skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Thanks for sharing this info.

As a Python developer and ebook writer I've gone a similar route. I'm currently writing in emacs using reStructuredText as my base format and have written code to generate [0] clean epubs which translate to mobi/kf8 pretty well. Part of this is a CSS file I'm working on [1] to make common formatting "just work" across the big ebook readers (old-kindles, newer kindles, ipads, nook and kobo).

I've spent a little bit of time (and money) getting very nice pdf generation working using sphinx and the memoir class for latex. It's not there yet as I've been focusing on the ebooks.

Yes, it feels like you need to be a programmer to create ebooks right now. You definitely need to feel comfortable editing html and css. I'm not completely happy with rst as the base format, but I don't think there is another lightweight markup language specifically targeted to authoring books. Even sphinx which is supposed to be for documentation isn't really well suited towards books. So there's little hacks here and there. Plus as I usually write about Python related material, rst lets me "test" my books using doctest and I can even templatize some stuff (I'm doing that in a book I'm currently working on).

0 - https://github.com/mattharrison/rst2epub2

1 - https://github.com/mattharrison/epub-css-starter-kit
This doesn't seem too out of character for Einstein when you think about it. Great scientists are't married to their ideas. As soon as a better theory comes along, it is reasonable for a scientist to abandon the previous theory for the newer one. Once he found a better wife, he dumped here for a better one. Great scientists don't just do science when they're in their laboratory. Great scientists rewire their entire brain to think of everything scientifically.
Wikipedia has their employees at 2, but wow, those are amazing stats.
That's all well and good, but does that (CCTV surveillance) fall into what cobrausn quoted (Benjamin Fraklin?) above?

I guess it's a matter of perspective or opinion. Where do you/we draw the line?
That is how it reads. I certainly wasn't there to know what really went on, though I think we can assume these are the issues that caused the relationship breakdown in the first place. It wouldn't be very fair for her to live in the lap of luxury while he solely provides for the home and does all the housework on top, even if they had a prior love for each other.
Oops and I specifically meant to avoid doing that. Self fulfilling! I think I'll delete and repost.
I'm not sure what Apple is expecting here. 9 women can't make a baby in a month, and a billion dollars can't make a Google maps clone in a year. I think Apple maps is a really good product. But to expect it to be on par with Google maps is crazy.
How Facebook Onboards Its 1 Billion Users
Sounds too good to be true. And you know what they about that
Great points, Jesse, but you're also insinuating that:
1) Marketers/SEOs specifically cannot code;
2) SEOs/online marketers can't do all of the things you mentioned (Analytics, CRO, social, PPC, retargeting).

I absolutely agree on the implementation part, but we can build some pretty cool stuff. Though as a consultant you're always at the whim of the client to get it implemented, no matter what.

We're also getting back to the "What is an SEO" discussion, which I'm tired of. SEO is so much more than linkbuilding. It touches content, CRO, social, analytics, email, everything. And we need to recognize that, otherwise we'll be marginalized and made ineffective quickly.
The world's already got a few of these to my knowledge, Brightcove launched one last week with native plugins..I personally would love to see a fully native version of this. People want real UIKit/Android components, not an approximation of same.
Roomr for iOS lets you view and book meeting rooms directly from your iPhone
Show HN: "Kestrels, Quirky Birds, and Hopeless Egocentricity," free online
I hadn't heard of Bookshop before, that's pretty neat.

<shameless plug>

I put together a project named Docverter that uses pandoc and calibre to do a bunch of this stuff. The conversions work pretty well, and it's all free.

http://www.docverter.com

</shameless plug>
"The other distinction is implementation. A Growth Hacker needs to be able to code, or it’s a dilution of the term — a Growth Hacker who can’t code at least a little is a Growth Strategist, still a highly valuable team member, but a different animal."

Is your issue that you're assuming if you can't code, you can't execute? While a good portion of what an SEO would handle is a bit on the technical side and might require some coding, a lot of the execution can be accomplished with zero coding ability.

Maybe the trouble is in the use of of "hacker" which is usually associated with "code".
"When a cellphone is reported stolen in New York, the Police Department routinely subpoenas the phone’s call records, from the day of the theft onward. [...]

But in the process, the Police Department has quietly amassed a trove of telephone logs, all obtained without a court order, that could conceivably be used for any investigative purpose."

Isn't a subpoena a court order?
9 Vital Tips for Choosing The Best Multivitamin to Take
Consult any current medical journal and you will find that it is widely accepted that most adults should be taking a daily multivitamin.
I lived in NYC in the '70s and '80s. It was an adventure, to be sure. But the crime started going down once the police started nailing people for so-called quality of life crimes. They busted turnstile jumpers and such, which gave them the chance to check for DATs and outstanding warrants. That helped them find people with unregistered guns and lock up actual criminals.

The current stop and frisk and TSA searches are perhaps not doing all that much to increase safety over what was before. It's not a choice between police state and crime sprees.
Starting-Up in America
If you have any suggestions for links to blog posts or other resources related to combinatory logic, please post them, Id like to expand the list of related links. Thanks in advance...
On mountain lion, it requires X11. Not sure why as my PyQT apps do not.
My take from the outside. Senior management decided to ship an incomplete project, and this manager is taking the fall. They could have evaluated the offering, made the hard decisions that they shouldn't remove Google Maps yet, and delayed the release.

Thing is, there wasn't much interesting meat on the iPhone 5 release, so I'm sure they were scrambling for any sort of "feature" to pad out the release.
How is $18,000 nearly enough for this?
I assume he's talking about errors in the runtime itself.

For example, you could write a secure Java app (let's assume this is possible), but if the JVM has a security flaw (and it did), it doesn't really matter, because the runtime is mandatory.

Over the years, I've become more and more distrustful of large, complicated systems designed "for my safety", and migrated towards tiny systems + formal verification/model checking/exhaustive symbolic testing.

100% certified and bug free (in the sense of "doesn't implement the spec") is where I think at least the safety and security critical part of the industry will be in 30 years. The tools available today are incredibly powerful, but systems designed over 5-10 years ago are unable to take advantage of them. There's no reason programs cannot be bug free with respect to their specifications today, given the tools we have at our disposal.
Hacker News is (was?) mostly run by one person and, about a year ago, was getting over 2.4 million uniques per month and 26 million page views.

Source: http://ycombinator.com/newsnews.html
Reverse Engineering Startup Press: How and Why TechCrunch Covered My Launch
Let's also not confuse differences caused by 32 bit engines having more developers with differences caused by the platform.
Having very recently switched to Sublime Text 2 (from Komodo Edit), I'm curious if this offers anything that can't be done with Sublime + mature existing plugins...?
The blog uses Redis as primary data store, unfortunately there is Ruby between the user and the DB ;-)

Btw here the problem was mine, I was running the Sinatra app wit "ruby app.rb", and Apache was mod_proxing to this running on port 4567.

By default mod proxy will suspend the connection 60 seconds with an error if the proxed thing returns something wrong. Idiotic default that can be avoided just with:

ProxyPass / http://127.0.0.1:4567/ retry=0

See "retry=0".
Great post and great sketches! Inspired by these, I published some sketches (within wireframes), too!
You find them on my page:
» http://hofmannsven.com/2012/journal/wireframe-sketches/
How To Help Startup Ecosystems: Be An Early Adopter
"Phases" are poorly defined. They exist wherever there's a statistical mechanics reason to define them, and they make sense only within the limits of the approximations on which they are based. Glass is "solid" to a mechanical engineer (in most regimes), but it's not a crystal and doesn't behave like one to a solid state physicist. Likewise "plasma" is a great tool to describe a fluorescent light bulb or lightning bolt, but not so much a white dwarf. Even stuff you think you understand, like "liquid and gas are clearly different" turns out to be wrong (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supercritical_fluid).
I do agree about Java, it strikes me as an especially bad language for teaching because most of the learning has to focus around Java's view of how object orientation should work and various JVM specific things.

It has a pretty steep learning curve to it before you can start writing interesting programs, compared to python or C. C has it's own difficulties of course but a lot of these are things that are actually difficult such as how to deal with memory management rather than fluffy problems about interfaces vs abstract classes.

OTOH there are a lot of jobs out there in Java which is perhaps mainly due to it getting into universities/colleges in the 90s when it had the kool-aid factor.

Not so sure about making all grading project based though. The problem with this is that whilst plagiarism is usually punished severely there is the gray area of "helping your neighbour". This gives a bonus to persuasive types who are good at getting other people to "help" them an awful lot.

Of course the argument could be made that this is good preparation for industry.
Do you mean the comedown from pure MDMA?
Ask HN: Question regarding non-technical cofounder
Let me start by saying I love the community here and have always found Ask/Show HN threads some of the most informative.

I got the standard approach a few days ago: an acquaintance with zero technical ability (who actually said he's "not good with the computer codes") approached me regarding something I should build in a field of shared interest which is ripe for technical disruption.

What surprised me is that it's actually a really good idea, and I could see it being a viable business - not the Next Big Thing, maybe not even a startup by traditional HN definitions (there would never be massive, viral growth), but I could definitely see it supporting a small staff if executed properly.

Here's my question: I could build it, but I don't know what this prospective cofounder would do. He's not a salesman, he's no more of a domain expert in this field than I am, and he's not a business guy (CPA/forensic accountant by trade); he's only marginally better connected than I am in the field as well. That being said, is there some vital function I'm missing out on? How can I vet him without just coming out and saying "what good are you?"
Oh, the old saying "Write once, run crappily everywhere." See the other comments already talking about it crashing or having weird behavior. It's something I've come to after many years of trying cross-platform apps that involve a GUI... They are almost all terrible.

I hope the group who agrees with me is cancelling out all the down-votes I got for expressing a valid & common opinion. :)
If you find yourself using these keyboard shortcuts frequently, you can save yourself some pinky fatigue by remapping caps lock to ctrl.
Yes, not saying it's never used ironically - I agree that that is probably most common - just pointing out that it originated as a serious label for anyone unfamiliar with the history.
In this case, it runs using X11 on OSX, which is a terrible way of making software ;)
It benefits all the kids who are given an opportunity to learn what they deserve to be taught.

If taught well, kids will understand that coding is an art and requires a lot of practice and thought. We are not claiming you can get a job right out of high school, but merely that they should get exposed in high school and have a basis for continued study.

If every kid learning to code increases the number who choose to continue to study it in college, there will be more qualified coders. Companies will be able to selectively hire good ones, and people will understand that they need to actually practice and get good at it to get a good job.
whats wrong with emacs ?
The journey from PhD to entrepreneur
The stigma is there because thats all I have experienced, now don't get me wrong I believe there are excellent individuals out there but unfortunately I have not clearly penetrated any of those circles of individuals.
If anyone wants to show me the networks where I need to keep my foot in the door then thats going to be really helpful and go a long way into changing my views.

I suppose part of the problem is the low barrier to entry combined with the fact that it's the web (which is also there playground) so you see and hear more of the bad ones than you do good
Perhaps I mis-insinuated, the implication I'd intended was that most SEOs can't code. There are absolutely many that can, but it seems problematic to imply that SEOs as a rule are growth hackers, when many (if not most) lack a good number of the required skills.

Totally agree on the exhausted subject of what is SEO, so let's not beat a dead horse.
ShowHN: Just launched Givetu - An easy way to find creative Christmas gift ideas
How does Twicsy do revenue wise? I would love to hear the story behind it and how you got to that many users.
I've published some children's fiction this year, but I suspect I will publish programming works again at some point.

I'll give another plug for Scrivener[1], which is really a great tool. All of the editions that I have in the major online bookstores come straight out of Scrivener (though I obviously used an image editor for the covers).

I wanted to also mention out awesome Leanpub[2] is. Write your files in Markdown (and they support code snippets well... definitely a service that works well for software topics), save them in Dropbox. Press a couple of buttons in your browser and you've got PDF, mobi and epub. And, you can sell right away and keep 90% - 50 cents. They make it easy to publish early in the process and keep readers up to date as you complete the work.

One bonus that's not as obvious: Leanpub also makes distribution to a sample audience easy. You can generate coupon codes trivially.

I'm planning to go straight to Leanpub with my next technical work.

[1]: http://www.literatureandlatte.com/scrivener.php
[2]: http://leanpub.com/
Some stats!
Obvious fact: The numbers are roughly proportional. The same crowd come to drudge report on a daily basis without fail. Might look to be overly ambitious claim but the reality might not be far from it.
I run a site that generates 300m pvs on mobile web, 100m pvs on desktop with 2.7m uniques every month (I believe this is actually substantially higher but not fully tracked in Google Analytics for some reason).
Enterprise support, tested and validated packaged software, security and bug fixes, stability of APIs and ABIs, certifications, and Red Hat Open Source Assurance program.
This manager is being thrown under the bus. Senior management approved the product and pushed it into production.
Where medical expertise meets user Interface design
CodeHS is well on its way to that, providing help from live tutors and feedback on coding projects -- http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4835649.
There's no such thing as a cross-platform GUI layer that doesn't suck.

Qt comes the closest, and it has all sorts of platform-specific hacks in it, some even visible at the API level.

If you're going to be writing something that's used as frequently and intensively as an IDE, then it had BETTER conform to the user interface guidelines of whatever OS it's running on. Those differ on Windows or Mac, and Linux doesn't really have any.
My impression was also incorrect. Wiki says it's an "amorphous solid" aka one that doesn't form into crystals.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glass

There's also Amorphous Ice, which is arranged in a "glass-like" form: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amorphous_ice
His goal was to create a sustainable relationship with her, and therefore he proposed a new set of expectations of her in consideration of his household cash flow. She consented to them; she wasn't forced to. This resembles a typical "live-in servant" relationship. The only strange part is that this falls out of a prior arrangement/agreement that was considered a "marriage" relationship. It's obviously no longer marriage in spirit, so why all the judgment of it that way?
A lot of overlap but not the same. CRO is not really considered SEO and is big part of growth hacking for example. But with the term Inbound Marketer I agree more.
It's a good product and in many ways better than the Google maps that existed previously on iOS (vector, 3D, Flyover).

The map data coverage is fine for probably most users. For those users it is inadequate for, however, it renders maps completely useless.

However, it is fundamentally flawed in the most important area: Search. The search just isn't good enough to come anywhere near comparison to Google Maps. Apple need to be focussing 90% of their efforts to catch up here - a tall order.
Younger developers appear to reject their senior colleagues's way of doing things and prefer their grand-senior colleaguues' way. That reminds me Structure of Scientific Revolutions from Thomas Kuhn where scientific developments only occur when an older generation passes away.
Voting is a Sham Mathematically Speaking
Why Nikola Tesla Was the Greatest Geek Who Ever Lived - tapestry
It is probably secure at present, but the margins are getting uncomfortably slim.
Sorry, to post my question here. I am new to HN.

How do you post your questions to 'Ask HN:' my questions landed up in 'new'. Your help is very much appreciated.

Thanks!
>No reasonable person ever begrudges someone being a hard negotiator on salary and benefits.

Not true at all. Both Felix Denis and Donald Trump have written about the perils of hiring overly mercenary employees. So did one of my former mentors. Being a hard negotiator on salary and benefits is a hallmark sign of optimizing for a short-term relationship.
I've heard of Drudge Report before, but never really understood it. Who / what does it cater to and what is its function, a sort of one-man curated news reddit?
I can't speak for gfosco, but my guess would be that it's because in IDE-land "cross-platform" frequently means "written in Java" (as with Eclipse, NetBeans, etc.), with all the performance issues and not-quite-perfect platform look and feel that implies.
As others have already mentioned, PEP8 validation is enable by default, which is a little excessive in my opinion (specially with the line < 80 chars rule). It would be great to be able to disable individual rules, a la Ecliplse/Netbeans.

All in all it looks very nice, thanks for sharing.
Fair enough. When viewed from a use-case perspective, I suppose you could claim that Ruby and Python are similar to C family languages.

I actually have started exploring Haskell recently, and clearly functional programming languages require a different thought process than imperative languages.

I'd still assert, however, that the difference in thought process is a growth in the theory of programming, or what I called the "0%". That's why many programmers find it hard to learn functional languages - it requires a great deal of conceptual learning. It has very little to do with the syntax.
Once again, the Kindle is selling like an unspecified number of hotcakes.
I don't know why you chose Codeacademy as an example of an online course but left out edX and Udacity and Coursera, which all have decent discussion forums and hackers of all abilities.
Am I the only one who uses PyDev?
> So that clarified to me that actually you a) believe women are inferior

It does not do that for me. The existence of a gender role or a population bias in current society says nothing about men or women being superior or inferior. It most likely says something about society.

The percentage of people who are serial killers is small, and empirically, most of them are men.
Shouldn't this be linked to the original Bloomberg article?
I was going to use Grafio, but this is a much better alternative!
It seems there's a huge opening in the market to make an end-to-end publishing solution. We're all taking this scrappy approach* to making our books work cross-device. It's something I'd gladly pay for.

*I wrote about my pipeline here:
http://startupframework.tumblr.com/post/36675629669/format-e...
IIRC the janitors have very few powers, similar to forum moderators on most forums. I suppose you could claim the admins are helping, but personally, I'd only consider people who directly work on the site's backend/frontend management and development, not unpaid community managers.
With regard to Coding, I'm not referring to absolutely ALL Growth Hacker skills -- certainly PPC, Media, and Intermediate analytics can be done with no coding skill, but at least half of the GH skillset requires at least minimal coding skill to execute:

CRO, UX, Advanced Analytics Implementations, Advanced Social Implementations, Doing anything innovated with an API -- these are off the table for a GH unless they can code at least a little, and who want's a Growth Hacker who can only do the bare minimum?

SEOs can absolutely get by with minimal coding knowledge, I give you no argument there, but that's part of what makes the who disciplines different.
Get free baby stuff
Sorry to ask my questions here. I am new to HN.

How do you post to 'Ask H:" my ask hn post landed up in 'new'. Your help is much appreciated.

Thanks in advance
Sure, Apple Maps was pretty bad relative to Google Maps, but it added a lot of great features. I think turn-by-turn is a great integration, 3D, among others, and will hopefully create a competition to be the best maps provider. Certainly given time, Apple Maps will be a viable contender.

I doubt Williamson was fired specifically for the launch product. Perhaps there has been internal issues since trying to rectify.
>C is a much, much better “lower” level language for really grasping the way programming works, and Python is a much, much more fun language if you want to lower the barriers to entry and get students making things right away.

I've never seen it put quite like this, but it seems correct and important. The languages with lower barriers to entry also tend to be easier to explore computer science in. There are some languages like C or assembly that make it easy to understand how the machine works and some languages like Python, Javascript, Lua, or Scheme (sorted in descending in order of how much they get in your way) that make it easy to try new concepts, and a student in university could very well end up knowing no languages from either of these categories.

I was lucky enough to circumvent most of these issues by using my mandatory CS courses as an annoying supplement to my programming contest preparation and game programming projects.
LuaJIT doesn't have increased memory usage. 32 or 64 bit, it always packs pointers into the low bits of NaN doubles. Addresses fit because current 64 bit chips actually use 48 bit addresses.

(LuaJIT also uses a limited memory arena for allocations but it's not inherent to the design; it could be changed but the current garbage collector can't handle that much data)