skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Absolutely agree with you. Database-to-spreadsheet is the best way to analyze data then summarize the results in a business setting. Unfortunately, the people seeing the results occasionally want to see how you got to your numbers, and since they frequently have non-technical backgrounds the database step is often where they can no longer follow.

I worked at a company where our data was in SQL Server but we basically had to import the entire data set into Excel because none of the higher-ups knew SQL and wouldn't be able to peer review. Those spreadsheets were slooooooow.
Pimp your Trello Cards with Screenshots
Yes but now with added computers!.
I had tons of issues trying to get Postgres to work on my Mac

Did you try http://postgresapp.com ?
Yup.

Let us know when you're slashvertising...
Does anyone else read these just for the awesome pictures?
I think SteamOS, is the killer-app
Yeah, I was a bit worried at first when I got my Mid-2011 MacBook Pro (first machine I'd got with a glossy display) but it turned out to be fine - I've never really had any issues with it. If there's glare, usually you just tilt it slightly and it's fine... And it really does make a big improvement to colour saturation.
“I Quit Academia,” an Important, Growing Subgenre of American Essays
And more Chinese labor:

> Though the firm won’t disclose profit margins, as of this writing there about 373 employees, the majority of which work in warehousing (the firm just set up an 80,000 square foot facility in Chandler where components from China are assembled before shipping). According to CEO Robin Crossman, employee numbers fluctuate tend to fluctuate.
Valid Point: High-Ranked execs use it and usually try to translate everything into excel sheets. They would really appreciate seeing excel sheets in presentations.

Invalid point: Formulae are easy to follow and audience can easily verify/reproduce your work.

My friend, excel rocks when MAKING a spreadsheet, but it can be hellishly annoying to follow. when you got a long chain of formulae cells, it is very annoying to trace the data through it to see where it is coming form. Sure, a properly labelled Sheet takes care of it, but that's not usually the case. That's the main reason i am very excited about that excel-sheet visualization tool posted here the other day.
Knowledge Representation in The Many Faces of Go
I do. Their comments about repairability sound very ancient.
Yes, take my high-resolution laminated LCD and put a film over it to make everything grainy: http://hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=1744879.
Why yet another clone of powerline?
vim-airline is a nice plugin, but it uses too much functions of other plugins, which should be done by users in .vimrc.
A revivalist tent meeting but everyone says OK a lot. Google Glass demo day.
Don't buy it during the initial hype. Wait it out. My 2 cents.
Please God, don't let the author be working for the NSA. These days I get suspicious at every "it's all good" piece of news.
Instead of installing PostgreSQL with homebrew, I suggest http://postgresapp.com/,
"the easiest way to run PostgreSQL on the Mac"
I'm sure some 16-year-olds do that. But this one merely suggested that a car would be a good gift. You've maybe done that yourself - planted the seed in your significant others' minds? Unfair to imply she 'demanded' anything - as if she's an entitled lazy girl instead of a record-breaking entrepreneur.
I perhaps should have been more clear, I know this. What I meant does this protocol require ethernet? which seems unlikely.
> AUTOMATIC BACKGROUND UPDATES

Great, now my plugins and themes can break automatically!
Don't use 'official' installers manually ever, for this same reason that they try to cheat you into 'agreeing' to something - use something like http://ninite.com/ that run the installers with the correct no-to-optional-malware options.
"The proprietary SSD has changed to a PCIe format, but still isn't a standard 2.5" drive."

Still? It never will be because Apple tries to make MacBooks as small as possible.
Developer just wants to develop
I want to agree with you because it sounds like a great story, the "American Dream", but there are so many kids who want so much and almost none achieve what this girl did. It's like praising a professional sports player for success but ignoring the fact that the other 99.9% of kids who played too many sports and didn't pay attention in school didn't get very far in life. It happened to work out in this situation but it is far from the normal case.
The video title is in fact not quite accurate -- I chose to err in the direction of "cool soundbyte", since "LZ77 + poetry = awesome" doesn't have quite the same ring.

aortega is quite right that this video actually explains LZ77, which is only one part of how gzip compresses. gzip (or the DEFLATE algorithm) also uses Huffman coding to compress the alphabet and pointers after LZ77 compression. I explain a bit more about the phases at http://jvns.ca/blog/2013/10/23/day-15-how-gzip-works

And if you really want to know how it works, you should read http://www.infinitepartitions.com/art001.html, which is the reference I used for writing my implementation of gunzip. It includes C source code.

The dig at hacker schoolers was unnecessary, though :)
Google Sever in Nepal is Down
The 3rd world reference was to show the other side of the extreme.

I was thinking there has to be some kind of middle ground.

Also, I don't want to be on the same road as a 16 year old driver in 2013 in the US (with their own car). Zero attention span.
So it's like a fancy display of adblock/ghostery (who tracks me on which site) with a correlation of the sites i already visited... ok.. i'm sticking to just some adblocker :)
MySQL Bug #20786 gets a birthday cake
I do not want to sound negative, but this post is complete water...

What you need is:

- understand your numbers, which requires knowledge, brain and a bit of experience;

- accurate numbers, which shall be output by accounting.

You can prepare P&L forecast for $50-100M business on one piece of paper, if needed. Excel just makes things more efficient.
"...not yet possible to print bullets" - ha! Its not yet possible to print anything but little plastic junk. If you could 'print' bullets, you could just make them anyway; you'd have to have all the raw materials at hand.
The wise assassin disguises his 3D printed gun parts as 3D printing machine parts.
This is really self serving nonsense. Of course its going to be harder to repair a computer that is made up of fewer and fewer discrete parts - the batteries bonded to the case means that the case itself is the battery and should be considered the minimal replacement part.

When my volvo died on the freeway, the "fix" was to replace the engine control unit, not some part of that computer.

This would be like complaining that just because you could replace the MMU on a Mac II in 1988, apple screwed you over by using a 68030 with on board MMU.
I Hate C Programing
> Origami Owl takes on independent associates – known as “designers” – who buy products at a discount and then peddle them to others for a marked up price. One of the favorite points of sale are “jewelry bars,” or private parties at someone’s home or another venue operated by a “hostess” (the hostesses get discounts and some free products too). The company has about 50,887 designers.

So, the "designers" don't actually design anything? They just sell stuff at parties organised by a "hostess"?

I hope the friends of the hostess, and the hostess, know that the designer didn't actually design anything, because otherwise this feels really sleazy.

EDIT: Great that it took off so well though. I guess.
Pages <-> TextEdit
Well, you can just use a mounted disk image formatted with a case sensitive HFS as development env. You'll need to mount that every time you restart but that's a minor hassle compared to problems you might run into when using a case sensitive FS for your primary partition.
Think You're Too Old For A Mentor? Think Again
Changed My Mind on This One Thing With Braces
Another pyramid scheme/MLM company. They seem to be at their historical peak right now, and no signs of slowing down. Am I alone in wishing the FTC would crack down on them?
>sugar is far healthier than sugar

Really? By what definition of "healthy"?
I bought a new ThinkPad W530 back in May along with an SSD and 4x8GB sticks of RAM to upgrade myself. I spent five minutes looking over the service manual and another five minutes doing the upgrades, thanks to the standard screws that Lenovo chose to use.

When I bought my last MBP, I had them (at the Apple Store) upgrade the RAM, which meant I had to wait around for 90 minutes for them to do it.
Ask HN: Moving away from contracting toward income generating apps & services
I'm a web developer with a CS degree. I've spent the last 2+ years getting into a position where I have enough experience and skills to make a living freelancing. Unfortunately, I've also come to realise that I really dislike freelancing and I'm simply not happy being a developer - it's not what I want to do professionally and not where my interests lie.

While I decide on what I do want to do (potentially going back to college for example), I want to greatly reduce my hours freelancing and invest that time into developing some small projects with the intention of generating some sort of income to sustain me. I like working on my own projects but I don't have any previous real successes or any immediate ideas on what to do.

I know there are a lot of people who are making their living selling their own products (be them apps, services or physical products) and I'd be interested to see if any of them came from a similar background and what advice they might have.
Actually I think developer time (and cost) is probably the main reason we aren't writing them in assembler.
> If gazillions of people are technically users of skydrive simply by virtue of having windows

Or Hotmail. I don't use Windows, but I use Hotmail and I have some files stashed away on Skydrive. This is stuff I don't access frequently where it's fine to go through the browser to get them.

I even tried it on a Mac, but it needs a case-insensitive filesystem. Amateurs...
Yes and privacy problems are still real issues especially as privacy rights are continuously eroded every single day.

Just because you wanted something in your pocket to solve all your problems, doesn't mean everyone else did. Many of us wanted a great tool, not a buddy or advisor or mind-reader.

Every technological development has many possible routes it can follow, it can't follow them all. And you will inevitably be disappointed at some of the routes it takes.

Can you imagine what it must be like to be Richard Stallman or Ted Nelson with a clearly articulated vision of the future but so many things go the other way?
yeah that works okay if you only need that, but then comes another project or new requirements and suddenly you run mongodb, redis and some background worker stuff as well and this slowly pollutes your system.

I did it that way for a long time too, but running vms became so convenient with vagrant and all the box configurations you can download that its kind of a no-brainer as long as you have 8Gigs of RAM or more.
A third party email server does not change this. The user's email server is not used. That's the point.

If a client sends an attorney an email from their Iphone, it will go to LinkedIn, instead of the client's own email server.

If an attorney sends a client an email from their Iphone, it will go to LinkedIn, instead of the attorney's own email server.
Got it. This has been very enlightening. Thanks.
"The president should use the power of the White House to end all large information technology purchases, and instead give his administration’s accomplished technologists the ability to work with agencies to make the right decisions, increase adoption of modern, incremental software development practices, like a popular one called Agile, already used in the private sector, and work with the Small Business Administration and the General Services Administration to make it easy for small businesses to contract with the government." > "use Agile"
I've built GrantTree's financial modelling (real time, to the penny) using a Ruby/Rails back end and FreeAgent for the transaction management.

No Excel in sight. The only thing we use Excel for is client calculations and holiday tracking.
Pretty sure they'd have a hard time bringing about a prosecution with unassembled parts as it is. Slow news day is what this is.
Launching the Salesforce $1 Million Hackathon
"My weird way of doing things broke, I don't like it."
No, definitely do not include the name consultancy.

Think about what skills you and your friend have the distinguish you from the pack. Then think about how you approach problems.

Also think about what you and your friend want your company to be known as. An exercise I give clients is "Think about five years down the road. Two future clients are discussing your company. What are they saying about it, in specifics? If one of them asks the other 'What do you love most about them?', what would the answer be? How about if the question is 'What annoys you the most?' (be honest and think hard, there are always tradeoffs)".

Make notes for each of these thought exercises. Trello is good for this, as is a mind mapping tool like XMind.

Then go over your notes with your friend and brainstorm about ideas, capturing all of them with no filtering. No idea is off the table at this point. You are looking for over 100 names.

Next go over your list and rate each one with 1-5 stars. When you are done get rid of anything that isn't 5 stars.

Now it's time to go over each of the 5-star names and ask the following questions:

.. is it generic enough to not tie you to specific technology, while specific enough to capture what distinguishes you?

.. is is short?

.. is it memorable?

.. how whimsical is it? Higher is usually better, but YMMV depending on your niche (financial software consultants might not want ButterfliesAreFree,Inc., then again they might...an no you can't use that one :) ).

.. is the domain name taken? Are variations on the name taken? Depending on your creativity you might want to use this as a first pass filter on your 5-star names.

I also tend to advise clients to either (a) pick a single word that represents them and change it with a prefix or suffix not usually used (e.g., Aptivity [not a client], Communitivity), or (b) pick two words that together represent them and use razr-spelling ( remove one or more of eliminate some vowels, phonetic spelling, etc.).

An important thing to not forget is branding. Your best bet is to pick five final names and play around with logo ideas for each, as well as company slogans. Please be aware that good branding is hard. At some point you're likely going to want to go a branding consultant and get a new or updated logo/slogan, but you shouldn't spend money on that at the outset in my opinion if you are bootstrapping, especially if someone if going for a lifestyle business. Your best brand is your product and the word of mouth of your customers.

Hope this has helped,

Bill Barnhill, Founder

Communitivity, Inc. - Community is a verb
You can do that perfectly well with R. Heck, R was designed with that kind of workloads in mind. With RStudio you can even present a table which the non-programmers can directly manipulate to test those conditions.

I usually use spreadsheets only as data entry software and then R does the rest.
And combined revenues of???
The result of my vexations with powerline -

https://github.com/kadimisetty/vim-simplebar
Giveaway Win One Of The Best WordPress Themes From Themeforest
Yes, the headphone jack was emphasised as if it's a big thing - but come on, how else should headphone jacks be attached? On my old PCs the hearphone jacks are soldered on to the motherboard, and can still be replaced by anyone capable of holding a soldering iron; unlike, say, soldered-in RAM chips which can't really be upgraded that way.
Thoughtful tweets by Nassim Nicholas Taleb
It may be hellishly annoying to follow (and trust me, I've had to clean up many Frankenstein-esque spreadsheets), but it's imo easier than any sort of messy code. Which do you think is harder for Average Joe Exec - following poorly documented and messy code, or following a poorly documented and messy spreadsheet?

PS I'm also very excited for that tool. Will make my life so much easier.
I am in the middle of moving from freelance to my own apps. I found it much more difficult to make what I want. Since there was no deadline and no goals to meet (other than what was in my head) it was very easy to go off the path. Things took longer than expected and my monies burned up. I would say make sure you have steady income before you fully give up working for others. The short answer is make sure you have the money to get you through the transition, otherwise you will have to take on more work and that will slow you down.
say they scaled from 1 to 10s to 100s of EC2 machines..who'd want to migrate to a different architecture after that?
I love Knockout. This is awesome news.

The thing I really like about Knockout is that I don't find the complexity to ramp up as much as it does in Angular. It's also super easy to just insert it into any page and use just the functionality I need. It's also got great performance when it comes to 2 way binding.
It's not a GNU/Linux + X + Gnome/KDE stack traditionally associated with Linux desktops.
"F# is mostly FP with some OO tackled on - mainly influenced by OCaml. Scala unifies both OO and FP"

So Scala is mostly OO with some FP tackled on?
It may not necessarily be a win-win for Google. It could actually make search worse. Consider if I search for Southwest Airlines and get a big Jet Blue banner that takes up 88% of vertical space, this would actually make me very agitated as a search consumer - it's almost the same as displaying a popup ad.
I got an impression from the article that disassembly was what he did to explain the binary differences that remained AFTER he corrected for timestamps/certificates/etc.
It'd be very interesting if BackBlaze open-sourced at least part of their code. It may be optimized for archival purposes but they're sticking your data on multiple 180TB pods using an open-source stack.

JFS file system, and the only access we then allow to this totally self-contained storage building block is through HTTPS running custom Backblaze application layer logic in Apache Tomcat 5.5. After taking all this into account, the formatted (useable) space is 87 percent of the raw hard drive totals. One of the most important concepts here is that to store or retrieve data with a Backblaze Storage Pod, it is always through HTTPS. There is no iSCSI, no NFS, no SQL, no Fibre Channel.
Wow, that sucks.

It's funny, the other co-founder of Efficito is a financial analyst who writes tools to do his analysis for him in Lisp. He also maintains a Common Lisp implementation. Fortunately I bet your former employer would not be interested in his services.
Just for point 7, it might be completely legitimate for an HR or a recruiter to use linkedin as part of his/her work.
Crowdsource your salary An economy built on love.
Microsoft Office 365 by YODspica Ltd
I do not see why this gets any publicity after a moment to think "Has any modular upgrade-able system ever worked?"

The best example I can think of are home-built PCs which sometimes go through one generation of graphics upgrade, and maybe the case gets re-used for a new motherboard. Anything else?
There's a release page for the 3.0 beta & RC here: https://github.com/knockout/knockout/releases
So basically it's a VM/hypervisor that creates a random key that is stored on the cache or on cpu registers, and uses it to encrypt memory content. similar to tresor[1].

Seem like something that can be usefull for android devices, since the main vulnerability of android devices is the ability if chips(like the modem) that have closed source firmware , to access the ram.

[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRESOR#Potential_vulnerabilitie...
At first glance, this all seems to be rather tinfoil-hattish and implausible. Mind you, after what we have learned in the past few months, who knows?

Here is an interesting cue for how social network information can be used to control the spread of unwanted ideologies & behaviours through a population:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CZNrOzgNWf4&feature=share

If anything like this was going on (and I am making no accusations; this is all speculation), then I suspect that it would work using mechanisms similar to those described in the above video.

No implausible high-technology mind control would be required, just the simple & conventional tools of the marketing/advertising/targeted-persuasion industry, directed towards a relatively small group of people, identified through the very surveillance mechanisms that have so recently been revealed to the world.

It is a pretty cool concept really, and (if we trust the people pulling the trigger), infinitely preferable to violent conflict. Better to counter the spread of hostile, dangerous and violent ideologies before there is loss of life, damage to property, economic disruption etc...

The key thing here is trust. Weirdly enough, I am normally* inclined to trust (the majority of) NSA & GCHQ staffers. My main concerns normally revolve around the proliferation of such technologies to groups and individuals with less noble aims.

* (Sometimes I get a bit depressed and cynical. At times like these I tend to reflect on the worst aspects of human nature, and the level of trust that I am capable of mustering drops in a corresponding manner).
Ask HN: Please review this Android App - Phonnix
I'm working on this concept app for Android that activates unconditional call forwarding remotely to VOIP numbers and redirect them to other devices or browsers.

This functionality is particularly handy when people leave their phones at home or when the battery is dying. Because with unconditional call forwarding the call is being handled at the operator level, calls will still be forwarded even if the device is turned off.

Users can receive calls and make calls, have access to voicemail and some other functionalities but I'd like to focus only on these. It's like a backup phone.

I would really appreciated your feedback on the concept and not so much in design or UX because that hasn't been the focus (yet)
Please try it out at http://www.phonnix.com

Thanks in advanced!
They are all like Microsoft Office where you have to pay for upgrades: one way or another you will, eventually, have to pay for an upgrade. Software is expensive to develop and eventually a constantly expanding market won't be enough to sustain development costs. Eventually everyone who wants one will have a copy of Instapaper and then something will need to change to pay for its development.
Knockout certainly doesn't get as much attention as it should. For those of you reading this comment feed to find out if you should try Knockout, I'd recommend trying it. It is fairly simple to pick up in a weekend, especially with their interactive tutorials: http://learn.knockoutjs.com/

Looks like this version makes what I believe to be Knockout's biggest strength (the data binding) that much stronger.
Because even though OS X is a pretty full-featured unix not all software that installs easily on a linux installs easily on a mac os. Vagrant boxes also are platform independent if he had a vagrant development env, he wouldn't have to blog about how to install python. You also can get closer to the target env - i.e. use the python you'll have on the target server etc. You certainly can install all pythons that your projects use side-by-side, but this quickly turns into a mess when you have multiple projects that deploy on different target systems, maybe with different sets of libraries etc. You can test/develop deployment scripts locally. All in all: It's cleaner, less work and more flexible. In general the extra ram is not relevant now that the upgrade from 8G to 16G costs a mere 200 EUR.