skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Help 8th graders get Chromebooks so they dont have to use IE
Please help out my wife's fundraiser to raise some money to get a classroom set of Chromebooks for her 8th grade students in Florence Oregon. They can get chromebooks for only $99 each! Do your part and chip in a few bucks.

http://bit.ly/Rrt02J

Use the match code: INSPIRE and donorschoose.org will match up to $100 of your donation.

She tries as much as possible to bring the internet and technology into her lessons and a lot of her class work is done in Google Apps. She has found that the students respond very well to this and the ability to do their work on their own time or remotely on their own devices means they engage more.

But my wife's classroom currently only has 2 old windows XP machines, with floppy drives. FLOPPY DRIVES! The students don't even know what they are! This means she has to jockey for position with the just as decrepit computer lab or the one set of old windows laptops the school has (that are really slow and run IE!)

So bring some christmas cheer to some 8th graders, and help make sure no child is forced to use IE!
Tiny EEG chip, mHealth infographic and more
Wow, that's fascinating. I occasionally tell some of my friends that it wouldn't hurt to pick up programming, but I never expect anyone to actually go do it. I like the idea of this school. They can learn a very marketable skill in a short (and intense) period of time and repent for their sins of majoring in something like comparative literature. (I'm just kidding, I love literature and I'm greatful there are people who understand it more than I do)
Vegas Jelly on Thursday nights at the Beat Coffeehouse
Understanding DevOps – Part 5: Infrastructure as Code
This is an excellent move by Yahoo and a sign of real fundamental change within the company. Having super intelligent, capable people leading the company and on the board is the only possible catalyst to transform the company from the lethargic political fustercluck that it has been for many years.
Android doesn't really have that many layers. It often comes off more complex than it really is, mostly from pretty good design work on the Android designers side.

Calculations:
CPU
- Dalvik VM doing JIT into ARM ASM

Graphics:
GPU
- OpenGL/Drivers
-- (a) Directly running OpenGL calls (native)
-- (b) Dalvik VM doing JIT
--- Semi-lightweight translation of 2D drawings

You don't really lose more than a couple percent on the 'many layers' compared to writing raw assembler, aside from using Android's View framework which is about as performant as most GUI toolkits in most situations.
Why a taser? Couldn't they just slap her in handcuffs and escort her out of the store?

Protocol. It took awhile before the second officer arrived. She resisted arrest for 15 minutes. The alternative at that point is to either use a club or hand-to-hand combat.

Legally (depending on the jurisdiction), and IANAL, only the taser is considered to be less-than-lethal. Clubs are lethal. Hand-to-hand combat is often considered lethal force and undesirable because of the risks to both the officers and the uncooperative subject.

I have two relatives working as either guards or wardens in maximum security prisons. By law they use tasers first. Any usage of hand-to-hand or extendable batons is treated the same as if it were a gun. Less paperwork and investigation with tasers. Maybe it is the same in Boston.
The confirmation e-mail doesn't have any link back to the website. Hopefully your weekly messages do, it's where most of us will look for a link if we want to share it with others.
I always found all of those 'fun' elements of GitHub to be sort of patronizing. It took extra effort for me to get past all of that 'fun' gloss to appreciate what a powerful tool it could be.

That's what makes design so challenging. Both you and I want to use the product and have legitimate but different tastes. New homepage looks like an improvement to me.
> Unbounded self-assurance is the doorway to destructive optimism.

That's a bit melodramatic. The author points out that media as a whole has the "serious problems visible on the horizon" stuff well covered. It's probably over-covered to an extreme degree such that we never hear about any good accomplishments at all. So he wrote one article listing out the good. All you have to say is that the article was vapid because it ignored what is already over-covered?
I wanted to compare the old and new pages, but noticed that their robots.txt disallowed the wayback machine from caching it.

Also, the Octocat was not on the page that Google cached: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:SZgkdCZ...
Braintree Interviewing
> You could start by inter-operating with the rest of the Android community. I can't get a photo transferred from the S3 to GNexus over Android Beam. Drop this "S Beam" island nonsense. Communities Dominate Brands. Get on board.

Samsung will never do that. Unless you can differentiate yourself from the rest of the Android competition, you'll just be another faceless hardware vendor with razor thin margins (see: PC industry). In a year or two, once the Chinese manufacturers get rolling, what advantages would a Samsung have over a ZTE or Huawei phone, given identical specs/prices?
Thoroughly appreciated, years overdue, and colorblind-aware. Nicely done.
Insert Homer-esq 'Do' (or is it 'Duh'?) here. I saw that as a brief glimpse while wading through my Google Reader hits the other day (week?) I'll investigate post-haste. Thanks!
It's very direct.

1. Von Neumann was biggest proponent of first strike

2. Was in a wheelchair

3. Wanted to create a doomsday machine that would destroy the worlds crops with intentional global warming. By destroying Russia's crops USA would end up ahead by better agricultural tech

4. Time magazine and others have acknowledged that it was directly based on Von Neumann.

Also Von neumann was way more important. He was easily the most important intellectual of his time. Without him there might have been no nuke at all--it was his design that finally suceeded.
Exactly. That's why it's a wistful post on HN and not a business plan :)
This proves just how far you can trust the stated intentions of free users.
Either: Facebook have no imagination.
Or: Slate (and the internet) has the wrong end of the stick.

Scenario the first.

So FB dropped a cool billion on a photo-sharing social network and app with a sizeable, vehemently dedicated and pretty damn vocal userbase. Now they want to make money out of it. Fine.

"So guys, Instagram monetization. Hit me."
"Um."
"Um."
"Ads?"
"Perfect!"

I (and I'm sure a large majority of Instagram users) am pretty much instantly put off by ads. Especially in-app or in-feed apps. Any ad space sold on my screen is pretty much money wasted.

Scenario the second.

There have to be other ways to make money from Instagram that make one iota of sense given the community and demographic. Premium filters maybe? I'm just sayin'.
Thank you

We have to stop pretending our professional lives are divorced from our personal - they grow out of one another, and in programming like other forms of writing the end result depends hugely on who we are as people - Hemmingway would never have written about a boy wizard.

Notch's work flows from who he is, and that flows a lot from who his father was.

Keep on flowing
I'll second the Varsity pens. I've bought, used up, and lost several of the Varsity pens. At $3/each, it's still less than having bought the Lamy pen mentioned above (which, btw, is considered an excellent starting pen), and in the process I've been able to write with a fountain pen for about a year. I like it a lot. One down side is that Varsity pens have ink that is not waterproof, and now that I live where it rains, I need something that lasts better.

Also, most notebooks or pads of paper in the office will absorb fountain pen ink like a 5 year old drinks chocolate milk, which makes your writing look terrible. The fountain pen forums linked above, and many blogs, have reviews about various types of paper. I found that I __really__ like the feel of the Staples sugar-cane paper. It feels nicer to write on than anything other than drafting vellum, so far, and is not very expensive. The notebooks are spiral-bound, but you can also buy it in reams, I believe.

I also tried another disposable fountain pen from The Other Brand (I forget the name?), and it seemed roughly similar to the Varsity. The clip on the cap was less flexible, though, and broke. I wouldn't have that problem with a more expensive pen, I imagine.
Headline in a year: "Instagram Owners Appalled To Learn That Users Don't Like Ads"

The fact of the matter is that, as long as the VC treadmill keeps moving, there will be start-ups earlier in the cycle willing to take the place of start-ups like Instagram and Facebook (which are trying to find a way towards profitability).
Signed requests!
Users don't really have any right to be upset over not being able to use services completely for free. Is this what the world has come to? Start-ups make their service free initially until they've gotten enough users, then try to monetize and then the users hop on to the next free service. And repeat. Either user expectations have to change, or start-ups will have to realize that they need to start monetize right away.
I don't understand why he thinks the pendulum is swinging back. Is there any particular evidence of that?
This is literally the only part of Dr. Strangelove that doesn't fit Von Neumann. Everything else including the accet is a dead ringer.
> Samsung will never do that. Unless you can differentiate yourself from the rest of the Android competition, you'll just be another faceless hardware vendor with razor thin margins

I believe you are confounding incompatibility/isolation and uniqueness.
> i'm guessing outside of the bay area/the US, orders of magnitude better

On the contrary, iOS 5 maps (Google bitmap tiles) and iOS 6 maps (Apple vectors), were generally comparable in Rome during the month of September. Neither was ideal, and cross referencing both helped.

For driving, Navigon Europe beat them both quite handily.

What's more, during my visit to Italy, the iOS 6 maps improved several times. As one example, in early September the areas between streets were a single background color, but by the time I left, they showed shaded buildings for every block.

By now, the historic center is rendered in astonishing "3D buildings" mode, making the hybrid view the easiest way to orient yourself among the maze of twisty streets and fantastic landmarks. Google Earth is cool, but doesn't look like the real city in miniature, and has severe memory problems showing Rome when zoomed close enough for rectangular instead of triangular buildings. I'm not going to say Apple's view "annihilates" Google Earth, but it feels like a completely new generation of technology by comparison.

Using the new Google Maps, asking for transit directions in Rome today says none are available for the region.

Doing the same in Apple maps offers to launch Navigon Europe on my phone which has "Urban Guidance" for Rome, but also gives me a list of local data specialist apps such as In Arrivo! HD (which claims to have real time bus positions).

All this said, when browsing Rome the new Google Maps app is significantly more speedy than the iOS 5 version, though it suffers from the early Apple Maps problem of having no data for roads (much less POIs) when zoomed out even a little, and when zoomed in a bit, is very challenging to read at a glance and still misses most points of interest.

> Google has everyone beat in finding things.

In the Trastevere restaurant neighborhood, Apple's data shows 10 restaurants for every 1 on Google Maps, any of which can be tapped to see a photo of the building and read reviews on Yelp. Google Maps, if zoomed in far enough, eventually shows you the POI, and can be tapped for a street view panorama rather than the actual storefront.

The wildly popular local seafood hangout "Fish Market"[1] shows up on Apple Maps with 3.5 stars and 5 reviews, but doesn't show up at all on Google Maps. Searching for it sends you to the other side of the Tiber, to an actual fish market.

1. http://www.tripadvisor.com/Restaurant_Review-g187791-d334907...

My point isn't that Apple Maps data is better, but that to a local who is looking for differences, either product can be shown to come up short. This suggests neither is "orders of magnitude" (presumably meaning at least 100x) better than the other, even when comparing this new offering rather than the iOS 5 version.
I don't like bootstrap / foundation. We need a stylus based alternative to those.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4893514

Since I'm a dev I would never use a compiled version of such a framework, but having adoption by non-devs would benefit the community and create a market for devs to create things for.

I wouldn't think of it as catering to them but creating an easier on-boarding process.
I Can Has Mobile App Tracking?
Full screen experience: Twitter 2012 Year in Review
MemSQL 1.8 Released - Now supports native replication, n-way joins, subqueries
MGM Resorts Presents Commitment To Diversity In Workplace
The Cloud Price Wars are a Lie
cloud storage prices continue to increase, as compared to raw hard drive prices.
> claiming that highly intelligent AI couldn't solve the upload problem.

Solving the upload problem possibly requires imaging / scanning at a level of detail that might be outside what is possible within the constraints of physics. If it turns out we need atomic level information for the whole body, the project might be hosed from the beginning, something that better ideas or more thinking can't overcome.
2001? man, you're hanging on to some old school hate. let it go, Ballmer's lack of impact has been made clear in the lost decade.

i know plenty of people that tote Apple products and work for Microsoft. many of these same people actually really love their job, and I think it shows that Microsoft is trying to get their innovation engine going again. They are close, probably make a few missteps, but I was once a Microsoft fan and root for them.

A big reason why I also buy Apple products is for the hardware design. I just ran across a new Lonovo and it still looked like a brick. Good luck to them in that regard...
check out flippa.com they have lost of niche sites wiht all kinds of info on sites for sale. revenue, google rank, etc. It will have lots of ideas.
and would you stay home and look after the kids if your wife earned more than you?
"Although braggadocio doesn't come naturally to most computer programmers..."

Ha! Made me laugh.
If you haven't already, seek couples counseling/therapy asap, as resent about parenting or living situations are big issues that hard to tackle without some outside perspective.
No, it's that Business Insider writes trolly headlines. Nowhere in the interview did Facebook say nor "confirm" they were adding ads to Instagram.
^ this. or something like this. It always bugs me that the only way anyone has figured out how to monetize anything online is by throwing up some ads on it. Its ugly, intrusive, and the users end up pretty much tuning them out anyway. Surely there has to be a better way to make money.

-prints, photobooks, physical stuff like that. people into making their photos look vintagey would surely love to place their fake polaroid next to their record collection.

-All instagram images are geotagged and timestamped. How about you partner with media outlets and allow them to leverage all the images being taken for specific events? "instagram @ SXSW" or whatever.

-"license this image" - Lets say I run a food blog. clearly a great place to look for imagery of food is on instagram. I could affordably license the image and give money to the photographer (and instagram gets a cut.)

-etc, etc, etc,

These are just off the top of my head. I'm not saying these are brilliant ideas, or that they would necessarily work at all. What I am saying is that I wish that we'd explore solutions outside of "lets plaster ads all over it." It's an ineffective way of making money that's just stolen from the slowly-dying magazine industry, and is that really the industry you want to emulate?
> random business people on the net say

Last time I checked the net was a pretty huge place. Can you please share specifics? Are general "biz" forums a good place to spend time on looking for ideas?
That's cool. I like PostalPix, which is similar. I agree that Instagram could definitely do something like this to make money instead of ads. The ability to produce worthwhile physical products from your service is an advantage over something like Twitter or Facebook.
It's not Retina-ready.
seems like a very cool idea! i'm exciting to use it and see where it goes.

You do have some bugs to work out though, the UI isn't very consistent throughout the site and somehow I got redirected to here: http://interviewpractice.herokuapp.com/ and now can't see anything. I also had trouble the signup process and had to reset my password to join.
My wife develops kidney stones when she is pregnant. During the second pregnancy, she had to pass them without pain medicine. There are many other conditions that women can develop when pregnant, but that go away after giving birth.

Pregnancies are anything but easy, even though they last a relatively short amount of time. Raising children is hard, but at least some portion of parenting skills come naturally. I don't think the same can be said for enduring months of intense pain/illness.
This is a subset of David Hume's analysis of causality, see his "An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding."
I suspect this is because he's already written several other posts (linked at the bottom) with the thermostat example, so is trying a different example here, in the hope that people might pay more attention this time.
From what I understand they don't even pay inventors, they hire lawyers to game the systems with ridiculously vague patents that will get through and then sue people who actually invent thing.
Hacking together a web app in 2.5 hours
Why does Apple need a status page? I thought "it just works".

Steve Jobs needs to make a comeback.
Oh, UI design. I thought he meant engineering design.

I'm not particularly fond of Holo, so I'm ok with this.
I think there is some "vocal minority" stuff going on here, particularly with regard to the look and feel of Google's app.

For starters, far from being "fluid", Google's app consistently has a much lower framerate when scrolling or adjusting zoom level than Apple's maps app. It never even approaches 60fps even when running on the latest hardware, whereas Apple's old (and new) map application has always been really good about this, even on old & low-end hardware. So I'm really confused as to what people are talking about when they say it's "fluid". Compared to what?

As for the UI, the way Google's search input bar is positioned actually results in more of the screen being wasted than Apple's standard search bar UI. Those little slivers of the map which stick out above and on the sides are too small to be useful, so what's the point? Just pin it to the top of the screen and make it standard height like all the other apps do, thus giving the maximum amount of contiguous real estate to the actual map itself. There is a reason why Apple does it the way they do, and it's not just for looks.

I have mixed feelings about the detail view being at the bottom. I understand the idea of one-handed operation and I appreciate what they're trying to do here -- optimize for the case of browsing search results with your thumb via a combination of horizontal and vertical swipes, however I'm dubious of the value of it since you still sometimes have to reach awkwardly across the screen for certain things. Not to mention the detail view takes up more real estate than necessary, much like the search bar. It also feels somewhat disconnected from the currently selected pin due to being at the bottom, which is a problem Apple doesn't have since they put the details directly on the annotation.

Oh and of course you cannot blink without this app bugging you to log in.
What Google Maps for iOS tells us about the battle for Google’s future
So they have almost all the share, of a slice of a small market in the whole Internet. Hardly winner takes all.

Also, that informal survey asked for the total of income, so it's heavily biased towards companies which started earlier.
but there is no lul if during the war Hitler was person of the year. it's not a popularity contest.
How to Fix Software Patents
Law school applications are collapsing
As it has been noted, the one primary problem is with data. The other is with deciphering user conventions in referring to that data. The Nokia maps app for iOS knows where the nearest supermarket is to me, but still refers to it as "Albertson's."

When human beings give directions, they can use information from the other party to improve their directions. How is this done with maps apps currently? I guess turn-by-turn apps can detect when someone deviates from the directions and use this data as feedback.

I wonder how much a maps/navigation app would benefit from being able to detect exclamations of anger? Or, even simpler, what if there was a "WRONG!" button positioned right where someone could press it on impulse? Or let users violently shake the device to let the server know they're mad? (Maybe activate a sound recording of their complaint for that 10 second timespan?)
Wait what? Breitbart died of a heart attack. He had a history of heart disease. He was also beloved of roughly half the US government. Russian activists with inconvenient positions and personal beliefs appear to routinely end up shot to death.

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

Anna Politkovskaya did not have a history of bullet disease.
Ask HN: Toronto hangout sometime Dec. 17 to 21?
I'm going to head home for Christmas from SF. Would love to meet some Toronto based entrepreneurs or hackers. Let me know... email in profile
Mathematics, Programming, Logic: We are looking at, like with the philosophical beginnings of the 20th century a question found in Hilbert, Russell, et al. Is mathematics reducible to a base system of logic. Today, we might see the cleanest expression of a theoretical framework answering to this question: free logic.

At the same time, programming itself, like mathematics, is not a world of numbers or any of this, and is in fact the expression of complexity: the complexity of the sign as written or drafted by the mathematician, itself expressed in a non-denumerable set. Programming itself depends on the conventional expressions and idioms of programmers who write actual code.

As Wittgenstein might say “Mathematics consists of calculations, not of propositions.”

Like so: "Programming consists of executions, not of functions."
I never had any serious issues with it.
And if not, do you want to buy my tiger-repellent rock?
Or viral marketing for a movie.
Learn Ruby Science – Book in progress
Chromium has Chrome Sync??
Great feedback. And yes, you are absolutely right that Amy and Patrick have a product that people need. I quite like the idea of deconstucting existing products and presenting a small subset of the features well.

Also, I realize the niche aspect isn't what drives the success, but at the same time it is surely easier pursuing smaller markets due to lower competition.

Thanks for kicking off some ideas!
Um, did you read the article? There's tons of good points in there. Some of them might be a bit exaggerated though .(like the oembed one, was that ever popular?)
Wow, it just occurred to me that I never see the github home page when I visit the site, seeing as I'm always logged in on the machines I use.

Compared to that cached version, I much prefer the new one. This is despite agreeing and lamenting that there is nothing particularly fun about it. But hey, I'm not even sure what I mean by that :)