skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Because lots of startup die for not having customers enough (or at all!), but I haven’t heard of any died because at first was not able to scale millions of users.

...So you never heard of Friendster, then?
Gentlemen, I think the whole emacs-is-too-big point is totally obsolete in this century.

Vim eats 8-10M of my memory. Emacs with many different modes running eats 15-20M. It mattered back in 1996 when I've had 24M of RAM, heck I remember programming in emacs + X11 having as low as 16M and I survived ;)

But to the point. The difference between 10 and 20M doesn't matter anymore.

What matters is that Eclipse eats 500M of memory, is sluggish and I doubt it offers better programming experience; still so many people don't want to listen that there are alternatives to it.

I think that's the area we should debate & educate people. Both vi/emacs are brilliantly light these days.
“You can't take an unknown and pretend it‘s a known.” is reasonable. However, the paradox still stands if you are allowed to open your chosen envelope and count the money inside before deciding whether to switch.

The problem genuinely does have to do with the use of an impossible probability distribution. It’s not just a straightforward mistake (as in the wrong answer to the Monty Hall problem, say).
Actually, I've wondered idly before what that time window might be between witnessing a behavior in someone for whom you hold a lot of respect and deciding that no, it's not an illusion, they are actually doing that, and that your estimation of them will consequently have to go down.
That's funny, but it reflects a poor understanding of probability.

Figure as an upper bound that there are 10^90 particles in the universe. Now imagine that you could turn the entire universe into such an efficient computer that every particle stored a bit of information, and you used it to calculate pi.

The probability of finding an arbitrary binary string of length N in that pi is (1/2^N)*10^90. Set to .5, solve for N, and you get . . .

388 bits. You have a 50/50 probability of finding an arbitrary 388 bit string somewhere in there. For reference, that's about 50 characters in ASCII. Maybe enough for a threat against the president. CD cracking software seems more dubious.

When dealing with brute force probability, the numbers get big very, very fast. Don't assume that just because they seem big to you means they're big enough to solve the problem you're thinking about. Do the math.
Yes, yes, I spazzed 0 -> U. Thanks for the correction.
Greed has done more to improve humanity's standard of living than philanthropy ever will.

Standard of living, sure. Quality of life... not so much.
Obviously any kind of discrimination sucks, but I have a hard time getting worked up over age discrimination. It is not like sex or race where you are hampered from the start and never have a chance to show your potential. Everyone is young then gets old. Systematic age discrimination just creates a market opportunity for businesses willing to hire old people. You could say the same opportunity exists in the sex and race cases, but they have the potential to be self-fulfilling prejudices--people locked out of the workforce from the start--whereas the age one doesnt really perpetuate itself.

signed entitled young white male
ah, I misunderstood. yeah, you really can't beat the flexibility of being self-employed.
A collection of ifless techniques for those of you lucky enough to read portuguese:

http://alquerubim.blogspot.com/search/label/ifless
I was learning Scheme from old SICP lectures online.

Best lecture EVER.

Why would professors need to make same lectures every year? It make more sense to make new lectures only when they have something new or better to say.
Like.fm isn't meant to replace iTunes as a place where you can play music. So it doesn't compete with Rdio at all. The music is just sourced from YouTube, so anyone can do that. The ability to play music is a convenience feature.

My main goal with Like.fm is to have a music app where you can publish what you've listened to that isn't targeted at music enthusiasts (2 out of almost 300 facebook friends have a last.fm app installed). You can follow people and merge top tracks. It's extremely passive (no need to change music listening behavior) so it's easy to get started. Really you just install the desktop client and go about doing your music listening business. And when you want to peek at your friend's music just check out their profile or their facebook. If you want new songs, theoretically, the merged top tracks stream will have best new songs for you.

Passivity is key to Like.fm. It's not a niche community of music lovers. It's designed to layer over your regular listening habits, and grab some interesting info to share with people.
Doesn't this depend on strict lazy evaluation? I could imagine if the implementation underneath changed (possibly to take advantage of parallel execution), if any segment had side effects, it would be horrible.
On the investor call they said they can't talk about candidates right now, but how about subsumed Palm CEO and Apple alum Jon Rubinstein? I don't know how he would fare helming such a vastly larger ship, but the guy knows a thing or two about a focused product strategy and the importance of good UX.
> It's actually not an iframe, or a frame at all.

Well there is a fixed position CSS box on the right with the main panel w/ overflow scrolling, so its just like an iframe.

Maybe its the small screen size, but it crowds up the layout.
Tele-Ball (or BallTime in Apple-speak). Hook the movements of two such balls together via a phone call so widely separated people can enjoy the bonding power of play.
That Wikipedia article is really bad. Here is a good article about the Two Envelopes Paradox, by Keith Devlin: http://www.maa.org/devlin/devlin_0708_04.html
eh, the social drama is different, and it depends on the industry. For instance, I can hold down a SysAdmin job just fine, as a contractor or not, but I lack the social skills to rent out people who work for me as sysadmins, even when they are obviously good people and I'm charging below market rates. in some cases, I've given up and suggested the people for direct hire... and they got hired, at rates higher than I would have charged, even including my cut.

I think either way, there is a tradeoff. If you get shit done, people will put up with a lot of social problems, in both situations. Like the guy who wrote a hn story about how I didn't answer his support email. He refused a refund and wanted to remain a customer... the thing was, he wanted better support, but when the rubber hit the road and it was time to cut a cheque, he chose cheap over good support.

You can set up your company so that social skills don't matter as much, but that limits what markets you can go after. You can also choose your career while working for others, and get similar tolerance for social oddity.

(of course, the OP's problem was not so much social skills as flexibility, and being self-employed almost always is more flexible than working for other people.)
Good for the poster.
US national park faces sale
Well, it was windspeed combined with enough water falling on me, but you're right- that's a given.
You need to explain this more on the frontpage, then. To me it looks like a clone, and it's confusing. There's no call to action, there's no "reason" that the average user should download your app.

Currently, the only people who will actually download something that complements their music player (itunes, winamp,whatever) are music enthusiasts. Change that somehow and you're golden.
Hey Ben, you're right about the Android app (I was the main developer on that one), its very limited at the moment. In the immediate future I'm planning to add more check info and basic historical reporting if some sort (there aren't a lot of good graph libraries for Android at the moment or I would have made graphs a higher priority). Admin functions (so far everything is completely read only) might be further out pending some work on the API and discussion of security considerations.

Any comments, suggestions, contributions, etc are more than welcome, either by reply or email (check my profile).

Also, this being HN and all, the direct source link: http://github.com/cloudkick/cloudkick-android
I have a hard time making sense of those graphs since I don't see units or a scale on th y-axis.
Also, I didn't even notice the "menulet" in my menu bar until I read it on another comment. The app just seemed to have a preferences bar. You should tell the user about what you've installed.
Exactly, A doesn't equal A for all parts of the formula, so it's silly to add it up.
It depends. When it's really really hot, yes, but at those temperatures it doesn't matter what I use to travel, I'll be sweating anyway.

Admittedly, I'm really quite good at my lowering my heart rate and by extension body temperature at stop lights, and my commuter bike has a fully upright riding stance with no wind protection. I get plenty of ventilation; on a night that would be temperate on my sport bike, I'd be freezing on my commuter bike.

P.S. have you bicycled recently? I feel so ridiculously exposed, out of control and vulnerable now that I'm used to armor, and I really do prefer the armor.
I'd probably use just use Tor or similar to make all requests come from different IPs. You don't need to increase the number of pictures by a couple, you need to increase the number of possibilities by several orders of magnitude.

A traditional captcha with 6 letters/numbers has 2,176,782,336 possible combinations. Not 36. The whole point of a captcha is that there is a large enough set of possibilities such that you can't just get it right by guessing randomly a few times.
Big-O for Eight Year Olds?
The unfiltered narcissism, the disjointed philosophy spewed by bored people, and the rap lyrics. Of course, most of my friends are young.
Is all this nerdraging warranted? The game is worth $60 without any custom maps at all. It's probably worth $60 without multiplayer. It's the most satisfying game I've played in years.

I think some people, judging by the comments here, have a giant void of actual problems in their lives and have nothing better to do than to complain about everything.
Optimizing code for instruction cache
If I did it twice, I'd automate it.

I haven't made very many AMIs, but when I did, I got it down to a little shell script that basically goes from a blank machine to me installing a few things I needed, building some stuff I needed, uninstalling some other stuff and uploading the images with roughly no effort on my part. The most painful part was using the web console to launch instances and then wait for them.
I believe Facebook is the most amazing social interaction thing ever made so I kind have this need to correct some of the things you said, sorry!

Friends: If you reject someone from being your friend they are not informed about it but, if they are smart enough, they can check your profile page and see if they can add you again; you can also block that person and he won't be able to ask to be your friend again; I think this is almost perfect, the only problem I see here is the word "friend". You can accept someone and add that person to a list which will make that person unable to see anything if you want to while still being "friends". Oh, you can also just forget about accepting friendships you don't want to have, the person asking for it will know you still didn't accept him but that's about it.

Emails: You can disable all email notifications (or toggle most of them off leaving the most important on, it's really well done) going to "My Account", "Notifications" tab.

Tagging: You can make your default friends' settings restrict things like seeing photos. If you want some of them to see those photos you can add them to a list where you let them see photos.

Vender Lock-In: I'm not sure about this but didn't Open Social just solve this problem?
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World of Goo, another excellent indie game, also reported a 90% piracy rate two years ago. The developers calculated that percentage from the number of users on their high score board, which were much more than the number of actual online sales. They were very gracious about it, deliberately choosing not to put any DRM on their software.

Sad as it may be, putting DRM might not increase sales numbers significantly. It just makes crackers more determined. Such was World of Goo's reasoning against DRM.

http://arstechnica.com/gaming/news/2008/11/acrying-shame-wor...
I already hinted at this on a comment I made above but you can make list with different permissions. I have one for real friends, one for people I have to accept but I don't want them to see anything about me and those who aren't on any of those lists are on the default one: they can't see most things but they can see more than those who are almost blocked.
Check my comment above about lists, it's already there!
This quote doesn't come from Gandhi at all, but from a speech made by an activist in 1914 to the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America.
Youtube ‘Day’ Project Will Consume Many
No one else, but Facebook itself will kill Facebook someday.
Why do you think #4 is unwise?
Um, I think you missed the joke :-\
To me it's ALSO about interaction and the group learning/creating dynamic, and that can't be parceled out through the web

Agree with the first part. Hoping you're wrong about the second. Time will tell :)
I am heartbroken to hear this. .Net, the Dynamic Language Runtime, IronPython and IronRuby are incredibly awesome technologies and if instead of embracing the cool aspects, Microsoft will focus only on the boring enterprisey bits in the future I'll have no choice but stop being a .Net developer and switch to something else. Which would be a shame because I really like those technologies.
The established brick and mortar higher ed industry is not going to have their livelihood taken away without a fight. More fundamentally, very few individuals aged 18 - 25 have the self-discipline to complete the equivalent of an undergraduate education on-line, with no class schedules, no set exam times, nothing to enforce any routine of learning. Some do no doubt, but not anything near the number that are able to do it now within the structure of a traditional university or college.
Depending on what app you're building, I would just go out there, get the interest of just a few fairly interested users (like 5 to 10), and hear what they have to say, before proceeding with the remaining "20%" of development work.

Is it a B2B or B2C app?
I don’t think that hacker has thought that through. Sure, he will find an infinite number of biographies which tell the story of his life up to the present with unbelievable accuracy, he, however, has no way of knowing which one of them actually predicts the future. The information just isn’t there. Oh, sure, among the infinite number of biographies there will be one which is correct, but it doesn’t come with a “authentic biography” meta tag (well, actually there will be a version that does, but so will the fakes).
Good point. I'm starting to convert my website from webforms into MVC and it's going to make a huge difference in terms of manageability.
Playlist.com files for Chapter 11
"The Difference Between Genius And Stupidity Is That Genius Has Its Limits."
Great idea, except I think my friend have horrible taste in music. Top 100 billboards are filled with popular music, not good music.
You are missing the way people break captchas... it is not because they have super cool software that can read the captcha, have a huge database of hashed portions of a particular captcha softwares library or make blind random attempts that would set off any simple limits ( although some have 1 and 2 ) it is because they build technology that sends the webpage to an outsourcing house that performs the actions remotely. I know of one with 200 FT employees each shift ( 24 / 7 ) that solve on average 4 per minute per employee.
Actually, a 5% return looks BETTER not worse, when there's deflation - you're getting the return, plus the base value of the investment which later can buy MORE. In your example the investment would allow buying 10% more later, the mattress-money only 5%. Actually getting that 5% will likely be more difficult though.
When there's inflation, you're return has to match the inflation rate for you to effectively break even in buying power terms and that's not counting being hit by taxes on the gain that wouldn't buy more.

The real danger of deflation comes when people stop spending thinking it is better to buy later because things will get cheaper. Along with problems getting funds, that's the killer with home buying. If people think there's continued deflation in housing, they'll try to hold off buying. Of course behavior has to be adjusted for other factors too.

Deflation from things like falling oil prices is good. Many consumers will buy more of other products if their energy costs fall. It would help others pay down debt. That's good, we don't want them to default. Of course those in the oil industry want things to fall just enough to kill/delay alternatives or improvements in efficiency. It's good if we reduce the percentage of our spending on imports if those prices fall, but bad if exchange rate shifts reduce demand for our exports. Deflation won't be flat across the board by wages, products, or region so analysis is very complex.

Income is another issue. Considering that most worked-for incomes haven't kept pace with inflation for some time now, our value to the workforce has deflated.

Deflation is bad in the sense of allowing those out of the country holding dollars to buy up more assets like real estate. We want people abroad buying our products and services, not our land. Not owning our land effectively makes us slaves.
Interesting that he's going to a financial technology consulting firm whose products include algorithmic trading. It seems like that would be one of the last spaces to be interested in a dynamic scripting language versus pure speed.
Anatomy of Malicious Advertising Redirecting Clients to Drive-By Attack Sites
It doesn't work like that. It's not some kid shouting obscenities down a crackly microphone. They're choosing to host the content, it affects the rating of the overall product. To keep the 'T' rating the content needs to be moderated.
I wouldn't count on any predictions made by Gates. He said that the spam problem would be solved. And that was meant to happen some 5 years ago.
As the author points out, he's concerned about the future about dynamic languages on the .net platform in general. IronPython and IronRuby are just two implementations of it.

The reason you should care (assuming you're a .net developer) is that the DLR lets you do all sorts of cool things such as the following c# snippet calling python code:

ScriptRuntime py = Python.CreateRuntime();
dynamic random = py.UseFile("random.py");

//Make an array of numbers
var items = Enumerable.Range(1, 7).ToArray();
random.shuffle(items);

(source: http://www.hanselman.com/blog/C4AndTheDynamicKeywordWhirlwin...)

Being able to have ruby, c#, python, et al all running in the same runtime with a clear stack you can inspect across the languages is awesome stuff.
I didn't get that Monty Hall problem for a while after seeing it, but then it clicked and I got it. It's really beautiful to think about:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monty_Hall_problem
Farmville-free Games WordPress Themes
Here is my last theme Farmville, inspired by the popular Facebook game with the same name, with more than 70 million active users and counting.
Wow man, you seriously like Spoon. I thought I was die hard. The last album is a bit of a disappointment for me though. Let's be friends though: last.fm/user/imissmyjuno
No, this problem is different, and has a different solution. In your problem it makes sense to switch when given the choice, whereas in this one it does not. With the three doors you're given additional information once you choose a door, which allows you to choose a door with 1/2 probability of being right, rather than the 1/3 chance you started out with. In this problem you are given no additional information, so the probability of choosing the right envelope is the same when given a choice to switch as it is at the beginning (i.e., 1/2).
Oh this is some great brainstorming. All these components need care and maintenance as well, so instead of having specialized cleaners for every component, I propose a "kitchen sink" component.

Yeah, that should definitely go in.
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This is precisely the correct answer — and it's disappointing to see a less good answer getting so many votes when this one hasn't had any.
Nonsense; this is local and state governments that spent like drunken sailors during the boom now having to cut back, and doing a poor job of it. They made stupid choices in years past, like not paying down debts, lavish pension terms, lots of staff, etc. Now they don't want to cut those, and in some cases can't. So they're making panicky choices.
I find hard drives are quite useful for storing lots of data. You might want to be more specific about your requirements.
They missed a big one:

> Salaries and benefits — for identical jobs — are 30 percent to 40 percent higher in the federal government than in the private sector. Claims that this dramatic discrepancy in compensation is warranted because of government workers’ high skills are unjustified, as this study shows. Equally unjustified is the fact that federal workers can rarely be fired, no matter how poor their job performance. Congress should align federal salaries and benefits with market rates—a simple, and fair, move that could save taxpayers nearly $47 billion in 2011.
Songs will be recommended indirectly from other people on like.fm via the follow feature. So you can follow everyone, and eventually I will have in place user recommendations (recommend other users for you to follow).

I know that friends != music friends, which is why you don't have to be friends on the site to follow (you can follow anyone). The only other problem is finding other people to follow, which is something I'm working very hard to solve.
PGFPlots is an excellent plotting package for Latex. Just include data from text files and define styles in Latex, and everything goes without headache.
I think it is unwise to reduce your options, especially in financial matters, especially regarding income, especially if you do not already have FU money. BATNA principle.
You mentioned "the equivalent of an undergrad education". This "equivalent" can have different levels (associate, bachelors, with honors), number of majors, average grade, testing criteria, testing jurisdiction, duration, how recent, etc. When the brick and mortar higher ed industry dies, perhaps the concept of achieving some recognized education "equivalency" will die with it. Everything will be ongoing learning, never attaining.
True, and the trend of questionable spending at all levels of government will likely continue as long as lobbyists are able to pay politicians to make these choices.
if you're planning on making wall street-level profits, the incremental server farm costs are probably pretty small by comparison
I actually have no problem with Apple's prices. People don't buy a Rolls-Royce because it's a car, they buy it because it's a Rolls-Royce. Comparing the purchase price or mpg to a Toyota Camry is missing the point.

I build my own machines, and don't buy Apple products. However, I see nothing wrong with charging what the market will bear for an upscale product.
nooooooooooooooooooooo
Same. I read it on Eliezer Yudkowsky's recommendation, but it was too much for me. I mean, I got a couple interesting ideas out of it, but I felt like I was barely scratching the surface.

I wonder if anyone has written a good companion guide to read along with it.