skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Easy API's
I want to start a small programming workshop with some highschool students. The main goals is to show them the "cool stuff" of CS. I have a couple of ideas:

Break some mice apart and connect them to a computer, make a small program that plays different sounds according to input device. Make a sound board.

Make a simple javascript or flash game

Make a game in a 3d engine like Unity3d

Make a virtual desktop that is managed using hands by capturing webcam video and doing blobrecognition in Jmyron/Java Processing

What I am looking for is something cool that can be done by highschool students (with little programming experience in C) in a week tops. Are there any cool API's that I could use, or maybe just some very cool/ingenious things doable in a more traditional language like C/C++/Java/AS/JS etc.
I like the idea, but what version of Python is supported? It seems that some operations are not supported. On the first challenge it didn't like the `sorted` built-in or allow iteration over a str object. I ended up solving the challenge, but in a way that I would never use in real application, i.e., not idiomatic Python. It should be clearer what language features are allowed.
Know Why Your Website’s Header Is Driving People Away
WHAT!?!?

Name ONE team with a stats department that consists of a SINGLE Assistant Coach.

What you said is not true. Stats is HUGE! Try to get drafted if the stats department gives you a thumbs down.
Just wanna add that despite what everyone says, mobile apps are NOT a good way to make money.
Subreddits are the new forums.
If you've broken the law, why should you be allowed to assume a position of trust with respect to the law?
CBC's Spark podcast: http://www.cbc.ca/spark/

Recent stories: Limor Fried on Open Source Hardware, Cory Doctorow on the War on General Computing, Don Tapscott on the Future of Crowdsourcing.
> The big draw for SendHub has nothing to do with buzzwords (aren’t you sick of local, social, photo-sharing apps, anyway?)

> In a couple of weeks (...) the mobile-optimized website will include social sharing buttons, so a business can spread its message even further through the recipients’ circle of friends.

Right.
Are Humans to Blame for Africa's Lost Rainforests?
Yes I didn't think Edison the [business] man was so ruthless and underhand. Always viewed him as a genius inventor and all round good egg.
Time Marches on | Healthmad
JavaScript 1K Competition Returns for 2012
Being on HackerNews, One week on
And you guys just demonstrated yet another reason why I choose Python for my go-to scripting language. Semicolons are completely redundant in Python and the language is so clean and the style guide PEP 8 is so natural, you rarely hear about these meaningless formatting style bickering in other languages. Saves so much time from arguing.
Please state why you think something is good when you recommend it.
Space exploration and Mars terraforming.
Hands up if you thought about building this, but didn't because you thought it was too simple.
Robots. Program their navigation and computer vision capabilities. Develop a base station with some fancy augmented reality overlays.
The other answers to this are good, but miss some fundamentals. Here are a lot of reasons why almost any SaSS idea you can think of will take off if you can find a way to market it for less than you charge for it.

1. New business are opening all the time. Every. Single. Day.

2. Most businesses go looking for solutions only when something is very painful. Convincing them of the need is something a lot of existing SaSS businesses don't do as there's so much low hanging fruit around still. If you can send a salesperson in, you win by default. You'll be amazed at how much you can charge for something.

3. Lots of businesses (the majority) are 5-10 years behind in the computerization of their business compared to any business you find mentioned here or any business you'll ever speak to at networking events for startups. That's pre-SaSS.

4. There are a lot of businesses where the internal IT dept wrote all the 'apps', they usually suck and are broken. More and more businesses are giving up on this model and buying the app off-the-shelf. A little customisability (logo, maybe colours, even name) goes a long way.

5. A lot of businesses still rely on some crappy Sharepoint or even Lotus or [insert unwieldy enterprise system here]. The internal people hate dealing with them and will switch to your system if you find someone with enough clout to sidestep 'the rules'. A 'department trial' is also a handy way in, some companies have very autonomous departments.

6. There's no such thing as an established SaSS businesses outside of the echo chamber of HN. Many businesses will not have heard of Salesforce, let alone basecamp. There's no such thing as an established time tracking tool for example.

7. Some 'great' apps are far too generic. New to do apps still come out every month

8. Marketing and designing your app for a particular market sector can give you a huge advantage over others. Just knowing the right words, phrases and acronyms to use gives you huge credibility with that market. Compare 'Project Management' to 'Project Management for Architects with full support for Drawing Issues and Revision Tracking'.

Before you embark on doing anything though, you have to accept that any business app you write is going to be incredibly complicated and you're going to have to fight to keep it simple as everyone wants to use it oh so slightly differently.
It didn't like the xrange function. Also doesn't seem to like the generator expressions.
Also worth noting that time tracking has multiple angles. It can also be used in the context of employee time cards for human resources. A while back I was working with a nonprofit trying to find a legitimate timecard web app or downloadable software and found that most were horrible. Most looked like they hadn't been updated since 1997 and had horrific design/clunky UI.

Most of them were also pretty expensive and charged per user, when this org had less than 15 employees and couldn't afford to pay $100/month just to track timecards.

It seems like there could still be a definite way for someone to get into this and build something really sleek and new, especially when you consider how many ways you could improve on it, like offering nice looking reports to the HR department, exporting of the time data to a variety of HR software, etc.
Disclaimer: I work for Google, this is my personal opinion, yadda yadda yadda.

I've used (and continue to use) Fastmail for many years behind a personal domain.

To call Fastmail reliable is a bit of a laugh. They've had at least three severe outages in my time there (we're talking 24+ hours without mail access). To their credit, nothing was lost in the end, however I was fuming by the end of the last one and determined to switch to Gmail. However inertia has kept me from doing so -- last time I checked it was tricky in Gmail to import a complicated set of folders like I have and retain the structure, so it's always been something I plan to get around to once I have time. Yeah right.

FWIW, I don't think there's been a significant outage since the Opera purchase. And I'm quite pleased with what I've seen of FM's beta interface.
From r60 to Go 1
I'm extremely interested in machine learning and AI as well. Could you email me to discuss more?
Do we even know how to render reality? If we can do it at 1/2000th of real time then somebody should have made a prerendered animation that looks real by now, but I've never seen one. And if we don't know how to do it, how do we know what GPU we will need?
Will Cure for Cancer finally be Found in the Cloud?
Here's a fun way to solve

Using the Python language, have the function pyChallenge() add up all of the numbers from 1 to 1000. But every time a number appears that is divisible by 5 or 7, disregard it and do not add that number to the others (ie. disregard 7, 10, 15, 21, etc). Do not put any code outside of the function and use the print keyword to return your answer from within the function.

def pyChallenge():
sum = (1000 * (1000 + 1)) / 2
for i in range(5, 1001, 5):
sum -= i
for i in range(7, 1001, 7):
sum -= i
for i in range(35, 1001, 35):
sum += i

print sum

#As opposed to:
#sum = 0
#for i in range(1, 1000):
# if i % 5 and i % 7:
# sum += i
#print sum

# this call is needed to test your function
pyChallenge()
I quitted my job 1 year ago and basically set out to make my own living on the Internet. I went from making an adsense-supported website offering free gift certificate templates to a Body Mass Index calculator with affiliate revenue, an online guide to help choose travel insurance, and now a SAAS offering for sending large files for small companies.

All of these websites make money to some extent. However I found the process of developing niche websites not to be too enjoyable (lots of focus on specialized content, nitty-gritty of building links for SEO etc) which is why I now try to focus on the SaaS file sharing solution.

If you want some money on the side, then niche sites are a good way to educate yourself on how to do it. On the matter of how to choose a specific niche, I found the ebook by Rob Walling (start small and stay small) to be a real eye-opener : http://www.startupbook.net/

Also, I would recommend you to check out http://www.flippa.com every week or so. You can see which websites are selling, and try to understand why they're successful and hopefully using this knowledge to advance your own ideas.
I'm working on one of these for a client. There are tons of similar services out there.
I've had a lot of different work habits over my career, mostly because of internal psychological factors and external work circumstances. What I've learned from all the variation is that when I encounter a moment of uncertainty and doubt, my brain wants to decide between two choices:

- relaxing and taking a web-surfing break (Facebook, HN, national news) until the uncertainty resolves, or

- gritting my teeth, amping up the intensity, and blasting through to the right resolution while heavy metal music wails in the background.

I think this is because I can't face the possibility that I'm actually having trouble. Programming is easy! I'm smart! I have to be, because I'm not good-looking enough to get away with being a moron who doesn't always know what to do next, who actually has to think when he writes code. What's the point of being alive if you have to be someone like that, both ugly and stupid?

Yes, my brain thinks a lot of strange and stupid things when I'm not paying attention and correcting it.

Neither of the choices that my brain sees as exhaustive alternatives is correct. The best thing to do is relax, tell myself that programming is sometimes hard and it's okay if I need a few minutes to figure things out, and keep working on the problem even though I'm confused. For most of my life I had to be either unusually excited and happy or under some kind of threat, such as a deadline or an upcoming test, before I could bring myself to concentrate on a task that I didn't find easy. Now I do it every day.

What's interesting is that the techniques I use to calm down my mind while it's freaking out over the uncertainty are exactly the techniques I use to keep my mind calm while I meditate: posture, breathing, awareness of body tension, and awareness of my mental states. I also analyze my thoughts and feelings just like I do in insight meditation. Zen coding, indeed!
There's relatively OK money to be made from repackaging OSS and making it easier to use.

Cheers
Do NOT lie if you are applying for a job requiring a high-level clearance!
Strong AI has always fascinated me so I'd probably do some research in the field (would likely take a few years of catching up before I can significantly contribute to the field though).
Did you know that the electric chair "invention" was funded by Edison in the "war of currents" again Tesla:

http://inventors.about.com/od/hstartinventions/a/Electric_Ch...

Edison also organized electrocutions of animals:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3582295
That "Punch the Monkey" thing had a damn good run. But it was done in Flash. HTML5ify that baby and you just wrote your own ticket!
We might not know enough, but there's much we CAN do even with today's limited knowledge. I see this field moving so fast that in relative few years we could do almost anything in living things.

Omri (CEO Genome Compiler)
The End of the Mainframe Era at NASA
Malaysia deports Saudi journalist over tweet insulting prophet
Previous submission (not the only previous submission) with 76 comments as of when I type this:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3573694

Submitting the canonical URL

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3571353

helps avoid duplicate submissions.
Open government.

Being very political and very active, during my personal time, I'm working on tools that I need to be more effective.

Sunlight Foundation's stuff is a fair start. There are some other initiatives.

The day job is just for healthcare and rent. It's a huge distraction.
Garry's SF Guide to Where Your Startup Should Be
Are there any issues with certain passwords (too long, containing special characters)? Also, where is the forgot password link?
Half right. They don't recur indefinitely, but they can happen within the first week or two after the trip.
I'll assume a bottle is a fifth gallon, or 750ml. Half that is 375ml, about 12 ounces, and thus about 12 shots.

I have often enough drunken half that, 1/4 bottle a booze, three double-shot drinks over the course of an evening 4-6 hours. It's definitely not enough to be drunk at that rate or even tipsy. I function just fine. Double that I would be rather tipsy and not enjoy it. But I have known people that polish off a half and even a whole fifth in a single evening. I suppose those are the drunks. They usually function perfectly fine at work and are often top contributors.

I've never smoked pot myself but I know plenty who do and a lot of them are really fine developers, even though they get completely wasted every single evening.

The people that seem to be negatively affected in work are the amphetamine and narcotic users, both of which are often legally prescribed to them for ADHD or back pain. Those folks can get a bit edgy.

As far as flashbacks, I did know one LSD user who had them. But this guy had been very irresponsible and done several dozen hits one day which landed him in an insane asylum for over a year, after which he remembered nothing. He was definitely messed up. Casual users I know of hallucinogens have told me they've never had a flashback. I have noticed though that long term casual users tend to become more and more flaky so I would consider that a negative in a job interview, except that I don't ask such questions of people in that situation. I am skeptical of the claim the authorities made that the person in the referenced article is genuinely at risk of flashbacks because of a single incident of mushroom use years ago.
Jan. 4, 1903: Edison Fries an Elephant to Prove His Point
The renderer seems to be easily confused, I'm using hyde ( http://ringce.com/hyde ) and Texts doesn't recognize my files as markdown.

They have Django template syntax mixed in, so for example:

{% extends "_foo.html" %}
{% block article %}

MarkdownPad seems to manage to convert the markdown bits just fine.
"Server" is an euphemism. The micro's run on the leftover capacity of their host. This means they're not suited to tasks that need any kind of responsiveness (as implied by the word "server").

They're meant for long-term crunching such as video transcoding or batch-jobs. And in most cases you'll want to have a lot more than one because a single micro has about the throughput of a modern android phone...
What does this have over Google Voice?
Google Displaying Drug Rehab Ads on Whitney Houston Blog Posts
If possible, could you expose any more details on this? It it more re-packing like bundling it with other software, or just using your own logo, or more like customizing? Many thanks in advance!
Probably most interesting Ask HN discussion I have ever seen.

I would work on new algorithms and application of high-performance computing to genetic sequencing, protein folding and, in general, modeling biological processes.
Build a better "Distributed Proofreader" system for Gutenberg like crowd-sourced book digitization projects which can use real-time feedback to reduce the human effort required for the task. I hope that this will make it easier to build PG like repositories for more countries and for more languages. Even those where good OCRs are not available.
To a first approximation, 100% of people have broken speed limits at some point. Where do you suggest we find the unicorns who have never done so?
Edison sounds like a blowhard with the initials JC :)
By consistency, I mean even after Steve & I left, the team continued to maintain the course and endured a lot of ups and downs in the process. What they've done is really impressive.
Are you looking at designers on the GFY forums (certainly not safe for work for those who aren't familiar with it)? If not look there - they will be used to even the craziest of niches.
It looks like we're slowly getting there. See the Luminous engine, for example:

http://www.digitaltrends.com/gaming/square-enixs-new-gaming-...
Because I like it, I'm good at it, and it plays nice with all my devices that support ActiveSync. Cloud providers have added support for ActiveSync, but I'm too much of a control freak to give up my self-hosted setup (both due to perceived privacy problems and spam concerns). At this point my Exchange environment is a collection of virtual machines spread across two physical machines (and two disk sets in one machine), so my hardware cost is minimal.
It probably depends on the place, it just seems very normal where I live. Young people smoke weed, just the way it is. Even cops have stopped really caring when it's done at open-air events.

But even when you consider that perhaps "only" 50% of your peers have ever tried weed ... what does it say about an employer (or anyone) who readily dismisses half of the population like that?
I agree with what you are saying; that's it's powerful.

But I'm still just looking for an example of how this can be leveraged? When you say 'used against' us, how do you mean?
I'm currently leading a small project where something like that would be extremely handy.

Copenhagen Suborbitals (copenhagensuborbitals.com) is doing five testlaunches of rockets this summer from the baltic sea. My job is to get live video from the launch to the Internet. There are several interesting problems in this, one is getting good footage of the launch and preparations.

The rockets will launch from a specially built self propelled vessel that sails from Copenhagen to The launch site aacompanied by a navy vessel that will act as support and crew ship. On launch the navy vessel will be around one mile from the launch platform, so getting good footage of the launch and preparations will be difficult.

I've thought that aerial remote robotics with cameras would be a good way of getting some really great shots. It's not easy though; you're operating over water, with one mile to the support vessel, and you'll need to steer the remotes via the Internet since there won't be available space for an operator on the navy ship (there will be a reasonable good internet connection available from the support ship)so you need remotes that can be operated over the Internet and send footage back.

If this sounds interesting, or if you have any ideas let me know, either here or by email. My mail is in my profile.
But that isn't at all relevant to hiring, since past psychedelic use can't cause future flashbacks as long as the person doesn't keep using those drugs. And plus the flashbacks that happen in the first week usually only happen if one smokes weed or else is sleep deprived or otherwise stressed out, it's not something that commonly happens at random. And that's being generous and assuming that flashbacks is even the right term, since it's really just your consciousness temporarily reacting differently to other neurological stimuli rather than being purely endogenous.
Bless you a thousand times for realizing that interaction with real teachers and students is necessary for the creation of educational software.
This is incorrect - they are allowed to ask whatever they want... they just can't use the information as part of their decision making process if it reveals membership in a protected class. So, there's no point in asking, but it isn't illegal for them to ask it.
This is also a very fun diversion - http://www.pythonchallenge.com/
Stack Overflow Careers has been excellent for my purposes. All of my information can be centralised behind an ordinary public URL (careers.stackoverflow.com/evincarofautumn) and I can really highlight what I care about and how I’m different from other developers. I’ve gotten about half a dozen job offers since signing up in mid-2010, which, well, isn’t nothing. Observe how Careers creates value and improve on that.
Google’s supremacy and your privacy: short considerations about Google+
Tesla is the real genius of our time. I'd want to meet him before Einstein, or any other thinker of the last 100 years.

Edison couldn't spell Tesla, but even in those days, he who told the story best, won.
My thoughts as well, doing a PhD strikes me as a mean rather than an end.
SendHub makes it easy to send 1 message to any number of people and allows your customers to join groups by simply texting a keyword to your SendHub number. For example, Tom's Pizza could have its customers text 'pizza' to be signed up for alerts from them. We also have feedback built in and you can be signed up and sending messages in under a minute - hard to do with Google voice.
288 hours per frame, 24 frames per second, 24 hours per day = 288 days per second of film time.

Pretty close but the assumption that you'd be using a single CPU is wrong.
Great PBS documentary of him.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jQC1lOZpsjQ
I agree. I have always steered away from sites that require "facebook connect." I'm worried one day many more sites that I use daily require Facebook, which I don't use.
There is one great movie about this: Gattaca (1997) - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0119177/
Rule 34a: there is a web site for everything.
What it's like at a local KenKen competition
Yes I did, but I found this stuff out when I was 15(I'm 19 now). Before that, from what I had been taught, we used to count Edison among the greatest minds of all time. Sad. Nobody knew about/bothered to even mention the great mind that was Tesla.
Hotels In
Help the greatest possible number of other people do that exact same thing.

(It's very tempting to reply with more multiple answers, in the form of a goal-subgoal tree. So for instance nodes in that tree might be "Help people think more effectively about their life situations", which in turn is connected to "Help people acquire better critical thinking skills", which, given my life history, has the greatest leverage when connected with the node "Help people become smarter about software development". But this kind of tree is dynamic; as you acquire new skills in the pursuit of intermediate nodes you often reprioritize nodes of the same level.)
Agreed. There are a lots of companies tackling this problem, for all sorts of niche solutions (texting students to remind them of homework, restaurants texting customers that their table is ready, etc.)
There's a pretty good museum of Nikola Tesla in Belgrade. Worth visiting.

http://www.tesla-museum.org/meni_en.htm
Amy would know better than I do, but she says Freckle has at least three larger competitors. It is also something like 2.5 years old (i.e. it achieved success way after I though that market was saturated).
Reminds me a little of Dick Hamming's two questions:

1. What are the most important problems in your field?

2. Why aren't you working on them?

(See http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/YouAndYourResearch.html)
I love this idea :-)