skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
In my case, I initially just built an interface for ThriftDB's HN data; I've recently started building my own data set in MySQL (partly because I wanted to learn how to tune MySQL, partly because I'm starting to expand beyond what's available in ThriftDB). I have a little custom crawler that regularly retrieves the stuff I'm currently after.

I've been looking at using Sphinx (http://sphinxsearch.com/docs/current.html#about) for full text search capability on that data set, but it's not set up yet. It seems to be the most recommended way to handle text search with a MySQL data store.

I wanted to have something that can do a good job of answering questions like, "popular articles about that space mining company from last week" (because that's how my brain works). I probably can't offer any useful information for what you're looking for.

edit: Sorry, to more directly answer your question: "Just curious, when you say that it's easy to roll your own web search engine, are you referring to things like Yahoo BOSS and Common Crawl, or are their other OSS projects / data sources out there I'm not aware of yet?"

Sometime around 2000, full text search of just the contents of your hard drive was still a really icky problem. Programmers spent a ton of time coming up with reasonable ways to do that. It blows my mind sometimes that now we can fairly easily set up our very own SQL database with just a few commands and a little bit of forethought, and then use any one of a number of programming languages to interface with a standard communication protocol to connect to other servers around the world and then download the data, use fairly decent libraries to parse it all, shove it into our own database, and then quickly search the database.

I wasn't really thinking about a particular API or service.
> Even if those workers were capable of acquiring the fabled 'transversal skills' necessary to do the surviving jobs (which many of them most definitely are not), the increase in labor surplus will mean more people will stay permanently jobless.

Great! Jobs are a means to an end for many people. The more jobs that get replaced by automation the more prices will fall, and the less you have to work to buy the things you want.

All the resources can never get into the hands of the producers without resorting to violence. Because if it did they would have no one to sell to and they would no longer be producers.
The jobs are divided a bit differently but the combo of gem/rvm/bundler is matched quite nicely by pip and virtualenv (with virtualenvwrapper adding some nice conveniences)

This article covers some of the equivalent jobs using Ruby and Python:

http://gillesfabio.com/blog/2011/03/01/rvm-for-pythonistas-v...

The article misses covering the freeze command in pip which is great for generating requirements.txt files:

pip freeze > requirements.txt

Covered in detail here:
http://www.pip-installer.org/en/latest/requirements.html
"we went in search of applications to build"

Talk about putting the cart before the horse. Having worked for spinoffs, spunouts, "we're from MIT" and a host of others throughout my career, I can attest that those with the greater chance of success are those who identify a need in the marketplace and focus all of their efforts, business, design and engineering, on solving a problem that people are ready to buy into. Building a framework for the purpose of later trying to find ROI on it is an expensive and often futile endeavor.
You don't want to watch TV ?

We don't care. We will make you, whether you want it or not.

And we will charge you for the privilege - having to subsidize the things you dislike, what a cool idea.

(I guess I would have to give up my computers if I lived in Sweden)

EDIT: Downvoted already? Whatever. I will not willingly subsidize government propaganda.
We've heard plenty of stories of false accusations in order to settle old family scores.

"Interested in men" does not necessarily mean in a homosexual way, but it can be twisted to look that way.

I accept what I'm implying is a stretch, but I'm not 100% comfortable with Graph Search either.
Personally, what angers me most about our system in Germany is that we have to pay the GEZ public television fee for internet devices, but only selected content is available for streaming online. When I want to watch an old Tatort, I still have to shell out 20 EUR for a DVD box.
> The minute the 2013 presidential inauguration started, it was as if the 2009 inauguration had never even happened — at least as far as Google was concerned. Searching for 2009-vintage photos of the first family, of the performers, and even of the President himself became much, much harder on January 21st, as did finding contemporaneous news accounts of the first election. The information was still out there, but it had been pushed well below the surface. Finding it was more like excavating than searching.

"obama family", from January 2008 through December 2012, including images: http://www.google.com/search?q=obama+family&tbs=cdr%3A1%...

One would have hoped the author would have at least mentioned this feature.
Ask HN - On your current project, how long does the build + tests take?
For me, 12 mins. And I'm impatient. :(
Which is why I resize the HN comments page. I'd really like to be able to do the same on that site (resizing just enlarges the background images, not the text).
Common Core, Curriculum, and Culture Change
Real-Money Tournament Platform For Android Games
Ask HN: Email services
What do you guys use to send and recieve emails from "@company.com"?

Also, is Google Apps a good choice for individuals rather than companies?
Before Launching Build Software People Use
If you exclude Facebook and Twitter from the Internet nothing of value would be lost. I'm perfectly fine with not having that information indexed and searchable, it would just get in the way. Also, if these disappeared there would be a lot more real time information posted in hopefully more open and accessible data stores (in the true spirit of the web) rather than in private corporate silos.
*amazing
Does anyone on this thread know why they have to identify the people's photos and names in the search to still allow marketers to be succesful?

If it didn't identify individuals would it be any less useful to marketers?
We also have it hear in Denmark. It's called »medielicens« and technically not a tax, but a licence fee (BBC subscribers will understand). It is also required even if you do not use any of DR's services (DR being 'Danish Broadcasting'), but own any form of media device. Most people I know do not pay it, however.
Weary Workers Learn to Count Sheep Using Special Lighting, Office Nap Pods
Intel to Shutter Motherboard Business
Really, it depends. For every small startup that needs a good full stack generalist to rush to different fires, there's a lot of medium and large companies that need a <whatever> guru to come and tune their production system.

Horses for courses.
Is traffic to Dropbox.com indicative of anything? I've been a Dropbox user for years (yo-yoing between paid and unpaid plans based on my need - the ability to do so is something I hugely appreciate) but never visit the site.

Is this not the equivalent of judging Windows usage based on visits to microsoft.com?
> football (the real one, my American friends [1])

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V4msKdfMtGY
Floor pads and good shoes are essential equipment.
Some details in this article: http://fail0verflow.com/blog/2013/megafail.html
The Intel SYSRET privilege escalation
I got rid of my TV licence when it came up for renewal at Christmas, and just watch on-demand content via iPlayer now. (Well, that was all I did before, but I've removed the little-used TV receiver from my house now.)

I can see them charging for computers in the future - but how would it work? Would they suddenly charge every office, for instance? We have an office with no TV but full of computers. None are used for TV viewing, live or otherwise. You just don't watch TV at work. It sounds like it could make them a lot of extra money!
Norwegian here, our National Broadcaster is planning to introduce the same here. Here's a story from today about it (in Norwegian):
http://www.aftenposten.no/digital/Norge-vurderer-TV-lisens-p...

I'm fine with a TV-license fee, but if they're going to charge it for everyone who owns either a tablet, cellphone, computer or TV (which is basically 99,9% of households) they might just abandon their massive fee bureacracy and get the money through the government budget instead. It'll save a lot of money, especially if everyone is basically forced into paying it (regardless if they actually own a television set or not) anyway.
Wait what? How do you not pay it? Just throw out the bills they send you?
Sweden: socialism. Check!
Or "obama family daterange:2008-2012"
I briefly used Axure and found it to be pretty solid. I know a lot of UX professionals that swear by it, but frankly it was not for me. For lo-fi prototypes, I still use paper. And, as I move into higher fidelity prototypes, I find it much easier to just code the prototype in HTML/CSS/JS. The primary benefit being that I can easily prototype responsive layouts without double (or triple) work, and the final product can be used as an input to the development process.
Remarker.be, beyond webpage highlighter, best practices for making notes
That's just one of the formal definitions:

http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/corollary

check out the second definitions part a and b:

2.a : something that naturally follows : result

2.b : something that incidentally or naturally accompanies or parallels
Steve Jobs may have been a dick, but he was really fuckin preternaturally good at being a dick.
I have recommended a article on an alt FB account. I never did this (I just logged on the website with FB connect), I can't see it on my wall and remove it, and I revoked any rights for this website on FB preferences.

I would be a lot more annoyed if it was in my real account.

Following that I removed most of my infos and page likes. Seeing the new Graph Search, I'm glad.
I actually think this is pretty reasonable - everybody I know consumes BBC content in some form (most of them without paying the license fee) and it's a small price to pay for the presence of an impartial news source.
Open-Source Travel
Correct. Communism at its finest.
Entity Framework & ReSharper - Free Webinar Jan. 24
I did a PhD in Computer Science in the UK and whilst it is definitely an emotional challenge, I mostly enjoyed the PhD and found it very rewarding. I never found it overwhelmingly difficult, and I never considered giving up.

My advice for any new PhD starts is to treat it like a job, work 9-5 steadily throughout your PhD, read as much as you can during your first year, and do things outside of your degree to stay sane.

RS
Show HN: Contacts storage the way it should be done.
Doesn't the same reasoning apply to VC's? Are there any huge barriers to entry the VC market that I'm not seeing?
This is similar to what Chrome and Firefox are both doing now, lots of smaller incremental updates. Problem I'm experiencing now is both browsers are less stable with all the updates.
The author states that there is no X server for Android. That is false, and not even hard to verify:

App name: X Server
Website: http://my20percent.wordpress.com/2012/02/27/android-x-server/
Google Play: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=au.com.darkside.XServer
F-Droid: https://f-droid.org/repository/browse/?fdid=au.com.darkside.XServer
Because if it's funded by the Government then it becomes a Government TV station. Using a 'BBC' method where there is a law requiring the license fee to be paid and allows for a third party to collect it and deliver the money direct to the broadcaster. This design can loosen the influence the government has on the channel. Whether you agree with the outcome or not, the idea is that the BBC's of this world are not government spokes-channels.
Oh good, let's compare yet another unrelated thing to aaronsw.
This assumes that those .js files on Mega will stay the same for those 2.5 years (or semester). Much more likely is that those files will be updated somewhat regularly, and any attempt to collide a specific hash will be rendered irrelevant.
Enjoy your taxes Sweden. I hope it's worth it.
"Oh why hello, thanks for calling, no, sorry, I do not own a TV, computer or tablet - I often spend time at my friends home and uses his computer and TV."

This is how people avoid it in Sweden. However, the stores are obliged to report in when you purchase a TV, but all of these things can be avoided by simple lies ("I gave the TV to my friend for his birthday"), and many do so.
It's already law in the UK for live channels. If you have no TV but only watch BBC1 live through iPlayer, you must have a TV license. However, you don't need a TV license to watch time delayed programs (so anything from the iPlayer archive), so perhaps this is an area where the law will change, although it never has for TV.
You might want a lookup method to usually throw an exception if it doesn't find anything, but sometimes return a user-specified default.

It's problematic though, because writing a thin wrapper becomes a pain in the ass.
By insanity I mean, "severe mental illness", which I don't think you understand (and you should be thankful for that). It seems to be extremely painful for the individual, and it's horrible for the people around that person. I don't classify people with occasional (but harmless) strange thoughts or paranormal beliefs as "insane". That's part of being human. Over a billion people believe that a virgin birth occurred over 2000 years ago. I personally think they're wrong, but I wouldn't call them insane or delusional. That belief, standing alone, is harmless.

I have no problem with people who choose to explore alternate states of consciousness, whether through meditation, brainwave entrainment, sensory deprivation, or psychedelics. I don't think they're "insane" for doing so. Most people who use LSD or psilocybin come out of the experience with no lasting harm. Albert Hoffman, who discovered LSD, used it into his 80s with no health problems. (He lived to be 102.)

However, if you spend significant time in a hipster enclave (e.g. Williamsburg) you see the long-term effects for people of certain mental patterns. The problem is that the people who are most attracted to frequent psychedelic use are also those, in my opinion, most vulnerable to the mental problems that this lifestyle can exacerbate.

Cocaine and alcohol are extremely dangerous, but everyone knows that. I think the danger of psychedelics (which are biologically non-toxic) is that they can appeal to an experience-chasing mentality, and that they sometimes become entwined with a pattern of self-medication for an existing mental problem that would be better treated by a real psychiatrist.

I've altered my consciousness a lot over the course of my life, and won't get into details (real name) but I haven't used any of these drugs for years. I don't even drink, except for an occasional beer with dinner. Drugs are not necessary. The way I think of it is that altered consciousness is like a wilderness. Meditation is like riding your bike into it, in the sense that if you're not in shape, you won't go very far but you'll be able to go back out. Keep riding, and you'll be able to go deeper over time. Psychedelics are more like hitch-hiking. You catch a ride, can go deep into the thick of it, and end up with no idea where you've landed. You hope you can find a safe ride back. Most of the time, you get a ride back and you're fine, but the probability of disaster is not zero.
That is why I provided an email address which I don't use frequently. I am expecting it to be spammed badly. Well...
Ask HN: Do I need a CS degree or should I stay with my job?
I've been programming for 4 years now, I started when I was 15 and have kept it through, 9 months ago I got my first job in the industry, building PHP web applications for small businesses, 2 months ago, I left that job for a larger agency.

Since I began programming I have taught myself PHP (and everything which comes along with that, MySql, Javascript (&JQuery), CSS, HTML), x86 asm, Scheme and have a good grasp of most aspects of computer science.

I have recently been feeling like my career is reaching it's peak even at this early stage, I feel as though there is quite a low ceiling for how far I could possibly take it in my current situation, I dream of silicone valley and the lifestyle which comes as a perk along with that, but those companies only seem to hire people with degrees.

My new job pays me a remarkable sum for someone of my age with no formal qualifications, but it is only a fraction of what my peers in the industry are earning.

My question is this, should I go to university or would I be better applying myself to the current state of my career and trying to improve it and ignoring my doubts?

Thanks for all the replies, I expected this to disappear as white noise & didn't expect to hit the front page, I will try to reply to everyone I can

P.S. To alleviate some confusion, this would be for the summer of next year, I'm not talking about leaving my job this very minute
20+ bold and beautiful websites
For a while now, designers have been absolutely infatuated with all things subtle. We love subtle patterned backgrounds and intricate decorative elements; we are even into the muted color palettes.
Founder here: started on Hacker News back in November (1) and now built. There's lots still to do though - all thoughts and comments welcome. You can email directly at hi@useadd.com as well.

1. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4777826
Funnily enough, Michigan.

The small towns exist, some moreso than others, but (at least the ones to which I refer) they don't really exist in the same way. The shops and amenities and zoning that used to make them work aren't there in many places.

In how many could you walk to a local grocery store, rather than having to hop in a car and drive several miles to a 'supermarket' or outright to a big box store? How many have a local hardware store, so you don't have to hop in a car and drive? How many have the apartments and lofts that make the place a viable neighborhood for people who can't/don't have a car? How many have bus routes to get you across town or to the next town? Many still have restaurants and small shops, but even the small town movie theatres are pretty much extinct.
I thought they already technically did. Don't you need to have a license to watch iplayer in an office? Ah, found a link, you don't need it for on demand, just live streaming, but stil...

http://iplayerhelp.external.bbc.co.uk/help/playing_tv_progs/...
>It's not a tax. It's a fee, required to pay by law to fund independent channels of opinion free from government and/or private funded influence.

Distinction without a difference. Would I be wrong if I tried to argue that an income tax is not a tax, but rather, a fee required by law to fund public schools, bureaucrats, and roads?
Have you not worked in an office environment at a medium to large sized company yet? As cynical as the original comment comes across it neatly encapsulates the realities of working in that kind of environment.
I had thought along these lines too. AFAICT, Terminal IDE is geared toward more of a developer toolset. Thats not to say you couldn't use this as a dev platform though.
>The job which required the least amount of effort.

Nor me. I'd be working on programming projects I'm interested in instead of the same lame CRUD apps for big companies.
What criminal law are you saying was broken?
I suspect it depends on what the offering is. If I had to choose between every commercial TV channel and the BBC for the rest of my life, the BBC would get my vote without hesitation (assuming it maintained its current level of quality).
Mega is a file sharing service, Dropbox isn't (well, sharing is just one of the bonus feature). Comparing traffic is stupid!
I agree with this. 9 years ago when I moved to the UK (from New Zealand) I didn't quite understand the paying for the license thing. Now I realise that the BBC provides so much useful content that I'm more than happy to pay for it.
How can you tell that he didn't carefully craft simple and direct speech to convey his passion with clarity? It's tricky to pin down cause and effect, but since so many people understood his passion through his use of English, I'd be wary of saying he didn't have it mastered.
Reinigen: op wat moet je letten bij de aankoop van een stoomreiniger?
Swede here.

The money goes towards radio and television that is free from political influence, and also free from ads. It is like a tax for something most people benefit greatly from. It has nothing to do with the medium it is broadcasted through.
To clear it up a bit, it's NOT what everyone is making it seem like. Facebook is NOT auto 'liking' a post on your behalf.

Basically, what is happening (per his example) is that "Johnny" liked "Vice", and what Facebook is saying is "Johnny liked Vice", and it's pulling in a recent/popular "Vice" article to expand more on the brand. To help get more likes for the brand (which is a good thing, for pages/brands). It's NOT saying "Johnny liked this Vice story", which is what he [the guy in the video] is implying. That's why it says "Related Stories", that story is related to "Johnny" liking "Vice", because it's a "Vice" story/post.

Facebook should just make it more clear that you like "Vice" as a whole, and because Facebook wants to promote that you like "Vice" they should phrase it like it's a recent "Vice" post and NOT an article "you" specifically liked. They currently have a horizontal rule with "Related Story" to show this, but that probably isn't enough since everyone is getting confused. That's the confusion here.

It's just a confusing UI/UX element, it's not like they are saying you "Like" this weird article that you never liked.

People need to take a "chill pill" over this, because it's not as bad as it seems.
Google Apps for Business is a good choice for individuals. I use it for several accounts and it works lovely.

However, they recently stopped accepting free sign-ups and is now a paid service. $5/user/month won't break the bank.
> Chart me a path from the privacy settings dialog in the header to changing the visibility of individual "likes",

And if he manages to do that, ask him to chart one which will be valid 2 months from now.

They keep changing that shit. Keeping up to speed is just a completely overwhelming sort of task which even most people who care about privacy wont have the stamina to do.
Fair play for responding. I still think the whole area is (for want of a better word) kind of scuzzy.
I'd have to agree.

We don't watch live to air anymore, but we do use the heck out of iPlayer.

When it came around to renewing the license a few months ago, we made the conscious decision to renew it, even though we legally didn't need to (no sat receiver, no aerial).

I know a lot of people will call us stupid for doing so, but I'm also convinced that the BBC will lobby (or whatever they need to do) for changes to the licensing laws once the UK officially is out of the economic danger zone.
Turn an RSS feed into an eBook
I basically learned Rails by looking at the Spree source, so this would have been incredibly helpful. Thanks!
Chrome had a debian repo.... and I use chromium anyway, or firefox/iceweasel.

What is a core library or runtime? Where do I draw the line? How do I know that app X is going to rely on the same version as app Y?

Google and Apples' app stores are (comparatively) full of toys and crap, I'm sorry to say. If 1% of the stuff in there is useful I'll eat my hat* . They also have the advantage of targeting a single language and runtime, anything else has to be packaged with the app itself. I don't think this is a good or useful model for an open source ecosystem.

For an open source platform and closed source ecosystem you may be on the money.

(* disclaimer - author does not currently own a hat)
We'll just put ads on
It sounds cool, but I'm not really sure what it does?