skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If cost is the only thing keeping you from coming to PyCon, please considering applying for financial aid. Each year we give out tens of thousands of dollars in free tickets and grants to help people get to PyCon. You could easily be one of them - please apply! See https://us.pycon.org/2013/assistance/ for more details.
I'd really appreciate if the next person to reply thinks about what they're about to say before they say it.

Ask yourself, would you say this to Stevie's face? If the answer is no, move on. If the answer is yes, I'm sure he'd oblige.

For the record, Stevie is one of the most talented and well respected members of the UK tech community, so once again, think before you comment.
Or maybe most of us who up voted knew it was PR and we want their PR to work?
I don't know if you have a Lego Store near you, but you can walk into a Lego store and buy generic Lego bricks in every color. They also have a great website that lets you order 1 of any specialized brick they make or the generic bricks in bulk for pennies each.

Not sure what the problem with that is. And as others have said, after a week all those legos just go into one pot anyways and mix together to make anything.
First Round Capital's Dorm Room Fund Invests in Firefly, co-browsing for support
So I have to admit. I'm still quite torn.

On one hand, keeping slides simple and avoiding "eye charts" clearly makes for better readability, and reduces the risk of the presenter "reading from the slide."

OTOH, a set of slides like that is utterly useless after the fact, unless it's accompanied by a transcript. Both audio and video recordings require serial attention for 15/30/60 minutes that I typically will not have, and I certainly can't see doing that to anyone else.

A question to the assembled: If you make "Presentation Zen"/"Merlin Mann"/etc. low-text high-concept slides for your talk, how do you make sure your presentation is accessible after the fact?
I sell things very rarely on eBay - recently I got an old Laptop at a garage sale that I realized I had no use for and went ahead and sold it.

Thankfully everything went well (I think the period for chargebacks has expired), but I had this awful feeling for a long time after the auction that something dodgy would happen. Every time I sell, I feel like I'm playing Russian Roulette.

Like a lot of the other commenters, I'm not sure why more hasn't been done to help the sellers out. Shouldn't it be clear that it's a scam if a buyer does a CC chargeback, given that it's easy enough to file with Paypal? Also, wouldn't giving sellers the option to only accept payment via a bank account help?
Adventures in pointerless computing
Gmail 2.0 for iOS released
Record yourself speaking. Once or twice through and you're going to have a very good idea of the parts you need to work on.

Also very helpful to have a "good run" recording saved that you can give a quick listen to if you're asked to do the presentation again. You don't have to find your words all over again.
How to tread lightly. Properly.
How much is zap.com worth? I would imagine at least 6 figures.
My daughter's favorite character is Olivia. They have profiles of all the girls. Hers says:

I love:
My friends, science, school, drawing, inventing things, nature, hiking, photography, history.

I ’m also good at:
Reading maps, navigation by the stars, building things, computers.

I want to be:
A scientist or an engineer.

I was very pleased they didn't all want to be pop stars. Olivia’s Invention Workshop is a great kit.
Guide To Amazon Web Services
Hmm. That is a very interesting analogy. Thanks!
Are there any sites that have risen to take its place? I think there's a lot of value in a site that does the sort of blogging Lifehacker does, but in a more concise and useful manner (like they used to).
I prefer my androids in vanilla form.
The video mentions that his parents allowed him to buy another set, but he still was sad that he didn't get the set he wanted.

So the $100 was spent on Legos.
Really? That's exactly what I got out of the article as well. They have to pay for the bandwidth somehow.
The re-enforcement of the fallacy that FP shuns mutable state really put me off this article.
Here's what ICT should really teach kids: how to do regular expressions
Amigos por Internet
A necessary distinction is between a "normal" thesis and a "thesis by papers". In the latter, the thesis is really just and intro and conclusion wrapped around already-published papers. In some universities in Ireland and in some other European countries, the student can choose either. In the case of thesis by papers, the required number of first-author journal papers is 3.

I haven't heard of any special dispensation for the case where the student has 1 paper proving P != NP. But the student is not obliged to choose "thesis by papers" so there is no problem.
Yes BMWs are just like MacBooks. They catch fire too!

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-17514172
Out of curiosity, do you know if this is more due to wimax cell saturation or backhaul limitations?
wow, such hate in the comments. I think some people are taking the "focus" theme too far. Focusing on one thing doesn't mean you absolutely ignore everything else. If you're going to ignore co-workers, then you might as well skip taking a shower in the morning, eating breakfast, and all the other things you need to do, and just FOCUS, FOCUS, FOCUS!
I was kind of hoping they'd put some more effort into Sparrow after acquiring it. Even without push support: I still personally prefer that UI. I have noticed a few minor bug fixes it being released so it doesn't seem like it is completely forgotten.

Still, I'll give Gmail 2.0 a go for a week to see how I like it. Who knows? I may change my mind.
Thank you for linking to a working copy.

On your #3, I prefer mjd's advice to "get to the point". They have already chosen to sit in your talk. Hopefully they know something about who you are, what the talk is supposed to be about, and there is little point in wasting the period when you are most likely to actually have their attention on reminding them of that.

(Note, mjd is the author of the conference presentation judo talk that I linked to above. TPC is The Perl Conference is the predecessor of OSCON. I don't know if he has continued to maintain the top speaker rating that he had, but he did so for a long time. He is worth listening to.)
Looks great!
Hope the Sparrow team they acquired will put out a new OSX app for Gmail soon.
Google Launches Gmail 2.0 On iOS With New Design
So is this the fruit of their Sparrow acquisition? Or is this unrelated?
I actually think that it's quite fair to criticize a "leading" achievement that falls apart or otherwise fails soon after.

For an achievement to "count", I'd make the bold claim that it has to actually work.

* However, I do agree that often to make progress you absolutely have to push your engineering "comfort zone" and try dangerous things, in order to learn from your mistakes. But this does not change my definition of "success", it just acknowledges realities of R&D.
I commented on this the other day. I won't give a talk unless video is being made freely available: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4762351

Since I tend to give talks without bullet points it's essential that people can hear me talk.
Yahoo Acquires Startup OnTheAir
Care to at least share your experience instead of only attacking Thiel?
Customers Don't Know What They Want - Until They See It
I can tell you from experience that usually there's not any written/formal publication requirement but I've never seen anyone getting his PhD in CS without at least 1 international publication (conference paper not workshop).

I disagree with people commenting that you could earn your PhD with zero publication. You need to compare your work with the state of the art and confront other people in conferences this is what research is about and not simply working on something and never open your work to critics.

In other theoretical field it's different but in CS there are plenty of opportunity to publish your work. PhD symposiums, poster sessions, workshops and millions of conferences (with probably only 10/20% of very good ones). So even if there's no formal requirement, I'd really suggest you put some effort into it. It's not just for the sake of showing who has the biggest (publication list), it's really to make you interact with people and have an objective opinion on your work through the review process of your submission to conferences.

I personally got my PhD with 11 publications (4 top tier conferences) and 5 patents. I can tell you it was a big shock when I submitted my 1st paper and got demolished but I really got valuable feedback I was on the wrong track and my advisor didn't care ;)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0hiUuL5uTKc

Great story. Shows just a glimpse of the many different angles you need to take as an entrepreneur to try and make things work. (or not work)
Obviously send an email to /dev/null, er I mean the proxy email address on the whois, but is me adding that worthy of your time? Also the post states I tried contacting people via LinkedIn and telephone before jumping on a bird. Did you read it?
I've always had luck just running the migrations before hand -- the only real caveat there is that you need to do a two-step migration process if you're removing fields.

If all your changes are additions, and your app is managed by supervisord, it's fairly trivial to pull the code updates, run the migrations, then bounce your supervisor instance.

Like I said though, if you're deleting, the process is to stage out the deletes into a separate migration so that your codebase is using new or added/replacement columns before you remove tables or you're kind of screwed.

Also bear in mind that this knowledge is somewhat dated as all my recent Django ORM experience is based on Oracle (ugh) which I haven't gotten South to work with.
If it is truly facebook only, that eliminates this for me. Too bad.
I'm getting "The item you tried to buy is no longer available." when I try to update.
Waterloo seems to be killing it this week (BufferBox acquisition, virtual brain, Facebook Hackathon)
Thanks for your remark. I agree with you about the seriousness of this, and I am sorry if our language was imprecise.

Please do not mistake any oddity in how this was written with the clarity of how we reacted at the time, our commitment to inclusiveness, and our complete agreement that this was unacceptable.

It wasn't even an attempted joke. The person made explicitly transphobic remarks based on their own intolerant beliefs.

What the person said was offensive and unacceptable, and I personally used those words, and I believe I made that clear to all involved at the time.
Rather than mionimize this, sweep this under the rug, or ignore it, I escalated this to all the other organizers immediately after I heard about it, and I am glad we wrote about it in the wrap-up.

I also apologized to the students that this happened at our event, and asked what they would like to see happen, and what we could do.
As the transphobic person had already left, ejection was unnecessary (though would have been the next step), and they immediate suggested putting a better policy in place for our events - which we are doing.
We also 'blacklisted' the person from all future railsbridge events.

We agree that transphobic/racist/sexist/homophobic remarks are simply unacceptable, and it was not about who happened to be sitting there.
I would say this about the students who happened to be sitting there - they stood up for themselves and each other, and are the reason the maker of the transphobic remarks left even before the organizers found out about it.

- Andrew Kuklewicz
Gmail 2.0 For iOS Released With Sparrow-like Features
Soundcloud's strategy is that soundcloud.com should only be for music producers. Consumers are supposed to use other, discovery-specific sites which consume the soundcloud API. This stops the SC devs having to please two conflicting groups of users. I think it's extremely clever.
72 year old helps granddaughters startup with modeling teen clothes
I recall it from his comments to ' YC Rejection Emails Are Out "

'A lot of people do that, and unsurprisingly some people (maybe all) working at YC do not appreciate it. Personally I would advise against it and think of a different way to get to the partners, n.b. Instacart, rather than show up to YC when everyone is extremely busy and putting YC staff in difficult positions." Now just think what he did with hedge fund manager ?.
"tell 'em what you're going to be telling them, tell them, and then tell 'em what you told 'em"

This is common advice. http://perl.plover.com/yak/presentation/ disagrees emphatically with it. Consider well that mjd both gave a lot of presentations, AND managed to consistently get the top speaker rating at a major conference.

His contrarian advice may be worth giving a try.
how do you find someone who is missing?

Amass all the data I can about someone (personal details, online handles, trickery, etc) and crunch data.

HN really isn't a good forum for this, you should try http://reddit.com/r/rbi/ or similar.

If you do post a request there, make sure you post plenty of details to go off of, otherwise you're wasting their time.

Alternatively, comb /r/rbi for techniques and go off on your own. They're a bunch of amateurs over there, but they're somewhat effective :)
Nice, it finally has multi account support, which was the big reason I was still using the mobile web version.
I wouldn't say it to his face, but that doesn't mean it doesn't influence my actions in regards to him.

I'm also concerned about the message this sends to others -- that since Stevie suddenly spent massively to try and coerce his way to meeting someone who could release the domain his company probably doesn't really need, that this is acceptable behavior we should all try.

Just because a person is highly accomplished and respected doesn't mean that person can't be mentally ill. John Nash Jr was.
The Interactive Aesthetic
Workaround: delete the app from your iTunes library first, then download the 'clean' version of 2.0 rather than the update.

[edit] Direct Link: https://itunes.apple.com/app/gmail/id422689480
DumbTable Gets A Menu Demo App
How to give wife emergency access to logins, passwords, etc.?
Though this is cool, I'm not entirely sure what this is good for. How will we use these portals?
Think of the verdant fields that could be reduced to red dust!

Truly, an environmental catastrophe. They could render the planet uninhabitable. :(
JavaScript Performance Analysis: Sampling, Tracing, and Timing
Lifehacker say [1] that it's Apple having pulled the update for some reason. No idea if that's true, but...

EDIT: They changed their tune to just "there must be a lot of traffic for this update".

[1]: http://lifehacker.com/5965550/gmail-for-ios-gets-a-completel...
Haha, I also noticed this on their website:

"Everyone throws gigabytes and megabytes around, but what do they really mean?"

It's a mystery!

Not really catering to the "Hacker News" crowd...
I don't know if this story is illustrative, helpful, or whatever. But to me it's a damn fine read.
Can't access the app in the app store.
I wish more of these were actually launched instead of just coming soon.

As an iPhone/Mac developer, Objective-Cloud is very interesting to me.

A few of the other apps, (I wouldn't call most of them startups) look pretty nice as well.
Sort of off-topic but I thought that the use of "take a punt" was interesting. Before I realized he was European, I thought it a strange phrase. Obviously in (soccer) football, taking a punt (a kick to try to score) would be a good thing, but it first registered to me as an (American) football reference of punting (rather than going for a touchdown).
A few interesting studies have been conducted on money and happiness. Here's a summary of one of them - http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/09/090907142345.ht...
The minimum number should be 0.

In most places, it is. That said, I think most CS PhDs -- and definitely most strong CD PhDs -- will have a few publications in top conferences. This has several benefits:

(1) communicating your results -- few people read entire theses.

(2) getting feedback from the community, both in the form of PC reviews and feedback from the conference attendees.

(3) as a way to checkpoint your work on individual sub-projects, and to act as a forcing function.

Trying to "require" independent publications as part of a PhD seems silly, but having publications is definitely a good thing IMHO.
It seems fon requires you already have an isp connection. Fon allows you to share it with others. The balance is that on a trip you will be able to access fon hotspot for free (?). Here Karma embeds a 4G connection, AFAIU. Am I correct?
The new Gmail app for iPhone and iPad
Functional programming does shun mutable state. It just doesn't make it impossible.

Functional programming is a style of programming which uses the lambda calculus as its base model of computation. Just because you can subvert that at times doesn't mean that idiomatic code doesn't disapprove of breaking referential transparency.
Ludwick Marishane: A bath without water
No disrespect to someone I have never met. I am frustrated that you pretend there is a symmetric equivalence between macro hedge fund investing and the world of private placements. Mathematically it couldnt be farther from your silly damned if you do solipsism. It is not Thiel I mind, it is his accolytes.
Obviously in the case of an unpromising startup, you don't care, but how does that 200k+ change your perception of a potentially promising startup? You've blogged a bit about this before, but have you ever asked yourself (or the applicants) "Why are these guys even sitting in front of us?"
Fortrabbit's pricing
I always suspected the real money in this sort of plan is selling the devices to people who think they're going to make money by reselling access. The timing of this announcement is particularly interesting to me, since I just wrote about the "selling pickaxes" model over the weekend. Strange.
Maybe, Amway wifi? Pyramid sharing? One way to kick off ad hoc suburban networks...

> The average person uses only 500MB, per device, per month.

I used 19GB last month, without even trying. To be fair, that's at home, not on a mobile "device".
After reviewing both pages I think you're 100% correct.
Things In Economics That Everybody Should Know
My understanding is that Waterloo has been a Microsoft and RIM software talent poaching ground for over a decade. The Waterloo Engineering and CS programs are known for their extremely high quality and rigour.

The recent string of higher profile alumni successes reinforces this reputation and serves as a beacon for Canadian high-school graduate intake. Now if only they would do something about the concrete jungle they call their campus :)
"I implore you to fail—intentionally" In Defense of Failure, an essay on failure
Does anyone know if this is a native app, html5 app, or a hybrid of the two? I could have sworn that the previous version of this app was at least partially done in HTML5 because of the way the ui would re-render itself occasionally.
The Universe Is Not a Computer
I don't know if recs are weighted based on that particular recommender's history, but they are definitely weighted based on how well the recommender knows the applicant, and how strong the recommendation is.

I still recommend that applicants seek out YC alumni when applying, but this is because they will give you good feedback on your application and advice on the interview process, not because their recommendation of someone they met once over coffee will move the needle.
Maybe if there are notable speed improvements it will replace default Mail as my go to app for e-mail.
> You can now login to up to five Google Accounts

Why a limit as low as 5?
In my rather limited experience this doesn't work.

Ex: Say you are working on just one feature for your company's software.

Most people, including myself, aren't able to sit for 8-10 hours a day in front of the computer working on just one problem. Your brain turns to goo, you start getting easily distracted and your productivity drops through the floor. I'd say at most I can sit in front of a debugger for 3 hours, and that's on particularly good day.

People need to be able to switch their brains to other work when they get overwhelmed or get stuck.

More interesting is the opposite problem of having too many things to do. At some point you never get to focus on any one of feature and you end up not getting anywhere.
When Apps Meet Cloud Storage: Tectonic Shift Ahead
Women&&Tech: New Infographic on Paid Maternity Leave
Programming
Hi I am Shalin Shah and I am a 13 year old kid who just started coding. I started web design 4 months ago and created middleschoolnotes.org and now I am learning Objective-C (http://www.shalinvs.tk/learning-objective-c-day-one) and I built Ideya (ideyaapp.tk). I would like some advice on how I can be a really great programmer. I really enjoy coding and I want to be the best at it so I decided to ask somewhere where everyone is really good. Thanks!
I had an image of what this was before I clicked the link but I was disappointed.

Here's my idea: No hardware required. You share your existing connection (mobile or not). It's public except the user needs to give you some sort of token that you can't forge and shows how much time they used. In turn you can use those tokens to get time on other people's wifi.

Basically "pay it forward" with a little bit of abuse prevention. Maybe the tokens are BitCoin, but it would probably work better if it was a little more "karma" like and the accounting wasn't so strict.
Where is "Press for human support" button?
Awwwww...
Do many people need more than that?
Seems like they already pulled it? I have it in my Updates section in the app store; but tapping "update" gives "The item you tried to buy is no longer available".
Well you can mutate anything you want in FP as long as it's the end of the stack (via function calls or return values).
I've seen some of the past top commenters on How-To Geek and Ars Technica forums. But there's nothing that really replicates the old Lifehacker. Reddit's LifeProTips might be good eventually, but there is a significant amount of noise since it isn't curated like a blog.
The Vestas Sailrocket becomes the fastest sailboat on Earth (65 knots average)
Thanks. This worked for me.
Winning for Waterloo hackathon or global hackathon? it's not clear in the article
I'm rooting for you. Great story, the only thing missing is a happy end. Keep it going - almost sad to see that the pessimists and skeptics have taken over in this discussion.
That's true for gadgets and some other industries, engineering of some things that makes the world go on, like container ships and cars are another matter in which the West has long ceased to be the sole leader, even in design.

Aerospace and software are industries the West still dominates though. Since HN tends to focus on those this is a common impression for people here, it's not in some other industries.

I think the PRC do have technology and money to put things in outerspace in the near future, what they do not have yet is the know-how.
Facebook's global university hackathon.
I removed it from my device to try a fresh install, but can't find it in the App Store at all.
Hopefully we'll see improvements in videogames, which I understand are among the harder type of program to multithread.
Last time I checked, I don't think craigslist was the place to go to avoid scams.

eBay has a fairly reliable system in place, even if there's occasional issues. craigslist is filled with scammers.
There were 17 teams apparently, here's a better article: http://thenextweb.com/facebook/2012/12/01/facebook-universit...