skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Great concept.

One suggestion off the top of my head is to allow for offline listening. Ie, configure soundgecko to get a snapshort of HN front page at say 5pm, TTS the front page contents, email the sound file as an attachment for listening.

This would be extremely useful for areas that has low mobile phone signal, or countries data plans are expensive or/and restrictive. (looking at you Australia!)
I think he sees the value in the product (since he eventually wants to sell it) but he doesnt seem like he wants to put in the work right now with identifying customers, customer dev.
I've been using Win 8 for about 4-5 months now, and I love it.

We've started to roll it out to power users in various companies (i.e. people that ask for it), and I have yet to have anyone say anything negative about it.

You read a tech blog though and they act like it's the apocalypse.
No, just more evidence female's life is unenviable in Albania
you should take a look at this: http://everycook.org/
Sasha and Malia Obama ‘Internet Face’ the Inaugration
Basecamp Personal
For webmail I can recommend roundcube + dovecot, for calendaring/contacts davical has all I need.
Ask HN: Has anyone used HitTail? Is it useful?
Kunstler's "The Geography of Nowhere" (http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/125313.The_Geography_of_N...) examines this issue in depth. Excellent read.
The Business Cards of Famous People
It does seem to meet PG's critera

1. The user has an opportunity to opt out.

2. Calling Ask Toolbar "crapware" is only an opinion. Someone may actually want it. sniggers

I think bundling software is fine so long as it is relevant and genuinely useful. Ask Toolbar fails on both accounts. Bundled software shouldn't be offered during minor updates or security fixes... or at the very least, during these minor updates, it should be opt-in instead of opt-out.
How about avoiding VCs in general. Unfortunately, that's not how things are done these days.
Well, he has a dozen years experience doing it. He brought about the IPO. He's been the business partner for thirty years. Who would be more qualified?
Is anyone distributing 64bit OpenJDK builds for windows?

EDIT: I found: https://github.com/alexkasko/openjdk-unofficial-builds
In terms of just the languages themselves, .NET is very solid. C# is definitely a better version of Java, and the rest of the # languages in general are decent or good.

However, the .NET open source ecosystem (while greatly improved from years back) still really really sucks. Historically, this is directly MS's fault (codeplex helped but it still will never be able to undo the damage MS did early on). I just think it's a waste of time having to reinvent wheels that pretty much every other major platform (Java, PHP, Ruby, Python, etc...) has plenty of. I always hate having to do extra work that I feel is entirely unnecessary, which happens a lot on .NET.
Why? Europe isn't exactly a hotbed of innovation, economic dynamism or growth; and that is largely attributable to the socialist mindset that pervades much of Europe. Although entrepreneurialism is a word that originated in Europe, it is rather hard to find much evidence of it in any meangingful way.
He was given founder's equity despite not being a founder because he was brought onboard to run the business side of the business.
You can send true MMS, means picture/video with in message body using txtimpact mms gateway, check out their developers api, http://www.txtimpact.com/mms-messaging.asp. simple to implement..

--Hugo
I agree, please clarify, because this sounds extremely useful. Within the Pocket app, if I tap on an article's title, it doesn't highlight, it opens. Then two-finger tap does nothing. Long tap in a paragraph highlights one word with the option to speak that word.
Well when after the last security issue there were articles calling end users for uninstalling java completely, I was pretty mad at the missing distinction between the plugin and the runtime.

But now I really think this is a good thing to recommend under windows.

I will still continue using OpenJDK for server projects under Linux, but will press for different solutions whenever installation of Jav on a Windows machine might be required.
I happily uninstalled Java from all of my machines/OSes last week. Glad to be rid of it.
Python's dynamicness is something you love and hate. Same goes for JavaScript (at least strict mode JS) in my experience. It's much nicer having the compiler tell you there's an undefined variable instead of the runtime.
The taxes are the same everywhere in Germany. What differs is how much you pay for pension insurance (and how much you get out of it, IIRC).
Also check MonoTouch and Monodevelop. Use C# and compile to Android and iOS.
Show HN: Shortcut Tool for grep / ack Search Results
I don't think that's possible. Big|Fast|Cheap, Choose two. (or one, under some circumstances).
It's 28 days minimum in the UK[1] (for a full time employee) but these can include the public holidays (8 a year in England/Wales, 9 a year in Scotland and 10 a year in NI).

<generalisations follow>

In reality most IT companies give ~25 days and give the 8 public holidays off too. Longer service often gets you more days. I'm up to 27 days/year (plus the 8 public holidays).

Any reasonable IT company will also require you to take all of your holiday during the year, it's a manager's responsibility to ensure that his team are using their holiday. There's certainly no pressure to not use all of the days! I can carry over the odd day or two across years but generally not allowed to accrue large amounts of unused paid leave.

We don't have a concept of an allocation of "sick days" either, if you're unwell for a day or a few days you can self certify yourself off work sick. If you're ill for longer than a week the expectation is that you'll provide a letter from a Doctor explaining the absence. If you're ill frequently then the company will discuss it with you (and if you're pulling frequent sickies then that'll be dealt with as a disciplinary). I've had 3 days off sick in the last 5 years.

1. https://www.gov.uk/bank-holidays#england-and-wales
Your World of Text: Inside the Hive Mind of the Internet
I agree with rmc. There are similar cultural roles in Samoa, India, Thailand. Gender-- the cultural notion, not the biological one-- is definitely more malleable than we typically assume.

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

Also, if you haven't read Middlesex, it is excellent.
There is independent information to support that NK is this bad and worse. No question about that.
Here are a few more versions of the story:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5090807 (venturebeat.com)

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5092088 (telegraph.co.uk)

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5092123 (bloomberg.com)

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5092327 (guardian.co.uk)

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5092447 (latimes.com)

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5092764 (lohud.com)

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5092889 (bbc.co.uk)

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5093489 (cnn.com)

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5094517 (ft.com)

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5094529 (wsj.com)

There are more ...
I fail to understand how that's the Windows philosophy. I've used Windows almost exclusively since I've started using computers and I don't recall that being the norm for quite some time. Even today I would say it's not really the norm simply because most people will not run into this on a regular basis. I would say that's the philosophy of business in general, especially considering the article is about Oracle's bad behavior. They target Windows simply because of sheer numbers which would possibly give them a good return on investment. The main reason you don't see that behavior on Linux, yet, is that it's not worth the time for these businesses. If they ever change their mind I guarantee that will be the day you'll start to see this type of thing.
Tried installing Linux Mint. Lack of hardware drivers for my 3 year old Dell laptop.

Have trouble leaving Windows 7 when everything works fine.
> AT&T's intent isn't really relevant. The fact is, they published all of those emails publicly. They certainly didn't mean to, but I fail to see how accessing public websites can be considered a crime, even if you access lots of them when the company doesn't want you to.

In the meatspace it happens all the time that you can get in trouble for being somewhere you're not supposed to even if they forgot to hit the locks on the way out.

Or for a possibly more relevant example, what happens in real life if you find an ATM that has an error such that it gives you twice as much cash as you asked for? Is it still theft if you take it? (Hint: Yes)

Should that equate to a felony here, where no authentication shenanigans were employed? I don't think so, but I wish we'd quit with the victim blaming here on HN.

I also wish we'd separate the enforcability of something from its morality or legality. There's many, many minor things wrong that people can do that even the current state can't hope to fully enforce, but that doesn't make it right, it makes it a fact of life. But if you do somehow get caught doing something that 99% of the rest manage to get away with, shame on you.

By the way, that ATM example wasn't made up: http://investorplace.com/2012/11/faulty-atm-gives-out-extra-... (the Bank opted not to try to find out which customers took the money, due to the difficulty with getting accurate evidence, not because it was right to take the money)
They don't even need to release a fix. I have been prompted to update several times in the past year, where I go through the install process (including having to uncheck the Ask box), only to get the message at the end that version x.y.x is already installed.

The updater is just plain buggy. Ed Bott mentioned the problems with limited user accounts, but I didn't see him mention the issue with jucheck ignoring the update settings:

http://superuser.com/questions/130961/how-to-stop-jucheck-fr...

I also had an XP system where the %appdata% environment variable somehow got deleted. This completely breaks the installer.
New release of AngularJS Scaffold
You don't remember Gator? or that smiley thing?
The Social in Media
Forget Amanda Palmer. Interactive systems design pioneer Richard Anderson, on how social media-based fundraising helped him through his homelessness. Tuesday, in Souciant.
Make love, not war with your dev team
Unity made me switch to Xubuntu. It uses a lot less RAM to begin with.
Your experience is not necessarily because Java is slow. It could just be the applications you are running that are slow for reason that have nothing to do with the language.

Swing is probably going to be slower (maybe?) than some native windowing framework.

But Java as a language running on the JVM is certainly not slow.

I've just been looking up pycharm and it seems that the slowness issues are to do with things like opening files and doing parsing. These things are likely to be slow for anything but the language they are written in.
As many others will tell you, installing Cinnamon within Ubuntu will give you a great UI.
I really don't follow the Linux news, I'm comparing to 2007 which was the last time I had a Linux desktop (SuSE with KDE), where the only available games were Frozen Bubbles and some half-baked sim game clones.

Seeing mainstream support (Steam and others), and 62 titles shows Linux has gone a long way, and of course the rise of web gaming is a huge boon.
Obscurity: A Better Way to Think About Your Data Than 'Privacy'
IPad Hack Statement of Responsibility
tl;dr: just a bunch of general, vague explanations, and for the real stuff you need to buy their book...
Dwolla launches partnership with State of Iowa government to collect taxes
25$ for a project?

I don't even know if it's better than Asana what is free for personal use.
They don't have N * 15 million people.

But they did use the "give us a hundred thousand tons of grain or 100,000 people will starve" tactic pretty effectively thru all the 90-s
In other news, the mid-nineties were a long time ago.
Most of the managers that I have come across are not worth the paper on which their job description is printed. I am talking about the middle level managers here.

There is some adhoc planning going on at this level but most of the time it is dictated by what is being conveyed from the top. This takes care of all the planning, task assignment work. If the manager has capable team members then all that is required is to just tell them that they are now going to work on project X. After that it is the responsibility of those team members to manage the work. All that the so called managers do is check periodically about how it is going.

Recruitment of engineers is again completely left to senior engineers. Once 3 senior engineers say yes to a candidate, the manager just has to complete the formalities. So there is no contribution in building better teams.

There is no technical input from the managers as this takes lot of time and is somehow beneath them.

With agile processes, the team manages their work flow on a day to day basis. So the manager role is reduced even further.

All they work on is performance review once a year. It is more of a give and take as the manager and his manager don't have any realistic idea of an individual's contribution.

I think time has come to cull the managers rank and just have 1 manager for 100 developers with developers organizing themselves in self-managing teams. The managers just get too much credit and money for doing essentially nothing.
"VCs from whom you should avoid taking money"
Not sure if Zuckerberg's is fake or if he is that much of an arrogant prick...
Recently, antirez pointed out that redis was essentially memtest86; consequently, he has had to spend a lot of time chasing down phantom bugs due to memory modules with stuck/flipped bits. At that time, I think HN was left wondering whether Amazon uses ECC memory in its EC2 machines. Do we know whether that's the case now?
Amazon Releases In-App Purchasing for Windows, Mac, and Web
Is the Ask.com toolbar installed before or after Java, and if java fails will ask.com be rolled back?
I live in Rwanda, so I very much know what the IDEOS and company are like. As a matter of fact I have both versions of the IDEOS in my drawer actually.

I'll check out Firefox OS on the latest builds for sure, but I'd be surprised if we weren't seeing the new IDEOS coming out this year with the latest 4.x Android. We'll see.

I hope Firefox OS does well, I'm just saying that their window of opportunity for addressing the low end market with something unique is very quickly closing.
That describes Apple well enough but Google's stuff is everywhere and best in class in most cases.
This looks a lot like https://github.com/begriffs/css-ratiocinator
Oh, things are much better now. All the games I buy nowadays (mostly indie, as I said) run on Linux, which is where I play them (or don't, as I don't have time). Steam on Linux is fantastic, since we'll probably see adoption from authors who otherwise wouldn't consider it, but there are fantastic games available for Linux nowadays.

Just not on Linux Steam, yet.
IP: Do Patent Trolls have a Place in Canadian Technology?
Why can't both parents get time off for the birth of a child? It's probably one of the most important events in any parents life.
Ignoring vim's weird swap files in git
I posted that link only because it was one of many search results for "Google benefits" - I was a bit surprised to see that the benefits aren't posted anywhere on Google's jobs site, but the fact that they're negotiable probably is why.

Anyway, the benefits are confirmable if you just ask someone who works there - those are the baseline benefits everyone already gets just by signing an employment contract. While I don't doubt that this article is a plant, I was making a point that I am pretty sure their benefits are best in industry, and I haven't seen any evidence that there are any companies that there are, as you say, several places that are on par with Google across the board. In fact, when I've spoken with people, the number of companies in Silicon Valley that are even close (NetApp is certainly one of them) can be counted on one hand.
http://techcrunch.com/2011/06/25/im-ceo-bitch/
Also see George Carlin's rants about business men (and women with shoulder pads who repeat the worst mistakes of men) ^^
I employed every shortcut in my keyboard-shortcut arsenal and fell short.

One good one to remember is ALT+Left Shift+NumLock

Then you can use your keypad as a mouse. / and - toggle which mouse button 5 is.
Java could have been such a good thing, even in the browser (ok, as platform, ignoring the language's shortcomings, but still...). Whys did both Sun and Oracle strive so hard to fuck it up? It's as if these guys have a "how to fuck things up for the end user" brainstorming meeting every week!
I had about a decade in both, and really they're two very different worlds. From a code standpoint I'd much rather be in C#. It's one thing that MS has done really, really well over the last 10 years. They've taken a pretty aggressive stance towards adopting new features and although it's become fairly complex as of 4.0 and on, it really has some great features, some functional-inspired things like closures and collections api stuff that reminds me of Ruby in a lot of ways, and a great web framework in MVC that is honestly almost as fun to code for as any of the open source web frameworks out there. If you had to choose between one of the big J2EE stacks and MVC, no question, MVC is far, far better. The infrastructure is still a big 'ol MS GUI world, and I'd rather do <badPainfulThing> than spend a lot of time configuring and deploying IIS apps, but then TomCat and WAR files et. al. ain't exactly fun either.

Java's JVM/bytecode infrastructure on the other hand has undergone a renaissance as a VM platform for a lot of very cool languages: Scala and Clojure being the two big examples there. But that's Really not the same thing as Java, obviously. And there's Android -- a completely different ecosystem, and somewhat truncated as a Java dialect, but still basically the Java language and able to employ most of the libs you're used to having: Guava, Guice and so on. No dynamic code gen, which stinks, but I know why they did it. So if you have Java under your belt and want to get into mobile stuff, that's a huge plus.

So, as a general-purpose language skill, Java is still really, really important to know and will have legs for a long time to come. ASP MVC is a great framework, and if you can't work in something like Django or Rails or the like, it comes in nice 3rd or 4th place in terms of making for general coder happiness. C# is a far more progressive and interesting language than Java, but that's a philosophical difference between the gatekeepers of the two languages: Java intentionally moves slow for the sake of stability and continuity, C#'s minders have apparently embraced a little of the 'move fast break things' attitude of some parts of the open source world. I prefer the latter, but understand the rationale of the former.

Me, I'm a Rails coder these days but also get to hop back into Java for Android dev and the rare foray into ASP work and they all have strengths and tradeoffs and they'll all be around a long time. The only thing I think I would avoid on principle, for my own sanity, is any enterprisey J2EE framework. That truly does feel like a massive leap backwards.
I'd like to see companies ditch "Human Resources " departments all together.
To put it succinctly: a gentleman doesn't kiss and tell.

It's disrespectful of the trust that your partner places in you by engaging in what is fundamentally a private interaction to share it publicly without their permission.
Given this story http://showcase.netins.net/web/creative/lincoln/sites/uscapi...

During the war construction costs for the new dome [for the Capitol building] other parts of the building drew unfavorable remarks. Lincoln, however, stressed the importance of continuing the work, saying, "If people see the Capitol going on, it is a sign we intend the Union shall go on."

The same reasoning would explain keeping the capital in DC.
Ladies and gentlemen, introducing THE fugliest company of all time - ORACLE.

The company that sued Android unsuccessfully, The company that fucked up JAVA, The company that fucked up MySQL, The company that fucked up OpenOffice, The company that doesn't like anything good happening within the tech sector.

I really miss those days when Oracle was highly respected and used to be a great workplace to be a part of.
It feels alienating to many of us Americans, too. Having visited a few foreign countries, I've seen beautiful public spaces, and its disappointing to come home and see how ugly our cities look now that I've seen better.
I desperately want to live in a cosmopolitan urban center that is practical, something I have yet to find here.
Being from Texas I can tell you, we spread everything out. Just looking at my Runkeeper logs, it's a quarter of a mile from my apartment door to the nearest street.
Phusion Passenger 4 Technology Preview: Out-Of-Band Work
On a semi-related note, I always thought this was a clever use of GitHub:

https://github.com/frabcus/house
Actually, that's very common. It's one of my pet peeves for web design but I see it often in installers and the applications themselves.
Just wondering what you are using to connect the nodes.
Is that all done with kinectjs?
Keys to Maintaining a Successful Offshore Development Team
The situation isn't really like this in the US either. There are exceptions but this is not the norm.
Future Mac Pro, Part II
From the Vinetrade site:"Secure and trustworthy. Your transactions are encrypted."

Step 1:
Start posting username/pwd to your server over HTTPS and
start delivering signup & login forms over HTTPS.

At the moment, both of these happen in plain text so I don't see how you can say you take security seriously if you can't even get the low hanging fruit.
An Open Letter to the People of Purdue
That's weird, I thought Oracle have been making insecure software for decades and this was just business as usual for them.
Very unfair comment on a good post which links to a bunch of extremely valuable posts and resources. All the video interviews of their book are also available here for free - http://tractionbook.com/old/

Gabriel is one of the best startup founders and bloggers, who always has a unique take on things and shares great data and resources. Please don't be so dismissive.
Thank you. I wish more people knew how to write properly.
How incredibly obscure! Thanks a ton for this.
If anyone wants an introduction to functional programming using Scala, I really recommend Martin Odersky's coursera course (https://class.coursera.org/progfun-2012-001/class). He restricts you to functional Scala; there isn't a mutated variable in the whole course. It isn't officially a course right now. You won't get a certificate for taking it, and I don't think the grader is turned on, but the other materials are still there.

That course does not allow registration right now.
Just the word 'unofficial' is enough to stop most large companies using them. It is (was?) the same with Firefox- they never offered an MSI installer for use on corporate networks. There were unofficial versions, but you could never be sure that someone hadn't bundled something extra in there.
I believe it was meant to be a joke.
A keen demonstration of price sensitivity.
OO vs. functional: the Game of Life
I've heard that Korea is similar, but with even higher-quality manufacturing. Do you know if this is true?

I'd love to come visit next time I'm around China. Send me an email and we'll connect?
i was with you until you didn't say Android. they really should have picked Android and done what Samsung has done.