skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I actually enjoy this mix of old and new in sci-fi, from an artistic viewpoint, that is. It gives it this little flavor that is a mix between very high technological advancement and simple nostalgia (obviously not intentional by the author, just a side effect of me reading this story in 2012). When I try to imagine a cool fictional cyberpunk future, I find it much more satisfying to picture hackers hacking away at the keyboard in front a screen filled with green text over black background than the more plausible shiny white touchscreen.

I prefer my space exploration to be done on a Nostromo than a Enterprise.
Business Start-Up Competition
Marketest, online quantitative market research experts for entrepreneurs organise its
2nd business start-up competition.

Objectives:
Stimulate and promote entrepreneurial initiative in the UK
Bring out new business ideas
Support the transition from the idea to the launching stage
Promote and reward start-up projects

Who can enter?
Anyone from 18 years old who has a new business idea!
Your idea doesn't have to fit into a box, no matter your target market, industry or service we want to hear about your business idea!

What's the benefit?
ALL PARTICIPANTS:

Entitled to tailored market research at a 15% discount rate for a period of 12 months.

A 50% discount on every market research report bought for/by the entrepreneurs that you support

THE WINNER:
Expertly tailored and personal market research report for your business plan worth:
An online survey of your target market (potential clients)

1st prize: market research project worth £1000

2nd prize: market research project worth £500

If you have an Innovative Idea we want to hear from you
Offline to Online Process Mapping
The Hunger Game Movie Details
The Hunger Game Movie Details
drunken former victor Haymitch Abernathy If she s ever to return home to District 12 Katniss must make impossible choices in the arena that weigh
I have still no clue how you guys are pulling this off. are you spidering descriptions of apps inside the marketplace? maybe look for similar keywords in different languages? or do you have actual access to search queries?
Paul Graham Wants You To Build A New Search Engine Or Be The Next Steve Jobs
Destroying medicine to rebuild it: Eric Topol on the latest medtech
PETA's Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad History of Killing Animals
With iMessage, you can't do group chat with non-iPhone users, can you?
Mobile geo chat
Math and games - an interview with J.H.Conway.
Putting the info about your startup experience from the above comment on your part of the 'people' page would help. The reason people trusted YC early on was because everyone knew pg, rtm and tlb did Viaweb together, so they'd been through the whole of the startup process themselves.

So if you consider advice and mentoring a major part of the investment into the startups you fund in exchange for a lower cash valuation, you'll have to be very convincing that it really will add that much value.
Nice bit of data mining but the data doesn't seem quite right -- an unusual balance of foreign keywords that seems quite surprising to me at least (look at "Smurfs' Village" for instance)?
Medical Relief Camp in West Bengal - Go Heritage India Humanity Mission
It is only 14 hours old, started on a Sunday evening in a user generated content community forum. It's 6am in Apple land, I'm sure some employee is about to get a surprise.
Well we had to start somewhere.

I'm pretty sure I understand the value of YC - I know quite a few people who've been through the programme and I've visited the space and met with Harj who taught me a lot.

We're different though and I think different startups are looking for different things. If you have time, I'd certainly be up for meeting to see if there is a fit. My email is on the site.
Which company are you: the Pusher
Punchbowl.com CEO is donating to a food pantry in MA. Donate $5, he'll match.
It's a pretty run-of-the-mill "Unity sucks, Gnome 3 sucks, KDE sucks" diatribe. Nothing we haven't all heard already.
That party is the opposition currently; the ruling coalition is a coalition of liberal parties: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alliance_for_European_Integrati...

Even the "Party of Communists" is pretty questionable on the communist credentials, though. As far as I can tell from English-language sources, they're more of a right-leaning populist party, with the main communist connection being that they're Soviet nostalgists. But their Soviet nostalgia seems to have more to do with a vaguely nationalist nostalgia for the days of a once-great power, than much to do with workers-of-the-world-unite. Vaguely like Putin's views on the subject, or the way a handful of Britons are nostalgic for its once-great empire.
Segmenting a Project
Hi All,

I'm not usually prone to looking for free advice, but I don't have anywhere else to turn. Help me hackernews!

Also, I'm going to be forthright by saying, I can't code, which is why I need some advice. I've got an idea for a very small project that sells specialized virtual goods. I'm a little worried that because I lack the technical knowledge, and it is hard to find developers in my area (foreign country, and I lack the language skills to work with locals on this), if I share my idea in its entirety with a freelancer online it would be fairly simple for them to build it on their own. Consequently I could little about it. I'm in the dark with what kind of skillsets are required to complete this, or where certain sections should end with one person, and begin for another.

Basically, any advice at all would be fan-freaking-tastic and probably give you enough karma to ride out the week. :)

What I've done:

-I have already purchased the domain, it is being hosted with dreamhost.

-I know I need someone to do the front end work - I've mocked up and wire-framed with some bootstrap graphics how I want it to look and feel.

What I think needs to be done:

-I may want to only have users login via an existing network (facebook, google, etc). It's not a must have, but I think this may be easier, and I want to hold as little details on my side as possible.

-I will need to generate a PDF based on some unique identifiers from users account details.

-Google checkout is the likely candidate for payment processing.

-There will be a piece where once an order is finalized, I will send the customers address out via another API (a mailed receipt).

Again, any advice would be great on what skills I may need per each point.

Humbly,

ar4s
Which Hollywood actors would fill Dota 2′s cast? (image)
Same here. My Dad is a life-long ham radio operator and if I hear a WWV broadcast now, it takes me back to my childhood in a flash.

On a related note, I always liked the British time announcements that used three tones, with the designated time being "at the third stroke". It's like a music conductor conducting a measure before you start playing or singing. I wonder if it's measurably more accurate than just playing a tone with the proper time is reached.
The “run-of-the-mill”, “not-so-ambitious” Startup Idea
I'm not getting into a religious war but:

I've had printer driver problems on OSX and on some Windows versions. The problem with printers is the evil practice of selling the machines at (or near) loss, and making money on ink / toner. Caveat Emptor applies.

Windows users (used to? Still do?) have problems with installing software. They wouldn't use the add software wizard; the software would install things in weird places; there were legacy problems. A common technique used by Windows users was to just reformat and reinstall. That's user ignorance, not a fault of the OS, but it still shows that simple app installs can cause problems.

And dropping to the command line to do stuff - well, you do that on any os, especially if you're a power user. Are there really simple tasks that can only be done on cli in Linux, that a typical user would come across?

I agree that Linux isn't ready for the masses; but then I think OS X and Windows are not really ready for the masses.
So the TSA and CIA cannot use it?
Java and Cloud in 10 minutes? Jelastic
Peter Thiel, university-hater, heads to campus
Good for who?
Watch 21 Jump Stree Online Free
Watch 21 Jump Stree Online Free is primarily based on 21 Jump Street created by Patrick Hasburgh and Stephen J. Cannell which is edited by Joel Negrone. The motion picture is distributed by Columbia Pictures and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer under Columbia Pictures, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Original Film, and Relativity Media studio which is scheduled to be launch in theaters on March 16, 2012.
Canned Messages for iOS [Concept]
(just hoping you'll take a look at my very-new website which, I hope, will be a great way of getting programmers to help your efforts: http://giving.github.com )
The great thing about getting money is that you can buy traction with it.

That's one of the best lines I've read on HN in a while. I think it ought to be a mantra for app store developers.
That's where it goes until around New Haven on the second playthrough. THEN it starts getting crazy again. You start feeling vulnerable and excitement picks up.

I'm not saying it's a good thing that you have to trudge through the game 2+ times for it to really shine, but I absolutely HATE grinding and gave up MMO's because of it... and I can't even begin to guess how many hours I have spent grinding this game because it's so damn fun.
The clock display is nice but not a killer for me. Here&There time comparison in different time zones is the best I have seen. Full page calendar with multiple months is very simple but works great for me.
This is becomes my favorite site for time/date related stuff.
Aye. What mothership? I'm not a fucking slave to the retardation that is this entire company. They regularly show they can't manage anything properly.
Developer says Android is 'unsustainable'
My dad has been using it for 3 years.
Italian Simplicity: Semplice Linux
In short (i'm on mobile) we're guessing the keywords an then verifying them with apple.
Back in the day of the iPhone 3G, iPhone 3GS and to a lesser extent the iPad 1, what adamjernst described below was how you got the best performance http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3692126

I would argue that nowadays with the power in the iPhone 4, iPhone 4S, iPad 2 and the new iPad (aka iPad 3) this is a premature optimization. The raw computing power of these devices makes creating a UITableViewCell with basic subviews total useable without affecting scrolling performance. I've worked on almost a dozen iOS apps in the last two years and that is all I do anymore.

Now about diagnosing the problem. 99% of the time the cause of the problem is one of two things:

1) Not reusing UITableViewCells
2) Doing way too much work on the UI thread

UITableView has a method called dequeueReusableCellWithIdentifier: which allows you to get access to a cell in a table view that is no longer being used. This allows you to reuse the cell instead of releasing the memory of that cell and creating a new one.

Memory allocation is expensive and if you had a table with 100 rows you could end up allocating memory for 100 UITableViewCells. Now on the iPhone if you are reusing cells you'd probably only allocate the memory 7-10 times (depending on the height of your rows) and then change little pieces inside it (like the text of the cell or the image that it is displaying). An easy way to see this is to create a demo app that has 1000 rows which are populated with random text, images you include in the bundle. Don't reuse table view cells and scroll up and down as fast as you can. You'll notice the scrolling is choppy. The second you reuse the the table view cells it will "magically" improve.

The second cause is people doing too much work on the UI thread. This is just bad practice and with the advent of Grand Central Dispatch and NSOperation you can simply take a block of code that is eating up a lot of time on the UI thread and pass it into the constructor of a NSBlockOperation and do all the work in the background. Some common examples of this are pulling data from a web service, converting data from a web service into local entities, reading from a local database (i.e. sqlite), sorting collections, etc.

If after solving these two problems your app is still jerky then it is perhaps time to look at adamjernst solution. But in my time I've created some pretty complex UITableViewCells in tables that have hundreds of entries and my scrolling is always butter smooth.
TED-Ed YouTube channel launched: educating the world one video at a time
I don't know. I don't have a problem with not being able to install stuff while updating stuff. Incidentally, the same is true for Windows and Windows Update enabled programs (think Office, Visual Studio) or OSX and the App Store.

Also, while I agree that the command line should never be necessary, it is often the most convenient way to solve problems on Windows and OSX, too.
I have not. Last time I complained to sony they sent out an update to all playstations and when I downloaded it my ps3 clicked off and i got the 'yellow light of death'... done, over, forever. This new ps3 was a gift from my girlfriend so I wouldn't want to give sony any reason to fry her $300 purchase like they did with mine.

I know this is a conspiracy theory. The sony fanboys ripped me apart when I complained on twitter about it. 'Obviously' it was just coincidence. I'm thinking at the very least it has to do with that legit version of yellow dog linux i had on it at one point which they forced me to remove with a more recent update if i wanted to keep my psn access. I have a feeling i would have been better off just giving them the boot then and there.. ohh well, SMH

EDIT: just so everyone knows the details it was after the big crack of psn, it was down for months and every day i turned on my ps3, checked if i could get on and turn it off. I complained on twitter at some point and when the network finally came back up I installed the update. It completed 'successfully' and asked me to allow it to restart my ps3, I said yes, it turned off, yellow light comes on and the tears begin to fall.
Increasing the age of required education to 18 doesn't sound like a good idea to me at all. I knew several people who left school early (aged 16 or so) who wouldn't have gotten anywhere staying at school longer - they were much happier getting started on "real" work. All it will achieve is massaging some unemployment statistics to make it look like some problems aren't so bad.
Korrio, Led by Former Isilon CEO, Seeks Fortune in Youth Sports Software
11 Open Source Programming Tools on the Rise
I think the author is correct in excluding languages that are non-free. Microsoft's promise means almost nothing in the real world. They could retract that at any point in time and leave any project built on that technology at risk. Mono is a non starter for any open project built today.
I actually tried that - maybe you remember Doom 3 - they had this little heads with spiderlegs - I had similar reactions to those, but I managed to overcome this (not completely, as I still paused when it jumped out of nowhere, but for most part I could just play along).

It's weird, because it's different for pretty much every game, and I can't put my finger on what makes me impossible to finish the game, and what in appearance of monsters makes it bearable.

I think it might be that in Doom, those were (more or less) human heads with spiderlegs, and I was able to convince my brain that it's ok, those are just deformed humans I'm fighting.

What might made Borderlands worse, was that those worms and spiders came out of nowhere. Five minutes earlier, I was shooting bandits and wolves (skags, or whatever they were called), then I go to new location, and BANG!, completely different enemies. And they looked totally different than what I fought before, whereas Doom spiders felt like they belong in the same world.
Sign language program converts hand movements into text
You have to account for the ~22% loss due to the packing density of cylindrical tanks within the container.

So that 38.5 m^3 is closer to 30 m^3 effective volume, maybe another 5% loss due to end-caps and plumbing.
Cpu_accelerator in C++ AMP
HackerNews Meetup Stuttgart: Event details out, sign up
Oh, man. I played Borderlands all the way through (once, anyway), and my reaction to all the things Steve praises was exactly the opposite.

* I had no idea that there was a special benefit to playing the game through a second or third time. That's because the game doesn't tell you that. So the only people who will ever discover this are the hardest of hard-core OCD types.

* Even if it did tell you that, it's ridiculous that it would push the "good stuff" out to the second or third playthrough. Old Man Murray said it best, more than a decade ago (http://www.oldmanmurray.com/longreviews/63.html):

> Here's a note to developers regarding what we hope will become an industry-wide policy: if your game has some good parts, try to put them at the fucking beginning. It takes us ten hours of dismal labor to earn enough money to buy your game, so please commence the entertainment early on. If possible, pack something fun right into the box, for instance a balloon...

> Developers have one goddamn job: entertain us. And we mean now, goddamnit, not in six hours.

* The huge number of randomly generated guns may create a token economy, but it also forces the player to spend way too much time trying to figure out whether Gun # 712,924 is better than Gun # 712,925. Sid Meier is supposed to have said that "a game is a series of interesting choices," and the problem with Borderlands' guns is that choosing between them is usually not interesting, because the differences between most weapons you encounter contemporaneously are so tiny.

This wouldn't be so bad if you could carry an unlimited number of weapons, but you can't, so you're constantly having to compare weapons to decide which ones to discard and which to keep; which means you're constantly being forced to make uninteresting choices. It's the opposite of fun.

And on and on. Don't get me wrong, I liked Borderlands; as a shooter it was OK, and its unique aesthetic was fun. But all the things that Steve is raving about here are things that I experienced as reasons not to like it.
I happened to come across that clause last week and tracked down some humorous commentary by jslint's author:

Douglas: That's an interesting point. Also about once a year, I get a
letter from a lawyer, every year a different lawyer, at a company--I don't
want to embarrass the company by saying their name, so I'll just say their
initials--IBM...

[laughter]

...saying that they want to use something I wrote. Because I put this on
everything I write, now. They want to use something that I wrote in
something that they wrote, and they were pretty sure they weren't going to
use it for evil, but they couldn't say for sure about their customers. So
could I give them a special license for that?

Of course. So I wrote back--this happened literally two weeks ago--"I give
permission for IBM, its customers, partners, and minions, to use JSLint for
evil."

http://www.mail-archive.com/debian-legal%40lists.debian.org/...
Go Ask Grandma: How To Design For “Normals”
Here’s the gist:
- Designing technology novices is a secret of great product design for all.
- First, it is important to quickly show the user what the product is for.
- Guide novice users down a path designed to delight them while teaching how the service helps them.
- Your site needs to be valuable and engaging to users before they sign up for account and even if none of their friends have joined.
- Designing for novice users often uncovers needs shared by mass markets.
+1000 for Dr. Doofenshmirtz allusion.
Earlier discussion:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3690063
Iff “don’t be evil” = “don’t do evil”.
Out of curiosity, did you find Diablo especially fun?

I mean I enjoyed Diablo, but not quite as much as some people did. I think whole system of grinding for better gear definitely appeals to a certain audience of gamers.

I also noticed that in the article he nags on Mass Effect 3, stating that the writing was juvenile, yet I really didn't think this article was written with maturity in mind :P.
Mmm, well I'm assuming that when you are using jslint to check your javascript you are doing so much good (avoiding increasing the amount of crappy javascript in the world) that it doesn't really matter if the javascript you are writing is for the skynet website. Plus we wouldn't want a xss attack to take down skynet allowing pesky humans to survive. That would be just wrong.

(Last part was a joke :P)
Could you run some sort of open day before applications close to talk about the scheme and meet the people involved?
You need to know the false negative rate to evaluate it against a coin flip. For example, a hypothetical machine with a 50% false positive rate but 0% false negative rate could still be really useful, if the machine itself is cheap/fast and the subsequent screening slower/more expensive. With such a machine, you know that the 50% who pass are clean, thus reducing your followup screening load by half.

Of course, a machine with ~50% false positive and negative rates is indistinguishable from flipping a coin.
Well, what if they do? Would they get sued for at least two crimes? How silly.
I used to spend (i.e., waste) time reading linux blogs, each touting innovations in Ubuntu, et al. on the desktop. These "innovations" were anything but sorely needed or outdated features / programs (look at basically any media player).

The most absurd aspect of these blogs is the focus on the desktop/laptop (well, also on the whole free software aspect, as if the average person cares or is aware of such a concept). Canonical is pushing for a smart phone (and TV), but they don't seem to be in a great rush.
CNN to buy Mashable for around $200 million, report says
This is because apple's search has approximate match, so a word like "historiska" will cause the smurfs village to be found if they used the word "history" in their keywords.
For example, try searching in us store for "historiska centex" - it will find smurf's village.
Also, some apps seem to simply use Spanish words as well, for example google uses "busca", which is Spanish for search if I'm not mistaken. In u.s app store search for "google busca" will find google

I'm on mobile, sorry for formatting etc :)
New iPad Pre-orders Sell Out Around the World
Seriously mundane startup ideas
Indeed, but there is nothing inherently wrong with superficial knowledge (as long you realize it is superficial). Before the AI-course I knew absolutely nothing about the field, now I know enough to start matching problem domains to techniques. Obviously I learnt nothing useful about how to actually implement those techniques, but at least I know what words to start googling for.
Some people (on this thread, too) seem to think that in order for Linux to be successful, it needs to become Windows. I think the exact opposite is true. Linux will never beat Windows at being Windows. But it may well be the superior operating system for many people.

If you ask me, this is what Linux should strive for, and incidentally, what it probably is striving for. Hardware compatibility is pretty good already. Usability is very good if you subscribe to the Linux way of doing things.

I don't think that Linux is particularly lacking in any way compared to Windows. It is simply different, serving different purposes and different people, optimizing for different use cases.

It is as ready as it ever was or will be. The question rather is, are people ready for Linux?