skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The OLPC programs was INSANE. First, there's lots of power in the third world - a hand crank is a crazy idea and makes it look like a toy while adding mechanical complexity.

Well, the hand-crank didn't work out, and they admitted that.

I disagree though that there is a lot of power in the third world. Looked at from an absolute cost as well as a relative-to-income cost, electricity is quite expensive for a large percentage of the world's population. Just look at Pakistan, for example. [1] Its much worse in other parts of the world. A lot of the slums surrounding major cities don't officially exist, so they don't officially get basic services (water, sewage, power) either.

So the OLPC project, rather than rely on cheap off-the-shelf hardware, tried to radically reduce power consumption for the people living effectively off the grid.

They were also concerned about the lack of wired/wireless communications infrastructure in these areas. So that drove the push for wireless peer-to-peer networking, and the need for the networking to run even while the rest of the board is powered down. And that drives a radically different board design, and thereby the BIOS too.

These days, it is feasible to accomplish many of their same goals with tablets, and that's what they've been working on. There was no significant low-power computer market back in 2007 to draw upon. Now there is.

If these third world countries all had decent mobile data infrastructure (at least 2G), and everybody could at least afford a phone or something to access the Internet, then the OLPC project wouldn't be needed. That definitely was not the case in 2007, and is still not the case in 2012 for many parts of the world.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_Pakistan
It's also a (moderately) higher barrier to entry, so it's less likely to be aggressively used by heavy-handed copyright holders.

Though in practice, fax has turned into this bastard child of excessive analog-to-digital conversion, at least among newer companies. Senders email their attachment to an email-to-fax service, which sends it over POTS to a fax-to-email service converting it back into a PDF and emailed as an attachment to the recipient.
Well, I appreciate your upvote ;)

More seriously, I think the tone of the comments on HN is not supposed to be binary: we don't aim for solely critical or supportive feedback. We try to improve things by offering suggestions. That my comment made it to the top means my suggestions were widely viewed as useful, or at least my criticism was accurate.

The magnitude of the negative sentiment isn't really important. It's the fact that, if the creator values HN's input, he should accept suggestions more-or-less from the top down, and weight them appropriately. If he scrolls to the bottom to see some generic 'Good work man, way to hustle', he doesn't really get it, does he?
Yes, I have used them heavily and just like any other tool you need to know when to use it. You fully misunderstand my statement, and that is probably my fault for being succinct. I wasn't saying that parallelism is the one-all solution, but rather I wouldn't shrug the research off as fallacy when they have a history of delivering.
Someone specifically requested the feature on the issue tracker, and since it was a one line tweak, I added it in :)
Is that a childs' handwriting?
Is it feasible to write Ruby without knowing English? Despite its origin, I would have thought that's the one language all users have in common, since the standard library and all the builtins use it. I suppose someone bilingual could publish a gigantic monkey-patch that renames everything, but a quick search didn't lead me to anything like that.
Exciting New Relationship with Disney
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Troll_(Internet)
Hàng Xách Tay Đức
Heads Up: Watch out for Data Lock-in
Fax usage in the United States is a small fraction of what it is in Japan.

I haven't received (or sent) a fax in 2+ years, and I used to deal with them (multiple times) every day in 2003.
I'm of the opinion that you learn way more by actually doing things at a start-up, small business, or Facebook or Google, and that Waterloo is great for giving you the opportunity to do that. Sure, the lectures are useful for theory of computing and algorithms, but if you're here wanting to learn how to program or how to write SQL, you're wasting your money and time.

That said, the last UOttawa student I knew who transferred to Waterloo failed their first term here, so don't do it just because people on HN said so.
Times have sure changed:
http://web.archive.org/web/20050331050049/http://ycombinator...
They also use pagers. Crazy.
At least andrewkkirk wasn't the one that submitted it.
Interesting--there is an email address listed. Wonder what happens if you email your notification there? Presumably, if you do, you are in compliance with the statute, regardless of the no-email policy, so they would have to do the takedown.
Also, there's one workflow which is still easier by fax than email: receive it, physically sign it with a pen, send it back with the signature.
Business success should not trump creativity: Pandora isn't playing fair
Null + Type Checking: The Bad, The Ugly, and The Good
Technically, they've won both. To qualify for the global hackathon, they had to win the local one first.
Only if you subscribe to a narrow, business-school centric, "very serious" view of business.
OnLive's protocol seems to be far more willing to sacrifice frames and quality to keep everything in sync; where AirPlay will (in my experience) hold up the stream until every last frame gets through, sync be damned. Also, AirPlay doesn't modify apps or input at all to compensate for the lag to the TV.
I'm submitting this because it appears to be in direct opposition to this that was on the front page of HN a while ago: http://blog.pandora.com/pandora/archives/2012/10/pandora-and...

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4633842
It might have just been filled out on a tablet.

When I had to fill out all my job paperwork for my new job, I used pdfpen on my iPad for everything, and it looks like it was written by a toddler in crayon.
Sounds like an i18n nightmare waiting to happen; in some locales, the comma is the period and vice versa.
Random question for someone way more experienced with this than me...!

With Bootstrap i've never figured out, am i supposed to hack the bootstrap less directly or am i supposed to treat bootstrap as a vendor library and craft my styles separately on top?

The latter seems to be the case, but can't be sure.

Also i've not seen a definitive list of what styles are available with a description of what they're used for, e.g. "jumbotron" appeared in a recent release of bootstrap but i wasn't sure where it could be used or what for.
I don't feel this at all, but do I think it's easy to cultivate your way into a corner with opt-in social media, especially if you come at it from an "industry" angle where you're following a lot of people stuck in the same echo chamber with little diversity in their messaging.

In fact I deliberately counter that by diluting my stream with lots of people of minor interest, or people writing in languages I don't know, so that the timeline is big and noisy and nobody's voice comes off as being particularly loud(if they are outrageously spammy I do tend to drop them though). Over 1000 followed now.

Yes, there's a subset that I care more about, but I don't try to lock it down. The point is that it goes both ways; I will use Twitter to say relatively less interesting/valuable things if I perceive it as a smaller thing than it is.
Not that much: http://ycombinator.com/legal.html
Amazing 9 month old twins swimming
Thanks! I'm not a make expert by any means, so any improvements are welcome.. I just did the minimum amount to make it faster.

I knew the wildcards would expand, but the subsequent expansions would have their dependencies fulfilled by the first one of them that triggered the commands, so it should short circuit (however you are right, it will be wonky under -j).

I left the "build" target in case I submit a pull request upstream and didn't want to completely upset the apple-cart; it's still useful to compile the docs.

Also, I just pushed another update to my repo, just fyi in case you are editing for a pull request.
For me, it's practice. Every month or two, I'll write a comment of high enough quality that I'll turn around and re-post it elsewhere because it captures whatever point I was trying to make much better than I've ever seen it said or previously written. HN delivers the right amount of quality and pseudonymity to give me both the motivation and feedback on how I communicate ideas.
My personal interpretation of the "tell 'em what you're going to be telling them, tell them, and then tell 'em what you told 'em" advice is to never tell people something the same way twice in the same session.

Poor presentations often do something like this:
* You should Foo because of X and Y
* We did Foo because of X and Y
* We've told about Foo. It solves X and Y

More entertaining presentations do something like this:
* Our life was full of problems X & Y - and then we found Foo
* We started doing Foo, which solved X & Y - with bonus Q
* These folk also did Foo - and found bonus Z

Repetition of the topic isn't necessarily bad. Doing it in the same way, or ritually, is.
The rebranding occurred when Google changed it from an Android app store into a one-stop-shop for apps but also books, movies, and other downloadable media.
Also, confusingly (after browsing HN), clicking the link title on the home page brings you to the 'Comments' page (just as clicking '# comments' will). Then, on that page, click the title takes you to the actual article/page.

Not quite what I'm used to.
Heroku doesn't provide Memcache, it's provided by Couchbase or MemCachier.
Correct. But I didn't want to rip out too many egos today - I haven't had breakfast yet.

Being alive today is another important factor. 125 billion people have ever lived - it's just sheer luck that one is born today at all.

Hell there were 250 million sperm at conception and by sheer accident each and everyone of us was born - I'm amazed any one of us is even around.
It takes an extra 8 months to get your degree. Your 4-year degree basically turns into a 5-year degree.
I don't have the original study I read (back in a cognitive development class in college), but I believe this one[0] should suffice. The original was a study that monitored groups of kids playing with toys and found the kids didn't develop a gendered preference until parents began interfering with toy selection. If the parents didn't interfere, they wouldn't develop a gendered preference until school age where they began interacting with other children.

[0]: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1540-4560.1990....
Hmm and RTG like the one Curiosity is using could be used to charge batteries at night and then run growlights during the day. Excess heat could be captured to keep the temperature up. There is a the radiation hazard of course.

A simpler solution is something like that setups that the aquaponics folks run. [1] Basically if you've got electricity (nuclear power) and water (from the soil/ice) you can build pressurized grow room to make food. It would be interesting for these guys to build such a system underground to get an idea of how much external electricity it needed to function.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aquaponics
This. I can't tell you how useful it is to have learned to be completely comfortable doing interviews. Through my co-op experiences, I've probably done 25 to 30 interviews at all sorts of companies, and different styles of interviews. And all this before I graduated. Very useful!
Various elements of the page are being split tested :)
To follow up on Omar's comment - there are some YC startups operating in Canada ;)

Some of those startups know lots of silicon valley companies looking to vet through the crowd of international talent. Working somewhere local is a great place to start.
3D CSS Hartwig chess (Photon.js in the wild)
Australia interest rate cut to 3%
this app looks great, but there could be fewer clicks when it comes to account switching
I love soundcloud, been using it for ages, HOWEVER, I am hating the redesign completely. I am coming from the perspective of being on it everyday for that past two years, and being happy with what it gives me as someone who stores music on it.

People can say UX this and UX that, I was more than comfortable with the previous incarnation, if ain't broke...
..just my 5 cents worth as a disenfranchised user!

..and so I will get used to it eventually!
I love Hacker School. It significantly changed the trajectory of my life. I barely didn't go, but in the end I did and as a result met some of the smartest people that were incredibly passionate about technology. Try and apply - they're incredibly warm, open people and a pleasure to talk to in any case.
In iOS 6 there is a way to open your native app with the same content as the current webpage.

https://developer.apple.com/library/safari/#documentation/Ap...
This is great. So much better than distributing APKs over email or something of that nature. The ability to push secure updates to internal apps through Google's network is gamechanging.
Just about any change can have this effect as long as you perceive the change to be significant.
Or ARPA:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DARPA

Or CERN:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CERN#Computer_science

Or the South Korean tech and steel industries, or...
I took it as a way of making Google's involvement more clear; it's not immediately obvious "Android Market" is Google-related, where "Google Play Store" is.
Hey Danny, I know where you're coming from, I taught myself everything as well and its pretty difficult when you go that route (though personally, I think it makes you better since you learn a ton of stuff along the way you wouldn't otherwise have known). Admittedly I didn't start with web development it was mainly x86/C but I think a lot of problems overlap - I mean I still remember (had no internet then ) reading tons of man pages and looking through c header files trying to find error codes and why gcc was giving me such and such error. So I do feel your frustration :)

One thing though, I don't really see how blogging helps you? Otherwise, I think your ideas are great especially having a mentor or just friends who you can talk to about code and the like. Also an internship or just building complete projects will help tons as well.

best of luck in your endeveours.
Enable HTTP Pipelining in Firefox
The Atlantic's "Year in Photos"
It appears to be unrelated. The lead Gmail iOS designer, Chanpory Rith, has been at Google working on this for most of the year. Not sure about the tech.

http://dribbble.com/shots/843203-Gmail-2-0-Multi-login
I wonder if on a mission to mars you can place a resupply module in the right orbit to allow it to be docked with on the way to mars.
What I still don't understand is how people who use Twitter use it at all? I mean, you can't give much information in 140 chars. So I guess most people post links. Now, if they post links, more than that, shortened links, the only way to follow people is to click on every 140 char message. Which means you don't read, you click and click and you don't even know what you're supposed to get before you click. It's hard to understand for me that people actually do this regularly and why do they bother to actually "follow" the tweets?

Can anybody explain me what's that that I don't understand?
Are we allowed to submit DMCA Counter-Notifications by email, or do we still need to use (fax or regular mail) to do so?
How I Passed the SQL Server 2008 MCM Exams
Why Dave Balter loves investing in startups
MySQL Local/Remote Account Password Cracking
Since writers are journalism majors, not science majors and the pr hierarchy is distinct from the research hierarchy.
you could sort by zipcode.

more similar zipcodes should be closer together.
I think the change isn't in the exact use of the item, but expectations. Did the 80's Nintendo generation (me) expect more or less video games in their adult lives, compared to other types of recreation?

Kids won't do work on the wii... but will they expect (or demand) that devices be motion-aware by default? Screens be touchable by default? Have 10-hour battery life by default? Be comfortably handheld by default?

Think about how downtime has evolved. This century we went from "I'm bored, let me grab a newspaper" to "I'm bored, what's on the radio?" to "I'm bored, what's on TV?" to "I'm bored, what's on the desktop computer?" to "I'm bored, what's on my phone/tablet?"

The earlier industries are dead or stagnant (newspaper/radio), regular TV (at a specific time, interrupted by commercials) is on its way out, the growth is in the new form factor/experience Microsoft is barely relevant in. That's the nightmare.
>My proposal would be to let mobile browsers download small apps and execute them within the browser window

Is this a sick joke? Besides the fact that the browser can trivially redirect to the exact app in the app store, I'm already annoyed that ABC wants me to download their god damn app everytime I accidentally click on one of their articles on Google News.

Not only that, but if the user has the app installed they're already prompted to open the same content with the app instead of the browser if they want.

This problem is already solved. This is very, very common in Android apps and I understand it is a new feature in iOS6 as well.

I guess if this is absolutely necessary, the browser could output a new header for domains that are declared in the .ipa/.apk that would notify the server that they have the app installed... and then they could force the app to open with a regular redirect. But that still majorly SUCKS to users who already have that choice anyway. If anything this gives the publisher more control of forcing me to use their app which I absolutely do not want.
U.S. fails to win early limit on Net controls at global gathering
Interesting. From today's page source:

<!-- | <a href="legal.html">Etc</a> -->
Org-mode is a good option for generating slides. You can also write your outline in normal markdown and use Pandoc[1], which is also very good.

[1]: http://johnmacfarlane.net/pandoc/

While Beamer is fine, you can also generate HTML-based slides with both Org-mode and Pandoc. You can use MathJax for the math. I personally prefer HTML slides, but it really is a matter of preference. (I also find it easier to customize with CSS than LaTeX.) The real beauty is that you can use the same document to generate both, so it's easy to try each option.

More generally, I find using Org-mode or Markdown far easier than any WYSIWYG program. Life is much easier when you separate the content from its presentation.
> As an Android user that recently downgraded from 4.0 to 2.3, it is frankly infuriating: you can only get the latest GMail app for Android if you are on 3.0+, which leaves the vast majority of Android users stuck with what is now a 4th rate app.

As of this Thursday, Gingerbread is two years old. Why would you downgrade to such an old version? That's comparable to running iOS 4 on an iPhone 3GS. I got an iPhone in June, and I'm already being told that I can't upgrade several applications because I'm not running the latest version of iOS and on the latest iPhone.

Second of all, "vast majority" is a bit of a stretch. 55% are on Gingerbread and 15% on pre-Gingebread[1], but given that Android encompasses a lot of lower-end phones that are simply feature phones as well, that's not really comparable to an iOS, which is used exclusively for smartphones. Many of those users frankly won't care that they're not able to use the latest version of the Gmail application - in fact, they may not be using it at all to begin with.

> Android users stuck with what is now a 4th rate app.

This is a secondary point of yours, but I should add that I don't consider even the Froyo version of Gmail to be a 4th rate app, let alone Gingerbread or beyond. I can name several ways that the Android app outperforms the iOS Gmail app.

[1] http://www.tmonews.com/2012/10/google-releases-october-distr...
If I had this problem - luckily I don't - I'd probably rig it up to a voice-recognition CAPTCHA. "You are trying to reach Pavel Lishin. In order to get his phone to ring, please answer the following question by speaking clearly: What country is Pavel from?"

If they do not know where I am from, they do not know me well enough to call my hypothetical landline.

Shit, I wonder if I could hook that up to Google voice.
previously by kingcope:

http://seclists.org/fulldisclosure/2012/Dec/2

http://seclists.org/fulldisclosure/2012/Dec/4

http://seclists.org/fulldisclosure/2012/Dec/5

http://seclists.org/fulldisclosure/2012/Dec/6

http://seclists.org/fulldisclosure/2012/Dec/8

5 other exploits/weaknesses. i am curious what will come in the next few weeks.
Well folks, I don't think we'll be seeing it on the front page. Perhaps I need to work on my titling.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4872751

Hopefully those who were interested have already had a chance to read it, by now.
I am of the opinion that FP isn't more complex, but rather it makes visible the complexity that was already there.

Edit: This is a very interesting statement, seriously. How easily do we stumble onto a statement whose truth hinges on the purpose of programming languages. There are a lot of ways one can look at this.

For example, the statement may be true but then if failure-to-hide complexity is what's making things hard, something is still making things hard. Reframing someone's problem won't make it go away unless you also hand them a way to deal with it.

Also, isn't whole point of a high level language that it hides complexity appropriately in order to allow the limited human brain to deal with the ungodly complexity of a large computer program? Having to paste ten boiler-plate arguments to a group of functions (when if one was using OO the arguments would be subsumed in the object) might not add complexity to the resulting logical object but without other mitigating factors, it seems to me that such an approach would add to the complexity of the code creation process, which is really the major bottleneck in computer programming, right?
TeMPoraL's comment comes close to my response, but it's not quite what I'd say:

A slide deck is a visual aid. Its only purpose is to be a visual aid. If you want your audience to take a physical memento away with them, don't be lazy: make a separate, physical memento designed to be taken away with them. Your slide deck should be useless after the fact, just like a bullet shell casing is useless after you've fired the bullet.

When you make something, make it with a singular purpose in mind and make it fulfill that purpose well. IIRC, Presentation Zen covered this fairly well; in fact, I'm pretty sure Garr Reynolds is where I got this notion to begin with.
Interesting. Must be in soft-launch - I get "Zip code not in the supported region." This won't be a direct Craigslist competitor as it seems to be aimed at dealer inventories.
As you may not have seen my further updates, I wrote a short bit:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4872751
The site is run as an experiment in internet social behavior. The idea is to see how to keep a growing community feeling small over a long period of time (without actually stagnating). The mod points and submission guidelines http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html aim to prevent the site being overwhelmed with "noise" even though traffic is quite high. Trafic is almost certainly higher than you think. New users get modded down until they be quiet, leave, or learn to stop making jokes that "belong on Reddit". I remember it took me a few months to learn how to write comments that got upvotes, now I'm #51 on the top karma list.

tl;dr I don't think it's a big deal, the site has kept up with new users just fine so far.
Link should also appear on this page:

http://ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html