skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Surfed the zero percent interest rate promos on credit cards: rolled debt onto a zero percent card (thus not really making a payment that month because you just moved the debt around) and had lower payments until the promo ran out. Repeat with new promo on a different card.

One I'm proud of but might not be counted as a hack here (not exactly naughty, but good for blowing people's minds, so similarly satisfying to me): Amicable divorce without lawyers. Saved probably tens of thousands of dollars on lawyers fees and had the added bonus that since we didn't lawyer up, we weren't getting antagonistic "cover your ass" advice from lawyers. This meant there was more money to go around (and less paranoia), so we both were able to refrain from squabbling about the small stuff and say "whatever makes it easiest for you". I had people tell me I was crazy to trust my ex but I got a lot more money out of it than I otherwise would have (more than I could have legally insisted on had I fought with him).

We went to the courthouse together to file the papers. The person behind the counter was telling him "you need to do yadda yadda". I guess they thought I was his new love interest, not the future ex. He turned to me and said something like "Did you hear that? You need to sign here." I signed there while the person behind the counter tried to pick their eyeballs back up off the floor. I guess they had never seen anything like it before.
And this, boys and girls, is why we have randomized algorithms.
In high-school I was part of the webteam. This gave us slightly elevated privileges meaning we could get away with a lot of simple windows NT/XP hacking. We had internet on the 'non-internet' machine much to the awe of everyone else, chatted with each other via netsend, played games (until the admin sent us a netsend telling us to stop).

Also, all pc's were numbered corresponding to their network name. You can reboot pc's via netsend. Much fun was had :) This went on until we could print on the machines of the principal + other higher-up stuff. We never dared doing that though.

...then I went to college and got an email from one of the sysadmins telling me I had a virus and that I should use [random windows antivirus]. I was using IRC on Ubuntu on a non-standard port. I got a really sour reply from the sysadmin upon telling him that.
I lived with a 1GB/Month connection for about one and a half year. If you stay clear of too many videos (I think about 1:30Hr of youtube is fine) and have something like FlashBlock I don't see any way in which it will exceed 1GB/month.
On shortened field names in MongoDB
> Anyhow - as web apps are not what ticks (at the moment) on the mobile devices (Apps are) - I was referring to an actual App version of Office.

Given the numerous reported problems that small-scale developers have had with App Store policies, up to and including pulling their software product from the store completely, I wouldn't want to invest time and money in building even a simple iWhatever app. Why on earth would Microsoft spend a fortune building a highly complex app when its availability would be at the mercy of a direct competitor?

Someone should really send a copy of that Ballmer "Developers! Developers! Developers!" presentation to the guys at Apple. They aren't the only guys in town with funky devices any more, and despite all the hype, they are not some sort of unassailable market leader either. If businesses find it too hard to develop and sell software on Apple kit, whether it's because of the danger of rejection from App Store, or not having Flash support, or whatever is going on with Java, or something else tomorrow, then platforms with better developer relations are going to pull ahead, and this is a fast-moving industry.
Sure, that's the main reason I built it. So other sites could easily link to it. I'm doing just that with http://ihackernews.com
Thank you, I'm happy to hear that!
Funny that they don't mention multigrid which is O(n) and very reliable for M-matrices (more general than SDD, which is a rarely used term in the multigrid literature). It's hard to take this seriously if they don't demonstrate that the constants are good enough to beat the various multigrids for this problem. Also note that most physical problems which lack optimal sparsity are also not M-matrices, and indeed lack H-ellipticity (necessary and sufficient condition for the existence of a pointwise smoother), even though they are often still SPD.
Ask HN: Which Engineering Blogs do you follow?
I like to follow engineering blogs of successful companies to know more about different technologies they use, technical problems they face, and other interesting stuffs they share.

I follow Twitter, LinkedIn, Rapleaf and Digg.
For sure. I still remember scooping out huge gobs of that yummy spagetti sauce from that stove. This feels a bit like my parents selling my childhood home. So many good memories.
At my highschool cafeteria we'd use these RFID charge cards which you could load cash into. Now, I didn't have the means to access an RFID reader to mess around with it, but turns out that there were other problems.

Being the absent minded person that I am, I'd often lose these cards, pay some extra amount to get a new card, and then find the old cards in my pocket, in a bag etc. The old cards wouldn't work in the main cafeteria but they'd transfer the cash amount you had into the new card (minus the card fee) for you. However, they would work in the coffee vending machines. It turns out they actually stored the cash value in the cards!

So, I ended up loading a large sum of money in a card, "losing" it, and me and my friends had free coffee and hot chocolate for the better part of the most academically challenging two years of my life.
When one of our co-workers was out on vacation, I put a panel across his cubicle's "doorway" opening. The maintenance guys were more than happy to help. ;-)
To rebut your Steve Yegge post with another Steve Yegge post (his opinion, at least in 2008, was closer to Jeff's than yours):
http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2008/09/programmings-dirties...
Even with virtualization - how many virtual instances can you possibly fit on a single blade server to give reasonable performance? I'm guessing 4 to 8?
A quick calculation shows that electricity costs for a 200W machine is 3 cents. Cooling costs same. So that's 6 cents/hour for just these two.
I think, much like Microsoft before it, Oracle's best products now are keyboards.

They have Control where God Intended It To Be (with the "Unix layout" option), a nice stack of keys to the left and the overall RT-PC layout we use today. X3701A-UNIX is the part#

I also find the 122-key IBM layout intriguing. Unicomp makes one http://pckeyboards.stores.yahoo.net/122keyterkey.html

Those, I think, are the only ones I would consider to replace my obsolete beige Microsoft Natural keyboard.

Those and a more modern take on the Space Cadet, but nobody seems to be doing that.
If the answer to this question were "no", I'd expect developer productivity to have increased over the years in line with computer performance, all other things being equal.
Or Cordwainer Bird?
If you sell stuff or if a conversion to user reliably generates revenue, you should almost certainly be using Mixpanel or Kissmetrics for funnel analysis. Squeezing the problems which you don't know exist out of your checkout funnel, signup funnel, first user experience, or viral invite funnel is worth your weight in gold. A client of mine is currently prepping a blog post about their experience. It is an epic tale of sorrow and redemption... or just making a ton of money squashing usability issues no one knew existed.

I also pay for Clicky as a backup to Big Daddy G, and am going to try out GinzaMetrics in more depth one of these days.
Download the Opera browser. Turn on Opera Turbo - it is (as I understand it) some of the same technology as Opera Mini, but for the desktop - increased speed and less bandwidth. (The turbo icon is a speedometer on the bottom of the screen)
The iPod Just Turned 9 Years Old
There are so many ways this could have gone wrong...

For example, the guy was passed out - the initial impact could have knocked the other driver's foot off the gas, or cause it to press harder, further worsening the situation.

Also, if the bumpers didn't match, or if the angle of impact was not totally flat, you could easily end up in a "jackknife" style situation where the rear car pushes the front car at an angle causing it to loose traction and knocking both off course.

Not to write off his quick thinking, but I would be hesitant to try repeating this.
But be aware of additional costs, for traffic, requests (no, that is not in the traffic included, e.g. SOAP requests), IP addresses, persistent storage or snapshots for your servers (e.g. EBS).

Here is what it cost me to run 2 micro instances behind a load balancer for 4 days (the hidden costs were more than the servers themselves):

US East (Northern Virginia) Region
Amazon EC2 running Linux/UNIX
$0.02 per Micro Instance (t1.micro) instance-hour (or partial hour)	193 Hrs	3.86

Amazon EC2 EBS
$0.10 per GB-month of provisioned storage	4.183 GB-Mo	0.42
$0.10 per 1 million I/O requests	144,345 IOs	0.01
$0.15 per GB-Month of snapshot data stored	0.193 GB-Mo	0.03
$0.01 per 10,000 gets (when loading a snapshot)	3,195 Requests	0.01
$0.01 per 1,000 puts (when saving a snapshot)	3 Requests	0.01

Elastic IP Addresses
$0.01 per non-attached Elastic IP address per complete hour	506 Hrs	5.06

Elastic Load Balancing
$0.008 per GB Data Processed by the LoadBalancer	0.013 GB	0.01
$0.025 per LoadBalancer-hour (or partial hour)	95 Hrs	2.38
Download Usage Report »	11.79
The optimal (Kelly) strategy for Roulette is not to play. It even says so on that wiki page.
Hahahah, I figured out exactly what net send * did when I turned my head and looked at all the other computers in the lab :P
I don't think it is about putting money in as much as it is about putting time in.

So to shift your question a little, how many people that have money put their time into something useful? I think this number is quite high. Whether it be building new ventures or doing volunteer / philanthropic work. Once you don't have to "make a living" you get to decide what is important to you and live accordingly.
Feeling wealthy and being wealthy are often two very different things.
You can fool it into opening the ' pc version' of the web app, but typing in word doesn't work, not does clicking a title in powerpoint
> Office is the Killer app that Windows has. But a lot of people are steering away from Windows.

Really? Do you think next year will be the year of Linux on the desktop? Or that desktop Mac sales will suddenly jump by orders of magnitude?

> The cost op upgrading is pretty significant, so companies wait longer and longer for that.

I'm not sure it's a cost issue as much as a value for money issue. Companies used to pay a fortune to upgrade to new versions of MS Office, but aside from changing the UI around, to mixed reviews, what major innovation has there really been since the early 2000s to justify the upgrade fees now?

There are plenty of pain points in MS Office where, for example, the usability could be significantly better or some potentially useful functionality is still missing. However, since alternatives such as OpenOffice or Google Docs tend to lag so far behind on these counts anyway, there hasn't been much incentive for MS to improve their product, and the stagnation you alluded to is the result.

> Editing of documents (albeit simple editing) is something people want on their iPads (and to some extend on other smaller devices too).

Sorry, I don't buy it. If I'm in a meeting with a bunch of other guys and we're working through something, it's painful enough watching the guys taking the notes when they are writing them up on a laptop/netbook with a real keyboard, connected up to the projector/TV on the wall. I can only imagine how tedious it would be if they had to fix all the typos and navigate around their document using only a touchscreen.
I did the similar thing at Heathrow Airport. I took the underground from London to Heathrow, but I only had Zones 1 & 2 travel card, while Heathrow is in Zone 4.

When I went out the train, I've put my worried face and I walked hurriedly to the guy on the exit gates (there's always a guy manually opening the door). When I got fairly near, I flashed my travel card asking in a worried voice "What's the quickest way to Terminal A?" Worked like a charm.
http://watrcoolr.us/ - most discussed news in a few min

http://hacker.watrcoolr.us/ - hacker version
Agreed. Sometimes being borderline delusional about your ability to accomplish complex things is crucial to actually getting them done.
I think it is a lot more than 4 to 8. The probably have between 16 and 64 GB of RAM per machine, and if they are 512MB instances, they fill it up. So figure 32 to 128 instances per machine. Those machines may use more than 200 watts, and the "reasonable performance" may be not that good.

Has anyone here ever tried out the Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud ?
How a construction crane is built
Turbo is fantastic for bandwidth-saving. It made browsing bearable when I was on stuck with 115kbit/s connection.

Also, in Opera Shift+I toggles displaying of images. There's built-in easy to use content blocker, so you can kill useless images (e.g. avatars, tweet buttons). Opera 11 added Flashblock ("Enable plug-ins on demand" in advanced prefs).
Not to mention the health care bill that the Boomers will generate. One way or another I think our generation will end up footing the bill for the extended lifespans of the Baby Boomers.
Two good Microsoft technology ones (ASP.NET/MVC/C# etc)

http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/

http://www.hanselman.com/blog/

Yahoo user interface blog:

http://www.yuiblog.com/blog/

Jeff Atwood's blog (lot of various things):

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/
> The truth, probably, lies somewhere in the middle.

Ooh I hate it when people say that :)

In particular, it is a hackneyed journalistic technique to list the positions of the Left and the Right, deride them both as extreme, and then settle on a reasonable compromise in the middle.

A much better approach is to consider each idea on its merits.

In fact the threat to informers was manufactured -- the last drop was unedited and so far there are no reports of reprisals. And this drop was redacted to reduce the threat further.

On the other hand by hastening the end of the war and preventing future wars (by informing the public of the horrors), the upside is solid.

That's what I think. Instead of two strawmen, I would like to hear what you really think.
Ask HN: Y Combinator Focus?
I really appreciate this community. Found it through PG and "Hackers & Painters" originally, and simply consumed passively before registering for an account several months ago.

I wanted to ask before I start making too many posts. Is news.ycombinator.com biased toward Y-Combinator people and the startup school schedule? And if so, would it be more polite to stay quiet?

The algorithms tend to hold me pretty far from view, with a karma score of 30 something. But I would like to participate, even as an IRL outsider.

Edit: The guidelines and community feedback, are really very clearly biased toward the 'informative/thought-provoking'. I am hoping the algorithms detect that more and more alongside account aging and points gained. Cool.

Thanks for the replies. Pretty close to my best guess.
Sorry to mislead, I didn't actually create this. It's been posted to HN before, but I decided to repost it as I use it as my own startpage and I didn't know how else more people would discover it.
It wasn't my hack, but someone did a hack that gave me months of entertainment.

I worked for Smiths Industries, and my buddies were smart enough to register "si.com". Sports Illustrated was a little too slow (ultimately they bought the domain - my buddies got nothing, life is not fair).

Anyway, someone on a University of Michigan lab email list forged an email... the "from" was a Sports Illustrated swimsuit model, with a bunch of "CC:s" to other "SI models" and CC:ed the UofM email list. The email was pretty well done, something to the effect of "Hey Tyra, do you know why we are getting this strange email from this UofM lab?" There were a surprising number of students that fell for it.

At the time, I was responsible for catching bounced email and dealing with it. For the next couple of months I was entertained by lovelorn UofM students trying to hit on Tyra and all her friends. :-D I saved all the email in an archive, but lost it at some point, moving between computer systems. :-( One of my life's major regrets.
Why is that nuts? A 401k is hardly a pension. Once the money is in it is your money. If you were to start putting 10% of your income into your 401k or IRA now, you would be able to live off it in 40+ years easy.

Yes, I think passive income is great. Most of my income is passive and I plan to keep growing that part of my life, but that doesn't mean it is a fool's errand to have a retirement account.
They're already fighting an uphill battle against Linux in the server market. They're probably concerned about what lending credibility to it on the desktop could do.
This is pretty much how I got interested in software security, btw.
Bruce Schneier has discussed this many times on his blog, but from the perspective of flying on someone else's ticket. The problem is that security usually isn't electronically checking that the boarding pass you are holding us actually valid, and the gate isn't checking IDs. This is still possible at many/most US airports.
Apple has simulator. It's conceptually similar to WINE — runs x86 code (not ARM) with Mac OS X-hosted versions of iOS frameworks.
http://www.gatcka.com

It's a simple discussion board, w/o registration, very (too?) clean.
Can't you do the same with Google Analytics?
Yes, indeed. Next time you should be very hesitant. Hesitate so much that the out of control car plows into a busy intersection. So many things could go right. It could just barely miss that SUV with 4 kids in the back, and I'm sure it would only scare the elderly couple crossing the street.

C'mon, seriously? The article is an up-beat account of how things can go right. How under pressure someone made a necessarily quick decision to take action rather than sit on the sidelines and watch as an observer. Do you really think anyone sane-minded individual is going to come away from this article thinking to themselves, "Man, next time I'm on the highway I need to give this a shot"?
not to mention
"Without consulting the passengers in his minivan — "there was no time to take a vote" — Innes kicked into engineer mode."

more like "Innes kicked into irresponsible mode risking other people's lives to try something he probably saw on a movie"
If he matched the truck's speed before pulling in front of him, would it reduce the risk of the jackknife situation you described? Seems like it would to me.
i'd be satisfied if they just switched to webkit.
http://pornel.net/gamejam/
Thanks for replying.

The 64 bit issue is definitely not the "same for all languages". Programs get slightly bigger, but don't double in size as happens for Python programs. Most Linux 64 bit C programs will be using 32 bit 'int'. Python consumes 24 bytes to store any single int on 64 bit.

Code generators: I mean ones which anyone uses.

Lack of type safety: it may well be "by design", but it's a dumb design which causes lots of problems. Search Bugzilla for Python tracebacks and you'll see hundreds of bugs caused by lack of basic compile-time type checks. It's easy for a compiler to check that a function you're calling requires 3 arguments of type foo, bar and baz, and not doing that simply causes lots of errors.

The whitespace issue is also real: if/else changes its meaning completely if you're not hyper-careful about how you apply patches (especially when you have to make manual fixes to patches to get them to apply).
This Week in Startups #88 with Maxwell Salzberg, Co-Founder, Diaspora
It's never too late if you have a mammoth no users already in one or other form (OS, Windows phone et al.). If MS still opens up the browser and start giving some goodie bags to the developers, something similar to other app stores, we might see some share of the pie going to MS.
That's a good idea... :)
Actually around 1985, Mark Williams invented the C Source-Level Debugger, which certainly did not suck, and was quickly imitated by other larger outfits.

However, my use of debuggers has always been quite minimal, perhaps because despite the CSD experience, I am often behind the times. Or perhaps it was due to my early (not quite childhood) experience building real-time interrupt-rich programs in Sigma 5 assembly language.

I also read recently that most of the grownups don't use debuggers but have always stuck by printf or equivalent.

It kind of reminds me of an early attempt on my part, not wanting to do laundry in my early bachelor years, to start a wrinkled shirt fashion trend. I was not successful, at least for a large number of years. It finally did become fashion.

So stick with printf and build useful but lean logging habits would be my advice.
Often duty-free items are delivered to you at your gate as you board or on the plane. In fact, lately, that's the only option I've seen at airports.
Isn't that what governments do every day? They take choices for the well being of the country, without consulting me. Oh the irony.
Whose life isn't?
It is not just Apple iOS devices that I am talking about. I am also not advocating Apple's policies or even technologies.

Microsoft has a history of always developing for their own (just as well complicating) platform, so does Apple. From both perspectives I would say: why not make something (good) available to as many users as possible.
Apple built in Exchange support in Mac OS X (and iOS). That is a product from their direct competitor...
I don't think that your company's conservative attitudes are because of their usage of Java.

I think that "one of the biggest financial companies in the world" would be just as conservative and anxious about the tiniest technology changes with any language: Ruby, Perl, or Fortran.

The attitude you describe sounds like it has more to do with being a large financial institution and the type of place where software development is a "cost center", not a profit maker.
This is great! Are you hiring?
+1

Opera CEO was at Plugg (conference) last year and he explained that Opera market share was huge in Russia and poor countries because of that feature. As for OP lot of people dont have unlimited bandwith and Opera seems to be the best at keeping the consumption low.