skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think you may have misunderstood how the algorithm works. N is simply the number of items remaining in the working set, so over the course of the algorithm N goes from n to 0.

You might be thinking of when √n - 1 = 16, (i.e. the maximum size of the initial length the pivot is picked from is 16). In that case, n = 17*17, or 289.

Does that help?
Panic makes solid software, and their site is designed very nicely, but this link seems out of place on HN.
At the risk of sounding trite and sliding into philosophy, how many people have to do something unacceptable before it becomes acceptable?
Well, "the crime against peace" is a single-serving "let's stick something on them" charge. US engaged in multiple aggressive conquests after WW2 without anyone even mentioning the word "crime" in a serious context. So aggressive conquest is a common practice, whereas civilian massacre is universally frowned upon - a big difference in my mind.

I can see how to tie holocaust to WW2 - the regime which perpetrated the former has then also started the latter. Stalin didn't launch the WW2, but then you can argue he did set it in motion with the Ribbentrop-Molotov pact making both the purges and the WW2 part of his empire-building. Good point, I agree.
Whenever I see a sensational news like this about China I wonder if the journalist is sincerely stupid or purposely evil. The picture for showing "exhausted workers" is a joke: there is a tradition to have a nap after lunch in China so in many businesses the hour after lunch is basically off hours. The place my parents worked for have 2-3 hours of lunch break so everybody can go home and have a nap. In bigger cities where people can't go home, people find convenient places for the nap: on the desk, or "under" the desk, and all conference rooms are closed for the same purpose as well. Heck I am still keeping that habit and have a small futon by my desk now (glad I have my own office).

The "sweatshop" is also a joke for westerners. In more developed cities in China, workers are free to change their employers just like in the west, and it has been in that way for a couple of decades. Those factories don't offer what we called "hu kou", so the employer has no power to slave the workers except higher pay.

The photo of the worker's dorm room is funny as well. I went to a good university in China (about 14 years ago) and that's how my university dorm looks like. It is difficult for westerners to live in that situation but using that photo as a proof that workers are slaved is misleading.
Actually, considering how things run around here, it's amazing that I've heard of it at all.
Quite right. But don't you see that as a problem? Shouldn't kids in China have equal opportunities as their American and European counterparts? Shouldn't they be allowed to get an education instead of working on an assembly line or in the field?
The Rubik's Cube at 30.
Generate 100% valid XHTML with Python
(I'm going to lose karma for this, but...)

Your "tl;dr" was tl; I dr.
Not just "Anyone who wants to solve X" but anyone who gets money because X remains unsolved.
This does sound like a panacea. My father says "if it's too good to be true, it probably is."

However, having the CIA and Navy as customers is pretty credible.
Quick summary: What I find so interesting about Die Hard—in addition to unironically enjoying the film—is that it cinematically depicts what it means to bend space to your own particular navigational needs. This mutational exploration of architecture even supplies the building's narrative premise: the terrorists are there for no other reason than to drill through and rob the Nakatomi Corporation's electromagnetically sealed vault.

The article is all about how "Die Hard" and an Israeli invasion of Palestinian territory in 2002 are both about using space in unexpected ways, and moving through everything except doors, streets and hallways.
Two-Button Modal Window Design Patent (Apple, 1998)
wow, headache medicine for CS lab proctors!

If a header named in a #include directive is not found, the compiler exits immediately. This avoids a cascade of errors arising from declarations expected to be found in that header being missing.
cool stuff from the makers of cool software. nicely done!
Chinese labor is competing and slaughtering the US machines.

There was a story on feats of Chinese manufacturing on YC not long ago, showing a guy sewing Chumby covers in 4 seconds flat. No machine could do that.

If you go look at HobbyCity, there are 30 gram brushless motors that are efficient, and can suck down 9 amps. Great for powering foamies, and most likely built and wound by hand. Cost $9 and up.

It's hard to conceive of an America that could perform such feats. It's been and gone.

I don't know if wage pressures will push wages up in China, but I do know there are a lot of qualified people unemployed, and plenty of unemployed unqualified people, and a government that needs to steer away from a housing and stocks bubble.

I'm not expecting this to be temporary, much as I wish life for the Chinese workers could improve.

Disclaimer: Typed on an iMac (Made in China), Mitsumi/Apple Bluetooth Keyboard (Made in China), MS Mouse (Made in China).
> Nobody would work those hours unless they actually had to

Patio11 will tell you the hours Japanese salarymen have to work to get anywhere. Same sort of situation; but it's not kids so it's fine ;)

If they don't work there what do they do - how do they go to (or afford) school? For the most part this is not a "job for life". There is a career path of sorts and, eventually, you work your way up.

This is partly what I mean by stigma: why is school the "better" option. (I can't argue with the hanging out with friends thing :))

I'm sure many would like to have an education; that's the problem to fix - how to offer it to them!

I'm not necessarily condoning this as a good situation but it fucks me off when people like the GP make very broad, judging statements with no context or experience of the culture and situation.

EDIT: I will say that while I have met several people that work in these places they were all older work-study types. So they were at schools, just working like stink in holidays/downtime. Hell; I did that working on my Aunts farm (voluntarily) doing 14 hour days :) (yes, I realise I had a choice there; not trying to compare too deeply)

I have no idea if there are these very young people working there (though I was told there were) or to what extent / why they are forced to be there.
And so begins the commoditization of Ubuntu.
Ericsson CEO Predicts 50 Billion Internet connected devices by 2020
I've been reading a lot more on it than I thought I would.

I thought that having a multi-purpose device would create distractions, but instead it gives me more opportunity to read since I bring my iPad with me more than I did the Kindle.
Google Follow Finder: Find some sweet tweeps
GCC ChangeLog for newly-released 4.5.0
So, pardon me, what you're saying is that someone's got to be exploited in the end for the system to work? Don't sign me up.
Steve Jobs says next version of Final Cut Pro "will be awesome"
I would just like to thank the FSF & GNU team and everybody ever associated with them - we owe them ALOT!!!!
That's my assessment, too. Crummy UI and frustrating navigation. But thanks to San Francisco's terrible, awful, horrible, no-good 3G network, the speed improvement over Safari makes it worth it for basic pages, when it doesn't simply break the page.
When you are a big company it takes a conscious effort not to be a dick by trampling the little guy. And this culture has to be set from the top. Given Facebook's history, being nice to the little guy has never been a high priority, so I'm not surprised with this incident either.
I believe it serves as a wonderful reminder that we ought to contribute to our communities in addition to the technical world.
Are you storing everything or just their unique content? Commercials and what not make up a large percentage (30%) and then re-runs (unknown percentage, but huge). And why multiple formats? Unless you're distributing the content it seems more efficient to transcode it when you need it.
Remember "Steve Jobs’ response on Section 3.3.1": http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1255858

The emails Jobs sent to Greg had headers from the version of Mail.app included with 10.5.
Does taking a rubber gel cap from one place and sticking into the bottom of a mouse assembly really require brain activity?

No it's more like things such as disassembling a batch of defective hairdriers, typically low volume things.
It seems to me that this comment was the driver for this Chrome "feature."

The problem as I see it is that the Chrome devs are fixing it at the wrong place. Changing one user app, when the standards state it's necessary to include just breaks things.

They need to change the standard, not the app. Until then, they've just got a broken implementation.
After a careful reading of the article, Facebook shot down developers/apps with Facebook in the name or using the Facebook icon.

I would assume this is in response to the horrifically bad "Facebook Ultimate" app that was top in social paid apps on iPad launch day:

[1] http://www.allfacebook.com/2010/04/fake-ipad-facebook/

[2] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/facebook/7560417/Unoff...

I'd read the reviews to see how the 7th highest app had a single star -- all were excoriating. But people saw the icon and name and clicked Buy in droves.

Facebook did the right thing by putting a kibosh on it and any others that might come up with a search for Facebook or spotted with a Facebook "f" icon.
Off topic:
Interesting that all the stories so far talk about mothers in sweatshops. Not single one here mentions a father.
Were they working in the fields while women in the sweatshops?
Cross-Compiling Android Applications to the iPhone
I'm pretty sure LZMA (7z) compresses better than bz2.

At least it does when I test it. But it's slower - sometimes much slower (depends on settings).
I think I know what happened - this is the fallout from iPad facebook story.

On day one of iPad there was some app called "Facebook" for $3 which wasn't really the app from Facebook itself, but some dude making a quick buck. Apparently some big wig then issued instructions "clear up our name usage on iPad/iPhone" and someone else implemented it via

SEND_TAKEDOWN_NOTICE(query("SELECT * FROM apps WHERE name LIKE '%facebook%'")).
The question is what other problem goes unsolved, if they dishonestly leave policymakers to assume this problem remains more severe than it actually is now.
Companies that have an application ecosystem that depends on external developers need to explicitly state how applications can say "This is an X app" and what, if any, icons they can use.

I would think it's in Facebook's interest to give out a set of app icons, or to have an app naming policy.
Kapil Chaudhary, Partner at the I2A Fund, Discusses the New Excelerate Program
I really don't know. I don't make those decisions.
I find it interesting that many of those in the lower income brackets, who pay little to no federal income taxes, think their taxes are too high. A lot of these same people are actually profiting from the credits in the current income tax system.

Strange.
Female strangers get better response rates when e-mailing professors
Awesome...Todd Rundgren rocks (and programs)
Here's a HN topic about contractors:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1262467
and the list:
https://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=0AlD_6iEb8Ed9dGs3clV...
They weren't astronauts wearing US flag patches, though. And it didn't rain hardware all over Texas.
Which is easy on any modern OS (including Windows) ... provided the app doesn't need to interact with others (by giving them a way to handle its file format, for example). At which point it you have the same problems which need to be dealt with one way or another.
That sounds plausible but it still sucks. Affected developers should email me with details: so@facebook.tld.

I can't promise that I'll be able to do anything but I'll try to be your advocate within the company.
I happen to agree, funnily enough. I only talked about the extreme ends of the spectrum. I suspect that C/A systems have a natural place, say, up to datacenter-sized systems. After that they founder on latency and partitions.

The big thing about Dynamo in particular isn't eventual consistency but configurable consistency. You can specify how much consistency you want and how long you will wait for it.
"And it gets way, way worse once you start writing actual programs as opposed to mere arithmetic expressions."

I deal with the issue of arithmetic expressions the same way i deal with any other lisp code, i indent properly:

(+ (* 1.2
(- 2
1/3))
-8.7)

now just read it from the deepest level outwards.
This only further proves the volatility and risk inherent in trying to build a business and/or a service on top of someone else's bigger business and/or service.
Doesn't Facebook benefit dramatically from all these apps? Hundreds of free developers filling use-case niches and giving end-users more reasons to connect with the Facebook platform. All blown to smithereens over a too-hasty decision to fire first and ask for fixes later.

Really sad.
Twitter releases @Anywhere developer integration tools
Quantitative increases in hardware capabilities are boring. (Qualitatively) new software capabilities enabled by those hardware improvements are not. If those aren't forthcoming, it's because software creators (or the creators of their tools) have dropped the ball.
Nifty Non-Linear Presentation Web App (2009)
Broadly speaking, your probably correct. I was referring to the ingenuity and skills that seem to come from much practice of using your hands.
Given that he was using a reply link to make the comment, he probably knows they exist. There's a "flame retardant" feature that disables the reply link for a period immediately after a higher-nested comment was posted.

In that case you can still get one by using the "link" link to get to it.
6 Million People Not Making Mortgage Payments Frees Up $8 Billion Each Month
88 percent of firms show Zeus botnet activity
Totally focused on Rails 3. Does not take into account migration or try to explain 2 vs 3.

(Disclosure: I'm one of the authors of the book)
Wikipedia is a fine source of information. I don't set my moral compass to it.
Don't Be Fooled
FourSquare currently does this - they've been partnering with restaurants for some time:

http://foursquare.com/businesses/ (large list of businesses and some info on the program)

If you check in near a special, it'll tell you - also, if you check in near where your friend has left a 'tip', it will tell you as well.

I don't know if Gowalla has any similar functionality.
Just got my first piece of spam from a site called newappidea.com. If any of you have anything to do with that site, please stop it.
Excellent find. However he mischaracterizes one segment of Die Hard that would actually strengthen his thesis.

The article argues that the logic of Die Hard rewards those who "infest" the spaces they inhabit, traversing them creatively rather than via their intended corridors, elevators, and doorways.

He uses the L.A. SWAT team running across Nakatomi Plaza's rose garden as an example of this.

I'd counter that the SWAT team's approach was actually conventional. They try to get in through the front door, and get blown away. Had they tried to tunnel in from below, for example, in Die Hard's world they would have been more successful.

Also, his point that the subsequent Die Hard films would have been improved by holding onto the premise of exploring an architectural space rings true. Die Hard 2 tried to do this with an airport, but it was a much less interesting locale. You could debate whether or not Die Hard 3 was taking the same approach to NYC or not...

If, as he says, Die Hard is more about architecture than characters, I'd argue that the true spiritual sequel to Die Hard is Steven Seagal's Under Siege, aka, "Die Hard on a boat." Throughout the (awesome) film, Seagal travels around a navy ship in all sorts of unconventional ways, letting the viewer explore the unfamiliar space in a fashion similar to John McClane's adventure in Die Hard.
> Facebook did the right thing by putting a kibosh on it and any others that might come up with a search for Facebook or spotted with a Facebook "f" icon.

Lots of people will come out and say that including the name and the icon is a minor thing, but this is exactly why it's more than that. It's similar to how searching google for "Facebook login" brings up a blog post with a few hundred comments about trying to log into facebook.

Edit: doing that search now has several sites right up top now for "Facebook Login Help" and such. I don't remember those being there before.
This is fantastic news! Please announce the public dataset on HN when it's ready for public download.
Actually, no, that's not how economics has always worked. Mercantilism was very popular before free market capitalism came along.
> " They didn't believe in providing ear protection to their workers and the loud machinery caused her permanent hearing loss in both ears that she still suffers from to this day."

My mother lost a segment of her right middle finger, and my grandfather eventually died of hazardous substances breathed in during his work. My father survived a chlorine tank breach by a hair - a low wall was the only thing between him and certain death.

None have regretted working there despite this. This isn't an argument against workplace safety - this is an argument against enforcing non-safety-related labor policies in developing countries where that is their chief advantage, and removal of it will harm economic development. Industrial jobs, shitty and brutal as they may be by our living and working standards, is a crucial part of the economic development of these countries.

Note that the author of the article's chief points are all based on how "bad" life is for these workers, and only one point is even remotely related to safety hazards in the workplace. His complaints range for anything from not being allowed cell phones in the factory to terrible food to hot-bunking in the employee dormitories. These are not at all safety issues, and thus IMHO something we must allow economic development and time to fix.

If the author has some real meat about flagrant safety violations in a factory, I would like to hear it, otherwise I stand by my assessment that this is nothing more than sensationalist reporting.
A podcast  C++0x with scott Meyer
conversation with Scott Meyers about the upcoming C++0x standard. We talk a bit about the reasons for creating this new standard and then cover the most important new features, including support for concurrency, implicitly-typed variables, move semantics, variadic templates, lambda ...
I very much appreciate your sarcasm ;)

But, it is worth remembering that regardless how noble their cause or goal may be, that does not put them above scrutiny.
I was interested to see how many of the bugs from the 5.1 release (which I haven't touched due to roundhouse slams from the bulk of the community) had been addressed, so I've had a look at the bugs in Monty's 5.1 GA blog entry - http://monty-says.blogspot.com/2008/11/oops-we-did-it-again-....

Without reviewing them in too much depth, several have been moved to closed in the bug tracker. There are still a few hairy ones sitting with later targets (6.0-beta) or sitting in triage waiting for attention, but it does look promising that several have been addressed.
An Introduction to Compassionate Screen Scraping
I love geodjango and postgis, but it's a lot of overhead.

I've been following the simplegeo stuff, and it seems pretty cool.
For a more general look at this topic: http://johnaugust.com/archives/2006/air-vents-are-for-air
Too bad more people didn't respect this patent. I hate modal windows.
Minimum wage is not a consistent measure and doesn't even have the same meaning everywhere.

And food availability varies too. I would probably have to make twice my current salary to eat Chinese food everyday.

But if you went further in your comparison you would probably conclude that you would make many times more money than them at the same job in the US. But that's because its two different countries, not because Microsoft is underpaying employees overseas, which is the point.

Though your calculations were way better than the author's simple currency conversions.
Google Releases Twitter Follower Finder Tool
Except that, apparently, it turned out not to be so simple in practice:

In each and every case we discovered devils in the details and realized "Well, we can't." We could make a TCL-like language that could run many simple TCL programs but that would not be upward compatible - and have that TCL-like language nicely integrated with the larger environment. We could make an Emacs Lisp style of environment that could run some Emacs Lisp code directly but that would not be upwards compatible - and have that alternative Emacs Lisp nicely integrated with the larger environment. But we absolutely could not, for fundamental reasons, directly support Tcl and Emacs Lisp with fidelity and wind up with a sane programming environment.

Can anyone point to what kind of fundamental problems he's talking about here?
I might be incredibly stupid, but what does this topic have to do with the theme of HN?
It doesn't sound like either of us is going to convince the other of anything. I think what you can see from a moving car, especially from an elevated freeway, is irrelevant to understanding what life is like in the city, because the essence of city life is the pedestrian experience.

That said, there are plenty of important streets that people take to work in the South Bay that are also residential -- University Avenue, Embarcadero Road, Alma Street, Charleston Road, and so on. What makes the experience of these streets from a car less informative about the South Bay than the experience of Mission Street from a car is about San Francisco?
No, I am not saying that. That was an assumption built into the question to which I was replying. Economic growth results in everyone being less exploited over time, and free trade results in people making the trade-offs to gain utility most meaningful in their own local circumstances.
> "vision" of a lisp-centric improved version of unix fell by the wayside

Dogbert would say: I like stories in which visions meet reality.

P.S. What was it about the new contract that made you quit, and why didn't you look for a job before quitting?
What is your source of moral advice for China?
so, you're saying, right now its too expensive.
US Military Warns Of Oil Shortages By 2015 With Significant Impact
Exactly, but more like News at never. Our ratings votes dictate we rarely see a piece on slave labour and sweatshops.

I did find the article pretty sensationalist. The sexual harassment issues are believable though and weren't picked up on in these comments.
Transcoding Flash for iPad
I thought the iPhone app approval process was supposed to prevent that kind of thing?
Awesome response, thanks a bunch!
It received a preposterous amount of hype for what amounts to nothing more than a old-school mobile web browser with a terribly awkward user interface. It does serve to remind users just how good native iPhone apps are compared to cross-platform apps like Opera.
Its a pretty special app that can't handle a few seconds of downtime. The first thing I would do is be very certain this is a requirement.

I thought it was a requirement for a couple of webapps I manage and I now think otherwise. I have scripts for starting and stopping various server processes and have other scripts that pull them together to do full deploy like what you are talking about. I could optimize it, but after doing it this way for a bit I realized I feel safer by keeping it simple. I'm fairly certain I've never had a quality of service problem with my users.