skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Here's the text in case anyone wants to search for it online. I've had no success. I'm thinking it's from a movie.

About I am the person Ramiro dis on the air (facebook.com):
Everyone it's time for me to come out and let you know I am
the one who Ramiro dis on the air. Not Crazy Ace. He tell
people that Crazy Ace and I am one person. As Ramiro has
anyone been calling in and playing the dis. To me I wanted
him to see how I felt. All you had to say I don't have slam
jam by Crazy Ace but you took it to far. Crazy Ace was
trying to make has life a litter better and you just made a
fool out out of your radio station. I will not good to your
level. I am a better man then that. The only way I will
Stop is you bring me to the station and put me on the air
and you can tell everyone what a big fool you and your
staff was. And then you can say how sorry you are and you
will not hurt any one else. That's what real men do. Not
the kid game you played.
See also http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=905702

and its parent http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=905528
Or professional certification programs.
Perhaps you should write directly to dropbox???
if you want to sell the site and can afford not to run ads, don't.
if you do run ads, your site will be worth n times your revenues.
if you don't, it could be worth anything you make up - look at twitter! ;-)
Rest of Geocities -- the ones worth saving
Malcolm Gladwell wrote a bit of personal history about the differences in native versus immigrant black perceptions. Interesting article.

http://www.gladwell.com/1996/1996_04_29_a_black.htm
I have found that I ended up watching a lot more varied and interesting stuff when I can search as opposed to just watching whats on.

Wow. The seeds of mainstream TV's destruction right there.

I think this is a fundamental part of the newspaper's demise that is missed, by papers and many others. For me and probably many others, it's not that the papers/news online is cheaper or free, it's that there's at once more variety and more depth. It's the reason why I'm commenting on an HN post instead of a Denver Post article.

A single paper or corp, or a single station or network, cannot compete with a universe of shiny.

When WWI ended, Boeing kept their airplane builders employed for awhile by building furniture (airplanes were made largely of wood back then, so they were highly skilled wood-workers). I wonder how newspaper and TV infrastructure could be re-purposed, for something more permanent than the mere end of a war?
Who Discovered The Isosahedron?
JavaScript and Ruby|Scala|Python, if you want to go the website route. (I'm a fan of Scala, personally)
First, don't conflate adsense with advertising in general. If you want to run ads then you can set up redirects so that ad sense is your remnant provider, but you'll get higher eCPMs if you can into an ad network. If you do want to run ads then you should be thinking more about what demographics you want to target, and how valuable those demographics are.

Second, lots of sites have made the switch from ad-less to running ads. Has there ever been a noteworthy rebellion?
This sounds kind of unscientific. Is this actually true for small time sales, on stuff like flippa?
The Art of Prolog is a beautiful book. I keep it on my coffee table, and non-programmers are always curious about it because of its cover. They sort of blanch when they open it, though...
Besides the performance difference, the main issue is the ideal of a perfect shuffle: each of the N! sorts ought to be equally likely.

(N.b.: this post ended up being mostly the same point as fhars, only phrased differently.)

However, this is tricky to achieve. It requires either:

- an infinite source of random numbers

- a psuedo random number generator whose pool size (the # of random numbers it can generate) is an even multiple of N! (If not, then it have bias towards certain shuffles almost by definition.)

Here's what happens when someone does it all wrong -- the wrong shuffle algorithm and, far more devastatingly, a poor PRNG choice:

http://www.cigital.com/papers/download/developer_gambling.ph...

(Consider that if your PRNG takes a 32-bit seed, there will be at most be 2^32 possible shuffles, even with a correctly perfect shuffling algorithm --- few enough for an attacker to pre-calculate every possible shuffle to use against you.)
Hey axod,

I joined the Windows Update team at Microsoft around two months ago. While I can't give exact figures, a standard non-SSIRP update costs Microsoft around 6 figures to code, test, and ship. October was our biggest release in history with something like 44 updates released (you can do the math).

Security incidents that are SSIRPs (effectively vulnerabilities that start actively being exploited, in particular with potential global impact) cost a lot more. Conficker.b was costing Microsoft over a million dollars a day for weeks in support calls alone.

Security flaws cost Microsoft a ton of money directly and through things like damaging their brand. They invested insane amounts of money improving security for Win 7, we'll see how it works out (as best as I can tell, it should be pretty effective).

disclaimer: this is my opinion, not my employer's
Haskell blog software
Not to mention the inestimable harm done to their reputation, leading to some unknown number of lost sales. Presumably they have some support staff overhead too for enterprise customers.

Given the relative weights on MSFT's balance sheets of Windows vs Live Cash Back, I'd say any serious OS problem probably costs them orders of magnitude more than this.
Hey ajross,

See my reply to axod: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=928267
That Samir guy is pretty shady :)

Seriously though guys, glad to see you're doing well. I hope the publicity nets you a traffic spike that results in more revenue than the $2k you could have kept.
Could you expand a bit on that statement with regard to development?
Making Games Faster
"Thou Shall Prosper" by Rabbi David Lapin. One of my favorites.

"Rich Dad Poor Dad" by Robert Kiyosaki. Yeah, really. Both this book and the author have been the recipient of a good amount of criticism, but this book help me a lot to increase my thinking beyond a 9-5 job as the primary way of making money. That said, the book is more inspirational and vague than a concrete plan on how to do anything in particular.
I agree. Either run ads or reserve the space for ad-like self promotion. It's better to set realistic expectations than to to end up with users who would no longer use your site once it's reached its "real" form.
NC Research Triangle
How about the North Carolina research triangle as a startup hub. 2 great universities, lovely weather. Sprawly but less so than today's Silicon Valley. And the state government deliberately tried to foster startup activity.
Regardless of if what the author did is deserving of sympathy, I think most of us can agree that the correct course of action is fixing the security bug rather than trying to cover it up. I mean we all know how well that works.
Links are valuable no matter whether you have 1 visitor a day or 1 million. Ads are not. Ads trade off with linkability. This does not make the decision hard for when you'd have ad revenues which couldn't buy a cup of cocoa.
I have to admit I wouldn't read that book if that's indicative of the general content and tone.

I hate how these days it's wrong to just write solid non-fiction without wrapping it in some vacuous story. Yes, illustrate your point, but make it relevant rather than just flowery words to make it more "readable and approachable."

Bah, I say.
Correlation is not causation. It's a logical fallacy to state that "rejection reduces IQ" on learning that rejection correlates with a decreased ability to get high scores on IQ tests.
The MS Cashback program is great. I don't think it's doing a thing to attract people to Bing but I've used it to buy several Macs at a nice discount off eBay. Thank you Microsoft.
Ask HN: Review My Library, Tempest
I wrote Tempest to reliably generate image heatmaps/clickmaps in multiple languages with the same or similar API.

I also hate compiling dependencies, so each implementation is done purely in its targeted language instead of the common practice of implementing in C with language-specific bindings. Clearly, this has its own pros and cons.

I know it's far from perfect (it's still in beta), but I'd welcome any suggestions or constructive criticism from the HN community.
Arguably, "non-stop" is "dangerous" regardless of what it is you're doing non-stop...
The ones that I have rated highly here:

http://www.squeezedbooks.com

The problem is that there are many that are good books by smart guys with good ideas - just that the ideas are really something that could be summed up in a few pages.

I would second the recommendation for 'Growing a Business' and 'Founders at Work', which is impossible to really summarize because it's full of interviews.
We need more articles about women in technology circles here on HN. Thanks for posting.
I would say it just the other way around. Not kidding. And using on production 9.10. Smooth.
I'd better pay for some business features, not just mere space
http://www.linux.com/archive/articles/17595?theme=print

http://www.gnupg.org/aegypten/
If it was just me that liked the concept there's little reason for them to consider implementing it.
If you don't see it, that just means you haven't spent a lot of time studying it.

The concept of someone who's the same exact you but grew up under radically different conditions is a red herring -- by the age of 12, there'd be more differences than similarities, and that's before the things that you're thinking of as "racism", job interviews and police harrassment and the like, have even started.
If you're so understanding of your own psychology, couldn't you just tell your brain the "fixed" sum of say 10x12 or 10x20 and be done with your decision-making?... ;)
I'd say: a design overhaul.

•The icon needs to change.
•The tiles could use custom images and the background could use some texture.
•The font looks great for the title, but I don't know if you should keep it everywhere.
•The two white labels are too close to the edge.
•PB? WR?

Game are about the experience (graphics & sounds) especially on the iPhone. Whether or not people click on your link from a search is heavily based on the icon, too.
I don't think the original code was stupid, it was just done quickly by someone whose background is not in parsers.

If it did the job, it's already ahead of a lot of code out there. Sure, the code was bad and not thought through.

That's kind of how I code when I don't care and need a quick workaround :-)

It takes special people to write beautiful code 100% of the time.
Looks interesting, quick comment on the demo

http://projects.digitalflophouse.com/tempest/example

Maybe move the Coordinates box right under the image and put some text like "Please Click Above To Generate Coordinates"

First thing I did was quickly scan the page and click "Render Heat-Map" button which threw up a php error.

I know it should be obvious that you should click image, but that text was hidden one of the paragraphs.
I think it depends on your 'project' as one person said. if you want to write systems software, or desktop apps C/C++ is a good route, however if you want to write Web Applications it's not, you should pick a scripting language. Pick the language for the task first then on preference. so like one person said python, php, perl, ruby, coldfusion are all good choices for web development... you just pick one of those if that's what you want to do. C/C++/Java(C# Windows) are all good for application developement. C is good for Systems development. Perl/Shell is good for scripting.
Post random censored sentences on your site
So the problem with 7mbs at 50 with 20:1 over subscription rate is, your assuming the local loop is over subscribed (which if its DSL it isn't), and the last mile is frequently the most expensive component.
As far as T1s go, those are a different beast entirely in terms of local loop costs, the standard of support, etc.
Reminds me of Liquid Web who copied rackspace calling it Heroic Support. If you need to be a Fanatic or hero you're doing it wrong. I think I'll start a web host and call it "competent" support.
I am using Ubuntu 9.10 as my primary OS also and it has been nothing sort of satisfactory. However the article does point out a few useful suggestions in order for Ubuntu to be the leader in Linux Desktop Computing.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=927621
The Ruby Guide to *nix Plumbing: on the quest for efficiency with Ruby
enum BabyStatus { sleeping, crying, hungry, smelly };
if (BabyStatus) {
exit(-1);
}
It looks great! I never played this game, but loved the semi-sequel, Flashback.

I'm having issues with Firefox 3.0.15 on Linux, though. It slowed to 5 fps and essentially froze. I'll try Chrome.
I dig my nonstop living :). Non stop cell division, breathing are ok too as long as their rates are in the green zone.

It was an extreme choice of words though. Over exaggeration of a way of perceiving stuff.
You get the added benefit of endorphin-fueled contemplation of the project you're working on.
Anyone has more info about the "not having any furniture" thing? It's the first I hear of it.
Gity (mac git gui)
I don't understand why this isn't a hot topic on HN right now. COFEE basically just installs a suite of mostly standard system administration/analysis tools onto a USB drive, and can then be used to glean info from a suspect's computer without disturbing any running processes (so you can see if they've been logging onto super-illegal-porn.com or dangerously-insecure-server.com etc.). Plus passwords and other good stuff.
Looks like Snow Leopard only.
Thanks, I've done that. I always overlook that kind of thing.
I've been fascinated with scala (http://www.victusspiritus.com/2009/10/31/im-having-way-too-m...) recently.

The perks:
functional and object oriented
compact syntax
lift is an excellent web framework
appears to guide design towards application or library perspectives
Dave Pollack feels that his perception of programs and functions has changed to state modifications and data transformations. I don't quite see it but I'm a noob.
How about setting a price floor, as oldgregg says, to stimulate demand/increase scarcity?

Do you work with an agent?
Is the iTunes tv stuff still DRM'd, or have the shows gone the way of their music? I grabbed an episode of Drawn Together around 2006 (I think), and sort of drove me away from the entire iTunes tv stuff. The quality was terrible, the resolution was something like 320x240, and it would only play through quicktime due to DRM. As I currently keep everything on my file server for easy access from all my computers, that didn't work out well for me.

Right now I just download shows when they're available, and then purchase the DVD when its available. Not technically legal, but I insist on owning my purchases, and I don't feel like waiting a year for shows to come out on DVD.
I might do this when iTunes carries more shows in Canada.

Sadly, the selection has pretty big holes (f.ex. Dexter).
As simonw said, what's interesting is that people kept commenting for 7 years on this blog post. With some interesting notes

* Most of them seem to be Perl folks

* None of the language seem to offer anything new to solve that problem 7 years later

* None of the languages converged, i.e. 7 years laters the advantages and disadvantages of each language seems to be the same
> He could try something with binfmt_misc...

Exactly! And that sounds like it would have been the smartest move from the start. Something like this doesn't need to be in the kernel. It doesn't need to be in glibc, and doesn't need to be in ld. There are probably performance advantages that you miss out on by using binfmt_misc, but that's the perfect way to get your solution working without any external dependencies. You create two userspace tools: 1) an app that stitches together multiple binaries into a FatELF file, and 2) a launcher program that, when given the path to a FatELF file, picks the correct embedded binary and runs it. #2 might need some fancy tricks with the dynamic loader, but it's certainly doable.

Assuming people do like it and use it, only then do you try to get it integrated into the system proper. Why try to push something into three pieces of software very core to Linux and Linux development when there's no evidence that there will be any developer, distro, or user adoption?
AdSense is a pretty ugly way to make money, especially when traffic is low. If you can afford it, focus on building your audience. You may discover alternative, more lucrative, and more 'prestigious' revenue streams than AdSense along the way.

For instance, you may find sponsorships, contests, and affiliate sales to be better, and better in keeping with what your audience wants from you. People actually do like advertising if it a) improves their experience, b) makes it easier to buy a good product, or c) enhances the social status of the brands they buy.
Do not worry about your education getting wasted. C/C++ are probably the most useful languages you can learn. This is the case because (a) most existing code is written in C/C++ and (b) C/C++ are probably as low level as one can get while being hardware agnostic, which means programming C/C++ will teach you the nuts and bolts about computers. Also, if you actually manage to learn C and C++ well most other languages will come to you much easier. So you should consider yourself lucky your school is teaching those languages instead of switching to something they think is easier.

But it is still a good idea to learn a new language just to get a new perspective. I would recommend that you learn a highlevel functional programming one, like Lisp, Scheme or Haskel. This will really give you a different perspective from C/C++ and teach you to think about programming in a completely different way.

I strongly recommend you check out this Haskel tutorial (which I found on HN myself):

http://learnyouahaskell.com/
Anyone else reminded of the Mac vs. PC commercials when looking at http://money.cnn.com/galleries/2009/fortune/0911/gallery.ste... ?
"I think most of the intended audience will not find 'Closure' confusing, because they are unaware of the concept that already has that name."

Pretty sad to expect that so many people working with JavaScript will not know what a closure is.

Not that you're wrong; I honestly don't know, but would hope things aren't so bad.
They have millions of users...if it's something a lot of people want, they will have heard about it from many people already.
Apologies Shouldn’t Be Conditional, Esp. When You Steal From Customers
It's too bad the relevant technical details of the story were overwhelmed by what felt a lot like arrogance and contempt for anyone without extensive experience with parsers.
I think calling this an article might be pushing it.
No, mental retardation is defined by poor functioning in everyday life due to widespread mental deficiencies, or due to profound focal deficiencies. A focal deficiency in IQ alone has to be quite severe before it substantially impairs life skills. Living well mostly requires talents like working well with other people, procedural memory of how to gather and cook food, manual dexterity, learning and ignoring extraneous stimuli, episodic memory, and so forth. These talents do not depend strongly on the symbolic reasoning skills measured by IQ tests.

Your confusion arises from treating correlation as causation. Mental retardation is commonly caused by genetic or developmental problems that cause global brain changes, producing deficits in many or all talents. This usually includes the specialized brain circuits involved in symbolic reasoning, lowering the IQ. So in a population with shared genes and environment, low IQ is strongly correlated with mental retardation, but neither is caused by the other.

"Either our ancestors were dullards, or the IQ test measures something other than innate intelligence."

The Flynn effect proves what we already knew, that human development is partially driven by the environment. Few serious scientists thought that each human is born with a exact fixed amount of smarts, like every atom of iron-56 has 55.93 AMUs of mass.
For the benefit of anyone completely confused by this, it's in reference to the concept of "quantum suicide", associated with the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics. The Wikipedia article explains the basic idea: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_suicide_and_immortality

In this case, the implication is two-fold: that many-worlds is the correct interpretation, and that the alarmists worried that the LHC will destroy the world are (and were) correct.

From that perspective, powering up the LHC can be viewed as a worldwide quantum mass suicide experiment. From a scientific standpoint, this theory would predict that because (by assumption) nobody will be around to observe any world with an operational LHC, we will observe it failing every time, and the more careful we are to prevent possible failures the more implausible the failures that occur will become.

As silly as this sounds, you have to admit it makes a certain amount of sense. I mean, really, a piece of bread? http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/11/05/lhc_bread_bomb_dump_...
Wow, what a useless article. "Early" adopters experiencing bugs?! Clearly the author must be new to "early" adopting. (Why he uses quotes for "early" I don't really understand.)
Google changes direction with Android Open Source Project
Reading this, and seeing how many versions of Android developers are going to have to support (1.5, 1.6, and 2.0) all at once, I wonder what the future of Androids holds for developers and manufacturers that are committing so much to the platform.
If you need a parser, ESR's your boy.
They claim that a poll said only 10 percent of people had a flawless install but the link actually shows 16 percent had a flawless install with another 12.5 percent having only minor problems. I don't know whether those numbers are good or bad. There's a selection bias in the poll (people with problems are far more likely to be cruising the site). I'd like to see a random sample. For myself, I installed Karmic on a quad core desktop and a netbook with no problems at all. The first time I've installed any Unix without any grief.
If you need arrogance and contempt, ESR's your boy.
Head start only raises scores on IQ tests in early childhood. The effect vanishes by the end of the first grade.

This is most likely because children in Head Start become more familiar with IQ test style problems and a testing environment. In short, Head Start (presumably unintentionally) teaches the test.

http://www.eric.ed.gov/ERICDocs/data/ericdocs2sql/content_st...

(Scroll to page 65)