skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Pairings involve matching everybody.
There are indeed O(n^2) (well n*(n-1)/2) ways of constructing the first match. But then the other n-2 people still need to be paired up.

The exact number is n!/((n/2)!(2^(n/2))). There are n! ways to order them. Pair each with his neighbor. The order of the pairs doesn't matter (divide by (n/2)!). The order within each pair doesn't matter (divide by 2^(n/2)).

Using Stirling's approximation, the log of this is about n log n - (n/2) log (n/2) - (n/2) log 2 = (n/2) log n. The exponential is then n^(n/2). 40^20 is rather large at 109 nonillion. Because we approximated the log, this significantly off. The right answer is 319 sextillion.
I know how you feel. I grew up in a house with 4 older sisters. The way their moods would change was unexplainable to 10 year old me. Probably why I only date women post-menopause now...lol
What do you think, 2.5/10? I didn't put a lot of effort into it.
Car-B-Gone: Mitch Altman’s Newest Universal Remote
This might be a "knows enough to be dangerous" type of situation. An expert in one field seems like an idiot to an expert in a similar, but different, field.

For instance I swore up and down that my Time Warner cable modem had blown up, and repeatedly called demanding for a replacement. I was a damned computer expert, and I knew the thing bloody well wasn't working.

So the tech comes, and we turn on the lights, and the thing works. It was plugged into a socket that was switched with the lights.

The tech support people are trained for "idiots" and they are not trained for computer experts that have varying opinions that may well be correct. Also, they aren't trained in understanding, or taking reports on, subtle cross-platform browser bugs.

I've been impressed with tech support that connects me with an expert who has both my experience and accent, but at some point I think someone in this mess would've just tried a different browser. It isn't like that was above the skill level of anyone involved.
Redwood Shores, CA (SF Bay Area) - Engineers and more

EA2D is hiring! We're a new, autonomous studio within EA building cross-platform social games for gamers. We've just launched our first game, Dragon Age Legends:

http://apps.facebook.com/dragonagelegends/

We need help building:

* New features for Dragon Age Legends (big ones: real-time, mobile, etc.)

* New games for big-name IP (we have access to the full EA library)

* An epic social gaming platform (for both internal and external teams)

We're small (30 people) and scrappy. And we're growing fast: 0-200 servers in the past 6 months. Tech stack is primarily AS3/Java backed by MongoDB, but we also use Python, JavaScript, and Ruby. We have a highly automated infrastructure running on AWS (EC2 w/ELBs and ASGs, EMR, SQS, etc., plus more than a few super-secret/unreleased Amazon features). Buzzword potpourri includes Chef, node.js, Google App Engine, Hive, Graphite, Tomcat, GitHub, Pingdom, Loggly, PagerDuty, and continuous deployment. <3 DevOps.

We need platform, game, systems, and mobile engineers. We need data people and a Director of Technology. We need producers, marketing, and designers. Some of our job listings are posted here: http://www.ea2d.com/jobs/, but we have positions we haven't even finished writing descriptions for.

If you're an A player, drop me a line: mikeb@ea2d.com
It's just a day to be lighthearted. chill out, it will be over in a few hours!
HTC Flyer - very impressive tablet
Off topic: but I have been unable to use my Gmail accounts for the last two days because Thunderbird warns:

You're about to override how Thunderbird identifies this site.
Legitimate banks, stores and other public sites will not ask you to do this

..
Certificate belongs to a different site, which could be ID theft

etc, etc.

Has Google changed anything? what could trigger this? I can't find anything in .. Google.
I'm a big fan of FlipBoard, but I've been launching Pulse again lately. It has made improvements, and handles RSS better. But I still prefer FlipBoard.
flagged... very funny... creative, etc.. and is overall an entertaining site, but not hn material in my opinion! even if this post is rather meta!
Communities age, and institutions which appeal to members of a certain age tend to "wander away" when in fact the actual wandering is done by the members of the community as they age. Its a weird thing to watch.

My feeling is that people who used to hang out on /b now hang out on /. and in another few years will start hanging out here. (or some other site that targets that particular group in time)
Or drop the gender altogether: "A good CEO knows their values." Grammar cops hate the use of the collective pronoun where a singular would be more correct, but I see it used often enough that it's slowly working it's way into the English language.

In Ben's case, he's making a political statement, so the use of "her" is appropriate in that instance though.
"If I'm here and you're here, doesn't that make it our time?"
Love the guy with the tie that does the hand gestures. Ha!
The 37signals one really got me:

http://37signals.com/svn/posts/2838-were-relocating-everyone...

I was annoyed at them for blasting remote work, until I started reading through the article and realized it was a joke.
James Cameron champions faster film projection rates (from 24 to 60 fps)
Okay. The minimal, no sarcasm response is this: Ripping words out of a conversation and trying to formally apply them against your understanding of economics is a bad idea. The word "enough" carries connotations that economics can't fully model. Your argument leads directly to the conclusion that every black share-cropper's job in the 19th century was "good enough" because if it weren't their best option, they'd have done something else.

Here's a more detailed response:

Switching costs matter greatly because it's possible that someone may feel that job B doesn't pay enough to compensate them for the unpleasantness involved, but job B is what they put 6 years of schooling into and they don't have the skills or qualifications for the more desirable job A.

Knowledge of how events will unfold, prescience, would be guarantee that one won't end up in job B after years of mistaken belief of being on track A. Prudence is some protection, but some people will still be unlucky.

Omniscience is the only absolute safeguard against making an unwise purchase. Many, many people buy defective goods every day. In the long term, those who do honest business should have an advantage, but the dishonest aren't all weeded out. In addition, it's possible to pursue an item (or a job) that isn't objectively flawed, but simply has no value to oneself. Without full self-knowledge, this can't be avoided completely. A person might believe a job that they are doing is a good deal when in fact, it is not. Radium jewelry painting was an extreme example.

And the gigantic elephant in the room that you were clearly trying to avoid was social good. Just because someone is willing to provide something for X amount of money doesn't mean that X amount of money is all it's worth to society. A cursory reading of economics would show that education is one such good. The return on an educated populace is so great that it's worth subsidizing. And that's exactly what this discussion is about. In the US, the pay for educators is low for the amount of schooling required, and the educators themselves are usually not drawn from the strongest of their classes. In many other countries, teaching is a highly competitive, highly paid, high prestige position.

FYI I have worked in education, both in the US and in east Asia. The difference is vast.
+1, or was that an April fool's joke as well?
I just tried this with Perl, and it looks great (the fold-column's a bit bright, but I don't have that on by default). Have you thought about uploading it to vim.org?
I don't think your solution is working very well :)
Launching Your Startup at a Conference; Lessons Learned by Yunoo
Jobs Jobs Jobs
I see, they're talking about the number of configurations of pairs, not the number of unique pairs themselves.
Are you tired of April Fools fake press releases? Yes http://t.co/paYbbkH No http://t.co/2x79Hgp Those are fake? http://t.co/w3aJVmf
I bet TextMate 3 will be published before 2
I think they are all linked in the corresponding project, event or community sites.

You can also search (this is one I never did before):

http://www.google.com/search?q=microsoft+site%3Ablip.tv

which led me to:

http://blip.tv/file/399103 and to its channel.

BTW, there is an http://oscon.blip.tv that promises to consume even more of my free time.
I guess it's something to complain about. It might be best for some to remember: Hacker News is not work. Reading is a supplement to work. If the Jokes bug you, maybe you can take the day off and get something done.

Furthermore, if it was work, if you can't take 1 day away from it to have a little fun, you are going to going to beat the rest of us into a pine box.

Life isn't about what you get - it's about enjoying what you get.
No, but thanks very much for reminding me. Usually I discover it's April fool's day by feeling, well, a bit like a fool.
Which I thought really cool, then I was disappointed when I read that Andreessen is an ex-boyfriend of Bianchini's. I can't help but feel that taints the coolness of it and reinforces a negative stereotype.
Please email me (my username at chromium.org) with the output of `openssl s_client -tls1 -showcerts -connect imap.googlemail.com:993` as well as any proxy settings, maybe a packet trace etc.
Hi,

This sounds really interesting to me, and I am in Vancouver too. Would you consider putting your email address in your profile? I have a quick question for you.
You mean "motion".
Live time 3D Aerial Mapping using a quadcopter and Kinect
That's probably the first April fools' joke that got a laugh out of me today :)
Canadian Tech Start-ups Head to Silicon Valley
Facebook Changes Mobile Website Interface,One Website For All Device
I think that would be more realistic but it might also lose some of that "pow" effect when you get sliced if you saw a dribble of blood pool up then slowly expand outward. Does the iPad have a vibrate function? If it does, I think it would add to it if it vibrated when it hit your finger.
You can use this to make your friends think you are playing the Facebook version of Angry Birds:

http://apps.facebook.com/afdjokeangrybirdz/
The Career Pivot: How to Break into a New Career or Industry
Ben used to have a saying when discussing roles and responsibilities in a company, it went like the following:

"Nobody is more important than any other person, but some people are more important to the business. To your children, you are the most important person in the world, and I don't matter whatsoever to them."

He used it in the context of making it clear that some people would need to carry greater responsibilities, and would be held to a higher standard, and be remunerated differently - but everyone in the company deserved a high level of respect.

And, let's be clear - Ben is _also_ the person who suggests that it's _easier_ to teach a founder to be a CEO, then to take an outsider and have them successfully run a business. It would suggest that he believes that the true challenge is finding great Founders, not turning them into CEOs.
wait, is this a joke?
One of the few apps that really makes use of multi-touch.
Unfortunately in the process of loading the pictures came up in color before the JS managed to filter them to greyscale :(.
This kind of joke I can stand -- it's ridiculous, but they actually did it.
Timber: A library for realtime pitch detection in web apps
Life isn't about what you get - it's about enjoying what you get.

This is a superb axiom to live by.
Does the font on the website look extremely blurry for anyone else...?
Nice.

It would have been more convincing as a url, like this: http://news.ycombinator.com/aprilfools
Technically, SS/Medicare/Medicaid are raised and funded on their own taxes, separate from the discretionary budget. (You can see "income tax", "FICA" and "medicare/medicaid" on your tax bill).

When people talk about the deficit, they're typically talking about the operating budget deficit, which is only funded from income tax and runs on a separate budget from the SS and medicare/medicaid administrations. So it doesn't really make sense to advocate cutting entitlements to address the deficit, they have problems too but they're separate problems.
I think the commenter is simply clarifying that the file has been a universal way to represent almost every resource in Unix since its inception.
I have a request: Enable downvoting on April 1st.
If you have multiple streams, you can give lower latency or better durability to critical or low-volume messages.
Are you sure? The timestamp on the article is "March 31, 2011 | 2:36 pm" which, unless they botched timezones, is pretty absurdly early to post an april first joke.

Also, the content is not at all surprising...
Hacker erases entire season's worth of "Zodiac Island"
Can you please stop commenting on whether to use posts as meta-moderation? The community decided the post was worth the number one spot.
Barbados. Nice.
9 Reasons Why you Should not Buy an iPhone 5 [Humor][Infographic]
A favourite quote of mine by Bertrand Russell:

It seems to them vulgar to enjoy food because you are hungry or to enjoy life because if offers a variety of interesting spectacles and surprising experiences. From the height of their disillusionment they look down upon those whom they despise as simple souls. For my part I have no sympathy with this outlook.

All disenchantment is to me a malady, which it is true, certain circumstances may render inevitable, but which none the less, when it occurs, is to be cured as soon as possible, not to be regarded as a higher form of wisdom.
So it's basically arguing that server-side code benefits from logging to stdout rather than a named file? Interesting idea if you aren't using stdout for something else, but it doesn't seem particularly radical since you can just use cat.

A few months ago I published a suite of scripts that allow me to run complex queries using shell pipes. They work by communicating in YAML. The first stage, cat_logs, simply parses logs from a file and emits yaml for each line. cat_logs understands that log files are split across multiple files, and that they may be gzipped.

http://akkartik.name/blog/2010-09-25-05-29-01-soc
I find the message and the service don't match. I don't see what life being short has to do with a picture of a yacht or a women drinking wine, or even what your service has to do with living luxuriously.

While I think your service is useful in many ways, but it took me awhile to figure out what your service actually is.. you're wasting the space above the fold on pictures that aren't even relevant. You should focus the merits of your service. To me it seems more like a joke or a scam. Just my opinion.
"Logs are a stream, and it behoves[sic] everyone to treat them as such. Your programs should log to stdout and/or stderr and omit any attempt to handle log paths, log rotation, or sending logs over the syslog protocol."

If you were being pedantic one might say that logs are a repository for temporally tagged event notifications that have occurred in the past. You can store these temporally tagged event streams in files, in a memory cache, in an email inbox, or a round robin database (RRD).

Not particularly profound, but useful. Logs from disparate processes which share a common time basis however are the systems analyst's go to tool for trying to untangle secondary and tertiary properties of a loosely coupled system.
Factorization is indeed in NP. It might also be in P. I should've said "based on the idea that" instead of "the fact that."

"Hello World" is NP. It's just not useful to talk about that fact.
Ask HN: Keeping an Eye on the Other Guys
With so much innovation happening around the clock, keeping up with new developments seems like an impossibly uphill task. How do you stay on top of identifying and following the progress of your competition? Especially without spending all of your time doing research rather than working on your own innovations? How much should you care - even if you think your product is the most unique and original thing going on?
> no lame submissions

Why not? What's so bad about them?

A submission is are only annoying if it is upvoted often enough, but then, there are obviously enough people out there who don't find it "lame".

So saying "don't post lame submissions" is essentially the same as saying "don't post submissions which I personally don't like".
Vancouver, BC - Front End Web Developer

Fulltime and Interns/Co-ops

http://silkstart.com

SilkStart is a web-based membership management and social network software product for organizations. We're looking for front end developers with experience in html/css/jquery. The product is built using pylons and mongodb so python experience is a plus.

jobs@silkstart.com
I don't know if there are too many problems that are in P but only "theoretically".

Actually there is a known class of problems that are in P, but only "theoretically"! But for very different reasons than what you are thining of.

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robertson%E2%80%93Seymour_theor... for a theorem that implies that certain types of graphs are characterized by a finite set of forbidden graphs that cannot be embedded in any form. (I'm being vague about "in any form" here, what I mean is that you can't do things like subdivide an edge and put a point in the middle then say, "Here! I changed it." More formally the forbidden subgraph can't be a minor of the main graph. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minor_%28graph_theory%29 for an explanation of what a minor is.) For instance planar graphs cannot contain in any form 5 points that all connect to each other, nor two collections of 3 points that all connect to each other. (These are known as K5 and K3,3.) Any graph that does not contain these anywhere is planar.

It turns out a finite forbidden set of minors can always be tested in polynomial time. Therefore an class of graphs that meets the conditions for the Robertson-Seymour theorem has a polynomial time test.

Here is the catch. For many classes of graph we can prove that this polynomial time test exists. But we don't actually know what it is. Finding it requires enumerating the finite set of forbidden minors. But we have no way to figure out what they are. For graphs that can be embedded in the plane we know that there are just two. The projective plane turns out to have 138. As of 2004 I know that were nearly 240,000 known for the torus, and this list was not believed to be complete. According to http://www.cs.uvic.ca/~ruskey/Theses/WoodcockMScThesis.pdf there were theoretical algorithms that were O(n) and O(n^3), but nobody had ever implemented them and it was suspected that they would be too slow to use in practice. Moving on, consider the set of graphs that can be embedded in 3D without any knots. To the best of my knowledge nobody even has an exponential algorithm for that - yet we know that the problem must be in P.

So there you are. A whole family of problems, all of whom are known theoretically to have solutions in P, but for most of them we have no way to find said solutions, and even if we did find them they would likely be too slow to use in practice.
Yes, but avoiding the Techcrunch blogspam is not a bad thing.
I vote for using the "Collect HN: April Fools" thread here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2394349

Best suggestion I've seen so far. Then I don't have to open dozens of tabs, or look for them :)
I've moved about a dozen domains away from GoDaddy over the last year. The time savings (less spam, cleaner interface) well exceeded the effort involved.
It's an April Fools joke in case anyone didn't get the Color reference.
Hate to pick nits, but you mean living animals. Plants are alive too.
It is? My first thought was actually "brilliant!" I can see how this implementation is a bit of a joke, but there is a bigger issue here. There's still a disconnect between the digital and physical world. I think any attempt to merge the two a little more is a win.
This reminds me of a great April Fools prank to play on my fellow Mac users:

System Preferences > Universal Access > Seeing > Display: use grayscale

It's more subtle than plain inverted colours, and the kind of thing that might make someone think their monitor is dying.
Um. Wow. If this isn't April Fool's...
Low cost of living really gives you freedom and flexibility, I agree. Once you have that mortgage and family you cannot be so picky anymore... I guess sooner or later most will have family and will be in this situation. But you can influence how extreme it will be by saving, mindful spending etc.
Yea, and the recent TechCrunch 'end fund' joke was actually quite depressing. For starving startups who have great ideas and are trying to execute them with little or no money...it was actually a pretty jerk move on their part.
HootSuite Pivots, Now Happy Owls
ok point well taken....high level concept was to send a message that Life is short so use the best calling card. We tried to keep that consistent throughout with the videos and messages on all other pages and so on.
whats the reason for the migration from MySql to mongo ?
Menlo Park, CA - Generalist Ruby Engineer http://www.nearbuysystems.com/company/rubyengineer

Menlo Park, CA - C++/CUDA Engineer http://www.nearbuysystems.com/company/cengineer

Nearbuy Systems is a year-old startup working on indoor location-based services. We've got two positions -- a C++/CUDA engineer to work on the "location" part and a ruby engineer for the "services" side.

Our location system fuses together multiple sensor feeds to get 1m accuracy indoors. It's a highly parallel system with agressive performance requirements and a lot of fun problems. "Services" encompasses a Rails frontend, a large distributed backend, data collection and reporting. If you like ruby but aren't 100% frontend focused you'll fit right in.

We're a small engineering team (currently three people, growing to six). We practice agile development, love playing with new technologies and know how to have a good time. Experience with something unusual and unrelated to the requirements is a big plus.
Netflix is hiring. Mostly in Los Gatos, but there are jobs elsewhere as well. See http://www.netflix.com/Jobs?id=7563 for a full list of jobs. (They reached out to me for http://www.netflix.com/Jobs?id=7563&jvi=o4dyVfwu which I could not consider for geographic reasons.)
My definition of "effectively" in this context is the above quote "with very few mistakes or bad behaviors." No one would claim any 49,000 person company is run under that definition, so I don't know why you mention it.

As for how it feels to the CEO I don't think you're right. The company I had experience with was run as a triumvirate with one slightly more powerful member. All three knew everything that was going on and had a hand in it, but two of them were experts in different areas and one was a generalist and overall vision-setter.

The CEO spent probably 80% of his time working on real projects with individuals and teams and 20% coordinating with his junior triumvirs.

He certainly was not was reduced to sitting in his office funneling orders through two people all day.
How to place Facebook Like button on physical object
Mashup lets you see recommendations from Facebook for physical objects
Higher than that; it's wonderfully easy to fall for. Though maybe because I was just hoping such a thing would actually exist, temporarily, for major submission-causing events.
It's not just about monitor placement though. Keyboard height, at least for me, is more important for a comfortable computing environment that monitor height.

Just checking now, I've got about 18-inches difference between my seated keyboard height and my standing keyboard height.
Obviously, the answer is no.
Ben Horowitz on perseverance
It's just a bit of fun. Lighten up a bit.
Well done, sir.

Again, I agree - I didn't think this belonged on HN.
Why I support companies like AppSumo and Why should you too
Half a star for trying.