skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is a prime example of pre-mature optimization. This, but itself, although interesting theoretically provides no practical information and should not dictate most application use or non-use of getters and setters.

Unless you're doing many millions of get/set operations a second, you will not see any benefit and time is more likely better spent in other areas (selectors, caching, DOM element reduction, etc).

That said, I am very interested why the prototype getter/setter is also bad. I wasn't expecting this to be quite as awful. I would imagine the javascript engine could cache or dynamically create an organic function from a prototype style reference (so there would be huge performance gains over many iterations).
I have a background in web development and would be open to talking to you about your project and helping you out in any way i can. Including helping you get your coding off the ground. Please let me know if you are interested. Thanks.
Why Nielsen Ratings Are Inaccurate, and Why They'll Stay That Way
How is that comment idiotic or hateful? Or are you referring to your own comment?
As a citizen of both worlds, I'll say the authors story rings very true. When I first came to the US, I did totally entitled from years of being upper class in a small third world country.. it took me several years to realize that I was now a very small fish in a huge pond where opportunities didn't just materialized for you and problems easily faded away.

20 years later I find myself moved up to a pretty good on that big pond mainly because of good opportunities in the tech industry but I would strongly agree with the author that a lot of that success was achieved through the Mojo that a complete lack of fear of failure gives you.
The point of the OP was IF the rich kid works just like the regular kid, then he'll still be ahead.
"NLP middle-ware company"

"Neuro-Linguistic Programming middleware? Eh?
3 years here too.. I guess there is a truth in what people say 'it takes 3 years to turn green'.
The $110 Billion Question
Ask HN:Who's Looking For a Cofounder? (March 2011 Edition)
We get a lot of "Who's hiring" threads on HN, but I bet many people are looking to join an early stage startup as a cofounder. In your comment, you should probably mention where you're located, what stage your startup/idea is at, who you're looking for, what you can bring to the table, and your contact info.
Introducing The Instagram Trio: Prinstagram, Instagrid, and Instawar
Well, it could be fair if we practiced natural selection based on intelligence vs. good looks.
You're not making a persuasive case to me that the programming language and OS, rather than the developement methods, management style, and expertise of the coding team were the factors that determined sucess or failure.
The thing that hangs me up with exercises like this is how to communicate how atomic the steps ought to be. The analogy misses, there. Why does the 'system' need to be told to open the jar, but not how to open the jar?
It's probably Natural Language Processing.
The whole post basically said the author was stupid while neglecting to explicitly point out anything wrong with what he/she said. That's pretty much the definition of ad hominem, no?
You could probably say the same thing about the summer session at most universities. The kids willing to give up their summers for education have a different level of drive than the ones that attend the rest of the year.

Not that summer session is always the best course of action. An internship will go a lot further toward most careers than a few extra classes.
So doing a startup is not about connections? LOL.

Having good connection is a necessary (but not sufficient) condition to identifying customer pain points, finding VC money, doing sales, etc.
... and have at least one other os than prod and just fiddle with it, fiddle with compiler switches, optimisation random testing. occasionally look at the results and see what they mean. for example, freebsd's jails can help setup many different things. use llvm/clang and look at the warnings. these help me find potential problems. what's better than the clairvoyant code-improver/bug-fixer. :-)
>That's what my generation believed. And my parents' generation. And their parents

That doesn't mean it will never happen. The world is changing rapidly, it stands to reason that even more big changes could happen.

I think "human nature" is a bit of a red herring. We don't currently have any scientific way to separate how much of how people behave is social/environment programming and how much is "human nature".
if insults don't make an argument ad hominem, what does?
What about just using HTML?
My Command-line Bookmarking Utilities
Every so often, I come across something which makes me feel a certain way. That something is this. That way is best described as follows:

Thousands of years from now, historians (in a more enlightened society, one can only hope) will look back on our time with disdain and pity, for our countless fellow people allowed to suffer due to war, poverty, famine, persecution of various kinds, curable disease, &c. They will find Locke's Natural Rights of Man and wonder how a civilization like ours, with all of our understanding, our might and technological prowess, our impressive wealth, allowed these atrocities to continue. They will undoubtedly find something which is to them like our rosetta stone, something which unlocks an understanding of this phenomenon, something which makes our misguided priorities clear, and they will be ashamed to be born from us.

But yeah man, cool ampersands!
The "fail fast" meme is useful for me only when followed up with "deliberate practice", so I don't fail again.
Flag Analysis with Mathematica
That tip also works when someone accidentally writes on the board with a permanent marker.
Ok, starting it off myself:

[RTP (Raleigh/Durham/Chapel Hill) NC]

I am. I'm working on an open-source Enterprise 2.0 project; elements include social-networking (eg, a Facebook'ish piece, but intended for organizational use), knowledge management / discovery (using tagging, collaborative filtering, automatic text classification, semantic-web tech, etc.) and social-search.
The technology stack is primarily Groovy (Grails for the front-end bits); but there is some Java code. As some functionality spins off into standalone services, I'm considering either Scala or Clojure, but no firm decision has been made yet.

More details on the current state of things can be found at http://code.google.com/p/screwpile, and there's a demo of a very early prototype of one of the components, at
http://spdemo.fogbeam.org:8080/neddick1/

I'm looking for one or possibly two co-founders.

For one, I'd like to work with someone who is a top-notch UI/UX person with strong skills in terms of design, HTML, CSS, Javascript, etc. and who can handle making the UI a strength.

For the other, I'm looking for somebody with a background in the sales / marketing / business development world... preferably somebody with actual experience doing B2B software sales, and actually closing sales. Any technical background would be a huge plus as well.

I'm in North Carolina and would prefer a co-founder to be local, but I won't categorically rule out working with someone remote, depending on the details.

I'm at a point where I feel like it's time to get into Customer Development seriously, and do the "get out of the building" thing and start getting feedback from potential customers; so that's a goal for the short-term, just to give you an idea of where this is at. Also, this is completely self-funded at the moment, but seeking outside investment is absolutely in the cards when this starts to look like it has some legs.

Finally... the (existing) code is out there, and Apache licensed... if anybody is interested on hacking on this stuff, but not interested in being a co-founder, feel free to jump in.

Interested? fogbeam [at] gmail [dot] com
Parent said this was in New York State.
The chicken and egg problem would seem to be the obvious problem with something like this. Can you broadly explain what you have in mind? I assume you're only pairing people with other Gobicab users, right?

You have the following testimonial displayed prominently:
"GobiCab is so easy to use. As soon as I get off my flight, I enter in my destination and have a match by the time I arrive at the cab stand."
Is that experience a fluke or is that what I'd expect to find if I used Gobicab at an airport in a random city of a million people?
Angel Topics
Care to elaborate on what you've learned about Appointment Reminder's market that would make you pessimistic about it?
I think the whole method that these sites use to deliver content is completely backwards, at least from the user perspective.

The goal of going to a web site is ultimately to get the content you are looking for. If you're going to Twitter, it's to read someone's twitter stream, etc.

The way these hashbang sites function is to display the least-relevant (to the user) information first, all the chrome and ads of the page. Then, when all the stuff you don't actually care about is done rendering, only then does it go and get the content you came to see.

This drives me nuts as a user. It is particularly annoying on slower devices, such as Edge or 3G smartphones, where you see the lag even more strikingly.

From a user-experience, content-oriented framework, this entire architecture should be reversed. The URI should point to the content, not the presentation as it does with Hashbang. The content should be served first, in a readable format, and then the javascript magic should kick in, download all the chrome in the background and then update the page once with all the other elements.

If you're going to have your page do a secondary load anyway (as hashbang does now) you might as well make the content the front-and-center part.
I am curious. Do venture firms buy whole businesses? I thought they invest in firms, not buy them altogether.
This whole business is suspicious if you ask me. SelectOut doesn't sell a product and is designed to remove its user base from the advertising industry. If there is no money being generated by the product and all the advertising bridges are burned, where is the money coming from to keep development of a product like this moving forward?
It seems likely to me that, through these opt-out services, someone out there is still getting handed your information.
How can angel investment in DC be rapidly expanded in 2011?
It's interesting that right now on HN there's another post about Facebook and how having one place for all of your conversations is harmful. I think the two topics are related.

It's not a matter of ignoring or running away from death, it's a matter of treating every piece of conversation that comes from my keyboard as all being the same.

There's been no time in human history where we had such a "flat" model of interactivity. Even in small hunter-gatherer societies it's common for information to be withheld from some, shared with only a select few, etc. Man is a social animal, and these types of channel-selection and social posturing are a critical part of his healthy existence.

We programmers have created the internet, and to us all of that social posturing stuff is just nonsense. Everything is just a bit on a disk somewhere.

While that's true in a physical sense, it's tragically false in practice. The way we discuss philosophy, death, religion, politics, science, history, and the rest of it varies according to the crowd and the mood. It's not all just bits.

But your point is spot on: we're still trying to figure out how to have conversations online.

I think we are making a LOT of mistakes that are going to come back and bite us one day, one of which is thinking that democratic metaphors are applicable in all situations, but that day may be many decades off, after I'm dead myself, so aside from complaining about it I'm really not worried about it too much :)
"The kids willing to give up their summers for education have a different level of drive than the ones that attend the rest of the year."

Not really, if anything it takes less drive. It's vastly easier to take classes over the summer (when classes are usually easier), and then do your internships in fall or spring when there's no competition. The only reason not everyone does this is that it wouldn't be financially viable.
Implementing Complex Systems for Testing Application Logic
Human Relationship Optimization
Is this an official Google project? Would be interesting to see Google Market support Bitcoin...
A magical interactive app for creating gorgeous beautiful artwork
It is true that you won't see much benefit when doing only a few operations, but we were interested because we do perform many object accesses/writes a second.

My guess as to why the prototype getters/setters are slow is that the prototype list has to be traversed and this requires a bunch of lookups that are not necessary when dealing with direct properties of the object.
Refactoring Cache Tables using Memoize
Valve's subscriber agreement says that they can close your Steam account (cutting off access to all of your games, even single-player ones) if they catch you cheating in certain multiplayer games.

And apparently the Blu-ray scheme has the ability to stop non-compliant players from playing new movies.
My apologies, I think that phrasing was difficult to parse: the 12 month estimate was excessively pessimistic (i.e. it probably won't take that long, because the market is better than I expected it to be).

I had been basing my projections off of running a medium-volume low-touch business with average yearly account values in the $500 range. It turns out there is an addressable market for which average yearly account values are in the five figure range. More detail on that in a blog post Friday-ish.
I highly doubt this is official.
Looks great and it was nice to see Kimball's testimonial on the homepage (I got to Wharton and met him through his cousin who is a close friend).

Would love to see learn more about how you plan to solve chicken and egg problem.
> That doesn't mean it will never happen. The world is changing rapidly, it stands to reason that even more big changes could happen.

Rapidly compared to what ? 1900-1960 arguably saw more significant cultural, technological and political change than 1960-2010. The internet and mobile phone are about the only significant technological breakthroughs in my lifetime - in fact even they happened before my lifetime, but were not commonplace yet.

> I think "human nature" is a bit of a red herring. We don't currently have any scientific way to separate how much of how people behave is social/environment programming and how much is "human nature".

Well, we do have millenia of recorded history. Social mores may change, human nature less so.
I like it a lot! From the design, to the music accompanying the video, to the way it looks so simple to use! Looks like you've done a great job.

To be honest, we'll probably use it ourselves!
Great work. Looks professional and polished.
Right. Natural Language Processing.
I built a system simple enough to sustain itself.

- Pierre Omidyar (@pierre)

http://startupquote.com/post/3702889751
Yes, my undergrad degree was in computer science/software engineering - so fairly easy for me to pick up iOS programming
Relevant: Richard Dawkins' review of 'Intellectual Impostures' by Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont

http://richarddawkins.net/articles/824-postmodernism-disrobe...
I lost money the first year. I was profitable in name only the second year. I made a profit that would almost cover my rent the third year. Now I'm in my 4th year, and I'm actually making a living. January and February covered all of my expected business expenses for the year. I never thought it would take as long as it did, but when revenue really started to grow, it came as a pretty big surprise.
Social Proof vs Information Cascades
I knew nothing of the HTML 5 history API until I read this. I found this page in the Mozilla docs to be fairly informative:

https://developer.mozilla.org/en/DOM/Manipulating_the_browse...

I look forward to the day when this API is supported by all the major browsers. In the meantime, the article suggests a sensible-looking set of steps for gracefully degrading.(and using hash-bang URLs as little as you can).

The frustrating thing about all this is that, until HTML 5, there hasn't been any way of causing the contents of the URL bar to change to an arbitrary URL within your site without reloading the page.
Hi, thanks for your comment. I'm the Sr. Med Director, and just wanted to comment that I began practicing as a family medicine physician 3 years ago in a clinic-based practice. I have plenty of rich experiences seeing patients at an outpatient level of care, and am quite experienced with the day to day operations of such a clinic. I recently started psychiatry as I felt this was my true calling, as I greatly enjoy it as well. My work consists of collaborating with our 100's of doctors who use our system, and I spearhead the improvements in the workflow and design of our product. Again, thanks for your comment and feel free to contact me for further info if needed.
The only thing that makes this seem offical is that the email address of the coder is "hearn@google.com", which AFAIK is only available to google employees.
"NBA star" != "NBA players"
Show HN: I spent the past 8 months mapping Chicago's History with Drupal & GMaps
Actually when they say "Open the jar" i start beating it against the table. But yeah, most the exercise is figuring out the granularity. After they get the idea, it's quick work to give me the steps.

I've been thinking up a similar exercise, for later in the course, for concurrency. EG you can have one student get a piece of bread and apply jam, another to apply the PB, etc etc.

The best part about food-based analogies is that everybody can enjoy them and relate and they all get to snack afterward while i give a brief lecture tying the example into the coursework.
It looks like it might be someone's 20% project.
This is already enabled in the OS X build. 3-finger swipe down brings up an expose-like view of all tabs.
The author mentions CPS...

There already exists a powerful cross-environment JavaScript CPS implementation called JooseX.CPS:

https://github.com/SamuraiJack/JooseX-CPS

Tutorials:

http://joose.it/blog/2011/02/14/joosex-cps-tutorial-part-i/

http://joose.it/blog/2011/02/22/joosex-cps-tutorial-part-ii/

If you're not familiar with the Joose object system (works great in browsers and node.js), you should give it a look: http://joose.github.com/Joose/doc/html/Joose.html

Also, CPS is not the only option for dumping callbacks in browsers / node.js. Another would be the Functional Reactive style. See Flapjax: http://www.flapjax-lang.org/

I'm working on a reimplementation of Flapjax right now: https://github.com/michaelsbradleyjr/Jolt

It's got Joose under the hood and I'm generalizing all the library functions for n-ary EventStreams and Behaviors (Reactive concepts). It's very much a work in progress and the test coverage is non-existant atm, but that's owing to the fact I'm working from an existing, working code base. As soon as I have all the core estream and behavior facilities in place, I'm planning to write some exhaustive tests that use JooseX.CPS together with the Joose3 author's Test.Run library: https://github.com/SamuraiJack/test.run
Moviebarcode - Movies compressed to a single frame
I'm not rich, neither can I cite evidence to back this up, but looking around in my circle of friends, I don't agree with you.

Rich(er) kids have just as much drive to work on interesting products, find new solutions to problems, etc. And they have the added benefit of not having to worry about making a baseline salary on the side, they can ask their parents to bootstrap them, to find first clients, etc. Sure you can say that there are some who are slacking off on their parents money, but then again there are also middle class/poor kids who don't do anything useful in life.
I'm not sure how much that matters. It is something new in the last century that most people assuming "working" means working for some company, no?
The ampersand is a subject of major fascination between type designers, and through that - the wider masses of graphic designers. See, for example - http://www.typophile.com/node/66611
Ask HN: 75,000 books & an active member base - is Questia.com a "quality" site? 
HNers:

There's been an abundance of discussion, misinformation, and general mayhem for many site owners in the preceding weeks over Google's latest algorithm update. Questia.com, one of my company's sites, was negatively affected by the change, in some surprising ways. .

Explicitly targeted at "low quality" sites, many companies feel that they were wrongly classified as low quality by this algo update, but I'm not here to make a stump speech for Questia. Accounting for my own bias, we feel like there's considerable value for users of Questia: with over 75,000 books, millions of peer-reviewed journal articles, and tools (annotation, citation generation) for students and researchers, offered at a reasonable cost.

The question, in my mind, is how closely can an algorithm model a human's experience of quality, using Questia.com as a case study? What is it about the site that might cause a person (or algorithm) to classify it as low quality?
I read my Python Head First when I got the time. I fiddled around with the IDLE editor, doing some basic lists in sqlite3 and some logic/math on some integers and string.

But I really want to do the WEB stuff. So I've sat myself a goal of posting a web form into a database and then retrieving that info somewhere else, seems like a feasable task.
This comment is dead for some reason, but useful:

1 point by nas 52 minutes ago | link [dead]

From the bitcoin.org forum: "Google is pleased to announce the release of BitCoinJ, an implementation of the BitCoin system in Java. You can get it here under the Apache 2 license."
I suspect this is maybe not Google the corporation but a Google employee using their 20% time.
Edit: I could be wrong, according to the IRC chat, it is an "official" project: http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/fyzhk/google_is_ple...
Anyone planning to store significant quantities of data across multiple distinct nodes should have a look at the Disco Distributed File System:

http://discoproject.org/doc/start/ddfs.html

It handles 'data distribution, replication, persistence, addressing and access' quite well.
Entertaining Story of Determination: Landing a Trip to NYC
Parul Gupta - Wireless Research Engineer
I'm up to 11GB free, it's possible. I've sent them over 150 referrals, most of whom've completed signup. Plus doing things like taking the tutorial, etc.

The referral model by dropbox must be awesome for customer acquisition.
A way to use BitCoin on AppEngine would be useful.
I was going to write on this yesterday but decided not to at the last minute for whatever reason. At that time there were 4 comments on this post. Between then and now there have been an additional 104.
Whether you approve of the post or not, I think we can all agree that there is value to be found in the level of response it has received. Maybe the post is appropriate, maybe its not. But its gotten people talking about something we often try to ignore and in that sense I cant help but appreciate it.
Gowalla 3 Launches For Android Today
PyCon 2011 - Startup Row Finalists Announced
A misunderstanding leads to method for making nanowells