skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Watching Ballmer speak at the end was hard. I wish they simplified their keynotes a little bit.

Off-Topic Question...

I need to purchase my girlfriend a birthday gift. She "really" wants a tablet. I think a laptop would suit her needs the best. However, "must make g/f happy", is what my brain says. Do you guys think the Surface RT is a solid choice? I asked HN here http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4697945

I ask, because I cant seem to pull the trigger on any tablet.
Because you then don't need the complexity (& boilerplate) of SERIES or LOOP the moment you want to do a series of transformations on a slightly bigger list.
That's great, thanks! I wonder if someone knows a googl+ish theme built on bootstrap?
Good post. Can't wait to get hackernews added into sharebelt now :)
I thought Travis from Uber had a great talk because he showed the operations of his business. Zuck mentioned that companies can 80/20 somethings but have to be the best at some things to beat the competition. I think Uber's core is operational efficiency. They keep metrics on everything, they predict where riders are being underserved, not just where they are. I posted some more of my notes on http://tommy.chheng.com/2012/10/24/startup-school-2012-summa...
Thanks for the encouragement. It's what drives the project. I'm thinking about offering some of the RailsApps advanced tutorials through a subscription site to support the project.
Right, I think the biggest draw back for Surface RT is the screen. I have an HP Touchpad, and the resolution is terrible. But, I think im leaning towards Surface at the moment.
> Many users of C++ pay a performance cost for the language's lack of automatic memory management.

Now that's just empty rhetoric. What about 'users of Java pay a performance cost for not having a stack, and creating every single object in the heap'?

I don't pay for unneeded garbage collection, and you can't use your rhetoric around it.
To be fair, I said "How We..." Did it. Also, I made sure to clarify the point of the post with the beginning disclaimer.

Apologies if you felt mislead. LMK a better title and ill change it. Also, I hope there's plenty of stuff in there that demonstrates how to write a good application.
> Our definition of "big", I think. I can't be sure because the article leaves it so loosely defined

The article doesn't define big explicitly, but given the context and examples provided, the author's intent seems clear. It's revolutionary vs. evolutionary, audaciously ambitious in terms of timetable and scope, and dependent on focused, cohesive effort that draws deeply from our pool of talent and expertise. A Herculean task for a nation.

This isn't precise, but it's not unclear.

Is shooting yet another Mars rover or satellite into space a difficult and impressive engineering marvel? Sure, but at this point, these events are not revolutionary. Cell phones have proliferated, but not due to any planned or concerted national effort. Same with computer vision, progress is humming along, thanks to (evolutionary) processing power advancements and the work of academic or industrial researchers working largely independently of one another.

I see pushes from government -- clean energy/arpa-e, cybersecurity, etc., but nothing "big," nothing the public has rallied behind (or is even aware of). In some cases, the momentum for these thrusts is slowed by questions of utility and practicality -- is global warming an actual thing? Sure, the U.S. has been spending money as if it's pursuing something grand, but everyone's just focused on keeping their heads above water.
I notice that there was a state poll released by Rasmussen but I haven't gotten an email. Is this only tracking national polls?
Don't date a programmer
Show HN: DIY-Portfolio, a website template for makers who aren't afraid of html
SDR (Special drawing rights) will displace the dollar before the yuan does. SDRs are instruments created by the IMF that represent a basket of currencies held by IMF member countries.

The yuan currency market is too small and illiquid to displace the dollar as the world's reserve currency.
"how we could identify the factors that lead to a community that doesn't appear to be following the aging and health norms of other communities"

How do you propose to do this while avoiding empirical evidence?
Dialoggs: Public Beta Now Open
Yeah, that's why the game industry uses Java almost exclusively.

NOT!
"retrospective" is better.
I am. Email on it's way.
Netflix now has more than 30 million members globally, 25 million in the US
Motif (X11 library) relicensed to LGPL
I think your balloon idea has some merit. For much of the early fall, very little gas would be needed to support a very large balloon that would retard the fall and limit terminal velocity. If your velocity stays low from the start, you never have to worry about heat building up. As the descent continued, eventually the atmosphere would thicken to the point that the balloon provided actual buoyancy, and subsequently a controlled descent could be made. Perhaps two balloons would be required, one weak, large one for the initial fall at the edge of the atmosphere and another stronger one for the final descent through ordinary weather conditions. The question is, how big would that first balloon need to be at the altitude of the space station?
Has this been submitted to the MythBusters yet???
> the past few years have led to massive increases in the size of the government

Except, of course, that's a big lie. The "public Sector Has Lost Over 550,000 Jobs Since Mid-2009".
I think the general consensus is "do not buy" because there are no apps for it and it can't run Windows desktop apps. I would wait for the x86 version at the very least.

http://techcrunch.com/2012/10/23/microsoft-surface-rt-review...

http://gizmodo.com/5953866/microsoft-surface-rt-review-this-...
hex:fb 92 83 a3 50 00 00 00
dec:251 146 131 163 80 0 0 0

hex:10 37 ba f2 00 00 00 00
dec:16 55 186 242 0 0 0 0

they do indeed look like IP addresses. The extra number is the port(maybe). what's weird is that it's sometimes zero.
I came across this issue when using node.js to make secure requests as a client and after setting up tests with bad certs found it silently worked anyway. To get it working you need to be at a certain version of node.js and make sure you set the options up carefully. Testing with a bad certificate is essential for this stuff. http://stackoverflow.com/questions/10142431/my-node-js-https...
Multimethods are an awesome feature, which I'm a big fan of, but they were lower on my priority list so I haven't got around to typing them. It's not clear how comprehensively they can be typed either, I comment about it in "Future work".

I don't know a lot about type-classes, but I'm doubtful that Typed Clojure could help make protocols like them. I would expect a whole different dispatch system would need to be designed. But that's mostly a hunch. Very interesting problem.

If you want to play around with this kind of stuff immediately, check out Typed Racket. The Typed Clojure implementation is in alpha and might not be very friendly yet :) That said, please try it out!
Until The Next Big Rock hits the Pacific, and then it will suddenly seem like an amazing use of resources.
How to get HP v115w pendrive working on MacBook Pro Retina
Ask HN: My startup idea, What do you think?
Idea is to create a platform for buyers on how they shop for better deals or prices.
It is a simple three step process

1) Buyers can either from their phone or web make a post saying I need to buy flat screen LED 42" TV and my budget is $500.00.
2) Sellers will response to the post by offering their prices either by matching or beating it. Buyer at this point can use the portal to ask questions or negotiate.
3) Finally, if they like the deal they can proceed with purchase.

Benefits for buyers.

Saves time.
Make purchases based on the price they are comfortable with.
Get notification when somebody makes an offer.

Benefits for sellers.

Sellers has buyer with money and intention to buy.
Good for small businesses who do not have resources to buy ads and SEO experts.
Get get notified when a new request comes in.

I am surprise giants like eBay and Amazon does have this. I would call it, name your price feature.
Craigslist has something similar to this but not intuitive.
It could be part of someone's crazy Twitter-based deployment strategy, using Twitter as RPC or pub-sub.
> going to Mars at this point in time is not the best option

Can you propose a better option?
Interesting. How can you tell? It looks like a google now notification to me.
I'm almost enough of a political nerd and devloper nerd to try this, but I think the hardest part would be the scraping... Since the news sites have probably changed their formatting since the last election, it would be hard to test the results until they start displaying. If it take an hour to get all the bugs worked out in the scraper, well by then, the scraping might be usless. Maybe there's some kind of centralized API for accessing raw election results, though.
Boxfish Updates Live Guide App To Improve Live TV Discovery
Video and Audio Enabler WebRTC Near Release
Thanks, I intentionally chose examples where types are particularly useful, like monads and conduits (and apparently null elimination).
Mozilla Ignite releases 2 new dev resources to hack the future internet
At what point did the dollar become the standard? Post World War 2 I'm guessing? What was the equivalent before? Anyone know?
If you're asking me for a thesis, then I guess it would include the idea that what people should be willing to devote to politics is more than, and fundamentally different from, attention. Once politics become politics of attention, they become, quite precisely, the spectacle you're referring to: a real-time feed of gossip, gaffes and stats.

More specifically though, my impression was, quite simply, that obsession with details, as a mainstream phenomenon, often coincides with the inability or unwillingness to see the bigger picture. While I can't back this up with statistical data, I'm pretty sure there's a well-founded psychological term for it.
> Realistically my solution is to only use features I understand in relation to how something similar would look in C.

Absolutely true. I don't understand people trying to use every single language feature in every single program. And I'm thinking in general terms, not just C++.
All of the above except the last one are much harder to do than kickstarting a Mars colony.

The last one is downright impossible.
> Now we just want the government to redistribute wealth and engage in irrelevant expressive acts

This seems like a gross oversimplification.
I love strong types on hobby projects, so I don't have to constantly go back and fix crash bugs after I get it working once.
Microsoft Kicks Off Windows 8 Era with Live Webcast
People are working on it: https://www.facebook.com/pages/FreeFly-Astronaut-Project/249...
All of closure's syntax is sugar on top of lists that still work.
Schools were and are the primary target. Just go back and read the story behind Raspberry Pi[1]. The point always was to get back to the days of the BBC Micro and a general introduction to computing fundamentals (as opposed to mere "using the applications" training) for British kids (although kids in other places can benefit as well), based on the notion that broad exposure would mean a larger cohort of people to draw upon as adults in the tech sector (commercial and academic) in later life. Full-featured computers in schools are expensive for this sort of task, and not everybody can take their work home with them to expand upon it—or even just to do homework. At around the price of a textbook, the Raspberry Pi makes that at least possible.

The low price, suggested curriculum, etc., are a big part of making it work. Or is it your contention that computing should be restricted to people who can afford a "proper" computer?

[1] http://www.raspberrypi.org/about
Where does that number come from? It sounds suspiciously made up -- not by you, mind you.
War on Terror to become permanent
This is not 'hacking' the application process in the slightest. You prepared yourselves well; there's a difference.

But then again, the title got you on the frontpage of HN, which was almost certainly the goal.
If it's as big as Chicxulub, or bigger, getting the hell out of here is the best option.
Ho dang! Congrats bro.
While slowing down IS great, I do sympathize with the desire to get my information without "human interest" and the infotainment slant that tends to skew pertinent facts.
Are Successful Entrepreneurs Skilled or Simply Lucky?
The top bar is wrong, the clock isn't centered on existing versions of stock Android.
absolutely; and i feel it’s because they’ve really pulled everything together nicely and built a very compelling ecosystem. people tend to define the merits of an ecosystem based largely on app counts, the real value (in my opinion) is in the range of services you get on a platform, and how much you can accomplish utilizing them..

connecting to my microsoft account today, i pretty much have access to services that cover nearly everything i need out of a computing device:

- email (outlook.com)

- messaging (skype)

- cloud storage (skydrive)

- productivity (office)

- collaboration (onenote)

- entertainment (xbox music / xbox video)

- gaming (xbox live)

- social media integration (facebook, twitter, linkedin, ... info pulled-in)

- roaming settings (windows, windows phone)

- roaming favourites (internet explorer)

that makes for a pretty compelling offering to me, and i honestly don’t see any of the others in the market coming close to this.

on the development side, while they’re not quite there yet, they also seem to be the closest in offering an ecosystem where a single application can be accessible on the widest variety of devices and form-factors; i'd say that’s pretty damn cool, and as a consumer i'm looking forward to the experiences that will bring..
The example node.js project sends a 3d pointcloud server to client using websockets, and renders it in webgl. Pretty badass.
His conclusion is that only government taking the initiative will fix things: "political leaders and the public must care to solve a problem".

But generally, only the governments of first world nation states can operate on that sort of level. They have the resources and are not accountable to voters the same way corporations are accountable to shareholders. Even the most impressive company couldn't have undertaken the Manhattan Project.
Is 27 really considered that old in the YC circle? Does it actually put you at a significant disadvantage in the application process?
Show HN - Weekend project or so - Create playlists collaborativly in live
What a Beta Looks Like: 19 Days. 3,718 Unique Visitors. 154 Signups.
I was interested in this statistic: " Back home in London (where such statistics are available), 11 women a month are attacked in unlicensed cabs, and unlicensed drivers are responsible for a horrifying 80 percent of all stranger rapes." I can't find where this info comes from. I was trying to find out the same stats on LICENSED cabs. I did find someone else trying to find this same info, by doing a Freedom of Information request, and they got the ROUND-AROUND and DENIED. http://www.whatdotheyknow.com/request/cab_related_sexual_ass...
How tech savvy is she? I've found that many people who say they want "a tablet" really only think the iPad. If she saw the Courier video, I take it she's a little more tech savvy than that, but it's still worth asking.
Bro, I want to know more about when we can see and experience mpost!
Totality is different. In C you can (using a pointed cast cast) add a float to an intended and get gobbledygook (by interpreting the bits in memory incorrectly) and keep going. In Closure you can't, it will throw an exception, but you won't get warned about that until runtime.
Reading the documentation is important, but tests are even more so. A simple test running with a bad certificate would have caught a lot of these issues. Small devs often push out software without having much time to read docs or make tests, but these are big players with lots of resources, and real money at stake.
SonicAPI.com: public beta of music processing service
Public or Private - The Fight Over the Future of Water
The agile/lean idea is not to have your users bug test your code! It's a technique for gathering feedback early and often in order to make sure that the requirements are sufficiently addressed. What you are describing is a shoddy work discipline which no self-respecting developer would even think of associating his name with.

More appropriately, one of the central pillars of agile is to be in a releasable state at the end of every sprint.
It lists a 360-degree camera - huh?
Nothing more to cut off, including runtime and memory usage.
I'll just note that any corrections are more than welcome, this is my first paper and I've got a lot to learn! Please send them to abonnairesergeant at gmail dot com.
Self-operating vehicles have a huge potential to upset travel and shipping and blur the distinction between transit and last-mile.

To say nothing of the generic bipedal utility robot.
CV is the big roadblock there. [1]

No, these things aren't going to happen tomorrow. But they have a fair chance of being delivered before we could actually put a human on Mars or eradicate poverty in Africa, even if massive societal projects were undertaken with those goals in mind.

And, conveniently, CV won't require those massive societal projects. It'll get them, eventually. To enable the really cool stuff. [2] Sort of like cars changed everything even before we had a massive highway system that unleashed further potential.

[1] Though power density is a big challenge, I don't think anyone's going to mind if version 1 of their autonomous maid/handyman only works in one-hour bursts. Not so long as it can actually do the housework. If someone's keeping up with things day-in, day-out, it's rare that more than an hour or two's-worth of work needs to be done in a day.

[2] e.g. Going from self-driving cars and trucks to self-driving transport pods that autonomously link to tracks and ad-hoc caravans for long-distance high-speed travel, then de-link and queue for self-operating cranes to be load them onto self-piloting ships to deliver them to foreign ports where they operate the same dance in reverse.
I did, see two levels up. Note that if your sole goal is to remove Earth as the single point of failure for humans, Mars is probably a good choice. All I'm saying is that at this point doing a mission similar to Apollo, namely flying humans to Mars and back, is not a smart investment (even if your sole goal is to establish a Mars colony, but certainly if you also like to improve conditions on Earth).
Expenditures are up at both the federal and state level.

http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/FGEXPND

http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/SLEXPND

It's true that the states chose to spend on the money increasing worker pay (http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/ECIGVTWAG) rather than hiring more workers, but that's a separate issue. (Call it anti-Keynesian spending during a recession.)

Historically we did things like hiring a bunch of unemployed people and having them build stuff (trails in national parks, fancy downtown landscaping, transit projects, etc). In the most recent recession, all we did was give the unemployed 99 weeks of free money.
The correlation in currency movement is most likely a result of concrete steps taken by China over the years to reduce the need for an intermediate currency, traditionally the USD, in trade between two countries.

There's plenty of evidence that the seeds have been planted for a free-floating (potentially gold-backed) Yuan to eventually sit alongside (not necessarily displace) the Euro and USD as a major reserve currency.

January 2012: "Sheikhs fall in love with renminbi"

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/NA24Ak03.html

March 2012: "China has signed a $31bn currency swap agreement with Australia, a step towards boosting the renminbi’s profile in developed markets. Beijing has established nearly 20 bilateral swap lines over the past four years, but Australia ranks as the biggest economy yet to sign such a deal"

http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/4b6c4ab6-7404-11e1-bcec-00144...

April 2012: "This morning, we saw the launch of the first RMB bond outside of Chinese sovereign territories. And it happened here in London. This builds on the progress London has already made toward becoming the western hub for RMB.’

http://citywire.co.uk/global/london-launches-its-first-offsh...

June 2012: "China and Japan began direct trading of Chinese yuan and Japanese yen in Tokyo and Shanghai on June 1, in a move to boost trade and investment between the world's second- and third- largest economies, and also viewed as a further step to enable the yuan to become a truly global currency."

http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/china/2012-06/04/c_1316294...

June 2012: "China and Brazil strike $30bn bilateral swap deal to reinforce economies. Announcement also includes plans for joint satellite launches, culture centres and language networks

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/jun/22/china-brazil-bil...

August 2012: "ZIMBABWE has been urged to follow the example of some Central African countries which have taken the initiative in using the Chinese currency - the yuan. Last month a number of Central African banks were given access to yuan-denominated bonds by the China Development Bank Corporation (CDB)."

http://allafrica.com/stories/201208160818.html

October 2012: 'Chinese Gold Imports Through August Surpass Total ECB Holdings, Imports From Australia Surge 900%"

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2012-10-21/chinese-gold-import...
The solution to nuclear waste is burning it up in breeder reactors. Who don't have to store the stuff for aeons if we risk producing weapons grade material in between.
Dr. Richard Dawkins On Education, 'Innocence of Muslims,' and Rep. Paul Broun
It was after bretton woods.

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bretton_Woods_system
Interesting article. For those not familiar with the problem, it's called the Collatz conjecture.

I'm curious how this would behave in case of the conjecture being false, i.e. found a number that wouldn't reduce to 1 by the algorithm.
Yikes, ok we'll take a look at that. Seems like we've got a lot of testing to do on this. Thanks for the heads up.
We already have a colony in low earth orbit. Also, by colonizing mars we will only have 2 points of failure.
I'm envisioning a new OS where this is built into not only the file system, but the APIs that apps use to interact with it. So all the (brand new!) apps work in the system.
No doubt I agree as well. Best way to learn is by imitation. But yeah, it is just a concern, that's all.
Rethinking the App Model
IIRC the average founder age is about 27-29.
No need to apologize. The meaning of "hacking" has changed over time, and of course you're free to contribute to that.
I doubt that SDR will ever replace the dollar. From wikipedia:

> Special drawing rights were created by the IMF in 1969 and were intended to be an asset held in foreign exchange reserves under the Bretton Woods system of fixed exchange rates. After the collapse of that system in the early 1970s the SDR has taken on a far less important role.[5] Acting as the unit of account for the IMF has been its primary purpose[Williamson 1] since 1972.

> Private parties do not hold or use them.