skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Perl had nested functions since v5, just with akward syntax. Does Python have proper <del>variable declarations</del> closures? That is more of a dealbraker than non-experimental nested function syntax for me ;-)

Python has had proper closures forever, just with awkward syntax. But there is nothing you can do with closures in Perl that I can't translate directly into Python code that does the exact same thing in the exact same way. (I may need to switch from a scalar to an array with 1 element so that modifications in a child scope are visible in the outer, but conceptually things remain the same.)

I'm not saying that you should use Python - I switch it up but Perl is my goto language - however you shouldn't spread incorrect rumors about Python.
Post author here. I'd love to know where you stumbled!
Lest we forget, the early days of Google monetization attempts were relatively poor - before AdSense came along.

Heck, other monetization attempts have been poor ever since too....soo....
What an unexpected outcome! Wow!
One of the books was self-published, so I wrote the author and offered to "kindle-ize" it and we'd split the proceeds. He agreed, and we've both made a tiny profit.

Only 2 or 3% of my books are available in digital format.
and it's almost always cheapest (even after labor support) to DIY with bare metal at very large scale

If you simply need to deliver files or live streams, without needing to provide complex functionality at the edge (various kinds of protection, geo blocking, or pay-per-minute), and your traffic patterns are predictable - it's often cheaper to build your own solution. Once you start thinking about backbone and colo redundancy, deploy in different countries with contract commits - things get expensive very quickly.

The beauty of using a massive third party delivery service isn't performance, it's elasticity. Just like with the web apps (frequently hosted on DIY systems) that go down as soon as the link goes up on HN - being able to absorb traffic spikes without failing (and without forcing you to commit to a higher tier for a year) can be very valuable.
related: there is a short series of exercises in SICP that explore the idea of building an interval arithmetic library. i.e. numerical values are represented by intervals [a, b] which encode their uncertainty/error:

http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/full-text/book/book-Z-H-14.html...

Exercise 2.14 and onwards point out that two expressions that are algebraically equivalent for perfectly accurate values stop being equivalent once we introduce uncertainty. This is only for a toy example expression with 2 variables. Suppose we want to solve a linear system of equations in 100s of thousands of variables. Is it tractable to track the uncertainty for all of those variables at once? Will their uncertainties be dependent? ...
I would argue that, in this case, long term irrelevance is a "major threat" to Yahoo!'s existence, and this is one of few ways to circumvent that. There's going to be the same seemingly irrational price pinned on this acquisition because it's a long term life or death situation.
What! Are you in asp.net?
well, off the top of my head, there's GNU Octave.
You could goto Bloomberg.com or Yahoo Finance and get real P/S ratios but you used the uncontested paragon of financial data - HuffPo.

And you said it's high but still used it in your headline cuz you thought would have a higher chance of getting to the top of HN.

I guess pursuit of provocative > properly researched.
While a public medium like a blog may not always be appropriate, writing about your struggle can often help you formalize the problem, reason about it in new ways, and suss out solutions. While grappling with the problem, quietly thinking, listening to music, coding, writing, talking, sketching -- each seems to recruit different aspects of the problem-solving engine.

There is something to the idea of "rubber duck debugging", especially if you're on a very small team, or a team of one.
"two routers emitting roughly the same type of radiation as an ordinary mobile phone." Wait, what?
I've had the PDF of this speech for a few years now. Great stuff!
Wow....the sheer joy from the commenters is quite telling.

I don't think I have ever seen that sort of reaction for an acquisition of any web property before - except maybe YouTube going to Google and not MSFT.
That sounds like a bug. If you want to help us resolve this for you, reach out to support@codeschool.com with your account details and I can look at what happened. Otherwise, sorry to lose you on such a sour note.
"Way better than a VM"

Why?
Duplicate of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5408002 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5445387
Fair point but 3 - 5x ad units @ $0.50 - 1 still don't add up to $10 - 20 . . .
You should receive a confirmation email soon, and you'll receive a link to access your Free Weekend next week when it starts.
I have played with .NET on my own in the past, and I had a class on C# and VB.NET and also ASP.NET at Camosun. The C# and VB.NET class focused on desktop applications, we built a few games (card games, memory game) and the .NET class had us build a term project. My project communicated with Reddit via its API. So the short answer is...Tell me more about any opportunities you know of :)
"You can't simplify this"

I have learned to be careful about making such claims.

http://mathworld.wolfram.com/NestedRadical.html
Bad font rendering in Chrome on Windows
I think the potential Tumblr acquisition offer is based on userbase/audience value rather than any kind of (current) monetization.

It seems Yahoo is trying to extend their reach in the active/young people market. Tumblr audience is a perfect fit for this strategy and sure Yahoo is ready to pay premium as there are not many comparable platforms available for acquisition.
"According to Forbes Tumblr is targeting $100M revenue in 2013 but, according to sources I spoke to who are familiar with the company, actual Q1 revenue growth was flat and Tumblr is on track to do only $15M in revenue this year."

This is unbelievable. I can't believe they're running out of the $85M so soon after raising it, and have basically nothing to show for it. I'd be pretty outraged if I were an investor.
We meant "Code School newbs" as in people who haven't tried Code School before, not programming newbies.
I too was hesitant because it was so vanilla, it took me about an hour to get it 'just right'.

I doubt I will ever switch to anything again. My system has never been faster. I feel like I am getting everything I used to get with Gentoo but without the gritty pain of compiling every damn thing.
Isn't this pretty much the same policy that you would find on any web site?
The true value of Google Reader is that it is a huge archive of past RSS entries, many of which are no longer available from the source. No matter how powerful or beautiful or user friendly your new RSS reader is, you do not have access to these lost entries.
sorry, not that I know of. Are you part of any local dev groups?
Or you could skip iTunes U and check out Try Objective-C for free right now: http://tryobjectivec.codeschool.com/ ;-)
It's possible that giving someone the power to give someone else power could be abused. A person could deputize their friends in order to upvote a link in which they have a vested interest, for instance.

But I think what you're essentially talking about is user reputation - the idea that the opinions of certain people weighs stronger than others. I think there's merit to that.

The upvotes of a person with a high reputation on HN would weigh more than someone else. Reputation could be determined by any number of ways (has authored comments of high value, is manually designated by HN as reputable, has been active in the last N number of days, etc).
> 1. Advertising rates are far below the author's $10-20 CPM

I agree with your analysis, but don't confuse CPM with RPM. Publishers can run 1-20 ad units, so the price you pay as an advertiser (CPM) can be an order of magnitude different from what the publisher receives (RPM).

At any rate, I can't fault the author too much. It is an extremely well researched piece that I am glad I read. It would have been slightly better if he started with the $15M revenue run rate, and then backed into the business model.
This is the weirdest approach to video glasses I've ever seen - really clever but strange. (that's not necessarily a bad thing)

They put 2 projectors on the glasses, pointing out. These are obviously extremely weak because they're so small, but the trick is shining the light at a retro-reflector [1] which bounces almost all the light directly back where it came from.

So even though the projectors are so dim you'd barely be able to see the image normally, it's apparently bright enough since a significant fraction of the light energy is bounced directly back to your eye. I assume they're using 2 projectors because the angle of return is so focused that it wouldn't be sufficient to use one projector between the eyes.

My only confusion is I don't get what this has to do with augmented reality. All that cleverness just emulates what a normal monitor can do - display an image to a person. The head tracking stuff is a completely independent system of camera and IR light, just like a wiimote sensor. Anyone have thoughts on why they need this new imaging system?

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retroreflector
The README lays out their reasoning under the second heading, Better Than VMs[0].

[0]: https://github.com/dotcloud/docker/#better-than-vms
The second part to that is that a plumber's job cannot be done "over the wire" in any current sense (or likely for many, many years given some of the problems being shown in remote medicine).

Tis a shame we threw away apprenticeships in the rush to colleges.
Crazily enough if you read the linked page you'll find out!
Can also be done with logs - play back same request logs against several different setups, compare performance.
You should really be using CloudFront and "NOT" S3 if you are looking for a CDN solution. There is a reason why CloudFront exists after all. S3 is a merely a drop-in storage option, consider it as a big file system residing within big fat piped data centers.
Sorry, that's correct. I have lexical on the brain.

I just think saying not to use $_ in real programs is a bit extreme. Truthfully, I don't use it in for loops at all, but my code invariably uses a lot of maps and greps. To throw away the expressiveness of map and grep because there may be a problem in some third party library I use at some point is too high a price for me. Especially because by the nature of how I use map and grep I think I'm less likely to run into problem code in those cases, and if I do I think it will be fairly obvious.
I think the problem is that the Haskell version is actually very simple, to the person writing it. Its a classical problem of teaching, it is extremly easy to forget how something looks to new people.
It's certainly not #3: with 3 hours and 70 votes it would easily be ahead of #4 in the screenshot (4 hours and 66 votes). Instead it's #27.

#2 I don't see why you would flag the topic and not the political comments. Moreover we see plenty of topics where comments go political that don't get egregiously flagged down.

#1, I'll plead ignorance on any automated flame detection but I'm very skeptical that's what we're seeing. I'll stick with Occam's razor: time and again the articles this happens to are either critical of google, or favorable to MS or Apple.

Examples:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5716010

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5715231
Barney Jones, ex-Google executive: the firm's tax avoidance scheme "immoral"
No worries :) Yes I am part of a Drupal meetup. There is also a Ruby on Rails meetup that might interest you. I was a part of it, but I don't want to put too much on my plate for the moment. You can find it on meetup.com
Speaking of passwords, or: how I detest them so...

Passwords ... other people can watch you enter them, even at distance, and are easily forged, once known.

Pen & ink signatures ... the results can be replicated and are hard to verify algorithmically.

Other solutions ... meh.

Hand gesture inside a box, more inventive than the bird, determined by cameras. 3D gestures like if android unlock worked in augmented reality.

The "box," not of the Dune kind, would start folded flat and open to be sure nothing else were inside of it. Sadly, not even Thing. Folds up to create a completely discrete puppetry stage for god knows what, but sadly it wouldn't be all that interesting.

The point being that it's harder to fake or compel a performance that would basically be impossible to observe (assume trust of the system, of course, like anything... imperfect) rather than something tangible like an iris, print, voice, etc.

I'm sure the DDR ATM will be next at airports, but passwords still suck.
can you expand on what you mean by "take a popular site and build a small client for it"? Do you mean just use their API to build a quick demo site or something else? My portfolio is a bit weak and I was looking for good portfolio projects to showcase my talents.
It was the goal of at least one terrorist organisation. http://rense.com/general59/bank.htm
I remember being so excited when I got both my wifi and my external monitor to work :) Good memories indeed, thanks Gentoo.
I wonder how many of our current social problems in high school are caused by our dropping apprenticeships and vocational education and going "college is the only acceptable result" route? We treat high school age students like children but expect them to think in terms of their adult future. At a time when some maturity and critical thinking needs to be developed, we keep the same factory system from elementary school.
Almost any article worth reading from the big tech sites will find its place

Also, journalists find stories here. I've seen Show HN's that turn into news stories - even journalists that give the hat tip to OP within the originating thread. That's pretty cool :)
We try never to make assumptions that would exclude beginners in our intro courses. As someone already mentioned, it's easy to jump ahead if you already know that stuff.

If someone isn't as familiar as you are with variables and we don't cover it, they might give up because too many things go over their head. That's not what we want.

Bear in mind, you're judging Code School based on our more beginner-oriented intro courses, whereas most of our paid courses are aimed at the intermediate level. That's why we like having an event like the Free Weekend, so you can get a good taste of all that we offer.
Docker is awesome.

It lets you use a Linode or AWS instance as a bunch of NATed containers. This makes it way easier to install just one thing in one container and not mess up the other ones. This is where configuration management is going.

Plug: CloudVolumes is awesome for Win apps.
This isn't really answering your question, but what's your motivation for wanting to "freelance until [you] find a job"? Are you expecting it will take you time to find the job you really like, or are you just trying to get more experience before you look for a full-time job?

If you are a good programmer, the job market for full-timers has never been better -- especially if you are willing & able to move to the bay area (a big if, I realise).
Let's keep in mind that individual box performance will not directly translate into your cluster performance or global network performance. A box can be fine-tuned to serve a file at lightning speed, but once you connect a bunch of them together, and start delivering lots of different files to millions of people - different factors come into play. Distributing files, replacing files when updated, content churn, etc etc

Simple caching works for images, but doesn't work for large video files, for example (look at latest financials from public CDNs - they are all bleeding cash).

It's really not that simple as testing a box to see which setup works best.
...and if you think you are a plumber without learning critical thinking then you aren't really a plumber.
We didn't plan for it but it's going to make for a perfect little refreshing break for people between courses and we're definitely going to have Netflix playing in the office while we work to keep everything running smoothly.

I don't think this was a huge mistake. ;-)
The contents of those tabs might make a difference!

All of my add-ons except for Ad Block Plus are disabled right now, 2.1GB of memory is being used.

I'm sure I could open up 200 tabs of Hacker News without problem. ;)
About five weeks ago I fell of my motorcycle into the path of an oncoming car on my way to Skyline/Woodside. The motorcycle went in front of it and lifted the car into the air. Then I slid underneath it. One of the rear wheels landed next to my head and I came out of the rear part of it.

The outcome was a broken left wrist. That's it. Literally nothing else happened to me.

There are things that happen to you that make it clear how close we all are to death at all times. I am glad to hear your injuries weren't too bad and hope you recover from them well.

Edit: I have to add, it's also times like these that you will oftentimes show you the best of people. The girl who was driving the car was very nice about everything and even offered me a ride into the city (more than 45 minutes) even though she lived in the opposite direction. The tow truck driver charged me only half the normal rate because "we gotta stick together" and he rode bikes too. Lots of people who were around near the accident helped immobilize my arm after the injury. The friendly folks down at Motoshop unloaded the bike and removed some of the ugly bits sticking out. Friend came to pick me up and take me to hospital. It was pretty inspiring. People are amazing.
How about continued fractions? Unlike floating point, they can represent any rational number in finite memory. Using generators, you can even represent many irrational numbers, like square roots and pi, in finite memory.

Richard Schroeppel and Bill Gosper explored continued fractions in the '70s:

http://www.inwap.com/pdp10/hbaker/hakmem/cf.html
Sure, but "Tumblr" is not an existential threat to Yahoo!. That kind of dynamic where you're such a pain in the ass to some big company that they have to buy you to maintain their status quo business as usual is one of the best ways to get acquired.

When you don't have that dynamic, Yahoo! doesn't have to buy Tumblr. Maybe they have to buy something but it doesn't have to be Tumblr and it doesn't have to be now, right this moment.
Printable A3-sized solar cells hit a new milestone in green energy
I agree.. historically I have liked writing, and used it to organize my thoughts.

It is easy to let the "supposed" urgency of work come before writing (or working out), but the time spent writing will probably be worth it. Thanks.
After a series of interviews with a company for a job while in gradschool (after I already had a BS in Computer Science) and was offered $10/hr as a contract C developer (no benefits).

Starting salaries in my area for developers with a BS is around 60k-65k/yr with benefits.
Yea but simplifications like this are probably non-computable, even when possible, and hard to do in any case.
There are a number of these. The one I have been using lately is sympy - a pure python symbolic math library.

You may also be interested in the open source "sage mathematics", which is a frontend/interface to many different open-source symbolic solvers such as sympy, maxima, GAP, PARI, Singular, and octave.

They are not as good as mathematica currently, but can already do quite a lot.
You don't have to blog exclusively about your venture, surely? There are countless topics out there in your industry and others, nice features you've seen in other products, etc.
I love this. Will probably add a bookmarklet or something to load it and use it when debugging.

My only question is how it works with prototyped or nested functions, such as the `hide` method that you mentioned. Would you just call Tracing.trace('$.fn.hide', 'Object.static_method', 'Object.prototype.object_method') for example to get access to those particular methods?
Ask HN: what's the app to read the content of a website from an url?
I don't remember the name.
I stumbled on the exact same thing. Eventually I just moved on without knowing what I was missing. Your post pointed it out to me, thanks.
I wonder if you could make early upvoters have some skin in the game. Maybe an early upvote could cost a little bit of karma (say .1 points), but if others agreed (as measured by follow-on upvotes) and the thread didn't devolve into a flame war, then that karma would be regained, possibly with a bit of karmic upside.
Security engineering / penetration testing may be for you.
Show HN: Whit - Access any kind of data through SMS
Whit is an open source SMS service, which allows you to query CrunchBase, Wikipedia, and several other data APIs.

Simply text 917-791-3098.

Special commands include:
P:'personName',
C:'companyName',
S:'stockTicker',
W:'wikiSearch'

ex. queries: 'p:bill gates', 'c:apple', 's:fb', 'w:philosophy'
Danielle Morrill is a she not a he.
Coincidentally, I was hit on Skyline just north of Page Mill Road (I had climbed Page Mill from the bottom then had turned north on Skyline). But my gosh, talk about a close call for you... were you heading up highway 9 or 84 and slipped out?

I remember looking up towards the direction the car that hit me went and thinking, "please, please stop so you can call 911 for me," and the driver did stop and come back to me. He must have been in a state of panic, since he asked me, "Oh my god are you alright, can I do anything for you?" and I replied, gasping, "C-a-l-l 9-1-1".

In the ensuing minutes, a person with EMT training and a biker who was an off duty fireman stopped to check me out, make sure my hands and toes moved, made sure I didn't have pain in my neck, etc.

When a friend of mine crashed his bike descending Page Mill last summer (and fractured 3 spinal fins), a random car stopped for him and took him to Stanford hospital. Complete strangers!

You're absolutely right; give them an opportunity and people will show their wonderful side.
New York Hackathon focuses on eBook Digital Discovery
The investment in learning any powerful editor would probably follow a power law, since you'd be continually learning new things. You could keep it to O(1) by choosing some subset and refusing to learn anything more. But the expectation is that time spent learning more than pays off over time.
Tumblr is very similar to Instagram and should be considered as example.

The overlap between Instagram and Tumblr users in the early days is huge. Both are targeted at young crowd with similar taste graph.

As a Platform Tumblr has great potential in spreading the content. Reblogs works just like retweet and a good content can potentially go viral. That also includes rebloging of promotional content.

I personally feel people who don't use Tumblr see this as yet another blog site. They have the best mobile app to post pics, stories, videos & even audio. After Instagram, I am slowly getting addicted to Tumblr's mobile app.
Whit is an open source SMS service, which allows you to query CrunchBase, Wikipedia, and several other data APIs.

Simply text 917-791-3098.

Special commands include:
P:'personName',
C:'companyName',
S:'stockTicker',
W:'wikiSearch'

ex. queries: 'p:bill gates', 'c:apple', 's:fb', 'w:philosophy'
If there is nothing holding you back, consider moving to tech hubs Bay area, NY/NJ etc. Preferably where you have friends or family where you can crash and tap into their networks. If you are interested in a long term career in tech, choosing the right city at the outset, can set you up for life. Good luck.
Danielle,

What do you reason is Tumblr's intrinsic value?