skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Heh... "90 degree summers" is mild. More like 105. Summer is brutal, though I actually haven't found it all that humid. That said, we were throwing pool parties in November while my friends in SF were walking around in coats.

Sept-Nov is nice in SF, but otherwise it was too cold and windy for me. I lived in soma, though -- if I were to do it again, I think I'd live in the Haight, mission, pac heights or the marina and I'd probably have a different experience. The variance between neighborhoods in terms of climate and culture seems to be greater in SF than I've found in Austin.
No, but it is a sucky one.
Cassandra 1.2 released with virtual nodes, collection types, request tracing
It begins!
Everything is on this page: http://code.google.com/p/phpvirtualbox/
You can obtain his email from http://code.google.com/u/109043195371721209508/
College math instructor here; I've taught Calculus III for the past three years. I always feel bad for my freshman students, particularly those in the fall semester. Some of them are prepared, and some aren't, but almost none of them have a mature understanding of mathematics that we expect in a sophomore-level course.

The problem with AP from my observation (at least in math) is that it encourages teaching the test. I'm certain many of them have never seen \lim_{h->0}\frac{f(x+h)-f(x)}{h} before, so how can they suddenly expect to understand the limit definition of a partial derivative either?

I took a Calculus course in high school, skipped on taking the AP test, and then took an honors section of Cal I when I got to college to get a deeper understanding (and an easy first-semester A). I feel I made the best decision.
The service don't break it into tweets. It automaticaly create "that page" and add a link to it.
Now this is the "short answer", if it the person reading tour tweet also happen to have the extension, he don't need to leave the browser to see the "longer version".

You should definitely try it and see how practical it is.
I liked it for that reason. Given, I'm also moving from Boston to SF this year, so it's particularly applicable to me.
It seems like Facebook is slapping AppData in the face for reporting on Instagram's drop in DAUs. When companies move away from transparency, it's a move that generally makes me think that they are scared of us seeing a trend.

It's in the best interest of the app economy to have numbers to know what's growing and shrinking and I think this is bad signaling by Facebook.
This is like insisting on driving around in a horse-drawn buggy because a car can crash at higher speeds. At this point I just ignore anybody trashing C++ that isn't offering any real alternatives. And no, C isn't an alternative for large scale app development.
Does this, and the Google Prediction API, and similar emerging offerings, herald the beginning of an "AIaaS" (Artificial Intelligence as a Service") market?
This was my first reaction as well, Princeton also does not offer credit for AP classes:

http://www.princeton.edu/pub/ap/
My high school offered a joint enrollment with a nearby public university. Taking my senior year there was by far the best decision I made in high school, and way more illuminating and engaging than if I had signed up for all AP courses.
You can't make a savings rate of 12.5% without "a lot of generational wealth backing it up"?
Any details on the criticism? All curiosity for me at this point.
Dev Bootcamp vs. Starter League Ruby boot camps comparison
Transplanted Feces Cures Drug-Resistant Gut Infection
automaton was created to greatly simplify and solve some of the problems with Gruntjs and Initializr. Our initial drive for this project was to simplify and automate some common tasks we had on another project. Although Grunt and Initializr could be used to solve this, they were just too verbose, taking away some of the flexibility we needed, and complicating some tasks that we felt should be really simple.

So, enough about the why, on to what it is exactly, and how it differs. automaton is a CLI tool and a Node.js module that, in its core, is just an engine capable of running an ordered list of tasks that need to run for the task as a whole to be complete. What makes this powerful is that every task that the user creates, also known as autofiles, encapsulates a specific feature that can itself be used by other autofiles, simply by referencing its id and some options that the task can take. Imagine boxes within boxes, each one with a specific responsibility. For more details, just look at the website above, which presents a more detailed description of what automaton is. As a final note, and we think this is a great deal, it accomplishes a lot, even though it is composed of only a few hundred lines of code, unlike the other tools.
I've recently realized that--at least to me--C is actually very much like Prolog. How? Well: Prolog is a fairly simple, Turing-complete language. For the things it's good for, it's great. But those things are few and relatively specialized. I could use Prolog for general-purpose programming, but I wouldn't want to. With Prolog, the question is always "why Prolog?" rather than "why not Prolog?". Sometimes there is a good answer to this, but usually there isn't. I can also get some of the benefit by using a DSL embedded inside a more general-purpose high-level language.

I've thought this for a while, almost ever since I learned Prolog. Make no mistake: I actually rather like Prolog. But I haven't been using it very much. The recent revelation is that C has all the same characteristics. And in a similar way, while I still like C to whatever extent, I'm going to avoid using it unless I really have to.

On a mostly unrelated note, I agree that Rust looks very promising. It's the new language that I'm the most excited about, especially after being let down by Go. Also, I'm not quite sure why he thinks the Rust syntax is odd: to me it seems extremely C-like, with some nice improvements (like implicit returns).
Yep. It's also in the source code too.
I thought that the canonical way to use pvfs was with the kernel module. Isn't the pvfs2fuse interface an afterthought?
I'm going to quit using WordPress on a shared VM, it's been 6 years since I installed WP and nothing is getting any better. Thanks for finding out the cached version. It should be available after a few retries for those want to comment on the page.
I disagree with the "sub-optimal" label... Tcl, Lua, Ruby, $whatever are amplifiers for C. Arguably especially in the cases your citing. With libcurl, you want handy, dynamic string handling for parsing results, or doing ad-hoc requests. With libxml I -suspect- that any DOM parsing or XPath work, etc is the only "heavy lifting" component, and easily driven by a higher level scripting language. In use, there's no cost, because areas where a scripted language fails compared to C (performance, low-level bit-fiddling) are not at all applicable in the scripted domain. Conversely the scripted environment brings a comfortable interface to the user, highly dynamic and, like Unix pipes, allow bringing new functionality into the scripted domain and interacting with that universe (bind ruby to curl, do a bunch of ad hoc tests in the REPL, slurp up a list of URLs from a textfile, report all 404s to a database).

Driving libxml or libcurl from C doesn't give this multiplier effect. Not that there's no reason to use C, but there are -easy- to identify reasons for using a higher level language. Whether the cost of integrating the two paradigms is worth it depends on the developer, and how they determine value.
Perhaps you should write that after you make the move. :) And even then it would be difficult.

As you likely already know, one thing sure to be on that list is "have a car". Which stems from the reason making such a list would be difficult. LA is so spread apart, what's true for someone on the westside isn't gonna ring as true for someone downtown, to south bay, to OC/irvine (if we're even counting OC/irvine).

lots of tech companies here in LA but due to the lay of the land and 30 mile commutes, they don't mingle as much.
You know what I'd like to see - is a second study, in which students who got the highest scores on the Dartmouth course, with the same interval of delay also take that same final exam.

I was surprised at the number of fellow students at my University who openly admitted that within a month or two of the final exam, they couldn't recall much of anything about some of the courses in which they had scored an A or higher in.

It's entirely possible that the issue isn't the AP courses, but the significant delay taking (and doing well in the course) - and retesting again.

Alternatively - take a student from another Ivy League, Yale, Harvard - and see how they would do on a Dartmouth Final exam with some delay between taking the course and testing out again.
With databases like Couchbase, MongoDB, Cassandra, Riak, MySQL Cluster issues like sharding and horizontal scaling have largely been solved for you. Meaning it's neither tough nor expensive.

And some of us run startups that have to deal with large volumes of data from day one. So this idea of "wait until you're big" is simply bad advice.
In my experience there's only 3 major C++ styles: BusinessObjects *(Java-ish Qt), std::cavedwelling<stl_guru, guru_cavedwelling_tag<const _Type<T &> >::const_value_type, and void _rather_be_writing_c();

Often code you'll come across is some combobulated identity crisis mixture of those 3. In terms of sheer readability and extension, I'm a major fan of Qt's design style (their most elaborate use of C++ appears to be virtual functions and the pImpl idiom), although that approach leads to heavy heap usage.

Really detest simple problems "overly" expressed in guru-ified STL. Can't read it, can't modify it, can't extend it, can't debug it. Naturally this means I'm not a great fan of Boost.
Interesting. I wonder how much the trend of "teaching to the test" has infected the AP program.
On the contrary, it is actually very common for Ivy League schools to offer AP credit, or at the least allow you to use AP credit to fulfill a requirement / prerequisite. Princeton, Brown, Columbia, and the University of Pennsylvania all offer AP credit or allow fulfilling prerequisites. Outside of the Ivy League, Stanford offers AP credit. MIT offers AP credit for 2 classes and elective credit for humanities AP classes.

None of these schools, however, will offer AP credit for all AP classes, since there is a lot of variability in the rigor of each AP class. Three of the AP classes that I've observed tend to be accepted for credit are BC Calculus, Physics C, and Economics. Physics C (for Mechanics and Electricity) was the most challenging AP test I ever took.
Don't give out your iTunes Connect password so easily
iOS 6 required?! Not so minimalist after all..
Yeah, you're right, if you put 10 dollars down as the annual savings, it just takes a very long time to finish.
Hipset Launches Artist Discovery Program
Slides and video from a webinar I gave on 1.2:

http://www.slideshare.net/DataStax/college-credit-whats-new-...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g9nxTTYSwi4&feature=youtu...
Indeed. A lot of education in the western world is remarkably shallow. Blitz through a lot of "material" and busy work, then cram so you can pass the test the next day, then forget everything. It's a horrible way to "learn" anything.
+1 on payment options. As someone with a British credit card, the site won't verify my card (I suspect I need to be able to put my name as per card and address on it). So much for being able to buy it :(
Install WP Super Cache. It should be able to handle HN's traffic even if it's running on an iPhone 3.
Well there is no official PostgreSQL solution. It's a bunch of third party solutions with varying levels of quality, documentation, support and use.

Every notable PostgreSQL deployment has had to 'roll their own'.
This headline is pretty misleading. He just introduced a bill to renew an already existing ban on non-metallic guns and magazines.
Possibly worth throwing into the discussion: Caltech does not accept any AP credit. However, classes can be tested out of with Caltech's own tests (which were considerably more difficult than AP tests in my opinion). Testing out of these classes removes these classes from graduation requirements.

Is it possible Dartmouth is just trying to raise their academic standards rather than milk students for more money?
Dejavu - A set of Object Oriented Programming tools for JavaScript
This is blogspam. Blogspam of a repost. From last week.
Why Your IT Project Needs a Cognitive Scientist
I thought the typical withdraw rate is 4% to maintain a portfolio indefinitely.
(1)Twitter / Search - #icanhazpdf
So my daughter is in High School and she's doing IB (International Baccalaureate) does that have any benefit for those aspiring to the Ivy League or similar?
I found my intro-level college calculus course to be fairly dissimilar from what we did in AP CS in high school, though I assume both can vary considerably. The main difference was that the high school course was much more calculation-oriented: a huge portion of it was just computing integrals and derivatives. I didn't find memorizing patterns for computing integrals or derivatives particularly interesting or useful: if all I need to do is compute one, Mathematica can do that much for me. What I learned in university calc, but not high-school calc, was more of the rigorous foundations of what calculus is and how it works. Part of it might be context, though: the freshman calc class was synchronized with the freshman physics and chemistry courses, so there were immediate applications where we had to figure out how to use calculus as a tool, rather than just as a standalone exercise (my high-school physics and chem courses were not calculus-based, so there was no similar synergy).
Transferring the person (incl. moving, flight, cost of living) is still high-cost. Transferring the information about/from the person becomes cheaper-and-cheaper. So I suppose things get (slowly) better for remote teams over time.
"Debating this fact would be the same as debating whether assembly is the most performant and reliable low-level language or not."

Discounting special CPU features that are hard for compilers to utilize (e.g. AESNI instructions in newer Intel CPUs), I think this is really a matter of scale. For small functions like MD5, hand-tuned assembly language is probably going to be faster than what a compiler generates. Likewise, for short, tight loops that are the bottleneck, hand-tuned assembly may be faster (you see that sort of thing in game engines). Beyond a certain point, though, compilers are going to outperform even the best humans; compilers are just better at keeping track of things across large areas of code.

Compilers are also going to do a lot better when they have higher-level information available. You could conceivably write an x86 assembly optimizing tool (I suspect someone will point one out) if you wanted to, but even the best such tool will lose to a good C compiler. At the very least, your C compiler knows something about types, which can help a lot with optimizing; your C compiler also gets information about the purpose of certain sequences of instructions and how various control structures relate to various types, in ways that are hard to extract from assembly language.

Of course, this argument can be taken a step further: a good compiler for a high level language should be able to do even better than a good C compiler at a large enough scale. While it is conceivable that you could do anything in C that a high-level language compiler does automatically, that just brings us back to the issue of whether or not compilers can outperform humans -- and again, at a large enough scale, that is going to be the case (of course, comparisons are difficult; higher-level languages are used for things that C is rarely used for, and we could debate endlessly about why that is the case).
Show HN: OCR Recognition API
> I think we can justifiably criticize [snip] Aaron [snip] for {his role} in this mess

Thank you! I think this is the first time I have read a comment on HN about this whole mess that actually puts some of the responsibility back on Aaron. He had several opportunities to exercise good judgement. Like the first time he had to alter his virtual appearance to regain access after he had been discovered and cut off. They didn't yet know who it was. That was a huge missed opportunity right there. It all would have been over.
My brokerage account (Fidelity) has limits in the tens of thousands, and can be accessed by any browser or mobile smartphone.

I'm fairly certain all online brokerages are the same in the limits regard. And yes, tens of thousands of dollars is a huge amount to lose.

I'm just fine with SSH in a browser.
Who cares if a magazine can be picked up by a metal detector?
Ingenious idea - let's play with it :).

In September 2012 a Boston-based energy group announced that it expected to complete an 800MW natural gas power plant in Oregon within 4 years at an expected cost of $850 million [1]. Let's use this as our naïve project cost paid up-front in equity. Thus, production begins at t+4 (2017).

Let's use uvdiv's estimate [2] of $220 million of natural gas being flared each year. Let's create a paramater, capture, for the fraction of the flared gas one is able to burn in the plant. I have no idea how to estimate this; it shall be the variable we solve for. Given that from 2008 to 2011 Chesapeake Utilities Corporation (NYSE:CPK), a natural gas distributor (close enough), ran a quck-and-dirty EBITDA margin of about 40% [3] we'll assume our annual cash flows from the operation be around $220 million * capture * 40%.

The State of North Dakota believes the Bakken wells "will take 15-20 years to develop" [4]. Some guy on the internet (in the Oil & Gas Journal) thinks the fields could sustain for 30 years [5]. Thus, we are going to assume a constant quantity of natural gas gets flared each year from now until 2045. Actually, it's worse than that, since we're assuming a constant $220 million of natural gas being flared (you hedged natural gas prices for the next thirty years with IKB Deutsche Industribank).

Chesapeake Utilities pays about 6% YTM on its 2031 non-callable bond [6]; we're going to use that as our discount rate.

Assuming the universe explodes in 2045, i.e. ignoring the salvage value/cost of the plant after thirty years, our hypothetical natural gas power plant breaks even provided you can capture at least 85% of the flared gas.

Let's allow natural gas flaring, and thus our cash flow production, to decline by 3% annually (approximate decline in U.S. petrol production from 1980 to 2000) for 20 years from 2045 through 2065. Given that we built our model around the cost of an 800MW plant, I allowed both the cost of the plant and capture efficiency to vary; here are the results: http://imgur.com/h9yaa. I'd say plausibility is sustained.

∴ Back-of-the envelope it doesn't look like a strikingly profitable proposal, but with proper connections to the national electricity grid and some clever financing it could be a deal. Bakken & Three Forks is only half a decade old.

[1] http://www.toledoblade.com/Energy/2012/09/06/Natural-gas-fir...

[2] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5073583

[3] http://www.google.com/finance?q=NYSE%3ACHK&fstype=ii&...

[4] http://www.nd.gov/ndic/ogrp/info/g-015-033-faq.pdf

[5] http://www.ogj.com/articles/print/vol-110/issue-4/exploratio...

[6] http://reports.finance.yahoo.com/z2?ce=571504915152148601684...
> a call to the FAA letting them know beforehand would not harm anyone

I wouldn't be so sure. In fact, I would rather assume that the FAA would want to stop the launch before they can rest assured it's safe.
"Making a schematic" is more of a thing you do in facilitation of something else, like designing a circuit (or documenting a circuit you already built, etc). You say you "know digital circuits and simple DC circuits", but it doesn't sound like you have the necessity of the design part in your head as solid as it should be. It really sounds like you're asking how to get started in electronics and build complete circuits rather than tinkering with demo boards.

I'd recommend choosing a microcontroller, probably a PIC or AVR, in a DIP package and putting it on a breadboard (or are there even ARMs in DIPs these days?). Figure out how to program the chip directly, and get it running by hooking up its supporting components (power, crystal, etc). You can rely on schematics of others' designs for the same chip. At this point you should have similar functionality (blinking LEDs, etc) as if you were using an Arduino (AFAIK Arduino, that is). It won't seem like you've accomplished much, but the whole point is to get comfortable working with raw components instead of anything "magic" (although an MCU is quite magic).

You then want to get comfortable building other kinds of independent circuits on the breadboard, probably hooking them up to the MCU so you're able to use your programming abilities as leverage. I'd recommend starting to play with opamps next (and ADCs on the MCU), but if you've got some ultimate goal in mind (and you probably will), figure out what type of chips are meant to comprise that functionality, get some in DIP packages, and start making them work using manufacturer's application notes as a starting guide.

1. Analysis, both before and after, are much more important than for software. Imagine you're working on a program that modifies its own source code, with no ability to backup.

2. There are no magic black boxes. Every component and pre-baked solution is made up of sub devices that you can be familiar with. Abstractions are there to simplify your overall thinking, but when trying to debug, you are going to be thinking about eg what the specific circuit behind the pin of a chip looks like.

3. Eventually you'll be confident enough to know what parts of the circuit you should build out before even laying out a board, and which should be relatively straight forward to blindly fab. But this only comes with knowing your experience and strengths.

4. This stuff takes a long time to get right. Good luck!
Lets say you have a smaller pool of talent locally but potentially you may have less demand on that existing pool.

In places like SF, you have a massive pool of talent, but demand and wages/perks are through the roof so finding talent ends up being a negative ratio.

That said, your first hires should be people who believe in your product, no matter where the pool lies
If you ban plastic, someone will figure out a way to do it with metal. Besides, the only way a plastic magazine would be undetectable is if it were empty, which make it effectively useless anyhow.
I think that the quoted statistic is misleading. For the students that are at top-tier universities like Dartmouth, the vast majority of students are still graduating in 4 years:

http://colleges.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/best-colleges/...

I think that the 6 year figure is due to an extraordinarily long tail.
Passing Data From Server To Javascript On Page Load
I like it. It does what it says. I can see myself using it for sketching out iPhone UI ideas because of it's size. And just quickly sketching something and sending it to friends. Thanks, keep up the good work!
C11 adds thread and atomic op support: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C11_%28C_standard_revision%29
> announced he would be introducing legislation to renew a ban on firearms and magazines that can't be picked up by standard metal detectors. The current ban on plastic firearms expires this year.

In other words, the only thing this has to do with printed magazines is that printed magazines are being used as a talking point to promote the bill.

Printed magazines, when printed with plastic, would still be picked up by a metal detector since they need a large metal spring (yes, there are printed plastic springs. they suck). Printed magazines printed with metal would obviously be unaffected by this law.

The concept of a "plastic gun" is (currently at least) largely an urban legend anyway. Glocks set off metal detectors just fine.