skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
An argument can be made for replacing brittle, difficult to follow twisty spreadsheet programs (which is a lot of what people do with Excel that they can't do with anything else) with more conventional programs; maintainability benefits could be significant, just to pick one low lying fruit. But there's no money in it.
I'm certainly not the only one to remember all the survivalist BS from the 80ies. Maybe that'd be a good business to be in these days. "Survive in the woods with only your wits and a loin cloth!" "Bob and Doug's guide to finding beer after the apocalypse!" and so on...
Ask HN: Is stealth mode passé?
It seems like lately the number of startups who are doing a secretive stealth-mode phase has decreased. s stealth mode passé? When is going in "Stealth mode" appropriate for startups?
Move over Elo - crowdsourcing a new chess rating system
One question you might benefit from is that if the users aren't tech savvy, will they be 'willing' to change the way they work?

I help maintain my university's portal, and often the biggest problem is to convince people that the way they collaborate needs to change.
I first encountered the Levenshtein distance at work (where I am part of a team developing SIL-4 level operating systems for use in the transportation industry), as part of our coding rules which describe the differences in variable names allowed (e.g. "char fic; char foc; // ") .. After I looked up the algorithm on my own intuition, I realized it had applicability to MIDI sequences in unique ways, and thats how it came about.
I don't think it is 'capitulating'. UStream's service was being used against its TOS by these users whose actions threatened the health of UStream. UStream can't afford a $500k-$2m legal battle with {UFC | WWE | whoever does PPV}. This is win-win-lose for UStream IMO:

* Win #1 - users who were causing harm to the company are no longer allowed in

* Win #2 - UStream has served notice that they won't allow this sort of behavior.

* Lose - a small percentage of people who are not really the target market for UStream's advertisers and who actually read the press release are put off by this action
Not always; I can do my job in my sleep but I'm barely expert in it... I think expertise is the next level beyond that - where you are pushing ideas of your own into what you do.
Python & Ruby did exist however their VMs were no where near as reliable and fast as Perl at that time. Another viable option would have been tcl but like you say Perl was probably better suited.

I wonder if perl would still be used if the project was started today.

I think so. But would that be perl5 or perl6? :)
I live in Vienna, and am constantly on the lookout for signs of the old wars. Its a very sobering experience to walk down some street and then realize later that was the site of intense street fighting and massacre.
I've worked at several BigCo's and they all basically worked like that. Now admittedly non of these companies where pure software or computer companies, but still in my experience the whole "large teams with hordes of managers" seems to be very much the exception rather than the rule once you actually take a look at most companies from the inside. The only "hordes of managers" company I've actually worked at was a smallish company (around 50 employees)
Is your mobile carrier modifying your data?
I'm not sure whether you're sarcastic or not...
The pictures of the Heldenplatz (here in Vienna) are particularly sobering, considering that its a very bright and vibrant place these days .. oh, except for the one week a year when the Austrian military put on their big displays there, of course .. that is a bit freaky.
What they're asking for is basically a portfolio. You don't need a portfolio to get a good job, but it helps. Perhaps you should spend some time putting one together.
Online education startup. MVP in a few weeks time hopefully. Join mailing list if you're interested: http://eepurl.com/MVat (previously people asked about this: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1561599 ).
Yes, for me undoubtedly, and for more than a few reasons, I am not a fanboy, but I see the Android platform as having great 'game changing' potential.

They are going to sell a whole heap of these things!

The latest Android handsets do deliver the stability required for a mainstream device.

HTC, Acer, Asus, Dell and Motorola are large manufacturers and they all have a presence on the Android platform.

China and other strong manufacturing countries can finally focus on delivering refined hardware platforms without needing to invest in software to break a Western market.

The ease of access to the SDK and the cheap platforms available for developing applications means that in emerging and developing economies there are a mass of people who want to learn to develop for Android, they will do a lot of the localization tasks for Google for free!

I am not going to dispute that there is a bias towards low cost and free applications on the Android, no doubt as the raft of sub $100 devices arrive, they are going to be bought by people on lower incomes than the average Apple user. The iUniverse is a great place to be, Apple's integrated media platform is definitely an achievement, but to join the party you really need some $$$

It's a numbers game in the end, the growth curve of Android seems to suggest it will dominate the smartphone market in 2011 and beyond, with that will come the revenue potential application developers seek.
I tinkered once with hash of a user's passphrase, salted, and then using 4 digits from the middle of the resulting hash as a username. I then used a different 4 digits as a cookie token so they only had to enter it once per sesssion. It's not terribly secure, it's not collision-proof, etc, but you may find some use from the basic principle - it's quick and easy and was useful on the scale I needed it for :)

Edit: Point of note: The same people who wouldn't type 16 characters of username and password would happily type 30 or 40 character passphrases... There's some novelty to it, apparently :)
But BiBOP (aside from being hard to implement on modern platforms) does not get you direct fixnums (or flonums in this case).
A bit idealistic in my opinion. In a lot of situations and places, giving that freedom simply can't be afforded. The stakes are too high.

They'll learn to be independent anyway, just a bit later.
I think a better alternate title would be: How it happened a dynamic language was used to save the Human Genome Project

Because at the time Perl was probably the only capable dynamic/scripting language.
at 50 years old - it's probably due for an upgrade!
An anything-ethicist is someone who failed in that field but still thinks they ought to get a say in what gets funded. Ignore them.
There are only three important numbers:

0 - when there are zero of something it is not possible

1 - when there is one of something then it is possible

more than 1 - when there are more than one of something then there is choice, and the possibility of many, many more

What is interesting is the transitions between them: when zero becomes one the impossible suddenly becomes possible, when one becomes two then suddenly there are multiple possibilities and you have to wonder if there are more... The N+1 Theory, to link back to the original article.

Some interesting values, that will get really interesting if they change:

0 - number of confirmed alien civilisations

1 - number of planets known to harbour life

more than 1 - number of potential partners who could be "the one"
Having any logo which looks like a "security seal" boosts conversions by a percentage, I recommend to put something up, even if its a logo linking to your own page with information about the security using an A/B test to see if it works for you.
Thanks for recording the talk. I enjoyed watching it.
Lim and llam with closures
He wrote once that startups are fun in the way that doing survival training is fun - which is to say, not at all if it is not your thing.

I tend to believe that.

Edit: actual quote

>rankly, though, if I've misled people here, I'm not eager to fix that. I'd rather have everyone think starting a startup is grim and hard than have founders go into it expecting it to be fun, and a few months later saying "This is supposed to be fun? Are you kidding?"

The truth is, it wouldn't be fun for most people. A lot of what we try to do in the application process is to weed out the people who wouldn't like it, both for our sake and theirs.

The best way to put it might be that starting a startup is fun the way a survivalist training course would be fun, if you're into that sort of thing. Which is to say, not at all, if you're not.

http://www.paulgraham.com/really.html
It is cool. I once ran OpenGLForums.com and when the movie Blade was really popular, I ran a contest to make a 3D movie programmatically about Blade and the winner would win the sword (or a replica, rather) from the movie. Unfortunately, it turns out shipping a weapon is much more difficult than it appears, especially overseas. I ended up just sending the guy the value of the sword and kept it for myself.

Regardless, this is a cool contest and has a cool prize.
Inception Special Effects Building Explosion
360 Health: Try Hemorrhoids Home Treatment For Yourself
Organic meat may be good in small doses. However most of the meat today is not the same as it was centuries ago. The book "The China Study" does a good job at explaining the diseases caused by meat.
While I agree with you, I wanted to provide a different perspective on how "remote" these images might seem. (I might be misunderstanding meaning you're putting behind that word. If so, please forgive me!)

I'm Russian, and I grew up in different parts of USSR and later ex-USSR. All of my older relatives were, in some sense, involved in WW2. A big part of my family died during that time - some killed in fighting, some from hunger, some from random bullets, some because of repressions of that time... That war greatly affected every family I know, usually in most tragic ways. So to many people over there, such photographs are not "remote" at all - they are an integral part of their own history.

At the same time, it is saddening to see a new generation grow up oblivious to what their grandparents went through... People forget so easily!
Art & Copy and The apple 1984 Ad
Ask HN: Who's Hiring?
First tuesday of the month again... So here we are.

I'm personally looking for Python/Django development positions in London, but obviously in the spirit of the community, all job posts are welcome :-)
What is the best advice you could give to a young first time startup CEO
In my opinion, operationally speaking, there really isn't a lot of difference these days between Linux and BSD.

Personally, I like both OpenBSD and Arch Linux.
A process is a formal, well-structured communication vehicle. It can be a heavily engineered six-sigma process or it can be a well-structured regular meeting. The size of the process should be scaled up or down to meet the needs of the communication challenge that it facilitates.

Reading stuff like that makes me wish I never have to scale my company.

EDIT: But perhaps I'm in the minority here because this story has lots of votes and no comments, which is usually a sign of a very good submission.
The bullshit is strong in this one.
Look, I have 4 data points, 2 each in some very psychotic societies. We are going to extrapolate to the entire world and then try and add some psychoactive substances to their water. Seriously, I've been near a couple of politicians - we can totally pull this off.
>The GCC compiler and toolchain aren't optimal, and I fully expect a major Linux distribution to switch to Clang/LLVM in the not too distant future.

Have you looked through the Linux kernel code? There is a lot of gcc specific stuff in there. I don't think the Clang change will be as fast as you think.
Implementing Smart Blur in Java
For "the true" read "worst of the".
Has anyone read Piaw's book (linked to in the last sentence of the blog post)? Do you recommend it?
Took me a while to understand the concept because of this confusing title. I first thought those buses would move the cars around, like giant ferrys.
For what it's worth, here's a bit more information. There are tax and legal reasons.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sweepstakes

"Because of their potential for abuse, sweepstakes are heavily regulated in many countries. The U.S., Canada, and individual U.S. states all have laws covering sweepstakes, resulting in special rules depending on where the entrant lives. The U.S. Federal Trade Commission exercises some authority over sweepstakes promotion and sweepstakes scams in the United States."

While this isn't a sweepstakes, the same comission also oversees rules and laws about contests and have equally annoying restrictions. Obviously, we would love the talent and potential of the international community to work on this.
Get Back Your Hacked Gmail/Facebook/Orkut/Google Account
Zed Shaw: "poll, epoll, science, and superpoll" with R
This set of data is just screaming to be turned into an iPhone app .. imagine, you're somewhere in Europe. The GPS figures out where, and gives you a picture (modern-day) to wipe your fingers over .. revealing the WW2-era pic underneath.

For some European cities, this would be killer .. I know a lot of people who are interested in the history of Europe from the perspective of WW2, and this could be quite an intriguing application to develop ..
Anyone who really chafes with the UI model of OS X probably wouldn't apply to work in Software at Apple,

I don't think very highly of OS X's Desktop UI but I doubt that would stop me from wanting to work at Apple.

and even if one did you'd probably get rejected for other reasons.

Such as?
I really like OpenBSD, but if there is one thing I have to point to as annoying, it would be the lack of binary system patches. Call me crazy but I don't feel that I should have to have a compiler and tool chain installed to have an up to date system.
I would say it could be when you have to search really hard to find an article/book/course/conference/etc. in your area of expertise that actually teaches you something. It is when the only way to perfect your skills is by yourself, by pushing the limits on your own without relying on others. It is when the only way to get better is not to buy the book but to write it. Anyone agrees?
Reporting for SharePoint... trying to federate multiple instances and make sense of the fact that every site/list has a different schema of potentially the same data. So it's a foray into reporting against federated semi-structured data.
Godwin is a lawyer?!? Good Lord, is there nothing the world can't do to surprise me?
C++ can have lazy lambda enumerators too
mobile site maker webapp http://www.gmbhnews.com/ , goes live next (or in 2) weeks, working on the backend http://www.gmbhnews.com/make-mobile-site/
The older I get the more I realize our biology has an agenda of its own. I wonder if people who smoke cigarettes are really unconsciously building up their immune systems for their great great great grand children for an unforeseen future where the atmosphere gets really bad and they need the immunity to live long lives.

These kinds of thoughts make for great sci-fi.
Why does everyone forget that copyrighted content can be shared if the license allows it? Copyright does not automatically prohibit sharing.

http://creativecommons.org/about/
http://www.opensource.org/licenses/alphabetical

The real problem is that content creators frequently don't make finding the license easy - if they even use one.
I can't build (for example) a doomsday device that will eliminate all life on Earth. I still think I should be allowed to disagree with the building of one.
.co Now Available
I did actually mean all the people that work in development on the product. That is, in MS terms, all SDE, SDET, and PMs. I happen to know this figure is accurate for Windows (over a million per developer), although that doesn't include sales/marketing, administrative costs, etc. As for the cleaners comment, I don't really get your point.

Anyway, my statistic wasn't really meant to be taken that seriously, just proof that server is actually making money over here.
For me, this article introduces some useful terminology in relation to concurrency that I had not read about before. I am thinking about "SPMD, Single Program Multiple Data" and data-driven vs control-driven parallelism.

As an Erlang user and forum/chat hang-around, I frequently see people come in with a problem that is very data-driven. Large matrix inversions, AI back-tracking, then dismiss Erlang as academic hot-air because spawning an Erlang process per element and taking care of calculation results was too much work and no speedup. Obviously they were having data-driven problems and Erlang is made for control-driven problems.

I would love to find well-written and succinct articles on the difference between these two kinds of problem domains to refer people to. I find that it is very difficult to describe this well myself.
Your comment and the parent's lack empathy for someone's circumstances. Also, you should just make your point and not worry too much about votes and points. I say this because, presumably, the implicit goal of a conversation is to understand rather than score points.
I agree the FBI went about this in the wrong way by threatening Wikipedia.

But would it be so awful for Wikimedia not to post a 2000px X 2000px high quality rendering of the FBI seal?

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/7/70/US-...

There are limits to free speech -- no yelling fire in a crowded theater and all that. I am just asking, is a huge, beautiful rendering really necessary and responsible? Maybe if the FBI had asked that question instead of threatening they would have gotten a different answer.
I have an inverted experience...

I have gone back to unconscious incompetence in some subjects I haven't touched for a decade, that I used to know better than most anyone I worked with.

It is embarrassing sometimes. :-)

I am still happy that I reinvented myself as a script programmer instead of a system programmer; what is fun for me is sitting down and generating lots of functionality in a short time. I can go to work with a smile and low risk of burnout.

On the subject of expert or not: I guess that locally I am considered an expert on what I do, but I don't see me as one because I know how the real experts are.
I think it's not about dying penniless quite so much as messing up your calculation by a year or two and living penniless at the age of 87.
I don't know about the OP, but organising your posts is a task for when you have reams and reams of content that is too diverse for one website. If it's a personal blog and no one is reading it and you have multiple interests, blog about them all.

If a particular post or line of posts in a given category pick up a readerbase, then you can very easily create a view on just that tag or category for them to follow, be that the rss feed or the frontend site itself.

In my experience at least, keeping the enthusiasm for writing going long term is the hardest part of the blog, not how you organize your posts. I'd worry about that later.
It all depends on the operator. A UMTS (3G) network can accept users using a GSM SIM if the operator allows it.

Authentication is performed by the network HLR (Home location register) which is independent of the radio technology used. The procedure/algorithms are different for 3G-capable UEs with USIM, but the HLR can accept 2G users as well.

Bottom line is that if your 'home carrier' (the one that produced the SIM) allows it, you can use your SIM in any 3G network that is part of the roaming agreement of that carrier.
What about user input validation? If I understand it correctly, all the application code resides in the browser. This means that there is no server side code to make sure that the data stored in the database is properly sanitized. For example, how would you go about making sure an input doesn't contain HTML code? If the verification is made on the client side, it is easy to circumvent it.
In my experience as a landlord "any area where you're likely to get undesirables" includes the entire land mass of the planet.

Unless you're a hands-on people person, I recommend running away from rentals as fast as possible.
Don't think I have read about any well-funded startups in this area yet, but boy there's a business opportunity here. Aside from the major historical locations, most every state/city in the US has a "historical society" of some sort that has thousands/millions of old pictures laying around. My own (Minneapolis) had a project many years back where they went around and took a pic of every single house in the city limits. I'd like to be able to go to a cool neighborhood and point my phone to a street corner and see what was there, sort of my own interactive history lesson. Rather than each of these government agencies or museums figuring out how to do an aug reality app on their own dime, someone needs to build the template/service and offer it up.
I have a really hard time believing that there will be no investments for 30 years.
You are right, but actually these people are currently using IM and emails for the communication because communication is essential for the work they are doing. I want to move these to web and make them more personalized and customized to that particular community or company.
> AMD brought 64-bit to the PC world

No. For most people, Microsoft brought 64-bits to the PC world. Had Microsoft decided not to support AMD64 in Windows and opted for some other 64-bit x86 architecture, AMD64 would be a curiosity.

It's a bit sad because I remember reading AMD's announcement on a 64-bit RISC workstation that was already a bit too old compared to its newer cousins.
Journalism, with a focus on early-stage technology companies. Entrepreneurs are doing amazing things with small teams and relatively little capital, but the stories and lessons seem mostly lost in the stream of tech news about iPhones, the oldest Twitter user, or Facebook's privacy policies. I think there's a small but significant market for passionate, well-researched, educational content like this. I'll find out soon enough.
I have and it's excellent. Short, to the point and contains a ton of invaluable information I never found anywhere else.
The worst that can happen is porting GCC features over to a GPL-licensed Clang fork.
And conversely, translating a library function into simple opcodes (rather than a real call) should be any decent compiler's responsibility, using intrinsics.
I'm sorry, and I don't mean to whine, but I don't think this is really HN material. Pretty much everyone who's used a spinlock instead of a semaphore knows that a context switch can be more expensive than the alternatives. For a nontechnical audience (Reddit, nowadays), this may be original, but I hope it's not so revolutionary for most of us.
>To be honest, what more do you want to see in it?

An App Store for OSX would be nice. Or even just a repository mechanism - I am so sick of updating the apps on my Mac systems when my multiple Linux boxes are always up-to-date with the latest stable releases.

Its 2010, can we please have an OSX repo mechanism, Apple?
Beacon College for ADHD Students, LD Students and gifted LD 
Beacon College in Leesburg, Florida is a college for ADHD students and college for students and a college exclusively for students with a learning disability.
I don't think I've ever been an expert in anything where being an expert is somehow worthwhile.

That said, I'd say you're an expert when you know what the bad parts are, why they're wrong, and why they're there anyway.
This sounds good, care to share your website url and may be the kind of startups/tech area (ideal profile) you'd like to write about?
According to my experience: never. I'm always surprised when I know something other people don't, but I always seem to know ~10x more every passing year than I did before. Going through theoretical CS papers always reminds me how much I have to learn.