skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Just got my new cards from zazzle today. Used them before and was happy but wish I had this info. Next time will try moo.

Question: what do others think about a large business card size. I like that because i inevitably jot something on the card when i give it to someone. The last example was that I was talking to a dogrun acquaintance about vyatta (ie the router project) and gave my card with the word 'vyatta' on it.

I have a minimal amount of information - name, email, google voice number as well as a small qr_code barcode which links to my online profile.

I think the oversized card (called a 'calling card' I believe) enables you to have a nice a mount of room for a graphic and room to write something.
I feel like I've been in the exact same position as the author for the past couple years. Ever since graduating with a CS degree.

I've tried a few different things to break the rut (chronological listing):
- full time 9-5er for a year
- 3 month internship working at a cool start-up
- freelancing from home as an independent contractor

Every time I start a new programming job I feel excited, but that feeling quickly disappears and I fall back into the same rut.

By taking breaks from programming I've only been feeding this cycle.

I've had thoughts of pursuing a career where programming is only 50% or less of the job.

Have any HNers been successful doing something like that? By starting a modest start-up perhaps?

Focusing on developing a physical product to sell online could be really fun and would seemingly entail doing lots of different things, most importantly using programming as the means to sell online and not the core work.
"Profitable, high flying startups like Facebook and Zynga don't bother going public anymore."

Aren't Facebook and Zynga widely expected to go IPO soon?
Doing mathematics is actually closer to hacking than to engineering.

Using mathematics (or say arithmetic in particular) may be closer to engineering. But we have no reliable and routine method for finding interesting statements and their proofs.
Making looping implicit seems to have huge benefits, in particular. It shrinks the code down quite a bit, much like the implicit search does in Prolog.

As for the unreadability - I can't read Turkish, but that has more to do with me than Turkish. Good APL really isn't that hard to read: The syntax is incredibly consistent, and while unfamiliar symbols are used, there aren't that many, and most are mnemonic - for example, the reverse operator is a circle with a vertical line through it, like a semicircle being mirrored.
Actually the facebook uid is very useful. Why else would facebook competitor.com need a friends email addresses but to spam them to sign up? If two people sign up with facebook data dumps you can still link them up via data dumps.

Another useful feature is email hashed (dunno if it's still supported. But if you have someone's email you can connect compare email hashed so emails are never revealed.
I am the same way. I need a stretch break every hour.

When working in an office, I will take my stretch break and no one has said anything to me yet. If I was in your situation though, I would leverage the fact that they consider you a "star performer." Talk to your manager that you believe the breaks are what make you productive and see if he will turn a blind eye to them.

If he doesn't agree, then maybe that tells you your productivity is not really valued there as much as it would be someplace else.
Facebook is play a greedy game theory strategy by not allowing for a user to download their social graph. Googles response was to use a tit for tat game theory strategy which is effective against the greedy game theory strategy.

The greedy game theory strategy in this case ends up being bad for consumers, they can not download their social graph from Facebook. Game theory subjects that when the vast major of agents are using the greedy strategy that is is impractical for a generous or tit for tact agent to survive. Each company that plays the greedy strategy is a step down the road to the greedy equilibrium. Where no companies offer easy methods to download your social graph or relevant information.

Google played a tit for tat strategy and did the world a service by preventing one step on the road to the greedy equilibrium.
It was interesting to hear the government's side of the story. Yet again I'm convinced that the most proficient computer security experts are way outside the government. Gonzalez doesn't seem exceptionally competent. I mean the only reason he got caught was because he used a bunch of cloned debit cards in front of a cop. Yet for several years he managed to inform for the Secret Service and keep his crimes hidden.

I'm not sure the Secret Service realizes what message they're sending to criminals. Sure they punished Gonzalez for his betrayal, but they basically advertised, "If you become an informant, you risk getting a much much worse sentence."
Names You Need to Know in 2011: R Data Analysis Software
Outstanding presentation. His point wouldn't have been nearly as powerful if it was organized/presented in a more traditional way.
Attacking the Library of Congress was probably a mistake. Also just strange; they have a relatively progressive view on copyright as far as government agencies go.
Apparently these people are sufficiently powerful that taking down a few useless sites can get the FBI to put together probably a multi-million dollar investigation.
Beating the ArcWTF challenge:

page '/said' do
form do
message = input()
submit do
link("click me"){ text("You said #{message}") }
end
end
end

Show this to a non coder and I'm pretty sure they'll recognize more than if you show them the 40+ lines of his Lua version.
A more charitable interpretation of

> It seems like you are calling the Apache Software Foundation "bunch of salesman-type assholes threatening to destroy billions (or more) in value in order to measure the length of their dicks is sickening.".

might be that he's referring to Oracle. It's not very clear though.
"By 2010, more than 50 percent of books sold worldwide will be printed on demand at the point of sale in the form of library-quality paperbacks."

Vint Cerf challenges with, "At some point, laptop or smaller devices with high quality displays and suitable access controls for intellectual property will make the sale and consumption of books, sound and movies through these devices practical." He goes on to cite the "iPOD" as an example.

http://www.longbets.org/6
Boxed Water Is Better
I call BS. A "Hacker" is not bound by a technology or language, despite what the [insert language or technology here] bigots want you to think. If you can create a spaceship from a toaster, who cares if it uses nanotechnology? It's still cool.

Go on working in whatever language or technology you want, and don't listen to the idiot zealots who aren't intelligent enough to broaden their horizons to the point where they understand that ANY language is cool if it provides the customers with a viable solution that scales.

Cheers.
Hulu revenue up 120% this year to $240 million
Exactly. Google's run around also had to do specifically with Java Mobile restrictions -- something Sun wanted Google to pay for.

The question Oracle's lawsuit raises is whether or not it's possible to compile Java without infringing on their patents. I still think my question has more merit than wmf suggests -- MS did essentially what I'm suggesting with C#.
"Might Be Misleading" is misleading
Apple IOS4.2 For iPhone iPodTouch & iPad Coming Friday
> Other than extreme conciseness (unreadable at times).

I have to agree with that. My APL programs were the epitome of write-only code. Even with comments, the magic being performed on the one-liner after them could hardly be described in less than 10 lines.

I suspect good APL programs have a comment to code ratio of more than 10.
Like the concept and the UI. My one issue was how the interface looks super simple then you get to Step 1. Does the time zone list really need to be that large? Some pretty obscure places and yet where I live, Atlanta, nothing.

Otherwise it looks great. I'll definitely be keeping an eye on this project.
He's not exaggerating the market there for people of other skillsets.

Fresh new young people trained in other professions are having a very hard time of it as their more experienced peers in industry are taking the entry level positions rather than nothing at all.

Now his friends might be unmotivated tools, have the wrong skillset for the area in which they live, or any number of things, but the economy is hard for some highly trained people even these days.
Similarly for me.

Also, I didn't think Colemak would actually let me type faster, but I did a speed test and scored 102wpm with 0 errors. I used to type 80.

It may not directly be Colemak. I may just type more because Colemak is that much easier to type. Because I type more, I learn to type faster.
I hope we never get to where civil engineering is now: a heavily regulated industry, need to 'join the club' just to practise; several degrees of separation between designer and builder" severely conservative professional body; inability to practise easily in foreign countries; tonnes of rules and regulations that vary from place to place; nothing gets built without people waiving clipboards and shouting. Oh, and 4 compulsory years of soil-mechanics lectures.
Show HN: my first ever coding project (7bks.com)
Hey HN. I've just launched my very first webappp and would love your feedback.

http://www.7bks.com

It's a book list sharing website - kind of like playlists for bookworms.

The site is built on pyton/appengine - and I learned to code in under 4 weeks to build the site. There's more details on the background of the site here:

http://www.7bks.com/blog/179001

I've also published the full Python code for the site here:

https://gist.github.com/670034

Feedback is really important to me and I want to work hard to make the site better so any and all suggestions are greatly appreciated. Contact details are here: http://www.7bks.com/contact/

Or just leave a comment below :)

Thanks, Tom.
This is something I have been thinking about recently.

I'm about to start a reasonably large project in rails and I've been trying to decide whether to host it with Heroku or Linode.

I've used Heroku before and I was really impressed, it's so simple to get started and I reckon it would scale well up to point I needed to start considering a dedicated solution.

My concern is, Heroku makes add-ons almost too easy, and in my opinion, it may become [for me] a form of vendor lock-in. I say this because I could easily see myself using several add-ons that I wouldn't otherwise, and many more that could really improve the efficiency of my application. But, how easy is it to migrate your application and attached add-ons from Heroku once you have installed / integrated through their platform?
Again, this hinges on the meaning "my data".

From your statement, I am guessing you believe that the email addresses of your contacts is your data.

So here's the thought experiment:

Amy uses GMail and has been corresponding with Bill, who works at Acme. Bill's email address, bill@acme.com, is in Amy's GMail address book. "bill@acme.com" is now a piece of data that is, unquestionably, "owned" by Amy.

Amy joins Facebook, uses the GMail importer to detect if any of her GMail contacts are also on Facebook, and sees that Bill is on Facebook. She asks to be Bill's friend, and he accepts.

Several months later, Bill gets a new job. He now works for The Nonprofit Foundation, and his new email address is bill@nonprofit.org. Bill logs into his Facebook account and updates his email address.

Because Amy uses Facebook and is friends with Bill, she can see his new email address.

Is the piece of data "bill@nonprofit.org" now "owned" by Amy?

--

Personally, I think it's a complex question. I don't automatically ascribe ownership of "bill@nonprofit.org" to Amy, and it's hard for me to say that she has a right to export that email address out of Facebook. Others may disagree. But I would hope we ALL can agree that the above scenario is not black and white, and that we can have a reasoned discussion about data ownership.
Learn to simplify and beautify.

We learn new tricks just to make our code simpler and prettier. As a side effect, we code faster and with less bugs.
Why do you say this? Orkut?
Jt7.0 - Java Design Pattern Framework for Android
Wow good find. I especially like this bet, Warren Buffett v. Protege Partners, LLC.

“Over a ten-year period commencing on January 1, 2008, and ending on
December 31, 2017, the S & P 500 will outperform a portfolio of funds
of hedge funds, when performance is measured on a basis net of fees,
costs and expenses.”

http://www.longbets.org/362
This describes the feelings I had a couple of years ago.

I didn't want to know about programming anymore, I was almost completely burnt out and needed a new direction to save my love for programming.

I took some time to think and reflect upon what I wanted to do next. Then it hit me, what I really needed was a new goal for my programming skills. That's when I knew what I needed was to programming in a different light: now that I have mastered the skills to program basically anything I want I could focus on the "creating, make it happen" part of programming.

So, I think what you need is to find something worth doing with your mastered skills. Center your focus on finding that thing, the masterpiece you will make now with your new found conscience.
From 50 days ago: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1706058

It was submitted a very, very long time ago:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13068

I wouldn't say it's a regular, but it's well-known.
Sit down and talk to Jason. It might be awkward at first, but you will all feel much better after a conversation. Get him doing something else.

If you guys can't work anything out, then kick him out of the group/project.
"Profitable, high flying startups like Facebook and Zynga don't bother going public anymore."

Um, Facebook and Zygna aren't startups anymore. Startup != privately-held company.
Is my description pretty accurate?
That'd require government control. Since there is no government agency that can forbid Facebook from trapping your data, Google is trying to use its position to do so. I think it's very fair.
"The only way to keep up is to simply get ‘er done." Agrrrrrreed.
I have no relation to this company, but I've always been very happy with my cards from 4by6 http://www.4by6.com/ (not covered in review)
Hmm, that's mainly to do with import/export though right? If its sitting in international waters (which it may or may not be) then that isn't you exporting it from the US. In fact, they sent the weapon outside the US themselves.

Also, maybe you wouldn't sell it outside of the US, but inside.

Wouldn't stopping me from just even simply owning this infringe my right to bear (massive) arms? :)
Speaking personally, this probably has to do more with resources (money, experience, people) and less with desire.
Steven Johnson TED talk: Where do good ideas come from? (video)
Making sure a PM on the product reads your blog post isn't about optimising the title and having buzzwords like graduate. Think about being in the PM's shoes and where you would be looking for coverage and posts and so on on your product.

Hint: Writing a cool, insightful blog post, teardown or even nifty mashup (youtube instant?) that appeals to both the HN community as well as being hand crafted to subliminally read 'Please hire me, Google' would more than get you noticed.

The premise in the main post is very sound. If you want a product job at Google, put yourself in the shoes and start thinking product.
Flowtown buys Who Should I Follow?; how to turn Twitter followers into customers
Are they going after 4chan itself? Or are they trying to find out who actually ran the DDoS? I'm not sure that the govt has a case to prosecute a website for what it's members do on thier own.
I'm a little confused about which elements here are true actually. Did he piece together pieces of factual history to create a plausible scenario? And if so, was there ever a flash mob that resulted in a riot which lead to 23 deaths?
In this case I'd opt for "clean" as a better word for what you're trying to describe.

I'd have thought everyone understands what a clean URL is without bringing across all the extra baggage/meaning of calling it RESTful.
how does it appear so?
Puzzle HN: 100 prisoners, 100 boxes...
There are 100 prisoners and a sadistic prison warden. The warden has 100 boxes labeled 1-100, in which he randomly distributes 100 pieces of paper. Each prisoner's name is written on one and only one piece of paper.

The warden says to the prisoners: "You may each open any 50 of these boxes that you choose. If all 100 of you find the box with your name in it, you may all go free. If any of you fail, you will be imprisoned forever." He tells the prisoners that they may agree on their strategy beforehand, but that he will choose them to enter the room in a random order, and they will not know anything about the previous prisoners' experiences ahead of time. They cannot move the paper around between boxes.

What are the best odds the prisoners can give themselves? (Hint: it's better than 1/2^100.)

Bonus question: in the limit as the number of prisoners goes to infinity (and correspondingly, the number of boxes), what value do the optimal odds approach?
I think that they are preventing long term problems with their business model and at the same time, in my humble opinion, preventing long term societal problems.
Expressed in greater detail here:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1891167
If Vietnam is not hard-core enough, you can try Iraq and Somalia.
The First Open Source enterprise diff framework released
I've been meaning to post my reading list for, maybe, 2 years now? I've never gotten it to a state where I'd consider it too helpful. Along with the list should come some comments on the books recommended: when to read them, how to use them, strengths/weaknesses i.e. rationale. It is silly to expect that someone will just go buy all the books you say and read them.

Basically I haven't posted mine so that the top-voted comment on my submission to HN doesn't read like this: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1889946 ;-) (which I upvoted and entirely agree with, by the way).
Here's the first patent they're complaining about:
http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sec...

So basically they patented the concept of www.customerdomain.com.cdndomain.com. How asinine is that.

I spend $35K/month with akamai and already have a meeting with Contendo setup for monday. Just forwarded this link along to my akamai rep with a snarky note.
Summary: A rocket engine is more powerful.
I tried breaking this captcha. Here are some experimental results and mathematics:

By applying the mathematics from the Birthday Attack (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birthday_attack), If an attacker is able to solve 15.8 million of the 180 million captchas, there will be a 50% probability that the attacker can beat the captcha.

I tried refreshing the page 10 times, generating a total of 100 captchas. Out of those, I observed 8 arithmetic problems which I entered into and solved using Wolfram Alpha. That gives roughly the 15.8m/180m necessary to break the captcha with 50% probability.

At 50% probability, again going back to the Birthday Attack mathematics, an attacker would need roughly 16.8 thousand tries before expecting a collision with one they could break.

This probability will increase if an attacker is able to successfully reverse-engineer more patterns.

Edit: thinking about this more after MichaelGG's comment, I think my math is incorrect. Either way, point still stands that Wolfram Alpha can successfully solve 8% of the captchas and other patterns should be solvable by other means too.
Thingd: The Super Ambitious, Low-Profile Red Hot Startup You’ve Never Heard Of
A Java language quirk
Abstract Expressionism was (in part) a covert CIA operation
Stealth YC Startup Hiring System Software Engineers
We are a well-funded-but-stealth YCombinator company solving a fundamentally fun and hard problem in the system software space.

There are two of us today and we're looking to hire Engineers #1 and 2 to help us expand and grow our business and product. Because of the nature of our product you will have the opportunity to work on both incredibly low-level and high-level problems. Because of the size of our team, you will be "CEO" of whatever you create.

You should be extremely detail-oriented and have a high bar for quality - for us, performance is crucial and errors cost lives (just kidding! maybe.)

This is a salaried full-time position with stock options and medical benefits (other benefits listed below). If you're curious and want to know more, shoot us an email at stealthycstartup@gmail.com.

========================================

Some fine print:

We really, really, want you to have a deep knowledge of:

* File Systems, Operating Systems

* Highly scalable server architectures

* Networking and Distributed Systems

* Databases background is a plus

Additionally, you should have:

* B.S, M.S, or Ph.D., in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or equivalent

* Expert knowledge of either C++ or Java (Shell scripting and Obj-C are a plus).

* Familiarity with the UNIX working environment

If you have any projects you've done on the side, we'd love to see them!

Benefits:

* Competitive salaries and stock options at an early stage startup

* Medical Benefits

* Free lunches, snacks, and a fridge fully stocked with BEvERages

* Build your dream development machine

* An XBOX 360 and Netflix

* Health insurance

* Working on University Avenue in Palo Alto (goes well with the free lunches ;)
I would also like to see any evidence you have for this claim.
The fact that Jobs wont be happy and act like a crybaby over this makes me smile.
I just wrote a long-ish hypothetical further up the thread.

And you know what? Maybe you're right. Maybe Google DOES understand this just fine. But I think the strong language they're using, the bombastic language of "fairness" and "protectionism", implies that they are taking a subtle, nuanced issue of data ownership and pretending it's binary.
Or more precisely, perhaps, the CIA used the art movement as part of their propaganda war against the Russians.
In the US there is probably a sharp difference.
Why is a universal translator so elusive?
I didn't know that the VC jobs were that hard to get.

I thought you could get into a job with a VC firm and learn from inside.

Not necessarily a VC job, but one where you're in contact with the business.

Or, you could get a VC or super-angel mentor.

I'm not looking to become one, but I was drawing from my father's experience on how he started his own company (he first learnt the ropes at another firm).
What does Zuck's level of personal awesome have to do with anything? This strikes me as a major confusion about the business/consumer relationship.

The answer is, "a lot". And there is no confusion.

I believe that Facebook's behavior stems from attitudes I dislike at the top. Believing this, I believe that they will continue to push the boundary. You're right that they need to find the right balance between openness and privacy. However the corporate DNA looks to me like they consistently err on the side of openness for profit.

Worse yet, the corporate belief seems to be that while people will moan, they will accept continued encroachment on privacy. As someone who has things that I really need to keep private, I don't trust that and don't want my information there.

As for Google's social ventures, I have nothing to do with that and know little about it. If Google starts doing the sorts of things that I see Facebook doing, then I'll readjust my thinking about Google. Companies do change. In the meantime I have my preferences.