skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The canonical sources are dense and difficult to understand unless you already grasp the language, IMO.

I can understand why people wanting to jump in and get things done prefer the more, er, apocryphal sources.
Share with HN: resourceful sales-building blog for SaaS startups.
And then they can hire the people responsible for the Open Source project.

That's kinda the point of Open Source as a marketing tool. If someone sees how awesome your Open Source software is, and they want more of that same brand of awesome (but to do something just a little bit different), they know exactly where to go.

I just talked about a software services business that I worked with a few years ago called Enthought, and it's deeply relevant to this threads interest. While at University the company founders built a set of Open Source Python (and Fortran and C++) components for scientific computing. They then went on to start a software services business with a little bit of money raised from family and friends. Their revenue is now in the millions (I can't be specific about how many millions, as I haven't known with any specificity for many years, and I've never been told that they would want me to talk about those numbers with specificity). Their business has very frequently first come from customer exposure to their (deeply awesome) Open Source software.
This was the test page when they turned the internet on for the first time.
My strategy is to use a catch-all and filters (with Google Apps). I have my catch-all for the domain go to an address like spam@<mydomain>, and then within that account have a filter set up such that all email with a destination that includes my code gets forwarded to my real address.

For example, I sign up to HN with the email address hn.rfg@<mydomain>. This gets forwarded to my real address because it's got the rfg string in it. If I start to get spam on that account, I can add a filter for hn.rfg on either my real or spam@<domain> account, depending on which is more convenient, and I know where it came from.

Blanket spam to <mydomain> rarely comes through to my email, since the to is unlikely to include the rfg string, and will probably get picked up by the spam filter on the spam@<mydomain> account. Backscatter spam with faked from headers rarely gets to my real account, since the faked address is unlikely to include the rfg string.
I want to clarify that this is a reference to the TV show Boston Legal, where William Shatner's named partner in a law firm, says his own name frequently, as if to say 'I'm Denny Crane and I'm the best'.
As a reference:

http://www.stevesouders.com/blog/2009/04/09/dont-use-import/

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=559804
The moral of this story really is: prettify your URLs, and make sure they aren't excessively long. Nobody likes typing in http://server3.example.com/show/content/view?pid=2847573&....

Once you've done this, no URL shortening systems are needed.
I am trying to figure out how to introduce my sons to programming. I am thinking about teaching them Ruby or Python since they are on their iMac already.

When I was in elementary school I made rocket ships with BASIC (granted, that was in the mid 1980s). I want something that simple and kid friendly.
PyPy 1.1.0 beta released
I would assume that is already there. I know there are pretty complete financial calculators for the iPhone.
I was asked this once during an interview. After I gave several lengthy possible explanations, the interviewer was basically speechless.

The previous question was much more interesting. I was asked to estimate the number of piano tuners there were in my city. I got it right, and it turns out it was one of the the class Fermi questions

http://mathforum.org/workshops/sum96/interdisc/classicfermi....

Still, I'm not really a fan of these types of questions. Chances are any curious person who spends a lot of time on the net would have come across them some time or another.
No, someone needs to NOT do that. The app store is crowded enough without every halfway serious blogger creating an app for their site.
Hot and Heavy: About NBA Shooting
I love nuclear reactors. I went on a tour of the GCR at Oldbury, in the UK, once.

Even got to see them changing one of the rods (Though of course, from a considerable and safe distance).

It was pretty sweet.
More details on the research here: http://web.me.com/sandy1729/sportsmetricians_consulting/Hot_...
Quantcast totally undercounts, by about 3X or more, sites that don't have their widget installed. I noticed this when they first got going, and immediately added it to all my sites.
By the way, do Enthought have something for simulations?
I have a kindle2.

I find it amazing for a linear reading experience. It's not quite as good for reading something that requires you to flip back and forth.
Nearly useless single data point:

I just stopped in my tracks today posting an ad on a site that wanted $99. Had they asked $25 I would've gone ahead.

I have no idea what their readership is like, and I didn't care enough to bother figuring out if it was worth it. I was willing to chuck $25 without thinking about it if for no other reason than to support the site. $99 - for me - was beyond what I felt like wasting today.
I have also seen financial calculators for the iPhone; these aren't very useful to me as an Engineer. I haven't yet come across a scientific calculator with graphing capabilities for the iPhone. If you find one, please post a link!
Yes, though I don't know enough about the field to say how it relates to what you're doing. I was holding them up as a business model to look at, not as an example of "here's your competition", though maybe they are. I dunno.

They work with geological data to help oil companies build safe platforms (losing a platform to a natural gas deposit costs millions of dollars and occasionally human lives, for example, so the amount they're willing to spend to prevent it from happening is incredibly high), as well as profitable and efficient wells. They also work with fluid dynamics data for a consumer products company, to make sure your toothpaste comes out of the tube without splattering, etc. All seem like "simulations" to me. But I don't know. Visualization is a big part of what they do, as well, and SciPy has awesome realtime visualization capabilities (lots of folks also like MatPlotLib, which works nicely with SciPy).
Heaviside’s Operator Calculus
"I can report that, standing on top of an operational 600 MW nuclear reactor weighing several thousand tons, all you can feel is a slight rumbling vibration like distant traffic felt through a road surface -- there's no indication that metres below your feet, hundreds of tons of gas compressed to conditions more normally associated with the surface of Venus are being blasted through the guts of a radioactive inferno."

I've never quite had such a clear visual picture of a nuclear reactor in operation.
Rather than new apps, I'd like to see the SDK open up for more powerful apps.

* I'd like Skype to be able to answer a Skype call when the phone's locked (assuming it's the active app).

* I'd like to be able to write a custom keyboards and custom dialers.

* I'd like to be able to send a quick note to Jott without entering my keycode.

* I'd like to see barcode readers as smart as the ones on Android.

* I'd like to see the SDK terms loosened to allow third-party app frameworks. Apple may not be fond of the impurity, but it's crazy that every simple web service needs to write a separate version of their app for Android, iPhone, Blackberry, Windows Mobile, etc. It wouldn't be far fetched to make a gecko-based app framework for mobile devices if the licensing allowed it.

* I'd also like to write iPhone apps in MacRuby.

Another pet peeve, though not necessarily app-related, is how the phone defaults to wifi hotspots that require web-login, breaking every other app until you either go to the website or disable wifi. I'd like either smarter software handling of that situation, or a physical button to enable/disable wifi.
How did a Python 1.5 article made it to the front page?! If interesting at all, it is only for historical reasons, and let's face it, if you're interested in the history of programming languages, there are a few things more interesting than Python 1.5.
Techcrunch posting about stopping the hype cycle?

Really?
PLAYING FOR CHANGE
Instead of charging $X, why not charge $2X with prob 1/2 and $0 with prob 1/2?
Given that people are often irrational (e.g., they buy lottery tickets), would you make more money this way?
Actually, that joke is extremely old too.
Ugly Perl: A Lesson in the importance of API design
One would actually think round manhole covers have several disadvantages to offset their one purported strength. For example, it would be more difficult to attach a hinge or locking mechanism. Also, the grip hole would not be guaranteed to be in the same alignment every time - if you were using a machine to raise the cover, you might have to manouevre the machine into incovenient angles to properly access the grip, according to the whim of the previous team who replaced the cover. With a square lid, the alignment could be standardised to the most convenient position for machine access. Also, assuming the bars in the ladder are straight, which AFAIK they always are, placing a ladder in a round hole wastes space.

Feynmann's answer about the cylinder being the strongest structure against compression is true but one wouldn't expect this to be a critical factor at typical street-access depths. Maybe if you were going down 50m or more, but even so, dirt is hardly as effective at exerting pressure as a free-to-move liquid.
It did work out ok for MySQL and JBoss, though ;)

Phusion offers a focused product - you install it, usually very easily, and you're done. It's hard to see a simple way to monetize it other than charge money for the product itself (thereby harming its market share). They might be able to sell support contracts or professional services, though.

On the other hand, if you're selling a service, seems to me you could benefit, or at least not lose anything, by opening your source. Would Twitter be doing worse if their software was open? They might actually have had better code by now, since so many coders use their product.

Also, you might build your product on top of an OSS codebase, using the accumulated code and domain knowledge as foundation. AFAIK that this is what Boxee is doing with XBMR. Also consider Wordpress - being open source helped it become a leading platform, later facilitating wordpress.com which has a pretty decent business model.
Mellon Award for Open Source Technology Collaboration
No. Buying a product/paying for a service isn't the same as gambling, and without a potential high payoff (3 million dollars or whatever) you aren't triggering the same neurochemicals.
Math Books for CS Undergrads
Ok, basically the situation is like this: I am one of the millions of students that hated mathematics to death while in high school but want to study computer science. As a result of this passionate hate I now find myself in university and although I can deal with the math of the course I really want to get a better understanding of most of the concepts and ideas in discrete mathematics, linear agebra, number theory, etc. However, it sounds ineffective that I just pick a subject, go to wikipedia, read about that, pick another subject, do the same, and so on. So, what I am asking is suggestions for books covering the concepts that a person who wants to understand maths better needs to be ok with.
I think its different for every person. You should find out what your tradeoff level is for comprehension/wpm, and how many phrases you can skip while still understanding the main points of the section.

I think everyone can pick up reading by phrases to a certain extent. Scanning full pages or even paragraphs is probably a innate skill that isn't learnable.
The expected value is the same:

(0.5 * 2X) + (0.5 * 0) = X = (X * 1.0)

but perhaps you would be able to attract more customers. I doubt it. While it's certainly true that everybody loves a freebie, no one likes to pay twice for something.

Why not charge X with probability (1-p) and charge zero with probability p? The expected value would be reduced to (1-p) but perhaps you would attract people looking for freebies. More customers is always a good thing, right?
Funny, I remember windowed ceramic parts as being quite a bit more expensive than epoxy plastic with no window, which would be a OTP (one time programmable) EPROM. Use the high dollar windowed devices during development or for unstable projects, then switch to plastic OTP once the code settles down for better production margins.

The good stickers we used were metallized polyster, I think. They were a bit more opaque than paper, as measured by the time it took to UV erase a device.
With a square lid, the alignment could be standardised to the most convenient position for machine access.

Small quibble, but most of those manhole covers and such are placed where they are because someone built some kind of tunnel there a hundred years ago (for whatever reason, from sewage to water to anything else). The layout of the streets then often evolves largely independently of the position of the manhole covers, thus resulting in some "interesting" placements of manhole covers, sometimes not all that accessible (though I guess it depends on how strict the local regulators are on the architects who design the new layout).
he definitely would be a microserf then
Programmers don't suck at CSS Design, it's Stefano's stereotype of programmers that do.
I searched for it and didn't find it. But, OK. You're not my hero anymore.

(wow, tough room).
Ah yes, like so many things it is probably for "legacy reasons". And needless to say really old manhole tunnels would definitely tend to be round, especially if they were constructed out of shaped stones, where the shape of the structure is an important contributor to its integrity.
It depends what level you are already on. At some point, you might like to read Concrete Mathematics: A Foundation for Computer Science

http://www.amazon.com/Concrete-Mathematics-Foundation-Comput...

which is an enjoyable book, but which presupposes a fairly strong background in math.

An easier book that is good preparation for computer science is Mathematics: A Discrete Introduction,

http://www.amazon.com/Mathematics-Discrete-Introduction-Edwa...

which is very readable and full of information that will get you ready for computer science concepts and for other math reading.

After edit:

Browse the books on this bibliography page

http://olympiads.win.tue.nl/imo/books.html

for lots of suggestions compiled by someone deeply interested in computer science.
Complete x86/x64 JIT Assembler for C++
TechCrunch need a new copy editor.

From run-on sentences to misplaced prepositions, this piece has it all:

_But_ it’s not all kumbaya here. _And_ one of the most destructive things about Silicon Valley is the hype cycle. _And_ judging by the fact that some bloggers pronounced Twitter “done” the same week the company was featured on Oprah, it’s clear that hype cycle has spun ludicrously out of control.

I’m sure you’ve seen the graphs. If not, it’s to the left.

It starts to attain huge growth and buzz. >> urgh, loose English ftl!

He was built up as the young, shoe-less God of the Internet that the press brutally tore him down once the crash changed the viability of his second company, Loudcloud’s, business. >> my eyes!

Unfortunately (and I'm not trying to be harsh), it seems to me that the thinking behind this article is as loose as the writing.
Though would a kid of today think a desktop app is cool? hard to share with friends like a website would be.

The only type of cool desktop app is a 3D game and they are pretty hard to get going like you said.
The width of the question makes it a tough one. I am lucky enough to have a mathematics professor one phone call away. You will find spending hours in your University's library rewarding. Start with a good book on discrete mathematics and move on from there. A good book is the one for which you can have someone explain your questions (meaning the one that your professor proposes).
What, exactly, should the hn community do about this? Should we all email Arrington and kindly notify him?

I simply don't read their articles. There hasn't been a good one that I can remember, even barring poor writing skills.

It's a game of capitalism, if you want them to improve, stop visiting their blog until they do. Until they lose traffic because of it, there's no impetus to improve.
People will "irrationally" learn that your product is valueless (after all, you give it away for free) and you will attract pathological customers (the kind who would put up with this pricing model, which screams scam).
It sounds like catch up on most of the examples given - if the total adoption rates had been higher for older generations then they might have a point. As it stands it seems as though a certain percentage of the total population are the sort of people to adopt new technologies (well, in a reasonable time frame) and younger people have reached this point quicker than older people. It's kind of like observing the "late majority" in Moore's chasm after everyone else has already jumped on board and then saying "look - the late majority do love technology, maybe even more than everyone else".
What happens when the author's website goes down? I'm guessing his job is not really to maintain an URL shortener website, so he probably won't be dedicated to its stability and reliability. Are there URL shorteners that let you edit the URL? That's probably what he needs...
A clever idea but I worry what happens to the people that miss out. They are either aware they've paid $2X (if you tell them) or they are aware that they've been "ripped off" (you are prepared to give it away for $0 so you must have at least 50% markup. Kind of like jewellery stores putting half price sales on $10-20k diamond rings). Either way you are associating negative feelings immediately and a sense of buyer's regret.

On a practical note, what stops them getting a refund and repurchasing until they get it for free.
I'd count that as these days, though that's was still some pretty old stuff at the the time you used it.

I was on BASIC on the BBC B computer in 1989/90ish and Q-basic around 1991/92 (when I was 11 or 12).
I'm really kind of mystified by how DTrace has captured people's imaginations. How could something like DTrace justify an entire server platform? I have it on my Mac, I'm a professional reverser, and it's never the first thing I reach for. I'm serious, what's the huge win here?

You never, ever hear people say that Detours is a reason to switch to Win32. But Detours seems, if anything, more useful than DTrace.
Health nanorobots.

I can't wait until we can inject single-purpose nanorobots to heal and augment our bodies. Imagine a injection that would completely eradicate cancer from your body. Or improve your eyesight.

It may be a long way off, but it will be amazing when science reaches that point
To sell your good a consumer must be both willing and able to pay. Under this system that would be the 2X price since he doesn't know which price he will actually get (if he knew ahead of time, or could back out of the deal after learning the price, you'd always be giving them away).

There's always going to be less people you can afford 2X than X.
How the E-Book Will Change the Way We Read and Write
He really needs to print both the actual URL and the shortened tag. This way, is his site goes down, the link is still legit, yet if the link changes, his redirect is still active. If both sites go down, well there's no solution to that.
Sample size of 1.

Interesting still. Makes you wonder if there ever was a "state of nature" when even half a million years ago we have evidence of altruistic communities.
My thoughts exactly.

The book might keep a website up for the next 1-5 years but after that I doubt the author or publisher will have much interest in keeping it up.

I'd provide both the short URL and the current full URL to increase the reader's chances of finding the resource.
One of those 'back in the day' posts, huh? I was just a kid when I started messing around with the Hewlett Packard HP-41C programmable calculator. That was an incredible amount of handheld power at the time. RPN and maybe 256 bytes or so to work with? Even got a little app published in the Key Notes user's club newsletter, but I'm sure it was due to my age, not the quality of the code...

Then I borrowed a TRS-80 Model I book--the intro to BASIC book that came with every TRS-80. Read it over a weekend. I remember it clearly because we also installed a garage door opener that weekend. Big fun! (Looking back, a lot of the books in those days were really clear and easy to understand.) To actually try the programs I wrote (longhand, on notebook paper), I would hang out at the Radio Shack in the mall and transcribe and debug the code. The sales dudes were really cool about letting a strange and polite little boy play with the low-spec computers for an hour at a time, even if he only occasionally bought electronic components. By this time I was hand assembling Z80 code (remember peek and poke?) and they were selling the TRS-80 module III and the Coco.

But you know what? As exciting as it was then, it's even better today. Free compilers and dev tools? FPGAs? More free online docs about anything than you could read in a lifetime? Places to meet, discuss, and share tricks with people all across the world? Hell, people throw away computers I would have killed for back then. The barrier to entry is so much lower than it was back then. No contest, things are freakin' great today and it's still exciting.

I still have the intro to Z80 book around here somewhere.
I have a 6-char Gmail account that's also an English dictionary word, which was made the day Gmail launched as invite-only. It gets a TON of spam, but I never notice it. The spam filter is well-trained. If you don't use any of the mailing lists you're on, one thing you can do is filter by the word "unsubscribe" or the phrase "remove yourself" :)
Performance optimization: The first thing to do
How about going all the way and porting a computer algebra system to the iPhone?
I'm glad a language other than Lisp can finally eat it's own tail.
A more common variation of this idea is "Win your purchase free!", with the odds of winning being fairly low, but the price remaining the same.

Car dealerships seem to like this one, and Visa ran a similar contest here in Canada recently (called "Win What You Buy").

The success of this kind of promotion is most likely proportional to the price of your product.
Wow he shelled out $349 for Adobe Audition 3. That is dedication.
Dtrace is useful because you can run it without having to interrupt any processes on the machine, and it is safe (won't cause kernel panics) and lightweight (won't slow the machine down too much) enough to use on a production site.

DTrace lets you instrument either 1 process, a collection of processes, or all processes at the syscall level. Want to know which processes are usinng disk IO; then what the size of the IO writes is? You can do that. For instance, you might want to tune your RAID controller stripe size to your IO-intensive application.

Etc. etc.
Just to fill in come context, SIOC is an RDF vocabulary that describes web content and communities. In my mind, any site that's based on a CMS or a database should export a version of itself in SIOC: SIOC, for instance, makes it possible to separate comments from the rest of a page, so search engines can separate comments from "official text", so we don't need to put a silly nofollow on comment links.
Yeah, I started out without personal computer, in a informatics club in post-Soviet Union country. We didn't have much money and were packed with 286s, 386s, and we even had one P133 (it ran... omg, Win95!!!).
How <i>do</i> you content digital and print media?
A quick search for "graphing calculator" on the App Store turned up lots of hits for me. None of them free, though.