skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Heh, seriously.

Google: "We didn't do it."

T-Mobile: "Well, we didn't do it."

Apple: "Well, WE didn't do it."

AT&T: "Well, WE didn't do it."

Apps: "Goodbye, cruel world!" BANG
Help Ken of HeliOS project with unexpected health cost
Reddit responded well to this (http://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/9csju/help_ken_of_hel...) but I'm hoping I can maybe raise the visibility a little more here at Hacker News.

Ken of the HeliOS project collapsed of exhaustion and dehydration the other day. He had to be taken to hospital and stay a night. The costs associated are bad for his non-profit. You can help.

The HeliOS project receives donations of money/machines, outfits them with Linux, and gives them to those in need in Austin, Texas. It's not just Linux Advocacy, it helps others. Now he could use a hand. Spread the word. Tweet #HelpHelios and help someone who's helped many others.
. . . which still seems to be about 4:50 longer than it takes with Google.
You have to know how to program to be educated? Is this guy serious? We have division of labor for a reason. Farming and raising livestock are fundamental to our society too. So is shipping, perhaps even more so than computers. Politics is also a defining element of our society. Why isn't he suggesting that everyone needs to know how to farm, run a shipping business, and be in politics too? It doesn't make any sense. Again, division of labor. Not everyone should know how to program. That just wastes their time from doing other things, things that programmers don't know how to do.
I had this exact conversation with a girl one time. She was the standard "work and work and work and work and work and you'll do well" kind of person, and I was more like you.

We were both in the lab, and she was working on finishing her assignment up for our class later in the day. I was reading Reddit and working on a side project at the time, and she asked how my assignment went. I replied that I wasn't yet finished, and she seemed horrified. I told her I had only about half an hour's worth of work yet, and I just simply didn't feel like doing it. My project was more interesting. She asked why I didn't just finish it and then I could "screw around" with the remainder of the time, because then I'd know I was done, and I couldn't really give her a better answer.

I started twenty minutes before it was due, and finished the work in ten.
Writing a blog post like this would be a lame way to get the attention of any future employer - that's why I'm complaining. You're questioning my motivations, which you have no insight into.

Whether I would choose one thing or another is irrelevant.

If I wanted to get the company bought, or get a job, I'd just have a conversation with any of our awesome advisers to get directly in touch with pretty much anyone.
"People might hate banks, but they hate people mining them for data potentially more."

Matt clearly mentions that selling accurate consumer data as one of the ways to generate revenue.

It's not any worse than the current situation. Aren't banks already mining consumer data?

Safebank could possibly be a more ethical alternative.

BTW, credit unions charge fees like overdraft fees, wire transfer fees etc., only they charge a slightly lower price than banks.
Wow, that sounds insane. I'm really going to have to spend more time diving into clojure. Or is this a normal feature of most lisp variants?
> the good news is that the barrier to entry is likely to be insanely high by the time they finally get it working...

. . . and the bad news is that the company is surely still going to try to claim copyright on results. Hell, by then it'll probably have graduated to trying to claim patents on results.
The general rule is that you shouldn't go free-ing memory you didn't allocate.
I had one colleague who would insist on trying to free FILE* after he had closed the file.
Your argument is specious.

The total addressable market for heroin and cocaine consumption is demonstrably high. Kiddie porn demand will never reach this level, and hiding a sex slave in your house is difficult.
Any advice for full-time software developer, father-of-two young-children, aspiring (non-fiction) writers?
I think it translates as something like "It doesn't have anything to do with it in the real world, but by syntactic trickery it can be truthfully (if not honestly) claimed."
You've got to be kidding. Evan Williams who co-founded Blogger, Odeo, and Twitter is from there. He tried to do several startups in Omaha before deciding that the problem was the place. So he moved to San Francisco and has been very successful. Follow his advice.
My main issue is that they add more complexity to the language, making it harder to learn and to understand. They also encourage even more verbosity in an already verbose language. Furthermore, the uses I have seen all seemed a bit borderline - they used to say that configuration should stay out of the code, but now it sneaked in again.
I lived in Omaha for 10 years and now live in the Research Triangle area of North Carolina where I started a company three years ago. Because of my Omaha ties we do some business there.

Omaha is a great place to live.

For startups as HN defines them, Omaha is not an ideal location. There are two big reasons for this:

1. Low cost of living. For a tech startup, Ramen and split-rent costs about the same everywhere. A low cost of living generally means that the people around you are used to paying less for things. Silicon Valley is nice because the population has money and is ready to spend it and founders can get by for dirt cheap just as they would anywhere else.

2. University System. SF, NYC, Boston (and RTP!) all have strong startup communities as well as great University systems nearby. This is not a coincidence. Omaha is an hour from the University of Nebraska. The next closest are the Iowa schools which are several hours away.

A good part of Omaha that the OP mentions is the creative scene. I am continually impressed by it. Omaha has also been making some great business development decisions over the last 10 years so I do believe the situation will only get better.
The problem with his reasoning is that the big banks are evidently quite safe. No matter how bad their investments are, the government will bail them out with taxpayer's money to prevent them from collapsing. I doubt the same would apply to a bank ran out of somebody's basement.
That sucks. Doesn't your health insurance normally cover this sort of thing ?
Totally agree. I think, more importantly than being 'ugly' or hard to mock, your second example is hard to understand. It took me too long to realize it was identical to your first example.
I don't think it's possible to make a system that is completely resistant to human error. Let me use the the idea of socialized health care as an example: it's proponents claim that the current system fails because of corrupt, unfair people, and it's opponents claim that the proposed system would fail because of selfish, lazy people. In neither case do people talk about inherent successes or failures of either system - the problem lies with the people using it.

So to apply this to HN: You can't make an online community or system that will be a success with every user. If you get enough people to do certain things, you can ruin the community. PG implements a system as best he can, but there will always be a time when he has to tell people "this is not the site for you" if he wants it to go a certain direction.
I bet that's working out great for ya. Tons of advantages. I'm green with envy.
If you're agnostic regarding the metaphysical details then you're not a materialist. Materialism is a strong metaphysical position, not a form of agnosticism.
Ken was laid off a number of months back... but he continued the HeliOS project in spite of it. (I am, obviously, not Ken. :) )
Similarity search engine for Wikipedia
We didn't want to do Tipjoy as a side project. Like I mentioned in other threads, payments isn't something to do lightly. Any contracting that would pay the bills wouldn't leave enough time to work on Tipjoy.
Please re-read his question:
"how many chars we have?"
"how many elements we have?"

ch[1] = 0;
ch[2] = 1;
ch[3] = 2;
...
ch[10] = 9;

This is about having the Nth element of the array with the index N rather than N-1.
Thanks for passing this on. I wouldn't mind getting http://www.snapact.com/ into a PyMag article.

Python/PostgreSQL (Django) replaced a custom PHP/MySQL website for us and in my opinion was a great help!
is this a normal feature of most lisp variants?

Yes.
I have yet to see this make a difference. The VCs that I work with look at the team, that's for sure. It won't hurt if you have a good education. But the focus is on the business, how well the team works as a team and how solid the business is put together.

Given the choice between a startup done by 3 guys with degrees from some prestigious university but with no solid business behind it or by 3 high school drop-outs with a can-do attitude and a lot of drive I'm pretty sure they'd go for the latter.

Where a university will help you is that you usually have access to the 'old boys network', if none of the co-founders has such access it may take a bit more effort to get the doors open.
Disliking a food or two doesn't detract from a person's very necessary social interaction.

If a person disliked the flavor of all foods except one or two, would that be a disease?

Given the serious negative impact this difference can have on a person's life, yes, it should be considered a disease.

IMO, the best analogy is closer to psoriasis. It's believed to be at least partly genetic, a lot of people have it, but only a few are totally debilitated. Since for the majority of sufferers, it only amounts to a little extra lotion in the morning, should it be considered a disease or a difference? I'm sure the people with mild cases would like even that to be gone.
I think we could all imagine the darker side of a legal drugs industry

Think of a crack resurgence in the inner city powered by a marketing campaign strong enough to make Nike envious, market penetration approaching that of television, and the resulting decision of middle class America to essentially write them off.

See, for example, alcohol on Indian reservations.
Not to inject politics into this, but can't we get some universal health care up in here, like the rest of the civilized world?

I can't think of a single better way to increase entrepreneurship.
I agree that the "flag" link is overloaded. I don't think I have ever flagged anything because I associate that with spam, not "opinions of people that I think are ruining the community"
For me, design is the same way. When I need to design something from scratch, or look at a current web design from a different angle, I like to be isolated and full of coffee (or red wine) -- free of distractions.

For coding, on the other hand, I don't really mind distractions.
Google can predict your searches one year from now
My guess is that it's less a "ban" on Skype than a bribe.

A quick search in the market found this client: http://sipdroid.org -- a SIP client for voice calls that claims to work over 3G and EDGE. So they're not enforcing a blanket ban on VoIP software on Android.

Instead, my guess is that Skype was enticed into offering only the "lite" version of the client (which according to the article works only over the existing cell call infrastructure, so you get free long distance but still pay for call minutes) by T-Mobile via being offered a cut of the profits.
The Rise of the Data Web, the Fall of XML
Yes, in fact most common lisps support quite a bit more run-time features than Clojure does - like saving and restarting the image, conditions, etc. I found the uncommon-web screen casts to be very inspirational.
> Heroin and cocaine both do really bad things to a very high proportion of the people who take them

The very simple solution is to provide legal drugs for users who are documented addicts (and no-one else) in certified clinics at a very low price.

Since most of the economy of illegal drug-dealing is based on recurring business (addicts), the illegal market for drugs would collapse -- drugs would simply be prohibitively expensive when the majority of clients run off to the much cheaper, cleaner and safer competetition.

Also, the biggest problem with drugs aren't the drugs themselves, it's the crime that follows as users need to get money quick to get their next fix. Burglaries, robberies, muggings etc. -- most are perpetrated by drug addicts. This would be avoided.

I'm pretty sure a secure system for dispensing the drugs in the clinic can be devised. After all, we can distribute large amounts of physical cash with few incidents, drugs shouldn't be much different. Heroin-ATMs, anyone? The addict "withdraws" one dosis pr. 24 hour period, authenticated by a retina-scan.
This is still pretty common in India, especially the south. My "last name" for instance, was just my father's first (and only) name. Particularly for people of my generation, who had to grow a last name because the West required one. That, or some people use their caste(Shetty, Singh, Patel etc) or village name.
I'm pretty sure most of the current JS interpreters do JIT native compiling of the code... much like Java (that he seems to like more), but with functions as first-class citizens. There are only a few languages I'd rather use than JS, and Java sure isn't one of them!
Neah. Generics are useful. Not perfect, but useful. They also happen to be optional.

The language evolution has been good, but too slow.

Even the platform evolution has been good, they have (and perhaps still) set the standard for many types of libraries.

My main issue is the growth of the platform (to what, 200mb?). I would like a much tighter standard library. In an ideal world, Swing, XML parsing ... etc. should be seperate, deprecated items removed and old apis redone.
It seems more like correlation than causation. A lot of ambitious people go to top schools so you also see them doing startups, but there are really no secrets they learn at those schools that give them an edge business-wise.
Hey, You, Get Off of My Cloud: Exploring Information Leakage in 3rd-Party Clouds
How about FOOD!
I write at night. I don't think I've ever written anything of value in the morning.
It wouldn't even cover your costs. Most bank current accounts are run at a loss for the bank, and just operate as a loss-leader for other products the banks sell. A current account costs in the region of a couple of hundred dollars a year to run (see countries which charge for current account services).

Assuming the bank is making an (adjusted) return of 2% on your money, the account has to have 10k in it even to break even. Very few current accounts do.
I can't speak from experience regarding what actually makes a difference to YC, but I think if there's any group in the world that places more emphasis on real talent and experience, and less emphasis on a degree from a prestigious university - it's hackers.
If that blows your mind, you might want to avoid looking at the following: "foo"[2] == ("foo"+2) == (2+"foo") == 2["foo"]. And yes, you really can do that: in general a[b] and b[a] are exactly the same thing in C.
Cautionary note of warning here: as Larry Wall observed, "there's more than one way to do it."

Alternatively: if anyone tells you there is one true way of writing ... then they're a charlatan.

(I speak as a professional writer, on the basis of (a) personal experience and (b) knowning a bunch of other professional writers.)
You chose healthcare as your analogy? You really are looking for a flamewar. :-)

I don't think pg has an issue with catering to a small group of people.

He's the only one who can set that tone, and I don't think he really has yet. If the problems continue, he will have to tell the others to go away, either explicitly or with rule changes, because right now, our tools for it are so primitive.
The typography here is very interesting; I'm quite curious now how the final book will look after typesetting.
Surely credible evidence would be better?

Start with the Forbes 400 and look at how they each got their money.
How else would you propose to make meta-information about code available at run time? Before annotations we had to put that information in separate configuration files. That ended up being more complex, and harder to learn and understand.
Troll ruled by court to unmask identity
From the comments: Getting Real was primarily about software development. Rework is primarily about starting, running, building, growing (or not growing) a business. There are some shared ideas between the books, but Rework was written from scratch. It’s a new book.

But I still think you're right: this is a book for people who buy business books in airports and read them on planes. Which is where 37s probably needs to be heading - my dad wears a suit to work and has never heard of them, but I think he'd get excited by some of their ideas.
I am starting to think Dijkstra is about the worst thing ever happening to software development.

He arguments that option A is the least ugly one, but forgets that computers have maximum numbers.

According to Dijkstra, you should test if a variable is a valid integer like: 0 <= var < MaxInt + 1. The best possible outcome of such a test would be a compiler error.

His argument that sequences defined as min <= i < (max + 1) because (max + 1) - min = total number of items is just silly. Maybe true for maths, not so for programmers. When reading code, you want to know if the code is valid, not how many items there are in a list. And reading i <= Max instead of i < (max + 1) is simpler.

Secondly, his article is about 0 or 1 based arrays, not random selections. And in case of 1 based arrays, the max = total number of elements.

So option C is best.

About whether 0 or 1 based arrays are better. They both have their uses. 0 based for spatial coordinates, 1 based for lists and character positions.
I'm not an investor so take this with a grain of salt, BUT:

Investors care about 1 thing: will you get them a return on their investment. They may say they care about a lot of other stuff too, but that's thing #1, always.

A degree can help them determine whether or not you've got the goods; but that's not the only thing - it's just a factor.

When they talk about investing in a team, not an idea; they mean "Will these people be capable of using our money as leverage?" and "Will they get results?". If you don't have the pedigree then you'd better be able to show them _something_ to tell them that you've got what it takes to get shit done.
Thanks for the wired link.
We make a conscious effort not to be influenced by it.

http://paulgraham.com/colleges.html
For class of 2009, degree doesn’t mean a job
200MB? The latest JRE is only about 20MB. Those libraries consume very little space.
If only there was some sort of fund that would provide capital for ventures for people with ideas and the experience to execute.
Check this book out (How to Be a Gentleman):

http://www.amazon.com/How-Be-Gentleman-Contemporary-Courtesy...

I got a copy around the time I started college, and it's really quite invaluable.
http://evhead.com/2007/11/where-should-you-be.asp
For me, my best writing happens when I've procrastinated away the day and I'm on the verge of falling asleep and I'm fighting tiredness as I write. I've tried so many other ways but that's the most conducive environment to get me into flow.

Unfortunately, this means that half the time, I end up falling asleep before I get into that zone.
The newfangled innovation brought about by capitalism isn't poor people: its rich people.

This is an excellent aphorism. I wish I'd been the first to put it that way!
The authors are able to conduct "cloud cartography" to map the internal structure of Amazon EC2 and identify where a target VM is likely to reside. Then they're able to get a VM placed on the same instance and experiment with a few known side-channel attacks.
I don't get it. Why would you use a real-time operating system on embedded devices? The devices they list aren't smart-phones but are appliances that only have a single purpose, thus you can code directly for that purpose and completely avoid the overhead of an operating system.
He could easily fight something like that, though. Not only does Google track EVERYTHING, but think about the witnesses from Y if he asked for them.

Also it's actually becoming quite popular for academics to post their papers online for peer-review.
I think you read "War on (some) Drugs" to mean that he felt a war on other drugs was acceptable. Instead, this is meant as a way to point out the ridiculousness of the name "War on Drugs": that it isn't "drugs" we're against, but only certain unapproved drugs.
I installed sipdroid yesterday. Routing calls over 3G is disabled (+) if you get it from T-Mobile's market. (Fortunately, I already have unlimited calls over the voice network due to "myFaves" and Google Voice. I just need sipdroid for when I am in a country without reliable GSM service, like Japan. If I need to call someone, I'm sure I can find some Wifi.)

(+) The option is grayed-out anyway. I went for a walk yesterday and sipdroid claimed to be registered even when I was away from Wifi. So I am not 100% sure it's actually "disabled", it just appears to be disabled.

Edit: yes, it is really disabled. However, it's a simple matter of installing the version from Sipdroid's website to un-disable it. Wow, arbitrary restrictions stopped me for like 30 seconds!
s/languages/software/g
HN provides again! Why read past the first paragraph when you can reply straight away!

You did see that the second half of the article was dedicated to reasonably concrete strategies that would be an improvement over the status quo, right?
I was referring to high-functioning autism. Similarly, if one dislikes a particular food, they do not have a disease. If one dislikes all foods and refuses to eat, they have a disease.
Funny that you say that.

In Japan there's a whole (legal) industry that would be probably classified as "kiddie porn" distribution in US. It's certainly bigger than the local cocaine and heroine market.
It's being fought for this summer. (Not universal, but a step towards it)

My contribution to the cause is working IT for the cause at a good deal less then what I'd be paid (or expect to be paid) at a for-profit.

I won't inject politics either, but asking for it on HN won't make it happen. Get involved.
The canvas chapter is great. Can't wait for him to finish it.
Thanks for the link. Have you worked with this company?
> I'd pronounce it Gal lee lay

Unfortunately, you'd be wrong.
Satisfy and Sell to Thought Leaders
My copay for the stay is 300 dollars

He obviously does have insurance.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copayment
I am doubtful about the value of reason 2. "Intuitive", very often, just means "familiar", and I think that's the case here. It's not too difficult to get used to starting at 0, at which point there's no loss in "intuitiveness" from doing so.

Reason 1 has more force. I don't run into it very often when transferring data from one language to another -- I don't do very much of that -- but I do when, e.g., translating between code and standard mathematical notation.
I don't understand. It sounds like you're saying rent costs the same everywhere. It manifestly does not.
Ripper: Modify and Recompile Ruby Code (in 1.9)
Ok, as a full-time software developer, single guy, part-time student and aspiring fiction writer I can talk about what works for me.

I have two usable slots for writing: get up early and write before work or write late at night. I'm really not a morning person so in the morning I just do half an hour immediately after I wake.

In the evening I have roughly 7pm - 11:30pm to play with. I normally sit down to write between 9pm and 10pm and then go through till 11 - 11:30. I don't think this is really enough and I'm looking at how I can get another hour or so a day from somewhere.

The most important thing is to set a regular time and stick to it. Certainly, for fiction anyway, making this time as close to sleep as possible seems to help.