skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Similar to mensamember on here, I'm also a member, or was, as I didn't renew. 20 years ago it might have helped me in social ways. As of now, it doesn't really provide any substantive benefits.

Unlike jeb and mensamember, I have it listed on my resume, at the bottom, in 'other', along with toastmasters experience, some public speaking activities, and other misc stuff. For me it wasn't so much wanting to 'brag' about it, but it felt like another facet of who I am (albeit a very minor one). It's also meant as an indicator that, objectively, there's a certain amount of quantifiable innate talent/skill I possess which can be harnessed for problems.

Specifically in the resume/job context, whether or not I completely understand the industry you're working in (perhaps I have no direct industry experience), ideally the Mensa qualification should indicate that I have the capacity to get up to speed quickly on the new industry and other facets of your company/business. If someone is that offended by me stating something like that about myself, they wouldn't like working with me anyway. I wrote a bit more about it here: http://michaelkimsal.com/blog/mensa-on-my-mind-and-resume/

All that said, I'm really not convinced that one can 'cram' or 'study' or 'game' the IQ tests all that much. I qualified for Mensa a few years back, but used tests scores from the 80s. A couple years ago I took some IQ tests (friend's wife needed to administer IQ tests to adults, and had a hard time finding volunteers). These tests were completely different instruments, administered by different people over 20 years ago, and statistically they put my 'intelligence' in pretty much the same spot. Not much had changed over 20 years. The tests seem to test something deeper than things you can 'train' for. If you took the same test multiple times, perhaps you'd get a better score, but that's not an accurate indicator then, is it?
A simple mark & sweep or stop & copy GC. Collectors which are incremental (work in small steps, not one full pass at a time) and/or generational (using several smaller generations, which are collected individually) break up GC pauses into something less disruptive.

For a good overview, read "Uniprocessor Garbage Collection Techniques" by Paul Wilson (check google scholar). Richard Jones's _Garbage Collection: Algorithms for Automatic Dynamic Memory Management_ is more in depth.
Ah, but what, you're using both managed code (C#) and unmanaged code (C++) in the same address space, doing memory intensive work using third party proprietary C++ code that does lots of small allocations?

In 32-bit land, it's welcome to OutOfMemoryException because managed code can't allocate a big enough chunk when returning to C#.

No free lunch :)

Either recycle processes often or reserve big enough contiguous chunks in managed code before calling out to the bad C++ code, no amount of good citizenship in managed code will stop the poorly written native code from fragmenting the hell out of your address space.
> people here WANT to see Y Combinator start-ups do well.

Sure, but being here and not being Y combinator funded should not translate in to a disadvantage either. After all, bootstrapping is a lot harder than getting VC money and some names behind you for equity, once your idea is out in the open the least you could ask for is a level playing field in terms of coverage. It's not like a posting about other start-ups would cost TC traffic.

In this case it almost seems like they delayed mentioning paraschopras offering until the YC combinator venture went live.
> In my opinion, the biggest problem with the google-style interview (other companies do the same thing) is that you can practice and get better at it. In fact, you can probably improve how well you do so much that even a mediocre developer can come out looking very good.

While this is true, isn't quite unlikely? Why not just invest the time into becoming a /good/ developer.

>"How can you detect loops in a singly-linked list without modifying nodes / keeping accounting information around?"

What do you mean by "accounting" information?

In the real-world I'd probably just brute-force it and keep around a set of elements already gone over. However I couldn't imagine ever having a need for that as I'd (and hopefully anyone I was working with) stick to the standard push_back functions available or that I created. So it shouldn't come about...

I feel I've missed something here, so care to elaborate on the answer?
Summary + Opinion :

Mark Suster, the prominent VC writes a highly supported (by Brad Feld, Fred Wilson etc.) article about the current status of his industry.

During their lost decade —since the 2001 bubble— they have realized startups need significantly less investment than before. That’s right, this is the 37 Signal way with no investment at all.

Since there is no need anymore for money to start up many investors will close their business. For the others there is one card left: scalability.

They think a business to become mature, to serve millions needs heavy investment. They only forget 37 Signals has over 3 million customers paying an average $50 monthly fee without any investment, with less than 20 employees and no offices at all.

Don’t repeat yourself and Less is more — staying lean — are amongst the basic principles of scalability.

Their only hope, the Fat model resembles ironically Clay Shirky’s, their mentors principle:

“Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution.”

The complete article is at http://metaman.tumblr.com/post/819220481/the-current-state-o...
Much of that gap is, DoD spending and interest on debt. However, per person Canada spends about the same money on universal heath care as we do to cover 50% of heath care spending. Much of that relates to malpractice insurance, the overhead from private insurance/medical billing, and higher doctor salaries. But, we also pay a lot more for the same medications/medical devices etc.

So, looking at our "overhead" it's easy to see why we get little benefit from the money spent.
10 ways curated app stores undermine developers
The problem with that might be that copper normally doesn’t get near an iPhone. The results wouldn’t matter. (Beyond determining whether the steel is insulated or not. And we already know that.)
Big O only says something about n = Infinite. But n is never infinite in computer programs.

Big O is a tool for making estimates, and like all other (such) tools, you have to know its limitations to use it properly.
How do you control for race? My grandmother is Mexican. My grandfather is German. What "race" is my mom? What about me?
16 Most Unbelievable School Pranks Ever Committed  
Check out this list of the 16 Most Unbelievable School Pranks Ever Committed and prepare to be amazed. Creative, clever, and unexpected, some school pranks stand the test of time. From Auburn to MIT, the smarter the school…the bigger the prank!
Look For The Simplest Solution
> would that not stifle free speech

No. Free speech is guaranteed, but that does't mean a company has to support and promote your speech on its private platform.

Considering that commenting on stories is only a recent addition. Might be surprised to find out that it was kind of difficult to comment on stories to the public when it was an actual newsPAPER. =)

You still have letters to the editor. You still have options to create a blog and post your thoughts.

> This site has no pay wall, yet the quality of discussion is great.

Yet it can still get pretty heated at times, and the moderation is pretty heavy. Also, the audience it attracts is a certain mindset. Invite the same audience a newspaper gets and it will suddenly get less civil.
Other measures of health care quality, such as infant mortality, are worse in the US...

Nope. The US spends far more on trying to save the lives of premature and sickly newborns than any other country. Many these don;t make it after being born and show up in the stats as "high infant mortality". This approach also drives up health care costs.

One can argue (having met two crack babies that survived, I personally would be tempted to in many cases) that US hospitals shouldn't do this, but nevertheless they do do it. And it costs money and skews statistics.

I also have personally experienced health care in other countries (Greece, Mexico, China -- where my wife was a doctor). No thanks.
Industrial directory launched after 2 decades
I recommend reading Buying a Small Business http://amzn.to/bmRz0T. It is really outdated in terms of the search methods (You can use a computer to do searches for information!) but the fundamentals about evaluating financials and understanding the relationship between buyer and seller haven't changed. One of the most intriguing aspects is for "lifestyle business" owners, your credentials and commitment to growing and protecting the seller's baby is nearly as important as your offer price. Huge caveat is that 99% of Business Brokers are complete morons and terrible to deal with, give them no insight into your liquidity, net worth, etc and stick to the type of business criteria or industry you are interested in.
Essays and Term Papers are admiring to Each Other 
Writing a term paper is a project that takes one whole term whereas an essay is of short duration. Both these carry grade points for your degree. Take them seriously and write good essays and term papers with guidance from termpaperstar.com.
You think most college graduates could get in? Perhaps we went to different colleges... :) I think you're being a bit too generous with the 'most' comment, or you might be biased based on your immediate peer group.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RkQ6XgXeNuY (I can't see the video right now) Yes, they might be cherry picking, and there's no indication all of these people are college graduates, but I suspect some were. One was a college professor.

I think you're in the minority (by definition of being in Mensa, you already are). But just because you aced it doesn't mean that most people - even most college graduates - can. I've worked too long with too many college graduates who struggle with basic concepts to believe that.
You're lucky! I'll never get the same innate ability for problem solving, but what I'm hoping is that it's actually possible to train my brain towards such spontaneity.

E.g., by spending time to solve a lot of challenging puzzles over a long period of time. It's like when you try to remember a shopping list by visualizing the items. After repeating the items enough times, you don't visualize the list anymore; you just know it.
Somehow, I doubt that Murray Gell-Mann, or any Nobel Prize-winning physicist could have been a slouch. Working one's ass off is a given at that level. And yet, even to Gell-Mann, Feynman was impossibly capable of solving difficult problems. Just putting in the hours and effort might be enough to make a great physicist, but it won't guarantee abilities on par with Feynman.
The performance of the JVM is phenomenally good with any modern implementation. The only issue remaining is the relatively poor loading time of the JVM. Hence, short tasks/scripts make little sense to run because the overhead of the startup overshadows the performance of the JVM.

But for long-running applications, the performance is very good, and the time it takes to load doesn't really matter. The startup time mostly effects the programmer, who has to start it up to debug the system so often. Clojure sort of mitigates this by having a REPL where you can do testing/debugging without restarting the JVM every time.
Show HN: HackerNewsers,com, find other hackers near you
There's been lots of discussion recently about finding other HNers to talk to / bounce ideas off / work with, some Google spreadsheets were set up to share details but they were soon vandalised. I had a spare afternoon yesterday (which turned into a long day) and here's the result:

http://www.hackernewsers.com/

It's only open to people with HN accounts, it lets you post your biography, location, skills etc. Anyway, I hope you like it and find it useful.
Brother to replace AA & AAA with shake-to-wake batteries
i think there's likely a minimal activation number where if there aren't enough women in a particular hacker space then the women who do come by don't stick.

as a woman myself, being a 40-yr-old entrepreneur makes sense in a dozen ways. one less important but rather interesting way is that one is more likely to be interacting with 40-yr-old males. i must say that most young men are rather self-minded. male hackers traditionally develop group process and team-supporting after a prolonged technical and super-independence+confidence phase. women tend to develop differently. once everyone matures and self actualizes interaction becomes awesome :-)
Didn't Gell-Mann say that the thing Feynman was truly the best at was inventing anecdotes about himself? You never know that much about other physicists because they generally don't publish multiple volumes of their own memoirs...
The Python Challenge: The first programming riddle on the net
Apart from the hardcore privacy crowd you would think they best way to advertise to these people is through text based targeted advertising. You have a mountain of comment data their to run algorithms across to decide which ads are most effective for each user.
i think that's what the article is trying to say. 22-yr-old women are not going to spend their nights in an underground lab (jesus christ!). a 40-yr-old woman has a different perspective and capability.

X-only in terms of constituents is always dangerous, of course. groups should aim to create a specific culture where Y is not tolerated, but where individuals are free to join the community within the constraints of the culture. eg, hacker news.
An amazing gift from an amazing individual and one of the original hackers.
I have been using JSF 2.0 with Tomcat for some personal projects and it's pretty nice. Using JSF you can quickly prototype things and the EL makes it simple to tie your java code (beans) to the web page (jsp).
With JSF 2.0 the faces-config.xml is gone and you just use annotations which has really simplified the whole JSF experience.

Edit: I should also add that JSF 2.0 makes ajax simple.
"The man who leaves money to charity in his will is only giving away what no longer belongs to him." -Voltaire
async tracking helps if the size of the download is large. In that case, a small stub of js is loaded, execution continues, and the large payload is downloaded async.

But the tracking code is small. It's not going to make much difference at all IMHO (And anecdotally in my experience).

Async vs sync, you're still going to have a DNS lookup, and an initial GET unless it's cached. Both can block your site from loading...
On Failure (Don't be Afraid, but it SUCKS)
To be fair unicode has never been without issues in Perl & Python either! Perl has generally been the best of the three (IMHO) but Python 3.0 & Ruby 1.9 have probably now caught up.
This is brilliant, but I fear it might be really distracting.
Clickable Link:

http://www.hackernewsers.com/
Great work, especially for 1 afternoon/day, and I like the account verification process too - it's quick and effective. Look forward to meeting more HNers via your site!
Where does it say to lower the barrier of entry?
You do the best you can. Perfection is not required.
I've experienced problems with java's concurrent mark and sweep collector. It will stop the world, two times, but two much shorter times than a non-concurrent mark and sweep. So it is definitely an improvement in the duration of the stop-the-world.

The problem tends to be that you need to tune it, and even as you have tuned it, you can not promise that under special condition it will fall back to a more primitive collector since the optimality it was tuned for doesn't hold anymore.

I would never argue giving up garbage collection entirely because of these failure scenarios. I would much rather look at moving some critical part of the code out to a language with manual allocation, and let it perform the latency-sensitive bits.

Another mid-ground is to have separate isolate processes (heaps really) that can be stop-the-world collected without blocking each other. Erlang makes great use of this to accomplish "soft realtime", among other things.
This will sound supremely sexist, but...
I currently work in an office with tons of women. Whenever you read something about gender in the workplace, there is a lot of talk about how women are team-oriented and cooperative. However, in my experience this is not true at all. The women in my office are shockingly mean to each other... not a day goes by without someone sobbing and fleeing to the women's restroom. At companywide events, the talk is always about who did what backstabbing maneuver to whomever else, why this woman doesn't deserve this promotion, i can't believe she wore that to the office, she's probably sleeping with the VP of Sales, etc etc.
Try allocating a very large chunk of memory using a high-level language with garbage collector. It's not always about collection.
(naive) Question: What do web startups need $20mm for? (linked from the article: http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2010/07/some-thoughts-on-the-seed-fu...)

I mean, what can they spend it on? I can think of servers and bandwidth (but they're pretty cheap these days, except for youtube-content intensive), and staff (but what would they do?) and perhaps advertising and publicity in general can absorb as much money as you can throw. I guess a professional sales force would be expensive.
thanks for your comments, hopefully enough people will see this and join so it becomes a useful resource.
Plus, doesn't stacckoverflow run on the microsoft stack?
Ex-Google News, Bing Engineers Set Out To Build ‘Newspaper Of The Future’
if you just look at age demographics of facebook users:

http://www.istrategylabs.com/2009/01/2009-facebook-demograph...

40% of facebook users are 18--24.

now compare to people with iphones in 2009 (different to people who queued, admittedly, got stats on this? but still earlyish adopters since 2009 data)

http://gorumors.com/crunchies/age-demographics-of-iphone-use...

whilst for the iphone, very few are in the 18--24 range: just 13%. most people are 35-54.

it seems from this 2009 users of the iphone tend to be older than users of facebook. perhaps because the iphone is an expensive device.
The article raises many more questions than it answers. Though I guess that's the idea.

Anyone want to write a book?
Know Your Meme: You Dun Goofed
That was Andrew Carnegie's goal. Way before becoming rich he had a goal to give away mass sums of money. He wrote about his philanthropic philosophy in The Gospel of Wealth, summarized here:
http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/1889carnegie.html
No custom server support that I can see, alas.
Money and Monopoly is why.
Australia has too little competition between big providers of anything and by laying out a 100MB/sec network they want to make sure that they stay in vision to provide the 1GB/sec network next (in ten years or so) while milking the users of said 100MB/sec network.
Just business.
BTW, do you have plans to integrate some geocoding/geonames capability? And how about having a map overview like,

http://djangopeople.net/
Servers are not as cheap as everyone says. You need the staff to keep the servers working.
spend $500 million for something worth $150 million - and make money on volume, I guess ;-)
So did 9/11, for that matter, which probably outranks the BP thing in many people's minds.
I think that the internet, as you imagine it, is being killed-- but that says more about you, than about the internet.

Your romantic view of the internet is exactly that: a romanticization. It's not the way things are, nor even the way they once were.

I don't want to be too harsh, but it's really hard for me to read things like "no longer does one need to be rich to read of so much history, ancient philosophy, or other books. No longer is knowledge the prerogative of those born in a wealthy family. Nor does one need to be near a library and be charged constantly for being overdue."

Overdue charges? That's your complaint?

Information wants to be free, yes; but it also wants to be expensive. Don't forget that part.

I'm not less resistant to paywalls than I was was a while ago; I've spent my whole life paying for information, in the form of books, newspapers, classes, etc. And even that information which I've gotten "for free", via broadcast television or public libraries, I've paid for via advertising or taxes. And if I haven't paid for it, someone else has.

And, by the way, you ought to make up your mind: are you against regulation, or against the freedom that is allowing bigger players to eat up smaller ones and create oligarchies?
This should have been a blog post somewhere with some concrete examples of what you mean. There is always an impulse to orderliness in human affairs and the Net is no exception to that. I'm sure the rulers hate things like Wikileaks, but that's the price they pay for trying to hide things the public should know. I'm sure some sites hate 4chan, but that's the price of freedom. It's all or nothing. Companies can try to throttle bandwidth, they can place caps, they can throw in filters, the can block IP addresses. But the Internet mimics nature, not corporate orderliness, and nature always wins. I'll bet on the net every time.
Until there's a single, stable, not-on-the-way-to-be-obsoleted version of D, with standard standard library, I'm not inclined to invest too much time in it.

I wish that D1 was oficially killed, and a stable strict subset of D2 ("D1.5") was chosen as a recommended future-proof version.
> And for application-level programming, why would you chose a language without a garbage-collector?

Because your code uses some finite resources other than memory, and you don't want the ability to forget to release said resources when you're done with them and they go out of scope.
iPhone4 Pulled from Apple Stores?
I can appreciate that. I think we've all accidentally made something public at least once. I'm running Firefox 3.6.6 on Windows XP.
This guy needs to get a native speaker to proofread his writing for him.
I'm all for affirmative action where it's done carefully but I think in this case, it should be more about encouraging and highlighting women in tech. Women need role models in tech and a lot of women would probably flourish more easily working with other women in tech. Although you can be gender-blind to a certain extent, you do know if the person you're working with is a man or a woman and you have cultural stereotypes to uncondition yourself from.

However, I don't believe forcing a mono-gendered environment is going to help narrow the gap between male & female techies and may just widen it instead.

It also sounds like they're tackling problems traditionally associated with women, i.e. family responsibilities. Why assume this is a woman's problem in the first place? Even if the majority of women are primarily responsible for the family, sticking with that premise will only further that view and excludes men who are responsible primarily for the family.
Maslow’s Pyramid Gets a Makeover
The map on the home page shows all the registered users, currently just the two of us lol, it groups them in to hot spots, but it's hard to see until there's more users.
The registration form is geocoded, it just wasn't working correctly, fixed now.