skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I believe the scenario is:

Your username: you
You are following: friend
You are not following: stranger.

stranger tweets: @friend #Scala works4me (using jcl.Conversions) where is your pain point?

friend tweets: @stranger I wish the would be like Clojure or better work on an Iterator instead of lists

The way it worked before, you would have the option to see both of these messages, one of these, or none of these. Now you get to see none of them. @you tweets are unaffected.

I'm finding it hard to find a clear description of this anywhere, so I might be incorrect.
As a simple heuristic, it's an elegant solution.

Could the front page 'merit' be more or less ~accurately~ described via continuous function?

for (User user : item.up_voters) merit += user.life_span_in_months/12;

for (User user : item.down_voters) merit -= user.life_span_in_months/12;
I don't have the time or energy to make a valuable comment about this, but my hunch is that in the real world, cache effects dominate instruction selection in how fast in-memory searching is.
Watch Atlantis rendevous with Hubble Live
Unless, of course, he's assuming a 6000-word sentence with no punctuation except the period at the end.
I know I'm in the minority here, but I actually like it that way --- and not just as a reader (I already unchecked the checkbox) but as a writer. It always bugged me to think that I was cluttering up other people's feeds with @responses, which made me feel obliged to rewrite them to be generally applicable.
The software industry does not need patents to encourage people to innovate

Without intellectual property, why would anyone ever acquire a startup? Just copy it or poach a few key developers.

Remember, everyone's gotta eat, put a roof over their head and so on. RMS has got that covered with a million-dollar grant from the MacArthur Foundation and another cool million from the Takeda foundation. What do you got?
There is also Zuora: http://zuora.com/

[unaffiliated]
I can't help but feel this is a very broad pattern that happens all the time.

"Hardware is always easy to built. Software is always hard to written except trivial case. Wetware is always expensive just for a competent one."
It seems both significantly less effort and less unpleasant than all the effort and time required to build a new life, or to become happy and accepting with this one.

It is, in short, the easy way out. And who isn't tempted by the easy way out?
I am commonly using clojure now to interactively test methods in my Java code.
The best take on privacy I've ever read (and the only one that actually made me pause and wonder about the hidden assumptions in my thinking) was Jonathan Franzen's Imperial Bedroom ( in http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&ct=res&... , although I didn't find a direct link).

He basically claims that privacy as we know it is an invention of our age (late 20th century, early 21st), and, as such, it is not necessarily something worth keeping at all costs.
Killing zombies.
So how did Apple compete against Microsoft in the desktop computing space? They built an ecosystem of their own. To make sure people would come there, they saw what sucked about Microsoft, and made sure that those very weaknesses were their own strengths.

There are plenty of things that suck about the iPhone. If Palm has the insight to spot those and capitalize on them, then they'll win a place in the smartphone businesss.
Check out some popular sorting algorithms, those that do the job "in place", i.e. without additional memory allocation.
You've worded this wrong. You meant to say, "Review my app: an API for iTunes". "Ask HN" only works when it's something HN people care about on its own merits.
Acquine: Aesthetic Quality Inference Engine
A monadic parser in JavaScript
What other name did he post this under? I only see the one other time, which he mentioned in the post text. Also, I doubt he's asking the wrong crowd.
Practicing Wisdom in the Obama Era
Who wants an employee who never questions the requirements?

More than you might imagine.

Think of all the people you've worked with, in whatever capacity, who never question requirements. It seems likely they will hire people of the same sort, not just because they might have a bias toward the "good" employee being subservient, but because someone who questions the requirements to them will inevitably want them to question the requirements to their superior. They've already spent their career up to this point avoiding this, it seems unlikely they'll take some action now that prevents it.
Agreed. In this case, I/O will tend to dominate as well. Looking into the optimized memcmp was fun though.
Lots of lisp and Basic variants are compiled and typed. Still tastes like chicken.

But if it is really fast, then I'd say it is like some spicy indian chicken and consider using it -- if there also is an interpreted version.
An Amiga 500 is barely faster and has not much more memory than a PC-Jr, but we don't "parody" the 500 like this article appears to parody the Jr. The 500 could connect to an ISP over a 56k modem and even had a reasonable browser.
Bad idea. Remember the kerfuffle around the orange names? This would be worse, because high karma would have a numeric and measurable effect on the site.
Ok, this is bizarre. Just submitted this link and it's by ontilt and not me... Why? Bug in HN?
Launch win, geek touchdown celebration fail [video]
Efficient Vinyl Banner Printing
No, it just means that ontilt submitted it first, so your submission counted as an upvote.
Speaking as an "admin" by way of job title (but developer by way of formal education, work history, and personal interest):

Yes, or at least they should be. :)

(I was going to write something much longer, but it's probably preaching to the choir here.)
7% speedup by going with SIMD instructions. I think I'd have guarded the memcmp() call with a check of the first byte and saved the call overhead on 99.5% of the bytes instead (insert assumptions on data).
Hmm, then the timing is far too coincidental.
Hire HN: Web Developer Needed in Columbus, OH
Greetings!

I used SearchYC to research the etiquette on job postings here (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=477675) and it seems like people are cool with it, so here goes:

We're a company called eRetailing (www.eretailing.com) in Columbus, Ohio. We specialize in allowing our customers to create their own designs on apparel, wall graphics, stickers, and more. The very existence of custom products leads to a lot of exciting ideas. We hope you'll be excited too.

We're looking for a programmer to aid in the development of several websites as well as rich media applications using web technologies.

Programming languages used will be PHP/ AJAX, Perl, and Flash. The job requires fluency in these languages, or a fluent base in C and C++ or Java with the ability to quickly learn PHP, Perl, and Flash. Unix experience a plus.

Requirements:

Bachelors in Computer Science or Computer Engineering.

Salary:

Negotiable based upon experience.

Respond to:

jbenzenberg at eretailing dot com

Thanks!

p.s. About 90 days ago PG said that we can soon post openings to the jobs page via Startuply. It looks like that part is live now, which is awesome. You can post there via JobSyndicate, which unfortunately is in private beta. If I need to move this posting over to JobSyndicate, I'd be happy to! (I suppose I just need to be invited first).
We get it. Now stop overusing this chicken metaphor.
I've worked 10+ hour days for months, before, and I can do it again, but it'll cost the employer. It'll cost him in money , productivity, and goodwill.

No more unpaid overtime, and you'll be paying more per hour as well. I'm only flesh and blood, so after so many hours, the over time will actually be counter-productive, but I'm sure you already know that. And once the economy recovers even slightly, or as soon as I get a new offer, I'm gone.

Little Chinese saying: You want a horse that's good, and you want a horse that doesn't eat grass. Can't be done, brother; at least, not for long.
I think such an API would be of interest to iPhone entrepreneurs.

I don't think it's best that he puts that out as a "Review my app" if he hasn't implemented it yet.
I didn't think much of this article.

A requirement to work nights, weekends, and vacation is called a death march, not hard work.

"How to get hired: give off every indication that your time is worthless. Agree to anything that is asked of you without regard to compensation. Act like being burnt out is a standard that indicates professionalism."

The article might as well be titled "How to hate life - and get divorced - in a recession."
The only thing I feel I can truly lock down is this : I don't know. Nothing can truly be trusted from whether there is any "me" to survive death all the way down to the accuracy of memory and the individual perceptions of my senses. Some more fundamental assumptions are more solid than others - such as the assumption that what I perceive through my senses reflects an objective reality that you also perceive through your senses. I only want to lock down a particular assumption in the context of solving a particular problem and only so far as empirical evidence supports. I want to mark down the appropriate set of assumptions (with perhaps a common base that is "identity") as known and solid then attempt to solve my problem and move on or revisit assumptions as required. So, my actions and values are in a constant state of doubt and while certain of my base beliefs seem very solid now - so did rejected beliefs of yesterday. This is my only core belief, that it is best to keep an empty mind, a mind free of preconceptions making minimal operational assumptions based only on empirical evidence (as time allows). I tend to think identification is overcompensation - people really NEED their religion to be correct because of the fear of the great unknown, death.
> relying on applications that you can't modify

Personally I don't worry about that. What I worry about is the safety of my data. When the day comes when I can't use a desktop client to download email from GMail, or when I won't be able to open a .doc file without M. Office, then I'll be worried.

> If it's not, everyone is at the mercy of one company.

I don't know about that. I've heard it from Stallman's talks but it's too dramatic for my taste. What people should be worrying about is open specs to protocols and file formats.

The best example of a software monopoly is Windows, and if Windows was the only operating system available, then we'd surely be at the mercy of one company.

But that's not the case and while some people can point to the GPL as the catalyst, that's not necessarily the case. It might be the technology's fast pace or the academia which has always favored collaboration, not to mention that the open source model of development is in many ways just better.

I don't think software is the domain in which monopolies can be established indefinitely.
If nothing else this is a gorgeous application -- it looks great. And in fact it looks like something I might use as often as Wikipedia (though not as often as Google).

I can't wait to play around with it; some of these examples (nutritional labels, the actuarial stuff, ISS location, etc.) are just dead cool.
This belong to Consumerist/Yelp.
I've been here long enough... since February or so I've drastically decreased my voting participation. I perceive that my votes won't counteract the effects of the (well-intentioned) flood of newcomers.
I meant what I wrote. Conflagration it is.
The Loopt bit was a non sequitur and is not related to the conversation.
How Violent Are You? [video]
If you don't have time, just watch from the 42 min mark.
With all due respect to him, however, Stallman's position seems contradictory now.

At first, when developers sent us information and it was on our computers, Stallman said that we should be able to use this information in any way we chose, since it was our freedom to use our property that was at stake. I agree with this.

Now, however, when we send information to the developers, it seems that Stallman has switched sides, and doesn't believe that that recipient or holder of the information should be free to do as they will with it. In light of this, maybe it was never freedom to use information we had that was important to Stallman, but something else that coincided.
i used to make liquid fertilizer for my aquascape (google PMDD -- poor man dupla drop)

the raw materials are very cheap (like $1 per kg, agricultural grade) and the end product sells like $10 per liter (by weight, ~100 gr raw material, the rest water)

so the multiplier (price/cost) is like 100, pretty common for chemical products

the whole hobby-industry is like this:
promote nutritionless sand as substrate to replace soil
use the expensive fert (surprise! they sell it too!) to enhance plant growth
use expensive 'full-spectrum' light
use heater to give vertical water movement
co2 tanks (you can make DIY using sucrose and yeast)

and of course without saying, spreading FUD to fuel collaborative manipulation

in the end, i end up just using soil, sun, no fert, no tech ... plants had lived for centuries on those with great success!

hey ... maybe i should go sell some ferts :D ... i still have bags of KNO3, H2PO4, MgSO4, FeSO4, ZnSO4, MnSO4, Na4EDTA lying around collecting dusts
Yes, it's some polynomial function initialized by pin number value. This is plain old technology which is very well used in corporate banking for years: accountants receive their "beepers" to generate authentication code to authorize their transactions (wire transfers for example).
No, corporations exercise power over others using the framework of the government. Without the government, their petty little monopolies wouldn't exists.(Think patent and copyright) They wouldn't be able to get any subsidy and favors short of extorting the consumers.

Democracy doesn't mean anything because it is two wolves and one sheep deciding what to eat for dinners. However, guns in the hand of the people matters. When people have guns, they have the ability to protect themsleves from a brewing mob. It creates for a more... polite society.
to raise a family with all the luxuries, conveniences and advantages money can buy, you're gonna need a lot more than $175k. How else can one pay for therapy sessions for the 5 year old, country club riding lessons with the older kid and semi-annual Euro trips for your entire family?

But if you can't raise a family with $175k, making appropriate "sacrifices" to pet expenditures that aren't necessary, and getting the best value of your money when it needs to be spent, you are doing it wrong.
There's only incentive to be honest and accurate in your advertising when your potential customers have the wherewithal to tell the difference. Economists have studied this in terms of online dating and used car sales.
I think this outlook sums up why news is so dangerous, no matter who the individuals are that make up the community or how they report it. . .There is some Alan Kay quote floating around out there of him paraphrasing something Douglas Engelbart noted about the difference between what is the news with computers? and what is new with computers?

I don't come to HN to read the news nor should HN be reporting the news to me, I come here because it's a community that is grounded in doing new things and showing me what these new things can do.
We also recently found a great book on this topic:

Leaving Microsoft to Change the World (http://www.leavingmicrosoftbook.com/) by John Wood founder of Room to Read (roomtoread.org). They require locals to build libraries and schools and raise the material and labor. Then they pay for scholarships and equipment and supplies. It's a true partnership.
Or, more simply: "A people hire A people, B people hire C people."
The first time I posted it via link by mistake and deleted it. I felt like I worded the second time wrong. Apparently I worded it wrong this time too.

I'm sorry if I seem spammy, I'm just desperate to get this post right for proper feedback. Most features I just build, keep if it's used and abandon if it's not.

With an API I know people would be depending on me for their site. I'm trying to make sure it's the right direction so I don't end up having to abandon the project along with 1 or 2 users who adopt it.

Sounds like no feedback IS the feedback. If it were a good idea the wording wouldn't matter so much.
What do you think about Wolfram's teaser strategy?
I have noticed a bunch of "Wolfram let me watch while he used his new engine" posts in the last few months. I understand that there is a point of building tension in your target audience. However, to me it looks that this is too much for such kind of geeky application - after too much of "I've seen it and it is too cool, it will put google to shame, but I won't let you try it yet" the result could be Wolfram singin' the blues with Cuil. Or I am too sceptic?
Well, RedHat is doing fine. Anybody can poach a few developers or copy from them. In fact, there are copycats who did just that.

However, RedHat manages to survive and even thrive just fine.
> Without intellectual property, why would anyone ever acquire a startup? Just copy it or poach a few key developers.

Reddit has no unique "intellectual property" of a make-or-break nature, as far as I know. Yet they were bought. There are lots of reasons to buy startups that have nothing to do with patents or copyright: to get the founders, to get the name, domain, and code, to get the userbase (same as last, in some cases), to get contracts or other associated deals, and probably lots more.
Yeah, I had three offers within two weeks of beginning my job search in January. This is NOT a bad time to be a CS graduate.
Actually one of the surprising things is the huge percentage of votes cast by old-timers. For frontpage articles it is never less than 40% and sometimes as much as 80%.
Yes, but me sending you my friend network graph and SSN versus, you sending me the source code of a GPL'ed app -- these are not symmetrical!

Also, in Stallman's world, if you don't want to share your source, you're free to keep it to yourself. Likewise, he urges users to keep their information to themselves.
Thinking about this from the interviewee side of the table, the answer I am given to this would provide me with a concrete datapoint about the culture I would be entering into. Is this a place where we are constantly seeking out better understanding of problems to come to better solutions? Or is this a place where the problems are not my concern, solutions are already determined before my involvement, and my role is just to grind out specifics of how that solution ought to be implemented? It might not play out that way if/when I'm hired, but it would be a big red flag depending on the answer.

From the perspective of the interviewer, I would worry about the interviewee who asks me this question. Do the feel the need to ask permission every time they want to explore the problem space? How often will they have a concern, but wanting to not appear confrontational or difficult, they don't even ask for permission to raise the concern? This may be good for workplace harmony and short-term image maintenance, but it sucks as a long-term strategy for corporate success and personal fulfillment and advancement. I realize this is in a person's socialization, and habits they form from interactions with past management. I also realize that other potential future employers would view this entirely differently; this is a sign this person is capable of fitting into a corporate culture where people just do things. This is a warning sign that this candidate would not work out well in any culture I could see myself hiring people into.

It seems a better strategy to just behave for the corporate culture you would want to be hired into, and let the ones that dislike your approach kick you to the curb. You’d probably be unhappy there once you were hired on anyway.
"Currently BBC iPlayer TV programmes are available to play in the UK only".
JPA2 - the potential to revolutionize Java development?
The typesafe metamodel API of JPA2 has some very interesting ideas, that might influence the future of Java.
Thanks for that link, reading through that site answered a lot of my questions!

And good point about the molding. It would probably make more sense to find existing plastic cases and tool out whatever holes you need for IO/display. Although that raises the question of how you would setup a factory line to do that tooling.

I'd even just like keywords so that I knew what this was called then I could google it myself.
A smart superior will always welcome valid questions about the requirements. No matter how bad his requirements may seem after the questions, it is usually better off than finding it out afterwards and letting _his_ superior know of it later. If he is the CEO, his superior is the board or customers.
Ask HN: Anyone know what to do with a failed external hard drive?
Sorry if this is not an appropriate place to ask this question but I'm a little desperate. My external hard drive died and it has a bunch of important files and documents. I searched around online and a couple of places recommend freezing it. I tried that - it didn't work. There seem to be numerous services that will take the failed disk and copy the data to a new drive but, inexplicably, they charge upwards of a thousand dollars for a seemingly basic service. I don't have that kind of money.

Does anyone know if there's a kit that you can buy to fix it yourself?
It's nothing new. In fact it used to be worse. Remember, HN started out as Startup News.
Knowledge, intelligence, and the willingness to coordinate are the key, not guns. If you don't have those three, it would just be a mob with guns. There are organizations that are orders of magnitude more effective than a mob.

I think those three are enough to protect the citizen's rights over their private information, without the guns. However, I think that these are lacking in sufficient measure in our society.
JRuby Nailgun Support in 1.3
if spinrite can't fix it, you'll probably have to spend a fortune to get the data off of it.
Steve Jobs Portrait made of Classic Apple Typefaces
i use simple chemistry recipes from the internet, like fertilizer, soap, making tofu and other simple stuffs

fear? don't! ... the beauty of chemistry is that you can dilute the concentration

so if a random guy say use a tablespoon of baking soda, try a teaspoon instead or use more water to dilute

the scariest thing i did was cleaning contact lens with baking soda (feaing it will make me blind) ... i'm not blind yet and found you can use saline (nacl) sterile solution to replace commercial solution

overall my costs decreased by a factor of ten

1 kg of baking soda can provide my basic cleaning (soap, toothpaste, contact lense, etc) for a year -- nowadays i don't go to personal health section (i used to go there every week whenever i go to grocery store -> 52 x 5 mins = 260 mins not wasted)
memcmp returns as soon as it finds a byte that doesn't match.
We did something that would probably go well with your site for Evernote. Probably could stand a once over from a talented visual designer, but overall we're happy with the UX choices.

http://fictivekin.com/Evernote_Redesign_A_case_study_in_UX