skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is what I thought aswell. Unless you cripple the UI, there's no way you are gonna be able to reliably determine whether a comment has been read programmatically. You could try to guess through a number of things, but it'll never be accurate enough not to break the order by false positives.
Thank you, your feedback is very valuable. May I ask you which piece of software do you use for that?
They seem to be showing up for me. I don't have any recent organic examples, but here's query for one of the most popular threads, and the quora thread is the first result:

https://www.google.com/search?q=How+do+I+get+over+my+bad+hab...

What do you mean by "private site"?

The other objectionable/EE-like thing about it is how it hides the answers unless you log in. That really sucks.
wow. I would love to get an Econ PhD from Duke. How does it feel to change from being pretty knowledgeable in Economics to being completely ignorant in programming?
One thing Linus didn't mention about Finland and education which some of you may find interesting and of note; is that the right to education is enshrined in the Finnish constitution. http://www.oph.fi/english/education Coming from a family of educators I can't help but think this plays an important role in cementing Finland's position at the top of the OECD education rankings.

Furthermore, being a Scotsman and understanding how the Scots have long since had a history of free universal education, I think it's fair to say that this played an important part in the industrial revolution. It's also worth mentioning that Scotland is about to have it's independence referendum next year and high on the list for those who would see Scotland have self-determination is a written constitution. The UK is an anomaly in the developed western world for not having a written constitution and many of us would like to see free universal education enshrined into our new constitution, should we vote for independence.
Bootcamp program will help but make sure you also have your own projects to learn with. As to the last piece: It's vitally important to be able to take advice from others in a startup.

http://www.paulgraham.com/word.html
yeah i was going to say that i know they aren't truly julian dates but... i figured someone else would point it out. i guess you could think of it as the last 3 digits are julian dates but they just reset every year?
No one wants spoken descriptions of anything. That’s just misleading reporting.

What the article means by that is text that can be turned into spoken descriptions by speech synthesis.
Be warned, that code is GPLv3. I don't know the specific legal issues with using it or porting it to another language, but if you're going to use it you should check.
Kill your fear of the DateTime & DateInterval classes
That's not really realtime. Realtime is a chat app - i.e even a delay of 10 seconds is too much. Realtime is a multiplayer game with 1000 users all at once. I'm afraid I was a little vague when I said realtime. Node.js is for concurrent realtime. Meaning it's good for a product where you have thousands of users that need to be connected all at the same time all communicating with one another.

Your app seems like a fairly standard SaaS app. The cost estimate is only "real-time" in the sense that there is some data that is crunched on the server before it's served up to the user. Users just deal with a form and they punch in their data, and then that data is shown to couriers. That's pretty standard CRUD and you don't need anything fancy. Node.js is really cool, but you're going to be a lot more productive and you're going to have a much easier time by sticking to a standard, mature web framework like Django (or Rails).

Are you fluent in Javascript, PHP, or Ruby? If not, that's even more of a reason to stick with Python and Django, because you can literally start learning Django and have your MVP up by Monday.
I'm an engineer at Google.

20% time is alive and well, but you have to be careful when thinking that 20% time is going to magically result in fully-polished new products. How much code can you write in one day a week? How much legacy code can you maintain in one day a week? The fact that programming is hard puts an upper bound on what you can effectively accomplish in your 20% time.

Effective 20% projects, in my opinion, are projects that add something new to an existing product and whose maintenance costs are low enough to be absorbed by the project's primary contributors. I've been working on Android lint checks recently: it's something that's self-contained, can be done without interfering with my 80% project, and won't make extra work for the project's main maintainers. (It's also open source, so it can't be canceled. Hah!)

It's also worth pointing out that not all 20% projects at Google are going to be visible outside of Google. I spent my first couple quarters at Google working on maintaining the internal Emacs extensions and user-base; most of my time was spent answering questions on the mailing list. This isn't going to result in Google Maps or Gmail, but it is still needs to be done.

If you want to do something with more public impact, I think you should work towards making that idea your 80% project. Get buy-in from your peers, write a design doc or description of the product, and talk to people who work on similar projects. Once you have a team ready to work on the project, a good design, and clear criteria for success, it shouldn't be hard to become a "real" project.

(I've succeeded in doing this for an internal utility I wanted to write. I wrote a design doc, got some feedback from my peers, and asked my manager for a quarter to work on it, and did. Now it exists and has users!)
This entire thread is specifically about C.
The parent called them "all-stars of iOS development". This is clearly only my opinion, maybe I was too blunt - in-game currency is a real turn-off for me.

After a whole 15 seconds of gameplay I was greeted by a popup "please buy a longer line in the store", that's probably what blew my experience from the start. Now I can only think of it as an endless loop of [coins -> better gear -> more coins -> gear], and have no interest in playing at all. Just trying to break a depth/points record, like pre-farmville games, would be enough incentive for me to keep playing.
Extortion is one of the better possible reasons for their DDoS. Eventually, when the money doesn't show, its in their best interest to stop attacking. While new extortionists will keep showing up, they won't likely come back.

Ideological or government attackers, on the other hand, can't be reasoned with and can only be expected to escalate in the future. If that's who Github is dealing with, then they'd better figure out how to actually deal with DDoSes sometime soon, because they will only increase in size and frequency.
Do more masculine names help male lawyers become judges?
Reddit is way ahead of the curve on this one. Here's a post by Randall Munroe on the problem and solution, from 2009:

http://blog.reddit.com/2009/10/reddits-new-comment-sorting-s...

I seem to recall they also randomly premute comment order a bit as well now.
> I'm pretty sure this project will not become huge. But it will get a of us thinking about making more open systems.

I appreciated this line and found it endearing. Thanks for spending time on this project; I look forward to seeing what you've come up with.
Teachers in Chicago are not paid over $70k/year

http://preaprez.wordpress.com/2012/09/12/the-in-box-the-7400...
This is great news. Fernando, thanks for creating IPython. I use it a lot in my work.
I was building a system in early 2004 that crawled and cached RSS feeds to collate them into streams for users based on subscriptions. My intention was to have one set of crawlers bring things into a large cache that could be accessed by a use base vs. having everyone constantly hitting up every website for the latest RSS entries and reduce overall traffic (excessive RSS traffic was an issue at the time) and to also provide people with consistent website formatting (enhancing readability) and all of those other no-brainer things that we take for granted now.

I'd progressed quite well and had a handful of people who were helping me test it out thoroughly addicted to using it to consume the latest news from their favorite sites.

I spent entirely too much time building in social features and essentially recreating LiveJournal (Live Journal's ability to allow you to follow all of your friends blogs in a somewhat clean format was my inspiration but applied to any RSS source) and by the time I was ready to take it to the next level Google announced Reader and I abandoned the project (beaten to market by Google yet again)

I had other distractions that made it an easy decision but I guess I shouldn't have given in so easily. Live and learn!
It would have been useful if there were some implementation detail. Did he go from hashes in python to maps in go? Or switch to maps of structs for example?
For all fellow rock climbers out there
Good day, HN.

As my latest weekend project, I've created an online guidebook for rock climbers which contains information about various climbing areas, sectors and routes. It's available at http://toprope.me

I'm personally a rock climber as well and I think that all existing solutions (websites) are not really easy to use. Here's what I tried to fix:

- Content-first approach.
- Powerful parametrized search.
- Mobile friendly.
- Offline support (via HTML5 Offline).

I'm also planning to expose a REST API in the near future.

Again, the website is available at http://toprope.me

P.S. Only sport routes for now, no boulders or trads.
Have you ever seen someone post "first!" on HN?
You can do whatever you want, really, you just need to keep it open source. I can give permission for pieces of that project in any license you need, just not the whole project. Just list the files you need and will grant you a license (no questions asked :D)

(except code not written by me, like the dropbox integration, etc)
Now.it can be done even better by adding a windows 8 or spotlight style search :)
So does this mean that the United States government will now accept bitcoins?
Agree completely. I'd love to use my phone as the sync server, the thing's on and under-utilized all the time anyway.
"It's been three weeks of highly public complaining/pseudo-analysis about Google Reader."

On March 13, Google announced it's killing Reader; that's 10 days a go. http://googleblog.blogspot.nl/2013/03/a-second-spring-of-cle...

I know I'll be complaining about this for quite some time to come.
what's up with the almost duplicate paragraph in the middle of the article?
> at least in my experience, made extension developers better at building extensions that don't break because I have upgraded from version 15 to 16 like we had back in the Firefox v2/3/4 years.

This is more caused by Firefox stopping to break the compatibility all the time. The plugin API in Firefox used to be just the internals, exposed to JS, so everytime something changed, it broke extensions. These days, they stopped doing that quite as often plus they published the Jetpack SDK which promises a stable API at the cost of less possibilities to change the browsers behaviour.
Is your list of companies in this db everything in their entity list of companies, or just ones that got acquired?
Yes, I think the funding is the key. There are already funders who see it as their mission to support scientists and allow them to tackle interesting questions. But in the end, they have a limited pot of money to dish out, and they have to somehow make a decision about what's worth funding. That brings us back to spending a lot of time writing grant applications and trying to justify the work.

Ultimately, 'gentleman scientists' were probably able to follow their interests because they were rich enough that they didn't need to worry about earning a daily wage. That's still possible, but we'd much rather let science be done by anyone who's interested and good at it.

The OP mentions Microryza, their crowdfunding platform for science. That's a very interesting approach, but I think it only works if you already have some kind of paid job in science: the projects I've looked at are all asking for much less than a year's salary for one person.
All I saw in that post is basically:

- Science is broken and needs to be fixed

- A 22-year-old bioengineer taught himself how to code

- The author started Microryza

and now this is on the HN front page.
Did I miss an important sentence somewhere, or is that the actual summary?
Ok, will add that. Thank you for testing.
It would make sense if your comments were weighted higher having a higher karma, but I think all of our comments start at the top to make sure that at least someone sees them and that they can get upvotes if they are insightful/interesting.
Fascinating!

My sister actually decided to reboot her career around that same age (though she is older now). She had to go back to school as her earlier major wasn't a science major. She ended up getting her bio PhD and now works at a great university doing way more interesting stuff than she did before she chose to "reboot" her career. This fascinated me because she rebooted, and moved to the field you're looking to get out of and ended up happier.

Go for it! I think that's a great example of how different people are happy on different paths. If you feel like rebooting, do it.
Hmmm... I wonder how many Mac notebook sales are to people who actually run Windows on it via emulation?
Thanks. I always have ongoing side projects, so I will work more on that. Re-read the article and I guess the inability to take advice is the opposite of "relentlessly resourceful"
Right. Like, for instance, I need some line smoothing code, but I don't want to use that in my closed source project because I don't know how far GPLv3 infects my project.
Bloomberg: ‘We’ll Have More Visibility, Less Privacy.’ Drones Coming.
He didn't specifically mention measuring test scores, you did. But is your argument that effectiveness of teachers, effective educational outcomes are unmeasurable? Then how do we know that schools aren't doing perfectly fine right now? Why is there even a discussion about improving schools?

Would it be that objective comparisons between US and foreign students is trending downward (while costs go up)? Would it be that more and more a high school diploma (then college degree) means nothing as far as employability?

Is it that the demands of modern economy is not matched up with a supply of highly skilled workers? I think these are all evidence that public education needs modified... not necessarily that someone needs "blamed" for it, just that everyone needs to acknowledge it and be supportive of change.

Now I'd argue that measuring student test scores should be one part of many that go into evaluating teachers. But above all there has to be something that we use to evaluate them, otherwise how do we know it's working... or not... or when or how to try new ideas? It's not just the teachers but the whole system that should be constantly evaluated. Not necessarily to fire someone, but to give feedback and constantly improve.

For sure it could be argued that it's not teachers themselves that are failing students, but the system is structured to be resistant to change and innovation. Metrics that should be used to guide curriculum are graduate employability, job placement, are skills being taught to satisfy the needs of the job market, what's working and what isn't etc.

Introducing some sort of competition will allow schools to figure out the evaluation process themselves. Look at places like Dev Bootcamp that claim 80% of graduates are hired with X salary after graduation. That's succinct way to measure the effectiveness of their teachers. Not that I'm saying this example exactly compares to public school or that a CS solution is applicable to the overall problem but... on a side note why isn't programming and such more prevalent in high school? There's no reason a private company can impart those skills in 9 weeks and public schools couldn't do it in a year. Maybe this type of thing has been incorporated into public schools if so disregard...it's been a while since I've been there. Generally, I think high school was an extreme waste of time in regards to what was actually learned. And then college is four more years with knowledge that itself could have been taught in high school. I tell people all the time, nothing I learned in CS major in College couldn't have been learned in high school. It just wasn't offered.

Likewise for subjects like economics, finance, personal finance, etc. Handling ones finances is something that more Americans need to learn and these lessons are not being taught early enough.
Here are some links to CSV files based on miquelcamps's sql file.

Acquisitions
http://db.tt/h6PoPnCn

Companies
http://db.tt/UNYulmJD

Funding
http://db.tt/SHa45HHc

Words
http://db.tt/mJMCIREX
Get rid of massive waitlists for college courses; make professors rock stars
"And then [Twitter] couldn't make any money that way."

Hold the phone. Did they actually try to make money that way?
No good, that would make me more offensive
Here's how Google should shut down a product:

Step 1: Over a period of say three months, slowly increase the average response time of the product.

Step 2: Listen to people complain that load time is getting unbearably slow

Step 3: "Oh, we'd love to fix this problem but because of $random_infrastructure_issue, and because we've got most of our developers working on Android, we think it's time to shut the product down. After all, it was getting old and slow, right?"

Step 4: Feel justified about their decision
I was curious too, so I checked; it's pretty obviously client-side blocking; there's even a flash of the blocked result before it's hidden, which is awful.
Good luck! Keep us updated, and don't be afraid to change your idea.
What American Startups Can Learn From the Cutthroat Chinese Software Industry
This is clever. At my last startup we were building a tweet-based mechanism for buying and selling goods and services over Twitter. We'd use procedurally-generated haikus, along with unique hashtags for location.

The haikus would have particular forms for buyers and sellers, but also create unique creative content on Twitter. The idea is that it would create an artform out of transactions.

Really like the thought behind this (at least until I start thinking about security...).
there are 4 tables:
- acquisitions (date, target, acquirer, price)
- companies (date, name, description, category, url, twitter)
- funding (date, company, round, size, investors)
- words (for the tagcloud)
I'll clarify: I was homeschooled. My parents always had a set schedule and curriculum. Within that defined structure, I mostly taught myself.

A parent is perfectly capable of evaluating and deciding on a wide variety of curriculum even if they may not be knowledgeable enough to write a Chemistry book.
Some of the things I use the build system for, that are purely for client-side work:

* compile .less to .css

* jshint

* jsbeautifier

* run unit tests (which launches a browser which runs the tests)

* concat src

* minify src

I recommend using grunt[1], but it's not required.. just makes some things easier.

1. http://gruntjs.com/
Precisely what I was thinking. Rather than assuming the what people have read, simply give less importance to upvotes made to a top comment than to those made to comments below.

I think it would also have to be logarithmic, because being the top comment is MUCH better than being the third comment, while being the 6th comment is only marginally better than being the 8th comment.

Coupled with the stochastic model, it could make it a far more level game.
Use your phone to see through walls and buildings
Thanks for this. I hadn't looked at that carefully enough and need to think more about it.
Interesting story.... the good old days of getting a bio phd will help you get a decent professor position. Those days are long gone now...
I guess 30 is an interesting age when people begin to reflect on their lives.
> I tasted meat recently for the first time in 2+ years and it was really lame and underwhelming.

That statement is about as bizarre as "I tasted alcohol once, I don't understand what the big deal is".
SHOCKING NEWS: Ethnically and linguistically homogeneous people from tiny, frozen nation easier to educate than diverse citizens of world's most-immigrated-to nation. Stay tuned for more surprising revelations, as soon as we hear them!
I just posted my project on your website. It looks amazing, and the experience was great. when are you coming out of beta?
What interests me most about your comment is that you are not even the second person I have heard of that dropped out of a PhD at Duke. Was it your advisor?
The link you cited is highly misleading. The Chicago metro area is a census tract of 10 million people. The City of Chicago is 2.7 million people. The Chicago school system and the Chicago teachers union disagree about how to compute the number, but CTU cites $71k and CPS cites $76k: http://chicago.cbslocal.com/2012/06/12/how-much-do-chicago-p...

Also misleading from that link: Chicago's cost of living is right around the US average: http://www.bestplaces.net/cost_of_living/city/illinois/chica...
Reading their copy in portuguese is hilarious! It's like a real-world version of the Cloud to Butt extension[1].

If you haven't seen the video (Rego == Buttcrack):

Your Rego is private. Nobody can see what you put in your
Rego. But we know that sometimes you wanna share your Rego
with a friend, and we make that easy!

[1] https://github.com/panicsteve/cloud-to-butt
Another useless going to be popular novelty site.
What allows for "control the supply"? You can have either physical possession amid physical scarcity (ie, saudie arabia/opec vs oil) or legal means of exclusion amid infitite propogation (ie, abstract possesion of an abstract good). Copyright is necessary but not sufficient step to make a business of the latter. You're implying AP is a failed cartel...and in this yes, you are right. But this also points out why it is being faught for. The quesion is: why is it interesting? And not just a failure...
Go for it! Start a bio startup!
Google Teams With Code School for Dev Tools Course
How come we can upvote top comments, anyways?
But just because you, in one particular instance didn't see it, doesn't mean anything in the long term. Obviously with any statistical estimate, individual data points can fall far from the curve. But the idea is that, after enough time, enough views, and enough upvotes, the system slides into place.
Self-driving one-person taxi
I'm using DDG, well, sometimes, and I really, really want to like it. But its reliability and performance -- just in producing search results let alone relevant ones, has been sorely lacking for the past 3-4 months.
But you have nothing against the second example, presumably? I still see that as a valid option.
"For instance, on the planet Earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much—the wheel, New York, wars and so on—whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man—for precisely the same reasons."

- Douglas Adams
dear dear, as you might know, a couple of million $$ is absolutely nothing for a bio startup
Exactly. If you reason for avoiding meat is only because of shitty meat producers, then why not vote with your dollar instead and support the non-shitty meat producers?