skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You can invest your companies' services as if it were capital in my company, TCombinator, for a percent equity stake, thus giving you a project you can be proud about: saving the world through entrepreneurship. Check out tcombinator.blogspot.com, tcombinatordev.blogspot.com and transtartup.blogspot.com to read about us and some of our projects.
I actually have dabbled with it and I think Xamarin has done some very impressive work there. But most of the work in the typical app is in the UI and you still have to essentially rewrite that for every platform with Mono. For some apps it could still be a net win.

Native has the same advantages on the desktop but that hasn't stopped it from being pushed out of mainstream app development and into a few select niches.
Webrf: refresh that browser on your other screen
At Amazon's Very First E-Book Author Lunch
I think the confusion here is that 'short selling' is a misnomer - it doesn't involve any merchandise at all.

From the article: "In other words, 107% of all Overstock shares available for trade were short – a physical impossibility, unless someone was somehow creating artificial supply in the stock."

That is to say, there were more Overstock shares in the market than actually existed, because they were borrowed from thin air.

With a retailer, the merchandise will get delivered, and then the buyers will have it forever. With 'naked shorting', the merchandise is created from nowhere, lent out, sold, rebought, returned, and then disappeared. The shares never actually exist. But they affect the market as if they do exist - e.g. more shares existing in a company means every share is less valuable, so by magicking these shares into existence the price is equally magically dropped, which helps makes the shorting auto-succeed. It is straight up cheating.

Imagine a grain holding company lends you some paper 'shares' that are stand-ins for X amount of grain. It produces many of these shares, flooding the market with 'grain', and as a result the price falls. At this point their lenders buy up the grain from grain farmers at these lower prices, thus making a profit, and then return the grain to the company who then hands it out to the people who bought the shares. In this way, the grain farmers lose money because their product is devalued, while the company and its investors make money. This is the only mechanic at play: money flowing from the people who create value into the pockets of the market manipulators. Oh, and this 'grain holding company'? They never had any grain to begin with. All they had was the know-how and connections to lie and get away with it.
Facebook 'boring'? 1 in 3 users are tuning it out
Added a clarification edit. Thanks!
Show HN: DIY Electronic Derailleur
So how much demand is there in todays workplace for historians, geographers and spellers - but they still manage to find time on the curriculum
people say this because outside the mainstream thoughts do get downvoted alot on this board.

which is maybe better than letting trolls take over, I'm kind of agnostic about it

but alternative viewpoints are often dismissed here

(only example I can readily think of http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3460572 , but I feel like I see it all the time)
What about Maxima[1]? I've used it for the last 7 years when I needed mathematical operations.

Its not only gratis, its libre.

[1] http://maxima.sourceforge.net/
The Arduino sketch, schematics, Fritzing diagram, bill of materials and CAD diagrams can be found on the project page http://nabilt.github.com/diy_eshift/. If you like this project please vote on the Instructables page.
Show HN: Redesigned site for my iPhone app. Looking for feedback.
http://chaincalapp.com/

I launched ChainCal back in late January, but I recently redesigned the app so I built a new site to promote it.

I'm not much of a marketer so I was hoping to get some constructive feedback from the HN community, having plenty of experience with this.

The site likely won't work well in old browsers at the moment since it uses a lot of CSS3.

Thanks!
I am definitely one those people. But I know friends/family who spend at least 30 mins per day on fb. May be I am spending too much time on HN and no time for fb anymore :)
Schools have many goals and education is but one of them and even education doesn't just mean reading textbooks, viewing videos and being able to reproduce that.
Looking for someone to help implement the mac port of this as I don't have a mac. I have a start but its probably not the best way.

Direct link to github: https://github.com/rynop/webrf
Clickable:

http://chaincalapp.com/
Ok, let's be serious. Usage of street view data may or may not be useful for the driverless cars. But the original, primary motivation for street view was the ability to build their own map data and remove their dependency on existing map providers like teleAtlas. Driverless cars were frankly too far out, and not close enough to their primary business model to be worth it at the time. And being able to remove their maps licensing requirements gave them infinitely more freedom at a time when their mapping product was especially important to them.
His summary of the object hierarchy of Ruby is probably more confusing than elucidating to most Ruby beginners, since he doesn't make it very clear that he's dealing with the distinction between instances and classes (which are themselves instances of Class).

From the description it seems like he doesn't quite get the distinction himself, and one of the later examples is broken:

"Array.new.methods - Object.methods" should read "Array.new.methods - Object.new.methods". Otherwise he's in fact subtracting the methods available on an error instance from the methods available on an instance of Class, not the methods available on a generic object..
If Game of Thrones took place in NYC Infographic
Cypher Punks: Andy Muller Maguhn, J.Zimmerman, J.Appelbaum talk with Assange
Gnome 3 has been shipping in Fedora for over a year now, and they just pushed the third such revision. I'd say they're running out of their matters of time and entering the realm of "long standing breakage" at this point.

Here's my biggest personal peeve: keyboard navigation in the overview screen has never worked. The gnome-shell process in that mode steals events from gnome-settings-daemon (which normally handles hotkeys). This means that if you like to do things like launch apps from the keyboard (I mean: who wants to launch an app when in the overview/app-launcher screen?!) it just doesn't work. Combine that with the fact that the overview screen pops up automatically when you close the last window on a screen (I mean: who wants to launch an app just after closing another one!?) and it drives me up the wall daily.

Three times now I've straight up decided to fix this, but it's a non-trivial codebase and I always give up before making it work. The core folks really need to look at this problem, but at this point I doubt they ever will. Consistent keyboard navigation is clearly not a priority.

(edit: this is the issue in question: https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=643111)
Vandalism is Increasing in Parks and Playgrounds
Hi,

If you are interested in front-end learning, I've found this useful for myself: http://www.codecademy.com They have sort of interactive tutorials to go through js, jQuery, html, etc.
I shall say that I was a complete newbie to programming (though I knew a lot about HTML/CSS). Codeacademy is meant to teach from scratch, so it may be a little boring to you. Anyways, it can help if you want to catch up in some of the most renowned front-end practices.

By the way, «...and use stackoverflow when stuck», great advise from freshfey.

Hope it helps!
We got a box of those kindergarten scissors in grad school!

Although there was a theoretical astrophysics group who probably shouldn't have been allowed crayons without careful supervision
I had difficulties getting heroku installed, even though I'm using ubuntu 10.04 LTS (as they are). It took many hours over several days, and several attempts.

One problem is that their deb package doesn't specify ruby as a dependency. Another problem is that you have to examine their inlined bash install script to get to the .deb package to diagnose that. Another problem was that ubuntu's standard package repositories didn't include the version of ruby they needed (ruby1.9.1 - though I just checked now, and it seems to be available again). So I installed rvm, suggested by www.ruby-lang.org as an easy route, which needed me to install a whole bunch of other stuff, and finally installed the latest version of ruby - but this was too recent for their package to accept. sigh
Eventually I found an old, undocumented gem of theirs that would install their command-line tool (well, half of it anyway). Maybe it's seamless if you already have ruby installed - but it's a terrible way to start ruby, in my experience anyway. Possibly it's more streamlined on Windows/Mac.

Then... all three versions of ruby that I tried (1.8, 1.9.1, 1.9.3) had changes that broke my tiny toy code. So astonishing, I'm not even mad.

Look at Python, with 5-year support for Python 2 before breaking compatibility with Python 3. And Java, well, I've never heard of code being broken (assert could have, but never heard it happen).

Ruby is labour-intensive - that's the price of constant (incompatible) improvement. Part of that price is documentation that goes out of date, instructions that go out of date, code that goes out of date. It becomes unrealistic to invest in Ruby - unless you plan to be working intensively on it anyway. Which I think does make sense for its original professional users, who are constantly iterating anyway. But it's not good for people who missed the early wave, when ruby was friendly.

It's a shame, because there's a lot of cool ideas in ruby and cool projects using it. I guess that's the trade-off. But, well, it took so much effort to get heroku installed that I haven't used ruby since.
Everyone is the hero of their own personal narrative.
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The people looking for buy hgh supplements, should consider carefully the following topics. The buyer should carefully search the different brands available for hgh and ingredients for each brand. The buyer needs to check the quality, customer reviews of the particular brand he intended to buy. There are more important factors like side effects.
Gittip - Set up recurring tips to people who do great work.
> guess if you're a company that targets discretionary spenders, you're doomed.

other than food clothes & shelter, everything in the world is by definition discretionary spending.
Agreed with pbiggar about trolling. Most YC companies are by far not social network websites. You have not done your homework, or you're just trolling.
The US still makes plenty of things. They're just not made by humans.
Startup Scaling: Overcoming 5 Key Operational Challenges
Give Mathematica a shot. If you can read mathematics you can read Mathematica.
Siasto Attempts the Improbable: Making Enterprise Software Beautiful (YC W11)
Craftsman vs. College
How do you weaponize a GPU?
Wouldn't normally post a youtube link but the famous Bill Hick's "what are you reading FOR" story

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uvs2g5Nj0NI
OmniFaces 1.0 is released (new JSF utility lib)
Scaling a 2000-node Hadoop cluster on EC2/Ubuntu with Juju
I really enjoyed working through the Ruby Koans (http://rubykoans.com/). They're especially nice because you can work on them offline, so I finished them while on a flight to the U.K. I'm considering writing up some "advanced ruby koans," with more in depth examples delving deeper into the standard library and whatnot.
Keep your application state out of your queue
This sort of thing (certificate compromise) has happened with open source projects as well.

The downside of trusting certificates is that you're abstracting trust to a point that you (where you == the IT industry) stops questioning who can do what. You trust something absolutely, but that trust is based on lots of people whom you don't know doing the right thing without making mistakes.
Hi there, it sounds like a really neat app. Love the clean look of the app.

However, maybe it's because of my monitor colours but everything looks pretty faint with the minimalist theme. I can't really see the various tasks that you've picked as samples. Also, personally, I prefer if you would tell me step by step what the app does instead of me having to wait for the animations to run through them step by step. However, I'm a technical user and I may not be your target audience.

Also, if you're looking to promote this app via your website, I'd recommend you have something that works well in most browsers so you can reach out to a larger audience.

Good luck!
I agree with you on the academia aspect, and it sounds like you are referring mostly to higher education, right? Or else, why would we want those from academia teaching our children in middle school and high school.

"intelligence, patience, curiosity, and creativity"

Are those really the qualities of a good teacher? In my mind, I don't really care of the teacher is curious or intelligent. I just want them to know how to deliver information to my child in the most efficient way possible. It would be nice if the children were engaged, and if the teacher had a clever way to even make it "fun" at times, great. But it's not a prerequisite.
> The Ext4 filesystem can now add checksums to its metadata to help recognise data tampering.
We have the advantage of using GitHub to build GitHub (http://zachholman.com/talk/how-github-uses-github-to-build-g...), so we all know what needs worked on. There is certainly some vision casting from a few core people, but everyone takes responsibility for figuring out what needs done and coordinating how to do it.

> Who makes these decisions, when there are multiple viable ways of going forward, but someone just has to put their foot down and decide which one?

We all do, but whoever submits the first pull request usually sets the tone of the conversation. Occasionally, a pull request will get abandoned, but usually it is the starting point and we build from there.

There are often intense conversations about how something should work. I've learned to just try one way and see if you like it. Not everyone will, but you can form some consensus.
One of our two full-time developers on the project spent most of his time fighting a never-ending war against our XML views to make the app look just as good on a ZTE Blade as it does on a brand new Galaxy Nexus.

I'm definitely feeling that way these days.

When I first started learning Android, I was very excited about the resource system. The ecosystem is highly fragmented, but they give you the tools to deal with it!, I thought. How cool, I want to learn from their wisdom!

Six months later, I'm actively shopping for a different UI framework. This one makes easy things hard and hard things impossible. I was recently trying to make a button 40% of the screen width and aligned kinda leftish and kept from getting too big on wide screens. In CSS, that's couple lines, maybe thirty seconds. But in Android . . . well, I spent six hours thrashing through documentation and recommendations and opinions on StackOverflow before I gave up and wrote my own Button class.

It's really that bad.

Ever try to change the color of a button on Android? It requires something like fifteen 9-patch PNGs, two or three arcane XML files, and navigating a style hierarchy for your activities. No siree, no .myButton { border: 3 px solid #C88; } here.

Ever try to wrap text on a canvas? Or scale a font based on the display size? Or add an element to a view when a screen is a little bit larger? The hoops you have to jump through are simply amazing.

I'm convinced it's not fragmentation, per se, that's the problem. The web has even more fragmentation, and it handles it well enough. No, it's that the tools you're given for dealing with the fragmentation are so very poor.
I'm a fan. A little busy, but intriguing enough for my tastes. I wish clicking on the little red boxes did something other than flip them to a different color, but it's really insignificant. The title bleeds off the black background on Chrome. Great idea for an app. I teach goal setting workshops now and again, this could be a useful tool to pass along.
New Google+ Ad Units Make SERPs Look More Like Facebook Than Google
> How does the demographic of existing farmers support this?

The point was to just highlight that people don't even think about who they are buying from. The chances of buying from a 55 year old farmer at your grocery store is statistically greater than a 20 year old, making it difficult for 20-year olds to break into the industry.

> Old people must be sacrificed so that the young can have a vibrant economy.

It is not a binary issue. You do not have to stop supporting older people in order to also support the younger people. If you allocate, say, 25% (picked at random) of your food purchases to 20-year olds, you will allow them more room to establish themselves while still leaving room to support the older farmers as well.

It is not just about food. It just seemed like one example that everyone can relate to. It is about spreading the wealth around, instead of everyone buying from a single source. That is, of course, if you care about a vibrant economy for the youth. If you don't, buy from whomever you want.
Google Acquires Quickoffice
I'm not so sure... The standardised tests don't actually weed out crap teachers as they can just teach to the test, and they do a lot to hurt the effectiveness of good teachers.

Also a lot of the motivation of the teacher who was annoyed with my parents was that I was causing problems in tests due to being interested in stuff well outside the domain of what would be taught in class.

Set tests largely test how good you are at those set tests, but most problems you will encounter in the real world are unbounded by a curriculum and the ability to recall stuff you have very recently read, while useful, is not a particularly good measure of wider ability.
Big Data is now TOO BIG - and we're drowning in toxic information
Operation Olympic Game, Project X and the Assault on Security
So wait, you're saying the reason for the lens to begin close to the glass is the same reason the lens should begin close to the specimen? How did you come to that conclusion?
These are a lot of really good ideas. Think about how much people like clever and funny TV adds released to Youtube. They upvote them, favourite them, and share them with their friends. (Old Spice, Superbowl ads, those old Rube Goldberg car commercials.)

If ads were treated like they were on Youtube - potentially entertaining or thought-provoking bits that people intentionally browse, upvote and share, Facebook would get much less flak for the way they've been trying to monetize their users. It would also promote creativity and thoughtfulness - which is something long term internet users respond to much more than the old blinking text and flash animations strategy.[citation needed]
Ask HN: open source video conferencing
what's a good open source alternative to the likes of vidyo or webex?
There is no such thing as Asperger's or ADD.
It's just the term boring morons use for interesting clever people.

If we were in charge we would have medical terms for "unable to set the clock on a VCR" and "unable to read a book when Oprah is on"

But fortunately we don't care what a bunch of dreary moron office drones think of us - even when we bother to notice them.
That photo says it all. Someone that's actually made something has confidence that cannot be instilled by positive, "you're a winner" affirmations. The individual is left with joy, not relief at having suffered through it.

The most important thing to be learned is that you can. And the most important thing that you can do is do.
I liked this quote from the article:

> Explain that velocity is not a productivity metric

Velocity isn't always about productivity. Sometimes it's about survival.

I worked in a startup (making enterprise software) right after the first bubble, and the company "practiced" its own version of scrum. We had a small runway and small sales, and the development team insisted on setting its own pace. The fact that we had to have stuff to sell to make money for our paycheques didn't seem to matter to development.

Needless to say, I managed to get the hell out of Dodge before the bank accounts went empty, but a good chunk of the dev team stuck around, plodding for months without pay. It took months before the dev team realized no more money (including backpay) was coming and most of the remaining people finally left. With no major release to sell.

If velocity is required to make development a financially sustainable effort, it can't be dismissed outright.
> What you’re saying is that it is possible to answer the question while staring bewildered at a device you have never seen or interacted with.

The question is completely invalidated by knowledge of the domain. If anything, they should have constructed an artificial device that would guarantee the student didn't have domain knowledge that would allow them to bypass the necessary critical thinking:

To avoid smaggling the fizdoodle, make sure you begin with the smunderson in the upright position.

Q: Why should the smunderson start in the upright position?

A: To avoid smaggling the fizdoodle.

edit: s/being/begin/
Whoops. Yea I meant investing. My assumption was that some part of a 1000 new millionaires would hopefully be putting some money back into the system through investments. I also think you'll see some people leave Facebook as they vest to go start companies of their own.
At least Mc Carthy thought that machines from the 70ies should have enough power to do it, i.e. it is an algorithmic/representation/etc… problem, not a lack of computational power one.

If you look at what happens in nature, relatively low-level organisms are capable of some traits that we wish the most powerful computer had (vision of insects, etc…). Also, if you look at a well defined problem like speech recognition, the relationship between computational power and say accuracy is closer to a logarithmic curve than an exponential one. The law of diminishing returns has been the rule most of the time.
Show HN: Royal Roads University site launch on Drupal 7. Looking for feedback
How  to Tell Most Popular Programming Lanugages
Backbone.js for Django Developers
Hundreds of people may read and agree or disagree. And usually the number of down votes is very small by comparison.
You are entirely right.

With that said, schools right now often emphasize testing and test prep at the expense of any hands on work. Naturally, we should have the right balance, which seems to be what you are proposing, but if we must overreact, I would much rather overemphasize building, exploring, creating and underemphasize testing than the other way around.
Don't be too sad ... my countries Malaysia, Singapore, or any Asian countries is neither in the list ... but this is a great first step ... hope more competitors (Stripe, Square, etc.) will follow ..
Minor League PPC management