skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Misleads who exactly? There are many things to which we ascribe ratios that have nothing to do with time. For instance, people say poker is 80% skill and 20% luck (more for tournament poker, less for limit ring games). Does that mean we should spend 20% of our time rubbing rabbit's feet? Not to anyone who has spent anytime playing poker.

I have been involved in sports at a fairly high level, and to assume that 90% of athletes (or other professionals) apportion time based based on non-concrete goals is, frankly, naive. First a non sport related example: Let's assume we have a Rails programmer who really wants to gain experience with Scala. I would contend there about 0% chance he sits down and says I want to spend 30% of my time learning Scala and then starts reading books. A more realistic scenario would likely revolve around picking a project and spending time completing that project, a concrete goal. The same holds true for a professional baseball player. When he goes out and takes hitting practice, it is not just to hit better, it is to improve his swing motion or change his mechanics, or mess with his footwork, all concrete goals. Yes, he wants to improve his swing, but there is no way he goes out there and says I want to spend 30% of my time improving my swing, he thinks, today I will work on my stance and tomorrow I will work on my grip etc. Sorry if this is belaboring the point, but I think it nonsensical to assume that high-level professionals anywhere do this kind of rationing.

That's not say that we should do away with non-concrete goals altogether. They are important drivers and having some indefinite goal for the future is a good mechanism to drive us to do the smaller things. That said, it is my experience that we partition time for concrete things (heavy bag work, jump rope, complete newest incarnation of website frontend, practice mozart on piano, etc etc.) more efficiently, and most importantly way more often.
I work at a University. Every time I have to work with one of our admins to get something through the Oracle purchasing app I feel like I just jumped back 10 years to Windows 98 and Web 1.0. It drives me insane how many things have to be clicked on to get a simple thing done and how it really looks like a very thin layer over their database.

So who is going to be the innovator who can supply the enterprise apps for 10k+ employee companies that actually work?
+1 for the squeaky wheel.

If these companies are large enough to have accounts payable departments, it's often standard to keep onto company money for as long as possible. If they can eke out a few more days of interest they will.

If you're persistent (read annoying) enough, they'll want to pay just to stop you calling every day.
I think you are best served by diving head strong into a programming language in order to make your idea a reality. When you struggle, get on mailing lists and forums. Go to Hacker meetups. Hang out at your nearest school's computer science lab. Contribute as best you can. Through that you will build connections and then you will be at the point of asking them to join you. However, if you have money, there are plenty of willing programmers who would be quite interested. What's your idea? How do you plan to differentiate yourself where other music startups have failed?

Disclaimer: I'm a programmer at a music startup.
> No one is being distracted by anything of value to draw them away and there is way too much going on to know that the contest has even ended.

> It was a "Jump to Conclusions" mat. You see, it would be this mat that you would put on the floor... and would have different CONCLUSIONS written on it that you could JUMP TO.
My contact information's in my profile. If you have any questions, no matter how general or specific, don't hesitate to bug me.
How A Quiet Developer Grew Goodreads To 2.6 Million Members
If you compute a string that is say 32 characters long using just letters and numbers, then there are 62^32 possible combinations. This number is 58 digits long.

In this case, extremely unlikely just means never unless you are being attacked by say Russians with secret technology and a room full of supercomputers. The world will almost certainly end before anyone guesses one of these numbers or before you generate two that are the same.

You can look at the probability table for the Birthday Attack in this Wikipedia article and decide how unlikely you would like this event to be: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birthday_problem

Also from the article: "In theory, MD5, 128 bits, should stay within that range until about 820 billion documents, even if its possible outputs are many more."
One thing I often run into is that the financial people at our University regularly send Excel spreadsheets to one another. There will regularly be email chains of 3+ people that result in the same document being sent back and forth by email 10 times in one day. And then I get complains that people are hitting their email quota of 500MB.

The problem seems to be that you can convince individuals to switch to using a shared folder on a server (got my department using one) but they can't seem to make everyone switch. They've got email, it works well enough, and now it's hard to switch.
Man, Settlers. I remember playing until 4 a.m. during a trip to Vegas once (don't ask). Kept on losing because of my reputation, of all things - after two wins, everybody got paranoid about making deals with me.
And it also contrasts to the startup that doesn't have the compliance issues etc to deal with that the big company does.

(See Paypal ignoring all the banking regulation - figuring they'd get big/bought first)
Please take this not as an insult but as invitation to offer help.

Rank shouldn't be something to get confused about; if it is you're probably overthinking it.

What did you find confusing about it?
the submitted link works for me!

anyone else has the same issue described on the comment above?
Just curious, are you familiar with the music business? Or a musician that had a bad experience interacting with the industry? Or just someone who has a random idea?

P.s., I'm also in the Baltimore area (~10 mins south of B'more). Drive near Frederick every so often when going to Annapolis Rocks.
anyone wanna play settlers in palo alto?
IT's Groovy Time Flashback
Instead to use the MD5 of the file name do this: create a random string and associate this string in your database. Simply grab 256 bits from /dev/urandom for instance (and convert this in hex).

This has the very desirable property of not being able to guess the name of the file even if you know the name of the "object".
You're also relying on the unpredictability of MD5 here, which is not so watertight as it was once believed to be:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Md5#Vulnerability
So you're saying that the (few) loaded words have set tone for the whole post? Ok, makes sense.

It's worth noting that they have very serious-looking pricing page (segmented even to personal, business, education and enterprise plans) and I actually had to enter my credit card number and activate a recurring plan before I could get to the juicy features. This stuff sets expectations.
Thanks, I will clarify that...

I mean a hacker that understands the current problem facing the music industry today. (eg: Piracy, declining music sales...etc. Someone that has an interest in solving these problems)

I hope that makes sense
Safe Online Holiday Shopping Tips | TechJaws.com
"Randomly generated UUIDs ... To put these numbers into perspective, one's annual risk of being hit by a meteorite is estimated to be one chance in 17 billion [24], that means the probability is about 0.00000000006 (6 × 10−11), equivalent to the odds of creating a few tens of trillions of UUIDs in a year and having one duplicate. In other words, only after generating 1 billion UUIDs every second for the next 100 years, the probability of creating just one duplicate would be about 50%. The probability of one duplicate would be about 50% if every person on earth owns 600 million UUIDs."

for smarter than brute-force random UUID algs, the odds of collision are lower.
With a bit of squinting, you can see that writing a file to disk is lot like a view, except delivered over fputs.

And, for that matter, so is pushing data to a database. It's just the app emitting some set of formatted data over some transport mechanism

For any app, data come in and data go out. It's useful to make distinctions among the formats and means of transport, and practical to define views as "That stuff that gets sent to a user agent over HTTP".
This is exactly what I did when I emigrated to Canada from the States. I let the company I was working for know that I was applying for landed immigrant status and that they could count on me until the immigration process was done and I had a job in hand for the move.

It took about ten months from start to finish, but they appreciated the openness, honesty, and (most importantly) hard work that I put into the company prior to emigrating.

Were we a startup? Um. No, more a small player. But I would have done this whether it was a small company or a large company because I respected the people I worked with. If I didn't respect them, then they'd exactly get the two weeks (and that happened more than once, too).
Kyro and biz2hack, I've been thinking it would be fun to get some beginners/novices together to learn the basics of various languages together. At some point we'd probably need to tap some outside wisdom but we could get started together. Interested?
What the author does not mention in "How did it happen?" is how a few people with a lot of clout in the developer community made really pretty Websites describing Ruby on Rails and used words like "elegant" to convince other programmers that their code was dirty. Once they felt dirty, they wanted to be elegant too. ;)
Video lectures on algorithms and data structures
To be perfectly honest, I'd like to see more and more failures of this sort.

In my opinion this sort of use (publicity seeking via encouraging retweets by offering a prize) is an abuse of the system. I hope it crashes and burns and dies. This sort of use pattern comes from looking at twitter through the lens of old media. "How can we get our brand out in front of lots of eyeballs?" "How can we artificially create brand recognition?"

You may be able to abuse twitter to get your brand seen by more people than you could reach with a superbowl ad at much less cost, but that doesn't mean you should, or that that's helpful. It's much better to use twitter as a means to interact honestly and directly with your customers. People retweeting about some lame-ass contest will get your brand as much negative attention as positive (if not more). People organically retweeting about positive experiences with your company will be far more valuable.

In short, don't spend your time pushing your brand on the public, spend your time making something awesome that people love, providing top quality service, and showing the world you are a company of real, honest people who believe in their product and care about their customers rather than a bunch of faceless attention seeking drones.
I used to be a local music producer, and most of the people around me are musicians.

I don't just have a random idea, I really want to dedicate my life time to music, and solving this problem. I believe if artists and fans are brought together, we can reduce piracy, and promote creativity in the music industry.
Yes, I am so tired of seeing this. I've been listening to this user whine since the days of the Apple II vs the mainframe. Yes, tech advances faster than organizations can absorb. Eventually, the organization will catch up. Until people stop worrying about unmanageable IT costs, prevalent breaches, and dumb users this will never change.
I am part of an IT department and I would gladly move our 350 users to Google Apps, Gmail, etc. Google could do more to make their products seem less "mavericky" for the office environment. For one thing, it would be great if there were Google certified partners, the way MS/Orable/SAP has thousands of partners.
I've been reading books, but reading hasn't been doing much for me, since I'm not really absorbing the material. I want to try 'testing' things out...I don't know if that makes sense, but I feel like if I have exercises to do, I will understand concepts much faster then simply reading.

IMO, then, you've been reading the wrong books. I went through "Learning Rails" (O'Reilly) and followed the text through, actually doing stuff rather than just reading about it, and it worked great. I do recommend the "Learning (foo)" series by O'Reilly, but I don't have a copy of Learning Rails right here to flip through to see quite how absolute-beginner-friendly it is. The Pragmatic Programmers guides to Ruby on Rails are also quite good. Flip through books in B&N or something to see if you can find something with really appealing worked exercises, do it cover to cover, and then sit down with the guys who did your current site and get them to explain it to you.

Alternatively, set yourself a target small project that isn't maintaining an existing site, e.g. creating a blog. Plenty of screencasts and online tutorials on that sort of thing to follow along with but I would say most of them assume knowledge of programming, whereas books tend not to.
Which means that the original corporation won't participate (unless forced to by accidentally including GPL'd code) because there are a lot of very good reasons for a corporation to not share their source code (ie, competitive advantage), and we've come full circle.
Do you seriously think google mines webpages with an HTML parser?
Algorithms and data structures - Video Tutorials
I am not so sure - you can always find a wife once you have made your millions.

But I guess if you are really happy with the one you found that might change.
Disclaimer acknowledged.

My start up idea doesn't have anything to do with the Record labels, but it does have everything to do with bringing artists and fans together, and allowing artists to control their own careers instead of signing their souls away to record labels.

I plan to differentiate myself from other music startups by NOT having anything to do with the 4 big labels or their music, but instead bring new talents to light!
Here is what you should do:

1. Get the firebug extension for firefox. It will allow you see changes live on your site, exactly how it appears in your browser.

2. Hit F12 to launch it.

3. Start out by learning basic CSS. Find a class to play around with, let's pick something like

textarea {
color: #000000;
font-family: courier;
font-size: 10pt;
}

What will happen when you change #000000 to some other color, #ff0000? AHA! that changes the font color for the text box to red. Perfect, let's try another class.

4. Next you should learn HTML, use the element tool in firebug and select one of the elements. It'll highlight the element in question. And will show you the code for that element. Click edit, and see the full code for that element. Then modify the code and try different options, to see what the changes do.

I'd use Dreamweaver as a suggestion tool, since it shows you all available options. Which comes in handy, if you don't really know HTML like the back of your hand.

Your #1 priority is learning to read other people's code. After you do, you can quickly "borrow" their code for whatever it is you are working on. Especially useful if it's just CSS/HTML.

5. After your get the hang of HTML and CSS, you can move on to scripting languages and databases. By this point you should be able to read other people's code, which will help you find the code snippets in the code your freelancer wrote for whatever example you are looking for.
Microsoft gives up on their ribbon ideology in Office 2010
It's such a false economy, anyways. If you have a family, and you aren't planning on trading them for your company, then you're never going to be sufficiently productive when they feel neglected.
Doesn't this all just depend on specific needs? At Poll Everywhere we have an email that gets fired off if a poll is close to filling-up. If we put this logic in controllers it would be madness considering that we accept votes via SMS, Web, etc. Instead we fire off the notification as a callback on our Poll model after a vote is received.

On the other hand, when a user signs up at PE, we fire that email off via the controller. There are certain times in our application where we don't want to send an email out simply when a new User model is created.

This seems like a silly argument; just do what works best for your app. Is an email a view? Use it in your controller. Is your email an asynchronous notification? Maybe it belongs in your model.
Virtual Video Revolution in The Beatles Rock Band
Uh, no, not at all. The ANSI strXXX() functions work just fine with UTF-8, that was kind of the point. Anything treating strings with nul termination or counted byte length works without change. Any work involving only ASCII substrings (e.g. parsing of computer-readable data) works without change. No non-ASCII character is represented using ASCII bytes in the string. Everything Just Works. Which is why you should just use it.

The sole exception are algorithms that truly need random access to characters within the string (e.g. "give me the 32nd character"), which can't interoperate with any variable-length encoding. But there are precious few of these. All anyone cares about is substrings.
One advantage is that you can serve more people at the same time. It is probably much faster to push a button and get a ticket, than fighting a phone system
I love this game, in 2 player games with my wife, I think it's about 18-2 to her, I'm not so good at the strategy!

The only bad thing is when in a 4 player game, depending on your placement of settlements and what happens right at the start of the game with road building, you can immediately find youself in for a very hard long slog and be stuck on 3-4 points knowing that you have no realistic chance of winning and are just waiting for one of the other players to get 10 points.

3 players is the optimum I find.
Settlers is last /decade/. Dominion is just last year.
you can be an entrepreneur and have a social life if you find an understanding girlfriend and not some paris hilton wannabe. I tend to find asian women more understanding about work life.
I can't agree, although it's obviously not the direct answer you're expecting. In the example you gave, Eco's reply can be summarized as 'lists are as poetic as other rhetorical devices'. One might just as well argue that the interviewer is bad at understanding the answers (although in fairness, I think it more likely he deliberately adopted a Socratic approach and is playing the role of the skeptical reader).
The criticism was directed towards Engadget's "coverage" of vaporware as mere video stenography--not statements by Techcrunch.
>Settler's is great, but a lot of people will complain it leaves too much to chance.

I've noticed this quite a bit in the board game community, which I think is unfortunate. Chess is a great game, but Poker is too.

The element of chance not only makes the game more entertaining against a better player, but also disguises the winning strategies so that the game requires deeper thinking to master.
Whoa, no, don't do this.

dsc-450.jpg > user/acbdddc1ab1b73536fabbd3f4ffeea4e
dsc-450.jpgsalt > f043ce111eb398cd280b67c80c6c8ca6
usersaltdsc-450.jpg > 272ed08a85fc1e47b97462fb053a7c29

You'd need at least a secret site salt, as well as a per-user salt. If you have only a site salt, I can figure out what file names would be by uploading my own. If you had only a per-user salt, I calculate it myself. The problem of your site salt getting out remains.

At the very least, you should randomly generate identifiers. This makes it less obvious which targets are worth looking at. What you really need, though, is something like per-folder access control.
Yes. This concept of 'leaking' the URL is becoming apparent to me. I naively assumed you could keep them semi-private (by simply not telling anyone), but this approach is doesn't appear to hold up.

It's a great point about the referrer header too. Thanks!
Would you please translate it? I don't want to translate via google as it would certainly miss something.
http://arclanguage.org/item?id=10254 says Arc 3.1 works on »the latest version« of MzScheme. That announcement was posted on August 4, so I guess it refers to MzScheme v4.2.1.
how can you say that C is challenged by Go? Go is built with C. This is true with python as well - in being a C abstraction. C is well suited for the UNIX-like programming, where you create efficient system libraries. With as little abstraction as possible I might add.
Ask HN: What art to you guys enjoy?
I am looking for some inspiration for my apartment's drab soviet-chic walls. I just printed out about 40 different John William Waterhouse paintings (http://www.jwwaterhouse.com/). What does everyone else like?
The death of the URL
by establishing the concept of scope and discriminatory criteria for inclusion or exclusion. Look up 'bongard problems' and appreciate that while some are based around topological or temporal progression, others require cataloging random arrangements and establishing membership criteria.
Postful is one I've used in the past. Does have API:

http://www.postful.com/help/integration

And, PostalMethods is one I've been meaning to try -- again with API:

http://www.postalmethods.com/
1.866.2google for US, There's an ireland one I use also but I forget it atm.
> I believe any methodology must have built-in feedback to ensure that it's applied correctly to be practical or successful.

That will be difficult; TDD is a design activity. You can test artifacts of the process, such as regressions over time, amount of rework necessary, time spent refactoring, quality of releases, and a few other metrics, but how do you measure the quality of a design in and of itself?

You might as well measure the efficacy of individual design patterns on their own.

> ... today the case for TDD as a one-size-fits-all methodology is far from conclusive.

Who suggests that it is? I'd very much like to see references to (well-respected) people who've written "If you don't use TDD, you cannot produce great -- or even working -- software."
Tell HN: New twitter HN feed with links to comments @YCHackerNews
Really? No large organizations. So what is the limit? Number of people? Revenue? What?
What would such a partner do?
Yes, and if you spend some time working with J, you will find that they solve this by avoiding variables altogether. Functions in J can only be applied to one or two variables, and it is clear from the context what the number is. So, you can write a bunch of code without referring to the arguments.
Developers don't benefit from having an all powerful middleman inserted between themselves and their users/customers. It's not that Apple just makes the rules. They don't even bother to make proper rules. They just rule.

But you're right, contrary to being born as a subject under some absolute monarch, I can make a choice in this case. My choice as a user and as a developer is not to accept the kind of nasty middleman structure Apple is perfecting.
I know there are other HN twitter accounts, but I couldn't find one that also links to the comments (which I usually enjoy more than the articles). So, I created @YCHackerNews to link to both the article and the comments.
Can you please continue down this alternate thread of straight-to-the-point-badassness? I was enjoying the story until the last paragraph, when it wasn't a story anymore