skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The $500 or so you need to buy your first computer is too much of an upfront investment for a lot of people in the world. And the time required to learn how to program, time you could be spending making money at a local job putting food on the table, is an insurmountable investment.

Part of my family is from a small fishing town in Croatia, I go the their every year on holiday. And every year I see so many intelligent and hard working people there who walk around with that lost expression on their face, longing for a way to make a good living. But there's no role models, no people to set an example. The wealthiest guy in town owns a cafe. To them, what is programming? How do you convince someone like that to spend a month's salary and many more months of hard work learning something when they have no sense of the implications or the benefits of it. A lot of this world doesn't even know what programming is or why we need it, no wonder programmers are in short supply.
I agree with you but "Apple doesn't do web services well" should NOT be an excuse anymore.

When they're using and promoting iCloud and Siri as much as they do, they're in the 'web services' game.
However it's far harder to make it not useless than other choices. To me at least, Haskell appears to be alphabet soup like badly written Perl. The syntax is so close to the metal it's unreal.
someone who can take a requirement and talk to the users and understand what it is they really want, then architect, design, code and test a subsystem that is not allowed to fail in its operating environment - that someone need no other guys standing between him and money.
I'd really appreciate a bit more info before I give you my email address.

How do you match developers to startups and how do you analyze enthusiasm?
UNIX is the "least crappy so far". There are probably better ways to do things, but we don't know them yet.
Aluminium smelters would really love free energy.

Yes, the problem is solvable - improve the grid so that too much energy in one place can be distributed around to where it is needed.

The simplest way to achieve that is probably reasonably sized energy trading areas - that will make the cost for transporting the energy baked into the price in a much better way that how it works in big unified trading area.
Flaw in ANTLR v3 LL(*) analysis algorithm
> The word "chivalry" has its roots in the knight's battle mount (cheval), not his behaviour towards ladies.

This is a bit disingenuous -- or perhaps just uninformed.

Yes, that is the ultimate linguistic origin of the word. However, our modern usage of the word "chivalry" comes from the Code of Chivalry, a set of ideas promulgated first by the church, and later more widespread, and intended to mitigate the worst aspects of warlord-ish behavior the article refers to. The various forms of this code usually included requirements to protect the defenceless and treat women with honor.
Denmark has been doing the same since the nineties and we have also developed over capacity. We get around the waste problem by "reusing" it in road construction.

BTW Denmark is the neighbour to Sweden so I guess they have their inspiration from us.
Find a position that supports value-based pricing.
It is pointless to even discuss averages in populations where only a handful of people at the top matter.
Lucky for you, they wrote a ftplugin for you.
You're absolutely right. MS gets to say "We have the safest browser" and users get nothing but a false sense of security. Google and FF look bad for not implementing this same feature, even though it doesn't protect the user from anything whatsoever.
Ok so the focus on negative isn't relegated to just this community, its rather pervasive in society in general.

Look at the iOS6 maps stuff and the flaking etc... Not to discount them in general but everyone that looks at my phone always comments about its weight first. I think humans focus on their pain points over the good in general.
The advice to "wait for the one due in a few months that needs a fan" makes me wonder if this author's sweet spot for tablets is anywhere near mine. I hate fans. (And does such advice mean the author is literally a fan-boy? A fan-fan-boy?)
Would be nice to know how the adafruit charger does:

http://adafruit.com/products/501
I think a timeline view probably makes more sense ultimately, but I have just modified the demo so that the events happen sequentially, and you can see a trail of events via expanding bubbles from the nodes.
Thx for the reply. I've seen the warning on Chrome for Android. On Win there was no problem.
Why should PL researchers care only about languages and lot about language usage? Only about programs and not how to create them? That seems extremely ivory tower to no good.
Violin, an experimenting in instrumenting JavaScript applications
Can you honestly tell us you watched the videos? I struggle to believe you did. Nobody who did could claim this:

> Rather its result of working so hard to find out even smallest issue with Microsoft's new product

Those were not "small issues." Very far from it. In fact all of the software issues he showed us were a big damn deal. The kick-stand one could claim is a minor whine.

Seems like you literally watched just the first video and then came and commented.
>Our bodies are designed to be in this reality and this is (presumably) what feels most natural to us.

You would have to design humans to accept that reality, perhaps. I've believed all sorts of utterly incorrect things about myself and my reality while i've been dreaming, and not noticed the fluid nature of that experience until i woke up -- but that's because I had another state to wake up to, and some structure or system in my brain that differentiates between dreaming and waking stimuli, and prioritizes the latter over the former. Genetics can be altered, and with them, what the brain expects to be real.
> Microsoft’sproducts say, “We’ll letyou tryto do anything on anything ifyou reallywant to, even if it sucks.”

In the specific case of web browsers, they will allow you to build one as long as it sucks.
Not sure about this. In my experience accommodation in the UK is more than in the US (possibly not in the big cities or SV, though it was true of SF last time I visited), gas and electricity are a lot more expensive, and food is about the same price.

Average annual salary of software developer in US: $93,000
Average annual salary of software developer in UK: £35,000 = $56,000 approx

Average house price in the US: $181,500
Average house price in the UK: £234,000 = $376,014

Ever feel like you're in the wrong country?

(the 93k figure from this recently front-paged article: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4696113>; all other figures from a randomly-selected page from the first few Google results, but the UK figures seem reasonable to me - I'm in the south of England but outside London, and houses here are all above 250k but most programming jobs I see offer 30-35k. Of course using nationwide averages isn't necessarily an accurate picture as the places with most tech jobs available are probably not the ones with most houses on the market)
Reminds me of the fishermans parable:

An American businessman was at the pier of a small coastal Mexican village when a small boat with just one fisherman docked. Inside the small boat were several large yellow fin tuna. The American complimented the Mexican on the quality of his fish and asked how long it took to catch them. The Mexican replied only a little while. The American then asked why didn't he stay out longer and catch more fish?
The Mexican said he had enough to support his family's immediate needs.

The American then asked, but what do you do with the rest of your time?

The Mexican fisherman said, "I sleep late, fish a little, play with my children, take siesta with my wife, Maria, stroll into the village each evening where I sip wine and play guitar with my amigos, I have a full and busy life, senor."

The American scoffed, "I am a Harvard MBA and could help you. You should spend more time fishing and with the proceeds buy a bigger boat, with the proceeds from the bigger boat you could buy several boats, eventually you would have a fleet of fishing boats. Instead of selling your catch to a middleman you would sell directly to the processor, eventually opening your own cannery. You would control the product, processing and distribution.

You would need to leave this small coastal fishing village and move to Mexico City, then LA and eventually NYC where you will run your expanding enterprise."

The Mexican fisherman asked, "But senor, how long will this all take?"

To which the American replied, "15-20 years."

"But what then, senor?"

The American laughed and said "That's the best part. When the time is right you would announce an IPO and sell your company stock to the public and become very rich, you would make millions."

"Millions, senor? Then what?"

The American said, "Then you would retire. Move to a small coastal fishing village where you would sleep late, fish a little, play with your kids, take siesta with your wife, stroll to the village in the evenings where you could sip wine and play your guitar with your amigos."
My first iOS App Experience - James Brooks
I visited some of the article from his homepage. This guy is an all-around genius! He writes every page on his website in this manner, on so many different fields. Bookmarked.

I hope no one will only look at his SAT.
> There is nothing, absolutely nothing, that you can do in Go that you can not do via libraries in Java

Agreed, however there are things I really don't want to do in Java as even using the wonderful selection of libraries and tooling out there they are like sandpapering your face and repeatedly ramming it into a salt bath.

By the time I've set up Eclipse, Maven, Jetty/Glassfish and a reasonable framework, I could have actually finished the task in Go. To be 100% honest, I could probably do it whilst maven is puking in the Eclipse log window.

vim gofile.go
go run gofile.go

That is practical programming.
That is because PL research isn't interested in helping programmers write programs under their real world constraints. Pike isn't interested in what geologists have to say about programming languages either.
Internet of food: Arduino-based, urban aquaponics in Oakland 
The land in West Oakland where Eric Maundu is trying to farm is covered with freeways, roads, light rail and parking lots so there's not much arable land and the soil is contaminated. So Maundu doesn't use soil. Instead he's growing plants using fish and circulating water.
It's called aquaponics- a gardening system that combines hydroponics (water-based planting) and aquaculture (fish farming). It's been hailed as the future of farming: it uses less water (up to 90% less than traditional gardening), doesn't attract soil-based bugs and produces two types of produce (both plants and fish).
Aquaponics has become popular in recent years among urban gardeners and DIY tinkerers, but Maundu- who is trained in industrial robotics- has taken the agricultural craft one step further and made his gardens smart. Using sensors (to detect water level, pH and temperature), microprocessors (mostly the open-source Arduino microcontroller), relay cards, clouds and social media networks (Twitter and Facebook), Maundu has programmed his gardens to tweet when there's a problem (e.g. not enough water) or when there's news (e.g. an over-abundance of food to share).
Maundu himself ran from agriculture in his native Kenya- where he saw it as a struggle for land, water and resources. This changed when he realized he could farm without soil and with little water via aquaponics and that he could apply his robotics background to farming. Today he runs Kijani Grows ("Kijani" is Swahili for green), a small startup that designs and sells custom aquaponics systems for growing food and attempts to explore new frontiers of computer-controlled gardening. Maundu believes that by putting gardens online, especially in places like West Oakland (where his solar-powered gardens are totally off the grid), it's the only way to make sure that farming remains viable to the next generation of urban youth.
If you pull the data together it shows that the best way to get a response is to send a short message early in the morning (during his peek email hours): "the one time I reply to more email than I get is the 5am to 7am time frame."

Pretty good place to start if you want to get a response.
MS never built their own computers, so that's a first there. Also while they tried to market Tablet PCs a decade ago it was always trying to make normal Windows work with a pen (although their handwriting recognition is the best I've ever used). So Metro-or-whatever-it's-called-now is a radical departure from that as well.

I would indeed label the Surface as a Version 1, both in terms of hardware and software.
You are wrong. windows RT includes the desktop environment but you can't install any new apps to it - all you have is Office and Explorer.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/6392/the-windows-rt-review/8

http://www.theverge.com/2012/10/23/3537710/windows-8-review
(Disclosure: Microsoft employee writing this on a Surface with Touch Cover)

Check out the Samsung Series 7 slate. 128GB SSD, 4GB RAM, core i5. 11.6 inches and a little less than 2 lbs. Unfortunately I don't know where you could find one in person to play with. I've been using it with Win8 for a bit and quite liked it -- with the dock and a keyboard you can run Visual Studio just fine.

This link suggests Samsung just rev'd it to add a higher res screen, keeping the 4 GB RAM and 128 SSD.
http://www.bestsalenewreviews.com/Samsung-Series-7-XE700T1C-...

It is too bad that they haven't figured out distribution for your area. It does sound like what you want.
The Windup Girl was a good novel but its science was poor, at least when it came to energy. The posited system of generating energy by using large animals to wind up springs is completely ridiculous, even in the semi-post-apocalyptic, heavily bio-engineered future it's set in.
Most people think that a block of text that is set together is a paragraph, especially as block paragraph format has become the norm for casual and business writing; indented paragraphs are the exception used when you have a layout process and not just depending on your word processor to get it right for you.

Email and HTML have not helped this; it is a common expectation that a blank line between two blocks of text represents the paragraph break—at least based on the emails that I've seen over the last two decades.

A fundamental philosophy of Markdown is that a Markdown document looks reasonable when sent via email as text or when sent as a formatted web page. That it's flexible enough to be usable for more than just email and HTML is a bonus.
Weirdly enough I'm the other way around. I have an android 2.3 device and find the UI frustrating. A mobile version of Unity with different lenses and searches would be far better, though I would want access to android apps.

I would find this useful assuming I could connect a keyboard and mouse to it. Assuming Android and Ubuntu could be dual booted quickly enough and I had a decent stand for tablet I could forgo a laptop entirely.
beautiful html slides, anyone knows what framework this is?
For portability, the Air can't be beat.

I use a MacBook Pro because I don't really have a use for portability but I have worked with an Air and it is more than enough for what you need.

The battery life is slightly lower than the Pros but, at least for me, 5 hours is pretty good.
Exactly what he was pointing out.
I feel that this is is often blown far out of proportion, everyone sells the whole DNT option as the holy grail of privacy, but the honest truth is that not everyone cares about privacy, in fact, most people don't care about it at all.

Everyone seems to be confusing privacy with "tiny amounts of information" such as age, gender, etc. which most people are perfectly happy entering on basically any site.

It shouldn't be advertised as "Do not track gives you privacy" it should be advertised as "Do not track stops companies from saving personal information about you, such as age, gender and location. Whilst this increases your level of anonymity while you browse, it also lowers the companies ability to provide you with a valuable experience, for instance, it can stop adverts popping up which you may find irrelevant and will allow them to better follow your needs online."
Zynga to launch online gambling initiative in 2013
Personally i would choose the one that can think
Give A Damn
Which ones give stacks to each runnable? Does Oracle? Does OpenJDK?
The 'superstorm' attribution has more to do with the prediction that it will merge with another weather system.
https://github.com/hakimel/reveal.js/
Strictly speaking, that isn't the problem being solved by Markdown, either.

Remember that Daring Fireball does not have comments, so this isn't a concern. Markdown was something originally created to solve an authorial problem, not something for forum creators to use for comments.

It's flexible enough to do that, but it isn't the purpose of Markdown.
Brent the author here. When I say wait for the one with a fan, I'm just giving guidance to people who really want the Windows experience. I hate fans too.
[Reading articles online is] a shallow kind of learning.

I couldn't agree more, and often wonder if we've even begun to work out the implications of this.
QWERTY wasn't designed to slow down typists it was designed to speed up typist by preventing jams.

http://home.earthlink.net/~dcrehr/whyqwert.html
What I find interesting is that I achieved a massive leap in my SAT scores without studying. As a disclaimer, I grew up in a lower-income area with terrible college prep and neither of my parents knew the college admission process. In short, I didn't actually know that you could study for the SAT. So the first time I took it, I did so completely blind and got an 1800. I took the test, again without studying, two months later and got a 2100. Given that both times I took the exam I was neither stressed out, tired, or even the slightest bit prepared, I'm not sure how to reconcile the 300 point leap.
Contact support?
Isn't there a famous paper entitled "Concurrency is not a Library" due to memory-model issues and somesuch?

Ah:"Are Safe Concurrency Libraries Possible?" And if the title is a question, the answer is no.

https://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&q=cache:fR6o9U8aDHEJ:...
I agree -- this stuck out to me too as not just flimsy, but at odds with my knowledge of US geography. Rather than the South, it's the rural US West that I associate most with self-reliance and distate for central government. I presume that guns per capita and support for the "castle doctrine" are also significantly higher. And while certain types of violence may be prevalent in the "on the frontier", I don't think that's true for gun crimes such as armed robbery and muggings.
I believe this is traditionally where the smug LISP weenies descend.
How did you get to windows 8 taking up 50-55GB of space out of the box?
> If MS couldn't optimize apps that ship with Surface, they shouldn't have released it.

They don't have time for that. Now there is only iPad with significant sales number. In 6 months Android tables will start to sell in significant numbers.

In 12 months opportunity to conquer world market with new tablet OS will disappear.
People might miss it (you should really mention it on top of your post!), the first quotes are from Marco Arment (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4705299), which was discussed earlier today (and flagged by many, too!) - people dismissed his critiques because he's obviously an Apple fan, but apparently at least part of his critiques were (maybe) correct.
I'd also recommend having a few months' expenses with you. With freelancing, it's not very difficult to get a few initial clients but it will take time to get to a sustainable $100,000/year.

Having a few months' expenses saved would be pretty safe. Even better if you can get a few long term projects before jumping in.

Here's something that may help you: http://blog.sidu.in/2012/06/everyone-is-running-business-inc...
Let's not be naive; there are most certainly jobs that cannot be outsourced, either for legal or for practical reasons: Jobs involving state secrets (military, intelligence, etc.--plenty of technologists in those sectors), jobs where shipping the poduct is infeasible or where the service must be performed locally (restaurant cooks, plumbers, ER doctors, etc.), and then the vast number of professional occupations that have legal barriers to starting practice in a particular jurisdiction (doctors, lawyers, accountants, the list goes on).
Hacker Takes Millions of SC Citizens' Personal Info
This link just wouldn't have been quite as clickable: A dozen USB chargers in the lab: HP is the best.
I entered my email address and the submit button wasn't working.

Chrome 22.0.1229.94 m, Windows 7, using a Lenovo Thinkpad.

~

This was bugging me so I opened my console and tried to submit again to see if it was a Javascript error, here's the dump:

POST http://hackrio.herokuapp.com/newdev 500 (Internal Server Error) application-49a9d247b95d318698fdc4d924ac3870.js:16

XHR finished loading: "http://hackrio.herokuapp.com/newdev. application-49a9d247b95d318698fdc4d924ac3870.js:16
It's off-topic, but I've been trying to figure it out for a while: I have a two-port "Gear4" USB charger with swappable plugs, so it's great for travelling. However, my new work BlackBerry won't accept a charge from it, complaining about it being too low powered - however, the Gear4 charger says it's 2A, the BB charger is 750mA.

Does anyone know what's the deal?
Depends where you live, like anything else, but in California there was a really bad stretch around late 2000 to early 2002 where it was pretty damn difficult to find new work as a developer.

Even companies doing relatively well were so worried about the future that hiring freezes were the norm across the board.

If you were really exceptional and really well connected or had very attractive experience, you could still find something, but it was certainly a very difficult time for a lot of people I know working in the industry in CA around that time.
Not sure why this post was dead from the beginning and only un-deaded after couple of hours. That way it won't have any chance to be seen by anyone (it also isn't listed under the “ask” section).Is it appropriate to re-post it?
>The use-case of an attached keyboard and the fully fledged Office app suite is not what this device is primarly for.

It may not be the One True Purpose (tm) but Microsoft is pushing it one of the biggest features. On Microsoft's store page for the Surface (http://surface.microsoftstore.com/store/msstore/Content/pbpa...), Office is even listed at the same level as the OS! The feature list, where each has an accompanying paragraph: the case (VaporMg), kickstand, touch cover, ports, Windows and Office, and the cameras.
My original submission title was "Fred Wilson's Email Stats (and the secret to getting a response from him)". Looks like a Hacker News moderator edited my title, even though Fred talks about the secret to getting a response from him at the end of his post.
Also the 2A, 4 port monoprice one:
http://www.monoprice.com/products/product.asp?p_id=8856
I don't know if you've ever stepped foot in an American high school but I can tell you from experience that the things you must do to do very well in an American high school are not things to be proud of.
Easier to parse is not only good for the compiler. There is lots of other stuff, which needs to parse a language: syntax highlighting, style checker, reformatter, static program analysis, automatic refactoring. Some simple syntax changes makes it tremendously easier to develop all these tools.

C++ is known for being really hard to parse. Rumors say there is no complete C++ compiler so far. Java avoided those pitfalls. As a result you can see that Java has much better IDE support (e.g. refactoring) than C++.
Remember The Memristor