skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I wonder what variety of iLightning he's having made, really he should let Hephaestus out a little bit more often, that guy helps with all the cool automata.

In all seriousness though, its a good spoof of how Jobs' product design skills are often portrayed.
Binary search is for finding x so that f(x)=y, where y is given.

Ternary search and Golden section are for finding a local optimum at x, where f(x) isn't given.
Quick explanation of what exactly this is:

It's a rule change regarding asset-backed securities. ABS are a type of bond where the interest and principal payments come from the cashflows of some pool of underlying assets. The simplest example is the now-infamous mortgage-backed security: a bunch of mortgages are put into a pool, and each month the homeowner's payments are passed through to the mortgage-backed securities holder (with some amount taken off the top to cover the cost of collecting, processing, and insuring payments).

There are many generalizations of this concept. There's no reason the underlying asset has to be mortgages. It could be auto loans, credit card receivables, student loans, whatever. And there's no reason that the cashflows have to be passed straight through to the bondholders. This is where Python comes in.

There are a number of complicated rules you can define. For example, let's suppose I have $100mm of assets. Rather than just having $100mm in bonds on the other side, I can define two pieces, or tranches. Tranche A is $80mm and gets paid first; the $20mm Tranche B gets paid next. So if some assets don't perform and the $100mm face value only turns out to yield $90mm, the investors in A are completely unaffected. This method is helpful because it can create a safe asset out of a pool of generally unsafe assets.

Another possible rule would be again to define two tranches, A and B. Each month, A and B receive the full interest payments on the $100mm assets. But A gets the first $50mm in principal, and B only starts getting paid principal when A is completely paid off. That way, tranche A has a shorter average life than the underlying pool of assets, and tranche B has a longer average life. This is helpful because some investors might want to buy short-term assets, but others might want to buy long-term assets.

You can define a hugely complex range of rules, depending on the purpose of the investment and the type of underlying asset. From what I can tell (I obviously haven't read the whole document), the SEC is proposing to require ABS issuers to specify these rules in Python, and to specify the underlying asset pool in an XML format. This will make it easier for independent investors to analyze the securities on their own, without having to let the now-discredited rating agencies do their work for them.

In general, sounds like a great rule to me.
A binary search is that complicated. It just doesn't look like it until you've considered all the possible edge cases

The fact that it's tractable to rigorously consider all the edge cases means it is ridiculously simple compared to common real-world programming tasks.
I don't understand where Ken Auletta gets his figure of Amazon charging $9.99 for all Kindle editions. --or was that only until they caved to Macmillan?

Maybe he took the example of Mossberg challenging Jobs in January on Apple's $14.99 for "True Compass" when Amazon sold it for $9.99, but at the moment Amazon's Kindle price for it is $16.99

But in my memory it's always seemed that Kindle editions (and I'm at Amazon.com daily) were priced a dollar or two less than the Amazon price for a paperback edition -whatever that might amount to [allow for my short memory].
Isn't that something you could cure with an old fashioned motor drive camera and two more servos ?
A magical and revolutionary shitstorm at an unbelievable price to be paid. Starting at $5,000 + traffic bonuses.
Ask a Biologist
Because Opera Mini is so bad there's no point in banning it?
Indeed. This sort of attack is good for breaking DRM, but not so good for any legitimate uses of cryptography.
Exactly. Doubling each dimension of an image is a cheap operation. Multiplying by 1.5 is not, due to the antialiasing that would be required. Even with aa, the scaled image would look worse than the original.
check out Johnny Long's Google Hacking Database, full of examples like this http://johnny.ihackstuff.com/ghdb/
This is pretty cool. I like the idea of memories being bite sized.
Flash Player 10.1 for Android on track for First Half of 2010
If you'd try to sell a crap app on the iphone platform I'm sure you'd get more sales but that would not say much about the iphone either (just that there are more people that have one).

This would be a good test when taking a 'best of breed' application and as clean a port of it to the android platform and comparing sales figures. Like this it is pretty meaningless.

Here is a direct link to the application:

http://www.androiddatabase.info/

It looks like a 90's style card file.
I'm a US citizen, and my experience has been the opposite.

Of course, US Immigration/Customs is not nearly as nice as immigration in other countries, but that's to be expected. (When I visit Norway and Denmark, the immigration people actually smile at you. When I visited Germany, the immigration officer actually laughed at something I said. It's like they are real people or something!)
But that's exactly the problem for developers. How many different devices are you willing to test on? Will your app's interface easily scale to all these different form factors?

A huge advantage of the iphone is that there's a single screen resolution to optimize for.
Never had that problem.

One big problem about curly quotes is that many default Windows fonts have their curly quotes all mixed up – Verdana is one of the offenders – as you can “see here” on HN. I then just refuse to use such shoddy fonts. Not the curly quote’s fault that the font is screwed up. (You can use incorrect UTF-8 characters to get the correct curly quotes when using something like Verdana, but as soon as your text is copied and the font is changed you again end up with the wrong curly quotes.)
Customs is after you arrive, so whatever.

If I'm ever in this situation, I fully expect to be arrested (and released 23 hours later with no charges filed), though.

(Expect the worst and you won't be surprised.)
I changed the title to be clearer. I am still watching to her interview. She seems very energetic in her interview, so I'd think its a positive opinion.

I like Andrew Warner's interviews a lot.
What does "SC" mean in the font descriptions? (e.g., http://www.linotype.com/1436/sabon-family.html?PHPSESSID=9df...)
Amusing fact: 960x640 is exactly the same number of pixels as a 1024x600 netbook, in a much saner aspect ratio.
No, but in the right language, you can at least be shielded from the monkey-patching.
Are you sure it's not apHELLp?
LLC conversion to C-Corp can be done (we did it), but it was certainly a headache. Letting our lawyer and CPA take care of everything but our signatures was well worth the money.
Small Caps. That one doesn’t come with lower-case letters, it comes with small caps (look at the picture :).
Video of world's air traffic patterns over 24h
In all seriousness, if you have to translate it, don't bother. I write in C nearly daily, and I certainly wouldn't trust myself not to lose something in translation.

I'd be interested in what's in your test suite, though. I must sheepishly admit that my 'fairly exhaustive' test consisted of running the above random input until I'd seen all the usual tricky cases go by:

- an array of length zero
- an array of length one
- an array of length two
- the value is present
- the value is absent and too small
- the value is absent and too large
- the value is absent and in the middle
- the value is the first entry
- the value is the last entry
- the array is all one value
- there are multiple copies of the value you're looking for

If you've got anything more interesting in that test suite, that'd be good to know. Like I said, I represent the one-bazillionth of programmers that actually have a recurring professional interest in correctly coding binary searches.
I wrote my version in PHP, wondering if someone could tell me what I did wrong (I didn't test it, I assume there are mistakes).

<?php
function bsearch($search, $array, $start, $end){
//$start cannot be zero.
//$search not in $array
if($start>$end){
return -1;
}
//calculate middle
$middle = $start + ceil(($end-$start)/2);
//check match
if($array[$middle]==$search){
return $middle;
}
//is the middle higher than the search, if so, cut top
else if($array[$middle]>$search){
return bsearch($search, $array, $start, $middle-1);
}
//otherwise cut bottom
else{
return bsearch($search, $array, $middle+1, $end);
}
}

?>
Make Your Mac Desktop Come Alive with GeekTool
I can't seem to find an equivalent in the iphone app store for #3, does that mean apple nixed it? Is there a list of equivalence between say the top 100 apple app-store applications and the android apps?

It would be nice to see how the two markets compare and what kind of applications flourish on the android platform because it is 'open' vs the more 'closed' approach used by apple.
It reminds me of fat camp.
Try this: http://www.tex.ac.uk/tex-archive/macros/latex/contrib/memoir... . It's the manual to the memoir documentclass for LaTeX. I learned a lot reading it, myself.
JsPlumb your DOM
If she is already working as a web designer, learning JS (with libraries such as jQuery) would be a great first step. This way, she could start prototyping her UIs to convince other people to help with the server-side components.

Also, she could take that skill to a design-challenged startup with a hot idea!
Good full-disk encryption systems use key strengthening, making even short passphrases reasonably secure. Testing one passphrase on my machine, for example, takes about 1 second of CPU time. 26^8 seconds is a long time (6,000 years).

The other alternative is to brute-force the entire keyspace, which puts you back in 2^128 (or 2^512) territory but with the option of trying billions of keys a second. A few Universe lifetimes, and my .emacs will be all yours.

Oh, but I use a long password anyway. The key, IMO, is to avoid using a password you have ever used for anything else. You might not have to testify against yourself, but your employer or mail provider will be happy to cough up your password for the authorities. So don't give it to them.
No ambiguity?

Suppose the deal goes out there, bonds are sold, but then real world inputs result in an endless loop. What happens to the money then?
Fair enough! You're certainly right about the facts and that being precise on these things is vital. Thanks!
"tput" exists in /usr/bin. I imagine bash sockets would work properly. I'm not aware of Mac versions of the others.

It is possible to use Python to display GUIs from the command line on Mac OS X, e.g.

env VERSIONER_PYTHON_PREFER_32_BIT=yes python
>>> import wx
>>> app = wx.PySimpleApp()
>>> wx.MessageBox("hello, world")

AppleScript is capable of this, but "osascript" doesn't allow GUIs to pop up when run from a shell.
Has anything changed? I didn't think Erlang had changed much recently.
Why Texas is doing so much better economically than the rest of the nation
Popeye 2.0: Elegant Integrated Lightboxes
I think there's a lot of truth here.

I would also point out that for a lot of programming tasks, particularly in a corporate IT environment, "thinking like the customer" can be a good thing: it helps you make sure that you are building something that truly helps the customer do their job.

The risk is that no matter how much "domain experience" you have, the customer has more, and you can fool yourself into thinking that you understand what they need better than they do.
Of course women aren't worried about their perceived sexual orientation, but they certainly are about their image (perceived "nerdiness", etc).
The bit about Times Roman and Times New Roman is fascinating:

Think of Monotype vs. Linotype as the Depression-era Mac vs. Windows and you’ve got it...(In fact, when it came time to license fonts for their operating systems, Microsoft licensed Times New Roman from Monotype and Apple licensed Times Roman from Linotype, perpetuating the schism.)

http://www.typographyforlawyers.com/?p=687
Your web app needs to be ten times better than the competition
No one will go to jail. This is the highest profile leak of the kind, but prototypes get shown online all the time against company wishes. It's usually a lot more shady than finding it a bar too--Apple would be a lot more concerned if their supply chain was compromised.
On a second thought they can use Python fine. Just issue something like the text at www.brool.com/?p=97 as the very first requirement.
It doesn't do much. Atlas works.
Yup, no sigar.

1. You get a division by zero when $start == $end

2. When the element $search doesn't exist your program breaks

3. You always check array for value $middle, so $middle should have the range 0 <= $middle < length($array). But according to the comment $start cannot be zero. If so, then $middle is always larger than zero, and as such, the first element of the array is never considered.

So it's pretty buggy.
Greenhouse: Open Source.

Atlas: Costs Money.
To me i don't believe everything I see and hear. This could be Apple doing this to create buzz, as well it could be Gizmodo and Engadget making this up for buzz/traffic.
Greenhouse isn't ready to be compared to Atlas just yet, the development has only been ongoing for a matter of weeks. That being said, Atlas costs money, and Greenhouse is completely open source:

http://github.com/sproutit/sproutcore/tree/mg/master

If you're more comfortable with Obj-C/J, then Cappuccino is the way you should go. Personally I use SproutCore because I'm far more comfortable in JS/HTML/CSS.
This a dupe of http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1277874

Not sure how it made it through the filter.
at least as often as you change your passwords

So, never? http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2010/04/11/...
I think this is going to end badly for all parties involved, named and unnamed: http://twitter.com/nicknotned/status/12479140215
Wow, you're both douchy and wrong. The article doesn't say anything about the techonology which I linked to. Did YOU "bother to read it"?

The article says that Newtonian physics does not allow any randomness, which is fairly obvious and has nothing to do with the hardware I'm asking about.

The article also discusses 'pseudo-random number generators', which, I'm assuming since this is HN, you know are purely software-based.

The Wikipedia page which I linked to, claims that currently used hardware uses 'thermal noise' and 'other quantum phenomena', which you might have realized "if you had bothered to read it".

If you don't mind now, I was really hoping to learn something about a technology which I am sincerely interested in.
I just wish they would use json instead of xml for the asset pool data :-)
History's Greatest Startup: The Standard Oil Company
s/UNIX/Linux, by the look of things... not quite what I was expecting.
I do think the "leadership" bias is only really apparent in large corporations.

I don't know about that. I think it's more impressive myself to see that someone worked his or her way through school than to see tons of extracurricular activities. In fact, unless they're professionally relevant, extracurricular activities don't rank very highly at all on my list of things I'd like to see on a resume.

Edit: Of course, I should add, I don't work for a major corporation, either.
Google Voice lets you send and receive text messages for free. TextNow let's you send free text messages, and if you integrate with Google Voice you can receive them as well.

Operating an SMS gateway is expensive and I'm sure there are not tons of apps that run one.
I just did this recently to work around a bug (enhancement?) in a vendor's API.

By some coincidence, I'd looked at "Programming Pearls" and tried this exercise and got it wrong. My mistake was moving the left/right (beginning/end, whatever) to one more/less than the target location. At least I have plenty of company.
I'm skeptical in part because my first reaction would be to email Steve and ask him if they lost anything the size and shape of an iPhone lately. If he did and he can tell you what it looks like they can have it back. If they didn't I hock it to the highest bidder and discard the email from Steve.
Yes, because I'm guessing that a CDN would want to have a server within a metro area like that, and that would make a big difference.
Wrong move though - really there should be one key per machine - and then ssh-agent set up properly to take care of the intermediate machines so you can bounce around. Using the same private key on multiple machines is just asking for trouble when you need to revoke something...
You should create your true root disk at a few levels down. If forced to reveal your password, then provide them only with the first level - maybe have it load windows 95.
Well there are 2 advantages that lets you reduce that time dramatically.

First you can use a dictionary - then munch it (with Jack or something) to create a large dictionary within the keyspace. It's surprising how much that covers.

Then you can parallel the process; I know a few commercial companies (ourselves included) with a large computer capacity for these purposes. I'd be surprised if the govt. didn't have some form of similar access.

If you can reduce the search space by a factor of 1,000 and run your cracker on 1,000 machines it makes a dramatic difference.
I think most of these are probably still valid (haven't paid much attention in the last year)—which in itself is probably a good point to make.

Katz intentionally chose an inflammatory and attention-grabbing title. Although the overall message of the article is "I love you, but I hate things about you", it's probably good to provide some time context. Especially so that short attention span people don't come away with the idea that Damien Katz suddenly realized Erlang has a bunch of ugly parts after working with it for 4+ years.
It's also worth noting that this is a minor part of a much larger proposal that came out more than a week ago. A bunch of media outlets ran stories... the NYT article is here:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/08/business/08sec.html
Your blog title needs to be 11.785 times stronger than the competition. Or maybe 12.785.
No that's backwards - the reason is laziness.

Sysadmin has two worksations - say a laptop and a desktop. He wants to SSH into all his remote boxen from either. The default reaction might be to just copy his already-authorized private key to his other machine just for ease of use - the proper solution would be to generate a new keypair on the new machine and then copy it to the required remote machines as well, so either can be revoked and tracked separately.
Isn't the demographic of iPhone owners vs. Andriod different? Like PC vs Mac demographic. Mac demo is more affluent and more likely to spend their discretionary dollar(paying for music) over PC owners.
Great points as we're looking to launch our first product in the next two months.

Helps us to aspire to a higher standard.
I have two Android apps out (one displays Mint traffic analytics on the home screen, the other displays Clicky analytics). Collectively they've sold about 50 copies since Christmas, nothing spectacular.

That being said though, they're two apps for really niche markets and I put no marketing into them whatsoever.
You're still confusing uninformed desire with informed desire. If someone takes a programming course or two, and decides they are not cut out for programming, that's fine. But what's clear is that women are not taking programming courses, so they cannot make an informed decision - it's just assumed that because women don't want to program, women would neither enjoy it nor be good at it, and this is fine.

It's only fine if it's true that women would neither enjoy it nor be good at it.
People who say that women are discouraged from computer science don't mean that women are literally told they shouldn't become programmers, either.
One can still collect the functions that loop into lambdas and start passing those around ?
Which channels would you recommend?
I don't understand in what way you think the Simple2ZOOM code is deficient. Is it just because you prefer it to be broken into many small files?
Same thing could happen with human language legal copy.
1. i knew there was issue with start==end. what is the solution for that issue? i had originally written $start<=$end

2. i think this is connected to previous issue, with ending it

3. I knew the zero thing would be an issue, but... had to write it before caps game started :(
Weren't we getting lots of reports about how unprofitable the iPhone app store was at this stage in the iPhone's evolution?

Also, it still seems like the app store does more to benefit established players and Apple than it does someone just developing some random app.
> From what I can tell (I obviously haven't read the whole document), the SEC is proposing to require ABS issuers to specify these rules in Python, and to specify the underlying asset pool in an XML format. This will make it easier for independent investors to analyze the securities on their own, without having to let the now-discredited rating agencies do their work for them.

Except that this just makes it easier to figure out who gets paid given a set of events, which isn't the hard part. (Yes, there can be lots of rules, but ....) It's also not where the ratings agencies screwed up.

The hard part is predicting the likelyhood of various events. This proposal does nothing to address that problem.
You should subscribe / sign up / follow me... why?
I had this random afternoon brain-fart. It goes something like this:

We end up posting quite a few good links to blog-posts here on Hacker news. A lot of those blog-posts have a little blurb at the bottom that basically says, something to the effect of: "You should follow me on twitter..".

Each time I see such a blurb, I tend to have a slightly defensive reaction. Something like:

What will we get by following you on twitter? Whats in it for me? How about something like:

- "You should follow me on twitter. I post all kinds of fun links about ... and also post updates about ... ".

The reason being, that as soon as I see the "follow me!" line, I tend to think of it as a separate issue from the blog post itself. What will I get by following you on twitter / adding you on facebook?
I think it’s easy to get stuck thinking you have to use bash and the UNIX utilities for sysadmin tasks.

Automating some more complicated stuff is just a pain in the ass to write and maintain if you just use bash, sed, awk, grep and friends. Free your mind and don’t be afraid to pull out Perl, Ruby or Python and apply liberally.
How to make a million dollars a year as a magician
I keep on pressing the "25 Reasons Why You'll love us" button and nothing happens, in either firefox and chrome.

I'm sort of confused as to what exactly this is. Seems to me its like twitter with pictures and video. I think it actually would of been a good idea to create a twitter hashtag, and build on top of there platform. Or maybe its like a facebook wall ?
This is one of those classics that deserves to be reposted every few months. Upvoted.
The extent to which it is natural is a diversion (as seen by the inevitable responses to your comment).

More damning, I think, are the experiences that many women have said discourage them from being programmers, e.g.: http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/Category:Issues

> However, fixing a problem is only possible if you don't deny it.

Yup. I'm always slightly shocked by how eager HN is to find any explanation for the lack of female programmers that isn't societal.
Big Data in Real-Time at Twitter
That is true. But it makes it much easier for potential investors to load up a bond in their own modeling tools, and run their own scenarios. They don't have to reverse engineer the cashflow structure based on the legal wording in the prospectus.