skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Unless your ironing technique is exceedingly thorough and your boards perfectly smooth, you will get pitted/broken traces. I found that the more traditional photographic method is just as quick, and the supplies cost approximately the same.
I've settled into a pretty happy workflow using Git as a local snapshot of an upstream Subversion repository using git-svn. With a bit of discipline, you can keep things nicely in sync, and get the benefits of cheap-as-hell branching and local/offline commits without forcing your entire project team to migrate to a new VCS.

I've got some notes on the subject on my blog:

http://rcoder.net/content/daily-git-svn
Hot and Safe: a Beginner's Guide to Multithreaded Libraries
Part of the problem with the game industry now is that there are just so many damn games being released. It used to be that a single title could easily hold my attention for at least a couple months. Now, the release schedules from just the big names alone clog up most of the calendar. People need to pick a cutoff for game purchases and I think the indie titles tend to get cut off the list first for most.
No.

http://www.etfrc.com/ChemicalImbalances.htm

"No experiment has ever shown that anyone has an "imbalance" of any neurotransmitters or any other brain chemicals."
What am I? A Salad? Am I taking a bath or stocking a buffet?

Spot on! always wondered why these utility product guys give food smells to those products
They are their investors. :-)
More importantly, Mercurial is extensible in Python -- you can write extension modules, hooks, etc., all of which have full access to the (albeit poorly-documented) Mercurial internals.

Writing extensions for Git is rather different, since you effectively can't. To extend or build on Git, you end up doing a lot of shelling out to the 'git' binary with use of 'raw' output formats and regexp-based scraping. It's pipes and shell subcommands all the way down, instead of a library-style programming API.

Which you prefer depends a lot on the diversity and preferences of the community using your repositories. Mercurial pushes you towards usability and single-language (Python) solutions, while Git easily drops into a classic UNIX-like "lots of little scripts" solution.
i'm curious why this was downovted. the author seems to have personal experience when sharing his opinion...so doesn't seem like bad spam to me.
oh cripes can we just kill these stupid stereotypes already?
You sound like a person who has read a lot of Solzhenitsyn.
Well yeah, but you rarely write programs about science and computer stuff. You write programs about some business/domain where English might not be The Language.
Is there a cliff notes version?
Alan Greenspan Explains Modern Economics
Earthquake in the Bay Area - Twitter Reports, Google Doesn’t Know
amazing. I'd love to see the lecture that this accompanied.
how important are thru-holes? my friends and i are making a cheap desktop circuitboard miller. it mills away the copper with a blade rather than etching.

it can do both sides of the board in series, but no thru-holes. is this something anyone would be interested in?
Ask HN: Looking for an accounting app with a descent SDK
Hello. I am looking for an accounting application for a startup where I work. We bill based on usage data (stored in our own DB and we use Ruby on Rails) so we need to (1) push the usage data into the accounting app (2) auto-generate billing/invoice through the accounting app. Any suggestions will be appreciated :)

- Josh
good luck passing a housing inspection there dude...presuming he wants to be buried in the house after this bit of idiocy, cuz he'll never sell it
This just sounds to me like the next step in a game of cat-and-mouse. What innovative technology can we geeks develop to circumvent these censorship systems?
The flexibility of the relational model is built on its bare simplicity: values + sets + logic. If you propose adding to this and giving up the benefits provided by these simplifications (simplicity of reasoning, ability to change the physical implementation without affecting the logical one [those not-magic indexes], declarative constraints, declarative queries), you need to have a really good reason.

The network model if it means anything is letting you add pointers to the mix and changing how you reason about your data from sets to graphs. This makes it harder to declare constraints, check integrity, update sets of data, access your data in different ways, and reason about your queries. An imperative script is in no way as safe a program as a declarative query.

The most clear benefit in my view to the network model it lets you use your object code fairly seamlessly. Ok.

The problem is that this is a good trade off for programs where you don't care primarily about your data, but about your code. I'd argue that isn't true for the majority of programs that have databases at all. The issues that kill your system years down the line and give you nightmares are not code issues, they are data issues. And the code you write to fix those problems... will end up re-implementing all those annoying "heavy" bits of RDBMSs that coders seems to hate.
http://searchyc.com/accounting+app
To get drunk fan kicked out, text 513-381-JERK
Ha! mercurialhub.org is still available...
I'm not sure why you're being down-modded.

The Python team purporting to do DVCS research and then saying their decision was made on a gut feeling seems disingenuous at best.

Sure, I'm biased because I work for GitHub, but this decision would have felt like much less of a slap in the face had they just said: "We're switching to Mercurial because we like it and it's written in Python, case closed."
yes because someone else coming over to the house may not realize that this is dangerous, craptastic, etc. dude may actually be setting himself up for a huge liability should this ever fail on an unsuspecting guest....his house insurance won't cover it, its non-permitted work

in any case he'll have to remove it if the house ever goes up for sale, there's no way that would pass inspection. the first thing an inspector will ask for is the permit for the work
That's a good point. Ruby has really become Python's "Other" in spite of their similarities.
What I really want to know is: Who's going to be the Levi Strauss of the "iPhone Gold Rush"?
no permit = ripped down at owners expense, pure and simple
What I take issue with however is that these warts get conveniently forgotten in the buzz

The problem, to paraphrase Tolstoy, is that happy users are all alike, but every unhappy user is unhappy in her own way.

It's easy to write a review that talks about the core features that a tool gets right. Everyone cares about those features, and everyone uses them, and they're well documented. It is much harder to write a review containing a categorical list of warts. Warts are incidental problems that only bother a subset of users. (If they bothered absolutely everybody, they wouldn't be called warts; they'd have a different name: bugs or misfeatures.)

Worse, one person's wart is another person's feature. Legions of people have complained, over the decades, that rm has a horrible and dangerous UI which lets you accidentally erase your entire machine by typing a stray space at the wrong time. But, somehow, rm persists, because there are plenty of power users who like it.
What I really want to know is: Who's going to be the Levi Strauss of the "iPhone Gold Rush"?

Incase?
I say this as a git user: msysgit works well, but that's not the same thing as working well on Windows. hq feels native on Windows in a way that git doesn't.
UGLY: How Unorthodox Thinking Will Save Design
I am thrilled that Python is switching to a python-based DVCS, but I'm bitter about Bazaar not being the choice :-/
Managerial Blunders - From The Economist
Despite layoffs, Microsoft is still hiring
But it could take incoming calls via wifi. 3G would be required only if you needed ~100% connectivity. In a wifi-only Skype app on an iPhone that supported background processes, it could auto connect to wifi networks whenever available and take incoming calls via Skype In... when there isn't wifi available it would be akin to the way your phone can't take calls when you have no service.

Anyway, according to the PC World article, Skype for the G1 works over 3G... I suppose that'd be an ATT vs. T-Mobile issue, though.
Don't fool yourself, once your app is off the charts — sales are virtually zero, there's very little trickle revenue. It will become increasingly difficult to land (and hang on) to top chart positions as the appstore triples in size this year, especially since the charts are governed by sales within 24-hour period.

I did a little research because I keep seeing that quote posted (which is from Dec. 08, before another 10k apps were on the store). I found his company and products:

http://www.ethanproductions.com

Mostly random saying generators, annoying sounds, picture shows, and a bunch of useless shit that's just not sustainable in the long-term. It's obvious to me his #1 intention was to rush a bunch of junk to the store simply to turn a sale, and nearly every app is rated 1 or 2 stars. He may have been getting $10k a month off unsuspecting customers in the past, but I highly doubt he'll see annualized sales over $100k. And I doubt he's still getting $10k in revenue.

If this is something that "inspires" you, then maybe you should reconsider your priorities if you have hopes of being the type of entrepreneur/hacker that wants to make a meaningful impact in the world.
Pinch Media, perhsps. http://www.slideshare.net/pinchmedia/iphone-appstore-secrets...

Or, more likely, one of the ad networks.
Dirty Secrets of College Waitlists
BetaWorks Raises Around $2M for Bit.ly, Spins It Out
I suppose this outcome was inevitable. MS couldn't afford the bad publicity of an all-out litigation, and would have perhaps risked a ruling that would render all software patents worthless. TomTom was in a worse position though: if they'd lost the battle, MS might have demanded an agreement that wasn't GPL-compatible (see point 7 in GPLv2), and this would have meant the end of TomTom's business - full stop.

So it sounds like now there's a mostly undisclosed agreement, which is a great outcome for MS: they get friendly publicity for being soft on TomTom, but the case is still feeding the FUD on Linux' patent infringements...
BetaWorks is a really unique firm. It has developers building things they think are going to be big, if they can't find companies to invest in or acquire. That could easily be a standard model for companies in the future; for companies that don't see having thousands of employees as a benefit.
A request:

1. Make a multi-player, network enabled version of Risk.

2. Point me at the technologies I'll need to make it myself.

Currently, the only Risk in the market is called Lux Touch. As such, it's great -- but there's a lot of room for improvement. It only supports a single player vs computers, doesn't save game states, and only has the generic Risk map.
A "Research Center Against Psychiatry" is hardly a reliable source for such a claim.
Thanks a lot. your suggestions are gems. We are thinking along those lines. We need to connect with existing ecosystems to provide value to the users. Thats critical.

What do you think about having your own personal web applications running in a virtual instance?
NY Times Nukes Itself On Google
Agreed. This is an article full of suppositions with little practical value.
Don't get so hung up on his point about whether or not you should write a business plan that you miss the rest of his points, which are great. Among other things, that it's about execution and staying power, not the idea.
I'm not a Git user, nor have I looked much at its code, so I don't really know why it's so fast.

I think this tells it all, he hasn't even used Git and he is discussing why it is fast !!

I think one should atleast use it to find out if what people are going around saying is true atleast.
TomTom to pay Microsoft to settle patent cases
Eggs, Tomatoes and Time Management
This has nothing to do with what you are talking about. Of course you have to take into account the language of your users. That doesn't mean that the development isn't going to be done predominantly in English. ESPECIALLY if you are working with developers with different native languages is English going to be the fall back. That was his point. And he's not saying that he's proud or arrogant that it is English, just that it is. It's a fact of life.
Read the actual arguments in the linked article, and refute them. The source is irrelevant.

Alternatively, ask an honest psychiatrist whether anyone has any solid idea just why the drugs work, when they work. Or why they don't, when they don't.

"How are the chemical imbalances which are the supposed basis for the prescription of "antidepressants" diagnosed? Is exploratory neurosurgery performed, using some technique that allows the surgeon to quantify synaptic transmitter levels? No, the very idea is absurd. Is a spinal tap, then, done to at least measure, on a gross scale, the distribution of neurotransmitter metabolites? Of course not – how many people have undergone spinal taps before receiving a prescription for Effexor®? Is blood at least drawn, to test something? No. This diagnosis – the diagnosis of the most subtle of chemical disorders in the most complex organ in the body – is made on the basis of the patient's report of feeling sad and lethargic. Try to imagine a hematologist diagnosing leukemia this way to get a sense of just how ridiculous this idea is."

"The principal reason for rejecting biopsychiatry (aside from the fact that intellectual honesty demands its rejection) is that it locates the cause of psychic suffering in people's "bad brains," and excludes the conditions of modern life, or anything else, from consideration as the cause of such pain."

Note also that the author defends your right to take any drug, if you wish to. However, he defends it from the personal freedom point of view, and attacks the (popular yet unfounded) notion that these drugs return the individual to some nebulous ideal of "mental health."
For our startup we had a huge integration project with an industry-specific PDF and so I ended up writing a PDF importer that sounds like it does something similar to this project. The best part is that I couldn't figure out how to get my reader to determine what page a specific set of coordinates was on and it looks like this library supports it - thanks for the link!
Halmos, Non-Standard Analysis and Names
Sure, but if you want to use current libraries and programming languages, chances are documentation is in English.
Unencrypted PDF files can be opened in any editor, they are plaintext.
And the code you write to fix those problems... will end up re-implementing all those annoying "heavy" bits of RDBMSs that coders seems to hate.

Or you won't. I have many important KiokuDB applications in production. And they are not toy Web 2.0 things, they are important sites that perform important data analyses. I don't think any of the logic I had to write to support was particualarly difficult, and it was fewer lines of code than I would need to define my ORM classes.

The flexibility of the relational model is built on its bare simplicity: values + sets + logic.

Simplicity is good. However, software is complex, and complexity has to live somewhere. Look at git, for example. The underlying model is simple and beautiful, blobs, trees, and commits. Wonderful. But, to make that beautiful model into a revision control system, thousands of lines of code had to be written. So while simplicity makes the bottom part of the system simpler, it didn't do much for the overall simplicity of the entire system.

I feel the same way about object databases. They are more complex than a relational database (unless you count things like replication and embedded scripting and ... as relational database features, which I don't), but they help me decrease the complexity of the code I see.

As an example, when I use an RDBMS, I have to maintain:

SQL schema + upgrades

ORM classes

Logic classes (for abstractions over multiple tables or data stores)

Random scripts to query the database and give me munged reports

With an object database, I only have to write the logic classes and the random scripts. The random scripts are slightly more complicated, but not significantly more. The main app is much simpler, and much easier to test. I also don't have to hack my data model into the relational model. (Ever represent a tree in a relational database? It's a hack.)
That is the way I understood it. What do you mean by "it creates an index for each view"? I just would like to avoid reinventing the wheel, and relational databases abstract away some of the problems of dealing with large data sets.

Edit: OK, read the CouchDB introduction now. Did not know that the "views" are server side. I have a past as a Java developer, and I have actually come across the "select all, then compute in Java" pattern several times in the real world.
"Not all hackers are criminals." --me
There is a personality questionnaire called the "Temperament and Character Inventory" which purports to partition personality into a few dimensions of temperament some of which (supposedly) emerge from the independent neurotransmitter systems of the brain. [1] So basically if you trust the test you could use it to gauge your dopaminergic and serotonergic activity level (among other things). I've not researched the test enough to draw my own conclusions about it. Thus I can't say this it is a "good" way to measure anything in particular. I've not taken the test yet as I am loathe to sit through 240 questions only to find out things I already know. But I probably will at some point. You can take it online for $14.50 though a website somehow associated with its designer C. Robert Cloninger, M.D. [2]

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temperament_and_Character_Inven...

[2] http://www.anthropediafoundation.org/site/PageServer?pagenam...
GoodHack - "Write an application which makes the world a better place"
Goodhack is a Hack day being held in London on the 9th May. The challenge is to write an application which makes the world a better place. Even if you can't come to the event, you can add your problems to the list to be solved (http://www.goodhack.org/problems/add)
If you read much of what Guido writes, you'll see that most of his decisions come from a lot of thinking about a topic or problem and then going with what his gut tells him. It just seems to be the way he works, and I'd argue that the results speak for themselves.

And I can understand how you would wish they used git, but if you're taking this as a "slap in the face" at all, I think you're reading it wrong. They did some research on various similar tools and picked one.
> I don't know why hackers are always fighting an impossible uphill battle to change public perception of the word

Probably because it allows easy group identification. Those that use the positive meaning are in the group and those that use the negative meaning are outsiders.

We use many words this way. At the risk of sounding very suburban, witness the difference between Gangsta/Gangster when used by people inside/outside hip-hop culture.
Alternative version for your last sentence:
"In fact, if done properly, the new phrase could even" be a hack in itself.
The ONE reason to start a business
Fair enough, but it's a fallacy to link the "flying blind" to the "not crashing".

I flew blind in my first business too, but I didn't have the gut instincts built up over years of consulting, like you did. So my first business failed, for a variety of reasons that included the fact that the product didn't fill any real need. If we'd done a bit of market research earlier on, we might have figured it out early enough to adjust.

Now, of course, if someone follows all the best bits of "Getting Real", they'll have a better chance of figuring out these kinds of problems ahead of time, even without a business plan. But Getting Real is not necessarily all that easy for everyone to follow. You need to already be a moderately experienced entrepreneur to make the most of it, imho.

For the neophyte entrepreneur, then, I'd still recommend spending a couple of weeks putting together a business plan, simply as an additional safety net.
Epic Story. Good read.
We've had this music search engine here for a while, the catalog is fairly limited though.
If your B2B marketing emails could talk
Well as a programmer, I'd say "a hack" has a mild negative connotation (something hastily thrown together and brittle).

But the terms "to hack" and "hacking" are both positive (to get stuff done).

I have no problem with the term 'hacker', but I don't call myself one. To me it feels the same as calling myself a 'player' or something... like I'm a poseur.
"Why the disdain and distrust of a novice trying to educate themselves?"

Accepting something that is wrong and dumbed down for "average users" is a disservice to yourself. The entire idea of "average users" and the infantilization that goes along with it is a big problem in the computing industry today. Read Ellen Rose's "User Error," and then when you need to learn something next time, go straight to the best available source for it. Frequently these will be technical reports or refereed papers. You don't need some hack being paid by the word to summarize and misinterpret these for you.
I asked him how the bonds worked.

“You put chicken into the grinder”—he laughed with that infectious Wall Street black humor—“and out comes sirloin.”

I'm speechless.
Bill Gates Demonstrates DirectX - 1995
the English language is defined by its usage

Any language is, but not by simple majorities. In practice there is something like a pagerank for people for language usage, just as there is for most topics.

For example, it could be that 99% of people who use the phrase "begs the question" misuse it. But the 1% who don't are not merely a random 1% of the population. So in disputes about how to use the phrase, those who get it wrong tend to defer to those who get it right. You couldn't say the meaning of the phrase had changed till that stopped happening, because it implies by induction that everyone who misuses the phrase would change their usage if called on it.
Or for stricter passwords: IamGod (6 characters), IamG0d (characters and numbers), or 1@m&0D (Probably not the best attempt, but you get my point).
The idea of building a suite of modest revenue-producing apps is what inspires me, not necessarily the implementation. Thanks for taking the time to do the research to find his AppStore alter ago. (Yes, I double-posted the quoted comment again).

I think inspiration does not always have to take 100% of the original story - part of it can do it (e.g. it's hard to replicate someone's exact formula) - this reasoning is along the lines of if you compare yourself to another person - you should compare everything, not just the job, etc. (e.g. making it logically absurd to compare yourself to another human being).
Until we get excellent interop between git and mercurial I'm not buying the argument that git vs hg is anything like vi vs emacs.
I don't like password requirements - It restricts the number of possibilities and for crackers who know the restrictions it makes life a lot easier for them.
TomTom Surrenders, Pays Microsoft Licensing Fees For Linux
Well, without wanting to throw myself into sarcasm, because my english skills won't be good enough, i found that really scary to say the least. Maybe someone can provide us some historical background about censorship ?

One side of me feels like, it seems OBVIOUS that this kind of things (censorship) have been going on since a very long time, and that we may not be living the worse moment of human history concerning that matter.

But on the other hand, i can't help but feel like the power to punish people trying to circumvent censorship has never been so great and ubiquitous.
JK Rowling Attacks Scribd For Pirated Content
US Angel Investors Clip Their Wings in 2008