skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
WNYC's Radiolab just aired a show on parasites, which included an impressive story on the ability of hookworms to heal.

Check it out: http://www.wnyc.org/shows/radiolab/
Parent said that economy will go down at some point no matter what. Which is why perks don't last. That's only one of the many reasons.
I quickly switched from reading to skim-reading to trying to find a pattern in the boldness to giving up. I might've read it all if it used one font face consistently.
cool to see mainstream news coverage of a theoretical CS problem. it'd be even cooler if they described one compelling concrete example of a specific way that the world would differ if P=NP, or if P!=NP
Tea time has gone the way of the dinosaur. (Well, technically not, since the dinosaur is still standing out in the courtyard, but tea time is just gone, but you know what I mean.)

Also, Charlie's Cafe now serves hamburgers and fries. Rumor has it that when Charlie was here, he banned the use of ketchup as a disincentive to the serving of foods that require it. Googlers are better than that!
AminiStaff -- thumbs up or thumbs down? Can you share what you're paying on health/dental per employee? Thanks for the info.
Just keep it simple..that's the most important thing. Simple POST name/value pairs and JSON output. I don't care if it's technically REST or not. One big long document describing every call and response (makes it easy to search with CTRL-F). Lots of examples. Complete example code. High level libraries that implement the boring parts. A direct email address to the developer.
I don't think it matters how secure your password is if it gets sniffed or keylogged. I have been at more than one internet cafe where I absolutly needed to login over an untrusted terminal to my mail account.
From: http://stats.grok.se/en/200910/Barcode

Went from 24.6k hits to approx 1.3m
Not really. The flattening part is old hat in functional languages, though this particular formulation is restricted to the special case of "non-recursive" functions. I don't know about the particular optimizations they apply to the flattened code.
Maybe it's just my dynamic language bias, but isn't GWT about 100X more complex than using something like Cappuccino with Atlas to build a desktop-like app?

And won't it look 100X uglier in GWT unless you are a CSS zen master?

Just watching that GWT "best practices" video made my head spin with all the many layers and buzzwordy concepts one has to master just to make a simple GUI.

Or perhaps it's just that I hate the staticness and verbosity of Java...
I have an 8-month old son, and one of my annoyances with working at a Real Job (tm) is that I really feel I am not giving enough time to him. I used to be a graduate student so I would get to spend a lot more time with him in his earlier months.

Anyhow, glad to see its working well for you. Your post is well-written and thoughtful. Success in any sort of business venture has some really simple rules, the App Store should be no different.
Sorry :) he is a very cute baby.

I just get the feeling that he has a condescending look on his face. Being a baby he cannot possibly be condescending, so this might be something I just subconsciously associate with apple t-shirts nowadays.
Seems like a really fun gig. Wish I had the chicken guts to qualify.
...in June, 2009?!
Expecting these things and calling the person an employee would be dishonest at best. We're in this to nurture a great company, not to nurture our egos. We feel that assigning a title of employee at this stage would be a display of vanity...

We clearly have different opinions here. I'd say that calling an employee a cofounder is dishonest at best; that you're in this to nurture a great compnay, not to nurture your employee's ego; and that for someone who joins several months after a company is founded to insist on being called a founder is an unreasonable display of vanity.
Either way, it still causes problems. And one can certainly point to historical examples of it causing unrest in culturally quite different societies.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lumber#Dimensional_lumber

A 2x4 isn't even 2"x4"
During Larry Ellison's recent interview with Ed Zander at the Churchill Club in Silicon Valley, someone asked Larry Ellison what he thought was the most significant distruptive innovation that Oracle was paying attention to.

Larry Ellison said: "Flash".

Apparently, Oracle is taking flash very seriously. They already have a flash-based Oracle database product that is shipping.

And with the Sun acquisition, Oracle now owns MySQL.

RethinkDB needs to move ahead fast.
One has the impression that this is all pretty much Java-world tooling. Is that true?

Have people every used it for large Ruby or Python projects?
It would also be useful if people would be more explicit and specific about the techniques they are actually discussing. Consider, for example, the earlier comments about confusing or conflating TDD and unit testing.
"he has a condescending look on his face"

Ha ha! Poor baby! The Apple T shirt is the villain! Amazing how brand associations carry over into the most innocuous situations.
What was interesting to me was the listing of IBM as a partner.

"Forming relationships with major partners: Intel, AMD, HP, and IBM."

So Intel/AMD make x86 Chips. Intel/HP basically do Itanium. What's IBM doing on the list? Sure they build X86 servers, but so does Dell etc. Is there a potential to see Windows one day running on Power7?
(Other option I guess is something to do with the XBOX3 - but that also doesn't seem to fit)

Any ideas?
My History of Visual Studio (Part 3)
This is one of those times where I honestly wish I was at a time and place in my life where I could take the leap. RethinkDB does exactly the kind of low level, rethink-the-whole-stack systems development that I've been crazy about from the get-go. Best of luck folks!
Stack Overflow - it might not fall into all of your above categories but I frickin' love that site! :)
Aks HN: What testing regimes do you consider most important?
In http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=866707 on "TDD Derangement Syndrome (objectmentor.com)"

I commented that: "It would also be useful if people would be more explicit and specific about the techniques they are actually discussing. Consider, for example, the earlier comments about confusing or conflating TDD and unit testing."

So what papers or other sources do you think are most fundamental or defining for whatever testing programs or regimes you consider important?
Study: Windows 7 doesn't boot faster
Certain infrastructure plays really get me wet. This along with push notifications is one of them. We need to start building the infrastructure for the future. If I knew anyone who was qualified for this specifically, I would tell them to drop whatever they are doing and go join the company. Best of luck with the co-founder search and the future.
I imagine there's plenty of money to be made by developers who are creating more traditional business apps which run on an intranet - it's what i do :)
This looks pretty amazing - but I wonder how 'staged' the demo is.

Often the problem with these types of high level abstractions is that there is so much magic going on behind the scenes that customising how things work becomes difficult and you end up getting locked into the 'Atlas' way of doing things.

I can't wait to get a chance to start playing with this though :)
You're completely right when you say "nonsense". I'm the founder of StyleFeeder. I've worked for five startups before this. Being a founder is a unique experience characterized by a constant feeling of being angry all the time and being emotionally drained by your work. Don't get me wrong - I love what I do, the people I work with and the company is doing great, but it is fucking hard. And I feel that all the time as 'founder' whereas I never did as an 'employee.'

I've also had conversations with other founders who independently used the exact same language to describe how they feel about their companies.

My simple rule: if there's nothing there when you start, you're a founder.
Sometimes the original titles are just not very informative. So in those cases it may be a good idea to change the title. But I still think that one should not editorialise -- i.e., one should try to use a title that faithfully summarises the article.
Search Engine Query Cheat Sheets
The Last.fm API (http://www.last.fm/api/intro) is the best one I've come across.

It has the most comprehensive and intuitive documentation of all the APIs I've used. Their format for API documentation should become a standard.
Not SOAP :) It's a pain to consume compared to POX (plain old XML) or JSON.
Gizmodo, TechCrunch, Hack a day, Yahoo technology page, and techzing for their podcast.
The lack of detail in what their users were actually doing on the sites they tested makes it hard to tell what they're trying to dispel.

If you're giving users a specific task to perform on a specific website in a controlled environment, then of course scrolling isn't going to deter them. The argument against scrolling is that if you're trying to attract users to your site---to pick your site over other potential sites---then scrolling will be a factor when people want to make a quick decision if your site is useful or not.
It is not often a primary factor largely because it is hard to know in advance. Also because of the above. Given a choice between salary and other things, people choose salary.

However, the "choice" is made in other ways. People stay in or leave jobs or even industries for non salary factors. Perks, culture, coworkers, pressure, interest in work etc.

While it may be hard to find cases that people choose a job because of good co workers, it's probably easy to find cases where people leave for the reverse reason.
It's funny because in the average CS degree the P=NP problem isn't even covered (my sample at least all learned about it online). I don't know if I know a concrete example of a specific way the world would differ either. Maybe quicker routing, cancer algorithm solving, simulations, broken encryptions that kind of stuff?
Top Mistakes in Online Dating Profiles
Does anyone know what the relationship between algebraic geometry and P=NP is?
I think HN has their niche covered.
P2P on the Flash Platform with RTMFP
We Are the Martians: Why we've never lost our enthusiasm for space travel
IS it really expensive? How do you measure these things? Relative to salary? Relative to other company's perks bill?
http://blog.computationalcomplexity.org/2008/04/how-to-prove...
To paraphrase a recent blog post (possibly by rjlipton?), one good reason to avoid a specific concrete example is that the answer to P=NP or P!=NP isn't quite as important as the specific time complexities involved in solving NP problems - for most practical purposes 1.000000001^n would be much more favourable than n^1000000000.
Not parasites, just honey. Sorry no references, but the idea is that honey from local allergens (flowers) allows your body to "recognize" the allergens as not harmful, and stop producing spurious antibodies to fight them.
While I think you are coming down a little harsh on the guy, I do have to agree. I am still trying to figure out how that code is enforcing a singleton pattern.

Further, why is everyone still reinventing this stuff. This has all been solved and is in almost every framework.

Take for example my personal favorite, Dojo I would wrap all of this functionality up into a widget that an HTML developer (or myself) could just use a tag to implement e.g

<a href="..." dojoType="my.namespace.BackgroundChangeHREF" newColor="#CCCC00">a link</a>

then the Dojo JavaScript object associated with the widget would have a routine that connects to the onclick event to do the following:

dojo.style("backgroundColor", this.newColor);

That's it, I never code it again. I understand if you are doing this a personal enrichment, but if you are doing this to complete a job task, you should really leverage existing code, this includes code that you and others have already written.
My employer doesn't provide many Google-style perks (we get free coffee and other drinks, quarterly lunches, and snacks, sometimes), but they do offer a very flexible working schedule. They could take away the coffee and the snacks, and I wouldn't mind one bit, but the flex time and the facilities for working remotely? I'd seriously consider a change of scenery.
dude, what the hell is wrong with you? You can still technically write someone in as a cofounder -- both in terms of equity and pay. Just because you're recruiting them later than the initial founding team doesn't reduce the title. Saying that it's dishonest is just wrong here.
While this doesn't directly answer your question, I've found this to be helpful in the past: The Little Manual of API Design - http://chaos.troll.no/~shausman/api-design/api-design.pdf
I can not share because I don't exactly know, at least not yet because we're still finalizing the last details. I want to say it's about $12k +/- 2k per year per employee. We're getting grandfathered in because our investor currently has a startup using their services. It's my understanding AdminiStaff doesn't support companies under 10 employees.

At the previous startup I was involved with as a normal employee, we used AdminiStaff and I thought it was pretty nice. It saves a ton of headache/time, and they keep you in check with all the employment laws, etc. I thought the health/dental coverage was really good too; I picked United but you get a few options to select from. I've been told AdminiStaff can get great coverage for a lot cheaper because of their size, but I'm sure you'll pay a premium overall vs. doing all the HR work yourself.

One thing I did like is after the startup failed, I was able to access all of my employment records for the IRS without having to jump through the invisible hoop of locating our former office manager (who we fired many months before the company closed).

So thumbs up from my experience thus far, I'm sure you can google around and find complaints though. Hope that helps.
Agreed 100%. My grandma was "dying" for years before they decided that it wasn't actually ALS. Death Sentences are always worth repeal.
This is a funny site that you can go to for that question:
http://istwitterdown.com/
No scabies is an external mite infestation. The theory is that the hookworms are internal so something about them stops allergies.
Yep. Race on to the first OpenID+key fob provider.

Go!
I believe that the reason why this works is because the bodies immune system fights the hookworms rather than wasting energy fighting allergens.

The basic reason why allergy suffers like me have such adverse reactions to common things such as pollen and cat dander is because the immune system over reacts.

From How Things Work:

As amazing as the immune system is, it sometimes makes mistakes. Allergies are the result of a hypersensitive immune system. The allergic immune system misidentifies an otherwise innocuous substance as harmful, and then attacks the substance with a ferocity far greater than required. The problems this attack can cause range from mildly inconvenient and uncomfortable to the total failure of the organism the immune system is supposed to be protecting.

So hookworms give the immune system something else to fight rather than allergens.

For that matter contracting AIDS would probably also limit or stop your allergies. (I'm not completely positive on that, just a theory.)
Ask HN: Whom do you admire most?
Whom do you admire most? In what way does that person inspire you?
Engadget, Hack a Day, Hacked Gadgets for my hardware news, but it's pretty tough to beat HN. You can always use an RSS reader and sync with all of the blogs that get most often linked to here.
> you're going to get a radically different K-complexity number than you will if your encoding goes the other way around.

in the limit, all schemes are roughly equivalent. (they are equivalent up to constants.)

> given the nature of the problems in question that's going to really not work

ok. so attempting to compute the kolmogorov complexity for iq test problems is a bad idea. it isnt actually a computable function. its existence shows there is a mathematically rigorous way to talk about the most plausible way to extend an integer sequence. more than anything, this is a counter to the argument that "an uncountably infinite number of functions to choose from and a finite set of inputs to choose among them" makes the test entirely subjective.

> there is no unique K-complexity value for a given language.

for any given language, there is, unless i dont understand what youre saying.

> your encoding scheme favors polynomials but makes expression squares a royal pain

i know its wrong, but i cant help pointing out that that doesnt actually make any sense at all
You've got 100 rocks of various weights and three buckets. You have to distribute the rocks in the buckets (yes you have to use ALL the rocks) to make the total weight of all the rocks in each bucket as equal to the others as possible.

What's interesting is that, once you have a solution, you can check that it's optimal pretty quickly. But it will take a very long time to come up with a solution. Unless P=NP, in which case the time may not be equal but will at least be reasonable.
My grandfather. You guys have probably never heard of him, but he rocked.
There’s no denying it is hands down the best porn search engine on the planet

Wrong.

http://www.monzy.org/unsafesearch/images/
New Mogul is my #2 visited site... when nickb remembers to reset the server ;). HN for macroecon/stock trading/fed bashing
Both Firefox and Safari boot you off one account when you login to another.
As a storage engine, are they in any position to fix MySQL's deeply held assumptions that the user is generally not interested in validation or constraints? We should at least begin expecting correct answers if this is the infrastructure of the future.
The idea that protectionism is bad needs to be qualified. Whilst the successful Asian countries that are cited here (eg. Japan, Korea, Taiwan, etc) are export-oriented and encouraged trade, they were all quite protectionist early on. Big companies like Toyota, LG, Hyundai, Samsung were all heavily subsidised by their governments in the early years, and were aided by other protectionist measures (such as local content requirements, import tariffs, etc). In these cases, protectionism served a purpose - which is to protect local industry until it is globally competitive (ie. infant industry protection).

Notwithstanding, these protectionist policies don't always work out (eg. see Indonesia's airplane industry). Furthermore, Korea and Japan have had (and still have) an extremely difficult time reversing protectionist policies due to the lobby groups that represent the vested interests of the now successful companies.
"The Java language does not offer any way to explicitly allocate an object on the stack, but this fact doesn't prevent JVMs from still using stack allocation where appropriate. JVMs can use a technique called escape analysis, by which they can tell that certain objects remain confined to a single thread for their entire lifetime, and that lifetime is bounded by the lifetime of a given stack frame. Such objects can be safely allocated on the stack instead of the heap. Even better, for small objects, the JVM can optimize away the allocation entirely and simply hoist the object's fields into registers."

Taken from an IBM developerworks article here:
http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/java/library/j-jtp09275.ht...
There's a good book that covers this exact topic in much more depth. It's called "False Economy: A Surprising Economic History of the Word" by Alan Beattie. If I remember correctly, he focuses on how Argentinian land was owned by wealthy elites, satisfied with their wealth. In the US, small parcels of land were handed out to poorer individuals. Thus, the US held a greater attraction for immigrants. In the US immigrants also migrated inland quickly, leaving room in the cities for more immigrants to arrive.

Some of the book is available online through google books.
Flamebait. You have cleaner and better examples of a world-class kernel and database engine? You want to do rocket surgery, you gotta bend a few scalpels.
Mr. Rogers. The guy was amazing on so many levels; there are lots of examples but I'll go with a HN related one. He contributed valuable testimony to the betamax case.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fred_Rogers
http://moobunny.dreamhosters.com

it was better years ago, but still..
Banks here are offering SMS confirmations as a 2 factor Auth. So I can transfer money to existing accounts fine - but any new account or bill requires a code that is SMSed to a pre-set number (and resetting the # requires a SMS as well)

key fob for google would be nice though. I'd be pretty tempted to pay
Solving the problem of P=NP? implies that you would also be able to write an algorithm for such a task that currently we don't know the answer to (whether a task can be completed in polynomial time, just as it can be verified) -- once this algorithm is written, basically every other problem in that category (class) would also be pretty much solved. We're talking about thousands of such problems.
That threw me off as well. The product idea (and even some code) is in place, the vision done, the roadmap well on it's way, and they've already identified they need to hire.

You're looking for an employee.
pseudo code, the language isn't important. Point is, because there are a number of ways to write the same ipv6 address (assuming it contains runs of zeros longer than 4 or multiple runs of zeros) you are going to have to normalize your string input no matter what so why not normalize to an integer/byte representation which is more compact.
Jakob Nielsen helped to popularize the myth that web users don't scroll down. It led to an era of website design that crammed as much onto one page, leading to busy, crowded homepages. It wasn't until later that early adopters of CSS made websites simple again, in part to avoid compatibility issues with Internet Explorer.
This isn't particularly surprising.

Microsoft has been doing this for years. They did a study with Microsoft Office, and realized that people thought the application started faster if the logo was shown during start-up, rather than just waiting for the actual application to start.
FreeBSD is generally considered to be a cleaner and better example of world-class kernel. MySQL codebase is OK, but isn't fantastic. In general, all mature large systems come with a can of worms, and it takes a certain kind of person to deal with that. Legacy code is always less fun than a blank slate, unless you have certain mindset.

Fortunately, we get to deal with both world-class legacy systems, and write some blank slate code. We get the best of both worlds :)
Minimizing Complexity In User Interfaces
Steve Jobs. (1) He has amazing taste. (2) He did it twice.
Billy Mays because he was a brilliant salesman.
With a Whole Lot at Stake, I.B.M. and Microsoft Await Year 2000
the unsung heroes who don't make time for brown-nosing and fame-whoring
The real question is: how does app development on the iPhone compare to it on competitors (Twitter, Facebook, Web, etc.). It stacks up very poorly (in general of course) by almost every metric compared to the last two. I'll be able to tell you about #1 in a couple months.

If your goal is to leverage your programming skills to make money (be it millions or thousands) and work from home, you're going to find much more success elsewhere. If you want to make cool mobile devices that run on a popular smartphone, you won't.
Here's the Junod profile of Mister Rogers (it's never, ever "Mr."): http://www.thedqtimes.com/pages/castpages/other/fredrogersca...

It will make you cry.
Well executed? Absolutely. Innovative? Well... not exactly.

Seek to 23:10 - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j02b8Fuz73A

(Man, look at that hair!)

I don't mean to downplay 280north's work - I'm very impressed with what they're doing. It just bothers me when people see a derivative work and think it to be original. (Ahem, Chris Hughes)