skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Another avenue for learning is to start from hard problems. A hard problem is a problem that is very hard without using a known technique or solution. Somebody who's unfamiliar with it has no clue on how to even start solving it. Solving such a problem will add new techniques to your tool-belt for solving a whole class of problems.

Problems that I've found worth studying:

- Parsing. This is hard if you don't know the standard techniques: mostly recursive descent parsing with precedence -- or a parser generator, but that won't teach you much unless you write the generator yourself. Moreover I've found that you quickly run into limitations with parser generators and they don't make parsing easier in the long run, that's probably why most real world parsers are hand written (e.g. gcc, llvm). You can probably hack something together that sorta works, but knowing the right techniques makes writing an efficient parser that you have high confidence in a breeze. I've seen many ad-hoc parsers that would have benefited greatly from proper parsing.

- Constraint solving. Examples are solving sudoku, the zebra puzzle, SAT solving, optimal register allocation and many others. The three most important techniques are backtracking, constraint propagation and conflict learning. Even professional programmers can't do this if they don't know these techniques (e.g. http://xprogramming.com/articles/oksudoku/).

- Interpretation/Compilation. In addition to being a hard problem, writing an interpreter and a compiler makes you understand how programming languages work. This is sometimes seen as a black art, but it is quite easy once you got the pattern.

- Numerical algorithms. The speed and the simplicity of numerical algorithms is astonishing. Newton's method is particularly amazing. In about 10 lines of code you can solve equations, do state of the art numerical optimization or solve differential equations. It can even handle problems that are usually considered to require specialized algorithms, like max flow and linear programming. It can also perform arithmetic operations, like division and square root.

- Machine learning. This gives you a different perspective on problem solving. Many people when presented with the task of spam filtering or determining the language a snippet of text is written in will respond with a hard coded scheme based on a lot of rules. A much better approach is to take a data set of known text and analyze the statistics of the data set and compare that with the snippet of task text. The same applies to many other problems.

What should be added to this list?
"Please stand by for a demonstration of relevancy."

That line is pure gold.
Unfortunately we can't.

Maybe for copy text it's ok, but not for other page elements, ones that we want to align in a specific way to bitmap images, no.

The page-zoom style resizing is our best bet --it's the "resolution independent" way to have your pixels and eat them too.

Now, if we could provide bitmap assets that could be zoomed in the same way, instead of just showing bigger but more pixelated (as we can in application icons in OS X), we would be done.
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Using Your Competition to Find Topic Ideas
Why? Both compilers are just one apt-get away.
"At age 40, only half the light gets through to the retina as it did at age 20."

Well, at least now I know why I'm constantly having to turn the fucking lights on when reading something on paper - that seemed like a new development. I'm 42.
typically most PRs are flunkies whose sole job is to just spam the bloggers in their database with the latest and greatest minor accomplishments.
I see the iPhone as popularizing the smartphone concept, but not fundamentally disrupting the concept of phones and their usage. Palm I think was the real disruptor there, but Apple perfected it.
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I think the author is trying to say, "use your sense of locality; you know, that thing we're all born with". Ironically, we don't really need to put an effort into using the tricks the author conjured up - it's all automated in other ways as part of the process of orientation. But, yes, I am aware of the fact that a small percentage of the population has practically no mentionable sense of locality at all, and may need to navigate manually rather than relying on inherent abilities.
VirtualBox is garbage
That has some features along the right lines, but I see that the 3D modelling bits really slow down when given more than twenty atoms to draw. Is that a limit of WebGL, or could I get better performance out by using lesser shading... or something?

Come to think of it, is this even WebGL?
Which CMS Powers More then 60% of Top One Million Websites?
Did anybody else have trouble understanding what "body copy" means? I know such things as "body font size" or so...
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I think Haskell uses a fixpoint combinator built into the core language under some syntactic sugar to enable any sort of recursion, so the real-world use would be pretty much making every Haskell program ever work.
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Interesting, the first guy not gushing over Jobs and hastily putting together a tribute is Stallman.
Many mobile devices ignore these units - to my annoyance - in favour of the "reference pixel" as defined in CSS. http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS2/syndata.html#length-units

Crazy-speak IMO, and I suspect I'm not the only one... perhaps someone in the standards community could explain the rationale.
I'm 23 and I zoom in on plenty of sites.
The quality I especially revered in him was his refusal to show contempt for his customers by fobbing them off with something that was “good enough”. Whether it was the packaging, the cabling, the use of screen space, the human interfaces, the colours, the flow, the feel, the graphical or textural features, everything had to be improved upon and improved upon until it was, to use the favourite phrase of the early Mac pioneers “insanely great”. It had to be so cool that you gasped. It had to feel good in the hand, look good to the eye and it had to change things. It changed things because it made users want to use the devices as they had never been used before.

Steve Jobs once said

When you’re a carpenter making a beautiful chest of drawers, you’re not going to use a piece of plywood on the back, even though it faces the wall and nobody will ever see it. You’ll know it’s there, so you’re going to use a beautiful piece of wood on the back. For you to sleep well at night, the aesthetic, the quality, has to be carried all the way through.

The fact that the customer agrees with that is a testament of how deeply Jobs spirit is entrenched in Apple's approach and philosophy.
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Now, if we could provide bitmap assets that could be zoomed in the same way

The most common way (used for icons) is to provide multiple bitmaps and load the right one depending on screen DPI. You can do this on your site too.

And there's of course vector graphics (SVG), if you don't mind some extra processing on the client for rendering...
For example, here's a random minor Irish law altering the boundary of a minor city: http://www.irishstatutebook.ie/2007/en/si/0818.html

The law is copyrighted to the Government of Ireland. The law basically says "The shaded area on the map is the new city limits". However the map is almost certainly copyrighted to OSi (Ordnance Survey of Ireland), and is not free to copy.
Body copy is a commonly used term.
That we as techies have a fundamentally different view of this than legislators, and legislators typically are going to listen to whoever pays to play. Honestly listen, as in they know what they don't know and are trying to learn. But they only hear part of the story.
Yep, that looks like a mistake in the article.
Indeed it is an article I wrote in 2008! I was quite surprised to see it on Hacker News only now... oh well, maybe I should write another one at some point.

Things are changing, but not that fast I must say. Go is definitely the biggest omission on that list, but again, it didn't exist back then!
Please. It's je ne sais quoi ("I don't know what"). εὐ πραττειν...
Oh please yes. cough Posterous
Why would Sweden be making laws to protect US IP?

International treaty obligations, negotiated on the basis of some advantage perceived for Sweden. A lot of what countries do in law enforcement protects the nationals of other countries or protects the interests of another sovereign state. The usual reason for that is mutually negotiated agreements.
WBC to picket Steve Jobs's funeral
Honestpage: 10 things Steve Jobs will be most famous for
Did Dropping Acid Make Steve Jobs More Creative?
Apple founder and tech visionary Steve Jobs died on Wednesday. Jobs was heavily influenced by 1960s counterculture, and once told a reporter that taking LSD was one of the two or three most important things he did in his life. Can LSD really make you more creative?
Reading this, I had to look up what a "Kardashian" is.
Many computer programs need to deal with historical dates. Without these tz rules captured into one place, it would be very difficult to determine when an event happened in another timezone. Also, most data is either going to be stored in UTC or in some domain-specific alternate "center" (New York time, for instance), forcing conversions if a user wants to view the data in their local time.

A contrived example: Say I'm in London and I want to know what time the NYSE opened up in London-local time on Black Thursday, October 24, 1929. That requires looking up the opening time in NYC and then converting the time to a different timezone, possibly taking into account DST in both locales.
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+1 this man made a very rational comment.

Simplicity is going to win one day.
Graphene creates electricity when struck by light
One thing to remember is that AFAIK no D2 compiler implements the whole language, and even DMD, which is the 'canonical' implementation seems to be well known for its copious bugs. This is not surprising given how huge and complex the language is.

Go's compilers (like all code) also have bugs, but you rarely if ever run into them, even given their youth and the blinding rate of improvement, they are quite stable.
Ninety percent of anything is crap. But then there are the remaining ones and they are big, bigger than most people think: http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html
I don't know about you, but before the iPhone, I hated touch screens. Before the iPhone, most people have only been exposed to touch via shitty kiosks, credit card readers and ATM machines.

I remember the skepticism around Jan 2007 when the iPhone was announced. They said, "Pure touch? No way. Won't work. You need to have a keyboard." I was one them! Even I said, "yeah, the UI is pretty, but the touch screen probably sucks." However, once I played around with my first iPhone, I bought one the next day based purely on the amazing performance of the touch keyboard.

Pure touch phones already existed in 2007 before the iPhone, but they sucked donkey balls. In fact, many of them still do. To downplay the iPhone's touch UI is disingenuous. To this day, the iPhone still has the best touch response on the market. Followed by WP7, WebOS, Android and lastly BB OS in that order. I own an iPhone, WP7 and a Nexus One and use them everyday. Typing on Android is like eating fried chicken with a chopstick.
There's LiberWriter made by HNer davidw - http://www.liberwriter.com.
This will hold true until the iPhone 5 comes with a 4"+ screen. Then it will become magical and revolutionary.

Mark my words...
Jesus Christ, are you my mirror image!?

Seriously.

I'm so sick of people whining about how I'm "so lucky" to have my job. To hear these people talk about how lucky I am is a huge fucking insult because they act is if it just fell in my lap.

It didn't.

I worked my ass off for it, seemingly just like you did. I worked shitty part-time jobs to pay for my own college education. I worked one summer AS A VOLUNTEER (i.e. unpaid) in order to get noticed and it worked, too, because at the end of that summer the company offered me my first decent-paying job in the tech industry (well, it was only $10-something/hr, but it sure beat $5.25 that I was making before).

All this time I was working on contributing to Free Software projects - not just in the hopes of getting noticed, but in order to improve my skills.

After several years of this, I got noticed and got an internship at a start-up and I grabbed that opportunity and I've become very successful because of it.

Saying this was all "luck" is bullshit. I made my own luck. I worked my ass off for everything I got.

I had friends in college that came from much wealthier families than I came from (my family isn't wealthy by any stretch of the imagination) who had plenty of opportunities in their lives but didn't act on them. Where are they now? Probably at those protests whining that they didn't get a job handed to them just for being them.

I'm serious.

Someone I knew in college (studying anthropology iirc) was offered, through a friend, a job interview at the Smithsonian. He didn't take it. Why? Because it wasn't a "sure thing". He was upset that he'd actually have to (heaven forbid) interview.

Where's he now? Living with his parents because he hasn't been able to get a job in the past 8 years.

He had better opportunities than I did, but I made more out of mine than he did.

He's one of the people who tell me how "lucky" I am that I have such a good job.

Makes me sick.
I can't remember the last time I saw a stock Ubuntu guest crash a VM process, but VirtualBox crashed 4 times in the last 2 days.
More amazingly it could hook your previous conversations up to a Markov chain generator and answer phone calls on your behalf using your voice.
Yes, I'm sorry I downvoted you too before I realized you were making a joke (no way to undo it, though I upvoted this post to make up for it). I guess it wasn't over-the-top enough, there are people that would mean that seriously, and defend copyright and patent trolls.
Yeah, that page is using a custom css.

See this for example, (at 12px)

http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2011/10/05/smashing-coffee-m...
Steve Jobs deserved an upvote record on hacker news.
I think I managed to crash it about ten times last sunday, doing nothing but browsing the web on a VM.
"him- or herself" or "his or her self".
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I do believe you just cut yourself on Occam's razor.
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I think this is good news, if it all happens. There are some hurdles though. D have always had a nice look about it, a good reliable, predictable, open compiler is a huge step to greater acceptance.
I have to admit, when I first saw this I wondered why Jobs was managing firewalls at all. I think I need better glasses.
> can people really be this stupid?

Yes. Always yes.
The question of whether there was a grand plan is certainly an interesting one, but it seems unlikely that in 1998 there was a big whiteboard in Cupertino with "iMac -> iTunes -> iPod -> iPhone -> iPad -> profit!" written on it. But some of those internal steps may have been planned. iTunes came out about 10 months before the iPod did, but obviously the iPod was in development for longer than that. I wonder if iTunes was specifically designed to be the interface between the computer and the iPod? Or if it was just part of a "digital hub" strategy (this was a term Apple bandied about a lot in the early '00s) that was envisioned as being focused on the Mac and that only pivoted when it became clear what a runaway success the iPod was.
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Oracle Decides If You Can't Beat Them, Join Them on NoSQL
http://news.ycombinator.com/over?points=2000
The best part has to be where the cretin who called her "a fucking bitch" tells her she went out of her way to be snarky and rude and should be flattered to have been pitched at all, by form letter on items that have zero relevance to her blog.

BrandLink Communications' clients must be proud.
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What is this about? I didn't understand anything what so ever. Only some PR firm calling some blogger a bitch by accident in an e-mail. The reason though was lost to me. Something about a picture of a guy collating papers?
Thanks. Seems to be common in typography, not so common in the HTML world. Guess where I'm coming from...
you should be flattered that you are even viewed relevant enough to be pitched at all instead of alienated PR firms and PR people – who are actually the livelihood of any journalists business.

Interesting that PR firms consider themselves providing the livelihood of journalism.
True, but if you're designing a product, you want to target the 80% and the average thumb length.

As I see it, that's how the iPhone penetrated enterprise. Everyone is a consumer, but not everyone is a business consumer. Regular people go to work and turn into business people. If regular people love the iPhone at home, why wouldn't they want to take it to work? Why were companies in 2006 designing smartphones only for business people instead of for everyone?
Yeah, VirtualBox crashes for me all the time. Does it have automatic error reporting to Oracle on why it is unstable? I would hope that these crashes are fixable.
I've read him say that he didn't think it was a big deal. Woz seems a pretty forgiving guy.

Me, I'd be pissed b/c people like Jobs always seems to think engineers are just sitting around waiting to get punked. I hate that someone has to be like Jobs to do so well. But, I also recognize he was successful and had a great vision, I won't begrudge him that.

Why can't goodness and success go together more often, without good people just looking like patsies?
Jesus, does it get any more petty? Some dumb person called this lady (who is apparently a Very Important Blogger) a fucking bitch. Forgive me, but so what? This is like caring about feuds between rappers.

If someone called me a mean name in an email, I think my reaction would be to get on with my day. Not sound the alarms.
Aw, I think we killed the site :(

Has someone got a copy of the text?
Yes it's sad how in software development, the most straightforward ways to do something (just specify cm) are usually broken. It's always exception built on exception, different per platform, different per browser.

I guess to do it correctly you'd have to write javascript to reliably detect the DPI on all platforms/browsers (as far as possible, if not make some educated guess) then adapt your text sizes to that :(

So I can certainly understand 'just choose 16px and be done with it'.
Funny? Yes. Pathetic in its own way? Yes.
Developing revenue projections, Brad Feld
I upvoted this but now I feel bad. On afterthought it is just another crap pointless story about an asshole being an asshole on the internet. Note to self: wait 3 minutes before upvoting "pitchforks and torches" stories. Read http://ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html again. Maybe raise a HN feature request for cancelling upvotes?
> Fortunately, thanks to the GPLv2, all the significant changes come back to the mainstream kernel.

How exactly, does that work ?
If you live in Canada you can learn about how to donate here: http://www.blood.ca/ (despite the name it's not just about giving blood).
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And here's a link to the actual paper https://www.sciencemag.org/content/early/2011/10/05/science....
What's wrong with the iPhone 4s, and why Jobs is not my hero
He created the dent - Steve Jobs
I had a lot of instability until I upgraded to a newer vm kernel.

I was on 2.6.38 fedora 64bit vm and it would crash once a day

now I am on 2.6.40 and it has been stable for 50 days
My vote is to go with a free version only, but have in-app purchases. You'll keep it easy to download and try and if they like the first 10 puzzles, they're more likely to pay the 99 cents or whatever for the next 30 puzzles.
The link in the parent is https, try this regular http link if you can't read the article:

http://lkml.org/lkml/2011/10/6/317
http://svn.webkit.org/repository/webkit/trunk/Source/WebCore...

http://mxr.mozilla.org/mozilla-aurora/source/layout/style/ns...
Has anyone managed to get Windows 8 running in VirtualBox on OS X? I've tried, keep getting errors.
Samsung, Google delay next-gen Nexus launch
LibreOffice one year on - a dive into the unknown
Is HN turning into TC? Come on put this on Reddit or something. Sorry, I just don't know how this is relevant. Email + Rant + Twitter = Technology or Winning?
Although I am a heavy VirtualBox-user (vagrant is just too good), I can relate to this.

The only reason why my machine ever panicks is exactly the one cited in this mail: vboxdrv.
Google Nexus Prime leaked with full features and specs
The full features and specifications of the Google & Samsung Nexus Prime has been apparently exposed, according to BGR blog post.
A slightly less caustic way of saying it would be to say that bug reports from things running on virtual box are garbage.
I can't remember the last time I crashed VirtualBox, browsing or not. Even with older 64-bit Flash. Only issue I recall is some snapshot breakage a while back.

Yay anecdotes.
It works fairly well (a bit slow) on Win7. Have you followed these instructions? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2995010
I recently switched from VMWare to Virtualbox because i was sick of finding patches for VMWare kernel modules everytime there is a new kernel version out.
I had some major bugs on VMWare too, usually. Either some keys stopped working (in the host system!) or the VM crashed completely..
I used Virtualbox only for a few hours but it didn't have any hickups so far.

Unfortunately i can't read the article either..
Lucky to have such good libraries available?

Are you KIDDING ME!?!?

I grew up in relatively poor small towns most of my life, where the town library was lucky if it had more than a thousand books. Certainly had no internet.

But you know what? I did the same thing rick888 did and I was at that library all the time learning, trying to make myself better.

I took advantage of every opportunity that came my way and I made the most of them.

I didn't have wealthy parents with connections like so many of the rich spoiled brats I see around me bitching about how "lucky" I am to have a good job, or moaning about how there's so many fewer opportunities around them.

Bullshit. Open your eyes. Stop making excuses.

If you want something bad enough, like I (and clearly rick888) did, you will be successful.

Do some people have more opportunities because of who their parents are and/or how much money they make? Sure, but so what? That's life.

I overcame. Rick888 overcame. So can everyone else.

Stop expecting things to just fall in your lap and complaining about how the world "isn't fair" and cast aside your damned entitlement complex.

The world doesn't owe you jack. You have to fight for everything you want. That's the reality, and nothing these protesters do will ever change that.
Three Startups Launch at FOWA - TechCrunch TV
Virtualbox works fine for me. Though I only use it to run Windows XP so I'm probably not a demanding customer, but calling it garbage is kind of over-the top. It's very useful for me for running some windows-only software that refuses to work in Wine, and to test my sw on windows without having to reboot...
Celebrating the life of Steve Jobs in photos, videos, quotes and tweets
I wonder if he was hosting it on his VBox VM? :P
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Reminds me of why a 27" screen is perfect, but a 30" screen is too big. Sure, 3" may not sound like a big difference, but when 27" is already the absolute max, any more is a waste of space and provides negative return (e.g., parallax issues). Bigger is not always better.
Potentially easier link to read, in terms of the threading:

http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.linux.kernel/1200194
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