skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I hear this so much, but it's just wrong. Here's a "interview style" question which is hopefully practical enough to show why:

Let's say you have a giant in-memory balanced binary tree (for your data store, maybe) with mean depth of ... 27, say. And you're deployed on a machine with 4 DRAM channels populated with (for the sake of argument) 7-7-7-23 DDR3 memory. Give me a ballpark estimate for how many reads per second you can achieve from that tree.

My experience is that virtually no one can answer this question well, and most programmer's intuition is wildly off (they think it's much faster than it is). And even the ones who get it mostly right usually just use "100 cycles" as their assumption of DRAM latency and get tripped up on the subtleties (like the interaction with the number of channels vs. precharge overlap; or the already-active row latency for sequential access which this question doesn't cover).

Reading this paper will teach you how to answer that question from first principles. Surely that's worth a few hours of your time. At the very least it's worth more than arguing on the internet about how you don't need to know it.

(edit: A bonus followup question -- hopefully just as practical -- would be: "So maybe binary trees aren't great. Given a node data size of N, what is the most appropriate fanout to use in a B tree implementation?". This pulls knowledge of caching architectures into the mix.)
Food Trucks Come to the Workers
Excellent write up. And most of all thanks for highlighting your service. I'm entering my 2nd month as a landlord so I don't need your service right now. But I know I would have used it a few months ago when looking for our first tenant. I'll bookmark your site for future use. If things go well, I won't be needing it for a few years though (fingers crossed).
There's a very nice piece by Fred Wilson related to that: http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2012/05/wheres-my-billion-dollar-che...
Another aspect that makes WebGL projects like this even more useful is that you can right-click and save what you are currently seeing as an image.
Dan reviewed this post in its' entirety before it was published. I gave him final say on whether or not it was published or submitted here.

I agree that personal stories like this should have the approval of everyone involved before they are published.
I don't think it's a matter of they not caring. But how would they support it without giving room for fraud? Their certificate only goes so far, the $1k limit just sounds like an easy way to make sure that the app is indeed reasonably good and has a real market. If they tried to support free apps, it would be much harder for them to make sure.
heh, did you look at the project? It's not open source, it's a decompiled Skype binary.
Multi-threaded QuickSort vs single-threaded Quicksort vs std::sort()
Can't have this without quoting Kawasaki's Valuation Formula for startups: Value = (500K * Engineers) - (250K * MBAs)
Microsoft to offer $99 Xbox 360 with $15 subscription
I believe he meant reproduction in the technical sense, which is different than ramping up widespread use of a social product.
The 5 dumbest VC deals getting done right now
>Each of the things you mentioned were instances in which the government interfered with the open market and made things worse.

No, all the things that I mention are instances of actual markets. Were is this free market? If it's possible, why it hasn't been seen anywhere on earth?

>The free market left to itself would fix most of it's own problems

I mean, to reason about what the free market will do IF it exists has no value.

The free market, even if it was imposed by some power for one second, would have to be forcibly sustained by human agents --namely corporations, consumers, workers and the government. Nothing tells us that it would, in fact history teaches us otherwise.

One might as well say: "If everybody always was pro peace and love, and never did anything bad, we would have world peace and love".

Of course, but the whole point is in how to achieve that. So, to say "the free market would fix most of it's own problems" has zero value, if the #1 problem is how to create and sustain a free market itself.
The authors website is http://skype-open-source.blogspot.com/

Apparently he had already been served with DCMA takedown requests. And talks about deofuscation. Doesn't sound like a cleanroom implementación.
Funny, I consider the ostentatious parading of excessive and spurious pseudo-sophistication as a mark of dishonesty, the inability to feel...the mask of cruelty.
Thanks for the excellent reference. That will help a great deal.
Thepiratebay.org block now in effect for UK Virgin Media customers
Who is Dan Shipper?
I don't think reproduced is the right word here. I think it's replaced. Any program that processes data can be replaced by another one. Excite was replaced by Altavista, Altavista by Google. Netscape was replaced by IE, which was replaced by Firefox, which was replaced by Chrome [1]. However, it much harder to replace Facebook. Sure the predominant social networks can and do change, but I don't know if Facebook replacing MySpace is quite the same. Yes, they are both 'social', but the interactions feel different.

Another way to describe it would be inertia. It is a lot easier to switch programs and leave nothing behind than it is to switch social networks and leave your history behind.

[1] these are just examples from my own usage - lets not argue about specifics. Never let facts can get in the way of a good story.
You mean like how Apple punishes its customers that want Dropbox apps?
Google is one company. Would you want Apple to have 5 different payment systems, or Facebook to have 5 different Like buttons?
How's this better than skype on a mobile phone?
Android Fragmentation: Good Or Bad For Consumers?
MS can't catch a break... They defend their copyrights and get slammed on Hacker News for not being "cool" with the OSS community infringing on their properties. Weak sauce, Hacker News.
The combination of the two services is about a 5% cut. As a non-developer, this combination looks appealing (I'm still waiting for someone to completely kill paypal), but that's a pretty big cut.

Maybe I should just spend a few weeks learning to program instead :)
"But none touched me more than a woman I picked up late one August night." <Snigger>
Vakantie: Grieks eiland Kreta meer dan zon, zee en strand
I'm going to guess this story has been Mike Daisey'd.

The author quite likely did work as a cabbie, did pick up an elderly woman on her final trip to hospice care, and did make an unexpected detour around town to look at some landmarks from her life.

It probably also happened in the middle of the day, only took about half an hour, and the patient probably didn't say "You gave an old woman a little moment of joy," because she fell asleep near the end of the ride.

This is sad, because, just like Mike Daisey's story, there's plenty of value in what really transpired, and by exaggerating it, it loses its believability. By becoming overly sentimental, bordering on mawkish, it loses the impact that a frank, thoughtful reflection on the actual event could have had.
House of the Flying Dragon: Searching for the Mother of All Ultrabooks(tm)
I strongly suggest you add this to the post itself. If not early on, then at least at the end. My thought that "they probably let Dan sign off on this, but it would be good to know for sure" distracted from focusing on the broader point of your article.
That's an awesome point I really wish I had made myself, so I'll just shamelessly rehash it to drive it home: Knowing how the system actually works down to a low level can help you avoid inadvertently writing code that will perform badly, even if you're dealing with code isn't otherwise required to perform above "reasonable" and thus doesn't call for low-level tuning.

Let's take database queries as an example: Knowing something about how the database is implemented will help you avoid writing queries that are pathologically slow, even if the queries you need to write aren't critical path enough to benefit from going to great length to tune them to the implementation.
Enough With Google+ification, Says Wil Wheaton — YouTube Doesn’t Need It
You linked to a discussion of a tool that lets you lookup the IP addresses of Skype users (which seems like it might have been developed with this tool), but I think you meant to link to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3753155
> what is the point of a 'like' button?

Feedback to the author, and crowd-rating for people you don't know.

What do you think the point of HN's up and down arrows are?
59% of apps don’t make enough to recoup development costs
I think most of the Google's PR debacles in past year have to do with poor wording and lack of proper information on privacy. When they omit things, people will assume the worst.
Run time or development time? Runtime is mostly negligible except for places with heavy congestion (caches + rendering) where you can turn the heaviest operations on and off as needed -- in our case the call to `System.getCurrentTimeMillis()` is usually too expensive to do unless we really need it.

In terms of development, it's not a lot of work continuously, but it took some while to write up, test and benchmark standard libraries for eg monitorable semaphores. In general though, what it does is raise the entry threshold for new developers a bit as you need to have a feel for when something requires monitoring and when it doesn't.
Some atheists are narrow-minded, sure. I didn't say anything to the contrary, although in my experience atheists on average are more broad-minded than their religious counterparts. I also know plenty of very analytical religious people, and even some that are free-thinking. They were all raised in the church, and didn't come to religion by any rational decision. I don't know any religious people that have the combination of being analytical and free-thinking, and converted to being religious as adults. I'm sure such cases must exist, but I'm equally sure that they are as rare as hen's teeth.
By making the threshold $1000 or 1000 downloads (or 5000 downloads, whatever)?

Really, they should be reaching out to developers who already have successful apps on other platforms and convincing them to port. But maybe that's happening also behind the scenes.
M-Pulse #14: Mobile development trends in Africa
> They gain a bunch of people with an easy and painless upgrade path to G+ usage

Do they, or do they just piss people off and result in them using their services less? When Google mandated migrating youtube accounts to G+, I just let mine rot.
Goodbye mashups: welcome to API applications
11.13, as the second post in the linked forum thread states.

For an explanation: http://www.macstories.net/stories/11-13-and-the-dropbox-sdk/
Protesters Plan to Destroy GM Wheat Crop Research
I love that as well.
EA Disabling Rockband for Paying Customers on iOS
Usually, that would mean reverse engineering to create specifications and then getting the product implemented by some one else using the specification which would then be termed as clean.
This is great. We've been hearing the mantra of MVP and focus for quite a while now, and it's nice to see an example that really lives up to the focus mentality.

I hope Rocketlease takes off soon-(as a tenant) I hate having to take paper forms, worry about making a "typo" and needing white-out, then having to fax it back to the apartment within a 24 hour period.
This is true, Alex. there are in fact many, many more things Rocket Lease does not do that would be very valuable. These include, but are not limited to:

- Curing cancer
- Making solar power economically viable
- Better public transportation systems
- Improving public education
- Picking up my dry cleaning

=)

That probably seems aggressive but its not intended to be. From my standpoint those are just all businesses I don't do (well, except for picking up my dry cleaning, I do that. But Rocket Lease will not pick up your dry cleaning)
Surely that's worth a few hours of your time. At the very
least it's worth more than arguing on the internet about
how you don't need to know it.

That's a great point.

Regarding your interview question, the kind of optimization you're getting into isn't something 99% of 'programmers' will ever touch.
Millennials: The Greatest Generation or the Most Narcissistic?
The name falls under trademark protection and is not related to copyright.
Groupon CEO Andrew Mason's Salary is just $756
Facebook Opens Up Hardware World With Magic Hinge
> With github and stackoverflow. Do we really need a degree? You only want a degree so you can get a confirmation that you know what you know, so employers will hire you. But why don't you just link to your github and stackoverflow accounts? These online courses could incentive you to build awesome stuff and put online for this purpose.

Github and a degree show different things.

Github shows that the person can write code. It doesn't show that he knows how to decide what code to write. Did he consider alternative algorithms? Did he chose based on understanding the strengths and weaknesses of the algorithms? If you see an O(N^2) algorithm used somewhere instead of an O(N log N) algorithm, is it because he didn't know better, or is it because he determined that for the inputs in this particular project the O(N^2) is actually faster?

A degree in the appropriate field from a good school goes a long way toward showing that the person can do that kind of analysis.
This is just as bad as companies forcing me to “like” something on Facebook before I can view whatever it is they want me to “like.”

I don't think it is "just as bad" but it is quite obnoxious.
Pretty straightforward, reasonable argument. Under opportunity cost (or another heading), I'd include the cash outlay for business school which can be $50-100k, plenty of money to fund 18 months of starting something up.
Do you know if Cascades will work on bb 9900 or 9930?
Europe selects 1bn-euro Juice probe to Jupiter
OK thanks for the clarification. I just meant, run the compiler as far as complaining about thread safety, without generating a binary. (That way, I could modify my Makefile to run this LLVM static analysis before running GCC like normal to actually make a binary.)
But there's a third option, and it's the one Wheaton is complaining is no longer there.

Instead of there being a way to "like" this thing on an external social network (like G+ or Facebook), what about just "liking" it on a system that exists only on the site itself (in this case, on YouTube)?

Then after that, how about a system to Share the item? This doesn't really exist on the web, but the Sharing system on Android solves this problem well.
I would have put that in the post, but it seemed too snarky.

I also considered linking to this: http://whartoniteseekscodemonkey.tumblr.com/

:)
Guardian open journalism: Three Little Pigs advert
> What's happened here is replacing needing a 'Youtube' account with a 'Google' account

No, that happened years ago, you haven't been able to log into Youtube with a Youtube account for a very, very long time. Instead, you've been greeted with this:

> Update your YouTube account by linking to a Google Account

> You will no longer be able to sign in to YouTube without a Google Account.

> If you do not want to link this YouTube account, you can sign out here.

This new move is about forcefully shoving G+ further down user throats in the hope of ever making it relevant.
Can you buy a Facebook account from the mobile site?
Four Performance Bottlenecks for Machine Learning Applications
This cheap feel-good fictional story did not gratify my intellectual curiosity.

And it sparked a religion flamewar in the comments.
This is perfect because I had forgotten everything I had learned about memory.
Cloud Computing Basic Concepts Interview Questions
Hijack warning: this seemed like a potentially relevant thread to a service I am looking for so I'm just going to post it in case any HN readers know of or provide this service.

I'm looking for an online service that can automate our order processing workflow.

Our current workflow is:
(For additional clarity, I am surrounding separate entities in [ ])

[Distributor emails] a Purchase Order to [OurCompany]
[OurCompany] forwards this Purchase Order to the appropriate [3rd Party Warehouse], who then picks and ships the order to the [Distributor]
[3rd Party Warehouse] sends [OurCompany] a Bill of Lading confirming product shipment
[OurCompany] forwards this Bill of Lading to [Distributor]
[OurCompany] invoices [Distributor] based on Bill of Lading (using QuickBooks)

I'm trying to find a service that will help us automate this, totally or partially, via a centralized website & automated emails.

Anyone know of such a thing?
Who Believes In Facebook?
Zerg Rush: How to influence Google
The google Zerg Rush Easter Egg has not surpassed anyone on HN. However, was Google inspired by our Detectify game? You be the judge – you'll need to sign up for our beta of course to get to the game (well worth it).
Thank you, Steve Jobs.
"Skype: patched and recompiled to do other stuff" is a better title. Decompiling a proprietary product, changing a few lines of code, and then releasing that code doesn't make it "open source", it makes it stolen code (semantics of "piracy is not theft" aside, it's still not his code to be releasing in it's entirety.).
Ok, I understand that. My issue is the conflating of approval with sharing.

In this case, the problem is that people without G+ cannot voice their approval. This is obviously a deliberate ploy to coerce people into joining G+, but motives aside the issue is that Google are forcing people to share when perhaps, some only want to approve.

As people have noted, whilst the frictionless sharing is good for viral marketing, in the long term it's devastating to signal vs. noise. I left Facebook largely because my stream was full of updates from people - good friends, who I enjoy talking to - that said 'John Doe likes this: "Click like for a chance to Win!"'
I totally agree, even for me 2.5% is cutting it.
This is my take on things but happy to hear other views. Google (and Facebook) are advertising based so try thinking about it in terms of how well they know their users.

The better they know their users, the more specifically they can target ads to them. For example, if I wanted to reach 20-somethings, who really like pizza and motorbikes, travel widely and currently reside on the west coast, FB can put ads in front of that group (I don't know if Google can, but I assume it's more tricky for them).

Since there are likely a large number of people that use the web while still logged in to FB, then FB could feasibly start offering to place highly-targeted ads out on the web at large. This could obviously have a dramatic effect on Google's dominance.

In other words, it's not just social per se, but being able to learn more about users in order to ensure that they can keep their hold over advertising revenue. Once I looked at it this way, Google's 'need' for social made more sense.

To test the above, we could look at what Google offers in terms of demographics/interest filtering when you buy/place ads around the web. If the ability to refine who sees your ads is really part of the plan then there should be signs that it's happening. I've never used any of Google's ad stuff so I wouldn't know where to look.
Be careful with cumulative evaluations - how confused students are may not correlate with how good a teacher is. And, if professors are going to be evaluated with the results, they are less likely to use the tool well...

For authentication, I'd make it so that when the professor each session, the class is given a random 4-5 digit code. That way the students would have to be in class to get the code and participate.

You may also want to think about adding the ability for the instructor to add different buttons, not just "understood / confused". You could then have class polls, or group questions to see how many people are paying attention.

This should all be able to be controlled from the instructor dashboard.
NY times just posted some analysis: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/03/education/harvard-and-mit-...
Normal users don't get "pissed off" like that. There's no requirement to "use" G+ to have a youtube account. They just click "OK" and continue using youtube as before. You (and the author of the linked blog) have a bone to pick with Google, which is fine. Just recognize that most people don't care. There's nothing objectively more difficult about youtube now that it's linked to G+, ditto gmail, etc...
SQL Query Interview Questions Using SQL Server
The golden rule has a serious problem of enabling sociopaths.

Only help people worth helping.
fair suggestion. I've added an edit to the end of the post which clarifies this.
http://www.scribd.com/doc/92111472

I'll just leave this here, PDF version for anyone who doesn't want to mess with the webpage reformatting.
> "It might even encourage better comments on Youtube."

I don't think the move to G+ will affect Youtube comment quality at all.
There was nobody to leave her money to.

1. The beautiful moral of the story is a split-finger fastball that you never saw coming.

2. Maybe she had heirs who would receive her assets upon her passing.
A..program & the programming language can't be..copyrighted (COJ EU)
Real or not, it's still a very powerful piece of literature. I think there's an underlying theme to the story - a lot of our history is being lost or superseded by the internet.

There's so many things we have left to learn from "The Greatest Generation" yet when given the opportunity, most would rather downplay the story, or simply go back their smartphones social networks.
Nine rules to live by in college
There are very few software environments where the cost difference of "Read 1MB sequentially from disk" versus "Read 1MB sequentially from memory" is irrelevant.
Impoverished people don't have any other choice.

It's part of how it's easy to stay poor. There was a while when all I had was a bicycle. When my bike got stolen I didn't have the money for another one, but over the next three months spent more than a bike would have cost on unavoidable and otherwise-impossible transportation. Mostly I walked (including three miles to work each day), but sometimes the cost of the cab was less than the money I'd loose by not being somewhere.
Amazon cloud drive desktop app for windows and mac
This is Katherine, Co-Founder of ShopLocket. Definitely understand where you are coming from in terms of fees. We've thought a lot about this. What we ended up doing for the pricing model is very much taking a cue from other services like Eventbrite, Etsy, and even lower plans on Shopify. Some competitors bring both there fees and the processing fees together, but it still usually ends up around 5%. This is actually a lot lower than tradition Marketplaces, say eBay that will charge much larger percentages. We're certainly open to feedback though!
Whoops! I had a feeling I was being careless at the end there. It should have been 30x20 years rather than 90x20, so just 600 years until Moore's law is absolutely finished regardless of technology. (That shouldn't feel all that much closer, but it does.)
I strongly agree with this point. I was also very distracted during this very good post wondering if Dan signed off on it before it was published. By the end I assumed that was the case, but the message would have been better served without the distraction.
I actually don't think I would care if Facebook had 5 different like buttons.
No, the jury will not be deciding on whether or not APIs are copywriteable. Judge Alsup is deciding on that, if necessary. The jury will be deciding on Google's fair use arguments etc.
Coursera allows you to view videos but not assignments. Go to any course and click on "Preview".
Was the code mirrored anywhere offshore before the takedown? Could someone re-host it?
Instragram -> Instagram (the title was wrong)
On what do you base that astounding assertion?