skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
And a couple of other related links:

Commentary on the compromise: http://thenextweb.com/media/2010/12/12/gawker-media-is-compr...

Gawkers official statement:http://gawker.com/5712615/commenting-accounts-compromised-++...
If the order of elements isn't important (fairly common) then you can do even better than invalidation - just swap the element you want deleted with the element on the end, and pop it off.

Of course, you have to be a little careful - if you're doing a `remove_if` loop, you have to remember to process the element that used to be on the end, and you need to make sure you don't iterate past the end of the (now shorter) array.

As for insertions in the middle, a vector may still be better than a linked list. If the vector is short you could win on that alone, but even if it's long it can be worth it.

Consider that the program you're writing probably doesn't consist entirely of middle-insertions into these data structures. If you iterate over those data structures with the same frequency as you insert into the middle, you're never not going to be O(n) there. The O(n) + O(1) = O(n) of the linked list iterate/insert may well be far slower than the O(n) + O(n) = O(n) of the vector iterate/insert for any n.

(And with binary search, your O(log n) + O(n) = O(n) may be faster again...)
Some percentage of developers do choose Javascript among multiple choices:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JavaScript#Uses_outside_web_pag...
Jorge this is a fair point. However, over time I have to believe that the shift to post-industrial will create more jobs. You're right that this doesn't absorb anything close to 10% in the short or medium term.

Also, I wasn't arguing in my post that this was a solution to 10%; just that in my world and sector there's lots of jobs despite this big unemployment number. And we need more technical literacy (not just programming skills as some commenters have misinterpreted) throughout our education system.

For example, every business class I took as recently as 2003 involved products in boxes and shipping.
There's a small amount of legitimate drain for US communication companies: the US's long-tail of users (for getting any / fast access) is extremely long because people are so much more widely distributed than in Europe / Japan. China tends to go all or nothing, it seems, so they simply cut off their tail.

But yes. We're getting screwed. Because we keep paying for it. How could enough people boycott it to actually force a change?
One place where this is the case is when developing Kindle apps using the SDK. From https://kdk.amazon.com/:

"Active content applications that are smaller than 1MB and use less than 100KB/user/month of wireless data may be offered at no charge"

How apps are priced takes into account their data usage over their lifespan.
I think it would be enough to jumpstart the process if one service that already reliably trades virtual currency for money (say, EVE) were to start accepting bitcoins for the purchase of said virtual currency.
Can we get filters like this for the official RSS feed?
There really is a huge difference between working in person with someone and working remotely. I've seen misunderstandings that could waste literally weeks of programmer time get corrected by a 15-minute pair-programming session.

It doesn't really surprise me that ex-Googlers would insist you work in person. As a large multinational, Google feels the pain of distributed teams more than many companies, which is probably why they're founding their startup. It'd probably sink their startup if one of their key employees was not working in person with them.
I don't think it is quite as "geeked-out" since the movies. I think an awful lot more people would now recognise the script (albeit having no idea what Tengwar is) - TeX itself is probably more "geeky" now :)
how does that work with RSS ? I never see the main page...
This may or may not be possible, depending on certain factors.

First, assume that this would cause a paradox, basically, an exception of type CausalityFailException.

If the universe has runtime checking, you go back in time, eliminate Howard, all those people, and then they never existed, your motivation never existed, and you can't have gone back in time. Basically, the stack of history is now in an unknown state and calculating the state of the universe causes the temporal stack to overflow.

XX/YY/ZZZZ AA:BB:CC ERROR: Exception thrown: "Unknown Timepoint" CAUSED BY:
XX/YY/ZZZZ AA:BB:CC Nested Exception: "TemporalStackOverflow" CAUSED BY:
XX/YY/ZZZZ AA:BB:CC Nested Exception: "CausalityFailException" CAUSED BY: yummyfajitas:1234224578783

IF, however, the universe had compile-time checking, you'd get a simple, much cleaner
13/12/2010 09:43:23 ERROR: Cannot compile module "yummyfajitas-timetravel" - Method "EliminateTheFuckwits" has uncaught Temporal Side-Effects.

This leads us to believe that any language which can do compile-time checking is necessarily better for debugging, quality, and universe stability.

(In other words: God used Scala.)
Your anger is well-placed. As far as I've ever understood it, the patent was used to ensure a competitive advantage against its competitors during the era when Amazon was promoting itself as the world's biggest bookstore.

11 years out, Amazon is the world's biggest a-lot-of-things. IANAL but at some point this is just stifling innovation, pure and simple. 1-click was licensed to Apple 10 years ago, and this arrangement doesn't seem to have threatened Amazon's market situation.

The real goal of my post is the hope that the right people will see is, so that we can start a process of change in terms of how (and why) they lock this IP down.
Is this based on a music hackday project?
Actually, I was talking more about graphic design than web design per se. As programmers, we mostly know where to put stuff, my problem is when it comes to "prettifying" it for simple projects where it might not be cost-effective to hire a designer.
I'm a big believer in self-study and self-training. Meetups, books, on-line study - I've personally done it all.

With that said, schooling at all levels, even when liber arts and fundamental, prepares people for the world they will work in. At the most basic level, writing and math prepare students for the workforce.

I'm simply arguing that we swap out a lot of industrial and unnecessary coursework (i.e. Latin) for technical thinking, examples, and coursework.
AP CS is heinous, yes.

I disagree with the rest, though. I would agree if I thought the other classes were worthwhile, but about 70% of my junior high and high school was filler at best. At least if there had been programming classes I could have taken those instead of truly pointless stuff like the JV girls volleyball coach teaching "social studies" via VHS tapes.
Colin Bartlett? ;-) Evan Light here, BTW.

There are definitely Rails consulting gigs out there. Engaging consultants is what startups tend to have to do when they can't find hires.

Marketing, for any consultant, is of prime importance. You have to find the work to get paid to do the work. ;-)
Ask HN: chances Apple buys a cell carrier in 2011?
Chance to vertically integrate and capital intensive. Seems to make some sense. Is it crazy?
Perhaps the problem was a poor balance between experienced and novice developers. I wouldn't expect a company with hardly any experienced people to succeed.
Excellent point, but it shouldn't impact an A/B test. Specifically, the experimental and control users should be equally drawn to look at the deactivation page.

However, this could give a false impression of improvement if you just look at the data before and after the launch. It's a good reason to also look at the total number of deactivations / visits to the deactivation page.
If you are interested in learning more actual logic, and scientific reasoning, I suggest Bad Science by Ben Goldacre, a book about pseudoscience. The author explains some flaws in some bad science in popular culture, and by learning from him you can learn how to critique bad logic.
Are iPhones and Blackberries becoming extensions of our thinking selves?
I agree with this, and think RIM sort of 'won' the smartphone throne without understanding good enough why.

One can see that they don't understand themselves by what appears to me as an attempt to out-Apple Apple, or as you say, trying to make the best iPhone -- a very silly proposition if one understands how deeply Apple's way of operating is embedded in its culture. The same thing, crucially, is going on with marketing. At least it would seem the PlayBook is aimed at business -- one right, if probably inevitable, choice for them.

They need to figure out what made them able to make the BlackBerry a success and then use the same craft to develop their game further. You can't grow wings overnight if you're a fish. My BB-toting friend is always speaking of the BB's intuitiveness and speed for what he does. Is touchscreen really a good choice for that? It seems silly that RIM would squander their assets for something new without first being totally sure that their new 'thing' is better.

In fact, in that matter I think Nokia might be doing slightly better with their transition Symbian-Symbian touch-Meego (anyone with an educated opinion on that one?).
That's why (for now at least) I'm not making it too easy to. It would be trivial to add a threshold field in the profile and use that as a cutoff when generating the frontpage for each user, but since I'm not sure I want encourage this, I haven't yet.

The whole thing is just an experiment.
I think your points are fair. However, I see lots of practical coursework at even purely liberal arts school. Architecture, accounting, chemistry, etc. all have direct and practical learnings.

Why not just try to inject a little tech and software thinking into the economics, marketing, sales-oriented, and management classes taught both undergraduate and graduate.

And why not teach code, as a way of learning to learn, in middle and high schools?
Interestingly (maybe ironically?) it was reading about your success w/ GOOL and GOAL that turned me onto lisp! Are you using ruby for game development?
Having worked at two startups that died either because they could never attract skilled senior engineers or because they lost them, I think the number is quite large.

There're lots of ways for a startup to die and relatively few for it to succeed. The value of having a skilled senior engineer (or "rockstar ninja" as you put it, though that term has connotations that don't really describe the type of early engineers you want) is that they can see many of those failure modes ahead of time and avoid them. And when they do end up in a dead-end, they can quickly backtrack and fix the problem instead of wondering "what do we do now?"
While I agree with some of your other points I can't fathom how a rational person could choose to not live/work somewhere because a few percentage points of the city's occupants are "wall street jackasses".

You're going to let other people make your living decisions for you?
Check out the FAQ - I think if you create an account the tailor the news to your tastes based on what you've listened to in the past.
This has probably been suggested before, but can we just get rid of the points display (story, comment, & user) altogether? The automated sorting on this data has always been enough for me, and I can't think of a reason why any of us needs to know the exact point total of any of these things (except maybe karma).

I suppose there are some out there that would like to know an individual user's karma as a quick indicator of worthiness for X. Aside from this I'd be thrilled to see the number games and measuring sticks go away.
SUP DAWG, WE HEARD YOU LIKE JAVA, SO WE PUT JAVA IN YO JAVA SO YOU CAN EXECUTE JAVA WHILE YOU EXECUTE JAVA
I love those tasks, and they area big part of my job. I guess everyone has their own definition of boiler room.
I didn't want to give the full categorical definition in terms of what a monoidal category allows, because I don't think that adds much, but I suppose I flubbed making it simpler. I just wanted to make the point that the monoidal portion determines how the composition occurs -- a given type constructor can be a monad multiple ways.
I spent a few days earlier this week adding hoops to a checkout process to avoid infringing on this. Previous devs had naively implemented something they thought made sense & made things easier for the customer. Foolish fools!

Still makes me angry that they got away with this.
Silicon Valley is a lot closer to New York than it is to Asia.
More importantly at this stage: is the interested executive thinking it'll be a neat solution to a little problem of theirs, or is it someone with ties to senior decision makers considering it to be something that could make a big difference across multiple divisions of the business?
If it's the former then you're quite possibly looking at more like $1-10k. If it's the latter then set your sights higher but expect it to take a long time.

The bad news is that just because a company makes $10bn in revenue doesn't mean your product is necessarily worth any more to them than it is to a company generating <£1 million, especially if it's only loosely linked to revenue or closely substituted for by alternatives. Where big companies do pay more it's usually because the scale of the solution being offered is much bigger.

Are there logical units/brackets related to your product offering (per licensed user, per store, per product, per client, per purchase, per click, % revenue generated)? If so, what sort of bracket or average number of users does a smaller client use, and how much do you charge them for it? If it's easy to charge directly per unit, do that. If it isn't, you'll have to gauge expected usage (by asking the client) and give yourself scope to renegotiate at the end of the billing period (preferably six months to a year) if they underestimate. They'll also expect a volume discount compared with smaller companies in lower brackets, but how much they get really ought to depend on two things:
(i) marginal costs to you - how much does each additional user/product etc cost to you in terms of support time, computer resources, transaction fees etc.
(ii) marginal benefit to them - will they get the additional value from having it for every salesperson/customer/product or is it something where the benefit is automatically companywide and most extra licenses/options are just a nice-to-have
Google might be working on a price index like that - http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/deeb985e-d55f-11df-8e86-00144feabd...
And I'm one of them -- except that I still want my work to be fun.

I got fired up enough about this topic that I wrote more on the matter here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1998515
Having recently been researching this, while I agree that there's a blatant truth in advertising problem there, T-Mobile do seem rather better than average. If I go over the quota on O2 (for example), I get a bill. If I go over quota on T-Mobile, I get my speed cut down below a level where I can use multimedia services.
That would be an interesting kind of conservation-minded business: just small enough. Why have a 20 person company doing a variety of things mediocre than a 5 person company doing one or a few things very well? There are larger scale versions of this in the AAA game developer world as the studio model has taken hold.
I have been teaching the same to myself. So far, I have learned:

- how to do low def wireframes (mokingbird, balsamiq, etc)

- from wireframes to psd files (fireworks, photoshop, etc)/

- learn how to slice a psd to css.

What to learn:

- UI/UX Desing Patterns [1]

- Css Positioning [2]

- Grid Systems [3], [4]

[1] http://developer.yahoo.com/ypatterns/about/libraries.html

[2] http://www.alistapart.com/articles/css-positioning-101/

[3] http://960.gs

[4] http://www.dexigner.com/news/22052
Responding to previous comments, I would advise against using an Indian firm for a startup. I think overseas firms can do well when assigned routine work, like putting in a CMS where all the requirements are straightforward, or handling inventory and accounting. For exceptional circumstances (which is what a startup faces) you want people who can meet everyday in the same room.

Geographical distance is a major problem for small startups.

I worked on a project last year where the project manager was thrilled at the idea that he could hire Indian programmers for $10 an hour. I was in New York City, we had another programmer in North Carolina and another in Europe. The "CEO" was an investor who attended meetings 2 or 3 times a month. The project manager was basically the CEO, but he had no real power, since everything needed to be decided by the CEO. Myself and the project manager would have 3 hour conversations and decide on something, but then need to explain it to the CEO, whom we only saw a few times a month.

The project went nowhere.

From this, I conclude, it is best to have small team working in the same room, when doing a startup.

The team in India was unusually bad. Every time they committed code to Subversion, something broke and I would have to fix it.
There you go. I didn't say you should do this, I'm just saying it explains the two complaints in the article:

* Nobody to hire
* No jobs
Indeed. Which is why, for my part, I consult now instead of work directly for startups. Having been employed by 2 failed startups was enough for me.
Well sure, but they shouldn't have to. That's why it's called "entry level." I've never heard of entry-level management or team leads!
It was, but that's ultimately the problem with hiring novices. We had a couple senior engineers. Most of their time was spent mentoring novices. Startups are cognitively demanding enough to take a highly-skilled engineers full attention. If the bulk of their time is spent managing, who's writing the code? You end up with a bunch of novices who gain a lot of experience, and a bunch of code that's crap.

If you have to hire the senior engineers anyway, why not hire only the senior engineers, at least in the early stages of the company? They'll be able to get actual work done, you'll have a decent codebase, and you might actually be able to ship a product that can get you additional funding and revenue. Then, once you've taken care of the money problem and the startup is no longer fighting for its life, you can hire some junior devs to flesh out the product and exploit market opportunities that you didn't have the resources to explore in the startup phase.
I used it for years. I had a "shop" page where each button went directly to the payment provider (with the appropriate details). This was the most basic way to make purchases years ago. The payment providers used this method in its examples. You still come across sites doing it this way, here and there.

The patent is beyond ridiculous. I doubt it would hold outside the US. (I'm not in the US, but I use some US-based service providers.) But I guess someone, sometime will have to go through the process of knocking this patent down, such is the madness that the patent process has become.
True. But you're not accounting for the time it takes to hire a programmer that is 5-10x more productive.
Need a 50% builder/co-founder for web2.0 prod w/ 60b+ domestic market. Ask?s.
Their entire database was stolen. So you should change your password to be safe.
How do I make my mark?
Its a rhetorical question.

I want to state something to the HN community who I think shares the same interest in people who inspire and break ground in almost anything they do.

I watched the Charlie Rose interview with Jay-Z yesterday (http://www.charlierose.com/view/interview/1211). If you like rap or not you've got to hand it this guy. He started selling crack then became one of the most successful rap artist/entrepreneurs in history. I just can't get enough of these life stories. Game Changers (http://www.bloomberg.com/tv/shows/game-changers/) is another show on Bloomberg which has had episodes about Steve Jobs, Larry Ellison, the Google founders, and Mark Zuckerberg.

Now each time I see these inspirational stories I feel amazing! I feel great for them and I think its a reflection on all of us, of who we are as a species. Humanity is capable of amazing things and its successes are a celebration of life. We should all share in these inspirational stories as if they were our own.

On the flip side, I also yearn to be an inspirational story to others. I often ask myself, 'How can I change the world?' How can I make my mark? The feelings to do so are so strong in me that it makes me sad that life might pass me by without ever doing so.

Does anyone else ever feel like this?
So far, on Hacker News, the conversation has focused on hiring programmers, but the original article is broader than that:

"Despite all this unemployment, every startup I know needs to hire not only engineers, but also sales and operations team members. And this is not just bubble seed startup dollars at work."

In 2008 I tried to find a good marketer to work with a client of mine. This is a difficult task. There are many people who claim they understand online marketing. Finding anyone who is any good is very difficult. The noise to signal ratio is amazing.

Likewise when it comes to fundraising, pitching to investors, etc. It is tough to find the few people who are good.

Possibly part of the problem is that, even in this economy, the folks who are truly good are making really good money and don't want to invest time with a startup.

No doubt there are many folks out there who will one day prove their talent but they have not yet had the chance. The question then becomes, how to find them?
Density plays a big role in the cost of the last mile deployment. In urban Japan you can reach thousands of customers in a square mile as compared to a few hundred (or less) in typical suburban America.

Though that still doesn't account for places like New York costing just as much.
Mako's also on the board of the FSF and the Wikimedia foundation.
Given a large enough sample of random noise, you can find any finite pattern in it, akin to the infinite monkey theorem. The human mind is biased toward patterns.
I've also noticed this. Seemed to be between September-November to me. Links fly off of the first page of /new a lot quicker than before and I've seen a lot of good ones get no further than 2 or 3 points - it's a crapshoot when you submit something now. I've also had a lot more people contact me with "check out this post" type stuff.
Apple iTunes credits Amazon in their patent credits section: http://grab.by/7RGo
You'll probably have to read a book. The design discipline, for all it's pretensions at least admits that 'Hello World' is a fallacy.

Visual design works by playing on emotions, perception and psychology. There is no simple reducible formula that governs what people find engaging and attractive.

I'd suggest starting with 'Universal Principles of Design', it's written in a very easy to digest manner, but isn't dumbed down. Then move on to 'Grid Systems in Graphic Design'.

These two should give you enough grounding to 'prettify' for simple projects.
Also: no evidence of Pop Tarts either.
Thanks and I'm from Atlanta so while I'm decidedly southern I also like to have a city to be in.
It was more like, "Dang, Perl users. How do you manage to get anything done with that rotting fish-head of a language? Check out what we have over here in civilization!"

... which is ironic for students of language design who realize that none of (for example) Ruby, Python, and PHP get lexical scoping anything close to correct, that none of them do object systems particularly well, none of them do an extension system particularly well, and only Python comes close to the amount of available and accurate documentation or the robust test coverage of the language and its features.

You can discount a lot of the rest of the criticism as "I didn't bother to learn what makes the language unique before writing a bunch of awful code" and "I don't like sigils but am embarrassed to sound that much a snob."