skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> its too risky without at least throwing the idea out there first to see if there's any response.

Even after throwing the idea out there and getting HN's feedback, it is still too risky.

It is difficult to predict the success of any venture. (If it were easy, every venture would've been successfull!) As you would already know, many ventures that looked promising in the beginning don't give as much returns as expected, while many ideas which were initially dismissed by experts go onto to become successful businesses.

And moreover, startups often "pivot", sometimes completely throwing away their original idea, while at other times making significant changes to it.

In short, it is too early to say how successful you could be with your business.

I don't know about your personal situation, but if my family were dependent upon me, I would not quit my day job for a website unless the odds of success were very, very, high, and then too, if I did have a "safety net" to fall back on.

Could you try to keep going in part time mode? Could you wait to quit your job until your website shows clear signs of gaining traction? Only you can really judge your situation and take a call.
PV cells are actually more efficient at lower temperatures. The lost production comes entirely from decreases in the amount of sunlight.
I don't disagree your points, (whether someone wants to expend effort to solve particular problems is up to them), its just I see you are dismissing other's problems as "not important". i.e the "#FirstWorldProblems" tag in your original post. The experience obviously was unpleasant enough for the the original author to write a blog post about it, yet you dismiss it so readily.

"Actually, that is correct. You should help people in 3rd world countries first. Most of the homeless in America are "voluntarily" homeless, or have drug/mental problems. Even still, as homeless in America, they have it better off than most people in 3rd world countries. The average person in a 3rd world country lives off a few American dollars (equivalent) a day - and that is your average person"

Let's say your next door neighbour gets into an accident and becoming disabled in the process, cannot afford hospital bills and becomes homeless, you're not going to care, because you're donating to your favourite charity for third word countries already? Personally I don't see anything wrong with people helping people closer to them. - The helpers can help with more effectiveness than people 5000km away because being closer they will have better perspective. I also see nothing wrong with helping with your siblings mortgages just because they're closer to you, starving children in the 3rd world or not.

If you don't want to "waste" your breath, then don't. I just don't see how you telling people how to allocate their resources will ever work out. How do you know your preferred allocation is the best? How do you know the relative effectiveness of a person voicing their opinion about this issue rather than some other? Maybe they are much better at articulating issues relating to computer games than, food, for example. There's no way you can know that for sure.
For those who are looking for this, but for a more opinionated, less-tabula-rasa framework, there's Angular-UI for AngularJS. (AngularJS provides more conveniences and a more defined framework than Backbone, having come later.) It's still in early development and has minimal documentation, but hopefully will grow into a nice set of widgets and wrappers for Angular users.

Go right ahead and test it out at:

http://angular-ui.github.com/

edit: there are also connectors for Angular-Sencha-Touch and Angular-jQuery-Mobile and an attempt at an Angular-Bootstrap connector...hopefully they'll all keep growing
I think it's kind of like the difference between writing in assembly and C.

Using a bunch of calls to appendChild() and setAttribute() results in code that is difficult to read, because it's so low-level. You can't "see" the generated HTML, just like in assembly you can't really "see" the code structure.

Whereas using templates lets you "see" your HTML, with an easy-to-understand structure. So it's the natural, default choice for ease-of-use and maintenance.
OK, so much for that idea.
Tell/Show HN: related to the MonkeySort algorithm ...
I originally wrote this as a comment to the submission about the MonkeySort

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4131217

I initially didn't find that write up very engaging, but then I realised it was actually related to work I did for my PhD, and so I thought I'd share that.

The proof that sorting a collection using comparisons requires a minimum of n.log(n) tests is well known. It simply uses the fact that there are n! possible orderings, and any comparison can only eliminate at most half (this is the crucial bit - I'll come back to it). Log(n!) is about c.n.log(n), so we might need that many comparisons. There are algorithms that are guaranteed to achieve that (shell sort, heap sort, etc.) and there are algorithms that usually perform that well and have a smaller constant (quicksort being the canonical example).

Fast forward.

Suppose we already have some information about the relative orderings of some of our items, and suppose there are now K possible linear orderings. How many comparisons might we need to make? The obvious answer is log(K), but that might not be possible. It may be that there is no selection of 2 items that lets us eliminate around half the remaining possible linear orderings.

Conjecture: Given a partially ordered set that is not already totally ordered, there exists a pair of elements a and b such that in a randomly chosen linear extension, the probability that a is above b is around 1/2 (in fact between 1/3 and 2/3 inclusive).

This means that given partial information, we can always find pairs of elements that eliminate around half (actually at least 1/3) of the remaining possible orderings. Thus, in theory, we can always sort in comparisons proportional to log(K) where K is the number of possible linear orderings consistent with the knowledge we have.

My PhD proved an infinitely large special case of the conjecture, showing that a plausible hiding place for counter-examples does not, in fact, harbor any.

Finding such pairs remains an open problem, and, in practice, unless your collection is already nearly totally ordered, it's usually quicker to discard partial information and start "from scratch".
++x evaluates to x's new (incremented) value.

x++ evaluates to x's old (pre-incremented) value.
It is the opposite, like in many other languages.
e.g.

int i = 0;
printf("%i %i", i++, ++i); // prints "0 2"

Same goes in C, C++, Java, PHP, ...

[EDIT] Turns out this is a bad example, as "the order in which function arguments are evaluated is undefined" (cf. below)
Correct is :

int i = 0;
printf("%i", i++); // prints 0
printf("%i", ++i); // prints 2
Clickable: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4131217
Microsoft Surface == enterprise manageable tablets. IT organizations familiar with managing fleets of ubiquitous Windows workstations (desktop or notebook) will be able to now manage cheaper Windows convertibles.

Similar to how Apple (and Microsoft, and Google) would drop machines in schools to indoctrinate the next generation, Microsoft is going after users where they use computers the most: in the office.

Those that do not get "Surface" per se, will at least be familiar with it in a few years, after they have been exposed to other Windows 8 profiles at work (or on new home computers).
Follow-Up to http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4054638
I mean - Turing was brilliant, but why everybody only tell the story from the middle ?

Turing was English.

(also the allies of the UK & USA were occupying Poland.)
:)) yep, clearly a mistake
Compiling the mistakes of a professor and entrepreneur
Awesome Marketing and Business Books
Before starting reading everything note that author assumed when writing the article that (provided sizeof( int ) > sizeof( char )):

char c = (char)128;
printf( "%d\n", c );

should always be -128, whereas his commenter Mans (March 4, 2011 at 4:15 am) points out that this conversion is implementation-deﬁned according to the standard, that is, compiler authors are free to decide what the result of such conversion should be.
Why choose? Apple doesn't choose, they use both. The two architectures are used for completely different purposes; they both have significant advantages and significant disadvantages. The consumer can choose which one has the better featureset for their use case.

An active digitizer stylus which allows graphic designers and note takers to write on the screen while rejecting finger input is a compelling feature.
It's a shame that even now, Alan Turing, since he was gay, wouldn't be allowed to get married in the UK.
Amen. This is avsolutely right on the money.
Well; maybe. But SciFi SE survives - and that would seem to have a similar issue :)
Good question. I was hoping some of the MVP movement would spawn interest and create a community around idea feedback. Although, to start, I've considered possibly crowdsourcing from MT or other service to get more eyes on a idea. Any ideas?
I guess if you are deploying the same site to more than 1 production server these will become worthy problems to solve?
Not the same, but similar story... 6-8 years ago, I chatted directly with the person responsible for breaking into a web server on the server itself. It's a strange feeling to ssh in and watch someone browsing through files. I did a 'echo "hello?" | wall', showed the guy how to answer me back, and we eventually moved the conversation to IRC. I was using some website to convert English to Portuguese.

Turns out it was a (young) teenager from Brazil. His compromise was that he wouldn't touch our files or deface our websites so long as he could remain in control of the server. I carelessly tried to kick him off, uninstall the rootkit and restart the server only to find out that he could continue to use the same exploit to get access. Then we just called our host and asked them to take down the box. Lost a whole day to it, but I walked away understanding a little bit more about motivation, and learned about an exploit that I hadn't known about previously.
Efficient argument passing in C++11, Part 1
>made up for by coal plants, which are much worse for the environment

This is exactly the point the article is missing. According to the german public, for the environment and the whole humanity the risks from nuclear plant are that high that coal plants, even though they are now used more and are unhealthy, are way less dangerous.

Keep in mind that the plan is to shutdown all nuclear plants, substitute them with green energy and use coal only as long as needed in between the change.
I respectfully disagree - in fact, I'd argue keeping them separate is one big reason why Windows Mobile failed in the past (the other reason is it sucked donkey balls).

Windows will sell regardless. It's a bit like if Google does something to the UI which people don't like - people complain, and some may leave - but the vast majority will stomach it. They're just that entrenched. Even Vista sold 400 million copies.

So by foisting Metro on their existing audience they virtually guarantee hundreds of millions of Metro users (albeit on the desktop, or hybrid platforms, at first). That gets their new OS traction, attracting developers, building a software library and brand equity.

If they don't do that, they'd be stuck selling Windows AND selling a competing OS at the same time (that rarely works out well). And they'd be up against iOS and Android purely on their own merits. With the market as busy as it is now, that'd be equivalent to releasing the Blackberry Playbook.

Of course I could be wrong - this is all just my speculation (I'm the OP btw).
With Cloud Monitor, measure the performance of Clouds and CDN
It's precisely the other way around: ++x is a pre-increment and x++ is a post-increment.
Google, Wikipedia and StackOverflow/StackExchange are my favorite "creations" on the Internet.

But StackExchange has been a big disapointment for me. No big traction on the StackExchange sites, and moderators constantly closing questions without providing better alternatives. It's really a turn-off. (StackOverflow is still great though).
I get weekly emails from Friendly's, IHOP and Dominos.
Well, back in my pre-teen script kiddie days of using BO2K/Netbus and early Sub7 builds I was on the other side of the screen. Sub7 I recall distinctly had all the listed features and a lot more - keylogging, chat client, webcam viewing, screen capture, open/closing CD tray, etc. There was a GUI interface that would let you select any of the above features that would create a payload that could be injected into any .exe file. You could also provide an ICQ account number that would get a message any time the client comes online, with the relevant IP:port to connect to. These were in the days before anti-virus or firewalls were prevalent, so it was pretty easy to trick people into opening an infected .exe.

I think I ended up having around 80 people infected, so there was always someone online. I never did anything malicious with it, just chatting and opening/closing CD-ROM drives mostly (and juvenile things like sending my friend's browser to bigboobs.com ... unfortunately his dad was standing behind him at the time). I had dial-up so the webcam viewing wasn't feasible. If someone was freaked out and wanted me to go away I could remotely destroy the trojan. Come to think of it, most people were just curious about what was going on and didn't seem to mind the chat very much (but obviously they usually wanted me to remove it / delete it afterward). Then again, I infected people by random selection on ICQ, so maybe they were just chatty people.
all good points. also, the obsession with pushing "off topic" questions to other sites means that the range of questions you see on any one site goes down, which makes it less interesting as a place to go to answer.

another way of looking at this is that originally i could design my own filter (via tags) to select what i wanted to answer. but increasingly that is being done for me by mods, and what i find interesting (which tends to be "harder" questions that are cross-discipline) is sent elsewhere. meanwhile, other people are complaining that harder questions are not answered.

i guess they may go full circle and provide a way to combine from multiple sites in a single interface...

and i guess you can argue that what they have now - many fragmented sites - is a better fit to (and a response to) the problem they used to have when there were still many simple/easy questions to ask. they're late solving the problem they had and, at the same time, are making worse the problem they have which is too few eyeballs on the complex problems.
Mnemonic: read as when you would read the text, left to right:

++x increment than use the value x.
x++ use the value x then increment.
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I believe you trigger an undefined behaviour there. You modify i twice in the same statement.
It's pretty obvious where that reaction is coming from.

As recently as last year Microsoft was singing the praises of being able to kinda-sorta-use desktop software on a tablet and pushing the notion that things without desktop operating systems were 'consumption' devices, at best.

So, yes, their sudden reversal on what people want in a tablet is worth noting and easily justifies the same kind of quips and barbs that people lob at Apple over Jobs' similar reversals [1].

And it's pretty easy to be ahead of the curve on blending mobile and desktop operating systems when Microsoft is the only party who sees a problem to be solved in the first place. [2]

Because this entire concept -- that people want both -- comes apart at the seams about a month after you've owned an Apple or Android tablet. [3]

Simply: there's no user-facing problem being solved here.

People use tablets for what they're great at and desktop PCs for what they're great at. And no-one who's ever put their tablet down to use their laptop is looking at that Microsoft Surface tablet and saying "this will mean I don't have to put the tablet down for these tasks anymore". [4]

Microsoft is attempting to solve it's own problem with this blending concept and the degree to which this tablet succeeds, is going to strongly track the degree to which Windows stays out of the Metro experience [5].

[1] "No-one wants a widget."
(Smash cut to 18 months later)
"Introducing Apple's new iWidget!"

[2] That Windows is irrelevant in a growing computing market.

[3] And I say that as someone who has been pro-tablet for a decade and only grudgingly gave Apple's "big iPod" approach a chance.

[4] At best, the typing-heavy market is saying "I wonder how long it will take someone to make an iPad keyboard case that slick."

[5] Metro is a unique, interesting and a refreshing change from Apple's icon grid. And I've heard far more praise for it from the design folks that get written off as Apple fanboys, than I have from the Windows crowd who generally echoed Microsoft's 'consumption' FUD.
Having Trouble Sleeping? It Might be Your Screens
Nope, you've got the two backwards.
Is that defined behaviour?

Is there any rule saying that args to a function have to be evaluated in a particular order - ie is ',' a function point?
The actual demonstration is kinda lacking - if you're observing the machine, you can't see what's going on in software, so there's still a layer of 'magic'. This isn't really much better than building a simple electronic computer with LEDs on each of its 32 bits of memory.

In some ways it's actually worse: for the electronic computer there are less layers of abstraction (digital logic [adders, flipflops etc] > logic gates > transistors > semiconductor physics) than for NXT (scripting language > interpreter > real language > compiler > digital logic > ...). Even though the NXT language is probably easier to understand, it takes longer to explain if someone keeps asking "but how does that work underneath?"
Water is the ash of hydrogen combustion. The energy has already been released. These news stories keep telling a fairytale - that we're getting closer to some technology that will effectively convert water into gasoline.

Hydrogen from water is a potentially useful energy storage medium, but it's not a free energy source.
I don't think this is right. If most of the women who come by tell the PR guys that they don't play, then the PR guys are right most of the time when they assume that women don't play.
Microsoft said on their technet blog that their ARM devices will be clearly labeled and marketed as not being able to run traditional Windows software.
Netflix could easily say that you do get your cut by them being able to lower prices due to any income stream they manage to get from the data they collect. Realistically that's the only way it could work unless you're suggesting that Netflix should pay you for watching their service.
nice. how to force it to show electronica? I keep refreshing and all it comes is indie-something and rock. I got techno once, but when clicked it it showed some christian rock, gagaku, etc. UI is nice, but something is wrong with jumping around content
Actually, the order in which function arguments are evaluated is undefined. http://c-faq.com/expr/comma.html

You can use a comma in other expressions to introduce a sequence point: http://c-faq.com/~scs/cgi-bin/faqcat.cgi?sec=expr#seqpoints
Dressed release first high quality Twitter Bootstrap Theme, Gimlet
I agree completely. And what makes SO even more frustrating is finding out the mods got all their rep 4 years ago from 'Programmer Cartoon' questions that would be closed in 10 seconds today.
How Virtuosos Get So Good: Ruthlessly root out your errors to achieve mastery
there is no such thing as unlimited? when will they learn?
There are plenty of right answers and more than plenty of wrong answers. Literature and other "soft" fields are not so different from math and science.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9jFQR2FUEm4

---------------

Right, so we study math for the twin reasons of wanting to learn mathematical language and wanting to understand our place in the universe, which turns out to be precisely why we also study literature: to learn about language and to understand our place in the universe. Which by the way, Hank, gets to the thing that make me angriest in the entire world, which is when people say that there is only one right answer in math, but that every answer is equally correct in literature.

First off, there is often more than one correct answer in math, and secondly NOT EVERY ANSWER IS EQUALLY CORRECT IN LITERATURE!

For instance, Hank, if you think that The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is a pro-slavery novel, you’re wrong! You’re as wrong as you are if you think that the square root of four is strawberries!

---------------
Most consumers don't use Photoshop or Visual Studio.

What do MOST consumers need full Windows for these days?

Office? Most consumers could get by on iWork.

I guess if they want to use their favorite virus scanner or anti-malware program they would now be able to do that.

Windows dominates the market for consumer PCs because it's cheap and because of games. These same games will not work well on tablets. iOS already has enough games, Windows is at a severe disadvantage in terms of touch friendly games.
I keep getting 'Wood' and 'Poland', as well as occasional articles on wrestlers.
When it works, it works well, though.
I've been a Drupal developer for a while now. I've been recently playing with Rails because that's what I wanted to be doing in the first place, but just didn't know enough about enough to be able to really get it. Thanks in no small part to working with Drupal I now know enough about enough to be able to get some stuff done in Rails. And the more I work with Rails, the less I'm interested in working with Drupal in the long-term.

So much of working with Drupal is just overriding what Drupal wants to spit out instead - here's this Views markup, or this user registration process, or this database schema, now customize it to your liking. Rails takes the exact opposite approach - here's nothing, now make what you want. As my abilities grow, I'm coming to greatly appreciate the second approach.

Perhaps it's the author's experience with other modern development tools rather than a misunderstanding of Drupal that's informing his bias.
A little C tip I learned from hard experience

NEVER, EVER, NOT IN A MILLION YEARS use a signed int/char etc, unless you are 200% certain you're doing the right thing (that is, it's for something specific you need it)

You WILL have problems, period.

"Oh it's just a matter of knowing the C spec" then please go ahead as I grab the popcorn.
Google+ Opens Its API To Flipboard
JRebel and Jelastic: The Silver Lining for Your Java Cloud
Web developers are software engineers, too
It sounds more like connection flooding to me. TCP SYN flooding would also work, although modern IP stacks should cope reasonably well with that if syncookies are used.

That said ... considering these are Macs, they probably have mDNS open to IPv6 link-local traffic. It might make more sense to flood the offending machine with valid, unicasted mDNS packets. I don't know how well the Apple mDNS daemon copes with high traffic volume, but in my experience Avahi (on an Atom-powered netbook, admittedly) can regularly use over 50% CPU on a wireless network with an oversized local subnet. Hypothetically, deliberately flooding an OS X system with complex but valid mDNS announcements could have interesting results...

I should probably point out that Windows systems tend to be protected from this. Firstly, iTunes or Bonjour must be installed separately. Secondly, Windows Firewall tends to kick in with its "Public" profile, blocking inbound traffic by default. Thirdly, Windows machines tend to use mDNS over IPv4 multicast instead of IPv6 unless an auto-configured external address exists. This further reduces the traffic seen, although this last point is no protection from deliberate floods.