skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Writing software quickly is much more important than writing it well.

I would say that releasing software is more important than continually delaying for amorphous "quality" concerns, but this is backwards. You want to write quality software. I've been on several teams that valued speed over quality, and in the end we always end up with a sad, fragile bit of software that's hell to maintain or add features to.

> Of course, when you have a product that makes money you'll have to rewrite it, but by then you will have money to pay for developers...

Again, having been part of teams that operated this way: later never comes. Paying customers means people relying on your software. You can't just stop working on it to rewrite from scratch, and their bugs/issues/feature requests are far more important than refactoring (which they'll never notice.)

If you ever want good software, make it good from the start.
All the journals in the list linked are peer-reviewed. We would all appreciate if you could keep your purposely misinformed snide out of academia.
Reminds me of a cartoon with a caveman thinking, "Something's just not right - our air is clean, our water is pure, we all get plenty of exercise, everything we eat is organic and free-range, and yet nobody lives past 30." :)
Get Started Developing For Android With Eclipse, Reloaded
Programming challenges: What are good toy problems in data science
Ha! So your solution to my pointing out their errors in their pieces is that I shouldn't read it???

MA: "Hi I am Michael Arrington, I built and sold TechCrunch to AOL for $25 million dollars. We post articles online about whats going on in Tech, the Valley, etc... check it out!"

Internet: "Cool, hey Mike, I noticed that you guys seem to consistently make spelling and grammatical errors in your articles - they have good content, but is anyone checking them?"

MA: "WHAT! YOU FOOL! If you don't like the articles with all their errors then you SHOULDN'T READ IT!"

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. How about a better argument:

If you're going to call your self journalists and WRITE about technology and trends and the valley and what not AS YOUR JOB why don't YOU check your fucking work before positing it online?
> What's wrong with extinctions?

We eat a lot of animals. If you mess with this complex system in weird ways like changing the climate, it seems possible that some of the animals we eat will lose their happy place in the food chain.

That's a reason to care and a reason to try and not dramatically and immediately shift the Earth's climate.

> 1. possible benefits

Some places will get more rain. They might like that. The rest of us might get a lot less rain...that would suck. Right now, people live where it rains. If it starts raining in different places...well, that's going to cause trouble.

(The rain is an example. There are obviously other examples.)

> 2. possible benefits and costs of so called solutions. For example introducing electric cars will increase demand for batteries and electricity. That means increased demand for coal, gas or nuclear power. What will be the effects of these?

Long term, this is far far better. Even if these electric cars are powered by dirty coal. The amount of electricity used to power an electric car pollutes far, far less than a gas car per miles driven.

But ideally we'd move towards wind, solar, nuclear, etc to make these options even better.

If you are scared or upset at the future using solar energy and you don't know what the effects are, will you at least agree that it's likely a much better move than burning things?

Your skepticism could be healthy, but I think you are too skeptical and that is damaging your ability to rationally think about our fragile Earth.
H.M. Government has a specific set of standards that apply to websites based on the impact of information assets contained on them (as well as other bits and pieces that I don't need to go into). The weird thing is, this site is for the Welsh Assembly which, as a devolved government has to meet the standards but is seen in certain respects as a 'foreign government' within the civil service (our H.M. Government sector). Make no mistake, there are some things that this site will have to comply with, but the implied and genuinely air-quoted 'measures' put forward would add nothing to any of this.

A moderately large amount of this information is available on the Internet, start at http://www.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/resource-library/security-po... if you want a look. A brief look through the sitemap suggests they are holding or processing Personally Identifiable Information (PII) which puts them under the Data Protection Act. Again, the presence of the javascript doesn't imply actual SQL injection, but it definitely doesn't imply a measure against it.

In this instance, the compliance requirements are fairly low. I guess the exam question is, can they pass the bar, or do they limbo under it?
I thought this could be a fun 'challenge'...

I'm inclined to believe that this is potentially ciphered in English, due to, what look to be stiking similarities between the alphabetic character frequencies of the notes:

http://d122.com/murdermystery/freq.png

and the frequencies of characters in English:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:English_letter_frequency_(...

If anyone else wants to have a play here is my (rough) transcripts and an ODS with some frequencies:

http://d122.com/murdermystery/1.txt

http://d122.com/murdermystery/2.txt

http://d122.com/murdermystery/freq.ods

I'll update here if I find anything interesting. Lots of patterns repeated in this text!
I've never used MySQL (and God willing I'll never have to) but in SQL Server you can limit rows by setting @@ROWCOUNT before your SELECT statement. SQL Server also allows CASE in your ORDER BY clause that can do pretty much anything you could want.

I've never had a situation where the client enters the column names to return in the UI. I mean the users should not have to know the column names in your database so surely you'll do that some other way instead? It's pretty rare (and probably wrong) to have hundreds of columns being returned, so we'd just return them all and show/hide the relevant ones on the application-side.

Same for table names. Why would you need to have a parameterized table name? This has never come up in all my years of SQL Server. Sounds like bad DB design or something exotic that I've never had to do. I mean how would you index queries like that anyway?

For your 'Advanced Search' I'd probably use a temp table or table variable and do the query in multiple steps using 'IF' switches depending on the flags or setting passed to it.
Daring Fireball's Traffic Stats Revealed
i doubt future-bill-gates would have the patience to apply and wait for big company internships. he would probably be spending that time hacking, hustling, and creating his own software business.
Data citizens « Follow the Data
What Tell Friends Service You Use
I think , tell your friends is great to get social publicity. I wonder what service your use and how you use it effectively in your website.

I have added mundane one here , it doesn't seem to quite working the way I expected. Site : <a href="http://mathalon.in/">Mathalon</a>
Spotify desktop app loaded viruses onto users PCs via advertising
a link to the distribution:

http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/exo/distrib.html
Inserting/disabling/swapping intermediate processing steps in between is immensely easier with pipes, and you don't have to take care of balanced parentheses.
I'm not a Googler, but I know many and yes, Google pays well, they work on very very interesting problems. Ex-Googler does have a ring to it when you apply for jobs. There are awesome benefits like amazing facilities and lunch everyday, on-site massages, fitness centers, etc. The environment is that everyone around you is incredibly intelligent so just being there is intellectually stimulating and feels like you're a student. Though working at Google is definitely not what it used to be, it certainly has its perks.
Poor public emergency care and unsanitary conditions would contribute to this very strongly. I bet they're mostly healthy until they get ill, or have an accident.
Granted I'm not a psychologist but am extremely familiar with the literature/research on AS, and everything I can recall promotes a severe disability in recognizing, interacting, and making connections with/between individuals, groups and environments--which is how I would define 'streetsmarts.'

But you're absolutely right in saying that it isn't black and white. There are also plenty of misdiagnosed cases; and the research and criteria continually evolve.
Founders Of MP3.com, mSpot On Amazon’s Music Locker: All Eyes On The Labels
All of those scenarios can be handled in such a way that you're only concatenating known strings rather than user input - e.g.

stmt = "SELECT col1 FROM table ORDER BY col2 " + (isDescendingSort ? "DESC" : "ASC")

As long as all your user input has been filtered through type checking, enumerations, etc. (aside from parameters), is that not a safe approach?
Design essentials for developers
Not as clear and simple as they could be but better than nothing.
In a few fields the bootstrapping has taken place by having the entire editorial board of a top journal leave en masse to start a new one, which in a few cases then quickly takes over. The most successful case I know of is the Machine Learning board leaving to set up Journal of Machine Learning Research, which is now considered top-tier: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Journal_of_Machine_Learning_Res...
Mentally making a note of that. I was wondering what kind of side effects the use of | would end up having, if any.
Windows Phone 7 to eclipse iPhone in 2015 - IDC forecast
(e^(i * pi)) + 1
I doubt it. The next Bill Gates isn't hoping to get noticed by some company. He's out making something and/or hustling for deals like the actual Bill Gates did. The next Bill Gates is most definitely NOT languishing unnoticed in some intern pool waiting to be discovered like some Hollywood wannabe starlet.
This was exactly my experience. Everything from the two technical interviews with the addition of a third to the technical questions with queries about bugs in the code. I think 2->3 conversion is exactly what you said. The first two interviewers split on their opinion of you, so you get scheduled a tie-breaker interview. Unfortunately for me, the tie-breaker interview was my worst, partly due to me and partly due to non-existant feedback for 45 minutes on the part of the interviewer.

But, I believe there is a method to the madness. They have so many qualified applicants that they would rather err on the side of caution. They would rather reduce the false-positives even if the number of false-negatives grows. They can afford this luxury. They want the best and they can afford rejecting good candidates.

My favorite way of thinking about this was from Steve Yegge's blog post about the interview process :
"Because of the inherently flawed nature of the interviewing process, it's highly likely that someone on the loop will be unimpressed with you, even if you are Alan Turing. Especially if you're Alan Turing, in fact, since it means you obviously don't know C++"
I've been overweight my entire life, and honestly, I blame the Surgeon General in the 1980s for telling my mom that feeding me low fat foods (which end up being high carb foods) will make me skinny.

Everyone believed this cargo cult "science" and it has had a devastating impact for hundreds of millions of people.
Some of his answers cover this concern (http://www.reddit.com/user/moot):

"We're using it during the beta period to handle invites and authenticate users (make sure they're real people)."

"As we've said before, Facebook Connect on Canvas is temporary. We're only planning to use it for the private beta period, and hope to see you on the site once we're out of beta. Thanks for bearing with us!"
Ask HN: Which business idea do you go with?
This is an intentionally open-ended question to spark a conversation.

I see lots of articles discussing what to do if you "can't think of a good idea". I rarely see mention of the opposite problem: The person with more ideas than (s)he knows what to do with. I know that lots of these people exist. (I think I'm one of them!)

How do you compare an idea you expect to be more profitable against one that't you expect to be more fun/personally fulfilling? I remember felixchan posting his story about selling his (booming) badge printing business to focus on an app he was passionate about. Many people here strongly disagreed with that decision.

Then again, maybe that's jumping too far ahead: Should you test multiple ideas to see what market traction they have? Maybe go so far as to produce several minimum viable products in parallel? How far can you go down this path without stretching yourself too thin?
This is one reason I find Michael Pollan's work so interesting, like "Unhappy Meals": http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/28/magazine/28nutritionism.t.... (advice: "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.") and In Defense of Food: http://www.amazon.com/Defense-Food-Eaters-Manifesto/dp/01431... .

His basic point is that "food science" doesn't know very much, is heavily politicized, and that we don't really know on a deep level how food, food-like substances, supplements, and so forth work. The war on "fat," as you note, doesn't make much sense because it counts the "fat" from a Big Mac and the "fat" from almonds the same way, which makes little sense. It counts the "sugar" from strawberries and Pepsi the same way. This is, to put it lightly, stupid, and it makes people stupid, since most people hear marketing slogans or public service announcements or whatever and follow those.
That's what my startup is doing, but also incorporating social and kitchen data.
Daring Fireball's Impressive Traffic Stats
You cannot take life expectancy at birth as a model for how healthy adults are. That statistic is massively distorted by infant mortality (which is an astounding 13.3% for Afghanistan).
1. So the business already does mid to high 6 figures. But is there scope to increase it to a 50 million or even a 500 million $ company? Without knowing more about the industry, we can't answer that. But you need to find that out.

2. The 2 problems you are facing right now is: the code need major revamping. A dedicated sales person is needed.

Because of your background, you seem to be putting emphasis on fixing the code first. Forget that. Make sales the priority. Join as a salesman and try drumming up new sales for the next 3 months. Without putting effort in revamping the code. This will show you:

i. If the demand is actually there in the market

ii. What features are essential and what are not

iii. And if you can drum up new sales, this will give you the money that can be used to fix the code.

3. One client is invoiced about half a million $ a year. This client is an awesome company to bring on board as a partner. Get this client to fund future expansions. Either by pre-paying you for getting discount in price for the next year or 3. Or by giving you a loan. Or by taking an equity stake in the company itself.
Is scraping data from the stores' site legal? Even if it is, is it a viable approach?

Edit:
Is there a way you could work with the stores to get the deals directly?
Yea, exactly. There are a ton of things like that - combined with cheap sensors / cameras + image processing / machine learning you could do tons of stuff:

- StreetView -> DroneView (w/ on demand updates)
- News / Traffic / accident remote reporting
- Inspection of infrastructure
- Small Package Currier Service

PS: Where my Pittsburgh Hackas At?
Another great JS security (view source)
just great. ;)
I hate little programming puzzles that you have code by hand or little word problems, or trick questions that you have to think "out of the box".

In many years of programming I don't remember having to write a binary search in C, by hand, in a text document, without being able to compile and test. Or having to dictate a Python program over the phone to someone.

I certainly do not remember ever having to solve stuff like:"One train leaves Los Angeles at 15mph heading for New York. Another train leaves from New York at 20mph heading for Los Angeles on the same track. If a bird, flying at 25mph, leaves from Los Angeles at the same time as the train and flies back and forth between the two trains until they collide, how far will the bird have traveled?" NEVER.

I had to implement & modify algorithms from scientific papers, I had to work with complicated lockless versions of data structures, but I probably couldn't write the binary tree search in C over the phone. If that's that Google uses to hire then I will never work at Google.

EDIT: Alright, got a angry and used the 'fuck' a little too much.
Google did not delay the release of Honeycomb or any other product. They delayed publishing the source code. How is this remotely the same thing? And they were pilloried in the blogosphere and by Apple pundits for not being "open." Seems like obvious link bait by Dalrymple.
Why not create landing pages (with a good description) for all of your ideas? Then spend a small amount of money on adwords and see how many people respond/sign up? That will tell you which of your ideas have demand in the market.
Did you wonder why they have their address in that page as an image?

Apparently it is also near an air force base http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1533674
"Operating systems typically interpret instructions written in high-level programming languages and oversee their execution on a device’s hardware."

What is that supposed to mean?
Sorry, I just don't do any apps that touch the internet...just some programming for fun on the side.

The only thing that I've written that could be applied to this is our POS system at the restaurant I work at as a dishwasher and cleaner for. It's in Django though, and the Django project takes care of most issues with that...not that they're really priority #1 security-wise...
The Paleo diet is interesting but is not the be all and end all.

Check out http://wholehealthsource.blogspot.com/ , http://www.marksdailyapple.com/ and http://www.westonaprice.org/ for more viewpoints.

The general consensus though is to avoid processed foods and stick to whole foods. A big one is to eat animal fat instead of industrially produced vegetable and seed oils.

Also, limit carbohydrate intake (ideally eating only fruit and vegetables).
Well said. I have found this to be true in my own life. My entire business education in college was a rehash of things I had already learned working on a pre-college startup.

Time is one thing in life you can't get back. From that perspective choosing to go the 'safe' route is as much a risk as taking a risk itself.
Many people are wondering the same thing: because most of the work is done by unpaid third party, the actual cost structure doesn't seem to match their demands. From what I understand, although the publisher is an academic non-profit, they handle the conference and outsource the publishing operation to one of a handful of a for-profit operator, most of whom are Dutch, iirc (Elsevier, Reuters).
On a related note - as a consultant, freelancer other provider of service it's important to know when firing your customer is the right thing to do.

It's not something that should be taken lightly and should always be done with kid cloves but if you have a client or customer that is not the right fit, taking advantage or abusive to your staff then it's time to let them go.

Of course usually the answer to your clients and customers should be "YES"
A Simple Filter to Weed Out Non-technical Co-founders
I'd love to see you go deeper into devops. How are changes pushed? How often do you push changes? How are changes tested? How do you performance test at scale? How do you recover if something goes wrong?
Maybe he was selling pirated copies of Windows and Adobe in the street?
A couple of open tabs on moderately complex web pages (no web apps though) runs it at around 75 MB on my phone. Seems perfectly snappy on the Atrix, but I don't know about older devices.
What are the license terms?
If anyone was like me and clicked back after they read the short quotes be sure to click through to here: http://www.zeit.de/datenschutz/malte-spitz-data-retention

Quite cool, even though it is indeed scary.
TL;DR - A German man got all the data his cell company had collected on him, correlated it to his other public data on the web (Twitter, etc) and made an online, animated map of his life. Illustrates how much can be known about someone from these two sources and argues for restricting what carriers collect and what governments can get from them.
See this http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1533674
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euler%27s_identity
Nice, fun story. Might have to try some of those strategies :)
That depends. Do agricultural subsidies count as control?
You can teach Math for high school students,Marketing,build static websites for companies
You have taken the high ground sir. Therefore, I surrender. :)
It's not just any carbohydrate, it's fructose, if you believe Dr. Robert M. Lustig: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBnniua6-oM

That explains why mediterranean and asian diets, which are high on carbs but low on sugar (or artificial fructose), don't cause nearly as much obesity.
http://imgur.com/RcMCl
Start-ups hindered by ridiculous software patents
The point is not that working for someone else is an entrepreneurial activity, but that experience is a prerequisite to successful entrepreneurship. School doesn't confer that experience, except to the extent that students often have a lot of spare time and access to resources. Self-motivated students who take advantage of that can do that well, but not everyone is a Gates or Zuckerberg who can afford to ignore the curriculum in favor of their spare-time projects. For most, working for someone else - which includes free-lancing or working for friends' startups - is by far the best way to learn what's truly in demand, what's truly new, what's truly possible.
triviatise hits most of the topics already. But I have some comments to add.

1) Congratulations! You've got a great opportunity here.

2) There's nothing wrong with not using the cool-kids tools. The cool kids get lots of attention, but they might not get lots of profit. Remember, even twitter's bottom line is negative. Pay off the technical debt over time, don't go gung-ho all at once.

I would seriously work on your sales strategy. Get some more sales done and diversify in addition to that one 80% client.

3/4) I wouldn't do this. Target some low-hanging fruit to attack and bootstrap growth.

Good luck!
One place to start:
http://www.antlr.org/wiki/display/ANTLR3/The+difference+betw...
This is capitalism 101.

Funny thing is, my parents (who are both near-retirement service providers in their own professions) won't adopt such a model in either direction (raising their rates or decreasing their rates based on workload).

They also just recently chastised my brother (who is in his mid-20s) for doing an arbitrage play where he could get a plentiful supply of iPad 2's on discount and sell them above market rate on eBay.

Threads like this remind me that I wasn't bought up in a capitalist family.
Yeah, that's definitely not how I would have explained it. I would say that a traditional OS provides high-level abstractions (think of system calls like open() or fork() — they're very complex compared to the underlying hardware) while the exokernel provides very low-level primitives like memory pages, disk blocks, CPU time, etc.

Throughout history, people have discovered that their OS doesn't provide the right abstractions to allow some apps to take advantage of the hardware's performance potential. The traditional solution was to add features to the OS (Web server not fast enough? sendfile() to the rescue!), but the exokernel proposes the radical alternative of providing simpler, maximally flexible abstractions and letting apps (or libOSes) implement whatever behavior they want.
Greplin (YC W10) open sources Tornado and Twisted utilities