skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Visualization of U.S presidents' approval ratings
I understand the practical ramifications quite well:

It's complicated as all hell to implement some very simple, and well known algorithms which rely on mutation and explicit memory management.

Take, for example, QuickSort:

"sorta looks like quick sort" http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Introduction#Quicksort_in...

"actual quick sort w/ in place memory mutation" http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Introduction/Direct_Trans...

The short, few-liner Haskell version is beautiful. It's also not the same algorithm. So then you whip out the larger "direct translation" version and, suddenly, you're wishing for C.

This story repeats itself over and over again. For example, try implementing the Fisher-Yates shuffle.

Now, in practice, you don't need in-place swaps. And you can argue code style and YAGNI and pre-mature optimization and practical implications and day to day use and parallelization and whatever etc. Yada yada yada.

I'm not saying there is anything wrong with Haskell. I'm saying that foundation of Computer Science lies in the study of data structures, algorithms, and computability.

Software Engineering basically boils down to a search and optimization problem: Find the data structures and algorithms which (1) minimize the weighted average of costs and (2) maximize the value that the solution generates.

Haskell's approach to Software Engineering presupposes the cost savings to isolating mutation (and other purity concerns) as a requirement. I'm simply advocating future language developers consciously address the problem of finding those optimal data structures and algorithms in minimal time, with an eye for the fact that data structures and algorithms are a fundamental law of computation.
ZakiR HackeR
Ah, I just won. Pretty sure the trick is indeed to not die while collecting powerups, and then not die while fighting the boss; I didn't lose any lives. I had to use all three bombs on the boss, there seem to be three places where there's no way to avoid a hit without the bomb.
Posting Blog Offline Dengan Menggunakan Windows live writer ~ ZakiR HackeR
Your data on Google.
The lines have blurred because the WWW was by far the most important and most visible system/protocol driving development of the internet.

I think it's a bit like internal combustion engines: They existed before cars, but people associate motors with cars, and even companies named themselves after them "Ford Motor Company", GM, etc... They became synonymous.
Didn't expect to see familiar photos when I visited the site, I'm a 3rd-year at UVA right now. Sick site man, and for an excellent cause.
The main problem with the involved donations like these (from my laymen perspective) is to convince me, the visitor, to donate. Everything else is much lower priority.

While your site is informative, and pretty, it doesn't convince me. There's no call to action. There's no short one-sentence explanation that it's safe. There's a ton of visual distracting stuff on the front page.

I think this is a much better approach:

A good photo of a female patient or a baby, and words:

"Donate bone marrow"

"Save her life"

"It's safe"
Seems like they're doing some major house cleaning on the code. Probably best not to rush it out the door.
The problem is that, to the uninformed, that information is not obvious from the term.
I thought Al Gore invented the Internet?

:)
Did it happen in 2006? I thought the 2006 version was what was stolen, but this happened just recently.

EDIT: Never mind.. it did.. wow.. well supposedly nothing was released publicly until just now though. Someone was just sitting on it. Ex-employee?
More than the astonishing data, the UI is so impressive. One of the best interface to combine all the HTML5, CSS3 & JQuery goodness.
Protip: ClamAV [0] is a software that doesn't need to rely on code secrecy, and it's completely free (as in beer and, more importantly, freedom).

[0] http://www.clamav.net/lang/en/
Great work on putting the site together. The design is beautiful. I was able to find the theme on themeforest, but it looks like you customized it in a really nice way. May I ask who designed the logo and background?

By the way, if anyone else is looking for the theme, you can find it here:

http://themeforest.net/item/etherna-powerful-and-flexible-wo...
fred_nada described it way better than I could in this post earlier in the thread: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3511595

"Bias" has the obvious meaning here. When searching for a topic on which I am not very well informed, I expect to see informative, authoritative results(which Google /does/ provides), but I don't want references to what my "friends" think on the topic. This becomes worse because in many cases, these "personalised" results are higher than the ones which should be more relevant.
A friend of mine started working at the Hacker Dojo in Mountain View. He was working on a web app with his brother, who was actually in another country.

Shortly thereafter, he gets a very worried call from his brother, saying "We've been hacked!" He saw a lot of traffic in the logs from an IP connected with the word "Hacker" and got a bit panicked.
If you're not a criminal, why are you in jail?

But why would you think like that? If, outside of any smartphone connection, someone said they'd "jailbroken" I would think "they were in jail", not "I wonder if they deserved to be there".

If you call yourself a jailbreaker you a describing yourself as an escaped criminal to many people.
In the spirit of more fun,
http://medlem.spray.se/erur/418.htm
You also have the freedom to curtail your freedom when you sign a contract.
Obat alami sakit pinggang
solusi untuk sakit pinggang dengan obat alami sakit pinggang... testimoni obat alami sakit pinggang XAMthone Plus sembuhkan... obat alami sakit pinggang XAMhone Plus.. solusi untuk sakit pinggang dengan obat alami sakit pinggang... testimoni obat alami sakit pinggang XAMthone Plus sembuhkan... obat alami sakit pinggang XAMhone Plus..
Funny that this posted the same time as Backblaze declaring DVD to be dead.

http://blog.backblaze.com/2012/01/25/the-dvd-is-dead-usb-fla...
Haha, yeah I re-read that part over and over again too. Sort of ruined the whole article for me. 220. Come on now. Someone commented on TC that as well and 3 hours later no one fixed it either. You'd think their editors.. or someone read their own comments. sigh
I just looked up analytics of a very popular website (13M monthly)

Flash is supported by 93% of the visitors.

HTML5 = 50%.
Hi Daniel, need help of any kind? My email is in my profile.
It might be worth noting that this is a roundup focusing very specifically on a subset of PaaS offerings. No Google App Engine, no Amazon EC2, and only a passing reference to Webfaction. :)
The point of full disclosure is to give the "corporate entities" that like to sit on vulnerabilities a swift kick in the ass and get them to do something...
Not to put a downer on what is a worthy idea, but:

> A small percentage (1.34%) of donors experience a serious complication due to anesthesia or damage to bone, nerve or muscle in their hip region.

There are very few things I would consider doing if they involved a 1-in-75 risk of serious health problems, particularly in a country like the USA where access to medical care is not a given.
Nice of them to tell us what some of us have known for sometime... I haven't used a DVD in... at least 4 years except for installing Office because it was $10 on optical media from my University.

This feels more like an ad than anything else. It went: fact + backblaze pitch + fact + more backblaze pitch, and then it was over.
[Citation Needed]

Chrome supports HTML5, and there are a lot of Chrome installs out there.
A nearest neighbor classifier to predict the hiragana being drawn
A more interesting question is HTML5 penetration in your target market - rather than general usage, it would be interesting to look at the analytics from an established Flash Gaming site.
Or someone who has been making use of those holes for the past 5 years...
Unfolding: Interactive Map Library for Processing and Java
You know those same capabilities are included for free with every modern operating system, right?
Which website? That can make a huge difference. Audience, demographics, country etc can all lead to a huge bias on the results.
People still use PCAnywhere?
> Which class are functions in C?

Economy class. :-)

In general, how do you write functions that return functions without some form of anonymous function? For instance, how do you write a function that takes an int a and returns a function that takes an int parameter and returns non-zero if and only if that parameter is greater than a?
Their demos look pretty solid to me. https://www.quantcast.com/yahoo.com
As an former Windows user who never ran A/V because of the stated reasons, in my old age I've finally broken down started using one as rebuilding a box is no longer high on my priority list. If you are a home user on windows, I highly highly recommend http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows/products/security...

It's free, it stays the hell out of the way, doesn't slow the system down, and works.

Edit: I do not work for Microsoft, and this post was written on a netbook running Ubuntu.
A UX lesson I learned long ago: If you have to have an option for it then it's a poor design
Ask HN: References for learning Graph Theory
I'm looking to learn graph theory (mostly from a parallel computing/CS-oriented approach), so can you please suggest any good books/online tutorials?
Well said.

I hated it it when I saw search results polluted like that a few weeks ago. Now I keep myself logged out of GMail pretty much all the time.
I've had an impression that because of Android's abstractions you didn't have the same "bare metal" access, such that scripting languages have to be run inside a container app: http://code.google.com/p/android-scripting/
Canon PowerShot ShootOut Contest
I sort of expected this reply, needless to say I'm not surprised. I compiled the list just so people will know, if they go after this thread, then they're sickening.
used to be safe...
Rob - how do you make the decision between going to oDesk vs doing it yourself?
Sure. An actual contract, not "by reading these words you agree to do whatever I say".
That is indeed the theme! I had never used themeforest before this site and it was absolutely a worthwhile (and minimal) expense.

The logo was done by a very talented friend of mine, who has a completely non-updated portfolio at http://ellykim.net.

The background I actually found from a site I found on HN: http://www.subtlepatterns.com. I just made it blue in photoshop.
bringing down facebook for a split second doesn't count...now for a day and maybe we can start talking props
What amazes me about Kimble is that it's not 100% fake; he did hype things up by a large factor (renting private jets and putting stickers on them for photos, vs. owning them outright as he claimed), but still, there was real revenue from some (illegitimate or fraudulent) sources.
This is a good first shot and ported from webOS to Android in just a few days - mostly dealing with the PhoneGap and android packaging learning curve, and porting native services to PhoneGap plugins.

Its written to the Enyo 1.0 framework that only really targeted the webOS implementation of webkit, so there are some performance issue with sliding and scrolling under Android that didnt appear on the TouchPad.

FYI, I'm the author (http://www.ryanwatkins.net/software/papermache/).
Thanks for the plug!
Technically most web servers are teapots, just incredibly bad ones.
Human Costs Are Built Into an Xbox/Dell Laptop/Samsung/HTC/RIM/Motorola Android Smartphone/Kindle Fire/Google Chromebook/Sony TV/etc.
John Gruber responded to this quite succinctly, which is that this isn't "embrace, extend, extinguish" because Apple isn't calling their .ibook format ePub. They just happen to use ePub + custom extensions.
>1. You always know how much a standard letter will cost, no matter where it's going. If you're mailing 100 letters to 100 locations, they all cost the same. Standard exemptions apply for rate changes every few years and for heavy items.

Computers can figure this stuff out pretty quickly. People who mail 100 first class letters to 100 locations already either use an automated stamping system or they take the letters to the post office.

>2. Based on the cash flow of the USPS, you're not subsidizing anyone by buying stamps :)

Well, okay, but how do you think they're going to plug that hole? I'll be paying for it eventually, either through income taxes or through higher postage rates.
Great question. I know that you can call 1-800-MARROW-2 and speak to a representative from the NMDP to see whether or not you're on the registry, but I'm not sure if there's an automated system in place that allows you to do so. To the best of my ability the rep "types your name into the computer"... whether or not that information is publicly accessible is a question better suited for them.
Wicked. I have to try one of these. It looks theraputic instead of taking a nap.
A true example of how ugly the 'fake it til you make it' mantra can be.
It is fine to show Ads depending on _that_ search. It had been a great invention of Google that had served them and us well.

But I don't want it to take my entire online life into account when I am doing a search. (At the very least I should be able to opt out of this).
While I am, at least at this point, a big fan of B-corps, the issues of efficiency are real. Organizations will sometimes use their B-corp or not-for-profit status as an excuse to provide poor value to their customers or for overall bad management.

Case-in-point: REI. Though they're a co-operative, they don't behave at all like one. They don't have a straightforward product pricing policy (co-operatives shouldn't have "sales"). They don't hold free and fair elections to their board of directors (candidates for election must be approved by those currently in charge). They altogether fail to serve as an example of how a co-operative should behave (this is obvious when you compare them, and their prices, to their Canadian counterpart MEC).
Google's New "Un-Evil" Privacy Policy
A query string, by itself, is just a few words in a specific order. It doesn't say very much at all. A machine has very little idea of what you're asking for. The more context it has for what you're talking about, the better chance it has at guessing what you meant -- that's all it can do, it'll never actually know.

Google's often guessing wrong now -- how many times is the link you want not the top one? How often do you have to change your query? It's all a guessing game, because the situations where there's an obvious right answer (like exact phrases) doesn't give satisfactory results. Moreover, interpreting queries for those situations can often (even usually) give sub-optimal results, as the computer's taking the query too literally.

As for programming queries, my email's actually pretty useful. I'm subscribed to a few mailing lists, and it'd be nice to not get Perl or Win32 results when I'm mostly in C and Linux. A trivial scan of my email headers would say as much.

For other interests, my youtube play list indicates a lot of what I mean. I like cats, and I watch them on youtube. When I type in jaguar, I'm actually probably asking about the cat, not the car. Lots of other people are asking about the car. It's particularly obvious if they were watching a review of a car recently, and not watching cat videos.

And as for your friends, how about the people you follow? If I'm following really good programmers, and I type in a programming-related query, I'd rather get results biased toward what really good programmers like, versus the unbiased average. Even for my friends, I actually respect some of their opinions (gasp!). If they've +1'd something in the realm of what I'm looking for, it's probably worth considering.
Public Alerts now on Google Maps
Very interesting. Would you really be more interested in leaving your job for a one week trial than writing a code sample?

I have no problem with trials.

Also, you mention my "loss," I've NEVER turned anybody down because of a lack of code samples, I've just moved faster with other candidates. I've never hired anybody with code samples, but there were other factors...
Can someone explain how this works?

I understand that (label second '(...)) makes second evaluate to that in the future, statefully, but, the lambda symbol doesn't even appear to have a definition; furthermore, if you try to use it in a way that would work with a real lambda, it doesn't work.

For instance
[[:lambda, [:x], :x], 2]
That was the longest way of saying "We now offer mailed USB flash drives as a restore option for up to 28GB of data." I've ever seen.
E-petition: Grant a pardon to Alan Turing
I have been using node.js for my day-to-day engineering for the past year. It certainly takes a couple of weeks to get a good feel for solving problems without being able to use normal flow control. But once you get it becomes easy. So I wouldn't call in inappropriate, just different. It's much like the feeling of learning your first functional programming language. It's not wrong, just different until you adjust the way you reason about your programs.
I hope nobody takes offense if I don't reply to every individual feedback item. I do appreciate all the feedback I've received thus far, and all of it is constructive in my book. Whatever makes the message/site better and more effective is in line with my goals. No better place for that kind of expertise than HN.

Just one disclaimer: I've received a few emails asking about overarching registration policy, the implementation for a buyer/seller market for donations, etc... I'm really not the right person for this type of question. Most of the time, if you're identifying a procedural inefficiency I agree with you, but I can't offer much input. Cheekswab as a site is not officially partnered with the NMDP in any capacity. Cheekswab isn't even a non-profit. Cheekswab is a website that I created in my bedroom/Starbucks in hopes of condensing some of the info I've found across the Internet on different sites and to personalize the cause. Not a cop out, just an explanation of scope.
I totally agree. Some people don't have time to code outside of work. I have two kids, a full time job, I haven't had time outside of work to write code in ages... and I've only been a startup founder for a short time. However, my point is that "code" is as important as "resume" when looking for a job. As someone hiring, I'm just thinking the time would be better spent on code samples than writing a resume. I'm probably wrong though as far as it goes to hiring at most companies.
I don't see how anything specified in the article is exclusive to Apple. Reads like linkbait, honestly. I was expecting rather more from NY Times.
The app is nice, but it runs at something like 3fps (yes, 3) on a Xoom. :(
Yes, if you can go over the valuation methods each side used, that would be very helpful to know, even if you don't share the cash figures involved.
I keep hearing this... that people send in other peoples code. I smell a startup idea: is-this-code-stolen.com
I think at some point people need to assess the value that they personally place on their data. Google simplifying their privacy policy and data collection practices are primarily aimed to coincide with the recent ui redesigns across all their products. In short, its a slow transformation of a company and with it, the web.

The era of being blissfully unaware of how your data is being used is ending. Google has anticipated and recognizes this, and is therefore reacting accordingly while providing additional value to users.
3 (sic, three) FPS here-- Linux Mint 12 amd64, Firefox 9.0.1, nvidia Go 7300 with 512MB RAM and 4GB system RAM. Also only about 60% of the frame is visible at a time on my 1280x800 display.
Here is a concrete example. A few days ago I visited Google and, rather tentatively, typed in the word "ring".

I was expecting to get garbage pages about wedding rings, or something like that. As its #1 result, Google sent me where I had wanted to go:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ring_(mathematics)

By knowing my interests lie in computer science, technology, and mathematics, Google was able to return this for me as the first result.

Other searches my friends did took them to rings for sale on Overstock.com or Amazon.

I welcome this new technology.
Tell him you're working on a child porn browser, or that you're building software by copying binary chunks of MS Office in your code.

See if he still wants to claim ownership of everything you build, then decide to hammer out a more explicit arrangement for deciding IP ownership.
Go to about:config , what are the values for the webgl.disabled and webgl.force-enabled?

If webgl.disabled is true set this to false. If that doesn't help you could try forcing it to be enabled.

Also, do you have the most up to date graphics drivers? This could be another thing to consider.
All right. Pretend the word Apple is replaced by "a client who wishes to remain anonymous". Is what is described in the article OK now and not newsworthy, or does the article describe disturbing things about labor practices that are intrinsically newsworthy?
I'm afraid you have to live in the UK to sign this. If you don't live in the UK you could still encourage any UK freinds to sign it.
That's an interesting link.

The email subjectline keywords are intersting. Almost all are commerce related:
travel, save, prices, markdowns, store, itunes, department, etc.

As if personal email is small minority of their email traffic.
Submit Your Articles to up to 100 Unique Sites Every Day
Here's where you're mistaken. Google is only compromising the relevancy of their results for a few months. After that, with such a strong (unethical) promotion, Google Plus results will be THE most relevant, because users have switched to it. It's a self-fulfilling prophecy.
It would be helpful if impossible points were the background colour (for example, 60/50 or 50/60, 40/70 or 70/40, etc) so that the big mass of whitespace is less distracting and it is more evident when neutral people shifted to one opinion or if people flip-flopped.
This honestly looks like the plot of a movie.
[FLOWCHART] Should you start freelancing?
I didn't see that coming, no, not with the creation of gmail, google docs, the acquisition of Youtube and everything else we use, why on earth would they want to put all my info into one place?... c'mon people! Facebook knows more about you than Google, and (shock) they're a for-profit organization, if they can target better ads to you, they will. I don't personally like this but as a corporation it's what they've to do.
Ever considered freelancing? This handy flowchart will help you see if it's right for you. Check it out now!!!
This is a false dilemma. Authors don't have to use iBooks software to author ebooks and users don't have to use iBooks to read ebooks on the iPad (and they probably don't because it's really buggy). Problem solved.
This appears to be totally broken in Firefox (9.0.1, on Linux)... don't know what's up with that.
Please no more extremetech.com links on Hacker News. There mobile website is terrible. Plus all that tracking software isn't nice.
The interface is pretty nice. Why are you plotting approval vs disapproval? These aren't independent quantities... I'm sure there is a better way to relate these two.
DVDs are ridiculously cheap to produce en masse. USB drives are getting cheaper, but it's not really the same ball park.
This adds side navigation to README's header structure.
I'm sorry if I sound negative, but I don't find this of much value.
As mentioned by other users, readme files are not suposed to contain a big bulk of documentation, and they already support formatting anyway.
Github also offers per project wikis and sites (which this is based on). Do we really need such a tool just to generate an index? Wouldn't this make more sense as a bookmarklet for those who want it?