skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You're on the right track with the recursive dictionary search.

For the Sling Blade Runner problem, I would make a trie (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trie) out of hash tables, like this:

trie = {
'dracula': {'': None,
'dead': {'and': {'loving': {'it': "Dracula: Dead and Loving It!"}}}},
'the': {'brides': {'of': {'dracula': "The Brides of Dracula"}}},
# ...
}

Then, for each word in each movie title, walk the trie from the beginning until you run out of matches (no match), or run out of words (at least one match).

Your anagram server is similar, but since they're not ordered like movie titles, you have to walk your scrambled word(s) and only generate permutations that have a matching trie path.

It's also quite possible to do it for phrases, not just words.

You can cheat a little by representing your anagram as a 26-key multiset containing the number of times each letter appears (in Python, use a dict; in C, use an array of 26 integers).

For each letter that appears in your anagram multiset one or more times, make a copy of the original multiset, and recursively descend the Dictionary trie, removing each matching letter from a new copy of the multiset (they're tiny, so don't worry). For each complete word you find, add it to a list of result candidates, along with the multiset representing the remaining letters in the anagrammatic phrase.

Repeat the process for each result candidate, growing your list into a tree. Stop when you run out of matches, or when you run out of letters in your multisets. (You can set a maximum number of leftover letters to accept, if you're having trouble matching a phrase).

If you test the letters in alphabetical order, your result phrases will already be sorted.
http://www.psd2cssonline.com/ attempts to automate the process but you need to lay out the PSD in a certain way.
Why is this inflammatory, tea party crap being voted up?!
Source for "FFixer" – Userscripts.org
Is said register accessible online?
How Korean tacos will restore our love for Twitter
I'd be a lot more interested in seeing someone go the other way and get iPhone OS working on a droid.
I'm not going to flag this story, because I find this pill to be a clever hack. It's basically an end-run around gastric bypass, if they can get its properties right. It takes up stomach volume, which is a really useful way to promote satiety thanks to the presence of stretch receptors there. If it works, it could seriously reduce the number of dangerous procedures for obesity treatment and replace them with a simple volume-filling pill. The battle of willpower not to eat instead becomes the battle of willpower to remember to "volume up" before eating so you feel full faster. This would be amazing for patients. I'm not convinced this will work as planned, but am excited that people are coming up with clever, relatively low-risk approaches like this. Eventually one might just work.
Emilio Pucci 2010/2011 Shoe Collection
Does anyone know of a way to reorder the icons?
"...paying a few percent more in taxes, for causes that benefit the common good..."

That's a very broad generalization and an extremely debatable statement.

1. "Paying a few percent more in taxes"
When you factor in the whole of the tax burden the average working American pays (Federal, state, local, special district) it adds up to about 50% of personal income. This is not just income tax, but sales, Medicare, SS, Unemployment, gas, property tax, special assessments, DMV, etc.

2. "Causes that benefit the common good"
Unfortunately, the vast majority of our tax dollars goes to servicing the interest on the national debt and our vast military machine. See: http://www.warresisters.org/pages/piechart.htm
The Funding Bill of Rights: Helping startups and VCs come together
Earth Day 2010 Activities for Kid
Would you happen to know what statute governs this?
I dont understand why people are blaming gizmodo and siding with the guy who lost his phone.
He works for a corporation notorious for secrecy and 'leaking' product info through such underhand means for generating hype. Employees of 3-letter Govt. agencies know the risk when signing up, that their life may be in danger because they know stuff which is worth killing.
Well, same with apple i guess. They have lowered(raised?) the bar on this whole secrecy nonsense that punishing them by publicly disclosing and humiliating their secret-bearing employees is the only way out. Let's keep in mind that it is apple which has cultivated this ring of secrecy, and now their employee is whining because gizmodo does what apple exactly expects them to?
Broken on OS X Firefox.
Baby steps towards "set phasers on stun". Good.
Henge: A Slide-in Docking-Station for Your MacBook
His loss then, 10 years of torture, basically. You don't play around with people that powerful.
GoogleSharing - A Special Kind Of Proxy
By "nice" I assume he means nicely designed, which is something that is largely unique to Apple.
I'm curious: is this not solved by a solid technical interview?

I would have guessed that if someone impresses HR, you could find out if they really know their stuff by getting a KNOWN competent person to ask them lots of hard technical questions, make them solve problems on the spot, etc.

A friend recently gave me a great example of how to do open-ended questions and probe someone's knowledge: ask a question like "when you type in a web address and hit enter, what happens?" The answer can range from "your computer loads the page" to delving into DNS, IP routing, HTTP headers, server load management, server-side processing, sessions, database access, cookies, browser rendering, etc etc. If the candidate gives a simple answer, you can continue to probe different areas to see how much they know in each one.

The trick is that the interviewer has to be competent enough to tell what the candidate knows and whether he/she will BS rather than admit not knowing something (which is also important to find out).

If you don't already have anyone competent enough to conduct the interview - maybe you're hiring your first programmer - you could temporarily hire someone who comes highly recommended to help you with the interview process.

So, was this guy vetted like this on technical merits, or did he just talk impressively to non-technical people? I'm curious to know how he slipped through.
Too early? I think this is a good example of "just because you can, it doesn't mean you should". There's little to be gained; any 3D usage I can think of would be much more well-suited to a specialized application than a document markup language.

> Google has not yielded up anything so I am guessing that it meets in secret for the time being.

I think it's more likely that they have no plans for "3D HTML" because it's not a very good idea.
On mine (5.0.342.9) you just drag them.
Do you suggest that Apple's secrecy policy justifies buying stolen property??
Who did you move to?
Steve Jobs Approves Which Apple Employees Can Carry Pre-Release iPhones
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VRML
The premise is similar to www.buysellads.com, but the on-page purchase is definitely an improvement.
Ask HN: Will Y Combinator launch topic-related threads?
I'm a UK reader. I've noticed that anything that anything that is not related to US very rarely gets on the front page here. Also, there is a lot of Apple news. Do people think it's worth creating sister sites - or even topic-related threads - so we can tag submissions and make them suited for different audiences? How would that work?
The 3 Tribes Within Your Tribe
We know who you are, and you stole my job!
What happens if you swallow a dozen of these?
Linode, after being convinced by uggedal's post comparing it favorably to other VPS services.
Facebook: The Entire Web Will Be Social
Gruber isn't an "any other company" pundit, he's an Apple pundit.
Header from the author's wikipedia profile:

"Richard Siegmund Lindzen (born February 8, 1940, Webster, Massachusetts) is an American atmospheric physicist and Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Meteorology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Lindzen is known for his work in the dynamics of the middle atmosphere, atmospheric tides and ozone photochemistry. He has published more than 200 scientific papers and books.[1] He was a lead author of Chapter 7, 'Physical Climate Processes and Feedbacks,' of the IPCC Third Assessment Report on climate change. He is a well known skeptic of global warming[2] and critic of what he states are political pressures on climate scientists to conform to climate alarmism."

Famous scientist and well-known critic of AGW? This is the first I've heard of him...
People always suggest that when there is a temporary overflow of stories about some topic they're not interested in. Don't worry, things will get back to normal eventually.
I want 4-D HTML so that an image of the sunken city of R'lyeh can be rendered properly in all its non-Euclidean glory. Ia! Ia! Cthullu fhtagn!
Hmm... I think the hidden story is this guy made the "stun-gun" to fill a need--filling a need is one of the elements you always hear when people talk about startups, creating your product, etc.

So, it only makes sense that the stun-gun he created was really for crowd control from the fanatical and frenzied parents who trampled each other when tickle-me-elmo first came out, not this spin doctor story about "looking for new power sources for toys."

You know it makes sense ;)

On a slightly more serious note, how awesome would that introduction line be...

Stranger: So what do you do?

Bruce Lund: Well, I invented tickle-me-elmo.

Stranger: Aw, isn't that cute.

Bruce Lund: Oh yeah, and a gun with a god-like knob to choose life or death when it hits it's target.
I'd suggest one of the main reasons that Gizmodo published the guys name is that Gruber implied immediately that they stole the prototype

How does that support the case that the phone was lost? Publishing the name of the guy who found the phone might support your case, but publishing the name of the phone's owner isn't helpful - you can steal something from a known owner.
I think tags/categories would be a great idea. For example, my favorite topics are the "Ask HN" ones, so it would be nice to be able to see just these by clicking a tag. Same thing goes for hiding all topics tagged "Apple". Even if the tags were "hard-coded" it would be useful to have say:

Ask HN,
Rate My App,
Tech News,
Acquisitions,
Job Postings,
Hacker Tips,

etc...
Your account isn't deleted. It's just resting..
The pill works by expanding to make you feel full (100-to-1 ratio claimed).

Here is a link to a 4min animation and a 1 minute live video (pill in glass of water):

http://www.gelesis.com/content/technology/
The top Australian tax rate is near-as-dammit to 50% (47% last I checked, plus 1.5% "because we can" levy). I think the great-grandparent was implying that 50% of his taxes went to the military though, which is completely false; it's closer to eight percent.
You perfectly describe an Successful Technocrat.

Go read Archibald Putt and you will be enlightened.
Yes the issue is tho', that the government relied only on the computer model, whereas the airlines compared the model's prediction with a) satellite data and b) their own observations by making test flights.

Willie Walsh, CEO of BA, himself an experienced pilot, was onboard the 747 BA sent up to take a look. Lord Adonis the transport minister declared the skies safe again having never left the ground himself. Who do you trust?
I would love sub-reddit functionality e.g.:

news.ycombinator.com/hn/technews

news.ycombinator.com/hn/python

news.ycombinator.com/hn/webapps

etc.
As simple as this:

(defprotocol Foo
(bar-ify [this]))

(extend-type java.lang.String
Foo
(bar-ify [this] (.concat this "Bar")))

(bar-ify "Hello world!")

Everything can be redefined interactively at the REPL. Also due to Rich Hickey's mad skills you get pretty much Java method dispatch performance.

EDIT: There is a gross misunderstanding about how this works. The following is invalid and will throw an exception, please take the time to understand this:

user> (ns baz)
baz> (bar-ify "foo")

Your changes will not affect use of java.lang.String in other libs.
Reminds me of jwz's Java doc on the topic of final variables, and how the access is restricted by compiler convention, not in the JVM:

System.in, out and err (the stdio streams) are all final
variables. They didn't used to be, but some clever applet-writer
realized that you could change them and start intercepting all output
and do all sorts of nasty stuff. So, the whip-smart folks at Sun went
and made them final. But hey! Sometimes it's okay to change them! So,
they also added System.setIn, setOut, and setErr methods to change
them!

``Change a final variable?!'' I hear you cry. Yep. They sneak in
through native code and change finals now. You might think it'd give
'em pause to think and realize that other people might also want to
have public read-only yet privately writable variables, but no.

Oh, but it gets even better: it turns out they didn't really have to
sneak in through native code anyway, at least as far as the JVM is
concerned, since the JVM treats final variables as always writable to
the class they're defined in! There's no special case for
constructors: they're just always writable. The javac compiler, on the
other hand, pretends that they're only assignable once, either in
static init code for static finals or once per constructor for
instance variables. It also will optimize access to finals, despite
the fact that it's actually unsafe to do so.
I'm trying to built a better multi-word anagram solver. If you input a 32 character string, you'll end up with hundreds of thousands of potential anagrams and most of them are pretty useless. For example, "Florence Nightingale" returns 52k results on:

http://wordsmith.org/anagram/anagram.cgi?anagram=Florence+Ni...

And most of them are pretty lame e.g. "A Fleecer Tingling Hon", "A Fleecer Longing Hint" etc. It'll take hours before you come across "Flit on, cheering angel" - I want to make this process faster/easier.
http://www.eurodns.com has a solid selection of international domains and provides local addresses/affiliates to enable registration in certain countries. It's a bit expensive for some domains. But they've got a good selection and have been reliable.
My iMac routinely locks up when it gets overly confused while playing a DVD. This is probably the only major annoyance the computer gives me, but it is annoying. Perhaps if I used VLC I'd have better luck, but DVD Player and Front Row both cause problems.
or they can't use GPL software because of the license....

They really need to obey the law and should have an actual statement about how this works.
White flight is about racial anxiety more than it is about wealth or tax policies.

It's not necessarily appropriate in the OP's case, because what he's describing doesn't have much to do with race inherently, although there is a correspondence between white racism and supposedly disinterested economic conservatism. The most flagrant opponents of government assistance programs have no problem with programs that benefit them-- "my opponent [Al Gore in 2000] wants to run Social Security like it's some kind of federal program" and "keep your government hands off my Medicare"-- but have a huge issue with "those people" (blacks and Latinos) on "welfare".

Author's note: "Welfare" is not one US social program, but a disparaging epithet used by working-class conservatives against whatever social programs-- Medicaid, food stamps-- are used predominantly by people lower than them on the socioeconomic totem pole. I grew up in a low-income, traditionally white neighborhood, so I've seen this first-hand. There was one family notorious for this: they received benefits from some social welfare programs and would rip on those who were on more such programs for being "on welfare".

Also, many racist whites are against "big government" not because of an inherent objection but because the government uses more affirmative action than private-sector employers, which leads them to the (wrong) conclusion that government is 100% staffed with underperforming women and minorities. This is what "government (except the military) can't do anything right" is actually about.
LHC: First reconstructed Beauty Particle
Wouldn't even this weapon make a sound when used? Like the nail gun he cites? I keep wondering about magnetically-propelled BBs.... no sound.
Of course, if the airspace wasn't closed and a plane went down, the airlines would be blaming the authorities for allowing flights in unsafe conditions.
Wow this was really not very enlightening. I don't know what kool-aid the other two posters were sipping.
The same thing that happens when you eat an overly large volume of something else, I would imagine: you throw up.
I'm getting the feeling more people need to stop using laptops without things like: remote wipe, too many attempts/wipe drive, encrypted home partitions
Losing Weight Fast - Lose 5lbs This Week
Basically, no. It is 50% of the loaded labor rate of all employees doing R&D activities on projects that your liaison agrees qualify as R&D. When you work out of your home, rent/mortgage on your home are specifically excluded as business expenses (by CRA), so they can't be included. Working out of an office, you get about 65% of salary back; out of a basement (my situation), it is basically 50% of salary.

Oh -- hardware purchases and the like don't count, and you have to be able to prove the salary was paid, so as far as I know there is no game to be played with stock options.
I don't think so. Facebook only had 132M unique visitors in March, compared to 400M users they are believed to have. To say that 400M were active last 30 days, Facebook need to workaround the pigeonhole principle.
University of Utah scientist links one gene to intelligence
http://news.ycombinator.com/ask
We pay a shitload in taxes in this country. I'd love to see the amount go down, and I agree that a lot of that money is wasted due to fiscal mismanagement and military buildup.

I'd also like to see universal health care and higher education, along with a reasonable social safety net. These are worth spending tax money on, even though they're expensive (in the short term). I care about these more than about the specific percentage we pay in taxes. 50% for a successful, great society would be a bargain; 10% taxation for no social benefits at all is unbearable.
> Then, for each word in each movie title, walk the trie from the beginning until you run out of matches (no match), or run out of words (at least one match).

I think that's the challenge ITA wants you to solve - recursing 300 levels deep into a list of 1000 movies will literally take forever. As you can see with the 2nd linked article, brute-force just doesn't work.

My original algo for the multi-word anagrams was nearly identical to what you described. The problem was when you entered a long phrase. You can form 8000 unique words from the letters in "William Jefferson Clinton." Even when I removed duplicates words with the same characters (art = tar = rat), it was still 7000+ long. Add in another 'r' or 's' to the original phrase and you're over 10,000 unique words. If I'm allowing my algorithm to make 5 word anagrams, that's 10^5 calculations for a single web query - absolutely impossible.

And even if I do magically return the 100k possible results in 0.1s, users can't parse through 100k results to find the ONE anagram that's funny or creative. I do have an idea of what I want to do. Maybe in a week or so, I'll have a demo working.
Why do you feel this story should be flagged? It's technology-related, involves a (biotech) start-up, and could impact a significant percentage of HN readers' personal lives. Seems like the ideal HN story...
This "Instant Personalization" feature - isn't this far worse than what Google did with Buzz?

Without notifying or consulting me, Facebook has decided it is now in their best interest to tell every website I visit who I am, who my friends are, and everything I'm interested in, and have buried the option to disable this 3 screens deep.

This is such an unfathomable breach of privacy and trust, I feel like I must be missing something, that they can't really be doing this. What am I missing?
Hmmm ... he's been well known in this field for both of the above since the late '80s, when a friend of mine interviewed him.

At the time he effectively said he had been rather naive in the publication of his research (as I recall it was a study going back 200+ years on ship temperature reports, rather important data since the majority of the world is covered by the seas). He had thought that the scientific community was interested in the truth....

His problem was of course that the '80s were the period where the climate alarmists switched from global cooling/new Ice Age to global warming. As I recall his funding sources went poof, fortunately he'd already gotten tenure.

Anyway, if you're interested in this topic yet haven't heard of him or, say, "atmospheric physicist" Fred Singer (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fred_Singer; e.g. he "designed the first instruments used in satellites to measure cosmic radiation and ozone" (all quotes from Wikipedia)), you might want to expand your sources of information.
The notion of a "company-specific pundit" strikes me as rather silly. "Cheerleader" seems more appropriate.
That might be a hardware issue, we had a machine doing that and had to get it fixed (not sure what was wrong - applecare with someone else taking it in).
April Fools Day will never be the same again.
"Homo sapiens originated about 200,000 years ago." That figure keeps changing, and it's so fascinating - fascinating enough that I wish they'd given a little more than the bald assertion of the current estimate as though it were long-established fact.
Ask HN: We launched ThinkCode.TV. Thoughts?
Hi guys,

my co-founders and I finally managed to launch ThinkCode.TV, a site that's aimed at creating and selling high-quality programming screencasts (with occasional freebies).

Our videos are:

* DRM-free

* HD 720p

* Available in several formats including the open source Ogg Theora

* When code is attached, it's released under the MIT license

* Subtitles are provided for the hearing impaired, people with less familiarity with the English language, and situations where audio is not an option

The Italian site was launched months ago and it's been doing pretty well ever since; many people love it. However, this is our international launch with an English site and content, so it's a whole new ballgame.

I kindly ask for you feedback, as HN is my tech community of choice and I tend to enjoy your insight. Please take a good look. What do you like? What sucks about it?

I'm available to provide a review copy of a screencast of your choice, to 5 members of our community. FCFS.

Thank you in advance.
A Database of Riches: The Business Model Behind The Google Book Settlement
I do like to use the "just because you can, it doesn't mean you should" filter like @JeremyBanks but I will say that the idea does excite me. If all browsers would support such a language like @jmount13 linked to (from what I see they don't?) I would love to explore the possibilities.

Many flash website and advanced java/jquery/css site concepts and designs that have wowed people in the past had elements of three dimensional experience, so I say why not adopt it and see where it goes?
But what about that advice makes it specific to New York City?
isn't this was canvas and svg are for?
No, you're awesome, Jöel
does it end up blocking the entire page or just the iframe?
Clickable link: http://thinkcode.tv
And you could always change the icon of your shares if it bugs you that much.
It seems to me you've just articulated a fairly powerful argument against this happening.

I'm having a hard time seeing what an acquisition would accomplish for Apple that a nice fat contract could not for much cheaper. It's not as if chip manufacturers tell customers the size of Apple to just get lost if they need a custom chip for some purpose. A "nice fat contract" negotiation would look somewhat similar to acquisition negotiations for rumor mill purposes, too.