skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I understand your point. I've work with people at both extremes:

- Negative people ruins ambiance and creates resentment. They think everything is doomed, and criticizes everything all the time. Their usual last words : "Anyway it won't work".

- Cheerleaders as you are calling them refuse to face the real problems, delaying the inevitable until it's too late.

None of these attitudes are productive, and they are not held by people who both care and grasp the situation. Sometimes cheerleaders care, they just don't understand what's happening (eg managers who don't understand anything about technology...).

By saying "here's why, and here's how to fix it", you show that you care, so you're definitely on the right path. The problem is that once you've said "That sucks" whoever you are talking to will stop listening. So it doesn't matter whether you say "That sucks, here's why, and here's how to fix it", or just "That sucks". It's pretty much the same.

And that's the hard point. How to make people understand that something is wrong without making them go defensive. A common "trick" is honest praise. Honest. It must absolutely be honest otherwise it will fail. Something positive. Just find something great, praise it, and only then you can throw your critic, in a humble way. A critic must never feel like a critic, but more like an encouragement.

It might sounds stupid, but it works. It's often easier to have people do a u-turn by pushing them forward.

And it will give much more weight to your words when you actually have to throw a "Well, if we continue like that, we're doomed.". If you are known are someone positive, that will make people think...
My dad is a thermal dynamics engineer at Lockheed Martin. He helped design the Dewar for the payload. The Dewar is a giant thermos containing enough liquid helium to keep the satellite's sensitive instruments cooled to below 4 degrees kelvin for the duration of the experiment (1 year).

http://einstein.stanford.edu/gallery/dewar/dewar_lift.jpg

The team had a bet going on how long the satellite would be able to record meaningful data while in orbit. He won the pool after guessing correctly to within +- 24 hours on the year-long mission. This is my dad on the left :

http://einstein.stanford.edu/Library/images/He_dep-MOC-1.jpg

Like jmillikin says, the science team collected terabytes of data and ran over several deadlines to report their findings. The precision required for the experiment is really quite phenomenal. Measuring discrepancies in gyroscopic alignment to within the 4 marcsec/yr is not trivial.
Ask HN: Ways for reading open source code bases?
Hi all,

Can any suggest a good way of understanding a largish code base (thousands of lines)? Is there any tools to help you visualize/understand a code base? In particular, i'm looking for tools for javascript/ruby/python code bases. Thank you very much!
Sorry, but when I read required Java, I immediately stopped. The app looks super cool but Java simply hangs my system.
As long as you have the "here's why," I think the "here's how to fix it" can be deferred- either to someone with domain expertise, or until you've had time to think of a better solution.
my mistake ... what i meant to say was lexical variables, lexical closures also needed the concept of references.
Black boxes look much more secret agent?
I bet the offer went: how about 30mil to prevent you from bitching on hacker news when we launch this same functionality on wave?
It's every Monday night here in Pittsburgh.
Xmonad is a revelation for anyone who spends most of their day on the computer. It takes about a week or two to adapt, but it's a great productivity enhancement. Its really a kind of desktop construction kit: I find myself making layouts that suit my work, mood, and hardware. Like emacs or hypercard, it has that "quality without a name" thing about it. It changed the way I think about user interfaces: there are opportunities for the ideas from xmonad and xmonad-contrib to be applied to window and view management on all sorts of devices and environments.

I'm glad to see someone's really thought about and implemented a way to introduce others to this great piece of software.
I've only experienced issues once with a local store, and a call to Apple's Customer Hotline (or whatever it's called) fixed that real quick. I was in a situation similar to yours (starting a new job, had to have the machine), and I was told I had to wait for them to repair it. After a number of back and forth conversations over a day or so and the manager ignoring me for a second time when I tried to appeal in person, I called the hotline.

The store called 2 hours later to tell me to pick up a new, updated machine, ready to use with my data transferred over (keep in mind the issue I took the original machine in for was super minor).

I know it's anecdotal, but every time I've had to interface with Apple people, it's been nothing but pleasant (even with the App Store).
This is an aside--fogus, you are on fire today. 5 posts in the top 30? Where do you find all this good material. :)
I didn't know that, but saw it last night on /r/pittsburgh... I would go see The Road and eat $.20 wings tomorrow night but apparently they aren't showing it at the South Side theater.

http://iheartpgh.com/2009/11/29/5-movies-and-more/?utm_sourc...
http://gigapedia.com/
Yup, getting the pop-up as well and it won't go away, so I can't read the article. I'm on Safari/Mac.
Not to be too critical, but that quote is traditionally ascribed to Cicero, not Michelangelo. (Though sourcing the quote to something that Cicero actually wrote is absurdly hard on the Internet.)
I like physics, but as a layman I have no idea what they are demonstrating. (Something to do with relativity, got that...) A little background information would be appreciated!
Yes! And the dragon curve can be written as an L-system, of which Hilbert curves are a special (space-filling) subset. Great tie-in, thank you.
Like what movie studios do. The general 'most popular' list is the highest grossing films of all time, which is based on box office receipts not the number of tickets sold.

Apple could do something similar - highest grossing games, not just number sold. Would balance out factors like those the OP discuss.
Google Code Search:

http://www.google.com/codesearch

I use it for working my way around Google's codebase, which is a few orders of magnitude bigger than that.

Also, there's no substitute for getting your hands dirty and diving into the code. You don't really understand something until you've changed it a few times. Grab a couple of low-priority bugs and write some patches for them; you'll learn far more than if you just sit down and study things.
Not one that, according to the original poster's definiton, would qualify Haskell as a pass-by-reference language.
Is vertical integration (finally) sexy again?
I found this article rather surprising since I come from a primarily Java background.

Do any other languages besides C++ allow this definition of pass-by-reference? The reason I ask is that it seems silly for me to change the way I talk just to satisfy one language that i don't even code in.

And if so, when would it actually be practical to use this? The idea of reassigning a parameter in a function and then having that reassignment affect variables OUTSIDE the function sounds very strange to me (and possible even dangerous).
Mud & Mayhem 4x4s - Join Club
>> Build start-up -> Cash in on nepotism?

Calling it as nepotism is quite unfair, dont you think ? Both are quite awesome products. Even if these acquisitions might be made for the talent, it might be worth it for Goog.
Creating a Flash platform game with Flixel - Victory State
I like the idea. Why are online apps not offering personal notifications as a RSS / Atom feed already?
I like watching Security Theater as much as the next guy, but this season's plot is so thin, I'm having trouble suspending disbelief.
Once upon a time, a client of the day job dropped a substantial Perl codebase on our desk and said "Tell us what this does." My boss gave me the job, and expected me to actually READ all the code, but given that I had no desire to read through 100 kloc of Perl code commented only in Japanese, I went for visualization instead:

1) Inspect several files for commonalities. Thankfully, the author was obsessive compulsive about coding standards.

2) Write a parser for the Perl they used. Use it to glean what pages of the site were connected to each other and what the flow control was like. (a -> b, b -> c, b -> d, etc)

3) Plot that on a graph (all hard work already done for me: http://rgl.rubyforge.org/rgl/index.html )

4) Visually inspect the graph to learn non-obvious things about the codebase like "Oh, there is an English language version of the site embedded in here. Isn't that TOTALLY UNDOCUMENTED." Do a bit more code to chop the graph into subgraphs by related functionality (signup flow, admin functions, etc etc).

5) Spit out all the code into HTML pages with appropriate autogenerated navigation, inline flow control graphs, and syntax highlighting. Do a bit of quality control, add in some comments about notable things I had learned, burn on CD and hand to customer.

6) Charge customer $X0,000 for the CD. The customer was overjoyed they got it done so cheaply. (Did I mention 100 kloc of Perl?)
You preferred a woman in your bed other than your wife last year, for interacting . Around that time, you vaguely recall it was considered faster than taking the train; and you found it far easier to do than be honest about what you want and how you feel. (You recall during lying to your wife during this installation, you kept signalling to your wife that you came to her every weekend because you loved her who you hadn't told that another woman had entered your life. Someone at the office had an idea what you were supposed to just keep telling your wife: to ignore the seven years your were married and the seven previous years she had spent working while you were slacking off doing nothing but post on JoS, prodding people until finally one commited suicide. That actually worked.)

Maybe things have changed in the interim?
Why does knowing it make you worse off? If you're a man, you're better off knowing it, because confidence can be increased by practice. If you're a woman, you're also better off, because you can better distinguish confidence from real skill in men.
I can't help but remember all the fuss a few days back from the UEA scientists applying corrections to their own climate change data.

These guys spent years coming up with complex modifications to the raw data in order to match the frame-dragging they were expecting to see. Are we going to accuse them of falsifying data and bowing to political pressure too?
This might add some light on the phone calls from higher up the chain - and also has the advice that this month is the time to contact Apple Support. http://www.cringely.com/2009/12/ask-and-ye-shall-receive/

(The gist of Cringely's post is that Apple want to top the JD Power listings for quality and support. This means that this month apple will bend over backwards to ensure they're keeping people happy)
Now is the time to start demanding customer service from Apple.
Instead of mimicing method dispatch, shouldn't this be handled by a factory that returns an appropriate action object?

Okay, the author writes:

> Skeptics may say, that problem has been solved in the Object Oriented world by [...] Wow, that is a lot of work, and think about the number of classes and lines of code you will end up with!

First, you don't have classes in a prototype-based language. Secondly, do it right or don't do it at all.
OO + JVM + tail calls, and being an expert debugger
The term fits here. Lala is more than just a streaming site. It has some of the features that the iTunes application offers. All your music could be stored in the cloud.
Google mails 2D barcodes to local businesses
It used to be very common in Turbo Pascal, where if I remember correctly you had to use the keyword ref.
His problem is staying faithful to - or at least honest with - his wife. This is the real problem he is facing.
How should a function be "user" specified? (But which user?) The set of eligible options is well defined at the time of writing the program.
QRcodes (and the wide variety of barcode scanning products) never reached critical mass:
- it wasn't worth it for individuals to learn how to use it unless there were businesses that had them,
- it wasn't worth it for businesses to install them unless individuals knew how to use them.

Google might just have broken that barrier by mailing out 150,000 QRcodes.
Amazon to open brick-and-mortar retail shops in Britain?
This is truly the one amazing thing Dell has over Apple.

One of the fan filters on my Dell laptop got clogged, which caused the graphics chip to overheat (resulting in slow graphics performance and blasting fans). I called Dell in the afternoon on a Monday and did 15 minutes of troubleshooting. They said it might be a problem with the model of graphics card or motherboard.

The next morning there's a Dell tech taking my machine apart, fixing it, and walking out in 20 minutes. Total disruption to my work was less than an hour that week.

Another time I was traveling (for work) in another country and I broke my laptop (dropped it). Dell had a contractor in my office with replacement parts the next day. I didn't have coverage on it though, so that time cost me a few hundred. I'd probably have been SOL with Apple though.
Don't hire someone unless you have tons of money. If you have less than a million dollars, the following advice will suffice.

Buy some geographically diverse index funds.

Keep some money in CDs if you want guaranteed returns that give up some liquidity, and some money in a high-yield savings account.

Keep the rest in checking.

Buying a house is also a good investment if you know where you want to live for a while.
Barnes & Noble Nook review: Interesting, but not a Kindle killer
Maybe try this book? http://www.amazon.com/Code-Reading-Open-Source-Perspective/d... I'm not sure how good it is.
I was not making a value judgment on these acquisitions.

However as Google is a publicly traded company, if I were a shareholder I would want to know if my money is being paid to friends of decision makers.

It would be interesting to see how many of Google's acquisitions have involved ex-Googlers?
But I bet you have Flash installed (which performs worse than Java).
Just a reminder, lots of things in that article are simplified quite a bit for the sake of putting together a coherent argument. The app store, in our experience, has an AWFULLY long tail. But our games have also been pretty successful - I would say the more complete statement is that you will do 50% of your lifetime revenue in the first 2 months, but it will take at least a year or so to earn the other half. That's not insubstantial by any means, but it also means that that revenue isn't terribly useful for building your next project (this is again a simplification, as the situation changes when you have more than one app bringing in that stream, etc etc).

So yea, I didn't mean for it to sound quite so dramatic, like the app store doesn't have any tail at all, because that's not really true. But for getting a read on your product's success and earning some useful revenue for the next project, those first 2 months in my experience are key.
I see the point about having an enterprise level of support.

I also see two edge cases.

I've had an LCD screen replaced (fo' free) 2 years outside the warranty period —

My first Mac, so it made an impression.

So all you had to do was wait for a postage-paid box and send it back?

As an aside, Apple's Bluetooth mice have always seemed terrible, IMHO.
(Did I mention 100 kloc of Perl?)

Hey, you got off easy. Just imagine how much more work it would have been if everything had been done in a single line of Perl. :-)
Apparently your sense of humor is too subtle for some other HNers!
I would also like to know about the quality/valuation diffrence between ex goog startups and non ex goog startups. May be ex googlers build better startups? a lot of ex paypalers made solid new companies. Had paypal acquired them I don't think we'd be criticizing them.
Same had happened to me. My guess is that not informing you that you can't vote is intentional. It's like making troll comments disappear but not letting the troll know.
If it was me, I'd have:

#1 Used software to manually control fan speed (watching temp).

#2 Bought a $10 USB Bluetooth device.

I hate shipping/going to stores for support.
would "could storage" be more appropriate?
Those spiral arm things sure look fractal to me, but I agree that this plot is much more serene than the Mandelbrot set or Sierpinski triangle, for instance.
Looking at the dates on the document, it was last revised in May 2008, so it seems like the horse left the stable some 18 months ago as far as actual bad guys and spies (who presumably seek out this information more actively than your or I) are concerned.
Here's another way to look at it: not only do they get their employees to spend 20% of their time working on their own cool stuff for Google, they have ex-employees spending 100% of their time working on their own cool stuff for Google. :)
I downloaded it earlier but it seems to have been taken down now. Very interesting. I bet that will lose some people their jobs - but I think it definitely highlights an underlying issue within the government bureaucracy that shows why people getting paid 30k with degrees from the University of Phoenix shouldn't be entrusted with national security... I wonder how many security people that passed through...
Ask HN: Good alternative to Google reader
I'm tired of Google and want to quit all it's services and products. But my feeds are important for me and I would like to port them.

Can anyone suggest a good alternative to Google Reader (preferably web-app) which also imports my google reader feeds and saved items? The saved items are important as well.

Ps. Please do not suggest bloglines because I only switched to Google Reader because bloglines started to suck so bad it was not funny.

Pps. The reasons for me trying to quit google are a different story and I would like to keep answers to this question focused on good feed readers

Edit: I forgot to mention that I would prefer to have a free service with a possible paid upgrade
If you open the file in Adobe Acrobat Pro, there's a tool called "TouchUp Object" that lets you literally just click and delete the boxes.
So the decision comes down to sell now and take the guaranteed money, or roll the dice and go for the big win.

As anyone who watches Cash Cab knows, take the money and run.
Absolutely right. It is maybe not insecure in itself. But as we all know: More possibilities to get into the server increases the possibility for an attacker to find an open door. Maybe everybody who has the right to grep and tail should get ssh access anyway.
But wether or not this App is useful: Nice implementation. Looks usable and gives clear output.
The cited article (thanks for the citation to that year 2000 article, which I wouldn't call "recent" on this subject) doesn't address the point I asked you about. There isn't any proof whatsoever that current human beings are fixed in "general intelligence" as soon as their genome is fixed. Rather, there is entire agreement among all researchers that each human being's neurological characteristics are shaped both by genome and by experience--on this point no informed person has any doubt.

I also think that we will not do this complex and interesting topic justice if we discuss it here.

You are welcome to speak for yourself on that issue, of course. But on my part, I have observed that there are some HN readers who do their homework on genetic and environmental influences on human intelligence before expressing opinions on those issues, and I have learned from some of those participants and so could anyone else who cares to read their comments.

I did not mention the Intelligence Quotient (which is subject to boosting). I mentioned the general intelligence factor (which is mostly innate).

It is for you to show that there is any practical way to make this distinction, because general intelligence is investigated in human subjects with IQ tests as the main instrument. See any of Ian Deary's extensive writings on this subject for how difficult it is to identify "general intelligence" without looking at IQ.
OT, I wonder how different the world would be if Larry Summers hadn't said that in his speech. He might still be president of Harvard and Obama would have chosen someone else to direct the NEC. Such large consequences from such a small thing.
it also gives the message of: "Every character is equally important".

That's a perceptive insight. I never thought of it that way before.
Kleiner Perkins Joins the Private Sale Rush
I wonder how this would this work for windows that can't be maximized, such as dialogue boxes. Does anyone have any experience using tiling managers here?
He subscribes to a great many of the same feeds that I do, but he usually submits the links first (he's the initial submitter on ~5 links a day!). It'd be interesting to graph story upvotes over time, distinguishing /\ ones from double-submissions.

I didn't see this one in my reader, though the author is a member: http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=KirinDave
Here's a version with the redactions lifted and the areas highlighted. http://cryptome.org/tsa-screening.zip
Combinator
apa yg anda btuhka? smoga ad di sni!
Impossibility depends on your set of techniques. The Abel-Ruffini theorem only applies if you are trying to solve them in terms of radicals. However exact solutions to any degree polynomial are known in terms of multivariate hypergeometric functions, and also there is another solution in terms of Siegel theta functions.
Service Review – Link Popularity Matters
Building a hotel in the middle of nowhere is no good. Similarly building a website, either for yourself or your clients, is pointless if they cannot be found via search engines.
Previously discussed here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=977764
Doxygen is great if it understands your language in question
Technically streaming songs from the internet is cloud-computing as it is a form of SaaS. Just because the common definition is usually referring to a VPS or some kind of obvious SaaS(basecamp, salesforce) does not mean that it is not indeed cloud-computing.
Forgive my ignorance on the matter, as I'm not a web programmer and don't keep up with the relevant technologies, but what is the difference between cloud computing and the Internet, if this is the case? I mean, the finger protocol is arguably "software-as-a-service".
Typically rules are provided in the window manager for "transients" and dialogs to have their geometry respected.
I used to use pdb.set_trace() liberally to poke around at the internals of Django to figure out what it was doing in undocumented places.