skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
+1. Same problem. I created a dummy fb account for these sites, but don't want to actually get on FB ever.
Last I heard the IH Institute was in Portland...
Not that this means I agree that you as a developer should do this, just that I understand. There are lots of hidden issues too - your service now has added another third-party dependency that could kill you if they decided to break in some way that you couldn't reverse from. Facebook now has all of your user/traffic numbers which they can use against you if they ever decide to compete with you on any front. In the future, advertisers can potentially reach users you've pre-targeted without paying you and instead paying facebook. The list goes on. It's putting a lot of trust in your relationship with facebook.
Ask HN: What is your biggest pain in creating/supporting an MVP?
I have been considering creating products for MVP-stage startup development, having gone through the process several times myself. I have my own pain point ideas, but it's about potential customers' ideas more than mine.

So if you have done an MVP before, or are currently working on or supporting one, what are your biggest pain points, and would you be willing to pay to alleviate those pains? Thanks!
We obviously won't force people to take naps, but I want an atmosphere where napping (or just resting) is encouraged and not looked down upon.

And you're right, sometimes I can't fall asleep during my naps, but that's OK for me. Then I just make it into a relaxing/meditation session.
Microsoft Switches to WordPress for Windows Live-Based Blogs - SuperSite Blog
RIM announces WebWorks development kit, in-app payments, ad platform and API
I don't think it will. Jasons's new project isn't just run-of-the-mill WP hosting. It's a cultivated WP environment with a different target than the Windows Live platform, in my opinion.
Yes, but in true PHP fashion they're just slightly ugly. :)

namespace my\name;

$c = new \my\name\MyClass;
Apparently, they even have a version that can be rapidly deployed.

Pretty impressive.

See video. http://www.hesco.com/raid/
Should it? I don't know. Will it? Absolutely.

And what does "aggressively" mean? Making a patent unenforceable will have the same effect as invalidating it.
I think this is a good example of meta-contrarianism. (see hn discussion/link at: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1730731).
No doubt! But since we're on the subject of "how to make code like this better" it seems appropriate to discuss what's really wrong with the code, rather than just what sort of duct tape style guidelines we can use to patch over its flaws :)
It's probably because you wake up when you're in REM (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rapid_eye_movement_sleep). The key is to wake up before you hit REM. I wake up after 30 minutes because I usually will hit REM if I nap for longer.
that is also an accurate picture, but lack of growth doesn't imply death.
Very little info, but I'd argue that the parallel qualities of the new algorithm are at least of similar importance to the improvement in complexity.

Old speed: (N + L)^(3/2) New speed: (N + L)^(4/3). (n=nodes, l=links)

>For a network like the Internet, which has hundreds of billions of nodes, the new algorithm could solve the max-flow problem hundreds of times faster than its predecessor.

Granted, it's massively useful for Internet-scale calculations. But it's also massively useful that this is just operations on a matrix - throw the sucker at a video card, and watch it finish thousands of times faster on cheaper hardware.

edit: oh, and:

100,000,000^(3/2)) / 100,000,000^(4/3) ≈ 21.5
1,000,000,000^(3/2) / 1,000,000,000^(4/3) ≈ 31.6
1,000,000,000,000^(3/2) / 1,000,000,000,000^(4/3) ≈ 100

Anyone know the scale of N+L for the internet? I somewhat doubt it's in the trillions. Which is not in any way to suggest there are not significantly larger applications - just nitpicking at journalism's grasp of numbers.
HyperDock Brings Window Previews, Other Dock Enhancements to OS X
I'm an original author of the code and I made it out of curiosity, not for other reasons. I also prefer readable (and concise) code in general, but shortening the code is a very different matter -- it is a sport (sometimes called code golfing) and not necessarily connected to good programming skills. And note that I have spent (and had to spend) only 24 hours to do it: code golfing is very time-consuming and 24 hours are often short for this standard. ;)

For the Brainfuck interpreter, I was also motivated by this StackOverflow question:
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1053931/code-golf-shortes...
In this sense it does have a practical implication to gauge the minimal possible Turing-complete language implementation.
I don't know. One of our general principles with YC is to apply software techniques to startup funding. So we approach scaling YC the way you'd approach scaling software: we scale up till we hit a bottleneck, then we remove that bottleneck and keep going.

Funding 36 startups at a time would have seemed impossible back when we were doing 8. And in fact it would have been impossible to do 36 the way we operated then. So how many will we be able to fund at once, after we've taken advantage of whatever new techniques we discover for scaling? We can't say, because we haven't discovered them yet.
It became significantly easier when Google (and Yahoo!, and MySpace) became OpenID providers. If you do something like StackOverflow does (click the Google icon to login with Google), then it's pretty low-effort to use.
While it's true that few would explicitly state that, there are certainly people on both sides that feel free to ignore inconvenient evidence.

Not exactly a shocking revelation, but humans aren't purely logic-driven beings.
Can anyone else here not nap? I've never in my life been able to nap, despite trying. I only ever fall asleep when I'm very very tired and then I have a long deep sleep.
Inventing a HTTP response code a.k.a. seriously nerd-ing out on RFCs
I upvoted you and downvoted the post.

I'd expect that an intelligent, well reasoned and well documented argument for fascism would still get a serious downvote here.

I normally down for quality on low karma posts and downvote for opinion on high karma posts. But when the opinion is assinine enough, even the most eloquent expression deserves a downvote.

Downvoting in this context isn't suppression, its just a strong statement that this opinion is outside our community. And there are plenty of things I disagree with that I wouldn't downvote below 1 because I know they are held by a reasonable fraction of the intelligent people here.
Providing a barebones core and allowing contributors to build onto it is a fairly tried and true strategy (Django and Drupal are two examples that come to mind). As time goes on best-of-breed contributed modules will gain acceptance (socket.io is one that seems to have achieved this).
Their "represent it as a matrix" approach reminded me of this Richard Feynman story:

[...] Richard had completed his analysis of the behavior
of the router, and much to our surprise and amusement, he
presented his answer in the form of a set of partial
differential equations. To a physicist this may seem
natural, but to a computer designer, treating a set of
boolean circuits as a continuous, differentiable system is
a bit strange.
Feynman's router equations were in terms of variables
representing continuous quantities such as "the average
number of 1 bits in a message address." I was much more
accustomed to seeing analysis in terms of inductive proof
and case analysis than taking the derivative of "the
number of 1's" with respect to time.

http://www.longnow.org/essays/richard-feynman-connection-mac...
The reasons you point out as benefits I see as downsides.

Facebook tends to leak personal information like crazy as it is; they don't need any help from random 3rd parties.
Play a random Google Tech Talk (made this on my lunch break today)
A simple open source couchapp that picks a random lecture from http://github.com/maxogden/tech-talk-urls and plays it.
Attack Targets LinkedIn Users with Fake Contact Requests, Spreading Malware
Agile Team Goes off Track in Search of Crab Meat
I applied very early too...but I am not sure if they have visited - because I also submitted the coming soon page here and I have a ton of California traffic from that event :|

I also created a unique URL for them, but not sure how to track that in GA separately.
BlackBerry PlayBook Tablet: An iPad Killer For the Suits
> assert l and len(l) == 1

This is redundant: if a list's length is 1, then it's true in a boolean context.

Also, please stop naming your lists 'l'. On a vast array of fonts, it differs only in a few pixels from '1'. Use "L" instead :)
Typo: "We make a point of introducing speakers to those who particularly want to them."
fair enough. i suppose ultimately the browser just needs a neutral vm.
How an iPad survived 70mph lift off on the highway
RIM introduces PlayBook -- the BlackBerry tablet
Lack of decent PDF support is what sucks for me. I have a ton of PDF books I'd love to read on the Kindle but after reviewing features available on the DX version, I was forced to send mine back.

I feel that while this is a good article, it glazes over a lot of the shortcomings of the reader and appears to try and sell me on the product. Meh.

I suppose if you're using the Kindle as a casual reader and not necessarily a tool for getting work done, then it will suit your needs. But if you require something more than this... just keep waiting.
Thanks, I'd rather be the one who's obsessed than being the one who doesn't care. FYI. social media is not synonymous to socializing.
Justin.tv open sources iPhone push library (Ruby)
> I'd avoid doing this, because people who'll read your code would have to check themselves what the `get_single` function does.

This is an argument against using functions at all. If it works against get_single, it works against all functions.

That is to say, it doesn't work at all.
Here's a good background paper by Spielman that seems to lay the foundation for the methods used:
http://www.cs.yale.edu/homes/spielman/PAPERS/icm10post.pdf

Although not the actual result itself. But looks like a really good read.
I see a lot of law suits coming from this one. A law firm gathering information on adult oriented downloads looks very close to extortion. It is UK law so I am removed from it, but I would have to assume that this will be a tight situation to wiggle free from for the law firm.
Would a t-test be more accurate than a z-test or chi-squared for small samples?

No. Here is a brief overview of the different tests.

The z-test depends on the assumption that the sum of random events is well approximated by a normal distribution. This happens with a large enough sample size. But is wrong for small sample sizes.

A further weakness with the z-test is that the same sample data is being used to estimate variance and averages. Depending on the specifics of your actual sample, both estimates can be off in a way that confuses the test. The t-test corrects for this possibility but assumes that the individual measurements you are making are normally distributed. It is quite sensitive to this assumption. Unfortunately in A/B testing the measurements are binary yes/no, 1/0 decisions, which are decidedly not normally distributed.

The g-test is designed to be a very good approximation to the exact problem that A/B testing tries to solve. Unfortunately it requires you to compute logs, which was hard before computers.

The chi-square test is designed as an easily computed good approximation to the g-test. It only needs you to square numbers and add them together. It therefore became the most widely used algorithm, and is the one that people have heard of.

Now that we have computers, the g-test is the test we should use. But nobody has heard of it. (However you're still free to use it! And should.)

If you get a large enough body of measurements then all tests converge to the z-test.

I've love to see a write-up on the statistics equations for A/B testing and guidelines on when to use which.

http://elem.com/~btilly/effective-ab-testing/ goes through this in some detail.
> I suppose if you're using the Kindle as a casual reader
> and not necessarily a tool for getting work done, then
> it will suit your needs.

You have a good point there. I would consider myself a simple kindle user. Most of my reading is done through books purchased in the Kindle Store, so I don't have to deal with the lackluster PDF support.
Why did you choose to use the z-test?
He didn't say that he did.
I don't see a reason for PHP to "die" (using that term very loose, considering that people think PHP killed Perl, while Perl is still very alive and well).

When people just want something nice and simple, PHP works beautifully. There's nothing wrong with the parts of the language that people who don't know programming are using to glue pieces of their website together. It's really only once you start using it for more than that when you start hating the terrible design choices and language constructs.

Leave PHP as the ubiquitous solution for simple glue, it does it quite well. When people want to do web development beyond the glue they can turn to any other number of great languages/frameworks.
It's just a table with some pretty standard css and a graphic or 2. I thought this was going to be an app that remade a standard notepad app in html and had decent features.

Color me unimpressed.
The theme with these MIT announcements seems to be HCA: Hope, Certainty, and Assuredness by analogy to FUD and with similar use of misrepresentation, simplification, and appeal to authority.
There are lots of people like that. It's very common and normal. Regardless of what people are willing to state, many will simply not consider unequivocal evidence of new phenomena if it contradicts their beliefs. They may recognize that the popular thing to do is claim to be open minded, and then disregard the evidence anyway. They may not even realize they're doing it.
> "<? echo "Hello World"; ?>"

That's actually a good example for why it should die (embedding code in html).
Can't believe that this wasn't already done long ago...
Fair enough.

I did say it was nothing fancy in the first few lines though ;)
What Problem do you have with OpenIDv2a + OAuth?
"With node.js you don't worry about performance (...)"

"Now we know that we can easily write well performing servers (...)"

these kind of statements are why i rarely read nodejs articles nowadays. you can't just say that in general.
Thanks .. i used : KL9MHYXYLTR3

By the way, do you have anything planned for the bookmarks?
Actually one of the magazines I got from the BCS (circa 2005) was saying how great outsourcing is. I wasn't so enthusiastic and didn't agree with the article.
Another option, if you don't mind USB, is to use Wordcycler (http://www.wordcycler.com). It's free, and allows you to two-way-sync individual articles to your Kindle. When you delete them from your Kindle, it will be automatically archived on the Instapaper website the next time you sync. And it titles the articles correctly.

(I'm the developer of Wordcycler.)
what happens if you ad-block google?
You win ;-)
I was thinking they'd more than double the security holes.

But seriously, it's nice to see MS on a steadily better track record with open source, and WordPress isn't a bad project. Hopefully it continues that way.
As opposed to what? Getting a shared host and uploading? Same two steps.
I don't think agnosticism can really be called reasonable anymore. We now know so much about the universe that believing in any specific deity, or even just a general sense of the supernatural, seems akin to believing into Russel's teapot.
Being atheist and being open minded are not mutually exclusive.
Define "something good." You haven't given any reasons on why it sucks.
Yes, definitely written by someone who uses a laptop on the go and doesn't like carrying its weight about - even though he acknowledges the significant proportion of users whose laptops don't ever travel.

In this case, the market is working for the majority of consumers - and he's rightfully disgruntled because he wants a laptop to be a laptop, and not a desktop replacement.
Very impressive. I hope to someday apply, but being a very novice technical founder, that day may be much farther down the road.
I disagree. Basically it's saying that it's the stupid ones who underestimate the intelligence of people they try to cheat. The sort of incongruity that irony is made of. If, say, only the worst martial artists picked fights with strangers, that would also be ironic.
I would prefer a twitter authentication.
Does Quora not provide a "Sign Up With Email" option (you need js!) right under the Facebook connect button? Granted, I don't understand the big deal about Quora, but I know an email signup when I see it.
I wasn't sure whether to upvote this article, until I got to this line:

> Design patterns are a universal language that few people speak, a sort of Esperanto for programmers.

Exactly. And I fully expect many of the hackers here to chime in with 'oh, that article is so wrong'. But, the thing is, HN geeks, you are that rare breed that knows and applies the patterns. I've met you, and I've worked with you. And for every one of you I've met in my career, I've met 200 who couldn't give a damn what a DTD is, let alone a pattern.

Design patterns are actually an excellent concept, but they won't really help programming for the masses. And, the more we depend on computing in our lives, the more we need programming as a technical discipline to be able to accomodate the masses. For every structural engineer out there in the real world there are probably a thousand architects. And for every architect, ten thousand carpenters. I know an expert carpenter and I'm pretty sure he couldn't calculate the tensile strength of a basswood 2x4, but he can sure build me a deck!
Amazon May Be About To Launch Its Own Android App Marketplace
I'm also waiting to get my KDK access but I would imagine they're trying to figure out the market lifecycle: from who gets to sell in the market, to how they will be paid, to how strict their app policies will be (especially after all the Apple Store hub bub), blah blah blah.
Very often we can't change the API (standard library or such). Should we not change our code to address the issue as best we can?
He's defending against None with the assert l and len(l) bit, or at least that's what I'd assume.
But in that case, either your code is evidently in a branch where the list will have one item -- as in your example -- in which case the context makes it clear. And if there's no context, such as in a nested function call, then at some point you should be passing that lone list item into a function which takes the item as an argument.
I too have gobs of PDF books. The Kindle is the wrong size (far too small) for PDFs. Mine are all formated (with lots of tables, images, etc) for 8.5x11". They require a device with a screen nearly that large. A Kindle DX, but that is too $ and also has poor PDF handling.
Has someone ever seen a site that would use the Linkedin API?
4 Rules For Bodybuilder Internet Entrepreneurs
references are not strictly speaking pointers but functionally very similar

I have more than a passing familiarity with C and Perl. References and pointers are very different. For example, you have to know where you allocated the memory pointed to to work with pointers effectively. You can also lie to the compiler about the type of pointer. You can also do math with pointers.

These are very useful things to do in C (or assembly or C++ or whichever languages give you access to raw memory), but you don't have to do any of those things in Perl because you don't have access to raw memory.

Similarly you can get into a circular reference situation with references that you won't normally find in C unless you have a specific type of garbage collector.

disputing the naming seems like nit-picking

Accuracy is important in programming. The difference between lightning and lightning bugs is not merely degree.
Former Stasi Cryptographers Now Develop Technology for NATO
Same here.

I'm curious about the browser too - does it work at all for something like gmail, or is it just too painful?
Stop the Internet Blacklist
This is the argument I always have about the ternary syntax in C-like languages.
This is very interesting, but the topics covered make it seem like YC is only focused on advising companies how to raise more money.
I have used it for logging into gmail but it's painful and slow. didn't try the html only version of gmail though.
Flash Development for the New Blackberry Tablet
The Android marketplace has so many problems and I'm not sure that fragmenting the market on its own will help. BUT if someone would be willing to do code review and verify it's safe it would go a long way with my comfort with installing apps. As it is now, I'm extremely reluctant to install an app that hasn't been developed by a major known company or in the store and reviewed by others. The details in the permissions slip are a joke.

Still haven't paid for an app yet. I haven't even bothered to explore how to do it. With Amazon as a billing solution I'd be more willing to put up with the payment system.
It doesn't imply it, it forecasts it.
I get it - its a spiral if you draw it that way. Then anything is a spiral - an ant marching thru the forest, me biking across Iowa, we're both approaching the 'origin'. I was hoping something about the ant motion would work into the spiral-ness.
BlackBerry Playbook or RIM Launches a tablet?
A/B Testing: The effects of a form on download rate
Of course it's okay!
Why Knowledge-Management should be like Facebook
There is Nothing more mathematical about assembly language than coding a book in ASCII - its a coincidence, not intrisic to the subject.
<rant>

Have you ever taken the time to learn it? JavaScript is a pretty neat little language - the way it does functions and closures allows for a programming style that doesn't really work in Python (due to the lack of multi-line lambdas).

Yes, I have, that's why I said I don't like programming in Javascript, not that I don't know Javascript. Most of the design decisions serve to frustrate me more than empower me. The variable context I'm working in always seems always a bit mystical. Their method of FFF has a lisp air but they way it's written always makes it seem like more of a bastardization than an homage.

Python doesn't have multiline anonymous functions, but it does have inner functions. Given that I find the style of doSomething(function () { something; something; something; }); verbose and confusing, I prefer Python's implementation.

In Javascript there is More Than One Way To Do It(TM). Sometimes I don't mind this -- writing Haskell has never felt anything like writing Python. In fact, writing Haskell almost feels like writing a proof (and for good reason, look into the type system theoretics if you're interested) instead of a program. Therefore when writing Haskell I never feel like I need to make a comparison to languages like Python. They work differently and will be used by for different things.

Javascript, on the other hand, feels bland and conventional and begs for me to compare it to languages like Python. When I do I realize that the modularity, import system, and library of functions I've written in Python have disappeared into the wind, along with the ability to jump to C when necessary for performance.

In fact, when it comes to performance, Javascript is the worst! Not that Javascript performance itself is terrible as a scripting language, but that There Is More Than One Way To Do It but Only One Way Is Fast. The JQuery author is an expert at this, as well as some of my good friends at Google. There's always been a Book of Javascript, passed from developer to developer, that says what the Fast Way is. I hate that. I don't want to have to memorize idioms if I want my code to be performant. In summary, I guess, I want Python ;)

</rant>