skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't really see that BB is inevitably headed for bankruptcy. They've had some bad financial results lately and some embarrassing service problems, but they still have a near-monopoly on retail electronics. Their larger problem is a poor economy and the end of a period of very rapid growth in consumer electronics.

It's very hard to argue that electronics retailers are necessarily doomed by the Internet when there's probably an Apple store ten minutes from any given BB doing more sales per square foot than anyone in the business, selling a tiny selection you can view in detail and order directly from Apple's own website. BB just needs to adjust the retail experience to suit higher-margin customers, as Apple did.
How the US pressured Spain to adopt unpopular Web blocking law
Apptopia - The Marketplace to Broker the Sale of Mobile Apps
One of their sub sites uses the "f" bomb, not a very professional way to operate a company.
Google makes SPDY special. If something is unquestionably useful but hasn't caught on, what you have is fundamentally a marketing problem. Google is the biggest marketing company on the Internet.

I mean, SPDY has some technical benefits of its own, but the biggest items in the "Pro" column are that it's an open spec and Google has thrown its weight behind it, even dogfooding it in their top sites and a major open-source project. This got people's attention, which previous efforts didn't really manage so well.
Yeah, I've got no problem with binary protocols, especially when they need to encapsulate arbitrary data (e.g. containing NULLs, etc). Just keep the protocol design sane and it's trivial to write a pretty printing trace tool. Requiring machine-to-machine communication to do heavy parsing is a bad idea.
Telling the user to write something in two different ways, depending on the argument being passed, isn't simple.

The point is an ending delimiter would greatly benefit CoffeScript.

Although CofeeScript certainly has its perks, anonymous function creating isn't simple then Javascript.
The first instinct of a beginning JavaScript developer on seeing that code would be to reformat it. Not as much with the CoffeeScript code. Also what would the beginning CoffeeScript programmer reformat it to? With the JavaScript code, just removing the extraneous whitespace ought to work.

Also you didn't account for the widely-deployed technology of paren/bracket matching.
New results on linear programming formulations of the Traveling Salesman Problem
I find it much harder to swallow the comments on reddit, at least here on HN there is a guideline which encourages comments which add to the discussion; whereas on reddit, it's a shamble of memes and novelty accounts which depending on the account handle are allowed to be rude/obnoxious/racist.

I find it easier to leave proggit/reddit behind and follow Hacker News simply due to my alignment with the guidelines and the current HN hive-mind (no memes, helpful discussions).
Here's my version in C:

int main(int argc, char ** argv)
{
long *n1,*n2;
int row,i;

row=0; N1[0]=1L; print_row(row,N1);

while(row++ < MAX_ROWS)
{
for(i=0, n1 = N1, n2=N2; i<MAX_BUF && *n1; i++)
{
if (i==0 ) n2[i] = 0 + n1[i];
else if(n1[i]==0) n2[i] = n1[i-1] + 0;
else n2[i] = n1[i-1] + n1[i];
}
print_row(row,N2);
for(n1=N1,n2=N2; *n2; ) *n1++ = *n2++;
}
}

void print_row(int row,long*n)
{
printf("row #%d",row);
while(*n) { printf(" %ld ", *n++);}
printf("\n");
}

This works through the size of long int (at least 50 rows).
Building Windows 8: Virtualizing storage for scale, resiliency, and efficiency
What a rambling, useless piece. Downes wrote an article about Best Buy's problems from a consumer point of view, and Biggs spends half the article going on about how Downes must have a misconception of what employees think of it. Then he sadly acknowledges that Downes is pretty much right, anyway.
Agreed, I like seeing the comments as well.
Typically we'll start with an even simpler problem before dropping them into something like this. Over time, we've found that a good 1/3rd of candidates can be eliminated with just fizzbuzz (print the numbers 1-100, for numbers divisible by 3, print fizz. For numbers divisible by 5, print buzz. For both, print fizzbuzz). Even if they do stellar on a phone interview, a large number of candidates still cant get past this simple problem. It's also easy enough that you can give it to people at job fairs on the spot. Any programmer that you'd want to hire can finish this in less than 5 minutes, which is an easy time investment to make.
That's actually pretty affordable. Thanks for the link. I will check it out.
It seems like the fact they no longer support SOPA doesn't matter: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3396634

GoDaddy screwed themselves and I'm not what they can do to recover. I don't know if they'll actually lose money over this, but PR-wise they're pretty screwed.
Yes, until there are proper stack traces in CoffeeScript, it's very hard for me to adopt it for anything. A project I work on has a small amount of CoffeeScript, and debugging problems in that component is the hardest part of the whole project.
What I don't know about building webapps
Erlang or C++ is not that important.

The real drug on performance is using javascript for queries & M/R and HTTP-based APIs vs. binary protocols.
Moving to UnQL and Memcached protocol may solve some of the performance problems.

There is a reason antirez choose Lua and not JS for a scripting language.
Ask HN: Best Linux Netbook?
Hey folks,
I'm looking for recommendations on a "netbook" that I can use to get some work done while spending 2hrs a day on a commuter train. Here's a rough idea of what I'm looking for, in order of importance

* Comfortable to use vim for an hour+. Something with enough screen real estate so that I can use NERDTree
* Wifi
* SSD drive (or upgradeable)
* Enough horsepower to use the gmail web interface, no problem.

Also, and recommendations for a lightweight distribution to use would be great too.

Thanks!
What are your thoughts on the amount of speculation in the software/tech market right now? Also real estate is very much a real industry that provides real value (like a roof over one's head)
The "fun" and "lighthearted" pictures are pointless and actively harmful. If you're going to show me ads, show me ads. But if you're not, don't. I'm willing to pay the price of being annoyed by advertising. The "instead of an ad" pictures generate no revenue for Reddit and they constantly waste my time and attention. They are purely a negative thing.

That's the most articulate way I can put my argument. If you still misunderstand, there's not much more that I can say.

Maybe some people actually enjoy the "instead of an ad" pictures. I absolutely hate them.
No, the front page shows just your subscriptions. my.reddit.com hasn't been different from the front page for years.
I can't agree with askscience anymore. subreddits start their reversion to the mean once there's 50-100k users, and they become awful once they're in the default set for new users.

Frankly, it's too much work to find the good ones.
Teaparty.com. Not what you think.
> 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.

Are you seriously contending that Pascal's triangle is such a problem?

We all know that "Aha!" problems exist, that there are algorithms that are simple in hindsight despite being anything but obvious before we were told the answer. I don't think anyone here is proposing that such questions are good for interviews. But do you really believe that producing rows of Pascal's triangle, when the triangle has already been explained, is actually one of those "Aha!" questions?

If you aren't contending that, I'm not sure what point you're trying to make above.
Beginner Haskell Solution:

pascal 1 = [1]

pascal 2 = [1,1]

pascal n = [1] ++ sum' (pascal (n - 1))

sum' [] = []

sum' [1] = [1]

sum' (x:xs) = [x + head' xs] ++ sum' xs

head' [] = 0

head' xs = head xs
The "tools, not rules" programming meta-methodology:

- Your own reasoning takes priority over any method or principle.

- If you can't see how a method is concretely helpful, you shouldn't follow it. The need for it will soon become apparent, if there is one.

- No method is universally helpful. There are always cases where it is detrimental.

- No principle is justified a priori. That a principle "fits" a particular situation is not a sufficient reason to invoke it.

(these are really all just different ways of saying the same thing)
I did some rough calculations using some online tools to determine the distance between the X-37B and Tiangong-1 and as far as I can tell they're on opposite sides of the earth to each other. I'd also hazard a guess that the USA has far better tools both on the ground and in orbit to track Tiangong-1 than the X-37B, especially with its rather limited payload capability.

Full blog post if you're interested: http://www.therefinedgeek.com.au/index.php/2012/01/06/is-the...
A thought experiment:

Let's say I, a Canadian Citizen, asked someone in Canada to enter a passphrase to encrypt the data on my computer but not tell me what the passphrase is until I safely get to my destination.

I cross the border into the US where my laptop is seized.

The case goes to court where a judge orders me to decrypt the contents of the hard drive... but I can't because I don't have the passphrase.

I'm assuming the court would not have the power to order the only person with the passphrase to enter it because they are not in a jurisdiction under the courts control.

What could they compel me to do? What sanctions could they bring to bear against me for not providing information I don't have?
The future of CouchDB
More specifically, because Google builds one of the most popular Web sites and one of the top browsers, they can break chicken-egg problems by JFDI. Things like SSL improvements, SPDY, SDCH, etc. have probably already paid for themselves.
What you consider "fun" and "lighthearted" I consider a waste of space and attention. Tell me how it is logically not.
Ask HN: any service that can send requests to a URL from a specified city?
Basically I'm trying to test a feature of my website, which displays the location(city-level) you're at when visiting my site. And the testing approach I'm planning is: using a host in an arbitrary city to send requests to my site, with the city name appended to the URL, and then compare the known city name with the city name calculated by my site.

This approach needs a service that, given an arbitrary city name and a URL, it asks a host in that city to send requests to that URL.

Does such service/tool/library actually exist? Or is there a better testing approach for that feature?
Al Gore isn't disagreeing with the scientific consensus, he's merely educating the public on what the vast majority scientists are saying. That's completely different that presuming to disagree with the vast majority climate scientists.
Have you tried spoofing the http request?
One of the advantages that proponents of reviewing the candidate's code before the interview have is that you don't have to spend any time doing FizzBuzz kind of problems, which are just time wasters.

If you're interviewing people who can't print the numbers 1-100 then something in your process is just wrong. Why did they get that far?
That's an implementation detail though. Although it's a lot of work to fix, it's not insurmountable. You would need your development browser to support Coffescript natively. It's not really a serious problem if IE7 generates a Javascript back-trace, right?

The important thing is if Coffeescript really does significantly reduce line count and by extension bug rates. I'm not sure it does, generally syntactical sugar doesn't have that effect.

I hope it does. My life seems nicer when writing Coffeescript vs JS.
State of Data This Week - #80
Bike accident visualization in Vancouver on Stackato
Please please please realize that it is highly unlikely that you will make any money off of this app, no matter how great the idea is.

It could be the next Flipboard and be an app that I could end up using daily and you still probably wouldn't make even on your investment.
Yup.

They are a tech company that supported the most egregious legislation I've ever seen in my life, and then took a "come at me bro" stance when the outrage machine was building. All they had to do then was spin it slightly differently, and this all likely would have been avoided.

Now, as it stands, Godaddy will be forever known to the tech crowd as corporation of hypocrites and liars. The brand is toast.
What in the world do they stand to lose by offering Game of Thrones through iTunes or Amazon in a reasonable amount of time? iTunes is already selling it even though it will not actually be available until March. None of us who are waiting for it are going to subscribe to cable in the meantime.
Drobo has been replaced by a built-in feature of Windows.
The thing is that it correlates proportionally and if you change from a more verbose language to a less verbose language you only change the proportion, not the amount of bug.
And Plentyoffish blows Reddit out of the water on page views. MySpace had massive page views (they resisted AJAX to increase ad impressions -- similar to POF).

It's a ridiculous metric. Certain types of sites simply get large numbers of page views due to their nature and design.

Monthly uniques, repeat visits, and average time on site are a much more reasonable basis for comparing different types of sites (and even that is quite flawed).
Markov chain paper title generator
It's solving for this problem: http://xkcd.com/949/

It operates at the torrent level, not the file level, so while you certainly can create a new torrent with updated content, it'll show up as a new entry instead of an update.

As a quick technical sketch, it streamlines torrent creation, transferring torrent references to others, torrent downloading (you either get a link your client understands, or a pre-built, quick-start client with the torrent already installed), and provides temporary cloud backed seeding.

Disclaimer: I work on the project as an engineer. These comments are my own, and have nothing to do with Bittorrent the company.
OS X has a fancy GUI for this called Instruments.

(Obviously the cmdline tools are there as well.)
I'm also a huge fan of that blog. This post is a favorite:

http://calnewport.com/blog/2008/11/25/case-study-how-i-got-t...

It redefined for me what it means to understand math.
For us old-school types, here's the 60-second version in C:

int main(int argc, char ** argv)
{
int i;
for (i=0; i< 100; i++)
{
if( (i%3==0)&&(i%5==0)) printf("FizzBuzz");
else if(i%3==0) printf ("Fizz");
else if(i%5==0) printf ("Buzz");
else printf("%d",i);
printf("\n");
}
}
I hope you keep up with this
Rick Santorum: No position on SOPA
Can you mention what the two degrees were? Maybe you've implied something but I'm not seeing it.
I won't comment on your other points but with regard to the flow of medical research information, I'd like to point out that it goes both ways.

Private US healthcare also feeds from research carried out world-wide without baring development risks.

For example, look at the amount of work done in genomic research in say the UK.

I think it would be somewhat naive to say that private US healthcare firms and their patients didn't benefit hugely by work placed into the public domain by organisations like the Wellcome Trust.
does it work this way?

user shares file > the system stores the file on S3 > the system distributes the shared file through torrent > "enough" torrent peers are reached > the system REMOVES the file from S3 > a week goes by and the file loses momentum > available peers drop > the file is lost.
Or they could act as Amazon's showroom, as they are now, and get nothing. What are they gonna do, throw out customers for price shopping?

What's Amazon's incentive for this?
They lied about dropping support for SOPA. They haven't made up for any of it, either.
Maybe you could look for a Macbook with a busted LCD. It might be significantly cheaper, but you could use it with an external monitor.
I am so sick of job ads
These days it's hard to come across an ad that doesn't seem like it came straight out of some fictional (?) book on how to hire "top talent". They all seem like copy and past work. I am particularly put off by the part that is supposed to entice us all: the perks. "Come solve hard problems at XXX", "bagels", "coke", "pizza", "hardware". Really?

Let me tell you a secret. Almost none of use are looking for a job. We all solve hard problems. Chances are, people that are paid upwards of 100K already have a functional development machine. I for one will have a hard time deciding where in the basement to shove your kick-ass hardware. Bagels and pizza are rather standard (sorry, it's not that we are spoiled, it's just the way it is) and aren't going to make anyone quit their jib, let alone move halfway across the country (unless you are after college dropouts). Video games are... well we all know that they are a joke, unless you have no life/family and want to hangout in the office after a 12 hour day.

You are in the business of changing the game. Your job ads are copy and paste. How do you feel when you read a resume full of clichés and feels like it was copied from the internet 5 years ago? Get a grip and start hiring remotely. You might as well change the game.

P.S. There is nothing magic about the words: "Come solve hard problems at XXX". We are not conditioned to salivate when we hear them.
Show HN: My first Rails app - a GroupMe clone
This was the first app I built in rails. I would love some feedback on the code. Especially on how to make the model fat and controller skinny.

http://bit.ly/groupmeclone

https://github.com/burtonic/GroupSMS
This is very, very, very bad scheme. set! and list-ref are no-no.

This is better scheme:

(define (pascal n)
(if (= n 0)
(list 1)
(let ((L (pascal (- n 1))))
(append (list 1)
(map + (cdr L) L)
(list 1)))))
A couple reasons for this but the main one is for many a year the NHS was underfunded by the Conservative governments of the 80s and 90s in the hope that it would crawl into the corner and die so did not/does not have the resources (doctors, nurses, beds, equipment etc) necessary to cope with a growing and aging population.

This resulted in waiting lists that for some patients are unacceptable and so people pay to go private to skip the wait.
While we're at it, the last one could work purely in-place.
did the ipo turn out to be a better payout than google offered them?
Look at dtruss.

Unfortunately you need to "sudo" to use it, since dtrace needs root permsisions.
Sure, and I currently work in academia and agree.

Doesn't mean we should worship the soundbites, though we do.
>The system isn’t up and running yet, but the idea is that users will receive free storage for their files by sharing some hard drive space and bandwidth with other users.

This is how Wuala works, if I understand correctly. And let's not forget AeroFS. While these products are somewhat similar, I absolutely love seeing apps of this nature (syncing distributed P2P) proliferate.
Apple Patents Reveal Thunderbolt is headed for iOS Devices - Patently Apple
Here's a shorter version:

fizzbuzz x | x `mod` 3 == 0 && x `mod` 5 == 0 = "FizzBuzz"
| x `mod` 3 == 0 = "Fizz"
| x `mod` 5 == 0 = "Buzz"
| otherwise = show x

main = putStr $ unlines $ map fizzbuzz [1..100]
Not a problem: http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/User:See

Just tell me in what kind of projects you are interested and I can show you more.
Digital Music Sales Finally Beat CDs and Vinyl for 1st Time in 2011
Lovely :)

Reminds me of my own playing with markov chains; http://williamedwardscoder.tumblr.com/post/13292744100/the-s...
For the first time in the music industry, digital sales surpass physical sales
They're complaining about everyone else missing the "viable" part.
40 Innovative Wall Stickers by Hu2 Design
Creatures frozen for 32,000 years still alive
"I reject and oppose this monopoly that was never for the creators, but always for the distributors: a guild whose time is up and obsolete, and which has no business trampling on our civil liberties."

I like this statement. This summarizes a decent portion of the anger generated by the RIAA, the MPAA, and the U.S. Congress.
That's a boring bet. Betting on an extrapolation of pageview graphs isn't much fun at all.
If you look at the situation I don't really blame HBO for that. HBO sells content to the cable companies, and the cable companies have to deal with the end users. So HBO might get a little less money than they could if they avoided the middleman, but on the other hand, they don't need to deal with sensitive customer data and huge customer support call centers.
...to make wifi ubiquitous in cities

As with everything it's the last 10% that takes 90% of the effort.

Or in this case the last 20-30% depending on how small you define "city".

The 2000 census found 58% of the US population living in "urbanized areas" of over 200,000 people and and 69% in areas over 50,000. [1]

So, even if you have blanket coverage for every urban/suburban area over 50,000 population, you still have over 30% of the US population to cover. [2]

Even AT&T with its existing investment has to be compelled by law to provide services in these areas where it is not economically viable to do so. The "Universal Connectivity Fee" on your telephone bill helps compensate for the losses. [3]

So, until either high-bandwidth long-range omni-directional wireless becomes portable and energy efficient or the government requires/subsidizes universal coverage, alternate technologies are not going to go beyond boutique "alternatives" for urban folks.

[1] http://www.fhwa.dot.gov/planning/census_issues/metropolitan_...
[2] For example, Southwest Bell had to set a number of poles and string over a mile of cable to my parent's house. We had friend where that run was over seven miles for a single customer.
[3] http://transition.fcc.gov/cgb/phonebills/samplePhonebill.htm...:
My first step is to stumble across a topic I think others may find interesting. Then I just start writing. The first pass generally comes out as a bunch of poorly organized random thoughts, but once that process is done I tend to have a much clearer idea of how I want to present the topic.

From there I can rearrange what I've already written, which is usually ~50% of the content, and fill in the rest. I will revise the post until I feel like it is coherent but I don't get too hung up on getting it perfect.

I started blogging back in the Fall so I'm just forming the blogging-habit but I'm finding this method works well for me. It removes the writers block problems I've experienced in the past and makes the process much more enjoyable.
For my solution, after Jemfinch posted about this topic on G+ - I had to remember what Pascal's Triangle essentially was (it's been awhile since I've reviewed the binomial theorem, etc). No big deal.

Once one understands the actual problem (wikipedia has a rather nice graphical pyramid showing a few rows being generated), it should be a rather simple task to implement a naive version of it in any modern language. Is my ruby version the best performing? Of course not. However, it demonstrates some obvious insights into it such that the first and last members of a row are always 1's.

If I were hiring engineers, I'd be slightly wary if they couldn't at least make basic insights such as that and get darn close within a few minutes. Obviously, there are nerves and other things that can cause issues during an interview process - but one should arrive at a general solution rather quickly, even if it's not the most beautiful.

I don't think anyone is trying to be condescending - but the quick naive approach using an array and calculating some sort of offset to get your values is simply bread and butter in our profession.