skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't think too much about whether this endeavor would be successful. It's more important to me that someone makes a stand and is able to convince other like-minded people to join him for a principle.

I'm just glad to see that he decided to be more courageous than most of us and believed that he should be doing the right thing instead of the easy thing by refusing to hand over his client's information.
In ClojureScript functions are data are functions
Useful for one thing but pollution for another.
Compared to articles on sites that Lifehacker that boast claims like "10 Ways to Perfect Your Sleep Cycle!"; I really love the honesty of articles written like this with the perspective of "it worked for me; I'd recommend it, but your mileage may vary".
They are also the leaders in vdi, competing with VMware.
You only need one tip: get a kid. Won't help with productivity though.
The Best Hackers In The World All Come From China?
Cool thanks! One suggestion though. The video on your home page. Allow full screen :) The full screen button didn't do anything and had to navigate to vimeo to watch it full screen. It convinced me to give the site a shot though.
Run Meteor apps on Heroku
A thought that folks reading this post might have an opinion on:

"Libraries should be mostly unit tested. Applications should be mostly (and lightly) integration tested. Naturally, some parts of a complex app will behave like a library..."

Agree or disagree?
I love getting pull requests, and even when there's a problem with the patch, I usually just merge it anyways and fix the problems myself.

I do this because that's what people did for me when I was new. I accidentally crapped all over this SVN repo we were working on, and everyone was super professional about it - fixed all the things I'd broken, taught me how to use the tools I was using, and generally welcomed me into the group even though I had no clue what I was doing.

So yeah, send me some pull requests, even if they're broken :) ( http://github.com/jayferd )
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But no one is going to spend $200k for a $300k mortgage if the house's value is significantly less than $500k. The price you would be willing to pay is basically the house's value minus the outstanding mortgage.
Oh, I agree with you that it makes HN worse.
How Micromanaging Educators Stifles Reform
Things like this make me feel so stupid. :(
Instagram and Digital Classism
Whatever you do, if you get traction you are king.

If you don't no matter how much coverage you get you will go down.

The only precursor for traction are users, tech blog coverage wont do anything about it: even consumer gadget blogs are niche compared to the mainstream media, and even then most people care a lot more about gadgets than webapps.

.........unless all their friends are using them, that's when they care, but that's growth which comes after.......that's right, TRACTION.
Interesting to see the "consecutive" days motivational tool come up again. I've been struggling with this recently and will have to give that a shot.
When did it become accepted practice to check in generated code? That's what packaged downloads are for.
<nitpick>
plural of Unix: Unices
</nitpick>
Oooops... thanks for reporting this! :)
Instagram hits No 1, Nokia lowers outlook   BlackBerry app numbers growing
I just wish I had friends on google+. :(
1977 Creative Computing Book on Kindle
The full impact of a recession for a couple of quarters is usually not felt until several years later.

What we're seeing with Nokia, BestBuy etc. is the companies that didn't adapt facing extinction. It should be happening to more - but they're being propped up artificially - that can't be sustained indefinitely.

If you think the valuation for Instagram was wild - look at their metric trends against these monoliths.

"but Instagram don't make anything" - in the western world we don't really need to consume physical products so much any more - I've got 5+ TVs in the house and 3 fridges - our consumption is moving to non-physical products.
Going to sleep when you're tired and waking up at the same time everyday sounds great but how does the occasional late night affect this?
I have to say that I feel like Rails' ORM does a magnificent job of saving me time. Migrations allow me to write database changes that can be undone more easily.

An ORM also seems to lower the amount of configuration it takes to get development databases synced. It's not as much of an issue for an experienced dev, but a designer or new team member would need help.

I have had to learn AREL, the relational algebra used by ActiveRecord, in order to do more advanced queries. That's analogous to learning SQL in more detail, but I'd still take that in a heartbeat over writing raw SQL. The ORM automates things like tersely expressing the object associations I've built, leaving room for fewer syntax mistakes.
Non-sexist solution of the ménage problem
So I'm wondering, does it support running as a companion for a BT enabled Laptop or desktop with BT? That would be great but I didn't see mention of regular linux/windows/mac support.
The publishing industry has been ripe for disruption for quite some time now. The pieces of the puzzle are there. But still it remains very difficult for a talented writer to make a living without some kind of brick and mortar publishing house agreeing to represent that writer.

So, this problem is especially interesting from the POV of a writer / aspiring writer.

Historically, writers would snail-mail the first 1-3 chapters to various literary agencies or publishing houses, include SASE, and wait for the inevitable rejection. (And yes, they DID insist on snail mail; this I know from experience). Those few lucky writers who would land an agent to represent them would likely get an advance, and hope for decent first-run sales. The publishing house would be responsible for placement in book stores, contact/ promo with "Book of the Month" clubs, etc. And depending on how well that writer's debut novel did, the writer would either get another advance, or fade into obscurity. Any number of circumstances around a first run could make or break a writer.

No piece of this old model was friendly to writers. J.K. Rowling was (now famously) rejected by every publishing house she sent Harry Potter to. The agency (Bloomsbury) that eventually agreed to buy and publish it didn't take on significant risk, and yet it has profited insanely from the success of her talents. It could be debated that back then, yes -- there was some risk associated with editing and formatting and typesetting and printing a hard-copy book. An agency would be right to take a "cut". But, aside from editing what part of the "book manufacturing" process is actually necessary now?

At some level, literary agencies and publishing houses have to know, deep down, that their time as gatekeepers of literary evolution is coming to a close. But yet, they dig their heels in, and refuse to acknowledge that their costs are lower so their prices should be lower -- if there was any real competition going. Instead, they say, "our costs are lower so our profit should be higher" . . . and so far, it is working for them, because everybody in their industry has agreed to play by those rules. Writers sure aren't getting any more wealthy, but publishing houses are . . .

One of the main problems with agency relationships is that they totally mess with the risk:reward model. Travel agents, insurance agents, real estate agents, literary agents, stock brokers -- their risk is minute compared to the risk of those they "represent" because the "agency model" encourages industry collusion. As long as every agent in the industry is doing the same thing, individuals are not accountable, and the mainstream society simply accepts it. The unfortunate thing is that the end sellers and buyers (writers and readers) are the ones who end up losing out.
Why would Windows Phone 8 make any difference? I don't think announcing they will go WP7 is what killed their Symbian market. It would've died anyway. They've lost more than half their market share in China last year alone. Android has a market share of almost 70% in China now:

http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/04/10/net-us-android-app...
E-reader wars: does the iPad's retina display measure up to e-ink?
Thanks for the feedback, I'll play around with the contrast a bit when I get back to my computer.
We've been looking for a dashboard for our engineering group to get some better real-time visibility into the health of our systems (been weighing internal run and hosted solutions). That said, we have a massive amount of data coming in we'd like to track and I couldn't find anything about volume, data-rate or event-rate limits/pricing. However, part of the $29 plan info is obscured by the signup button, so it may just be hidden (Android device). On only a mildly related note, I only get a pleasant wood panel background on a dev account sand the demo on the same device, no menu, no widgets, nothing.
Our companion app runs in the background on iPhone (thanks to a new exemption for Bluetooth accessories in iOS 5). We will try to get Google Voice SMS messages working on iOS.
Monetarily, the Government gets the fine. Then this money disappears into the bureaucracy and the people that were allegedly hurt receive none of it.
Stop Motivating People - They Hate It
Think a/b testing: if your users start customizing around a particular pattern (particularly in larger numbers), there might be something to learn from that.
Solvs
How we defeated Facebook Password Reset mechanism
Choosing Technologies For Your Next Project
Really utilitarian math education would be good. The problem is that it's not even that. It's just test-oriented and boring.

See this twelve minute video: http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/en/dan_meyer_math_curriculum_m...
After seeing so many alternatives, I was really dying to see an e-paper incarnation. This would be awesome and it would give me a reason to get back into embedded C-types.

I would loooove to see a watch like this integrate NFC as well that could be used in applications. Think PKI in NFC on your wrist. Want to get in your office, dorm room, car? Just hold your watch up to the handle and it unlocks.
This version's is a good improvement. But there is too many spaces on the screen, it's waste.
It will run whatever is in the flash chip. That one is generally written to outside the system's control.

On modern PC mainboards with SPI flash (8 pins), there's often a set of pins (also 8) in close proximity to the flash chip - attach an external flasher to that, and you can write the flash while the PC is turned off.

The alternative would be to write the flash before it's put on the board, but which method is chosen is an implementation detail.
Groupon Kidz Club
Congratulations on the book, Jason!

I don't have any freaking clue how you did this AND OnSwipe, but somehow you managed to pull it off. Thanks for giving back to the community.
How realtime web frameworks work?
With the recent advances in the web technologies like Node.js, WebSockets and cloud computing we are moving towards the new design paradigm for web apps and lot of smart developers are leading the way with their cool new frameworks.
Is the design of this new frameworks a completely new development in Computer Science or has it been done before in a different context?
Are there any research/white papers they rely on ?
on a related note, Are we reinventing X Windows on the Web ?
Seems like they hitched their wagon to the wrong horse going with WP7 over Android.
In my mind it's different in that with certain groups of people, I want to be myself, and with others, I want to be semi-anonymous.

To me it's more like being a member of multiple message forums, where you might have a different name, avatar, and whole manner of speaking to go with the subject matter of the forum.
Why do people build nice GitHub bugtracker clients, where there is already a free GitHub Issues App, and us FogBugz users are stuck with crappy apps that do not work?

Many users of FogBugz are willing to pay decent money for a good iOS client. Much more than $1.99, I assure you.
Cell Phone Pioneer Buying up Patents
I keep mentioning that, in my opinion, non-college mathematics teachers generally only know enough math to get through the end of the material they're teaching in any given semester. I don't think they're capable of teaching the material from multiple angles, which seems necessary in order to instill a fundamental grasp of the material.
No Free Lunch for GPU Compiler Directives Either
Probably yes, once the system gets matured and we have something that is fault-proof. We would love to share. Probably we will try with Trueskill, ELO and glicko and see how each of them works. For now if you wish to see the code its some 4 lines of python, 4 lines is too short for a library ;)
Github Issues is excellent, but it's iPhone only (no iPad).
"No one could have predicted..." Classic head-in-the-sand, barely-reactive executive "leadership".

Is this what Microsoft and the Nokia BoD planned when they hired Elop, who scrapped Meego and their N9 (now N900 running WP7) and wiped out their entire existing "burning platform" revenue stream from Symbian?

This was all planned - it's not a disaster. The problem is, the plans may have been too successful.
Having done this, I still wake up at the same time, but may take naps (5-40 mins) during the day. It's not that I'm trying to avoid sleeping in-I just can't, having gotten so used to the habit of waking up at 6 AM every single day.
Thanks a lot Jason! This will definitely be a huge help to entrepreneurs and the startup community!
Freeware: Delete duplicate contacts from Outlook.
A huge problem with math is we end up teaching mathematical vocabulary, not mathematical fluency. It's like high-school language classes: everyone memorizes vocab lists, stutters out canned phrases, and forgets it all later. I'd prefer to speak fluently with a 3-year old's vocabulary than artificially with a high-schooler's.

Similarly, I'd prefer students leave high school fluent in basic algebra, vs. trying to force-march people through algebra 2, trig, calculus, etc. when it's clear they'll just hate the subject afterwards. (Some students will read ahead, great. The others, since they actually enjoyed math, will pick up the other stuff later).

Asking "When will I use this?" reveals that we don't understand a major goal of math education: fluency with powerful mental models, not just factoids you can directly apply.
Don't you think that there might be a difference between a person contemplating something, and an organization of people doing so?
They're all used - to save others the trouble! I bought it nevertheless. It looks pretty and will come in handy I'm sure.
Looks pretty cool! Good luck to you guys!
Is it just me or does anyone with large screen resolutions see this abomination?! https://twitter.com/#!/pavan_ky/status/190128945918783489/ph...
Sorry for the late response - was looking into this, and unfortunately this talk won't be streamed or recorded. We hope to record future tech talks, and will make it clear whether or not they're recorded in the future (we have them every two weeks).
Svbtle cloning is the HN version of the Barbara Streisand effect.
> Logically you might think so, but noise is not always noise, sometimes it's what you're interested in reading about, some days it isn't. Spam, however, is always spam.

Spam is not always spam. There is a subset of spam that are obvious spams such as ones that tries to sell you viagra. Outside of that, there are mails that are harder to classify since different people will respond differently to them. It might seem like that's just me being pedantic but the result is that user end up with mail they do not want to receive, and mark it as spam. This is similar to how I respond to news feeds except I dont have an easy "mark as spam" button without blocking that person forever.

G+ should implement some sort of rating system to rank items that I liked and push those ones similar to it higher on the feed.
I think that a lot of the math we learn in middle and high school is not that useful. For example, when was the last time I used the quadratic equation, or had to calculate a derivative using the chain rule, or had to do a geometric proof of any kind.

Personally I think learning to program is far more useful than any of those skills and yet it is usually presented as an 'elective' course in most schools.

Not to say that I don't appreciate math, but if we look at cost vs benefit, I think our current curriculum could be updated somewhat. Maybe some math classes could be offered as 'electives'. Of course, there were other less useful classes I was required to take as well.
It took me a month of living with withdrawal symptoms and headaches to get over the addiction.

Let me just point out that this is totally not normal. I drink 10-15 (20-oz) cups of coffee a week, in addition to caffeinated sodas, and when I'd go off caffeine for a few weeks (as I used to do regularly), I'd have 2-3 days of feeling depressed from normal, and a very mild but persistent headache over the first 1-2 days of it. If someone has caffeine withdrawal symptoms for a month, I'd think something else is wrong.
The low-level programmer isn't gone, but over the past decade we've seen the rise of the meteoric rise of the high-level programmer.

For instance working on web apps, when you an extra server costs $400/month (4 developer hours or less), what value is there in spending days hand-optimizing an algorithm (into a form that'll be harder to debug later)?

Another example: writing mobile apps. On a phone today you have 1 GHz of power, but still a very limited interaction model. It seems basically only games actually need to optimize for performance.
The flaw in your argument is that what's "readable" changes dramatically over time. Once a programmer has used it enough times, "mtx" will be every bit as readable as "mutex". The brain readily tokenizes what it's seen before. Thus the case for plain-English-readability in code is limited to programmers who are not yet familiar with a notation – not a strong general case. We ought to have learned this from COBOL and every other attempt to make programming languages be like natural language.

Code is read more often than it is written, therefore one ought to optimise for reading

But by the same logic, code is read more often by people who know the language and most often by people who have been working on the program for a while, so they are the ones we should optimize for. The readability test that matters for maintaining a complex system over time is hardly "can someone unfamiliar with both the language and the program dive in to any random function and make out what it's doing". So why is that the standard always held up in discussion?
Facebook Announces Groups for Schools
This is a follow-up post related to an NVIDIA blog post from one week ago: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3796039
Every time I have tried to jump into a project, it has required a couple hours to figure out the compilation method, unit test runner, peculiar inheritance structure, or messy class names. This is simple stuff that the author left out of the Readme because he wasn’t expecting contributions. So I woudn’t blame the contributor if she didn’t fully understand it before the pull request.
> What if your employer wants you to steal from your family?

Stealing should be illegal in any case. It has nothing to do with labor laws.

> What if your employer wants to have sex with you?

Again. If you don't like prostitution, ban prostitution. It has nothing to do with labor laws.

> You either believe labor laws should exist or you don't.

> If you do, I don't think the answer need to be anything more than "common sense".

Those two sentences are classic logical fallacies. I can support just some labor laws and "common sense" is not an answer to anything.
From wikipedia:

That is to say, the reset vector is a pointer or address where the CPU should always begin as soon as it is able to execute instructions.

In other words, people who have lots of experience in this stuff gloss over the fact that "reset vector" doesn't mean reset at all, it actually means "whenever it's turned on, it jumps to this address and starts executing instructions".
Groups for Schools - Facebook Help Center
DCPU-16 Studio - assembler, disassembler, emulator and debugger for DCPU-16
Facebook isn't even the #1 spot right now. Google, apple, and microsoft are still much bigger companies than they are. And oh yeah, they make PROFIT.

IMHO, facebook is GREATLY overvalued, but only time will tell if it's true. Their investment in price assumes that they will continue to grow and will still have no competition in a 1/2 decade.

$120 billion, or $80 billion - depending on who you talk to. Google is making cars that the blind can drive and glasses we saw in terminator. Facebook, they're giving us timeline. GE makes light bulbs, owns NBC, create military jets. Facebook gives us status updates. You think facebook can possibly be worth 1/3 of ALL of GE?

Of course, I'm joking a lil about facebook's offerings. I know they offer far more. However, to think they're going to be the only dog in town doing what they do is just being ignorant.

Tech is filled with creative people who fuck shit up all the time. Just as facebook made some people turn heads at MSFT and GOOG, so will someone else in the future.
Thanks for the clarification. Congrats and good luck!
That sounds good, with the caveat that most applications should have their business logic roughly organized into libraries. After those libraries get their unit tests, integration testing the application<->library barrier makes a lot of sense.
Taming Email Overload With SaneBox
Speaking as someone publishing an ebook through BN, Amazon, and Apple, there's some competition in distribution. Basically Apple and BN are competitive and Amazon isn't (which is, I guess, what you'd expect given that Amazon is dominant). Apple offers 70%, as does BN. Amazon offers 70% if you sell your book for under $10, and only in some markets, and it charges you for downloads (from your 70%). If you want to price a book over $20 you get 35% royalties.
shameless self promotion: i also wrote a dcpu emulator pastebin at http://dcpubin.com/ as a weekend exercise to learn heroku and mongodb. it's definitely not as pretty as 0x10code, though. i've also decided not to implement some features (like keyboard input) until an official spec is released for them. maybe that's the wrong choice, not sure. anyway, it's a fun project to hack on. the code is here: https://github.com/jazzychad/dcpubin
well done Jason!
Exactly. To get Python running, you need your webserver, some kind of fcgi/wsgi module or interface running in your webserver, specialized configuration for your app in your webserver, Python installed, some enumeration of your app's packages installed, and finally, your application running.

We laugh at PHP as a giant glob of senseless stdlib crap, but for its purpose as a web-facing product, it works. Users almost never have to worry about installing extra libraries or modules. mod_php means that you never worry about whether or not you have mod_proxy and some fcgi wrapper installed. You don't have to worry about process management.

This doesn't make PHP less of a disaster from a purist's standpoint, but I think it's exactly the things that make it a disaster (gigantic stdlib, no real package manager to speak of, single-threaded, designed to run in short-lived processes and then die off, etc) that make it widely accessible as it is.

I still think there are huge issues with PHP as a language, and I'm long past the point where I'd consider it an ideal candidate for web applications development (because I can deploy python and ruby apps with ease now!), but it has wildly succeeded at hiding all the underlying machinery from the user so that Joe Average can just start scripting his webpages.
Because a lot more people use GitHub themselves I suppose. It's more fun to build something you can use yourself.