skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Does Software Development Have A Culture Of Rewarding Failure?
You could replace 'MacBooks/Windows' with 'computers' in that sentence and it would still be true.
> If two groups are arguing, but one group has an implementation and the other doesn't, well, the implementation wins. It almost doesn't matter how braindead it is

I'm the least bit surprised.
All TI Signing Keys Factored
When it was just gaining popularity, did Google really produce better search results than AltaVista? That's not my recollection.
I was under the impression that it was simply what the robots were programmed in.
How Google Taught Me to Cache and Cash-In
They are talking about: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secretary_problem

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stable_marriage_problem is also interesting (Residency programs use it to match up students to hospitals)
That poor guy, he's got the weight of the world bearing down on him. So nervous. Everyone's looking at him. But what he is talking about is so completely fascinating. I want to thank him for talking about it. I want to thank MIT for making brilliant stuff like this available to all of us for free.
"But I guess given where he came from and what he's accomplished he's earned the right to act however he wants."

Why's that? It excuses nothing.
Notice how Google has influenced the current design of most other search engines.
Now you've got 3 problems?
Of course, the politics isn't entirely one-sided. The foaming at the mouth that came from certain communities when it was suggested that perhaps Scheme and SICP aren't the one single universally true compendium of all useful CS knowledge now and forever was, well, off-putting.
There's a huge problem with this though. From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secretary_problem : "There are n applicants for the position, and the value of n is known."

That is categorically false when talking about marriage. How do you define "potential life partners"? Is that anyone of the appropriate sex? Anyone who meets your criteria (but potentially you don't meet theirs?).

Further, the number of people you will meet is a function both of time, and of the probability that you will meet a new person on any given day. Then there's the issue that your desirability is non-linear over time, based on age, experience, etc.
From the article it sounds like he got his brother to sign, reading slightly between the lines. So his brother would be the one on the hook, legally, if that were the case.
Facebook lite is now available to all
Should I be blushing at the pictures?
> Sure, if you tank a startup, you likely lose only your investment, and you'll probably learn a lot. Problem is, you've also just spent N years of your life doing little but working like crazy. If you're lucky, you've got about 80 years to enjoy on this planet. You've got about 15 of those as a young adult. How much are they worth?

I have recently come to the thinking that a life in search of fun and happiness leaves one feeling empty in the longer term, where a life with intense focus on a cause you deem worthy will have plenty of fun and happiness along the way.

Now, most people are kind of in a borderland where they're not focused on something intensely purposeful, nor are they enjoying their life. It's a sort of limbo. But to get out of that, I think focusing on finding something worth striving hard for that will produce plenty of short term joy and enjoyment to go along with long term fulfillment.
Very true about computers. I find even with CDs I don't get the same thing as with vinyl though. It's just not as compelling an artistic medium.

As to putting it on a website, that could work and some people have done exactly that, but this is cool because it turns that novelty into a product you can sell (access to a restricted area of a band's website on the promise it'll be there in a year's time is a hard sell by comparison) and this is where people know to go to buy music now so the expectation that it will cost something is already in their minds. So this just works better as a saleable product.
Is there an Internet intercom?  Need help for a friend and his mom.
My friend lives in California. His mom, 90 and now with failing short term memory, lives in New York. Even dialing the phone can be an iffy experience for her.

What he'd like is an intercom so he or his brother could monitor his mom's apartment and speak to her without the necessity of her doing anything. The sticking point is use from her end must be totally passive.

Does such a system exist? Thanks.
The Next Generation Company : Collaboration and Social Groups
you know what would be a great publicity stunt? Get accepted into TC50, then launch early, then get auto-kicked out from TC50....and THEN get a ton of coverage for being the site that got kicked out of TC50.

You go to TC50, you are one out of 50, you do this thing, and you are the only one they talk about. And hell after TC50 launches, you'll still get covered all the place as a sidenote.
This doesn't include the TI-Nspire or TI-Nspire CAS. Not all too surprising, but the title is a bit misleading.
heterogamy: best of both worlds?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heterogamy
Google is the only one that looks more or less the same now as they did ten years ago.
It's not really bootstrapping considering another crane is used to build the base of it and initial structure.

I was actually hoping it was more of a bootstrapped effort.
I took art in high school and my teacher used this technique, although getting kids to adhere to the style wasn't very easy at first.

I guess my teacher had an advantage with a psychology degree though.
Yes, "They either didn't understand that, or intentionally ignored the possibility that, the random variables they were working with would eventually be correlated" is great summary of math BS for laymen.

However, I think that the "art" of the whole affair was looking at a domain just complex enough that even they themselves couldn't sure whether they were lying or just "being clever".
Wasn't this done a decade ago with ReaperBot?
I think this would be an interesting idea to implement.

Although, maybe 1. ask his mom to get a separate phone, specifically for your friend to call her and 2. for her to keep it on the line, constantly.

now that is pretty iffy, but it's a quick hack.

although I think a program would be much better, obviously.
I've used these- really brilliant. Takes the pacing effect but makes it conversational so it really seems to flow. The trade-off, of course, is that it has no idea how well _you_ have memorized various things (i.e., being prerecorded audio, it is generalized).
Only if the circumstances of the abductions were random, which seems doubtful. If, say, a significant number of those kids were taken by strangers in cars who lured them over verbally, simply informing parents to push the "Don't talk to strangers" bit might alone prevent some future occurrences. Just because the number is small relative to the overall population size doesn't mean that there isn't some correlation between many of the incidents, on which some acceptable measures could be taken.
What do HR amateurs look for?
Not necessarily idiots, If you are expecting someone going through and throwing out resumes to be happy that you know X languages worked on X open source projects think again.. That should be left to the person interviewing and hiring you.

To be hired you have to be able to stand out of the croud while fitting into what is required. HR is there to make sure the latter is true and once that is met see if you have shown enough to move up to the next level.
Oh you've got me started...

A whole of array individuals and idea-systems bare blame for the bubble. From the Quants' model to Alan Greenspan's ideology to the to mark-to-market-accounting to the repeal of Glass-Steagal and onward, they justified what was effectively the largest bubble in history. And given its size, the blame can go many places...

Moreover, you're acting like the crisis was just the bankruptcy of a few companies - the ones conveniently without Quants. The crisis has, in fact, hit the entire economy. And moreover, all of Wall Street was effectively bankrupt at the point when Lehman failed. The Fed just chose to throw some trading houses to the wolves and bailed out the rest. If the bailed-out houses thought like you, I wish they'd let them go too.

And further, you are not in the least addressing the points in this and other articles, the problems with Black-scholes, the Gaussian Copula and so-forth.
This is great. I found audio files of this in the past, but without being able to see what was going up on the board, it wasn't really useful.
Now you just have to get the Queen to give him that knighthood...
Sure, but there's a difference between aiding in the spread of the cancer you are unlucky enough to have and contributing to causing someone to get cancer, which a complex and not fully understood process...
PHP isn't an effective final solution? Yahoo uses it as the front-end language for tons of stuff.
i have yet to meet a quant who understands what curve fitting is and why it's bad.
I'd love to see a memory/speed comparison of vanilla PHP and Ruby. I don't think it would be very flattering to Ruby, but I'd be happy to be wrong.
Seems to mainly be about Reddit.

Didn't seem to answer the #1 question I had in my mind - how do they cache votes for logged-in users? Do they, say, cache a generic front page and then apply the user's prior voting choice via JS? Or do they cache the page only for the general public, and for logged-in users just cache their voting history and generate it on-the-fly?

However they do it, they do a damn good job. I'm always impressed by how responsive Reddit is, along with the other highly dynamic / high load sites like Digg, etc. They manage to stay up and running fine even with all that going on; but just a link on their front page to someone's blog, which should be almost static, crushes that server into goo. Shows the power of good design!
Thought experiment:

You find an algorithm that is very reliable for forecasting the near-term prices of an asset. Your algorithm only works in contemporary, or at least recent, markets. You notice that by building a basket of many assets, you can increase your leverage as you have a reduced the volatility of returns. You DO UNDERSTAND that there is a possibility of major failure, but you assign it a low probability and decide to let it ride for the time being. After all, after a certain level of profit, you can scale back the risk. The profits are too good, so you never scale back. Thus, you are the one standing when the music stops.

The end.
I'm trying to learn Clojure at the moment and pong seems like a decent real world example program to learn from. I'd love to see this code rewritten 'properly' with all these suggested improvements.
I don't think it would be unreasonable to assume I could seriously date 1-3 people a year (other people might go slower/faster, but that seems like about how long it takes for me to get to know someone in that context), with an average of 2. Assuming I start seriously dating at 18, and want to get married before 28, I've got 20 potential mates to evaluate.

So, the 'algorithm' is that I should date as many as I can (each for just enough time to be able to order them ) till I am ~22 (1/e*20/2 ~ 3.7 years), and then between 22-28 only date women long enough to compare her to all the women I dated from 18-22. If she is better, I should marry her. Otherwise, move on ASAP.

Of course, I've already 'failed' miserably at that plan (e.g., a 3 year relationship from 19-22), but that's what the math says you should do ;-)
IPhone Firmware 3.1 Jailbreak Is Here 
Much awaited iPhone OS 3.1 Jailbreak seems to be on the horizon but this time instead of the usual iPhone Dev Team, Chronic Dev Team seems to be taking the crown for 3.1 jailbreak as hints on their coming jailbreaking utility Greenpois0n start appearing on internet, the Chronic Dev Team earlier tweeted that iPhone OS 3.1 is still vulnerable and they are working on a jailbreak - now to make things more interesting they have posted a video showing proof-of-concept demonstrating the exploit working on iPod Touch 3G (video after the jump), they have named the exploit Greenpois0n and the site is already online waiting to be updated with a working jailbreak for iPhone OS 3.1 ;).
It isn't used because it requires a lot more work from the teacher. Notice this was a one time college level course from a GA.
Writing Linux Kernel Modules in Haskell
All of the lectures are absolutely fascinating. There is a student named Lativ or something, who asks tough questions which are interesting too. I recommend this to all fellow hackers.
In my experience it's rare to come across a "HR professional" who knows anything about tech. Now that's not to say they're necessarily dumb; said "professional" could know, I dunno, gender discrimination legislation like the backs of their hands. But expecting HR to take any active role in selection of technical people is unlikely to improve the quality of the candidates you interview. The most they can do is the same as they'd do for all employees (e.g. checking references).

Also here's my tip: someone who describes themselves as a programmer or a sysadmin is likely to be a can-do type. Someone who calls themselves an "IT professional" is likely to be the sort who spends half his day drawing UML diagrams and the other half in meetings. Wonder if that's true for "HR professionals" too.
Look into VoIP. A specific system probably doesn't really exist yet, but you/your friend might be able to cobble something together.

Or an auto-answering skype client?
Just get a single button telephone with their number hardcoded. Or something like that.
I wonder if anyone's gone the next step and written updates to the caches directly, leaving out the database write from the critical path.
Brute force for the win?
I know I tend to lose enthusiasm for a problem when I can imagine all the steps required to implement a solution to it. It's as if problems become less interesting to my brain if it thinks it has a solution worked out as "all" that's left is just implementation. Of course I know better but it's still hard to get over the inertia caused by this.
My recollection is that AltaVista had paid inclusions (paid links to be placed prominently in search results) in its search results. I think most search engines at that time did. So that the first AltaVista results page or two was rarely what I was looking for. So I did a a good deal of skipping past the product and service placement links to get to the information I was looking for.

Google appeared to be an exception in that it didn't appear to have paid inclusions, so I could usually start with something on the first page.
The Rule Of Least Power
Apples and Oranges.

End users don't care if a program was written well or not. They care if it solves their problem. There are countless examples of horrible buggy badly written programs that are wildly successful. There aren't many examples of horrible bad violinists that are successful.
Aren't there web enabled baby monitors?
Good Practice: Use the least powerful language suitable for expressing information, constraints or programs on the World Wide Web.
Wow,

This fellow has "discovered" one small fragment of vast enterprise known as Neurolinguistic Programming.

NLP has explored many generalizations of this sort and manages to make somewhat fewer generalizations than our blogger. NLP would say for some people, Tediousness is many small steps and fun is one big step. They'd even go into some manipulations to use that fact.

Of course, the validity of NLP itself is open to question but it's vast field that has already explored many of these kinds of things, the kind of thig that people often ... think they've invented themselves.
Expressing constraints, relationships and processing instructions in less powerful languages increases the flexibility with which information can be reused: the less powerful the language, the more you can do with the data stored in that language.
This probably isn't how they do it but you could have a static page updates customizing information with AJAX.
I played around with Flash Media Streaming Server a while back it and might be able to do what they need it to:

He could setup the freebie developer's version (at least it used to be free) on his computer. Then you'd need to make a flash player or two that will stream the video and audio back to the server so they can each see and hear the other. Then just stick those players on webpage somewhere, and you're pretty much set. This could be done as an Adobe Air app as well I think...

If they have the computers and webcams (hp mini or eee pc would work!), I'd be happy to see what I could do to help them out: admin (at) hpminiguide . com

(Sorry if this doesn't make a whole lot of sense, I'm super tired and coming down after a few strong drinks)
This brings back old memories. We were given this task as an assignment for a course in college called "Theory of Computation". I stayed up for 3 days without sleep to implement this thing. I did it in c++ though, so a lot of that time was due to the choice of the language.

Edit: Forgot to add, got 140pts on it(over a 100, there was a bonus). Yeah, I'm awesome.
Father of Green Revolution, Norman Borlaug, Dies
The last I heard is that Uzbl is currently unix-only. It is very possible that it will eventually become portable, or at the very least work under cygwin.
Your original statements were "being an awesome excellent programmer doesn't mean guaranteed success in any real measurable way. " and "Begin an awesome excellent business guy does mean success in a measurable way."

When the argument was made that success has meanings beyond "how much money someone made" or needs an absolute scale of measurement to define it, you are now saying that software that is not well written can be successful, Sure, but by that logic then many businessmen get rich by luck, not by being "awesome excellent business guys". So ? Still doesn't affect the irrelevance of your original argument.

There are godawful musicians who lip synch songs and can barely maintain pitch but are successful in terms of making money. You need to let go of thinking that your ideas of what "success" is, is somehow universally held or accepted.

( I am done with this thread. It isn't worth the time. )
Internet Hoax Convinces Germany of U.S. Suicide Bombing
Writing Keyloggers - Full Length Tutorial
Somebody here at HN built this for justin.tv:
http://www.slumbervision.com/
In the past my strategy was basically that.

Load a static page from cache wherever possible. If the user performs a vote, or submit, or what have you, write it to the database, but just perform the update on the user's local page in the DOM.
I'd say the opposite: hard SF needs an underlying economic model for it to work, because the protagonists are necessarily resource-constrained. Alastair Reynolds is particularly good at this: in his universe, interstellar travel is possible using a combination of relativistic time dilation, suspended animation and various therapies and enhancements for longevity - there's no FTL. If his characters have to go get something from another star system, they have to sit down and think, well, is it worth it? And it will take X years anyway, so let's spend a few years getting ready.

Star Trek even had to abandon any concept of economics because there's no viable model for it in their soft-SF universe but even so: the Federation's resources are finite. How do they decide what planets to colonize, how many starships to build, who is the poor schmuck who fixes the replicators?
What's with GoDaddy's web interface?
The busiest domain registrar (GoDaddy) on the web is designed the worst? They 1) flood you with choices (left hand nav, topnav, every page with a dozen dropdowns), 2) cross sell too much (hosting, privacy, 5yrs, 3yrs, .net, .info... just way too many), 3) every page in checkout process has more than one submit buttons!

But one thing I don't complain about is, its inexpensive!
THE WESTERN AZERBAIJAN PROVINCE
So, in other words, you saw 5 things you don't agree with, and you don't agree with Intelligent Design, and you conclude that it must be wrong.

If you're no scientist, it's very hard to find errors in this theory, and the book is citing many scientists agreeing with the author.

No, it's not that simple to discard new theories, since this one is very elaborate, and has gone through reviews by some scientist. And this one is really, really interesting.

If you prejudge that easily, you may exclude yourself from learning many interesting things.
Sorry to say this.

HR Professionals Look For a Highly Qualified Wage Slave in a Programmer's Resume.
Or, if you don't want to do any programming, Skype plus VNC.
[Funny] We've seen tornado vs twisted, how about tornado vs rails?
It is debatable whether or not Nobel Peace Prize winner Norman Borlaug was the greatest human being who ever lived. It comes down to definitions. If you define greatest as saving more human lives than any other one person, he is indeed the greatest human being who ever lived. He is certainly greater than your average religious prophet.

As a social movement, Borlaug's Green Revolution saved hundreds of million of people. It is an astounding achievement in the history of humanity. He deserves so much more recognition and I hope the media doesn't forget about him. I only heard of him because of a Penn and Teller TV show. Voters, at this time you may want to consider voting this story up if you haven't already.

Previous discussion: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47348

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norman_Borlaug
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Revolution
What We Can Learn About Pricing From Menu Engineers
This may seem a little too 1984, but you can set up a camera with an external IP address in her apartment:

http://www.networkcamerareviews.com/articles/portforwarding....
Ah, but you don't have to even be that clever...

If you just come up with an algorithm that mostly says 'buy', then you can look good for as long as a secular bull market lasts. And if your algorithm sounds amazing, then you can get lots of leverage without otherwise doing anything.

Of course, this story ends the same way, you're left standing when the music stops (along with most of Wall Street) - but with luck, the Fed will buy your toxic assets...
Mobile News Now
Mobile Technology News Blog
Markov chaining bach is also interesting

http://www.caerwyn.com/ipn/2007/04/lab-77-unexpected-markov....
Happy Programmer Day
Its 256th of the year :-)
It's kind of different in Russia: you have to know about Apple, Macs are harder to find (only recently Apple Russia began installing tiny Mac booths in large computer stores), there are no ads (except for iPhones), iPods are not popular. 99.9% of people don't know about Apple.
Raytraced metaballs in a 512b html file. (Not for IE.)
Strange. I don't recall that at all, and I think I used AltaVista a lot in 1997-99.
Only 84,000 dollar-millionaires in India
Despite all the hype surrounding pagerank, which continues to this day, Google's search results were not of noticeably higher quality (to me) than the alternatives. What was rings-around-the-competition better was how fast they were.
Pissing off a a few people while reaching a lot is a better then reaching few and pissing off none.

You rarely get a downvote as a consumer, just like on HN. Going in to the comments to register your dislike is not the same as a down vote.
And then what happens when the server with your cache dies? :)
Use grandstream gxv3000 ip video phones. You can dial by IP (no pbx or sip service required), set the phone to auto answer on her end and administer it via web browser. (Why a video phone is more desirable in this case than a regular phone should be self evident)

This means you don't have to depend on computers or buggy software being on and set up just right and turned on to work. If nat is a problem thanks to your internet carrier, use a pair of open-wrt boxes with openvpn to make sure you're always connected to each other.