skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The latter. My understanding of graph and complexity theory was a little weak, but about on par with what the average CS student actually remembers upon graduation. It's not that difficult if you actually care about it. The great tragedy is that most people who study things don't care about them. I see this all the time: in any given subject, the people who think it's interesting are the people who will learn an order of magnitude faster, and actually remember it afterward. The ones who go in with the attitude of just grinding through won't learn nearly as much. This is why I think that the best way to learn any technical subject is to start on a project you think is cool, and learn whatever becomes relevant, with enthusiasm. If you start programming, sooner or later you'll come across this "quicksort" thing and hear that it's usually "O(n lg n)", whatever that means, and the next thing you know you're reading through an algorithms textbook of your own volition. It's freaky, but it works.
A counterexample is Causes on Facebook, a for-profit entity which utilizes social pressure to drive donations to nonprofits and has its own successful "tip" system.

http://www.facebook.com/causes
Those were the days. I remember how there used to be so many arguments and petty battles about which protocol or extension to use, and all the incompatible clients and how one client maker would add an extension that would break other clients. There were so many vested interests, including the music industry giants who also had their internal clients being developed.

And the bittorrent came and overtook all of them pretty quickly.

The file-sharing scene looked calm from the outside, but on the inside the wars and the intrigues were vicious.
it's a 17 year old's blog and he got on hn. he's not doing that bad - cut him a bit of slack. none of your "points" are devastating (even the quote was an exception; the majority of the code is formatted very nicely).

having said that, i used jquery for the first time last week (to make that greasemonkey script that zaps karma info here) and there's plenty of info out there if you just google for it. so i have to agree it's not really "hacker news".
"Most acquisitions fail. Most founders end up leaving the bigger company once their golden handcuffs are off."

I don't know about that. It's not necessarily a sign of failure when the founders leave, and it may actually be a good thing in the long run. You want the founders around long enough to ensure that the business you bought gets integrated into your operations and company culture, and once that is done the founders should be free to leave if they choose. It may be a less desirable situation for the founders, but that may be due more to them being founder types (plus suddenly having a lot of cash ) rather than employee types. The other approach is to buy the company but have the founders run it as they did before with little interference from the acquiring company (e.g. Berkshire Hathaway).
It sounds like the sort of thing any C programmer went through 5-10years ago when they first encountered Java. Java is what it is and I wouldn't generalise the comments beyond this: If you're thinking of copy'n'pasting your Objective-C iPhone into Eclipse and changing some method calls, don't. Different devices and different languages with different capabilities and performance profiles require different thinking and different approaches. In short, they're different.
The point is that Mozilla, Apple, and Google have all built capable (HTML 5) browsers using the APIs Microsoft provided in Windows XP. If they can do it, why can't Microsoft?
It's most likely those folks buying the app at $400 thought it was $4.00 or just misclicked. And then they complained to Apple about improper charges on their credit cards, which causes chargebacks, which causes problems for Apple, which causes them to remove the problem at its source. It's just Apple trying to maintain a positive user experience, nothing more.
Gigantic type set? Ok. Irrelevant background images? No consistency amongst other UI elements?!

Please explain. All I see is consistency in this UI style. And the background images look pretty relevant to me.
Have the worse-off schools dump their football teams and you'd be financially OK for quite a few supposedly ambitious activities, but that won't happen in many places.
AppWhirl: Create an iPhone app from any feed
Professor with background in game design abandons grades for experience points
I find it incredible that he's a Japanese Salaryman having recently read another such peron's Q&A on reddit: http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/bewof/iama_salaryman_僕...

Seems like once you've finished working 10 hours every day for your lifetime employer, there's not much to do than the obligatory heavy drinking!
They are all newbie's.
I would like to know more companies like 37signals, that are thinking more in product than in ridiculous company politics. Myspace & Rupert needs to learn the lesson, Newsorp destroyed Myspace, and wasted time forgetting to work in the product (the heart). All are bosses, don't forget that somebody needs to get the job done. Meetings everywhere, powerpoints, financial promises for what? bankrupcy? welcome to the beginning of the end of corporations.

37Signals will be the first milestone to change the new era of bussiness.
Not true. WP theme files get loaded by the application and the theme runs its own code while talking to the API that WP makes available. It would be similar to saying every application running on Linux would require GPL licensing because the kernel itself is GPL. The GPL is infectious, but not that far.
http://chargify.com/ - the front page does a good job of selling it. It has a good API and they take care of almost everything - you just need to list the stuff you want to offer and either point people at a special Chargify page or pass info through the API.
Good video indeed
The contrast that you describe between the state of spirit of sysadmins vs. programmers seems to mean that programmers do not need to consider impact on the rest of the architecture and the long-term maintenance cost of any given code change.

The programmer you are describing are a kind of programmer who makes lousy programs. I've read enough of those programs to say: they are not pretty -- they do not work well in large scale -- and they cost a LOT.
Ask HN: How should I prepare for an interview?
I was wondering how I should prepare for an interview for a technology company. They are a security research firm and they already have looked at my resume. I am already reading the companies website. What else should I do to prepare?
Broadcast your runs & rides live as you do them
I've had very good experiences with Spreedly... you'll need to get a payment gateway, but they handle all the work of renewals, expiration dates, plan upgrading/downgrading, etc. They have a RESTful API so you can check status at any time, and will also ping a URL you specify when somebody's status changes so you can clear any cached data. They also do a pretty great job of support via their Get Satisfaction site and via e-mail.
Simplest is probably http://cheddarGetter.com or http://spreedly.com or http://chargify.com (they store and abstract the payment gateway apis for you, and do recurrence, along with managing and handling the user data, and exposing a super simple api to your end). But the catch is they also charge a fee...

The cheapest is to use a service like Paypale/FirstData/etc which are a bit more tricky to setup that the cheddary/spreedly but also offer recurrance charging. The catch is you'd have to keep track of the user data and management, and slighly more tricker to change providers .
It's no wonder that students aren't interested in learning if their desire to learn is suddenly discouraged once they've gotten off the lesson plan.

When I was at high school (in the UK), teachers were keen to only cover things that were known to be in the eventual tests. In math, we skipped set theory entirely because it was known to not be in the final exams.
Anyone else have experience in this area?

Is Java on Android _really_ slow? Or is it the porting of objective C to Java?

I'd really like to know. I have an interest in developing for the Android.
I'm guessing its the first reason. I guarantee you IE has native code running.
That's the point, isn't it? You tried to make it in the interview but you didn't do it as successfully as you did right there.

If you're in a dogfight with a company that's A) taking funding in exchange for a minority stake or B) willing to have a whatever-it-takes development cycle, and they're executing as smartly as you are, then you have no choice.

If you want your product to succeed in the marketplace and you can't outsmart them, then you need to decide if you'll let them win just because they're using more horsepower.

Good call there Jason. Because you don't always get the choice about the dogfight. Sometimes the fight finds you.
1996? huh?
Let’s see if we can calculate that:

The Enterprise D is about 650 m long, the scale model 8.8 µm. If you move the model 1 m you move it about 114,000 times its length. If the real thing were to move 114,000 times its length, it would move 74.1 million m. If your walking speed is 1 m/s, the speed of the real thing comes out to one quarter c. Not nearly enough. (Wikipedia says that warp 2 is about 10 c.)

Calculating how fast you would have to walk if you wanted to reach a scale velocity of warp 2 is left as a exercise to the reader.

(I’m not really that good at math so please feel free to correct me :)
Porting the Firefox code base to the CLR would be a massive undertaking
There are a lot of things in this article I disagree with.

1) Wikipedia doesn't have 5 billion unique visitors (there are only 1.6 billion internet users in the world). And they only put up banners asking for money when they need it, not all the time. So both variables in coming up with the "$.00124/visitor" estimate are incorrect.

2) Tax deduction does not make something cost-free. For most people, a donation saves them nothing (since they use the standard deduction) but even for those who itemize, it only saves them the tax they would have paid on that income, not the income itself.

3) Tipping doesn't have to create price uncertainty. As someone who has tried the donation model, it's clear that if you set the price of a donation (such as placing a banner that says "Give $5 now"), that's the exact amount that 90% of people will donate. So in essence, you do get to influence what the perceived value of your site is worth.

4) The article claims that in order to orgs like NPR to succeed on the donation model, they have to have federal grants and corporate sponsorship, etc. But this argument ignores the low barrier to entry (and low cost) of online content; it's not a valid comparison.

5) The article also mentions that those orgs can succeed because they offer physical goods and imply scarcity, but there's no reason that a donation-accepting site could do those as well.
Not sure the time limit on this but they seem to be rather recent:
http://news.ycombinator.com/best
tl;dr: Java's not all that great for writing the typical gory OpenGL code you need for great performance, while Objective-C's (C's) pretty good at it; also, the iPhone dev environment is pretty good, compared to Android's.
Apple is now accepting iPad app submissions
That's true. I think it's unlikely that I'd build a better company than what I have with 37signals. If I had some great ideas for a better company, I would be busy implementing those ideas at 37signals.

And no, I certainly don't think any of the likely suspects for acquisitions could run 37signals better than we do. I consider _that_ common sense.
http://recurly.com is another similar option.
Note that this uses the "new" warp tables, which are controversial to some folks.
Justin Frankel is my hero. I learned so much programming from his releases. I remember having a fully printed and annotated copy of the Waste source code.

He is one of those extremely rare programmers of the "too smart to need unit tests" type and he can come up with paradigm shifting code by hacking on something in a weekend.

All his utilities were fully dependency free, straight up C code that compiled something epic into a 50kb executable. Back in the day I had a job which paid a substantial bonus for every kilobyte that I managed to shave off the executable binary size ( 14.4 baud modem days ) and his code as well as all the code from the 4k and 64k demo scene that was available was my only reference material.

I lost track of what he is up to these days, but I hope he found much happiness after the apparently tough AOL time.
Anyone know if there's similar services for non-recurring payments?

I'm currently planning on using e-junkie but its kind of a piece of crap. Looking for a slicker integration similar to spreedly or chargify.
Yah, very interesting if you measure in that context.

Lots of the restaurants seem to be doing a "food at cost" type offer and make it up on the booze sales. For a restaurant that could be a great strategy -
We're planning on using Spreedly on http://seoaholic.com, however, unrelated to Spreedly, which is easy to configure, getting the merchant account is the hard part.

'From scratch' it has taken close to 60 days - creating a company (LLC), securing a bank account, having the bank verify your physical location (even though you don't have one - don't ask) - total about 20 days.

Next, FirstData for the merchant account - talk to an account manager, then fill out a paper application, which leads to an online application via a relatively inflexible javascript-heavy website, then faxing supporting documentation, then applying for a state DBA license because the company name and the physical name don't match. Then, faxing personal bills with addresses that must match the physical address of the business address, even though there isn't one. All-in, this phase took about 20 days.

Next, website edits - They didn't like the word 'forever' on the pricing page, because it was too open ended. This phase has taken about 10 days.

We think we'll get it all done this week, at this point we're just waiting for an answer, but we had no idea how long it could take.
Basically if your box gets rooted, you're fucked ;)
While the author says stuffs like "not to be used by bad persons", he also writes long shits about evading pursuit in the woods, killing dogs as needed, or getting out of cars while an helicopter is watching. Definitely weird, paranoid, but entertaining. You can indeed find stuffs in the same spirit in some Hollywood movies -- "Enemy of the State" comes to mind.
I'll admit that I was a little bit harsh... well, no, very harsh in my original comment. That said, I'd fed up of dealing with the results of spreading misinformation in beginners' articles. It's great that this 17 year old writes well and gets on HN, it's less so that he'll be causing people to make mistakes and misjudgements in future.
What level of student do you teach? I'm curious if they've been conditioned to not get off the lesson plan because they know it's not worth the effort and it won't be on the test anyhow.
The image of the setup with the keyboard and the monitor gave me an idea: Open a coffee shop/internet cafe type place where people could bring tiny computers and/or cell phones in and plug them into a docking station attached to a keyboard and a monitor.
Wikipedia, Notability, and Open Source Software, Part 2
Heroin is actually not that bad for your health per se -- it's the stretching agents that'll get you.
How does Twitter Ads Look Like...
There is no JIT-compiler on Dalvik, and its garbage collector is a very slow mark-sweep. Both are known deficiencies being addressed by the Android team.

I've been working with SISC Scheme on Android, where it is truly slow. At the moment it is little more than a toy, a Schemely palmtop calculator.
I assume you are joking.
I remember readng this a long time ago. About that time I've also read this wonderfully amusing piece from Pat Metheny about Kenny G: http://www.jazzoasis.com/methenyonkennyg.htm

This is a hell of a crucifixion :)
Anybody know approximately how much is donated to OpenCourseWare for the free content they provide?
i think i agree. it's difficult to find or make meaning.
HN suggestion: Allow hiding username when commenting
This might apply only to users who can also downvote (apply the same "good citizen" filter). I think this would open up a lot of important comments and good stories.
I tip out of fear.
I used Amazon Payments for CustomerFind.com. It's really easy to use, but the documentation is kind of outdated. If you want I could tutor you, send me an email.
In my book you are living the dream man - doing what you love and not having to worry about paying the bills.

Stupid analogy: having your own precious Q3 server successfully running with a broadband connection back in the day and then selling it to somebody who eventually might be able to turn off the service in order to better serve to the CS crowd because of whatever reason.

You care about what you are doing - not surprisingly that is confusing to a lot of people who have been told to do the "right" thing instead of doing what they really want with their lives.
Don't feel like you have to justify anything to some random guy on an internet forum. You are the most qualified/informed to run your own business however you want. :)

From reading your comments on here, I better understand where you're coming from. I think it's cool that you love what you do, who you do it with, and how much money you make doing it enough to not be looking for an exit. You're basically living the dream that conventional thinking has come after the exit.
If you want quick, easy and cheap, go with PayPal. They have a button generator tool that takes the hassle out of submitting html forms to them. There are plenty of libraries out there that will listen for their IPNs (instant payment notifications) so that you can update the user's subscription record on your site. And there are no start up costs, win! ;)

That said, personally I'd start with PayPal, see if anyone gives you any money, and the moment users start paying switch to a proper merchant account and CC processor ;)
It's worth noting that Chrome only runs on Mac OS 10.5 and better. I can't install it on the iBook we keep around, running 10.4.
You have to plan from the beginning to abstract away the system-specific stuff.

Java: I only wrap what I need with JNI and use C for the rest. Anybody would get burned out trying to cut-paste a huge Objective C program into Java.

Debugging: good old asserts and printfs are your friend. Last I checked asserts weren't working out-of-the-box on Android, so you may need to roll your own log/assert macros.

Profiling: it's not supported very well on the NDK, so take 15 minutes to add timestamps to critical parts of the code and printf.

OpenGL: again, target C for the bulk of your code and vertex buffer objects and interleaved arrays work great. No need for ByteBuffer madness.

Fixed point: ARM chips are not going away anytime soon. Converting your data to fixed point before uploading it to the GPU is a simple problem compared to getting your fancy website to render properly in IE6 or your pretty desktop game to not choke on Intel Accelerated Graphics. Do microbenchmarks once at runtime or test lots of different devices to see what kind of data works best on the host device.

Good thing is you only have to do these things once, ever. Once you have your build system setup and all your happy interface libraries running you can do the same things for all your Android+iPhone projects.
Thank you for your notes.

1.) I didn't say Wikipedia has 5 billion uniques. I said it gets 5 billion visitors. In ad sales a visitor is different than a unique. I changed it to "visits" so avoid the confusion.

2.) Tax deduction makes the perception of something's cost free.

3.) If you can still get a product without paying for something (i.e. tipping) the price is either what you ask for ($5) or nothing. That's the definition of price uncertainty.

4.) I pointed out the problem in using NPR as a model. Federal grants and family endowments are not the best model for a blog...

5.) A donation accepting site can suggest scarcity, but the questions is how compelling will it be? PBS and NPR offer content in a very limited channel space. Most blogs and podcasts do not.

Best,

Andrew
With #1 the point is that although tons of people use Wikipedia, only a microfraction of em donate. I, for example, have gotten tons of value out of it yet have never given them anything. I think that they should petition universities for sponsorships.

I just donated $5 because I realized how ridiculous my lack of patronage is.
Sorry, went for an eye test yesterday, had a blast of air shot at my eyeball, and have had a thumping headache for the last two days. 2007 it is.
My post was about using this model to support blogs and podcasts. Not bona fide charitable organizations. I actually have experience in doing successful online fundraising for those kinds of groups.
I actually run a site called BitBuffet that let's you sell individual files (like PDFs). Or are you wanting to charge a one time fee for access to a site?
Always the best motivator.
You will probably have to be more specific about the role to get better feedback, but my general suggestions are:

1) Confirm the day before and get the names of everyone you're going to meet

2) Make sure you have all materials you're expected to bring, including several copies of your cv

3) Read the website or other materials to prepare specific questions about the business and prepare questions and ask those questions (they should mostly be related to your role, but a few general should be ok)

4) Arrive exactly 5 minutes before the start time

5) Look people directly in the eye at all times

6) Be yourself

7) Tell the truth, especially when you're tempted to bend it

8) Use language as if you already have the position like, 'I will report to ...', 'I will support ...'

9) Treat everyone like a VIP, even the FedEx guy

10) Smile
To really get rid of the shortage of organs, allow people to freely buy and sell them.

Murder (and other initiations of force) is both immoral and illegal, so there's no conflict there - you need your organs to live, so these laws (and many others) already criminalize the theft of organs.

There's no valid reason that you or your estate shouldn't be allowed freely sell things you don't need anymore, including your liver.
We look forward to the next part in the series!
going to melt the ice caps.

An exaggeration built on an exaggeration is doomed to fall over. I implied nothing of the sort, and my main goal was just to point out that a hardware decoder is a big deal in terms of battery life, though I admit it didn't come through clearly. Though I will claim that hardware decoding is typically more power efficient than software, and has much more room to improve.

I'm glad to see Theora getting hardware acceleration, especially as I hadn't heard about it, though I'd be curious to see if it'll work on more computers / devices than h.264 is likely to appear on.

As to MPEG-2 and other formats where there are more prevalent hardware decoders, do some comparative runs. h.264 does significantly better per bit from my subjective experiments. It's more future-capable because of that and it's ability to do ridiculously high quality encoding, which combined with a business to hold accountable for problems will likely mean other businesses will choose it over Theora.
That's exactly the kind of thing I was looking for. Chargify looks really good. The whole thing is explained nicely in the video even though it doesn't go into any details about the gateway.

Do you guys have any idea which one of those three are the biggest? Because I would assume the one with the most customers is the most reliable one... Even though that logic might be broken.
Oh dang, this is really awesome. I wonder how strict the rules are for what you are allowed to show.