skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
One problem with these kinds of articles on Wikipedia is that there's something of a deadlock between pedagogy-oriented and mathematical-precision-oriented editors. There's been a lot of discussion in WikiProject Mathematics over how to balance those concerns, in some cases producing multiple articles for the "introductory treatment" versus the "formal treatment", and in other cases just being better about organization, inclusion of visual aids and examples, etc. I think there's been an improvement in a lot of the math articles over the past 2-3 years in that regard, but the focus has been on more of the "core math" articles, and the CS articles have lagged (one reason is that mathematicians, including some very prolific professors, seem more numerous and active in the Wikipedia community than computer scientists are).

In theory, Wikiversity and WikiBooks are supposed to do even more on the pedagogy/introduction/tutorials side, but those projects have never gotten the same level of participation as Wikipedia has.
This was on HN earlier today: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2322401
I think we're overestimating the "anonymous internet snark" aspect of this phenomenon. Back before most people lived in large cities and could be anonymous, this sort of thing still happened. People got reputations, and they rarely lived down embarrassing things that became public knowledge.

Is it really worse for some random person thousands of miles away to laugh at a mugshot and a story (someone who could meet you a week later and not even recognize you), or to hear "Got anything interesting up your ass today?" from people you run into on the street for the rest of your life?
Isn't "upto" a loop? The idea, IIRC, is to print the numbers without loops and conditionals.
It's blocking porn for kids - is that _really_ such a bad thing? Anyone who wants to can unlock it
So they replaced a generic roff system with a specialized man page viewer? Why? I mean, if you're rewriting everything and include a bevvy of output formats, why not make it a proper replacement? Would be quite a bit more unix-y. Yes, maybe a bit more work in the end, but you could always have "oroff 0.1" which only supports a -man subset evolve into a full-fledged implementation. Going from mandoc to "oroff" seems less likely.

(Or I'm just the only one who still occasionally uses ms/tbl/pic…)
It depends on the situation. The old title went against the site terms, but also it was just a distraction. What's the point of thumbing your nose at YC for the initial rejection when at the time it had many strikes against it?

Single founder, yes -- that makes it harder to succeed (certainly not impossible, but investment is about risk assessment). But more importantly, notice the step that comes after the YC rejection:

"The rejection email came on November 2nd, and I got the app into the store a week later.

"At that point, it was pretty clear the app wasn't ready for prime time, so I worked on it and racked my brain for a viable near-term business model and marketing strategy."

Once he'd finally hit on the successful approach, it was too late for the YC cycle. If he'd gotten through the brain-wracking phase earlier in the year, maybe YC would have selected him in spite of the single-founder risk.

"My idea development process didn't align with the YC application cycle but now I'm racking in 100K/month in revenue" is more accurate, but doesn't have much of a ring to it. So why not just focus on the success story? It's a good one.
Anything that has 'void main' isn't quite up to snuff, to begin with.
Awesome find!

I'm sure the Appleseed Project evangelist will drop by to mention they were also founded in 2004 in 3, 2, 1...
No, you can add a field on a server that some clients do not yet use without changing the semantics for the clients that do not know about it, for example.

The loosely coupled model is more or less Duck typing for interfaces.
They speak about bunch of (seemingly) toy OSes but do not mention Plan 9? It's a well-designed OS that takes the UNIX "everything is a file" abstraction to its logical conclusion.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plan_9_from_Bell_Labs
Write now. Right now.

I like that and plan on stealing it.

Not that this quote applies to me, but it's germane: Bad artists copy. Great artists steal. - Pablo Picasso

The point being that everything you write does not have to be unique or earth-shattering. Many times what we call "writer's block" is simply applying a perfectionist mindset to the act of writing.
This is an interesting acquisition. It seems, to me, to be almost entirely a recruitment play. Some cash for the founders and an as-good-as-guaranteed high paying job for the next few years.

I know that recruiting good Rails people is tough but I must admit I'm surprised it's gone this far. Congrats to the InfoEther team. I bet they weren't short of work to do independently so this deal must have been pretty stellar.
IMHO, `&&` and `try` are conditionals, even if they lack the word `if`. :-)
Getting in the habit of kindly offering constructive criticism will pay off big-time when and if you raise kids -- at least if you want them to like you when they're adults.
Sorry for posting a comment and deleting it, but just after posting I saw

repeat:
...
goto repeat;

which is an endless loop, even if it is not a for loop, and just deleted the comment. Evidently I did not delete fast enough.
Escaping the Zone: Suggestions for breaking flow and shifting mental gears?
The IMCB is a collaboration between Vodafone, Orange, T-Mobile, 02, 3 and Virgin Mobile.
Wow Plumb Tree in particular got some amazing palettes back.

Been playing with random keywords. Beer came back with some amusing pictures but no color combinations I really liked.
Are you really making enough from the ads on the bottom of the page to let it clutter up your design?

If you continued to develop this so your special offers would allow me to do whatever it is (send flowers, etc.) with one click or one reply e-mail, that'd be great.
Sam Walton started Walmart at age 44
"Honestly I never use remote X. It's just too clunky"

Why not try to fix it? This isn't the fault of network transparency or even the X11 protocol, but the tools.

"oops, lost the network connection for a minute? crap, there goes the entire app"

How is that different from losing your SSH connection? There's a screen-like program for X that gives you persistent applications: http://code.google.com/p/partiwm/wiki/xpra
Ditto. I think about this in the context of Steve Jobs's health. I hope he doesn't, but he might die soon. If so I wonder (a) how long can Apple continue to shine? and (b) what other company could develop a similarly excellent ethos?
DIY iPhone Call Recorder
I won't believe that this is the real Peter Cooper unless you say "frickin' awesome!"
This does not always play to Apple's side. In my last visit to the local Apple store the saleswoman recommended that we wait for the next model. That was early February.
The Most Streamed Movies on Netflix
This seems like someone just discovered that once you consider a large enough group of people, a bunch of them happen to be narrow-minded people thinking they know The Truth and feel they have a Mission to teach Gospel. The best thing to do is to actually ignore them lest one risks engaging into void arguments. Once you learn to get over the empty side of the Internet you discover that you can also find a bunch of open-minded, constructive people (of which hackers are - by the idealistic definition - a subset).

Trains can be late and one can be quite vocal about that, but few talk about those that are actually on time.

Also, http://xkcd.com/386/
Probably a good choice. For a workstation, you might encounter the need for a typesetting system. But for your router, you probably don't need it. So I think OpenBSD made the right choice about what to ship in core.
Deleting History: Why Governments Demand Google Censor the Truth
Blocking porn for kids is great, that's why devices have parental controls. This is an involuntary, arbitrary blocking of content.

If you actually read the article, you'd know that they're not just blocking porn sites. They're blocking Google Translate, Jalopnik, a sexual health charity, and anything else THEY deem "indecent".
Google adding new features to Blogger
It came into effect for me about a week ago.

For 3 years I've topped up with a credit card, so O2 already know my details. I thought it was a scam the first few times I saw it.
What does that come out to in units of banana? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banana_equivalent_dose
So you speculate despite not knowing either language or use case? Nevertheless I don't want to be a bad geek so I did some trivial googling:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4064451/luas-gc-and-realt...

tldr; LUA's GC isn't magic and for games you need to control it carefully. Even then a reference counting system is often better.

Answer excerpted:

As for the garbage collector. Use it as is first. If later you find performance issues use lua_gc to fine tune its behavior.

Some examples:

Disable the garbage collector during those times when the slow down would be a problem.

Leave the garbage collector disabled and only step it when game logic says you've got some head room on your FPS count. You could pre-tune the step size, or discover the optimal step size at runtime.

Disable the collector and perform full collection at stopping points, ie a load screen or cut scene or at turn change in a hot seat game.

You might also consider an alternative scripting language. Squirrel tries very hard to be a second generation Lua. It tries to keep all of Lua's good features, while ditching any of its design mistakes. One of the big differences between the two is squirrel uses reference counting instead of garbage collection. It turns out that reference counting can be a bit slower than garbage collection but it is very deterministic(AKA realtime).
I'm so on the fence with the ads. I agree they clutter up the design. We've made the big $0.04 on the ads so far... I'd much rather send well formed and target recommendations with the suggestions.

tl;dr - we'll probably kill them, but thought it would be cool to buy a beer with the proceeds.
I guess I'm sensitive to the different lights in which people tend to cast Groupon. Newspapers also have ad salespeople who, at the end of the day, are motivated entirely by their revenue targets and not by the well-being of their customers. It is entirely possible to overspend on newspaper ads (for a lot of businesses, $1 is an overspend on it).

At the end of the day, as a business owner, you are responsible for creating a marketing plan with a budget and allocating it in the best possible way for your business. You cannot push off any of that responsibility to a salesperson at another company.

You are clearly right: using Groupon as an inventory management valve is probably a very bad idea.
Not to diminish the importance of doing good work, but the reality is that knowledge and expertise are part of a continuum and even well-respected experts can easily make mistakes. If you're trying to make a living, you have to attempt to sell yourself at whatever level you're at, then work to keep improving. It's the customer's responsibility to do due diligence and discover potentially critical gaps in expertise, not the provider's to trumpet his/her own weaknesses. This is just the nature of a marketplace.

The hacker who postures a bit in order to get a job he isn't truly suited for, but works hard to get up to speed and does his best, will be much better off in the long run than a hacker who declines the project, even if it leads to problems for the buyer later on. There's only so much you can learn without jumping in the deep end, but in order to get that chance, you often need to give the impression you've been swimming in the deep end for years. That's how the world works.
or the never announced Windows Live Circles http://www.freepatentsonline.com/y2009/0132365.html
Thanks, now I understand why I should stick to Texas hold 'em for now ;-)

</OffTopic>
Thanks. I used to work for Lycos. The Circles project was before my time but it came up in conversation now and then. So when I heard Google Circles it was the first thing that came to mind.
Sorry, clicked down when I meant to click up...
Judgment under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases [pdf]
What Is Success? (and The Importance of Grit)
Should we let them know platitudes are not the solution?
Ask HN: Websense blocking encrypted.Google.com?
After wasting the better part of an hour diagnosing this problem, I have been told that our campus Websense device is blocking access to 74.125.95.100+, which is (in part) encrypted.google.com. (NB: I can't verify this, as I have no access to the Websense device.)

Can anyone corroborate this? I tried to reach someone at Google by phone, but they have excelled at making their telephone system and web site lack any obvious contact for such matters.
The thing is, there are NO challengers in the hardware arena. Google et al do software pretty well and will continue to improve. But who else could create hardware as beautiful and functional as Apple? I've been a Windows-then-Linux guy for 15 years and it's the hardware behind MacBooks and iPhones that drew me to Apple. There is simply NO competition. And, unfortunately, it's much easier to be a software startup than a hardware startup. Microsoft and Google aren't even playing the same game.
I think people tend to hear the latter when geeks say the former, because non-geeks usually aren't so direct.
> It's usually "you don't know what you are talking about," followed by bashing until the person takes their ball and goes home.

I agree that if it's just that kind of content-free junk, it's pointless.

However, if the beatdown comes with a factual and logical refutation of the idiot's points, or at least a link to a site that has such a refutation, then it performs the inestimable service of educating the lurkers.

For example, let's say we had an anti-vaccinationist come here and start spreading lies about vaccines. We would, rightly, be dismayed at such utter lunacy at work in our forum, and we would (hopefully) post multiple refutations of that dangerous nonsense. Ideally, the lunatic would find that we are not amenable to that kind of idiocy and would leave, sadly uneducated (most likely) but at least doing less damage. The real benefit to such actions may come months later, when someone unsure of the facts about vaccines discovers a dead thread that has all of this wonderful information we used to refute the idiot.

(And, heck, we might even convince the anti-vaxxer. It could happen.)
The main reasons for replacing groff were:

1. Groff is buggy

2. Groff is slow to compile & execute

3. Groff is not BSD licensed

mandoc has none of these problems. If you want a "generic" roff system, groff is available as a package.

According to http://mdocml.bsd.lv/

> groff amounts to over 5 MB of source code, most of which is C++ and all of which is GPL. It runs slowly, produces uncertain output, and varies in operation from system to system. mdocml strives to fix this (respectively small, C, ISC-licensed, fast and regular).
IE 9 Q&A: Microsoft's Ryan Gavin on IE 9's Future
It's not a platform conversion. iTunes runs on Windows, and that's all you need to run the iPad. You can't install OS X apps on the iPad.

Would you call a Mac user buying an Xbox a platform conversion?
That might actually be a compliment to Android's success in the marketplace. The article is about Alternative Operating systems, likely the ones less explored.
Pay overtime. Not being glib. It works like a charm. Then again, "works longer" likely isn't your real goal, and more hours may not serve that real goal.
As an aside, I haven't had a similar experience as you have with Ekiga. I would not recommend it for my family members, for example.

Don't forget that Skype's UX is only one fraction of why people like or don't like Skype. The codec they use is often vastly superior for "normal people" situations than even commercial SIP clients, or the WebEx-es of the world.

I don't doubt that the Skype network topology has something to do with it, but I am (perhaps erroneously) lumping those features together for the purposes of this discussion.
I like the idea. Would definitely sign up, though would want to see an explicit statement that my email will be safe with you!
The network effects are (luckily) also not exclusive. There's no reason why you can't use Skype AND a SIP phone AND GNU phone software - the only time it's an issue is when you want to do a conference call. That said, if GNU want to win this one, they'd better not make freedom their main "selling" point. Skype's usability and reliability leave some room for improvement, and users might care about those points enough to switch.
For [2]--NoSQL.
1.upto(10).class
=> Enumerator
I'd have thought you could make more from affiliate links on your recommendations.
I like to use http://750words.com/ to help push me to daily writing. A simple canvas to write with some light game mechanics to keep things competitive.
Trying to type three pages of text every day is damn hard but the flow of text, ideas, and spelling (darn Autocorrect!) does improve with time.
IMO, Android isn't generally applicable. The reason Android works is because you have a (fairly) limited set of devices with more or less the same hardware and capabilities (e.g., touchscreen, GPS, radios, gyroscope etc.) So application writers have a fixed number of events they need to access, and a VM + software stack would be able to provide that while making development and security relatively easier.

Real operating systems have to run on a myriad of hardware and potentially interface with tons of devices and protocols, so you would need to allow programmers to go to the hardware level and read and write bytes by hand.
Perhaps because there is so little change from the original? (Cameras, gyroscopes, and slightly greater performance don't merit another $500 a year later for the average user IMO.)
I'm guessing the sentence would look kinda funny with a random "s" following the word sanctimonious.
"Analysts expect Apple Inc to have sold close to a million iPad 2 tablet computers in its first weekend."

So, no official number, although we do know that they've sold out in many places. That's somewhat less exciting, though I don't doubt that a massive number of iPads are being sold.
I'm also rather confused as to what "doesn't work in Java". The logical conjunction operator does short-circuit, it's merely restricted to the boolean type. Since you aren't using the result, it doesn't matter:

static boolean print1000(int n) {
System.out.format("%d\n", n);
return n<1000 && print1000(n+1);
}
public static void main(String[] args) {
print1000(1);
}
His last paragraph completely ruined the entire article for me. I was actually getting emotional as he wrote about stories with his childhood friend. I was hoping this article would have a point. In the end, he had no point and nothing changed, except he still remains another asshole on the internet (which was common knowledge in the first place). I want my 3 minutes back.
Microsoft launches IE9 web browser
I memorized π to about 180 decimal places at age 9, but I supported the switch to τ when I read about it, and I have no regrets.
Hey all, I submitted this this morning, but never anticipated getting this much traffic.

I really appreciate all the comments :) If the site is slow to load, there is a static version of the page here:

http://thingist.com/static/4372.html
Ask HN: When reaching out to bloggers/press, should I include an affiliate link?
I know that the best thing I can do is create a site that people want to talk about, I am just wondering if including an affiliate link (which could help the writer make money) cheapens our site/story when reaching out to press/bloggers early on.
A bit of a blackbox from a user's perspective about what it will be they would be receiving beyond "it will be an email" and "it will have an idea".

From the stance of someone who may have just entered their email, before doing so it would be helpful to see an example of what it is we're getting ourselves into.

The pitch is too easily misconstrued to "every few weeks we'll ask you to buy something from one of our advertisers, so please sign up".

Perhaps a friendly use case/sample would be helpful here.
Patio11 on BBC Radio discussing the Japan earthquake
Glad they have Inferno, but why no Plan 9?

In any case, two tongue-in-cheek:

``Systems Software Research is Irrelevant'' by Rob Pike http://doc.cat-v.org/bell_labs/utah2000/

``Why Some Dead OSes Still matter'' by Andrey Mirtchovski and Latchesar IonkoV http://doc.cat-v.org/plan_9/misc/dead_OSes_still_matter/
g++ hasn't gone anywhere.
The author's point is well taken. But:

* Stop using comic sans

* What are you, illiterate?

* Tables? What is this, the 1990s? Ha ha ha!.

* This design looks like myspace

* You're using the default hashing algorithm in mysql instead of bcrypt?

* God I hate the arduino. It's not real hacking.

Which of these things is not like-the ooooother?
Very cool, nice work.

You mention dealing with syncing data with the server. Is there anyway to cache that data locally? Maybe let me still vote on pictures even if I'm not on the net and just sync my votes next time I connect?

I don't have an iPhone, but you might want to check out http://testflightapp.com/ for doing beta testing.
MITLeaks: http://www.mitadmissions.org/topics/apply/the_selection_proc...
> "10 Operating Systems With Great Screenshots"

Except for OpenBSD, which I suspect they made look as old and frumpy as possible for that article. I'm sure OpenBSD can run about as many attractive window managers as Linux can.
libstdc++ remains as much a part of core as it ever was.
I bet we can... that's a great idea, thanks. It'll help us get rid of the ugly.
Cool, we'll add a privacy statement.
That's a great idea, and easy to show on an example page. Added it to the TODO - thanks!
I did, it was a great post. You and Paul are an amazing team, and I feel fortunate to know both you guys. Hope I can make it out to SF soon and stop by the office!
I think that might be a bit cruel to those who get deferred in December, not to mention slightly impractical ;)

Only 7 hours and 15 minutes to go....
I was very much involved in the Lycos Circles product and sent Andrew the link yesterday. If I had any hair left, I'd have been pulling it out yesterday. Maybe it's time to add Lycos Circles to my LinkedIn profile
Aged skateboarder here. Been a few years since I have even rode one. The nature of skateboarders is something that I am glad the blog author got a taste of. I seem to compare every "culture" that I get involved in to skateboarders. I don't think you will find the same camaraderie in many other places.

It's very hard to explain. For something that is rather competitive, it is also very much a competition with yourself. Just the act of truly wanting to be a part of it will make you part of a family so to speak.
Startup with consumer product looking for awesome developers in Canada
We're a pre-alpha startup (ie. we haven't launched) in Canada, and we're hiring a few developers for our core team. These are fulltime salaried positions with benefits, we pay competitive wages (we have good backing).

We're just starting our team, we currently are 1 product guy and 1 lead developer, looking to hire about 3 more people.

The product is exciting, I'll tell you all about it in person. (Sorry, not ready to post details.)

You should know your web stuff, be comfy on *nix command line, and we also need someone who has done iOS, Mac OS and Windows app development.

Here are the details:
http://blog.getgush.com/post/3858261541/were-hiring-a-few-senior-developers

(All this assuming that hiring posts are ok on HN, they seem to be and I didn't see anything against them in the guidelines?)
This isn't the program you are looking for [[ http://man.cat-v.org/plan_9/1/troff ]]