skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think this is mostly about the resources available to self-taught programmers. I know on many occasions I've sought to strengthen my mathematical and theoretical background without a lot of tangible progress because the resources online don't really approach things comprehensibly or accessibly. I have a friend getting advanced physics degrees and even he says the usual suspects like Wikipedia are uselessly over-technical for him. I've bought a couple of textbooks without much progress in penetration, and Khan Academy and/or Open Courseware is kinda OK for specific issues but they're too tight and "locked up" in video format to really constitute a generally useful guide, and I think they lose some relevance without the greater context. Better Explained is also selectively useful, but most of his analogies don't click with me and the site tends to ramble.

What I really need is a decent tutor who is willing to help me specifically with the issues I have but I've sought in vain for one who is willing to free-wheel it with me instead of just copying out of a textbook. I tried one briefly and he came up with a cop-out shortly after our first lesson, because I don't think he liked the unconventional questions I was asking, like "Why and/or how are sine waves relevant to non-geometric data? The only definition I can find of a sine casts it in strictly trigonometric terms, so how is it applicable to non-trigonometric data? Is everything encoded into a representation of a triangle before these calculations are applied?" Heh, that one made him pretty annoyed and he didn't really have a good answer.

I would love to increase my background in statistics and comp sci theory (which is basic but imo sufficient, and I seem to have a better grounding than most of the CS grads I've worked with), but I don't really know of a good option to receive that training. If someone wrote tutorials for graduate-level math from the bottom principles up like they write out tutorials on PHP or whatever, I'd be all over it. I really want to increase my formal mathematical literacy.
Looks like my user name throws an exception, might want to create some rules and validation on usernames:
http://thelist.io/user/chris.truman
More pernicious is you may think that the result of a computation should be an exact number, but it may not be. Consider:

#include "stdio.h"

int main()
{
double num = 3.0;
unsigned long long i;
for (i = 0; i < 1000000000; ++i) {
num += 1e-9;
}

printf("%f\n", num);
printf("%llx\n", *((unsigned long long*)&num));

double four = 4.0;
printf("%f\n", four);
printf("%llx\n", *((unsigned long long*)&four));

return 0;
}

And then executed,

[scott_s@local ~] ./float
4.000000
40100000058d7800
4.000000
4010000000000000
Cool idea!

I'd love to be able to sort by most starred and/or most viewed, however. :)
ES6 generators are futures
Talent is one of those words with a thousand pet definitions.

Personally, I see the word used most often a kind of negative rationalization. A way to disregard success as lacking in effort, to say it's inborn, incidental.

I'd generally prefer to be described and to describe people as passionate, dedicated, capable or plain smart rather than talented.

I think those traits, often in combination with a lot of thought/practice, but not necessarily direct experience are the things that add up to what's often described as talent.
I'm glad promises are gaining traction in JavaScript, but it's a shame they chose to use jQuery promises rather than CommonJS Promises/A. The differences in error handling are significant.

See Domenic Denicola's comment at the bottom of the article, and his excellent "You're Missing the Point of Promises" post: https://gist.github.com/3889970
the point about dsls for business logic is a good one. it always sounds so good in theory...

i'd love to hear success stories about this. what makes a dsl intended for domain experts work? i suspect it's got little to do with the dsl and a lot to do with politics and motivation of the parties involved. and unicorn blood, of course.

[edit: limiting functionality (related to raganwald's reply below) reminded me of this exchange - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5111265 - which was perhaps a wiser approach than i thought at the time. lbrandy says: "as simple as possible for analysts to use". and that seems to have been a success story.]
can't wait to see the Argaiv ads w/ the skinny actors smiling away and the low voice at the end warning us that our partners need to know about the side effects, perhaps talking just a bit slower than the normal disclaimers, and with a few more select adjectives about the side effect experience.
Harddrive space is consumed like flour or sugar is, not as eggplants are.

Nobody says "I want n pounds of eggplant", rather they say "I want n eggplants". They then pay based on weight, for the convenience of the grocer.

On the other hand, you don't want "n bags of flour" but rather "n pounds of flour". If flour were being sold such that more than a miniscule single-digit percentage of that weight were actually packaging, people would be justifiably upset.
Second Life (I may be wrong on the game itself) talked about how it manages game scale across many servers.

The entire game is a virtual machine.

When a player leaves a server boundary, their player VM state is packaged up and sent to the next world server and then resumed on that server.

Players don't even notice they crossed server boundaries, and this was possible because the game can be paused mid flight for that player - pretty neat.
Just wait 'till next year when they come out with the iPhad.
SimilarGroup Raises $2.5 Million To Take On Alexa
Ssshh, don't tell anyone that UT Austin is a top 10 CS program :-)

I would strongly encourage any potential competitor to never recruit from UT Austin (or any UC school, U of Washington, UWisc Madison, Waterloo, etc...). Oh, and amongst Ivy League schools please be sure never to recruit from Brown.
We're using Encoding.com right now which works off the AWS infrastructure. We pre-paid and got our pricing down to $0.018 per megabyte. The drawback to this method is that encoding charges you for MB in AND MB out, whereas Amazon and Zencoder are charging just by the minute of output.

I'm pretty happy with Encoding.com but after running some test files through AWS, I have to seriously consider switching - AWS seems much faster (not a controlled test, more is needed) and in our case it's much easier to predict costs by going with a per minute model than a per MB in/out. An added bonus - boto already has support for it.
Thanks. I really hate it when articles come on HN submitted without context assuming we all know what is all about. The submitters should provide some comments when submitting such stuff.
My sense of order would've been served better if one of baseball's many famous wisecracks had come up with that line. A football coach originating baseball metaphors, egads!
Yup, that's exactly right!
You can do that yourself, if you want. It's a feature that you can repair and restore the Surface Pro very easily. You can save 20GB if you are willing to make it harder for yourself. If you copy the 20GB restore partition to a microSD card, maybe not that much harder....
I believe the FTC says screen dimensions must be viewable area. Coming from the CRT days when the bezel did cover part of the screen.
Thanks. I think that's a great idea.
Was there any interest for adding Toronto, ON?
Related: http://unspace.ca/blog/duck-programming/
Quite a loaded statement.

Are top-ranked colleges not adequately preparing their students paying hundreds of thousands of dollars to be a successful software developer?

Are there not enough work to go around for software developers of all levels?
Listen I get it. Everyone has their own coding style and what makes it easier for them to read. But, am I really the only one that likes curly braces and semicolons here?
I think Slashdot has a pretty fun model, if you are referring to the point system. My favorite moderation model so far is SA's, because it actually adds value instead of merely deterring vandalism. That's also why seeing pg post here is nice.

It is very much my preference, but I do think that ultimately we'll be able to show and justify that gated marketplaces of ideas are objectively bad (as exemplified by community-created filter bubbles, etc.).

Edit: No idea why people are downvoting you. You raised a few good points for discussion. C'mon HN. :(
The point about Surface Pro being that it can run both desktop apps and tablet apps, without you having to buy or carry two systems....
Introduction to Haskell, Lecture 3 is Live
My goal is simplicity, but I wouldn't mind bringing in features like that to help users narrow down their results and get right to the good stuff. Thanks for the feedback :)
Thumbnails for Django via REST API
That's very impressive. Although this doesn't effect me directly, I'd like to say thank you for your efforts. I was personally let down by secondary school technology education in the UK. I ended up with a D for GCSE IT, even though I'd been programming on my BBC Micro at home from the age of 10. Luckily I had a decent teacher at tertiary college and ended up with an A at A level.

So it's great to see somebody put their knowledge to use and to hopefully create a better environment for kids to learn and be inspired.
This is the second place in this thread you've said this, I don't understand what you could possibly mean.

Do you think Microsoft could somehow throw the space in "for free"? How could you even tell?
I see what you mean. Thanks for elaborating. Good luck to you and your friends.
Richard Kyanka (Lowtax, SomethingAwful founder) on Internet communities
> One should expect how ever much is advertised.

No, one shouldn't, because that hasn't been true of any comparable electronic device or computer in the last 5 years. You confirm this in your next paragraph, so I don't understand why you included the first paragraph.

It's not "just advertising." There truly is a 64GB chip in the device.
Goes back further, even the C64/C20 was hard to squeeze the whole ram out of unless you wanted to scratch build everything. Even a Timex 1000/zx81 didn't get full use of the 2/1k ram. I'm thinking this has been standard literally forever (I'm assuming no one argued over usable space v total space pre-transistor).

That doesn't mean it's right of course - space post-os would be a great spec to have. Also a motivation for more people to question why. A lot of the overhead (CPU, ram and long term storage) on a regular computer or phone is there for good reasons, but I would venture to say the majority of "no-load load" is questionable at best.
Horsepower is fairly useless in cars and trucks and buyers know this. If you care about speed, that's what 0-60 is based on as it factors in power/weight. If you care about hauling stuff, you care about how much it can tow and how much it can put in its bed.

This is a roundabout way of saying that Microsoft has a problem on its hands.
> Lots of people plan to one day work through some textbooks, but most people don't. You see it in a lot of self-taught programmers, many of whom have a weak grounding in computer science. That might be okay, depending on what you're hiring for, but there are many cases where you want some more solid foundations.

This rings true to me. I have a degree in aerospace engineering, but I'm a self-taught programmer. I've worked as a programmer, never as an aerospace engineer, but to this day I have a much better theoretical grasp of the latter than the former. I was recently trying to understand bidirectional type checking, and I'm just stuck. I understand ML-style type inference based on unification, for which there are a lot of undergraduate-style descriptions online, but I'm clearly missing half a dozen classes between "point A" and "point B" when it comes to anything more advanced, and I don't know enough to know what I need to learn.

Some things are just not easy to pick up, even for people skilled at self-education. They require a level of background knowledge that has to be acquired incrementally, and it takes time and discipline to pursue that path systematically.
(a) Marco is an Apple fanboy so he's not supposed to have a sense of perspective. He doesn't really need to have any sense at all....

(b) Maybe Marco hasn't discovered cloud storage yet... Or the microSD card.
Seems like a neat idea - Can you tell me more about how it would work on a detail level?

"Team Formation" is listed as one of the first scheduled activities, but you also say to apply with your team - Is this for making new teams, or working together in a cool space with your existing team, and maybe finding some cool people to help?

The idea of sessions seems really cool, and I'd love to see a HW startup conference, but this is also called a hackathon..?

What sort of things would we actually DO ? ;)

Basically, I love the idea of a get-together for HW startups, I just don't quite get it yet.
The reality TV show "The Voice" is similar. The on-TV auditions are done such that the judges cannot see the performer and must select them for their season-long team based purely on their voice. It's worked well.
First thing I wondered when I saw the announcement was how long until you'd support it :)

Great work!
I've thought about this but my concern is that it might harm more than it hurts. For example, I search for music albums sometimes and filter by "long (20+ minutes)" for that, but the other 90% of the time when searching I don't want it to keep that filter, so it would be more of a pain. Thoughts on that?
I heard this too but in my exploration of functional programming I found little to back this up. Automatically deciding whether it's worth running a given function on a different processor or not (i.e. whether the overhead is greater or less than the savings on the wall clock) is not so much different than the halting problem and many implementations either don't try it or don't do it well. Also, every practical functional program needs to deal with the real world, whether it's in a "pure" (Haskell) form or not, and one way or another this introduces ordering constraints that work against parallelization.
Immigration Reform: Should We Treat Engineers Differently Than Bricklayers?
Personally I prefer the journey which leads me to the final result, sure, I could outsource some of my paid work to you (with you without the wisest) but not only would that be morally wrong of me, it wouldn't be fun.

I don't code because it pays well (or in my case, okay) - I code because it's what I love. I'm sure someone else will find use in this so I'll upvote it in any case because charity without request is often just what someone in a tight spot needs, but myself... I'm gonna just keep coding away.
Pricing hasn't yet been announced, but a draft is in progress, I'd love your feedback. Here is what we are thinking.

Free for all public-cloud services.
Paid if you want to run the workflows on your own servers. For example, you could run a workflow which includes a step like "run shell command xyz" which could execute on your own servers. This paid plan would start at $100/month for 4 servers.
Also planning an enterprise plan which doesn't limit the number of servers and also includes premium support and implementation support, which starts at $5,000/month.
It's a bit more nuanced than that, Surface Pro runs Windows 8, the iPad runs iOS (not MacOS 10.x)

Here is the typical HP blurb about hard drive space (and as far as Surface Pro is concerned that SSD is a "hard drive")

"Actual formatted capacity is less. A portion of the hard drive is reserved for system recovery software — for notebooks up to: 30GB (Windows 8 & Windows 7), 12GB (MCE); for desktops up to: 30GB (Windows 8), 14GB (Windows 7), 12GB (MCE). For hard drives 1GB=1 billion bytes. " [1]

When is the last time you bought a windows Laptop with less than a 80GB hard drive in it? What was your user experience with that?

Somehow, people seem to thing that the Surface Pro is something other than Win8 but it isn't. It's a laptop with an optional keyboard and a touch screen. It is Microsoft's "take" on the Tablet experience. It is a mashup of legacy code and modern product design. It's an unattractive date with an interest in entomology.

It's a Macbook Air competitor, not an iPad competitor, the Air btw contains this warning for the 64GB model [2] : "1. 1GB=1 billion bytes; actual formatted capacity less." How much less? They don't even say. But it would be fun to find out.

The 'bug' here is that Hard Drives got super big super quick and nobody back in product management got the memo that SSDs were the new hawtness so trim the fat.

[1] http://www.shopping.hp.com/en_US/home-office/-/products/Lapt...

[2] http://store.apple.com/us/browse/home/shop_mac/family/macboo...

EDIT: its -> it's
Well put--this largely sums up my perspective in these sorts of discussions, though I've never been able to put it quite so coherently.
In all cases, including the web interface, the app is client-side. When you access the web interface, a Silverlight app is actually downloaded to your browser, so decryption and encryption is always done locally. Once a box has been modified, the box is encrypted locally, saved locally, and then it is uploaded over HTTPS to cloud storage.

With no-compromise security in place, and with the incredible convenience the app affords, it is leaps and bounds better than home brewed solutions like GPG + Dropbox (which I have used for many years prior to switching to Strongbox).

I have found Strongbox so awesome, that I wanted a Terminal/command-line "Strongbox reader", so I recently wrote a Ruby gem and command-line interface for decrypting and reading Strongbox files:

https://github.com/abatko/strongboxio

Just try Strongbox, and I'm sure you'll be quickly impressed. Besides the obvious conveniences, including box sharing, it is possible to transfer ownership (e.g. you start a box, and pass its ownership on to your client). Also, there is an amazing feature planned that will bring cloud password storage to the next level.
Getting Started With OMeta#
Same reason people spend hours tending their farmville farms...
Hey Chris,

On wunderlist.com we support back to FF16, anything older will trigger the upgrade your browser screen. Our reasoning for this is that the ESR for firefox is currently at FF17. It didn't make sense for us to try support (by support I mean try and get a modern web app to run on it) a version so out of date that even mozilla is not supporting it. It also helps get users out of old version that don't auto-update, or in the case of FF, a version that will never receive security updates.

If you are just looking for the download links for the native apps, you can always go to http://www.6wunderkinder.com/wunderlist which doesn't have the browser restrictions, and update screens that are present in the web app.
To be fair, I knew nothing about contentEditable until I sat down and tried to design my own RTE. It's actually very cool how little it takes to develop one that works, and FontAwesome makes it even easier. I would definitely consider it obscure.

As an aside, it's really interesting to look at the source for Ace[1]. It doesn't use contentEditable, but certainly represents the sort of complexity we'd need without contentEditable available.

[1] http://ace.ajax.org
The point is to some extend right, that you need in a general purpose language an easy way to reason about the consequence. But DSLs are very useful in their analogy towards another system, i.e. Mathematica is very successful in that way.

Another example is Siri. If the end result is not of most importance and an educated guess is acceptable when Siri for scripts could be a way to easily program the device.
What do you mean by 'above infinity'?
For mercury thermometers, it's because mercury freezes at -38C (-37F). Alcohol (red liquid) thermometers should work to -70C (-94F).

It's not clear why your thermometers don't register below -40, unless it's a legacy of the mercury thermometer limitation baked into the product (or frozen in, so to speak).
Quick question.. What is to stop me and all my friends using this on my bus to farm gift cards? I travel for 3 hours per day, I'm sure between the 6 of us we could be a real pain in the ass.
Good point. This is fixed. Ranges are now .25-.4%, .5-.9%, etc. Thanks for the feedback. - mischa @ angellist
Hi Jonas! You might be interested in our Mixpanel integration: At Bitdeli, you can create all the segments and metrics you need by running custom analytics scripts for all your raw historical data from Mixpanel - all without changes to your current setup.

http://bitdeli.com

We like to think our approach as best of both worlds: Get the beautiful interface and intuitive functionality Mixpanel provides with the ability to answer the occasional hard questions about your data.

Feel free to drop me a line at jyri@bitdeli.com and we can help you get started!
But I can't help but thing... What kind of operating system is FORTY ONE GIGABYTES?! My C:\Windows is 20GB, that seems excessive already, and I know for a fact it was originally much smaller. What the hell are Microsoft putting on these things?!
I believe he is characterizing Hornstein's theft as a low blow, as it was.
There's plenty of work to go around; unfortunately many companies blind themselves to only hiring top-rank college grads.

People complain about a lack of talent in the technology world--some of that has to do with the absurd hiring practices of technology companies
If you're saying we should aspire to be as honest as the car industry, could we perhaps aim a little higher and aim for perhaps as honest as the nutritional supplement industry or the mafia?
Parse is hiring web developers
Heh, I could never play EVE because stuff like this would make it more addicting for me.
Is there an equivalent to `this.onkeyup` for touch devices that don't generate onkeyup events? Trying to make this work on an iPad, but I only have surface knowledge of JS.
One doesn't have to go that far back. I bought an ASUS Eee 900A. It had an 8GB SSD... and Xandros, set up to use UnionFS so you could go back to the original state easily. I took it home, powered it up, and it promptly downloaded enough new versions of packages that the SSD was filled and it hung.

I wiped Xandros, installed what was called Eee Ubuntu (now Easy Peasy) and never looked back (though I since got a bigger SSD, maxed it out on RAM, and happily run Bodhi Linux)--but I can only imagine the wrath of someone who bought one and didn't know that was an option, especially one bought as a gift. I had to wonder whether it was set up to fail.
interesting post! i wonder at what point will people on the bleeding edge of the industry maybe think this trend has gone too far, if ever
any ideas how to smartly send the written things to evernote? the webclipper doesn't work.
Just-in-time compilers for number crunching in Python
The moral of this story is not to buy the 64 GB Surface Pro. Hopefully Microsoft will get the message and either reduce the footprint of the OS or only ship 128 GB and above Surface Pros.

There is a perfect market solution to this. Don't buy it. Now that I know that the OS takes up an insane amount of space, I have no interest in this product.
Well, you wouldn't do it at all. That's why the alliances try to help their members after fights.
"had personalities which was horrible to work with."

Output will probably be 0. To create something good, you need to do it as a team. If they could not work with non-rude ppl, there is no guarantee they will get along with each other just because they are all alike (rude).
I'm back to Firefox. I like Chrome, but I get bored of using the same browser for too long ;)

In FF, you can do it with about:config

Just set "browser.newtab.url" to the page mentioned in the original link.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melanotan_II
I should have looked up in Firebug before asking ;) Anyway a `title` to be displayed on hover won't hurt ;)
Why (on Earth) would it be shady?!