skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I am currently writing Ember.js in Action (http://manning.com/skeie). This book is, of course, through a traditional publishing company. Combined with the fact that this is my first technical book, my royalty rate is pretty low (10%). This is OK, as the book will reach a wider audience that I would on my own! So far, the book is approaching 2000 units in pre-sales (MEAP - Manning Early Access Programme), which make it the 5th most sold Manning MEAP of 2013 :)

I have started work on my next book project, which will be completely free and open sourced. This book will teach JavaScript programming to kids through building a Raspberry Pi powered remote controlled car (or or other vehicle). The content for this book is not yet available online and most of it will be created through a hands on 7-part course that I am teaching during the spring of 2014. You can find a bit more information about this book here: http://www.indiegogo.com/projects/open-source-programming-bo...
My only question is... does Gunicorn+Gevent work on Python 3 yet? Last time I checked one worked and the other only had a branch which you could use but wasn't in master yet.
That's true in the long run, when its value has settled to something far less volatile than it is currently. Today, storing value in it is investing/speculating/gambling.
What fundamentally changed in web design this year (and what's next)
That's definitely one important aspect. And even stuff not formally fossilized often becomes de-facto fossilized due to the way funding for development works. Things are often very bursty: a large library or piece of software may be written over a period of 2-5 years of concentrated effort either by a PhD student, or by programmers/research-scientists/post-docs hired on an NSF/DARPA/EU-funded research project. But then the PhD student graduates, or the project ends (and therefore its funding for programmers), and the software goes into much lower-staffing maintenance mode. In that mode there aren't resources available for anything but minor fixes. There are some very high-profile projects that are an exception to that pattern, because they're seen as important enough that they manage to string together continuous development for years or decades, either through a series of PhD students or a series of grants. But lots are more or less write-and-then-maintain. Despite being lightly maintained, if the initial work was solid and produced a reasonably "complete" output, it might still be useful to other researchers for years into the future, if it doesn't bitrot. Some of the R packages are a good example: plenty of stuff hasn't been touched in 10+ years but is still in daily use.
The fall of the wrist watch has a lot more to do with the rise of the mobile phone that has a clock (even "dumb" phones had the time). Regular people have an equal if not greater need to coordinate with each other than soldiers in war.
America Is Basically Irrelevant To The Future Of Facebook
Creating cookie cutters using offsets (and minkowski sums) in OpenSCAD
Mercurial is a big project. Surely there's one skilled C programmer who could write a relatively-portable, efficient, limited version of this feature (or find one, I assume something extremely similar exists in several flavors). Once that's done, have a Python fallback for those esoteric systems where it doesn't work, and move on with life. Since it's apparently a critical code-path, that's normal development for great performance.

I could easily be underestimating the difficulty of integrating C with Python - I've never done it personally, but I gather that's one of its strengths. But this seems like a pretty simple problem, which has a pretty simple implementation in any language (there's an included Python implementation on the linked page, ~20 LOC?), and if it's a critical performance piece it's surely worth the cost to make that piece.
The website was down for me at first but after 27 refreshes I managed to get it. Here's a mirror: http://pastebin.com/avMpRwrU
That is what we're talking about... They're problems that need to be addressed that pg has decided aren't his responsibility. That's the whole point of what we're talking about.

You don't need to mold someone from adolescence in order for them to be a founder or a hacker. It's not something you have to grow up with.
I copied it to a pastebin: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6992850
As many comments in that thread point out, byte arrays are not strings, and casually conflating or implicitly converting the two is terrible mental hygiene.

Explicit is better than implicit.
LTE-Advanced Is the Real 4G
And introverts. I've never understood the complaints about the South Bay being socially dead. I've got a very busy social life here with a number of friends within walking distance, it's just my idea of socializing involves going out to dinner or over to someone's house for Starcraft or board games or a movie instead of doing a pub crawl of half a dozen bars or having a raucous house party.
Show HN:PHP CLI MVC framework
The critique you link to comes from an academic.
I've followed NY insurance premiums in the individual and small business market carefully for the last several years, and it is very hard for me to see how anyone came up with the 50% drop statistic. The linked article doesn't really help unfortunately.

The only thing I can think of is that they are comparing apples to oranges. The standardized plans available in the exchange are somewhat different from almost all plans that were available last year in the private market. In particular, and surprising to many not paying close attention, none of the exchange plans downstate have any out-of-network coverage at all. Not even the usual and customary rate reimbursement. So while it's true that you could easily have paid $1000/month or more for an individual health care plan last year (and remember NY has even stricter community ratings than ACA, everyone pays the same) it isn't true that the same plan is $500/month on the exchange.
> With healthcare, the free market has clearly failed. The United States now has the highest per capita healthcare costs in the world, but not a commensurate level of health, ...

Because you aren't buying health. You're buying health insurance. It may come with free assumptions, but those are generally worthless, and they are not health either.

If you want a thing, you should buy that thing. Health insurance is not health, and absolutely everyone who buys health insurance gets exactly what they pay for: insurance. Whether that indirectly results in health depends on the individual policy.
Would you have any resources to recommend in regards to using LaTeX? I work with plain-text source as my default (Markdown, etc.), but haven't used LaTeX specifically.
I would be interested in physical/chemical sciences MRS, APS and ACS come to mind as examples of things with annual meetings which might have best paper awards.
Your peers cannot know if the data originated from you or you're simply relaying traffic. Thus, your IP address cannot be associated with tweets.
Some US dollars were paid to my paypal account; I won't convert them to local currency, but wait til I buy something in USD - and so avoid the exchange costs you mention. Meanwhile, my local currency works fine. Of course, the bigger the ecosystem for bitcoin, the better this works.

Credit cards are an incredible business for VISA etc. I agree with the article that circumventing it in some way, esp for micro-transactions, would be great. They probably should stop gouging, to deflate interest in alternatives.

It's a pity the press for bitcoin all bubble and crime. OTOH it is press, and niche adoption works.
There's not much more I can say that I haven't already said, as some of the conversations I've had were explicitly off the record. But I can say this, in a generic sense: All of the top accelerators will seek out people they want to attend and encourage them to apply. When this happens to you, as a founder, you're well aware that if you apply, you're very likely to get an interview and also very likely to get in. I can say on the record that this happened for me with Techstars Austin.

So the decision you're facing as you're applying, knowing what you know, having the conversations you've had, is not "Will I get in?", but "Do I really want to do this?" And that's when I found the frat-house aspect of YC to be discouraging.

(Edit: I suppose I should expand on that since people will invariably have questions. I'm a 32-year-old female. I'm in a different stage of my life than a 22-year-old who just got out of college. I didn't really want to deal with keggers full of falling-over-drunk guys, jokes about "chicks", guys hitting on me, etc. I'm just kind of over all that, and I'm weary of fighting battles I have no inclination to fight over casual sexism--I'd rather focus on growing my business, so I choose not to be around those types of people. Yes, you could say I'm painting YC with a wide and potentially unfair brush, but that was my impression.)

This year, I decided to do Techstars instead, and have no regrets about that.

Today, having gone through one accelerator with my company, I'm done with accelerators for this business and I'm moving on to doing a seed round. If I have another business that might be a good fit for YC, and they've made an effort to change (this article by pg is a good first step), I'd potentially consider it again.
Try talking with someone who grew up in China, not Americans who traveled there. The culture is different, but the government even more so. Remember this is a communist government which none the less worships at the altar of capitalism. A lot of behavior is illegal yet expected or even demanded. Leaders are more interested in getting wealthy or influential or even safe and less interested in wide ranging fixes to the country until there is no other way.

Also realize that most of the population that matters lives in a narrow band near the ocean and sometimes in terrible geography where screwing up water or air is easy. One thing might help in the long run, bad water and air affects everyone including the politicians who might someday realize they have to do something. You can ignore a river of dead pigs if you live elsewhere but choking on air is fairly universal.
Let's call it Domestic Arbitrage, increase your net worth while living cheaper elsewhere.
Yeah, it's definitely something that can be worked around, but it's something I don't have to get around in python2, so I keep using python2. Nothing truly major, just a sticky point.
Do a lot of folks here generally like Mac desktops? I've grown to like Macbooks because I do like working on a portable UNIX-y platform, and have had generally bad luck with Linux laptops in the past.

On desktops though, I'm willing to put more effort into settling software update issues/device conflicts, since I probably have to do that anyway to write performance-optimized code (depends on the exact purpose of the desktop though, but I do a lot of scientific computing). So a Linux/Windows split boot on a generic PC usually wins out. I used to do a lot of PC gaming, but that's really less of a factor now.
I had planned to castrate a hippo over the long holiday weekend, but now i'm taking it off my TODO list.
The PDF I linked to in my post above has a great deal of useful information. The commentary at the beginning is especially helpful.

If you're running a website where DMCA safe harbor protection is important, you'll want to discuss a compliance plan with your company lawyer.
> Utilities seems like a good use of Go

Can you elaborate? I'm unfamiliar with Go, but most of my Python (and Perl, sigh) coding could be classified as "utilities for work". I would have thought that any language with an explicit compile step would be at a disadvantage in this space.
Write the assignment using docs offline mode.
Print it out or email it from school. Or from a friends house. Or from the countless places that have free internet these days.
You can get some of this from Google Scholar's metrics pages, which list, for each venue, the most-cited papers since 2008. These indeed seem to be different than the best-paper selections, though I haven't examined this systematically. (I guess you could take the best-paper and look at its citation rank out of papers that year. But this raises other questions; for example, is the point of best paper award to select the paper that will be most influential?)

From this page, http://scholar.google.com/citations?view_op=top_venues&hl=en... , click "Subcategories" under "Engineering & Computer Science": for example, "Artificial Intelligence," "Computational Linguistics," or "Human Computer Interaction." It lists the most-cited-venues for each area, but if you click on a particular venue you get its list of most-cited-papers.

Here are a few that are also on Jeff Huang's list:

ICML: http://scholar.google.com/citations?hl=en&vq=eng_artificiali...

NIPS: http://scholar.google.com/citations?hl=en&vq=eng_artificiali...

AAAI: http://scholar.google.com/citations?hl=en&vq=eng_artificiali...

ACL: http://scholar.google.com/citations?hl=en&vq=eng_computation...

EMNLP: http://scholar.google.com/citations?hl=en&vq=eng_computation...

CHI: http://scholar.google.com/citations?hl=en&vq=eng_humancomput...

CVPR: http://scholar.google.com/citations?hl=en&vq=eng_computervis...
By your definition the Soviet Union wasn't a superpower.
And everyone knows that Barbour is the way to go :-) style tip dont wear them with the Barbour enamel badge on very non U.
I think there is a lot in technology we can change to make it more appealing. I hope to help facilitate that change with some of the things we're working on. If you're interested check out what we're doing, and what we will be doing in this next year:

http://www.techendo.co/posts/thank-you-for-a-wonderful-year

If someone has ideas, or wants to help out, reach out and let us know.
Another win against Zooko's conjecture!
After running every version of Windows since 3.1, I've decided to go Mac for my desktop. I run stuff on it 24/7 and have 6 external disks, so a MBP is out of the question. The cost of external enclosures, though, for the new Mac Pro makes it out of reach ($3000 + $2400 = $5400... I can put together a nice hackintosh for $1700).
I'd give bonus points for pointing out some implementation decisions:

-when searching is it better to use copy-make or move/undo approach ? (copy make is faster on modern pc's, at least for things like 8Q's, it's also much easier to implement as you don't need any code for undoing moves)

-what is the best way to check if given move (placing the queen) is valid ? (you need three 0-1 arrays for rows and diagonals in both direction this a neat trick, very difficult to come up with but which speeds the whole thing immensely)

-how do you break out of the recursion if the task is changed to find one solution ?

I know all those things because I am a hobbyist who wrote a lot of solvers and dabbled into chess programming. I am probably in top 0.1% of people if I get question like this. I am incompetent when it comes to things needed in most commercial applications as I've never worked on big commercial projects.
This question filters for people like me. I can't imagine how this a good thing for anything practical (unless the task is to produce the best chess program or something).
A little anecdote to add - just before Christmas, I ran into a Google rep who was doing customer research at an electronics store, observing customers who tried a Nexus 7 or Chromebook & noting down what they were most interested in (then offering to answer questions about the devices).

Once I told him I was a developer, he loosened up and started talking about their marketing strategy. He said that Google is pushing Chromebooks hard in 2014, and have been frustrated by stores not using the marketing displays they provide. (Apparently my city is a test market.)

Most interesting to me, he said the main use case he was hearing customers ask about was video chat. (Something which probably wouldn't show up in StatCounter numbers.) Customers were most interested in Skype, but if they'd settle for Google Hangouts, then they were particularly interested in the Chromebooks. (He also said many older customers were buying the Nexus 7 purely as a Skype device.)
As a biologist, where we emphasize publication over conferences, I am really curious as to what "best" means? Innovative? Most data to back hypothesis?
A site that lists both (building off this one) is http://arnetminer.org/conferencebestpapers
Everyone should agree that a college degree has some positive impact on future earnings. The problem is that the real cost of that degree has been doubling every decade for more than 30 years while the real earnings of college graduates have increased very little both on an absolute basis and relative to those without a college degree. Assuming college is worth it today if these trends continue it's net value (benefit - cost) will rapidly decline. This is a problem.
You are definitely correct; it's really the combination of py3 using generators more frequently (which is a definite good thing) with the py3 repl not evaluating them that keeps me going back to py2 for my repl needs. A more fair comparison is with ghci, which expands thunks and runs IO actions when functions return them. As others have pointed out, this can be "dangerous" in the sense of flooding your console with crap (try typing [1..] in ghci; its' annoying, but not the end of the world either), but it's also really convenient when that's what you want. The python2 repl/functions do what I want, and the python3 repl/functions don't, or at least don't often enough that I keep going back to python2 for all my repl needs. Just a random chunk of anecdata, I guess.
Civilians also tend to have a lot more clocks handy, even absent mobile phones. I'll grant, though, that wristwatches would've stuck around, as an acceptably convenient means of carrying around a timepiece, had not mobile phones with clock displays come along.

The point, in any case, is that there's nothing intrinsically special about wearing a chronometer, or any other information display, on one's wrist, such that "smart watches" are necessarily a qualitative improvement over, for example, "smart phones".
Be More Awesome Than Last Year #whatyouwishyouremembered
Eventually (soon I hope) internet connectivity will be truly like electricity.

I live in Silicon Valley, and based on my internet options (one sole unreliable option: Comcast), I have to say that we're far from the day that connectivity is like electricity.
Are you arguing that the inclusion of political opinions negates the value of the author's actuarial discussions? If so, why would that be the case? If the author's statements about actuarial science are incorrect, why not just say so?

Or is it that you don't trust the author, so you suspect the factual claims underlying his argument are false? If that's the case, then why not cite outside sources to demonstrate as much?
How much of the increased spending do we expect to be higher prices for the same care, and how much of it do we expect to be new types of care? Thus far there has been a lot of the former.
Ask HN: Can open source books be crowdfunded
I'm teaching a hands-on programming course for kids aged 11 to 15 this spring. The course itself will be held over 7 lessons with 3-week intervals. The idea is to teach kids to program in JavaScript using the awesome Raspberry Pi mini-computer to build a remote controlled vehicle. The kids will build, program and configure the vehicle themselves (in groups).

In the end the contents will be brought together and published as a free and open sourced book.

I have created a crowdfunding campaign for this project, but there is currently not that many backers. What can I improve to reach the funding goal, and is it realistic to reach the funding goal based on crowdfunding alone?

Link to the crowdfunding campaign: http://www.indiegogo.com/projects/open-source-programming-book-for-kids/x/5687072
Its actually quite accurate:

https://www.google.com/search?q=economics+private+vs+public+...

Free rider problems, tradgedy of the commons, etc. The best examples are conservation with regards to fisheries and sought-after endangered specifies. You have to give people an economic incentive, which usually includes some sort of privitazaion of the resource (for fisheries, tradable quotas).

I actually just read an entire chapter about this concept last night: http://books.google.com/books?id=lbOkUCVNSPoC&pg=PA31&lpg=PA...
This from 2010: http://www.nationalhomeless.org/publications/winter_weather/...
Says 700 annually, 4 of 700 is a bit more than 1/2 of one percent. I believe they got their number from this paper (http://www.bhchp.org/BHCHP%20Manual/pdf_files/Part2_PDF/Hypo...) or its source material.

More recent numbers from this blog entry (http://blogs.kqed.org/newsfix/2013/12/06/santa-clara-county-...) have the unsheltered homeless population in Santa Clara county (where four people died) at 74% of 7631 or 5647 souls living unsheltered. Four of them dying is a mortality rate of .7 people per thousand. Not a very likely reason for dying.

It isn't that surviving cold is "easy" or "hard", it isn't that unsheltered homeless folks are "ok" or "not ok", it is that death from hypothermia is a function of both exposure and duration, which is minimized in climates such as that of the Bay Area, so that the risk of death from exposure falls below that of death by being hit by a car (http://www.nbcbayarea.com/news/local/San-Jose-Leads-Bay-Area...) for example.
The spiral of learning
I fought my ISP's bad behavior and won
Apple Denies Working with NSA on iPhone Backdoor
Back in grad school, I took a configurable computing course where we were to solve the N-Queens problem on an FPGA. My short write-ups are here: http://people.cs.vt.edu/~scschnei/ece5530/

This was a computer engineering course, and I was a computer science student with no background in Verilog or VHDL. I think it took me about 30 hours to get a working solution. However, my solution is very limited, and shows how unfamiliar I was with thinking in hardware terms; other students in the course produced solutions which did not have my limitations, and they did it with much less effort. When I mentioned that to another student in the course, he looked surprised. When I mentioned I was a CS student with no prior experience with FPGAs, Verilog or VHDL, he said, oh, that's pretty good!
Hey Chris, I was trying to reach you to talk about Bitrated. Drop me an email (in my profile) if you're interested to chat about it and see if we can do something together.
To rephrase, giving everyone a blank check to pay for healthcare will never work.

Many countries that provide universal healthcare either have budget problems or financial situations not true of the U.S. (small size, proportionally large oil reserves). Even then, at the end of the day, someone still says no to some costs.
I would argue in this case that Bitcoin is likely to be more effective in a huge number of cases, not less effective.

I agree with the first part of your second paragraph, but I don't necessarily think it's going to apply here for any places where we see Bitcoin in wide deployment.
Does anybody know how much work is required to run Linux on this thing? I read some documents but found them complicated enough that I don't want to deal with on my daily computer. Also there seems to be driver problem related to thermal issues. So I ended up with virtual machines every time considering installing Linux on Mac.

Anybody running Linux on Macbooks or Mac Pro? Does it work well?
w be Walt Disney, the Person
d be Disney, the public company
m be Mickey Mouse, the fictional character

I can love w & m, but hate d.
I can love w & d, but hate m.
I can love d & m, but hate w.
I can love d, but hate w & m.
I can love m, but hate w & d.
I can love w, but hate d & m.
I can also be ambivalent to any of these, while hating/loving one or two of the other.

tl;dr: "hating Disney" (whatever that means) has nothing to do with liking Mickey Mouse, or with wanting to use its image. it simply is not related at all.