skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Given all the articles about people being pretty unhappy with not being able to watch Game of Thrones on HBO, I don't think content is commoditized. I also don't think a picture on Instagram is equivalent to an episode of GoT.
Um, why not? Before copy/paste was introduced, text editing apps introduced features to provide that functionality. And the video shows it is clearly possible.
Understanding solves school discipline problems; suspensions not so much
This guy is really smart. Add to the fact that he's seems to be offering this purely in an altruistic (non-profit) way is beyond cool. Maybe with Apple's bags of cash they should simply "buy" his idea anyway. Imagine the number of people this could affect in a positive way. So simple.
Service as a service.
I am unreasonably proud of this recursive anonymous quicksort done in Matlab
How does that have anything to do with improving the iPad's existing type functionality?

Plus, my mom (and I assume many, many others) has completely switched over to an iPad and manages all of her emails on it. I'm sure she'd appreciate better editing features. I myself use my iPad to do some light email managing when I'm out, and I too have issues with how tedious editing text is; so an improvement is more than welcomed.
No, actually.

I can use Ruby's nice facilities for external processes (e.g., "x = `ls`" to get a directory listing or "system('do_something')") or simple regular expressions (i.e., "'string' =~ /my_regex/" and friends vs. NSRegularExpression's verbose syntax). I'm not forced to use Cocoa's verbose API if it has a nice Ruby wrapper (and if it doesn't have one, I can make one).
They're certainly trying. The Mars Curiosity rover will be capable of amazing feats. Unfortunately, the JWST has been chewing up a lot of the space science budget at NASA lately, and will continue to do so for a few years.
If you mean "How can I buy stock at $25 and sell it right away to the general public for $35 to $50 on the same day?" Then the answer is, "Sorry, you can't."

If you mean "How can I create a company that will allow me to sell a future interest in the company for way more than I put into it?" Well that answer is "Play the tech startup game."

During the Dot-Com bubble a company often had a 'friends and family' plan where if you had a family member working there or knew someone you could participate in some small way in the IPO. I know families that no longer talk to each other (even now over a decade later) because of that 'opportunity' so I'd approach it with caution if offered.
> Steve Jobs was a sucker

That's really respectful, yea.

(irony alert)
looks pretty good - I am of the belief that anonymous comment posting should not have a place on the internet simple because of the poor quality of conversation it leads to. Would have been nice if they had innovated in this desperately need area of real IDs for comments. Image all the shitty comments that will disappear when people have to back them with real name id.
Skype Hack Reveals Users’ IP Addresses
It doesn't even have to go that far - build an editor à la ia Writer [1] or, if willing to dive deeper, an email client. This gives you protection over the intellectual property and acquisition for technology or aqui-hire potential.

[1] http://www.iawriter.com/
I wouldn't want it integrated with current sites though. I'd like it self-hostable and with separate account signups. "Login with facebook/gmail" is ok but for some people that's a privacy barrier that they won't cross.
I write emails and messages using both my iPad and my iPhone and would argue that such activity (which includes editing text) is an intended use case. Anything that increases how easy it is to do this is a huge win for both the users and Apple.
She picked me off the waitlist.

Really - she was the Dean of Admissions for a very long time (I think she was at MIT for 28 years overall, something like that) and while I can't remember her personally any more, I know that she had a strong rep both inside the administration and in the related professional community as well. If you're going to be Dean of Admissions, I'd have to think MIT is one of the most prestigious schools in the country for that post, especially when you consider it doesn't allocate large quotas to legacies the way some other top schools do.
Sure. The ipad may never be the right tool to write a novel or business report.

That doesn't mean we shouldn't improve text editing so it's slightly less painful for email (and other applications that involve small amounts of text editing.)
Android is already much easier to select text with. The arrow under the text that you drag is just so much easier than the magnifying glass that is just cumbersome and awkward to use.
Survey - Agile methodologies 
Hi All, In order to examine the types of Agile methodologies that have been effective so far and the methodologies that have failed. I am conducting a research, and would like to receive your valuable inputs for the same. The survey would not take more than 10 minutes to complete. Thank you!
Luck and the entrepreneur
Very often all I have is an iPhone and maybe an iPad. I don't do enough hardcore editing to justify carrying around a laptop anymore. So I would definitely welcome better text editing features on iOS even if it's not the best tool for the job. It's funny because I originally thought the text input via touch would be the biggest problem but I'm now crazy fast with it. It's the editing that really slows me down.
We built Instapaper for Music at Music Hack Day Sydney
From the commit that introduced this bug:

The point of the question here is if anybody remembers why we decided not
to parse command line args for the cgi version? I could easily see it
being useful to be able to write a cgi script like:

#!/usr/local/bin/php-cgi -d include_path=/path
<?php
...
?>

and have it work both from the command line and from a web context.

As far as I can tell this wouldn't conflict with anything, but somebody at
some point must have had a reason for disallowing this.

Perfectly illustrating the utility of well-chosen comments in code.
Ask HN - Small cool niche conferences worth attending
Any cool conferences out there?
Let's assemble a list without the usual suspects (TED, E3 or SXSW)

Small cool niche conferences that you think are interesting.
Matterport: create 3D models of spaces and objects in minutes
smoody! brudgers! It's been too long man, let's catch up?
http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=2376#c...
I honestly can't think of a single way HN's software is superior to reddit's from my standpoint (as a user), so I'm curious -- what is it you like better about it?
Apparently the disconnect here comes because you think of a language as trivial (as compared to an API), however it's often hard to separate the language (syntax, and its built in methods), and the libraries which make up an API/standard library. In addition to the cost of learning a library/language, there is also a day to day cost in using it - a certain friction which encourages you to take some paths and not others. A language and the available tools constrains the way you think about problems you are solving, and in some cases might dictate the sort of solutions you come up with.

For example, consider using regular expressions in Ruby to check a string -

puts "The limits of my language define the limits of my world" if string =~ /foobar(\d*\w)/

or in Objective C:

NSError *error = NULL;
NSRegularExpression *regex = [NSRegularExpression regularExpressionWithPattern:@"foobar(\\d*\\w)"
options:NSRegularExpressionCaseInsensitive error:&error];
NSTextCheckingResult *match = [regex firstMatchInString:string
options:0
range:NSMakeRange(0, [string length])];
if (match) {
NSLog(@"The limits of my language define the limits of my world - Wittgenstein")
}

Until quite recently it wasn't even possible to do this in ObjC without an external library.
Mars continues to have large amounts of water ice in the form of sub-surface permafrost across most of the planet.
> So far the data shows that the severely limited gains it provides, it provides at the cost of significant complexity.

Source?
Some corporation better not go out and patent this idea.
I was going to mention this. It seemed like the management at Inktomi let it fall once the engineers started using Google search engines. Their response is a likely bellweather of the attitude of the time.
They would never have paid that much of their cash. As others have mentioned they have much more cash than that, plus some was shares.
Getting started with HTML 5 and JavaScript
Yeah. It's a little sad that when you're in college, taking the harder path of two similar sounding degrees is a point of pride, but nobody* will ever notice or care once you have that degree.

*For a value of 'nobody' that doesn't include your graduating cohort at your school.
It would be the reverse case if it were non-circular, returning 0.
On Tiger Moms
Evernote raises $70M at $1bn Valuation
A butterfly flapping its wings in Sweden makes the MPAA skittish too, unfortunately.
Cheap Monster Beats by Dr.Dre Studio Blue design for low price
Ask HN: Would you use this app?
I regularly email actionable links to use on my Mac from my phone.

These emails clutter up my inbox.

I'm building a very simple Mac app which gives you an email address to send content to.
When you email to the address, it sits in a top toolbar app.

Another use case is when I'm at work and find a link I'd like to view at home - I'll email to my personal email. Vise versa when I'm at home.

The second feature would be the ability to email photos from my phone to the app. If I quickly want to get a photo off my phone, I'll just email it. I'd rather not clutter my inbox.

Is this something you would use? Pay $.99 on the mac app store?
Startups Party at the Patent Office
Game of Thrones is world-class Content with a capital "C". Revision3 had nothing so valuable or desired. That was my point. Their content never really escaped the commodity zone.
I may be mistaken, but I don't think it's possible for an iOS app's keyboard to become the "system" keyboard. In other words, you could make a text-editing app with a keyboard using this feature, but it would only be usable within that text-editing app.
3 Ways to Access Your Linux Partitions From Windows
> "Its amazing people fall for this."

I imagine for the common man, "investing" is nothing more then betting on who will win the popularity contest. None of us will be able to invest in facebook, we're just buying the chips off of those that did.
Just another example of how out of touch the MPAA is with reality. Any 10Mbit+ connection is perfectly adequate for downloading pirated material. It very possibly might take an individual less time to download a torrent than to navigate some archaic cable box UI to find the same program. Mandatory un-skippable movie trailers on DVDs or BluRays can take longer to watch than downloading a torrent. Why isn't the MPAA concerned about that?
Gear Obsession
Quantum Computers to Simulate Reality Better?
Thanks a lot, I'll pick this one up.
You know how if you look at polling data, you'll find that a representative democracy doesn't actually act according to the will of the majority? Well, the connection between the actions of a corporation and the shareholders is even more tenuous then the connection of the public and the actions of government, there's the extra layer of the board.
5 Reasons Why You Should Have Australian Forklift Training Licence Your Staff
How would you like to have total confidence in knowing that all of your drivers are licensed, and properly trained? Listen, getting your operators licensed can be a quick, easy and completely painless exercise. You see, operator licensing courses are available which can be conducted on your site, and at a time that suits you. They can be completely structured around your workload so that no disruption is felt. Although the inconvenience is small, the benefits to you are huge!
I have severals problems with this. 1) The implication that working legacy code needs to be modified to use C99 features lest it be "out of date". 2) The idea that the world is moving on to newer C standards. 3) The idea that legacy code is moving on at all.

C90 isn't going away, and it's not Microsoft's fault. Many C compilers still support 1st edition K&R style for a reason — old C code is going to stick around, and it's probably not going to change much, let alone in any way that needs C99 features.
My biggest annoyance with Disqus is that you can't tell in advance what requirements it will make in terms of signing in. Some sites have openid and some don't, some are okay with anonymous comments and some aren't. Usually you have to type some junk, hit post and then find out what you'll be allowed to use and give up, or comment as appropriate. Sometimes I forget, write an insightful comment and then find I can't actually post it.
I wholeheartedly disagree. There are bad programming languages. Brainfuck is a good example. I don't mean that as a joke, but only as proof that programming languages can be objectively bad. As an extension of that I'd say that languages can be bad because of their constituent parts (syntax, semantics, constructs, features or lack of, etc..).

Some languages have constituent parts that I'd say are objectively bad. I'll argue all day that Objective-C's handling of nil is stupid beyond belief. Nil/Null itself is bad enough...
Talk about short sighted.

Editing text does not exclusively mean writing code or long documents. I and many others do a large chunk of casual web browsing, email, and messaging from iOS devices. Having better cursor movement to go back and fix a mistyped URL or quickly select a block of text from an email would be a huge improvement over the existing clunky behavior.

That said, I do not think there is anything wrong with using an iOS device for heavier text editing either. It is currently more inefficient than a laptop, but new interfaces may one day make it just as efficient as a traditional keyboard for text entry and manipulation.
>Businesses use their negotiating position all the time to lower wages, it's not called entitled, it's called business.

[Citation needed]

Wages are sticky. Very rarely do wages go down, at least in nominal terms. So unless you meant, employers negotiate to not raise wages, and this lowers an employee's real wage in an inflationary environment (in which case you should be more clear) then I don't see any facts to back up your assertation.
The prison system shouldn't be about either "increasing shareholder value" or "minimizing cost-to-taxpayer". It should be about rehabilitation, justice, and public safety.

Part of the problem is that it's really hard to win an election against someone who has positioned themselves as "harder on crime" than yourself. As a result, we have legislators pushing for tougher and tougher prison sentences, mandatory sentencing, etc. I don't know how other countries deal with this pressure, but I would be eager to see the United States do better.
Yeah, well, it clogs up the RSS feed.

Hacking the email introduction: do it right
How to write an intro email like a BOSS & get funding
How to write an intro email like a BOSS
One of those cases where relative rather than absolute manipulation is a big advantage. I could see this being a nice feature on PCs as well (modifier key + mouse movement to change text cursor position, rather than precisely moving the mouse pointer and clicking where desired).
Also good. Let's just hope some sort of space science budget continues to exist. Hopefully one day it will start to grow.
"It's probably better to have him inside the tent pissing out, than outside the tent pissing in." -- Lyndon B. Johnson referring to J. Edgar Hoover.
It's not really a PaaS, because it only provides a single service (in this case realtime messaging).

That doesn't mean this model doesn't make a lot of sense.

If you are using IaaS then it can be a lot quicker to use something like this than build it yourself. Same for things like Search, or (sometimes) Database services or distribution (think CDNs).

Even if you are using a PaaS it might still make sense to use this (depending on what your PaaS supplies).
It is not currently possible with the underlying routing technologies, nor do I think it would be desirable, for you to get a single IPv6 address assigned to your device for the entirety of its lifetime.

Firstly, each publicly route-able address (for both IPv4 and IPv6) belongs to a particular network (known as an Autonomous System). The traceroute utility on unix and windows can be used to show you the path from your local network to a particular network, simply by traceroute'ing address that you know are operated by a particular network.

The way this works is a series of routing protocols that ask the question, "Which network routes this address and what is the best path to get there?" and answer it in various ways.

So, I do not think it is possible or desirable for a single publicly route-able IPv6 address to follow a particular device between networks.

Finally, I would like to point out that, even though we can change them, MAC addresses are supposed to be the permanent unique identifier for a particular network interface. I do not think adding an IP equivalent makes any sense, especially when a particular interface may have multiple IP addresses, and a particular machine may have multiple interfaces.

Now I will forget my hackernews password once again, until I am needed.
I have "up to 15 Mbps" cable internet. I've gathered this is becoming a pretty standard speed for this type of service. If I use the torrent to download the image of Ubuntu 12.04 it takes < 10 minutes. That's 650 MB, which is enough for a 720p version of a full-length movie or a high def version of a 1-hour show (42 minutes I think). It would take about as much time to download a show as it would take to decide to watch it, find it, get settled on the couch, etc.

And don't even get started on streaming...
Not unless they decide to completely revamp how addresses are assigned, no.

Edit: and to address the comment that slipped in just ahead of me...MAC addresses as a part of IPv6 addresses are fine. If the interface is on several subnets, then the network portion of the IP address will be different.

Edit2: To clarify my initial comment, as the other commenter stated, there is no effective way to handle the routing for keeping the network portion the same, so that would always depend upon where you are. The only possibility could be to be assigned a permanent host ID, but considering how many devices the average person has with network access (I have a couple dozen easily, but I'm not average,) I'd think that this would be impractical anyway.
I concur with the other posters who say Objective-C itself is not the barrier, the API is. Such is the design and verbosity of the API (which is great for self-documentation and talking about, less so for typing), it'd be an absolute nightmare to work with without the extensive auto-complete Xcode offers.

This is a very exciting (and very positive) development, but at this moment in time I would still bite the bullet with Objective-C. I came to it with a background in PHP of all things and didn't struggle with picking it up in a few weeks.

I can't wait to see the things people do with it and with Ruby's metaprogramming.
If you have a jailbroken iPad, you can get a five-row keyboard in any app with "iKeyWi HD for iPad", and it includes cursor keys: http://www.ipadforums.net/jailbreak-applications-tweaks/6968...

SwipeShiftCaret is also a nice little tweak for typing better on iOS - it lets you swipe on the screen (although not on the keyboard) to move the cursor one character at a time: http://www.idownloadblog.com/2012/02/10/swipeshiftcaret/
Show HN: A Random Wiki Page Every Day (via RSS)
I think native packages make things too rigid. A private PyPI server hits the sweet spot for us. The steps to deploy an update is as simple as:

1. activate virtualenv

2. run `easy_install -U app`

and no root permission is required. It also has the added benefit to allow having multiple copies of the same package in the same machine [1], which can't be done with native package.

[1] In one deployment, we have staging instance and production instance in the same machine...
Thanks for digging that up, it's indeed a very strong example in favor of good comments.
>This is absolutely amazing engineering.

It was also luck.

The rovers had their power requirements and solar panels designed so that 90 days of mission could pass before getting occluded by martian dust. Once on Mars NASA discovered that occasional whirlwinds, which existence was unknown during mission planing, cleaned the panels back to usable current output levels.
This is similar to the problem with deletion in a standard linked list. Destructive actions can invalidate existing pointers.

One fix for this issue would be to extract the node where you split and "freeze" it. i.e. If you split at element 10, that element gets shoved into a new node which holds only one element and pointers are adjusted as necessary. The node it's extracted from may also be split into two pieces if necessary. From this point on, the single-element node is never merged into another node. It always exists independently.

Merging in this world works basically like it does in a normal linked list. You rearrange pointers but don't combine nodes. Insertion works like it does for a typical unrolled linked list, but with the frozen nodes special cased.

The tricky bit is if you're saving a lot of pointers that aren't part of a split operation. Then you might need to explicitly expose the freeze operation. And if you use it on every node, you're back to a standard linked list (with a bigger constant factor). You could also expose unfreeze, but that could get buggy really quickly. You could do a ref-counted freeze/unfreeze, but you should probably quit before you get to that point.
Best Practices & Lessons Learned from 30,000 A/B and Multivariate Tests
But then airport security will become all about stopping the credible threats, customer service and value for money. We can't possibly have that in a country that does everything the most complicated and expensive way possible (see healthcare, politics etc).
Purchased. Good job, @lrz. Glad to know your departure from Apple and (apparent) distancing from MacRuby were in a good cause.
Getting the closest string match
The Decline and Fall of the Library Empire
Garden Supplies, Home and Garden Products and More….
I admire the effort but I don't think Apple will (or should) go for it. iOS is a direct manipulation interface. Swiping over the keyboard to move the cursor around another part of the screen is really counter to that.

What would make more sense is to add faster direct manipulation gestures. There's opportunity for that, without throwing out the whole paradigm.

For example, today to select a range of text you:

1. Tap-and-hold to bring up the cursor magnifying glass
2. Let go to bring up the context menu
3. Tap "select" from the menu
4. Drag one of the endpoints to one end of the selection
5. Adjust the other endpoint if necessary

But why not this?

1. Tap-and-hold to bring up the cursor magnifying glass
2. While holding, use a second finger to drag out the desired selection!

Now that's something Apple might actually go for.
Exactly what? C99 doesn't have any killer features that legacy code would need to "update" to. If a C89 program is working, adding unique-to-C99 features isn't going to magically make it better.
I've tried many times :) But the main reason I've left academia after my master's is that I realized I liked developing the code to run the experiment much, much more than facing my writer's block.
Your counterpoint is way off topic… What you're saying about the business of prisons here is 100% true, but you could increase prosecution (and imprisonment) of white collar fraud by 10X and the effect on the overall US prison population would be small.