skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I meant to say $10K in signups per month

They charged us in the neighborhood of $10,000 to program the app and submit it to the store.

That is to say people who checked "iPhone app" in the "how did you hear about us" section during signup. It was about 6-7 signups per month, and I believe it's still bringing in signups (I no longer work there).
Matlab, R, and S-PLUS are all different animals. They are usually used for different things (and what they are used for can vary from person to person). For instance, I use matlab for object oriented scientific programming, R for quick and dirty (but math intensive) scripts, and S-PLUS for quick and dirty stats intensive scripts. Long story short, S-PLUS is geared towards statistics (better modules, functions, etc). If you do some searching, you'll find that R is actually an offspring of S, with S-PLUS being R's sibling. If one can program in R, picking up S-PLUS should be cake since the syntax and programming hats are similar.

I don't really like to type that much, hence my initial terse commentary--but I can certainly oblige someone who is genuinely interested :-)
Yes, you can easily switch between K and Q (and call functions defined in either language from the other [side of the same coin]).

K4 is a significantly more powerful language (tables are a first-class data type). Stevan Apter summarized the differences here:

http://groups.google.com/group/personal-kdbplus/msg/f18fb3a8...
So stop rationalizing, stop making excuses and just do it: move to Silicon Valley.

I might, if the US would stop making "immigrants are destroying our country" excuses for not having a sane immigration policy.
Ask HN: Any meetups going on in SF?
Just moved to SF from the Midwest and am looking to get plugged into the Bay Area tech scene. I've been hanging out at HN for a while and would also love to meet some startup hungry people to exchange and bounce ideas off of.

Where are some good places people go/hang out and is there maybe a good source for up to date event/meeting listings in the area?
How long have they been available? Are they iPhone only? What are the prices? Can you tell us the category? :)

Really appreciate the sharing!
Ask HN: Homework you did/didn't do before a startup 
I have been pondering over the last few days: what homework had you done before you started your last venture.

I was trying to think of everything that can go - WRONG - when you try to start a firm on your own.

If you could add your own experiences along with stuff you wish you had taken care before you jumped in - this would be AWESOME food for thought for a first timer.
A+ has an ASCII mode, activate w/:

$mode ascii

For a mapping between ASCII tokens and APL glyphs, see:

- http://www.vector.org.uk/aflat/tutor/index.htm

- http://www.aplusdev.org/APlusRefV2_15.html#HEADING349
Nor will it.
Thanks for the laugh! :-)

I worked and lived in downtown "Man Jose" for a few years - It was always amusing going out, to say the Mission mAle House and observing the wolfpacks encircling any available female(s).
Yep. Going to find some of their videos now to see if I can vuvuzela them :)
Facebook Won Because Of MySpace's "Gross Incompetence"
"some already existing TLDs were just absurd"

My favorite is .um, for U.S. minor outlying islands, population 300. It was, um, discontinued.
You're correct that he doesn't make an explicit judgement, but there are two things to note: (1) he used the rhetorical question to prove a point (he meant something by it), and (2) the obvious answer to the rhetorical question is "No." Therefore, it's fair to ponder what the equivalent statement would be if it weren't written in the form of a question.

The way I interpreted it was "No one could rationally ignore this information. Clearly one should factor it when making a decision about which cover letter to read first, which candidate to interview first, etc." I don't think that's an unfair way to read this, and it clearly implies something about the qualities of former candidate with respect to the latter.
Nokia are insane. They seem to be intent on destroying any chance of success for their new interesting phones.

They announce the N900 and then soon after give a confusing message about MeeGo being the way forward and it not being supported officially on the N900. They deprecated the device almost immediately it became available. What commercial developer would try to produce applications for it now?

Now they announce the N8 with the amazing Symbian^3. Everything will be awesome about it according to press releases. Now, even before it becomes available Nokia announces it'll be the last N series device running Symbian. Another device deprecated just as it gets out the door.

Nokia, I used to like your devices. You made great phones. But please give them some future proofing and stop abandoning them the moment you release them.
Replace phone with hotdog. I can bet you there is a place in Chicago that has lines out the door. I fail to comprehend how the type of device is relavent to this discussion.
Well ... a little over an hour from now will be the Lean Startup Circle (SF Chapter) meeting, at UCSF. http://www.meetup.com/Lean-Startup-Circle/ I'd get over there tonight if I were you.
http://www.meetup.com is an obvious one.

Another cool one is http://www.plancast.com. This allows you to see what meetups people in your network are going to.
Much easier to configure and install.

* You get Pig, Wukong and Dumbo out of the box. Don't learn Java hadoop, use one of those.
* Standardized setup which really helps if you have to seek IRC or other outside help
* Reasonable default parameters tuned for each of the EC2 instance sizes.
* Spinning up and tearing down a cluster is so much easier: experiment away. EC2-backed instances help this too.

Now of course you're trading the complexity of setting up Hadoop with the complexity of setting up chef and poolparty and EC2 -- but those are far less esoteric; and they either work or they don't.
Just history, I think: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X-rated#United_States

.xxx conforms nicely to most users expectations of a three letter TLD.
You should be measured every time you rent or buy a suit or tux. Men's Wearhouse would be doing their customers a disservice if they just handed out suits based on 6+ month old data.
Voyager Data
DNSSEC adds security to URLs
Typically I can weed through 1000 resumes by simply excluding those unaccompanied by a cover letter.
The issue is that they want me to pay my own way in order to be on call.

Ah. Well in a salaried world I would say fair enough (my organisation pays for phone and internet connections for on-call staff).

In a startup world... I don't know. But either way, I don't think there's any point in feeling insulted. It's just a matter of fact issue of "I choose not to spend money for an Internet connection. If the company pays for it, I will do my best to attend after-hour calls". No point bringing emotions into it.

But you know, if you have a stake in this company succeeding and if the company has no money... if it was me, there are definitely circumstances in which I would pay for it.
Giving Great Talks: A Mashup
I write quite well and could indeed craft an excellent custom cover letter but I refuse to include cover letters when applying for jobs and I've never had problems landing great interviews and jobs. Letting my experience and educational background speak for me has never let me down, and I'm no rocket scientist. If an employer ignored my resume, its probably better that I don't work for them, its the first sign of arrogance and disregard to throw away the intellectual capital of time honored industry practices as an employer as a blanket statement backed by faulty reasoning unless you're hiring someone for a writing job. I don't include cover letters because it leaves room for discussion when I'm called in for an interview.
Coincidence that xkcd also has a vuvuzela-related comic today? http://xkcd.com/757/
Is this not adequate? http://posterous.com/api/posting
Europe funds ARM-based server research
Who cares if people or computers trade securities under market value for a short amount of time? It only affects the idiot that is selling them at that undervalued price. The value of the underlying company is unaffected and market forces will always quickly correct it.

Well, the stock price is the market value - if it's not then what is? Detecting errors as opposed to genuine changes in value is a non-trivial problem.

Use buy and sell limit orders, you should be already.

The flash crash happened so quickly that a lot of limit orders weren't executed, because the price dropped past the limits too fast.

If you had an order to sell something at $20, and the price dropped from $25 to $1 in seconds then there's a good chance there were no buyers for you at $20, but instead your trade might have been executed at $1. That makes a pretty big difference.
Well, stole might be too strong a word. Erm, I guess you could say he xerox'd her look.
Oh. Hell. That hits a little too close to home.
Absolutely "this is a brick" is an exaggeration... good thing I didn't said that then, huh. And I don't remember suggesting that Apple won't make good, so your pouting charge is still misplaced and increasingly impolite. I questioned someone's, seemingly abject, willingness to take the hit for fixing it themselves rather than putting the responsibility where it actually belongs.

The electrical properties of skin can vary quite a bit. One person's specific and firm grip to get good contact is another person's sweaty handed casual touch. That still sounds like blaming the user that finds the problem to me. The guy in the key-test video mentioned that his company's half a dozen phones all behaved the same.

Is the press inflating things? They do for everything, so sure. Just how much is a guess till some stats come out on this thing. If and when we do get good numbers, this will make a good example case for the distortions introduced by internet media.
I hear you. I actually managed to wrangle Voyager 1 into a brief nerd-out component of my wedding speech:

"Like me, the space probe Voyager 1 launched in 1977. Unlike me, it is one of the pinnacles of human achievement. It is currently the farthest man-made object from the Earth but it could not have achieved its speed and distance to date without gravity assists from Saturn and Jupiter. When space probes are launched, their path is often planned to get a gravitational slingshot from the most significant entities in our planetary family, to take them further than their launch alone might do. That boost is something invaluable, natural and efficient."

"I don't want to call my parents, (mother) and (father), giant balls of gas, but the boost, the impact they have had on my life, on my sister's life, my brother's life and now the lives of our partners, is huge." And then, later on: "Everybody, wish me luck that in our future together, there are only few occasions where (bride) wishes I was the farthest made-made object from Earth."
You might want to say what it it does on the frontpage. I thought it just auto-muted videos or something.
Mister Softee Jingle Again Draws Mayor Bloomberg’s Ire
I spent maybe 5 hours programming Silver Revolver (originally Russian Roulette) http://silverrevolver.com/ and it has made probably $30,000 over the last year, most of which was during a two week period when it was on the top 100 charts. I'd say I got pretty lucky.
There is a geolocation API that falls under the extended "HTML5" family of technologies. It's implemented in MobileSafari, don't know about Android or WinMo.
There will be a screening process, yes, and diversity of experience will be one of the factors we take into account. Nobody wants to hire or work with a one-trick pony.
I had assumed that the "Vuvzela button" would feed the audio through the bandpass filter that got rid of vuvuzelas.
What caused the bit to be flipped? Cosmic rays?
Reading group from 2005. The author comments:

Not surprisingly, after a very short period of time, this fell to the wayside. The page and schedule are left up for anyone who has interest in their own push through TAoCP.

Anybody care to comment on whether the pacing seems appropriate?
No offense, but that app really blows. Really good on you if you were able to milk 30k out of it :)
I don't see how this could be a software problem.
I had a chance to hear Tufte speak for the first time last week and he starts with his first point. He doesn't say his name, or show any agenda for the talk. He just started right out showing the Music Animation machine, an interesting way to visualize music (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pVadl4ocX0M&feature=playe... if you are interested).

I was a little surprised he didn't introduce himself, but then he didn't waste my time telling what I already knew. I knew who I had come hear. And the agenda had been handed out, so he didn't need to waste time with that either. Very unusual, yet compelling, presentation style.
Ask HN: What should I do with this web app I built?
For the past two years, while at a full time job, I spent my free time building List Central (http://listcentral.me). Essentially it is a social network for lists and list lovers.

My motivation in building LC was both a desire to improve my abilities as a web developer, and a to dream to build an application that people use, and hopefully brings in some money.

While I was building this, the economy fell apart and now it is obviously clear that advertising as a business model is undependable at best, but given what users are accustomed to getting for free now, I can't imagine charging for List Central.

I now find myself with this app that I think is pretty neat, and I find useful, but I'm not sure what to do with it. I would love to get it out there, and see people use and enjoy it, but I am hesitant to invest much effort and/or funds into promotion due to it's lack of a sound business model.

I ask you HN, what would you do with List Central if you were in my place?
Pinging VOYAGER2 with 20 bytes of data:

Reply from VOYAGER2: bytes=20 time=46152000ms TTL=53

And I thought my latency was bad...

The Voyager probes are absolutely astounding. I thought President Bush had proposed cutting funding to that project as a cost cutting measure. I'm glad that never occured.
insightful comment of the day
As someone who works with autonomous robots, restarting a system 30 feet away in demo conditions can cause pins and needles. I can't fathom how the NASA engineers felt. They probably didn't get any good work done waiting for the ACK

It's incredible that NASA, 30 years ago, built such a durable and reliable system. The hardware has withstood one of the harshest environments in the universe for decades, and the software hasn't been irreversibly scrambled by passing cosmic rays. My cable modem doesn't even last an afternoon without rebooting itself.
Objections to a "xxx" TLD seem to fall into one of two categories: That there is no way to decide which sites should be given a "xxx" domain, and that there is no way to enforce a "xxx" domain. As far as I know, there is no current plan to legislate the "xxx" domain so it would seem that it wouldn't matter. Even as an opt-in for self categorization, it can only help to make the purpose of a site more clear. Even if not universally used, it makes it a little easier to both find and avoid pornography. Chances are that what gets put under the "xxx" domain will eventually be decided organically. Personally, I think that it's likely that businesses who's explicit purpose is selling sexual content will begin to use it and websites which contain pornography only incidentally will likely avoid it.
The key is that you will still need to write specifications if you want anything good. And that takes time and effort too. People in general are lousy at reading your mind.

In my experience, writing a 'good' specification is as much, if not more, work as writing the code. If you write it at too high a level of abstraction, the programmers will probably not implement what you really wanted.
Indeed.

As a point of interest Ada Lovelace was Byron's only legitimate child, but he is known to be father of one other, and presumed (with varying degrees of certainty) father of two more.
Clickable: http://listcentral.me
I think the un-funness in this case stems from people not expecting the line in the first place. Movie-campers sometimes literally camp out in line, tent and all. It's a different experience entirely.
I recently saw Alex Stepanov quoted recommending TAoCP to his students, saying "It is something that they should keep studying for the rest of their lives." While that might be excessive (volume 3 is still less than 40 years old, right?), I think a year sounds short.
Steve Jobs Responds To The Antenna Issue: Hold It Different Or Use A Case
I suspect there is some underlying issue that you are not divulging. Do you get along with the founders ? Are you comfortable asking them to pay for the internet ? Do you feel you are being treated unfairly ? Talk these things out with them. Posting on HN is sort of a passive-aggressive way of dealing with the issue. Whether you should get internet at home is not the crux of your problem.
Oh my gawd, I didn't realize they were SO OBNOXIOUS!

What determines the frequency of the hum? is it tube length, or characteristics of the vocal chords or something? I ask because I can just see someone trying to make the hum span the audible frequencies, so it can't be filtered.
I'm wondering if this would work better as a Google Apps survey. In particular, there's a big difference between an app that takes one guy an afternoon to write and an app with man-years of development time. To get some insight on that, I've thrown together something here:

http://spreadsheets.google.com/viewform?hl=en&formkey=dF...

Please look at it and make suggestions about what I am missing. I will of course publish all the data.
Programming the PDP-11
These are all great questions — indeed, they're ones I've asked myself. Only time will tell, I suppose.

However, the impetus behind Hidden Hires is a cry real need: although Django's community is growing at a rapid clip, it's still a niche enough technology that employment is tricky. I regularly hear from developers who are having trouble finding jobs that match their skills, and I'm simultaneously hearing from companies who can't fill open positions. It's clear to me that the existing employment markets — job boards, recruiters, etc. — aren't serving our community very well.

We're hoping to fix that problem eith Hidden Hires. We'll see how it works out.
If you are using PHP, then why do you need Windows? Any Linux based VPS will do the same task and at a lower cost.
How much time does it take to manage? I can't imagine it's too demanding if the lists are user-generated. I say keep it...it could be that if the site gets a food sized following, you might be able to make a fair amount from advertising. I have a friend who runs a site with scraped news articles and a forum, and he's making $80K a year on ads alone. Of course it took 10 years to get to that point, but he didn't have to touch the site more than an hour or two each month.
Liability for illegal P2P file sharing in Germany
How Indian & Western CEOs differ (a study by Wharton Univ prof.)
Was this PR necessary for Posterous? Doesn't look right to me. Same kind of thing as the affiliate links called a 'test' after 4 months.
Jessy? Hi, it's me. I'm just calling to let you know I finally caught up to your boyfriend in love making quality.

I wonder if she'll consider making the switch.
Maybe but it sure as heck won't run Ruby.
An interesting flaw (or feature?) in Amazon's marketplace
What's wrong with it? (not that I care, I haven't touched it in year)
I brought it up as an example of a society in peaceful revolt against a high price for goods, doesnt really matter who was setting the price, a tyrannical government or producers. They had civil disobedience which has a few similarities to how people flout copyright laws today (not completely the same of course, since they were willing to go jail). Like charging high prices for access to something that's essentially free (salt then, copies of mp3 files now)

Also see how electricity is commonly stolen in developing nations, anti-prohibition activities etc. For examples of societies trying to act through government to regulate payments to people, look at the UK bank bonus tax or the Autralian attempt at a mining super profits tax, and in the other direction blank media taxes, farm subsidies etc.
Make sure your speaker volume isn't on 10 before watching the video, that was terrifying.
I've been using this for awhile and wanted to get it out into the wild to discover any bugs. I hope others find this useful.

It combines a launchd service, a simple Python script and logging functionality of Growl.
How Scribd runs 150,000,000 polygon intersections a day
I would love it if LC could be a 80K/year site in 10 years!

I'm expecting there to be considerable effort involved in user acquisition, which is an area I'm not terribly experience with. If anyone has advice in this arena, I'm all ears!
They are concerned, but they have no choice. Heat production and the ever increasing cost for pipeline misses were killing them.

Of even more concern is that all of the major operating systems use SMP to scale, however scaling SMP becomes ever harder, and given Moore's law in just a few years a single chip will have more cores than SMP can comfortably handle. At that point we'll need a fundamental rethink of operating system design.

See http://www.bitmover.com/llnl/smp.pdf for more on that.
SMP scaling considered harmful (1999)
Well other "extreme" things like violence or gore could conceivably be expected under .xxx but not .porn

Agree though that the ever increasing number of TLD suffixes is a bit of a joke. (I think it's a scam to get more money from people, mostly, at this point.)
Do any laptops support ECC RAM? Lots of machines will run with ECC RAM but only a few can perform SECDED (single error correction, double error detection). I had SECDED in my previous desktop and the machine seemed more stable than the one I had before. Here's Daniel Bernstein's rant on the subject: http://cr.yp.to/hardware/ecc.html

Microsoft's datacenters have a straightforward policy for dealing with software errors: first restart the service, if that doesn't fix it then restart the OS, and if that doesn't fix it then swap out the machine.
I agree with the general spirit of your post, but IIANM Maemo apps will work on MeeGo and vice versa with minimal effort. Not to mention Maemo's been around for over four years now -- significantly longer than the iPlatform's existed.

Anyway, let's see how long MeeGo sticks as the go-to platform.
You could be cute and say that Marco has seen the writing on the wall with his Mac-only backup client (http://www.marco.org/277762675). :)

I belong in the group of people who have yet to be convinced of the financial stability of Tumblr, but its free hosting, great themes and ways to get exposure using the platform in combination with Fusion, Deck and other ads is very attractive; you would not risk any economical loss using Tumblr.

To be fair to Tumblr, most of the people using the service don't seem to blog with writing content with staying value in mind; you could argue that the microblogging serves as a Zeitgeist echochamber similar to what Twitter can be in some instances.
Given two equal route options on a map, travelers prefer the southern one.
hacked together a little vuvuzela bookmarklet and chrome extension last week fwiw

http://github.com/jgv/Add-Vuvuzela
Well it makes competitive Starcraft more exciting. (I kid!)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vZ1IUQRTtNw#t=5m40s

Anyone know if you can enable the vuvus with a query string?