skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Agreed. FFT is easily one of the top 10 algorithms of all time outside of the Carmack method for fast inverse square root.
As the duration of space flight missions has increased, many other symptoms related in particular to being away from gravity have been observed. They include a kind of anemia due to reduced red cell mass, muscle atrophy and reduced strength of those muscles that keep the body upright, loss of calcium from bones, reduced bone density and strength, reduced calcium absorption from the gut, disturbed sleep and a depressed immune system. These are all normal body function adaptations that occur when away from gravity. Degradation of body functions no longer needed in space is the normal adaptation to living away from gravity.

OK, these are pretty bad, but they're not literally cancer. My space-age dreams live on.
Yahoo cycling team
most of my friends tend to, maybe this is why I fail most of the courses and afterwards go to internet and learn about the topics on my time, just for fun
A good example is the UK. We spend ~200Bn a year on welfare and ~30Bn a year on defence. Yet the US leads in almost every technological field.
Don't forget about google street view. It doesn't provide the nice bird's eye view that this does, but there is street level coverage of a good chunk of the city.
So you made $18,525 in profits, and figure that worked out to $125-$150 an hour. That means you worked somewhere between 124 and 148 hours over the entire year, or less than 3 hours a week. Is this correct? If so, then it is very impressive...
This isn't digital rights management, it's basic operational security. A security failure damaged their preview. Having intense security controls on one of the most eagerly awaited movie premiers of all time is not unreasonable and it's not about "rights"; in fact, it may simply be about the production company not getting sued by its investors.
Sure, I just found your comments interesting and wanted to respond.
I'm curious as to why your expenses were so high? Advertising and server charges should be the bulk of that, correct?
They are so responsive on the mailing list. You can mention features/bugs and see them in the next nightly.
Sorry, your comment wasn't witty or original. Sniping, contentless comments don't belong here, and I'm surprised you're even disagreeing. It's plain to see your comment wasn't additive.

Twitter is making many millions from their search deals. They may not be worth a billion dollars, but I'd bet with the current business configuration, they could become profitable if they focused on it.

What part of "we're focusing on product and growth, not on making money" is hard to understand? Do you not believe them? Think they're actually pushing out ad sales and content licensing as hard as they can? Or, more likely, you're just ignorant of how their business is actually run. Ignorance is actually a generous term - you might know they're already making money and willfully ignore it.

I actually agree that twitter's image is inflated. But the US government was the first to make a move here. They didn't ask facebook to try to stay up (they didn't need to). I think this response by cyber terrorists (if it isn't some teenage in ohio) is rational.

It isn't what you were saying that I reacted to particularly, but how you said it. It would be the equivalent to my just responding "you're obviously an idiot who doesn't know anything about twitter".
I have never gotten the digital copies, that come with some blu ray movies, to work.

I have to turn around and use a torrent. I feel smug about it too. Serves them right.
This article is about 10 times too long for the point it is trying to make. It could be summed up as "don't let implementation considerations quash your UX creativity."

That's a valid consideration for sure. But as a full UX developer with a nice bell curve of experience centered squarely over javascript and server side programming, and extending respectively through Photoshop/Illustrator on one side and Linux server admin on the other, I can speak from experience that when you have hard separations between the skill sets of your team, a lot gets lost in translation.

Knowing code is pretty much orthogonal to design creativity. If your goal is to create the most stunning and innovative design possible then I think there is some merit to the OA's thesis. However, most the time, time-to-market and length of iteration cycles are far more important than breaking new design ground (not to mention giving up the usability capital of tried-and-true UI design elements).

Having a cross-disciplinary team makes it possible to start performing usability testing and iterating rapidly even before graphic design is finalized. 9 times out of 10 this is going to result in a better product than trying to silo your people to force them "out of the box". If a mind-blowingly original design is what you want, you just need more creative people, not less cross-disciplinary ones.
he has pie charts of how his expenses break down at http://www.bingocardcreator.com/stats
I couldn't remote desktop into my servers during the outage
What a shame the IPO doesn't seem to be true...
Amazing and humbling.

"""Another argument for the surgery is like the rationale for sending people to the Moon, Dr. Emond said: “Understanding things better or extending the limits of care in these extreme situations somehow moves the whole field of medicine forward.”"""

Not just medicine, but all of humanity.
The absolute worst web design trend of 2009 is this header background that extends beyond the container and makes it look like the header is on a piece of paper that has been folded around the background. Let me show you what I'm talking about: http://i.imgur.com/yP7CH.png

It's a silly and needless ornamentation that wasn't cool or interesting when the first person did it, and became even more worthless and boring with each successive use. Bahhumbug!

I'll hug it and kiss it and apologize if I see it used in a way even remotely relevant to the context of the content, or integrated into the visual language of the design (e.g. on a blog about origami), but until then, I'm a hater. I'd rather see drop shadows under blinking text; at least that would be quasi-original.

Also, the blue logo area pops so ridiculously hard it makes it impossible to keep my attention focused on the rest of the page. I'd tone it down to a smooth #80a7d3, like you see in the image I linked above.

EDIT: Don't get me wrong, I'm thrilled w3 finally redesigned the site; on first impression it appears to be a marked improvement.
I never thought I'd say something like this, but watching "lie to me" was worth it!
Under "Things that went right", you state:

In addition to collecting numerous mentions from luminaries in the community, actually using A/Bingo has been key to my ongoing conversion optimization efforts. (Last year, for example, I had approximately 1.4% conversion rates for the downloadable version of the software.)

Since you list this year's download-to-paid conversion rate as 1.17%, I assumed you were talking about the visits-to-trials conversion rate, as going from 1.4% last year to 1.17% doesn't really strike me as something that went right in terms of conversion rate optimization :)

I didn't take the aggregate conversion rate into account.
> No, I think the parent's point was that if bright people still go into fields that matter, then the economy won't "suffer."

So by implication business isn't a field that particularly matters. People passionate about startups just wouldn't agree with that.

> Also, the parent joined HN 12 days after you.

I was more talking about the voters (both parent up voters and my down voters). Anyone can make a throw away comment but voting patterns say something. It would be really interesting to know the average 'age' of the up-voters and what other posts/comments where correlated. I'm detecting a growing 'arts studenty', anti-capitalist, humanist, complaining sentiment here (i.e. reddit). I'd prefer a community that has a deeper interest in getting stuff done rather than complaining about the 'system'.
Ah, thanks, you're right.

My bank's website specifically calls it "multi-factor authentication", and I never bothered to double-check the term.
The uppermost nav menu is a blob of text, the nav item "standards" is repeated (Standards, STANDARDS, standards, STANDARDS) like the date of a monster truck rally, and there's no obvious difference between left-nav and top-nav. It looks like a blog from 2005 viewed in a browser with the wrong fonts. Who designed it?
Sure, and I'm clearly not a lawyer, but it seems difficult to say that you don't make any representations about them when you did exactly that 3 lines earlier. For example:

"This car is the best deal on the lot!"
"I have made no representation as to the value of this car."
Mostly because mmap is not portable. If you're writing a Linux specific version of your code then mmap is fine. If you foresee running your code on other platforms then you shouldn't use it.

Basically, there's a reason why it's called "standard" IO. Generally you shouldn't use system calls unless you are absolutely, 100% sure that your code will only ever need to work on one system.
Patrick, I have incredible respect for what you've accomplished, so I hope you won't be offended by this, but do you ever think that you might have picked the wrong niche? I mean, you're killing it in terms of growth, clearly, but the market for bingo card creation software is only so big, and it doesn't strike me as a particularly hungry market. I guess I'm wondering if you had picked something a little bit bigger, could you have done essentially the same thing and reached the point where you can do it full-time even sooner?

At the end of the day, it sounds like you're pretty much there, and the experience you've gained is worth much much more than the dollars you've gotten out of it, but still...I just wonder if a different niche might have been more...efficient or something.

Again, I hope you don't take that the wrong way. You've accomplished something pretty amazing, and I'm looking forward to hearing about what you do next.
PR vs. CYA (Thoughts on Google's Developer Directory)
Code Reformatting Unnecessary
This has been asked for again and again. Apparently whoever maintains this site is busy with something more important. Huff.
The Decade in News Photographs
Does consistency in programming language somehow automatically translate to consistency in output?
I take pictures to "show off locations", not to toot my own horn...

Besides, taking these are not trivial, so it does show some "ability". It's difficult to get the lighting consistent, for example. But maybe you only value artistic ability?
Amazon Won't Be The Only One Selling Kindle Books Next Year
Heh, I think it ties in very nicely with my experience of W3C specs!
After a quick browse, that reference seems quite good -- but with a lot of spin. Who wrote the article?

Can you get me a REAL reference for "really excessive" radiation? IIRC, it contradicts both Dyson's son's book and most everything else I've read.

Edit: The Wikipedia page on project Orion (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Orion_(nuclear_propulsi...) contradicts the claim that the radiation estimation is based on fusion only bombs. ("Freeman Dyson, group leader on the project, estimated back in the '60s that with conventional nuclear weapons, that each launch would cause on average between 0.1 and 1 fatal cancers from the fallout"). Also see "Edit 2" below. That fits with my memories, too. A serious error on the page -- to make a point... a pity, the author was obviously knowledgeable but seems dishonest. (I won't bother checking the rest of the reference, if that got through.)

Regarding costs, the Orions were thought to be built like a water going ship out of steel. That means orders of magnitudes less cost. Also, many problems just go away in designing equipment if you can throw weight at it (common example is heat distribution.)

(Was there even serious discussion about making ion drive research in the 1960s? Ah, another thing NASA should have founded -- but used all the money for the shuttle instead. :-( )

Also, the whole point with Orion was that you could literally go in person all over the solar system 30+ years ago -- which we still won't do inside decades...

Edit 2: Also from the Wikipedia page discussed in the edit above:

The fallout for the entire launch of a 6000 short ton (5500 metric ton) Orion is only equal to a ten-megaton (40 petajoule) blast, assuming the use of pure fission weapon-type nuclear explosives.

With special designs of the nuclear explosive, Ted Taylor estimated that it could be reduced tenfold, or even to zero if a pure fusion explosive could be constructed
> why are the left and top menus (standards, participate, ...) the same?

Looks like the top menu is static, but the left menu changes as you navigate. Compare the two on this page: http://www.w3.org/Consortium/membership-benefits

Kinda falls apart on pages like this: http://www.w3.org/Consortium/fee-history

There's a lot of needless elements though. Go here: http://www.w3.org/Consortium/membership.html, then click on the drop-down under 'Fees'. The 'current fees' link takes you to the same page that the 'Fees' link goes to. And the 'fee history' link goes to a page that is also linked to from the page the 'Fees'/'current fees' links go to.

Same with the drop-down under "Join W3C" The "Join W3C" link and the "how to join" link both point to the same URL: "http://www.w3.org/Consortium/join
It's not always bad -- very often it's the right thing to do. Just not "always".
Wow, Thanks for sharing.

Have you thought about going into e-flash cards, it seems like you would have an overlap in customers for this product? And it wouldn't be too much work to create.
I've worked on a project that successfully uses memory mapping on all the major OSes.

mmap is (allegedly) portable across Unixes:

http://opengroup.org/onlinepubs/007908775/xsh/mmap.html

and you can do the same thing (with a few more hoops) on Windows.
What's neat about it is that he can spend time on A/B testing and stuff like that. Also, it's the sort of app where you have a problem, you google it, and you buy it. These are great products to sell. With apps like mine, users need to warm up to the app for much longer.

With me, I spend all my time working on new products or supporting the existing ones, so I always feel sleazy neglecting that in order to tweak marketing.
It looks like a cheap bastardization of Drupal's default template that I think they launched with Drupal 5 several years ago.

Quite simply I think they tried too hard. The gradients and whitespace are extremely clumsy. It would look 10 times better with flat colors and standardized on some kind of grid and font size scheme.
I'm a huge proponent of C programming, but I have to say this article is not very compelling. Object-oriented programming is just as important in C as it is in C++, it's just the syntax is different.

I think my high regard for C comes from work experience: the C projects I've worked on have been less of disastrous messes than the C++ projects I've worked on. It's hard to pinpoint why, because on a small scale C++ is very nice. But I've noticed that once > 10 people get involved, C++ projects become more bug-prone and difficult to understand and fix.

I especially love ADTs in C. C++ encourages you to declare public and private and protected class members in a single class declaration in a single header file. Yes, you can work around this (ie, have a single private member m_priv), but I haven't seen it done much in practice. In C, on the otherhand, it's much easier to separate implementation details from the public interface. Put "typedef struct Foo * FooHandle" in the public header and the structure definition in the .c file. This is common practice in C and very elegant. As a coworker once put it, "I don't like the way people put private members in header files in C++... it's like seeing the class's underwear".
I'd give it two weeks until it's hacked. Anybody using Wordpress is asking for trouble.
For the gamer who liked Monkey Island, they might also like On the Rain Slick Precipice of Darkness

http://www.rainslick.com/
Attention Internet start-ups: operations is your core competency. You can't just expect to push your application code to "the cloud" and have somebody else make it scalable and fault tolerant.

It's fine to use a managed hosting service provider if you're just getting started and paying month-to-month based on credit cards and can't afford networking gear (hardware itself can be leased). However, it shocks me to see venture funded, post-series A start-ups exclusively relying on others to do their operations (including systems administration).

Problem with outsourcing your operations to somebody else is that you're outsourcing it to somebody who has zero knowledge of your application and is also responsible for at the very least dozens of other customers. Essentially, rather than developing your own vertical technology team, you're relying on a on horizontal technology team whose resources multiple other companies (including your competitors) are fighting for.

That's exactly how poorly run big companies function (multiple engineering teams competing for attention of monothlic operations, SCM, release, QA etc... teams). Well run Internet giants, however, function much differently. If you look at Google's job openings, you can note that they don't hire IT/Systems Administrators (aside from data-center technicians and corporate IT). Instead, they have Site Reliability Engineers (SREs) assigned to specific properties. The SREs are actually engineers who are able to write and debug code and deeply understand the application-specific stack they operate rather than treat it as a black box.

Sure, there are great business and technical reasons (edit: it said financial, which I felt was an unfair strawman) reasons to use a managed/"cloud" provider (EC2 and Rackspace cloud are very attractive due to the ability to add/remove nodes as traffic goes up and down, as well as provision machines ad-hoc for analytics tasks/MapReduce) -- but even then, you're not off the hook for operations. It's still your responsibility to ensure that at the very least, there's a "hot standby" disaster recovery site. Yes, it's not easy - but running a successful business isn't supposed to be.
Designers & programmers are not necessarily good writers either.
I haven't actually played it, but "blueberry garden" looks pretty sweet from the trailer and won top prize at the independent games festival. http://eriksvedang.com/blueberrygarden/
This is divine punishment for the term "the cloud."
JQuery 1.4 Alpha 2 Released
eg means 'for example.' I wasn't summing 30+ books worth of economic thought.
New Year 2010 Wallpapers, New Year 2010 Pics
I switched away from WordPress to a custom app engine blog package mainly because of this, and the fact that you need to install and maintain at least the SuperCache plugin if you want your WordPress to handle even a modest traffic surge.
This is what I love about Patrick's business. He has it essentially stripped down to the bare essence of marketing and selling software. Everything he does is teachable. We sell a 5-figure enterprise product, and I pay attention to everything he does.

I'm pretty sure he said himself that the actual product was a weekend project for him.
This article makes me nervous. The author freely admits to a gaping security hole in part 3 of the article. Instead of fixing the code, the author just added an annotation. I just know that someone inexperienced in the ways of PHP is going to copy and paste that code without reading everything thoroughly. I understand the author was trying to keep things simple, but it's irresponsible in my opinion.
you yourself are at the same risk of getting the same exact problem...who do you think is better at fixing it, a startup guy who is no expert, or the 100 people at Rackspace who know what they are doing?
The largest geothermal power plant is in the US and Iceland actually receives most of it's electric power from Hydro Power. They are almost done another 690 MW peak 525 MW av hydro power dam which is being created for the Fjarðaál smelter. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K%C3%A1rahnj%C3%BAkar

They do use geothermal for home heating which has an above normal payout in large part due to the cold preventing normal heat pump's from working at reasonable efficiency and the long winders preventing solar home heating system from working when they are most needed them. Most of the continental US can use solar hot water heating systems with a fairly fast payback for lower cost than Iceland's geothermal systems.

I am just pointing out that "green" tech is already competing with fossil fuels and winning in many areas. It's not a question of turning off coal and other fossil fuels today, but rather limiting their use to the most useful systems such as cars and airplanes.

PS: Many homes in the US would reduce their CO2 emissions more by adding insulation than they would by doubling the fuel economy of their cars.
18. Anthropologists find genetic and archeological evidence that ancestral man once flew between the stars and listened to Lenny Kravitz. A huge post-hoc revision in a popular sci-fi series replaces "All along the watchtower" with "Are you gonna go my way?" and comes out better for some weird reason.
HPP -- What is it, and what types of attacks does it augment?
Part of the problem is that Facebook isn't really a brand
yet. They are still trying to define how the site is going
to make money. Dragging the customer kicking and screaming
usually doesn't do it.
Sounds like those guys should learn some card games so they
understand the value of a good finesse.
I disagree, I think it's exactly DRM. It's not DRM that normal consumers ever interact with though (except second hand by seeing the movie, or not seeing the movie as the case may be) but it's rights management none the less. From the failure modes it doesn't sound like there was any security above and beyond the standard DCinema encryption.
I've been using MongoMapper with Rails for a while and I've really enjoyed it. It's so freeing to be able to include embedded documents or other modules and not have to deal with migrations.

ActiveRecord is great, but MongoDB and MongoMapper feel so much more natural to me.
I dont really understand how you could dislike it so much, its a tiny flourish that gives a little visual hierarchy
Antitrust law is famous for enabling the government to chase after pyrrhic victories in the name of benefiting consumers. Competitors will cheer, of course, because they get to see the big guy hammered in a way that might benefit them competitively and that costs them nothing.

In the microprocessor field, during the years between 2000 and 2006 (when Intel's alleged monopolistic practices supposedly hurt consumers), the quality and performance of microprocessors improved significantly while prices fell at an annual rate of 48.9%. So we have anti-competitive behavior that, far from raising costs, has lowered them in a huge way - yet, and this is key for antitrust purposes, at no time has Intel sold below cost (which places it squarely within two decades of Supreme Court precedent consistently rejecting antitrust challenges to above-cost price cuts).

In this context, the FTC seeks a remedy "[r]equiring Intel to make available technology . . . to others, via licensing or other means, upon terms and conditions as the Commission may order."

Now that will certainly spur companies to spend hundreds of millions in fields such as this to innovate.

Will this hurt Silicon Valley? Draw your own conclusions. The cheering competitors will say no. My guess is that just about everyone else (at least those who are informed about the issues) will seriously question whether having regulators throwing their weight around helps innovation or the consumers that benefit from such innovation. But at least we can all feel satisfied that the bully is getting its comeuppance.