skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
this is pretty awesome! i wish i'd read the pagination tutorial about a year and a half ago...
I also had to register for a DUNS number. I was somehow able to do it online and get the number emailed to me immediately, without any phone calls or other human interaction. Of course the email contained promotions for services like "DNBi SelfMonitor" for $39/month. So much for accreditation.
Perhaps I am missing something here (correct me if I am), but Android has never needed root privileges to run 3rd party apps. Just have to check off the "unknown sources" box under application settings and any sort of app can be side loaded. I'm just guessing this app is just a way to easily facilitate the download of such apps? If so, then users can install them, but they don't get updates to them on the market (it'll just say invalid license or "you don't own it").

The Android Market is also rather slow to take things down. I've seen MP3 downloader apps that just link to gray area music at best and blatant ripoffs of well known games (such as cut the rope and plants versus zombies) stay listed for months. Eventually they seem to disappear, but then another app pops up in its place.
I'm willing to bet Wikipedia uses far more bandwidth than Reddit. Reddit barely hosts any images, it's mostly just all text, plus plenty of sites hotlink Wikipedia images.
I remember working with QnX back in the mid-90s and found it quite fun (compared to Unix at the time). A friend of mine worked at a company that made commercial X servers and that company's fastest X server ran on QnX (yes, even with the overhead of message passing, it was faster than their Unix version on the same hardware).
The Mindful Programmer - mindfully get more stuff done.
You are right about the history, though I was specifically talking about the usage of the word "number" not about whether people knew about fractions. I won't dig up the reference, now, but I read in a history of Calculus treatise somewhere that Newton was the first who started using the word "number" in its present sense: any quantity including integers, rationals or irrationals.

Thx for spotting the f(x-h) typo. Fixed.
That's a fine reason.
5x more expensive than what? Owning/leasing servers? Similar cloud providers?
Why not show AdSense ads to visitors that click on through Google? Would be surprised if this doesn't cover their costs, and it would not affect return visitors for the most part.
Just as a tip for Arduino newcomers, if you want to put the UNO R3 into DFU mode [1], just bridge these two pins together with a jumper or a cable for a moment:

____________________
| o ···········
RESET ---> + · ·
GND -----> + · ·
_|____
| |
| USB |
|______|
|
|

Then, if you want to use the dfu-programmer[2], you need to apply a patch[3] to make it work with the R3.

Being myself a complete newbie, I found it time consuming to reach the state in which I knew how and what to do just to upload a new firmware.

[1]: If you want/are interested in playing with Arduino as an USB device.

[2]: http://dfu-programmer.sourceforge.net/

[3]: https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/dfu-programmer/
I'm surprised this post makes it to the homepage... They've been doing that for ever, no need to look at your logs to figure this out. How else would they find and display an image form the page you're providing a link to.
Even so, for those who are up to that point, that headline could give the implication that Facebook is getting into the search business.
Have you considered Titanium, Sencha, PhoneGap or any of the other js -> iOS frameworks?

A dedicated iOS developer would be better, for sure, but maybe there is an intermediary step where you can utilize most of your current functionality into a native app using a framework / compiler.
The fact that someone is willing to go to those lengths indicates a level of interest on their part
Sounds like this person needs to learn how to become an iOS developer. There is so many tutorials, guides and sample code out there and a very large portion of it is free.

No, it's no easy. No it might not be as fast as getting a seasoned developer, and yes the code might be poor but I hold to the belief if there something you can't find someone to do for you - figure it out and do it yourself.
I am a big fan of "choose your own adventure" kind of books, and I will try to do something with that soon.

For the physics part, I also have a simple physics game engine which is in the works. Instead of answering questions about different //points// of the motion the user would have to specify the js function which describes the entire motion. There will be not "grades" just test suites your code has to pass ;)

What do you have in mind exactly when you say "interactive book"?
Curious: what were you using before?
Carl Woese Dies at 84; Discovered Life’s ‘Third Domain’
Excellent comment, sir!
It sounds like I'm not the only one here who wants to use this for marketing a web app - do you have some sort of a mailing list I can subscribe to for updates? I'm sending you an email directly but if you do I'd like to subscribe. If not you may be missing a charm!
Programming is like Drawing.

Drawing the blueprint of an engine is not the same as understanding the fundamentals of physics and engine design. And it's not the same as drawing a portrait, a building or a landscape.
Ask HN: Is it realistic to launch a product if you have young kids?
Many product people are able to launch products because they don't yet have kids. Simply put: they have a lot more disposable time with which to launch a product.

For those of you with kids: is it realistic to launch a product if you have young children?

I imagine that certain types of products (like e-books) are more realistic than a full-blown SaaS app.

I'd love to hear from those of you that have successfully launched paid products while you've had young kids. What worked? What didn't?
This is a good point, reddit has plenty of images but they are generally hosted elsewhere. The images they do host directly are fairly static, and can be cached.
I'm guessing you're not a developer for a living.
How do you remotely log in to one user account on
an OS X system while another user is logged in at the
physical machine?

You don't...

This ceased to be true in the past year or two, FYI.
Yes, this is the real problem. I find all process-related documents are, once written, shelved and ignored.
That may well be true in your discipline, but there are some excellent, concise texts in undergraduate mathematics. For example, Apostol's Calculus or Spivak's Calculus on Manifolds. Not the most accessible texts by a longshot, but not your average Pearson or Wiley drivel either.
My books of 2012
A collection of Business, Fiction, Science and Philosophical diversions that made me ignore my wife this year.
Programming is Terrible
Not sure. What I meant is that what bores me with Mr Arrington, is that he is always lecturing from the passenger sit, rather than just do stuff and show us how things can be done. That's bores me.
i'm just not so sure if the direction this is heading to is good. and also the headline of that article is miserable (as omarchowdhury already pointed out).
Sure, to each his/her own. In my experience, one long running side-project does not afford the learning opportunities of doing many smaller (non-crappy, imo) projects. For me, that's the main motivation behind them: to learn new things and have an excuse to implement them. Also in my case, my day job is extremely demanding, so I don't have tons of time to devote to one giant project... thus many smaller bite-sized projects.
Congrats on getting your book published Ivan! Starting the New Year right by being at the top of HN.

Did you end up giving Jarryd an editor credit?

I wish you continued success.
Stuff sucks when you don't have to pay for it. That's why Android apps have never really held a candle to their iOS counterparts; piracy has been easier on Android. As an Android user, I'm just hoping this causes developers to not automatically develop for iOS first and then Android as an afterthought, if at all.
Agreed. And this thought process is effectively shortsighted: "I can apply band aids now, which is superior to gaining the knowledge needed to perform surgery because that would take too long."

Disclaimer: Programmer who wishes his professional work contributed more to the greater good.
Thanks a lot. I've just got one Arduino, and was wondering where to start :)
Try getting the number from here: http://fedgov.dnb.com/webform/displayHomePage.do

You basically tell DnB that you are applying for a US government contract. They are then required to give give you the number within 1 day.

They will tell you that they will revoke your number if you don't enter yourself in some government database within 90 days. You can then enter yourself there (or as happened for us the first time we needed the number, we were just too busy to do that and figured that we would let it expire and deal with the consequences if anyone really needed to use the number).
> I'm not a big fan of that picture. We're
> trying to compute f'(400),
>

Well, technically speaking, you are not supposed to talk about derivatives in the picture answer. I am just trying to connect the notion of "download rate" with the "slope of the file size function".

The triangle with the hypotenuse touching the function (tangent line) is a way to compute the slope from the graph. As such the actual size of the triangle is not important -- so long as it helps you compute the rise-over-run.

So to answer your question -- the triangle is not meant to illustrate the derivative calculation. Indeed, it would be quite difficult to show an infinitely small triangle ;)
Node.js Worker Farm
No, please, keep reinventing the wheel, keep doing the same thing that everyone has been doing for the last two years. "We need a better way to do identity and auth!" "[here's a rehashed email-login system]" or "[here's a new identity management system I built instead of using an existing one. surely this one will take off!!!!!1111]"
I hesitated to post this, since I think clearer, shorter, better written textbooks are an admirable goal, and I keep a (short) list of good text books I have found over the years. But based on the preview on the website, I'm going to keep referring those who ask me to Gelfand's wonderful basic math texts instead (Algebra, Method of Coordinates, Functions and Their Graphs, Trigonometry -- anyone who wants further pointers to these, private message me).

There are also some howlers in the preview text, such as "after thinking very hard the mathematicians were able to classify all the different number like objects into sets" and then lists the naturals, integers, rationals, reals, and complex numbers. Except that these are nested subsets of each other, not disjoint, and the four normed division algebras are the reals, complexes numbers, quaternions, and octionions, so if you're going to talk about all the number like objects without including those last two, you're off the mark.

I haven't seen the physics sections, but I will say that teaching physics is actually remarkably difficult. I tend to recommend 1960s editions of Halliday and Resnick (not the recent ones!), though I will probably switch to recommending Karl Wiemann's work (http://c21.phas.ubc.ca/).

I absolutely agree that mechanics and the differential and integral calculus should be taught together, though. They don't make any sense without each other.
Catatonia? sigh. Chemical lobotomies.

Don't worry, God is just.

God says...
surmounted That's_gonna_leave_a_mark mad seeking Surely
dialogue discipline Sudden soughtest Rhetoric ghastly
sings weaving Babylon swiftness itching wallowed well-drunk
whitherward Fish so lowest eloquent is sons Head crosses
harsh calculate IS affirm passes hurried not_in_my_wildest_dreams
likeness homo affect belongeth folk recite composed ofThe
grew encourage abstinence dispensing influence refuge
enemy excel fixed replenishing hid ehheh_thats_all_folks
composed lord perish
I appreciate the goal and the bold tone. I volunteer time to tutor middle and high school kids in math. It would be nice to have a fresh approach available, and a hard copy or four would be nice.

Would it be possible to create a version without the 'bullshit' language? Outside of the cover there are two 'bullshits' in the first chapter. It doesn't bother me but I don't think the directors of my program or parents would be very happy about it.

I'm sure the kids would like it but in a program such as ours, adding unnecessary friction to the relationship with parents is not a good idea. The older kids are spending time in our program that could be used to work jobs to help support their family (and it is a real pressure on these kids and families), so anything that threatens that is a non-starter.
I got my 5 yo daughter a Pi and she's been playing around on Scratch (and typing) and it's surprising how quickly they pick this stuff up. She guess doing a minus number would move a sprite in the opposite direction!

I was experimenting writing libraries in C++ (I prefer a more OO interface to things) so I created an AnologLed and DigitalLed class and showed my daughter in the code how I made a red LED come on and she proceeded to make the orange and blue ones come on too.

This stuff it the literacy of the 21st century.
OT performance rumination: I've not run tests on Rails' performance in this capacity, but I've always thought that the runtime gymnastics to pluralize model names would be a big drag on Rails performance. I'm guessing something's cached, but I've never understood the 'opinion' that a class should be 'Person' and the table name should be 'people'.
You assume they were indexing skydrive documents. It could well be that one of the people who visited the link had a Bing toolbar installed.

Either way, all publicly accesible documents will get indexed sooner or later.
I'm glad you know where now :)
I enjoyed the article but was also a little bummed `for` wasn't mentioned at all.

Minor nit: `for` is a macro in the clojure.core namespace, not a special form. Special forms in Clojure are these: http://clojure.org/special_forms
Better for Pinterest too. It means they need to develop services that can be launched and terminated quickly, and that their services are much more resilient during times of high load.
SNI does not required dedicated IPs. Named-based virtual hosting works fine with it. See linked Wikipedia article for details.
You should use that a lot with lisp (or rather use it for projects that require you use it a lot). The secret sauce of lisp is that code is data.

Instead of using hacks like c's function pointers, lisp lets you pass code around as easily as any other variable type (1st class functions) instead of just pointers to the code. You can then exploit this ability to make code that will generate code on the fly and then execute it (macros). The homoiconicity of the language itself makes it much easier to make useful macros as opposed to just toy examples.

Since lisp and c are both turing complete, anything you can do in one language you can do in the other, but lisp's macros, 1st class functions, and homoiconicity make it possible to actually write something that would be almost impossible in c due to complexity issues. For example, in Cal's old intro cs course which used a lisp dialect, the last project of the course was writing a meta-compiler for the entire language. In contrast, Cal's compiler course uses c++ to compile only a small subset of python2 over an entire semester, and is considered one of the hardest classes due to the project's complexity.
there's a very good web app (it works on mobile browser as well, but no native app) on japanese. please someone make a mandarin version that works like this
http://nihongomaster.com/
Are you looking for junior or senior engineers?
As a complete n00b to all this stuff there seems to be some more stuff I need to look in to, thanks!
I'm wondering if you did (or anyone has done) any cost effectiveness on using SSD's rather than HD's. (Or maybe that's an order-of-magnitude too low to consider?)
Sports Games
I would imagine they're checking the URL for malware as well.
You may be right, but I can't help but smirk at the thought of PG or Buchheit downloading and installing the Bing Toolbar ;)
That figure is not what it costs to run the theater - that cost is royalties to the studios.

Theaters make money on popcorn and soda, not tickets.
The date on a magazine is when it's supposed to come off the shelves, not when it's published.
Ask HN: Review my startup, Quivee.com
quivee.com
Well, the title was the article title "Dear Michael Arrington, Perhaps You Are Bored Because You Are Boring" but somehow it got edited :(
I think citing notable accomplishments was important in supplementing the point he was making. I also think that also allows us to relate better to how he feels. E.g. would he feel as proud, and would we relate as much, if this line ...

...software I've written has helped people capture >tens of millions< of dollars of wealth. It's been run on >hundreds of millions< of computers.

... instead read ...

...software I've written has helped people capture >hundreds of dollars< of wealth. It's been run on >tens< of computers.

I don't think so - scale of accomplishment change how we feel about what we do and how we relate to the motivation of others. And I think that was the rationale in citing some of his biggest accomplishments. I didn't take his post as lacking modesty.

Point taken on the freelancing bit though (upvoted on that point ... I've been a consultant for 5 years).
Mark Zuckerberg Hunts and Kills Wooly Mammoth
"I haven’t seen any commercial products that put together all these different things" (emphasis mine). There appears to be more to Cerego than simple spaced repetition, but I can't tell exactly what right now because it is in limited beta.

I used "Mental Case" on the iPhone a few years ago, and it had a simple implementation of spaced repetition, but it did not adjust itself to my progress very well. I would like to find something better; if you know of anything specific besides the Wikipedia article, please post it.
Compuware, United Way aim to better child literacy
Please listen to this guy's suggestion of making the price for both only marginally higher than the price for the Print version alone. One of the quickest ways to kill my interest in in purchasing a book is by expecting someone to pay a non-trivial amount of money for a digital copy after they just purchased a hard copy at full retail.

As far as pricing the ebook alone, I think it should be somewhere around 14.99 to 19.99.

If it helps, I am probably a good example of your target customer. I didn't take my education seriously until I was out of high school for a few years, and now I find myself trying to catch up with all of the stuff I should have learned when I was younger.
That seems dishonest. I don't think that's a good idea.
Ah I see. Mixed it up with plain SSL and the struggle I had a while ago. Tnx for clarification.
I will like this thing to be continued. I have been contacted quite a few times from these posts. The only complain I have that I find more developers looking for job/project than the people seeking developers. This thing needs to be addressed.

I have a suggestion, please make it fortnightly .
What about consistent and hygienic gourmet food for the cost of a Big Mac? I think the proported high quality of these roboticly produced burgers is a big selling point. Fast food is awful and unhealthy maybe automation can give us healthy and tasty food both quickly and cheaply.
I find that it's easy to fall into the trap of feeling like working as a software developer in the commercial world is an exercise in applying duct tape.

But I think this is a mindset problem, not one with the state of modern software writing. We're standing on the shoulders of giants; There's plenty of unsolved problems out there to be solved by the next person willing to do it. And we do it armed with the work of the previous generation that's been packaged into the convenient form of libraries, modules and established knowledge.

Would your time really be better spent finding the most efficient sorting algorithm?
Perhaps C# is a particularly terrible language and people need to search for tutorials more.
There should be a separate section for WhoIsHiring on Main Page ordered by month wise.
I've briefly looked into PhoneGap. If this cry for a iOS dev doesn't get me anywhere I will more than likely be going down this road. I know the technology is advancing and that the experience can be nearly the same.
Scala and Clojure — Some Pros and Cons
Intel is reportedly going offer the ability to sub to individual cable channels
It generates Go code which is compiled in to the package.
I agree, recent technology progress has been quite "boring"
So.....you aren't even offering to share the donations or shirt profits or anything? Who owns the mobile app after someone makes it for you for free?
Corruption is bad in China, but not as bad as it is in India.

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

India is ranked 96th, China is ranked 80th (the US is ranked 19th).
> normed division algebras are the reals,
> complexes numbers, quaternions, and octionions,

Can you see why I would not want to talk about quaternions and octionions in a chapter which is meant to introduce math to people who have math phobia?

> these are nested subsets of each other, not disjoint,
>

This should have been more clear. Will fix.
Bah Humblebrag - The Unfortunate Rise of False Humility
Machine Learning: Access Tiny Images Dataset with Python
Imagine unix/C without the ability to create new programming languages such as sh, python, yacc, etc. C would be all you had.

In lisp you can create sh, python, and C, and mix between them freely within a program/function/block with almost zero friction.

By having a simple universal syntax for all your sub-languages, syntax becomes a non-issue. What in unix may be separate language is just a library in lisp.

This is not a water-tight analogy but I hope it illustrates the point. If you want to really understand I recommend actually digging into a language in the lisp family such as Common Lisp, Racket or Clojure.
SEEKING FREELANCER (remote)

Looking for Front-End Developers to grow our team. We're an around the clock dev shop specializing in PSD to HTML5/JavaScript conversions with quick turn-around times. Irregular or regular work schedules are good. http://overnightconversions.com
I think there could be something to models like this. I saw a startup trying something like this recently (I think it was called MoviePass?).

My wife and I see around 2 movies a month on average, and we probably saw 3-4 a month before we had our 2 year old. If there was a subscription plan that let you see new releases and actually saved you money, we'd most likely do it.
Honestly right now to make something using phonegap that matches or nearly matches the look/feel/quality of a native app is harder imo than just making it in obj-c or c# with monotouch.
Ask HN: Do you listen to music while coding? What genre makes you more creative?
I have tried listening to different genres of music while coding, from heavy rock to pop music with different results on terms of how do I feel creatively.
Lately I have stuck to classic rock, I feel the classics don't get on my way, I just code without feeling distracted.
Night Ranger, Journey, Triumph among my favorite coding music. So I'm curious to know what kind of music do you like to listen while programming if any at all?
He buried the lede!

In fact, no one has proved that any particular number is
normal. However, we do know that almost all numbers are
normal. That is, the set of non-normal numbers has
Lebesgue measure zero.
I've received $25 in donations in the past 2 years. I've sold 0 shirts. I pay out of my own pocket to run tubalr. If donations where to kick up I would without a doubt split them in a fair way with whoever is involved. The owner of the mobile app would be me, whoever made it, and tubalrs.
What if you then went out and found a random government contract to apply for?