skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm not sure I've talked to a single Android developer I know, including myself (yes, I talk to myself) that sees fragmentation as a significant difficulty in developing apps. Something to consider whilst developing? Of course (and fundamentally moreso if someone wants to support tablet devices now), but supporting multiple devices is something that Google's made ridiculously easy.
I'm going to assume the parent post wasn't edited. I swore there was a dollar sign there.
or, my http://onememory.me ! :P
He is probably on a 1099 rather than a W-2. Still... he is getting a pretty good deal.
Agree. A finer example of such techniques are prevalent here on HN. Recall VirginMobile Nexus and black Friday items with tons and tons of comments. Coincidence? Appropriate timing? VirginMobile ran out of that product by the way.
What Got Buzz at Mobile World Congress?
"Well, they don't scale indefinitely, and you do run in to Brewers Theorem at some point. "

SQL and the Relational data model are not limited by Brewers Theorem, this is a myth.

More info here: http://sergeitsar.blogspot.com/2011/02/mongodb-vs-clustrix-c...
Or they could have just done what Android did. Allow browser plugins and make it Adobe's problem to put the plugin in the market.

Google isn't holding back on major OS updates because Adobe isn't ready.
Was that all for a single crime, or did each trial cover separate instances?
RockPaperShotgun refutes Fox News scaremongering over Bulletstorm
What I find amazing about them is that they were able to figure out so many things with a very limited body of knowledge. I understand they missed the mark in many things, but still they were able to come up with many great ideas(even if they were wrong).
CSR and Zoran merge to create consumer chip powerhouse
What it really highlights is how English desperately lacks a gender independent way of saying he/she. I can't tell if you are a guy or girl based on your name, I bet most people don't know if the K in my name is Kevin, Kyle, Kris (guy or girl!), Kathy, Katrina etc. (for the record, it's Kevin). But most people when talking about me will just assume I'm a guy and use he.

I'm not offended by people incorrectly using gender pronouns, it is just really awkward to write something without knowing the gender of the person you are talking about.
Would you hire somebody that already stole something major from your very company?
How do you recover from a passion deficit?
The Mythical Man Month is a classic. I'd suggest that you also read the transcriptions of the two NATO Software Engineering Conferences -- Garmishch 1968 and Rome 1969. They were incredibly influential and still make good reading thanks to the efforts of Brian Randall and others. Many of the classic software engineering quotes come from these conferences. The citeseer cache links are:

http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.14.2...

http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.127....
Musicians are more like startups than we think (freemium, MVC, metrics)
Let's think of uses for such a home...

* rental property

* work space (perhaps he has a recording studio?)

* renovation for future sale

* housing for family

The article doesn't say he lives alone with his butler.
You're right, I didn't literally mean CS 101. In fact, at my university I believe the class was CS 1511.

What I mean is, "Things that a CS major probably should have been exposed to in his or her first year of college."
That's a really good point and I appreciate you trying to help. To be honest, the 'frustrations' that I had heard about were all second hand stories, so it is hard for me to say that it really is a problem.

Having said that, I agree: everyone should be giving it a go. I live on PEI so it's a bit harder, but trips to New Brunswick are great as you see the English / French mix there as well: I think the bilingualism is amazing.

Merci :)
Plotting 3D Graphs with Python, igraph, and Cairo: #cn220 Example
My point is it would encourage more people to apply by trying to hack into the company's networks instead of just creating impressive mods, Valve is a game dev/platform company after all not a network security one.
Show/Ask HN: Review my customer support service?
This is an idea that has been swirling in my head for almost a year now, but I've not had the ability or time to execute on it until very recently. I was partly prodded by some of the recent submissions on HN, for sure, but it also took finding some trustworthy, experienced people to get onboard as well.

Anyway, concept is simple. Customer Support as a service, with pricing done in a manner intended to at least partly shadow something like EC2. Buy what you need, overages get billed at a higher rate. No commitments. Multiple support reps with a distributed workload means things can get done in parallel to help deal with unusual spikes in support requests, etc..

Thoughts? Feedback? Suggestions? Would you use it? The website is only partly complete, so excuse the work in progress, but on the flip side of that coin, feedback there would also be welcome.

http://supportcycles.com/
> While I'd love to agree, reading someone's code does not
> tell you:

Neither will asking about linked lists.
clickable: http://supportcycles.com/
HIT – Health Internet of Things
I"m less concerned about Linux taking Windows market share, but I do not want Windows to be considered the only viable option, as so many IT departments do consider it.

Even just a 10% drop in market share, with Macs and Linux splitting the gains, would be awfully nice.
The end of an era for Historic shuttle Discovery
Java's documentation is pretty good, and it's usually the first place I look if I need to see how something in the Java world works.

Sencha's Ext-JS has interesting documentation. It seems comprehensive, but I've run into undocumented properties and undocumented interactions between documented properties before, and that makes me very wary of what I read there. Further, they only offer documentation for the most current version of their libraries. Unless you are always using the cutting edge, you're not guaranteed that the documentation will adequately describe what you need to do.
The Cognitive Startup - Blink or Think Twice?
I wonder, too. I sure agree with them that it's possible to mess up with exceptions, sure, but the alternative -- using error codes is also prone to bugs. For starters:

1) It means that you have to check the return value of every call. Miss one, and errors get ignored, which can result memory corruption or worse.

2) Checking return codes after every function call results in terribly verbose code/ Whereas exception-based error handling, when used in the right way, only needs catch() statements in places where the error is actually handled.

2) Every function has to return a status code. This hijacks the return value, meaning that you cannot simply return a value anymore, you always need to use output parameters.
LispScript
Considering the rash of "OMG the police barged into my house, shot my goldfish and raped my star wars collection" type stories I've been hearing, is it safe to assume that the German police are quite a bit more sensible than their American counterparts?

The whole experience sounds rather civilized. The police let Gembe get dressed, eat breakfast and smoke a cigarette before bringing him down to the station. And when he confessed, his punishment was 2 years in probation.

I somehow doubt his experience with the FBI would have been similar.
> Um... in what way is it not a sexist assumption?

Because it's statistics. 99%+ of relationship advice columns are by females.

Is it sexist to give women lower rates for car insurance? Is it sexist to give men different rates for life insurance? I would say absolutely not. Women are safer in cars, and men die younger. Those are facts. (FWIW The interfering EU are due to vote on 'sexism' within insurance shortly)
> I've disregarded resumes before because of a single typo. Usually in ... blah blah blah...

What does this have to do with my comment? I was remarking on the limited information provided, not whether it's unfair or not to dismiss a resume based on grammar. I'll just assume you inferred more from my comment than was stated.

> It's not insufficient information.

This is the only part of your comment discussion mine. So, let's see what information is missing.

So, someone whose primary language is, let's say, Italian, French second, and English third is required to have impeccable English skills? In Quebec, whose primary working language is French? These aren't exceptions. These are the rule outside the US. Knowing 2 languages is common. Knowing 3 is not at all unusual.

It's insufficient information precisely because it doesn't provide us any context.

Employer is where?
Employee is from where?
Employer is hiring for what position? From where?
Employer has few/many candidates to choose from?
Employer seeking highly specific skill set?
English mistakes were real mistakes, and not merely a single typo?

Now, you can make a lot of assumptions and say that the employer was hiring someone from the USA, a native English speaker, for a job in the USA. You can also make the assumption that the employer isn't looking for a specific skill set, and that the mistakes were more than just typos (despite that being the only example offered). I can make a lot of assumptions. But that's all it is, an assumption.

> the answer is unquestionably NO, it is not unfair.

Such a hard and fast rule. Unquestionably? I think it would be grossly unfair to hire in a region where people aren't native English speakers for a programming position and demand better English than the employer.
I think you're exaggerating. Parisians may tease Quebecers, but that's just to keep themselves in teasing shape. Teasing is a sport, you gotta practice. Most French people will be able to understand most Montrealers.

It should be noted that France itself has many regional accents that are quite strong.

Also to be noted, there is a steady flow of young French people immigrating to Montreal.
I don't think your lack of understanding entitles you to demand someone write a 2000-word essay for you.

But, briefly, many of the points in Road can still be right with the conclusion being wrong. Yes, data is more important than computer, and server-side computation and storage of data etc is increasingly important.

But the web as the client interface? Network-aware native apps are trumping all over it. These aren't the desktop apps PG speaks of, they're not shipped in boxes and they're not static. They're downloaded instantly, updated easily, network enabled and fully responsive.

Convenience over all is the thing for users, and apps are just more convenient. They don't load themselves from network every time (Gmail, Twitter), they don't have UI elements that fill in slowly as their graphics load over the network (Posterous and a million others), they don't transform without warning (Facebook) and they don't pretend that a way of sharing research papers can support an interactive session without you noticing.

As for the size of the Market, I've already spent way more on desktop and mobile software than I've ever spent on Saas/site subscriptions and I don't see that changing. Where there's a native app I'll almost always prefer it.

Why? Because native apps are better software; a better experience. And when they're supported by (synced/cached) server-side data (and ideally a fall back to a web client if I find myself at some random terminal somewhere) I get the best of both worlds.
Volvo's New Diesel Hybrid Will Let You Check Car's Charge Status Via iPhone
You're assuming all requests actually go through to the rails app: what if you have, say, a Sinatra app mounted at '/documentation' and you'd like to check the constraints for that?
I'm also a non-twitterer. I do not care at all about this app or its rankings.
This is a good way of teaching in general - presenting a problem, having students work at it (alone or in groups), then everyone discussing solutions. This is class time well spent, much more effective than lectures. Students being becoming interviewees is just one side effect.
They may have been considering you for a "site reliability engineer" position, which requires knowing these types of things.

I've been involved in ~100 Google interviews and I've never seen questions like this in a SWE interview.
A monopoly isn't required to act anti competitively. Creating monopoly takes time and many anti-comptitive moves. Apple's rule of not letting a app vendor charge more on iPhone direct sale than on a web or android sale is anti competitive in my book. It prevents Android from competing by only asking 5% or something and making the in app subscription cheaper.
Russian Cops Crash Pill Pusher Party
Not a square. The diagonal dimension of a square is sqrt(2) * the edge length, so roughly 1.414*edge length. So if you rotate the square cover 45 degrees, you can kick it right down the hole no problem. Sure you could have a cover that was several inches bigger than the lip, but assuming the lip is only going to be on the order of .5-3" and the cover is going to be around 24-36" wide, you can always rotate the square one ot fall down there.
This is baffling to me that the founder of Heroku, a service specifically on automated web scalability, would write an article on how SQL doesn't scale, when he uses Postgres as the de facto database for all of his customers.
Thanks a bunch for the detailed examples. I've noticed this is a huge problem in my code: too many nested for loops. I've generally gotten better about using built in functions like set (in Python at least):

Out = list(set(A+B)) # right?

Or even DISTINCT in SQL (when dealing with webapps).

And now I never doubt the usefulness of fuzzing the DB with hundreds of thousands of random entries. That quicky code that took 40ms to run over several dozen entries turns into a minute or more for several thousand.... Ouch! ;-)
Do you guys have a flagging system in place? If some coffee shop loc' insists on telling everyone he's going to kill them, this might be frowned upon.
Study: Falling in Love with Gadgets Is Possible
First and foremost -- focus building your company and put together a great application! Have "the talk" about what you'll do if you are funded after you get an interview.

That being said, Lloyd's family stayed home and Rachel came with me. In retrospect (and with more money) we might have done things differently.

One thing to keep in mind is that I prefer to work at home when I can and Lloyd likes to maintain a strict separation between work and family, so those things contributed to our decisions.

There aren't many times in life when you'll work harder than when you're in YC, so your preferred working style should be part of what informs your decision to bring or be away from your family.
My Ideal Social Network: The Interest Graph
I suppose you'll have to do the Android on iPhone thing though. They're still kind of struggling with a lot of issues, like power management for one.
When and if Klout (or something like it) becomes as ubiquitous as this article predicts, then we should expect a giant upsurge in inane tweet-farming around professional topics. I don't see how anyone benefits from the world thus created.

Would much rather live in a Klout + Quora world than a Klout + Twitter world.
Yeah, I was going to comment on this as well. This is a good deal compared with most consultancy shops I've subcontracted through, more typically 15-20%. Or in several cases, they expect me not to know the ultimate rate billed to the client and we just agree on my hourly rate.
Ask HN: Who do you need to talk to for 15 minutes about your biz or product?
We're building a product focused on connecting you with people that you can easily have a conversation with regarding your biz/product.

Who would these people be?
- Entrepreneurs
- Designers
- Engineers
- CPA
- Lawyers
- VC/Angels
- ????????

PS We'll have some people donating their time later this week. Looking forward to your response!
Don't worry, I got you covered
http://www.pylaw.org/RegAB.html

"The Securities and Exchange Commission is proposing two new disclosure requirements for offerings of asset backed securities. See the RevisedRegAB site for details on the proposal."
Fallout and Frustrations From Apple's New Subscription Plan Continue
Why post this meaningless comment when you could have just looked it up on Wikipedia yourself?

Real Estate Settlement Procedures Act:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RESPA
Relativity demands and demonstrates that there is no such thing as "'reality' in the physical world". Events only occur and exist in the context of an observer.

From the perspective of an Earthbound observer, the photon emitted by the ship will travel from 600kkm away to 300kkm away in one second. (Actually the observer cannot see the photon until another second elapses and it collides with him on Earth.) This observer will see the ship and the photon moving almost together, the ship slower by whatever infinitesimal fraction of c.

From the perspective of a shipborne observer, the photon emitted by the ship will travel from 0 kkm (away from the ship) to 300kkm away also in one second. How do we reconcile this with the knowledge that the Earthborne observer sees the ship and the photon staying together? Length contracts in the direction of travel. So the shipborne observer's meters are very short. The small distance perceived by the Earthbound observer is perceived as a 300kkm distance by the shipborne observer. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Length_contraction

In general, this is how you resolve paradoxes in relativity: work it out from the perspective of each observer and understand that there is no central objective reality. You will find that you made an assumption that does not hold true across both observers.

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

If you can wrap your mind around the Ladder Paradox, you're well on your way to understanding space-time transformations in relativity. The key to the ladder paradox is that there is no such thing as an objective standard of "simultaneous". Simultaneity is specific to each observer; two observers perceive the simultaneity of two events differently.
If it triples the number of subscriptions then it could be.
No, we have two. A kludge: "he/she" (which I personally despise and refuse to use), and something which people have used for a long time, but educational-America refuses to accept: "they".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender-neutral_pronoun#Historic...

In particular:

>The singular "they" is widely used and accepted in Britain, Australia, and North America in conversation and, often, in at least informal writing as well. It is important to note that this is not recognized by the SATs and other standardized tests.
You are free to do whatever you want to your iPhone/iPad hardware. You can build a Linux distro and install it, there's already an Android distro for it, you can smash it, tear it apart, put it back together, wallpaper your room with them, etc. Nothing prevents you from doing those things. It's not Apple's duty to make it easier for you by building a boot loader into the device, adding double sided tape on the back so it will stick to your wall or putting a hammer in the package to make smashing it easier.
When was the last time you were in a $180k house, built over 100 years ago?

The 6 bedrooms are probably all tiny <300 square feet, with closets that can't hold more than 3-5 items of clothing.

I'd be surprised if the entire house was more than 2500 square feet.

This isn't a 6000 square foot McMansion like you're thinking it might be.
Can you spawn a new whiteboard when more than 40 users join?
Unfortunately, you are trying to impose a traditional world, where speeds are additive, onto relativity. It just doesn't work that way. A light beam fired from Earth would overtake the smaller ship, so in Earth's frame it is going slower than the speed of light.
Raleigh NC: The World's First Open Source City?
The same problem applies, however.

The report would have at least some use if it accounted for the freshness of titles (given the short snout of sales), the number of titles published in a year, and the title efficiency.

(Then again, I've made this criticism year after year, so I've come to take the report as chartjunk with slightly better data than TIOBE.)
I think this (along with Peopleware) should be required reading to start a software company. It's incredible how many companies still make fundamental (and preventable) errors in running a software project.
Really nice to interact live with strangers like this! I always thought HN guys were a bit more matured, it was funny to see every other 2nd doodle was of a dick!
My satellite TV provider has an app I can only use if signed up to them. Do they now need to offer TV subscription through their app? What about the 37signals Campfire clients? Do they now need to offer Campfire subs via inapp purchase too?
you can't launch the app in absence of more buyer interest

If somebody mails that to me, I myself would lose interest in the product. And I don't think that's just me.
It's all about time man - you can't measure time from the frame of a photon.
Ultima 3 was the ultimate hacker's game. You could crack it open with a Hex Editor and mess with anything you wanted. Your characters were all stored in one place, with every attribute easy to find (and change to FF). Towns and the world map were all sitting there in memory waiting for you to change whatever you want.

I made my own town at one point.

Better still, you'd inevitably screw something up and suddenly find yourself being chased across the map by a giant letter M, which you couldn't defeat because your armed weapon was "Paladin". Too much fun.
There's a fairly practical reason to ask for a breakup fee in a smaller acquisition (or even VC round): the legal costs of these events are significant for a small company. Generating Series A paperwork, or acquisition paperwork, could easily run 20-30k. That may not be a lot to a company generating millions in revenue, but to a small company just graduating Y Combinator (as an example), it could be a substantial amount of the money on hand.
Man dupes CIA of $21 million with hoax software
Apple-Cat II: A cooler modem there never was
Missing: don't waste your time reading stupid-self help lists. Go build something, real or virtual.
Exactly. In houses over a 100 years old (actually in houses built before widespread electricity), most of the bedrooms were only big enough to accommodate a bed, a nightstand and a chair.

My house was built in 1905 in a mining community. It was 2 bedrooms originally. A queen bed wouldn't fit in either one. We ended up combining them into one decent sized bedroom.

Before electricity, there was nothing else to do in a bedroom besides sleep. No sense in making it bigger than it had to be.
"I feel like I'm the butt of a joke for even visiting TechCrunch."

Ha! That's an awesome way of putting it. I nominate you for comment of the year.
I think they might have a point, but their ineffective communication style and adversarial tone will surely guarantee they are ignored this time around.
Thanks for the article. Too bad there's no such finds on Reddit anymore.
Ask HN: Does YC accept already funded applicants?
YC mentions that they accept already funded startups, but how would the term sheet be built? From what I have seen of their terms it works really well if you have not received funds yet.

I am very interested in applying to YC and building the network that will far outweigh the cash they give, but does it make sense to do now that I have funding?

Any advice would be greatly appreciated!
The error was due to a bad string message not parsing properly. I fixed it in the client and should be fine for new users now.

But performance gets pretty crappy at about 40 concurrent users anyway. :p
Thanks for pointing that out. Named regexp catching isn't supported in ruby 1.8. I'll update the gem with 1.8 support.
Can Your Klout Score Change Your Life? Or Get You a Job?