skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Amazon Unbox
I had a terrible experience with Amazon's Unbox last night. I wanted to watch Monty Python's The Meaning of Life, and found that I could rent it on Unbox. After I found out that I couldn't do this on my mac, I fired up Parallels to give it a shot. Then install of the video player on Windows took many steps including upgrading my systems DRM. After that it went ahead and tried to download the 2 gb+ movie to it's default location under C:\Documents and Settings\... without ever asking me if I wanted it there or not. My C drive on my parallels system doesn't have enough space, so the download failed. I found in preferences where I could switch it to another drive so I tried to switch it to my mapped drive on my mac, and it wouldn't let me since it "wasn't a local drive". Now maybe I've been away from Windows for too long, but I thought this was ridiculous. I'm used to developing on the mac and cloning my development environment by mounting drives and having those available to me as if they were part of my local system. Why does this software care if it was a local drive or not? So I had to pick another "local" drive that I created in Windows and everything seemed okay. I then found it impossible to download that original file. It still said not enough disk space and I determined that the file was still trying to point to it's original location. I probably could of figured out where that was stored behind the scenes and fixed it, but I was getting frustrated and wanted to watch the movie. I deleted it and it warned me that I'll have to rent it again. I was mad, but considered that my easiest solution. I rented it again and nothing happened. I was charged for another rental, but when I went online it said that I'd already downloaded the file. WTF?

I know that Amazon may be handicapped by what it can do on this platform (system based DRM and such), but my question is: why not develop these applications first on another platform (mac or linux) and get it done right first with a group of users that really want access to this type of service, then port it to windows with a precedence of how it should work? Also, I don't understand how if I have problems with this, the average user is going to make it work. Have my standard just been raised in the past year or so using non-windows environments causing my frustration levels to increase when I run into problems with this, or is this just another poor user experience due to lack of effort by the software developers?
So you are saying that because the names don't matter, there is no bubble?
Very odd, indeed. If you're going to engage in shameless wholesale scraping as appears to have occurred here (and the site does appear to be a scraper site), why not pick content on a topic that you can monetize (porn/gambling/pharmaceuticals/mortgages/etc) easily?
Funny thing... the other day I tried converting some Lisp to Python as a demonstration, and discovered that the number of parens you get to remove depends largely on the programming style you're using. Mostly, they just get shifted around or replaced with brackets (or braces), and you have to add a lot of commas.

If you scan over http://norvig.com/python-lisp.html, you'll see a lot of opportunities to remove parens; but in fact many of those are not semantically identical.

In python, a block does not return a value.

if a:f(x);else:g(y)

If you wanted it to return a value, you'd have to rewrite 'if' as a function and say something like:

myif(a, [(f, x)], [(g, y)])

If you wanted to evolve python towards Lisp without having to add parens, I'd make it so indented blocks are actually expressions and automatically return a value to the defining block.

(Of course, the normal python way is to use "return" statements or side-effects, rather than writing an ad-hoc version of the lisp 'if')
Microsoft Office under fire
After an entire semester of that class I still fail to grasp what exactly a non-fiction essay is. So far as I could tell, it's only an essay if you write about how your parents were alcoholics, how you were beaten as a child, or how you live with a terrible illness. Needless to say no one liked the stuff I wrote and I didn't do very well.
That must be come foil to Godwin's Law, right? Talking about economic matters and bringing up Weimar :-P
What, like create the web as we know it...again? :-)
PG, Aren't you a vegetarian ? Remember reading that somewhere.
What makes that claim pseudo-science is that it demonstrates a total ignorance of probability and has been debunked many times.
http://scienceblogs.com/goodmath/2006/08/big_numbers_bad_ant...
For one such example.
The Elements of Computing Systems: from logic gates up through OSs and VMs
I've always wanted someone to create a touch screen device that was the size of a pad of paper. I don't even care how much storage it has, although you can fit more into the form factor then something the size of a phone.

So if it had a touch screen the size of a pad of paper, had an iPhone(ish) interface, had some decent productivity apps, could play music and most importantly surf the web, I'd pay $1,000 to $1,500 for it.
Python 2.5 now lets you do:

x = f(x) if a else g(y)

f() and g() aren't evaluated till they're needed.
Cornell Bread:

http://www.everything2.com/index.pl?node_id=1538361

"It was claimed at one time, that, with a multivitamin daily, you could live on it. Try it and you'll seriously contemplate doing so."

Don't believe the hype, but this is delicious bread.
Seth Godin: Seven tips to build for meaning
I talked about a variation of this idea with pg, and he brought up some important points. First, who uses enterprise software like distributed computing? Outside of research, it's people unlike us, so what do we know about them? Pretty much nothing. Additionally, what IT manager at a solid company is going to buy the "el cheapo" (pg's phrase) solution when there are guys from Sun telling him/her "Just buy our system, and if anything bad happens, we'll fix it, and you won't lose your job."

BTW, the RSA Factoring Challenge has been over for some time: http://www.rsa.com/rsalabs/node.asp?id=2092.

But back to my first point, what else - besides trying to factor big numbers - would I/you/a-20-something-hacker do with a big distributed network? I can't think of anything.
It's sad that this got downmodded; seems funny to me. :)

(That is, if it really was "Rant rant rant!! Rant." when it was downmodded).
"Topics in X" courses where you pretty much got to do whatever you wanted and then you wrote a report and gave a presentation about it, exploring what you wanted to with advice from the professor.

Somewhere in there is an argument for constructionist education a la Piaget et al.
"It would help his business connections a lot more."

Best line of the morning.
Declare intentions publicly and be open about results.
With all due respect to VC;s.

I strongly disagree that VC's will stop putting money into new ideas. Can you imagine a Joe Shmoe VC putting a lesser amount of money into the Google Series B round ( when the company was worth 75m) because the tax rate was high. That is absurd. Many VC's have clauses in their contracts where they decide what their rate of return should be. In the event of higher taxes the greedy ones will simply increase the rate of return in their contracts.
That's a great resource. I know I'll definitely be referring back to this.
Radiohead rejects iTunes
I think that the flipside of this article's point is important too:

Don't worry about sort algorithms when your n is small.

A real example: with social networks, you can make some reasonable assumptions that people will have hundreds, perhaps thousands of 'friends'.

For many activities (not DB selects), that's a small value.
Now I'd use vegetarian bouillon.
Simple. I didn't know it had been submitted. I did a search before I submitted, but the article didn't come up in the first page or two.

One solution would be for news.yc to improve its matching algorithm (perhaps looking at the body of html text, not just the title/url) - most people won't even search for previous articles before submitting.
At my company adoption rate is 100% :) I showed it to 3 people, all 3 decided to install it themselves and so far (after a week) nobody uninstalled it as far as I know.

Features they like (sorted by importance) are Search,
"Connected people" (they are somehow sorted according to importance) and "previous attachments".
That syntax looks like it's intended to communicate that f(x) is the normal result, and g(y) is exceptional. I wouldn't want to use it unless that's what I intended to communicate. It also looks like you would need to put parens around the "if" expression if you were to use it within a more complex expression, e.g

2 + (f(x) if a else g(y)) + 3
Solve The VC's Issues
In your first meeting you need to solve the VC's big issues. It's likely that before (or during) the first meeting the VC will have identified several key concerns that could end their interest in your venture. These could be the competitive threat, the addressable market size, the likelihood of acquiring partnerships or a variety of other topics.
Here's a different version (and I haven't checked to see if such a facebook app exists): Why not pay users to fill out surveys? Help companies that need market research, and help consumers (like eRewards).
Google should tie-up with biggies like HP, IBM, Best buys etc. and give their apps on CD for free - this will increase the awareness and potential, also they should add a tool for automatic synchronization between docs on the hard disk and google doc website, this way user can have a backup copy and they can work off-line while they are on the go.
I use it every day and still don't like it - I miss Lisp.
I'm investing in a copper mesh suit ASAP (copper mesh reflects microwaves). Actually, I wouldn't be surprised to see troops wearing mesh suits in the coming years as these types of weapons proliferate. I smell a new startup idea...
And before Python 2.5, people usually used this idiom:

x = a and f(x) or g(y)

If you know the idiom, I think this is more readable (conditional is on the left), though it has the drawback of using completely nonsensical keywords.
You're right that it's a stupid debate that doesn't belong here, but all the down-modding and vitriol smacks a little too much of a tyranny of the (correct) majority.

To the poster, you're not going to find any funders here, but there are probably some groups elsewhere interested in funding people to put together a case for ID. Your best bet is probably working through an evangelical school like Liberty University.
-They've used Fortran 77 which requires 6 whitespaces before a normal statement, 5 + any character for line continuations, and which truncates silently (as in, without warning) any line longer than 72 characters.
Philosophically speaking, we live in a world where the number of spaces doesn't matter anymore (although it did matter in those pre-historic pre-Internet times). Spaces may be lost in HTML, in word processors or in an editor that accidentally wasn't tuned for Python. However neat and readable it is, just try to show your code, for example, on some minimalist web forum like this one. It's too bad you can't, isn't it?

It is also true that Python has survived already, but I doubt this concept would leak to new languages.

Upd: In other words, it's electronic typography that made the space character irrelevant.
Yeah, it was. I don't get it either. But it's just karma. Not like it's important or anything.
Your parents might.

If it's my money, why isn't what you're proposing to spend it on relevant?

It's not about you.
Guido is awesome. He clearly does not take himself too seriously. :)
Linus'es answers were the ones I most agreed with.
It's exactly to avoid these kinds of issues (and perhaps a little for union-related issues) that entertainment production companies return unsolicited screenplays and ideas unopened.

Since unsolicited business plans and ideas basically never get funded, it's a little surprising that VCs don't follow that same policy. In Facebook's case, my guess is that you've got no chance at a "grant" unless you put together an app to demonstrate at least a little of what you want to do.

And be wary of comparing it to YC. Besides requiring more than an e-mail (and informally promising not to blab about your product), YC is on top of you for three months in carefully structured environment. They don't just give you some money and wait to see what happens.
When I started reading this article I figured he was going to deliver a lesson on when it's better to fall back to less efficient algorithms when you can be sure of a small n. Territory that's been covered before, sure, but also a topic with a lot of room left for discussion.

Instead we get a CS 101 discussion of big-oh?

What?

Do I really want to take advice from someone whose first instinct was to implement insertion sort?

I'll counter: Here's a gem from CS 101 that not everybody's seen: Sorting out Sorting (edit: see the better link posted below)

Even if you know algorithms the video is still stylistically interesting. It's a good example of how to teach quantitative material. The YouTube video is speeded up, but the presentation of n^2 sorts is more effective when each of the demos runs for a painfully long two minutes.
Yes, it's called a banana.
This tech has been around for years. I wonder why they haven't got it in production vehicles yet?

Bose Whitepaper: http://www.bose.com/pdf/technologies/bose_suspension_system....
Tech titans rule the billionaires club
Half of the ten wealthiest earned their billions from the tech industry.
Jeff Clavier's New Seed Fund
average "bite size" of $250K, ranging from $100K to $500K
I think it is just recounting "the facts" in narrative form.
I'm just saying there's no reason to panic. There is is an upside as well as a downside to this whole devaluation thing. People on the right AND left have been complaining about the loss of manufacturing jobs for years -- well, now they can have them again -- if that's what they want. I personally wouldn't enjoy working on an assembly line. Hell I don't really like working at all.
Kinda, though I know if I had alot of money, it would be kind of cool to fund people who are passionate about something to just go do their thing and see what happens. I figure creative work prospers best when a person isn't tied down to some specific problem space. This is where most of our great scientific revolutions seem to have come from. This was true for the Greeks too, who built so many of our intellectual foundations.
I only went to college for 2 weeks, but I enjoyed sculpture. Everything else seemed like a bad joke.
5 Tips on How to Leverage Social Media for Your Startup
Testing the People Search Engines
Nod, I loved "History of Math" it traced the methods people used to solve problems though time.

The strangest part was how interconnected mathematical understanding is with the rest of society. EX: Try and run a bank without basic algebra.
No, I brush my teeth every day because it's a relatively low price to pay for the health of my teeth in case I am alive tomorrow.
Z is soooo awkward. Ripe for parody.
I have some of those between by igneous and metamorphics.
i'm a research programming working in the computational biology field. basically, trying to understand what all those genes mean and what we can do about it to make new drugs. tons of need for people who are into data mining and statistical data analysis. database, algorithms design, computer graphics for protein visulization, open source medical records for the poor countries, web tools for doctors and patients, data security and privacy issues, etc. the problem is, it's a new field, doesn't pay as well as those consultants working on people-soft HR modules, but good enough to make a decent living and buy a nice car etc.

ps: if you really into math, statistics, and feel good about everyday job, the best book to read and get into the field is "Biological sequence analysis" by Durbin, Eddy, Krogh and Mitchison.
The week that Big Software shattered
A lot are actually using the <canvas> tag instead, which is a bit more widely-supported in present browsers, though I believe it's a bit less flexible.

There's the aformentioned Doom clone (http://canvex.lazyilluminati.com/83/play.xhtml). A bunch of JavaScript charting libraries have sprung up recently - one I'm familiar with is WebFX (http://webfx.eae.net/). I did a real-time charting widget for my former employer that graphed stock prices in real time on your browser; unfortunately I can't show you that. SVG's also apparently getting popular in bioinformatics for viewing protein-folding and other biochemical interactions.
Woops...forgot the squeeze an "often" before the "either"...
Are we allowed to pass on the installer like this? I would have been doing the same thing but I thought the NDA prevented it.
I see. Well, sounds like you know more about the pre-Socratics than I. I was under the impression that it wasn't until Heraclitus that people thought things in our mind, like math, would correspond with external reality.
Its one of the great PR tool if used smartly ... honesty and simplicity works in blogging arena ...
Athena Health Hosed by IPO Process?
I had the chance to meet up with Guido at one of the Linux conferences in 1999, back before Python was all that popular. Very nice guy, but something I said then still stands true, in my opinion:

The white space issue doesn't really matter. Except for a few specialized areas like template creation, where Python is just not a natural fit.

That's one of the things I like about Rails - Ruby may not be the absolute perfect language for scripting web templates (maybe Tcl is?:-) but it's good enough, and it's useful without some of the weird hacks that the Python guys use to do templates.
To loose weight things you have to do are obvious: eat less, run, pump iron. And whats even better is you have a feed back loop where you can monitor clearly in simple terms ( a number ) that indicates your progress. But to become clever both the method to follow and the way to measure it is so vague. Which is what is at the root of the problem.
Mark Z is not your best bud. He's not gonna hold your hair while you puke in the toilet and he's not going to compile your program for you while you take a nap. He runs a company now, it's called Facebook, have you heard of it?

As a company Facebook do things that makes Facebook worth more so that Mark Z can pretend he's Steve Jobs of Bill Gates of Web 2.0 and that includes convincing people that just because there's an "investment fund" for making FB apps, you can be rich. You won't.

You can design for the web or you can design for Facebook, but 10 years ago everyone would have laughed at you if you said you wanted to make a living designing a channel or chat room just for this little thing called America OnLine.
"Sorting out Sorting" at normal speed, about 32 minutes long: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=3970523862559774879 (Thanks, kcl.)
Infact setting up a feedback cycle is important in anything that you want to make progress. If you think startupishly, the early prototype-userfeedback-update cycle is not so different
Yay! I've been fed up with the typical nokia SMS client and a few days ago started writing a better one which does pretty much the same as this one.
I don't think the keywords are nonsensical.

(or (and a (f x))
(g y))
Why Doesn't Tokyo Have Anti-Godzilla Defenses?
There are plenty of ways to represent a Lisp parse tree without using parens. The only thing is, by the time you know Lisp well enough to implement one, you've begun to like the parens.
History of Imperialism

Ethics

Remember that cheesy line from Spiderman about great power bringing great responsibility? In the event that great intellect allows a person to attain wealth and/or power, I would sleep better at night knowing that person understood some past mistakes of the wealthy and powerful, and they had at least considered some of the collective guidance of humanity.

If the question were constrained to CS, then I would say Compilers. But that's a loaded answer, since it damn near requires a CS degree to truly appreciate compilers.

If you want to have fun and know yourself better, take a class in art or music.
acting 1, history of modern arts, public policy in econ, game theory in econ, finance, and lots of math
If this is anything like Bose products of the past, I'm willing to bet that:

1) Bose wont release any technical specs (b/c apparently those dont matter in loudspeaker design)

2) It will be overpriced.

3) It will be over hyped.
""We think the future is going to be software plus services," Darren Strange, senior product manager for Microsoft Office, said. "There are some things which thick client [Microsoft's favoured model, where PCs are linked to a central server but can operate independently] is better at than [web-based services] X offline use being a big one."

The need for off-line access to data is shrinking every day. Many people simply can't do their job without a network connection.

"You also can't create the richness of an application like Word through a thin client [where a user's PC is effectively a dumb terminal and the processing of data is done elsewhere]".

Why not? Maybe not today, but next year, five years from now? Items get checked off the "can't do that in a browser" list every day.

"Our smartest people are looking at mash-ups [where several online tools are fused together to create new ones] and web 2.0-type applications [which focus on online tools that allow users to collaborate and share information]".

They're just LOOKING INTO mash-ups and Web 2.0 applications now? Isn't the industry looking for a Web 3.0 model already?
Wow, it IS like 1999 all over again, isn't it?

I remember shopping for capital in '99, and we had quite a few problems getting VCs interested because we weren't asking for enough money, had a CEO who actually had 20 years C-level experience and a name that didn't start with the letter e.

About 2 years after we shuttered and sold off most of the code to various people, EMC implemented something very similar and made a few hundred million dollars off of it :/
Does she still dress you, too?