skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This reminds me of the airplane on the conveyor belt, in that the only confusion comes from the question being insufficiently specified.

- Friction of the pulleys
- Mass of the pulleys
- Moment of inertia of the pulleys
- Mass of the rope
- Unit of mass of the weights
- Is there a surface that the weights are resting on?
- What's the local gravity like?
- Others

If we assume the things we're likely supposed to (rope mass, pulley friction, pulley mass and moment of inertia all insignificant, gravity tending down, resting on a surface), it's clear that the lightest weight will rise first. If, on the other hand, we make ridiculous assumptions (weights mass in AMU, in a no-gravity environment, high moment of inertia pulleys), then the "heavy" weight will lift first (because it's easier to lift the weight than to spin the pulleys).
"Though it's possible to write a garbage collector."

There is a Garbage Collection package available for Forth here (http://www.complang.tuwien.ac.at/projects/forth.html).
Nice to hear. I own all three of his science books and they are excellent. I wish someone else had spent five years fighting libel charges, and he had spent five years writing new books.
Plex to enable streaming content in LG TVs and Blu-ray players
It's LiveNetLife. They're trying to introduce live chatting features into random websites and I thought I'd give the service a try. Mostly because I personally know the founder.
OP jumped to an unsubstantiated conclusion

Unsubstantiated? The OP is Don Norman (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Norman) and he's speaking from experience. The fact that he has more experience in this branch of design than pretty much anybody else should give his argument some weight.

we could have been writing about the elephant in the room: that functional design, like journalism and sensible politics, is a lost art.

I think he was addressing this point directly, but he happens to disagree with you. Take the following as an example:

Hurrah, I said, now the entire wash can be automatic, so there need be only two controls: one to chose between “hot and colored wash” and “easy-to-clean fabrics,” the other to start the machine. Nope, this washer had even more controls and buttons than the non-automatic one. “Why even more controls? I asked my contact at Siemens, “when you could make this machines with only one or two?”.

“Are you one of those people who wants to give up control, who thinks less is better?” asked this usability expert. “Don’t you want to be in control?”

Strange answer. Why the automation if it isn’t to be trusted? And, yes, actually I am one of those bizarre people who think that less is better.

It appears that marketing won the day. And I suspect marketing was right. Would you pay more money for a washing machine with less controls? In the abstract, maybe. At the store? Probably not.

Both Norman and his friend at Siemens understood that the interface to the washing machine could have been as simple as two switches. The problem is that they need to sell washing machines when they're sitting in a row of competitive products. In their experience, people in the market for a washer tend to buy on features. And Norman never claimed that everybody buys this way, just that most people do.
He does get it, you don't. Apple needs to actually make a useful product if they want to sell music through Ping. This miserable turd they have forced out is unbelievably bad and will not drive up music sales at all. Instead, it's bringing the sanity of a respected company into question.
I really like the idea of this site, but it needs some polish.

1. As everybody has said, more languages.

2. One of the aims is to have the candidate as calm as possible. Seeing that 90% of people can't write a C program that reverses a linked list makes me nervous about the strictness of the test.

3. Rather than giving just a subset of the environment how about you make each test have to produce a binary. Then tell candidates that the test is for `gcc -o reverse reverce.c && ./reverse 1 2 3 4` to output "4 3 2 1". I presume you are running them in a sandboxed VM? That will help people run and debug the program on their own machines.
the ROI is people spending more time on Twitter. have you used the app?

it's set up for much more noodling/discovery of tweets and people, rather than just looking over a timeline.
> And I have no idea who Yo-Yo Ma and Jack Johnson even are.

oooookay.
Apple's controlling nature, and desire to be the Disney of the computer world, seem incompatible with the instincts needed to create a successful social network.
If you like that, you'll like this:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1658524

... or this: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1658380

... or this: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1658263

... or this: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1658186

... or this: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1657733

... or this: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1655864

... or this: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1655658

... and probably more.

http://searchyc.com/submissions/hawking?sort=by_date
Personally, from the other side, I've seen literally hundreds of people apply to jobs with only one or two open positions.

Most of those candidates turn out to be just noise, but the few that are not don't always get a fair chance because screeners/interviewers are just too swamped. A tool like this can take a large chunk of that load off, and any candidate who invests time in taking this kind of test will know that they are ahead of the 'unwashed masses' without having left the comfort of home.
Also, if it relayed anything that you played, some unsavory results might be relayed (and if it only relayed Apple purchased tracks there would be complaints).
Tell HN: Potential problems with iTunes 10 and ad-hoc distribution
Just a heads up to any iOS developers out there, I've had problems installing an iPad app my company is building as an ad-hoc provision since I upgraded to iTunes 10 on OS X. I've contacted Apple and they've confirmed it might be a problem on their end.
Yeah, this guy not knowing who one of the most skilled cellists on the planet is kinda undermines any of his music-related credibility.
Zach Klein posted a list of Startup Jobs -- Mostly NYC and SF based

http://jobs.zachklein.com/
sweet. About time. I asked http://stackoverflow.com/questions/130264/impact-of-aws-acco... almost 2 years to the day..
I like this idea a lot. We routinely screen people with a really simple programming task to just make sure they aren't completely lying (which happens more than I can believe).

1. I took a test, implemented reverseWords (which is a test we often give candidates), and was rather shocked to discover that in your estimation, I failed. Yet, pasting the code into vim, and the unit test you say I failed ... I didn't fail. The fact you failed me when I should have passed, isn't great. :) More info on the failure would be helpful.

2. If I were using this on a real candidate, I would like to know how long it took them to do the test.

I think it's a great idea; I'd consider using it for pre-screening once the kinks are worked out.
I don't see that applicants are the target audience for this service -- the companies using it would be responsible for making the tests a good experience for candidates.
Oh. Seems interesting... although the UI could use a little softening up. If there's one thing I agree with Steve Jobs about it's rounded corners.
I "got" the reasons why Apple didn't integrate with the leading rival social networks.

But bearing in mind they've got their own piece of software that'll tell them everything you listen to (and how often) and a library full of albums for sale by those artists, any halfway competent product manager would have made recommending albums by these artists their absolute #1 priority. Complete with big "buy" button.

Judging by the authors screenshots and lists of bands it sounds like they've released with the Cuil of music recommendation engines.

For a company whose attention to detail is legendary, that's embarrassing.
Ah, thanks. Never knew that. (Still not sure I want to switch that feature on, but it's good to know.)
Very good discussion. Is it software or marketing or the people who wrote it or the community they have grown? The software is Balsamiq btw.
If you don't understand how A/B testing works, and are unwilling to read the clear explanation on the dashboard telling you that your results are not significant, your problem is in your chair, not with A/B testing.
It's just like the loose change in the street musician's instrument case. They always start with a little of their own money in there because it helps people understand what's expected.
When we launched our commercial SaaS, we initially offered an annual payment only, but ended up adding monthly options in response to user requests. Students, in particular, wanted a monthly option, so you might want to keep in mind the age demographic of your users.

The monthly was priced so the annual provided a 17% discount. At first, the split was 1/3 annual and 2/3 monthly, but this migrated over the past year to the current 50-50 (we expect this to revert back to the 1/3-2/3 split once the schools fire back up).

In the meantime, we added two other offerings, one of which was a set of virtual goods that could be bought separately or as a bundle, and the other were add-ons that augment the basic desktop app. These are one time purchases.

The combination of offering both subscription based services and one off purchases has worked well, with each model generating 1/3 of our revenue (the other 1/3 comes from a mobile app).

We often see users tip their toes in to the water by buying one of the lower cost "one off" items, and then come back later to buy more and sign up for the subscription service. Having a low cost item for sale seems to provide a mechanism for the buyer to check out the process before committing to a larger and/or repeating purchase.
Deploying with Bundler and Capistrano
Apple, Apple, Apple.

They went from being a computer company struggling to survive to one of the world's largest and most profitable consumer electronics companies based on an obsession with simplicity and elegance.

Simplicity is hard, but get it right and the world will beat a path to your door.
Dup: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1644338

Several up-votes, but no comments, though.
In the case of embedded programming, Forth is often made for the job. C is great for embedded programming too, and you can always mix the two languages. C isn't made for scripting, and hacks like PicoC don't appeal to me since it will always remain a hack.

While not exactly a scripting language per se, Forth does have amazing interactive capabilities. It's extremely light-weight and it's easy to implement a new Forth on a new hardware architecture. Footprint issues aside, development time in Forth is usually shorter, and the ability to connect directly to a device's Forth "shell" and try out Forth words (functions), create new words, play around with hardware in real-time is invaluable.

Forth code is less readable if you don't know Forth, and occasionally Forth programmers write ugly code, but that is definitely the case for embedded C programmers too.
Dont understand me wrong, I am skeptical too. Just wanted to clarify that its still early days as many here believed the opposite.
Java/C#/JS developers at Wingspan Technology at Blue Bell, PA

We're a small company in the Philly suburbs that with several products integrating Documentum and Sharepoint. We're growing and looking for new engineers. We do most of our work in Java (cross-compile to .NET) - lots of javascript too. You don't need to know Documentum or Sharepoint to apply, just general programming skills.

If you're interested, please email rvolpe@wingspan.com.

http://www.wingspan.com
http://careers.stackoverflow.com/Jobs/8344?campaign=List
Man, I remember wondering if Javascript would ever be widespread or enabled enough for me to even make use of it. Not to mention how useless it was until the DOM got "sorted".

Everything since then has been a kind of slow, gradual surprise.
Business models in Education
They're not nanobots, they're microrobots of very simple construction (one metallic claw). You only need one, and they're much more precise.
Wow. That was REALLY fast...
2 - wasn't intentional, what wordings exude that attitude in your opinion?
Thanks!

- With the 'open' tests, encouraging experimentation was the intent. It definitely needs an interactive syntax check as others have suggested.

- Each test does produce a binary, which runs in a sandbox (or rather a few nested sandboxing mechanisms). Your suggestion is interesting but I don't think I fully understand it. For one it might restrict us to solutions expressible as strings, and the formatting requirements might make the task stricter.
I worked on a memory allocator (as in malloc, not garbage collection) that takes a similar approach: http://people.cs.vt.edu/~scschnei/streamflow/

A group at Intel independently came up with a similar approach as well: http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1133967
Just because they keep doing it doesn't mean they're "happy." Lots of folks never realize that they, yes THEY, could do something different.
Clojure is my first choice language for new projects, but improving other options in the Lisp space is a Good Thing. I prefer the idea of having more than one making headway outside the hardcore programming lovers, if that's possible.
Operations Engineer - San Francisco, USA (no remote)

Mixpanel is looking for someone to help us automate and manage our infrastructure. Primary skills are python and chef or puppet. This probably won't take all of your time, so it's likely you'll also work on product stuff.

About Mixpanel: YCS09, we're an analytics company currently tracking ~1 billion requests per month for companies like Slide, Bebo, and Posterous.

Tech stack: python & django, js & jquery, mongodb, mysql, erlang

Full job post: http://mixpanel.com/jobs
Contact: tim@mixpanel.com
IOS passes Linux to become third most popular Internet browsing platform
The title sounds like what Reid Hoffman says:

In real estate the wisdom says “location, location, location.” In consumer Internet, think “distribution, distribution, distribution.” Thousands of products launch every month on hundreds of thousands of new Web pages. How does a company rise above the noise to attract massive discovery and adoption? YouTube did it through existing channels like MySpace, which already reached millions. Yelp had strong SEO, which found them a mass audience searching for restaurants and nightlife. Facebook’s University-centric approach landed them 80% adoption across a campus within 60 days of launch. Every Net entrepreneur should answer these questions: How do we get to one million users? Then how do we get to 10 million users? Then how will you get deep engagement by your users.

http://techcrunch.com/2009/04/19/reid-hoffman-my-rule-of-thr...

It's important to look for undervalued distribution channels, not just the ones that involve lots of eyeballs. PR, for example, is completely saturated; go to a couple networking events and you'll bump into countless forty- and fifty-something PR people who desperately need a job. They're no longer gatekeepers; they're a commodity.

The other channels listed are similarly commoditized. You can put an extra unit of time or money into them, but it's hard to get more than 100 cents on the dollar from your investment.

The best way to think about distribution is to think about how you can create a sustainable competitive advantage. Group buying, for example, means that there's a positive dollar value on persuading friends to participate. Social gaming lets Zynga recruit your social network to prod you into reengaging with games.

Better to come up with something like that--something that will make your competitors feel a little queasy about the thought of trying to peel off your customers.
Austin-based startup and Rice create a ReRAM prototype that packs only 1-kbit
Aside from the particulars of this case, I just got through reading a book recommended by another HN'er: "Wrong: Why experts keep failing us--and how to know when not to trust them" http://amzn.to/aNY2rL

And while I have always been a skeptic of just about anything, even I was struck by the perverse disincentives there are for reporting scientific malpractice. If you're a student, then you're side-tracked and black-listed. If your'e a colleague, you're shunned. Even professional publications get in on the act -- positive findings outrank negative findings when it comes to publication by a factor of 10-1.

Good book. A little over-the-top, but powerful and relevant.
REPL is indeed a great feature. Once you get used to it, you can hardly ever go back.
Latency is the keyword there: "Latency critical".
IPad owners so desperate for Facebook app that they're paying for bootlegs
Also, Forth can compile itself into a new compiler!
Sorry, local to chicago only
One of PG's main things is "push 1.0 out as quickly as possible." Maybe that's what Apple is doing here, and they're already working on scrobbling.
Oops, I'm an idiot. I printed the output of strcmp() == 0, not strcmp() :^). Still, it would be very nice to see what was the result of the test.
The linker and makefile are not at all part of the c standard.

Also, I assert that any "A versus B" will almost invariably favor A.
Could you paste your code here or email it to me at karan@codeboff.in? I'd love to find out what happened.

In my experience code that runs on OS X often fails on linux, because gcc on OS X seems to initialize newly malloc'd memory to zero, when gcc on linux doesn't (and it shouldn't, according to malloc's man page).

Thanks!
Don't forget to mention Ben Goldacre's own website too which has more of the same stuff - http://www.badscience.net/
I would try it. Though last time I tried online I dropped the course.
This could actually be useful for a mission to Mars. Every bit of biomass available for a biodome (if such a thing could be maintained) would be vital.
I'm not sure that's a very fair assessment. The article was an even-handed reminder that both tools are useful and can serve different purposes.

We lost Kodachrome, we lost Polaroid (for a while).. I think there's a handful of folks trying to make sure that with the influx of interest in digital photography that people are aware that film still exists and does a few things that your digital camera doesn't.
You should Create an Stirring Title to Add Substance to Your Math Essay
Writing math essays are boring tasks. Math is a subject which no matter how it is written will not spark excitement. Therefore, it needs to have a title which catches the reader’s eye. With a good title and an interesting introduction, you will be assured that your math essay will be read.
7 Good Foods Gone Sad
There are hundreds of lists on the internet detailing the weirdest foods the world (but mostly Japan) has to offer. They typically revolve around other cultures eating strange items, like haggis or unicorn.
Lisp was for big iron in 1975. Machines with over a megabyte of RAM and several hundred KIPS. There are several Lisps and Schemes targeting the embedded world these days.
I fear that as the scientifically correct action keeps getting further and further divorced from the 'common sense' action on any given issue, the two worlds will continue to divide, and as the distance increases, science will get harder and harder to follow.

The bridging has to be done by cultural evolution, so that the prejudices that form by 18 are not as counter-science as they are now, but even so, they cannot be adapted to future science when it's not yet in existence.

So we need a culture based on constant learning and adapting our views to evidence. Based on the amount of cognitive bias we have built-in, the 'uncoolness' of rationality, and the speed of scientific progress, I'm not hopeful save for deep de-biasing interventions on our hardware.

Let's see what 'anti-' movement that's going to raise.
If you entered a valid email address, it should mail you a report that includes a description of the testcase that failed.
I know this really wasn't the platform for Simon to defend or assert his views but he certainly does a poor job of it. It seems the interviewer was soft-balling questions simply because he won in court. Blindly trusting scientists because they're perceived experts, have advanced degrees or are in agreement in large numbers has historically been an unreliable way to judge whether or not something is in fact true.

I do agree that the "media" and "common sense" assumptions give more legitimacy to seemingly crazy ideas or counter-ideas. But simply dismissing all opposing viewpoints because they don't fit your scientific model is insane.

I think Simon needs a little more years under his belt (wisdom) and maybe another PhD in history to make him aware of this historically painful fact.

Also, he's a great example of why average people dislike academics. Just being smarter is not enough to convince people. You actually need to listen to them, and learn to communicate with them in order for them to trust you. And isn't that what Simon wants?
Sure, but the megapixel war is pretty silly... Even when applied to analog. I believe the minimum resolution for digital cameras used by nat-geo photographers stands at 6mp.
Tell HN: 1 ticket available for Vienna bootstrapping conference
I'm founded the Bootstrap Verein, a non-profit club in Vienna, Austria to promote bootstrapping.

We're putting on Schnitzelconf (http://schnitzelconf.com) on Tuesday, with speakers like Peldi from Balsamiq, Tobi from Shopify, Tom P-W from Github, etc.

It's been sold out for weeks.

But, an attendee told us today he couldn't come. Want to buy his ticket at the original price of 300 euros?

Talk to @tobie on Twitter. We'll transfer it.

(Unfortunately, it's too late for us to refund it. We're non-profit and we've used every penny on the conference.)

You'll get to attend a kickass conference and promote the promotion of bootstrapping, all in one ;)
And that's worse than Ping not knowing who The Doors are?
Kinda strange that they don't lump android and linux. What exactly is this 'platform' they speak of? It's not the browser used I guess. But it's not like they're calling KDE and Gnome separate platforms either.
scala/ruby/obj-c/javascript dev - Boston, MA, USA (telecommute)

We're building Jarvis from Iron Man -- but our first iteration is more mobile and alarm clock focused (http://getzazu.com). We've been featured in the New York Times, presented at TechCrunch Disrupt, and are currently finalists in the PepsiCo 10 Challenge.

If those languages don't fit you, we'd still be interested in talking.

Shoot me an email at marc@getzazu.com
And how is that different? You're still soothing your problems with other people's money.
Developers of all types, multiple locations (with most in the SF and bay area)

The YCommonApp is a common application for applying to YC-funded startups. There are over 30 companies hiring through it, and they're looking for everything from Rails devs to systems-type C hackers to frontend people. You can apply in about 10 minutes and see a list of the companies hiring here: http://ycommonapp.com
So what's the problem? Let them continue to do it.
Where do I send my CV?
No, because you're interested in honest communication. But it would be more honest to phrase the strong opinion as "I don't necessarily believe X, but it sounds reasonable to me. Is there anything wrong with that reasoning?"
Security leak affects thousands of companies who use clickbank
Google Wi-Fi Spy Lawsuits Head to Silicon Valley | Threat Level | Wired.com