skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
xdissent made a great command line installer on github for virtualbox and these virtual machines; you can get them running with one command. I've used the script for the last year or so when I've had to set up a new box for testing and I've really enjoyed it.

https://github.com/xdissent/ievms
Honestly, if it's not worth 20 bucks a month to you, you probably aren't in their target market (deliberately priced out of it, for good reason).
Would be glad to join - I live in Menlo Park, office in Palo Alto. Coupa or Nola are good places to meet. I also like smoking shisha - there's one place in PA, and a good place in Sunnyvale. Igor
> A traditional college education probably is better than MOOCs, but the economics of MOOCs are so good that it just doesn't matter.

How can you say this, and then not understand why so many people come out negatively? Some people feel that the extra 30% matters. You clearly don't, but disagreeing is different from not understanding.
This is really cool. It's also quite similar to a game I have in the works.
It feels very polished, and there's very little latency.
Many cars nowadays have seat warmers, which can warm you up faster than turning on the heater. It's very pleasant in cold weather.
Actually iTunes uses tcp over usb[1] . Which is why this is so counterintuitive - adb already does everything on tcp over usb, why didn't they just use it for everything.

I hope it is not patent encumbered - I'm hoping at least Cyanogenmod can implement it.

[1] rant warning -http://sandeep.wordpress.com/2012/10/15/the-fastest-way-to-t...
The best cs book by a mile. One can't help but fall in love with programming after reading SICP. I'm now reading Peter Norvig's Paradigms of AI Programming. It's another classic.
I've also listened to video lectures of Brian Harvey. I think his own twists to SICP such as starting the course with functions on words instead of numbers are invaluable too.
Quite common in Thailand too, and as anyone who's ever used one knows, they are far superior to toilet paper. I've been meaning to install my own sink sprayer next to my toilet for a while now. Guess I should get to it.
Which gets you close, but not close enough to say "I've testing in IEX." Although the DOM modelling is very close, the CSS and JS quirks between different versions aren't emulated enough in F12 to catch the problems that using the actual version would expose.
As a longtime fanatic and now dismayed ex-user of Sony products, I'm startled at what all the analysis missed: the last 10% of the user interface. What we need is completion of the work done right with followup; what we get is "oh crap, ship it and forget it".

A simplistic example: my Sony BluRay player, upon completing any network activity, announces that it has completed the network activity. I don't want to acknowledge that, I want to get on with what I'm obviously going to do next. The same player features streaming video services which, next to Apple TV, look like some techie was told to slap on; the worst offender being the promotion app for "Salt" (movie premiering about the same time as the device) delivers what should be premium video quality in the worst ugliest over compressed dreck form.

Time and again it seems they take an otherwise fantastic product, and to meet a deadline slap together what's missing, shove it out the door, and never show any interest in supporting it thereafter.
Do you know anyone who has changed their opinion about anything to do with Israel?

These tweets just re-enforce people's existing opinion.

Also, 'ELIMINATED' is a distasteful way of saying 'DEAD' or 'KILLED'.
Might be more related to Web dev? I'm a self taught C dev, and I consider those points to be a bare minimum of required knowledge for my kind of work.
Americans in general boil and over-steep their teas. It's common for people to let tea steep indefinitely.

It's sad.
Shantaram by Gregory Roberts.

Pirate Cinema by Cory Doctorow.

That's Me in the Middle by Donald Jack.
New reality TV show about startups: "Start-Ups: Silicon Valley"
Giant rogue planet, without a home star, may roam nearby heavens
Other than being a huge generalization, it's kind of a moot point.

"Hey self-taught developer, here's some things you don't know because you're self taught"

"Great, I'm going to go teach myself these things now."

It's very liberating to not have to ask permission to learn valuable skills.
Oh thank god, it isn't just me.
Ask HN: Which market testing tools have you found useful?
I admit it: I've made the typical developer mistake more than once of building a product that I thought was "cool, and easy to whip together with Rails." I've said things like, "I'm sure that we'll be able to find users for it after we can show it to people."

I'm finally over that mentality, and from now on I will only build products after collecting thorough data that demonstrates a market need. So, I'm wondering what tools hackers here have found especially useful for finding markets and testing viability of digital products (web services, apps).
"In my experience, relatively few students appreciate how much they're learning in my course while they're in it."

How true! I hated CS61A when I was in it, and I thought nothing was practical and everything was a trivial example. Sorry Brian! I failed to grasp the depth of all the 'trivial' examples. I never appreciated the complexities of the class until I started being a TA for it, and I never truly loved the class until I lectured it.

Notes, homeworks, etc, available here: http://www-inst.eecs.berkeley.edu/~cs61a/su10/
I didn't read the comments first, spent about ten minutes on it. From a cursory glance, I think it comes down to the following lines:

In modal.register.js:100, 128, 337

$("#veriImg").attr("src", "/present/captchaImage.action?t=" + new Date().getTime());

It doesn't seem like the expected value of the captcha ever actually gets registered on the server side.

My one idea of stopping before the Ajax request and setting the verification code equal to an empty string to try to match a null/undefined on the server side didn't work.

It's possible that, in some really obvious error, the server makes its own request based on a current timestamp to get the captcha value to match against and uses a later timestamp, but the time difference because of latency means that I can't test that without guessing a bunch of times.
Why can't you sell the game so someone else can take it over?

It's complicated, but it comes down to this: if that were a transaction that made sense to the purchaser, we wouldn't be shutting the game down.

Obviously that's pretty opaque, but i think this suggests that they've cut a deal to sell the assets. I dont't know a lot about that market but it seems to happen pretty commonly when 3d online games flop. Somebody in a market that never was exposed to the game buys them and repurposes them or uses them as a jump start in some tier 2 freemium project.
You can say that about almost anything, then. Your bedroom door: why not throw a thousand at it? You open and close it frequently, and that tiny squeak is ever so annoying. If you greased the hinge it would go away for a few months, but still, how long does a door last? Ten years?

Now substitute toilet for door, and wiping for greasing. Or sink, and running out of room or not having the nozzle high enough or having scratches. Do this a couple times and congrats, you've just paid enough for most Americans to buy a car - which is more important?
Hello, I've lived in Japan for about 3 years now and I find these toilets indispensable.
For the situation you described, I have experienced the same thing but I have found that there are a few ways of getting around it. The main way is the "move" function, which oscillates the nozzle back and forth. Usually you can activate this by pressing the spray button twice or pressing a dedicated button. You can also usually manually adjust the nozzle position to better suit your needs.
Additionally, some of them have dryers which further negates the need for toilet paper. My routine is usually spray, oscillate, check with one or two TP squares, and then dry. This saves me from a lot of hassle and saves a lot of toilet paper.
Excuse my vulgarity, but I've had times where what would otherwise turn out to be a "nightmare shit" became a relatively pleasant experience. It's those times where I can really appreciate modern technology.
I think Toto did a good job to try to get it to fit the majority of people's needs, but it seems some manual tweaking and button pushing is still necessary sometimes.
Some thoughts and musings about making things for the web - The Oatmeal
If you like sci-fi - try the Red/Green/Blue Mars trilogy. Not exactly recent, but I thought quite good.
>Except that I imagine these very low caps are long play to justify price increases when using 4 or 8 or 20+ GB per month on your phone becomes the norm, or 600GB/month on your desktop becomes the norm.

I work for a mobile phone provider in the US. I'm at the bottom of the totem pole, so I'm not really privy to what the people at the top are thinking (and don't think what I'm saying is in any way official), but I don't think this is true. We really do have bandwidth constraints, and it takes a small fortune plus a couple years to slog through the process of putting up a new cell site.

The reality is if we don't have caps some percentage of our customers is going bittorrent twenty HD movies at the same time, completely swamping that leg of our network and causing everyone else's cat videos to start buffering. If we double our capacity they'll just double the number of movies they download at the same time. We can't win by adding capacity.

The part that pisses me off about all this is everyone I know who compulsively downloads a bunch of movies hardly ever actually watches them. It's some kind of pack rat syndrome.
New Jersey Devils Jerseys
Holy shit! What the fuck are they doing? This is absolutely insane!

What better way to create more terrorists than by laughing in their faces, publishing military operations on Twitter as if they were trivial events, showing military kill strikes on YouTube and using game like graphics stating their leaders have been "eliminated".

Do you want to enrage your enemy into more violence or do you want to win?

Do your military operations - kill terrorists or don't - protect your borders or don't - I don't frankly give a damn.

But don't give the enemy more emotional ammunition than necessary, especially since you know they will use this as perfect fodder to indoctrinate even more people to their cause - especially children. This is the stuff they'll show kids, stating "Look, do you see how they mock us! - This is why you must fight and die!". You're just setting up the next wave of violence.

This is why the US military didn't release anything to do with Osama's assassination, and buried him at sea - nothing to worship, nothing to point to, nothing to show the people you want to brainwash - and say "Look how they mock us!".

You don't poke a cornered enemy unnecessarily. The expected value of that is negative.

It's not a fucking game.
It surprises me that intelligent people are so ready to take bureaucrats and politicians at their word when they claim that "your safety is our priority".
This definitely has historical significance, and I find it fascinating. Thanks for sharing! Generally, I believe that more direct channels between governments and citizens will be a long term win for everyone.
In my experience, the people that want me to use them have that exactly backwards.
I've taken Andrew Ng's Machine Learning class, Daphne Koller's Probabilistic Graphical Models class, Dan Jurafsky and Christopher Manning's Natural Language Processing class, and currently Geoff Hinton's Neural Networks class.

I have spent a lot of time on Khan Academy to learn the calculus. In my experience you can get by with a surprisingly small amount of calculus, but it happens to be a small amount from a high level.

For example, backpropagation is just repeated application of the chain rule. Did take a while to get a handle on the derivatives, but it's worth it.
Hey here's an idea: Let people create their own challenges and let them assign some point values to them (if the person is a high scorer, maybe let them give the challenge higher points). Then other people can try to solve it and vote on user created challenges. Get the ecosystem going! What do you think?
If my memory serves correctly, that's where Keita Takahashi[1] was currently stationed. Wonder what he'll do next?

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keita_Takahashi
I took the liberty of reformatting this into a PDF: https://www.box.com/s/r05a7tluz8alpmlmh16c
The school is located in SF, but only 50% of our students come from the SF Bay Area. 45% come from other parts of the US, and another 5% from other countries.

We want to make DBC more affordable, but there are some very important things we get by charging students directly that we'll never compromise on. We're working hard to make it more affordable within those constraints, though.

Some of the benefits we get by charging students:

First, the vast majority of our revenue comes from directly from students. They're our customers. If we made money only from employer referral fees, there'd be a financial tension between "in-network" and "out-of-network" employers. Right now about 40% of our students are hired from companies who don't have a referral agreement with us.

Second, when students pay they feel it. They demand so much of us because of what they paid. Their bar is set incredibly high and we push ourselves every day to overshoot it. If we're delivering the value we promise -- you'll be job-ready in 10 weeks, if that's what you want -- then we think the price tag is worth it.

Third, we, as staff, feel it. When a student hands over a check like that, holy shit, you feel responsible. They're entrusting you with their livelihood. It helps hold us accountable to remind ourselves every day that they're not just students, but customers.

Fourth, when you're in a room with 50 other people who have made that kind of personal and financial commitment, you can feel it. It's electric.

Fifth, we have a sustainable business. We don't need outside capital. We can create an awesome space. We can have an awesome library, events, etc. We can hire awesome teachers and pay them 2-3x what they'd make teaching elsewhere.

Just some food for thought. It doesn't change your overall point about our price tag, which we're sensitive to, but those are just a few things on the other side of the scale.
> It provides a really convenient and valuable service.

(@@) <--- eye-roll emoticon (not often used)

Sure. Just like the "report abuse" link actually does something.

Right now, 4 of the "public pasts" in the sidebar are ill-gotten materials. I realize it's not always that way... but is often enough.

As for the "creative cloud," it's actually more expensive than buying the software.

And yeah, security is really important, but so is using strong passwords on the Interwebz.
Change.io
Self-taught developer here with getting close to 15 years experience and these were not really the things I missed.

Here's what I know I missed: a bunch of useless shit. Sorting algorhythms that I don't have to implement. Understanding of trees that I don't have to implement. Knowing what "NP hard" means.

That stuff gives you maybe 5 minutes of conversation with another comp sci major a year in many jobs- as those were the 5 minutes I cut to 10 seconds with a "whatever". Sure, some jobs require you to think like you just got a PhD in computer science. That's fine, but I worked with a PhD in computer science, and one with a masters. It made very little difference. I ended up managing the one with the PhD, not that it matters.

But to all of those guys and gals thinking "so I don't need a degree in CS" think again. What did matter was that I didn't apply for least 50% of the jobs I could have applied for, not because of my ability, but because of my lack of a CS degree that was in the job requirements (although that requirement is often bullshit). And when you have no experience then it really can keep you from getting your foot in the door. I got lucky- I had worked at a place that had a developer opening, so I was a known quantity and they knew I could pick it up. These days I think it would be easier to start off as a contractor writing Rails apps.
Microsoft Surface review for real people
the first challenge that came up asked me to fix a JavaScript program. however, the logic of the program was fine; it merely contained a syntax error that was obvious if you know the peculiarities of JavaScript syntax but hard to spot if you don't. that's not the sort of challenge I want to solve.
Then if you imagine how long the Internet has existed compared to the universe, all of this hullabaloo on HN becomes even funnier .
I agree that the tone is childish and unnecessary, but I doubt it makes much of a difference.

Large organisations are still figuring out how to use social media, but in principle publishing an operation on twitter is no different than putting our a press release or sending someone for an interview at a major TV channel.

Same goes for making videos available on YouTube, I don't see anything wrong with that. In fact, since I don't watch TV I would have never seen this video if it wasn't made available online.
Stay Young Enough To Try Anything
I wonder how you would go about verifying an account for the Alqassam Brigades.
This doesn't mesh well with http://www.ie6countdown.com/
Their premise is that they source hard-to-find high-quality beans. Which creates natural limits to scale. Farmers who sold you 10,000 lbs of coffee beans last year cannot sell you 10,000,000 lbs this year just because you have more capital.
When HBR Revealed Microsoft's Secret Playbook
Yeah, and that is the same water you drink, too. It goes through the same kind of pipes, they just end in different places. You could do a A/B test and most probably you would not be able to find any difference between water from the toilet pipe and water from the kitchen pipe.
Nay. Reaching between your legs? I'd honestly never even thought that was an option.

You just lean to the side, while seated. Just try it once, and keep an open mind.
That was my experience as well. Although exploring the world was initially interesting -- and I enjoyed outfitting my character with a fez -- after a while wandering around squeezing chickens got a little dreary. And when you leveled up and learned new skills, most of the time they weren't all that interesting. Becoming 10% more efficient at gardening or whatnot.... It definitely seemed to be lacking a hook of some sort. I bet there are some interesting lessons for game designers there.
"Hard work" is worth exactly nothing if it doesn't provide value to someone else. I can assure you that walking out into my side yard and digging holes all day in the summer is much harder work than sitting in my air-conditioned home office writing code for the company I work for, but they receive no value for all that "hard work" and do value the time I spent in-chair in my office.

Work-for-pay is only as valuable as someone else willing to pay for it. No one cares how hard you worked, they care about how much value you delivered to them.
I'm assuming this is based on the Framingham Heart Study (although the article doesn't mention it) since it is a longitudinal study of 20+ years.

What I've always wondered in these pop science pieces is if the authors go for the easy sensationalist content on purpose or if there is actual substance here. I see no mention in the article of other issues that may or may not have correlated with eating red meat. The biggest question I have is about the exercise levels and body fat levels of the subjects that ate red meat. If you normalize the data to include two cohorts with an equal proportion of people with similar bodyfat percentages and activity levels, is there still a significant difference in the heart health issues between the two cohorts?

Most red meat eaters I know are more likely to be overweight, but not because they eat red meat, but because they live more sedentary lives and eat larger portions. If you eat tons of read meat but are active and maintain a low body fat percentage, are you still susceptible to the heart issues?
My sister has one of these.

My 4 year old used it. Once. When it sprayed her, she jumped up, ran out of the room, and refused to ever touch that toilet again.
Small typo: should be "farthest man-made object" instead of "furthest." Otherwise, awesome job.
I read the OP thinking, this game seems as crazy as Katamari...and then came across your comment. The original Katamari games were so mindblowingly great that I'd buy anything Keita designed
Surprised nobody mentioned Interview Street. It has a lot of difficult challenges that you can solve in your own favourite language (supports 15).

That Leaderboard is dominated by China, perhaps you guys shouldn't be battling each other ;)
>Maybe for that reason, OO languages (Java/Python/Smalltalk) were more likely to come without their batteries included.

Surely you mean "WITH their batteries included"?

For this is the very situation in Python (and it's slogan in fact), and of course Java has the most extensive "included batteries" in the form of the JDK API than any other language.
Seven tips for lean market research
I'd be really curious to see how the royalties from traditional radio breaks down on a cost per person per play basis. I have no feel for where that number would end up, but I think it would really shed light on how comparable a payment of 0.005 cents per play per person is.
Is this a joke? Japanese brush at least three times a day. Probably more than in most western countries. And they have tons of breath fresheners in convenience stores. You would not have such products if no-one was buying them.

This being said, I can certainly relate to the cigarette smell, but that's not only a breath issue, that kind of smell sticks to everything, from clothes to interiors.
I love both Solr and ElasticSearch but the big missing comparison for me is: are there any books available? Or even comprehensive tutorials beyond the basics? I love ElasticSearch but it was a huge pain getting up-to-speed on everything. Figuring out things like EdgeNGrams (something I already knew how to do in Solr and Lucene) meant digging into the source code. I'm not shy about doing that myself, but giving that advice to a consulting client would be a non-starter. With the explosive growth of ES just in the last year or two, it's really time for someone to start working on a book. Packt, Manning, O'Reilly, any news?
I will be chairing the CalCPA International Tax Conference at the Hotel Nikko (which is close to the Westin, where Tufte's sessions will be held) on Tuesday. Arriving Monday, if you want to talk tax (especially international stuff) related to your startup. Contact me by my HN username at the Google mail service.
Talking to Your Television
From personal experience, USB tethering is both faster (bandwidth-wise) and uses considerably less battery than Wifi tethering.
Reminds me of a key tenet I heard about PR is: It's not what you say, but how you say it.

A dry press release, no image data, and a dry political report from the relevant spokesperson is perfect for this - there's nothing to latch onto - if you just list the facts, and get it over with.

It's what Obama did after Osama was assassinated, and it worked well - there was nothing offensive to latch on to, nothing to point to, and say "Look, that's what you are fighting for!".
you'd be even hard pressed to find a well upvoted and accepted answer on stackoverflow that suggested to do this type of implementation
Misfit Wearables’ First Product is a Aluminum Fitness Tracker with Wifi
The XP image has a hard expiration date (currently just a few months from now: 2/14/13). I believe you would need to rollback to s snapshot and screw with the system date or the VM.
Well, it is still more economical to warm up ONLY the seat than insulating the whole room. Especially since you do not stay hours every day in the restroom.