skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Single page print version:
http://www.gq.com/news-politics/big-issues/201012/viral-me-s...
How are you planning on getting a motorhome across the Darien Gap?
Correct in my experience (I sometimes work with music, sometimes with silence). Deep insight needs silence: "You want to quiet the noise in your head to solidify that fragile germ of an idea" ->

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124535297048828601.html
"if they can dictate operational terms, they can dictate Cisco and Microsoft". They could just as well dictate Linux or Apache.

Except one of those scenarios I can believe happening, and the other won't.
Did Those Yahoo Layoffs Hit Early?
WTF, of course he is associated to anon: he wrote the freaking press release!?!
I listen to one particular song that I've found very mellow and repetitive (the album cut of DJ Shadow - What Does Your Soul Look Like [Part 4]). It helps remove outside noise and get me in the zone quicker.

I just stick it on repeat. It segues in and out to itself nicely too.

I was thinking about getting some other ambient music, but it can be hard to set up a good playlist.
To everyone wondering whether these teens wouldn't be tweeting much, here's a good link: http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-31749_162-20016059-10391698.html
From what I have observed, it seems to be a two-edged sword and can go either way, but a lot appears to depend upon how it is done. Some folks do appear to post it here primarily in hopes of getting a traffic spike. I imagine many of them are pretty disappointed because those posts tend to be boring and seem to not get much response. Others are obviously looking for feedback they couldn't get too many places. Those posts seem to generally go over better and accomplish more.
Cool, understood. Just keep in mind that most psychologists will tell you that you are (or you can be) by and large in full control of your personality traits and that these things can change dramatically through your life, either through your conscious decision or through environmental influences.

So to make a determination over why you are the way you are based on how you perceive yourself in terms of a personality trait category that (Jung or not) is related to the Psychology of Types is doing a bit of that self-fulfilling prophecy.

There's nothing wrong with preferring to keep to yourself and socialize less frequently, but perhaps it would be wise to rule out other hypotheses (like, really really convince yourself that there's not something else bothering you in life). That's as far as I can speculate, because although I might claim you might not be consciously aware of the whole story, I am even less aware, it's just a pattern that I noticed with some friends and some of them, years later, refer to those periods as periods of depression, some of them even talked to a good psychologist about it.
Because HN readers aren't his target audience. Most people have no idea where to go to register a domain or host a site or how to evaluate different options.

Instead they chose based upon what other people have chosen. That's why he asks those questions.
OpenCL is the most verbose, awkward monster I have ever seen. No exaggeration. The "Hello World" of GPGPU in OpenCL is over 100 lines long.

Use CUDA directly. Get access to new features as the chips ship and a much nicer interface. NVIDIA is so far ahead in terms of GPGPU it's worth the vendor lock-in.
If you read past the top dozen or so comments on Reddit, you get to the likely real explanation. The guy is (1) emptying his account every day, and (2) making unusual large oversees payments.

These are things that correlate pretty well with scammers, and that is probably why his account is being investigated.
Electric Composters Don’t Say “Holiday,” Where To Buy Green Tech Gifts Online
Microsoft squashes IE on Spoon
I am ill and bed-ridden right now otherwise I wouldn't have time to comment so much on HN or read reddit.

I am not sure your "real-world" social skills will improve through reading reddit. It takes real time investment and accepting that you will fumble, fail and make a lot of mistakes. HN people often talk about how domain expertise rarely transfer easily into another domain and here's a perfect example.
However, it would be useful for the higher-level logic - like a print function. You decompile calls to this function, no matter how the function works.
> If they do 'bad things' to you, you should consider switching to something more appropriate.

Well yeah, that's what I'm saying: there's some trust involved when dealing with companies, like will Oracle pull the plug on the platforms I'm building my business on? And it makes perfect sense to switch to something else in such a case.

So when Oracle acts a certain way, then backs away when in control forgetting their own complaints, how can you trust them after that?
Thanks for mentioning that. I scroll to the bottom of the book and got this for reference:
"The Cornell experiment was never documented and has thus taken on the status of hearsay evidence except for those of us who were there. For a concurring view of the effect of music on concentration, see Jaynes, 1976, pp. 367-68."
Indeed, all conjecture, zero substance. Once more: don't expect serious journalism from Fox News. Nevertheless, I can quite easily believe Teheran lacks the technical knowhow to defend themselves. And given the large number of involved parties (we were talking Siemens hardware), a clean room approach won't work either.
The little tasks you assigned to yourself to try and tackle at least the low hanging fruit are in a way core to the Cognitive Behavioral Therapy. CBT is the most often used form of psychotherapy not in small part due to its reported effectiveness. It's great to hear your story, thanks.
You're welcome! :D

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1525865

(may have been me)
I did it for fun for many years - had my work exhibited and in books, got to travel around the world, and met interesting people. Then it turned out I was doing it because my day job was so unsatisfying - as soon as I got a job at Google, my 'artistic' output dropped to zero.

However, the stuff I learned while doing it was invaluable - I maintain that the best designers can code, and the best type of code they can write is visual interface code - being able to clearly describe animated sequences in code (motion curves, costs of different effects) makes communicating your design that much easier, and helps you polish the working product to your exacting specifications.

Stop thinking of it as a career path, and more as a highly-useful method of expressing yourself, then let it take you where it takes you - the market for visual effects programming might be unpredictable, but the market for coders who have the drive to learn how to do anything in order to achieve a specific and detailed aim is huge.
Speaking from a recent interview: ask them if they'd be happy to maintain a highly visible deployment app for all the code in an investment bank using bash exclusively.

The role paid GBP 650+ a day. That's a thousand US dollars a day. Although the spec asked for python the guys doing the interviewing really didn't actually want anyone using anything the other members of the team didn't already know.
I think they were actually an excuse to get some affiliate links on the page.
Market-driven security is failing us. It's luck, not sound engineering, that is preventing catastrophe. I can respect that regulation would be even worse than catastrophe, but have a hard time dignifying the argument that there's no tradeoff.
Clockspot looks really nice and by the numbers quoted it sounds very successful.

I'm quite intrigued by how he arrived at the current pricing model. It looks like it's been through a few iterations and I'd be really interested to learn more about it.

Does anyone know if this has been discussed anywhere online?
I am struck by how much of that seems to echo http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html
I don't believe there's any banking regulations that require you to have virtually nonexistent customer service. If you're required to freeze someone's account, that's not your fault. If you refuse to even tell him what's going on and what he might be able to do to sort it out, that's your fault.

Similarly, your business-critical application might go down due to problems with your host. That doesn't mean you can just kick your feet back and laugh, "Oh, those hosting companies! Sure good I don't have any responsibility to anyone in this situation!" You need to apologize to customers, possibly issue refunds and harden your infrastructure so that you don't get extended downtime in the future. If you don't do all this, big surprise when your customers hate you.
But it can be time consuming. Back in college, a friend asked for some help with his homework in implementing a linked list. I did the whole Socratic method on him, and it took (from what I recall) about four hours for him to have his "aha" moment.

Sometimes it's just easier to say, "Oh, you want to support local variables in your compiler? Easy, just implement your symbol table this way and support for local variables will just fall out as a side effect."
> That means there is a lot of overhead for doing something simple like an in-place qsort

Well, the problem not so much that there is a lot of overhead for doing an in-place qsort. The problem is that "in-place" anything is impossible in Haskell, it violates referential transparency.

Merge sort however needs no in-place update and can trivially (in Haskell world) be parallelized (merge sort is associative, you can use it as the reduce step of MapReduce). So you are correct in concluding that mergesort is used in Haskell.

You state "something simple like an in-place qsort", your statement about qsort being simple makes some assumptions about your programming languages world, which are not the same for all languages especially not Haskell. No whether all this is a pro and a con depends on what sort of coding you're doing of course.

I think that people call Haskell's code more elegant because they (like me) find C++ template and type annotations to be annoyingly verbose and messy for no good reason. For example for the two quicksort functions:

"template<typename RandomAccessIterator>
void quicksort(RandomAccessIterator first, RandomAccessIterator last)"

vs

"quicksort :: (Ord a) => [a] -> [a]" (where "Ord a" means that a is an instance of the typeclass of ordered items).
> As for what art buyer might think of computer art?

Paul Smith already stole someone's Processing output for a rather successful scarf print.
The recent trend of him outsourcing his own posts is really annoying.

I don't understand how anyone can learn anything from someone who has pretty much diluted his work to appeal to the widest possible audience.

I mean the guy has a weight loss book now.

EDIT: Most of his recent posts have been "guest" posts, which I consider the same as "outsourced" since he didn't write it himself.
SpaceX's top secret payload
ahem,

I have developed both on iphoen and android:

1. Dalvik VM manages a lot of stuff that have do by hand on iphone resulting in iphone always costing 1.5 times as much as android.

2. I can point out the crappy iphone apis if you like such as that notification api that freezes iphone devices more than once even for the average user on a daily basis.
Beautiful, Slow-Motion Engineering Views of a Shuttle Launch
I think I've shown above that lack of affordable net access is not a real problem in the US — it's apparently already more widespread than adequate housing, adequate nutrition, and adequate health care — but BoxTop, if successful, could make it a real problem.

So, should they be allowed to try this mechanism? That's the whole net neutrality debate. The net-neutrality position says, "No," or in its milder form, "They should be allowed to sell crippled TCP/IP services but not advertise them as internet access."

You're probably familiar with the arguments for net neutrality already, so I won't repeat them again.
My experience has been that anyone I would want to mentor me is too busy running their own company to have time to mentor.
Can we seize control of all remaining Bush appointees in influential positions, too? I'm deeply concerned about severe economic consequences, if we don't.
I've read other studies that say the same, and even experienced the effects myself. If I'm doing something for fun or the love of it or out of kindness, and you offer me money to do it, I lose a LOT of motivation. Sometimes even to the point that I don't do any of it.

I think a lot of people have trouble realizing that money isn't the only form of payment for something. Gratitude or self-respect can be even more powerful, especially in an absence of them.
http://www.paypalalternatives.net/
Zappos meets Groupon
Slate has a weekly segment on the New York Time's bogus trend of the week (http://www.slate.com/id/2259817/). Not 100% sure that this is the case, but this article didn't really ring true to me for two reasons:

1) All of my friends majoring in engineering or CS or anything tech are already deciding between multiple job offers all over the country. AFAI can tell there is a huge shortage of qualified candidates for tech positions; at least companies are recruiting heavily at my somewhat well known state school. I have talked to friends in other disciplines and it is definitely harder for them- but they are usually the ones much less interested in entrepreneurship as well.

2) While I see a much higher level of enthusiasm for entrepreneurship in general, I really don't see any higher level of students taking the plunge and actually doing it. Most people (like me) are deciding that given the high cost of college and their lack of savings/debt the prudent thing is to save as much as possible by working. Again- those who are considering entrepreneurship tend to be tech students with job offers they are turning down, not turning to as a last resort.

In short, the recession seems to either be ending, or just not particularly relevant for people with tech degrees, and I would obviously love there to be a ton more students diving into entrepreneurship when they graduate, but I think the trend is overstated in the media.
Tesla X-Mas Tree
Entrepreneur Talk vs Engineer Talk
Unless you have a space leak, how is laziness a weakness there?
Thanks for the kind words about Memolane. Really appreciate the great suggestions on how to make Memolane experience even better. We are still at a very early stage and with the many features we plan to add, we surely have our hands full for the foreseeable future.

@thwarted - We hope that Memolane is more than a log, but rather a destination to relive great memories and yes as its your content, we also wants to ensure that you can control it. Twitter api is always a pain ;-)
@Zazi - great input on how to prioritize memo's, surely an important feature for the social media active super users.
@deviatore - we will be adding features to control your memos.
There's a news feed about this here: http://news.ellegon.com/

Obviously biased to Joel's side, but there's several different links you can follow on the story from there.

I'm getting in touch with some gun-right lawyers I know to see if they've heard of what's going on here.
For what it's worth, MacPorts has all the dependencies. Worked for me out of the box after doing:

$ sudo port install valgrind gmime talloc xapian-core glib2
Very encouraging story and congratulations.
Just out of curiosity, what does agriculture software do?
Case in point: Nobody has cloned reddit's code and built another reddit. Of course, they're selling the community, not the code, so don't go around open sourcing your SaaS thing.
+1 for highlighting lack of journalistic integrity at Fox News.

-1 for making a statement, that could quite happily be broadcast by Fox News ;)
Somebody should make a smart phone that is based on the c64. At least nobody will be able to sue them for patent infringement. ;)
You mis-understand keep-alive. Keep-alive is good and should be used. The real problem is elsewhere in your configuration.

Perhaps I should write a blog post about this.
http://openjdk.java.net/
Interesting. I didn't know he outsourced his blog posts. Can you give me the link for that?
Do any of the links on that site work?
Requiring 2 years of iOS experience is hilarious considering the platform has barely been around for 2 years.

However, the iOS SDK is large enough that I'd be skeptical of candidates without a reasonable amount of experience. There are a lot of areas to learn and a lot of gotchas that will only be understood after building (and maintaining) a real world app. For example, with Core Data, the rabbit hole gets really deep really quickly.

I wholly agree that the best measure of an iOS developer is the apps they've actually shipped.
Check out meetup.com - I expect you will find there are local meetups of programmers in your area.
No mention of what happened to the dog.
Dup: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1994193

It's even still on the front page, and has 60 comments.
Tell These 9 Angel Investors You Don't Want Their Money - Innovation America
Yes. But even CUDA is pretty verbose and weird in places.

CUDA C compiles to PTX, an assembly-ish intermediate language. You could target it with much nicer HLLs to hide a bunch of clunky stuff like cudaMemcpy. Unfortunately it seems to be such a moving target right now that all the non-C interfaces I’ve seen are either very incomplete or use the C internally.
One more step toward a fully self-replicating reprap.
I'd use it, if it were able to work with like Newegg, or something. Basically, it just encourages people to shop together and buy in bulk.
But seriously, I need to bring my gun with me when I go to city hall.
I'm impressed. It's not just a fluff piece about how amazing it is having dropouts save the world.

Devin keeps trying to figure out why omnipresent ego inflation is a good thing. He hits all the major points: it's about mindshare, addiction, and manipulating people to get a higher CPM.

Is that all social media is doing? Playing psychological video games in ways
that form habits and drive revenue for Internet companies?

He takes interviewee's quips (reduce friction! share yourself!), actually thinks (instead of sitting dumbfounded when someone young talks about technology and business), then figures out why the fads of today are shallow substitutes for sincere social interaction.
Terminal app for the Kindle
Although this was submitted first, another submission has got all the upvotes and comments:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1995639
Dup from yesterday: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1993352

No upvotes, no comments.
This is one of several articles that expand on an essay written by SF restaurateur Mark Pastore and published in the SFGate and on his site.

The original is also well worth reading: http://incanto.biz/2010/10/22/is-opentable-worth-it/
Social benefits from economic cooperation
Check lowendbox.com
Thanks, I'll try it tomorrow then... It is well worth the try to get fast search
The best sounds for getting work done
This article is claiming they've been trying to get rid of a worm for months? Why wouldn't they just format the computers and return to a previously backed up state?

Secondly, if the government needed information on how to solve the problem and didn't want to be detected, wouldn't they just send one or two of their top people to research it and then tell everyone else? How does large traffic from a certain country imply that the government is trying to find out how to defeat the worm?

Very strange article. Almost surreal.
There are actually some very interesting efforts around building languages that compile to PTX ("Parallel Thread Execution"). NVIDIA treated it as a trade secret in the beginning and so only now is that really beginning to take off. The introduction of C++ support with Fermi took a little bit of the pressure off, but I bet we'll see some new parallel-oriented languages in the next few years.
I've tried having this conversation so many times at my current place! We don't just have an open plan office, we have a huge open plan office with a mix of developers, client facing staff, managers, secretaries, phones going off, people wandering through to the kitchen or toilets, small meetings going on around tables.... It's a terrible work environment for actually getting to focus on what you're doing, yet any suggestion that we might do better with more secluded, private space is met with ridicule.

A new head honcho is not long in post, and has decided to make his mark by moving the entire department into newly refurbished offices at a cost I understand that's about equal to 3 months salary per head. The plan is for long rows of desks so we'll have even higher density and less private space. I'm not optimistic for its effects on the department.
The C API is pretty verbose, but it's not poorly designed. Creating an expressive wrapper with a higher level language is pretty straightforward: https://github.com/ztellman/calx.
Google Chrome sandboxes PDF.
Control a CNC router with an iPhone
Are you sure there's an order of magnitude of difference between real and virtualized hardware? Does redis actually deliver 100k operations _per core_? (I thought it is supposed to be per machine, because memory bandwidth is a bottleneck or something) Can you point to the relevant benchmarks, please.

I am interested to know how big of a difference there is. Maybe redis on Xen performs not bad after all, considering that 2.2 GHz Athlon 64 3700+ (single core CPU, circa 2005) is lower powered than what is considered server box today.
Ask HN: Can we transparently rid the web of crufty design?
Once I installed AdBlock a few years back, most ads went away and I never heard from them since. But afterwards I realized that third-party ads make up only half of web cruft. The other half is poor design and misguided self-promotion on the part of publishers. And while GreaseMonkey with its userscripts is a step in the right direction, there is still room for improvement.

GreaseMonkey as a form of web-design vigilantism has two problems:
1) The web is too large and too messy a place for GreaseMonkey's fix-the-web-one-site-at-a-time approach to be practical. We need an subscription-style approach à la AdBlock.
2) Multiple user-submitted redesigns exist for the same site. Yes, choice is great. Especially if you're a power user. But it's confusing for my grandmother who has neither the inclination nor the time to weigh the advantages of different mods to her favorite recipe site. Again, AdBlock has the answer with its you-don't-see-me-but-I'm-making-your-life-better mindset.

So what about this: create a collaborative community for web cleanup. Members with an interest in improving a particular site will act as curators, creating and maintaining a single, cruft-free redesign of that site. These redesigns will be transparently applied to sites of any end-user who chooses to subscribe to this service, thus requiring no effort beyond the initial installation of a browser plugin.

Playing devil's advocate here, I'm sure the top issue to be raised will be: What guarantees that sites won't be altered in an unfavorable or, worse, biased way. Technically: nothing. But then again, what guarantees that wikipedia articles stay accurate?

Thoughts?

PS: There's something called GreaseFire, but that only informs users that userscripts exist for the site currently being visited. The task of manually evaluating and then installing them is still left to the user.