skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I grew up in china, my family was among the first families to get a home computer in China, thanks to my parents (They worked in Germany and brought one back). many of my classmates got their first computers at their high school age. but we got a 486dx33 when I was in elementary school (around 94 I think). But the machine was new to my parents too, they couldn’t provide any CS education to me. I was mainly exploring it myself. it has few games pre-installed, I spent a great amount of time on them. I also created lots of art works with the paint program of win3.2.

I was sent to a student club and then later a weekend school to learn programming. both of them were targeting ACM contest, the only usage of computer those Chinese educators could think of. I hated programming, I couldn’t get it at all.

Then in junior high, I met with another student who not only had a computer but also had network at home. I don’t know if it’s internet, I didn’t have a chance to see it or try it. He basically described it to me when we had breaks during the PE class. It seems to have a BBS system, and tons of pirated games. One game he told me was about building a Mars colony and that game blew me away. I soon fell in love with games and then QBasic. I spent lots of time creating images and animations with QB. I worked for three days without sleeping to duplicate a Mario game. I probably didn’t even know the name collision detection. I just solved everything my own ways.

I didn’t have any hard time deciding which major to take in college, it must be CS. My interests in CS have changed over the years, from gaming to computer graphics to entrepreneurship. But I still love computer very much.

I really want to thank my parents for all these. Even they don’t know too much about technology, they have done their best to expose it to me. I remember when we wanted to purchase a second computer because our 486dx33 was too old, I asked for a voodoo card with two chips (along with many other high-end parts). The machine was quite expensive (about $2000) and was a lot to ask from them (because of the salary level in China at that time). But they never said so.
DataBall
Our Oriental Heritage, by Will Durant currently has about 56 used copies for sale on Amazon. It's not especially rare; I bought it to fill out a half-set I bought from an antique store for $20. But the two highest prices are $225.00 and $588.99 when there are seven listings under $3.00.

That's just one example that I noticed the other day. Presumably, the cheaper copies are either poor condition or from high-volume stores. The middle prices seem to be in better condition, from lower-volume sellers. The higher prices are from sellers with many different levels of volume. Presumably, they're hoping for the inattentive-buyer market.
It should be titled MVC => Minimum Viable Concept
imgur was basically founded on the principle that it will allow hotlinking.
Could you give some estimates how much energy is spent on having current fiat currencies, and how much energy would be spent if similar amount of transactions were used for cryptocurrency. I always wonder why people don't discuss this, or when do, no estimates are given.
Does anyone know of any other Bill Gates interviews of this quality from, say, 1996? I suspect that one doesn't exist, but I'd love to hear what sort of lessons he learned from ten more years of running Microsoft as the company got larger and he moved "up the stack".

It's clear, though, he still paid attention to details:

1991: Product review for Excel Visual Basic - http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2006/06/16.html

2003: Critique of Windows usability - http://blog.seattlepi.com/microsoft/2008/06/24/full-text-an-... (the article emphasises the drama, calling it an "epic rant" and shows how Gates "isn’t immune to the frustrations of everyday computer users", but that's just some journalism bullshit. What's more interesting is that he still has a wicked attention to detail, and you still see that he's the same person that gave the interview in the original post.)
As if a sticky, following you around top bar wasn't enough, they also have a bottom bar? It's like reading from a driver's seat of a tank.

Where has this terrible trend originated?
Silicon Valley is a beautiful area as is Tel Aviv and Singapore, but none of these places is going to change who you are or the decisions you make.

Working long hours is not a function of where you live. It's a choice.

I checked out the website for the company OP mentioned selling. The about page is not filled in with content, leading me to a conclusion that it's not really a fully thought through idea, let alone a company.

There's a moment in everyone's life when they either decide to start telling themselves the truth, i.e., I am not a hockey player (Guy Kawasaki reference from the linked article), or they continue to live a life of lies.

Perhaps moving to a new place will convince someone they need to be honest and make the right choices for themselves, but I suspect a dramatic move is not necessary to begin telling oneself the truth.
I'm neither a coder or a programmer, I'm a code-monkey and proud of it.
‘Disturbed and Angered' at Extent of Snowden Defense Leaks
With ASIC miners starting to become common, isn't GPU mining also becoming extremely inefficient?
Off topic but kind of related:

Although this is certainly not without some moral issues I do think we need a better rating system for raters too.

I.e. it would be great if reviewers themselves were rated across their ratings so you can see how critical in general they are.

I.e just like you see what how a product have been rated on average it would be nice to see how the specific reviewer rates on average.
Are you serious? Not linking to the app store is an extremely dishonest move. Like if EA could restrict that only the people who are satisfied with Battlefield 4 should be able to rate Battlefield 4 amazon after buying it; otherwise "fill an email please".
Unlocking the Power of Stable Teams with Twitter’s SVP of Engineering
Ask HN: Why Aren't Smart People Asking More Questions About Bitcoin?
Like many here, I have watched Bitcoin come on to the scene and evolve. I have also dabbled in it.

But, I can't shake some fundamental questions, and I wonder why other thinking people don't seem to be asking them.

The TL;DR is that Bitcoin is very mysterious and quickly evolving away from its initial billing, yet no one seems to be seriously questioning its true purpose or whose agenda it may really be serving.

I realize there's been speculation about its mysterious "founder". But, that's only part of it. The other part is that it was once a Libertarian's dream, which would explain some of the appeal, given its decentralized nature. But, what's become increasingly clear is that there will not be anonymity or even psuedonymity as governments move to regulate it and companies backed by the usual VCs move in to build infrastructure and platforms around it.

So, the "usual suspects" are, effectively co-opting it, centralizing it in practice (even if the peer-to-peer network for crunching remains), positioning themselves to profit from it, and steering it directly to their governments.

So, here we have this mysterious founding of a potentially revolutionary tech that is solidly on a path towards not living up to its initial billing. Instead, it's en route to becoming a global currency that is, for all intents and purpose, not decentralized, while appearing to be so (in fact, one could argue that it represents global centralization). Further, it appears to be well on its way to benefitting the traditional players. Now, why isn't that bringing up serious questions about its true origin and purpose?

Some may say this sounds like conspiracy theory, but on the contrary, I have no theory, just questions. And I am wondering why a lot of smart people who initially gravitated to Bitcoin aren't asking similar questions as it evolves away from its initial promise.
> I actually think it's a great idea for any developer.

That's short-sighted thinking. This kind of manipulation will only condition people not to trust you and destroy your brand and reputation.
Darn it, I had this idea last year and was going to call it GreenCoin.

Oh well, laziness wins again.
Much clearer! Great to see it's at that stage already, the video makes it much easier to see how far along you are. Yep for the tag line I meant the second one, sorry that wasn't clear - I can see why you want a secondary one but the first one is much stronger.
The reason email usage is so ubiquitous is because everyone has an email address, and the protocols are well-known and universal.

How else would you propose inviting people to a meeting? Put a paper memo in their mailbox asking for a written reply? Call everyone individually on the phone? Walk around the office and gather everyone together?

If you're thinking about the meeting problem, do you propose a meeting/calendar app/client or protocol that is separate from email? Then the problem becomes saturating your user community with your new client. What do you do if someone doesn't use your new meeting/calendar app/client?

I think what you are describing is a problem with meeting/calendars not email.
looks good but with some bugs...

it's very small!!!

thx
"Can you teach someone to be an entrepreneur?"

Can a government? No.

Can an impersonal bureaucracy? No.

Can a major corporation? No.

Can a committee? No.

Can you? Yes.

People can do wonderful things. Inspire others. Open eyes. Light fires. Imagine. Dream. Leave them alone and they can do great things.
That would have been a more accurate description. I can´t change the title now, the edit button is gone.
>It's also about gearing.

True, but gearing and power are two sides of the same coin. You can't have tall gears if the engine doesn't have enough power to move the vehicle or sustain speeds on the highway.
Which would make sense if they understood apple's decision, but since they don't it's just a tantrum.
> collaborative email client for companies

I read that and thought "what does that even mean? Yet-another-busted-calendar thing?"

Turns out it's actually multiplayer inboxes. Neat! Are you going to release an API so the diehard Emacs users et al can work with everyone else?
Apple wants to help you correct a text message after you send it
In my area, Comcast runs its own Speedtest.net server to hide the fact that the closest peering point that leads back to the same state is a few thousand miles away and is insanely oversubscribed.

If Speedtest had more integrity, ISP-owned servers would be deprioritized.
It's what's called a "dark pattern": purposefully designing the user interface to make it hard for users to do what they want to do, and easy to do the thing you want them to do.

It's cases like these that make me think there should be an ethics code for software developers.
They clearly "manipulate any product ratings" by dishonestly filtering their users which would rate the game well, and those that wouldn't.

This manipulates the product ratings by only letting 5 star ratings go through.
B2B SaaS products we loved the most from 500 Startups demo day
On encouraging decentralized home-based solar power in general, wasn't there an issue with the grid not being optimized for this sort of thing? Has that changed?
Roughly 60
Yes, this happens to me as well. Netflix downloads at around 500kbps. Try using a VPN service. When I do, the throughput jumps to 8-10mbps.
Assertions Are Pessimistic, Assumptions Are Optimistic
The site is called CodeWars, not CodeDances or CodeCaligraphy. Kata here is clearly associated with martial arts. Martial arts and war tend to be popular with men and less popular with women. Is that really a contentious point? Do you want a market survey to back that up? Or have you actually been to a karate class and opened your eyes? I trained kung fu for six years and have gone to taster sessions and occasional classes in karate, savate, jui jitsu, escrima, tai chi and aikido. Martial arts is more popular with men than with women. Everyone knows this except you, apparently.

Also, you put "welcome", "excluded" and "offended" in quotation marks. Sandrae did not say any of those words. Whoever you were quoting isn't really relevant to this discussion.
Preview of Slashdot's new look
Why does it need to buy the book at all?
It can read from a distance of up to 100 feet at night.
Check out the second link, and scroll down. A lot of proprietary Win32 application work just fine.

From 3D games like Unreal Tournament to Adobe Photoshop, Screensavers, XEmacs... like in Wine plus apps like CD burning apps and similar that require NT drivers.

As driver support is still an issue on desktop Linux (3D graphics, HD audio, proprietary hardware cards, etc), ReactOS has a great advantage over *nix operating systems.
Is X the next Silicon Valley?
I am curious about the run time analysis. O(log_3 n)

If you have two comparisons per call to your quicksort recursive function instead of just one comparison, are you reducing the complexity at all?

The benefit of this method is less recursive calls, therefore, less overhead of recursion.
"but it would have been a lot of work just to validate a simple idea: is this useful, do people need this?"

I would say the opposite. You could easily do rapid experiments to validate the idea before investing any development time, figuring out why you are building the product, and how people would use it. It's the whole purpose of UX experimentation and idea validation before investing code time. Not that I'm saying you wasted time, but rapid experimentation, prototyping and storyboard mockups is the opposite of a lot of work, its rapid validation that can help you start off on the right foot. I recommend this video "creating a culture of rapid experimentation http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7-WLX8gc8WY"
> However, it's also perfectly legal, as far as I can tell

There were civil rights before corporations even existed, so
conciencious legislators, would see this as a matter of property..

If apple opens a centralized app store, (its in their right to do so) and create whatever criteria they want to allow or ban apps in their store, its also in their right to do so..

But there two things conscious legislators should propose:

* They must create a explicit written rule for what they ban and what they allow and stick with it .. this will also serve for apps that were banned without a proper reason to go to the court and make Apple put it back there (because it was not explicit in their rule, so they could not have kick them out)

* They must allow other app stores to offer apps, with their own rules.. they cannot force people that have already paid for their product to have only one store or source of applications they can go to.. cause this is, you know.. forced monopoly

If these two rules were granted as civil rights.. they couldnt hurt your freedom so bad.. but you now.. democracies are rotten all over the world.. they are not working anymore as they suppose to.. they are ill and weak.. monopolies are forming all over without no one to stand for our civil rights :/
Fighting for more #transparency
This could easily be because the redirected domain allows them to provide og:image meta data specifically tailored for the sites.
I think where they cross the line is not making it an option to still leave a 1-4 star review via the app. It makes perfect sense to steer those users towards giving you direct feedback, but you should still provide a path to the app store for a review regardless.

If you _are_ actually listening to feedback and iterating on the game, the new version will bury the old reviews anyway.
Apple has put EA up on stage to demo their games at many of their keynotes. I really doubt they'd ever get removed without a discussion taking-place beforehand.
Not only that.

You also have x vector libraries for helping with bound checking in secure sensitive code and macro based generic data structures.

No thanks.
Indeed; ISP-level stats aren't fine-grained enough. We need route- and hop-level stats to find the real bottlenecks.
Get rid of ratings altogether. Period.

I want to see usage statistics:

- How many users are continually coming back to the app?

- How many times a day/week/month, on average, is the app opened?

- How long is the average "session"?

- How many days is the app used after it's initial use?

- How long does an app stay on the device before it's deleted?

These stats are more objective and less manipulable -- and therefore, more valuable -- than user reviews/ratings.

And I realize that the value of these will vary app to app -- i.e. the stats of a productivity app can't be compared to the stats of a casual game -- but it gives me a much better idea of how an app is being used, and therefore how I might use it vs. reviews/ratings.
0 degrees lat, 0 degrees long
@judk's comment should be higher... it is the unfortunate cycle of ad-supported startups.

imgur grew out of the garden that is reddit; it was suppose to replace all those other crappy hosting services. It's been known for a while that directly navigating to a i.com/direct-link.jpg link costs imgur because they get no ad impressions from those loads.

While I think this is the eventual trend of every imgur page load, they are saving reddit for the last as that is the last community they can afford to piss off.

I feel for them though... it is really hard to stomach how expensive bandwidth and storage can get for a "free" media startup like this -- I am guessing they are slowly shifting scope and "growing" though as they hire more people, like every other startup in history... at some point they grow out of that sweet spot they supported (easy/fast image hosting) and into a realm no one really wanted or needed them (but makes them money).

Oh well. Every time a company does this, it leaves the door open for another company to come up behind them and re-solve that problem in another interesting way. It is the way of growth and change.
I think in the general population you'll find a lot more people who would be so annoyed at the people smashing their phones that their message will be drowned out with anyone they might possibly be trying to influence.

People won't see this and think "Apple is bad for blocking these types of apps" they'll think "I can't believe those guys smashed perfectly good phones!" and the message is lost.

As for the lost revenue they only revenue Apple will be losing is future iTunes store purchases. Should they give the phone away to someone that was going to buy one they will probably cost Apple around $300 in lost profit. Given Apples take from the iTunes store it would take a very long time for most users to hit that level of profit. So it's not even effective as revenue denial.
Then they could just demand they get a cut of every transaction. Also, you can do homebanking on your iPhone (I assume, I use Android), and Apple doesn't want a cut on every wire transfer you initiate.

If I had to guess, I'd say there is just a gentlemen's agreement between the powers that be and Apple (and other companies) to keep Bitcoin down.
FWIW, gcc does have destructors for stack-allocated data as an extension: http://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gcc/Variable-Attributes.html#i...

#include <stdio.h>

typedef struct foo foo_t;

void foo_cleanup(foo_t *f);

struct foo { int i; };

void foo_cleanup(foo_t *f) {
printf("f %d\n", f->i);
}

int main() {

foo_t a __attribute__((cleanup(foo_cleanup))) = { 7 };

printf("l %d\n", __LINE__);

{
foo_t b __attribute__((cleanup(foo_cleanup))) = { 8 };

printf("l %d\n", __LINE__);
}

printf("l %d\n", __LINE__);
}

l 18
l 23
f 8
l 26
f 7
Show HN: Drone Prize – Show the world how you use drones for social good
How about a script that'll randomly request Speedtest page while you stream ?
Thanks for the correction. I didn't know that, I just knew that it came out of the famed Skunkworks :)
> I know it's "cool" to hate on EA

Nice, lead with a statement designed to belittle the opposition akin to killing an argument with the term 'fanboy'. Only slightly subtler.

This is a UX antipattern. If I want to leave feedback, then I'll leave feedback. If I want to rate the app, then I'll rate the app. What this is doing is facilitating 5 star reviews and taxing 1-4 star reviews with extra clicks and potential user confusion. It's anti-consumer, as negative reviews are likely filtered out. EA's repeated anti-consumer choices are why I hate EA. I couldn't care less if it was 'cool' to do.
My own rant on this from 2008 from a different perspective:
http://timepedia.blogspot.com/2008/05/decentralizing-web.htm...
Here's a link to the real text:

http://www.theguardian.com/technology/blog/2013/mar/12/tim-b...
I thought that at first too, but for some reason, the Open Graph and Twitter cards don't render on their respective services. (although the meta information is present, which makes it weird. I believe Facebook/Twitter can still get meta info through redirects.)
Yep, that's the one! This came up at PyData NYC this past November.

@jakevdp did most of the work; I just shortened it a bit to fit the 140-characters.
https://twitter.com/jakevdp/status/399982844803424256
that doesn't seem true to me, and it certainly wasn't when I was writing the software.

I follow what you're saying, but it's not what happened IME.
Because meetings and finding those email addresses are done through email clients, you need to take those into account if you try to write new email client.

Because there isn't any other way to send those invites, figure out the meeting room and the recipients, you need to support those use cases also. Otherwise people will not user your client because then they would have to keep using the old one also.
I'd like to see the UI be more IM-like.

Edit: Guess I can try to explain. Email messages have become much shorter and back-and-forths are frequent (and not always best solved with a call). IM has almost no spam so the idea would be to strike a better balance between only hearing from people you know against the need for "cold emailing". Google's new tabs sort of address this. IM still suffers from fragmentation so there'd be a benefit from using the universal email protocols (so long as unwanted messages could be contained).
"But goto is considered harmful"

GOTO _was_ considered harmful back in 1968(!) when structured programming was still in its infancy. Code of that time was usually peppered with GOTOs and therefore a pain to read.

Using GOTO for cleanup tasks is perfectly fine because it increases readability.
"And, more importantly, you don't contribute to the wealth of people whose target market is 'the inattentive, ignorant, and preferably inebriated'."

Hey, hey! Let's not get crazy.

If everyone did that, the first-world economy would disintegrate.
Darpa Official: Human-Robot Teams Key to Disaster Response
Looking forward to my first package! Always nice to see some (at least almost) Finns on HN :)
Interesting problem! I was wondering why even define things like SquareMeters, but as you say the issues is reducing the terms that have different forms but mean the same thing.
Uber would do poorly by this metric because I rarely need to take a black car anywhere, so even though the app is great I rarely open it.

The app that shows me when my bus is coming is pretty crappy, but I use it multiple times a day.

The deleting part is interesting, but I'm not sure how many people bother deleting apps they don't use.
Then, if they are going to afford the protections anyway -- they should afford them in writing and contractually.

This way, they could only partially refund and say that we're lucky to get anything at all.
Anyone who's trying to think of new ways to disrupt email should take a look at this:
http://visualidiot.com/articles/mailappapp