skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Alex seems to have some reading comprehension problems. In nearly every email Phil mentions his desire to keep his blog as separate...

"You and I have similar objectives: you want to extend your already-successful brand by offering something new to your readers, I want to grow my new blog."

"I like the idea of having a Programming Praxis sub-section on TDWTF, and I also want to keep my blog at programmingpraxis.com."

"May I ask a favor? Can you please include somewhere in the text of the exercise a link to my blog?"

"First, programmingpraxis.com will continue to exist in roughly its current form, as a stand-alone web site with two exercises per week, no matter what happens with Programming Praxis exercises at TheDailyWTF."

"Regarding linking: If Programming Praxis is going to become a regular weekly feature on TheDailyWTF, with at least some original content, I don’t see the problem with putting a link to programmingpraxis.com somewhere obvious."

Alex constantly ignores this until the end when he says:

"I don’t want to come across as abrasive or inconsiderate, but we started this conversation on the premise of joining forces, and I’ve reiterated that intent several times. My understanding has been that, if our test(s) proved successful, then we’d combine blogs; if not, then you’d continue with your blog, and I would continue with mine."
If it works the way I think it does, look up the (basic) physics around gravity.

You probably wouldn't even need to break out of the mass * g * height = energy equation.
theatlantic: "wow this story is amazing, thoughtful, and powerful, but the title has got to go. How about something catchy like: How American Health Care Killed My Father"

author: "umm..."
I think Atlassian is a good example of what you are looking for. They certainly have sales people, but you can buy licenses on their website. Their product pages seem designed to provide one with useful information instead of useless marketing babble. They provide free trials for their products that don't require that you talk to anyone. Their development process is quite transparent. They even provide source code to paying customers (again without having to contact them).
Wife/Mother/Worker/Spy - Caught in the Deceit of the Web
I can't even count the ways his innovations shaped my life and how I express myself.
Can the Twitterati help sell your soda pop?
I think we should get a HN NYC meet together while you're here. There is a great beer garden in Brooklyn where we can all get together.
The Perl that most people write can be parsed just fine.

Not true. The example he shows to not be statically parseable is:

whatever / 25 ; # / ; die "this dies!";

(because you need to know the value of `whatever' to parse it)
I wrote up a little walkthrough a few years back... make it would make DD a little clearer.

http://blog.fogus.me/2006/07/10/duff’s-device-walkthrough/
It's coded so that we only have to check if it works in Firefox. It's not like we're explicitly trying to leverage Firefox-only markup or CSS. I believe the idea is to reduce waste of development time and effort. I think I'm going to call YAGNI at this point re: future patent problems. I don't see that happening soon, and I'd gladly take the time savings now, and cross that bridge when we get to it -- if it comes at all.
Maybe it doesn't work as well because people are starting to overuse it...
Most of the guys who I regarded as the very best developers were in Seattle and Silicon Valley.

Sorry you see it that way. I have found little correlation between developer quality and location. Great developers can be anywhere, with many reasons why they haven't relocated to a tech center. They may be right under your nose. Sounds like you found a few.
Whether the team is more or less than the sum of the parts depends on how well the team works together. A team of good programmers who value each other and work to improve each other will cause each other to be better than if they were all alone. A team of rockstar programmers who get into lots of design conflicts will be less effective. Imagine a team of Linus, RMS, JWZ, and Miguel de Icaza; probably a pretty ineffective team. But how about Kerninghan, Ritchie, and Thompson? From their writings/interviews they seem like good people who became great because they worked together as a team. Or maybe Xerox PARC is a better example: how many members of the team can you name, yet the set the UI standard for years.
And he had taste too. The original Les Paul guitars still look and sound great today.
It's all done. Redhat wins enterprise (server) market, while Ubuntu "just works" on desktop.
ReMail Brings Speedy Full Text Search & Entire Offline Mailbox To The iPhone
A real hacker indeed, at least he lived a long fulfilling life.
It is an object lesson in concrete syntax design. This result probably won't be of interest to Perl hackers for precisely that reason.
The reality is that battery systems have orders of magnitude more capacity per volume and weight. I'm probably going to get the math wrong, but the mechanical energy that a generator extracts from a gallon of gasoline (~ 11 kWh) is equivalent to the gravitational potential energy of 80,816,326 liters of water at 50 m. (8.08e7 = 3600 * 1.1e7 / 9.8 / 50). Without a lake on a hill, you aren't in the right ballpark. Flywheels are similarly useless for modern energy consumption.

With lithium ion batteries, the Tesla Roadster stores 53 kWh's in an area about the size of the trunk.
I first encountered eigenmagic in machine learning --- we were interested in the eigenvectors of the adjacency matrix of a graph. When the space that the matrix lives in is so abstract, 'real world' examples don't make it any easier to visualize what's happening.

If you really want to understand them intuitively, I reccomend plotting a few hundred matrices and their respective eigen- values and vectors. When you feel like you can predict what the results will look like at each frequency, then the stories about rubber bands and shiny coins will make sense.

Or maybe you're faster, and the stories helped you make the leap --- in which case, ignore me!
Yes, but most people's health problems are not as severe as to cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. Your argument assumes everyone will become so ill as to require massively expensive treatment at some point, but they don't.

My point, though, is that multiple competing private health care providers create administrative overhead without delivering the benefits of competition because sick people are a captive market, and thus normal market forces are unable to operate properly. If you look into the history of private fire companies you'll see problems which are echoed in today's health care system.
From the CNN report:

Paul is enshrined in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, the Grammy Hall of Fame, the Inventors Hall of Fame and the Songwriters Hall of Fame.

"I had to build it, make it and perfect it," Paul said in 2002.

"I learned a long time ago that one note can go a long way if it's the right one," he said in 2002, "and it will probably whip the guy with 20 notes."

A hacker if there ever was one. Most of us still enjoy the output of his output. RIP.
I think the prior agreement between The Daily WTF and Programming Praxis would make a lack of knowledge defense difficult.
These sound like things to avoid if you want to get a cushy job at a big company, not find stimulating work at a start-up. Or is that the point? Color me confused.
I'm doing SEO myself as a consultant so it's very important for my business ;-) and I have to disappoint you:

1. SEO is not about "a tool", it relies on a plethora of factors and tasks many of which user solost has already outlined in his comment

2. There is no single tool that will allow you to do SEO work, you need a few tools, I'd say more or less 10 depending on what you actually do.
Three weeks ago I compiled a list of the most important ones:
http://www.seoptimise.com/blog/2009/07/the-30-free-seo-tools...

Nowadays SEO is more about "killer" content creation, social media and viral marketing than anything else. The basic on site SEO work and link building is trivial and not enough.
memoaddict.com
I'm pretty sure all Canadian privacy laws can be worked around with a disclaimer. You just need to tell them what you intend to do and get them to sign off on it. IANAL though.
Okay, advertisements fart in the general direction of your brand.
I would say it actually helps the high-end fab manufacturers by creating an onramp into the world of 3d printing.
He's responding on the blog itself. The user that posted that on proggit is a brand new account, so I don't know if that's really him.
It would be great if Mint could move into other markets. However, privacy is always going to be an issue with this type of business. However, at what stage do they think it is worth financially to move into a new market? After Series F of funding? or do the investors want a return in a set time frame?
"I learned a long time ago that one note can go a long way if it's the right one," he said in 2002, "and it will probably whip the guy with 20 notes."

A sentiment proven time and again by Status Quo (the 3-chord band) :)

A serious hacker. RIP.
"Much of the hostility, and consternation, towards Microsoft results from the simple fact that it is difficult for outsiders to comprehend the truly Herculean problems the company faces with creating and maintaining the most widely used software products in the world."

No, trying to kill everybody in tech, intent to derail any initiative against their core business, using unethical and monopolist tactics, holding the web back, etc.

These are the real reasons we "outsiders" hate M$ to death, nothing to do with hercules, research, competition, too many employees or any other fallacy seeded in the minds of softies.
Design for Test
Just (potential energy) * (efficiency)

I am going to assume 100% efficiency for simplicity. [1]

mgh Joule = 20 Watt * 4 hour * 3600 s/hour

(Joule = kg * m^2 / s^2 = W * s)

Lets say you pump water to a height of 10 meters.

m = 20 * 4 * 3600 / (9.8 * 10)

m = 2938.77 ~= 3000 kg

So you need about 3000 liters (1L = 1kg for pure water) of water at a 10m high tank to power a 20W bulb for 4 hours. This about 800 US gallons. Considering other inefficiencies, you'll need more.

[1] http://www.jcmiras.net/jcm/item/93/ (first google result for efficiency of a generator) says typical efficiency of a water generator is 0.95.
Thanks to whoever posted this! I've been agonizing over my career for years and have only just started to realize the truth (and beauty) in what he's saying.
Maybe the term "rockstar" is where the trouble lies. Because, I don't know about you guys, but when I think rockstar, I don't necessarily think about virtuoso performers capable of creating masterful artwork. I usually think about burning out by their 30's, trashing hotel rooms, refusing to work because the mic settings are incorrect.

I think what everyone's trying to get at is, "consummate professional devoted to their field." The sort of person who, in an academic setting, might obtain a PhD and publish, or at the very least an engineer who reads technical journals and contributes, either to newsletters or publications, or as a member of a professional society; someone who considers personal improvement necessary to do their job as best they can. I think even if you're looking to hire someone to work on your CRUD PHP webapp, that's the sort of attitude you need, regardless of their actual experience.
If you advertise for rock stars and/or ninjas you deserve every candidate that you get.

If you really do need such talent, you are unlikely to find it through classifieds or job sites, but through the network of technical people you know.
I wish they would fix the many issues they have now before adding even more features.

The categorization system is still a nightmare and kills approx. 10 - 20% submissions (because nobody likes politics on the Discovery channel) that end up in the wrong shelf.
It's astonishing to see how many comments on the blog are not only hostile, but rude and hateful. I guess I'm naive and overly optimistic, but it always surprises me to see the Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory [1] proven in practice...

[1] http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2004/03/19/
It's "hate" to not want to pay for kids to be taught creationism in place of real science?
And it's for the same reason as stated in the article.
Seeking - How the brain hard-wires us to love Google, Twitter, and texting
Heating is not really an issue, because the island isn’t accessible on the coldest days, when the swell in the surrounding seas can reach 9 meters.

That probably makes his energy independence problem a lot easier of the coast of Connecticut.
I don't think so. It is an example of how Perl's interpreter changes what a program means, based on information gathered at runtime. The halting problem stuff is just a formalization of the difficulty, to show that in some cases it's actually impossible to parse.

Try this one:

#!/usr/bin/perl

BEGIN {
my $x = int(rand(2));
print "randomly picked $x\n";
if ($x) {
eval '
sub foo($) {
print "executed foo()\n";
}
';
}
}
foo / 25; #/ ; die "DIED\n";
print "DID NOT DIE\n";

This is technically parseable but only by thinking of it as a program that branches at every call of 'foo'. And think about what would happen if many such cases interacted.

"Modern" Perl programmers use a lot of syntax-perverting trickery, so this isn't as unlikely as it may appear.
Great podcast! If you develop on Ruby on Rails, this is a pretty great way to get caught up on the recent Ruby on Rails news, not a bad use of 5 minutes.
I recommend PLT Scheme too (especially for its IDE).

After you've played with it for some time (and if you're versed in C, of course) I would recommend to grab a lightweight implementation (TinyScheme is my favorite) and study its source.

Happy hacking!
Alex is quickly (rightly or wrongly) coming off as a "bit of a dick" in this. On the Internet you can live or die on your reputation - right. Surely the logical approach would have been a "sorry dude, ill change it, misunderstanding"

And of course the cynic in me is saying; well programming praxis will be getting a shed load of new publicity now :)
Because the original vector is not pointing in the same
direction as the final vector (it is at an angle of 60 degrees to it). If you do a 360 degree rotation you get back to where you started. So any number of successive
full rotations will have eigenvectors, each with eigenvalue
1. If you do a 180 degree rotation, the resulting vector
will be pointing in the opposite direction, and will have
eigenvalue -1.
I'm an American and I think the one dimensional political spectrum idea is nonsense. I have also never voted for a mainstream party.
To be fair most of the page is tabular data...
Mint accesses your banking information using a service from Yodlee. I don't believe Yodlee has many partners outside the US and am not aware of a similar vendor with EU coverage.
This is the kind of seemingly non-hacker RIP post I love seeing. I didn't know much about him before seeing this post, but the comments made me read more about him and I'm glad I did. Great stuff.
I once attempted to learn Perl, several years ago. I always felt I was walking on quicksand because I was never sure how a program should be parsed. It's nice to confirm that it wasn't just my unfamiliarity with the system; the actual design of the lanugage is deeply, deeply defective.
I share your concerns but what if you want to discuss politics with the inhabitants of Hacker News? The community here is the best on the web by far. I want to discuss any number of things and hear the views of the smart, technical people who hang out here. I often enjoy the non-code articles more than the "on topic" ones.

It's a tough, but interesting, question. Limiting the topics allowed reduces the functional value of the group. But loosening it too much will reduce the quality of the group itself. I don't know the solution (yet).
Digital Camera With Projector – NIKON | Modern-Gadgets.Com
At least? What more could anyone ask for?
Netflix made $1.36 billion in revenue last year yet is still only in the US market. Why?
Meh, "defective" is a strong word. It really depends on what you want out of your language - if you want static code analysis or a macro system, then yes, it's defective. If you're looking to write a language that people use to write scripts here and there, then it's just a question of taste.
I have only ever used PLT which is fairly nice and comes with a number of libraries and tools over and above the Standard, such as objects and a gui lib.
That was a very nice explanation. I love the rubber band analogy. But one minor qualm: A transformation, when applied, typically has several eigenvalues and eigenvectors associated with it. The "first" (usually selected as the largest, or the "principle component") eigenvector and it's associated eigenvalue is really being discussed. There are (or at least, can be) more of them! We could think about stretching the elastic along its width as well.
Yeah, sorry about that example. There were much betters ones out there that I could have used (but it was likely late, and I was too lazy to try and come up with them at the time).
Using SMS technology to track Pandemics (video)
Medical apps.
I like the story as well, because it's a nice example of a startup that has nothing to do with social networking, but rather a nicely defined niche (not to say it's a small industry--I know it's huge, I used to be a part of it).
JSConf Goes Global: JSConf.eu in Berlin, Germany  November 7th & 8th
Modern Flywheels (in a vacuum with magnetic bearings) have close to the same energy density as batteries.

From Wikipedia:

"Flywheel power storage systems in current production (2001) have storage capacities comparable to batteries and faster discharge rates."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flywheel_energy_storage

Also, I've heard that satellites often use flywheel's over batteries because they last longer.
I'd argue that "building the simplest thing that could possibly" is amongst the hardest tasks available.

A veteran has an arsenal of tools and knows which shortcuts to avoid even under pressure.

An aspiring hacker usually has a single tool and under pressure will take all shortcuts he can find.
I get that timing attacks are reproducible in test environments and in a theoretical sense, but have any major real-life attacks been based on a timing vulnerability? Most websites anyone would want to attack will be running off of multiple servers (which will be reading from replicated mysqls, parts of the requests will likely be memcached, the load balancers will likely have fluctuating load etc. etc.), even multiple data centers. The number of requests you'd have to observe before you could have any statistically meaningful information would be huge. And we're talking about sub-millisecond differences (even Google routinely serves pages in the 50ms range, so this difference is tiny).

Seems like other, more traditional problems (weak / poor crypto, social engineering) are much more important problems.

I kind of wonder if people just really like timing attacks because they're so easy to understand, and, once you spot them, so easy to fix.
No, it wouldn't render in any XHTML-supporting browser. You'll get the error message instead of the page.
I'm also NAL, but I think privacy laws are the kind of thing that you can't just disclaim away - you may be willing to give up that information, but if it's illegal for them to collect it it's still illegal.
The answer is easy - When the cost to move into the new market is outweighed by the profits that the new market can generate and there is a need to create new profits.
well, didn't want to get into explaining what the heck the cave reference was all about, hoping people who were confused about all of that could get some more insight to the basic ideas.
seL4 and L4Sec are capability-based and thus quite different from regular L4. I always found capability systems much easier to understand than L4's message registers and flexpages.
Penis Enlarging Devices
1:14 swim (5 minutes faster than first)
6:13:55 bike (way faster than the first, like over an hour and change)
4:43 run (about 45-50 minutes faster than the first)

First was Wisconsin, second was Lake Placid.
Nothing is illegal to collect, as long as you disclose. Ergo credit bureaus, insurance companies with SIN's etc.

I believe there is a set time when certain things will be frowned upon (That SIN particularly) but we are currently within an incremental period where it isn't right now.
An Insider On the Apple Tablet
Come on, you have to admit it. This article has all of us gizmo fanboys drooling.

ASK HN: How many of you guys would shell out $800 for this thing? Honestly. I'm thinking about buying it for my dad.
many fascinating scalability and algorithmic challenges... do not occur until the stage where these companies are no longer start-ups

I agree with your point that you shouldn't think about scaling too soon, but you're overstating the case. Twitter is still a startup. And they emphatically did have to worry about algorithms and scaling while they were still a startup.
If you are learning Scheme by reading SICP, you might want to install MIT/GNU Scheme. Otherwise, let me join the bandwagon in endorsing PLT. The PLT camp has its own favored textbook, qv http://www.htdp.org/ .

The just-released game QuantZ (http://www.gamerizon.com/gamerizon-news-and-media.html) was written almost entirely in Gambit Scheme (per https://webmail.iro.umontreal.ca/pipermail/gambit-list/2009-...). Your Scheme factoid for the day.
I hear what you are saying. I'll definitely need to come up with something that can translate into dollar signs. Thanks for the input.
I fully agree.

Further I'd argue that even for your CRUD PHP webapp you ideally want the guy who, first thing, explains to you why doing it in PHP is a bad idea and how he'll do it with a more powerful tool in a day - rather than the guy who will just nod and then go off to blindly beat "something" into shape in a week.

Both candidates will deliver the first iteration of your "simplest thing that could possibly..." within a reasonable timeframe. But their respective effectiveness will diverge dramatically starting from the second iteration...
Thanks for posting this!

The title sounds like we're doing full-text search.

But we also do something far more valuabel: We download all your email to your iPhone for offline access. For the first time ever, you can have all your emails in your pocket.

And they take up less space than you’d think: 100k emails need about 500MB on your phone. (=6% of a 8 GB iPhone, the smallest you can buy)
There are good alternatives to mint, too, like wesabe.com
Another review of Coders at Work: "Know the greatest coding brains."
Linked article reminded me of a passage in "Topoi - The Categorial Analysis of Logic" by Robert Goldblatt:

"It would be somewhat misleading to infer [...] that foundational systems act primarily as a basis out of which mathematics is actually created. The artificiality of that view is evident when one reflects that the essential content of mathematics is already there before the basis is made explicitly, and does not depend on it for its existence. We may for example think of a real number as an infinite decimal expression, or a point on the number line. Alternatively it could be introduced as an element of a complete ordered field, an equivalence class of Cauchy sequences, or a Dedekind cut. None of these could be said to be the correct explanation of what a real number is. Each is an embodiment of an intuitive notion and we evaluate it, not in terms of its correctness, but rather in terms of its effectiveness in explicating the nature of the real number system."

Tim Gowers makes a good case for the usefulness of the "infinite decimal expression" view of real numbers.
I'd like to second that. Unfortunately we can only vote once. But this talk is now tied with Jill Bolte Taylor's as my favorite Ted talk. Thanks for posting.
DownRounds+Cramdowns = 2009’s Top VC Exits?
How Apple could grow to dominate tech sector