skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
MemberHub -- Basecamp for nonprofits, churches, and associations?
MemberHub provides a single place for member-driven organizations, like churches and nonprofits, to connect with their members in secure online hubs.
No - the big point of this device is that the b/w (epaper) mode has the same enhance resolution and low power consumption as the Kindle!
We are one of the countries with the largest immigration in the world if you consider immigrants per-capita. This is consistent with our history, we used to be a favorite destination for Europeans a hundred years ago and now for fellow Latin Americans. There are always some right wing idiots complaining, but most of the country welcomes immigrants. Also in the last couple of years we are again a favorite destination for Europeans, you see them everywhere and not just as tourists.

More info, but a bit outdated: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_in_Argentina

"Nearly a million permanent residency applications were filed from 2000 to 2008[]"

And we are just about 40 million. :)
Ask HN: Is Twitter lost on me?
Hi All,

I do not want to burst the Twitter love-fest bubble but am I the only one who feels Twitter is aimed at a pretty narrow demographic?

This demographic I would split into two:
1. People who have a lot of time on their hands to read tweets or add their own. For me this means mostly students and those between/without jobs.

2. Companies/Individuals trying to link themselves with this hot new trend for profit, monetary or otherwise. A win-win situation develops as Twitter's success can drive people to a company/individual and the company/individual will drive people to Twitter.

Why this post I hear you mumble?

For me personally, I do not fall into the above demographic. I have a full-time job which takes up all of my focus/attention during the day. I do not have time or feel compelled to check a website/twitter client constantly to read new tweets or post myself. And, to be honest, I already have plenty of things to read/do when my mind does need a wonder in the evening/weekend (Yes HN et al, I am looking at you).

Are there others out there like me?
I took the plunge and looked around the site. I didnt actually sign up; it sure wasnt anything I wanted. It looks like a way for the creatively challenged to create content for the various social networking sites. The user doesn't even have to come up with a topic; they supply it.

My initial reaction was why not. Web sites are cheap. Throw it out there. See if it works. After all icanhazcheesburger.com became a hit. Then I went into the "about" section. It's run by a suit and it is funded by a couple of VC's and an angel. It has a bunch of employees. No discernible revenue model. I say they have some pretty high barriers to success.
I answered the questions and nothing happened. Perhaps the site requires javascript?
Why (Regular) Releases Matter
You're hurting no one through your so-called "dishonesty."

Do you have a better solution? The system cannot be fixed to a complete extent quickly. My solution is to avoid busywork classes and get high grades in the busywork classes so I can just skip assignments instead as often as possible.

Do you have a better one?
What I learned from this post:

* The author thinks startups are better than large companies

* The author thinks senior developers at large companies are older than startup developers --- else, why bring up age?

* Despite admonishing his protagonist to learn one new language per year, the author believes "career rust" is a problem of age --- else the story would have worked with a 28 year old dev still writing in PHP.

* The author really likes unit tests.
I had never heard of that. I'll check it out!
Please stop repeating the Nova thing. It's an urban legend.

Just like us English-speaking peoples, people from Latin America understand the difference between separate and compound words.

Do you confuse a carpet and a car pet?

And according to Just As Reliable Sources As Yours, Rolls Royce changed the name before introducing to Germany. If you try to find any records of a Rolls Royce Silver Mist, you will find that there are almost no results - because the name didn't ship. The only results are erroneous, or retellings of this stupid tale, or people debunking said stupid tale.

http://www.snopes.com/business/misxlate/nova.asp
http://www.i18nguy.com/translations.html
http://www.rrocwa.com/Resources/FAQ.htm

This is HN. For the love of god, check your facts. Especially if it's something that's so bad it's on Snopes.
Sorry, I use a browser which trivially allows me to only enable executable content for sites I trust and until you're one of them no javascript for you.
I understand that there are a wide variety of acceptable writing styles. That said, there are many literary devices and techniques that wouldn't have been possible without the Internet. And, when writing for the Internet, it often makes sense to incorporate these as they tend to improve one's writing.
I thought it was interesting that this cycle takes 20+ years in this author's world.
Fortran II? Real Programmers used FAP! [EDIT: Fortran Assembly Program]

I have fond memories of the Bendix G15 - a drum memory machine where each instruction included the address of the next instruction.
I assume it doesn't handle it as well as custom hand-tuned code.

I've also never used SQLite on an embedded system.
Does your client know you're asking about how to program their application on HN? It doesn't sound like you're particularly experienced, so maybe you should do them a favor and pass on this project.
I think it is at least plausible that some fairly complex image recognition could be genetically determined. Indeed, the classic example of the seagull proves that pre-programming such circuitry is possible in animals with significantly simpler brains than mammals. I don't think it's such a wild leap that more complicated image recognition could be possible at birth.

At any rate, it's not even necessary that such image recognition be completely formed at birth. It can develop along with the rest of the visual system and other systems that are tuned for sexual attractiveness. (I'm ignoring breasts-for-food-purposes, the recognition of which is largely determined by tactile stimuli, mediated by the trigeminal nerve).
"exit" merely references a function. It doesn't call by name alone.

His point was that the user already typed in "exit", and the interpreter recognized the user's intent to exit, so it should just shut up and exit already, instead of telling the user to exit in a different way.
Global VC Blog Directory – Ranked By Google Reader Subscribers (May 2009)
I think Skribit ( http://skribit.com/ ) might lead to better topics for blogs. This site seems good for facebook wall posts or tweets.
Lessons from failure
"os.listdir() returns a list of bytes instances if the argument is a bytes instance" and unicode otherwise.
Assuming the developer was wise with his money, he should be fine. I don't feel too sorry for him.
Coming from a Java-background, I've often found myself trying to call list.add(). I think that would be an even more natural complement to list.remove().
My father loved to have back and forths with me trying to come up with a clever response. But the most important lesson he taught me was that there is a time and place for such things.
On the App Store Hype
To be fair Hacker News doesn't allow you to submit a link and write a description. Therefore, any description would have to be posted as a comment which in all likelihood would eventually trickle down to the bottom of the comments.

Submitting a url as he did is no different than a ASK HN: Review my startup.
Hipp is also the guy behind Fossil[1] (a new DVCS) and CVSTrac[2] (the inspiration for Trac).

1- http://www.fossil-scm.org

2- http://www.cvstrac.org
Your preferences are your business, but just because you don't run javascript doesn't mean a site is broken. It means you have a default setting that is in conflict with the current state, and direction of the web.

If I do:

csh> lynx www.facebook.com [et al.]

it really doens't mean facebook is broken.

That's my point - you're mixing up your personal preferences (paranoia) with the condition of a web site and they are not the same thing.

Fortunately many others are willing to move with the times, otherwise we'd all be still running gopher://news.ycombinator.com
I've always thought it'd be quite fun to make a POS system. I'd definitely try to make it mostly web-based. Doesn't seem like there's any reason it couldn't be, if you paid close attention to responsiveness (maybe you'd have to run the database and web server on the local network/host).
Looking at the Submit page, there is a spot for the URL and another one for a title. I may certainly be mistaken as I have never used it, but I would think those two fields are just for the described purpose?
According to Wired's Chris Anderson it's all but dead. His coming book is about this very subject, called "FREE". Until the release, take a look at this article (and video clip) by Anderson himself: http://www.wired.com/techbiz/it/magazine/16-03/ff_free, or at his own blog (which lately have been featuring several articles about "free"): http://www.longtail.com/the_long_tail/2007/05/my_next_book_f...
I don't fall into (1) or (2) either, but I still enjoy the service. I like it because it puts me in touch with likeminded people and keeps me up to date on what interesting stuff is happening in my city.

It's also a nice way to have interesting conversations "in public", where other people might chip in. The recent @reply changes have largely put an end to that particular use case, sadly.

Finally, it's directly and indirectly generated a lot of leads for jobs and projects (I do freelance programming). Not via shameless and annoying self promotion, but simply because people will often post if they need someone for a project. Staying up to date on the developer community in my area also means I don't miss meetups which allow for networking in the classical sense.
My argument does not apply to the case were two parties have fully negotiated the terms of a contract.

It applies to cases where the terms are not negotiable. If thousands of others have signed the same contract, then there is no room for individual variations in the terms, even if that would benefit both parties. Try to get a different contract with your local library or a university: impossible, even though it would be in you, their and societies best interest.

The pragmatic choice is to sign the contract, but break it in a way advantageous to all parties involved.
Ask HN: Does HN need to have a delete account feature?
Do we need to have a feature to delete our own accounts?
If your site requires JS, not bothering to tell people just shows how much you (don't) care about your users. It's interesting you bring up facebook. I'm not a facebook user, but on I whim I just went there and what's the first thing they told me:

Sign Up
It's free and anyone can join
Javascript is disabled on your browser.

Please enable JavaScript on your browser or
upgrade to a Javascript-capable browser to
register for Facebook.

That tells me that the people at FB care enough about my time and theirs to tell me their requirements before I use the site.
It's because of the self-referential, contradictory nature of Wolfram Alpha's answer. Kind of like trying to assign a truth value to the statement "this statement is false".

By putting in "how to program", and having it misinterpret it as "What is the world's most powerful computational software?", having the answer come out as "Wolfram Mathematica", and having the whole thing be powered by Wolfram Mathematica, you get a contradiction (maybe even 2)... in Gödelian style.
Plinky is just a smarter version of a meme. Instead of everyone "knowing" a meme, everyone "thinks about" a... Plinky.
No IE6 support?
Two words: iPhone and Elevator. Twitter is a fun thing to check/update when you're otherwise unoccupied. When you're waiting in line, riding an elevator, in a dentist's waiting room, driving at high speed in the rain, etc. The iPhone makes the experience pleasant.
"like to repeat my comment in replying to @madair:"

Oh I was just adding an interesting link, not disputing/challenging your positon.
Nice Fairytale for the youngsters.

Now for the real story.

51-22 = 29 years of programming for the same company. Which means John started programming about the time the IBM XT came out. So I doubt his MASM 4.1 and C skills would have lasted him the 29 years he worked at BIG JOB. In fact, given the pace of change, its pretty much a go he didn't last 29 years at any single BIG JOB.

Worse yet, when John started he likely worked on a Mainframe or Micro using VMS or a commercial *nix variant and had COBOL skills. Since the WWW was still a text based protocol running on a military network John wasn't likely to have any Internet skills at this point.

John likely ran a Wildcat BBS, or E systems communication system using dialup. John did this until about 1992 when the Net finally took. Along the way John continued with COBOL and his Mainframe buddies shifted over to the net. After Y2K fewer and fewer of his buddies stayed in COBOL and the market for his skills went through the roof.

Today John still hacks out COBOL for legacy systems and makes about triple what he did in 1989 when he started because the idiot children of this age think the only way you can carve out a living is with your RUBY slippers, drinking a cup of JAVA, while you fight it out with INDIA for your job.

But John doesn't have that problem, because believe it or not he knows what an AS400 is, and YOU DO NOT.

John is socking away enough bank by being available for legacy gigs because the market passed him by. Thank god for that...

And yes I know John. More than a couple of us old farts do...

Now lets stroll down that hill and have a poke with all them cows....

2 centavos..
Recommendation: Python, commandline; then wrap a GUI around it.
Still, it's really easy to have a "this site requires Javascript" message. It also demonstrates a minimal level of design diligence. (It's a little like ensuring labels work to toggle checkboxes, or not using fixed-size fonts, and so on.)
>> If Microsoft adds a few features and they prove popular, how long precisely will it take Google to mirror or even leapfrog those features?

Is that a bad thing? I don't think so. Competition is the key to progression and innovation, which results in good things for us, the end users.
"Literary devices and techniques?" Do you mean... hyperlinking? Because there's nothing else that's been done online that wasn't done previously in other mediums.
You're equating 'cheating' with 'lacking knowledge/skill', which is unfounded. In the preceding discussion we are talking about cases where cheating would be considered ethical by some, because the trade-off is acceptable. For instance, someone may be on their way to becoming a very good physicist and doesn't care for compulsory german. Who cares if a current physics professor ever cheated at german?
"I already have plenty of things to read/do when my mind does need a wonder in the evening/weekend" -- for many people, especially those in their 20s who came of age using Facebook, Myspace, AIM, etc, one of those things we do to occupy our time is use the Internet to keep up with friends who we, for whatever reason, can't just call on the phone or hang out with in person. Recent college grads especially suddenly find that their once close friends are scattered across the globe; Twitter lets them maintain a sense of nearness.

To me, that's the appeal. You don't have to be unemployed to have 10 minutes a day in which to keep up, particularly when you weigh that 10 minutes spent reading Twitter against the amount of time it would take to maintain individual correspondences.
Sorry. I didn't realize that some of you were writing for the Financial Times.
Wonder what we'll be saying down the road...."in my day, we didn't have these fancy neuron teleporters. If you wanted to mash up, you'd use Twitter or Google Wave." Some young hacker would look up, scratch his head, ask, "What's Google?"
my understanding is that the student simply did nontrivial work on a problem that has previously been solved, but is impressive for a high school student
Neither do I. I'm just occupied with a lot of other things.
Good point. On the other hand, if you've got some breathing room to see how practical it is, it's conceptually pretty simple. Start by finding out why they want to go Linux rather than using something like Quickbooks (which is not that expensive overall). Then start hacking something together with MySQL to see if you like it. I'd lean towards using python because it's friendly, but C remains popular on Linux.

There's a book called Beginning Linux Programming by Stones and Matthew which is a great introduction to the operating environment and key concepts, and nice to read. The use an example database application of a CD collection/music store, developed/extended in a variety of programming contexts and languages. I'd say obtain the book and curl up with it for 3 days, it's worth owning a copy anyway and you'll know after a few days whether tis feasible for you or you're entering a world of hurt.
I've made it very clear to them that I'm inexperienced. It's sort of an experiment for them too, as they have an existing POS but are just unhappy with it as they cannot customize it to their liking. I'm not charging very much, either.
Assuming the only sharpening tool in the "youngster's" box is picking up another vanity language for their resume, I don't feel sorry for him either, because he's busy kicking their asses on real projects.
The article doesn't discuss the technical merits of each company's offerings, rather their approaches.

.NET might be a very powerful and complete software platform that lots of people rely on.. but it's still a proprietry piece of technology that requires (and maybe even demands) putting a great deal of trust in Microsoft's hands.

He makes this point clear in his discussion of Silverlight. He's not dismissing it on technical merit (where it may have plenty) but on the different approaches Microsoft and (in a hypothetical world) Google would take to it.

Microsoft was to other OS and software vendors in the past, what Google is to Microsoft now. They're just using more open policies for some of their products to gain an advantage for their core business.

Don't get me wrong, i'm not calling either company good or evil.

I'm also undecided whether a company can be good or evil. There's illegal and unethical, sure but good and evil just depend on how you view a company's motivation.

Microsoft's goal is to keep you in their ecosystem, Google's goal is to sell your eyeballs to the highest bidder.
Just think of it as micro-blogging...all the admin is handled for you, so it's an easy way to post a simple thought/question/interesting link. I don't use it much either, but I've overcome my initial skepticism.
I just check in during builds or on a walk, it really doesnt take a lot of time to keep up. That is the beauty of twitter aggregating all the content you want.
evan miller explains how the economics behind groupon are more complex than just a traditional coupon's price discrimination and/or gimmicks.

"Groupon represents a profound economic innovation."

well worth the read. plus it has slick graphs.
What Ails the Short Story
I agree with you wholeheartedly about the mixed signals thing. I definitely experienced that phenomena because of my science pursuits. I can also understand your point about how certain students would develop a "Well I'm NEVER going to do that..." attitude when shown certain specific examples of math. But a more practical applications approach - no matter how poor the examples - should still interest more students than a "I don't know why you have to do it, but just do it" approach.

I think your disagreement with me comes about in part because you are thinking in more concrete, specific terms than I am. You're correct that "You can use this math to build rocket ships" would probably not have helped me if I didn't have an interest in rocket ships. But a teacher wouldn't necessarily use just a single type of example. Beyond that, I'm saying that my teachers never explained the overarching concepts of math and how they were related or explained - in GENERAL terms - what it could be used to do. Each math 'concept' was presented as a discrete type of chore that you completed in order to satisfy some perverse deity for no apparent reason. Math was not presented as a language of logic and reason that could be used to solve practical problems, but as a completely made up busywork exercise. I might as well have spent my time memorizing Klingon grammar rules. I literally didn't realize calculus was the study of change until college, even after having passed a course in it! Maybe you had a better experience with math instructors, and it is just difficult for you to understand how woefully bad some practicing math instructors actually are?
What's goin down at Maker Faire - From the DIY crowd
Your two use-cases are not how I think about Twitter. I think of it as a virtual office, basically.

If you've ever worked in a small development room with no cube walls - just some tables, a whiteboard, and 3 or 4 people (for example) - it can very easily become a fun place to get stuff done if everyone gets along. :) The dynamics are such that someone might run across a funny youTube video or a joke or have a programming question or comment, etc. and they can just blurt that out to the room. Others answer or not based on what's going on, etc. Perhaps a small discussion breaks out for a bit. Or maybe an impromptu huddle forms around one computer to work something tricky out.

To me, that is what Twitter is especially good at - replicating that kind of small group interaction over the net. It allows me to feel far less alone during the day than I actually am since I work from home now. It's not quite like IM or even a department/company chat room because I'm also able to "hear" the blurbs by certain celebrities I may follow or people I'm good friends with but who work at different companies or whatever.

If I'm busy, I just ignore Twitter. Unlike IM, it doesn't really "demand" attention - and I think anyone using a Twitter client that treats new IMs like a telephone call are doing it wrong. :) But the beauty of Twitter is that it can be used however you want - so my opinion really doesn't affect yours or anyone else's. :)
Do you read Hacker News, or just troll it? Twitter stories make the front page several times a week, and virtually every one of them has a high-rated comment from someone who needs to point out to us how unimportant Twitter is to them.

I don't have time to learn to like anything but Bass and weiss beer, to find out what J-Horror is all about, to play Mob Wars on Facebook, to learn Haskell, to put up solar panels, or to visit New Orleans. Is that 6 "Ask HN" posts I'm unfairly holding back? Or is "I don't see why this is so hyped up" just a really boring story?
Long-distance brain waves focus attention
I don't have twitter account and I am not going to get one. Whatever _useful_ twitter does other tools do better. And I am not interested in useless stuff it is most effective for.
I stumbled upon this a while back and was quite taken by it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nial
I was having this discussion with a friend last night...

Like you, I have struggled to find personal relevance with the social aspects of the service. My friend pointed out to me that the recent mainstream growth that Twitter has been going through is starting to create a lot of services that lay outside the two demographics you mention. The one that I found most interesting was local businesses (movie theaters, coffee shops, restaurants) tweeting about day only or hour only specials etc.

If you start to think about the Twitter service outside the bounds of social networking there is a lot of potential value that is just starting to be discovered.
Frustrating, because with good anecdotes this could be a great article, but without them it's barren as a salt flat.