skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Anyone enrolled coursera's course, please feed back.
I kind of wanted to vote for groovy. It's pretty much what you get if Java and Ruby had a baby and is a pleasant language to work with. Truthfully though, I like a lot of the languages on that list so it's hard to pick just one as a favorite.
2 Questions
1. How much did they raise in angel/vc funds?
2. What was the purchase price?
also see:
http://www.thoughtocean.com/what/biggeridea
My opinion is that they suck. Because they do not (and cannot, largely) re-create the experience and value of Apple's phone, no matter how much they copy its look and feel. Of course a complex device like that has nothing to do with a simple script running a website.
Llvm's site down?
Has anyone else noticed that LLVM's site appears to be down?
Just hide the default behaviour and make the overrides optional.
some interesting profiles - http://askolo.com/alexis http://askolo.com/harj http://askolo.com/patio11 http://askolo.com/iamwil http://askolo.com/edw519 http://askolo.com/aaroniba
These are good points. Solr/Lucene tuning is an art, so much so that some search consulting companies charge tens (or hundreds) of thousands of dollars for these services. That's the value proposition of Searchify's hosted search - if you just want search, you shouldn't have to worry about shards, commit strategies, batching, GC, etc. You just want to add your documents, search them, and get great, fast results, without having to become a Lucene expert in the process.

If this sounds interesting, check us out at http://www.searchify.com - We offer true real-time, fast hosted search, without requiring you to learn the innards of Solr or Lucene.
Yes I think ktsmith has hit the nail on the head on synergies.
Its single-threaded nature for map/reduce is its biggest liability in my opintion. It will apparently be fixed in the next version (https://jira.mongodb.org/browse/SERVER-4258)

Right now, large map/reduce operations just bring the thing to its knees. So we just don't map/reduce with it. The query features are really quite nice, and we do the rest in hypertable.
2,100 Megapixel panorama photography game 7 of the Stanley Cup Final 2011
I'm surprised to see such a low number of Fortran programmers. Are we really at the brink of extinction or are people from science and engineering not interested in all this kool new (hacker) stuff?
Link to the dyslexie font: http://www.studiostudio.nl/project-dyslexie/en/
There is also NodeBox http://nodebox.net
I'll admit it – the new galaxy desktop background is one of the things I look forward to in new Mac OS releases. So pretty…
The Ennron Act 2011- Job Act | Authspot
So it's a great opportunity for some synergy: FeeFighters can really help out Groupon.
I recently built a new low-end computer with one of the AMD APU's in it, because it seems 'good enough' for that type of machine. However, it still doesn't perform as well as discrete parts. For about $80 you can buy a low-end video card better than anything integrated at the moment.

AMD has a full line of high-performance video chipsets to pull tech from, but they still just barely get to 'adequate' for low-end useage with the cpu/graphics combo. I don't see where intel is going to leapfrog everyone else in this area, unless they buy NVidia (which would probably be blocked).
I voted for Python, but I would have voted for F# if it had been in the list. A good mix of strong language design (the ML pieces, plus some of the bits like workflows) and pragmatic utility (all those .Net libraries and such).

I code mostly in C# for employment reasons, but I do personal code in F# or Python, depending on what kind of tools I need access to.
Must-Have Python Packages for Finance
had a similar idea a long time ago (ie. ~2 years) and it was called askcue.com (still online). question sites like these face a huge chicken and egg problem, because you need people asking and answering... sorry to break it to you, but you've ventured into a very competitive and difficult (answers.com, answers.yahoo.com, quora.com, askreddit, formspring.me) section on the internet. still, best of luck to you!
We're still on EC2, though we've learned to distribute servers across availability zones.
As others have mentioned, Kyte replaces the default home screen, so whether kids turn off the phone, pull the battery or the app crashes, it'll just restart. The only way to exit is for the parent to put in their password.
So is wikipedia. Or am I taking crazy pills.
I am a contractor at a client that does exactly that:

http://patientsafesolutions.com

Using a iPod Touch and a proprietary jacket, patients can be monitored and transferred to the next shift of nurses through an intuitive App. Its really quite amazing.
Ron Conway Saved OMGPOP's Life Over And Over Again
AT&T declares it could have saved T-Mobile from job losses
They're pictures of our office in Durham, NC.
I've only heard of Scientific Linux once before (Ironically, in a HN posting) - 100% of all the companies I work with (Bay area), or have colleagues working at, use CentOS, until they get a lot of stodgy enterprise types working for them, or need to call Oracle for support, or need to resell their product to customers - at which point they switch (mostly) over to RedHat and start paying licensing fees.

What is other other people's experience for *nix server environments that deploy more than a hundred or so servers? (Presumably, at low server count, it's whatever the guy deploying them decided to deploy at the time - Suse/Debian/Ubuntu might all be in the mix - maybe even RHEL. )

Personally, I'm an Ubuntu + OpenBSD guy for my workgroup / personal servers, except for Linode/Slicehost where I usually go with CentOS.
I'm actually able to load wikipedia.org . . . llvm.org appears to just be sitting there and not loading for me.
Would restricting to same-origin break http://hackerne.ws?
To Do Mapr - Location-aware task manager
Try out our new free task management application for Android called To Do Mapr. It is freely available on Google Play -- check out www.todomapr.com.
I'd love to know what dictionary this uses to look up pronunciations. Is it the CMU wordlist, or is there a better one that's freely available?
Thanks for checking it out. The key difference isn't so much what you can't do with Quora, but rather what you don't do. People don't use Quora as a place to ask specific people questions.

We're interested in optimizing Q&A around thought leaders and experts. Quora works well for finding the right answer to a question - we're interested in finding out a diversity of opinions.
Great writeup outlining some of the features you get out of the box. But at the end of the day, this is another RHEL clone. Other clones are mentioned, like CentOS, but there is no clear motive to choose SciLinux over anything else.
Surprised to see the poll includes coffee script amongst the list of these elite languages
When the announcement doesn't say and there's no paired announcement at the acquirer, it usually means they're not allowed to say. GRPN is a public company and if the acquisition is material to the company there's a whole regs dance they have to do.

So long story short: not much point in asking the second question.
C# is my favorite language, too bad I can't use it since I work at a Linux shop.
tl;dr It's basically a lightweight sandbox to let you run untrusted code from un-managed languages (i.e. C/C++/Assembly/etc) in the native host format (i.e. in Linux i686 or Win32 or iOS).

My comment: In other quarters, people usually use OS process plus permission to isolate the running of a untrusted program. This is basically what ZeroVM is, a more restricted process.

One major downside of this approach is that you have to compiled to different host formats to deploy to different host environments. You don't have the write once and run everywhere advantage of Java/C#/Python.
Which could possibly be the reason why they acquired FeeFighters.

Companies sometimes make acquisitions to augment what they are lacking.
With tools such as?
Yeah, wiki works now. I spent a solid 60 seconds watching a page not load. So I panicked.
We actually have an option to login without Facebook right below the FB login button, so you don't need it to sign up.
Good Old Games calls out Steam, hints strongly at competing service
Wow definitely soak as much of the news cycle as you can get out of this, amirite?

This is one of the dumbest story cycles I've ever seen on HN. There's little point in doing this (I'm sure my comment will be illegibly grey in a minute or two) but I did my part to try to flag this away.

A dark pattern, a dark pattern indeed.
Good stuff. I see you're on Heroku as well which is always a win.

Now if someone could put SenseiDB on the cloud, i'd pay for it...
Mono is open source. If it were the official (reference) implementation, of course I'd consider .NET more of an open platform.
What sort of security implementations were you thinking of? There are companies out there aggressively working towards "uncloneable" cards and such.

Secure elements for payments I think are pretty secure, more secure than credit cards at least.

Edit: here's one company that claims to it: http://www.verayo.com/products/unclonable-rfid
I definitely see where you're coming from, I'm just commenting from an observational standpoint. I think that some people felt a little cheated by the "you can look but you can't touch" mentality of the blog post.

(I'm also a fan of dcurtis' work, including Svbtle, by the way).
So if anything, downloading music and films is worse than what they did to Curtis?
Hey guys - thanks to HN folks for your support over the past couple of years. We owe no small part of our success to the community here - not just in getting you guys to use our products, but lots of other stuff that has helped our business along the way.

We're super thrilled to be a part of the Groupon team, it has been a great outcome for everyone.

I was going to answer the questions that I could but Thomas has answered all of them accurately for me anyway.
Bless you! Standard ML is the closest thing we have to a perfect language, in my opinion. My only wish would be a solution to the non-extensible overloading issue, but to fix it without also fixing the formal semantics around it feels like throwing the baby out with the bathwater, and is why I haven't gotten into Felix or Mythryl.

I mostly use Haskell myself. I find myself missing the laziness and purity when I use Standard ML, but I think the biggest obstacle for me is the shortage of libraries. I'm happy to use a language without a community, but compared to Haskell it feels a bit like a ghost town. Such a shame, it really is fantastic and would have been the perfect tool for building huge systems on.
No, it's more like the IDE is augmenting your brain and fingers. The code comes out readable, but you only have to type a fraction of the characters. It's a code-writing assistant robot.

Also, it makes APIs incredibly discoverable. Not sure what a `IQueryable` provides?

IQueryable iq = null; iq.

and scroll through the popup. Instant one-line descriptions are available in the tooltips, and you can get full documentation with F1. you've ever experienced this, it's REALLY hard to go back to Emacs. It's incredibly well done.

(edit: formatting)
Do Rich Kids Do Better In School?
Scientific Linux is faster at patching and keeping up with RHEL releases than CentOS has been.

After the extremely long time between the release of RHEL6 and CentOS 6, I don't know that I would choose to go with CentOS for new installs.
How's SQLAlchemy working with MongoDB? I, for one, am very happy to be able to use MongoDB as a Django backend. I believe this is largely due to the fact that Django has never directly assumed data models to be stored in a SQL database, but has defined its own object abstraction layer instead.
This is an exceptionally low standard. Are unmanned flying taco deliveries one millionth the benefit towards society that roads are?

There is also an entire industry based on keeping children safe from everyday dangers. We have baby gates, plugs for electric outlet, fences for yards, childproof medicine caps, cabinet lock, etc. Exactly how are you keeping your child safe from the swarm of helicopters delivering tacos en masse to the park he's playing in? Do kids need to walk around in protective bubbles because the need to avoid waiting in line at Chipotle outweighs the need for safety?
California To Build A $100M Electric Car Charging Network
What about sensible defaults? If the libraries you use are designed with reasonable defaults that have already anticipated your needs there should not be any need for anything but the most basic syntactic autocomplete functionality (closing brackets for example) because any code at that point is customization for your specific project which is not easily generalized (otherwise it would be a default in the library).
In my mind, this acqusition is about making good on the IPO. A lot of people, including me, are skeptical about how Groupon can differentiate itself from the competition. It looks like Groupon is trying to address that with this acquisition... it's trying to position itself as the easiest deal service to work with--an interesting strategy, considering that many businesses don't come back to Groupon after the first deal.
Where's F#?
I suggest you not try to speak for every parent. Also, it'd be best if you didn't use euphemisms for censorship.
Next iPhone Coming Fall 2012 with LTE, 3.5-Inch Screen
According to this article, all you need is cloud computing and a NoSQL database to scale to 36 million users. Really great journalism.
I wonder if it is a "reflexive" view point on how to manage a worker. If you don't have the "employee" in front of you, how do you know that they are working? Of course, there are advantages to collaboration and access with a developer on site. Then again, those kinds of needs can be met technologically if an employer is willing . . . Which leaves me back a "That's the way it has always been done."
It's exactly the same that happens with me, and i guess with most of the people. Besides, whenever i am programming in a new language, it happens that I gradually come to know more tricks, hacks and lower level details about the language which makes me like it even more. And, then it becomes my favorite language. And, then I can argue with someone over it. And then one day, I start writing hello_world in a new language, or one of the languages which i had not touched for many years and it becomes my favorite language. And then, i think how foolish it was of me! Btw, i voted for C because nothing is more beautiful than it IMHO; you can do whatever you want so elegantly that it mesmerizes me.
That's why I said http resources are typically small. They won't take up too much cache memory when brought in from disk. Filesystem caching is so good these days that if a file is used more than once, its disk seek time is negligible when amortized over its many read.

I'm pretty sure jquery.xx.min.js will be downloaded over and over again for every page if you don't cache it.
I find that I'm rather productive in python for scientific computing and go towards C (or occasionally even fortran) when I need something faster. I also find that it has a rather shallow learning curve for students who come in knowing java...

But generally, I think it's good to pick the right language for the right domain. I keep trying to find an excuse to learn Erlang ;>
Thanks. This is what I am talking about (I think). I have a hard time understanding the counter-arguments though, without any background in philosophy beyond Plato. I will try again when I am less tired.
Travel Guide: Holiday Trip to Greece Islands
AFAIK, Unladen was a 20% project for a couple (less than 5) Googlers, running without any corporate support beyond the 20% system.
That doesn't sound more open to me. Is Java more open than C++? Java's official implementation is open source, but it's controlled by Oracle. C++ doesn't even (to my knowledge) have an official implementation, yet it has numerous practical implementations, some of which are open source.
Used Delicious in the past, now i just use Safari and only bookmark really really important stuff.
I disagree completely. The article is one example of the "sometimes not doing something is better than doing it" anti-pattern, it just is in the sales category.
What to do man, what to do?
Bomz... Opah!
My understanding is that some "hospital chains" have started doing stuff like this, primarily larger ones, however I think a lot of the smaller / independent ones are often still stuck in the dark ages as they can't afford the hassle of moving to newer technology
A. One possible attack would be that this new TOS provision is unconscionable [1], and therefore unenforceable, to the extent it purported to give FB trademark rights beyond those provided by trademark law.

This argument might be supported by a longstanding public policy (at least in the U.S.): Trademark law gives certain rights to trademark "owners," not because they have some natural-right entitlement, but to protect the public's right not to be confused about the origin, sponsorship, or endorsement of the products and services they encounter in the marketplace [2]. A trademark owner can't enforce its trademark rights against another when there's no likelihood of confusion as to origin, sponsorship, or endorsement [3].

On the other hand, even if Facebook didn't prevail on a trademark infringement theory (requiring proof of a likelihood of confusion), it still might succeed in a lawsuit for dilution of a famous mark [4]. A court might view that as legitimizing the new FB TOS.

B. There might also be an antitrust challenge: By requiring users to agree not to use a term to which it (hypothetically) doesn't have trademark rights, Facebook might be guilty of an unlawful tie-out [5].

C. Finally, if FB doesn't require users to click on "I agree" again, and doesn't even notify them that the new TOS are in effect, then courts are unlikely to enforce the new TOS. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit already ruled to that effect in one case [6].

It'll be interesting to see what comes of this.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unconscionability

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trademark#Public_policy

[3] http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/metaschool/fisher/domain/tm.htm...

[4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trademark_dilution

[5] http://www.dechert.com/library/Analyzing%20IP%20License%20-%... at p. 7

[6] http://www.theiplawblog.com/archives/-cyberspace-law-ninth-c...
Newer version of Duqu virus discovered, attackers are still at it
C++, Flash, and Tamarin and Neko experimentally.

Platform specific APIs are awkward, which is why it's mainly used for writing games. NekoNME abstracts most of that away. I'm not so sure how easily it does node.js.

But the standard runtime for Haxe has been ported to the other languages in a fairly bulletproof way.
I agree in large, but there are some rough edges.

-It's wordy. The var keyword was a step in the right direction, but there's still a lot of redundant type information, even compared to other statically typed languages like Go or F#.

-Legacy code. A lot of things that are concise and easy in C# 3.5+ were possible but hideous in older versions. Sadly, that code must still be maintained.

-Null handling. Like another commenter, I wish the language would help more with null values. I'd love an operator to do monadic null coalescing: var foo = thing1.thing2.thing3.bar; Sometimes I want foo to be null if any of the chained objects are null.

It's a pretty good language, though. I'm looking forward to the Roslyn API to the compiler: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/hh500769
Same here.

Also obligatory #golang so people can search for it on the page! (Had to sift through every "x hours a<go> to find this thread.)
From my personal e-book experience going from $.99 to $9.99 cut down sales by about 90% (so it was the same amount of revenue, but higher processing fees), and going to $49.99 only decreased sales by a further 33%-so $49.99 was massively more profitable! This was over thousands of e-books by the way, not any particular one.

<Insert standard "this may not apply to everyone but is an interesting datapoint" caveat here>
No Self?
The SL additions seem very inconsequential for most users. The article doesn't imho give any good reasons to use SL instead of some other RHEL clone (such as CentOS).
>I quit medicine too, but not because of the lack of adequate computer interface :)

If you don't mind my asking, why did you quit?
It's called market segmentation and is fundamental to most businesses. I say most businesses, because there are always cases of businesses that succeed because of dumb luck or just being in the right place at the right time.

The statement "Happy customers beat the crap out of any marketing team you could hire" is pretty ridiculous because it downplays the importance of great marketing, without which, most products will get ignored.
Groovy (Added Two Hours Late Due To Requests)
I recommended the same thing to my clients for a while last year, CentOS 6 was not getting updates at all for a time. They seem to have fixed that now though, it looks to be safe to use CentOS 6 again. Of course, if you want fast updates, pay RedHat.
"Shit’s gotten real with 42Floors."

How do you start a blog post on your company's site with this sentence? Are you going out of your way to look unprofessional?
Ask HN: App overload?
A friend and I recently had an interesting conversation about ‘Apps’, specifically apps for phones and how the both of us are suffering from ‘app overload’. At what point are there too many apps? I am a droid user and my friend uses the iphone 4s. I’ve got about 120 apps installed and use 7-10 on a regular basis, not including ‘base’ apps like email and gMaps. I’ve paid for a handful and the remainder are free (amazon free app of the day, etc.). My buddy has more than me, close to 200, many of which he paid for (which is interesting because I have noticed both anecdotally and read in articles that iphone users tend to spend more on apps vs. droid users).

We both organize our apps into somewhat logical folders but once you’re in the folder we are bombarded with rows upon rows of apps – many of which you forget what they actually do. A lot of the apps have been installed, used maybe a couple of times and not used again.

Will we reach a saturation point for apps? How many are too much?

[I know this is highly subjective but thought it was an interesting conversation and wondered what others thought about it and whether, they too, experienced app overload.]
Perl, especially when parsing and manipulating text files. Still the best glue language between applications that don't like each other, such as when the output from one is incompatible with the input of the other (of course, vendor of second app promised it would be compatible). The only downside after perl saves the day is that it makes whoever decided to buy that application look far less bad than they deserve.
Agree on the discovery part, this is the biggest reason why I stay away from vim.
Why We Need More Credential-Seeking Consultants and I-Bankers in Startups
A response to Geoff Lewis.