skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is something I've often observed. Something about a looming deadline really focuses my mind and lets me churn out amazing work in surprisingly little time.

Most recently I noticed this when writing an article for a magazine. Weeks went by and I didn't write a thing. Then days went by and I churned out perhaps 100 words.

Then the deadline was in a few hours and I churned out a 3000 word article over two cups of tea in a single sitting. Didn't even take my eyes off whatever text editor I was using. The flow was just there.

So yes, from my observations, if you want to get in the flow - just have a looming deadline.
second this. also, because "Demo" was a different colour, i assumed i was already on the demo page...
For me it is the price barrier. Being able to use a language like F# on the iphone would be awesome.
somewhere on the net are comments i made about european idealists v american pragmatists (the whole "worse is better" thing).

i have never been so glad to be proved completely wrong :o)
Algorithms are not statutory subject matter, according to any court. Software patents are always drafted to claim a larger system of which the algorithm is a part.
Also, I'd suggest letting people set up tag filters without accounts. Even if they don't persist beyond a single visit, it allows users to see just how useful this tag concept is without any commitment, making them more likely to use the site. They'll also be more likely to sign up for an account since they already spent some time making a filter and might want to save it.
This is a highly relevant point. The article you're referring to discussed the effect of motivation on IQ tests: motivated subjects did meaningfully better, which undermines the use of IQ as a test of general intelligence.

At 5, children will differ hugely in how motivated they are to do well on an IQ test, and parental influence may well play a large role.

A 5 year old won't exhibit much working memory if they're not concentrating on the test, and if they're not test-motivated by 5, they're less likely to be so when they're older.
Opt-in Rules Are a Good Start
But the money in your paypal account is denominated in US Dollars (or Yen, or whatever real world currency), isn't it? Paypal's 'online wallet' is just another way of saying 'checking account'.
I have a checking account which has a stored value that I access via debit card or paper check, and can transfer or spend the money at my direction. The money in that checking account does not exist elsewhere at an account under my control.

I don't see the difference here?
Windows Azure isn't just .Net. There's Ruby, Python, PHP and Java.

http://www.microsoft.com/windowsazure/interop/

[edit] I've just thought, the Ruby and Python support might technically be through .Net via IronRuby and IronPython, but I'm not sure. This certainly doesn't apply to PHP or Java though.
Not just deadline, other kinds of constraints do that too. When you're given a paper and asked to draw your mod creative piece, you can sit there for hours debating where to start. Now if you are asked to draw the your most creative flower with four petals, you can channel your creativity to very specific areas.
Neither the command on the page, nor the script it downloads, use sudo (or su for that matter).

Just invoking 'sh' really should not give you a root shell under normal circumstances.

You can try running 'echo "whoami" | sh | grep root' to verify this yourself.
I preferred the right; the only thing I saw as a problem was the place name was not emphasized at all. At least having Portsmouth Akido in bold type would give the viewer a cue to find the name. If the flyer is on a wall and not a handout then the audience needs to locate the name.
ICFP Programming Contest 2011 schedule announced
Agreed.

There is a profound philosophical disconnect between the (well-meaning) author of the Haskell and the way the law works.

There is a whole body of thought regarding dealing with humans that plays out in the law: mathematical approaches to law do not regard that and tend to fail.
This makes the following situations possible:

1) You want to add a convenience method to someone else's object (a quick search of my own posts reveals that about a dozens of my own posts involve adding convenience methods to Cocoa classes, e.g. Safely fetching an NSManagedObject by URI).

2) You want to change the behavior of a class you didn't (and can't) allocate because it is created by someone else (this is how Key-Value Observing is implemented in Cocoa).

3) You want to treat objects generically and handle potential differences with runtime introspection.

4) You want to substitute an object of a completely different class to the expected class (this is used in Cocoa by NSProxy to turn a regular object into a distributed object).

One can do all of the above with the Go language. In addition, one could also write a reasonably performant compiler in it. (Also JIT dynamic language VMs are good enough now, that I've seen dynamic language parser/compiler implementations perform as well as a naively written Lex/YACC C implementation. And yes, companies paid money for the latter!)
You're absolutely right! I've added your suggestions to my to-do list. Will be ready soon. Thank you so much!
This is a very real problem with many "hyped" languages. Sure, they might seem more powerful and elegant, but if you got to spend tons of time re-implementing basic networking/web libraries, then what's the point in using them for web development.
I found the flyer on the left quite readable but that was probably influenced by my expectation that it was from a newspaper classified section or similar publication where the formatting options can be quite limited. Once I read the article I agree that as a flyer the design on the right works better. From this I take that the context in which the information is presented is also quite influential on people's ability to assimilate the information being presented.
From experience: high ceilings, and big space let you have very different thoughts than if you are in a tiny flat.

I've worked in an advertising agencies where the office is designed to look plain, and let the work stand out more. It was also designed to look good with the macs. The lighting is different for different areas, and also floors are designed with the types of clients they service in mind. Different designs for sectors like financials to creatives to airlines. With different journeys through the building depending on who the visitor was. There are white boards built into the walls, meeting rooms, board rooms, pitch rooms, reading areas, relaxing areas, and other special purpose areas including thinking areas.

There are architects who specialise in party dynamics, and provoking all sorts of different emotions. There are people who specialise in shopping centers, public areas, and sporting areas. Each type of place has it's own needs and requirements.

However, none of this is new - it's been happening since people have made and designed buildings.
You should try naming one company which relied on "contentious" spelling and failed. I'm pretty sure the sample either way is too small to be meaningful.
Lexus LFA: Strategic or Stupid?
I'm saying that in terms of real time, if you have enough parallelism, you don't have to wait for n units, but rather log n units. As a function of CPU time, sure it's linear, but ignoring what parallelism gives you is just not being realistic, IMHO.

As to the sibling comment, that's another good point. You say it's because it knows about the queries ahead of time, but you don't get excellent real-world performance without what an academic might consider cheating. Special-case your data structures to expected queries, where those queries are either empirically discovered and adjusted for manually, or learned automatically over time. A closed-minded approach that simply shuts down creative thinking by parroting out "linear time, no can do better, sorry" is poor form.
I would heavily recommend "doing the science". It's a lot of fun, and it has one of two outcomes: You confirm what you think is true, in which case your argument has a LOT more weight (as so few people will "do science"), or you disprove your idea, which means you get to find a way to make your design even better. Win-win!

It really is a lot of fun, too. We had a university assignment to investigate a particular public-facing system, and while most of my peers turned to Google I hit the streets with a clipboard. I had a really great afternoon, learnt a huge amount about the system, and discovered data that no one else did.
Which means I get moderated down too? I thought he had an interesting and valid point, saw his statement when it was grey and made my comment.
If I am incorrect, or have made a HN etiquette faux pas, I would appreciate knowing about it.
> I remember the last time I had to connect to mysql from erlang I had to download a few library files from some company nice enough to release them and dump them into my projects directory

Forgive my ignorance in all things erlang but how is this different to connecting to MySQL from Java?
Gender inference: uncertainty vs fuzziness
Please revise the title to conform to the guidelines, thank you!

http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

If the original title begins with a number or number + gratuitous adjective, we'd appreciate it if you'd crop it. E.g. translate "10 Ways To Do X" to "How To Do X," and "14 Amazing Ys" to "Ys." Exception: when the number is meaningful, e.g. "The 5 Platonic Solids."
Yes, but everyone should be able to make that decision themselves instead of that decision being made for them by their socio-economic status.
Enjoying the moment
SHA1_Pass 1.6 Released
Great summary of the PSN intrusion & implications
It's also had a lot of funding, and more full time workers than on CPython (who has zero full time coders).
Hello community. Can anyone hypothesize about how airline pricing works? In the screenshot, you'll notice:

Wed –> Fri = $483

Tues –> Fri = $177 less than above. This means Tues flight is $177 cheaper than Wed.

Wed –> Sat = $122 less than first. This means Sat flight is $122 cheaper than Fri.

Now if the leg pricing was independent I would expect Tues to Sat to be $299 less than Wed to Fri, or at LEAST cheaper than both the adjacent boxes... However it is more expensive.

Why?

Full post - http://macklinchaffee.com/daily-dose/sorting-flights-by-naus...

Kayak search - http://www.kayak.com/flights/CHO-MSP/2011-05-10/2011-05-14
Enter something like Clojure whose "host" platform is not just an implementation detail, but a feature.
I have a few social circles and if I didn't expand beyond my dayjob friends I would probably have the same problem. Once you start mingling with other entrepreneurs you should have no problem finding them.
It is not just deadlines, I find that any social situation where people are dependent on what I produce to be an extremely strong motivator - moreso than any well organized task list or plan -
It is not just deadlines, I find that any social situation where people are dependent on what I produce to be an extremely strong motivator - moreso than any well organized task list or plan - where the work tends to fill the time available.
Could this present any utility as a communication interface between an RDBMS with XML support (DB2, MSSQL) and a document DB (MongoDB, CouchDB) ?
What a post man, this is exactly what keeps you going in your startup.

Loved the quote from Andrew Warner's interview. Balancing the two things out and differentiating between vision/ambition and day to day happiness is a powerful concept.

You taught me a lot there, thanks Joel! :)
First, I wasn't "cheaper" labor. The fundamental difference is that the people who build new stuff often are too expensive for maintenance duty. So, a company might have a group of projects that need to be done. Some take multiple years. This ruling really shifted the strategy to an outsource solution instead of a contractor / employee solution.
Agner is your solution!

http://erlagner.org/
Cool post. Same applies to me. I want to build a startup which require money to complete, so i started freelancing to fund it. After one job, i could not take it any more. I don't just like working for people. Prefer to be my own boss..
Michael, I liked most of your presentation and I agree with a lot of what you said there. But was it really necessary to post it twice to HN? Why don't we just stick with this one: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2503064
Wow, cool job. I was just going to suggest the 1-2-3 approach to his landing page. You're really talented! Only 2 minutes, wow....
I'm sick of having account here and there. Some of my peers remained at Delicious, some ran to Diigo, and I'm currently using Pinboard.

I'd prefer that bookmarking sites would cooperate in some way. Not just importing data or having some sort of master-slave replication, but making inter-site social networking possible (OStatus?) and actively exchanging data.

Sure, from business perspective, the data (and the user base) could be considered as assets, so site owners have no incentive in doing this. But I still have a dream...
I certainly stand behind the substance of what I said, but I definitely could have packaged it a bit different. I agree with pg that HN's comment quality has been deteriorating, and to that end I'd rather be part of the solution than the problem.
> More broadly: every tax cutout, no matter how well-intentioned, distorts the economy by paying smart people to spend more time figuring out how to hit the algorithm versus doing whatever they would otherwise do to earn money.

Worse, the smart people often figure out a way to go beyond whatever tax break was intended, then other smart people have to spend time figuring out how to tweak the tax code. The tax code then grows.

My favorite example. Once upon a time a large company (I think it was General Motors) was preparing to pay a dividend, which would count as ordinary income for the shareholders. One of their smart people got the bright idea of instead of a dividend, doing a stock split to slightly increase the number of shares (say, a 50 for 49 stock split), then having the company do a buyback to reduce the number of shares (say, buy back 1/50th of the shares). The split was not a taxable event, and the buyback could then be reported by the shareholders as capital gains. Ta-da! Ordinary income converted to capital gains.

So now there are something like three pages of regulations and tests to determine how to classify a stock buyback to stop that trick, but not to penalize buybacks that aren't for tax avoidance, and to anticipate possible loopholes in those rules or close loopholes that have been found in them.
Just added my comments.
I can recommend these two:

* http://colorlovers.com

* http://colorschemedesigner.com
A commonsense social ecommerce solution for nightclubs.
Duuble: Quantified-Self+Microblogging - Share want you want [feedback, please]
Introducing Nodeler
Nodeler is a Bonjour like service to easily pair web & mobile apps. Currently there are nodes that have been written to remote control Amazon VOD and Rdio running in Chrome. A modified version of Dale Harvey's HTML5 Pacman has been created that can be launched on an iPad and remotely controlled with an iPhone. Unfortunately performance in Mobile Safari makes Pacman move in the Matrix Bullet Time but a native implementation would perform much better.
Yet another AWK competitor - C++
Paypal's arbitrary policies and ability to freeze on whim or even pull money out of your account with no comeback are the reason my latest startup[1] doesn't take Paypal at all. It's just not worth the hassle of dealing with customer (or $deity forbid, your own) paypal problems.

[1] - http://www.44con.com/
That was what I was implying, yes. Do you really think it will be hard for most people to work together towards a goal they both share and want?

I'm sure there will be conflict, but I doubt it'll be more than any other partnership.
One note for designers about color blindness - the "strong contrast" green dots (with one red one) example has essentially no contrast for those of us (~1 in 10 males) who are red-green color blind. All the dots appeared the same color until I saw the text which suggested one of them was different. Yellows and blues are safer color combinations to use if you are looking for contrast.
19. I created an online app that led to Microsoft licensing the underlying bits from my lab. I also helped present it to what was then Live Labs.

I was an employee at my lab; so, I didn't have any rights to royalties and such, but I was well compensated.
You should indeed. A couple of possibilities are http://www.gsfsystem.ch/ and http://goldnowbanc.com/ . Or just delivery in person for local business. Go ahead and quote a rate in silver while you're at it.
StayFocusd provides more of a gentle hint but is not an effective cage. You should compare it to leechblock's "evil" modes. Like forcing you to type a 64-character random stream of letters and digits (that can't be copied and pasted) before accessing settings or disabling the extension when in lockdown. StayFocusd is just a right click away from being disabled, it's really not even worth installing.
I do not know Haskell enough to fully judge this, so maybe someone can correct me, but that seems _very_ minimal. From what I understand, it doesn't even have arithmetic operations, it "executes" incorrect programs without any error (try repl "())") and also it doesn't have any kind of scoping, for example in the following code a function argument is bound in the global (and only) environment:

Main> repl "(begin ((fun (x y) y) 1 2) y)"

([("x",Number 1),("y",Number 2),("begin",Fun),("car",Fun),("cdr",Fun),("cons",Fun),("cond",Fun),("def",Fun),("eval",Fun),("fun",Fun),("t",Symbol "t"),("quote",Fun)],Number 2)

I don't think it's fair to call this a Lisp at all at this point. There is a nice writeup of implementing a Lisp in Python by Peter Norvig, where at least the most basic things are implemented correctly (and the code is documented): http://norvig.com/lispy.html

Also, I get errors even with some very simple statements that theoretically seem to be implemented like:

Main> repl "(cons 1 2)"

([("begin",Fun),("car",Fun),("cdr",Fun),("cons",Fun),("cond",Fun),("def",Fun),("eval",Fun),("fun",Fun),("t",Symbol "t"),("quote",Fun)],List

[Exception: lisp.hs:48:8-48: Irrefutable pattern failed for pattern (ctx', [v', (Main.List vs')])

Am I doing something wrong here?
I agree with you on a lot of points, especially the following two:

1. College doesn't guarantee success.

2. Not everyone should go to college.

But here's where we diverge: I believe we'll never get to the point where everyone will "succeed". We all want our kids to succeed, but our definition of success is usually based on things like "have a high-paying job", "be important", "be powerful" or "be famous". This is because we want our kids to be happy and we come up with cookie-cutter solutions for happiness: "have a high-paying job" supplants "not have to have headaches about money", "be important", "be powerful" and "be famous" supplant "be harder to oppress by society or more powerful people".

To me, that seems to be a more fundamental problem than the problem of education and one a lot harder to solve. Disclaimer: Please don't take this as a criticism; on the contrary, when you have two important problems and you can see the solution to the one that's easier, it's a lot better to try to solve it than to sit down and lament the fact that you can't solve the harder one.

That said, I believe that we should define "success" differently for our kids. I believe we should give them a different goal: happiness. Believe it or not, you don't have to achieve greatness to be happy. As long as you can enjoy your work, your family and your life in general, you can be happy, without Leaving Your Footprints In The Sands Of History.

That doesn't mean we shouldn't teach our kids to strive to achieve as much as they can. It just means that we should try to encourage them to look for their own path to happiness. It shouldn't matter if theirs doesn't happen to pass through fame, power, influence or riches, as long as it leads them to happiness.
A similar legislation was also passed in Malaysia not too far back. I would not be surprised if the same situation occurred there as well. However, enforcement would be another matter.
The Little Red (Face)Book
The Future of Advertising will be Integrated
MIDI would be overkill. A pitch-duration table along with the code to vibrate the speaker at the right frequency for the right amount of time would be far simpler.
I wrote one post on landing page optimization. You may find it relevant: http://visualwebsiteoptimizer.com/split-testing-blog/landing...

(I also did a Mixergy course on the same.)
I wonder if there's a way to use a short-range radio signal on a public band (like CB, if that still exists) to do local sharing at crowded places. Can the radios in iPhones and typical Android phones even do such a thing?
The surprising thing here isn't that the yellow badges can't use the cafeteria, it's that OP's group could. The rule "the cafeteria is only for Apple employees" would be pretty natural and easy to enforce. If you want to make it so everybody has the same benefits, the easy way to do that would be to remove cafeteria privileges from OP's company. As for "and this person can witness this daily", if OP weren't muckracking, the yellow badges wouldn't know that his group was getting extra benefits they weren't. Anyway, how do they "witness this daily"? It's a big campus and you'd have to go out of your way to go to the cafeteria if you had no access or business there.

Consider that I don't have a company car. I'm sure I could "witness it daily" that other people are being driven to work in their company cars if I knew where to look for it. But since I don't know about it, I feel fine.
Within a few years I expect to see legislation which mandates a minimum level of participation in U.S. government debt for all retirement accounts and pension funds.
Clickable link http://173.255.212.42/
We've started referring to it as the "RPython translation toolchain" which will hopefully reduce confusion.
I agree. When human designers are not around, however, and I urgently need a 5-color diverging, colorblind safe, print friendly palette, I go to http://colorbrewer2.org/
EA bought Shawn Fanning's company Rupture a few years ago and they used Erlang.
Making Boston Awesome for Entrepreneurs: Offer More Cash
My respect for Intuit has really gone up reading this.

Square has an awful lot of momentum behind it and is incredibly well-executed. Distribution through the Apple store is a good example of how well they're doing.

For a large company like Intuit to launch their own service that, at least in transaction terms, is doing roughly as well (in pure transaction terms at any rate) is an achievement (IMHO). Sure they can leverage off their Quicken/QuickBooks franchises (not to mention Mint) but as Microsoft has demonstrated time and time again: you can still fail when you have a massive incumbent advantage.

Plus I like the competition. It's good for us, the consumers.
[YC W11] Stealth mobile startup looking for hackers
We're a well-funded pre-Series A startup that is changing the way that mobile apps are developed.

We are hiring skilled, ambitious hackers who are looking for a challenge. OpenGL, iOS, Android NDK, and compilers experience are a huge plus. We are offering a competitive salary, benefits, and equity package.

If you're interested, send us an email at bayareahacker@gmail.com with links to what you've done in the past.

We are based in San Francisco, the head of Silicon Valley.