skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Fullstack engineer? Join Hyperink’s core team (YC W11)
Who we are:

A hacker-friendly team of 8 with big plans to grow and disrupt the publishing industry.

Hyperink’s investors include Andreessen Horowitz, Y Combinator, Lerer Ventures, and SV Angel.

Publishing for Developers: Our applications and services include a collection of web APIs and interfaces to enable our team, self publishers, and developers publish more quickly.

AI + NLP: We use AI, machine learning, and natural language processing to make publishing a hands free process; to automate article summarising, uncover leading topic trends, assist in content quality control, and semantically tag documents.

Big Data + Analytics: Driving our systems and processes are hundreds of book-loads of valuable data.

Enhance the reading experience: We want to make books social, personalized and interactive. Share, recommend and experience books with your friends. Clothes aren’t “one size fits all”, let’s make books more personalized. Redefine how people interact with books - let’s add images, videos, annotations and music to deliver a more engaging, informative experience.

Become the biggest publisher: How do we publish thousands of books every month? How do we reduce the traditional publication time from 18 months to less than 1 week? We want to achieve this in a short time AND keep the content quality high.

---

Programming Challenge:

If you really want to knock our socks off...

* Advenjure
Create a simple MUD (Multi-User Dungeon) text game in Javascript (coffee script, clojure script) which makes AJAX (JSON or XML) requests to a central server. For brownie points, generate a basic infinite map.

* Auto-meme
Write a RESTful web service which takes a random image url, analyzes the image, and intelligently stamps it with appropriate, generated meme text.

* Hacker News
Write a program which analyzes hacker news posts and determines common attributes of successful posts (topics, dates, events).

* Command Line Equalizer
Write a command line tool which plays a song and streams its equalizer in ascii.

===

Send:
* résumé
* github
* your interest in publishing and hacking
* (optional) programming challenge

...to engineering@hyperink.com

We’ll respond in 48 hours if we’re interested. Thanks!!!
You can definitely use this with WiseStamp although that's not the recommended path to integration :)
Parallel tests. Use all your processor cores to speed up your development
Title is incorrect, should be: "A story about me".

This seems kind of grouchy I know, but I am getting a bit tired of these wildly overblown titles attached to very thin blog posts. I knew what I'd see when I clicked the link and was just as disappointed as I'd expected to be. I guess I have a masochistic streak.

The actual stories of those three editors, their authors and how those stories intertwine would probably be pretty interesting. I guess I'll have to wait for This American Life to tackle it.
Unfortunately this is the case now. I am hoping that someone invents something that makes steganography more usable. "----BEGIN PGP MESSAGE----" is a little obvious for my taste, though of course encryption is much better than nothing.
Apple’s Quarterly Profit Eclipses Google’s For the Entire Year
To an extent, yes, but surely there's no clear line between a small excel macros and monstrously complex excel macro systems that are dreadfully abusing the Turing-completeness of excel macros and should use a better tool. But the latter comes from people playing with the former. I think that as information tools become more sophisticated, they necessarily develop programming-esque characteristics.

Figuring out a way for that to happen naturally, intuitively, and broadly is a hard problem that seems like it would probably have huge rewards.
Marci, I saw you guys present at Dingman (capital access network). Glad to hear you got funded in an innovative way.

Did you guys move or stay in DC?
Wow I'd love to look at that project. The one problem is that we don't always have access to the actual HTML of the emails being sent out.

For example, you can integrate Airtime with GMail but Gmail doesn't actually allow you to play with HTML tags. You have to do it by inserting an image and then linking the image by hand. Effectively it's the same result, but it really limits our options in terms of styling etc.
Yep, I didn't say it was the last democratic developed country to grant universal suffrage, because of Switzerland (or the one or two cantons that didn't let women vote).
Show HN: 7courses - The easy to use online recipe manager.
I think it's important to scope the word "against" here. When one is "against" copyright, one is usually against extortion-esque tactics and expensive punitive judgments from courts against individuals in a campaign of intimidation. That's not really at play here, even discounting "potential profit motivations." There's just no threat of a lawsuit, and so that's probably why they'll be reasonably quiet on this article.

If you're a comedian, there is a professional artistic courtesy that you do not steal another comedian's joke -- that if you do, then you are "taking credit" for something which you did not produce. It strikes me that this is the same sort of irritation. The corporations who get mad that you've been seeding the Bourne movies on BitTorrent don't pretend to any sort of artistic outrage, and if they did it would be absurd, because you're faceless and not claiming to any sort of artistic innovation. But we're quite clear, I think, on the fact that (a) they're executives, (b) the government gave them a monopoly on copying these films, and (c) they're upset because end-users didn't care about the monopoly and shared anyway.

Given all that, I'm not sure I find the discrepancy particularly ironic. Actually, I think I'd more or less expect it -- if only because developers have clear human faces, while the RIAA's lawyers and executives do not.
What?

No Chunkhost. I signed up for the beta and now pay for a Xen machine with 512 MB of RAM for only 14 dollars.
That's a pretty general assumption thinking you would learn less at a paying position. Not all of us can live at home with mommy, we have bills to pay. There are also older people, wanting to change careers, that need to provide for their families. People need to stop taking unpaid internships so companies stop thinking they can get away with it. They make money off your work so you deserve to be paid for it. If they don't pay you then they are taking advantage of you, and if you allow that then your just a tool.
TeagueLabs creates Muze: a MIDI musician with AI
> put us on the path toward resuming a kind of modern homesteading

Future homesteads will lose bids for natural resources because big actors will be able to exploit these resources more efficiently due to economies of scale. I'm for basic income.
It's not helping that you give the wrong explanation. The issue here isn't that the password is recoverable, because you don't know whether that is true. It may as well be properly bcrypted. The problem is that they sent you the plaintext password you just entered via email.
Can someone describe what level of programming competence is needed for internships? I am really intimidated about applying and think I might drag a team down
When were you in college? These days nearly everyone I've seen is paying for interns. Kids from top schools are looking at $15-20k offers from Google and Amazon and at least $10k or so from startups in the Bay and NYC.

The one shop I've seen who didn't pay for interns was in upstate NY and only recruited from a small college nearby. It was hard to take them seriously with just that but when they said they didn't pay, the top students with options just walked away.

Not only are interns doing work but they're being trained and inducted into a company that they have a very high likelihood of returning to. It is a big win for the company if they can try you out at a discounted rate before hiring you full time.
Reading your post, it occurred to me that its tone sounds very similar to things I've written when I had had a lot of caffeine, or was on methylphenidate ("Ritalin") for a long time. In my case, prolonged methylphenidate use induced mild psychosis, a known effect that is common in long-term users of the pharmacokinetically similar amphetamine family, which also dramatically improves learning performance.

Thus extrapolating, I wonder if tDCS use might also induce psychosis.

Going off methylphenidate on the weekends ameliorated the psychotic effects, but some of the psychosis-induced beliefs persisted for quite a while.

I was 9.
Right, that's what GP said in the comment you replied to: that he probably should not use that VPS provider.

And yes, password-reset emails may also be a concern (not as severe, though, if reset emails are single-use and have short TTL).
Don't hold your breath. We haven't revisited the mobile version of Basecamp since we released it and haven't started any other new projects based on Cinco.

I'm not sure when/if we'll have a chance to get back to it.
You need a one-click (flash based unfortunately) copy and paste to put that into a text format for forums/blogs.

Just list each line in plain-text.
Why not use pipes for piping? e.g. print du("*", "-sb") | sort("-rn")
Another .js framework? Must be that time of week again
> Why did I, as a programmer, have to learn history, geograghy, foreign languages, music, chemistry, biology, etc etc.

Because the education system is broken.

Many subjects we teach in schools today are there only because they classically established your social status as a proper lady or gentleman -- not necessarily because they are of any practical use to the modern public.

For example, see Harvard's entrance exam from back in the day:

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/packages/pdf/education/harvarde...

That's not to say that (for example) music theory doesn't have a place in today's society, but is it so absolutely critical to the functioning of productive citizens that we should require everyone to learn it, and subsequently forget it?

This isn't why the education system is broken, but it's a symptom.
It is not a settled question whether you can be forced to decrypt or not; some judges have considered encrypted drives protected and others have not. And the UK has compelled individuals to decrypt as well.

The fact remains that you are much better off encrypting in the first place even if you are eventually forced to decrypt. You can challenge the order to decrypt, you can add more time to the investigation and give your lawyers more time to put together a strategy for whatever angle they consider most prudent, you can prevent surreptitious listening that may arouse interest in your activity in the first place, and so on.

Even if you ultimately are forced to comply with an order to decrypt, which again is by no means guaranteed, you still do yourself a lot of favors by encrypting from the get go. And we haven't even mentioned protection from non-governmental entities like script kiddies, competitors, or tabloids.
Visualization of chess during search
This is pretty spot on with what I've seen up close. Specifically:

1) "Throw [y]our normal engineering practices out of the window." - We treat Data Science very much like the "R" in R&D. We point them generally towards a problem and give them time and latitude to solve it. Trying to fit that into our normal scrum process is impossible.

2) "Data scientists are going to end up building things that need to be translated into production code." - Our hand-off between Data Science and Engineering can be pretty messy. Getting stuff into production efficiently is an ongoing challenge.

3) "Trying to explain some of the hard math that's going on to the entire company isn't a productive use of time." - This point is pretty self explanatory. I get in pretty deep on a regular basis and it gets over my head quick. It can be very hard for the average account manager or marketing person to keep up.
You can't joke about the prophet. You can't joke about the US. Zealots just have no sense of humor.
No. I've worked on projects where our tests outweighed our "code" by 2x or more.
Naturally torrentfreak has a completely unbiased view on this issue...
Apple Fuels Silicon Valley Hiring Amid Bubble 2.0
To avoid any magic you could use:

ifconfig = pbs.Command("/path/to/ifconfig")
I agree with only one point in the article; the ability to delete tests. Tests of all kinds should be living, breathing code, just like the code in the rest of your application. As such, tests, like production code, can become outdated and obsolete and need to be updated, changed, and sometimes deleted.

However, I do not agree with the idea that tests are evil. If your tests are failing, or breaking regularly, or are hard to write, then your tests are trying to tell you something. Tests are a direct mirror of the state of your code. If your tests are brittle and hard to manage, don't delete the tests, fix your code. If you need to instantiate a tonne of objects in order to make your tests work, fix your methods dependencies and learn to test your methods in isolation of its dependencies.

Any production code needs tests, this is non-negotiable in today's development eco-system. But I get tired of people who do not understand the purpose of tests complaining that tests are evil. If there is a problem with your tests, then your tests are telling you there is a problem with your code. Clean up your code in order to clean up your tests. However, remember that as code changes, your tests will need to change as well. It is okay to edit, delete, change tests to reflect the current state of the application. Just change the tests first to express how you want to interact with a specific bit of code and then change the code, not the other way around.
It's odd that the import mechanism is abused here to make objects "out of thin air". The fact that "from pbs import ffmpeg" works only if ffmpeg is actually on the path is somewhat surprising.

I think the more comfortable (and Pythonic?) way to do this would be to explicitly create these command objects:

>>> import pbs
>>> ffmpeg = pbs.Command('ffmpeg') # or '/usr/bin/ffmpeg', perhaps
>>> result = ffmpeg(...)

[Edit: I really like the concept of using Python's positional and keyword arguments to construct a shell command, though. Great insight there.]
Curebit apologizes for theft, but leaves something out
There might not be hardware companies but San Mateo has lots of software companies and startups. Oracle is right in the area.
this is boring now. leave them alone
Ask HN: Will you buy Facebook shares when it goes IPO?
Just curious if anyone will invest in Facebook when it goes for IPO?
Kurt mentions it early in the article, but I have to also recommend "Building data science teams" by Patil:

http://radar.oreilly.com/2011/09/building-data-science-teams...
Calling for Evidence-Based Elections
"Good luck getting rid of stupid when stupid has a budget."

I love that line. Catchy.
Not all PR is good PR: http://cl.ly/1p0D1i1J3U133f0R3G1i
As an example of exploratory development that's very difficult to do test-first, I've been doing a lot of image processing work lately with the objective of improving the legibility of photographs containing text. Trying to find a way to automatically test the output before putting together a solution is a unique problem unto itself, since any given set of input parameters could potentially "solve" the problem for some images but not others.
The difference to me is that you have to be a skilled operator of these devices, not a programmer. Absolutely, they can be very complex to operate but the main difference is that you are using these tools to do your task, rather than creating the tools.

It is true that they sometimes have plugin APIs, but so do most applications. A writer would not typically write plugins for MS Word. But he might buy one for his needs. The API is not necessarily intended for the end user to become a developer.
Very impressive, but the use of globals and the dynamic lookup mechanism are a little scary. Looking at the source there seems to be some magic involved like hacking the interpreter.

I'd feel more comfortable if it only exported one variable.
LandingZone, a compact dock for MacBook Airs
Discussion is a stretch. I weep for HN.
I don't think so. If you're really concerned about communication staying irretrievable by hostile players you will have to use some alternate channels and take care to ensure that you don't leave tracks on the devices that would get confiscated. I wouldn't just plop something in Costa Rica and expect it to be OK.
How to Work with Someone You Hate
An argument for hardware buttons on mobile devices
I use standard images (three of them) linked to my Facebook, Testimonials, and Twitter - they do end up getting a lot of hits so I see the benefit in something like this. Not sure if I would go through the hassles of tracking email opens for my conversations with people though.

I also find that when the emails are coming back it is quite annoying to have all the image placeholders in the conversations.
DynamoDB feedback
Dear all

We moved our testing platform to dynamoDB 24 hours ago, running a couple of thousands of READ/WRITES. This morning, we had the little surprise to see that we have billed 230 usd for those operations.

After a quick message to our account manager, it appears that the provisioned capacity is used for billing and not the actual usage of the service. It's weird, especially for people used to simpleDB.

Did anyone here ran into the same issue and which strategy do you use to tune the capacity to your exact needs?

Thanks in advance,

William
You can't get hired if you don't apply. They'll flush out your skills in the interview and, if they hire you, they'll find a place where you can use the skills you have (and learn more!). I landed an internship after my data structures course.
I dropped out after three semesters, and two decades later nothing has happened to make that decision seem like a mistake. I've always had as much work as I've wanted, I've always been able to do the work I am interested in, and I haven't hit a ceiling yet.

The one thing that clearly does constrain me is my lack of literacy in the math-style symbology used in academic CS papers. It is all quite literally Greek to me, and I know there's interesting research locked up in those papers that I simply can't use because it all disappears off into math-land after a couple paragraphs of introductory English.

On the other hand, I have no trouble abstracting the concept out of a working example, so I can usually muddle through by simply looking for web pages that refer to the paper and include source code. In a few cases I've been able to reinvent the implementation from what I guess they are getting at in the introduction; it's a lot of wasted work but at least I know from the start that I'm headed in a direction that will eventually work out.

Drop me back in time, stand me in front of that old crossroads, and I'd make the same decision again; it's worked out pretty well, all things considered.
pollution of the global name space
Off the top of my head
a) Nothing prevents the writer of the module you are importing from overriding symbols that you expect
b) In many cases increased load times.
c) Irrelevant symbols present in scope when debugging
d) Makes the order of import statements important, because potentially different modules might be providing the same variable name
More photos at KickStarter: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/29222207/landingzone-the...
No, not at all; especially not for enterprise applications.

The current project I work on has 292908 LOC, and Code to Test Ratio: 1:1.1.
You're right in that it's about experience and not about the money, BUT if it's a tech company that can't properly compensate, it should be a big red light.

All the internships I've done and folks I knew in CS/CE/EE, I don't recall anyone having an unpaid internship.
because this might mess up your script by either overwriting something that's already defined, or you might accidentally overwrite something that is 'hidden' behind the '* '.

somewhat naive example:

>>> time = 'blah'
>>> time
'blah'
>>> from datetime import *
>>> time
<type 'datetime.time'>
>>>
Because it leads to namespace pollution and hard-to-track-down bugs.

It's especially bad in this case where adding an executable in the system can suddenly shadow any built-in name (e.g. imagine someone adds a "print" or "sys" executable).
Are there reasons why the idea of a Guaranteed Minimum Income could not be implemented using a peer-to-peer system? Would middlemen be strictly necessary?
I am happy to announce to relaunch of 7courses.com!

I launched almost exactly a year ago, as a sort of weekend project http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2087598

I've sort of let it stagnate, and gotten a few users, mentioned on smashing magizine, but nothing major. However, I use the app quite a lot, and was getting tired of some small bugs, so decided to recode and relaunch.

The app is 100% JavaScript, node js backend and thick js frontend (jammy.js, model.js, etc). It is a mobile web app, looks great on iPad and iPhone too.

I got enough feedback that I decided to charge for it, but for a day the first 100 signups will get a month free!

The price is very tentative, and I'm open to any and all suggestions. Also, if you would like to give accounts away on a blog etc, contact me, I'd be happy to set something up.

Any and all feedback is welcome, thanks a ton!
This is a great way for Wefunder to attract future funders to their site. Besides the traditional name and email address for a signup list, they're also finding out how much people are willing to fund each year. To add to that, it's also an open list where you can see who and how many people are going in on it. One way to solve the chiken-and-egg problem.
Facebook IPO: "There’s little left for the hoi polloi."
Would break syntax too much and would make even less sense to python user reading the code. But there is several packages which does this (piping using pipes), maybe you could use that.
makes references ambiguous to anyone but the interpreter

let's say you have

from a import foo
from b import *

what does 'foo' refer to? 'b' could contain 'foo', which would overwrite your previous reference to 'a.foo'. its hard to figure out what 'foo' now refers to from inspecting the code. its better to be explicit:

from a import foo
from b import bar, baz
Irrelevant for shell-style scripts because they are entry points, not included from other modules.

--And its not a "global" name space, its just the namespace of your script.--
How Yelp destroyed the thrill of exploring
I think they should at least allow users to access their data temporarily. Open up users accounts for downloading only the files that they have personally uploaded for 48 hours and after that they can wipe everything clean.
Malvertising Or Just Advertising? The Curious Case Of Counterclank
funding is fine, but making a measurable contribution to a business that really makes money is divine ;-)
But lottery returns might be better than startup returns. In both cases, investor sentiment is hyper-focused on the very, very low probability event of a high return, but unlike startups, the lottery's returns are deliberately smoothed to keep people playing.

That doesn't make lotto better than startups; the lotto is obviously objectively much worse. But the financial outcome of an unsophisticated investment in startups is likely to be worse than a lottery ticket; if you buy a bunch of lottery tickets, you'll get something back. If you don't know the industry, investing in startups is like throwing your money away.

I think something people don't consider in these discussions is that the current startup ecosystem --- the one in which the majority of companies return zero to their investors! --- is the product of relatively sophisticated investment. It's not impossible for a huckster to get funded, but it's troublesome enough that truly fraudulent companies are the exception.

All that changes once you set up a structure that allows people to "fund" companies "retail".