skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I must have missed something about this platform transition.

First and foremost, where are his customers in all of this? Languages are tools to reach goals for humans. What goals did he not accomplish because of using Mono and C#? What specific business objectives were impaired? How would these goals be more easily achieved now?

Secondly, I find it odd that a position on patents would work it's way into a tools choice without there being some kind of firm evidence of trouble. Did Microsoft's decision change the technical environment? Were there problems with building or maintaining code? Or did Microsoft just tick off the open source community and that made him decide to change? Perhaps I missed something, but it was sounding like he was making platform decisions based on some kind of popularity contest or imagined threat. Like I said, I'm ignorant here. Perhaps Microsoft's move has real-world ramifications? If so, I didn't see them in the article.

Finally -- what about F# on mono? You've got all the functional programming you can throw a stick at. And you've got objects as well if you want them. I didn't see that come into consideration at any point, although it seemed relevant -- if his interest was functional languages.

I also found the comment about the .exe and .dll file extensions weird. So people think they're strange? So what? Once again, what does this practically mean to developers or maintainers? Did it cause real problems? Or does it just look bad?

Language and platform discussions always come down to defining criteria: you determine what criteria are important to you and make your decision around that. Sometimes it's speed or conciseness. Sometimes it's availability of programmers. Sometimes it's ability to grow and maintain large code bases.

Whatever the criteria, you have to establish them and the stick to them. I prefer "ability to provide value to customers as quickly as possible" over things like "ability to run in parallel" or "ability to easily find programmers", but to each his own. There are great arguments to be made for all kinds of criteria.

What I didn't see was what exact criteria was being used. Sounded more like somebody just chasing whatever was trendy at the time.
This wiki was created to list what tools are used by which startups. http://startuptools.pbworks.com/
The batteries are covered by a 10 year warranty. And the entire battery would never fail, at worst you'd have to swap out one small piece of the battery which isn't very expensive. (The 2nd generation and later support this.) Of the million plus that have been sold, I read that something like only 3 people have had battery issues so far.
A lot of mathematicians I've known feel a kind of awe for Hilbert that they don't feel even for history-makers like Euler or Gauss. I think little stories like this one are part of the reason why. Hilbert always makes it look easy, even when his results are weirdly counter-intuitive.

Technically, though, there aren't any paradoxes here. It's for the purpose of avoiding paradox that we're willing to talk about infinities in the first place.
I believe greatly that being a "hacker" is more than being a great programmer (although that is an important aspect). It means (as a job title) you can take an idea, transform it into a working business based on programming and profit both monetarily and through experience.

Many of those are "learn by others' experience." Others have great tidbits of hackerish potency that, once exposed to, may give you an "ah-ha" moment when you're trying to figure out a problem. Others, even, expose you to new technology or different technology you may be interested in learning or using in a project.
It reminds me of TTDPatch. It started with minor modifications to Transport Tycoon, but eventually rewrote large parts of the game itself.

Summary: http://www.ttdpatch.net/features.html

Details: http://www.ttdpatch.net/Manual/ttdpatch.html#The%20Patches
Neo4j - a Graph Database that Kicks Buttox
"Although I was unable to use LISP in any production code"

Does he refer to LISP 1.5?
Could you explain in more detail? Why do people in 3d simulations and graphics care about the existence of a point where the function value is 0?
There can be a signficant difference between the kinds of problems our friends help us with and and the kinds of problems that shrinks have unique information to help us with.

For example, I have a friend who has just turned 40, is still a virgin and is consulting a psychiatrist to decide whether to lose his virginity to a prostitute. I have given him my take on it which basically boils down to "get laid by whatever means necessary" but he is taking a more empirical approach and wants the advice of an expert on all of the possible psychological ramifications of his act before the fact.

Am I delinquent as a friend because I don't have enough information to answer his question? No. I'm not trained in psychology although I can give him some of my guesses about possible psychological ramifications - excitement, anxiety, guilt, wanting to go back for more.

However, because of his empirical leanings, his question is best answered by a professional. But to say that all he is looking for is "sympathy" would be a gross misunderstanding of the valuable role that a therapist can play because of his/her unique traning. My friend wants facts backed up by studies and he doesn't have the time or training to find those answers efficiently himself.

So to talk about 'mental illness' and 'sympathy' as being the primary distinguishing features of psychiatry vs friendship is a gross oversimplication of both.
The page won't load at all for me.

Can anyone provide a quick hint to what it actually is?

Thanks.
There is more to the story but I tried to stick to the main point I was making. In the future I'll cover what happened to PolishMyWriting. It's a problem I am passionate about. Eventually PMY found an audience and I used their feedback to turn it into a software service to check grammar, spelling, and style in web applications. I "launched" two weeks ago but that is a story still being written.
Humor is really tough to do
There were eight rounds in the experiment. The NS article says, "In the later rounds, guessers tended to avoid advisers who had been wrong previously."
When you ask client N to move to N+1, what happens is this client becomes temporarily "homeless", or not occupying any room for the duration of this procedure: packing, moving out, asking the next client to do the same and waiting until the next client packs, moves out, etc. So once you want to make room for your new client and start the procedure, one of the existing clients at any given time will be in the lobby, not occupying any room.

Accommodating infitine number of newly arrived guests thus means having infinite number of poor "homeless" guys in the lobby.

So? So... Grand Hotel can accomodate exactly infinite number of guests, but not more than that. If it's full, it's full.

Let alone the fact that infinity doesn't exist because we can't observe it.
He's not taking an empirical approach; he's taking an argumentum ad authoritam approach. An empirical approach would involve observing other people doing this and seeing what the effect is. The best you can say is that he's consulting an authority whose information he hopes is empirical.
Think of it as any of the basic DB gui tool + visualization features: plots/graphs. You can create tables, import data from excel/csv, modify, view, visualize.

The one visualization feature I like is the intensity map - it plots it by geography. Something I always wanted to view on several data.
Where are you?

I'm pretty sure things will get better soon for CS folks.
Ask HN: Looking to furnish our new office in NYC. Any suggestions, inspirations?
We are looking to furnish our new office for 7 in NYC. I am looking for budget furnishing ideas. Office has lot of windows and sun light. What are must haves? What are must avoids?

Seating and desk suggestions at budget (think IKEA budget not Joel Spolsky budget :-)) price. And in general, how did you furnish your office? Any recommendations to buy good used/refurbished office furniture in NYC etc.

Thanks in advance!
Pivitol Tracker, Harvest, Google Apps for Domain.
As linux user I cannot be anything but glad to see skype developers a little bit pwnd. What is wrong with skype? They detain the monopoly on VoIP and yet they have not been able to keep up with the development of the program in years, now. It seems it is all about selling headphones on the website.

I think the linux version is something like 2 years old now.
Statistics for Large Numbers of Rare Events
Well, I must admit I didn't try every link so perhaps one of them might be valid but lets see what happens when we try the first few:

cweb - The requested URL /~uno/cweb.html was not found on this server.
Axioms and Hulls - The requested URL /~uno/aah.html was not found on this server.
Computer Musings - The requested URL /~uno/musings.html was not found on this server.

Don't waste your time with this page, use the one dimitar posted instead:
http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/programs.html
That's really interesting, thanks for writing. Any other thoughts? Are you doing a startup now?
What is missing from this discussion of infinity is the notion that there are multiple infinities that are different from each other.

The integers (like the hotel rooms) are countably infinite. There are only a FINITE number of integers (or hotel rooms) between any two integers (rooms), like between rooms 1 and 100.

The set of real numbers is a larger set than the integers. Both are infinitely large, but the real numbers are a larger infinity. Between any two real numbers, (even 0 and 1), there is still an INFINITE number of real numbers in between.

The notion of a hierarchy of infinities initially seems paradoxical, but once you know how to distinguish countably infinite from uncountably infinite, you have the key concept.
"now my interest is peaked."

Piqued. Unless this is the most interest you've ever given Opera ;)

Going open source would be cool, but given the nature of the comment on that page, my money's on something like an embedded webserver, with some interesting means of finding and sharing things with it. Maybe some integration with Opera Link, so users can always find one of your running clients (or even Opera in --server mode somewhere on 24/7; something their good cross-platform support will help).

Opera do have a very good full text search engine, currently used for email and to index the content on every page you visit, and obviously has the ability to easily generate HTML from content it has stored and indexed; if they wanted to go this route they could easily make some sort of CMS using it.

They also do blogs on my.opera. Maybe an integrated blogging engine, which can serve content on its own and also upload it to services using some open protocol anyone can implement (e.g. pushing people to support importing .atom feeds). Publish content on your browser, push it to any online service which supports it, and keep it locally accessible and indexable and outside the control of any third party.
Yeah. Solved it 16 years ago as an intellectual game. comp.lang.c was my Hacker News at the time ;)

See http://groups.google.fr/group/comp.lang.c/browse_thread/thre...

The method is very simple. We know how to compute the square of a value. So start by finding the biggest integer value with a single bit set whose square is smaller than the input value. Then set the bit just below to one, compute the square of the value and compare it with the input value. If it is bigger, the bit should be 0 otherwise it should be left to 1. And so on.

The thing is to avoid the multiplication to compute the square. So if you have a value n and you want to set a bit to one. We compute in fact the square of (N+B) where B is an integer with the bit to set to one, set to one. We then have (N+B)² = N² + 2NB + B² The last term is easy to compute from the previous B with the previous bit set. We simply divide by 4. 2NB is computed by a simple shift and N² is the result of the previous computation.

For fixed point, we benefit from the fact that while we progress in computing the square root, we have an increasing number of bits set to 0 in the most significant bits of the values. I then simply shift up to get usable bits in the less significant bits.

The only limitation is that we need the sign bit of the fixed point. So the computation won't work with big unsigned fixed points. This is solved by unwinding the first iteration.

It took me some time to understand all this. All I had was a short code to compute integer square root and I had no idea how it worked.
For me the reason I avoid Opera is because of its miserable excuse for an extension system, and that the so-called 'native' themes look out of place no matter what operating system you use.
Python is better than the lisps for team based development, IMO, primarily because you can't write your own language in python. In a team you're normally working on long-lived code of medium - large projects (e.g. over 100k lines, over a period of 1 - 5 years). You need to be able to quickly grok how to maintain older code written by someone else. Python's mantra "there's only one way to do it" means that is more likely to be possible than it is in one of the lisps. However I have to admit that that is conjecture on my part, not having worked on a large team with a lisp project.
So what does it explain in this context?
From http://www.alljapaneseallthetime.com/blog/about

"In June 2004, at the ripe old age of 21, all post-pubescent and supposedly past my mental/linguistic prime, I started learning Japanese. By September 2005, I had learned enough to read technical material, conduct business correspondence and job interviews in Japanese. By the next month, I landed a job as a software engineer at a large Japanese company in Tokyo"

Basically, his method involved constantly immersing himself in Japanese media.
[Macros] make it harder to reason about code you didn't write.

No, actually, they don't. Given the usual high quality of your comments, I'm surprised you would repeat this canard.

you can look at the inside of a function and have some idea what it is doing.

This is just as true of a macro. In fact it's more true: you can expand a macro in place on your code and see what it is doing, a maneuver there is no exact analog to in functionland. The macroexpansions in your example make it immediately apparent what the problem was.

Macros are different from functions. That's why they're useful. I'd encourage you to stick with the learning process. The key difference with what you were expecting is that macros control the evaluation of their arguments.
Why is that cracking? It's just a hack; patching a binary to fix a bug is by no means a crack IMO. A clever hack? Sure, but calling it a crack just serves to make it sound like a bad thing.
No this is naive.

You are asking for business versions to be slowed by fancy virtualisation, home versions to be confused by power user features etc.

Okay so let's imagine that you can pick some magic confic option when you install to get around this. Then every version will include the price of all features. So the home user and netbook OEM user will be required to pay the current "Ultimate" cost.
Changing the Language of Fatherhood
Ok, fine. But it's as close to empirical as he's going to get since he can't do an observational study.
Facebook Usernames and OpenID
One solution I've seen described is for Microsoft to spin off all of those features as separate products.

So sell IIS as one product, and so forth.
I’m Going to Harvard. Will You Sponsor Me?
See http://www.hyperrealm.com/main.php?s=talkfilters
Seeking a Better Way of Living in Co-housing
we are talking about propagation here. its built so that the person who receives the image is then unable to forward it to somebody else. or at least they can, but that person won't be able to unencrypt.

its pretty standard, and working with e-commerce for a while now.
Right, because programs with millions of lines of code written by many different people are so easy to "quickly grok". As long as they stick to lower-level constructs.

The problem with this fallacy is that it assumes that what is true of a single self-contained function is true of thousands of inter-depending functions heaped on top of each other.
As far as I understand, Skypemate is a hardware phone made by company named Yealink and designed to work with Skype. It is not made by Skype, and that can possibly explain why it is not so polished and bugs are left unaddressed for long time.

If the user really cracked Skype, as the title made me believe, this would be big news. I have been told that Skype's protection is really tough.
Jira & FishEye.
No. I am saying goodbye karma because I am saying something unfavorable to Windows. You have no idea how many people prefer to disagree by voting you down than by starting a legitimate discussion.

You have to see what happens when I say Mono is a bad idea...
So instead of bundling the software together to match common use cases, put the burden on the shopper to know what every single part of windows does and whether they need it?

That would be fine for geeks but the vast majority of the population would not appreciate that at all.
I've been working for a client on a huge (400K lines) sales/inventory/workflow enterprise management system which was orphaned when the original developer walked away. The origin intent when I started was to spin it off as a separate software company, but the recession has hit the client an they are putting every thing on hold. It's really a shame because it is really at the mezzanine level of financing (released, version 3, real customers), but they dont seem to want to try to raise the money. So I've started looking for another gig.
Mangle - View Manga on the Kindle
I think it's actually not the Skype who got pwnd. It's a company named Yealink who make phones that work with Skype.

If he pwnd Skype, that would be bigger news.
Few embedded systems depend on the date, do they?
I downloaded Gumdrops and played it on my iPod Touch.

It seems like a game with potential, but I see the rating in the App Store is currently 2/5 stars.

I would recommend that you interview people who have played the game and learn how to increase the enjoyment of the game play.

You might be surprised. If you can improve your games and bump up your rating to 3/5 stars, you might find many more downloads.

Thanks for your informative posting. If your apps earn $1/day with your current rating, it helps you and other app developers know they need to achieve a higher star-rating to be profitable.
Alternatively, just pretend the other versions don't exist and buy a PC with Windows 7 Home Premium on it, like 99% of other users will. Starter (basically Netbook only) and Home Basic ("developing markets" only) can largely be ignored, as can Enterprise (volume licensing only).

I see nothing inherently wrong with Microsoft trying to sell business premium versions with more features that the vast majority of people won't use, and with Windows 7 they've fixed the biggest confusion with the different versions of Vista by making sure that Business is a clear superset of Home's features. That said, perhaps they should merge Ultimate with Business to create a rather clear-cut two-tier system.
A well-written story with a lot of details about the back-forth, cat-mouse between the anti-viral and the conficker teams.

Apparently the conficker guys were clever enough to have a business model in place to recruit other black-hats who would be ready to use the zombie network.

Sounds like international forces are going to have to go under cover and infiltrate some of these groups. We just got to hope they get over-confident like the So Calif guy that was finally entrapped some years ago after he became a source to other criminals and yakked a lot on boards.

Maybe undercover hacking work could provide some new start-up possibilities?
This article overlooks a favorite feature of mine which I have not seen on other browsers: quickly accessible site-specfic preferences.
"Trendy market" does not describe the owners that I know. They usually rank high instead on either Green scale or cheap-skate scales. [ disclosure: I rank high on both ]

If I had significant distances to drive I'd sure be watching to optimize my gov-sponsored rebate options to acquire one before $4 gas returns and jacks up competition for them.
Oh man, I wish I could advance at such a pace. Sometimes I doubt these fast-learner stories, but I guess different people just have different abilities.

I lived in Tokyo for 2 years, studying Japanese full-time, and completed several courses in Finland before that. Speaking came pretty easy and I am quite fluent in normal conversation, but learning kanji has proven to be a real time-sink and a source of frustration, although at the same time I love them for their beauty. Also reading Japanese feels different than reading languages in the Latin alphabet, as the characters have an extra layer of meaning (not a huge difference, but helps to distinguish homonyms + create new kinds of puns / emphasis).

There are roughly 2000 kanji that you should know to be a high-school level reader. The latest test I took (http://www.speedanki.com) shows I know about 800. Reading a newspaper is not possible currently, as I would have to constantly look up kanji, and often the important words are the rarer ones.

But I will learn them. At this point it's an obsession, I'm not even sure why I need to know them, except to prove to myself that I can.
As I said, I know the programming mistake I made here (and that it reflects lack of knowledge of clojure on my part). But the problem I had with the doto macro could easily translate to a problem you have with my kwyjibo macro.

In python, I know what this code does, regardless of what happens at higher levels of indentation (ignoring some rarely used class-level hacking):

f(a,b,c)
g.h(i)

In lisp, I can't necessarily assume that

(f a b c)
(.h g i)

will actually call f on a,b,c and then call the h method of g on i. The ability to modify syntax programmatically implies that syntax (i.e. the s-exp structure) may not mean what you think it means.

I'm speculating that this may make collaboration more difficult.
I think the article has the right idea. No one thinks that if the single version is the Ultimate, it will cost $500. That's silly. It would be priced somewhere near the bottom of the current range. Starter should not exist. It's just a way for low end OEMs to screw the end user. It is reasonable to have two or three versions: a desktop/laptop for nearly all users, a server version with fewer UI frills and more system management/security, and possibly a smaller fewer frills for low end devices but not crippled like the starter version.
I do the same. But many people don't have the same level of sophistication or simply don't have the time to spend so they just look at the aggregate review and buy the top-rated product. That why I think Vine is potentially subversive.

I'd love to see Amazon reviews have a HN/Reddit/Digg-style up/down vote system where crap reviews automatically drop off and aren't factored into the overall score.
Yeah, I was looking at ~$250 products that had tons of Vine reviews. If you're getting something worth $250 free to keep I gotta thing that's going to affect how you review it.
Damn - I was expecting to see something horrific in your comments judging from all the downvotes (had to highlight to read). What was so annoying about this comment? Relax folks!
But this assumes that Amazon removes people from the Vine program if their reviews aren't voted helpful. I don't think that's a safe assumption and furthermore, it might even be the case that people are removed for a lot of negative reviews. After all, the companies are paying to have their products in Vine. If word gets around that Vine produces a lot of negative reviews then companies pull out of the program and Amazon loses a revenue stream.