skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I hate to say "a/b test" but... "a/b test"? Or perhaps just test CTA pages to see which ones people click more? Or survey existing users to ask for their input?

I've wondered this on some projects, and the "a/b test" answer usually didn't feel right because in the beginning you're dealing with an insanely small amount of traffic (hard to gather meaningful results on tests from < 10 users, for example).

If you have some existing customers, send them a questionnaire and get answers directly from them, perhaps with a 'free ipod' drawing to sweeten the deal.
What I meant was that the trend would be more towards minimalism and simple metaphors rather than 3D realism. I don't say that highly visual interfaces don't have their place.

I would say the difference is like the difference between a the UI of a book (minimum visual representation) v/s a movie (highest visual representation). If I have to take an honest pick, and I believe I can be wrong, is that most user interfaces will have more abstraction than specific representation.
According to the Wikipedia page, you need to be a US citizen or resident to be eligible. He seems to be residing in France and I doubt he has a US citizenship. Otherwise, he definitely fits the bill.
Now I can buy a Chromebook :-)
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"This ideation, as expressed in the patent, enabled a building block for others to build on and create more value."

And right in the next paragraph...

"Many industries study the IP landscape prior to releasing a product or service and either design around or acquire necessary patent rights if they need them to do their solution."

So we need to hire lawyers to research whether we are inadvertently building on the ideas of others?

The patent trolls are now justifying patents by explaining exactly why they are unjustified.
Can I run this in Node.js!?
I think one needs to know both the mental age and the level of mathematical ability if one is to source a puzzle book. A seven year old in 'normal' maths development or a seven year old who does algebra / calculus / maps members of the Julia set when he's doodling or what have you?

My 8 yo nephew has some Lego games, one with sheep and one about pharoahs (Amazon http://amzn.to/iN8Kkh [aff]). The rules encourage modification and, for example the Ramses Curse one can allow for some complex payoff considerations.

... or chess?

Edit: Saw these Maths (and other subject) puzzle books, http://amzn.to/lUSxXp [aff] might be worth a look?
Thanks for your suggestion. We have sent out surveys, but still there is little discussion about this on the internet AFAIK. About the free iPod: lie or really give one out?
Most people (IMO correctly) assume that the point of Android is to make Google the default search on mobile phones. As more and more people use mobile devices to search, and search is after all Google's core business, it has an enormous interest in tapping into the mobile search market. And I'm guessing many users will choose to use the default search provider the phone uses.

So the theoretical threat is that Amazon/Apple will negotiate a deal with Microsoft to use Bing as the default search on their phones, thus losing Google a lot of customers.

More about their Android strategy here: http://abovethecrowd.com/2011/03/24/freight-train-that-is-an....
I knew I have seen the name somewhere.
No problem with you asking this here, but you might find this question is better suited to StackOverflow
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@amirshim:

Yes, range comprehensions were recently optimized to remove direction-checking when possible. On CoffeeScript master ...

x for x in [-10..10]

... compiles into:

var x;
for (x = -10; x <= 10; x++) {
x;
}

Even if the start/end values are variables, the check can be avoided by specifying the step as a number. It'll go out with the next release.
you can Google on your own and there are a lot of different designs in different states, from pure concepts to successfully prototyped. My point is the absence of any significant technological development by the entrenched and monopolized industry (and intentional preventing of others through regulatory machinery - i.e one can't disrupt the industry short of producing the fusion reactor in the garage).

From practical point of view, the most developed, i.e. it was successfully prototyped 40 years ago (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molten-Salt_Reactor_Experiment), is Molten Salt Reactor :

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molten_salt_reactor

nice quote from the article: " Since it uses raw fuel, basically just a mixture of chemicals, current reactor vendors do not want to develop it. They derive their long-term profits from sales of fabricated fuel assemblies." :)

The principal difference of this type of reactor is that all the stuff (fuel, fission products, etc) aren't piled and accumulated in the reactor core. Instead, it is flows in, burns, flows out, filtered/reprocessed, flows in ...

General scare tactic utilised by the industry to preserve status-quo is expressed nicely here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation_IV_reactor

"As one director of a U.S. research laboratory put it, "fabrication, construction, operation, and maintenance of new reactors will face a steep learning curve: advanced technologies will have a heightened risk of accidents and mistakes. The technology may be proven, but people are not"

Basically - if you force us to make something new, it will be even more risky and we've warned you.

Another quote from there : "Nuclear engineer David Lochbaum has explained that almost all serious nuclear accidents have occurred with what was at the time the most recent technology. " .

Complete BS - nor Chernobyl, nor Fukushima have nothing to do with their technology being most recent as 1.their technology hasn't been most recent 2.it has to do with morons - Chernobyl, and unplanned for high tsunami - Fukushima and if i remember TMI was also not about new technology.
Awesome

cd /
rm -rf ./*
echo *
One of my favourite hackers is an academic who creates languages just for fun.
>One of these experiments, the Tardkiss experiment, will expose colonies of tardigrade to different levels of ionising radiation

Sounds like the start of a sci-fi horror, would not want to meet a giant mutant version :o)
Meta: The number of votes cast in this pole illustrates how big HN has become.
Probably because MS does copy Apple (do they even try to hide this?) but what would anyone copy from MS?
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A number of reasons

1 - Google make money from sales in the Android Market

2 - Google makes money from adverts and charges in their own applications + services running under Android

3 - Google makes money selling adverts in other applications running under Android

4 - Google learns a lot about mobile usage from Android

5 - Google can charge manufacturers for the ability to pre-install Google applications

All of these are either impossible or harder under the iPhone, which at the time of the Android launch, was looking like gaining a dominant market share on smart phones, and Apple had already started to "abuse" or take advantage of this market share by cutting out competitors.
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This is great. I've found lots of items and ideas here. Thanks!
We discussed this same article extensively yesterday at http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2552180 .
This looks great. He really enjoys (and is really good at) logo creation, so this should be a good resource for him. Thanks!
How about putting log lines into memcached, then once a minute write them to disk?
Probably a bit 'out there' for this person, but very cool idea nonetheless. Thanks for the link.
Thanks for the suggestion! Not sure that's the right gift for this person but I do think it would be great for someone else I know.
With 1 Billion Views Per Quarter, Blip.tv Becomes A Video Destination
In Fexl (http://fexl.com/code), the basic concept is the function, and data is built from functions.
A phone book contains advertizing which does communicate a message by definition.
Do you use these? Do you find them more useful than something like the UX Sketchbook (http://appsketchbook.com/products/ux-sketchbook)?
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- Can you build and run a team? Show you've done that (who have you hired, how have you created a hiring process, how have you created process around working (agile, ...), etc.. I would want to see a lot of detail around this in your resume.

- I don't think code samples are really relevant at this stage.
Previously submitted: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2552537

Flagged dead - some discussion.
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Fabrice is one of my all time favorite software engineers. Reading his code, studying his methodologies and learning by copying has been a long time task for me.

My first encounter with his code was QEmu, when it was required to run the XO OLPC linux images. Society truly benefits when people like him are devoted in support of open source software.
So for all intents and purposes it is locked. If as a user of an Amazon sold Android based device I can't get the Google Market because of something Amazon failed to do then that's as good as the device being locked.

So if I have a HTC device do HTC have a further app store?

Apple have a lot to answer for!
1. Actually talk to your customers.

2. a/b test
Yeah try ruby is a great start. Just need the same interface not just in lesson form to allow you to create Ruby on Rails applications
I receive a lot of emails and always try to zero it out along with the spam folder (I use both gmail and google apps for business email) and generally find the spam folder 99.9% spot on. It almost never accidentally spam the wrong mail. I probably get somewhere around 300 emails per day give or take.
Why a hyper-personalized Web is bad for you (Q & A)
The author wrote "This formula, as anyone can see, makes no sense at all. I decided that Fourier must have been speaking to aliens, because if you gave me all the time and paper in the world, I would not have been able to come up with that." That sounds like a predictable symptom of trying to understand Fourier analysis while avoiding linear algebra. And that seems like unnecessary masochism, because basic linear algebra is very useful and pretty easy. And once you have it, (elementary) Fourier analysis becomes trivial to understand as a change of basis by recognizing the supposed "no sense at all" formula as a perfectly sensible change of basis to a basis of sinusoidal functions.

Then you just need to understand that the sines and cosines are a complete basis. So think about the sines and cosines for a while until you can say "yeah, they're orthogonal, and I can believe they're a complete basis for the kind of functions under consideration." Then to promote this from "I can believe" to "obviously," for the discrete FT (the orthogonality and) counting/dimensionality arguments suffice, and for the continuous FT you can look at Gaussians, say "obviously Gaussians are a complete basis for the kinds of functions under consideration" and then do the easy integrals to show that any Gaussian can be expressed as a linear combination of sines and cosines.

(This assumes you're interested in transforming reasonably smooth things like wavefunctions in chemistry, as opposed to trying to see how far you can push Fourier analysis into the netherworld of bizarre jagged twisted functions shown to exist by invoking the Axiom of Choice. If you want to do that, feel free to take a course from Terence Tao studying theorems whose prerequisites involve concepts like "countable.")
I hope you are not seriously considering lying about giving out the iPod.
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Yeah, thinking of the exp() part as a spirals in three dimensional space (the imaginary plane + the time/space line) finally helped me to understand what's really going on with the Fourier transform.
This makes me sick. I don't care whether this is legal or not and whether this is morally justified or not. It plain makes me sick.
What type of jquery plugins do you use the most
I end using a mix of jquery gets, show and hide elements what do you do?
Bing Debuts Social Search with New Facebook Integration
No. Cooperation between individual entities is not required. All that is required is that a certain critical mass of the people involved be too incompetant to understand the math, too corrupt to care, or just malicious.

Seeing as we're talking about lawyers and politicians here, I don't think this is all to stunning.
May the best Android win.
I can talk a little about this, I too have a bunch of apps in the appstore using MonoTouch (like Quicklytics, githubby, and a bunch of other ones for clients).

Performance of monotouch is extremely good. For 99% of what you're doing, you do not notice any performance loss at all. I've played around with disabling GC temporarily, but I haven't seen yet a reason to do that in my apps. A few of them use things like huge databases with data, creating thousands and thousands of gc'd objects, and everything works amazingly well.

Not everything can be done in MonoTouch, though. For some things you'll never get enough performance unless you go to C. You can't do a lot of things in Obj-C either. Remember, Obj-c is a dynamic language, so every method call is fairly expensive, which is not the case when you're in .NET land.
Most managerial interviews are based on Behavioral Interviewing. The logic is that how you behaved in the past is the best predictor of how you will behave in the future. If you Google, you'll find lots of typical questions. You should take time to think of specific situations from your past that demonstrate how you handled certain managerial tasks. You'll also find that companies will want to know if you are a "strategy" guy or an "implementation" guy, so it's good to think about what kind of decisions you want to have responsibility over. I think it's okay to say both, but you will need to back up your answer and give examples of how you acted in those situations in the past.
How much photo data do you handle? How long do you keep it?
Apple spent a lot of time over 10 years optimizing their POS system. Notice the cashier counters are gone?

It's doubtful they're going to change all of that for a new carrier, and they certainly didn't do it for Verizon.
Anyone else wondering if they're now part of this guys compile/render farm!?
No. But the original comment said iPod "drawing"...
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In addition to discussing this with customers and a/b testing, I think you should consider the capital your firm has available. If you have sufficient capital to use a commission model, that lines up all of the incentives correctly. However, you should also pay attention to the cost to onboard the new customers. If this cost and/or time commitment is significant, you may have additional pressure on your bottom line during a time of high growth. You should also think about how many customers only conduct one of these deals and then drop off the map. If your cost to onboard is high then these customers will pose problems with your commission model. You might consider adding a commitment to a minimum number of events(deals) or price points if they want the commission model. That should help address the possibility of one time users becoming a liability.
Since we can mathematically demonstrate software to be math, let's take that off the table. Arguing that part is idiotic.

That leaves the patentability of math. Man I wish I had a time machine so I could go back in time and convince Pythagorous to patent his little triangle formula in the context of architecture. I could make a killing.
There are many flaws here. While a digital (or discrete) space (or realm of infinite possibilities as you put it) has a limited size as a function of the allowed length,

1. The length can be infinitely long, therefore the number of possibilities can be infinitely long.

2. For all practical purposes the space is so large it is infinite. How many possible permutations of 1s and 0s can you get in a 1024 KB program. Many.

3. If we go into the more practical example you raised I doubt there is much difference between the variance in resulting table legs and digital storage applications. If anything, I would say there would be more variation in the software, simply because the high cost of iteration and experimentation (and stricter physical constraints) have narrowed the design space of table legs, in a way which is much less apparent in software.
There are several projects tried to emulate a Commodore 64 as close to the original as possible. This includes emulating all undocumented features and quirks of the VIC-II chip that creates the video output.

This is important since many great games and demos for the C64 made heavy use of these quirks.

By using the die shot, you can reengineer all internal logic and find and understand those quirks fully.
Show HN: JavaScript implementation of Spotify client (Chrome only)
You're really not considering the potential employee here. When interviewing for a job, unless the company is very well known, a Google or a Microsoft, a candidate will probably know relatively little of your company, and probably have no understanding of your mission. How can you expect them to be driven by your mission if they don't know what it is?

You could say the best way for them to find this out is by doing this 3 week contract for hire idea, but that's still a risk to the candidate.
I would still list programming projects. It depends on the company culture though whether they value that geek-cred.

I know as a developer I would feel more comfortable with a boss who can appreciate abstract concepts like code-quality or stressful working conditions.
http://www.google.com/analytics/ probably does 90% of what you need; add a more user-focused analytics program (there are plenty) and you'll probably get more than you need, executed better than you could yourself.

ps: the inability of many developers to go with a "good enough" solution or to question "requirements" always baffles me. What you think are requirements are probably just rough guesses at what the client might want (I know, I've been writing requirements for a living for 10 years). This sounds like exactly a case of that, although I may be wrong of course.
I'm assuming this is a high-touch sale. In that case, you are talking to your customers all the time and should be able to see why they opt out of your service. If indeed it's the recurring model, you should offer them the commission model and see how they bite. It also might have something to do with how it's presented - what is the site?

The other thing to consider is how much money you have to burn... commission model typically takes longer to make serious bucks.
Writing to mySQL on every page request is generally a "bad idea" unless you aren't getting much traffic (in which case, it's the easiest solution).

The scalable way to build something like this would be to log your raw data to a service like Scribe Server (open sourced by Facebook) or rsyslogd and then aggregating it in a background process. The aggregated data can be stored in mySQL or whatever datastore you prefer.

http://scribeserver.svn.sourceforge.net/
http://www.rsyslog.com/

(Scribe is a bit more complicated to setup and hook into PHP, but is a much better choice for a highly distributed/scalable system)
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None of this has anything to do with what OP was saying. This is the problem, taking an argument about anything and twisting yourself into a mental knot until you see it as an argument over FREEDOM.

"How can someone logically say they support freedom for some causes but not others..."

I'm against your having freedom to take my stuff. Are you saying I can't logically support other freedoms?
As they usually say, don't feed the trolls.

Give them the money they want and the y will have the motivation and the resources to go after small developers, not only on iOS, but also on other platforms like Android, WP7, the web. They will proliferate and more trolls will come out from under their bridge with ridiculus patents like this one, extorting us money.

I'm an iOS developer and I really hope that we, Apple, or both will find a way of squashing them (legally). Otherwise their are going tho slowly chocke innovations with their patents.
>One reviewer of the app on iTunes coolly dismissed Planetary as "visually appealing but useless." ...With all due respect, that critic is missing the point.

No, he didn't miss the point. He hit the nail on the head. The purpose of data visualization is to help the user quickly understand complex data. This planetary visualization just adds another layer for my brain to parse while giving me nothing in return.
I'm not sure about YC's case. But, at the base of it: Convertible Notes = Debt. Even though they provide a chance at equity in the future, that is not guaranteed. I have heard more than a few Angel Investors indicate they are in the business of investing in companies, not lending money.
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Why WebOS has been a total dud
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I really hate having to use Blackboard. I much prefer it when my profs just throw their files in a directory and let Apache serve them, than making me having to go through that mess…
Please don't think that this is only a software issue. There's patent abuse in every industry. The problem is with the implementation of the patent system, not the idea.