skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Reddit seems to have forgotten this for a while, and as a result they started sliding until they became, well, Reddit. The community we're currently discussing this in, on the other hand, has been a lot more conscientious in cultivating the type of garden it would like to see. And I think we can all say the result is a lot more pleasant than a less tended place such as Reddit or 4chan.

5-6 years ago, Reddit was exactly the same as HN is now.
I'm hoping that the ICS version of the Droid Razr doesn't have any extra stuff on it, but is just an Android phone.
Poll: How do you use Posterous?
I know the big value proposition of Posterous is to post by email, but I find myself constantly using their web-based tool. Perhaps I'm using the wrong platform as I just get so nitpicky over a post that I just want to tweak it to death in a WYSIWYG editor before releasing it to the wild.

I'm curious if I'm in a minority here. How do you post?
Exclusively by web
Exclusively by email
A little of both
CS is a tricky term, in that it is actually (mostly applied) math, and math ain't science...
"It’s tough being a journalist, especially if you’re covering technology and living in Silicon Valley, because it seems as if everyone around you is getting fabulously rich while you’re stuck in a job that will never, ever make you wealthy."

Um, forgive me if I don't sympathize? My job will probably never make me wealthy either, but that's not why I do it, and it's sure as shit not a reason anyone ever went into journalism.
Do you mean "legally" is in the title of web page, or of the HackerNews post? I see it on HN, but not on the website.

Btw, I'd like to echo someone's request for an RSS feed. I'd love to see when new books are added, and I wouldn't mind if you had ads or affiliate links to Amazon for hard copies in those updates.
Touch interfaces are just fine for creating. They only become limited when you're trying to emulate a different interface, like a precision pointing device, or half assed emulation of an interface like a keyboard, which relies on precise finger placement and a variety of non-visual feedback mechanisms.

The iPad has no practical multitouch input limits (I think it's limited to what int can hold), so it can track all 10 of your fingers at once, just as fast as a keyboard. Given the right interface design it has more input bandwidth potential than a keyboard, just not the current familiarity.

Give it time, tablets and multitouch are still in their infancy.
Strengthen the ties between images, content, and viewers.
My wife is a medical doctor doing a Phd right now. By her own admission, doctors are _not_ well-versed in the scientific method _by education_.

She is wise. A good website about current medical practice and whether or not it is based on science, with a lot of guest authors with varying specialties, is Science-Based Medicine.

http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/

Some doctors are more scientific than others. The practice of medicine will advance as it becomes more scientific.
I have a dream.

That one day all the good fellows who have their clue about what being a "kicking-ass entrepreneurial leader who's a real alpha male with big balls and strong heart" will start wanking in silence.
I think when people call the mainstream Republican party "anti-intellectual" they are referring to things like: the quite obvious skepticism of even the most mainstream scientific theories, constant rhetoric deriding intellectuals and artists, policies that are guided by puritan morality rather than a rational evidence-based approach aimed at a certain outcome (drug policy, abstinence-only sex ed., myriad other distracting culture-war issues), policies that place little value in the arts/education (Romney's recent proposed budget would slash the National Endowment for the Arts by half, saving something like $70 mil), etc.
My inlaws purchased a fancy laptop for my kids. It serves as a game and Youtube hub. Occasional Wikipedia lookup for school. I help them fiddle with a few kid-level programming apps, but other than that I have the existential feeling towards computers and kids: what's the point? I'd just a soon break out the Apple 2e from the garage and let them stare at the DOS prompt - they might discover its a computer that way and have to DO something that benefits them.
A Geek's Dream Hospital: UCLA' robots, flat screens, and life-saving cell phones
To be fair, the JVM is why Clojure doesn't have TCO (and no, trampolines don't count).
I am pretty sure that is how it works, yes.

Sure, when I got my first Mac back in the day, all I wanted to play were video games. Because I was a kid and video games were cool.

Maybe it was the small selection of computer games available back then, but I quickly became disinterested in the games and wanted to start tinkering as soon as I knew it was possible.

Or perhaps we could simply persuade these children to think learning was cooler than video games. They are ours to mold at that age.
So would i :) Added to Tracker
Foursquare Support: Why do you search my phone’s contacts?
You're mostly right, but it's legal to separate the mains voltage and low voltage connections like this: http://www.smarthome.com/2546/Low-Voltage-Divider-Plate-SCDI...
>I think the README convention that github has helped push out there is doing more to get people using each other's codes than any amount of variable naming.

Well… the README file is an ancient convention that probably stretches all the way back to the 70s.

IMHO, no, not at all. Github is helping people cos it lowered the cost of publishing code by 1) making it easy and 2) putting code at the forefront of the project.

In my ideal world, we would all use something like Docco - http://jashkenas.github.com/docco/ - but in my day to day I count myself lucky if I find the barest amount of class documentation, let alone a literate style.

So: people will do what is easy. Everyone should start by having meaningful variable names.
`Locally Integrated Menus`: Yet Another Menubar Might Land In Ubuntu 12.04
Same old stuff people always say. Gruber, fanboys, yadda yadda, wakka wakka.
Great idea. This is similar to a game I used to play all the time as a kid. What are you using to generate the random squiggles?
> I have to add "my" to a variable to get reasonably-sane scoping, the default is that everything's global

To be precise if strict is not enabled then any variable declared without a "my" becomes a package variable.

With use strict enabled then any variable declared without my, our or state will give a compilation error.

> Perl's defaults tend more to the insane side of the spectrum, especially in comparison with Python

Actually Perl with use strict is the sanest IMHO. Because this means that Perl avoids the sloppy (but serious) errors that can easily creep into code in languages that don't have explicit scoping / variable declaration: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3087990 | http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3587659
I feel the deprecation of copyrights must come to pass (pure speculation). Have bought into that notion some time ago. It did make me wonder how did we end up in this situation in the first place?

I mean, having the copyright laws in place will bring about the current Hollywood lobby, that's clear (to me). What I wonder is why did we end up with the copyright model in the first place?

In the article it mentions games as something you'd rent which in the world of MMO's makes complete sense. But weren't books not kinda the same in the old days? Too expensive to own, so libraries sprung about. In that setting, you didn't need copyright either right?
BitTorrent Live – P2P Video Streaming
The logical extreme (depicted): http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0119174/
Hey, thanks for the recommendation, I did that a while back , will update it shortly.
When we build the Metaverse.
I suspect some hubs would be suitable for buffering against that sort of attack. Not sure which though, or whether a more subtle approach (some sort of pulsed power to avoid tripping polyfuses, perhaps) would still be practical.

If you wanted to be a dick, I think replacing the insides of a USB stick with a large charged capacitor and leaving them in parking lots would be the way to go.
[Show HN] autocompletion widget for Wikipedia pages
Common Roofing Problems: Skylight Leak Repair
> Without that interference in the invisible hand of the market, your cellar would be full with other 40+ chargers. All in name of 1€ profit.

At most my cellar would contain one additional charger for the phone. Other devices didn't come with a charger at all (some aren't even covered by the directive or were made well before its announcement). I guess in the name of 3€ of cut cost which coincidentally also reduces the number of junk electronics in my basement.
Probably, but....

Insurance and incidents of the sort outlined could push a turnaround in 2-3 years, quite easily IMHO. Insurance changes could make it extremely expensive in the space of a single year if they're on annual policies. If school boards are given the sudden option of running football at a substantial loss, pulling athletics programmes altogether and losing their value while mothballing their assets or trying to switch code, I'd bet on the latter.

Instinctively the elephant in the room is the different college conferences. Varied enough to go in different ways if push came to shove, big enough that they could impose a code change on their feeder systems. Plus, a big enough bottom-line contributor that if the numbers turned around fast enough I suspect administrators would try a roll of the dice rather than a mothballing.

(And I still want to see a greater uptake of cricket! :-))
Interesting read. I also believe that software patents reduce your own flexibility in work. If you spend the time and money to patent your software, you won't be changing it any time soon, even if you eventually discover that there is a better way to design your product.
I got the impression form the article that they were referring to passing through a technological gauntlet during the interview process (ie. complicated programming puzzles) rather than life experience. Is that also what you are referring to?
This is totally awesome! Here is some constructive feedback:

It took me 3 visits to the site to figure out how to add something to my shelf. The little pin would probably be better served if it were below the short description next to the 'Book Profile' and 'Book Website' links on the browse page. Though since adding a book is really the primary action you want your user to take I'd say make it a really obvious button that goes underneath the image of the book cover.

Also once I've clicked on a book to learn more about it, there's no little pin icon on the in-depth description page. Again I'd suggest making it really prominent and obvious. I went back and forth between browse and the description page several times looking for it. I need the brain dead 'Add this thing' button. Your pages are minimal, which is great, because it means that you can make that button obvious very easily. I think there was a good HN article a while back about making the most important item on the page obvious. IMO adding something to my shelf is the most important user action because after I've added just one book I now feel like I have a bit of a virtual stake in that profile I just created and I will definitely come back to build my collection :)

Great idea! Thanks for creating it

P.S. Also just noticed that the hacker shelf logo and title text does not link anywhere. I'd suggest that take the user home.
In Germany, ropes courses gained a strong increase in popularity over the recent years. They are pretty fun and you can "magically fly" through the forest. You get this harness and can lock yourself into 300 feet long ropes in 30 feet heights and just fly from tree to tree. I'm sure, you can find them also in the US. If you get the opportunity, check one out.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ropes_course
Interesting argument. Personally, for all the stuff I do, Linux is far superior. Give me Emacs, R and LaTeX working out of the box and available in easy downloads with no spaces in my paths, and I'm happy. I can understand that others may have different perspectives.

That being said, has he tried Emacs? As far as I know with GDB and gcc and flymake, pretty much everything he wants to do is available.
Bonus points for using the glider logo, will definitely be checking this out in more depth when I get a chance!
I have a theory that part of Europe's success was due to the fragmented nature of States. Within a small area you have independent nations with their own laws, currency, elections, etc. This represents less single points of failure IMO.

I think the early U.S also had a similar model. State's had their own currencies and regulations, with the right to over-rule federal regulations. Now, the US is essentially one state, one currency, and a giant single point of failure. Now the EU and the US are metastasizing in size/power and crushing anything that poses a threat to their authority.
No, touch interfaces definitely have less bandwidth than a keyboard, and you can't make it all up with clever tech. Fingers are huge, relatively speaking, and for touch interfaces to make up for that fact they must get fewer bits out of the resulting input. The mathematics of signal processing require this. A stroke is much less definitive than a keystroke, or a mouse motion with click, etc. Moreover, you have the problem of interfering with output bandwidth as well as if you want to touch anything other than the very bottom of the screen you must obscure the screen with your hand while doing it for seconds at a time. You get less bandwidth both out and in.

What obscures this fact from your immediate recognition is that, unsurprisingly, touch interfaces are optimized to work under those circumstances, so you don't really "feel" the limitations, but you would if you really tried to push them the way a really good content creation application would.

For low-bandwidth applications they're fine, but they will never ever take over everywhere because they have weaknesses that make them unsuitable for high-precision, high-IO tasks.
Maybe we should give an "enable up/downvote" cookie when the user clicks through the link and actually sees the article.

I cannot imagine 5 people (currently with 6 points) upvoted this after actually reading it...
It's an e-commerce startup that's dogfooding by selling stickers, if that makes more sense.
I stopped reading here:

> I doubt whether our software could be patented anyway, but if you can patent a [linked list](http://www.google.com/patents/US7028023), perhaps it could be after all

If this guy knows so little about patents that he thinks the title of that patent defines what it protects, and apparently has not even looked at the claims, then why should I listen to his opinion about them?
Congrats to Andrei! He has one more, similar, product:

http://www.yasiv.com/amazon#/Search?q=data%20mining&cate...

Both youtube and amazon visualization show very nice clustering. In case of technical books they cluster into, e.g., beginners, intermediate, advanced book groupings. It's impossible to notice that without the graph visualization.
Not actually Chrome's fault here. But it's a great example of the idea that no issue is caused by a single thing going wrong - it's a few things going wrong at the same time that causes the most problems.
Old flamewar, same argument, move along folks.
Nice project.

Feature Request:
You need a way to let people specify an image from a URL, not just upload one from local storage.
Makes you realise how it's a clever strategy to make excellent dev tools for a platform. Visual Studio is really one of the best, and developers will go where the tools make it easy for them.
Everyone here is talking about the limitations of scale and repeat-business when it comes to these "experiences"

Science Fiction writers have solved these problems already, just tap directly into the brain, Minority Report style. Now all you scientists just need to catch up.
I understand JS just fine, and I know where semicolons are needed and where they aren't. But minimalism is not a reason to avoid using them. Feeling you're more clever because you leave them off doesn't make you so. JS interpreters use semicolon insertion: it's not that they're not needed, it's that they're being added for you if you don't use them.
Show HN: Sparcet: Free Employee Engagement Platform
Why only free books? Seems like an arbitrary constraint.
Can anyone explain why the US DoJ announced that they were OK with it less than four hours after the European Commission?

They haven't come out and given it as a joint decision, but it seems too close to be a coincidence - had they just co-ordinated PR releases, or was one of them pushed into a decision by the other, or...?
Here's the thing - Devs around the world has spent many working hours learning Objective C and building on it. They are not going to leave that proven profitable avenue for a fragmented Java programming platform any time soon, even though in this case the Java is much easier.
Yes, because all the best C programmers use Windows.
I've found Skim (https://github.com/jfirebaugh/skim) which is a version of Slim designed to have embedded coffescript instead of embedded Ruby, and compiles to Javascript Templates.

Nice, but I see that it still requires Ruby. I'd like to see a language agnostic client-side implementation (Well, javascript or coffescript implementation).

I've used haml-js and it is nice...
Ramos alarm clock
i may be being a bit dumb here, but i can't see any way to register...

[edit: also, clicking top left should always lead back to the front page] [and you shouldn't be displaying "shelves" on "about" to people not logged in] [and now someone else has registered it anyway]
This is some impressive detective work. Especially considering how common the "redirect all wrong URLs to index/search" behavior is.
Why Obesity is Bad for Businesses
so.. why is an unplayed/unreviewed/undocumented game on here? is there something special about it?
> Many in what may be called left or liberals (again, very loose terms) also exhibit a form of this behavior.

That's a good point, but I don't think you really see this reflected on the public stage like you do with the right. For instance, I'm not aware of any barefoot, herbal-medicine/astrology enthusiasts on the national political stage.
I have no idea why I should be interested in whether or not someone uses a particular OS. Especially when that person appears to be an uninformed youth.

I would be much more interested in "Why this government department decided that Linux is a good fit for some situations and what they're doing to migrate" style article. I'd hope that HN would avoid the traditional flame-bait; but perhaps that's optimistic.
Yes (demographic). Although all sorts of people use tumblr, it seems to be most popular among (predominantly American) high-school age (and a bit older) teenagers. It has settled into a middle ground between Twitter and traditional blogs for a lot of these users -- single-paragraph posts or photo posts are the norm, and re-blogging is very common/encouraged.
Right now the app has around 150 predefined "scribbles" that are randomly sized and placed around the canvas. I'm working on making them randomly rotated as well.
I'm porting some of my software to Windows. I haven't used Windows in years. Doing things like opening a DOS console and typing "cd C:\" was like going back in time about 25 years. And then I had to create a Batch script using old BASIC style commands, using REM at the start of comments... It's like Windows is stuck in time, and Microsoft's primary way of making money is by keeping this crusty operating system running, and milking enterprise IT budgets as long as possible.
What It Would Be Like to Meet My 90s Television Crushes
It's just so hard to resist the flame bait. Although I really believe that the author tried to be honest here and simply missed a few things that the platform has to offer and tried to make an argument out of his own failure.

But the naivety to believe that *NIX platforms would exist for a few centuries and that none of the smart people that used them got the idea to write a debugger, is just a little bit too much to take.
I didn't say that it was justification for piracy. I was pointing out that your claim that Amazon met all of the parent post's 'demands' was false.
The argument of "readable" code is like saying Steak taste better than Chinese food: it depends on your audience.

I used to buy the whole dynamic language argument (heck I even lead local Python user group) but not any more these days.

To me, Ruby is less readable than Python. To me, when reading a large code base, Java is more readable than Python. To me LISP is weird (even though I kind of like it).

Now you said "it makes sense to optimize for readability" the problem with this statement is that less code != readable code (and I don't mean to jam everything in one line a'la Perl). I find that I need to read, re-read, think, and re-think a few times just to understand what the Ruby crowds refer to short, concise, and elegant code.

Whereas in Java, albeit more terse, I can just read within seconds to know the intention of the code.

So it all depends. Hence me not buying the dynamic vs static debate.
Fighting Scenes From Syria.
Because paid for books are already on amazon or Barnes & Noble, or what have you, and their respective computer science/programming sections — including an indication of how popular the book is, and often also reviews by customers.

I like that this is only for free books, since, as a poor grad student, I can actually do more than just window-shopping.
I hugely respect science per se -- but scientists and most other types of intellectuals are typically people stuck working in a bureaucracy.

Working in a bureaucracy induces a particular type of thinking on an individual -- I call it statist thinking -- that bureaucracy is not evil (note: it is), that difficult decisions should be made through careful deliberation and possibly collaboration with others instead of on your own (a precondition for groupthink and a bad quality in an executive position which by definition requires a degree of mental toughness). People who got rich and successful outside of the bureaucratic system often become an object of envy by people inside the system, even if they will consciously deny it, which then leads to the perverted notion that the only way to make the world a fair place is to increase the reach of the bureaucracy.

Now, America was founded by intellectuals (though not of bureaucratic kind). The thing that distinguishes America from most other countries in the world is that in America one specific type of freedom is respected: "freedom to rise". In the old Europe people at the top were often members of aristocracy and it was obvious to everyone that they didn't have to work as hard as everyone else to get where they are. In America, people at the top were often (though I admit not always -- just more often than in Europe) the hardest-working, smartest, and toughest-minded individuals, and it was obvious to everyone that they got there on their own. Bureaucracy, in a way, is a lot like aristocracy (actually it is more like a medieval guild system), since it has its own system of ranks, and you can't easily get from one to the other just through working hard -- it has to be "bestowed" on you. Hence why Americans tend to disrespect bureaucracy, and, by the way, that is a very good thing.

EDIT: downvoted: time to leave Hacker News.
ha - they don't even do that with their phones!
Coming soon to iPhone: The Fussy Eater's Cookbook
A quick update for HN: when I wrote this blog post (Sunday evening), we were receiving 80 measurements per hour. Since the 2.0 launch, that number has been skyrocketing and we're now sitting at about 300 / hour and climing.
Actually, that does, thank you.
New Service Will Stream Local TV Stations in New York