skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You might be thinking about Latitude, another rejected iPhone app by Google. "Apple requested we release Latitude as a web application in order to avoid confusion with Maps on the iPhone."

http://googlemobile.blogspot.com/2009/07/google-latitude-now...
There is often a good leverage mechanism if you can do more than one thing well.

For instance, has the biology guy a suitable background for bioinformatics?
My first thought too - this also might be a perfect fit for something like vaadin where you do everything on the server side and push it to the client gwt for rendering.
Yankeeracer,

It is my observation after 5 years in the coffee house biz is that it is an inherently low margin situation.

You can't charge for wifi since the other guy gives it away free.

Alternative business models? I chose to sell more food in addition to just drinks.

I tried shows but that just drives out the regular customers.

The main thing is just educate the customers so they care about the business and support you willingly. Get a big selection of drinks, bottled etc, so people can get what they like.

The money maker is probably booze but I am not going to go there since it would significantly change the atmosphere. It might also cause problems given that we are open 24/7 and the alcohol license people might not like that.
You can get GPS coordinates from web apps on the iPhone using the HTML5 geolocation API. (But no, you don't have full accelerometer access, or push notifications, or various other native app capabilities.)
Tell them to start from their domain. Find a simple problem that could be solved using a command-line utility (ex: bioinformatics tools). Pick a scripting language (Python, Ruby, Perl - any big one will do since they don't have deep coding knowledge yet). Read an intro book, tutorials and create the command-line tool. If they found the language intuitive to them, great, otherwise try a different language. Then, incorporate storage using a simple in-memory or local database like BerkeleyDB or SQLite - the key is to focus on the SQL rather than db admin. Then, consider how you might create a web application for this tool (sure, it could be a stupid example of a webapp, but again the goal is keeping things simple). Maybe, a mobile app?

Hope the pattern is clear here. Tackle each bit as simply as possible to quickly build a wide range of skills and also find out where their interests lie. If something is especially interesting, go deeper.
I'm seriously considering the newest Herman Miller Embody, Aeron, or maybe the Steelcase Think.

Love the look of the Embody, willing to spend $1,200, and reviews so far are great but is it worth the extra $$ over the Aeron which has been around longer and also has great reviews.

I sit at home for hours at a time per day and been using a $200 Staples chair. I've had bad back and hip discomfort for years which I've gotten pretty used to but now starting to really hate. I probably should have spent the money on a great chair form the beginning.

Would love to know what you end up with...@jsmakr on Twitter
If redraw speed is a problem, perhaps in-browser vector graphics (SVG, VML) would be a better solution than raster (Canvas).

There are probably a few libraries around for this sort of thing, but the one I've had experience with is Raphael: http://raphaeljs.com/

It should mean less time redrawing the map because you can just reposition the elements on the screen dynamically.
Student groups typically in my experience don't have any money. Administering 'reservations' is a PITA and I think you would end up dealing with no-shows and pissing off drop ins and regulars.
if you spent all day running and resting/drinking water from running, you could do it.

Well, I am a Marathon runner. I know what burning 3000 extra calories in a day feels like. There is no way I could do that every day, and the average person is a LOT less fit than me.

Exercise is important for many reasons, but fat loss is mostly about the diet.
Ask HN: What would you love to work on?
We all either do or do not work on stuff we really care about.

If you do not, what would you love to work on.

If you do, what are you working on?

It can be hacking related or anything else.
It's also a question of motivation. I'm sure I burn more calories mountain biking given the fact that several times I've gotten to the top of a hill and then puked. I've never pushed myself that hard running.
> to narrow it down even more, go with JavaScript. It's a lot like Java, which is a lot like C#

You are high as a kite.
It's true that the computer requires a precise formulation of what you want it to do, but I'd submit that current programming methods are very far from the so-called minimum description length limit, where we'd be telling the computer nothing but what we want it to do. A framework for encapsulating different problem domains would help, as there are far fewer problem domains than there are programs.

If anyone seriously thinks that traditional procedural languages (even the more concise ones ones like Python and Ruby) are going to scale for another fifty years, they're on glue. We can't go on like this.
They're kind of fun to look at, but I guess I don't really see the point.

What are these supposed to illustrate?
Let's not forget the role that Nike has played in this by popularizing the running shoe based on perpetuating the notion that padded soles reduce injury when in fact the effect is the exact opposite.
or you could just install zsh and the problem is solved.
I think for me a higher burn rate isn't motivating; it's operating without a safety net and worrying about seeing your baby hit the ground. The money that I've invested in my own company isn't what I'm worried about losing -- it's the > 1 year of my life that I've put into it. Ultimately, my life, to me, is a much higher value currency than the US dollar.
A coffee house is attempting to be an open public space while making money on the drink concession.

Some people think it's just fine to take advantage of the public space and not use the concession.

Those people are clueless or jerks and fail to understand that the space is only as open as the owner wants it to be.

It's a fine line.
My experience, as a developer in huge multinational that has been involuntary moved into QA: it sucks. You might need sysadmin skills but not dev skills. You don't get to solve the problems, just identify them. If you do overstep the boundaries by suggesting a solution, you'll quickly be put back in your place. And lastly, although the automation carrot is often dangled the deadlines are always tighter than the human resources for manual testing so you'll just have to test it over and over and over again.
Ask HN:  How to reduce sloppy mistakes?
Hi,

I make a ton of sloppy mistakes when I code. Stuff that leaves me kicking myself when I spend 20 minutes trying to debug it. Even though I've gotten better at programming, the number of sloppy mistakes I make is still way too high and its my biggest time drain.

I think part of the problem comes from writing code, glancing through it quickly, and then testing it with a large number of "F5s". I'm trying to get away from this and am reading my code more thoroughly before testing to see if it works. Anyone struggle with the same issues? HOw did you improve?

Thanks!
CopyGator - Catching duplicate content & plagiarism in the Blogosphere.
Actually, I suspect the point of the article is to help fat people feel better about being fat. People (especially American people) need reassuring that nothing is ever their fault.

You didn't get fat by eating too much because it's all determined by genetics, and you actually have a medical condition. You don't need to worry about trying to lose weight because it's been scientifically proven that you can't. That's why those diets failed. Not because of any fault or lack of determination on your part.

I have no idea why it works this way, but I've observed it happening all my life, so I've just accepted it as the way things are. Not surprisingly, living in Europe, where being fat is generally considered to be a condition you got yourself into all by yourself, you don't tend to see many fat people around.
1. Get a good editor, and watch the syntax highlighting.

2. Start unit testing your code, there are plenty of libraries available for this.

3. It comes with experience.
We have frameworks for encapsulating different problem domains--they're called frameworks, libraries, DSL's, sometimes full-fledged languages of their own.

Sometimes they are called operating systems: if you want to tell the computer "play chess with me" it's a simple matter of opening a chess program.
I've had that problem, too. I generally leave the top 2 pages empty and blank for that reason.
I would say get better at using a debugger and/or use a higher level language.

My guess is that worrying too much about low-level correctness while writing your code could lead to very poor productivity and even OCD.
HTML5 apps on the iPhone can:

- cache HTML, javascript and images for use offline
- use HTML5 SQL data storage for offline data storage
- use 2D and 3D GPU-accelerated CSS transitions for fast iPhone-style animation
- hide Safari's UI when launched from SpringBoard
- request GPS location information via JavaScript
- receive orientation change events for UI switching

The main downside for Google's purposes would be the inability to read contacts off the phone, but they'll probably excuse that by suggesting that people sync their phone directly via their ActiveSync support.

My first (admittedly minor) iPhone app will not be written to the native API. Too much bullshit with Apple at this point to deal with.
SFTP/SCP and other applications that use SSH for transport encryption work by invoking commands once they have a shell on a remote machine. (A user can be given a shell that limits the commands they can execute to only those needed for such services.)

The problem occurs when an admin does not know what the daemon they are running on their machine does. The article is placing blame on the SSH daemon maintainers for making it easy to run their daemon in a way that exposes features that the admin would not want to knowingly expose.

So blame could be placed on:
* the admins who unintentional leave their machines using such configurations
* the developers of services which function over SSH, for using a design that makes it easy for an admin to unintentionally use such configurations.
* the developers of the SSH daemon for not designing their software to prevent misconfiguration when it is used to encrypt the communication of other services

[excuse me if I sound hostile, I've had a fairly bad day]
Why Exercise Won't Make You Thin

10 Sex Tips To Drive Your Man Crazy

Jon And Kate What Now

Bat Boy Born in Boise

Subscribe to HN and get headlines just like the ones on the magazine rack in the checkout isle of the grocery store!
It's not a computer keyboard, but there is a good use for this that's been around for years - midi piano keyboards.
That's how the government operates, too. The government doesn't actually alter things--it just prohibits their publication or distribution. In affect, the government (and Wal-Mart) delegate the actual alterations to the producers of the content, which is a nice gesture but still censorship.

(The government does actively censor soldiers' letters home to remove sensitive information.)
You need _why's syck library:

http://github.com/why/syck/tree/master

http://pecl.php.net/package/syck
This Gary Taube is an idiot. Here's how it actually works: you notice yourself getting fat over a period of weeks, and then you correct it over a period of weeks. It's a process of continual adjustment. You don't weigh yourself once every 10 years!
The first paragraph of the post explains, "it’s my first, real foray into Haskell."

If your first real program in any language was a Tetris game, you'd probably need some help getting started too.

As shown by the various games posted elsewhere in this thread, there are perfectly trivial and straightforward ways to write games in Haskell. If nothing else, Haskell's "do notation" makes it easy to safely mix imperative programming with pure functional programming.

When people do post about writing a game in a new language as a notable achievement, it's usually because they did it in part to learn a new language (as in this case) or a new concept (like using FRP or Erlang-style message passing, instead of imperative programming with mutable state).
That would make for a great submission, really enjoyed reading it.
Are science fiction/fantasy writers insane?
First let me state that I don't think there's a role for government intervention in the case of the iPhone or iTunes right now. I am absolutely advocating for people to make a decision not to own Apple products based on the way they are treating their customers.

Now to the point. I think maybe you are misunderstanding what I mean by information asymmetry. Obviously there is a trade-off between the consumer's right to know and a company's or an individual's right to privacy. I don't think anyone would say it's ok to force SJ to open his inbox in order to have that information spread widely.

But there are times when the benefit of open information outweighs the cost imposed. And sometimes the only way to reliably eliminate information asymmetries is for the government to step in, because the free market isn't capable of self-imposed openness.

Consider cigarettes. No, I wasn't born with an inability to discover that cigarettes are highly addictive and likely cause lung cancer. I could have done a bunch of research and maybe run some experiments to determine those things. But before the landmark Surgeon General's warning in 1966 tobacco companies had pretty effectively suppressed that information. Things started to change when that warning was required on every pack of cigarettes so that every consumer was at least aware of the risks of smoking.

This is the kind of information asymmetry that the government (and you) should care about eliminating. When companies wield (political, economic, etc.) power to keep consumers in the dark. No we're not disadvantaged from birth, we're disadvantaged due to lack of resources. I think you'd be surprised how bad many aspects of our lives would be without government intervention in a lot of information asymmetry situations.
When this first came out, I recall bypassing print quotas at my then-campus by finding the ip of and connecting directly to one of the many printers. May I be forgiven, the printer rolled on for what seemed like a half-hour, deposited 100 pages. I took them in a stack to the campus print shop and asked them to cut off the white edges. I'm sure they flipped through - 100 whole pages of dots - and wondered what the hell I was doing, though they didn't ask. A fun time ensued, me carefully taping the whole thing together across the corners. Went ceiling to floor, with a row or two to spare. I later sent the picture in, and was pleased to see it marked "cool" - last time I checked it was in the page 40's.

My friend, she had sent me a picture of Natalie Portman in these sweet retro headphones the day before. I didn't really think far ahead, since I could always print another off. I never did, though. After I put it up, and the sense of accomplishment wore off, I realized I wasn't the sort to put lone wall-high posters of girls up in my room, even with dashing headphones. Not that I didn't think she was very pretty. It should have been Vonnegut, Derek Parfit, Schopenhauer (it's his hair I admire most), David Hume, Licklider, though I didn't know most of them then (not that I truly do now). Natalie remains in one of my boxes of papers, folded into an immaculate stack.
> e) I want a firefox extension that lets me suggest alternate or additional meanings to chunks of text. In this particular case, entire paragraphs could have been condensed to a zero-byte string. Someone get cracking.

Nuke Anything would do the trick for this particular case.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/951

For the general case, firebug will let you modify content on the fly: http://getfirebug.com
If I were them, I'd ditch the project now. IE support is not their problem. Everything they're doing just screams "this is my first try at game development", as well as "this is my first try at DHTML", and they've bitten off more than they can chew.

As it turns out, IE's rendering engine is actually faster than Firefox's. I know this from having written a pretty heavy Canvas-based web application recently, and from a dozen years of writing video games for browsers. If he were to ditch FF support, he'd actually have a better shot of getting this thing working.

But really, he doesn't have a chance, so the point is moot.
How about links to any random thing (tetris, etc) implemented in Haskell?
Wow, well that was a great rebuttal. Perhaps you should review logical fallacies. If you'd like to disagree with what I say, attack what I say, not me.
Excellent article. I like how the author's head turned to Star Wars at the face of death lol. I wonder if there's any similar kind of deviant thinking among hackers.
I'm not sure you need a jre.

Eh? How do you run a Java applet on a system without Java (Java Runtime Environment)?
The study referenced in the beginning (with the 4 groups of women) did not sufficiently control diet. OP: <i> All the women were asked not to change their dietary habits... </i> They were asked, but did the women comply? Not likely, due to the compensation problem.

Bottom line: Regulating exercise without regulating diet is not likely to produce results. I don't think this is news.

It has been shown that one's metabolic rate has a certain momentum; it naturally seeks an equilibrium that is different for everybody. Exercise a little more and your body will crave more food; eat a little more, and you will naturally burn off the excess. (For most people).

If one desires a physique that differs from their "natural" state, one must very carefully control BOTH exercise and nutrition. Both are usually necessary to lose fat and gain muscle. And this requires discipline. One cannot exercise regularly and then simply "watch what they eat" and expect certain results. You need to eat certain foods at certain times in certain volumes. Amazing results can be achieved.

"natural" because there is nothing natural about having close to zero food scarcity. Most people eat whatever they want, which happens to be WAY more than they need, which isn't really "natural."

Recommended reading:
- _The Paleo Diet_
- Precision Nutrition, http://www.precisionnutrition.com/ - their forums are highly recommended.
I agree with the suggestion to drop IE. If someone is willing to dedicate enough time to play through a Civ game, they're probably not at work and probably willing to install a third party browser, so you're not sacrificing too much potential "market share," and saving yourself some grief; assuming Canvas performance is sufficient on FF3/Safari4.

Some other suggestions:

* Investigate multipart XHR

http://blog.digg.com/?p=621

This is "bleeding edge" and may not, in the end, work, but it'd be worth looking at the work Digg has done w/ multipart XmlHttpRequests (cramming multiple objects/files into a single XHR). The demo they've posted works pretty well in non-IE browsers and it looks like they've laid the foundations for supporting COMET-like delivery of objects over a single request, and have thought about how to address client side caching of objects.

* Business model?
Is this just an OSS project or an attempt to build a business (or both)? I could imagine a small business that might generate enough $ to pay some coder/admins & some freelance graphic artists to work on the open source part of the code by providing easy-to-set-up on demand game servers for multi-player FreeCiv games, perhaps w/ a sister set of web apps for collecting game stats/organizing games/etc.

Good luck!
"A deep understanding of the inner workings of personality genes is not required."

So, personality is genetic? Do you have any evidence to back this up? Show me some scientific papers on this, please.

"You could just use a machine learning algorithm to identify the sorts of sequences that tend to work well together."

Sorry, but that sound ludicrous. We already know what works well in relationships. If women stayed thin and hot for many years after marriage, and guys actually worked around the house and listened to (or pretended to listen to) her concerns, that would be a huge leap forwards. You're assuming that nature plays any role. Well, maybe the initial "spark" has some genetic component (hell, if she's genetically "blessed", any non-gay guy will feel that "spark"). But relationships require work. You don't get that with DNA sequencing.

Having said that, maybe your DNA sequencing and matching would work in other domain. Honestly, I think that dating is the worst possible application for it. It would be more interesting to use that approach for wine-making. You start mixing various grape types, you see what comes out of it, and then use that machine learning approach to predict what mixes would work well.
Never use a 3rd party library to do your core functionality.

This guy's whole project is going to revolve around DOM and Canvas stuff in Javascript. He needs complete control over that, so relying on somebody else's library for it will kill him.

If you're building a business app and need graphics for reporting, then sure, use a library. Use jQuery even. But if you're building a video game, you're going to need to do this stuff yourself.
Ask HN: Any good free HTML/CSS templates for a Web app administration GUI?
I am aware of the Pilu Web app theme (http://github.com/pilu/web-app-theme/tree/master) but I simply hate the way its HTML is laid out. And I know of http://www.webresourcesdepot.com/free-admin-template-for-web-applications/ which doesn't thrill me either. Any other suggestions?
Some good advice already.

Don't try to always be coding. You need to have total focus when you work. If you work when you don't have it you are just creating more work for yourself later. It's a net loss.
UK national ID card cloned in 12 minutes
Try setting yourself a mental challenge of having a subroutine/code snippet work the first time you run it. Start very small. You'll be surprised at how hard this is, and trying this repeatedly can build good habits of reasoning about code.
Any advice on how to get started on a DIY notebook?
hope you read this, screenshot: http://dl.getdropbox.com/u/421955/netbook_vim.png

Of course I don't think you'd enjoy coding on a small laptop (netbook), if you don't follow some recommendations (which I think are good recommendations anyways):

* limit your code to 80 cols

* limit your code to less than 400 loc

Actually on my main laptop I get 34 loc full screen (I try not to use full screen), on my Dell mini 9 I get 31, not bad at all!
You just need the following: proper editor, proper debugger, years of painful experience.
So you need to BOTH watch your eating and exercise. Color me surprised...
All I know is when I exercise regularly, I'm thinner. Just about everyone I know that exercises regularly is thin (and healthier). There are a few exceptions.
Write tests before you code, and spend more time planning software with pen and paper before you actually write it. If you're having doubts about your abilities or solutions and work as part of a team, ping team members or friends.
A Failure of Understanding - A response to "The Start-Ups We Don't Need"
Don't use a debugger - think when something doesn't work. The feedback you get by thinking about your own code teaches you much faster than anything you get with compile/run/debug cycle.

"I think that without a debugger, you don't get into that mindset where you know how it behaves, and then you fix it from there. "
http://linuxmafia.com/faq/Kernel/linus-im-a-bastard-speech.h...
If you want to roll your own most full service copy shops offer several types of binding.

Before I got a tablet/ebook reader I would regularly print out documentation and get it 'perfect bound' with a heavy card stock cover sheet.