skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm neither a linguist nor a psychologist so I'm just going to chalk it up to how amazingly flexible the human brain is. I found out about that language from reading http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/29/magazine/29language-t.html.

But I've had a long interest in how language can have a measurable effect on what your default thought processes are, even if it doesn't limit what you can express. This also folds back some interesting perspectives into computer language debates and if the one you use actually makes a difference..
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Here are some great open source iPhone libraries I use:

* Mopub - mix and match ad networks, server side - open source SDK (brand new start-up that just got funded, out of AngelPad)

* ASIHTTP - makes networking easy

* TouchJSON - the fastest JSON library, AFAIK

* Appirater - easy drop-in widget for prompting for reviews
On not coding late
The fact that this travesty continues (and how it is portrayed in the media) shows what society still thinks of as a proper place for geeks like Zuckerberg[1]: to implement some business guy's vision. The message is loud and clear: "you may be smart, you may go to the same schools as we do, but you are an inferior being." Our skills are thought of as a commodity, that we can implement a site like Craigslist, Amazon or Facebook (in its modern incarnation) in a weekend: it's as if the idea is the hard part.

This applies not only to Zuckberg, but also to the employees at Facebook who have been busy working nights and weekends building, scaling out and monetizing the site. Apparently, however, society thinks nothing of a wealth transfer from the workers to the privileged elite (i.e., the twins).

I'll be the first to say: even if the allegations are true, fuck these jocks[1]: everybody and their mother had a "social network for X" idea; the idea wasn't unique, turning it into an a product users love was.

[1] It's popular to portray Zuck as some PHP script kiddie, but that's not the case. He's written a Winamp plugin in high school, for which Microsoft offered him a $1mm bonus if he signed on as a full time employee (forgoing Harvard). His initial technology choices may be disagreeable, but he's still one of us.

[2] http://news.cnet.com/8301-13577_3-10016183-36.html
In my testing that I did for our DotSpots client-side code (basically MD2 over tokenized text), I found that the WebGL arrays performed at best the same as native arrays. In some cases they did much worse. This was universal across webkit and gecko as well.

It's still worth testing - I'm hoping that the JIT engines are finally able to optimize them properly.
You can, but it is a hassle, and Apple certainly could have made it easier.
ASK/LF YC: Paying for Code Reviews?
So I've gotten approval to work on some code outside of work, and I'm looking at getting back into writing some scheme code. That being said its been pretty long since I've written scheme code, and I'd like to improve my style. Does anyone have experience with hiring people for code reviews? Where do you find them? How much do they cost? How do you judge a good code reviewer? etc.
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Agree on most of the points. Just two I disagree on.

> Do you really want code that's easy to read and maintain years from now after it's no longer fresh in your mind?

In my experience ruby code isn't inherently less readable than python if you know ruby moderately well. Ruby has more syntax but it's standard library is fairly clear and it's easy to look up.

> Do you think Perl is a bad thing?

I think it's a horrible language and absolutely I love ruby. :) Granted, I learned ruby before I learned perl.
getImageData returns an array equivalent to grid_1d_array. The computation required to translate the 2d position (in this case 3d position as there's 4 slots per index) is what killed the performance of grid_1d_array.

Also I don't see how invalidating the canvas 24 times per second is going to help in this benchmark?
Yahoo stock outperforms Google for 2010
Sorted sets. I mean, c'mon. That's worth the price of admission right there.
For some of the apps I've written (status: trying to get the frame-rate up) the constantly changing screensizes of the devices is a frickin' nightmare.

I'm currently really only supporting iPad because of that... but of course Apple will change the screen size on iPad 2.0 when that comes out. Aargh.

Went and bought an iPod-touch so I can test the 960x640 res if I ever get enthusiastic enough about it....

...then it turns out that Apple's implementation of multi-tasking is going to be a nightmare of a whole new dimension... lovely.
There is a problem in the code that causes the grid_1d implementation to dynamically increase array size on demand.

In the test case, it looped over from w to 0, and then from h to 0, thus, the scanline size is (w + 1). In the grid_1d impl, he allocated array of w x h size, which in fact should be (w + 1) x (h + 1).
It depends on the stickiness of the rice. If you make rice to normal (for Chinese... ok, Taiwanese I can't actually speak for the mainland) levels of stickiness, then shoveling in with chopsticks is every bit as efficient as using a spoon, especially if you use the small rice bowls (it's hard to cram a spoon in there while it's up at your face).

The looser the rice becomes, the more efficient spoons become. When I get fried rice (typically fairly unsticky) with my western friends, I always laugh a bit as they attempt to eat it with chopsticks. Pretty much every pragmatic Chinese immigrant (of my generation anyways) just ends up falling back to spoons then.

...and the incredibly systems engineer in me points out that since most chinese main dishes are meant to be eaten with chopsticks (the whole grab a bit, eat it above your rice and let the sauce enrich the loveliness), and the fact that it's nice to keep a hand free for liquid, using a spoon to eat rice in an entire Chinese meal would decrease the overall efficiency.
How did this even get on the front page of HN?

It doesn`t convey anything useful and is a blantant promotion for themselves. I `don`t mind blantant promotions as long as there is something valuable for me to look at while I`m there.

All they ramble on about is an untapped small business market. Hmm, or maybe businesses that are becoming obsolete because they can`t keep up with the rapid change in the business world.

The final frontier, I think not. How about a dying set of businesses making way for the new small businesses that are changing with the times.
There are probably people 1/2 way around the world you could hand deliver a letter within 24 hours, but I suspect there are more people you can't hand a message to within 24 hours now than there where alive in the 12th century. At the extreme, a random Peasant in North Korea and someone staying at mcmurdo station in Antarctica are both fairly inaccessible in those time scales, but so is most of China, and India.

PS: Granted, extend it to a week and the numbers shift, but at the edges the world is really not all that connected. Getting within 1000 miles of someone may be easy, but that's not contact.
Good Bye 2010
Ask HN: Best cities to live in?
Let's say this: male, single, 24 years old, web/mobile developer, passive income covers all expenses, desire to start tech startup.

I know the default answer is silicon valley. But what are the other cities that I might look into, worldwide?

(For those interested: my plan is to live a short period of time in each promising city.)
Don't you have to test on an iPad? For that matter - testing on couple real Android devices is equally effective - Galaxy Tab and Optimus S or G1/ADP and Nexus One.

My point was that you don't need to test on ALL different Android devices - just a few which seems to be similar with iOS from what you said. If you want to test lots of real devices - it's actually easy with Android - push the beta in the Market and let users do the compatibility testing.
What would the actual consequences have been had it worked?
This is getting to the point of embarrassing. It is time to give it a rest.
With the stigma of Nigerian emails scams would you really even want to be associated with .ng?
Some iPhone developers don't do so well
I don't think very many trained economists would have a hard time expanding my sentence into a reasonable claim.

Not if you're espousing the woo-woo of market infallibility. markets are very good at lots of things. They aren't great at everything any more than Bayesian filters or genetic algorithms are infallible oracles.

Some exceptions for truly ideological-only propaganda, sure, but those are the exceptions.

Market infallibility woo-woo is ideological propaganda.
Moral of the story folks. Be very careful about people you go into business with. If you smell a hint of "douche" or especially narcissism, just walk away.
"the malware was designed to spread throughout the Fannie Mae network of computers and destroy all data, including financial, securities and mortgage information"

Sounds like a prototype for the toxic mortgage derivatives spreading throughout the banking system.
Tech bloggers focus on making money.
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Buenos Aires.

Austin.

NYC.
I'm in Canada accessing it using my regular IP address, and I managed to get the Advanced Probability and Statistics book transferred to my 3g kindle without a hitch.
Seattle seems like a good place to start up, though I haven't lived there.
I break things down into Developers and Hackers. A Developer tends to create new foundations using existing and documented API's. A Hacker works within a system, and focuses more on existing code and what it actually does than documentation. Hackers tend to be worth more in the short term, Developers tend to be worth more in the long term.
வருடமலர் ( From டிசம்பர் 29,2010 To டிசம்பர் 29,2011 )
write nontrivial programs and show me the code. Then we can talk.

I think there should be a development group rating organization based on this idea.
Huh?

My reading of the text was that he was praising Marx's concept of work and more or less attacking liberals for not having it. He claims old Karl agree that creative, productive activity is superior to consumption. I see not mention of the Marxist concept of a planned economy in the text either.

There are strong indications that B. Traven was a revolutionary German Marxist who escaped the failed Sparticus rebellion after WWI, btw.
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Hackers obtain PS3 crytography key due to epic failure
This is really powerful. So many problems in this world, I wish I did something about them.

This isn't meant to be political, but that orphan kid who's entire family got shot at the American checkpoint in Iraq, the woman who was disfigured due to abuse by acid, the Haiti earthquake, Katrina ... I feel like I accomplished nothing in the past decade.
The problem with any app, games included, is that designing , developing, and then marketing is hard. My wetwork game ( http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/wetwork/id410170565 ) for the iPhone took a lot of time to develop, but hasn't really gone anywhere in the app store. I'll be the first to admit that it isn't the greatest thing since sliced bread, but it is upsetting that my dumber apps bring in considerably more money.

If anyone has any suggestions on how to market games, I'd really appreciate it.
His initial technology choices may be disagreeable, but he's still one of us.

To be completely honest, I have no more affinity for Zuckerberg than I do for the Winklevii. One is new money, one is old money, but they both share a severe lack of idealism and social responsibility.
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you just wanna live there for a while not found a company there, right? then i would add these cities to your list:

madrid

zurich

perth

vancouver
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How we shared content in 2010 - Facebook  Gmail  Twitter
The Brits often have such a way with words. Bless them.
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joe_the_user's exactly right.
Kasparov vs The World (2007)
Actually, it is said that there are more slaves today than at any point in history

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=859770
TS - Videos
Seaside - a WebFramework based on smalltalk and continuations that make developing complex WebApps extremely easy.
Seaside led me to learn:

Smalltalk - What a powerful language. This is what OOP should look like.

Object Oriented Databases - Gemstone and db4o. Not having to deal with the OO and Relational mismatch is a breath of fresh air.
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Affidavit Details FBI "Operation Payback" Probe
Seems like Google's taking a leaf out of Paypal's book.

I think that a system where the only game in town has a financial incentive (they get to steal your money) to ban you is bound to be open to abuse.

====

But even apart from that I think the internet advertising model is all kinds of broken. It seems your choices are:

(a) try to get real money for content

(b) try to get tiny money (micropayments) for content

(c) give it away free, and hope that the ads you slather it with don't drive away too many people (axiom: ads always suck, and are a drain on the goodwill of the people whose time you are wasting with them)

(d) abandon all hope of making a living
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5000 Servers. A "Senior Engineer" discovered this script. Probably it was a cron job or something which they review regularly?

Would be useful to know how exactly they got to that one script. Must have real good review practices , audits and logging in place if they were able to find it before it did the damage and then collect evidence to trace it back to the perpetrator.
Honestly you're probably right when put in that context (I had no idea who B. Traven was) but if that's the case this post is kind of odd. It ignores the end result of every government based on Marx's theories that has ever existed in the history of man.

I mean really, does anyone think people living in communist Russia and being assigned an occupation based on an aptitude test weren't "alienated" from their work (to use Marx's term)?

Also it's odd to quote Jesus while defending Karl Marx (who famously called Religion the opiate of the masses and claimed true happiness could only be achieved when religion was abolished)

Anyway, as I said, you're almost certainly right I'm just saying my mistake wasn't entirely stupid ;)
I'd like Redis more if they had chosen the logo that had earned the most votes. :-)
> One is new money, one is old money, but they both share a severe lack of idealism and social responsibility.

Disagree strongly. Old money usually came through parasitic exploitation. New money was earned in fair and honest ways: by building something. We like to talk about how our society it's meritocratic, but extra ordinary wealth earned at a young age is still looked down upon in our society. Witness the hatred of Yuppies and (outside of the Silicon Valley) dislike of startups: you're supposed to join $big_corp and work your way up through the ladder; if you shortcut by getting a high paying job right out of college you're a hated yuppie; if you shortcut by leaving for a startup, you're a traitor and a job hopper.

I barely use Facebook: I didn't enjoy high school (I have no desire to learn that the dude who slammed me into a locker just got engaged and is eating a sandwich) and I went to a small university where it's easy to keep in touch with classmates. I find other sites more interesting.

Facebook is not just Zuckerberg. It's now a corporation. The only social responsibility of a corporation (thank you Dr. Friedman) is to generate profit for their shareholders: this profit will channel into mutual funds which individuals use to retire, to philanthropic endeavours. The engineering work that goes on at Facebook (they're now endowing research fellowships) will go towards better machine learning algorithms, more efficient data centres, etc... It's almost certain that the work Facebook has put into Hadoop, for example, is helping make protein sequencing an easier task (e.g., HDFS RAID-node means being able to use a smaller replication factor, which means being able to store more data on less physical hardware!). That's the beauty of capitalism. Capitalism is sometimes horribly unfair and inefficient, but it's far better than the other systems (an immigrant from a communist country speaking here...).

Would the Winklevii had any interest in building our such a business? Their plan was to use hired help (what they think of you and I) to perhaps build it into a $100mm acquisition target that would rot at Yahoo, Microsoft or Newscorp; their plan wasn't to build a world class technology company.
They would have to decide if they believed in the vision, and if they believed in my ability to contribute something valuable that they could not.
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I can understand why you'd be skeptical - most people are unwilling to put themselves in harm's way to break up a fight, protect people around them, or explore the slums of a city to understand more about the development of humanity.

I do do those things. I don't know exactly what to tell you if you want to doubt that - there was a guy yelling and spitting on the floor of the Tsim Sha Tsui McDonald's in the late night/early morning, yelling at the staff. He was with two of his buddies. I told him to knock it off. Shouting match ensued.

I've had three attempts to mug me in my life - once in Shanghai, once in London, and once in Saigon.

You can dislike me - that's your call - but I dunno man, I don't say things that are untrue.

> Thus far, I haven't found a single article that's genuinely helped me

That's too bad. You've obviously been around my site a fair bit, and I do try to make it of value to a visitor. I cover lots of stuff that a lot of people have found useful - what are you trying to do exactly? What have you tried that I've written/advocated on that didn't work for you?
Some sane discussion on why iTunes slows down with GoogleDNS or OpenDNS
Does anyone know what the actual "logic bomb" consisted of?

My money is on a crontab that executed a simple set of ssh command attacks on the specified date.

As per the article, to destroy "all data, including financial, securities and mortgage information," it would be as simple as an "rm -rf" across multiple servers. Except for one critical item, he would have to have root access on all those servers.

Either the scope of his potential damage was very small, or Fannie Mae had some terrible security and change management policies in place.

I cannot decide which to pick.
What is it like to always be the smartest person in the room?
Anybody have a copy of Netscape Navigator 2.0 to browse the site? I'm noticing some bugs in Chrome 10.0.612.3 dev on a Mac.
Interesting, I'd comtemplated writing a similar game using http://anscamobile.com which is lua, but looks and works a lot like actionscript.

Now there will probably be a dozen other similar games though. ;-)
I admit that what follows is tangential to the post. However, as a freelance developer who, of late, works for startups, I've been mulling this a great deal.

Startups are acquiring money from somewhere. While VCs may be raising less funds and funding fewer startups, the demand for technical hires is soaring! In my particular areas of expertise, Ruby and Ruby on Rails, demand seems, frankly insane.

So what's going on? If there's less VC money in play, unless people are exiting the software development market faster than new people are coming in, one would expect that we software developers would be suffering employment issues like the rest of the US.

And yet I know extremely few Ruby on Rails developers who are wanting for work.

Is it perhaps that my perspective is limited? I know a fairly large group of developers. The only ones who are looking for working (and we're always looking for that next gig) are freelancers.

Is this the Google/Facebook "brain-drain" effect at work? That these megaliths have hired so many of the talented people that, despite reduced VC funding, startups are still suffering hiring issues?

What gives?
I'll take a mortgage-reduction bomb any day...
Go. I've had more fun writing Go programs and working on the Go project than any engineering work I'd done before.
Picking good technologies for your project is hard work

This is probably the most important and relevant point I've seen in a while. Architects should take note...
agreed, but in no other case is an income tax levied twice on the same owners of capital...hence why people refer to it as double taxation.

interestingly, the total federal rate paid on dividends = 1-(.65*.85) = 44.75%. I wonder how this compares to the total individual income tax rate (including soc sec/medicare/etc) and at what points in the individual income tax schedule is one rate more favorable than the other.
You'd probably get better results for free just by hanging out in the right communities and asking for feedback on your work. I don't know what those are for Schemes but they shouldn't be hard to find (and don't forget IRC). That also solves the problem of how to judge the reviewer - your reviewer is the community as a whole. If someone gives you bad advice, someone else is likely to correct it.
How you conclude "a severe lack of idealism and social responsibility" for Zuckerberg, a guy who turned down $1.4B in the early days of FB and has already pledged to give away the majority of his fortune, is beyond me.
AP to earn the big share
I went searching for a registrar as well. There are a couple of ng domains that might be interesting to use though I'd still be worried about the Nigerian scam stigma.
but look at how much revenue they're going to lose by not making .ng available.... .ly is a good example
The loop is from w-1 to 0 and h-1 to 0.

https://github.com/shazow/grid-benchmark.js/blob/master/inde...
You would be debt-free for the 48 minutes it takes to restore from backups.
Exactly. Also, why isn't he trying out with different keywords. Placing all the eggs in a single basket wont get you much. If he diversifies ad campaign across different categories, he will see better results.
If he not happy with cost per click mode, he can switch to CPM advertising where ther are lesser chances of fraud.
Before the majority of the investment went towards capital expenses to build infrastructure. Now most of the invested capital goes towards salaries for the development of the idea.

If the idea is successful then cloud computing is utilized to grow the business. If sufficient scale is reached then you'll see companies take large late rounds to build their own data centers and infrastructure out (such as Zynga and Facebook).

So while total invested dollars are down, the cost to invest is down significantly and "big money" doesn't need to be spent until you know you have a success. VCs are poised to make much better returns over the next decade if they manage their funds correctly.
Not in the same sense as an SQL database. You can freely add columns and rows, just not Column Families or Keyspaces. This is because a KS+CF combo is stored in it's own file, in a certain order, so that it can be efficiently traversed using natural ordering. If you don't have this need and just need a flat K/V database, you can use a single KS+CF for everything.
Yet another comparison is temperature. The 12th century was in the medieval warm period. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medieval_Warm_Period for more on that.
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