skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Very much needed and I think it's a great initiative.

But you'll have much higher conversion rates if you

1) have some sort of example lesson / money back guarantee

2) table of contents, course schedule, what is covered in each lesson, 20$ for 20 lessons is great, not ok for 4.

3) use stripe and not paypal, for so many reasons

4) have a nicer landing page, even a wrapbootstrap template for 18$ will do.

5) have the course be online and not in email (like http://tryruby.org and many others)

Great work though, this is the definition of MVP, I think most people don't have the guts to simply start charging right away, but I think it's the right thing to do, you can always offer discounts / free first lesson later if you see very few sign ups.
Links below are of an Android application with a functioning sqlite database for a flashcard app. Shameless plug with my first foray into open sourcing development. The code-base is yours to browse, forage, or contribute to.

GITHUB: https://github.com/abettisworth/flashcards
I signed up to 'keep myself honest' on my commitment to migrate my websites from my Bluehost account to my 3 month old Linode. I'm somewhat comfortable with CLI, but need to fill in some holes and get the practice.
But in other areas (colour accuracy, viewing angles, contrast) they're already miles ahead.

I think this is mainly because of Apple's aggressive use of high quality displays in their iOS devices, competitors had to try to match or surpass them and the competition has given most phones really nice displays.

Hopefully once "Retina" displays in the MacBook Pros become slightly more affordable this will have the same effect on the laptop market.
A goto for latest Hadoop news
To be fair, he also owns at least one desktop with several 30 inch screens and probably a nice TV. I admit, when you make it a monthtly cost it's not that high, but 390$ a month is still almost 5k a year, which means most people would be working full time for between 1 and 5 full months a year just to pay for gadgets.
I've never really understood Uber, in London there's a company called Addison Lee, do basically the same as Uber London and have for years, have loads more cars, more experience and charge about 20-30% less than Uber. I've never been to any of the other cities where Uber operates but I can't see why anyone would pay more for Uber over Addison Lee. Have I missed something?
A great book. Despite the cheesy-looking cover there is a lot of technical detail in this book.

It is also worth noting that there is now a second edition containing additional material. http://www.amazon.co.uk/Apollo-Springer-Praxis-Books-Explora...
There is something like that underway currently and the guy who was arrested for tweeting was part of it - India Against Corruption(http://www.indiaagainstcorruption.org/). Like every common Indian, they have my support and money and when time comes I am willing to take it to the streets as well.

The litmus test will be, how much interest it can get from people beyond big cities.
The Kremlin's New Internet Surveillance Plan Goes Live Today
Ask HN: Is the new Compose feature slowing down your Gmail too?
Ever since activating the new Compose feature in Gmail yesterday (which I love), Gmail has been running noticeably slower. Reaction to clicks are delayed and I'm constantly typing way ahead of the text on the screen. Anyone else experiencing this?
Still a very weak argument. I look at the ways I use a laptop and none of them would be served any better by a touch device.
Lack of energy is not a worry at all. I had a fast day yesterday, didn't touch breakfast, dinner and had something very small for tea but wasn't completely drained at all. I had walk to and from the convenience store about 3 times after work, which wasn't harder. It even felt easier climbing the stairs too.

I chose the 5:2 since I'm interested in trying intermittent fasting in general but thought alternate-day would be harder to stick to. The plan is to transition to ADF eventually. There was a BBC documentary that shown the benefits, including more controlled IGF-1 and compared them to a group of people who completely like IGF. The people in this group are only around 4ft tall yet have a immunity cancer and a whole host of other diseases.

Another motivation is that my boss has been doing ADF for the past 3 - 4 weeks. He reported a 4in drop in his waist line and felt fantastic overall. He mentioned the story that motivated him to try too. A friend of his followed ADF and within 6 weeks, he looked like a new person. He is also an MD so it makes me much less worried about trying it.
He's not trying to illustrate what HN readers think, but the mindset of people that try to use technology for purposes of control. Either by having programmers build software for surveillance tech, or by making them build backdoors into other software making surveillance possible. Even though we (collectively, as technologists) make this all possible, we hardly have a say how it will be used, even against ourselves.
I really struggle with analysis paralysis as well.

The best treatment I've found when realizing that I'm stuck is to identify the smallest viable action I can take to move the project forward. Often tackling this task is enough to overcome the static friction and get the project moving again. At which point I'm fully immersed in the project context and the larger issues somehow seem less formidable.
I couldn't upvote this hard enough. I've been using my Transformer Prime for 10 months, and it has changed the way I do many things. I still do my consulting work on a laptop, but almost all of my side-project coding is done from my Prime. I can sit on my couch, with my feet up for 6 hours and code - and like you say, still have 10 hours of battery life for gaming or email or web surfing thereafter. I couldn't think of a more comfortable development experience.

The money line of Atwood's post about the future, though, is this one:
And I'm beginning to wonder about my desktop a little, because lately I'm starting to I think I wanna touch that, too.

I don't know that individual touch computing on a desktop will ever be a good idea, but I've been thinking a lot lately that a 42in Android tablet would make a ton of sense. Think of everything you use a whiteboard for to the Nth degree. Gathering around a large touchscreen to communicate ideas, allowing others to manipulate parts of the screen with wireless keyboards, and providing office-wide or household announcements and reminders just makes a ton of sense to me.

Personal computing has already gone touch, it's time for group computing to go touch too.
The Surface keyboard has a trackpad. That just moves the problem from hardware to software though. How do you make a single UI that is equally fit for touch and mouse? I doubt that you can. But it probably doesn't matter, touch is going to win and we're going to be stuck with mice being a second class input.
Great job on the site! I love sites that look great and work well like this.
Using PHP5-FPM With Apache2 On Ubuntu 12.10
I just cannot imagine spending my entire day holding or reaching up to touch a device. I work at a desk. I code. I write documentation. I send emails. I don't see how touch fits into my workflow at all.
It's not a throttle, it's the "physical" capacity of the "interface". If you're on an instance with gigabit connectivity and you're doing 1 Gb/s of EBS I/O, other network chatter will suffer, probably fairly dramatically. That's why the high-I/O instances have 10 gigabit connectivity, as I understand it.

Happy to be proven wrong but this is based on a year or so of experience dealing with EBS. You can't see the EBS traffic in your tools (at least that I've been able to find), which complicates things.

It's all kinds of different on VPC instances, therefore I suspect the network interface model -- and possibly EBS connectivity -- is different on those. So, who knows? I'd kill for Amazon to be more forthcoming here so I could understand the infrastructure running my fleet, but, I don't and they aren't.
The int pointer syntax is in fact ridiculous, so it does not support your point. Also s[x:y] is intuitively understandable compared to referencing two colons and minus one...
> If you cause "annoyance" or "inconvenience" to someone, you can be fined or jailed up to three years!

Only if you do it via electronic communication. Books, leaflets, etc have no corresponding laws.
Marketplaces and Online Payments. An overview
That's what I thought he was talking about until I got to his second paragraph, which seems HN-specific.
Case in point: I have very dry skin. The tip of my fingers will crack and bleed unless I use a copious amount of hand cream. As a result, every touchscreen I use becomes a greasy mess of smudged fingerprints. I also hate scrolling and zooming, because rubbing a finger across several inches of plastic irritates my skin much more than simply moving a mouse around and clicking from time to time.

So, regular screen + keyboard + mouse for me.
I usually get ridiculed for saying this, but I see Leap [1] (I'm not an affiliate, bastards [2] still didn't send me a developer kit) as complete replacement for the interaction.

Your hands don't even need to move from homerow to point around, precision is (supposedly) awesome, potential for interaction is in much greater space than any other input method, and your keyboard can be completely dummy (and let Leap capture where your fingers are, even adding pressure sensitivity check there), replace touch screen in the same way etc.

I just wait for a day where they'll just replace touchpad with it (it's even in similar hardware format) and OS' to provide a boundless desktop experience.

[1] https://leapmotion.com/

[2] I still love the guys
Linux distro spotlight: Fuduntu
I doubt it would be any different. LQG folks still seem to resent the greater attention that string theory gets. String theorists still mostly don't spend any time thinking about LQG. Neither has made any great breakthroughs or grand new predictions for experiments in that time. And it's just as easy to make up a straw-man character today as it was in 2003.
Don't fall into the same trap as the recording industries did, which is to assume that your market model will stay the same for ever. It won't, and developers don't tend to have the same lobbying power to get new laws to try and cling onto their old model.

Go with the flow and find other ways to monetize your skills.
First of all does anybody seriously believe that anybody will be using the Surface to do the sort of work where shifting a layer one pixel to the right is critical? The mouse isn't going to disappear, and I have yet to meet anybody who seriously thinks it is.

As to styluses, it seems to be a fairly solved problem. Most designers I know use a Wacom tablet of some description. And those with a big enough budget use a Wacom cintiq (which is basically a huge touch screen).

As for things like selecting text and other in between tasks, I agree that current solutions aren't great. However I suspect people are working on it. My initial guess after having thought about the problem for 3 seconds is that some sort of clever context aware zooming and input scaling might be a good place to start.
I think you dismiss styluses too quickly here. You can be much more precise with a stylus than with a mouse. Just because the tip of the stylus isn't one pixel in diameter, it's probably the most accurate form of input you can get. That's why Wacom tablets are so popular.

Also:

> Even a conventional touchpad on a cheap laptop has better precision than your finger does.

A conventional touchpad...that you use with your finger...? Am I missing something here? How is a touchpad more accurate than touching a screen?
No physical keyboard doesn't always mean immediate large-scale writing failure for all people. I think some people either just get used to it for extensive prose, or don't.

In Japan, the keitai-novel - novels written by young authors often entirely using featurephone numpads - has gotten past its initial craze and appears here to stay as an established genre. Even for other genres, there has been a recent example of a self-published science fiction novella scoring high in the just-started Japanese Kindle/Kobo sales rankings, having its majority written on an iPhone.

I imagine the general populace will gradually get accustomed to using a non-physical-keyboard device for extensive text input, especially as more kids emerge experiencing the touchscreen as their first and only input device. (And the aforementioned author wasn't even that young - IIRC he's around 40!)
Is there a similar site covering the UK and or western europe ?
Fuel shortages, power outages hamper Sandy recovery
There is a great explanation of IO lists in Learn You Some Erlang [1], but in short — an IO list is functionally equivalent to a string builder, allowing you to accumulate individual strings in O(1) time.

[1]: http://learnyousomeerlang.com/buckets-of-sockets
kernelmag.com for the UK
The Surface keyboard cove also includes a touchpad, so this particular problem may be solved already.
Given the very sad state of the extensibility of Visual Studio (I wrote about it earlier this year http://evain.net/blog/articles/2012/02/27/visual-studio-your...), it turns out that not only are the Python Tools an excellent plugin to write Python code in VS, it's also one of the best example of how to implement support for a new language or a debugger in Visual Studio >= 2010.

Some things we do in my product would not have been possible without having access to the source of the Python Tools (which again say a lot about the sad story of extending VS).

Shameless plug, if that's still too much work for you, you can contact my company to integrate your language in VS.
It is more then just adding a keyboard. All the interactions in surface are first class keyboard friendly. Switching, closing app, switching tab etc. work well with keyboard. So you have a device which supports multiple usage perspectives either working on a 5 page word doc/blog with keyboard, touchpad or browsing web, watching movie, playing angry birds on a light weight touch enabled tablet
I'm not sure this is a problem. Android supports precise text-selection via automatic zooming and start and end block markers, like this: https://www.dropbox.com/s/grmlsgqgqc5qqs6/Screenshot_2012-11...
It does not unfortunately. You can do interactive matplotlib plotting but it doesn't behave in the same "shell + REPL" way that ipython does.
Conway's Law: How Do Committees Invent?
What it comes down to is that eventually it's better to have 1 thing than 2 things that serve a similar purpose. Many (most?) computer people today have 2 things because the gap is too great. Eventually the gap closes a little, and although it will never close completely, it is better to have 1 thing than 2 things, so you make compromises. I think that is what Jeff is saying here, the gap is closing just a little, and eventually a tablet becomes good enough as a PC.
Nice really simple and clean and one of those, I wish I'd thought of that moments.

Couple of things I'd change.

First ( probably me being dumb ) but for some reason I clicked on "Money per month" first rather than "amount". Maybe a dollar sign in the text box would help. Although I realize this has probably been done deliberately so it's currency agnostic.

I wasn't allowed to put in period characters, I tried to put in 37.5 hours ( standard week in the UK ) and it put that as 375 hours, which screwed the results just a little bit.
Tell HN: Moderators are out of control
Pointing out that worshipping Kim Dotcom is stupid should not result in a hell-ban! It is pg's site and he can do what he likes with it but I imagine it is just some fervent lackey. Just my two cents.
I don't know if there's a groundswell, but people in the UK are certainly talking about it.

In particular the libel laws here are utterly crazy, frequently you'll see two Americans, or two Russians, suing each other in UK courts over things printed or put up on the internet in their respective countries. Nothing to do with the UK really, but because there is no 1st amendment, and the courts consider it their jurisdiction if the material was ever available over here, they go for it.

And because most countries have agreements on collecting money owed due to lawsuits, a judgement in the UK (where it's easy to get one) can affect the defendant wherever they are. I believe that this sort of things is starting to be recognised and the US (possibly Obama himself) have put an exception on their legal reciprocity - UK libel judgements don't count in the US any more.
>>If you cause "annoyance" or "inconvenience" to someone, you can be fined or jailed up to three years!

This doesn't even begin to describe ridiculous. Ever heard of IPC 498a?

For those who don't what it is- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dowry_law_in_India

The law is such, you might even repent being a born a boy in India.
The CPU is already done. The OpenRISC has been around for a while and is silicon proven [1].

Not quite an FPGA, but around 2001 Reinoud designed a "Meta FPGA" (the MPGA). This was essentially an FPGA implemented on an FPGA. Whilst not really practical, it was a demonstration of how one might get away from a proprietary tool chain, the idea being that the MPGA would be placed and routed once, then open source tools could place and route the user's design on the MPGA.

An FPGA would be an excellent candidate for a first "open source" chip. A keen university student could fabricate it via MOSIS [2], a service that provides cheap/free fabrication to Universities. The main stumbling block, from an open source point of view, is that many of the process specific libraries are locked up under layers of IP. One day desktop manufacturing might be feasible, especially if carbon (nanotube) based chips can be made to work and can be fabricated at low temperatures using self-assembly techniques.

[1] http://opencores.org/or1k/Main_Page

[2] http://www.mosis.com/

-----

Edit: It turns out that OpenCores is currently attempting to crowdfund a SoC Computer/CPU, based on the OpenRisc.

http://opencores.org/donation
Here's How Disney Can Turn Tomorrowland Into Star Wars Land
Agreed. As I said I think the problem is one of persistent surveillance. This is only going to get worse as technology develops and it becomes possible for governments and police departments to deploy hundreds or thousands of insect-sized drones through our cities.

That's why I think focusing on drones obscures the real issue and makes it more difficult to have the serious and very necessary debate about whether we want to live in societies where the state is able to track you persistently in any public space.

We already have the beginnings of something similar in cities like London, where thousands of CCTV cameras are every bit as invasive of our privacy as a police drone flying overhead would be.

In other words this battle against the police use of drones like the Predator could be 'won' and it would probably not make any difference to the police's ability to track you with video and audio surveillance.
Love the simplicity of the design.
Section 66-A deals with messages sent via computer or communication devices which may be “grossly offensive,” have “menacing character,” or even cause “annoyance or inconvenience.”

Sounds similar to the laws we have here in the UK. Section 127(2) of the Communications Act 2003 [1] states:

(2)A person is guilty of an offence if, for the purpose of causing annoyance, inconvenience or needless anxiety to another, he—
(a)sends by means of a public electronic communications network, a message that he knows to be false,
(b)causes such a message to be sent; or
(c)persistently makes use of a public electronic communications network.

The act allows for imprisonment for up to six months, or a fine. It was the legal basis for the "Twitter Joke" trial [2]. In my opinion it is worryingly broad in its scope.

[1] http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2003/21/section/127

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitter_Joke_Trial
Nice. I created this exact same calculator in the spreadsheet I'm using for my freelancing. It's kind of amusing how few knobs there are to twiddle for freelancing.
I'd suggest looking at the book Imagine by Jonah Lehrer. It doesn't refer to coding specifically but he talks about ways to foster focus and inspiration. The author looks in to all ways to get to these states of mind including drugs.
Actually there was a time in the past two years, where a street revolution was inevitable. Especially last year and this year, both during Anna Hazare's fast.

But some how they couldn't hold on and fire died soon. Last year the fever was really high.
Killing the computer to save it
Apple's Samsung statement reprimanded by court of appeal
Sarcasm?

If not: "What is Kickstarter?" [1]

1: http://www.kickstarter.com/help/faq/kickstarter%20basics
Crap My Amazon Cloud Drive mac app is a black hole
Unicode (outer world), what an hassle!

Today, I downloaded the mac app for my fresh Amazon Cloud Drive space.
No synced folder, drag and drop to send a file. Anyway.
Happy enough to see my files listed on the web interface, I deleted the files from my laptop (knowing I may have a backup somewhere).
Let's give a try to the downloading experience.
Click... (Download in progress from the mac app)... Finished!
Hurray --wait. No file in my Downloads folder that shows up.
No panic, just log out from the mac app and do a regular download from the web -- I said to myself.
"In order to download your files, you have to use the mac application"
......

It turned out (I sent a bug report) that the destination folder of incoming downloads was set to "TÃ©lÃ©chargements" instead of "Téléchargements", the french localised alias for the "Downloads" folder.
Oddly enough. When I click on "Download completed" in the app, it opened the right folder.

I don't think the average user would enjoy not to figure out why he can't get back his files, even not knowing they are somewhere around in the Halloween-freaking limbo.

Now, I am not a Mac developer and I usually don't rant about technologies I know nothing about but gosh this is a very fundamental topic that you have to deal with when designing any software. How can an engineer from a major company like Amazon fail miserably at getting it right?

Joel Spolsky, even consider this as the minimum thing that you, as a developer, must know about (no excuse!)
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/Unicode.html
Getting bigger with Flask
Anonymous ransomware spotted in the wild, campaign to Infamous Activists group
With most touchpads/trackpads, you can tilt your finger by a few degrees in any direction to fine-tune your aim before you click. This enables pixel-perfect clicking when you need it. (Use the physical button when you do this, because tapping will ruin your aim.) With touchscreens, you can't fine-tune your aim before you tap. You just tap, and hope that you hit the correct coordinates.
Have you read this page :

http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/

The first sentence under Reserved Instances is :

Reserved Instances give you the option to make a low, one-time payment for each instance you want to reserve and in turn receive a significant discount on the hourly charge for that instance.

In the table below you'll see that for each type of reserved instance there's an Upfront column followed by an Hourly column. To get your total annual cost for 100% utilization you would presumably add the 1 yr upfront cost to the hourly rate multiplied by the number of hours in a year (8760). You'll find that the total cost for a reserved instance is significantly less than that for an on-demand instance (where the upfront cost is zero but the hourly rate is higher).
Apple told to rewrite "Samsung didn't copy", post on front page until Dec 14th