skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ah right, sure.

I took the 'n' to be the 100, not the 101. A little too quick on the submit there, I should have run it :)

But anyway, that seems to be a damn sight faster than to run a loop to add a bunch of numbers in a fixed interval.

Especially for large 'n'.
Tim Armstrong: The name of the game is (still) content
fascinating story.. kind of a blemish that the article contains an error:

a virus which can't get into cells is just a scrap of amino acids waiting to be destroyed.

To the best of my knowledge, viruses do have DNA, if very little. That is in fact the reason they need to enter the host's cells - they need access to the DNA reproduction machinery inside to make copies of themselves.
But why would someone in the developed world need Web 2.0?

They're not spoiled by PC interface, so they won't require interface on the tiny (smart)phone screen to be alike.
My main point is that an entrepreneur has complete control over everything they do and therefore complete control over how much money they make (or as much control you can possibly have over something like starting a business), while a teacher simply receives a bonus when their students test well. For the average person, I can't expect that a bonus is forever-motivating (not to say entrepreneurs are always motivated). I agree that teachers may perform better with bonuses, but that's obviously not how it SHOULD be.

"they can either continue to perform well or find a new job"
How to measure?
Ask HN: What's in your .emacs file?
I recently accidentally lost my .emacs file which I'd tweaked and put together over the last 5 years. I though this would be a good chance to ask you, what's in your .emacs file?
if they are guilty, they'll just go to a higher court and so on until they are allowed to go to the European courts where they certainly would win the case.
It might take a few years to get there tough
Working as an employee at a startup is a gamble. A startup employee needs to be willing to look out for himself or herself. Employees need to be willing to pick up and leave if they're consistently treated poorly.

Unpaid, un-comped overtime? Leave.
Political bullshit? Leave.
Illegal activities? Leave.

The other mistake I see commonly made is employees assuming their options will be worth something. Unless there's a market where the stock's value is known (and the stock can be sold), it's a gamble with crappy odds.

Not all startups suck, but only fools stay at the ones that do. This guy (girl?) left, and it was the right call. In fact, being willing to leave means this person was exactly right for a startup.
Gotta start someplace. Would like to also mention that the position is in San Francisco.
edit: this is wrong. See timr's comment below.

DNA is made of amino acids. If the DNA can't get into a cell, it's useless as DNA and is only good for digestion into amino acid building blocks for some other protein.
Ask HN: Best hosting partner for India, China, Africa?
Hi,
I'm starting to develop some WAP websites for the developing world and was wondering what hosting companies people used to serve these markets with the best speed, reliability, etc as I'd rather not have a cross-ocean delay in serving pages.
Thanks
> There are ways of avoiding the long compile/deploy cycle in Java development, but most people don't take the time to learn them.

Pointers would be very much appreciated.

I've inherited 50K lines of java of the 'cut-and-paste' variety after one of those 'rockstar ninja' types quit just before product launch and I'm busy refactoring and commenting everything. Currently the ect cycle is on the order of a couple of minutes and I'd really like to get that down to something more manageable.
The lawyer makes some good points and seems to know what he's talking about. Didn't understand about not blinking first - still liked the video
it is turbo addicting. I spent last couple of hours watching trailers
The Idea is to provide a platform where all your tweets can be data mined and regularly update for searching, trend analysis and sharing.

Off course twitter have a search tool, the question is how do you get relevant information from the maze, how do you see what your buddies talked about today while you were busy?
We like to think we can reason about reason, but to some extent we are simply regurgitating prior knowledge, or trying some random combination of old concepts and getting lucky. If this were not the case, we wouldn't have had to wait until the 1900s for Godel's theorem -- we would each discover it independently during childhood. Godel was standing on the shoulders of giants, just as we are when we use his work, or set theory, or mathematical notation, or rules of logic, or language. In a way, our intelligence is the byproduct of a stochastic program that has been running for thousands of years consuming billions of terabytes of memory. It seems rather cruel to expect Eliza to match us under her more limited conditions.

And it is a difference in degree. A dog frequently comes up with new, previously unseen behavior -- burying certain objects, shredding toilet paper, etc. The problem is that most behaviors are not seen as useful by humans, hence they go unrewarded as "tricks". But there are also examples of dogs learning useful behavior on their own, from learning to bark something that sounds like "I love you", to learning to knock down an owner who is about to have a seizure, to learning to fetch the leash when it wants a walk.

Defining "intelligence" as "doing something that humans can do that animals and computers can't" seems somewhat self-centered (although I admittedly cannot think of a better one off the top of my head).
Now it appears that they didn't purchase it, as it's available.
It's hard to consider a free and public internet service provider as a "content provider." In the case of television and print, this makes sense as the people providing the content are under the employ of the organizations distributing said content. This is definitely not the case for content-driven sites based upon public submission.
Having used Erlang, Ruby, and Java in production, I can say all these langs offer the ability to do just about anything. Its a matter of style with each lang having strengths and weaknesses. Also a matter of library choice so you don't have to roll your own for everything. Erlang a few years ago had many libraries missing for mainstream web app needs. Although Java and ruby have multiple options in almost every category, erlang seems to have "enough" options these days.

I don't agree that erlang fails the "don't repeat yourself" test. In fact, I think ruby fails this test miserably in that you have to write so much test coverage. Although Ericsson devs wouldn't agree with this, I found that my code was my tests. I think the difference of opinion has to do with how the apps are used. My apps were end user web apps and my code was solid enough to be its own tests. Ericsson's code is enterprise grade telecom switches and their business model demands test coverage far beyond what most web apps demand. If you tried to write telecom switching code in ruby, your tests line count would be multiples, perhaps an order or magnitude, greater than the line count of the Ericsson erlang tests.

Ruby is class based OO programming, erlang is functional oriented. My erlang webapp line count was very reasonable. I'm not sure I would have fewer lines of ruby for the same app. The syntax sugar that makes ruby so appealing is a drawback as well at times: the code can be ambiguous with the only way to be certain of what it does being to write tests. Erlang syntax takes getting used to, it certainly doesn't have the immediate appeal as ruby. But it makes up for this in that once you are comfortable reading erlang, you can simply read the code and be certain of what it does and that it does it correctly.
Hi can you talk like a real person instead of a robot. kthx bye.
I'd like to think my car (or POS terminal, or mp3 player) would have better reliability than my desktop.
"DNA is made of amino acids. If the DNA can't get into a cell, it's useless as DNA and is only good for digestion into amino acid building blocks for some other protein."

No, just totally, absolutely 100% wrong. If you voted this comment up, please smack yourself for voting up things that merely sound authoritative. Thank you.

Proteins are made of amino acids. DNA is made of deoxyribonucleotides. They're nothing alike. Proteins are translated from the information in RNA, which is a minor variation of the information in DNA. Think of proteins as molecular machines that are made from the instructions in DNA, and you're closer to the truth.
I was thinking the same thing! I wonder if the asker ever thought to talk to the A? Maybe he's ticked off because he's had to fix countless careless bugs produced by the 'B's for the past year? Maybe his salary isn't up to par? Maybe he's not pleased with architectural decisions? Maybe his 'nix box was pwned last night? The best way to fix an A is to talk to them. A happy A is worth 10 'B's. 'B's produce redundant and infuriating sloppy code. Most 'A's are self-taught for the most part and they play very well with people on their level.
I think you've missed my point. It's silly to imagine that the rest of the world will start buying smart phones yet they will remain without electricity, broadband, literacy, etc.

The numerous examples we have from history indicate this won't be the case. People value electricity, and sanitation, and literacy, and all the other things that are valued in first world economies. If people can perform work that pays enough for them to buy smart phones, then they will surely work to buy all those other things as well.

The image of some 3rd worlder sitting in a corrugated aluminum lean-to amidst filth and poverty while spending all their hard earned money on iPhone apps is fantasy. The 3rd world will get to work, they will make money, and slowly but surely they'll build infrastructure and acquire wealth and be just as wealthy as the 1st world. Taiwan did it. South Korea did it. Many countries in South America and Eastern Europe are doing it right now.

Back to the main point. In 5 years the "highest range" iphone-android phones will be obsolete. Phones of that class, the class that can browse the ajax/css web, will be so cheap they will be considered entry level phones. In 10 years iphone equivalent phones will be sold in blister packs with prepaid phone planes in convenience stores.

In short, the premise of this article is economically, culturally, and technologically naive in the extreme. It should not be taken seriously.
I can see that angle of it, but it just seems more to me that you're better off sticking with markup the most clients can understand. I'm not too familiar with programming for low phones (or phones at all for that matter) but it doesn't strike me as unreasonable that even the low end will start to have webkit derived browsers over the next several years. I do admit to knowing nothing about how long that takes to filter its way down to the developing world.
A lot of great points, thanks. I removed all the text ads, so it's just display ads now. And on the movie pages, I enlarged the "log in to vote" text and cleared it up.

A bunch of your organizational points are good ones, and I'll probably be changing the structure of the site as time goes by. Thanks for the guidance.
What I mean by repeating yourself is code like this:

skip_past_separator([]) ->
[];
skip_past_separator([$; | Rest]) ->
Rest;
skip_past_separator([$, | Rest]) ->
Rest;
skip_past_separator([_ | Rest]) ->
skip_past_separator(Rest).

(From mochiweb). That sort of thing appears to pop up with some frequency in Erlang code, and it seems wasteful.
Smartphones will become cheaper, more powerful, more rugged, and third-world customers will opt for them because they can't afford the PC yet want access to the wonderful things they can do on the web. Data plans will be ubiquitous even in poor areas, services will spring up where people can plug in every day for a small fee where there is no electricity, and people will learn to read when there's a reason to. They'll also shell out a bit more for the HTML and the bandwidth. HTML5 will win this battle.
real person sez, help I need a junior front-end developer know anyone? thx and let's go have a beer.
I was speaking about long term funding for my projects. I ended up with funding in spurts which made it hard to keep any programmer on long term. So I ended up doing most of it myself. Given this hindsight, this means I could chose language and framework for their tech merits only and not worry about placing bets on programmer community growth and costs.

I started a new webapp two months ago. I ended up using merb again because I already have a merb app in production and could leverage my investment. Merb is obviously not mainstream and even less so now that the project is mostly discontinued in lieu of rails 3.

If I knew now about the length of these projects and my limited funding, I may have stayed with erlang. It was a tough call to let go of it and go with ruby/rails and then have to go to merb due to rails not satisfying my needs to ensure the app only did the things I expected it to do. This is a key issue with rails. Its too complex for some needs. Some apps have a need for simpler frameworks due to security concerns, which was big in my case.
It would be nice if each function/macro was linked to its documentation. Of course you can use (doc functionname) in the repl...
I think the problem with building generalized intelligence is that it needs to built on a general platform, like the x86 architecture in flexibility but designed to be self-maintaining and self-upgradeable to the highest degree possible.

This means you kind of have to start from scratch as it is not backwards compatible (the idea of a superuser is baked into most archs), which is an enormous amount of effort.

I'm thinking about trying to start a "reboot computing" campaign to get people to think about how we could improve computing if we didn't have backward compatibility to worry about (different security archs, self-maintenance etc).
Hey my karma points are in the negative, all I'm trying to do is help! Geeze I better go become a shaman.
Cool site, cool name.
As mentioned by a few others I run into the same problem.
I enjoyed browsing and watching, good way to waste a little time, derive a little enjoyment. And I may use it as a way to evaluate my movie going options, but i'm not entirely sure that I would make a point of returning to review a movie after the fact. Rather I would use it to choose from movies, and then not revisit until I next wanted to watch some trailers. Seems that there might be a huge drop off point, where people don't bother coming back to vote. Whereas if you can somehow link the trailer=>movie times=> buy tickets locally? Hmmm not entirely sure as to where you can add value, regardless cool idea, maybe a good starting mvp
The smartest man in the room
Java is just as productive in my opinion, when built and edited in a command line environment. Using Eclipse slows things down quite a bit (but speeds up things like refactoring). I've found myself no more productive with Python since I end up having to find the syntax/type bugs in runtime rather than compile time.
DevCentral Weekly Roundup Episode 105 - Welcome Documentation Team
I think there is great utility in the concept. The most accessible description of a movie is the trailer, and this site allows people to comment on how accurate this description is.

The use-case I see is people looking for movies they're interested in and watching the trailer. They can then use their impression of the trailer and the comparison of trailer to movie to get a better feel for what the movie is going to be like.

Rather than a simple rating scale (80% of people liked this movie), there is a more subtle dimension to the metric of this site: Of the people that liked the trailer, this fraction didn't like the movie; or of the people that didn't like the trailer, this percent of people actually thought the movie was good.
Having an entirely new idea is great, but in reality it comes down to a mix of fulfilling a demand and profitability. You can be as new fangled as you want but if you miss the boat on attracting customers/users or on generating sufficient revenues your startup will have a hard time in the marketplace.
He compares some aspects of the bubble lifestyle to a typical corporate job. He's right that even typical corporate jobs are often far better than big bubble blowouts.

In the kind of startup he describes, a large amount of outside money is injected into the company. Predictably, this makes all kinds of things go wrong. You'll notice that one of the nice things he says about the big corporation is essentially that there's some sanity there. Again, when compared to a bubble company, that's very true in some ways.
The outcome of such lawsuits and the possibility to settle them for cash varies greatly with location.

In the USA you'd be right, in Europe or Asia much less so.
Agreed ... too often the stupidity is coming from the organization rather than its employees. Earlier today I read about a VA data HD with 10 million records being sent for repair unencrypted.
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2009/10/probe-targets-archi...

As with the UK ($2 billion) 'mistake' sent unencrypted and unregistered, the institution is dumb, not its 'component parts'.
Thanks, I'm working on setting it up with the Fandango affiliate program so that you'll get a convenient "find nearby theaters/showtimes" box.
And the attitude displayed at the outset does not have to stay in place as time goes forward, even without funding.

I've seen really nice people turn into absolute jerks as the success of their company went to their heads.
The economics for a non-founder in a startup are drastically different than they are for a founder; however, the risk is only slightly better than the founders. It is among the worst risk/reward tradeoffs I can think of.

The two reasons to do it are (1) some people love the opportunity for responsibility/growth or environment and/or (2) the poor risk/reward is actually an investment in themselves, so that they can gain the skills to become a founder.

For founders, I don't believe it's relevant that the median startup doesn't make money: the more you found, the better you become; a diligent and intelligent founder is bound to ultimately make quite a bit of money, but it may be a good number of tough years and failed startups before that happens.
The pirates would then take the necessary steps to avoid being caught.
also a "next" or "random" or "suggested similar movies" button on the video page would be extremely useful also (instead of having to navigate back to the homepage)
God, seeing straight C programs that don't use any superfluous libraries or stupid coding tricks that just obscure the intent of the programmer is so refreshing. Just one C file that anyone with a barely working knowledge of C can understand and a very clear Lisp implementation.

Just don't try to learn C from it; code is saturated with boundless copying into stack buffers.
You say a third-worlder in a lean-to shack might not spend their hard-earned money on iPhone apps.

I lived in Rio de Janeiro in the early seventies as a small kid. My parents were missionaries and we'd visit very poor areas of town often, and some times we'd go to the famous "favelas" (slums) where people live in improvised lean-to-shack housing. People in the favelas didn't have much, but almost every corrugated-metal/wood/cardboard shack had a TV antenna.

These days people might not spend the money on the apps but they'll spend it on an iPhone or a smart-phone. They'll find a cheap way to get the apps they really need. In Brazil people love technology, especially when it helps them connect with others. I don't think it's much different in other third-world places.
HIV, a retrovirus, contains RNA, not DNA.
Startups have risk associated them, sure. But that risk is different for different parties, in general those that are in control experience much less risk than the small time stockholders.

The pay can be lower in return for 'options', but whether or not those options are ever going to be worth anything depends on how the company is run and how ethical the management will be when vesting and/or buyout time comes around.

It's not rare for small time shareholders to be totally screwed in that case.

A good way to protect against such trouble is to make sure that a mid sized shareholder and your interests are suitably aligned.

That way you're not the only one fighting, and the other party has a lot more clout to make their point than you do. So if you're going to be in that position make sure your type of stock and conditions match that of a larger shareholder.
http://github.com/johngunderman/emacs/blob/master/emacs-john...

Mine's pretty minimal at the moment, but it does the job.
Off topic: What are the final costs of a book and what is the share? (i.e. printing, authors cut, publisher’s cut)?

Buying books really hurts my back-pocket (the last book cost me $140+ dollars – and it is a lot more expensive if you do the currency conversation). What is sad is that when I move to another country I will not be able to move all my books. If there is a good e-book reader and books are well-priced (e.g. $30-40 directly to the author) it would feel a lot less painful.
Like apgwoz said, the first 30 seconds are not very good at all, but things get better after that. But even then, the best things in the video would have been in the written application, too. I'm not sure how useful this video really was to YC other than as a basic filter, as in, "Hey, these people were willing to make a video and talk about their product, and they say at least a few things that make some sense. It's fine to bring them in for an interview."
Having worked on several Rails projects and now working on a large erlang application, I'm not sure that bringing Rails idioms to erlang is a good or desirable thing.

I also find it somewhat funny that it includes an ActiveRecord port - an object-relational mapper in a functional language to talk to a non-relational backend (tokyo tyrant).
The real culprits are the makers of the video camera, for not requiring any recorded video to be sent to a moderator first before storing a single bit.
It's the correlations that would be interesting here - how does marketing cost per user relate to revenue per user? How do monthly costs relate to number of active users? Etc. Or even if we could see all these same pie charts, but filtered to (eg) companies with between 20 and 50k in monthly revenue...
This is the former.
As I see it, you can do one of three things:

1. Have a new idea (invent first search engine).

2. Have a new approach to an existing idea (Google).

3. Adapt an existing idea to a new market (Baidu).

So no, a new idea isn't required. In fact, it's not so much the idea that matters as the implementation. No one cares who had the idea first. They care which service is the most useful now.

Also, there is the larger point: If it's fun to work on, and you think you can do it better, then who cares if it exists or what others think. Prove them wrong.
That is a T-Shirt with ink on it..
Whether it is HTML, WAP, SMS or some other language/protocol yet to emerge is largely a moot point.

The big question to me as a mobile app developer is, how do you make and sell apps to "the next 4 billion"? And is this market segment even sellable to, given their low disposable income? This can easily be a billion $ question...
I smiled at the last two lines of his test file:

(define exit (dlsym "exit"))
(exit 0)

Certainly no need to define exit any earlier than that...
Definitely, since Malmö and Copenhagen are almost the same city nowadays.
Top Types of Medieval Torture
Wow, "the dark ages" were pretty damned dark. SO glad I live now.
What's that snarky quote, modern art is 90% justification?

Not sure why that popped into my head whilst reading seven paragraphs about his t-shirt with a vertical bar...
This guy will implement your business idea