skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Upvoted for two reasons - Making me laugh out loud, and for letting me know that I am not the only one getting confused.

Other commentators have mentioned the confusion with Rich's Clojure, and despite Rich's stand that is be pronounced like you would pronounce "closure", I usually still say it with the emphasis on the "J", esp. to Lisp-savvy folks.

[On a side note, and I am nitpicking here, but it's just Clojure, vs Clojure for the JVM, considering Clojure for the CLR is very close to 1.0]
There is lots and lots of "dingy boiler room stuff" in scientific computing. What the math is doing is clean. Doing that as efficiently as possible in a computer is generally not.
This sounds like one of those future management case studies everybody will learn about in business classes in a few years. "Why did Dell fail? Well, they sacked all their sales people and nobody could buy their product!"

I remember studying one of those. Can't remember the company off the top of my head, some retail electronics outfit. They sacked all their senior sales people on the floor to save money and ended up going out of business because people could find anybody to help them adequately when they were in the store with money.
If he changed the background color to a very dark shade of grey rather than straight black, it would lessen the contrast and ease the strain on your eyes. If you're feeling buzziness from reading inverted type, there is also a good chance your screen is at an unhealthy brightness. Great for picking out contrast, but painful on the eyes. One trick my friend taught me was to place a light source off in the distance to the side, to break up the focused source of light from the screen. It cured his computer-induced headaches immediately, along with lowering his brightness.
What is the defining characteristic of Mandriva that sets it apart from Ubuntu and Fedora?

(As an aside, I think one of the worst things to happen to Mandrake/Mandriva was the awful naming choice.)
On the Indictment of Ryan Harris, author of Hacking the Cable Modem
10 Immutable Laws of Security Revisited: Part 1
Unlimited Pros of Die Cut Stickers
Found on Schneier on Security blog: http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2009/11/mossad_hacked_...
F1 designer unveils electric car
That was what happened to Circuit City.
I believe this is the commercialization of H-Store, which has been featured here on HN before.
A list of papers proving and disproving P = NP
Yes it's a parody.
Many items, much discussion.

See also: http://searchyc.com/mockingbird?sort=by_date
Lucene / Solr meetup yesterday Apachecon Oakland
Vertica's load performance is quite impressive actually. Teradata also has installations doing high volume OLTP, not just OLAP.
Steve Jobs Will Save Print Media
Again, you could say that of the internet in general.

A medium is (un)deserving of 'hype' based on whether it can be used to do anything that appeals to us.
I saw that as well. No idea when I approved that one...
NoSQL meetup, including Steve Yen taxonomy
Sounds like they had good operations people but sacked them.
How about farmer's Game of Life on those blocks, with new iterations growing up each year. :)
You say that like you think it's a bad thing.
Now this is where I can now point to the next time someone asks he'd like to know more about the programming field.
The Nitrogen Fix: Breaking a Costly Addiction
Yes. The thing is, in a startup there are so many roles that can be recorded and flipped on the net. Marketing, deciscion making, design, good atmosphere at the office, programming, ...

It's just crazy how big a market we can attract by following these principles.

Regarding the editing, I agree. Yet uploading the videos edited is very time consuming even though it'll probably increase the spice of the video.
Judge spanks lawyer for leaking personal details in brief
Klueless 5 has begun.... Can you solve it, or are you klueless?
Its that time of the year again, when for two weeks, the world comes to a halt,
project deadlines are missed, classes are bunked, loved ones are ignored and
nights spent without as much as a minute of sleep. With over 5.5 million hits
last year, Klueless 4 was believed to have been responsible for increased hair
loss, decreased geek sightings and was known to have caused more layoffs than
the infamous recession.

Klueless 5, or K5 as they fondly call it, promises to cause even more mayhem with
many more levels that will challenge your wits and test your faith. We don’t
guarantee that playing K5 will help solve world hunger, global warming, or get
you a better job. But what we can guarantee is hours of pure excitement and
unlimited bragging rights for the coveted few that beat all odds to enter the
hall of fame.

Here's the link:

http://www.ahvan.in/ahvan/klueless5/
I think the last PC I bothered to build myself was a Pentium 4 some ages ago.

Since then I've decided that the two pennies (or otherwise insignificant amount) I save building myself is not worth the time it takes to assemble it, not to mention keeping up to date on current HW trends, configurations, sockets, power supplies, mobos etc etc.

Pretty much all hardware these days are technically overspec'ed compared to the load I can put on them, so as long as your needs are not high-end, pretty much any moderately modern Xeon should do.

I just buy a preconfigured setup from Dell, it just works, and at worst I'll buy some extra RAM and drives elsewhere later.

Maybe that's not how you like it, but for me it means zero hassles, zero work and a guarantee which is for the system as a whole working unit, not just single components. I couldn't be happier, and the days of building systems myself is definitely over.
IBM Launches Cloud Platform for Developers
It's interesting Kogi BBQ is mentioned, because that to me is an example of the dysfunction around Twitter.

Twitter started out as an SMS service, yet these days they cannot reliably deliver SMS messages. Kogi is awesome food, so whenever I visit LA, I turn on SMS delivery for Kogi's messages on Twitter. This would be a really great feature, since when I'm out for the evening I may try to stop by Kogi for some food, and it's great to get updates about where they are in relation to me, and if they're running late due to traffic (which happens a lot in LA). Except the last two times I was in LA, Twitter didn't send about half the updates to my phone. Which makes it not useful at all.

The Kogi case is a great application for one-to-many SMS updates, but Twitter completely drops the ball on that. Yet Twitter is so popular, there isn't really room for a more technically competent service to provide value. As we've seen already, merely cloning Twitter, even if you do it better, isn't enough.

The world could use a popular, reliable one-to-many SMS delivery platform. Instead we're stuck with Twitter. It's sad.
If nothing else, the SO Careers site provides a convenient place to park your CV and make it public (if that's what you want) -- for free. I think the markdown formatting is more than sufficient to get the look you want and highlight what's important. The linking of up to 10 technologies with job experience is intuitive.

SO reputation or not, this presentation is at least as good as what even an "elite" programmers resume would look like.
The Internet in general is not as narrowly scoped as Twitter's feature set, so that is not the same.
I don't know why you're being modded down.

To elaborate: You can define "simplest program", for instance, as "shortest string consisting of [0-9], plus, minus, times, parentheses, and the symbol 'n' that when evaluated as a mathematical expression yields the given sequence for n=1, 2, 3...". You can then find a suitable string, like "((8 * n + 4) * n - 4) * n + 1", and do an exhaustive search of shorter strings to show that no better string exists. That would be 16^16, or less than a year on a computer that can knock off a trillion strings per second -- less if you use logic to constrain the search space.

However, realistically, a person asking such a question is merely looking for a "good" solution, not necessarily a proven-optimal one, as there may be multiple reasonable explanations for a given sequence. Rather, the value of the "simplest program" criteria is that it allows you to compare proposed solutions. So, yes, for any given number, there is a formula to make it next in the sequence. But by applying the "simplest program" criteria, we see that some formulas -- and hence some values -- are better than others.
great! another way for me to filter out potential employers.

"can you send us your stack overflow account?" "yeah, i'm no longer interested."
Why is that a problem that Google knows about you?
Google knows about me a lot, and I think it's a good thing, because:
1) I might be found by relevant people.
2) It adds up to my reputation, for example it may help to send email and have it delivered, because I look like a real person.

What are the downsides of Google watching you/me?
Despite the closeness in name, aren't they pronounced differently? I've always pronounced "Clojure" with a hard "j," rather than like "closure."

Edit: Turns out soft "j" is order of the day, there's a whole discussion about it: http://groups.google.com/group/clojure/browse_thread/thread/... - so confusion can continue to reign ;-)
I think b/c it's using the difference table method in both cases. Where as, if the pattern starts with 1, it recognizes it as powers of 2.

R code:

solver <- function(x) {
print(x)
if (length(x) == 0 || all(x == 0))
0
else
x[length(x)] + solver(diff(x))
}

solver(c(0,1,2,4,8,16,32,64,128)) #=> 255
solver(c(0,1,2,4,8,16,32,64,128,256)) #=> 512
solver(c(0,1,2,4,8,16,32,64,128,256,512)) #=> 1023
solver(c(0,1,2,4,8,16,32,64,128,26,512,1024)) #=> 2048
I agree that "Clojure" is kinda a silly name, but what else are you gonna call it? I assume Henly wanted a name that conveyed its functional and/or Lisp roots, and the fact that it's on the JVM.

Let's try some names using the usual JVM language conventions:
JLisp works, but it's boring, and Jisp sounds kinda suspect. Parenjases is just silly. Or maybe LLBeans for "lazy lisp beans"...but that's just getting too cute.

I think I probably would have gone with Jambda.
That appears to be the standard way to present performance improvements. Have a look at any recent announcement of javascript advances or other ruby improvements.

But I agree it's somewhat confusing.
I disagree with your characterization.

Have you ever tried to convince someone to join a truly ridiculous idea? You'd be surprised. People aren't that stupid. We are talking about someone joining as a co-founder. Therefore, that person has some basic notion of what a co-founder is, what a startup looks like, etc. We are not talking about finding a random person on the street who'll give you a quote "great idea".

For the best idea in the world, I also challenge you not to find anyone who believes in it.

Now, to be practical rather than extreme, my experience shows me that having co-founders brings a lot of value during the brainstorming phase. Although I like to think of myself as very smart - I could figure out everything on my own, right? Co-founders bring balance. Once in a while, I have a crazy idea that deserves to be killed. But I'm crazy enough that on my own, I might do it. With co-founders, you get very quick reality check.

The secret is to find co-founders who share your vision 90% of the time, and help keep you on the right track the 10% when you are wrong.

If you don't share the vision with your co-founders and can't even agree 50% of the time, then you are correct: it will be a waste of your time, arguing endlessly about trivial stuff.
From the article, We’d given Jessica cards with our cell-phone numbers on them during the interview, but that didn’t seem to have registered.

I take that to mean that they tried to make it clear how to call them, but for whatever reason signals got crossed.
It's really amazing to see how something is finally starting to supplant ancient Fortran code in sci-comp.

I think one of the major reasons for Python being that choice is that its syntax and "Python way of doing things" is really geared at making it difficult to obfuscate the code into meaninglessness. Clarity is always important in research.
And you'll start with your next post, right? :-P
Resources to Get Your Startup Off the Ground
I havn't had any problems at all with the Karmic version. The past two or three Ubuntu releases have installed similarly without fuss (and I've installed on multiple PCs and laptops of varying ages). I don't care about Samba, and I don't have a tablet or Intel graphics.
Japan's technology champions: Invisible but indispensable
Trevor talked about this in the comments to my article on applying to YC:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=854088
>> After all, everyone around the tech forums just want you to launch early because they want to see if you have a good idea that's not flushed out enough yet so they can copy it quickly and build it out faster and better than you. Only the competition are reading these threads - your customers are out in the world.

What? Really? You think people say to launch early because they want to copy you?
Neat! Hopefully a good example of how Wave might have a quick uptake. Relatively easy to write for and against might mean a fast adoption rate.
Color Wheel - Extending the Flashlight Experiment
Reasonable people understand that we're looking for a closed-form solution that can generate these numbers.
CEO of the century?

CEO of the anthropocene?

CEO of the universe?
Mine too. In fact, I think that there is even a filter for spamassassin that marks emails with embedded images as "spammy".
Paintball sniper
Cheap paintball
Everyday creativity
Of course they do. Sure, co-founders can fight over product design, what type of pizza to order for lunch, or which programming language to use, etc. But where I've seen most startups collapse and fail is over contentious issues such as splitting ownership and compensation. The inability to come to an agreement on this is when relationships turn sour and co-founders split. It's rare to hear about someone leaving a startup because s/he disagreed with the startup's product vision. Don't treat this issue lightly and get a lawyer if necessary to write up a 1 page agreement between the both of you. Things can get ugly.
See also Clamato. http://clamato.net/
Some talk about Steve Jobs's reality distortion field.

Your quote offers another example: "Having the small character limit really forces you how to get your message across very succinctly". All perfectly logical.

Do you really, really, really believe this? That a limitation at 140 characters is helps people express their thoughts better? It doesn't strike you in any way, limiting? Are there some good thoughts that need 200 characters?

Don't get me wrong: having such a limit has advantages to the readers. But if you think of it, twitter is not so different from a giant blog RSS feed which only broadcasts the titles of the posts...
If only there were a way to detect accounts that are always upvoted by the same group of accounts...
Them's fightin' words!
"Publically mock the appearance of your Dell sales rep?" That's gotta be a stock photo. Can a Dell sales rep even afford that tie, let alone that hair cut?
Difference table only works in case of arithmetico-geometric series or polynomial series. It fails in other sequences like fibonacci,prime etc. However if given a sequence I always try difference table first as there are high chances that it'll be cracked.
I'm not willing to bet the house against Steve Jobs but unfortunately, just like this article and just like today's world, no one has announced a plan or much less hinted at an idea of how to save the print media world. However, I think there is an important distinction here - one between the actual art of print dying (the physical paper) and the other of monetizing the digital aspect of it. The latter is so challenging because the online distribution model is so vastly inexpensive to produce that charging for it goes against everything free out there - which is the majority of the market.

Now, if a tool such as the tablet is such a cool way to read the paper in the morning - then maybe, just maybe, apple can work with publishers on some fee based solution. I think that this article leads us back to the underlying point that technology can and has saved some industries from dying and now, how can tech save print media from running out of ink.
On a computer, you have to also be concerned about error propagation and efficiency, and that can take what might be a very beautiful, simple solution on paper and explode it into a big ugly mess in code.

That doesn't mean it isn't fun, but it's a lot less clean than you might think.
Also related, Google's Data Liberation Front: http://www.dataliberation.org/

"The Data Liberation Front is an engineering team at Google whose singular goal is to make it easier for users to move their data in and out of Google products."

They provide information on how to "escape" from a particular service ie. download/migrate data from that service. However, I can't find any indication of whether there is a way to permanently delete all your data from their servers.
Am I the only person who uses Ad-Art?
I'm slightly terrified by consensus design
You would still need to define precisely what you mean by a closed-form solution and this definition needs to be part of the question.

But even then you would be faced with the difficult task of proving that your answer is correct.

This kind of ill-defined question might be a fun diversion but it should never be used for any serious purpose (e.g. in any test/assighnment that matters)
Other people have given calculus answers... here is one that doesn't require calculus. Its very tedious, but fairly simple to understand.

Give your DT "coefficients" work your way back to the solution.

I.e. in this case: you start with

48

48

48

From which you can get

104 <-- Note: this needs to be given!

152

200

248

And work your way back to

9

73

241

561

1081

1849

So you know you want a polynomial P(x)such that
P(1) = 9

p(2) = 73

...

p(3) = 1849

So now you know you need at most a 5th degree polynomial.

So, you have y = a_0 + a_1 * x + a_2 * x^2 + ... + a_5 * x^5

Plug in each value of x and you get 6 equations with 6 unknowns. Solve for a_0, ..., a_5.

Bunch of the a's might well be 0, but thats ok.

Edit: This only works if your difference table eventually reduces to a set of differences which are all the same (e.g here 48, 48, 48). Otherwise, the answer is not a polynomial.
print "9,73,241,561,1081,1849,0".

So 0 is the answer. Actually, any digit, so I don't waste one extra character in my program.

Did I win?
creativity is in the eye of the beholder. But when creativity is applied to an actual physical being, something that people can hold, use, and abuse, then the understanding or appreciation of creativity can spread from the inventor to the user.
I agree. The beauty of software systems is they can be made as complex as the programmer can imagine; this is also the horror of software systems.

All software should be as complex as it needs to be to do the job, and no more so (where complex means the cognitive load necessary to understand it). Unfortunately 99% of programmers and 100% of programmers' managers don't understand this (both numbers are probably correct to the nearest integer, in my experience).
Isn't the question really, that if Steve's gone, will there be another breakout hit, like the iPod / iPhone, or will you just see more evolutionary products, like Microsoft does?
Sorry, I was referring to the twitter exporters :)
I think Clojure copied Arc on this.
If Myspace and Facebook Merged...
Would anyone who already knows this tool, or is taking the time to learn it, care to explain what they mean by "compiles web apps down into compact, high-performance JavaScript"? I assume this is a JS-to-JS translator. How exactly are they transforming the JS?

I mean, of course, besides the obvious things they mention: minification, removing dead code, and some error checking.
Write .NET Code? There's a Big Prize For That.
My current side-project is doing something like this. I have IM and IRC logs going back to 2001 and wanted them in a single format in a database.

I'm at the point where the logs can be loaded and searched, and am currently trying to decide what to do about merging the identities of different people. I've got about 2000 unique names and have been thinking about what sort of interface to use to unify and hide ones that don't matter (exactly the problem the author of this article is having).

I didn't think it was viable for a business, so I'll be curious to see what happens with them.

If anyone's interested in my source code, it's on github (http://github.com/jeffjenkins/cdb). It handles Adium (HTML and XML), Miranda, Trillian, and Colloquy (and almost mIRC)

edit: there's also a fairly basic UI which I can put up somewhere if people are actually interested in using this.
Probably shorthand for "what's your real competitive advantage here".
BUDGET BRAKES OFFER LOW PRICES WHICH PROVIDES COMPETITVE EDGE
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As their name suggests, Budget Brakes specializes in giving customers complete brake jobs at a price that won’t cause their cash flow to grind to a halt. Budget Brakes will give customers a complete brake job, with a lifetime warranty starting at the incredibly low price of just $78; a rate 40% lower than other comparable chains.

“We provide the same service as Midas, Goodyear, Pep Boys, or Firestone - we just do it for a lot less,” said Michael Palazzolo, owner and founder of Budget Brakes.

What’s the secret to customer satisfaction and prices like these?

“It’s about taking care of the customer, “said Palazzolo. “It’s very simple. We have the best parts and the best service – and we do it for the lowest price. Why get your hands dirty when you can get your car worked on for a price like this?”

Unlike other do-it-all chains, Budget Brakes stays close to their specialty. The chain has become known for discount brakes, resulting in thousands of satisfied customers.

“We actually have an edge because we’re doing brakes, all the time,” said Palazzolo. “It’s the majority of what we do, so we have a real expertise.”

Customers can also make appointments from the convenience of their own home – www.budgetbrakes.com offers online appointments. By visiting the site, the customer can easily find a close location and book an appointment, saving the ordinary hassle of the auto shop waiting room.

The website offers numerous specials and online discounts and customers can sign up online to receive regular printable coupons

The Nashville, Tennessee based company was founded by Michael Palazzolo and Steve Ryan and currently has 15 locations; having recently opened in Pensacola, Florida.

For more info or to book an appointment today, visit http://www.budgetbrakes.com.
sorta kinda, but not really, python isn't supplanting fortran, it's supplanting Matlab/IDL for prototyping and visualization, and half-baked command languages for interfacing with packages of data reduction routines. Which is still nice, especially things like (to take astronomy) AIPS/IRAF, specialized packages of routines that are controlled by the worst command language possible.