skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>No, I did not. The existence of two sexes is only because of sexual reproduction. If organisms did not have sexual reproduction, and only reproduced asexually, there would not be two sexes. If something like two sexes arose in a species (i.e. one that is good at math and one that was good at cooking), it would speciate, because each "sex" would just keep changing individually; evolution is a chaotic process. Sexes only exist where there is sexual reproduction. The question of why two sexes exist is absolutely about why sexual reproduction exists; two sexes exist BECAUSE sexual reproduction exists, and sexual reproduction exists BECAUSE it confers some evolutionary advantage.

your post again confirms my point. You're very good a "housekeeping" of facts, yet you miss the ability to analytically transcend beyond the mere set of facts. The sexual reproduction is the _mean_ of keeping 2 sexes from speciating, and not a _goal_ of the 2 sex existence. The 2 sex specialization inside 1 species is what confers primary evolutionary advantage.

>IF it were possible for a species to evolve to be "strong" AND division of skills produced produced "strength" THEN you would expect to see asexual species with "sexes." But you don't.

because without sexual reproduction the speciating happens. Sexual reproduction is a necessary mean for keeping of (and not a goal of development of) specialization without triggering speciating.
A charm to read, but I still find it too inflated. I guess it could be equally effective if it was twice as short bu to the point.
"But the iPhone and iPad aren't priced at a premium."

I believe that AT&T subsidizes the hell out of the iPhone (pays Apple $400 per phone sold), which the do for the privilege of exclusivity, among other reasons. When/if that exclusivity dies, we'll see if carriers will pony up. The alternative is more expensive iPhones or reduced margins (will Apple be willing to accept the latter?).
Site back now - but yes I'd push for one font size larger - you have a lot of text there, so always good to make it readable (if you want it read ;) )
I think the best one so far was Github Cofounder Tom Preston-Werner's talk. Almost every sentence of his was a gem, and the fact that he had bootstrapped both his startups made it even more interesting!
This was a great episode. Cool when can identify world changing shifts as they are happening.
This is a great critique of the publisher/author model, but it makes me sad that this writer also believes that his book price should have something to do with the cost of paper.
It depends on the department. Some have a heavy focus on implementation projects in courses.
Wouldn't it be cool if there were an auto-balanced unicycle that just kept you from losing your balance and still made you do all the pedaling? Now THAT would make you look cool.
There seems to be a disconnect between his argument for tighter engineering standards as the single key for building better software and the stated fact that software is not bound by the constraints of physical reality.

In designing and producing the physical components of a 747 (like a bolt to use his example), there isn't the same level of potential abstraction as there is for even a very basic software component.

The fact that he's talking specifically about the development of a secure OS does strengthen his argument though. So in that sense I agree with him.
McDonald’s Happy Meal resists decomposition for six months
How We're Wrecking Our Feet With Every Step We Take
Of course, dealing with passwords properly on the server is only one side of the story.

If the connection between client and server is not secure, then an attacker could intercept a user's password as it travels in plaintext from client to server. And if a user's login persists by the use of a cookie, an attacker could impersonate a logged-in user by using their cookie, after intercepting it as it is sent in plaintext in every request from client to server.
Same here. Edit distance for fuzzy matching of strings to strings.

I suspect that edit distance accounts for 83.52 percent of dynamic programming wordwide.
See, I don't like this job description. To me, it misses the point of job descriptions: to attract the best possible candidates. This is a very long list of requirements. They are indeed charming, and they do indeed sound all the right geek dog whistles. But they are all about why the candidate will be valuable to the company.

It's definitely better to be explicit and evocative about how important the role is going to be, and that does make this ad better than most HR job ads.

But an even better job post would spend the majority of its words selling the job to the candidate.

(Also, the skills list at the bottom is a straight-up unforced error. There are obviously candidates who are very much worth considering who will not meet all these requirements. From bitter experience: give anyone an excuse to believe that they're not qualified, and chances are they'll take that excuse. A constant thrum of feedback we get: people aren't applying to Matasano because they're afraid they're not "good enough", which is shocking for us to hear. Our only spelled-out requirement is "ability to code in any language"!)
I didn't see anyone mounting or dismounting the unicycle in the video. If it's awkward to stop and start, it's going to look much more dorky than the Segway.
Truck noob question, what's an inverted "T"?
Unfortunately, if you want a warranted phone, I think the nexus might be your best choice. Someone can correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe that they will still replace it under warrantee if something happens to it and you have root. With all other phones, as far as I'm aware, if you root your phone, you loose warrantee.

I rooted my Motorola Droid and a about 6 months later parts of the screen stopped working. They wouldn't replace it because it had been rooted. I probably should have just undone all that and taken it back to another store, but I ended up just buying a new phone.
I see, so the point becomes even more clear when you contrast it to the question of whether you'd trade with some random person in today's world. Imagine you were forced to trade lives with some random person. I'd much rather it be today than 100 years ago.
> "I believe that AT&T subsidizes the hell out of the iPhone"

No more than any other device. By all reports, the iPhone is not significantly more expensive to build than comparable smartphones, and in fact if you look at similar smartphones, both subsidized contract prices and unsubsidized prices are very similar to the iPhone as well.

Android is going to open the market for cheaper, low-end smartphones, that's for certain - but comparably equipped smartphones, whether they be Nokia, Android, or WinMo7, are all in the same general price point.
6) Make sure you have an ISBN so you control your metadata.

Could you go into more detail? I understand what an ISBN is, but why is it important for self publishing ebooks?
Because when a small company is hiring an employee they are risking quite a bit. It is worth spending more time finding out who they are. Hiring and firing people immediately because they turned out to be the wrong person is very counter-productive and demoralizing for everyone involved.

Before the day long interview we would have a phone interview. At that point you would decide whether you want to take a day out of your life to find out more about a company where will potentially spend years working. I don't think that is that unreasonable?
A BBS? Now you're just showing off :)
A quick googling will yield plenty of articles that say that Facebook is profitable, from reliable news sources like Reuters and Techcrunch, but these all cite "inside sources" so we can't be sure. The problem with privately held companies is that they don't have an obligation to report their financial like publicly traded companies do. These sources could be guessing or exaggerating.
Thanks for the tip. I checked it out and posted to the blog about it. Looks like it could be really handy if you've got a newborn.
hm, actually I might be wrong. Shame on me for trusting my memory. :)

Double flame then! Someone give us some real statistics!
You could do this by adding your own .debug() function. In some ways this would add an advantage, because you would be making your debug code reusable.

Example:

jQuery.fn.debug = function(){
if (console && console.log)
console.log(this);
return this;
};
...
$('#elm').debug().color('red').debug().click(function(){}).debug();
> I don't think the Taliban have any secret documents to be released.

It was reported a couple of years ago that "Taliban maps, manuals and propaganda have been discovered at training camps in Pakistan showing the sophistication of the insurgent's operations in the country's tribal areas." See http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/pakistan/3441....
> "All true, and still they've had great success."

I'd argue they haven't. The success would've been the adoption of the platform - but as far as I can see none of the major Android phone vendors actually support the platform - they see it more as a way to skimp on software development costs, and offload it onto Google instead. There's little to no interest in even updating the phones, or supporting the platform as a whole.

I feel that Google has been taken for a ride by Motorola, HTC, et al - there's a lot of lip service paid to Android, but none of their actions have helped solidify the platform, instead being treated simply as free code. The fact that there are a lot of units of hardware moving off shelves means little, IMHO, for the long-term success of the platform.
I was just coming here to say that myself. I'd much rather have a book on Kindle than paper. The DRM is the only reason I ever buy any book on paper at all, and that is limited to the rare one I think I will read multiple times.
And please, if you add a warning, make it to the effect of "Hey, we know there's an issue with your browser, sorry.", instead of some line about IE being evil and standards and so on.
Assuming that by singly linked list, he means that each node only has a pointer to the next node and not to the previous one. For each node, I'd save a pointer to it and to the next node. Then replace its next pointer with the pointer to the previous node which should have been saved. Move to the next node and do the same. Done in t(n)=n. If the list was doubly linked, you could do it in half the time by switching 1 and n, 2 and n-1, etc...Would I get the job?

EDIT: also change the list to point to the new first node.
How about?:

http.ww.com -> haha.com

Thanks!
Business tips from a guy with £800 million
The critical people interview first, after the interview they talk to one of the owners. At that point the interview could stop. So it might actually not take more than half an hour.

Hiring many people at one time I think is a sign of a problem. We try not to hire more than 3-5 people / year. It is not that bad for a each top dev to spend 10 hours / year to find the right candidate.
Algorithm was fine in both cases, I had the problem solved in my head but couldn't pass it onto paper effectively. I had trouble remembering semantics. Because I use autocomplete functions of IDEs a lot.
> " "delivered the awesome Android experience to the iPhone" - yeah probably never."

That's because the iPhone still doesn't have half the features that are standard on Android :/
That's very much like what I would ask from a candidate developer: "Bring your laptop and show me some stuff you made in the past year(s), and expect to implement a small programming problem I give you. You may use your favourite development environment for that."
It sounds like you know exactly how bad it would look! I agree that if your manager found out, it would look terrible. That said, would he (could he) find out? Obviously you'd be reviewing and probably editing everything before "handing it in," so it seems unlikely. If you're confident that there's no confidential information, you probably wouldn't be fired over it, if he did find out. But it would look really bad and have you doing a lot of backpedaling. And maybe you'd feel bad about it.

Or maybe you'd have lots of free time, he'd never find out, and everything would be hunky-dory. And you'd be helping out somebody overseas with some money.
News Corp. Shuts Off Hulu Access To Cablevision Customers
For any parents who are interested, a friend just posted about "how to set up an old iPhone for kids" on a parenting blog I run:
http://parentingmode.com/stories/how-set-old-iphone-kids
Can this be used also for parts of a site that are accessible to registered users only? I'm seeing it work on our homepage, but I can't access the rest of the site.
In developer survey, 72% think Android has better long-term viability than iOS
This might come true for Android soon, too: http://monodroid.net/
To take it a step further, what if the unicycle was integrated into your car seat. When you leave the car you leave on your unicycle. No switchover necessary.
I understand Scala works fine for Android, too, which is much more attractive than working with Java.
Not in the least. We support both. Most students don't have Macs and feel pressure to develop for the iPhone.

Of course you're right - it isn't strong evidence, just another opinion.
I've noticed that too, that Google seems to have created the Windows of mobile phones, while Apple, of course, is the Apple of mobile phones.

So, where does that leave Microsoft?
Probably I would not suggest this book otherwise, but if you are an experienced C programmer then Bruce Eckel's 'Thinking in C++' book might be for you. It explains to C programmers why object orientation is a good thing. It gradually shifts from C to C++. (If I remember correctly; I've read that book long years ago.)

You can freely download the book:

http://www.mindview.net/Books/TICPP/ThinkingInCPP2e.html
I think you're undervaluing the value other people put in feeling and owning a physical book.
The Corporation
Full movie on Hulu.
Is our memory so shallow as to forget the anti-trust methods that brought Windows to dominance?

As far as I know, no anti-trust methods brought Windows to dominance. Anti-trust methods did bring IE to dominance, however.
OKCupid: Please improve your customer service
Second that. But for 2500$ you already have a 2 room/50qm flat and a Mini Cooper. At least I do. I don't know any other place where I would earn that much money as a student.
Could someone describe SecondMarket? Particularly, I don't understand how the stuff traded there is illiquid in some context, but evidently not in _their_ context.
What's the shebang (#!) in Facebook and new Twitter URLs for?
It makes sense that ebooks can cost as much or more than the same print book. Publishers' current revenue model for ebooks is an extension of that for their print books. These are colossal organizations. At the Startup School today Reid Hoffman (founder LinkedIn) talked about the ability for organizations to pivot. Small startups can easily pivot, these large corporations take time and money to change direction. Publishers have not changed their production processes to respond to ebooks. They have just added another step in the process.

Would I pay more for an ebook than a print book? probably not. Most ebooks available have less features than a print book. Ebooks are portable, cant get wet, font can be resized, etc... Print books dont expire or change formats, I can share it with my buddy, and I can scribble in it. Unless the ebook costs less I probably wont get it.

Does an ebook have to cost less than a print book? of course not. There are a lot of cool features an online text could have. Searching the book is just the beginning. Integrated audio, video, games could bring new life to stories. The author can continually update the text and interact with readers. The problem is ebooks dont have any of this stuff right now.

Whether any of the large publishers innovates, or new companies rise, the future of publishing is through adding value to the digital texts. By adding value to the texts, the publishers can embrace open content allowing sharing and remixing of text. As the book marketplace moved online, barriers to publishing will also be removed. This will enable authors to receive a greater share for their work.
This thread is now closed... sorry!
Business tips from a billionaire
That's so interesting. We are definitely self-similar, over and over in the course of our lives. If you could view a person 4-dimensionally (with time as the 4th), then the furthest level of zoom would be the person's entire life, replicating patterns at every instance. Zoom to any shorter time span and you would likely see something different but still similar. Could the narrowest level of zoom be a single thought in a single instance? That it itself probably has fractal-levels of complexity.
Mind if I join in? I'm also living in Zurich and have been evaluating contract work. Therefore I would be very interested in anything you would like to share on that topic.
Thanks for the feedback. I definitely worded my comment too strongly. Of course that article isn't strong evidence.

We're supporting both Android and iPhone.
I debated youtube vs. thisweekin.com and went with our site since it has show notes and youtube doesn't.
Average teen sends 3,339 texts per month
It's great for getting news about music and bands, and also connects you to people like that (large or small celebrities) in a unique way. Posting messages on Twitter takes much less time or commitment than writing a blog post, so I hear a lot more from and about my favorite musicians. Following humorists such as Steven Colbert is entertaining.

Twitter also hooks you into a social circle of your choice in a unique way. I've heard about all sorts of software projects, new releases, rumors, etc. from Twitter.

I have also used it as a place to post and broadcast messages about my businesses, and customers may see it appear in their feed if they follow us, or they can go to our page as twitter members or not and see the latest news.
Yes. "A quick googling will yield plenty of articles that say that Facebook is profitable".

But sadly this sounds to me the same as "most of the oil in the Caribbean just disappeared". Also "Beer is good" and "Angelina Jolie is beautiful" can be read in many web pages.
Well, it was the same for FF, Chrome, Safari, and Opera. IE 7/8 wasn't exactly the same, just didn't have the shadows or the rounded corners. Still looked good though.

Use a little javascript animation between views and getting an app to behave like an iPhone app is extremely easy in HTML/Javascript/CSS.
That's awesome. I hope you don't mind that I linked to it.
Exploit Hub Aims to be iTunes for Exploits
Your requirements list is ridiculous, and will exclude everyone you want to find. Does your applicant REALLY need to be the one guy in the world who has a degree, AND certification from a hardware vendor, AND has written scripts for Amazon EBS, AND has a background in cryptography, AND has built and configured everything from down to disk subsystems up to Java, etc... for at least 8 years? I don't think this mythical man exists, and if he does, he just might be worth so much more than you can pay that the list of off hours and customer support responsibilities would have him pass you right by.

I'm being harsh here, but I don't know anyone qualified that would look at that enormous list of requirements and actually apply. The only thing that list might be good for is catching lots of keyword searches on job sites, getting you tons of unqualified applicants.
Me too. How representative are we of the population?
Apple is fairly similar on that front. If you want to develop iPhone apps, you have to buy into the whole stack: XCode on OS X on a Mac.

(Well, technically it's possible to target the iPhone via other methods, but they're not easy or supported, or in some cases even legal.)
I'm trying to learn programming with zero experience too, and highly recommend book "Learn to Program" (http://pine.fm/LearnToProgram/). It was worth every hour even while my goal is to learn JS and book based on Ruby. Now I'm reading JS book with much better understanding of basic things.

Also, "Ship It!: A Practical Guide to Successful Software Projects" (http://www.pragprog.com/titles/prj/ship-it) gave me a good understanding of development process. I think it's worth to read even if you are going to work on project alone.
Fundamental Limits of Locality
> Memoization is top-down dynamic programming.

It really is not.

Memoization has the same time complexity as dynamic programming. But it has much worse space complexity.

First some approximate definitions: The tasks to which memoization and dynamic programming are typically useful are
those in which a problem can be decomposed into subproblems, and subsubproblems, and so on, where problem->subproblem dependency is many-to-many, not one-to-many. That is, the dependency graph is a DAG, not a tree. By memoization I mean the process of computing the solution to a function by first looking up in a hash table to see if the solution has already been found, and only computing the solution and storing it if it has not been found. By dynamic programming I mean the bottom-up process of first solving all of the lowest level decomposed subproblems, then solving the next higher level subproblems using the solutions found at the lower level, then the next higher level using the solutions found so far, and so on up to the desired top-level problem.

Whether memoization will do the job depends on the nature of your task. In some tasks the higher-level problems depend on simultaneously knowing the answers to all of the subproblems at every level. For those kinds of problems memoization will be just fine.

But for many dynamic programming tasks, you don't need to keep around all the low-level problems: just the most immediate ones. For example, it's often the case that once you've computed problem layer N, you can get rid of all the layers 0...N-1. They're not necessary to compute problem layer N+1. For these kinds of problems the space cost of dynamic programming is just in keeping that immediate layer N. But memoization has no way of forgetting these layers, because not only is it top-down, but it's also typically depth-first. As a result, by the time you solve the final layer, you have all of the previous layers stored in your hash table.
Correct, I felt that those were outside of the scope of the post though. However, as I think about it more they seem fit better and better.
Thanks, that's a wonderfully detailed response. All your points are correct, but I don't know if that really captures people's reactions. I get this reaction almost immediately --- before they've tried the market, before they've played any music or taken any pictures.

The hardware acceleration graphics might be key. I immediately turned off all the transitions and animations upon getting my phone, as I find them distracting. Perhaps this is what throws people: where I see crisp and fast, they expect smooth and silky.

Personally, I greatly prefer dealing with the Incredible interface to dealing with the iPhone's. Every time I borrow a friend's to do some simple task, I end up handing it back to them much more angry than I began. I'm not sure what it is, but I feel like I'm swaddled in cotton gauze and unable to breath.