skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't agree with your reason but am totally behind you when you say there should be a t&c page. I need to know how my user will be treated and if the founders care enough about my placing their trust in me etc.
Because in the real world, doctypes don't make any difference?

Don't get me wrong, I do understand where you are coming from- but when there is literally no actual change aside from what the first line of the document source looks like... I have a hard time getting too agitated about it.
I guess I can kind of see what you're saying, but where is it supposed to lead? The courts are never going to come to the conclusion that Congress passed a patent statute intending to make nothing whatsoever patentable because all patents cover only abstract ideas and abstract ideas are unpatentable.

I think part of the trouble may be that you're finding abstraction in patents and taking that to the conclusion that patents are nothing but abstraction. Take any given patent and you can find some degree of abstraction in it. The question is in some sense whether there is anything else there too, something concrete that nails down a particular invention as distinct from the underlying idea.

Is the point that it's an amorphous and nearly unintelligible criteria? Because that's certainly a fair argument. Nobody seems to know exactly what "abstract idea" really means in this context and the courts have been little help. But the same goes for half the laws on the books, so what else is new.
Facebook emailed me the same question 24 times in a month.
According to Wikipedia, it's probable that Lovelace's contributions are overrated; it would appear that Lady Ada has little claim to the title of "first computer programmer". [1] But if you're looking for a female computer hero, you're in luck: Grace Hopper developed the first compiler, popularized the term "debugging", and was an admiral in the Navy to boot. [2]

In 1952 she had an operational compiler.
"Nobody believed that," she said. "I had a
running compiler and nobody would touch it.
They told me computers could only do arithmetic."

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ada_lovelace#Controversy_over_...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grace_hopper
Something is proxying my whois queries, I don't see any of this and instead get Facebook's Markmonitor result.
I wonder how many of these total sales were to individuals who actually had a choice of OS?

I'm not sure it matters, for their purposes. They are people running Windows for developers to target, how they came to do so is largely irrelevant.
"List Games" -> Select #4. -> slow smile. :-)
You're right, the searching code should be updated to hide deleted results.

Don't expect companies to really delete anything- they have little incentive to do so.
was this influenced by the famous [well, back in the day] regexp in scheme post by that gun guy? [if not, you may find it interesting]

[edit: ok, so forgive my slow memory. it was olin shivers and ended up as http://www.scsh.net/docu/post/sre.html]

[edit2: gun context http://www.wanderings.net/notebook/Main/BitterAcknowledgment... (cannot find original); meant only in fond, amused recollection, although not personal, having never met him, of course.]
yep, lots of legal hurdles to go through – took us like 6 months – but now they have a full time opensource shepherd @cra which makes this much smoother
As a compiler guy, I found that reading a lot of type theory papers helped me really get into the CS theoretical mindset, which made reading mathematics papers a lot easier. Writing a lot of Haskell code didn’t hurt. Oleg Kiselyov has some fairly approachable papers, as do Simon Peyton-Jones and Daan Leijen. Try searching for things on Lambda the Ultimate[1] if you’re interested.

[1]: http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/
Listening to it really does bring up how there are almost no female characters in Foundation.
Dear fat,

This post comes off to me as cocky and untrue.

First, the general tone of this seems very pompous to me. To me, it reads: "I know so much that even building the most popular project on github and possibly of any library on the web can't teach me anything new." It might have been a little more gracious perhaps to thank people for using and contributing to the project...?

Also, you definitely learned something building bootstrap. I'm willing to bet you learned a lot of things between the few major version updates and 2,500+ issues, most of which are closed. In fact, here's a presentation that you made detailing something you learned from bootstrap (accessibility, specifically): http://wordsbyf.at/2012/05/21/jsconf-argentina-2012/

I'm really not trying to be that negative guy on hacker news, this was just my immediate reaction upon reading the post. That being said, congrats on building an immensely popular and important library, and here's to hoping that you learn and always continue learning.
"This code omits error checking in the interest of brevity and simplicity."

In the interest of brevity and simplicity, and at the cost of correctness and reliability - I understand the intent, but I believe that there is a balance to be struck on this for all code, whether example, prototype, or production.

Because sample code so very often chooses an extreme of that spectrum, it is easy for neophyte coders to end up thinking that is how all code should be written.
8-Bit Generation Documentary
Ask HN: Have you ever spammed on your competitors to get users/traction?
When you launched your startup (or while it was already running), did you spam your existing competitors to get users and some tractions? Was it useful or did you risk a legal action for spam?

We all need the airbnb story that spammed on craiglist during the first days, but what about other examples?
Are you sure you really want to maintain a VPS mail server? I've got a little shared hosting account priced at $7.50 / 3 month. (yes, thats ~$2.5/mo) that hosts email for about 25 domains.

I use the plesk control panel to setup addresses, forwards, and catchalls. Works like a charm.

The company is http://www.stablehost.com.

Disclaimer: I am oa customer of theirs. Just pushing them because they are cheap and reliable. No affiliate links.
I was thinking the same thing. All I've learned is how much power/draw the Twitter name has.
...if you can verify a boolean answer in polynomial time, you can always find the solution in polynomial time too, after all there are only two possible solutions so you need to verify only one to find the answer.

It doesn't work that way. The common characteristic of NP-complete problems is that there are an exponential number of possible solutions, but verifying that a purported solution is a solution takes only polynomial time.

For example consider SAT (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boolean_satisfiability_problem for more). This is the problem of deciding whether there is a set of possible variable values that make a given Boolean equation evaluate to True. For an equation of length n there are in general O(n) variables, and therefore 2^O(n) possible sets of true/false values that the variables can have. So a brute force search takes exponential time.

But if you give me an equation, AND a set of values for the variables that you claim will result in the final expression evaluating to True, I can verify it in time O(n).

Does that answer your question?
This is eerily similar to the biology on the planet of Lusitania in the Ender's Game series book 'Xenocide' in which every remaining species has a two part life cycle which is the result of an virus's effect on two previously separate species. They start as one form, die and are reborn into another form.
I often set my user agent to iPad so that I'm served <video> elements whose src attribute is a direct (cURLable) link.
I think the content makes up for the eye-injuring theme. There was some Scala talk recently with nice ideas.
A microalgae lamp that absorbs CO2
If you have time, it might be worth checking out if you can contribute to VXConnectbot, which seems to be the most maintained fork
Playing music louder and dimming the lights to reduce visibility is a technique used to make a place seem busier than it actually is.

I once visited a restaurant that appeared to be using this technique when we were the only people in the entire place (~7500 square foot space). I literally had to lean across the table to shout at a coworker because he couldn't hear what I was saying otherwise.
That's coming from a developer that lost it's business because RMS told him on the show he hosted (Linux Action Show) that he was imoral because he was developing proprietary software, so he decided to GPL his applications and ask for donations. Now he's working for a development company because he couldn't make a living from donations.
Google Apps for Business- No longer Free
Agreed. As a Bowdoin alum, this showed exactly what I'd expect from a great liberal arts college. But perhaps that's its value, for the parent concerned about their kid's choice of a "soft" major.
This reasoning only makes since if most porn sites are trying to avoid being blocked. I can't imagine why this would be so.
Holiday Gifts We Want (Maximum PC)
The decision problem is formulated something like "Is there a hamiltonian path of at most length n" for different n. You can get the actual answer by polling the algorithm that answers the decision problem using a binary search plugging in different values for n (since there is a maximum number of possible paths through a graph with a certain number of nodes)
YES, YOUR MAJESTY!
VXConnectbot
Awesome, after language and dbs I was waiting for Hickey to get down to the OS level.
VXConnectBot - please contribute!
Good post describing the thought process involved in selecting a language. It is interesting to see that the choice boils down to having resident experts and the ability to steer/train the team quickly. I wonder what the decision would be if the entire team was open to using the best available language even without resident experts in that language. For APIs my biased decision would be node.js using CoffeeScript.
A Little More Re: Writing For Free – Whatever
If you want to talk simultaneous execution games, the original computerized version is probably RoboSport, a 1991 Maxis game.

The mechanic is deep enough that it can still be fun to play a few rounds with a friend, despite the utter simplicity of the game.
Block Disposable Email Addresses
Rackspace cloud has servers in the UK.

http://www.rackspace.co.uk/cloud-hosting/
UN proposal to grant all govs equal 'rights' in managing Internet withdrawn
You're already on a cloud system, so you have to have a plan in place for your instance to up and disappear without warning. If your instance has an unplanned outage of any kind, you kill it and spawn a new one. You may as well use libeatmydata and reap the performance benefit.
Given the error message I received I think yes to the first :)

RECEIVED MESSAGE "Quota Exceeded. Please see http://code.google.com/apis/websearch.

HUMAN READABLE: "Mountainview, we have a problem."

ADVICE: A quota error indicates a temporary overload due to high demand. Please retry later.
I'm all for funding 40k pounds (~65k USD) for VLC (they deserve it), but 40k under the guise of Metro seems a bit much, no?
Bit of a spoiler for the previous novel in the series, that.
Easily collect and manage video feedback for video editors
If a problem is NP complete then there is an algorithm to solve it in nondeterminstic polynomial time. Any nondet algorithm can be transformed to an exp poly time algorithm (just run through each of your poly time algorithms one by one) so showing CLIQUE has an exp algorithm doesn't help at all. We want a lower bound.
Sorry I was referring to iGoogle - and it is still alive, but to be retired after November 1, 2013. Personally I like the idea of a dashboard - I just dont see it as a killer product.

What Yahoo really needs is a GMail, a Facebook, or even a Pininterest - something that will engage with a large proportion or majority of web users every single day. Unfortunately Yahoo has lost on Search, Email, Social, and even managed to screw up Photo Sharing (even after buying the leading site Flickr).
check it out. looks pretty cool and their import to final cut pro feature alone makes the price worth it.
You're missing the point of his post - he was saying that while path recalculation exists, it's hard to make an AI that makes proper choices when it comes to following the current path and creating a new path - especially when it's opponent can also modify the available paths in the future.
Perhaps you have also uncovered the true cause of the problems with the Nexus 4 launch.
The Nonexistent Facebook Democracy Is Now Gone for Good
Because in the real world, doctypes don't make any difference?

Really? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quirks_mode#Comparison_of_docum...
My cached results seem to have a cname of "star.c10r.facebook.com", which works:

Non-authoritative answer:
Name: star.c10r.facebook.com
Addresses: 2a03:2880:10:8f01:face:b00c:0:1
31.13.72.23
Aliases: www.facebook.com
The Computer History Museum in Mountain View spent 2 years fully restoring a DEC PDP-1. You can go see it - I don't even think you need to pay for admission to the museum.

During the presentation, they load Spacewar! from paper tape, and two members of the audience can battle it out.

It's pretty amazing to play one of the first graphical computer games ever, on a computer first released 50 years ago.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spacewar!#Spacewar.21_today
Mating between two different speciecs? Rather carying over significant dna of the host inside the parasite that grew out of it.

There are a lot of the winged insects that lay egs inside other insects. Maybe some freakish viral infection long time ago carried over lots of dna of the host into the parasite egg.

It's still insane but at least it's imaginable.
My god, a college that has a larger Math department than a CS department! What a wonderful place that must be.
Ancient virus DNA thrives in us
Well, no, this is not too much.

This is an excellent question.

Designing a UI above VLC for Metro is quite easy, and we've already done some proof of concept. Finding a designer would be simple and 1k$ for the project would be too much already :) It would take a couple of months and be done with it.

The issue is to get on the store. And this is hard.

Why is that?

VLC (and its underlying libraries, including codecs, networking and demuxers) represents around 7M LoC of C, C++ and ASM. All of this is very C99 code and inline ASM. Visual Studio cannot eat that in any way. Believe me, we tried. A lot.
So we need to compile the VLC for Windows on Linux, using gcc+mingw.

Unfortunately, this does not work on WinRT ("Modern UI" or whatever you like to call it). WinRT restricts a lot the Win32 APIs. And only Visual Studio knows which ones. Oh, and the BSD sockets are gone...

So, we need to change and update the toolchain, fix MingW for WinRT, rewrite the code that is using Win32 APIs since 10 years (and in all underlying libraries too...), write a new UI above this, fix the code using HWND for rendering, port the audio and video outputs, work-around the sandbox for DVD playback, probably write a WinSock2 replacement library to build all the cross-platform libraries that expect a BSD-socket-like library, etc...

Add to that the need to modify MingW to output dlls that we can load on ARM (Windows RT) and fix all the same different APIs for WP8.

Of course a lot of the work is not really on VLC, but on being able to compile for WinRT with open source tools, and a lot will be re-usable.

So, yes, we will need quite a few developers, and therefore money.
Consider that what you are seeing in him is actually something about yourself that you can't be with.
Wine already runs many windows binaries, without modification, on linux. Often times when wine does not work on a given binary, the issue can be resolved by patching wine, again without touching the binary. It seems like it should be relatively easy for someone who can modify the binary source code to resolve any bugs that wine runs into (probably exposes subtle flaws in the game code in the prosses).
The other issue I can think of is performance, but my sense is that the win32 API pipe is not a bottleneck in almost any program, so that is likely not an issue.
"If you need extra data to prove this "yes" in polynomial time, then the answer isn't a boolean anymore, but a boolean plus the extra data, so how can you still call that a yes/no problem?"

You are combining two distinct concepts: the answer and the 'evidence'. The answer to an NP-complete problem is always Yes or No. But, we say that we can "verify" a decision problem in polynomial time if, given an answer AND evidence, we can check that the answer is true.

For concreteness: the k-clique problem (determining if there's a clique of at least size k in a graph) is hard. But, if somebody told us the answer was Yes, and gave us appropriate evidence (say, a set of k nodes in the graph which form a clique), verifying would be easy.
Economists end up in law all of the time because economics and law are so tightly knit, particularly antitrust/competition policy.

In my undergraduate thesis I looked at what causes schools to graduate more or less economics majors, and the most important factor is the existence of a business school at the university. If a school does not have a business school, like at a lot of top ranked liberal arts schools, students flock to the economics major.

As a former economics PhD student, I've seen first hand the breadth of fields that economists end up in. From professors in a law school, to FTC economists, to public policy and healthcare, economists will always end up in a diverse set of fields. That's the nature of economics -- it does not teach you a set of facts. Instead, it teaches you how to solve problems. Whether anyone wants to admit it or not, every industry has problems that boil down to raw economics.
Yeah, I pretty much have given up on finding a local cofounder. My location doesn't help either I'm on the the central coast (California). Right smack in the middle, about 4-5 hours away from The Bay and 3 hours away from L.A.
I think the point he was trying to get across was this: "Getting together and creating something with your friends is amazing"
Actually he never used Ubuntu as his main distro, just for reviews. He's main distro is Arch.
What I Learned from reading "What I Learned Building Twitter Bootstrap.": Unironic "brogramming" is still alive and well. What a slap in the face of the community that made bootstrap successful.
This was submitted a few month ago (4 points, 3 comments): http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4334906

I will quote a comment that I made that time (beacuse I don't want to write the same thing again):

This article doesn't have any scientific base.

Insect have exoskeleton so they can't grow like ducks or bats. They have to make a series of metamorphosis to grow. Usually the form for change from one stage to the next step, because they are adapted to different lifestyle. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metamorphosis#Insect_metamorpho.... .

Butterflies are one of the most well known and extremes cases of changes. The caterpillar shape is adapted to eat a lot and be camouflaged, the butterfly shape is adapted to travel and mate. (Both shapes share the same general blueprint. For example, if you see a caterpillar carefully, it has only 6 small real legs in the front, and some prolegs in the back.)
DNA transfer in higher life forms occurs far more frequently than the geneticists of 60 years ago could have suspected.

Astonishingly, only 1.5% of the genetic material in our cells codes for human life. Half of the rest is sometimes described as "junk DNA" with no known function, and the other half consist of genes introduced by viruses and other parasites.

[http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-17809503]
Russia withdraws Internet regulation push, apparently under ITU pressure
Seconded. Lovelace deserves some place in the history books, but her pre-eminence doesn't do those of us concerned with gender justice in computing any good.

Grace Hopper, on the other hand, is a badass by any measure.
OK, let me rephrase. "The HTML5 doctype and XHTML Transitional doctypes do not make any meaningful difference".

Luckily, we are long past the days of quirks mode if we just remember to set a decent doctype.
I think that SUSE are trying to differentiate themselves by supporting Btrfs, which is a nice move on their part. Btrfs extensive features can be very useful in quite a few scenarios, so its wider adoption is more than welcome. I know quite a few people that have been longing for ZFS's functionality for years and Btrfs provides the most important (IMHO) ones.

For some time Btrfs has been rapidly stabilizing and I expect the other distros to jump ship and provide support as well.
My opinion about RMS is very simple. He did a incredible job by creating the GPL license and funding the GNU project, but in the modern world he needs to get out of his cavern and at least try the things he rant about, after he tried and realized that it really isn't good he can say anything about it.

I can't hear a person that wants anarchism for the open source community and reads sites by wget'ing them. After he tries things for himself instead of just hearing about them I'll start to hear him again.
I wasn't promoting poor workplace behavior or corporate culture. Fortunately, HN doesn't have enough layers to simulate a cubicle farm.

Rather something analogous to an ideal workplace in a slightly Platonic sense. Thus, treating others decently carries more weight because it facilitates their productivity.
There's actually an PDP-1 easter egg in this one, just search for space and it takes you to a HTML5 version of the original screen / vector graphics.
"There's an old stereotype about black people not shutting up in a movie theater. There's a lot of truth to it, but it's not just black people, and it's not just in movie theaters."

That seems like a strangely incendiary way of saying there's a lot of people who don't know when to be quiet....
Touristing through Texas, I visited the Caverns of Sonora. You're taken through the caverns in a group, and at the nadir the guide turns the lights off so you can hear what it's like in the dark cavern. My otherwise-quiet tour group (all Americans bar me) went absolutely nuts with the chatter when the lights went off. It seemed less about 'talk to alleviate nervousness' and more 'teacher's not watching, let's yammer!'. Lights went on and the chatter reduced again. It was very, very weird.
The "reel to reel" was still faster than the old cassette player I had hooked up to my old TRS-80.
You are describing EC2. Most other providers do provide proper persistence.
OS share slide from Mary Meeker's presentation last week showing that changing rapidly: http://static2.businessinsider.com/image/50bd70c96bb3f73b0e0...
'Library Rules' also include things like "you're only allowed to be on the computers for 15 minutes" and "Storytime is at 2pm". Libraries have changed over the years.
Wow, holy hell. I admit I skimmed TFA; I'd assumed that the folks got lost somewhere in the bush _near_ Mildura. That's just not good.
This is old. You can see this on most big company whois lookups. It is just subdomains that show up since whois just pulls everything with the domain name in it.
Yes, that's what he is saying, every CLIQUE algorithm takes at least exponential time.
I'd love to see a widget that would let you display and toggle between two versions of the code on a webpage:

* a first version illustrating the core concepts

* a second more complex version aimed at showing proper coding practices including comments showing where you can have performance or security issues.

It would be a nice addition to the many source code beautifiers/formatters out there.
I was expecting this: http://cl.ly/image/2g1Z3K143X34

Quota exceeded :)
I found one nugget: “You want very small, tight teams, same thing with running an engineering department.”

I can think of reasons why you'd want that, but yeah the article wasn't about making that point.