skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
10 good reasons to look for something better than Java
I think there is a convergence of opinion in the industry regarding deficiencies of Java. What the next step is going to be is not yet clear, however, the current fad of functional programming and functional languages is promising.

This article is yet another list of deficiencies, plus a discussion in the comments. I am sure there are deeper discussions and would welcome any links. Thanks!

(The article is not mine, nor have I participated in the discussion.)
Men emerge from Mars experiment
SlickMap CSS — A Visual Sitemapping Tool for Web Developers
New York Times R&D group is braced for the future of content delivery
Entirely depends what your planning. I've only written one 5 year plan admittedly but it was 4 pages long - and will guideline the project for that time.
Cool video: http://www.niemanlab.org/2009/05/the-new-york-times-envision...
Red Hat gave away a lot of shares to Linux/Unix contributors. Here's an article from Eric Raymond about shares he got from VA Linux, but it mentions Red Hat doing this as well http://www.linuxtoday.com/news_story.php3?ltsn=1999-12-10-00...
WHY IS SOMAK HOLIDAYS THE MOST SOUGHT OUT HOLIDAY COMPANY
Somak Holidays was established in 1968 and is a family-run tour operator which offers an extensive variety of exotic holidays to India, Indian Ocean, Far East, Middle East and Africa.
Well, there's no such thing as the GNU Foundation (there's the Free Software Foundation and the GNU Project), so technically there's only one. :)

Assuming that he meant Free Software Foundation, his mention of The Free Software Law Center invalidates my point, though, because clearly they're not closely tied to the Free Software Foundation. Otherwise, they wouldn't say "Open Source" on their home page without going into a diatribe about the term.
Well, are you also including the fact that there is nothing forbidding repeated words?
That's promising to hear. I worked IT for a large government contractor for years and it often took long amounts of time to roll out new images to the whole company. Considering the average lease time of 3 years, a full IE8 rollout could certainly take time.

I was especially surprised to hear about the piloting of Firefox. Is there a site somewhere to keep up on technology rollouts across the different US Gov't agencies? Or at least the ones EDS provides support for?
You're claiming it's "borderline irresponsible" to say what he said, but not that it's false. You'd certainly be justified in calling conclusions people might draw from it (e.g. that women should not be hired as Linux programmers) false. Simply publishing some observations from a single attempt to hire a programmer is fairly meaningless in a statistical sense, but still somewhat interesting to me.
I predict there is a 50% chance you are either right or wrong.
> I've had much more luck and a hell of a lot more fun traipsing around Guangdong and dabbling in manufacturing.

Now that sounds fascinating. Maybe you could share some details on that?
If your project is 5 years long, it's really a series of smaller projects.

There isn't much that can be anticipated 5 years down the line, but I'm willing to hear any examples that you have.
Reading "When Genius Failed" or whatever that book was that discussed the fall of LTCM, I thought LTCM failed because they started doing things their original mathematical models didn't cover, and assuming that Russia wouldn't default on its debt. They started doing straight up directional trading and other things that weren't safe or something to that effect.
This is the sort of thing that hash functions are designed to avoid.

Since getting closer words does not get you a closer hash, usual optimization algorithms (like genetic algorithms, simulated annealing, etc.) are not going to be helpful.

Perhaps I'm missing something, but I think brute force and luck are going to win this contest, assuming that SHA1 is not broken between now and July 20th. If you want an iPhone 3G S, you should probably just head over to the Apple store and buy one and spend your valuable time on something else.
"Among 30 random people who applied for my marginal job opening [in 2005], no married people, women, or university graduates were observed logging in to complete the unusual programming test we set up for candidates".

When you write it out the way it actually happened, it doesn't sound so interesting. That this post dates back to 2005 is not the author's fault. And yet here we are in 2009 talking about gender politics and married people and whatever on Hacker News, based on what? Nothing.
Monkey Fitted With Hi-Tech Chip Moves Robot Using Mind Control
No worries, since I'll just register .milllion for $30 and call it a day.

This is either going to be more of the same (with .com) or it will be a complete non-starter.

(Oh wait, I just saw the end. Hah, $200K? Nobody will care.)
500 days? Thats almost 2 years of your life given over to essentially a useless experiment. What are they going to learn? People don't like cramped conditions, but they can deal with it. Give them movies and books to read and don't be a d*ck when you have to share some cramped space with people.

Are they going to cancel the mission to mars if it turns out people would become extra-irritable?
Why do you think Office Web is more feature complete than Google Docs? Has anyone even had a chance to review it yet? I honestly have no idea.
Sony Ericsson W395 Unlocked - A Walkman
Sony Ericsson W395 is a Walkman phone with TrackID music recognition, and has Picture editor, Organizer, Voice memo with T9 dictionary and powerful battery backup of Up to 480 hrs of standby and Up to 8 hrs of talk time and Up to 12h 30 min of music play.
Hey, if you guys are working on this, check out these papers on SHA1 collisions:

generated in 2^39 perms - http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~dbrumley/srg/spring06/sha-0.pdf

generated in 2^52 perms - http://eprint.iacr.org/2009/259.pdf

Since it would take an average supercomputer 5-6 days to generate the collision, I think I'm going to give the contest a rest (generating something close isn't useful outside the contest).

Another way to go about this is to sort huge rainbow tables by distance, which have been already created by a few reverse hash lookups ( http://md5.rednoize.com/ , http://hashcrack.com, http://sha1-lookup.com ) - You'll probably need to contact them directly or hurry up and make your own.

Here's the SHA1 algorithm itself for anyone interested:
(Google Cache) http://74.125.95.132/search?q=cache:QjZpAaNXJr0J:https://www...
IMO, this seems to be more of a "lottery for nerds" than a programming contest.
Most people do know their immediate neighbors but your neighbors just down the street? Where would you run into them? Unless you're already friends when/where would you rub shoulders together?

Most commonly, communities in rural and suburban US form primarily around churches and schools; and secondarily at places like bars, the library, the YMCA, or charities.

Also, "just reside here" tends to mean a lot more in a suburb than a city. I "just reside" in my apartment in the city, I live in the neighborhood. In a suburb people don't just reside in their homes, they live in them. They have dinner parties and outdoor BBQs. Their kids play ball in the back yard with the neighbors and hide-and-seek in the nearby woods. Even a modestly priced home has room for a workshop, a library, a garden, and an entertainment center. In the city, you'll be lucky to pay through the nose for enough room for one of those things in a decent neighborhood.
Also, the people who are not upgrading their browsers (mostly because they are not technologically savvy) are not frequenting websites like YouTube and Facebook. My grandfather doesn't know what Facebook is and is definitely still running IE6 (even though I tried to get him onto Firefox)!
This blog post is a discussion of a podcast discussion of where to host discussion of stackoverflow discussion.
<shrug> As you wish. As someone who currently manages 8 programmers, and am always being approached to see if we have an opening, and am always concerned about the hiring process, I am always interested in such things. I thought people here on HN might also be.

I'm interested to hear your views, much as I might disagree with them. I haven't down-mud you, and I wish others wouldn't. I think your thoughts add value. They make me think again, even if I conclude that in my opinion you're wrong.
Huh? WebKit is a portable version of KHTML, with an abstraction layer to handle the QT dependencies. Most of the love would be aimed at the KDE developers.
Sorry about the formerly digg-tastic title; kept it only because is was the actual blog post title.
I have a picture of my drivers license on my iPhone, and it's come in handy several times.
You've done a lot to increase his reputation. Look, you just said that the web server he wrote was good enough for your production work and that you believe other web servers to be inferior.

By mentioning Mongrel you increase the visibility and reputation of Mongrel, which increases his visibility and reputation. Now, when he introduces himself to someone he can say, "I wrote mongrel." And they will say, "cool!" instead of "what's that and why should I care?"
Ask HN: What hardware startups are you working on?
A lot of attention goes to software-based startups here on HN so I'm curious what hardware focused startups you guys are doing. (Software can be a big part of it as long as there's hardware somewhere in the loop--and I'm not talking about your server.)

All I can think of is Frogmetrics…
Indeed it is true, except for very short periods of time where it begins to break down. In quantitative finance one can model the market or an individual stock as a Brownian motion with a long term upwards drift. The results look startlingly similar to what we're used to seeing on actual stock charts.
In the current state of the web, nobody is going to beat Google at search. Google has been tweaked and squeezed for every last ounce of searchy-goodness over the past decade, and it shows by how they dominate the web. (With that said though, Bing rocks Google at both Image and Video search)

Google is so entrenched into the Internet and the minds of average users that it's going to take a paradigm change on the web to bring up a new level playing field.

It's the same way with Microsoft + the Operating System, Apple + the iPod, and so forth.

For any of these companies to get disturbed from their positions, the landscape and the playing field needs to change. This is best exemplified by how Sony used to dominate the portable music market until MP3 and digital music became possible and Apple eventually took over.

Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on how you view it), these broad technological jumps don't happen every year, so companies often stay in a position of domination until the whole game is changed in front of them.
We've never been a big fan of "splitting things up" (I know others are) because it tends to over complicate matters :)

Examples - they should be obvious. 5 years isnt a great long time in some industries (Operating systems perhaps, Chip manufacturing etc etc.). Our example is case management software - it's a good 5 year plan, Im sure it will work with little modification (18 months in things are going nicely).
I don't think it's only about social and psychologic issues. Prolonged lack of gravity can cause real health problems. Certain aspects of it can be imitated on earth - for example by lying in bed at a certain angle so that more blood flows to your head..
Just because you are not an expert and do not see the pitfalls does not mean that there aren't any.
I might suggest that there's some irony in suggesting that one use Ruby to write an algorithm that's going to basically be 100% compute bound . . . seems like this contest is a classic example of exactly the sort of problem where you do, in fact, care about raw language performance.
Yes. I think by the second season they get A computer.
0 A.D. Open Source Release
Really? Do you think the average Linux user thinks that? Compare kernel.org with linux.org. Or the Wikipedia entries on each, where this topic has been done to death.

Personally I disagree: I think 'Linux' is actually multiple, fragmented OSs, in the same way that 'BSD' is.
Microsoft is a much better suited acquirer of Netflix
I agree. I was just responding to his comment that he doesn't trust a service that doesn't have paying users who subsidize the free users. The point of the freemium model is to attract paying users.
Not exactly 'anytime' since Twitter search history doesn't go back that far. I can't find the link now, but I'm pretty sure it only searches up to about 30 days back.
(Not a guru)

I think the main challenges are deciding how to manage the brute force effort.

You can precompute a lot of hashes, and then search them on the contest day.

Or you can run it only during the 24H of the contest, and only store the result which is nearest.

And the second issue: how much resources to invest. A high CPU on EC2 is $20 for the day. Another doubles the price, and doubles the number of hashes you can check.

EDIT: The restrictions they place on the input makes rainbow tables kind of pointless. Just partition the search space (i.e. the permutations) pick a piece of it at random, and send it to your brute forcers.

EDIT2:

Back of the envelope: you will be able to try about 100million hashes for $20.
> We get a lot of questions wether we can also make a Git/Mercurial client, but the GPL makes that really hard as we would have to wrap the command line or make an open source communication library.

Couldn't you re-implement the GIT spec (including making such a spec if it does not exist now)?
Global warming: Our best guess is likely wrong
We had been doing some pretty standard manufacturing stuff for the publishing industry so when we went to build out a new office we decided to do it ourselves. Visited factories for furniture, electronics, marble, fixtures... Everything custom made and dropped in a few containers. Definitely cheaper than if we had gotten everything locally, and although it did take some time, the process was a fun cross cultural adventure.

I haven't done any projects like this, but I think the next big thing is going to be random iphone/bluetooth devices. Imagine any kind of small object and add low power internet access over bluetooth to it... whole new world of opportunities... Random stuff, like take this object and make all the data available on your iphone...

http://www.thinkgeek.com/gadgets/car/aa31/
I wonder why no women were involved in the experiment. Will we not be sending women on the first mission to mars? Also, I would imagine that regular sexual activity would make for a more placid social environment.
I have a feeling that organizations that are able (financially and technically) to run their own domain (named after their brand, ie .coke or .nike) will start to seem more authoritative than those that can only afford a .com address. Companies that end up doing this will inevitably have very corporate-looking/feeling sites that give consumers confidence in the organization. This in turn, will lead to people giving more credence to the custom TLDs than to .coms.

Not sure about what the impression might be of those who register websites with a generic domain (.softdrinks, or .shoes). That seems to swing the other direction.

Seems the usefulness of owning such a custom TLD id limited to those with huge brands to protect.
I haven't read the article, but I learned everything I need to know from John McCarthy (Creator of Lisp).

He's got a great FAQ on Nuclear Power, and it's incredibly convincing:

http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/progress/nuclear-faq.html
Why does it overload "*" on the right, but not on the left side of the string? Python has __rmult__, and it works. Please do not try to make language warts look better by spilling a bucket of architectural-astronauty crap.
do him a service and at least upgrade to IE8, it also does wonders if you just replace his 'internet' icon with a browser thats more recent, he'll never know the difference but will thank you later that he can watch videos of his grandsons on youtube.
Just for the record, it crashes the browser of Android (Cupcale) too. Seems like a limitation of embedded Webkit.
Back to School Laptop that Performs for Under $500 | TechJaws
I went to Imperial and while it's deeply boring (for a practical person like myself, there is a LOT of theory) it is a really great course and it will set you up for a life of further learning which is after all what is important.

I've not met students from ANY other university that had such a broad and complete introduction to Software Engineering.
Applications open for winter 2010 YC funding
I had a guy once who I asked on day 1: what time do you want us to expect you in the morning? He said 8:00. He never made it in before 8:07. I asked him on the first day what time he wanted so that we could have an expectation. He didn't do what he said and, to be frank, it was a sore spot for me. 7 minutes wasn't what upset me; it was that he chose the time and he didn't stick to it.

It was too small of a deal to mention to him but it definitely was something that made a bad early impression.
The Boomlet in Nuke-Proof Data Bunkers
For any kind of self-modification project, I strongly recommend the book "Self-directed behavior" by Watson & Tharp. It's the thinking man's (or woman's) self-help book, with general all-purpose advice for any kind of change. Very practical and very useful.
I've had my iPhone for about six months and I've yet to find an app that I would pay even $0.99 for let alone $5-$20. Having an in-game upgrade option would not appeal to me. I'm likely different from most though - I want my phone for calls, browsing, music, email, and the occasional time-waster while sitting in an office waiting room. I don't want it to replace my computer.
Not sure how I feel about the "He was wrong before, so he must be wrong again," strategy. Ballmer's probably learned a thing or two in the past few years, and history isn't always the best measure of future accuracy.
Thin is built with the HTTP parsing code from Mongrel - and, curiously, has always admitted it.

A large number of the people who shout "Mongrel sucks" have those funny ways of saying "except when it doesn't" under their breath right after.
How does citizenship work for the results?
I predict there is a 100% chance that he is either right or wrong.
To me this is just a money grab by ICANN, they had better specify how they plan to use the money that they will cash by setting up this scam for the public good.
4 founders should get $23k, right?
To all the downvoters: "conservative" and "liberal" mean very different things in the US and UK.
Oh please, just stop writing stuff about what is not known yet.

All these pseudo journalist are taking Google OS as a great success for granted and ridiculing someone who uses a safer and smarter approach of just not predicting the future.
Breaking News Online: How One 19-Year Old Is Shaking Up Online Media
I think you misunderstand: 3rd party code, not 3rd party software.

Think Open Source CMSs and Javascript libraries. Anybody who's been burned by enough of that sort of thing quickly learns to avoid it. 3rd party Javascript is especially bad in this respect, generally requiring a complete rewrite before it performs the task it was advertised to perform.
Apparently you believe that some users do not deserve the same rights to their copies of your software as others.

Well, they can still get the software directly from me - regardless of what Company A does to it. BSD won't guarantee that Company A doesn't do anything "bad" and apply restrictions to what I've created, but it does guarantee that anyone can get -my- software from -me-.
"Are they going to cancel the mission"

Unlikely, but they may consider postponing until a bigger spaceship is available or trying other crew formulations.
Oh, as opposed to all the times when CEOs make positive, optimistic statements about their competitors' products.
Martian?
I like it. What are you using to send the email? Simple HTML functions or perhaps something more sophisticated, like phpList?
No: "we're going to invest $11k + $3k per founder, for up to 3 founders"
So, how many plans at the beginning of 2008 had recession in mind? My guess that no one was that "ignorant" and those who were were fired at the spot.
So much consideration.
Apple’s App Store Downloads Top 1.5 Billion in First Year
Seems like it's time to get rid of domain names period :) Why not go back to numbers? Most people use search engines to get where they're going anyway. Who's with me? :)
Virtualization in Windows 7, Win XP mode
As you probably know there is Win XP mode in new Windows 7 (former virtual xp). Here is virtual Windows XP setup process.
What's wrong with wrapping the command line?
Agreed... The average developer has no hope of winning this. It will almost certainly be won by someone with a roomful of PS3s or graphics cards who already cranks through hashes for a living. (like these guys: http://www.win.tue.nl/hashclash/Nostradamus/)
Google in your house [ 2 more episods ]
Yeah, if you are in the business that does not depend on the market and other people, you can plan. Otherwise you are just guessing.
No doubt about the $$$ grab. I'm just thinking about the implications of having such a domain. Aside from providing the TLD system, what benefit do we have from ICANN now? And what benefit can you imagine them providing with all the potential loot from this move?
Twoyeur - peep pics from twitter in realtime
Where To Find Startup Job Openings
Interesting, but poorly written; the real news doesn't show up until the last 4 paragraphs.
They might be able to afford the application process, but would they be able to handle the infrastructure required to administer the TLDs they buy? Seems like a costly and time consuming proposition for squatters.
I don't see a reason for these useless and throwing life away experiences if the purpose is just making the astronauts used to isolation. I kind of get it if it's to study something psychological, but we have so many prisoners in almost the same conditions...

After the moon, everything is just too far away to travel. We can study Mars very well with the robot approach. We're just throwing astronauts life away for our stupid need of putting Men in Mars, which I dare say is utterly pointless.
Perhaps, but it pretty clearly is not "hundreds of feet deep".
I had a heck of a time trying to get my company to use one of his excellent libraries. Why? Because they saw Zed's "professional" home page for the library and documentation and didn't want to be associated with that kind of persona. "It's all about the image," they told me. I disagreed with them, but there you have it. None of these folks were "wired in".
Do Ex-Operators Make the Best VCs?
Am I the only one who's thinking about pricing of this deal?

Netflix market cap: $1.8 billion
Amazon market cap: $35 billion

Wrt future prospects, Netflix is not dying, but is in fact at the forefront of digital delivery. They won't sell it cheaply. It would be one very-very expensive purchase.
we may ask some YC alumni to help us review applications

Why limit this to YC alumni? Obviously you don't want to fully "crowdsource" the process (both for reasons of quality and for reasons of confidentiality); and YC alumni presumably have an advantage of knowing what being in YC is like -- but conversely, using YC alumni has the disadvantages that (a) they're liable to be busy running startups, and (b) there's a good chance that they would fall into the people-like-us trap.

Can't you think of any smart and trustworthy non-YC-alumni?
Yes. The sales tax consequence to amazon is huge. I really don't know why these rumors keep popping up every couple of years. Perhaps it's because Werner Vogels spoke at our weekly tech talk thing?