skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Some applications work best on the web. Some applications work best natively. I don't really see this is an either/or thing.

I've been doing Cocoa programming and heavy amounts of JavaScript for some time now. Anything bad one camp says about the other is pure FUD. Objective-J is but one example of proof in the pudding. I myself work on a codebase that's nearly 25,0000 lines of JavaScript with a design heavily lifted from my experience with Cocoa. JavaScript's expressive power makes this possible, even trivial.

Yet, JavaScripts tooling support is just subpar compared to Apple's. While people complain about XCode, it makes FireBug look like a toy.

Also pretty much everything for building interfaces is just Precambrian compared to Apple's. Code generation for UI must die.

I could go on and on.

As far as the article is concerned: Android, Windows 7 Mobile, and iPhone are all lockins if you develop native apps for them. You have non portable code (unless you're writing a game) who cares how "open" the platform is.

It's too early to see how all of this will play out but I guess that doesn't stop everyone from hand-waving every chance they get.
> Besides OTToken's text patterns we also have when the comments were left. So we can throw out certain people that never comment during the hours of the day that OTToken did.

Noodle already clued in to that:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1199768

Also, if you could check my comment history (which you can't because it seems to time out on HNs server) you'd see that my comment speed is usually fairly quick in threads where I'm active.
If your overall score reaches a certain level, you get downvote arrows.
I don't think we need to leave it to Eric Ries to define what a lean startup is. It's been all the rage in the valley since at least when Flickr sold in 2005.
A different (and probably much easier) challenge: Disprove that it was me [or insert any other user here].
I don't think that reflects the current economic fact by evaluating oversea student number. The way families in China to collect tuition towards college is much like many families in the United States. They just start early. Thus, it cannot reflect the economic status at this very moment. Besides, although whether true or not is unclear, I do believe Asian families in general are more willing to invest in education. The number of people who is taking National College Entrance Exam is dropped from 2008. It is a safe bet that the number of oversea student will drop in 5 to 6 years (due to the birth control policy).
It's a quote from the YC application:

http://news.ycombinator.com/s2010form
It seems a shame to me that nowadays "protecting the environment" is virtually synonymous with "curbing CO2 emissions", which means that serious issues like ocean pollution get very little attention.
Karma doesn't enter in to it, what's the difference between posting a challenge yourself vs mailing someone and having them post it for you and credit you.

Seems a bit roundabout without any real advantage.

Daniels tag is all it really needs.
Thanks. I knew that I read that sentence before.
It's not all about the signatures. Vaccination would be just as ineffective as anti-virus if biological viruses were anything like computer viruses. Imagine billions of biological viruses that are instantly transmitted upon infection to anywhere in the world, have an immediate impact on the host, and can evolve and adapt with human-like intelligence. Good luck fighting that with vaccines.

Because computers are not human beings, if we can do detection well, than the problem of fighting an infection is already solved. Just run your server on a virtual machine verified by a trusted boot module. When an infection is detected, just roll back to a trusted snapshot or roll back to a clean install.
Seriously. Looks "egotistical, pompous, and self-serving" to me.

Fool that I am, I took the bait and posted a response on the guy's site, which of course was edited in a remarkably classy way.
I agree that the efficient market theory is generally wrong, but this example seems a bit extreme. I am surprised one of the sharks out there did not take over the company to merely shut down everything and get the cash.

It could be that Mr. Horowitz was excluding certain privately held shares from the market cap. Or maybe there were liabilities so that while they had 68 million in cash they did not have 68 million in net assets. Or maybe they had a poison pill.
sweet - thanks. oh! it's gone... and it seemed so reasonable!
Hey Jason,

awesome work!!!! love the design

in my original email i said 'clarity,simplicity, community, not overly flashy' - this design communicates this on a level that me as a php guy would have no hope of coming up with - refer original site for my attempt :)

the simple invoices community thanks you for your work - it will really help us communicate what were on about

now onto the fun part - turning the psd into html/css reality :)
-- any html/css gurus want to lend a hand ?

again - really appreciate this help !!

will post here once we have implemented the design

Cheers

Justin
-- simpleinvoices.org
Also check out http://domai.nr -- might get some good suggestions for alternatives.
My googling turned up "neilc" as a user of dashes at least one of the obvious digrams from that post.
The diet pill example ("Oomph" and "Precision") from the Ziliak and McCloskey's book really made it clear for me:

http://books.google.com/books?id=JWLIRr_ROgAC&lpg=PA25&#...
Hg and Git : Can't we all just get along? (PyCon Presentation)
(Nearly) Visible Quantum Interactions
If your site is one of the world's top three most-visited websites and every pageview generates a single extra request, then you bet your ass it's going to cause problems.
DailyBooth Conga Line
We moved to Austin to benifit from the much better tax structure and lack of red tape when operating compared to California. Texas is very business freindly on purpose. They focus on it, and so far seem to be doing a pretty good job of it.

Austin is a nice place and the people are very nice, but in the summer the humidity and heat gets pretty bad. Too bad its not right on the ocean like California or Seattle.
BTW, I actually read the book. It's alright but really repetitive after the first couple of chapters. McCloskey overwrites as usual.
Not for articles.
I don't think that's an easier challenge at all.

Disprove that pink elephants exist vs prove that gray ones do.

Which one is the easier challenge ?
Not a problem, I will send along the assets you need in a little.
Oh, goddammit: Lean Startups aren't Cheap Startups: http://steveblank.com/2009/11/02/lean-startups-aren’t-cheap-...

Horowitz agrees with sgblank and ries!
Also donating prizes would give a different metric than pure karma-per-submission to order the challenges. (Though it might be hard to order bragging rights. But we should be able to find a (corporate?) sponsor who hands out 50 dollar for the charity of choice of the winner every week. (Hey, I might even be able to get the money out of my employer, if I asked to--or I just do it myself.))

Enough parenthesis. I just go ahead and pledge 10 Pounds per week to it. Perhaps we should discuss more by email?

(More later, I'll have to go to bed now.)
You're assuming that your static assets (js, css, images) aren't served from a CDN (pretty much the standard at companies like Yahoo!). When your main server is serving just the HTML it's much more likely that your requests could double.
Oh and a little help: why is it I can't post linkable URL's? Do I need more karma?
Guessing someone is male on HN is a pretty good bet.

As for the 'learned conversation', I think that sets the bar a bit high, as long as it is polite and somehow coherent I'm fine with it :)
See:

http://us.metamath.org/mpegif/mul01i.html

http://us.metamath.org/mpegif/mul02i.html
I'm not even sure it's possible. Much of electronic stuff is fundamentally difficult to secure, eg pgp.
Ask HN to Discuss: Privacy in the new modern world
What I found more fascinating than the cute little challenge jacquesm proposed was the very content of onetimetoken's post ( http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1197027 ).

He's articulated rather well the practical demise of privacy. Is it perhaps time for a fundamention revision of privacy itself? In this day and age, where do we draw the line? Identity management is a task that only the technically-minded can successfully pull off, and 'being quiet' isn't a very good alternative either.
I'm a 15-minute walk from Davis Square, where the subway is, and my rent is only $425 / month.

Not only is Boston the #2 city by number of startups:

http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2006/06/startup-centers.ht...

It's the #1 city by number of universities. It's really a fantastic place with a terrific startup scene, and one that's still growing and getting more connected.
You seem to contradict yourself:

Personally I'd expect that line to work better on "good quality" girls, actually. Especially pretty girls that know they look good.

Uh huh.

With really beautiful and/or confident girls you're more likely for them to expect guys to be shy and deferential or just plain creepy.

Of course the chance of coming off as creepy with a line like that if not delivered with the perfect attitude is pretty high.

Uh? So if a pretty girl is more used to guys being shy or creepy and you deliver the line in question, which way do you think she's more likely to interpret the approach? You then go on to say that in any case, the chances of coming off as creepy while using such a line are pretty high.

Sexual intent, confidence and the perception that you're very successful with women and don't need to by shy about what you're after means far more than looks.

Well that really depends on how ugly you are, doesn't it. :) If you're average to good looking, then yeah I can see (and have personally seen) how attitude makes a difference. If you look like you fell off the ugly tree and hit every branch on the way down, then good luck with that awesome confidence you're exuding. I suspect it will be just you and your hand tonight, as a lady once sung.

Sounds to me like you're more working off how you wish things were as opposed to how they are. It seems pretty self evident in my mind that no matter how the line in question is delivered, there will be girls who respond positively and girls who do not. The point I'm trying to make is that it's more about the girl than it is the opening line. How inebriated the girl is would make a large difference to the outcome of the interaction and at the risk of repeating myself, in my experience the girls who would respond positively to that line generally are not the ones I've wanted to sleep with.

It's another thing entirely if we're talking about using this line or something similar on a woman who you've know for a while and who has had a chance to get used to your personality and sense of humour. I think there might be a far greater chance of a positive response from a "quality girl" in this case. But this isn't what we're talking about here.

In the end, I guess you can test your expectations for yourself. Let me know how it goes. :) And hey, this is HN and I have no studies or statistics I can cite to prove my point so we'll just have to agree to disagree on this one.
Ok, I'll match your 10 pounds, whatever that works out to in my currency (euros).
Thank you very much for the response.
I found another good software.

Rescue time looks very good for me, for time management. :)
Oh, there's something to be said for having an "official" challenge of the week. It focusses attention. Though on the other hand, having the primaries out in court of HN may be the best approach to picking the most interesting challenges.
It sounds bizarre, but by far the best thing I ever did in this direction was to start wearing Vibram Five Fingers in public. They look like crazy monkey shoes, and initially I was mortified at drawing such attention to myself, but within a few months I had completely adjusted. Moreover, they are an incredible ice-breaker: I've had more conversations with strangers in the last 1.5 years than in the previous rest of my life combined.
"Urls become links, except in the text field of a submission"

refer: http://news.ycombinator.com/formatdoc

i assume that this means if a title of a post is a url then its a link - else is formatted as plain text

cheers

justin
Interestingly. the president of the International Actors' Federation is quoted as saying that "we should change the word piracy". I couldn't agree more. Robbery, kidnappi g and murder on the high seas is far more serious than illegal filesharing. When they stop using the term "piracy", lobbying for creepy laws and making wild, unverifiable claims about losses, it might be possible to take the recording/film industry seriously when they talk about this stuff.
Are you sure he does? There's plenty of overlap, so it's easy to see the similarities, but he's talking about spending tens of millions per month investing in software development. Having 100 people when you could get by with much less. Outspending the competition. That sounds different to me.
It's a mental closure to the transaction like a handshake.

A gimmick that makes the customer feel like he just did something and gives him something to talk about when describing the transaction to a friend.
Informal is cool with me. Someone could just state their challenge, and the prize, if any (which need not be money), and if others think the challenge is interesting enough they could paypal the author their contribution to the pot, or they could publicly state that they want to up the stakes (or both).
Maybe they know most of these books are available at the library so they don't feel right buying them, even if it's paid for by the card.
lol, creep perhaps. But hardly confident :p
thanks - i'll post the design and psd on the simple invoices blog - http://simpleinvoices.org/blog and ask the community for help to make this into html/css

greatly appreciated

cheers

justin
Ask HN: What are the essential skills for a web developer?
Well,
I am PHP developer already, but I feel that I still miss some skills and knowledge.

Can you list a skills, languages, and tools that I should learn to be the perfect web developer.. for open source?
Yes, and still people seem take the denials of the other users at face value.
Some of the stats are kind of self-explanatory.

For example, "#8 seeds often upset higher ranked teams. In the four match-ups against #2 teams, #8 teams won twice. They have also beaten #4 and #5 seeds more often than they lost to them."

For an 8 to play a 2 (or 4, or 5) they'd have to have already beaten a 1. That's a pretty good 8. The typical 8 will have already lost to a 9 or 1.

Personally, I love Ken Pomeroy's rankings / predictive model (kenpom.com). It breaks games down into possessions and then builds a statistical model of each team from that. The predictions seem pretty accurate by the time February rolls around.

Of course, the biggest caveat of this kind of model is that it doesn't take into account extraordinary events. For example, a player gets injured or comes back from a suspension.
Isn't this the original idea that got Paypal's founders their initial VC investment - transferring cash from one Palm Pilot to another? If memory serves me right they scrapped it early on because the tangential website transaction feature was becoming popular.
Wait, you commented on the story and then he changed the text of said comment? Wow.
It's not. Ries and Blank argue for focusing your money expenditure on validated learning about your customers. They don't argue for whether you should spend more or less.

You could have a lean start-up that burns $10m a month.
Yes. Probably a common protocol will emerge.

Also posting bets and searching for someone to take the other side (or be the arbiter--in case any is needed) could be interesting. Similar to http://www.longbets.org/, but embedded into HN and not focussed on long-term bets.

Edit: I have opened a new top-level post about this topic. See http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1200153
> Do you have a corpus?

Yes, that's why I thought it would be an easy challenge.

My bad :)

> Further, and this is an open question, is there an archive/downloadable corpus of HN in part or entirety anywhere?

Yes, you can query the google cache. It's fairly easy to do.

The only things you don't get that way is the stuff you can see as a logged in user.
Have you got some links about this?
scrollamount="30"
”Salt Lake City merges.”

Merges with more than one parent.
This article is basically political bullshit masquerading as some sort of prediction.

Where exactly is this bubble? The author's logic appears to be: "China has defied the recession, therefore the economy is a bubble!"

China's economy has been turbulent over the past 30+ years, but with a lot of saved money (both at the personal and government levels), they've been able to weather much worse than the US's current situation. Massive unemployment, food shortages, inflation, you name it, they've been there.

But for a "bubble" to be afoot as suggested, there really should be speculation of some sort going on, which the author doesn't even go into. Sure, the price of real estate has tripled in the past decade in many areas of China (which he also doesn't mention), but for a nation bent on saving money rather than massive mortgages, it's not clear whether that's really a bubble or just what people can actually afford.

High GDP growth at this stage in China's development doesn't mean it's definitely a bubble either, nor do they have to keep it up. It's like a start-up who get's 80% traffic growth on their website every month for the first 6 months, it will slow down eventually and that's ok. China doesn't have to keep this rate of GDP growth to keep people happy: a higher standard of living will do that too.

China is complex and our understanding of their society and economy seems poor at best. People like this author don't help.

In any case, there are valid arguments (both pro and anti bubble), but this article is missing a lot.
Proof from the beginning of this article is ok but you have to reduce hypothesis to axiom using only operations that transform one line into second line that is true "If and only if" the first line is true.

Following proof of 1 = 0 does not have this property.

I was taught that this kind of proof is named "proof through equivalence" (my own translation) and should be avoided because it's easy to mistakenly assume that two lines are equivalent but there is only one way implication between them.
"Beijing has pointed out many times that a contraction in the Chinese trade surplus does not necessarily mean an equivalent contraction in the US trade deficit. All it requires is an equivalent contraction in the rest of the world’s net trade deficit. This could easily happen with an improvement in the trade balances of Vietnam, Mexico, Korea or anyone else, enough fully to absorb the reduction in China’s trade surplus. In that case, the US trade balance does not improve, and the US gets none of the employment benefit of the RMB revaluation. China will simply import fewer jobs from abroad and some other countries will import more, or export fewer, jobs."

This is probably the most overlooked aspect of the debate. It's hard to argue that China's currency manipulation doesn't destroy manufacturing overseas - but is it American jobs that are lost? It's more plausible that China's rise comes at the expense of other countries like Mexico that specialize in low-end manufacturing.
I thought google ignored dashes (as well are all other punctuation characters), how did you deal with that?
What's more likely to happen?

1) The wrong email address because you have an incorrect entry in your address book. It's not just a typo, but a typo for a real email address.

2) A server/software issue that causes the bump to go somewhere else. (It's my understanding that the two devices being bumped connect through the vendor's servers.)
You "bump" another phone if you don't have their contact info already. The app automatically sets them as the recipient of your paypal transaction (presumably without you having to save their information -- which allows "business" type transactions without filling up your contact list.)
Well they're making up a new definition of lean if having 100 people when you could easily get by with 40 counts as lean.
iPhone App Digitizes Sheet Music, Teaches You Piano
Please read the whole original thread, that's exactly how we got to that point, and the response I got to my 'I bet I can identify you' and his/her admission that they thought of obfuscating the text made it pretty clear they would not mind an attempt, but that does not guarantee that there will be a resolution.
To prove something about multiplication you first need to provide a definition of multiplication. So what is you definition of multiplication? The usual definition is:

a*0 = 0
a*S(b) = a*b+a

Cancellation follows from injectivity of S by induction.
same thing happened to me. i left a joke comment, and somebody edited it into an ominous-sounding threat. thankfully, i wasn't foolish enough to include any real-life indentifiable details.
It could still work now that handhelds are more prevalent
You're on the right path, but missing a lot of the key overhead costs in moving a consumer-electronics piece of hardware in volume.

Your rough BOM estimate is close enough to accurate, but you'll also double that by the time you add in assembly, packaging, shipping (from Taiwan/China), and some sort of sales commissions (you're not going to just walk into Best Buy and drop these on the shelves). An online/direct-sales model can augment your big box outlet strategy, but is unlikely to scale nearly quickly enough unless the concept explodes virally.

Or, you can do what you want from a price perspective and build a little niche business that supports you and 5 friends "nicely", but never becomes a household name.
But Paul Graham is the fraud ;)
It's not 'worthwhile' in a sense that you can't take it to the bank (though it may come to that, see elsewhere in this thread), but I think it is what hackers do, solve puzzles.

This is effectively a puzzle, a reasonably hard one (my attempt failed, but not for lack of trying, I spent a fair number of hours on it before making my guesses, of course it could simply be that I'm stupid), and one that seems fun to solve.

It is exactly the kind of thing that I enjoy doing when it comes to programming in the first place, figure out how stuff works and/or solving reasonably hard problems. One step above my current competence is my favorite, that way I'm reasonably sure I can solve the problem, if the difference is too big then I tend to get stuck.

It's of course a bit like the question why people climb Mount Everest, the answers are: because they can and because it's there.

edit: Funny, I thought your downmod for asking a valid question was unfair, in return I get downmodded for answering :)
Let's only be fair and try to discover if the flaw is really Microsoft's or something they bought from Connectix.
Depends on what you do with your logo. What would you pay for the Nike swoosh?
Browsarity, Rapportive, Etacts: game on for browser apps
Actually, not even this is not true!

The Central Limit Theorem applies only to samples which have finite mean and variance (see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_limit_theorem).

Take a distribution which has infinite variance or mean and you can wind-up instead with one of the fractal distributions which Mandlebrot studied.

see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stable_distribution

Distributions with infinite variance or mean are more common than one might imagine. Some might argue the stock market would qualify.
Feature we need: ability to transfer karma from our own unjustly high-ranked comments to new, better comments.