skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
But then I dont think Google trends ranks by the percentage within total queries from the country.
That example of coding an elfLikesMe attribute for 150 monster types, why to code it at all? My first hunch would be to use SQL table for monster attributes, then adding new attribute would be equivalent to adding a new SQL field, or table?
It only works if the product is great. There are a few rocket ships that are great products that have grown with word of mouth that don't have the structural virality (as with Facebook quizzes or the Hotmail footer) - Mint and Dropbox immediately come to mind. Google, as well, if you go back a few years.
Launch48 startups present their ideas after a frantic 48 hours
http://www.codecommit.com/blog/scala/joint-compilation-of-sc...

Above is an overview of how the Scala compiler attacks this exact problem. Long story short: It is able to grok just enough Java to build a basic AST and resolve circular dependencies the same way it handles one in pure Scala.

The article also hints that Groovy has similar capabilities.
Ok, so "the power of viral loops" basically amounts to:

1) Spend time and effort build your product
2) Give it away for free
3) Embed a tagline into the product so that users are "involuntary salespeople"
4) ???
5) Profit!

There isn't really anything new here. Applying viral marketing is trivially easy for email, or other social-media apps (which is not to say it will work, just that's it's a natural fit). What I would like to see is an analysis on how to adapt viral loops to non-social settings. How would someone like LifeLock.com apply this message, for example?
You also have to remember this is a showcase, and sites with a lot of visuals tend to make better showcases simply because they're more fun to look at even if they're not easier or even more fun to actually use.
The only thing that's totally obvious is that there are some individuals that let the State do their thinking for them.
I'm still not convinced. If it's 90% heritable, then the average of the shortest population needs only be 5' tall. That's pretty short. Nutrition could account for the rest.

Yes, nutrition is environmental, but it doesn't change my original claim. Our physical ability to respond to environmental changes is inherited. If you feed someone who has inherited the genes from two 5' tall parents, I highly doubt you could feed one twin better than the other and get a 6" difference in height. You know by thinking about it that it won't happen.

Furthermore, 4 generations of offspring will lead to genetic differences in the population. Foxes can be domesticated in 10 generations. That's a huge divergence in phenotype.
Ask HN: Axing features in a prototype product?
I'm currently working on a startup I've founded, trying to get my project out the door. When I initially conceived of the product, it was extremely simple, and then I quickly added plans for a whole bunch of features which I thought would be huge and amazing. Now that I'm trying to implement, and get it out the door, I've got a twofold incentive to boot some of them, first, they're pushing forward my launch, and second I'm not sure some of them are all that compelling to being with. Nonetheless, I'm very anxious about launching with a minimal version of the product, or abandoning what felt like a "grand plan".

Has anyone ever been in a similar situation? Is it just a case of telling your inner perfectionist to chill? I'd love to hear your thoughts.

Thanks!
Right. I didn't say it wasn't possible to do these with relational databases. Typically you use Hadoop for when you want to take the processing "offline", like in doing data-mining of log data. For our company, our log data is hundreds of millions of rows and if I were to do any significant processing, it would block the ability for anyone else to do any less-intensive tasks. By exporting this data first into HDFS, I can now run Map/Reduce jobs more quickly and not hang up DB connections (we're using MySQL).

Another thing to note is that Hadoop becomes incrementally more useful as the size of the files increase--which to my limited DB knowledge, is not the same for relational DB's.
The fact that it happens to be perfect for generic programming is pure chance. It could have been botched like many of the other features. It had too many design goals, that is part of the point.

It is not abundant with regular programming capabilities: the main point of the arguments against C++ is that the regular capabilities are infested by problems from the more advanced features. Marketing something as multi-paradigm language implies that you can also use it for plain and simple things. Hell, you can even use Java for simple things. The post I responded to denied that. You are simply trying to prove my statements incorrect, without looking at the context in which they were made: the parent post and the specific sorts of criticism leveled against C++.
As smart as it was, I have yet to find some software that adds tags to the messages that I don't hate. Mostly because the kind of software that does stuff like that isn't the kind of software I would want to use - but it is pushed on me anyway.

Even the mail stuff in my Ipod Touch does that by default (I turned it off, but but that isn't going to do much for the stuff I receive).
I spent part of 2 summers (in '98 & '00) in some of the cities/villages near the exclusion zone (as close as 30-40 miles from the plant). Seen the road barriers and warning signs. Met kids and adults with cancer from the radiation.

Ukraine has a wonderful culture and beautiful people. It's a shame that this happened to them.
Okay, we want to start a bank.

What's the paperwork that we need? What are the restrictions and requirements?

Forget about how you're going to make it awesome -- do you even know what the barriers to entry are, so that you can start thinking about how you'll overcome them?

This guy wants to Start a Bank like I want to Fly Spaceship One -- I think it could possibly be fun, but I don't even care enough to install a flight simulator on my computer.

I'd be much more interested to read a blog post that summarized what your average HN reader would need to do to (legally) start a bank. That seems fascinating.
Sites affected by the wazzu virus
It's really not as simple as you say. 20BB (BB = big blinds), the usual minimum starting stack size, is too large for a fold/shove strategy to be profitable. You need to do a lot of limp-reraising and squeezing pre-flop, and you also need to not be terrible post-flop, since, e.g., after a raise of 3 BB with one caller, the pot is 6BB and you still have 17BB.
Two things that immediately jump out:

>> we would allow all of our account-holders to withdraw funds from any ATM at NO CHARGE (woo-hoo!).

So he would just eat the interchange fees that the owners of the other ATMs/networks charge him? That would add up pretty quick. There's also the issue of the service fees that non-bank ATMs charge directly to the consumer - would his bank cover those as well?

>> We would only give out credit cards to those who are qualified to receive one.

How do you define this? And what happens when someone goes from "qualified" to "unqualified" (like when they lose their jobs) - a normal bank would just jack up the rate to cover the increased risk. Would he pull the card?

More broadly, this guy has no idea how banks make money, or even what it is that banks do (hint: what they do with individuals is only a small part of it). It's also not one of those businesses you can just buy into - there's all sorts of issues about chartering, insurance, etc.

Anyways, this seems like more an idea for a credit union as opposed to an actual bank. They're easier to start, have an existing legal framework for some of the more unorthodox ideas he's got, and are designed to appeal to a specific group of people with a common goal - which is exactly what he's talking about.
Seems easier than setting up a WOFE in China (wholy owned foreign enterprise)...
C++ contains C.

Unfortunately, you cannot just use C++ as if it were C, because some of these FQA's will still trip you up. The point of this FQA and other recents C++ criticisms is that you have to choose a specific subset and still be wary of all 'unexpected' things that happen in that subset.
oops, wrong link. You want the Hadoop Training for Virtual Machine:
http://www.cloudera.com/hadoop-training-virtual-machine

It includes Hive pre-installed and Pig as well. It also has a list of tutorial exercises an sample databases for you to practice on.

I'm not really a Hadoop expert to be able to address the data store issue. I'm basically one of two researchers at our company that is testing out these new technologies for select tasks (parsing log data, machine learning algorithm implementations, quick statistical munging, etc). In our configuration we have 7 nodes and roughly 3 TB capacity (although we're scaling as our needs increase). For our needs it works quite well. There was an instance where one of our nodes went down while in the middle of a big processing job, and Hadoop kept chugging. Quite amazing.
Ontology Development 101: A Guide to Creating Your First Ontology
Wouldn't that be cheating ?
Which Industries Are Most Favorable to Start-Ups?
Coin toss not random after all
I'm sorry but I don't buy that.

If I just look around me you could almost make the opposite argument. The kids of drunks and lowlifes score and the ones from 'well to do' families are doing drugs and pissing away their lives. Not all of them, of course, but a good portion at least.
Ask HN: If C++ is so bad, what should game developers use?
I've been reading some of the C++ hate that's been on HN of late. I've been successfully convinced (not that it was hard) that C++ is a really terrible language. But, if that's the case, then what else are commercial game developers to use? Is pure C sufficient? What about Haskell, or is that too slow?
and the paper in question: http://comptop.stanford.edu/preprints/heads.pdf
All serious comments in this thread will be downvoted.
I live in Seattle and visit Portland a lot. I agree this is a very good list.

The main Powell's location is just as much a destination as the Technical Books store and the two locations are just a couple blocks apart.

Portland's public wi-fi project has never seemed to work very well for me. I don't know if they've improved it recently, but kudos to the city for at least trying.

Rimsky-Korsakoffee is quirky and clever with mechanical secrets built into the furniture, and also really good desserts and coffee.

Radio Cab is one of my favorite cab companies anywhere I've traveled, but in Portland you always have to call the dispatcher to get a cab. Even when downtown, they don't drive around looking for fares. (Not just for Radio, this is true for all cab companies there.)
If you think it's easier, switch your idea. Everything is easy and obvious after the fact; e.g. The Pythogarean Theorem. For anything that can be easily explained in a few minutes of class or blog post, it took years for the brightest of scientists, mathematicians, or inventors to come up with.
SSD Reading List
Let's try this again. You have said, and I quote "neither Apple nor Verizon is making ads that mention phone calls whatsoever". This clip proves you wrong, yet you can't bring yourself to admit it.
But seriously (If I may spend a little accumulated karma), I argue though humor alot (ALOT), and I sometimes have people ask me "how come you're never serious?" to which I reply, I'm deadly serious. If I didn't care, I'd just be quiet. Keying on the irony of a situation is often the quickest way to get everyone in the same frame for problem solving.
Consumers Won't Pay $120 for Windows 7 Upgrade
I'm getting a lot of error notices of no response before five seconds, then immediate error resolved. Not sure what this indicates. As I'm just a designer, I don't know if this is a problem or not. I'm at the point where I ignore all the notices. So now if it did really go down I wouldn't believe it.
"In the US, most Starbucks use an explicit correlation identifier by writing your name on the cup and calling it out when the drink is ready."

Reminds me of Professor Frink giving a physical explanation of a toy lawnmower on the Simpsons.
EtherPad Blog: Embedding Etherpad
> logic should be doing some type checking and verification before insert

There are a minority of coders who are actually anal enough to get that right 100% of the time in every version of every app that touches the database. But those are not the people who are reckless enough to want to omit types from the schema. If you think doing it the easy and reliable way isn't worth the hassle, you are not actually going to do it the hard way, even if you can convince yourself you will.
i bought it...thanks. hope its good
Tell HN: "Proper News"
As an experiment after this post: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=888251 I have set up a version of news.arc that covers "hard news" in any topic. There's the usual thing that trolling and spamming will not be tolerated.

http://www.propernews.tk (Temporary until I can think of a good domain)
Direct link: http://www.propernews.tk
Most of the rest of the Fourth Estate is large, publicly traded companies who are already taking a beating in the stock market.
As opposed to distributing FOSS Party kits to encourage users to have FOSS Launch Date Parties? (ala Windows 7 Parties) Or having obviously stock photos of people all gathered around a computer screen with creepily huge smiles on their faces?
Which reminds me of:
"The relationships between Blizzard and russian gamers community were worsened by the fact that the first Warctaft III tournament were held in Saint Petersburg, one week prior to its release date."

However, this time, MS pushes beta builds so agressively that it's wide availability is no surprise.
Thanks for sharing that - it gave me a lot more perspective. I've spent a lot of the last three years out of the States, and it was quite insightful.

Just pondering now, but I think it might come down to a couple things -

First, a lot of people take anything different than them as a threat to them. So if you don't blend in, they might not like you even though you're just doing your own thing, enjoying your life, dressing in a way that appeals to you, and so on. People sometimes take that as a threat simply because it's different.

But there's also a second kind of thing, where the people who are rejecting the mainstream do it in a haughty way - so it's not so much the taste in music, as it is the way you present the taste in music. As if someone who doesn't know isn't the club - intentionally exclusionary. (Also, I remember this kind somewhat commonly in some New York City circles - there's some people with this insufferable "oh you don't know about abc? I seeee, hmmm...." I haven't seen it so much elsewhere)

So whenever someone feels excluded, they usually wind up disliking whoever they feel excluded by. Sometimes it's intentional and elitist, but I think most of the time it isn't:

Hearkening back 10 years or so, I remember when other kids were talking about music I didn't know, I'd always feel kind of shy and left out. Nowadays, I'll say, "Wait - I don't know that one. Any good?" And then five seconds later, "Ok - and I don't know that one. Any good?" And if it happens a third time, "Hmm, I don't know much about this genre - it's all going over my head. Could you explain the basics to me, how it started, who is important, what I'd want to listen to to get started?"

Like, I like the Beatles. Great stuff. But I'll ask people, "Did you ever play any of their albums straight through? What songs have you heard?" If I just start saying that Revolver's first two tracks might be the best two in a row on any Beatles album, but that Sgt. Pepper's plays much better all the way through, it'd lose people, and most people are too shy to speak up. So they'd feel left out, and then maybe they'd kind of project that outwards and dislike me.

So you've got two genuinely different kinds of people - the kind that want to exclude and make people feel left out, and the people who are doing their own thing who are very nice and would happily welcome with you if you could get into a good chat with them.

Something to think about. Thanks for taking the time to elaborate and explain what's going on, I learned quite a bit from it.
There are "good" banks that have high credit standards and simple businesses - mutual thrifts (they go back to pre-Colonial America in England when communities would band together, pool capital, and one by one write mortgages so that everyone would end up with a home). If you find one that's operated well, they wont be engaging in sub-prime mortgages of extending to credit to those who shouldn't receive it.

The problem with mutual thrifts is that they're constrained by how much they can grow. They are owned by depositors. Usually, when one grows a bit, they're acquired by a larger player who wants a foothold in your geographic area / wants to take advantage of your excess capitalization (let's say Bank of America is capitalized at 4%, I've seen some thrifts at 13%)... you end up having that excess capitalization because of the high loan standards.
This seems to be geared towards the type of systems administrator that you're not really looking to hire, if you're the kind of startup that hangs out on hacker news.

Frankly, the Solaris & NIS+ questions are useless. You will not use either in a modern web startup, unless you're doing something wrong. Ditto for the AIX questions, LPARS, HP-UX, and Power-VM sections.

Ask a sysadmin questions relevant to your environment, or where you want your environment to go. Don't expect them to be a domain expert in every single region, and don't give weight to domain expertise irrelevant to your startup. I coached a friend through a phone interview with a generic LAMP-based startup recently whose hiring consultant spent an hour asking him questions about BGP, OSPF, Solaris, VMWare and EMC specific SAN devices.

The interviewer was a typical big company/academic systems administrator who had no startup experience. It was pretty ridiculous, these questions were asked by the interviewer because that's what his expertise was in, not because any of these were ever going to have any relevancy for this startup.

He passed, of course, and now their whole environment are AMIs.

I will say that I think any systems administrator today who isn't excited about learning Puppet or Chef is the wrong choice for a web startup.
Link fails for me - it goes to a registration check page or some such?
Very interesting subject, makes me wonder what it would take to start a bank. But I wouldn't follow this authors advice. I don't know a lot about banking, but this guy sounds like he's deciding to be unsuccessful.

Part of being a successful business is parsing what people actually want vs what they "say" they want. It's amazing how many people shop at wal-mart even though they "hate" it.
Outdated or not, it's an impressive list.

You might expand the packaging section to include at least apt-get, and the source control section to include at least svn and preferably git. There's really no reason to still be using CVS at this point.
Creating strong CAPTCHA with PHP
Like, I like the Beatles. Great stuff. But I'll ask people, "Did you ever play any of their albums straight through? What songs have you heard?" If I just start saying that Revolver's first two tracks might be the best two in a row on any Beatles album, but that Sgt. Pepper's plays much better all the way through, it'd lose people, and most people are too shy to speak up. So they'd feel left out, and then maybe they'd kind of project that outwards and dislike me.

Funny you mention the Beatles. This argument inspired me to start writing a post about hipsterism, and I open with the argument that the Beatles were the most hipster band of all time. I mean, naming an album after an old-timey 20s pastiche, singing songs about carnivals and India, and did you see what they were wearing? Totally inauthentic hipster garb, that. ;-)
Zimbabwe's life expectancy for both sexes is closer to 45, which is similar to it's southern neighbor and regional economic stalwart, South Africa. It's that 15% of the population of both countries have HIV, not specifically economic troubles that the mortality rate is so high.

https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/...
Well, I've been using HTC Hero for more than a month now and I usually spend about a hour or more a day browsing, and I found it ... fast. And the browser is great.

What's this with the boot time? I rebooted it once I think, since buying, and it was when I had to put another card on it temporally.
Magstripes are only incrementally harder to reproduce: the equipment is more expensive, but still available to any attacker. That the magstripe is visually opaque contributes to a false sense of security -- people thinking the magstripe info is somehow locked against unauthorized use, even though it's still essentially plaintext.

The magstripe is thus a bit like the 'lock icon gif' on an insecure login page -- creating enough of an illusion of security to assist commerce, but ultimately misleading. A visual barcode would be more honest: letting anyone see/possess your card long enough to scan/photocopy it is the exact same level of risk as letting them swipe it through a magstrip reader.
cool!

Thanks as well, it's always nice to see people get up and do stuff instead of just talk about it.
Enhancing our Grasp of Complex Arguments [pdf]
I have to say it, this guy is a smug asshole. Right or wrong about seo; his writing is smug.
I thought this was about Paul.
The claim is that it's not uniformly random - all outcomes don't have equal probability. But it's still a random process.
I thought this was outed as a hoax years ago. E.g. http://articles.latimes.com/2004/jul/06/world/fg-chernobyl6
try this?

http://www.mercurynews.com/search/ci_13579962?nclick_check=1...
It's not necessarily illegal. Nokia, Nintendo and Tesla all openly do naked short selling of their products. They call this a "preorder" -- you preorder a Wii/N900/whatever and they deliver it on or before a fixed date.

It's only illegal when you do it to manipulate a market or if you intend not to deliver the shares.
I did the same, except it's been a month and I am still waiting for the documents to arrive. Director registration took a week and then name verification itself took another couple of weeks. :(
TV Stations Start Broadcasting to Mobile Gadgets
My friend Makar studied how radiation affected populations of mice. I mean, he actually caught great numbers of mice somewhere on Urals in a disaster zone.
The conclusion was: mice adapted, there are no statistically distinguishable differences compared to a normal population.
What kind of game are you writing? If you're just a hobbyist, you might want to try a popular choice like python. (Pygame is insanely well known.)
How to start a bank
here we go: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=888687

http://www.ehow.com/how_2062432_start-bank.html
I edited the original post. I'm interested in commercial game projects. Real games, the kinds that you see in shops for PS and XBox etc.
M yakub chowdhury freelance programmer and trainer bangladesh
m yakub chowdhury freelance programmer and trainer in bangladesh
XNA is great, but your games will only be compatible with windows(and xBox).
Haskell is definetely not a good idea.
They are deliberately making search results less useful. If this became widespread we would have to abandon search engines entirely. That's the same as the ethical argument against spam.
Plants perform quantum computation for photosynthesis
What FQA's will trip you up if you want to compile "clean C" (i.e: the C and C++ subset)?
Use what most developers are using for the gaming platform of interest.
Don't let them scare you away... C++ is fine if you use what you need and take the time to actually understand the tools you're using.
Isn't that C++? (I'm not very learned, here, I'm really asking about this for a friend).
Why is Haskell a bad idea?