skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The moral of the story: Don't optimize before you HAVE to. Write clear, maintainable code and profile later. Only add in all the ugly "trick" optimizations if a) your compiler can't do it for you, b) you can't get a better compiler, and c) you've proven that the area in question is slow.
I think that's a great idea. From here on, it will come down to marketing.

You may want to offer a self-hosted version as well (sell it), to allay fears that one day you'll go away.

Why are the screenshots blurry?
It sounds like you're starting off with a reasonable MVP feature set, but I'm mainly wondering what lists you will have at the start. It might go more smoothly if you pick a few important lists to feature, and maybe even scrape data from the Google Spreadsheets if it's current, than just leave it wide open for us to create lists.

Lists I'd suggest featuring:

- Companies Hiring

- Hackers seeking full-time jobs

- Contractors available for hire

- Seeking co-founder

There are certainly many other lists that come up on HN, but I'd strongly suggest focusing on a small set of proven ones to feature prominently on your site, with others available in a list sorted by last update time. Also, I'd suggest you work to ensure the featured lists capture enough information to discourage forking them -- for example, you should collect geographic data in the job-related lists, and at some point allow filtering by location. You don't need to support filtering in the first release, I think, but you want to avoid splintering attention from the featured lists due to e.g. "Boston jobs" and "Bay Area jobs" and "New York jobs".

TL;DR: this app will succeed if it has a couple of major lists that a large group of HNers use regularly; so it's more important to ensure the key lists have staying power than encourage the creation of lots of little lists.
Yeah, I guess if you're doing more complex math with the figures than just addition and subtraction there's the possibility for magnification effects. I'd be interested to see an actual example from business, though.
I've been wondering the same thing lately! following this post
Also, first map of the Internet.
Do users care. Quite a thought that actually scared a bit out of me, because unless these users would actually care, only would there be protocols that would prevent this from happening. And when would users care? When their personal identities have been stolen, and private information (credit cards, social insurance numbers, personal messages) have been compromised. Do we really have to go that point where the risk is imminent before taking action?

Having identified the vulnerabilities of WEP encryption on wireless networks, shouldn't it be that device manufacturers of wireless routers take away WEP encryption as an option but instead focus on a more secure method of connection? Of course this may have some downside to it, but unless your ordinary Joe and Jane realize the upsides of having secure connection to the web, they may see this as a discomfort.
It's not a bug, it's a feature or better said it's a known issue which should be taken into account when writing a program that uses floating point numbers.
The point would be to do your due diligence and find out what your contract has and to not leave it to chance. I guess I could have clarified that a bit but I expected that people would have been able to infer what I meant. I have no need or desire to over-answer in every situation.
HTTP cookies, or how not to design protocols
The arrow at the first result indicates the keyboard shortcut functionality. Now you can navigate results without mouse: use up/down keys to select a result, then press enter. I love that feature!
I actually mean 0.999.../2.999... .
Are you using it? :)

Seriously, I'm sure it depends on what country you're in, whether you're racking up late fees, etc., but I'm pretty sure that it's required in the US:

http://creditshout.com/credit-card-minimum-payments/
http://www.fdic.gov/news/news/financial/2003/FIL0302a.html#h...
Nope, Erlang's floats are still IEEE754 floats:

1> 1.0e21 + 1 == 1.0e21.
true
http://osdc.com.au is also on in November
Thanks for the feedback.

I blurred the screenshots as they didn't look nice. I just have an ugly prototype so far. I wanted to ask for more feedback and validate the market more before spending more time on making the system nicer.

Currently you cannot sign up. You can only enter your email in a list and get notified when the product launches.
I too have noticed that some testing practises seem to be particularly optimal for (and preferred by) consultants and agencies working on short-to-mid-term web development projects.

When they go on to over-generalise TDD as the one true 'professional' approach to all development on all projects, it can become a little grating though. Like all things, the right level of test coverage and the methodology used to achieve it, are a matter of trade-offs and the right trade-off can vary a lot depending on the type and lifespan of project, the way requirements are gathered and the project is governed, the business goals, the people involved, etc etc etc.
Cool. Still, I wouldn't blur them. I think this is a difficult market to be in. Think back to all the hosted CMS's in the past. If there is really demand, there will be a free solution that you run yourself.
Conditional stability?
That's a rather provocative interpretation of what I posted. I was merely pointing out that the birds thing is a relatively small issue, and if you really care that much about them you'll have to sacrifice much of the modern lifestyle.

For what it's worth, the book I quoted from (link in my previous comment) is (in my interpretation) fairly skeptical of wind power. I highly recommend it: It looks at the issues in a balanced manner, with extensive figures and calculations, and without resorting to sensationalist language like "it's OK to kill birds", or putting sarcastic quotes around "saving the planet" to imply naïvety of anyone who dares to disagree.
Yea, I just found out about this today as well - seems to run, but dies on any connection at the moment - but hopefully it will be working soon
I made the switch to tmux only after very briefly using screen. It helped me in switching away from Textmate to vim, because I could use it like a tiling window manager and have vim going on the right, and man pages/documentation/irssi on the left.
They make a movie about you!
I just can't figure out what the developer stands to gain from giving out such private and proprietary information... If you go around telling people that you make $500,000 in ads on a simple iPhone game that someone else could clone, you should expect to be hit with tons of clones and SEM trying to take traffic away. I don't get it.
The unofficial ycombinator tweet didn't have a link embedded for this submission.

EDIT: changed official to unofficial, thanks riklomas
I like the concept and it seems like it would make it easier to get an app going.

One criticism I have is not so much about the concept but the signup page. On your signup page you have that mini f.a.q. I think around a couple of those questions sound like they're coming from a skeptic. Your signup page shouldn't focus at all on the negative and I would probably even move the faq to a different screen all together. That screen is about funneling people into the service, not answering their questions.

Questions I think you can get rid of:

"Why isn't StorageRoom free?"
-I have to pay for it, so should you, Jerk. The world isn't free.

"How does the 30 Day trial work?"
- It's a 30 trial. You don't have to pay till you've been using it for a month. Haven't you ever seen an infomercial? Are you even smart enough to write code?

"What browsers work with StorageRoom?"
- StorageRoom is a modern web app and, if you're planning on giving me money, you should trust that I put the time in to test on more than one browser. This isn't 1996 anymore you can't get away with "Optimized for Netscape Navigator 2.5 and later on and 800x600 resolution"... c'mon, seriously?

"Do I get a 30 day free trial if I upgrade?"
- No, you cheap bastard! You already know what the service is like. You don't need to figure out if you like it or not. If you decide you need to increase your capabilities, that's on you.

--------

Sorry for the snark (well, not really... well, maybe a little.) You shouldn't be trying to argue an imaginary skeptic. You should be trying to tell us why your awesome product is so awesome.

Good luck!
Question about the article, and suggested use of hierarchical file storage: why would you want to make the user "mark" files? Why not just have the OS keep most-recently-used (perhaps weighted by size?) files on the fast disk, and migrate inactive files to the slow disk?

Or, just buy a hybrid disk and let the hardware do it.
A Facebook without walls: Appleseed opens to the public.
Hello, HN!

Appleseed is an open source distributed social networking framework I've been developing for the past few years, and I've been making rapid progress in the past few months.

I'm giving out invites to the test site, and I wanted to personally ask HN users to check out this work in progress and if you could give me feedback or suggestions, that would be fantastic.

Post your email here, or send an email to invite@appleseedproject.org if you don't want it to be public, and I'll send you an invite. Once you sign up, you'll get 5 invites of your own.

Project's Website: http://opensource.appleseedproject.org

Github: http://github.com/appleseedproj/appleseed

Twitter Announcement: http://twitter.com/appleseedproj/status/29017132391

Thanks again for being a great community, and feel free to ask any questions and I'll do my best to respond.
Completely open key-value data store, exposed as a web service.
I have to agree that the icons are pretty crap.
You just have to be proactive with paypal..contact them before launching, stay in touch with them to resolve/ prevent any issues (hopefully) before they arise.
> I just like the approach of a BigDecimal literal instead of having to write that boilerplate.

Ah yes. Well not all languages require a bunch of boilerplate either. In Python for instance, there is a type decimal.Decimal which you can just alias to `d` and write:

val = d('0.1')
Also, to be realistic having an antagonistic relationship between the two owners of the company is going to be poison. The other guy should understand this; if he owns half the company then hack_rohan is probably not going to be terribly keen on continuing to work on this company.

But certainly the other founder is entitled to a lot more than a thousand dollars here (though there's some vagueness in the description). A good negotiating position might be to tell him he can have half the company or the $2000, and plan to get bid up on the $2000 side somewhat.
The numbers:

.. more than 47.5 million installs on iOS devices to date, and 5.5 million on Android .. of games including Paper Toss, Ragdoll Blaster, Harbor Havoc 3D, NinJump and Buganoids .. 15 million monthly active users .. generating between 600 million and 800 million ad impressions a month across its free games
Write amplification (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Write_amplification) means that naive random writes like what you see from b-trees are going to degrade performance on SSDs too (although not as pathologically as doing rotational seeks). In other words it still pays to be smart about i/o patterns.
I was frustrated with a project I was working on a couple weeks back and wanted to just hack on something totally different. As a result, I wrote code to display the clock in tmux as a binary clock[1]. As someone who does not do a lot of C coding, I found the code base to be very clean and easy to figure out.

[1]: http://bitbucket.org/mdg/tmux/
When should you sell your company?
Real Sustainable Competitive Advantages are Rare
Facebook applies for ad-targeting patent
Same here, I just sent you an email. That's a really great gesture! Thanks!
Influential Forecasts
A free self-hosted solution is definitely competition. But many people will probably still think it is convenient to use a hosted service and pay for it.

It's the same with Gmail, salesforce, 37signals products and many other services. There are almost always free open-source alternatives, but not everybody wants to deal with installation, hosting and maintenance of those solutions.
I disagree. Test coverage is a wonderful metric.

100% coverage is a feel-good metric. I can easily achieve 100% coverage with bad tests. But I routinely use coverage as my guide to find things that might benefit from further testing, as in "oooh this path is never tested and stuff is more likely to break here".

I try really really hard not to write useless tests-I use tests to drive the development of my app. I need feature x, so I write a test for it. I end up with relatively high coverage because of that. And because I've gotten more disciplined over the years, I'm only implementing the stuff that passes my tests, so I'm less likely now to have things that aren't covered.

So, I view coverage as a guide, not a rule, but it's not a useless metric at all unless you designate an arbitrary percentage.
Ah, that's my fault actually, it occasionally chokes on punctuation (especially ampersands), I plan to fix that this weekend. It's not an official Y Combinator twitter feed by the way, it's just something I knocked up in my spare time.
SAMSUNG F110
If you want a new phone that must contain what you need or such a suitable combination of the features then here is Samsung F110 with some more. Internet Browser of WAP 2.0/xHTML is amazing with fast accessible and it enables you to download your data’s. It has 2 MP Camera and 1 GB embedded memory. Dimensions are 101.5 x 45 x 14.5 mm. It features EDGE, Bluetooth v2.0 with A2DP, USB and Messaging (SMS, MMS, and Email) and many more.
They can't if the minecraft client uses TCP.
I don't agree with killing the messenger here. His activity is in a decidedly gray area, but I think the results and discussion are valuable.
Nice hack. Very good idea. I keep wanting to give Twitter a whirl but I never know who to follow, thanks.
Online webcam qr code reader
what European company is that?
If you have an Alchemy-based firmware running on your home router, you can enable sshd so you can have an always-on ssh tunnel wherever you go.

I did this to my home router and had it all working in about 30 minutes. Most of that time was trying to figure out how to get putty to open a tunnel (and registering/configuring a No-IP dynamic dns account).
ownership of what, though? As an American citizen, you can't have ownership of an Indian corporation (as a individual shareholder). You'd have to do it through a subsidiary.

Conversely, it's impossible for a Indian citizen to own individual ownership in a US company (unless it's through a company JV type arrangement, or he has a legal visa to work in the US - this is the founders dilemma that often plagues startups)

Additionally, it's near impossible to sue a foreign corporation without a US presence.

This whole situation is sticky, and the US "investor" has little leverage. One would think that if he really wanted to take 50% ownership of the company, he would have thought through all these issues - but he didn't.

Since he was the one that threatened to sue, you have to play hardball - you have to take that threat seriously, even though it might not be credible.

Rohan: Remember that any admission that equity should be given can later be used in court (if somehow, someway it ends up in a court case...but always prepare for the D-Day case)

Remember: you own the code, the servers, and the bank accounts. You control all the leverage. What has been said is done for now, but if I were you I would calculate all the hours you put into the project, and show that the $500 doesn't take you very fair.

Additionally, someone that "wants 50% of the profits for the next 2 months". Seriously, what kind of business arrangement is that?

As I said in another response, remember that he's also responsible for 50% of the costs. As managing partner, you can take on additional equity, and he'd have to match that, or risk being diluted.
>All that refreshing takes a lot of time!

I have the same problem as the parent and this is exactly why. I've always thoroughly tested everything but with ad hoc tests that I had to do over and over.

The main thing I miss with TDD is the interactive nature. If I'm testing in Smalltalk I can write code right inside the debugger and watch the effect it has, but TDD always moves me back to what Smalltalkers call "cult of the dead" programming where I have to stop, run the tests and wait for the output. I wish there was a way to make it more interactive. It would be easier to force myself to do it then.
You should absolutely not drop out. Leave high school with a diploma, no matter what.
One could flip that question around and ask: Why does China need the fastest machine? The significance of the story isn't that America no longer ranks first.

I believe that in general, the really fast machines serve one of two purposes-- simulating nukes (for example, to test new designs), and simulating global environment (for example, to improve climate predictions).
Accessing R from Python using RPy2 « Byte Mining
Last time I played with tmux (v 1.1-1) I found the following behavior a bit of a show stopper:

* start tmux from ~/project1: windows created all start in path ~/project1

* start tmux from ~/project2: first window has path ~/project2 but subsequent windows have path ~/project1

haven't had time though to check if this is a (known) bug
Wait a second.

You're saying I shouldn't bash my employer on a public blog and then submit it to another public website?

OMG

Really you didn't dig deep enough. Googling my name pulls up an email with my current employer in it. I don't work for Amazon anymore.
On my phone (Nokia N86), there's a sliding cover for the lens, which is a nice bit of reassurance. (It's also very convenient: open the cover, and the camera app starts up.) I wish some of the Android phones would imitate it.
I'm not even sure how they would go about creating ownership in the company. An American can't be an individual investor in an Indian company. An Indian without a working visa can't have a startup in a US company. Ownership issues are convoluted, and would take way more money on lawyer fees to figure out.

Everyone keeps bringing up US laws with regards to ownership, but remember that this is an INDIAN company, where different rules apply.
"I can only find good things in unit testing"

Then you are simply not very experienced using it. You're in the love-phase where everything about some new technology seems wonderful, and since it's solved so many previous problems for you, you are blind to the warts and problems that come with it.

We understand your enthusiasm for it, unit testing and TDD are good tools, but they're just that. Tools. That you can choose to use if they fit the project.

Your blog post (and the previous one) both said that unit tests and TDD are always awesome for all projects. This is not true, and this is what people here are reacting to.
while looking thru some 360 assembler code one day, I came across this ...

XC loc1,loc2

XC loc2,loc1

XC loc1,loc2

It took a day of head scratching, and various notes, before I understood that it was a clever way of exchanging the contents of two storage locations, without a third intermediate location. Three consecutive exclusive-Ors.
I think the article is making the argument that the goal of having the fastest X or the biggest X or being the first to X is not the point. Supercomputers have real value, in the sense that they are used to solve real problems that can't be solved otherwise. The bigger point seems to be that the benefit in getting to X is that you normally create a lot of technology that ends up being beneficial to the economy in general.

Having an uninterruptable communication network led to the internet. Being able to deploy ICBMs across the nation led to the Highway System. Going to space created a ton of new materials and manufacturing systems that have created products that couldn't have existed before.

Having the fastest supercomputer is the trees, the forest is the wealth of technology and industries born out of that race.
If it where me I'd store the value of PI as a structure containing an IEEE double, a decimal representation of, say, 100 digits and a pointer to a function to that can evaluate PI to an arbitrary precision.

Then I'd just just use PI as a symbol and do symbolic algebra for as long as possible. Don't evaluate it to anything until the user actually asks for a numeric representation. Once a numeric representation is required I'd pick a value from the above structure based on what has been asked for.
The Craziest Laws Olympics
Nope, it makes code more complex. For example, if the customer makes payments in 2 installs and you want to check if they have payed the full amount, you can't do "if (a + b >= c)" if you use floating point. You'd have to use something like "if (a + b >= c - 0.01)".

A normal double (IEEE 64) has only ~15 digits of precision, so when the amounts grow large, you loose the precision for the cents.

Example (in Java, which uses IEEE):
double d = 1e9;
System.err.println("d: " + d);
d += 0.01;
System.err.println("d: " + d);
d -= 1e9;
System.err.println("d: " + d);
d -= 0.01;
System.err.println("d: " + d);

What is 'd' at the end? Not zero. This adds a gazilion weird cases in the code that you have to handle.

Some countries have laws are very strict about how rounding should be performed and that all amounts must be an integral number of 'cents', so using doubles are completely out of the question in those cases.
I was thinking it's too odd to be fake.
I just downloaded it to see. On the iPhone the ads are placed at the top of the screen constantly while you play. They are also in other screens. So you constantly see ads throughout the use of the app, but they are not annoying, there is plenty of screen to play.
Relevance time for Twitter
Yum, Baked Altivec!
What you've written is quite contradictory; for example: why does he want 50% of a now defunct company?

You said that you made 6k in one week; after saying that you've been working on this start up for 3 years. Is the $4,000 the entire profit this company made over the course of those 3 years? Based on these inconsistencies, I'm finding it hard to follow your story.

To start; IANAL so YMMV.

It sounds to me like you went in with different mentalities. You were a founder; he was an investor. I realize that from your perspective, "he didn't put as much time in" as you did; however, you agreed to give him some share of the company for his monetary investment. That said, it sounds like the valuation agreed to was $6,000 when he invested and that by contributing $3,000, he would own 50% of the company.

However, if he only invested $1,000, then he actually bought only 1/6th of the company, not 1/2. My calculations say you owe him approximately $1,680 which includes returning his initial investment and the profits from a 17% share of the company (which he really does own whether you like it or not).

All that said, if he can document actual material contributions to your products, he quite likely has a legitimate claim for a higher share.

The lesson here is NEVER do business in any form of partnership without a written agreement as to the ownership levels, roles, and responsibilities of each partner.
Did an article about Car Insurance Really get 337 Diggs?
Ah, completely true.
Greasemonkey script: Highlight new posts on HN homepage
Ryan, I really like a lot of your posts, but some of them feel a little light for HN. This one could be summarized as "I got an Arduino, Physical products are really cool". Kind of bummed its #1 right now. Nothing personal against you, just that personality rather than content seems to be rocketing things up the page.
well, glad to hear that :D . and let me twist the knife in your "wound" : Join our community! http://harkopen.com - and get more open source hardware projects , news and hackerspaces near you