skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Unfortunately, the person who put up the project did not specify that the solution has to complete within a timespan. So given a piece of code, a proposed solution could just try all possible values, trying to discover if it will halt. This may take very long.

If the project client complains, he will need to prove that your solution is wrong, and he cannot prove that if he does not give your solution enough time to try all possible combinations.
Jurors Begin Deliberating Over MySpace Hoax | TechJaws
While that might be true, my reaction comes from seeing it overused by techie folks that can't manage to state what they want, and the closest they've been able to figure out is a euphemism for a workaholic with more enthusiasm than expertise.
My interview at Google:

First basic recruiter basic questions.

Second part, call from Mountain View to London. They couldn't organize a VOIP line that didn't sound underwater. They tried calling again and the line was still bad. They proceeded anyway.

I spent 5 minutes answering a basic question about deploying some changes across a thousand machines, then the interviewer mentioned he'd heard part of it, but how would I deploy it across a thousand machines?

I talked about things stored in inodes, including POSIX attributes, he asked for an example, I mentioned immutable. Google: WHAT? Me: IMMUTABLE. Google: WHAT? Me: IMMUTABLE. INDIGO MIKE MIKE UMBRELLA ...

The whole call went along those lines and was generally a massive waste of time.

Apparently they were going to organize a second interview with a working phone line. They haven't gotten back to me in the two weeks since.
I use and like Gnumeric- http://projects.gnome.org/gnumeric/
it tends to be lighter and faster than the Open Office equivalent and I haven't found any features which it lacks. Excel has more prettiness options for display/print but from what I have read Gnumeric beats it's pants off in terms of math and statistics functions.
Men's Perfume
Men's Perfume has information and reviews of lots of different perfumes and fragrances. We give you info on the smells, prices and best buys.
The most influential women in Web 2.0
Nokia 6600 Power Button Ways
6600, 6600 power button ways, 6600 power switch, broken prints, Nokia, on off, power button, power switch, ways
If these Ruby bloggers got together and coded instead with the time they take to write and edit these posts to nowhere, they might come up with something pretty cool.
Polly Wanna Cracker? Squawk That’s So Bush League - ‘Alex and Me’
I would also like to believe that everyone will behave rationally but sometimes people don't especially when they get panicky. Here's hoping they do.
In an Age of Robots, One to Clean the House? Still but a Dream
Did you look at rsync? You don't really need to implement anything.

My point, though, was that in some sense you're trying to find a way to bend a VCS into doing something well outside the strengths of VCSs, so it is worth looking into categories of tools better suited to the problem.
A Whisper, Perhaps, From the Universe’s Dark Side
I understand what you mean. I don't know if this is the correct forum to convince you otherwise. This is the WOTI mission statement.

White Oak Technologies, Inc. (WOTI) seeks to be the premier organization providing the next generation of advanced algorithms and systems for large-scale data retrieval and exploitation to our commercial and government sector clients. Being the leader in advanced Computer Science demands the very best engineers and analysts, and our stringent recruiting process assures our customers that WOTI staff is truly the "best of the best" in the nation. We are committed to delivering exceptional value to both our clients and employees through innovation, solid business skills, and dedication to excellent service.
True - I was only half joking, though. With the internet we really can browse through new topics outside of our field very quickly. Not to become experts, but to find specific aspects of other areas of research that might apply to our problem.

Who knows what Leonardo would have done with the internet...
One of the problems FORTRAN was trying to solve (from Backus's paper): "The cost of programmers associated with a computer center was usually at least as great as the cost of the computer itself." Interesting how things change; the ratio would be more like 100:1 now.
Why should you need to "get used to the decentralized nature of git" on a one-person project, though?
There's a record called "Symphony For Dot-Matrix Printers" which consists entirely of music made from printing special patterns to a load of dot-matrix printers. I heard it in a record shop once and it sounded pretty cool but not having the equipment to play vinyl I didn't actually buy it. Wish I had now, if anyone knows where to get it on CD then let me know...

Also, this article reminds me of the Tortoise's "I can not be played on record player X" record from Godel, Escher, Bach :)
Is peace a human right?
Seadragon Ajax - pure JavaScript high-res zooming
Have you seen http://l8tr.org/ which also scans web sites that are temporarily down and emails you when they come back up?
It seems today it got broader attention.

http://www.reuters.com/article/ousiv/idUSTRE4AO1LI20081125

http://www.forbes.com/afxnewslimited/feeds/afx/2008/11/25/af...

And everybody mentions WSJ as source but couldn't find the original, perhaps it's offline only.

Yeah, no mention of (mostly) not hiring but I am very sure of that, too.
Some food storage containers, water bottles, and the like are advertising "BPA-free."
In my experience, Mercurial delivers the advantages of git without being "inherently complex and arcane". I would recommend it over e.g. SVN because it has far the flexibility of DVCS features available (and its extension system), but in the case of one user, it behaves very similarly to SVN.
doing so for every new consumer scare would be a full-time job

It's been around for at least 10 years...I was concerned about warming plastic baby bottles.
Widget Locationizer Plugin Makes Widgets Smarter Improves Ad Targeting
I have a small service and about 3% of the user base opts to pay for advanced features. That figure has been consistent for me for some time, even when the user base as a whole was smaller.
"Horizontal scalability achieved through the implementation of a load balancing solution is easy." - makes me giggle and not want to continue reading. If one is still relying on vertical scalability then perhaps therein lies your problem.

@poster: URL needs fixing
http://research.microsoft.com/Terminator/

The ultimate goal of the TERMINATOR project is develop automatic techniques (and tools that implement them) that will allow us to prove that industrial software components cannot hang.
Please, have mercy!

http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=qhoxie
Making Twitter Smarter
(Said in an Austrian accent:) They'll be back.
They can't match expectations.

Violent discussions, even with name-calling and everything, is very common in open source projects. Look at Linux, BSD, etc. There will always be a clash of egos. That might even be motivational for the mud slingers, to prove their point.
getcpuinfo
get cpu info
Saas costs can be pretty low because you only need a couple hundred users to get to that 10K a month. A couple hundred users on most apps can probably be run totally fine off of a <100$ vps.
Stack Overflow Is You
Agreed, but not for the same reason. A better response would have been "we have great revenue and broke even X months ago" not "we're funded by VC money and consequently could go under at just about anytime".

Also, why are there 170 comments in this thread with many job openings but the 'jobs' section of HN is ... quiet?
Outsourcing to a far away place to a random contractor is looking for trouble. But your generalization is offensive.
Bad advice for most people.

When Penn and Teller hire a 'light guy' or a 'stage hand' I'm sure they don't say "Well Mr. Shmoe, do whatever you want, we're cool with it!"

It's their show, not yours. If you own the show, run the show and star in it you can do whatever you want. However if you're just a cog in the machine, you better do what is asked of you.
A very clever idea though, but i wouldn't have come across it if i had been "working" on my "disconnected-from-the-web-work-computer". So there are trade-offs.
Unless I'm wrong, a "private" delicious link doesn't generate an RSS feed, which screws up my RSS/FF3 bookmark action.
Why doesn't twitter do these "smartening" things and make the experience more engaging and useful? Might even charge money for it!
That's his point - it IS your show, if you make it your show. If you don't make it your show, don't complain when you end up as just another cog in the machine.
Weebly's SnapAds: Survival Of The Fittest Meets Madison Avenue
"a workaholic with more enthusiasm than expertise"

I've spent the last twenty years becoming a slacker with more expertise than enthusiasm, so I'm with you there ;)
Terminator Research Project - Hoping to Prove Some Programs Terminate
Omg it's Seth Godin. He is so wise. I will go develop a "shtick" now because I want people to think I'm like Penn and Teller.
I was involved with wikipedia at the time of creation (and the whole gnupedia vs nupedia debate), and Jimbo was the driving force. Larry undoubtedly played a major role as editor-in-chief but from the very beginning it was clear Larry was subordinate to Jimbo (although that doesn't necessarily mean he wasn't a co-founder of sorts).
I don't think he's referring to "virtual machines" (which I think tend to run one operating system 'within' another (ergo much more than the processor)).

He's talking about programming languages which generally run in a virtual machine (e.g. the JVM) or other interpreted environments (e.g. ruby, javascript, et.al).
> usually from eating Tofu

Evidence?

You just keep chowing down on your steak burgers and corn derivatives mate and we'll measure the differential in results in about 20 years OK? Tofu seems to work fine for the Japanese.
I would strongly suggest having a handful of clients. Currently the two things likely to kill an early consulting / freelancing career are: the client you're working for going out of business, or the client you're working for cutting budgets back to the point where they can't afford you any more.

Being spread across a few clients lessens your risk a great deal, but it shouldn't become unmanageable to keep in touch with all of them.

[Edit] I should have said - couldn't agree more about the conferences. Whether full on conferences or more community driven events like BarCamps, they're a great place to meet very good contacts.
Car Navigation Map Mashup in Canvas
Editors, please fix headline. Should be: Google cuts hundreds of contractors, more cuts rumored.
In Norway most cafés actually got more visitors after smoking was banned. Even the smokers themselves preferred the clean air.

This article about the poor French café's is just plain nonsense.
You have some rendering weirdness in Firefox 3.0.1 on OSX Leopard:

I've put up a screenshot: http://cli.gs/152EXg . Look at the first blue rectangle's left side edge and the bottom right blue box's right edge.

Interesting idea, too :)

Pierre
Go through all that when Linode (or others) lets me click a button to get the same thing? No thanks - it looks like a 'hack' to me. Sure, I don't mind running my own system, but imagine doing that every time I decide to provision a new one - yuck!
You guys are awesome and it looks like you have a lot of fun.

http://www.vimeo.com/173714
This is actually pretty interesting. They aren't claiming that they are trying to make a general solution, just one that works in most cases. It might even be possible, AFAIK there hasn't been very much research in this area.
Yes, it was a bit longer than necessary to make his point. I think the general point is that programming is more about information and system architecture and less about the details of one particular language. I tend to agree with this view.

I agree that RDF and the semantic web folks are also working on related concepts (as are the PBEL / web-services folks). The programming landscape seems to be changing faster and faster, so I do think that we will end up with several good meta-programming environments in the near future.
I've got a fairly high amount of karma over there (> 3000), but I've already grown tired of the community because of "questions" like that one. Basically, if I want to have fun online I'll go to a humor based site. If I want to learn more about programming, I don't want to be interrupted by Internet memes that were beaten to death over a year ago.
We're always hiring senior php developer talent at myYearbook. If you're up for relocating outside of Philadelphia or are in the area, drop me an email at gmr@myyearbook.com.
> westley.c:107: warning: incompatible implicit declaration of built-in function 'exit'

You need

#include <stdlib.h>

to declare exit().
It has already been linked here, but I think it's worth noting that Cathedral-soft is working on it: http://research.microsoft.com/Terminator/default.htm
Good point...

But I would counter your counter by saying that you identified late in the game that you were going to have a very hard time marketing the app due to people's expectations. Poor marketing and inability to get users to bite kills plenty of decent ideas. Not recognizing that early on is as damning as building something that collapses when you try to scale it.

I'm not saying your idea is a bad one. I'm just saying that getting criticism early on, even of a vague idea, can be very helpful. It can help you not only in implementing your idea, but also in implementing any marketing strategies or deciding how you want to position your product.
"More and more, I'm thinking that it was a major mistake on Apple's part not to allow developers to easily offer demos and upgrades in the same app..."

When the author states things like this, it should be written "More and more, I'm thinking Apple should have delayed the release of the App store until they could easily offer demos and upgrades in the same app..." When put that way, does it still hold true? I doubt it.

Apple has singlehanded revolutionized the mobile phone app marketplace in spite of only being in the business for a year at the time they released the app store. Good for them for not trying to add every bell and whistle with their first release.
Not a CD, but:

http://www.theuser.org/dotmatrix/downloads/en/frame_index.ht...

Hard to imagine those collections of sounds just being made from those objects.
When the kindle launched my reaction was "What?" then the idea grew on me. I now want one, but only if the price is right. Has there been any decent tip offs on what the price for Kindle 2 might be?
Linode will raise that limit too if you ask.
I never claimed it was entirely unique. Bookmarking via a bookmarklet has been around a long while. I took ideas from several places, and then trimmed it down to the simplest set of functions that solved my problem.
Interesting application of evolutionary optimization. The system is probably easy to reproduce: expect open-source versions soon.
love the comment on their discussion board:

"BTW.. I think it is incredibly ignorant to post such a question with the purpose of mocking those who are not informed on Turing."
since lcm(|X|, |Y|) != |X|, |X|^n cannot be divided evenly by |Y| (since its factors are the same)

Can you go into more detail about this part?
"Claim 2. Ruby is the slowest thing imaginable. I’ve tackled this argument with some vigor before, but suffice it to say that real-life Ruby applications must be compared against real-life PHP or Django applications, and they perform quite well. Even Rails, not exactly the fastest Ruby web framework, beats out CodeIgniter in Hello World benchmarks, and is dead even with CodeIgniter on more robust benchmarks. Comparing it with CakePHP, which is a closer feature-for-feature comparison, Rails completely destroys Cake in all benchmarks."

Huh? The original argument is that the language is slow yet Yehuda is comparing framework speeds. Apples and oranges.
How to select mens shoes
There is more to choosing men’s shoes, particularly men’s dress shoes than just the color and the price. Women are the best when it comes to selecting their shoes. It is almost an art that women have actually perfected over the years. This is the main reason why it takes women hours to be able to purchase a single pair of shoes. With prices going up drastically, it is important to select a pair of dress shoes that would last you for more than the special occasion for which you buy your shoes. Here are a few tried and tested tips that women have used that you can use as well.
Lenovo service lets users disable lost or stolen laptops with a text message
I wholeheartedly agree. After getting several shoddy outsourced projects I've come to adopt the mantra that "if you want something done right, you've got to do it yourself".

The individual who created a template for me did a decent job on design, but the CSS was absolutely pitiful and full of many unnecessary and confusing layers...

I think this is why large corporations that have detailed processes involving requirements definition etc. do a far better job with getting what they want from outsourced work (as compared to startups). With a 1-2 person company, most of us don't have the time or money to throw together a 50-page whitepaper detailing exactly what is needed.
New Xerox toner cuts power costs
OpenOffice Calc. One nice thing about OOo is that you can write scripts / extensions in pretty much any language you feel comfortable with. I think I've seen some reference to some integration between R and Calc as well, which would make Calc incredibly powerful for statistical analysis.
What do you buy a programmer for Xmas?
What is offensive about that post? Maybe I'm missing something or others are reading too much into it. He says he would not recommend outsourcing to India, Pakistan, etc., but would consider outsourcing to a qualified firm closer to home.

This doesn't necessarily imply that he thinks developers in India and Pakistan are a bunch of dopes. In fact, it doesn't imply anything at all except that he prefers not to outsource overseas. We can really only speculate since he doesn't provide any reasons for his opinion, but maybe we should give him a little more credit here before we jump to conclusions and call the post offensive.

His opinions could be explained with a variety of reasons like time difference, difficulty in communicating (either long distance phone calls or having to do everything over email) or even possible language barriers. Sometimes when you need a very specific result you need to be careful how you explain this to someone whose native language is different from your own. Even common figures of speech can be taken literally and result in confusion over what is expected. All of these possible hurdles can be alleviated by working with a group closer to home.
Business Models to Avoid
mylunchmoney.com is definitely working
I'm not sure, the amounts vary. The top one at least looks like someone incompetent just guessed a number.
Andy, the gentleman organizing this charity drive, is a friend of mine. I threw in a bit of an inducement for people who want to help:

http://kalzumeus.com/2008/11/25/help-debug-the-world/
Clickable is hiring for Software Engineers in NYC. See the job description at http://www.clickable.com/corp/jobs/20080723softeng.aspx.

We're still a very small team, but our customer base has been expanding rapidly since we took our second round of funding this summer (Led by Founders' Fund, with additional investment from FirstMark and Union Square Ventures).
"37 Signals Release the Getting Real Ebook" -- in the top ten? Wow, I'd have put other things there like MySQL, the first open source load balancer, flash-based video, etc.
Amazing idea. I guess user interfaces for websites could follow a similar route some day. You specify the parameter range for the appearance of a website and the system finds the appropriate settings for a given demographic/geographic segment/time of day.
He has taken a remarkable interest in robots, so it's a pretty close race at this point.
FreeBSD Kernel Critical Update: arc4random predictable sequence vulnerability
If it is running on a 32 bit machine, and can't make IO calls, you can just enumerate every possible memory/register state and see if the resulting fsa has any loops for the given input range of the function.
Schneier reviews: Here Comes Everybody
Being with other people?

What have they done about drinking? Italy banned smoking, but not drinking. Austria has yet to ban much of anything anywhere, and thus it's impossible for my wife and 6 month old daughter to go out for coffee and cake with friends in a pastry shop and not come home reeking of cigarette smoke, which is pretty gross (babies should not smell like smoke).
There really aren't any plans to monetize it. If it manages to cover it's own costs via donations or possibly ad sense, then I'd be happy.
Funny, after reading jeff atwood's article on codinghorror (http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001190.html), I left a comment suggesting someone do this. I see someone took me up on the offer.

PS, mega points to whoever claimed to know BNF, and also to whoever made the George Cantor post. Also mega points to the creator for using the handle "AlanT".
Good for them, however I've got more pressing things to worry about than hypothesizing how much another tech company is raking in (let alone make a huge blog post about it). Like for example becoming profitable myself.

/back to work
Still pretty much vapourware. "November 5, 2008--Wolfram Research announced an initiative today to develop a cloud computing service for users of their flagship technical computing software, Mathematica."

(Having said that, I'd expect Wolfram to do this sort of thing pretty well. Mathematica does stuff at a high enough level that automatic parallelization at least has a chance, and they've already got some of that for SMP systems in Mathematica 7. It'll probably need some tuning to make it effective in a cloud-computing context, where the communication overheads are higher.)

Also not Amazon-specific. "Nimbis Services will enable the Mathematica cloud service to access many diverse HPC systems, including TOP500 supercomputers and the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud."

(Quotations are from the Wolfram announcement linked from the AWS article: http://www.wolfram.com/news/cloudcomputing.html .)
My experience is with AdSense. It's a huge part of their business, you'd think there would be real people for every point of contact. It's disconcerting to get a response from a robot when there are thousands of dollars at stake.
I'm pretty sure the ad agencies have something like this already.
OperaMini 4.2 Review with G1