skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
For me, coming from java, macros and closures were the two concepts that were completely alien and made a huge difference. Java provides a lot of structure (packages, classes, interfaces) that result in a lot of reassuring boilerplate code. If you're using lisp for conciseness, there is no boilerplate to comfort you, to signal where you are and what you should be doing at this point in the code.
Did you, in addition to not taking the offer, make sure that someone above that recruiter knew about the issues described?

It is hard to fix problems if nobody reports them.
Background on the story and original image at National Geographic: http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2002/04/afghan-girl/index-...
That site is pretty cool, there are lots of similar charts and graphs on there.

Day jobs...

http://laphamsquarterly.org/visual/charts-graphs/?page=71
Fashion vs Comfort: Why Do We Buy Uncomfortable but Stylish Shoes?
From eyeballing that chart, x264 Baseline (a very, very good implementation, that can beat some other H.264 encoders in High Profile) never beats Theora 1.1 by more than 20%.

Actually he has figures in the table, but the figures are all given against the winning x264 profile, I've adapted them to compare x264 baseline and Theora 1.1:

SSIM 0.95 0.96 0.97 0.98

x264_baseline	438 kbps 576 kbps 799 kbps 1322 kbps

theora	576 kbps 713 kbps 943 kbps 1648 kbps

increase 31% 24% 18% 25%

Which is a very good showing for Theora, despite his misleading textual comment ("Ogg Theora, is a big disappointment: I never expected it to play in the same league as x264, but even I didn’t think that it would be worse than even Baseline Profile" -- remember x264 Baseline can beat Apple H.264 High Profile amongst others). Particularly with them claiming good improvements between 1.1 and the in-development 1.2 that already exceed the jump demonstrated in 1.1 over the initial 1.0 release. He tried to use the latest Theora code for this test but got the wrong branch unfortunately.

He also, bizarrely, commiserated that Theora is in the same class as the "old" Xvid, which beats the (again very, very good) x264 Baseline at the higher bitrates. One of the better thought out codec tests I've seen, but his commentary is weirdly lacking in context. On that note I've just noticed that he, incorrectly, described Theora as an "MPEG-4 derivate" (like Xvid and DivX) in the intro when you could say that not deriving from patented MPEG technology is perhaps a fundamental feature of VP3 and perhaps the whole point of Theora.
I vividly remember C "clicking" for me with the "getpwnam()" function. Which is to say, go to /usr/share/man/man3, pick an interesting function, and write the (bad) 20-line program that makes it work.
I type rather fast as well, but I find dates awkward in ways that a picker solves. First, the mechanics of typing dates requires slashes.

But also, it requires knowledge, like "what the hell is today" so I can then work out "what is the date of next saturday". Date pickers do all that work for you.

Fuzzy text is fun, and can solve some of those problems as well, but is less intuitive (what is accepted, what isn't).
Google rivaled by open source in angel investing
And, oddly enough, for Persian (fa), Kazakh (kk), Kyrgyz (ky), Uzbek (uz), and Mongolian (mn) too ...

http://www.google.com.hk/preferences?hl=fa etc. (replace the fa by your desired ISO 639-2 code)

YMMV. I'm in Hong Kong at the moment.
No. Opera Mini only understands what they call OBML, which is what the Opera Mini servers give the handsets.

Opera also produces Opera Mobile for mobile devices, which is a full-fledged browser. This is a separate product.
How are parents supposed to get their children prepared or take them to school in office hours?
Perelman declines 1M prize: "I have everything I want"
I laughed - but there are already plenty of other web browsers on the iPhone platform.
Well, starting with tools, I have heard good things about Scrivener: http://www.literatureandlatte.com/scrivener.html

I think it helps you to start just writing stuff down, and then, as your story takes shape, helps you organize all that to a story.

Since you say that you have writing abilities and imagination, I guess what you need is a way to start, and this might be it, since you could start in the beginning, end or in the middle and then organize everything as it becomes more clear.
You can boost your productivity even more by combining several of these methods. For example, you could shave half your head, take off all your clothes, and walk to work with a drink in one hand and a rotten apple in the other.
It is not at all the point, the point is to provide a faster browsing experience, Opera servers rearranging the content is just a means to an end.
Yes. I asked to complete a survey about my interviewing experience, and I wrote about my recruiter at great length. (I presume that someone read the comments on those surveys...)
Cross-Site Scripting through Flash in Gmail Based Services
jQuery.ui ones supports keyboard!
Just a note to say the magazine, Lapham's Quarterly is amazing, it gives you essays and information from ancient Greece to modern america. It is my favourite subscription, really gives perspective on all sorts of issues that were as important 3000 years ago as they are today.
The Lost Principles of Design
Basic mathematical structures are the most useful for programming. Learn about sets, relations, logic, graphs, first class functions, infinite sequences and other basics and you'll be able to solve algorithmic problems much more quickly.

Most programmers think in objects and arrays/lists. While this may result in the most efficient program it's not the most efficient use of your time. Many problems can be modeled much more concisely and easily with structures that are used in math.

Here's a challenge for HN: write an AI for Dawson's chess [1] that can determine whether a position is a winning position or a losing position.

[1] http://www.madras.fife.sch.uk/maths/games/dawsonschess.html
Interesting they specifically mention being able to save Office documents automatically. It'd be really nice if all programs implemented a method for the OS to call 5 or 10 minutes prior to shut-down to let even heavy duty apps save all their data too.
New York Entrepreneur Week Event
I've noticed that New York Entrepreneur Week is coming up in April 12-16. Looks interesting, but wondering what HN thinks. Also are you attending? speaking?
I came to programming from a mathematics background, and I find it helps me on a regular basis, especially set theory when trying to understand more complex SQL Queries.

Of course, I started with a bachelor's in mathematics and then moved into programming professionally. I am currently working on my masters, so I see things differently from some of my colleagues that got traditional CS degrees or were entirely self taught.
Another factor is that in the US, there's often a bottleneck in the bus system. It's more efficient to use the same buses for multiple levels of school, but a "bus cycle" may take an hour, and you may have three schools to service separately (high school, middle school, elementary). As a a result, the elementary school may start at 9 AM, but that pushes the high school to 7 AM. And you don't really want to reverse it.
This is usually how I did it in high school. I would stay up late either working on actual school work, messing around with video production for tv station, or some web stuff. Instead of waking up tired as hell, I would just go in later. It's better to miss a few hours than take the entire day off OR have that tired feeling ruin an entire day with a domino effect impacting the rest of your productivity. I'm glad people are finally doing something about this.
The distinction can be important. For example, are you one of the less intelligent members of HN, or one of the fewer intelligent members of HN?
The Brightest Tech Minds Sound Off on the Rise of the Tablet
Wanting to do the 'creative thinking' to move projects and ideas is the reason why I now find myself now teaching myself math and advanced math. I have ideas that I want to push through, and I will need people to help me with them, but I'm not going to be able to get the talent I need without being able to 'talk' to them in their language. Also it will help me to see and answer new problems that I am unable to now. This is especially relevant to me as most of the interesting ideas I have are regarding AI and machine learning. I am unable to teach myself from some great books and examples out there because, quite frankly, my math skills are non-existent. It is frustrating because I want to move forward, experiment further with these ideas, but can't do this using pure 'black-box' mentality. I need to understand whats in those black boxes so I can make my own.
Nobody is going to look there, I should hope it's presented when they try to load up an SSL page.
It's the typical early adopters/mainstream/laggards split (see Crossing the Chasm). Basically employees at BigCo get a smile and a pat on the back if a decision they make goes well, or they get punished, demoted, or fired if it goes badly. Since they're not writing the checks and have little upside, they're inclined to go with the boring, conservative choice.
I note that the poster described a Lisp and not specifically Common Lisp. Clojure at least has plenty of batteries available via its Java interoperability. The biggest thing holding Clojure back at the moment appear to be installation, building other people's projects, and IDE setup.

I don't know if Clojure is a helpful suggestion to the OP but it is certainly a more appealing way for me to get into Lisp than Common Lisp was.

Edit: I have just recently completed the install/build/IDE trifecta myself thanks to ELPA and leiningen but it certainly wasn't a one-day process. One of my biggest problems was reading out of date tutorials rather than the latest and greatest. It can be hard for a newcomer to see a HOWTO blog post from mid 2009 and decide whether or not to try it out.
I read your TrueSkill article, and it was very thorough. Coincidentally, I was looking over the papers and things for a few days just prior, trying to figure out all leaps that the authors made. The math was simple, but there are a few gaps to actually implementing the thing! I didn't quite get to the part where I would email them, but I was amazed that you spent 6 months on understanding it. Good for you for being persistent!

As for math, unfortunately it applies to the general public too. It's part fear, but also they keep telling themselves they're not good at it - and not trying in response. Math is a mature field, and as such, there's quite a bit of it to get going. It's tough to catch up years of math without doing it.

A peculiar part of it is that some people correlates math with calculations at an early age, the simple arithmetic operations. Maybe it's unfortunate that it is such an easy metric to see who's better at it - easy negative reinforcement.

One of my algorithms professor in college explained to me that in (research) math, it's all about being creative, seeing things and making connections, and teaching understandings. I try to keep that in mind whenever I read up on math, though I am eager about everything to learn in general!
Strong disagree for a bunch of reasons.

First, there's no style of C++ I've seen in the field that totally eliminates any of the C-isms. Modern C++ code still has pointer math and it still has function pointers. In other words, you still have to learn the trickiest stuff from C.

Second, while <vector> is great, it's not a good idea to think about it as a black box. The whole food chain of STL containers from list to dequeue presumes that you understand the tradeoffs in actually implementing data structures in memory. How do you select and use these things intelligently if you've never even implemented a linked list? You're basically just writing a very verbose and very error prone form of Java.

Finally, C++ just isn't a very good language. There is nothing you can do in C++ that you can't deal with in C. There is a clear difference between the outcomes of, say, Perl and Python --- Python code is clearer and more maintainable. There are clear differences between Java outcomes and Rails outcomes --- the Rails code is tighter, smaller, simpler (though perhaps less featureful). Compare giant C and C++ codebases. What's the C++ win?

C vs. C++ is a can of worms. I know. But I've spent quality time in both languages and I'm an unabashed fan of C. I think the 2010 answer to the problem C++ wants to solve is "C and a high-level language". The future belongs to things like Lua (or Python with a better FFI, or...). C++ is a dead end.
Reminds of a story from Greg Mankiw's blog on Machiavellian Entrepreneurs:

http://gregmankiw.blogspot.com/2008/07/machiavellian-entrepr...
A number of people have recommended David R. Hanson's C Interfaces and Impementations, so I'll mention his A Retargetable C Compiler: Design and Implementation. I own this book though I haven't read it, but it's about writing a C compiler in C. You should pretty much just go out and buy these two books because they'll eventually go out of print, and then you'll be screwed. CII used to be out of print and impossible to obtain until Addison-Wesley started printing it again a year ago.
Eric Enge interviews Matt Cutts
Problems with this line of thinking:
1. Anti-trust implies monopoly. No monopoly on phones here. Plus it's Apple's store, you can't have a "monopoly" on your own product.

2. Apple haven't exhibited a consistent pattern of app rejections to imply any particular competitive bias. (They host many applications from their traditional competitors.)

3. Point 2 is moot, as it's still not a monopoly to begin with.

If you'd like to see what real monopolistic-competitor crunching behaviour is, then read up on the halloween documents. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Halloween_documents_l...

Compare Apple to Microsoft and IBM... Apple don't have the slightest on these mammoths.
The problem with this worldview is that if you don't want to reimplement data structures, you might as well stay in a modern language. Control over memory layouts (either for performance or for systems programming) is the reason to be in C/C++ in the first place.
Public Companies That Are Toast Without Google
And exactly how you defend deontology without any reference to the consequences? - in fact you have explicitly said "to judge actions by their expected results". So you have said deontological ethics is justified by reference to consequences. Is it any surprise that people who actually think about the real world rather than philosophers' fantasies prefer consequentialism.

ADDED: Thinking about it further, the only people who use deontological ethics any more that I can think of are religious people and Marxists, those who have a transcendental source for their required actions.
I think you're right. I sat down last night with a Red Bull and just starting typing up anything that came to mind. It worked decently well and could be a good starting point.

I'll check out that resource you just pegged now as well. Thanks!
Ask HN: Anyone willing to build a "ls" with Subversion integration?
I've been Googling around for a while looking for a "ls" script that would highlight versioned/non-versioned files differently (or even display a tag next to their filename Added/Modified/Deleted/etc.).

I haven't found anything, so if you're looking for a fun project, here's one :) I would build it myself but I'm still a noob at shell scripting.

I've talked to a couple of friends about this project and they all seemed to like the idea.

If anyone's interested in building this, keep us updated here !

UPDATE: I've found this script that colorizes some svn commands: http://snipplr.com/view.php?codeview&id=28748
You should read it! It's fantastically written, and goes from a hand-written C lexer all the way to x86 code generation. Hanson's books are written in literate code style, and it's a shame that that style went out of fashion, because it is the answer to how to write code-heavy books.
Jedi Software Training--Part 1
"It's really stupid and counterproductive"

One might say the same about Wall Street in general... alright, maybe not completely, but a little?
-1? humor is allowed on HN you know :)
Dudebro wiki: http://dudebro.wikia.com/wiki/Main_Page

The acronym for the game is amusing: Dudebro: MSIFUSIGTS/SY II: ISUDT
Am I missing something, what does that HN article have to do with $100k? EDIT - never mind, I missed the connection! Good call.

I like the concept of this app, but it seems from their blog that they were having a hard time charging for this service. Without that model in place, like earle mentioned, this isn't really a startup - but for the right person it could be I think.
Installing lighttpd/PHP/MySQL on TonidoPlug
Holler when you get the hockey stats going! :)
Good story, but in Russian. Most of the audience might want to read the original, from the Daily Mail, which is in English: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/worldnews/article-1259863/Wo...

Another article in English, from Pravda: http://english.pravda.ru/russia/kremlin/84114-0/
Alright, so the research has been conducted, verified, and introduced changes in the lives of teenagers. Now let's move on to adults. Where's my 10am start time at work???
anti-trust for what?
If you really want to do Python modules, I can understand.

In terms of hacking small Unix tools, have you considered other options like perl, bash, combo's of unix commands, etc.? I suggest that those options could be a lot more productive for your time investment than C. IMHO. Hope this helps.
This is a great comment but I have to disagree with your conclusion.

I love both C and C++, although I don't use them currently. And I can't imagine using them in the future.

The issue here: is there a language that is both low-level enough to write hardware drivers yet high-level enough to abstract away anything that I might want? Close-enough to the metal to bit flip with the best of them yet powerful enough to create and organize large hunks of code?

I think the answer is pretty clearly C++. C is a very close second, but the entire reason from evolving from C to C++ was large development situations.

Would I write a new web-app in C++? Heck no. But software development is a lot bigger than the little corner of the world I have my fingers in, and I can easily see where C++ will be around 20 years from now -- and for new development, not just maintenance. Perhaps even 50 years. So no, not a dead end by any means.
I can do an SBCL/emacs/SLIME setup in 15 minutes or so, but I've done it a bunch of times. Someone following my guides can do it in ~1 hour.

I'd love to try out clojure, but I want to type something like 'sudo apt-get install clojure-sandbox'.
Everybody so far wants to increase the risk of loss for the pirates. But there's far more to running a profitable enterprise than risk of loss; that's just the factor that "feels right," morally, when dealing with pirates.

Here's a different strategy, just off the top of my head: The large shipping companies that keep getting raided could put economic and legal pressure on fishing corporations from other countries that use Somali waters, and garbage companies that dump waste in their waters. This could easily increase the returns from fishing for Somalis with boats to the point where engaging in piracy was a net loss.
You know, philosophically speaking, I'm not sure competition really does help the end user. Is a constant search for something better good? Is life now bad? Do we really need it to be improved? Perhaps the idea that it can be improved -- or even should be -- is itself a negativity creator.

Beyond those questions, some of the tactics and strategies used by competitive companies don't lead to better lives. For example, if VHS had never been in competition with BetaMax, our lives would be better because Betamax is better than VHS. Perhaps if there was less competition, many of the startups that are put out of business every day would survive longer and provide even more better life. Sometimes competition destroys the best alternative.

Little things like that make me wonder about our conviction that competition is better.

Further still, imagine if all the energy spent competing was spent collaborating! Imagine if we all focused on a better life, rather than two separate teams focusing on two separate paths to that better life. Mozilla team + Chrome team could be a better scenario than Mozilla team vs. Chrome team.

So, my point is, It's not really that clear cut that competition makes our lives better. Another example, in many countries around the world with single payer health care systems, the people live longer, have lower infant mortality, and disease than in the U.S. where there is competition for health care provision and insurance.

So I'd like to see some evidence for the claim that competition makes lives better and products better. And, even if they do, does it matter that those products have become better? Does the fact that our lives will be better 10 years from now mean we can't be happy today? Should we not focus on being happy with what we have? If competition weren't the status quo, maybe there would be something existing right now to make our lives better than our lives currently are, but we simply don't know about it. It's not here. It doesn't exist. If it did exist, perhaps our lives would be better, but we only believe they are better because we can compare our lives with this thing existing with our lives when it didn't exist.

Would our lives be better if we could colonize mars? Would we have been able to colonize mars if we had worked with the Russians during the cold war? How much more progress would have been made if we had collaborated? Instead, competition has led to nuclear proliferation -- is that a good thing?

If there were only one browser, my life would be better. I wouldn't have to develop for four... wait, five browsers. I'd be able to spend more time focusing on the features and requirements of the system, rather than IE showing a div a little higher or than Firefox. Or Chrome throwing an error on an Ajax call. Or adding IF statements to handle key presses.

Take it to the logical extreme. What if there were 20 browsers each with 5% market share? Would life be even better still?
That's ok :) My reading wishlist grows a lot faster than I read books, so unless that changes, I'll clearly never be able to read all the books I want to. Just the way things are.
Related, Vonnegut on drama: http://sivers.org/drama (more graph sketches!)
What a weird platform the iPhone is, when established companies like Opera have to resort to such things.
Rethinking Professionalism: The Meta-Expert
Ask HN: Any alternatives to Mixpanel ?
I'm looking to integrate something like Mixpanel to one of our Rails applications. Mixpanel looked good at first, but they don't allow importing historical data (which is important for us). Is there any other similar analytics service out there with similar features ?

As a last resort, I'm thinking of using R (http://www.r-project.org/) - is this a good idea ?

Thank you for any advice on this.
svn status does not provide you enough information ?
in Chrome there is a nice translate option at the top, the comments of russian readers are pretty interesting
Ronald Merrill suggested a couple of decades ago that "normative ought" and "instrumental ought" are likely two sides of the same issue which he called the "unification of oughts" (rather like Maxwell's unification of electricity and magnetism, Merrill was an engineer). That "normative ought" in morality is an instrumental ought with an understood object (for example to improve your or someone else's life); and I would suggest the proper study of morality may be to understand, make explicit, and rank/prioritize those implicit objects.
Lol. http://translate.google.com/translate?u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.gaz...
Beneficial Compounds in Maple Syrup