skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There are no Indian universities in the top 200 universities according to the QS World Universities rankings. There are only 3 in the top 300! While I don't know if this is an institutional deficiency(lack of research, distinguished professors) or a lack of quality among students, one thing is for sure and that is Indian degrees are not very respected worldwide aside from possibly Indian Institute of Technology.

From what my father tells me, the K-12 education system is also broken. The public education system is considered a joke in India to the point that anyone who can enrolls their kids into private schools as soon as possible. Most students who pass India's rigorous college entrance exam take extensive coaching(as my cousins have), and this results in a system of college acceptance being determined by wealth.

The thing is, I can't see change coming. India has yet to address nationwide corruption that cripples the whole country!
Twitter-controlled tennis ball machine V. Jo Wilfried Tsonga
Excel is very powerful as a general-purpose tool. In addition to all the calculation systems built-in and easy-to-use, the "UI" (the grids and cells and chart/drawing tools) is extremely customizable, and VBA lets you do basically anything. It's the non-techie's IDE.

This is what makes it so useful for business users, so hard for any other spreadsheet app to unseat, and so notorious among hackers (who often have to troubleshoot or replace complicated mega-workbooks)!
So... how do I protect my 2nd Twitter account? You can only associate your mobile number to 1 account. How will these social media companies protect the many accounts that they manage? While this is a good first step, it's a major fail. They didn't think through how Twitter is actually used and instead just put a band-aide on a problem.
Ask HN: What kind of music do you listen to while programming?
Usually I listen to '70s / '80s / '90s rock. What about you?
Where was he years ago when this sort of 2-factor auth was starting to get popular?

Don't you have to actively defend your patent? Sitting on it for 15 years and then deciding to sue on a whim can't look good in a court's eyes...
How to work remotely as a software developer
They're late to the game. I use Facebook, Google+, and Dropbox to share and view photos. Right now, Flickr doesn't give me any reason why I should switch.

Facebook is already good because everyone uses Facebook. It's a convenient way to tag, share, and comment on your photos of your friends.

Google+ has a great Communities section where people share and post photos to other people. Also, a lot of photographers hang out there.

Dropbox is great if you want people to download your photos. They automatically zip the photos up. Or if they have a dropbox account, you can share your folder with them.

I do like they give us a TB of space. I think if they make a way for Flickr to sync my Lightroom catalogue and all my RAWs, I think that would be a good use of that TB of space.
I launched, ran, and sold a software startup from Akron, OH (an old rubber manufacturing town in the Rust Belt). I'm now the CTO of another startup in Durham, NC (an old tobacco town).

Is it easier for a software startup to succeed in Silicon Valley? Probably. Is it necessary? Absolutely not. The most compelling thing about the software industry is that you can start and run a company from literally anywhere in the world.

My issue with your mindset is that you're only considering "big" companies. For every Facebook there are hundreds or thousands of startups, many of them profitable or otherwise successful, and many of them not located in Silicon Valley.
Guide for book
> I don't think it's really racism per se, as I think amongst many Chinese, especially the less well-educated, they believe that for reasons of history, foreigners, [...] owe them something

Technically, that is racism. Blaming similar looking people.

Less insidious than other forms maybe...
The challenge I see here is power provisioning. With the space that a Sears store offers, you'd be hard pressed to put 10 to 50 MW of power into it. But perhaps if you already have the land covered smaller things are more desirable.
It's interesting. Much of what I think is beautiful about Ruby (and Python, and Objective C, and Smalltalk) is what people who like PHP consider ugly. I, myself, and it's a matter of taste, find PHP (and most of the code written with it) ugly. There is no objective measurement for ugliness.
FREE Your SELF FROM PANIC ATTACKS
How to Improve Customer Experience In 5 Minutes
Twitter Launches Twitter Amplify For Real-Time Videos In Stream
> Don't you have to actively defend your patent?

No, you don't. You may be thinking of trademarks, which you do have to defend or license to avoid dilution.

You may say that this is a problem with the patent system. But here on HN, we already know how broken the patent system is, don't we?
The Evolution of the Freemium Model - Roy Saar at Mangrove
5 Coolest Technologies Invented by High Schoolers
This is a random sample. How different was your lab session compared to http://engr.case.edu/merat_francis/eecs245/EECS%20245%20Syll... ?
s/its citizens/people/
It's a process, which is patentable.
There's plenty of excellent, freely available, writting out there that didn't involve an advance. So, I'm sceptical of the necessity of that model.

But even if we assume that an advance was necessary - A couple of years of no starvation wages ought to be negligible compared to the sort of amounts we're talking about for a successful book. You don't pay fixed amounts back in terms of percentage of take - that's foolish. At worst you might pay it back with a risk premium, like a bond.

Publishers would presumably have you believe that they're providing a service, at risk to themselves, and that risk is sufficient to justify their take. That they have to make as much money as they can on the few successful books to pay for the masses of dross that they fund. But this just makes it an exceptionally bad deal for people who are consistently good. If you have a track record, then you should be in a different risk pool.

The questions are really ones of risk management and information asymmetry: how many successful books are you going to get and how well can you predict your risk? Does the author even need an advance? Are the editors even honestly trying to predict the success of a book or are they just going with their gut or their political bias or whatever? It's not a very competitive market after all.

If people had the option to not take an advance, and to take a much larger cut of the sales, I think many would.
As a friend of mine pointed out, PHP's problem is not that it's improving, but that bad things continue to happen. C wrappers continue to be thinner than tissue paper, error-handling routines continue to segfault, and bizarre security holes continue to be found.

"Decent object-oriented structure" doesn't help when the language still has so many primitive types. Namespaces don't help when most of the built-in and standard libraries live in the global namespace, C-style. The runtime is still creaky and inefficient.

There's not really any hate these days, just eye-rolling. You could be doing better things, but you're deliberately choosing not to, and harming nobody but yourself in the process.
I am a proponent of changing IP laws, but this does not seem to run a muck of the type of abuse typical of most patent trolls. KIM obviously developed this system, because he is/was intimately involved in the industry and he likely invented the patent in question, and actually used or intended to use the same in commerce.

Whereas your typical patent troll buys IP for the sole purpose of shaking people down, trolls usually did not invent or file the patent themselves, and they usually never have any intent to utilize the IP in the market. Additionally, patent trolls usually hold patents on patents that should not have been registered in the first place (they were obvious or the technology was already in the stream of commerce before the registration).

Disclaimer: I emailed KIM with interest in researching the issue, performing due diligence, and maybe enforcement per the article. Though any response will be maintained confidential. I also have a track record of supporting KIM on the underlying legal problem, including a few posts/comments here on HN.
Blackmail. Pure and simple.
The problem is not with spammy applications, but with others that you don't need notifications at all. I don't know, new Google's Hangouts, I don't want to receive notifications, but I don't want to delete it, because I may use it sometime.
Also, you're thinking as a developer. As a developer that cares on the user, so you probably are thinking that your app will have internal notification settings, about frequency and which to notify, but in the real world it's not a standard, sadly.
Seems like Yahoo has decided cash in the bank is pointless, it's an interesting gamble to take. At the very least there's a lot of conversation surrounding Yahoo, instead of people claiming their impending death.
Really? I'd suggest that Microsoft development of XMLHTTP and by extension XMLHttpRequest were pretty big developments for the web as we know it today. They certainly enabled Google to produce many of their services that are taken for granted today.
I wrote a thing about how your favourites are public and searchable with not opt-out on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5756487.

Other than that, Flickr is one of the most privacy-conscientious services I know—which is why it took me by surprise that there weren’t controls for my favourites.

Flickr’s (general) emphasis on privacy and ownership rights are their main features to me. Maybe those are just hold-overs from the early days when monetizing your users’ data weren’t in vogue, though.
I agree with almost all of your points, the exception is the sidebar.

Not in the traditional sense, but in the sense of quotes, images, supporting items - that are called left, right, or full width.

Using your site as an example and lets pretend its 12 columns with 3 empty, 6 for the blog, 3 empty. That space could be well served with links, resources, images, quotes that serve to enhance the writing. These resources could stretch into the 6 for the blog or remain isolated in their sidebars.
Google keeps on hurting small businesses, the big boy who keep on abusing its guidelines are fine, after every single update.

Also, they are not fixing basic issues like exact match domains and domain crowding.

Here is a relatively good example

https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=care+homes+in+essex&aq...
If you RTFA, it mentions that Greek Yogurt produces extremely acidic byproducts which are more difficult to deal with.
Two points. (1)The externalities are not caused by either the car makers or the oil producers. They are caused by drivers. Driving creates the emissions, and under a fair system drivers should bear the costs. (2) Mandating fuel efficient cars has the same effect on consumption as reducing the cost of gasoline.
Did some hackin of my own & downloaded the entire user details. Almost all of these are fake users with majority of the users having a gmail address with some random numbers.. something like xyz222@gmail.com...

here's the bash script I wrote, feel free to use :P

#!/bin/bash

clear

for count in {1..10000}.
do

curl "http://worldfloat.com/AjaxControl/AJAXRequestHandler.aspx?AC... -H "Accept-Charset: ISO-8859-1, utf-8;q=0.7,;q=0.3" -H "Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate, sdch" -H "Host: worldfloat.com" -H "Accept-Language: en-US, en;q=0.8" -H "User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1) AppleWebKit/537.31 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/26.0.1410.64 Safari/537.31" -H "Accept: /*" -H "Referer: http://worldfloat.com/float.aspx -H "Cookie: ASP.NET_SessionId=aqyrjy455jhgegy4pf2jjsza; __utma=75150868.1043408261.1369317545.1369317545.1369317545.1; __utmb=75150868.9.10.1369317545; __utmc=75150868; __utmz=75150868.1369317545.1.1.utmcsr=nextbigwhat.com|utmccn=(referral)|utmcmd=referral|utmcct=/indias-zuckerberg-wordfloat-busted-297/; __asc=4cf55f8513ed1af94822591db23; __auc=4cf55f8513ed1af94822591db23; __unam=3e2676f-13ed1b17520-389700fe-3" -H "Connection: keep-alive" > $count.txt.

done

echo "command completed successfully".
Antagonism is the Heart of the Consumerization of IT Movement
How To Backup Your Postgres DB To Amazon Nightly
What's your chance of success?
Apologies if someone has already done this, but I thought it would be neat to make a HN poll for those who have started a company to see how many regard themselves as successful and how many don't (yet).
The idea is an indicator of the average success rate of HN users.

As a new user he karma threshold kept me from doing it so if anyone would also like to see this data, please submit a poll, thanks.
Google's Offshore Tax-Shelter Time Bomb?
I'm speaking for myself and what I think, rather than on behalf or Postgres or any company. I assume you are also referring to the possibility of a private fork.

What I've seen in the Postgres community is a group of developers that takes an aggressive stance against companies "taking advantage" of the developer community. Companies that invest both time and money in development get far more attention for their patches than companies that try to either throw code over the fence, or do "drive by" development projects.

Tom deciding to take this job indicates to me that it is because Salesforce is making a significant investment in open source Postgres.
8 ways to report errors in Haskell
True about politics. And there is a lot of corruption and politics of hate. We are stuck between a corrupt party who also play caste/religion and a party who plays the religion card and is equally corrupt.

If you are born into a particular religion, you are stuck with it (even if you don't give a damn about religion) and you get the impression that everyone wants to kill you or throw you into the extremely shitty neighbouring country. The same is true to an extent about caste. I have seen educated penple getting married on the basis of caste and religion, even with all the globalization. People support political leaders based on caste and religion. Religion plays a big role in India. You aren't what you are. You are just one more member of one team or another. And people live accordingly.

Sorry for the rant. I suppose conditions are not as bad as that in Pakistan or the middle east. And religious-background intolerance is commonplace in the west too.
An interesting drawback to the location-by-IP-address approach is that for cellular devices, IP addresses can be supremely inaccurate. For example, I have a Verizon device whose IP address places me way off in the West coast of the US even though I purchased it and reside on the East coast, 3000 miles away. The approach is pretty solid for LAN/WiFi, though.
That's great!

Just let's hope this doesn't happen: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0091993/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1
I'm trying to find the thread that binds all of this recent M and A activity together. There have been so many acquisitions of companies big and small, wrapping your head around Yahoo's global strategy is beginning to look like Google's.

Does Yahoo have the engineering prowess to pull off this Multi-faceted hydra strategy? Do they have the management?

It seems news will play a very prominent role in the new Yahoo, but, to my knowledge, this is the first gaming acquisition in a long time.

Whatever happens, perhaps the most interesting thing is that we're talking about Yahoo again. 3-5 years ago many of us had written them off, but at least for the time being they've caught my attention.
You might be right for how the system is supposed to judge validity, but how many patents have been successfully used and abuse that are nothing more than "<insert_old_idea_here> over the Internet"?
Would new programmers have trouble using decorators? With writing them, yes. But I think the idea of "tagging" your function is pretty approachable for even a new-programmer type.
I'm honestly surprised that Excel can handle that many drawing elements without bogging down. The paintings look very complex.
> They're late to the game. I use Facebook, Google+, and Dropbox to share and view photos. Right now, Flickr doesn't give me any reason why I should switch.

Let me give you one: full quality image.

Aside from Dropbox, the other services will compress your images. If you're an enthusiast and expect people to see your photos in all it's glory, that's important. And while Dropbox does that, it doesn't really supports the concept of galleries and such.
The actual evaluation stack (re: GHC w/ DWARF symbols) is also quite useful for debugging and doesn't need a profiled executable to work.
> No, but a statement of fact about a company that is not backed by public data is slander.

whether slander or libel or whatever, this article states how much time NYT spent on it:

http://source.mozillaopennews.org/en-US/articles/how-we-made...

so much for backing it up. the author stating he did it in an hour, might be true or a boast, that's a claim about himself not the NYT, doesn't matter if it's true or not.

i can see how they can ask him to remove the video (and the author complied), but I really don't get on what grounds they can ask him to remove all mentions of NYT from his site.
Most of the US educated academicians who teach in India are normally at the IITs (engineering schools) and IIMs (management schools). The teaching styles of professors at these schools are identical to US schools, however their effectiveness is debatable. To be fair to them, they are usually ham-strung by institution-wide regulations such as a guideline that 80% of the grade be determined by a mid-term and a final (I know this is the case at IIT Kharagpur, not sure about the others). They are not as productive research wise because while the graduate students in the US are competent and (usually) smarter than undergraduates, the reverse is true at most Indian institutes (the smart guys go abroad). There is no room for mentoring because undergraduates have a heavy courseload (5-6 technical courses per semester) and the professors have a lot of administrative work apart from teaching.
Agreed. I also miss being able to see photo titles for all of the displayed pictures. Now, in order to view the title, you must mouse over the photo which is a tedious task when there are hundreds of images.
Command Line Calculator bc – 11 Extremely Useful Examples
Announcing the release of AMQP support with Windows Azure Service Bus
and what do you do when the network is down ?
> I don't think it's patent abuse as much as it is good old fashioned extortion.

Precisely. Large companies routinely employ such negotiation, as does the US gov't to an extreme. Kim Dotcom is no worse.
Actually, I've thought about this a bit more....there could be a whole book of guidance written about how to create a flask-plugin to be consumed by other users.
"Interestingly, Mr Packer takes all this to be a sign that the tech industry may be showing signs of maturity. Rather than airily rise above the fray, or, worse, try to produce a technological fix to a political problem, it, or at least those elements represented by FWD.us and the grizzly political hacks it has hired, has chosen to dive deep into the political mud."

In this section, I take "maturity" to mean that Zuckerburg et. al. have had to emulate what others have done: "diving deep into the political mud". A technological or any other type fix seemingly cannot work (according to this commentator). Only big money (elements represented by FWD.us) and "political hacks" can get the job done. Maybe I'm reading too much into it.
Ask HN: Where is the best place to find solid HTML5 game developers?
Hey HN! I'm looking for a good HTML5 game developer. Any suggestions where to look for a full time HTML5 game developer? Is HN a good place for that or are there better boards out there for game devs?
I don't have extensive experience with other Python frameworks, but what attracted me to Flask is what taude said.[1] There is just enough existing code to get you started and you don't have all of the technical debt of a full-fledged framework.

When I was starting, my first thought (like most people) was to work with Django, but what drove me crazy was that my project started with a bunch of files and code that I didn't write. I want all of that to be abstracted away via plugins and modules, and Flask does that really well.

I'm not sure how that compares to Bottle or other Python frameworks, but I feel like Flask suits me perfectly.

Regarding Python 3 support, a port is in progress so as Python 3 gains traction I think Flask will emerge as part of that transition, but for now Python 2 works well for most people.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5757038
Your comment is a bit of a window into yours - disparaging remarks made against the left wing don't imply support of the right wing.
Yahoo acquires PlayerScale
Aaron Swartz needed a few million dollar for his defense (probably the main cause of suicide).

I don't think $50 million for someone like Kim who was probably at the top of the list of the Obama administration along with Osama Bin Laden, is that outrageous.
There’s actually reason to throw good money after bad
Tumblr VC returns: Make that 1,400%
Good point, I'd suggest using a green checkmark instead (which basically means "OK" instead of the X's "Cancel").
I've done both PHP and Ruby/Rails professionally. They are quite different. I earned a living with PHP first, but I prefer to use Rails (or Sinatra) for most projects these days.

Even though PHP and Ruby (and therefore Rails) have little in common, I think you can still learn the Rails fundamentals quickly. Check out Michael Hartl's excellent Rails Tutorial. Also, Ryan Bates' Railscasts are a fantastic resource.
I've been toying with this. Their developer tools are looking rather neat.
Is it really though? I wouldn't necessarily classify it as a microblogging or photo sharing platform. It's a good old fashioned social networking service which revolve around the world of profile pages. Early on they introduced photo albums and it became huge for photo sharing with your friends.

At the end of the day Flickr is about one thing, photos, and it needs to stay that way. Yahoo bought Tumblr, an actual microblogging platform, that's their way into the big social game.
Well, wealth is subject to entropy. We usualy call it "expenses".
Somewhat tangential, but still part of the core argument:

Most of the issue with power is moving it. Generating power is not trivial, but it's easier than moving power, which is still very inefficient. Distributed solar panels on the roofs of Sears facilities might offset their own carbon footprint, but it's unlikely that the power they generate would have a significant impact on the surrounding area.

This is the reason we don't have giant floating solar panels in the ocean, for example.
"almost artificial skin"?
>> It's these type of posts that make it to the top of a thread that make me not want to check into HN.

I disagree. This is actually the kind of posts that makes me want to check into HN. The poster knows what he talks about and he shares his view on the matter.

For comparison, read the Reddit comments about the same link:
http://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/1evskd/tesla_rep...

.. and next time, please skip the fallacy of attacking something irrelevant, i.e. what kinds of posts you like and what you think fits on HN, instead of the argument itself.

Notice: I'm only annoyed by the first two lines of your post, the rest I think is a valid argument.
I liked the part about structuring the code/files. As you, I'm not a fan of the seed-app where you have one js file for controllers, one for directives etc. Makes it hard to find the stuff I'm looking for, and there will be merge conflicts.
All languages and VMs are compromises: JavaScript, JVM, CLR, LLVM, Flash, etc. Question is which compromise you prefer.