skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I had to upmod this, although it is quite an unusual submission. I too have enjoyed the kind of discussion here over the past year or so.
Who visits Hacker News and doesn't know that "Dennis Ritchie" is the R in "K&R"?
Did Alexa Die and No One Notice?
rottled on aim, up for whatever :)

out of the ordinary submission, but upmodding.
Very witty and very true. Direct and to the point, I like it.
That's one heck of a magic number...

The strangest one I've seen is the fast sqrt() function in SGI OpenGL source code: there's a magic step where a right bit shift is applied to a 32bit IEEE float.

(oops.. just clicked your link, looks like we're related)
I've found that interesting ideas come mainly from current life experiences combined with something that happened to you in your past. By this I mean current inspiration (ex: weekend snowboarding trip) that brought about a great idea for a product, then that idea is refined by your beliefs of what you feel a great product should really be. These beliefs are mostly derived from your childhood believe it or not. But most of all interesting ideas come from finding interesting things in the day to day grind.
This is where companies like Cilk Arts are going to get things going, hopefully:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=FjGKLYINGsg

Edit: To provide some more context, they work on tools and extensions for C++. Things like race detection tools and new language keywords that make it easier to parallelize algorithms. Based on this work at MIT: http://supertech.csail.mit.edu/cilk/
All of the links to the profiles appear in the first paragraph of the featured article. The companies/services are Boo, TheGlobe.com, Pets.com, Webvan, eToys, DrKoop.com, Garden.com, Kozmo, Excite@Home, and Entertaindom.
Maybe a screenplay - "Seeing PG"
I posted this just for people with smart brain to understand how things turns up. Sorry if you thought that this was for everyone - including you.
"Also, interesting ideas are rarely individual insights but usually come from merging two or more different ideas in a new way to create something genuinely cool."

There you have it. It's hard to think of interesting ideas we had in the past because we tend to think of ideas as atomic, but those kinds of insights are pretty common and thus not so interesting, it's usually when you have a complex set of inter-related ideas that something really significant and interesting can emerge.
BarNone is using the puppet ironically...almost as if they're winking at the failure of pets.com (and blaming it on the annoying mascot).

I don't know what they paid, but I could see the purchase making sense at the right price.
The conversations on #startups are not always about startups at all, its just a bunch of people interested in startups hanging around, talking about all kinds of random stuff of interest to hackers in general.
See also Universalis

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universalis
http://www.indie-rpgs.com/ramshead/
I remember when I first "discovered" RLE, 8 or 9 years old, sitting in the backseat of my parent's car in this parking lot:

http://maps.google.com/maps?ll=41.764966,-87.724457&spn=...
PayPal is ripe to have someone eat their lunch.
I certainly gave up when they did that.
The point of the partial feed is get people to click through so you can hit them with ads. The drawback is that a lot of people just don't.

I'd say that generally the best approach is to toss a tasteful text ad at the bottom of your RSS entries, like Engadget does.

Also, there are other, more engaging ways to get people to click through. Make something people want to respond to in the comments.
I had mentioned this earlier. Flex is amazing for this. Coming from a pure C++ background I had no difficulty learning it for implementing some custom remote monitoring UI for our games. The documentation is quite comprehensive and the learning curve is not too steep either. If you know javascript or have some knowledge of functional programming it makes it a lot more easier.
When I started asking interesting questions. :)
Also partial feeds make it more difficult for black hat SEO types to steal and duplicate your content which is bad for SEO all around. I run full feeds but I should really install this plugin because people jack our feed all the time on auto-gen black hat sites.

http://redalt.com/Resources/Plugins/AntiLeech
I miss Nomic. I played a few games of it back in, wow, 1995?

There were a good number of people playing online versions like Ackanomic and Internomic.

Great game with lots of high-level cleverness.
Google AdWords: A Brief History Of Online Advertising Innovation
i read through some answers here and i nodded in agreement with raganwald saying that this only worked as a filter on failure.

but then i read this and i thought "would i really want to give a job to someone who needs a pen and paper to subtract 1 from 255?"

i'm not sure what the lesson is here - perhaps that programming tests are dangerous because it is very easy to over-interpret the results, even when you start with the best of intentions?

[edited for grammar]
Pure Nomic works really well as a geek drinking game, try it.
Thanks!

1) Coming soon.

2) Could be done, but I'm not sure how useful it is for whiteboarding. (It is with photos though.)

3) Not sure about this either: you'd inadvertently end up with an ugly drawing with too many font sizes... and you'd have to spend time to make them the same size.

4) Right now the only thing the border tells you is what you'll end up selecting if you click. The issue is selection vs drawing disambiguation (described in some other commments).

5) How about a hotkey "CTRL-A" instead?

6) Coming soon.
Flash.

I really want to say JavaScript just to be different, but JavaScript has timing/performance issues that can be a pain to work around. And you can forget about embeddability: security considerations prevent most social sites from letting you embed JavaScript code in their pages. It gives you mad geek cred if you do a good game in it, though.
Ask YC: Finding a New Job as a (Semi)Recent College Grad
I graduated in April 2007 and joined an established company in a software development position that seemed rather promising. After spending nearly a year there, I can certainly see that it's not really a good fit for me. I crave something much more technical than the role I currently occupy.

At this point, I realize I need to move on. Only problem is, I really don't know how to conduct a job search. I know that sounds ridiculous, but in college this was like shooting fish in a barrel. Between job fairs and friends being employed at various places, paths to employment were bountiful. Now I find myself wading through pages of uninteresting job postings on various internet sites.

All I’m looking for are interesting and challenging places (big or small) to work in the Bay Area that would hire a recent college grad. Anyone know any quality job search websites? Also, I’ve heard good things about head hunters. Anyone have any experience with them and/or recommendations?

Any suggestions at all would be fantastic. Thanks.
Yes. One of the original Unix guys.
Awesome, thanks for spreading the word!
Placebo Pills for Children
I just put an ad2.html at the end of the URL on a hunch.
What is owed? A non-obfuscated 'referer' header on clickthroughs.

Then, the author can find here if they want to monitor offsite discussion.
That could be useful I guess. Any other users here want/need this?
I'm getting pretty tired of this Musion company claiming "Star wars" level "holograms".

Its not a hologram. It is a 2d projected overlay on a giant film mirror stretched in front of the stage. There is no parallax, there is no depth. The people onstage cannot even see the image that is being overlayed with them.

Its noting more than a "smoke and mirrors" trick from the 1800's called the "Pepper's Ghost" illusion. They've been using it for decades at Disney theme parks.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pepper's_ghost

There's a lot of exciting innovation going on in many fields right now, this just isn't one of them. Call me when my beer-fetching robot can project a 3d image on my coffee table.
Researchers have found that most of Piaget's milestones actually happen much earlier than he had thought. Basically new methodologies have been invented to simplify the questions so that children can show competence at an earlier age. Before many children had been failing to perform at things they were able to do because the tasks involved ancillary things they were incapable of, for example they relied on background knowledge that wasn't there or unrelated motor skills that hadn't yet developed. I'd be interested in seeing what Piaget's methodology was compared to the current state of the art in terms of measuring inventive ideas.
Anyone know what the technology is that tracks people's location by their cellphone signal?
i want to put together a site that uses the same technology as the recently discussed trapster.com where people press a key on their phone to mark a speed trap. the server automatically knows where the user is located by reading a signal sent by the phone and marks the spot on a map for other users to note.

my question: anyone know what technology is needed to implement the same technique for a different purpose?
1) Said before...Image upload into drawings would be nice
2) Adding clickable URLs in the text would also be nice
3) Different download option types, especially SVG, would be helpful so that it can be sent to people with Visio
4) Did not recognize a diamond shape, I use that all the time for flowcharts
5) Easier way to create lines that connect shapes. Again, i do this all the time when creating flow charts and it is sort of a pain to have to click the arrow icon. Maybe if I was using the right mouse button???

Overall very nice, I will probably use again.
Last semester I took a course on parallel computing and one of the things the Professor stressed throughout the course was that historically, parallel machines were built focusing first only on the hardware challenges and software/programmability was a mere afterthought. As John Hennessy related in an interview with the ACM: “Many of the early ideas were motivated by observations of what was easy to implement in the hardware rather than what was easy to use [vis-a-vis programming].”

We are going to see the situation change when there is a shift towards a more abstract/simplified approach to parallelism, where the minutia of parallelism is handled under the hood. I.e a return to the foundations of PRAM theory of the 70s. Otherwise, I don't see it getting much easier to find that kind of talent.
I'm actually surprised we didnt see a little more blowback from that post. It seems TC has been getting progressively more opinionated and biased as of late...

But you get what you pay for.
I'll see your ten minute video with annoying sound and raise you an hour long video about Erlang's background, how current parallel architectures work, and how Erlang nicely fits current systems requirements: http://www.infoq.com/presentations/erlang-software-for-a-con...

(plug: we also offer Erlang training http://blags.genges.com/itsgenetic/Bay_Area_Erlang_Training )
Attention: WordPress 2.5.1 breaks your Atom feed
Heck yeah...even a comment saying "Hey pal, there's a convo happening at xxx.com"
Hackers?

:)
curi42 on AIM

edit: wow, this comment is already the top google hit for 'curi42'
Actually, if he knows how to code, and he's doing anything more complex than Space Invaders, I think Flex is definitely the right choice. You don't have to use MXML with Flex - your entire project can be in Actionscript.

I just finished up Robokill (http://www.rocksolidarcade.com/games/robokill), and doing that in the Flash IDE would have been a nightmare.

Incidentally, Flash development tools are very poor. Full of subtle bugs (both compiler and runtime), things get broken all the time randomly in the frequent flash player releases, and there have been multiple year long petitions to get Adobe to fix simple bugs. But if you're going where the customers are, it's a necessary evil.
So my only issue with Flash/Flex is performance. They are both amazingly easy to use, but even just making a simple ball that bounces around the screen pong style isnt silky smooth. (The framerate is set at 60) Im worried that if just one ball isnt silky smooth, 100 objects moving at the same time would look bad.

Based on the nature of the game I am developing timing needs to be very precise, Im also very picky about choppy graphics.
I do this, and provide a subset of REAL input data and perhaps a sample of the expected output. This ends up showing capabilities for more than just minor singleton operations, and shows that someone can use the atomic units of programming (loops, recursion, functions, etc) to actually produce a result. The chosen programming task is one someone in the office recently had to tackle themselves, so there is a working benchmark to compare against. I give it to them ahead of time, before an in-person interview, and say tell them I'm not necessarily expecting a working program (however, that would be nice), but come to the interview having considered the task and be prepared to talk about it, or talk about their specific solution/implementation. I find this also helps communicate the kinds of tasks the company deals with, and maybe a little of the company culture.
Wall Street will solve this exactly as they've solved every other talent problem - offer such ungodly amounts of money that every man and his dog wants to enter the field; skim the cream.
The blog title and post itself is click-whoring.
The thing you're missing about San Francisco is that in the early to mid '90s, commercial real estate crashed hard enough that you could get plush offices with bay views for less than a tilt-up in a Mountain View office park. That's one reason that so many internet startups ended up there instead of the valley back then. When things heated up in the late '90s, the combination of hipness and by then very expensive office space made it even more desirable in those "let's spend as much money as possible to show how serious we are" days of internet bubble 1.0 silliness.
"3. The a priori likelihood that your site will be popular enough to demand the scalability GAE can apparently deliver is very low, indeed nil. Are you willing to pioneer on an inconsistent infrastructure when you could use a proven relational one?"

The perceived probability of "getting popular enough" is for most start-ups non-zero. Else many start-ups would not even exist at all. That is, the expected value of the entire start-up endeavor, E(start-up)--say in the unit of dollars--is driven by these rare, but extreme outcomes.

Given this is the case, my impression is that:
P( failure to scale | RDBMS ) > P( failure to scale | BigTable/simpleDB )
(that is, it is much more difficult to scale up RDBMS than BigTable/SimpleDB)

and P( success | failure to scale ) is near 0,

then it makes sense to prepare for that possible rare outcome of having to scale, in order to preserve that expected value.
Feed readers I've used do not work well for me for reading length posts, so even if the whole thing is in my reader I may click through to the site to have a better viewing experience.

Some folks say they flat out reject partial feeds. That seems like a win for both parties. The host isn't wasting bandwidth sending content to people who don't really care for it anyway.
I realize it's not the main point of this question, but I don't get the Set Godin's idea. If more people were telecommuting, then the in-person interaction would become more scarce, therefore more demanded, so the expectations for the quality would be lower I would think?
Wow, I think Robokill might have sold me on how smooth graphics with Flex can actually be.

I posted earlier about how I made one ball bounce around the screen in Flash and it wasnt silky smooth, but the polish on Robokill looks fantastic.

Any tips/tricks for Flex game development? Are there any game frameworks? My previous Flex work was a RIA and it seemed that Flex took care of all the frame drawing for me, do you handle things any differently when making games (ie something like bitblt)?
Now that the article is up they sort of address that. It mentions how MediaDefender has used their same DoS techniques to bring down sites which disagree with them.

Even if it they attack R3 for pointing out it was them, the information is out there and can now be syndicated.
How ironic that you blast Americans' reading aptitudes with a mistake. It's "Hear, hear."
+1 SPF. It helps a lot with the major email providers, and it's super easy to configure.
Cilk looks like a useful abstraction on top of threading libraries. It will be quite useful for people who already know how to write proper parallel code. Concurrency-challenged programmers will need a language that better protects them from race conditions. I think they'll need a strongly-typed language combined with something like Cilk.
Judging by his recent posts, it seems like Mr. Arrington is now on Microsoft's payroll. His pro-Microsoft bias is not just evident, it is verging on an edge of outright lies. It is also very annoying.

In fact, I have stopped reading Arrington's posts altogether and funny enough TC still reads exactly as it did few months ago.
I don't work in this industry (thankfully), but why work at a megafirm like Goldman Sachs or even the less elite ones like Morgan Stanley when you could work for a cool boutique rocket scientist company like D. E. Shaw or Jane Street? (Jane St uses OCaml very heavily.)

You'll have trouble finding good software people as long as you make them work deathmarch hours and treat them like glorified typists while acting like hypermacho traders are gods.

They will have problems as long as they view technology as a depressing cost instead of an asset.
Why Twitter Needs Its Power Users: They Play Host to Newbies
Microsoft’s grand plan to eliminate phone numbers
There is a strangely sad yet intensely kind message inside this post. . . so unlike anything I've ever seen in a forum like this. Not sure why it compelled me to write this comment, but it did.

I'm very happy to see the community rise around you here. HN has got to be one of the best communities out there.

Be sure to reach out to your fellow human beings in person, if you can. Massive colleges/universities can seem cold and distant for many. If feasible, I would recommend transferring to a good smaller college, esp. a Liberal Arts college. You can make friends for life at the smaller institutions. That being said, I have no idea what your interests are so take my advice with a massive boulder of salt.

Take care, Steven.
Naveen Jain’s Latest Scam: Intelius
Pics: 24-hour NYC Apple Store closes so they can film a commercial... mysterious!
If you're efficient about coming up with interesting ideas, you'll come up with a lot that are just outside the bounds of what's obvious, given your current knowledgebase. When you're younger, not only is your knowledgebase relatively small, but there have also been a lot of people with very similar knowledgebases before you... the result is that that space is pretty heavily tapped, and most of the "actually interesting" ideas you can have are well known to more knowledgeable folks. Before you learn enough to have an interesting starting point, the odds are against your getting interesting results.
Good post here about finding a start up job:
http://ryanspoon.com/blog/2008/05/18/landing-a-great-start-u...

Also, what's your skillset? Depending on, I have a couple available opportunities... how should we contact you?!
I actually like that Arrington is expressing opinion in his articles... the other authors on his staff mostly give the news in black and white. When Michael writes, at least it has an op-ed type feel to it and gets you thinking (whether or not you agree with him is a totally a different matter!).
I have to agree it was a great liberty taken by Micheal, on the other hand its his business and he can do what he feels he has to in order for it to prosper.
Yeah, you're probably right ;)

I'll take a look at the learning-javascript-stuffs, thanks
In other words, there's at least factor beyond your control in having an actually interesting idea: You can't control what's ultimately considered interesting for its time.
They don't care so much about the language... but they certainly care about the ability to scale - which language can impact.
That's also the informed opinion of Jakob Nielsen:

http://www.useit.com/alertbox/20010805.html
Reference list of interview questions for a software engineer position
Paypal isn't going anywhere soon...
1. They have a massive lead in audience
2. They are already the 'accepted' internet payment
3. If Google can't compete when losing money at trying who can?

http://www.google.com/trends?q=paypal%2C+google+checkout
Apple planning biggest back-to-school promo yet
wow... robokill is pretty good.
Please lets not turn Hacker News into a microphone to talk to TechCrunch.
Thanks! We spent a lot of time to make this one as good as possible.

One gotcha with Flash is the default frame rate is 24 - if you turned that to 60, and bounced a ball around the screen, it should have been reasonably smooth. The smoothing property of an object turns on antialising which helps as you get subpixel movement, which helps too. Also, something about final graphics makes you just not notice as much - alpha blended edges definitely help.

I don't do anything really special. I wrote my own set of libraries, and they're just simple boilerplate that you'd expect. Rendering as in bitblt inside Actionscript would be way too slow, and the Flash render is actually reasonably good at throwing up untransformed images.

Some tips for speed:

* Composite the hell out of everything. Our background is just one 800x600 image, but it looks like there's a lot of variation because it is composited out of different layers (background scenery, large lighting sprite, tiles, decals on top of tiles, free rotated static lights and the walls sprite). You could do all of those as free sprites if you had a 3D renderer (Robokill would chew through maybe 1/40th the juice of my 8800 GTS), but it would absolutely kill the performance of the Flash renderer (and reasonably so - a single x86 core simply does not have the throughput).

* Untransformed images are very, very fast compared to transformed. If you must rotate and scale something, try to make that transform a constant and use the cacheAsBitmap property, which will mean Flash will render it to a cache bitmap making it a simple blit.

A concrete example of this is all of our particles are animated images, which blit untransformed to the game. It works out to about 10x faster than what would be possible if we did rotation/transform on them in real time.

* You can use additive to make stuff look cool with little overhead (the additive formula for pixel blending should be faster than the alpha formula, but who knows with Flash). That's the blend mode that gives you the fire and plasma glow look.

* ActionScript is slow, too, but there are almost always game specific hacks to get the desired performance out of it. Use lazy computation where possible. My enemies use real time pathfinding, because all I do is trace outwards from the player each frame, then reset that when the player changes square. Doing a per enemy pathfind, even using an optimised system such as A star (damn markup), would have been pretty much out of the question.

* Don't forget that you get more of your budget back when the action goes away. You may have noticed the additive lights and idle animations that fade in when the action dies down in a room. It doesn't matter that they're expesnive to render, because they're only there when the enemies (which are more so) are not, but I think they really help the look of the game. Also, our intro just goes over the top using lights like this, since they're the only thing being rendered.
Has anyone done a benchmark comparing a real machine to an EC2 instance on something concrete that is processor-bound? I'd be interested in hearing from anyone who has personally made a comparison in some manner.