skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I feel the same way. But as I take a step back and look at the big picture, it seems to me, anyway, that this isn't just in programming: it's the whole society.

When I was growing up in the 70's, it appeared to me that we were dreaming great things, like going to the moon, even despite a backdrop of fear about the Cold War. Today I don't see such dreams; instead, our thoughts seem to be centered on just treading water, like combating climate change.

Maybe it's just me getting older, as Neward says (my 45th birthday was last week). Maybe it's only my own perspective growing jaded. But it sure feels to me like it's all around, not just in my head.
Announcing github-backup
I'm not sure K's in-memory processing is incompatible with running on a GPU, either. I've been working on a fork of Kona that has a very different architecture (e.g. a bytecode VM, generational mark/sweep GC, lexical scope), and I plan on experimenting with CUDA/OpenCL once the fundamentals are set.
The 17 habits of highly-effective cloud providers
I would also be very interested in this list, for myself and others. Email in profile.
This is why the Raspberry Pi misses the mark. A FIGnition is much more interesting http://sites.google.com/site/libby8dev/fignition
Paternot has worked in the film industry for the last 8 years and definitely acknowledged that the biggest challenge was getting the social proof in place to ensure that investors and talent feel comfortable listing on Slated.
Chargify down, working to restore database
I'm not so sure anymore that was Google's only intent. Google may be later be forced to become an OEM. As of today, it's quite a reality that Samsung (who sells 55% of all Android smartphones), Amazon, Facebook and Baidu won't completely fork Android in their own best interest. It may behoove Google to develop a Nexus line that covers a wide range of prices.
FIGnition
> I believe I have read that typically on third of
> the population don't drive, either because they are
> too young, too old, or have some sort of disability.

Presumably a sizable portion of that third isn't capable of getting around on their own regardless of public transportation options.
Your customer pays through our hosted checkout pages.

We have found that a combination of the Direct Debit branding and the merchant's branding help with customer trust.
It sounds like they're working hard to restore it, so I'm not posting this as a rant about downtime. Instead, I think reading the status log sounds like a lot of my own "oh shit" late nights.
Ask YC: Best way to get my son started on programming?
Hi all. My son is eleven years old and I'm looking into a good way to get him passionate about computer science and programming. There are a lot of resources out there. Does anyone have a recommendation on the best?
$12.5 Billion is the price, but that's not how much Google's paying out.

http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/08/31/us-motorolamobilit...

Motorola had $3.2 Billion in cash, and its losses act as tax deductions for Google (8yrs * $700 million = ~$5.6 Billion, from the article). 12.5 - 3.2 - 5.6 = $3.7 Billion.
For the sake of those who may not realise: You can take a password protected ssh key and remove it's password protection (if you know the password). And do the opposite of course (adding a password to a key without one)
Programming is so exciting today! One post here talks about the thrill of coercing a limited machine into doing something useful - that's one kind of excitement and it is awesome. On the other side of that, today I can rent a super computer and write something that stores and computes terabytes of data, or I can create software that lets 15000 people connect and interact thanks to ubiquitous connectivity, or I can make something that computes a FFT on a slice of music and does a spectral comparison of 100000 other songs (Shazam) in real time because that kind of power is available, and (maybe it's just me) but functional programming seems more in vogue and declarative programming's hey-day is just around the corner ("I predict!").

We are just scratching the surface of what is possible. Programming is scintillating.
Hacking Chess with the MongoDB Pipeline
Get him one of these http://sites.google.com/site/libby8dev/fignition - and nothing else, no PC, no games console, no smartphone. When I were a lad, we made our own fun. Out of rocks. And we liked it that way.
Shit, no! Look, I've been programming since 1982 (BASIC on a Hewlett-Packard with a 3" screen - lap equipment, essentially - then an Apple ][e for BASIC/assembly, then Turbo Pascal, then real Windows with C++ for my first couple of professional jobs, moving into Tcl under AOLserver against databases in the 90's, adding Perl later) and so I think I know whereof I speak, and I've addressed this point before, but ... it just keeps getting easier to reach for the stars. Sure, there's a lot of wasted time on boring stuff, but that was already there back in the day. It's just easier to read about somebody else doing something than to do something yourself - but nobody's stopping you from doing hobby work on Z80 in assembler, or implementing your own language, or whatever - and no matter what you want to do, there are more tools, more references, more help to get off the ground and going.

You want excitement? Stop reading blogs and just program something.
Wikipedia Wants to Be Free -- for Mobile Users, in Africa
FourSquare on Facebook
The smartphone market is worth much more than a measly $250M/quarter. Nokia would want to sell any and all smartphones it can, not just enough to cover production costs. That would be suicide. Your best possible scenario is actually the worst possible scenario for Nokia.
I saw this with Verizon fios too. It's $85 for 25mbps Internet service. It's $75 if I get the same thing bundled with tv service.
We are looking to roll out across EU as soon as possible. We are in discussions with the banks to make this happen.
Natalie, who wrote the article, asked me to share this:

"Thanks for commenting. You are spot on, we weren't profitable in many other ways. The time we were spending on Newsberry could, and does, bring more profitability on our other products. In our opinion at Wildbit, half of an anything is not worth something. We don't build half-projects, and we don't put interns to work on them. But for many, it's hard to turn away $75/year."
One thing this article disregards and I haven't seen touched on here yet is time value. My time is worth money. If driving a car saves me more money in time than it costs I'll drive a car.

For example, if it would take 20 minutes in a car vs 1 hour in a bus I've saved 40 minutes. If I bill at $75/h that's $50 worth of time or $100 round trip (assuming I work instead). Do that a few times a month and the car has paid for itself.
[EDIT] Cont'd:

Also, do folks around here actually "+1" and "Like" stuff on the web?

It seems to me like the people who actually click on ads are not likely to be the kinds of people that advertisers are actually trying to reach.
Node has coroutine support via the fibers package: https://github.com/laverdet/node-fibers. For some benchmarks, check out my Common Node project's README: https://github.com/olegp/common-node
Mayor Works to Bring Clean Tech to Los Angeles
At the VerdeXchange Marketmakers Conference that took place in downtown Los Angeles this week, Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa gave a keynote speech to an audience of 500 industry leaders working to build and shape the green economy of Los Angeles and the nation.
Shapeways doesn't seem to be too bad for most things, and have a wide range of materials. But i was mostly talking about the DIY reprap style printers. Makerbot[1] and Ultimaker[2] are great places to start there if you can't or don't want to source all the parts yourself to build a reprap/repstrap. Eventually when the kickstarter prizes are all taken care of brook drum will be selling Printrbot kits which from what he's said will be much more affordable but also a much simpler looking printer. I haven't been able to play with one to see the quality that they'll do but I'm very hopeful for when mine comes in from the kickstarter he did.

[1] http://www.makerbot.com/
[2] http://blog.ultimaker.com/
[3] http://printrbot.com/
Heart Stop Beating
10 excelentes aplicaciones para la educación (siglo 21)
I hadn't realized they had changed it again. Back when it was a combined service the number of streams limit was related to the number of DVDs.
Cut those employee time figures by half -- FT employees cost a company about twice as much as the base salary. And even then, your designer and marketer figures are way low, even in a city like Philadelphia.
True, that's probably per-year instead.
If selling phones is profitable, then the best scenario is to sell as many phones as possible, regardless of Microsoft's money. Once they sell more than enough phones to offset Microsoft's money, it means their profit per phone goes up, so "selling just enough phones to cover the production costs" doesn't really make sense.
I hope this gets more attention and doesn't slip under the radar.

On the contrary.

It seems (from the article; I haven't looked at the bill) that this is so poorly thought out and constructed that, if passed, it provides ample opportunity for a real demonstration of exactly why it's awful.

With a complete lack of specified privacy protections, how long do you think it will take for Mizuno and the other State legislators' records to be outed? Once their own dirty laundry is exposed for all to see, they'll try the usual gambits about staffers' unauthorized usage, etc., but it will be crystal clear to all just what happens when all that information is agglomerated.
Hyperbolic trees of Species
Making more money from Office is winning a battle while losing the war. If Microsoft didn't infuse cash, Apple could have potentially died. Microsoft's biggest competitor--one who's Mac division made more revenue than Windows--may not exist at all or no where close to as strong as it is today.
EU Seeks Joint Cloud-Purchasing by Governments
The opposite of Apple, Nokia posts huge loss to end 2011
Paleo Diet Recipe for Butter and Garlic Scallops
This is great, I love web interfaces that are completely async where you can do whatever you want in realtime and it "magically" gets stored on the server for me later.

This just makes loading up a page even faster as the data is more than likely already on your computer.

Will this work for offline? If someone views a todolist, makes some changes offline, then visits it later online will it sync the changes automatically?
Our new national ID cards (called 'citizen card') here in Portugal work like that.

They have a keypair and the private part is never transmitted out of if: the card itself can (when plugged in a reader) sign and encrypt data sent to it. So it's secure even when using a public (not trusted) machine; I mean, it can spy on your connection, but it can't clone the key.

The certificate can be used in browsers to login to websites that support it or any other applications that implement the right PKCS standard.
Or the Big island.

I was going to say the same thing: if you want to do something interesting, like go to Haleakala or O'heo on Maui or various volcanic excursions on the Big island, you'll get nowhere without a car. Granted, that's probably a minority (thankfully) of the people...
Fotografía de la Tierra
Denmark same thing
That's a nice change -- lately everyone interviewed is using Apple's hardware and largely software.
LongTail Video: The State Of HTML5 Video
Video: Eight Years After Martian Touchdown, Opportunity Rover Soldiers On
Sssshhhh - if more people thought this, Google would start charging for products
The Nano Letters abstract, linked by the TR piece, at http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/nl203701g , has good enough pictures, including a voltage-current plot. That plot seems to demonstrate useful switching (1 nA to 10 uA within 1V).

The abstract's pictures of the structure do a much better job than the TR 'conceptual illustration', which is headed "Nano gate" when the tube really is the transistor channel. The controlling gate, according to the abstract, is buried underneath (not above the channel, as usual in all-Si processes).
I'm looking at this as an iOS developer and not a Mac App developer, but I think this is overblown a bit.

In this case, the APIs are the iCloud related features. There are many reasons to allow only approved apps access. First, to some extent Apple are subsidizing the cost of iCloud and they want to ensure that they get their piece of any app using it. Also, it gives Apple the opportunity to make sure that an app that uses iCloud doesn't abuse it. In fact, I've had an iOS app rejected because it was putting to much data in iCloud. (Which wasn't unexpected, the customer for the app was warned it would likely happen)

I'll be worried if it applies to an API not related to a service but rather a core piece of tech.
Not entirely automatically. The app would have to explicitly sync the model when it believes it can.

I do plan to add a helper for that, that keeps a list of unsynced models. Then a function could be called when the server is reachable, or just periodically.
Mr. Vengeance Act 2
Microsoft is gigantic, rich and relentless, they do not give up. Look at the amounts of cash they've been burning on Bing for years patiently waiting for their opening. You should not never count them out.
> lauching the Lumia 900 in March on AT&T for $99 on contract.

That's not "the real news". It's speculation. You even pulled it from a blog titled Great Speculations.
2012 Cynicism Projections
Keeping cool with Node.js
I respect the Reddit team, but I don't think they need to use Cassandra at their scale. I mean they only have 2TB of data in total. They should easily be able to use a simple caching system to keep the last 2 weeks of data in RAM and basically never read from the database.

That said, they may be freaked out based on their growth curve and simply thinking ahead.
I am not sure I understand, exactly what you are saying here. I am sure you guys could have devoted a day a week to find out what was lacking in Newsberry and make it better. Creating value rather than just destroying it. You said you were a company that prides itself on design, detail and quality, so why not make an existing profitable application better and reap the benefits from that effort.

Totally doesn't make any sense. Idealist for sure.
I look forward to seeing it. I definitely plan on using this in the future when that functionality is added.
This is precisely why I held on to the underused "2 DVDs at once" plan until the Great Netflix Exodus. One queue for me (gritty/scifi/tragedy/guy-movies), one for my wife (sappy/Hallmark/romantic/Christmas-year-round-movies). Easy to toggle queues, easy to see corresponding recommendations. The DVDs themselves tended to sit for a month or so at a time in favor of "I wanna watch X now" streaming.

But, alas, that's gone. Now Netflix thinks I'm fond of gritty survivalist Dora-The-Explorer romantic comedies featuring Barbie.
They _have_ introduced a "For Kids" tab. That helps.
Do you know if there is any plan to open source the code?
Just to clarify; I am not saying you are wrong and trying to talk you into it, just didn't want other readers to come across that comment and throw them out the window especially if they are a good fit.

That being said, I am a big believer in gut feelings and if yours is telling you the answer is elsewhere then it is probably right.
Not the essay I was expecting from the title.

Programming is less exciting today, at least for me. I'm 55, and have been programming for over 40 years. My first program solved quadratic equations on an ancient Wang programmable calculator that had 3 (three!) registers. I spent a long time trying to figure out how to compute the intermediates and final results while taking the three coefficients as input, in order, once each. That got me used to being very, very careful about memory. I remember my first program that ran really slowly for large N, and getting my first glimpse of algorithm analysis, and then being very, very careful about performance. And I have spent many hours coding low-level data structures and algorithms. It was a lot of fun.

Maybe it's my age, or maybe it's seeing all the libraries with the cool data structures and algorithms already written, but programming is often more about snapping pieces together than doing difficult new things. Yes, it's better this way, and yes it's really just a matter of choosing the right problems to work on. But here's the thing: You get used to working in an area. For me it's database internals. And more and more of it gets "done" over time, and available as open source. So there is no point in doing the thing that you naturally want to do.

What to do about this? I highly recommend working at startups. And not yet another social media site, (there are probably 15 different scalable NoSQL systems out there, pick one and move on). I'm at a database startup, and while we use a lot of open source software, we are building a ton of interesting, new, low-level stuff too.
1. We pay out on a 7 days after a transaction is initiated.

2. Faster payments is the new standard for payments initiated from within a bank account (e.g., via online banking). Direct Debit is still the standard for "pull" based payments.

3. Keep an eye out. We have some big announcements coming up.
Still the start-up nation?
IBM was the first company to successfully release a commercial USB flash drive back in 2000.
The questions all founders must ask themselves
To be perfectly honest, we didn't test for differently worded labels at all. So, we'd be outright lying if we said what you're asking us to.

We agree that we need to work on improving the design of the feature and we will be doing just that. “X seats left at this price” is a better label, but may be too long to fit for the way it is currently designed, so we will need to think about how we can best convey the information better.
Inside SAP's Skunkworks As it takes Aim at Oracle
kls - Thanks again I really appreciate it.
I've been using Rackspace Mail for years.
RIM’s 2012 roadmap: 3G PlayBook, Curves, and possible London delay
I agree with some of the other posters:

What is exciting about programming is how easy it is to realize an idea.

Programming is so accessible that anyone with a good idea can change the world. (well...okay, there's competition and patents and stuff but you know what I mean)

Technical programming theory is pretty cool too, but even if there aren't any huge technical breakthroughs for years, I doubt if we'll be able to fully harness the potential we have right now. I'm excited whenever I start working on a fresh new project, despite the fact that I use Python all the time. (actually, that's pretty exciting too)
I worked on a cross domain CouchDB connector(using the postmessage and eventsource APIs) for Backbone that would work pretty well with this.
You might have skipped insurance in your list, but I don't think the parent meant $20k-30k as the yearly cost (because that much is rare), but as the initial purchase price (which is common when buying new).
Not at this time, no. Sorry.
The "blackmail" fragment isn't just out of context, it's plain misleading. It suggests that the PM treats street protests as blackmail, when in fact the PM was referring to statements from "hackers" that said they will release official docs stolen from govt servers if the govt signs ACTA.
You'd be quite surprised how mobile disabled people can be in a walkable area. It's night and day how many disabled people you see in a walkable area versus the suburbs. Areas that make it easy for people to walk are also very friendly for people in wheel chairs. Where I live, there are lots of people with motorized wheel chairs and they can go to restaurants, the grocery store, the liquor store, the movies, ride public transportation to get to other areas, etc.

You'll see many of wheelchair-bound people outside every day, interacting with people. I can't imagine how lonely it must be to be disabled or elderly (to where you can't drive) in a car dependent area. You'd rarely leave your house.

Walkable areas are also more liberating for children. Where I live, we have some areas that are pedestrian only, and you'll see children hanging out and playing. They can walk there from nearby homes.

The disabled, elderly and minors do ride public transportation.
News in the sense, something new to report on. Anyway, two reliable sources say March 18th. BGR and Winsupersite.

Looks like Winsupersite is banned on HN (too many fanboy flaggers?)

http://www.bgr.com/2012/01/25/atts-q1-2012-roadmap-nokia-lum...

http://www.winsupersite.com/article/paul-thurrotts-wininfo/e...
If you care to read a little ways up the thread you'll see that the parent was replying to the assertion that "drivers do pay for roads in the form of gasoline taxes".

Incidentally, registration fees are there to cover the cost of the beaurocracy overseeing the registration, the sales tax brings in about $235 million (based on 1 car per 2 people, replaced every 10 years, selling for $15,000). It might really be higher or lower, but its still going to be far less than the gas tax. And sales tax on car incidentals is going to be much less than that.

Also, the fact that there are more car users actually doesn't tell us anything about which way the net flow of money goes. If there are 10 times as many car users, but expenditures on roads is 20 times what it is on trains then there will be a fairly large flow of money from train users to car users. If spending on roads is only 5 times as much as on trains, there will be a fairly large flow in the other direction.

So may I suggest you consider the facts a bit more carefully the next time you try imputing dishonesty to your opponent?
I was thinking about that. What about an asterisk? Then you could make the tooltip the asterisk expansion. On the bottom of the page, you could also give the expanded version.

This might be the best of both worlds, because you can keep the wording but you also let people know there's more information about what it means.

EDIT: Another idea...

So, you could make the price plus the "x left" be a single graphical unit, thus strongly tying the "x left" to the price, rather than to the seat selection. Then, right below that in a light font, you could say something like "12 left from $y to $z".

So, as an ASCII art example: http://pastebin.com/tS8MPeXK
What's your insurance cost? Most people probably pay at least $500 per year for insurance.

But the majority of a car's cost is depreciation, which of course will quickly take your estimates up by 2-3x if you buy a new car. (Which, even though it's such an atrociously bad economic decision, a surprising lot of people seem to do.)
Well I'm a young one, started programming in '97 when I was 11 so yeah, maybe I don't get it but I feel like he's missing something here. There's more to it than just languages, platforms, and frameworks. To me the most exciting thing about programming these days is shared knowledge. We've always had a lot of sharing of source code, techniques, and styles but it feels like now, more than any other time, programming is now more open and accessible to more people than ever before. Yes, it's still hard as ever but the resources available to us like GitHub, sites like Codeacademy, the thousands of free tools circulating have lowered the barrier to entry for anyone with a deep enough desire to push through resources and learn it. Before there were far fewer resources to learn. It was mostly books, classes, and your programmer friend. The web helped but not as much. It's really exciting to see us all teaching each other more than ever.

Or maybe I'm wrong and far too green to have an opinion.
GPUs have always had amazing floating point performance for single precision floats, that's basically all graphics is. The problem is that double precision support was traditionally non-existent, and has been slow until recently and it is still much slower than single precision float performance.