skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Although I have no idea since I have never seen the code, I'm pretty sure there's no way to hit a bomb on your first click. I'm played enough (MS Windows) Minesweeper and have never, ever hit a bomb on the first click.

As a side note, Minesweeper the first game I ever programmed was for my intro C class in college using SRGP[1] as the graphics library. Thinking back, it was a tough project. The Minesweeper logic wasn't so bad but doing the graphics was the most work. In hindsight, it shouldn't have taken more than a couple hours to code but took everyone a fair amount of time. Of course we didn't know what they hell we were doing. Fun stuff.

EDIT: After searching around it appears there is code to prevent the first-click bomb in a rather novel way[2].

[1] http://www.niksula.cs.hut.fi/~tik86120/X_srgp.html
[2] http://www.sanchitkarve.com/blog/2009/01/does-minesweeper-ch...
their TOS refers to privacy policy. dont' read things in isolations and without context.
I'm not an economist either, but what you say is - for what I understand - the consequence of the whole supply/demand concept. There is no global "value" of things, in the end the only real value is what people are willing to pay for it.
Sustainable Startup Pace
This went far, far beyond a cheesy pickup line. This was repeated harassment far beyond the bounds of acceptable behavior, even at a bar. She made it very clear that she wasn't interested, and he continued. She moved away, and he followed her and continued. She brought up the fact that he was married, and he continued. She brought up his daughter, and he made sexually disparaging comments about his own daughter.

We should not confuse ambiguous situations in which someone makes a slightly off-color joke with serious, repeated harassment. That does nothing to help the situation.
Having just spent the weekend doing an iOS app in PhoneGap and jQuery Mobile, I can say that PhoneGap can get you to the first 80% really fast and it can look/feel native, but the devil is in the details and the last 20% is going to take an extra 80% for sure.

Native vs HTML/PhoneGap is about tradeoffs. With a little bit more experience I'll be able to easily ship a working app in a weekend using PhoneGap, but there are plenty of use cases where native would be a much better way to go (games, photo filter apps, etc.)

It's not about what is better in all cases, it's about what is better for your project.
We're having a mini-hackathon in Melbourne, FL on the FIT campus. If you're a local hacker, would like to learn some cool new tech or just a HN reader, please stop by, it's FREE!

We'll be building apps to help non-profits organize volunteers locally.

Worthy cause + geeks + code = fun evening!
Caught my attention eh... but agreed, it's not a real threat yet but for those on a budget, it will be a better option especially if IE also supports Flash and can stream from sites like Ustream etc..
I think Facebook should buy one. I'm tired of hearing about nebulous data-mining aggregate privacy concerns; I want to be afraid of Facebook literally watching me, damnit!
Great thoughts! But I still want to be an entertainer...
Is LinkedIn the only successful Web 2.0 IPO of the past couple of years?
"With a Hubble here you could see a dime sitting on top of the Washington Monument." And these are better than that. And the DOD doesn't need them.
Arduino and the Web using NodeJS and SerialPort2
"With postgres you have to roll your own [sharding]"

but it will be trivial if you do not do joins.
Color Picker and Confirm Button - Exploring MS ASP.NET Ajax - Lesson 11
"Read It Later, whose Firefox extension (but not web or iPhone app) actually predated Instapaper,"

http://www.marco.org/2010/05/19/on-read-it-later
Join Vint Cerf in a June 5 Google Hangout On Air About World IPv6 Launch
Does anyone have a link to the experiment mentioned in this speech?
Right, and Nintendo is now in a world where their hardware gaming platforms will never even remotely reach the scale of distribution they can get from the iPhone all by itself.

A lot has changed in the last decade.

A billion global consumers now have powerful computers in their pockets, and no Nintendo games run on them.

Nintendo isn't wildly profitable, and has rarely ever been so. They'd be far better off distributing their extremely valuable IP across a billion consumers via other vendor hardware. Put good Mario and Zelda games on the iPhone, and make a billion dollars tomorrow. Let Microsoft / Sony / and Valve fight it out in consoles, and release a Mario game for the XBox that sells 10 million copies. It's a radically more profitable approach than trying to stay in the hardware business when gaming platforms are plentiful via smart phones and tablets.
Ten-year-old boy co-authors scientific paper
Don't forget about the dozen+ beers!
Original article:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405270230374530457636...
If you just need a simple key/value, a good way to go is HSTORE in PostgreSQL. It allows only string key/values, and not complex structures. Use the JSON datatype if you need lists, nested objects etc.

With HSTORE you get indexes on keys.
This is how I envisioned Google TV would work. I hope someday it will.
Another priority with the first click is that you won't be entirely surrounded by mines and wires, wires being indeterminate, entangled chains of unrevealed spaces.

I'm pretty sure a probability can be worked out for rate of occurrence and length of a wire - but with the corner strategy, you're minimizing the likely amount of perimeter by 3/4. That's got to make a "coin flip" situation more likely, which has to be weighed against the more likely reveal.

If you don't get a reveal on the first click, you end up just clicking again a few times and restarting if you reveal a mine. Doesn't waste more than a second in any case. Not sure if that's really meaningful unless there's a no restart rule, or you're being graded by the percentage of games finished that are started.
This is exactly the blindness he talked about.
The point of the speech wasn't that you shouldn't apply yourself.

Your hard work, passion, and focus likely correlate with your successes. But that doesn't mean you weren't also extremely lucky to be in a position where those factors (things that you have more control over) were so able to tip your chances.

Edit: Firstly, we should all be able to voice unpopular opinions without getting silenced by the crowd. I may have disagreed with your analysis, but I voted up your response nonetheless.

Secondly, to respond to your edit. I think you are not quite correct in stating that your down-votes are due to the fact that "people object to the political incorrectness of not supporting the ideology that argues 'luck determines success, therefore the rich should be taxed to pay us! we just weren't lucky!'"

There is a difference between those who do not apply themselves and believe success is entirely down to luck, and those who work hard and dedicate their lives to the pursuit of something more, never to achieve the kind of successes that others take for granted. It is the latter group that you are failing to acknowledge, which is perhaps why you are seeing so many down-votes. I wouldn't simply attribute it to "anti-intellectualism."
Being that Smartglass is a precise clone of Apple Airplay, I think it needs to be interpreted as a response to Apple capabilities in cross-device media sharing.

Airplay is exceedingly simple. There is no prior setup, no sync, no user-visible state transfer, no unnecessary session management, it handles multiple users properly, it backgrounds well on iOS, and authentication is "free" since all that's handled at the Wifi layer.

When you see people in wizzy concept videos flicking content from one device to another, this is what they're doing. The only thing they get wrong in these futuristic videos is that this stuff has been shipping for the last two years on a major platform.

Microsoft was correct to clone this.
I've enjoyed two great books that discuss this: "The Drunkard's Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives" (http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/08/books/review/Johnson-G-t.h...) and "Fooled by Randomness" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fooled_by_Randomness)

I think people dislike talking about luck's role in our successes (but not failures) because it hints at a deterministic world view where our free will is less important than we'd like to believe.
There's no austerity. I don't even know where you'd get the idea there's some sort of austerity in the US.

NASA's problems lie elsewhere, mostly in the form of having a boss (Congress) who demands that they spend their money in mind-bogglingly inefficient ways, and then adds further inefficiencies by continuously jerking them around. Giving them more money won't solve this problem.
I assume the NRO telescopes had their instrumentation removed before gifting the optics to NASA, yes? Or were they really just "blank casings"? Either way, it's kinda freaky to think that there are such powerful monitoring devices in space...
Some of the very few GameCube games that took advantage of the GBA link-up cables made good use of player-specific screens. Final Fantasy: Crystal Chronicles used it for individual inventory management and Four Swords switched play to the GBA screens when players entered buildings/caves.
:( unfortunately might not be entirely applicable to this problem... unless some measure of blood density and hence probably glucose mix... but at least at this layer of filtering and reasoning, it appears to be about minute amounts of motion... is there something about motion that could denote glucose? trembling maybe? maybe a score could be derived using something that borrows from this technique, but you'd have to put more into it than it seems this technique specifically shows.
Would realizing they are lucky benefit the lucky? In the cookie experiment Lewis wrote about, the randomly appointed leader would then not take the cookie so effortlessly.
You make a leap in the story there when you assume that the incumbent will discover the innovation. It is so subtle too:
and one of them happens upon the fact

I don't think its that easy, and the story could have turned out a number of different ways and you chose the one that supported your argument (much like I did in my other reply to you).

Increased competition could lead to a race to the bottom, with each competitor slashing prices, engaging in expensive marketing wars and predatory acquisitions. With so much heated competition, R&D budgets get slashed by short-term thinking managers. There is no innovation for a decade, only decreased profits.
So your understanding is that manufacturers will still be able to add their own "instant boot" capability for media playback or quick access to contacts, but will have to have the system image signed by Microsoft to do this?
"This isn't just false humility. It's false humility with a point."

This is why I like Lewis' writing. Liar's Poker had a huge influence on me at an influential age.

There's always a sense that he's playing the same game that he's writing about. And not in a George Plimpton sense. But he's often got a message to deliver that other players will not touch. The message always seems worth hearing.

I interpret his reference to the Berkeley study as not one that explains "luck", but of one that explains how life is role-based. People take roles and play them, as if "all the world's a stage". It is. We are all willing to go along either as the audience or in our appointed roles. What I think Lewis means to say is that the assignment of roles, the "casting" if you will, is often arbitrary.

I only wish Lewis had made this longer. There is so much more to say. Not only do people not like success explained as "luck" but they insist on success being attributed to "brilliance", "genius", "hard work", etc. In this case, when the cause of an effect is not clear, we are very quick to find one that suits our purposes.
If someone started a fistfight in the conference's bar after hours, would you be surprised if the conference chose to not invite that person back again, ever? Would you come to his defense by saying "It's not the conference organizers' responsiblity what happens in the bar afterwards!" Some of the commenters have this idea that if you behave like a jerk to someone, ONLY that person has the right to distrust you. WTF?
Alternate explanation: People know they can't do anything about true luck, so they want to focus on things they might be able to do something about.
I'm surprised by how defensive people can get about their own success. It seems to me that you can never know if your success was due to your own hard work or some lucky breaks (or, more probably, a combination of both to which you'll never know the balance).

It reminds me of the story about thousands of people flipping coins. Out of those thousands of people, some of them are going to flip a long string of heads. Does that mean that those people are "good" at flipping heads? Is someone who flips a string of tails "bad" at flipping heads?
Oddities in Chinese stock index evoke Tiananmen
> From real experience

Did you just violate your security clearance?
Ask HN:Designing beautiful UI for Android
Unfortunately default UI components (until 4.0) doesn't look so good. Tutorials don't cover how to design awesome components and what is the best way to do it. I am wondering how can I design UI components which looks great in all platform versions.
Speaking as the same sort of person (96 secs on expert :-) ), I agree that the most useful strategy is to click in the middle. This is because the cost of restarting is practically nothing for your first few clicks (no sunk time costs), so what you should really be optimizing is trying to get the most information about the board as soon as possible. All the more so because optimally your whole game will proceed logically from that first cascade. Bigger cascades are less likely to dead end, meaning you'll be less likely to have to guess at random again later (when you actually will have sunk time costs).
Chrome Networking: DNS Prefetch & TCP Preconnect
Then it is your definition that is debatable (and self-centric). By the same reasoning Linux is not general-purpose because it does not run Visual Studio.

OSX, Linux and Windows are equally general-purpose by all reasonable definitions.
And part of the little psy-war game that no doubt played a role in the decision to turn these over to nasa instead of letting them rust in some warehouse.
Just to clarify, it is a common misconception in the "western" world to associate USSR with Russians. There were many different nations in USSR.
Leftronic (YC S10) turns any startup office into a command center
Fascinating stats - NPR Interview with author of Talking Back to Facebook
I am by no means an expert on financial markets, but my layman's observation is that the internet seems to have changed the whole equation dramatically. In 1980, it would have been almost completely impossible for a new-ish company a few years old to have almost a billion customers. But now it's possible, and moreover it's possible to do that without any of those 'customers' having bought anything at all. I imagine that makes the whole game much more volatile.
But then do people overestimate the impact of their own influence? Would it benefit themselves/the world to come to grips with randomness?
Experimenting with new technologies is encouraged, especially since cross-pollination of ideas happen this way.

However I would actually advise developers to stop and think if they really need MongoDB or the latest fad, because their current relational database, such as PostgreSQL, does a mighty fine job for most of their needs.

Why? Because I have never seen angry opinions about PostgreSQL losing people's data. Or about how the modeling tools and architecture exposed by PostgreSQL are insufficient for certain problems ... not until you're operating at Google's scale, and MongoDB won't save you there ;)

give it a try before buying that you can do it all
with Postgres tweaks

My main problem with most NoSQL solutions is that I have to tweak the problems I have to fit the solution, instead of the other way around. Technologies that can be tweaked simply rock.
One thing I have noticed is that the times when I get into situations where I am working 100 hour weeks for extended periods of time, it is not something that I can just make a decision in that moment to work less. I painted myself into a corner and I left myself with limited options (i.e. work harder to get it done or admit failure). The better way is to see these types of situations ahead of time and make decisions so that you will never be put in that situation. I think the hardest thing with that is that making those decisions often requires passing on opportunities (i.e. I can't handle that right now) or backing down from a challenge (i.e. I am not able to get that done fast enough). Both of which are extremely difficult for a type A personality.
Black hole version of inception!
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1375666/

Actually, this is much to complicated for my feeble mind. I am sticking with the "Parallel Universe Box" from the Futurama series (http://futurama.wikia.com/wiki/Parallel_Universe_Box). It makes my head hurt less.
Sadly, I'd imagine all those super toys are designed to point at Earth - different design requirements than for looking outwards.
Sorry, those were meant to be examples, not an exhaustive list.
Lewis didn't work at Goldman...
Ask HN: Would you like a free invite to our SC2 tourney in SF on June 13th?
We're throwing an epic SC2 tourney for nerds interested in the mobile space :) Lots of fellow ex-googlers, mobile developers, signed copies of SC2 and other prizes from blizzard, food, drinks, and booze!

We just want all of us hackers to have some fun :) http://starcraft.crowdmob.com/ RSVP at the registration link!
Rackspace changes pricing on CloudFiles. Now $0.10 / gig
http://www.rackspace.com/cloud/cloud_hosting_products/files/pricing/

Just got the news in my email and though it would be relevant here. I'm glad to see one of my favorite hosting companies take on Amazon. I'm already a customer there and welcome the change.
Its quite true that polygraphs and similar means of telling whether a person is distressed are almost useless. However, there have recently been some advances in using fMRI to do direct lie detection by looking at what parts of a person's brain are being used at a given time. This doesn't seem to be reliable enough for courtroom use yet, but its getting there.
Among other reasons, it is disingenuous. Was it only luck?
I'm pretty sure it was always worth less than that.
I love Pocket. It's one of my favourite Android apps. Apart from the great features (video, paging, tagging) I've always found the parsing algorithm to be superior to the alternatives. Another plus is their dedication to support many platforms, which means I'm not tied to Android.

Ultimately I liked Pocketso much I paid for the pro version, just like many others[1]. Their business model seems pretty sound and they have a lot of users and the product is excellent. What is so exciting about Instapaper?

[1] http://getpocket.com/blog/2012/01/what-devices-did-read-it-l...
just law of large numbers at work
> On another hand, it makes your backend to have exactly one function – to be a simple REST provider. That leads to easier development support and improves the scalability greatly.

It does? Hm, I guess Twitter is wrong then.
I agree in the beginning - "get to work and build a product." Spending a day or a week on something without having this difficult conversation is not a huge risk, but don't spend months or years. The conversation only gets more difficult and can destroy whatever value is created.

> So, yeah, I'll stick with my advice: if you're a fledgling startup, don't waste intellectual, physical, emotional and economic resources on your "stake". Earn it. Having a contract will not prevent disputes; I can speak from experience on that. Get to work and build a product. When there is something actually at stake, then worry about your share of it.

I think this is bad advice, and goes against both my personal experience and almost every bit of startup advice on the internet.

Sure, you don't need a formal contract, but you do need to make sure you are on the same page equity-wise, while being open to renegotiation. Generally, that "same page" conversation should be documented somewhere, even as a simple email. While that email IS legally relevant and possibly enforceable, the point is to get keep everyone's memory honest and provide clarity.

An email thread like: "Based on our conversation, we plan to split this company equally three ways. Is that everyone's understanding?" "Yes, sounds good" "Yep"

Can be very helpful to avoid misunderstandings both presently and in the future. The point is not to get into a lawsuit, but to avoid one.
The sheer scale of the universe does funny things with probability.
Are drones replacing space telescopes?

This sounds like a reasonable speculation to me. Drones would be orders of magnitude cheaper, more manuverable, expendable, not as subject to being obscured by cloudcover, able to survey many places at once or swarm over a wide area, etc.
Wouldn't bigger cascades be more likely to deadend, due to the average density of what's leftover increasing?
the fact that all these social media stocks are declining is PROOF that we've been in a bubble, and now that bubble is deflating.
If you want people to remember what you have to say, make your point, and get off the stage.
No. I worked on unrelated things that blow up and kill people (no more!). Lots of black holes with big obvious scary pieces missing. Drawing assumptions doesn't violate clearance. Speculation is allowed.

Some things don't fit into normal technology progression.
In Soviet Russia, language programs You!
Now you're just getting into life philosophies. Fatalism vs. free will is not an argument I am equipped to engage.
Because the touchpad had a fairly open bootloader and we built a more versatile one for it based on the same code base (moboot). The bootloader in the OMAP chip also allows booting from usb and does not require the second stage be signed.
Every week you can once (or less) in a lifetime lottery numbers, too.
The maximum resolving power of a satellite with a 2.4m (8 foot) lens, at 650 km (400 miles) orbit, is 10 cm (4 inches). The Hubble is in a circular orbit so I don't see how it can do better than that. http://everything2.com/title/Spy+satellites+can%2527t+read+y... Spy satellites often use highly-elliptical orbits to swoop closer, say 320 km (200 miles) for part of their orbit.

edit OK I might have found an answer actually. Using multiple exposures from different angles, you can resolve an object as if you had a lens that spans the entire angle. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aperture_synthesis I'm sure the movable secondary lens helps with this :) I'd heard of this technique used by ground-based radio telescopes before, and according to Wikipedia, the ability to do this within the visible spectrum has become possible only recently.
I had this discussion with my father today and he finally conceded to me that I am partially right (he hates being wrong).
The fact that you were not born in a war torn country, the fact that you had good role models, the fact that you weren't born with a mental or physical handicap, the fact that you met your long term business partner at some random get together. Are all luck. Now that doesn't mean you should give up on all of your activities, because if you don't try at all you have a zero percent chance of success at that point. Even getting to the point where you have this work hard mindset is luck.