skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: How do you come up with side project ideas?
Everyone says to scratch your own itch and build something you would use.

What if nothing itches? Maybe I just live a simple life and don't feel I have a need for much.
What I do have is an itch to build something.

Unfortunately my job has changed so much over the years I hardly do any type of development work anymore. My job is shifting more into an Ad Farmer role.

Recently I have begun work on an internal system for work and it has reignited my love for it. Every time I get in this mode I have an urge to build something but I hit a roadblock when coming up with an idea.

I don't care to build yet another picture/messaging/food review/ web app.

So my question is, how do you come up with ideas for side projects?
This was my experience as well. Inevitably, at some point during every long road trip, there'd be a period where I'd get reception for a while, and I'll be darned if it wasn't Car Talk. After hours and hours alone on the road, it was always warming to have them guffawing about whatever they were rambling about at the time. Brightened every trip.
Apple Watch vs. Rolex: Watchmakers and Fashion World Reacts
That is likely going to be a consequence of these actions. Digital security is a huge industry and is going continue being a huge industry for a long time. US companies are decreasingly in a position to market themselves as genuinely secure companies.

Companies that want to have credibility in the industry are going to need to bring themselves out of the jurisdiction of restrictive laws, or lose business to companies that have set themselves up in more friendly jurisdictions.
FreeBSD has the sysctl too. (oh, and openbsd syscall is called getentropy.)
The inventor, David Hall, is an interesting guy. He started off making subwoofers and among other things he invented the 3D Lidar system used by the winners (and second place) of the DARPA Urban Challenge. Also used in the Google self driving car.
Interesting to hear YC classes framed as "we help each other." I thought there was a fair bit of internal fighting to end up as a "featured startup" from the batch. Conversely, my startup just went through the Hackers and Founders accelerator, where each startup is given equity in the other startups in the class. This is a great incentive to help the other founders in your incubator.
yes, they both were. it is in the NPR article.
MySQL itself should not be the main interface; there should be some kind of model layer on top of that which does the translation of things like that, such as (for example) ActiveRecord if you were on a Rails stack. That gets you the best of both worlds.

OR you could store the uuid twice, once "natively" and once as a computed column. Searches on the native field would be faster vs. an index on a string column.

> you're presumably doing so so that humans can run ad-hoc reports (otherwise there are better datastores)

oh dear, someone has drank the NoSQL punch... Storing data relationally is NOT something only suitable for ad-hoc queries by end-users! :O
I'm not advocating warfare. Of course, peace is always best, when you can get it.

You can't always get it, though.

Nations have conflicts and need to resolve them. In descending order of preference, I would prefer they resolve them via diplomacy, economic warfare, cyberwarfare, covert targeted operations, conventional warfare, total warfare.

I am glad cyberwarfare exists, because -- unpleasant as it is or could be -- if a nation is trying to accomplish something it thinks is worth the pain of something further down the list, it gives a more civilized way of getting it done.

In a more general sense, war not at the absolute bottom of my list. Horrible as it is, I am glad it exists, because tyranny can be worse.
The bit about why humanity collectively seeks to measure time so accurately -- perhaps, because, in fact we don't really understand it at all -- is an interesting and salient morsel for us technologists to chew on. What do we do when we don't understand something? Measure it!
Real men scroll only with space bar (and shift + space) :)
TreeFrog: high-speed full-stack C++ framework for web applications
Someone should do a skit with people throwing Aerons into dumpsters.

Frame:
http://www.ikea.com/us/en/catalog/products/10117561/
+
whatever table top you want:
http://www.ikea.com/us/en/search/?query=table+top
+
bed risers if you're 6' or over.

Hard to break $200. These are geek sexier and some are adjustable:
http://www.simplifiedbuilding.com/projects/category/furnitur...
do you have one? in the demo I saw [1] the girl had to actually press the watch with her finger to get it to light up.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gQgbPWRbbOc#t=237
A comment of the article by Joey N correctly notes that:

Right now, on the top of Mount Everest, time is passing just a little bit faster than it is in Death Valley. That's because speed at which time passes depends on the strength of gravity. Einstein himself discovered this dependence as part of his theory of relativity, and it is a very real effect.

"Just to be clear, the clock in Death Valley appears to run slowly from the point of view of the eagle-eyed observer standing on top of Everest.

To a person in Death Valley, the clock appears to tick at precisely the rate it would appear to tick if both person and clock were on top of Everest."
Globetrotter Pico Iyer makes case for staying put
Well... Not really... They split the MNIST data set and trained on disparate halves. Which is to say I wouldn't generalize from two networks trained on far less than 10x their parameter counts all the way to all neural networks in existence, but of course, your opinions may vary...
Someone hasn't used Postgres. http://www.postgresql.org/docs/9.1/static/datatype-uuid.html

And anyway, all a UUID is, ultimately, is a big number. It's a simple transcoding to get it into base-10 integer format and back.
I too am stunned that someone has used their computer for many years without ever having to send SIGINT, but perhaps she only uses very well behaved applications?

It's not often however you have to send raw characters. Several of my coworkers didn't even know what that particular control sequence did when I quizzed them, so that doesn't surprise me at all.
6 Types of Businesses Bitcoin Will Enable for the First Time
Interestingly, most of my experience is in c#, but I've now got a side project that requires apps. I wrote them in Android and iOS. I looked at Xamarin as well, but I couldn't see the point of learning essentially a new framework. I figure whatever pattern you use (probably MVC) it will be the same on both. And the layout paradigms are different between them, so how is Xamarin going to fix that? My solution was just to use webviews instead of the native layouts (decided after bashing my head against both layout engines).

Anyway, my point is once you understand how things are organised, the language shouldn't make much of a difference. Especially not between popular, run-of-the-mill languages like c#, java and ObjC. Your devs could probably learn iOS pretty easily.
SRV records would help with load balancing and automatic failover – something you today need serious hardware and routing clout to pull off; something not even mid-sized companies can achieve. With SRV, these capabilities would be available to everybody.
Routine "is down" posts are not on topic for HN. HN calls for posts of intellectual interest, and there's nothing particularly interesting about this or that site being (or not being) down for a bit.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I listen to reruns on a regular basis, and what continues to amaze me about the show is their ability to "debug" cars and make it sound fun. They were always helpful, never looking down on the caller or the predicament they found themselves in. Us techies could learn a few things from them.

He'll be missed.
So is asm.js.
My takeaway from this and about 1/2 of AVC's recent posts is that he is long Bitcoin to the gills and wishes everyone else saw value in Bitcoin like he does.

FWIW, I like cryptocurrencies and believe in their utility, but I don't like Bitcoin. There's just too much mystery around its genesis. Will the real Satoshi please stand up?
Degauss a quarts watch and time will seed up!
I always wondered what happens to quantum entanglement when time dilation is involved. For example if one of the particles falls into a black hole, can we get info out?
I had mine in 2006 at 32. Details http://davidcrow.ca/article/1130/barcamper

Make sure you go your an annual check up. Figure out how to get some exercise. And pay attention to the warning signs.

Worst part for me was the 8 hours waiting for troponin levels. Well and the angiogram/pasty/stent.
State of Clojure 2014: Text Answers Analysis
I'm here representing New Relic - ask me anything!
Which language did you switch to?
You are correct, Credit Card users are not liable for legitimate fraud. About half of the credit card fees charged to merchants is to cover fraud.
Having lived in NYC too, the greed there trumps the greed in Silicon Valley. The greed in NYC is money for it's own sake. The greed in Silicon Valley at least has the pretense of creating good products. The greed in Silicon Valley requires creation of value in addition to capturing it. NYC is all about capturing in.

A $4,000/month apartment in Silicon Valley gets you a good school. A $5,000/month apartment in NYC gets you a public school where 90% of the kids fail the state exams.
Not a lot moreso than you'd see in a hovercraft, which are currently used in some jurisdictions (including locally where I live) for the kind of rescue work this technology is initially aimed at.

It's actually a pretty clever example of disruptive tech: it does almost everything a hovercraft does but is far closer to conventional tech and will likely be cheaper and lower maintenance.
Russia Takes Down Steve Jobs Memorial After Apple's Tim Cook Comes Out as Gay
That was not my intention, no.
Their calendar on the web can both import and export iCalendar feeds. I'm not sure about automatically writing back updates though.
Female Tech Founder Just Launched a Cool Campaign
Because that combination hasn't ever come up in any other application?
As a mostly backend Django dev who's only done front end with jQuery, I've been asking myself this same question but looking at other options as well. So far my conclusions have been

Angular: Hesitant because of the recent 2.0 announcement. It also doesn't doesn't seem to play as nice with other libs like jQuery. Also just don't like the feel of using it (this is a personal pref though)

Ember: Looks great, but rather complex and heavy handed. Between working for multiple clients concurrently, I don't feel like I have the time and mental capacity to really dig in at the moment. May consider in the future.

Backbone: Seems like a nice framework to organize your code + routing. Am wanting two-way bindings though.

React: One look at JSX and my brain goes 'yuck'

Knockout: I'm heavily leaning towards this at the moment. Seems like the perfect balance between shallow learning curve, playing well with other libs, and offering way more than what jQuery does.
I thought the reason time flows differently on top of Mount Everest is because the top of the mountain travels faster through space-time than the base (because of the rotation of the earth), not because of gravity...
My impression is that Silicon Valley (like NYC) is a destination. Move to St. Louis and everyone asks where you went to high school. Not here. It doesn't take long to make a name, and there's a tradition of helping "the next one."
Also may depend on what kind of watch you wear, like quarts watches are sensitive to magnetic field.
Ask HN: What are some great product design write-ups/reflections?
Reading the recent article about SoundCloud's product design process (http://www.michaelevensen.com/building-soundcloud/introduction/) makes me wonder what other great write-ups and reflections are floating around out there. What other articles have you read that break down the design decisions and challenges of (re)designing a great product?
We normally think of Strings as being a special case of an array, but arguably String<T> should be a fundamental datatype, and we could do away with Array altogether. In that case, having operators for add and remove doesn't seem so crazy, especially in light of the fact that vectors often outperform doubly linked list for insertion and deletion on modern hardware[1].

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YQs6IC-vgmo
In the sense that it's annoying a lot of Android users, it certainly is paying off.

What the current Android leadership simply don't understand is that there were a lot of Android users that bought Android devices because they didn't like iOS, not because they couldn't afford it. iOS 7 caused a critical mass of my iPhone using network to want to switch to Android, and now with Lollipop the reverse is happening, since if people wanted the iOS experience they might as well get the real thing.

Design fascism works when you're in a niche, but will never be mass market. Windows Phone is similarly lauded in design circles but mysteriously fails to sell, and this is why. The crowds praising all these "improvements" are the sort of people that actually thought Windows Mobile was not only tolerable, but a good idea.

My gut is Google think this is the only way to get iOS users to switch, and they aren't too concerned about existing users, but the side effect of this is that all of the major smartphone OSs have reached the same level of out-of-touch ness that we had prior to the original iPhone coming along.
This is a fascinating read, particularly because a few familiar names pop up...

>> (Knight collapsed on August 1, 2012 because of a little problem with one of their smart order routers)

No kidding :) For anyone interested in a good breakdown of this, Nanex has a pretty good one @ http://www.nanex.net/aqck2/3525.html
Redbox Instant actually shut down last month: http://venturebeat.com/2014/10/04/redbox-instant-is-shutting...
Better abandon any front-end JS, too...
>So I thought I’d highlight this fact that nothing substantial would change.

Nothing substantial, aside from the fact that world has lost one of smartest, funniest, and most humble people ever to provide untold hours of entertainment on the radio...

The show has been playing reruns for a couple years now (I thought this was common knowledge?), but Tom's passing is indeed a sad day. He was absolutely someone who embodied the hacker ethic.
Scaling Mesos: A Perspective Featuring Mesosphere, Airbnb, Ericsson and Others
Incredibly drunk.
Judging from some of the comments, people are still wondering.
Actually software developers have long been aware that different clocks can run at different speeds and tryto compare apples to apples.

Does anyone remember the name of that article that describes various clock synchronization techniques? I think it went something like "more than you ever wanted to know about computer time" and was based on an earlier similar title about another subject.
The Ramadan fast ends at sunset. The sunset ends later for people at higher elevation because you can see over the horizon a little bit more. Not because of the time dilation of gravity.
Be sure to klick through to the full simulator [0]. Here you can adjust values, steer the crowd (using a,w,s,d) and see the results at the same time.

[0] http://mattbierbaum.github.io/moshpits.js/
There are a lot of people talking about sea sickness but the reality is that sea sickness is usually a bigger problem standing still rather than moving. I could see some applications for bay usage, I would be pretty scared in the open ocean.
>Remember: Rails caught on like wild-fire because of it's mantra convention over configuration.

And Ember didn't... well, not compared to Angular anyways. ;)
Stuxnet didn't work though. Sure, it very likely damaged some of Iran's Uranium enrichment centrifuges and set their program back by months perhaps, but those months have passed. Iran has a fully capable Uranium enrichment infrastructure. They have the enrichment capacity to build bombs within a matter of months at most. All they need to do is take their existing Uranium stockpiles and run it through their existing enrichment infrastructure. Claims that it would be "oh so difficult" for them to build bombs are Iranian propaganda at best.

Iran has been very savvy here. They've built the capacity to become a nuclear weapons power on a moment's notice without actually putting weapons in service or having nuclear weapons tests. So far they've avoided the worst negative consequences of acquiring nuclear weapons.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HW0_D83NLfQ
High-achieving teacher sues state over evaluation labeling her ‘ineffective’
Seems to me they haven't built a clock: they've built a tricorder.

Put an array of these in a box. Then computationally map the changes in gravity from each clock. Bingo presto, you've just created a 3-D model of the mass in the local area.
This appears to be a simple rebrand of Aurora with some extra features[1].

[1] - https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1076914
Rest in peace Tom... I like to think you've now been reunited with your beloved Black Beauty :)
No one's absolutely certain, but the following article makes a pretty good case for Crypto AG:

https://web.archive.org/web/20080101082631/http://www.inteld...

Edited to add:

I tried chasing down a few of the links mentioned in the comments of https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2008/01/nsa_backdoors..., but I hit some dead ends and lack time to give you further detail. Sorry about that. As far as I can tell, the original report comes from Der Spiegel.
Imgflo: on-demand image processing used on the Grid
Quite real
It's like Java 9. That hasn't been released yet. But so is C# 6.
Even on a high-end phone all that fancy js uses a lot of battery. Some "mobile" sites cause my phone to get warm. I don't like visiting them because it's like I can feel my battery draining.
Good grief, they sure are desperate to turn their most useful apps into activity streams. The day I have to scroll past an ad to check an appointment is the day I stop using Calendar.
If we designed houses around planck lengths as the unit of measurement, we'd get nothing done.

It's not that timekeeping gets meaningless- it just means that there is a threshold where the variability of unsynchronized clocks disrupts certain highly precise problems.
I feel the same about certain things, like video or music stores. It was kind of an event in and of itself to get up and go somewhere, maybe with friends or significant others. You could potentially meet new people, discuss movies or music with a total stranger.

"Honey, what do you want to watch?"

Before Netflix: "let's go to the store, see what we could find. Let's stop on the way, get some ice cream." Invariably you also run into someone you know on the way.

After Netflix: "I dunno, just pick something."

I'm not saying I miss Blockbuster or I under-appreciate the convenience of Netflix. I just miss that tiny sense of adventure.
This what it felt like with Combimatrix http://www.evaluategroup.com/Universal/View.aspx?type=Story&... who are still around but had a pivot and change of leadership.
Lots of "great" stuff in this post.

1) Problem only rich people have (sharing Nets season tickets)

2) Talking his own book (slavish praise of the Coinbase mobile app; Coinbase is a portfolio company)

3) Mentioning irrelevant Bitcoin features (tracking ownership of the tickets is the least difficult problem he presented and could be done trivially on a centralized server rather than using computationally inefficient colored-coin techniques)
HomeAway Sues San Francisco to Block So-Called ‘Airbnb Law’
Yup, and they warned me not to follow in their footsteps. I didn't listen, though.
I think semantic web could benefit from not using a blanket definition. it could be driven down further, like semi-structured query language, or aggregated data collection etc.
Having reflected on my own question for the past 20 minutes I'll add the following.

For decades programming languages struggled with how to persist object state. We built custom file formats, tried to serialize object graphs, built ORMs to map to SQL databases, but it took us three generations or so to get ORMs right.

Today's struggle is how to program a distributed application. First we built the server to render dumb html, then got smarter and added some glue like JQuery to the client, now we are onto full fledged client side frameworks. But we haven't fundamentally solved the productivity challenge to generate a rich client experience that leverages the work done on the server. I can't help to think that a unified programming model between the server and client frameworks could become a significant step forward.
Googlers Say Their New “Material Design” Guidelines Will Unify Android Apps
It amazes me that our master clocks can be so accurate and yet our devices, which ostensibly get their time from the master clocks through networks, can be so off.

My Android phone is very frequently 30 seconds or more off from my friends' iOS phones. I don't even...
It's gravity. The mountaintop doesn't travel faster through space-time. There's no such thing as absolute speed, there's only the velocity compared to something else.

Special relativity covers time dilation due to relative velocity, general relativity covers time dilation due to gravity.
Linux Outlaws – Nothing Lasts Forever
Dunkin’ and the Doughnut King
> "With C# I can get all the goodies on customer projects.
"

And F# can cover the rest if needed.
Thanks! Clearly missed that when I skimmed.
I don't know what "well typed" means, but I assume you mean something like "correct use of the type system". If so, then 4 is "correct" in the sense that the type system eliminates or mitigates certain categories of programming errors, but not all categories of errors.

FWIW, I don't know Haskell, but off the top of my head in Ada if I couldn't use a subrange type, I might use a Contract (Pre or Post condition) to insure I was iterating correctly, if I thought to include one without appropriate caffenation.
It's not about that, it's about manufacturers going for the low hanging fruit first if they are restricted to selling a small limited amount. These manufactures in my example have already gotten the economies of scale by developing for their local market, so on a marginal basis, it doesn't apply in this metaphor.

On a cost basis, those unit construction costs are around $200k for a 3 bedroom 'family' condo vs. the $1 million that a condo would currently cost today in the SF bay area. Big difference and actually affordable for a $70k/yr annual income vs the $335k/yr income required for a $1million dollar condo.
Work on someone else's side project. I think we too often ignore this as a possibility. There are tons of people out there with an awesome vision/idea, but without the resources to achieve it. Find an awesome open-source project that is busting at the seams with issues/PRs and lend a hand.
> No it's not because MSI packages and EXEs are signed

Is it more difficult to provide your own fake exe installer than to middle-man https that curl examples use?
doesn't change the facts that it is expensive and the benefits are useless.
Have you tried something like f.lux ? it can remove the black spectrum of colors from computer/tablet displays ,and they claims there's research that this is the spectrum most critical for messing up with sleep.

With regards to eink web-apps, don't forget you'll also have to fight the keyboard if you'll even get one. So it's hard to design to that medium. On that note, there's the onyx eink phones/tablets that have a version of the play store, but their only unique apps are rss reader and google calender. But maybe sniffing around onyx and their users will let you discover usable apps.
if there is one company to trust in the bitcoin world, it is trucoin.com
I know the two co-CEOs and founders personally since 5 years and they have built an excellent bitcoin company