skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Domain knowledge is important; however, even more important is domain experience. With domain experience, you learn where the bottlenecks and pain points are in your workflows.

During my time as an interest rate risk analyst, I had the displeasure of working with a horrible piece of software. It crashed at the most inopportune times, usually near the end of a run. Considering that one run could be on the order of a few hours, you could lose a significant portion of your computing time, something in short-supply when other business processes don't get you your input until seven to ten business days within a new monthly reporting cycle. When it did finish, the probability that there was a problem with the final output was much larger than it should have been. Furthermore, the software could not even be used for actually analyzing your results. You still needed to dump out the calculations to Excel before finishing your analysis.

On the surface, it would seem that the hardest part of solving this problem would be implementing the software as it's a highly specialized area of finance with lots of mathematics. When you break it down, however, what needs to be done on the software side is pretty straightforward.

I had to document this stuff for regulatory purposes at my old job. To document this stuff, I had to do a lot of "reverse engineering" of this software, basically building in Excel the same calculations performed by the software. If any person or group of people near Mountain View are looking for a problem to solve, I'd gladly sit down with you one evening and answer questions about this space.
Most technical computer topics have an IRC channel on freenode.

Often google shows up a page for the active channels. The searchirc.com sometimes shows dead channel.
Ask HN: Do You Use BitTorrent Sync?
Just wondering if anyone around here uses BitTorrent Sync. If you are why are you using it over dropbox or some other comparable service?
I just was waiting for that. I was recently searching for a new open source project in Ruby on Rails where i could collaborate to improve my skills and generate some value...
That's what I thought. My preparations would begin and end with selling the Mac (which hold their value surprisingly well, even when older than dirt) and buying a $250 Chromebook with the proceeds. All my older relatives use their computers for writing many and large emails. That's not really want I want to be doing on an iPad.
Again this is not a particularly useful comment. It prioritises one metric ('startups' and some undefined notion of 'innovastion') over all others.

The 'Europe' you are talking about is characterised by much lower levels of violence/crime and poverty than the United States. One could argue that these are more important metrics.

But in either case, the argument deserves more than the jingoistic rebuttal you offered.
Ask HN: Where can I find volunteer opporuntunities for IT or development work?
You've seen ancient nonprofit technology systems, and you've seen nonprofits struggling to achieve their goals because their missing the IT expertise they need.
I moved to Seattle around a year ago for a job.

Is there an active volunteer opportunity listing site, or one geared especially towards IT/tech-type work?

If anyone knows of local Seattle clearing house volunteer organizations or open opportunities, feel free to share too.
Thanks, I was wondering if that was going to make an appearance. I'd almost call what the next web is writing here to be plagiarism, but probably just lazy reporting (didn't know it existed and didn't even try to look).
You characterize the situation very well.

It reminds me of the parody of the academic left in sci fi such as the novels of Neal Stephenson and Vernor Vinge. And the parodies of religion and philosophy are even worse.

It certainly came as a shock to me to realize that much of academia is simultaneously incoherent and pretentious, and full of deep insights.
If you're on Linux, you can mount remote filesystems super easy. Look up `sshfs`
What runs where?
What-runs-where is a service that parses and aggregates the version strings of any number of web services which choose to publish their version. It is useful when you have several testing&prod environments where several versions of your web services are running and you want to have a quick overview of what runs where.
Live example hosted on Heroku: http://vast-brook-8589.herokuapp.com/
"Crate is a new kind of Python package index."

Why?
That's international English (lingua franca).

I find it fun when native speaker complain about ESL speakers, since in the end it is likely that international English will win.

I live in a non-English speaking country, the common language in the office is international English (there are 60+ nationalities, and less than 20% are native english speaker). It would be fun to track over time if the native speakers start speaking international english :)
And that's the problem - you might as well keep pirating as Spotify isn't helping any artist while users think they're doing the noble thing.
A better Autocorrect - Using autocorrect to teach spelling
I think the CMS selection depends on the kind of organization that will be ultimately using and maintaining the site.

For small groups/projects like student organizations and blogs with multiple editors, Wordpress can be a godsend. I was part of a student organization that needed an informational website with a blog component so I quickly set up a Wordpress site that 5-10 people used to populate the site with content.

As an aside, the individual who took over my role as web admin has since moved the site to Dreamweaver :( The older members of the org are frustrated that they can't individually add content to the site anymore and the org is transitioning the site back to Wordpress in the fall.
Tech All Stars announces top 12 EU startups
thanks! it was just a quick idea so we brought it to live right away. but tweetspiration seems to be really good...
Google doesn't care about GPAs from 25 years ago.

1) No one cares what the recruiters think. If you mean interviewer that might be different.

2) My GPA was worse than that, and it was only 5 years after the fact, when Google totally-ignored-my-GPA. Anecdote stalemate.
Metasploit RPC client for nodejs
Twitter API returning results that do not respect the arrow of time
China is not a developed nation by modern standards. It still has very high levels of poverty and a low average income compared to what is typically called 'The West' (Western Europe, North America, Japan, etc.).
In re hypertext, there is precedent in the widely published works of Vannevar Bush.

Nelson spent a lot of time refining many ideas that were not really viable before the availability of computers. Given the timeframe (growing up under the shadow of the Military Industrial Complex and then maturing during the Cold War/proxy wars) he hit a very ripe time for populist activists.

I do think Nelson is one of the most influential thinkers regarding information science, but not as much as he desperately reminds people that he was. I also do not think his limitation is his inability to program computers, as he had a number of well-funded people helping at different times.

I suspect that, if you were to sit down and force rank the 50 most important thinkers of the 20th century, you'd have to exclude Nelson. Had he realized his ideas in a timely fashion, or inspired anyone to realize and exceed his visions, then his place would be secured.

However, I think much of what he created, other than the specifics of a great potential implementation, would be classified as simultaneous invention. Semantic networks existed before hypertext and it's a pretty nominal step from there to the basics of hypermedia. The Mother of All Demos is probably the best example of his contemporaries realizing their ideas.

What he does have is charisma and an ability to communicate his ideas. He gets people fired up about his dreams of a better world, and yet it has not come to pass. No one has been inspired enough to implement Xanadu. It's appropriately named. It's an interrupted dream that is incomplete.
What a formatting mess -- I hope you can you still edit your post and put two newlines after the >-cited lines from my post, and the text where you start replying? Thanks.

If I can read through the mess, you seem to be saying you can't evaluate PNaCl, so you'll just make airy and overconfident assertions about it. Even on HN, that doesn't fly. -1!

When I challenge your further assertion that something is "easily integrated into any browser", you switch subjects to arguing for prototyping and developing a complex system before standardizing it. Good idea (but beware the difficulty standardizing it late if simpler evolutionary hops beat it in the meanwhile; more below on this). However true, that is a dodge, it does not excuse your assertion about "easily integrated".

Doubling down by citing "the DOM" as if Pepper were only about OS and DOM APIs, or as if even just the DOM implementations in different engines had enough in common to make interfacing from native code (not from JS, which is hard enough even with a decade+ history of written standards and market-driven interop testing) easy, just repeats this bad pattern. So -2.

Then you seem to confuse ES4 with Harmony (which I made clear came about after ES4 failed). -3.

At this point on USENET, you'd hear a plonk. But I'll close with one more point:

Mozilla and Google using LLVM does not equate to standardizing PNaCl. Pepper is one problem, a big one, but not the only one. Consider also the folly of using a linker-oriented intermediate representation for a shelf-stable Web-scale object file format. See Dan Gohman's "LLVM IR is a compiler IR" post:

http://lists.cs.uiuc.edu/pipermail/llvmdev/2011-October/0437...

Shortest-path evolution usually wins on the Web. Trying to standardize PNaCl -- including Pepper and LLVM IR abused or patched into shape as a long-lived object file format -- is an impossibly long, almost exclusively Google-dependent, path.

Extending JS among competing engines whose owners cooperate in Ecma TC39, via a series of much shorter and independently vetted and well-justified (by all those engine owners) path-steps? That is happening in front of your eyes.

You may not like it. You may want to say "Go home, evolution, you are drunk":

http://wtfevolution.tumblr.com/post/40659237456/this-pelican...

But it would be foolish to bet against evolution.

/be
Mapping bitcoin's global adoption
How Android will rule the world?
Only twice? I've never know the ins and outs of the military (and ex-PFC Wintergreen is the closest I'll probably ever know to people being demoted or missing promotion) however this seems incredibly harsh.
It wouldn't be very surprising if the vast majority of teens who do not know how to write a letter have parents who do not write letters themselves.

That said, it seems surprising to me that the topic of 'where does the mail come from and how does it get to where it is going' would have come up at least once in 18 years of childhood given that mail shows up at homes every day.

When I was teaching middle school several years ago, my 6th grade students didn't know about long distance phone calls. I took it upon myself to give a basic explanation about phone calls, switchboards, and even things like 10-10-321.
This is nothing new and has been around since people started to make usable software for computer systems. The idea has been tried to death with countless software writing tools. MS DOS Dbase tools on top of dbase, written in clipper or what not to make CRUD applications by non programmers. There are generating tools from before that generating compile CRUD from just 'a business person definitions'. I have seen presentations from countless products like Filemaker, MS Access, Foxpro etc claiming that boring CRUD is gone and no programmers are needed anymore for application building.

When I was younger, one of the product managers for the Dutch product SDW told me that programming business software was something of the past as business people could just input 'how the app should work' and the app would be automatically built.

Outsystems have claimed this, as do Longjump and web based systems.

They all have something in common; they work for some cases, if you want more you have a problem. You CAN do it, but it's hard and the resulting 'code' (usually visual programming or 4GL) will usually be bad. Ohyeah, and you're still programming. Worse than you would have with actual developers from the start.

Note that most of them start out as simple systems, like this SteveApp. That's nice; it serves a purpose. But when you get users, people will request features and these feature will, in the end, require a full fledged programming language. So now you have non programmers creating an app up to a point which they still get and for more they'll hire you. They did a bit of 'programming' though in the built in language, which was made easy (which usually translates to visual and/or 'very much like English), so not very terse and often not very well written. Now you have 'code' like this http://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/6134596/Screenshots/uo079... and you only have to fix some extra features :)
They should consider the % who look at their template and don't purchase (I do this all the time on ThemeForest). Apply that percentage to their imaginary number (nothing spectacular about it, so I'll guess 1%?) Email on Acid should send them a check for $200 and call it a day.
https://bitbucket.org/danstrother/dls_cores
GPA seems to be an American thing. I graduated Uni in 2007 (in Scotland) and I've never been asked mine.
HaxeJS comes with a built in JQuery extern, so you can basically make a page the same way you would with a JS/JQuery frontend, but you get the language feature and type checking benefits of Haxe.

JQuery should handle all your front-end cross-browser issues.

Also, you can do your backend in Haxe, and target the NekoVM (via mod_neko (single thread per request) or mod_tora (multi-threaded) for Apache) or NodeJS. Haxe could do this long before Dart showed up.
Successful Entrepreneurs Give Their Younger Selves Advice
The real crime here is that awful photoshop job...
Some context: Rob Ford is the mayor of Toronto, the most populous city in Canada. This is the newest of numerous controversies during his time in office.

Edit: it's also worth noting that Mayor Ford's relationship with the media has been... colorful. Some funny cases include him calling 80% of journalists "maggots" (1) and lying about a drunken outburst back in 2006 (2).

(1) http://read.thestar.com/#!/article/51a27b477b1eacc589c3f4ae-...

(2) http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/story/2006/05/03/tor-f...
The usual stackoverflow reaction. They just closed it as a shopping list question.
Same here, used vWorker both as provider and recently buyer. The quality of bids we received from vWorker was magnitudes better than the crap we are getting now on Freelancer. Already wasted time with one project there, and I guess its re-post will be the last attempt to get work done there.

vWorker worked well, and the quality of users was better. Good luck with your Workana, it looks good.
Thanks, I added a bit of context
I bought my first Mac in 2002 (an iBook) for, I think, 800 Eur. Back then I was really, really poor, and I considered the Mac an investment in education (I wanted to run a Unix OS to learn about it, while still being able to use Photoshop, Illustrator, Flash, and Cubase).

Sadly, I wouldn't have had the money to buy Apple stock for 800 Eur instead. I should have bought the stock a couple years later, in 2004 or 2005, when I was absolutely sure Apple would be huge; I just never thought about buying stock..
What is Gibson cache server and why do i need it | Gibson Cache Server
Proving what my dad is always telling me "The stock market is essentially gambling. If you're going to buy stock do it to own the company not to speculate"
And, there's a good chance that the video will not surface because Rob Ford (or, you know, the way mob bosses wink) ordered the murder of the video owner: http://gawker.com/ford-staffer-tells-police-about-tip-linkin...

[Edit: uhm, tongue in cheek, obviously. But Rob Ford is pretty clearly messed up with some dodgy people doing dodgy things.]
"[Packer]’s clearly onto something in the way the experience of continuously solving seemingly insoluble technical problems can lead the technocracy to dismiss the challenges of actual societies or, worse, decide they’re simply above them."

This rings true for a number of issues in San Francisco. Let's underfund our public transportation and make taxis inefficient and hard to find -- we'll let the free market solve those problems! Corporate shuttles and a thousand taxi hailing apps will make up the difference.

Except they don't. I can't take a corporate shuttle to buy groceries or go out at night, and the cab situation in San Francisco is embarrassing. How do people here think they're living in the future when they can't even run basic infrastructure?

You can order food or hail a cab with your phone in any city. I only know of one city where idiots who will tell you this is revolutionary.
One thing that really worked for me is doing customization and add-ons for a software for businesses I'm developing. It got me in touch with a ton of people. Plus I get to sell those changes and add-ons to other customers.
Incremental improvements are improvements, but one runs the risk of reaching a local maximum. As we see a significant change in the landscape (say, networking, SMP, or GPGPU, which haven't been prevalent since companies wrote their own minimal operating systems when receiving a computer), we build on what we have rather than breaking it down and factoring new capabilities into our way of thinking. We know it's a good idea to do so, but the advancements tend to be limited to academic or research oriented projects rather than widespread commercial pursuits.

There's a good reason for this, which is backwards compatibility, in terms of concepts, education, maintaining a skilled workforce, and retaining the value of prior investments in hardware and software.
I'm not the author, but to me this is an attempt to reinvent PyPI from the ground up, with a focus on usability.
When they appeal to the Supreme Court, which they will, they will get the trial they wanted—a trial on whether Amazon, not Apple, committed antitrust violations by selling e-books below marginal cost in order to capture the market.

Thats just all kinds of ".. what?". I don't think you can appeal to the supreme court on the issue of Amazon having comitted a crime in your very own federal trial. That simply does not compute.
Out-of-print book, "The Making of Kubrick's 2001", posted online
Can you elaborate on this? I am a fairly new developer and haven't found it particularly difficult.
The OP links at the end to the PDF he uploaded, but just in case you missed it: http://www.scribd.com/doc/143395393/The-Making-of-Kubricks-2...
I must have missed the part where MetaCosm stated his developer was buying health insurance in an age-discriminating market.
Chromium Likely to Replace Firefox As Default Browser in Ubuntu 13.10
Crazy, I've never thought about crowdfunding in this way before, feels like some sort of interactive scandal
I would say yes, it is biased towards twentysomethings because
1) they have disposable income and more easily part with it, and
2) they are more likely to create a tech solution (and surrounding business) to a problem they are familiar with.
Disclosure: I'm in my 30s but had similar wide-eyed dreams in my 20s of creating some big piece of tech that would net me millions.
Haha, I appreciate the skepticism for my apple praise. :) For what it's worth, I don't care much for the rest of Apple's offerings.

It's only 2013 - I get another six years for my macbook investment to play out. In April 2007, AAPL sold for $90/share, which works out to profit of $36k over the same length of time, four years.

Have I made $9k/year more than I would have had I not bought the macbook? Not likely. But it's helped me to work and learn efficiently and productively, and $9k/year is inexpensive tuition.

Could I have done the same with a different laptop? Maybe. But my point is that it's important to invest (judiciously) in yourself, too. Whatever tools you need to learn and become the best at what you want to do may be different, but don't underestimate the utility of that investment.
There are so much problems in the World that software can help solve, and there are not enough developers to solve them. The time developers spend writing code for CRUD apps would be better spent on other, more important things (more complex apps, user experience, etc).
By automating the coding of trivial CRUD apps, time and money will be saved and reallocated to more challenging problems.
Also, from a developer point of view, writing CRUD apps is boring. :)
There are many historical examples where a smaller force has taken over large populations. You need some sort of military advantage to do that. Britain, Spain or going further back the Romans.

These involve components though that are unacceptable in modern warfare. e.g. the threat and execution of collective punishment against large populations. The smaller force doesn't need to subdue the entire population at once, just a chunk at a time.

For less extreme measures you would effectively need to put in place martial law and martial rule that governs every aspect of the populations' lives. In this case you need enough force on the ground all the time to enforce it and those forces are going to take losses in a guerilla warfare situation (e.g. the Russians in Afghanistan). Especially if someone is supporting the opposing side...

In Afghanistan it's a mix of issues:

1. The occupying force has low tolerance for casualties and is in defensive mode.

2. The population has a long history of overthrowing occupation and therefore assumes the same will happen here.

3. Everyone can see the lack of commitment for the occupying force. This is not a "win at all costs" situation.

4. The Taliban is supported by external entities fighting a proxy war.

5. The Taliban is, at least in theory, in a "win at all costs" mode.
Pretty simple, really. First I've tweeted a couple of things like my own blog, other articles, news, comments, opinions - all related to my area of expertise. Then I searched for related keywords and started following other people. A bunch of them followed back and now I'll get retweets, replies and traffic to my site when I tweet.
Great commit message: https://github.com/crateio/crate.pypi/commit/94ce379fe386c90...
Crowdfunding For Journalism
What is your opinion on Stog? (an OCaml static site generator)

http://zoggy.github.io/stog/getting_started.html
http://zoggy.github.io/stog/slides/2013_04_23_inria.html#%28...
You know, I had been previously thinking about crowdfunding competitors to Kickstarter. Like Google, that company has pretty much cornered the market in mindshare to the point that kickstarting is synonymous with crowdfunding. Good on Indiegogo, the West Coast/Silicon Valley alternative, for establishing itself with this, I guess.
Rob Landeros, a pioneer of 1990s games plots haunted-mansion genre comeback
A lot of those annoying interview questions are just tests to see how someone handles borderline-insulting questions about their past. It's to see how the person handles stress.

It's not a practice I like, but it's something everyone will have to face. The older you get, the more people want to know about your past (which is rarely as good as it should have been).
Similarly, Abuse is not a 'clone' but was released into the public domain in its entirety and has had some work done to it since (cross platform porting, etc.)