skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Is he (Robert Virding) looking for a lightweight, Turing-complete data description language extension?

I started using Lua because I needed to gather logs from many different systems and build timelines around the events to identify patterns across all the aggregated data. The logs were large, and the metadata was often very complicated.

I looked at several SQL-like solutions, and at Perl extensions on CPAN. After lots of googling, it finally occurred to me that I might need a programming language that had been designed with efficient data description as a high priority. I was surprised that a streamlined "little" language like Lua fit my requirements [0]. I was expecting to have to learn something big, complicated and esoteric.

I needed my resulting datasets to be portable between various Unixes, and fairly standalone. Because of the long load times, I didn't want to use a tool that required any more processing steps on input than absolutely necessary. While serialized Lua tables are more verbose than CSV, they do compress well. They are also valid Lua programs. They can include metadata of arbitrary complexity, and even turing-complete snippets to modify expression of the data as it is loaded.

Salvatore Sanfilippo (antirez) had many languages to choose from for his "data structure server". The next major release of Redis will have a Lua interpreter. [1]

I don't know Erlang well enough to guess -- is a valid Erlang program an appropriate way to store a large amount of polymorphic data? Is Lua perhaps a better way to approach this problem?

[0] "Lua as a data description language (Dimitris Papavasiliou)" http://lua-users.org/lists/lua-l/2004-06/msg00028.html

[1] "Short term Redis plans" http://antirez.com/post/short-term-redis-plans.html
I don't really think of HN today as being for any geography. Sure, it may have a slightly Silicon Valley-centric feel but SV also is the epicenter for HN type activity and YC is based there so perhaps only natural.

Genuine question - What does the "for Australia" achieve that HN today doesn't?
"What I find more interesting than repressing memory is enhancing it, Anyone know of any product development based on this, or if it's viable?"

I'm certainly no expert in the field of neuroscience, but in terms of practical and available memory improvement, I've found that practicing mnemonic techniques is very helpful.

If you're unfamiliar with this area of study, I'm basically referring to a set of techniques that aid in memory retention, mostly through creative visualization and pattern creation.

If you can get past the wild claims put forth by guys like Tony Buzan, you'll find a wealth of useful information on how we can learn to remember and recall more information.

I've found the books of Dominic O'Brien to be good resources. There is another book called "Moonwalking With Einstein" that shows how applied study in this area can lead to real results.
Particularly when indeed.com lists MongoDB as their #2 hottest skill:

http://www.indeed.com/jobtrends
> Replacing income tax with a national sales tax

Not in jest: This would be terrible for the poor and middle class and wonderful for the rich, which is the only reason you've ever heard of this cockamamie scheme.

The reason is that the poor and middle class need to spend a greater proportion of their income just to survive, whereas the richest can more-or-less sit on most of their money (in banks and other investments, to be sure) and still live like rich people. Taxing spending is therefore what's known as a 'regressive tax', in that it affects the poor more than the rich, as opposed to a 'progressive tax', which affects the rich more than the poor.
Incidentally, the artist who made this (Julian Oliver) is part of a free technology workshop series aimed at artists who don't necessarily have a technical background, which may be interesting if you know any people in Berlin meeting that description: http://weise7.org/labor-berlin-8-workshops
Some people I know are trying to get one started in Cape Town (South Africa) modeled on the bay area one.

http://www.codebridge.co.za/
Email at least has SPF records and DKIM.
> why should I have pay for the risky behaviour of parents of poor children

It's not a similar argument: people don't chose who their parents are, or where they grow up. The quality of life of a person who receives education (even if our education system isn't perfect) is definitely greater than the quality of life of a person who stays uneducated. It can actually reduce crime rates and improve the overall standard of living.

Startups are a little different, because the risks are optional, and there is a huge reward for success already built into the system. There are already tons of VC's making money helping entrepreneurs make money. It's a system that attracts people, and it's optional.

That doesn't mean we shouldn't teach entrepreneurship and creativity, but the human capital of the startup world is more of a luxury than a basic education. I would prioritize fixing our current education system before adding another layer of complexity.

If we can teach our kids in a way that allows them to be creative and inventive with already-established tools (writing, math, arts, etc.), they will definitely be better entrepreneurs. But they can also be better lawyers, better doctors, or better anything.
Hackathons are not the nonsense in this piece, the author's assumption that hackathon projects are expected to be actual business-ready products, that's the nonsense. The author is really shooting himself in the foot and missing the point of hackathons: they are about experimentation and practice.

> However, to make good software, requires lots of thought, trial and error, evaluation, iteration, trying the ideas out on other users, learning, thinking, more trial and error, and on and on.

The whole point of a hackathon is practicing and experimenting with some of those or other aspects of software development in an environment where the quality of the product isn't that important. The product doesn't have "to be any good" for it to be a successful hackathon project!

The ill-recieved Facebook timeline comes to mind:

https://www.facebook.com/notes/facebook-engineering/building...

One could easily say this support's the author's argument, but it doesn't really evidence that hackathons are nonsense, just that hackathon projects are often not viable business-wise. It's great if they are, but that shouldn't be the point.
I think in terms of "news" I don't think it achieves anything unless the news is inherently local focused. i.e. our own raising of $500k wasn't huge news in the US, but it was a big deal here in Aus.

A good example is the current top topic "co-working space opens in Marrickville"...certainly wouldn't be of interested to anyone outside of NSW.

In my mind, anything that raises the profile of local events/news is a good thing. I think I'd have preferred to see an actual localised version of HN which rates "local" content higher than US content (perhaps).
Why not print them using a font that looks like handwriting?
That being the case, try landing a job where the focus is pair programming. You'll learn more from a good mentor than you will ever learn on your on. Try to get involved in your local software development community, too. That is equally important as job experience.
What if Jackson Pollock had comments?
Single atom transistor gets precise position on chip
This software analogy is more flawed than most. Both of the other things have timed contests exactly like a hackathon. Cooking has Iron Chef and all of those variants, and film has their own 24-hour (or X-hour) contests where teams make a film along a certain theme. In all cases, it's not so much about the finished product as it is about the process, and a way to measure the abilities of the contestants. And if the challenge is good enough, a way to grow in that field.
Programming
Hey I'm a 12 year old who is trying to learn programming. I heard about this hacker news at ycombinator and I wanted to blog here. I heard that developers read this and I wanted some feed back. I am learning ios developement as well as website making in HTML. I wanted to ask you guys, "How can I learn programming the best and easiest way?"

Thanks for reading this article
But swombat specifically referred to obesity, which suggests that you eat too much, not just that you eat the wrong foods.

If you are already eating too many pies, you can afford to replace some of them with cabbage or sprouts (at least here in England; Maybe it's not as cheap/easily available in other parts of the world?)

Don't confuse it with malnutrition, which is a real (but different) problem.
The ability to forget unimportant stuff may be important to remembering the important things in the long term. So I would never use such a drug unless it had been tested for decades and shown not to have negative long-term effects on memory.
I thought hackathons were just meant to be promotional in nature. Sure they can't straight up admit it isn't about the code (as that's where they get the promotion from) but every hackathon I've looked at has been more about the API, the sponsor(s) or the technology than actually getting anything concrete out of the process.
Ask HN: What is the most cost-effective machine learning school?
Perhaps a more accurate wording of this question is: What the lowest-cost, highest quality structured environment for learning the theory and practice of machine learning?

I've tried online learning, and I need more structure than that. I like school, and appreciate the structure it gave me for my undergrad in computer science, but I'm not sure I can afford MIT at the moment (although that's where I would be if I could). What is the best school, program, or other system for really learning machine learning well, without paying $100k?
It's not just surprising -- it's a disgusting lack of respect for history. It's kind of like saying McDonald's invented "takeout food" or Madonna invented "pop music".
I've actually never heard the phrase "golden uterus complex", but I seriously wonder if it's any different from calling a black person "uppity". Which is also not cool.
I feel like the only way entrepreneurs can do good is to provide services for students and not for teachers. Stuff like khanacademy.com and teamtreehouse.com

Sell to the learner not to the teacher.
This reminded me of a really good movie about a guy (Jim Carey) who gets a painful memory erased and how he regrets it afterward. It's called Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind if anyone is interested.
I love the idea of policy incentives that encourage entrepreneurship, but referring to such a framework as a "safety net" is a misnomer that hurts the author's argument.
Hey, real nice landing page. There's a bit of confusion in that your example doc is a tax form (which isn't typically a document you would collaborate on). Some users may be confused into thinking this is a rightsignature/echosign alternative.

Also - I'd probably add an about us page. Might just be me, but websites without an identity make me skeptical why the site was created. I see you guys have posted a blog post but adding something about yourselves can't hurt - especially when you're planning on dealing with people's sensitive info (again - going off the tax form example).

When did you launch this? There's a ton of functionality here - seems pretty well built out.
These sorts of things strike me as a bit off. One of the problems of being a doctor, much like being a police officer, is that you tend to get exposed to the worst experiences. Good folks may have the occasional run-in. With police but by far the bulk of encounters a police officer has will be with the worst parts of humanity, again and again. Which can lead them to become jaded, depressed, etc.

The same sort of dynamics play out with doctors too. People who get better stop spending time in the hospital, and stop being seen by doctors so often. This can lead doctors to a false view of late stage medical care. They see every moment of the pain and suffering, the struggling that turns out to be in vain, the sheer cost of heroic measures, but they often miss out on seeing the benefits. The time given back to patients who then spend happy years with their family away from hospitals and doctors.
I honestly have no idea. I believe we will figure it out eventually.

The clone will be you, and you will be the clone. It will be like going to sleep and waking up in the virtual reality environment. From the clones perspective it will feel like the original you since it has all the memories of the original up to the point before you went to sleep. You just have to make sure that the original you is destroyed if and only if the virtual you is created successfully and with no corruptions. Otherwise there might be problems between the real you and the clone.

Side note: I believe there was an episode in Star Trek where something like this would happen. Star Trek made a treaty with an alien race to allow them to visit their planet via teleportation over huge distances. The thing is that they would not really teleport the person but rather they would create an exact clone at the destination and destroy the original.
If you don't mind me asking, how do you do it?
This all sounds reasonable to many people.

Unfortunately, the motivation for these kinds of testimonials is not sentiment or reasonableness. Its profit. Its just not profitable for health insurance companies to treat old people -- that's where they lose all of their money.
This isn't correct. You're falling victim to a fallacy sometimes known as privileging the hypothesis. When you look back and say, "Look at all the things people thought were impossible but are now possible!" you're ignoring all things that people thought were impossible and are still impossible. Moreover, you're looking over all the things people thought were possible but are actually impossible.

The entire frame of your questions shows the fallacy because you explicitly abandon all other notions to just come up with things that were thought impossible but are now mundane.

It's true that we don't know everything, but implying that because we don't know everything we know nothing is absolutely ridiculous. All current knowledge of physics points towards entropy, and moreover the second law of thermodynamics, as being one of the most important and consistent laws of physics. It's so important that one of the most well-known physicists in the world is so well-known because he created a theory of black holes that meshes with our existing theory of entropy, proving that the second law still holds. The idea that we should abandon this knowledge because, well, it's inconvenient strikes me as being disingenuous in the highest order.

Anyone can say, "Well, you don't know everything, so you may be wrong." That doesn't make it an informed or useful comment.
Nicholas C. Lewis posted a decent open source inkjet[0] on Thingiverse. He had a Kickstarter for his inkjet cartridge controller[1], which I later used for something silly[2].

0: http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:8542

1: http://nicholasclewis.com/projects/inkshield/

2: http://eclecti.cc/hardware/semi-automatic-paintbrush
I feel iffy about the film comparison. Because I have studied film formally in a limited context, I can say that there's a lot of planning, communication and collaboration that goes into creating a film, from storyboarding to script writing and doctoring to photography and lighting. And, for someone familiar with the technical details of composing scenes, it is possible to get an understanding of why directors make certain decisions in keeping with a particular style.

I liken programming to that process. There's a fair amount of intention and consideration that goes into composition. With activities, such as pair programming, I argue that is possible to see inside a creator's head.

The benefit of participating in a hackathon is fluidity. There are monolithic projects for which the hackathon was not designed to address. But, at the end of the day, you're a better problem solver by working under the constraints of that kind of environment.
First, re Groupon. Certainly they help people.

But I didn't say that making the world a better place was necessary. I said that it was one way to make products that benefit people. Groupon benefits people. Whether it makes the world a better place is a different question.

As for your scenario, I don't trust VC's. Someone may be being nice at first just to leverage you out of more of a share later.

My first impression is that SPECTRE poses a distinct danger of pushing a company too far too fast, and that this is most likely the source of the accusations of dirty tricks. I don't know what you mean about assholes. If they are merely arrogant and irreverent that's one thing. If they seem to encourage unethical behavior I would not consider them.

HERO poses a different initial concern. I would be worried about them pushing to dilute my share, and just being nice at first to win confidence.

Bringing someone into a business is a lot like getting married. I would want someone I could both respect and get along with, but failing that at least knowing where I stand would be helpful.
Not too sure about the "Opens a UDP connection" though :)
With so much on the line, you'd think NYT would A/B test article titles. Anyone know if this is done with modern journalism? Is is feasible?
> "obesity, which suggests that you eat too much, not just that you eat the wrong foods."

It suggests no such thing. The obesity epidemic is all about eating the wrong things.
I think it will only serve to hammer home the mathematical concepts. Best of luck!
There were teachers at your all-boys school whose job it was to prevent the Lord-of-the-Flies scenario and if yours was anything like mine, they expended a lot of energy on that task :-).

You're attempting to rationalize the mostly-male situation you find yourself in, but it's pure conjecture. Women are (in general) just as capable as men (in general) at software development. My own belief is that there are a host of poorly understood factors that tend to push women away from software engineering careers. One of them is the fact that it's a "boys' club", but it's mainly a boys' club because it's mostly boys—if there were more women, cheerful misogyny like that exhibited in your "take it like a man" comment would be less acceptable.

In other words, we can't fix the problem (and it is a problem) of gender imbalance in software engineering just by not being asses to women, but it's a place to start.
Show HN: QR Pixel encodes pixel art in QR codes.
Oh, for sure. I'm not advocating getting it right on the first try -- that's crazy talk.

I'm mostly thinking about programming in the small: methods, classes, parameter lists, that sort of thing. Essentially complex problems can't (and shouldn't) be solved up front, but that doesn't imply the internals of that partially-solved problem should be disorganized, or that the API is inconsistent. I find that if I explicitly scope my work as I'm doing it, I can write good code to fuzzy specs, without over-generalizing, relatively quickly. Plus, coming back to it a couple months later (well within the typical employee-raise timeframe), I can fix or modify it much faster.

It's a balance, to be sure, but I think it's sometimes possible to work both faster and better.
Hey I made CleanIcons.com and I was just wondering what kind of privacy policy you are expecting for the site? I am using a third party purchasing service (gumroad.com) and I am selling icons that I made. I guess I could have a privacy policy that says I will not sell your email to people? Is that what you are expecting?
You need to do two things to get good at programming: go deep, and go broad. The problem is, you can't do them both at the same time, so, you have to alternate between the two.

Pick a project that is awesome, and that you think you might know how to do (or even a little bit). Work at it and try your best. This is how you go deep. Basically, you pick one narrow thing and do it as best as you can.

Next, find someone (or a book, or a web guide, or a website like codecademy.com) that can teach you about the principles of programming. This is more of the "computer science" side of things: how CPUs work, how data is structured, what kinds of algorithms have been discovered and created before, how to succeed at putting complex parts together. Learn all you can about the general rules of programming and the lessons learned from many decades of people trying to get computers to do what they want. This is how you go broad. Basically, you give yourself over to someone who has some structured lessons to teach you.

Then go back to deep. Then broad. Repeat, until you are happy with where you're at (which, if you're an evergreen learner like many of us, will be never! :)
First of all, don't trick yourself: HTML is not a programming language, it's a markup language parsed by your web browser which then turns that markup into cool websites.

Then, wanting to code "the fastest way" is a wrong concept. Learn everything you can, doesn't matter how long it takes, learn right.

There are basic tutorials on programming languages online which are good for starting up, and then there are thousands of books and documentation which might help you around. Specifically, for iPhone development you need to know the Objective-C programming language, so here's a tip: Don't head into coding a huge app hoping you'll just learn by making it, while you just end up copying code from StackOverflow entries. Learn, and then use what you learned inside an app.

IRC is a great way to talk to experienced developers, and browsing source code is also great for learning new coding techniques. If you need any more help, I'm always reachable.

(Also, as a wise man said, "Age is just a number". Just because you're very young, it doesn't mean you can't do stuff better than a 30 year old might. All it takes is effort.)
I hoped to see a comparison of expressiveness: e.g. a minimal todo list app implemented in several frameworks. I guess this is too much work...
This is my side project I've been working on for a while now, and I've just gotten around to a v1.0 release. Questions and feedback highly appreciated! Leave a message here or email me at info@qrpixel.com.
OOo an opening window. I like it. That's re-imagination right there.
Actually, the more common name is hackerspace (or hackspace), and they are quite common all over the world:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hackerspace#Notable_hackerspace...
Easier said than done. How will you know which are the 1% worth pursuing? There have been a lot of ideas that people have thought to be moronic and despite that ended up being extremely important.
True. Strictly speaking, that means it isn't context-free in the usual sense (right?), but it's a practical extension.

Matt Might uses Python's indentation as a lexing/parsing example in his ongoing "Scripting Language Design and Implementation" course (http://matt.might.net/teaching/scripting-languages/spring-20...), which is worth following if you're reading this thread.
Heh.

The better question is "How can I learn programming the best way?"

HTML is good. iOS is also good.

Learning programming quickly: For playing around, Processing is fun. For "real" programming, I would suggest getting a copy of Learning Python and working through it.

Learning programming well: Get a copy of Kernighan and Ritchie (The C Programming Language). Learn it. Then do the same with The Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs (Abelman and Sussman). Once done with those, you will be WAY ahead of most teen programmers.
I don't think armed guards see the silhouette of a grenade, a device that can maim, wound, injure or worse kill a number of people in the terms of "espionage".