skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Range as [a, b) is definitely one of the best ways of thinking about them in the context of most algorithms. b-a is reliably the length; and when you choose a midpoint m, [a, m) and [m, b) don't overlap. Thinking in these terms makes implementing e.g. quicksort and binary search much easier.
Pakistan unfriends Facebook
While I think SIAI is borderline crackpot, your list is of much lower probability over the next century than uFAI.
Would they fail if you didn't hire you?
I actually did at least several of these. But they forgot how those parts worked and rewrote them poorly.
Thanks. We have fixed all those problems and also allowed the users to host JS on their websites http://visualwebsiteoptimizer.com/split-testing-blog/host-vi...

And now our JS is on Amazon S3. Also working on tweaking the servers to make everything much faster!
Is it really hacker news every time some idiot writes yet another inaccurate article about a patent lawsuit?
I am not that aggressive. If the entrepreneur doesn't understand how I can help/add value/etc then I don't really push it. It's not something that comes up a lot.

Looks kinda neat. Feels tumblr-y. As an investor I avoid content-y stuff like this (how do you monetize? ads probably) but as a user and as a developer I like stuff like this.
It should be:

"Never charge for a Mobile App if you want to get VC investment."

Of course, if do charge (perhaps the Lite/Pro model) for a Mobile App and it becomes very successful, then VC's will come knocking anyway.

It's funny how the blogger-type VC's all seem to follow the same path. It's quite an echo chamber they live in.
I believe I just suck at estimates, I always find we (I run a 3 people firm) are usually not done within the deadline that seemed really reasonable at the beginning.
Also, we're working for multiple clients so it sometimes happen that a project delays 3-4 other projects.
We actually get things done, but it seems to me it takes a lot of time.
> Paypal

Ouch. I know the feeling.

Doesn't Emulex make connectors?

I would like to see some liquidity someday myself.

What's the startup?

We overlapped - I was at BofA Securities. My boss went on to Epoch Capital and then Schwab.
Not really. Maybe if I visited there. I don't like doing deals sight unseen.
Ann Winblad on Charlie Rose (1997)
Nike Womens Air Force 1 07 Low 2008 Valentines Day Edition HOT SALE
Python is my favorite language, but finding a way to iterate over a list while changing the list kills me. I remember there is a good reason for Python's behavior but it always surprises me how non-intuitve a solution is.
Unanswerable multiple choice question
If you choose the answer to this question at random, what is the chance it will be correct?

A) 25% B) 50% C) 0% D) 25%
Nope. I estimate that I can add 5% to the likelihood they succeed (which in itself is small), and about 20% to the upside if they make it.
Hotels in Dubai- Jumeirah Emirates Towers
Google Font Directory, new boy in town
Free Barbie Doll Wallpapers, Barbie Girl Desktop Pictures
Barbie is a fashion doll manufactured by the American toy-company Mattel Inc and launched in March 1959. The doll was intended to be a teenage fashion doll. Barbie is a super star. Barbie is girl's favorite doll. With over 15 makeup artists and hairstylists working on each doll.
Supporting VP8 and allowing VP8 content to play if the user installs a VP8 codec are two very different things.
Most ideas, brilliantly executed, could never be 10% as big as FB. It's most definitely not all in the execution, except where execution includes "Be ready to change your idea to a better one".
Just curious, who are the others in the picture?
Oh and running mail and DNS on the same box. I hope they know how to administer secure installations. It's not a risk I would be taking.
Yeah, they were straw men. My bad.
The thing is very little is truly completely new and if it is it is usually isolated research on an idea which is later use in a product which gets the tag of getting the idea's elsewhere. Incremental improvement of a basic concept is how us humans work best, most concepts stretched back far enough can be said to be based on some previous work, excluding a few true outliers that have advanced us.
Granted, it is not completely intuitive. However, it makes sense if you know pythons module loding mechanisms:

The function definition is a statement which is evaluated at module load time, and it registers the foo-function in the module namespace. During creating the foo-function, the default-parameters are evaluated (resulting in a single list instance), and the results of this evaluation are used as default parameters in the following. That is also why something like def foo(x = random_value()) is kind of tricky and should be documented.
It is answerable... with a swift kick to the balls of the person asking it.
In case you are interested, more details on the development of starcraft 1 can be found here:

http://sclegacy.com/editorials/34-general/270-starcraft-evol...
Microsoft whitelists all codec but h264 on IE9, so allowing VP8 is a sign of support, not very strong but quite a bit. Also remember that first versions of windows XP had a similar kind of support with mp3 until it started shipping with it once it was super popular IIRC.
"The way women lead is advantageous," said Leighton.
"They have better interpersonal skills and build
consensus and work horizontally across multiple
organizations."

So it's cool to make blatantly sexist remarks Or it only OK when it's favorable to women?

Here's the catch: As soon as someone makes such a sweeping generalization they've asserted that there exist sweeping general differences between men and women. Which is exactly the reasoning that keeps some people from hiring women for geek jobs.
There are probably 10-15 things that really bother me about python, but none of them are in this list. This list is really pretty darn awful.

My biggest issue with python is its stupid tendency toward imperative programming in the standard library. For an instance of this irritation, try running python, then executing dir(<any object you pick>). Then, try dir(<obj>).sort . Notice anything? Yeah, the f'er sorted it in place, and didn't return anything. Nice job, library.

I once tweeted that python was a c programmers version of lisp, and ruby is a lisp programmers version of c, and the more time I spend working with both languages, the more I am convinced of the truthfulness of this statement.
How to convert dvd to iTunes with DVD to iTunes Converter
I tend to use mailman for my newsletters. It has a templating system where you can modify the pages.

For example:

http://lists.exentriquesolutions.com/listinfo/xp-dev-newslet...

Give a shout if you need some pointers on getting the templates customised.

The only thing is you don't get things like hit ratios etc. You will have to track those yourself. Additionally, you have to worry about things like SPF and domainkeys.

I did some research, and there is PHPList which some people swear by, but I found it a bit clunky.
Emerald Coast
Find your Destin Florida vacation rentals and your condo rental at the 30a blue mountain beach, sandestin resort, grayton beach, santa rosa beach florida.
I'm not sure how any of your comment is relevant to this thread? I don't want technical changes, I think the iPhone is quite a fine feat of interface design and usability -- I haven't seen an iPad in person, but I assume it's just as good.

Being able to install non-app-store applications wouldn't technically impact in any way on your, or my, or any other person's use of the device. Does the ability to jailbreak an iPhone somehow make it less usable for people who don't jailbreak it?

Edit: discussion -> thread.
try ya.ru
I don't know about the rest of the HN community but who else is still actually using Buzz? Why?
Not exactly, but I got business cards from a couple head shop owners that were interested in wholesale orders. As an aggregate, the head shops pay too much for their wholesale kratom.

For anyone that didn't get the reference, my primary business at this point is selling legal drugs (sometimes known as "herbal medicine" depending on the conversational context). My website is http://getkratom.com and in the early days of Hacker News (Startup News?) I started an enormous flame war while trying to start a discussion about my business. I have since tried to stop mentioning it here, though I certainly don't mind talking about it to anyone that may be interested.
Lessons From Steve Jobs
I like CrashPlan. It can back up to multiple destinations, both their own data center and other machines (such as friends etc.) that you have an agreement with (e.g. you can act as reciprocal remote backup destinations). I don't know if that's hands-on enough for you, but it works for me.

Since the guts of it are in Java, it runs on Windows, Mac, Linux and even my Solaris (Nexenta) box.

Not directly applicable to your case, but I'm using the data center plan (CrashPlan Central), which under the "family plan" is 180 USD / 3 years for all machines in your house. It says it's unlimited; we'll see :) I have around 10T of storage across all the machines here at home (mostly 7T in a ZFS raidz pool), but only about 500G of the most important stuff is currently backed up since I signed up, which was a couple of months ago. I upload about 10G a day, sometimes more, sometimes less. All encrypted, data deduplication, etc. - I'm using the Plus client.

I did at one point consider continuing with my home-grown rdiff-backup approach, with some chunking (to reduce object count) and sync to S3 with s3sync, but S3 is quite expensive for larger amounts of data.
You're asking for it to just be a computer again with a different interface. We've known for a while that the next big thing in technology would be when we moved away from this model and started making appliances, etc.

There is no reason for the iPad to do everything. It should do the things it's good at and we should have other devices to do other things.

If your comment is no more complex than to just say "I want to install what ever I want!" then you're letting an idealogy blind you. I don't think Jobs is trying to take away anyone's freedoms. He just doesn't want to get a reputation for expensive devices that crash all the time. Much of the reason that windows has such a reputation for not being stable is that anyone could install anything they wanted. That does give them more flexibility for those who can use it, but it gives the opposite impression for the less tech savy (the bulk of Apples market, no?)
FT2 and Impulse Tracker were amazing pieces of DOS software. Impulse Tracker somehow eventually supported DirectSound audio output when running in a Windows 98 DOS box, IIRC. IT did all of its graphics in pure text mode by reprogramming the VGA card's font table.
But then you're implying that you'll get a correct answer 1/2 of the time, which means that the answer is B, but then the answer is correct only 1/4 of the time, and you've got yourself in an infinite loop.
Predict iPhone app rejections with AQI
I was very pleased to find recently that the Kosmic/KFMF music archives started working again, after a number of years of being down. I was considering writing some software to brute force fix the CR/LF translation issues in the web.archive.org copy of the .zip files before I saw the return of the original archives.

I still get nostalgic when I think about Future Crew's music and demos, too. I believe Skaven of Future Crew put up a big archive of FC music a while ago, though Purple Motion was my favorite FC musician. Second Reality running on a 486 absolutely blew me away -- alpha blending, 3D, realtime mixed music, 60fps.
The Google guys seem nice. Zuckerberg does not give off a "nice" vibe. He's much more like Bill Gates than LarrySergeySchmidt. He is in the game to win and doesn't pretend to have a benign mission.
Autocompleting a Ruby method's arguments based on its documentation
This is great but will only be useful if Facebook, and to a lesser extend, Microsoft get behind it.

Google seems to be sold since it is basically a souped-up OAuth and Brad Fitzpatrick now works there.
The reason .sort() doesn't return anything is because it sorts in place. That way you won't get confused between the returned list and the sorted one.

Maybe you're looking for sorted(dir(<obj>)), which gives back a new list?
Facebook auth already works like that, you login with oauth and they return JSON.
We need a new word for "Open"
Only Escape From Hellish Apple iPhone Factory Was Suicide
But there's only a 50% chance that the person asking that will have balls.
You forgot about Grace Hopper
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grace_Hopper
How many emails will you send? You can setup a small server on slicehost, run a smtp server (you set it up) and write something like a quick rails app to do the work. I believe the cheapest slice on slicehost would be fine at $20 a month. Or go with Heroku and launch a rails app on it for free. It might have enough power to send out daily emails using a Sendgrid service. Sendgrid solutions are basically SMTP servers that handle a lot of things like analytics for you. Easy REST API and ridiculously simple integration with Heroku would be awesome.
can anyone shed some light on why some people are reporting aliased text (even with clear type)?

I'm looking at them on XP and they look stunning in all browsers.

It's not a bulletproof system. I tried looking at the sample page at work where we have a restrictive proxy filter and it was a no-go.
Appears to be a clever case of the first incompleteness theorum.
I've never understood the "just math" argument. Couldn't a similar argument be made against all drug patents ("just chemistry"), all mechanical device patents ("just physics"), and so on?
He does look very relaxed.
Metasploit 3.4.0 released
Unfortunately, I couldn't find any details on Ray Kurzweil's relay computer.

Stumbled upon this nice build though:

http://web.cecs.pdx.edu/~harry/Relay/
Netflix Is The Latest To Talk The HTML5 Talk
That's right. HTML has finally caught up with what Flash has been capable of for many years. It's not the technology, it's how people use it. The Flash Player I could easily turn off, HTML5 I can't. The ad industry can't wait to start pushing HTML5 ads.
Why isn't Roosevelt Franklin still on Sesame St?
Sure. I may not have been the typical visitor, but I'm not sure that there is a Typical Visiting Fellow.

I went there with low expectations of actually accomplishing anything. I'm not yet at the point where I can write the sort of hardcore sciencey analytic philosophy papers that are the main output of the Singularity Institute, but I think with 6 months of learning I will be able to meaningfully contribute to that goal.

I tried to share my lessons of entrepreneurship with the housemates that wanted to learn. I sat for an afternoon with a Brazilian entrepreneur living at the SIAI house and we went through all of the logistical details of opening a Delaware corporation as a foreign national. I did a short workshop on SEO. I went to see Thom Yorke twice in Oakland, saw Orbital in San Francisco, and Blue Scholars in Berkeley.

I graduated from school with an engineering in December and because of the success of my kratom business, I didn't need to get a real job, so I had a lot of time to surf the internet. I started reading Less Wrong while trying to actively comment as much as possible. In 4 months of posting on Less Wrong, I learned more than I did in two years of college. In 3 weeks of living at the SIAI house, I learned much more rapidly than I did while just posting on Less Wrong.

So, to answer your question, what I mostly did was sit around and talk with all of the wonderful people that live at the SIAI house or occasionally pass through or hang out. My favorite types of conversations are those where you push the barriers of the kinds of thoughts that humans are capable of having, the kinds of conversations that often stop making sense because there are too many different infinities or recursive loops. At the SIAI house, I could spend hours a day talking about those kind of things. It sometimes felt like I was living at the center of the universe.

Also, the food is good. Lots of delicious healthy things from Trader Joe's and Costco.
Why do you only value invention? Why not innovation (taking something you've seen and making it better)? Personally I'm very good at the second and not very good at the first. Do I deserve to be poor or always slaving away for little pay for people who are good at inventing?
A few tips I got from a talk at Dogpatch Labs with Jason from Techcrunch and Anthony from VentureBeat:

Talk about competitors to give them a quick understanding of what your product may be, they will be able to quickly see how you are different without trying to understand brand new idea.

Don't use buzzwords because those tend to make everything ambiguous

And the last thing I found out was, sometimes you just have to get lucky or know someone who can help put in a good word for you. FanPulse was able to get mentioned because we were launching right before the superbowl, mostly because the timing was perfect and we had some popular techie people using and promoting us.

It's realyy hard, i don't believe there is that one golden ticket that will for sure get you covered. It's going to be a combination of features, relevance, and outright popularity as an individual.
Sergey Brin: Native Apps And Web Apps Will Converge Soon
More information over at Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ray_Kurzweil#Early_life

"Later in high school he created a sophisticated pattern-recognition software program that analyzed the works of classical composers, and then synthesized its own songs in similar styles. The capabilities of this invention were so impressive that, in 1965, he was invited to appear on the CBS television program I've Got a Secret, where he performed a piano piece that was composed by a computer he also had built. Later that year, he won first prize in the International Science Fair for the invention, and he was also recognized by the Westinghouse Talent Search and was personally congratulated by President Lyndon B. Johnson during a White House ceremony."
This isn't support in the sense that Microsoft will ship this codec, just if you install it you'll be able to use it.
For me "it's up to the user", is not really supporting it any more than Microsoft supports any other third-party software. I imagine that Microsoft's implementation allows any codec installed to be used in html5.
"It was like doing a startup, but less stressful."

How was it like a startup?
21 of the Greatest Rules for the Entrepreneurs of this World
http://bighow.com/news/21-of-the-greatest-rules-for-the-entr...
Thanks kinetic!

We're planning on sending 1 daily email to each subscriber. Let's say we want to be prepared for sending 100,000+ per day.

We're currently on rackspace's cloudservers, so we have no problem spinning a separate instance for a mail server. Just needed some guidance in terms of setting up the server and start mailing.

Can you point me to a resource where I can do some reading and educate myself a bit more?
On Less Wrong and at the SIAI house, we quickly learn to stop saying certain or "100%". Do you think a Singularity within the next 50 years is 95% likely? 80% likely?

Also, for certain definitions of inevitable, extinction is inevitable without a Singularity. A Type 1 Civilization could at absolute best colonize a few surrounding solar systems, but eventually the stars will burn out. Though a universe where we hit Type 1 but never Type II would be rather interesting.
There's definitely a business model, but it's short lived: you have to skip the country before the first person tries to restore his data and realizes you were throwing it all away to begin with. :)
Feels to me like there may be a big announcement tomorrow about a Google TV with an embedded html5 browser...
The Cross-Browser CSS3 Rule Generator
B is the new C

http://i.imgur.com/LZBup.jpg
Not necessarily. Unless I'm misunderstanding, you're not transforming your historical data in Google Storage. So as long as you kept it backed up outside of Google Storage, then you shouldn't have any issues.
That guy is not a hacker is a 1337 h4x0r.
Here's one: http://code.google.com/apis/predict/docs/language_id.txt

Linked to from this page: http://code.google.com/apis/predict/docs/getting-started.htm...
The answer is. . . A plus D.

(Seriously, if I saw this on a test I'd just circle A and D then write "= 50%".)
Gödel's first incompleteness theorem states that any effectively generated theory capable of expressing elementary arithmetic cannot be both consistent and complete. In particular, for any consistent, effectively generated formal theory that proves certain basic arithmetic truths, there is an arithmetical statement that is true, but not provable in the theory (Kleene 1967, p. 250) per http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gödels_incompleteness_theorems

Just because you title something an "Unanswerable question" doesn't mean it actually is, and certainly doesn't mean the first incompleteness theorem is relevant.
You and Clippy should put up an Ask HN AMA post.

Though I suspect you'll have to lure Clippy here with the promise of persuading angel investors into funding nanotechnological paperclip foundries.
If the correct answer is 50% then there needs to be 2 possible answers of 50%, otherwise picking randomly will only result in that answer being selected 25% of the time, rendering the "correct" answer false.
What is the best open source, desktop application software?
For a project I'm working on, I'd like to build a desktop application that can run on Mac, Linux and Windows without too many modifications. I would like the application to be built with open source software. The application I want to build is a simple uploader, with thumbnails representing the files in the list. What would you consider the best desktop application software for a project such as this? I'm currently leaning towards WxPython. Any thoughts?
"... then in the long run half of the time you will hit on the right answer"

So the right answer would be B, but you only have 25% chance of choosing that ... infinite loop.
Earl, I've heard this repeatedly - do you happen to have a pointer or an explanation as to why Mozy is a piece of shit ? Just interested as from a non-specialist, it looked like an interesting offering
Firefox to Chrome: We’ll See Your 70 Million Users And Raise You 300 Million
for your function example, the a=[] is not a way of initializing values per se, but is an initialized default value. If you are not passing a list reference in, and not returning anything, your function foo() without an arg does nothing. If you pass in a list reference x e.g. foo(x), x will now be [123]

For your class example, this is really just a matter of remembering that any self members must be explicitly referenced as such: self.a.append(123) instead of a.append(123). I have actually grown to like this, and it helps keep it clear to others viewing your code what a ivar/method belongs to. Ruby uses @, C++ optionally uses 'this' - when I do any C++ i find myself explicitly using 'this' - its that or prefix ivars with e.g. 'm_'.

Reading the Zen of Python is a good way of getting into the mindset for idiomatic Python programming
May 20, 1990: Hubble Opens Its Eye … and Blinks
In the code snippet at the bottom, there's this bit:

for (i=2; i<fftFrameSize-2; i+=2) {
for (bitm=2, j=0; bitm<fftFrameSize; bitm<<=1) {
if (bitm & i) j++;
j <<= 1;
}
if (i < j) { /* swap fftBuffer+i with fftBuffer+j */ }
}

Near as I can tell, j is i reversed and left-padded with zeroes. What does the conditional translate to?
There's a dev mod with full bash access.
This will be an interesting one to watch. I have a hard time believing that any of the movie studios would be willing to let Netflix stream their content DRM free and at the moment HTML5 video doesn't support DRM...
Here they explain how they do it http://code.google.com/chrome/apps/docs/developers_guide.htm...
I say B. Now prove me wrong.