skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Strong disagree with this analogy. A junior developer studying yacc is not the equivalent of a junior chess player learning the Ruy Lopez.

In order to learn strategy from specific chess openings, you have to study them in context. Memorizing the Sicilian defense lines doesn't teach you much unless you can study it comparatively with all the other openings and learn how that game developed --- and at that point, you're just using the one opening as a forcing function to learn chess strategy seriously.

But that's not what happens when a junior dev learns yacc. Simply by learning to make yacc do things, the developer is given a vocabulary to express parsing and compilation ideas, in somewhat the same sense as a REPL gives you a tool to learn lisp. Sure, you could stop after learning yacc syntax and adapting the RPN calculator example from the yacc book... but nobody does that.

I think it's exactly the opposite to what this guy wrote. People who can express ideas using yacc are to be preferred to people who can talk about LALR parsing but can't show real practical work. The dev who wrote an AST generator with yacc has had to learn how to juggle a parse tree, how to traverse graphs, and what the stages of evaluating a language are. The chess player who learns Ruy Lopez gains no comparable automatic understanding of chess.

And, for what it's worth: yacc and MP arith --- could you have come up with two worse examples of "shallow" programming technologies? If you're for-reals parsing or dealing with problems that need bignums, you're already a million miles past the people who know only how to copy buffers into file descriptors or marshal queries for database engines.
Mobile Advertising SDK for Windows Phone 7 Apps and RTB Exchange
VoltDB as an SQL Developer: Presentation by Tim Callaghan
Interestingly, Nokia started off as a Finnish paper mill.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia#Pre-telecommunications_er...
A friend of mine got access to the traffic accident statistics for Connecticut for several years. He found that it was safer to use smack than to ride a bike. If I remember correctly he also found that in the event of a reported accident, a bicyclist had a 15% chance of a "life-altering event". (For instance you might live, but never walk normally again.)

After that he gave up biking and switched to tennis.
No, the app is targeted at Doctors and Medical Students. Most of the cases use technical terms and require medical knowledge in order to be solved properly.

The case displayed on the blog is admittedly very simple - mainly because it is a 'demo case' for users to become familiar with how the app works. The remainder range from easy to quite challenging.

The app is almost ready - at the moment a panel of consultants (attending physicians / surgeons) is going through them to make sure that all details are correct. Once this is done, it will be submitted to the app store.

Would you like to be a beta-tester ? Please let me know.

P.S. I am a doctor :)
Fair enough; in that case, why would I use it instead of (say) nginx? Is it an optimization thing or a logging thing?
"The iPod Touch is successful specifically because it is a non-phone device that resembles a really hip phone."

Disagree. From my personal view, I have an iPod Touch and love it, but I'm really not a fan of the iPhone (I have a blackberry, and if I were to look for a non-blackberry, iPhone wouldn't be near the top of my list). From a non-personal point of view, iPod Touch was popular long before iPhones existed, so you can't explain its popularity with "it looks like an iPhone".
Of course I cannot speak for people on HN, but this has been my anecdotal experience. People cite all sort sof utilitarian justifications for believing in the absolute power of free markets, or of democracy, or of paying lower taxes, or whatever.

I'm certainly representative. I like having the government provide my children's health care and enjoy living in a safe city. What a shocking surprise, I advocate those principles that I perceive (rightly or wrongly) as providing me with the things I like.
I've had my MX Revolution for over a year without experiencing the problems you describe. While I'll admit that I've never been the biggest fan of the locking/unlocking of the scroll wheel, it's never had an issue detecting motion. Also, the fact that it requires a transmitter is a bit annoying, but I've never run into an issue where it stops working or goes out of range, line of sight or no.

I've actually had all the mice listed in the article and I still keep coming back to my MX Revolution. The problem is that none of them are two-button mice that I can rest my hand on. The older mice simply did not support right-click functionality, and the newer mice require that your left finder can't be on the mouse while performing a right-click.
Just signed up, looks pretty good. 2 suggestions:

1) Having a linkedIn profile shouldn't be required to sign up.

2) The 'pages' associated with an account don't seem super useful to me right now. A lot of my most interesting work is not graphical in any way, so given that the main element of a 'page' is the image that is not super helpful.

Maybe a 'projects' section as well/instead? That way I can provide links to GitHub pages or whatever.
I do this sometimes too, which is usually when google instant works for me, like when I've visited a page a bunch of times, but I can't be bothered to bookmark it or save the search in some other way, and I know it will come up easily in the first page of results- I just want to get to a page super fast, and it's not a url per se, but something specific I searched for and need again.

I'd say most times I search through my chrome bar, but sometimes I do end up on the google page for whatever reason.
Disturbing levity?
Google Releases Instantiations Development Tools, Free Of Charge
The research was conducted by a prof at my old school.

He also discovered that drivers gave a female cyclist much more space - although since he did the experiment himself in a blonde wig he did consider that perhaps they just give unconvincing transvestites more room !
There you go. http://64.38.236.7 Build on WordPress. Anymore questions? Well, I have to say WooTheme is fantastic. It does everything I wanted...almost, then WP Plugins come to rescue. once you learned how to use WP as a content management platform, the possibility is endless.
Code, Test and Deploy in the Cloud
How to set up a solid Agile process for coding, testing, and deploying via the cloud using source code management (SCM), continuous integration (CI), and deployment recipes.
As a note jeswin comments on this in another thread: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1698039

The idea seems to be to restrict this to western countries only
Unfortunately the search for short domains leads people to abandon this rule. (worst offender of all time: del.icio.us)

If you look at the YC list it looks like at least half the YC startups would fail the radio test: https://spreadsheets0.google.com/ccc?key=t_toYuVyy6fci0MAiIa...
Michael Grimm-America’s Got Talent Winner
>> It's simply the better of two options.

What if it's pushing a philanthropist onto the rails to save 5 serial killers?

I'm not entirely sure what's the goal of this exercise. I'd imagine that in real life, regardless of who's getting killed, most people would simply let things run their courses since inaction is generally less risky than action.

Then, if confronted, I'd guess most people would probably come up with a justification that was favorable to them (i.e. thay would get them out of trouble's way), not follow some strict ethic model.
I guess that it does have its pros and cons. The idea is that the app would be used by doctors and medical students, perhaps while they have a break or when they are traveling.

Given the massive amount of 'serious' stuff that they have to go through every day, we thought that a more 'fun' style would be easier on the mind (and on the eyes !).

After a day in the clinic (I am a practicing doctor), I feel like I have brain damage - and I just don't want to even think about a medical textbook or journal. But something less serious might sit better with my mind.
We used to use the "would you kill a jogger for his organs" question on smug medical student applicants - those who wanted to be doctors "to help people".

Another good question is ask them why they don't become civil engineers - good drains save a lot more people than doctors ever did.
Making medicine fun, after all ! There is too much seriousness in what we do - why add on to it ?
Good point there - we were planning on adding that to the text on the app store, but it would probably be good to have a disclaimer inside the app as well.
Bring up a discussion on piracy, DRM, intellectual rights, etc, and watch this play out in a very passionate way.
There's quite a lot of difference between buying a domain with the intention or prospect of putting something of value it and buying up a large array of domains without any intention whatsoever to ever put any content on it or make any use of it besides squatting. The second is a blatant waste of preciously limited resources and should not be allowed in my opinion.
Mooyah Burgers & Fries Partners With KeyRing (TechWildcatters first class)
I don't understand, this article is talking about the future of Palm devices. You don't think a faster OS and newer hardware will fix a couple of freezes when multitasking?
There is also a chance to have a "trial period" in the sense that you give them a 30 day money-back guarantee. Hence, it will still be a paid trial because they have to pay upfront in order to use it.

Or yet another would be to have a fully free trial (no upfront cost) just to get more people to try it out, but then you have to worry about converting those free-trials into paid users, which might not be ideal if you're looking for cash now.
How many AMAZON EC2s should I start with for a Facebook Application? 
So I am in the midst of doing a very private MVP type of roll-out of an application: I need to run Apache + Glassfish + PostGre + MongoDB + Memcache + ActiveMQ ( a java messaging server). I fully realize that I might have gone overboard: I started with Memcache + PostGres and then I started dabbling with MongoDB and liked what it did especially for social graph data. Should I put it all in one big EC2 or should I split it among multiple EC2. MongoDB pretty much mandates at least 2 EC2 instances ( for replication). Any suggestions ?
Excellent suggestion. This open course lecture from MIT has more, for those who want an example or two:

http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/electrical-engineering-and-comput...
BareMetal OS: A 64-bit Operating System in only 16KiB
If it was profitable, why did you stopped running it? What are ridiculously low levels of traffic for you?

(Just a bored programmer who tested AWS this weekend for the first time)
To the average person who hasn't encountered this word much, it is reminiscent of 'spores' and 'diarrhea'. Clearly, not the best branding.
Yes. It is true. However, you can customize the theme any way you want to make it look unique. For $150 that's a deal... or you can spend $3000 for a "buyout" template from monster template (http://www.templatemonster.com/) and not even going to work with WordPress.
The Magic Trackpad + BetterTouchTool is a great combination.

I absolutely love the 3-finger drag. Use it all the time. With BetterTouchTool I now have 3-finger clicks for middle-clicks, and 4-finger swipes for Spaces. Tons more gestures are possible, but this is enough for my purposes.

Having the touchpad off to the side rather than in front of the keyboard makes all the difference in the world. I quickly found myself more productive on it, then on my venerable Kensington Expertmouse trackball (which is now reserved for games).
And in the old days, to hide dirt and especially to mask the yellow sweat ring that develops around the collar after many days of hard labor, companies issued blue shirts to their workers as a uniform. Hence, "blue collar" work.
Hello Seattle « Hulu Blog
Unless the digit actually plays into the name.

I put up the Web 2.0 Validator site: web2.0validator.com (now on vacation until I get around to updating some code).

Interestingly, someone wrote to me asking how I managed to get such a domain; I pointed out the domain is simply 0validator.com, nothing magical.

Which of, course, means I can plan on web3.0validator.com :)
It is a complete web application to manage ads, something like Wordpress for ads.
How long until Google releases a similar thing for YouTube and Justin.tv starts to suffer? :(
The fact that they are using rails demonstrates more newbie-style cluelessness, to me. Not even remotely a good choice. But, the sort of things 4 guys fresh out of college with no experience would think was the obvious choice.
It is not unlikely that many of those would end up as failed endeavors whether or not MS existed. We can only speculate though.
Nice. Who has experience working with GWT? Is it easy to get stuff done in? To work around its limitation (whatever they may be?) We're considering it for a project, but I've never worked with it.
You are wrong - the next billion (or two!) live next door to China, from where we are seeing the emergence of the first sub $200 (full, unlocked price) phones this month [http://www.priceindia.in/tv/spice-mi-300-price-%E2%80%93-che...]

That price figure is going to fall way, way lower once the Android supporting Mediatek chipsets enter full production [http://www.electronicsweekly.com/blogs/david-manners-semicon...]

I predict $100 Mediatek-powered Android smartphones by summer 2011, flooding the Asian market.
Making Over McDonalds
Ask HN: What would you do with free images of everything on Earth?
We've just launched a web site that provides RDFa metdata and a simple JSON API for programatically looking up pictures of things in the web of linked data (for instance, in Freebase or Wikipedia)

http://ookaboo.com/

Right now we're really looking for somebody who can use our photographs to build applications and we're willing to adapt our API and metadata to their needs. We're also trying to build an integrated search and browse interface that will help people find pictures that they're looking for. Everything is PD or creative commons, so our content is reusable and remixable.

Any thoughts?
Automatic Mobile Emergency Alerts [Free Startup Idea]
Maybe a new developer rule could apply in which for the first 5 or so jobs the mandatory minimum is waived when they're sending in offers.

Wouldn't this just incentivize people to keep making new accounts? If there's going to be a minimum, there shouldn't be any exceptions or it defeats the point and allows people to game the system.
I was warned about potential security vulnerability in WP, but guess that's true for any Internet applications. Also, any WP updates could potentially break plugins used. If you got a lot of plugins, need to be very careful.
I'm glad that you think that the app looks like fun. It is a 'diagnose the problem' game, but it is targeted a doctors and medical students.

I've noted several comments that the cases appear to be simple and targeted at lay people - mainly because our blog showcased our 'demo' case, which was built to introduce users to how the app works. Most of the other cases require a medical background in order to be solved properly.

Thanks for the comments on the marketing pitch - I guess that we need to fine-tune it ! I like the idea about how some simpler cases targeted at lay people might make it appeal to the general public as well.
It's symbolic. The game is making a bold artistic statement about the hardships colorblind people endure in daily life. :)
MOO2 could have another improvement: let me design starbases, missile bases and ground batteries! Its so frustrating to capture Plasma Cannon and have all the ground batteries become worthless.
Isn't the true version of the radio test whether when someone types what they hear into google they end up on your site?
Proud beta tester here: works quite well. :-)
How to Turn High Fructose Corn Syrup Into Corn Sugar in 3 Easy Steps
Also a morally bankrupt business. ;-)

(And also, via inflating a property bubble, in no small part responsible for current economic difficulties.)
We definitely want to be more inclusive. Just taking one step at a time. We want to maintain a high quality median. Basically want to see quality content everywhere.
Check @orbscom
Some people (Gamers, CAD engineers) wouldn't even consider a mouse with less than 4 buttons.
Not convinced Google could hurt Justin.tv the way you're imagining; the Justins have too many deals, too much traction.
The link is http://ookaboo.com/
Thanks for the article. Luckily, the app is (currently) just a fun educational tool and should escape their scrutiny !

I guess that this news will put a dampening on innovation in the mobile medical field though ....
Palm/HP is in a tough spot, but it's possible for them to go up with a bit of luck.

They need mindshare, solid hardware, and apps. The 3 are codependent. Good hardware and apps help mindshare, and having market interest and a good phone attracts app makers. If they mix their timing just right they could come in at third place behind apple and google.

They are doing good things right now on the app front. More and more good iPhone games are coming to WebOS. HP is having a lot of their software engineers spend a bit of time writing for WebOS as a sort of 20% project.

If they can get an exciting headset (not just good, exciting), and a marketing campaign that puts it in enough impulse buying hands, then win those users over with webOs + good app selection, they have a chance.

However, if they release a half hearted handset with little marketing, their base wont' expand and it will slowly but surely fall into obscurity.
It really is an ignorant assumption.

I am skilled and work for less as an employee (before tax) in Romania.
I think the zip lookup is broken in general. I tried zips for places with a population of 90K and 1M and neither of those worked either.
If a restaurant goes under, whoever provided funding takes a big hit. Losses = value destroyed. Liquidation values on fixtures and equipment are low.

BTW, here's a good rule of thumb for investing in restaurants as a non-controlling partner: Don't. I never heard of a good ending, even if it was good for a while.
So the basic premise I get, but as a nascent founder, you haven't seen a lot, so sometimes, you may not know if this is a dime a dozen commodity or an opportunity.

I'm wary of fooling myself into thinking most thing's an opportunity rather than a commodity. Besides getting more experience and seeing more, how does one guard against it?
But then neither does the default notation for this thing. It has the ability to specify note durations, but doesn't require it.

Tab at least has spacing that can be used to infer note durations relative to others within a single piece.
Yes. These tools are great if you can include them in your nightly build, and if they're accurate enough you can insist on 100% clean runs every night. But a big dump of cryptic errors, many of false positives, from a commercial vendor with a proprietary tool? If you care about security, you've _got_ to act on it. But I understand why volunteer maintainers get pretty grumpy after the first half-dozen false positives, or if the tool seems to be half-baked.
Off the top of my head, the value is in the data and analysis that the widget can capture and provide.

Can you track which sites embed the widget? What else can tracked?
The problem is that I don't want to disable the acceleration entirely, I just want a _different_ acceleration curve: http://db.tidbits.com/article/8893

I'm not sure if this command will help with that.

But in any case, I'm sold on the trackpad now, and I'm not going back. :)
Qik.com (in addition to having a 3 letter domain) has had that functionality for a while. I've used it on my HTC Incredible to record video and have people watch, and also auto-upload to youtube.

Not as well known as Justin.tv though.
"The results surprised me. Apparently the optimal number of digits to include is 1, and the more digits you have the more likely it is to be registered. In fact, it appears that someone has registered every dot-com combination of 4 digits."

It shouldn't be completely surprising. The more characters (c) than digits (d) in a name, the more options available. 3c1d has more options (26x26x26x10=175760) than 4d (10x10x10x10=10000).

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

EDIT: And also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Probability_theory
I'm not sure about your color choices. It is just hard for my eyes to focus. I mean I can read it, but I can feel an extra one or two mississippi before my eyes really lock in.
What about the Asian market more than 10km from the coastal cities?

The same market that has one Nokia1100 per village in Africa aren't about to buy $100 smartphones for each of their kids.
The acceleration curve came directly from NeXT (traditional Mac OS had a more similar curve to Win/Linux). So my best guess is that Steve Jobs also likes this acceleration curve ;)
For a framework we both like Zend Studio, it ties in with Eclipse and Subversion.

Framework:
http://www.zend.com/products/studio/

To learn Zend Studio:

Zend Studio for Eclipse Developer's Guide http://www.amazon.com/Zend-Studio-Eclipse-Developers-Guide/d... will walk you through it painlessly in a weekend.

Subversion Setup:

1. http://wiki.centos.org/HowTos/Subversion
(This is unique to the Centos5/RHEL5 distro)

2. http://www.tonyspencer.com/2007/03/02/setup-a-subversion-ser...
(This is unique to Fedora core 6)
If you are using a different distro, look for it on the web.

3. http://www.kreci.net/linux/working-with-svn-how-to-start/

I am not a Subversion Guru, but as a PHP developer you will get the most benefit from it (productivity wise) if you can install it directly on your production server machine. This is because your development server, staging server, and production server environments will be identical, meaning you will not have to spend time re-coding to make your stuff run due to minor differences in servers.

You can find free Subversion accounts on the web http://stackoverflow.com/questions/59791/free-online-private... but I do not recommend it for PHP because you lose the benefit of using it in identical development and production environments.
I think a bigger problem might be that for the majority of people who use The Facebook, diaspora has absolutely no denotation. (And very little connotation).

Diaspora is at least an easy-grade SAT word.

Even for those of us who know the denotation, it gives absolutely no indicator as to what the product does. (It is instead a reference to how the product works... dispersed Facebook). From a marketing standpoint this is a problem.

Hopefully this will become 'the diaspora project', and they will come up with a new name for the actual results of it.
What is HNs general feeling toward the Go Programming Language? Will this be the next big thing to develop with?

There's a rather attractive summary on the golang.org main page:

"The Go programming language is an open source project to make programmers more productive. Go is expressive, concise, clean, and efficient. Its concurrency mechanisms make it easy to write programs that get the most out of multicore and networked machines, while its novel type system enables flexible and modular program construction. Go compiles quickly to machine code yet has the convenience of garbage collection and the power of run-time reflection. It's a fast, statically typed, compiled language that feels like a dynamically typed, interpreted language."

But how likely is this language to be generally accepted? I guess only time can tell as to whether they generate enough interest for people to start developing cool things with it. Just trying to get a better idea as to whether it'd be worth my time to really dive into... (I know, more exposure never hurt anyone... Sans Chernobyl... too soon?)