skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Why would you consider unfair to call logic thinking as mathematical thinking? Maybe it is the engineering background indeed, at least it is for myself. Maybe it was all those "engineering math" mandatory courses... you know, calculus, differential equations, linear algebra, statistics. If we keep thinking about math in terms of some sort of computation which ought to result in a numeric answer... then, absolutely, I agree that has nothing to do with logic.

However, least see what happens when one does not apply mathematical thinking into his own reasoning. I do it myself from time to time and refer to it as my "rat intelligence". You go over and over the facts, one at a time, trying to figure out the way out... It feels pretty much like a rat walking through a maze inside of my brain.

But it comes to a point, when the problem is very hard, that no matter how many times the rat goes over and over the same data, it does not find the answer. In that case you need a superior type of reasoning. You need to step aside and look at the problem as a whole. To find patterns that you can abstract out and rephrase the problem in a way more tractable. And I think in this broader sense logic and math use the same type of mental tools (principles) to attack the same issues.
Maybe, but would it retain its real worth?
Wrong Tomorrow - holding pundits accountable for predictions
Whereas google ad-words tests work well for web-based consumer products, this guy advocates 400 cold calls/month for an analogous test in building the right enterprise software app.
Unfinished X-Men Movie a Hit On BitTorrent
SGI killed themselves, just took a long time to die.

They had geniuses working in their graphics side, and when they decided some 15 years ago that "Unix was dead" and WinNT was the future, those geniuses left for Nvidia and other places. SGI never recovered and ended up reselling supercomputers with ATI cards in them.
I voted this up because of the title.
1. Proper grammar. 2. Proper spelling. 3. Proper punctuation

C'mon , give the guy a break ...
Bellard is one of my programming super heroes.
Well, frameworks go a long way but they don't help with the pains in the CSS area. When supporting IE6 you're generally limiting yourself to the capabilities of that browser. And for any non-trivial site you will run into hard problems regularly, unless you're leaving HTML behind entirely (ExtJS, Flash).
I think lumping all of Mathematics together in this context is mistaken.

It amounts to arguing that arithmetic is as relevant to programming as discrete mathematics are.
Faith-Based Development
Because you build better software when you put the compile in God's hands.
Any feeling why llvm gets the call over pcc? Certainly a lot of energy going into llvm.
The obligatory Aleph One article:

"Smashing the stack for fun and profit" http://www.phrack.com/issues.html?issue=49&id=14&mod...
Designing to Sell
nope, just php. If it turns out to get some hits I might, rebuild it on the App Engine with python, but for now I just wanted to test the idea.
Problem with Open Textbooks: They are Free
I'm actually pleasantly surprised at the amount of skepticism people are showing towards the defenses of GS around the web.
Facebook’s Problem is the Management
Jeff Atwood posts more anti-intellectual drivel. News at 11.
#4 nails it, but I see it slightly differently: Hackers don't realize that while what they do is easy for them, it is immensely difficult for the common person.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=229067

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=524856

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13218
Indeed, it's a re-post, but it's always one I'm happy to read again from time to time. :)
I am wondering if we end up with more than one c compiler. For the OS and base stuff, done with a compiler that is verifiable. For other more performance-demanding applications, something that compiles to faster code, but is not as verifiable.
That raises an interesting question, doesn't it? I wonder how many mathematicians turn out to be good programmers vs how many philosophers turn out to be good programmers?
Hadn't thought of that, but it sounds extremely useful.

I imagine a heatmap would be more applicable to a SOS-type message though, like say during a national disaster or other such catastrophic events. Search / rescue would be a lot easier, faster and more successful with a GPS position.

Not at all being sarcastic - it sounds like an idea well worth running with.
Ironic in light of http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/03/22/the-nasty-exploding-ter...
Ask HN: What's in it for the author of Conficker?
I was reading that Microsoft is offering $250,000 for information leading to the author of the Conficker virus. So, why would someone write such a thing and put themselves in the crosshairs of authorities? How does the author profit from this mess?
Fog Creek Professional Ladder
This is the NYTimes piece where they discuss the Microsoft reward:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/01/technology/internet/01viru...
SaveIE6: Help us save the best browser around
Ancestry.com CEO describes "once in a several decade" opportunity for buying advertising
Ask HN : Startups in London
Hi folks,

I was recently bitten by the startup bug and came across this wonderful forum (glad to be a part of it)

I was wondering if the forum was frequented by any startupers based in London. I would love to get involved in the community there and join a startup.

I am a front-end engineer (Javascript/CSS/DHTML, et al) with 3 years of f2e experience.

Looking forward to the community's response!
So, where is GS's CEO in all of this? Isn't she the "leader"? Why is the CTO/Founder doing the PR campaign?

This whole thing leads me to believe that GS operates a little on the shady side. Everything from the poorly worded "box" to the competitor's ads to the clipped logos and trademarks seems designed to stick it to the companies in question in a manner that is borderline extortion.

It seems that instead of seeing companies as clients and selling them a service they can use, they're operating a giant defamation board where anything goes, and perpetrating the "us against them" mentality that seems popular these days with consumers.

Bad karma begets bad karma, and the whole business case of GS seems to be designed to generate bad karma. Once GS gets big enough to rankle a company with big enough legal pockets, it's going to go the way of the dodo.
I thought Lisp would be fun to learn (2007)
Ask HN: What license for our ad server project?
I've been working on an ad server (that collects and randomizes ads from different sources, displays them on your site, and collects statistics). We can't decide what to license it under. GPLv2? GPLv3? Affero GPL? MIT??

My initial reaction was to license under 'GPLv2 and up'... I have some qualms with v3 but I don't want to limit anybody's use based on that. But it would suck if someone took it, improved on it, and made a lot of money off of it (say by running an ad hosting service like OpenX), and never contributed their changes back to the community.

But I'm not sure I'd use a project under Affero (if it weren't mine). Argh what to do?
I don't mind at all if you use it, but I have the file on some other computer right now. If you can use the one which is on the page, feel free to do so.

I'm sure any flash developer could make you something similar in a few hours, if you need a custom one.
I spent most of grad school with one Octane on top of my desk (my primary machine) and a second one under my desk. Beautifully engineered, rock solid and great for their time. But SGI's steps post about 1998 were just crazy. Windows boxes with no software, a failure to realize how powerful linux systems were going to get, and losing their OpenGL team to NVidia.

Will certainly be missed.
This is a copy of:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tao_of_Programming

with another online version:

http://www.canonical.org/~kragen/tao-of-programming.html
Ask HN: Good books on negotiation 
Negotiation is a very broad scope so let me narrow it down with context to start-up folks.

Lets say what book/resource would you suggest to improve negotiating skills for
- hiring & incentives
- investors/evaluation/deal terms
- mergers/acquisitions terms
Start With No
You're giving GS a pass because they are a small startup. If Microsoft came out with a similar service it would have no defenders.

Fried did the right thing by bringing this up in public. Your "BRAVO!" story is naive. If he would have pursued your polite strategy it would have ended in nothing but a sales pitch. That's how GS's business works.
"To put this in perspective, the entire archived contents of the Internet fill just three petabytes."

This is categorically false. While the "Internet Archive" currently has the capacity of 4.5 petabytes, the sheer amount of data available on the http protocol is more likely in exabytes (especially once you take into consideration high-capacity services like youtube, bittorrent, and other file sharing protocols).
you can't really force people to contribute code.

you only really have two options. release the code how you want and suck it up if someone makes money on it. or, release the code how you want and create a commercial branch of your company to preclude other people from making $ (see: sugarCRM)
The author claims that monkey-patching private methods to expose them publicly is representative of Ruby's beauty, and specifically:

"... later upgrades to the library don’t need to be re-fixed: the one-time patch will automatically get re-applied by application code automatically!"

Anyone who fails to realize how monkey-patching can and will break both subtly and catastrophically across library upgrades has no business advising anyone regarding language choices.

[Edit] I hate April Fool's Day. Depressingly, the author's satire is so subtly aligned with common arguments as to so thoroughly fool.
Free Domains and Hosting Compared With Own Domain and Paid Hosting
When is the first release ?
I assume the 25MM value is in the patents and research?
Ask HN: What is that you think you need / want for your business to launch? 
What is it that drives people to apply here at YC or any other fund whatsoever? Why can't you do it on your own, and what is that you believe is necessary to get where you want to get with your business idea? Helps me, helps all of us.

Cheers,
+D
Also that graph at the top of the page needs an X-axis like my brother needs a job.
Committing Suicide Over the Credit Crisis, Hell No... | Niche Audience
You have to put effort into creating good content and in promoting yourself.

Writing good posts is a no brainer, but it's easy to underestimate the importance of marketing yourself. It can take a lot more time than you'd think.

If you look at the most successful bloggers, they write stuff people want to read, but they're also good at networking and self-promotion.

If you're an incredibly good writer, than maybe all you'll need to do is post articles and let word of mouth do the rest. Otherwise, you need to put effort into getting the word out to make up for the slack.
You know, this is fascinating. I don't have a trouble closing - I have trouble cold calling and prospecting. In a negotiation, all you have to do is figure out the cost savings/additional revenue for your customer and find the highest acceptable price that's NPV positive for them. That's why healthcare sales people have all these fancy ROI models (built by third parties, wink wink) that they truck into sales meetings.

It's much easier mechanically and emotionally to deal with a negotiation; it's much harder to randomly call people and be cursed at/hung up on.
JQuery custom events open doors to complex behaviors
What about employees who think they deserve to be rated higher on the (somewhat subjective) scope and skills metrics?
I consider the beta of Zillow prices to be about 2-4x that the actual market. When the market was good in 2007, home appraisers priced my house at $160k up from $145k two years ago. Zillow said my house was $185k. Now a home appraiser valued my house at $150k and Zillow says it is $110k.

While it may give the newspapers some cash infusion, overall for the end-user, Zillow prices are just plain horrible.
April (fn [f] (fn [x] (f x)))!
Just because it's a satire doesn't mean the title in incorrect. I would argue that Ruby is, in fact, the future for the same reason that Python is the future.

As for monkey patching, yes, it's ill-advised in general just as global scope and gotos are ill-advised for similar reasons. However, monkey patching is a powerful feature if used responsibly as Chad Fowler has noted ("The Virtues of Monkey Patching"):

http://chadfowler.com/index.cgi/Computing/Programming/Ruby/T...

Now admittedly, not every programmer is as competent or responsible as Chad Fowler or the programming world would be a very different place but the point is there's a right way and a wrong way to do it.

Werner Schuster's article on InfoQ ("Ruby's Open Classes - Or: How Not To Patch Like A Monkey") has more good advice on how to do it the right way:

http://www.infoq.com/articles/ruby-open-classes-monkeypatchi...
Yeah, I agree - the negotiation comes in when someone says they are rated too low, asks to talk to the review comittee about it, and leaves when they don't get it.

That said, I think this system is probably superior to most.
I like Blizzard's jokes the most:

http://www.starcraft2.com/features/terran/terratron.xml

http://www.blizzard.com/diablo3/characters/archivist.xml
Worms aren't created by the likes of RTM(1) anymore; malware has been big business, and global, for quite a while now. Conficker was probably created by a professional malware engineer, or a team of them, working for somebody like the Russian Business Network(2)--and in a jurisdiction that makes legal prosecution difficult.

(1) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Tappan_Morris
(2) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_Business_Network
Draw a triangle; Do the trig.

Between any arbitrary point on a line segment, the point on the line segment that contains the shortest point, and the point in question, you have a triangle.

You can take the length between any point on the line segment and the point in space, find it's magnitude squared, and subtract the magnitude squared of it's projection along the line segment. This gives you the distance of between the point and line segment squared by pythagoras' theorem.

x
/|
/ |
/ |
-a****-----

a is the arbitrary point on the line, the *s are the projected segment, and x is the point you want to find the distance from.
That was seriously one of the most depressing documentaries I've seen. I really want an EV and should have one by now.
Want to give your site that official web 2.0 look?
wonder what happens if you laminate laminatr?
This is largely a consequence of the defeated IPO market, due to increased regulation on publically-traded companies. It's now much harder to IPO.

I think the home-run seeking mentality of VC has always been flawed, though. Maybe in the long term these changes will have some positive effects, if they can alter the goals and behavior of the VC firms so that their incentives are more closely aligned with those of entrepreneurs.
I think that Jeff just takes math for granted. Without algebra, you would have a really hard time even understanding your run-of-the-mill business apps: order of operator precedence, the general notion of a variable, functions, etc. Let alone compound interest, expontential growth, etc. We're not talking combinatorial logic or multi-variable calculus here. If you complete your basic education in a first world country, you probably have some grounding in basic mathematics and logic, whether you realize it or not. Learning to program makes real a lot of these concepts that were probably sitting in the back of your brain unused for some time.
Sure-- though I think saying that GS is "centered" around "public criticism" is wrong. It's centered around getting help and being heard.

I separate willful misbehaving from bad judgment and mistakes. Startups are like children- they flail around and make mistakes (lord knows mine does!). If a child/startup does something bad without intending to do evil, I think a quiet correction is a good idea.

Example: A child spills juice all over the floor in a classroom. Is it right for an influential classmate announce his clumsiness to the class and lecture the class on how sticky juice on the floor is a terribly thing, inconveniencing everyone? If spilled juice is a big deal, you could STILL go public with a, "Hey, Billy didn't mean it-- but this is a good opportunity to discuss the perils of spilled juice and why we should be so careful with out juiceboxes".

If the act was a result of malice or shameful neglect, then I think a public thrashing is more appropriate. GS clearly fucked up, but I think there are plenty of scenarios where that fuckup could've been a result of a hurried design/review process, an errant employee, or just plain bad judgment. You can read the founder's letter describing how the design decisions happened ( http://blog.getsatisfaction.com/2009/03/31/open-letter-to-ja... ). It's a pretty credible story.

It doesn't excuse the mistake, but it should make us lean towards leniency in the punishment-- especially considering that all of us are in the same boat (37s, HN Founders, etc).

A lot of it comes down the the style of the attack by 37s and the influence they wield. Vigilante mobs are easy to summon but hard to dismiss. The internet is forever, so if you damage a party (or damage them way more than they deserve), it's very hard to repair.

IMO, one of the biggest problems with the human race is that we don't seek to understand before we condemn. I'd kinda hoped that the HN community would give a startup that's pretty clearly trying NOT to be evil here the benefit of the doubt.
E-mail fail, or terrible AF joke
Well-known April Fools pranks of the past
An Open Letter to Technology Startup Marketers
I dunno, man. They commented on the original post, wrote a blog post, had a web conference, and wrote an open letter.

All of them had a strong tone of "mea culpa"/regret even if some of them didn't use the word sorry.
As noted in Werner Schuster's article, many languages (such as C# or Scala) do support type-safe, non-ambiguous, non-conflicting extension of existing classes, demonstrating that extension of existing classes can be safely implemented and does not require the use of dangerous monkey-patching.
Why Scala for Web 2.0
What a silly rule. This 'equality rule' is why union shops have some of the worst productivity levels in the industry and why union workers have zero incentives to innovate and become more productive. Under this plan, people have no incentives to give more and work harder. Inevitably, the equilibrium for this type of a system is the productivity of the weakest worker.

Sorry but communism just doesn't work.
You could look where Ray Kurzweil gets some of his data points for "The Singularity is Near". If you serious you could check around for a similar academically compiled list of "significant" historical events. (I think Ray mentioned doing something just like this...)

Further more, I'll mention there is some crazy Russian who thinks our modern calendars (Gregorian) are an elaborate hoax. But, as I understand it, he had someway of applying algorithms to historically "significant" data points. (If you're actually interested, reply and I try and find his name again.)

...FWIW
A lot of well-intentioned mistakes have serious negative consequences. This is one example, but trust me, I've seen worse. GetSatisfaction will go on.

Not only that, but they'll be much more careful in the future (when the dust settles). All of us --- customers and companies --- will be better off for this experience.
Just two words: "Hopefully not..."
We had that with assemblers. Back in the day, the Linux kernel was built with the x86 assembler from Minix (or a clone of it at least) and the rest of the system used GAS.
Wonderful. Thank you.

Ok, so you just used Flash. I wasn't sure whether you used some alternative flash-generating tool.
well you can try : )

Is that your way of saying 'just GPL it'?
They "negotiate" by leaving.
Why? Because of monkey patching, syntax, performance, the community or some other reason such as you prefer Python or have an intuitive, ineffable and unexpressable disklike of the language or because Matz is from Japan and they bombed Pearl Harbor?
Not only is this a lame post, but it's also a duplicate: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=541786
Tony, this isn't rocket science. You've been PR trained. This is one of the basic rules of crisis management: the first thing you do is, KILL THE STORY. They need to defuse this. But every time they provide a justification or make a comment on JF's behavior, they're keeping the story alive.

I have a little bit of crisis management experience. What works is telling people you screwed up. That leaves no room to argue about whether you screwed up. What doesn't work is trying to get your side of the story out first. That leaves a whole lot of room to argue about stuff.

I am mystified as to why GetSatisfaction wants this controversy to rocket to the top of Google's search results. Why aren't they just killing this stupid story?
I'm actually interested in how exactly something like this is leaked? Assuming editors and 3D artists are worried about job security, how easy would a disgruntled poster worker (or, for a flair for the dramatic, a rival studio executive posing as a disgruntled poster worker) be able to handle a copy? Do they just send progress copies to executives and studio heads unencrypted?
As I understood the article, the fixed levels only apply to base salary. There is still room to reward high productivity through bonuses and equity.
Maybe this works for Joel. I find it funny though how performance does not get included in his calculation.

Some employees are more productive that other employees and get more done therefore they should be payed more. An employee with less skills can still be more productive that an emloyee with more skills.

The reasons CEOs make millions is because their performance is directly measurable in how well their company did that year.
If you look at the chart on the second page, it's clearly not "communism". There's a "scope and skill" component to salary level. If I want to make more money there, I increase my skill, and push to get more responsibility. It's just saying that people with the same skill and responsibility get paid the same.
"Under this plan, people have no incentives to give more and work harder."

There are some people ("salesy" types particularly) whose performance is motivated almost exclusively by money, but I find this to be the exception.

As was mentioned in the article, hard work tends to come from high job satisfaction. Compensation is only one component of that, and arguably not the most important, provided it's not unfairly low.

Finally, if you're right and Joel's wrong, how do you explain Fog Creek's success? Do you consider them an outlier? If so, can you give a counter-example of when you've seen this system fail? Fog Creek is strong evidence of the efficacy of this approach, while you seem to be relying on nothing more than your opinion.
Immediately, you've now moved beyond salary and are discussing job performance.

That's what you want to be discussing after all.
I'm pretty sure he mentions that bonuses are something he still uses, among other things.
So..is the implication that writing software is not worth anything? I think some pretty successful entrepreneurs would disagree.

There is nothing innate about building something in college that makes it less valuable than building it in an office you sit in 40 hours a week.
As a Fog Creek employee, I can attest that the profit sharing at the end of the year is a pretty big incentive to work harder.

Also see http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000070.html for a discussion of why Joel doesn't want to have incentive pay.
I'm going to dig through HN archives or wait until tomorrow to read any news.