skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
With the discussion on whether 'Offer HN' should be encouraged or not, it appears that within a couple of days, Offer HNs have 'jumped the shark'.

Whilst a generous offer from the submitter, I fail to see how this thread 'gratifies one's intellectual curiosity' and I hope topics like this don't increase with frequency on the front page.
They were likely trying to help you and wanted to say they don't care whether you write an iterative or recursive solution.
This is the best part: "A number of officials have expressed outrage at the leaking of evidence of US war crimes, with the Pentagon insisting WikiLeaks doesn’t support the troops."
The curse of updating the IDE
I got mine a week ago by calling the Apple Store at Eaton's Centre in Toronto on a Thursday evening; they told me they would have stock the next day. I got there at 6:50 am and was out of the store with a phone at 9:50 after a somewhat problematic activation with Fido.
If you watch his "Free to choose" series (http://www.ideachannel.tv/), Friedman blamed the Fed for the depression because they didn't keep the money supply stable. Because of bank failures the money supply decreased by a 3rd. He never advocated massively increasing the money supply. In fact, he has been consistently against printing money because of it's leading to inflation.

You can interpret his comments on the BOJ in the article that he would support buying government bonds only as a way to provide liquidity to banks. In the current US scenario, the banks and corporations have enough capital, so I cannot see that Friedman would support QE2.

P.S. "Friedman believed in the power of money". Nonsense. He believed in the power of individual freedom.
Im not a republican or even a Whitman fan. But that article was so much hyperbole I could not read beyond page 2. eBay revenue in 2000 was $431.4 million; revenue in 2007 when Whitman left was $7.672 billion.

Seems to me like she did a great job at ebay.
Some of the comments on the article are worth a read as well (but only if you're interested in the topic, as they're quite lengthy and surrounded by dross).
To me "notify" signifies a "one off" email saying "hey, we're live".

I think the "click here to continue to be on the list" is more polite than "click here to unsubscribe" in this case.

What would be better still would be to spell out the situation under the input box. e.g. "We'll only send you one email when we're live" or "We'll spam you everyday until you tell your friends" or something in between. Just be upfront about it so people's expectations are accurate.
I worked with a programmer who was legally blind. He used speech-recognition software plus some sort of display software that blew each character up to about 10" x 6".
I wonder what an Armenian would have to say about all your grandstanding...
I don't think it put the above commenter off, as he signed up. Is it the top choice that put you off, or was it that you weren't actually interested in what it is we have to offer?
Solving that puzzle is far beyond my intelligence, but I did have Dr. Sudborough as a professor. He was one of the best professors I had at UTD, really taught Automata Theory very well.

I'm glad he's getting more recognition.
I'm not going to defend the original poster, but Vienna does have some racism today, and especially against Turks.

Some of my family lives there (I have an Austrian half-sister), and when I stayed there, as a Uruguayan of German descent I never had any trouble, people were friendly and made some friends... but the son of the Uruguayan Consul at the time (a diplomat), who has some African or native ancestors and is thus a bit darker-skinned, had some trouble with buses not stopping when he was the only one at the bus stop, people being rude to him and other petty meanness.
Offer HN: Can teach C to who ever is willing to learn
C is my first language and my one true love. If anyone want's to learn, or just want's some help with a specific concept let me know! You can shoot me an e-mail: jdefr89@gmail.com if you're interested..
So, you're an idiot?
Facemash makes more sense I think I was misled by another comment I read, thanks.

To an uneducated observer (that would be me and I cautiously assume most of the girls being compared on Facemash back then) girls were being evaluated on their physical appearance. That is not a noble pursuit.

I completely agree with you about the motives of the characters in the movie being ultimately for the movie. I think a lot of people in this discussion are reading way too much into Sorkin and Zuckerberg.

Anyone who seriously thinks Zuckerberg made facebook because he got dumped by a girl doesn't deserve acknowledgment. It was a mistake for Zuckerberg to even bring this up.
Change the title to "HN Berkeley Meetup" and I don't think we have a problem.
Test driven development, to me, starts as the harness you use to write your code in the first place. I'm not sure how people write solid code with any kind of speed without a harness testing/driving it. Why not make your harness your tests?

Everyone keeps talking about how it is more work, which confuses me. I don't make a religion out of test coverage, so maybe that is the difference? As in, I don't write a test for every basic thing, like an accessor, for example, because I feel like there's a point of diminishing returns.

edit: To those downvoting, I'm interested in a dialogue and hearing your thoughts.
Develop, Deploy, Integrate web applications and business processes in the cloud
I made a site just like this http://yamr.net to be able to group chat with friends/family/co-workers and not have them install anything (can go to yamr.net/any-room-name)

It's pretty cool seeing your site and what you decided to do differently. I'll be checking out your source later when I have time.

Mine is also built with php/node and I added socket.io so I could take advantage of websockets. I auto-log in users and keep chat history (although right now it only shows the latest 30 messages)

If you're looking to implement any features I have (like chat history) PM me and I'll share how I did it
The Tortoise and the Hare: The tale of Android evolution
Has technology lost its magic?
I am on a unix platform, why should I use Cain Able?
Handling binary files? The language itself is fine but some support for special things is still lacking. But that's changing fast, in the future it would be an ok choice.
I'm extremely happy to upvote first-hand TDD articles whenever I see them on here.

There have been quite a few nice stories, both pro and con. I'd like to see more folks talk about competitive advantage. After all, code just doesn't exist by itself -- it's supposed to do something. Does TDD help make technology make people's lives better? Or is it just a big PITA that ends up with more maintainable code? There's nothing wrong with that, but it's the kind of perspective question can be a critical success factor for startups.
I'm sorry but looking at packets on an unsecured network is in no way "hacking". Even cracking a WPA network and using a MITM attack is trivial with all the tools and tutorials available.
Except Oracle has revenues to offset the cost of litigation, this could last years.
Offer HN: Free licenses for two developer tools
So, I've been working on two apps for the past year and a half. They're not extremely polished (I need better error handling), but the definitely get the job done and they've been paying a few of my bills.

Atomiq (www.getatomiq.com) will find all the places someone has copy and pasted code in your project. It supports analyzing C#, VB, Java, Javascript, Python, Ruby, Actionscript, C and C++. We leave it up to you on how to refactor the duplicate code, but you should definitely check out "the wheel" visualization (www.getatomiq.com/images/faq/wheel.png)

Nitriq (www.nitriq.com) is a code analysis, code review tool for .Net developers. It helps you find problem areas in your code by allowing you to write LINQ statements against your assemblies. It is in the same space as FXCop, but Nitriq makes in much more easy to tweak the kinds of problems you're looking for.

Both apps are written with WPF, so they're windows only (sorry linux/osx devs).

I love HN and find it to be a source of inspiration, so I'm offering free licenses to any HN'er who has been around for at least 6 months or has 50+ karma. Please send your name, HN ID, and email address to me (info in profile) and I'll send you a free license. Also let me know which tool you'd like. The system we have to generate licenses is kind of a pain to use right now, so it may take me a day or two to gen the license for you depending on how many people respond.

Thanks HN for being HN
Do you find it hard to change directions with a feature or component, because your tests have sort of "locked you in" to the structure you were working on?

How religiously do you follow TDD? Do you literally not write a single line of code unless it's in furtherance of passing a failing unit test, or do you just worry about the system test you put in place at the start and unit test aspects as you need to?

Also, you mentioned changes to the API of third-party libraries. How do go about catching how those changes impact your code? (I would assume you are mocking these in your unit tests.)

Wow I just asked you a lot of questions.

Seriously though, thanks for posting this article. It's so rare to be able to read an article about unit testing that isn't just some guy demonstrating how he'd use TDD to determine if a number is in the Fibonacci sequence or something.
BTW Felix was interviewed about Node.js at http://chaosradio.ccc.de/cre167.html (German)
Yeah I got that from the movie too. It definitely illustrated that Mark had mixed motivations in creating Facebook, but generally it seemed to portray "building stuff" as an outlet to whatever more primordial drives (fear, angst, excitement, desire for power, status, etc.) were behind the action.

the movie wasn't about reality, it was about the exaggerated reality from court depositions, qualified by counter-arguments. Made me think of Rashomon.
I think there is a big difference in an 'Ask HN' post and a 'Offer HN' post.

In general terms, an 'Ask HN' post is the HN crowd helping an individual. Everyone can participate to help that individual. An 'Offer HN' post is one person helping one other person (or maybe a small handful). I enjoy seeing the occasional Ask HN post because I can participate/contribute in some way to most of the requests. For Offer HN posts, I can't participate unless I have that specific need that needs addressing.

To me, there is less 'value/participation' to the HN community from the Offer HN posts to the Ask HN ones for that reason. Offer HN type posts are better serviced by other specialists sites of which there are no shortage. Yes - I understand 'value' is subjective, but this I think my point is reasonably objective from a 'whole community' point of view.
Possibly horrible product, but the best Amazon Customer images and reviews
I have written a library called gently. This library lets you define a series of expected function calls spawning multiple objects (since overall order is important to us).

Whenever you define such an expected call, gently returns a closure that you can use to inject this expectation in the right place.

From my understanding this is hybrid between Mocking (where you have an object with an expected call / state sequence), and Stubbing (where you have various pre-recorded answers to function calls).

But generally I found the semantics of the various TDD methodologies very difficult to translate into actual code. That's why I'm using as little abstraction as possible.
I'm a fan when Gruber makes comments over 8 words. Not so sure when he hits 1000.
Yeah it's really annoying to have to give them any info just to download the JDK. Ugh, and I started to really like clojure. I don't want to have to go the Mono way.
The key is to use a good screenreader like JAWS. As I posted here its next to impossible using Window's built in screenreader, Narrator.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1799588
Tell HN: Alphalab's Winter/Spring 2011 app deadline is Monday
Alphalab (http://alphalab.org) is a Pittsburgh based startup incubator. The deadline for the Winter/Spring 2011 session applications is this Monday, November 1st. Sessions are 5 months long with a Demo Day at the end where companies showcase what they've accomplished and present in front of investors. More information (including funding info) can be found here: http://alphalab.org/about.aspx

For full disclosure, I am an Alphalab alum. The experience was great and the relationships I've built and things I've learned are invaluable. These incubators provide the means for companies to do things right and really jumpstart their businesses. I encourage anyone at all interested to at least apply.

One thing I'm sure will be brought up in the comments is the fact that you need to maintain a significant presence in Pennsylvania for 5 years as part of the Alphalab terms. Honestly, I relocated to Pittsburgh for Alphalab and it was one of the best decisions I've ever made. The startup community here is thriving and everyone is willing to help. There's also great talent right around the corner with CMU, University of Pittsburgh, and Duquesne University all within 1 mile of each other. The community might not be as big as SF or NY but I think the smaller size makes it more intimate.

You can apply now at: http://alphalab.org/survey_overview.aspx
I think it would also behoove you to start using BDD in your development process. With BDD, you get a one-to-many correlation between behavior and code. This also greatly improves on quality. I say this because quality can only be based against requirements. BDD forces the developer to have the behavioral requirements upfront.

BDD allows you to take a given behavioral requirement and see all the code that supports that requirement and visa-versa. If a customer ever asks you, you can point to exactly where you are fulfilling that behavioral requirement in the source code.

And BDD languages such as Gherkin are easy to read for most non-technical people.

Of course, this isn't a replacement for TDD.
Why Cycling Is A Lot Like Entrepreneurship
Offer HN: Exec Assistant - Trademrk, SNAP-R (US export lic), Patent Search
I am a single-founder government contractor. That is a recipe for drowning in paperwork and not spending enough time on product. I found someone I trust, who is fast and good that does the: trademark, local taxes, SNAP-R, lead generation, and prior art search.

Since I only cover him half-time I thought maybe someone here might need the other half of this person's time.<p>Contact 20101028paperwork@freytag.org - we're in Wash, DC but Skype works well.
Desperate times call for desperate measures. Part One.
Also if you just put them into bins by year, you could have others do the sorting per bin - so more of a distributed model.
Seriously. I love this kind of thinking! Hell, it might just work.
That's a pretty good suggestion - from what I can see most other similar books have at least one chapter that you can download. I'll see what I can arrange.

Any preferences as to which one? :)
Could the argument be made that Sorkin's style filled a void in the marketplace that was network TV drama in the case of West Wing?

Long, tight, terse dialogue is what the audience interacted with most immediately with West Wing. Sorkin can write, so he does. I would say audiences who appreciated good writing and a different conflict arc to drive the narrative had few other alternatives for that time slot.
If "as described" includes running automatically (without user permission), then you'd be incorrect in this case. This particular trojan doesn't include any privilege escalation exploits, so the user must confirm a couple of security dialog boxes (including keying their password) before the trojan can install.
The costs for TDD greatly vary. Trying to do TDD for GUI / frontend programming is much more expensive. I also find TDD very hard when working within a framework that was not written using TDD.

So of course, if your environment makes TDD as cheap as ours does, I'm with you and think you have to be a little crazy to not at least try it. But it's not for everybody / everything by default.

About skipping tests for accessors and stuff: That's a slippery slope, I'm afraid it would lead me to skip more "obvious" tests which in turn make it harder to write the right test when this stuff actually is part of a bug in the future.
> I was able to learn Python in 2 weeks

Not to pick on you in particular, but comments like this are a pet peeve of mine. While Python is easy to learn, and most languages are, but even if I'd built a little application in Python as you had, and knowing what I know already, I still wouldn't say I know Python.

Maybe I'm the exception to the rule, maybe my definition of knowing a language is much more strict then most, but I really don't think you can learn a language, any language, in 2 weeks.

I've done apps in Java, C, C++, Python, Perl, PHP, and even Obj-C now. Real working apps that do things, but I'd feel very uncomfortable claiming to know all those languages.

Oh, I know the syntax. Basic syntax is easy for any language (with my vast knowledge of C-style syntax languages providing a good basis for this assumption =)). But really knowing a language? Being able to create an application from scratch? I mean, really knowing, not just hacking together stuff you find from tutorials on line and running to SO whenever something happens a Google search doesn't solve.

I fully realise that my standards might be a bit to high. I just don't know by how much? Am I really just not giving myself enough credit, or am I reading too much into this?

Edit: fiveo, I'm not focusing this at you, obviously. This is merely a general observation. =)
Me and my friends thought about sharing a VPS, but it did not work out.

Google App Engine sounds good. I will give it a spin as soon as I can... Appreciate the response :)
An excellent piece. For those who don't know Chuck Lorre:

Chuck Lorre (born October 18, 1952) is a writer, director, producer and composer who has created many American sitcoms, including Grace Under Fire, Cybill, Dharma & Greg, Two and a Half Men, and The Big Bang Theory. Lorre also serves as executive producer of the sitcom Mike & Molly which premiered on CBS in September 2010.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chuck_Lorre
If he was using Truecrypt Deniable Filesystem with FDE (and the proper protocols), we wouldn't even be having this conversation.
Agreed. That's the most fun I've ever had reading statistics.
Well most of the comments are jokes.... I'm guessing that this appeared on something like reddit or digg?

"Wow is this thing great! I use it as a "mini-bar" when the friends and I go out to the bars. I can quickly fix multiple shots of tequila for myself and the friends as we drive from one bar to the next. We also discovered that if you place a pillow on top of it and turn on the cruise control you can catch quick naps on the interstate. If you swerve to the left or right the rumble strips on the road wake you up in plenty of time before you get into trouble. I can now take longer trips without being tired!

Also, i am now dating a midget and she fits nicely on the steering wheel desk which allows us to experiment sexually while driving. This thing is like WD-40 or duct tape, it is a million and one uses!"
BlackBerry Bold 9780 come to the Worldwide in November 2010
Google Settles Competition Case in France
Are you a Human SpamBot?
I don't understand the downvote for this (so I voted it back to 1).

Generally speaking, the idea expressed here matches my own understanding (though I'm more specifically familiar with Hayek and Mises). Can anyone explain why bj_nortier_hn is wrong?
Interested! And flying back to Berkeley from the east coast today (just in time :). @artvankilmer
Here is your design: http://212labs.com/retro/nearagent.png

Things that I've done:

* Search is now placed in Agent locator, I believe it is a good practice to group similar features

* This design is more application like. It should resize itself with page. That way there will be no multiple scrolls

* User info panel is designed.

I hope you like it
"Oracle also has patents that pretty much prohibit anyone from writing any kind of JIT VM"

That's the biggest issue I see with this suit, so they want to own the language and syntax, whatever. But if I have a language X lets call it D# and I want to build a vm for it, I can't because of those patents? It's not like VMs and JIT are new, I'm sure someone was doing it before Sun.
Stanford University opens new stem cell building, bucking federal restrictions
I wouldn't say so. I use daily a hand-held device capable of browsing a media library of hundred of millions items and reaching about 1/5 of human population anytime, almost anywhere. That wasn't possible just a decade or two ago. It keeps fascinating me!

(This being said, I was born and mostly grew up before the era of ubiquitous internet. Would be nice to hear opinions from post-1990 generations.)
The lower bound indeed is 1, however higher lower bounds can be found.

Here lower bound means that there exist a permutation that will take this many operations. Their goal is to find what the maximum number of operations assuming worst permutation. This is accomplished when the lower bound equals the upper bound.

Proving lower bounds is easy they just need to give an example. Proving upper bounds is hard, somehow they have a way besides running all possible cases. (The article doesn't explain how and I haven't delven deeper).
That's a very good idea. I would go further and tell the candidate that I don't know the solution myself, thus hopefully putting him/her at ease and making it clear that I am more interested in the thought and design process, rather than figuring out the "trick" in the question.

The tough part here is to choose a good question.
In the context of this study, does riding a bicycle in the normal seated position count as sitting?
FeedBurner Finally Doesn’t Suck
You can pick it up in a store in Denmark. No waiting lists anywhere.
Yeah Miguel de Icaza had that moment six years ago.
Very smart, I like this new widget.
Point #5 did a good job of addressing a debate we see here sometimes: "Language X serves our company well, but picky developers don't want to work for us because we use it" vs "I want to work in a job that uses Language Y because it's better." I think it's worth quoting:

Lets say you’re something like me: You’ve learned PHP and used it to build and launch “real world” apps. For you, the cost of change is high (maybe even prohibitively high). Really hard to justify the change, because though you might grudgingly admit that Python is better, it’s not better enough to warrant switching. You’ve got a startup to grow, you can’t be bothered with trying to join the cool kids.

But, I’m to advocate for some empathy here. Lets say you were on the outside looking in (i.e. you’re a gifted developer looking to join a cool new startup). Since you’re really good, and demand for great developers always exceeds supply, you essentially get to pick where you want to work. All things being equal, you’re going to pick the place that is doing Python vs. PHP. Of course, not all things are equal, and you might actually pick the startup whose business you think has the best chances of success or whose founders you like and respect. But, often, it’s hard to know that stuff upfront, so you focus on what you do know — that developing in Python’s a better “bet”. I wouldn’t fault people for solving for their self-interest and preference. They’re not trying to talk you into switching, they’re just saying that it matters to them.
Pointing out that might have been the point of this posting...