skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Be aware there at least 5 variants of this system. His latest is called Super Focus and tries to account for the arrival of unscheduled urgent tasks, see the discussion forum for the most recent description.
Nah, he was definitely talking about OOP I feel. I mean, specifically, he was pimping his product that he was launching, NeXT WebObjects which was just an application server for OO apps.

In 1996 most software was being developed in, hmm, C, C++, and Visual Basic 5. Java was just launching. Most web stuff was Perl or old fashioned C. VBScript (Classic ASP) was being developed.
If you're logged in to GMail in another tab, sign out and reload the Groups page.

Also, tack 'topics?gvc=2' onto the end of any Groups URL to get the nice tabular view (you can get there through clicks but this is quicker).
This looks like a very simplified bloom filter made with a very bad hash function. Mind you, though, I am pretty sure I'd never rediscover that particular data structure by myself :)
Worldwide Mobile OS Usage Infographic
The balance between native and web-browser controls is interesting. The author indicates a preference for native, but chose web so they can change things more quickly:

This capacity for testing is so critical to how we innovate, we’re willing to forego having a native UI experience to accommodate it.
I'm confused. Is 10000 the number of integers or the maximum integer that has to be stored?

I would have thought it (in general) impossible to store more than 2^15/log2(10000)~2500 integers between 1 and 10000 in 4kB, but I look forward to hearing more.
Chrome Web Store - An open marketplace for web apps
IMHO it's really best as a lo-fi paper based system. The act of having to rewrite re-entered tasks lets you revise the description as you go.
That's something I'm also hearing. What's the best way, do you think, to help educate investors? Or is that simply not possible because the unknown risks seem daunting? I'm sure it's hard to trust an enthusiastic and green startup. Is that a sticking point?

I understand why web apps are easy to understand, if done well. But opportunities in greentech and medtech seem like a huge unmet need. We have health and defense grants to fall back on, but for seed-type money we can bring a product to the medical market. That to me is where a quiet revolution is already underway.
From working in extremely small things myself, I can recommend a few things:

1. Write tests around everything you have the time to.

2. Communicate frequently.

3. Try to write things in vertical (shippable) slices.

4. Work in short iterations.

5. Keep what works, drop what doesn't

Ultimately, the most important element to reap the benefits of 'agile' was #5.
The future of games: Jesse Schell interview
Can PayPal really afford to say no? The government has many ways it can make life miserable for the company.
"What WebObjects would have allowed us to do today if it hadn't been left to bitrot was write an app's business logic once, customise the interfaces and have a webapp, Mac app and iPhone app all from the same codebase. They would connect to the same database, and sync seamlessly."

I think this is pie-in-the-sky just the same way his prediction of being able to write an app in "20% of the time" was.

"Write an apps business logic once." I've been developing software for a while now, 10 years, and I've never seen true company-wide (let alone world-wide) code reuse on a massive scale.

Yes, there is a lot of code reuse. And yes django and zend framework and RoR are all examples of code reuse.

But I've worked with so many entrepreneurs and CEO's who have this same wish: Write it once, Use it everywhere.

It just doesn't work that way in practice.
If you've never seen an Android advert before, it looks like clicking it will "dismiss" the advert and this seems even more prominent on Angry Birds. I know I misclicked the advert once. There were comments on the market saying that the adverts had been moved to block critical parts of the display, such as the score, possibly this was done to improve the chance of misclicks? I didn't play long enough to really know what part of the screen was important and what wasn't as AB ran so damn slow on my older phone that I uninstalled it right away.
I'm thinking more the inherent programmer hostility of the underlying platform.
Drawing monsters for fun & profit
Thanks :)

> please get rid of the "OMZG! NO laziness detected!" thing, it's distracting and looks like an error message..

Done. Replaced it with "Tip: use a ful email address".
I'm just glad the EFF is not considered a terrorist organization by the US government because of this.

It does seem to condone the abolition of IP rights, though.
Expert witness commentary on USA v. Crippen by bunnie (of chumby and xbox fame)
You should start a blog, or YOUR own startup that tackles this this task. It would be a fun resource to browse. StartupDay1.com is free.
From Google to Facebook: The shifting monetization landscape
Not the original source - original here: http://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=1472
I think I can safely say that I know more about the usage of WebObjects within Apple than (probably) every other poster here, and my knowledge in this area leads to me to one inescapable conclusion: it's a dead technology.

HINT: My last job was writing WebObjects software for the aforementioned music store.
Ask HN: Pledge that your startup will serve Wikileaks?
Wikileaks is getting blackballed industry-wide now, between PayPal and Amazon both shutting them out.

Does anyone else want to pledge that if Wikileaks should choose to use the goods/services of your startup, that you won't turn away their business?

The startup I work for probably isn't applicable to the needs of Wikileaks (VoIP for gaming) but should they choose to use it, I will not turn them away without a court order. No logs would be turned over without a valid court order (and opps, we don't always keep the best of logs...), and the fact that they were clients to begin with would be kept in confidence.
how about the JFDI method?
PayPal!

Ah, but their existence bore YouTube, and without YouTube, where would we be then?

What did Mark Cuban ever do for you?
I have used www.tektonic.net since 2004 and have been pleased with their service.
10 years ago, I never thought I could be without a desktop and it was laughable that I'd even consider going laptop-only.

Yet, even for HD video editing now, laptops seem to hold their own. I'm starting on a documentary soon and I'll likely do most of my HD editing on a Mac Pro, but I could get by on just a laptop if I needed to.

I have a desktop around for gaming and testing Windows software. That's about it.
Innovative People Laugh and Have More Fun at Work
With a paid model, the developer captures the sale and gets paid at the end of the billing cycle. With the ad-based model, the developer's revenue is dependent on ad impressions or clickthroughs, which means the developer's content must be compelling/interesting enough to keep the user's interest long enough for the app to pay for itself. But there are many other complementary products, and Pinch Media has shown that free app usage drops by 50% within 10 days[1]. Even though paid app usage is equally steep, the developer has already captured the revenue up-front.

So the takeaway from this is to make a well-timed paid release first, _THEN_ make it ad-driven after sales have tapered off to capture any remaining holdouts. Which, it would appear, seems to be the trend on the App Store. Apps that used to cost $0.99 are now routinely being made free.

[1] http://www.slideshare.net/pinchmedia/iphone-appstore-secrets...
I make this comment on every one of these posts, but the one I am so glad some beardie committed way back in the dim mists of time is "tsort". Sure, only the linker really needs a topological sort, but pulling it out into a separate executable has saved my bacon on more than one occasion.

It's little gems like that that make Unix bearable.
Exactly. So far I've found few good uses for GPGPUs. They're great for all the things that they're "traditionally" good at:

* Graphics manipulation.

* Physics simulation.

* Video encoding/decoding.

* Anything else involving lots of matrix/vector calculations. Probably lots of scientific uses.

But for general purpose programming, GPGPUs aren't so useful. Suppose you're writing a web server. It would be very cool if you can leverage the GPU to make it faster but I don't think you can. Suppose there is a good way to write an HTTP parser in OpenCL; by the time you've uploaded the socket data to the GPU you could already have parsed the header 3 times in CPU.

Feel free to correct me if I'm wrong.
With default Ubuntu configuration you just have to enable/install OpenVPN server (1) (server), generate one user certificate (2) (server) and configure NetworkManager profile (3) (client).

All the other steps are just intro to using Linux and/or Amazon EC2 infrastructure or such technicalities as copying files or (unnecessary) configuring time zone.
On the other hand, AppStore has brilliantly fulfilled another vision mentioned in the article: removing a lot of middlemen and thus making hierarchies flatter. If you worked either in the mobile business or game business, AppStore is indie paradise compared to times before it.
If you know the maximum integer you can receive, you can do a sort of bucket sort, where the Nth bit in the page represents whether you have revceived number N. So yo can store as many numbers as bits you have available.
It's worth noting that 20GB EBS space is provided with free tier. Though all default Ubuntu AMIs use 25GB EBS by default AFAIK.
Ask HN: Can you help with Google App Engine question?
Hello:

I have been reading the Google App Engine documentation to learn how to use the Images Python API. I asked several questions in the appropriate forums but so far there were no relevant answers. I was wondering if an expert here help me out with this. I put the entire script here http://pastebin.com/dxWJPNCa

These are the questions that I asked in StackOverflow and Google groups for GAE:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4353939/how-to-write-an-image-to-datastore

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4350193/how-to-display-an-image-from-blobstore

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4351375/how-to-use-images-python-api-correctly-to-display-an-avatar-with-user-comments

http://groups.google.com/group/google-appengine/browse_thread/thread/3c55ed3461e6395b?hl=en#

These are the sample code that I am trying to copy:

http://www.renepedersen.com/2010/04/12/how-to-serve-images-dynamically-from-google-engines-datastore/

http://code.google.com/appengine/docs/python/images/usingimages.html#Serving

Thanks!
http://pastebin.com/dxWJPNCa

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4353939/how-to-write-an-i...

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4350193/how-to-display-an...

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4351375/how-to-use-images...

http://groups.google.com/group/google-appengine/browse_threa...

http://www.renepedersen.com/2010/04/12/how-to-serve-images-d...

http://code.google.com/appengine/docs/python/images/usingima...
Try it in conjunction with the Pomodoro technique http://www.pomodorotechnique.com/ where Autofocus helps you pick the task to do and Pomodoro helps you track blocks of time (and reminds you to take essential short breaks)
So what is the plan for Grooveshark Desktop?
Hacker News is not as consistent as you think it is: http://news.ycombinator.net/item?id=1932278 (Pure sarcasm, no content, 16 upvotes. That was actually a bit of an experiment on my part. I wouldn’t have expected to receive any upvotes.)
Source? (EDIT: Nevermind, I see the GS devs on here mentioning it)

As a project lead at my last job I championed jmvc for a new project. We had mostly good results but there was always a couple developers who were against it (and who IMO worked to undermine it).

We were building a very ajax-heavy UI for an Ad network. Think.. Adwords UI meets MailChimp UI.

In our case, my biggest worry was how easy it is to write spaghetti JS. A classic example is a page with several JS includes and they all are binding to the same event (or to different events on the same element). You're in one file working and you have funny results and you only then discover the event handlers in the other file and then you have to refactor the whole mess. We actually had that a lot in a previous project.

Also, 2 things jmvc did that excited me:

1. Easier JS unit tests.
2. Fixtures! You can build and test the JS without relying on the server to send you the json you need.
Ever actually used WebObjects? Especially in the objective-C days this is exactly what it did. (What became) Cocoa has pervasive MVC all the way through. Turning a WO app into a NS app was a matter of working on the V, as it should be.
Don't bother too much about how to split work, how to manage schedules, how not to step on each other toes (I actually recommend doing it). This all comes naturally.

Worry mostly about focusing and decision-making, how to cut unimportant stuff early enough. With 2 guys, that's the big challenge.
Agree. Anyone can write a webserver in a day. It's all the extra crap that takes a while to get just right.

The hero worship really puts me off checking HN.
Thesis Statement Writing Guidelines
The thesis statement is vital to any type of academic document. The thesis will inform the reader what the document is about. Although one or two sentences, the thesis statement is invaluable to the document and should be written in the proper manner.
There's an insight here and a fallacy.

The insight is that behavior is more interesting and flexible than content.

The fallacy in the title is the idea of a "level" entirely encapsulating the gameplay opportunities. The point is that the game developer needs to trade off static content vs. dynamic behavior. Some "behavior" may look like content.

Or next we'll argue than randomly generated graphics are equally liberating,

Still, as always, an interesting article.
The advertisers won't wise up. Look how much money Google makes with shitty PPC campaigns people haven't set up properly.

The main point I took away was this is replacing TV eyeballs, so what is to stop him from creating his own ad network for his game only.

This is like having a prime-time tv show and the ability to do ANYTHING advertising-wise to it, in real time.
Those diverse experiences are exactly the purpose of a “liberal arts education,” something that’s derided here as bad job training. A degree in Shakespeare won’t help with cache invalidation, but it’ll sure spice up the naming.
Pretty much, yeah.

Next year with Intel's Sandy Bridge and AMD's Fusion things will change significantly. With CPU absorbing the GPU cores many shortcomings will be gone:

* Low latency GPU-CPU interaction via L3 cache
* Conditional execution for parallel code
* Low cost to set up a parallel thread/tasklet

And also next year AVX will revive x86's SIMD.

* Double sized registers
* Non-destructive instructions (yay!)
* No alignment madness

OpenCL is a bit of a can of worms, I'm not sure it will prevail in the long run. There are exciting new products for higher level programming like Intel's Parallel studio, in particular Cilk and Array Building Blocks.

Hardware is changing and it's unviable to recompile for every possible combination of hardware. Most educated predictions are on generated code.

The chaos and misinformation is very annoying, but it is very exciting to live in an era of such a huge paradigm change in computing. Most algorithms have to be rewritten with a very different mindset. It's like a gold rush. Good times :)
Shortage of Engineers or a Glut? No Simple Answer
How To Make Money On the Internet
Recovering China's Past on Kenya's Coast
And Cheerios in a couple of weeks!
Isn't that the VERY PROBLEM Wikileaks is showcasing here?
Indeed. I enjoyed watching his interviews and dug into his background out of curiosity. Totally turned off by him once I read this. Really shady.
Isn't that the very problem Wikileaks is showcasing here?
Just because that's what it CAN do doesn't mean it will ever be used that way in practice.

There are many existing technologies that would let you "write it once and use it over and over in different platforms" which is the generic version of what you described specifically using iPhone, etc, as examples.

But in practice writing code general enough to do that takes much longer and is much more difficult and required more elite developers.

Might work fine for the companies that are Mecca for grade-a development talent. But for the bread and butter companies wherein 90% of software in this world is written? Please.
I don't dispute that it was years ahead of its time. But it has stalled (five years ago?) and promised improvements are largely vaporware.
I'd narrow the question - there's a difference between being profitable and having revenue.

1. Some companies have the revenue from day one, but never reach profitability

2. Some don't have revenue at day one but are profitable.

For example, most consulting businesses, when started by people who already have the chops for what they're doing and have clients lined up, tends to be like #1.

A company that needs to scale up it's online presence to be effective (for example, something that works on user network effect like ebay/craigslist/etc.) may not take in money during the product development phase, tend be be like #2.

You can also be a hybrid, like 37 signals that went from consulting and design for others to selling their own apps. I tend to think that this is one of the better methods of bootstrapping - you get exposure to customers and business methods, and can see where needs are, then target them, all the while taking in revenue.

The downside is that bootstrap method is that your consulting could cause contention for time/resources - you have to want to do both and be good at balancing them. If this is an issue, it may make sense to look for investors to put in capital to cover the dev phase.
Well obviously. That idea is not (IMO) worthy of a news post. But it doesn't say that the integers are distinct. I'd be interested to hear if it was possible to store numbers in general better than above.
Can't I laugh anyway? This seems an awfully thin reed upon which to hang millions of development dollars.
Ask HN: Any influential movie about Mathematics?
Have you ever watched movie(s) (or documentaries) that has changed (or raised) your view about mathematics?
I've watched "N is a Number" , "Fractals The Colors Of Infinity" and "The Professor and His Beloved Equation" so far and I like all of them.
Henry Mintzberg: How the enterprises trashed the economy
The Defacer Safari & Chrome extensions (http://babelstudios.se/defacer/, https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/ikfbfahhinbemoji...) seem to break this (just shows up a blank page)... any way to fix this?
The Miraculous Decline in Deaths by Fire
"Donald Duck In Mathmagic Land" had a pretty profound impact on me as a callow yout', but it may be a) dated and b) too targeted towards the kiddies for you.
Web server nerdvana
Iron Lisa and the arsenic bacterium: GFAJ-1 stands for "Give Felisa a Job"
Bacteria evolve a way to share electrons
I did a pseudo-agile process for a project where I was the solo developer. A lot of agile practices scale down quite nicely: defined scope, sprints, unit testing, etc. The key is to keep everything small: short sprints, small features or small parts of large features. ALWAYS deliver a shippable product at the end of each sprint, even if its just for morale purposes.
Lets separate out here Job's utopian spin and focus on what I'm actually talking about, which is not "global level code-reuse" or whatever generic strawman you're aiming for.

But let's say I'm writing a web app, perhaps in RoR. I build an entire model for the backend and set up controllers to drive it. Have my HTML views and I'm good to go. Then I want an iPhone client. I have to reimplement that exact same model in Objective-C, and a good portion of the controllers too.

With WO, all that wasted time vanished. The same models and controllers worked for both, right down to the NSString level and below.

Does that let you write once and expand to everything, everywhere? No. But does it take grade-A talent to work across its supported platforms? No.
I can't quite cut the cord; so I have an MBA and a big iMac at work. But I can see the not-too-distant future when a laptop will be sufficient, especially as I no longer write much CPU intensive video software.

I also practice "disposable computing"; I change hardware every six months or so (the older machines trickle down to friends and family), so the overhead in changing is pretty minimal. For as much as I bitch about Apple, they make this very easy (unsurprisingly, upon refection, as they love them their 40% gross margins on hardware.)
I disagree, I think the definition of profitable requires a company to have (had) revenue.
I'd just donated to Wikileaks and PayPal wont let me close my account until next week when it's cleared. I hope they actually see the money :o
The treasure fleets were going to be the subject of my thesis, had I stayed in school. I find the idea of finding fourteenth century artifacts from China on (say) Zanzibar one of the coolest things imaginable.

I also really like that the ships were abandoned. The cultural turn and dynastic politics required are also really fascinating. The treasure fleets play a role in Kim Stanley Robinson's Years Of Rice And Salt, which is a counterfactual history book that was right in my wheelhouse, much more interesting than German Zombie Nazis take over Mars or what have you.
An Alternative Financing Option for Start-ups
Daniel Assange: I never thought WikiLeaks would succeed
If you're willing to accept false positives, then yes, you can.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloom_filter

I'm feeling a bit lazy to calculate the error rate right now.
So did I. I wonder if wikileaks will still get that money.
Women who sunbathe live longer: study
Can I ask why not to just use tail? What benefit does this serve?
Is the College Debt Bubble Ready to Explode?
Japan, like many other countries including the United States, makes a distinction between criminal and civil infractions. If you suspect someone is violating your reproduction rights, Japan will allow you the use of the court system to enforce those rights, but will not use physical force on your behalf to compel compliance from the other party.
Thanks, I realised it was old, but didn't bothering figuring out the date.

Personally I would like it if people put the publication year in the title when posting articles such as this.
Well, do they turn a profit? Being one of the most visited sites on the net does not equal making money.
I suppose that we could retarget something like Jython to compile Python to native code?
GP is probably referring to low interest rates and the general availability of investment dollars.
There are no goods which by their nature require the initiation of force against other people to produce them.
The Japanese actually reads "The Agency for Cultural Affairs announced the change in policy on [December] 3rd."
Every US lottery I've seen uses the same system. It's not nice, sure, but it's not uncommon. Also, since all the US lotteries use it, I suspect there's a reason. For example, perhaps the underwriters require it. (Or perhaps since they all do it, they all can do it).
If the integers cannot be guaranteed to be distinct, and all of them must be presented at the end, then no algorithm which restricts itself to O(1) memory usage can be correct. Since the problem restricts you to using 4KB of RAM (O(1)), and there is presumably a solution, you can conclude that you need not count non-distinct inputs - but yeah, it's kind of a bad problem description.
Re-reading the article, the story I'm thinking of was Mackenzie Morgan's. She was grabbed from behind and kissed. She says that she found out that it happened to someone else as well at the same party.

It is not clear to me that she actually knew the guy's name, or that she reported the incident. If she didn't report the incident (women rarely do), how could he be banned?