skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'd call phone calls limited to just 14 seconds a new technology, and I'd love it. Imagine that you could just answer any call because you know that it's not going to degenerate into 5-minute long series of you just nodding to the endless story of the other side.
Why you shouldn't switch:

This reminds me of when I tried to switch to a Dvorak
keyboard. The trouble was, I don't use one computer. I
use all kinds of computers. I use other people's
computers. I use three computers fairly regularly at
home and three at work. I use computers in the test lab
at work. The trouble with customizing your environment
is that it just doesn't propagate, so it's not even
worth the trouble.

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/uibook/chapters/fog0000000059....

Which is my experience too. Dvorak would need to be at least 2-3 times faster than Qwerty to outweigh the disadvantages, a "possibly 10% faster" doesn't cut it.
Yes, but the 'US' homepage as you call it is used by people all over the world.

See: http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/google.com

Then click on the 'more' link under the flags. Google keeps trying to redirect me to google.nl but I always set it back to google.com and it looks like I'm not alone in that.
Nike Dunk High KickerBockerGlory Octopussy
Ask HN: are there good video lectures on real analysis available online? 
I'm interested in a full real analysis course - it's usually broken up into three separate classes taught over three semesters. Are there good video lectures anywhere online?
Programming Languages are not Zero-Sum
Rather, domain experts armed with statistics.
There is a God
Asking HN: Is there some app for linux or a mobile java app for this?
My co-founder and I (we run a smallish, growing business, but not what would typically be called a "startup") met at high school (aged 11 or 12). We then went to different colleges, shared a house after university, worked for other people for a bit and then started our company.

I can't imagine founding with someone I didn't know incredibly well - though I don't think you need to go as far as we did and choose your best friend. In any case, as others have said, make sure that your friends are actually good at stuff.

I suspect this also only works if you have the kind of friendship that is built on talking business all the time too. It is actually the foundation of our friendship in many ways so I think that reduces the risks involved (though not to zero, obviously).

There is clearly some personality-type stuff going on here too though - my wife was also my friend for years before we got together...
Power Balance Bracelets And Celebrity
Jaaga.in: Art & Technology fellowships in Bangalore
That's pretty funny, everything in Seattle seems to happen on Wednesdays.
Air Jordan 9 (IX) Retro For The Love Of The Game
Illinois Mailing  Lists and  Email Lists.
Online Publishing Services has been built to ease the stress, pressure and minimize the risk involved in buying data, by building our own Business (B2B) lists and B2C lists in addition to a unique searchable database of niche audience lists.
You can't go wrong with Mahmud.

He's spent quite a bit of time trying to get me to understand some obscure stuff that I'd like to know, the guy is honest to a fault. Be prepared for take-off though, a 10 line email from Mahmud will expand in to a month of reading ;)
I'd be down occasionally.

http://www.seattletechcalendar.com/ shows that Monday is perhaps the best time to hold it. It's at least a little out of date though, Seattle Wireless Hacknight moved a year ago.
"The key to making programs fast is to make them do practically nothing. ;-)"

In a prefect world, I would prefer many programs that did nothing and worked together, than a monolithic program that does anything (and even contains a kitchen sink!) but is slow.

So come on fellow developers, let's make a bunch of nothing!
Boyer-Moore is one of the examples that made me realize clearly that on the larger scale of programmer competence I'm nobody special. Some algorithms show such out-of-the-box thinking that it blows your mind.

The most interesting thing is that most pattern matching algorithms up to then got slower with longer match strings, but Boyer-Moore actually got faster!

To quote Majikthise: "Bloody hell, now that is what I call thinking."...
True the overlap might be very high and it is extremely hard to find the common userbase with the available open tools. Will have to wait for hitwise, comscore or someone to publish a report.

I happened to look more into the global top sites http://www.alexa.com/topsites/global. It is lot more confusing - Google's India, German, HK, UK sites are considered separately. A clear example is http://www.alexa.com/topsites/countries/SA and http://www.alexa.com/topsites/countries/Italy where the top site is not google.com, so these users are not accounted in .com but use other google properties or variant country TLDs.
So, my co-founder and I met during our studies in Singapore but we met at least in part because of Hacker News.

Before moving to Singapore I updated my profile on HN saying that I would move there. A few weeks after I had arrived in Singapore I got an email from Ata asking if I was interested to meet up. And that is when the "mating dance" began ;-)

Over a period of six months we started exchanging ideas and building trust. We brainstormed a little each time we met and after about five months I told Ata about this idea, my nugget, that I had been thinking about for 8 months then. I didn't hear from Ata for about two weeks after that meeting and started to worry a little. But two weeks later I had an email from him in my Inbox which contained the URL to a prototype. That sealed the deal between us. A few weeks later, we signed a declaration of intent, and we have been moving forward full throttle since then.

So far the collaboration hasn't always been easy - we are still getting to know each other and working from two different locations doesn't make that easier - but we have found ways to get things done. Starting up with a friend might be easier because you know each other very well but I found a new friend and our relationship isn't loaded with baggage from earlier.
Upon hearing that I use dvorak, people occasionally ask me if they should switch, to which I usually shrug. I'm happy with dvorak, but almost everyone else is happy with qwerty. I switched at a time where switching was cheap and am now "victim" to a similar kind of lock-in that most qwerty users are.

Despite being happy with dvorak, I see no real reason to evangelize a keyboard layout. It's simply not that big a deal.
"Overtake" is an ambiguous word. If these extrapolations are correct then Facebook will get more unique visitors than Google some time in the next year or two, but why use this metric rather than (e.g.) total number of visits, total amount of traffic, amount of time spent at the site, revenue, or profit? On some of these I would guess that Facebook's been ahead for a while; on some, Google is probably well ahead for the foreseeable future.

In any case, comparing any metric of this sort between two sites that are so different, and that do such different things with their visitors, seems rather pointless to me. Like comparing unit sales volumes between a company that makes mobile phones and one that makes cuddly toys, or comparing one hospital's survival rates for heart transplants with another's for cancer surgery.
I switched to Colemak after getting my arm in a cast and having my typing speed slowed anyway for three weeks. I've been using it for over a year now. I can't start touch-typing qwerty instantly any more, but I can still type comfortably on a qwerty keyboard as long as I can look at the keyboard, so occasional stints on a non-Colemak workstation aren't a problem. I had been touch-typing on qwerty for close to a fifteen years before this, and the switch was surprisingly problem-free. Getting to a nice speed on Colemak took about a month.

I haven't seen significant increase in typing speed, but there could be ergonomic benefit from having to twist my hands less to hit the awkwardly placed keys.
"First, lookup time is O(1) in the size of the trie."

The article skims over the tricky part - the dependency on the size of the alphabet. Which you can no longer treat as insignificant in the days of unicode.
Generating sounds from a source code structure (if, for, while, etc) at runtime
Why is this URL marked by "[dead]"?
We're due to run out of it within a year. We know how many blocks remain, and how fast they are allocated. It's not that hard to tell when we're going to hit zero...
The reason why I looked in to this (this time) was because I was wondering if the whole privacy backlash had put a dent in facebook's growth.

It seems that's not the case, they're still growing at more or less the same rate (to my surprise).

I wouldn't mind analyzing a days worth of logs of either company, but I don't think I have a machine large enough to store the files on (nor enough CPU to process the data).

It would be quite the goldmine of information.
In france everybody uses google.fr. Not all countries and cultures are comfortable with english.
Your comment is a marvelous antidote to hype and rumor. Thank you, sir.
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Google.com is the #5 site in France.
An by 2050 both will have 500% market share!
Germans: Argentina shows no respect (AP)
So You Put an Application in the Cloud. Now What?
This is just the latest revision of MySpace pages too.
> I honestly believe Facebook is on the way out.

I'd like to believe that but I can't find any figures to substantiate it, I think it's a bit premature to make that statement unless you're looking at a specific group of users.

I see you've qualified your statement as speculative.

My personal 'data' is limited to my friends and family, and there is some anecdotal evidence that a facebook account has a 'lifecycle' that is measurable in a relatively low number of years whereas a google one seems to be long enough that we haven't been able to detect its length.
I almost died when I had to use a Mac & all I got there was some unexpected home key behaviour and the squiggle button.
Yeah, I do the same but it looks like the majority uses their country specific Google pages.
On the iPad/iPhone, you can't get an on-screen Dvorak keyboard. People petitioned for it years ago and it's just not happening.
personally I prefer this intro:
http://marknelson.us/1996/08/01/suffix-trees/

or this one which is slightly harder:
http://linux.thai.net/~thep/datrie/datrie.html
Just a quick note: your update icon looks a lot like Mozilla Sync: http://mozillalabs.com/sync/

It might be that you came up with this icon independently but anyway it's better to change it.

Terrific product otherwise. I'll try to convince people at our company to tale a look at it. We currently have our own AutoUpdate implementation but it downloads the whole .msi files.
The whole discussion of which Tao's comment is a part is well worth reading for those who enjoy such things: lots of interesting ideas there.
Good luck building a Unicode trie -- the branching factor would be too high, never mind lookup time. Instead, you'd make the trie of an encoding, probably UTF-8 (off the top of my head) that would enable you to keep the branching factor at 256, which is already rather large but doable (You can switch to Judy arrays if the wasted space bothers you.)

Does anyone know, is there a Unicode encoding that enables you to map arbitrary ranges (so I can, for example, use the greek alphabet only at 1 byte per character or less)? I suppose UTF-8 is already hard enough to decode.
Not only that, but when people 'like' your product, they automatically market it to all of their friends.
Yes true. But I am not sure you can discount the other domains

For example .co.uk and .com.hk, for example, have a global reach of 3 and 4 percent respectively (I've made a guess that those are the top two alternate domains).

So already that is a significant boost to the Google stats.

(edit: checked .fr, that is another 3% reach)

(edit2: .de and .in are also in the top 20 and contribute 3.5 and 4 percent in their turn. I make that a [rough] grand total of 57.5% reach.)
I am aware of that. Can somebody please pinpoint the errors or show articles that explain where the writer has done errors? I am curious if it will be worth to switch, but I need some facts first :) .
The irony is that you won't discover happiness until you realize that there isn't such a thing as happiness. Misery and pain is part and parcel of being alive and that's the way it should be.

It's ironic because this encourages people to use the scientific method to delude themselves into thinking that eternal bliss is possible. I actually implemented something like this. I used to keep a detailed diary of the things that have happened and I used to analyze the shit out of everything on paper and then I would check the conclusions and do it again, but somehow it never worked. Upon hitting this I would blame myself and everything I've touched for it. Clearly there has to be something wrong with me , but what I failed to realize was that I was fooling myself in the most logical manner possible.

It's amazing how twisted things are.

Although, this concept will help you to evaluate things and get things done. It won't help you to achieve happiness. Nothing can.
The Security Now podcast did an episode on the Boyer/Moore algorithm. Not the most information dense way to learn about it, but might be of interest.

( Starts at 34m10s -- http://twit.tv/sn203 )
This is essentially the same as the "RISC patent" - a patent that essentially said "if you make something simpler, it'll go faster"

Quoted from James Gosling,
http://nighthacks.org/roller/jag/entry/quite_the_firestorm

Also, kudo's to the 15 years maintainer of GNU grep.
Have you read the article in question? It does a pretty thorough job of analyzing (and demolishing) the "research" presented, by Dvorak, in favor of the Dvorak keyboard.

If anybody has a strong, data-based counter-argument in favor of Dvorak, I'd like to hear it.
Photos of Debrahlee Lorenzana
Debrahlee Lorenzana is the woman who sues Citibank after being fired for being ''too hot''. What do you think? Did she deserve to be fired? Does she really look ''too hot''?
The Third Replicator
Let's face it: Apple will and can reject whatever they want for whatever reasons and you can do nothing about (except by abandoning the appstore).

I personally couldn't invest weeks of time in an app where i can't be sure whether it may be rejected for some stupid reason.
Formatting Links for Usability
The No.1 free money making website, you must see it
Malware obfuscation.
once I was in a conversation with two friends of mine, one of them had recently switched to dvorak and was explaining us how he was using some software to improve his typing speed.

The other replied "you are a programmer, you're supposed to spend 90% of the time thinking about what you do, why do you try to slightly improve the 10% spent writing it"?

Do dvorak users out there find themselves much more productive at the end of the day because of their typing speed?
Smoothie Charts
This as may be. But Google have 7 of the top 20 sites :) Five of which are Google search.

http://www.alexa.com/topsites

I think they are pretty solidly established as the "biggest" :)
I've read from several sources that ebooks are currently 8.5% of the total book market. By the end of the year, they may be over 10%.

I wonder if those are US or global numbers? One downside of going Kindle only is that you've basically killed any chance of selling books outside the US.
The most interesting thing is that most pattern matching algorithms up to then got slower with longer match strings, but Boyer-Moore actually got faster!

Another interesting bit of trivia: In the first chapter of my thesis I present a string matching algorithm with almost exactly the same asymptotic running time as BM -- but where BM performs exact matching using no precomputed index, my algorithm performs matching with mismatches using an index.

With an index, of course, exact matching is O(log N) time -- in a peculiar way, the "cost" of inexact matching is one index worth of efficiency.

[EDIT: On second thought, this last comment meaningful at all? I'm not sure, but it's almost 4AM so I'm not going to figure it out now.]
Google CEO on the future of search
Of course, because everybody knows you can extrapolate graphs past their domains and that you do not need to take saturation in to account at all.
Sweden drops rape warrant for WikiLeaks founder
Is your thesis online?

I'd like to read that.
Plenty to Watch Online, but Viewers Prefer to Pay for Cable
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=991961

http://searchyc.com/submissions/zsh?sort=by_date
Maybe because it's something a lot of people do want, but can't justify getting for themselves (I already have a laptop, I don't really need an Ipad).

Or maybe just 'cause it's the shiniest new toy around :)
Bathroom Monologue: His People's Story
How was the google line trending when it was 6 years old? I am sure the acceleration of their traffic must have reduced over the past few years and would expect similar thing to happen to facebook.
Facebook's increasing focus on business customers will be at the detriment of regular users, who will be demoted to the rank of mere 'consumers'. It's a subtle - but important - distinction.

Facebook's decision-making will increasingly be driven by thinking like "how can we monetize all this wealth of consumer data" or "how can we introduce tiered fanpage packages to business customers as a revenue stream" rather than focusing on what makes a great user experience.

Currently, knowing that my friend has achieved another 'badge' in Mafia Wars adds zero value to my life. It only gets worse as Facebook focuses more and more on business brands. What do I care if my friend 'likes' Apple or Nike? How does that improve my relationship with that person? People I am really friends with in real life don't care what brands I like, or what isotonic sports drink I drink. The like me because of me. Much as businesses would like to think that people define their lives by the products they buy (this is like the opening scenes in 'Fight Club' where Edward Norton's character tries to pick out stuff from an Ikea catalogue that defines himself) that's not a basis for a relationship. And Facebook used to be all about relationships. Now I look at my Live Stream...and it's got all this random flotsam floating downstream. I care about none of it.

The reason I love HN, incidentally, is because it's the polar opposite of MySpace and what Facebook is gradually becoming. Real people, that I share a lot in common with, expressing their real opinions, no auto-generated crap, and zero bling.

You see comments like "What could cause FB to die?" here on HN. They're so big at this stage, with the power of network effects and lock-in, that external competition is no threat to them realistically. The only way they will die is if they continue exactly the way they are now, making people's experience ever-more spam choked, till people realize "hey this experience is actually quite shit, even if I do have 500 online friends" and start looking for alternatives. We're not quite there yet though.
Traffic Experiments -- How to clear traffic jams
Or you use a sparse data structure instead of an array in each node, for example a binary tree. This gives you ternary trees.
This:

> The key to making programs fast is
> to make them do practically nothing.
> ;-)

is a paraphrase of something I posted here a long time ago:

> You can't make programs run faster,
> you can only make them do less.

While not entirely true (and Ph.D. theses have been written about the corners where it's wrong) it's an excellent start when you have to make a program run faster.
Actually you can. At least in iOS 4
I think you need to distinguish between interface inheritance and implementation inheritance.

The reason to use interface inheritance is to allow polymorphism in a statically typed language.

The only reason to use implementation inheritance is code reuse. And yes, you should only do that if the classes conform to the LSP.
Isn't that a big part of the GNU mentality too? Lots of little programs that can be easily chained together.
I agree. I would also suggest that Google search plays a much more fundamental role to the internet than Facebook.

Facebook in my opinion is a trend, like yahoo chat was or usernet. Its a way for people to communicate and people move their groups and places where they hang around on the internet all the time, but everyone needs to do their weekly shopping, that is everyone needs to search and unlike real life supermarkets, on the net there is just google.
I've noticed that quite a lot of my friends are now using it pretty much exclusively for a) sharing photo's (because that's where everyone is to share them with) and b) as an interactive contacts database.

Even game usage seems to have plummeted on my feed.

I think you are right; Facebook has a lifecycle - so it's reach will probably flatten out (I'm guessing it will drop a bit first) and it will end up with a slow churn of new users taking the place of inactive ones.
Nice. I experienced that first hand earlier this month.

During a two week holiday I spent 2 days in a city hotel, then the rest of the week in a campsite and then another week camping in another country.

On the penultimate day I remarked to my wife that I felt like I'd been away for 2 months. Now I know why. Thank you.
Is your thesis online?

Yes, http://www.daemonology.net/papers/thesis.pdf

I'd like to read that.

I recommend skipping the proofs. They're not very informative and the calculus gets rather tedious.
Yea, that is what Linux needs badly. Another text editor.
I hear this so often as an anti-Dvorak argument, and I cannot understand it. It seems like a complete non-objection to me.

If I need to use an unfamiliar computer, I can revert to hunt-and-peck Qwerty.

If I use that computer so often that hunt-and-peck significantly slows me down, I can afford to spend two minutes to switch the keymap to Dvorak.

[FWIW: I use Dvorak to prevent repetitive strain injury. "Time saving" is hardly an issue.]
Apache Server Status for www.apache.org
I doubt programmers will be more productive in Dvorak. Typing speed is not time critical.

Item 4 is why I use Dvorak.

"Dvorak is more comfortable and better for your health."

I changed to Dvorak to eliminate repetitive strain injury. I haven't spent a moment regretting it.
I was trying Vipassana, as taught by S.N. Goenka (http://www.dhamma.org). It is based on "tactile sensations".

But I'm trying to understand if a prayer-based approach (like "Lord's Prayer") is better for my nature.
Lots of little programs that can be easily chained together.

I think that's usually described as "the Unix philosophy." It's not limited to GNU (nor does it originate with GNU). See, for example, the Wikipedia article on "Unix philosophy"[1]:

Doug McIlroy, the inventor of Unix pipes and one of the founders of the Unix tradition, summarized the philosophy as follows:[2]

This is the Unix philosophy: Write programs that do one thing and do it well. Write programs to work together. Write programs to handle text streams, because that is a universal interface.

This is usually abridged to "Write programs that do one thing and do it well".

[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix_philosophy#McIlroy:_A_Quar...

[2]http://www.faqs.org/docs/artu/ch01s06.html
FACT CHECK: 500 million users is over 25% of the world's online population.

Actually, the last time I checked http://www.census.gov/main/www/popclock.html shows the world population at 6.8billion. So 500 million would only be 7% of the worlds population. Impressive, but nowhere near 25%.