skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The 12 Days of Geek Gifts: Keep Calm and Geek On  
12 days of gifts for both guy and girl geeks. From bacon shaving creme to app pillows, pocket watches to Instagram phone cases, this list has got something for every aspect of your life. So let's geek out!
Implementing Realtime in Streak Using the AppEngine Channel API
Are you sure people actually use Twitter according to the model of usage you have derived using only the maximum number of characters in a tweet? (They don't.)

I'm actually not a fan of the 140 limit, but you can fit a joke in there. You can do multiple tweets in a row. Most tweets aren't links. Links that do get posted are shortened, true, but through a bit of cleverness the original URL is preserved. People get creative, because that's what people do.

If you don't want to use Twitter, that's certainly understandable. But this distanced reasoning about it, like Twitter is some giant hiding in the woods, it's very strange.
Sorta sad, seeing as this site performs way better than HN ever has. Is HN hosted on Heroku or something? It's SLOW as hell for me all the time...
I use it as a super wire service, I follow thousands of news organizations organized by lists, it's pretty cool for news junkies and journalists. I never tweet anything though, I don't see the point.
While Waterloo often does seem to be about 178.72% male, parts of engineering are at parity (chem eng was 50/50 a few years back) and there are entire other faculties with lots of lovely people for you to make friends with.
I'm curious, how did you et into the 'speaking business'? It seems a lot of these conferences only invite people to speak who have already spoken at large conferences. I did a talk at a local usergroup (5 people attended) and I loved it. I want to give talks at bigger conferences, but my proposals always get rejected. It seems once the ball is rolling, it just keeps rolling. Got any advice?
Netflix signs licensing agreement with Disney
The fire exit issue is a separate one: The reason emergency exits need to open out is that you can't count on being able to take a step back and open the door in a panic. In non-panic situations (practically all of them), doors work equally well opening in or out.
I'm not sure what gives you this idea. I've found jruby tool support lacking a bit - for example guard-spork doesnt work, guard-jruby has been broken for months. This tells me jruby is outside the mainstream, which matches other observations of the Gemfiles used in many projects which do not support jruby.
Which is fine by me, it's one of the better gamepads I've used in a while and its widespread adoption makes for good prices and speaks well for future use.
"Hard wiring" means running conductors to the service panel or subpanel. Plugging in to a recepticle outlet is not hard wiring.

In addition, solar panels have their own increasingly complex electrical requirements due to the unique life safety risks they present, i.e. they cannot be readily deenergized during daylight hours. In situations involving emergency response personnel, pulling the service meter or throwing a main breaker does not eliminate the risk of electrocution. Likewise, during routine building repairs and maintenance portions of the electrical service are likely to remain live.
> That's a huge plus of iOS being a developer, you can safely target year old releases without a problem.

I'd say the big plus is that you can safely target only the newer releases without a problem, because power users just rush out and buy the newest iPhone when it comes out.

I got an iPhone 4S in June, and I'm already getting told that I can't upgrade certain applications because I'm not running iOS6 on an iPhone 5.
HTML is inherently bad for print because of the pixel-inches transition... I'm not sure how quark gets around that, but it's a serious issue.

What CSS/HTML does Quark support?
Congratulations, Thomas! And Thank you for sharing the knwledge! - @MarlonRibunal
Hey guys, I'm with SocialEngine - we are helping Brad build this community. First off, want to thank you all for the helpful feedback here.

- We've toned down the colors. Look better?
- Sounds like you guys feel that the right-side gutter isn't serving a good purpose? Should we just ditch that?
- We are going to tone down the BigDoor plugin.

This is still, at its core, an experiment. It definitely isn't perfect yet - the underlying platform is only 2 months old - so your feedback is really helping us... please keep it coming!
Quienes Somos - Don Pako Sex Shop
Great contribution, my point is still valid regardless of what you think of me... you, on the other hand, didn't make a useful point.

To say Adobe is tied to Postscript unlike Quark comes across as fanboy-ism. Given adobe are heavily invested in HTML. That said the OP clarified what he means by Desktop Publishing and it makes more sense.
These colors are from Greatist's Brand Guidelines!
Oh, did you mean the title of the HN post? Whoops.
I'm currently a CS student and kind of like the idea of doing Hacker School for Summer 2013 or 2014, but could never afford the living expenses. Why do you only do scholarships for Women?
Might be bugs - we'll look into these right now!
Show HN: See what Apps your friends are using on iPhone in real-time
Whether Digital Newspapers Succeed is up to Apple
http://www.techvibes.com/blog/the-dark-world-of-newsstand-2012-12-04
Transactional Email: Not Just for Developers
In the section "What about attribute names?" I think they get it wrong by saying that camel case would be better than snake case because it would make more sense in Javascript that way.

The issue I take with that is you can't assume your API consumer is using Javascript at all. Thus, making it camel case might look right in Javascript or many other languages, but weird in Ruby.

There are a lot of good ideas here, but I think the author messed up on that assumption. A huge portion of modern API usage is in Objective-C, Java, PHP, Ruby, C#. So, attribute naming could be valid as FooBar, fooBar, or foo_bar.

I think the right point would be to be consistent in attribute naming style. Pick one format and use that.

Designing your API to be consumed by one language is mostly foolish unless you are the only one using the API.
Who ever said forms should be boring?
Today's modern websites & applications embrace the rich front-end features that HTLM5, CSS3, Responsive design and Javascript animation offer.

So why has this trend been mostly overlooked when it comes to forms? Who ever said that a survey has to be functional and boring?

There is a new service called www.typeform.com that thinks otherwise. I would be interested to know what people think and expand on the topic of responsive webform design.
Only lawyers and realtors, from my experience
The site says you shouldn't host your private data on certain free services because they show you ads, so they recommend instead using free services that don't show you ads?

This is an unfair characterization of the reasoning in the article. The main point isn't whether or not a service shows you ads. For example, the suggested e-mail provider, Lavabit, shows ads to certain classes of users.

Rather, the point is whether the service sells your information to advertisers, or mines your information-- including the contents of any messages you send via the service. Often this data mining is done in order to target advertisements at you, but the targeted ads, per se, are not the point.

For example, the main objection to Google Search isn't that they use the information to target advertisements (it even admits that doing so may allow Google to serve you more useful ads). Instead, the stated rationale for using DDG is "if you're worried about the amount of data collected on your browsing habits..."

Others on this discussion have pointed out that a lot of people are willing to make that exchange (trade off a little privacy in exchange for a good service). That's fair. But the article is clearly written for those who want to limit the inspection and selling of their personal information, not those who want to avoid advertising.

Oddly, the second part of your post shows that you understand the distinction. But I think any conflation of the two (advertising and privacy) is in your reading of the article, not in the article itself.
Here are my tips:

1. Don't try to write jokes into the presentation. It won't be funny. It will only be funny if the joke comes to you on the spot.

2. Try to write the talk in terms of vague concepts instead of specific wording. WHen practicing, don't worry about how you're going to express a certain concept, just focus on understanding the concept inside and out. Every time I give a talk, the words come out a little bit differently each time. This keeps the talk from sounding robotic.
What problem are you having with registration?
The best replacements would be local applications under one's full control that seamlessly sync all data on a peer-to-peer network encompassing all of one's devices -- desktop PC, tablet, phone, etc. Alas, AFAIK, such applications don't exist yet.

The next-best replacements would be paid services that work with all of one's devices, but transmit and store one's data only after it has been encrypted, with the private keys fully under one's control. Alas, AFAIK, such services don't exist yet.

As a compromise, I would pay for a decent integrated alternative to Google's Gmail, Contacts, and Calendar that doesn't use my private data for anything else and works across all of my devices (Linux desktop, tablet, phone). Alas, AFAIK, such an alternative doesn't exist yet.

Only a tiny number of people today care enough about their privacy to worry about it, so companies have no financial incentive to do much in this regard (except as required by law).
Sketch Toy
Done. Better now?
Would it necessarily be much worse than falling on a motorcycle at relatively low speeds?
There is a product called Knappsack that I have been using to help with this problem... www.knappsack.com . Gives you a private app store, cross-platform, open source or SaaS.
How can we make it better?
You forgot to read all the text you just copied:

"we mention this not because our language design is focused on performance, but merely to point out that heavy use of reference immutability, ...has not come at the cost of performance in the experience of the Microsoft team."

Stop trolling
Zapier co-founder here: we love bringing tools traditionally "for developers" to folks who are less code inclined. It is really awesome to see our users sending transactional emails via tools like Mailgun/Mandril/SendGrid.
Changing the login experience
Imagine you're a user whose "blog" is facebook, and primarily sends texts, tweets, and 2-line status updates / comments. Email is like paper mail, used as an archive for official documents / notices, or used on the work computer for work things, and rarely replied to ("Why did you email me? Just text me or facebook me." aka "Why did you send me a real letter?").

This sounds like a hypothetical, right? My brother's laptop broke for a year, and he was fine on his phone until it was recently replaced.
Take a look at open web apps / chrome apps / phonegap / the Firefox OS project (I work on the latter). The line between apps and websites is getting thinner by the day, and getting very close to being non existent.

Also the 'apps are an island' comment is quite specific to iOS, Android has a very elegant system for allowing apps to interact with each other, one which the web is adopting (web intents/activities).

The basic premise is the wrong way round, web apps will adopt native functionality (web api's) and native performance (which already good enough for most use cases), they will (and can often already do) work offline.

'Native' apps are almost by definition going to have to be rewritten for every platform and will never have the same introspection and interconnectedness as the web.

Which platform do you think is going to fix its disadvantages first? seems obvious to me.
The proper solution to this problem is for content providers to build a properly responsive site. Allowing apps to access browser cookies isn't going to fix anything - the reason that a native app doesn't open to the place you left off on the web is not because it's technically impossible, it's because app developers don't give a damn. Giving them more tools isn't going to change this.
Why would you do that? I would bin any application that looked that way automatically.
Reddit makes rage-reading* extremely convenient and efficient with its downvote button. I realised recently that I dislike half of the posts I see on reddit, but I don't mind because I feel like I'm doing something worthwhile by downvoting them.

* Personally I don't get enraged, just annoyed.
Great write up! Thanks very much.
the problem is some things are very hard to moderate, so they are better off being cut entirely.
They do have an ecosystem but it's built on top of a platform they've open sourced. Also, you are allowed to load apps manually into the phone so you aren't really tied into their ecosystem.
Your "how to follow the advice right" looks exactly like mjd's point "Don't repeat; embellish".
I find girl/boy toy segregation sad too, but I'm a woman and when I was 4 my first post-Duplo Lego sets were the early 80s "Lego Fabuland" series: anthropomorphic animal minifigs in gingerbread-looking houses with furniture and cookers and tiles with pictures of food on.

A few years later I was asking for every Lego Space set going and building planes and spaceships. The Fabuland bricks went in the big Lego bucket and would sometimes be repurposed as space station decor. So as an introduction to Lego for younger girls I don't really see a problem with it... though I'd prefer them to be less overwhelmingly pink.
Happy to discuss any questions the HN community has about our site!
Compostable all-natural water filters
The solar wind is a few nT, while Earth's field is tens of uT. You're not going to be moving anything with that.
Why oh why must blogspot.com break the _back_ button, of all things?
This is perfect timing for a video streaming solution I've been working on.

I'm trying to build a video capture program and a google tv app that talk to each other so I can stream video around our LAN. The video capture box would probably be in the $1000 range. Then each tv that wants to see that stream would only need a $100 Vizio Google TV box and the private android app. Now that I know I can build an app that won't be in the public Play store, but will be accessible easily to accounts on our domain, I can make that app much more specific.

I could see this being really popular with companies who use a lot of TVs for signage. The first thing that comes to mind for me is all the TVs in airports showing departure and arrival information.
This is going to be incredibly useful for me.

I'm not familiar with the Apple or Windows Phone platforms. Do they have anything similar?
> it is the attitude that "Under no circumstances should considerations beyond profit exist".

But that's a strawman. Companies are ultimately guided by the concern for profit - but they can only make a profit (long term) by providing a value to all their stakeholders. Of course companies can some times profit in the short term by screwing over one group of stakeholders, but generally they only get to do that once per stakeholder group.

> The rest of us say, oh there is this government tool, and there look, it solves the problem without contortion.

Hardly. Yes, it can solve the problem (it's hardly a rule that government actually solves the problems it takes on). But even the problems that can reasonably be said to be solved, there are more often than not some unintended consequences.
Developer challenge My attempt at a few programming problems.
Does anyone know if this is, or will be, powered by microformats?
here's a tip for you: because twitter will delete your account if you deactivate it for more than a month, you can use a strong password generator to lock yourself out of the account to try taking a break.
Spanx's Sara Blakely: Turning $5,000 into $1 billion with panties
Prior to 9.1, you couldn't include information in the notification. So you could prevent the listening threads from polling the table looking for work, but you'd still have the race condition. I don't know whether being able to include information in the notification is sufficient to prevent the race condition either. I suppose if you notified with the ID of the entry, and the IDs are evenly distributed across integers you could do modular arithmetic with the thread IDs but you'll have to coordinate among the threads. I also don't know what sort of guarantees Postgres makes about notification delivery.

My intuition is that this isn't enough to bypass the problem, because it addresses the polling side rather than the enqueuing/dequeuing side. But that doesn't mean there isn't a clever way to put this to use.
I made two just for fun: http://teespring.com/football and http://teespring.com/starwars - note my good urls, not sure that teespring has enough SEO for that to matter tho...
icewater: Ninjaquote was our winning project for the regional Waterloo Hackathon. It was a name chosen at the (nearly) last minute, when the domain with the name that we originally wanted wasn't available. :) -- Jinny
The best part of this is of course the piece of generic template at the bottom. :)

If you want to read about what I've learned about the software business, leadership, and team-building, follow me on Twitter.
I think it's just lame that a site like this could be accused of copyright infringement, unless it's a text-only post or a comment. Linking to copyrighted material should not be illegal - the DMCA takedown notice should have to be directed at the linked site, not the linking site. It's not YC's job (or Google's job) to fight copyright infringement by policing their indexes.

But more importantly, it shouldn't be the job of small organizations with few resources to have to create a DMCA policy like this, much less enforce it.
I like characterizing the investment in a startup for preferred stock as a bond with an out of the money option. That is certainly the sort of expectation I hear about from investors. Sort of a "well we'll get our money back at $X, may money at $Y, and kill it at $Z" sorts of things.

I don't know that I agree with hiding your valuation. Like it or not those big valuations lend a certain credibility to a company when it knocks on the door of an established entity. If 'some startup' wants to talk to a city about how its regulation of the livery business is not good for its citizens, it might not get the time of day, but if a $2B company comes calling? Sometimes it seems like that is the difference between them taking the meeting or not.

I could certainly see this as solid advice if you're just beavering away at a killer product company, but if part of your strategy is going to require influencing the public or a market segment, then sometimes this sort of 'validation' can be very helpful.
Allowing apps to access browser cookies is a solution to the problem that apps and websites are disconnected and don't know about each other's state. That's a different aspect than the one you're talking about.

Yes, you can build responsive sites, but what you can do in the browser is limited, especially when it comes to flaky connections that are still very typical. To take the example in the post a little bit further: Imagine you're on the train and are reading a multi-page New York Times article. Train goes into a tunnel. Trying to load the next page will result in a connection error. Native apps can know about your network state and can pre-cache content you're about to read next.
Indeed, big things in the pipeline!
I don't get why music sites feel cover art is so important. It is so generic and interchangeable

Uh, because I want to brand my offerings in a distinctive fashion?
I never got the impression that DF was single-threaded due to theoretical constraints, only that the game was originally single-threaded and that refactoring to make use of multiple threads is just too difficult for a lone developer on such a sprawling codebase.
It should also be noted that several programs at UW are offered in the regular sense (i.e. no co-op) as well. Engineering is the only faculty with mandatory co-op for all undergraduates.
I don't have an iPhone, but on it's face this seems like a very scary idea. They say they select from a database, but does that mean that I can whitelist what apps are shared with the server, or is some random person going to see everything I do?

Also, the unstyled privacy page is a bit offputting:
http://appmap.mobi/privacy
Alum from the third batch here. In the hopes that I can convince someone else to apply, my story:

I applied to hacker school, on a whim, while I was working on a php app at an advertising company in Boston. I didn't think I would get in, and I hadn't made any plans to support spending three months in NY. When I got in, I decided to drop everything, and left a month later on the dot. It may have been the best decision of my life to date.

Going in, I was a programmer, but I wasn't very good. Hacker school was so transformative, so incredibly valuable that three months later I was accepting an offer at Stripe, where I am now.

The strange thing is - the value doesn't come from lectures, or workshops, or anything like that. Hacker school is valuable because it gives you the space to grow into your full potential on your own. Just having three months where I could dabble and play in the company of similarly-minded people was the best thing for me, and it's hard to overstate how much I learned.

Do it! Apply! I don't know of a better way to spend three months.
Great links, it's a solid place to kickstart an idea.
I think he means "enjoy the benefits of acid" as in LSD. Not much of a pun.
So it's a geo location-enhanced "most popular apps" list, essentially?
If a company sells both services (hardly unusual) and a client of theirs sends a fax to another, I wonder if the system calls itself... ;)
I'm having a hard time understanding how that website is any different from reddit.com/r/startups. Sure, it looks different, but the content is the same. The reason I visit HN is for the people commenting here, not the actual posts. Even the simplest thread can spark an interesting discussion from physics to business. I fail to see how that site will try to build such atmosphere. The desgin is also too busy, looks like a wordpress blog with one too many plug-ins.
How does this work? iOS has permissions to see other running applications?
Netflix gets pay-TV rights to Disney movies
Both iOS and Android allow apps interacting with each other. iOS has URL schemes, Android has Intents which are obviously far more elegant. There are tricks you can play to have apps intercept web page visits on Android [1], but other than that, web apps are disconnected from native apps.

[1] Intent Filters: http://developer.android.com/reference/android/content/Inten...
False. There are many women in Waterloo, of which I am one. My chemical engineering class was about 32% female, but many of the programs at Waterloo have more women than male in them.
Exactly, if you are careful you are safe. But it takes just one mistake to get caught. For example, if you have javascript activated (without it most of the web is useless), you could get fingerprinted, and then make a match with facebook or gmail, or if you are already a suspect, just get raided and make the match there. I don't know exactly how these guys I mentioned got caught, they probably did something stupid like logging in to a website with a real account. If I remember correctly, the news article only said that the police started running an exit node and sniffing the data that went out.
How do they collect this data, technically?
That doesn't really start for a long, long time. If you just keep good toys around they'll take to them. If they really just don't like building then you find something else but in my experience just exposure to toys is a great starting place.