skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
War Made New: Technology, Warfare, and the Course of History, 1500 to Today by Max Boot. Just published in 2006.

http://www.amazon.com/War-Made-New-Technology-Warfare/dp/159...

I don't agree with the guy's politics, but his view on the melding of technology and military history is pretty interesting.

"My major conclusion? Simply that it's not enough to acquire first-class technology. You also need the right organizational structure, training, and leadership to take advantage of that technology. Today, the U.S. is the undisputed leader in high-tech hardware, but our government bureaucracy is still designed to fight mirror-image adversaries from the Industrial Age--not nimble, decentralized foes like Al Qaeda." -- Max Boot

See also: http://www.cfr.org/publication/10313/war_made_new.html
So I just entered len() for PHP's sizeof(), and when I searched the other way, I got a suggestion...

But I am pretty sure that when I searched strip in PHP, nothing came up. I don't remember if I clicked a suggestion item or I selected a language from the second dropdown. That might be the problem, since I think you're mapping string.strip() to trim(), and not strip() to trim(), which is understandable :) Maybe a LIKE %% search instead of =?
Wikipedia list of data structures
This is pretty sick. Nice job.
Pregunte HN:  ¿Adonde encuentran nueva información tecnológica en español?
For the hackers that speak spanish: Where do you find your technology information? In English, there's Hacker News, Proggit, Slashdot, etc...

Any great sites in spanish?
Woodrow Wilson was basically arguing the same point in 1909:

“We want one class of persons to have a liberal education. We want another class of persons, a very much larger class of necessity, to forego the privileges of a liberal education and fit themselves to perform specific difficult manual tasks.”
http://www.microworks.net/PACIFIC/battles/index.htm
has very good accounts of naval battles against the Japanese.

Highlights:
http://www.microworks.net/PACIFIC/battles/vella_gulf.htm
http://www.microworks.net/PACIFIC/battles/savo_island.htm
http://www.microworks.net/PACIFIC/battles/leyte_gulf.htm
He is talking about a site that it took one person one day to rewrite. Then he writes:

'''Ruby’s inheritance, metaprogramming, flexible mixins, and testing culture support a fantastically granular ecosystem of encapsulatable, interchangeable, combinable tools.'''

This doesn't sound very convincing.
It is probably better to build such a framework on top of a search engine rather than SQL.
Hmm, sounds interesting.

In practice, I'm not sure what it looks like. I wonder if something like "minimum number of edits" would work? Probably not, I guess since that's more like a "diff" and the docs are not likely to be similar in that way.

Perhaps just "the function who's documentation uses the most same words", stripping common words? Perhaps that could be improved a bit via synonyms too.
Ok, if anyone is interested, I've got the basic forum up here

http://news.virid.us:8080/news

Now I need to figure out how to tweak things like color, text, ports, etc. (or find someone who know who can do it)...any takers?
Like many things in life ... you get what you put into it.
Any reason you can't go with http://slinkset.com ?
Ah, that's probably it. Thanks, I'll look into it more carefully.
You might be right. I'll try to make it a great site for both audiences.
Professional Website Design | Web Development | SEO Services
Global Web Plus is a Professional Website design company located is Arlington. Our team in Arlington has vast experience in website designing & development and internet marketing. We are Providing Professional Website Designing & Development services to Dallas, Texas, new York and India.
I use SVN with the repository hosted on the same machine for all my lone projects.
Google Reader makes some improvements
Very good observations.

- I'm not sure what the best way to show the price is. I played with having it big and bold on the registration page but couldn't get it to look right. In an effort to learn how to do it better, I've been taking photos of price tags at Walmart, the mall, etc and have got some good ideas in mind on how to make it better. There's definitely an art to it...

- The search does do substrings. No auto-acronyming (not sure what that is). No regex, as I don't think most people would use it.

- $14.99 vs $9.99... its tough. I figure I'll start higher and drop lower eventually if it seems necessary. It's easier to lower your price than to raise it.

- Inventory... most people haven't scanned past the first few pages. I'll need to find a way to make this easier.
When Sitemaps Don't Work: Two Alternatives
Another great thing about life: a billion dollars couldn't buy you an acute understanding of every line of Finnegans Wake.
I would prefer if, in the future, list posts are preceded with the number, even if the number is a lie. This will tell me that the post is low-value filler, and I can skip it accordingly.

Seriously, though, when was the last time you extracted actual business value out of a list of 100 things. 97 of them were on every other list of 100 things, and the 3 novel insights are both buried and underdeveloped.
I think the higher education market is in for a reality check just like what the credit market is going through right now.

1) Because of the deluge of college students. Many college educated people get jobs at Best Buy and retail outlets. Some of my high school friends are in situations like that. They assumed they would get a good job out of college, but that's what they get by getting a liberal arts degree and partying for 4 years. A 30,000-40,000 per year tuition, all down the drain.

2) Because a lot of job performance is measured by the market (i.e. startups). Getting a prestigious college degree doesn't necessarily get you the job needed and a lot of times you'll get beaten out by someone at a "less prestigious" school.

3) Many people getting a college, medical, or law degree should realize that if they're not at the top of their class, it's not necessarily guaranteed for them to get a great job. For a less prestigious university, it's even more so the case.

4) All of this will lead college counselors and the next generation of parents to advice people to get the most value for their money: i.e. a good education for a good price (i.e. not going to Harvard for Engineering, etc).
For the same reason that a billion dollars couldn't buy you a number that was prime and factorable.
I would say the real genius is the ability to do it via the camera rather than inputting 54 squares. Seems a lot easier.
At this point it seems to mean everything which is a coincidence and occasionally, perhaps by accident, events which actually are ironic.
"Shucks, the transmogrifier doesn't know what PHP's count is in PHP."

hehe
I like the idea in the end of the software, "Every designer on the planet has a portfolio of their designs, but how many have a portfolio of their minds?". Rarely you see a designer or an enterprnuer talking about what is in there mind. Portfolio of mind does not mean you have to spell out the idea verbatim, but you present a map of the path you are planning to tread. Having tried this technique of presenting what is going in my mind to potential customers, I can say when 'mind portfolio' is mixed with 'brand portfolio', you do get more customers. In my experience of running startups, customers do prefer startups that can think over startups trying to simply sell stuff.

The caveat is, you should be capable of presenting the mind portfolio without appearing to be a smart donkey. Spelling out your mind portfolio during a general chit chat with potential customer over a cup of tea, is what I do.
Same response to macports below: Not-Invented-Here syndrome.

I suspect they've got the same problem others do: a case of NIH, without the resources to invent it themselves.

Ugh.
Sun Protection Tents | UV Sun Protection | Best Sun Protection
Sun Protective Clothing at Affordable Prices. SPF T Shirts, sweatshirts, hats, sunglasses and sunscreen products certified UV sun protection for the whole family brought to you by the SPF Store.
LaPetiteClaudine sometimes does tech stuff.

There's also
microsiervos.com and
mangasverdes.org

I haven't found any hardcore stuff like HN, but maybe the microsiervos guys can help if you ask.
heh, I tried to fix that in the UI (the wrong place, obviously). There's some browser that doesn't do <option disabled> I guess?

Perhaps a sarcastic answer is the best solution. ;)
A Layoff in the Smith Family Ripples Through Town
Wow, even worse than that is that I read it as "iPhone" :/
It doesn't suck for him. He should be happy people are responding AT ALL and that he's aware of where it is so he can participate.
Teensy USB Development Board - 16MHz, $19
It's dangerous on some level. I'm looking for a domain for something I have in mind but while browsing through I've been thinking up functionality to match up to any good names... must stay focused :-)
spelled out like this so Google won't index it

Obscurity will NOT HELP YOU avoiding a Google index. They have many sources of data, including receiving toolbar data from users, and they very pointedly do not mention all sources they use to generate the crawl lists.

If you want to not get indexed, use the nonindex meta tag, or sign up for their webmaster console and remove that particular URL from the index. (Somewhat counterintuitively, robots.txt-ing out a site doesn't prevent it from being indexed, only from being crawled. They will still include it in their search results if it has external indicia of trust.)
Erm, I get protocal erros when I attempt to run the first test.
Court Orders, Facebook, Lawyers and a Catfish
Finnegans Wake absolutely has meaning. It's just an abrupt pain that refuses to go easy on you.
China’s Great Library of Alexandria
Some people with an English literature or English writing degree are effective teachers of English as a second language, but many are not. If I were hiring second-language teachers of English in an overseas country (as I have had some occasion to do in previous foreign residence), I would look for someone who was a native speaker of English, yes, but preferably someone who majored IN SOME OTHER LANGUAGE so that I know the would-be teacher understands the task of a language learner.

There are also masters-level professional programs in teaching English as a second language, which are usually quite well designed.
Processing Hack Week
The contents of the MySpace page may influence the company not to hire the individual. The MySpace terms provide that the service is only to be used for personal use. Therefore the company is breaching the MySpace terms of use.

I'd love to see somebody use that as an excuse in a job interview. "Sure, I went drunken joyriding and photographed it, but you can't use that against me because then you're breaching MyBooksFaceSpace terms of use.

"I'll have the corner office please."
a good education for a good price (i.e. not going to Harvard for Engineering

Do you seriously think going to Harvard for engineering is a bad idea? Why do you think so? Would it still be a bad idea if the student enjoys Harvard's financial aid and is paying just a few thousand dollars a year (earned through part-time work) to attend Harvard?

(I'd really like to know, so I'm inviting any onlooker with knowledge of this issue to reply.)
Processing is a visualization tool that's Java-based and it looks friggin' awesome: http://processing.org/

There are some bugs to fix, features to add (mainly in the command-line & build department), etc.

There are also text editor modes (vim-related stuff will be up soon-ish, and there used to be a TextMate mode) and derivative projects such as Processing.js and Ruby-Processing that need some work.

Hey, if you can't code, you could just learn Processing and make something cool :D
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burning_of_books_and_burying_of...
It's misleading to end by saying we can only speculate about what has been lost. In both cases scholars have some definite ideas about what has been lost.
Find Your Next Web Site Flip at Web Auctions Daily
http://www.webauctionsdaily.com is a one-stop shop for all the latest website, template, domain and software auctions online. Designed with internet marketers in mind, http://www.webauctionsdaily.com is a practical tool that draws on the newest auctions from eBay and rolls them into one nice, neat little package.
It's important to understand what asthenopia/eye strain is caused by and then to try and reduce this. In your case it's most likely caused by over use of your eye muscles when focusing on the computer screen. To reduce this take a break every 15 minutes and focus on a small point about 10-15 metres away.

This gives your eyes a chance to refocus and relax.

More information: www.strainedeyes.com
Tetris Inoculation Against Post Traumatic Stress Disorder Flashbacks
Personal experience: Dreamhost is the suck. What I saved in hosting fees, I lost due to downtime ("oops, our bad") and absolutely no customer support to call and wonder what the hell is going on. I did some research into hosting, so did an Information Architect friend of mine, and Slicehost has got a good blend of price/reliability. Dreamhost, if you're doing anything with a decent margin or lifetime value of a customer, is a big no-no. Really big.

Important business mantra: "Always pay well for money." Hosting that's up falls into this category.
I was using covers.com, it has historical results, spreads, and Over/Under lines for several years back.
DR?
Technical story? Well here it is: "I ported this small, simple band site from PHP to Rails in a day. My co-developers (this site has more than one?!) didn't understand at first but I brought them round".

I don't get this site Muxtape.com. I've seen it mentioned here a few times but I don't understand why it's "favoured".

It looks like a super-simple site where a few bands have uploaded some pictures and a couple of songs, which can be played by a flash player. Well, that's neat and all, I like the minimalist design, and mootools rocks, but, you know .. and?

I kept looking for some kind of advanced functionality. Since the domain name kind of sounds like "mixtape" I was clicking on the songs and trying to, you know, mix them. Nope - one at a time. Right. So where's the beef?

The guy says he ported to Ruby in one day, and I can believe that, since the DB design was already done and it looks like most of the work is in the layout and JS which could be just copied over into Rails.

So, can anyone enlighten me as to how this site, while nice for what it is, is special in some way such that "hackers" would care about its implementation especially?
What practical use does this serve? Just for fun hacking?

For anything of significant use, I think you need something like the Beagle Board (beagleboard.org) or a Gumstix. Anyone know of any others?
Developer's eye view of smartphone platforms
Clickjacking Twitter
Estimate: Top US Firms Have Over 700,000 Job Openings
The Forbes Web Celeb 25
as a investor using angelsoft, i think it is a great service for angels to manage their dealflow. however deals in angelsoft have not been too interesting, my guess is it will probably never be the top tier deal flow. However, you may need a ranking system (not crowd sourced) to bring the top dealflow to the top of the list, this may drive some activity.

as an entrepreneur, i think the $250 mark is not expensive IF we know who the investors are out there and how many actually read my documents and how many actually respond to it constructively. Paying and not getting heard/read/feedback may not be the way to do. I would not mind paying if the right group of investors read my summary and will pay more if they submit comments or questions more on a success base rather than upfront.

my 2 cents. cheers
Arduinos seem pretty popular around here (http://arduino.cc/), but I think they fall under the "just for fun hacking" category.

Once adafruit (http://adafruit.com/) gets the starter kit (http://is.gd/4sRs) back in stock, I'm going to order one for myself.
If we're going to be nitpicky isn't 'learning to learn' a skill?

:)
No question. In my personal experience, most engineers are TERRIBLE at writing, whereas whereas science majors are much better. English majors I've seen less of. From what I have seen, they tend to write well, but mostly about pointless things.

Creative writing.... Now that would be something. I haven't actually read anything from these magical fairy people, but
someone writing well about new and creative ideas would be amazing!
It's a tough business selling the domain name ideas.

I make a buck or two on each sold domain at http://HotNameList.com. But it's too easy for users to skip your link, or have an ad blocker etc. Then you get nothing for the sale.

Site looks nice, though.

Good luck.
Looks like fun to me.

I know very little about hardware hacking but I had an idea the other day: I wanted to rig a mini-stoplight up (green, amber, red LEDs) that I could plug into my computer's USB port and hit hot keys to change which LED was lit.

Then my wife could look over and see if I was super-focused or not. When I was thinking about code or trying to do science writing, I would toggle the thing to the red LED; when I was screwing around on HN, I would toggle it to green.

I looked around naively but couldn't find something small & easy. This product could maybe fit the bill nicely.

Whether my wife would appreciate such a thing is another matter. :)
Sorry about that guys!

Thanks for telling me how to not do that in the future. In this case, for some reason the edit button has disappeared... possibly because it was posted a while ago.
Motorola Razr V3 Pink Deluxe Pack Unlocked 
Motorola’s V3 epitomizes cellular technology with a phone that is ultra-thin and has incredible features. Upon first impression the phone might look like any other, but that is only because the V3 focuses on making the experience of using it as easy as possible.
Not sure about MIT and Harvard, but for Stanford CS courses, if you go to csXXX.stanford.edu you'll typically get the class page, including slides, problem sets, programming assignments etc. Ex. http://cs221.stanford.edu.

Obviously, I agree with you. In fact, I'd go a step further and say that watching the lectures without doing the problems/coding gets you significantly less than halfway.
What happened to those other people that was so bad?
How can you know how to do custom builds and not know how to fix your $PATH? ;)

$ mate ~/.profile
# add "/opt/local/bin:/opt/local/sbin:" to beginning of "export PATH"
save

Now force a reload (eg. open a new terminal) and done ...
The LEGO Turing machine
A TV Shop themed demonstration of a Turing Machine made in LEGO Mindstorms. It was made as part of a project at computer science at Aarhus University.
Defect Ticket Response
Nolan Bushnell: From Atari, Pong, and Chuck E Cheese to the Future of Games a...
This link is much more interesting than the posted article. I saw a jellyfish aquarium years ago and thought it was one of the most beautiful things I'd ever seen.

I wish the site had some indication of price ranges.

Get your roommate to post, please. Definitely hacker news for us biologist types here.
1969 film predicts PCs, the Net, multi-monitor setups, Webcams, online shopping, etc.
The "100 companies is a representative sample" is a big assumption. The linked article says those 100 companies were all Fortune 500: that implies that there's a very large likelihood that they are bigger than the other companies in the Fortune 1000. Bigger companies naturally have more job openings.

Even if this is true, it doesn't necessarily mean the economy's doing better. It's pretty likely that the job openings require skills that the newly unemployed workers do not have. Otherwise, they'd be filled. You can't hire a former real estate agent at Google and expect him to be immediately productive. (Hell, you usually can't hire a software engineer at Google and expect him to be immediately productive, but at least you can hire him.)

The issue with recessions is misallocation of capital, and it can't be fixed with a magic wand. You generally have to wait for people to retrain in new, productive areas of the economy, and for capital to be liquidated and entrepreneurs to find new uses for it. That's why it takes ~4 years instead of ~4 months.
Life Tips From Nassim Nicholas Taleb: the prophet of boom and doom
Grails 1.1 Beta3 is out
i've been using a butterfly, myself, which is what i learned on and know the best. plus, it does a good bit of stuff.
Does CMU offer any lectures online?
Awesome!

I couldn't figure out how to submit it though :(

I know it's probably a bad idea, but I feel wistful for the original "How the fuck is ___ in ___?"
This can be taken one step further to create a hacker-wife-trainer. Add a water pistol, a microphone and a stepper motor to the set up. Audio signal in wife's frequency range when LED is in red should trigger water pistol in the appropriate direction.
Only if you could filter them somehow. Most omnisio comments weren't serious. Half of the lecture comments would be idiots making fun of the instructors hair.
Would be much nicer if MacPorts was preinstalled so that everyone can install and update their packages as needed.
I can't really speak to net worth at 50, except to note that the lifetime earnings of my dad, with a Ph.D in nuclear chemistry from MIT, are significantly lower than the lifetime earnings of most of my coworkers, with bachelors from Berkeley or Ann Arbor.

But 4 years out of college, I can say that the salaries of my friends with no college degree and significant marketable skills are much, much higher than the salaries of my Amherst friends with English, history, or foreign language degrees. Like 4x higher. What you study seems to make a far bigger difference than where you go to school.
The funny part is -
Order the Turing Machine today and you'll also receive...

- Infinite tape*

- Infinite storage*

- Unlimited computability*

*Subject to availability
My adviser's been poached
I just found out that my adviser is being wooed to teach at another university starting next year, and I'm in a huge predicament because he's the only one in the department I'm currently in who does anything even remotely similar to what I do. I'm only in the second semester of my PhD, (have no dissertation proposal yet, but do have a general idea of what I'd like to do), but I am already 900% sure this is the person I want to write my dissertation with. Am I too far along or not far enough along to consider following him to this new university? Is it rude to even ask him if I could do this? The deadline for applications for the next academic year has already passed...Am I expected to go and do something else for a year and apply for the next, or should I see if there's a way of being taken in right along with him? What is the socially acceptable thing to do here? I don't want to overstep my boundaries, but I don't/can't write this dissertation with anyone else at my current university, and I don't particularly want to begin all over again somewhere else where I would know absolutely no one (adviser included). Help! I'm at a loss for the right thing to do...
Another way to do it is to DFS or BFS a graph while marking nodes "visited" or not. If you encounter a node in your search path that was marked, there's a cycle. I think you did something extremely similar, but I'm not sure you marked them or not. There might be a simpler way to do it wihtout so many loops:

# Initial condition is for all nodes: node.visited = False

def detect_cycle( start ):

if start.visited == True:
return True

start.visit = True
cycle = False
for child in start.children:
cycle = cycle or detect_cycle( child )
return cycle

Of course you might need some other stuff to be returned, in which case this would be wholly inadequate ;-)
Thanks for that link; I was starting to feel too productive today ;)