skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This feels somehow wrong.

When one decides he wants to publish some information privately he should decide:

1. Whenever he trusts the delivery and storage mediums (on all layers) not to leak and/or tamper with this information, and deliver it in time.

2. Whenever he trusts the recepients to handle this information properly.

3. What are the risks in event the leakage happens (even if all parties are highly trusted), and what measures should be taken in such case.

This is not paranoid thinking (although it sounds so), it's security ABC.
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:jerome-etienne/neoip && sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install nodejs <- to install node.js 0.4.1 on ubuntu
Are you explaining the difference between code you have to write and debug and code that someone else has already written and debugged?
If that's what Agile is, then Agile is just common sense. So, as someone else commented, it apparently has been diluted down to nothing.
Skipping BDD is a great idea for speed when you exit three days after founding the startup. If you go beyond that, you're going to be glad you used that basic engineering discipline
On a macro-level, how would you even begin to write tests for a search engine or some stock market bot or other notoriously hard problem?

These problems are hard because you evaluate your results with some kind of "quality score" instead of a simple "pass/fail" metric. You need to adapt your testing strategy accordingly.

One useful strategy is to define a decent metric, and try to maximize it. Let's say that you have two sources of data: (1) A list of pages that should rank highly for specific queries, and (2) a list of links that users clicked on and stayed at without coming back to click on other links < 30 seconds later.

Your goal is to write a search engine which ranks these links, on average, as highly as possible for the relevant queries. You do this with the usual techniques of experimental science: Split your data in half, develop against part of it, and hold a part in reserve for your final tests.

If you make a clever change, and your average "good link" position drops from 1.7 to 3.9, you back your change out and try again.

One of my clients actually did something similar with mapping software. Before deploying new code (or a new version of the map data), they ran extensive automated tests, and flagged anything weird for human review. I wrote them several test harnesses, one of which discovered a situation where the driving directions took a right hand turn off an overpass and tried to merge into traffic below... :-)

Granted, these types of "tests" are essentially very high-level integration tests. But they serve the major purpose of tests: Automatically ferreting out disastrous mistakes before you ship to customers.
Exactly. Not everyone in a company can be focused on directly getting money from the customers. IMO, it's not a problem if sales people get paid somewhat more than engineers.

However, if the ratio of pay of a sales guy to an engineer gets distorted too much, no one will want to be engineer any more. If that was the case, technological advance will stagnate. Everyone will be fighting to get the biggest part of an ever decreasing pie, instead of actually creating value.

See also http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2233736
Once I stopped punishing Symbolics, I had to figure out what to do next. I had to make a free operating system, that was clear — the only way that people could work together and share was with a free operating system.

At first, I thought of making a Lisp-based system, but I realized that wouldn't be a good idea technically. To have something like the Lisp machine system, you needed special purpose microcode. That's what made it possible to run programs as fast as other computers would run their programs and still get the benefit of typechecking. Without that, you would be reduced to something like the Lisp compilers for other machines. The programs would be faster, but unstable. Now that's okay if you're running one program on a timesharing system — if one program crashes, that's not a disaster, that's something your program occasionally does. But that didn't make it good for writing the operating system in, so I rejected the idea of making a system like the Lisp machine.

Is this something that is still relevant to modern attempts at making a Lisp operating system?
Btw slides aren't in English (and download is disabled, what's up with that?).
WOW! I just fell off the couch laughing!
> I need to present the value proposition more clearly

... while cutting out the flab, if I were you. :-)
Tough Calls: How 40 CEOs Made Their Career-defining Decisions
I think this would suit a Nanonote (Qi Hardware's pocket computer), to use for task management. I use emacs' org mode in it, but the time it takes to boot (15 seconds)+opening emacs (I didn't check, but probably as long) make it too cumbersome. When I have it connected for downloading things I'll try t- (I have debian in it).

Thanks for sharing it, these one-hour happy projects are the most fun to read and hack
I think there's still many homeless who still have hope, and they are more deserving of the shelter and medical attention. But that's no reason to say that the guys who are lucky enough to get shelter don't deserve it.
I think his main argument was that the sun always shines somewhere and the wind always blows somewhere so if you build a good enough grid you can balance it all out. I don't know how much energy is lost in long distance transmission though.
Argh, can we please stop using exponentially recursive Fibonacci as an example to parallelize? Because using a linear (or even constant-time) algorithm makes it moot.

How about a big parallel mergesort or something?
One metric: more new modules uploaded to CPAN on a daily basis than ever before.
if this proves to be true, I'm most grateful for your tips. Maybe you could be even more specific providing a page number/chapter?

http://books.google.com/books?id=GtPoyremy4EC&printsec=f...
> Why is that almost all the super-heroes have their arch-enemy in their nearby locality.

Well, it would be silly to have an arch-nemesis that lives on the other side of the planet where you are never going to bump into them...

> They also share the same trait.

Well, it would be silly if a character with super powers was battling a mere-mortal, or a god. I guess that is why I always had a problem with Superman vs. Lex.
http://www.google.com/trends?q=perl The downwards trend seems to be flattening off, maybe "it's losing popularity at a slower rate" would have been more accurate? Seems pretty cruel teaching undergrads Perl when they could learn Python.
You can attach code to visual elements and then "scrub" across them in real time, a bit like how a DJ would scratch a record.

You can also embed sliders and colour-pickers etc. directly in your code to give you even more ways to modify things.

Yes, this is as amazing as it sounds!
Unless you are able to create a superior experience for the final customer, how much hardware you have is not relevant...
Yes.
http://www.irongeek.com/i.php?page=security/programmable-hid...

Plug it in, makes the OS think it's a keyboard while the user thinks it's a USB stick.
A car from tijuana is much cheaper than a plane from Manilla.
Their followers on Twitter is now 94,000+ . Last week or so they were around 22 K- 23K .
Wonder why HN is mostly uninterested in this. While applauding Socialscope guys- this also shows the the high risks of user retention for social networking client developers. You may very well bleed your hard-earned user-base north of 100 K in a couple of days, if the tide is against you. Ouch.
It's both, as a matter of fact, and judging from the struggling competition neither is particularly easy. When discussing Cook's qualities and Apple's refined processes, there isn't much fanboy-ism involved.

They're simply really, really good at it.
In scotland rugby developed this way, so that now the "FP" (i.e. school) teams feature promininently in the top two tiers: GHA, Boroughmuir, Watsonians, Heriots, Dundee High, Edinburgh Academicals, Aberdeen Grammar, Stewart's Melville are all such teams.

School\Uni rugby (universities compete in a separate competition) is the closest equivalent we have, though it's utterly unable to compete in terms of attendance and money :)
> companies are taxed on profits not revenues (!!)

Businesses are always taxed on profits, not on revenues.
I think anyone that can get a 100k+ job probably doesn't really get it because of her resume.
And you shouldn't care. Move on.
That there is the big reason I can never convince myself to stick with a language like Ruby or Python. I do about one project a year in one or the other, and am always re-amazed at the lack of proper tools. It's a shame, because in other ways they're so good.

The refactor you mention is single right click in C# (with ReSharper, and without the frankly terrifying idea of using Regexes to do it). Compounding matters is the fact that a huge portion of your unit tests simply evaporate once you realize that you simply can't have typos or type mismatches in an old dinosaur language like C#. So it's entirely possible that that big suite of testcases it took so long to refactor would not be necessary at all (replaced instead by the occasional int x;).

Once somebody gets the tools together so I can be as productive in Rails as I am in ASP.NET, I'm jumping ship. Until then, I'm hanging tight.
Hi All,

I am one of the admins of HPR and I would like to address some of the points here.

We do not host any malware. If at any time you notice anything coming from our domain email me directly on admin at hacker public radio dot org.

Our comment system was overrun by spammers and scammers so it's possible the bad reputation came from there. When I started admining the site, I manually went through them all and now I approve all comments which has made them go away and has reduced our traffic by half. I think trend micro is scared of the word "hacker". Oddly enough I'm allowed to browse to the website but it's only when I go to the rss page does it give a warning.

As far as the comment from planckscnst goes, I'm not going to give any excuses for the audio quality. We are a podcast network where the members of the community can submit a show on any topic that "are of interest to hackers" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacker_(hobbyist). Some of the hosts start off a little rough but get find their feet as time goes on. It's on my list to put up a page of tips but a lot of becoming a podcaster is getting your own workflow sorted. Our focus is on content and we will not reject any show so long as it's audible.

The best way to get topics you like on air is to submit a show. It can be on any topic you like and as long or as short as you like.

Ken.
And another metric shows that Perl continues its years-long decline:

http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/index....

This is one of the factors why we have replaced Perl in our curriculum with Python. The other being that Python is far more fit for education.
It's an interesting comment and I know you're not alone, having worked with similar people in the past.

Certs provide a baseline - if you have an MSCE it means you can use Windows, nothing more. For some positions it's a means of covering your arse which is useful when you're in a big company.

Personally I prefer to judge people by their deeds rather than their words, or in this case letters. That's why we have a fairly gruelling test for positions these days.
You're right -- surface-level politics today is more like theater than genuine debate.
> Designing in-house means Apple doesn’t have to pay licensing fees to third parties to use their intellectual property. For instance, the A4 chip inside the iPad is based on technology developed and owned by Apple (not Intel, AMD or Nvidia). The operating system is Apple’s own, not something licensed from Microsoft or Google.

Apple doesn't/didn't pay licensing fees to ARM or PowerVR for the A4 components?

What exactly do you have to pay to Google to "license" Android?

It seems like the author doesn't quite know what he's talking about.
That doesn't follow, at all. Let me reformulate: any job whose existence isn't necessary (most of the financial sector, for example) can be terminated and the remaining jobs, all being necessary, are of equal value.
Are you saying that people in China think US propaganda is worse?
> I definitely need to improve on the copy skills.

I'd not say 'improve' - call it expand :-)

Being verbose has its own advantages too. One that I can immediately point out is from SEO perspective.

As most know, one thing the SE crawlers love the most (besides links) is content. Content rich (i.e. verbose) pages are usually good organic traffic magnets. (On the flip side, they can deter many human visitors! The Catch 22 is, common webmaster guidelines say 'optimize for human visitors'.)
Of course you can view HTML in emacs! Nowadays most people use emacs-w3m as HTML viewer/browser in emacs. It's quite easy to integrate it with gnus, rmail or other emacs mail clients.
What I'm saying is that passing functions (or functional programming) allows you to reuse a lot more code than typical imperative programs with a lot less effort. I personally find the functional style to be much more readable and don't understand why everyone has such a problem with the maintainability of code written in a functional style even if it's a mostly imperative language.
Investment help
I'm looking to make my first investment in a start up and am trying to navigate the murky waters.

The site which launched late last year has received a seed investment of 50K pounds, and the founders have invested 30k pounds. They are based in London but are planning to move to Silicon Valley later this year.
Is there anything in particular I should be looking at when valuing the business? The current monthly burn rate is 7k pounds. This is paying for 3 salaries and operational costs.
They are looking for a seed investment of 500K pounds. They will then hire 3 more engineers (they are ready to go now). The 500K will last 12 months. The post funding valuation is estimated to be 2.5M(USD)

I will be investing around 30K pounds asap. My investment will essentially facilitate the time between now and the 500K seed funding which may take some time.
I guess I'm looking for some sort of guide in which to calculate equity share for my investment.

Any thoughts would be much appreciated.
Considering the amount of money governments are willing to spend on rootkits as compared to more benevolent activities, I suspect that these companies won't stay a minority for long.
> Intrinsity clearly improved the A4, but overall A4 is a very standard Cortex A8 SoC.

Agreed. According to the Times, Intrinsity only made the Cortex A8 perform at a higher frequency [0]. An another Times article suggests PA Semi worked on the A4 [1], but no details are given.

[0] http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/28/technology/28apple.html

[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/02/technology/business-comput...
It never was a closed platform. C# was always an ECMA standard. MS even created rotor which was a FOSS implementation of C#.
It's always twice as hard to read code as it is to write code. For that reason alone, clever code is usually unmaintainable.
> They follow where We the Blessed Gurus lead them. But
> this time it is to the slaughterhouse, because the
> world needs only fifty Lisp programmers to write All
> the Code.

Oh comp.lang.lisp. Why did I even bother to read the replies?
You should not. In fact they page you have quoted says it quite clear. They want users who don't like capitalism and if you like capitalism you may express your freedom of speech on one of the thousands of pro-capitalist providers.
That's the great thing about a market: You don't have to use services you don't like.
I wish people would distinguish more between the "visual" side of UI and the "UX" side of UI. The question and discussion conflate them. And then they confuse the whole thing with branding.

Branding is NOT about distinctiveness in visual design. Branding is about owning a particular position in the users' mind. ie. "The cheapest" (Wallmart). Or "the original" (Coca Cola). Or "Search" (Google). Or "Classifieds" (Craigslist).

The purpose of visual design, particularly on the web, is to communicate well and make your site easy to use. I don't believe it is to "stand out", although that can be a nice-to-have.

If you want to study the relation between visual design and branding, study Craigslist, eBay, Google, Apple, Amazon etc. Dropbox too.

On the web, the reason why most sites look the same is that we've found again and again that usability trumps "looks", since the browser is so limited. So sites have converged on a whole bunch of conventions. (I'm talking about the ux side of design).

Having said all that, I think it's totally ok to not follow the pack in terms of gradients and dropshadows etc.
They don't. As you can see on there homepage the provide e-mail and web services to their users.
It seems pretty logical that St. Anthony's -- in certain cases -- is preferrable to the AA model.

What bothers me is that my understanding is that a large percentage of long-time alcoholics and homeless have mental health issues. These issues would perhaps best be addressed by forcably interning them in mental health institutions (which, again according to my limited understanding, have gotten somewhat of an unfairly bad reputation in the last fifty years). Perhaps using the the correct pharmaceuticals and treatment would be better than the "drink yourself to death" approach. However, this would involve removing the freedom of the homeless person to decide for himself. It's a tough choice, but all in all I applaud rational systems that are subject to a-posteriori measurements of efficacy.
I see no numbers for individual sports. Athletic departments losing money does not mean that the football team is losing money.
"They have peed on their last couch"

Hilarious
Yes, the thinking that "it must be hacker news because lots of people voted for it" bothers me.

This thread is worth perusing:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2235206
This is the equivalent of heroin injection galleries that has been trialled in various parts of the world. The basic idea is that these people are at less risk of overdosing, or sharing needles. Basic medical care is readily available should these people need it.

I just haven't heard it being done for chronic alcoholics. But the hospice analogy is correct.

It is the equivalent of palliative care for cancer patients who have given up (or their doctors have given up) further treatment.
LOL PERL USES FUNNY LETTERS!
Market can't and won't solve some problems. Wasn't US debt crisis caused by market?

We could let market solve the problem if all people were intelligent and aware of biochemistry (at least when we're talking about food). This, however, is very rare.
If Agile is about doing what works for your situation, how is it different from magic pixie dust solving all your problems? :)
What is the world coming to, if three sentences need a tl;dr?

Might some functions behave like some compilers?
archos101 $300, 10 inch screen, 1024x600, android 2.2, usb host and client.
of course, not a us company ;-)
Holy hell! Emacs really can do everything! :]
I'll be using that instead of Links now, thanks.
Launch Your Startup at SXSW for $880
BTW, the Credits link goes 404 at bottom-right corner of

http://www.sparkmuse.com/about

(It points to http://www.sparkmuse.com/footer.html#)
Cool - let me know how you get on, and whether I can help.
My first job in a hospital (I'm an ER nurse ) in 1993 was as an ER tech at Hennepin County Medical Center in Minneapolis.

After welfare checks came out at the beginning of the months, we would have literally dozens of homeless alcoholics lining the hallways of the ER, sometimes stacked in gurneys along the wall, three deep.

The beginning of the month, people would drink hard liquor. Middle of the month, cheap grain alcohol and towards the end of the month, when Walgreens sold 1 liter bottles of Listerine for $2, "List" became the drink of choice.

At the time, it was illegal to be publicly intoxicated in Minneapolis, so the police would pick up the drunks and bring them to the ER for medical clearance, but never take them to jail when they were sober. So, the drunks would marinate all night in the ER until they could blow less than 0.1 on a breathalyser and then they could walk out.

ER overcrowding with drunks became such a huge problem, that the hospital opened up a "drunk tank" or a dedicated hospital unit to let these guys sleep and sober up. It was a 25 bed unit, and you weren't eligible to stay on that unit unless your alcohol level was over 0.3. I routinely saw people at 0.4 and occasionally 0.5. (Legally drunk in California is 0.08 these days.)

On top of that, the ER built a dedicated holding unit for the alcoholics who blew between 0.1 and 0.3 on the breathalyser. It was an 8 room locked holding unit. staffed by 2 nurses, 2 security guards and 2 ER techs. One night, I remember holding over 26 patients in there.

One night, two police officers (understandably) who were quite fed up with the situation brought in 3 patients soaked in urine and feces in to the ER in their patrol car. They could only fit 1 in the back seat of their car, so they brought the other two.... in the trunk of the cop car. Bad plan.

Someone called the press, the cops were suspended. The two alcoholics pressed a lawsuit against the city of Minneapolis, and were awarded $4 Million in damages.

Hennepin County Medical Center, the ER where the alcoholics were brought to knew these two men well. They had had over 200 ER visits and/or hospitalizations in the previous 2 years. So, Hennepin County immediately pursued payment for these two men's ER bills (over $2 Million each), and got a lien on the lawsuit money.

A month after the suit was settled and these men received the payment for the county, and paid off their hospital bill, they started frequenting the ER where I worked yet again--passed out, covered in feces and soaked in urine.

I'm not trying to make judgments. It's a terrible situation all around. Alcoholism is a terrible disease. And, when it's terminal... I think hospice might be the smarter choice.

At least via the hospice model, the alcoholics can die with a few shreds of dignity instead of passing out drunk in a snow bank when it's -20F in the Minnesota winters and having toes and then feet amputated because of frost bite. Also, in the hospice model, the health care system can take care of people who can best use their services.

Good article. It brought back a lot of interesting memories. :)
They should thank Foxconn!
http://news.google.com/news/search?aq=0&pz=1&cf=all&...
I'm not sure I agree that the market makes a great test suite. It kinda hurts when you fail.

But yeah, there's other things you can use, like - A/B testing (for web apps). You can automate "code smell" detectors, and get a continuous graph on how good your code seems to be.

Of course, things like converters and math functions (anything non-GUI) can benefit from unit tests.
Lanier is one of those bewailing the end of the artistic class... yet this is a class that thrived essentially on the scarcity of knowledge - making their produce have value. Now that this scarcity is being removed through innovation - they claim that their 'special' insight is going to be lost.

Meanwhile - the artists continue to shack up ever closer with 'big content' and their IP lawyers... a group toward which all their romantic cliches espoused the most profound hatred.

in depth counterpoint:

http://reviewsindepth.com/2010/11/the-social-network-the-end...
I have read of a shift from treating addiction as a criminal issue to treating it as a public health issue, and this seems to fit with that. As with cancer, when a cure seems sufficiently improbable, trying to salvage remaining dignity while also reducing costs to society, through hospices, is certainly thought of well around here.
How to use BDD to discover value-add for your startup