skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>>> Mindstorms is pretty cool...but the price puts it out of reach of any but the well-heeled.

I run an after school tech program for kids in grades 5 - 8 where we've worked with Scratch quite a bit, and did one session on robotics using the Pololu 3pi line-tracing/maze solving robots and the Parallax Mini-Sumo bots. These robots run $100 - $150 each as opposed to the Mindstorms $250+ (now $350) price point. <<<

I have tested the Parallax Sumo bots and Mindstorms and I'm firmly of the opinion that the Mindstorms set represents better value.

The thing is that at the end of the day the Parallax Sumo bots are one trick ponies and have a fixed chassis and configuration around which you really can't extend without some effort. Even if you do put in the effort, then your design is constrained by the type of chassis the machine came with. For example, you can't easily convert the sumo bot into a hexapedal or bipedal walker. The value proposition for these machines rests solely on programming them in beautiful ways and it really isn't possible for a child to extend the machine itself. Assemble it yes, but it extend it? Not yet.

On the other hand with the Mindstorms set you have these precision milled parts that can be combined in endless ways by anyone to create anything from walkers to holonomic drives. There's also the benefit of the entire Lego range, you can easily mix and match all of these parts and combine them in countless ways with one another to give you literally any type of machine you want without getting out a file or a drill. That's something that instantly appeals to children and I remember the amazing feeling I used to get out of playing with Mindstorms when I was a little girl. I could actually create something that was "alive," and there was nothing better than that. Programming seemed dull and useless to me as compared to putting these pieces together and bringing them to life, somehow. It was captivating and it's what gave me the real push towards actually learning engineering. That's a miracle if you think about it and it represents great value.

>>> There is a huge untapped market for a programmable robot at the $50 - $100 price point. <<<

It's actually quite easy to build something yourself at that price point. Get $3 DC motors, waste aluminium channelling from build sites, acrylic, gear boxes + wheels, wires, an arduino, and a few screws. Build a frame out of the channelling, use the acrylic sheets as a type of wall, drill and mount motors on the acrylic sheets and put the arduino on somewhere with pencil cells. You're good to go.
'tac'. It is 'cat', but backwards.
I forgot about the DNS querying of wikipedia. Probably could've used that to entertain myself on my flights over the holidays since I'm pretty sure gogo inflight passes DNS through.

Anyway, I'm a big fan of piping things into xargs. xxd is a terminal-based hex editor. It can convert both to and from hex to binary. I also use 'pgrep -lf 'partial_program_name' a lot in place of 'ps aux | grep partial_program_name'. 'pkill -9 partial_program_name' searches for and kills all processes matching the string.
Ok, didn't know the exact setup. I thought even the regional were run by a BBC branch.
Your last two pages of comments are almost exclusively anti-Google. I highly doubt that it has any impact on your battery life and we both know you can more than easily disable it. You opted-in to turn it on, you haven't turned it off and I don't believe that it sucks your battery at any perceptible level.

edit: to be fair, it does use data. a whole 5MB tying it in near last place with the stock News and Weather widget. Though that also includes the data used for all of my searches, including my voice based searches from the app.
Write less, do more: CSS Style
There must be a better way of tackling complex, content-heavy sites while keeping things straight between backend and frontend developers.
> What i'm trying to say: If you feel your situation is similar and you maybe even have some money on the side for the beginning: do it. You will not regret it. Don't be scared and never give up.

I'm in a slightly different situation and wonder what advice you might have.

I'm not on the border of going broke. I work for myself from home, alone, and have a comfortable income that I expect will continue for a while. Definitely enough to travel with. So I'm not afraid of not having enough money.

But I am afraid of simply not knowing what to do. Typically when I take vacations it's pre-planned, a week-long thing with a specific destination or event, and then it's over.

A part of me really wants to go "nomadic" and travel lots of places, but I just don't know what I'd do with myself. How to choose where to go to next, how to get the most value out of where I'm at, etc. It seems like constantly moving and trying to get something unique out of each place would take so much consistent planning and work as to be a second job, sucking attention away from where I'm at so I can plan where I'll be.

I don't work with anyone else (even remotely) and I don't have friends scattered across the country/planet. It's extremely unlikely that I would be receiving random calls from people I know, deviating me from my path and pulling me into unexpected interesting places or scenarios.

So my fear is that I'd end up wandering aimlessly, missing the good bits for the obvious ones, not getting a whole lot out of it, and wondering what I'm doing. Is this a legitimate fear? Is there a way to prevent this?
> This is it. No silly stories, no funny antidotes.

I could use a funny antidote after that!
Mainly rock (Guns n' roses, ACDC) and pop (MJ,Maroon 5).
I don't see this as a tech vs media issue. Companies like Google would love to have free access to old copyrighted material, but that's a minuscule part of their business. Newly created media is valuable but will always be copyrighted.

Copyright holders have a lot more to lose than tech giants like Google have to gain from looser copyright laws. This means media companies will lobby more aggressively to save their copyrights.
What about a RESTful API where you pass in a list of IDs to retrieve from the server? You'd want to use a GET so it's idempotent but I can't see how you'd make an exceedingly long list of IDs without using a data payload underneath the GET statement.
I disagree. No matter how interesting and meaningful our lives are much of our day is spent doing these relatively normal, mundane tasks. I don't think that necessarily has to be depressing. It's actually a really interesting way to analyze a life and I'd really be interested in producing my own annual report.
ARgh, where do they find these people, and why are they entrusted with important positions affecting the education of our kids?!

Seriously, what are the qualifications required for school administrators? These stories give the impression that they're crazily gullible and shallow people, whose decisions are guided more by the latest school-administrator fads than by actual experience with education...
The point is that if Patrick can do it starting as a Japanese salaryman, you can most probably do it from whatever position you're starting from even more easily.

Obviously, most HN'ers haven't established for themselves the career Patrick has. My point addresses why that is.

I'm arguing here with the same mentality that says 37signals advice only works for 37signals, "because they got to start with a hugely successful blog".
How the TV Business Got rich off the thing that was going to Kill It
I believe the correct terminology for C++ would be "member function", and specifically "non-virtual member function" for the ones that actually work with NULL. I also wouldn't be surprised if using a non-virtual member function with NULL is actually undefined behavior that just happens to work with popular compilers, although I'm too lazy to look up the standard to see.

"Class method" is usually used to refer to methods that class objects have themselves, as opposed to an "instance method", which is a method that instances of a class possess. C++ doesn't have class objects or class methods.
> we extract citation data from PDFs so you can browse the
> citation graph immediately

Can you just.. give us the citation data instead? How is this better than ISI and other vendors? Edit: removed some other comments. That's my most important question.
You shouldn't blame the webdev for you using a slow browser. There are plenty of other browsers out there that are faster if you are concerned about speed.
Google Maps, Windows Phone, and an avoidable mess
> I am not convinced that internet and video games are fundamentally different from things you could do before the internet existed.

They're not, they're just a lot easier. The effort that it takes to get high and go to the beach with friends is massive compared to the effort it takes load a video game and join a server.

When I was an aimless teenager type in the late 80s/early-mid 90s, people would eventually stop hanging out due to fatigue, and the idea that getting a job and going to work every day might be easier than running the streets hustling up something to break the boredom of existence. The notable exceptions to this were binge drinkers and drug addicts, who, if they had a steady way to score, would end up stuck in that life for the next 20 years.

>Slackers have been around for ever. Are there fundamentally more today?

Who knows? Sounds like a research question rather than just an opportunity for handwaving.
In terms of search relevance- sorry, it needs to be way more clear that we're just computer science right now.

Re: funny authors- these things happen when you use extracted metadata. I've been fairly successful internally cleaning it up, and will apply those techniques further to the production data soon.
The animals were annoyed because they were embarrassed.

The fact that people thought the questions were confusing is quite worrying.

Here is what I feel the story is analogous to:

A scammer is selling dieting pills on the internet.

The scammer claims it will beat all other methods of dieting, even better than not eating outright. The scammer challenges half the commenters to use his pills (eating normally at the same time), and the other half not eating at all, may the best dieting method wins.

The commenters thought it was strange the scammer would want to challenge the best dieting method of all.

"This isn't even a dieting method, you're eating more by taking the pill!" One said.

"Well, you know what I mean", the scammer said. (it's a weight loss method).

"The scammer has some trick up its sleeve," said another.

Scammers scam, a moderator said.

"Well, you know what I mean,” another commenter said. "If a scammer challenges the best dieting method of all with his dieting pills it must have something to it to allow him to win.”

“The scammer probably expects us to root for the sensible dieting method and then look like fools when it doesn't work,” said the person with 76 points of karma. “Then the scammer will win because the dieters are overconfident and takes a banana, or binges, or something.”

The commenters agreed that this made sense. There was no reason a scammer should challenge actual dieting unless his pills had a clever mechanism of some sort. So the commenters, wanting to back a winner, all cheered for the scammer.

When the challenge began, the commenters who dieted by skipping food lost 5 kilograms within a week. The commenters who took the dieting pills just continued to gained weight.

The commenters continued to observe how the dieting pills were going to beat actual dieting. Two weeks later when the actual dieters have lost 10 kilograms, pill takers did not lose any weight, and in fact, gained 10.

The commenters lynched the scammer.

MORAL: Scammers scam.

People make foolish predictions because they don't want to become fools, but then when their foolish prediction turns out to be foolish, they seek revenge, vengeance. This seems to be happening more and more these days, and that's why I am worried people think this set of questions were confusing.
Scientists Estimate At Least 17 Billion Earth-Size Planets Inhabit Milky Way
We hadn't really thought about importing existing keyrings to be honest, but it seems like a good idea. I can't immediately think of any reasons why we wouldn't do it.
faucet 80 --in cat

This is useful for creating a connection for receiving the input of what you get...

e.g. running

faucet 80 --in cat

and later

curl http://127.0.0.1:80

will deliver to you console :

GET / HTTP/1.1
User-Agent: curl/7.21.4 (i686-pc-linux-gnu) libcurl/7.21.4 OpenSSL/0.9.8n zlib/1.2.5 libidn/1.19
Host: 127.0.0.1:900
Accept: /
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_humorous_units_of_measu...

probably best to measure it in time. that is, a clean shave is length 0, time since last shave estimates length. If you use an electric shaver, the settings on the shaver associate to a known length. If you trim with scissors... that's a bit trickier.
True, but the fact that we work in the tech sector aside, how is the idea of keeping people employed in jobs that are redundant or being replaced any different than buggy whips in some of the first automobiles?

Continuing to prop up economic models that likely won't last doesn't seem very market driven. I understand the politicians don't want to address this fact, whether republican or democrat or other, but it will eventually come to a head and need to be addressed. Eventually even our own subculture here will be at the point that the movie industry is where most programmers/it people/etc... are unnecessary.
I never directed my comment to Python. That because what I said serves to any language, from C to Python, and including ObjC, Pascal, JS, Ruby, etc. From WP:

In computer science, functional programming is a programming paradigm that treats computation as the evaluation of mathematical functions and avoids state and mutable data.

FP is a paradigm as OO is too. One thing does not exclude the other. Nothing stands between you and using the best of both worlds, in any language. You just have to think outside of the box. ;)
What a ridiculous fixed header. It's taking up 2/3 of my phone's screen.
Spammers also have ways to determine your social circle (eg. scraping Facebook), so they can send mail to all your friends.
Apple: 40 billion unique app downloads, $7 billion paid to developers
If it works, sure - as I said, what I have heard is that it is actually detrimental for self-defense. Maybe you could also provide pepper spray training, which seems to be a requirement for using it effectively?

Also, it seems a very aggressive stance, also with the wording about pigs. I worry that what we will see now in India (maybe it has been like that before) is a lot of acts of arbitrary law, people killing other people just because of a rumor. So in general I don't think pouring more oil into the fire is the best idea.

Don't get me wrong, I have no sympathy for rapists at all. They can be roasted in a bath of pepper spray for all I care.
Bad UX killed Yahoo. Intrusive, animated advertisements and a cluttered home page are how I will always remember them. I often joke about how I test Internet connections by going to yahoo.com in the browser since no one goes there anymore and I won't be deceived by cache :P
> but ridiculous to put on a test that will define the lives of the people who have to answer it.

Depends on how the question is graded and what the objective of the question it. I think it's a wonderful question, personally. It's not the type of question that you can just memorize the answer to, and then regurgitate on the test. You also can't just put down an answer that you think the testers are looking for, as you would on a question about, say, climate change or multiculturalism. So what's left? You use your brain, reason something, and then justify it.

//
No standardized test in grade 8 will define your life and certainly not any single question will make much difference.
Timing (http://timingapp.com/) does a nice job. It also allows you to define "projects" which are applications, folders, or websites which then get tracked together. Useful for client work or in figuring out how you actually spend your time on a spike, for instance.
Yeah, we understand there are unique situations like this so we typically reach out for more information when someone says they are willing to relocate.
Disruptive Web Security Startup Shape Security Nabs $20M
How does this work with visas, etc? Maybe Asian countries are less strict but in the US and EU you'd need to jump through many hoops or lie to immigration officials about intent.
And for the folks who didn't request their passwords via email

By definition, we don't know who has requested that the password be sent via plain text email because that party has not successfully authenticated as a known user.
I don't mean to be obtuse, but what would that look like? We've been focused on providing a better browsing experience with these citations, but if there's a demand for them in a different format I don't see why we wouldn't provide it.
Who is this aimed for? PhD students? Faculty? Businesses looking for consultants? I'm not that far along in my career (assistant prof in econ) but I know many of the people working in my area personally, so it's not clear how much value I'd get out of a search engine like yours -- not that the information isn't useful, but people working in the area have already internalized a lot of it. For prospective grad students or other people outside the field, that obviously wouldn't apply.
G+ will be the bane of google.

i use gmail, gmaps, i use android, i use gcalendar, i use gdocs... but I don't use freaking facebook or g+. but now every new feature i click i get a "you must have a g+ profile"... want to leave a review for an android app? too bad, you need G+. Want to thumb up/down a youtube video? too bad, need G+. want to share location with someone on latitude? too bad, he's not in your circles.

for the first time, i'm looking for alternatives to Gmail. because i'm pretty sure i won't be able to use it unless i have g+ at some point. And everyone knows what happens after you get free from the gateway drug...
iTunes. I know Banshee is an alternative, but it seems to have trouble with syncing my books, for which I need Calibre as well. It would be nice to have an all in one solution that didn't suck as bad as iTunes.
The browser doesn't send yahoo.com cookies to abysssec.com. The way XSS's work in general is that the attacker's landing page probably has an invisible iframe that GETs or POSTs to yahoo.com, with the right parameters, to trigger an XSS with js code that sends the cookies back to abysssec.com All this is invisible in the video, as the author does not want to disclose the technical details.
Political shifts don't "occur", people make them happen.

Well, obviously. Nothing really happens without people causing it. But a lot of political shifts are gradual, large processes that can't be attributed to one individual or even a single group.

Take gay marriage, for example. There has been no lightning-rod event, nor one particularly vocal advocate group for it. But over time, we see that opinions about gay marriage are shifting. While people did "make it happen", it's more of a broader consensus occurring.
You might want to link your href-s to new tab/window.
Ideally this should be made clear on the front page - under Learn More?
Would this be an example of implementing the new API?

Have calls to your mobile number ring to a phone or computer in your house (wifi or wired).
Infusionsoft Raises $54M From Goldman Sachs
Looks like AT&T screwed them (Twilio).
> Google+ is Google. It is a way to consolidate all Google services. Requiring a Google account to utilize Google services seems pretty okay to me.

that couldn't be more wrong.

it used to be a gmail account was a google account. They even 'consolidated' in the clumsiest possible way my google-domain account into my personal gmail account some time ago.

now they are bullying everyone to use their gfacebook.
What kind of work are you looking for?

You mentioned that you were looking for a Vibrant / growing tech community. I think you need to check out both Raleigh and Durham, North Carolina.

Both are really great areas to live, work, and play. They offer great communities with lots of small and growing companies. Both places are up and coming as well, so you have the ability to shape it's future in a bigger way than somewhere already established.

Links to take a closer look.

http://triangletechtalk.com/

http://www.exitevent.com/

http://www.americanunderground.com

http://www.hubraleigh.com/

http://www.rtp.org/

Feel free to email me at my username @ gmail.com if you'd like to talk further.
SomaFM. Makes me feel like I'm in a science fiction epic.
Brace styles and JavaScript
No shit. Drinking milkshakes for breakfast is pretty disgusting.
Until you're suddenly participating in a social network under the default (public) privacy setting without realizing or intending it.

As what happened when Buzz was (c)rudely integrated into the rest of Google+.

One minute you're sharing links and sending short messages to a small private group. The next, your posts are all publicly visible on a public profile page you didn't know existed.
> He started from the worst job in software, and clawed his way out with (all due respect to Patrick) possibly the least technically ambitious product in the history of commercial software development.

I don't mean to disagree, per se, but I don't think this is exactly a fair statement. Making a successful business out of selling bingo cards to teachers on the Internet is actually pretty ambitious as far as I can tell. Yes, the bingo card production itself is basically RNG on Rails, but that isn't what made him successful. I could put up a precise clone of Bingo Card Creator and it wouldn't even pay for its hosting.

Put another way: If I picked some crappy niche and put up "Hello World" attached to a built-in algorithm, do you really think I'd do as well as he did? (I don't think desire is the difference, as I certainly desire for that to be true, in much the same way I desire for ice cream to not have any calories.)

He did an amazing job with practically nothing — do you really disagree with that? It's obviously not impossible, but it's certainly not normal or the preceding statement wouldn't be true. Painting it as impossible is wrong, but trivializing it has the opposite effect of what you want: It makes it look more impossible than it is, because it isn't actually trivial.
http://musicforprogramming.net/

http://simplynoise.com/

Groove Salad from SomaFM

And often, simply quiet. Quiet is underrated in my opinion.
I agree. They start out by talking about video and phone integration in apps. But then they are like, you have 1 million api calls, and it will translate text for you. Please pay us money for our babel fish. Also we will populate forms for you sometimes.
BBC1 Essential Mixes. It's a great way to discover new styles of music while listening to the (hopefully) best, curated tracks of each genre.
i must say jqapi's quick inline search is a win! Has been on my bookmarks bar for well over 2 years now!

Thanks
Thank you, thank you! Has been a much needed replacement to JQuery's awful docs. Hope you can up the bar again!
Michael O Church of HN fame was the reason that I decided to dump LinkedIn. He pointed out that a stupid mistake in entering information on a site like LinkedIn can band you as a liar (even if the mistake was inadvertent) and give you no ability to correct yourself.

It would be tantamount to sending out hundreds of resumes with a typo in your email address.
Nice and clean/simple. Also great use of filepicker, just joined!
I imagine it would look like raw data, probably json. Then you can do the mashups play, etc. I think Elsevier has tried some of that to some success (look at their API docs). Mendeley is also trying this approach and has done fairly well so far.