skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Another reason is that many places that develop safety-critical software use languages like MISRA C, a subset of C that's supposed to make code more reliable and static analysis easier.
Google launches blog about the social web
That's a lot of sentence fragments and I still have no idea what you're trying to say.
Relevant notes and a letter @ http://ma.gnolia.com/

[For background on this, see http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=458622 ]
I agree. But there is another, perhaps even more important factor. That is market vs. politics. In a market, every strong opinion has a chance to get realized. In politics, only one opinion is chosen.

Hot debates do happen in market as well, but they are rarely a problem as all opinions get realized as long as they prove demand that they can fulfill.
Me too! Last few weeks I have been working with Python (which makes me smile after Java and C++) and looked up plenty of stuff like "how to elegantly get first day of week N", and about 50% of my questions were answered in SO.
It's not just the YC application... it's every part of the business that has to do with effectively explaining things to people - be they investors, board members, employees, reporters, or customers.
That's some gentle comedy.

Especially since they're flies, not bees ;)
You can't spam on Twitter. The reason I say this, and some will disagree, is based on where your attention stream is.

In your inbox, that's where your attention stream exists. When something new pops in, you check. The reason email spam works is because it inserts itself into your stream. Whether you actually go and click through on whatever's it is your own damn fault though.

The reason that "spam" in the context of email can't exist on Twitter is precisely because you have an on/off switch for who's allowed to post into your attention stream. I used to follow Robert Scoble because he's interesting. But yammers on constantly about the most inane crap that it completely floods out the interesting stuff. Its like the man has ADD and a neural mind-reading prosthesis hooked up to a keyboard. Anyway, the point was that he was "spamming" me in a way, so I turned him off. Instantly my attention stream went from murky and muddy to useful again.
I work for smaller metro paper, Austin American-Statesman. There is some amateur(non-pejorative meaning) coverage of local news(a lot of it comes to us via twitter, our comments and blogs). There's the ubiquitous weekly paper that competes in the "where do I get drunk/laid" niche.

But local (and Texas political) news is owned by us. esp in depth news. It's a small market and really no one else wants to compete.

Local is the near-future of news organizations. Nationals are fucked.
The percentages on password-use percentages on this article shouldn't be taken too seriously. More than 200K accounts were compromised -- of those 200K, about 27K passwords were recovered. Those 27K passwords were recovered because they were able to be looked up on a md5 lookup website.
Note the huge increases in print newspaper circulation /sarcasm
Hahah, you are probably correct there.
And yep (Im the writer), you should definitely do a little research before you actively start pursuing someone. Sure, getting to know them at the bar or party is fine, but before a private date do a bit of research. Its flattering - and hopefully they do the same for you. :)
How do they monetize this? I don't see any monetizing currently.
Usually they are bees, urinals have had them for a century
I guess by "true value", I mean the value that assets would have had absent the housing-bubble induced speculative premium.

My best estimate for this quantity: let gamma = (historical price to own)/(historical price to rent), with "historical" meaning pre-1995. Gamma was more or less constant up until the housing bubble.

I'm guessing the "true value" of a house was in the neighborhood of gamma x (price to rent).
Just start working on it, and don't worry too much about tips, etc. It's easy to get paralyzed on doing it the best. The best is the enemy of the good.

Always work on the most important thing. If it's not going to move the needle or if its a tangential/pet feature, recognize it and don't do it now. Your most precious resource is time.
The 'deliberate distortion effect,' that's apparently not the intended way to use Auto-Tune, has been used as a vocal effect for decades now, not specifically with Auto-Tune but with instruments like the TokBox and vocoders.

Thing is, people say it gets old because they think that all voices filtered through Auto-Tune sound the same, but that's not true. Kanye's voice through Auto-Tune sounds a lot different than T-Pain's, and you have to be talented to make it sound good. Can it be a cheesy effect? Absolutely. But if tuned correctly, can really add a cold, robotic color to a track.

Personally, I love it. Kanye uses differently than T-Pain and they are very distinct styles I enjoy.

It's a damn fun thing to play around with, too. :P
Payday loans and Cash advances
Payday loans and Cash advances. Speedy Cash offers online quick cash loans. Start Here with our fast and easy application.
I assume there is some credibility to it. More importantly, it is the default extension tried/searched by browsers when the user doesn't specify a TLD.
They have a company with 6 employees, that generates about 20K per month in revenue and are trying to raise 500K at $3,000,000 pre-money. I thought they were dreaming and told them so.

Is the valuation just too high? I've heard 3-5x revenue quoted as a good starting point for figuring out a valuation during an acquisition, but I'm assuming this is an early stage start up which expects to grow this revenue number quite a bit.
Anyone have a theory why the more recent recessions had such long troughs and slow recoveries?
Seeing the headline, I thought 'one free interaction' was some sort of free-trial business-model analysis.

Clicking through and seeing the context was UI, I then thought 'one free interaction' was perhaps some sort of first-time-confirm of major or dangerous operations, or a way to walk people through key steps once before they're really used.

Turns out it's something else entirely... that's misnamed. I suggest instead 'playful interfaces' or 'fidget-friendly interaction'.
People don't like hearing that they don't know as much as they think they do. They mistake intelligence for domain knowledge, or at least totally dismiss the importance of it.
Steven Brill is a media critic who doesn't work for the NYT. Flagged for deceptive headline.
But they do, see Robert Grahams full article:

> 14% of passwords were patterns on the keyboard, like "1234," "qwerty," or "asdf."
Making Your VC Presos Suck Less
Funny, how Google is so all about being 'open' and such when they aren't in control of the market.
Flynn Effect has reversed among British teens
If a low bug-count is your goal, use a statically-typed, functional-programming language like Haskell or Ocaml. You'll probably also win on development speed, although writing fast-running code in these languages can be painful/ugly. These languages kick ass for producing reliable programs quickly.
...but you CANNOT be friends with anyone you report to or who reports to you. Eventually they will have to screw you or you will have to screw them.

Can't disagree more. If you're clueless about everything outside your job responsibilities, then I could see how that's true, but if you're at least moderately engaged with those you report to, you can certainly have friendships.

Nobody looks to screw anyone over - constantly ask hard and honest questions - if your boss says "if I were to ask your colleagues right now, you would be fired", ask "do you think it's something we can work out, or should we talk about my leaving the company?"

Be honest with your superiors, and demand they be honest with you.
Amazing that this fact is not mentioned in the original article nor the writeup! Totally changes on how one should analyze the numbers.
OK, so constructive feedback:

1. Comparing pg, who is almost universally positive in the things he says and writes (the things you accuse him of are...well, simply not to be found in his writing), to Dziuba who drinks hateorade from a fire hose, is disingenuous, at best. You've accused pg of saying things that Ted Dziuba said pg said...not things pg actually said. That's...umm...really dumb.

2. You've proven yourself to be a bit of a douchebag, on the order of Dziuba, by calling out a handful of small startups and calling them worthless. Startups are experiments. They aren't "done" yet, and by virtue of them trying new things, they are doing good things for the world. Tearing them down for not doing things you think are important is less than useless; it's actively harmful. I don't worry too much about people picking on pg--he doesn't need anyone to look out for him. He has thick skin, and millions of dollars with which to soothe any bruises his ego might sustain. I make jokes at pg's expense every chance I get; I can't think of anyone I enjoy making fun of more, actually. But I never do it by picking on the companies he's funded...because those companies aren't pg. They are non-wealthy, non-famous, regular entrepreneurs who are trying new things, and devoting a year or two or three of their lives to the task. I'm not suggesting that YC company founders have thin skin, or are particularly hurt by the rantings of some random dude on the Internet. In my case, as an Open Source developer of over 10 years, I've heard worse than you could ever come up with...sometimes even from people I know and respect. Just that if your rants about specific YC companies in this case had any value to the world at all, it is negative.

3. Misrepresentation is not insight. You've made pg sound like a smug Lisp weenie...and he is. But, you've made it sound like he doesn't say nice things about languages other than Lisp, and doesn't believe other languages can be used to build successful startups or "beat the averages". Once again, stupid assertion. YC has funded almost nothing but startups building with languages other than Lisp. PHP, Ruby, Python, Perl, Java, C#, etc. are all represented by YC companies.

4. Dziuba is an angry non-starter. pg has built things. Real things, that are still in use by thousands of people and making lots of money today. If you'd rather have a beer with someone whose sole purpose in life seems to be to tear down others over someone whose purpose in life for the past several years has been to help entrepreneurs start successful companies, then your priorities are misplaced. pg also has a much better sense of humor than you give him credit for.

5. Your post is a troll because it is calculated link bait for this particular audience. Regurgitation of Dziuba's (and a few others) criticisms of pg is not insight, it's merely link bait.

Now, see, you've made me go negative, and I don't like going negative. Negativity breeds negativity.
Its more due to the brand association people have with the .com domain.

When you're telling friends about sites "I found this great site, its called facebook" - for those people not in the know, the natural thing people do is to use the .com extension.

It's also why the .com domains command a higher premium on the domain name aftermarket.
It sounds obvious when the settings are turned up really high and it's used as a pronounced, deliberately artificial effect, as in T-Pain and Kanye West and that one Cher song. Used at gentler settings, it can be almost completely transparent.

I'm willing to bet you've heard it used both ways, and on the first ones you've thought 'obvious and atrocious,' and on the others you haven't noticed it at all.
The Gray Lady
friends that could get a job anywhere (as in, they're unbelievably awesome)

You don't have to be that awesome... generally, if you can create more wealth for a company than they pay you, you can get a job there.
Yep, I have this ability too - I thought I was the only one!
Thanks for your comment rantfoil, I agree its easily to get paralysed looking for the best way, and doing nothing!
Yup. I do the same though I only end up annoying myself, much like the above select-and-deselect-text posters when they're on nytimes.com, when I'm on the scratch buffer and I keep getting the "File to save in:" prompt.
Hackers don't work in maintenance perhaps?
Google Taking a Step Into Power Metering
Secrets of Productivity
Calling an event "random" does not mean its causeless. It simply means its not predicable. Its not predicable because we don't know and/or haven't measured the relevant causes. Hence, Black Swan events are caused.

Perhaps it would be an interesting and profitable exercise to look for and measure causes of Black Swan events.
Has anyone read the book they talk about in the article (http://www.amazon.com/Nudge-Improving-Decisions-Health-Happi... )? It has decent reviews and seems like it might be interesting, but I never seem to have as much reading time as I'd like, and I was hoping someone here could give me a heads up on if its any good.
Actual hackers (usually) make things that require minimal maintenance. The idea that code needs to be "maintained" (it's not like it degrades over time) is actually silly once you think about it. Maintenance is just a way of covering up for software that was poorly designed or has too many bugs.
All I ever needed to know in business, I learned in a strip club.
http://guitarrising.com/
An Engineer's Suggestion for the Stimulus Plan
I'm curious about their "480% increase in ad impressions" - I find this a disadvantage than a feature. It may increase their impressions, but will lower their CPM and CPC rates in the long run. Furthermore, its a hassle to the user since it steers them away from the content.

Does anyone see differently?
Two cases:

1.) The string in question has an observable effect on the application's behavior, eg. a filename or text that appears in the UI.

2.) The string in question is used as a programmatic key; its actual value matters to you for readability's sake, but the user doesn't know or care what its value is.

For #1, you should be using some sort of localizable message catalog (eg. gettext or Java property bundles) or config file and not hardcoding it as a constant. Almost all of these use strings as the message key; in gettext's case, they just happen to be fairly human-readable strings. Converting them to a constant merely goes from one suboptimal solution to another.

For #2, the particular string used is part of the internal API of the program. Coding it as a constant buys you a little in that you can get the compiler to check it for you and make sure you didn't make any typos. The difference is really the old static vs. dynamic language debate. In any case, changing the string value here should be considered a program refactoring and done the same way you would do any other refactoring.
generating random numbers seems right.. maybe they switch chips when accuracy matters, or maybe they don't care if some of the output gets mangled since the human can 'ignore' the mistakes.
The fact that it's not available in other countries doesn't have to do with technical limitations of the over-the-air functionality since you can just download books to your computer and copy them to the device over USB.

The problem is the same as it has been for other content distribution systems like iTunes, where the publishers/other big-brother-ish entity decide what Amazon (/Apple/whoever) can do with the content.

Amazon says to pengiun books (or whoever) "We want to put your books on the Kindle." and pengiun tells them where they can go... Eventually they start convincing people -- but start throwing 'Canada' and the like into the deal and it gets a lot harder.

In short, what I'm saying is that eventually Amazon will convince the powers-that-be that the kindle is a profitable business and they'd be stupid to continue ignoring potential sales in other countries... And that's when the rest of us will get it (wirelessly or otherwise).
> For example, 5 vehicles join together but only 2 keep their engines running but the power comes from all 5 vehicles' batteries equally.

Why is power-sharing interesting for electrical vehicles?

Yes, you want to avoid free-riders, but IIRC the efficiency of electrical motors isn't that dependent on load, at least for partial loads.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coand%C4%83_effect

http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/2450/urinal-101-aim...

http://ask.metafilter.com/8204/Urinal-Aiming#160007
W3C Workshop on the Future of Social Networking
I wonder if this design adds or detracts from aim:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/gojomo/3267808953/

(It may be decades before News.YC has another thread where this photo is topical!)
That last part was my first thought. Everything else about pop music is highly synthesized and scientifically produced. Why not the vocals?
Music is definitely in a rut and has been for years now. It's just part of the cycle. There is still good stuff being made, just as some companies prosper in a depression, but the overall industry is really stale.

It never stays that way for long though.
Will applying now affect future applications?
Why?

The scale of information they collect. I am paranoid. Google and other web services collect a LOT of data and I'm just not comfortable with it.

While I do not intend to stop using _all_ services altogether, I do plan to minimize it as much as practically feasible.

This includes using my own email (yes, the web-host/ISP, as the case may be, have some degree of access to it unless I set up my own hosting server)

Sanitising my search queries along with using random rotation proxies if possible. perhaps use TOR. This will depend on acceptable speed achievements. If it is too slow, I will think of other ways.

Blocking all _known_ google (and of course other services too) tracking applications, viz. Analytics, Feedburner, Adwords, Adsense etc

And others I'm still thinking about.
The wonderful thing about this story is that if it had happened a month ago, odds are that we'd be hearing about a pending bailout.
Indeed I do intend to. Perhaps either to help others who wish to do the same or just for those with academic interest.
Is there any place to get YC like advice and connections without the requirement of moving to Mountain View for 3 months?
IBM to laid-off staff: Go to India
They're getting a lot of traffic, but is it really a success; are people learning or getting or understanding the best answers to their questions?

Are there enough smarties (experienced smart programmers) on the forum to answer all the inane newbie (inexperienced programmers) questions? And if there's too many newbies it's possible that incorrect or sub-optimal answers will get voted up because there aren't enough smarties to realise what are optimal answers.
In one of the promo videos they demonstrated the TTS. The quality of the audio was robotic, so this feature does not really appeal to me.
For instance, three years after deployment, the production line is modified and the code must be adapted to suit the new configuration (which may contain devices that didn't exist when the code was orginally designed). Do you consider that maintenance?
Location Sharing: Yay or Nay?
The shape of the graph for grader.com is pretty close to the real thing (and eerily the same as Stackoverflow.com).

http://siteanalytics.compete.com/stackoverflow.com+grader.co...

(Which is surprising. Grader.com is nowhere near as useful).
Maybe you could have 3 processors running the same code. You could repeat any steps that resulted in disagreement between processors. If the 30x less power claim is true, you would still be saving ~10x the energy(Less than 10x due to repeated calculations and inter-processor communication).
If you want to be one of the first companies to use it email me sumon [at] snaptalent [dot] com
Transplanting with Mercurial
Naan Kadavul: Hey man, nice shot
Slumdog Millionaire: An overrated French poodle
"In a world where even a idiot can start a company, you will eventually end up with companies run by idiots."

Given that market forces determine which companies survive, if we eventually end up with companies run by idiots, it tells something about the rest of us too.
'Falling For Science': Obeying All The Signs
Firstly, forgive me for being a little antsy after you called me a nutjob. Perhaps if you take a step back, you will be able to imagine how your initial abrasive approach may invite uneasiness.

You seem to have decided, seemingly in retrospect, that the article was satire in its entirety. But, in the end I still walk away with the idea that you think people who disagree with mainstream ideas in economics are nutjobs. And, importantly, are in no way qualified to talk about them or think about them.

"I think you'd be hard pressed to actually make the case that my post represents an appeal to authority."

Well, lets see if I'm up for the challenge.

"Fiat currency is superior to the gold standard. Bankers are not evil. The Federal Reserve does a half decent job. Money is not debt. Debt isn’t even bad — the vast majority of it can be healthy. If you disagree with me, you are wrong, and a nutjob."

Is this an ironic punch-line? Or part of a pattern of defending the status quo established earlier?

"All you have to do is bring up topics like fiat currency, the gold standard, money creation, the Federal Reserve and inflation. It’s like walking into a southern church and bringing up evolution. (It’s not often I get to compare you guys to creationists.)"

See, earlier, you cited the same series of questions and compared those who disagree with the mainstream to creationists. (I think this is an unfair comparison, but that is another question entirely.) So, I think it that it is reasonable to interpret that as a component of your thesis.

Sandwiched in between these ideological statements are a few paragraphs about how the layman is not equipped to understand or discuss the ideas. This is what I read in telegraph form:

positions on economic theory STOP,
you are not equipped to disagree STOP,
therefore: positions of economic STOP.

Maybe you didn't mean to communicate this. But whatever your intention, I think you did end up saying it.

But, now, I realize I really have no idea what you actually meant. Maybe I am too foolish to understand; maybe your writing is imperfect. Oh well, I think we are all likely to survive to see tomorrow.

*

I feel pretty silly writing all of this nonsense without even mentioning economics. Is it reasonable to question whether mainstream economic hypotheses are valid?

I think so.

Firstly, professional economists disagree about everything you mentioned (especially the role of the Federal reserve and the wisdom of a fiat currency).

Secondly, consider the practitioners, who are under much more pressure to get it right than academics because the practitioners are subjected to real feedback. The practitioners are forced to discard poor ideas and routinely reject many mainstream academic hypotheses (like the efficient market hypothesis and the sanity of the Fed's inflationary bender).

Finally, these practitioners are frequently laymen. So, maybe there is hope for us. Maybe we can learn something by talking.

I think we can all learn a lot by talking more: nutjobs and all.
Hey Alex, thanks for feedback. For sure - we didn't anticipate anyone seeing that page. So look out for iterations over the next few weeks. Hard to optimize when you didn't anticipate being "hacker newsed!"
You don't pay the price you'd have to pay if it didn't have any advertisements either... In Montréal (at least) they even give some newspapers in the subway.
That's a great idea. Will see if I can create a "Version 2.0" of the article (wrote it a while ago) with some concrete examples and screenshots.
Apple's Flatland Aesthetic
If I recall correctly, the ~27k were not the easiest to lookup, but just the first 27k that the attacker looked up. He said he just got bored after that many.
No, they were stored as unsalted MD5 hashes.