skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Sorry, haven't watched the show - has he tried $10, rounded off?
Actually that's within a stone's throw of the Belgian border.
Some clickable links:

The previous thread: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2171135

The website: http://www.too-long-didnt-read.com/
Not true I bet there are plenty of hackers that are single and looking for love! I go on there even though I don't like the website and its functionality once a week just to see who's around.
There are a lot of sites guilty of this, even those that should know better. In 2009, I lost my username to the Microsoft TechEd Africa site. So I phoned Microsoft South Africa's number for the event, and I was shocked when the chap at the other end read my password back to me!

It was a strong password that I used on a few other low-importance sites, but I immediately changed it on all of them.
I think this touches on an interesting point: A few weekends worth of study can produce a short term "unlicensed" practical grasp on pretty much any subject.

In the startup world this is almost taken for granted. For example, I needed to learn how to collect money from customers and didn't want to use PayPal. One weekend later I had a basic understanding of payment gateways, merchant accounts, PCI compliance, etc... The next, I had working code processing customer transactions that has been running for years now without a single issue.

I've learned a lot about payment processing since then but I _still_ trust that code and by extension my former self that was able to quickly get up to speed on a specialized topic.

I imagine the NCDOT engineers had ascribed a lot of value to the time spent obtaining their degrees and licenses ...instead of the practical benefits obtained. They anchored that pride and sense of accomplishment to the specialized format of the reports they work in.

It's interesting to see these two world views collide and certainly this won't be the last time it happens.
They, like every other community site, have a ToS that grants them rights to publish and sublicense user submitted content. They couldn't function without it, when you view a twitter feed with your browser and see sponsored trending topics, they're "selling" content:

> You retain your rights to any Content you submit, post or display on or through the Services. By submitting, posting or displaying Content on or through the Services, you grant us a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free license (with the right to sublicense) to use, copy, reproduce, process, adapt, modify, publish, transmit, display and distribute such Content in any and all media or distribution methods (now known or later developed).

http://twitter.com/tos
management didn't understand basic automata theory

Do tell more about it; as I feel that's not why they wasted millions.

That company tried to translate code from one programming language to another using only regular expressions. (This was a long time ago when you couldn't almost count on most "regular expression" implementations being Turing Complete.)

Perhaps the problem was really that engineers who understood the futility of the approach didn't speak up or weren't listened to. Still, I'd expect people managing an engineering firm that builds bridges to have some basic grasp of physics. So I don't think it's going too far to have those running a software company to have some basic grasp of the basic laws governing their field.
> There is just no excuse for this.

Sure there is. It's their store and they do whatever they want. Not sure how does that involve ignoring the reality of the world surrounding it, but Apples seems to do quite well regardless.
Just two days ago I accidentally found a way to trick myself to switch to a morning schedule. Drank a large quantity of beer one evening, fell asleep at 9 or 10pm, woke up at 3am. I couldn't fall back asleep so I stayed up another 7 hours before I had to be at work yesterday. Last night I went to bed at 10pm again (sober), and woke up a couple hours ago at 6am. I kind of like the morning, and hope I can keep it up.

I normally have pretty bad insomnia (the idea of falling asleep in 5 minutes sounds hilariously far-fetched to me). And I really do go to bed when I'm sleepy. It just doesn't happen.
Sing.ly where Local Apps Compete on Value not Network Lock In
If you really know how to program / software design / make it work, you can simply read "The New Turing Omnibus" (66 Excursions in Computer Science) from A.K. Dewdney and learn complexity/algorithms with "Introduction to Algorithms" from Cormen, Leiserson, Rivest and Stein. More important than _reading_ this last book is _doing_ the/some exercises, follow open course ware (for instance: http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/electrical-engineering-and-comput... ) if you prefer but do some exercises found in that book (or on Top Coder or Google Code Jam or whatever suits you).

Also, if you have time and passion, write a compiler.
Exactly. Once I didn't sleep for 3 days, and it still took me an hour to fall asleep :(
Zach, I wouldn't call the limited scale on which Thiel is acting "tearing down the system"--more like creating a nascent alternate system, side-by-side with the existing one, for the few who can benefit from it.

There are already things like this; Deep Springs College certainly isn't for everyone, almost by definition, although most of those who attend it seem to do quite well.

Anyway, an escape hatch from the system isn't necessarily an attack on the system.

[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_Springs_College
I was always under the impression that robots.txt was intended not to control search results, but to help prevent overzealous crawlers from taking down your website.

If you want to control what a search engine does with a page, you should use <meta name="ROBOTS"> and rel=nofollow, neither of which Google includes in its results pages. It would be reasonable for Bing to look for and honor these directives when collecting their clickstream data, and Google isn't availing itself of the option.
Android Special Report: Is Samdroid the new Wintel?
That meme deserves an XKCD
Hot New social network for developers. Check it out
I've seen that link and I had no idea it was an auto-login.
Expand please
tl;dr SO is about keeping yourself entertained while you're learning how to write (among other things). But so is HN :)
USB 2.0 Hubs blog - lol
Great to see some young folk lurking here. These whipper snappers will have a head-start over us 30/40/50 somethings.

TL/DR: "There was nothing like Hacker News in my day"
I live in London and am currently trying to get my startup off the ground. I am also an avid reader of HN, and was considering going to last nights event.

Due to work pressures, i.e. launching soon, I saw it better to spend my time working on my startup than going to the HN event. I have 2 children, and work from home, so I need to grab any opportunity I can to work.

Also, there are now lots of startup events in London, and if you are busy then you really need to pick and choose which ones you go to. In my case I am going to the lean startup one next week, which I see as being currently more relevant (and maybe more useful) to me than the HN event.
Now you have another security hole - teaching people that it's a good idea to click links in emails, and making it orders of magnitude easier to be phished. Probably better than plaintext passwords, but still bad.
The feedback I got from talking to people seemed to indicate people had been doing their project for too long not to feel like a startup, or that their startup was a side project but the day job got in the way. That's partly why I (somewhat cheekily) asked a question about profitability.

If youre a contractor with a day job the safety net combined with the time loss really works against you getting your startup off the ground. I think nearly everyone in the room recognised the sheer balls it took for the playnice.ly guys to go and launch. Everyone I spoke to mentioned the marketing point that wad raised and so few felt they could get it right. Perhaps that's also a factor in the response.
How Classpath work in Java?
For those reading along: loaned not gave
<self-promotion>
Take a peek at my company (ReignDesign). We design and build mobile games and applications for iOS, Android, Blackberry etc etc http://www.reigndesign.com/
</self-promotion>

Good luck finding the right shop!
Shining my tptacek light re: Applied Cryptography

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=639786

Thomas recommends Practical Cryptography instead.
Is masturbation so much of a taboo to be mentioned there? Or startup founders don't masturbate? If you can't sleep, you can use your refractory period: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Refractory_period_(sex) .

Of course this is a throw away account.
Counterpoint: Free.fr in France. While the incumbent telecoms were charging out the nose, Free.fr charges a moderate price for unlimited access and all sorts of awesome features. Clearly it's working for them.

Canadian telecoms are some of the most profitable companies in the country. The "no incentive to invest" has been because they can charge whatever they want for their service, milking the aging infrastructure they "own" that taxpayers heavily subsidized.

Why invest early and often if you can just crank up your rates when things eventually break down?
They're both bad, but it's more work to intercept email. I would imagine most hackers will want to break into the core system and download a bajillion passwords all at once.
Logging in anonymously, because it lets me be slightly more direct.

As someone who does work on a startup in London, but didn't go last night, it's because I've found the HN London meetups to be chock-full of people who don't work on startups, but simply talk all evening about recycled opinions they've garnered from reading HN posts.

Not an interesting way to spend an evening.
> Update only when you need to update. Otherwise you may alienate your core customers.

This is a bad side-effect of App Store policies. Why is there no auto-update option? Users should be able to go into a settings page and check "let this application auto-update". With an opt-in system like this, users can always have up-to-date versions of programs they know and trust without being bothered to update manually.

This is the way Android does it and it makes tons of sense to me. Just as users are not expected to use File -> Save anymore with something like iOS, they shouldn't be expected to keep track of the version numbers of the Apps they've downloaded, decide on updates, etc.
I did a lot of Push learning in college and shortly afterward. I'd buy a bunch of books, read them cover to cover, and look up stuff on the web. I found that it was a good way to get familiar with certain topics, so I knew which tools to use for certain types of problems. The problem I found is that I'd spend lots of time reading about something that was less applicable, and the minute I got into a non-trivial application, I'd have to spend hours looking up details that I hadn't covered. I spent a bunch of time doing Push, but then had to also do an equal amount of Pull when I tried to use it.

I've since changed my approach. I limit my Push to little bits in order to familiarize myself with tools, but don't go too far in detail. This way I can cover a wider range of topics without wasting time on details I'll never use. Then when I actually start a project, I'll dive into the details as I'm using them. I find digging into details after you have context for what you're doing also helps with memory.

I think the OP probably learned more than they think they did, they just need some context to string it all together and help jog their memory. I wish I'd figured this out in college or shortly afterward, because most of what I learned was "in one ear, out the other".
Can you solve the mystery of PRICE?
Sounds like a case of mishandled expectation to me. Computer science is a mathematical and logical discipline; programming is a good means to practice that mathematics and logic, but it's not what computer science is.
Meanwhile, the rest of the world will be over here not having to do mental math every time we go to buy something with a $/£/€5 bill. And we'll still know how much tax the government is charging if we really care - it's printed on the receipt.

Wondering - how do you feel about gas prices? Do you support advertising airline tickets net of 30-50% surcharges so you can know exactly how much of your ticket goes to fuel, airport charges, taxes, and "fees"? And for the other side of the coin - what about not being reminded exactly how much value you got out of the government every time you drive down a road?
Ah, I didn't realise their product was only recently released.
I can't draw, but IMO git's basic operations are pretty easy to visualise if you think of the repository and commits as a graph (a tree). You start with the first commit/snapshot as the root, and every node after that is a child of the root. To bring diffs into this model, I suppose you could think of the edges as the "diff" between two snapshots; ie. how to get from node A to child A'.

The staging area is pretty simple. You can think of it as a "WIP" snapshot: it's what gets recorded in the tree when you make your next commit. It may seem like extra work if you're just used to committing every change you have in the working directory, but at least I tend to not want to do that, and git has some pretty cool tools for crafting neat commits out of working tree contents. :)

A node can of course have multiple children, so branches are natural in the git world. "Named" branches are merely pointers to a snapshot somewhere in the branching structure of the tree.

Merges happen when two branches join together: a new merge snapshot M has edges from both parents A and B (or more, if needed) representing the conflict resolution, and M represents the finished merge.

Rebasing or reparenting is somewhat different. You can think of it as cutting a branch from the tree and gluing it elsewhere. ie. if you rebase branch B onto branch A, then the divergence point of A and B is looked up, and all the edges (diffs) from that point on until the tip of B are applied on top of A, resulting in a series of completely new snapshots. This is why rebasing is "dangerous" or destructive: branch B is no longer the branch it once was, but something completely different.

Unlike in a merge, information about the original branches, or any changes needed to fit the changes on top of the new base, is discarded.

Of course, git won't actually destroy anything during rebases either. As long as you keep a reference to the original branch B, git will keep the snapshots and you can go back to them. There's just no straightforward way to tell that the original B has at one point been rebased on top of A.

EDIT:

I think I should note that every "ref" in git is a reference to this giant tree data structure. Let's take for example origin/master. When you fetch changes from the origin repository, git fetches snapshots from the remote data structure, includes them in your own local one, and updates origin/master reference to point to the correct tip in the data structure so that it corresponds to the remote's master branch.

The same happens for other branches, too of course, depending on what you tell git to fetch. (git can also handle snapshots completely unrelated to other commits in the repository. ie. you can have multiple root commits, but that's not often done. :P)

A "pull" then goes a step further and merges your local 'master' with origin/master and updates your local reference. (origin/master remains untouched until you fetch new changes or successfully push your merged master to the remote)

In essence, git manipulates references to a growing, mostly immutable, distributed data structure. I think it's simple and elegant, but YMMV. :)
I can only imagine how many regexes this will break.
HN is probably quite an aspirational thing for those still stuck in the perceived drudgery of enterprise and large scale software development for established companies. It's their dose of inspiration, I feel.

I agree it doesn't add a lot of value to the community, though. Speaking for myself, as someone who works at a startup, I was actually busy working last night. Like most nights.
Not to mention the potential for creating other problems. Say you've started dating somebody that doesn't use POF or know the site does this, and they notice you're getting emails from a dating site to remind you of your password. All of a sudden you need to make them understand that you're not actively using the dating site.
I agree that the only way to truly understand Git (which I am still a long way off from) is to understand how it works. Otherwise it really is totally incomprehensible. Two resources that helped me a lot were the "Git magic" link at the end of the article, and "Git from the bottom up" (http://www.newartisans.com/2008/04/git-from-the-bottom-up.ht...). Well worth reading, you'll realise just how simple Git really is and it's quite beautiful how much utility comes from such a simple model.
Source: https://twitter.com/#!/secretsquirrel/status/325967820137472...
I'm too frugal to buy a new car, what about those that want a used car?
I'd love to hear why that code doesn't embody brevity?

As for obfuscation, it's rather straightforward -- it's just concise. A lack of instant understanding doesn't indicate that a piece of code is without merit, or not honest and straightforward.
Do You Ever Get Bored Of Blogging?
Introducing RestKit: A RESTful Object Mapping Framework for iOS
Very odd to read, after the Android Market has been running for quite some time, that "The result of [app store review] is that Apple can more easily let us use their payment system without scaring their lawyers, devaluing their store’s image, or incurring high fraud and chargeback fees from their payment processors."

Google certainly has lawyers, and the (former) try-before-you-buy policy was a much more direct answer to fraud and chargeback than stringent app review. As to reputation, the Android store's poor rep is more due to the absence of particular good apps (or the difficulty finding them) than the presence of crud (which Apple's store has in abundance) --- and I don't think you can credit the review process with attracting good developers. Most of them hate it.

It's also funny that he doesn't mention the one thing that the review process does do for end users --- it makes sure that apps conform to Apple's UI guidelines. They can be obnoxious about this, as in the flat rejection of camera apps that use the volume buttons as shutter controls, but the consistency is probably a net win for users overall. Though for Android, manufacturer reskinning is probably a bigger problem.

But it's been used in directly anticompetitive ways (the Google Voice holdup, which let to an FCC investigation; the current Sony reader payments flap) that it's really hard to deny that that's one of the points of the exercise from Apple's perspective. And fanboy rationales which ignore that awkward fact are getting really tedious.
4. They network elsewhere

Many views on why they do, and why it's so fragmented. But fragmented it is.

5. London is flat and wide with the startups not centralised

Not everyone is around Old St, and even those who are might still be grinding out code when the meetup started and then just opt not to walk in halfway through. For the ones further out, timings and stuff might put them off. People don't live around their either so it may be a trek home for some that puts them off.

6. Topics might not appeal to them

Then there's those who might go for the topics, but weren't interested in that set of topics.

7. They don't wish to have the distraction of networking when they just want to keep their heads down and get on with it

And those who have what they feel is the network they need, and so invest their time in that network alone.

I didn't go, even though I have intended to go to the last couple. The reasons above aren't my reason, but I'm speculating that there are more than just the reasons you give.

And I do have a startup (a small but profitable one, it ticks over nicely and I have a few things in the pipeline to help push it a bit further). And across the office I see another guy with a startup who managed to sell recently. And then there's people I know down near Shoreditch working on stuff. The people are clearly around, but none of the ones I know went last night.

Just asked a couple of guys here. Reasons given: Formality and agenda, hanger-ons, recruiters, aimless networking.

Concensus here was that if it was more to let off steam and pressure with a bunch of like-minded people sharing the problems informally over beer and fussball (yeah, we're thinking Bar Kick)... then most of them would be good for it.

Also, there was the shared view that DrinkTank was pretty damn good whilst it was very small, invite only and vetted (people actually doing stuff).
I typically write mine down in a notebook. If its a really great idea, it doesn't normally just go away. You'll keep running into situations where it would be useful if the idea was already a reality. If after a week or two you still can't let the idea go, you "may" have a keeper. Get some feedback from friends and fellow techies - figure out which idea has the best chance of success and go with that.

PS - Don't second guess yourself after you've made a decision.

PPS - Don't undervalue the work you've already done on your current project. Execution is harder than ideation.

PPPS - Lay off the coffee.
Excuse me, but in my programming thought flow, there are checksums and limits, not c's and l's, and my code reflects that. Do I not qualify as a coder?
I remember feeling the same thing in college... I expected CS to be a vocational program that would teach me how to write the applications I used on Windows every day. By Senior year, when not a single "real world" application was written, I finally realized it was all about teaching good theory and practice, and the practical stuff I'd need to pick up on my own.
Perhaps I shouldn't be reading HN at work, but that was way more NSFW than I thought it would be.
Hacking the Toshiba T4800CT (a love story)
I'm sure that you've done a great deal of challenging/complex programs in pursuing your major.

If this is so, and you can't program, then how did they appear?
Actually not. I started using 1Password and I must say it increased both, security and convenience. No temptation to reuse the same (and simple) password, easy login ("Fill and login") and password generator with which I generated absurdly complex passwords I am using now. And I don't even have to remember them!
IAds more effective than TV advertising, Nielsen finds