skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
How to get upvoted
There seem to be a lot of recent meta-articles explaining how to get hits.

I saw a story with a drawing of men on dinosaurs fighting robots with lasers. I chuckled and thought to myself, "That's childhood innocence." That's sure fire content for kids.

Recently, I saw a story about cromagnan man having sex with early homosapiens and it mentioned large brains. Just throw-in cannibalism and you have a winner for the evolution obsessed computer-nerd crowd.

By the way, any number from 105-160 is always an IQ. Any number in the 90's is a percent. Throw an IQ number in there too.

:-)
Ask HN: What would be a proper Boing ball demo for a current Amiga
With the recent announcement of new Amiga computers based on PPC and XCore processors, what would be the "Boing ball demo" that could impress current geeks as much as Boing impressed those in the mid 80-s? What would be the readily identifiable impressive, even to the non-initiated, show of graphical prowess for current desktop PCs?
I'd really want to know which technology powers these scanners. After a quick googling I couldn't come up with any relevant information. :(
When Redis is used as a persistent cache, the clients implementing consistent hashing are perfect fit for a distributed-redis, as you don't need all this data safeness. You can lose a node if there is a disaster without too much problems usually (like it happens in memcached), but you want, in normal conditions, that the cache is not volatile.
You should run a programming competition using this software.
There are less than two hundred heads of state in the world, so that by itself doesn't worry me. Imagine, though, how quickly this might drift to immediate family of heads of state... top diplomatic corps officials... people travelling on diplomatic passports....
You've shattered my dreams. :)

Thanks for the clarification. The ad hoc manner in which many projects roll out at google, it almost seems as though they're still following the previous method; but I suppose that it could also be a function of management deciding to jump when a 20% project bears fruit.
Tadpole code convert any &lt;4k string to a 'single' character (Unicode magic)
Usually... not always, but usually... people get paid very real money to find a great candidate for the company. The person you talk to in your target company to get in the door isn't even doing you a favor.
"Anyone who is educated about script writing knew exactly what it was by minute 20"

So true...

My wife says that's my "useless superpower": to be able to predict the next 5 minutes of a movie I never saw.
Sane web development with Compojure, Jetty, and Maven
Some observations:

[tang ⇔ gnat] are not only the ROT13 of each other, but also the inverse of each other. It seems these two properties coincide in this pair only.

I'm also surprised that the longest pair is [nowhere ⇔ abjurer] at 7 letters, with [terra ⇔ green] being second with 5.
"And your computer has no Qemu or vmware player ?"

I prefer VirtualBox, but running Plan9 inside a VM takes all the fun out of it.
/۠ۡۜۙۛۚ۬ۧۢۡ۟ۤۢۘۙۨ۫ۤۘۤۘ۬ۚۖۚۚ۬ۜۙ۟۫ۧۖ۠
Try #3, Thomas Jefferson, a deist.
I recommend reading on; he goes on to argue how it is generally a Good Thing.
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> A good magician never explains his tricks to the audience.

Illusions, jaquesm.
I've created a relational database that can horizontally scale and now I'm putting it to use.
Now you should be well settled in for applying to YC
Yes I finished it off; the bit where he lays out the FSF's stance was good.
I agree. What matters is to write great software, how you finance it is irrelevant to the end user.

Open source makes reverse engineering easier. Users don't care about reverse engineering your software. They care about great software.

My point of view is that great software comes from great engineers, not from a license.
The ones being planned for deployment in the UK use Millimeter wave scanning. The description on this BBC News article matches that technology: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/8438355.stm
That is an amazing piece of software. I hope you make a mint.

I'd give people access to their language's output facility for playing around to the solution, but that is a minor nitpick. (And I suppose I could open an irb instance on my machine for exploration and then give you code when I'm good and ready.)

My Ruby solution, in case we've got anybody who is struggling: http://pastie.org/771438 This would be my first cut if you asked me to whiteboard this.
wow, yes. Mod the title someone! I clicked through and "confirmed" it was just a link to Sketchup - totally missing that it wasn't.
Honestly, I'm not quite sure where all the controversy is coming from.

If I'm going to take the time to write an article for my blog, I'm generally going to write something that I think would be interesting enough to be worth reading for other people as well as worth writing for myself. Otherwise I'm merely indulging myself, and that tends to make for unbearably bad writing.

Likewise, when I think of a title, I try to come up with something that will attract people's interest so they read the article.

Is that "social engineering"? If not, how is it different from what you did? Is the issue here intent - the intent to create something interesting/useful vs. the intent to capture pageviews per se - or is it merely the tone of your subsequent introspection, which admittedly was nakedly gloating about having achieved your objective of attracting readers and twitter followers?

Finally, what is the latter if not a reasonable proxy you used to measure the former?
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Please pass the SPF 14,000 sunblock.
Nothing so special in here. Thats exactly the ways movies have worked, from times immemorial.
Dammit, are you sure your not across the road or something?

Our backup server(s) are currently in pieces on the floor..... (long long story).

Coincidence? I think not :)
It needs to be noted that RSA as a whole is discouraged in favour of elliptic encryption.

RSA is difficult to use correctly, one needs the data to be padded correctly (OAEP), the prime numbers ideally should be Sophie-Germain primes and the keys need to be longer and longer which causes other problems related to prime generation.

See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NSA_Suite_B_Cryptography
Nit: most modern crypto does not rely on large numbers that are the product of two primes. Truly number-theoretic algorithms are mostly in the province of public key crypto. For all you read about public key, it's somewhat rare in workhorse production systems.

Also, truly modern public key systems aren't the product of very large prime numbers. Elliptic curve systems achieve better security at much lower key sizes, and for that reason and others it's displacing RSA, especially in the cryptosystems you don't regularly read about in Ars Technica.

There is probably another 10 years before there's even an academic result against 1024 bit RSA keys.
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It's awesome that he mentioned SUMPRODUCT, which is a function that anybody who uses Excel for startups should master. It allows you to do things like calculate the amount of sales in a region, which is enormously useful to analyze data and A/B tests.

For instance, say you have a spreadsheet listing every sale in 2009 along with the region it was in. Column A is the sale amount per transaction. Column B is the region its in.

You could write a SUMPRODUCT formula to see how much revenue you made in the West region, like so:

=SUMPRODUCT ( ( A1:A1000 ) * ( B1:B1000 = "WEST" ) )

You could repeat the formula for every region to see how sales varied by region (or whatever metric).

If Column C had another metric, you could add a further filter for that too by adding a term:

=SUMPRODUCT ( ( A1:A1000 ) * ( B1:B1000 = "WEST" ) * (C1:C1000 = "Male" ) )

COUNTIF is useful for its limited purpose, but SUMPRODUCT is an incredibly powerful function that I use all the time to calculate summary stats by period and other metrics.
What matters is to write great software

I disagree. This is what I think of as the "Apple stance". Don't worry -- we write great apps and you will like them.

However, no software is bug-free or suits everyone. People here are probably not typical end-users, and I can certainly think of the times when I've been forced to use software that didn't quite do what I wanted or that had some bug the vendor could not be bothered to fix. And because it was proprietary, I could not fix it regardless of my motivation to do so.

If you say you're going to cater to everyone's needs and write perfect software, then maybe you're right. But if you're more realistic and aim at making the majority of your users happy and do a cost-benefit analysis of whether it's worth your time to make the minority happy, you will not be producing great software in their eyes. And I'd bet you they'd be happier if they could just patch it themselves.
"What is clear is that you had no base motive, no sexual motive and there was not any question of deriving sexual gratification from what you were doing."

That's what a judge said before passing down sentence for a guy who took 'fairy' pictures of children at the request of their parents. He got 150 hours community service, which I guess was the lightest sentence the judge could hand down.

Story on it here: http://tinyurl.com/69ew9w

He pled guilty, probably to keep the case short and after being pressured to by the CPS. That means no jury was involved.
There may not be a single person on Hacker News, including Colin, who knows enough to implement ECC safely. It's got at least as many easy dealbreaker pitfalls as RSA.

You don't need OAEP to make RSA work for signing.
I wonder if there's a study into how successful internet child porn laws are at actually preventing crime.

I'd guess they are absolutely not effective at all.

I don't understand the rationale behind making viewing certain images illegal :/ Obviously I'm not someone who wants to view such images, but I can't see why doing so should be a crime. It's verging on 'thought police'.

We're living in an age where you can view videos of beheadings, people send around youtubes of some guy being electricuted on top of a train. Death? Hey sure that's fine, but post a pic of your baby enjoying bathtime and you'll be hunted down and burned as a witch. It's perverse.
Very cool product. Well done
I should have also said that Plan9 runs Qemu in the Linux emulator. We've done the usual Plan9 running in Qemu running in LinuxEmu running on native Plan9.

But come on, which way do you want to have it. Castigating because of lack of certain apps.

BTW if Django is pure Python then it should run just fine, we have native Python.

Emacs, hmm blegh. FF and OO well ok, no native. That's why I have multiple comps.
great software comes from great engineers

Tautological, but fair enough. Could the choice of license affect which engineers work on your product?
Pasties are a good idea, but results pages are more interesting. Here's my sad effort after 8 mins in python: http://codility.com/demo/results/?id=demoXFXD64-GCZ

The site's very slick. My only feedback is the histogram on the results page could be more prominent - it's cool, useful information but I ended up inspecting the html elements to work out what it was.

Also the results page seemed to keep refreshing for me while waiting for results (Safari 3). Surely that should've been AJAX'd?
> I agree. What matters is to write great software, how you finance it is irrelevant to the end user.

Well, yes and no. If, for instance, you have proprietary software, and your users depend on it and have no source code, and you go out of business, they are up a creek. Or, if you have released some open source software that people like and find useful, and you can't find a way to fund more than sporadic development, that may be a problem too: in an ideal world you'd spend more time working on it.
Sigh. The worse thing is, I reckon this idea that seeing children naked is "forbidden" encourages people to seek them out. It's the old, utterly predictable story - people want what they've been told they can't have.

Anyway, that's getting off topic. Yeah, I suppose a hyper-media-brainwashed jury might reach the conclusion that some fuzzy grey image of a child is "porn". God help us all.
This only makes sense for libraries, it seems, because it relies on embedding.

For end-user software, I wonder if you could do the opposite, charge extra for a GPL version of the software? I know there would be times where I'd pay more for that.

The vendor would of course run the risk that I'd then start shrink-wrapping and selling it, so maybe you'd have to modify the license slightly to include distribution only as patches, not full source code. That way people could share code but would still need to buy initial access from the vendor.

Edit: The responses miss my point: I know it won't be copyleft / totally free software with such restrictions. But if such restrictions would convince someone to change distribution terms from shrink-wrap to partially open-source, I think many of the strongest reasons for advocating free software would be accommodated. That is, you could modify the printer driver (or whatever RMS's initial reason was).

Or if Photoshop doesn't have the functionality you want, you can pay extra to get the source and patch it. And you could even share such improvements with other users, provided they have the full source.
"The most plausible theory, though, is that Google’s Android phone software is a more open and hackable operating system than the proprietary software on the iPhone, BlackBerry or Palm. Therefore, Android appeals to precisely the sort of frustrated, anti-establishment people who have no trouble writing abusive notes. It brings them out of the woodwork, gives them a new counterculture champion."

I agree with Pogue. It is absolutely baffling how something as ephemeral as a technical solution tickles our religious reflexes.
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.. well I guess he'll never do that again.

You know, hearing things like that makes me determined to never, ever have anything to do with kids no matter what. If you're below 18 I won't even look at you, let alone talk, let alone help. It's just too risky.

To me, this outcome is more perverse than any picture could be.
Well... You rarely implement the algorithm yourself, do you? It's a project by itself.
Why a public that's ho-hum about tablets expects Apple's iSlate to be magical
No, you can't charge extra for a copyleft-licensed version of software. Any licensing change you made to try to do that would make you not copyleft.
It does. It's weak though...
Hard to say, but we increased speed pretty much across the board about 50% from 0.4 to 0.4.2, by 50% (compounded :) to 0.5, and looking at 100% already for release-after-0.5... and we're ready to help configure on IRC :)

(Also, I'm not sure when you were looking at it, but bootstrap -- adding nodes without any downtime -- is done now.)
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This is great!

I've already sent it around at the company I work for. I'm hoping we can put it to use.
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It sounded like they want to use it as more of a "real" database than a cache, since rebuilding data in case of a hardware failure is so painful. <shrug>
I don't see the Vietnam connection (apart from "being in the jungle") - there was nothing in the Vietnam conflict that was about resource extraction.
Except they would have to port Office, games and convince the whole Windows ecosystem to port (and support) everything to different platforms.
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I think arguing about what you did is right or wrong misses the point. You're free to say whatever you want on your own blog. For the record though, I had no idea who you were before reading your previous two posts, but after reading your third, I'm left with a negative impression of your writing and probably will not be coming back and will probably associate that with your HN username as well.
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Definitely agree with this "global approach" when creating a startup, but obviously build all that it's not straightforward and where you start from does matter.
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In the middle he says that view-source encourages incompatible renderers but doesn't support that position. I really don't see how that can be the case?
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The power of view-source is multiplied when generous parsers forgive errors and render anyway. The value of a big internet is much greater than the value of a clean internet.
11 Strategies to Rock Your Startup’s Scalability in 2010
Got my 94% C solution up to 100% by using long long ints for intermediate sums.

http://pastebin.com/m6e742f56

Edit: And won't this be a problem if interviewees can access the internet? The interviewers will have to make sure they can check the browsing history of the computer being used!
Nah, it doesn't actually recurse infinitely, it just looks weird. Here's an example in c:

http://codepad.org/Xysob1jS

Obviously this is a totally contrived example but you get the idea.
I'm guessing, since I sleep in the same bed as my wife and my daughter's new puppy, that this would have no chance of working with me.
No ideas?

I know it's hard. Graphics and polygon count would not impress the PS3 generation, but what would? Real-time video interference? A new desktop-less webcam-captured gesture-oriented 3D environment?
I've always called this "dual licensing" and I'm very surprised that Stallman is in favour of it. I seem to remember him being against it. The arguments he uses now make sense, though they also made sense in the past.
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If I know nothing about computers and software engineering and I have a problem with an open source software, I will have to pay someone to fix the bug (business) or rely on the goodwill of someone else to do it (charity).
No. It's a solution in search of a problem. There are plenty of businesses that would like to receive micropayments, but time after time customers have rejected them. Even if you somehow created a system that was absolutely seamless and required zero effort on the part of the user, you'd still have to convince people that they actually want to make micropayments.

The trouble is that if you set a price that is very nearly free then you are inevitably competing with actually really free. Dan Ariely's research has shown that customers massively overvalue anything free. Customers overwhelmingly prefer a free good to a good at any price, even when there is a significant difference in quality. No experimenter thus far has managed to break this natural gravity towards free in preference to any price. Add in the inevitable friction of the act of payment and you've got an overwhelming barrier to entry that without fail drives the mass of the market towards free alternatives.

There have been a litany of failed micropayment services, all of whom failed for the same reason - rather than doing the Agile thing and finding out what the customer wanted, they tried to impose a 'great idea' on a market that has consistently rejected it. Why exactly are you going to succeed where dozens have failed? What are you going to do differently?

http://www.predictablyirrational.com/pdfs/zerofree.pdf
http://www.shirky.com/writings/fame_vs_fortune.html
Clever. Looks like it's using all of the diacritic marks to encode information onto a / character. (it's easy to see if you use a large enough font)
/ۤۧۚۖۚۚۗ۟ۙۗۖۜۤۢۙۘۖۜۜۛۙۡۧۘۙ۫ۙۢۧ۟ۘۘۨ۫ۛۗ۠ۨۘ۫ۗۘۚۛۧۧۢ۬۟ۘ
This is a little silly. I haven't played with Compojure, but Maven, and all this save-file-to-reload stuff is completely unnecessary with the Clojure and Jetty combination.

Clojure is a Lisp, and like any decent Lisp, gives you full access to the compiler at runtime. This means that, if you wire your app to Jetty correctly — remember that Jetty can run embedded in your app, rather than making your app run inside its container — you can just recompile whichever functions you modified and see the application change on the fly. No XML, no scanner intervals, and no additional complexity. I don't know about Enclojure (Eclipse) or La Clojure (IntelliJ IDEA), but with Emacs and SLIME, it's just a matter of hitting C-c C-c to recompile the current function.
I think that's the first time I ever voted you up axod :D

I agree. The idea of making certain strings of bits illegal is perverse and, long term, utterly unenforceable, and will only promote contempt for the law - well deserved contempt.
Yes 30fps has less information than 60fps, but I thought you were saying above that we can't perceive it. The whole point of the argument is that removing every other frame (and thereby doubling the viewing time of the shown frame) is perceptible. A game running at 60fps is doing exactly that: rendering twice as much information and showing it to you.

And it's all relative… The argument is that 30fps is perfectly smooth until you see it side by side with 60fps.
/ۤۛۗۜۚۛ۫ۗۢۜۛ۠ۤۨۜ۟۟۫ۗۢۚۘۖ۠۟ۜۗۛۚۜ۠ۡۚ۫ۙۧ۫ۘۧ۬ۤۖ۫ۛ۬ۛۚۧۚۢۧۡۖ۫۟ۧۚۡ۠۫ۜۙۜۡۙۢۡۖۚۡۚۛ۠ۡۗۗ۠ۢۗۢۤۖۢۜۡۧۙۡۜۗۙۛۖۧۖۨۡۢۙ۫ۤۙۙۙۢ۫ۘۡ۟ۗۧۧۚۨۗۤۢۚۚۙۙ۟ۜ۬ۧۧۛ۫ۨ۟ۤۛ۟ۘۛۡۤۨۚ۠ۘۘ۠۬۟ۨۤ۟ۖۚۤۚۗۡ۟ۖ۫ۜ۠ۤ۬ۖۚۧۨ۫ۘۨ۟۬ۢ۟ۗۚۡۜۜۙۗ۟۫ۚۧۜۡۗۧۗۚ۠ۙۖۢۡۙ۫ۤ۠ۛۨۖۤ۠ۗۡۡ۟ۡ۠۠ۚ۫۠ۛۡۘۤ۠ۛۨ۫ۧ۟ۤۨۜۙۚ۫ۘ۫ۡۤۗۢۜۖ۬ۛۜۤۚۛۨۨ۟ۜۙۜ۫ۡۨۛ۠ۗۘۨۙ۫ۚ۟ۗۢۡ۫ۖۖۢۤۚ۫ۛۖۙ۠ۖۗۛۧۛۧۖ۟ۧۘ۬ۘۜ۫ۨۢۛۙۛ۟۬ۤۧۧۖۡۜۗۤ
never change. <3
Come on. That's a silly theoritical argument.

Dump 10MB of source code on the users and see if they bother to fix it or just move on to something else.

If your customers are also programmers who don't mind going through other peoples code, then possibly.
As I understand it, you can in fact charge for GPL software.

http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.html

What you can't do, is to refuse to provide sources and to prevent your customer to stick that source on GitHub for everyone to do whatever they like with (including selling).
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/۟ۢۘۙۨۙۖ۫ۜۜۖ۟ۡ۬ۗۡ۠۬ۧۤۧ۬ۚ۫ۖۤ۠ۢۚ۫ۡ۬۫ۢۛۗۡۙۡ۟ۧۤۡۘ۠ۘۜ۠ۜۛۙ۬ۙۖۗۨۙۤۛ۬ۘۛۜۢۧۧۧۗۖۡ۟ۛ۫ۤۡۖۘۚۙۤ۠ۡۧۜۤۖۡۨۜۨ۠۠ۙۚ۫۟ۢۛ۫ۛۧۚ۬ۚۘ۟ۤۙۨۤ۠ۘۤۘ۬ۤۜۤ۠ۨۨۤۤ۬ۡۤۧۘۛ۟۟۫ۗۢۗۙۢۚۨۖ۠ۤۖ۬۟ۢۤۙ۟۟ۢ۟۟ۘ۫ۜۙ۟۫۟ۗۨ۬ۘۘ۟۟ۜۛ۫ۧۧۧۗۢۤۢۜۧۖ۟ۧۜ۠ۢۘۖۤۗۙۛۧ
Moral of these recent stories: Write something good and you'll get a lot of uniques.

Monetary value of those uniques: $0.00

Self esteem/social confirmation/confidence boosting value of those uniques: very high.
So proprietary is bad, unless someone pays a GPL IP owner for it? Seriously?

Come on rms, it wouldn't kill you to admit that sometimes non-GPL licenses are ok.
/ۡۗۡۡۤۜ۫ۡۘۛۧۘ۠۫۟ۖۧۚۘۤۨۧ۫ۘ۟ۛۜۤۚ۟ۖ۫ۙۚ۠ۙ۬ۙۡۚ۠۬ۘ۟ۡۧۚۤۙۨۗ۫ۘۚۗۜ

I wish I were a tadpole
Smartphones are transformative. They're already affecting popular culture and will do so even more as they become more widespread. (One simple example: arranging to meet a friend at a location new to one or both of you can be more spontaneous if you both have GPS-enabled local search.)

I suspect most of the changes are for the better, although I'm sure there's an argument to the contrary.