skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Good point. I guess usually crops up when I've already got a predicate function handy and I want to say `all(items, f)`. I always just expect that to work for some reason. Using a generator expression works just as well, though, and is probably clearer in the long run.

Besides, I guess if `any` had a signature like

def any(xs, pred=lambda x: bool(x))

or something, that would reverse the signatures of map, filter, reduce, etc.

On that note, I always want the arguments of filter and reduce, but not those of map, to be reversed for some reason.
A challenge with a prize - crypto, programming, logic, your choice.
Greetings all,

I couldn't think of a better title - sorry.

I'm currently writing an article about the mathematics underlying public-key cryptography, and I thought I'd use an unusual example. If you have a good pseudo-random number generator, you can distort the Diffie-Hellman-Merkle-Williamson public-key negotiation system into a public-key cryptosystem (sort-of).

So I've done that, and I thought I'd set a small challenge. Now,
I'm not an expert in these things, and the article will make clear
that the real-world implementation problems are deep and subtle,
but just to make things interesting I'm offering a prize.

I've generated a public key and embedded it in a small encryption
program. I've also used it to encrypt a short message. If you
can decrypt the message (and that should only be possible if you
have my secret key) then I will send you a book of your choosing
from Amazon up to the value of 30 pounds sterling.

If you're interested you can find the challenge here:

http://www.penzba.co.uk (slash) DHMW_Challenge (dot) txt

Please do not make it clickable. Please do not link to it. While it's in its current state it's specifically for you folks here on HN, and I don't want it found by Google.
I think you can register CSS classes via JavaScript...so if they couldn't put a style block in the header, they could put a script block in the body.
T-Mobile considering acquisition of Sprint
This is incredible! I have 800 cable channels and absolutely nothing like this.

I didn't watch earlier because I don't watch video at work. But rest assured, I'll be watching for the rest of the night. I guess dinner and Monday Night Football will have to wait.

I've only been watching for a little while, but some first thoughts:

- Public speaking lessons and practice may provide some value, but the best public speaking will come from your absolute conviction about your product and market.

- I finally get Twitter. The sidebar is fascinating.

- Hire a panel of experts (just like here) and do this privately. Several times. Keep doing it until you have it nailed. By the time you do it publicly, there should be no surprises.

- Make your screens dead simple. The more you have, the longer it takes to understand. The longer it takes to understand, the higher the risk you lose your audience before your window closes.

- Don't make fantastic claims. You'll just look silly. Let your product make your claims. (I understand that this is a fine line between confidence and silliness.)

- Have a sense of humor. What is this, a funeral?

- On one hand, the presenters are great. Lots of hard work and dedication went into all of this. They should be proud of themselves.

- On the other hand, the longer I watch, the more I think, "I can do that!" Time to get off my ass and launch something.
"Them's fightin' words!" is what I said out loud when I read that. I've programmed extensively in C# and barely at all in Objective-C, and I wouldn't say such a thing. C# is a very nice language, but such things really come down to tool support and standard library. And legions of dedicated NSCoders will tell you that their platform is a very nice one indeed.

The actual story here is that big companies who have lots of c# code/programmers can now use those to write iPhone apps. Presumably this means the .Net remoting / WCF as well, which is easily worth a grand to someone who's already running apps with those technologies. In that very narrow universe, I'll buy the productivity argument.
I think this article exaggerates the potential licensing problems. There are few GPLv2-only apps, it's common for app developers to make license exceptions (especially in such an inoffensive case as GPLv2+Apache), and none of that would prevent other apps from using GCD.
To allow for differing time-zones, I will choose a winner at random from all correct replies received within 48 hours of the first correct reply. This allows for the possibility that this is trivial and there's an avalanche of correct responses.

EDIT: corrected typo - I'm half afraid there'll be a flood of correct answers in the next few hours ...
I see what you're saying. I've felt that way myself sometimes.

It's usually called "arrogance". ;-)
This is why Eric Evans' "Domain-Driven Design" should be on every programmer's reading list. He applies object-oriented principles (though not exclusively) to real-world-sized problems, frequently pointing out the traps inherent in the enterprisey languages most big systems will use.
Great news thanks...that is the way to do it!
Learnivore.com - ruby/rails screencasts aggregator
Apparently enough that even another alternative (Google's "argparse") is a candidate for inclusion in the next standard library, or so I thought. :)

I only have experience with the default "optparse", and not "argparse" or any others. While optparse seems like more than enough for what I use, I know of exotic command line bastardizations that optparse would never be able to handle without some tweaks.
None, they're mostly a lost cause. On the other hand, the locking down of actual research makes it that much easier to make wild claims:

Turns out there is a cure for Cancer. They did a paper in XXXXXX about it, called "BioFlavin shows recession of cancer cells in multi-celluar automotons".

Being able to easily check up on that would make the argument a lot less convincing as a "Cure for Cancer". As an anecdote, there was recently a discussion at my workplace about alternative cars, specifically alternative storage mediums. Due to some quoting of a research paper done that had shown some amount of energy could be stored in water, and be returned to electrical energy at a later point, everyone was eventually convinced that Big Oil just stifled the story. If that paper was readily available (and probably read "very small amounts of energy can be stored in water"), we all could have taken a look at it.
All these observations are true, but the reason behind them isn’t that we’re an unscientific society. It's because we're a capitalistic society; money makes all the difference.

Or rather, we are a society made up of people who's goals aren't always identical to proper explication of scientific principles. Science is hard; people are flawed; why should be expect any different?
I would not consider Carl Sagan or Richard Dawkins "PR people". While they do educate the public, "PR people" tends to refer to someone who has an active interest in a particular side of an issue, rather than a general interest in educating the public.
The author of the article seems to think that the only reason people take a company public is for the money. Nope. A company can be forced to go public (at least in the United States) if they meet certain criteria as set forth by the SEC (I think that's the proper department). I do know that Microsoft put off going public as long as possible, as well as Google.
Will be interesting to see how the results shift over the course of a day. I'm in the early stages of my work day (9am Tuesday), so most of Europe is currently in bed.
Can anyone explain what exactly Foursquare is? From what I can gather it is some sort of social-networking mixed with Geocaching, but I seem to be missing something about it.
Yes, but some previously lousily governed countries like China and India have become much better options than they were even ten years ago. The goal is not to have "some kinds of immigrants", it is to have the best.
It's hardly an achievement, heh. ;) (But returning to comment anyway, because if this is news to you, I envy you the joy in your future).

It's just your regular emacs + ruby(merb) workflow.

Merb console in one buffer for a repl-a-like (you can do more of a "real" merb repl if you want, starting the merb console from a ruby buffer in emacs, so you get the benefits of built-in ruby-mode for evaluation of forms at point, etc; I never use those shortcuts, so I use a regular old merb console running in an emacs shell, and either type into that or drag code from a code buffer when I want to see the effect of code live for some reason instead of just saving the file and letting merb auto-reload, which is default behavior).

The 'test, deploy' is just a rake task that wraps a capistrano deploy task (which is usually 90% wrapping git, heh) in a conditional: call the deploy task if rspec succeeded. Easy-peasy!

It's a joy.

Anyway, I don't see how the lack of .NET could even remotely be costing me ... anything. This is the standard way of developing for a LOT of people, you write the code, you deploy it if it doesn't break, you do it all with as few keystrokes as possible.

Of course, I'm sure one can concoct horror scenarios built upon stupid coworkers and unmaintainable scary piles of text and inscrutable shell scripts and lions, tigers, bears etc.

Well, don't work with idiots, and the FUD vanishes into thin air. Plenty of complex open-source projects thrive on a foundation of hardly more software than (vi,emacs) and (git, svn, whatever), so manifestly these tools are no obstacle to coding awesomeness.

As I said in the root: Microsoft PR piece.
Ok. Normally, the articles on HN with similar titles about quitting this or that are an exposition having to do with some technical or moral appraisal of the service; this is just a complaint that he no longer finds himself needing or wanting what the service provides. And that's perfectly fine.
Not to mention that many of the "best" immigrants (i.e. highly trained, highly educated) have come from first-world industrialized nations to begin with. Political instability and threat of mortal danger is not the only thing that compels people to move.
"Such a merger would be difficult, as the two carriers operate on different style networks. AT&T and T-Mobile share a GSM network, while Sprint, like Verizon, operates primarily as a CDMA network"

Seems like deja vu all over again. I seem to remember Sprint merging with Nextel for the same reasons, and with the same network-incompatibility hurdle. I think a T-Mobile/Sprint Merger is a bad idea, for the same reasons Sprint/Nextel was a bad idea.

At best you'll alienate a lot of customers if you go with one technology: GSM-loyalists would lose their international travel ability if they go with CDMA, while CDMA fans won't be able to roam in Mexico/Caribbean, to Verizon in the US, or use the fast EVDO data network. At worst, they'll struggle to maintain two incompatible networks.

We saw the mass exodus of Nextel subscribers (who were cash cows) when Sprint forced users of the popular walkie-talkie feature onto Sprint's inferior Push-to-Talk service.
Looks to me like its an intentional play on Earth/Animal Liberation Front (aka ELF and ALF).
Hmm,

The thing is that the phrase "pre-scientific" implies that CS is destined to reach a scientific phase. I don't know if that's at all certain.

... Another thing, just to think about, is how Google today often lets one find more cross-links than any hierarchical system would allow you to find, yet Google is, itself, not a well defined system using the semantics of the items involved but rather a "dumb" algorithm that only looks at the links between things...
[Edit: pg's back on now.]
Google introduces "Fast Flip"
This is terrible news for consumers of the software. Quicken is a horrible product if you like good user interfaces and software that just does the job. You have to constantly handhold Quicken and on top of that, many times your bank will charge you to let Quicken have access to your data. The big two (Quicken and Money) personal finance software suites had no way of competing with Mint. I would rather have had Mint start charging a fee for the service instead of selling out their users. Intuit will probably do both.

Obviously, if your reason for starting a business is to get a huge lottery ticket payout, keeping it free and hoping some megacorp buys you is a great idea. I'm disappointed that this was the plan from Mint. I had hopes they would find a business plan that made them money AND that was good for users.

Of course, if Intuit doesn't fundamentally change Mint, maybe all my handwringing will be for naught. I hope I'm wrong.
There is only one user like that afaik.
You had me until you compared yourself to the Spartans, a people who were strong because they let their weaker babies die. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infanticide

There's a moral line between "it's not my job to help you succeed" and "it's not my job to help you live".
When ALSA was imported into the mainline kernel, software mixing became possible without servers and they largely died out.

My experience was completely different. A few years ago, ALSA software mixing was not enabled by default and didn't work well when enabled. When not enabled, apps couldn't share the audio device at all. KDE created aRts to allow sharing at the app level, but aRts sucked, plus it hogged the audio device so non-aRts apps wouldn't work at all. Later aRts added a timeout after which it would release the device but this obviously wasn't a good solution. Gnome had ESD which I didn't use but it conflicted with aRts. JACK came along but was only ever used by high-end audio programs.

ALSA finally did get decent software mixing support, but now people are used to running sound servers. PulseAudio is the newest thing but last I heard a lot of people are still unsatisfied with it (e.g. http://jeffreystedfast.blogspot.com/2008/06/pulseaudio-solut... ). Furthermore, people who know what they're talking about are recommending a move away from PulseAudio and ALSA and back toward OSS! Personally, I think the case is quite convincing: http://insanecoding.blogspot.com/2009/06/state-of-sound-in-l...

To my knowledge, the only filesystem which has poor performance when using fsync() is ext3 in data=ordered mode (which is not the default).

Not according to http://lwn.net/Articles/351422/
Looking at argparse just now, I get that one, if you need more functionality than what optparse offers, it's clearly superior. I just don't really get what opster's offering, though.
I actually think this is pretty cool. I know I tend to jump from cnn.com to bbc.co.uk to espn.com to velonews.com so it would be cool to have a quick way to do this.
FYI: Current votes at 00:04 GMT

UTC-8 4 points

UTC-5 3 points

UTC-4 1 point

UTC (Greenwich) 1 point (me)

UTC+1 2 points
Reminds me of the Nike ad, "Training is the opposite of hoping."
Aaargh. This uses one of the principle UI ideas we're integrating into our wanna-be YCW10 app.

EDIT: Hah. Plus "like" and the mobile UI -- that pretty much is 80% of our client interface.
Yeah, this article concretized a lot of the types of thoughts I've been having recently about how best to live my life. I'm preparing to found my own startup in the next 2-3 years and determining my goals from the outset is incredibly important.

All too often people are ideological about this subject. On the creative side people say "don't sell out" and on the business side people condescendingly say "oh, a lifestyle business." I guess I can respect the creative ideology a little more because it doesn't stem directly from greed, but I find both positions ridiculous. I want to make enough money that I can own a nice modest house without a mortgage, and that I can take my family on vacation anywhere in the world 2 or 3 times a year, but I don't want to sacrifice my relationships and the joy my work just to scale my business from $1m to $100m.
Not being able to measure on-device performance and stability during evaluation is a pretty big deal. The simulator is only useful as a smoke test, even when using the native tools.
When I can import OPML, do I need Google Reader?
Some previous discussion:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=817416
Mobile version also available! Same site.

"Swipe left and right to move between articles. Stretch & pinch or rotate the phone to zoom in and out."
I have never heard of this, but I'm fascinated. Can you provide more information?
I like optparse, but I wish it handled positional arguments too.

(I fully expect someone to now come and tell me how to get it to handle positional arguments easily)
Try to stay positive - this demonstrates that you're onto a good thing.
Visual Search - Why type when you can see it?
It has potential... I'm having trouble with readability of headlines though :|
Wow. They're shamelessly wrapping ads around other people's content.
> What advantages would a .war provide?

Deployment. If you have a procedure in place that handles versions of the server side code using .war files then you can simply give the sysadmins a new war to deploy and that will be that.

It's convenient because it is just a single file, if you want to roll back just move the old war file in to place, do 10 seconds of housekeeping and you're back up. Not that anybody ever had to revert to a previous version of their production code, of course. But in that hypothetical case...

Another advantage would be if you've automated your deployment across a large number of servers using this method. Update the master, send the signal to 'fetch and deploy' to the rest of your servers and that's it.
part I is here:

http://blog.okcupid.com/index.php/2009/09/03/how-to-get-peop...
AFAIK with the consent of the content producers, and giving them a cut.
"I believe the Spartans weren't known as nice and understanding bunch."

Actually, I think it was the opposite in terms of their general personalities. They were renown and respected for doing the "right thing" no matter what the personal cost may be. There's a story to that effect, which might be only a legend, but it goes like this:

"An old man wandering around the Olympic Games looking for a seat was jeered at by the crowd until he reached the seats of the Spartans, whereupon every Spartan younger than him, and some that were older, stood up and offered him their seat. The crowd applauded and the old man turned to them with a sigh, saying "All Greeks know what is right, but only the Spartans do it." (http://www.pbs.org/empires/thegreeks/background/8c.html)
Pre-rendering websites in the cloud, and sending them as images is an interesting concept.

If there was some way to keep them interactive, it'd be even more interesting.
Ah, I do believe you're right:

http://fastflip.googlelabs.com/sources

Surprising they did it here b/f News and Reader.
Yeah, we've still got some tricks up our sleeve. OTOH, we were really counting on surprising a lot of people with the UI, and that's out the window at this point.

...And, this isn't just an idea on paper -- we've written a huge chunk of both the server-side and mobile client code already.
Freakonomics: Gompertz' Law of human mortality
At work, I have to restart my computer at least once a week. I'm not sure if it is Windows XP's fault or if it is another program I run. All I know is that after about a week the computer grinds to a halt, taking way too long to do anything reasonable.
I think "Change Something" should point back to "Are you happy?" - this is an iterative process.
I don't really get what cloudkick does, likely because I don't use the "cloud", but it seems to me that cloudkick can correct a few things:

1. Free is good, but asking for money will teach you early in the game what people will pay for and what not. A small amount like 750k does not allow you expand, it just allows you more time before you can discover what part of your service people will pay for - and that is bad

2. The first person they hired seems overqualified.

3. Their blog and overall message seems very distant. "Team Cloudkick", "We" and the quasi-corporate speak is exactly the wrong tone to use to approach the developer crowd - who are the core audience for this tool

4. Screenshot on their frontpage does not convey anything to me.

I'm sure that the idea they have is good, but I have a feeling that the people behind cloudkick are not too competent, and that they will bungle their opportunity.
Curious. Why ustream and not justin. I thought justin.tv was a funding recipient of YC. No?
The coupons / deals for mayors offer a more practical reason to use Foursquare. Judging from Foursquare's funding announcement, more resources will be given to that aspect now.

As an entrepreneur, I see this aspect as very Tom Sawyeresque - I love the idea of getting third parties to pay your users to use your service.
Techcrunch 50 is Techcrunch's event not YCs
RSS skimming is better for me, but I can see the appeal.
Didn't it also take that long to port the OS X version as well? (I seem to remember the 'developer' builds of Chrome for Linux and Chrome for Mac coming out at the same time)

Keep in mind that he seems to be mostly using Python and doing mostly number crunching (which would seem to be rather OS independent) from what I could glean.
Its API: it needs a lot of boiler plate code just to make it work, a lot of repetitions and it's object-oriented while there is no need in being so.
Microsoft had to go public as soon as they had 500 employees in their stock option plan.
The fonts on that page are nice. He's using the free ones here: http://www.exljbris.nl/
I sure would hate to have things like "stringByTrimmingCharactersInSet:[NSCharacterSet whitespaceCharacterSet]" in my programming life.
Agreed. Maybe I'll get my Photoshop on.
No, there is no easy answer to this problem in a way that jives with all doctrines and also works in practice.

OO is ambiguous as to whether a "subclass" of an object is specialization of the parent object or a generalization. In practice, most subclasses are a generalizations and specializations introduce all sorts of problems, especially enforcing constraints.

This naturally comes down to OO trying to shoe-horn (at least) four related-but-not-necessarily-identifical activities together: code/data encapsulation, program design, code-reuse, and modeling (the translation of real-world objects-and-categories to code).

The net result is that OO languages, tools and methods can be useful for writing large program and can give you effects that are better than the alternatives but that the pronouncement of OO gurus wind-up sounding idiotic and following the book to the letter can create situations that negate the particular benefits of OO.
A Visual Way To Search Google News.It’s Google Fast Flip.
Startups need immigration reform
I think the logo doesn't go well with the concept. Their other logos are pretty good in my opinion

http://www.google.com/intl/en/options/
Title should be "iPhone to run .NET applications via Mono"
If it was only because of an accounting rule, why couldn't they charge $0.99 instead of $5/$10.
That used to be the concept behind searchme.com
Fake Video Can Convince Witnesses to Give False Testimony
Agreed - sometimes known as "group by".
"...	Ask HN: review my tiny app ..."

works well for me. I'd like to see JSON as a data format or better still an API to let you define your own code to convert.
Mint is such a great website.

Can someone please tell me how they are able to access websites with scripts? What languages do they use to do that?
Having developed in .NET and Objective-C I think they are both pretty much the same (.NEt might be a little faster, but not much). However, if you've already got .NET programmers then it's going to be a lot faster than having to train them up in Objective-C, which does take a little bit of a mind-shift.

I think where this really comes into play is now there are literally armies of iPhone developers in India and elsewhere (where there are lots of .NET programmers). The cost of iPhone app development should come down considerably.
Wolfram Alpha - Computational Knowledge Engine