skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Voluntarily? There's a lot of wiggle room in that term, and probably some assumptions that need to be challenged.

If we assume that "voluntarily" means that you expect your developers to simply stay late without any investment of effort on your part, then good luck to you - I hope your developers REALLY believe in your company. You want something for nothing, and personally, I'd comply long enough to get another job. My life is too short to spend it "killing time" on your project.

If we assume that you are willing to invest in the environment or other workplace changes, but not willing to compensate your developers financially for extra time, then I think that you're going to want to be careful what message you're sending so you get the most bang for your buck, so to speak. Ordering dinner (and not just pizza by default), for example, would be a good start. Most of the time, I'm hungry in the evening, but if I'm staying late I'm not going to be thrilled about spending 30+ minutes to go get my own food. I'm going to be thinking "great, this is 30+ minutes later I need to spend when I get back." Giving me clear direction for what you need and why you need it now is another biggie. If you're asking me to stay late, clearly you have some task in mind so make sure I understand exactly what you want to see so I don't waste my time. Making it clear that you are doing whatever you can to remove the reason I'm here late is another biggie. To paraphrase, lack of planning on your part does not constitute a good reason to give up my evenings on my part. If you're asking me to put in 12 hour days, I'm not going to be amused by the addition of a pinball machine or other games (I have worked at a startup where the other developers managed to squeeze in 8 hours of work and 4 hours of ping-pong in every day and bragged about "working" late). I'm at the office late because you need something done, and anything that doesn't make that goal easier so I can hurry up and get home just reeks of management missing the point.

If we assume that you are willing to compensate your developers financially for their time, then make sure that this is a win for both parties. Time after hours is time that your developers can't spend doing other things. Evenings are time with families, for example. Evenings are a chance to spend time with friends away from the office. Evenings are a chance to unwind with hobbies. I value my evening hours more highly than my midday hours because I have a family and that's when it's easiest for me to spend time with them. If I'm not going to make it home for dinner, I don't want to tell my wife "honey, I need to work late but it's okay - I'm getting an extra $50 out of the deal." That figure needs to be high enough that the decision is easy. I also do contract work after hours, so if my day job wants me to stay late, I'm forced to either give up sleep to meet those obligations or I'm giving up weekend time. You're shifting the array of my life around, and that's an inconvenience I would like to be compensated for. I'm not asking for something ridiculous, but I think a premium atop my regular rate is in order.
"...bashing until the person takes their ball and goes home."

And that's often a good outcome. Consider for example this article published recently by a Connecticut state senator on why she wants to put people in jail for having 'fake weed'.

http://newcanaan.patch.com/articles/fake-pot-a-new-threat-to...

The entire article was riddled with sloppy thinking, and thoroughly plagiarized, so I got all of reddit to utterly destroy her until she deleted all of her comments and wrote a followup stating that the issue was no longer a top priority of hers. I tried to engage her respectfully first, but since she wasn't willing to engage in an intellectually honest debate then going out and fucking up her day seemed like the second best option. Overall I'd consider it a win. Sure it would have been better to get her to change her opinion, but once it becomes clear that no amount of facts or logic her will persuade her then embarrassing her until she shuts the fuck up becomes the best option left on the table.
I would really appreciate your thoughts on this.
But Plato is, actually, relevant to our site. The cave analogy is a perfect description of how we see current social discussion- people understand themselves and others by interacting with mere "shadows" that are not very substantive. Facebook lets you know who you're talking to, but profiles are often more about what that person wants to be seen as than about who he actually is.
Our goal, conversely, is to let people strip away the superficial and discuss their real opinions in an unadulterated form.
The old stereotype of the socially awkward nerd is just as true now as it ever was. The points the author brings up are classic signs of lack of ability to articulate in a social context.

It's not a popular thing to say but programming and hacking is, at the end of the day, a mostly solitary endeavour. Why would someone who spends most of their time stuck in their own head know how to converse about technical matters, especially when it's online and behind a wall of anonymity?

I'm not saying all geeks are antisocial. I'm saying that the kind of person who would call another an idiot over a minor disagreement isn't demonstrating a lack of confidence but rather an inability to communicate in a friendly way.
1. Many entrepeneurs do not achieve an exit until they are in mid thirties to late forties. What is this obsession with the exit? I want to build an empire, one death-star at a time. Think Warren Buffett, but crappy little me instead.

2. Learning can be a bit like compound interest. The more you learn, the better you become at learning. Fortunately, your competition are 99% shit, so you still have time to get on that horse yet.

3. You can't be successful in your mid twenties if you haven't succeeded by then.
Objective-C memory management has nothing to do with RAII.
How would you do the same in other languages? It would be interesting to see the same question answered in Python, Perl, Java, etc. etc. Just as a fun thought exercise, and not to get into language flamewars.
I'd count achieving something less than 50 people in the world have achieved as a success regardless of politics.
How The New York Times Graphics Department Uses R
Apple Inc. Files For Apple Corps' Old Apple Logo Trademark
This is getting a little absurd. First, I'm specifically referring to the Feds in its tight control of the money supply during the Depression. They restricted the money supply. If you have another term for what the Feds did (note the difference between the Feds and the federal government), then so be it.

Loose monetary policy during a drought is not just supported by Keynesians (who really emphasize more expansionary fiscal policy), and is definitely not a 100% Keynesian view. Monetarists, for instance, support it widely. As do other economists. Friedman supported it, as does Bernanke, Greenspan, Summers, Mankiw, et al. To claim that an expansionary monetary policy is 100% Keynesian is just absurd and distorts the positions of other economists.
I've been toying around with Hg for some time before Git. Indeed, DVCS by itself implies high degree of flexibility and whatnot.

However, I'd still like to single Git out, because of its storage format. In Hg, for every file in your repo, you get one storage file holding revisions -- plus one master file with changelogs. It's just boring files all the way down.

In Git, every object (file, tree of files, commit with a tree of files & parent commit(s)) are represented by hash. The data itself is stored somewhere -- in an interchangeable format (currently two formats are used: blob and pack with index). Storage is somewhat decoupled from toolkit. You can even fix a broken repo by literally copying in file(s) with proper content.

But the true power comes from somewhere else: you can envision defining own data types, beyond files, trees and commits, and plugging them into Git. And having them play along with the usual ones.

A general content-addressable storage :D

(Too bad Venti [1] was invented a bit earlier)

I believe Fossil (the DVCS [2], not the FS [3]) comes pretty close to that, too.

--

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venti

[2] (the DVCS) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fossil_(software)

[3] (the FS) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fossil_(file_system)
Adobe was founded by two guys in their 40's
I have become something of an Apple fanboy, but I completely agree with this sentiment. I would love to see a company that could create an Apple-like computing experience but with a much more progressive view toward the computer industry (licensing, developer support, even product specification info). With Android, Google seems to be the strongest challenger, but I suspect they will likely never have the focus necessary to compete successfully in Apple's market, much less any other existing company.
Granted, but unlike skateboarders, the developer community depends on online interaction as their _primary_ form of community / communication / learning. So the faceless nature of net communication may affect the overall tone of the community and experience if its members more.
Competition is always good. Finally an overdue upgrade and nice to see continuous development. I think Blogger is one of the few Google product which still has relevance and consistency. If only they had worked a little faster to catch up with Wordpress and had controlled their spam earlier in the game.
Here's the announcement http://buzz.blogger.com/2011/03/whats-new-with-blogger.html
printf("1 To 1000");
Making someone look like a moron can be done with tact :) I would say that this is essential and more effective. Doing it without tact makes everything you say easier to dismiss.
Speaking as someone who used to write Zope 2 apps, allow me
to say no. Hell, no.

Zope < 3.0 was a convoluted mess of two over-engineered
applications named Bobo and Principia that were hacked
together.

That's why the API had functions names like:

bobobase_modification_time
principia_is_folderish

That's why Zope 3 was rewritten from scratch.

Zope 3 has a sane, albeit complex, architecture. Regretably
it came too late into the game and by the time it was ready,
every Python web developer had moved to turbogears or
something else.

The only interesting piece of technology from Zope was the
ZODB. I wish it had developed as a separate product.
That's because clothes are important in the desert. It's not intuitively obvious at first, but the right clothes shield you from the sand & sun, combat dehydration, and actually keep you cooler while also keeping you warm during cold desert nights.
Agreed, gringo. If nothing is going to happen, I'm still going to make a ton of noise about it.
In what sense do these lack conditionals?
Someone claims the second answer "obviously" isn't C, which I don't understand. GCC 4.5.2 compiles it without complaint.

Is pointer arithmetic not allowed? Or calling main()?
This happened to a colleague of mine, but I'm on the same network and it didn't happen to me.

You can turn it off by either going into an O2 store with some ID, or paying £1 on a credit card - you'll be given £2.50 in credit to your phone bill to compensate.
That's one of the few hard-copy books I keep around (I don't like wasting dead trees for something that will be outdated in a few years). I don't think it makes for a good self-teaching book for many people, because it's very long and dry, though it's still a great reference.
Great work. I did something like this and had it generate a sample website: a head, a content area, some tabbed navigation, a logo, and some headline colors.

I essentially quantized the image that was uploaded (I didnt use flickr) into 5 or 6 of the most obvious colours, then applied a little bit of math to determine which colours would work well together as well as adjusting the lightness (up/down) to help contrast.

It worked out okay. Maybe I should upload it? Your take on the flickr version is much, much cleaner than mine. Mine was a quick and dirty hack but was done as a learning experience.

Here's a screenshot using the UPS logo as an uploaded image:
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/3731176/auto-ups-logo.jpg
Mandoc is a tool specifically for formatting man pages. Groff is a general typesetting tool. That probably accounts for most if not all of the difference in speed.
But Arduino fanboys really deserve it :P
Orthogonal to bloat, libstdc++ is a large, ugly, and hard-to-audit attack surface that I'm sure OpenBSD is glad to push out of core.
The One Ring maybe, but still I'd rather see more elves with rings then men.

It's the same fallacy, really. Even if politics is as corruptible as it's made out to be (which I tend to doubt), still I'd rather have more people with my viewpoint entering it...
Ask HN: What is the optimum length of an explainer video?
I am working on a script for an explainer video for my product http://www.skillendar.com. To make it funny and more interesting I have to add some unrelated content which in turn is increasing the length of the video to about 3 minutes. Do you think I should restrict the length to 90 seconds in order to retain the viewer's attention? This would mean that I would need to compromise on the whole story line.
Tokyo voluntarily goes into the dark to conserve power
Very well executed. My only question is whether you have any definite ideas for monetizing it, or just a project for learning and fun. Either way, awesome job.
The more interesting question is why there is incredible pressure in Silicon Valley and other tech hubs to be successful by 30. In other professions, particularly ones that require graduate education such as law or medicine, it's almost impossible to be "successful" by 30.

I suppose the easy and simple answer is: one must be young to "understand" what the youth market wants. Facebook went after the college market at first, and Zuckerberg was a college student, so that makes sense, right?

Well, life is what you make of it. Sometimes circumstances prevent young successes. That doesn't mean that anyone should give up. In fact, it may be a self-fulfilling prophecy - people are so enamored with the idea of being a billionaire by 25 that if they don't make it by age 28, they give up.

Life is your own story and you are the only writer.
What the poster misses is that many people don't come to online forums for just polite intelligent discussion. You might as well tell football fans to be quiet so everyone can concentrate on the game better.

Is he comparing online forums with in-person experiences?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kQFKtI6gn9Y&feature=youtu...
In Japan, Many Under Sea Cables Are Damaged
They weren't before Western culture got involved.
http://golf.shinh.org/reveal.rb?Quine/shinh+%28C+C%2B%2B+Rub...

Here is a 396 byte C program that prints a C++ program that prints a Ruby program that prints a Python program that prints a PHP program that prints a Perl program, that prints the original C program.

Coincidentally that program is the same in all languages :) it is a polygot. This is definitely a much harder problem than just cycling through the languages...
1UP: The importance of platforms, and how we’re extending ours
Show HN: eBay rounding error results in incorrect credits
About a month ago, I tried to sell a few items on eBay including a Nexus One phone. 2 items were left unpaid since the buyer's tried to scam me (fake PayPal payment emails, cancelled PayPal eChecks).

Once an item sells, eBay charges a Final Value Fee (FVF) that is a percentage of the total proceeds. However, if the item is never paid for, you can request eBay to credit you the FVF.

Yesterday I called eBay to get my credits, which they gave promptly. However, I noticed that the credited amount was off by one cent. I explained to the representative on the phone that I was able to see the credit, but was curious as to why it was $.01 less than the FVF. I asked if they kept a penny, assuming they did, but she assured me that the full amount was refunded in both cases. Again, out of curiosity I pushed the issue and she insisted that the full amounts were credited ($13.48 and $14.55) even though I explained that what I saw on my eBay account was different.

I was being incredibly polite and merely inquisitive (it's 2 cents for god's sake) but she rudely stated "I can't help you anymore, if you have more questions, then you need to use the eBay help menu online" and hung up on me.

Ouch.

$13.48 charged, I was refunded 13.47.
$14.55 charged, I was refunded 14.54.

Since we're literally talking pennies here, I don't care enough to call eBay back, but I'm curios as to what caused this.

I assume this is a rounding error from taking a percentage of the amount (possibly a floor function being used for credits). This all reminds me of Office Space, and made me wonder how much money eBay makes off of these penny differences, if this indeed happens all the time.

Has anyone ever come across this before, or am I an anomaly?
Vacation (Scott Adams)
Nuclear meltdown Q&A
MIT guy hacked his son's life & beyond that
The fact that I will be able to build it from source does make a difference to me, and likely to several people I call. It doesn't matter to me if everyone uses it as long as the person I want to talk to does.
No mention of Google or Android in an article about the future of operating systems? It seems to me that a current big shakeup on the OS market is actually being led by Google and that Android represents quite a bit of the future of "alternative" OSs.
What makes Apple so unique is it's unwavering faith in it's founding values (genius marketing + simple design + useful software).

I believe there WILL be another great to rise this decade, it seems like Google is the new Microsoft and Facebook is IBM's grandson. I just feel it in the air, it's only a matter of time before a few rebels come together do something that shocks the world...again.
When I read proof, I assumed you meant you proved your quicksort returned an ordered permutation, but after looking at your webpage, I see you are only claiming to have proved termination.

Not sure why you posted the github instead of your webpage, as without any explanation this code is nearly unintelligible. It would be interesting to hear an explanation of your example, it really is difficult to decipher.

If you are interested in proving things about programs, you may want to check out some mechanical theorem provers such as ACL2, HOL or PVS.
Why Android Tablets Will Dominate
Does O2 have a monopoly on wireless internet access?
You probably have one of the most poisonous perspectives one can have in this type of thing, this is exactly why the world sucks. There _NEVER_ is a reason to give "harsh" feedback, go read some kevin pollak or study psychology, humans are not "dogs" giving harsh or stupid feedback wont change the broken product.

Offer your help, "Holy shit dude you have a XSS/SQLI in there, lets fix that up before you get in trouble".

You are probably one of those people that wouldn't help someone on the edge of a roof trying to commit suicide. Just sayin.
Tell that to my 12-year old nephew who memorized π to 128 decimal places in celebration of today! He'll be heart-broken to find out he memorized an inconsequential number.
More like, "10 Operating Systems With Great Screenshots".

Using the ability to run Firefox as a metric, I think only Haiku, ReactOS and OpenBSD qualify as great.
Don't quit just because you have disagreements. Some studies have shown that disagreement is actually healthy and encourages learning, as long as it isn't bitter tit for tat disagreements (as long as it's not personal).

Don't quit before you have discussed the issue with management. If the managers are good, they will be open to your point of view and try to come to a common understanding. They should explain their point well enough that you can come to that common understanding as well, whether or not there is common agreement on the issue.

If you still wholeheartedly disagree with their viewpoint and can't come to a common understanding, then it may be time to move on. If they dismiss your point of view out of hand, it's definitely time to move on.
Bing makes another small gain in search traffic shares
Can't be that hard, really? I can't say one way or another but I'd kinda expect the experts to have thought of this at some point if it was a trivial possibility.
How An iPhone, An iPad And A Mac Are Shaping My Digital Life
مشاهدة مباراة مانشستر يونايتد و مارسيليا بث مباشر 15/3/2011
مشاهدة مباراة مانشستر يونايتد و مارسيليا بث مباشر 15/3/2011
مشاهدة مباراة مانشستر يونايتد و مارسيليا بث مباشر 15/3/2011
Herschel Specter
With regard to your information box on the three nuclear facilities, if offsite power was actually available it is unclear why there would be any problems at these power plants or why plant operators would turn to the emergency diesels. With a huge earthquake and a subsequent tsunami it is unlikely that offsite power would be availbale. Please check this statement about offsite power being available.

After much more information is known and carefully analyzed it would not be surprising to get a very different understanding of this tragic event. My guess is that we will realize that this event represented a very large economic loss to Tokyo Electric and a very small health risk to the public. Such a conclusion would be consistent with analyses at Sandia National Laboratories which has examined hypothetical extreme accidents where all active safety equipment that relies on emergency electric power were assumed to have failed, causing the reactor to have a full core melt. These Sandia studies showed that even in this rare situation, very little radioactive material would be released into the environment. It appears that nuclear power plants of the type now in trouble in Japan act like large, complex passive filters trapping much of the radioactive material on site. This major conclusion is the result of natural chemical and physical processes that are immune to terrorism and huge natural initiating events, like enormous earthquakes, tsunamis, etc.
The original question is unclear. What is a 'loop' and what is a 'conditional'?

Tail-recursive calls (like the linked solution uses, though C compilers usually do not implement 'proper' tail calls) or short-cut conditionals might not look like but are still loops or conditionals.

So, why the answer is funny it does not answer the original question.
>...I'd wager most small businesses have no way of tracking the marketing impact of a Groupon (i.e. how many people come from 2nd visits or word of mouth from Grouponers)....

Aren't there ways to solve this; e.g. change the name/sku/price/etc of the item you are selling through a groupon. When it gets bought, referred to, asked for etc via the new tag-info you can relate it to the groupon?

IANA sales/retailer etc... but I can imagine that you could figure this out.

---

On another note; My friend owns a successful cup-cake shop in SF, groupon was asking them to sell what was typically a $36 box of cupcakes for $15 -- and then asking for 50% of the $15. So effectively sell the cupcakes for 25% of what they typically retail for.

That just sounds like BS. -- however, as another HNer wrote earlier in this thread- this model works really well for things such as fitness - where your product is effectively just the groupon-buyer's attendance.

I was talking with some people the other day and they said they bought some work-out boot-camp deal that was retailing for $600, for $200 and that was a good deal.

I agree that it is a good deal - but it also proves to me that the $600 price point is way to freaking high...
How is 'goto repeat' not a loop? You've just 'spelled out' a for-loop, I think. :-)
1.upto 1000 {|n| puts n} # ruby ftw
Everyone (in the world) should just be less critical and stop thinking their shit doesn't smell. But as far as hipsters are concerned, I won't ever respect someone who trades their individuality for conformity.