skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
One theory for why two bombs were dropped was to intimidate Stalin into thinking there was a production line of such weapons -- ergo, he should stay out of western Europe.
>these kinds of problems are far removed from what I work on day-to-day.

Exactly! The OP says he "clarified" the problem, but I can clarify tons of math problems for you where the solution is staring you right in the face yet its impossible to solve if you haven't seen it previously.

example:

We all know 2,3,5,7,11,... are the primes

So the next guy is 13.

We all know 4,9,16,25,36 are the squares

So the next guy is 49

We all know 1,1,2,3,5 are the fibonacci numbers

So the next guy is 8

..

..

..

..

..

So, what's the next guy in 1,5,7, 15, 20 ?

( Remember the solution is right in front of you, but 90% of people on average won't figure it out. These are called convolution series. The solution is 28, if you haven't figured it out yet. )

(edit: provided solution and fixed a simple numerical error: dekz, thank you for spotting that )
The CEO of HBO is infuriating. I will never have a cable subscription ever again and it has nothing to do with the economy, yet I would love to be able to purchase HBO shows digitally. Game of Thrones? Still not even available on DVD, let alone iTunes, Amazon, or shit, even some crappy HBO run service. Have friends in the same situation who just gave up and pirated it.

Perfect picture of an out of touch media executive.
Groupthink on an epic scale, linkbait headlines, and hordes
of people that want to feel angry about things so they can
at least feel something. (Just like old media!) Now, there
is some good content on there, but there's way too much
crap to wade through in order to find it.

So... it's exactly like the internet?
SXSW rejected our application without reviewing site, any similar stories?
Long story short, we got our rejection letter from SXSW today and checked our sites administration panel to see if they used any of the beta invites we sent them to review the site. They didn't use any so there was no way they could have looked through the site we submitted. It seems to me that they should at least do a little review work if they are going to collect a fee for the service.<p>I was wondering if this was typical and if anyone else here has similar stories.
I think they can afford to be slightly ballsier than they're being. But not by much. And that matter of degrees is what makes the situation with "rocking the cable providers' boats" so fraught. Fact is, HBO is not in a power position against its cable providers. HBO doesn't drive cable subscriptions en masse the way sports packages do. HBO still -- for the time being, at least -- needs Comcast, Time Warner, et al., a lot more than they need HBO.

That said, I don't think there is a major cable provider out there right now who'd dare drop HBO from all of its offerings if push came to shove. And I think HBO is, in many ways, the perfect content brand for on-demand subscriptions or a la carte episode sales on digital ecosystems. Its content is top-notch, and the potential audience for that content is theoretically a large multiple of the current HBO subscriber base. The quality of a typical HBO scripted series is lightyears beyond that of almost any other network show, and consumers would eat it up.

I agree with you that HBO seems well-positioned for either world right now: the world in which it currently lives, or the world in which it could find itself a few years from now. HBO GO is a great app with what I imagine is a large install base. It seems relatively future-ready, if not wholly future-proof.
http://dcrainmaker.com comes to mind
The article mentions replacing with cloth.
Also some of the replacement coffeescript files are just empty files.
Ask HN: What's your process of writing a blog post?
I've made it a point to start blogging recently, and with a huge thanks to Octopress, I actually enjoy it now.

I wrote about my typical process of writing a post here: http://cnnr.me/b/2012/01/my-blogging-process/

But I'm interested in hearing how HNers typically blog. Do you have any kind of process you usually follow before getting a post up?
The mystery of missing heritability (Eric Lander et al.)
He's probably precisely the type of guy you should listen to when it comes to how things don't work as they should.
I think thats exactly what Im saying
The site seems to be down. The dicussion on Reddit: http://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/o46zk/twitchtv_drops...
Here's a 5 - 10 minute iterative version in C.

https://gist.github.com/1567842

I tend to like to rough code out Lispishly, but if I'm actually running stuff I'll often do it in C.
Data communications carriers. I agree with you, yes Wifi alone is not enough, which is why companies like Clear/Clearwire partnered with Time Warner & Sprint: http://www.clear.com/about-us. So it's just one dot. But it's an interesting dot. Because there are literal hundreds of millions of wi-fi enable devices that can handle all kinds of communication with the right app. So we see the cable companies(with their optical fiber) partnering with upstart carriers(fiber or 4G connected wifi hubs) and more establish carries(more underground optical fiber or 4G) to make wifi ubiquitous in cities and bring more competitions to the giants like AT&T and Verizon. In NYC verizon is competing with Time Warner cable, so it won't surprise if time Time Warner get's more involved with mobile(i.e.: clear).
No, he wouldn't have. If you use === everywhere, you're wasting bandwidth for the extra character. Use === only when the type matters and is likely to be different. 99% of the time, it's when you want to distinguish between undefined, false, 0, and null.
The generated CoffeeScript also seems to be a bit more verbose than necessary, though, as it mimics the JavaScript rather closely. For example, there are several cases where instead of `unless @foo?.bar?.baz?` it does `if not this.foo or not this.foo.bar or not this.foo.bar.baz`.
The problem is not that the prototype was released to the public; it's that it was left in prototype form for so long after it had proven its worth to the company.
I have exclusively used Lisp for over a year, and I haven't fell into any traps.
It's obviously bad business to get involved in politics

Quite the opposite; each dollar spent on lobbying usually produces more than a dollar in government subsidies.
"Does it not strike you that quite a few HN'ers openly admit that they would not pass the filter?"

To be quite honest, this thread is having the opposite effect. I'm questioning the quality of HN contributors based on their inability to either comprehend the question or code a simple algorithm.

I passed similar coding questions in interviews before I'd ever written a line of code in my life (in a Microsoft PM internship interview). No one cared if I wrote a semicolon or not - the interview was asking if I understood basic concepts like loops and logic.
Where The Cloud Will Grow in 2012: Look Back at 2011
Where The Cloud Will Grow in 2012: Look Back at 2011
5 Anonymous Search Engines
Update: Symantec Comments on Breach - Alleged Hacker Speaks Out
The domain is non-descriptive, and .info is typically associated with spam. It also looks like you're in a flux state of completion, with not a lot of detail. I'd suggest limited your scope and making a smaller, but more polished product, before trying to attract more contributors.
So, JChris is at Couchbase and developing on a mobile project that synchs with CouchDB. Yet the flagship product at Couchbase cannot do so. I wonder whether Couchbase is planned to synch with CouchDB in subsequent versions?
That image does a facile job. You could create an equivalent for almost any other language, and JavaScript would be lucky if that was the worst kind of criticism that could be leveled at it.
Because Reddit is not like those other sites. I have 130 feeds in my RSS reader, 9 pages on my speed dial (including HN and other forums) and still visit Reddit every once in a while.
Because combining two unrelated ideas is confusing (e.g. it would lead people to the false belief that upgrading to IPv6 will negate the effects of SOPA).
It Is Time To Stop Pretending To Endorse The Copyright Monopoly
Subreddits are what will keep Reddit strong. Even though Reddit has tons of members, subreddits make it feel much smaller and personal.
Reddit's advertising UX is horrendous, every time I use it I always have to spend an hour figuring exactly how to give them money.
As a society we are lucky to have both his intelligence and patience for all these years.
Factories are a good way to solve the problem of not being able to pass a function that creates an object. They're generally an OO kludge around passing an anonymous function, because for some reason passing a function needs to be insanely difficult. And so another class is created to manage the thing that the constructor was supposed to do in the first place (manage the creation of objects) but if you called it the constructor pattern they'd have to admit the language was broken.

OO languages that support passing functions generally don't have very many instances of the factory pattern, and languages that have abstracted allocation of memory and initialization of memory have even fewer instances of it.

That's why I consider the factory pattern to be an anti-pattern; you've chosen a language that's ill suited to the task you are solving and instead of fixing the real problem (can't pass functions that create objects in a reasonable amount of effort) you're inventing kludges.

I've only seen a handful of cases where accepting a parameter of type () -> T or x -> T doesn't solve the factory pattern issue.
how about rackspace use your slick dreadnot technology to deploy php 5.3 to your cloud sites?
The focus on getting rid of paper is naive when you start talking about Dyson Airblades. It's not just the cost of running the thing that matters, it's the cost of creating and maintaining the thing. The same principal counts for hybrid cars. They feel environmentally friendly because of marketing campaigns that focus on metrics like paper and gasoline consumption, but when you count the cost of creation, and even more importantly the cost of getting rid of them, it's not as black and white as "we should move off paper and gasoline."
We're certainly hoping to reduce the complication by removing the boundary between (clustered) BigCouch and Apache CouchDB by making the clustering an optional and transparent part of the Apache CouchDB project.
LOL, what time?
"Prototype as fast as possible" is a good rule of thumb. It's not always the right way, but from a business standpoint you're not wasting time polishing a potential loser, which means you have more time to devote to other potentials.
>Some other countries around the world, including Japan and the UK, however, rarely use toilet paper at all.

I can't speak for Japan, but the UK? Really? Are people secretly running around here washing their bums? I think I know one person with a bidet, and I'm pretty certain they've never used it to wash their bum.

The article reeks of poorly researched "facts". Encourage less use of paper, sure, but the environmental cost of installing an additional fixture and using more water must be considered.
Except HBO won't do this. If HBO wanted to charge some pittance for HBO Go, I'd pay it. Instead they want me to sign up for cable, which I don't want, so they don't get my money at all. (And I don't see how refusing to negotiate a DVD rental deal helps that goal at all.)
Yes, I'm aware that there lots of people in USA who think USA is the best at everything. However there are some things the USA is best at. So just because someone from USA thinks USA is the best, doesn't mean they are wrong. They might be right. Look at the evidence.
Amazon's running a television ad that shows a guy use the Amazon smartphone app to scan a package of diapers and then put the diapers back on the shelf.

I'm hard-pressed to see a way for physical retailers to offer any sort of competitive advantage, especially since Amazon's customer service is so much better than everyone besides Apple, despite being online only.
We're working with a couple SaaS companies right now to get a feel for how to best apply our platform in that setting. If you're interested in chatting about your SaaS product, email us at info at custora - happy to chat!
Prepend is probably a better way of expressing "insert before" :P

n->p = p->p

I don't see the last one - unless foo should be returning n?
So you're listing it for people, collecting the money on their behalf and then forwarding it to them?
> You could go to the bank and get about the same and not have to give away anything.

Could you? It seems like a bank would want some kind of collateral for a small business loan (unless you spend 6 months trying to get a loan from the SBA). Unless you have a car or house you're willing to put up for collateral, I think the bank will just laugh at you.

But I'd love to hear from others that have secured loans from the bank.
I got to talking with a power line crew as we waited for the utility to give the go-ahead to fix downed lines in our neighborhood.

They felt the utility engineering personnel had very little comprehension of how the field work was actually done, and complained they got direction that made little or no sense. And they made a lot more than the engineers, though they had to travel the country and work long hours to do so. These guys were licensed and came through a certification program, but had little or no college.

They allowed that the engineers had much better theoretical knowledge, but were so divorced from the realities of the work as to be basically useless in disaster recovery.
which of the three Javascript examples is generated by?

foo -> bar 'foo', -> 'bar'

The point, is that Javascript is simple in demonstrating what are and aren't functions because it has an ending delimiter.

CofeeScript isn't simple with anonymous function creation.
Ask HN: What password management system do you use?
I'm trying to start using random passwords for [almost] everything to be more secure. What do you use to manage your passwords?

(I'm on a Mac, but all suggestions are welcome)
strace tip #31415927: If your program is I/O bound, sometimes you can improve performance by increasing the size of the read buffer. A bigger buffer means fewer system calls and potentially increased performance. How do you know how big the read buffer is? Sometimes it's hard to tell even if you have the source (i.e. you're using stdio). With strace you can see the number of bytes you're trying to slurp in with each read system call. If it looks like a small number, you can then go figure out how to make it a bigger number, perhaps using setvbuf or rolling your own buffered I/O.
My app store can beat up your app store
The primary problem with the argument of "is college worth it", or one component of it that I find more interesting, completely misses the potential opportunity cost of college. Someone who goes to high school and immediately joins the workforce with a high-school level job will often not continue to put forth school-level mental effort in that job or at home. Is that a school problem or a workplace problem? A more fair (or rather helpful and telling) comparison would be if the student undertook an effort that can rival the purpose of the university.
As with any user-generated content website, it has a problem: amongst those many users Reddit has there are also lots of dicks that spoil the conversations for everybody.

I don't think Reddit wants to go on the path of Youtube - useful for finding out links, but with useless and rude conversations that make you mad at waisting time reading them. I think Reddit got popular because in addition to links, users had meaningful things to say about those links, but the overall quality has been constantly dropping. Reddit should try to find ways to alleviate this phenomenon.

Here's a case study from today. I submitted a link to both HN and /r/programming [1] [2]

Most popular comment and criticism on HN:

1. User tumblr.
2. You're done.

Most popular comment and criticism on /r/programming:

Scumbag programmer: Titles post "Blogging for Hackers".
Writes the whole thing in Ruby.

Edit: Whoops - looks like those Ruby rockstars woke up.

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3428369

[2] http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/o3v2u/blogging_...
that's a false economy since you must also include however many bytes it takes to explain in a comment that you used == on purpose, and not as a typo- to warn future maintainers not to switch it to === when they run it through JSLINT.
Fairly niche perhaps, but i think Wired benefits from it. Other than the natural posting of wired articles on reddit, there have been a couple of articles in wired which originated from reddit content.

There is a lot of potential for datamining and finding trends, what is popular, what would go down well, etc, which they may well be doing too.
Feds Want Judge to Force Suspect to Give Up Laptop Password
Ding-ding-ding! Correct answer. Now lets see where are we in the cycle... technology boom ... oh yeah, real estate must be up next
Thanks sounds like you have a good plan... Amazing that officials can keep quiet on issues until they vote... I think your approach can at least provide hints and motivate people to call and get direct answers
I don't understand, I'm afraid. How does function passing negate the need to choose between multiple implementors of an interface?
20% of Facebook links lead to viruses (infographic)
Xfinity costs extra money and I don't get nearly enough in return for it to be useful to me. Not only that, but content streamed over their Xfinity is still counted against my bandwidth cap with them so basically I am paying them extra money to kick me a little bit harder.
This is a great point that other folks haven't brought up. As an interviewer, you need to make sure your "calibration" is genuinely a smart candidate who is creating a novel solution, not a smart candidate who is pretending to create a novel solution while actually coding from memory!
1) Your developer is way out of his or her league

2) A more popular framework than .NET? Really?

.NET has built in membership providers which means the encrypted password should be a non-issue. If your lead developer is rolling their own login system then they shouldn't be your lead developer.

The timezone issue and recurring events are also no brainers. I don't think you're micro-managing at all, you're just trying to avoid horrible design decisions which will hamstring your application down the road.
Digital music sales top physical music sales
Double the battery life of your android phone. 2x Battery Saver is amazing
Ask HN: Gmail redesign an attempt to make me use gmail on my phone more?
I can't stand this redesign who ok'd this?
This is why SOPA/PIPA shouldn't exist. People aren't criminals. I wish the corporate sponsors of these bills would open their eyes and see this.
Separating the college group to reflect marks could be a little more interesting, compare under achieving but passing college students to those who didn't attend. Of course there will still be bias but it gives a little better picture on how much smarts plays into it and how much just having the piece of paper plays into it.
It's a joke commit, with auto-generated CoffeeScript from a conversion tool.

About 3,700 deletions come from files that were erroneously replaced by empty files. Another 1,400 or so are from removing the license comment at the top of the files, and I'd imagine stripped comments throughout the code add a bit more.

The actual compression ratio seems to be about 20-25%, then. It's likely that idiomatic CoffeeScript, rather than generated CoffeeScript, would be somewhat shorter, but probably not by a drastic amount; I'm no JavaScript guru but the Node.js source doesn't strike me as verbose to begin with.

It seems to me that CoffeeScript is in some ways an attempt to make you write using only - in the words of Douglas Crockford's book title - "Javascript: The Good Parts". The most representative test of its success would thus be rewriting a bad library or tool into CoffeeScript and seeing if it makes the inner badness come to the surface where you can deal with it more easily. If you're already writing disciplined, well-organized JavaScript, than there's no reason to stop.
That mirrors exactly our experience. We have used Pyramid for three recent project and its awesome. It just takes a little longer, but its flexibility is impressive. We've just used it with Pure templates also, which I was very impressed with
You put comments in code? I place all comments in a separate markdown file.
The compensation difference between a large tech corporation and a startup
I tried to recode what you did in scheme for practice

(define (pascal n)
(if (= n 0) (list 1)
(begin
(let ((L (pascal (- n 1)))
(ret (list 1)))
(do ((i 0 (+ i 1)))
((= i (- (length L) 1)))
(begin (set! ret (append ret (list (+ (list-ref L i) (list-ref L (+ i 1))))))))
(append ret (list 1))
))))
FYI, function application wraps rightward to the end of the line, or the end of the block, so:

foo -> bar 'foo', -> 'bar'

Means:

foo(-> bar('foo', -> 'bar'))

But in any case, you wouldn't write it like that.
If you know the problem you're solving and how to solve it well (i.e. product-market fit), then you shouldn't waste your time on a hack MVP. Build something awesome.

Unfortunately, the majority of work for a startup is about finding product-market fit. A la Steve Blank, a new product rarely survives first contact with customers. As such, spending too much time on something that will inevitably be changed doesn't make much sense.

Also, some people who are testing out ideas are probably just exploring, playing with the idea in their own head. It helps to send something out to friends simply to generate conversation and get quick feedback.

Don't hate.
lastpass.com
I have an idea for an iPad app...constructive criticism needed
I have an idea for an iPad app and I am about to let a professional developer implement the idea.

But I am unsure if my idea is worth the amount of money I am going to spend on it. The developer thinks it's a great idea - but he's obviously likely to be biased.

Is there any professional developer out there who would be willing to provide some feedback on the idea?
- Is my idea worth fighting for? Do you think it's an app that you would use yourself?
- How much would you expect the implementation to cost?

Any help and constructive criticism would be much appreciated. Just let me know in the comments and I'll contact you if you're interested.

Cheers
-sabertoothed
(from Hamburg, Germany)
Everytime I see one of those over limit pages, I make a note to self. This time it's don't use bluehost.com. Hosting providers should really not brand those pages.
Yes, it should be returning `n`. And the final one I was thinking of was a segfault on an empty list

prepend(NULL, &something);

would die if you don't do;

if (p != NULL)
p->p = n;

I think, this would be easier in a larger problem where you had context that gave you usage examples. I probably wouldn't ask someone to debug a function floating an a vacuum like I did here. I'd use a trivial but full working program.

I don't think I'd expect everyone to get every bug without a little bit of prodding in the right direction. Being able to step through the code and show what it's doing to the data structures would be a first step that would make me happy. Recognizing that the data structure looked like it's a linked list, and finding and and fixing a couple of the bugs, and I'd be very happy.
Open Data: From Contests to Co-Creation Lifecycle
from World Bank blog
I pirated it, but I also preordered the blu rays yesterday. i am willingto pay, but i want the flexibility of streaming or disks.
After A Breakout 2011, Yammer Is Working On A Big New Funding Round
Introducing FlowingData Membership
Now that I've used it for a while, I find that I hate it less than I used to. It's still one of the worst mail interfaces that I've ever used, though.