skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
the naive solution would just be to pre-size the hash table and be careful about insertion/deletion architcture. Not to chuck it in favor of an AVL tree or whatnot.

Sometimes, a pre-sized hash table is the "best" solution, depending on context, and for some perhaps debatable value of "best." If I was doing hard real time (which is not what I generally do) and I didn't have any good idea of how much space the system would need, then I'd use a largish pre-sized table as a starting point then think about cooking up some sort of incremental growth/rehash code. Start out just using one hash table. When it gets too close to full, you allocate the bigger table and you start moving things to the larger one with each table access. To check for membership in this state, you check both tables. To add a new entry, you add to the larger table. Once you are done, you can throw away the old table. I don't do hard real time, but this is just what comes off the top of my head. (Note that table allocation might have to be done incrementally, if nulling out lots of entries would take too long.)
It's amazing what people can do with $1000, and sometimes it is simply needed to inspire and push people in the right direction. I know I personally have a lot of projects that I want to do, but I just don't have the extra money to make them happen today (but they aren't expensive and would just need that extra boost).
Part of the benefit of ScaleWell is office space in Chicago during the grant period, but we will entertain companies from the Midwest since most urban centers suffer from the same problem. If some from the coasts or the south applies at this point, we will at least provide some feedback from the trustees.

The Awesome Foundation established chapters, which is another long-term possibility...assuming we have success.
The number of companies looking to hire at this event exceeds the number of job seekers. If you are an unemployed HN reader in the Bay Area you _have_ to attend this event.
Yeah I feel the site is somewhat vague in who can apply. The only way I could even tell where this was located (for the coworking space) was by looking at the Trustees page or the twitter account which mentions Chicago. I like the idea I just wish it was explained a little better.
Thanks for posting Stevan's gist... I hadn't seen that elsewhere.

When I first saw Ovid's post I could see a MooseX::Declare lightbulb going off in my head ;-)

use 5.010;
use MooseX::Declare;

class Foo {
use MooseX::Types -declare => [ qw(Filename) ];
use MooseX::Types::Moose qw(Str);

BEGIN {
subtype Filename, as Str, where { -x $_ };
}

method file ( Filename $name ) {
say "Houston, we have a filename: $name";
}
}

my $foo = Foo->new;
my $perl = `which perl`; chomp $perl;

$foo->file( $perl );
$foo->file( 'no_such_file' );

Above throws the expected exeception on 'no_such_file'.
> Up to that point in time my knowledge of LISP consisted of the usual hearsay and mantra of those unfamiliar with the language: "People who like it are crazy zealots who think they’re superior to everyone!"

So I used it... and now I'm crazy for it and I think I'm superior to everyone!
Requirements and reality [Slideshare, 10 slides]
I got my Nexus One yesterday.

Yeah, the "cube" is annoying and the tweaks they made to the physics of the menu made it worse (IMHO).

But the speech-to-text (and probably the text-to-speech too) is part of their "Car Home" app. Voice Dialing is a pretty common and useful feature while driving.
That's because the recruiter and the candidate are supposed to be two different people, so the candidate doesn't have the access to the 'dashboard'.
Why are Customer Development and Lean Startup Principles So Popular?
Ideological indoctrination is an important part of the US education system. But we should be indoctrinating children to the American philosophy and not some anti-american religious ideas. This builds a stronger society and goes a long way to destroy tribalism.
If you want a compromise that takes little space like hash tables, has average time complexity of O(log(N)) like balanced trees, and is as simple to implement as hash tables, take a look at skip lists.
For one, it self-selects developers who are proactive, with a can-do attitude. They are most likely above average, so that in turn should attract good companies. I know I would look around to see what talent is there.

I know there is an argument that the greatest coders would not bother. That's probably true, but you may get access to the level immediately below: not bad...
Right now TopCoder is focused on coding competitions. We are focused solely on recruitment - those are pretty separate markets at the moment.
Emotionally this sounds appealing.

But it seems to me that htis is just another example of the kind of government that brought California to bankruptcy. Governing by emotional appeals to the way our values tell us the world should behave is not a recipe for success in a world that behaves as the chips fall.

More to the point, read Friedrich Hayek's The Fatal Conceit for a discussion of the hubris of believing that we can engineer a world to our liking, and that this world be at all sustainable.
More on Golden Ratio in math:

Wolfram: http://mathworld.wolfram.com/GoldenRatio.html

Geometry: http://www.cut-the-knot.org/do_you_know/GoldenRatio.shtml

which includes the beautiful identity
φ : 1 = 1 : (φ - 1)
Keep in mind that it's not just because of the studios: it's also because of the various TV networks that the studios have signed exclusive re-broadcast deals with. That's why Netflix sublicensed the Starz's rebroadcast rights, and why those movies rotate in and out of being available to play on demand (since the rebroadcast rights are all windowed to specific periods of time, with different broadcasters getting the rights at different points in time).

So it's all a very complicated problem. Movies that already have the rebroadcast rights sold off would be tough without the sort of cross-licensing Netflix does with Starz; the studios don't really have further control until those deals expire, since they're legally-binding, exclusive contracts. Rentals don't conflict with those exclusive rights, which is why the studios can license Amazon or iTunes to offer the movies for a fee, but can't license Netflix to stream them.

What they could do is to stop doing those sorts of exclusive deals, but those deals bring in a fair amount of money, so someone like Netflix would need to pony up enough cash on their end to make up for the loss of revenue that would come with either the total loss of those broadcast deals or with the loss of exclusivity on those broadcast deals. But I'm sure that even renegotiating non-exclusive contracts to use in the future deals with existing broadcasters would take a pretty long time once they've decided to do it; those sorts of legal maneuverings take a long time.

So certainly the studios could start trying to do something about it, but it's not a simple problem that they could just change their minds about and make go away instantly.
I'm curious: What exactly are you expecting to be able to do with multitasking that Android doesn't already do?
We're thinking about it. Stay tuned on our blog :)
Yes, sure, a good answer which amounts to: transaction costs are higher than the variance. That's the answer they should have given Paul.

TAM answers the question, "In the best of all possible worlds, how much money would you make?"

As an entrepreneur you'd better have a good, if not totally accurate, answer to that question. At the very least it shows investors how well you've segmented and sized your target market.
So car manufacturers should fund the continued operations of buggy whip manufacturers, even though nobody wants their products anymore.
The rebuttal is indeed good but I believe that the following quote is a bit strawman-like: "When it's scrambled by Monolith, the claim is that the resulting file has no Colour - how could it have the copyright Colour? It's just random bits!"

The claim is not that the file has no Colour. The claim is that there is no way to distinguish it from one that has no Colour. I am not convinced about the implications, this way or another. Just saying that it is not as simple as in the quote above.
S'all good. I assumed you had answers, because your product was clearly thought out, functional, and polished.

It was just rough to watch the video -- I actually cringed.
If an edu focused business case emerges, we will definitely look into it.
First time was in '86 after working for a bank for a while and talking to my boss who laid out for me why I should go and do a thing on my own. Awesome guy (Thanks Eddy!).

I sold that business and traveled for a while after that, freelancing whenever the money pit was at low tide.

It was '93 last time I started from scratch, re-migrating to NL from PL, baby on the way, no outlook at getting a job (minor IT crisis in NL at the time).

Simply a need to put food on the table. Which I can guarantee you is a very powerful motivator, especially when it includes little humans.

I wouldn't worry ao much about what others think about it.

What is more important is that you cut down your costs to the absolute minimum (this may require a serious change in lifestyle) to give yourself as much 'runway' as you can get. It takes a while to get off the ground, and with a lower expense pattern your chances of success increase tremendously.

edit: You know you've made the right decision when you're happy. In spite of all the risks involved (no pension, no social security for me) I wouldn't want to be doing anything else.
Allow the CCPOA to unionize TAs. Problem solved!
I've been logged into GMail in an incognito window, and done a Google search in another tab on the same window only to have my email address show up at the top of the search as 'logged in' (same with Google Maps).
Steve Jobs presentation skills, ironically, leverage little in the way of technology, and everything in the way of presence.

What's your issue with the Outliers 10K hours expert thesis? Do you have any sources that indicate a significant number of individuals with a baseline skill of ability in a particular ability, who also put in 10,000 hours of _focused_ practice _haven't_ established "expertise?"

That particular thesis of Outliers very, very strongly resonated with me.
This is very true. I actually try to reverse translate lots of error messages back to English when googling for help. It's not always easy to get the correct wording however.
I'll have to check it out. I played with a Motorola Droid today and the typing was absolutely horrendous. Definitely a lot of room for improvement.
Yes, but they are asynchronous.
You know the sad thing is that the law enforcement interests would probably come after you on that too.

Sad.
Don't worry, we have some nasty surprises for the cheaters ;)
Cookies are allowed within incognito windows, they're just kept in memory and flushed when all incognito windows are close.
Is there a transcript?
Or grab it from the local library.
Congrats on getting this off the ground! Quick question - who's sponsoring/funding the grants?
"Alert! Phishing attempt!" would be my first thought on reading the second URL.

I would click on the first one, though.
"California spends about $50,000 a year per inmate"

On the surface, that number looks somewhat insane.
Which is why "myfreeenlargement" probably would not work.
Ask HN:  Coming soon pages worth it?
Hey all-

So I'm working on an app now and I am considering setting up a coming soon page. I already have a domain name, but I assume I would need to either buy some actual hosting, or farm it off to some service like weebly or whatever. Two questions:

1) Is it worth the effort/expense? Evidence?
2) Rec's for cheap ways to do it.

Thanks!
Seems to work well here. But I don't see how it didn't suggest "hello" as a possible correction of "helo"?
That's a good question. I would imagine the probability to vary a great deal by what particular number one is looking for. That is, I would expect it to be very easy to find small integers, but extremely unlikely to accidentally find a very large prime number.

I suspect it would be much harder to find (1 + sqrt(5)) / 2 everywhere you look than to find 3.
This doesn't work because some of the bits the software downloads couple be "innocent" bits. E.g. the firefox installer or some random looking piece of data. Any bits can be brought into involvement by the system, hence the denial of service.
I think there will be more job seekers than employer representatives. Not everybody wants to plaster their name on a webpage saying "I'm looking for a job!"

It's also before (and close to) SHDH 36, so people will have reason to be in the area.

We'll see how it goes next Saturday.
Heck, they're probably not a democracy. And probably have no constitution or bill of rights. And probably haven't caught up with the 19th century. And probably disappear people left and right.

Great role model.
We hope that this model will help highlight developers strengths and shorten the hiring pipeline for the companies that are hiring.

Success at a typical job fair requires that the job seekers have a certain amount of personal salesmanship. We changed the format of this event to highlight the strengths of developers - many developers aren't comfortable promoting themselves.

Additionally, there is no way for recruiters to judge the technical competency of job seekers at a typical job fair. Because of this most hiring pipelines start with a technical phone screen, which isn't always done by an engineer - it's pretty easy to convince engineers to come to this job fair and to technical screening: SuperHappyDevHouse is immediately afterwords.
No, they are telling us that while the barn doors seem closed, they are in fact open and that, while the ponies have left, the horses are still in there, but will soon be leaving.
I grabbed the last four annual revenues for Amazon and Walmart from Google Finance. The average growth (in revenue) for Amazon over that period is 31%; for Walmart, 9%. World GDP growth is about 7% per year (over the last 30, through '08).

Assuming those continue then Amazon will sell $1T nominal in 16 years. Unfortunately for the author's claim, Walmart will do it in 12. And also unfortunately, with that rate of growth, Amazon's revenue will exceed world GDP in 41 years.
This is just numerology. You can find all kinds of 'special' numbers anywhere, if you just try enough 'special' numbers on enough of 'anywhere'. This has no special significance at all.
Not so minor point: the California Three Strikes law requires the first two felonies to be "violent" or "serious". From the reference I just checked, the only non-violent serious crimes are "lewd or lascivious act on a child under the age of 14 years" and providing hard drugs to minors ("heroin, cocaine, phencyclidine(PCP), or any methamphetamine-related drug" or a precursor of the latter).

I find it impossible to work up any sympathy for someone who commits two such crimes and then shows he has no intention of staying on the right side of the law by committing any felony, violent or not. I also don't see how it's bad public policy; as one person put it WRT Giuliani's clean up of New York City: "He found the root cause of crime, criminals."
Or if you're an employed HN reader looking for a new gig - it's on a Saturday..
My thoughts exactly, if this does what it says on the tin, it will save me months!

This is definitely my Friday night! Now to get the source, what license is being used here....

Real hackers steal!
I expected there to be more job seekers than employer representatives, but as of now (time_t: 1262991491) there are more companies signed up for the "recruiter" mailing list than there are on the "job seeker" mailing list.

As far as seeing "how it goes", the reason we are using mailing lists for "signup" is so we can gauge the success of the event not just on Saturday, but 30, 60 and 90 days after the event.
Twitter is the New Noosphere
Thanks very much for the FUD-debunk, it's always great to get advice from someone who has thoroughly kicked the tires of something. I may start considering it once again.

Would you mind sharing what kind of small-block IO/sec numbers you've seen from the EBS's? My app tends to generate lots of IO with not a huge amount of cacheability, and it has a relatively small dataset, which is why I'm considering SSDs in the first place.
28 days is a small price to pay for an improved streaming selection.

The claim of "improved streaming selection" hasn't been elaborated on or even substantiated anywhere that I've seen.

Even if it were, I'd still disagree. Now my Netflix account is no longer sufficient to handle all of my DVD rental needs and I have to go to one of their competitors to fill that gap. It's a real shame and a major ding to one of the few services that I considered practically perfect (on the physical DVD side) and improving (on the streaming side) every year.
How to Find and Hire Amazing People, Part 4
If by "this site" you mean HN, then these numbers are wrong.
Let's see how this one goes. If this event helps people find jobs, I have the resources to help take this event to the East Coast.
We do understand that. But the economics of doing so are a lot more challenging than most people realize (see my long rant elsewhere in the thread).
On the flip side - this just opened up a _huge_ opportunity for a Netflix competitor to start offering DVDs that are recently released but not available from Netflix.

People like new things. Netflix will no longer be offering new things. That smells like market opportunity to me.
No, you got the tech equivalent of a lolcat.
o Me thinks you missed one :)
The evolution of Borg
Busy Week: JRuby with Android, Maven, Rake, C exts, and More
I'd say it's worth it. It won't take long. Try and do what you can to squeeze out some SEO juice, throw in Google analytics, and an email field; see if you get any hits or email addresses.
Forget about competition

Focus on customers

Don't cut corners

Stay agile forever
"When Netflix or any other rental business buys DVDs, they don't just buy the same copy you and I do, but a rental version with different licensing terms which costs considerably more"

Citation?
Well, Ken's entourage of 85 people:

http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/standard/article-23421491-kens...

Boris flies economy to Beijing:

http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/standard-mayor/article-2354228...

There are plenty like this. Ken's extravagance and the favours he dished out to his cronies were legendary.
How to sue your employer and win
Yes, I've seen Pi as well. Good Movie.

But I think they put a little more thought into it before publishing it in the Science journal.
So Google is better than US intelligence?
The variation is a function of how well the film does on release. The faster it goes to DVD, the less it has made at the box office. There isn't an exact formula but there are a lot of rules-of-thumb. For example, the best time to launch a horror movie is in early October (because of Halloween), and then you'll get it to DVD pronto because most horror movies have a short shelf life so you want the fans to buy it for themselves for Christmas. Animations and action thrillers are timed for summer and winter holidays. Screwball comedies are timed for spring break (youth) or thanksgiving (romantic). Arty dramas release near Christmas partly because of holiday viewers but also to meet the deadline for consideration during the q1 awards season without spending too much on pre-marketing; the DVD will be held back until after the nominations and awards ceremonies have taken place, because an Oscar or a Golden Globe will increase sales.

The film sales markets (where producers sell to distributors) also take place in Q1, so if your goal is to make the hit horror for 2011 you start planning now to shoot in summer so you can be done editing by fall and sell it in winter so you can market it during summer for people to see during fall and buy during winter. Whew!
The value 1.618... is not as interesting as its recursive fraction form which happens to be = 1 + (1 + 1/ ( 1 + 1/ ( 1 + 1/ ... an infinite recursion based on the number 1 is somewhat interesting and could be insightful.
Note that due process doesn't apply to extortion. Mike Freedman gets a ton of inaccurate nastygrams from copyright enforcers, but they don't care. They keep sending them. This situation may be evil, but it exists today and it generates significant revenue. (It doesn't seem to deter much infringement, though; I guess people think it won't happen to them.) http://www.freedom-to-tinker.com/blog/mfreed/inaccurate-copy...

Also, any P2P system that downloads a significant amount of extra data won't become popular anyway, since it will be slower than non-deniable P2P. Freenet suffered from this, since all the pirates switched to the more efficient BitTorrent.
1023 if no documents are embedded you can't harvest their email address.
"Omit needless..." was the first thing that came to mind for me before I even started reading the list. It applies to so many things. Words, features, expenses, options, etc. If it isn't absolutely necessary, omit it. You'll know soon enough if it turns out to be absolutely necessary, whatever it is.
Add a mail chimp form with: We will let you know when we launch.

There is definitely some value with getting a page up. I think there is even a webapp that will do it for you. I forgot the name though.
I guess Chinese should have been quite important in east Asia (and getting important again right now)? Any experts on that around here?
It's definitely worth it. You need to have something. I'd throw up a Wordpress install with a landing page theme that you modify. I saw a few on themeforest for $7. You should certainly start blogging around your industry as well.
As I said to pg, if the studios don't want to sell to Netflix because it would cannibalize their DVD sales, what makes you think they'd want to sell to 'newflix'? If you try buying films and renting them out on the first day of the DVD release, you'll get slammed for copyright violation about 5 minutes after you ship to your first rental customer. Consumer DVDs are not licensed for public performance or rental.
For one thing, it's made it hard for me to sit still for 10,000 word think pieces.
What about fair use?

It is theoretically legal for me to write an article about a song, and include a ten second clip of that song. It is also legal for another person to do the same thing, but with a different part of the song.

At some point, the entire song becomes downloadable, but without any party distributing it outside of their fair use rights.

Now what?
I can recommend a book called: The Golden Ratio: The Story of Phi - the World's Most Astonishing Number. It gave me a bit of bit of a Phi fetish. It appears like a kernel of existence.
Stallman was on shaky ground with CLISP. The reason CLISP became GPL is because the author eventually decided he liked the FSF's philosophy.
How to detect a page request from Safari 4's Top Sites feature
That's the same conclusion I found, using the same tools. I tried something different this time and searched for "purrel oed". Managed to find a citation from c 1617 in "The Acts and Ordinances of the Eastland Company". "Noe brother of this Companya .. shall .. halfe or Cut .. in the myddle of any Cloth .. Nor shall after the Laste daye of August 1618 shipp any Cloth into Th'eastparts which shall have two purrells or a particon in the middle."

I think I just added more mud.
I think it will be easier to just host a bunch of MP3s in a country that's unfriendly to the US.
Now to convince somebody to set up a laptop on a table with me appearing live via video conference.