skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I was trying to point out how ridiculous the prices they charge are for everyone and that it's a total rip off. Unfortunately, most people don't know any better and they make it really hard to not get charged for "Professional" install.
Ask HN: Time for collapsible comments?
I've noticed that some threads are getting more challenging to work through. Anyone else feel like collapsing comments might be useful?
“The person who runs anvisoft company is not worth mentioning because he is unknown to you.”

Now that is customer service.
For web devs, if you want to test your site on IE7, download the XP image and install IE7 on it - the image comes with the installer on the desktop. Don't bother with Vista unless you need to support something OS-specific, which if you do - you should just stop what you're doing and severely rethink your web dev stragedy.

For use with Oracle VirtualBox, you'll have issues with networking, which will prevent you from Activating the VM.

I posted detailed steps to get networking working in VirtualBox here:
http://bittwiddlers.org/index.php/2012/11/xp-vms-with-virtua...
Should the Class Object Be Enumerable?
This is a very common statement. It's talking about their rights over the product, not the product itself.

Plain english: "If you break our rights (patents, copy our work, etc) the amount of money we will loose cannot be predicted and probably will be a lot. We can only calculate how much you own us after the damage is actually done. Also, we will need time to do this because this is our very unique zebra-unicorn."
And if we are to believe the dude who created the problem, the swarm of hate on his personal twitter & email accounts.
I used to draw out little graphs representing data and more exotic structures, but I found that trying to focus on the paper would ruin my train of thought. I try to visualize that stuff in my head now, and it's gotten easier with practice.

It's not intentional, but it seems like my method has turned into "stare at a wall for an hour, and then write function prototypes."
Or better yet, just use https://browserling.com/ which is from another HN member, pkrumins.
it's easy over bluetooth, no root or custom software required..
At Yammer we used to have a phrase that analytics was "domain knowledge + counting". Lately we've moved to "analytics is workflow" which better captures the deep integration of data, analysis and business decisions that we have now. I still think the first thing matters a lot. You don't necessarily need fancy technology. If you can count and know everything about your business and what makes it valuable then you can start building real insights.
I really don't get why there are so many people that come out negatively against MOOCs.

A traditional college education probably is better than MOOCs, but the economics of MOOCs are so good that it just doesn't matter. It is literally like saying a $50,000+ product with 100% of "maximum benefit" is a worthwhile deal compared to a product that costs $0 and gets you, say, 70% of the benefit.
In Virtualbox you can take a snapshot of the VM after the initial install and revert to that snapshot to reset the trial period. ievms does this for you automatically.
holychiz, I'm interested in your experiences as a parent with Bing. Any chance we could meet up to chat?

I can be reached on grant@criticalyears.com

Thanks in advance!
This was something I was curious about as well. It is a skill to make systems that can be managed by only a small number of engineers/operations types, but it is no more difficult than building a game world like this, just different.

I was wondering how much capital it would take to build that replacement infrastructure. If you went through game engine, databases , everything, and said "Hmmm, ok how can we make this thing basically run itself, or at a minimum with a staff of 3 or 4." Then you'd need a game population that supported that, and I don't know what it cost to play. But I'd love to do a deep dive into the business and technology and figure out if there was a way to make it work. I would expect to be disappointed because it looks like they had a great team and I'm sure they did all of this too.
On a tangent, it's not only list-set-dict comps what makes Python interesting. The very simple and powerful approach to metaprogramming is very interesting as well (all the magic __whatever__ methods, for example)
3 Things Self-Taught Developers Missed
Georgia GOPers hold meeting over Obama mind-control conspiracy
what about parallels? (arstechnica recommends it)
JezzPaul game just launched
Ask HN: What are some Good Books you have read in past one year or so..
Hi,

I have some free time coming up next month and wanted to know if you have some good books to recommend.

I'm looking for not-strictly-technical books. After a whole year of going through programming related books, it would be great if I can unwind with some non-technical mind opening stuff.

Thanks in Advance! :)
Are bidets really that common in Brazil? I had one in my old home but I don't recall spotting them in new houses or apartments.
Israel live-tweets assault on Gaza
Bummer. For anyone with a hiring budget, hire these people: http://www.glitch.com/hire-a-genius/
It's almost like Glitch was more fun for the game designers than for the players. It was full of gorgeous art and silly jokes. But, for the player, there wasn't much to do, except collect N of these so you can get another X.
This is nice, but it suffers from the same flaw all the other virtual browser services suffer from: No pay by the minute/hour. I probably only need 1 or 2 hours with IE 8 every month or two.
Truly a sad end to a great game. The Glitch player community had some of the most friendly people that I've ever met and I had a great time both playing the game and developing against their API[1]. I think what really killed their momentum was pulling the game back into private beta[2]. Quite a few players left after that and the game obviously never recovered.

[1] http://rubygems.org/gems/snafu
[2] http://www.glitch.com/blog/2011/11/30/the-big-unlaunching/
Nice anecdote. :)
Also, this was kind of a impulse buy. My initial idea was to use facebook for ads but the ad is still 'pending review' (for 2 days) so I just went to adwords.

I bet there are a lot of cases like mine, where people just give up waiting on facebook to review their ads.

With stocks at 22 dollars I don't think FB can afford loosing any customer at all.
The idea is to just rollback the VM snapshot to day 1 and move on. These are for testing websites in IE.
What does this have to do with being self-taught? Everyone knows CS graduates who suck at those three.
For your own work, or for a project as a whole?
So we can all learn something from that G+-post - if you want to apologize for your behaviour, don't imply that it wasn't really your fault, apologize for everything.

Especially Japanese company-leaders handle this very well, often resigning over (to Westerners) trivial matters - it's their company and they take the blame.

This way, the guy just makes himself look even worse! If he would've just left the matter be he would have still had the benefit of doubt, which he himself now destroyed.
Here's one. Even though it is more varied and complex than your average Zynga pump-and-dump, at a fundamental level it is still the same kind of get-on-a-treadmill-and-keep-walking sort of game, where the primary form of achievement is watching numbers increase linearly as rewards start getting exponentially farther away. You feel almost as used while playing it as playing farmville, which kills enjoyment. That is, you are acutely aware at all times that the game mechanics are subtly or not-so-subtly designed to keep you recurrently tied to the game. To profit you need to spend a certain amount of time per day doing menial tasks.

Thankfully it is a real MMO, and there are some redeeming social aspects to it, but it has very little to recommend it over, say, World of Warcraft. It's a browser game, so it's more accessible, but it doesn't actually play nicely with mobile since it runs in flash, and you might as well go big or go home.
Also, it's about the challenge. Maybe specifying the problem a bit more: a reward value divided by the number of pixels required to identify each digit
Here is more background on the guy who posted this challenge.
http://www.iamthespecialist.com/

https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1JiJWn0hVMYm8X9a_oVvJ...

Slide 11
Thanks for posting, I had no idea that was available.

Count me as a guy who has a few copies of Windows I only use for browser testing in VMs...
Someone somewhere is probably trying to invert the blurring algorithm used on the check.

Blanking it out is far superior to blurring. If you know the kernel, partial deconvolution isn't impossible.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4679801
Here you are:

https://github.com/jwise/HoRNDIS/issues/2

Thanks!
"Bad corporate performance" : you've hit the nail. Remember when Sony publicly adopt Objective-C and GnuStep for a week before canceling it ? [1]

This is symptomatic of a dysfunctional organization. Not a content vs hardware problem.

http://appleinsider.com/articles/10/11/27/sony_adopts_then_d...
Troubleshooting slow boot performance in Windows
If I got poop on my arm, I wouldn't use toilet water to wash it off.

This to me is the #1 reason I don't want bidets and would never use it. Pretty much the most repellent idea to me is the concept of the toilet spraying me back.

How's this for an idea... a sink next to the toilet where I can warm a piece of paper with water and use it. Nice, simple, and works well.

Or baby wipes. Those work really well too. Replicate this with an "adult version".

Toilet spray? No thanks. Ever
OOP's unique feaures can't deal with massively parallel CPUs. In the future the following will not be allowed:

The following are not allowed for the core data in your code.

Recursion.

Variables declared with the volatile keyword.

Virtual functions.

Pointers to functions.

Pointers to member functions.

Pointers in structures.

Pointers to pointers.

goto statements.

Labeled statements.

try , catch, or throw statements.

Global variables.

Static variables. Use tile_static Keyword instead.

dynamic_cast casts.

The typeid operator.

asm declarations.

Varargs.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh388953.aspx

OOP may live at the top level of granularity, but when it does for working with your data, OOP is not compatible. You can choose which module to run with polymorphism, but you data can't be be processed with virtual functions.
Python - With clauses for generator expressions
There are a large amount of enterprises, businesses, universities, and other entities that are having serious issues with boot performance on their Windows 7 and Windows 8 computers. This article is at least a starting point to help out the I.T. technicians tasked to fix the problem.
I shared this because for me seems like a significant change on the force multiplier of the Internet. How will it affect the thoughts and impressions of folks who deal with this locally, or remotely? Will it inure us to violence or create hypersensitivity? Out of control rumor mills or inability to cover up anything. I don't know where this road leads but I'm not sure I even want to know.
I appreciate the feedback. The content here isn't how I want to represent myself in the future, I'm going to try to keep writing, but switch to more technical topics where I can express myself in a different and hopefully more useful way.
Unless it's changed pretty recently Adagio stores your password in plain text. If you use the 'forgot my password' link on their login page they mail you your current password.

edit: Just tried it, they still do.
IETester anyone? http://www.my-debugbar.com/wiki/IETester/HomePage
If some enthusiastically work over 50hrs, everyone else basically has to stick around as well or they will be evaluated poorly and lose out on advancement.

Do you mean in that particular company? In general, I think that's a myth.
Great Expectations (Charles Dickens). It grows on you after you've read through the first part.
er, he's responding to Mark Cuban's public statements. If Person X says A, it's not exactly unreasonable to write an article titled "Why Person X is wrong about A," even if you have a business that involves A. Like Cuban, the author of the blog post clearly has a point of view on the subject, and we can all evaluate their competing arguments.

I think I would probably talk to my mother before writing a blog post publicly disagreeing with her, but I just don't see what's so insulting about disagreeing with Mark Cuban's own public statements.
What occupation? where was he being "occupied"?
"I moved everything off of CloudFront for my users to triage the cost."

Can you explain more? Was there some cloudfront behavior exacerbating the issue? AFAIK this is just a client (mis)using range requests and CloudFront replying as requested.
According to ArsTechnica:

"No money has ever been extorted from CM nor will it ever be," Deveci told Ars. Ahmet claims that Kondik once asked him how much he would be willing to sell the domain for. "I replied as a joke and said $10K. He didn't even reply after that, he went offline, and simply started changing all my logins access and passwords."

http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2012/11/owner-of-cyanogenmod-...
Show HN: Customer support/issue-tracker, control via email/web/CLI 
This is a bit of a re-post, because hey, you know that app that tells you when the best time to post to HN is? Well I don't have that app. I have the opposite of that app. Because I posted just before Sandy hit. Clever me. So now I'm trying again!

http://alouy.com

Bit of an introduction here:

http://alouy.com/blog/introduction.html

Alouy does not intend to replace your email, or get in between you and your clients, but to supplement your email conversations, effortlessly keeping the issue tracker in the loop.

Also, alouy does lots of stuff.

Demo, user/pass: ned
http://baby.alouy.net

Sales pitch complete. Please resume your non-alouy-related activities.
I'd guess they've licensed libraries or patents from the non-open source world or developer their own that they're not willing to release.
Clickable:

http://alouy.com

http://alouy.com/blog/introduction.html

http://baby.alouy.net (u/p: ned)
It would serve the world so much better IF THEY JUST LET IT FUCKING DIE! GRAAAAAAGGHH!

</rant>
Open and free access to high-quality curriculum is amazing, but I don't think it's a foregone conclusion that "in the future" education will be online-only, and certainly not in the short-to-medium term.

There are so many things that go into creating an amazing learning environment beyond curriculum. What are some reasons people go to college?

* To be surrounded by similarly motivated people

* The promise of a transformative experience

* A certificate that is valued by the marketplace

* Employability, job skills, etc.

That's not a complete list, but are some dimensions that an online-only education is ill-suited to address.

Even the best online, gamified, social learning experience won't hold a candle to just sitting next to another person who is equally motivated to learn the same thing you are.

Disclaimer: I'm about to pitch the startup I work for. :)

These are some of the core ideas behind Dev Bootcamp (http://devbootcamp.com). Most of our incoming students have gone through all of this online-only curriculum and they want more. Employers demand more, too, because a lot of what goes into making an awesome employee is about the ability to learn quickly, work on a team, communicate effectively and non-politically, etc.

We're in the middle of our third class of students. In our last class, 95% of those looking for a job received an offer, including internships at Twitter and ThoughtBot, and jobs as a software engineer at places like Hipmunk and Pivotal Labs.

Here's Justin Kan on Dev Bootcamp: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4725790

His youngest brother went through our program in the summer.

Coursera is amazing. We're living in a world where everyone can visit the Library of Alexandria, which is itself mind-blowing.

But I don't think Coursera or other online-only educational experiences can have the kind of transformative power that an in-person education provides.
The water comes from your water piping, not the toilet bowl.
I'm sure I want a plastic nozzle, mounted inside a toilet, spraying water up into my ass.

I poop in the morning, wipe off the worst with toilet paper, then hop in the shower. Works great, and my shower head has the advantage of never having been splashed by someone else's pee.
Except these aren't VHDs, they're EXEs that wrap VHDs.
I'm trying a release-early, release-often project for a tool to facilitate writing (which is subtly different than a text editor).
Simon Peyton Jones - On the usefulness of languages
Anyone else notice how the IDF has a verified account but "Alqassam Brigades" does not?
Wow. This list seems like a set of things many self taught programmers know. Truly understanding data structures (everything is a graph!) was a big ah-ha to me as a self taught programmer.
A while ago I used Windows XP Mode to create VMs with different versions of IE for testing - very easy if you have Windows 7 Pro because XP mode can be duplicated/copied around like any other VM and has automagic licensing provided the host in Windows 7 Pro (if you move the VM to a different type of host it will fail to work)

Obviously this is only good if you're already on windows but that was a huge help for development and didn't take much effort to set up.
Nicely done. Reminds me of codingbat.com (solve the questions there in java or python).
"OO works best for large-scale, lots-of-people projects."

Nice! But, I think it is the other way around. Throw a lot of people at something with some software architects and you'll probably have a large-scale, lots-of-people, "OO" project.

I worked at a company that was between small and mid size and had ~150 developers. We bought another company that basically did the same with 10x fewer, and that group won out over ours. We had some excellent developers that went on to other excellent shops, and I was proud of the work that we did there and learned a lot about process. It was the best run development team I ever worked for and probably ever will.

I was an "OO" developer, now I'm just a developer. Not because of that learning experience, but because I found Ruby and I no longer see the benefit in intentionally writing overly large applications. Ruby is truely more OO than Java, imo, but I don't write like I used to which I think is what is being called "OO" (lots of packages and interfaces, pattern usage, lots of maven projects).
What does the licensing accomplish? Are drivers double drug tested? Are they double insured? They're using all licensed drivers, which means any arguments of "unfairness" are baseless. They aren't benefiting from lower labor costs because they're using unregulated drivers who might be able to compete at lower costs.

I don't think it's a degree of how onerous the requirement is. It's more a matter of what does it accomplish? There's not a precedent for double covering in the industry, and Uber certainly isn't gaining a competitive advantage because of it. It seems strange that they're lumped in with the other two services who clearly use unlicensed drivers.
Hacker Grabs 150k Adobe User Accounts via SQL Injection
For me, and from an enterprise poit of view, Big Data has always been data external to the enterprise, i.e.: not stored in the warehouse but rather harvested from the web or other sources.
Seems strange, doesn't it? But the rendering engine is shared with countless other system components, it's not portable between operating systems (no IE9 on XP, no IE on mac/linux, no IE7 on certain x64 windowsen) and all attempts to extract the rendering engine into a portable .dll have quirks of their own (IETester et al).

Sad state of affairs, but a whole OS image is the only way to get guaranteed compatibility with what real-world users are seeing - A better comparison would be to iOS Safari or the Android browser, where the vendor just has zero incentive to make that specific browser work (identically) on other platforms.
I think Dev Bootcamp's got a lot of things right, but it was too expensive when it was like $6000 (?)(if I remember correctly), and it's way too expensive now at $12000. Maybe it's because the school's located in SF. I hope that more affordable schools start offering similar program.
Server side state per client is insane. Pushing it client side would be what, a kb? Wih an average object size of 50kb that's 2%. I doubt CDN customers would be willing to take a 2% cost hit for this feature.

Now, assume we solve all that. The state is pushed on the client. The performance hit is so small as to be free. And the CDN eats the dev and opex. So what does the CDN do when "bad" range requests are detected? Throw a 400? What customer is willing to break all IOS 6 clients?

Also, iRules. Serious LOLs.
You don't need VMs or the sort to test old versions of IE.

Open IE and hit F12, this will open IEs equivalent of Chrome Developer tools. It has options to change which IE engine it uses all the way back to IE7 for testing.
Have you actually gone through any program from University of Phoenix?

I am not trying to be sarcastic or anything. I am genuinely curious of the quality of education institutions like UP provides. Is it so bad that it's not even worth paying for? Although, I could say the same about some courses I took in my school ...
If you're on a Mac and have VMWare fusion its actually really easy. Just use VMWare to import the VHD files and it works fine. No need to use other utilities.
Do the theano deep learning tutorials. And keep hacking away at the math--you need it, but it eventually sinks in and becomes reasonably intuitive. Starting with code helped me grasp the math (I'm also much more comfortable reading code than math).
Why do you need to go through Toto? Installing a simple comod with a hand hold bidet http://handspray.com.au/images/retro-hand-spray-bidet/retro-... (or attached depending on your preference) can be done by a run of the mill contractor.

It looks like it's perceived as a modern, costly setup in Japan(and the thing shown in the article is expensive) but the simple comod-bidet setup is inexpensive. It's quite common in India.
SEEKING WORK - San Francisco, CA - Local or Remote

I'm a full stack developer, experienced in Java and Ruby on Rails stacks. I'm also a published app developer, with a game on the iOS App Store (Flake Escape) and multiple enterprise apps developed.

http://www.linkedin.com/in/nickkleinschmidt

Email: nick.kleinschmidt@gmail.com
You have made my day...that blasted button is so clearly in the wrong spot that every time I bump it I secretly hope the Sony engineer responsible has been fired
Scheme is also known for its simple and powerful meta-programming system: macros.

Macros might be hard to fully understand at first, but the core idea is really simple. They're also extremely powerful: they let you change the actual syntax of a program and give you extremely fine-grained control over virtually everything.
It's a bit beside the point, but I'd like to note how refreshing it is to read an honest shutting-down-and-wrapping-up post from a startup that had big dreams. It's all too easy to mistake bluster for confidence, and end up writing a shutdown note that claims some kind of hollow victory.

The true feelings of the Glitch team aren't being hidden here, and although it's sad, I think folks appreciate it a great deal.
I commend your enthusiasm for the vast potential that technology provides us. Whether the packaging of your message was naïveté, or a little bit Jersey Shore, is up for debate. But it sounds like you've already learned a bit from this exercise,so consider yourself a tad wiser than you were yesterday.