skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This PR news release is a little less opaque:
http://www.marketwired.com/press-release/blackberry-receives...

Summary:
- $1 billion of convertible debentures, $250 million of which is provided by Fairfax.
- 6% coupon rate, 7-year maturity.
- Convertible to BB shares at a price of $10.00. (If all the debt was converted, it would result in 16% of all common shares outstanding, so a significant potential dilution.)
Innovation kills specialization - anyone can learn to be a specialist, but...
Should you recruit at campus career fairs for your startup? 5 Steps to Take
Part of me hates the spammers that do this, creating nothing of real value for anyone but their own wallets, but another part of me, the grown-up, cynical part, figures that what they're doing is smart as hell: they're selling shovels.

Startups come and go in the thousands nowadays. What could possibly be smarter than sucking them ALL dry, instead of trying to be a profitless, slave-to-the-VC startup themselves?
Try Lazarus: http://www.lazarus.freepascal.org/

About "GUI builders were crap. GUI builders are still crap": that's just BS. Not usable by non-programmers? Of course. But that hand-wavy dismissal is terribly lazy. Identifying what's exactly wrong and specially how to improve is the difficult part.
Programming is the new literacy. It isn't going away, it's 5 years out from being a mandatory high school or middle school topic.
I'm pretty sure it's just really well recorded. The voice changes in tone to emphasize different words, which isn't a feature in any text-to-speech program I know of.

All that said, every time I read a comment in this thread, I hear it in that voice now.
Universities often play the role of NPE, e.g., when they license patented technologies developed in the laboratory to startups intent on commercializing the technologies.
Of course he missed that it's not funny.
Amazing in Motion (Quadrotors)
Show HN: Factoclock - Learn a new fact every minute
Just a little project I've been working on within the last couple of weeks. Learn a new fact every minute!
Are HAMR drives commercially available yet? Wiki makes it sound like 60TB HAMR drives will be readily available at low cost for consumers by 2016 or so, do you think that's likely the reality of things?
Here this guy claims to have put on 20 pounds of muscle in 8 weeks, and in another article he claims 34 pounds in 4 weeks. Hmm... I wouldn't invest in anything he was associated with, he is clearly full of shit.
For Haskell too, with ghc-mod[1].

[1] https://github.com/eagletmt/ghcmod-vim
What he means is, Gates time is so much more valuable to him than his money is to him, where most people time or money might be more valuable than the other, but not to such an extreme. My time is more valuable to me, but there is only so much money I'm willing to spend on convenience. Gates however would probably be willing to spend thousands of dollars on convenience that would seem like huge waste to the rest of us.

He makes the point that despite his time being so much more valuable to him that he is still willing to spend his time doing good things instead of just having a stress free easy life.
Growth hacking via blogging: inbound marketing for startups
I also mention illiteracy. They lack even the basics to grasp any knowledge they could find online, or the capacity to imagine how they could use it, let alone being aware of what "online" is. My point is that their situation is so drastically alien to us, that ways we imagine they could leverage information simply does not apply to them.

For instance, the basics beyond food and shelter. Something we take for granted, like, say electricity, is not easily available to them. To get them Internet, you have to first get them power.

And then you have to convince them to let their kids peruse the Internet, because that's not going to earn money for their next meal, whereas going out and working in the fields or a construction site is.

The ironic thing is, many of them are aware that education is important, but in a very shallow way: to them, if it doesn't come with a degree attached, it's a complete waste of time. Not only is that mostly true for their situation, they lack the foundation to even imagine that they could actually apply the knowledge themselves to improve their own lives. Education is the ticket, but it's so much more complex than "here's the Internet, go learn."

It's hard to appreciate their situation until you spend enough time in the poorer parts of a third world country and see this day in and day out.
Command-Line Intransigence
FOSS APK downloader extension for Chrome free from spyware
While I understand you generally shouldn’t rewrite
software from scratch, maybe TeX should be one of
the few exceptions to this rule?

I think the rule is better stated as, "It should be a long time before you choose to rewrite usable software from scratch. But after 35 years, you can maybe consider it." TeX is great, but it is definitely showing its age, and it shows a lot of the inconsistencies many (other) programming languages of its age also exhibit. Besides, it's not really a rewrite; this is a new piece of software that does something similar.
Vim can be setup to look and scroll exactly like Sublime, I recall a mapping where the key for 'go down a screen' is overridden with multiple 'go down 1 line' which makes it feel smooth. (I generally just go '{L,H,M}', 'z{t,m,b}')

As for jumping around while in insert mode, I totally understand that instinct but it goes against the grain of Vim. Don't spend extra time in insert mode.

I think the real problem with Vim is that you have to wrangle it with a lot of tweaks to make it sane and comfortable and that's a rabbit hole a lot of people (justifiably) don't want to go down. Sublime is very friendly, I like it a lot, Vim demands a long weekend of your life to customize but it really does leapfrog everything once you get it right.
Prioritizing Malware Analysis
Show HN: Only Real Men Haircuts
Show HN: can we get rid of SQL?
newbie insight at FP: basically: avoid (hidden) state and write everything like mathematical functions (perhaps calling some other littler, math-like functions) and it's done?
So, I'm actually looking right now for a microcontroller to run a bunch of real-time I/O that may involve a certain amount of fairly timing dependent bit-banging. I'm planning on building a pinball machine, and so need something that can take input from a couple of buttons, a bunch of switches and some sensors, and drive a bunch of solenoids, LEDs, and the like.

Since I will need to do a bunch of PWM or possibly bit-banged serial protocols to drive all of the LEDs, and I want to have good real-time guarantees on input from the buttons and driving the solenoids, I'm trying to figure out what microcontroller I should use; something like a Propeller, or an FPGA, or maybe one of these, or something else entirely.

Anyone have any experience with these kinds of issues? Will the GA144 be able to do some fairly timing-dependent bit-banging reliably? I notice in the docs that they say the time it takes for each instruction to execute is not fixed. How would you go about doing a timing dependent protocol on these? Is there a high-resolution timer you can poll to ensure that your transitions occur in a timely manner? Or should I bite the bullet and start learning FPGA programming?
F# is an ML implementation for .NET; being an ML-based lanaguage, it shares many similarities with OCaml, but as I pointed out yesterday, it is definitely not the same thing as OCaml:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6660947
They already kind of have. You can make most android apps work on a Blackberry 10 by simple repackaging and resubmission to App World. They didn't go the whole way, but as protomyth says, losing the control on critical parts wouldn't help them further in the long term.
You could look at Org Mode.
You can write your document in a similar fashion you would with Markdown, but then you can export in many other formats (including exporting to LaTeX and PdfTeX).
A Critique on the Structure of U.S. Elementary School Mathematics
Yeah, South-Africa > Zimbawe is one of the most costly corridor in the world. Starting at 20%...
Unable to edit the post since it is too late to do that. But have submitted another story with an appropriate title - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6668889
It is possible that your file wasn't indexed? The whole dump is 3 point something Gigabytes I think, and in the link only a portion was pasted for obvious size limitations. The indexed file was from a (spammy) copy paste service. so chances are good that the part of file which contained your ID wasn't indexed by google or was deleted. I also sent a complaint to Google and the copy-paste service to take down the file immediately for obvious privacy reasons..
Also:
"High Quality Themes 24ui.io provide high quality and awesome themes based on Twitter Bootstrap."

If you aren't able to effectively _design and theme your own site_, how can you make this claim?
Because this happens when you open a large file in Vim

http://i.imgur.com/erVrk5j.png
Very nice work and a worthwhile project!
5 Personalities of Biz Dev Partners
Related articles:

Making advanced prosthetic hands for under $1000 using 3D printing:

http://www.3ders.org/articles/20130905-making-advanced-prost...

The video mentioned in the article:

http://hackaday.com/2013/02/08/3d-printed-prosthetic-hand-he...

I'm personally keeping an eye on this space, partly because robot hands are cool and partly because they're a huge help to what has historically been almost untreatable. (In the sense that treatment would never restore anything approaching prior functionality.)
"I think trying to name and shame is absolutely the wrong way to go about this. Most of these startup ecosystem folks mean well, and most of them have products that are well worth the money -- for folks who need the products."

Completely agree. I'd love to see more stories that leave out the personal drama and, instead, run some analysis. There are a lot of these companies out there, offering similar services. What's the ROI on spending money with them? Which ones are better than others? How do they rank against each other?

To your point:

"I think the real problem as entrepreneurs is that we are unable to recognize for ourselves whether we need something or not; so we buy too much. If we're too ignorant to know what to spend our money on, can't well blame others for selling us stuff."

We can't blame others for selling us this stuff, but we can and should share our experiences. It's completely legitimate to share a bad experience (or a good experience). There is a lot of opacity in this space, and transparency is going to help ease it.

I am completely with you, though: I could do without the public outing of names and email addresses. And I hate smear campaigns, even when they appear to be warranted. A lot of people make stupid mistakes when they're young and dumb; few people deserve to have those mistakes chase them across the internet for the rest of their lives. (As will probably be the case with the immature BD guy named in the article. If even half of what was said about him is true, he deserves to be fired, and his former employer should issue an apology to Ms. Fichtner. But does he really deserve a life sentence?)

In general, I wish tech blogs would focus more on tech and less on people. Leave gossip to the gossip blogs. It's hard to tell where informative journalism ends and personal vendetta begins in pieces like these. So I've trained myself to gloss over them. That's unfortunate, because underneath the thicket of naming-and-shaming, there's often some wisdom or advice to be found.
The idea of using helium in a hard drive
is old, goes back at least 20 years.

As I recall, the main reason for using helium
is that it conducts heat better. Heat? Yes,
the spinning drive acts like a centrifugal pump
which moves the gas and heats it.
When I saw this, the first thought that came to my mind was "How long till Google sends a Cease and Desist letter to the owners of this service!"
That's too many characters, plus "Favourite of 12 Apostles" doesn't mean Jesus', it could be the users. I'm not convinced that it's St. though as when they say name1 that would suggest St. was part of it :p
Tracking a United International BusinessFirst Upgrade
I'll put in a plug for Roy Osherove's "Notes to a Software Team Leader" which discusses some of these issues and how to deal with them. It especially deals with how to handle "overload" and the feeling of falling behind and the decreased productivity that can bring a team.
Everything I did to self-publish a textbok about OCaml
Every time I see a UI-to-code translator or converter[1], I find that it produces terribly crufty output- they tend to take that high-level design and regurgitate The Code that would produce "correct" results. Maybe the answer is applying compiler-type optimizations to the output.

On the other hand, maybe the answer is learning logic ... nay, code.

[1] The one currently on my mind is the web publisher part of Microsoft Access from about 2000. Certainly not today's state-of-the-art, but representative of the typical tool.
The Educational Power of Elementary Arithmetic
Isn't Org Mode tied to one editor.
I'm not sure I understand sites like this - is the business idea just that you can make money by taking a smaller cut than more established sites? Is it just an attempt to be a better middleman than other middlemen without actually creating anything other than a marketplace?
Payroll service allows you to get paid in BitCoin
Not that crazy. Vim itself is a reboot of Vi, and there were/are other minimal Vi clones that are very small (couple of KLOCs). You'd be throwing away the horrible Vimscript, and sadly the community is married to it.

As a result your neat little Vim2 reboot thing will not be nearly as useful for a long time, so you've lost backwards compatibility for what? Cleaner internals? Doesn't really benefit the end user much. :)
I think the offense with YSV is that they are preying on the vulnerable. When a start-up is running out of cash and / or facing extinction they become desperate for money.

I would even go so far to say that money is rarely the real issue. Start-ups need to create the formula - insert $1 here, exit $2 there. Building a start-up is a lot of work and there are no quick and easy answers at any point, money may seem like the answer but in reality it can cause more problems then it solves.
Actually I know all about that patch and have commented in that thread. I tried that patch and vim segfaults. It's not the patch's fault, it's vim's fault. Checkout this response from Bram when one of the devs for that patch reveals an error:

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!searchin/vim_dev/kans/vim_...

It's clearly an unsafe operation that wont work with async/timed code, because the buffer may be null at that point, but Bram's response is how do you reproduce it? How do you reproduce it? It's a segfault on an unsafe pointer! It crashes vim. Anyway, the way to reproduce it and all the other segfaults I encountered is to develop a plugin using the timers in that patch.

So nope, vim is broken, and that patch will never see the light of day. Those guys put months of work into that patch and Bram is like "I don't have time." His instincts are right. The patch would ruin vim for anyone using timers.
signed up for invite. mharris717 at gmail
good stack exchange answer explaining various other tex/latex options - http://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/36/differences-betwee...
This looks very promising! Definitely going to give it a test run. Thanks for sharing.
Bill Gates has long seemed rather skeptical of the Internet. During his time at Microsoft, he only embraced the Internet to the extent necessary to prevent it from disrupting the Win32 monopoly earlier.
Great initiative, great work! Please keep this project alive. I will be looking forward for your progress :)
Helium gets you low density at standard pressure. I am guessing that they prefer not to construct hard drives as pressure vessels. Probably that makes thermal conductivity, among other things, a problem.
Google is in the business of organizing the worlds information and monetizing it through advertising.

If you are in the information business, Google is in competition with you.
> his time is much more valuable than his money

That is the case for everybody, for time is limited and money can be created arbitrarily.

Don't take my comment as an attack to the OP, I'm just stating that the situation is the same for everybody, and there are many people out there with less resources, but I claim their contribution is as valuable, if not more.
Php_mt_seed — PHP mt_rand() seed cracker
PandoDaily is a gossip blog that just happens to cover tech.
I love vim's keybindings and cant work without them. I really like sublime but i just cant leave vim's keybindings which makes me so much efficient. Last time I tried a vim emulator for sublime it didn't go so well. it wasnt as smooth and limiting. I hope someone perfects the vim+sublime combo because that would be killer.
That's true I would prefer a detailed blog post on the benefit of IRC for programmers.
Using PaintCode in production
How Oak takes the pain out of building Single Page Apps
Actually, it does: http://cl.ly/image/2Z2U080T0L2A
The challenge will be in getting the crazy compatibility that vim currently has. Given the pre-1989 C style syntax it probably still compiles on the original Amiga it was developed on. That's not really a good thing unless you use an Amiga still.
BlackBerry abandons sale plans, will replace CEO
That's why I said "(randomised)". The worst case occurs when the list to be sorted is already ordered and you select the head of the list as the pivot point.

Even though other algorithms such as Mergesort also have O(nlogn), Quicksort is normally the preferred implementation because it's relatively easy to do in-place and generally is the most efficient[1] of all the sorting algorithms.

[1]Not my field of expertise though, happy to be told I'm wrong.
If he really is bipolar (manic-depressive is an outdated term that most of us don't use) this sounds like a very manic period after coming out of depression. The truth is somewhere in the middle. If he sustains this for more than 6 months it might be sustainable, otherwise his mania will run out and the depression will set back in.
Your solenoid response time is likely to be much, much slower than the bit-banging rate of any modern uC. A standard PIC or similar would do fine (assuming it has the I/Os you need).
Actual power efficiency depends on the application of the CPU. If you have a use case that mostly leaves the CPU in an idle state only to react on occasional events, the F18A would probably be more efficient than the Parallela chip.
I would imagine they include a bladder of some sort to handle expansion and contraction due to temperature changes while the drive is operating, in order to keep the internal pressure fairly constant. That's probably a wider range of pressure change handling than weather systems would require. (There was a time when I knew how to do the math for that, but I haven't used my MechEng degree in a long, long time.)
1. That's probably illegal so if there was one it wouldn't be publicly advertised

2. If adobe weren't completely stupid (a big if admittedly) it will be infeasible to brute force (>100 bits of entropy)
Or just wait a couple of years until the block on using the brand on smartphones is removed and sell the name to Xiaomi, Huawei, or Lenovo.
There are many googlers who sincerely support free software, but Google the company is a business that has no particular interest in preserving other businesses or even business models.

Why would anyone expect Google not to eliminate its competitors?
Here's an interview with the founders of StatusPage.io and about how they built it. You might find it interesting. In the end they stuck with what they knew - Rails.

http://blog.leanstack.io/how-statuspage-io-was-built/
Ruby gem: table_print - explore and contextualize data
"There is no strict separation of content and style. This is mostly an issue for publishers that want to ensure a consistent style across articles in a journal. With LaTeX, academic authors can always reduce the margins or change the interline spacing to be able to squeeze in more half-truths."

Does this ever happen?
Okay, so they charge to attend a conference. Maybe the money isn't worth it. I don't see any mention of people having actually gone there, nor if the conference is actually a good thing.

Not recognizing the VCs from an east coast conference is hardly an automatic fail, in my mind. There's no shortage of financial companies here, after all.

A "scam" would mean that the people paying don't get what they were promised. This article doesn't claim that at all. It's just a bunch of people who think the price is too high.

YMV might be terrible, but this article is hardly convincing.
I was surprised there were tips to begin with. After seeing the crap-ads on his site, I expected a sign-up form asking $100 for his productivity guru webinar (a $300 value!).
Exactly what I thought about. I enjoyed Google Wave when it came out.

EtherPad was really cool as well - its functionality has been absorbed in Google Docs and elsewhere.

Today a key devops workflow I see on a daily basis is team-based HipChat rooms with deploy / alert notifictions and links to GoogleDocs, especially spreadsheets.

Which somewhat duplicates Goggle Wave - at least how I remember it.
Of course there are substantial subsets of UK workers that "can" stick to 48 hour working hours, but where "everyone" know full well their career is fucked if you don't opt out.

Major law firms, for example, where the expected level of billable hours might eek in below an average of 48 hours, but given the amount of non-billable time, it's basically impossible to meet expectations and get promotions if you don't opt out, and you'll eventually find yourself sidetracked so thoroughly there's little reason to stay.

My ex works in one of those places - one of the magic circle law firms -, and she keeps fantasising about opting back in once she's set aside enough money that she can risk having legal career go down in flames.

I live in the UK too, and work in IT, and have never seen a contract that even mentions the working hour directive at all. If I did come across one, I'd probably laugh in their faces and leave, as it'd indicate bad things about the working environment to me.

At the moment I work strictly 9-5 due to childcare commitments (though I do occasionally have to handle emergencies from home). As in, I leave between 5pm and 5.04pm or so, every day.
Monthly Review – October 2013
Interesting article. Despite the rise of technology are humans committing less crime ? I don't think there's a relation between technological development and morality unfortunately :(.