skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I noted that ("x" == x) avoids the problem of (x = "x") that others mentioned, but really, any sane compiler will warn you about the second. (GCC does, mxmlc does, Python flat out disallows the syntax.) The way to shutup the warning is to say ( (x = "x") ) if you really mean it.

I was more worried that the language in question was C++, so you have to worry about conversion constructors, conversion operators, operator==, etc.
"... how close should a person be entering the hallway from the opposite direction be before I wave or say hello ..."

From far away, Joe Navarro, "Impressing other at a distance - getting it right" ~ http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/spycatcher/201011/two-go... then up close, "Influence - Up Close (Part Two)
~ http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/spycatcher/201102/influe...
About 2-3 hours. Lots of breaks though; I started about 16 hours ago and finished about 4 hours ago.
Any idea how much investment is taking place in MacRuby? If they're really interested in grooming a successor, I'd figure that there would be some serious work going on, behind the scenes.

With the success of the platforms on which Obj-C is used, I don't know if a successor will be another language. An update to Obj-C itself might make perfect sense.
The only date check generally is that it be in the future

That doesn't always work -- I've had my credit card rejected because I typoed the expiry date.
O RLY?

http://i.imgur.com/ccBEs.jpg
You don't know this guy, I've known him for years.

Most recently, he's run into and fixed some bugs in linenoise, which was written by one of the most prolific programmers I'm aware of in recent history.

Don't badmouth people you don't know.

Quirky was an adjective for him, not his code.

He's writing the it for fun, that's all. He has no needs.
Pondering how to make a Java Component based game
It's back up and for right now, I was wrong, prices seem to have dropped. I believe that there are a small but significant group of people who actually need to use BitCoin to conduct their business. Liquidity problems hurt them, and their demand is inelastic.

There are certainly plenty of speculators, though, and I wish I'd bought more than I did back at $.07/BTC. :)

There's some lag between reading about BitCoin and actually driving demand, so I tend to see news response as driving up BTC a bit by speculation, and then a longer slower ride up.

That said, BitCoin has zero elasticity on the supply side, and it has for some time seemed extremely likely to me that prices will continue to rise drastically for some time.
From Nietzsche's Ecce Homo:

"So wenig als möglich sitzen; keinem Gedanken Glauben schenken, der nicht im Freien geboren ist und bei freier Bewegung, in dem nicht auch die Muskeln ein Fest feiern."

"Remain seated as little as possible; trust no thought that is not born in the open, to the accompaniment of free bodily motion-nor one in which your very muscles do not celebrate a feast."
Tag them in WP ?
Google’s Secret Class System
That guy backs up constantly.

At some point, you have a really nice bounty for finding a hash collision, though. : ).
Tibco RV Interview Question as part Tibco RV Tutorial series
How Many Mulligans Does Color Get?
The Federal Reserve does not print US dollars, nor does it have the right or power. The US Mint and the Bureau of Engraving (both part of the Deptartment of the Treasury) produce coinage and print dollars at the advice and counsel of the Federal Reserve, and are the only agencies so empowered.
You can certainly refuse US dollars in the United States, however you cannot refuse them for payment of debt.
Anonymous did instead, I think. (Not sure if that was the same documents though...)
Where does he make the assumption that Oracle was trying to do the "right thing"? As I'm reading it, he says that Oracle did it because they were unable to monetize OO and he adds "After all, I seriously doubt that Ellison had an attack of conscience."
Isn't it a little illusionary to think in this good guy, bad guy fashion? It's all about money. It was the same for Sun. It's the same for Oracle. And if the "good guys" can't pay the bills for the Open Office Servers anymore, they will see, it's the same for them.

That Oracle gave up that project so fast, actually makes me think, that they just found another way to make money out of the situation.
If I'm ever in the position to interview, I'd ask the candidate to teach me something of their choice. (Preferably something in the realm of technology rather than how Magic: The Gathering works, but I'd accept either.) Teaching me things I don't know is better since I'd rather have someone who has a different knowledge base, though teaching me things I do know might help me judge their ability to explain things. (e.g. making reference to an efficient subway system (New York's) when explaining skip lists as done in the MIT video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kBwUoWpeH_Q )

A lot of my interaction between coders is explaining to each other what we've done, I'd prefer someone who might be a worse coder than me but can explain things well (and write good commit messages, etc.) than a guy who writes epic code but can't explain it to me.
"If it’s any consolation, at least we don’t ask gotcha riddle questions anymore. Those were especially offensive."

What, no more Fermi Problems anymore? No more reasoning about how many piano tuners there are in Chicago? No more estimating how many hairs you have on your head? Not necessary to calculate the total number of sheets of 8.5 x 11 inch paper used by all the students at the University of Maryland in one semester? How many drops of water are there in Lake Erie? How many notes are played on a given radio station in a given year, has become irrelevant? What a loss ;-)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_problem
Alternative currencies are fine, as long as they are not being represented as US currency. Most of the private currencies, including casino chips, are merely tokens of private contracts between the holder and the issuer.

The issue with alternative currencies is primarily that of tax evasion. Income earned in any currency/denomination is taxable, and most users of alternative currencies underreport or do not report their income. This problem is especially prevalent where the currency's value is not tied 1:1 with the US dollar.
From wikipedia:

"J. Michael Arrington (born March 13, 1970 in Orange, California)"

Is techcrunch not an internet company?

Furthermore, the story here is some anonymous VC has volunteered that this is a "data-driven observation" and well, we have a sports analogy to go with it.

There's plenty of studies not done by people who profit from promulgating the hype around young entrepreneurs.

Show us the data, 41 year old dude.
Perl Cloud at Phenona http://www.phenona.com/
Counterfeiting, mostly. The coins he made looked like normal US coins, except that the presidents were swapped out for Ron Paul or other anti-establishment figures.
tldr: s/"EBS Control Plane"/Mechanical Turks™/ (plus a bunch of other not very good jokes added to fill space)
In state prison, father and son make good cellmates
I started a similar group this semester at UMass Lowell called Maker Club. However, instead of just coding we work on hacks and crafts of all kinds.

In the month since our first meeting we've done a variety of things like making catapults/trebuchets out of popsicle sticks and rubber bands, made giant bubbles, and played Portal using the kinect.

The semester is winding down, but I'm planning on having some hack nights next semester, both general and themed. On general hack nights the club will provide the food and caffeine as long as people are working on something. On themed hack nights everything we make will involve a certain theme. Also, if there's a student or professor who wants to show how to do something like knitting or creating a web page we'll provide them with the supplies they need, take care of the paperwork, and promote it. All they'll need to do is show up.

That's one of a few things I have planned for next year, and I'm going to be planning more over the summer.
Scheme operations are mostly early-bound, even more so than Common Lisp; you standardly use vector-ref or string-ref, for example, instead of nth. (There are Schemes where this is not true, such as RScheme, but Racket is not among them.) Vectors aren't resizable; for that kind of thing, you must use lists. You can't attach arbitrary properties to some arbitrary object, the way you can in JS or Ruby. You can't introduce new variable bindings in the middle of a block. (What you do instead is make a new nested block.) Finite maps (assoc, make-hash-table) are second-class citizens. Standard Scheme is nonreflective; you're supposed to do your metaprogramming with macros, not reflection and interposition. (I don't know how much reflection Racket supports, but I'd guess almost none.) The object-literal syntax is quasiquote, which is clumsy.

It does have dynamic typing, but that's not what it means to be a "dynamic language". Dynamic languages are late-bound; everything is up for grabs at runtime. In standard Scheme, this is true in the fairly useless sense that everything depends on the bindings in the global namespace, so you could in theory (set! car somethingweird), but this is very rarely practical; it almost serves only to make optimizing Scheme compilers difficult to write. Aside from that, the language leans much further toward early binding, doing things at compile-time, and using efficient data structures at the cost of flexibility.
Map of every street tree in Washington DC
until 2am? Sounds like they need to vacate that name for the real night owls ;)
But Arrington founded TechCrunch at age 35 — or doesn't he count?
How to convert MKV to WMV with MKV to WMV Converter for Mac?
Pfft. Who has talked about Color since their launch? Absolutely nobody except HN and TechCrunch.

I'm going to tell you why no one in the UK used Color: 1) no one cares for another photo sharing app -- they have Facebook, and, 2) it's misspelled. :)
Radii straight jackets
Asperger Syndrome
The YC data point probably has a sample bias. I'd expect that young people apply in disproportionately large numbers.
The reason that YC funds more younger people is because the amount offered is not really enough for anyone to live on (especially in the bay area). Things are different now with Yuri offering 150k, but that is a recent change.

If you are a kid right out of school, or have your parents basement to fall back on if you go broke, you haven't lost much.
spam is spam though. everything has a footprint, and systems like akismet can detect those.
Barry Eichengreen...what else is new. Career Fed-monger. I remember reading his book in college about how the gold standard was the cause of the Great Depression. Later on that year I attended a guest lecture he gave in which he made fun of Joseph Stiglitz.

Status-quo economists have too much power in this decadent society.
The article allows for exceptions, and presumably it fits well into his world vision to think he is exceptional.
Hey Alex, can't find any contact info for ya. Shoot me an email or find me on Twitter, geuis.teses@gmail.com or @geuis
link bait
"CONST == variable" is called a 'Yoda condition'.
More information on this can be found at http://united-coders.com/christian-harms/what-are-yoda-condi... , which describes its uses and advantages. I tried to use them a while, but not anymore, because I find them unnatural; like reading backwards. In my opinion, it's more logical to first introduce what is being compared instead of some value which will be compared against. This is especially true if you revisit the code after a few months.
Nerd Venn Diagram
Ohhh... you want to know about the age bias for the actually successful startups, and not just the age bias of having enough life flexibility to go off on some 80%-baked adventure...
See also http://www.defmacro.org/ramblings/lisp-in-haskell.html
I'd argue TechCrunch is a blog, rather than a consumer startup (after all, it started with Michael Arrington alone -- and grew from there).
Although this article says "last year Y Combinator said the average age of their founders is under 25," in the interview it links to, I say the average age is 26:

MA: What’s the average age of investment?

RC: I don’t know. It’s 25 and under.

PG: Ours is 26 — yours have to be older.

I'm not sure what the median is now. We haven't tried to calculate it for a while.
Yea.FM - Listen to Free Music
The design of the Times actually gives editorial emphasis to the stories that are the most important on the page — in that way it's the opposite of a laundry list site like a blog or Hacker News. You may argue that the grid is sloppy, but it makes you engage on the page for a great deal of time (which advertisers like) — and the quality of the writing and photography makes that exploration worthwhile too. Besides if you don't want to sit back and browse you can get the latest laundry list via rss, twitter or even a mobile app.
"... Does anybody know of a good introductory text about these various theories of memory? ..."

You might try, DeBono Edward, (Professor of Investigative Medicine at Cambridge when he wrote the book), "The Mechanism of Mind" ISBN 0224617095 January, 1969 ~ http://www.amazon.com/Mechanism-Mind-Edward-Bono/dp/03179055...

I've read it, it's old but forms the basis of DeBonos ideas on thinking. The book goes into detail on the physical formation of memory ~ http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?EdwardDeBono & http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_de_Bono
* Syntax sucks: I think Objective-C is actually pretty beautiful. Maybe I'm crazy.

* NSInvocation should serve the same purpose in most cases.

* I find the block syntax atrocious if compared to Lisp lambdas. It's not that bad. Blocks are objects, so you're creating an object, with all the same predictable retain/release semantics. Maybe a few gotchas if you're not reading the documentation and realize you should avoid retain loops. Hardly different from Java, only it's easier to miss it in Java, because you never release, anywhere.
Not to pick nits, but this is off by one. If you need the n most common elements, you should use

c.most_common()[:-n-1:-1]

because the element at

c.most_common()[-n]

is actually the n-1th most common element.
I'm pretty sure that's from Adam Smith's Money World a show that ran on PBS back in the day.
Yesterday I was thinking about exactly same thing, and buuum here I go :). Thanks!
I guess Michael Arrington isn't an investor in Color.
That seems like a dubious distinction, given gawker and other blog networks. I find it hard to find a clear difference between consumer internet products and blog networks.

Facebook is the obvious exception, but even youtube almost feels like it started out as a blog.
Because young entrepreneurs are more creative and imaginative, and are willing put 100% of their lives into their startups, he said. “It’s not a guess, this is a data driven observation,” says the VC.

The article is unclear as to whether this applies to startups seeking venture capital or all startups, in general.

It also states that it's not a matter of opinion, but data-driven fact. If I'm not reaching out to a VC or engaging with a VC in any way whatsoever, what data is he going to have on me? Isn't he only going to have access to data about startups that are reaching out for capital?

I'm in my thirties and I know that very few startups actually need millions of dollars. I still haven't figured out the justification for such ridiculously huge investments and expenses in most internet startups. Anyway, I digress. Being in my thirties, what I need are ambitious partners who can fill in the tech or business gaps I personally have as well as inspire, invigorate, stir ideas and share in the glory and the gloom.

What I don't need are millions of dollars to get started. Or even hundreds of thousands. Whatever I need, I can almost assuredly take care of on my own (and with partners, our own). I suppose that one reason I don't need this is that I'm not just a year or two out of college and $200k in debt from my education. I'll never reach out to a VC and he'll never know of me, unless he comes sniffing around.

By the way, it would seem that investing in someone younger is a lot wiser, because you'll get a lot more potential years of return if you're investing in "people" and not "product". Why invest with a stubborn middle aged guy who won't put up with your shit? Come on, honey! Sign on the dotted line and we'll make you a rock and roll star!

Anyway, this all seems like a lot of navel-gazing. I could sit around arguing if someone is too old to do something all day, but I'd rather go prove it.
"He often buys companies with very little due diligence;" that doesn't sound like Buffet at all. If everyone who bought stock, CDSs, and other complex financial instruments did as much diligence as Buffet everyone in finance would still think a TARP is something you use to protect things from the elements.
Not to mention he basically seems to be writing blog posts during NBA playoff intermissions. Sports metaphors abound (and confound).
Man, I really hope that isn't true. Or if it is, that it doesn't affect angels and VC's that funding new companies based on someone's age. I'm 31 but feel like I'm 20.
> The recommendation I've seen from some gateways is to add multiples of 3 years until the date is in the future.

Did you read the rest of the post?
Sounds like you're about to invest heavily in a web-based company. The main application that customers will see your product through is a web browser.

You can easily write code for, and contribute to, these browsers. Whether it's for the rendering engines (gecko, webkit) or their open-source browser counterparts (firefox, chrome). Get involved!
You make it sound like the median age is trivia at best, contrary to Arrington's suggestion that it is part of your "data driven" strategy.
IPhone 4 Soon Coming To India Via Flipkart.com
Ask HN: How do I minimize the taxes from selling my startup?
I'm about to sell my company. Because the company has existed for less than 1 year, I'm subject to short-term capital gains tax - about 35%.

The tax code stipulates that, if I invest the proceeds in a "qualifying small business" and leave it there for just a few more months, the proceeds of the original and the new investment are treated as long term capital gains - 20%.

Even better: if the proceeds stay in a QSB for more than 5 years, the whole thing is tax free, due to this:
http://www.cpa2biz.com/Content/media/PRODUCER_CONTENT/Newsletters/Articles_2010/CorpTax/TaxExclusion_Expanded.jsp

I'm fairly certain that there's a win/win/win here: a way I can use my proceeds to invest in a small business, create jobs (the goal of the tax break), make the economy better, but not take on the kind of risk that comes with a traditional tech startup angel investment. I've thought about buying a diversified portfolio of franchised businesses, for example, or creating a holding company that makes many small investments.

But I'm not a financial genius, there's always gotchas, and I don't want to re-invent the wheel. I've talked to two startup lawyers, a financial planner, and two CPAs, and while they can explain the mechanics, none of them have good suggestions about implementation.

Does anyone know of solid strategies for sheltering investment proceeds in a QSB without taking too much capital risk? This information would be really helpful to anyone here who successfully sells their company!
>That's the take-away idea, that there are still unexpected discoveries to be made all around us.

Especially now, that we are able to store all the knowledge in a way that it is easily accessible and searchable. How much old "knowledge" is there, lost on paper in archives?
I think the idea that a failed launch can kill you is (generally) bullshit. Unless the company is weak it isn't the end of the world.

If they make their product great and it resonates with users it will be successful eventually, if they stick with it.

There are a billion people in their target market. Even if they spoiled their rep (for now) with 10 million (unlikely) that leaves quite a few other potential users.

Being cuil in Silicon Valley is not a prerequisite to success.
It's easy enough to appear to be a dick quite innocently though.

Take the suggestion in this thread of asking people "What is it you like about American Idol?" - a question which is all too easy to appear dismissive of their mainstream taste (especially when you're obviously the only person in the room not able to discuss last night's installment) even if you regularly enjoy providing detailed answers for similar questions posed by the same people on your love for Lisp, string theory or Star Trek.
Isn't there a "scientific Google Goggles version"?

Wouldn't it be as easy as photograph all archived specimens and let Google's photo search filter out duplicates of known animals. What remains needs names...
unfortunately this currently returns:

<?xml version="1.0" standalone="yes"?>
<result code="api temporarily unavailable" />
<!-- fe02.api.del.ac4.yahoo.net uncompressed/chunked Sun May 1 07:46:07 UTC 2011 -->
I would if Foundation/{App,UI}Kit were open-source. I personally think it's fantastic.

The thing is, I actually take offense to people who call a language ugly. Just because it doesn't prioritize the kind of expressiveness you desire doesn't mean whining about it makes you cool or a better programmer. What everyone here who says 'Objective-C is ugly and outdated' should be decrying is the relative lack of choice of implementation language for iOS.

I like Objective-C, because I look at it from the point of view of C. It's a systems language with support for OOP that I find completely satisfactory, which prioritizes flexibility, predictability, and maintainability over raw speed and constraints. On the other hand, I love that Java and similar languages in its family can reason a great deal about classes and their interactions, and I love that Python and Ruby step out of the programmer's way when you just want to make something --

-- But to write software for an embedded platform that can be natively fast when needed (the C part of ObjC), but offer a solid OOP abstraction, and to reconcile these two needs as well as expose some of the lower-level workings of the OOP system to the developer when they really know what they're doing and need it? I think Objective-C is hard to beat there. It's a language fitting for projects from small-medium size to very large. It's not the only language that I feel can scale like this, but again; that's a problem (availability of alternatives), not a reflection on Objective-C's language. The language combines the low-level with the high-level, and is many things for many needs, yet is without the rigidity of a Java-style type system, yet is also without the inability or difficulty to deeply reason about high-level language structures as in some more dynamic languages, Objective-C manages to allow sufficient and sloppy "it just works" implementations, for when you just need to bang out code that works well enough, as well as encourages polished and well-engineered APIs (such as Cocoa's).

I think Objective-C balances these concerns - small or big, dynamic or inflexible, as well as the reality of mobile devices' limited memory capacity, particularly well. I would make a more cogent argument were I more awake and if I did not have a splitting headache, but I think it's extremely unfair to call (or imply it) Objective-C strange, or that it survives merely because Cocoa would not be supported if another language were to replace it. Although I may be in the minority (at least amongst those who are posting here in this thread), I think it is a fantastic language.