there. You can even use your smartphone to pay.
Stack Exchange grew from 16M to 32M uniques in 2011
Watch the video-- the interviewer literally asks the question about application of the technology, and Ungar gives several including business analytics, intelligent cities, associate search, basically anything that has to do with extracting meaningful information from massive data sets.
Evolution of complexity recreated using 'molecular time travel'
How would a 'forgot password' function work in this case? If you're using something like GPG to encrypt and the password is basically the passphrase for the key, a customer forgetting his/her password would become an irreversible event, and he/she would end up losing all data.
They misspelled 'PanderDaily'.