skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Very nice and useful website. Couple of points:

* The input box for the logo name is not obvious.
* The options on the left hand side are quite techy. I don't understand how they can help.
* Do all the four drop down boxes on the bottom work together? Or is it one font at a time only? The default view shows four active fonts. I was thinking that there was some cool algorithm which 'mixes' fonts. Is there any?
Epic, really. That's one for the 'best of HN'.

I'd hate to work for you though ;)
If he never closed shop he was selling over 11 pairs of shoes a minute for 2.5 days straight. I assume he was actually doing bulk sales to distributors.

The article doesn't make it clear. Was Market Week a retail event or a business to business event?
>This would be much more interesting if the GTK components map to real HTML elements.

This is where we're eventually headed, the mozilla project "chromeless" is an interesting experiment down the path. IIRC It gets rid of XUL for the application chrome and uses html/js for the entire program gui.
I don't want to sound elitist, but I really think the team double-checked all the trivial reasons which could explain this extraordinary result (à savoir : faster than light particles).
yeah possibly. maybe it's more a tool for startups who don't want to pay a designer to make a web logo quickly. as for kerning and web typography i think there might be a better future with http://endtwist.github.com/kerning.js/ and http://letteringjs.com/
> Seems like an utter waste of effort.

In a sense, isn't your entire social life a waste of effort? Even if you think the ultimate goal is to construct the ultimate hivemind, massive cultural flip flops can still represent progress.
Following the conversation about teaching programming in schools, I thought people might be interested in this exam paper.

GCSE Computing was introduced this year for the first time as an optional course for those aged 14-16, it's the only examined course at an under-16 level that requires programming.

Here's the specification of the course if anyones interested:
http://www.ocr.org.uk/download/kd/ocr_31053_kd_gcse_2010_spe...
I wish I could work with you on my projects. I am more of a backend guy who has to get his hands dirty with front end stuff. Something like this could help me get atleast one thing on the page done more easily.
Collection Of Puzzles For Programmers
Turn the 3700 Closing Post Offices into Tech Centers/Incubators
This was very interesting. I would also recommend reading the article about increasing your luck surface area (http://www.codusoperandi.com/posts/increasing-your-luck-surf...). Luck is a concept people think about a lot in terms of startups and "luck surface area" is a great way to quantify this.
Show HN: Write a sort, watch it go
This story takes place in Fall 1992 ( http://philip.greenspun.com/bboard/q-and-a.tcl?topic_id=27&#... ) so I'd be really surprised if MIT Scheme hasn't fixed it.

Sussman's readiness to kill the MIT Scheme project at that point indicates to me that he thought other implementations were less buggy, e.g. mzscheme (later PLT, later Racket). But admittedly I'm reading sense into the story when there might not be any. The story was written more than 5 years after it occurred, and written hastily. For example, either "300,000 phone numbers" is wrong or "30Mbyte file" is wrong.
Two more approaches:

1) There's the well-known Secretary (or Marriage, or Sultan's Dowry) Problem (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secretary_problem). It has three caveats, though:

* Solution assumes that you have a lot of (e.g. ~20) candidates.

* It is assumed that you can sum up each candidate's ability in a single number. This is the hardest part, since the human mind works relationally and assigning absolute numbers to anything is hard.

* The probability of picking the best candidate is only 1/e.

But at least there's a guaranteed bound on the probability of success, that some of the other methods lack.

2) (If possible) Hire the engineer and HR person at the same time and have the HR candidates evaluate the engineering candidates. Then run Knuth's stable marriage algorithm (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stable_marriage_problem) to pick the best candidates for each.
Adding to a Devise model after creation (Rails 3.1)
Everyone I work with is a former textmate user. Seriously, at least a couple dozen people. I know maybe 1 or 2 who are dumb/crazy/lazy enough to keep using it. Not a good retention rate.

It was good software, and had great longterm potential. But Allan's personality destroyed it (he's an artist, not a coder). I'm sure there's a great story behind how the project fell into the toilet, I'm looking forward to the book.
It's free now :)
I want to clarify that the app has not been "done" since May and that my experience working for Facebook was incredible. The amount of time I spent working on the project was purely because I enjoyed it.
What’s Really Behind the Netflix/Qwikster Split?
>Given a whiteboard and one hour,

We, hiring folks, aren't limited to just that anymore. There's github, linkedin, hn/reddit posts, random google stalking, etc.

I can find a lot about you, your attitudes, opinions, ability to communicate, style, etc. that, or you for whatever reason (paranoid, on the lam, aren't passionate) have zero online presence).

The face to face interview is mostly to confirm or refute what I've already learned about you.
Yes, a trie sort is one kind of radix sort. However, a trie is very far from minimal memory usage. Minimal memory usage for 300 000 (USA) phone numbers is about 1.5 megabytes, 5 bytes per number. A straightforward Patricia trie in C on a 32-bit machine is going to need minimally 16 bytes per number, about three times as much, 4.5 megabytes. If you're boxing each number, that's going to double your memory usage.

I think he has an order-of-magnitude error: he says the 3600 was paging continuously because it was "reading a 30 megabyte file into VM", but 30 megabytes / 300k phone numbers is 100 bytes per phone number, which seems like a lot for a text file full of phone numbers. I think he had 3 million phone numbers, ten or eleven bytes each, so 30 or 33 megabytes, so building a naive trie in memory on a 64-megabyte machine is not going to work.

If you wanted to sort a 30-megabyte file of 3 million phone numbers, a machine with four 9-track tape drives, no disk, and a kilobyte or so of memory would be able to do it in 22 passes over the tapes. (Practically you'd probably need at least 12 kilobytes.) On 1970-era tape drives, running at 1.25 megabytes per second, each pass would take a little under a minute.

From the fact that the 64-megabyte RISC machine ran at 50 MIPS and was considered capable of handling "massive data sets", I'm guessing this anecdote dates to about 1992, plus or minus 2 years, which means that the machine in question probably had about a 5-megabyte-per-second SCSI disk and maybe a shared ten-megabit Ethernet. Without doing any nifty compression or anything, on a machine like that, you could easily read thirty one-megabyte chunks off the disk, sorting each one in memory before writing it to a temp file, and then merging the thirty one-megabyte chunks in a second pass. This is not too far from what GNU sort or Unix sort would have done, and it would have used a total of 120 megabytes of disk transfer, about 24 seconds. That is, it would have been CPU-limited, not I/O-limited. And you could have even done it in MIT Scheme, which was perfectly capable of reading a megabyte of numbers into memory even in 1990.
My view is the average teacher is just about competent enough to teach the average Londoner where to find the fonts on Word but would probably do more harm than good when it came to teaching the theory behind programming.
Thanks for the link for the article - I appreciate it.
I agree it is easy to design the system with 10 ns precision. Just like it is easy to calculate trajectories using different units, yet the $125 million dollar Mars Climate Orbiter space probe crashed due to a metric mixup that could have easily been avoided. Another way I look at it is that the OPERA experiment is either going to be concluded by brand new physics, or by a statement like "doh! I can't believe we screwed that simple thing". Out of all the systems they described, this one seems the more likely to be erroneous to me.
VLC Player for Android is almost a reality
7 Yoga Stretches to Relieve Stress
notepad -> netscape gold -> dreamweaver -> textmate
What’s Really Behind The Netflix/Qwikster Split?
"Thrashed" means it was using too much memory. AFAIK MIT Scheme doesn't have a memory profiler even in 2011. Memory profilers are actually hard.
Apple holding off on the iPhone 5?
Ruta del Vino, Enoturismo en Oporto
Ask HN:  Is there a HN for the humanities?
With the exception of political articles, HN is relatively tech oriented.

Is there something like HN that's focused on the humanities?
I'm starting Anti-Facebookism. Any takers?
Joel Spolsky can do a fanfare launch. Does that mean you should too?
Show HN: I built a webapp to help web "designers" create logos and fonts quickly

FTFY
I wonder how it compares with webkit? There's android, iphone, RIM, and chrome.
I like your understanding games, game, a lot i look forward to finishing it!
Sure there is... dark matter particles; now if only we can find them!
Great articulation of what makes so many of us uneasy about cloud computing.

While I'm not sure I agree with the anti-authoritarian reason for the outrage over cheese-moving (I think people just generally don't like change), the cognitive dissonance over saying we don't trust while acting like we do does ring true.

I wrote a bit about what I hope is the swinging pendulum between centralized and distributed computing, and where I hope this is headed in a blog post a while ago: http://blog.byjoemoon.com/post/6277876911/the-personal-cloud
Not to nitpick, but founding Google doesn't automatically qualify you for a job at any large company, as the article states.

Not that I would refuse him a job... but it would require the same interview process as anyone, because I need to find out what he knows about my industry, what his current skills truly are, learn his philosophies, and find out how he would fit culturally.

Even brilliant people are sometimes crappy fits for the specific roles a large company may have to offer.
One thing I noticed in recent interview is that the problems often test if the candidate can think to use two structures or algorithms to solve a problem. Early on, I made the mistake of thinking of interview questions more as homework problems from college where there was often only one type of data structure or algorithm involved in a problem. That's good when teaching a single concept, but real-world problem are more complex. My advice is to find problems that use multiple structures or concepts together and study and code those.

Also, learn to code the basics so well that you can do them by hand on a basic text editor or whiteboard. Get so good at it that you can write code that has a very good chance of running if it were actually compiled/run. I found that it's very different to code on a whiteboard than it is in an IDE or text editor. When my first interview came up, I struggled to write down things with a dry-erase that would have taken me seconds on-screen.

One strategy that I liked to see an employer use was homework. That might make some job seekers cringe, but gave me a chance to write real code like I would for a job. It was also a filter for how badly I wanted a job. There were jobs I didn't complete the homework for just because the location or employer wasn't something I was genuinely interested in.

I did homework for the position I landed and they did a code review as part of my interview. It went well, because I got to see how my future co-workers would handle giving feedback, and some comfort on my end that this employer actually cared enough to do code reviews.
Although I think Crossing the Chasm is a great book and will give you perspective... it is largely about the final stages of being a startup. After you cross the Chasm, you are a mainstream company. The 2 books that I recommend for early stage startups are "The Lean Startup" (especially for consumer) and Four Steps to the Epiphany (especially for B2B).
After about 5 or 6 months of that nonsense, they discovered the deception (because we let them in on it... that was a nervous moment, and I got to break the news. lucky me!) and they finally relented and stopped pestering us about the tool they paid too much for. All the teams agreed fairly quickly that 1 particular tool was better, and we all standardized on it.
Chris Hedges: Tomatoes of Wrath - Chris Hedges' Columns
But saying it's extremely unlikely doesn't mean the speed of light is wrong, it means the error could be elsewhere in the system.
What the Dead Sea Scrolls can teach us about information paranoia
Python S3 BlobStore
Too expensive, for a newsletter.
Will be interested to see how the humidity increase is received. I know that decreased humidity is why I can't stand many shops (Ikea!)... along with the terrible ambient white noise, it's very fatiguing.

Props to Boeing for aiming at improved human factors in their design.
Washington's Back: What's on the Tech Agenda?
I was going to write a similar reply to flyosity. This is a tool for non-designers. Designers already have far more precise tools.
It sounds like most of the things that concern the author would introduce substantial amounts of scatter on top of some possible systematic shift, so I have a hard time believing they wouldn't have seen that.
Recognize the name because palantir sponsored one of the super happy dev houses. Rather insightful talk was given. Seems like you guys do a lot of number crunching which involve a lot of algorithms work.
I'm seeing the logo half-cropped off the top of the screen, save to examples and the link is overlapping the Logo, and I can't find the text input anywhere on the screen to put my text into. Chrome and Firefox on Mac OS X 10.6.7.
Yes, you have to exclude a whole lot. You also need to exclude binary files (like database dumps and tarballs) that you have lying around in your project directory, because once TM accesses those files it will read everything into memory, and it seems particularly bad at doing that.

Another problem with TM's built-in "find in project" is that it's not incremental. AckMate will list matches as it finds them, whereas TM will only return results once it's read everything.
Ah come on, Freshkey :) ... I know I would still have to pay 15 bucks afterwards.

I think you should have a lower price point. The way I think of it is I am almost sure I would like the digest, and in the future I would like to subscribe to at least one more vertical (business).
Justin Palmer is a GitHubber
There has been quite a flurry of open source projects getting hacked as of late (kernel.org comes to mind, but I think there were 1 or 2 others as well). Does anyone know if these different hacks are related to each other in any way?
Facebook’s New Timeline: Data Goes In, But Can It Ever Leave?
One Tool to Rule them All would be nice, but at the moment we're focusing on a fairly specific niche to address real problems we've personally encountered at companies. We're not the only ones who've had these sorts of problems either:

http://gigaom.com/cloud/cloud-computing-fiascos-lessons-from...

The key thing here is really to address two things that seem to come up a lot:

1) Cost items that can vary considerably and where a mistake -- code bug, forgetfulness, sloppiness, whatever -- can leave you with serious sticker shock. (At one company we were at, an engineer spun up a couple hundred EC2 instances for a map/reduce job and forgot about them, racking up an extra $100,000 that month.)

2) Cost items that don't vary much but which have such a low friction to signing up that you wind up with bunches of accounts across an organization without realizing it.

Finance departments already tend to have the software purchase cycle fairly well managed, but SaaS/PaaS/IaaS doesn't fit nicely into those procedures. Because of that, we're building our tools to play nice with others, so whether your finance group is managing things in Excel or you have a fancy SAP based system we're working to make it easier to get this data where it needs to be.
Google and Israel post 2,000-year-old Dead Sea Scrolls online
I assume that it's doable one way or the other, there are a number of third party sites like MySupermarket which can automatically add products into your basket on different supermarket sites. I'm guessing they do so either via URL hacking or XSS, but it should be fairly easy to figure out.
Apparently I was not very clear in my writing with what "500,000 daily activations of Android" means. I elaborated my reasoning in a followup post. Feel free to rebut that.
"I tried that! Don't you think I would have tried that?" --Paul Richter, WarGames

Not that it's not a worthy thing to consider (after all, the claim is extraordinary), but it was probably considered.
Capture a command-line session and replay online
Funny Soccer Players Picture - Funny Sports
Maybe it's their way of saying "sorry for the delay"? Rewarding dedicated users with a free upgrade seems like a good idea to me.
/dev/ttyS0 » Blog Archive » Exploiting Embedded Systems – Part 1
Saudi Monarch Grants Women Right to Vote
have each applicant interview each other. The applicant that gets the most 'hires' wins
Ttyrec: a tty recorder
"Error establishing a database connection". heh.
1) The secretary problem does NOT assume a large number of candidates. In fact, your odds go down as the number of candidates go up.

2) The secretary problem DOES assume you can't go back once you've evaluated a candidate. This is not the case for prospective employees.

Edit: s/passed on/evaluated/
Yes, sort of like Michael Jordan playing baseball.
Facebook Sucks Up a Ridiculously Huge and Growing Share of Our Time
Announcing PhoneGap for Windows Phone Mango
Life is chaos, and chaos is life.
Facebook’s iPad App Has Been Done Since May, But They Won’t Release It
Bakecaweb.net – Annunci ed incontri sul web
Bakecaweb e’ un sito di annunci gratuiti ed incontri online. Sul sito e’ possibile inserire tutto cio’ che non si usa piu’ e si vuole vendere. E’ possibile venderlo nella propria citta’, con consegna manuale oppure cercare di venderlo in tutta Italia.
Inoltre’ e’ possibile trovare tante offerte di lavoro, immobili e viaggi
From the page

"
A hint of Facebook’s importance in our universe was the rapt attention paid to last week’s F8 developer conference, where Mark Zuckerberg announced some earth-shattering changes to profile pages and some new buttons and such. Traffic for the WSJ.com live blog of the event trumped traffic for every other single blog post on the site that day.
"
I had an interview back in 2009 where the CTO of the startup asked me a question, I answered it, after which he very confidently corrected me with the wrong answer(!)

Needless to say I didn't join them. The startup also went belly up about 6 months after I interviewed there. How do guys like this get funded?
My startup has a policy of no-questions asked refunds, if a customer wants a refund for any reason whatsoever they'll get it.

We've had around 500 customers and not a single customer has requested a refund yet.
Couldn't this possibility be eliminated by calibration?
How to stop e-mail overload? Think before you hit send.
I created a groupspaces account, sign-up there and I'll send you further details about the meetup via groupspaces and with a second post on HN:

http://groupspaces.com/HNBerlin/
It's unclear to me why I would want to (or have to) create an account in order to play with this, at least initially. No thanks.
Agreed, being able to see multiple variations of the logo simultaneously would be nice.

I could see myself paying somewhere between $1-$5 for a zero-effort placeholder logo like this.
思加图新款女鞋
That's sorta true, but only applies to specific technical & domain skills needed by your industry. There are a lot of "soft" skills needed to found a successful company, and entrepreneurs start in wildly different places for this.

DropBox was Drew's second company, and I remember him saying that his experience with the first and the intervening jobs was what made him so determined to do it "right" this time and have the persistence to stick it out. Facebook was Zuckerburg's third company; he'd already had acquisition offers from Microsoft for his second (Synapse Media Player). Apple was Steve & Steve's second company together; the first was selling blue-boxes. Google was started by first-time founders, but they were first-time founders who had the background and upbringing to have confidence in themselves and believe they could change the world.
Temple University got $700K in Fed money to create "Urban Apps & Maps" program
For me, this blog post represents a step backwards. They open up saying that the 1 hour interview provides absolutely no indication of how well a prospective candidate will perform. Hopefully most people will agree here. Then they go ahead and state that their staple interview will be an on the spot problem solving screening and then list the steps the expect the candidate to take in solving said problem. What does this say about their own problem solving skills? I will leave this upto the reader. Let me throw an alternative out. Why don't you give a prospective candidate a written test/problem and give them as much time as they want, using methods and environments they are comfortable with, and have them return to you a solution of their choosing. Wouldn't this best capture how a person breaks down a problem, solves it, and finally presents a solution? Leave the onsite to better understand someones personality, likableness, and workability. Maybe even ask them to walk you thru how they came up with the solution and how they worked the problem. The options here are plentiful.
The birth of the Kindle Tablet and the death of the public library
What I found - people don't want to pay for content. Period.

But they would pay for curated content. I don't want to pay for the news. There is lots of great news written by great journalists for free. However I want to pay for someone to take the time to sort through it and give me the best of it daily. I just wouldn't pay $15 bucks. $5/month, yes.

I remember signing up for Kevin Rose's video newsletter for $5/month without thinking. I cancelled the subscription after 2 months because I found the videos were available later for free anyways.
Did Facebook and Spotify just save the music industry?
Ask HN: Better to be pretty good at a few things or really good at one thing?
The steepness of Facebook's curve is very likely to freak Google out.

Facebook looks likely to exceed 200% in just a few years!
Senators Criticize OnStar’s "Track You Even If You Cancel" Privacy Policy
>>my point is simply that these two are contradictory

My hypothesis assumes that the following statement is false on sick individuals.

>>"the less sodium that study subjects excreted in their urine - an excellent measure of prior consumption

Hence there would be no contradiction.
That parse-int is 3x slower than (read) at parsing integers on sbcl
It's fantastic. I don't know CoffeeScript so all I did was compare the pre-written ones to each other and see if they did what I expected them to do, but it's a nice visual representation. The only problem I have with it is that the neon yellow on black with a gray/white background can be pain inducing, especially when moving quickly.
The Rapid Growth of the Suburban Poor
Masterpieces: Ico and Shadow of the Colossus
Subjugating the Wild Animal
Facebook is free and always will be
There's an option in your Spotify preferences to disable it.
I agree... the post just has a sensationalized title. He was just missing his company's pitch at the end.
No, I'm serious. Free now, trying the ad-supported model (ads by cool startups) and I have no more intentions to make it paid any time soon.