skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> The current theoretically best max flow algorithm uses, at its core, an SDD solver.

Does anyone know how this improvement in solving SDD affects the complexity of the current best max-flow algorithm [1] i.e. (N+L)^(4/3) ?

[1]: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2010/max-flow-speedup-0927.htm...
http://readerluv.com/ - yes, that's R Kelly on the home page
So that's, what, another few months? Of course, there are still many other huge blocks of unused space. But eventually we'll either finally make the jump or everything becomes the NAT setup from hell, as it is today with mobile connections. Speaking of which: I believe mobile internet would have been an excellent opportunity to ship IPv6-only devices to a mass market and that in turn would have resulted in a widespread adoption effect. Oh well...
This is an absolutely fascinating idea. Why have you stopped working on it? I know that astronomy fans are a small subset of HN readers, but this is the most interesting project I've heard of in a while.
Long, gorgeously written biographical article.

Charlie Rose -- "nobody watches him, except everybody we know"
The key travel on those keyboards is phenomenal. How do you not injure yourself? Who is still using non-laptop style keyboards and why? :/
No dictionary at home?
Can you spend your Twitter/Google 20% time doing something non-technical that matters to you or your community? Like helping out a local charity, drinking beer, or gardening for your disabled neighbour?
I've never seen anything but praise for them. My mac keyboard is the best keyboard I've ever typed on.
The current crop of macbooks also have extremely good keyboards.
Why do you consider http://news.ycombinator.com as half baked?
I'd argue that it's exactly the other way around.

GAE offers massive scalability at relatively little cost, at least theoretically, but you lose flexibility. (For instance, you're limited to a very specific database backend and so on.) A cheap VPS, on the other hand, gives you free reign. But scaling isn't trivial - you have to take care of it yourself.

Learn and fiddle around on a VPS, deploy on GAE or EC2 or whatever cloud computing service suits your needs.
Whereabouts are you? If you're in the south, drop me an email and lets meet up for coffee sometime. I'm not averse to investing in the right opportunity either - might be a good idea to knock our heads together and see what comes out.
It wasn't so much a problem of a price. It't that you say the platform is free to try and the hosting is free for a year... but you pay 1k in setup up costs. Most companies willing to part with their money to get a good CMS will have a CTO that's going to look at you product and say "I like it! What free hosting? Free trial for a year? Where do I signup!?! Oh wait... 1k in setup fees? :@ :@ :@"

Offer the same thing for a month with no setup fee and you'll get a lot more customers (though I don't know if that's what you are looking for at this point... maybe you're waiting for more infrastructure before a big launch, I apologize if this is the deal and I'm getting ahead of myself) and can probably build some following through word of mouth alone.

In any case I like your product, looks really polished, and I hope you guys hit it big. Good luck!
http://gitblogs.com/ - there is a long to-do list and I'm still working on it at least once a week. Not investing too much energy though.
How does a HackerNews user not like Tony Starks? ;)
Not red.
I'd definitely be interested in talking to your friend. Feel free to pass on my email - me@alexmuir.com.
College hack: I was tired of college so I changed my major to General Studies which had the laxest requirements. The biggest requirement was a certain number of classes at the 3000 level or higher. Then I did a year abroad in Paris. The exchange program gave 3000-level credit for any course taken in French (as opposed to English). So I took first-year courses and finished my degree early. Plus I got to name my degree. Bachelor of Computational Linguistics

-----------

I had a terrible supervisor at work. He would send incomprehensible one-line emails that he dumped into his Blackberry at all hours. They would usually be some unimportant and ridiculous task for me to do. At first, I would stress out trying to do them all to a high level. I eventually started replying immediately to the email with the short, cryptic message "Need more detail." That put the ball back in his court, and of course he'd never send anything back.
I really like your pricing strategy. I nearly bought the paperback/pdf package at $31 (I'm in the UK) until I realised that I really don't need the paperback too.

But you nearly had me! Throwing in the PDF was a huge motivation to upgrade. I think (if I may be so bold) that you should throw in the PDF with all paperback sales, and make that obvious on the homepage, eg:

[Download Sample] [Buy PDF $19] [Buy Paperback & PDF $24]

Re-reading chap.1 is on my list for today and then I'll buy the PDF.
http://Like.fm - people always ask me how is it different from last.fm. It's a work in progress so frankly at the moment not too much, but there will be!
Not sure, but I've heard that salt water triggered the coin detection mechanism in old soda machines.
Six years ago my brother rented out a beach house in another state for the summer and would let me stay there with some friends. One fun summer week a good friend and I were enjoying the house to ourselves and decided to make a 7-11 run to pick up some much needed snacks and other provisions.

When we got back from our adventure my key wouldn't open the door. Unbeknownst to us, this was the one time that closing the door triggered an old lock on the door that we didn't have the key for. Amazingly, we had taken care to ensure that both the back and patio doors, along with all the windows were locked before we left, thus cementing our unfortunate predicament. It was already late in the day and the broker's office was closed, leaving us with what it seemed to be a limited amount of options. We could call a locksmith and try to convince him to let us in, which would likely cost more money than we were willing to spend, or we could stay outside for the night in the house's semi-sheltered porch area and walk to the broker in the morning.

Although it was summer, it still got chilly at night, and I most definitely did not want to stay outside. While thinking over our options in the porch area I noticed there was one of those big outdoor candles that come in a metal housing. Fortunately, the housing had a handle, and I was young enough to think I could do something with it. With much finagling, I was able to remove the handle from the housing and bend it into a hook. My plan was to try to use the hook to jimmy open the window somehow so that I could climb in through the window and open the door. After several failed attempts my always skeptical friend reminded me that I was wasting my time and should accept the situation for the night. Fortunately, I ignored his advice and persisted through several more attempts. Finally, I was able to sliver my makeshift hook through the frame of one of the windows and manipulate my way to close proximity of the window's lock. After flailing with the wire for several more minutes I finally hit the window's lock and opened the window. After which I climbed in and opened the door. I had successfully broken in to our rented beach house. I immediately taped over the broken lock to prevent this situation from repeating itself.

My friend of course was absolutely shocked, and still recounts the story in amazement.

Fortunately none of our neighbors thought that two unknown teenagers breaking into a house the least bit suspicious,
The thing is, if we stop downvoting comments like the one you posted (even though it was a completely harmless comment), people would start to think such comments are acceptable and we'd soon have useless comments on HN that would add absolutely no value to the discussion.
Tony Stark is Donald Rumsfeld's Mary-Sue.

I am a British center-left -- liberal democrat voting -- Volvo-driving organic-eating media luvvie. (I'm also a self-employed businessman and a sometime dot-com veteran; let's not get too carried away with the socialism here.) Muscular two-fisted violent imperialism lacks appeal. I could have written Tony Stark as an anti-hero, but the risk for pushback from the fans would have been significant.

When you're looking for a project to work on for possibly several years, you should pick something you love. As I was simultaneously looking at two multi-book contracts from major publishers for books that I would have complete creative control over (and retain copyright on -- don't forget, Marvel and DC insist on work-for-hire!) I went with the "do what you love" option.

(The books in question, for what it's worth, were "Accelerando", "Glasshouse", and the last three Merchant Princes books.)
Thank you for your message - METTLER TOLEDO - United States
Internet in South Africa is expensive. It's still expensive, but in 2002 when I started my first job, anything better than dial-up was REALLY expensive.

The cost was split in two:

Really expensive bandwidth, and less expensive, but still costly, line rental.

My boss' parents lived in a town about 200 kilometers from us. They owned a stationary shop and also happened to have an agreement with a large ISP to store equipment in their
shop. The equipment serviced the dial-up users in the town, and the stationary shop could use the Internet "for free" in exchange.

I figured out that it would be cheaper to get a line all the way from the computer college to the stationary store and simply "borrow" the bandwidth.

Instead of our 64kbit/s we got 320kbit/s for the same price!
I guess my answer to the naughtiness thing, was when I wanted something from a certain organisation. I looked at the organisation, looked at where their weaknesses were then made sure that I could find ways of addressing them. I then contacted said organisation, offered to fix their weaknesses, did so then asked for what I wanted, knowing that while it was a big ask, they'd have to say yes given what I'd put in, and that if they said no I'd scale back my support (which I think is not unreasonable). In the end they said yes because they wanted to, and felt that I'd put more than enough to justify it, although for me I just picked problems where I already had the solution, or was relatively close to having.

On the one hand, it seems somewhat insincere to approach someone with solutions and not immediately make your wants clear, but on the other it's a win-win all round.
Reminds me of a timeless quote from @shitmydadsays:

"That woman was sexy...Out of your league? Son. Let women figure out why they won't screw you, don't do it for them."
I went to Punahou Academy in Hawaii. I think it was Pauahi Hall (long time ago) but in the basement near keyboarding class were mens and a ladies rooms, with doorways on opposite sides of an upward stairwell.

Well, at the back of the bathrooms were matching doors, to a personal student file storage room and network interface boards under the staircase. We were able to defeat the lock with edge of our laminated student ID cards.

Naughtily, we smoked in there. And tried to look up hot junior's phone numbers, or obstruct campus security lines so as to come and go truantly. We were pretty harmless though. Someone found cigarette ashes, and the MasterLocks appeared.
I hate to have to be "that guy", but Please remove all the listings from the Site. ;(

You're violating people's trust, and making them less likely to post to HN in the future.

It would be best to keep the job board, but re-target it.
Back in the day when you had to pay for games, I really wanted Wing Commander III but it cost a whopping £39.99 which was far more than I could afford with my few savings.
Solution: I designed a voucher for PC World giving £25 off the price of the game, and printed it off on an inkjet.
I went to the shop, handed the game and the fake voucher to the cashier, who looked at it with obvious suspicion and told me "I'm going to get the manager". At this point I was on the edge of running out of the door, but I held my nerve and tried to look nonchalant. The manager came over and luckily for me her mind seemed to be on other things as she just glanced at the voucher, said "yeah that's fine" and walked off. So I paid £14.99, took the game and walked past the security guard out of the store, then sprinted for the next mile in case someone discovered my fraud.
But every time I played the game I felt a little bit dirty. Until a few months later I saw the game in the bargain bin for £4.99
D*&n, this is why I love this place, overwhelming creativity.

My entry would be http://listward.com . Still much left to do.
That's a pretty worthless comment if you don't have justification for either of those two points.

I see you haven't been here long, though, and your karma seems to be reflecting that you don't really get HN yet, so if you're just trolling you can ignore this comment.
Is Twitter Going Back to the Funding Well for a Giant New Round?
How to schmooze.
If your goal is to make money, then a few hundred dollars to buy into the platform is meaningless. If your goal isn't to make money then why would you develop for a platform that you don't have access to?
Though it may be unpopular, I agree wholeheartedly. Things simply get done with PHP and the environment doesn't get in the way like it does with any other framework/environment I used. Besides, it is possible to write good, fast and maintainable code with PHP, and when people do they can do so elegantly.

And you know what, I even prefer the bad script kiddie PHP code to, say, a 20k line classpath disaster in Java. Because this being PHP it's trivial to fix or rewrite stuff.
Oh I remember at his age I was playing with the latest versions of Slackware, and I could never get the damn thing online, since I had some crappy Packard Bell hardware. I then switch to Mandrake, went back to Slackware in the early 2000's and never looked back... Until Arch off course. Screw this Ubuntu fad.
Well Britney is a good example but at the other end I'd offer something like Die Antwoord, who were able to get themselves a big record deal by simply putting their videos on youtube.

Or Justin Bieber, who also only exists because of the internet and youtube. I'm not saying Bieber makes good music, but he exists and thrives because of the internet, not despite it.
What does '"Skolka kilometer Volgograd?" will do. When they answer, nod, smile, shake their hand and say, "Speciba."' mean? I'm having no luck with online translators.
Back when I was in high school, On one Friday afternoon I discovered the ethernet cables connecting the computer to the network had the same plug on both ends. I wondered what would happen if I had a cable coming out of the wall plugged back into the wall, so I pulled out the cable out of one of the computers and plugged both ends into the wall.

On Monday, One of the teachers went to each class and (loudly & angrily) asked "Who was it that pulled the cable from one computer and plugged it into the wall?!". It was only when they got to our class, I realize something was wrong because of something I did, so I timidly said "I did".

Well, as you might have guessed, what happened was a short-circuit and all the computers in the school couldn't connect to any network anymore. The office staff lost all their current work and had to work for extra 4 more hours each, doing office work manually. They didn't find out what was the problem until Monday.

The principal asked me why I did it, and I answered "I was curious." Due to my "stellar" past performance and history at the school, I was fined $300 (the cost of the technician) and sentenced to 2 days suspension. I was told that if I was any other student I'd have been expelled. My lesson that day was: "If you ever muck with stuff for fun, PUT IT BACK TO IT WAS BEFORE."

My school record indicates I have been put in detention 0 times and suspended 2 days in total.
this was an hilarious joke by PG, lost on the humourless HN community.
Of course they're not rich. What a silly thought. They're poor people with penthouses, Mercedes, caviar and champagne. Umm...
I turned down a meeting with Bill Gates in 1982. It was a personal connection, and we were going to meet at his house; maybe his dad's house, maybe he was still living there, I don't recall. MS was ~150 employees at the time and hiring like crazy. Bill had my cv.

I was visiting from the UK with my girlfriend who was raised in Bellevue. I think I instead opted to jam with a band called Myth in a barn in Redmond. Myth morphed into Queensrÿche soon after, so I guess I missed two chances!
Child labor laws are made to avoid having 6 year olds asking for money on the streets and 10 year olds swinging crates at the dock when they should be in school. If a kid want's to work, social/child services approve the motion after interviewing the parents, and does well in school for a trial period, he should be let to do so. Hell kid actors do it all the time!
My #1 Doh moment so far
I sold the domain name socialgraph.com for $1500 to some woman claiming inexorably to want it for "just a personal homepage". Ah well, I thought, I will probably never get around to building something for this particular domain anyway, might as well make a few bucks.

A few weeks later, Mark Zuckerberg is on Web 2.0 Summit telling about something he calls the Social Graph and I whip up the whois results for socialgraph.com.

Administrative contact: someone@facebook.com

Doh! Would probably have been able to score a few more bucks from recognizing the term social graph before Mark did.

Proof is in whois record history for socialgraph.com.
At my very first internet job, in 1998 or so, I was hired as a temp. They said they wanted me to find websites that would be good publishers for their content network. They said to do so by searching AltaVista for sites, and then looking to see if they had a web counter, the kind that say "You are visitor number XXX". If the counter said over 100,000 they considered that a good sized publisher and someone else would be in charge of recruiting them. In retrospect, of course, there was no indication of how long it had taken the site to get that 100,000 visitors, nor did any good site use the counters much. But I didn't really know all of that then.

So I ask the other temp, "How do you do this?" And he says, "Well, right now I decided to find sports sites, so I just search for the word 'football' and click each result, scroll down, and see if there is a counter over 100,000." I said, "How many do you usually find?" He says, "Yesterday, I found 6."

I did this for about 2 minutes until I got smart. I searched for 'You are visitor number' and instantly got only sites with counters. Within a few hours I had logged a ton of sites. At the end of that day, they fired the other temp and asked me to work full time, but the agreement with the temp agency said that they couldn't hire me for 90 days after they let me go. So, they fired me and told me that I could work from home as an independent contractor for the 90 day period. They would pay me to keep finding sites, and offered to pay me $10 per site that I found for up to 50 sites per week ($500). They had no idea I was able to find sites so quickly.

I spent the next 90 days building a Rage Against the Machine fan site with my friend at home and, every Friday, I'd spend 20 minutes logging 50 sites using my "You are visitor number" technique, drive into the office, drop off my list, and collect my $500 check that they thought I had worked all week to earn.
Does every bar have happy hours? I thought it's rare thing for bars to have.
HAHA that's awesome - TOP OF THE CLASS! 1:21.1
From context, I'm guessing, "How many kilometers to Volgograd?" and "Thanks"
You shouldn't have been domain camping in the first place :)
Gretzky wasn't born with that amount of talent, his talent grew out of doing nothing but spending as much time as he did practicing on the rink his father made him, day in and day out. Practice, practice, practice.

Get the idea out of your head that people are on the outset better than you. You're always going to lose with this kind of attitude you have, though. Even if you won I don't even think you'd know it.
Indian Navy SSC Officer Technical Entry July 2011
I used to live in a new build block of flats that was mostly buy to let - it was actually still being built at the time and I was amongst the first to move in. I wanted high speed broadband but it was quite expensive at the time (8mbit was about £50/month back then) but I was close enough to the exchange to get it. I bought a wireless access point, set myself up as a linksys reseller and sold WRTs to most of my floor offering unlimited Internet access for £10/month. I then used a Linux box as my gateway for the wireless, split everyone off from my internal network and throttled connections based on the amount they paid. When new people moved in I came round to see them (usually with a pre-configured router) and offered them 12 months (as that's how long most tenancy agreements were) for £100 plus £50 for the router.

I ended up having 5 8 meg ADSL lines and almost the entire block on the network, each getting 512k-2mbit for £10 a month and a nice profit margin too!
[...] the only requirements is you have a large ($million) wad of cash

Precisely.
Also...in High School typing class, I was a two-finger typer. Every morning we had to take a two sentence typing test to see if we had improved. Rather than learn to type like I was supposed to, I just memorized all of the two sentence phrases that made up the tests. Within a couple weeks of the class, it didn't matter which phrases popped up, I was two-finger typing over 80 words per minute.
Nice, kept my attention enough to try it twice (~2:30 then ~1:30). Why do you make the user write their own time in order to save it? Is that some technical limitation or part of the game design for some reason? I always find these games to be neat when they show detailed stats of your performance, like a probability distribution of everyone's (best) scores and which percentile you fit in etc.

Would be neat if the goods were selectable with the keyboard.
Bummer, I was just about to point you to the Google page of their index from 2001, but it looks like they took it down - http://www.google.com/search2001.html
author was able to develop without having access to hardware, and the product looks great. I imagine they will make lots of money with it.
Obviously it does, it's just further than it was. Just the other day I loaded a few million points into a WebGL canvas. I was trying to see if I could load a full MRI scan. It work aside from being really slow (my box was dying ;p) I could see my head in 3D ;p I then tried to load a high resolution rat brain and my application couldn't handle it. Also, chrome has a really low memory limit on scripts, trying to figure out how to not hit it.
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Maybe not :) Although I'm reluctant to call it camping when you have a clear idea of something to accomplish with the domain. Even if it's not to take over the world :)
It is facinationg how people get stuck into one idea and can't get out of it.

Why would anyone want to type on a touchscreen the same way he used to do on a keyboard?

I am actually thinking to make an ide for the ipad that eliminates typing of letters one by one.
Getting your code into the machine should have much more freedom, than stooping in front of a keyboard and typing each word and symbol after another.
There must be some next level ui to autocomplete/typing in the world of multitouch.
There was a fairly well publicised court case here in the UK last week. The general consensus now is that they are legally binding.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/law/2010/oct/20/banker-fails-chall...