skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Lots of places log IRC and host the logs. That might not be your cup of tea, but it's far from hard.

In addition to privacy issues (many individuals don't approve of logging of what they perceive to be ephemeral 'hallway' conversations), there's the simple fact that these types of conversation don't lend themselves to well thought out messages -- as you noted with: "you can't really 'write up' something in IRC the way that you can compose an email."

Why not create a web forum/usenet/mailinglist gateway?

I'm sure nobody would object if you did -- Jive Forums (when the product still existed[1]) used to support both web-based and NNTP-based access.

[1] Jive Software was profitable[2] and engineering focused, and Jive Forums was a great product. They had both large and small customers, ranging from Amazon, Apple, and EA to numerous small businesses that required quality collaboration software -- jabber, forums, etc.

Then they took a massive, unnecessary $15 million investment from Sequoia Capital in 2007, hired a Chief Marketing Officer, completely fouled up their product line in "simplifying" it, and wound up having to raise another $12 million in series B funding in 2009 to keep the now-bloated machine running. They had to lay off a (reported) third of their staff in 2008 (but kept the 'CMO' position).

Waste of a good company with a solid set of collaboration products and a solid engineering team. Trimming down their product lines and raising their prices has left them out of reach of SMBs, and the "one size fits all" product completely ignores this straight-forward e-mail/forums/web problem space.

It also leaves a large market opportunity for someone to write a forums system that doesn't suck -- a surprising number of large corporations are still slaved to Jive Software's increasingly hefty licensing fees.

[2] http://www.jivesoftware.com/jivespace/community/jivetalks/bl...

Why did we raise the money?

Since the beginning, we have had a vision of open collaboration and how it can fundamentally transform the way a company works. Now the market is starting to agree with that vision and is seeing the benefits. We're proud of how we have grown this business over the last six years. We've been profitable since inception and have put good money in the bank. We have made our share of mistakes and missteps, but we haven't sacrificed our values and ultimately those mistakes made us stronger and smarter. This year we struck a mighty vein with Clearspace when we launched in February. Now the growth is in high gear and bringing on a funding partner is a step towards becoming the provider of choice in the market.
Ask HN: Learn Web design and frontend programming
I consider myself a good backend programmer with lots of experience. I'm very interested in learning Web design and frontend programming.

What is the best way to do it? Any good book/source code to recommend?
Ah - scam de jour. How nice to see the World's Best People haven't lost the touch.
Vero. Now there's a name not suitable for the Finnish market. Vero = tax. Then again, selling water to Finland would be like selling freezers to Inuits.

Nice logo. Applied here to the company website:
http://verowater.com/

Like heyitsnick, I also read the bottle as logo + "ERO".
The problem is that YC doesn't think that is a good way to find a cofounder. Founder disputes are a top way for companies to die and are more likely the less well you know your cofounder. Maybe a cofounder from the internet is better than no one, but the best cofounder is someone you've known for years and trust.
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A fine pocketknife has a very limited set of use cases compared to a Leatherman.

It also is actually good at a limited set of tasks, instead of just being mediocre-to-terrible at %90 of everything some bureaucrat thought might be useful 5+ years ago, all in a monolithic pile with awful configuration.
I wouldn't be that confident. D1 is a dead-end. If you ask a C++ user, he wouldn't drop C++ and a damn lots of libraries, IDE's, debuggers and industry support for it. I recently talked to my C++ friend writing scientific multithreaded stuff, and he was only convinced by D2.

Templates are the killer feature of D. There is nothing wrong in the emphasis on them.

Yes I agree that there are problems in D2. But there are much more problems in D1.

If I were you, I wouldn't do such an anti-advertisement campaign here. Instead you could have pointed at what you think are the problems with D2. That would be more constructive.
You're missing the point. The folks in the rural areas won't be able to use a computer in the first place, because the keyboards are in latin. I've never seen a Cyrillic or Arabic keyboard.
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>> ...the people that don't write programs in D at all (Andrei)

>> Walter Bright listens to Andrei (ok, a smart guy) but he doesn't write D programs

You stated twice that he doesn't write D programs. Well since you are mentioning Tango, it's unfair because he writes code for a _standard_library_. And he is writing a good code.
This sounds similar to the basic idea behind the psy optimizations used in the Vorbis encoder: the ear expects to hear something rather than nothing in a given frequency band, so it's better to play back noise in that band instead of playing nothing at all. In other words, energy preservation is more important than mere accuracy.

Of course, in this case, the logic is being applied to the audio stream as a whole, not just individual frequency bands. Since the voice activity detection is removing background noise, the lack of energy in the audio stream seems odd to the brain, so the noise has to be added to compensate.

The same seems to apply in dealing with images and video: the eye notices a lack of detail (blurring) more than it notices inaccurate detail.
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Ha, I was just googling a range of years along with keywords trying to find that very article.

Traffic Server looks to be well designed and implemented (especially compared to Squid), but it's still based on exactly the same idiotic 1975 assumptions.
This was entirely not what I thought it was given the title of the article. That is, I didn't expect this to be related to telecomms in any way.

... and now that we're on the topic of strange subjects involving telecommunications, I've managed to distract myself by listening to recordings of numbers stations again.
Unlike a student loan, I could simply refuse to pay back the 3%. In the relatively unlikely case a court held the contract valid, I could shed it in bankruptcy.

The downside case is much better with the "3% equity in a person" investment than a student loan.
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How I got to learn to type
Robin Hanson Argues from Authority
Greenland is warming up
Another fine evidence of how bloated Oracle is. Sorry, that's just my opinion. Why would you want to be able to do something like this in your datastore? Maybe a database-admin really wants to be a programmer?
Made a short URL
The dmd front end is GPL'd.
Facebook has extraordinarily good localizations, done primarily by their active users: http://www.facebook.com/translations/

Japaneses tastes are quite different when it comes to design, anonymity, and personal privacy -- and the divergent social network doesn't help anything.
CD quality audio at speech latencies

Don't exaggerate so much. Celt is good, but it's not magic. It certainly won't even be as good as something like AAC-HE -- which of course is intentional, since Celt's target is ultra-low-latency situations, which inherently results in worse compression. It also has to be relatively loss-redundant without the use of forward error correction, which introduces even more constraints on inter-frame prediction.

And of course one may note from http://www.celt-codec.org/comparison/ that it doesn't actually compete with AMR; it's easily 5-10 times lower latency (and higher bitrate as well). It's really just a totally different use-case.

proprietary

However crappy it is, I'm pretty sure I recall AMR being an open 3GPP spec. There's even a free software implementation (under Apache v2).
I tend to learn languages by writing compilers for them. I'm sure that isn't normal <g>.
D started 10 years ago. It's not a flash in the pan.
cross-link: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=913364
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Working with Noah was a great experience for me, and this interview is really great because it emphasizes a lot of the topics that came up during our burrito lunches together. It's great to see he's found some success and still loves to share his ideas and advice. Thanks Andrew for the interview!
APPLYING math is problem solving. And that is the hard part of math too. Or doesn't anyone else remember all the complaints in school about word problems.
Okay, first of all, you should apologise to mechanical_fish. Ad hominem attacks are not cool.

I agree it's a bit shady to sell reservations, and I would be uncomfortable to play any role in this (person in line, person buying, student selling, or restaurant employee), but how is it "dishonest"? That implies deception, and I see none.

Selling reservations definitely violates the egalitarian "first-come, first-served" nature of the restaurant queue. If I were a restaurant owner, I wouldn't let it happen out of fairness to the people in the queue who don't want to pay. Both choices send strong signals, certainly, but I think that's a choice on the restaurant's part.
One of the reasons I cannot stand VoIP and all those online talk things. Might be badly calibrated microphones of the users too though.
Memorization, at least in its meaning of remembering facts, is a necessary prerequisite of understanding, which is needed for effective problem solving. http://williambswift.blogspot.com/2009/03/learning-journal-a...
Well, let's see
Front-end programming is easy these days -- most folks are using jQuery or other similar libraries which insulate you from the problems with implementing complicated effects in various browsers.

Web "design" on the other hand is a vague term. Do you mean the graphic design aspects -- layout and graphics in general -- or do you mean the translation of layout and graphics to HTML + CSS?

If it's the former, then -- in my opinion, which really isn't worth much -- good programmers just aren't good graphic or layout artists. The two fields require diametrically opposed skillsets.

But if it's HTML + CSS, then that's just a matter of studying sites like cssplay, smashingmagazine, and csszengarden.
Depending on what you're doing, you can definitely save money and get similar service with Linode:

http://journal.dedasys.com/2008/11/24/slicehost-vs-linode

Basically, with Slicehost, you are paying to have 64 bit pointers - without that, the price difference isn't that big.
You have to remember that most MMOs are not economic sims, they have an economy minigame where people act silly with their virtual currency because it's not real life. Any steps to manage the in-game economy take away from designing more fun stuff that players may care about more.

Furthermore, I bet the only reason non-gamers pay attention to this stuff is because of third parties selling virtual currency and goods for real currency, which nearly all MMOs forbid.
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Great...Comment Got Down Voted...But Still i am struggling to find how this can be posted HN community....Everyone would wanna own a world record if possbile..but i dont expect a Hacker to be interested in beating this Breath Record..
lol, basic econ fail. life is not zero sum. WHEN will people get it through their damn head?

there are "sources" and "sinks" in the real world too. people constantly produce wealth, then consume it.

there is also artificial scarcity in real life: government backed labor unions (AMA, Lawyers, Teacher's Union etc), as well as regulation preventing competition in certain fields (medical insurance, banking, food and drug certification, DMV to a limited extent Pennsylvania has a privatized DMV, legal arbitration). I'm sure there's much more.
"Of course, I'm sure you'll find people fiercely arguing either of the products that have been competing for ages now, so trying to come up with a rubric based on your taste preference is pretty useless."

The only people still arguing are those who have not experienced the cola-nirvana that is RC cola. Interestingly enough even RC had it's own can label redesign recently, getting rid of its classy old-school look for a more modern one. The armchair designer in me preferred the old one, it seemed to fit the brand name better.

I remember back when it first hit me how perfect the logo design for the Nike swoosh was, it blew my mind. Ever since then I've tried to pay more attention to what companies are trying to portray through the images, fonts, and colors they use in their advertising and logo's.
That's a great read, thanks very much. It might be worth submitting the link itself to get a wider audience.
I wonder if talking on any phone puts you in a disconnected and disembodied world. Conversing on a phone is quite unnatural.
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I call ಠ_ಠ.com
I've tried several times to write a project in it, and every time I found some horrible bug, something missing, broken (OSX support is poor) or libraries turned out to be useless/outdated (dsource is a graveyard), or that I've chosen the wrong set (D1 vs D2, Phobos vs Tango).

I'd really like to use D, it's the non-sucky C++ I've been waiting for, but it's just far from being usable and reliable yet.
I don't think consumers will see it as being cheaper than free. I think they'll see it as something that's part of the phone (service) they pay for.
Try to substantiate your point, when you dismiss something as "easy to do". If it takes only 5 minutes, link to a better logo from iStockPhoto
Yes, it does. This is the problem with making phone calls while driving. Even if you use a headset to keep your hands free (as is mandatory in many countries), you are still so distracted that you are almost as likely to cause an accident as you would be if you drive while holding a phone in one hand and far more likely than when you chat with another person driving with you in the car.
I also don't think it's true. In addition to writing code for the std.* Phobos library, I think Andrei has been using D for data processing stuff related to his recently finished dissertation. He would make comments from time to time about this or that not performing well enough in std.*, and then go fix it.
FTA:
"The result of receiving total silence, especially for a prolonged period, has a number of unwanted effects on the listener, including the following ..."

Besides what is listed in the article, prolonged silence may result in media platform forcing disconnection. For example, that's why special RFC exists for RTP for comfort noise. However, not all user agents (neither all platforms) honor this rfc. Note that I use the term "media platform" for any media gateway or media server, that establishes and manages connections between two or more clients.
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Mini and Micro USB are similar but different:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Types-usb_new.svg

I've got various Card readers, HDDs, Hubs, etc. that take Mini-USB B, but I've never seen Mini-USB A or any of the micro ones in the wild. Apparently Micro USB will be used for charging mobile phones henceforth.
I'll give it a shot. For me, I think about e in terms of compound interest.

I.e. you have a bank account and put in a dollar. Its a great bank, they give you 100% interest. So, after a year, you have (1 + 1) = 2 dollars.

But wait, instead, they compound twice. That is, every 6 months, you get 50% interest. So now you have (1 + 1/2)^2 = 2.25 dollars.

Instead of compounding twice, they compound 4 times. So now you have (1 + 1/4)^4 = 2.44 dollars. Each time you get interest, its given in proportion to what you have in the account at the time. So, if they are compounding 4 times:

1 --> (1.25 * 1) = 1.25 --> (1.25 * 1.25) = 1.56 --> (1.25 * 1.56) = 1.95 --> (1.25 * 1.95) = 2.44.

(Please note: Rounding error. I just typed in to two places after the decimal point).

Why 2 or 4? Lets just call it compounding n times. As n gets larger, you get more money, but it doesn't go on forever...

For n times, the formula for how much money you have is (1 + 1/n)^n. What if you want to continuously compound? I.e. at every instant, growth is proportional to the current value? Well, then you would want something like (1 + 1/infinity)^infinity. But, we can't really do that, so instead we say:

lim (n --> inf) of (1 + 1/n)^n

And thats what we call e. Start putting in larger and larger values of n and you'll see that it converges to 2.718... The point is that e is pretty much defined as the number you get when you take a number starting at 1 and have it grow in proportion to itself continuously. Instead, if you use 5 instead of e, your growing too fast. In terms of johnaspden's explanation, you'd move too far around the circle, past (-1, 0).

Also, johnaspden, your explanations are truly great, really
helped me understand Euler's formula.

Edit: Small change.
Same applies for other emerging or obscure technologies as well (I'm looking at you Lisp).

This is so generic a remark as to be worthless. You do know Lisp signifies a family of languages, right? Of which most or neither emerging nor obscure.
Which doesn't necessarily contradict with the high score of the conversing couple. I think that they have a wider peripheral field than one person and they will pick up visual clues from one another - glancing &c. - where the person glancing (or whatever) perhaps didn't even notice.
Actually, there are widely used standards even for mains power:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEC_connector

C15/16 are widespread for grounded, C7/8 for non-grounded all over the world. I even use C16 distributers with C15/16 extensions to the devices at home (having moved repeatedly within Europe, this ended up being easier), but those are comparatively rare.

The article actually lumps almost all of Europe into one, which is an oversimplification. Leaving aside the Swiss and Italian systems, there are 2 at least types of grounded sockets in continental Europe, the Schuko and the CEE 7/5 (fr be cz pl, sk). Both are round with round and symmetrically placed neutral and live contacts, but the former has 2 springs at the side for ground, whereas the latter has a male ground prong. Luckily the plugs can be made to fit both (CEE 7/7), but that doesn't mean that all are. You may not have to worry about borders while travelling in Europe, but you still have to worry about plugs & sockets.
The Conet Project: Recordings of Shortwave Numbers Stations
And yet you get things like shavers that auto-sense the voltage and adapt accordingly in tiny form factors.
That was already feasible, this news is about punycoding of the TLD, punycode in the non-TLD portion was already allowed.
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Every keyboard sold in Russia has both latin and cyrillic letters on it.
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However, 'beta' IS the traditional word for this situation, it's just that Google (principally) has butchered and mutated the meaning of beta over the last few years, to the point where people view 'beta' as meaning 'open to all, but no guarantees' (except when it comes to video game testing, there the traditional meaning of beta stands).
the point made here is valid to an extend but tangent to the basic objective - A startup joins a seed fund incubator program to get to the next level & not get funded by the sponsoring VC. Thereafter if the venture displays potential it cant be ignored for long. Good ventures should not get too concerned about VC firms giving them a pass remember Canaan
Partners gave Google the pass
I happen to love my Leatherman.

And, there are no bureaucrats involved in the development of Squid. The Squid team are old friends of mine, and they are smart, competent developers working with a much larger set of problems and compatibility issues in a much larger codebase than most of us have to contend with, and they do a fine job of it. As is shown by the market leading position of Squid; it is the most popular Open Source web caching proxy server, by far.
I would rather go for beating the world record of breathing. Somewhere beyond 120 years, I think.
I do everything from a single core 4GB Win7 laptop and a 23" monitor. All my development work takes places by vim'ing on the production server running multiple webservers (one for dev and the other for live/staging).
...and newer Windows default on the local (i.e. cyrillic) layout.

Some clueless linux distros even install cyrillic layout as the only one; which is completely unusable of course.
Microgrids: A $2.1B market in the making?
I first did typing at school in an IT class (c. 1990) where most felt it was useless. I didn't realise how important it was, I think the teacher did, she was very prescient.

At Uni in 1994 I realised how important it was going to be and taught myself to touch-type. I think it was a little easier starting as I learnt piano from when I was 11 years old.

I don't type a lot day-to-day. My http://play.typeracer.com/ unpractised score was 50wpm at 96.2% accuracy (oh yeah and that site is good example of unregistered users mentioned a couple of days ago http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=910829). Though I found it a little hard as normally I'll type a few paras and then use spell-check whilst I proof read so the modus was a little forced.

---

there are plenty of touch typing resources only a bing away

First time I've heard MS Bing referred to like that!
I haven't upgraded my mac to snow leopard yet. Main reason is I'd like to know - do they have a way of getting a smooth, full-screen console on it yet? On leopard iTerm works. (You used to be able to get a plugin to make normal terminal do it, but this broke in leopard)
UK's Royal Mail threatens site offering taxpayer-funded postcode data for free
A major factor is the lack of context. When the people conversing are colocated, they share a context and their conversation respects their context. When the people conversing are talking over data pipes, they do not share context and their conversation subsequently does not respect the context.

For example, when I am a passenger in a car, I typically pause the conversation momentarily if the driver is trying to change lanes or exit the freeway. If I'm walking down the street with a friend, I might pause and stare at a clown instead of dumping a constant stream of audio into my friend's ear.
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He mentions that final instance variables incur a memory fence cost. Any reason for this? What's really going on there?
I've recently moved from qwerty to dvorak for similar reasons. Even though it's not yet been 2 months of dvorak training, I score around the 60wpm in typeracer.

One of the reasons I decided to try it was the same 8hrs a day excuse. I now have a hard time imagining going back to qwerty like someone that touchtypes has with going back to look at the keyboard.

Ps. I never understood why vi navigation is done with hjkl instead of jkl; - if you touchtype the classical way, it means you navigate with 3 fingers instead of 4.

Edit: correcting typos. I'm typing from my iPhone :)