skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm really not clear on where we disagree at all. We seem to agree that:

1) Reading keyboard input and clearing the screen can both be executed via a ROM command.

2) Doing these things otherwise would have made the program bigger.

Am I right that we agree on these? If so, I don't see how you don't agree that:

3) Having both of these as ROM commands helps make the program smaller.

As far as I can tell, we agree on these 3 points. You, however, seem to be bringing up a few more points:

4) Instructions are short.

5) Alignment is on the byte.

...

And, from what I can tell, you are saying that these were more helpful in reducing the size of the program. Am I right so far?

If so, you maybe right that compared to modern computers, but that doesn't mean that @tezza is wrong that the other factors helped.

Also, I believe its already been agreed that Huffman encoding doesn't help...
Google Chrome can check that a website you are about to visit isn’t a known attack site, without needing a copy of the black list or sending the URL to Google, by checking:
~/.config/google-chrome/Safe Browsing Bloom
When "network" is used as a verb, be very careful.
F/OSS Web Deployment Engineer certification by NRC-FOSS, India
An interesting approach to certification. No canned multiple choice questions. Instead, candidates will be asked to solve a practical problem using any tool/framework of LAMP.
This is one of my problems. I recommend that a lot of my smaller clients experiment with AdWords as an alternative to Yellow Pages. Try $50/wk and see what happens. Many are eager to continue but don't have the time or understanding of AdWords to do it themselves.

The problem comes when setting up and managing a small weekly account is as much work (billed hourly) as is being spent on the ads. That's a little difficult to justify and never worth my time to handle.
Thanks, this comment helped me fix it! (My profile now has an email to reach me)
Thanks, I have no idea how I was unable to connect "renaissance man vibe" with "users wrote all the content". But you are absolutely correct!
Thanks! Did not realize it needed to be in about. It is there now
If I managed to sell something for a billion dollars, I'd be off doing something more interesting than trying to make more money for the sake of it. I guess that makes me a "no" man.
What made it work? I would think it would be filled with a lot of low quality "articles."

Or is that where all the admin work came in?
Ask HN: am I too old to learn the guitar/music? 
Sorry if this isn't very hacker-related. I know there are a good amount of musicians here, so I thought I'd ask.

I'm 34. Quit 5th grade music (teacher was a jerk) and haven't really touched an instrument since. But I've always wanted to learn some guitar.

Is it too late?

My wife is a decent musician so we have a few guitars and keyboards in the house. Always been good with math and languages–not sure if that helps or determines how I should try and learn.

Anyway, any suggestions from musicians is much appreciated. Should I take some lessons? Watch some videos?
Turning Traditional Tools into Computing/Date Input Devices
What makes a great teacher?
Is Price Inflation Alive? -- Seeking Alpha
I thought Unladen Swallow had good reasons to be on 2.x, such as the fact that Google is on 2.x internally. Maybe Google's decided it's time to migrate?

EDIT: the FAQ I was thinking of is at the top of http://code.google.com/p/unladen-swallow/wiki/FAQ . They do say 2.x internal, but willing to port to 3.x to get it merged with mainline.
You've Got Mail - Sale Mail
hell no you're not! And if you are a programmer/math inclined you will probably actually do really well once you get a few fundamentals down and start to see the patterns/logic in the tuning. (learn to play a power chord and then realize that the same finger pattern applies all the way down the fret board for the first two top strings and you're on your way to writing some ramones-esque songs!)

For the record I am a drummer but I understand guitar well enough to write songs that other people can then play better haha.
I honestly thought py3k wasnt being sold. As of the last pycon, there was a lot of talk of 'slow and steady py3k adoption'. The general roadmap assumed by most people I interact with is: at some point someone will make a killer feature with py3k and that will be the tipping point. Until then, 2.x doesn't stop being awesome just cuz 3 around.
The point being, this is a clear abuse and absurd level of Orweillian surveillance on what's supposed to be a free society.

If the government attempted anything remotely close to this relative to the day a hundred years ago there would be a revolution by morning.
No one has more than a cursory understanding of how climate works. That's why there was no science called 'Climatology', until people realized it was a vehicle for doing 'Post Normal' Science.
http://buythetruth.wordpress.com/2009/10/31/climate-change-a...
Is the package named "arch" in the ISO?

I'm downloading it right now... :)
Allright. It can run the Control Panel applet. What else? Notepad? At the same time?
‘Social’ Games Predictions for 2010
>But don't fool yourself that "MOST" of anything works with any one architecture. It's a big world.

Of methods of concurrency that people use, there are two main approaches, threads, and multiprocessing. I just contend only about 15% of solutions are super clear winners for one or the other, leaving 65-70% of apps that can go either way.

And I'm not a web developer, I'm an embedded software developer with years of experience in embedded video, streaming video, and hardware emulation. Lots of THAT stuff also fits just fine in either system too. As does the test systems, large analytics programs, etc that I've seen unrelated to the field.

Actually python largely keeping to the inconsistency of the underlying OS with regards to mmap and other shared memory solutions is the biggest obstacles there. Oh, and the fact that hardcore numerics are still callouts to C libs in python.

>And I assure you I've read Stevens.
Lots and lots of people read Vol1, it seems like 1/10th as many read Vol2. Hell, I'm pretty sure most people who read Vol1 haven't a clue what's in Vol2.

I'm by no means saying I want the GIL to say the same, I just think numerics work, graphics, games need threads, after that, you get to use either one (aka, 15% need threads, the other 85 need processes or can use either).
My 62 year old father just took up Piano and is loving it.
Unfortunately both are useless for mortals because there is no transactions and locks.
It's just impossible to write applications where uniqueness and real ACID transactions are required. Please don't send me to CouchDB bulk document API, I don't wanna dance with conflicts and inconsistency every time I am going to write simple application with user registration for example. The same for apps with direct purchases where you need to update quantity of item in stock. Just impossible. Solutions with "inventory tickets" sounds insane. Unique fields as an _id also sounds insane, because it's impossible to create complex "unique keys".

Both are cool, seriously, and you know. Lots of developers are going to use this software, but every time the lack of such features just rejecting these people.

1. Add real transactions to CouchDB/Mongo
2. Add unique indexes to CouchDB. IIRC Mongo has already.
3. Add map/reduce chaining to CouchDB
4. Dominate the world!
The Windows Experience score has a lot to do with 3D Graphics. A significant difference between Windows 7 and Vista is that 7 only accepts WDDM drivers while Vista takes XDDM and WDDM drivers. This means all older video cards are not directly supported. All 3D rendering is done by the CPU instead of the GPU. The OS will only allow you to run the graphical Aero interface if you have a WDDM driver to make use of the GPU. Otherwise it uses an interface that is similar to XP but a little more modern and simple.

The result is a blazing fast system. Watching DVD's, flash, DivX is all fine. I'm one of the unlucky one's with a Thinkpad X40. The only thing I can't do is run Aero or Direct X stuff. It's annoying at times but I can live with it.

What matters - web browsing, video and music is an awesome experience. You don't need modern hardware for that or a high Windows Experience score. Just a well made OS.
What you've described is precisely Yext's business.
I'd love a good windows fork.....win7 hasn't implemented it yet I'm guessing?
You can!
Best Point of Sale-POS Software Solution Providers India
Billit : A Business Point of Sale (POS) billing software, Sales Management Software and their Software’s Solution Provider in India offers a lot of Business POS System and Software Products for Hotels, Restaurant, Food Chains industries and more in Pizza Shops, night clubs, bars and more outlets.
Well, if it can, it means he could use less than 96MB.
Ask HN: Any Open Source Projects Looking for help from College Students?
So, I have to admit, I'm kind of asking this question selfishly. A friend and I are taking a course that requires work on a serious project as part of our Software Engineering minors, and the forward-looking faculty of the S.E. department is looking to try out some open source stuff (a similar project of much smaller scope (not the whole course) has been very successful in a prerequisite course to this one).

We'd need to be closely involved with a 'client', basically someone who wouldn't mind the overhead of laying down some goals and stuff and who would be willing to interact (though not handhold or anything near it) throughout the process. Many larger open source projects have these kinds of people already (specifically David Humphrey at Mozilla).

More generally though, I believe this to be a good way of getting college students more involved in open source projects, and wouldn't be surprised if other HN students jumped at the opportunity, so feel free to comment if you're also an interested student.

That said, if you'd like more information about myself and my friend (to make sure you're not wasting your time) or about the minor and related courses at my school, feel free to email me (agartrell@cmu.edu)

Edited to add: We're talking about small groups of students as part of a class. In this case, we're referring to two students, but one can imagine groups of 2-5.
Honestly, I think you are making some good points. However, I think they would be better received if you changed the tone of your replies. Starting with "well, you and your friends can leave" pretty quickly turns the the thread from a discussion to an argument.

Just my two cents.
We had an EIR when I was in grad school. He would basically just give a lot of advise, and explain why everyone's ideas wouldn't work. The exciting thing is that you potentially hear a lot of nearly-good ideas and you get to help transform them into good ideas.
Agreed. I have a lot of respect for someone who looks at the changing situation and decides to grab a pair and make the best of it, rather than calling his lawyers or claiming the internet needs to be changed so he can make money.
Why infomercials are soooo good
Very cool, both tech-wise and for Arizona (where I live, and more local jobs == a good thing).

I want to put solar panels on our roof (different tech, same motivations) and my wife is just about talked into it. Most things that help the local economy and help people be more self reliant are good things.
I was thinking of making a clone of hn to do this it wouldn't be that difficult. Possibly a patch to hn.
It is definitely a big deal to write scalable, fast and a good recommendation engine. Item level collaborative filtering is easy to write - but anything beyond that will require significant effort.
I would consider adding more description blurbs for this app.
$19.99 is definitely too expensive. It is a niche app and I'm guessing it took you a couple months to build but that kind of pricing may not work on the app store for such an app.I'd drop the price to at most $9.99 or even $5.99. Marketing, marketing. Getting noticed after a few weeks in the app store is always a problem. I hope Apple can come up with better ways for developers to market their apps.

I've published 2 apps in the store and it's been a fun experiment :
http://dearcloud.com/mobile/

Sales do spike up the first few weeks while your app is on the first or second page of its respective category. Good pricing will get you more downloads. Good luck
They showed up to interview him, as a west-coast artist, and instead walked into a (rather sad) pitch for a music publishing network. It would be atone to going to a party and seeing an agent and trying the agent pester them to switch record labels or something. It was awkward because it was Tom DeLonge who they respected too much to say 'what the fuck' half way through.

How can anyone see this as them being 'too-cool-for-school'?
Here's a good explanation that I found:

"What does an EIR do?" - http://framethink.wordpress.com/2009/08/08/what-does-an-eir-...
(Not really on topic, but if I could nominate this as an example of the ideal HN comment, I would. It'd be nice to have a gallery of things like this attached to the guidelines. Thanks jey!)
Here is a bit more info from the actual posting:

"If you are an individual with an outstanding entrepreneurial spirit and mind, who is looking to create the next best thing in consumer internet, would like to assist in the evaluation of potential investments and provide functional expertise to existing portfiolio companies, we would love to hear from you. You need to have a successful track record as entrepreneur or CEO / CTO in a start-up environment, ideally in the Consumer Internet area."
See also security, which they have seriously found religion on.
PushButton Tutorial Series - Loading Resources
Proof of Concept - See through OLED screen on a laptop
It depends on each firm, but it usually goes something like this:

You just left a company like Google in a prime role or sold your last startup. You don't know what you want to start yet, but you jive with the firm. They want first dibs on what you do next and/or you already have a great relationship with the firm. It might be joining another startup that comes in through the door or doing your own thing.

Bret Taylor did this with Benchmark before starting FriendFeed. Not sure if he frequents here,but he could give some insight. Jason Calacanis did it with Sequoia as an "Entrepreneur In Action" as well.
Well said! Let people who create decide how to distribute their creations. Also, that was a really good analysis of the history of balkanization of BSD derived OSes.
Causes of smoking why do
HP's Windows 7 Slate Device Revealed by Steve Ballmer
So, this problem question isn't very difficult. However, I am interested in more ways to prove lower bounds on complexity. As far as I know, there are a few ways to do this:

1) Time >= Size Of Output (As done here)

2) Time >= Number of bits of information (As in the case of showing that sorting takes O(n*log[n]) if all you can do is compare elements).

Are there other ways to find lower bounds?
I'd be more curious on how much pagefile it's using at idle, and how much swapping it did to just get the Control Panel open.
Voyeur
Find your lover on Secret4play.net. The best adult network to seek and interact with your erotic friends. Built your new bedroom in cyberspace and you will have total control over who gets access to your bed.
The fibonacci sequence sounds good in theory but I can't imagine this actually looks nice in print. Or notably more 'natural' than using standard sizes, for that matter.
Redsn0w 0.9
Clojure Quick Start Guide
As far as I'm concerned (as a CPython developer), the 2.x branch can live as long as necessary. There is no reason to play games trying to push people to upgrade to 3.x. Those tactics piss people off and for good reason.

That said, I don't see this as a tactic to get people to upgrade. Python is an open source project and the developers get to choose what they will work on. If the Unladen Swallow guys want to merge into 3.x, that's their right. If someone else steps up to merge it into 2.x and support it, that's their right too.

Myself, I'm going to continue to fix bugs in the 2.x stream for the foreseeable future. I do plan on moving my applications to 3.x eventually though.
Parrot AR.Drone (iPhone Aug Reality App + Remote Ctrl Heli)
I have a feeling I am saving almost every HN article on Clojure. Just wanted to say thank you to everyone who has been working on and with the language and sharing it with the rest of us.
Heh, well, I'm not clear what is unclear. The poster said 'well, the program is short because of these N things'. Except none of the N things were accurate or relevant. There are architectural factors that much more significantly affect the size of the program, but poster didn't mention any of them. My point is tezza either didn't know or didn't think what s/he was posting about. It's sort of like having the discussion "So, airplanes fly because of magic" - "Well, no actually airplanes fly because of [a bunch of physics]" - "Right, you're making my point, airplanes fly!".
What happens when you buy something big like a flat screen TV and it goes on the fritz and you have to pay to ship it somewhere that really suxs
Ah, nice post. Also, worthwhile: http://framethink.wordpress.com/2009/08/08/many-benefits-and...

Slightly comparable risk to Chris Dixon's why you don't want to raise seed money from a VC firm: http://cdixon.org/2009/08/14/the-problem-with-taking-seed-mo...
This is by the CEO of Three Rings, which makes Puzzle Pirates. I pay them $50 a year for an account I don't even log into anymore just to say thanks for everything they have taught me about testing. (The game is fun, too, although I make a heck of a lot more doubloons from split testing than I do from plundering.)

In particular, I think Cleaver is spot-on about Zynga's competitive advantage being based off of having obsessive attention to testing written into their DNA.
'In 9 years, not one conviction of cyber criminals in state'
It has been nine years since the IT Act 2000 was passed. Since then, there has been a lot of talk about cyber crimes such as hacking,
Reminder: 1/7/10 is SparkFun Free Day (get a free Arduino)
There's no replacement for good private lessons.
If you opt-in to a service which allows you to be tracked, then you're going to be tracked. And the service a hundred years ago which did this? Police trails of suspects. Following people around, as part of an ongoing investigation, to find out who they interacted with and where they went - sort of like this, only it's easier to stop a cell phone. Where was the revolution?
No.

That's the template response for questions of the form:

/^Am I too old to learn .*\?$/i
Ask HN: How do you vet the startups behind the job postings on Startuply?
I'm not going to name names but I found a job on Startuply. Everything looked great. But after doing a bit of digging, the whole company started to seem like a bit of a mirage. Is this common? How do you avoid getting tricked into taking jobs like this and how do "startups" get away with this kind of stuff? Can pretty much anyone post a job on Startuply?
You aren't too old to learn.

It is hard (though probably not impossible, given sufficient motivation and practice) to get good enough to play professionally with a late start), but if you plan to learn for the joy of music and playing songs at parties and so on it is very doable. If you practice (guitar) for 20 -30 minutes daily for a year, you should be good enough to play some popular songs at parties and so on, ideally with people playing other instruments.

The key is to regularity (don't miss practice) and focus (be aware of what you are doing when you practice) and not so much short bursts of intense practice.

As mentioned above if you can get good private lessons , go for it. You can teach yourself with books and an electronic tuner and so on, but it is way harder than getting a good teacher. Since your wife is a musician she (or her friends) should be able to find you a good teacher.

Good Luck!
> he is actively undermining the product

I wonder when some Sun/Oracle lawyer is going to give him a call and let him know about the legal trouble he could be in for this. I mean, wouldn't this type of behavior have been dealt with in the original MySQL purchase agreement?
This would be phenomenal for augmented reality applications.
Ok, thanks. So how would you recommend I learn the fundamentals?
> It is definitely a big deal to write scalable, fast and a good recommendation engine.

I know, I've invested $30K US in to a dutch company that does this for one special interest field. It took them quite a bit of time to get it working perfectly. One very big reason why I'm so impressed with Directed Edge. And why I think they'll make it big.
"What does DP [Deliberate Practice] look like for fields that don’t have a tradition of performance-optimization, such as knowledge work, freelance writing, entrepreneurship, or, of course, college?"

Does anyone have a system for answering this question?
The thing is, those companies are not technology companies. They would see such practices as things that software companies would do (and they don't believe the potential savings - as often that is all they are, savings, not new revenue). Consequently, the talent goes to companies that are technology companies, and the cycle continues.
Thanks a lot for some very thoughtful feedback. I will make an effort to incorporate all of this.

What do you think about a lite version that limits you in terms of the # of bugs downloaded to the app, but otherwise offers the full range of functionality?
I'm concerned about having a leading (by usership) free SQL database under the control of the leading (by revenue) proprietary SQL database vendor.

And, I believe it would ultimately be better for MySQL users for it to be under a more permissive, non-copyleft license. It allows for a broader commercial ecosystem.

But, I'm uncomfortable with regulators telling companies what to do with their lawfully acquired property/rights based on speculation about potential abuses that haven't even occurred yet.

And, I'm uncomfortable with someone who chose for their own benefit one doctrinaire set of rules -- the GPL -- now asking for the rules to be rewritten, against the wishes of the people to whom he sold his package of rights.

So I can't support the campaign, even though I'd like one of its sought end states (non-copyleft MySQL).

Maybe if someone other then Widenius led a purely-antitrust-based case for divesting or relicensing MySQL. As an advocate, he's tainted.
My take is if mysql is important to you as a resource, get together with similar people and settle on a fork, then move on.

As for trying to influence the status of any IP owned by Sun and acquired by Oracle ... good luck with that.
You're right, but I think 'scam' is too harsh a word. Reserving the right to create non-GPL'd versions is a legitimate business model and way to finance copyleft software. It's just that since it was an allowable strategy for MySQL AB, it should be allowable for Oracle Corporation, too.

FWIW, a variant of the same business model was used by Sleepycat Software for the BerkeleyDB family of products -- which have continued to be supported and improved and sold since Oracle acquired them.