skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The internal hackathons at Yahoo (Europe) were essentially an exercise in futility. They jumped on the hackathon bandwagon, but were unprepared to deal with the after effects of a hackday - what to do with these ideas.

From what I saw, hackday was used to pretend the organisation cared about the ideas of it's engineers and web developers, but at a safe enough distance not to affect their product roadmap. When push came to shove we were all enthusiastically encouraged to patent our ideas, because it protects us from evil people stealing all our ideas. Naturally I refused.

The Yahoo Open Hackdays also, was an exercise in futility. Yahoo didn't do anything with ideas generated, or encouraged the people who attended and built something. It was just a two day event over a weekend where a venue was populated by groups of people who may be building something, or not. Esssentially it was just a marketing ploy to get developers using the Yahoo APIs for a weekend.

Looking at that, these hackdays offered no value. I don't need a hackday / hack-weekend to work on ideas I consider interesting. I don't need to be in a noisy drafty building where the roof opens up during a thunderstorm ( http://developer.yahoo.com/blogs/ydn/posts/2007/06/hack_day_... ).

I gave up on the internal hackdays, after participating in two: winning one, and getting a notable mention for the second. Ideas are no good gathering dust on the shelf. And all hackdays accomplished was for the company to have an inkling on the ideas I was working on in my own time, so they could decide to claim ownership if they liked.

Open Hackdays are only useful to meet up with people you haven't seen for a long time. So having free beer and pizza is useful, I guess.

To be honest, the things I did gain from being at an open hackday:

* Watching James Aylett build a social network from scratch, and fully unit-tested. That demolished most of my reservations of unit-testing and development agility.

* Meeting some of fine Yahoo US folk during that time: Ryan Kennedy and Dav Glass.

* The internal hackday win led me to meeting David Filo to give him a quick demo. Not often I meet people who are also Wikipedia entries.
I don't know what is more infuriating. Having some incompetent fool that I can argue with or not even being able to initiate contact.

At least the former inspires hope that it could potentially lead somewhere.
Interesting, how do folks who find security holes and blog about it get around this type of thing? I imagine you are worried about this, or IP issues?
That's not certainly true. You can use Bootstrap at any level, even, skipping every of the baked modules and make a website who doesn't look like Bootstrap.

For the variable parts, thats another myth: you can override variables easily.

I have nothing against Foundation, but to me, all the frameworks claim silly things to gain developers and developers aren't that kind of stupid consumer.

Just bring the facts, let the devs decide.
I very much recognize myself in this piece and I believe that these situations is created and fostered by a mind stuck in an infinite loop. The notion that one cannot do without knowing everything there is to know about the subject first is mere an excuse not to pursue. It is similar to not doing running because "I've got an fallen arc and I should not run", these excuses define what we can and cannot achieve.

When I was 18 I was amazed by some of the programs that people my age put together and I constantly compared ages believing that I should be able to compare with any my age without putting any effort behind it. Even if I wanted to accomplish something similar, a voice inside me said that I still not had the basic knowledge needed to even start. I'm now 28 and can say that I have in very few ways moved towards these goals.

I have yet to fully break out of this loop, but now I know what tools I need in order to do so. Break the bad habits, by replacing the actions that lead to a goal with better ones. Realize that instant gratification serves little purpose beside delaying you even more on you way to the real goal. Really focus on areas and put some real time behind the goal in order to have a chance of finally getting there.

Our daily motivation is limited, so stop spending it on getting nowhere with everything that remotely interests you and get somewhere with something.

Also: exercise, get some sun and spend some time alone (no friends, music, podcasts, audiobooks or electronics) with your mind every day.
Yup, and I never said I was advocating extremities either. I'm simply pointing out that short cuts can be appropriate some times.
> Am I allowed to reverse engineer an Internet service and blog about it?

Possibly and in some cases, however this might run afoul of the laws that prohibit defeating computer security schemes.

My point is that the answer is not simple, and a behavior that may be completely acceptable for case A might be a felony in case B.

Source: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/2701

Quote: "(a) Offense.— Except as provided in subsection (c) of this section whoever—

(1) intentionally accesses without authorization a facility through which an electronic communication service is provided; or

(2) intentionally exceeds an authorization to access that facility;
and thereby obtains, alters, or prevents authorized access to a wire or electronic communication while it is in electronic storage in such system shall be punished as provided in subsection (b) of this section."
I'm afraid he can't read that from behind his mountain of money.
Ask HN: What is the most satisfying peice of gadget ever owned?
Could be anything that qualifies as a gadget, even shoes.
Yeah, in an ideal world, that would be better -- and I've tried writing like that ... but sooner or later I end up wanting to open the file in a location where the wrapping isn't configured properly, and all of the super long lines look terrible.

So I just tend to hard-wrap manually, out of habit, even when writing in a .txt file or an email. In fact, it's hard to stop myself from doing it in this textarea ;)
Facebook, Google tech gurus to design cancer research game
That can be done in basically any dynamic language: see http://docopt.org/
> Yup, and I never said I was advocating extremities [sic] either.

What -- you're against the idea of fingers and toes? Or did you mean "extremes"?
Not totally dead, it still has some strongholds left, but I'm sure Netflix doesn't use the rolling-release side of it (ports mainly). :-)
With some elite shell scripts to boot. It's nice to know that if your primary skills in 1988 were UNIX, C, and shell scripting, should you be magically transported 25 years into the future, those same abilities would allow you to feed a family of four in 2013.
While I on the whole agree with the sentiment that there are a lot of delusional people here thinking that functional is better even though it's constantly been the new fad and still hasn't caught on, this post is wrong and was proved wrong in the last 4 years.

Because any language feature that is objectively good with no downside or trade-off has already been implemented in some popular language somewhere.

But C# and now C++ and Java have all very recently and quite suddenly included lambdas and closures?

It took javascript, a hybrid language, to show language designers just how powerful those features can be. It took a practical application of the concepts in an almost OOP setting to allow people to understand just why they're so useful.
By the way, is there a simple command line tool implementing RBM? Something easy to pick up and use.
Have you tried Lisp?
Bootstrap 2.3.1 Released
Op here. HN won't let me edit my post after this much time.

I finally got around to looking at Todoist. All the apps are really just what looks like Adobe AIR apps, and they make you pay for SSL support, exporting data, and reminders.

I think I'll go look at Any.do and RememberTheMilk instead.
The most important thing to teaching anyone to program, but especially someone who already has a career and isn't looking to switch, is to make it relevant. Find out what they do for living and what they do all day at work. Find out what software they have to use and try to find a way to show them how they can use a programming to make some task they are currently doing easier.
Write about the problems you have.
Groupon fires an excellent CEO while Yahoo's new CEO is utterly impervious (for whatever reason) and is getting away with waging a holy war against engineers? What is going on?

Can I expect the laws of physics suddenly to invert tomorrow?
I think you're missing the perfectly plausible use case where the user has used the Dropbox send link feature.

Note that a third party will now have the second party's email address without Dropbox being in any way culpable.

It's possible that the feature was never used but it's hardly an obscure use case.
I remember this very well because I'd had JANet/Internet access since 1986 and was using Internet system daily at the time and for a period we had no Internet access. That didn't matter that much because I just couldn't access various Usenet newsgroups and anonymous FTP servers.

I remember thinking it was totally awesome.

Awesome because it was a demonstration of the power of this individual and what could be done with software and got me thinking seriously about computer security. A year later I opted to stay at university and do a doctorate in computer security.

That doctorate brought me into contact with RTM's father who was a terribly decent chap also named Robert. He used to come to the place I was with his wife. The first time I met him I misheard his wife's name as "Alice" (instead of "Anne"). I mistakenly thought that that they were the Alice and Bob in all cryptographic examples.
Ask HN:Is there any uncensored search Engine
Part of the confusion here is that, I think, people treat different kind of hackatons differently. I took part in 48-hour coding contests long before they were even called 'hackatons' (back then we called them Jams). Those are some of the best coding experiences in my life. Working in small teams on something fun and creative with tight deadline was absolutely exhilarating and reinvigorating. But there's one caveat.

We did this by ourselves, for ourselves. For fun.

What I personally strongly dislike are the 'company hackatons', in which developers from a company are basically tricked to do some unpaid work for the company. In my opinion, it's dishonest. You can feel the difference in the air - events that are created by the dev community for themselves to play and improve just smell different than the ones started by managers.

So for me, the problem with hackatons boils down to the problem of "fun" vs. "work". Things started as fun, but they seem to be turning more and more into work. Just like in case of SEO and the Web, it's all great until someone from outside comes who wants to profit on this, and this is why we can't have nice things.
Note that for for-loop-style number crunching code, the speedup you are aiming for over CPython is on the order of 50x-750x depending on cache locality.

I'm definitely not saying that PyPy won't do better than 15x speedup on number crunching code, just pointing out that in the context of NumPyPy a 15x speedup is not very relevant if you want PyPy to be a viable alternative to, say, Julia.

(Disclaimer: I'm a Cython dev)
As The Cloud Moves To Indianapolis
That's perfect, I wish you could do something like this in gmail without specifically creating a new account for every alias.
Well you have missed the point that they chose C over Pascal to implement Unix. I don't think that was by accident.
Ask HN: resources for creating fast webpages for very slow interent connection
I am trying to create websites in a developing country with very very slow internet access. Which javascript framework should I use for best performance? Or should I even use javascript at all? If you have any techniques or resources on making fast webpages for slow internet connection, please let me know.
I think that's why I don't find it a very interesting article. The capability to build isn't very useful unless you have a theory that informs it.
I think the point of the article was "Could Romans build a computer, if plans were magically given to them?". Given this, the critique I am about to make is a little outside the scope of this thought experiment. However, I've wondered about questions like this a lot before, and I think it is also interesting to consider that the Romans (possibly) had many conceptual hurdles to cross as well. I am not a historian, but it seems that given their numeral system, they would not have had a firm understanding of mathematical bases, and thus would have not understood the importance of diodes/transistors/etc since they would have had to make the conceptual leap of representing numbers (and all information!) in binary (base 2). It's interesting to think about what obvious inventions we may not realize today due to the way we represent certain forms of information.
This is the exact reason you want your CEO to have a good cushion: So you can fire him from one day to the next, or even discuss with him over a longer period of time that he'll have to go, and have as few worries as possible that he's going to take it reasonably well.
JetBrains Sessions at 33rd Degree Conference
340 bytes is not worth 20x time increase. 0.4% decrease in file size IS worth the time. If you can measure the amount of time it takes to download those last 340 bytes, then you can start to count how many downloads it takes before its worth it. (If download speed was constant, it would be about 224 downloads).

PNG seems like a good candidate for this style compression. A constant time initial cost for recurring savings in bytes transmitted seems like an excellent use of CPU time to me.

As an aside, I ran the Zopfli program with 10000 iterations on jquery-1.9.1.js:

268381 jquery-1.9.1.js
75622 jquery-1.9.1.js.gz
Check Jetbrains MPS
6 things you might not know you could do with Google
Some points:

1) The new co-founder does not deserve 50%. There are only two instances in which I might see him getting 50%: he either brings in money (invested into the company), or he takes a significantly smaller salary than you take. What you give him will depend on how you perceive his value, and how much you need him at this point. Something like 30% is a reasonable starting point.

2) Going off point #1. Are you sure you need a new technical co-founder? Do you feel like this is a gap in your knowledge? Because you may very well be able to forgo the technical co-founder route, and simply start hiring 1 or 2 technical employees. You would need to pay these employees salaries. You would pay them slightly below-market salaries and equity in the range of 1-3%. Nonetheless, there are very compelling benefits to having a co-founder with very strong technical skills.

3) What concerns me the most is that its unclear how well you know this potential new co-founder. What did you think of his part-time work? Was it amazing? Even if his part-time work was amazing, it is still unclear if he is the right co-founder for you. Did he work remotely? How well do you guys get along? How well do you guys communicate? If he worked remotely, it will be much harder to assess how you get along with him.

Something I've noticed about YC, for example, is that I keep running into founding teams (of YC companies) that consist of founders who knew each other as 1) friends from high school, 2) friends from college, or 3) worked together at the same company for 1 or more years. I suspect that YC would be willing to hire 2 co-founders of slightly-above-average intelligence who are best friends from college over 2 brilliant co-founders who worked on one class project together. One of the reasons is because the #1 reason (or at least one of the biggest reasons) for a funded startup failing is co-founder disputes.
True. It's even noted in the book, but the protagonist wanted to be absolutely, positively sure that no one - neither the current bully nor any other future bully - will try to hurt him again. He pushed things to the hard limit in pretty much everything he did. We don't have to - we shouldn't - go that far.
"One simple example from everyday life: Imagine that you don’t have in your vocabulary notion of a sum. Therefore, if you would like to tell someone to do a sum of some things you would always have to express the process of summation in details instead of just telling and then you sum these numbers."

If you can encapsulate an undefined idea into one stream of commands, can't you just create a function to do it? What does that say about programming languages? Maybe I missed the point.
yeah sure - email address is on my profile page or just ask google ;)
Tails - Trusting Tails
Box is doing a 50GB giveaway at the moment. Seems like good timing.
Manning, shocked by “the bloodlust,” went with WikiLeaks
> This workflow/tutorial is designed to remedy these three problems. The tool chosen - Maxima - is available for free, as is all its supporting software ...

Hey, knock yourself out, but Sage (http://www.sagemath.org/) integrates, and improved on, Maxima, and represents a much more advanced free tool for symbolic mathematics.

Also, there's Sympy (http://sympy.org/en/index.html), a Python library that does symbolic mathematics and would be a much better and simpler way for you to explain and demonstrate symbolic mathematics in a tutorial. Let's use Sympy to solve a quadratic:

from sympy import *
var('x a b c')
sol = solve(a * x**2 + b * x + c,x)
print(sol)
print(latex(sol))

Output:

[(-b + (-4*a*c + b**2)**(1/2))/(2*a), -(b + (-4*a*c + b**2)**(1/2))/(2*a)]

Rendered Latex: http://i.imgur.com/Z4yKvkq.png
Aokigahara Suicide Forest
It would need an opt out, much like contraception.
Lumache con tonno, primi piatti veloci
Megaupload founder Kim Dotcom closer to extradition following ruling
Symbolic Mathematics Using Maxima
Why do you feel so?
Personally I think it's exactly the reason why you don't want your CEO to have a cushion - he doesn't really care, it doesn't really matter to him that his former company is going down the toilet as he's cashed out long ago.
It would be suicidal to accept that, it would settle a tremendously dangerous precedent.

This should never be accepted, full stop.
This is true from an academic perspective, but not from a practical perspective. Typical crud apps don't have complex problem domains. They're just electronic filers with a search field. You do need some dsl's, for formulating views, tying those views to models, and tying those models to persistent storage. That's why most popular frameworks implement pseudo-dsl's for MVC and ORM. MVC and ORM can be solved in a generic way at the framework or even language level, and it could be argued that you shouldn't try to solve them in a project-specific way to ease maintenance. There is little value for many (or even most) projects in having a more powerfully abstractable language.
Very hard they are. But that's what we have engineers for :).

See what you just did: you outlined some real challenges we face if we want to improve this technology. And now we have something that is in domain of science and engineering, so we can discuss ideas and solutions. We're in a much better state than if we just left it on "it's hard to imagine" or "it's impossible".
That's function scope, not block scope. You can use the "let" keyword to get block scope since Javascript 1.7.
Pulp Fiction - Kill Bill - the connection
The most serious problem with hackathons is that many of them create the misconception that anyone can build a product in a weekend. Most cannot.

A few can build a great prototype; an even smaller miniscule few can build a product. But most hackathon participants produce either no code at all or terrible code.

This is fine if all you want is to make friends or build working relationships or make a throwaway prototype.

But, if you want to make a lasting code contribution, it's almost certainly got to be a small feature or bugfix on an established project, for which the problem definition, skill set required, and relevant parts of the codebase were documented in some detail before the hackathon. Very few hackathons have this level of preparation.

Better preparation or better expectation-setting -- that's what is needed.
I agree with the secrecy part, but please stop with the Samsung copying Apple bullshit, it's simply not constructive. I'm sure you know how much copying went into Apple's products themselves.
> After all, a deep belief network starts with an RBM for unsupervised pre-training, but the finetuning stage that follows just treats the network as a standard MLP using backprop.

We could also pipe the raw data through an RBM and then slap a SVM or some other classifier on top.
ARM servers to disrupt data centers. Legacy apps "just don't matter"
Yes, but that minor difference makes a huge difference in usability.

Thankfully C++ is powerful enough that user types have the same rights as built-in ones.
Frankly, 'var' is fine most of the time. Keep writing small functions and all that. Besides, you have 'let' now.

I have much a bigger beef with the type system (or lack thereof), the array-and-hashes-as-one-datatype stupidity and the lack of a module system.
And is present in this case. But the OP decided to ask about gay parents instead...
I think the bigger question is: could they want to?
Exploit lets websites bombard visitors’ PCs with gigabytes of data
I have not really had to use ruby, but are gems really that much of a pain to use? I mean dependencies exist in other languages too, what makes ruby so crazy that even I know about the pain everyone seems to experience?
Threre's also LPeg [1], which I find much nicer than lex and yacc (or flex and bison) for writing parsers. I just finished up a quick hack to pull out a single file from a git repository into its own repository, and the parsing of the "git fast-export" output is 70 lines of Lua/LPeg. It may sound like quite a bit, but it's a near dump of the BNF you find on the man page [2]. From there, it was simple enough to grovel through the in-memory representation of the git repository and output only what I needed.

[1] http://www.inf.puc-rio.br/~roberto/lpeg/ [3]

[2] http://kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/docs/git-fast-import....

[3] I actually use the re module [4] as I find the results more readable, and only use the LPeg module when I need something that the re module can't provide.

[4] http://www.inf.puc-rio.br/~roberto/lpeg/re.html
Tracing the birth of Italian computer science
On Archetypes of Smartphone Users
Let's say you have a new idea about a mobile application and your start designing it. Do you have somebody as a target? Do you write down one or more descriptions of a persona? If yes, which details you write down? I have experienced something similar recently and I wrote down a semi-serious list of smartphone archetypes. Do you match any of them?
Scholar of Internet Freedom Denied Tenure for Human Rights Advocacy
Why Apple’s Interfaces Will Be Skeuomorphic Forever, And Why Yours Will Be Too
Ask HN: Planning to work in London
I'm planning to move to London (from Australia) next year and will be looking for work. I have approx. 2 years self-taught experience in iOS development, and some experience in Rails. I've just started my final year thesis in relational database/social graph construction, and will be graduating at the end of the year. What sort of chance do I have of getting a job in London? Is there anything in particular I should be doing to increase those chances?

Thanks in advance for helping out.