skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I assume you stopped using outlook or thunderbird when you began using gmail in 2004? :P

~8000 messages, couple of gigabytes, takes about as long to search as gmail takes to reload the page in thunderbird for me (and I can customize my search endlessly), this on an old machine that I bought in january of 2008 (searched for the order confirmation ;)).

gmail is great, for a web service, but you shouldn't rely on google having backups and you should indulge yourself with a native client, keep gmail, or any other service, for web access.
Google's official URL shortcut just for Google websites
Python 2.7 almost all features of Python 3, and Python 2.6 has almost as many.

Don't let that stop you from buying a book you like.
Today's MongoSF Events
There are two "extreme" ways of doing things, the "crafting" way in one side of the spectrum and the "engineering" way on the other side.

You can "craft" a car without knowing a single formula, but that proved to be inefficient.

In programming is kind of the other way around. There is a way to use formal mathematical methods to "engineer" programs, but for general use they seem to be economically "inefficient".
I'm not sure if you mean that it's worth pointing out because he has experience with prisons and therefore his opinion should be given more weight, or because he's biased and so his opinion should be given less weight. I'm not sure I think either is true.
I wonder how differently this story would have played out if it was Steve Jobs, Bill Gates or Jeff Bezos? My inclination is that there would be a resounding ya, but he's doing a great job so why does it matter?

So...does it matter any way?
It's so sad to see old age claim a great mind.
if dropbox could only up the space on their free plan...
But here in America we punish our prisoners, no matter the cost to society!
Ask HN: CodePupil
CodePupil teaches you how to code thru unique visual exercises & games. We recently launched and would enjoy hearing your feedback!

Right now the learning is on rails but here are links to various exercises..

Intro to HTML/CSS exercise...
http://codepupil.com/ex.html

Intro to CSS property Background-Color & how it affects HTML
http://codepupil.com/ex2.html

HTML/CSS 101 video & typing exercise...
http://codepupil.com/ex4.html

One of our games - Code Stitch....
http://codepupil.com/game7.html
Startups.com Is Shutting Down, Domain Name Not For Sale (For Now)
It's not really the unions, it's just markup the venues charge on everything.

The worker is likely part of the regular physical plant run by the venue and it is cheaper for the venue to have someone on staff to fix things. The electrician is on salary or steady wages.

Each $350 fee likely pays for most of the electrician's wages for that day, so if you have 20 rooms that need electrical drops, you are paying 10-20x the cost of the electrician and assistants.

You as an event organizer don't have a choice about whether you need electrical power for a room so you are a trapped consumer. And the venues take advantage of that.

This is made worse because of the economic distortion caused by Pharmaceutical or Medical conferences which are so flush with money that $350 for an electrical drop is inconsequential. There are conferences where they'll set off indoor fireworks and hire professional musicians to write songs for the event.

The venues get accustomed to event planners that write checks for every problem, so if you are running a conference for people like geeks or academics who may not be as lucrative, you pay through the nose.
Here's a short list:

http://www.sheepfriends.com/?page=billy

Billy is a lightweighted no nonsense audio player that allows you to quickly play an entire directory of MP3/FLAC files.

http://www.foobar2000.org/

foobar2000 is an advanced freeware audio player for the Windows platform. Some of the basic features include full unicode support, ReplayGain support and native support for several popular audio formats.

http://twotoasts.de/ http://www.twotoasts.de/media/midori-0.4.5.7z

Midori: Webkit Web browserScribe is a small and fast email client with an intergrated contact database and calendar.

http://www.memecode.com/scribe.php

Scribe is a small and fast email client with an intergrated contact database and calendar.

http://mmm3.sourceforge.net/

Magic Mail Monitor (MMM) is a free POP3 mail monitor with multiple accounts support. It sits silently in your system tray, and notifies you about new messages in your mailboxes. Then you can preview messages and delete unwanted mail in order to avoid spam and viruses.
And software engineering is quite dissimilar, if not completely different to computer science. Creating API's, building user interfaces, testing, has little to do with computer science, or information theory, or mathematics. Yes, it has some overlap, but not nearly as much as academics like to think.

Take an example as implementing a 3D renderer. A computer scientist might argue that underlaying 3D calculations should be correct. A software engineer might optimize for speed, and simply allow incorrect/imprecise calculations, as long as the rendered result does not look very different.
I miss the old-old UI, from before the HTML and CSS lessons were added.
Five Ways to Get the Best From Evernote
The soundtrack for The Social Network by Reznor and Ross is my staple. It's all instrumental with a good beat, and gets me in the entrepreneurial mindset.

Hand Covers Bruise:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9SBNCYkSceU

In Motion:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yczul_609Gg&feature=relat...

Outside of that, anything techno-trance or industrial works. I definitely don't like too many voices, it's distracting.
Why? I would imagine that better and better autocorrect will make us want it more and more, not less and less. I'm just interested in why you would drop it.
Being a good entrepreneur is more than identifying opportunities for arbitrage and executing on it and rolling profits into the system that can fuel more arbitrage. It's also taking into account the sustainability of the system. Evaluating the legality of the arbitrage is more important than the skill to profit from it.
CodePupil just launched (in preview mode) and we'd love to hear your critic.

We just submitted a Ask HN http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3928702

Appreciate any and all feedback - thnx!
Why RubyMotion Is Better Than Objective-C
First time I read this lunatic. I am not quite sure how reasonable his opinions are (Skype is avaible on other platforms and not hurting them), but it is entertaining. I have to look what he is writing about the iPhone 2010.
definitely a far better design than the previous iteration, feels more intuitive
Aluminum Dining Tables
Shop here for fullcast aluminium dining table or cast aluminium bases with glass top such as aluminum patio table, aluminum dining set in a different variety of colours and shapes.
The open source social experiment: Here’s my Facebook password
In what I do (mostly business cruds) it is mostly an art. The skill is not to get it done, but to organise the code effectively so that it will be easy to debug and adapt and reuse etc. It really doesn't feel like a science and more like being an editor of an anthology.
Indeed! Just published a little blog post about these changes: http://codecademy.com/blog/8-tracks-gets-a-design-upgrade
档案夹
doesn't support Firefox 12.0
New Advances in Biometrics: A More Secure Password
I was a Safari subscriber for two years and it was great! However, it felt a bit overwhelming at times to have access to so many books. It brought back memories of spending hours in the computer book section at the bookstore. Now I just buy the books I need and it keeps me a bit more focused -- at least when I'm not reading HN :).
Actually, you seem to exist solely to troll. Guessing you won't be around for very long.
>you'll probably need a degree

You may be right, but I see the phrase above as code for "college graduates discriminate against people without degrees". Notice you didn't say "You'll need the skills a degree gives you". The reality is, you can get skills in a variety of ways. Most people who switch careers don't do thinks they have no skills in, they find a better use for the skills they do have.

I don't see how college forces you to be exposed to the world, as in college you're just continuing the insular educational perspective of high school. Sure, its a little broader, but its still the ivory tower perspective. Going out and getting a job and being responsible for your monthly rent is the splash of cold water.... and also exposes you to all kinds of people you won't meet on a college campus full of students and professors.

I agree with you on the year off to travel, but working for a random startup for that year would be hugely rewarding as well.

>programming as we know it today may not exist in 20 years.

If the way we know it today it doesn't exist in 20 years then you'll be no worse off than the college graduate who now has a useless degree and 16 years of experience.

>A little startup isn't worth screwing up that experience.

Until you've started a business, you don't really know what business is really like. A "little startup" is the experience, if you want to be an entrepreneur. Doing on one the side in college is fine if you want to have it go both ways.

Its only the first job out of college where they care about your grades.
Clever. I wonder if they have a tradition of having exploit easter eggs like this?
Hey no problem, a fellow cinephile here. And yes I knew it was on a book but did not read it. I liked the movie for a whole set of reasons (For instance, Christopher Walken's performance) but reading the book would definitely have affected how I value the director's work. I had a similar discussion with my uncle, who is a writer and director, about another movie: The Girl with the Dragon Tatoo (The original version, not the American adaptation). My uncle read the books; I didn't. I really liked the movie, and found the plot rather satisfying to some degree, but my uncle hated it, and said the director simplified things to an alarming extent, losing all the interesting details that made the books successful.
So I think reading the books is a good habit if one wants to judge the director's intention, but sometimes I just don't have time.

Update: I reread your question, and I think you want to know if directors are taking too much credit which ought to go to the book writer? I think in this case we might disagree about the director's function, which I think goes far beyond the intricacies of the story.
I wonder what the percentage is of those delaying the line due to their slowness vs. the need to search out space.

The most aisle time I've taken on any flight might be 10 seconds, though most of the time it's zero since I prefer to store my carry-on below the seat when I can.
This is great and everything, and I've been a happy user, but my Gmail opens slower than ever lately. Any plans to address that?
Excellent! Just bought another 4 books. Now I just have to find some time to read them. I should probably start buying books based on the number of pages -- shorter book wins. I seem to stay better focused on tech books with < 300 pages. Probably related to my motivation level.
Having a tool to make something easier is one thing. But the commenting style complaint is valid. I am not puzzled by the complaint. It would be nice to have it work as he described so you would not have to rely on the tool to be there.
That looks pretty interesting, cheers!
Do not rely on fastmail.fm for XMPP service
It is surprising that as sole guardian of the girls, he would run the risk of them going into the state foster system just so he could get (illegal) lolz online. That's very irresponsible and I have no sympathy for him.
Apple Patents Multi-Tiered Haptics System
Finagle works fine. Thank you. Love it. But it does not take off. Why?

What all the JVM Node.js clones are missing and what Node.js sets apart are async libraries. There is no async (MySQL) JDBC driver for starters. If your IO drivers are not async, your async container is not very useful in real life.
At my current pace -- 1.5GB in 8 years on gmail -- I will fill up 10GB in about 48 more years, when I'm in my 70s. I'm probably an above average case, so I don't know how many people will hit 25GB in their lifetime unless something drastic happens.

I may have received more than 10GB of email in my lifetime, but I certainly don't store it all (though I'm not skimpy either), so I think 25GB might be high.
QR codes in art
I have read them, actually they're the articles that changed HFT from a 'meh, maybe I'll do that' into a 'hey, that looks super interesting, that's what I'll aim for'. Cheers though!
Somebody already did once[1], though it's gotten a bit out-of-date. It needs to be manually revised every time a new SDK comes out, so it's going to keep falling out-of-date.

[1]: http://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=2674
Graphical Display of Polaroids and Digital Cameras
Except underlying that 3D renderer is a whole bunch of Computer Science research that had to be done in order to allow the engineer to make an optimized implementation. And I doubt a decent Computer Scientists would argue that. In fact, you might need some more CS (or science in general) to figure out what tolerance can be allowed for. Further more, while an optimized implementation is good, an optimized algorithm is probably even better, and right there i more CS.
Oh my word. I've just installed the extension. That's absolutely marvellous. Nice implementation. And actually, it's similar to my idea except that instead of the large work being a book it's the entire internet!

Edit: On closer inspection - it doesn't really work that well because it's too much of a scattergun approach. You really want the words to be swapped out progressively. (Probably starting with the most common - articles etc)
Cheers buddy! Guess I have a lot to learn then, should be interesting.
Using travis-ci with bitbucket
I'm really excited about this. While node-js is a great project, it still doesn't have the awesome instrumentation and tooling around it the JVM does. Additionally, real threading is damn nice, and the JVM definitely has that.

Combining this with languages like ruby, clojure, and scala seems like a definite win.
Factors such as parents' education, where one lives, age, race, family structure, IQ are measured and factored in.

I would classify those as luck factors. They don't really address what I was speaking to.

Even if you believe college counts, someone with the fanciest of PhDs is going to really struggle to out-earn high school dropouts if he or she is not willing to work on the job. And that is the point. College is not the driver, it is the person. A person can leverage college to find themselves in better standing, but there are a million other ways to do the same.

Just blindly going to college is not going to improve anything with respect to income. You have to be someone who is cut out to earn more, and if you are that person, you will find a way, college or not.
An Easy-to-use App to Track, Organize and Communicate Projects
There's additional abstractions, e.g.: Strings inherit from NSString, you can also use "#{variable}" instead of the stringWithFormat:... objc thing.
I think unions and companies have closer working relationships in Germany and Scandinavia

The core of this is most certainly true. In North America there is an extremely adversarial atmosphere between unions and workplaces. This leads to the natural result that neither side ever wants to give an inch (the slippery slope principal), and will always try to take an inch, the game leading to the scenarios described.

There is no doubt that the union principal is sound for many professions where power is unbalanced, however the implementation is just completely broken here.
> The next conference of the day is Future of Web Design. I believe these tickets are well above £1000.

She could have at least checked before making this nebulous claim; the most expensive ticket at FOWD London is £695+VAT, some way shy of ‘well above £1000’. It does somewhat undermine your argument if you pull numbers out of thin air…
Microsoft ejects DVD playback from Windows 8
Comparing Mobile Web Frameworks
I don't understand what you mean. His intellect certainly shines through in the interview, especially in the latter part where he talks about physics.
Lockheed wins contract to run U.S. cyber crime lab
Yes it does - just go stand on the carpet with your family.
the Levenhstein distance is at the heart of most opensource geocoders.
Hey, thx for writing this down! We are going to do a A/B test and will see the efect.

Thx again. :)
Recently I've been researching autonomous cars, and I haven't explored this idea much, but could DRM have a role in preventing users from modifying the software that drives their car, or other life-and-death scenarios?

Like I said, it's just an inkling at this point, any thoughts?
Why the downvote? Codecademy and CodePupil are working towards the same goal.

TO make learning how to code easier and more fun then before.

We are happy of Codecademy's success, as it shows there is a need for the learning to code through gaming space. We just went live and are looking to gain insight on what works best - our visual exercises, our games and or our watch a video/typing exercise - thnx
This. The biggest difference is in the two cultures: blocking is anathema to the Node.js community - they will literally reject libraries or code that blocks because it destroys the entire model; the JVM community does not value non-blocking code - most of the core (JDBC, Networking in general, File system operations) is all written in a blocking style - the JVM community accepts this with the implicit assumption that threads will help assuage those issues.

Python, Ruby and Perl all have the same cultural tolerance for blocking code. The Node.js community has a complete lack of tolerance for blocking code.

I work with the JVM every day (Clojure) and wish it was different wrt the common use of non-blocking code, but it's going to be a long road to get there on the JVM.

Kyle
And there's the difference. I do not think a calculation is necessarily a proof, but some proofs are accomplished by calculations. Some papers may contain a proof that "f(x)=g(x)" and proceed to prove the result by calculation, but that's not the only kind of proof, and it's not the only kind of calculation.

And doing the kind of calculation that's in the intersection is not then programming. Sometimes in the act of programming you will do some math, but doing the math is enabling the programming. Doing the programming is not doing the math. It's a separate activity and a separate skill.

Of course the boundaries are blurred, but I've honestly seen people write a program to take data from a database, present it nicely on the screen, and then assert that programming is just math. I doubt you're claiming that, but I've seen it claimed, and I think it's not only wrong, but misleading, and demeaning to both subjects.

Sometimes you will use math in programming, and sometimes you will use programming in math. That doesn't mean that either is the other.

And now I'm going to be controversial.

And in case anyone else is still reading, here's a theorem:

Theorem: A prime number can be written as the
sum of two squares if and only if it
is of the form 4k+1 .

Just as there are many ways to write a program to accomplish a given task, there are many proofs of this theorem. If you're a programmer, and you think that programming is just math, then you should be able to come up with a proof for that theorem.

The reason this is controversial is that many mathematicians couldn't come up with a proof quickly either. Here's another:

Theorem: A number N is prime if and only if (N-1)!+1 is
a multiple of N.

And finally, one from my own area:

Given a graph G=(V,E), a proper coloring is an assignment c:V->{1..n} of
integers to vertices such that for every edge (u,v) in E, c(u) != c(v).
(In words, color the vertices so that the endpoints of an edge are always
colored differently).

The "Chromatic Function" of a graph takes the number colors and returns
the number of proper colorings.

Theorem: For every graph, the Chromatic Function of G is a polynomial.

People say that a good programmer can pick up a new language and/or library quite quickly and become productive in fairly short order. Most of the comments on HN about hiring practices say that you shouldn't test for knowledge of language or libraries or frameworks, but for actual ability to get things done.

If programming is math, and someone is a programmer, shouldn't they be able to prove these theorems?

========

Disclaimer: This is a stronger position than I'm actually willing to defend, but I'm interested to hear people's views.

ADDED IN EDIT: I've spent way too long on this and have things I must do. I'll return later to check for any replies. I'll also get a HN_Notify email if you do reply. Or email me directly.
I'm not to 30 or 40 yet so I may not be your target audience here but I can comment on how it has affected me thus far and what I usually tell people about making this choice when it comes down to it.

I dropped out at 20 as a Junior in college. I had scholarships to school and every reason to stay but I was already working long hours on a business I had started as a Freshman and had no intention of slowing down.

We were growing, by my nineteenth birthday we had 13 employees and by my 20th I got my first acquistion offer.

I decided to take one of those offers and as a condition of it had to consult for the company I had just sold to for a while(turned out to only be 8 months).

So I made the decision to drop out and pursue this opportunity.

There are days when I regret leaving school for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that I never really got to be a kid or act like my fellow classmates, however NONE of the reasons I regretted it has to do with not being about to find work I like or chase my dreams.

I recently went through the Winter 2012 YCombinator class(and subsequently left the company as well) Then was picked up by a well known company in the ruby community almost instantly and have continued to be able to find work at levels which I cannot handle.

I run a boutique consulting firm and have for quite a while. I usually do one or two projects a year that amount to anywhere from &125k-$300k. I almost always turn a few projects a year down and rarely do I ever get bored or have nothing to work on.

I think the major difference between the people disappointed they dropped out and the ones that aren't is motivation.

It does not matter how bad you want something you still have to work for it.

The people who sit with their hands on their asses and complain they did not get things handed to them get no sympathy from me.

I grew up the absolute epitome of middle class and have fought my way out of there. I make no apologies for my mistakes and I rarely give up on anything. I think its fair to say most peoples successes or failures lie solely on themselves.

EDIT: I noticed I never said my age(I'm 25)

and also when friends of mine or people who know my story ask me about dropping out or say they are considering it, I almost always tell them DON'T DO IT!

I think there is a place and a special set of circumstances for dropping out, but its not for everyone and certainly not everyone who goes that path is as fortunate as I am, much less as fortunate as Mark Zuckerberg or Steve Jobs.
Cancer & populating the moon are monumentally difficult problems. Comparing curing cancer w/ 'kids' trying to build 'FaceTube.ly+ 3.0' is beyond silly.

By the bye, there are thousands of researchers & doctors around the world trying to cure cancer. As for the moon, it's not exactly the most compelling place to live.
Here are some of the results we have in my lab:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0-cuWmrQA0s
Top tech and data officers for city of Chicago available for May 9 chat