skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That was better than I thought it would be. The bit about manager's saying "I want a pony!" really resonates with me. My latest project caused me immense problems because I got one damn long shopping list from the client's head honcho, who finally said (as he left the room) "Oh, and it should look exactly like the one we have now because then we won't have to train people to use it." Now he keeps changing his mind. So the thing about "pixel-perfect mockups" had occurred to me as a way to avoid this in future, and it's nice to have it confirmed.
Oops, sorry, here is the correct URL
http://www.google.com/sky/#latitude=56.66358551191311&lo...

Beautiful :)
My (very limited) experience in the game development industry was that it was half way between academia and traditional software companies. I think what drives this is that the problems are much harder, and there are so many different types of problems, that developers from different companies are more willing to share ideas and experiences with each other simply as a survival mechanism.
Slightly related: Arrow's Theorem
Long Now clock photos and drawings
Going forward, I'm wiping new machines and reinstalling from disk when they arrive.

Not to mention that the factory install of os X was seemingly screwed up on my MBP and missing tar and gnutar and I'm still not sure what else.
Garmin's King of GPS, but With Sinking Profit and Weak Economy, What's Next?
I'm not sure it's a ceiling as much as it's a runway congestion problem."

- I think a company with so many talented people has to find a way to make them feel ownership. Perhaps a mentor program that after so many years allows you to at least co-produce a movie.
Hallway Testing: Get Free Usability Feedback
I started this blog to present short web site reviews I do every once in awhile. Hacker News people especially are welcome to contact me to have their site reviewed - contact info is on the site.
fixing common problem.

Shoe polish selling nice cars with phone numbers.

I am making a way to connect those people with buyers in a nicer way including a website. I can beat ebay and local newspaper.
Sorry, I blended together several issues:

* My wrists used to hurt a lot from bizarre keybindings that use the control key (I used to use emacs a lot), than from mouse usage. Remapping to the caps is no use (strains my left little finger and left upper side of the hand). Remapping to alt (or to the apple key, in a powerbook) helped a lot, but still too many control pushes.

* The mouse slows me down, way more than hurts my wrists.

* I use Blender a lot. Using the mouse for Blender is no problem regarding my wrists. The trick for me is: extend the arm to fully rest in the table, flat, so that the mouse ends up nearly behind the laptop.
I started this blog to present short web site reviews I do every once in awhile. Hacker News people especially are welcome to contact me to have their site reviewed - contact info is on the site.
People often say the problem is the vast distances in space. I think they're wrong: a few thousand years is probably enough to colonize hundreds of worlds with generation ships. The main problem is the vast distance in time. An inhabitable planet may exist 20 light years from here, but odds are it is hundreds of millions of years behind or ahead of us in terms of evolution.

The eery thing about the Fermi paradox is that it may spell doom for our own longevity.
check out the rest of their message... sharendipity is building a platform where all of these programming elements can be re-used without the need to program. you can build a complete application without punching a single semi-colon.
Because I would rather work to make myself rich then to make some shareholder of a corporation richer.
Search in page http://www.canonical.org/~kragen/tao-of-programming.html for DOS.
The reasoning behind this idea, I think, is this: since the entire population depends on a search engine to do their work and pretty much everything else, search engines have become a utility and utilities should be state run.

Much in the same way railroads were nationalized in most of the EU sometime during the early 20th century or even earlier.

As far as railroads are concerned, it was probably a decent idea (not much free market competition possible there, really), but whether it works for a search engine remains to be seen.
Because Scala still has a lot of the verbosity of java. So I'd rather use plain java for the plumbing, and then use concise, clean, reads-like-documentation short jython scripts for high-level programming.

[edit: by which I mean I don't have such a need for properly functional programming with function-as-argument etc. Most of what I do is plain ol' number crunching, paired with threading.]

[edit 2: i.e. "blub" is better. I have to give scala a better look one of these days.]
For me, it's not the money or prestige, it's because of how good the constant desire and pressure to innovate feels.
Innovation rarely comes from large companies - especially European ones. Big companies know this and don't care anyway... they can depend on ill-informed politicians and a general public who think Bill Gates is a really cool guy ('he invented the moderen world, don't ya know') to throw money at them.
This isn't 100% true, i'm working at a VC-backed startup and i wouldn't say that there's a lot of pressure on me (as a developer) to work 90 hour weeks and stuff. Although to be honest, i'm not exactly sure how smart our VC's are.
This is pretty much what I had gathered previously; learning a bit for the sake of knowing every aspect of the business isn't enough to do the job with much excellence, but I think it could help a lot in understanding the problems my coders come across and in being more knowledgeable about the time restraints on certain tasks.

Thanks for the input.:) While I'm very busy with school and two outside projects, I feel like I'm missing a piece of the puzzle by not at least understanding the programming aspect.
I just realised that it is not even a fully fledged search engine, but a "multimedia" one:

"Quaero aims to be a multimedia search engine that will work across all online digital media platforms including PCs, mobile phones, set-top-boxes and handheld devices. The engine will index content in several languages and will provide content management tools for media producers to promote their material."

This is my favourite bit:

"But after seeing that Quaero's German and French researchers were working in different directions, the project split in December 2006, with the French continuing to work on Quaero and the Germans focused on Theseus. Managers from both projects have, however, said they will meet regularly to form synergies when possible."

Like I said - bickering.
When you pull the zoom all the way back you can see the Milky Way as a sine curve.
I have to ask - for those of you who work full-time at a company- what do you guys think of the Intellectual Property/Employee work agreements (that you probably signed on your 1st day) - are you worried that if your idea is good enough the company will claim ownership of your work, your idea even if you (wisely) did not work on it during company time or equipment?

I am working to sell (not financially, but buy-in) a startup-type project to my company. It might involve developing the prototype and emotionally selling the prototype to key individuals. But if that happens, then I'll be able to work on it officially.
Despite Bebo's big pricetag, lofty valuations will elude other start-ups
You seem to have studied Astronomy so I've a question. To me, these are just bunch of some cool pictures? What information can we infer from them? I mean how further work is based on such pictures besides enthusiastic exploration?
Have you read this paper? "Why Productivity Fades with Age: The Crime-Genius Connection". Just google it and read it. It is the same coin with two different face.
I can't tell if this is real or just a joke.
Asciify - an Actionscript library that draws ASCII art
I personally would be interested in reading a "Founders at Work" style book about successful entrepreneurs who have had earlier or later failures. I don't know of too many off the top of my head though.
I thought the description of the true Caramilk secret was much more interesting:
http://www3.ns.sympatico.ca/mt-edward/cadbury.htm
The Lost Google Tapes: Early days interviews conducted on January of 2000
Well it may be natural to feel that way, but it sure ain't rational.
DBpedia - structured, queriable infomation extracted from Wikipedia
I was going to try to figure out how to turn this into an even-cleverer one-liner which did not create any files at all, using something like:

$ echo -e "#include <stdio.h>\n#include <time.h>\nmain(){printf(\"%d\\\n\",sizeof(time_t));}" |gcc -x c -o >('some command which runs a file received on standard input') -

Unfortunately, after about 20 minutes of searching, I've found no Unix utility like that. That seems somewhat strange since it is possible to utilize pipes in so many ways. Am I missing something?

Oh, by the way, I got 8 as well.
There was nothing wrong with your factory install. As I said in a previous reply, gnutar is installed as part of Apple's Xcode Tools. It is not included by default.

There is no reason to format every factory-new machine that you receive. That's just paranoia. These incidents have been relatively rare.
Can Microsoft be more transparent?
Interfacing a Rails App to Fire Eagle Pt 1: Exploration via IRB
I blew an interview recently because of this. Of course, I can't be 100% sure this is why, because I interviewed for six hours, but it was the only part where I felt like I wasn't doing well. I really fumbled at the whiteboard on some tree walking algorithms . If I had reviewed my data structures and algorithms book, I would have rocked these questions. What could have come off as a strong point instead came off as weak and rusty.

I do think that the company lost out on a good hire because of this. The job requires some specialized math, as well as domain knowledge and programming ability. I don't think there are many people will this skillset.

But next time, I will most definitely review this material prior to the interview, because it really cost me.
ECMAScript 4 Progress Spreadsheet
It's truly amazing the quantity of information in the images you are looking at. Basically, we're trying to explain how galaxies form. The progress that's been made on the problem has been tremendous over the past 10 or 20 years, but we still have a long way to go. My hope, is that we do not figure out how galaxies form, instead, finding some new physics.

Anyhow, one highlight: By counting the same red galaxies you seen in sky's SDSS data, we have been able to measure the universal distribution of matter, and the change in "size" of the universe, through the Baryon Acoustic Oscillation.
I agree with you, I meant which are the main reasons.
A Masterclass With The Adventure Capitalist
For the cisco, it takes about 6 seconds on my average speed connection. If you want to see what takes so long, I recommend using FireFox's Firebug extension. In Cisco's case, it is a simple 20k html file, but then there are 3 js files and 8 css files each of which has to be loaded in a particular order before the page is rendered.
Story Writing Is Fun
If you applied to startup school, please put the same email in your profile
We've made the startup school application reader import karma scores from News.YC, so we can consider karma as a factor. (It is a meaningful one, because it shows your contributions are valued by your peers.) It matches people based on email addresses, so if you have high karma on News.YC and you're applying to startup school, make sure the email addr in your profile is identical with the one you used in applying.

We've noticed people using forms like whatever (at) gmail in their profiles. As well as making it impossible to match user accounts with applications, this isn't necessary, because your email addr isn't displayed to anyone except to you and editors.
I don't like those agreements, but luckily I have an employer that was willing to rework the agreement with me to a way that favors both of us. We changed the wording to cover that which relates to actual work done for my employer, in effort to lessen the likelihood of them trying to claim something unrelated to their business. Our agreement explicitly assigns to me the ownership of the project I began before taking employment with them. Much better than the "we own you and your mind" approach.
And as I said in that post, I already had the Xcode Tools installed. In fact, based on your advice, I reinstalled the Xcode Tools to be sure.

You're telling me that plain old tar should be missing, by default, on an OS X machine? I ended up taking tar and gnutar from a buddy's machine who did not have Xcode Tools installed. He's not a developer--he doesn't know what xcode is! He had both files from a clean install of his shiny new Leopard install disk.

It's not paranoia. You trust strangers in China? What's the downside to reinstalling? Maybe an hour? The upside is reduced risk of someone emptying out your bank account. For these factory workers, the contents of one US bank account might be 5-10 years pay. If you think this is paranoia, hope you don't manage any security functions. I think it's just being safe.
Federal Reserve Pledges to Supply Cash for Bear Stearns
I think the most interesting observation here is on the nature of simulation: nobody can simulate the entire universe without having a spare universe to play with. Something I came up with myself years ago.

The rest of the article is deadweight.
Time Out of Mind
Thank you, npk. Amazing stuff.
A funny story..

My girlfriend is student teaching and taking her fourth grade class to the museum for pi day. Yesterday, one of her students (the worst behaving one w/ the most hands off parents) said her mom was coming for the field trip..

Her mom didn't want to miss free pie!

My girlfriend then finds out the entire class thinks they're going for pie day!
Interesting approach, but funny that he never mentions the single key word that makes it all possible: revenue. Whether you're bootstrapping or not, the best way to verify your concept AND position yourself to run a marathon is to FIND A CUSTOMER. Putting a team together, launching, getting into yc, taking serious investment - these are all great milestones. But there's still nothing quite like depositing a customer's non-refundable vote into your bank account. That's the day your world REALLY changes.
The RIAA wants to charge broandband users $5 a month because of online piracy.
I kind of forgotten which email I used to apply. Is there a way to figure it out?
There actually could be a business here. Start an new ISP and make a deal with the movie and record labels that you'll charge your users $10 more a month to compensate the artists as long as your users can download as many movies and songs as they want without fear of lawsuits.
What if we already applied? Should we re-submit the application?

Here is the link for people who wants to apply: http://www.startupschool.org/
While fun to think about – a nice little brain stretcher – this solution smells of cleverness for cleverness' sake.

Arguing that this is a better solution on the grounds of optimization would be salient if this were a function likely to be called thousands of times on a large data set. I just can't imagine that being the case in this instance.

I subscribe to the idea that when given the choice between 'clever' optimized code, and code which is instantly readable and maintainable, it's best to opt for the latter – unless you're trying to resolve an execution bottleneck.
Because I've said, "Who wrote this sht?!?" 342,864 times.

Every time I had to maintain someone's else's crappy software, I've said things like:

"I can do better than that. Way better."

"Why would anyone buy this &#@^&^?"

"People shouldn't have to suffer with this."

"If other hackers only knew how to x, y, or z, then it wouldn't have to be this way."

"I really oughta quit working on other people's crap and do it right."

I'm finally putting my money where my mouth is. Money and employee status have little to do with it (although they're nice). Now is my chance to get these great software ideas out of my head and into other people's lives.
True, but AdWords isn't meant for the average web-user.

The point is not to automatically simplify the design to its bare minimum its to consider your users needs and their ability to handle complex UIs.

Its a scale with power users on one end that want all those flags and options, and the average lay-person who wants things as simple as possible, always remember who your target audience is.

I strongly believe in following the Google approach of data-mining usage stats for your apps, to test different UIs on 1% of your audience and select the one with the best results.
If I may ask, what were your impressions on Norvig after the interview? And on Google Research itself, apart of the recruiting stuff?
10 Useful Firefox Extensions You Probably Don't Know About
Some interesting comments on that one if you want to waste a minute or ten.
I'm a little late to the party but I'm a co-founder of Digital Envoy (www.digitalenvoy.net). The company was acquired last year (Landmark Communications) but we invented the field of IP location technology back in 1999. The company's technology is generally considered the best available and has shown to be more accurate in head-to-head competitions. Of course, it isn't free but it isn't ridiculously expensive. Performance on Digital Envoy's stuff beats anyone else out there (hence the great customer list). Not sure why I keep selling for them since I no longer work there so for what it's worth, take a look.
Now there is: try http://news.ycombinator.com/testmail

Here's the source, btw:

(defop testmail req
(whitepage
(aform [pr (if (mem (arg _ "email") (keys (sus-applicants)))
"yes"
"no")]
(single-input "email: " "email" 30 "check"))))
Top 10 Secure Coding Practices
Your karma is 15 points... :)
I think I used different email last time so I re-applied.
Please don't do this. If you think you applied using an email address different from the one in your profile, just change the one in your profile.

Can you send me an email telling me the email addrs on both your applications so I can delete one?
The common practice in Smalltalk is to just extend Smalltalk so that it becomes a powerful domain specific language for your application. Most everything in Smalltalk is just an ordinary message send (procedure call) so any good programming where you Don't Repeat Yourself ends up being a domain specific language.
I’ve Acquired ReadBurner: Attention Data is the Future of Social News
Sure, the RIAA get's $5/mo, then the MPAA will want $10/mo. Television isn't covered under RIAA or MPAA, so they'll need, say, a $5/mo surcharge as well. Naturally, the BSA will want $5/mo too. Next, comes the book publishers who will only want $3/mo. Then, the audiobook publishers, which aren't represented by the RIAA, want $3/mo too. But wait! The game publishers aren't in on the action yet either. They want $3/mo. Newspaper and magazine publishers are satisfied with a modest $1/mo.

So far, we have a total of a $35/mo surcharge on your internet bill just in case you should happen to download copyrighted content. And that's not even covering the more niche copyright holders such as photographers, graphic designers, and 3D modelers.
If you installed Xcode Tools/Developer Tools, then you have a copy of gnutar. Mac OS X, like other BSD systems, include their own version of userland tools in the base system. If you want the GNU version of specific tools, you have to install it separately. That's why gnutar is in MacPorts and that's why, if you extract the Developer Tools package, you'll find gnutar. It's not there by default.

I find your claim that somehow your factory install is incomplete very unlikely. Your factory-new laptop is missing these specific files yet everything else operates normally? No.
No, do not resubmit your application. Use http://news.ycombinator.com/testmail to test which email address you applied with.
Wow, government controlled search engines. Here we come 1984! Big brother does it again.
Economics of Performance Optimization
I work in a Smalltalk shop where we get around Smalltalk's lack of Interfaces/Multiple Inheritance with State/Strategy objects. That's not so unusual. What goes against the grain is our eschewing polymorphism in that one situation, instead having case statements for the different object types. My boss prefers that because he feels it's better from a code management standpoint. The rest of us just quietly acknowledge to ourselves that it's not real OO, and play along.

Surprisingly, it works well, probably because it discourages us from making those things too complicated. The frameworks/APIs used by those objects have to be clean.
Humanoid Robots Battle for Supremacy (Of Market)
Ha! You don't grok the RIAA. More likely they'll sue you especially, because if you're willing to pay the $10 you must be pirating.
Are tech startups losing their cool in Silicon Valley?
For those of you modding us down... the first post was duplicated 25 times, filling the comments on this story.

It is fixed now. Thanks Paul!
Ask YC: Good compiler books?
Background: CS/EE undergrad... love studying programming languages... eager to study & write a compiler...

I'm going to take a compilers class next semester, but researched the required book on amazon: http://www.amazon.com/Modern-Compiler-Implementation-Andrew-Appel/dp/052182060X

Doesn't look too promising...

Any suggestions for good compiler books or related books?
All USENIX conference proceedings are now freely available to everyone
Today (3/14) is Pi day. Celebrate with Pie :)
Whether ISPs will be willing to ante up remains far from clear, especially since many users can be expected to protest the extra charge.

Whether the snowball will stay frozen in hell remains unclear, especially since the temperature can be expected to exceed 5000 degrees.
Ask YC: How do you find people who share a passion to build a company?
I have ideas for companies I would like to start and I have a good technical background, but I am not an experienced programer, I am a Product Manager. Where does someone like me find people with the right skills to start something?
This feels different than the Dot com boom. The boom that is happening now is not just a free-for-all, anybody that has a website becomes rich. You actually have to be pretty clever to make it these days. I am not saying that you don't get 2-bit start-ups, but the community won't let them last long.

Which is another distinction. The start-ups that make it are the ones with a community. So I think that there is no reason to be scared if it's a solid idea.