skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Maybe you're right about learning 'the hard way'. I too strongly believe in learning with rigorous practice. But, one has to understand that people take various approaches to learning and teaching.

There cannot be a right way to teach given the multitude of learners now online.
I may not own many things but I am sure a digital hoarder. http://andrewhy.de/im-a-physical-minimalist-but-a-digital-ho...
Tools - Share Using AddThis for Internet Explorer - AddThis
Thanks very much for all your posts here, I read them all.

There are so very few profoundly gifted kids and hearing all these anecdotes from a parent is a rare treat.

Clearly for highly intelligent children, unschooling - going their own way academically, is something that works very well. There's also the traditional child prodigy approach of pushing them even harder, and it seems in those cases the kids are never heard from again, perhaps they crack.

Some people ask if unschooling can work well with students that are just normal and aren't highly intelligent. I've seen where it works well in that case as well (or at least as well as traditional schooling). But, obviously for a special needs child with disabilities such as Downs Syndrome, it would not work as they need much more intense interaction just to learn how to live on their own in society. Or say for Helen Keller, what saved her from madness was intense personal tutoring and not just being left to her self. Presumably there is a dividing line in their between disabled and normal where unschooling becomes more suitable. Since unschooling is not a big thing in the modern era, there's few if any studies on results looking into these issues, only anecdotal data and what we know from meeting unschooling students.
> For example, Facebook with its terrible URLs and JavaScript everywhere is very fragile. Hard to cache, hard to archive, but who cares? If the whole site went bankrupt in ten years, would many people actually export their data?

If I had been coming up with examples of sites where people would want to export their data in such an event, Facebook would have been number 2 or 3 on my list, after an email or a document site (eg. Gmail or Google Docs).
Rough example below, partially taken from a book I have on Scala.

//define it like this:
def using[T <: {def close(): Unit }, S](obj: T)
(operation: T => S) = {
val result = operation(obj)
obj.close()
result
}

//use it like this:
val writer = new FunkyWriter
using(writer) {
writer.write("outputting some data")
}

ARM was therefore possible in Scala before the Closable interface was even added to the Java libs.
its nice but the issue for me is that it will be backwards compatible so the preJRE7 way of managing IO resources is also included , this means an even more bloated java api :-(
Better is subjective. As such, I'd say its valuable feedback to know that even after seeing this tool, if I were looking for a new domain today, I'd still use the domaintools tool over this one. Remember, just because this is a startup community, we shouldn't hold back from giving negative feedback or pointing out existing products that are better. It's a first cut, so it's not expected to be perfect. Reading the author's comment on mine, you can see that he understands that.

For me, I'd rather see synonyms for the words I include than random words tacked on to either side of it. I also want to see all the tld variants of the name itself.

When I'm searching for a name for a new product, I'm in a flexible frame of mind, and the words I toss out for suggestions are not carved in stone. I expect them to be sent through a thesaurus and given back to me in every conceivable combination. Usually one of those unexpected combos ends up being the one I go with.
Led ceiling panel
illumination for offices
Ask HN: how do comparison websites prevent scraping?
I'm developing a web app not too dissimilar from a price/flights comparison one (nothing to do with travel though) and part of it is collecting lots of info not currently available in a single db (that's were the value really is).

But then I wonder: how to I prevent people from getting all that data off my website (via some sort of scraping, intelligent or not)? I realise it's not worth it to try and cover every single attempt but surely there are ways to make it at least very difficult - apart from presenting everything as an image or via flash!

Thanks for any input

Zuz
I'd like to check it out. matt@leandomainsearch.com

FWIW, I plan on adding an option to automatically search for synonyms down the road.
I was simply giving the short form version.
Izzat you, Mirabai?
I was a complete beginner at coding a few months ago. I really really wanted to learn, so I've tried going to local meetups designed to teach newbies to code and I've tried Codecademy.

The problem I found was this tendency to start with the terminal as the teaching tool. The terminal is a black and intimidating hole to a beginner. Sure, I happily typed in 2+2 and got 4 as a result, and I understood how to store variables and even if statements and while loops, but honestly, I found this to be too abstract. I didn't understand what the terminal was and how typing in 2+2 was supposed to help me build a website, which is why I wanted to learn to code to begin with. I got frustrated and quit learning to code for a while as a result.

But then I decided to try out the free Stanford CS106A course. I was hooked from the very first lecture. Instead of starting at the terminal, Stanford had me download Eclipse (which is less intimidating than the terminal) and they started with a fun "Karel the Robot" language. In the first assignment, my goal was to make Karel the Robot run around the grid and drop / pick up diamond 'beepers'. I LOVED it. The excitement I got from actually getting Karel to do what I wanted was exhilarating and far more rewarding than getting a pretty badge from Codecademy. I completed the course in about a month and am now learning Ruby, which I absolutely love.

My point is, people want to learn to program so they can build something, so starting off with concrete and fun projects (versus typing random stuff into a Terminal) is the way to go.
I want to agree, but it's hard to fight against ingrained human instincts. The need for social validation is very powerful. I would say instead:

If you have to build your self-esteem by comparing to others, do it by looking at what you've created, not what you know.
Nice tool.

The lookups may need to be fixed -- the first two "green" domains I clicked when searching for "mobile" were actually taken. However, "green" means available, right?
It's back now. Fault PHPFog's cloud architecture
So now we just wait for someone generous enough to upload to Youtube/Mediafire for the 'masses'.
I guess when you say "language" you actually mean "implementation"? Is it even possible to license a language specification itself? (And why would anyone pay for this?)
Sarah Lacy’s PandoDaily launches with $2.5 million in funding
For a more fair comparison, I'll point out that the "skynet" Heroku outage you cited would have caused roughly 16 hours of downtime for the particular type of application used by the OP (a static site with no database), not 76.
Both of those things are TODO.

Drag and Drop was working, but I broke it again (file input is handled differently in different browsers, which was a headache) and I just wanted to get some more eyes on it.

As for True P2P - give it a few months. Once WebRTC is here, this will be very very easy to turn into proper P2P.
Nassim Taleb on Antifragility
I've been intrigued by literate programming since I first heard about it last year.

Since then I've searched out many examples and I've come to the conclusion that almost nobody understands what literate programming is!

Taking this submission as an example: It's a .emacs with some comments that happens to use the org-mode of emacs. Commenting your code does not make it literate!

Literate programming is the intertwining of an essay describing your program as a narration and the code itself.

If the author had combined what he wrote in the submission's blog post with his .emacs, that would have approached literate programming.
Neither a "right to bear arms" nor "free political speech/press" are actually all that protected by modern US jurisprudence. ("political" is important - pornography does have significant protections, far more than political speech.)
For google, I turned on two-factor authentication. The provide an iOS/Android/Blackberry app that acts like a secureId (provides a different security code every 30 seconds).

The phone app could be also be used for your own projects. It supports multiple accounts and either manual or QR-code based configuration.

Google provides a PAM module so you can add 2-factor auth to ssh. And it is easy to implement the standard on the server side, if you want to add 2-factor auth to your web app.

For more info, see:

http://code.google.com/p/google-authenticator/
this reminds me of a recent google effort to add a terminal emulator within the chrome browser : http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3344678
Of those four goals, I hit one of them in a month, then hit another two months after that. I still consider it the high-point of my career thusfar.
Listen to Linus tell the story of Linux
Wunderlist has an incredibly annoying feature, that when you open the app and start typing into the obvious box at the top, it assumes you want to make a new list (which I never want to do), rather than new 'todo' (which I always want to do).

This seems like a really stupid design choice, and one that is very shortly going to stop me using the app. I mention this as an example of an app looking great, as opposed to being well designed.
My Music Tastes are 13.3% Terrible, Says Algorithm
I actually think he probably grasps it well enough, but he doesn't like what it implies and ergo he goes down the track he does out of preferential hope that he can influence his way backwards. He is indeed against "the fundamental architecture of the web and the net" since it's not that he doesn't see past the old models, it's that he can't see a way to make the margins he has previously enjoyed, with the control he usually exerts. His one stab in the dark was purchasing MySpace arguably, and that did not turn out terribly well.
There is still PIPA out there. Basically the Senate version of SOPA. Just a change in focus is all that is needed.
> Coding is best learned "the hard way".

Funny. There is a series of books by Zed shaw called "Learn 'x' the Hard Way". The books tells you to type things first; the explanation comes later.

In my experience, the most important part of learning to program is that you can do something fun, quickly. If you enjoy the programming, you will continue with it, and then bother to learn the "why"'s. If you don't find it fun, why would you bother learning "why"?

The Code Academy tutorial isn't perfect, but I do think it's a fun introduction. Importantly, it's a fun introduction that require almost no set up. I know it has limitations, but it is pretty awesome, and a much better path into Ruby than a lecture on object oriented programming.

Not to knock the lecture. It's very important, in fact. I just think the lecture should wait until lesson 2 or 3.
His and Hers Dental Floss
> However, I see the takeaway is that he gets by with a lot less stuff than the average person in his demographic

Except that he doesn't. He merely doesn't own the stuff that he uses/consumes.
Similar, longer article with a ton of similar discussion can be found here:

http://boingboing.net/2010/09/10/technomads.html
Russian Mars moon probe crashes down
Very neat! Had no idea about CloudMine before, but always happy to see alternatives to Parse and whatever other mobile backend service providers there are out there.

Congrats!
Google is a public company and a blackout would throw off the income statement for the quarter. Share holders would not be happy, a doodle is more appropriate. When you have millions of users you I think you have to consider them first. People run businesses off the Google platform so there's a domino effect.
3-4 minutes, but yes, it's rather annoying.
What I really want is decent PKI for ssh host keys so I can verify a key once, sign it, and have it respected by all other users/machines without further intervention.

I may try out MonkeySphere, anybody already use it?

Edit to add: MonkeySphere doesn't support options in authorized_keys, which is a bummer.
Is there anything stopping the sys admin from doing the snooping?
TunesViewer is program to access itunes-university media and podcasts in Linux.
jQuery Mobile adds a lot of other useful stuff -- primarily the ability to create an iPhone-style UI from HTML markup. Unfortunately as other posters have mentioned, it's pretty slow.
Actually, I said the same thing after I wrote it.

Initially, I tried to convey the anecdote in prose, but I couldn't decide what the "message" was. I was reading GEB at the time, which inspired me to try a more indirect approach, in the style of a Zen Koan. The theory is that this lets the reader decide what their takeaway is.
You'd have to be pretty killer to pull that off, however. I know for a fact that out of college Microsoft picks up engineers from MIT for 84k, and NASA gets new greats (not necessarily from MIT) for 76k. (disclaimer- I am not from MIT, but these ate both very reliable sources)
Wait a minute... haven't I been told that the solution to numerous environmental problems is to move more people into cities for the infrastructure sharing? Not necessarily told by you specifically, but certainly by others. Now moving into the city and using its infrastructure is unsustainable and selfish? (Excluding your flying point.)

Help me out here, how am I supposed to be saving the planet today again?
reviews look pretty bad. any defense/pro arguments for this?
IPhone, iPad owners see glass half full; BlackBerry users are down in the dumps
Had had the DROID now the DROIDX. I have loved these phones for the first few months and the everything seems to go on them. My GPS is useless at this point and dealing with Verizon to get any help is always very frustrating.
At first glance, looks pretty cool. However, I find the green of the available results to be quite painful to look at. Something like #B8FC9F looks a lot better, to me.
This will be interesting. Considering former TC writer O'Hear's new Startup getting coverage on TC, http://www.beepl.com/

I wonder if the Sarah Lacy will get a friendly mention on TC.

Ariana would have a fit.
Pando Daily - TechCrunch 2.0
Gotcha -- I misunderstood.

For complicated reasons, sometimes a registered domain will show up as available. This should only happen in less than 1% of cases and I'm working on reducing it to zero.
I'm not sure how this is a koan [1]. It's a clever turn at the end of the story, but I'm pretty sure I understood the meaning through rational thought. Am I missing some key contradiction/ambiguity?

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K%C5%8Dan
My first instinct was similar to yours, but Canada is one of those "foreign countries". Sorry, from the hearings, you need to lean into that word more; foreign countries.

Thus, it would probably be more expedient to block a Canadian operation. To say nothing of the integration that already exists. My (Canadian) startup is dependent on playing by Apple's rules from California and exists on a couple Amazon servers in Virginia, so it's not like I can really thumb my nose at US law just because I'm incorporated and operate in BC.
(I had another comment here but I figured out the answer.)

lombok's @Cleanup will close anything, interface or not.
All Zappos customers will be receiving the email linked to in this thread. If you haven't it might be in your spam folder or it might still be queued to go out. The link above is the same as the email contents.
I think the only thing that was added to the API was a single interface called Closeable. Adding 1 interface to a library is hardly bloat. The change is essentially language support for a common syntax for resource management, not a new API.
Thanks! Glad you know about us now. One of our big differences from Parse is our focus on server-side requirements as well as client-side. Case in point, our server side code execution environment. Check it out if you're interested.
http://blog.cloudmine.me/post/15748285350/server-side-superp...
Are smart people ugly? The Explainer's 2011 Question of the Year
Interesting color. Anyone else have any recommendations on what to change the green domains to?
A Proud Heritage: 9 Photos From the Civil Rights Movement
WebKit only. That might be acceptable in certain circumstances, but only if your definition of acceptability stretches to “95% of the world is on IE6; we don’t have to support anything else for our site.”

See also: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

Edit: to downvoters, I’m not being cranky: I specifically wouldn’t use this because of this lack of compatibility and would advise against using it for the same reason (especially seeing as the couple of people I’ve pointed this out to hadn’t realised). Can you explain why you think I’m not adding to the conversation?
At least the Mac Pro gives you a choice to not pay for a fixed, glossy display.
I am constantly amazed with a) peoples obsessions with underwear and b) how really bent up people get over a number being 16 instead of 15.

I said somewhere in the comments that I was disqualified for the minimalist Olympics...

Hello from Colorado!
The examples you named (legal pads, green rooms), all of which I was aware of, are rather psychological examples of what I meant by a discussion of substance. What she's exemplifying is a solid strategy for brainstorming color schemes and nothing more. The way she presents her color schemes allows them no function besides eye-candy.

Inspiration that sticks with you for later is observed naturally in a real-life context that makes you remember it, not by demand in the midst of a hoard of formulaic pinterest posts.
Fair points --

There should be a lot of value in being the first site people visit when searching for a domain name though. We'll see.
Tim Tebow: a really talentd sportsman having mysterious appeal
All the data should be encrypted and only the user's password should be able to decrypt the data. That way you eliminate the problem of someone peaking into your files.
Most likely your password reset email is in the queue to go out. Emails are slow to go out due to the massive volume of outgoing email we are trying to send out.
He juxtaposes his "minimalism" with being an "overconsumer". His words, not mine.

That makes him a bit of a douchebag who deserves to be called out on his bullshit minimalism claim, not just someone who's just "experimenting and learning". He consumes way more resources than most people on this planet, including most Westerners. By what insane standard is that minimalist?
I'm guessing zone files. If you load zone files into something quick to search like an indexed DB table, memcache, etc they are super fast. They are also inaccurate and give you false positives since a domain can be out of the zone for a multitude of reasons.
I don't think it's spam. Instant Domain Search is a great site, but you still need to be creative in order to know what to search for. Lean Domain Search does it for you.
The "C++ renaissance"
Only 20% of all applicants get in, as determined by a filtering process done through manual review in combination with algorithms that rank the applicants based on open source contributions.

Applicants are ranked based on their open source contributions? Jeez, I'd never get in. All of my clients require me to work on closed source code, and I've worked on the smallest of the small projects, to large $700 million dollar projects.

I realize that choosing the right candidate for a project can lead someone to a certain set of paranoia, but isn't there more we can use to rank people other than their open source contributions?
Be warned, there's some evidence that GoogleBot now executes Javascript.

http://ipullrank.com/googlebot-is-chrome/
Arnoldo is their a video of your talk online?
Thanks -- some registered show up as available and vice versa, an unfortunate side effect of the way I'm doing the searches. Am looking into reducing the error rate.
This is really useful, but is there a reason why you are limiting the maximum length of the input to 20 characters? I already came across a few cases where I wanted to use a longer phrase.
I took a look at lombok and it's pretty obvious from the way cleanup method names can be passed as strings that's it's using reflection. It's a bit of a nasty hack, but it works.
The failure of Airdrop
Is Your DBA Lying to You?
mmmmm.. edible color schemes...

also, color palette extraction tool
http://www.degraeve.com/color-palette/
Manpacks.com is a great example of a company that started up to fill the void left when Zappos stopped shipping to Canada.
This site is barebones semantic HTML. Turn off styling and JS and you’re left with something eminently readable or consumable.
Kingade (Kids + Games = Better World)
Except that doesn't work. You lose your rank for your existing keywords if you replace your site with an anti-SOPA message, which is what this is about.

If you just add a banner or message to your site and keep the rest of your content intact then sure, it may show up.
I wouldn't call your service a startup.

So, this is like my unfinished domsrch.com, my experience is that people don't really need this service this much and there are some others that already fill the space.

I definitely wish you to succeed where I failed :). I just wouldn't leave my day job which is why I am saying it isn't a startup.
I just pushed it to my github in case anyone else wants a copy. It uses commandline whois so it's not really useful for a website implementation.

https://github.com/gravitronic/DFind
Where do you get 90 seconds per set from? 4 seconds per rep would be 32-48 seconds.
I wouldn't call this a rewrite of jQuery, it's more of a from-scratch implementation of a very small subset of jQuery APIs.

The semantics of the subset vary significantly from jQuery as well. Take for example the show/hide implementation. `.show()` blindly sets the display to block. jQuery remembers the value it had when you hid it (block, inline-block, table-cell, etc.) and restores that setting.
Wait a Minute. I’m a Woman AND I Started a Company?
I think this post highlights a missing component of the IT ecosystem -- a professional code of ethics.

Many companies, especially large ones with lots of lawyers, have developed policies and procedures relating to what's acceptable and what's not. But most smaller companies and startups don't seem to have time to formulate these policies.

A professional code of ethics, specially with regard to privacy and user data, would be very useful.

Right now, most developers operate on a "do unto others" philosophy. While this may be good intentioned and work well a lot of the time, it's highly subjective -- as evidenced by the comments on this thread.
The simplest example I can think of is to create an app on twitter https://dev.twitter.com/apps/new

They hand you a consumer key and a consumer secret which are used to access the API. Then, individual users must use an Access token and Secret, to get back an Auth Token.

While you don't need to be that sophisticated, requiring some authentication for queries against your webservice will allow you to disable shared or abusive keys.
Because it doesn't work that way. Removing the keywords you rank for and replacing them with blackout pages will kill your rank for your target keywords.

If you want people searching for anti-SOPA messages to find your site and not your regular traffic then go for it.
Seems reasonable, but can adults stop boasting that they're behaving like adults? Unless 37 signals is being run by children, in which case: good job kids.