skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Show HN: NYC Hackers/Designers Seeking Same - List
I'm creating a Google Doc where Hackers/Designers in NYC can place their information, or search for other people, with similar interests. Hopefully, this will help a few more companies get started in the NYC area.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0ArVkFagUZg7bdGo4VGFEWUpibnFnTEh6LS12QWJHUWc
This article's title is sarcastic, apparently.

Sure, some mathematics is outside the purview of programming. Certainly some programming activities are only loosely mathematical. But to say that the clerical part of programming is all that matters (and that's really what he says here) is totally ridiculous.
What Is Your Facebook Page Post Reach?
Chris,

I do not have any experience with that API but from looking it up very quickly I found a variety of sample code for different languages listed by Amazon under their web services page. Needless to say they have github repos for anything from PHP to even node.js to interface with that specific API. I have not looked much further beyond that but it seems very doable.

In short, it sounds like an interesting project. If you want to discuss it further feel free to drop me a line (did not see an email listed under your profile):

jasoncb[at]cs[.]stanford[.]edu
Google Voice: (650) 691-5806

- Jason
Yes, I think that at some point in the future (one we are hopefully quickly approaching) basic programming knowledge would be treated like arithmetic & literacy and be taught to every school kid.

But we aren't there yet, and there are plenty of kids (especially in poor countries) which simply don't have access to a computer and/or someone to give them that first nudge to start programming.
I always want to have programmable computer so i can do data entry during fieldwork and do data analysis instantly without reaching pc..
Evidence of iPad 3 and iOS 6? Server Logs Tell the Tale
> I noticed several complaints, so I am going to reconsider it.

You cannot easily switch licenses because you use other GPLd code. The spirits that you called up will now not let you go.
Ballot Rigging in Russia
> I've started a small experiment in self-documenting REST APIs.

Reading your docs.erb, the core structure (of the docs, and of the APIs it will document) seems to be along the lines of URL > Verbs > Content.

According to Fielding, you probably shouldn't call it REST or RESTful, because it's not[0]:

> A REST API should spend almost all of its descriptive effort in defining the media type(s) used for representing resources and driving application state, or in defining extended relation names and/or hypertext-enabled mark-up for existing standard media types. Any effort spent describing what methods to use on what URIs of interest should be entirely defined within the scope of the processing rules for a media type (and, in most cases, already defined by existing media types). [Failure here implies that out-of-band information is driving interaction instead of hypertext.]

and

> A REST API must not define fixed resource names or hierarchies (an obvious coupling of client and server). Servers must have the freedom to control their own namespace. Instead, allow servers to instruct clients on how to construct appropriate URIs, such as is done in HTML forms and URI templates, by defining those instructions within media types and link relations. [Failure here implies that clients are assuming a resource structure due to out-of band information, such as a domain-specific standard, which is the data-oriented equivalent to RPC's functional coupling].

That your documentation is function-driven:

> Documentation for every single function

also hints at this being RPC-over-HTTP more than REST (which is fine, as long as it's called correctly).

[0] http://roy.gbiv.com/untangled/2008/rest-apis-must-be-hyperte...
Developer discovers there's a difference between the declarative paradigm and the imperative paradigm, writes blog post, news at 11.

Snark aside, you can take the author's advice too far in the other direction as well. Relational algebra is all fine on paper, but relational integrity, foreign keys, strict normalization and n-way joins are horrible for performance. At the end of the day, the declarative SQL you write has to translate to a bunch of bulk reads from a hard drive somewhere, and you really need to understand execution plans as well if you want any sort of performance.
Anonymous supporters deceived into downloading a Zeus Trojan
I don't know, Knock manages pretty well with seventeen.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knock_%28short_story%29
Yes, I think that this an important point. I learned programming with QBASIC which had a manual included. I learned a lot just by trying to figure out all these commands.

Another thing that may greatly help is auto-completion. Type some random stuff and look what the IDE thinks it is.
Commodity News for the Week Ending March 2, 2012
HN News Recommender v0.3
It's a Long Road Ahead: Freelancing to Keep on Bootstrapping a Business
So why is there more focus on computer science than software engineering if most businesses do not care about the science one bit?
The original diagram isn't important any more. It is replaced by the new values that are the results of the experiment. Kind of like:

world = get_world()
for experiment in experiments():
world = combine(world, experiment())

The original world doesn't exist after the first experiment. The experiment has provided us a new world.
The Venn diagram makes visualizing the update so easy, you start to wonder why the Bayes rule is a "thing" at all.

It works especially well with the examples, like Yudkowsy's breast cancer screeening example.
Cool! We have a professor at my university who leads a project where students go to schools and teach the kids logo. (I just started with them, and so far it's a lot of fun and also quite a challenge.)

May I ask, what sort of programs you wrote? Interactive stuff, drawings, calculations? And what kind of topics/challenges did you like most?
It has everything to do with the kernel. You've taken a piece of code that belongs in kernel-space and put it into a user-space process.

There might be valid reasons to do so, but since I haven't seen any good explanation I'd just assume this project was coded for lulz or out of technical ignorance.

P.S. "avoids callbacks" and "minimizes complexity" is a red herring; all threaded code has these properties, regardless of how the threading engine is implemented behind the scenes.
Cassandra is essentially a key-value-store. Accessing data by key is fast, everything else is slow as molasses and something you really should avoid. So to work with that, you fit your data to that model. Think of it as a RDBMS where you can only do primary key lookups and you're pretty much there.
Have you set your regional settings in DDG to "Sweden"?

Heres a comparison between search results when I chose "English" vs. "Norwegian" on a Norwgeian term:
http://i.imgur.com/ReIa5.png
Dude, it's a laptop you want, not an iPad
Businesses--by which I assume you mean employers--do care about CS. Knowing CS makes you a better developer.

But more to the point, universities try to be more than job training programs.
I learn programming since 15, but i realy do programming during my free time recently when i'm an undergrad student. I'm a i spent my time observating animal; measuring plant, trees, and microclimate; analyzing gene expression or culturing microbe on college. There's no need to do programming seriously, so i write code just for fun, solving project euler or other problemset.
Hey masklinn, I'm totally receptive to constructive criticism like this, so can you make it even more constructive? :)

I've seen many "RESTful" APIs with this structure:

GET / => index

GET /<id> => show

GET /?someparams=someattrs => filtered index

POST / (with encoded params) => create

PUT /<id> (with encoded params) => update

DELETE /<id> => delete

If you made a Rails scaffold, and got rid of any of the POST, PUT, and DELETE actions, and then added some basic filtering to GET "/", you would have a nearly identical API as generated and documented by Restivus.
I subscribe to the economist, and enjoyed reading this, but it's political comment. Please let's keep it off hacker news.
> The use case for the iPad’s camera is FaceTime, and for me and I’m likely in the minority here, FaceTime is a classic You-Gotta-See-This-Once feature. You demo it once and never use it again. The line I draw for the cameras is “it can’t be crap.”

Am I the only one that uses FaceTime on a regular basis?

I have family scattered all around the world and pretty much every call I get from them comes in as FaceTime. Most of my family has iPhones and it just works for them. The audio quality is great and it's so much better than a normal phone call. Does everyone else use Skype? Are your family members comfortable with using that?

I would love a very high definition front facing camera on the iPad 3 to compliment a possible retina display. I think that would make it a very compelling video conferencing device.
Predicting gender on Twitter
Heaven knows that having to act all politically-correct and tender-footed in the face of technical incompetence on the Internet, of all places, would drive me insance.

I get enough of that icky stuff at work.
Ah, that might be a improvement but then the questions becomes, how does the English results become affected by me changing it to Swedish?

To be fair I do most of my searches in English and therefore it might cause irrelevant results again. Changing back and forth depending on what language I am search for is hardly ideal.

Will have a look to see how it affects my searches.
Had to wait until after the Vietnam thing plus 8 years as an art major. When I walked across campus and sat down in the keypunch room I very shortly began to spend all of my time there. This was before you could have a machine at home so I'll count the non-class time as 'free' :)
Anecdotally, I loved my iPad and used it daily until I got an 11-inch Macbook Air. Now it sits on a shelf for a month at a time without being used. I don't even really understand the appeal any more, I'm positive that most of my daily tasks like web browsing and email are much faster on a full laptop (efficient tab-based web browsing is a huge win) with only a very marginal decrease in portability.

Maybe this is just a power-user thing, though?
and certainly impossible if you don't provide at least object files that can be relinked.

This isn't news; this requirement exists on all platforms, not just iOS.
What's Cookin' Italian Style Cuisine: Spinach Ricotta Stuffed Shells
Any examples of games that have been in developed over decades (indie, own or retail)? Can't think of any other than Duke...
If that is your intent, why not place it under LGPL. That way changes to the library must be published but the program that uses it can remain closed-source? As you have it now, the library is unusable for any commercial application. I thought it was a great match for a project of mine, but there simply is no way to actually use it with that license.
What's Cookin' Italian Style Cuisine: Microwave Bagged Popcorn Recipe Plus Video
+1. My Air is definitely my mobile go-to mobile move. Wondering if all the iPad love is from folks who don't get the Air form factor.
Please don't read just the selected answer, because he got the optimizations wrong. Bit shifting operations are always faster than multiplications (as the guy with the second most voted answer explains).
Training A Google Prediction API Model Using CrowdFlower’s Workforce
Yes, I think vastly more people use Skype for this use case.
People are born creative, sure, but not necessarily as someone who simply applies their creativity to startups / startup ideas. Both idea and product development can be learned over time thankfully. Just one year ago I was a business guy, and I knew no code. Now I'm learning machine learning, have built several web applications, LOVE the unix shell, etc. All in under a year.
20 Crimes Committed & Solved On Facebook (INFOGRAPHICS)
Hacked: commit to rails master on GitHub
Yeah but 2% of a very high cost is higher than it would be if the cost is lower (obviously). Of course you won't cut the costs much by targeting those 2% at first, but if you ever get to reasonable prices those 2% would transform in 7% and 7% is starting to be notable.
Like the students the OP describes, I too started programming hoping to build a game with as little effort as possible. (I wanted to build a massively multiplayer first person game. I know, I know. Hey, it was high school.)

As soon as I hit topics like OpenGL and networking, I realized this was going to be harder than I thought. The only reason I stuck with it is because I found joy in each little success, like sending a single character over a TCP connection, or putting a border around a <div>. And these successes continue to make the struggle worthwhile.

So this is totally anecdotal, but my personal experience conforms more with what Zed's saying. I think you won't enjoy programming unless you genuinely like the minute, seemingly boring details. Because those become your day-to-day consciousness far more than glamorous stuff like imagining new game mechanics and plotting out a storyline. (And that's assuming you're doing game development at all.)
Well.. amazing how long it took to realize for him..
There are certainly usecases for a tablet and for a laptop, it's not like you have to try hard to use a shiny new gadget for something it is not good at..
Clover: One Tap Payment - Non Crappy Version of Paypal
It doesn't load either on my Nook Color. Bizarrely, it seems to work fine on my Mac under Firefox...
Other tips, independent of whether you're using Google Analytics or any other tool:

- Plan and set up your analytics early. If you're using Google Analytics, set up goals (and goal funnels) for the major actions that are successes for your business. If you're not using GA, figure out how to model user interactions in a meaningful way.

- Track any and all of your efforts to spread your web presence. Tag links in emails, social sources, and advertising solutions. If you don't know how you acquired a particular customer, you don't know what's working.

- There is only one number that matters at the end of the day: revenue. Understand how metrics play into revenue before trying to optimize for something web-centric like "Bounce Rate" or "Time on Site".
Would be nice to know how it works? What's it supposed to do?
When I started to study last year in October I thought about getting a tablet for day-to-day use.
But then I realized everything and more can be done with a small Laptop aswell and reading papers is even better on a Kindle than on a tablet anyway.
I am happy with my choice, there's such no usecase for a tablet where my laptop/smartphone/kindle can't do a better job overall.
I think there are a few problems with FaceTime.

First, there's a bit of a trend toward somewhat less interactive conversation. If text messages are rising in popularity as phone calls wane, it would also make sense that FaceTime wouldn't be the most popular. Plus, with FaceTime, you might not want to use it on a saturday at noon when you're still disheveled in your pyjamas.

Second, it only works with other Apple stuff right now. AT&T announced that they wanted to push for a video calling standard. I hope that the industry really coalesces. That will probably mean Google adopting FaceTime for Android handsets and Google Talk/Google+. Even if I have an iPhone, only one other member of my family has an Apple device. Many of my friends have PCs and Android handsets. That limits how important it can become for many people.

That said, my friend's grandmother loves it. She's too old to travel, but can see her grandchildren 4,000 miles away with it. It's really special for her.

Still, it will remain a bit more of a niche product since there isn't broad compatibility and, at least right now, there might be a stigma to using it when one doesn't feel put together.
It's pretty amazing that Apple is bucking the trend by releasing the iPad and iPhone once a year despite the rest of the industry releasing new models every month or two.

There's nothing more frustrating than shopping for an android product knowing that it'll be out shined in a few weeks and out dated in a few months.

Edit: this is coming from someone that owns 3 android phones and an android tablet and zero ios devices (at the moment).
I should have linked to my first post on this. Sorry. http://normansoven.com/blog/?p=651
There should be a law that you only get one paragraph and one figure when explaining Bayes' rule.
Just as modern toys prescribe a specific form of interaction, a specific game to be played science prescribes a specific causal relationship between the parts of the world. If toys or scientific theories describe a fixed link between 'what is' and 'what can happen' the opposite process fails. Kids are not able anymore to just invent a new meaning for the toy, a new way to play it just as we are not able to form spiritual belief-systems. And that's frustrating. That's why people say 'old toys were better, you could play with them how you wanted' or 'science is bunk, explaining everything down to the molecular level doesn't give me meaning in my life'. And that's why a new religion is needed which is built on science. Which gives explanations of the world that are not in direct conflict with scientific theories but also rooted in human imagination instead of observation. Which makes them meaningful. Also new toys.
Reasons Why Your Facebook Store Might Be Struggling
In machine code language, we refer to these as rotating and shifting, instead of "shifting and non-circular shifting".
"Knowing CS makes you a better developer."

I'm not convinced of this at all (this is the first time "citation please" popped into my mind, and I hate that response :). Of course, there are some problems that have a strong need for erotically background, but those positions tend to require a graduate degree.

On the other hand, I've seen self-taught engineers who have far more passion for developing software, which seems (in my experience) to correlate more with engineer productivity.

I have a CS degree from an institution that has an extremely strong theoretical computer science department. I value my degree and the knowledge I gained to get it, but, beyond getting me in front of hiring managers early in my career, I don't think it particularly made me a better developer. A little understanding of algorithms and data structures (much of the need for which is obviates by today's VMs and libraries) and some understanding of what is really going on under the hood (again, not as helpful in the VM word).

For me, a degree is a nice-to-have, but you won't get hired if you can't convince me you are a good learner.
You can have both with an Asus Transformer - integrated keyboard that turns it into a laptop and with 15-18h battery life, and tablet for when you need it on the couch/whatever. Why compromise? Those accessories for the iPad are not integrated at all, and they look rather silly.
Valve Is Working On Secret Steam Box Console[Rumors]
Not a plug for Nikon, but they do put out a pretty awesome interactive "scale of the universe" thing. The attention to detail is noticably more than the htwins one. You can find it here: http://www.nikon.com/about/feelnikon/universcale/index.htm
People don't need two Facebooks, especially since everything on Facebook is designed to keep you maximally engaged. It's not surprising that Google is not getting Facebook numbers.
"Ideally, what I would like (and I think most people would like) is something of the form factor of a MacBook Air (thin and light), that has a detachable touch-screen that can run apps written for iOS or Android, and when the screen is connected to the main body, acts like a fully-functioning laptop."

What's the difference in practice between "a laptop with a detachable screen" and "a tablet that fits into a case that holds up the screen and provides a keyboard"? In terms of form factor, those two strike me as identical. Of course, if iOS doesn't do it for you in the laptop form factor, then it doesn't do it for you, but that's more a software than a hardware problem (and I'm willing to bet is a software problem not everybody has).
Show HN: I Redesigned Apple's New Homepage
Diode Performance
In a way this can happen (though i'm far from being sure it actually does...): the medical area is one where the prices are the most regulated. In the public sector the prices for an MRI are probably very largely fixed by the government (and more probably completely) and given that even in the private sector you need an authorization to build an MRI counting them mean the medium price will not increase too much and the public operators might have less arguments to ask the government for price increase. Of course that would maybe not destroy effects of offers and demand and I don't know which one would win in the long term. But remember that health is a very different market than commodities and trying to compare the economics of health vs. crews and bolts by using crews and bolts theory might not going to work well.

The lack of MRI is a big problem in France anyway. Regardless of the effect on prices (except maybe if they triple or something like that) having 100% more would be a lot better.
Santorum backs nullifying existing gay marriages
I am curious as to why The University of Cambridge.. He seems kind of eccentric, but that's what I expect from math professors.
Ultrabooks are rushing in to fill this need. I just bought one and it has been everything I hoped.
Now imagine the theory of ultra-massive black holes creating white-holes on the other side, essentially our "big bang", and that each one is creating another universe just like this one.

Repeating probably like a fractal where we are just a point the tree. Staggering.
Police agencies in the United States to begin using drones in 90 days
I only purchased an iPad after realizing one specific use case. Managing my new baby. General purpose computing or browsing is left to my laptop. Things specific to baby like FaceTime/skype, pandora music, one-handed browsing while holding the baby, work perfectly. But it never leaves this environment. Laptop for everything else.
This works well for the cancer example. I'm not picturing how it would work for the Monty Hall problem. Guess it's time to open the drawing app.
That's the point. A laptop with a detachable screen implies a full OS with the ability to run in mobile mode. A dockable tablet implies only a mobile OS. The former can be your only pc while the latter is purely supplemental.
Flowers regenerated from 30,000-year-old frozen fruit tissue
The difference is that an iPad docked to a keyboard isn't a fully functioning laptop. It seems like the author is looking for (for instance) a device that runs OS X, with all the power of a MBA when in laptop mode, but once you detach the screen runs iOS and has limited functionality. So maybe the author really just has a problem with the limited capabilities of iOS and the performance difference between an iPad and a MBP.
I don't believe there are any 'push' notifications, but you can use the "threads" link on the top bar to see each of your comment threads and scan for replies.

Not ideal, but it's still better than either remembering to check the discussion itself.
I don't really understand this point. That should be true even if you buy an iPhone. If there are better/more powerful/higher resolution phones out there 2 months later, that will be true when compared to the iPhone as well. This is just competition in a high-growth market.

So yeah, that doesn't make sense to me, unless you want to pretend that once you get into the Apple ecosystem, there is nothing better out there until Apple releases the next version of the device.
A different POV: I have a 2 year kid and I feel like the macbook air's screen wouldn't stand a single pull from his fingers. The ipad in its case? he can walk on it, throw it, it won't matter.

Before the little monster gets to sleep, any form of computing is limited to the ipad.