skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
My focus wasn't really on subtlety (or lack of it). The parent poster was upset about political bias. My point was just that the joke didn't suggest bias to me. Anyone who runs for Vice President is (pretty much by definition) full of ambition; so are the SO people, according to them. That seems to be a pretty limited and simple analogy. I don't see an insult there of any kind, much less political bias. Even more so since the whole point of the analogy was "we have this quality too." I don't see why any of this would "hit a sour note."

Having said that, the two other early responses to your post do suggest that you may be right about how polarizing Sarah Palin is.
"It doesn't always work out so well for the little towns the highway goes through, however, and I fear the carnage that might result from this as well."

Totally off-topic question: how so? Don't most of these little nowhere towns turn into vast opportunities to build gas stations and hotels where no opportunity existed before? I'm not denying any bad side-effects, just asking what they are.
Considering how poorly Adobe has treated non-Windows platforms for the past several years, I would accept "sheer spite" as an answer to why they're screwing over Adobe. The better question is why Apple would do this to all other developers as well.
I agree that removing barriers to entry means more people can get in, but isn't that the point? I can see that, from the perspective of someone who would be in the market either way, more people is bad: you'd rather be one of 10 than one of 100. But what if I'm one of those 90? I'd rather be one of 100 than excluded from the market entirely. And it forces everyone to compete on innovation, rather than using market incumbency and competitive moats to keep up profits by keeping out competitors.
+named.
It can't be hard to make copy and past work fine without http://. Fact is that it's mostly irrelevant for the majority of users.
Music Business Driven by Data [Infographic]
doesn't even attempt to address why requiring all programs be originally developed in objc,c, or c++ is a good way to prevent being held hostage by Adobe

Sure it does - it provides a legal footing for denying apps based on Flash. That pretty much prevents Adobe and Microsoft from establishing a mobile platform that would

nor does it address the huge repercussions it could have.

There have been a lot of keys struck in anger since this was announced, and I find it to be too naïve. Apple would never enforce such a clause against something that was beneficial to them. So far, there have been no killer apps in the mobile space (sorry guys). While I enjoy the massively discounted offerings on the AppStore, the core OS and applications that Apple provides are the only things that affect my device buying decision.

When someone makes a killer app that cannot be released on the AppStore, then this will matter. Until then... Sorry, no one was going to buy your Scheme-based app anyway.
Thats interesting that you say 'become the plumbing'. Thats exactly what everyone told us when we first launched http://www.KaBadge.com - Why do I want to give you my badges?

That's why we ended up creating another product called http://www.IActionable.com where we provide a rule engine that constantly evaluates actions performed by users and awards the badges, points, whatever for you.

I was actually just reading someone's comment this morning about how they created an Achievement system for the workplace. Can't seem to find the post it was on though.

Keep up the good work guys. I'm happy to see other sites enter this space.

Here are the posts we made for our two services. Perhaps the feedback provided there can help.

(IActionable)
- http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1126780

(KaBadge)
- http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=795952
At least two of the people acknowledged are world famous algorithms researchers.

But it's not clear how much of the paper they looked at and whether they think it's correct.
The worst criminals in that war were the Communists

Stalin's purges predate 1941 when SU entered the war. So they aren't part of the same war, unless you also want to add the extermination of native americans to the list of WW2 crimes.

And what was wrong with the winter war? A plain old war of agression, sure, but I don't think there were any war crimes?
Sometimes doing things like that work, re: floppy drives and the iMac.
"I'd rather be one of 100 than excluded from the market entirely."

No, you wouldn't; that's the whole point. Suppose that there are two options: an open market and a closed market. If it's a closed market, there's a high barrier to entry, and so only ten people are in the market. If it's an open market, anyone can join who wants to, and so there are a hundred people. However, you must not be able to benefit from joining the open market, or else more people would join and drive wages down. And, if you were one of the ten people in the closed market, you still wouldn't be any better off, because the high wages of the closed market would be counteracted by the difficulty of getting into the market (see: "medical doctor"). There ain't no such thing as a free lunch.

EDIT: Your reply is potentially valid, but only if the market we're talking about is so large that opening it up will raise salaries outside of it. The startup market is only ~0.1% of the US economy, so I don't think this applies.
I look at it like this: up front capital requirements are more of an artificial barrier to your success. It doesn't matter how good you are: if you don't have the money, you can't get started. Removing this artificial barrier is a good thing: it makes the market closer to a meritocracy.

Although anyone can stick up a website, not anyone can make a good one. But if you've got the skill, there's nothing standing in your way.
I agree with what was said below, it wasn't a great article, but you must not have read the entire thing. His main point is actually that Apple is providing a hell of a distribution platform for developers that is going to be very expensive to leave.
I'm more interested in how Adobe is a competitor to Apple (in a Windows-vs-Mac way). Though there are a couple of areas that Apple and Adobe products compete, I would hardly say that it's in Apple's best interests to screw over Adobe. Do you think that the Apple faithful will be especially pleased if Adobe pulled all of their products from the Mac platform? I'm betting that it would tick off a fair amount of Apple users, who could direct their anger at Apple if they feel that Apple started the whole thing.
I think your reading to much into this. To me it seems like the stack exchange sites just got too little traffic to reach critical mass. Ask Metafilter is an exception to a lot of other communities which became awful as they grew.
the 7 of 8 chars in prefix is irrelevant, so, replacing them with an mini-icon in UI saves space and improves readability.

The better question is - where are all favicons? =)
"up front capital requirements are more of an artificial barrier to your success"

This isn't necessarily true. In markets requiring a high degree of sales skill, like enterprise software, ability to raise capital is highly correlated to business success. However, I will agree that it is true in some cases.

"Removing this artificial barrier is a good thing: it makes the market closer to a meritocracy."

It's a good thing for Internet users. The point is that it's not necessarily a good thing for founders.

"But if you've got the skill, there's nothing standing in your way."

If you have arbitrarily good skill, there's nothing standing in your way. This is not a good argument for whether you should go into the startup industry, anymore than "if you're Michael Jordan, there's nothing standing in your way" in the sports industry or "if you're Harrison Ford, there's nothing standing in your way" in the movie industry. Most people aren't Michael Jordan or Harrison Ford.
The letter-perfect logo
Index Compression algorithms used by Google
The expensive part of a web startup is Engineer salary. for nearly all web startups, everything else is comparatively free until they get fairly big.

The thing is, Engineers are pretty expensive. around here, once you get through benefits you are probably looking at $120-$200K+ per head, for upper mid-range people (assuming you aren't paying for office space and have minimal hr overhead; it's more otherwise)

So yeah, if you talk 3 or 4 friends into taking a year off to work on a startup, guess what? You've just got your $500K in investment.
he lessons I took out of it were that I'm the kind of person that needs people to bounce ideas and enthusiasm off,

Try customers. Seriously.
Do you think Adobe stockholders would be particularly pleased if they pulled all of their products from the Mac platform? They would be burned at the stake. Apple isn't afraid of that happening because it isn't going to.
Yeah, I'd be curious what the opinions of other researchers in this area are. There have been a number of debunked polynomial time algorithms for GI, so it's one of those things people are always skeptical of; but that of course doesn't mean this one is wrong too.

The author of the paper recently posted a blog comment in which he says he submitted to a few journals, and complains that "referees did not find any fatal error in my proof, but all the journals rejected this paper": http://rjlipton.wordpress.com/2009/05/04/an-approach-to-grap...

I'd take that as evidence that the referees at least didn't think it was a successful proof. The comment is attached to an old blog post about the problem from a well-known theoretical computer scientist (R.J. Lipton), but since it was posted about a year after the initial post, it hasn't gotten any replies.
List of apps that use Unity (and other non C/C++/Obj-C/JS languages):

https://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=0ApLAS6djiVwydGhJMmh...
I've never tried adding achievements to my app...is it difficult to get right?

The services I like to outsource are the ones that are hard enough on their own...mail server (sendgrid), possibly hosting (heroku), recommendations (directededge). Some of them which are relatively easy, like comments with disqus, have been successful, but there is an added benefit here of letting users comment with the same account all blogs they visit.

Are achievements hard enough that users should offload them to you? Will they have to define various rules using some sort of interface you develop? I'm skeptical at first glance, but have been wrong before.
This makes me nervous:
Further, without loss of generality of the task, we will consider undirected
connected graphs without loops.

Tree isomorphism is polynomial. It's not obvious to me how you cut the loops out of two graphs and ensure you end up with similar trees. Quick scan didn't show that in the paper. I guess i'll have to read in more detail after dinner.
Most startups pay early-stage people primarily in equity. You sound like you're not from the US, but that's mostly how it works here. Startups are also founded mostly by younger people, who have much lower salaries and cost of living requirements. It might work differently elsewhere, in which case my argument doesn't apply, but I was talking specifically about the US startup industry.
I did read it, but you're right about what his main point was. I was mainly referring to the last two paragraphs.

His main point boils down to, "Baby, look how sweet it is up in here, look at this bling bling, now shut up while I smack you about." Sure, I agree, Apple has a wonderful, beautiful setup. I don't think anyone disputes that, but I fail to see how that's supposed to make me respect their actions.
For example:

http://pullmantransit.com/

http://www.pullmantransit.com/
Try to copy "http://news.ycombinator.com to the clipboard.
Fireside chat with Eric Schmidt
Context: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graph_isomorphism#Algorithmic_a...

tl;dr:
Graph isomorphism recognition is an old and well-known problem that is in NP. It was not known whether it was NP-complete or in P, but this paper suggests that it is in P. This is kind of Big, assuming the paper's correct.
Of course. And even before 3.3.1 they had the ability to reject your app for any reason they felt like; see Google Voice. This new clause doesn't actually change anything in reality; it just pretends to make the process more objective.
Distribution of wealth isn't necessarily the same in both situations, though, so things can really be materially better in one situation vs. the other for different sets of people. The closed-market situation leads to more divergent outcomes: you have wealthy people who are in profitable markets, and non-wealthy people who are kept out due to high barriers. Reducing market barriers makes that rigid in-v-out dichotomy harder to maintain, which is better for the people who would have been out in the closed-market situation. They can still only profit a little, but before they couldn't profit at all.

Markets where capital is a requirement also tend to result in rich-get-richer effects, where you have to have money to enter profitable markets, which then make you more money. Low-barrier markets make it harder to get a return out of capital, and force people to get returns from other things, like their tech skills. (Of course, tech skills are probably correlated with wealth too, but not to the same extent that literally having piles of money is.)
Loops as in "edges from vertex a to vertex a", not cycles, were discounted.

That's fine because you can ignore them until the end, and then just check your vertices for any loops, in O(n) time.
I'm saying that you can look at the engineers working for equity as investors; they are. Your Engineers getting tired of eating ramen and leaving for real jobs is a lot like investors not giving you the next round of funding.

Also, even mediocre engineers in their mid 20s are going to be making $85K or better plus benefits here in the sf bay area. add in benefits and you start approaching the lower end of what I suggested; and all other things being equal, you are going to have a hard time if all your Engineers are mediocre.
As far as I understand, the service provided will be a respository of badges. Your site will have to determine what the badges are and when to award them to users. Then you'll let Webchiever know about it so they can store a copy. This way users have one place to show off all their badges.

In regards to how difficult it is. The repository concept itself isn't hard, but the idea is if you can get enough sites to use you then I imagine other sites will see the site as a great advertising opportunity and will want to award badges just to get visibility on the site.

The rule engine is a different story. (Of course I'm very bias)
A 3rd party rule engine is useful if you plan to constantly add badges and/or change the conditions which award a badge. Otherwise you need a developer to essentially rewrite your badge awarding queries or code every time you want to make a change. Or write your own flexible rule engine with a management UI. :)
Mixergy interview suggestion: Andrew, as part of your format, your face is visible for 50% of the interview. Trouble is, you always look like you're sitting in a dark storage closet. Get a better webcam, or at least orient your desk toward a window so that your environment looks brighter! :)
We are simply passing JSON back and forth over Unix pipes. JSON support in both languages is great.
Okay, I'll bite. What law is being violated by Apple deciding who they wish to partner with and selectively give advantages (and disadvantages) to.

What an amazing number of people (hackers included) don't understand from the 1999 ruling against Microsoft, is that Microsoft was ruled a Monopoly. Now that, per se, is certainly not illegal, but once you are a Monopoly, a large number of activities that previously were allowed, all of a sudden are now restricted. In the case of Microsoft, it was attempting to leverage a Monopoly in one market (Operating Systems) to takeover another one (Browsers).

Apple is so, so, far away from being a Monopoly in any market that it's laughable. Profitable - yes. But I think they have like something of 25% of Market Share for Smart Phones, and less than 3% of the market for Mobile phones. And Android is aggressively courting developers/users who are interested in their Open and flexible platform.

So, no - Apple is completely free to disallow competitors, and put them at a disadvantage, while allowing the Unity/Rhomobile's of the world.
Where are you based, Dave? My day-job company is actively seeking a technical recruiter for internal and client placements. (Oh, and I should add that we're pretty damn good at communicating with the people who apply for jobs).
This reminds me of this project by Jeff Lindsay (progrium) : http://www.getachievements.com

I'm not sure it's still active though.
This is exactly why you are better off giving your music away for free so that more people hear about you and then making money off of higher margin, less transferable experiences & products. As I understand it for most artists their real income comes from touring and selling merchandise.
I have been running the 5.0 dev channel builds for a while and I didn't even notice this change until I read about it now. I think it's OK. It has been done in such a way that it never bothers the user.
Make downvoting also cost the downvoter one point.
This would be big news if true (though not P=NP-big; graph isomorphism is an apparently-hard problem that isn't known to be NP-hard).

From a cursory glance, it doesn't look terribly promising, but I haven't made a serious attempt to see what he's doing and how it might work. Examples of not-terribly-promising things:

1. He proves what he calls "Assertion 1", then says that it "suggests" some other propositions that he calls "Conclusion 1", "Conclusion 2", "Conclusion 3". He doesn't offer any proofs of these; they don't seem to be obvious consequences of Assertion 1; they don't even seem very likely to be true. In particular, Assertion 1 has the form "if graphs G and G' are isomorphic, then [linear algebra stuff]" and Conclusion 2 (which he uses later) has the form "if [linear algebra stuff] then graphs G and G' are isomorphic".

2. He then defines this thing he calls a W-matrix, which seems like it basically encodes for a given vertex of a given graph which other vertices are at any given distance from it. He then appears to claim -- I'm not quite sure, because his notation is eccentric and it's late at night -- that equality of W-matrices is basically the same thing as similarity of vertices (i.e., whether some graph automorphism carries one to the other), and that doesn't look right to me.

I repeat that I haven't looked at this carefully, and I'm not an expert in the field anyway. But it's not compelling enough to make me want to spend much more time on it; I expect that if it turns out to be valid someone smarter than me will check it over and let the world know :-).
This reminds of an earlier article, another look at a historical context for twitter. Apparently, there were lots of postcards sent back and forth between family members, most of which weren't much different those those sampled here.

If I remember the article correctly, it was relatively recent, perhaps in the 19th or early 20th century?
um... Advertising? Seems to work for a few sites around the place.
"I'm saying that you can look at the engineers working for equity as investors; they are."

Not in the barrier-to-entry sense, which is the one I was discussing. It's a lot harder to get a VC to invest in you than to get some guy you know from college to help you write a piece of software.

"Your Engineers getting tired of eating ramen and leaving for real jobs is a lot like investors not giving you the next round of funding."

Hence vesting.

"Also, even mediocre engineers in their mid 20s are going to be making $85K or better plus benefits here in the sf bay area."

I know several full-time software engineers in the Bay Area who are 25 and making that much, but they're all a). extremely smart and b). have degrees from top universities, so I really don't think "mediocre" people make that much. Still, you're right that top people are reasonably expensive if you pay them in cash rather than equity.
24 hours after "This link ain't from YouTube hack" they fixed the problem
1. All old links have a "warning message" :

http://www.youtube.com/redirect?username=digitalhook&q=http%3A%2F%2Fsecuritytube.net%2FSocial-Engineering-Attacks-using-Simple-Redirections-video.aspx&video_id=Vgc3NVVpb8c&event=url_redirect&url_redirect=True&usg=UE0DOmwjBRK-mgheFtW1hMTEvh4=

2. All new links go directly to the real site. There is no redirection.

Thanks HN!
Tutorial: Using JQuery and CouchDb to build a simple AJAX web application
I had this exchange with a recruiter working at Google.

Recruiter:
I am writing to introduce myself as I recently received your name from a current Googler who mentioned you'd be a strong asset here. I am hoping that you might be open to confidentially exploring engineering opportunities with Google. If not, it'd be wonderful to hear a bit about what you're doing currently so we can keep in touch down the road. Please let me know if you might have a few minutes to discuss.

Me:
Who recommended me? I'd love to know.

Recruiter:
I have been asked to keep that confidential. Let me know if you are interested in exploring opportunities that we have here at Google further. Thanks again and have a great day.

Me:
Thanks for the inquiry but I'm not interested. I also just want you to know that I'm aware of passive recruitment techniques and for some people it's frustrating to engage in a conversation at that level. I don't think it reflects well on you or Google.
I am located in Spartanburg, South Carolina. Tell me more about your company at the profile address email.
Not to be snarky, but, we know :)

"We chose killer graphics plus 10 hour battery life over a very small CPU speed increase. Users will see far more performance boost from the speedy graphics" (Steve Jobs).
I'm having trouble following your logic.

How do I determine whether a useful and nonthreatening program in the App Store is beneficial to Apple? It seems like it would go without saying that every good app is a boon, but you appear to imply that there's some threshold of "killer"-ness that needs to be breached before your contribution is beneficial (and by extension you are allowed to use whatever language you want). How is this determined?

Further, since you state that an app must be "killer" to be beneficial, and that there are no killer apps in the store, does this mean that Apple derives no benefit at all from the App Store? Because that seems like a pretty absurd claim.
Applying your magic sort() encourages replies by users who want to play a game. That only works if those users exist and actually have useful contributions to make — both of those properties are much diminished outside the SO population.

You don't to rank answers unless you have unproductive bullshit in the replies. While programmers might love the karma stuff, everyone else prefers it if the bullshit was just not tolerated by the community and deleted by moderators.
Please do not change your password
A fresh take on the TechRepublic story on the study of how many security precautions are a net drain on the economy.
Simple Daily Git Workflow at Gameplan (Cheatsheet included)
That's pretty common as well. I've learned not to be afraid of who recommended me, or where the recruiter found my resume. The point of this is bi-fold, both to your advantage:

1. Check the integrity of the recruiter talking to you, ensuring they're not employing tactics that hurt your reputation with other employers and

2. It's a low tech form of analytics to help you further understand how helpful the job boards your resume is housed are.