skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Actually, it's not supposed to slow you down. It's supposed to make sure you're normally hitting keys that are far apart, which means the hammers won't interfere with each other. QWERTY is a pretty good layout because of it. The next letter you try to type is rarely in the domain of the finger that just pressed down, meaning you can line up a number of keys to be pushed at once.

In the Design of Everyday Things, Donald Norman talks about keyboard design a lot. QWERTY is really good, so switching to layouts that are only slightly better (dvorak) end up not being worth the time and effort.
Before the Internet | TechJaws
I think people are reading too much into it. They could only accept people that applied.
All I'm going to say is, if you can't handle the truth, you're in the wrong business. Now,they'll probably go back having gotten an honest response and make it better.
Download Friends Episodes
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He's churning these out faster than I have time to step through them!
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Java is still the standard language in the vast majority of CS programs. Lots of programmers entering the enterprise only know Java, and if they know more languages they definitely don't know Erlang.

Certainly demand for Erlang programmers will increase over time...
I was making the point that even a lowly hare-brained 8-bit processor can run a Unix-like OS.
Thanks so much for posting this! My thoughts here:
http://startuplessonslearned.blogspot.com/2008/09/seth-godin...
I have to agree that current rates are absurd considering the file size and actual cost incurred by the carriers. It would be nice if the government can slap a collusion case on them and make them send a refund to all of their customers and lower the texting rate.

It's interesting that typically as new technologies become more popular and are adopted by more and more people the costs tend to decrease. In this case however the prices have gone up. Seems counter intuitive.
> The Perth plant, which uses technology from Energy Recovery, a firm based in California, consumes only 3.7kWh to produce one cubic metre of drinking water.

This comes out to $0.37/264gal of water, assuming $0.10/kWh.

edit: should have read the next paragraph before posting :-/
GPS systems (PDAs software and applications)
Over-training is term used in weight lifting for those who are looking to build muscle mass by overloading their muscles during their working, forcing it to go into a greater "repair mode" than from your average person lifting regimen.

Another term would be 'lifting to failure', which obviously doesn't sound as good/simple as overtraining.

It's understandable you're not within his target demographic and can't relate to the idea, but your comment is rude regardless.
GPS tracking systems are well known GPS based applications in daily life. Some applications can run independently, such as navigation, geo-tagging and passive track logger.
Like YC08 PopCuts: SongVest allows investing in songs
You can grab the "normal" search results by using our api.
There aren't however any clusters in it (only the first result of the cluster is returned). If it is useful, we might be adding those as well.

We also have support for timeslices (divide the search results into multiple days) and other statistical stuff (hits from #tlds, domain, sources, etc...), but it's not yet accesible for the public.

Here is the link to the api: http://blogs.iterend.com/en/display?show=api
thanks, we will do that.

The name is a miture between iteration, iter (latin for way), and trend.
More than a year ago, I remember a feature in a magazine about someone with a similar business model. Don't remember the specific company though.
I'm afraid of stating the obvious here, but patents on a piece of information like this is really creepy. Especially given that it is a matter of public safety. If treatments become available and genome sequencing becomes really cheap, how are these patents going to be enforced? No one is going to tell you what mutations are scary unless you pay royalties?
The first thing that came to mind was "Newton," which used stroke-recognition for recognizing letters. I doubt it's actually computing letters on the fly, I go along with your thought that you precompute vectors for each word in the dictionary. My thought is that the vectors are probably very simple. They may start with a specific letter, but after that I'm guessing they are very forgiving of inaccuracies. A rough direction and distance is probably enough to disambiguate words from each other.

I'm guessing it precomputes a tree for the dictionary. With each stroke, it drills down the tree along the most likely path. If it runs out of nodes, it backtracks and tries a more likely path somewhere,possibly using a precomputed list of vectors most likely to be mistaken for each other.

That gives On for the best case.
I'd look for a better name, honestly I have no idea what iterend means...or what it hints at. + even now I tried to type it out as iTrend subconsciously.
Implications Of TV-Internet Convergence
My apologies. I didn't realize it was a duplicate - I just assumed if it was the dupe filter would catch it.

I can't seem to delete the submission now though ... I'd appreciate it if one of the mods could.

Thanks.
What is particularly alarming about this industrywide rate increase is that it does not appear to be justified by rising costs in delivering text messages

Yep, I don't really believe that it costs the telcos $1000/MB to handle SMS.

http://mobilejones.com/2007/07/27/you-might-be-paying-1000-p...
Hold up $1.7 billion in 2005 to $1.9 billion in 2007 is not 13.4%. 1.9billion/1.7billion = 1.118 but it's over 2 years so: 1.118 ^.5 = 1.057 which is ~2% faster than inflation.

Edit: 1.7billion * 1.7 * 1.057 * 1.057 = 1.9billion and 1.9 billion * 1.057 ^5 is 2.5billion in 2012. So, their numbers seem off.
Steinhaus, Mathematical Snapshots
Polya, Mathematics and Plausible Reasoning
Pappas, The Joy of Mathematics
Gardner, The Colossal Book of Short Puzzles and Problems
Winkler, Mathematical Puzzles: A Connoisseur's Collection
Andrews, Number Theory (Dover Books on Advanced Mathematics)

- The last book is not really that advanced, It can be understood by most with an understanding through high school algebra II.
Brilliant quote from a Microsofty "That’s why we’re putting Internet Explorer 6.0 on Windows Mobile where we’ll complete that in the next six months, and that’s so that you get the full PC experience on a mobile device. That’s not a cut-down browser; it’s the full IE 6. We’ll continue to innovate..."

Yes - let's lead with just about the worst browser imaginable - that's what I call innovation.
Don't waste your time on your average religious nutjob. They're just not worth it.

Pull these arguments out for things like schoolboard meetings and the local PTA/PTO. As long as we can keep evolution in schools, we can always hope that children will end up smarter than their parents.
You know, most people seem JUST FINE with their files scattered on other people's computers.

Just look at webmail!
Startup Profile: Nectar - a fresh look at you
10 things you could be doing to your code right now
The Infinite Canvas: An Interview with Scott McCloud, the Google Chrome Comic Guy
History shows that the languages taught in CS and the languages used in industry don't need to be related at all. That the same language is popular in both at the same time is unusual.
The other blog search engines return hundreds of results for my app name, this one returns 1 result.

Not a good start :/
Ah, nice catch. Thanks!
There is something like this that is needed. (Witness the various desktop UIs with two lists with arrow buttons between them. That's a lot of widgets and a lot of space wasted for this fairly basic function.)
The Programming Elite, Programmers Who Read
I think what ars meant was that you can dislike something, a la Microsoft, yet still use their product. I dislike Microsoft, but there is no alternative for me. I have no interest in Linux as it just bores the crap out of me, it's not even an alternative as there's just too many hoops to jump through to get it working and then I'll still have XP on my computer so there's no reason to switch.

I would switch to Apple as an alternative, but as you have to have an apple computer to run OS X I don't even consider it. I'm not going to throw out over $1000 on a macbook, and god forbid I want extra ram installed at apple they'll take another $600 for sticking two little chips in two little slots. The guy who does it must be making $550 an hour cause I can install two ram chips for little over $50 tops! (that includes buying them, I know this because I did it just last weekend for someone, $38.99 for 2x1gb)

So even though I detest microsoft, I hate them less than the rest.
I doubt they use bloom filters (or any other hash-based algorithm) because hashes by their design are a quick way to reference something well defined. A gesture is anything but and you need something a lot more fuzzy and flexible than hashes.

I'd think that they try to calculate the focus of each direction change and see what letter it landed on, then try a fuzzy match to words that have the smallest hamming distance between their input. After you get a good approximation of all the letters, then you can try hashing techniques.

Also, pivoting on first and last letter of each word isn't fool-proof, as the first and last letters are also not guaranteed to be hit dead-on.
Can it come in the form of a bright light?
- But see, the wonderful thing about open source is that you're not DOING it for a profit. If you don't WANT ads, you don't have to GET ads. And it doesn't MATTER how unpopular your browser is, it WORKS.

- I attempt to make logical assumptions about what's going on. You're spreading FUD. There's a difference.

- CustomizeGoogle doesn't merely remove things. It adds other options. And it doesn't do it particularly nicely. What would Mozilla benefit, furthermore, from blocking ads on Google, when they make 80% of their profit from Google? You're not thinking logically. You're being ridiculous.

- I didn't say what I did to help you get friends. I told you to stop bitching because you being a bitch is irritating and unnecessary. But you're still going at it, so I'll assume there's no help for you. My sympathies.
Financial Primer For Self-Funded Startups, Part 1
Text Messaging Prices...You're Doing It Wrong
Certainly, though it seems rare in practice. I suppose the possibility, however small, is enough to warrant not automatically assuming anything.
And he did it to prove his point when D.E.Shaw & Co refused to fund the bookstore idea.
CustomizeGoogle. It strips the ads out of all of Google's webapps.
Write a Sudoku Solver in Python
...and make sure you actually get your cash. Say no to "earn-outs", and check to make sure there are no hidden conditions in the deal. (Sadly, I speak from experience...)
http://xul.fr/
Well then, I must be in the utmost echelon of hacker demigods, as RescueTime tells me I spend the majority of my days reading programming stuff on the interwebs instead of working.

(In my defense, I do still manage to finish stuff on time...)
Impressive. I love this kind of websites (this reminds me to Why's books and that kind of material). Any other sites to recommend in the same kind of style?
at least 2 companies doing this already. neither are very popular
I think it's just a case of offering a service that costs so little to use. Even the inflated price is an insignificant cost for most people on a per message basis.
The irony is that Erlang is so much easier than Java.
Cellphones: Blindingly Fast Touchscreen Text Entry System Gets a Push By Creator of T9
have 23date.com if anyone wants it - isn't there something documented relevant to biological preference for genetic combinations resulting in the smallest overlap in the union of existing sets of DNA, as such would be advantageous within a certain range?
What I find to be particularly evil is that most carriers charge you for receiving messages, but you cannot opt-out. That means I have to pay for every stupid stock spam and wrong number, and there is nothing I can do about it. They give some bullshit answers about being able to block certain short numbers by configuring it manually through their website and calling them for a refund... but seriously, who is going to take the time to do that?
Interesting:

"Mr. Kohl's letter noted that each company appears to have changed text-messaging rates at nearly the same time, with identical prices. 'This conduct is hardly consistent with the vigorous price competition we hope to see in a competitive marketplace,' he said."
Cuban? Really?
Two words: Tacit Collusion

And to all those libertarians here, no just market forces wont fix it, as in this case they are clearly broken. As long as the carriers have a lock on the data on your phone, and what applications you use on your phone.

This is a classic examples where some gov. regulation is required, by: 1. Forcing prices down. 2. Or forcing carriers to allow users to use their prefered SMS provider

EU has been using option 1., where it recently forced carriers to put caps on insanely "roaming data" pricing. (or better rip-off).

The internet equivalent of this would be that your ISP forces you to use only one kind of push email that they provide. Kinda outrageous, no?
Just to add to the blog post a bit:

those flog scores interpretation are ONLY valid if you use them on a per-method basis... on a per-file or per-project level they're completely invalid.

For example:

% pwd; flog -n -m lib | head
/Users/ryan/Work/p4/zss/src/ruby_parser/dev/

Total Flog = 5284.4 (12.2 +/- 2852.7 flog / method)

RubyLexer#yylex: (1076.9)
RubyLexer#tokadd_string: (146.8)
RubyLexer#read_escape: (130.5)
RubyLexer#heredoc: (118.3)
RubyLexer#heredoc_identifier: (89.6)
RubyParser#literal_concat: (81.2)
RubyParser#assignable: (65.2)
RubyLexer#parse_quote: (63.4)

There is little I can do at this time to clean up the monstrous yylex, but tokadd_string, read_escape, and heredoc are all too big and need some attention to clean them up. Everything else is, relative to those scores, reasonable and can be ignored at this time.

I am still chuckling that he recommends capistrano right after pushing tools to fight complexity...
No it won't (this coming from someone who loves Erlang and has worked full-time with it for a year).

There has been way too much invested in both Java and conventional OOP for them to be displaced that fast. 2 years may be a long time in startup world, but in the enterprise world it's nothing.

Ruby has been growing rapidly for the last 3 years, and it's still nowhere as popular as Java. And Ruby's marketing has been way better than Erlang's.
I think the problem is people who read things but don't try to build new things. You can write Lisp style code in C# and if you want to play around with the object system you can even do so in C++ or even Java but coders who only read the hype and never understand what it's saying build the same junk in each new platform.
Yeah, patents in this area are pretty bad. A gene, something that exists in nature, should not be able to be patented. It's ridiculous.

Biotech and medical science have been greatly held back by the heavy enforcement of patents in this area -- imagine what would have happened to software if software patents are enforced.

And correct, no one is going to tell you scary mutations unless you pay royalties, because the only people that aren't afraid to deal with scary mutations are medical doctors, and they certainly pay the royalties as needed. Probably the single most useful and popular (if you're a woman) of the medically actionable genetic tests is the BRCA1/2 test. Myriad Genetics owns the patent and the test costs several thousand dollars in the US. The patent was overturned in Europe, I believe, so it is probably cheaper there.
From what I recall too, the marginal cost of SMS is 0, because text messages are sent on your cell phone's control channel (also why you can't send/receive a call while a text is transferred):

http://mobile.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=433536&cid=22...

That said, I can't wait to see the BS they come up for this one.
I wish there was a carrier that advertised their real rates for every aspect of their plan instead of their bullshit rates.

Real rates include those ridiculous fees they add on at the very end each month - and no those fancy sounding names aren't all government taxes and ridiculousness - just clever suit trickery. Excluding sales tax, grocery stores aren't allowed to lie about their prices, why are cell phone carriers?

I'd pay a premium and tell my friends.
Mooooooooonooopoly. Actually colluding oligopoly, but that's not as fun to say.
Even when I am actually doing work, I often spend at least half of my time reading and investigating existing code, not coding. Why? Because I want to:

1) Really understand what is going on in the existing code base

2) Make sure what I plan to do is in line with the philosophy of the current code

3) Make sure I'm not replicating something already implemented

4) Give my brain enough gestation time to allow lateral thinking to happen

In fact, often I'll spend some time reading, go off and practice juggling, then come back and whip off an initial prototype, then go and do something else distracting (read Hacker News) then revisit the problem again the next day. Most of the time, I'll figure out an even better way to do it.
Cybersquatter Email
Hi All,

Someone has been sitting on octopart.cn and octopart.com.cn for over a year now. Occasionally they send us an email to ask us if we want to buy them back. Yesterday we received an email from public-domain.net.cn which claims to be a domain name registrar in China. They said someone is trying to register our brand with them and they wanted to verify it with us. I'm attaching the email below.

Has anyone on HN received a similar email from public-domain.net.cn? Previously when we posted about the cybersquatters, other people on HN said they had gotten emails from them as well.

Thanks,
Andres

Dear CEO,

We , a registrar organization in China, have something to check with you. We received an application on Sep. 9th. One company called "Repet Trading Co. Ltd" is applying for "octopart" as internet brand and following Asian/.CN domain names to use.
octopart.asia
octopart.com.tw
octopart.hk
octopart.net.cn
octopart.org.cn
octopart.tw

After checking, we found the internet brand and keyword of these domain names are as same as your company’s, so we need to check this with your company.

If the aforesaid company is your subsidiary company or your business partner, please DO NOT reply us, we will approve the application automatically. If you have no any relationship with this company, please contact us within 7 workdays. If out of the deadline, we will approve the application submitted by " Repet Trading Co. Ltd " unconditionally.

Best Regards,

Louis Hua
Lead Checker
I liked the simplicity of the invite experience. Your home page times out. :(
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AlphaLab applications open
Chrome Users Coming from IE
This is not going to happen in 2 years, inertia is too high. Imagine all those projects that have just started now that aren't even out of analysis yet?
The average software developer, for example, doesn't own a single book on the subject of his or her work, and hasn't ever read one.

I used to own, and read, books about programming. Now my reference books at least are made obsolete by the web.
what's the cost in your country? In Italy it's more or less 10 cents of euro for SMS sent. To receive an SMS is of course free.
Peter Norvig wrote something along similar lines: http://norvig.com/sudoku.html

Highly recommended.
I tried to read this, but the text was too dense for me to concentrate on from this noisy coffee shop. Oh well.
Better Title: "Hasty Bloomberg employee causes United Airlines Stock Crash, but I'll put Google in the title too, so people bother to read this."

Even the original Wired headline was "Six-Year-Old News Story Causes United Airlines Stock to Plummet".

It's especially funny that you word-smithed the headline linking to a story about people overreacting to a headline.
Umm... I have AT&T and I could cancel all text messages from their setup website or by calling customer support. The messages just went into a blackhole and I never saw or paid for anything my friends would send me.

Of course I share unlimited text with a "family" plan that me and 5 friends are on. But the opt-out for texts still exists last I checked.
I tend to be cagey about it, because a. I still own some stock, b. I'm still subject to a legal agreement and c. I'm too busy to actually figure out in detail how b affects what I can and can't say.
2 years may be a long time in startup world

It's actually not a long time in the startup world, either. The average life cycle in the valley for VC-backed startups from founding to exit is 7 years. There are always exceptions, of course. But two years isn't enough time, in general, for anything interesting to shake out--either in languages or in startup companies.
To be fair, there is overhead to opening a connection. If sending a text was a matter of transmitting 160 bytes, it wouldn't take a second or two to send. Networks now transmit at 600kbps easy and yet my messages don't send in 1/3750th of a second. And that network usage counts. Calculating it based on the number of bytes just seems unfair.

That said, they're still overpriced. They should cost less than a minute of phone conversation. Really, they should cost probably around the equivalent of 1 second of phone conversation. So, you should be able to send 60 messages for, say, 10cents. That would come to $10-11/MB by your logic which is high if you don't count the cost of building/tearing down the connection.
I want to read a zomplet run of Zot!

Shoot... the entire run of Comico books would be great.

(I miss the black and white independent comics fad of the 80's. Adolescent Radioactive Blackbelt Hamsters? Anybody?)
Hard disks already use error correction, but you can add more if the uncorrectable error rate isn't low enough for you.
I think the internet equivalent of the wireless industry as a whole (instead of just this situation, which you noted) would be the following:

1. Misleading pricing that never matches the advertised rates

2. Unexplained and unrefunded outages

3. Misleading services that have built in caps that aren't explicitly stated in company literature or advertising

4. For consumers, only able to choose between 1-4 providers, based on your location

5. Normal hold times of 30 to 60 minutes

Oh wait, that's how the internet is if you're stuck with Comcast, RCN, et al in the States. It's almost uncanny how much the internet providers, wireless providers and the RIAA/Big Labels have in common including their share prices.
An iPhone app that does this came out around the time the store first launched. Does anybody remember its name?
Ask YC: Alternative to Nagios
Can you help me with some pointers to some non-GPL equivalent of Nagios while offering SNMP monitoring for systems.
If there were a public market for predictions, I'd short-sell this one.

Not saying it couldn't happen, but the odds are highly against it.
0.20 USD send and receive, with no data plan.
Obviously you can't just eliminate congestion control, and the coding rate should be adaptive to reduce overhead.

At least one startup has gone broke on this idea already, but maybe it's possible to do it right.
Sure google appengine scales, but is it also fast?
(Since scaling != speed necessarily)