skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Well, they did shutdown r/jailbait for "threatening the structural integrity of the greater reddit community."
I use a .io for my startup (served.io), and the reason why I picked it is because of its "coolness" factor. No need to spend thousands or millions to obtain the .com at this time.
upvoted for realloc trick
This is all because of their new pricing model. Overnight our pricing went up by 5X and that was after 50% discount, which make it really a 10X hike. Here is a graph of it: https://plus.google.com/114790424055754975707/posts/eUMhYDVf...
I occasionally watch things with my friend who has access to HBO Go in our office. It's horrible. Adaptive bitrate streaming is slow to switch or nonexistent, buffer times are too long, aspect ratios are often handled incorrectly in their player, and even figuring out how to log into the damned thing is an absolute nightmare. The Netflix user experience is vastly superior.

edit: typo
Been considering the following hiring technique, interested in thoughts/opinions:

We accept applicants of any experience level. To apply, find an open source project on github, get a patch accepted to it. It has to be of useful scope with a unit test, object-oriented code only. Send us the diff, a brief work history, a reference and why you want to work for us.

If we like it, come work with us for a day, paid at market rates, and we can both assess whether it's a good fit.
> So that's 40M writes to create an index, or $400!

At $0.10 per 100k writes, 40M would be $40.
The front page truly is trash. It is filled with the repost and circlejerk subreddits that thrive on sensationalist post titles. Once you find your niches though, you will discover some solid communities.
Could UnQL be the future of querying?
Wouldn't the iPad just hit terminal velocity pretty quickly, making most of the height of the drop relatively useless?
Yeah .io definitely has that "coolness" factor right now. Nice landing page BTW. How are you liking launchrock?
Vimpc - vi like mpd client
http://sourceforge.net/projects/vimpc/
https://github.com/richoH/vimpc

Anyone who uses vim (or doesn't- it's still intuitive enough) and mpd, but hates ncmpc(pp) should at least give this a look in.

Still in development but becoming mature, and feature requests motivate us to improve it.
I'd recommend finding some local groups and taking the time to get to know people in person.
On the other hand, if it didn't count against your bandwidth cap, then we'd all be calling it abuse of a monopoly power to muscle out Netflix (b/c Netflix does count towards the bandwidth cap).
Ask HN: Anyone here interested to work on a music startup?
Hey everyone!
I am working on something very interesting with some really cool artists some are famous on a startup to help indie artists and to create a fun experience for consumers. Please contact me at fffseek@gmail.com if you want to know more.

Thanks.
they are afraid that people will cancel their HBO subscriptions and buy just the shows they watch
There are two issues be-deviling couchDB as it stood before, well, now -
* front-end caching
* back-end scaling.
The back-end scaling is handled quite wonderfully by BigCouch (we're users, and pretty damn happy ons at that), but pretty much everybody rolls their own for front-end caching (lord knows, we did, with mnesia, and a bunch-o other erlang.
My hope had always been that we would end up with some version of BigCouchBase, but that is clearly not going to happen.
With Adam's post, the back-end-scaling issue is pretty much a 'taken care of' issue as far as CouchDB is concerned.

Thanx Adam (and everyone else at Cloudant!)
I am a creator. I create:

• original songs

• original movies

• original apps

• original documents, such as this post

I am my own distributor. In other words, I am a competitor to the outmoded entrenched RIAA, MPAA, etc.

Because I am a competitor, and I am cutting the bottom out of their market by doing my own internet-based distribution, they are frightened.

Rick Falkvinge and the religion, Kopimism, made my day. :)
It used to be that, if you wanted to distribute NASA-sponsored software using an open-source-like model, it had to be done through Open Channel foundation. Here's a press release which gives a flavor of how that looked:

http://www.openchannelsoftware.com/NASA_1.html

Sounds pretty bureaucratic to me.

Open Channel was an antique system (pre-WWW) in which software was "thrown over the fence" to a caretaker, with no provision for general users to contribute back. So, faced with a long process of approval and little possibility of tangible benefit, it was unusual for software to be released that way.

I'm not certain about the reason for a long approval process. Since about 1999, there is ITAR, which is a huge impediment, but open-sourcing was hard even before ITAR.

My guess is that NASA wished to (or was required to, by Congress) recover some costs by licensing the software, and this was the reason for the impediments to open-sourcing. In this way, the government was treating software more like hardware components than like documentation of research results.

NASA as an agency has always had an uneasy relationship with software. It's much more comfortable with hardware technology, and tends to treat software technology by analogy with hardware.
I think you're confusing me with someone else, or have misheard something.

I didn't have anything to do with Proust.

My first (and only) startup, Metaplace, was sold to Playdom in mid-2010. A lot of people think we closed when we pivoted away from UGC virtual worlds, but we didn't. We did social games for six months before being acquired.
we use Egnyte (http://www.egnyte.com) at our office, it does file sync like Dropbox, except more secure and scalable.
> Once the public begins to transition en masse to
> another medium, it's very fast.

HBO already has a system in place (HBO Go), but it seems like they are waiting for a tipping point to divorce their internet content streaming from the requirement of having a cable subscription. Probably once they feel that pissing off the cable companies is worth the revenue they will gain.
The 70 yards thing is entirely fishy. Compared to this video, where it dropped 20 miles away, yeah. I don't really believe it survived, and they replaced it with another.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v...
I authentically hate these types of interviews.

1) I don't program on a whiteboard. It's 2012, I have tools, and they beat the whiteboard setup every time.

2) I will never implement something that I have not implemented before without at least first consulting with a search engine. You see, I am not a genius that will come up with the best algorithm for a calculation every time I am put up to the challenge. My amateur attempts will be no where near as good as what others have collectively accomplished over the years that the problem existed.

For example, in this particular case (I have never had to implement a function that generates Pascal's triangle before), I can guarantee you that anything I came up with at a whiteboard right now would be completely inferior to what the result would be if I was allowed to do a search first. So unless you're trying to see if I am capable of writing any old crappy code so long as the result is correct, your test isn't adequate.

3) Interviews still make me nervous, doesn't matter how many times I have them, I never feel comfortable going through the process. This often leads me to simply draw blanks when given a whiteboard assignment of this nature. You may think this means I am just incapable of solving your problem, or that I perform poorly under pressure, but I can tell you that this type of "put you on the spot" pressure is much different from the type one generally feels in a work environment.
> How many times did you have to solve a brain teaser at work?

There is a fine line between brain teasers and the difficult problems that are our bread and butter. To answer your question: I would categorize many particularly subtle problems I've solved at work as brain teasers, so my number is high.

Relevant problems are a great way to judge someone's problem solving skills, but any problem that gives a glimpse into the way a person thinks is sufficient. I am probably not willing to give a candidate the amount of context to describe, let alone time to solve, the exact problem that I happen to be in the middle of on the day of an interview, but rather one we have already solved and determined to be interview-worthy. This means I certainly don't care about the solution, but rather the path to the solution. If you believe, as I do, that people tend to walk similar paths through every problem they solve, and that the path is important and the solution worthless, then the relevance of the problem is irrelevant.
Acer aspire replacement battery
acer aspire replacement battery
Customers buy this item with NEW Laptop AC Adapter Power Supply Charger US Power Cord.
A friend hit a rut a little while back. He had a few apps in the app store, but wasn't advancing at his day job and couldn't quite get a team together for a startup (I'm partly to blame there...). So, he moved.

To Nicaragua.

Now, he's gotten a group of friends and a couple of local college kids together and he's developing an app to promote tourism in the area. Because of the differences in standard of living, he's got a nicer place than before, goes out for dinner with friends regularly, and is still managing to save a bit. From our conversations, it seems like he's really enjoying the change of pace and the different culture.

So, my recommendation would be to move. Far, far away. There has probably never been a better time to be a programmer in a developing market. Brazil, Argentina, Chille all seem to have rapidly growing developer communities. India is still struggling to break out of being labeled "that place to outsource stuff", and Russia, while significantly hampered by corruption, is still managing to spawn a handful of tech startups. There is eastern Europe/former Soviet republics, where I know a number of western Europe startups are looking to expand to.

Finally, if none of the rest of that tickles your fancy, try Ushahidi: http://ushahidi.com/ . If you have enough money that you don't need to worry about a specific salary, or if you are even wealthy enough to work for free, these guys seems like they might just be able to change the world (or at least Africa). Could be fun...
I think the "70 yards away" is how close they parked their vehicle once they found where it landed.
Good. Given RIM's position, it made no sense for them to spread their talent and energy across three devices. That's a recipe for three mediocre devices.
gonewild?

r/teen_girls

r/picsofdeadkids (yes, it's what it advertises)

r/DeadPeople

r/rape

r/incest

Basically, everything moderated by violentacrez: http://code.reddit.com/wiki/help/faqs/violentacrez
To be fair, it looks as though the guy is just stepping out of a car/truck as he says that it is 70 yards away.

They probably just drove to a spot close to the signal of where the iPad landed and then started filming from there.
This is hugely important. I don't remember where I ran across this idea (the "you're smart" vs "you worked hard") but it was a while ago and it explained a _lot_ about my life. Growing up I was always told "you're smart" instead of "you worked hard", and this left me vastly unprepared for situations where actual work is required (starting near the end of high school). By the time I was a sophomore in college I had already identified this problem, but it didn't stop me from flaking out most of my classes and eventually dropping out. Even today, I'm 26, with a great job working for an extremely influential tech company, and I'm still struggling with the motivational issues that started with "you're smart".
I would recommend that you write more descriptive commit messages for one.
Egnyte : www.egnyte.com

Hybrid Storage with multiple access methods : Web, Desktop (Win/Mac), Mobile & FTP.

Flexible subfolder sync with versioning
The branches on the right disappear after the camera cuts away (I had to flip the image): http://i.imgur.com/a9qbm.png
Is AeroFS even alive? Waiting a few weeks or months for an early product to be perfected is fine, but it's been more than a year. This is ridiculous.

AeroFS want users to invite their friends to put themselves higher on an invite list... For a product that will use MY hard drive space and bandwidth.
Ask HN: Who is your sounding board?
Do you have a couple of good friends who you bounce your ideas off? Do you throw your ideas out on twitter, and see if there's a response? Do you keep a blog somewhere with all the pieces of something (possibly) that pop into your head?

I want to know who you use as your sounding board. Are they someone who 'gets you', who easily shares your vision, or someone who can quickly spot the strengths and more importantly weaknesses of your ideas?

Personally, I have a few 'trusted' friends who I know will listen to my ideas, but aren't afraid to point out when I'm being an idiot. I've been known to flood an IRC channel at times trying to get all my stupid thoughts out before I forget them.

I've tried blogging, text files, and carrying a note-pad, but being able to bounce ideas off a real person (and one who doesn't just say "yeah, that sounds great" in a disinterested tone) is by far the most effective way I've got of fleshing out ideas.

So what works for you?
Let me point out a slightly different whiteboarding approach I've used. I give you the problem. I give you the solution too! I will even explain the solution patiently, line by line, until you are absolutely convinced.

Then I simply grow the problem - just one tiny step.
I ask for the solution for this new problem.
And guess what ? Most people still flunk!

Here's the problem I use( we are a quant outfit ):
---
Say I have $100 in 1 dollar bills.

How to make the most money if I have to split it between google and apple ?

---- solution --

val apple = (0.015,0.1) // 1.5% return/month, 10% risk

val google = (0.008,0.05) // 0.8% return/month, 5% risk

val rho = 0.4 // google apple correlation is 40%

// returns are weighted means

val myreturns = (0.0 to 1.0 by 0.01).map(x=>(x * a._1 + (1-x) * b._1 ))

// risks are standard deviations

val myrisks = (0.0 to 1.0 by 0.01).map(x=>sqrt( x * x * a._2 * a._2 + (1-x) * (1-x) * b._2 * b._2 + 2 * x * a._2 * (1-x) * b._2 * rho))

// sharpe = my return over my risk

val sharpes = (0 to 100).map(x=>myreturns(x)/myrisks(x))

// goal is to make most money ie. max sharpe

println( "Most money has sharpe:" + sharpes.max )

------

Now let me grow this problem, by just 1 more stock.

I have $100 in 1 dollar bills.

I give you 3 stocks: google, apple and amazon.

How to make the most money ?

This stumps so many people I have lost count! The ones who do well have usually taken a semester of undergraduate combinatorics, so they see instantly what needs to be done.
"Those who say it can't be done are usually interrupted by others doing it."
-James A. Baldwin
According to the billing page [1] writes are indeed billed $0.10 for 100k operations.

Also, reads, writes and small operations (which are the ones billed) are low level operations. An API operation actually translates into several low-level operations. And the way it is described [2] I think the poster is doing more writes to reindex 10M entries.

Considering that reindexing takes 1 write for the entity itself (existing put) + 4 writes for each element in the list property and considering that the poster has on average 18 elements in that list for each entity, then he's probably doing on average 73 writes per entity (I'm taking the "Existing Entity Put" scenario into account, otherwise for new entities it would be 2 + 2 per list element == 38 writes).

So by these numbers, that's 730,000,000 writes, or a cost of $730 -- if you go over them sequentially, only one time. But considering that he's doing manual full-text indexing, maybe he had to go over those items several times for the reindexing being done.

Maybe I'm missing something here. I don't know.

[1] http://code.google.com/appengine/docs/billing.html

[2] http://code.google.com/appengine/docs/python/datastore/entit...
Those are "writes" from the users perspective, it doesn't take into account writes due to index updates. So that's 1 write multiplied by however many indexes that need update.
Ask HN: Tips for learning a foreign language
As learning a new foreign language is a mental task which can be improved by practice does anybody have any tips from previous experience?
Thanks so much. We have not tried this...but you've motivated me to take another look at it. Do you know anyone who's used it?
I use my Geeks circle on G+, a few close friends on IRC and there are a couple of close friends I'll call in a pinch.

Although are we talking about geeky ideas or life crap?
GAE has become completely infeasible as a hosting solution for me (ThatHigh.com). My hosting cost increased by 90x, and I did not get nearly enough notice.

I don't have the time or resources to move the site, so I'm forced to shut it down. It really, really sucks.

Personally I'm more disappointed by the lack of notice (1 month is nowhere near enough time) than the actual increase. I totally understand the need to charge.
The details have finally been posted in that thread. And while $6500 is a lot of money, we have to realize that this is a lot of writing - the headline doesn't give the full sense of it.

For those unfamiliar with GAE, a ListProperty is really a collection of properties. The author is using the property as a geohash with a significant number of values, plus he has additional multiproperty indexes defined, plus he's doing a rewrite (delete + write). All combined it appears to be ~460 writes per entity.

So what we're talking about is $6500 for 6.5 billion writes... exactly what is printed on the sales brochure. Is that a lot? Most datastores don't charge by the operation so I don't have a lot to compare it to. It seems expensive but not crazy, especially considering that the data is replicated via PAXOS to 3+ datacenters with automatic loadbalancing and failover.
Newcomers to web design, don't be put off | Two Step Media Blog
Could this have something to do with the quality being halved?
Your going find that anywhere where there is a general audience, HN has it's -isms too. How is it very reddity?

Not being exposed and thus made aware of such attitudes can leave you in a bubble and not realize how good you have it. I didn't really realize how many people in the world have attitudes that belong to a 150 years ago in the developed world until I traveled to such places and saw and interacted with it with my own eyes.
Geeky ideas, for sure.

I have recently started a few new side projects, but due to the fact that my regular sounding boards weren't available at the time (timezones... blergh), I keep getting this dread that they're not actually good ideas.
I hear this complaint a lot, but I kind of don't get it. I just don't know any way to make job interviews fair for people who are having a bad day. Can we just stipulate that any interview technique will fail to recognise the potential of some candidates? False negatives of that sort are kind of inevitable. And from the point of view of a hiring company? a few false negatives aren't the end of the world. A false positive is way more costly.
I did indeed. Serves me right for commenting on the run.
I love Twitter's Bootstrap, do you?
OT: Tonara may be of interest. It "listens" to your playing through the iPad mic, and marks your position in the score, and turns the "pages" accordingly.

It doesn't have anywhere near the breadth of scores that Etude does, but there's enough to get started with.

http://techcrunch.com/2011/09/12/tonara-ipads-app-looks-to-r...
Definitive set of HotSpot performance command-line options
Done right? Sorry, you bored me to death as soon as you started blabbering about Pascal's Triangle. I'm sure I learned about that at some point, but I've forgotten it. You asking me that questions would result in:

1) Me feeling stupid because I don't remember what Pascals Triangle is.

2) Me stumbling through some code while I try to understand the explanation you give me.
If they have a github/bitbucket, this will show more than answering silly questions.
No problem. I believe mine is a late 2010 model. It has the 1.4 GHz Core 2 Duo with 4 GB of RAM. It's 11'' rather than 13''. Performance is generally excellent and it's probably the best computer I've ever owned in terms of outright utility simply because it's approximately the size of a Kindle DX and I can take it anywhere without a thought. The fact that it's usable and responsive essentially instantly after opening the lid is also huge.

The only real problem comes with pushing pixels around, as the other reply mentioned. I can watch QT video fine, but if I go to Vimeo or YouTube, I can't really get a good playback out of Flash. Generally Flash is bad on this machine. I'm a long time Mac user so I'm not too unused to this, but it seems a little worse than on an iMac or something like that.

I think if you use an IDE for dev work you should check it out at an Apple Store or something to make sure the resolution works for you. That's really the only thing I'd consider. My 11'' is really just too small to me, having been spoiled by dual 30''s on my desktop. If you use a text editor or vim/emacs it'll probably be fine, but IntelliJ or Eclipse or whatever just have too many windows to manage in the space, in my opinion.
I find it amusing that each time an interviewing technique post is made to HN, invariably a post by someone claiming they work for Google is made, always disparaging the manholes problem (I've never even heard of this being posed in the real world) and tossing out some algorithm problem as a throwaway. The best part is the torrent of solutions that inevitably follow, in every popular language regardless of whether their solution has already been presented in another language.

It's almost like Google has some sort of informal process for throwing away old interview questions this way, just for laughs...

This also makes me think I may spend too much time lurking on HN.
The User-First Imperative: The Secret To Thriving In Digital
Many companies, including producers of revolutionary tech products, are faltering because they don’t understand and aren’t built to respond to consumer behavior in the digital age. In short, these companies failed to prioritize their users.
This is great for Appsumo, but not so great for the people trying to win.
How A Computer Scientist Tried To Save Greece
Carbon bottle cage
Hire Real Troopers, Not Whining Pussies
Ask HN: What ERP system do tech startups use?
My company (Envato.com) is looking at changing our accounting/ERP system and I'm curious to know what other startups and tech companies use? Apparently eBay/PayPal use SAP, but that is a little too large for us :-)
True. Doesn't necessarily make it less impressive if true :)
Probably made the same mistake I did with iOS 5 and the icon. You have to define in the root level Custom iOS target properties: Icon already includes gloss effects BOOLEAN YES

You've probably only set it under Icon files -> primary icon

You can tell if you did it right if it shows up without the shine in itunes connect when you upload.
You should check out hulu first. It has the biggest selection for tv shows
This inspired me to write one that is even shorter and doesn't heap-allocate any memory at all. What can I say, I'm a sucker for minimal C.

#include <stdio.h>
#include <stdlib.h>

int main(int argc, char *argv[]) {
int row = atoi(argv[1]);
long data[row];
for (int i = 0; i < row; i++) {
data[i] = 1;
for (int j = i - 1; j > 0; j--) data[j] += data[j - 1];
}
for (int i = 0; i < row; i++) printf("%ld ", data[i]);
printf("\n");
return 0;
}