skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Well, do you really want ALL possibilities, or just valid ones (actual words - HZLLO is not a word)?

If you want all possibilities, I might suggest wrapping it in a function that can lazily return the possibilities one by one as needed (see the yield keyword).

If you want only valid entries, you will probably want something more sophisticated (e.g. a search tree)
Excellent, was waiting for dropbox to give my ipad a cloud filesystem! I'll probably pay for it now.
Try this for when you need to fill 2 blank tiles:

import string
from itertools import product

w = "H_LL_"
w_fmt = w.replace('_', '%s')

product_args = [list(string.uppercase)] * 2

expanded = [w_fmt % repl for repl in product(*product_args)]
I guess the only problem there is that it makes it harder for one community focused on a certain topic to "branch" to another when things get rough, whereas now you can just start "/r/ruby_two" or whatever if /r/ruby makes you mad. It's definitely a trade-off, but I think Hacker News is still high-quality enough that tagging would work.
How? It doesn't seem to work like Firebug does where I can just double click and new attributes...
Great point about, "full-service solutions provider."

It's the kind of language I'd try to avoid using, but the alternative is to use 100 words to say something like, "Our company can handle the entire process, from strategy and planning to the execution of the smallest detail, or we can take on only the pieces where our support is most needed."

Which is better, the simplicity of sounding like an average joe or the simplicity of using 4 words?

Again, just because that language is occasionally left awash in a sea of meaninglessness, doesn't mean it can't be useful and send meaningful information.
If you've always been a success it's really hard to do something that carries the risk of failure.
I have not seen any data, but I don't think that's totally fair. Students from my class or those within one of mine at Harvard have started Facebook, Scribd, Airbnb, Paperless Post, drop.io, Baking for Good, and probably others that I am not aware of. Granted Facebook was not "after" college.

I am also not sure that in this regard risk and reward are proportionate. Again I have no data, but I think a random sample of 100 people from Harvard who went into finance 5-15 years ago may have made more money to date (and taken far less risk) than a random sample of 100 college students who started startups 5-15 years ago.

I think the fear of not knowing what else to do, not the money, is the primary force that leads most to finance or consulting. Anecdotally, 0-10% of my friends from college have any concrete thoughts at all about what they really want to do.
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First Kin reviews begin to arrive
Shenanigans. I can watch HD Netflix streaming on my Mac Mini without a hiccup with CPU to spare, but 480p Lost on the same machine makes it cry for mercy. Pretty Microsoft doesn't have access to any super secret APIs that Apple saw fit to hide from Adobe.
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But of course risk and reward are usually proportionate.

In aggregate startups should actually provide greater than proportionate rewards as they're not merely more risky, but also more poorly defined and require more internal motivation.
Similarly, people are free to buy Mac OS, Ubuntu...
Who has time for meetings? (or, How to approach investors)
Upsight
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The question isn't weather Facebook's TOS makes sense, but if violating them is criminal.

It should be up to facebook to find and ban violators from their system. TOS is not a contract and, even if it were, a contract dispute is a civil case not a criminal one.

Comment TOS: Reading my comment is strictly prohibited. Violators will be punished to the fullest extent of the law.
Well, risk taking is not the forte of the overachievers: at least not the typical overachiever. They're the ones (and I say this being a member of the group) who have learned how to avoid risks, rather than take them. Consider what the continuous inflated GPA system teaches a student: don't take courses that might drop your GPA and put you below the mysterious wall-street/google-cut (which is rumoured to be 3.7/3.8. It doesn't really matter if it exists - what matters is that there's a perception that it exists). Instead, take courses that "look hard". Stay in your major. Don't explore.

Risk avoidance, ironically, is a fantastic skill for risk takers to have --- as they end up minimizing risks skillfully.
Despite the high risk/high reward, I think the expected value (in money) of going to Wall Street is still quite a bit higher than that of a startup.
It makes me happy to see how much success Dropbox is having. It's a great product.
I'm guessing platform specific... because the chromium builds don't work either and the nightly builds are built off of the chrome trunk. But since it doesn't work on any of the mobile browsers, I'm guessing the code might have other issues too.
I can't edit it any more. :-(
Considering there are IIRC 1600 students in each undergrad class that probably counts as few.

As for the risk/reward ratio, you may be right, or you may be wrong, but since neither of us have any data we should probably default to the assumption that they're proportionate.
William Shatner, tech mogul?
Can someone please explain to me why HN readers dislike Wall St so much? There are honestly a lot of interesting things to be "hacked" and a hell of a lot of money to be made if you're good at finance. The personality traits that make people a success at startups (perseverance, critical thinking, people skills, creativity, analytical skills, etc) are the same ones that make people a success on Wall Street. A Wall Street job is not a wrong choice, and neither is doing a startup, in fact there are a lot of similarities.
The way I see it is: I like to solve difficult problems, which is why I became an Engineer. But now that I'm older I realize that the Wall Street guys are also solving a difficult problem, namely how to maximize your returns.

Instead of taking a wireless signal and deciphering what bits were transmitted, you take a stock market signal and decipher where the market will move next.

So, instead of solving engineering problems and getting paid decently, one can solve financial problems and get paid much much more.

If the intellectual stimulation is there in both cases I don't see why someone would choose to be an engineer any more.
The one place data is easy to find is at the high end-- in the Forbes 400-- and there at least that is not the case.
Right on, this is exactly how I see it sendos (see my comment).
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If your collection is truly random access (array, search results, relational sets) then use a form that takes the 'foreign key' as input. Then there's one URL and standard query parameters.

In pretty much all other cases a collection would have data/metadata in the response that far outweighs the links. And given that it's perfectly fine for the links to be completely opaque, there's no reason for them to be very long.

The real problem with pagination is that all but a few brave souls completely fuck up the implementation of it. This is the worst possible way to paginate something, but just about every webapp ever written does it like this:

SELECT * FROM posts ORDER BY date DESC LIMIT x OFFSET n*x

The locations of items on pages change constantly as new items are created and destroyed! You page through the history (usually via links with the worst possible names: prev & next), and the items shift around as you move around. It's OK that the page with the most recent items changes as new ones are created, but having the archives be a pushdown stack is just idiotic.

Shit would be less fucked if the pages would count up instead of down -- with the oldest items on page 1 and the newest on page N: http://www.dehora.net/journal/2008/07/20/efficient-api-pagin...

It would be terrific if people used meaningful pagination instead of arbitrary offsets: posts by year/month/week/day/hour/minute/second/etc. is far better than "Page N" -- you don't even need to give me any options, just use older/newer links that point to the level of granularity that would give an appropriate number of results.
Fundamentally, what he nails is the recruitment question.

People make decisions based on their sense of what is possible. We hang out on HN and join things like YC to be surrounded by people who reinforce the possibility of our big crazy dreams.

College career offices are the single most antiquarian institution on college campuses, and the institution most letting a generation of people into the embrace of the only external groups who are willing to pay for the privilege to be there.

Still, there is massive movement against this tide. Teach for America is outrecruiting these firms at many of the best schools - which demonstrates the opportunity for alternative organizations and just generally alternative thinking.

But most schools are not Stanford, and most students don't think in terms of startups yet. Finding ways to spread an entrepreneurial culture on campus and connect it to the broader movement towards a new shape of the American business landscape has huge potential to shift what is at the root of this story.
Showing a 12 second demo without a crash makes a product flawless?

Every dodgy piece of software ever made just earned a "flawless" reclassification.

Someone tell Microsoft: Vista was flawless after-all.
ive personally found finance is the complete opposite of a soul sucking cushy corporatre gig and infact working in a sme or larger company in the valley the real cubicle soul sucking el dilbert gig. yes your card says * famous web company but in reality all companies primary function is to make money, its just the branding is change the world vs lets make a ton of cash.

im going get downvoted like hell for this but saying all finance jobs are soul sucking cushy jobs is like saying your startup, yes YOURS, is the next google/facebook/twitter/blah
Cyberattacks: Washington is hyping the threat to justify regulating the Internet
Primarily because most of these people aren't really creating things. They're moving money around, but as we've clearly seen in the last few years, they're doing a very poor job of optimizing capital placement in the economy.

There's no question that there's lots of money to be made on Wall St., but such activities don't really seem to improve the world or anybody's life other than the bankers. Compare that to people who form startups that can literally change the world for the better.

Wall St, with its massively inflated salaries and bonuses creates a huge brain-drain which attracts bright students away from more socially-useful activities. I think anger about that is the primary source.
That is very similar to the license that Knuth used for TeX as well.

However in both cases Knuth made it clear that he is OK with people reusing the TeX source code as long as they make it clear that it isn't TeX. And again his reason is that he wants people to be able to rely on perfectly consistent behavior from anything that is called TeX.
Apple: iPad tougher than iPhone
You miss the point were the Wall street guy gets huge bonuses when he succeeds, and you get a nod.

Of course, this can't go on. The Wall Street guy doesn't actually create anything, just uses arbitrage to make some cream off of all the dollars these investment banks move around. Or exploit some foreign imbalance. They are the ultimate middle men.

You still need actual people to solve the problems in this world. Or will this all be moved off shore?
Speaking as a college freshman, what I see wrong with finance is that fundamentally, these people, who have essentially spent their whole lives learning to solve complicated technical problems, are being employed by society to essentially produce nothing.

Thats the issue I see with it. I guess only time will show if my perspective changes.
Ask HN: what is your wishlist for cloud computing features?
I will be speaking on a panel to discuss features that developers want for cloud hosting (e.g. related to security, payment, storage, performance)...

What's on your wishlist?

What do you wish EC2/AppEngine/Heroku/... could do?
There's no 'like' button for this article.
My startup Feedity allows that - http://feedity.com

Try first, register later to save your work.
I think you miss the point that they make it very easy to go with Wall Street, they tell you exactly what to do, coach you in interviews, and constantly call you to convince you to come to them. They hound people, make them feel special, wanted and even needed. Difficult to compare that to all the companies I have interviewed at, even when they did want me to work there.

So you have the big bad world of the unknown, or this nice bunch of people, who also went to your school, and really want you to come over to New York and hang out with them.
There are plenty. RentACoder, oDesk and ScriptLance are quite popular.
Yeah - but I meant something easier to use... Like registering on both services and having a choice of "fork on github" and "fork on bitbucket" on every project (and on both services).
See, now why not take that wall street job for a few years? You would have extra capital to spend time working on your startup, maybe make some good contacts, and maybe seek an insight into a world that could really benefit from a startup-wannabes insights.

All the time, you could be looking at someway to make their job easier -> there is your startup.
The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs  :  Guest blogger: John Gruber
Yes, if you wanted to only have valid words, this could reduce the search space dramatically. I know it's not python, but if you replaced the '_'s with '.'s just the grep command will be surprisingly quick and powerful.

$ grep -i ^H.LL.$ /usr/share/dict/words

Maybe a similar method using the re module and then matching on your dictionary?
Hey, yeah didn't mean to imply that. I mean, you could paint, or write, which are all very worthy pursuits. I mean, I also bike ride every now and again, do a bit of downhill. But still spend most of my time (free or at work) coding.
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I didn't mean to imply it is going to die. I mean that it is walking into a hostile environment: reviewers, carriers, developers, everything is against it and it hasn't even come out yet. Never mind the huge internal pressures. It's a scary place to be, even for a big team at a big company. I guess I choose the wrong phrase. I'm not sure how to describe it succinctly.
Yikes. I think introducing 'merit' based voting is a terrifying idea. People with high IQs still can make stupid votes. How about trying to educate people on what the issues are, and how their votes would change those issues.
"The European Union almost single-handedly took down Internet Explorer"

IE has been losing market share for years and this is hardly the EU fault.
can literally change the world for the better

There is plenty of software that does not really make the world a better place. How much of the time do we engineers spend complaining about crappy code that doesn't work? Or take video games, sure they provide entertainment, but do they have a net positive impact on society? It's dubious at best (not that I don't love SC2).

I don't want to sound too negative, but maybe a lot of finance people aren't adding much value, but neither are most programmers. And there are clearly counterexamples in both industries.

Furthermore, try to imagine our economy without the stock market. It would be very different. That's a clear indication that there is some value there. Granted the market is surely not an optimal system, but that's a hard problem that smart minds absolutely need to be working on.
8 jQuery Micro Optimization Tips
Is it just me, or is this really difficult to understand? What exactly is this? I saw hourly stats from analytics, which is cool, and I saw some in depth stuff concerning AdWords campaigns from within Analytics.

None of these things has anything to do with an "app store". Does this have something to do with Android?
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I recall Microsoft, Google, and other large engineering companies making very similar efforts (and the tech companies certainly push lifestyle factors much more directly). It's the same in lots of areas, not just finance and consulting. The main difference seems to be that these finance and consulting companies recruit across a huge variety of departments, so are relevant to many more students.
3. It doesn't seem you understand the concept of an open platform. Google doesn't need to "be careful" about anything, the market will decide.

Uh... which market? The cell phone market? I hate to break it to you, but most people don't buy their phones after considering whether or not the apps they might be interested in will be running natively or using an intermediate platform. To most people, phones are about communicating status more than anything else.
I lived in countries other than that of my birth for most of my life. Understandably, I think, this has given me a very different appreciation.

I mean, what's a "foreign" country, anyway? Is it one different than the one you're raised in? Your parents were raised in? One that doesn't harbor the same culture as you? Where am I from? Is it the country I was born in? The country I grew up in? The country I formed my political beliefs in? That's three different answers, and there are more to choose from.

So, I don't buy this "loyalty" thing. Who am I supposed to be loyal to? Why? Why can't I be loyal to an altogether different country that I like more, but have never spent much time in?
Tools don't matter
Fair enough.

But I implore all of you at facebook to make your feelings known to your higher-ups (if you feel, like many of the rest of us on HN, that something bad's happening).

These kind of decisions generally only go in one direction, and only early-on can they be stopped.
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In this thread, it has been said that people on Wall Street aren't creating anything; they are just moving money around, making a profit on arbitrage, etc.

I would like to disagree, and recall the second paragraph of this comment by xxzz: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1242980
The only problem with the financial industry is that after ten years or so you realize that 20% more of 80%* of the minds of people are motivated by a greed that simply doesn't exist in other industries.

*I read people's minds.
Mh, as a developer i can see that it can be a totally different thing then just "here it works, here it doesn't". Software architecture is not as simple as you seem to think.

Also, on the other hand, i know that Apple released the API for this just recently, which tells me that it wasn't possible before? Maybe Silverlight uses some undocumented, unsupported API? Or maybe it does software rendering but faster? There are a lot of cases why silverlight could be faster, but it's extremely superficial to just blame Adobe.

http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2010/04/adobe-will-acceler...
There is a lot more to Wall St than skimming a few dollars office space style off of the stock market. Ever heard of an IPO? It's what software startups dream of!

We absolutely need smart minds to go into finance because some sort of economic system must exist and everyone will admit the current one needs improvement. Still, there's not reason to resent people who invest in companies that succeed and make a lot of money doing it. This is almost certainly good for the economy, and I would bet that the majority of people who read HN do the same thing Wall Streeters do on a smaller scale by investing in the market.
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I laughed too.

A veritable SEA of ads like that is sadly not that uncommon these days...
For anyone who missed the reference, a similar (same?) scene was used in Koyaanisqatsi: http://www.collectspace.com/ubb/Forum3/HTML/004072.html
A carefully designed madness: Ars reviews Alan Wake
Interview with Dave Thomas - Part 2
The thing about "grades" is that the mindset that revolves around getting them can change instantly. They aren't necessarily a sign of intelligence, more of work ethic.

If a person is shown progress or potential in an area of motivation, they can express the same "care" that got the person a 4.0 great grades.

Of course, the person who got the 4.0 shows more historical evidence of continued motivation towards excellence, but I think there's something to be said for such a broad number that's more an implication of ability to solve thousands of fragmented problems than a person who is capable of solving one problem extremely fucking well.

Also, how many startups are really back-checking grades when recruiting? I can see big companies with HR departments and stuff doing so, but I imagine many just-ins don't have the resources/time/care to do so.

So, lie, programmers. Lie.
awesome story. thanks for posting it!
I currently work for an investment bank and have worked at a fortune 500 web company. From a technologists standpoint, the cultural chasm between the two is great.

This is largely because pure technology companies can succeed by culturally incentivizing good engineering, which is timeless. Banks have much shorter horizons in building systems of comparable complexity, and thus have a far greater need to constantly mobilize and change architectural direction. This is just a fact of the industry: technology advances, finance is cyclical. One of the cultural side effects, which certainly can have sinister implications, is that financial institutions lean heavily on monetary incentives to provide such mobility.

There has obviously been a lot of bad press on structured credit, but the basic concept is ultimately a great innovation in risk management.

Surely there was excess. But before ye great engineers start throwing stones, consider how much your current occupation is aided by the massive corridors of fiber optics constructed during the tech boom.