skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: How much theoretical computer science do you directly use in your work?
Do you regularly implement van Emde Boas trees and analyze the big O runtime of your algorithms? Have you ever saved the day by applying a highly theoretical result? Or do you find theory largely unhelpful?

Some context: as a mathematician transitioning into programming, I find it easiest to pick up the theoretical side of computer science, but I don't know how useful this will ultimately be. It seems like most problems, even performance-sensitive problems, are best solved by standard techniques, or clever memory management, rather than theory.
I'm surprised no one else wrote this but why not increase your price to $199?

That is still dirt cheap for anyone who wants to get an app made.

You'll do half the work for the same no eyes.
I think you may not know as much about WSGI as you think... like, say, who originally created it.
4 ways we learned we are building the right thing
I launched early with a paid copy of our product, and people complained about it a lot. This was good since I knew what to improve.

The best way to make people care about a product is get them to pay some money for it first.

I also launched a free version of our product after. While this one has a lot more users and is growing exponentially, the feedback is far sparser. People care for things they pay for and that attention is great for shaping the beginning of your startup.
Can you be more specific about what is missing?
Yeah, no need to petition.

Assuming the bug is fixed (and it sounds like pg is working on it), I'll post it again on Tuesday around 11am EST and we'll see where it goes.
Why Aren't You Developing in the Cloud?
Fuck you, I’m the ‘D’ on this
The money is irrelevant. $70 is chump change for any application I care about enough to do custom drawing in. But if there's something unworkable about the approach, I sure wouldn't want to waste my time.

(I have a couple Mac Cocoa apps I'm working on that I kinda sidelined because UI controls were painful).
The Journey to HotKeys
One would think they would have looked at dropsend.com when they saw that it was registered.
I'm curious to see how we are going to navigate this data.

I'd love to see an etherpad type slider where you can see a page evolve.

Or could we have a search of the entire history of the internet? Or search and browse the internet "as it was in 2007"? It's fascinating to think that Google "only" allows you to search a snapshot of the internet as it is now.

On the other hand the death of the ephemeral scares me a bit. It's like watching Captain Flam again as an adult. If you loved it as a kid, heed this warning - don't do it.
iOS jobs job numbers take off vs Android in March
Creative Commons Version 4.0 – License draft ready for public comment
Language-ism
I can't imagine how it would be worthwhile to go to that much technical effort for the sake of ranking on HN.
There exist many, many businesses where V1.0 of the product can be the CEO scrambling with a cell phone, Gmail, and a spreadsheet. This is especially true for business process innovation type businesses like e.g. ZeroCater (which actually started out pretty much exactly like that). After you learn exactly where the painful bits are you can code to prevent them rather than coding for problems which may not ever be experienced by any human ever.

To this day, there's a couple of things where my workflow is "SSH into the box and run commands against the Rails console" because those tasks were never common/important/etc enough to justify even an hour writing up a tool to automate them.
Google makes 4 times as much revenue on iOS as on Android? Not so fast
Okay, does anyone else have the unfortunate problem of automatic numeracy?

After a lot of physics tests, basically comparing numbers and subtracting exponents is something I do almost automatically. Like, I enjoy that they're donating at all, and I know that their staff often contribute in the form of patches and commits -- really one of the key ways contributions should go -- but somehow the numbers seemed a little dramatically understated. They're literally saying, "Free software made us billionaires, so we're paying them a 0.01% commission." It just sounds like, "I earned $4 000 from homeless people and then gave four of them each a dime."

I mean, I'm sure you made their lives better and helped them to help you, but still, the gap between the numbers is a little startling. ^_^
You can, but you won't. Blood glucose is tied to willpower, so once you crash, it's exceedingly difficult to not eat more sugar.
Enabling HiDPI mode in Lion - use it to test the retina-readiness of your apps
No one's lunch was eaten by Wii. I think by now it's pretty much been concluded that Wii was an alternative to the PS3/XBOX demographic (that is, people interested in PS3/XBOX also bought Wii), and that Wii itself brought a lot of new players into the console gaming world. Not much if any actual cannibalization of sales occured.

Also besides ignoring game sales, it also ignores the fact that Wii sold the most during the early part of it's release. This year Xbox 360 and PS3 are on pace to massively outsell Wii and have been doing so for a while. This is the part in the cycle where hardware sales are most profitable, so who really has the last laugh?

Besides, with the PS3 it was mission accomplished for Sony as they used it as a large bargaining chip to win the blu-ray format war.

Looking at 10 year stock trends, you can see the real story. Nintendo had a massive stock surge after the release of the Wii, but now they have fallen to pre-Wii levels. Sony has been steady throughout.
There's actually a bunch of copycats. The libcoin library has actually made it very easy to make your own.
Sure, but not enough to keep our joints healthy indefinitely.
Hey, nice to meet you .. I also had Yggdrasil (and SLS!) systems back in the days of OS/2, which I very briefly flirted with (IBM compilers, yay!) then seguéd back to MIPS and RISC/OS and Irix and SGI (grr.. why you no make laptop, SGI?!! wtf..) with a bit of a dodgy diversion from Linux in the 90's through NextstepX86, sustained a lusty affair with a BeBox, until .. like a lot of other people .. here I am with my 'best unix workstation ever', an Apple.

Apropos the living-on factor of OS/2 nuts keeping it running, its a good, healthy thing to 'not-abandon' technology.

There is a scale to this.

I personally really like the guys at forum.Defence-force.org, burning the machines in current glory with new code. The Oric-1/Atmos is still a computer, and its values during its market period rose (and fell!), but yet the working machines, today, are still getting new code written for them.

It is actually some sort of utter joy to have new titles for a very old, memorable machine or system, which can still be enjoyed!

Computers don't die. Their users do. Lets hope the kids can still turn every single one, on ..
I started Spring of 2004 when I was a freshman at Stuyvesant High School. We could start taking electives our second semester, so I signed up for Intro to Computer Science on a whim. I was decent at math but didn't know a thing about programming or computer science and never bothered much with computers aside from playing games.

I fell in love. I remember we worked with Netlogo and Scheme. We learned about towers of hanoi, various search algorithms, dynamic programming, cellular automata, disease spreading simulations, lots of recursion, prisoner's dilemma and many other things. I remember implementing a calculator in Scheme and writing a billiards game in Netlogo as projects. People did lots of awesome projects and it was an inspiring time and place to be.

I've been programming ever since and I was very very lucky to have the option to try it out in the first place. There's a real need to bring that option to more people, and I've been thinking lately about how I can do that.
Most (not all) really successful infrastructure open source projects tend to be implementations of standards (MySQL/SQL, Apache/HTTP, Bind/DNS, etc.) In this case the defacto standard is AWS...

But x86 HVM, Ethernet, IPv4, IPv6, NFS, SCSI, etc. are also standards... that EC2 doesn't support (fully). There is room in the market for standards-based IaaS IMO.
I really like your idea. However, you didn't provide us with a link to signup if we're interested.

On that note, how does the app release work. Do you leave the client up to their own devices to submit the app? Do you provide them with all the assets upon completion(tar of code, etc)?
Looked up author. Discovered he is a doctor of laparoscopy, which has bugger-all to do with psychology or neurology. That he's an idiot was apparent as soon as I read his thesis which relies heavily on oversimplified, stereotypical, pop-psy brain lateralization memes straight out of books you might find in that feminist bookstore from the Portlandia skit.
This product just outputs Obj-C, which must be baked into your source code, right? That's what I think of as hardcoding. I wouldn't call loaded PNG's from outside of the binary "hardcoded".

I can certainly see where having easy programmatic access to the primitives that make up a vector drawing would be useful though.
Really? Think about the exposure a fledgling starup can get from being on page 1 for an hour or two. I think a post from malda said HNed was the new /.ed...
>>>But legally speaking it wasn't cruel because it had a practical rather than a punitive basis; and it wasn't unusual because everyone is subjected to the same degree of inspection at those facilities; and he hadn't been punished, because he hadn't been convicted; and it wasn't relevant because his counsel (correctly) focused on on other constitutional protections.

Wow. So a cop who brings you in because he had a bad day or doesn't like your skin tone and has you subjected to a strip search isn't punishment? Nor is it cruel? And because everyone is equally degraded, it isn't unusual? Look, you can spout whatever "The law says..." all you want, but this is not what I want my country to become.
For example A9 and EC2 VM Import teams.
It's all a journey. Some good, some bad. I believe everyone needs to start that journey but not everyone needs to see it to completion.

Naively, I like to think that nobody should look back on high school, university, or anything until many years AFTER it has completed. Only then have you progressed far enough away from the experience to make an objective view of it.
GM Uses LEGOs for Visual Management Tool
"bot quoting a notable woman" == "the room equivalent of a screaming maniac yell at you (politely)"

That's quite the assertion you are making.
If you put in so much effort, including a sample screenshot would probably get more people to download it!
To be fair, the author only claims to talk about high school.
273 things
Hi,

I'm Chris from GameWeaver and HotKeys is my new app.

I've got some promo codes, so if you're interested, please let me know and I'll send you one, As you're probably aware I only have a limited amount.
I see. Well $70 isn't irrelevant for everyone so I am glad they have the free trial. Good luck on your apps!
Core Graphics drawing is actually quite slow. On the Retina iPad, drawing is 4 times as slow and uses 4 times as much memory as the 1st gen iPad, and all the CPU cores in the world are not going to help you.

Having recently ripped out most of my -drawRect: methods, replacing them with custom rendered UIImages, I can attest to the significant performance gains that UIImage gives you. On the Retina iPad, I think it's pretty much mandatory.

With that in mind, I think most people are better off using a tool like this to produce PDF data rather than raw CG calls, and use generic code to render that PDF data to a UIImage. PDF data produced by Quartz is going to render exactly the same as raw CG calls.

It makes for easier project management, and much better performance.

Of course, if you don't need resolution independent graphics, just use png.
Lamar Smith: SOPA protesters were “misinformed”
Groper: simple Python command line and config file options
My first experience at a hackathon
Took me a second to find, but here's the all-on-one-page version: http://www.linuxprogrammingblog.com/all-about-linux-signals?...
Philip J. Eby was the author of WSGI, not myself. But which mismatches are you referring to? I've frequently heard these complaints, but generally they are fairly obscure things (which are hard to resolve because we can't form a quorum of people who actually care), and a lot of vague FUD.
I tried to use OSX as my primary OS for a year but I couldn't be as productive as I am on Windows. However I would really love to be able to use Linux.

MS Office is really a lot better on Windows. It is miles a head on features and stability in for example Word, Outlook and Excel. It is so much more powerful and if you are an advanced user, OSX version is just frustrating.

The file management and the window manager of Windows is to me also a lot more convenient then on OSX.

On Windows you also have the Adobe CS and there is no substitute for it on Linux. Running it under Wine doesn't give the same user experience.

I see more and more web development tools for OSX only. I hope it is not necessary therefore to have to use OSX.
I would guess that any given technology-related topic is deeply deeply boring to a significant slice of the HN readership but we don't flag them just because cloud computing or database design is not a personal interest. We know that if it's a subject we find boring we can just not read it. It's the "sexism in technology" posts that are reflexively flagged and to me that suggests something more than boredom is at work, perhaps an unease with the whole topic. As if certain people can't even stand the idea being discussed anywhere around them.
'Super Meat Boy' for iPhone revealed as an entirely new game optimized for touch
If you try following my train of thought, which is only a few paragraphs long, you'll see that I'm saying the law is deeply flawed.
Public Beta of Mandrill SMTP Email Service
The page keeps crashing in Chrome
I don't know why it is slower, I've just noticed that it is considerably slower than gcc and VC.

As a side note, on my Mac, Clang is really fast for compiling code.
My points were purely economic. The OP was just asking a simple economic question, and I gave a simple answer. It doesn't need to be explained in the mechanisms employed by the design of bitcoin.

"Not a problem. This is solved because bitcoins are infinitely divisible"

I detect confusion here.

I'm not talking about lack of divisibility, but a lack of demand. Increased divisibility doesn't facilitate demand. It's just a nice feature of something that could be money or commodity.

Water is infinitely divisible but that doesn't get it demand. If people don't exercise demand for bitcoin, (as in, they don't want it) divisibility doesn't solve the problem.
Today's Calvin and Hobbes is relevant:
http://www.gocomics.com/calvinandhobbes/2012/04/02
At this point, there are a couple of heavily funded daily deals sites that can afford to hire armies of sales people to literally pester their way into multiple local markets. My friends that work at one of these firms say there's about 60 devs supporting 4,000 sales people. My friends that own local restaurants constantly complain about the incessant daily deal sales reps that won't leave them alone to sign up.

These larger firms make their data available to smaller sites via APIs, allowing for firms like Yippit, Sqoot, etc to serve as aggregators. These sites then skim off the top of the deal sales, sometimes getting 50% of the commission on purchased deals.

The danger is that the larger sites that are the life blood of the system run on enormous deficits to maintain those armies of sales reps.

As DHH put it, local deals is like finding oil on the moon: a valuable resource that might ultimately prove too costly to extract.
If they must have a bezel, it should at least disappear when the device is sleeping/powered-off. Why not extend the screen fully to the edge and instead illuminate a bezel with the screen itself. You could even allow users to customize it a bit. Then you could gasp remove the Home button for a soft button or buttons.

Soft buttons are possible and sexy, really. Just because they are executed poorly on second-rate Android devices does not mean that they are all bad and impossible.

After all the hurdles they've crossed, do you really doubt that Apple can solve that UX problem?
Exactly. I saw that back and forth thread on education and it made me cringe.
Hacking Various Sites
I'm trying to provide examples
these 'pranks' are all marketing gimmicks.
One thoughtful Fitbit user explains how Fitbit badges get him moving
The author looks to be planning a future post on how he plans to take on this responsibility. Can anyone (who feels that they have 'taken full responsibility') share what path they have forged?
Even if the WM itself is somewhat primitive, Exposé and integrated swipe gestures more than make up for its shortcomings.
As I understand it, in statically typed languages that support multi-methods, you import the generic function declaration for a multi-method. This multi-method can be defined in zillion different modules. You only have to import the generic function declaration, not any of the function definitions. The generic function declaration can be parameterized, just like parameterized declarations in Scala. Single or multiple dispatch may be used to locate a method definition.

So, yes, your code does need more import statements. I don't consider this to be a problem. Your code, however, does not need to qualify the functions that it calls with the module where the function is defined.
Very interesting. Definitely a war going on. There's a lot of articles here that are obviously placed by lobbyists. They get killed and then reappear posted with another account. Like all the "Toxic Sugar" stuff lately, which also got placed several times over the last year.
Selling a startup at the age of 15
The law doesn't take effect unless it's signed by Governor Brewer, who would hopefully have the sense to realize that it would probably be struck down by the first court that weighed its constitutionality. Media Coalition, a First Amendment activist group, has urged her not to sign the legislation into law. A link to their letter, and more information about this law, can be found on this page:

http://mediacoalition.org/Arizona-House-Bill-2549-Censoring-...
Maybe the algorithm was modified to give some initial karma based on the users past submissions and this is running into the spam filter settings?
I think this extends some of your same ideas:

You can't always learn with the expectation that everything has a perfectly applicable use case (i.e the point about learning Geometry to build a renderer). This may be fine if all you want to do is (re-)implement things that have been done before but if you want to develop new things and solve new problems, you won't know beforehand what tools and what theory will lend to the solution. I'm doing a PhD now and I will take classes and read papers outside of my focus to see if anything will lend itself to my research. Much of this doesn't go anywhere until one day I go, "this problems kinds of sounds like what they did in [that other field]".

Also, many complex topics build upon many, many smaller results. I've found this true for large portions of math. Many readily applicable theorems, for example with applications in signal processing and control systems, require many years of math background and maturity. It's very difficult on the onset to connect the basics to the complex theories. (On a personal note, I've found that I had a relatively extensive math background as an undergrad. You could argue that the extra math I did was not worthwhile as it isn't all applicable. However, in some of the classes I've taken in grad school, I've noticed the gap in math background and familiarity as other students try to catch up.)

That said, I do admire the OP for taking hold of his education. I did not find my high school education, targeted at the average or at most students, to be well-suited for myself. I would just say that there's a reason the topics and material chosen are what they are. Extending what's done in school is a great idea, but if you are going to deviate, make sure you have a very good idea of what you are deviating from (and why).
What you just explained is simply your arbitrary and subjective personal belief system about technology that makes one system inherently "better" / "superior" to another.

Proprietary software - i.e., software you can not modify to suit your needs - can actively inhibit your ability to "GSD". That's kind of the point.
Entrepreneurs Don't Need Work-Life Balance
Play framework 2 tip: interactively play with your app from the scala console
Please, please everybody, before saying that the cloud is amazing let it resist the test of time. I am myself using some cloud software but there is one thing that is not yet being reflected very well, the ugly monster that lurks everywhere: Legacy.

How will AWS/RackSpace/SaaS software handle legacy data/ code in, let's say 10 years? I have no answer to that question and I bet few people have it but time is a tough mistress for computer software and data. The good thing when your data is not in the Cloud, especially when you don't control the inner mechanics of a database like SimpleDB is that you can migrate, change it the way you want at the moment you want. When you have no control over your data, well bad things could happen in the future.

Be smart, be patient.
Who cares, really? It's all play money.
Because I am not stupid to pay monthly fees instead of single upfront licenses.

Because my desktop screams while my net connection is so so.

Because a native UI kicks the sh*t out of any web interface, in looks, perfomance and integration.

Because I am paranoid and I like my data in MY local net.

Because I do not mind a bunch of (easily scriptable) installs.

I short because the technical problems I am trying to solve go way beyond a trivial LAMP app...
I've found that programming can be as theoretical as you make it, when you do it as a hobby. Professionally, you may have to look a bit harder. Most "standard" coding that I've done involves finding the right library and wiring together with another, and then building the application between the two.

As always, your milage may vary. Speed is still a very real concern, especially in fields like data analysis. And even wiring libraries together you may find that eventually you may have to write your own implementation of something theory based.
Your ignoring the fact that the homeless people are no longer homeless and able to support themselves now.
In my experience the institution itself (the state-mandated curriculum, the teachers, other students) is the limiting reagent, not the individual student who wants a meaningful education.

There's only so much you can do when everyone around you wants to know if "this is going to be on the test?" rather than "is there a deeper meaning to what this character said?".
Perhaps the proximate cause of low Windows license cost is that there are alternatives that are free as in beer, but it's obvious to me at least that the only reason such "free as in beer" alternatives exist is because a lot of people work very hard to make sure that there are "free as in speech" implementations of fully fledged operating systems.
Customizing Your Markup