skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Every investor prefers companies with IPO potential. However, IPO potential is more a property of founders than ideas. In 1975, writing a Basic interpreter for the Altair was an idea with IPO potential, because Bill Gates had it.
Care to explain that?

Because their only important clients - those responsible for about 90% of their revenue (Acer, Lenovo, HP, IBM and Dell) - are still buying lots of licenses.
What they teach you as C/C++ is the final point that these languages have come. It is the final outcome of their evolution. It is absolutely normal that you don't get it when they teach you encapsulation, classes, functions, return values, arguments.

How did they get created or conceptualized in the first place? Why do we need them?

Do it the right way: Start with C, and start from the smallest and most fundamental constructs that C has: The structures and functions. Know that there was only assembler in the first place. Then look into how function calls are made. Disassemble the simplest function you have and understand its logic. Now you know why there is a function. Then go into the structure. Disassemble one. Put different types in it, see how they get laid out in memory.

Start as above, and learn how things work down to the last byte. Then eventually you will cover all constructs created and you will know where they come from. Do the above for 3-5 years, each time you encounter a new language idiom or concept.

Finally you will see that in all strongly typed languages most constructs are worthless and they get in your way. You will get back to using C ;-)

You might also go for the much higher level languages or different areas of computing, but since you showed interest in understanding programming deeper, this is the way to go.
I haven't had Cable/Satellite since 2002. I started watching all my TV on DVDs that I bought from Amazon, but then switched to iTunes around 2006.

Now it's mostly a combination of iTunes/DVD - I'm pretty certain it's less expensive than subscribing to TV.

The good part of this (and it should be emphasized) - is that you now watch for a _purpose_ - Latest episode of Lost, BSG, Dexter, Weeds, South Park, Doll House, BtVS, Angel, The Wire, DeadWood, Heroes, The Office, Dr. Horrible, Mad Men, Parks and Recreation, Castle, Californication, Dr. Who, Kings, Sarah Connor Chronicles, True Blood, Torchwood.

Any time that might have been lost to just passively watching television, news, is now, of course, lost to passively reading ycombinator, nyt, wsj, groklaw... :-)
And in reasonably idiomatic recent Python, the whole thing'd be:

#!/usr/bin/env python
import fileinput
import csv

EMAIL, CONTACTME, SKUTITLE = 17, 27, 34

tsl = csv.reader(fileinput.input(), dialect='excel-tab')
for line in sorted([r[SKUTITLE], r[CONTACTME], r[EMAIL]] for r in tsl
if r[CONTACTME] == "1"):
print "\t".join(line)

It's going to be good in any language though, isn't it?
The best way to get this right in Perl:

use List::Util qw(shuffle);
shuffle(@list);
Agreed. I haven't held the Droid, but most video reviews of the interface reveal a need to re-click items and a delay in scrolling/reacting to touch commands. That's my impression anyway. This doesn't happen with regularity on the iPhone.

I'm not saying this is a show-stopper; Android will get there. What's amazing, however, is that we're almost 3 years past Steve Jobs' first demo of the iPhone at Macworld, January 2007. I still can't believe how well they nailed it, first time.

I own an iPhone, but I love the open nature of Android. Whatever the Droid may lack in fit and finish it is going to be more than made up for by the degree of control it places in the owner's hands.
Wow, that's a lot of practices.

I generally go by Damian Conway's rule of thumb: 10 hours preparation time for every hour of talking, or 20 hours prep if it's a difficult talk. I make sure the preparation includes at least one full run through (out loud in an empty room, usually my hotel room) with plenty of time to spare to fix things that inevitably come up. I'll do another run through once I've made the changes.
Great... so every time you guys down-vote me I get stupider.

Edit: fixed grammar after being upvoted.
Is there anything like this for Python? I know there's Google App Engine, but to deploy a Django app it seems like you need to specifically write your app to work there. Where as this appears to be a solution to deploy any rails based app as is.
It's not a bad question, really. One reason is that JavaScript is the only popular language with no standard library.
That's pretty expensive to be buying those episodes from Apple. $35 a season? Why not get netflix and watch them online or get the DVDs in the mail? I guess this is a better solution if you are further ahead in the series you are watching.
As it's written I'll blow the call stack before I see a performance decrease. :)

Actually, the algorithm is O(n), it's essentially a list reversal with a call to random inserted. In psuedocode:

oldlist = [...]
newlist = []

if oldlist not empty
do
x = remove random from oldlist
insert x into newlist
repeat

Of course, I'm ignoring the complexity of 'butnth' in that assesment, but this was just a 'first instinct' sort of deal.
I don't mean they should mess with the backup. Only that talking about deleting the data is not very productive since the data won't ever be completely deleted. What can be talked about is data usage, confidentiality or specific "deleting" mechanisms.
Just read volume 4 of TAoCP when it appears in print :-).

Actually, if your game is not about real money, this problem might be more of an academic curiosity, but there are some algorithms with very long periods, start at one of these pages to look for an algorithm with weaknesses that you can live with:

- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mersenne_twister

- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blum_Blum_Shub

- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pseudorandom_number_generator
Fully agree with this, SICP won't make you an expert, but it will take away much of your feelings of being lost.

Text: http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/full-text/book/book-Z-H-4.html#...

Videos: http://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/classes/6.001/abelson-sussma...

I'd recommend at least the first video lecture and see if you like it.
It sounds like a nice hobby, but I'm not sure it's a sound business.

Your content is going to have to be pretty stellar to be able to charge $3-5/month, and you're going to have to have a fairly significant subscription base if you want to cover your expenses and pay yourself (and your writers, etc.) a decent wage.

And that's assuming, of course, you a) have easy access to some top-tier songwriters, and b) are a great interviewer. (Many great songwriters are notoriously difficult interviews....)
Between your lack of comprehension of "factor of 20 speedup" and "20 orders of magnitude", combined with the fact that this seems to be the person who wrote PuTTY, I'm pretty sure he wouldn't want to be working for you anyway.

Also, when did it become wrong to point out people's stupidity when they do something as utterly stupid as (quite clearly) demonstrated in the article?
But that misses the point of the exercise. :)
Think about how many people have to work, and for how long, on every OS fix Microsoft publishes, and you have a starting point.
I didn't like the butnth. I get an allergic reaction to append. Blame Ken Tilton.

(defun shuffle-in-place (l)
(cond ((null l) nil)
(t (rotatef (nth 0 l)
(nth (random (length l)) l))
(shuffle-in-place (rest l))))
l)

(defun shuffle (l)
(shuffle-in-place (copy-list l)))
Even on a laptop with English versions of Windows and Firefox and my Google accounts language set to English, it still displays that page in Chinese.

What a terrible design choice, assuming the intent is to make it easy for users to see how much of their personal information is out there.

For anybody frustrated by this behavior, the way to force it into English is to append ?hl=en to the end of the URL.
The best example of this is the Flynn Effect - IQs have dramatically risen over time. Either our ancestors were dullards, or the IQ test measures something other than innate intelligence.

"If American children of 1932 could take an IQ test normed in 1997 their average IQ would have been only about 80.[2] In other words, half of the children in 1932 would be classified as having borderline mental retardation or worse in 1997." (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect)
not a bad question, though poorly (immaturely) articulated.

in addition to mbrubeck's comment, i'd say that javascript has grown from merely providing neat actions to webpages, to being model, view and controller.

at my startup we (er, the other developer) ported/mimic'd django's mvc to javascript. we're building a firefox extension, so this is particular critical as the extension must provide the full mvc for the "website."

edit: as a ff extension, our models are backed by sqlite files. in jester and kiwi are models objects? that is, are these frameworks purely for client-side applications, or for javascript-server stuff?
Poll: Should you run ads from day 1?
Early on adsense, will make you a couple of bucks...maybe. Do you think it's worth running adsense from the start, or do you think it's better to wait to grow the audience and then monetize them.
Yes, you should run adsense from the start, to get users acclimated to seeing ads on the site.
No, you shouldn't run any ads early on, to avoid scaring off potential users/advertisers.
I'm soooooooo glad, that first, there is an explanation for this on wikipedia and second I read here that I'm not the only one.

I suffer from hypoglycemia and have a very unstable bloodsugar level. With that comes that during the day I fall asleep. During the night I sometimes have to much energy and can't sleep deep enough. Sometimes I fall asleep very quick when I hit my bed. But after a few minutes I wake up and experience sleep paralysis so it seems.

What makes me curious is the effect on the brain. I read that people get scared or paranoid for a few seconds. I sometimes start to blasphemy or get a low voice in my head. In other words, I can't move my tongue properly either. Or so I think I can't.

Very interesting to read about something I couldn't talk about with somebody else until now.

Thanks for posting this subject!
Title is incorrect - the post is dated March 22, 2007 (which, in some ways, makes it more interesting).
C is indeed imperative, but so is python and scheme too. In fact, both scheme and python are multi-paradigm languages, where both support functional (lambda calculus), object-orientation and imperative statements. If you want to focus on learning your computer, in a von Neuman way, then C is perfect. C++ is a dead horse, that should be left alone. But with scheme, you can focus 100% on algorithm development. That is not true with C/C++, which strictly speaking requires extreme caution with regard to manual memory management. Python is fun too, but has mainly gained more momentum than scheme because it has a more pragmatic focus on building and maintaining libraries with backward comp.. If the God of scheme manages to summon their rXrs camps into one 'multi-cultural' one - then we can expect scheme to mainstream adoption.
Your link is pointing to the article from 2007. Here's the followup he wrote yesterday titled "The Django community in 2009" http://jacobian.org/writing/django-community-2009/
That's just saying Microsoft isn't efficient - they make lots of bugs, then have to fix them.

I doubt they loose much revenue from OS vulnerabilities.
I guess if I want some traffic on my blog, I'll title it Emacs vs Vi =].
But that's a fixed cost, not a variable one. They have to issue the fix, period. The poster's point was that MS does not lose money because of an OS vulnerability directly. Here, however, they do.
Marissa Mayer: The Visionary
Short Story:A Father
... and not really related to HN IMHO.
Blame Ken Tilton.

I do. Always.

One could use nconc instead of append, but that's not where the processor cycles are being lost as far as I can tell.
You could exploit the fact that you're sorting numbers and get a better time complexity:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radix_sort

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bucket_sort
That's different. In the early days of the web, the quality of any board <<<<< forum was destined to plummet every September, then slowly rise with attrition until after Spring break.

But then maybe there aren't that many students here ???
It's not O(n): both 'nth' and 'butnth' are themselves O(n), and get called 'n' times. I'm fairly certain you'll end up with O(n^2) unless you introduce mutation. I'm also fairly certain there is no purely functional O(n) algorithm. ;)
The 50th Law: 10 Lessons in Fearlessness (50cent Robert Greene)
wait, so verizon is actually allowing the google maps gps app for free?
distribution of random numbers might not be random enough to get decent results, right?

This is a problem, but it will be a problem no matter what algorithm you choose. You can always use something like http://www.random.org/ or special hardware, but I'd just look to /dev/random and whatever your default psudo-random generator is for your platform.
I don't know where people get the "Happy Days" type concept of the past that this piece talks about. If you watch old (American) movies, relationships between men and women were typically portrayed in a very awkward, stilted, "I have no idea how to talk to you" kind of way. I strongly suspect that reflected actual cultural norms to some degree or another.
That problem (not enough entropy in your PRNG state) isn't specific to the particular way of shuffling: it applies just the same if you do a Fisher-Yates shuffle, for instance.
I think JavaScript will become a good option for the server, too (or already is so). Furthermore, lots of things can be scripted with JavaScript, including Photoshop. Although a couple of years agao I was warned against scripting PS with JS, so I am not sure.
You're right of course; I'm not looking very deeply.

I'm also fairly certain there is no purely functional O(n) algorithm.

(defun nth (index list)
(if (zerop index)
(first index)
(nth (1- index) (rest list))))
Émile: A 50 Lines-of-Code JavaScript Animation Framework
Internet Business Models of the TechStars
No, the fact that IQ can change does not prove that it can be intentionally changed. Head start, the increases in IQ that African Americans experienced when they moved out the segregated South, the Flynn effect, etc. also do not definitively prove that IQ can be intentionally changed. All they do is strongly suggest it. However, I have yet to see any evidence that would strongly suggest that IQ is impervious to change that is anywhere near as convincing as the above. Even identical twin studies (which have inherent problems with them) suggest that a large percentage of IQ is determined by the environment. Definitive proof is very hard to come by when it comes to human behavior. Just because something has not been definitively proved does not mean it is wrong.
The original post can be found in this Google cache:

http://74.125.155.132/search?q=cache:3hxOgSPu460J:bountii.co...

If that doesn't work, the text has also mysteriously made its way into this EtherPad:

http://etherpad.com/0feqRE5pmE
I'm sure you're right. Plus, in the sciences, he knows how his colleagues minds work (and all the politics). Dirac probably kept mostly quiet about his doubts because Bohr, the Godfather of QM, thought QM was the Cat's Meow, which Schrodinger didn't. And Schrodinger knew that he pulled his famous equation out of a hat (not derived).

Likewise with Feynman, who always repeated "nobody understands quantum mechanics."

Too, because of the very competitive culture in the hard sciences, you don't talk about things that are poorly understood. Because if you make a mistake, you'll catch a lot of (friendly or unfriendly) ribbing later.
It still costs you £120 though.
Game developer RedLynx seeds own game on torrent sites
Great, so every time I apply to YC I'm getting stupider.
Heck, if they want to sabotage their own brand why go out of your way to stop them? The urge to over-extend a good brand seems to strike every large company.
in retrospect, yes.
I've been to a few conferences with Scott and watched a few presentations. Stand up guy.

He is one of the best out there, excited to see the rest of the book.
If you are going to be running ad's eventually, it's better to start off right from the beginning. At the least, you will be making some cash (however meager).
With digital downloads you also get to keep the episodes forever.
This is/was one of my fav games of all time...played it on an old Macintosh back in the day! <props>mad</props>
Well, almost. You may have to modify existing apps to deal with having a read-only filesystem, e.g. anything that accepts user uploads.
The traditional view is similar to IQ as an empty glass. You can fill it up to the top, but once you're there, you've maxed out on IQ itself. Different people have differently sized glasses, and there are many things that clearly affect the rate or amount of fill, just as there are many things that affect height. However, there are few things that indicate that they are increasing the potential IQ.

Losing a tire in my car won't make me lose any horsepower, but it's not going to be the same ride.
I totally agree. You can do really awesome stuff with high level languages too. JQuery has had a huge impact, for example.

The parent post nails it: Find something you want to build and then build it.

I'd add that once you build it you'll probably learn enough to want to rebuild it without all the mistakes... and once you do you'll probably want to rebuild it a third time.

It's supposed to be fun. Work on something you love so much that you work on it until your hands need a break from the keyboard.
Having written apps for both iPhone and Android I rate iPhone over Android - around 10x better - both as a user and as a developer.
Content Management Systems Without The Need Of A Database
What a complete nerd. I love it.

Dangerous, brainy AND fun.
Ken Auletta talks Google on Charlie Rose (type "Auletta" into large search box)
No. Never run ads right from the start.

Advertisements hinder user experience. Startups with the best user experience (and value) to visitors will succeed. A startup who works on implementation and user experience before monetizing the site has a better chance of success.

This is not to say you shouldn't think about how to monetize in the future.
Just click the above instead.

Can Anon84 (or mod) link the original in the title instead? I enjoyed the post, but it'd save people time.

Not to be stern but: Please submit the original source. If a blog post reports on something they found on another site, submit the latter.
Found it--it's a Prohance Powermouse 70. Looks like it has the standard left/right buttons, plus 15 additional buttons. Normal config is F1-F10, plus esc, ctrl, user, fn, and enter. The driver allowed you to customize it for apps such as AutoCAD. Typical mechanical ball mouse guts, DE-9 serial connector. Actually pretty high quality, as you'd expect for a CAD peripheral back in the day.

Couldn't find an images online (I could take one if anyone is really interested), but I did see that someone was trying to reverse engineer the protocol:
http://stuartl.longlandclan.yi.org/blog/2006/03/03/reverse-e...

chadaustin's mention of a custom mousing surface makes me think he was looking at a digitizer, although it could have been an old school optical mouse, such as the ones Sun used to use.
Choice quote:

“Get in a bit over your head,” she says. “That’s how you grow and learn and stretch yourself.”
I can't help but think that this is another Joost in the making.
Split test it and measure the actual impact. Don't guess.
You only need a UK TV licence to watch live TV online, not replay things that have already been broadcast.

iPlayer Doesn't Require A TV Licence... Yet:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/bbcinternet/2008/01/iplayer_does_...
On the other hand, this is such a glaring security flaw that it's hard to have much sympathy for Microsoft (or Microsoft's infamous legal department), since this could cause significant problems for a merchant. The people deserve to know the truth. ;-) Thank you for making this public.
Perl's dereferencing semantics are atrocious. I love the language, but figuring out which combination of sigils dereference something can take forever. I'm so very glad they included arrow notation, that's literally saved me hundreds of hours. I've always had the impression that the basic dereferencing ($$r[$SKUTITILE]) semantics were more a function of clever Larry thought he could be than something that was well planned.

If I'm not mistaken, the dereference notation changes again in Perl 6, but I haven't bothered to really check it out until the releases reach a production level.
Once he explained that usernames were recorded in many different places and that it would be very difficult to change them all.

Hacker News is great, but the software behind it makes me a little uneasy
I meant for perfect shuffling, not 'nth'. :)

This is for you, since I've already had three today & the brainos in your nth implementation are a strong indication for its prescription:

http://www.espressoguide.net/resources/images/articles/A002I...

Cheers!
you can always use the space you will stick adverts into in the future to put up graphics and stuff that promote your own site/brand if you don't want to run with them from day one.
Yes, it was posted before, a few times at least. And looking at the videos and reading the comments makes it clear that the design does, in fact, have a fuse.
Sounded great to me. So I went to look at Apple TV on apple.com and I can't figure out how to see what TV shows are available. Help?
I was looking up Facebook on Alexa, and I came across this...
Tufte would be proud of this.
Latest DVB-S, S2 transponders update 11-07-2009 | fastsatfinder.com
Satellite transponders list for ProgDVB, FastSatfinder, DreamBox... only C-Band, only Ku-Band, sorted by satellite and regions.
It doesn't matter: no one is visiting your site. Deal with that problem first.
even better: the first ones to chip in pay less, and then other people will have to fork out more, as they will be able to share documents with a larger user base.
An alternative between Yes and No is to build the site with the intention of running ads but instead reserve the space strictly for website announcements, to help with conversion, or as way-finders for directing user-flow. This way you set a precedent with the user and should the time come that you need to turn on 3rd party ads, then it should be significantly less disruptive.

I still caution anyone from overloading their new site with ads, it will definitely turn off a lot of users... especially if advertising revenue (specifically banner ads) are not a big portion of your model.
The curve for young black educated men was actually the most shocking for me. It doesn't follow the smooth, more predictable trending that most other groups show.
I would think the real question here is, "do I start charging for my product from day 1?" whether it be through ads, subscriptions, or purchases.

The answer is, "it depends". I say yes, charge for your product immediately.