skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I agree, but you have to jump all over your data when you do a heapsort, blowing your cache.

It has nice worst-case guarantees, but a well-implemented quicksort has good cache locality.
Ask HN: Trademark registering
I am looking for a cheap service to register a trademark in the US, Canada, Europe. Any suggestions?
"I find your lack of faith disturbing."
OK then, what does it mean to say a question is meaningless? If an answer to the question is important, how is the question meaningless?
Product Review: Kinesis Advantage keyboard
Ask HN: Working at Pivotal Labs? 
Hi HNers, here is a follow up to http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1488273.

There is surprisingly little of Pivotal Labs on HN, if you consider their reputation. Any opinions on them as a work place? Pivots?
I'm not suggesting that logic would lead you to adopt any certain religion. I'm just saying the question itself isn't meaningless, because it's answer is actually pretty important (not that we can know for sure what the answer is).
In the current version of WHS (I can't speak for the upcoming "Vail" release) you can think about its redundancy in terms of file-level software RAID 1 without integrity checking.

Pros and cons abound in that setup, of course, but setting aside the lack of integrity checking ala ZFS for a moment, I have personally taken advantage of the file-level software RAID 1 portion when my first WHS server encountered an internal hardware issue and I had to pull its drives (normal NTFS drives full of the files) and bring them online in a replacement WHS server. Each drive was brought online out of the storage pool, its files copied into the pool volumes, and finally the drive was added to the storage pool. It requires an extra drive already in the pool to pull this off, but given that it worked very well, far better than some of the horror stories I've heard about people trying to transplant RAID 5 and 6 setups when other NAS solutions have failed at the server level. A part of me of course wishes for a ZFS-style WHS, and perhaps MSFT will get there some day, but in the meantime I can certainly see how WHS's design decisions were reached.
IntelliJ is great. They have a free version for people who want to try it.

http://www.jetbrains.com/idea/index.html

The same guys make Resharper for Visual Studio. I can't imagine that Visual Studio is better if the Java guys are making a plugin for it. I have heard that for C++, VS is hard to beat, but I haven't done that in a few years.
As I recall the "is" inquiry was the segue to the lie. Could be wring about that. It was a long time ago.
The British Library has an awesome map of regional dialects of the UK (http://www.bl.uk/learning/langlit/sounds/index.html), though the timespan is rather limited (only about 100 years in terms of birth dates of speakers). It's pretty extensive, with each dialect getting a 5-10 minute recording and a few paragraphs on its notable linguistic characteristics. Great time waster!
> I have a great job that pays very well, offers excellent benefits, and has a good work-life balance. That said, my partner and I have spent the last few years building our business and have, for a while now, been at the point where it really deserves our full attention. Quitting would cut my income by a little more than half.

Imagine you're working full time on your own business and you get an offer for [your current job] at twice your current income with excellent benefits. Do you take it?
That's a valid explanation. When I hear someone call a question meaningless, I immediately think that it must not matter what its answer is, not that the answer (presumably) can't be known.
This is more contemporary, but here's a massive database of dialect recordings: http://accent.gmu.edu/browse_language.php
I have run into this problem before. I find the best way to get motivated is to send it out to a few friends. Usually they look over it and tell me it's awesome, which is a great inspiration towards getting it out to that general audience.
The Past, Present and Future of Local Storage for Web Apps - Dive Into HTML 5
If you reread the original link you'll see the main source of Dawkin's frustration comes from the misappropriation and misuse of mathematical logic and scientific fact with disregard for the preserving precise meaning.

This is a large problem not just in Postmodernism but in many areas of modern analytic philosophy as well, especially Philosophy of Mind.
Did British in 1776 have modern British accents?
"Why does Perl 5 need a Rails?"

So O'Reilly can sell books about it.*

"Despite the existence of Rails, Perl 5 is still more widely used than Ruby."

Who is writing new projects in Perl 5? Ruby will also have a lot of legacy code in five years.

* If you thought that was a joke, you're still missing the point.
Something like this could be very feasible, especially when combined with the array interfaces so that the fact it's an object with a moving pointer isn't even noticed.
I got a paper copy of the report while at RailsConf, so I took a picture of the chart for all to see (no scanner, sorry!).

http://nbrochu.posterous.com/the-state-of-the-internet-opera...
Meetings have a use. Meetings are a good palliative for ownership and trust issues. If nobody is responsible for a feature or decision; or worse several people are responsible, and people don't really trust each other to make the right choice, then meetings can force everyone to "get on the same page".

Managers should realize that when decisions are getting made in a meeting that someone needs ownership of an area, or the owner isn't trusted by the people that area influences.

As an example, if coding style is debated in meetings, someone needs to the "coding style boss". If there already is someone in charge of coding style, then they need to communicate better. This would also apply to more important things than coding style ... but it's a good example of something where the cost/benefits of addressing it in meetings approaches infinity.
Not particularly no.
I think our fears are unfounded. Development following an industrial revolution is so fast compared to the time scales involved in interstellar travel that we are unlikely to have anything of interest to a society even 500 years "older" than ours. It is somewhat akin to a three year old worrying about a sixteen year old wanting their tricycle.
That's right, in my case, the first time I tried to do my own business I didn't plan it well, I had to look for a job offer and I learned that as long as you have good skills you'll always find good pay. Building your own business IS the way to go.
You do not need to read balance sheets or dig into financials (you can find general info) about nearly all listed stocks on financial websites and message boards.

Then think about your risk profile.
If you are relatively risk averse (hoping to beat inflation) then it is more prudent to diversify into some ETFs. Not necessarily the broad market but maybe some macro strategy.

I prefer to look at the Risk/Reward profile. More akin to VC investing: I look for 20x based on macro trends or interesting opportunities (scalable growing companies in a huge market).

One really basic way of looking at this is something like Baidu and Google.

Baidu (BIDU) is the Google of China. The market cap is ~ 25b while GOOG is ~130b.

With the growing middle class in China and the sheer market size, it would seem more likely that BIDU would become the size of GOOG rather than go bankrupt.

This is just an example, but I have owned BIDU, based on this principle for 4 years (it was under 100 and it recently split 10-1)

Another sector where this strategy works is in biotech. I have already commented about a similar investment in ARNA -- feel free to check out my past comments.
The main problem with Visual Studio is the "soft" vendor lock-in problem: if I want to use VS.NET with SVN (via AnkhSVN), the experience sucks compare to Eclipse and Subclipse.

Basically, VS.NET wants you to use other MS products as well such as MTM, TFS, to be very very productive in MS environment. Using VS.NET, SVN, TeamCity and a mixed bags of other software will not give a smooth experience compare to using all-MS or go with Open Source.
You may try to quit your job gradually -- talk to your boss and explain that you cannot dedicate as much time to your job anymore and can work only ~3 day per week (with reduction of pay of course).
When (if) your new business really picks up -- you would be able to make safe transition to your full-time start-up involvement.
Too much sarcasm.
Great marketing, great sample, and timely content.

I just bought a copy. I'd be very interested to see the sales volume data after the HN submission.

Can I convince you to do a aftermath blog post?
I have plenty of problems for you to solve. For a low, low fee of $12.99/mo. (plus sales tax as appropriate) you too can be the proud recipient of a collection of problems to solve!
I got my results about 20 minutes ago. (I should have got it a few weeks ago, but DC post office screwed up delivery of the spit kit.) I assume a lot of other people on HN have gotten results recently: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1288125
Isn't that what these are for: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Process_calculus
When talking about nuclear fucking weapons???

Are you serious?
Sure. Trivially true. I meant to overloaded O() to mean "order of magnitude" when used for a constant factor, but you're right that in computational complexity's big O notation, O(k) = O(1) for all constants k.
What about this? http://www.typetester.org/
Icelandic is, I believe, a Germanic language dating back to the 1200s or so.

What I think you're getting at - and one of the cool things about Iceland - is that the language hasn't changed all that much since it was introduced back then. This means that modern Icelanders can read the Sagas (written in the 10th and 11th centuries) with relative ease. The majority of people will read them in the same way we read Shakespeare or Dickens (with modern spelling and some footnotes), but with some effort they can be read by most well-educated Icelanders in their initial forms.

While isolation had a great deal to do with this initially, nowadays it's mostly because of the work of the Icelandic Language Institute, which religiously updates the language to add new words for concepts that didn't previously exist. They also work with the Icelandic Naming Committee, to maintain the list of acceptable first names that Icelandic children can be given - if the name you want to give your child isn't on the list of previously-used names, you have to submit it to the Committee to make sure that it is appropriate (i.e. can be spelled in the Icelandic alphabet and fits into Icelandic grammar).
Did you read the parent post?
Here's an earlier thread on the topic: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1485947
I think all of this guy's requirements would be satisfied by something like a Mac Mini with two additions:

- The ability to mirror the Mac Mini in the cloud
- Something like an Airport Express with an HDMI output

Simply leave the Mac Mini on all the time. It becomes the stand alone device, satisfying point 1. You can use the iLife suite and a few other programs (mostly free) to satisfy point 2. It has a remote and has been satisfying all the other points except 4 and 9. The Airport Express+HDMI thing would satisfy point 4. (And Apple TV already does this, but it costs too much to get just for that function.) Being able to mirror it in the cloud would give you point 9. (It's only a matter of time before we see a Time Machine back-end in the cloud.)
As a developer starting to wrestle with some design concepts myself, I think you've laid out some good things to keep in mind.
Recursion, map, and fold can be used for iteration. car/cdr is just one way to access elements of a sequence.
I just recently got hooked onto Evernote. Definitely lives up to the hype.
If I recall correctly, Kevin Phillips attributed the American southern dialect to old East-Anglian dialect. At any rate most of the original white settlers in the south, Georgia especially, were subjects of "transportation" and subject to seven years of indentured servitude, or were Scotts-Irish recruited to be frontier settlers. Only a relative handful of ruling-class whites could afford nannies. And those families, the Washingtons and Lees for instance, were descended from landed aristocracy back in England who were on the losing side of the English Civil War. Take away the minority plantation owning families and the average white household at best could afford one, maybe two slaves as full-time field hands. Still, west African dialects probably did make their mark on southern dialects.
Going mobile: mobile website or app?
I could be wrong, but much of this kind of feels like a recap of this talk http://blip.tv/file/3685673/ that was given at djangocon by Idan Gazit.

If I am wrong, its a good talk and its definitely worth watching.
Dear Apple, what the dock?
I like it a lot. The user-facing (content producer, I mean) UI could probably use an iteration or two for polish, and it seems like the resulting content pages are a bit broken on the iPad (custom scrollbars == bad news, I figure), but definitely useful -- and bookmarked!
For most, starting with a mobile website is the best option as the cost is lowest to develop and you reach the widest audience.

If warranted, you can follow up with apps for specific platforms.
What about Jeff Bezos, Pierre Omidyar, or hell, Ray Kroc? No one is saying that it is not advantageous to team up, just that you cannot discount single founder successes.
Thank you! I'd been wondering how it looked on the iPad
I was using Titanium Mobile 1.1 I think. Yes, please do! I'd love to know how that goes :)
Having competition got us into space to begin with.
I've used a Steam a little over the last couple of years (bought maybe 3 or 4 games), but with this recent summer sale I've added another 15-20 games to my collection, and all for around $60 total. When the price is right, I'm very happy to use a service like this, despite the DRM. The user experience beats anything else out there, including going to the local mall and buying a game boxed.

The key is the price though. With Steam games, I lose the ability to sell the game on after I'm finished it, and publishers of all kinds (music, movies, ebooks, videogames) need to understand that I'm not going to pay them the same (or more) for something that doesn't give me the same rights as the physical media.

The policy of certain publishers to charge considerably more for the same game in different regions (in my case Australia - see e.g. the price of Mass Effect 2 in Aus here: http://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/clwk1/steam_final_da...) is also something I'm not going to tolerate. I didn't buy any of the games in the Steam sale that were priced higher in this country, so those publishers lost out.

I presume that this is due to the way publishing rights are apportioned internationally, and I've seen similar problems afflict other media (particularly ebooks, where the availability of a particular Kindle title varies a lot depending on whether you're in the UK, US or Aus). Again, publishers need to understand that consumers really couldn't give a toss about this sort of thing: we just want to buy their product, not have to worry about some international publishing agreement bullshit. If somebody can't buy something on Amazon/Steam/iTunes/whatever in their region, that's driving them towards the pirates, not towards the locally-published version.
Not sure of the situation but for me nothing focuses me more than having a real customer and/or collaborator to whom I've made real commitments to.

When I've worked on my own, its real easy to get distracted and rationalize putting things off. I'd be lucky to get in a full eight hours.

But working with others, I found myself working many hours beyond even the time we spent directly collaborating. Because I had to deliver on my commitments. I think many people need that.
@960gs: I was also excited about it some time ago, now I use http://www.1kbgrid.com/ It's nice and lightweight, does the same with a more simple approach. I usually put it together with mayerweb's css reset, having a ready basic reset+grid in a 1.7kb file before minifying.
Africa, Tunisia. Hey! no one from this continent?
Thanks that is exactly what I was looking for, just some things to keep in mind while designing, I think I will do a follow up with more practical and actionable advice.
It's a good list, but there's been a few articles on here that talked about hashing and other security-related algorithms. Generally speaking, if you're implementing one, you're doing it wrong. Of course knowing about them and how they work is essential.
The other thing I found was that I was more productive when I was working fulltime, than when I had more time to work on my own project. I worked better when I had less time, since I was more focused, would only work on the most important stuff, and only had a few hours to get something done.

You may miss this, but hey, go for it anyway. If you leave on a good note, then there is always a chance of going back.
I havent seen this talk before, but I will check it out and probably link to it in the post.

(added a link in the post)

the book mentioned in that talk looks really good as well, amazed I havent come across it before, thanks.
I'm not sure post-modernism advocates any kind of 'giving up' -- otherwise no one would bother with all that effort of writing laboriously long and dauntingly opaque essays on why we should all just give up.

Why not call the statement true? Go ahead. The issue is whether we (can) classify truth as an essential quality of a statement, or as a description of a statement from a particular perspective.

To make an analogy that dawkins would surely crucify me for, it's like the difference between the notion of absolute time, and time as described by Einstein's relativity. From a post-modernist view, time/truth is relative, but being relative doesn't mean it doesn't matter, and just as with physical time, there are narrow frames of reference (day to day life on Earth) where the relativity of time/text/truth is... irrelevant.

God, it really is impossible to advocate for post-modernism without writing in that multiple meaning style.
I'm laughing. But really at this point, I'm convinced people will shell out whatever amount of money they have for an Apple product. I'm in awe of their marketing and ability to sell computers with hardware that is priced 3 times more than anywhere else, get people to pay for software updates that should be free, and sell phones which ... (well obviously right lolz) require you to update almost all of your other peripheral oriented accessories. They have created an experience above an beyond all. It's almost like Barbies ... you have to pay for the high heels after you buy the doll but at least her shoe size stays the same.

I do however think that time is running out. Nothing lasts forever my friends. But I guess we'll see.
Hegel was self-refuting enough to be pomo.
I recently wrote about the psychological elements behind fun game/webapp design, elaborating on a very cool UX presentation:

http://www.zacharyburt.com/2010/06/why-games-are-fun-the-psy...
Gulf spill a familiar story in oil-soaked Nigeria
I'll never forget what a wise entrepreneur once said to me as I was scared of going out on my own:

"You have nothing to lose. If you quit your job and start your own company, and fail, you'll be much better off than if you hadn't. If you go look for a new job, you will have run your own company. Would an employer rather hire someone who hasn't run their own company, or someone who has?"

Running your own company definitely brings with it valuable lessons. If I were to get a job today, I would have a completely new perspective on the concerns of my superiors, and what really matters in a company's day-to-day operations. Before working for myself, I didn't feel any motivation at my job because I often felt I could make better decisions than my superiors. If it came down to me needing to get a job, I would clearly know whether this was really true or not.
True, but if Opera was better enough, it'd surpass them. The fact is, it's a web browser, and Google can put enough engineers on it to build a better JS engine just because they feel like it. There's not really any room for a killer idea, or at least I can't see any.
I would prefer a comprehensive blog post outlining the bullet points of what we should know, rather than a mini-course. Also, you may enjoy this blog post I wrote: http://www.zacharyburt.com/2010/06/why-games-are-fun-the-psy...
Aggravating, but par for the course, The info about the mic/amp/audio out is super interesting though.
It sound like he's trying to fight the Church-Turing Thesis.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church%E2%80%93Turing_thesis

I don't think he'll win.
If my math is correct, your company - which you run when you aren't at your job - makes you as much money as your job does? QUIT!
What I would really like is some metadata baked into the filesystem layer that allows you to specify backup levels, which vary how often, whether or not, and where things are backed up.

So something like:

1 - always back up to primary backup locations in full.
2 - back up to primary backup locations if it's not too much trouble (some sort of configurable threshold for space)
3 - like 2, but a lower threshold
4 - only back up to secondary backup
5 - do not back up.

I know that there's a lot of configuration that would have to go into this, but I think as data becomes a bigger part of our lives, we need to have a more intentional attitude towards how we store our data, and not just 'let the computer back it up.' Until movies are as easy to store as text is currently, there will always be tradeoffs that we will want to think about.
I agree - beautifully done.

In addition:

-Release an ebook now, ask for feedback, improve and add content, and perhaps release a physical book and get paid again.

-The fact that Eric mentions that this book is heavy on customer discovery and less so on the other parts leaves plenty of room for expansion on this book or new ones from scratch.
Impossible.
Also see "Design for the Coder's Mind" http://www.kadavy.net/blog/posts/design-for-the-coders-mind-...
This implies to me that the ideal method for a more advanced civilization is to build a "honey pot" planet, sending out prime numbers or something, with redonkulous power. Advanced-enough-aliens-to-be-friends-or-enemies are attracted to such a signal, while you merely observe and decide what to do based on their reaction.

Nuked the planet? Find out where they came from. Tried to contact, and eventually left, after some vague friendly gesture? Might not try to kill you.
Here's the post this one is follow-up to, which has a little more background:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1486017
How to Create Your Own Real-World MBA – II
I can't wait until something like this comes out for my Xbox. I can't tell you the number of times I've been bored enough to shell out $60 bucks for a game I heard was good but was way too lazy (or slightly too inebriated) to drive to the store.

Sometimes I feel like companies just don't want my money.
Having a todo list with predicted ratings is really great.
I quited so-so, but still my own, business and started work full time (first time in my life) due visa related stuff and i regret i went this way (although, do not have much choose). And I would say working full time kill any creativeness and it stops keeping you "fit" business-wise. So I'd say - go ahead if there is no other "dependencies".
In the 2 minutes I've spent on there I've seen a number of artists I don't know (which could be unsigned garage bands) and number that I do including Of Montreal and Animal Collective — both well respected and successful groups. I'm not sure what quality control they have, but it doesn't seem like all they're looking for is unsigned groups.