skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
These questions seem to be levelled directly at students; I would be curious if they asked the same questions to someone with more experience. These seemingly have very little to do with the day-to-day development of the site.

I would much prefer to see a sample of data they work with anonymized and being asked to come up with a creative solution to a specific problem.
I am intrigued by the idea of having something modular. I think plugging a phone into a case to get a notebook or tablet is pretty cool. I guess I want a block of cpu/memory/storage to be my portable home (kinda like some people used their iPods for) that had docks and cases to become something else. Probably a pipe dream, but it would be interesting.

Or maybe something designed with bluetooth as a known instead of an option.
AT&T is going to fire this person's manager, and then buy the next company he moves to so they can fire him again. What a catastrophic breach of PR policy.

Stuff like this is going to happen more and more; people don't realize that Twitter is a broadcast medium, or that they are seriously getting published every time they reply to an online media story.

Unfortunately, the idea that AT&T CSR's see customers as "crazy idiots" is at least marginally newsworthy. You can't call this story "evil". Bait, yes. But valid.
Paul Graham even seems to advocate the 2-3 years instead of 20.

From http://paulgraham.com/wealth.html

"Economically, you can think of a startup as a way to compress your whole working life into a few years. Instead of working at a low intensity for forty years, you work as hard as you possibly can for four. This pays especially well in technology, where you earn a premium for working fast."

It's a motivation for a startup. Solve the "money problem" early in life, and do more important things later.
Can you explain in simply terms what Occam's razor is? I Wikipedia'd it, but the definition was too dense.

It could be as a result of me being tired...but I couldn't quite understand it.

Thanks.
Do you have any good examples? Because I never could come up with a good one.

Probably 99% of the reference usage I've seen (all in C++, fwiw) could be about as easily accomplished with pass-by-sharing through pointers. The actual valid uses never seemed worth the nasty copy constructor bugs created by people mistaking reference semantics for pointer semantics.

At this point I gave up on "true" references so long ago that I tend to fall in with everyone else and call pointer-based sharing "pass by reference". I suppose I should amend my initial comment to specify that most of the team "pass by reference" is really "pass by sharing (through pointers)", but I'll wait on that until something convinces me that true references shouldn't go the way of dynamic scoping.
Eyeo Festival June 27-29
The EFF's Deep Crack could do 56-bit keys in a matter of days, and this was a long while ago:

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

AES256 is more complex than DES, but it's still in the ballpark of "possible".
I was with him at first, particularly bringing up college as a motivator, but the author pretty quickly loses focus and takes the analysis a bit further than he really has context to support, particularly since he's analyzing strictly from the WSJ article, not having read the book. I don't think he really needed to make tangential and dubious claims about her beliefs and her world view to make his ultimate point that the WSJ chose this article to support theirs.
I should stress that I'm probably an unusual data point in that I could touch-type tolerably well and quickly on a Psion 5, but....

From having owned both 9 and 10 inch Eees (still got the 10, lovely machine) - the 9 was perfectly manageable for me but the 10 I'm as fast as I am anywhere. I regularly use it to take sermon notes at church and have before been able to keep up fast enough to produce a readable (if a little abbreviated) version of the presenters' material, because a friend used it for exactly that.

Now, I'm probably a bit unusual there and I could've sold tickets to some from their expressions watching me concentrating on the speaker as my fingers flew across the keyboard, but I don't see typing on a 10" netbook as any hardship at all.
The ability of tracking to get better is almost unbounded; the ability of advertising to get better is probably not. Given the way things are distributed, there is a segment of the population who will simply never respond to advertising the way advertisers would like and sooner or later they're going to be able to notice us.

And while I will (and did) concede that I am not magically unaffected, as I am human, I will point out that my actual economic decisions tend to come from non-advertising sources. When I have actual money to spend I look for reviews and the experiences of others. "But reviews are just ads too!" Not all of them, and I have gotten pretty good at finding the ones that aren't. I'm even pretty decent at reading through the reviews that are mostly ads. It's not that I'm unaffected, it's that I take paths they don't want me to take and I don't plan on stopping.
This could be a goldmine for HR and recruiters to help vet someone's likability before sending them on an interview.

Any plans to roll out a ranking badge that people can embed on their sites/resumes/linkedin page that gets dynamically updated as more votes come in for each person?
It's Facemash for the office.
In C++, pass-by-reference means the method gets a reference to the thing. Pass-by-value means the method gets a copy of the thing.

Do these terms mean something different in Java? Again, I'm not a big Java dev, but I am interested in why there's such a big debate on this topic.

In C++, I typically pass-by-reference when I need to change the thing. When I don't need to change the thing (but it's expensive to copy) I pass by const reference so the thing cannot be changed, but is still efficient.

I seldom pass-by-value unless it's a primitive type (int, char, etc.).
> There's no reason why they would have to make it closed
> source, especially if they use x264.

That's not what the lawyers said. In the US, at least; things may be different in your jurisdiction.

Note that this is the route Chrome used to take: Chromium did not support H.264, while the Chrome binaries, built from some source that was not public, did.

> H264 patents don't require everyone to pay to create
> content

They do require you to pay to produce an encoder. Of course someone can then distribute said encoder for free if they want, so the end user doesn't technically _have_ to pay. But in practice they do.

And if you use an unlicensed encoder, then you're infringing on the patents. So is anyone who views any videos that were produced with the unlicensed encoder, even if their decoder is licenced. And some other restrictions to do with the fact that encoders are typically not licensed for arbitrary use (e.g. the encoder in a typical digital camera doesn't give you the right to put the resulting video on a website that you make money from, via Google Adwords, say). You should in fact read the licensing agreements involved, or at least the excerpts in http://bemasc.net/wordpress/2010/02/02/no-you-cant-do-that-w...
It just seems completely petty and unworthy of TC's attention. Really a whole post on this girl who dared to challenge MG on Twitter? She's not even as bad as half of the TC commenters. It just seems like this girl at most tossed a dirt-clod at TC's tank, and TC dropped a nuclear bomb on her life. It seems like this is a subtle threat by TC to not challenge or oppose them.

I really hope it was worth the page-views.
For any given search the user can type a few words, click on a few results, and going back to the search results until he finds what he wants.

He can also change the words in the search in the process.

This last click when the user stops searching is, for this particular user, the most relevant result for any of the search strings he has used.

I don't know any search engine that uses this data.
I think a 68% to 84% increase in the number of people that never click ads is something to take note of.

For sure the number of 'clickers' will never reach 0 but this is definitely a trend worth monitoring.
So, because of your questionable personal knowledge of Jobs and the influence he holds over Apple, a video codec will fail? Last time I checked the world didn't run entirely on Apple hardware and software alone.
I think this is on HN, not because of Apple, but because many people here like creating new stuff. Advise on how to create something innovative is valuable here.
FYI, the answer to the EDIT:first tech interview is a rather clever dynamic programming solution. The thing to be careful of is that you can actually get two different dyn prog solutions: one which is O(n^2) and one which is O(nlog n). Also, the use of "ascending" seems inaccurate. Based on his example it looks closer to "monotonically non-decreasing."

FWIW, it seems like a good problem to me. Dynamic programming is essential to finding good algorithmic solutions to many fundamental CS problems so I would expect everyone to be able to use it.

Edit: Thanks to kenjackson for correcting my numbering. The second problem doesn't look like it requires dyn prog to me.
I think you've missed the point, friend.
I really hate that format of replies. So, no, I will not be switching to that format.
On the other hand (and without disagreeing), there are very few technology companies who have been around for 20 years and still produce exciting, relevant products. Perhaps short-lived enterprise also has benefits to the world as a whole?
People have been battling over top-posting and interleaved quoting for fifteen years, about the time Microsoft introduced their HTML email client that couldn't handle proper quoting without messing up the whole message, and subsequently introducing email to people who couldn't handle even trying to quote properly.

This is nothing new. Anyone who's used to BBS's, usenet, or any pre-Microsoft email will probably assume that interleaved quoting is the only way to properly reply to a message.
You also can't predict whether the phones you're considering will get updated to newer versions of Android. I got burned by this when Froyo came out three months after I got a phone, and the manufacturer would not update it.
Even Lucid had some problems for me--the system would hang on hibernate 2 out of 3 times, among various other minor, but honestly very irritating bugs.

My concern for the long-term viability of the entire Ubuntu project is what happens once a user's system starts notifying them that they should upgrade their distribution. Not sure if that happens for non-LTS releases or not, but eventually it'll happen. The user will click 'yes' and then be presented with an extremely different windowing paradigm without having asked for it. It's like having clicked 'upgrade' to go to Lucid and finding all my window buttons on the other side for absolutely no reason. Tech folks like you and I can adapt, but will Grandma continue using Ubuntu if every 6 months something crazy changes and she has to re-learn everything? She won't--she'll get fed up and ask for her "old computer" back, which means formatting and installing Windows from the rescue CD.

I guess what I'm saying is that you can't be both a viable alternative to Windows and Mac and also be a paradigm-changing evolutionary UI experiment. The two markets--nerds and grandmas--just don't mix, at least until the next generation or two.
I'm at a startup now. But I think you'll find most of the big shops you know about, like Google and MS, generally practice pre-commit review.

Open source projects often will do post-commit review. The review process is viewed as friction, and they don't want to block contributors due to the review process.

I personally prefer pre-commit review, although post-commit is a legitimate option (one I admittedly wasn't thinking about at the time).
> Not sure I'm following your analogy here... You're making a bunch of false analogies.

Not false at all. Substituting FP for OO, the Java install "lacks" Clojure. So extensibility is a weakness? If so, then every gem is a sign of a defect in Ruby The Language (an absurd conclusion).
Tarpipe introduces feed reading
Fun trivia: the blink tag actually started as a joke[1].

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blink_element
Microsoft thinks my company will be around in 10 years
I think that on the one hand, this is because Facebook wants to put on the big-boy pants like the other grown-up companies. Gogle does this, so Facebook must. And Google does it because Microsoft does it. And Microsoft does it because Billy G is a freak of (un)nature.

At least they're not asking why man hole covers are round, or if you had a bathtub the size of New York how many Grand Pianos would fit in it (correct answer: "I'm not aware that the Grand Piano is an internationally recognised standard unit of measure")

On the other hand, interviewing is not a solved problem in IT. It can't be, otherwise half (or more) of the people would never have gotten in, and productivity would soar.

On the gripping hand, for all that I want to denigrate Facebook, these questions do actually make sense - do you want people on your server writing an O(n) algorithm when an O(log n) one will do? When N is ridiculously large, like 500 million or something like that? And if the only place to learn these things is in an academic environment, then so be it. I admire the generic self-taught programmer as much as anybody else, but if they really love what they do, it would behoove them to borrow someone's old computer science textbooks and skim through them.
Hack Week at Dropbox
I also agree with their premise that a lot of the development cycle already happens online. E.g. bug tracking and code repositories.

I think if it will stay exclusive to (client side) web development for a while though. But who knows, maybe someone decides to make some web service available that allows you to deploy straight to some server.
I just posted a blog about the experience: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2101422
Come on. You don't seriously believe those numbers do you? They're from crazyland.

Also there are so many types of advertising... Banner advertising is but one. Things go out of fashion, other types of advertising become popular, etc

I monitor my ad revenue and ROI very closely, and have done over the last 10 years. Slightly more than some random unscientific 'study' ;)
Call me cheap but $495 seems quite expensive.
There have been some different attempts to expand JavaScript syntax to make this style of programming more elegant.

Narrative JavaScript http://www.neilmix.com/narrativejs/doc/ has a single construct, the arrow which turns everything after the arrow into a closure which is passed as an argument.

StratifiedJS (http://www.neilmix.com/narrativejs/doc/) is more rich with a number of new keywords: hold, spawn, wait etc. for asynchronous programming.
Cosmology standard candle not so standard after all
Heh. Of course being a non-linear transformation, bias will creep in if you just naively take the non-biased value, but people rarely think about that. Thanks for pointing this out.

(BTW, the link needs an apostrophe: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bessel%27s_correction )
Petty? Sure. Unworthy? What does that even mean? Someone posted an insider's take on AT&T's customer service vis a vis network complaints. TC ran it. Would the WSJ do the same? Probably not, but at the macro view of the WSJ, AT&T network quality is too small a story to address anyways.

If Consumerist had run this same story, nobody would think it was "evil". It would get a comparable level of attention. The CSR, who made a grave error, would still have been fired.
I guess contests like these intend to foster out of the box thinking. But once that very out of the box thinking surfaces every competitor cries foul, including (some) teachers. So, do they perform such competitions because they have to? Or do they just fail to see what they engage them to?
Logic has no place in Wisdom
How is that uncluttering? Filling your head with names of people you don't need to know is definitely clutter.
This seems like the kind of report they'd show as a flashback in a post-apocalyptic film :)
TripIt acquired for $120M
Twitter Considers Moving Its Headquarters To Brisbane
Email is "electronic mail", why should the fact that it is transmitted over fibre-optic cables instead of by truck change the legal protections given?
There is a proposal for adding generators and the yield keyword like in Python, and Mozilla already supports it.
Soon, your life will be nothing but Facebook
Nanoscale silicon material with desireable physical properties?

Sounds a little asbestosy to me.
Ask HN: What are the best unique metrics you've tracked?
The recent TC article about why Greylock invested in Groupon got me thinking more deeply about metrics. Yes, we all (should) track things like conversions, our viral growth rate, etc. But are there some really unique metrics we're all missing?

That article made me think that there are. These lines prompted it: "They talked us though the obvious data such as customer acquisition costs and lifetime value and the economics of entering a new region. But they also dove into some unique metrics we’d never seen startups track before."

So I'd like to know: what are the best unique – and actionable – metrics you've tracked? I'd also love to hear how you reacted to those metrics, and what your outcomes were.

I want to compile a list on my own blog as a resource to other entrepreneurs, so if you'd like credit as a linkback or something, feel free to post that as well.
> February 2, 2010

Yep. The year of spray-on liquid glass on the desktop!

( Previously: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1092741 )
How to Get Going with PyDev
I've been in New York for 3 months and less than half of my calls go through without a problem. Haven't called to complain yet mostly because I don't want to spend an hour on the phone.

I swear I'm not crazy either.. :-)
Machine Bests Man in Jeopardy Practice Round
Slavery was economical for the slaveowners [1]. Agriculture wasn't economical relative to industrialization (which is why the economy of the US South sucked), but that was a separate matter.

Slavery was abolished primarily due to the religious beliefs of assorted evangelical Christians (quakers, baptists, methodists), not for economic reasons.

[1] If you ignore the utility function of the slaves, slavery is economically equivalent to robots.
Poll: Do you click on advertising?
The '8% of the users are responsible for 85% of the clicks' title may be linkbait supreme, there definitely is something interesting to be found out there. I know HN is not exactly representative of the public at large, but still, do you click on ads?
- never (just that, never)
- rarely (once a year or so)
- sometimes (once a month or so)
- frequently (more than once a week say)
- very frequently (daily or more frequently)
I think this has huge implications, not just in this space, but in others (which restaurant? which vacation? other facets of favoriting co-workers? ways a person could improve) -- ties in very well with Jon Bischke's article on Reputation Graph:

http://jonbischke.com/2011/01/07/reputation-graph-one-of-the...
The lack of understanding about possible cancerous effects of nano materials worries me, especially with stuff like this and "nanocosmetic" materials. I'd just hate to find out 20 years down the road that all of our miracle materials were slowly killing us.
I know Brendan Eich has mentioned that he would like to bring python-like generators into the language. They're in Mozilla's engine, were in ES4, and they're a ES Harmony strawman.

http://wiki.ecmascript.org/doku.php?id=strawman:generators

Otherwise, I'm not really aware of anything. I know there's been efforts around Promises but I think those have been restricted to libraries and I think that even that's stalled because the CommonJS list is split between Promises/A and Promises/B.
Android upgrades: Which carriers can you trust?
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2101494
Yeah, I was just thinking, "what if it gets into my lungs?"
Picture of the Day: Mapping Twitter Activity on News Year's Eve
I'll start off with one that I spotted the other day while researching:

Email notification length vs. CTR.

That's one I never considered before outright, yet I've crafted all my notifications with a sense for that metric. You want your notifications to be just long enough to be tempting, but not so long that they can simply read the email and never click through.
Surfing the Internet: Introduction
I guess what I don't understand is what the significance of pointing to this effect other than to poison any chance of there being a reasonable discussion about the submission.
IBM's Watson supercomputer beats humans in Jeopardy (video)
> Would it be possible to create personal blacklists and have one for each user?

I think that's pretty clearly what we were talking about. There are invisible global blacklists already, as should come as no surprise (even if you haven't run into one of the hits omitted thanks to the DMCA).
Jobs: Make it work with one button
Interleaving is for people who can't write a coherent, self-sufficient response that answers the questions set forth in earlier messages.

I don't want to have to re-read the question every time I get an email; I already know what I asked. I want to know the answer.

The only time interleaving is better is when the answer is short and context-generic, i.e., a "yes" or "no".
Is There A System Administrator?
lol What will that prove? Why not do a poll asking who here likes Justin Bieber?
Microsoft also thought that they properly licensed MP3, until they were forced to pay additional $1.52B to Alcatel-Lucent...

MPEG-LA does not provide any protection agains patent holders coming out of the blue.
Python CoffeeScript directory watcher for cross-platform compiling
I seem to remember reading a while ago that the immune system in animals with regenerative ability needs to be stronger because the blastoma wound is "open" longer and more prone to infection. For humans today we can mitigate infection pretty well relative to a pretty much any mammal in the wild.
Be Rude, but Not Insulting
Have no fear, consumer; it's breathable, so there's nothing to worry about.
Yawn... I always see claims like this made about almost every new advance in materials science, but I hardly ever see these products reach the market.
MIND-blowing productivity skill
A Visual Guide to Version Control
Product placement may play a bigger role. Apple has already shown the world how effective buying/trading your products into 4 out of 5 TV shows and movies can be. I don't know how active major brands are in online placement, but the FTC disclosure rules are generally considered easy to skirt or just plain ignore by smaller players.

Looking around at tech blogs and social media it's easy to spot dozens of pieces a day that might as well be ads for firms like google, microsoft, samsung, amazon, apple etc. In many ways these are far better than display ads because of the engagement of reading and sometimes commenting on a piece. The measurable difference between some of these brand's #1 fans and paid promoters seems quite small. How sure are we that some of them aren't just ads already?
I quit facebook a year ago. Wish I'd never signed up in the first place.
Adam Doppelt (co-creator) here. Feel free to chime in with technical questions and I will attempt to answer them. That's half the fun of a side project!
Let's see, international ITU/ISO standard designed by video professionals (not web search people) vs. WebM de facto "standard" controlled by Google.

I think I know which one the world is behind and which one Google is behind. I vote: world.