skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It looks like a joke to me. The program always just calls exit(0); straight away if the main function is the expected one, which is why it's so fast. All the rest is just noise to hide that. All he seems to be saying is that the competition could be won by implementing fastroot() as just calling exit(0).
Please kill the submitter's account. His other submissions are equally retarded.
I'd be careful with some of the advice in this thread.

Your idea doesn't need to be original, but your execution of it needs to be better. In at least some small way that will gain you customers, it needs to be better on day 1.
eh I don't mind that, just install adblock and you get the stuff for free w/o being annoyed by ads.
I would guess that fb's market share is close to google's and youtube, or at least will be soon based on current growth patterns. I may be wrong.
Presidential email is a tough technical problem. The audit trail piece is easy enough, but there's also the problem of keeping the email account clean and secure. Somehow, it needs to provide relatively unfettered access to the president from his close friends and advisors, but not allow the general public or untrusted parties to send messages to it. It should guarantee that emails sent to that account are from verifiable sources. It absolutely must guarantee that emails sent from that account were sent by the president.

Security by obscurity is bound to fail, as an obscure address will leak out quickly. A private-key system (PGP/GPG) is a step in the right direction. All unsigned or unencrypted mail sent to or from that account would be rejected outright (but looked at by staff and saved, of course). In this restricted case, where the number of trusted recipients is manageable, even the public key distribution problem is simple: a Secret Service agent could hand-deliver a CD containing the president's public key to every trusted recipient, and pick up the recipient's public key in return.

Keeping recipients' private keys secure is more difficult. Whereas I'm sure that the NSA or even the White House IT staff can keep the president's private key reasonably safe, a security breach on a correspondent's laptop, with a private key on it, would potentially mean that someone can masquerade as a trusted recipient. That would, at best, lead to the feared PR nightmare and scandal.
"Bush used his power to indefinitely detain and torture people he didn't like"

That is not true. Bush himself neither detained nor tortured anyone. Bush is not The Bush Administration, so that example is invalid as it pertains to Obama and him being forced to give up email.
Sorry, but those are quarter to quarter growth rates - which, for seasonal industries, need to be year-to-year instead (unless he shows what these same quarters did in the previous years). He said that it is 18% higher in 2008 Q3 than 2007 Q3. It could be that every year the big jump is from Q3 to Q4! And, perhaps, every year, the quarterly jumps from Q4->Q1, Q1->Q2, Q2->Q3 are relatively small.

Also, as someone noted in the TC comments, this is all in USD, which I presume is safe, but I don't know what fraction of ad sales are logged in international currencies, and the dollar has gained recently.
I think as a language C# is superior to Java. That being said, learn Java. The open source community alone makes it a much more attractive platform to build apps on. The number of choices in terms of frameworks + no vendor lock in makes it a winner. If you're serious about learning it pick up a copy of Effective Java by Joshua Bloch -- by far the best general Java book out there.
You're not going to find a clear answer one way or the other. If you enjoy working with Microsoft products, including Visual Studio, go for C#. If you like, or would like to learn, using other platforms, go for Java.

Keep in mind a lot of the value of Java is the JVM. It's everywhere now so it's kind of like a perl for enterprises.
I'm in Silicon Valley - so this skews me a bit, but Java by far.

It does depend a bit on what you want to do, but most everything I see is sliding towards java. You can do web development, mobile (except iPhone) and though it hasn't fully caught on yet, I'm seeing more apps on the desktop in Java than in the past.
Perhaps more succinctly: The second mouse gets the cheese.
The technology that powers the body doesn't change much from year to year, unlike for computers.
Posted any interesting Submissions, yourself?
Or their inappropriate phallic references, perhaps.
If you are looking to only program for windows, C#. Stay away from java at all cost. Java is a career trap, and more importantly a destroyer of intellect. My roommate is a C# programmer and a system architect. Really smart and he makes close to $150k per year. Java would qualify you to flip French fries in comparison.
Also, keep Objective C in mind. That opens up Mac and iPhone development to you. Macs are at 20% marketshare now, iPhones the best selling smart phone. Plus programming for Mac/iPhone is just fun.
Further afield, look at languages like Erlang. The future of computing is hundreds and thousands of parallel cores and parallel languages like Erlang are in many ways increasingly important.
Java, then Clojure. I've never used Clojure, but my understanding is that it's a Lisp dialect that targets the Java VM.

Do learn a language like Lisp, Ruby, or Ocaml, though. Once you get used to the functional paradigm, you'll realize how much more powerful these languages are, and you'll never go back.
Sisvel isn't a patent troll; it's controlled by Philips. Patent trolls are companies that don't do anything but enforce patents.

By all means hate Philips, but use the right terms. =)
Can chatbot programming save computer science?
I think chatbots hold enormous promise in raising interest in computer science.

The reason is that they allow programming for the masses. Even if a
chatbot language is not Turing complete, people could still get a feeling
for what it's like to program a computer.

Of course spreadsheets have been doing this for a long time, but
chatbots are way more fun.

And unlike Logo's Turtle Graphics, chatbot programming is not math-oriented and will appeal to a larger number of people.
How to price your iPhone app out of existence
Yup, you'll never look back! ...unless you need to get a job, of course...

Though Python is used more and more now, you can definitely get jobs in languages other than Java and C# and such... But sadly, not Lisp or Ocaml though, at least not easily.
It was long due.
So you've learned C, and C++. Of Java and C#, you may as well continue learning them in that order to see how one tries to improve on its predecessor, though by now it's likely that Java has adapted some ideas from C# as well.

Oh, and learn Objective-C!
None of those represent virtues of irrationality, but rather common misunderstandings of rationality.

1) If goodness is your goal, rationality lights the path.

2) To engage in a lifetime of cogitation when a split-second decision would be good enough (given your goals) is not rational.

3) Rationality includes making decisions under incomplete information (including the correct assessment of risks). The argument you present here in fact presupposes rationality.
On the other hand, why would you want to work for just as much as you've earned in the past?
True, though I don't think it "boils down to incentives" only.

Frankly, I'm tired of people crying about CEO pay. Yes, there are examples of ridiculous compensation and severance packages (former Home Depot CEO got a $210M severance when leaving, for example). But I think it also boils down to demand and human capital.

A good CEO can do things the average person in the labor force cannot. No two ways about it. And, as economies/industries grow over time, the is greater demand for these people.

Robots and offshore workers in Ukraine cannot lead publicly-traded US companies.
Also, don't trust someone who trusts you without good reason.
Man I know that I'm gonna get burned for saying it, but java isn't all that it's cracked up to be. I've worked for two companies that are java-based and both experiences have been horrible. Except for a handful of people, every java "engineer" I've known has been a siv. The ones that rock happen to just know java in addition to experience in other languages. Point in case, we are implementing some new web apis soon. I have been extolling the benefits of JSON and REST. Friday, the manager/lead java dude that is in charge of our 10+ engineers and making critical technology decisions asks me, "So, what is JSON"? Oy...
Ask YC: Should we flag Trolls?
Should we have the option to flag Trolls such as 'tsetse-fly', then display a warning symbol alongside their login name whenever they post?
And how does this chart account for possible factors such as:

People leaving for a different, newer platform.
More Ad dollars being funnelled into platforms which don't restrict the type of content on which they're delivered.
Sites that pull ads due to setting up their own delivery systems

etcetera
I think the Systems Architect position earns that salary, not just a developer who uses that specific language. I don't think anybody is saying C# developers are paid badly, but that Java is open source in (I think) every way by now, and that means it will survive for a long time.

On the other hand, I'm never putting faith into Microsoft's development tools again, as nice as they are, because in recent history, Microsoft has killed off programming languages and tools at will, even their most popular ones. Microsoft makes developers depend on Microsoft's ability to update and improve their programming tools, in order to make the case they should charge for them, but has killed off popular programs or languages in order to concentrate on new ones, given that they themselves don't have resources to support all of them at once.
I think that was Yudkowsky.
AIR has an encrypted local store you can hide secret information in.
C# has got a bunch of neat functional stuff in it (Microsoft's researchers have seen the glory of functional languages), but Java might be easier to start off with.

Once you can get through Java, everything else you learn will feel immensely superior...
4 Steps to Making Strategic Decisions in Today’s Market
I would recommend looking at c#, or more interestingly the .net framework and the CLR. Once you've learn't the framework then you can also look at the other .net languages. Ironpython, IronRuby and F# give you a width breadth of languages and ideas but with the benfit of the shared .Net framework and the object inter opt that comes with the CLR/DLR
That technology may look perfectly adapted in movies (eg. Minority Report) and concept demos, but I'm utterly unconvinced it would be much practical for real-world usage.

For one thing, it seems like you'll have to learn lots of complex gestures if you want to accomplish something nontrivial. You'll run out of simple, intuitive, distingishable gestures really fast.
Obviously it's a good thing if an employee gets what he's worth, and it's nice if you can actually accurately determine that.

But what's his previous salary got to do with what he's actually worth, now?

If you tell a potential employer what you're currently getting, doesn't it set an upper limit on how much you can get from the new job?

If no one knows what you're getting now, you could get a 50% 'raise' when changing jobs, and still happen to be worth just that.

Is there any way that a potential employer knowing your current salary can work to your advantage as an employee? I seriously doubt it.
He may be right but I would have liked to see a deeper understanding of price elasticity of demand, as well as some data to back up some of his claims.
Agreed. Incomplete. Slow news day, so let's make some of those charts that everyone loves to look at to pull in traffic.
This is kinda old news. The latest hoo-ha over bannings was when a Fastcompany writer accused users of being sexist and Digg banned 20 to 30 of them.

See here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=365415
I don't think I have a ceiling on the price I would pay for an iPhone business/productivity app. I would pay hundreds of £/$/€ if the app made me that much in return.
My Journey To Tweetsville
This post seems to gloss over the point about VALUE.

Sure, sell your app for $9.99 if you want. But it'd better be worth it.

And almost all of the apps ON the app store are little quick pieces of fluff, barely even worth 99 cents.

Even the better pieces of software are mostly timesavers or memory aids, games notwithstanding.

The problem seems to stem from the fact that there is this expection to spend a few weeks and crank out an app, then live on it for a year, when I just don't think this could be the case.

iPhone apps just aren't as big or useful as desktop apps. I'm not saying there aren't useful apps, but come on, you're not gonna see Photoshop or Visual Studio or.. World or Warcraft for the iPhone any time soon.

And this doesn't even get into the fact that a lot of apps I could use can be replicated just by opening the browser and going to a website. And that one app I WOULD buy, I can't, without jailbreaking. (Ah, Podcaster. C'est la vie. And that app is only 4.99 too.)
You missed the other thread about Alexa. Alexa do not measure mobile traffic so Alexa numbers are very to irrelevant for any mobile services
Why is he anymore of a troll than you are? Have you read your submissions?
Somehow, I'm having a really hard time taking an article about lolcats seriously. (btw I love lolcats. But analysing them?)
Context:

http://news.ycombinator.net/item?id=366128
Once you said ASP.NET it is clear that you are heading to the web.

If you insist not to develop web applications using the greatest open source platforms which serve today all the largest sites, then C# would be better than Java simply because ASP.NET has much more to offer than Java in the web field.
Clueless management is platform independent.
More context: http://news.ycombinator.net/submitted?id=mellow

Plus one about aliens that was killed.
I'm missing something - the article refers to the Blackberry in the title as well as all over the article...

The comment about it being pathetic that Obama would be the first "emailing president" or the first president with a laptop in his office is unrelated.
Or more along the lines of Computer Assisted Chess.

A person assisted by a computer can play better chess than any human, and also better than any computer.

Maybe it will be the same here.
This reminds me of "America, Fuck Yeah" in Team America, wherein U.S. credit is taken for sushi, Christmas, and books.
I wouldn't worry too much about it. People vote down bad submissions all the time. And I think if it gets way out of hand, pg has no problem banning people
To be fair, your Obama question was retarded. Sorry, I'm being honest.
Interesting. 'About 1/2 of the human population suffers from poverty.' Well, let them die so everyone can be wealthy. Can you see the flaw in my argument?
In chaotic computing, anarchy rules OK
Can you back up your claim that Java is easier to start with?
Sorry for the generalization shimi. I thought for awhile about how to express that idea and couldn't think of a good way. But you're right, education and/or intelligence are not the predictors. I guess it just seems to me that it SHOULD be.

Also, though my statement is essentially indefensible, I did want to point out that I was not saying that all postal workers are uneducated, but rather was referring to the postal workers that had opened fire years ago as being the intersection of the set "uneducated" and the set "postal workers." I apologize.
I assume you're mostly referring to VB6 being EOL'd. Any other examples?
You won't get funding on the basis of finding a better/missing feature of another product
The World is big, the market too.
PDF link to the original research, well worth looking at:

http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2008/04/25/0801268105.full...
"[A]nyone smart enough to make it as a computer scientist can make it with less work and risk as an MD, MBA, or JD."

Oh, come now. I see a lot of over-the-top programmer glorification on this site, but this takes the cake.

I know plenty of complete dolts who managed to get degrees in CS, and who went on to have reasonably rewarding careers. At no point were their grades (nor their general levels of ability) high enough to get them anywhere near law school, let alone medical school.

Now maybe you, dear reader, could have easily got into medical or law school, but the vast majority of your classmates couldn't.
I thought the one about Aliens was prescient. Oh well.
Learn Scala: http://www.scala-lang.org
Statistical Hypothesis Tests for NLP
To be fair, POTUS is one of the most important people in the World. His team should be reading news.ycombinator.com for many (I would have thought, obvious) reasons.
I've noticed that no-one has talked about the cost of using either.

Yes the Java IDE's are somewhat inferior to MS's, but you can get everything you need to write, develop, manage, and host Java applications for free compared to MS; the OS, IDE, Web Server ... all cost money which can be a substantial amount for commercial purposes.
Wealth is absolute. Since the Baby Boomers' DoB, many people have got wealthier, very few have got poorer.
He has posted more comments than I have which could be considered Trollish.
In that case the term "neocon" is sufficiently broad to be meaningless. We should probably make up new labels if nobody can agree on what this one means.
Competing From The Fringe - How To Outsmart Big, Dumb Companies
Entrepreneurial tips for competing with both big and small companies.
You should look at doing C# and learning .NET, and as has been stated, you could then use .NET with all sorts of languages (IronPython, IronRuby, etc.) You could also look at the Mono project for Open Source development, and as you are doing web apps, take a look at Silverlight/Moonlight. Silverlight has very impressive capabilities and potential.
Strong earthquake hits Indonesia, tsunami warning lifted
Warfare Helped Shape the Evolution of Human Cooperation
Censored from YC: Aliens
See below for my original post censored from YC.

pg, what is wrong with this post? I would have thought it was suitably out-of-the box. If not, if it was considered cranky or absurd, well, the comments would have lead to this conclusion and could have germinated some interesting thoughts along the way.

I'm guessing you are using a variation of your Bayesian filter which requires at least one user to complain about the post also.

Here it is:

---

If ETs exist, Darwinian evolution tells us to expect intelligent ETs. Intelligence begets technology - humans have gone to the Moon and created the Web. Planets with technological, polluting civilizations will be found by astronomers within 5 years. Have you factored this into you start up's expectations?

---
Yeah, you know oddly, I remember the scrollwheel working at some time in the past. Also, the interface seems to have inherited that unintuitive "grab and drag" functionality from Adobe Reader.
Raid1 idea was a suggestion of how to deal with system crashes, not to populate the buffer cache.
There is high value in the work that people do to build that house, though. Look to your computer -- all it is, is a collection of petrochemicals, metals, a bit of rubber, and a bunch of bits etched into silicon. If you were to look at the sum total cost of what it took to build your computer, it would probably be much less than what you paid for it.

Yet you probably think you got a bargain. This is not because you are a fool, but because you probably did get a bargain -- your computer is, as a programmer, your means to create value and wealth.

Every time I read about the gold standard, I'm reminded of the Germans and Japanese during World War II -- they were insanely gold-hungry, and yet the only lasting legacy of value from either culture, has been the technologies they developed.

Wealth is something we create, not metal dug out of the ground.
"Jaeggi’s fluid-intelligence game works, but it’s lab-based at the moment and has yet to be adapted for general use."

You can try it right now at cognitivefun.net created by whacked_new:

http://cognitivefun.net/
http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=whacked_new
I just up-voted you. I know it is against the rules to say so, and it is a trivial statement to make, but I did laugh as I clicked the mouse button!
i think a lot of <traditional> companies will not stand this storm. the biggest factor in the "financial crisis" that has been underlooked is the death of the traditional media. we are amidst a huge culture switch from from newpaper to feedreader, from retail stores to estores, from calling your broker to etrading. there is a lot of industry that is built around the old model of storefronts that simply can not sustain and compete with a spaceless model.

as far as the tech industry goes, i think the desktop makers <and desktop chip makers> and the smaller web startups that don't bring in any cash are screwed.

while there will always be a need for desktop computers and server grade hardware, people are now more interested in buying mobile computers. most people only check their email and visit a few other webpages (youtube, facebook, etc.), and this need can be fulfilled from anywhere with a small handheld computer (iphone, g1, blackberries) and a mobile internet connection.

the small web startups are in trouble because not only do they are not bring in any cash, it will be harder for them to get cash from VCs. i'm sure some will weather the storm, but i can also see a lot of them not being able to do so.
Is a ring tone worth $3? To many people, it is.
I don't think there's a single idea -- no matter how unorthodox -- that would go down in flames here if it were well defended.
Sony Ericsson C905
The C905 body is smooth and sleek with button layout intended to speed up the process of accessing applications. The slide mechanism has a dual-purpose. It reveals the powerful camera on the back and the keypad on the front.
OK, now I suspect you're a troll, and that tsetse-fly is some kind of sock-puppet, and that you really need to think of something better to do with your time than this.

update: No, now I come to look at it, tsetse-fly has been around for a while and made some sensible comments, so probably isn't a sockpuppet. mellow, on the other hand, is 14 days old and has mostly posted rubbish.
Would probably be good to specify your goals. Long term job security? Payscale? Building your own startup/app?
Cognitive fun
The cat one was funny.