skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
UK Libel Law Is Out Of Control. We Know From Experience.
I should have mentioned earlier that I want to host it or at least have my own domain point to it.
pair programming went out of fashion for the same reason foosball tables in the office did: it was a dumb idea somebody concocted in the haze of the dotcom boom. reality eventually reasserted itself, we grew up, and learned to work like professionals.

if the only way to keep your developers busy and not goofing off is to have someone looking over their shoulder, then you, my misguided friend, fail as a leader.
Players can adapt to different rules. Selection is not the only relevant dynamic.
I'm well aware of this. I was simply remarking on how it is sometimes used.
I did some work at a place where they had a PHP class called something like "foobar_2004_08". Given that it was 2006, I asked about axing it, but was told it was still in use. Shudder
Yeah same. It drops quite a bit in the Los Angeles area. Wonder if this is a big city problem? =)
I'm not talking about the money here, that's a whole different discussion. Of course everyone will shell out money for their child's safety.

My point is with your statement, "to avoid the risk of my child becoming retarded." Since when does a high fever cause brain damage or whatever? It seems to me that unless you're burning at over 106°F (or 104°F for children maybe) there shouldn't be much to worry about. Just try to alleviate the fever at home (unless it constantly persists that high over a day or something).
Hey what a coincidence! I dunno why he failed with the 4th one.

We maintain a leasing administration system here, and one of the most important/critical features is doing the thing he describes. You can know the exact state of any leasing contract (or a group, or all of them) by chosing a date of the future and past. That way you can compare the expected result vs reality. It is implemented fully inside a SQL DBMS (and works fine)....
Pretty educational. I will pass this information to my team. Thanks
Is that your home address? If so, get a PO Box.

"Leftnode Software is a new, small, and socially progressive software company". Why would you even mention that you are socially progressive? I do my best to shelter my clients of my political views. I don't mind theirs, and I wouldn't want them to not pick me because we disagree politically.
While presence of controls is admirable, it's still reasonable to simply look at countries that implemented a minimum wage and ask, what happened to the unemployment rate?
This article makes me nervous. I think that the example given is somewhat overengineered for the task of representing a tree with values and operations, and I don't think that it's good to jump immediately to "let's design an object model with abstract operations and operands using polymorphism to sort out the different behavior" for this problem and other small problems like this. It's a fun exercise in modeling, but produces code that is often just more than you need or want.

There's a time and place for good OO, but knowing when not to apply it seems like an equally useful skill as knowing when to apply it.
Sure, some person has to make the decision, but what happens next is total apocalypse. Works as advertised, IMHO.

(I agree though that the whole 4-page article could be condested to one paragraph)
"My opinion on an Ideal password ... Memorize it once, use it forever."

Just about the worst password advice someone could possibly give. Hack someone's password once, and you've got access to all their accounts everywhere.
Actually the British version is less unsettling, it's resting the command on four Captains of the Royal Navy. First they have to confirm that the UK has been destroyed (this means no government or no established military chain of command) then they have to establish the prime minister has been killed. After this they execute their last order, which is whatever is held on the letter, which could potentially be anything. It would likely be targets, but it could equally be orders to contact an ally for appropriate targets prior to launching a blind attack.
ترافيان - لعبة الانترنت - الرومان, الاغريق, الجرمان
1. Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion by Robert B. Cialdini

2. How I Raised Myself from Failure to Success in Selling by Frank Bettger

3. The Four Steps to the Epiphany by Steven Gary Blank
Realizing of course that there are any number of factors that could cause a difference...

...I've never had problems with with AT&T's network here in Rochester, NY. The calls sound very good, I have generally good reception everywhere and I get a dropped call maybe once every week or two - not out of the norm for any cell phone I've used.

I am pissed at AT&T for other reasons - when I went to PAX a few weeks ago the data network basically crashed and a voicemail I received didn't come in until Tuesday when I connected in JFK, the MMS/tethering debacle, the plan pricing.

But the quality of their network here is something I can't actually complain about.

(It seems like I see tons of iPhones out and about, so I don't think it's that we have a lesser percentage of iPhone users than other areas. Maybe we're just spread out more or have a better tower/phone ratio than more densely packed areas?)
I do not represent 2 + 3 * 5 as a binary tree internally. Of course, I encounter it in a parse tree when parsing, but as soon as I do I transform it into a mathematical expression object.

I don't actually use inheritance, but composition. Who contains who depends on the grammar. The expression 2 + 3 * 5 becomes (using a pseudo-object shorthand) Add(2, Mult(3, 5)).

It looks something like this: http://github.com/scotts/cellgen/blob/master/src/math_exprs.... There is an interface that all of the classes share, I just haven't bothered to abstract it out. (Partially because it often changes, and I've never need to refer to that interface explicitly.)

I get his point, of course, it's just that the solution he's looking for isn't the most natural way for me to solve the general problem.
This is entertainingly insidious. Can anyone think of similar instances where a flexible plugin/extension system was subverted to basically turn one product into a competing product?
I've found that push-style notifications actually make me check things less, not more. I hit refresh on Twitter every few minutes 'till I turned on SMS, I kept popping gmail tabs open every 5 minutes until I eventually just left the tab running in the browser window. I kept checking blogs every day until I found RSS.

Now I don't have to visit those places all the time, they bring the info directly to me.
Silverlight Web OS Lets You Develop Apps Online And Share Them With a Click
Back when I worked for a large networking hardware company, we tried it a couple of times. It didn't work, people cheat.

We asked to implement a splay tree container in C. Got back clean and working code, followed up with phone interviews, then brought these guys in (from another city) only to discover they didn't know what the offsetof() was. Even though it was used in the code they have submitted.
Couldn't disagree more.

In fact, because of the times you'll probably be ok but I'd be careful about losing your sales team when things get better.

Unless you're paying them 6 figures then I'd really suggest getting them on some kind of commission.

Commission is a huge part of the sales process and always has been.

People are fundamentally motivated by greed. Especially sales. At the very least they should have a choice.
Again! Great interview.
Socially progressive in the software market == we like open source software and contribute back to it. I'll make it more evident.

No, thats a real business address, we have a real office.
From reading the article and then the FAQ on the Google Chrome Frame site, I don't see how they'll get around users not having admin access to their machines. It seems to require a download/install which is the current issue preventing a large base of users from upgrading beyond IE6.
This is really cool...the best use of Silverlight I've seen so far. Now Microsoft just needs to cook a clever implementation of Silverlight into the next version of Windows Mobile to have a truly powerful mobile platform.
If your application is designed properly, you don't need admin rights to install - proper Windows installers are supposed to support a "This User Only" install method which shouldn't require admin rights.
"Polymorhism" in the article is just a workaround for Java's lack of a real type system. An alternate representation:

data Op a = Constant a | Add (Op a) (Op a) | Multiply (Op a) (Op a)
deriving (Show)

evaluate :: Num a => Op a -> a
evaluate (Constant x) = x
evaluate (Add l r) = evaluate l + evaluate r
evaluate (Multiply l r) = evaluate l * evaluate r
I can see your point, but training is very important at the mind level. Many athletes use it when they can't physically train.

Anyway, I don't have the data but I guess 80% of results are still from physical training, although adding that 20% for free wouldn't be bad. I'm going to try it.
I would guess it's the latter. I mean.. we don't even have MMS yet, and it was huge news when we got copy & paste.
Wordpress is dead simple, flexible, and offers an infinite array of plugins (Of particular value are Akismet for spam filtering and some of the Cache plugins that make your pages serve fast).

On the down side, it requires constant security updates, and has a bit of a learning curve if you're trying to customize it. (It's also in written in PHP, which is a big problem for some people).

I've used it on my personal site and many work projects and found it to be great as long as you're willing to pay attention to updates and find/install plugins that fit your site.
Same here, and probably.
How very cool.
Why hasn't Pair Programming extended itself beyond just programming? What about something like "Pair Accounting"? "Pair Book Writing"? I don't see anyone arguing that the cubicle office is fundamentally flawed, except for in cases where people are anti-social and don't like each other.
Agreed. You still need a nest of conditionals when you populate the tree, and you need a separate class for each operations - so what's the advantage of using polymorphism here?

The disadvantage of poly here is more code and more classes. Yes, you can add a new operator without modifying the node class - but now you must modify the tree-populating code instead.
I find this solution both hilarious and awesome.

Assuming no major downsides, I'd opt-in.
I can only imagine the support headaches that this will create. On one hand, the user insists (correctly) that he's using Internet Explorer. On the other hand, the observed behavior will be as if he's using Chrome.
Nice.

The only problem is that most of the people who still use IE6 are in locked-down corporate environments where they can't upgrade their browsers. They most likely won't be able to install this plugin either.
When Your Venture Guy Says Goodbye
You know it's TechCrunch when the only credible thing you can find in that article are external. Google Code link + YouTube video. Otherwise, I probably would've assumed some kind of gossip reporting as usual.
Me: thanks.
Look for anything where there are multiple groups using some backend. libpurple is pretty good, both in that it's not perfect, but it's pretty good.

Anything where there's just one group using it lets too much stuff get through.
Be sure to Google "Vistaprint promo codes" before you order. You can usually find up to 90% off codes floating around, depending on the time of year.
Open source is mostly apolitical, so I'd just say open source if that's what you mean.
It's a "state machine": a device that can be in one of a set number of stable conditions depending on its previous condition and on the present values of its inputs. Machines don't need to be built out of springs and gears. RFC1149, I'm looking in your direction.
I like this. It will be much easier to convince people to install a small plugin than it would be to explain to them how to upgrade their browser. My app don't support IE6 for the back-end so no real way for us to loose by using this.
Indeed. I read the profile in the screenshot, and he says he hates describing himself and then decries how people whose profiles he liked weren't actually like him. Well, yeah. If you don't provide any information about yourself, then you are not going to meet people that are like you.

I am not sure how "real-time search" is going to solve this problem.

(Incidentally, I have started the online dating thing, and I am shocked at how little some people say about themselves. "I like having fun". Wow, let me guess... you have two arms and two legs too!)
And now it works on my Mac (one of the main complaints the first time it launched http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=734886) so I can actually play with it.
I actually can't abide the 'mac club' mindset, it's partly the reason I avoided the platform for so long - the idea of being part of a brand 'family' is hideous I think. The association of the fact that you use one particular brand over another, in some way makes you superior to other computer users, is an appalling, but highly effective piece of marketing hype.

Just as a machine to use, I find it very efficient, I couldn't care less who made it.
So uh, does this kill browser targeting?

http://www.alistapart.com/articles/beyonddoctype

Or can you just do something like content="IE=8;chrome=1" ?
It's entertaining but it's not insidious. It's a nice bit of additional PR for the "IE Sucks" movement, but no one will use this. The people who are using IE6, by and large, don't have the ability to install stuff on their machines. Assuming any of them know/care what browser they are running. Most of the time when I answer support emails with "What browser are you running?" the response is "I don't know-- how do I check that?".
Still looking for nominations for BizSpark Incubation week in Boston in October
1) SPIN selling. period.
2) The Art of Woo
3) Getting to Yes
I stumbled into this post and thought it might be useful for some people here
I'll repost from another thread about the NYTime article, http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=834681 :
The next contest info surprised me:

"The data set of more than 100 million entries will include information about renters’ ages, gender, ZIP codes..."
It's enough to identify 87% of the people, apparently:
http://www.freedom-to-tinker.com/blog/paul/netflixs-impendin...

I hadn't realized that someone identified some of the raters in the previous contest with their imdb ratings: http://www.cs.utexas.edu/~shmat/netflix-faq.html

Also, why this matters, page 44 of a research paper (PDF): http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1450006
This isn't true of Scribd.

Why not? It's a PDF reader that you pay to use by looking at ads.
TI issues a DMCA notice to hobbyist group United-TI (re: key factorization)
My Dad Asks HN: Should I Build A Hackerspace?
OK. Quick back story: Over dinner with my, real estate developer, father he got very interested in the idea of owning a building with a large hackerspace in it.

The idea would be that the tenants of the building would be hardware startups who would use the space during the day, and it would be open for hacking and workshops by night. The space would be extremely well stocked with gear (soldering guns to BUGBases and everything in between). The office space would be a separate business entity from the hackerspace, and the hackerspace could be community owned/non-profit with its own management.

So, what makes a great hackerspace? How do you make the community self-sustaining? Would you pay more to run your startup in the same building as one of these spaces?

If you lived in Vancouver, would you join?

Thanks a bunch, and I'll keep you posted as the idea progresses.
is it April 1 already?
UnCommonWeb: Preparing for the road ahead
This is kind of a disappointing 'doomsday machine', it's basically an over complicated and/or machine.

I was hoping for at least a stockpile of nuclear weapons in a converted cobalt mine (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobalt_bomb). Get a few hundred multi-megaton nukes wired up together and if the country gets nuked it blows, kind of like a dead-country's switch. If you generate enough radiation you can essentially guarantee you wipe out your enemy by wiping out the majority of life on Earth.

Essentially any large-scale nuclear war can potentially render the world uninhabitable. The amount of soot put into the upper atmosphere by the detonation and widespread forest fires would potentially eradicate all ozone, meaning heaps of UVA, UVB and even UVC. The concern is that we only receive 1.3% of the suns UV's thanks to the Ozone layer and can still receive major burns. Consider that it takes ~30-60 minutes on a bright day to get a burn (at least it does for me), after a major nuclear war it could possibly take less than a minute of direct exposure to get a sunburn and it could possibly take 100 or more years for the depleted ozone layer to restore itself.
Interesting point from the hack-a-day thread of comments[1]:

"This article lashes out pretty bad against TI. Please
keep in mind what they have to lose here. It’s not about
keeping software proprietary.

It’s keeping their calculator OSs standardized so they can
keep their approval for national tests such as the
ACT/SAT. I.e. a TI-89 is not allowed on them, but if some
hacker can force an 89 OS onto the 83, then that would
mean the TI-83 couldn’t be used either.

I’m all for hacking something, but TI stands to lose their
entire market share because of this. Keep in mind your
ethical responsibilities. Hackers have it too. A site like
hackaday should hold it in much higher regard."

[1] http://hackaday.com/2009/09/22/ti-lashes-out-at-their-bigges...
So does this just modify IE, or does it also affect aps that render HTML using MSHTML? This would be twice as hilarious/awesome if it made Outlook suddenly render HTML-formatted e-mail to standards.
Effective and interesting choice of blue tones. I like the point and click pictures on the front page - I actually wanted to click to see what happened. so I did...then you want me to sign up. Please give me something before you take.

If I could see what the site did, before you signed me up, I might go for it. All I know so far, is that I've told you my three favourite foods, and that I want to go on a "Camping trip at Yosemite".

I'd love it if you'd answer my question to you.. where do you get your first sign-ups for your social networking site? If there's no one to network with, what am I doing here?
I actually realized that relationship about a month ago, but not too many people read the related article: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=779689
can’t help but think that Sun continued to blow its
opportunities here, for years.

Usually I jump on the bash-java bandwagon. However, I think the author's wrong about this. Java is good in a team setting, and Java is the best choice for the enterprise.

I support a cross-platform, plugin-oriented Java application with a large install base and wouldn't want it written in anything else.

In C applications, it happens that applications will have segfaults, and threaded log less helpfully on the way down whereas in java there's a command that allows you to analyse threads of a running process. When there's a Java problem I have much better odds of getting my head around the source than I would for the sort of macro-affected C source that you'd need for an application run in this setting. If it were to run out of memory it would be clear about it. When you're stuck with libraries where the source and developers are long gone it's realistic to use a decompiler. With some preparation at dev time you can use the classpath and classloaders to hot-patch.

C is good for programmers, but not so good for the other technical workers. And I don't think C is as much of a big deal as it used to be due to the advances in scripting languages. I do a fair bit of programming oriented around unix system calls, all in python. Sometimes I find the documentation is better in C, and mock it up there, and then carry it back to python where I can do more with it. Also, if you're on Bigco's standard-issue Solaris host you're far more likely to find perl than a C compiler. Computers are faster than they used to be. Raw execution speed and memory footprint of a process (areas where C is stronger) are much less relevant to scale issues than they used to be.

Reply said:

The author is comparing Java to C#, not C.

Er - ah - so he did. Thanks for being polite about it.
could have two completely different meanings

Ah, I actually had missed the sense in which yardie might have meant "I hope you don't already have kids", and they've actually said that that's how it was meant (approximately), so I was a bit out of line, above.
I agree that this won't make any difference to people who are totally clueless about browsers and browser compatibility, but extending the idea might make life easier for others; if you could run IE6 in "IE-mode" for a whitelist of sites that you knew required compatibility, "Chrome mode" for all other sites, and toggle between them on demand, wouldn't that be pretty useful? Assuming that you have any need for IE at all, of course.

Of course, when you think about that scenario, it starts to seem insidious the other way around. People might be less and less motivated to write cross-compatible websites if it becomes easier and easier to work around incompatibility.
If you haven't already, check out this guy's growing treasure trove of writing:

http://sites.google.com/site/yacoset/

Many of his articles have been posted on HN and elsewhere already.
Rajeev Motwani was a very nice guy and would certainly talk to you. He's the only top CS theorist I've met.
Ugh, makes me sick to my stomach.
Most people in the world are incapable of developing quality software, after any amount of tuition.

That's a very strong claim, unless your bar of quality is set very high.
I think someone should write internet worm that upgrades IE on the computers it infects, spreads for after a while then closes hole through which it spreads (so the computer won't get infected again) and then delete itself. The fact that such worm does not exist yet after all years of IE6 suffering might mean that worm writing hackers are assholes.
I would answer the question in my best alan partridge voice and say "but I'm using smalltalk you bastards!"
I use Vim plus Snipmate, its actually really awesome. It will definately be worth checking out the authors Django-Snippets project

http://github.com/robhudson/snipmate_for_django
You do not know how to produce higher-quality software.
Me neither.
But I just /know/ what MS would donate enough $$$ to certification whores to be sure they teach that "to produce higher quality software one should use a platform from The Trusted Vendor."
You know, the one who makes "the other browserTM", as in "can you please try this in The Other Browser"?
Ask HN: Where do I get the first sign-ups for my social network?
I'm not actually starting a social networking site, but I've always been curious about the hundreds, if not thousands that are out there - where did they get their first few thousand users? Obviously we all know the story of how Facebook started, and how their user base grew. Same applies for the story about Twitter and the big screens at South by Southwest (SXSW) festival, but what about all the others?

Has anyone here who's started a social network got any insight on this? As far as I can see, no users = no social network.
So... does this mean IE finally has a chance of having a nice javascript engine?

For those folks who have nightmares over JavaScript's DOM performance on IE, this may be a remedy if it includes V8.

"Is our site running slow for you? Try this magic new plugin and the performance will improve!"