skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The comparison operator that returns -1, 0, or 1 depending on how the operands compare is often represented as <=> and commonly referred to as the "spaceship operator" because it looks like a flying saucer viewed from the side.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spaceship_operator
Feedback on our new site (users bid to put one of ten messages a day on the front page)
I've done that a number of times. I have to, because in my life, ideas are constantly jostling for first place, and falling to the side.

I'm blessed with an ability to focus very sharply on one idea and do great things with it, but that blessing is a curse too since while I'm focused, I tend to ignore all the other stuff.

On the other hand, I've also got a bad habit of starting many more things than I can finish. As a result, most of my ideas have been on the backburner for some time. Eventually, they have to become the focus, but being on the backburner doesn't mean they're gone (though some of them certainly do change and evolve and even die while on the backburner... but I don't get too attached to a single idea).
They used to be, now moved to the old ABN Amro building, downtown. Still have the ping pong table though. ;-)
No, obviously, but I was barely able to with Modafinil.

Perhaps better phrased: I wouldn't have been able to pull those hours without Modafinil. That, I have tried, and failed.
Ask HN: How do you run code reviews?
I am hoping some of you would share a bit of practical experience with code reviews, in particular I would love to get some answers to the following questions:

Do you use any tools?

How many people review a particular piece of code? Is it a 1-to-1 process?

Any rules for the communication associated with the review? I have heard rumors that to avoid the review turning into a discussion, some companies does not allow the reviewee to answer review comments.

Does the amount of code review change with the progress of the project or the seniority of the developer?
Yes, for instance: X11 and port forwarding.

The bigger problem is, it's just hard to know what else you're allowing once you let someone "only" access SFTP via SSH.

Most of the BigCo's I work with use "Secure File Transfer" software to solve this problem, which are just glorified upload CGI scripts under SSL. That's the best solution, I think.
The wiki-like revision tracker is extremely useful, I'm also a fan of the "press this" feature... its just the name seems a bit odd for the functionality.
My random thoughts:

Many people talk about "first mover advantage", although often times large companies like Microsoft, Google, etc., prove that there is a larger argument for second or third (or n) mover advantage.

Not to be too harsh, but I doubt many (if any) of us here have ever had a truly unique idea. The fact that somebody else noticed the same hole in the market and attempted to architect a way to fill it is no more noteworthy than the sun rising. My personal opinion is that in most cases this neither validates or nullifies YOUR idea, it is simply one of many variables to take into consideration.

It is very important to be aware of and monitor your competitors in any market. However, if you create a better solution, their existence will be less than a footnote to you. Keep an eye on your competitors, but don't obsess over watching them and worrying when they (or you) solve a particular part of the puzzle differently.

My advice: go and build your solution IF you think it is whole and complete and solves a compelling and valuable problem.

If your entire user market is worth only $5M (and I'm not saying that it is), it doesn't really matter if there are 1 or 100 competitors, NOBODY will make any money anyway :)
it is actually a very good book. i read it a while ago when it came out. It is great how it starts off giving you some very detailed background on the Dewey decimal system and then moves rapidly on with how information could be structured in the future.

You can´t have too much meta data :)

They are right though, it is a hell of a book.

Basti.
Perhaps a police officer works with a somewhat skewed sample of the poor population in the same way that a TA for a class tends to deal personally with a non-representative sample of students from the class. They would both do well to remember the context of their occupation. Not that it would necessarily come from novels, but it's an argument for a general education.
Keep going. Competition only proves to validate the worthiness of the idea. Is there only one car manufacturer? Telephone utility? Clothing Store?

Of course not.
Most people buy cars on credit or lease.
We will work that much harder to prove doubters wrong.

No one here's doubted your ability to deliver eventually. Just the wisdom of dropping out of school to start a start-up at 17.

A top quality for any entrepreneurs is the ability to judge risk accurately. If you drop out of school now, you probably lack that ability, because you're taking a risk with an unlimited downside potential, and those are never good.
I would have thought they're just about cheaper than they've ever been in relation to wages. I can't find numbers right now, but I'm pretty sure I've read such figures in the past.
Sojern gives airlines a new way to make money .. your boarding pass
Ask HN: Is there a NYC AI startup job list anywhere?
I'm in New York, having recently left a job as a program trader at a hedge fund. I'm 25 and have no advanced degree, though I spent a year in a top math PhD program.

I'm looking for jobs at startups, but I haven't been able to find a comprehensive list, and I'm looking for something fairly particular. Ideally, I'd like to be in an AI/research role, though I know how small companies work and I'm willing to "wear different hats" and expand from my comfort zone.

What sorts of networking resources and job lists are available in the NYC startup community?
It makes the most sense intuitively, and it's the only one I've seen evidence (e.g. the work of Ian Stevenson) for.
They don't require registration for users referred from Google:

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=%22It+Takes+a+Schoo...
From Wikipedia's entry on the Model-T:

"In 1914, an assembly line worker could buy a Model T with four months' pay.[18]"

4 months pay for an average American making $45k/year is $15k. (Not including taxes, but I'm not sure if they're included in the Model-T figures above.)

I recently asked my parents how much they paid for their first cars, and IIRC the answer was about $3k on a $6k/year salary, for 6 months of pay. (This was around 1970.) It'd seem that cars were more expensive then.
To an extent it is a cultural problem, but on the other hand, why would you want to learn about something that's taught in a dry and boring way?
Why it's time for Blockbuster to give up
Interestingly, most coal miners make a whole lot more money than, say, an adjunct lecturer in English. There's nothing wrong with being a coal miner.

Arts degrees are a luxury for children of rich families, not a good way to get ahead in life.
Forums treat all threads as equal. Usually they are listed by the time of the last post. You can get any thread back to the top by "bumping" it. Within threads all posts are equal and listed by time of entry. In a long thread the only way to see the best comments is to read the whole thing. Voting mechanisms are either poorly implemented and almost useless or not available.

For many subjects a 'social news site' style of threading is probably a better fit than traditional forums. Right now everyone knows how to use a forum. Despite Digg, reddit etc. social news sites are still a niche. But I have often thought when using forums that I'd like to be able to vote up a comment or thread. Over time, a 'social news site' interface might become a widely used alternative to traditional forums.
Yes, and if we were immortal, suicide would probably be a lot less common. Suicide is a lot more common in older people than in younger people, but the claim that this is driven by health problems is a misconception. Most older people who kill themselves are in good health, but suffering from depression-- the same illness that drives a lot of young people to off themselves. The difference is that the 65-year-old has about 15 years left of life, and the 20-year-old has several decades left, and so the younger person is losing more. If we were immortal, suicide rates would probably be very low, because one would be giving up an infinite amount of life, during which there would be more than enough time to work out one's problems.
Ask YC: Best Local Conferences to Hire Lead Developers?
Any advice on local (Bay Area) tech conferences / meet-ups ideal for meeting potential lead developers?

Can range from large productions (Facebook) to small meet-ups. Thanks!!
Revenue from App Store Activity…
One danger of the term "gigaflop" is how it is measured, and what you use to measure it. Also note that CPUs get a lot better when you start using SIMD code instead of scalar.

One classic example of the danger of the word "gigaflop" is that of the exhaustive motion search. If we define a single mathematical operation as a "flop" (technically an iop, since this is integer math), using Sequential Elimination, an optimized exhaustive search algorithm, an 8-core Core 2 system can crank out over 2.7 teraflop-equivalents of processing.
This is interesting, but honestly who cares if it's widespread. It's their respective bodies, as long as they aren't hurting anyone else, they can do whatever they want.
Just, basic stuff.Otherwise, it's just ridiculous. That's what these colleges should be doing, if they're taking student's money.

No, that's what high schools should be doing.

No wait, actually, that's what primary schools should be doing.
Arguably supercomputers at home are common, and have been for years. How does your machine stack up against a Cray Y-MP?

(That Cray got 330 megaflops/core, Macs are peaking at around 1400 - each with 8).
Cripe. I have this vision of my property taxes going up 100-fold as I pay to educate every single child in the world. The NEA will be thrilled. Really, it's not the USA's responsibility to buy schools for non-Americans. Shit, it's not the USA's responsibility to buy schools anywhere.

Any genuinely effective techniques can be covered under this heading:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychological_operations
Digg Is Pushing More Traffic To Traditional News Sites
The Wall Street Journal Lesson
The Chevy Aveo is about 10K, which is less than 4 months of an average salary. Needless to say, it is far superior to a model T.
Twitter-Summize deal with $15 million, cash and stock
Well, not knowing your opponents' moves is common to every game. Otherwise its not a game.
I taught basic computer classes (Microsoft Office) and the lower level computer science courses as a similar institution.

This article is so spot on, it's a little eerie. Do all adjuncts feel the same way?
Alpha DNSRBL module for haskell released
Getting Real was definitely very motivating for me and changed my outlook on web development for the better. Big thanks to the team at 37Signals for putting it out there for all to learn from ... even though it cost me $20 to get it early ;).
Chance is a huge element in sports. Otherwise nobody would watch them.

You're separating luck and skill as if games can't have both, and in the process entirely missing my point.
The problem with dissecting a book is that -- just like dissecting an animal -- at the end of the exercise, the subject of the dissection is dead.

While mulling over a good book and discussing it can be enjoyable, the attempt to squeeze deep meaning out of something that the author put in by chance simply kills the joy of a good book.

Besides, I find that often the books that tend to be chosen for literature classes (at least in high school) tend towards empty, meaningless "classics" about empty, meaningless people. Reading this sort of book really ends up sucking the joy out of an English class.
I can bet that woman must be good at something she has never been tested on and probably does not know about. Maybe if we start from the premise that most individuals have something they are really good at, we might be able to move beyond the educational system of As and Fs and take advantage of people's abilities to the fullest.
Look, it's simple: XML is a markup language. It's for documents. Don't use it for data.
Chicken and egg problem - as a viewer (not a bidder), why should I visit a site that is nothing more than a sponsored advertisement? And if nobody visits, why would anybody bother to bid for messages?
I find "The Morning After" WP theme, a good online magazine theme. http://code.google.com/p/the-morning-after/
Python isn't just Java without the compile
What? You _needed_ a drug to pull 13 hour work days with 5-6 hours of sleep? Did you try a cup or two of coffee?
Interesting, thanks. I guess what my skepticism (which is certainly not limited to 37S - it comes natural to me about many things) revolves around is seeing a lot of things that are easier said than done, in my experience, at least. Four day work week, successful products in 10 hours a week, "just ask for money", and so on. It makes me wonder how much of that is really "repeatable", and how much is due to things like Rails.

Thinking about it some, one of the other things that I'd like to know is what your barriers to entry are - the things that make it so that you can work less, limit features, etc... and still stay ahead of competitors who hire smart people themselves and are willing to work more, and perhaps invest more money. "Being popular" (whatever the source of said popularity) would certainly be one answer: that popularity gives you the possibility to have a much larger customer base than a less visible company whose products might be high quality and relatively inexpensive.
This article is worth your time if you're curious what some of these folks look like.

Otherwise total waste -- clearly not in any sort of appreciable order.
Sigh.

So now we have to build millions of schools around the world so people will love us.

Is this reddit, the "social" socialist propaganda site? What does this have to do with hacker news?
How much of a competitive advantage would a startup have if it strictly avoided booze, weed, and coke?
http://search.twitter.com appears to be the new url
Ah.... caffeine counts as a drug too.
Why You Should Use 'Cache-Control: public' for Caching to Work with SSL
touch base with me.. donna {at} genuus dot com
Google is either getting good at marketing speak or drinking their own kool-aid a little too much.

The deal won't be good for advertisers or publishers. It means less competition.

In fact, if Google is smart, they could use this to quite a sinister advantage. All of a sudden, they have access to the search terms people are searching on Yahoo! That means that they can run metrics on the differences between people who search on Yahoo! and people who search on Google. With that information, Google can improve its offerings to snatch more Yahoo! users.

Search doesn't make money. Ads do. By moving the ads from in-house to Google, Yahoo! is potentially eliminating any way for their firm to stay afloat should Google not be so kind in the future. Yahoo! needs to invest heavily in their ad system to compete with Google. Outsourcing it means that Yahoo! can never be an independent company since it doesn't have the technology to create revenues.
A New Frontier for Title IX: Science
If you liked 'Getting Real', you might also like 'Growing a Business':

http://www.squeezedbooks.com/book/show/4/growing-a-business

He said many of the same things 20 years before 'Getting Real', and as an added bonus, you get a real paper book for nearly half of what Getting Real cost you. Ask tptacek, he seems to have enjoyed the book:-)
I started when I was 10, but I didn't get seriously into programming (like deciding it was going to be a profession) until I was 23. Also had a heavy math focus, though it was more because I enjoyed math than because I knew I wanted to do something that needed math.

There's plenty of time to try things out in high school and college, and it doesn't make sense to specialize until you have a sense of what's out there and what you might enjoy. The world is much, much broader than it seems in high school.
I wouldn't be surprised if it's still using the API. Anyone else think that this functionality should have been native and built in house? Just seems lazy to me.
Regardless, it's a cool tool and I'm glad it's an official part of twitter now.
The U.S. takes on plenty of "responsibilities" that it shouldn't. I would be thrilled if the world saw the U.S. as ambitious educators, not aggressive policemen.

But don't worry; first world nations don't want our education anyway.
"I had always assumed that SFTP was always and only SSH transfers, just like using `scp`."

Which brings up what I was wondering, what use cases do SFTP/FTPS/FSTP etc. satisfy that a combination of scp and rsync do not? Maybe better for GUI client and file browser interfaces?
Delver’s Social Graph Search Engine Now Open to All
"Made to"? Made by who? If you believe in evolution via natural selection, you believe that the human body is, at minimum, just barely good enough to propagate its genes -- with no other lower limit specified. I think we can definitely improve on that.
Sure, but when I was five I found tic tac toe a challenge because I couldn't visualize the game tree. It's also a game of "perfect information."
Twitter-Summize Deal Confirmed
This really was a great submission. I also am an adjunct instructor (albeit at a 4-year university), and I can attest to this guy's experiences.

The line that really lit me up was this:

Our dialogue had turned oblique, as though we now
inhabited a Pinter play.

This is golden. If anyone here has ever seen a Pinter play acted out, you know exactly what this means, and it is totally spot on. It's when you totally have begun to talk beyond each other, each sentence containing only enough of the subject continuum to keep you in the conversation, but apart enough to make it clear that nothing is being exchanged at all.
Indeed, that's the little experiment. People want to post a message in a place it'll be seen, which is why they propose at baseball games or write on bathroom walls. The question is finding a high-visibility forum.

The incentive here, at least at first, is that if there are less than 11 bidders, you don't pay anything. So in that case, the proposition is "Write on our front page for free," and the only loss is time. Beyond 11 bidders, the market sets the price.
Yup. I just had a class in which 15 of 18 I caught cheating, with 6 of those committing blatant acts of plagiarism.

When you try to talk to those kids, it's totally like a Pinter play.

I also completely empathize with the high-lows he described. Teaching is a high, especially if you allow yourself to be deluded into thinking your students are interested and learning; that makes the lows of having your delusions shattered at grading time that much lower.
I just brought one back a couple weeks ago (http://eve-language.blogspot.com/). I'd started it 3 weeks before my startup, and then let it die to focus on something that might actually make money, and am now bringing it back as a hobby project.

If you're really passionate about something, it's not going to die just because you spend some time on other stuff.

I think the "strike while the anvil is hot" phenomena is largely because of survivorship bias. Most of the time, if you drop an idea after 2 weeks, you're not going to come back to it. But that's because most ideas that are only 2 weeks old aren't very good and should probably be abandoned anyways. While if you've been turning the idea over in your head for 2-3 years (as Eve had been, before I started working on it), another 18 months isn't going to make much difference.
The beta has been interesting, but the delay in aggregation and processing is irritating.
I'm sure it could be very useful for marketing, relations, and communications departments of large organizations.
Personal use is limited.
Bloatware is a Business Opportunity
A friend and I were talking about how scotch is made. We know nothing about scotch except that a popular kind is aged for 10 years before being bottled and sold.

So, in theory, it would take 10 years before you knew if it was a good batch or not. You might be able to tell sooner, but you'd have to know what it should taste like before it's 'ready'. This can only come from experience.

So we deduced that it would be very difficult to start a business of making scotch if it took 10 years to know if we got it right, with no prior experience.

Then my friend added "also, how could you run a company that doesn't make money for 10 years?" to which we burst out laughing, as my company hasn't made money in 10 years. We've made money for periods of time, and had our ups and downs, but overall we have lost more than we made.

But this year we should make a bunch. We've branched out of our core competency and added products that widen our market that we can sell to our existing customers and leverage off our brand name. We've gotten a lot smarter about how we do business. It just took longer than I thought. At least if I was starting a scotch business I'd have known that it would take 10 years ahead of time.

In my business I'm often meeting rather successful, wealthy people as they are our end customer. One of them recently said to me: "It took me 20 years to become an overnight success".
as an economics guy, I can tell you the fundamental flaw is with the signal models higher education systems currently use.

It follows even on through to the wall street ibanks. "Ivyleague type with above 3.7 GPA."

look at the mess they are in now.
Coal miners make more than an adjunct English lecturer because there is something "wrong" with being a coal miner: it's a dangerous and exhausting job.
It is interesting how the author is so cautious about saying "College is not for everyone". Maybe we hear "It should be hard to get a college education - especially if you are poor". I'm a big believer in getting all the education you can. That is not the same thing as believing you should get as many college degrees as possible. There comes a point when it is time to get out and do something with your life. For some people that means a PhD. For others a B.S. For some an apprenticeship with a skilled craftsman. Don't confuse a degree with an education.
3G iPhone Jailbroken: Live Chat with Pytey
What We Say Without Words
You learn by doing. So keep doing it.
Are Your "Invite A Friend" Emails Ending Up In The Junk Folder?
Confirmed: Apple files suit against Psystar
My favorite 'English' class in high school was a journalism class, which was centered around learning to write well and communicate something effectively, with none of the BS about "hidden symbolism".

I proudly got a D on an English paper once, when the topic was "how does the symbolism help us understand what the author is telling us", where I answered that it didn't help in the slightest, and that, truth be told, if the author wanted to tell me something, he ought to have come out and said it directly instead of beating around the bush with "symbolism" that to me was as clear as mud, and that in the process he would have saved us all a great deal of time because his message wasn't really all that difficult to summarize in a paragraph or two.
It would be such a simple thing for me and judging by Ms. L's plight, it could make all the difference in the world to some people.

SIMPLE!!!??? You clearly didn't teach your parents to use computers. Teaching people how to use computers is one of the more challenging and frustrating things I have yet to do. Besides perhaps math, computers baffle more adults than anything I can imagine. I used to have 2 hours phone calls with my mom trying to "get her document back". She had just clicked another window and her word doc was behind it. 2 hours later she accidently clicked the word doc again and it came forward. Teaching the computer illiterate is a can of worms I wouldn't open without some serious friends and some serious beer.