skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Sequoyah is an interesting example. He had access to English printing and knew that it encoded the English language, but he didn't know exactly how, since he couldn't read or write English. He couldn't read or write any language in any script, so in the process of creating a script for Cherokee, he had to independently invent the concept of the syllabary. The proto-Elamite script might also have been invented by someone who know how others used the Mesopotamian script but wasn't literate in it himself. If you learn to read and write one language you'd want to re-use as much of that knowledge as possible when writing a second language (e.g., using romaji to write Japanese) but there's no loss in creating an entirely new script if you aren't literate in any existing writing system.
I really like the 10 year plan. It might seem a long time, but if four of those years are college that's about half, and if you do a masters program that cuts it down even more.

Personally if you do four years as a CS major but program on the side or actively practice programming it's more like 5-6 years. That gives you 4 years, where you go out and get programming work experience, in the real world. In that situation, 10 years isn't much.
I'm surprised it took this long.
Possibly not. Those benchmarks (mandelbrot and n-body, pi-digits) are very low memory footprint benchmarks. So it might be a difference of going from 20K to 30meg constant memory usage.

Whereas the other benchmarks seem to have single digit multiples of memory usage. SO seemingly real world apps will use more memory, but not 100x in practice.
Backbone.js Application Walkthrough
If the site isn't working or is fixed here is a screenshot for reference: http://i.imgur.com/ID2jE.jpg
Airbnb is an iteration on the company's original name, which was "AirBed and Breakfast." The idea was (and I think still is) that there is a ton of unused potential "capacity" in terms of empty couches and inflatable mattresses (airbeds) that people could offer for rent if given the opportunity.
I assumed at first they were talking about Linear A[1]. Ah well.

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_A
Congrats on your release! I love the camera effects, definitely adds a lot to the atmosphere.
But the animation is the demo...
The only thing I can think of would be something wrong with the credit card (fake, chargeback each book), but that would be a new account thing.

For a legitimate purchase, I can think of nothing.
EC2: What Happens When There's No Cloud?
Tablets are not Post-PC devices
Many years ago -- 1980? -- I visited SLC and looked at some of these microfilms. They had tax records from the turn of the century that included info about my grandfather. It was like going back in time.
Small Programming Decisions that Expose More Information than Intended
Can't you get both, and redirect to the .io one? Or is that bad practice.
How do you know it's not the other way around?
Seriously? You feel confident enough to evaluate the qualifications of the 'doctor' you've just gone to see about the potentially life-threatening bulge on the side of your neck, which he dismisses as just "an enlarged lymph node, no way its Non-Hodgkins lymphoma", which if caught early enough is totally treatable but if you wait too long is fatal? You really feel qualified to do that?
Use your brainwaves to control your computer
Italy’s Troubling Earthquake Convictions
Keep in mind these things change like fashion and it depends if you're selling to consumers or business.

You'll also want to be sure that the name appeals to your target audience or you risk it being liked only by clones of yourself, which are likely to be few.
Apparently iCloud is multi cloud (AWS and Azure).

But regardless it's not like all of EC2 went down just one or two AZs. So why couldn't traffic be migrated transprently to other AZs/regions ?
If that's true, I don't think you need to worry about people "stealing" your idea. Most people don't have the drive to stop what they're doing follow through with someone else's idea just because it sounds nice.

My advice is to feel free to talk about it and gauge interest. If you're that worried, just choose who you share with wisely (don't share it with people currently looking for an idea to work on), but I really doubt it will be an issue.
This should be no problem. However, I am talking about a significant amount: I was told that at most %10 of total contribution (posts, comments) could be self-promotional.

The problem for me was that my personal account contained stuff I did not want to share as a game publisher. Now I am trying to use the game account as my main, just to catch up.
In a standard charger, the car has to negotiate a power level before there is any voltage on the charging pins at all. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J1772#Signaling However while the Model S comes with a J1772 adapter, I'm sure your Leaf doesn't have a "Tesla" adapter.
Italian scientists sentenced to six years in prison
Poland's oldest Auschwitz survivor dies at 108
Thanks for the feedback. We've been using the technique on a few other sites with mostly positive response. We're tweaking it as we go.

On article pages, the left-side article list is actually pretty similar to something like a "See Also" box that would just show a few articles. Add a few extras and make it infinitely scrollable, and that's what we've got here. The main benefit is to not have to do a full page-load when skimming a series of articles. You also get the google reader-like J/K key navigation. Otherwise you'll be clicking the Back button and going back and forth.

Having the right sidebar scroll separately helps with ad exposure and keeps it from showing just whitespace. Some people like it.
3D Printed Maille iPhone Case
If you define 'being really good at what you do' as being driven like mad, never giving up, having a massive tolerance for pain and uncertainty and a gift for recruiting others to join you for lots more pain and uncertainty - then I agree.
Full Show 10/19/12: Privatizing the Vote
The "DIY black dome" object mentioned briefly in the article is used to create "polynomial texture map" images. If you're unfamiliar with it, it's a very cool technique. http://www.hpl.hp.com/research/ptm/ has details, but in brief: an object is photographed multiple times from one camera position but multiple lighting positions. Software can then programmatically interpolate to how the image would look from all lighting positions. It's a way to improve on basic texture-mapping for games, of course, but it's mostly proving useful in archaeology, allowing more people to interact virtually with precious objects. PTM images can also be provide "impossible" views of objects -- e.g. giving every pixel a different lighting angle so as to maximize contrast.
How well do the 'text message after login' coupons convert?
> "slippery slope" is a logical fallacy by itself.

Not necessarily. I wasn't making a fallacious slippery slope argument of the form A leads to B leads to C : B, therefore C.

I was simply pointing out that we are CURRENTLY in a state of greatly reduced Liberty and we got here slowly, step by step. I wasn't positing an inevitable terminal stage which would indicate a slippery slope argument. The stage we're in regarding Liberty sucks plenty enough as it is.

> Hard to say -- how would you make it apples to apples? Obviously "has universal healthcare" isn't the most significant variable in a straight comparison.

Right you are. Since I'm not looking for a PhD in the area, I'll go with my impression that the US has a great deal more entrepreneurial opportunities than any other country on earth, especially when you put it against reasonably comparable countries with universal healthcare. Add to that impression my experience in starting up companies here in the US (in the Bay Area) where I had plenty of disposable income because I wasn't paying high taxes to go to large socialist programs for healthcare, housing, food, etc.
"Until we figure out how to paint solar cells on flat surfaces, energy will never again be as cheap as it is right now."

Oh, really?

What about natural gas, hydrated methane and the most important of all, nuclear fusion energy?

The universe is filled with billions of billions of billions of stars, it is not that fusion energy does not work, we only have to control it and we will.
Well, we shipped Twine
Crazy app... Find Out if Your Girlfriend is Cheating on You ...
Initially you have to choose between building something lots of people like a little bit, or something a few people like a lot. Choose the latter.
Extremely well. People who are users of your service enough to trust you with their mobile number are typically avid shoppers. (My experience is only with e-commerce sites in this context.)
I'm going to assume many of you are going to disagree with me. Mainly because we come from a world with a much different customer acquisition models.

I don't disagree with path A, but the fact is, path B (and Musk's prediction that half of all cars sold will be full electric by 2032) can't possibly happen with our current power distribution system in place.

The only conceivable way that electric cars are going to take over will be if the government steps in and mandates universal form factors for swappable batteries that can be charged at advantageous times and locations and made available to drivers when and where they're needed. Any other approach to electric cars is simply stupid, and I can't begin to imagine why someone like Musk doesn't grasp that.

I speak as someone in the market for a new moderately-high-end car who would love to support Tesla... if only the whole idea wasn't so hopelessly wrong from an engineering standpoint.
HN really needs to hold a "snarkiest response of the year" award.
I'm working full time on a game development project in Unity. I have nothing but good things to say about it. The community is great, and our development would take twice the time without community-created tools like NGUI and PlayMaker. Unity 4 will address some major irks of mine (esp. animation handling), and a new UI engine is down the road.

Its Javascript support is probably what's drawing you to the engine though (I use C#).
To be fair, the entire region was decimated by that storm. I didn't have power for 5 days. Much of the area was out. There was a ton of physical damage. That's not excusing them, they should do better, but that storm was like nothing I've experienced living in the area for 20 years.
My experience is that if you don't need JRuby (for Java interop or to satisfy pointy-haired strictures), you probably won't see much benefit from choosing it, at least for a Rails app.

On one hand, JRuby is technically a much better Ruby than Ruby, and if you want to improve bulk throughput you'll probably benefit. On the other, if bulk throughput were important, Ruby probably wouldn't be your first choice, and there are some downsides.

The biggest problem, especially for Rails, is the warm-up cost. Rails's start-up time is already painful, and adding to that hardly improves the test-develop cycle. I've not tested this latest release, but in 1.6.8, running a test suite was multiples slower than C Ruby. Test suites, which run a lot of different code, aren't really representative of real-world workloads, but if you're working on an application it really hurts.

You might also have trouble with gems that have compiled extensions. It takes a bit of Gemfile fiddling, but there are alternatives to most of those.

For applications other than Rails (which is really a bit of a pathological case), JRuby seems well worth a look. I've never found C Ruby's threading up to the job of making a responsive GUI application, but JRuby might work a lot better with its JVM-backed threads.
How does this work? I was going to try it out but then I noticed the catchphrase is "Trust but don't be naive."

How do I know this isn't just farming numbers + addresses for spam?
Show HN: webmon.com
Bah, don't try to impose your standards on me. The only people who can afford to turn open source into a full-time job are those who don't have a job or whose job is to work on an open source project. Most open source projects will never find a community because they are lost in the crowd and marginally useful, at best. Even very large open source projects - remember Jelly? - can lose their communities when they prove to be dead ends or new, shiny things come along. That's life. If someone wants to just put their code out there for someone else to use or improve on, that's plenty. If it catches fire and gathers an active community, even better, but there's no sense and it's faintly ridiculous to try to pump up every little hobby project as the Next Big Thing.
Are the coupons that you text typically time sensitive?
To be fair, you could say the same about iOS.
HNers are extremely bad at getting jokes. See http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4677335
That doesn't change the fact that Windows RT is a direct competitor to iOS. Windows 8 might be different, but it's still the successor to Windows 7, meant to run on x86 machines. Sure it has a much nicer touch-centric UI that allows it to be put on tablets as well, but for the full traditional computing experience you'll still be pushed into the desktop.

Windows 8 is not Windows 7, it's the next version of Windows. This brings changes like it always has. Windows RT is not a traditional PC OS, it's Windows 8 with the desktop cut out. It runs Windows 8 apps but not Windows 8 programs. The easy way to say it is, Windows 8 is the successor to Windows 7, and Windows RT is a tablet OS. I'm not seeing how my statement is wrong.

Trust me, I like Windows 8 just as much as you seem to. Check my comment history to see for yourself. But the question is "how do we explain it easily to a clueless customer?" and the answer is "by not getting bogged down in semantics that would turn a clueless customer away." People will see once they start using it, the hard part is getting them to start using it.
Interruption Handling Techniques for Programmers
Mind in The Cloud
EDIT: I WAS WRONG. Chaos Monkey and Chaos Gorilla both exist and simulate different forms of chaos.
Not my politics nor bigotry, thank you. I'm just thankful
that some entity came up with a generally usable standard,
rather than 20+ competitors in the software market all
rolling their own incompatible or non-exportable data store.

I haven't checked recently, but for a while there was one vendor
marketing family tree software in big box stores that used a
proprietary and non-exportable data format. People would buy the
simple package, work on their tree, and want to migrate, only to be
put off by: "you'll have to re-enter your data."

As for non-support of non-traditional family structures,
I'm not surprised that a conservative religious entity
motivated by research into historical vital records
tends to focus on the typical needs for its own users.

Many of the rest of the user population benefit from a generally
usable (and I'll agree, imperfect) data standard, without which
this field would be less interesting and less profitable.

There are a bunch of challenges for software developers in
regard to traditional family structures of many kinds,
generally showing that real life is often more complicated
than simple tree-oriented data-structures might suggest.

Divorce & step-parents are fairly well handled, but consider how to
store, display, & represent explicit and implicit relationships among:

unmarried persons living together
adoptive parents
egg donors
surrogate mothers

I expect that software and standards will evolve as real life
does, but I don't expect the LDS to be putting their effort
into areas that they likely do not see as benefitting them,
or that they see as controversial for many of their members.

On the other hand, an entrepreneur could produce a set of patches or
extensions to GEDCOM that addressed the more complicated areas, and
provided export into and import from GEDCOM or an extended format.
Here comes another round of Hacker News posts about how you should never host your app in just one availability zone...
Is this inspired by In The Hunt for PS1?
Technology companies follow an extreme power law curve.

Of all tech companies started in the US in any one year, around 15 ever generate $100M in annual revenue.

Those 15 companies are ultimately be responsible for 97% of the market cap for all companies started that year.
15 companies! That’s way harder than making the NBA in any given year – most of you would never attempt such a difficult thing. And yet here you are.

---

Wow.

Edit: I mean you hear a lot about it's near impossible to have a super profitable startup and that most fail, but when you say 15 only ever generate 100mm in revenue, that puts a new perspective on it. For me anyway.
What am I missing to get users? It lets teachers to run their own school. Thx
To survive, genes pick up new skills
Have you got a source on the whole plastic surgery thing? The difference between the two photos just looks like a man who grew into his looks and got took onboard some style advice.
I gather from the website that this app is trying to discourage tax evasion by exposing evaders. Your sentence "it aims to crowd source tax evasion in Italy" gives the wrong impression.
Unless you're new to the web, you'll be surprised to learn that most of the Internet runs on Linux. It runs because it's a commodity server, because it has first-class support for most NoSQL data stores, caches, proxies, etc. because its highly configurable, because it's much more automatable where everything is scriptable with simple unix commands.

Going to call BS on Azure being cheaper. All of ServiceStack's live demos are deployed using simple bash scripts. There's none of these admin overhead costs, I check-in on my dev box and run a remote script to deploy straight from the Git repo. The projects are also un-touched ASP.NET or stand-alone Console hosts (which I host behind an nginx reverse proxy). I've no doubt that it would be at least 11x more expensive if I decided to host servicestack.net on Azure, even more if I decided to use SQL Server (PostgreSQL/MySQL is free to use on Linux). And I'll also miss out on cool linux utils like rsync which is how we migrated GB's of content onto the new vServer.
Great points. I, too, am 2.5 years in and would offer the same advice.
Once again, just because the benefits don't outweigh the costs for you does not mean it can't be a net positive for other people. eBooks have resulted in me reading twice the number of books I would've read otherwise and I've never bought an ebook that costs more than the physical copy. Explain to me how that is counterproductive or self-defeating.

Laws are simply the consequences you face if you get caught performing behavior deemed illegal. The chances of someone being punished for removing the DRM from an eBook are essentially nil (provided you're not sharing it).
Scientists guilty of manslaughter for not predicting earthquake
Sturgeon's Law ;)
I've paid $3K to rent an Audi R8 for the weekend. I currently have a Model S reservation. I'm cool with paying $300 to see if I want to spend $80K on a car (0.00375% of the value of the vehicle).
Are you asking this question seriously?
I bought the game via the PayPal link but so far haven't received my copy. Not sure if this is related to the load on your site. In the meantime I'll play around with the demo. But I did want to mention that I hadn't received it yet as there are likely to be other people in a similar situation. Maybe it's worth putting a note on the blog post?
Convenient that we're too backward to use AWS. That means everyone can at least talk about it here when AWS is down.
This is infuriating. Our instances aren't ELB-backed, so we have an entire AZ sitting idle while the rest of our instances are overwhelmed with traffic. Why did they make this decision for us?

I'm normally an Amazon apologist when outages happen, but this is absolutely ridiculous.
Da Vinci robot heart surgery at New Cross Hospital
I can't believe that people keep hiring Dan Lyons. He's gotta have the highest attitude to accuracy ratio in the industry.

Too bad, ReadWriteWeb used to post useful, informative (I.e. not link-bait) articles. Already on the home page I can see content-free link bait like "How many screens does one man need?" (name-checking Apple) and "As Facebook prepares to release 3Q earnings, reasons for cautious optimism."
I'd question if they are truly wrong to send out news like this? Basically you have to weigh the realities of the 'cloud' with the perception.

The perception that many people has is that somehow the 'cloud' is a magical up-time device that will save you money in droves.

The reality is that for many companies with mid-level traffic and aren't a start-up with a billion users, the 'old' style tech might very well be your best option.
It's more inspired by Metroid, Yume Nikki and Thunder Force, but I suppose a little bit was taken from In The Hunt. The original game was going to be much closer to In The Hunt, however.
Also bought a copy - good work!
Website pitches solutions in search of problems
Free mindmaps
I will guarantee it will not be free once electric cars get a bit more popular and legislators need money for roads. These charging stations provide a convenient venue for taxes.

I would also imagine some bill will show up asking electric companies to tax home charging stations separately.

Given the tax implications, I would also bet the 110v plug-ins will be made illegal for electric cars for "safety" reason ("safety of a state's road tax revenue").
Optimize Your Social Media Campaign In Real-Time
Australia is the token example of what I said above- the bill for its social system is footed by immigrants, to which some bright bulbs think removing coverage would be another bright idea.

Um... what? I'm Australian and have a pretty good idea of the funding of our healthcare system. Can you please explain in better detail how it mooches off our immigration?

Also, can you please cite some references showing folks that want to remove coverage from immigrants being sensible economists rather than fringe racists?

It seems to me that you're just inventing things out of whole cloth at this point.
Get rid of the DRM first. They'd be useless without an amazon account otherwise.
"The greatest thing about being rich is that you don’t have to do business with people you like.’”"

That was 'people you don't like' :)
No. That's not why they were found guilty.
Sigh.
http://www.nature.com/news/italian-court-finds-seismologists...
http://www.nature.com/news/2011/110914/full/477264a.html
Easily making a blockdev available to a container
I'm a Model S reservation holder and a TSLA stock owner. I'm perfectly fine with TSLA charging for test drives.
For what it's worth: Onyx, the manufacturer, only half-heartedly support their current e-ink readers, leaving lots of annoying bugs unfixed. However, there are very concrete rumors that Android is also being ported to the some Onyx e-ink readers [1].

[1] http://www.mobileread.com/forums/showpost.php?p=2237483&...
It takes development/engineering resources, and additional hardware resources to make your architecture more fault-tolerant and to maintain this fault-tolerance over long periods of time.

Weigh this against the estimated costs of your application going down occasionally. It's really only economical for the largest applications (Netflix, etc.) to build these systems.
Motivations for choosing C: Git case study
Monkey takes down single hosts; Gorilla simulates the loss of an entire AZ.
I'll send it to you right now.

I did make a little note at the bottom of the page about the possibility and I'd hoped it wouldn't happen, but I hope everybody who has a problem tells me as soon as possible.
It only takes one bad Apple to have a rotten experience…
Looks great!

Any chance of IE9 or IE10 support? I hear it's pretty fast for 2D games (certainly in my experience it has higher FPS than Chrome and FF)
When in doubt, name it after a fruit!
It's a great choice if your application needs real concurrency. JRuby does not have global interpreter lock like YARV, so threads can take advantage of multiple CPUs.