skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Assembly language also lacks a ton of stuff.

Which is why people rarely program in assembly language any more.

> The point is, you build it if you want it. That's what makes you a good programmer.

Sure, but working around the issues I mentioned would require altering the syntax of the language, or preferably constructing a new language from scratch. But I wouldn't count that as programming in Java.

> I haven't needed any of the items you state as shortcomings of Java

People rarely do until they have experience of using them; it's the blub paradox. If you take a look at the code of a seasoned Lisp or Haskell programmer, then you'll note that a large proportion of their code includes syntax structures that cannot be replicated in Java.

> But if I did, it really wouldn't be hard to add them in a preprocessing step.

Fixing Java's type system as a preprocessing step is not going to be very easy, I'm afraid!
Oops! Corrected.
It may work the other way round --- if you don't look it doesn't appear. But you can't just make any stuff appear.
Did you do the commercial yourselves or hire an outside firm? Also, your logo is pretty confusing. It took me a while to actually realize that it was the logo for NerdKits while watching that commercial.
There is a very important scene in "Tous les Matins du Monde" where Gerard Depardieu is pretending to play a Viola de Gamba. (Ancestor of the Cello) It's the climactic scene, actually.

This scene works very well for most people who have never played an instrument. Gerard Depardieu is considered a good actor by many, and he's doing all sorts of things right as far as that goes. However, people who have played an instrument often cringe when watching that scene, because it's glaringly obvious that Mr. Depardieu is not playing the instrument. He's faking it so badly, it makes many musicians consider the scene hoky and disappointing. (It's still a great movie, though.)

What's really interesting, is that musicians who know nothing about playing a Viola de Gamba can still tell. I play wind instruments, and my fingers are doing nothing that resembles what a bowed string player has to do. There is no resemblance at all -- some things are diametrically opposed, and while I do nothing like bowing, I also need to incorporate breathing to play, in a way which is not at all needed for playing a string. Yet I can still tell immediately. This difference is very stark, and you'd probably see much better discrimination in a double-blind test than with 128 bit MP3's versus 320 bits. Note that there is a well known mathematical and physiological basis for the latter.
patio11/Patrick is another single founder.
Significantly optimized:

import pydroid, operator

INIT_COLOR = 473428
BELL_COLORS = set([12702690, 8950940, 9016477, 9017249, 9018536, 12505567,
12505568, 11715538, 10862803, 12965603, 12439776, 12834019,
14411502, 8953000, 5401724])
CANVAS_WIDTH = 751
CANVAS_HEIGHT = 501

CHECK_WIDTH = CANVAS_WIDTH / 2 - 50

def find_init_color(screen, xr, yr):
for x in xr:
for y in yr:
if screen.get_color(x, y) == INIT_COLOR:
return (x, y)

def init():
while True:
screen = pydroid.bitmap.capture_screen()
first = find_init_color(screen, xrange(0, screen.width), xrange(0, screen.height))
last = find_init_color(screen, xrange(screen.width - 1, -1, -1), xrange(screen.height - 1, -1, -1))

if first is not None and last is not None and last[0] - first[0] >= CANVAS_WIDTH and last[1] - first[1] >= CANVAS_HEIGHT:
return first, last

def triangle(base, width, height, top_left, bottom_right):
for i in xrange(0, height):
y = base[1] - i
diff = i * width / height

if y > bottom_right[1]:
continue
if y < top_left[1]:
break

for x in xrange(base[0] - width + diff, base[0] + width - diff):
if x > top_left[0] and x < bottom_right[0]:
yield (x, y)

def check(first, last, prev):
screen = pydroid.bitmap.capture_screen()

if prev is not None:
for y in xrange(prev[1] + 20, prev[1] - 20, -1):
for x in xrange(prev[0] - 20, prev[0] + 20):
if screen.get_color(x, y) in BELL_COLORS:
pydroid.mouse.move(x, y)
return (x, y)

for point in triangle(prev, CHECK_WIDTH, 150, first, last):
if screen.get_color(point[0], point[1]) in BELL_COLORS:
pydroid.mouse.move(point[0], point[1])
return point

for y in xrange(last[1] - 100, first[1], -1):
for x in xrange(first[0] + 1, last[0]):
if screen.get_color(x, y) in BELL_COLORS:
pydroid.mouse.move(x, y)
return (x, y)

def main():
print 'Searching for Winterbells...'
first, last = init()
prev = None

print 'Found at %s, %s. Running.' % (first, last)
while True:
prev = check(first, last, prev)

if __name__ == '__main__':
main()

It still only scores in the thousands because one of the bell colors sometimes maps to the rabbit, but it's at the point where it scores better than a newbie. Instead of looking from the bottom up for bell pixels, it tries to look in the following regions in order:

1) The area near where it last looked.

2) A triangular area above where it last looked, which is a heuristic guess of where the rabbit would be able to jump to.

If those fail, then it looks from the bottom up for a bell. Okay that was fun, but it made me realize I really need a day job.
Beauty and Fitness
Barnes & Noble College Moves into Textbook Rental Market
Interestingly, there seems to be a higher percentage of single founders in the MicroISV type of companies.
Perhaps this thread made sense at one time, but this is the first I've noticed it. Its a hell of a long thread and I'm not sure the HN tools are oriented to glean value from old and lengthy threads that few know about.

Thanks for letting us know. There must be a better way though.
Are you sure it wasn't Ondra who did the grepping? I thought Derrick was an idiot.
Don't get me wrong, I believe language choice matters a ton when it really matters - maybe you need specific libraries, maybe speed/memory concerns, etc. I just don't believe the actual syntax (Which is pretty much the only difference between language source code) matters much.
Yes, but it's well known that certain kinds of changes are qualitatively different. There is a big difference between learning how to speak French when you are a child, versus someone learning in middle age. There are also big quantitative differences in MRI scans of people listening to music between those who learned how to play an instrument before the age of 12 versus those with no such background.
Poll: Hackers, do you play any musical instruments?
Inspired by http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1045422
Yes, more than one, proficiently in my opinion.
Yes, one, proficiently in my opinion.
Yes, but not very well.
I hit this bug on deleting list members for a new app I'm working on.

I only hit it when I switched to OAuth

The issue is that in DELETE spec it isn't specified how to issue params, so in the OAuth case they only accept GET params - in the normal auth they accept POST params
Assuming you're talking about splitting your SSN down the middle (two 5 digit numbers) and it looks something like this

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

The candidates are (unless I horked something up, these are pairs of 5 digit twin primes that start with a sensible 6 digit date and checksum as Danish SSNs)

0212702129
0608706089
2105721059
2210722109

That's assuming you were not born in '90 or '91.
Done: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1045758
What you are calling "awareness" sounds like what I mean by pattern matching. When I'm "on" as a musician, this "pattern matching" operates on a variety of time scales--multiple concerts, this concert, this piece, this verse, this phrase, this chord-- and multiple people scales--me, my fellow musicians, different people in the audience, the audience as a whole.

At the very highest level (perhaps five times in my life) any consciousness of all this disappears, even though I'm sure all those factors are still influencing my behavior. Strangely, this is absolutely sublime in music but I tend to produce code I later regret when programming in this zone.
He responded to my son with a letter and signed drawing the same way. Way cool.
Ski Resorts Exaggeration of Snowfall Reduced Sharply Because of iPhone App
Need To Build A Community? Learn From Threadless
Wasn't balsamiq (Peldi) a single founder? I've founded a few startups as a single founder, but they'd most likely be classified as Micro-ISV's instead of startups. But I'm okay with that.
Venture capital fundraising gained 7.4% last quarter
Tech execs trade brick, iron and wood in The Settlers of Catan
Because nobody has ever had problems w/ expensive domestic contractors. * rolls eyes *

This story is meant to scare us away from offshoring but if I'm to be convinced I'd need to see some stats and studies that show wide-scale differences in code quality. Until then this story is just an anecdote and we all know how much those are worth.
I'm another single founder. I spent a lot of time looking for cofounders but after a few months without success I decided it was better to create something, even if it wasn't an optimum setup, than to keep spending energy playing matchmaker.

I've found that people have wildly different ideas about both the reason to do a startup, how to execute, what's important, and where to exit. There's a great diversity even among people who know/read a lot about it. In fact, I'm amazed that the multiple founder system works at all. Except for cases where everybody is a college friend or something, it looks like a recipe for a lot of conflict.
Dan Buettner: How to live to be 100+
I've recently wondered, is the common knowledge that kids pick up languages quickly and better than adults really true?

Adults have a much wider range of skills and far more knowledge than children, adults already have some of the most important aspects of thinking down: a set of concepts about the world. Yet many struggle to learn a second language past a certain time in their life.

Clearly children learn languages better than adults, a near 100% success rate for children picking up their first language, to what may be something less than 50% success rate for adults (guessing these numbers, but its clearly lower for adults).

As a child though, what do you spend nearly every waking minute doing? practicing and learning language, usually from their mother. Where as adults, usually they give up not because its impossible, but because its too hard -- and they have better things to do!

Is ten thousand hours of language study as a kid really worth ten thousand hours of language study as an adult?

I would be interested to hear if anyone knows of research looking into the actual hours/work put in to study a second language to get to some certain level of proficiency where the subjects started learning at different ages (5 years, 10 years, 15, 30 years old etc.)
3D Flocking Boids
Note that: "is" and "is represented by" are not the same on my book (which is obvious from the previous comments). If you want to counter-argument, try harder.
More single-founder stories: Overture (Bill Gross), eBay (Pierre Omidyar), Napster (Sean Fanning), Lycos (Michael Mauldin), Amazon (Jeff Bezos), AOL (William von Meister), Digg (Kevin Rose).

Source: "If you’re going to launch a startup, how many friends do you need?": http://buzzpal.wordpress.com/2008/01/06/if-youre-going-to-la...
The DMCA is of particular interest because it's a potential counterexample of your assertion that other tools or intent are necessary to make distribution of a number illegal. The whole point is that it's a bad law, primarily because it's unclear what it prevents you from doing.

The law is pretty clear, though, on stabbing people and committing espionage.
Over half the list is old and bad (estimation questions, well-known, or hackable behavioral, etc), but there are a handful of pretty cool ones I never saw. My favorite are:

1.) How many tennis balls are in the room right now (good for a WTF shock, similar is 'how much money do I have in my pocket right now, what is your 95% confidence interval?')

2.) How much would you charge to rent Central Park for a day (better than a standard estimation question by far)

3.) If both a taxi and a limo were priced the exact same, which one would you choose? (knowing nothing else I would pick taxi because I'd be afraid the limo would expect more tip)
New vehicles in India have to confirm to a Euro IV emission standards (equivalent).

GM sells an LPG version of a small city car in India [1]. Just so that you understand the level of market awareness and "capitalism" in play.

[1] http://indianautosblog.com/2009/06/chevrolet-spark-lpg-launc...
America Will Crush Europe And Japan In Race For Recovery
I wonder if this is related to the version of the Android OS these devices are running ? The article does not mention that.
Towle_,

Thank you for the followup. I'm not trying to do science here, just understand my own experience.

Regarding the correlation between musicians and programmers being the result of socioeconomic status, that doesn't match my experience. I had lots of high school friends from similar backgrounds, and very few of them became musicians.

My experience is that the brain "peculiarities" that dispose one for accomplishment in programming are the same structures that dispose one for accomplishment in music. I'd love to see what a scientist would make of this claim.
In response to the security threat posed by terrorist babies climbing into luggage bins, the TSA has decreed that all children under the age of 8 are hereby forbidden from entering airports.

Take that, terrorists!
My comment on efficient markets was facetious. Sure, one must consider the time spent at the flea market, but what numerical value does one assign to 1 hour of one's time? In the end, I find that the question "are markets efficient?" is not even well-posed, as one must provide a precise definition of efficient in order to avoid engaging in endless pseudo-philosophical discussion.
If the service saves me a bit of time and headache, then yes I will pay for it. For your blogVault, do what I suggested in your comment: Allow me import ALL my historical writings (of which I am sure there are about 10.000 pages of floating around on the internet), and I'll pay you what you want. I want my writings on paper, not on websites that shut down and throw away stuff I spent a lot of time coming up with.
I would go with the Kindle as well. I've used both and the Nook seems much slower when doing things that you do a lot with an e-book reader, like turning pages.
5V * 0.8A = 4W.

Wireless access points are around 50–100mW. Even if you put a 100% efficient Dyson sphere around your APs, you'd need 40–80 of 'em.
Rogue phishing app smuggled onto Android Marketplace
The story seems a bit too condescending. Did EVERY quote and comment from the contractor have to be in broken English?
I'm a single founder. Thinking about crossing over to the dark side, but it's not such a bad life. You keep more control of the company, but things move slower as a result.
1) Don't use anything fast (like md5) to hash your passwords. Use many-rounds of md5 or sha-1, or use something specifically designed for password hashing like eksblowfish

2) Don't escape your SQL, use parameterized queries
Yes, sorry; let me rephrase that. I believe the syntax of a programming language matters a great deal, and has a significant impact on code length, quality and flexibility. axod disagrees on this point.
How good is md5 plus a 4-character (digits, actually, in the slides) salt?
Then the Wufoo example is mistated in the blog. The feedback was useful for deciding on interface changes but not useful for deciding on platform/technology changes which is what it seems to imply.

So I'll change what I said...It shouldn't have taken you more than 5 min to realize that GNU/Linux users wouldn't have been a huge percentage of your users and you could have gotten away with ignoring their advice on Flash/Javascript.

It's a good case against releasing early and asking for feedback...you have no idea if the market segment using your product is the one you will be targetting in a few months.
To be a single founder, you need to be quite special. Most people are not that special. A lot of those who think they are that special, actually are not.

It's not smarts you need - it's self organisational ability, and most people lack that if there is nobody else watching them.
How is Internet Changing the Way You Think?
Why not just wait until you can employ someone? :)
Finding a co-founder who matches your views and passion on all the points mentioned above to a reasonable degree is as hard as finding the mythical soulmate.
Maybe someone can have a startup like eHarmony (eCoFounder?) for finding such like minded people.
Ha! I first thought this meant "unmarried" rather than "unpartnered."
Perhaps he becAme a she because he later realized the market for female sex dolls is bigger, if you get my drift.
"a task which is believed to be NP-hard"

CITATION NEEDED
Same here. I clicked through thinking "Wow, I always thought most founders were single and being married made me a minority."
jacques, sorry to hear you're getting harassed enough to make this feature request. I don't pay any attention to the leader board (or my own karma), but I guess some do.

I think most of us can tell the difference between a great contributor such as yourself and a karma-whore.
> this story is just an anecdote

All Daily WTFs are anecdotes, designed to appeal to IT engineers and programmers, and usually portraying business owners and managers (and the other programmer) in an unfavorable light. It's a formula.

Totally useless for any insight about how to start or run a business.
For a thoughtful critique of language used badly, I've always liked Politics and the English Language (http://www.k-1.com/Orwell/index.cgi/work/essays/language.htm...)

Most of the points mentioned in the article misidentify the problem or give bad advice.

> Powerpoint is the ultimate in the depletion of English. It just doesn’t approve of sentences. It makes them into dot points.

When a few words do the work of a sentence, I would not call that 'depletion'.

> The invention of a mission statement is too late. The worst companies in the world are using mission statements.

Let's not do X. The worst companies in the world do X. X could be just about anything.

> The language I think is poisoned, generally. And it’s poisoned in the name of efficiency for some strange reason. It’s as if the whole culture has been corporatised in one way or another.

Since the function of language is to convey meaning, language that is efficient is language that deftly conveys meaning, by definition. Assuming that all his complaints amount to wishing for language to be meaningful, it is a contradiction to say that efficiency is poisonous.
Single founder here. But I'll admit it: I can use as much support as I can get sometimes.

I've been thinking of starting a "braintrust" of solo entrepreneurs so that we can pursue our respective passions but also reap some of the benefits of having a co-founder, by sharing ideas, debating stuff, etc.

Anyone interested in joining?
Huh? What kind of cars do americans buy? My parents aren’t exactly super rich and they just bough a run of the mill, middle of the line Mercedes for $10,000 more (30,000€).

I know quite a few people who would be comfortable spending that amount of money on a car. That’s not luxury, that’s a standard car for your middle class dads and moms in their fifties.
To find someone to devote free time to more work, to reach the end goal that maybe months down the line is hard to do. I've been approached by others to join their side projects, but I would rather work on my own and I think this is maybe how a lot of people feel. Any other founders in this predicament as well ?
There's a couple of these already in progress, but you usually have to get introduced to them via your network. Ask around :)
Yes, it probably is a recipe for a lot of conflict. But that's part of the idea. If you and your partners work the same and think the same, a lot of the point of having a partner is lost.

The question is not whether or not you and your cofounder disagree. The question is whether you can nonetheless find a way to make decisions and move on. If every disagreement causes your progress to stop dead, you've got a problem. If every disagreement is resolved in favor of the person with the loudest voice, you've got a problem. But it is in fact possible to make progress even with a team full of people who disagree, provided everyone is sufficiently open-minded, mutually respectful, and willing to indulge in whimsical experiments.

A lot of startup stories contain moments in which the cofounders had big disagreements; e.g. the time when Steve Wozniak had to be dragged kicking and screaming into quitting his day job with Hewlett-Packard.
That part makes me wonder. It seems odd to me that a Mac would have trouble with Apple's Bluetooth keyboard. You would think Apple would have gone over that with a fine toothed comb. Is this guy doing something weird?
Me! while i always try to find someone to help me on my projects, it really is difficult to find someone as passionate a founder as I am. But I never let that fact stop me from doing what I do. It's also forced me to become technical.
Plugging in the machine was merely to simulate power restoration (a more accurate test would be to leave the DC connector attached to the laptop and cut off power to the AC plug, which sometimes creates different behaviour). I want a server to come back online unattended, so I can enjoy my vacations. :)

I've only read that MacBooks overheat with the lids closed (I definitely feel the warm air being expelled near the hinge, and the area surrounding the track pad can get pretty hot), but if that's not the case, I might reconsider using them as servers.
Blind Men and an Elephant: Thoughts on an Amorphous Profession - Francis Hwang
you can find a short description of what the algorithm does and some pseudo code here: http://www.kfish.org/boids/pseudocode.html
Why Do We Need Cyber-Security?
It's sort of worse. With relationships, if you break up, you move on, find another mate. You get over it. Once you're sure they're "the one", then if you like you can do a family startup and create some babies.

But with a startup, you don't usually have any time before you start building something. So if something does go wrong, the split up is bad.

It'd be like having a baby with every one of your ex girlfriends :/

I think ideally founders should have already worked together on something.
Presumably somebody at Silicon Graphics was willing to say, "yeah, we'll keep using this code. But we're not in this business. We're not going to be in this business. We don't want to be in this business."

Which is really, really awesome of them.
Getting users is just as hard building a product. In a way it's harder, because it is very easy to put energy into product that should have gone to user acquisition. The biggest weakness of being a single founder is that you can't put 100% effort into getting customers (since you're distracted by building the product).
Ask HN:How to automatically fill in craigslist post form from another website? 
What is the best way to automatically fill in and submit a craigslist post form from another website? We're making a website that has posts similar to craigslist, and we want to add an option to repost the same post to craigslist with as few steps as possible for the user."
Thanks for the help.
Yep, Blues harmonica ;)
Actually, Napster had a cofounder, Sean Parker (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sean_Parker).
AWS working on higher level orchestration?