skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm doing this for a Database Systems course I'm currently taking. Sadly, the lecture notes are terrible. They're basically just visualizations for him to talk to and convey little to no information on their own. As such they're not only hard to read ahead with, but hard to use to review.

As such, it's back to the textbook for me!
Math Puzzle
Actually, developers under an in-house bounty system have quite an incentive to make maintainable code. For it is very likely that the bounty for next month will be a feature added to the code they are already working on. If the developer makes the code a mess, then they will not be able to keep earning bounties and will start losing a lot of money. A developer just needs to think long term. And if you haven't hired developers that can think long term, you already have a problem.
Feature checklist dysfunction
>There has to be a certain allure to having a wifi chip in there

Until some war-driving script-kiddie shows up and causes a buffer overflow in the driver and gets root on your car. :)
This might be worth it in some very old cemeteries in Europe, given considerations mentioned in other comments about the coffin being 10 feet tall.
There's a good reason for the former definition of "fact".

It's what you're tested on in school.

My personal favorite history book of all time is "Japanese Culture", because it's not a typical "school history textbook" that has just name, date, and event. It's not about who conquered whom, and on what day and time it happened. It's about why X was a successful conquerer, and what happened to the place afterwards, things that actually bear significance through history and have left their mark on the society.

isbn: 0824821521 if anyone is interested.
This kind of implies that to design a viral product, you need to identify the transmission vector. Every class of meme has a substrate. Genes have DNA, lolcats have images, viral videos have youtube, bit.ly has twitter.
For me, XHP is far more interesting than HipHop. And I say that as someone who administers a pile of single-application CPU-bound PHP servers. This completely and forever changes the templates-vs-just-PHP debate, and I'm glad -- it's the kind of evolution PHP needs to continue to be taken seriously.
Developers have to fix their own bugs regardless, or they are quickly not be developers for our company any more. In this system they have a lot more incentive not to create bugs, because the time it takes to fix them will take away from earning their next bounty.
The first-gen iPod had Firewire (instead of pre-2.0 USB), the scroll wheel (vs. button-only interfaces), and it actually fit in a shirt pocket (vs. the Jukebox which was the size of a portable CD player).
If you want to know how the Soviet standard GOST block cipher works, Applied is a great book. If you want to learn about obscure challenge-response authentication protocols nobody uses in the real world, again, Applied is your book. If you need to look up what a "Vigenere cipher" is, because you're reading something about crypto written by someone who doesn't do crypto, Applied is there for you.

But if you want to know how to implement a protocol that uses Diffie Hellman, RSA, AES and SHA1 to protect traffic without introducing 40 errors any of which completely negate the security of the algorithms you're using, you need a very different book from Applied. That book was Practical Cryptography, and now it's Cryptography Engineering.
No, I haven't got it yet. That's why I'm reserving judgement of the actual service until I can use it. Google's engineers are fantastic and I'm sure it's a good service. My concerns are purely on the business/competitive side.
Indeed, that's essentially another way to rewrite what I said above, though perhaps a bit of a pessimistic one.

If you're just squeaking by, getting enough consulting work to pay the bills, then your schedule is likely pretty open most of the time. Unless you're spending 28 hours a week chasing work, you should have plenty of time for entrepreneurial stuff.

And of course, if you're working 20+ hours a week on billable consulting work and just squeaking by, you're simply not charging enough.
No. In fact, you're better off if you haven't read any other crypto books before this one.
Quicktime and VLC and MPlayer, and just about any reasonably well-featured video player will have the feature to adjust the playback speed.
What would be very interesting would be a book based on one YC group, from profiling all the companies and people, to following the experience and how ideas and people change over the time.
This seems like a good bust. If an affiliate contracts to advertise for compensation, and they finagle payment without advertising, that's plain fraud. The guy who helps them do it has aided and abetted.
You can increase the playback speed in VLC player.

If you're using a mac, press ⌥ ⌘ →
This is hilarious, but probably not viable:

a) Coffins are sold to grieving families on the basis of "the one last thing you can do for [deceased]". Hence sales are made based on how luxurious, etc. the coffin is, not how efficiently it bores into the ground.

b) Who is going to want to file past a gigantic drill bit in a church?

c) If you look at the silhouette in fig 6, the coffin is roughly 40% longer than the deceased. Hence to bury a 6 foot tall individual, the coffin will need to be ~ 8.5 feet long, too tall to be screwed in by hand.

d) Part of the point of burials is the ceremony of lowering the coffin into the grave. This won't be viable with the screw coffin - "alright folks, it's time to bury Dad. Now these two hefty blokes are going to take a quarter of an hour to screw him into the ground. You all stand there and listen to him bump around inside the coffin".
It's just a mausoleum with a really deep foundation.
I cant get Buzz to show up in my gmail, what am I doing wrong?
The two authors have completely different views about the purpose and nature of history.

Justin Cunningham, the author who doesn't think that memorizing historical facts is important, has the view that history is just a collection of disconnected, but interesting stories. He refuses to memorize anything that doesn't pique his interest.

Scott Powell, the author who does think it is necessary to memorize history, has a much different perspective. He thinks that the purpose of history is to "use the past as a resource for living in the present." In order to do that, he thinks that it is necessary to memorize all relevant historical facts -- even the ones that don't have fun interesting stories. Memorizing what happened and in what order is the only way one can fully integrate the historical context into ones understanding.

Here is a link to Scott Powell's article for comparison: http://www.historyatourhouse.com/?p=154
I guess count me in the 'Information should be free' camp. I strongly disagree with his opinions. Sure things are going to change but it's worth the pain. There's too much to gain from having free, unfettered, anonymous information exchange between people all over the world.
Ask HN: Has anyone got a Kindle SDK invitation?
I'm curious if anyone has got the Kindle SDK or had a chance to check out the simulator. I'm patiently checking my gmail every 1.5 seconds. Is there any news at all on developers getting accepted? Google searches are failing me.
Not to comment on the merits of this particular charity, but the important part is the feeling of doing meaningful work rather than the meaningfulness of the work per se. Part of this is feeling that you are contributing something unique to the cause yourself.

I do not believe that writing a check each month would make you feel that you were doing anything meaningful (after all, many people are capable of writing a cheque).
Not really. You can still separate MVC style. Templates have always had some display logic, which is ok. What you don't want is intermixed application logic.
Does anyone have any good tricks for downloading WMV videos at faster than real-time? The Stanford Videos come as WMV or Silverlight, and it seems I can't get them to download any faster than real time. VLC has an option to write out to a file as it plays, but even without locally showing the video it doesn't speed up.
On the other hand, if you're going to bring in machinery, you need to make sure that there's enough space to stop them from crushing the other coffins - which might negate any space-savings from burying people vertically. Whereas with this, a few people put it in, which needs very little space. Besides, don't the families of deceased generally pay for their coffins?
My point is that you have 86,400 seconds in a day. Well before you are spending $864 per day maxing out the number of messages you can send, you have $1 in the bank to get another number.

But then again, having a bank of 100 phone numbers just to send the million messages you want to send within an hour sounds slightly annoying from a logistics perspective.
The Blind Men and the Elephant: A Story of Noobs
Flash 10.1 will require 'some enhancements to existing versions of Android'
Where can I find a list of these things?
Skip this. By his own admission, the author was heavily medicated at the time of writing.
The contract language is pretty clear. The company owns all IP invented by the employees in any time during employment. In the absence of state or Federal labor laws making exception, the agreement is cut and dry. It is an enforceable contract, signed by the employees.

You might say it's not fair. Yes, it's entirely written for the employers. That's why there's needs for state or Federal labor laws to help the little guys.

I don't know why you want to get around it and trying to give false hope to people. If you want to claim the contract is not enforceable, then you should provide citations for the claim.
A lot of this is subjective, depending on how your friends use either service. For instance, I have a lot of friends that post photos on Facebook and other interesting things in their streams. Twitter is more conversational, as I don't tend to follow a lot of people that post nothing but links and retweets. I have a different experience from others who have friends that do post those things a lot.

I do have a nit to pick the Privacy and Spam sections.

With privacy, he's basing his results on speculation. Facebook is far more granularity and control over the content you post on the service. Twitter offers you a single switch to either protect all your content or none of it. There's no in-between.

On spam, is he friggin' kidding? I can't tell you how many spam bots follow me or @mention me with crap (and no way to block them!) on a daily basis. Facebook has the option to hide individual posts, entire users/pages, and particular content sources (such as Facebook for iPhone or Ping.fm posts). I never get any spam on Facebook and anything I get that's annoying I have a decent amount of granular control over what gets displayed. I'm not sure how Twitter can win on this one.
Comment further down on this page

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1112969
I got turned on to overclocking lectures from Peteris Krumins’ blog, http://www.catonmat.net/blog/how-to-save-time-by-watching-vi... Then I wrote a .NET Windows forms wrapper program around his method that controls the speed and pitch. Overclocking lectures is the only way to go.
Good point. We do need to remember our own confusions when starting with rails, I remember looking at lambda and being totally confused, took me months to really grok blocks and lambda's in Rails.

Being worried about asking for fear of getting lmgtfy'd is not conducive to expanding a community.
The HTML tag closing rules specify they only get closed when they have to be. So neither of your solutions is correct. It is:

<div>foo<a>bar<span>baz box</span></a></div>
BTW for those of you interested in installing on Linux, you'll need php5-dev (so on deb/ubuntu machines a quick apt-get install php5-dev solves it). Run phpize from the root, then the normal ./configure, make, make install etc...
The original Burrows & Wheeler paper, SRC Research Report 124: http://apotheca.hpl.hp.com/ftp/pub/DEC/SRC/research-reports/...
Usually signing a cookie means adding a HMAC to the end of it so the user can't modify the contents without invalidating it. The example given seems kinda misleading, because including the salt offers some measure of protection against tampering anyway.
Google Buzz Vaguely Familiar with Others
Actually, I once visited a website that didn't close its tags where that practice hindered my use of it. That page used backticks instead of curly quotes, so I wanted to use a bookmarklet to fix that. The bookmarklet cycles through every DOM text node and replaces the text. When I tried to run it on that page, nothing happened – probably because there were no text-only nodes, because the page was treated as one big tag. So browsers don't handle missing closing tags completely correctly, and therefore one should include closing tags.
A good read on this subject (which shows why it falls down) is von Mises "Bureaucracy". It's probably available on the web somewhere.

Also, Ronald Coase on the Theory of the Firm. Strangely enough, economists have a lot of useful things to say about business ideas.

It's all about transaction and information costs. The hassle of managing and measuring programmers in this way would outweigh the benefit of keeping them working hard.
Many people have the ability to write a cheque but they dont.

All I can say is to try it and see how it makes you feel. You'll be pleasantly surprised.
Suppose 3 UI changes go out. How do you decide how much each increased users?

Measure the change in usage for each screen or section of the app that each team worked on.

Perhaps one was trying to drop support calls and the other increased users.

Measure support calls per user (which is the right way to measure it).

You thought that developers saw QA as a roadblock before? Wait until they see QA keeping them from the check they think they are going to get

This has never been a problem for us.

How do you gently break the news that you're not even going to let the developer try to get that dangled reward.

These kind of tests can be easily randomized. If product management really thought the UI was a bad idea, they could keep the first test size really small and then only increase the sample if the design proved itself.

If I worked in an organization that announced a policy like this, I'd start shopping my resume around.

We would definitely only do it for one small part of the team that volunteered for the experiment.

Overall, any kind of performance based pay depends on the metric. If the metric is robust, the scheme can succeed. If the metric is not robust, the whole thing fails. Will the metrics I proposed be robust? I can answer your concerns and attempt to make them more robust, but I don't know if they would be robust enough. I think it would be interesting to run the experiment, and find out for real.
I tried watching it but there's so much fluff that I can't really follow what his arguing for. Would you mind if I asked for your interpretation?
Thanks, I didn't know about either of those projects.
While I agree with you about AdMob, his point isn't that the numbers are bad, it's that the metric is bad. Smartphone sales are not nearly as meaningful a metric as a browser-usage distribution based on measuring page or ad impressions.
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It's not that I refuse to memorize things, it's that things don't just happen. Everything happens for a reason. The reason behind things is usually very interesting, whereas what actually happens isn't necessarily interesting. Although I will say that memorization without understanding is useless.
I wish I could answer your question but that would mean I'd have reached Budhha-hood :). Helping others is about the most meaningful thing you can do. What else is there?

All I can say is to try it out and see how you feel. You can support families in Africa for $10 a month.

If you want theory then you could try the following books:
1. "The Art Of Happiness" - (Interviews with Dalai Lama).
2. "A New Earth"
Interesting... especially since I consider paying for advertising "per click" fraudulent as well. In what other form of advertising do you get the brand recognition, message delivery, word of mouth, and all of the ancillary bits of advertising that actually makes it work completely for free? No other method. Because content producers and advertising companies in every single other medium understand how advertising works, and understand that only paying when the ad results in a direct IMMEDIATE sell amounts to them defrauding the content providers. I can get my message seen by thousands of users and only pay for a tiny little fraction of that? I can certainly see how that would be an ethical challenge for a company, wanting to get 90%+ of an advertisements benefit without paying for it, but it's pretty clearly unethical to rip people off in such a way.

Call me if you see a magazine, TV, or radio ad that was carried for free and agreed to only accept a payment when a customer shows up and specifically mentions the exact ad that inspired them to make the purchase.
You can do the same on mplayer on linux, pressing [ and ] to speed up / down the lecture. Being a non native English speaker, my current comfort zone is between 1.40 - 1.60 x.
Facebook is Worse than AOL
I can't find anything online, but I can recall reading that Christian heathens were buried vertically, because this meant that they could not enter heaven. Is there anything like this in other religions (especially other monotheistic ones)?

There'll be plenty of non-religious folks who could opt for this or another form of vertical burial, but I wonder how many people or their families would simply opt for the traditional, religious burial.
Regarding XML, I'm speaking of the way it is used for configuration/build files and metadata in many Java projects.
I'm using PHPTal right now to achieve more or less same effects, but it's not the easiest solution - it becomes a bit cumbersome for long fragments.

XHP looks very promising because it solves one of my problems with PHPTal - generating complex content in the loop (in PHPTal having multiple conditions in loop is possible, but not exactly elegant)

For example:

<?php
$list = <ul />;
foreach ($items as $item) {
if ($item->bold) {
$list->appendChild(<li><b>{$item}</b></li>);
} else if ($item->foobar) {
$list->appendChild(<li><i>{$item}</i></li>);
} else {
$list->appendChild(<li>{$item}</li>);
}
}
?>
Rendered html that will be sent has an http response should have ending tags. That doesn't mean the programmer/designer has to write them:
#a dumb ruby example:
def p(content)
"<p>"+content+"</p>"
end

p "hello" #=> "<p>hello</p>"
has anyone gotten this to work on OSX?

I get strange errors after I build and add the extension to php.ini

LOG: http://pastie.org/817528
Did you fill the job already? Looks like your email address disappeared.
However, relativism is incorrect because it says that all knowledge depends on the context. It's a bit like saying that all questions are ambiguous just because some are and because precision is difficult. Also, relativism is ambiguous about whether contextual knowledge is absolutely truth within that context; many relativists object to the idea of any absolute, permanent, unitary truth. But why should the truth for a given context ever change? Relativism provides an argument that the context is important, but no argument that the truth can change if we keep the context constant.

If you look into eastern philosophies, you'll find an interesting concept: that there is in fact no objective truth that can be expressed.

This is subtly different from a relativistic argument, though. The idea is, we can only express thoughts, ideas, etc, in terms of words and concepts that are products of our minds. And those products of our minds are intrinsically personal. Even with mundane things like tables or hoovers we might disagree on the meaning of words. Society teaches us to have more or less the same meanings so we can communicate, but those are intrinsically relative.

So then, there may well be an underlying, intrinsically "absolutely true" reality (in fact, there almost certainly is), but any attempt to express it results in a statement of relative truth.
I hear what you're saying but I have also been in this situation before. There are no-fault bugs that happen (or, maybe not even bugs: maybe just someone's got the system configured badly, and the person who wrote the code is the best person to figure that out). You're not firing the developer who left a bug behind. You're just incentivizing them not to help.
Wanted: Junior iPhone (+Android) UI Designer
I'm looking for someone to do iPhone (and if you can Android) UI designs. You design the UI on Photoshop and refine it with feedback from the client. We then code it.

This will be fairly casual and would be perfect for someone looking to get in to mobile UI design. Some designs will need to stick closely to the client's wishes, others there will be a lot more room for your creativity.

I don't mind where you are, how old you are or how educated you are as long as you can create designs and communicate well.

Email tomasatbappzdotcom with a bit about yourself if you're interested.
For a relatively constrained device like an Android handset, I'd have thought it would be better to compile the bytecodes into an optimised native executable at installation time?
I have, to my memory, never seen Twitter spam. I have more followers than you do. What am I doing right?
> those products of our minds are intrinsically personal

An idea in my mind is that 2+2=4. What's personal about that?
I really appreciated the article's look back to previous experience with collapsing networks and how users found spaces in those as they were dying. Facebook will provide value like that for a while, but the latest homepage update is part of a too steady trend toward less and less user control over the aspects of the Facebook interface that matter most for the user experience. If the user experience is annoying, it is easy for Facebook to die.
Video: Sergey Brin On His Six Months Using Google Buzz And More
Assuming by viral we all mean achieving exponential growth without marketing

Don't assume that. Viral is a class of mechanisms and is orthogonal to growth rate, not a descriptive term for growth that means "good".
What he's saying is that lolcat images and videos aren't viral. Looking at them doesn't help to spread them.
It would be very easy to accumulate a lot of technical debt (hacked up code) very quickly.

Also, it would be frustrating for developers being paid performance pay but not totally in control of their environment. Bitter infighting might occur about language and technology choices, server designs, even dev machine quality or working hours.

However, I do like the idea of proposing a general goal and asking developers to come up with their own ways to meet those goals.
The home page is confusing for people who don't know what it is.

What is it? What does it do? I realize it searches Twitter, but what does it search for?
Doing research with the Mechanical Turk
It might be hard to sell upper management on the value of documentation vs the new feature "required" for the $1mil customer to finally purchase your system.
my solution was to merely demonstrate the difference between what a programmer writes and what gets sent as an http response.
Brilliant writing. However I can't help but imagine that had he lived a more risky and foolish life he would have come up with a different set of regrets and wishes. Although that could just be me living in "the hypothetical alternative past" and not "the now".