skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Michael Jackson Memorial Service Live Stream | Buzz Online 24/7
Review My App: Zen
We just launched Zen, a lightweight, web-based project management tool geared towards startups and small teams that are interested in adopting a lean mindset. We've been in private beta for awhile now, but just opened to the public this morning.

Check it out and let us know what you think! I'm interested in any and all feedback.

http://agilezen.com/?r=hn
I'm a braces-stand-alone person.

I've seen code that got confusing with K&R, especially when the programmer forgot to indent the next lines. And I really like the ability to adjust control flow with block commenting you have with braces-stand-alone.

I'm not looking to compress code. My goal is to make code as readable as possible. Anything I can do to make it explicitly clear what's going on I'm going to do. Code should not read like a mystery novel.
I took that test once when I was 14, at a party, and I was INTJ as well.

But the reaction I got from other people was a little weird. I sense they may have been judging me because of the J. Which stands for Judging.

So the successive times I've taken that test, I've been overly aware of my responses, and I'll consciously skew them to produce a result that represents a more outgoing, easygoing, emotional person.

Is that wrong?
All this talk about cloning Stack Overflow makes it ripe fodder for the next "make an X in 20 minutes" web framework screencast.
J2ME Mobile Development Series 2 - Planning
Slackware uses the Linux kernel and GNU toolset. The manual pages are all GNU. The only thing BSD like are the startup files.
That's much more interesting data, but it clearly shows that the reason Redis was performing better is because it's caching a ton of data in memory, whereas MySQL was constantly hitting the disk for access. This seems to be a misconfiguration of either your kernel settings or MySQL settings. If Redis effectively cached your entire dataset in RAM, then MySQL could have done so as well (or the kernel could have). I'm guessing that you configured MySQL in a way that caused the kernel to fight with the database over memory usage.
That's the weird thing about the coding profession. I'd wager that the vast majority of people here work on solved / "trivial" problems which have established best practices and everything all laid out there for you to find if you bother to look.

And yet we've all encountered so many developers who continually get it wrong.

It's this weird recurring phenomena I've had throughout my career (and I'd wager I'm not alone in this) where I know I'm not an excellent programmer compared to even, say, a random sampling of linux kernel developers _but_ I'm flat out horrified by the incompetence of my peers who seem to find the most asinine solutions to these trivial and well-known problems.
Good point. There is currently a 3 second update on the chat window. I'm interested to see how well App Engine scales on lots of little requests. I'll report back on that later...
Sorry, you're right. My recent work has involved pathological cases of dynamic spanning trees, and I've recently proved that a sub-class is NPC, and I mis-spoke myself here. The SatNav problem is obviously easier. Given the power of the processor, limited memory, and complexity of streets (in the places I typically deal with) I still find it surprising.

But you're right. Dijkstra's algorithm clearly solves this problem simply enough in O((|E|+|V|) log |V|) for the sparse case.

Apologies.
I don't think you understood the situation. It sounds to me like he was killing his own teammates -- who literally couldn't attack/fight his character -- using glitches/bugs. He just wasn't roleplaying a villain.

Normally when a villain tries to kill you, you can at least fight him. He was killing people for which "PvP mode was not enabled".
They since have. I believe chapter 13 of CoH/V addresses many of these PvP issues.
I actually keep a blog to keep track of my fitness related activities - I call it the Nutrex (Nutrition and Exercise) Log.

It may be useful to have an SMS app for heavy mobile users, but it wouldn't be very valuable to me.
The problem: RMS doesn't program either.

Back when he did, he was a much cooler (and cleaner) guy.
> The precision to which you need to compute phi in order to compute the Nth Fibonacci number by exponentiation is the precision you'd obtain by computing the ratio of the Nth and (N-1)th Fibonacci numbers

This seems true empirically, but when I do the math, it looks like you only need to calculate F_n up to about N/2 to make the ratio precise enough. (Since:

|phi - (F_(n+1)/F_n)| < (F_n)^(-2) = phi^(-2n)/sqrt(5) (approximately)

And, if |a|>>|b|, then:

|(a+b)^n - a^n| = n a^(n-1) b (approximately)

So our error just has to be < 1/(n phi^(n-1)), which should be true for roughly the N/2 convergent.) In either case, the algorithm is still basically quadratic.
Fixing all the loopholes is hard. Blizzard didn't want to mess up the game when they made the telekinesis skill in diablo 2, but it turned out to be a big problem. Similarly they didn't want you to be able to PK people with no warning, but various methods of doing that emerged. Now for Diablo 3 they're so worried about people screwing with each other that the game gives everyone separate item drops, but something like that is too big a change to just go back and "fix the loopholes" in diablo 2.
Boilerplate Phrases That Kill Resumes
We are different from hunch because we are more of a perspective gathering tool, rather than giving you an answer at the end.

This system is meant to help with gathering advice and wisdom from your network and the crowd. It then lets you rate how important those things are to you so that you can make a decision.
I read that whole thing, and I'll re-read it, but I really didn't hear at all that he was using glitches and bugs. In fact, the rules and rule-abiding were an important component of the study.

Other users were using an area designed for free combat as a social zone. Perhaps the designers should have created a safe social zone, if that was such a popular thing to have.
Perhaps you were drinking too much caffeine at once?
I think you've misunderstood me. You don't evaluate the CF for Phi, you compute with it directly.

Gosper showed that it's possible to compute the CF of Phi^2 (say) directly, without evaluating the CF of Phi. Lather, rinse, repeat. The numbers involved are all similar in size to F(n) and so the complexity is linear. The number of multiplications and squarings is log(n), so I think the whole thing is sub-quadratic. Possibly it's n log(n) rather than linear.

The point is that there are fast ways of doing these sorts of things, but they tend to be little-known and subtle. I've not gone into the details, there may be something I've missed.
An outlier like Google can probably be used to disprove almost every rule of thumb you can think of. That doesn't mean it's not a valid question to ask.
"In my opinion, the Allman brace style is easier to read because..." (blablabla)

bottomline: because he is used to them. I feel the K&R style is easier to read because that is what I am used to.
One more thing for those who still like the look of "beta", we've made it easy to re-enable the beta label for Gmail from the Labs tab under Settings.

This is silly and undermines the whole concept of a "beta" version. It makes it look like a fashion accessory more than anything, not an actual indication of product stability and completion.
"We're often asked why so many Google applications seem to be perpetually in beta."

It was a great lead-in, but he never did answer this.
Ask HN: Equity Splits
First, I want to apologize for posting this under a new account - I am a regular and active HN participant, but just need some anonymity for this.

I've found two recent business school graduates (a top tier school like Sloan, Chicago, Harvard, Wharton, Stanford, etc.). They have an idea for a software/web startup and a lot of the business scaffolding in place (prestigious board of advisers, lawyers, industry contacts, etc). Neither one knows anything about code/computers though.

When I met them a few weeks ago, they had no code, no app, no users - but over the last few weekends I hacked together a quick and dirty prototype from scratch. They were impressed, and miraculously parlayed the prototype into a verbal funding offer (in the $1-2Mil pre-money valuation range). I did the prototype for them out of good will and the desire for experience.

Now, they have offered me a CTO position, with the condition that I will continue to work part time for the next few months until they are funded (they want to launch before raising capital, as they expect it will greatly raise the valuation). Once funded, they will hire me on as a full-time CTO with a salary. The vesting agreement will have me slowly gain equity as we hit technical/business milestones, and I should have an ~10% pre-dilution stake if all goes according to plan (they've put this all on paper and I'm having my lawyer go over it now, but it seems kosher at first glance).

On the one hand, I will be building their product from scratch, which makes me think I deserve more - but on the other hand they have a lot of strategic partnerships, etc. that I don't have. I expect this venture would never gain traction without their connections (one used to work in the industry and the other used to work at a major VC firm, plus they have several big-names as advisers).

Technically, I'm very interested. Their startup touches a lot of fields I'm interested in, and I have complete free-reign over technical decisions.

If it's relevant, I'm 23 with no college degree (in school part time now). I worked at a startup as an employee once before, and currently make a little over $100K/year at my day job (not a startup).

Their ideal exit would be an acquisition in the ~$100 million range (not entirely unprecedented) within about 5 years. After the two major rounds of funding they expect it would take to get us there, my equity would be diluted to ~3%. Realistically, I understand this is a long shot, and, more likely than not, my equity will be worthless. I do like the idea of being able to put 'CTO of ~$10M company at 24' on my resume though. I hope it would give me the experience and connections I need to start my own company a few years down the line.

Any thoughts? Is 10% completely too little equity for the work I'm doing?
> Rather than fighting other players directly, he used a special ability to teleport them in front of a computer-controlled firing squad, which would immediately kill them.

He's doing that because he can't attack them. And they can't attack him either. it says:

> the victim has no chance to retaliate

They mean literally. If he was just attacking people who could attack him, in a zone where PvP is enabled, it wouldn't be called griefing.

Also someone in comments below says they have patched this stuff now. Legitimate behaviors don't get patched.
Well I feel the block kind of belongs to the function definition/for loop/whatever, so it seems illogical to me to artificially separate them. I'd like to see what belongs together at a glance.

A single bracket on an otherwise empty line carries very little information, so why not reduce the strain on the eyes.
I don't think AS3 and JS will merge anymore, the ES4 proposal was ditched in favour of continued evolution of ES3.1.

As an aside, I'm not sure what the article was talking about with those examples that are "not possible" in Flash, as I see nothing that couldn't be done. If it's just because they were transformed with CSS3, there's nothing stopping a CSS3 parser being written in AS3.
I don't know if compressing code is a bad habit. Generally the more code I can see on a screen the faster I can understand what is happening. A good way to add visual space is to supplement the extra lines Allman style would add with comments. I hate scrolling up and down constantly to see what a simple class is trying to do.
Just because the quote sounds arrogant doesn't mean its not true ;)

I have no inside info on its "truthy-ness", just making a small point.
Bet you feel dumb this morning. ;-)
This guy's own math makes it clear that a VC who invested well could make a lot more from the carry (the returns of the investments) than the management fee. And the better VCs do try to do that, even if many of the worse ones are in it for the fees. Which implies exactly what Fred said: the model isn't broken, individual VCs are.
Why the gender bias? Even women seem to start these small businesses that just happen to be helping the economy.

Honestly, I'd much rather hear stories of off-beat small businesses getting value from technology than yet another twitter app startup.
can't get to it
Clickable link: http://agilezen.com/
Using the phrase "crush the competition" seems to go against the rest of your site - calling the product "Zen," the bonsai tree, and the logo. At the least, it's a jarring contrast that distracts me from your product.
I thought the common wisdom was that it's a matter of liability as in "hey, sorry we lost all of your emails but it was clearly indicated as a beta product; maybe next time you'll pay for the commercial version which has SLAs"
my partner set up Joomla for the Seminar Paper we wrote last year. don't know why he did that since later in the project we had to code, but after using it for a day or two I immediately asked him to set up Trac. it just was a pain viewed from the usability point. so, my advice is to stay away from Joomla if it's an option. I can't say if Drupal is better or not since I've never worked with it, but what I can say is that it can't get worse than Joomla! conclusion: use Drupal.
Do you want it to be part of your product? Or, your security needs are so serious that your users don't trust OpenID?

In any event, if it is that important to your core business, you ought to code a subset of the features you need. While it's not a weekend project, it's not a terribly large one, either, if it is that important to your business.
I have been an OpenBSD user for about 3 years, and I can't give high enough praise. The programs work as the man pages say, and my experience with Linux/GNU has not been the same. The OpenBSD system is logically put together, and simple to debug. The same can not be said for Linux/GNU; not only because each distribution has its own startup style or package system, but also because the tools that make up the system aren't a cohesive package.

I haven't used FreeBSD in about 10 years so I can't comment on it, but back in the late 90's it was pretty nice. NetBSD feels particularly old school to me, and I just liked OpenBSD the best.

There are times when Linux/GNU is necessary, and in that case I run Debian.
Why is a badly-written anonymous comment getting attention on HN?
I completely agree.

It's like saying "farmers farm", and then standing there whipping them.
Resumes are the place to toot your horn...
This seems totally reckless to me. Google is out of control!
The way I see it, he was clearly exploiting game mechanics to grief other players. He was using a specific ability, one that teleports players, to teleport them in front of what appears to be an unkillable robot that instantly kills everything. After he was done with that, he "innocently" taunts them. I'm pretty shocked that NCSoft didn't do anything about this. In other MMOs, that person would've been banned a long, long time ago. I played CoH for a bit, and I think it's still one of the nicest, casual MMO communities around, hell, one of the nicest, casual gaming communities around. This guy walked around a virtual community, disrupting it on purpose just for an experiment. Imagine coming home after a pretty long day of college/work, log on to play, only to have someone permanently teleport you to death, and then taunt you.
I think he alludes to it with, "So we've focused our efforts on reaching our high bar for taking products out of beta, and all the applications in the Apps suite have now met that mark."

Achieving the goals of the "high bar" seem to be the key to getting out of beta. But five years? That's a really high bar.
Well put. Personally, I get distracted when reading Allman style. When I start scrolling, I start daydreaming about all of the wasted space and how that programmer must have met his/her line quota for the day. Most editors have a brace matching feature that helps.
Sorry, was there a war? I must have missed it.
Small recommendation - add a home link at the top navigation bar when you are at sub pages. Helps people go back to the home page if necessary.
Because someone is wrong on the internet.

http://xkcd.com/386/
Ho Chi Minh is responsible for the Vietnam catastrophe. He would have seen the Vietnamese people go extinct before losing that war.

And, like in North Korea, they run a big song and dance on how they have to reunify their country, but thats not it at all. It's Communism first. Have to reunify under Communism

Until then, the hell with the country.

The Vietnam war was a triumph of evil. The bad guys won, and lots of people here helped them.
I strongly suspect that's the point. What does "beta" mean on a web service that is continually updated by the developers in essentially realtime? The only real meaning I can think it has is the liability concerns that others in this thread have mentioned.
Thank You HN - Free Launchly Promo Code
I just want to say thank you to the HN community for taking the time to review my latest app, launchly, and for all that they do in general. HN is an invaluable resource for me personally.

Launchly has been doing very well recently with articles appearing in RWW, Mashable, and softpedia so I'm really excited for the future.

When I originally submitted my request for feedback for launchly, the app was still in free beta mode. I have since started charging for it but I want to offer a promo code to the HN community so they can still try it out for free.

The promo code is good for 1 week from today. You will enter it in the form when you create a new launch. It will completely bypass all billing information.

Promo Code: HN_LAUNCH

http://www.launchly.com
At least at the UC, I suspect this sort of research would require human subjects approval, just like if you want to interview random people or put them through some form of test. You can't just harass people who have not agreed to it in the name of "research" anymore in a MMORP than you can on the street.

I think someone at Loyola needs to think about ethical guidelines for research here.
It certainly seems like they had every opportunity to ban him, but chose not to, which implies that it's not quite as simple as the griefer explanation.
Tabs vs. spaces would not be an issue if we let go of the stone-age practice of storing source code as text files.

Every moment you spend cleaning up Windows-style EOL characters or transforming tabs into spaces (or vice versa) - or programming your editor to do so - is a moment of your life that could have been put to a better use.

With a standardized S-expression format (it could even be human-readable, as for example, Lisp source is) all possible source files which result in the same syntax tree would have the same canonical (by definition) representation. Yes, this means that parsers will need to parse comments rather than toss them, but implementing this minor trick is not a challenge for anyone who has read a few chapters of the Dragon Book (or its imitators.)

Your editor can still show you exactly what you want to see. And other people will have the same ability.

If you are using Eclipse (or whatnot) to magically reformat source to your personal tastes every time you edit anything, you have already quit pretending that the original raw human-readable representation is worth much. All I'm suggesting is to take this process to its logical conclusion.

Storing source as ASTs instead of ASCII would, among other things, increase the usefulness of revision control systems. It would eliminate the need for programmers to agree on any formatting style at all.
Rubik Cube inventor devises new puzzle to drive us all to distraction
This news and Google Apps coming out of beta in the same day?

I can't take all this sudden and drastic change!
Link that nkohari would probably rather you click:

http://agilezen.com/?r=hn
Ogg Theora, H.264 and the HTML 5 Browser Squabble
Pollution Effect: Optimizing Keyword Auctions by Favoring Relevant Advertising
Yeah while I was reading that article it occurred to me that Allman is a good way to increase LoC count ;-)
From reading the earlier articles, I believe the player in question was --

* Going to PvP-specific areas only (i.e. areas where 'hero' player characters are meant to fight 'villain' player characters)

* Using 'in-character' communication to indicate he wanted to fight villains, like heroes in that area supposedly do. His character was a hero.

* Using a teleport power to move some nearby villain player characters near non-player-characters, who would then kill the villains.

* Subsequently using 'in-character' communication to cheer about having killed villains.

* This was a major issue because many, many players in those player-vs-player (hero vs villain) areas instead would use the areas for 'farming,' i.e. trying to get experience points (or in-character currency) by killing non-player-characters instead.

* The 'written vs. unwritten rules' that he broke were specifically the customs of what players were actually doing in those areas (farming) vs what the game designers had intended them to do (kill each other).

That conflict between the intended purpose of a game's aspects and how others reacted to it being used that way is the main focus of that professor's article. He seemed to expect for people to suspend their disbelief and remain fully in-character, i.e. following the game's ostensible in-character limitations.
The Best Bits: Compressive sensing
What is Kanban? Was that the original name? I ask because it's on all of your page titles.
Rackspace down again...
This is getting really expensive
Except they already had a paid commercial version with SLAs, while the product was still labeled "beta."
I really hope nobody with any industry experience thought SO could be cloned in a weekend. That notion screams "The longest program I have ever written was for a CS lab, and I got extra credit for it because I am the awesome."

But, hypothetically supposing that it had been cloned in a weekend, then you'd be staring at the 90% of a software business which does not happen in an IDE. My app can be cloned in a weekend. It has been before, by someone who was PO'ed at me and wanted to drive me out of business. He did a pretty good job in his weekend, too -- I think the user experience of the app was probably better than I managed for 1.0, which took me a week and change.

But the other 90%, yeah, that has taken me about 3 years and a week now. It has had a lot of mental effort, sweat equity, and failing-my-way-forward invested in it. And the business, as distinct from the app, is fairly resistant to cloning.

Somewhere out there, in the forgotten corners of the Internet where not even Googlebot dares to tread, the earstwhile weekend app is probably still wondering what went wrong.
It wants me to login to yahoo to see this article :(
Sounds similar to stuff I sometimes see on programmer outsourcing sites: Build me a clone of Youtube. My budget is $500.