skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Interesting thoughts.

But is it an accurate analysis when considering the costs of R&D?

As an example, Dropbox may invest $X in their product so that they could deliver $Y, but Box.net is more expensive... So if they make more money they must be exploiting us, right? Of course not... we hope :)

In this case it seems clear, Apple appears to have some unique R&D in this component... which may justify a (albeitly unknown) premium for the product.

Is the price right? I'm not sure. But they certainly seem to have an interesting edge with the tech.

That said (and the real point of my thought), I do wonder why we in the tech world place such a difference in R&D between HW and SW. If a HW company finds a niche, and does interesting tech, we still seem to devalue it compared to SW Dev (yes there are exceptions, but as a rule we seem to throw HW under the bus).

What's the difference? Why are these dichotomies acceptable in the software world but not the hardware world?

If Apple delivers a product that (apparently - without considering or understanding the actual R&D cost) costs less than competitors it's a problem... But in the SW world we barely bat an eye.

Is R&D and creativity in HW design is a valid cost?

Anyway, I'm not harping on your comment (which is valid in it's own right); I'm just curious and interested in the apparent difference in SW and HW innovations...
There's nothing wrong with wanting to be debt free and he's in a great position now. I just think that it's possible that he left some money on the table to do this quickly.
microsd's are not meant for constant read/write. they will degrade incredibly quickly. Its a beautiful project, but a flawed idea.
No, the lambda expression creates the function, which is returned as the value of the let block; defvar just binds the function to a name so we can use it multiple times.
I happened to be up late last night and saw they were webcasting the launch, which I watched. I was surprised at how excited I was by the whole thing TBH. In a world where everyone seems to be trying to create the next social network for cats it's truly exciting to see something as revolutionary and innovative as what SpaceX is doing (to the economics of launching into orbit).

I was disappointed to see the launch aborted but also impressed to see that they could abort the launch after ignition and not lose the vehicle ("safe'ing the vehicle" as they said a number of times).

Oh they made one factual error in the Webcast too (or one is on their site). A pre-launch question came up about what they look for in hiring. A representative said they must be US citizens. According to the site, you can be a US citizen or permanent resident.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tall_poppy_syndrome
Build MVP like BufferApp
dudette*

FTFY

(source: https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=michelle_)
I think only familiarity with Javascript makes that "nice".
One could argue that this

(lambda i: i%2 == 0).filter((lambda i: i/2).map(nums))

makes (marginally) more sense. But I like filter and lambda alright as they are. I agree Python's inconsistency in this is a bit unfortunate, but I haven't had much of a problem with the runtime errors you mention.
> You've read enough of Tesla's diaries to know that?

I know enough physics to know that. Tesla's diaries are irrelevant.
No people from Crete, Turkey, Bulgaria, Serbia, Macedonia? Really?
Is this a recruiter you have an existing relationship with? If not, it's strange that a recruiter would reach out coldly, with a candidate name and other information.

If it's someone you work with or have some sort of relationship with, I would respond ASAP and say something like, "This person reached out to me directly, via (method) on (this date). We are currently evaluating him/her." And possibly re-iterate that you are willing to engage a recruiter for new candidates...blah blah blah.

Recruiters aren't the enemy. The sooner you get it out in the open, the better. This is a very mild example of the types of awkward / uncomfortable conversations that you'll have as a founder / manager. Get used to it.

IANAL (Not Legal Advice)
Any java guru think this is good stuff? Just curious. I moved on form java years ago.
Running for the Senate would be an interesting move, to say the least, and would probably create a headache for the Australian government that they don't want.

I imagine Assange's lawyers have done their homework and have established that from being on house arrest in the UK he could run for the Senate (contrary to what 1-2 commenters here have said).

There's probably few better elections to run in than the next one. It looks like the current Labor government will be decimated in the next election (in some ways history is repeating itself from the Hawke-Keating years, which is interesting).

Yet the population seems disillusioned with the opposition too. My biggest problem with the opposition is their pointless continued opposition to the NBN.

Anyway, the big potential headache for the Australian government here is Assange would go from being a citizen possibly being extradited to the Sweden (and potentially the US) to being a sitting Senator being extradited. While he wouldn't be a head of state and enjoy those protections, I'm not sure if there's any real precedent for extradition of someone in the government like this.

Australia should be standing up to the US over this however so it's a headache I would invite and welcome upon our government.

That all being said, I'm not sure I buy the theory that Assange's extradition to Sweden is to get his extradited to the US. I seem to remember reading something saying it was just as easy to extradite him from Britain so who knows.
Marin Soljačić might disagree.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marin_Soljačić
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Why choose?
I was talking with some friends who are Aerospace Phds at Stanford last night. They told me how the last few decades were sort of a "dark ages" in the Space field, that there is now a glimmer at the end of the dark tunnel.

It seems that in many ways, this launch is a make or break point in the private Space sector. For the sake of shifting our attention to truly great, ambitious endeavors, and for the sake of many great engineers who have chosen to devote their lives to a now-unsexy craft (and the many who may follow in their footsteps in the future as a result of these projects), I truly hope that this mission ends in a resounding success.

I personally haven't been this excited about a technological milestone in years.
Won't read. Disagree with title.
Read again. "1.4 the size" is 40% larger, not one fourth the size.
Ah.

These are the little assumptions that keep blowing off my feet. Thanks.
It should not be surprising that this can be done in php.

The libevent extension for event driven non-blocking I/O has been added some time ago. Together with many nice new features since PHP 5.3, including improved garbage collection and speed improvements, it naturally follows that php will be used for these things.

Btw, the libevent extension is really fantastic. If you're doing server programming, take a look at it, it will turbo-charge your server http://php.net/manual/en/book.libevent.php

Perhaps php lost some if its sexiness, but it's still rapidly evolving and improving.
Despite what the movies tell you there is no such thing as true immunity.

If you commit a crime in another country under "diplomatic immunity", your host country must decide to waive your immunity and allow you to be prosecuted, or have you expelled back to your native country. The receiving country could then request extradition for a criminal trial (so you essentially get kicked out as a diplomat, and drug back as a citizen).

In the specific case of Assange, professional activity outside official functions isn't protected at all. So if Australia did come to his defense and claimed he was acting in a professional capacity for doing something like leaking US military secrets, it would be an act of state sponsored terrorism.
I disagree. I rarely find Django apps without accompanying tests. No submissions to Django proper ever make it in without tests. But as to no test-based tutorial - you're right, but most tutorials in any given language cover testing only after the language is learned, so that's hardly unique to Django. I hope this changes, of course. Everyone should test.
My MBP becomes a jet engine when under load, but I've honestly never heard the fan in my various Mac Pros after 5+ years.
From their FAQ:

Why is Goldman Sachs open-sourcing GS Collections?

- We believe that GS Collections offers a significant advantage over existing solutions. We hope others will benefit from it.

- We believe in the power of the technical community to help improve GS Collections.

- Technology is a huge part of what we do at Goldman Sachs. GS Collections exemplifies our commitment to technology.

- We use open source software in many of our operations. We have benefited from the work of others and we'd like to give something back.

Does Goldman Sachs use GS Collections?

- Yes, we use GS Collections in many of our internal applications.
"crazy hard-core shit"

This is the problem. When basic understanding of a system (e.g. I/O) is viewed as "crazy hard-core shit" we are in trouble.

You do not even need ls in today's UNIX.

Globbing, printf, echo and stat can do it all.

And if necessary it's easy for the user to write her own custom utilities for displaying file or directory information from the stat struct as long as she is provided with good documentation for the standard C functions.

If you don't know how to do these things then you need to learn. And I say that as a dumb end user who can do things in UNIX that apparently most programmers of today cannot or will not because it's "too hard".

To me, learning all these high level scripting languages is crazy hard core shit. It would take me forever. They are large and complex.

Meanwhile I can do things the short, simple way. And learn about "crazy hard-core shit" like basic I/O at the same time.
This translates into

fn = lambda y=[y]: y.push(7); return y

if you accept the ; to separate statements, as the lambda in python is syntactically only allowed to contain one statement.

(The introduction of the variable x into the example is not important for the behavior of default arguments, however, it is important for a separate issue. I've stripped it out here.)
Yes, the lambda creates the function. Note that defvar does not. So there is still only one function being defined here.
Well in fairness, both inexpensive and independent are used in the original acronym
I always thought the vilification of Edison was pretty ridiculous, myself. For heaven's sake, if nothing else respect the man for the work he put into giving us the light bulb.
Sorry for asking a question that may seem obvious to others: Why were they waiting for the IPO? Is it for financial or legal reasons, such as a Community Property State?

Did he sign a prenuptial agreement? An internet search implies he didn't. This reminds me of Tom Leykis' advice that everyone have a prenup. On the other side, some women have created companies by divorcing a business owner and taking half of the company.

How has Mark Zuckerberg protected his ownership of Facebook from his marriage? How would you?
This was also trunk.ly 's remit before it was closed
I wonder how thick the stack of pre nup papers are.
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As erdemozkan stated in a duplicate discussion: Mark married Priscilla one day after the IPO. That means they were waiting for IPO to get married.

Sorry for asking a question that may seem obvious to others, but why were they waiting for the IPO? Is it for financial or legal reasons, such as a Community Property State?

Did Zuckerberg sign a prenuptial agreement? An internet search implies he didn't. This reminds me of Tom Leykis' advice that everyone have a prenup, for many reasons. On the other side, some spouses have created companies by divorcing a business owner and taking half of the company.

How has Mark Zuckerberg protected his ownership of Facebook from his marriage? How would you?

[1]http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3997659
Ahh, it's Henry Blodget fault. He argued that Goldman lost the FB IPO partly because the other underwrites were semi geeks investment bankers, http://www.businessinsider.com/morgan-stanley-goldman-sachs-...
Took a quick look, GS Collection seems to be a similar library like Google Guava; a nice functional library helper to perform operation against Java collection.
You grow up being told that this is guy, Edison, is the most awesome inventor in the history of America.

Well, consider this. Let's suppose Tesla was actually the most awesome inventor, and Edison was second. Which do you want to show children? The one who was a genius, or the one who made no bones about the fact that hard work was the main ingredient to his success?

In other words, do we teach children that being smart is important, or do we teach them that hard work is important?
Congrats to him. May this be the happiest day of his life.

I'm not all about hating on a man just like you and I, just because he made it and we didn't (haven't?).
> Strings are copy-on-write, for example. So you are technically passing a reference (from a performance POV), but acting like it's not.

That's just an optimization; it's not a very significant detail. All languages have these little details. Java, for example, caches and reuses Number instances if the value is below 127.

> PHP is a dynamically typed language

It's also weakly typed. You can, for the most part, assume that the type isn't very important. If you've got the value 12, it doesn't matter much if it's stored as an int, float, or string. But obviously if you attempt to do an operation not supported by the value then you'll get an error. There's nothing surprising about that.

PHP arrays just take the idea of an index and allow it to be both strings or integers. In both cases, you're providing a value for the key and getting out another value. It's pretty easy to explain. The issue, I'd say, is that programmers rarely ever index by both integers and strings in the same structure. There are also performance differences but hash tables are so fast that you need to be doing something unusual for it to matter.
"Being out of code" isn't always a result of deterioration or neglect; sometimes it's just a matter of the code changing. Structures built in the 1950s may not have, for example, ADA-compliant accessible restrooms, though the restrooms may be perfectly usable. But putting in something as simple as a wheelchair ramp at the front door might require also remodeling every single restroom in the building to be ADA-compliant.

I've seen half a dozen small religious groups go through this sort of problem -- because they can't afford to make the church/synagogue/etc completely accessible, they aren't able to make incremental improvements. The buildings remain perfectly functional and well maintained and retain all of their value, except in the eyes of the one guy in a wheelchair who can't get a ramp put in because his church can't afford to drop 15 grand on all the other not-very-useful-but-required stuff.

Relating this back to code: if you have a policy that requires any old code must be brought up to new standards any time it's touched, then there are at least some occasions in which someone could have made a useful incremental improvement, but is stopped by a stupid policy decision that would saddle them with burdensome work. The net result is that small, high-value fixes get put off because of large, low-value busy work.
Did they also hack this to autopost to Facebook?
Visualizing Galois Fields
...
import com.gs.collections.impl.block.factory.Comparators;
import com.gs.collections.impl.block.factory.Functions;
import com.gs.collections.impl.block.procedure.CollectionAddProcedure;
import com.gs.collections.impl.collection.mutable.AbstractCollectionAdapter;
...

Gees, I feel sorry for people still stuck using Java.
Random Array of Independent Data Centers (RAIDC)

Edit: maybe Random Array of In-dependent Clouds (RAIdC)?
Man, this kid is having the time of his life right now. How can any guy beat IPO + married in two days? Good for him, and take that vacation while you still can!

From what I hear, the pressure starts to build when your a public company. Those quarterly earnings should be interesting.
But what he doesn't say is that Apple's charger is safer than the standard design. The best we can say for Apple is that it has cleaner power which is helpful for the touchscreen circuitry. That's why I say Samsung's charger compares favorably: it charges the device and it meets UL standards.
I'm not sure how well this works, but Nimbus (iOS framework) lets you embed itself in your own static library with a custom prefix via preprocessor macros. It would helpful if more libraries provide this feature.

http://wiki.nimbuskit.info/Nimbus-Namespacing
There are people not on Facebook? I keed, I keed :)
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As a long-time listener, I feel a peculiar closeness with the hosts, even though I've never met either one. Having witnessed [the public part of] their friendship evolve, it is sad to think that something may have happened that soured it. Still waiting to see what Dan/5by5 will say, as the silence on bigweek.co/twitter/5by5.tv has been uncomfortable, to say the least.

I still enjoy John's shows, but I agree with many others in this thread on this point: a year ago, TTS was the podcast in my list that I'd drop any other to listen to when a new one aired. Lately, that's become Hypercritical, which always leaves me feeling like I learned something.
Retrofit your old iphone into a Nintendo Gaming Device
The standard DC connector also has pretty good function. Humans have been putting things into holes for a very long time and we've gotten pretty good about it. I estimate I use 0% of my mental capacity to plug in my Thinkpad.
Why?

I mean, I know it's interesting to think about how you manage Facebook and a marriage at the same time, but this news doesn't seem god-thankingly urgent.

EDIT: Ah, sarcasm. The bane of net conversations everywhere.
thanks, I've always wondered about that.

to the downvoters: thank you for letting the world see the hatred.
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> While the date of the wedding was timed to Zuckerberg’s birthday and Chan’s graduation, the IPO was a moving target, our source says, and was definitely not part of the whole plan.

http://allthingsd.com/20120519/just-married/
> Did Zuckerberg sign a prenuptial agreement? An internet search implies he didn't.

Yes. That's exactly the kind of questions that Google helps you solve.
I'm kinda disappointed that he didn't wear his trademark hoodie to the wedding like the way he did to the IPO roadshow. :/
Why? It's pretty good, all things considered.
Speculation: sarcasm.
Given how carefully he has protected his stake thus far, it would be very surprising if he had not done a pre-nup.
I would marry someone I trusted to death and beyond, compared to which trusting with mere property is trivial. Yes, it's a risk... there's a saying about risk, though, isn't there?

Let's give Mark the benefit of the doubt and assume he's marrying for love.
This does not seem to be new. According to their profile they have had an account since Dec 16, 2011. This might be the first time they have open sourced anything though.
You don't have to be so explicit:

import com.gs.collections.impl.*;

Just out of curiosity, how are imports done in your language of choice?
It's called destructuring assignment. It's been around for a while.

http://dunsmor.com/lisp/onlisp/onlisp_22.html
I'm not entirely surprised. A few months ago (a year and a half! wow!) GS hired Ulrich Drepper, the longtime project lead of the GNU C library.

I also read another article (no way I can find it again now) saying how big investment banks are hiring more and more software engineers.

Disclaimer: I work in IT for a large investment bank which's gradually outsourcing all its IT department to south asian countries.
I think he was being sarcastic... That's how I read it.
> For America, it maybe true, but not for the rest of 'THE WORLD'.

Apple's influence is very noticeable in other developed countries too. Tablets and app phones (except for Windows Phone) are all heavily inspired by iOS devices. On the desktop it's similar, but not as visually obvious. Unit sales are not the way to measure this.

Of course, that still only covers the developed world.
Why simulate Lambda? Couldn't they just have waited on Java 8? Or maybe just used JRuby, if Java was a requirement? Still- it's great that they shared this.
No, never. The items method generates an intermediate list.
All you need to do is jam some images from the first page of a google search in there and it's an Atwood post.
"gets a near-perfect opening price."

If Morgan-Stanley was propping the stock up, then that's strong evidence it wasn't a near-perfect opening price, but that it was too high.
I think being a multi-billionaire makes managing everything easier.
No Java devs actually type any of that. Java IDE's are very good at generating this sort of code...for this very reason. No one would still be using Java if they actually had to remember full package names.
Yeah, what a wild ride it must be for him right now. Suppressing the urge to feel envious is proving to be increasingly difficult.
Sorry, I wasn't clear. I meant for sellers, not buyers.
I feel like "ask hn" questions are very similar to a large portion of the initial content on quora and the initial communities were somewhat similar. I wonder if there is anything that YC could do to make hacker news better preserve the evergreen content on the site. Sometimes I check out a 2 year old thread and feel like commenting on it but then I realize that boat has already sailed.
I'm not--someone who takes marriage more seriously than running a multi-billion-dollar company, has their priorities straight. :)
Ok, I see now.

You've still got that &optional argument though. I don't see a huge amount of difference from a semantic point of view between that and the Python version though (ie. if x == None: ...).
Yeah, pressure from people who have authority to fire you. I don't think that's the case for Zuckerberg.

"Even after the IPO, Zuckerberg remains Facebook's single largest shareholder, with 503.6 million shares. And he controls the company with 56 percent of its voting stock." (http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/47491836/ns/business/)

Does anyone know what sort of recourse the minority shareholders and the other 44% voting holders have if Mark runs the company into the ground?
Call me a Luddite, but I don't have a Facebook account.

But then again, I don't have friends, so I don't see the need.
I don't think languages, large organisations, and backwards compatibility work in the way that you imagine.
The question is jerky.
Unfortunately, Counter is not available before 2.7, so for many people it's a bit too early to require it.
Easel.js[1] makes it much easier. Actually it gets easier than Flash.

[1] http://www.createjs.com/#!/EaselJS
Can you please name this dental appliance? There is also a relatively minor surgery where silicon is embedded to prevent airway collapse (a common cause of sleep apnea).
The examples they give seem to be pretty much standard functionality of the Guava Collections2 class. With Guava quickly becoming one of those standard libraries that just gets automatically added to virtually every new project, I don't see much reason to use this.
We are not using this option, and it is probably there by mistake.

Aww, sweet innocence.