skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A (relatively) free market for phones does exist globally, and Apple's first mover advantage (and the profits and marketshare it brings) is being rapidly diminished in a fairly textbook case of free market competition. I believe Tim Cook has gone on record about these price pressures.

But that wasn't my point.

My point was that people within the U.S. bubble seem to recognize on some level that they've got a weird market dynamic for smartphones. But they seem to think that this has only helped Android ("because it's free"), and hindered Apple.

Which seems a bit odd to me, as outlined in my first post. I think people who are outside the bubble can understand this better since a) Android is doing well outside the bubble too, so we don't need to look for crazy excuses to explain this "anomaly" b) we have a better grasp on the distortions that those in the bubble experience because we have an outside perspective (e.g. Android phones are not actually "free", nor do iPhones cost $200).
Minty geeks and flirty beermats - UK Hacker Expo
Since this is a story from a German company... such a 24/7 clause can't be enforced in .de, it's void.

The company can claim inventions you made during work hours, and can forbid you to compete with them directly in your free time. That's it.
I'm a student and I'm thinking about taking a year off from college (a CS degree) and explore the world of startups.

US is out of option leaving with some European country. I've heard Germany has a very vibrant software industry.

Can you please give a little more information about heading over to Germany?
That was about three years ago, see http://www.economist.com/node/10328123
Well at some point heavily critisizing it is be the best way to impove it. There's a start, and that great. Simply the fact that they can point someone to 99designs might just make his day and be a big problem resolved for him/her.
The world's best medical drug search
The rules are definitely different for foreigners.

You are assumed to be wealthy or at least a very good bet to eventually be wealthy.

As well, you can guarantee citizenship in a First World country. Have you encountered the term "filial piety" yet?
I didn't make it clear but I was advocating a pre-built device - I went with the ASRock NetTop 330 because it was exactly the specification I wanted, and cheaper than building it myself.
1 in 7 Boarding Passes delivered to Mobile Within Two Years
You're white, for most Chinese families that is very good, better than owning an apartment. Plus you're from Canada, that is automatic opportunity for their daughter and the rest of her family. Given Canada's preference for uniting families in immigration policy if you marry her then the better part of her immediate family gets in much easier.

Some of my friends (guys no less) get paid to go to clubs in China just because the owner wants to associate it as a place white people go.
It was me that actually built this site. Around 2000-2001. To give you a bit of background or "excuses":

It was my first website at an agency, I'd just taught myself ASP and SQL in just a few months previous (with no help or guidance). If my memory serves me correct, that dodgy JavaScript was put in there by a more senior developer. I had no idea what SQL Injection was and it wasn't until at least a few years later that SQL Injection was even something any developers I knew were aware of - The Wikipedia page for SQL Injection (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SQL_injection) under "Known real-world examples" has the earliest dated at 2005 (but obviously, this vulnerability has been around forever).

And yes, I'm still a Web Developer (front-end nowadays - that also knows much better than this) and no, I no longer work for that agency and haven't for a long time.

In response to some of the comments:
* I've seen many many developers write SQL Injection prone code at least 6 years after this was written.
* Any developer that was around during 2000-2001 would know that this was before the time of CMS's (free or otherwise), libraries, frameworks, SQL abstraction layers etc.
* I'm pretty sure there is some server-side sanitising done too (before we'd heard of the term SQL Injection).
* I don't think it was using an SQL login with drop permissions.
Submitting good articles is definitely of value, so HN should give out Karma for it. However, I believe because articles cannot be downvoted, there is no risk involved for spam bots and spammy humans alike. The solution seems simple: allow downvoting on articles that are younger than one hour. And add captcha for submissions.
please don't.
Why is Clojure so slow (more exactly, why is it as slow as Python)? Naively I would have expected it to be much faster than Python - it's not.
Getting penalized - sometimes heavily - for pointing out someone else's security problems can and does happen:

http://thedailywtf.com/Comments/Hack-School.aspx
NWA Startups vs Investors
I'd be OK with this if there was some way for me to access this data programmatically. That would also make the data collection more transparent.
Indeed: to reward quality over quantity you'd need to use a function such as x^2, or probably x^2/C for some constant C.

Interestingly, Oxford University used to mark final exams for Mathematics and associated schools (such as Computer Science) in this way. Questions would typically start with parts that were largely "book work" and move on to parts that required more careful thought. In addition, you could answer as many questions as you like. Therefore, to avoid people getting lots of marks by just answering all the book work, the papers were scored by squaring the scores for each question and then summing those squares.

That is: overall_score = sum(q in Questions | score(q)^2)

This practice stopped in ~2003 (now you can still answer as many as you like, but the mark for the paper is the sum of your top 3 marks for individual questions, so it's only really worth answering 3 as well as you can).
Inside Seized Drug-Smuggling Submarines
Hmm. I don't recall what I'd call "lambasting" - most viewers came away with a very positive impression of the Tesla - especially as it outperformed the Lotus in some areas. The bit about pushing it into the garage was obviously staged, and for humorous effect.

And to claim that providing two cars to the TV crew invalidates the point about range is a little bit outrageous. It's like saying "they cheated by not letting us cheat."
Jumpers for goalposts 3
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Ironic. I always assumed jacquesmattheij.com would be such a bot submission. Every day a new post from that blog in the tops :)
There is a lot of cool stuff in the pipeline coming out in the next couple of months. But yes, there are missing services in the bitcoin economy, it's a young economy, which is all the more reason to jump in.
I came here to this thread only to say this:

When reading Jacques' post on his blog, I immediately thought RiderOfGiraffes must be up to one of his social experiments with the community.

FWIW, I find your 'work' interesting and the chilled out approach to it, doubly so.
Interesting that the clojure stuff is slower than python. From what I gather most clojure stuff never actually gain any of the possible multi-core performance boost that is one of promises of the language.

Not that I don't like clojure, but part of the hype is that it's supposed to do a lot of the scaling inherently just by the design of the language. But in reality it's never that simple. Switching from map to pmap doesn't do much, actually a whole different way of writing the code is necessary. I'd like to see a version of this that tries to maximise multi core performance, and see what a 12-core mac pro can do with the execution times.
>One has to wonder though, if the FBI can't figure this out, who can?

This is frustrating. Why would we assume the best people possible all work for the FBI? Is there nothing else the best people could be doing? We already know that everyone isn't hiring the top 1%
I agree, there is no substitute for working on a real problem together outside of the pressures of an interview room. This'll really give you an insight as to how a candidate is likely to perform within your team.

I'd have to disagree that all resumes are nearly useless though. We need some way of screening people and I think we just need to improve the resume format. Perhaps by making a tech resume more structured and uniform across candidates things could be improved. I built MightyCV with the aim of doing this - it's a resume platform with hackers in mind. I'd like to see MightyCV become a service that shepherds candidates towards producing a resume that is actually useful to tech recruiters. A MightyCV allows you to hook into the API's for HN, Github and Stackoverflow. When integration is activated this means recruiters get a useful at-a-glance overview of what people have actually been up to in the community. I'm toying with the idea of using an aggregation of these metrics to produce an overall MightyCV score. I'd then like to create a MightyCV map that resume owners could choose to place themselves on. Candidates electing to be included on the map would only appear if they had attained a certain score. It'd be a little like how down-vote privileges work here on HN, i.e. you have to earn your way on to the MightyCV map. I guess if I set the score threshold high enough then this map could become a good source of resumes within our sector that weren't entirely useless.

Also I liked the OP's suggested list of questions too:

- What's the last project you worked on at your former employer?
- Tell me about some of your favorite projects.
- What projects are you working on in your spare time?
- What online hacker communities do you participate in?
- Tell me about some (programming/technical) issues that you feel passionately about.

I'm going to give some thought to how I could incorporate these questions into MightyCV. I might even consider making them compulsory for all MightyCV owners. What do people think? Is forcing people to include something in their resume a bad idea?

Anyway, if you've read this far you might be interested in seeing what a MightyCV looks like. Here's mine: http://robeastham.mightycv.com (For those paying attention I don't think my theoretical MightyCV score would be high enough to get me on the MightyCV map at the moment. Answering SO questions is on my list of things to do in April).

If you like the look of it and want your own MightyCV then sign up for the private beta. There is a beta code and link in the first entry for experience within my resume. There are a couple of bugs I'm ironing out at the moment, mainly associated with the LinkedIn profile importer, but otherwise it's fairly robust. If you try it, I really hope you like it.
Don't want to start a religious war, but to me the Python code just looks more clean.

I am amazed that Python ran anywhere close to Closure in terms of speed, let alone faster!
Developing Africa: Policy and Economic Challenges
+1 for ptx
As a SCREENING mechanism 10 hours might be too much for the candidate to spend. But once past the initial screening, if there is serious consideration of an actual job offer, it is quite reasonable. The company will spend a good deal more than that on every candidate brought in for interviews (if you add up the time of everyone at the company). If the applicant is considering tens of different offers then they're Doing It Wrong(TM) -- they should pick the 4 best and choose amongst those. If they're considering 4 offers and can't spend 10 hrs on each, then why on earth not?
See my reply above. Yep, 1x1 gifs and table layouts were cutting edge back then ;)
IE9 Best in Battery Consumption
wow these guys are such whiners.

Top Gear makes fun of everyone...and it's not like they hinted at something that would never happen

Other manufacturers are mature enough to understand that TG is a comedy show about cars, and their stunts are covered by satire.

And of course Top Gear will retaliate...they always do in cases like this.
Your AI does work for me, although I'm still not sure it's not trying to lose.

BTW, have you seen http://www.turbulence.org/spotlight/thinking/method.html? It's not great as a chess AI, but the "wow" factor is definitely there.
It'd be good if Top Gear was more clearly 'labelled' as fictionalised entertainment. In the UK the brand/programme name still carries the associations of 'old' Top Gear, which was a factual motor review programme (which was cancelled, the format - but not name - sold to Channel 5, and then relaunched with the new format). Most of their challenges are staged, and I don't think they'd lose entertainment value by being clearer that it's fiction.

It'd also be good if they stopped pandering to Daily-Mail-reading-racists. The Mexican stuff in the last series was horrific. I wish BBC America had had the balls to include it in their version, if only so they'd have to deal with the enraged viewers.
Would have been extremely ironic if this post had been submitted by a bot!

My vote/suggestion is to hide Karma from all users once it reaches a fairly low cap. I know I am in a minority here but to me personally Karma beyond the level needed to downvote and basic functionality is hardly an issue.
These days, rather than figuring out exactly which commands and which params to run, it's faster for me to just run it through a simple Pig [1] script and be done with it.

[1] http://pig.apache.org/
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That would at least slow down the bots based on how attentive the maintainers are. There are of course captcha solving services but this just trades maintainer time for money - trying to run a successful karma hoarding bot would still be death by a thousand papercuts.
Little weird they would be bothering, if Tesla won this case a large amount of the cars featured on the show could surely win similar cases. It's part of the show to pickup on cars flaws and over emphasise them.
Agreed, on balance the review was very complimentary, especially for Top Gear; they only pointed out the very real limited range that all fully electric cars have with today's battery technology. I don't see the lawsuit getting very far.
Does this mean you're back on HN? (http://jacquesmattheij.com/Tell+HN%3A+So+Long+and+Thanks+for...)

Or perhaps I missed something during the last few weeks?
i'm not sure how much "zillions" is, but it's not at all clear to me that it's large enough for spam to remain profitable if they use their own machines. i suspect the difference in computing power is only 100 or so (you can get low-power servers using atoms...) and that a spammer needs to send millions of emails to get an edge.

however, it doesn't work well against bot nets (and i think that's where most spam comes from).
My guess is because the Python example was written by Peter Norvig.
rev - reverses the order of characters in every line for processing. Sometimes the values you need to cut are more consistently delimited from the end of the line than the beginning. Simpler and easier than sed in these cases. Reverse the line, cut the value and pipe it back into rev to display it normally.
We're strange, insofar as we've a foot in the software door, and a foot in the agency door - there's method to our madness, insofar as the agency side of things is effectively our peer-review group. We're highly profitable, but everything, other than bare-bones just-about-covers-the-cost-of-living stays in the business, or goes on staff salaries. Our goals and the market we're in both require vast amounts of dev work. Success, for us, is either absolute or absent - not interested in half measures. We've had two 8 digit cash offers for the business, both of which we've refused, as we don't plan on exiting until the product is fully baked.

Ultimately, I guess it depends on what you want out of it - if you're after a lifestyle business, what you describe is just fine. If you're after total global domination, it's back-breaking effort for a number of years (or a huge injection of capital up-front, although that's generally a good way to lose sight of what you're doing).
About Thesis Writing Process
The writing of a thesis is an important element in a student’s life. The thesis is not something which you can write randomly. There is a process involved which if followed correctly will enable you to write a good thesis which will bring you closer to attaining the degree.
Argument between Torvalds and Drepper (RedHat) on memcpy() behaviour
A lesson in how not to respond to criticism
It's also valuable because it eventually grants the ability to downvote.

(It's annoying to see obvious trolls and spam sitting at 1 and not be able to do anything about it. I'm still a few hundred points away, unless the threshold has gone up again.)
I wish I could vote up your first paragraph and vote down the rest. Given how little real science has ever been done on the subject why are you so confident about causes?

You can't get a 6 pack by exercise, you have to eat correctly.
The trick is to do difficult work early, and save the easy/boring grunt work for the 8-midnight period.
Ah, but I don't miss the free time, partially because I've rationally weighed up short-term costs against long-term benefits, and partially because I've come to realise that I actually enjoy working myself to the bone - hence the probability that even after this, I'll likely put myself straight back into the grinder with something new.

As to 2&3 - we've already had a few substantial (8 figure, cash) offers for the business, but we've passed them up, as they were the wrong buyers at the wrong time.
An auto company targeting auto enthusiasts suing Top Gear is like a tech startup suing YCombinator. In nine cases out of ten the loss of goodwill is going to make this a losing proposition.
They don’t point to 99designs any more but to the Design Business Association ( http://www.dba.org.uk/ ).
NASA probe returns first-ever orbiter photo of Mercury
I don't understand the point of the solutions - why is a non-deterministic output of a function better than iterating over a list? If anything, it would be worse.
no they wouldn't. they'd write "don't ask who the bell tolls for." which sounds fine.
Ask HN: Open source development / support split
Hello all,

I'm the author of an open source Javascript library for adding dynamic controls to HTML tables ( http://datatables.net ). Of late DataTables has proven to be reasonably popular, which I'm absolutely delighted with - but with that comes a lot more support requests for integrating the library into pages and apps.

As a result of this, I now find that what time I can spend on the project is spent answering questions in the forum and not taking the core project forward. Even then I can't keep up with the number of posts in the forum! When that happens, inevitably, there come questions such as "is this forum alive" etc. I've even been accused of making the forum rubbish intentionally to "force" people to make a donation to get support (the reality is that very few people do make a support request using that method).

Please don't misunderstand, asking questions is great! It is how we all learn after all. I want to be able to help people do the integration that they want to do with DataTables - but at the same time I want to be able to improve the library going forward.

So what I wanted to ask was, how do other developers maintain their development to support ratio? Does anyone have any suggestions for how to get a balance?
agreed, Top Gear is pretty much THE car enthusiast show world wide...by suing them Tesla is pretty much attacking 80-90% of their potential customers.

This will do nothing but hurt them...especially after Top Gear retaliates.
Is HN karma worth anything? Don't get me wrong. I love HN and I think it is unique in its way but I never thought that I could earn a medal because of a lot karma on HN.

I can understand this "function" on StackOverflow (even though I don't have much karma there either) cause karma at StackOverflow can bring in new chances.

My question: Do anyone use HN karma as measurement to see if this guy is worth to hire or worth for something else?
You can't drop lithium ion batteries much below 25% charge or they start to die. If you fully discharge a lithium ion battery it's dead forever. That's how the Tesla engineers knew it didn't drop below 25% charge because otherwise the car would be undrivable. Why is it unbelievable that a car with a normal range of 200 miles would only get 55 on a track? If your car normally gets 400 miles to a tank it would not be unreasonable to expect 100 miles during a track day.
This is probably a better place to continue from our discussion on Twitter...

What is the benefit of describing http://jfdibritain.com as first "cynical" and then a "negative reaction"?

Like Start Up Britain, JFDI Britain is positive about startups in all industries. You can JFDI it with any business. We are a response to Start Up Britain, our only direct reference to them is that we say they "inspired" us to create the site.

We think Start Up Britain should continue to do what it's doing and we hope that it evolves to highlight that the only real barrier that exists to starting any kind of business is the time you have available to get on with it.

Our only real criticism the prominence and potential damage of the 1:Idea 2: Biz Plan 3:Kit 4:Logo approach. We're suggesting a positive alternative.
When discussing the characteristics of their ideal husband, Chinese girls will occasional joking (not really) say, "有车，有房，父母双亡”。 Which means, "[He] has a car, a house, and both of his parents are dead." Filial piety is hard work.
Just ask your friend how much you should be making at Google, he works there after all. Then try to get that.
Two ideas- what do you think?
(1) Keep karma hidden from everyone except the owner of the karma
and/or
(2) Charge a small fee ($10/year) or so to access the site (with certain exceptions to be sure).
Definitely not.

I just figured that since I submitted this article myself it would be pretty silly to stay out of the comments. Don't take it as a religious thing, I've cut down the time spent on HN by over 90%, I have lots more time to write about other stuff now and I have more time for the people around me. On top of that my out-of-band contacts with HN'ers seem to have only strengthened.

Win-win.
OK, now I'm confused. The average karma on my HN profile is blank. After reading "hey, the average karma score is gone"[1] I thought that HN had done away with it, but now I see that pretty much everyone has an average karma except me. Could it be because I have only comments but no submissions?

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1944871
Good Design and neat execution. I'll just add: I don't know how to play Chess, I would prefer that I find a tutorial in the site itself that offers the game rather than looking in Google.

Design Note: It would be better that you add a hover effect. It feels more user-friendly and realistic.
Agreed. The only downside was that I wasn't in on the joke and that quite a bit of the backlash was directed at me, not at the people running the bots.

I also think that it would be prudent for anybody that intends to run any kind of bot on HN to ask PG for permission.
Lived in a ghost estate in Dalian, China for about 2 years. Could have loud music and parties and was never really bothered by anyone. Moved to Beijing, real estate in 2007 was at a premium. Its even more so now since the Olympic games. Apparently prices have risen dramatically, the demand is incredible.

The same cannot be said for the rest of the country. Many apartments are owned by companies anticipating renting the rooms to their workers. One of the buildings I was initially staying in was a dorm room sharing with other developers in my team. With wages so low it was difficult if not impossible for many of them to afford an apartment.

Many other apartments are owned by overseas Chinese, investing in their locality, awaiting their return.