skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think if you cut everyone's income of fiat currency by half, the effect is not that everyone is 50% poorer. I think if you cut everyone's disposable income of fiat currency by half, the effect is not that they can afford 50% fewer luxury goods. And I don't think any of the uber-wealthy sit around and think "You know, I was going to make an extra billion in the market, but since I'd have to give up 20% to capital gains, I'll just stick all my money in a non-interest-bearing account instead.".
Yikes, thats an alarming story. The fact that they were deliberately asking junior developers to impersonate senior developers using the same email addresses etc is a really worrisome practice. I had a situation managing a team for a client a while back where developers suddenly turned awful, and I'm now suspicious this could have been the case. Do you know if this is widespread with other companies?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=471353 (1674 days ago)
But, your parents KNEW it was R-rated, they didn't go into an UNKNOWN and then got whatever they got... I am fine with a hackathon saying "This is X rated, for improving <pornsite>" -- that is perfect fine, it isn't about the specific expectation, it is about SETTING one.

Having no guidance means that if this is acceptable is far more grey... I think it if was supposed to be G-rated, everyone would agree it was not.

Clear boundaries and expectations help everyone, from a parent deciding if their children should participate to an adult deciding if they want to attend.
SF Disrupt hack 2013
http://udiscover.me/landing
I don't see how there's anything fundamentally offensive about it. Maybe immature, but harmless from my point of view.
He was making a joke that Yahoo don't have many users.
Post samples. Charge high rates. Clients that pay you low amounts of money tend not only to be bad for your bank account, but for your professional development... not to mention your sanity.
Think I'm looking at this differently - as breaking down the granularity of a page. If you standardised on a card API it wouldn't quite be a web of things but takes you in that direction. Something like RSS/Atom but less general and oriented to individual items rather than lists, with a richer data model. That content is then available to pages and apps equally and could maybe help against the walled garden effect.
.NET Pills Newsletter #9
Seconding this. In consulting or SAAS work I've done, the trend has been the same: low priced customers generate the highest levels of support, send the largest amount of unreasonable requests, and produce the most headaches.

None of this is a dig at the grandparent comment. Just a general tendency. Produce something of value, and people will pay and be glad to do it. The whiners will go elsewhere and you'll be better for it. (again, NOT a dig at the grandparent. There's an actual class of whiny users that vanishes when your don't pander to them)
They called this the punch card in the 1960s - have I gone too far :)
It's nice as a footnote, but in the end it's just a trivial observance that has no real significance. I don't treat it as any different from a regular day.
If you're trying to figure this out by hand, without software, here is the general technique:

1. figure out how to swap two corners on the top layer, leaving the rest of the top layer intact, completely screwing up the bottom.
2. rotate the top layer.
3. do the exact opposite of step 1. This will repair the bottom two layers and swap two other corners of the top, leaving you with a 3-cycle or a double swap.

Figure out the same thing with edge pieces.

You can now get all of the pieces in the right location.

Now figure out how to rotate a corner clockwise (only screwing up the bottom two layers), then turn the top and undo it.

You can now rotate all of the corners to the correct position. (For every rotate, you have to un-rotate something.)

Do the same with flipping an edge piece. (You can flip an edge, but you have to unflip another edge.)

NB. With the 3-cycle you developed in the beginning, you will may have to turn an edge to get the three pieces you want to rotate in the right position relative to each other, and then turn it back when you're done with your transformation.

This technique can be applied to similar puzzles.
I remember when having an air conditioned cab was considered to be high end farming...
Then it was 8 track stereo, and microwave ovens.
The tractors were over $100,000 before the advent of the personal computer. I wonder what the cost of a smart tractor is now?
It's alarming what they're doing, but the rate at which people are losing faith in them is more satisfying than alarming. Fuck the U.S.A.
Actually you don't need to trust the fab: you can get a batch of identical chips, select X% at random (use dice!), grind off the packaging, examine them under a microscope, and compare what you see to the plans you sent to the fab.

Proving that the plans themselves aren't backdoored (your layout software was written by whom exactly?) and aquiring a microscope that can resolve 32nm features without using any integrated circuts (which, by paranoia, we know will identify images of backdoored ICs and replace them with images of non-backdoored ones) is left as a exercise for the reader.

I'm probably forgetting some other attack vectors here, actually.
mikeknoop: no offense, but pacing a direct link to a compromised site isn't good. these types of posts should link to a screenshot.
In 2012, the US imported 40% of their oil. Of that, 13% is from the middle east. The middle east hasn't had the lions share of US oil consumption for quite some time.

http://www.npr.org/2012/04/11/150444802/where-does-america-g...
The benefits of Hacker School
That's not how foreclosures work.

I do see plenty of web references that describe foreclosures the way you do, but they all talk specifically about foreclosures when the lien is a mortgage. Does the same process apply when the lien is a tax lien? What information I can find suggests it doesn't--or at least, there seems to be a lot of wiggle room.
I live in the near future
>Hacked by Shadow_Haxor

>Contact Me:https://www.facebook.com/Shad0whax0r

GTFO.
I like the word 'card' to explain it to clients, but really this is just another way to say modules or objects, which we've been using for quite a while.
For sure. Good point about the contractors hiring generals. There are lots of different revolving doors in different industries.

If you work at a major investment bank, why would you speak out against government regulation of your industry when you might need a bailout some year in the future?

If you work at a government regulator (e.g. the SEC), why would you regulate the industry too hard when they are going to be your biggest source of consulting fees after you leave your government employment?

For example, Bernie Madoff's brother was a director of SIFMA (Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association) for two years.
An option to detect and remove broken links could be nice.
I'm glad I resisted pressure from Intel to let /dev/random rely only on RDRAND
The way this should have been done is there should have been a unit test that tested the correctness of whatever the
"dummy thread parent" was supposed to achieve. With such a test in hand the new implementation would have been obviously deficient.

Of course, in accordance with another of jwz's laws, the CADT model of software development, test suites are often discarded along with everything else when some attention-deficit teenager decides to rewrite everything from scratch.
> Doesn't it stand to reason that if it were ever possible to travel back in time and kill Hitler that this would've already happened?

No, because all the idealists who went back in time to kill Hitler (believe me, they were lined up around the block, and with no expectation of a safe return), according to multiple witnesses suddenly and inexplicably vanished just as they were pulling the trigger. Theorists say that outcome may have had something to do with the fact that their own existence depended in some perverse way on Hitler's uninterrupted existence.

All except Martin Bormann, who (I bet you didn't know this) went down into the bunker and killed Hitler and his girlfriend Eva Braun -- and even shot Hitler's dog Blondi -- then made up something about Hitler committing suicide, then disappeared without a trace. Of the top Nazis who survived to the end of the war, most eventually were located, but Bormann totally disappeared.

There's obvious speculation the Bormann was the time traveler we all imagined could have done it, and wished we could be. Too bad he didn't act sooner -- every month that Hitler lived caused the deaths of tens to hundreds of thousands.

Okay, I just made that up. Ordinarily I wouldn't have to say that, but there are so many crazy ideas uncritically embraced these days that I realize someone might take this seriously.
It did tell you it was gonna ask questions. Anecdotally I read the second paragraph faster because I had an idea of the difficulty-level of the questions involved. (ie not very)
Ask HN: I am working in a troubled startup and seeking some advice
I've been working in this startup for over 1.5 years. My boss keeps the financials hidden from all the employees. Lately paycheques were always delayed. Also I had not been paid for my latest salary payment.

The boss and an investor came to apologize to each of the coworkers individually. However, I found I was the only one who didn't get paid for this time. I found out about this just the past Friday. I emailed my boss and politely asked him when is he going to pay me. He didn't reply me.

Tomorrow is also the last legal day he must pay me. I am struggling whether I should just quit tomorrow. What would you do if you are in my position?

Thanks a lot for your advice in advance.
I believe the palm pre did this like, 5 years ago. Nobody was excited about it then. The concept with the PRE was: Instead of having apps, you have cards- bits of content, that have some chunk of functionality attached to them by virtue of their type. So a contact card has contact stuff on it. A web page card has browser stuff on it. It's a kind of abstraction that allows some new kinds of interaction like, arbitrary sorting of cards, searching through cards, shuffling, etc etc- Making the content itself more like a file icon. Or conversely, bringing more of the content and app functionality into the freedom of movement of a file icon. There's no concept of "opening" a file in an application. The file is just there, with everything you need ready to go.

This new incarnation has to do with facebook and twitter's inclination to actually retrieve the contents of a user supplied inline link to try and show a "preview" inline, so you're not just clicking into the link blindly. The twitter card concept is about giving the people at the destination of that URL some control over the appearance of that twitter preview- by the use of metadata/microformats-like markup. This level of control is starting to approach the uncanny valley of resembling the above Palm-Pre-like card concept; turning the preview into the app functionality itself.
Very morbid - a lot of endings and very few beginnings. I think that makes a case for the inauspicious HN post not giving a great indicator of start-up success. For example if it were the other way around I would expect to see many many more show HN posts on this list.
The real shame to me, is that a 9-year old girl presented, it was mentioned in this article, and I can't find a single link anywhere to what it is she presented.

We should be promoting her and getting her to the top rank on HN rather than these guys who built useless apps that, though I don't find offensive, are completely beyond useless and uninteresting. Tech reporting needs more than just shock-value. How do we reverse this trend?
America's Car Recovery Explains the U.S. Economy
> What if by killing Hitler all future timelines ended a lot worse than this one?

I always like to hear from at least one optimist. :)
You have a good point about the porn industry.

If someone were presenting a true technical innovation that happened to be inspired by the needs of that industry, that would not be objectionable as long as the 'product' itself weren't displayed in the presentation. (e.g. this innovation in streaming video software enables 10,000 concurrent streams etc etc)

Though if it were the AVN conference rather than TechCrunch, showing the product would be practically required. You, know, for demonstration purposes ...
...

Aaaand I just realised I was talking to mpyne, not rayiner.

Sorry, you two share positions on so much I get you mixed up.
PEG parsers use backtracking and do not operate in a single pass. They use memoization to avoid the combinatorial explosion, but that trades one problem for another (though of lesser magnitude).

Recursive descent parsers are normally LL(k) and are O(n) in the size of the input - choices are made based on the next k tokens and no backtracking or alternate grammar paths are generally ever tried. Though they are not particularly efficient when rules nest deeply on the left before consuming tokens. It's better to use an operator precedence parser for parsing arithmetic expressions than use LL(1) rules to handle precedence, for example.

Having a separate lexer has other benefits besides eliminating explicit whitespace. It enforces consistency in the token set, which can otherwise seem arbitrary - a keyword has a special meaning in one part of the grammar, but not elsewhere. And this in turn helps with keeping backward compatibility when growing a language, because you can know for a fact that using a keyword elsewhere in the grammar doesn't introduce new problems.
There was a thread about nytimes.com getting hacked [1], where it was discovered what appeared to be malware on the site to which the NYTimes.com site was redirected. By linking to a hacked site, you expose everyone to possible malware or other targeted attacks. Sure, this could work for any popular content submitted here, but I think the threat might be higher for a hacked site.

A second example, would be where Facebook and Apple employees were likely targeted and hacked by visiting iPhoneDevSDK, where their computers were compromised by Java exploit [2]. HN attracts lots of tech folks from all over the place (apple, google, facebook, startups, etc) and would be a ripe target, similar to the iPhoneDevSDK incident.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6288051

[2] http://thenextweb.com/apple/2013/02/19/facebook-apple-employ...
It's worrying for MS that for all the major divisions shown in that image, I've never once thought of or used them in relation to each other. MS has no unifying experience to build on in consumer consciousness.
Off topic: in what context do so many people on here need parsers? Do you actually use them for your jobs or are all of these use case for pet languages? When reading comments for threads like this I cannot help but feel that every day a half a dozen new programming languages get released that I never hear about.
I can see both sides of this. Perhaps a solution is idonethis not charging per-user? $10/mo for a small team seems fine. $50/mo for a small 10-person business would certainly put me off if I had a team that size. $20/mo would compare more favourably.

As a point of comparison, I pay $600/yr (same amount @louthy pays for idonethis) for Xero which is my accounting system. It does reconciliation for multiple banks accounts, statements and invoicing with templates, handles payroll for up to 20 staff at that account level, enables remote and auditable participation from my bookkeeper and accountant, has extensive reporting, etc. I could not build even a simple replacement for all that functionality for less than a few years worth of $600/yr in time.
Regardless of the intent, property taxes do serve both purposes. Developed land must provide a return above and beyond the property tax rate in order to be profitable. That includes primary residences, where the return is... not easy to measure in dollars.
I wonder if the test tells you when you read faster without it. Subjectively I feel that I did, but the test just returned "No improvement with BeeLineReader"
Half the posts are less than 1 year old. Wish there was a way to normalize it against active users around the posting date.

It might be interesting to plot the top 4-5 posts per month.
Why is this a worry for Microsoft, but not Google and Apple? This isn't really tackled until the last sentence of the article, and even then, they say that Google and Apple are more focused.

Is that correct? or do Google and Apple just have one larger profit maker with many smaller profit-makers or loss-leaders?
Yea that would actually give a better dynamic of the number of votes. Right now the top ones are the recent ones which makes sense since the number of active users here is growing.
I think he was asking for a non 5 i's partner, even if he did only say "non-US"
When I wrote "Don't Fly During Ramadan" (#3 post), I anticipated it'd get a few hundred hits from my friends if I was lucky. I almost didn't even post it to HackerNews, until a friend told me I should.

....Boy was I wrong.

That aside, it's sad how many of the top posts are negative in some way, even if you exclude the death announcements. The exact count depends on whether you consider things like PG banning SOPA companies to be "negative" news, but only a small handful of the top 30 links are truly positive (eg, Light Table).

It's also interesting how many (or few) of the posts are technical in their nature. I believe I count two that are completely non-technical (mine, and the other one about the TSA), and three or four that are about software that people have built (Meteor, etc.).

The rest are "in the middle" - mostly about people important to the tech community (Dennis Ritchie, Aaron Swartz, etc.), or about political issues related to technology, but not talking about the technology itself in any depth.

This pattern continues even if you look beyond the top 30.

I wonder if this has changed over time as the HN community has grown - perhaps in the morning I'll try filtering out posts less than X days old and see how that affects the top results.
> Maybe it happened, sort of. I mean our timeline being the result of killing Megahitler and replacing him with the Hitler we know and find him totally evil only because we can't compare him to Megahitler.

That might be a little tongue in cheek, but in fact, Hitler made a number of very bad decisions, like invading Russia, that a MegaHitler might have avoided. The history of that time could have been much worse with someone a little less nutty in charge.

I bet someone from the so-called "History Channel" is reading this and planning to turn it into a pseudo-historical TV series.
Virgin Galactic on schedule to put tourists in space next year
I would have preferred to link to an article but no-one has written one yet -- and Boxee devices have been offline all day.

EDIT: here is the screenshot: http://zpr.io/6SmC.png
Basically, if you can simplify it to a standard, well understood, and high level construct you should. If you can't, you might be doing something wrong and adding unnecessary complexity.
FWIW, I've used http://www.snptz.com/ off and on since it debuted on HN some years ago for weekly snippets.

I've since developed my own daily forward-looking/backward-looking format, essentially a simple text-based mashup of David Seah's inspiring productivity forms:

http://davidseah.com/productivity-tools/
A Visualization to Help You Keep Track of Probability Distributions
I think it's just much easier to know what was than what's going to be.
Meet 'Titstare', the Tech World's Latest 'Joke' from the Minds of Brogrammers
You are too focused on pay. Continuing for a limited amount of time without pay is not unheard of, but if I were in that situation, I'd want the founder to be completely open about what's going on. The fact that he isn't is obviously a red flag.

What else is going on? Do you have a viable product? Is it not selling? Or is the problem that he says that it's selling but there's no paycheck anyway? Does the product's market make sense to you? How does your product stack up against the competition? In other words: is there any point to sticking around, even ignoring the paycheck issue?

If you have doubts about the company's prospects, and they are being cagey about how things are going, I'd probably leave.

If you think the company has a bright future, then I'd dig deeper into the paycheck issue, maybe asking the founder why he's being so secretive. Have with him the conversation you're starting here. (Him thinking you are about to leave might not be such a bad idea. Hard to imagine that would be a surprise.)
I'm not sure if you fully get the idea of freedom of speech. Some dudes can do a presentation at a hackathon and say whatever they want. Other folks can get on Hacker News comments and say whatever they want (about the first dudes).

And anyway, "freedom of speech" only exists as a law when applied to Congress. For the rest of us it's just a guideline.
In general, my advice would be to not approach freelancing as an exchange of expertise in a certain technology for currency. Usually people are looking for their problems to be solved - build me an app, fix my slow site, make me more money - so my advice would be to market yourself as a problem-fixer instead.

That said, web development is obviously hot at the moment (Django, Rails, Node, etc) and I have marketed myself as an expert Ruby on Rails developer successfully. Now, I don't do this for in-person gigs but on oDesk I think that it helps with my credibility for those tech-savvy employers with lists of skills they need. There are certainly a plethora of jobs posted for various stacks. I believe oDesk lists their projects in public and if not, you can create a free account and peruse the listings for a better idea.

I still would advise you to address other risks in your pitch to employers though, because generally speaking you'll be talking to people who are nervous about hiring and spending money on someone they've never met (and may never meet in person). A business owner or entrepreneur posting on oDesk is disproportionately worried about things like:

1. Is this guy for real/a flake?

2. When is he going to work on my site?

3. Is he just browsing facebook since I can't look over his shoulder?

4. What was he doing for 4 hours yesterday and nothing got deployed to the staging site?

Communication is really the thing that is going to set you apart, much moreso than your technical expertise.

To give you an idea, I opened my profile on oDesk with about 2.5 years of professional Rails development experience and started out around $25/hour for my first gig (gulp, a bit nervous admitting that I worked as a developer for $25/hour) - I was new to this freelancing thing and if I could go back, I would run screaming from that $25/hour client, feedback be damned. I raised my rate rather quickly however - I have since taken projects at hourly rates of $35, $50, $65, and $75.

Please note that this places me in the top 5% of successful freelancers on oDesk, and that I never worked for a client more than 20 hours per week. Yes, you're competing against folks who bid $2/hour and no, I have never spent a moment worrying about them. Nobody, and I mean nobody wants a client who values developer time at $2/hour.
Don't let anybody fool you. There are a lot of goofy things going on around here.
Or cookies :(
Are we not at a stage where we can disable/disarm a 107 year old man without killing him?
Why can't SWAT teams tranquilize a risk, like we do an animal?

I completely understand the risks involved for the police, and am thankful that none of them were physically injured in doing their duty of protecting the public, but along with one dead old man, I'm sure their is a psychological cost to the SWAT team in, after the dust settles, recognizing that they have killed a man who was in need of help.