skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
HP's primary goal was to make great products. And our primary goal here is to make the world's best PCs -- not to be the biggest or the richest.

We have a second goal, which is to always make a profit -- both to make some money but also so we can keep making those great products.

The garage where HP started is purported to be the beginning of silicon valley.
But what if you are a drug dealer, and you suspect your boss is going to kill you. You want to use the old "if anything should happen to me, a friend will mail a package into the FBI" insurance policy, and you want it to be automated?

There have to be at least 10 or 20 people who want this.
I like their products, and buy them, but the above is not my experience (great to aim at; very hard to do): Apple's LCD display had a really annoying design (splayed supports, where I want to move my mouse; no connection to a PC - to be fair, they fixed both issues in the next version). ITunes on Windows is awful. My iPod headphones are really annoying.

But I have had the above experience every time with another product: vim (the editor). Whenever I'd think of a cool feature, it would already be implemented, with lots of associated features that I hadn't thought of yet. Impressive. OTOH, hard to find the damn features, unless you already have the idea for them (like google). So, vim could be better designed in that sense (no, I don't know how one would do that).
Windows was/is a great product in many senses. Great is not a word with a single application to an OS.

Windows was great in that it allowed multiple hardware vendors to compete on hardware without having to also design their own OS. It was great in that it allowed multiple corporations to market the same platform. And as it grew, it was great in that it allowed developers to write an app once that ran nearly anywhere.

There's a lot more to "great", as applicable to an operating system, than even usability, stability, graphic design. A lot of times the things you value, as a developer, aren't what the general public does. You might want an OS that's very much like Linux but with a much better GUI. Most people just want their PC to cost $300 and run any program they buy or have bought in the past.

So Microsoft's OS was clearly great by far more people's definition of the word than Apple's, and it reaped the rewards.
DO NOT USE THIS REGULAR EXPRESSION FOR ANYTHING.

This is a terrible example. First off, you're using double-quoted syntax, but it's not in double quotes. Additionally, you're confusing when regular expression metacharacters need to be escape because they're metacharacters and when they need to be escaped because they are in a double-quoted string. The PHP documentation is particularly terrible in this regard (telling you to put regular expressions in double quoted strings rather than single quoted, because PHP doesn't have a regular expression type).

[-\.\\w] means match a dash, a dot, a backslash and the w character.

Secondly, it's not anchored to the start or end of the input.

Thirdly, the LHS can be empty according to this regular expression.

Lastly, we've finally uncovered who it is that's keeping everyone from using + on the LHS to do sendmail style +folder references.
By bad dice luck usually, or by aunt Jane placing a hotel on Park Lane.
They're certainly neither a monopoly nor stagnant. They've pumped out innovative new products over the years (Diet Coke for instance) and continue to do so. They've been an innovator in marketing in their industry.

Even the New Coke fiasco was only a failure to understand what nobody really understood at the time, which is that people don't purchase a soft-drink based on taste. It seems obvious to us now, but who would have guessed it back then?
Totally agree, although great technical innovation and marketing is no guarantee of success if the industry is disrupted.

Jobs is unique in that he disrupts the industry (well, he facilitates it): Apple, Pixar, iPod
I'm curious what TechCrunch's article provides beyond what came out in the standard press release on the Google Blog. (http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/09/google-audio-indexing...)
"Controlling the conversation," I like that. The ads are way clever, since they connect with the average person in a sitcommy, "yah, but not really," way. It's completely breaking the ad formula all together.
If I might ask, what C extensions are you using today?
That being said, RDPs have quite a bit of boilerplate that may obscure your grammar. (And small bugs in a RDP are sometimes very hard to catch...)
Depending on the regex function you use, you may or may not need the anchoring.

FWIW.
Some have programmers in them, like Achewood.
DIZZY
My mother always says that violence never solves anything.

RASCZAK
Really ? I wonder what the city fathers of Hiroshima would have to say about that.	You.

CARMEN
They probably wouldn't say anything. Hiroshima was destroyed.

RASCZAK
Correct. Naked force has settled more issues in history than any other factor. The contrary opinion 'violence never solves anything' is wishful thinking at its worst.

RASCZAK
People who forget that always pay... They pay with their lives and their	freedom.

RASCZAK
You. Tell me the moral difference, if any, between the citizen and the civilian ?

JOHNNY
The difference lies in the field of civic virtue. A citizen accepts personal responsibility for the safety of the body politic, of which he is a member, defending it,	if need be, with his life. The civilian does not.

http://www.imsdb.com/scripts/Starship-Troopers.html
The problem IMHO will be the fact that it's reasonably easy to make money from their web traffic. Making money from API traffic seems downright impossible to me.
Maybe the combination of gaming and info harvesting, like in Google's image labeling game, makes such a merge plausible. Given how much online gaming happens, I think there's a lot of potential there.
Thanks a lot guys..
Will consider your advice. Much appreciated
Mersenne Twister (lrandom) from http://www.tecgraf.puc-rio.br/~lhf/ftp/lua/.

I have previously also used a network library for SCGI, and some homegrown code which I can't remember.

I should point out that I am planning to move away from Lua for my webapps so that others can maintain them if that is needed. My plan is to use server-side Javascript built on V8 (Google). I still prefer Lua - but Javascript programmers are pretty easy to find.
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Is it just at my workstation, or did they somehow manage to disable page-up/down and arrow buttons on the question pages?
I think another application could be software transactional memory. As far as I can tell, this more or less requires a functional implementation (since you can't roll back side-effects most of the time).

Very cool stuff.
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I meant their main product - Coke, which has stagnated as a product for as long as I have lived upon this earth, and yet it is the leader in market share.

But you are right that they have not stagnated on Coke's marketing, although those Santa Claus commercials have been pretty repetitive.
How many monopolies were lost without government intervention? I wouldn't call Apple's OS a monopoly, and even if it were, it wasn't for 10 years since Windows overtook it in 1990.

I'm trying to think of genuine monopolies that faded away without intervention and am coming up blank.
I wish I knew a better way to get a survey of what's available in the Emacs world - something that would have clued me in to this command, for example... any tips?

http://planet.emacsen.org/ often has useful stuff.

The emacs wiki (http://emacswiki.org/) is often where you end up after googling and has a heap of information (although even it isn't complete!). You could try http://www.emacswiki.org/cgi-bin/wiki/RandomPage when you're bored :)
Well, it's not stagnant. The formula is (other than the change to HFCS perhaps) but the marketing, which is the true product, is not. What New Coke taught is that people aren't buying a drink for the flavor, they're buying the physical representation of good marketing and the positive emotions that come along with it. They've never stagnated in that aspect.
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I think you're missing the point. Of course being able to ask questions would make a much bigger impact. That's why people go to school. This is not meant to replace that.

> "This isn't all that much different from a textbook, is it?"

1) Video. 2) Textbooks aren't free. 3) Wikipedia isn't organized into bite-sized lectures, and doesn't include ways to evaluate yourself. Wikipedia is a quick reference, not a comprehensive guide.
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I think there's a lot of independent thinking here. The important thing is to keep it civil - to say things that you'd feel comfortable saying directly to the people involved.

Personally, I am kind of skeptical of 37S in that they talk a good talk, but... I have a sneaking suspicion that their true scarcity power comes from things like Rails and their blog. Or maybe not; it's hard to tell without doing some very in depth research.
They've also innovated in logistics. You can get Coke in places where there's no running water.

They way I see it, Coke's goal is: 1) to make you want a Coke whenever you're thirsty (that's the marketing), and 2) to make it very easy for you to get that Coke (that's the supply chain/logistics part)
Thank God(or YC) that Jessica left the Investment Banking Industry way back in 2005.
The value of regex-validating emails and urls are limited. Validation is mostly useful for flagging completely malformed input, like people writing "asdf" or "I dont have an email, plz use fed-ex.".

Regex validation will not catch common typos (or made-up emails) because they tend to look like correct emails. So the intricate, syntactically correct email validation regexes are a solution in search of a problem.

If you really want to be sure that the email is correct, you have to send a confirmation mail. For your input validation, just check that there is a "@" somewhere.
Good question. I suppose you'd want to dig around dead technologies... perhaps someone had a monopoly in the wooden wagon spoke business or something like that, that simply ceased to matter as an industry.
One could also use an email with the "will" to a special mailbox as a switch to activate some processes that could do all kind of stuff..
Ask HN:Infrastructure for a software project
Hi,

I'd be leading a new project soon. And I've been pondering over what are the basic infrastructure for a software project. These are the stuff that I think every project should have:

-Coding style conventions

-Naming conventions

-Standard project directory structure(eg maven standard dir layout, etc)

-Project management and issue tracking(eg trac, redmine, etc)

-Continuous Integration server(eg, hudson, cruise control, etc)

I'm not sure if I missed out anything. Would anyone like to add?
Sorry... I'm new to this... where is your site!?
Central banks to pump cash into markets
Amazon announces a Content Delivery Service
Version control, of course.
Creating a good product because your greed says it will get you more money is ok, but I think the point is that if you flip it round - create a good product because you want your product to be good - you get a better product and potentially more money.
So how little should you deliver to users as an first release to get the right balance between getting the great feedback, and not loosing a lot of your initial users because its too simple for their needs?

You can either launch too early and it doesn't compare with other more mature services feature wise, or launch too late, and the software is a bit bloated or another service has got a massive lead by introducing one of your main features! (or something along those lines)
Are you a super-influencer?
As an aside, I'm coming to this story 18 hours late, but every single link posted on this page, is down. Wikileaks is even down. All of it.

I feel bad for the script kiddies that did this. They are going to get Mitnicked on this one: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kevin_Mitnick

General law enforcement in the US is crap when it comes to computer crime, but if you get the boys at the NSA, the FBI or at Secret Service interested, you're going to be spending a lot of quality time exercising in a little room with metal bars for a wall. And, if you have any sort of "ideological" basis for your acts, I wouldn't be surprised to hear the word "terrorism" creep into the DA's vocabulary at some point during your legal proceedings.
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HN comment pages need a footer
Sometimes, I get a little frustrated accidentally trying to scroll down past the bottom of a HN comments page. There is no marker to indicate the end of the comments. I never make this mistake at Reddit because they have some footer stuff. Maybe if the orange top bar were repeated at the bottom like a book end, I wouldn't have this problem.

Rumor has it that the Google homepage has the copyright notice to indicate to users that the page has finished loading: http://blogoscoped.com/archive/2007-12-19-n14.html

Makes sense to me :-)
it would be nice t have a torrent of all the lectures for a given course + materials together.
If ever someone wanted an example behind the logic "let the language / stdlib / mature framework handle email validation," here it is.
Hear, hear indeed - It was 11pm after a long day when I wrote that, but I won't make the same mistake again, lol!
Hottest tech job in America? Wildlife biologist
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Agreed. Which means there is already a market with market players involved. I think that's good news, not bad.

So what are your differentiators? Well you're virtual, not physical. So you can be changed easily. Plus you can offer all sorts of interactive multi-media instead of paperwork. You could electronically interact with other services, such as FaceBook or MySpace, where other older services couldn't.

I'd use my differentiators (and there's more than I listed) to explore some market niches.

There's nothing wrong with trying to create an entirely new market with a free service. To me, that's swinging hard for the home run. Or you could just take a good base hit and enjoy what you can get. I don't think there's a right or wrong answer. I do think that we startup types usually think big. "Big" is a very relative term -- a successful entry in an existing market could be a lot better risk/reward scenario than making it all up from scratch.
western union?
Getting past the startup roller-coaster
Please stop the stereotyping of military service. It's shoddy and it's inaccurate.

For most of our country's history, large portions of the population have been exposed to military service sometime in their lifetime. This is the longest period (since the 1970s) where the greatest percentage of people have not had that experience. It's a great social experiment, one that's not generally acknowledged.

I'm not going to argue your stereotype. Suffice it to say I have several concrete examples that each of your points are wrong. "Not even wrong" would be a better characterization.
actually i didn't use PHP, the code i submitted is 'ported' using /regex/ ... i haven't tested it in PHP (i don't have) ... but that what i might use if i were forced to use PHP

the actual code is in newlisp:
<code>
(set 'p1 (regex-comp {[-\.\w]@\w+(\.\w+)+})) ;compile
(map (lambda (f)
(replace p1 (read-file f) (push $0 E) 0x10000)
) (directory "." "php|htm|html"))
(set 'E (unique E))
(save "email.db" 'E)
</code>

my newlisp code is not used for validation, it's for scrapping emails from ~30000 html pages totalling 870 MB
<pre>
~/dl $ find . | wc
29546 29548 1423727
~/dl $ du -h
870M
</pre>

I used more complex regexes (slow) but only marginal improvement (< 0.1%) and a lot of noises

This code is pretty fast, almost an order magnitude faster than more complex, complete email regex

[-\.\\w] means ... match - or \. or word (a-zA-Z0-9) character ad nauseum (can put more chars inside [] but the regex is slower)

i didn't use it for validation, so no anchoring needed ... but it's an easy modification

anyway, this is the code i use for real world - i won't pretend that it's perfect for every corner cases, but hey it works fast for me :D short code solving 90+% cases
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They claim that they don't do any image processing. Personally I'm pretty convinced that it's fake. (And I'm guessing that the TC50 judges are at least skeptical as well.)

To clarify, I think the augmented reality bit is fake. (Where you point the camera at something to get information about it.) Getting information about which stores are in the area as well as adding comments to a location is neither new nor particularly hard.
Won't work - unless providers employ some heathens - all will go to heaven.

And who wants to do business with infidels?
Doesn't seem very convincing to me.

"...life expectancy for African-Americans rose... [after] public officials upgraded the sewer and water systems in black neighborhoods."

I think I'd rather be obese and alive than thin and dead from a disease caused by poor hygiene.
The site appears to promise features that don't exist in the app.

From TFA: "The emails are sent in configurable intervals. If you don't answer the first, you will get a second and a third one. If you don't answer those either, your switch will be activated. Of course, you can have your switch postpone its activation (if, for example, you'll be away for some time) by telling it to not try to contact you for a specified period of time."

Yeah, well I can't find this functionality. It's just a sign up + add an email toy app. What a shame, I wanted to have a fiddle with the settings (in my opinion, the most interesting part).
If you're in this stage of setting up, there are a lot of (free) virtual machines (virtual appliances) that will do a lot of what you need.

You can spin up a VM that's got linux and already installs of things like SVN, Trac, etc, etc. Run them on something like VMWare Server (free) and you're all set in mins/hours.

There are a lot of VMWare based ones listed here:
http://www.vmware.com/appliances/

Really handy and can save a lot of time.

If you're working remotely, or at disparate or varying locations, I'd recommend the Hamachi VPN software (www.hamachi.cc). The Linux and Mac clients are very basic, but still work well.

With this kind of setup we can take VMs of all the infrastructure, drop them anywhere and still work. We can take our laptops home, move house, sit in a cafe, go overseas and still check code in and out. All been very handy.
But you can roadblock a lot of good domain names with a little money.
"I can see a time when the community builds the environment within the bounds of the rules of the game engine - and I'm not talking about second life."

Hey! Like Spore! I think it's a damn great idea :)
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Interesting to see how that follows the cost of a barrel of crude oil.. roughly
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Please provide:
1) legal citations to the Alaska and/or Federal laws that say an elected official may not use a personal email account to conduct business.
2) links to the email(s) showing evidence that she broke a law.
3) an explanation as to why you are angry about a claim, stated without any evidence, that she broke the law, but quite happy about an ideological friend who has clearly broken the law and violated someone's privacy; and how you justify the difference.
4) an explanation as to why those people you agree with are innocent even when they've obviously committed a crime, but those you disagree with are guilty until proven innocent.
5) the name of a good civil defense attorney. Public accusations of the criminality of the unconvicted are legally actionable.
6) an explanation as to why murderers should be able to walk free if evidence was illictly obtained, but for the most smeared Presidential-ticket candidate in the last century no accusation is too baseless or low.
Yes. And adds bundles http://manual.macromates.com/en/bundles which are the killer feature. Jumping between files and methods with shortcuts is nice, too.

Of course, it is archievable with VIm but it takes time and you'll constantly find you forgot to mimic TextMate in yet another aspect.
My (completely uninformed) opinion is that the Seinfeld ads were not CP&B's idea. It seems like something that'd come out of msft marketing.

OTOH, what I hear they're doing with the next set of ads -- taking the "I'm a PC" and trying to redefine it -- is 100% CP&B and reminds me of other things they've done recently, such as taking burger king nastiness and making it a manly thing.

I wonder if Microsoft rejected CP&B's initial idea and pushed for this Seinfeld thing instead. After it completely tanked, they were persuaded to go back to the original idea.
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I don't know about the lisp code (where you use \w), but \\w matches a backslash and a w, as the first \ escapes the second. I wasn't saying you were using PHP, but I know the PHP docs were confusing on how to escape things because backslash is overloaded for string escaping and for regular expression escaping and character classes.

I can't see how a more complete (complex?) correct regular expression would produce MORE noise in your output. The very fact that you allow the empty string on the LHS means that you risk getting invalid addresses.

Continue to use that busted regular expression for parsing email addresses out of these 30,000 HTML files and please remove all my email addresses from the list you generate while you're at it.
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Still the only way that millions of poor people working in rich countries have to send money home. If I recall correctly, at least.
I'm outsourcing to South America and I've been using PayPal.

There were a few other options, as I recall. A service called Payoneer, some others.

It used to be W.U. exclusively, but that's changed in the last ten years.
Did innovation, in financial offerings, cause the crisis on Wall Street?
Funny, I really don't feel bad for people who break into other people's accounts and steal their information.

Whom I feel bad for is all the regular folks that had the same thing happen and are not running for office.