skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: What version of BlackBerry JDE to use?
Hello. I am seeking a recommendation on what version of the BlackBerry JDE to use. The video http://www.blackberry.com/DevMediaLibrary/view.do?name=java, at around 3:20 or so, correlates device model to JDE version. Is there a good source of data for installed base of each device model? Thanks!
Just as I am reviewing Sipser, this shows up. On that note - is anyone on HN interested in creating a CS theory online study group? You see, I've had an interest in the "important, hard problems" of our field for a very long time now: both the "is P == NP ?" and "How do you make something people want?", but in this post I'd like to address the first one. I used to toy with the idea of going to grad school, becoming a hermit, and just studying complexity theory for the next 10 years, but since then I've become somewhat disenchanted with the allure of grad school. However, I still want to know what is wrong with all the purported proofs listed here:

http://www.win.tue.nl/~gwoegi/P-versus-NP.htm

What do you guys think?
I can't tell if this advice is intended for technical matters or a general sense. In real life, a person is going to have a lot of real identities (that can be actively ignored by that person, but not so easily dispensed with.) The same person might be a father, an accountant, a divorcee, an alcoholic, a cancer-survivor, a member of an ethnic group, a 45-year-old, etc, etc, and all of these will inevitably effect that person's mental state and behavior.

A relative of mine voted for BHO because she thought he would be "good for teachers". Lots of people think this way. A friend of mine loved a previous governor because he was "good for divorced fathers". Public policy is a huge subject, but people will throw away every consideration for a specific connection. People who don't play this game (or play it badly [1]) become the victims, rather than the benefactors, of a massive bureaucracy.

The advice is, in fact, really bad advice (if intended generally). It amounts to: Don't stick up for yourself.

[1] The two examples I mentioned were playing it very badly, for instance.
More important than technical accuracy, I knew what he meant.
I think that the point of the article is not to "Keep Your Identity Small", but to not be a jerk about it. "Which topics engage people's identity depends on the people, not the topic." People's actions are not the result of their beliefs, but themselves. The topic of conflict, religion (one of your examples), is only the medium. To rephrase, people decide when to fight, the people's beliefs are only a push. With enough discipline, a hardcore religious person can avoid a religious war.

> Most people reading this will already be fairly tolerant. But there is a step beyond thinking of yourself as x but tolerating y: not even to consider yourself an x. The more labels you have for yourself, the dumber they make you.

From what I can tell, Mr. Graham, you make the assumption that identity ('labels') itself is bad and should be minimized. I disagree. Identity, whatever the kind, serves the purpose of providing a person a sense of self. In other words, identity helps create a sense of belonging and protection. Forming an identity is like entering a family.

* Whether that family is good or not is subjective.

Mr. Graham, using your religion metaphor, a religion does provide many useful outcomes. After the Civil War and into Reconstruction, there was massive economic turmoil. There was a large debt to be paid, the sharecropping 'trap', the Financial Crisis of 1837. During that time, a lot of churches were formed. Essentially, the purpose of those churches is to provide emotional relief from the horrid state of the Union. These churches were a coping mechanism for the people. Generally, they worked. People formed a religious identity with the people they were with. Religion provided comfort. Identity is not always bad.

As a political example, in 1860, a party known as the Populist Party was formed. It was composed of farmers and the Grange. These people formed this 'Populist Party' identity because they all faced common problems: long hours, a cycle of debt, and control by monopolies. In a short span of time, the spread their identity and 4 million people joined the movement. They promoted the idea of a 8 hour work week, direct federal loans, and graduated tax rates. Many of these ideas are implemented today. Political identity provided people a voice. Their identity is beneficial to many people today.

* This came from my U.S. History notes from class.

Mr. Graham, I agree with you that social identity causes many problems, but it also provides many benefits. Please do not dismiss identity as completely harmful.

I am sorry if I offended anyone. Downvote me if you wish.
Depends what your niche is. Do you manage a petabyte cluster? All of a sudden, everything that used to be "complexity theory" becomes "complexity practice".
This essay reminds me of this bollywood song:

Bulla Ki Jaana

Not a believer inside the mosque, am I
Nor a pagan disciple of false rites
Not the pure amongst the impure
Neither Moses, nor the Pharoh

Bulleh! to me, I am not known
...
Secrets of religion, I have not known
From Adam and Eve, I am not born
I am not the name I assume
Not in stillness, nor on the move

Bulleh! to me, I am not known

Full lyrics: http://www.lyricsmode.com/lyrics/r/rabbi_shergill/bulla_ki_j...

Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pTxZy32Fv_0
You've never been to a pink floyd show on mushrooms...
Wow, now that's a really fantastic post. Make me want to shut down my computer and do some yoga. I think my computer use is giving me a chronic cough, too. I don't smoke or drink ever.
Game of Life text and image generator generator
Why those three types and not others?
I certainly do agree that for most entrepreneurs machine learning is much more useful than computational complexity theory. However, I figured there might be some people on HN who would like to learn a bit more about complexity, and hence I submitted the URL, not because it's extremely useful, but because it's very interesting.
To be means to be something - ie have and identity. Your identity depends upon what you are and what you make of yourself. If you seek your identity from others, then conflicting discussions of religion and politics can be seen as an assault on your identity.

If you are self defined, you prefer that others see you as you are. However, if they don't, its their loss not yours. You are still what you are.

If you are other defined, you have no identity of your own. You have taken it piecemeal from those around you. Your identity has been diminished to a singularity that can be attacked by a single conflicting opinion. What you are becomes deeply threatened.
Interesting story Palish...how is your startup coming along btw?
No, I don't think we are talking about the same kind of complexity here. Complexity Theory is exactly the opposite of real world pragmatism. It is about the asymptotic behaviors of algorithms and the resources need to solve certain class of problems such as Traveling Salesman or Min-Set-Cover.
That's true. I think lst makes that point somewhere, and gets downvoted for it. What is your opinion of the poll, in terms of pushing the HN community towards being able to talk about such things well?
You need to find the thing that distinguishes you from your peers. My story is undoubtedly different than yours, but I'll share parts; perhaps it can help you.

I went to college on a military scholarship. After four years of school, I spent 6 years in the military. Three critical things came from those years: contacts, credibility and experience.

After a couple tours, the military's plans for my career and my own ideas didn't sync up. I left and used a contact to land a nice job doing exactly what I wished. I floated my resume around, but serious offers only came from those I knew. I got other offers, but they were in a different class.

I've been with the same organization for several years. It's awesome. I get calls occasionally from those old contacts, asking if I'm ready to move on yet. I'm not, but when I do, I'm unlikely to "hit the market." I'll make a few calls, express some interest and find a home.

I'll say this: your technical skills alone will not land you the _awesome_ work. There are plenty who (claim to) have the same skills; in the world we live in, it's very difficult to distinguish between us and charlatans without experience. For me, the military provided the contacts and touch of reassurance a hiring manager needs to make a decision.

You need to find your distinguisher. If you don't have one, make it. The other comments here provide plenty of ideas how you can do so.
It's inherent to TCP's exponential backoff, which means any one connection's throughput follows a sawtooth pattern, pushing to use more capacity, then falling back after lost packets. The gaps between the 'teeth' are suboptimal utilization.

Multiple TCP connections improve things as long as each connection's 'teeth' aren't aligned. Consumer broadband asymmetry makes it worse, because when one direction gets saturated (like an uplink) and loses ACK packets on connections that are primarily downward, the downward side still backs off, even if it wasn't yet close to using downward capacity.

Your example of getting full capacity from a LAN link isn't very instructive for what happens over broadband links. Suppose your NIC supports 100Mbps and every link to your LAN destination has at least that capacity. Your NIC will be the bottleneck; you won't trigger the TCP mechanisms. As soon as your 100Mbps local link hits your 10Mbps cable modem, the TCP congestion control becomes a significant factor.
Worst case they will lose a few comments and some karma.

I think the worse case is actually substantially worse -- call it an identity escalation attack. I think a huge number of Internet users are vulnerable to it:

a) Use any means you please to compromise the password on a low-security site, such as HN.

b) Use the same login credentials at other low-security sites, such as Facebook and Twitter. These compromises are valuable in their own right, but what you are really looking for is the email address.

c) After you have their email address, compromise it using variations on the same password you already know.

d) You can now read their email. Search for "statement", and identify which bank they bank with. Go to bank and try logging in with their email and password. That probably just worked. If not, click "lost password", supply email address and their security question (you have their Facebook already or can in seconds, how hard will it be to find their mother's maiden name or middle school?), and enjoy.

e) For added fun, look for other high-value accounts whose security is premised on the email user being authorized, such as brokerages (a tough target due to strong institutional controls, like banks) and GoDaddy (a successful compromise would cost me FAR more than what I have in my bank account).

The worst part? You can automate large portions of this attack (given a list of usernames and password, writing a script to try them at a dozen or a hundred popular services is child's play) and outsource the rest right up until the "compromise bank account" portion.
Derren Brown beats 9 chess players simultaneously.
nice game!
Even more broadly, when was the last big idea in academia? Yes, they've mapped the human genome and all that, but that's just grunt work, not a big idea that lead to new fruitful research. I don't know a lot about the different disciplines, but it seems like math is running out of steam, so I've heard from a PhD student who switched to CS.
The real issue is whether the identities conflict. It doesn't hurt my marriage to know that your marriage is great. Meanwhile, knowing someone is a proud follower of the One True Way threatens your identity as a member of the One True-Er Way.

Though if you both happen to be members of the same True Way, starting a conversation about religion and politics can be incredibly beneficial. I know seeing a bunch of Ayn Rand books on a friend's shelf boosted our relationship immensely.
Pardon my ignorance, but what's specifically wrong with the HN site on the iPhone? I've been accessing it since the first gen iPhone came out, and I haven't noticed any problems.
Perl.com is no longer maintained.
Actually, that is exactly what I am talking about. The implication was that problems like that do show up in "real-life" coding, and while brute-force solutions for those problems work for very small n, you need to recognize the fact that those problems do not have reasonable solutions in general, and you should know how to approximate the solutions (in the technical sense of "approximation"), and furthermore know enough complexity theory to know the situations where even an approximation will not have a reasonable solution.

For example, I believe that the problem of creating optimal schedules for high school students is NP-Complete (optimal in the sense that it will satisfy all of the students' preferences for electives, and all of the teachers' preferences for the classes they want to teach).

Yes, I admit that the example will never involve petabytes of data. That doesn't invalidate my original point though.
The problem is that "subscriber" is supposed to equate to "person", but it does not. In email marketing this works because we have a person identifier (the email address). There is no similar identifier for feed. What that means is that out of TechCrunch's 100,000 subscribers, I as an individual represent 5+ subscribers (once on Google Reader, once on bloglines, once on NewsGator, once with NetNewsWire at home, once at NetNewsWire at work). I am a pretty typical TechCrunch subscriber so it is possible the number of "people" is actually 20% of the number of "subscribers".

Do typical TechCrunch subscribers subscribe using five different feed readers? I don't subscribe to it anymore (I do follow @techcrunch on Twitter though - TC posts too often for my feed reading habits) but when I did I used, well, one feed reader. I assume that is pretty typical. Besides, your e-mail example doesn't work either if someone has five e-mail addresses!

Going off of the stats on several of my feeds (ranging from 18,000 "subscribers" down to about 1000) I see that in most cases Google Reader accounts for 50%-70% of subscribers. The numbers Google provide should be pretty accurate.. and so while there might be a slightly inaccurate swing in the remaining 30%, if the Google Feedfetcher number is showing 10,000 subscribers, I am pretty much guaranteed that's 10,000 unique Google users.

As a publisher with a significant audience for my niche, I find the subscriber count very useful and it provides much of the reason why I've stayed with FeedBurner despite the issues. It makes it easy for me to prove I'm the biggest in my niche because the closest people have counts over 30% lower than mine.. and I can't see the swing being that much considering how popular Google Reader is now.
Both participants need to identify strongly. If two guys strongly identify over the same woman there will be trouble with any talk about her. People fight over sporting teams, but you can ask a fan about the season without conflict if you don't identify with the sport.
I think the problem your friend is doing it that he/she thinks people will draw conclusions from his identity.

I'm Swedish. But it doesn't mean that I'll defend Sweden in a war against Norway. I have very little more in common with the Swedes who lives on the border to Norway then the Norwegians who live on the border to Sweden. However, I'm Swedish - I grew up there and I have my cultural heritage from there. That's not wrong - it's just fact
I'm sorry you get downvoted so much for your views. They are interesting and you conduct yourself well. So, feel encouraged.
An upside to the global credit crunch for Silicon Valley
There are lots of people looking for freelance Rails developers. You need to engage with the community more somehow to ferret them out.
Two years ago on News.YC, I posted a well-received* four page article by the author here. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20032 It summarizes the essence of founding Tripod and his "I'm not smart, just hard working" attitude more than Gabrielle's blog post does.

(*Of course, back then, 40 upvotes was incredible.)
This is one of my favorite PG essays because it's applicable to anyone. I think the opposite is also valid though - an identity that encompasses all. If you think about it, it gives you the same power of objectivity as not letting anything in.
Ask HN: Which company do you wish had a developer API?
There is an abundance of data that could be useful to developers, but that is not available yet. Which company do you wish had an API?
Here's some unsolicited advice for anybody: a) build the product b) charge money for it c) get to ramen profitable. Then you can try asking for investment again. If they say yes this time, great. If not, you are in a pretty good situation for continuing development and proceeding down the boring path of taking money from people.

Go far enough down that path and you'll have to beat off investors with a stick.

[Edit to add: It is really scandalously cheap to get something on the Internet these days if you have a programmer on board. People used to cite "thousands" of dollars a lot, and thousands is a darn low number compared with "real" businesses. If someone was asking me for advice I'd say its much easier to do if you have "hundreds" but I have empirical experience that it is possible with "tens".]
A couple of my professors at Rutgers did something like this in advanced classes, albeit at the end of the course.
And yet. And yet Harry Potter says that Voldemort isn't the only evil, that the Ministry that Harry's expecting to take care of him is just as awful in that it hides facts to raise morale. And yet, part of the moral of the book is that if you fight for what's right, there's a chance you're killed for your beliefs. And yet, the father-figure is revealed in the end to be a racist and a bigot and partly a coward. Some of the villains go unpunished. Some innocent people are tortured and killed. The moral of Harry Potter might be that good wins in the end, yeah, but it absolutely offers ambiguity. Never with Harry, but with other people. And that's fine, literarily speaking: it makes Harry and Voldemort into foils, into pure good and pure evil, and from there you can debate the exact nature of good and evil. The story's deeper than it lets on because it's so well written (for the most part) that you can ignore a lot of what's going on because it puts itself very subtly into the background.

Furthermore, it ended a lot of the publication limits on what constitutes kid's literature. Suddenly the stories don't have to all end happily ever after, lengthy series with big books are acceptable, and heavily political and religious themes are allowed. That's big: it let kid's lit writers have a lot more respect for their work.
Many years prior to his "Last Lecture", Randy was Pausch was first famous for his Time Management lecture. I posted the video here 8 days ago.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=459095
This confluence of religion and politics was especially prominent in the recent gay marriage debate.

Really, the entire issue revolves around the word "marriage" having a dual meaning in a religious sense and a (government) civil contract sense. When the government "redefines" civil marriage (e.g. with the inclusion of interracial couples), religious organizations can still retain their own definitions of marriage.

If the government had originally had all couples register as "civil unions" and optionally marry in churches, then surprisingly this debate may never have occurred -- it is purely semantical.
"I finally realized today why politics and religion yield such uniquely useless discussions."

In the context of HN or other topic specific forums your points are valid. Check your guns at the door.
But isn't that always the case? In the 1300s, very few people were composers of great music, or writers of great plays. Very few people wanted great music or great plays. That's nothing new: it's necessary for high culture to always appeal to a significantly slimmer portion of society, because it requires an effort on the part of the experiencer.

I'd argue that now more people are in high culture than ever before because, for the first time in history, when I wanted to learn about old music I could research critics and torrent vast swathes of music and listen to three albums a day and develop a sort of standard for what I like. That was never possible before.
Recession? No, It's a D-process, and It Will Be Long
>Lately I've been stuck thinking credentials are supremely important. I'm happy that people can challenge this and become successful!

Credentials are supremely important. For every plucky kid who does something like this and succeeds, there are a hundred plucky kids that try something like this and still don't get accepted.
My doctor. Or my hospital. Or pretty much anyone in healthcare.
One in Three Broadband Subscribers is a Pirate
There's already emphasis on that in society. You'll find that the weakest-minded people are all socialites who exercise and obsess to get their work done. Schools are littered with "all-American students" who try to be as generically happy as possible. It makes finding actually bright kids a pain.

The problem is that the counterculture rejects that stuff - partly because it's true that a lot of people who do all that are shallow and annoying. (The counterculture's just as bad, of course.) If you drop out and eat too much and don't make friends, you're bucking the trend, you're rebelling. That's how it is among a lot of younger kids, anyway: past a certain point obesity is just a matter of not caring enough to keep care of yourself.
Does Hacker News absolutely make you less productive? Yeah, you're not getting work done right now, but you're debating people, you're teaching yourself to write out good arguments, and you're reading a ton of articles, some of which are bound to fascinate or teach you.
Out of interest, how do you know which posts in the feed get the most attention?

Do you include an invisible 1x1 picture in each RSS item so you get that data? (That would have been my first idea)
The people who don't use RSS don't care enough about information to use a site like this. That's largely true if not entirely. Furthermore, obsessive gamers are more likely to use RSS. It's progressed enough to be commonplace amongst nerds.

I would use this site if it offered RSS. I will not use it because I don't care enough to visit a web site on my own, without prompting.
To be fair, if we publish 500,000 books a year now, less than 100 will be interesting. ;-)
Meta-Politics(Religion) is another way to talk about it, like PG's essay did.
I would suggest that. I was applying for a job at my college doing programming work for a website and database. One of the questions was whether or not I had a personal website, which I didn't. I did not end up with that job.

A website will make you more professional. Let's say I come across your blog. If I read more than a few entries, it would probably be that I was interested in your writing. Since your writing sounds technical, your blog might make me interested in having you work for me (assuming that I was in a position where I was managing people). Well, if your blog was on a website, I would be able to find out a lot more about you. And things like a resume and a project portfolio might convince me that I wanted to contact you.

So basically my point is that a website related to your work and career will help you market yourself and build relationships with other people. Not everyone will be looking for programmers, but it at least gets your name out to more people.