skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't think logic means what you think it does.

Logic is about using deductions to reason about a thing. For example, in sudoku, "If I write a 5 in this cell then the column will contain two 5s. Therefore, this cell can't contain a 5."

Completing sequences of numbers like:

Q: What comes next? 2,3,5,7,11,...

A: 13, it's a list of primes

isn't about logical deduction at all. If anything it's about inference, but I'm probably classify it under pattern matching or something similar. In some sense these problems are meaningless. You could also answer the previous question with

A: -302, the list is the sequence {2,3,5,7,11,-302,5903,pi,....}

and no one can argue with your claim beyond "That's not what I/the author had in mind."

To get better at such things you just need to collect examples. Maybe look at http://oeis.org/Seis.html
I don't really follow - the hamgurger wont be free tomorrow, it will be mouldy tomorrow and you'll be more hungry.

The film may be free but it will be "old", and the app may have a free clone but people (businesses) still pay for old proprietary software now instead of free clones.
Most (if not all) cell providers that allow SMS to other phones will also allow SMS to e-mail addresses. Back in the day I wrote a news/movies app (before Google released their GOOG SMS service) that received an email with a query, parsed through the mail spool and sent off a reply. Worked pretty well.
It could be, but it often isn't. One could imagine someone arguing against open source software, saying there isn't enough interest or talent to maintain all of the open source projects in existence. I think the article we're commenting on was written in response to that argument.

I agree with you about proprietary software, but that model is rarely attacked in the way open source and free software is.
Ask HN: How do you come up with a good startup idea?
I've been trying to unravel the process of coming up with an idea for a startup for a couple of weeks now but to no luck. Sure I have some ideas, but they're not targetted enough for my first startup.

I've read Paul Graham's essays and have lurked around here a little for the past few months as well. Technology wise, I'm ready to go. Coding it wouldn't be the hard part, that'd just take time.

Ive tried coming up with organic ideas but they don't seem to be quite good enough yet. Ive tried actively thinking up ideas but thy just isn't working.

Does anyone have advice for finding a startup idea?
"You're safe if any of the following is true: ... The build date is Friday 10th December 2010 or later; "

I find it hard to believe that simply recompiling old broken code will magically fix it.
Anyone notice how the author's picture is around 2.69 MB?
Then again, you should probably be careful of someone described as 50% hair! :)
Since you ask, personal opinion only ...

Articles without links have a penalty applied. This site is about finding cool stuff, not about musing over the site itself. If it isn't a link to somewhere else then it's less likely (although not certain) to fall strictly in line with the site's original intent.

Yes, it's a valid point to raise, but a better way to raise it would be to write a proper article, discussing the issue, proposing possible solutions, weighing their merits, then making specific suggestions, and finally, submitting a link to the item to wrote. This is much to be preferred over just complaining.
What defines a professional or amateur, though? If you define a professional as someone that contributes to software as part of their paid work (and an amateur as anyone else), then Linux and GCC were both begun by amateurs, and are now maintained partly by professionals. Likewise, many projects are begun by professionals and receive contributions from amateurs.
Between increasingly repressive governments, a deep financial crisis that is in it's third year and nowhere near being solved, peak oil and a southeast asia that could turn very ugly if the wrong events happen - I certainly don't want an exciting decade. I want a really boring one where as little as possible happens.
The bottom line is while all the debate about how to improve Javascript is going on, all the while with no real changes coming to all browsers (I'm looking at you, IE), Jeremy went ahead and shipped something that's great that you can use now. As usual, the people who ship will win. Good luck with all the wrangling of the big vendors to change a tiny bit of syntax, I'll be happily sitting here writing CoffeeScript today.

All that's missing is a layer of tooling in modern browsers (Chrome, FF) that make it so you can look at CoffeeScript as if it were in the browser, and the abstraction would be pretty complete. You'll still have to precompile the stuff on your server, which sucks, but practically speaking we're not talking about anything that can't be clean and easy to use without appropriate tools. Generally speaking client side code is short and sweet, so running your system in development mode where the script compiles on the client and doing a full compile server side for production mode isn't that far off from doing a debug vs release build in the world of native apps.
Wow, really? I've been pondering whether I should get off linode and try out vps.net due to the elastic scaling they have (burstable memory, etc), but damn, they're this bad?
what, no love for bogosort?
Look into abstract algebra. Often those types of problems need to be solved by forgetting any assumptions you make and focusing solely on the information given. Being able to work in an abstract ring or group requires that ability.
Yeah, never arbitrage the arbitrageurs; they won't stand for it.
Out of interest, what would this mean if I don't have a Facebook account but my friend posts a picture of me?
This is a great comment and I guess it's good advice, but doubling vectors have never caused a problem for me, I profile, and I've had them dealing with data sets like "each side of every TCP connection traversing 1/8th of an entire tier 1 ISP backbone".

I'll steal the Python trick, because it's neat, but I don't think worrying about your resize function is a good reason to procrastinate moving away from linked lists, which are mostly evil.
Why should they? Companies have every right to choose their own business model.
Thanks- I am doing that right now +1
There's plenty of new stuff on here all the time. Get an rss reader and scan through titles. Makes it easier to filter the repeats.
Oh, that's a clever solution. Thanks.
the hive mind is an interesting beast! just wonder how many more people will become involved now there is the javascript version, no installing anything, just pushing a button on a website? and how many of those could end up v& (picked up by the feds...)

(edit)
looks like ALL European amazon sites are down too.
Hmmm, I think the dreamhost guy gave a pretty good explanation. Thanks for that. But he seems to be getting downmodded (downmod if he's wrong; not if you disagree).

Yes, it's subjective ("doesn't require us to upgrade infra just for you"), but so what? If you want hard numbers, go with the ones which advertise hard limits.
Anti-Trojan Elite 5.2.5 + rus
Can you? I looked for it but couldn't find it on the Market. (EDIT: Found it on the site). As for the browser being bundled in the OS, it's probably both, since users will need a good browser (which webkit is), but they can install their own if necessary (although we know how likely that is to happen).

I hope we could do the best of both worlds and make the browser a separate app that got updates from the market, like Maps, Gmail, etc, but still run webkit.
I don't know. I think the key is just knowing how to prioritize. Sometimes it makes sense to go deep, especially if the problem is causing a lot of expense. Other times it's important to work on other problems.

Right now we're refactoring our codebase from one language/framework to another. Identifying which parts are still maintained and need the refactor vs. which parts would be a waste of time because a developer hasn't touched it in years is important.

This is especially important if you're one of few/sole engineers on a project.
Ask HN:  Raising the cost of your product?
I've been selling my SaaS solution for the past 5 years at the same cost. We have some clients that are amazed at what they are getting for the price, and not a single complaint that it costs to much .. but would this be a reliable indication that we can raise the cost without p*ssing our clients off?

If anyone has been though this, what strategies did you use when increasing your prices? How did it go down with your clients? etc.
You've lurked for the past few months? Have you read these:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1974726 - 6 days ago, 27 comments

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1750877 - 71 days ago, 35 comments

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1916801 - 25 days ago, 32 comments

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1870456 - 38 days ago, 1 comment

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1796372 - 57 days ago, entire blog post.

You're asking the same question that's been asked a dozen times. Have you read the previous replies?

Try reading these:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1996830

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1994998

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1360665

If you're serious about a startup then one thing you'll need is hard work, lots of time, and dedication. Start by showing some of those qualities. Read the above advice, find more, then summarise it properly. ON the way, ask yourself what you're finding annoying, awkward, tedious or painful.

There's your idea - solve that problem.
This is only true for SBCL on Linux, isn't it?
Top 3 Code Editors For the iPad
Kinect hacked to control a mouse in Mac OS X
he was a cool dude
Idea #31: Award badges to businesses instead of ratings
Well, I havent had any successes yet, but here is how I come up with mist of my ideas- by mis-understanding an existing product or service, and thinking, wow that's a great idea. When I finally realize how the product works, i think "my way was better".
This isn't something you can just make happen, but reading about as many great ideas as possible helps.
* the hamgurger wont be free tomorrow, it will be mouldy tomorrow and you'll be more hungry.

The price for that particular hamburger will be $0 once it's mouldy. It only reaches $0 when nobody will pay anything for it so it never actually reaches $0. Now imagine McDonald's developed technology that could produce a million hamburgers per second really cheaply. I imagine the price of hamburgers would become practically $0. This is essentially what's happening to most aspects of our technology, information, and digital goods.

* The film may be free but it will be "old", and the app may have a free clone but people (businesses) still pay for old proprietary software now instead of free clones.

It's not that it instantly drops to $0. It's deflation, the price decays over time. The longer a film is easily available on the internet, or the longer a "good-enough" free app is out the more the price of the film and app fall. The pace of this deflation is increasing as technology makes it easier and cheaper to produce and distribute digital goods.
Rock-paper-scissors-lizard-spock
The End of a Decade
Pricing Strategies:
1. Cost plus: What it cost you plus profit margin. Bad idea in software

2. Multiple of annual demonstrated savings for client: How many people save how many hours per year? How much do they get paid? If you connect customers to the client what does this mean to the bottom-line of your client? Repeat purchases? You need to be able to justify the price with an ROI calculation.

3. Delight: Hard to measure. Are customers so excited by the new connection that they talk about it? Does it become a part of marketing?

From your terse description it looks like you are doing something that is 'marketing.' Marketing is very hard to measure and while people may be willing to test new things out, to get repeat customers you will need to be able to demonstrate measurable value.

Other factors:
1. If this is your first client don't sweat optimizing the price. You can charges others more later. A reasonable price will allow you to get the deal done quicker and get a satisfied customer who will recommend you to others
2. Remember to ensure that the contract stipulates that the price cannot be disclosed to others

best of luck!
Actually, it's been even longer than 25 years.

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=2550902895914120566#

But I'll be patient.
you didn't really follow the history of lisp did you? Plz at least go to wikipedia befor you write something.
It's stretched?

That is very different from saying, as you did above, that "This quote is completely fabricated." (it also wasn't a quote).

I'm not trying to start a flame war here. I like you (and the rest of Twilio) quite a bit. I admired what you said and the goal it represented: Focus on and attack a different market from a different angle than we are. Build on your strengths and acknowledge your weaknesses. I wish more companies would do that. No company can be good at everything.

You did say something very similar to what Diggz referenced (not "quoted"). Then you accused him of outright lying. That's just not cool at all.
I second that. Also you may find this helpful
http://projecteureka.org
They make you pay extra for an unmetered gigabit port, so it seems reasonable that you should be able to use more than the standard bandwidth allocation if you pay for more and if you don't you should be able to use the standard package.
> Except that it's the exact opposite

You're wrong. GPL makes you free like human rights do: You are free to do whatever you want as long as you don't step on other people freedom. With the GPL, you can do whatever you want with the software except prohibiting users to do whatever they want with the software, with BSD you can do whatever you want with the software including prohibiting users to do what they want.

GPL promotes freedom, BSD does not.
Thanks to another HN comment, I recently purchased the book Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation in order to answer just such a question. I'll leave that recommendation there, but I will admit that I haven't yet had a chance to crack the book--been too busy on my December project. I figure that's a pretty good excuse though, so I'm letting myself off the hook for awhile.

The most common and useful answer I've ever gotten for this type of a question is to simply find the smallest possible problem that you could solve, and solve it. I personally find it easiest to solve a problem from which I am suffering. This has a couple nice advantages, primarily that I can usually tell if I solved the problem sufficiently or not, and also if it flops, at least I've saved myself some trouble.

I launched http://sleepyti.me on November 8th because I personally always wake up tired. I didn't really expect much out of it, but I'm averaging about 10k visitors per day and between $15-$20 in Adsense revenue per day. Maybe not "successful startup" money, but for a free webapp that only took me a few days to write up (and only costs $20/month to host on Linode, along with all my other sites/shells), I consider it a pretty big success.

I don't think that there's a secret that can foster brilliant, successful ideas, otherwise we'd all use it and be billionaires. For me anyway, it's just the tried and true combination of persistence and solving problems.

Good luck!
Anecdotally, I can recall exactly how to manoeuvre the TSS register in real mode to successfully boot a VMM guest but I couldn't for the life of me recall how to make a speckled background in CSS.

Asymptotically there's no such thing as a systems programmer but that's not really how the real world works.
Most Twitter Accountholders Rarely Tweet -- Twitter -- InformationWeek
Seems like there are lots of people hiring employees but not Rails contractors right now!? :(
Brendan opened a Firefox ticket this morning to make line-number mapping possible, and that's really the biggest outstanding issue for debugging, since the semantics are otherwise one-to-one. In fact, it would make <script type="text/coffeescript"> tags a lot more fun to work with than they already are, since debugging through an "eval" would be far less painful if exceptions pointed back to the proper position in the original source.

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=618650
Another suggestion, which is something I have done- take your best idea that you have right now, no matter how bad it is, and start building it. Don't spend much money on it. It might turn out to be a great idea, but more likely that project will spin off more 'great' ideas than you have time to pursue.

Start doing something, even if it's stupid, and the ideas will start flowing n
Show HN: Wrench, a library for handling recursive operations in Node.js
The Future According to Tim O'Reilly
I was wondering the ame thing. If I were to start youtube on 100tb, would I be blacklisted too?
Yes I saw that it was posted before and reposted based on some recent sorting articles because it is so helpful. It is like Asimov's 'The Last Question' and 'How Software Companies Die' and others because it is very interesting.

An interesting static visualization from the other threads is here : http://www.hatfulofhollow.com/posts/code/visualisingsorting/...

I think seeing the timing and sorting in action is so helpful to understand what is going on.
> They aren't meant to detect explosives.

Yes, they are.

http://www.tsa.gov/approach/tech/ait/faqs.shtm

> Advanced imaging technology safely screens passengers for both metallic and non-metallic threats, including weapons and explosives, which may be concealed under a passengers’ clothing without physical contact to keep the traveling public secure.
The best tip I've been given for practice is to actually sit with a piece of paper and write out your thought process whilst solving these little problems.

It's feels a bit laborious at first, but I find it makes for much more effective practice than getting to the answer in a roundabout way, and not really knowing how you get there.

As in hackerblues' comment, sitting and explicitly writing: "If I write a 5 in this cell then the column will contain two 5s. Therefore, this cell can't contain a 5." is more effective than bumbling around and just getting it right, particularly when practicing with simple examples.
Exactly this. I had a brief foray into this. A mentor of mine had taken over the reigns for the mobile division of a large publisher. He asked me to work on a few titles for them, and I gladly did. It sounded fun.

He was great (and remains a mentor and friend), but my GOD was the larger legal department a nightmare. They attempted to put 100% of the risk on to me. I lasted about 3 weeks before I had to tell my friend that his company was insane, and they weren't budging. Unfortunately, even as a high level executive, there wasn't much he could do.

Thus ended my brief career as a freelance game developer:)
http://www.amazon.com/How-Solve-Heuristics-Zbigniew-Michalew...

That book will help you on your journey.
yes. seems like everyone is co-opting the definition based on what they WANT it to mean, and thus being intolerant of the fact that everyone has their own pre/mis-conceived notion of "hacker". hence, knots in the panties from the "that's not a knife; this is a knife" crowd.

(apologies for my poor aussie accent)
Fair enough. But if it takes 4 hours to figure out how to write these two lines of code, something's wrong. Documentation, complicated and confusing API, hard onramp to get started...

Our goal is to get a developer who knows nothing about telephony from signup to making their first phone calls and text messages in under 5 minutes.
The review is by Javascript library company Sencha. Who can talk about cross browser js compat than the company that has handful of JS libraries that are expected to work across browsers and devices?

The website on which the news was posted may have an Apple bias, but the reviewer doesn't.
For those interested, I wrote this up some time ago. I saw some people discussing their need for something like this on Twitter yesterday, which is why I figured I'd submit it.

Yes, you can just as easily jump it out to a console and execute a raw command or something, but if you want something more Node-tastic, here you go.
The bad guys already know this stuff, or are capable of searching teh G00gelz for l33t hackorz skriptz which will automate e.g. trying SQL injections or pulling cookies out of your wifi. The good guys, on the other hand, need all the help they can get (including, for example, being reminded that one can easily pull cookies out of your wifi).

In a related vein, there is WebGoat, a Java application which is designed to be compromised.
this is best idea, but I would suggest do something in an area you either have a lot of knowledge in or are passionate in. Because you will that find its very hard and difficult, and will probably not get an easy win.. so you have to be passionate about whatever it is you start doing, and just keep going. Keep reading about other startups, and try to form connections and ask yourself what is the next step .. not just what is hot now.
Previously submitted here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1997408

Subsequently killed.
Without knowing more, I'd guess that means they rebuilt the binary against a new version of some library.
Unauthorized access to computer systems is illegal on it's own and not because of any conflation with the word "hacker".
قيمزر
Careful about raising prices for existing clients. You don't want to seem like you're pulling a bait-and-switch.

That said, you might even get greater customer satisfaction if your existing users realize "hey, I'm getting a better deal than most people!" I'd raise the cost for new signups and maybe create incentives for existing users to refer new signups (if your service is in a field in which that makes sense).
I think you may be referring to the "rule following" paradox http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wittgenstein_on_Rules_and_Priva...
I agree. It would seem to me that if such organisms had such a big advantage in the wild they should have already evolved independently.
John Dawkins, Richard's Father, is dead
Of note in the documentary: a number of the disenfranchised wikileaks supporters have started working on http://openleaks.org
Sweet Jesus! Scientists have discovered gravity! In addition, to add insult to injury, as things get closer they only increase the gravity between them. Soon, the world will collapse into a swirling singularity if we don't take swift, immediate action. Refrain from forming crowds. Be cautious not to marry your dinner service. Only you can prevent black holes.

/sarcasm

The reasoning of this article is incredibly specious. There is no adequate evidence or inference that mirror cells would have any advantages over standard life forms. Isomers aren't incredibly divergent structures that nature fails to handle on a massive scale. Isometric molecules are a basic part of molecular life. Mirror cells would have the same biotic survivorship of the rest of the cells on the planet.

By synthesizing cells that use a proportion of molecules that have an inverse chirality to the majority of biotic life we're not exactly making cancer airborne and contagious.
I am not sure that Lisp not being mainstream is very much to do with Lisp at all, but much rather not being in the right place at the right time.

Would we really be having this conversation if Sun or Microsoft had promoted Lisp?
One thing that is implied is a strong understanding of who the users are and what they want from the product. I'm always encouraged to hear of large, influential companies talk about these sorts of things because I hope that these practices become more standard. Understanding users rather than guessing at what they want and measuring the effects of changes made seem to be obvious, but I'm always surprised at how often it isn't done.