skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I wrote one in JavaScript a long time ago, again using a simple backtracking algorithm.

http://www.amrittuladhar.com/projects/sudokusolver/

EDIT: Just realized the "load puzzle" feature doesn't seem to work on Chrome, but it does in other browsers.
Also consider how much you'd be willing to invest overall. if they took off, you want to make sure you can maintain your stake. it's probably better to start with a more conservative position, and leave yourself room to re-up.
Ask HN: Are we too much focussed on Big Players?
This community is awesome. Firstly, because of so many great hackers, and secondly that it truly shows the actual Power of Web. I mean such a great deal of fun stuff (and useful) come out with the hobby based projects. So much knowledge is out there when people write not for optimizing and monetizing the site. (seriously, do you still read full article on techcrunch or skip just after reading the headline and clicking on the mentioned site link)

And here's my question. Are we too focussed on Big companies. Almost 75% of buzz we hear is either about MS, Google, FB or Apple either suing each other or adding an extra text button somewhere on their homepage which a tech reporter noticed. And maybe something about a startup raising $41 million in funding. Does it even matter? And isn't the web meant to be the way rest 25% portion? Which is right now dying out. just want to hear your opinion or is it that I am the only person who is giving a thought to this.
I actually have asked customers - both men and women, but the main issue is that only a small percentage ever contact me for pre-sales or support inquires (which is nice in its own way), It never hurts to read academic or professional studies with a broader scope, though.
I have f.lux in two monitors, with no problems. Windows 7 64 bits.
11 games in a year?! That sounds amazing. You do it full time?
I think it finally clicked what people mean when they say "don't build your presentation around powerpoint"- your presentation style is great. Also, clever story about the teacher/classroom getting written up but not the software.
That, and having your data as a single entity you can manipulate and collaborate from any platform is, IMHO, a killer usage.
Ok, thanks for the info. I'll check both out.
The main question is how will these companies grow?

When google went public everyone thought it was overvalued, because the perception at the time was they were top of their game, and had nowhere to go. Of course they proved everyone wrong and became so much more then they were. Google is a great example of a software company using a public offering to help expand the company.

So the the question is, which of these companies can become more than what they currently are. What does Facebook need cash to accomplish? Can Groupon push in to every continent? Can Twitter become more than a microblogging service?
You've never seen the "better" product, with superior performance and more feature check-boxes, lose to the product with the more attractive user interface? Because I feel like that's the oldest blues song I've heard sung.
> Makes a lot of sense, if you kept a transparent source control of every change made to something and constantly updated it on each change. The issue though is how everyone is used to save.

True enough, but they're also getting used to transparent saving. You don't 'save' your state in Gmail; if Firefox or your computer crashes, you didn't 'save' the current tab state. And so on. The state is just there and always up-to-date.

If you look, you can see how they are saving in the background every X seconds (such as Gmail's composition warning), but I imagine most people simply gloss over that.
Many applications have both a "close" and a "quit" option. The "close" option does what you describe - they want to get rid of the "quit" option, which is used to quit an application.

(Try opening two Firefox windows and you can easily see the difference.)
The article made an interesting proposal. Do you intend to implement it?
The problem isn't with the Web, it's with current Web standards. The concept of a secure platform for rapid application development and world-wide distribution is great, but Web standards (HTML5 + CSS3 + JavaScript) are really failing to deliver on their promise.

There are apps written in HyperCard 20 years ago that are richer than anything that has been created on the Web that I know of. With iOS, Android, WP7, developers are developing better apps faster than is possible with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. The Web needs better standards to compete; HTML, CSS, and JavaScript are a dead-end.
"A few behemoth applications, such as LibreOffice and Gimp, still keep “Quit” separate from “Close” for the original reason — to save you from having to wait for the application to relaunch after closing its only document. But that is fixable, and all other applications have become fast enough that they don’t need it any more. After all, they’re running on hardware that is hundreds of times faster than it was in 1984."

"all other applications have become fast enough that they don’t need it any more". I'm glad this person has decided what I should consider 'fast enough'. So kind of him.

As much as I didn't really like the Mac 'quit' model (as distinct from closing the last document window), most apps still take a long time - meaning I can notice it - when opening from a cold start. Perhaps when everyone has SSDs this will be less noticeable, but it's still noticeable/measurable to me.

I remember working with a guy in 1997 who was fawning over how fast the next Windows was going to be. "It'll boot up in, like, 4 seconds!". Right... however fast our hardware becomes, our apps fill up the hardware with more 'stuff'.
Improving happiness quotient with effective Customer feedback.
Based on your comment then, do you believe that the only thing anyone should be really interested in is stock?

Here is why I ask, my salary ranges between 110K and 175K depending on the project, position, how interested I am in it etc...

I am a very senior infrastructure deisgner and PM.

I am 36.

To say that someone out of college getting 100K as an expected base salary is not pirma donna material -- then you are setting them up to believe that, as an engineer, their salary expectations should grow over time to say ~350K.

However - nobody pays that.

We can argue that everyone is underpaid, sure, I feel underpaid. But the truth is that the only way I am going to get a comfortable windfall is to build / sell somethinf of my own.

The fact seems to be that the mean salary is fairly flat regardless of experience in general - but in the relatively more rare cases that people cash out, there i wild profit to be made.

This is clear in SV where it is far more common for people to make out on their stock -- but that clearly indicates at least some sort of bubble for silicon valley as compared to the rest of the country/world.
(In agreeing I'll add) I'm stingier with my time than $2000; the thing making me hesitate on the next one is that I wonder how much of Patrick's endorsement is based on him getting to sit at the cool kid's table in the evening and talk directly with the other speakers. Patrick, did you learn much from talking directly to attendees? Had you not been speaking, would you have learned as much from (say) Peldi?
Do you remember the name of the nuclear power plant control software?
Friends don't let friends get into finance
This looked like an interesting read. But then they mentioned Rhythmbox and I remembered the one thing I hate about that player: that stupid icon that stubbornly stays there in the notification area even if I don't want to listen to music any longer.

I think you could easily make the opposite point: With slower media (floppy disk, slower hard disks etc.) starting an app was costly. This is why people tried to avoid quitting an app just to select a file. Today hard disks (especially SSDs) are fast. Quitting and starting an app is rather cheap. (With the exception of those commercial apps that try hard to make you feel that they were worth the money.) I thus would like to propose to get rid of all those "Open file" dialogs. In the age of multitasking, they are an obvious case of cargo cult.
I know that organized randomized studies are what is really needed, but there is a poor-man's substitute : Simply gather the data systematically, and data-mine anonymized records.

Of course, there will be unwanted correlations in the results (Dr X always does steroids), but those can be weeded out statistically (similarly for Hospital Y kills patients). But if the patients are receiving/not-receiving steroids at anything approaching random (as claimed in the article) then good data collection, and good statistics should be able to tease out results.

Many important findings in medicine are due to meta-analysis : whereby multiple trials are aggregated, and answers gathered across the meta-trial (and the questions being answered may even be different from what the trials were originally seeking to answer).
The Heist for Rubygems
New Samsung Galaxy Tabs Announced | Technorox
The good thing about Business of Software is you get to sit at the table with the cool kids the whole time. The capacity for the event is 380 people in total. That is a small conference by any standards.
Do you mind sharing a link to your video selling app?
Anybody else at the Overnight Web Challenge at the U of M?
Impromptu HN meetup?
It's always a trade-off, but in this case the cost is minimal. If your program is limited by the speed of memmove/memcpy(), and you absolutely must copy (rather than alias, or whatever), you probably want to use a 128-bit aligned, widely unrolled SSE copy or something like that. That is, take advantage of the constraints of your precise situation. You can't do that with an API as generic as memcpy().
Fallacies of Distributed Computing has nothing to do with webapps.
RIM Buys Developer Of HTML5 Mobile App Testing Platform TinyHippos
Precisely.

It also indicates that Adobe don't run their code through valgrind, which would have picked this problem up.

Considering that flash is (a) security critical and (b) often full of security bugs, you'd think they might run valgrind over it once in a while.

Entirely Adobe's fault this one.

BTW with Firefox 4 the need for flash has virtually gone. All the popular video sites can play most of their videos using the native video support in the browser.
Of course. But I don't believe that every sale I have lost for what I believe to be non-rational reasons is inherently an emotional decision. Sometimes I just don't understand the motivations of my customers.
I had a Symbian phone for three years. For three years, my two biggest complaints were "why can't I copy and paste?" and "what the heck is that pencil button for?".
It's grim up north for UK startups, but things are changing
NetJets doesn't fit that bill, but might be the exception that proves the rule. Also, "troubled" probably isn't the right modifier; he famously invests in managers in addition to proven businesses; he isn't a turnaround guy. How many companies has BRK bought where he replaced the CEO?
As the originator of the OS and still working at a low level, it's nice to see him (A) care about the user experience all these year later and (B) cut through other people's bullshit the way a lot of us wish we could.
Cool. A little birdie tells me that Adii Rockstar, founder of Woothemes will be coming from South Africa to talk at Business of Software this year.

http://businessofsoftware.org/
I feel the same way as you do - I like to feel my system is clean and uncluttered. However, I still agree with their thoughts.

We may like quitting applications, but realistically, memory/CPU management is something that can and should be handled by the OS. It's an overhead on the user's mind that can be dealt with perfectly well by clever automation. It should keep itself clean without needing our help.

A kid growing up in a world without the 'quit' button would not feel anything is missing; we've just been conditioned by the creaky operating systems of our own youth.
What? The whole raison d'être of Windows 95 was backwards-compatibility with primordial PC junk. The entire thing was a hack from top-to-bottom, far beyond a workaround for a particular game.

Also, to quote Linus:

"And what was the point of making [an OS] again? Was it to teach everybody a lesson, or was it to give the user a nice experience?"
Good, although that's also an argument for ditching C and using a decent high level language instead.
context: http://tc2011.overnightwebsitechallenge.com/
Great. Wonderful.

So what does it mean to "win" the test?
What do any of those numbers even mean?
We killed their server.

There's a cache here:
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:KY4Mjyl...

I'm not sure if any there was any images in the post.
Do you at least attempt to show the customer the error of their ways?
I think Groupon actually deserves high valuations. They actually have a clear and simple way to turn a profit. They also have a tremendous amount of business relationships that are hard to replace.
Scoped properly, he's entirely correct. The user doesn't care about standards. The user cares that STUFF WORKS.
Standards serve a purpose - but standards are guidelines.
Adobe & Redhat had no contractual obligation I assume, so really it's up to either of them to fix the problem - and in fighthing about who did what wrong is pointless if a couple lines of code ora few hours of work are all it will take to make things work.

In this particular situation, the standards were not helping get things up and running, right?
a) Does this mean ubuntu will be patching each and every application in synaptic to follow this new paradigm?
b) Isnt an explicit action more favorable over an implicit action? ie a direct mapping between what the user is doing and what happens with system resources.
c) How do you close emacs with 25 buffers or browsers with 20 tabs in this new world?
I don't think there is a limit to any network or business. Someone will always find a way to do things that the existing do not do, or don't do well.
Sure, it could be incorporates into FB or twitter, but that will be a big shift in their business. Are they willing to do that?
Things are going more visual and I believe that's what Color.com is betting on. Visual search.
Top Clever Uses for Spare Thumb Drives
Reminds me of a quote I posted on LessWrong: http://lesswrong.com/lw/37k/rationality_quotes_december_2010...

> 'One day when I was a junior medical student, a very important Boston surgeon visited the school and delivered a great treatise on a large number of patients who had undergone successful operations for vascular reconstruction.

> At the end of the lecture, a young student at the back of the room timidly asked, “Do you have any controls?” Well, the great surgeon drew himself up to his full height, hit the desk, and said, “Do you mean did I not operate on half the patients?” The hall grew very quiet then. The voice at the back of the room very hesitantly replied, “Yes, that’s what I had in mind.” Then the visitor’s fist really came down as he thundered, “Of course not. That would have doomed half of them to their death.”

> God, it was quiet then, and one could scarcely hear the small voice ask, “Which half?”'

Dr. E. E. Peacock, Jr., quoted in _Medical World News_ (September 1, 1972), p. 45, as quoted in Tufte's 1974 book _Data Analysis for Politics and Policy_; http://www.marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2010/12...
I have a better way to help Japan
More downvoted than upvoted that's all, i voted you up.
It is oppressive that if enough people don't like what you have to say they can remove your ability to post.
Post mainly stuff that people like and you'll be able to weather some unpopularity without risking being shut up.
>> Phone and tablet operating systems, such as Android and iOS, have abolished the ideas of “quitting” or even “closing” applications altogether.

Try to Google "android task killer" to see what users need.
If you are thinking of going to Business of Software this year, the first Early Bird discount finishes midnight PST on Sunday night. Over 150 places of 380 total gone already.

http://businessofsoftware.org/
NC would conflict with the Free Redistribution criteria of the Open Source Definition[1], and BY would be the equivalent of the "obnoxious BSD advertising clause"[2].

And besides all that, I really don't think the world needs yet another GPL-incompatible licence. You effectively wall off your code from being used in the vast majority of the ecosystem and vice-versa, and you end up with a scenario like Sun's CDDL where developers have a disincentive to work on your code due to its incompatible licensing, and they have to jump through hoops to integrate it with anything else. Unless those effects are desirable to you, you're better off just picking a compatible licence[3].

[1] http://opensource.org/docs/osd

[2] http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/bsd.html

[3] http://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html
We're spiraling here. All I'm saying is, emotional appeals are very much in play in most markets, very much including old conservative white males in '50s-era financial products businesses (fear; get - me - home - in - time - to - see - the - kids; fraternity) and young thin white males at software shops (vanity).

Someone said, "sell emotional experiences and features". You said something to the effect of "eh, maybe that works in your market". Here's where I cut in: bzzt! It works in virtually all markets.

Even in buy-by-committee enterprise sales, there are emotional appeals that will give you an edge.

A fun exercise: look at the most successful, best marketed products in a variety of fields, and spot the emotional elements. Start with Github.
> Yet HTTP authentication is still the norm

No it's not.

> tubes appeared several months after YouTube

The model of YouTube was unique, yes. YouTube, however, wasn't doing anything new from a technology standpoint, however.

> and porn hasn't migrated to make good use of HTML5.

Yes, it has.

Porn, and the industry, and deployed new technologies that were eventually deployed or adapted my main steam companies. PayPal and Apple are two of my favorites.
Pretty hard. C is a minefield of undefined behavior. Integer overflow is considered undefined behavior. Which means its perfectly valid to call abort(), wipe your hard drive, then light your system on fire. Or, have the number quietly wrap around.

Oh, and its perfectly fine for me to change the behavior from one to the other, or even have a lookup table of random responses to undefined behavior. Because, like, you're not following the standard. And its so easy.
Jason Cohen: How to work out whether advice is helpful to you.
you may want to talk to all the people who take the idea quite seriously as a critique of market speed in reaching equilibrium.
"people on the internet like weird things" - story at 11.
No C blocks, alas.
There are other similar situations in other fields, as well as medicine; Robin Hanson had a post last Saturday on "Institutional Review Boards" in academia. They are involved in all human research, social as well as medical.

http://www.overcomingbias.com/2011/03/against-irbs.html
i'd like to, it's just a case of finding the time. i'm sure i'll get around to it at some point.
I don't use Microsoft tools but I used my brain for a few seconds and figured it out. This sort of argument is why everything ends up so bland and boring. It's a site for programmers. Now we're worried about if certain programmers will "get it?". I know, lets just put a plain text 500 error page up since everyone "gets it".

Bah I say, bah.
"That's it, we're quitting.

Sincerely,
The Canonical database servers"
The link-time optimizations seem useful - not only can the output code run faster, but the compilation is in parallel. Has anyone tried it? g++ is a fast compiler and it's easy to parallelize on files, but making the linker faster/parallel sounds like a big deal.
Jason Cohen's talk at Business of Software http://businessofsoftware.org/

How to filter advice from others. Brilliant advice, but don't take it as the absolute truth.
Hmm, I've worked on NPP control software for a guy, that bootstrapped the company. The software was absolutely nasty - copy/paste and what not. And the bootstrapper got the business of his first couple NPPs because of family connections ...

So I'd prefer to sit next to you, Patrick ;-)
Entrepreneurs and the Cult of Failure
The article completely ignores the "appstore" distribution channel advantage. This isn't quite the windows/mac application versus web debate of the web 1.0 days. The appstore model significantly lowers the barrier of app consumption found in the old app distribution models, and brings the total distribution "cost" to be at least on-par with web apps, with a couple significant advantages.

Appstores provide near instant consumption, virtually eliminating the distribution inefficiencies of retail purchases. They also solve the payment (and collection) problem. Apple shares the same advantage that Amazon has in online shopping, as they already have my credit card, so purchases are just easier when going through Amazon, and Apple with the AppStore.

The appstore app model also provides an ongoing consumption advantage over web apps, as direct integration with the device provides unique to maintain engagement over the long term. Notification features will keep customers returning to your app. Also, presence on the home screen is like a built-in advertisement for your app. While you can add icons for web pages, its not typically used by most consumers.

I do recognize that developing to HTML5 instead of the specific mobile platforms can save the developer a lot of time, but it doesn't matter. Its all about the customer. Whichever model provides the superior overall consumption experience will win.

Who knows what the future brings, but the argument provided by the author is void of true analysis of the dynamics at play, and uses an imperfect historical comparison as a means to justify his view.
The Art of Undercutting your Competition
I definitely agree that there are a few parts of the book which could be re-ordered so that you could always play with the exercises right away without reading ahead. Really good advice for someone about to start is to explore ahead before getting bogged down in the exercises for a particular section, like the metacircular interpreter and the compiler. I think the end of Chapter 2 also requires some destructive put/get functions which aren't introduced until Chapter 3.

I'm reading Christian Queinnec's Lisp in Small Pieces now, and I think it's a great next book after SICP. It picks up right away with a metacircular evaluator very similar to the first one in Chapter 4, but diverges from SICP to explore different semantics, like Lisp-1 vs Lisp-2, dynamic variables, exceptions and control flow with catch/throw and continuations. Later chapters address macros and compilers I think one to bytecode and another to C.

It's very well written and the translation from French is clear if a little bit flowery. Highly recommended, but watch out for the Scheme code from the author's site. I don't think it's been touched since the early to mid 90s and I had a rough time trying to get it to run in any "modern" Scheme. I'm just translating the code as I go to run in Racket, which is much easier than trying to figure out what a thousand line Makefile does, or re-write some strange non-hygienic macros. If someone has advice for running the LiSP code, please speak up!

http://pagesperso-systeme.lip6.fr/Christian.Queinnec/WWW/LiS...
Yeah, the bumble-bee thing is unfortunate. But there is something to this: we can trade away a verifiably optimal solution for something more useful, like a timely one. (Coincidentally, I submitted an article on that general theme this very morning: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2371977) If that concept entered the public mind it would be a great thing.

Unfortunately the article never touched on that, and all we get is "bees > supercomputers!!!".
How to Value Social-Networking Companies?