skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Insert Linked Pictures to Worksheet & Direct Excel to PDF Conversion
Aspose.Cells is a Java component for spreadsheet reporting without using Microsoft Excel. Other features include creating spreadsheets, opening encrypted excel files, macros, VBA, unicode, formula settings, pivot tables, importing data from JDBC ResultSet and support of CSV, SpreadsheetML, PDF, ODS and all file formats from Excel 97 to Excel 2007. It is compatible with Windows, Linux & Unix and supports all advanced features of data management, formatting, worksheet, charting and graphics.
Future of Food- Startups
Yeah, I've been bitten by this more than once while writing code using for-each and Iterator in JavaScript. It is definitely counter-intuitive.
So what you're saying is that it's OK to kill birds as long as you're 'saving the planet'? Because that's how it reads to me. I'm shocked that environmentalists support wind power with the large ecological footprint it has. Plus you have to build baseload power to back it up, so it's not like you are stopping the construction of fossil fuel plants.

It just seems like a gigantic waste of resources to me.
"I dedicided yesterday asked to not to do any futher business with him and pay him for the expenses". I'm sorry, you are wrong here. He took risks. You can't just "pay him for expenses" and expect him to give up his part of a profitable business.

If this company made 4000 US$ in a week (as you say), it is worth a lot of money and you will need to negotiate with him. Offering to pay him 1000$ for his part (ie. "his expenses") is ridiculously low.
A better solution would be for those sites targeted by FireSheep to force encrypted connections to login.

Also a simple fix for open networks is to enable WPA encryption with a simple password and give it to everyone that wants to use the network. It works the same to the end user (just one extra step) but at the same time protects them from unwanted snooping.

On a side note, all those coffee shops that don't like people solely using their networks and monopolizing tables, this news could push people to use unsecured networks less.
The best part is what the first message was: "LO"

Short for LOGIN. They only got through the l and the o before the system crashed.
yes, those pesky seal level rises. Fixed now:)
True, but there have been other people arguing with more force for bimodal. pg's paragraph is fairly resonable, otheres have been more hysterical. Unfortunately, I can't dig up the links at the moment.
In any practical sense, no. The inconvenience is overwhelmingly offset by it working the same everywhere. And as others have said, you can sacrifice speed for it working "properly" anytime.
It's not over 2000$, in the post he states that they made 4000$ in a week.
I don't think it's just that it's an approximation. We're used to doing math with approximations (0.33333...). What's unintuitive about it is that numbers with very simple finite expressions in decimal (0.3) can only be expressed by repeating binary floating points.

Even competent coders who usually work in higher-level languages can sometimes forget that the decimal representations they work with are actually approximations of binary numbers, which is responsible for other seemingly weird behavior (why does ~2 = -3?), and I doubt even most skilled computer scientists are used to converting decimals to arbitrary-precision binary in their head.

It is unintuitive, and it's not like it's hard to explain why. "You'd understand if you were smarter" is a cop out.
Funny thing. Google has this page at rank 5 by now (after 42 mins).
In a perfect world with perfect coders we wouldn't need tests, things would just work. So tests are a trade off, insurance against our human fallibility. As with other types of insurance you weigh the probability and costs involved in something failing and invest accordingly in insuring it.

Covering every edge case isn't necessary. Tests should cover core functionality and then the ongoing addition of regression tests. We hover in the mid to high eighties with our test code coverage and find getting more than that overly time consuming (Python/Django btw).

80/20 rule coming into play?
Yes, that's http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEEE_754-1985 specific. I like this explanation: http://docs.python.org/tutorial/floatingpoint.html#represent...

There is alternatives but don't forget that it is hardware issue not software. It looks like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEEE_754-2008 has decimal format thus it should address that.
he was to lead business development with minimum 2 hrs of commitment everyday which he failed to do
Am I missing something or is this pure filesystem cache? What happens instead if you configure an SSD as your swap device? Wouldn't the OS then be able to use the SSD more generally as a piece of the memory hierarchy?
Glaucoma info
You have eye problems? Maybe it is glaucoma.
Good point, but rational numbers aren't closed under power/square root operation :)
In 2013: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chang%27e_3
I should clarify what I mean by 100% test driven. By this I mean that no line of code was written without first having a test written for it. While you can't practically achieve 100% coverage of all code paths you can at least exercise all of the expected code paths.
1. None.
2. Yes.
3. Confident? - Yes. Guaranteed? - No, nor would it be with 100% coverage either.
4. Absolutely (Java + Eclipse + proper use of Exceptions).

Somethings need/should be unit tested, but most "glue" code benefits far more from investing time in robust error handling rather than testing.
Firefox Add-on Firesheep Brings Hacking to the Masses
Call me negative, but I am certain it will either be vaporware (never be released) or a failure like the WeTab.
It is easy in Ruby and Python.
When you feel you really need a home router, you will have a Biesse Rover you can use to make the parts for your project. That's a real luxury!

The reason I posted the Mantis and not the one from buildyourcnc.com is that the Mantis is student-grade: simple, cheap as hell, small volume (not only working volume, but also external envelope) and easy to align by design. You could probably build it using only manual tools.
2011 Median IT Salary
The text to speech is slow and it is a drab. I can open up Wikipedia and run through the content 5 times faster than that. You will have lot of impatient users waiting for the information they actually want. It is like calling your bank up and listening to their long IVR menu when actually you want to report your stolen credit card.

Imagine waking up every day to the same drab slow dull voice that tells you about the day's weather.. !!
I'm intrigued to know whether your "code, compile, check" anecdote was meant to argue for or against TDD as it could go either way.

I guess the point you're responding to meant that "eyeballing" whether something actually works is the equivalent of "estimating" a length, a couple of easy tests is the equivalent of "measuring once" and "measuring twice" is taking the extra effort to build a small suite of tests with corner cases, a small sign of having learned from bitter experience.

Of course with automated tests you are literally measuring twice (indeed, measuring many times) even as the tools and materials change out from under you.
Coincidence saves a life.
Actually, just encrypting the login is not enough. FireSheep steals session keys, not passwords. Everything that needs to have the session key needs to be served over SSL.
Ready.js – prepare your javascript for production
Even then it doesn't matter fully. There are some languages with supported data types where you can actually write the equivalent of.

x = 2
y = 2
1.upto 100 do
x = x ** (1 / 2)
end
1.upto 100 do
x = x ** 2
end
x == y # => true

because it handles the math by only evaluating the operations at the very end.
My point is, this is elementary stuff that you need to know as a computer scientist or self-taught hacker.

Whether you can convert a decimal number into its binary IEEE-754 equivalent, or not, is besides the point.

You just need to know that it is lossy for certain classes of decimal numbers, and how to avoid or mitigate those effects.
Might want to check this out...plenty of ideas there.

https://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=0Ag-R_ZlGO21NdE9HSWR...

EDIT - the original post: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1190974
John I tend to agree with you - and applaud the effort you've been doing with jQuery Mobile - but I also think the focus should be on mobile data usage, not device sales. In our case (and YMMV) mobile users are 80% iPhone, 10% Android and 10% everything else. That seems to be pretty par with most US-centric e-tailers. In addition the price-per-order on iPhone is much higher than the rest. Presumably because the experience on other devices doesn't lend to hanging around and buying stuff. Do we really want to develop for platforms that aren't there or for which the device handicaps the experience?

Mobile devices don't have the staying factor of desktop browsers (most users upgrade their phone/plan every 2-3 years). Shouldn't we target the best devices going forward to ensure that adoption of technology keeps up and everyone is entitled to the best experience overall?
ahem you have skills to create a biz worth 6k in income.

Your best option, state you are walking away form venture and that if he wants the 50% you owned to pay up..

Now, when you create the new one..get a lawyer involved and have things in writing.
While I appreciate the shoutout (thanks), did you have to put my name next to Ballmer? ;) le sigh.
Ask HN: Preventing SQL injection/XSS in web apps
Before releasing a new web app, what are the top security-related items you check in order to prevent SQL injection, XSS, etc.?
Articles generate more interest when they're black and white though.

It's not that you have to cross the Malaysia border to encounter dirt for the first time, but compared with neighbouring cities, or even parts of European cities that have been built since 1956 - levels of visible dirt and poor people that aren't working are noticeably low in Singapore. The streets might not be paved with gold but they still shine.

You might see vestiges of poverty in sleeping middle-aged "security guards" and armies of immigrant construction workers, and the even poorer denizens of Desker Road that serve their base needs, but you won't encounter homeless people begging for change. HDBs are colourful, well-maintained homes for the people. When I did see a piece of graffiti in Singapore - a political slogan even - I thought it worthy of being photographed.

In London, every ATM machine appears to have a friendly beggar and his dog, our failed attempts at social housing are used as the setting for A Clockwork Orange, and our transport networks are lined with graffiti to the point that sometimes I wonder if it's the only thing holding the crumbling structural fabric together.

And yes, outsiders' analysis of our social and political relations is always amusingly exaggerated and inaccurate. :-)
That is really cool. Have you open sourced it? It's JavaScript in the first place so I know anyone can see it in your site, but it would be cool to track it on Github.
Things get a lot easier when you're working with tools that help you out, even just a little.

Clojure here, FWIW:

(+ 0.1M 0.2M) =>
0.3M

That 'M' suffix denotes a BigDecimal, which provides for arbitrary-precision decimal math (which Clojure's arithmetic ops dispatch to as necessary).

A similar 'N' suffix is coming in the next release that denotes (contagious) BigInteger math (though as fast as longs when values are < 2^31), so one doesn't have to worry about overflow issues (which rate up there with misunderstandings of internal floating point representations in terms of frequency).

Other reader syntax is provided for other common notations (e.g. 10e6, 16rFF, 0xFF, 0220, 2r100010101).
Ask HN: Best software in the world?
This question was originally asked at Barrapunto, a Slashdot clone in Spanish: http://preguntas.barrapunto.com/article.pl?sid=10/10/27/1045237

I'm interested to see what HNers think, so I'm translating it:

"From your point of view, which is the best software in the world? I mean software for end users, MQSeries or a virtual machine with a JIT compiler would not be valid answers. Some examples that come to mind: LaTeX, Bloomberg (real time financial data), Emacs."

In the following discussion, VLC and 'Hello, world!' were the most voted while Excel and browsers such as Firefox or Chromiun were the most mentioned.
sup 'friend'
I love Doctrine at work. I hate it at home. It's a great standardised system that that has a lot of great features we use, but for simple projects at home, it's far too cumbersome to set up.
moved here a year ago! woop woop
But the problem with the phone (in the US) is also that there were still two types to buy - 3g on att or 3g on t-mobile. Those that wanted a carrier-less phone were undoubtedly stymied by having to choose a carrier anyway, the exact opposite of what they were trying to do.
So, does this have anything not included here:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1841807

or here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1843248

or here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1844338

or here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1846681

or here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1846717
He is a former co-founder(their co-founded company went under) currently he is an angel investor in this startup. He is asking for 50% of a company on $1000 investment (that is to say an initial evaluation of $2000) for a company that has already turned 4K in profit. The investor has already broken his side of the agreement of 500 a month for 6 months, Why on earth would he expect a full share of the company? He deserves something more than his 1000 back, but it should be closer to a couple of percent ownership. Considering an angel usually gets 10-20% and his early break of contract that would put it at around 3-6% ownership. If he still wants in he should get it, or a new valuation and pay out on that amount of ownership if he doesn't.
Agreed. If you've ever had ramen at a good Japanese restaurant (or better yet, in Japan), you know that what most Americans consider ramen does not compare. Udon and soba noodles are good too. The difference is mainly what accompanies the noodles (vegetables and broth).
The Openfund offers tips on getting seed funding and support (3/6)
I'm tried of religion being spoiled for the rest of us by a few fanatics.

What is it with religion/politics/"science" that makes person urn their brains off?
You linked to a fork of the original project http://github.com/nornagon/nodecraft
Emacs. Because it can have (and most often, it has) everything else built into it.
So I tried it out and it fixes my 2 pet peeves of screen.

1. The defaults are sane (altscreen is on by default, emacs keys in copy mode by default, no stupid "wuff wuff" covering up my prompt, history is 2000 lines instead screen's almost useless 100).

2. Screen sometimes interacts badly with Terminal.app on my mac. I can't run aptitude from within screen on my mac without it randomly switching to graphic charset mode. Also running emacs inside screen sometime results in the arrow keys not working.

I like it so far. I think I'll switch for a while and see how it goes...
Yes it is IEEE-754 specific. I think any binary floating point will have similar pitfalls though.

Python has a Decimal type that can represent decimal values exactly. It must be imported first though. It is probably much slower than IEEE-754 floating point, but for many uses that is not an issue.
http://docs.python.org/library/decimal.html
This reminds me... I need to start making landing pages for my projects :)
Depends on the amount. It really depends what US STATE the man was in whether it does or not. For instance, anything 1k or up must be in writing in Georgia.

What you can do and what you should do are different things. If he's not keeping up his end of the contract, then sue him in the country the company is registered in. Don't give him time or the benefit of jurisdiction in any legal action. If you just don't like the guy, he likely still owns part of the business.
Hi all,

I'm the author of the blog post. I'm very glad that it has gained already so much opinions and feedback.

As user ollysb, I'm quite surprised to notice that there seems to be more against the post than for it. And that was one of the reasons why I actually wrote it: You are smart guys, please proof me wrong about unit tests. I can only find good things in unit testing, so it seems that I have not fully thought it through.

ps. Did the post have "inflammatory tone"? It was definitely not my intention. Sorry if it did. I have done computer programming for living only just about 10 years and I am definitely not a professional in it yet. Which parts made it sound cocky? I would love to hear feedback for that too improve my writing.
I bet many many people who "do a bit of programming" have no formal CS training, and only begin to understand the complexities of floating point arithmetic when they come across a problem like this (and hence ask the question)

Oh, this applies to me btw.
1. Isn't this a repost?

2. Maybe the plumber didn't feel like chatting while he worked.
It's in california
Sure, if you want to have computer hacking be a big part of your life you should know that numbers are binary on computers, and that that has side effects. But I don't think it betrays a serious lack of education that someone who does know that theoretically has never realized that practically means there's no such thing as 0.1 on a computer.
Hacker News has intrinsic value
I don't go to the movies to get preached to and I don't go to concerts to hear the performers political opinions. Wrong venues.
This seems like the right way to do it.

Though, I assume non-suffixed literals are still regular floats?
DigCS - The new Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation Computer Science Complex
A bit out of topic, but what is it that makes the article to have "inflammatory tone"? Would love to hear some feedback about this too to improve my writing skills.
Why is this so surprising? Most people I know don't really care about internet privacy. Most people I know don't post anything sensitive to their facebook pages. I don't use facebook and when I mention that I think it's weird to put personal stuff on the internet (which always has the potential to be public) they think I'm a paranoid nut. Let's admit that it's not really an unreasonable position, provided you don't work at the NSA.
What was your game-plan if you'd stumbled upon something highly personal and sensitive in their mailboxes? Or if one of their friends had sent them a person IM while you were logged in as them? The fact is, you could have easily approached these people face-to-face, offered to show them the risks they were exposing themselves to using your laptop, and give them the choice as to whether you took control of their accounts. While it appears that you did what you did with the best of intentions, you violated the privacy of the people whose accounts you accessed; broke a variety of laws; then documented your crime in your personal blog.

You describe your targets as lacking judgment. Maybe you should consider your own.
I would't necessarily call this a failing of CS education specifically - some, or even most of these questions may have come from self-taught individuals.

What does worry me is how many times this question is asked on The Web. This is a sad indictment on the quality of education in general. Given this resource, where information is far easier to find than in any library, there are still so many people who can't be bothered to look things up for themselves.
Yup, from the ShedSkin tutorial (http://shedskin.googlecode.com/files/shedskin-tutorial-0.5.h...):

"Shed Skin is an experimental Python-to-C++ compiler designed to speed up the execution of computation-intensive Python programs. It converts programs written in a static subset of Python to C++. The C++ code can be compiled to executable code, which can be run either as a standalone program or as an extension module easily imported and used in a regular Python program."
Agile Book Development
Totally cross Linux platform. Great!
That is so awesome! Love it for so many reasons!
I had this problem with XUI (and even Madrobby's brilliant Emile - although that's mostly a proof of concept). The library is just beneath what I consider necessary in terms of flexibility and robustness to be usable in production. Like no error handler in Zepto Ajax - seriously? An Ajax request will never fail... on mobile!? And this could be my perception - and I could be completely wrong - but when something is marketed as 'in only 2K!' or 'in under 50 lines!' there's a discouraging resistence to adding code in order to keep those metrics.

On the other hand, most micro-frameworks require the user to take more responsibility for making sure things don't break - which could mean lighter code... a good thing for mobile. For example, Emile does a fine job of tweening integers or colors, but watchout for inherited values - like fontWeight 'normal'. So the user has to take the extra step of defaulting the styles to values the script can work with.
Ask HN: Does Google decode bit.ly URLs?
Is it a huge SEO mistake to use shortened URLs places? I'm hoping Google is decoding the big name ones these days like bit.ly, t.co etc... But I can't find any definitive proof of this. Does anyone know for sure?
Checking my command history, grep comes out on top.
Apple's Calculator app used to have an odd floating point rounding behavior (I filed a bug report and they fixed it):

14479.14
-
152.36
=
(result is 14326.78)
1143
/
78
=
(result is 14.6538461538461)
14479.14
-
152.36
=
(result is 14326.7799999999884)

Note that the first and third calculations are the same, yet they resulted in different displayed results!

I never understood this bug. I understand floating point, so understand that some numbers are not exactly representable. However, it should at least still be consistent! The same calculation should give the same results every time.
Django unittesting for multiple interdependent projects
In practical purposes, this isn't really going to happen. If you really wanted to be on the up and up about it, OP can just tell the guy that he's closing the venture to pursue other projects.

Presumably, he can use the business model knowledge to get a new domain, start a real company, and redo the same business model on his own.

It sounds like the US guy is really going to push him around. Sue him? How is he going to serve the papers in India? With no contract? Really don't think lawyer would take that case.

If it comes down to a bunch of IM's sent, well then it'll be case of "was this an equity investment, or was it a loan". If the OP paid him back, a strong argument could be made that it was a loan.
> Discuss their crimes with them and persuade them
> to pay restitution?

Why restitution? In some cases - violent crimes - any amount of money would not be enough. Punishment has no positive effect for society.

Discussing and admitting the crimes would help the victim and be cheaper. In our current law system the victim, who is the one we should pay most attention to, is mostly ignored.

For more on this controversial standpoint read up on how Tutsi & Hutu learnt to live together after the genocide.

or:

When Brute Force Fails: How to Have Less Crime and Less Punishment
http://www.amazon.de/gp/product/0691148643
Have you considered supporting the memcached protocol? It might help with takeup as client libraries already exist.

http://github.com/memcached/memcached/blob/master/doc/protoc...
Recently: Dropbox. Just Brilliant, solved all my problems.

Slightly off topic: MidWinter. Massive believable world, multiple forms of transport. This game sticks in my memory.
Not just on many machines. You can change your MAC address on any manchine using GNU macchanger http://www.alobbs.com/macchanger/
Take-Two Interactive Software CEO Ben Feder To Step Down
Does anyone know anything like techshop in the DC area? I've been looking for a long time and the best I can find is hacdc.org.