skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
How to Find Frontierville Guides
Want to know how to play FrontierVille? Playing FrontierVille games is an awesome experience, if you have the right tips & tricks with you.
Visualising sorting algorithms
Nokia Hires Pamela Anderson to Promote the N8
Looks like someone just won the contest...
Just as a technical update, expect to see more recommendations for things to read start to show up in Mendeley over the next couple months. Right now you can go to the article page for a paper, such as this one, http://www.mendeley.com/research-papers/search/#0/abstract:r... and get recommendations, but that's not as useful as having recommendations pushed to you so when you get 100 new papers staring you in the face, you get the ranked according to priority and relevance.
lol, yes! You need Windows box.
I don't know about the usability, but the concept is just awesome. :)
I think luu is underestimating Mr Dijkstra - this one essay has more nuggets than Mcdonalds...

I prefer to describe it the other way round: the program is an abstract symbol manipulator, which can be turned into a concrete one by supplying a computer to it.

if we wish to count lines of code, we should not regard them as "lines produced" but as "lines spent"

As economics is known as "The Miserable Science", software engineering should be known as "The Doomed Discipline"

and so on.

You can happily read most of the current problems we face in the Doomed Discipline laid out 30 years ago.

In the end, reading honest thinking from people orders more intelligent than yourself always inspires something.
I upvote all comments that compare Larry David to Laurence Olivier, regardless of what the commenter is saying.
So all you have is an idea in your head and you want people to give you money? Don't expect anything. Put yourself in the angel's shoes. Do you know how many people tell them "Psst! Have I got an idea for you!" on a daily basis? Your chances are very close to nil and you need to produce some value to differentiate yourself.

Either roll up your sleeves and bootstrap the beta or have professional courtesy to sit and honestly write down, in-depth why you think it would be profitable for someone to give you money.
I was also in the middle of Morocco the first time I tried. Then it worked.

I think what happens is, the first time you go to geosay you have to allow the browser to give away your location; if you click on "search here" (bottom left) before having given this authorization, you land in Africa.

A simple fix could be to not show the "search here" link before the application has a real location...?
In most cases I would say yes, however, on the off chance the person doing the attack has an army of bots at their disposal it's not going to do that much good. The reason for this is bots can all have separate IP addresses in totally different IP ranges. I am not saying, "nothing is secure" but merely "read your logs".

This whole post got me thinking about ways to sniff out proxies. I am usually behind on this kind of thing, but bare with me please :).

Using PHP and Javascript I think you could weed out the majority of proxy users; avoid IP spoofing, protect sensitive places a little better. Use php to get the users IP address. Find location of that IP. Find timezone/time of that ip. Have a range set up to catch errors. Now use JavaScript to get the time.

Javascript will return the time specific to the system. If the two times do not match up then you possibly have someone using a proxy.

There are some issues with this type of system, traveling business man, but it could be useful at some point.
It says in the description that it doesn't support castling or en passant. Also, wtf, the guy wrote a chess program with AI in 1 kb and you're complaining about castling?
> I don't condone this type of government action just to make my life easier

It is certainly easy to have one's opinions shaped by personal circumstances. But do you really think that Australia's long term future will be best served by relying on our minerals rather than our minds? It's like the economy is telling us 'this information economy stuff is all rather nice but the best thing you could be doing now is figuring out how to find and extract minerals from the ground'. I don't happen to agree but could you honestly recommend a comp sci degree over metallurgy to a financially ambitious school leaver?

A heavy reliance on minerals and therefore on our relationship with China seems fraught with danger. Politically speaking, mining requires 'stability' where as the information economy seems to require democracy and freedom. All income is not equal.

> Continued foreign investment in high risk mining activities is good for the country, and this was going to stop it.

It seems to me that the value of the minerals is not in danger of disappearing any time soon. So I don't really see the frantic need for us to sell it as soon as it can be economically extracted. Are we really so badly off that we need the money as soon as we can get it? Unemployment is 5%. To me the danger is that are we becoming so addicted to this revenue source that when our dealer stops supplying we won't be able to cope.

> If anything was to be done then the state-based mining royalties should have had some component to adjust with the price of the underlying ore.

You must be from WA :) Seriously though I'm not sure about the best mechanism but I think this is a situation where the pure free market could become a tragedy of the commons.
>Yet as astronomer George Abell noted, a mosquito sitting on your arm would exert a more powerful gravitational force on your body than would the moon.

No it won't. The moon's gravitational force on you is roughly G * m * 5.68 * 10^5 N[1]. (G is the gravitational constant, m is your mass.) A mosquito weighing 2 mg[1] would have to be within two micrometres of your brain to have that effect[3].

[1] http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=%28mass+of+the+moon%29+...

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orders_of_magnitude_%28mass%29#...

[3] http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=2*10^-6+%2F+x^2+%3E%3D+...
Ask HN: Are you planning on building apps for the Google Chrome App Store?
Feature, Product, Business or Company–What are you Building?
for real formal methods it's a trade off that only those who really need security or reliability might practically make, eg banks and space agencies.

however, i think there is a continuum of methods, from TDD to proving correctness. it is often practical in the real world to do up front design before hacking out some code. i believe super smart hackers actually make lots of smart design decisions when "hacking" out code, whether that is realizing the appropriate loop invariants to make an algorithm work or figuring out the right abstractions for reusable code. there's lots of ways that good forsight produces correct code faster. that's what intelligence is: thinking, not brute force.

the smart coder, especially after gaining a variety of experiences and learning from different mentors, takes pieces of different methods in order to simultaneously make headway on different goals, not just correctness and extensibility, but refactorability, fast-rampup for new team members, fun, etc.
The article provides no insight beyond the title whatsoever. What are we looking at here? What do the colours mean? What do the shapes mean? Why is this interesting beyond "ooh pretty"?
I have to agree with the author's friend that it's easier to share with those that are similar to you. Europe is getting quite tired of the wave of mass immigration, partly fueled by the welfare state. The hard working immigrants are tolerated especially in today's climate of political correctness, but what about the ones that live off welfare and don't integrate? This does not seem to be the case in the US where you have to work so you integrate in the workplace.

Here's an interesting editorial I just read on that topic: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/sep/06/immigrat...
So it's worth 4 million US dollars today. I wonder who those 5 purchasers are.
One of my favorites is merge sort, visualised in Protovis:

http://vis.stanford.edu/protovis/ex/sort.html
I think it came from one of those network diagrams where you have :

local server <> picture of a cloud <> remote user

I now have to deal with management types who have read too many magazines wanting their data stored "in the cloud".

The management of the company I share an office with is seriously thinking about moving all their email "into the cloud" because the person that was responsible for backup did it wrong and they lost some important emails. They now associate "in the cloud" with "reliable". They are paying for an expensive consultant to come in and tell them what to do.
In the discrete world of computing, there is no meaningful metric in which "small" changes and "small" effects go hand in hand, and there never will be.

This is a fascinating quote. What's the justification for it though? Is it not possible that one day we will invent a computer language that supports writing very "robust" (in the sense of source code sensitivity) programs?
Flagged - This article is nothing but racist hate bait.
We have just deployed a fix for this. I _think_ some versions of FF have a bug in NetworkGeolocationProvider.js

(I think this is the bug: http://support.mozilla.com/en-US/questions/740469 although I have it in 3.6.8)

Anyhow, could you try again and see how it works?
Ignoring the drama: my current favorite scraping combo is NekoHtml underneath Scala's completely kickass combo of pattern matching and XML literals.
The difference between talkers and doers
I'm not sure that anything you're saying there contradicts what was in the article (or the headline), though thank you for detailing what the article calls just "new therapies that work".

The article seems to have been written in the context of the numerous people who have been sent to jail solely on the testimony of people who thought they had repressed memories which psychotherapists were able to recover. See wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satanic_ritual_abuse
I just tried this with the fix and it seems better
Brilliant. Reminds of the old 4k demo competitions - craft at its best.
Oh, I was expecting a more general discussion about business plans so I didn't put in too many details. I have talked to quite a few customers during our customer dev and some of them really like the idea. They think this innovation will increase their revenue but no one is sure by how much (and there is of course the risk that we are all wrong about it or the idea needs pivoting before it does that). It also involves a little bit of hardware so I need about the amount of money an average yc company gets from yc to get to the demo from here. I can do some other somewhat related projects to slowly raise that money but that is just wasting time. Ideally I should just get on it and get the demo out and deployed. Once we see what effect if at all it has on our customer's sales and how much it cost us to get that, we can iterate, price, figure out the revenue and generally write a business plan we could honour.

So, basically my angel's roi is not clear and a convertible note with a reasonable discount sounds ideal but the system here is the system and I don't want to waste time fighting it. I will put in a business plan to get talking to the right guys and then try and convince the right angel to ignore it and do a convertible note and hopefully all will be well in the world again. This will have the unfortunate side effect of polluting my mind with fake figures and expectations which I wish I could avoid but that's just part of the game at the moment.
Yeah, that would happen when the ATP was fully converted - so 5-10 seconds.

t-nation.com reckons it's related to nerve signals rather than individual fibres tiring tho'.
140 characters seems a little limiting for news.
Does every political essay have to be such one-sided argument? Isn't it important to understand the truth, the crux of the matters?

"Politics is the mind-killer. Arguments are soldiers. Once you know which side you're on, you must support all arguments of that side, and attack all arguments that appear to favor the enemy side; otherwise it's like stabbing your soldiers in the back. If you abide within that pattern, policy debates will also appear one-sided to you - the costs and drawbacks of your favored policy are enemy soldiers, to be attacked by any means necessary." -- Eliezer Yudkowsk
My girlfriend is German and lives in Berlin. I just spent 3 months there. She lives in Kreuzburg, it's a poor area of Berlin. You get the winos, drunks, and junkies. There's a fair share of street people with mental issues. But one thing you don't get is fear. It's a safe place by American standards. You also don't see many cops. There are way more cops in American cities. This suggests that it really is fundamentally safer.

I don't know why this is so. Maybe it's because of the social safety system, maybe it's because of culture or a combination of both. But German elites want Germany to emulate America. The social system is under attack there and the government wants to embrace American style corporatism. It's ironic that while it is better there those in power want to make it more like America.
No, in the perfectly valid analogy, we are Winston Smith, Apple is Big Brother. Though it also might be argued that in this analogy you are O'Brien.
Endangered or not, wolf killings set to expand
It reminds me of Atari 2600 chess, which used to be able to beat me [1] using 4k of ROM and 128 bytes of RAM [2].

---

[1] This is not a particularly remarkable achievement even today, of course.

[2] Note to people younger than twenty: this is not a typo.
The title here on HN is "fully working", which isn't true.
Just like latin. Forever is a long time.
Microsoft Research has an interesting project along these lines, called "Penny Black".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penny_Black_(research_project)
http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/PennyBlack/

It doesn't sound particularly evil to me. What's the danger, in your mind?
Controversial Research Topics Discuss Acute and Topical Matters
There is much hype when discussing controversial research topics. Controversial topics are not easy to discuss as the position taken will be unsure. However, a good controversial topic is of great interest to the reader. Therefore, if the right topic is selected you will be able to write a good research paper.
The 40-30-30 Rule: Why Risk Is Worth It
Isn't that, in many ways, the opposite of what people want out of a programming languages? It seems to me that expressiveness, and robustness (in the sense that you define robustness) are inversely related.

Whenever a language comparison pops up, there's always a large contingent of people who argue for the superiority of a language because ideas can be expressed more concisely in 'their' language, but that necessarily means that some small change will have a relatively large effect.

There's also robustness in the sense that, e.g., BitC was trying to be robust, and that's something that I think is promising.
He could have put in some templating to make it easy for the next person to quit.
I have an idea, a co-founder, a company bootstrapped and running. I have potential customers who like the idea and are ready for a beta. And I am pursuing the idea whether or not the angel money comes through (just a whole lot more slowly).
Reminded me of 1k ZX Chess (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1K_ZX_Chess), an implementation of chess with AI for the ZX-81, a home computer which had a whopping 1k of RAM.
Prostitution is actively illegal in all forms throughout the US, with the exception of licensed brothels in some counties in Nevada.
Ten Components of Startup Valuation For Investors
New Google AI Challenge: Planet Wars
In case you don't take the time to have your mind blown, here's the source (1014 characters):

for(B=i=y=u=b=i=5-5,x=10,I=[],l=[];l[B]="ECDFBDCEAAAAAAAAIIIIIIIIMKLNJLKM@G@TSb~?A6J57IKJT576,+-48HLSUmgukgg OJNMLK IDHGFE".charCodeAt(B)-64,B++<120;I[B-1]=B%x?B/x%x<2|B%x<2?7:B/x&4?0:l[i++]:7);function X(c,h,e,s){e^=8;for(var o,S,C,A,R,T,G,n,N=-1e8,O=20;++O<99;)if((o=I[T=O])&&(G=o^e)<7){A=G--&2?8:4;C=o-9?l[61+G]:49;do if(!(R=I[T+=l[C]])&&!!G|A<3||(R+1^e)>9&&G|A>2){if(!(R-2&7))return 78-h<<x;n=G|(e?T>29:T<91)?o:6^e;S=(R&&l[R&7|32]-h-G)+(G?0:n-o?55:(A<2)+1);if(c>h||1<c&c==h&&S>2){I[T]=n;I[O]=0;S-=X(c,h+1,e,S-N);if(!(h||c-1|B-O|T-b|S<-1e4))return W(B=0),e&&setTimeout("X(2,0,8),X(1,0,8)",50);I[O]=o;I[T]=R}if(S>N||!h&S==N&&Math.random()<.5)if(N=S,c>1)if(h?s-S<0:(B=O,b=T,0))return S}while(!R&G>2||(T=O,(G||A>2|(e?O>78:O<41)&!R)&&++C--A))}return N}function W(){i="<table>";for(u=18;u<98;i+=++u%x-9?"<th width=60 height=60 onclick='I[b="+u+"]>8?W(B=b):X(1,0,0)'style='font-size:50px'bgcolor=#"+(u-B?u.9&1||9:"d")+"0f0e0>&#"+(I[u]?9808+l[67+I[u]]:160)+";":u++&&"<tr>");document.body.innerHTML=i+"</table>"}W();

Beautified:

for (B = i = y = u = b = i = 5 - 5, x = 10, I = [], l = []; l[B] = "ECDFBDCEAAAAAAAAIIIIIIIIMKLNJLKM@G@TSb~?A6J57IKJT576,+-48HLSUmgukgg OJNMLK IDHGFE".charCodeAt(B) - 64, B++ < 120; I[B - 1] = B % x ? B / x % x < 2 | B % x < 2 ? 7 : B / x & 4 ? 0 : l[i++] : 7);

function X(c, h, e, s) {
e ^= 8;
for (var o, S, C, A, R, T, G, n, N = -1e8, O = 20; ++O < 99;) if ((o = I[T = O]) && (G = o ^ e) < 7) {
A = G-- & 2 ? 8 : 4;
C = o - 9 ? l[61 + G] : 49;
do
if (!(R = I[T += l[C]]) && !! G | A < 3 || (R + 1 ^ e) > 9 && G | A > 2) {
if (!(R - 2 & 7)) return 78 - h << x;
n = G | (e ? T > 29 : T < 91) ? o : 6 ^ e;
S = (R && l[R & 7 | 32] - h - G) + (G ? 0 : n - o ? 55 : (A < 2) + 1);
if (c > h || 1 < c & c == h && S > 2) {
I[T] = n;
I[O] = 0;
S -= X(c, h + 1, e, S - N);
if (!(h || c - 1 | B - O | T - b | S < -1e4)) return W(B = 0), e && setTimeout("X(2,0,8),X(1,0,8)", 50);
I[O] = o;
I[T] = R
}
if (S > N || !h & S == N && Math.random() < .5) if (N = S, c > 1) if (h ? s - S < 0 : (B = O, b = T, 0)) return S
}
while (!R & G > 2 || (T = O, (G || A > 2 | (e ? O > 78 : O < 41) & !R) && ++C--A))
}
return N
}
function W() {
i = "<table>";
for (u = 18; u < 98; i += ++u % x - 9 ? "<th width=60 height=60 onclick='I[b=" + u + "]>8?W(B=b):X(1,0,0)'style='font-size:50px'bgcolor=#" + (u - B ? u.9 & 1 || 9 : "d") + "0f0e0>&#" + (I[u] ? 9808 + l[67 + I[u]] : 160) + ";" : u++ && "<tr>");
document.body.innerHTML = i + "</table>"
}
W();
Great article, but what if you're a BA with a great idea and super low budget?

You can either:
a) Learn to develop applications on your own (potentially slowing your time to market and reducing product quality)

b) Develop the requirements and hire someone else to build it (cheaply and effectively if you've got a good team in India)

c) Take on a developer as a partner (diluting equity and who knows if he's the right guy for the job until you've learned more about the nature of the solution needed?)

My contention is that its not worth diluting equity with an additional partner until you've put out a product yourself that tests of all your original assumptions.
In DoD we embrace the NoSQL movement and jump straight to the data-store of the future: a CSV file.

I can't wait for COBOL on Crank. Or Assembly on Acid.

(Sorry. I just had to do that. Don't know what's wrong with me today.)

Good stuff. Many times you can say more with satire than you can with diplomacy. Other times you're just being snarky. Tough call.
Well, something like English anyway - Expect lots of loanwords from all over the world, and lots of misspellings to become variants and eventually standard.

While English has a simple script and basic grammar, the spelling is horribly inconsistent, probably worse than any other widely spoken language. I suspect that the influx of people using it as a second language will eventually wear down the resistence from horrified language conservationists.
The free/proprietary dichotomy is not the same as the left/right (or communist/capitalist) dichotomy. They're mostly orthogonal, in fact. Unless having any kind of ethic makes you left wing, but I doubt you think that.

Also, if the film doesn't look balanced, that's probably because the facts aren't. But to the point of looking like a mere propaganda piece? Only the background music gave me that impression.
Actually wasn't the it called mining 'super' tax becuase it was to fund superannuation? I know there was to be some increase in funding but I'm actually not 100% sure because the govt did such a poor job of selling it.

Anyway I think this may be one of those cases where the XX cents we typically get back from each dollar the govt taxes could be worth it to slow the party down.
A new startup should write a business plan. If nothing else you familiarize with writing about your ideas and products on paper. With that you make a clearer vision of where you are headed and what you want to do. I believe you are thinking about everything everyday and all the time, but if you have to explain it to someone, it can be easily done with a business plan. It also shows you have read through most of the 10 points that potential investors are looking for, so you did your homework.

No one is saying that you should make an ultimate one, its a practice to refine it on a monthly, or semi monthly basis, depending on the pace of your development.

And also a product by itself is great to show around, but the numbers in business plan can also convince a lot of maybe not potential users, but business partners and investors.

I vote for writing it just so you put all your thoughts and plans on paper and doing iterations forward from there, I believe it's useful.
There's already Cobol on Cogs: http://www.coboloncogs.org/INDEX.HTM
Sorry but I'm with the other luddites here. I don't encourage iDevice usage with my small (2 and 4) kids. I prefer them using old-fashioned machinery (books, sticks, rocks, dirt, toy trains)
Agreed, I wasn't complaining, I was just pointing out a minor inaccuracy in the title. It's very impressive and doesn't need to be oversold.
Normalization is from the devil
gets ... at least you theoretically can use strcpy securely.
I've told my girlfriend about Haskell to make her go to sleep. Works like a charm.
Math lectures online, Not video
Castling is pretty important move in chess. You can hardly claim an implementation to be fully working without it (although it wasn't the author claiming that).
Honest question: Are you basing that off personal experience, or is there evidence that this happens on a large scale?

To provide another data point, my Dell Latitude D520 still has all keys intact, and I've been using it roughly (in every sense of the word) every day since 2005. On the other hand, my HP notebook from work has already lost it's Shift key after just one year. (Maybe that's an indicator that I'm YELLING too much at the office...)

That's just an anecdote however. There's no way I would try to make claims about either keyboards based on that small sample size.
That's exactly what I've thought when I read:

Thirdly, after you come back from your short camping trip, you’ll not easily fall back into your old schedule.

I've reset my schedule a couple of times and I can say that falling back to the old schedule was a piece of cake.
Good stuff. I plan to share this with each development manager on my team. We've learned many of these lessons the hard way. Others, we've decided not to pursue. For example, we have found working together in a team room is extremely helpful when working through a new model design, etc. So we have a 3 days in, 2 days virtual model.

Along the lines of removing technology, we've enjoyed using a mockup tool (like Peldi's Balsamiq or Mockingbird) for capturing story flows and wireframes. I know it's tech, but these tools do such a good job of removing the tech it's barely visible.

And from the article, a diagram that captures the idea behind MVP fairly well: http://rubypond.com/images/scheduling-stories.png
Nice, but it isn't very good, lost to Fools Mate (it took a knight then got mated) (1 look ahead would see it, queen and bishop just attack pawn near king)
I wonder how many characters of code it would take.
Installing Liferay 6.0.5 Community Edition Bundled With Tomcat On Ubuntu 10.04