skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This sounds to me like the Fundamental attribution error[1]: Attributing too much to the person and not enough to their situation. Smart, motivated people will eventually succeed. However, that doesn't mean that every given startup they found will succeed. A lot of people will go through a few startups before they get it right.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_attribution_error
It matters when you have an interpreter/compiler that does tail-call optimization. If the function is tail recursive then the recursion will only use O(1) stack space, while non-tail recursive functions will use O(n).
So this person dropped his iPad, and cracked it and expected a new free one? Warranties are offered on products with certain limitations that keep the companies from having to replace hardware through negligence. Sounds like this person was pretty negligent.

Also I find it funny that he says "the refused even though I said I would do a restore on it" but also admits that the wipe bricked the system.

You take your fate into your hands when you jailbreak. If you're not smart enough to do the wipe before bringing it in then you're not a smart person to begin with.
London Times behind 100% firewall.
The tradeoff is that you get a much more stable runtime, true multithreading, and the ability to play ball with everything in the Java ecosystem.

Sure, it takes longer to start up, but we're talking a few seconds here, which is nothing for a long-running webapp. Plus, the JVM is rock-solid, has very predictable memory usage, and also has tons of monitoring infrastructure to bring to bear against problems.

Yeah, I'm a fan.
One day in the not-too-distant future, we'll see a headline here "Netflix stops mailing discs to US customers, goes streaming-only." It's (mostly? ideally?) all about the most efficient and user-accepted way to move the bits around.
i bet you can find some small idea somewhere and create your own project, it will be a lot more fun and that way you'll learn easier too.
Google responds to news site complaints
This could be why they switched to blaming the dropped iPad as the warranty voiding. Either way the author is staggering around and damaging his iPad.
He's actually managed to create a container by using the variable scope of the App class. That'll work fine for awhile, but it doesn't scale particularly well. You also lose lifecycle management (in his example, everything is a singleton) and lazy instantiation. Also, you lose the ability to isolate dependencies on external libraries to separate assemblies -- in this case, the main assembly needs to know everything about everything.

I'm biased (I wrote a DI framework for .NET), but I don't really understand what people think they're gaining by avoiding the use of a container. The complexity of dependency wiring increases geometrically with the size of your application, and I personally would like as much of that complexity hidden as possible.
I'd be worried about legal ownership issues with this. If someone just writes code for you and says, "Here you go, it's free" I'm not sure that would really work. There has to be a contract in place (right?), and can contracts be "for free"? I guess this could be structured as an internship, but I read here awhile ago that those are being cracked down upon in the US.

Here's one idea: Have ehansul write and open source code that would be helpful to you. That way there are no ownership issues.
Does it autonomously change the tires when they go bald?
+1 for Boards of Canada -- I prefer "Music has the Right to Children" over "Geogaddi" when coding -- the latter is a little too angular and abrasive at points.

"Combustication" by Medeski, Martin & Wood is another great one for sustained productivity. For me, anything that grooves is helpful. Stuff with lyrics tends to be too distracting.
In the future there won't be cars, we'll just beam ourselves anywhere we want to go. If we're going to dream, might as well dream big.
That, is a group of squares, not a cube.

How is this more difficult then:

permutate all possible orders for each length 1 to 9

the check and see if they are in a dictionary

this only 623,529*(3ish) operations.
I'm much, much more concerned about the memory usage of JRuby than the startup times. For toss-off scripts I can keep using MRI.

I've read that JRuby memory usage scales better than MRI though, so you pay a higher cost upfront but can actually accommodate more workers on the same hardware. I haven't gotten far enough in my exploration of JRuby to see if this is the case in my own apps.

Hats off to all the devs working on bringing us a better Ruby runtime. I realize it's a lot of work.
5 minutes with the chief architect of OpenStack
Ask HN: best mobile broadband or tethering?
as usual, you guys are smart and know your stuff, so i trust your opinions. i've gone looking for current info on this, but have come up short.

i'm looking for the best available mobile broadband or smartphone with tethering (or any other viable option). i'm looking at the possibility of doing 8 hours of work a day while on the road, so something with a 5mb cap + $1/mb overage is right out. i'm also able to wait if something shiny is coming out in the near future.

anyone have any thoughts or experiences? i'm willing to consider most things, including something more expensive for better quality.
this is nonsense. the numbers and starting points are completely arbitary. Every business is different, every founder will have different skills and contribute in varying ways and to differing degrees.
If you were feeling bold you could create a demo site that displayed stats of the app itself!
QED: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1528019
Finally! Maybe this will force ISPs to raise the bandwidth cap.
The value of a printer is easy to understand. The value of a programmer with no portfolio is not.
No that's not powerful imagery.

"Some portion of the people living in the US can hold one". Yeah I know, 184 million out of ~300 million people.

You either reduce it to a value where you say, "one half quart per person" or you get out. Don't sub divide saying "the most populous states ...". You want to try and hook the 184 million gallons (a big number we have no concept of) to another big thing we MIGHT have a better concept of. Not a partial bit of it.
"Actually, if you wanted continued work, you'd pay for it. You get only one free job, which should be limited in scope. If you want more work, you won't get it for free, and that's reason enough for any freelancer to keep working with you."

If you are working on a free project for me and you get a couple of paid projects (they are paying you), my project will most likely get put on the back-burner. Even if the freelancer knows they won't get any more work from me, projects that pay the bills now are more important.
The sad reality of trying to win the debate about any dichotomy (such as typing) in computer science is that turns out mostly to be religious bantering of personal experiences rather than clear arguments with verifiable claims. Which always end with people covered in shit.

For instance, we can say dynamic typing makes huge productivity wins. Ok, but that is only a short-term win; what about supporting an application that needs re-factoring due to a marketing fuck up. Well, maybe we don't care about dynamic languages and uses the reverse. static typing wins in long term support. Ok, well you work at a start-up that may not exist in a month, it is better to get the product out early so the marketing and business fuckups can be found early.

Long story short: both static and dynmaic typing suck.
Tail recursion means that there's nothing in the continuation of the recursive call besides a return from the outer call.

This means that a compiler can optimize away the saving of a new stack frame for a recursive call, because the old stack frame of the enclosing call will never be used again. That's tail-call optimization.

If there's stuff in between the return from the recursive call and the return from the enclosing call (like the multiply in this factorial example) then the old stack frame will have to be kept around which means you must use unoptimized recursive calls.
Node-inspector - NodeJS debugger extension for Google Chrome
Great, now how about an article that is based on going in the other direction... technical founder has an idea and has it X% implemented ( where X can be 0-whatever) and is seeking a non-technical co-founder to focus on sales/marketing/bizdev/etc?
This would be absolutely huge if you integrated with other affiliate networks(especially Linktrust and DirectTrack API).
I know a lot of affiliates who would pay good money to have all of their stats in one place. Your major competitor would be statsjunky.com, which is an expensive desktop based crap tool.
Yes I do. The question is where you draw the line. Once you admit that there are professions where certification / professional associations with legal rights to enforce entry to the profession / licensing etc. are needed or at least a less bad solution than the alternatives, the discussion will degenerate into everybody falling over each other to have their professions declared 'difficult' or 'a risk to public health'.

Of course I choose the florist and the doctor because they're two ends on the spectrum, but where do you draw the line?

Case in point: jacuzzi salesman. Doesn't sound like much of a problem, does it? Couple of years ago there was a show or trade fair of some sort around here where a jacuzzi salesman failed to disinfect the water in his sample jacuzzi. Salmonella developed in it, people walked by (thousands of them) and 10 or so died. Could this have been prevented with a licensing mechanism for jacuzzi salesmen? Probably. Is jacuzzi salesman a bigger health risk than florists? I don't know. Once a florist screws up and sells a flower with a fungus on it or whatever that they could've recognized, there will be calls for 'professional standards' and what not.

Because of this slippery slope, I oppose all forms of registration. But yeah that probably means that there'll be some quacks who call themselves medical professionals. It'll be up to the patient to check if a hospital employs doctors who didn't go to medical school, or the mortality stats of a certain hospital. Let organizations like Consumer Reports find out who are trust-worthy and who aren't. I don't consider that a government job, let alone a job that we can reasonably expect the profession to self-regulate.
Why Developers Should Run for Congress
Data doesn't have the same protection as forms of expression do.

Copyright doesn't apply in the same way, educate yourself a bit before trying too hard; you may find out you're not going to be able to do what you want to do:

http://www.pddoc.com/copyright/compilation.htm

http://www.bitlaw.com/copyright/database.html

http://www.bitlaw.com/copyright/obtaining.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_copyright_law#Com...
Google Code Playground
Opportunity today to pitch to investors fr @InLabVentures & @TechCoastAngels
Should I risk the fine and travel first class?
Brendan Eich - A Brief History of JS
I'm not sure your standards for success are the same as the writer though. You need a home run idea to hit a home run.
(FYI: HN's forum software is open-source: http://arclanguage.org/)
Offer your help to non-profits instead. They can give you tax credits for it. So even if they don't pay you cash you can pay less income tax at the end of the year.
Dual SIM adapter hack
Would it be safe to assume, that while you're dealing with some large files you're not typically streaming movies (no Netflix, Hulu etc by maybe some YouTube clips etc) or BitTorrent?
I'm not very familiar with Camlp4. I tried skimming the tutorial to see if some of the big benefits of Perl 6's syntactic extension are there, but couldn't tell.

Are Camlp4 extensions lexical? Can you load some syntactic extension within a single function and have it apply within only that function's lexical scope?

If I understand Camlp4 correctly, it's essentially a pre-processor. It's a very powerful pre-processor, perhaps, but you'd probably have to work very deep magic to be able to replace the Ocaml parser for a lexical scope. This is not yet implemented, but eventually you'll be able to do 'supersede slang MAIN { ... }' and rewrite the grammar the current lexical scope.

How easy is it to use Camlp4 extensions from OCaml programs? In Perl 6, it's a simple matter of "use SomeModule;".

Here's the code of a module to provide a factorial operator.

module Factorial;

multi sub postfix:<!>(Mu $n) is export {
[*] 1..$n;
}

And an example of using it:

use Factorial;
say 5!; # outputs 120

This is actually essentially how many of the built-in operators are provided in Rakudo. The ones that aren't provided in this way are the ones like || and && with short-circuiting semantics which need to be evaluated specially and the ones that are better implemented in PIR.

I'm afraid I don't have any examples of more extensive grammar modifications, as Rakudo doesn't have much support for them yet. More accurately, it doesn't have support for adding them in mid-parse yet; it's fairly simple to create a new grammar class deriving from Rakudo's Perl6::Grammar with a few modifications and parse files with it.
Can't go wrong with Evil Dead and Morrissey.
The guy who builds - he gets half, minimum.
This is sorta halfway there, maybe a better analogy would be "the amount of milk america drinks in two weeks"? Although it doesn't sound particularly severe.

avg american drinks 25 gallons of milk a year, an avg household of 2.59 people, 184 million gallons oil, and ~population of 307 million. (307,006,550 people) / (184 million gallons / ((25 gallons / (52 weeks)) * 2.59 people)) = ~2 weeks
A phrase with the words sledgehammer and nut comes to mind.

Obviously somebody was a naughty boy, but what about the other users of the server?
I remember reading somewhere that the reason they called the company Netflix (and not something like, say, Mailflix) was that the distribution model was always intended to be flexible.
They should tape a sample tea bag to the bottom.
I agree that this is a great method for your work to get a lot of exposure, to help out a lot of people, and add something cool to both your profile and resume. It has a lot more potential than doing one free job for a company. You should really look into this.
Death and Facebook, revisited
On the JVM, wouldn't * be an operator rather than a function? Would it even make a difference?
A legend and a hero.
Don't you want some cookies besides the milk?
If you're only using an IoC container for wiring up some singletons that the main app knows about... I suppose he has a point. For most applications that I work on that would never fly, I rely heavily on the lifetime/scoping abilities of my DI framework (Autofac).
Reminds me a bit of metricly.com.

Any plans to include Google AdSense stats?
Create a mobile version of your website using CSS3 media queries
I don't see any problems having contracts which do not enable any compensation for the party doing something. And even many FOSS projects want copyright waivers (I think that's the term) for any patches they receive.
Stack Overflow's "Food and Cooking" site is in public beta
I know from experience that some jailbroken apps cause the device to run at a hotter temp.
Entrepreneurs, teams and primordial joy
The fact that Coke have taken on an ethically-conscious company isn't going to directly impact on the way the public views Coke. I think, these days, the majority of people are too sophisticated for that kind of simple brand-arithmetic.

A battle with a larger corporation over marketing just makes Honest Tea seem more honest, and as the concept of 'honesty' is one its main marketing pillars, the spat could possibly lead to more profit (for both companies) as a result.

Even if this story doesn't involve a strategic decision, there could be a positive pay-off for both.
Yeah, it would be a lot cooler to go into space...
There is one high profile illegal hotelier in NYC who is probably solely responsible for all the media attention and ruining it for everyone else: Hotel Toshi. He's a wannabe actor who was the asian chippendale gag on Conan a few years back. The guy even advertises for cleaning staff and has his own vans and trucks painted with his logo. I found AirBNB unusable in NYC because half the listings were from Hotel Toshi.

http://ny.curbed.com/tags/hotel-toshi

http://www.airbnb.com/users/rentals/8194

http://www.myspace.com/toshifilms
"Hotel Toshi" in NYC does exactly this. The fact that the guy is operating somewhat high-profile and attracting attention to himself is probably what brought knowledge of this problem to the NYC media and regulators.

http://ny.curbed.com/tags/hotel-toshi

http://www.airbnb.com/users/rentals/8194

http://www.myspace.com/toshifilms
850,000 people have top secret clearance? It doesn't feel that secret...
The post I responded to said "language" so your comment about CPAN doesn't apply.

On the second part, I did misread the OP as meaning he would return to perl 5 (probably a false mental cache hit, since this is usually the context of such comments). Perl 6 does indeed have a few interesting bits.
Flippa.com Hacked?
Flippa's having a hard time lately. From seller complaints to fraud to hackers, the king of sites for sale seems to be under attack.
Is your argument that he ought to charge nothing because it's too hard to figure out what he's worth? If you're not willing to sort out what you're worth, you're dead in the water from the outset. Don't work for free. It's almost always a disastrous set-up. Your client doesn't have skin in the game. There's an emotional investment that comes with paying for something. It's a demonstration of VALUE. No payment, no value. It's pretty close to that simple.
Why no IronRuby test on Windows? Understand, I'm no fan of M$, but it seems very odd to run the IronRuby test on Mono, then omit running IronRuby on the "native" .NET environment.
The Hidden ‘Inception’ Within Inception
Thx. The tweets will also contain an attribution if the submitter lists a twitter handle in their HN profile.
We absolutely do not all like being called rockstars or ninjas. I do agree that the communities are different but the differences are usually not that important when comparing languages that are very similar, such as Python and Ruby.
iPhone is still basically in a class of its own for UI elegance and consistency but compared to the typical third party enhanced Android experience WM7 is looking pretty good in my opinion. At least it's consistent.
Here's how I would sell it to Coke.

"You guys have a large financial incentive to believe that HFCS is no different than sugar. Maybe it isn't. I'm obviously skeptical, but that doesn't matter.

What does matter is that a large and growing segment of the population does believe HFCS is bad for you and doesn't want to drink it. Chains like Whole Foods won't even carry your products because of it.

You invested in Honest Tea because we were eating your lunch in the iced tea and kids juice markets. We have competitors who are doing the same. You have your own iced tea and juice brands, and part of the reason some people choose ours over your older ones is the belief that HFCS is bad for you.

So even if HFCS is no different than sugar, as long as people think it is, that's going to remain a key reason why people buy products. Studies keep coming out and getting highly publicized saying it's bad for you. You can refute it all you want, but to the believers you just look like cigarette companies who say that smoking doesn't cause cancer.

So you have two choices. You can tilt against windmills and keep arguing HFCS is no different than sugar, which might even be true, but it won't matter because people will buy products that don't have it more and more over the coming years while our competitors eat our lunch. Or you can eat your own lunch.

What did Apple do when they realized that one day iPods would be obsolete because phones would play mp3s? They built a phone that played mp3s better than the rest. That's what you need to do.

And note that Apple is still selling more mp3 players than anyone too. So keep making your Hi-C with HFCS for the people who don't care, and let us monetize the people who do care for you. Someone's going to eat that portion of your lunch, it might as well be you."
i don't think i'd be doing anything particularly bandwidth-intensive (if i would, i'd hit up a wifi hotspot). most potentially troublesome task would be remote desktop.
I don't think this is the same thing. You're conflating a bureaucracy and expenditure problem with the CIA. I mean it's hard to say which one is the bigger problem, but they're very clearly 2 different issues.

The problem with pointed out by the article is that there's a closed community within the security apparatus that has grown so big and extensive that it's difficult for the government to control, and could give us a situation where the tail wags the dog. Greater transparency there could be helpful.

On the other hand I don't see how the CIA could work without secrecy. It's nuts.
"This is exactly the kind of thing a business guy would use..."

Thanks for your comment. I didn't mean for this to come across that way. I wrote this is because I keep seeing technical cofounders getting the shortchanged on equity, and I want them to know should get more. And I want non-technical cofounders to know that they should expect to give the technical cofounder a larger % equity than they often expect (unless they've really got a lot to offer).

Here's a scenario I see a lot: a non-technical cofounder has just received their MBA, they have no startup or industry experience, they have no prototype, they want a "code monkey" like YuriNiyazov says in another comment to build their product for them, they offer them 5% equity with no salary. For some reason, I keep seeing developers take them up on their offer! Under this scenario, I'm saying a developer should get 50% of the company because the non-technical founder is probably ok (maybe not great) and hasn't contributed a lot to the business yet.
Too bad there's no MacRuby, which is probably the fastest ruby interpreter (though it only runs on OS X).
Dealing with dependencies is almost always the toughest part of making code modular. This seems to be good advice for a small, simple app. But as your code gets more complex, you need a strategy for dealing with dependencies somehow. I'm not saying that needs to be a DI framework of course. But I start to appreciate them more and more as my codebase grows.
One way that would make that particular example clearer is to convert the multiplication from an infix operation to a function call:

return n == 0 ? 1 : n * fac(n -1);

becomes

return n == 0 ? 1 : multiply(n, fac(n -1);

This makes it a fair bit clearer, IMO.
No. The very last instruction of tail recursion (on the recursive branch, not the base case of course) should be directly returning the return value of the recursively called function. Otherwise, you cannot overwrite the stack frame (in other words, you need to remember the values of temporary variables of previous iterations).
Me too. Go Ooshma!
Nope, Ytterboe isn't swedish. "Person living in Ytterby" is "Ytterbybo", which is close but not quite the same.
I think it is with all the resources we blow so carelessly; plus they have been around for the past 20 years. The guy listed is not the inventor and it would be greta if journalists would do their homework-rewriting history is too easily done.
Indeed. No doubt the massive Coca Cola marketing team is salivating at the thought of spinning this.
No problem. The air travel sector is quite complex, so I understand the confusion. I interned at ITA for a summer a few years ago, so I have a little first hand experience with it.
Isn't the computing power on the ISS almost purely made up of Thinkpad laptops running Windows? Will they be running PostgreSQL and Nagios on a Windows machine?
Whale Watching in Bloody Waters