skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I 100% agree with this, if you want to be seen as an authority (or even just a respectable person) you should take care with the trust people have in you.

Some people subscribe to the theory that any press is good press, but there's definitely some long term costs to that. Short term thinking can work for now but eventually it'll catch up to you.

That being said, from what I know about Jason Calacanis he's probably loving this and the whole SEO book thing.
True on the schedules. In 2008 Flash's mobile and desktop teams merged, to create a common runtime codebase across device form-factors. The Open Screen Project has a dramatically wide range of collaborators... one of the most massive examples of cross-company scheduling I've ever seen.

Mobile World Congress is in Barcelona in February. That should be the coming-out party for the entire next generation, and shipments will ramp up through 2010.
Walmart is certainly not good for Walmart suppliers

No. Wal-Mart offers suppliers enormous volume at the cost of tiny margins. Sometimes this is a bad deal for suppliers, but Wal-Mart sells the equivalent of $200 worth of stuff to every human being on this planet, every year, and has done so for some time. If this was unsustainable, it would have stopped by now.

Disdain for Wal-Mart is disdain for products that have no story attached to them. Taste-makers promote this attitude -- in part by pushing narratives about how Wal-Mart hurts whoever it does business with -- because their livelihood comes from telling stories about stuff people buy.
I guess if I had five days to produce a "tech discovery" document like you describe for a non-technical audience, it would be breaking down the tasks and providing detailed estimates. Software estimation is very hard; I'm no good at it, but when I've been close to the mark, it's been because I broke down the tasks into 1- or 2-day chunks.

If I were to work on it, I would start by reading their wireframes and building a mental model -- at a high level, how the app must work. Then, if applicable, I would search for libraries which will save lots of time; the presence of an important library may pull me strongly towards certain languages, platforms, or architectures.

Once I had decided on platform and architecture (not in stone), I would start writing out the details of the tech into a document. I would put in all the technical stuff I thought I might need at first, because it's more for me to build my model right now than to give to the client. I'd spend two or three days on this, focusing on identifying the risks. If the risk is huge or easy to research, I would research it at this time and see how to mitigate it. I would also not be shy about calling them up if I think I might have a misunderstanding, as a few minutes on the phone might save hours or days.

Anyway, the last step is to distill the document for the audience. At this point I should have all the information to produce a document that includes an estimate, risk analysis and implementation plan.

[Edit: I probably sound obnoxious by using "I would" everywhere rather than "you should". (Sorry!) But I have no actual experience doing this sort of thing, so I feel dishonest giving prescriptive advice.]
That government is best which governs least.
-- Thomas Paine

Something the American government seems to have completely forgotten.
This is true. Most companies are structured so that there exists a preferred share class with greater voting rights so to pass anything you'd have to get buy in from the board members who are the ones who typically own this share class.
"dividends are obsolete" sound to me like another form of "it's different this time."

I don't believe that. The purpose of a company is to make money for its owners. Dividends are payments to the owners of the money the company makes.

As far as capital gains goes, that is just a side-effect (albeit, a potentially lucrative one).
Closely related and many comments: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1053059
The author points out that a two-stage process consisting of 1. counting the number of elements in the list, and then 2. finding the right element, is quite inefficient -- but he then presents a different approach which uses two pointers instead of one, yet is equally inefficient -- almost every pointer is dereferenced twice.

Challenge: Show how, using three pointers, you can find the kth last element from a linked list of unknown length N with no more than N + O(k) pointer dereferences.
Personal anecdotes incoming:

I live in a Japanese apartment. Like many Japanese folks, I read a lot and cannot possibly keep all the books I read here. Most go in the garbage when I'm done. I have no particular desire for ownership but, if I did, I own the bits on my Kindle in a much more durable fashion than I own the atoms in my trash bag right now. (Thirty volumes just got evicted.)

It seems to me in theory every author could put their books on a web site right now, using whatever payment system he likes.

This has been true in ten of the last ten years, and I have never bought a single book through it. The experience matters, and the Kindle is an amazingly better experience for me than reading on my screen is. (Amazon also beats the stuffings out of Google for book discovery, which is what I'd have to do to get to your website if you sold it directly. I can't very well Google [sci-fi I would enjoy], but Amazon will give me four titles fitting that bill on my front page. And they're pretty good at it, too -- Amazon probably has a better handle on my tastes than anybody except my siblings.)
Wouldn't that violate our various free trade agreements and lose us our membership in the WTO?
Ask HN: If you were to learn a programming language for your first time
which would you learn?
What about people starting small businesses manufacturing buggy whips?
Look again, Patrick.

The windowing only would apply to the "old terms of sale", where Amazon can arbitrarily set the prices. Macmillan wants new terms, with prices to be set according to a sliding scale.

"Windowing" is being used as a threat here, to push Amazon to the new terms-- it's not what Macmillan wants. (Amazon in turn retaliated by opening the ultimate window-- delisting Macmillan altogether.)
LSE.ac.uk IS grad, LAMP, Mostly interested in business/marketing/managerial type of work on a technical project, or with at least some technical component. You'd be a fun, serious, results-oriented team that has an idea of what you want to achieve. I am not a designer, but we'd be focusing on good design/presentation as much as on you bottom line. Ideally, telecommuting for a non-US based comapany, some travel is fine especially if you are located on a tropical island ;).

Someday, I'd like to do "something" at the intersection of Technology/Travel/Health and Wellness/Sustainability just to help keep things nice while doing something fun.

PO Box: khalamx | abv.bg - Free Response!
That "Player 9.4" is a bit of an odd bird. Nokia was insistent, a few years ago, on showing the world's real webpages on a pocket device -- they were the first to want to do desktop-style browsers and plugins, rather than Flash applications or native UIs on mobile. I didn't believe it could be done, but I did use an N700 when it became available.

From what I understand, Nokia adapted an older Adobe Linux codebase to the smaller device, and implemented it as a plugin to their browser. Nokia is currently a major partner in the Open Screen Project, and is poised to take advantage of the mobile optimizations in the upcoming Player 10.1 release.

So, oddly, I'd tend to agree with the earlier poster, than we haven't seen fruits of Mobile Flash work recently. But now in Jan10, it's almost showtime.... ;-)
While decent writing, and an interesting premise, I fail to see why this belongs on Hacker News...
I fail to see your argument. The owners make money without receiving dividends. It's reflected in the stock price. When a dividend is issued, the stock price goes down by exactly that amount. It's the exact same thing. If you want that money, sell the stock. My argument is that from a tax perspective, it's more beneficial for the owners for the company to NOT pay dividends. If you ignore taxes, they're identical.

Put another way:
Company X's stock is $100/share. They issue a 50 cent dividend. The stock price will go down to $99.50/share upon announcement. The investors/owners still have $100 whether the dividend is issued or not, except the investors have to pay taxes on that 50 cent dividend now instead of having it re-invested.
MobileMe still gives them a pretty extensive network of information about you ... all of your emails, contacts, etc. Google might track more, but you have no evidence to support a postulation that we should fear for its evilness. I agree that we should try to break the monopolies where Google has them, but they've been friendly heretofore.

And MobileMe isn't Apple's only source, it's just the most directly analogous to Google's data, but as pointed out above, all of Apple's offerings are closed-source and at least on the iPhone you have no idea how often Apple is pinging your phone or what data they're sending back. They have plenty of opportunity to gather even _more_ data than Google.

I don't think the "paid up front" thing matters very much, either. I would be surprised if Apple wasn't after the same kind of profiling that Google performs insofar as it has adequate data on a group of users. The same information that advertisers want (that Google automatically applies to their ads) so that they know what to sell you, Apple wants so that it knows what to sell you.
It'll probably happen eventually, and I'm sure there are several app-store developers whose machines are already members of botnets.
What Happens When You Unplug from Your Internet Addiction?
The "All Amazon was saying" is because, reading the article with little-to-no outside information about the situation, the author makes it sound like Amazon isn't setting a price ceiling, but an absolute price. I was trying to verify that that was the case, since the article seems to be saying that the only price point will be $9.99.

I seem to remember a price point being thrown around in one of the threads here that The Publisher/Author share 30% of the price of the book, the distributor takes ~40%, and the marketplace (Amazon, bookstore) takes 30%. From what I've read from these posts, it seems like the Publishers were fighting over the wrong thing entirely. If Amazon is acting like both Distributor and Marketplace, they currently take 70% of the sale price of an eBook. Why are Publishers arguing about the total price, rather than their cut of it?

Looking at the recent move, Amazon now offering 70% to the publisher, with the requirement that they get the lowest price point, and that that price point is less than $10, it seems like that should have been what the publishers were fighting for the entire time. If both distribution and selling of the book are being by the same company, for the same effort as just selling the book, there's no real reason for them to be double-dipping and taking that huge of a portion of the sale price.
As does MSFT (as the article points out). The question is why do they retain a larger proportion of their earnings relative to non-tech companies.
Descended from Loglan, whence came the old joke,

How many Loglan speakers does it take to fix a broken light bulb?

Two. One to fix it, and another to figure out what kind of bulb emits broken light.

In all seriousness, though, one of the things I treasure most about our squishy human languages is how much ambiguity they contain. Being able to construct sentences that mean two (or three, or more) things at once and playing around with the intersections of polysemy (http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=2079) and listener context is great fun. I feel like you lose some of that when you take inspiration for your language as much from predicate calculus as from Chinese.
Ian Grigg uses a self-signed certificate on purpose (he and I both have some unconventional views on the efficacy of CAs). In Firefox it's a simple matter to accept this site as a security exception. Now whenever I visit financialcryptography.com, I know I'm at the authentic site because I don't get a security warning. And that's without using a CA.
3) 4)

<?php

echo foo('baz');

function foo($bar) {
return $bar;
}

?>

This looks to me like you can use PHP functions before declaring them above.
FB is on a much different scale so it'll be out of question for short term but I wonder if they have looked at Quercus.
Elliot Soloway (from UofM), pitching Computer Science to Freshmen. (iTunes U)
How To Report The News by Charlie Brooker
Yes, that's the way of getting around the technical restriction, but if you read the terms of service, at least as they were a couple of years ago, what I was doing wasn't allowed - I was over the upper limit per month.

I ended up finishing things with Yahoo's service instead, so she eventually had a list of handicapped places in her GPS :-)
C# or Java because they are easy on beginners.
Programming language learning life cycle
evaluate quercus.
I took the Official Counterintelligence Training at a major aerospace contractor in the late 80s. It was bunk. The korean war vet who ran the class gave us some cock-and-bull story about Bulgarians flying ultralights at the state park not too far from the "Main Plant". But everything of merit about our rockets got published in Aviation Week every two years or so. Even material about possible payloads, which was so compartmentalized that we knew next to nothing, maybe a bolt pattern, mass and location of center-of-mass above the bolt pattern.

The "training" was all superstition and cargo cult management by slogan. When you thought about it for a minute or two, nothing they said made any sense.
"Oh, cool, a new Clojure library," I thought to myself.

Time to stop coding for a little while.
That's a neat one. My solution: pointers A, B, and C. A proceeds through the list. B is always at the largest multiple of k that is at or before A. C is at B-k. Every k steps, set C=B and B=A. When A reaches the end, step C forward B-A times.
pragmatism vs. idealism, etc. etc.
I have to that but one comment - why make such a video?
I had Soloway for two consecutive semesters when I went to UMich. This is a cool lecture by a wonderful teacher.
Exactly so. This is the SSH model, and I love it. How does a CA's signature protect against phishing anyway? It doesn't. Equifax signs both the real site and the fake site.
In that case, you're selling your ownership in the company in order to make money. Dividends pay their owners without attenuating their voting power. This might now be very useful in the modern marketplace, but from a historical perspective, and from a small business perspective, they are VERY useful.
The Romney administration increased fees across the board. They wanted to claim "no tax increase" and hid the tax increase in these fee increases. It's politically easier to increase a fee because not everyone pays it immediately or thinks that they necessarily will.
That's a very one-dimensional view of investing though. The Bogle (the founder of Vanguard) school of investing says that investing in the hopes the price will go up or down is nothing but speculation on the same level as investing in commodities (a barrel of oil does not do anything, it just sits there and is worth what the market says it is worth).

This traditional view holds that companies are fundamentally different than barrels of oil, in that they can produce wealth and provide reasonable returns to their share-holders year after year and that you can take your 7% appreciation at the rate the economy grows (or at least used to).

Timing the market is certainly a valid (if highly risky) strategy, but it's only one view of investing. It's only in this strategy which dividends don't make sense.
I would say eclipse with pydev. I tried out komodo for a while but it seemed a bit on the slow side. Same story with netbeans. I also recently tried out wingIDE but was not too impressed. Most of my coding in python is done in either textmate for oneoffs, vim on a server for quick fixes or eclipse/pydev for more in depth stuff.

Pydev has the code completion and debugging facilities that you are looking for and I would imagine that you could find a suitable plugin to do the continuous deployment and automated build testing as eclipse has a strong plugin ecosystem.
Most Popular DIY Projects of 2009
You're ignoring the point. Intel pays crap dividends for a company of its size and profit margins.
Does this mean that any webapp that uses Amazon's API is prohibited, if someone loads it from their iPhone?

So technically then, any use of the Amazon's API is prohibited. Great decision guys!
heh. thanks for that comment. i had to sit and think for a moment.
My bank takes a different approach, an old one, to security. Here are three things that happened to me at their main bank office over the last 6 months.

1 - I sat down with a mid-level manager asking about a debit card in my wife's name for one of my accounts. The manager pulled up my account and says "I see you were in Wilmington last week. My family is from there." And we chatted about Wilmington for a bit.

2 - I walked up to the teller desk and said "Please move $500 from account A to account B." I filled out no forms, showed no id, didn't even know the account numbers. The teller said "No problem Mr. Hancock, have a nice day."

3 - I needed to change my phone number linked to all my accounts. I walked into the teller and told her I have 5 accounts and wanted to change the phone number on all of them but didn't have my account numbers at hand. She handed me a post-it note and asked me to write down the new phone number: "No problem Mr. Hancock, we'll see it gets done."

The approach this bank takes is oriented around trust and liability, not IT security. Some may be upset that a bank manager would/could scan my transactions and openly acknowledge they see where I was last week. But I see this as openness in acknowledging that they can see the data. All banks can see this data and many credit data warehouses have this data. My bank simply doesn't pretend they can't see it.

In response to your post, jacquesm, I completely agree with your point of view from an IT perspective. However, I do not expect a bank, large or small, to get things perfect internally. So I choose to do business with one I trust to uphold their end of liability. I take this approach with most business partners, as I'm sure many do. When I buy a $50 item on ebay, I expect less of the supplier and pay accordingly.
It's not equally inefficient. The former will trash the CPU cache on large lists, whereas the latter will not if the k is small.
Lojban has all of the wordplay and fun constructions of any natural spoken language. The difference is just that it parses cleanly. This means you can actually create richer constructions that are arbitrarily cleverly convoluted... you just have to hope the reader has enough stack space in his head to parse it!

Personally, I won't miss the self-parodies in English like the sentence "Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo." (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buffalo_buffalo_Buffalo_buffalo...)
Does Google Voice say, "we don't want to pay a connection fee" or does it just block the call? Was Google open about blocking certain people? I think if they cost one person a job or internship because of blocked calls, that qualifies as "evil". I find it funny that AT&T had to figure out who was getting blocked and how sloppy Google was doing it (Google was blocking more numbers then they had to to avoid the fee).

I'm glad that you are unaffected by such things, tis a shame for other people.
> one of the things I treasure most about our squishy human languages is how much ambiguity they contain

Agreed. Designed languages lack...poetry.
Git-goggles - "git branch -a" on steroids plus basic codereview tracking.
Walking a hay maze: unintended exploitable data hidden in plain sight
Unix. Use multiple refined tools that operate well together.

Editing: vim or emacs. if vim: nerdtree, vim-snipmate, vim-omnicomplete, vim's python integration.

Deployment: rsync (or your DVCS). I have a simple script that 'touch'es my Django .wsgi files before rsyncing to the deployment server.

ipython is great.
(I always thought of that as the CRT of Damocles.)
If patio11 gets paid the same, and Paypal eats the difference, then why would he care?
GHC 6.12.1 dynamic Haskell executables fun - "26K executables instead of 681K"
This was originally submitted here:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1028317

It was, however, not submitted as a URL so it might never have been seen, and I liked it. The author wrote this:

Often when working on a problem you are able to apply a general algorithm to solve it, but if you look under the surface you are able to find all sorts of hidden data about the specific problem that can be exploited. Recently I went walking through a hay maze and discovered just that. While I could take every right hand turn just by opening my eyes and ears I could solve it a tenth of that time. I wrote up the experience and thought you might enjoy it.
False. http://lmgtfy.com/?q=lojban+poetry
So, can anyone explain why the three-tiered memory architecture described here (RAM, flash, HD) isn't widely used in computing today? It seems to me like 32GB/64GB of flash memory in between disk and RAM would dramatically increase performance of virtual memory, disk access, etc. without increasing cost very much.
You write that like membership in the WTO is necessarily a good thing. It isn't. International organizations range from "mostly harmless" to horrorshows. (The mostly harmless ones are a basically specialized phone books with an information exchange/meet people conference every year or so - think ACM.)

Tariffs are a bad thing, but the US is a big enough gorilla that the WTO would figure out some way to accomodate the US in that circumstance.
IPad: A question for the magazine industry, not an answer
The online bootstrappers meetup group
Are you starting an online venture with your own savings? Do you need help from other bootstrappers on topics such as business planning, sales, marketing, web development and web design?
As someone currently doing the technical interview tour, I really appreciate this link. Particularly that the author follows the general thought pattern of thinking of an inefficient way and then searching for better ways. Does anyone have any other favorite sites that have these types of questions with answers?
Seriously, pick one with great online resources. That gives you a lot of options at first glance, it would seem... Of course, online resources vary greatly in terms of quality. Personally, I wish I'd started (years ago...) with something like Python. Great resources, great community.

Great tutorials: http://diveintopython.org/ (for the recent Python 3: http://diveintopython3.org/)

What it all boils down to is finding a language that teaches you the fundamentals well. Once you have those basic precepts and fundamentals, you can transfer them quite easily to take on other languages.

And Python is also quite easy on beginners.
It would be cool if they developed nano-scale thermocouples to combine with this, so that we could use our body heat to recharge the wearable batteries. I could see getting a very nice recharge while at dance clubs.
Exactly. The easiest way for the government to get people to hire is to start buying stuff from them. It's a buyers market right now and there are many ways for the government to use that for the public good and incidentally to create jobs.