skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Does it really have to be on an epic scale? What if you kill just one person to get rich? Or what if you ruin the lives of just a dozen or two? Or perhaps you just cheat one person out of everything he owns?

That's certainly not epic. Might not even make the paper.
Don't car dealerships do this all the time? Or small shops in Chinatown that negotiate for tourist souvenirs? Safeway or CVS cards? Google AdWords? Priceline.com? Employee/corporate discounts? Heck, on my recent trip to the Grand Canyon, my sister and I both checked out the exact same rental car through our respective employers, and it was about $30 cheaper through mine, presumably because my employer gives a better corporate discount than her employer. Really, anything where you negotiate the price will end up with different prices for the same item.

You're thinking that just because people don't do it, it must be illegal. The idea of "one price for identical items" is a pretty recent invention, dating back to the rise of department stores (Woolworth's, Macy's, Sears) at the turn of the 20th century. It's for economic reasons, not legal ones. They found that it was cheaper to forego the extra revenue than it was to hire all the salespeople needed to negotiate each individual purchase. Charge less and make it up in volume. It also has the advantage of fairness and simplicity, which customers tend to like.
Report: Skype Delays IPO Until Second Half Of 2011 To Build Up More Revenue
Macros actually saw a great deal of use in the assembly-language space for as long as people were writing large programs directly in assembly. (Typically, the assemblers would let you define "pseudo-operations" which could appear in place of an actual opcode, and whose arguments were used to fill in templates.) In fact, one of the raps on Unix among "big iron" programmers was that its assembler was so primitive --- meaning, in particular, that it had no useful macro facilities.
I certainly don't think your post was for naught. The flask app is a great way to do it.

If i didn't already use git in my workflow, i would prefer this approach.
What if you do display different prices, but at the end of checkout you surprise them and charge everyone the lowest price in your range.
Huh, why not MaxPhysicalAddress[1]? "maxphysaddr" looks like my cat walked across the keyboard.

[1] or seperated by underscores or dashes in up- or lowercase wearing earmuffs
I'm suggesting that you can call it a web app even if it doesn't run in a browser at all. What matters is that the data is linkable / remixable. The UI doesn't matter.
I performed the analysis comparing the performance of various search engines on the corpus of past Jeopardy! questions, which is featured in the middle of this blog post -- there is a supplementary Mathematica notebook for those who want to know more. There's also a nice word cloud of Jeopardy answer types up at http://selfishmeme.posterous.com/comparing-search-engine-per...

I thought this might be of interest to the H/N crowd, especially with all the recent chatter of Google's diminishing search quality. This approach has the advantage that it is a very wide and deep sampling of the world of possible factual questions, and a reasonably objective measure of the ability of search engines to strip out fluffy natural language to get at the heart of a search and present possible answers on the first page of results.

Note the prominence of Yandex, the relatively unknown and recent Russian entrant to the English search market.
It should for all banks that operate on the ACH network, which from my understanding, is all banks in the US.
Is there a C macro that can do this?

(defmacro execute-in-reverse (&body body)
`(progn ,@(reverse body)))

(execute-in-reverse (print "Hi") (print "Middle") (print "Bye"))

Prints...

"Bye"
"Middle"
"Hi"

Point: You can do whatever you want with the symbols sent to the macro, whatever their contents. Mahmud's wrapper macro is trivial (it could be done with lambdas). Lisp's macro system allows you to create new syntax, including changes in flow control.

But my example is trivial, too. I could go on to swap individual parts of my forms around, remap them to other forms depending on various conditions, etc.

In addition, people often talk about Lisp macros, but they neglect to mention the power of reader macros, which allow you to go beyond Lisp's basic AST look-and-feel.
You can do that in any language. Java's ubiquitousness means that there's a lot more bad code, especially when you look at some of the places it's become ubiquitous.

But you know what? Once we've established that you can write bad code in any language.. I'd prefer to deal with bad code in Java than almost any other language I can think of (and I've seen a fair bit). Maybe Python wins out, but I'd rather debug bad Java code than bad C++ or bad Ruby for sure.
I've noticed with the Android Market the Top Paid Apps are rarely of general interest. I don't really want to buy ADWLauncher EX Pro. ezPDF, or the various ROM managers for a phone I don't even own. I have no doubt they are the best selling apps but you really have to dig to find general interest stuff sometimes. I think they should probably balance it out so utilities/modifications don't dominate the Top Paid Apps list. Another issue which sounds like nitpicking, but is actually kind of significant, are all the cruddy icons. I don't know how other people respond to this but when I see a $5 game with a bad 90's Windows shareware style icon I instantly dismiss it. Not a big deal for non-games but I don't think it's unreasonable to assume bad icon graphics = bad game graphics.
This reminds me of Rirkrit Tiravanijas work, a contemporary artist who uses the experience of a shared meal and its underlying mechanisms to create a space where strangers can connect (usually it takes place in a gallery) and form new communities.
Google Releases Preview Version Of Honeycomb SDK
users can check out each others profiles and decide if they want to eat with them or not
I'm reproducing the comment I left on their blog post below:

My biggest privacy complaint is my inability to change my application/privacy settings to keep other people from changing MY profile page by tagging me in pictures.

I do not want people tagging me in photos, and while I explicitly tell people not to, they still do. I can remove the tag once Facebook notifies me, but I don't hover around my computer waiting for notices, so there is a period during which these pictures appear in my status, my albums, my wall, and I have no ability to keep people from seeing them. This is a violation of my privacy, to which the only solution is deleting my account to make myself untaggable; something I don't want to do, because I truly enjoy using Facebook.

This really needs to change. Please add a privacy/application setting that either makes you "untaggable", or at least prevents tagged pictures from being automatically put into your status feed / wall / albums.
I was careful to use the term "private beliefs" in my first paragraph. If your beliefs, religious or otherwise, are not affecting your job performance, I don't see how they're relevant to hiring and firing decisions.
what a bunch of marys.
NSAutoreleasePool is the same on both platforms AFAIK. Any vestiges of garbage collection you see are from there.
Ask HN: Who established the "Ask HN" tradition? or How was it established
Hi guys I'm relatively new to HN community, but I'm here to stay, for good.

So recently I did a post and someone informed me about adding the "Ask HN" in front of a question, which I felt was kinda neat because it seems like a tradition establish by the people of the community, which really fascinates me.

Any HN oldies know how this tradition got started?

thanks!
You know I might be able to get behind the idea that religious beliefs shouldn't be privileged against other "crazy" beliefs, but I can't help but feel that Dawkins has an unjustifiable axe to grind against religion.

The idea that people are divided into rational and irrational is just plain wrong. We all take things on faith, because we do not (and likely can not) have perfect information. Science is great at deducing rules from observation, but life is more than a series of facts.

I am agnostic, not because I believe any religious texts literally, but in general the very nature of my own consciousness leads me to believe that we are here for a purpose, and I believe that purpose could be communicated to us from "a higher power", and if that were the case, of course the tool of choice would be through parable digestible by the masses within a given culture. If God exists, he is certainly not comprehensible by our limited brains, and so of course a metaphor like a bearded man in the sky is the closest we're going to get anyway.

There is a significant number of science purists who seem offended by the fact that I might choose to believe something vague and untestable. They set up strawmen about the irrationality of believing in a flying spaghetti monster without evidence, all the while ignoring all the subtle beliefs that they take on faith. The fact is that almost any idea can be broken down, and attacked on various levels—just try the three-year-old test and ask "Why?" a half dozen times, and pretty soon you're on some heady philosophical ground.

At the meta-level I feel like the intolerance of religion today is no different than the intolerance of atheists from generations past. Fundamentally it's about people who are uncomfortable with people who hold different beliefs, which is inevitable if we are to be free thinkers. The fact that science is about factual observation and the pursuit of true mathematical models doesn't make it axiomatically right. Science is orthogonal to morality, and morality is a key part of human relations.
Make sure you follow everything in this article, and get something signed by them: http://blog.asmartbear.com/working-startup.html
IDEABOLT: It is well-known that the media constrains the creator, but (as Hofstadter so eloquently explains in Le Ton Beau De Marot) constraints lea to innovation.

AFAIK, currently we have the following new media transformations/revolutions going on (in order of how far they are in the transformation):

1. Music: The old N songs bundles in one container is gone. Note that the replacement of LPs with CDs didn't bring in the revolution, it was just repackaging. MP3 players did it.

2. News: N news items bundled in a paper is getting replaced by news readers that mix and match

3. Book publishing: Natural constraints of having N words in a book (after all, it's hard to publish a book with 20-30 pages, although this seems to be the natural length of many business books)

4. TV: The constraint of watching live has been broken (thanks to DVRs) but programs are still relatively arbitrarily grouped by channels.

In most cases, a new device brings about the major change (MP3 player, iPad, Kindle, DVR). The last frontier, I think is TV, where arbitrary sets of programs are combined into channels which are in turn bundled into sets (i.e. you can't only subscribe to a list of channels you select).

Companies that aim to transform one of these fields should understand that they need to be in the business of producing at least some of the content in that field, they can't just be bit pushers and rehashers. That's why, Amazon should publish books and have short story competitions for Kindle Singlets and Google (and Apple) should buy a TV station or at least a production company.
He is not saying you should offer a second basic plan next to the primary basic plan. He is saying that you should AB-test two different basic plans, only one of them is visible for any given customer.
Practices That Hurt Dyslexic Users
I'd also like to hear some pragmatic CSS professionals weigh in on this topic. From what I've seen so far, I agree that some of the resets are over the top, but I'm not sure whether the opposition to them is a result of purism over pragmatism. I really just want to speed up CSS development...
Elevation's Bodnick is headed to Quora
Thanks, about the post, I meant that nobody saw it (it only got one upvote, no?). That's why I assumed people thought it was useless.
A video of Honeycomb's new "Holographic" UI: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hPUGNCIozp0

Not sure yet how well that theme will go over. When the Sense UI came out it was certainly more flashy and pretty than the stock UI, but at a major cost to battery life. Hopefully holographic has mitigated some of this.

It'll be interesting to see their UI builder in action once they finalize it. One of the larger gripes I've heard from iOS developers turned android is the lack of decent/fast UI construction tools.
These are the two least-useful pieces of advice in software security. Everyone has heard them, nobody is secure.

Great counter-indication of software security: "We have no SQL injection. No way. You'd get fired." What that tells me? You're not looking out for SQL injection; you think it can't happen.
Thanks for the input!

what features would you like to see for a landlord/manager?
Actually, Objective-C has class extensions for just this purpose. No need for a private category.
I have a question. Why would wilcard domains be 'nasty'?
It's not that unusual, is it? Would Google discourage this?

You're thinking of wildcard subdomains, where a [[domain.com]]'s naming servers are configured so *.domain.com resolves.

Google is taking action against wildcard domains, where the nameserver resolves every domain to some IP. Valid domains are (usually) resolved to the correct IP, invalid domains are resolved to the ISP's ad-laden search page.
That gray is #737373 which is in the darker half, though not by much and the background is full white.

People's vision varies, but it might be worth a check at a black and white gradient with your display to see if it is wonky.

I keep one from the bad old days of CRTs at http://jim.studt.net/bw.gif if you want to take a peek. If you see wide, uniform areas then your display needs work. (As does my gradient, now that browsers have a white background by default. You can't tell if there is a flat spot on your righthand edge.)

It helps to make a little circle say 1/10th the width of the image with your hand, and look through that. See if each section looks like a gradient in isolation. Your brain lies to you a lot.
haha yea we hate that ourselves
Not really. Targeting 2.1+ gets you 87% of the market [1], a clear majority. Beyond that, does every Android thread have to talk about this? It is a well covered topic, everyone knows the deal. Android has a problem with updates. It isn't ideal, but things are what they are. We all know this. How about we focus on what this post is about, a 3.0 preview.

1. http://developer.android.com/resources/dashboard/platform-ve...
I don't see any stats on change over time in the link you provided.

Are you seriously suggesting that religion is as well-respected today as it was 100 years ago?

> but even if it was so, at which point is it OK to discriminate against people holding fringe views

When they are a danger to others.

Insanity is culturally-defined. We currently discriminate against people we consider insane.
but doesn't some spam post get more credit than intellectual discussions? Because lately I realized that something Sean Parker said about the Social Network movie got way more credit than it deserved as opposed to some interesting innovative hacking news some newcomer provides
Wildcard domains (*.bloggo.com) aren't nasty. Wildcard DNS servers are. They inject domain name data into zones owned by other entities; if you type news.ycombinator.com, you get this server, but nwes.ycombinator.com gives me a JS redirect to www.ayudaenlabusqueda.com.ar/?query=nwes.
"and that in turn is different from claiming as true things that you believe to be totally false."

Dawkins approach would lead to more people claiming as true things they believe to be false, so they can get the jobs they want. Kind of like how people living under totalitarian regimes pretend to really like government policies and government officials, in order to get or keep a favorable position within the system.
I am very very confused what this post has to do with Java? It has everything to do with premature optimization and implementation of Design Patterns unnecessarily... And since Design Patterns are not language specific the title of this post is wrong and misleading even the conclusion that the author tries to draw up is of dubious merit ..... The only part of the post that makes this specific to Java is the comment that the factorial function must be wrapped in a class.
I'm a little suspicious of this dataset.

$122k + 3.5% for a mid level product manager who joined Q1, 2011 at (presumably) Groupon?

$320k + 1.5% for a C-level bizdev who joined Q1, 2011 at Groupon?

5% of equity to late entry employees at a company where, presumably, first employees have been diluted into sub .5% ranges seems not just ridiculous, but impossible. I mean, they just closed a series G for crying out loud -- they don't have 5% to throw at new employees.

Unless of course there are other group buying startups in Chicago with a valuation greater than $10bn that I haven't heard of.
skip Lauren Ipsum, Achilles, and the turtle. Tell you what, I'll print this out and read it to my kids and let you know.
The drain method releases the pool itself — it's precisely equivalent to release. This does release the objects in the pool as well, but a lot of people seem to think that drain leaves the pool valid. (The reason it was introduced is so the same method could be used in non-GC and GC code, where release is turned into a noop.)
My argument is that there is no purpose for the containment walls. They are theoretically yet another barrier to leak of radiation on top of the fuel rods and the piping itself but I would argue this as unnecessary.
Chernobyl should have had a containment vessel. This would have averted that disaster. Three Mile Island had a catastrophic systems failure with a partial meltdown yet only 1 inch of the 7 inch thick reactor vessel was affected. Some xenon gas and other radioactive elements were released to the atmosphere but of minimal quantities.
Map view is a good suggestion. We are hoping with more volume we can release something of this sort.
HTML tables are not evil. Using them is not a sin. They do not suck.
We're hosting a bunch of grubwithus dinners in the Bay Area with YC alumni for women interested in learning more about startups: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2144852
exactly. it's as if your phone company were to reroute calls to non-existent numbers to toll number instead of the usual intercept message "the number you dialed is not in service." the catchall search/ads page wastes way more bandwidth and DNS lookups than NXDOMAIN.
Thanks for the link to the talk. Interesting stuff! :D
In any of the places I've worked, someone who enthusiastically affirmed that they believe in God would seem a bit weird.

Contrast this to 100 years ago.
> because the Java developers who made them has these habits that Java developers apparently have.

That's the point. Java, it seems, make it tempting to "overarchitect" applications into excessively generic and modular beasts early in their lives when a much simpler implementation would be perfectly adequate and much simpler to extend and maintain.
I'm really asking myself when ECMA Script will take over the world. Everyone is talking about that it will be the NBL. It's not that I don't like ECMA Script but there is a shit lot to do to implement all those language features into ECMA Script.

All those stuff and sure much more have to be done:

- performance of eval() (yes, I even don't know if this is ever possible)

- tools (great-eclipse-visual-studio-like IDE)

- Destructuring bind (e.g. x, y = returnTwoValues())

- Standard OOP with classes, instances, interfaces, polymorphism, etc.

- Visibility quantifiers (public/private/protected)

- Iterators and generators

- Namespaces and packages

- Operator overloading

- Static typing and duck typing

- Solid string and collection libraries

Does anyone know if ECMA Script is going to implement half of the stuff?
If they can't ask, you'll find out they just got their 14th dog, though. It's enough to make a man screaming from landlording - oh wait - I did!
<troll>You should envy us! The last Chicago one had about 30 people show up and was far and away the best one I've ever been to. There's great people here in Chicago.</troll>
after the meal you can post comments about your dining experience with the individuals you grubbed with. these comments are listed on their profile page for others to read.
Is OpenID Living Up to Our Expectations?
Dawkins wouldn't just chuckle, he'd write a book about it.
http://sixrevisions.com/css/a-comprehensive-guide-to-css-res...

Good roundup of popular resets.
In general, a scientist will never "claim as true" anything. They will make claims of the following nature:

Theoretical: Given assumptions A, we derive conclusion Y.

Experimental: We observe phenomena Y. This is consistent with A, but inconsistent with A2. Thus, assumption A2 must be false.

The fact that you don't believe theory A doesn't make your experiment refuting A2 invalid. And the fact that you don't believe A doesn't mean that it's incorrect to make conclusions about what would happen if they were true.

And in particular, none of this has any bearing on holding beliefs which are not even wrong. You might believe in Copenhagen QM, I might be a Bohmian, but that doesn't make either of us frauds when we do calculations involving the Schrodinger equation. That's the thing - science isn't religion. The correctness of a theory or the usefulness of an experiment is not dependent on the beliefs of the person performing it.
Also, FWIW, the new home page is LIGHT YEARS better than the old one. Great job. Got a designer referral?
Another privacy 'win' by Facebook.

I'm somewhat surprised by this feature, it would be fairly easy to abuse. If you were suddenly upset with say Starbucks you could change your photo and use your 'check-in' comments to push negative advertising as well. Not only negative advertising, but targeted negative advertising.
Try being a landlord. It will make you lose all possible belief in the basic worth of humanity. You cannot imagine.
If it seemed like I was arguing for Dawkins' position, that wasn't my intention. It just seemed like yummyfajitas was lumping a lot of very different things under a vague umbrella term, which I think does a disservice to the argument he was making.
I believe the author was attempting to illustrate both how easy this is to do in Java, and how prevalent the practice is.

Every book I've read on Java shows even the "Circle inherits from Shape" examples to be ridiculously overarchitected and encapsulated (I am aware of why they are this way for illustrative purposes, however).
Totally dumb pedantry, but:

> You will not find anything that is more user friendly, period

If you write 'period' does that mean you don't need a period? It's the only sentence in the list that doesn't end with punctuation.
BlueGriffon, The next-generation Web Editor
Someone here--it may have been you--highlighted this problem once as the difference between a diet that works and public policy on diet that works. If you actually follow the (security guidelines|diet), you'll be good; but naively telling people has very little effect.
Former Googler & MIT grad launches Android app, Smoopa
EmailOracle shuts down
THANKS! We did it ourselves -- just great feedback from YC and our user base. We went through a ton of iterations