skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Oh my god Joel has Spoken. Must worship etc etc.
Seriously - why do people genuinely wait on his every word? Atwood is the same!

All they do is spurge illogical capitalist business nonsense for the sake of making a few pounds/dollars/yen etc. The blog is a marketing medium for their products and their mindset. They constantly contradict (think Joel on simplicity a while back).

What about people who do this because they like it and want to help people. What about those people and their motivations. The altruistic nature surrounding these people is far more important than the self-important blog pimps.

And yes CityDesk and FogBugz are crap. CityDesk is a chunk of jumk reminiscent of MCMS 2002. FogBugz is FlySpray with some tartyness and some cost added. So whoopee doo.
It took him a week of bad press to apologize! This means it's not sincere but just an attempt to appease the raging crowds. He just figured out after a week of horrible publicity that no other tactic will work so he had to apologize. Next time apologize immediately so I can believe you are truly sincere.
I think the issue is why is there a watch worth $35000?

I have a cheap Casio $10 which is functional. I don't even use that half the time (I have a clock on my phone).

I want the time, nothing else.
Nice one :)

A wishlist api/widget might be a good way to promote the site, and you should install the FF SenSEO plug-in as there are a few things you can improve on that front.
Clever, but it doesn't seem particularly practical, is it actually useful?
Linus' words are spot-on as usual. But hatred of any large group of people is usually a disease.
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All of us love to capture the special moments of our children growing up. Normally we take photos of our baby as he/she grows, their first smile, their first step, their first day in school and so on. We normally put all these photos in a conventional album for safekeeping and for cherishing the joyful memories of our baby’s childhood and growth. There is nothing new or exciting about it and every parent does this.
I bet the military loves that.
I may be wrong, but I read on LinuxJournal review of Kindle 2, that only first generation Kindles have a physical switch for the whispernet. New models activate whispernet automagically.

Perhaps someone with the new Kindle can comment?
Great idea. I won't be able to participate in it even virtually (have other plans), but it's inspiring. Maybe next time. Good luck to all and have fun!
I'm not quite sure I'd sum this up as "issues with co-working spaces", more a variety of strategies.
As you said, not necessarily.

More often than not, however, "free software" does mean "free of charge". You can sell support, but that's it. The reason is simple: if you try to distribute your software for a fee, someone else will do so for nothing. If nobody does, it probably means you hardly sell any copy.[1] Stallman managed to sell emacs thanks to the lack of global network (imho).

One kind of software is unaffected though: custom software. You can even charge more, because the freedom you give to your client may cost you money —compared to the classic proprietary vendor lock-in.

[1] Any data on this?
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Obligatory Snake Robot Video
I really should dig out the Z80 based computer I made back in the mid 80s and write it up. I wire-wrapped the first version, it worked first time up, so I etched my own double-sided circuit board, and that also worked first time up.

4MHz Z80 with 8K RAM and 8K EPROM. Power transistors for switching motors on and off, opto-isolated infrared sensors for input, and it drove my micro-mouse.

I really should find it ...
The same can be said about laptops. Why buy a $2,000+ Macbook Pro when you can get similar functionality in a $400 Acer?

Simple answer: It's nicer.
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Twitter Correcting Follower Counts: 1000s of Spammers Perish
I don't know about Portland but where I live it's still too expensive. For below the price of a month co-working I can get a regular office sharing contract. Also drop in for a day is too expensive. You can work in a cafe for half as much and get drinks all the time.
How do you go about finding someone good to fix an obscure Swiss watch when you are living in a city that is not in your country? The issue is - once you hand it over for service there's no particular reason for you to get it back except for the honesty of the repairer. How do you guage this? Or is it better to freight it back to manufacturer?
I'm really surprised nobody has mentioned Peopleware (http://www.amazon.com/Peopleware-Productive-Projects-Teams-S...). It's full of stuff about creating an environment that minimizes interruptions so you can get into the flow (or zone or whatever you want to call it).
Microsoft has a pretty consistent record of trying to leverage their strength to stay on top. Remember, there are real human beings who do this (Gates, then Ballmer) - It's not anthropomorphizing when it's a _human_ behavior we are talking about.

Remember - Linus and Crew's itch is mostly about writing excellent software. Microsoft's itch is about dominating the competition, sometimes by embracing-extending-and-extinguishing standards, and sometimes by engaging in illegal monopolistic behavior:

http://www.usdoj.gov/atr/cases/f3800/msjudgex.htm

"412. Most harmful of all is the message that Microsoft's actions have conveyed to every enterprise with the potential to innovate in the computer industry. Through its conduct toward Netscape, IBM, Compaq, Intel, and others, Microsoft has demonstrated that it will use its prodigious market power and immense profits to harm any firm that insists on pursuing initiatives that could intensify competition against one of Microsoft's core products. Microsoft's past success in hurting such companies and stifling innovation deters investment in technologies and businesses that exhibit the potential to threaten Microsoft. The ultimate result is that some innovations that would truly benefit consumers never occur for the sole reason that they do not coincide with Microsoft's self-interest. "
> MS shouldn't be excluded, or hated solely because it's MS.

This will sound too simplistic to many of you, but MS really should be hated because it's evil.

And no, not everyone working there is evil, but the leadership is, and they control the company.

OOXML, FUD, threats, and so forth are only a small sample of all the evil things they've done. Read a few articles on www.roughlydrafted.com for example, to remind yourselves of more.

People just keep forgetting all the nastiness, for some really strange reason. Possibly because it's an Ah-mmmeeeeeerrrrr-ih-cann company.
In case your into selling real estate, software or marketing etc. don't rely on pretty faces at all. People trust people who look like experts not like call center agents, that means they are older and look like real people.
gives 100 times more thrust, but needs 1000 times more power...
The average number of choices to be endured is minimized when there are three items per menu.

Can anyone provide proof of that? I calculate that for 100 choices convenientely separatable into a balanced tree, then base 2 yields: 7 levels * 2 = 14 choices, while base 3 yields: 5 levels * 3 = 15 choices. So, advantage to base 2. For 1000:

base 2: 10 * 2 = 20 choices
base 3: 7 * 3 = 21 choices

(I neglected the incompleteness of the tree to simplify, maybe that'd make a difference)

I suppose, the average number of choice to listen to could be 1.5 and 2 respectively. However, if I know that it's a binary or ternary phone system, then the right numbers are 1 and 2 instead, because I don't have to listen to the last option; I already know that it's "everything else". Then base 2 would again trounce base 3 for 100 and 1000, and probably any number.

Finally, if his proposition is right, does it mean that a ternary tree is a more efficient data structure than a binary tree, when there is a natural ternary separation?

EDIT: I figured out the first part... the number of choices would be k * log[n] / log[k]. So the important factor is k / log[k], which is 2.88 for base 2 and 2.73 for base 3. It's really close, but assuming as I said that we should multiply by 1 and 2 instead of 2 and 3, then I don't think his assertion holds at all, in theory or in practice...
Cause of the whole chicken <-> egg problem. No-one will use CueCats unless there are lots of those barcodes online. The barcodes wont appear in significant numbers online unless everyone has a CueCat.
Infrared is a bigger problem.
Yet this has nothing to do with low latency. You can have a decent realtime preview with ~120ms latency, which I use as a limit for instantaneousness.

Low-latency is good for performance, as in, for performing live. And that's it (Then again ask any church organ player about latency.. He has ton of it)
People want to know they have a legitimate shot at getting a fair deal.

Ironically, it's articles like this that give them doubt. They could've just as easily written an article praising high-frequency trading for getting most participants a fairer deal.

High-frequency trading has driven down costs. They're the main reason most people will only pay a 1c bid/ask spread for those Broadcom shares. Before computerized trading, they would've paid over 12x that. Additionally, as they push the systems to scale and force competition between markets, the per order and per share fees are driven down.

They've also made the market more efficient, so most people don't get screwed by some slime taking them for a quarter to a dollar per share doing arbitrage against another market, mismarking the trade, or maybe the worst, an order his friend is holding in their pocket. Those things are now typically limited to less than a cent. High-frequency traders are usually overjoyed to average 1/4 of a cent profit. You'd be amazed at how many losing trades they do. For most orders, most of the screwing happens between the trader and the broker, not the trader and other traders.

It's important to remember that there's two parties involved in every trade. One could easily say the Broadcom buyers described were upset they couldn't screw the sellers as badly anymore.

If you look at the details of the Broadcom trading given in the article, it's likely even more simple than what they conjectured. 56,000 shares of Broadcom really isn't that much. It's only 1/2% of the number of Broadcom shares traded daily.

The issue the buyers probably had was that MOST bids and offers in such stocks (>80%) are from computers running high-frequency trading strategies. If the computers just stop offering to sell more shares (the simplest reason being they hit their margin limit), you could get the same exact situation described.. Except now, there's nothing sinister at all going on. You just get to see how much they're normally helping you, and you'd write an article about how the SEC should increase the margins for high-frequency traders (which would be equally silly.. and meaningless since the large firms ignore the rules on that point anyway).

Disclaimer: I put bread on the table doing this stuff.
Ask HN: Anyone working on a game?
Dear HN,

I am wondering if there are any startups working on games? If so, what kind of games and what platform are you targeting?

We ourselves are working on a GTA-like game, which will be set in a different time, however. We are a very small team - currently 2 people. The biggest challenge is 3d modeling - we are working exclusively on our own tool to generate the game world semi-automatically. The only input will be a map and "skins" - and these skins will be modified by an artist. We hope to make the artist at least 10 times more productive than the norm - since we couldn't afford to hire 10 graphics guys :-), we need to make him super productive...
http://send2twitter.com - a very simple but efficient email-to-twitter gateway using oauth.
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You can override the ambient light sensor easily. It's just a handy default.
http://woodgears.ca/marbleadd/index.html

Awesome!
I set the policy early on in my company (we follow very complete Agile and XP) for all engineering related meetings: immediately after lunch or not at all. Standups, Iteration planning and review, Manager 1-on-1s, you name it.

Lunch interrupts everyone and people are rarely doing their most incisive thinking while food digests...if we're going to be unproductive anyway, might as well have a meeting.

I put in this policy for the same reasons PG talks about, and feel like it pretty completely handles the problem. Do people agree or disagree? Is there any reason I shouldn't be treating 1-2:30 as talking time, and the rest as coding time?
Many attractive women milk their attractiveness until one day they aren't the center of attention at around 30. At about 24 many women are physically not as pretty as they were in a downgrade.
This link bait has no place on hacker news.
As a hobby only at the moment, ultimately to give it away free/cheap, but it consumes my head so much I do ponder about other potential for it. One of those is its K-12 educational potential (in an alternate non-game mode) but I currently know next-to-nothing about the educational software market.

It's cross-platform OpenGL (C++ & Lua) and is basically a "unit-less" RTS with a planetary sciences bent. I'm enjoying every second of developing it.
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I've not been paying attention lately but for the first few generations of iPods, the manufacturing scale and some key prepayments for flash memory (they just recently prepaid another half-billion(!) to samsung) meant that iPods were very price competitive.

It appears to be very difficult for people to see this though. When the original iPod came out, some people were claiming it was over-priced while other people were removing the hard-drive and selling it on for more than the cost of the entire iPod.

Also if, when you compare Macs and PCs, you do so in terms of "HW power" then you are missing the biggest part of their value proposition: software.
5 Java logging frameworks for building automation software
Getpersonas is pretty. It pleases my eyes.
A short course in behavioral economics
(Richard Thaler, Sendhil Mullainathan, Daniel Kahneman)

http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge263.html
mancuso5, I called you out yesterday for submitting spammy affiliate stuff to HN and you go again and do it.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=719359

In fact, going back through all your submitted stuff, it all appears to be spam.

Is it possible to auto-dead everything a user submits?
Apple did not start from scratch in 2002.

Mac OS X got it's first (server) release in 1999. And even that was a reboot of Nextstep which was originally released in 1989.

Of course, the whole point of Chrome OS is (apparently) to not have a traditional GUI and apps, just a browser, which is most of the stuff Apple had to add onto BSD.
rythie said,

"Apple's emerging threat is Linux/Open Source, because " [reasons]

to which you (mikecuesta)replied

"I don't think for a second that Linux/Open Source is an emerging threat to OS X, " with no rationale or logic to support that viewpoint.

"I don't think X", without supporting reasons is an almost meaningless response in a discussion. I am surprised it got so many upvotes. Just imagine someone responded to you with "Oh yeah? I do think so" without providing any rationale.

Your response could validate rythie's "classical innovator's dilemma" argument, since in a classic innovator's dilemma the proponents of the disrupted product never "think for a second" that the disrupting product is "an emerging threat" till it is too late.
Yep,you need to go for nuclear on this one. Not that we have never done just that ( the US has flown one reactor in space while the Russians have flown up to thirty) rather, I don't see this option being exercised anytime soon as part of any space exploration programs.

Igor.
Very useful, well done.

Hope you don't live in North Carolina.
"Joel built his business by relating Microsoft gossip and telling programmers what they wanted to hear."

I'm pretty sure programmers don't want to hear "you need to be writing functional specs" [http://joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000036.html], "you don't know enough about Unicode" [http://joelonsoftware.com/articles/Unicode.html], "if you don't 'get' pointers and recursion, you just ain't cut out to be a programmer" [http://joelonsoftware.com/articles/ThePerilsofJavaSchools.ht...], or "you should never scrap a working codebase and start all over" [http://joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000069.html]
It's a mistake to assert, as you do so confidently, that how functional the language is depends on how similar it is to the lambda calculus.

The article agrees with this assertion, Wikipedia agrees with this assertion and I agree with this assertion. Why is it a mistake to assert this? Granted you point to earlier type theory which I was unaware of, but my claim wasn't that lambda calculus was original.

If you look at that, you'll discover, for example, that while having functions as first-class citizen was always a definite requirement of functional programming, neither immutable state nor TCO ever were.

Here is another big gripe of mine. Given that there are practical reasons for the earlier functional languages to have been different from the lambda calculus (speed and memory), why continue using those languages as metrics later on when the limitations of speed and memory no longer apply?
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"Being Asian myself, I concur that we tend to have questionable tastes. "

Being Asian myself, I concur we have different tastes. ;-)

Most Asian cultures(Japanese, Indian etc)have their own aesthetic sensibilities. I concur that they are different from the "default" western sense of style. I just don't think it is true Asians have "questionable" taste!

NB: I am not getting into culture wars etc or claiming victimization etc, I just think that sentence is not true.
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Microsoft was violating the GPL after all [repost]
Earlier submission http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=720261
didn't get the attention it deserved (EDIT url edited)
100 and 1000 are both slightly less than powers of 2, so 2 has a slight advantage for these numbers. For sufficiently large numbers, 3 always wins. Here is a proof:

If there are a total of N options, the number of choices is x * d, where d is the smallest integer larger than log_x(N). When N is large enough you can approximate d by log_x(N), so the number of choices is x log N / log x. We are looking for the x that minimizes x / log x (in any base). Let us arbitrarily choose base 2. So 2 / log 2 is 2, whereas 3 / log 3 is only 1.89.

Incidentally, to see that the minimum of the continuous function x / log x is reached at e (although this has no relevance to the discrete problem), take the derivative and set it to zero, giving 1 / log(x) - 1 / log^2(x) = 0, or log x = 1, giving x=e (differentiation rules are always in base e.)

Finally, if his proposition is right, does it mean that a ternary tree is a more efficient data structure than a binary tree, when there is a natural ternary separation?

This whole argument is based on an arbitrary -- and IMO, rather flimsy -- measure of efficiency as the product of depth and width. The optimal branching factor for an n-ary tree depends on many factors and is heavily dependent on the details of the implementation; no single n is always optimal. For example, when traversal of the tree involves disk seeks, a very large n such as 512 or 1024 is used.
I've been toying around with a browser game based on Uplink: Hacker Elite (but as a multiplayer: think Uplink + ForumWarz + EVE as influence). But it's a pain :P
What's the best thing to do to make a high end PC look good? Make it out of carbon fiber?
There has been reams of discussion of this on the other threads about it :)

(my opinion: it doesnt matter - this happens all the time, it's only news because of it being MS)
> However, if I know that it's a binary or ternary phone system, then the right numbers are 1 and 2 instead

Not really, it's 1 and 1.66(6) (you never listen to the 3rd option).

Also, for e.g. 1000:
in base 3 a lot of 7th level menus will contain less than 3 choices,
while in base 2 almost all of 10th level menus will contain 2choices.
Ha, I wish I had this guy in my college lit. class. Of the 3 I had 2 were great and the one in between (the one I knew I was going to fail) was a complete asshole. I'm still not sure how the other 2 managed to find a way to make the material covered relevant, yet the 3rd guy managed to make me hate everything about him, his class, and his topics.

And the dude was a real hippy, but not in a cool way. All his themes were some sci-fi postapocolyptic drivel. When I brought his name up people knew of him and gave a sad frown like they knew I was suffering. Not just students but teachers and other professors.

For 3 years I was listed as a freshman with over 90 credits because the I refused to take another lit class and the university wouldn't change my status until I did.

BTW, almost 10 years later, it still pisses me off.
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Responding to your edit: I don't think you should take the phone menu example too seriously, I think that was just meant as a fun diversion. The real question is whether a ternary-logic microprocessor would require a smaller area than a binary one, under the plausible assumption that this is proportional to depth * width. I think that would almost certainly not be the case -- binary is just so much more natural than ternary that you're just going to end up simulating ternary with binary anyway. In fact that is exactly what seems to have happened in the attempt that he describes to build a ternary computer.
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Looking good Louis!
The Favorite iPhone Apps of Five Geek Rock Stars
That's this submission ...
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