skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Is it a solved problem? No? Invent it.

Something to consider: Sometimes we can change the rules. If given requirements A, B, and C, and we discover that “A” is not a solved probloem, we could go ahead and invent a solution. Then again, perhaps we can push back and ask if some lesser requirement A’ (which is a solved problem) is sufficient for success.

The converse is possible as well. Given requirements X, Y, and Z, all of which are solved problems, sometimes we can raise our hands and say “Will we really be successful implementing another Me-Too thingummy? If we take a chance and try to add feature W—which is not a solved problem—we will have a competitive advantage.”

I agree with your basic premise, but want to point out that given a certain bias, we can sometimes fark around with the requirements to suit ourselves. So a candidate in an interview could easily convince you that he had to invent a way to synchronize documents while supporting offline editing, but aother candidate in the same situation might have avoided the requirement necessitating invention in the first place. Or the reverse!
Jakob Nielsen on the Internet bubble in 1999
Not a talking point, we just have a lot of conversations about this at the office :)
Google+ is good, but don't switch [from Facebook] to it
Los Angeles, CA

I have no experience with HTML, CSS, programming, or website design. I was hit with a brilliant idea for a social networking, user review, and local search web site months ago that can create excess income for many of the common talented/skilled that lack the resources.

I am on an inexorable hunt for a tech co-founder! I am passionate about my concept and vision. Only the hungry reply.

wmandrell.iv@gmail.com
Twitter.com growth flat for past 3 months
From programming perspective it's better to crash hard and let the error be known rather than fail silently and introduce more sublte errors.

From user perspective, what is the point of saving file in a program that is falling over when you could potentially save a corrupt file and instead of retaining some of the work the user will end up with a blob of useless data. I guess you could do Save As... and then manually compare changed data with last save. Still I'd be extremelly suspicious of it.

I am absolutely shocked that nobody else has even hinted at this. I wouldn't recommend this tool in almost any circumstance.
I wish we had this in the US. I would much rather pay $2 a month for talking and text than the ridiculous prices that the phone companies charge.
Due to the fact that a program is a composition of programs which at the lowest level are loops and instructions this also means that it is impossible to determine whether or not a loop halts.

It is easily provable that this is theoretically possible, but the required time is too long for it to be applicable. Suppose your memory has N states. Run your program through N+1 computation steps and if it's not already finished, then it will never halt.

Thing is, N is very large for real memory, so this straightforward approach is not applicable. However, there's much room to improve this algorithm and I assume that's what the MIT folks did.

True halting problem is about computational devices with infinite memory.
GitHub Nodeload2: Downloads Reloaded
It's a great read, but I'm honestly struggling to read the text unless I highlight it first. Please change the colours to make it a bit easier to read :)
When it comes to deciding whether to champion someone's cause or not, yes.

How would you feel if someone started criticizing you for not getting on a plane to Darfur to rebuild war torn villages?

How about your choice not to get on a boat to blockade tankers?

How about your choice not to hand out flyers for the SPCA?

How about your choice not to partake in attempts to pierce Gaza blockades?

I could name many more causes you're guilty of not partaking in.

The question actually is: Are YOU justified in criticizing others who don't share your zeal in a particular cause? Because by judging others, so too are you judged.
Need a Tech Co-Founder
Los Angeles, CA

I have no experience with HTML, CSS, programming, or website design. I was hit with a brilliant idea for a social networking, user review, and local search web site months ago that can create excess income for many of the common talented/skilled that lack the resources.

I am on an inexorable hunt for a tech co-founder! I am passionate about my concept and vision. Only the hungry reply.

wmandrell.iv@gmail.com
Ask HN: Job searches don't have to suck, do they?
We're working on a 'Hipmunk' for hacker job searches, and we'd love to hear from this community about what's important in a job search.

What drives your search? Is it 'job first' or 'company first'?

We can imagine job/company location is pretty important, but what about understanding the customer problem the company is trying to solve? How important is that to you in your search?

What about the day-to-day perks of working for an organization (e.g., 4-day week, choice of hardware, free lunches, etc.)?

Would information about a company's success in the market (as much as can be shared publically) be highly relevant to your search?

And finally, how do you discover what great new companies are out there to work for?
My worthless 2cents.

> Did the exposure count for much in the days afterwards? That’s also a big no, the day after saw a blip in sales, followed by things going back to exactly where we started, selling a few apps a day. In fact Amazon decided to rub salt in the wounds a little further by discounting our app to 99 cents for a few days after the free promotion.

Well here is the image with sales numbers from the day after.

http://i.imgur.com/bBovl.png

What I'm seeing is a a huge sales/profit increase; $300 that day as compared to <$50 before. Full discloser, i.e. sales from the subsequent days, would be very nice to see at this point.

Next logical step? You have a >100,000 user base so push an update to the free app so that it now includes ads.

The tone of the article feels like the author is just upset he didn't get his way- "I was against putting the app on Amazon and my partner was for it"- so now he is trying to make himself appear "right". It's called pivoting.
Yes, but what TAL has done for the cause is millions of times more effective than what FSF is asking for them to do. Furthermore, what they've done is uniquely beyond the capability of the FSF and all its resources. Overall it just seems silly.
My thoughts exactly... and by shoving domain logic into a bunch of EntityFooServices you might end up with code that is more procedural than OO. But maybe it's just the example that was too simplistic.
What I really love about emacs is that it is so easy to move keys around and to assign function to keys. For example, I find this really useful on my MacBook Air keyboard:

;; Map option-up/down do page-up/down
(global-set-key (kbd "ESC <up>") 'scroll-down)
(global-set-key (kbd "ESC <down>") 'scroll-up)

Now option up/down do paging. Win.

(Probably already default in Aquamacs, but I prefer to use the 'real' Emacs.app)
I think it's worth asking yourself what you're looking to get out of Facebook likes. How often do 30+ urban professionals look at their friends' likes?

Running facebook ads is a great way to get likes, but are the likes worth that money? I'm in my 20s and I almost exclusively use facebook for sharing links. You said you already have an interesting blog, are people sharing that content? How can you encourage that?

I'm not saying that you should avoid facebook, just make sure you know what your goals are and what metrics you're going to use to measure success vs failure. If getting facebook likes makes sense for those goals, then by all means go for it. If getting facebook likes isn't important for your strategy, then don't worry about it - your page will grow organically as your user base does.
Logging into someone's Facebook account and posting: identity theft?
They won't. To lose control of the information, the way it is _generated_ must become decentralized. While this may happen (e.g., it does in foreign exchange markets to some extent), it will not be _this_ kind of information, but something completely different.
CA security finds Android Trojan which records phone calls
I'm looking at it from the angle of someone that has spent over a decade in and out of C. The code in the loop is in NO way an "artifact", it's absolutely critical to the comparison. My example in no way removes the essence, especially if we are using "idioms".
Interestingly it was also Ken Thomson who invented UTF-8 as well.
Only if you take a very liberal definition of memory. The following probably isn't an infinite loop, even though it'd look like one under normal definitions of memory (either RAM or RAM+disk):

$ while ping -W 2 -q -c 1 www.google.com; do sleep 10; done

Eventually, the network will go down.
They are certainly a traditional stronghold of straight up C.
I can't tell if you're joking or not... so I'll just reiterate my main point: men fighting to prevent the suffering and death of their families is not even remotely the same category of thing as startups (and business in general).

We can read in lots of fancy analogies, but unless we recognize that war (with the possibility of real, major loss) is played at completely different stakes (and therefore different strategy), it seems like a silly exercise. My $0.02!
All the YouTube vids are broken because the account has been closed. How odd.
Happy WiFi day 8.02.11, the most exclusive holiday ever
I've always found understanding the lower-level workings of computers to be very enlightening. After I finished with this text, programming and syntax made perfect sense. You may never need the bits on Assembly language, but the knowledge itself of the transition from hardware instructions to programming languages is extremely beneficial.

http://highered.mcgraw-hill.com/sites/0072467509/
Yes. Anything i7 or i5 that Apple has used has aes-ni in it. The last machines to fail this were the old mbp13 (2010), 2010 Mac mini, and 2010 MBA. Everything currently sold has aes-ni.

On the new MBA 13 1.8ghz, I don't even notice the hit.
The author mentioned this:

"IBM had decided to use the slash for command flags, eliminating Unix as a precedent, and the period was used between filename and filename extension, making it impossible to follow DEC's example."
Yes, anyone (barring odd things like maybe felons?) can form a corporation in the US. But without a status like H1B you cannot work for that corporation in the US.

You just need to show that you will report to a board of directors that has the ability to control what you work on or whether or not to continue to employ you (this really isn't too far off from anyone else starting a company with cofounders and investors).
Nope, you're right. It's particularly noticeable if you have something like the 1Password extension installed, whose icon used to perfectly match the shade of the wrench menu. That's no longer the case.
You shouldn't have to use such an API though and this case could be optimized by any C compiler.
No. Each master has an offset so when you build a ring you give each master a different starting point. This keeps your ids in sync. So master1 would create ids: 1, 11, 21, 31, 41, 51, etc... and master2 would create ids: 2, 12, 22, 32, 42, 52, etc...
This reminds me of the old George S. Patton quote: ""The object of war is not to die for your country but to make the other guy die for his."
A C string is a convention, not a type and I don't know why we still cannot get a string type in C that can live side by side with 'char *'. I mean we got wchar_t duct-taped to C so why did the C99 guys not introduce a 'string' type (add/len)?
> On a finite-memory machine, a computation fails to halt iff it eventually repeats a state

This is too strong of a statement. Lots of software simply loops, repeating the same state over and over, until an external interrupt occurs.
I'm sitting here looking at the brown, dog-eared old McCracken Fortran IV book from my high school comp sci class (1978). What magic it was to conceive of a program, cut it onto punched cards, suck the stack through a card reader, and then see my output appear, line by line, on the dot-matrix printer. Thank you, professor, for your contribution to computer science and for inspiring me to find the work I love.
Not in every case. I want to use firefox because of some plugins. There is pretty much no alternative for them. Given that is was the best choice so far, I get to choose again between something that doesn't do stuff I need, or something that doesn't look the way I'm used to. Staying with previous versions is never an answer due to lack of bugfixes, security updates, etc.

Same mistake ubuntu does sometimes. It's the best in general, but has more and more really annoying changes in my opinion.

You cannot "just switch" in many cases. In some other you'll have to choose between two things you don't like the least. That's not a good outcome.
Since the document isn't accessible (for me) at this time, can anyone please TL;DR; this?

I am an alien entrepreneur - in what circumstances can I found a startup, and legally immigrate to the US while working it?
Wow, I've seen some sensationalistic articles before but this one is pretty sweet.

Let me see if I can recap on the main points.

1) There supposedly is software that doesn't appear to exist anywhere outside of a research lab.

2) This software as written doesn't actually do what it is reported nefariously to do because it is bugged.

3) It clearly declares the capabilities it intends to use to the user via a standard install screen which can be declined.

In summation, there may or may not be a program somewhere that isn't currently functional and of which the true intent is unknown.

If the above is accurate then I might have reports of thousands of trojans across various operating systems, or maybe I don't, who knows!
I've always been fond of Steve Losh's "Extravagant Zsh Prompt": http://stevelosh.com/blog/2010/02/my-extravagant-zsh-prompt/

Screenshots from the article:

http://stevelosh.com/media/images/blog/2010/02/zsh-prompt.pn...

http://stevelosh.com/media/images/blog/2010/02/zsh-prompt-co...
The report matches my experience with Verizon FIOS. By far the best internet service in America. I was coming from TWC and had positive experiences there, but FIOS is even better. Low latency, high bandwidth.
http://pgraycode.wordpress.com/2011/02/23/solving-xkcds-nerd...
I'm surprised A) anyone takes that too seriously in the past 10+ years and B) there haven't been more current studies.

Regardless of what the studies say, I often get comments from 'average' users about how fast I type and work. It's all keyboard shortcuts. I remember first seeing a guy using the tab-complete stuff in a shell - I was shocked, because I just thought he was typing fast at first, then he showed me the tab key use. My life hasn't been the same since.

By comparison, when I watch other people use a computer ('average' people), it's like I can watch their thought process as they grab for the mouse, move it around, the sloowly start moving it to a menu, then they click around and move the mouse over each selection, pausing, then moving on. It's painful to watch, and often seems to happen in slow motion.

So... keep the studies going on. Until they study power keyboard users against power mouse users, my money's on the keyboard.
Recording phone calls is useful to suspicious girlfriends, and about nothing else. I doubt any identity thief would listen to your phone calls in hopes that you mention a credit card number or something of value.
What this story teaches is a simple business lesson.

If you give an app away, you should build in some monetization.
A problem with a header solution would be the user does frequently then see the requested content. Google's pre-fetching only kicks in if it believes you're going to visit, so most of the time it does end up getting shown to the user.
GCC got that option recently with '-flto' (or whatever it was to enable link time optimization)
> If you're asked this in an interview, you can't respond "no".

I don't see why not! It would save lots of time.

This is a poor question as phrased. If you want to know about the developer's attitude toward reuse versus DIY, then simply ask that. The common usage of the word "invention" today invokes questions about intellectual property, patent rights, copyright et al - topics most developers would likely rather avoid.
You're late. It was in February ;P
I wish I could get something more out of this than "Quora has a lot of interconnected Topics". I've never used Gephi but it seems like there are at least small ways to start making network diagrams like that more readable.

This visualization of the Marvel social graph does things like coloring bundles, and surfacing larger node names at higher zoom levels: http://exposedata.com/marvel/data1/
Hate to ask, but is there a way to make a note of a thread for later, aside from making a comment in it?

Yes, that is what I'm doing here. On my phone right now.
Missouri law bans teachers from interacting with students on Facebook
Just including vprintf is not enough. Here are some timings (GCC-4.2.1, system compiler on OpenBSD-5.0-current/amd64 on a Thinkpad SL510; all timings are median-of-three):

Provided program, -O4: ~5.06s

Provided program, -O4 -march=native: ~5.07s (i.e. no difference)

Provided program, includes sprintf and the vprintf family, -O4 -march=native: ~4.84s

Of course, this is just a silly example (realistic programs don't make things that easy on the JIT). Still, quite impressive; congratulations to the PyPy guys!
Ok, for the sake of argument, let's say I'm a developer, intrigued by your idea, and willing to move to Los Angeles...

What do you bring to the table?

Do you have relevant industry experience?

Do you have valuable connections to advisers, customers, investors, etc?

Do you have experience with branding, marketing, promotion, and/or sales?

What will you be doing while I'm building the site?

Do you know anything about Customer Development?

Have you started Customer Development? If not, why?

Have you founded a startup before?

Do you have experience raising money?

Are you putting in of your own money into this venture?

Can you manage a company? What do you see your role in the venture as being?

Edit: Just to be clear... I'm not in the market to move to LA, but I wanted to point out that these are (among) the questions a potential tech co-founder is going to have. If you have good answers for them, it would be best to go ahead and post them now. As it stands, your post is so light on details that it's not very tempting for a qualified co-founder to reach out to you. Give 'em something to work with...
What the NYC startup world needs (and doesn’t need)
Your birthday comes around once every year, Halley's comet passes once every 75 years, but WiFi day still takes the cake as the most exclusive holiday. Happening only once on this fine day of August 2nd of 2011 and thus cementing it's position as the ruler of all holidays.

What about August 2, 2111?
Traffic spikes on the blog
They still haven't fixed that ugly icon. I'll never get used to it.
Logging Into Someone Else's Facebook Account Could Be Identity Theft
Cool additions by Dropbox Interns
Where is the ontology available for download?

If you scraped it, do you mind sharing the scraper and the data?
Yes, but you have to prove that there is a separate Board of Directors which has the ability to hire, fire, pay and supervise you. If you get funded, i think its easy to prove
i wish i could do that for safari
Thanks for checking out the article.

Which browser and OS are you using? Scrolling isn't slow in webkit for myself, but I'd be happy to dig in and make it smoother if it's an issue.
5 Best Books on How to Influence People
Factors for me in order:
* Location (or telecommute options)
* Pay range
* Problem space
* Perks/benefits
* Other

By location I'd generally mean what's nearby me, but secondarily, if I was ever considering a move, that target destination would obviously come in to play.

Pay range - I really need to have an idea about pay scale/range from a company. It's really annoying that more companies don't offer a range up front. It might attract the wrong crowd, perhaps, but it might also help people be a bit more realistic about the value a company places on them.

Problem space is less important to me for a couple reasons. I've worked in a range of domains over the past 16 years, and have found I can adapt to most problem domains, and am generally equally happy in all. I don't have a huge push to be in telecom vs education vs retail - the problems each industry face can be as interesting as you want to make them.

Perks - they're nice to have, but I'm not driving 2 hours per day just for a free gym membership. They've never been a deciding factor for me. 401k contributions - nice, sure. I've generally never pursued 'jobs' in such a way that I had 3-5 offers at the same time, so I'm not sure how much of a deciding factor they ever would be, but I think the other factors would generally outweigh most perks.
Is it possible to design a language that circumvents these concerns?
My suggestion is to use something more like this (provided by Git's bash-completion):

branch=$(__git_ps1 "%s")

That doesn't have any problem with detached head: http://cl.ly/8yN8
At least they aren’t gobbling up a generation of talented youth and putting them to work plastering optimized and personalized little text ads on everything ;-)
So is "founder" in the chat box appearing when we watch the demo
Same with Cox and me. Pretty fast speeds (for the South and cable, anyway), great ping, and no caps.
I said the loop is an artifact, not the code in the loop. Their experimental design is "Do x N times, then divide the overall runtime of the program by N to estimate the cost of x." If timing a program that did x once lead to good results, they would do that - but it doesn't, so they don't. You're trying to optimize around the loop, but by doing that, you're changing the x that is being measured.
More likely built on WP7 than Android. Microsoft + Facebook are all ready in bed with Skype
This wasn't written for "us". Look at the homepage: http://bostinnovation.com/
Upvoting it will put it in the "saved stories" section in your profile, but that's about it.
OK, that's a valid point - however, copying and pasting from the Library/Application Support folder is just as easy (except maybe finding it).

Where I have a problem is that it violates the expectations of the platform. It's a Mac application - it has a Preferences GUI. This is not a problem with things like Apache, which, as a service, doesn't even have a front-end; I don't expect it there.
We've wanted to make that better, just haven't found the time. Scrollbars seemed good enough for the interim.
Cool API Server Error Page
The guy works there, so that's probably how he got hold of the data.
A good autosave mechanism seems to be a much better solution than this. While that would mean the loss of a little bit of data, it seems better than saving a potentially corrupt file or incorrectly inferring that a loop is infinite.
If it's not in the trash, and if you haven't made a back up (something I should really do, come to think of it), then there doesn't seem to be much you can do. Bother Google about it, I suppose, they might still have the data around somewhere.

They actually have a page that addresses this: https://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answ...
The Future of 3D Printing
Why Is It Important To Hire Women In Your Startup?