skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've had the Nexus 4 for about two weeks and it's surprised me a handful of times. You really have to use Google services to get full use out of it though. Like adding locations to events in Google Calendar (and, you know, using Google Calendar in the first place) to get the "you should probably get on the road now" messages.

Also things like birthday reminders seem to only work with your friends on Google+. None of my friends use Google+ and I only use it for specific groups. And I've yet to see a package tracking card, but it will be cool if they make improvements and stuff like that starts actually working. Things like that are small but on the day-to-day level would be pretty helpful.

Aside from that, the Nexus 4 is a nice device and refreshing change from iOS.
I have to agree, Linode's support is second to none; they've helped me debug problems that had little to do with them, and they respond very quickly.
Between Google Now, the anti fragmentation stuff in the SDK agreement and learning about the way Google share names/addresses with app developers I'm really thinking that Google are actually becoming Android's largest liability.

The problem is the GMail and Maps apps (as distinct from purely the webapps) are used as gateway drugs to casual information leakage, and Maps in particular becomes almost unusable unless you agree to let them slurp extra info from your vicinity.
You probably aren't the target market for Steam in that case.

If there was a compelling collection of open source games I would certainly play them but that has never really been the case.

There are tangible advantages in having open source tools and components such as compilers,kernels and desktop environments even without every program on the system being open source.
RailsView - Finally, a Market for Rails Themes
Did Jeff Nelson invent Chromebook?
9. I agree it's a miss but since then:

* Gateway was bought at a firesale price by Acer

* IBM sold off their PC business to Lenovo

* both Dell and HP have been in the doldrums in terms of PC/laptop sales and they both desperately have tried to milk the enterprise software and services business

Apple's total revenues come to about 69% of the combined revenue of HP, Dell, Acer and Lenovo ... so a miss since the iPhone/iPad have been what boosted Apple rather "laptops" per se (and certainly not to complete equality in revenues by 2010), but it's an interesting miss.
This is the second time in a couple of days I've seen a wikipedia link posted with the %27 character stripped out. (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5208678)

Is there some browser or extension that's accidentally filtering this when you copy/paste a link?
Your Organization is a Cult
Six Steps To Getting a Top Rated Control on Cocoa Controls
I manage full-time contractors who can work any hours they choose and have an endless stream of work. Many of them are paid 4-5x average pay for their countries. I've noticed that most of them end up working 30 hrs/week. They're required to stop tracking time for every break, verified by cam/screen shots. Additionally, many end up taking on a second job. I wonder if that's because they can extend their productivity by doing completely different things.
Of course, for every hour of operation of the heater, you're using up about 1.5% of the battery capacity.
Meteor shards hit Russia after explosion in the sky (video)
I think the common programmer considers first-class functions and closures as 'functional' features. This is from the bad old days when procedural languages didn't usually have these things.
Currently you can't get any extra dedicated IP4 addresses no matter what VPS you have (which is what OP asks)
The problem with auditing excel isn't the kind of individual statements, its the lack of structure.

Excel is effectively an easy-to-write self-obfuscating coding environment.
The Web Audio API is Chrome-only (or I guess it shipped on iOS 6 now? I still can't use it in Safari on my desktop PC) because Google wanted it that way. The API is incredibly poorly specified and poorly designed.

HTML5 games have been able to use <audio> to play sounds since before the Web Audio API existed, but Google never bothered to actually make it work right in Chrome. They were too busy coming up with their own thing.
> An alternate explanation that doesn't involve a fantasy world where Brendan Eich issues oppressive decrees from his throne of skulls ...

Eich is the CTO and sets the technical direction for one of the four major browsers. The browsers can only move forward standards in cooperative with one another.

This isn't a fantasy world.

> Maybe Mozilla dislikes NaCL because there's actually a lot wrong with it?

Then maybe they could propose a solution to the problem other than adding more JavaScript? Mozilla also dislikes standardized bytecode and virtual machines:

http://www.aminutewithbrendan.com/pages/20101122
Seems to me like a classy response to a real problem from Heroku.

We all need to remember that there are no magic bullets. The fact that Heroku can get a startup to, say, 5M uniques per day by dragging some sliders on a web panel and running up a bill on a corporate AMEX is pretty impressive.

At some point scaling a web business becomes a core competency and one needs to deal with it. I'm guessing by the time scaling an app on Heroku becomes an issue, if better understanding your scaling needs and handling them directly isn't going to save you a TON of money, your business model is probably broken.
Agree. Dedicated servers are getting cheaper and cheaper. I'm running a box at Incero (http://www.incero.com) for $121/month that's decked out, with quad-core Xeon, 16GB RAM, SSD, and unmetered bandwidth. It's really a different world of performance for a relatively modest price increase from my former VPS ($80/mo, for a 2GB Linode).
Client: Jade, Sass/Compass, CoffeeScript, (AngularJS|Backbone), GruntJS

Server: Nginx, (NodeJS, Express, MongoDB) | (Django, TastyPie, Postgres, Gunicorn)

Hosting: S3, Linode|Ec2, Ubuntu12.04|{Gen,Fun}too
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5225232
Its not just training, though... It will update you based on searches you make on an ongoing basis, often in very unexpected but nice ways. To make that work out, I think you really just need to be using Google search day to day.
Startup funding is structured as equity, not loans. The situations are not at all comparable. You can virtually always walk away from a failed startup.
Have you tried onx?

https://www.onx.ms
I too search all kinds of crap, and I don't mind anyone to build a profile on me based on that, if that's what I like. Some more crap in the future might be relevant for me, and I don't want to miss out!
Doesn't parse. What indication did you give about tribal identity did you give beforehand? Also, what does the irrational hatred of a dead, old rich man have to do with that?
The internet, private networks/listings, friend of a friend...

Japan is just the opposite: prostitution is illegal, but prostitution is defined by law as "penis in the vagina for money". So a lot of institutions have sprung up to offer every other kind of service.
Startup founders are not "indebted" to their investors.
I wonder if Edison viewed a lot of these bits of information as truly pertinent to his work (e.g., many of the questions seem to be about building materials and where to get them), and then just tossed in a few items of random trivia for good measure.
brillant!
What makes you think disabling search history is going to stop them?
PivotDesk (www.pivotdesk.com)

Ruby on Rails, hosted on Heroku. PostgreSQL.

Queuing is handled via Redis/Resque, and we're using Pingdom and NewRelic for primary monitoring.

SendGrid powers our email, GitHub hosts our code, and we use Campfire + PivotalTracker for day to day coordination.

We use Haml for templating, and SCSS for styling. [edit, forgot JQuery]

S3 for image storage, we'll probably be moving the whole app to Amazon's cloud in the next few months as well.

We've also made a couple tradeoffs in terms of browser compatibility, including using some CSS3 animation features not fully supported by IE9 and under. We'll see if that works out for us long term.

All in all, a pretty standard setup for a Rails startup.
How to build a news app that never goes down and costs you practically nothing
The Volkswagen Scirocco is a 2L TDI which isn't actually sold in the US, so I'm not sure how you came up with that conclusion.

Besides, you're completely missing the point anyway.
We shouldn't mistake the HN hive mind, which is pretty firmly pro Elon Musk, with the internet hive mind which is pretty firmly indifferent to (a) Elon Musk, (b) the NY Times, (c) Tesla.
This reminds me so much of so many software engineering interviews.
All of those are what I would call common knowledge that an average human being should know.
Not that they are relevant in any way to the job Edison was offering - but they would serve as a GREAT way to indicate whatever a person answering these questions is well educated and well oriented in the world surrounding them.
Well, I've never done either, but if you gave me a choice between having a startup fail and coming out of college with $100k in debt and no job prospects, I'd probably choose startup failure. It'd suck, but, assuming you did things the right way, you don't personally owe anybody a dollar.

When you raise money you take on certain ethical obligations. I owe it to my investors to try my damnedest to make the company succeed. I owe it to them to try to give them a good return on their money. I do not owe it to them to reimburse them the money if I fail. At all. There's no debt of gratitude.

If my startup dies and I go down swinging, then I'll know I gave it my best shot. That will suck, but they knew that was the risk going in. I won't lose sleep feeling like I ripped them off, just as I won't feel they ripped me off if I succeed and write them a check for millions of dollars. (I'd actually be quite happy to do so.)

Student loans, on the other hand, leave you saddled with debt that's hard to get rid of even with bankruptcy. There are a lot of people graduating with law degrees right now who are screwed. I imagine startup failure is painful, but not going to ruin your standard of living for the next 10+ years.

I don't know the particulars of this case. Maybe Jody's depression made him unable to live with mistakes he (or someone else on his team) made in good faith. Maybe he did something unethical and couldn't live with being found out. It's tragic either way.
I think it would be not that much better than prefix.

Infix is easier to read, because it is just more natural to parse. An expression like:

sin(1 + (5 + x + y) / (n + k)) is just really easy to understand

(sin (+ 1 (/ (+ 5 x y) (+ n k))) is inscrutable, at least to me.

The second thing is, intermediate variables makes code much more readable, but lisp strongly discourages this. The only way to create a lexical variable is with LET. But this causes indenting, which is pretty ugly. In fact, the use of indenting for both logical nesting and variable creation is a really nasty thing:

so this:

def qualifies_for_free_shipping(item_price, weight, shipping_factor, category):
if category is in FREE_SHIPPING_CATEGORIES:
return True

item_cost = item_price * TAX_RATE
shipping_cost = weight * shipping_factor + 2.00
total_price = item_cost + shipping_cost

if item_cost >= 80:
return True

if total_price >= 100 and category in ELECTRONICS_CATEGORIES:
return True

return False

becomes, in some lisp dialect I am making up but is like common lisp

(defun qualifies-for-free-shipping (item-price weight shipping_factor category)
(if (in category FREE_SHIPPING_CATEGORIES)
t
(let* ((item-cost (* item-price TAX-RATE))
(shipping-cost (+ (* weight shipping-factor) 2))
(total-price (+ item-cost shipping-cost))
(if (>= item-cost 80)
t
(if (and (>= total-price 100) (in category ELECTRONICS-CATEGORIES))
t
nil)))))

I could have cleaned up the code and used a better conditional than nested if's or something, but this is my point. I can't just glance at the code and see what is going on, I have to parse it and keep track of where I am as I move around the s expressions. In the python version I can just jump in the middle and move around without keeping a mental bookmark, because I always know from indentation how I can get to where I am now.
I've been living in thailand for a few months now and I can't say I've ever seen this - it looks like a government office from the pic, and my experience is that they're regular stand-in-queue (like at a post office) or take-a-number setups.

Then again, it's Thailand so anything goes.
It was the northbound trip before the first charge. For the southbound trip, the car was effectively dead on the tow truck(it didn't have enough charge to disengage the parking break):

http://jalopnik.com/towing-company-the-nyt-tesla-model-s-was...
Looks like Cnet is having issues. I keep getting "Whoops! You broke the Internet!" on most of their pages.
MOOC Mania and the 99%
HTML5 color palette tool
Show HN: We built a live tracker for hedge fund brawls
There are 64 bit versions of Firefox available for Mac and Linux.
NASA's just confirmed this story on their twitter feed.
>>>@NASA #RussianMeteor is largest reported meteor since Tunguska event. Impact was at 3:20:26 UTC. Still being measured. More info to come.
O'Reilly Erlang Ebooks 50% Off until the 17th
Just train yourself to use Incognito Mode when you're looking for porn.
New Owl Species Gives A Hoot For Science
Just like a software interview - demonstrate that you know a bunch of stuff that we, in our company have & never will use. For many software jobs...its like hiring a mailing man based on his understanding of mail-delivery-cart mechanics.
> Compared to steady-state driving at the same average speed, yes. Compared to steady-state driving at a significantly higher average speed, not necessarily.

Look -- stop trying to change the subject. Obviously if Broder wanted to maximize range and with the choice to either engage in stop-and-go driving or drive at a constant speed with the same average speed, physics says drive at a constant speed. Your claim that one can only drive fast or engage in stop-and-go driving is false. If the point is to maximize the car's range, the driver can drive at any speed he cares to. And Broder did just that -- he drove as slowly as necessary to prevent pointless losses of energy.

Do you really think that the police will arrest you if you drive too slow on the freeway? Tell that to a long-haul trucker.

> Regen typically recaptures about 80 percent of a vehicle's kinetic energy

Absolutely false. Source: http://auto.howstuffworks.com/auto-parts/brakes/brake-types/...

Quote: "The miraculous thing about regenerative braking is that it may be able to capture as much as half of that wasted energy and put it back to work."

Source: http://theeestory.ning.com/forum/topics/regenerative-braking...

Quote: "Tesla Motors claims an 87% efficiency for powering the electric motor with the energy in the batteries, and the same efficiency in returning motor power to the batteries via regenerative braking. TM also claims an average 80% mechanical efficiency (this goes down as friction increases at very low speeds), including tire loss. So if I have it right, round trip efficiency from taking electricity out of the battery pack to putting it back in, after regen recovery, would theoretically be .87 x .8 x .8 x .87 = 48.4%. But the Roadster uses regenerative braking only on the rear wheels, so if you actually use the brake pedal (instead of coasting with the regenerative braking on) , then the recovery will be far less. The front disc brakes will absorb most (over half) of the kinetic energy when using the brake pedal, because braking action throws more weight to the front of a car."

Your preliminary assumptions are spectacularly wrong. According to the above, the energy recovered in the Model S is about 20% of that required to get the car to its present speed.

> So if we compare stop and go driving at an average speed v1 to steady-state driving at an average speed v2 ...

Learn about science, and don't post again until you do. Science isolates one variable, the topic of study, and keeps everything else the same to the degree that's practical.

Regenerative braking is much less efficient than driving at a steady pace.
Asm.js: a strict subset of js for compilers – working draft
Reminds me of Google's fabled interview process. And on that note, I find it very interesting that virtually all of these questions could be answered almost verbatim by Google or WolframAlpha.
It's pretty fortuitous that so many folks in Russia have dashboard cams. I've got to think this is a meteor impact that has the most independent, distributed points of view that were dutifully recorded.
People always bring up cars in these discussions like it's a counter argument, when they're actually a perfect example.

You don't necessarily need to know how a car works to drive one, but if you don't you're completely at the mercy of those who do when something goes wrong. Even when things are going okay, you can only do magic rituals to your car, with no understanding. That's how most people interact with computers. It's a bad thing.

What to teach? The very basics. Some idea of processors, machine code, compilers and interpreters. Skim over computability, Turing completeness, the halting problem. Designing an algorithm to catch edge cases. Conditionals, loops, variables. Strings. I think that's enough to start off with. If they're still interested, set them loose with some real coding classes, or just point them to the Python tutorial.
Scientists discover why modularity evolves; 'holy grail' discovery for AI
As programmers know, modularity is critical to making reusable, adaptable software. However, modularity is not instinctive for beginners and must be learned via painful training. Biology faces a similar problem: modularity is useful to make species more adaptable, but how did it evolve in the first place? Surprisingly, computational simulations of 25,000 generations of evolution reveal that modularity does not evolve because it makes organisms more adaptable. Instead, modularity evolves as a by-product for selection to reduce the "wiring costs" of a network [1]. The discovery greatly advances research into evolving artificially intelligent robots [2], a field where the inability to evolve modular designs has long been thought to be a key roadblock [3] to evolving truly complex, intelligent neural networks.<p>The paper [4] was published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society. You can also watch modularity evolve in this video. [5]<p>[1] http://phenomena.nationalgeographic.com/2013/01/30/the-parts-of-life/
[2] http://www.fastcompany.com/3005313/evolved-brains-robots-creep-closer-animal-learning
[3] http://www.technologyreview.com/view/428504/computer-scientists-reproduce-the-evolution-of-evolvability/
[4] http://rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/280/1755/20122863
[5] http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=SG4_aW8LMng
It is disappointing unless you live in a large city. Even in areas of about 1 million it doesn't know the mass transit, etc. It ends up just displaying weather and being able to answer the age of Abraham Lincoln, but the latter could be found by Wiki in nearly the same amount of time.
Try www.kimsufi.com .. they have ridiculously cheap dedicated servers. I'm using one now, but haven't had any "real load" yet.

Or if you insist on getting a VPS, how about www.gandi.net ?
I help organize one of Canada's largest student run technology conference. http://infect.cutc.ca/
I don't live there, but when I've eyeballed the craigslist ads, the job market is not strong. Certainly I don't think there's anything like a "scene". nbouscal may disagree though.
Really? You think the voltage on a street car and the wood that kerosene barrels is made of is common knowledge? I would say that I knew maybe 1/3rd of the questions in that list.
Correct, I mis-typed. Also, the more room there is in the tank, the more room there is for water vapor in the air filling the rest of the tank to collect. This can cause rust.
This would make the best homepage header or even a epic Google Doodle
There's an assumption there that there is some reason why some of these are relevant to "common knowledge". Perhaps they had recently been in the news or something...

For example, I guessed that Spitsbergen was in Austria/Germany. It's actually a town of <3000 in Norway. Not significant, until you realize that it was the subject of the 1920 Svalbard Treaty between 41 countries. The Edison list purports to be from 1921.

So yes, you are exactly right... the man wanted people that were actively self and location aware, nothing wrong with that.
jQuery, LESS, Knockout and Uppercut (my Backbone-style model transport).

ASP.NET MVC 4 (Razor) with WebAPI, Unity IoC/DI, Enormous (a micro ORM not published yet)

PostgreSQL, Redis
I'd add: Watching the reaction of a person when they don't have one or more factoids at their fingertips is also useful for measuring the temperament of people.

The fact that he torqued a candidate so badly that it resulted in a letter to the NYT tells you that Edison didn't miss too much by passing on that hire.
I get the impression the guy has been called a genius so often he feels insecure about not living up to the name.
Here's the original thread, from 50 days a go:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4974055
I have a server with Hetzner, it's amazing. I drool every time I log on.
Belly Shack is great! And only a ten minute walk from my apartment. It's cool to see a decent-sized Chicago presence on HN.
Advanced Xcode logging in Terminal app
http://www.pangeaprogress.com/1/post/2010/09/einstein-edison... 'While in Boston, Einstein was subjected to a pop quiz known as the Edison test. (...) A reporter asked him a question from the test. "What is the speed of sound?" If anyone understood the propogation of sound waves, it was Einstein. But he admitted that he did not "carry such information in my mind since it is readily available in books." Then he made a larger point designed to disparage Edison's view of education. "The value of a college education is not the learning of many facts but the training of the mind to think," he said.'
but the question is: what's the time range necessary for immediate communication? Do all developers need to be in full-communication mode for a full eight-hour span? And if so, when does code get written?
What would a standardized bytecode bring to the table over asm.js?

To me the choice is between more convenient encoding format for the bytecode and backwards compatibility with all browsers, and going with the latter sounds eminently reasonable to me. The x86 bytecode encoding is really ugly too (look at those one-byte-long binary coded decimal instructions), but the survival characteristics of backwards compatibility are undisputed...
Are you sure you're being rational about this? Your own time is going to be worth far more than $100/month, your living expenses will be much more than that. So spending the money isn't going to shorten your runway much.
Yes. Will I boast if I say that I honestly don't know just 3 things on this list?

Back when I was at school, we had all the subjects as mandatory, chemistry, physics, biology, history - there was no choice like you get today. So yes, I happen to know the weight of the air,or the lightest/heaviest types of wood. And if you like researching things(in my case - spending hours on wikipedia) questions like the one about optical lenses are easy.

And I am pretty sure that's what Edison was looking for - people who are curious about stuff and research it themselves. Common knowledge in my opinion,because in an ideal world I would like everyone to be that curious about the world that surrounds them.
When Good Design Isn't Enough