skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It always bothers me when I read something like this - I strongly disagree. There's always going to be things that are tangential to what can be considered HN's main "scope" - I'll go on a limb and say the main scope here is programming and entrepreneurship. Writing (and communication in general) is a key component of what makes an exceptional coder/entrepreneur (or professional, to generalize). So I do think this is a great post to see on HN. And lets be honest, there's a ton of other good posts to read on the homepage right now if you do not like this one - thats what makes HN pretty darn good.
GG, I hope I can ask the underlying difficult question without causing any offense.

What spurred you to write this?
The comfort of being alone and not interacting awkwardly currently outweighs your resolve to solve this problem.

It's hard to self-diagnose with introversion, you might just be seriously depressed and not willing to admit it to yourself, but I don't know you at all so all this is maybe BS.
The name is used by the 4chan folks (many of them are "anonymous") as an internal joke.
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=+site:pastebin.com+...
Haskell has easy message passing as well. You can plop "forkIO" in front of any IO operation to make it concurrent
> grandboss

Oh god what a great term. Never heard it but will use it.
FYI, Haskell was originally created as an extension of Miranda, basically a testbed for lazy functional languages. Removing lazy evaluation seems almost like killing the language.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propinquity
>>What is the purpose of showing your site to other entrepreneurs?

I have to wonder what percentage of people on this site are entrepreneurs or just hackers that like cool stuff? I think the feedback from the latter could be invaluable for people just launching their website.
there's beer out there. go forth.
Angry Birds, Flocking to Cellphones Everywhere
I don't believe you're right about that. What you're seeing is Anonymous punishing someone for making a stupid mistake, i.e. "being a newfag". The same kind of schadenfreude that lead Paul to post this to Tumblr tends to inspire a markedly more severe reaction out of Anonymous itself.
Thanks for that, it wasn't mentioned anywhere. I think I can wait for like a month or so at maximum, so let's see.
I find it puzzling too http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1987034
So your answer isn't 'no'. It's 'If you've shown significant effort on your own, then yes; otherwise, no.'
Mobile e-Commerce and Augmented Reality
AOL Radio 00's and 90's Alternative channel, sucka!!!!
Well, regardless, your execution is now or imminently in competition with that of other developers who read about you right here.

How many motivated, hard-working, capable people do you think are lurking here, just waiting for somebody to drop an idea in their lap? Wouldn't the motivated, hard-working, capable people most likely already have their own projects to worry about, and therefore lack the resources to jump on "your" idea? And do you really care about the people who aren't motivated, hard-working and capable?

Personally I wouldn't hesitate in the slightest to talk about my project(s) here... anybody who's terribly likely to represent competition to me, probably either already is, or would be so anyway. And the rest are just gonna read, go "uh huh" and move on to the next comment.

Heck, I'm so unconcerned about "idea theft" that all my source code is open-source, and under the Apache license.

And to avoid an accusation of hypocrisy:

http://www.fogbeam.com

http://code.google.com/p/screwpile

edit: to be fair though, what I'm building isn't a "site," it's enterprise software, although a SaaS offering could be in the cards down the road. So my case doesn't technically fit the OP's question as worded. But I still stand by the contention that sharing here is most likely harmless.
Erlang. Sometimes I curse it for being a high-level, low-level language yet I always come back to it in times of need. (Or for play, really.)
I'm working on a language along those lines, called Aeon. I guess I should save any plugging until I actually release something!
This is gold, thanks!
If your boat is in good shape and you're in a harbour it's not a problem. If you're not protected from the open sea by a bulwark of some kind the ice might drift towards land powered by wind and put a lot of pressure on a boat or whatever else is in the way. This will only happen if you're moored somewhere you shouldn't be though.

Basically what happens is that your boat just gets stuck in the ice and moves with the ebb and flow of the water.

The only problem you have is that you can't go anywhere until the ice breaks up. Last winter I got stuck in the ice somewhere in the Copenhagen harbour a few miles from my homeport and ended up staying there for almost three months. Here's a picture: http://tinypic.com/view.php?pic=oa2m2b&s=7
Just don't get one of the mini windmills that a lot of cruisers are getting. They are so freaking loud they destroy your peace and quiet (and for those around you). Solar panels are far better.
OpenTable: The Online Reservations That Restaurants Love to Hate
Maybe google engineers figured out a way around the ad block

I can't imagine Google engineers trying to get around AdBlock. That would be evil (and, ahem, trivial). :-P
Is "fine arts" or "live coding" necessarily implied? Millions of people have bought computer art, once you include games and related interactive media. Although the audiovisual elements are very strong today, interactivity remains one of the best and earliest creative uses of the computer.

It's really a matter of whether you've made something awesome or not, and then how you choose to position it.
is_a? and respond_to? are code smells.
I don't listen to music with words. My brain's language processing unit goes into action, and disrupts my ability to code.

Instrumentals, electronic music, or classical music are fine.
Nice idea, interesting interface. Was able to grab a beta account. So I've imported a few of my accounts from other services, now what? Their "create story" functionality will be the killer, unique thing, if it gets traction, I can definitely see this being a good way to get things organized after the fact. There is definitely the capability to get things organized, if you're that kind of OCD on your timeline, in this kind of product.

Unfortunately, I don't think I'll be using it a lot because it's just another place all my social media data is effectively locked up and managed by another party. Getting things organized is a lot of work to not have complete control over it. Facebook, for example, is already effectively a log of everything I've posted anywhere. Admittedly, there's not a really good solution to having your own control of all your social media data right now, but there are a lot of projects out there trying to tackle that.

(And of course, Twitter's API is down, so my twitter stream isn't being pulled in right now.)
HTC Desire HD Review and Specifications
Advancing compilers is hard. When people argue efficiency as a compiler implementation detail that is going to get worked out, they forget about many who have fallen before them.

You can argue some older languages were written in a way in which it was (reasonably) easy to write a compiler that generates code with little performance overhead when compared to assembly (at worst a factor of 2 to 4, back in the 80s). Some popular languages keep adding abstractions and constructs that the compiler can actually deal with without some new compiler research breakthrough.
I've been using Gnus exclusively to read mail since I switched away from using mh. There's good stuff in here; something to consider is the eudc-mab integration; that way, you can get autocompletion of your address book. I worked on a bi-directional Address Book/iCal bridge for a while in my typical desultory fashion but gave it up when work intruded.

My next project that I will likely never finish (but perhaps start!) is a Spotlight importer for Maildirs, as my baroque mail reading setup involves syncing all my various mail accounts via offlineimap to my local machine, where I run an IMAP server. It'd sure be nice to get the benefit of Spotlight indexing without having to have Apple's wretched mail client running all the time.
I always use bigboss. MGS anyone?
I can't believe that an article about the contentiousness between different design styles doesn't actually have clear pictures of the designs being discussed! Here's a few I've been able to track down:

- A 1966 map, in the style Vignelli replaced: http://www.nycsubway.org/perl/caption.pl?/img/maps/system_19...

- Views of the 1972 map: http://www.nycsubway.org/perl/caption.pl?/img/maps/system_19... http://subway.com.ru/maps/1972.htm http://www.visualcomplexity.com/vc/project_details.cfm?index...

- The 1979 map: http://www.imageexchange.com/mvx10/engine.cgi?cid=Z4uJrwOtIs... http://gothamist.com/attachments/nyc_daveh/Fig.-3---79-orig....

- A 2008 map, an update of the 1972 Vignelli: http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2008/04/30/nyregion/Vign...

- A current 2010 map in the 1979 Tauranac/Hertz style: http://mta.info/maps/subway_web_full_map_Jun10.pdf

And finally, an interview with Michael Hertz about the development of the 1979 map: http://gothamist.com/2007/08/03/michael_hertz_d.php

EDIT: and a page that contains both the current map (in Tauranac/Hertz style) and the KickMap referred to in the article: http://www.kickmap.com/pages/7_wholemap_comparison.html
I had not considered Microsoft's legal need for consistency with statements made in past anti-trust cases. Was the company's argument that IE was not extricable from Windows or that Windows could not function without a tightly-integrated browser? I had thought the argument was the latter, and, if so, I don't see why Microsoft could not provide IE6 as a stand-alone browser while leaving IE8/9/whatever tightly integrated with the OS.

"Also, their revenue model only works if they can keep selling you upgrades all the time"

I think the need for IE6 hurts the velocity of Windows 7 upgrades, especially for large accounts.
That's a very simplistic and inaccurate statement.
I party/get drunk with my non-programmer friends at least once every 3 weeks.
Yeah, web programmers are regular geniuses.
For the record: Varnish and Money
I watch movies and TV comedies while I code often. If not, I usually have music TV on. Working from home rocks.
Yep, I agree someone that know's the principal of HCI to any problem set. In the technical world, were things move so quick they have to be able to adapt to new technology. I see HCI as a discipline unto itself and would not see the value in such fine grain specialization, like mobile HCI specialist. But I don't see HCI as a generalist.
this is great. so is bernie sanders.
Steve Jobs' grinning turd
I can't stand total silence. There must be some music, people or I'll go crazy.
The reason is simple: YouTube changed video pages, so that YouTube downloaders and adblocks stopped working.
I love music, but I've never been able to work while listening to music. If it's music I enjoy, it consumes my attention (see quote below), especially if I'm familiar with the specific songs. I don't like listening to music on "broadcast," so I'll almost never enjoy a Pandora station even of a genre I generally enjoy.

"Music is the pleasure the human soul experiences from counting without being aware that it is counting." -Gottfried Leibniz
When you say "market" I assume you want to make a living out of doing this. If this is the case then this is the strategy I would advice:

You're currently a sophomore in high school with probably zero work experience. This means that for the next 5 to 10 years you need to start making a name for yourself. You need to become that guy who creates awesome stuff. Few examples of these sorts of people are Dr Doob (mrdoob.com), Andre Michelle (lab.andre-michelle.com) & Grant Skinner (incomplet.gskinner.com). These are guys who made their name in the Flash platform scene over the past 5 to 10 years. They do visual experimentation but they way they make their money is but working for digital advertising agencies.

Now depending on where you live, get your self a junior role at a "large" digital adverting agency and work there for the next 2 or 3 years. I emphasis large because it's important and will come back on this later. Focus on things such as HTML5, Javascript and mobile, or anything front-end that is in fashion, because those are the technologies these guys will be using for their clients. They will tell you that Processing is cool and all that but no client will pay for that. At least not in your current position. Now, work your ass off for say 3 years and learn as much as you can. Next to that get to know as many people as you can. Getting to know people is key! And also the reason you need to work in a large agency, there are simply more people there to get to know. Build your network. This means you need to hang out with them in the pub etc. Be really social. Become part of the in-crowed. While you work there other people will leave the agency, stay in touch with them! You might need them later on in live. Though, be genuine about your relationship with others!

After three 2 or 3 years you might want to swap agencies, go work for another big one. Do good work, do work that's respected by others and be humble, honest and sincere. Because you work in another big agency you expand your network even further. Try to get to know people who work in "events" agencies. Events agencies usually do not have a strong tech element in-house but they often work with freelancers and contractors. Event agencies usually put up large shows and stands for big companies at, guess what, events. This is where your visualization passion comes in. Let them know what you do and show 'm your passion.

After 5 years of working your ass off you can start venturing out on your own. You have a massive network of people who respect you, want to work with you, know how awesome, humble and honest you are. Start by doing small things on the side and if it works out plan to make a big jump. The key is in your network. If you're just some starving artist sitting lonely in a room without knowing anyone you can forget about it. You'll be spending your days/nights in the bread factory. Don't let it come to that.

Good luck!
> If there was a serious security vulnerability in one version of the software, would users be stuck waiting six months (or possibly forever) to get a patch?

They'd probably have to release security fixes for each of the currently active major versions. (Which is probably all of them.) Having the carriers be responsible for pushing security fixes would hardly make it a quick update though.
I now listen to white noise while coding. I have an mp3 called 'Lost In Space' from a CD called 'White Noise Therapy,' which I play on repeat. It's the sort of sound effect they use in sci fi films when a big space freighter drifts onto screen. It helps because I can turn it up to shut out other sounds, but there's nothing there to follow or analyse whatsoever. I get a nice clear head with that.

Sometimes though if my concentration is more robust for whatever reason then I can afford to listen to some music - usually instrumental jazz or classical.
Some of the articles posted here from OK Cupid indicate that an awful lot of deception goes on there. Average reported heights are two inches taller than reality. Average reported income is higher than real averages. The most attractive photos are older on average than other photos on the site and were typically older at the time they went up. Most people who list themselves as "bisexual" don't actually chat up members of both sexes. Genuine, intimate relationships require a certain degree of honesty that dating seems to actively discourage.

I read once that people are generally more honest online than in person. I don't know if that applies to dating sites or not but I've heard plenty of stories that indicate people are not terribly honest when going the normal dating route either. People who get to know each other socially (through work, hobbies, etc) before getting romantically involved seem to typically have better relationships. Hopefully this site will offer something in common to base a personal connection on and give people a good place for starting a meaningful conversation. The fact that both parties are looking for someone else is usually not much of a conversation starter.

EDIT: All of which is beside the point. My only point was that I am not a fan of dating sites and even I think this is a good idea. I added a little bit of why I think it's a good idea in hopes that it is useful information for the site owners. I don't see why that merits a downvote or reactionary comment.
Paul Graham on developer productivity
i hope my hackernews account is not shut for upvoting this post
Balkan Leaks
Stop pretending there isn't something horribly wrong with the company just because it suits your rhetoric.

They go above and beyond what the law requires them to do.

>Disclosure: My first entrepreneurial effort was annihilated in concert by UPS, PayPal, and eBay.
How to Request Help from a Successful Entrepreneur
Depends on where the problem is. If it's in the kernel, it would have to go through the carriers, which could take a while... But probably not longer than any other cellphone takes.

The applications are updated by the market, though, and that seems to have pretty fast.
In particular, this one: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1992756 has a link to a blog post by the guy that made the video with some of the background on that, which is particularly value-added.
Correct me if I am wrong but they are actually using mergesort (mergeAll) as it is significantly faster in Haskell than in-place quicksort (qsort).

That means there is a lot of overhead for doing something simple like an in-place qsort that should be much faster than a mergesort.

I am at a loss on why the provided code is any more elegant than:
http://en.literateprograms.org/Merge_sort_%28C_Plus_Plus%29

or this (also taken from rosetta code)?

#include <iterator>
#include <algorithm> // for std::partition
#include <functional> // for std::less

template<typename RandomAccessIterator,
typename Order>
void quicksort(RandomAccessIterator first, RandomAccessIterator last, Order order)
{
if (last - first > 1)
{
RandomAccessIterator split = std::partition(first+1, last, std::bind2nd(order, *first));
std::iter_swap(first, split-1);
quicksort(first, split-1, order);
quicksort(split, last, order);
}
}

template<typename RandomAccessIterator>
void quicksort(RandomAccessIterator first, RandomAccessIterator last)
{
quicksort(first, last, std::less<typename std::iterator_traits<RandomAccessIterator>::value_type>());
}

The above code is more verbose?
I've been using nature sounds recently. No words, no song changes, and relaxing.
NotionInk Adam is finally ready for primetime
Very well stated; and I agree 100%.
*
In other words, when you asks for a busy person's time for "mentorship" or "advice" or whatever, show (a) you are serious and have gone as far as you can by yourself (b) have taken concrete steps to address whatever your needs are and (optionally. but especially with code related efforts)(c) how helping you could benefit them/their project.*

Funny -- this is almost exactly the advice I wrote in "How to get your professors' attention -- and coaching and mentoring": http://jseliger.com/2010/10/02/how-to-get-your-professors%E2... . The big thing you need to do if you're trying to get someone's attention is show that you're worth the investment.

Most people either don't do this or don't know how to.
You can save millions of $$$ in tax in 5-10 years if you act in the next 3 weeks
This has been discussed here before, e.g. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1972515 , and may apply to yourself and your investors, but time is running out.<p>See http://angelsoft.net/blog/2010/10/08/new-federal-law-zero-taxes-on-gains-on-small-business-investments/ or straignt for the horse's mouth at http://www.irs.gov/publications/p550/ch04.html#en_US_publink100010688<p>I got a recommendation for http://incorporate.com for handling the incorporation part - the website seems decent enough. Does anyone around here have experience with them, can recommend alternatives, or otherwise share his insights about the Small Business Jobs Act of 2010?
I actually listen to television while coding, almost always Futurama or It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia. I've gone through all of the seasons of Futurama 3-4 times in the last couple of months (at least it seems that way), and gone through the latest season of "Sunny" about the same.

Something about Futurama especially is just the right (I don't have a property to describe this...) color to keep my brain right in the sweet spot.

I actually feel a bit bad for netflix because of this. I'm almost constantly streaming futurama in my house, it wouldn't surprise me if they were losing money on me as a customer.
> What is the purpose of showing your site to other entrepreneurs?

Mostly to get feedback. Sometimes to get a little pat on the back, especially if motivation is dragging. But I suspect mostly it's to get sanity-checks and feedback for improvement.

Sometimes you've been so working hard on something that you're too close to it to evaluate it properly. Taking a few steps back from your project and getting feedback from HN is really handy for finding out whether you're in the weeds or not.

I've gotten incredibly useful feedback from my "Show HN" posts, without which I'd probably not have even continued my projects.

As for driving traffic, there's certainly an aspect of that, but mostly in the sense of establishing a toe-hold in the Google index and getting links from people who like what you produce and then later blog about you. I don't think (most) people are trolling for clients/customers here.
Ask HN: Selling domains that another site started to use?
I registered a domain name (.com, .net, and .org) for a startup I'm working on, and before I could launch, someone registered the .info domain and started a legitimate business on there. I came up with a new name for my site and am not going to try to use the old name, but is best to try to sell this other site the TLDs I own, auction them, give them away, or just let them expire?
New US cybersecurity bill could threaten free software
I've been a fan of Instinctiv for quite a while. As someone who mainly listens to music while doing something else (like coding), it's great to have a music player that doesn't require any maintenance beyond hitting "next song" every once in a while. Good complement to Pandora when you aren't feeling adventurous.
My point is that the arrest was not exactly due to LOIC usage, because the kid apparently got tagged by virtue of being one of the IRC ops for a/the payback channel. IRC is much easier to investigate than LOIC packets. This is what I meant by it being a corner case.

So, the story as I've been able to understand it is that the law tagged him via his association with the IRC channel, then under questioning revealed that he used LOIC as well. This isn't the same thing as your average payback participant having their identity revealed merely by their participation. I simply don't believe (yet, I haven't closed the door on this) that this arrest signals any risk to Anonymous.
I'm confused - you're linking to someone else's page that simply quotes one paragraph from a PG essay, and adds nothing? Why is this of value?

Quick Google - here's the original. Read the quote in context:

http://www.paulgraham.com/wealth.html
I was never able to listen to music while coding until someone here on HN suggested creating an Abakus channel on Pandora. Now it's Pavlovian, and I find I'm able to get into flow sooner. Even if it's psychological, I'll take it.
I'm surprised I can't yet find a service that rates the reading level of books so as to guide selection by early readers (typically children, but also learners of foreign languages). Amazon? Startup?