skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Actually, it's not meant for making estimates, it's meant to compare algorithms. You can't look at a single quadratic algorithm and try to estimate how long it will take to run on a certain input and certain hardware. That would be pointless, because any quadratic algorithm would result in exactly the same estimate.
That's a reason why the Semantic Web won't wake up and become conscious, like many bad sci-fi stories.

However, if you think of it "vocabularies for people to tag their own stuff in a structured way", which Google can then index and traverse, then it's more realistic.

That said, the Semantic Web people are indeed guilty of hyping this technology as being able to "reason" on its own.
Can somebody explain why these unilateral Big Brother actions always seem to originate from or be attached to the state of New York or jurisdictions within New York?
This is the reality all technical founders I've met want to be true: If you build a good enough product, competition or not, existing market or not, people will come to you.

I also know plenty of people who are cynical about that reality. So, what's going on? Is it just a matter of how good the product is? It can't just be great, it needs to be amazing?
I don't think it can just be the iPhones fault. Reception in the US seems really sketchy overall. Whatever phone you have (Just my experience).

I just tried holding my Nexus One (UK) in different ways. I was able to squeeze it from 4 bars down to 3, but nothing else :/
That explanation is not right either (at least I don't find it intuitive). It's not about the size of n at all, but about how the running time changes when n changes.
It's still information. Interpret it how you choose.
How would you pronounce it?-couldn't find anything on their site. I could only think of one way to make the name fit into these syllable structures, but glottal stop is missing from its inventory. No diphthongs either! That's odd. How does the robot explain what it's speaking?
This web page is in contravention of Section 508 (29 USC § 794d). It's just an image with no alt-text. Here's the markup:

<html>
<body>
<center><img src="SiteSeizedNOTICE.JPG"></center>
</body>
</html>
Good post but #2 is probably far from the average. A lot of people don't read/watch the news anymore and if they do, they usually watch it on one channel at night. I find it rare for people to do something as simple as use google news or other aggregators. And even if you were to read multiple papers, the Times does get reprinted a lot, so does Reuters and AP, Knight Rider stories etc. The newspaper industry is about as consolidated as the search business. There not that many conglomerates in news and independent newspapers are rare.
Jobs Antennagate Presentation
Useless? I use both of those apps daily.
videos: death grip on EVO, Droid Incredible, Nexus One, Galaxy 1, G1, etc.

* Samsung I9000 Galaxy S: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LROTHrTR92k

* HTC Evo Signal Attenuation: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2pj2YBYTbag

* Samsung Galaxy 1:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=

* Samsung Galaxy 2:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oPCQdYtPihg

* Droid Incredible: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eaDE941PzQk

* Droid Incredible (With Network Extender in Room): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VpEQH9_A5jw&feature=relat...

* Nexus One: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qEIA_lMwqJA

* Nexus One vs. iPhone (start at 1:29): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NvMoV4_C4aA

* Nexus One: http://posterous.com/getfile/files.p...n_-_iPhone.m4v

* Nexus One (after Google's update to correct): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x2g5J4qPp54

* Nexus One: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=deCkjeHYT-g

* Android G1: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3CDaxhjUs9M

* "Major signal degradation when Nexus One is picked up" (N1 Thread on On this Problem): http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/android/thread?tid=34a...
I have no idea what you mean by this. Twitter is not trying to become a database or Wikipedia. Tweets are short communications and signalling, which they want to enrich with more data for specialized applications.
Surely the solution though is to improve signal strength everywhere so it isn't an issue. Other (admittedly smaller) countries don't have any issues with cellphone coverage.
But in a society where women are so valuable that they need to be shared, what's the incentive for female infanticide?

Is it possible that many of the women disappeared into harems of the nobility?
Technically, you can't ever guarantee that you'll avoid the worst case of quicksort. All the techniques to make it nlogn are probabilistic, and you can always engineer a pathogenic input that will make quicksort run quadratic. Mathematically this is expected, but I'm not disagreeing that quicksort is in practice even faster than the true nlogn comparison sorts.

I don't consider this a limitation of big O notation at all, but rather a common misconception among students when they first learn about the notation.
Almost certainly not. You will often find reference to papers by authors not listed in Wikipedia and not notable enough to be listed.
Sounds good in theory, but how would a newly-degreed person without any capital start a business?
Hands on, yes. But "notable"? It's really a fuzzy criteria.
I mean would you still know Gates for MS Basic if he didn't succeed with Microsoft?
Download free Nokia software
If the intent is for a universal language that can overcome language translation issues then I think the main concern should be building an interpreter that is capable of parsing numerous real spoken languages. Or, perhaps, as the rest of the world has been doing for years with international interfaces-- use English.
The hairy state of Linux filesystems
No. There is currently a 2 to 3 week backlog at all NYC apple stores.
The Eminem Band-Aid For iPhone 4
And Vala. How could I forget Vala?
"Not timeable" isn't entirely accurate. There are still ways to make use of timing information; they are just not this particular textbook example.
A Field Trip to an Apple Lab
Perhaps the fix is to comment it out and explain why. ;)
The women are valuable to grown men, they're not valuable to the parents that have to raise them. That's where the infanticide comes from.
Everyone knows who the bad teachers are, but it is a bureaucratic nightmare to do anything about it.

This is one where parents can have an impact. As in most areas, the local school system here has a school that's in a "white collar" area and the students do well on standardized tests. Another school in the same system is in a more rural area and the students overall do not do as well on the standardized tests.

Talking to some teachers who know, one big difference is that in the white collar area, the parents pay attention to what's going on in the classroom. If they think a teacher is slacking, they are calling the principal, the school board, and the superintendent until something is done. In the more rural school, few parents really challenge the administration to address issues in the classroom.
Ask HN: Socially very rusty .. how to fix things ?
Hello HN'ers,

Recently I realized that during the past couple of years, due to various reasons (working a lot/ working remotely/working at places where I hated my job and was perenially bored/didn't want to talk to co-workers most of the time, etc,) I didn't have much face-to-face human interaction. Also, due to being very unhappy at work, I didn't feel like doing anything and that affected my personal life leading to little social interaction there. As a result, I have lost almost all my social skills.

Now, I find myself in a position where I am hesitant to talk to people and am afraid of social situations. This creates a vicious cycle where I don't get out much, which only serves to make the situation worse.

Have you been in a similar situation ? How did you get out of it ? Any advice for me ? How can I get a normal social life ?

Many thanks!
I noticed just now that my iOS 4.0.0 3G was at 4 bars. Lifting it slightly, I got up to 5. Holding the base, sandwiched between both hands, I managed to push it down to 2 bars (you have to wait for a bit, there seems to be a delay of five to twenty seconds between each step).

However, I have to wonder at this PR, changing the discussion from whether it is unusual to dropbars from how the phone is held, from whether it is unusually easy to miss-hold the iPhone 4.
The point the book makes is that as we transferred from foraging to farming the entire dynamic shifted. As hunter-gatherers there was not competition for resources and it didn't matter who the genetic father of a child was. In most foraging societies today people don't care about paternity and treat all the children in the village as their own. In several Amazonian tribes they believe that children are made from an accumulation of semen in the mother and husbands often offer their wives to other people in the village.

The shift to farming meant that population density increased and competition for goods meant that wealth began to concentrate. With that there was a reason to ensure paternity. So yes we made a shift, but looking at our existence for the majority of the time that we've existed as a species we can see why we have always had a very tough time with monogamy.

Also, the idea that women have little desire to have multiple husbands is not true at all. Women are just as promiscuous as men are and when given the freedom are more than willing. Again, I highly recommend Sex at Dawn because the views that you're expressing are the exact ones that it addresses point by point.
Hmmm. Someone needs to let them know that computers these days have higher resolution than VGA. MY PHONE has higher resolution than VGA!!!
Just started to at WePay, and it has changed my world.

Especially good for big press and turning certain ads (fb and google) on and off.
Abosolutely. If kids cannot read, write, analyze problems, do basic math.... computers are a waste of money and a distraction from more fundamental concerns.
Put a Plug on Your Prius (and get 100+ MPG)
You might love your Prius, but you might love it just a little bit more if you could plug it into an outlet and it got 100 MPG. Enter Green Gears, a garage in San Francisco run by Pat Cadam, which for several thousand dollars can convert a second-generation Prius into a plug-in (and much more efficient) hybrid.
Depends on the rest of the strcmp implementation. You might still leak information such as the number of correct characters if responding to a correct character takes a different amount of time than responding to an incorrect character. Ever played Mastermind? Same theory here.

Your best bet is to generate a huge body of inputs (including the relevant special cases), and tweak the code until it takes the same amount of time for all of them.
This really brings up a question that has been bugging me for years. Why must aren't HS (and below, really) schedules more college-like? Instead of 1hr of a subject every day for 5 days, couldn't they do 2.5hrs of a subject twice a week? This would allow teachers to teach their preferred subject in multiple schools within the district. The current schedule just strikes me as inefficient; it forces teachers into picking up subjects they are not specialized in.
And even more so, with people potentially sitting right next to each other on services like AWS, RackSpace, etc.
At the last startup I worked at we had a movie night where we watched this. A non-programmer PM was, at the time, pressuring us to hire more developers by loosening our standards to get more bodies working on features. There's a great line in the movie where one of the managers basically says the product isn't coming along because it's not like they have a bunch of genius programmers to work with. I shot over a smirk to the PM after this line and I didn't hear too many more about hiring low skill in bulk.
So if this not just FUD. I wonder why all these companies obviously put the antenna in the wrong place. If your hand affects the signal strength through the case, you shouldn't put the antenna at the bottom of the phone, because that is where you hold it.

Also: "bars" is not a scientific unit.
Thanks! It only has a couple of hundred hits per day, and it is an astrology site, so I am not sure if it is worth your personal attention :-) Although of course it would be great. Also of course I'd be glad to be of assistance to Google in case I can help to improve the algorithm :-)

I know it is an uphill struggle for Google against all the spammers and I am sure Google is trying to rank the best sites as the highest ones. It just gets frustrating at times.

The site is http://mondhandy.de - page 6 for the keyword "mondkalender" (it is also German). Some of the sites before it are fair, but I think it is obvious that there are many that are worse than my site. For example, some are just sites where you can order a book about the moon calendar.

I think I did most of the "on site" improvements, but I don't have many inbound links, and the domain name is weird.

I plan to move to http://mondkalender.us soon, hoping that I won't be punished too much for running a German site on a .us domain. Also finally want to launch an English language version (although I think the topic is not popular outside of Germany).

Also plan to improve the widget - just wondering, do iframes also count as inbound links? That was my secret master plan to generate links, to make lots of blogs include my widget. The widget really needs improving, though.

Once I entered the site in some catalogs. A while later I noticed the ranking had really tanked. I guess that was a big mistake. I tried to remove it, but it wasn't possible for all of them. On the other hand it seems it shouldn't be too bad, otherwise it could be used to damage the competition (enter them into catalogs, too).

Anyway, I plan to give the site one last push, so that I can say I have tried what I could. Also planning on an Android and an iPhone app, so that I have everything covered. Suggestions are of course very welcome.
Also, blind people exist.
> * a small web app with Compojure

perhaps s/Compojure/Ring/ - looking at how the request response cycle works in ring and how you can write raw handlers, or dispatch via compojure or moustache or aleph etc.
This violates all concepts of the FREE Internet.
Yes. Absolutely correct. I worked at a semweb company for years, it's all about making a small functional ontology for a particular purpose.

Of course, that leads to the question : is that ontology actually relevant or is it just important that the data is structured?
I really wish people like this would stop calling themselves journalists. While he had a glimpse at the early stage stuff, it's not a finished product and I really wish he put together something well written instead of this hack piece aimed at grabbing headlines. He has some good points, but wrapped around the rest of what he says makes the whole article a useless exercise.
Glass Microbiology
I'm not a lawyer but, there is probably favorable case law in NY State on the issue.
This is false. Quicksort can be made worst case O(n lg n) with linear time selection and pivoting around the median:

http://www.cs.princeton.edu/~wayne/cs423/lectures/selection-...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selection_algorithm#Linear_gene...
http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/electrical-engineering-and-comput...
Ask HN: B2B Opportunities?
I had a thread a while back where I brain dumped all of my current ideas. I'm hoping good karma from that will come back around and help me out now :)

In my braindump, I had a few B2B ideas but for some reason my brain seems focused on B2C or just "content" plays.

I need to start thinking in a B2B direction, but I work from home, and between that, raising my son, staying in shape at the gym, I feel slightly removed from the business world right now and am having a hard time kick-starting the brainstorming juices.

So, I'll toss this out there - I guess I'll get ignored or downvoted - do you have any B2B ideas/opportunities you'd like to share?
Yes! You put it very well. I've felt this for a while but not been able to get it down like you have.

I'm usually on the "cutting edge" when it comes to things online, new technology, apps, and so forth, but no "personalized news" service has ever stuck with me. It "feels" wrong and I can't put my finger on why. I prefer to just subscribe to a handful of trusted sources and let a human (or many humans, in the case of HN or Reddit) curate what I'll be seeing.

I believe, however, that better querying is going to become a big deal and could become a good way to have "personalized" news but without all of the AI and guessing games that seem to take place with clever new personalized news services.
Ask HN: To launch or not to launch
I've been working on a B2B SaaS billing site for almost a year now, we never officially "launched" it - but signup has always been open to South Africans only. With just local users the business model has already proved profitable.

The question I'm stuck with now, is do we launch it internationally as soon as possible (after a couple days work with timezones and currencies) or do I wait till we're better equipped to deal with the traffic and growth.

1. We're a very small team at the moment, we're trying to hire urgently but unfortunately the task of finding top notch developers locally is more than a little challenging. A big concern is if its popular it is unlikely we'll be able to scale quickly enough (support wise, and service wise) -- our plates are pretty much full as it is.

2. I've been following the "move fast and break things" philosophy. I've achieved very rapid development (I'm the only developer), but it has come at the cost of occasionally broken parts of the site (generally for less than an hour). With < 500 users this hasn't been a problem, but I'm assuming it will be once we've launched internationally. Also 'service standards' in South Africa are far worse than the rest of the world - which means our current users are generally far more forgiving than we expect international users to be.

3. I'd like to wait for the API to be ready (another post on that later). I've been working on an experimental API that I believe is pretty "cool" (you can browse it and test it out with a standard web browser)

Has anyone here ever launched too early and regretted it? Vice versa has anyone wished they launched earlier?
"There are few people over 40 wandering the halls. " -- Oh yeah. I wonder what happens to an engineer at google when he turns 40. Does he go to Valhalla or something?
Germany.

The process is very easy. Just show up, show them your contract or if you do a lot of freelance work, register yourself as a freelancer. The only caveat is you will be required to start German lessons. The wife and kids should be fine also. There is a minimum salary you have to make as well.

Pro Tip: Go to a city where there is a lot of volume in foreign skilled labor such as Dusseldorf. (besides, imho, it's one of the EU's hidden gems)
New Technology Visualizes How Matisse Changed “Bathers”
This might be harder for a B2C company as people won't be in front of computers as frequent, but try to get them logged in on a demo account when you talk to them on the phone.
Nowmov (YC W10) is seeking Rails engineers
HN Yellow pages - followup
Previously on HN: HN yellow pages:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1517198

>On Fri, Jul 16, 2010 at 11:22 PM, Neil <kngspook@gmail.com> wrote:

>Hi,

> First, I want to thank you for coming up with this idea and getting

> the ball rolling on it. And second, I want to thank you for

> switching the HN post's link to the form/appendable version.

> Last, I wanted to ask if you'd consider making the old, publicly-

> editable spreadsheet read-only while we migrate the data from there

> to the new one (which David has generously offered to do over the

> weekend).

>

>Thank you again,

>Neil.

I did not switched the HN post's link to the form, for several reasons that has to do with forking generally being a bad idea, and community freedom for curation / wiki level editing, which you took away.

Someone else, on the other hand, did. And also revoked my ability to edit the article, or any comments I've done there.

The publicly editable spreadsheet currently has 72 entries. Yours have 43. That's the least constraints principle at work.

Based on these datapoints, I will encourage the HN community to submit to the publicly editable spreadsheet ( http://spreadsheets2.google.com/ccc?key=tFgepUuuBHSgfeuKPKccxTA&authkey=CIqAl7wO&hl=en#gid=0 ), and disregard the forks.

The content of this e-mail, and my reply has been submitted to HN for discussion here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1522928 . Should you have any comments, or replies, please do so there.

Regards,
-SDr
The original post to the mailing list mentions the ruby open-id library (along with Java and Python libraries) as being vulnerable.

Checking out the code, it looks like the string comparison at the end of the check_message_signature method will leak timing info (uses rb_str_cmp internally?).

Link:
http://github.com/openid/ruby-openid/blob/master/lib/openid/...

Edit: Was wrong about what could leak.
Many people need to tag text with these "bar codes" (uniquely identified entities).

This sort of thinking seems to be common in people who like the idea of the semantic Web but who are pessimistic about its implementation. I'm not sure it's going to be the case.

As we've seen happen with other technologies, I suspect we'll see a MetaWeb style approach of "deriving the barcodes" from existing and unformatted content. This will not be a 100% accurate process, but will be "good enough" to make the semantic Web a realistic and large scale underpinning to the next generation of search systems.
The Trinity Test: What the First Atomic Bomb Looked Like
True; meters/sec versus feet/sec.
Will the New Perl Development Kit Bring Developers to the New Perl (5.12)?
This is actually quite disturbing, as it seems to ignore due process in every way, shape, and form. (Side rant: I really wish I could figure out how to get the US Government down to about 1/20th its current size.)

It is also seems obvious to me that there will be a solution to this very soon: Underground DNS. Since only the DNS addresses were taken and it was facilitated by ICANN, I can't imagine that somebody else (I could even picture it being the Pirate Bay, once upon a time) saying "I'll play root for the sites that can't trust ICANN anymore."
Nate Lawson debunked this and other arguments in a blog entry linked in the thread:

http://rdist.root.org/2010/01/07/timing-independent-array-co...
I tried this on my 3GS at different places. Some places, the bars dropped from 5 --> 0. Others it went from 5 --> 3. In some other places, it didn't drop at all. It's pretty random, but the effect is certainly repeatable at the same location.
See http://www.antennasys.com/antennasys-blog/2010/6/24/apple-ip...
The music in the video had to be the worst selection of music for a demo video of all time. Note to self. Lay off the beat boxing.
Just as an FYI, an RF anechoic chamber is not the same as an acoustic anechoic chamber. One is designed for free-field testing of RF signals, the other for free-field testing of acoustic signals.
>The company says that...the company or Wilson "surreptitiously hacked into plaintiff’s database with an unauthorized 'administrator' password, extracted confidential materials" and gained access to Think Brilliant's confidential materials.

Sounds like something Mr. Shrute would do. GUILTY!
It's very sad. In fact, the only state in India where there are more women than men (which is the natural state in most everywhere in the world) is Kerala, the state I'm from. I believe this is because the state has been run by the Communists for most of its post-independant history (which has also resulted in a 99% female literacy rate, again by far the highest in India).

Sometimes we forget about the social benefits communism has provided in certain parts of the world. I have no doubt, for example, that Afghanistan would be far healthier, wealthier and more advanced today if the Russians were not driven out in the 80s.