skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Judge Frees Google’s Android From Oracle Copyrights
I've been meaning to write a script to update a wifi access point every time I tweet but I've never gotten around to figuring out how to do it.

In college, my roommates and I spent at least 2 days trying to figure out the name for our router. We settled on "The girls upstairs suck" because some girls lived above us and we were college guys trying to be funny. Later on, it turned out they weren't paying for Internet and they were using ours. (We gave them the password so they could have Internet while theirs was getting "fixed")

I always try to name it something that passive aggressively yells at my neighbors. "Clean up after your dogs" "Don't be loud at 4AM". Right now it's called "Frasier Crane" because I just moved to Seattle and thought and used to like watching Frasier.

I love wi-fi names.
If you did have an idea before leaving it'd still be wise to "have" the idea after you left, out of an overabundance of legal caution.
Unless you're left-handed :-( Then you spend your time scratching and pushing against the paper and smudging your handwriting :-(

If you're trying to do mirror writing they become awesome again, but that's not a frequent use case:-(
Customized DNA for Stingray Leather Shoes
Well, from the end-user's perspective they care very much that the clone can provide the same functions organised in the same way as the original, because otherwise their scripts that run on the original interpreter won't run on the clone.

But yes, the underlying implementation is still subject to copyright (and potentially, patent). You can't copyright the fact that your scripting language has an operator spelled >< that concatenates strings, but you can copyright your particular code that performs string concatenation.
I disagree pretty strongly with that viewpoint. It seems very elitist to me. What defines Phoenix University is the quality of its courses, not the social status of its students.

The idea that you'd no longer have "intelligent people" at Udacity if it were accredited makes no sense to me. If the courses are of sufficient quality, you'll have intelligent people. The fact that it's available to someone who might need an alternative to spending four years and $136,000 at Stanford doesn't lower the intelligence of the students.

Sebastian Thrun, speaking to Charlie Rose, was thrilled at the fact that 150,000 students from around the world had been able to access Stanford's open courseware. He talked about democratizing education. At no point did he say he was worried about it being compared to Phoenix University.

What is the difference between someone who takes a course to earn degree credits and someone who takes it for "personal growth?" Is the course going to be dumbed down for the degree-seeker? I see no reason at all that it should be. I'm sorry, but wanting to deny access to degree credits in the name of worrying that it would be "another Phoenix University wannabe" just sounds snobbish.
"Cool" is undefinable and you also need to consider one thing. Look a the number of cool people you've known who are unsuccessful because they view being cool as a priority rather than other things in their lives. A lot of people I went to school with 20 years ago are in basically the same jobs they got when they left school. They earned money at that time which seemed amazing to people with no income, got to do more fun stuff because they had the money etc.

Fast forward 20 years and they're in the same place. Just the "uncool" kids have overtaken them by a long way.

It's about finding the RIGHT people to hang out with not just ones who seem cool. If you're 20, your idea of cool is different to when you're 35.

MY advice would be to hang around with people that challenge you because that is really what people need.
Personal issues? Do you think that broadcasting stuff meant to be as offensive as possible is impolite?
I don't get it, can someone explain what this is supposed to mean?
I'd put 5 at "wrote the language or contributed to the language". So 1-5 on Python where 1 is completed first tutorial book, written a non-trivial program. 5 == Guido Rostrum / contributed to a release. 3-4 would be if you have written a compiler.
Sure LoL is dominant game in North America and even EU and most importantly while LoL numbers can be tracked while original DOTA numbers aren't trackable. But if what I hear is true, then DOTA is huge in China and that player base is more likely to switch to Dota2 than LoL. With F2P model and upcoming LAN support, dota2 has pretty good chance in China and that itself can dwarf north american player base.
It had been MySQL's standard MO for a while. Their point of view was you either had to completely open source your product, or you had to pay them lots of money. Using it in an in-house webapp, or as you mentioned, reverse engineering the API, would get them knocking on your door threatening to sue you.
Here is my list. The other person has a small mind, but you guys should already know that.

1. Burn bridges to the ground. People you grew up with are not the relationships you made after having decided what you will do with your life.

2. Leave your family behind, they will only drag you down.

3. Reinvent your field of interest. The methodoligies used to progress it to it's current level most certainly weren't through, accurate, or designed from a large perspective.

4. After you grow up from asking questions for other people to answer, begin to ask questions no one knows the answer to. Find answers to those questions which are important to you.

5. Look around you, observe the people of your city, observe how it was designed, learn why it is dysfunctional. People are stupid, so don't let them have any say so in your life.

6. Computer Science is largely untapped. It's a great field for thinkers and builders to make their own. We will soon have an intelligence explosion and those who are controlling it will reign supreme. Be one of those people.

7. Never ever depend on the analysis of another person. If someone is influential to you and it is affecting your decisions in life. Stop. Learn enough of what you think they know in order to make better assessments.
For me, #5, being shy, is more about the reinforced belief -- after a life time of observation -- that no one wants my opinion regarding any topic.
That is true advice and you can actually accomplish a lot by adjusting your attitude about failure. I personally try to consider something a success as long as I attempt it - regardless of the actual outcome. If I don't even try, that is failure to me. If I try and it doesn't work - that's still a success because I made an attempt and most likely learned something along the way.
From my experience, these are things I wish I had known, not should have known, at 20. As Rod Stewart said, "I wish that I knew what I know now... when I was younger."
This might be more accurately titled "Why ext2/3/4 doesn't need defragmenting." The advice given in the article:

Copy all the files off the partition, erase the partition, then copy the files back onto the partition. The file system will intelligently allocate the files as you copy them back onto the disk.

does not work for ntfs-3g. Whatever strategy it uses to allocate blocks, it's terrible for streaming reads of large files (last time I checked about 1-2 years ago). So, if you're trying to use the copy-off copy-on method of defragmenting an NTFS partition, don't do it from Linux.
Yeah, if I remember correctly "NUMB3RS" likens IRC to pirates trading illegal drugs in international waters.
The solution to captcha annoyance is not more annoyance in the form of a spammy-looking game. You can get to 99% of the use cases using some simple javascript logic and a hidden form element that is invisible to the user and catch the rest using a solid spam-detection algorithm on the server. The solution to spam is not to annoy your users. At least reCAPTCHA helps transcribe books…
Exactly. Fake it till you make it.
It's more likely to be the offer-hosted-version model rather than the Redhat/MySQL model.
This comment is all negative. I can't stand that. There is no one way to interpret a piece of writing, and I wish people didn't act like just because they were curmudgeonly in their reading, other people were as well.
It seems like the difficulty would be relatively similar.
Intelligent people can translate the most idiotic sentences to be meaningful and articulate. That's great and all, I do it too. Just know what you're doing.
The list is all phrased as commands. I can't stand that. There is no one way through life, and I wish people didn't act like just because it worked for them it will work for everyone.

I've heard this sentiment before and I don't get it. If it makes you feel better to have authors qualify every sentence with "In my opinion ...," you ought to simply imagine it there, not force that kind of timid writing on everyone else.

Relevant: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wVoQ5jde1yQ
Taylormade r9 irons
I was surprised to see someone still commenting about how you can't use Linux in the "real world" in 2012. So my world's not the "real world?"
Agreed.

The image I carry is of a special forces soldier in movies/tv: "the situation is not what we prepared for. crap. okay, let's move forward with our skillset."

Trying to emulate this in bad situations seems to always work out to my benefit, even though I'm not being shot at. Accept your situation, and start problem solving from it, not from what you expected. This is an amazingly important skill and gives what results in the air of relaxed and unflappable. That is what I think the author is labeling as cool.
I use TexLive on a Linux netbook almost every day and it weighs in at around 200 Mb. It includes TeX, LaTeX, XeTeX and LuaTeX. Its fast and works extremely well.

I don't know where this 4Gb figure comes from. OK, TexLive for OS X is bigger for some reason, but I'm sure its around 2Gb at most.

People laugh at netbooks but I find mine far more practical than an iPad. Not better, just better suited to programming a few things and using stuff like LaTeX.
Getty Launches Full Text Website for Art History Research, More than 20K Titles
Managing memory and using low-level system functions is only advanced when the problem at hand requires it. Otherwise its yak-shaving. It would be like digging a pool with a spoon because you're too bad-ass for shovels.
So my story is, I once started a blog. I added an RSS feed and everything. As soon as I showed it to a few friends, one of the first responses: "How do I get this via email??". That's when I learned that most of the world still likes to receive things they care about via email, and don't care about RSS at all.

That's when I had the same realization as Patrick. Email is awesome. If I care about something, I used to run circles to remind myself to check it out when it became more important to me. Now, I just sign up via email, and it saves a lot of cycles.

And hey, if I don't care about it anymore, I get rid of it. We're at the point, with spam filters and legal forces, where 99% of what pops into my inbox, I can make sure never gets there again if I don't want it. To most things, unsubscribing works (it has to by law). The few things it doesn't work for are probably not getting past your spam filter anyway.
Get into them now before these companies start charging for these, which they probably will at some point in the future. Personally I'd be more than happy to pay something, but I know that there are a lot of people around the world who would be excluded if any fee was charged, even a small nominal fee.
If your filesystem is completely full, fragmentation should be the last of your worries.
Why Facebook Went Down?
Which is, incidentally, not too far from how GNU/Linux came to be - a free OS with the same interface as a nonfree[1] one.

[1] AT&T was legally required to provide the source code of its OS 'for free', I'm not sure if the terms actually qualify as 'free-as-in-freedom', hence the impetus to create an alternative implementation.
What would it take? The biggest thing I need is knowing there's a market, how big the market is, and who to market to -- classic customer development activities. Right now, I know my actuators meet my needs for the stuff I'm building, but need more data to know if I should scale it. So... you want one (hundred thousand)? :-)
Search process
Agreed. I find myself increasingly annoyed by the tone of people who have discovered that the Great Secret of Life is having kids/getting up at 5AM/exercising for hours every day/eating nothing but meat and vegetables, and if you don't do that you're a pathetic specimen who will never amount to anything.
16 cores in conventional pcs(2 laptops, 2 desktops), a wii, an iphone and a kindle, so 19 total
Fred Wilson on why he doesn’t invest in media
Can't one be cool without being concerned about appearance?

I think coolness is about how one responds to situations, esp those unexpected.

Think about how people talk to gate agents when their flight gets cancelled. Those that are reasonable and rational are cool (as in cool headed). Those that yell are not. They also tend to get more of what they desire while not making enemies.

The definition of cool should not be stuck in a 15 year old's perspective of jocks vs. nerds.
Great point! nReduce is not your customer. Your customers are your customers. nReduce is there to remind you and to motivate you to ship to your customers every week. Our goal is to motivate, plain and simple.
I think this is quite a brilliant move for Google. I know a lot of Chinese people considering Google inferior, because "I often don't get anything when I use Google. It must be a company of inferior technology." Actually, they have just encountered the GFW's reset, and for common people it's natural to blame the site. Now with this move, these people will gradually know that it's GFW's censorship.
Personally, I love the OP's response to your last comment:

"I hate Scala with a passion, for what it's worth. I just wish there had been more advocacy for it."

I wouldn't characterize myself as hating Scala, but I understand where he's coming from on both points. There are reasons that this static typing fan tends to prefer Clojure to Scala on the JVM. Also, it's just a beautiful quote.
NASA can now predict Andromeda collision with certainty
Cool beans.

My suggestion based on no evidence what-so-ever is that I'd like to see something like this in a richer environment.

To give a bad example, VB. The original VB had forms (maybe it still does). You'd make a form. Double click the button and add code for "onclick" basically. I guess maybe that was inspired by Hypercard.

In any case it was really easy to see how to make a useful program because of the structure a form plus code snippets gave. If those code snippets were Blockly that might be better for learning.

A maybe better example is Unity3D. You add a 3d object, attach a Script and start editing code to move that object by supplying an Update() function or something along those lines. Maybe a Step() where you can define state change code snippets?

All I'm saying is a language like Blockly that removes the syntax errors, attached to a larger framework (games, graphics, or webapps), seems like it would make it far more approachable. You could actually make something useful or fun in a less steps.
I smell a Kickstarter project ...
Antibiotic-Free Meat Business Is Booming, Thanks To Chipotle
I don't think it's the direction they're aiming at the moment, but that makes me sad. There's an opportunity here to step out of our privileged bubble of tech startups and make a difference for the world as a whole.

I was watching Charlie Rose's last interview with Carl Sagan recently. He cited a NY Times article, "Americans Flunk Science" that said less than half of American adults understood that the Earth rotates the sun yearly. http://www.nytimes.com/1996/05/24/us/americans-flunk-science...
Carl Sagan pointed out that "if we (the general public) don't understand, then who is making all the decisions about science and technology that are going to determine our future?"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jod7v-m573k

When the general level of education suffers in a society, you get superstition, xenophobia, anti-intellectualism, bigotry, and many other things. It's in everyone's interest to raise the educational level of the human race.

If open courseware is viewed as something that's only for those that already have a love of learning, it will remain elite and cloistered among a small segment of society. If it becomes available as a formal education, it could go mainstream, and suddenly anyone with access to a good internet connection will be motivated and able to pursue higher education.

If we want to make quality advanced education mainstream and widespread, most people will need to see OCW as an opportunity to earn degree credits, not just as an opportunity for "personal growth." Sure, I think everyone ought to love learning just for the sake of learning, but I'm realistic, and I know that if you want to bring everyone in, you have to entice them with tangible benefits. They'll catch the love of learning once they are exposed to the kind of things a service like Udacity offers, but first you have to get them in.

Another commenter was worried about services like these becoming "Phoenix University wannabes." There will be some OCW services that will cater to the less ambitious or less intellectually capable. That's not a bad thing. For the impoverished or otherwise disadvantaged student capable of Stanford or MIT-level academics, though, there will be more challenging OCW services.

I can envision no scenario where making quality education and formal degrees available to anyone willing to step up and take advantage of it could be a bad thing. It's important for us to remember that while a formal degree might be unnecessary for someone with the right connections and opportunities, for most people in the world, it's still a very important thing to have.
San Francisco, CA - https://singly.com/jobs: Full-time Platform Engineers and Lead Developer Evangelist

Hi, HN! Thanks for the nearly 10,000 hits yesterday [1]; that was a blast for us. Each dollar of the $10,000 prize in our app challenge this weekend [2] is now dedicated to one of you.

Singly is hiring a lead developer evangelist and horde of generalist engineers to build a cross-service API that provides merged, normalized and deduplicated data from all of your personal sources (Facebook, Foursquare, Fitbit, email, text messages, you name it). We recently closed $7MM in funding, which we're using to expand the team and ramp up developer outreach, as well as put on huge events like this weekend. Mega bonus points you've got tons of experience building or heavily consuming APIs, but if you're smart and like burritos, let's chat.

Apply through https://singly.com/jobs or kristjan@singly.com. Or, just come hang with us in #singly on irc.freenode.net and at our monthly happy hours [3].

Happy hunting!

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4048324
[2] https://singly.com/appchallenge
[3] http://www.meetup.com/Singly-Happy-Hour/events/65360972/
Draw Something Cheat
Why do people like to start a point with "As a x"? Does it mean that he/she speaks for the group as a whole or does it add extra relevancy?
Nice, that pure tech ventures get high fundings of well known VCs but thinking a little bit more about Meteor I come to following conclusion:

First, we do not really know the first payment/milestone, maybe it's just $1M.

Meteor itself is an amazing technology, very well marketed by obviously smart guys—their Marketing pitch few weeks ago was just awesome and far beyond any other new JS framework. And I understand that Meteor gets very positive feedback here on HN due to their great communication skills and YC affiliation

But it has severe drawbacks:

=> While employing Node as core they surprisingly ignore the well established npm package manager which is one of the best package managers around. This is bad and there's no excuse because it leads to fragmentation of the still young JS server-side landscape dominated by a lean and modular-driven Node which is just the smartest way to establish a real ecosystem—the one-size-fits-all approach is aged and that's Meteor. I assume they did their own package manager due to their upcoming business model (which will be introduced very far in the future if their ecosystem is once established), maybe they'll take license fees or demand support fees or whatever of everyone who wants to actively participate as contributor in the ecosystem. They couldn't do this with the npm. And by choosing this path the can lock out competing frameworks: if Meteor would just be a package in the npm ecosystem the opportunity costs of changing to other realtime frameworks in the npm world wouldn't be that high because changing the framework wouldn't mean changing the entire ecosystem.

=> As long client-side JS is delivered unprotected to the browser you will never have the one-code-base-or-name-space-covering-front-and-backend approach. This approach doesn't provide any security—client code could do any shit to the server side—and others who tried made great products too but couldn't get any traction (nowjs i.e.). You will need always to separate both. They promised to come up with solutions like authentification or signed data, but then we have again more communication overhead than we would have if just separated those layers. This drawback isn't as huge as the first one, it's a technical challenge and thus, I appreciate any efforts to solve this problem.

Meteor was at the beginning a great tech demo, now they want to get serious and I doubt (and hope) that they won't succeed. Mentioned drawbacks are the main reasons I won't use, support and even advise against Meteor (as much as I like these guys and YC but sorry). They do not seem to contribute in any way to a great and existing ecosystem called Node but using it as their core to build a new competing one with monetization reasons in mind and a severely flawed architecture. Now, they obviously need and will use the money for PR and paying/incentivizing devs building the ecosystem and this competition between ecosystems (pure Node/npm vs Meteor) which is basically about winning the best devs will lead to further fragmentation and at the end no large ecosystem could be established and server-side JS failed. No, thanks.
Conventional wisdom is that turning off SSID broadcasts does absolutely nothing to deter people using hacking tools.
It should really render to CoffeeScript first.
Funny you mention this, the folks at Heroku did the same: http://blog.golang.org/2011/04/go-at-heroku.html / https://github.com/ha/doozerd
And don't forget sunscreen.
On my resume, I have a "skills" section that basically lists technologies I've worked with that I'm interested in working with now (and some I haven't work with) with a "code-word" based description of how I'd rate myself. The "code-word" selection will beat most HR folks, but I include a "decoder-ring" style description in my cover letter on what I mean by those code words. Things like, "familiar: know at least basic syntax and can easily use all syntax with reference, will likely need to use a reference for common libraries" and "expert: Need documentation only for infrequently used or obscure library calls, comfortable writing a tokenizer and lexer for the language given the specification". I actually got the idea when I applied for a job way out of my league and actually got a response explaining it was out of my league, so I asked for some feedback on my resume, figuring don't let a good thing go to waste and the response was "years of experience in a language doesn't quantify your knowledge of the language." I was quite young at the time and the approach I ended up with hasn't steered me wrong yet.