skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Work on the stuff that shows things visually before you work on other behind the scenes parts. Try to get it to show it doing a number of things asynchronously. (A screen that populates a number of actions or data points is going to win out over a single action step-by-step demo.)

Have a screen or two that's nicely designed and laid out. Good graphics, buttons, icons.

Work on your presentation. Many hackathons are beauty contests where a tight presentation and good look will win out over serious stuff under the hood. Have a simple imaginative funny description of what it does. (Funny apps tend to win out over more serious apps.)

Build an app that can get the audience involved. "Everyone take out your cell phone and text ..." "Go to this link and sign in with your twitter credentials." "Take a picture of the person next to your and send it via email to this address."

Do something that makes use of existing data or data that can easily be gathered from users when they sign up.
Agree with this. Editorial is quasi ~= personality. And its <hard> to automate personality.
Your Medical Records Aren't Always Safe: The Important of Security in Medicine
After Deal Changes With Zynga, Facebook Could Now Make Its Own Games
3-for-1 Match for Internet Archive Donations: Please Help
Just another chiming in here with nerd rage at low screen resolutions these days.

Absolutely crazy to make a "developer" laptop that can't even display the full standard page size that web developers will target web pages to. The surface pro has more resolution. The Nexus 4 and Nexus 7 have nearly the same and the Nexus 10 is nearly double in each direction and all these Nexii are priced < $400.
> a new kind of science developed that produced results through opaque processes in closed source proprietary software.

The amount of restraint you've just shown in describing NKS is superhuman.
You don't have to drive to Staples. Apparently, they will deliver, much like their existing print services.

They are using a 3D printer that uses glued paper, rather than plastic. I don't know if Shapeway offers that. It'll be interesting to see what the pricing is, and what you can do with layered paper vs. plastic.

The important thing isn't whether you can get stuff 3D printed at Staples. The important thing is that we're nearing an inflection point for 3D printing the way mobile was when the iphone came out in 2007. Meaning, if you missed the elevator ride up with the smart phone, there's another ride coming around the corner.
No, but I think for casual users print providers will want to host 3d models in a browser app.
I like the idea too! However I also got the tooltips to flicker: mousing a few pixels above the bolded text.
No, the root problem is not modern governments, it’s modern social norms. Which, frankly, aren't a problem, they just are. That is why anonymity and security are important, despite the government's position (which will often reflect social norms). Try to engage in unpopular speech and then later apply for a job. Or simply try to be a public figure whilst trying to have some privacy.

There will always be a place for these tools because there will always be people not just governments, who disagree with you and are willing to show you how much.
"Actions always trump words."

My point exactly.
How easy is it to switch my usage to google from s3?

Right now i have a rails app that uses carrierwave to manage images and store them on s3.

All i needed to get s3 set up was two lines of config, a ruby gem, setting some heroku config variables to the api keys.

How easy is it to switch?
Child porn is not a legitimate exercise of the first amendment anymore than shooting sprees are a legitimate exercise of the second amendment. The government has a legitimate interest in stopping such speech, just as it has a legitimate interest in prevent sprees.

So far, the people on your side of the argument have only been able to draw lines in the sand and insist that ISPs and exit nodes are the same. They, and presumably you, claim without justification that "bad" speech cannot be pursued without chilling "good" speech. Your comment adds no real world understanding of this fact: people don't want child porn to be traded over the Internet. Your case that political speech cannot be free unless child porn is free, is uncompelling and lacks nuance.
Those OBD II connectors in cars can be kind of a pain to plug and unplug, so it does need to fit the hand well, but your point about the bright colors is very good. I hope they consider something more discrete.
Hacker, geek, nerd (which term is more popular?)
jQuery. x100. If I had to pick one tool for a front end developer to know, it'd be jQuery/Javascript.
While it is meant to be humor. Might be cocaine too, but coca is extracted from leaves rather than flowers, and that didn't seem a good fit. On a more innocuous note, he might just as easily have meant tobacco snuff. Or nothing at all. With RMS, all things are possible.
At these prices it's up against really high quality ultrabooks. However it seems really heavily compromised if you can't use it in your lap - for many people it just can't replace your laptop. So then it's too expensive to be an "extra" device along side your laptop but it's incapable of replacing it.

I hope to see some more innovative hybrids next year, but I can tell straight away this is not going to be a device for me.
To give credit where it's due, this is based on a post by Sai on Google Plus: https://plus.google.com/103112149634414554669/posts/UqoBpW18...
Yes, this is exactly what we want. Instead of discussing the surface tablet, let's discuss the discussion or lack of discussion of the surface tablet, along with speculating as to the behaviour of our fellow HN participants, conjectures about what might or might not be the algorithm behind "burying" stories, and so forth.

While I'm sure your insights into online behaviour are valuable, I'd rather read them in a post about online behaviour than in a post about a tablet.

JM2C.
>All cars and light trucks built and sold in the United States after January 1, 1996 were required to be OBD II equipped. In general, this means all 1996 model year cars and light trucks are compliant, even if built in late 1995.

http://www.obdii.com/connector.html
It depends on where you think ownership comes from.

If you use the Lockean concept where use is applied to create ownership, piracy is fine. Put into an analogy, it's like this: you plant an apple tree. You do not eat the apples from this tree, and they fall to the ground in a public space. Walking over, I pick up and eat one of the apples. I have not diminished your utility from the tree as the apple would have spoiled.

Did I steal from you? It was originally your use that planted the tree, but you don't currently use all of the apples. You are deprived of nothing, and I am momentarily enriched by the consumption. How is that wrong?
Agreed. Ruby is already difficult to debug on projects of any significant size, and frequeny docficut to wrap your head around where various behaviors are originating from. Ruby's dynamism is -- or was -- a strength, but it feels like the language maintainers might have taken it a bit too far.
I thought it was DJ Kool Herc.
I am personally OK with the laws as they are.

Why? Because I don't see viewing bad stuff as a crime. But I believe that most people who want to see a snuff film are not murderers, while I believe that most people who are interested in child porn are pedophiles who likely offended.
Focus. Focus. Focus. Too many times people want to accomplish too many things. Do one thing. Make sure it does that one thing. Make sure that one thing can be presented well. If you can accomplish more, AWESOME. If not, you still have something deliverable. The worst feeling is being an hour or two away from the end without anything working and a lot of little half-functional pieces.
HTTP 2.0 Draft – SPDY Protocol
It works with OBD-II. All cars built after 1995 were mandated to support OBD-II:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On-board_diagnostics
I hope you came to this conclusion by actually trying out the language.

I have written thousands of lines of coffeescript and I have never faced the mentioned problems.

Besides, you can always use the pragmatic approach and use parenthesis in case of ambiguity.
Losing Humanity: The Case Against Killer Robots
How Apple can build the next-generation TV
Yah it's very long- truth be told, when I first came across the talk about Jewish administrators & saw the length of the article I assumed it was written by some crank with an axe to grind. Whatever one makes of the analysis & conclusions, if you hear the author out it becomes clear that this was done in a very thoughtful & thorough manner.

For some context:
The author is Ron Unz, an "activist" type & former financial software guy whose company was acquired by Moodys in the mid 00s. He's quite difficult to pin down with traditional USA political shorthand (see his other positions on social services for immigrants vs bilingual education in CA for example.) It seems that whatever subject on which he focuses, he really goes all in.

This is a pretty interesting profile of him from the late nineties: http://www.onenation.org/9907/071999.html

If you're familiar with Steven Colbert's SuperPAC shenanigans you might remember that someone named Trevor Potter (former FEC) was Colbert's legal advisor & "straight" counterbalance. This is what that Potter said about Unz's unsuccessful campaign finance reform initiative:

"[...] Unz's "California Voters Bill of Rights" includes voluntary spending limits accompanied by partial public financing, a ban on corporate giving to candidates, overnight Web-based disclosure, and reasonable contribution caps (e.g., $5,000 for statewide races) that should survive a court challenge. "It's far wider-reaching than McCain-Feingold," says Trevor Potter, former chairman of the Federal Election Commission

This post was provocative & definitely passed the "...anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity" test.
Accoding to wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On-board_diagnostics) starting from 1996 The OBD-II specification was made mandatory for all cars sold in the United States.
The companies:

Pericope: http://www.periscope.io/

FreedomCP: http://www.freedomcp.com/

Kinnek: http://www.kinnek.com/

Boomtrain: http://www.boomtrain.com/

Tray: http://www.tray.io/

Circl: http://www.joincircl.com/

ScaleGrid: http://www.scalegrid.net/

Buyou: http://www.buyouapp.com/

cisimple: http://www.cisimple.com

Shop2: http://www.shop2.com/

UpCounsel: http://www.upcounsel.com/

Storefront: http://www.storefront.is/
Well done guys, fantastic class.. congrats to ThomasK
Police work.

The same way we've been catching criminals for years. Surveillance, warrants, legal due process, etc.

I really don't feel that some reasonable tools in the hands of law enforcement but also checked by the justice system need to encroach on anonymity, TOR or any existing technology. Because despite these technologies, it's remarkably easy for a person to get caught if law enforcement is determined to catch him if they use the same tools they’ve used for generations.
Yeah, leaving out the keyboard seems like a poor idea, though at home most people already have a USB keyboard sitting around doing nothing, most like.
Oh, I see. Yes, I should check the tooltip. Anyway, you can use your own style and edit the css file if you want less animation or something like that.
>SSL doesn't introduce scroll latency

It introduces request latency, which could certainly add latency to Facebook's infinite scrolling.
Here's the paper in Science for anyone with an account:

https://www.sciencemag.org/content/338/6111/1202.abstract?si...

I couldn't find a pdf that wasn't behind a paywall. Also, there are different details at popsci.com:

http://www.popsci.com/science/article/2012-11/meet-spaun-fir...

As for my own comments, I think it's actually a promising approach but that down the road it will be necessary to model emotions if human-like AI is the goal, and that this seems... harder. So much of our thought and behaviour is driven by emotion that I would say it was actually primary.
That doesn't mean that the security issue doesn't exist. Via wikipedia:

"Researchers at the University of Washington and University of California examined the security around OBD, and found that they were able to gain control over many vehicle components via the interface. Furthermore, they were able to upload new firmware into the engine control units. Their conclusion is that vehicle embedded systems are not designed with security in mind."
it simply means you probably won't go to jail.

Well, not go to prison. You go to jail while you're presumed innocent, right?
‘The Cashless Society is Almost Here’
Right, the "conspiracy theory" phrase is weird (what is the conspiracy supposed to be?)
Whoops, posted a link to the overview article. Here's the report it refers to:
http://www.hrw.org/reports/2012/11/19/losing-humanity
Since BGP is sent over TCP, the routers are definitely pingable. You know how when you run traceroute you see a bunch of IPs between you and your destination? Routers like these are those hops.
YC applicants 'after interview' meetup
My initial (sure to be expanded) list of things I hate about iTunes 11:

1) The option of a dark background in grid view has been removed; the white background is horrible;

2) Sometimes the expanded view works well (the algorithm is clearly quite clever, zooming in to remove borders, etc.), other times it looks atrocious; it's around half and half; I've now spent hours debating whether to turn it off or keep it on;

3) Track lists in columns, everywhere, often inexplicably (e.g. on an artist page with no other albums); I know there's a bunch of horizontal white space to fill, but this is an ugly way to fill it;

4) With the new grid view and 'expanded view' there is no longer a quick way to view useful metadata about tracks (e.g. last played, number of plays, etc.);

5) Previously track lists formed 'rows' that had alternating background colors (I forget the name for this) that made it easier to follow; this is no longer the case, and for some reason looking at track lists in iTunes 11 makes me want to break things;

6) The new status bar no longer allows one to toggle the unit of measurement for the amount of music in the library; previously you could toggle hours, minutes, etc. now all it shows for me is days;

7) There is no longer an easy way to copy album artwork out of iTunes; previously you could have a preview up in the sidebar, right click -> copy; now one has to select an individual track (inexplicably, doesn't work for entire albums), right click -> get info -> artwork -> copy;

8) The album artwork thumbnail at the top of the window (in the little dialog showing the track, etc.) looks ugly and can't be removed;

9) The sidebar in the old version used to match the sidebars in other OS X apps (Finder, Mail, etc.); now the font has changed to Helvetica (bold, for that matter) it doesn't match anything;

10) The coloured sidebar icons that got ditched with OS X Snow Leopard and iTunes 10 are back; I really hope this isn't a sign of things to come elsewhere in the OS;

11) The option to change the size of album artwork in grid view has been removed; it's now one size, take it or leave it. This is excruciatingly irritating;

12) Still no FLAC support; this is beyond a joke now;
> "I personally cannot be attracted to a woman without breasts."

I personally cannot be attracted to men. I think dudes are icky. But I don't think this gives me a valid claim to say that nobody else should be, or that those who are have something wrong with them (indeed, I'm glad my wife does not share my aversion to males.) As you say, emotional reactions vary a lot by person. They don't form a very solid basis for law or morality.

Some people are attracted to children. Regardless of how gross that seems, it is reality. And the major problem with this reality isn't that the attraction is gross, but that it places children in danger. So how do we best prevent abuse? Certainly reducing opportunity is a part of it, both through (better) sex-offender laws and through policies that make it hard for adults to be alone with single children (many schools, scouts, etc. have strong policies to this effect.) Having strong legal punishments for such abuse might also be valuable. It seems important to also identify and treat those with such sexual attractions, and there are a few options [0][1], but it appears they're not terribly successful. At least one prominent researcher thinks there could be greater success if the medical community put more resources into it [2]. But society has been trying to "cure" other types of sexual attraction for quite some time with limited success, so I'm a bit dubious.

The end result is that we have a fairly bad set of laws, and little in the way of effective treatment, for something that tragically affects far too many children. So I must agree with your final statement -- :-(

[0] http://whyfiles.org/154pedophile/2.html

[1] http://www.minddisorders.com/Ob-Ps/Pedophilia.html

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pedophilia#Limitations_of_treat...
Excellent point about the drug trade. It's not just the dealer on the street corner who profits. HSBC, Wachovia, Citibank and others have all been caught profiting from drug money laundering. (So do, albeit on smaller scales, the corrupt cop and judge.) As cryptogon points out, hard to do all this if all transactions are digital and logged.
IPhone 5 Wifi Nightmare
A regular laptop is fine in a backpack, holding with one hand, and tossing onto a bed. You could probably prop it up sideways and read a paper on it as well, although I'd probably use a tablet for that instead. I think your last sentence answers my question though.
The problem with the return of manufacturing
I'm not even that old, but cry me a river. My whole life I was told dress a certain way or you won't get hired. The world put up with it when it was old guys telling young guys they had to wear a suit. Now there's an older guy who says he can't get hired unless he dresses in jeans and sneakers. It's kind of funny but at least he's getting hired. Age discrimination against the young is still perfectly legal in the USA.
Not quite, I really like the idea of selling to consumers :)

As a consumer I pay for a bunch of (online) services that I use. There's bound to be others out there ...
It has an i5, pretty good screen, USB 3 and the light form factor. Which half is missing from the equation?
This is sharp, I like it, but just FYI: the tip never goes away on iPad.
[1] is wrong. Perl is defined over a finite memory computer, not a Turing machine that by definition has infinite memory. The Turing halting theorem does not apply.
Minus the keyboard :). Add that and the price is in line with the MBA. Surface Pro is still the better deal in my opinion, because of the newer CPU and better screen.
I like the design :) clean and simple.
I used to do less copy-paste but since I got decent with vim it flows right into my typing. If you're not using it you should give it a try, with that kind of typing skill you could be insanely fast at editing too. (Has a learning hump at the beginning though.)
I highly doubt we know enough about the Brain to begin running realistic simulations of one. I am not even sure if scientist/mathematicians have identified a rigorous, mathematical definition of exactly what is intelligence. And yet we feel like we can correctly simulate a miniaturized version of Brain?
Or planning a massacre?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hama_massacre
There's also Mailgun.net. Infact I co-wrote a mailgun ruby client sometime back http://github.com/hashnuke/mailgun
It seems that Apple, with iOS 6, has messed up Wifi across many device somehow. I can't use the Wifi on my iPhone 4S at all after upgrading to iOS 6.0.1 - I had issues similar to this iPhone 5 post when using iOS 6.0. I upgraded to iOS 6.1 beta 2 (for Apple developers) and that hasn't resolved the issue either. I've read that people are experiencing similar issues on their iPad 2 with iOS 6.

See my previous submission: iOS 6 Kills iPhone 4S Wifi - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4811540
It's not like people who work at Facebook have to use PHP anyway - there are quite a few who work in "superior" languages, although most just use C++, Java, and Python.

In my experience, the top-tier developers enjoy challenges and solving problems, and languages are just tools they use to defeat those challenges and solve those problems. Sometimes it's a language they really enjoy using. Sometimes it's a situation where that language isn't a suitable one.
Why not just use Turkey, Iraq, or Jordan, which are approximately 0km from Syria, and hate Assad too. And are already serving as basing, conduits for personnel and materiel (particularly Iraq and Turkey), etc.?
Large ice deposits found on planet nearest the sun: NASA
Apple launches redesigned iTunes 11 after delay
Huh, refinement is most of the reason I would want to upgrade to Ruby 2.0. 1.9 works for well for what I want to do.
I'm kind of surprised you didn't pursue the JVM and InvokeDynamic for this purpose instead of PyPy
While I agree that this won't necessarily be accurate, I think this could very well lead us to a better and deeper knowledge of the brain regardless. Being able to do experiments here and see how they differ from the real world is quite awesome.
I came here to post just this. IMO it's one of the best tech blogs on the net right now.

It also seems like it would be a really cool place to work.
CourseTalk Launches A Yelp For Open Online Courses
The new ODROID-X2
'JavaScript: The Good Parts' by Douglas Crockford is a great place to start[1].

This authoritative book scrapes away these bad features
to reveal a subset of JavaScript that's more reliable,
readable, and maintainable than the language as a
whole-a subset you can use to create truly extensible
and efficient code.

The other thing that has had a huge impact on my coding style is learning to write tests for everything with Jasmine[2]. Forcing myself to write tests has basically forced me into better design practices, since it's nigh-on impossible to test javascript callback-spaghetti.

Doing a couple of backbone.js[3] tutorials may be a bit of an eye-opener too.

[1] http://shop.oreilly.com/product/9780596517748.do

[2] http://pivotal.github.com/jasmine/

[3] http://backbonejs.org/
Please don't get me wrong or take it the wrong way,

But I just can't seem to get over the fact that you are obviously not a Linux person (you seem to have strong preferences and by the looks of it, you know well that you are very much a Mac person), who won a Linux laptop for free and hasn't used it at all.

Had you but magnanimously declined the offer and passed it on, someone else could have used it happily all along....
Ok this is just so true.
Not to mention the constant arms race with biological pathogens.
Humble Bundle THQ games
I'm with you on the lack of a dark background settings in grid view. Too much white.
Michael was speaking at the KWB2B Marketers Meet Up
I hopped in my dad’s car and drove to Waterloo.

Do founders usually prefer hiring someone who stalks them? Even if they quote: "lacked any and all experience we were looking for."

Don't get me wrong, I think what Amar did shows a lot of hustle, and his case on them showed that he was willing to learn and is passionate. But still, I think ajross hit the nail on the end with saying "I think the end is near." And I think that end will be when Pinterest has their IPO.
Skrillex Quest
Sure, you can do all those great things, but your genes won't pass to the next generation unless you reproduce. Evolution is a specific thing: the ongoing change in the inheritable traits of a population. Humanitarian efforts are great, but they have nothing to do with evolution in this context.
Ah, sorry, I meant now, in the current state. I wonder if they just shut them down (the routers), or blocked all incoming connections from the outside...
Although there is obviously some debate among scientists, natural selection is considered to be the most important force by far.