skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Hey, awesome. Can we use this as a vehicle to force people off IE6?

"No banking for you, dear sir, until you upgrade."
The major flaw in StackOverflow is the huge difference in rep you can gain depending on how many people use the same tech as you do. Answering C# questions, even insanely easy ones will get you loads of rep (between +100 to +1000) but that really specific and difficult post about some edge case in a niche technology will probably get you +10 rep, mebbe +30 if you're lucky.
Dell does provide prices on their website. You can pull out your credit card and buy a server without talking to anyone. The purpose of a quote is to negotiate a better price.
This question is not well-defined.

It's defined just well enough to identify you as someone who'd rather debate the problem than attack it. In other words, it has done its job.
Want to take a guess at how many lines of code are in the Linux kernel?
This is something I'm sort of worried about. I've generally kept my casual nickname separate from my real name. If I'm doing something professional or academic, I'll use my real name, otherwise I'll use a pseudonym, and I work to keep them separate.

I've been thinking about starting a programming blog with my real name just so people have something to find when they Google for me.

Of course, it would help if I had some public results to point to with my name on them...
At this point, you need to either be important somehow to the industry or have something really novel to say to get my attention with a Twitter critique. Maybe I'm wrong, but this guy seems like neither; he works for an ad/PR agency, and is saying the same thing everyone else does about Twitter.

Twitter is undoubtedly overvalued because of all the media exposure they've received. But why the f@ck is that supposed to matter to me? Twitter works; I've used it to run surveys, I've used to answer questions, I've used it to find customers, I've used it to fill classrooms for OE courses.

If an ad/strategy person can't figure out how to use the service --- or, better yet, refuses to embrace it for emotional reasons like "the hype bothers me" --- I have to wonder what they're doing in that profession.
Nope:

js> a = {}
[object Object]
js> b = {}
[object Object]
js> a == b
false

== only casts between certain primitive types, it doesn't do a deep comparison:

js> x = null
null
js> y = undefined
js> x == y
true
js> x === y
false

Also undefined comparisons are still true with ===:

js> var _
js> _ === undefined
true

But you're right, === should be the default choice, and only use == if you have a good reason.
Fetchmail is the most famous one. http://fetchmail.berlios.de/
The simplest program that outputs these numbers is the program that outputs these numbers, so it doesn't output anything next.
The purpose of a quote is to negotiate a better price.

I know, which is why I said exactly that in my post =)

That said, I prefer vendors that simply charge everyone the same reasonable price, rather than having such a large profit margin that they can afford to:

1) Pay a sales team to finagle over quotes.

2) Slash their prices on demand.

Obviously, things are a bit different when you're buying in truly massive quantities.
Congrats. Thoughts about what you're going to do with the funding? I have to imagine it's a huge credibility boost.
It also conflicts with gettext libraries. The name '_' should be considered reserved for that purpose.
I mean that if the story is about a person it says hero/jerk...
Please don't post your homework to the list.
Define "simplest program"?
If you Google my name you get a variety of people with my name. For example, I know there's at least one other person with my name on Facebook who also lives in the same geographic region.

As more people get online it becomes harder to differentiate them.
The methods he improved the perf of were in string, array, and struct. I think that counts as "globally improves performance", there are very few non-trivial methods that won't benefit.
Green Planet USA - Green Planet USA
Green Planet USA featuring news on environment, print campaigns and blogs.
Hiring a hacker. If anyone's interested in working with a ramen-profitable startup making waves in the online news space, check out my profile.
Well, reading through your previous comments, you seem like a very knowledgeable guy who shares a lot here. I appreciate that. The insights and discussion from those who have made it and accomplished something great are why I come here.
Can you somehow prove that Koichi made the solution SOOO obvious that even a teenager could have made the fix?

From what little I've read, it seems to me that this kid is pretty smart and has made a very generous contribution to the Ruby community.
Hopefully the last example of his leaving is an aberration due to the circumstances. On top of that we have some lessons learned from the executives brought in post-Steve. e.g. the people who run a company should have some kind of understanding of the vertical.

Looking at this recent absence, it looks like Apple and Steve has done the kind of continuity planning we'd all like to see.
Great, that reminded me to remove something I apparently put on my Google Products wishlist in 2005(?)
This method of computing successive terms of a polynomial actually has an interesting place in the history of computers; the basic principle is the same as that used by Charles Babbage's difference engine.

Wikipedia article on the difference engine: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Difference_engine

Just for fun, a difference engine built with Legos: http://acarol.woz.org/
he obviously hates dealing with regular expressions and I do too. It's only natural.
jaml + node.js + couchdb could make for an interesting web framework.
Jason Fried == Jack Handy 2.0
Monkeys definitely keep it real.
Integrate the constant 48 back to the series level:

48 -> 48x -> 24x^2 -> 8x^3

Subtract 8x^3 from the series

9 - 8•1^3, 73 - 8•2^3, 241 - 8•3^3

and repeat the whole process on this series for the coefficient of x^2, etc...
If you're using GNOME and Compiz, this feature is buried in the settings (run 'ccsm' aka 'Compiz Config Settings Manager'). It's called 'negative' or something like that. I don't recall off-hand if it is enabled/disabled by default or what the default keybinding is, but it's there.
Because you haven't yet done it, perhaps? Having the small character limit really forces you how to get your message across very succinctly. How many times have you read something that could have been boiled down considerably and gotten the point across more clearly? We actually do have meaningful real-time conversations in #profood. I have rarely used two Tweets to make a point.

Having said that, many Tweets are links to #profood blogs.
Ask HN:  How important is "rocket science" to startups
Hi,

Reading the article "The Interview with Y Combinator That’s Not" earlier I thought there was an interesting angle to be explored.

During the interview, the DirectedEdge team got a question, "So where’s the rocket science here?" This clearly attaches some value to the underlying implementation and algorithms.

How critical is having some super-advanced software tech to startup success?
As an individual, I don't like to have to deal with sales people either (but it's possible my orders aren't big enough that they can offer much of a discount).

Most businesses don't feel the same way - they like sales guys, because the orders are larger - and it gives them the feeling that they are getting a special, one-off customized offer. No matter what the listed discounts are on the website, they'll always feel like a custom quote is a better deal (because it's part of the salesman's job to give them that feeling).

AFAIK Dell does offer automated quotes (I found these http://www.dell.com/us/en/business/servers/rack_optimized/ct... for example) - and even he says "I even put the $4000 server that I want to buy in my shopping cart".

So what I think he means he gets the automated quote, but since it's not the 'special offer' he's used to getting directly from the sales guy, he's unhappy.

So it seems that the blog author loves the hardware - but not enough to purchase it at the price listed on the website.

My question in general is, how good are the discounts you get from these a sales guys, typically?

And my question to the blog author is: How much of a discount are you losing now, that you'll compromise on the hardware you wanted.
I can't recall the last time I ordered a pre-built server from anywhere. I build my own. I know the cost, no gimmicks, no countless e-mails back and forth with sales people. Done on my time frame and my budget.
My goal is to establish a successful company that people will recognize as being worthwhile and offering a useful product or service. Then if I'm ever in a position where I'm looking to work for someone else again I can just point to that and say "I did that". Hopefully that'll be enough street cred to get me the job.
IPhone app store rankings are broken (intermittent bug)
I'm guessing that some of you may have noticed the broken app store rankings yesterday.

It is broken again now. So apps that used to be in the top 100 are no longer in that list. Most of the apps that are now in the top 100 look like they got in there because of an app store bug.

I don't know if this is related to the app store app count exceeding 100,000, but it does seem like a bug and the rankings don't seem correct
python -c 'print 9,73,241,561,1081,1849
# or better yet
echo 9,73,241,561,1081,1849
Can anyone reply back with a list of known services which would be affected by this attack? Would like to stay away from them until patches have been circulated...
Spit out a warning that something may not work as expected is much better than actively sabotaging what the user and another company are trying to accomplish.
Home Buyer Tax Credit Extended and Expanded by The Senate
Besides the current low mortgage rates you now have another incentive to buy a home. The Senate has voted to expand and extend the first time home-buyer tax credit that was due to expire at the end November 2009. The House is expected to vote and pass it later today.
Thanks for the resources. I did not know that Google had a tool for this.

I have a few questions. How important is this A/B split testing thing? Is it an essential thing to do? How many companies does these experiments in their websites?
Yeah got me wondering too. So this is a parody? Please confirm someone.
True, but as long as _ is defined as a non-primitive type (namely an object or function) it can be used for both gettext (or underscore.js) and this currying function. All that's required for the currying is that comparison with anything other than itself is false.
What's going to prevent recruiters from seeing these? They're unbelievable pests.
Not to be a jerk, but why? What if gettext isn't important to your current application? (I don't know a lot about gettext; I went and read the blurb.)
I haven't played at all with UE3, but if it's anything like UE2 you get a tremendous amount of power with UScript alone. C++ access would be nice, but you're not too severely restricted by not having it.
Maybe AA's customer service or PR team is unionized, and this was just a CYA maneuver? (I realize that this is a huge stretch, just saying...)
Dialog from Makers, by Cory Doctorow http://craphound.com/makers/Cory_Doctorow_-_Makers.htm

This dialog comes near the end, Lester and Perry discussing the paradox of working for a big company. According to Cory's bio, he never worked in a big company, but he nails it here.

gvb

-----------------------------------------------------------------------

Lester: "They said that they wanted me to come in and help them turn the place around, help them reinvent themselves. Be nimble. Shake things up. But it’s like wrestling a tar-baby. You push, you get stuck. You argue for something better and they tell you to write a report, then no one reads the report. You try to get an experimental service running and no one will reconfigure the firewall. Turn the place around?" He snorted. "It's like turning around a battleship by tapping it on the nose with a toothpick."

Perry: "I hate working with assholes."

"They’re not assholes, that’s the thing, Perry. They’re some really smart people. They’re nice. We have them over for dinner. They’re fun to eat lunch with. The thing is, every single one of them feels the same way I do. They all have cool shit they want to do, but they can’t do it."

"Why?"

"It’s like an emergent property. Once you get a lot of people under one roof, the emergent property seems to be crap. No matter how great the people are, no matter how wonderful their individual ideas are, the net effect is shit."

"Reminds me of reliability calculation. Like if you take two components that are 90 percent reliable and use them in a design, the outcome is 90 percent of 90 percent - 81 percent. Keep adding 90 percent reliable components and you’ll have something that explodes before you get it out of the factory.

"Maybe people are like that. If you’re 90 percent non-bogus and ten percent bogus, and you work with someone else who’s 90 percent non-bogus, you end up with a team that’s 81 percent non-bogus."

"I like that model. It makes intuitive sense. But it’s depressing. It says that all we do is magnify each others’ flaws."

"Well, maybe that’s the case. Maybe flaws are multiplicative."

"So what are virtues?"

"Additive, maybe. A shallower curve."
I'm a little confused by this... so the Unreal Engine 3 (included in the UDK)... isn't the same as what's being distributed to the big-time game development studios?
What an unfortunate name. Perhaps, in the confusion, it will help to actually promote Rich Hickey's wonderful work.
Sorry, have to take my server down quick. Getting DoS'd with the HN visits. Back up in a few minutes after reconfig to make it a little faster. :(
Gartner’s magic hydrant: It gushes money
Apple is preventing you from making your own netbook or phone?
When It Comes to Job Creation Startups Are More Fertile
You, for instance, didn't know about it.

Quite true -- but my attention rather drifted once I got past page 50 of the RFC. I would argue that any cryptographic protocol which cannot be described in less than 10 pages is too complex to be secure.

a finding in Tarsnap is worth $0 to an industry researcher

Come on Thomas, I'm sure it would be worth at least $1 to you to have me shut up about SSL. :-)
Here's a niche marketing idea for you: executable hedge mazes that print out paeans of praise to the owner of the maze.
I don't understand why those people that clamor for stack traces don't also clamor for full histories of their programs' execution.

It's as if we do the loop:

for (x=5; ; x--)
y += 1/x;

And when it throws an exception for dividing by zero, you should want a full "backtrace", with a "frame" for each iteration of the loop.

That's no different than demanding a stack trace for:

(define (loop x)
(set! y (+ y (/ 1 x))
(loop (- x 1))
(loop 5)
Google collects its own information, so it is in control of the quality. When you pull someone's credit report, you don't know if what's listed is entirely accurate, and you don't know what it's omitting. So there is a difference.
You forgot the 'output next', bit of the question ;)
What you're saying makes sense, but I'd like to see the data. In a split test of that email and one without the guy, which would win?

Sadly, I bet it would be the one with the guy.
How to fix the DNS.
Cool PNG!

As an update, I'm still trying to get the semacode software to work in OS X, and it's just not cooperating. Sun recently pre-released a J2ME environment for OSX, which is frustratingly buggy...

Here's a link to the SDK:

http://java.sun.com/javame/downloads/sdk30_mac.jsp

...and here's a link to a thread about the (apparently common) issue I'm having:

http://forums.sun.com/thread.jspa?threadID=5412666

Glad to hear semacode JAR works on cellphones. If you get it working in an emulator, please let us know about it!

EDIT: meh, forget it... the Sun SDK just isn't ready for primetime. Instead, I recommend libdmtx:

http://www.libdmtx.org

It's available from macports, there's wrappers for tons of languages (e.g. python), and although it doesn't magically work with your PNG, I think it only requires a little tweaking...

EDIT 2:

Forget the version from macports... just compile from source, and your PNG works fine using version 0.7.2
There is never an "easy" way to do this. But in the early stages of your venture, there should be very few battle making decisions. Lead by persuasion and team-building. You're only 2 people and don't need a general calling the shots just yet. In the later stages, your role as CEO should emerge from your ability to lead and pursuade. Go 30/30 with vesting, add an options pool of 20% for later employees and 20% for early stage investors. If you are both starting from scratch and equally committed to the venture, the even split is fair and reasonable. But that is a conversation you should have with your co-founder and not us. Be honest about the shortcomings to your potential marriage. Good luck.
Did UnrealEd ever work on Linux? Or just the game?
This is a great story and I'm happy for Mudge, but I wish the story had been a bit more detailed. It pretty much boiled down to "he had this idea, some friends liked it so he didn't quit, he got acquired". When I saw the title, I was hoping for details on what made it all come together.
If OSX tests the hardware to see if it is a Mac and fails on Mac-compatible but non-Apple hardware, then yes: Apple is actively preventing people from building netbooks that run OSX.

It's just not a big problem, IMHO. If you want a Unix netbook, get one and install Linux, *BSD or OpenSolaris and get done with it. All three are much better unixes than OSX
I loaded into excel, then copy and dragged down to see what excel would say is the next 2 answers ... I got the following

...1081,1849,[1890.067],[2248.467].... Now I just wonder how excel got these answers :/
I'm with you. I totally read Closure as Clojure.
Absolutely. Firstly, that I knew about all three.

Notice that, in my post, I reworded the 1st claim to say that it "facilitated" the protesters. (Are you sure that you read my "claims" carefully?) It was a real-time messaging service that the government wasn't able to shut down as easily as cell service that spread the word about what was going on and there is plenty of proof out there. Furthermore, one could argue that the Twitterers counted as "news outlets" supplying information not otherwise easily uncovered. It's like having a free workforce. (Of course, with a lot of Twitterers, you get what you pay for.) You may offer proof that this wasn't the case if you choose.

Secondly, lot's of people have blogged that they love the Kogi truck and followed it to find out when it would be arriving. Another score for real-time messaging from one-to-many. Even the editor of Bon Appetit wrote about it, How many other food trucks do you think she writes about? Major PR score!

Thirdly, the the proof is in the Tweets for all three examples. (I didn't follow balloon boy but I can picture the scenario that anyone interested could follow the balloon's path in real-time.)

Finally, I offered proof of my own claim as to it's usefulness for #profood. Tweet to them otherwise and see what they say.

What I and other posters are saying is that, even though it is a one-to-many messaging service and not a platform, it does have value and that Twitter bashing is as useless as a submarine with screen doors.
I understand but Paul Graham really makes an emphasis on the team, and that a demo is not required. I mean there has to be a way to prove that that the team can produce what they claim: past work, past startups, etc right?
That would be worth much more than $1 to me, personally, but unfortunately not worth enough to offset my bill rate.

Your first argument --- crypto protocols that take more than 10 pages are insecure --- is, I think, asinine. Not you, just the argument. The argument is asinine. You're great. Argument: not so much. Why? Because more damage has been done to Internet security by crypto protocols that can be described in under 10 pages than has ever been done by TLS. Start with PPTP, RADIUS, and RDP, but I can keep going.
First of all, you have to consider who was being quoted (rtm).

Secondly, the statement points to how you protect your IP. If it's something that's easy to make the first time, then it's even easier to duplicate. How do you protect your idea without any kind of "secret sauce"?
The 26th Alliance, FOWA India & 104 advisors for 26 startups
Dell's process has always had that "car salesman" feel... I can get you a better price - Let me talk to my boss.
> And so I want these things--netbooks, phones--that don't exist. Well, fine. I'll make them. But then there are people out there who are actively preventing me from making them, and thus having the things I want. Not only is Apple saying "We don't care about X" but they're saying "we hate X and will prevent it from coming into being." It's being needlessly antagonistic.

Two points here I've been mulling over for the past few days:

1) If Apple did nothing to prevent it (if there was no EULA restriction or DSMOS[1]), running a Hackintosh system would still mostly be about finding supported hardware or getting some unsupported hardware to "mostly work", and there would still be no promises that a point release wouldn't inadvertently hose your system. Honestly, aside from feeling better about breaking the EULA I don't see how it would be that much different.

2) Mostly speaking in regards to the Palm syncing with iTunes, but also in regards to Hackintosh systems, if Apple does nothing then they will be in a position will they will have to support these systems on some level. Taking the Pre as an example, who is the consumer going to blame when a future iTunes update breaks syncing? Who will they call for support?

Consider, if the Pre syncing went on without interference with Apple and worked fairly well it would certainly be included in future devices from Palm, and a similar tactic would likely be employed by other device makers. All it would take would be a change in the iPhone OS or iTunes to piss off millions of consumers. You'd get PC World running "Apple update breaks millions of consumer devices" (or worse yet, something resulting in data loss), with single sentence somewhere at the end about how these features aren't actually supported by Apple anyway. Why would Apple allow this? They are already the target of some absurd outrage as it is.

Not speaking to you specifically, drewcrawford, but it seems like most people don't want Hackintosh systems to be quietly accepted, they want them to be supported and tested.

[1] While I run a few Hackintosh systems, I'm not sure what other intentional barriers are in place other than the DSMOS an the EULA.
It was called Closure before Rich announced Clojure to the world.
I agree. From a startup standpoint we are able to decrease a lot of expenses by simply utilizing public API's. The advantages of open source code for companies meant that you didn't have to go out and purchase software. We are seeing the same thing with API's. The only problem I see with this trend is the dependency of those API's. With open source software such as PHP & MYSQL once I have it installed, I own it, where API's are real time dependency i.e twitter going down, will cause twitter dependent applications to go down as well. As as a developer myself the value proposition is that the data is also available with the API.
I hate talking to sales people--that's why I buy reconditioned Dells from websites that publish their prices.
I can't think of a degree that's more resilient to hard economic times than a programming degree. That being said you should look at the job boards now and decide what kind of work you want. For example a lot of .NET jobs want 2 years ASP.net. So if that's your cup of tea then get started programming ASP.NET sites now, and in two years it should be a piece of cake.
This is great! It should be on my iphone, so I can listen to it on my way to work!