skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>I watched Social Network for the second time today, and it got me thinking. Entrepreneurs are no different than struggling actors.

Didn't we already collectively agree that the events depicted in the Social Network were more Hollywood than Silicon Valley?

Not that I totally disagree with the comparison, I've made it myself as recently as yesterday, but it's not exactly a bad thing. There was a time when Hollywood was making a lot of good films. But those films brought in money, and money brought in vanity and all that other nastiness. There's certainly plenty of money bouncing around SV, but the fame is a bit more self-contained. If you move to the valley and send a letter home to your mom about how you bumped into Fred Wilson in a coffee shop, she would probably not run off to tell all her friends about it.

If the worst thing you can say about the valley is that everybody there wants to build something great and is willing to risk a lot to make an effort at it, that sounds like a fantastic environment.
Apple's rejection of 'Readability' iOS app stirs subscription controversy
Hacking Valve. Damage: $250,000,000

Bullshit.
I'm still not clear why you stopped though. Was it not enjoyable? You say you remained calm during these 7 years, is that not enough? You say it was less and less effective - effective at what?

Were you seeking something that you eventually felt you couldn't obtain? Did you try other forms of meditation?
Conspicuously missing is the brilliant new Proc.curry method!

For those that don't know currying is a method that returns another Proc with one fewer argument, so you can do:
multiply = Proc.new { |x, y| x * y }
multiply_by_five = multiply.curry(5)
multiply_by_five.call(3) # => 15
Thanks for fixing it, and sorry about the window.close() thing :P Very cool; its mind-blowing how simple the code is. Can you post some of the server-side code?
I was in a similar position once, many years ago, in the early days of the web. I had managed to get parts of the source code to a popular online game (no real hacking here, they left a tarball in an open directory I stumbled upon), and being a foolish young kid, I decided to brag about my insider knowledge of unfinished features on a website. A few weeks later, the company contacted me with a job offer... they just needed my name and address to start sending me checks. Fortunately, I wasn't that dumb.
Reminds me of the recent BBC show on China in Africa. I stated that just now and wanted to ask something along the lines of what kinds of morals seem inherited in American capitalism vs. China's designed capitalism, but then I remembered the whole of the financial crisis.
Update: I asked some people in my office if they've heard of Mark Zuckerberg - 100% had and could identify him as 'the facebook guy.' Same question with Sergey Brin and Larry Page - crickets.
I have no idea. I do a lot of searching, some computer assisted, some directed by Bayesian filters, some directed by keyword search, and some just clicking around. I spend about 2 hours a day on searching about math, teaching, hacking, programming, physics, enrichment, and similar. I also employ programmers, and am interested in the problems of interviewing. I guess in that 2 hours I view about 700 or 800 pages, most for just a couple of seconds. I then save around 20 that my systems have marked as potentially interesting.

I found it in the bundle.
Why not both? The two are hardly mutually exclusive and both have somewhat different goals despite some overlap.
Thank you, I'll follow your suggestion.
Hollywood controls the movie and TV distribution, so if you don't play their game, good luck getting on TV or in the theaters.

In Silicon Valley however, you can still win without playing the insular game, and paradoxically it might end up making you more successful.

I was always interested in startups because it seemed a path to 'doing your own thing' and not being beholden to 'the man.' It's funny that people have now come to think of it in the complete opposite way.
And it isn't abuse until it is used in a specific abusive way. Having the options available to you isn't abusing it.
Seems that Apple just wants to prevent any market creation, not just subscriptions, that play anywhere near their sandbox.
I find I go directly to subreddits I like now, like r/wikipedia or r/cogsci

I still surf the Internet, but it's more focused, and less like bodysurfing through shit.
> It definitely changed my life.

How so?
Experimenting with Penguins
Isn't that essentially what lending tree is?
Even though this is satire, you could rebut a few of his arguments (specifically, the typing skills one).

Can we just move on as a development community and let each developer/team choose whatever language, framework, or toolset they find suits them best?
It's a literal statement for people on the west coast. It becomes figurative as you go east.
And now no one can forget to close the file, plus it’s shorter as well. There is no way to do this in a non Lisp language.

C# has the IDisposable + using construct for exactly this purpose. If you're not happy with that you can write your own using a lambda, just like his example...

using (open file here)
{
// Do work here
}

WithNetFile(f => do work here);

Lisp is neat, this is not a great argument though.
End of the article refers to a book Mindfulness in Plain English, which you can also read for free: http://www.urbandharma.org/udharma4/mpe.html
There are reasons that PHP is better than Ruby but instead of pointing those out this article chose to:

1. focus on some of the ways that Ruby is better than PHP
2. lie about the topic in the title
3. have an annoying sarcastic tone throughout.

-1
We didn't start to code until we had 15 "strangers" willing to pay for our solution... and the sense of idea validated I had it after talking to 30 people and had 100+ surveys filled.
This "thing that can't be done in any other language" looks an awful lot like RAII in C++.

For example I can write:

{
ifstream file("filename");
...
} // file closed here automatically.

or

{
mutex_grab g(mutex);
.....
} // mutex automatically released here
You can't really go too wrong by starting right now. Sit still in a comfortable position, relax, and focus on your breathing.

You don't need to know more to get started.
I simply like the platform. The hardware is nice, Objective-C is a pleasant language for me to write in, the library is very well thought out. And it certainly does not hurt that we can keep the company afloat by developing for iOS -- we simply could not do that on Android.
I think it was self-taught from the book linked at the bottom (and available in PDF and .epub for free, as mentioned in comments here).
Excellent points, for me these arguments are also highly applicable as to why C# is better than F#. The extra code really helps with readability and maintainability.

You'd scarcely need any developers at all to maintain that ruby class.
Ask HN: Any startups need design work done?
I'm interested in doing web design projects for startups to build up my portfolio.

I'm someone that loves creating clean and effective designs and turning them into finished web pages. I have a decent understanding of the entire spectrum of web design, from the underlying technologies, to typography, to color, to effective layout.

Here is a rough sketch of what I can do:
http://farrspace.com/acc/landing.png (unused mockup)
http://www.mariettaoh.net/government (live city government website)

I would love to get more experience, and I can't think of a better place than the startup community here.

So if you have a web design project that you want help with, email me and we can talk about it, and I can tell you if I can help, and send you some sketches. As I am doing this mostly for experience, my prices will be extremely reasonable and can be paid at completion.

Thanks for reading!

brianfarr@gmail.com
Try to get a monthly cash retainer at a competitive consulting rate: say $1k/day (i.e. 3-4K/month).

Also, try to get a small commission on successful sales where you are involved.
Same here for my product, Kwolla. I took a failed social network I built and productized the code behind it.

I suppose I could've done some more research before I built the social network first, but my first month of sales have been stronger than I expected: http://blog.leftnode.com/entry/first-month-kwolla-sales-repo...
> with a big enough lip/flange

Your flange is not "big enough". For an absurd example, consider a hole 3" to a side, and a flange 48' in width.

That said, I honestly meant this as a mathematical/rhetorical statement, not a practical one. So yes, you're correct that for any reasonable flange width (given the assumption we're talking about steel/iron manhole covers, and accepted values of the material's strength, etc.), some shapes wouldn't qualify.

My point was to show that the question, taken at its face value, isn't even a good question. It assumes a flange, or no shape would work as a cover, as the cover would simply fall into its own hole. Thus, if we're to assume a flange (or a taper; it could be argued wine bottle stoppers and the holes they "cover" are both "circles"), we should be able to assume one of arbitrarily large size, and then ANY shape will work.
So happy to have this out for general use. I work at Twilio, and use the OpenVBX app to manage all my voicemail for business. It's cool now, but is going to be so much more awesome with contributions from the community. I'm very interested in talking about how to expand the plugin architecture for the web app to work for mobile as well. If anyone else wants to chat about working on this drop me a note a danielle@twilio.com
Show HN: Write to the President
Hi,
I just prepared this:
http://motivapps.com/tete/president.php

It's a simple webapp that helps users to create an e-mail to Mr. President.

I hope there are no spelling or grammar mistakes - I'm not a native english speaker...

What do you think?

Cheers,
Tomasz
The Day I Learned To Love Perl
They are free to choose, but if a friend came to you and said "Hey I'm doing a web startup, I want to write it in assembly" wouldn't you advise him against it unless there was some kind of restraint that required running on embedded hardware? Even then you might suggest C if a compiler is available for that chip.
There's no way they lost money because of the hacking. They probably made money from the publicity.

Edit: I'm agreeing with you haha.
I don't get it. Was he making fun of both or just PHP?

Some of the things I "think" he was ripping on PHP for are some of my favorite things.

I don't program in Ruby and the part where he said the code didn't make sense - well, it didn't. But was he saying it did sarcastically? Or was he saying it was good that it couldn't be read?

Anyway, I wish I had a down arrow next to articles for this one because I really didn't like the way this was done.
Miniature Projection Mapped Storytelling
Wells Fargo failed to pay the damages levied by the court. You can't just lose a court case and not pay, not if you have assets at least. The Sheriff is taking possession of their assets (the office) and selling them to pay the claim.
Focus on the good. Focus on what went well. Focus on what got done. Right before you end add a quick whats left and follow with a game plan to get it done.
Neither of these proposals is optimal; patio11's proposal takes linear time in the worst case.

IIRC, the correct solution to this is in sqrt(N) time; for a 100-floor building, you drop at floors 10, 20, 30, 40, 50, 60, 70, 80, 90, and 100, in that order. In general, this is sqrt(N) floors, spaced sqrt(N) floors apart.
The bulb will break at floor sqrt(N) * X [10X in this example]. Now, drop the bulb from the approximately sqrt(N) [10] floors between floor sqrt(N) * (X-1) [10 * (X-1)] and sqrt(N)* X - 1 [10 * X - 1], inclusive. When it breaks, you have the exact tolerance rounded down to the nearest floor, and you've done it with at worst 2 * sqrt(N) drops.

By the way, this is a great example of a dumb interview question; it's not particularly obvious that there is a solution in sqrt(N) worst case time, but once you're told that there is one (and, perhaps, that binary search + linear search is linear search in the worst case), it's not too difficult to get it in sqrt(N).

Also, note that average case running time analysis is meaningless if you don't have a distribution for the input; simply assuming that the tolerance is distributed uniformly at random from 1 to 100 just because you have a 100-floor building makes little sense.
I've said this before but i'll say it again.

It doesn't matter if you develop in php, ruby, python, asp or whatever, if you're a good coder you will produce good secure code, if you suck, so will your code.

Can we stop the language flame wars now?
Sorry, but I can't figure out how to connect up the referents so that your comment makes sense to me.

I have no idea why someone would want to hide "being a good person" for any interpretation of good subscribed to by people who exist outside of fiction.

As for becoming good: I think most people are basically good, but some have acquired pathological behaviors. And of course, it's not the business of someone hiring, a startup, or an incubator to do anything about that, except to exclude it. I think a lot of hackers are angry or at least have a chip on their shoulders because their lives and/or their livelihood lacks efficacy.
I was trying to draw a distinction between this and something like Wikileaks. There are acts which are illegal but might be done for the ultimate good of society. If Gembe hacked into a company's network in order to secure evidence of their involvement in some heinous thing like genocide, it would still be illegal, but he would have my sympathy. But Valve just makes games. It was a dick move.
Great to hear news like this from microsoft, I think real kudos is deserved for moves like this.

No matter what sort of benefit they get from it.

Probably too much to ask that they release the SDK cross platform :)
I started with Basic on a C-64 when I was a kid, mainly using the official manual if I remember right. When I went on to the Amiga, I didn't code anything for a few years and eventually wrote some extensions for bulletin board systems such as AmiExpress and CNet.

On the PC I did about the same, coding add-ons for PCBoard, mainly by decompiling other add-ons and learning from them. Later on I started with C/C++ (and some x86 assembler) and that's when it started to become more serious. I got a programmer job, moved on to Java, web development and many more languages.

I wonder which language 'kids' are learning first these days though. Looking back I'd say Basic was a perfect starting point but it's pretty much gone these days, isn't it?
On being a member of the "dumbest generation"
I don't care if it was illegal, or if it was a dick move. Prison time is hugely out of line for this sort of offense and perpetrator.
Ruby may be better than PHP, but the kind of attitude that Ruby seems to encourage has always been a huge turn-off for me. The amount of time Ruby supporters will take in bashing other languages seems... immature, at best. It doesn't seem as though it's always been this way, but it has become that way.

For me, Python is the place to go if you want a good language with an emotionally mature community. Maybe that will change, just like it has for Ruby.

Luckily, there's always the PHP community for people who will never cop an attitude about how beautiful their language is. Such is the inevitability of a pragmatic, patchwork language.
These were posted here recently (in case you missed them): http://all-things-andy-gavin.com/2011/02/02/making-crash-ban...
Computer Engineering & software engineering degrees are a lot different than CS than just another year. CE degrees in Canada are pretty much a dressed up versions of Electrical Engineering degrees with a few programming courses thrown in they go pretty deep on the hardware side of things but the programming stuff is covered in somewhat handwavy way. Software engineering degrees on the other hand are something that I just don't get. They require you to take too many useless courses like Chemistry and business-esque courses. I think CS degree is the sweet spot for programmers, I had had enough of computer hardware after take taking computer organization courses, building circuits is not of any interest to me, something that CE majors spend a lot of their time on.
There are a lot more web servers than exchange servers in this world...
The idea behind an interview is to understand how proficient you are in articulating your thoughts, and how well you can handle difficult problems. No good interview asks only simple questions. The hard ones are there for the interviewer to understand how experienced one is in handling newer situations, and how he/she performs in a "virtual" stressful situation. Its not a litmus test, but probably the best an interviewer can do in 60 mins. These skills only come by practice, and if school can help accelerate it -- that's great!

My only concern is that for introductory courses, programming must be a "fun-only" affair -- let students explore, crash and burn the computer rather than worry about small details.
Tell HN: Adopt a Course from OpenCourseWare
We at Udemy are huge fans of OpenCourseWare. Personally, I learned how to code from MIT's Intro to Computer Science and now I get paid to do it. The content is seriously invaluable.

There is a problem however. When working through these courses, you have virtually no support available to you. We want to change that.

Starting today, we are accepting applications for people from the HN community to “adopt a course” from OpenCourseWare on Udemy. This basically means that you as an instructor will define a schedule for people working through the content, lead discussion and answer questions posted on the discussion board. And if you want to do more, such as leading live discussion, creating supplemental content, or giving tests, we encourage it. The goal is to develop a nice community around the courses, so that students can help each other.

If you want to adopt a course post below or email me (email in profile) with what course you’d like to adopt and a sentence or two on why you’re qualified.

Sample courses:
http://www.udemy.com/cs-107-programming-paradigms/

http://www.udemy.com/introduction-to-robotics/

http://www.udemy.com/mit-6046j-18410j-introduction-to-algorithms-sma-5503/

Full list: http://www.udemy.com/courses/Academics.html
I don't get the feeling he's used anything besides Java. His technique that's impossible in a non-Lisp language is the normal way of doing IO in Ruby, only it doesn't take a macro.
He himself admits that what he did was criminally and morally wrong.

I don’t know why he should go to prison for a long time for what he did, though. He was punished harshly (two years probation are no joke) and the judge made abundantly clear that the only reason for not punishing him harsher was his behavior after being caught.

I have no desire to destroy other people’s lives just out of spite and I find this desire to be quite baffling. The only question I care about is whether the punishment is sufficient to prevent future similar crimes from him or other people. I have no doubt that allowing him to keep his stable job and leaving it at a strong slap on the wrist is pretty much the optimal thing to do in this case, in terms of deterrence. (I would think that hackers who lose everything and go to prison for a few years are more likely to become criminals than hackers who get two years of probation but get to keep their job.)

The only quarrel I have is that it took apparently three years to bring this case to court. Swift trials matter a lot more than the harshness of the punishment when it comes to deterrence. (In this particular case it was probably for the best that it played out like this but as a German citizen I would like to see a faster judiciary in general.)
A retainer generally implies a fixed fee for up to "x" amount of service time. The company risks part of their investment if they don't use all the time available on the monthly retainer. However that risk is offset by having the service provider generally available as needed.

My recommendation to you is to mentally set your hourly rate and then multiply it by the total number of hours you are willing to give them, regardless of the number of hours they want. So if you are willing to give them 5 days (40 hours) of service a month, then set your rate at that point (This should always be a fixed number, not hourly billing, so you and they know the exact cost every month and you can be prepaid).

Remember when setting your rate, odds are they will use every single hour available and if you are not getting other services, then your rate should be higher than your salaried rate was because the company is no longer having to eat all of the other “hidden expenses” and you will be taking on new taxes such as an additional 7.5% for being self employed. Consider lowering your rate for continued access to services like health insurance or retirement plans.

Decline any financial compensation related to performance, only go for a fixed fee, else you may find yourself distracted or side tracked and working extra hours that you never intended to, to achieve some financial goal or project closure. The hardest part about working retainers is actually limiting yourself to the contract requirements and no more, especially when working with people that you have real personal relationships with.
I often wonder why Google is giving stuff away for free. Can a publicly-held corporation do something just because it's cool, interesting, or The Right Thing To Do?

Here's something they give away that I use every day: a reliable DNS server. (Much more reliable than my ISP, and yes, I cache DNS locally).

http://code.google.com/speed/public-dns/
Enjoyed the article a lot, I'm currently 3rd year CS. Although I understand that its not always practical to follow lessons with immediate or else set practicals, I find these are the lectures in which I excel.

We also had a lecture this year involving role playing of a RISC-1 processor pipeline, felt stupid at the time, but don't think I'll ever forget the purpose of an out 1 internal register.

I call for a new structure to sit down and listen lectures.
guildhub.com? guilds for github...
The difference is that this can only increase sells of Kinect hw and MSFT sw.

Samba allowed you to replace expensive Windows Servers and expensive Client access license with free Linux boxes != Balmer being a happy bunny
Should developers get free reign over workstation purchases?
Year to date (Feb 21 2011), I have measured 32 hours that I wait for my compiler. Admittedly, a portion of this time is when I hit 'build all' and go to lunch - but I believe the majority of that time does serve to lower my productivity.

If cash flow is not a problem, should developers be given free reign over their workstation purchases? Has such a policy ever been a problem at a successful software company?

I know from benchmarks that my compile times could be halved on a new $2000 PC, and I also know our company is not cash strapped, so it irks me every time I have to wait for the next fiscal year (April) to roll around so that my new machine can 'fit into the budget'. Am I alone?
This is fun, but you should remove the eraser. I think you'd find more creative graffiti without it.