skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The Square card reader is an amazing device. I do wish my Android phone had the equivalent of a dock connector to allow higher powered accessories, but barring that I'm really excited about the potential of using the phone's audio jack for power and signalling.

This one's been linked on HN before, but if anyone hasn't seen it:
http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2011/01/project-hijack-use...
FFI to C++ is a frustratingly difficult task for a number of reasons (there's a great presentation from FOSDEM where the Mono guys try to do this, can't find it right now though). There's a reason why FFI is mostly done against C libraries.
and he's been telling the same story for as long as Square has existed...
My failing hard drive would like to have a word with you.
http://code.reddit.com

The point is to show off your frontend skills, not make a fully working clone.
About the only comment thread on this story that has a claim of belonging on HN.
I have always referred to them as "Spin Factories", they provide the content that are used in PR and media to spin issues in a manner that is favorable to the sponsor(s).
Gerrit feels so... heavy. Are any of you using it at a small-ish company? Does it get in the way of getting work done?
1- easycal is for soloists. bookingbug is for soloists and large enterprises and anybody in between

2- we've consciously chosen to leave out lots features so that we can focus on making the core booking experience simple and easy. bookingbug looks powerful, but also confusing.
If you send it to me (jedberg@reddit.com) I'll tell you how awesome you are. :)
The title of this thread should really be changed. First, I get that LivingSocial is of the same type of business and hence was mentioned in the title but then its more than just Groupon and LivingSocial.

Second, it's not Groupon that is engaging in the questionable practices. When you're going through massive deals like this, it can be easy to miss that the retailer you're doing business with is pulling a sly one on you. It's not uncommon to get a separate link and to think that some on here would believe that Groupon should thoroughly go through every link and verify for price discrepancy that may show up is unrealistic.

Lastly, it's also not uncommon for coupons to be honored on original prices rather than sale prices.
I certainly hope C++ on the desktop is dead, there are far more productive languages for UI development. Obj-C, Ruby, Python, C# all come to mind. Show me a UI that a C++ programmer took a full week to build, and I can probably build it in an afternoon in C#/WPF.
You're ignoring real-world aspects of the problem. For example, you're assuming that the data points are evenly distributed across time.

Reddit will most likely have regular busy and quiet periods, which will impact the density of the log at certain times.

Thus, one can tune the algorithm to work better on Reddit's specific visitor pattern, if you can learn it. As an example, you need to jump back further in the file to get from 8pm to 6pm than you do to jump back from 4am to 2am. <- assuming US time, which they don't.
The comments from merchants below the article are pretty revealing...
Nah. This is dogma.
Qt as an open-source project will do just fine.

My fear is that Nokia will let future development languish and/or restrict future commercial licenses. Nokia's track record to date hasn't shown anything this evil, but you never can tell.
Yes indeed, now the hard part comes.
The video is far more relevant and interesting.

I propose: "Square founder Jack Dorsey's talk at Standford (video)"
Political activity != hacking. Nokia and Microsoft are tech companies.
Whatever outcome may result over time, I'm happy for the people of Egypt. Once again, the desire to be free eventually overwhelms the arbitrary tyranny of a dictator.

It will certainly be interesting to see if this leads to a domino effect in the Middle East and how it affects US foreign policy.
You should only offshore a mature product that's past its prime and just needs maintenance programmers to keep it alive and prevent it from blowing up. Any code changes will be bug fixes only and you won't be enhancing this product much.

For such products, the controls to keep bad code from getting release should have been put in place long before the teams were offshored.

When you're building a startup, your product won't resemble a product that is ready for offshoring. You'll be constantly iterating, rebuilding deployment infrastructure, and will need to respond quickly in case of catastrophic failure.
Clickable Link: http://videolla.com/

Feedback:

I believe that your website design and UI needs abit of work on but right now we are focusing on the product itself and its pricing strategy.

Firstly, if you raise your prices, you should honour the rate that current customers are paying. As you are offering $5/month package and taking 10% + $0.10 on each sale even if you change this aspect this should always remain for your current client base.

However, what I recommend you doing is offering a "new tier" in the payment pricing in the form a Gold, Silver and Bronze packages.

Example prices you could charge/offer to your customer base:

Bronze being the FREE package

Silver being your existing package although you could tweak this to be $5 month although you could take 15% and $0.15 per each sale.

Gold being say $20/month taking 10% per sale and like $0.05 per sale.

Then eventually this also leaves the option to introduce another tier like "Platinum" where it can just be a monthly fee and a small percentage per sale and/or a fee per sale.

Additionally, you should make "extra features" available to higher tier customers to encourage signups to the more expensive packages

Obviously you know more about your business than I do, so you will know more about the convertions etc but you should A/B test the prices for signups etc and see which one especially focusing on the distribution of revenue per customer so that you will know how much additional revenue it will bring in for your business.

You should also consider making your signup page like CrazyEgg's Plan Page - http://www.crazyegg.com/plans where it encourages users to pay for the $19/month package over the $9/month package.
What the Nokia Deal Means for Microsoft Developers
The Future of Education Technology: Freemium
Just wanted to update that we finally established SSL support. Thank you again for the feedback zoowar!
>"This work represents a quantum jump forward in the complexity and function of circuits built from the bottom up, and thus demonstrates that this bottom-up paradigm, which is distinct from the way commercial circuits are built today, can yield nanoprocessors and other integrated systems of the future,”

Define "bottom up", please. I highly doubt that chip manufacturers haven't been trying extremely hard to make smaller chips, so I'm forced to assume they mean something else. In the meantime, of course chip manufacturers are focusing on increasing macro-complexity, because that's where the major speed increases have been for quite a while (SSE, predictive branching, hyperthreading, multi-processor, etc)
Clustered Actors with Cloudy Akka
So, does kidnapping innocent people off the streets, imprisoning them in dungeons and torturing them by wiring car batteries to their genitals count as "fundamental"? Or is that just one of those insignificant matters?

What about stealing billions of dollars from your people? Is that a sign of enlightenment?
Ok, I have a lot of respect for esr, but all this talk of "porting" makes me think that no one knows how any of this works. "Porting" Android or WP7 to a new phone consists of: write drivers, write userland apps that give your users the experience you want, and possibly modify your existing bootloader code. They have documentation on their hardware, they have existing BSPs to reference, etc. This is not a hard problem. Getting this up and running with basic functionality would absolutely take no more than a month. Period.
Can I contact you directly?
> But what do I know, I'm only an Egyptian.

You're only one Egyptian.

Borders won't disappear, at least not over night, but Arabs have a sense of unity and brotherhood in their subconscious.

> WTF? Have you ever spoken with an actual Arab?

I am one ;) and I speak with them all the time. I believe csomar is also one (judging by his name).
you're essentially forced by the nature of video and the desire to compress to recognize features of images that exist in multiple frames and then encode based on them

Which is exactly why such methods should not be patentable. Do you really think the VP8 guys had no idea how to do that until they read the H.264 patent? Of course not; it's a strategy that's obvious to skilled engineers, and granting a monopoly to the first entity to file a patent creates huge market inefficiencies and reduced innovation.

things like android couldn't exist, because they wouldn't have a source of technology to copy.

What did Android "copy"? An interface with a grid of icons?
I felt it was interesting to point out it's economic evolution, even as a potential market. Also, as far as i read from the webs, there's a lot of momentum on open source and inovation (Lua for example)
I understand your concerns, and we thought about it a lot ourselves. "Are we asking too much?"

We came to the conclusion that what we are asking should be fun for you to do. Something you might even do without us asking.

Also, it shouldn't take you more than a few joyful hours. If it does, you probably aren't the person we're looking for.

We gave the task to a couple of trusted folks beforehand, people who we would love to hire if they weren't already doing something they loved, and they said that the tasks were pretty straightforward and quick to do.

We already tried doing it the other way around, and we realized that it just didn't work. The guy that turned out to be the best was the one we almost rejected because he had a bad resume and cover letter.

We don't want to make that mistake again.

If you think it is too much to ask, well, I guess you just don't apply. <shrug>
no. Apple bought Next, they didn't license tech from them. Nokia is licensing tech from MS. those are very different circumstances indeed.
Fine, I'm a fanboy, who owns lots of competitors products because I got confused at the mall.
Am I the only one happy that WP7 is NOT dead?

I very much prefer a threesome!
Every mobil user will benefit from this. And this is not like Desktop. Everybody will have to bring their A-Game.
It's fun for a while -- like a continuation of school / residence.

Also, it can give you the technical chops, contacts, and pedigree to eventually become a generally-self-employed 41-year-old father who works fewer hours.
It does quite aptly respond to the comments about WP7's abysmal sales, however: the lack of apps is what's killing it. I'm honestly surprised that more people aren't developing WP7 apps right now, betting that it'll take off.
Compactified version: "I prefer Windows Phone 7 and consider it much better than the rest, so it was a smart move. It's just that WP7 has no apps now, but you'll all see it'll rock."

He says that platform with no apps doesn't matter at all, then believes apps will magically come out of nowhere (uh, reminds me of http://twitter.com/RovioMobile/status/35985499667562496), so the platform will shine and become an ecosystem. Sure, this is probable (especially after the agreement), but they'll have very tough time making it so. We've already seen lots of great platforms failing for about the same reasons and WP7 may as well become another one.

Time'll show the real outcome, and we could only wish Nokia+MS to success.

Personally, I believe Nokia would've in a better position if they put all resources on MeeGo development and ability to run Android apps on it (which was already shown recently). This way they'd profit on two already strong ecosystems at once, yet won't become yet another Android vendor. But that's just my own thoughts.
What I meant was, people may not be running so fast if they have no options.

Re: the last sentence, yes that's exactly their problem and why I said 'under 80th percentile'. The best employees know the fat days are over and are moving out asap, leaving the hanger-ons to run the place. The rest can't get other employment so will just sit there hoping for a miracle.

But yeah, bottom line: Nokia is still screwed.
Yes, that was cute. I love how it seemed to be lost on the interviewer and editors. That makes it so much better.
It’s Facebook V Twitter In the Race to Make the News Social
Nothing will every beat ismichaeljacksonalive.com

just...brutal.
Something I learned from business and retail:

Groupon and their clones only need to pull these types of shenanigans to scale.

If they refine the model to compete largely with themselves, in the end, the company will win.

In order to do this, Groupon (or likely a smart clone) needs to break itself apart into niches and dominate the smaller markets that they are engaged in.
> You're ignoring real-world aspects of the problem.

No, I'm not. The most important real world aspect of this problem is that I can pull the complex part, the binary search, off the standard library shelf. All I need to implement is a random access iterator over the lines of an open file and I'm set.

> For example, you're assuming that the data points are evenly distributed across time

No, I'm not. I just don't care how they're distributed across times. 70GB is between 2^36 and 2^37 bytes. It's probably around 2^28 or 2^29 lines. Binary search over the characters would take at most 37 probes; over the lines it would take at most 29 probes. Since each probe is so cheap (one disk seek and one disk read, essentially) there's absolutely no reason to optimize any further, especially when I can use an off-the-shelf component like C++'s std::lower_bound to do my binary search for me.

> Reddit will most likely have regular busy and quiet periods, which will impact the density of the log at certain time

If you think that impacts the runtime of binary search at all, you've got a serious misconception about how binary search works.

> Thus, one can tune the algorithm to work better on Reddit's specific visitor pattern, if you can learn it.

Why bother? We're talking about a savings of milliseconds on an interactive process. An ordinary human like myself would never even notice the difference. The network lag from SSH alone would be greater than the difference in runtime.
But that's my point exactly: I don't want to torrent books, I want to purchase them legally.

Also, do any DRM-free stores have nearly the selection of Amazon/B&N/iBooks? From what I understand, the DRM-free stores only have independent/self-published books.
If you look at what has happened with Greece and Spain and Portugal and Ireland in the Euro... I strongly doubt any large group of nations will get on board the "one currency" train in the next 25 years.
After some dilemma when working with Netflix we finally got SSL support up and running. We apologize for the delay.
Except Apple now owns the technology, which is significantly different than licensing the technology.
I've had extremely good experience 'offshoring', but I have one criteria: we meet in person and I spend time with them in their own environment so I understand what challenges are to be faced.

Also, it has to be said: constant communication. It won't work without constant communication, preferably in real-time (email is good for specs and bugs but IM/voice is the only way to make sure you are on the same page). I wouldn't recommend offshoring if saving money is your primary goal - good, long-term work comes from being invested in the project financially.

Additionally it helps that we consider ourselves friends. We get on, to the level of being able to go out for a drink with each other and keep updated about our personal lives. Even just asking about the local weather is an important indicator that you recognize each other as people. I met with the people I wanted to work with and established strong relationships over time. I continue to work with them as we're all invested and familiar with the tech at hand.
Human-translated version: http://www.hs.fi/english/article/More+than+1000+Nokia+employ...
Having had a Groupon shouldn't preclude a business from offering other promotions. Typically you can't combine a Groupon with another offer, so if a restaurant has 20% off Mondays and you use a Groupon, they'll probably charge you full price and then subtract the Groupon. If people are truly unhappy with the FTD deal, then I'm sure Groupon will live up to The Groupon Promise and happily refund them.

The comment that this links to is much more disturbing, but it happens whenever you have a huge sales team. The real question is whether deals based on inflated prices are actually being sold. That would be alarming.
If I interpret the page correctly, somewhere between 1000 and 1500 employees at this location ALL worked on the Symbian OS.

THAT might have been part of the problem. 1000+ people for a mobile OS? And people wonder why Nokia can't innovate fast enough to keep up with iOS or Android?
Yes. I've worked in some bad open-concept setups where the mean-time-between-distractions (MTBD) was sometimes 5 min or so. Awful.

Um. Did you just sit your sweaty ass on the corner of my desk so you can lean over and chat to the dude sitting next to me? WTF?

Programming (and games programming, especially) seems to attract a lot of ADHD types.
Borders won't disappear, at least not over night, but Arabs have a sense of unity and brotherhood in their subconscious.

You know this is pseudo-science garbage, right? There is no reason to believe that Arabs have a particular "sense of unity and brotherhood". There is no evidence. I know that people like to make up stories about how awesome their national/religious/ethnic group is, but at HN I'd hope we could dispense with that BS.

And even if it were true, that doesn't tell us anything about whether Egyptians want to merge their country with Jordan or Libya or Sudan.
What in particular about the UX of the latest beta do you find slow? We should fix it.
They were mentioned in the comments
First book about FORTH programming language is available online now.
> I've never understood the objection to MPEGLA. [...] MPEGLA is a licensing agency, so there are no personal or political issues.

They have a vested interest in having their technologies (ones for which they have pools) win over other technologies, and they have a whole chest of patents (aka. legal weapons) with which to intimidate companies who won't come into the fold.

The whole problem of patents is that they give established interests total control over everyone else. At best, the established interests will be content to just take a cut. At worst, the established interests will refuse to license to you, because they don't want a competitor. And they can change their mind on this matter whenever they want.

> That VP8 infringes on patents is pretty much a sure thing-- unless I'm fundamentally misunderstanding how VP8 works

How do you know that h.264 doesn't infringe on Google patents?

> If you wish to go to a system whereby there is no patent system, then recognize that people wouldn't be revealing their inventions, and thus things like android couldn't exist, because they wouldn't have a source of technology to copy.

Are you seriously suggesting that the creators of Android read Apple's patents, as a way of "catching up?" Or that Apple wouldn't have released the iPhone, which is a cash cow for them, if they couldn't patent it?
"We don't need every single episode of Eastenders archived for all time to understand culture."

Speak for yourself!
Look at how difficult any of this similar co-operation has been for Europeans.

You seem to suggest that you can't extrapolate from one Egyptian to all Egyptians, yet at the same time you seem to be talking about Arabs as some monolithic mono-culture, which seems like a very backwards and ill-informed view.

Sure, Egyptians and, say, Jordanians are both Arabs, but guess what, Brits and, say, Austrians are both Germanic Caucasians, don't expect them to team up anytime soon.
For the current stage, both Tunisia and Egypt, it's more important for these countries to regain their internal health: freedom for the people, fixing the corruption.

Getting rid of external influences (specially American) is a whole other story; to come in a later stage.
The leaked campaign to attack wikileaks or HBGary act II
And from what I hear Boxxy is the queen of /b/

http://images2.memegenerator.net/ImageMacro/4642541/QUEEN-OF...
"Porting?" As I've noted already, this move sounds like he's trying to follow a script for corporate meltdown drawn from Smalltalk history:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2206788

Congrats. "Porting" enters into the plan!

If the CEO follows that script, he will have damaged employee relationships to the point that Nokia won't be able to execute some of the difficult goals he's set going forwards.

Seriously, he needs to look up some old ObjectShare alums to get some historical perspective on what he's trying to do and how it can go seriously wrong.
Penrose believes that the nature of consciousness is connected to a physical phenomenon which happens in our brains but not in computers, therefore he does not believe a computer can posses consciousness no matter what software you put on it. He's written several books on the subject as well as given a number of talks which are available on YouTube, but I don't have one link which I'd recommend above others. Sorry.

I don't think the properties of identical particles in Quantum Mechanics bring much if anything to the discussion at hand. Even if we lived in a classical universe, in which every atom would be unique and numbered, we could come up with thought experiments, in which, say, (a) a mad scientist makes an exact copy of your body including brain, (b) then kills you and feeds your ground body to your unsuspecting copy as hamburgers, and (c) all the atoms from your digested body make it to the same spots in your copy's body that they used to occupy in your own. (That last part might seem like a stretch, but really, is it more of a stretch than postulating that you and your copy would be identical in a sense you invoke in QM?) The end result from the world's point of view is exactly the same as if nothing happened to you.

And all that has not even that much to do with the question of what happens when you upload your brain to the computer, let it run for a while, and then recreate a physical brain with the updated state from the computer, since then the final state is emphatically not identical.