skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Could you please expand your acronyms?

I interpret NSA as National Security Agency and NASA as the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (two agencies within the US Government). However, considering these are two entire agencies, it does not make sense to say that either is 'written in python'. They may use Python, but I know that they also rely heavily on other languages including C, C++, Java, C#, OCaml, and assembly among others.
Since this is Hacker News: https://github.com/kothic/kothic-js#readme should make it fairly easy to render your own map with latin characters.
If you're getting ripped off, you're going to a bad tapas restaurant.

Speaking from experience, a meal at a good, appropriately-priced tapas place should cost the same or slightly less than a meal at a regular three-course restaurant, and should offer what seems like an endless stream of food!
It simply doesn't make business sense for Apple to build a suite of web apps. Their business is built on hardware sales. Web apps commoditize hardware.

They don't want customers asking themselves why they're buying shiny expensive Apple hardware when they could get 95% of the same experience on any computer or mobile device with a modern browser.
This is not an interesting thought for someone who has a degree.
As far as I know (and I haven't read too much about QC, so I might very well be totally off), QCs are only useful for a very specific set of problems. And none of those seem to map to FB problems right now.

Will that change? Sure. Will FB do internal research with QCs? Maybe, once they've progressed past the vaporware state. (Sidenote - if we observe QC less, will development work better? ;)

But a working QC will not put FB out of business any time soon. The hardware is only a tiny piece of the puzzle of quantum computing. Algorithms for QC are rare, hard to develop, and the field is in its absolute infancy.
I suppose that's true, I think I was looking at things with more of a lens towards music.
Techniques for idiomatic Python code
Ask HN: Who is interviewing for YC Reject?
I was wondering who else has been offered a (or even had their) YC Reject interview and if anyone has heard who in terms of investors and press will be at the YC Reject demo day, if its still going ahead.

has her fingers crossed for the Winter Y Combinator still ;)
> So they have some R&D there.

As I outlined above and which you are purposely and blatantly ignoring, our relationship is more than economic.

Ireland doesn't face an existential threat from anti-Western regimes, nor does it have the same military relationship that we do with Israel. The situations could not be more different.
Thanks! This improves it a bit though for me the slider is now above its track on Firefox. I'll keep at it - my GL skills are a bit ahead of my CSS at this stage!
> As a developer you don't want to start at 0 reviews every time there is a OS update. Reviews are pretty important, and if it periodically looks like you don't have them it would be very bad.

This is not true. Sure, if you were the ONLY developer with 0 reviews on a new OS version and everyone else had a bunch, it would look bad, but if every app had 0 reviews, you would be no different. And if you had a large user base on one version of the OS you'd likely have many reviews quickly.

> You should not see any difference in the different versions of iOS. Though it might perform differently on different hardware.

Certainly things are often mostly backwards compatible, but there are often changes at the API layer which break some things or add features that are available on the new version that weren't on the old one. For example, Apple added the backgrounding/multitasking mojo with iOS 4 but until an app was updated from iOS 3 and could make use of those APIs, the functionality wasn't enabled. Does it make sense for users of iOS 3 to see reviews of an app, not yet updated for iOS 4, of iOS 4 users bitching about how the app doesn't multitask right when multitasking wasn't enabled in iOS 3?

> I feel as if Apple hasn't really done very much to help the developer note what platforms they are targeting in an easy way. If you don't want iPhone 3g users to use the app, they shouldn't be able to download it that that device in the first place etc.

This is a decent idea, however most things DO work from one OS version to another, so barring people from using an app on their new device seems like it would often be an artificial limitation. Further, it is tough to beta test an OS if there are no apps to run on it. I think this concept of splitting the reviews would solve the problem of clutter in the current review system without barring people from doing the testing that ought to be done.

Further, some kind of hybrid could be done, such as maintaining the star rating across OS versions (so people could have an accurate representation of the general reliability, etc. of a given app) without clogging the review systems of different OS versions with irrelevant data and unwanted complaining about incompatibility with the new beta.
Totally agree. As a technical lead I tend to stay atleast one major release behind the lastest. However, you should try 2008R2. Its pretty darn good. :)
Even after doing all that the prize money is for getting the company name right.
TDD is very similare to define the use cases which make sense to di first. The difference is that they are expressed in a very formal way that can be used as validation test.

In such example, the benefit would be that a change in the date matching algorithm could be done later and rely on the unit tests to detect a regression.
Innovation challenge: Data Design Diabetes
To be honest, I think the browser support picture is changing. An increasing number of people are developing apps where they have some idea of what their target audience is like. Greater than 40% of the browsing public is now using Firefox, Chrome or Safari.

Flexbox is already in that bundle of browsers (and it rocks :)

calc is in IE9+ and Firefox.

Chrome and Firefox are in autoupdating very short release cycles (or, at least, Firefox is getting there rapidly).

I think the ideas in HSS are interesting, and I understand the motivation. But, the world is rapidly changing. Not everyone is going to be able to support the latest standards in their apps, but I think we're moving past the point where most developers will need to support a 10 year old browser. Time will tell!

(obDisclaimer: I'm a Mozillian)
The other thing, in terms of elementary schooling, is that it is far more cost effective to distribute paper books than eBook readers to hundreds of children. It's possible that a nigh-indestructible e-paper could work, but only if it's incredibly cheap, and the electronic formats of the books are much less expensive than traditional hard copies.

If 5 children out of a class of 30 lose a book a year, and each book costs between $5-$10, replacement costs are not substantial. If 5 children out of a class of 30 lose a kindle a year, then we're talking serious money.
Ultimately, Groupon needs to understand this and work this into their sales script/recipe so new restaurants/customers can prepare for the Groupon event.

However, they may be too busy preparing for IPO so the investors "get paid".
When you look at the $1bil they made last year in funding, and what amount they listed in their IPO paperwork, they certainly look and feel like a ponzi scheme. I hope they are not, but it feels that way. I'm staying as far away from that stock as possible.
What's up with the 48 year olds?
Welcome to a Faster Web
Oh look, another 'Groupon isn't magic' post.

Yes, you have to actually work to maintain those new customers, just like always. In fact, you'll probably have to work a little harder than normal, since their first experience at your business is at a huge discount.

But treat them right and let them know what they're in for and it's no different than other other coupon scheme designed to lure customers in. Oh, except for being a huge buzzword right now and attracting more customers than would normally be possible.

Yes, you heard that right, I'm saying that Groupon can be a really good thing for your business if you jump on now. But ONLY if you have properly prepared for it, and negotiated with Groupon correctly.

Don't let them badger you into a bad deal for your business. You would be better with no deal than a bad deal.
Welcome Sam, Garry, Emmett, and Justin
one of my interests is startups that are in the mobile SaaS space..do you feel comfortable giving out the firm's name?
> this has not happened.

Would you know if it did?

Waters himself wasn't really appreciated for a decade or so. Movies with zero marketing budget don't get recognized immediately.
Even worse, there appears to be at least one site that is selling access ($7) to beta iOS releases, which surely isn't allowed by the TOS: http:// iosactivations. com/
As they say on their front page: "The part of the various browsers we want to NOT be different, the rendering engine, would be shared among all of the browsers".
I don't see why older platforms can't be supported should the compiler vendor decide it's worth the trouble. Any architecture can be made coherent if you sacrifice performance. The compiler can conform to the standard by being very conservative. Just a question of cost.
I went in with my metaphorical trigger finger on the "flag" button, but it does seem to add a new and useful perspective that I haven't seen yet. Explaining Groupon as a network of loans makes a lot of sense.

In fact, as someone who has resisted the characterization of Groupon as a "Ponzi scheme" on the grounds that I prefer the term actually mean something specific, this has gone a ways to explaining how that may actually be true. But the interesting scheme isn't so much in the investors, where people have been talking about it, but in the way that businesses are being paid with revenues from the subsequent Groupons, and so on. There's a lot of loan risk in a lot of directions on Groupon's balance sheet. It seems to me they don't have to be off by much for it to crumble. "Collapse" in the title is not just a linkbait word, the author really outlines how the whole thing might very quickly collapse.
Netflix is mainstream.
There are 148 of them, I'd wager there are a couple with super-high stats who throw off the average.
I'm not sure how it matters what part of the company went wrong. As a customer, you only care about the end product. You don't care whether an owner or a waiter failed to do their job. The responsibility for the failure always lies on the business.
Whiley, a programming language with extended static checking
Yes, although it's also common in the UK for restaurants of any level to add 10% to the bill for larger groups of perhaps 6+ or 8+ people in a way that is clearly not meant to be optional.

I never quite understand people who always pay 10% for service here, though. If I have received good service, I will tip perhaps 15% or more, partly to reward the good work financially and partly simply because it shows that I appreciated their efforts and encourages similar behaviour in future. Likewise, I will drop a tip to 5% or even not leave anything at all if service has been poor. In a happy coincidence, this means I tend to be regarded as a good tipper in the kind of place I want to go back to, and a poor tipper only where it doesn't matter. :-)

I also only ever tip in cash, directly into the hands of the waiting staff I've been served by. What they choose to do with it after that is up to them, but you'll never catch me adding some arbitrary amount of "service" onto a bill that's going to be paid on a card machine and go straight into the hands of the management.
Is the decrease in number of developers due to real scarcity or due to fewer people that actively using Stack Overflow?
When malware saved the day
Hardly seems like they get better with age, just more active in educating other developers. The quality of posts doesn't look related to age at all. As far as I can tell, that should be the parameter to measure if you are going to make any sort of induction about the quality of a dev from their SO profile.

And obviously, the fact that this only takes data from SO means whatever the conclusions, they only hold true for the kind of people that post there.
I did this exercise on my blog at http://programmingpraxis.com/2009/02/27/mark-v-shaney/.
It seems his main point is this:

Google Offers pays merchants faster (80% of the money goes to the merchant right away, vs 33% with Groupon). The OP expects this will force Groupon to make the same deal with merchants, which will change their business model, which will put them out of business. That or Groupon won't change its business model, and Google Offers will run them out of business by virtue of this better deal.

IMHO, going from that small point to "Groupon is poised for collapse" is just a bit hyperbolic.
By looking at the Reputation by Age graph it looks more like there are just a few really good older developers. The rest probably are so out of touch they do not participate in developer communities such as Stack Overflow.

In my experience it has been that older developers hold on to old coding habits that are today considered dangerous and are reluctant to change that.
Geeky cookies
The problem is that there is no guarantee any of those customers are actually new. It appears that in many cases, most are ALREADY your customers and you're simply giving them discounts.
Watch Live US Open Championship Golf live
[ldng: put some whitespace before code on hacker news: it indents it and the asterisks don't disappear.]

I infer that ldng has a 64 bit machine. On my 32 bit machine, Python 3.1 is faster than 2.6 for these examples. On a 64 bit machine I get similar results to ldng's, with Python3 being slower. If I wrap long() around the x in the example, Python2 becomes as slow as Python3.

Note that taking the cube of lots of big integers is not typical for many people: it generates very large integers that have to be in Python2's special long type on a 32 bit machine. On a 64 bit machine they stay as normal ints in Python2, which are much faster. Python3 has a single automagic int type, which seems to internally convert to the arbitrary precision type sooner than it has to on 64 bit machines(?).

Examples more typical of my use would wrap float() around the x, or change the example to add up 3x instead of x^3. These examples are all faster in Python3 for me. Faster still is to use numpy (which is now supported in Python3).

Summary: the people who would be affected by this regression have both a 64 bit machine, and do a lot of exact integer arithmetic on integers that can be represented in 64 bits, but not 32.
Geeks at the Beach: 10 Summer Reads About Technology and Your Life
My wife has the same issue with it. She gets too bound up in the day-to-day, and feels too obligated to keep up to date, which the site makes nearly impossible to do efficiently.

Then there's the typical drama on any social network, the annoyances with closed systems (we're happy with email and caldav, thanks, anything can use them!), and the endless, endless spam on the news feed. I always hid the feed with my user CSS file, and stayed on top of it, but she'd get roped back in when it occasionally broke. Being social is addictive, and she's more social than I am.
I'm a little surprised to see that they provide more answers, but that they aren't of better quality. I would have expected experience to show more.

Of course, we only know they are older, not that they have more years of experience.
I thought iOS and OSX had versioned frameworks etc exactly to avoid issues like this. Yet every beta seems to bring nasty crashers from core functionality. How come?
The disclaimer at the bottom suggests to me that perhaps there is a second part of the puzzle, which occurs after finding the "answer key" and signing an NDA. So I'm pretty sure no one will pick up $10K for solving a linear system.
If walling off your group is equivalently difficult to creating a yahoo/google group, then yeah.

Facebook's entire premise is that people LIKE being heard/seen and LIKE seeing/hearing others, in their social graph.

What is really needed is multiple distinct social graphs per user with distinct walls between them, done elegantly... this isn't an easy problem to solve.

There was a really nice presentation from a Googler (who subsequently moved to Facebook) which described this problem eloquently... but I can't seem to find the link.
This totally changed how I used git, wish I'd known about it from the start. Also emacs users should check out magit, which has a good 'add -p' and 'checkout -p' style of working
John Carmack: PlayStation Vita Won’t Compare to Phones in Two Years
Age correlates with experience.

If you've been something longer, you've had time to learn what works and what doesn't, and why.

Thus, you can do a better job at guiding people who are newer to the material.
It's interesting to me how many news articles are out lately taking a negative tone toward Groupon. I'm sure that has a lot to do with the upcoming IPO (and I won't be an investor based on the numbers), but I thought I'd share my experience with Groupon, because I've never had anything close to this sort of problem.

We had a $20 for $40 deal at a restaurant owned by a local restauranteur. There were no restrictions other than that the Groupon couldn't be used for the tip, which, on the Groupon indicated that the tip should be made against the total bill because "groupon customers are good tippers" or something like that, I found that statement kinda silly, and I just thought it was common knowledge in the US that you always tip on the pre-discount price.

The place had piqued my interest because it was nearby and it wasn't a chain nor did it appear to be owned by one of the larger businesses that plant unique, but rather predictable, restaurants. That's unusual around here.

There were little/no reviews of this place on Yelp and I can say with certainty that there is no way I would have tried this place at this time were it not for the Groupon. The restaurant was "new", which usually equates to a long line and an unprepared kitchen staff. I have children, and frankly, when there's an opportunity to take my bride out for a night on the town, I'm going to go someplace that I know will be good. Nothing is worse than setting up a date, a baby-sitter, and then getting crappy food/service and overpaying for it. Because of said baby-sitting fees, I also won't venture to a place that's far away. I'd rather spend the money on the meal, not the college kid who sits on my couch and watches TV while the kids sleep.

This place ended up being fantastic. It was also inexpensive even without the Groupon. So to point #1: The only reason I went was because of the discount, but point #2, we've already been back once and even later purchased a $50 gift card for my dad on Father's day. I think a lot of the issues with point #2 have to do with the small business in question. We didn't have any limited "Groupon" menu (and I wouldn't buy a deal that's structured that way ... there would be too much of a temptation for the owner to cheapen it up if they were having a bad Groupon experience), nor were there any alcohol limits (which is really common).

Groupon worked great, at least for me, in discovering a new local business. We're planning yet another trip back in two weeks. My bride and I both wrote a thorough Yelp review afterward, we liked the place so much. Is it a good value for that business or would that money have been better spent advertising in other ways? I have no idea/that probably depends on the business. If he's got the working capital to run at a loss for 6 months, I'm willing to bet this place sticks around, provided the food quality doesn't change (the price could go up substantially, and I'd still continue to eat there).
You could use polymorphism - but that scatters the transition logic to the four winds.

I guess pattern matching would work well (haven't used it that way myself).

An actual state transition table seems the most straightforward way to represent it - but I agree, it's striking that there isn't native support for it. Perhaps there isn't a better way to do it...?

EDIT just thinking, a state machine can be modeled as a regular expression (they are formally equivalent). You could represent them as productions; or, as regular expressions. Composed of the input symbols causing the transitions - the states are implicit; but you could associate a function with each symbol, by inserting it afterwards; the 'symbol' itself could be a function that return true/false, for matches:

isStart() setup() ( !isEnd() processInput() )* isEnd() teardown() | err()

I would guess that Lua deals with these problems a lot (as an embedded game scripting engine, both enemy AI and UI logic might be modeled well by state machines (in part) - perhaps it has a good way of handling them, or at least, good idioms have developed.
In languages with first class functions and hash tables, you can use this instead (here in Lua):

state1.goto = {
state2 = function() ... end,
state3 = function() ... end
}

state1.goto.state2()

Much cleaner (even though the Lua syntax for function literals is a bit heavy. It would look much nicer in CoffeeScript...).
But would you have known the significance at the time? Google at 10 employees consisted of a handful of scraggly guys* typing on a computer all day, and a couple other scraggly guys talking on the phone all day to get deals done (hosting contracts, funding, etc). There's nothing that looks interesting or unique about an early-stage startup--it's just people in an office. Compare that to a zoo that has plenty of room for kids to run and scream and see things they've never seen before.

I'm not saying it's useless to take kids to startup offices -- it socializes the value of entrepreneurship -- but it's not quite the same experience as seeing the size of an african elephant for the first time, or looking a gorllia in the eye.

* I use "guys" in a gender-neutral sense here; I don't know what the gender ratio was at Google at 10 employees.
Agreed. It's a very insightful article on the pluses and minuses of their business model.
Happy Endings and the Nonsense of Realism
"I think that they've picked as eminently a suitable hardware spec as they could for that,” Carmack told the pub. “They're going to have you program for it like a console, so it's going to seem twice as powerful as a smartphone with the exact same chips in there."

"But of course, by the time they actually ship, there may be smartphones or these tablets with twice as much power as what they're shipping with on there. And a year or two after that, it's going to look pretty pokey."
Freshbooks welcomes Apple to the *Cloud* ; parodies Apple's 1981 ad to IBM.
I've worked in a building with motion sensor lights. It means you have to wave every few minutes of the lights will go out.
That's almost always the case with coupons, though. Sure, you can exclude current customers under some coupon schemes, but you risk alienating them... And losing an existing customer is costly, since you put so much into gaining them in the first place.
you can start doing independent research as has been suggested. you need to believe in yourself, however, and trust that the plan will pan out in the end. maybe it won't but did you have something to lose?

edit: also a valid set of questions might be: are you after recognition or personal intellectual growth? why do you think that organizations like IBM is the place for you? DO you need somebody else to guide you or maybe share the research experience?
Facebook 100bn IPO likely in Q1 next year
Yes, for most reasonable Jews. My point there was that the process is not reasonable, as evidenced by the people who get caught up in it.
actual interview: http://e3.gamespot.com/story/6318725/e3-2011-john-carmack-ta...
Worse is Better.