skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Study Finds that Annoying Users is Most Effective for Banner Ads
Because it's hackery, and hackery is fun, which is why most of us got into it to begin with.
Except that reality doesn't bear out your position. So far, I haven't seen you give any evidence, other than your feelings or what you think, that things are the way you say they are.

I have visited the FAD page right around midnight pacific (when the free app is revealed) every day since it was first introduced in March. A few apps start with no rating, but most have 4- to 5-stars. By the end of the FAD promotion (the free-day,) I've observed at least half of them go below 3-stars. The only ones that have gone up are the ones that had no rating to begin with. Many, but not most, do recover some of their rating. I've yet to see an app (that I recall) which regained its previous high.

My understanding, and I don't have any link to really support this, is that Groupon customers are some of the most demanding, selfish and entitled gits out there. If Groupon is so great and customers are so thrilled at getting a premium thing cheap, why do more than half of merchants say they wouldn't do the promotion again?

http://www.businessinsider.com/groupon-survey-results-2011-7

You say Groupon is successful? You're right, but pretty much only for the customers [ab]using it. Groupon loses money at an alarming rate...

http://www.minyanville.com/businessmarkets/articles/groupon-...

Your logic is really flawed when you say "I'd also argue that the sheer volume of downloads (100k vs 20 the day before) would also support that claim."

It supports the claim that people like free stuff. Once a year IHOP does a free pancake deal for charity. On those days they see roughly 50 times more customers than on a typical day. By your logic, people perceive pancakes as a huge value.
How on earth is bumping the dates up unethical?
I was hoping to see some measurement of dropped connections - something that I used to see sometimes when I was still using DSL.
In the article he says it is just one byte extra, but that's clearly not the case, since we probably want strings longer than 255 characters. To be practical, even in the sort term, you'd probably need at least two bytes, and that's still a bit limiting. NUL-terminated strings keep you from having to worry about the size of the length specifier and what byte ordering when storing it.

He notes that other languages of the day didn't go with NUL-terminated strings. It could also be interpreted, considering that C is more widely used still than other languages from the time, that by doing something different, C made the right choice.
Wanted: Screenshot of your smartphone homepage
The initial high load time is due to the combination of 1.9.2 and the new structure inside Rails 3. You can improve this by applying one of the approaches listed here:
http://www.rubyinside.com/get-edge-ruby-faster-loading-ruby-...

or checking out the 1.9.3 release (I think it has one of these approaches applied).
The internet makes it harder to determine the truth. If not careful, then anyone can start spreading falsehoods against their best intentions. Nobody wants you to shut up about the truth, but your ability to judge what is "true" is greatly impaired by the cheap (and legal) proliferation of falsehoods.
Maybe 8 checkboxes, but hundreds of products.
With yesterday's news that Google acquired Dealmap, it may get worse.
I know this is a subjective thing, but I think the app's graphical style is somewhat ugly. If I'm supposed to be creating an attractive animation for my site, I want to be surrounded by a similarly attractive workspace. I know it's a nitpick, but it's why I write code in Coda, not Vim, TextMate, BBEdit, or anything else. I'm fickle like that.
The other problem I've read (from another article about Amazon's Appstore, which I haven't been able to find) is that it does not support the compatibility portion of the manifest (i.e. incompatible devices are allowed to download apps). There is also no way to respond to negative reviews. The result is a lot of negative reviews by people who cannot run the app, and cannot be responded to.
ReadWriteStart
Rework sales: Paper ain't dead yet
InfiniBand Addressing New Markets
If he is interested in putting it on the App Store, I doubt such an established developer would sweat maintaining a parallel standard version. Although the free upgrade promise is/was rash, I think it's too late to go back on it.
You don't "use" big-O, it's just a way of writing down different classes of (mathematical) functions; hence, "big-O-notation".

At all times when writing software the engineer should know a) the complexity of the code they are trying to write and b) what the memory complexity of the program is and, in many cases (slightly off-topic), c) the approximate times it takes to do certain simple tasks (this may be memory access, simple disk/network IO, database queries etc)

This is useful because it protects you from writing programs that "perform" unexpectedly badly (I'm confused why anyone would expect them to "perform" without thinking about it).

It may sound like a lot of work, but thankfully most things you program are really constructed of simpler things that have well known complexities (simple loops, sorting, hashing, stuff like that)

At our company (pretty straight-forward social web-app), we have surprisingly many pieces of code where the trivial implementation wouldn't work. We have a graph of different users and relations and want to maintain a transitive closure for each type of edge while also maintaining a bunch of indexes.

Even on the client side we have simple things, such as an autocomplete box for usernames. With many users, we can't just keep an array of all existing users and iterate through it on every keystroke. At that point you have so many options to choose from (e.g. have an index on the server and do a request for the filtered list after short timeout or build a simple index (searchtree) on the client and use that for searching) and you couldn't make a decision without knowing about runtime complexity, constant time factors and memory usage.
That is a fair point, I don't think the OP's complaint about the 20-to-0 switch was invalid, but I do skip past it to try and look at what kind of benefit can be squeezed from their current predicament instead of scorching the earth and walking away.

Thank you for the feedback.
HelpJuice -- The automatically updating help page
You could use a variable-width size field similar to how UTF-8 works, but that's getting pretty complicated and inefficient.

e.x.

0xxx xxxx

10xx xxxx xxxx xxxx

110x xxxx xxxx xxxx xxxx xxxx

1110 xxxx xxxx xxxx xxxx xxxx xxxx xxxx

etc
[video] NodeConf 2011 – Ryan Dahl
Four Strategies To De-Suck Your Commute
That study was done in 1989, without experts, before standardized keyboard shortcuts, and in a lab setting rather than actual usage. I really doubt its relevance today, and I'd like to see an updated look at it. I don't think it should be cited as often as it is.

Reference: http://www.asktog.com/TOI/toi06KeyboardVMouse1.html
Nowadays they're using child pornography as an excuse to verify or monitor just about everything. But there's always a hidden agenda behind it. Plus, I'm sure the music and movie labels gave their full support for this one, because they truly care about child porn - oh, and that other little detail that they can more easily use this law to catch "copyright infringers" later on.

EDIT: And I really think they're "boiling the frog" here. They steadily take away our rights to privacy so there are only a few people mad about it at a time, until they have full control.

But we need to step back a little and think about what they're really doing. They're trying to have full access to everything you're doing online, while the Internet is becoming more and more our main communication method. Then how is this much different from communism where the Government wants to monitor the whole population - "so there are no crimes or anything". It's a very slippery slope, and it has started a while ago. Take a step back and look at everything: Patriot Act, TSA, and now this and other similar laws. What's the end-goal here? 100% complete security - therefore no liberties?
You can’t prove ‘new’
Collecting ambient electromagnetic energy
Should be a lot more stable now. We were up late coding up an alternate route to access HN. Enjoy!
Thanks, and great suggestion about reading aloud, I'll give it a try. I'm pretty sure that the typical "computer manual" style of acronym-loaded, compressed run-on sentences is not a delight to the ear :)
What you would likely do is use an extension bit so there would be no fixed maximum length for the strings. This would of course add a bunch of overhead that you may or may not make up with the other advantages of knowing the length of strings.
Big O notation is intended to convey the algorithm's runtime as a function of the inputs. By the sounds of it, the number of checkboxes you had was actually fixed and relatively small. In this case, the algorithm is still O(n). The real problem with your code is that you went through the list (an expensive operation) multiple times. This gives you a large constant factor, not O(n^2). Because Big O notation is only concerned with large (asymptotic) values, the constants are generally ignored.

If you had a form where the number of checkboxes scaled with the number of items on the list, then you might end up with an O(n^2) algorithm, depending on how exactly they scale.
Relevant: Slacktivism http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slacktivism

That's not to say that doing things on the Internet are never useful activism, but often times they are used in place of actual action. Think "change your Facebook picture for the cause!" vs spreading information about a relatively unknown story.
ok formatting went all wrong, here's the same code on pastebin: http://pastebin.com/S5324Gfw
hiiiiiiiiiiiiii
Agreed. Downtime in NYC from TWC is painful. Youtube actually has a tool that shows much of the information available in this report for your own connection: http://www.youtube.com/my_speed

Strangely enough, in the FCC's wireless report, they could not come to a conclusion about the state of competition in the wireless industry. I would imagine that coming to a conclusion about wireline broadband would be equally (if not more) difficult for them.
Child pornography is one of those bugbears -- much like terrorism -- that is so theoretically abhorrent to a lot of people that anyone trying to push legislation or regulation through the system can summon its specter for an instant veneer of credibility and legitimacy.

"If you don't support X, then you're leaving people vulnerable to Y!" has long been a cheap scare tactic trotted out in service of agendas on all sides of all aisles, pretty much since the dawn of time.

I hate that tactic in general, and I hate it here specifically. Not just because it's intellectually dishonest, but because it cheapens the actual victims of child pornography and exploitation -- using them as little more than rhetorical chess pieces.
gnghhng
> the more prepared side always wins

I'd say it's more subtle than that: the side which is more appropriately prepared always wins. Arguably the French were "more prepared" for WWII if you go by amount of effort expended - building the Maginot line wasn't cheap - but it didn't do them much good.
Idea is good by the tool is not good enough -- it only notices the population centres that author has took a note of, this looks like unintentional confirmation bias.

See my reply to author with fixes.
I'd really like to do cross-platform. I've ported the rendering core to Direct3D as part of a previous project, so the fundamental pieces are portable to Windows... But there are also some important dependencies on Mac-only components like QTKit and the Cocoa version of WebKit. These would need to be replaced by Windows-native code.

In other words, it's not entirely out of the question on the long term, but I haven't really done the work to even figure out the difficulty.
Netflix iPhone app that lets you scan movies by barcode
I'm excited to show off my new iPhone app--Q Scan for Netflix! Despite some setbacks with the development process and changes in the Netflix API, I finally have the app live.
With Q Scan for Netflix, you can easily scan a retail DVD or Blu-ray barcode to add the title to your Netflix Queue (instant or disc/DVD). Q Scan can come in handy when you're walking through a retail store and notice a new release you've been meaning to watch--now you can quickly check to see if it's already on Netflix!

I'd really appreciate any feedback and am glad to share this with the HN community. And, what you've been waiting for, a few promo codes:

RJTA64TL46YT 9WJ396PJETYH 6MXMP3RRKNFF LHL94X4T3ANH

Thanks, John on twitter @qscanapp http://qscanapp.com
Bullying Essay
Writing a bullying essay can be tricky. It is a common topic and students often get an assignment on a bullying essay. They often don’t know how to attempt such an essay.
"H.R. 1981: Protecting Children From Internet Pornographers Act of 2011"

I really wish that bills were named for their function, not their intent.
I read it as "one byte more than just using one byte for NUL". In other words, two bytes.
I strongly doubt that "most people" think that Amazon pays 20% of the asking price to the dev. Maybe if you limited your audience to "Android developers very interested in the Amazon App Store", but that's really a pretty limited audience, and not who your app is targeted to. Has Amazon ever trumpeted that 20% figure to the public? No. I mean, I work for a competitor, and am ready and quite willing to see the flaws in their model, that's a horrible thing to compete against, but it absolutely does not surprise me that they're not giving away their money. I mean: it's clearly not necessary. Once they run out of indie devs willing to give their app away for nothing other than incredibly great exposure, then maybe they'll need to start paying out, but not before.
Objective-C Tuesdays: more about dynamic arrays
..but that's just a convenience to allow them to play (mostly) nice with wchar APIs. The BSTR itself could have avoided the trailing NULLs if it never had to worry about being treated as a simple wchar buffer. http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ericlippert/archive/2003/09/12/52976...
I thought it was Cortes who ordered his boats burned once he landed in the New World.

Source: http://burningboats.com/about-burningboatscom/
A product that serves the company's bottom line, takes a load off the support team AND serves the customer very well.
You can send a form letter about this to your congressperson from here, via the EFF: https://secure.eff.org/site/Advocacy?cmd=display&page=Us...
Android Trojan records your phone conversations
I think there's lots of ways to stop that from happening.

For example, giving a green card to people who graduate with certain degrees like Engineering/Science or MBA's from top schools (yes its snobbish but whatever ... a degree from the University of Phoenix shouldn't get you a green card)

As well as allowing students in particular programs to work while they go to college.
But then a rage comic has nothing to do with entrepreneurship, technology, programming, et al. right? I would also dread the day a rage comic gets to the HN front page.

If something is flagged by enough people, it probably means that it's not something that deserves a spot on the HN homepage. As such you have every right to flag it if you don't think that it deserves it's rightful spot, but if you comment on why you think it doesn't deserve to be there you'll invariably get a response by someone (in this case me!) that does believe that it's useful enough to deserve a spot. That being said, I just want to know: How can you equate a rage comic post to a post leading to the application of (particularly good) special effects on TV series?
Check out the new iCloud web apps in action
I, for one, didn't know before reading this that the temperature gradient is so large, about 25C/km. Being someone who, if I had to guess, has never been more than a hundred metres underground or so, I assumed it was about an order of magnitude lower than that.
The last time I had to rewrite an SQL query because it was too slow (5 days ago) I definitely used the knowledge taught to me in my CS course.
Sent this after waking up to a weekly digest email from Venmo listing all the payment activity of the people in my network.
Probably— although I just googled 'textmate 2 free upgrade' and the top hit is a blog post from 2006 titled "[TextMate] 2.0 Will Require Leopard".

It's possible he might just be able to walk that one back a little.
Great article. Fun to see an app "launch" get salvaged, though of course the main takeaway (as usual) seems to be "get featured by Apple" (but you have absolutely no control over that, sorry). Not to fully discount the obvious effect that redoing the icon and screenshots had on sales in the midst of being featured, of course.
I'm not so sure of that. A quick search put the figure at just 3.4% of GDP [1].
Even if a lot of sales do happen online, many of them could shift back to phone calls relatively easily.

Obviously there would be a significant impact, but I think the Internet is still a long way away from being something that simply can't be turned off.

[1] http://www.mckinsey.com/features/sizing_the_internet_economy...
Is Fab.com worth the $8 Million investment?
Push Pop Press acquired by Facebook
I believe this is not uncommon. But look at it from the manager's perspective: unless they are really using design to move the needle, individual bouts of creativity are frequently counter-productive.
Thanks for the nice words :)
Indeed. I already assume that my ISP knows what IP address I've had for at least the last 18 months.

Where did this FUD about recording IP traffic history come from?
Wow, downvotes for asking a question?
The insuffficiency of efficiency
The Mother of All Interview Questions
FCC: ISPs Are Finally Getting Close to Delivering the Performance they Promise
...because the free music is disappearing (forever) in a few days.
"Child porn" happened in germany 1 or 2 years ago (for some stupid dns-censorship law).

The nice thing about "child porn" is, "normal people" do not easily understand why a law against "child porn" could possibly be bad. Really, they do not easily listen to arguments. Unless you talk to them for at least 30 minutes. Even when they understand, they are often not comfortable fighting "anti child porn"-stuff.

Lets just hope the law gets crazy amounts of negative mass media press. Otherwise, I do not believe, you stand a chance.
I suspect that "Rework" suffers from the same fate that many hot business books suffer from: a lot of people buy it more to display it on their shelves than to actually read it. They imagine they gain some degree of intellectual credibility every time someone walks into their offices and sees it on the desk, or above the computer in a stack of brightly colored and catchily titled books by Kawasaki, Godin, Gladwell, et al.

I've actually read "Rework," and I quite enjoyed it. So I am not speaking ill of its content or its value whatsoever. But we should be honest -- and, sadly, uncharitable -- about what percentage of books sold we believe are actually being read. Especially in this genre. Remember: an eBook can't sit on a shelf in an office somewhere, impressing someone's boss.

On the flip-side, there are some actionable and interesting marketing implications presented by this case and others like it. That is to say: your eBook buyers are (probably) more likely to be your actual readers. Perhaps it's time publishers started segmenting their audiences accordingly, and focusing efforts accordingly.
The internet is just a medium, and one of many. What I see is an arms race between "compliance professionals" (advertisers, election strategists, PR firms, et al) and the rest of us. Though the population is getting smarter and more media-savvy (good luck finding a millennial who'll fall for a political attack ad), the professionals keep getting smarter too, because they're paid immensely to get results by any means necessary. (Interestingly enough, the internet also gives them the rich data and feedback loops they need to evolve their tactics more quickly.)

Frankly, it's something that would take such a large cultural leap to change, that I'm not expecting it anytime soon.
What's worse is even depictions of minors can be considered child pornography. I recall reading of one guy who was arrested for a drawing of Bart and Lisa Simpson.

＼(^o^)／ - This emoticon could be illegal if it depicts a minor. (Disclaimer: the emoticon is over 18)
I see what you mean... The trouble for me is that I'm working on Radi alone. Coming up with an attractive custom UI style is a big undertaking with an inherently uncertain result.

It feels like a safer use of my time to work on features, and just aim for a "boring but reasonably professional grey" appearance for the interface. I know that many artists actually prefer grey UIs so that it doesn't compete with the actual content.

I've tried to use Cocoa-native controls wherever possible, and that also limits the UI possibilities quite a bit. The overall look needs to be rather neutral so that changes in the Aqua look don't mess up the custom-drawn controls. (Recently Lion had a big change in most of the standard controls' appearance, but IMHO the updated look made Radi look a bit better.)
In the performance category, it imposes a cost on string searches, also, unless you know the string length via some other mechanism. Algorithms like Boyer-Moore get their speed by skipping over some characters, but with null-terminated strings it's unsafe to skip any character without first checking if it's null. Granted, that's mostly a cost imposed on long strings being searched for longish substrings.
> The other thing that came to mind to me was that you have now defined a maximum string length, unless you then had a meta-length number (describing the "length" of the length). And how long should that number be?

size_t
According to Wikipedia, the average depth of the Atlantic Ocean is just about 1200 feet deeper than that.
Making money is so old media.
Even so, 2^16 chars is still absurdly limiting. Furthermore, address/length pairs complicate otherwise very simple programming tasks such as creating string tokenizers (with NULL-terminated strings, you just need to drop in a \0 where the deliminator was).
And re-introduces the 'magic character' you're trying to eliminate.
this seems interesting but I feel like it might not necessarily replace things like tinymce and ckeditor. this seems to blur the lines between the text you're editing and the page you're on, which can be nice for certain things, but for certain blogs and CMSs people might want a more traditional "here is the edit box: the text you type in here is what's going to appear on your blog/page/whatever" text editor.
Advice on getting a startup job
or Remember: it's easier to share a Hardcover book when an ebook has restriction.
I haven't had the chance to deal with big O issue in the frontend web apps where most operations are short and data set are small. For backend processing, looping and large data processing are always considered with efficiency in mind.

The most memorable big O analysis that actually led to fixing a performance bug was when I wrote the caching layer of a file system using bubble sort for sorting the dirty blocks before flushing. It slowed down noticeably, like seconds of pause with 100% CPU, when the cache size exceeded 10K blocks. Replacing it with heap sort made the problem go away. O(nlogn) really is much more scalable than O(n^2).
Backbone Design Pattern: Controller/Delegate
MIT, You're Not All That
The damn page crashed my browser. Nice going nosh.me!
Alfred updated: Extensions & New Theme
American Cops to get Mobile Iris Scanners