skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I wish I knew how to learn how to get customers as well as I know how to learn how to scale technology
I agree with most of what he says except for US books beeing to long. I recognized it when I spend a year in the US as an exchange student. The books really are longer than in Germany but I actually consider it to be a good thing. Sometimes explaining something in 3 sentences makes it easier and therefor faster to understand than saying it in 1 sentence which you have to read over and over agin to get it.
New Project: Website to Help Manage Your Books
That he was fired over something as unrelated to business skill as sexual harassment is sad.

It turns out that it was more to do with inappropriate payments to a contractor with whom he had a person relationship. http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-08-06/hp-chief-mark-hurd-... The headlines are rather misleading in this respect...I'm not sure whether that tells us more about journalists or the way HP announced his departure.

edit: more comprehensive report w/press release text: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/blogs/techchron/detail?entry_i...

But regardless of the specifics, your implication that a firm should employ no other criteria than financial ones for employment decisions is odd to me. Private affairs are one thing, but committing a crime or tort on the job is considered unacceptable for most employees. How much incidental misbehavior do you think is excusable by high productivity? Alternatively, how much lawsuit liability should an employee be able to run up on their own account?
I'm surprised; I find threads both conceptually simple, easy to explain and criminally easy to use - it's when you start talking about locks, semaphores/etc things sort of go sideways for most people.
Dislike of if confuses me. People claim to find conditions wordy or confusing. I don't find conditions particularly difficult to follow, but I have a question from the other side: when you use && and || as logic gates, don't you (in your mind) translate them back into conditions anyhow? Here's his first example without if:

function getEventTarget(evt) {
evt = evt || window.event;
return evt && (evt.target || evt.srcElement);
}

Sure, it's very short in this written form. But for me to understand it, I need to think, roughly: evt retains its value, if it's a truthy value; otherwise give evt the value of window.event; if evt is a true value (now), return it and the value of evt.target - if that's truthy, or, if not, add in the value of evt.srcElement; oh, and by the way, if evt was not truthy initially in the return statement, bail out early (and return no value) since && only continues on if the initial value is true.

I'm not trying to be difficult, but I don't see that as miraculously more clear.
Interesting... here's my "gut reaction" as a non-statistician. The problem is that 'A' has a probabilistic component as well. If you let X be the "lesser of the 2 dollar amounts" and let A = X/2 + 2X, then you come out with equal expected values for switching and non-switching.
Saw these guys at BDNT a couple days ago. Love the smart toys concept.

My dream is a personal UAV I can fly over the cell network. I want to drop my android phone into the cradle on the plane then sit back on my laptop and fly it around town, take pictures, stream video, fly it over the pentagon, etc.
Mostly Indian ones, but the provisions apply to any firm with >50 employees and >50% of whom have H-1Bs. Probably doesn't affect many people here.
hm nop ! Good luck :)
Ask HN: Adobe Ideas for the PC or MAC?
I have Adobe Ideas on my iPad, but I am looking for something similar for the desktop. Any suggestions?

Thanks
Could be an easy Putnam problem.
I don't know the specifics and I don't mean to suggest that what Hurd did was excusable. I am just exploring my thoughts on HP's strategy and how this affects the company and the industry.
In what context was the interview (ie type of position).

I'm all for logical problem solving questions in interviews, even ones that can't be solved but are interesting to see how people tackle them.

However this one doesn't seem to lend itself much to programming or true problem solving - just probability theorem.

In other words, I'm not sure what useful info I'd get out of a candidate by asking them to work on this (other than their understanding of probability, which is not that useful for most programming jobs)
You may want to put your email address in the About section of your profile.
Is there any advantage to SMC vs. Ragel for parsing? The code looks similar but a bit larger.
<aside>
Use of the term "camp". This ErlangCamp seems a neat conference. I'm an erlang lover. The website and proposed content seems compelling.

I helped start a few "camps" about 6 years ago. The idea was you put together all the items to enable folks to get together and decide on content the morning the camp starts. Its an un-conference and everyone is expected to participate. Thats how it was explained to me at the blossoming of the camp phenom. Now it seems the word has been co-opted and in this case its just a specialty "conference".

...thoughts or opinions?

</aside>
I like what these guys are doing but the Android app seemed very limited feature wise.

It shows me the headline status for my server (CPU, RAM, disk space) but no graphs or historical reports or, from what I can see, admin functions
Plus the title of this post takes a naive twist to this topic. It's not the current prices that makes deflation bad for an economy, but that the (perceived?) future price will be even lower than the current price, which discourages investment since the investment will just lose.

As for the comment about computer hardware (and this applies to cars), the opportunity cost of using the physical good now vs later is a bit more concrete than throwing money in a "business", esp. startups, which are by nature extremely risky.
Yeah, but qualitatively you usually got more for your money by waiting with tech, the price may have gone down on the original product only because something better replaced it. The price drops are predictably cyclical.

If I buy a commodity like corn, oil, or steel I'm still getting a virtually indistinguishable good regardless when it is bought. The expectation of price drop can create a deflationary feedback if it happens in enough commodities.
Andreessen at the center of HP’s future - new CEO?
Did you know that absolutely anything you can imagine is encrypted with an OTP in the first N digits of pi, where N is the length of your information?
Well, you're both right, or you're both wrong, depending on how you look at it. From your Wikipedia link:

> The term "inflation" originally referred to increases in the amount of money in circulation. Today, the term monetary inflation is generally used to distinguish such an occurrence from a general rise in prices, sometimes called price inflation.

"Price inflation" is the increase of prices. "Monetary inflation" is increases in the size of the money supply. Economists originally used to use the term "inflation" to mean monetary inflation (larger money supply), and if it's an economist not speaking to a popular audience, that's probably what he means. A larger money supply (monetary inflation) typically results in higher prices (price inflation).
Information, trade and money flows at light speed around the world now. This is very different than the 1930's and with a world wide market system, and the US having the reserve currency, I think it would be tough to have spiraling asset deflation like the Great Depression. Whats not tough is abusing this and printing tons of money.
Greed has done more to improve humanity's standard of living than philanthropy ever will.
Video based CAPTCHA
Independent of the product's merits; it's fascinating to see a large corporation experiment with the concept of "MVP".
Did you ever get past the first 10 pixels?
As a trade off, you can play on any other computer.

But doesn't Steam also work similarly?
I agree. Camp = unconference. Schedules are decided the mornings of the event with little to no cost to attend. Also, free food and free shirts.

Otherwise you just have a plain ole' conference.
But as the years passed, as I dealt with hundreds of entrepreneurs, and with Packard himself, I began to understand that the key to the greatness of Bill Hewlett and David Packard was that they held no attachment to things, only people. The garage was left behind, as would be, in time, the redwood building. So too was the audio oscillator and thousands of other products--all abandoned in the endless pursuit of something better. Only the people remained, and they were cherished and respected, far more than by any corporation in history.

- Michael Malone
http://www.forbes.com/2000/10/19/1019malone.html

Mark Hurd did not fit in this mold. Neither did Fiorina.
Yeah, I meant the sale, it's 15 quid on Steam :/
It is, but no sale :/
:-)

I'm not sure if we're talking about the same terminal.

M-x term is a terminal emulator that acts like xterm and obscures all the great emacs stuff. I think that thing blows.

M-x shell is a fully-featured shell that also happens to be a normal buffer. When you cat binary data to it, it just displays binary data (as control characters, most often). I usually have to use quote (C-q) to, for instance, send a KILL to the running process (C-q C-c RET). On the bright side, if I change my mind, I just delete the C-c before I hit RET and type something else.

I'm not just talking about re-replace in history (although yes it has that, along with M-/ (for me, hippie-expand) to complete with arbitrary text from any open buffer in Emacs).

I am talking about manipulating the input/output by just editing junk in the buffer. For instance, I get 10000 lines of output and just clean it up or select a region, then run a ten-line function I wrote in elisp to do some calculation on the data, in the shell buffer, without copying it anywhere else or otherwise disrupting my flow. And I never have to touch my mouse to do it.

This is the real promise, that any useful integration you do for one part of Emacs applies to every part of it, without having to learn a new set of bindings or the weird indirections you get out of combining screen plus the terminal plus the command line sql interface plus... And there are many many useful libraries that have come out over the years.
I think this is better posed as two random-drawn sets of numbers for the first drawing of an as-of-yet un-played lottery. Then, there's no value in considering extraneous data such as the mass of the envelopes, looking through them or other potential evidence.

Instead, you're left with two identical chances. Since there is no data to suggest that either has an advantage over the other, you have a probability of exactly 0.5 that you have the better chance of winning.

On the question of the switch, it's important to consider that you have no new data about the one you picked, so the odds are _exactly the same_ as they were at the beginning: there is no conditionality, nothing has changed since you picking it.

The probability then of the winning ticket is still 0.5. This is where the infinite probability problem kicks in.

I don't think this is an actual problem needing to be solved, unless we can find a way to mathematically express the probability modifiers of our gut feeling, which is impossible, as it comes into our own personal experiences.

Still, Gladwell might have something to say about it :)
See if you can make SQLite lose your data, I'd like to see that...
buildbot is the lisp of CI systems.

That is to say, as a buildbot user/contributor I look at things like this and say, ``Oh, yeah, we added latent slaves with an EC2 sample implementation somewhere around the end of 2008/beginning of 2009.''

buildbot lacks a really awesome web interface, but I don't use that part very much. It runs everywhere and does everything, so we end up having to focus mostly on our actual software.
Ironically, what really matters is limiting heap fragmentation and memory allocation. Not nearly that exciting or tricky.
Hopefully, http://js1k.com/demo/49 will top JSpongy ;)

This time I wrote a Quaternion Julia fractal raymarcher using the Hubbard-Douady distance estimation and tried to wrap the all thing with a nice design.

Hope you like this first entry to JS1K and appreciate the efforts.

PS: It works at a good 20fps in Firefox on my 2yo machines.
Which kernel was a bit tricky for squeeze (note that the below is based on old and perhaps out of date research):

First of course they wanted to start with a stable enough one; I remember them passing over one possibility (.31???) because it wasn't very good in their and many other people's opinion.

This will be the last version of Debian that supports a Xen DomU with a patched kernel vs. pv_ops; in theory pv_ops DomU will be sufficiently solid by the following release. Doing a solid merge of the code even with the SUSE foundation is non-trivial (Xen supplies it as patches to 2.6.18).

I pay attention to this because some of what I do is with or on Xen and Debian lenny was the best DomU solution for me when I started.
I'd rather move to Pittsburgh! :-P
A Twitter Analog to PageRank
Rapidly Developing Fish Feeder: How I Created A Facebook Game in 6 Days
IOS 4.1 beta reveals FaceTime e-mail address option
The swapping indefinitely does not work. For the first iteration, if I have A in my envelope, then yes, the other envelope will either have 1/2A or 2A, meaning the expected value is indeed 5/4A. The switching argument wrongly assumes this is again the case after I switch. After I have switched, the value of the original envelope is unchanged (meaning it is A with probability 1), so I should not switch back.
Ian Bogost appears flattered. http://www.bogost.com/blog/cow_clicker_cloned.shtml
The 39 one reminds me of pNebula and Mars, two 256b JS prods.
First a random observation. People use "expected value" to evaluate risky decisions far too often. In many investment situations a more appropriate measure is "expected value of the log of my worth". (See http://elem.com/~btilly/kelly-criterion/ for an explanation of why.) That measure, in this problem, says that you should be indifferent about switching.

Admittedly that is coincidence - the investment reasoning for that rule has little to do with why that rule works for this problem.

But it turns out that there is an even crazier twist to this problem. Change the problem to say that you're allowed to look at the envelope you receive before deciding whether to switch.

Would you believe that there is an algorithm for deciding whether to switch that results in your getting the larger envelope more than 50% of the time? The catch is that those odds depend on the unknown amounts in the envelopes. But, no matter what is in the envelopes, you are guaranteed to get the larger one more than 50% of the time.

See http://www.perlmonks.org/?node_id=39366 for an explanation. Read it very carefully, because the problem is very subtle. Even a slight change in what is meant tends to render the problem ill defined and indeterminate. (And our intuition is very bad.)
"With all due respect, he's wrong on the library issue. Lisp lacks good libraries, period. Couple years ago I have a project in mind and tried to develop it in Lisp. I couldn't find good libraries on database binding, SMTP/POP3/MIME, threading, Unicode, etc."

I don't understand why this objection comes up. CLSQL has been around since 2002, bordeaux-threads since 2006, CL-SMTP since 2005, SBCL has had Unicode support since 2003 or 2004, CLISP for even longer. All this stuff has been around even longer in commercial implementations. Where were you looking?
In this specific case, there was a better article from TechCrunch covering the same info. I just didn't see it before submitting. Also, it was upvoted quite decently.
I "read" this book, in that I passed my eyes over the words it contains, and mentally recreated the sounds of those words, parsed the individual sentences, and digested some of the paragraphs. It has had certain effects on my manner of thinking and acting, but it bothers me to know that there's a great deal more information in that hefty tome than I've managed to get out of it.
You missed my point.

If you read my comment, I think it's a good idea. I just don't want legislation either for or against the idea. If people want to live in car-less suburbs, I support that. I don't support being forced to live in a car-less suburb, that's all.
TunkRank
DjangoCon US - September 7th–9th 2010 Portland, Oregon
Anecdotal, but I have experienced an SMS message delivery delay of about 7 hours within the past week (on Verizon). I would agree that delays are less common, but they're by no means over with.
Look at it like this. I am a developer who prefers the terse code compared to the longer if() variety. I've been doing this long enough that its is easier, clearer, and faster for me to understand the "evt = evt || window.event" than it is to trace through all of those if() statements.

I used to be the opposite, I couldn't understand the short form or how it worked. Ternaries confused the hell out of me for a while. Why?

Because when I look at "evt = evt || window.event", my mind has learned about the conditionals that each of these represent. Its analogous to phrases that mean different things in different contexts. "That guy has balls", for example.

So I look at it and I know that "if( evt )" is the same as "evt ? true:false" as "if( typeof evt !== 'undefined' ). I know that in the context of that statement, evt || window.event is saying "if evt exists, use that. if not, use window.event".

So the reason its confusing to people is they haven't learned all of the different things the shorter code means.

For me, after having spent many, many hours writing javascript I find the short form easier to understand and less tiring. Not only that, in raw numbers it just saves space.

Now, the other lesson I've learned over the years is that many times it is much better to start out writing in plain old "if" statements. Get the logic right, then reduce it down. There's nothing more annoying than trying to debug someone else's poorly written code.

And for god's sake, DOCUMENT!
You're right. I did not realize your blog post was from 2008 (I falsely assumed it was a recent post). I based my assertions off of the fact that Google has a cache of the page in question dating back to July 1st 2010: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:a6pIrYo.... Unfortunately, it is too late to edit my original comment to remove my inaccuracies. Thanks for digging this information up. :)
Unusually large ice island separates from Greenland glacier
CoffeeScript for Ruby Bros
But how do you ensure that your EC2 slaves have exactly the same tools/libraries/environment as your blessed build machine? I'm guessing you just have to carefully curate and update AMIs every single time you make a change to the master. Chasing that stuff down is massively time-consuming.
and Slang is used for bootstrapping squeak (smalltalk).
Gotta love the confidence. You are talking about price inflation, the parent is talking about currency inflation.

Maybe you guys should stick to Merriam Webster's definition which masterfully butchers them into one:

"a continuing rise in the general price level usually attributed to an increase in the volume of money and credit relative to available goods and services"

http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/inflation
40 U.S. Billionaires Pledge Half Of Wealth To Charity
I'm a bit amazed that HNers have to know from here whenever there is some big news regarding their softwares of choice.

I didn't mention just GNU/Linux distributions, though, but all major pieces of software (languages, frameworks, etc.). Of course, if there is something special about some news, we'd like to know. For instance, when Debian started building on FreeBSD kernel, well, that's news! Instead, recently Debian got frozen... so what? If you already follow the development of Debian, you'd already learned that from other sources, and reading it here wouldn't add any value.

It's about keeping an high signal to noise ratio. Recently, I feel HN is becoming noisier. Maybe I just overreacted because that annoys me. Well, it seems I'm the only one who's annoyed by this "noise", however. Or I just picked the less offensive source.

Thanks for listening.
Yes but there's a much greater amount of money involved here.

$85,000 first prize per month for a year.
Not Silverlight based, appears to be all Javascript. That's interesting coming from MS themselves.
Look Microsoft, you can create useful dynamic web services without requiring Flash, I mean Silverlight.
If creation isn't an important form of personal expression, what else is left?
I saw Neil DeGrasse Tyson talk once and he said something along the lines of "assemble your role model from pieces of lots of different people". You can still admire the admirable things about this man even if he has failed in other ways.
As a former HP employee, all I can say is good riddance. People sang, "Ding Dong The Witch is Dead" when Carly left, I can only imagine what is happening there today. This is a much more unexpected way for him to go than they way Carly left, though. It doesn't feel quite as vindicating, being that he hasn't been fired for the really visible stuff he did, namely, extreme focus on cost cutting at the expense of future business and employee happiness, and a complete shift to a dictatorial leadership culture with variable bonuses and 401k contribution matching based on forced employee rankings.
Awesome idea, I wonder why it hasn't been thought of before. One obstacle, however, would be the users whose browsers don't support the video.
Thanks for the feedback. Yes, the app is limited at the moment - but don't worry this is just pre-alpha-rc1 :) just one of the several projects to come out of our 24hr office hack-a-thon. Also, the app is open source, check it out here http://github.com/cloudkick/cloudkick-android
Please explain to me why his argument is ridiculously emotive and not the likely death-knell of bootstrapping.
Ok, I'm not a huge math wiz and after reading this article 2x, I'm still at a loss as to what the answer is. So after we have the nice breakdown in the form of a mathematical proof, we should keep switching envelopes forever? I'm the kind of guy that isn't as interested as to the joy of solving the problem. I just want the money!

If I were to break this down into layman's terms, would it be appropriate to say the following?

"There's equal odds whether you keep the envelope or exchange it for the other one. There's no difference either way, so flip a coin and decide."
Carly at least paid it some lip service to respecting the people of HP. Mark worked really hard to completely remove that culture.
8 Important Personal Development Lessons To Learn From Inception
Damn, there goes my ZergNigger mod.
Heyzap (YC 09) Hiring for Business Development in social gaming space
I bought the plans for this tip-powered copter from the back of a magazine like Boy's Life about 20 years ago.
It doesn't matter how old it is, if it's interesting to hackers it's appropriate.
You don't even need length because there must be an instance of the document in pi that is already prefixed by the correct length, so all you really need is the offset of the first occurrence of that variation.
You are absolutely right, and the argument is the same as why there cannot be a compression algorithm that compresses something without making something else larger.

Namely that there are 2^n possible signals with n bits, so if a compression algorithm compresses some signal that is larger than n bits down to n bits or less, then there aren't enough possibilities left for all possible signals of at most n to also be encoded with n bits or less.
Actually...
"Zoom.it runs on Windows Azure and enhances the experience with Microsoft Silverlight when available."

From the "About" page.
The artificial inertia is pretty annoying. Have these guys ever used an iPhone in their lives?
Key takeaway:

In the words of [David] Chalmers this is "just another example of a familiar phenomenon, the strange behaviour of infinity".