skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think this is an issue that needs to be dealt with in schools, because it's going to be VERY important by the time current kids grow up, and most of them don't know what they're doing.

Here's what I do. I have two branches of passwords: one unsecure and easy to dictionary attack, another that was randomly generated and I got into muscle memory when I was a boy. Each secure site gets its own slightly different version of the password, with an additional suffix which is usually a small word.

It's a system that's served me well. Are there some glaring weaknesses that I should take account of and switch to something else?
Now you're thinking with Portals.
Don't get me wrong - I'd love an excuse for a nap! But its guaranteed to burn the hours involved, for a marginal increase in productivity.
How an indie game developer sold 30k copies on Xbox Live
>The last time I checked concurrency isn't possible with standard C++

If you don't know, then I can't tell you. People have been doing threading, re-entrant code, libevent/libev in C and C++ for decades. (cf. DragonflyBSD)

I didn't say it was trivial, just that it's an industry standard for when you need to get things done (TM).
Yes, but with most functions there's no choice, because most of the functions in your program do something (a) complex and/or (b) specific to your program. This `get_single` function falls into neither of these categories.
The interview is far more interesting than the segment on dropping out of school. The section on economic disconnect silicon valley and rest of the US and Thiel's thoughts on the maturity of the internet industry compared to the evolution of the automobile industry and comparing that to hard-tech is worth the price of admission.

Thiel always strikes me as something between the Buffet / Soros of the startup world.
Some of my favorite (unintentionally?) humorous bits:

We have to recruit the largest founders in each batch to act like Tokyo subway pushers and herd all the investors back to their seats.

The founders of Cloudkick are sysadmin gods who within the alumni network play the same role for servers that The Wolf in Pulp Fiction played for the back seats of cars.
Life hack: How to catch a smarter than average rat (not informant, but rodent)
I wouldn't name a list l in real code. It was just the first thing that popped to mind. :-)

And as was mentioned the "assert l" part is defending against l being None. I suppose I could be more explicit by saying "assert l is not None and len(l) == 1".
I've noticed exactly the opposite on recent flights between NZ and Australia -- they're now a lot more tolerant about having mobiles in flight mode (and specifically say so in the pre-flight announcement) and they let you turn your phone on as soon as the plane has landed. Previously you had to wait until you were "well inside the terminal".
I agree with you about "dependency sprawl". Depending on how critical address-verification is to your system, you could also implement the USPS verification into the workflow as an alternate or a fall-back. They have an API which can be used to verify the formatting of an address is acceptable.

http://www.usps.com/webtools/address.htm
None of which they are likely to find out without far more sellers. Maybe not thousands, but certainly not three.
I'm a regular guy and I think that I don't argue for status
or social standing, but because I'm interested in 'the
truth', insofar as that means 'what works best for us',
where 'us' includes everyone I care about.

I find it fascinating that as soon as you tried to counter an argument about signaling social standing, you directly signaled social standing. Truly, we do not always know the real motivations behind our own actions and words. You may need to do more introspection.

"I'm a regular guy" -- This establishes a social status you want us to see. You are trying to create a peer relationship with other "regular" people, to connect with your audience on a friend/peer/informal level. Then you follow up this statement with an assertion that you wish to speak for others ("I'm interested in 'the truth' ... where 'us' includes everyone I care about"). You have elevated yourself to leader/spokesperson status. You make another social distinction when you say "individuals like me", and here you are trying to tell everyone -- in so many words -- that you are unique and special. Whether you realized you were doing this, you employed arguments from standpoints of status.

I cannot find the article, but I read an account from a guy who took a few-month vow of silence for fun to see what it was like. He had a number of interesting mental state changes and experiences, all of which seemed beneficial, but one thing that stuck out in my mind was a little principle of communication that he felt he discovered: Almost all our speech is to express existence, to say, "Hey, look at me! I am here!"

In forums where people pass ideas back and forth, it is often, "I exist! I have something to share that you will find useful! You might like me if I share it! Look at me!"

And yes, the fact that I am responding is, indeed, to draw attention to myself, to establish myself as something of an authority on this issue, given my limited experiences in this lifetime... is just a pompous way of saying, "I am here". :)
Hm. I've written 100's of thousands of lines of debugged deliverable code, and the number that matched a design pattern in a book was smallish.

Everything looks like a nail to a guy with a hammer.
Hrm, that's not good. Most of the convos are actually about the product. We only switch to talking about investors towards the end of the 3 months, and even then we talk more about the product.

Maybe it seems that way because this talks about all the stuff that's common to all the startups, and the things to do with the product are usually more startup-specific than those to do with investors.
The Best Promotional Quality Products - Document & Invitation Folders
Did you ever wonder about the most productive marketing products? If not, yes they are called as document and invitation folders since they are professionally made by means of the most up to date tools and techniques creatively.
Major problem with this approach is that textarea doesn't have an autocomplete feature. Having single line textboxes for each field allows me to tap the down arrow and have previous entries listed. With a multiline textbox I have to manually type all my information in.
It was long, but not too long, because it was thorough. I didn't realize you were doing so much. In a way the article is kind of like a long sales pitch for YC without all of the typical sales language hype. Which is nice.
The accounts have nothing in common - not IP address, nor cookies nor names nor friends or anything. With the fake accounts I just added fake friends (Facebook was so kind to suggest them) and they approved me. I even wrote 'whats up' on some peoples walls and they replied. No idea who they are, seems people just need somebody to talk to.

I am a bit of a privacy nut (multiple browsers, incognito, proxy servers, VPN's, multiple accounts online (including this site)) and I intentionally keep my person, work, online life etc. completely separate. So as interesting as it would be for you to test my accounts, it means I would have to kill you :)
What if you're not an entrepreneur, but you'd like to be one some day, and you're overwhelmed with the sense that you're more intelligent than the majority of the population? Should you write then?
I actually have something in mind for a Master's thesis that may solve my problems permanently, but I'm afraid I have to keep it quiet for now. :)
Hi,

I reserve the right to think that nobody will be bothered, but here it is anyway:

http://www.sanfransys.com/pretext/ [Software to rip text from colour images and return a new image with text in 8-bit grayscale]
Because they are paid in the charge of the largest online authentication system in the world?

That's not to say that they are the strongest professionals in the world, of course.
That Q2 2011 date might make for some trouble if Apple set the iPad on a yearly update cycle. QNX's contribution will be interesting.
Actually, in regard to the navigation, this is something I'm working on. Another visitor had trouble with a finite difference method article I wrote and so it is high time to make an "Article Series" banner.

In regards to the HN crowd, perhaps an article on how to use C++ for quant models may be more appropriate? How many of us on HN are interested/practicing financial analysts?

If you have any more suggestions (particularly about navigation improvement!) I'd be keen to hear them. I want to make the site as useful as possible.
In my experience, few real-world problems fit neatly into one out of a handful predefined patterns. Having a few typical models to draw inspiration from when solving a problem is of course useful. Mindlessly applying a recipe without consideration of the unique aspects of an individual problem instance will inevitably lead to suboptimal or overly convoluted designs.

A skilled software engineer will recognise important aspects in a given situation and design a suitable solution based on similar situations (patters) without necessarily having a name for it.

Every attempt to formalise good engineering practices has met with a similar fate. Be it structured programming, design patters, agile development, or something else, they all fail when the chosen process is followed to the letter at any cost, no matter how absurd the consequences.
Interesting behavior. I like the one commenter's explanation that it emerges from ants simply being selected to follow ants in front of them.
Happy 12th Birthday Google
How about this:

Design patterns have flopped because many if not most of them have proven not to be the universal computer science gems they were touted as.

Rather, they've proven to be:

* Stock workarounds for the overly restrictive type system of a particular language X

* Patterns which in a more powerful language would be a language feature (or trivially abstracted into a small chunk of library code using the language's existing facilities for abstraction) -- but in language X, require so much boilerplate for each invocation, that the boilerplate merits a special name.

(Where for X, substitute mostly Java :)
The fact that each article makes the front page shows that someone here does care AngelGate. Perhaps not founders, but "hackers."
Maybe I'm a little grouchy today but the article was a bit annoying to me.

- His argument for why PHP needs to die basically comes down to "PHP is lacking is lambdas and method chaining".

- He flirts with a possible replacement to PHP being Ruby on Rails, even though he comes around to note that Rails is not a language (essentially making that whole tangent masturbatory)

- Then he forgets to assess Sinatra http://www.sinatrarb.com/ which really sounds like something that actually fit the mold of what he's actually looking for (allows you basically run Ruby on a webserver)
"... most numeric functions in Clojure, will no longer auto-promote values to Big numbers..."

Oh no! Clojure is choosing the route of premature opt. What a terrible shame.
It is a similar situation to legacy Fortran code in the academic physics community. Fortran is used because some guy wrote the core algorithm 30 years ago in Fortran 77 and never wrote any docs about it. "If it ain't broke don't fix it."

I don't agree with this mentality at all. In fact, I make use of Python almost exclusively for the work I do (in a small fund). My NumPy/SciPy is not good enough though to choose it over C++ when I need to perform some hefty number crunching.

How did you find using SAS/SPS? Is R not a good candidate for what you're doing?
Can't put time on a T-Shirt. Clearly he's thinking 3-dimensionally.
Can you social network your way to revolution?
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This is only true if you use the annotations, at least that is my understanding.
Using a different HTTP response code may be kind of "nerdy", imo, but in a lame junior developer kind of way. BTW- nerds are not as cool as geeks.

Trying to evaluate the impact of the choice and other potential choices in some sort of quantitative way before making a decision that almost no one could reasonably dispute would have been more respectable, a.k.a. somewhat geeky.
Video: Amateur Spacecraft Goes to Space
Dup: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1732757
Amazon ec2 is extremely popular. I use it for my current client, and my side project. I know lots of other startups use it. However, it is lacking in the control panel department.
> - UTF8 came from Plan 9

Not really, Ken Thompson certainly contributed to it, but they didn't invent it.
Moving to cities makes you healthier than moving to the country
What's interesting about this will be the enterprise adoption.

Blackberry's played a key role in kickstarting smartphone adoption, even though iphone takes all the credit.
Americans are wallowing in decline
Something that doesn't require you to be a techie to understand. OpenID is a bit advanced for many users.

FB Connect actually does a pretty good job at being "easy to use". Just log into your FB account and you are set. I know it's not fair, but most people havn't posted anything to that openid website.

Google or Yahoo logins would work, since there's a recognizable brand name and there's a good chance that the user has an account on those sites.
Precisely what I meant, thanks for clarifying.
shouldn't it be called (++ clojure) or something like it?
Leave it to PHP to look up to MS-DOS for inspiration.
AFAIK, .htaccess files are strictly for Apache web servers - if you're even using lighttpd or nginx, you're pretty much boned.
I would expect the new iPad no later than Q2 2011. The current generation was announced in January and available in April. I see no reason why Apple shouldn’t update the iPad yearly – just like the iPhone and their iPods.
design patterns are recurring patterns in code. you may not know how often you're solving problems in the same way, but patterns recur, even if they're not one of the classic big-white-algorithms-book ones.

just because you dont have a class called Factory in your code, doesn't mean you're not using one.

and finally, if your programmer doesnt know what design patterns are, do yourself a favor and tell them to learn at LEAST what they are. they'll find a use for them, guaranteed.
Sorry to bust-up the love-in but Matt isn't the CEO of Wordpress.com, but Toni Schneider is.

Also the open source project doesn't have a CEO. Matt is lead-dev at both.

Points still apply though, and Matt should get a ton of credit
Sorry I'm late on this; my wife and I spent the last 3 days playing MineCraft.

Here's why it's so engaging: it successfully combines the ideas of LEGO, zombies, swords, model trains, spelunking, and electric circuits. It's like a 6 year old boy's idea of paradise. (I'm considerably older than that, but still interested in all of those things.)

It does take a little while to get started and get a stable base of operations up and running, but once you have one, you can do some really cool stuff.
Any MIT people know if this is open to the public? Might be worth leaving work a bit early to listen to that talk.
Registration for BlackBerry Tablet SDK now open
Right - my point isn't: YC only advises on investment topics, but: This overview makes it look like YC only advises on investment topics.

I'm the last person to give you writing advice, but maybe some examples would help.
Or maybe it makes sure that the only people who go the length to sign up are aware of the benefit of Quora, and therefore likely to be quality users contributing the the quality of Quora. In a sense, Quora uses Facebook as a filter to get great users.
no mention of battery life- a worrisome omission.
I'm curious whether, and how, you're going to start pulling in alumni to scale it up, and how that will turn out.
Thank God they didn't call it the BlackPad.
If you're a founder of a tech company and you spend most of your time programming, you're in for a rude awakening [1].

1. Unless you have one hell of a business cofounder.
Quora no longer forces you to log in with Facebook, nor do you need to log in at all to browse the site.
A little aspirin may prevent colon cancer
I would take it at face value.

First, the author is taking for granted that his readers are intelligent enough to realize that self-reported IQ scores are inaccurate, that IQ as measured is not equivalent to any real world intelligence, and that the accuracy of IQ tests is limited once one gets out to the extremes. He links directly to the survey --- what more can he do?

Second, I'd guess that the numbers are about right. In the same way that one would be safe assuming that the posters to StackOverflow are probably mostly in the top 1% of programming ability out the entire population of the world, I think it's likely a site dedicated to debating 'meta-contrarianism' might select quite precisely for people who can score well on standardized tests.

I'm not a regular reader, but I know enough about the site to suggest a solution: come up with a means of testing your hypothesis, and put up some money to back it. The more direct the better: bet them $1000 that none of the regular posters can show a bona-fide IQ test result higher than 160 (or whatever cutoff you think fairly accounts for the limited accuracy of the test at the extreme).

And then report back to us if it was money well spent!
Besides music labels, are there other industries you try to steer startups away from, either through not accepting them or through nudging them in other directions? I'm looking specifically at medical applications, but I imagine there are others too.
if it wasn't a bit ugly (organically grown, just one endpoint), I'd direct you to the source code of the tempalias HTTP server.

You can still have a look at it. As I said though, it's really ugly and I should really split it up into multiple files, factor out the common stuff and make the whole thing more clear.

Still. Here goes:

http://github.com/pilif/tempalias/blob/master/lib/tempalias_...

Lines 30 and following handle calls to /aliases (in my case, that's just a POST to /aliases to create an alias - later I'd add PUT to /aliases/<id> to update it and DELETE /aliases/<id> to delete it - assuming that a correct update key (part of the response to creation) has been created.

As I said: Butt-ugly code. Don't do it like this - factor out common stuff, create smaller functions for the various parts of the needed setup.
> Ruby is a newer, cleaner language, with modern features and a sparse, elegant syntax...

This isn't entirely true. According to the two languages' Wikipedia pages, development on PHP started a year after Ruby. The first public version of PHP came out six months before Ruby.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruby_language and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Php have more.

Here are the salient dates:

- Ruby conceived of in December 1993

- PHP development started in 1994

- PHP/FI 1.0 released in June 1995

- Ruby 0.95 released in December 1995

- PHP 3.0 released in 1997
HP's Bradley says company is not trying to be Apple
If he's defending against None, he should

assert l is not None and len(l) == 1
Lots and lots and lots of sites fail because they depend on jquery hosted by google.
There is nothing bare-bones about Django, Drupal, RoR, etc. Node.js is about as bare-bones as you can get without getting into C.
Yeah, I totally agree.
You don't need to do that for a set. sets support `len()`. Also set supports `pop()`, so the code is very similar to the list one:

assert s and len(s)==1
return s.pop()

Or if you want to stay in the immutable land:

assert s and len(s)==1
return tuple(s)[0]
Most of the dinners and office hours are focused on building a great startup, not raising money. There is structure around raising money (angel day, demo day, sequoia, etc.), but it's definitely a minority of the focus.

I'd also say that even the fundraising stuff isn't just about raising money. Having a smart angel investor give you feedback on your startup isn't just about raising money; it's also about building a product, a team, and a company.
It does look very accurate though.

It twinges some school nostalgia for me.
In a sadly ironic fashion, a lousy API, that makes you invest months on kludging your code, can tie a company or developer to a platform.

This was a factor with Microsoft's domination.

How much do you think this is a factor with Facebook.
There already is apn_on_rails which I've used with success. It would be interesting to learn why this gem was written instead of using that one, it's been around for ages.
To add to this, the other article wasn't even that bad. It was more taking some shots at a few libraries.
Unless that site is Yelp. Or Pandora. Or...

"Always" is meaningless for SAAS that you don't pay for.
We understand nutrition

No, we can not say that. Nutritionists can not even decide on the reasons for the obesity - some say people just eat too much and exercise too little (aka "calories in, calories out"), others point to more complex reasons. Not to speak about more complex issues.

It is vastly healthier than the average person's diet, really

To that I agree. But "better than X" still does not mean optimal.
Agreed. And, pg has already written plenty about advising startups to build things people want - I just want more :)
Yes, in several ways. We hired Harj and Alexis, who are alums. We have some of the alumni read the applications, in case we overlook any good ones. And the alumni who come in to give advice about funding are fabulous.
Warren Buffett has a good quote saying something like "when people are scared you should be brave and when people are brave you should be scared" and then elaborated by saying something like "It's never as bad, or as good, as people think, it's usually somewhere in the middle." Basically, Buffett says don't believe the hype.
Facebook lawsuit coming in 3.. 2.. 1...
interesting.

Why doesn't it scale?
Ug. I thought you were joking. Now I'm sad for humanity.
No surprise, DODOcase tests these sort of things in our state of the art wind tunnel facility.

The DODO is a very aerodynamic bird.
Sudanese woman's books deal with taboo topics
Well, this is the first non-iPad tablet that I find remotely compelling. If this thing doesn't require a carrier to be useful and affordable then it has a chance.
Opera 10.70 Is Faster Than Chrome 7
Http://www.nikkibeach.com/miami/events.php
Design patterns are not, and never will be "important field of computer science".

They're a neat-seeming idea with very little practical value because the real world doesn't fit into a small set of neat patterns, no matter how cute you name them. Overall, they do more harm (usually of the "golden hammer" variety) than good.
Interesting, that makes their altruistic (CDN) hosting seem slightly more strategic.
That wasn't my takeaway. The emphasis to me was on how the creative process is nurtured and accelerated. I'm actually surprised by how many times the word "event" occurs, but stepping back that makes sense. Events are opportunities for action.
Qwiki Just May Be The Future Of Information Consumption. And It’s Here Now.
I don't quite get agnosticism. It's perfectly reasonable for me to say "Superman doesn't exist" so why isn't it reasonable for me to say "God doesn't exist" ? They're equally sensible statements...
I was happy to see the RIM acquisition of QNX bear fruit so early (I've always been a big fan of QNX).

I get the impression from the keynote that as the plan is to tune a JVM for performance working on top of QNX, that the longterm plan for the phones is to also migrate to QNX. (The tablet provides a good means to test this out, and get it working before migrating the phones)

This is one benefit to the virtual-machine based phones, if something better comes along in the underlying OS, you can migrate apps easier.
Not all patterns are equal. Of the GoF patterns, I'd say there are a few that are important to know: factory, observer, and visitor spring to mind. (Then there's the singleton pattern...)