skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Why can't you learn data structures from a book in a coffee shop? I did.

I would argue that you can't learn the theory until you have enough practical experience to actually implement and play with the theoretical concepts you are learning about. By not learning "the trivial stuff you can learn from an Oreilly book in a coffee shop", you are wasting your on time. The sooner you stop wasting your own time, the less of it you will waste.
It would surprise me if updates get rejected. I'd hate to be the reviewer who rejected the one app for which Steve Jobs personally said the API rules don't apply, forcing the developer to write a second e-mail.
TAOCP is a very thorough "text book" for people who really are interested in the subject matter. It's not really Knuth's goal to break new ground with it, but to compile the most interesting things he's found into a single work.

It's hardly the only thing he's done though. Even without TAOCP, he's one of the more prolific and accomplished computer scientists in history:
http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/vita.html
"Miyamoto - That's when we thought about what kind of creature could withstand being struck from below and would eventually recover. We racked our brains thinking what we could use…"

"Iwata - And that's how you came up with the turtle! (laughs)"

"Miyamoto - The turtle was the only solution! (laughs) Strike it from below and it flips over! Leave it for a while and it rights itself!""

I always wondered how turtles came to be so heavily involved.
Perl 6 Advent Calendar - one Perl 6 tip per day until Christmas
Ironically, their claim that releasing the data would make them look bad makes them look bad. Rather than giving us data that we could use to reach the conclusion that they are bad, they simply said "we are bad" with no room to argue. Brillant.
Is TeX really a novel app in the sense that twitter say is?

In fact, TeX isn't even the first of its kind.
Craig Newmark: "as a rule of thumb, okay to use RSS feeds for noncommercial purposes."

What's predictable here ?
This is a potentially off topic question, but what is the average wage that the typical sculptor makes, considering hours invested/sale price of the art? I have known at least a few former art student friends/family that have definitely worked for less than minimum wage.

Is it possible for an artist to create a piece like this that is actually more profitable for the user of the art than it is for the artist who created it?
Ever watch Metropolis? I was giving that movie a slight nod. Every worker in that movie is doing the most pointless work. It is amazing to watch the human workers file into the machinery, then to see them crank levers and move the hands of a clock-thing.

They are meant to look like they are suffering, very badly. These energy comments are interesting since I have always thought that the city of Metropolis slowly got that way by giving the lower class people more and more menial work that was less and less meaningful.

I mean, as long as we're living... right? We shouldn't complain.

As someone who has worked fast food before, I can say that the work is probably only a few steps less painful than cranking a energy-machine box would be.

----

I should add, before anyone yells "off topic," that this is probably the sort of discussion that the artist would welcome.
> That's an established difference between men and women.

It is? And it's cross-cultural?

I'm astonished by the amount of "men and women are just different, everybody knows that!" going on in this thread.
And, I'm not arguing with you. I think fraud will be a big part of the problem they have to solve. I'm just pointing out that fraud has been solved in other novel payment processing cases in the past and will be solved for this particular case by someone, possibly this company, possibly one of the several likely competitors that will spring up (payment processing is incredibly lucrative if you do solve the fraud problem well enough).

I'll also mention that folks swipe their cards in fake ATM swipers pretty regularly. It hasn't hurt ATM usage, in general. Likewise, PayPal fraud is still an issue that they fight every day...but PayPal is incredibly profitable. eBay and craigslist also have huge fraud problems, but again, the sheer volume of legitimate transactions and the value of the huge markets they serve is enough to overcome any misgivings people have about using the services. So, I don't think that fake swipers will make this particularly company any more or less trusted than existing providers that have to fight fraud (assuming they are vigilant about actually fighting it).
Kongregate's system is not distributed so it doesn't work whereever the SWF is. Also our system ties in to dual currency (points) and Facebook/ Twitter.

Kongregate's system is nice though.
Nope. Perhaps this is a country thing.
In the UK pretty much everything happens in a specific looking chip+pin reader POS device. They all look pretty much the same and are pretty secure afaik.

(Also most places in the UK will not swipe your card anymore. It's all chip+pin).
OK It seems the issue is that the US is far behind in this. Pretty much every restaurant in the UK has portable POS devices waiters carry around to take payment. Pretty much every shop has the same standard looking POS chip+pin devices.

eg http://www.theopusgroup.co.uk/images/Secura-PIN-pad.jpg
I learned a similar lesson in college. My university had a little-known program called the Bachelor of University Studies. Given that you could get a faculty advisor and independent committee to sign off on it, you could patch together your own degree from the courses offered in any of the colleges. The idea was to encourage students to create an inter-disciplinary course. They took care not let anyone who'd just changed majors 10 times to graduate with a BUS.

By combining courses from the Architecture, Film, and CS departments, I created a 'Digital Media' degree which doubled my salary in the graphic design department I was working in at the time. (My responsibilities stayed exactly the same). Since then no potential employer has asked about it, but it set the precedent for paying me more money.

Lessons learned: 1) You don't have to follow the same path as everyone else. 2) For plenty of places, the fact that you have the paper means more that what's printed on it.
Why pay anyone, in essence, purely to suffer?

Because that way, they are not out on the street annoying The Rich People.
This seems like a good time to point out that his annual "Christmas Tree" lecture is a week from today.

http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/musings.html
Do you know exactly what's involved in placing a single tap? I don't. That it costs them $2500 in extra time across a large bureaucracy sounds reasonable to me.
When I was younger, I used to look down on musicians. I saw what they were doing as not being on the same level as being an engineer, because engineers were more clever than them. I figured they were born with some talent, and all they had to do is play their instrument.

Now, I realise that they practise more than I do. It's even tougher for them, because there is no easy way to judge how much better they have become. And they have to do all that they do with people constantly judging them.

Engineers, scientists, mathematicians - we have it real easy. Our talent is an easy one to develop, it's an easy to make money from, and it's easy to get good. Artists & Musicians who manage to be successful have achieved a lot more than engineers who manage to become successful.
I'm not sure, but 1W LED lights shouldn't be more than $10 (mine were $7,50 iirc). I could say it took me 1 month, but that wouldn't be entirely fair since I have significantly reduced the lighting and changed the way I use it. Something which I probably would not have been able to do by, for example, reducing the number of lamps since that creates an annoying bright/dark distribution of light)
A reasonable answer, but I keep thinking that there has to be some middle ground between pummeling the occasional (and clearly not mean-spirited or cruel or nasty) joke and the barbarian hordes of pick your least favorite other place.

Edit: Based on the voting, I'm clearly in the minority, so I'll leave it alone in the future.
How is this different than what I said? In my example/metaphor Asterisk is the crufty lumbering giant..
Yeah, i'm not so good at keeping ton top of my inbox. You always hear folks talking about a 0 inbox, but nobody brags about 18,000 unreads.
how is this different from what mochi media does?
"A rule of thumb is a principle with broad application that is not intended to be strictly accurate or reliable for every situation."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_of_thumb
Yes, paypal does something similar for online payments. I'm pretty sure the lag for merchants is longer.

Note that PayPal was revolutionary and is worth many billions of dollars - largely because they could handle the fraud this kind of configuration causes.
And pornographic pranking.
Did you try Spelunky or Nethack?
If you're interested, you should play Portal in the 'commentary' version -- a lot of thought went in to making the game intuitive with zero explicit instructions. I think they were pretty successful.
This is great.
The link to tickets for Fantastic Mr. Fox is broken right now: http://www.fandango.com/fantasticmr$002Efox_109297nu/movieov...
Looks like it's a Freebase bug escaping the title properly, though, not on your end. (edit: It's that 'nu' at the end of the movie url fragment that does it, which appears to come directly from freebase)
Yes, and I'm sure not only me. I have bookmarked your HN profile page! :)
can't find the demo.
AOL's Latest Dumb Business Plan
Predictable is that craigslist seems to have some vendetta against external web apps, and you showed them a big data hole they had.

I'd ask Craig again on Twitter about the Pipes thing, he's better at responding to tweets than emails sometimes. http://twitter.com/craignewmark
Why don't you use Facebook Connect, most students already post that info on facebook.
What aspect of Mochi Media are you comparing Heyzap to? They don't have achievements or dual currency.
When I start IE6, About 1/3 of the time rather than open the homepage I have set, it loads Microsoft's IE8 download page. This doesn't seem to be new.

Is IE6 really that prevalent still? I don't work on a particularly tech-oriented site, and only about 3.5% of our visitors appear to use IE6.
Note that the graph is average drive temperature. It would be interesting to see at what room temperature drives operating in a server have the lowest failure rate.
Oh, apologies. I misread your comment.
Haha, that example game seems familiar.

http://www.rocksolidarcade.com/games/robokill/

:)
i've seen more come in through sales, customer support, mba, or project management.
I wish SJ would intervene with me. I've had two BS rejections in the last few months--one where the reviewers flat-out LIED about my application behavior, one where I wasn't even notified / given a reason.

I knew when I started that both apps would be kinda sketchy from Apple's end (nothing illegal, no private APIs, nothing against the contract, just something Apple wouldn't like). I walked into it knowing I ran a significant risk of rejection, but the apps were so cool I simply couldn't resist building them.

Needless to say, I've been focusing on contract work lately. I'm done bearing any sort of risk for the immediate future.
This is really weird for me. In the UK we've been trained to not just allow people to swipe our cards into just any hacked together device.

If the device doesn't look 100% 'official' I wouldn't touch it with my card.
The feature I'm most excited about is e-mail receipts. If I never had another paper receipt again, I'd be perfectly happy. I also think using the audio jack as the reader is incredibly smart.

Actually, there are two things about this system that I really like:

1. I can see a future where paper receipts are a thing of the past.

2. If someone uses my card fraudulently, I'll receive an e-mail a minute after it happens alerting me that something is amiss.
Blame the fashion designers. Lots of the clothing women wear lacks decent pockets. So they're stuck putting things in their purse.
geee...what could go wrong here.
I did to begin with (2-3 months ago). The issue was that students were uncomfortable with the idea that people could view their transcripts on their computers if they didn't log out of Facebook. So yeah, good idea in theory, but students rejected it.
...why not 99 red balloons instead? :)
Creating a live Twitter status update with YQL and JavaScript
"I must admit the title of this article is a bit of a misnomer. When I began writing the article I agreed with the title, but after reading up on what Defensive Programming really is, I realized. I am a defensive programmer."

Next time the author will know to check the value before evaluating.
The Business Model Generation
Yeah, they sorta missed the boat I think. They should have created a distributed system like Heyzap in addition to their portal site. They should really acquire Heyzap now though.
"This means that adding support for EMV to existing payment applications can be a daunting task!

Furthermore, the demands of providing an EMV solution do not even stop once all the necessary processing has been implemented, thanks to the extensive type approval process enforced by the governing body, EMVCo. Before any EMV-capable solution can be deployed, there are thousands of tests that need to be passed to validate that the implementation conforms to the EMV industry standard, and as the EMV specifications are regularly updated this becomes a major task in itself! This is why many businesses requiring an EMV "Chip & PIN" solution choose to license a purpose-built EMV software kernel rather than developing their own."

http://www.emvx.co.uk/emv_guide.aspx

idk, maybe they could license it from someone, but I wouldn't say it's a trivial thing to add.
Isn't that how people get through college? Three all nighters per semester + three months of doing nothing. Just remove the part where you're doing nothing, and suddenly you can get so much more done in life :)
It hurts me when people chose to keep things broken (Craigslist) for irrational reasons, especially when it wastes hours of time for millions of people.
Incidentally, in case anyone did not get the reference, the title comes from a song called "99 Red Balloons" which is a brief chronicle of military awareness computers detecting a group of red balloons as an incoming threat which leads to a war.
Well, my problem is usually that one of us has a particular data structure or sequence of steps in mind, and it can be hard to explain the exact reasoning for it sometimes. Things are a bit better when you have a nice whiteboard to draw on.

I always feel like the guy at the keyboard ends up having to write most of the real code, because if the other programmer has an idea they either have to switch spaces or he has to painstakingly dictate what he wants. Whoever isn't at the keyboard then tends to feel like he's not really contributing except to pick out occasional syntax errors and try to follow along with what's being written. Maybe it works for some people, but I prefer working alone.
Jackson Pollock's paintings really stand out in a modern art gallery as being way too pretty to be there.
These guys raised 5.7MM and believe it or not they won $400k from business plan competitions!

http://www.cmu.edu/news/archive/2009/October/oct15_dynamics....
This comment bugged me until I read the rest of your comments.

http://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=evgen
For those of you who are like me and that type of format (a product a page? Ugh), the ten products are:

Friendster

Palm

Netscape

Webcrawler & friends

Tivo

Saehan and Rio [mp3 players]

Betamax

Atari

Everquest

Kindle
I've heard one classic example. When PDAs came out they could manage one calendar for one person. A woman looked at it and noted that it must have been designed by men who manage only their own schedule while many women manage schedules for multiple family members.
How much feminist material have you read? IMO your theory is very silly.
Maybe someone as a musician can enlighten me, but I always have so much trouble doing rote scale at every guitar fret position, arpeggio, memorize-these-chords exercises.

I always hear two sides of the argument that a) a la Mr.Sivers, oh you need to learn how to play fast, memorize all of these scale/chord patterns, and every single guitar-player style from Blues to Jazz to Folk to Pop, or b) you shouldn't worry too much about playing or learning too fast, but concentrate on the music; enjoy yourself, find your own style and get in the zone and slowly you'll understand how to improvise, compose and tab by immersion rather than memorizing patterns. (Because if you try to learn or play too fast, you get frustrated quickly that you aren't doing well and concentrate too much on the mechanics of note perfection that it affects your performance). Some books I read recommend daily practice sessions of only 20 minutes per day, but consistent daily practice.

I'm sure I'm painting a totally false dilemma but curious as to how some of the pro musicians out there takes are.

EDIT: Since we are on a programming forum and I assume that the advice is geared towards developing for startups, IMO, the best way to learn how to program is to learn by working on your own project and ruthlessly plagiarizing off of other people's open-source code base. Because you are motivated to finish the project because it's something that motivates you and you are forced to look deep down into the stacks because you almost always have to customize/hack 3rd party code to do something your way.
Among other things, SarbOx has become a boogey man to scare IT rank-and-file with. IT managers use SarbOx to deskill IT work.
Anecdotally, I've found working through and solving a difficult problem together reinforces social bonds. Even introverts crave some form of social interaction. It almost seems obvious after the fact.
Instead of waiting for a tool to mature, they help it mature. It's not an insult that you've matured, you should take it as a kind of a compliment.

If that's not a back-handed compliment I don't know what is.

Here's the thing though, I'm not risk averse. I am the first one to jump into a nascent project and throw down code. The problem here is the cost benefit just isn't there for me yet. I feel I have more competitive advantage to gain by working on greater pain points (for me personally) like lack of continuations in Rails, or even something a lot more ambitious like writing a usable web framework in Haskell in order to gain the advantages of pure functional programming.

In other words, just because I don't a big competitive advantage in your project doesn't mean I'm not an early adopter.
This is just going to be used for porn.

Thereby guaranteeing iPhone (?iPorn?) supremacy, at least until it's ported to Droid.
Something that might help would be to have the grids in some sort of canonical form: as swapping rows and columns doesn't change the score, for every configuration there is a reordering such that the whole grid value is minimal (i.e. if we read out as a 279 digit number). Intuition says that if grids were brought in such a canonical form, recombination might work better.
I'm just getting "[object Error]" in IE7 with nothing beyond that - no rendering.
MacSlaps
Which computer type setting system do you know that preceded TeX and produces beautifully typeset text and mathematics?
my guess is that they've run this calculation and have decided against it. or there are top level execs that are in charge of the marketing divisions who don't want to lose jobs and learn something new.
Having a brother who is a musician taught me this one early :) now he's at university I barely see him any more he practices/plays so much.

The effort he puts in just to graduate each year is more than I have put into my entire career so far (including uni)!
I suppose it only makes sense if the data would make them look even worse...
is this situation good or bad?
Spend $50 Earn $10.  Sound Like a Familiar Business?
Google Caves to Murdoch, Adds New Options for Publishers
Hey immad,

Do you guys have a solution like Jambool's in-swf flash payment system?

https://www.jambool.com/socialgold/flash_promo
Providing the user with a few options can be nice, but it doesn't work for all sites.

One of my companies sells gun supplies and accessories. There are tons of manufacturers and parts. Thus, for the redesign of our site, we went with a mega menu structure to help show all of the different departments and manufacturers.

People have responded very well to it.

The web site in the article is absolutely gorgeous though. I really like what they've done with the shopping cart.
Interesting that tho it started as a ML-like language with a different type system, it morphed into an implementation of ML97.

Anyone know the reasons for this? And what advantages Poly/ML brings over SML/NJ or MLton?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Troff
My favorite band--Dream Theater--was formed at Berklee College between three ambitious instrumentalists. Two of them, John Petrucci and John Myung, spent their high school days fanatically devoted to practice (before applying to Berklee together). During that time they had an agreement with each other to practice their respective instruments six hours a day, and if they hung out in the evening it was with the understanding that they'd finished their six hours practice.

Like Derek, John and John finished their Berklee education early, but in their case it was by recruiting the rest of their band and dropping out to get started. That was in 1985. Their first major commercial success (in the sense that applies to progressive metal bands with cult followings) was 1992's Images and Words.
he's the chairman and co-founder of Twitter.
While it is true that anything you don't exercise will atrophy, like you said, but - at the same time - you can't be a master at everything.

The person that can be a master programmer and a charismatic salesmen is very rare indeed. In fact, so rare that I would be surprised if they exist at all.

So I agree, you shouldn't completely ignore tasks that don't fall under your speciality; but also, work on those tasks only enough to maintain a certain level of competency and skill. Then you can hopefully stay in touch enough and not "loose sight of the company as a whole."
What the world's first 'space station of the sea' will look like
We looked at doing this at Kongregate - to us achievements are only meaningful in the context of a community, something you don't get with a distributed system. While the integration with Twitter and Facebook addresses this to some extent, I don't really think it gets at what achievements are all about. They're meaningful to a community of other people who play the game, not to everyone you know on the internet.

Another problem with this is that the other portals that the game would be distributed on are our competitors. They're not really going to take kindly to having our achievements on their site. And frankly, they're not going to want HeyZap's, either.
I remember reading through Eliezer's explanation of the Bayesian theorem just so I could be in the cool club: http://yudkowsky.net/rational/bayes

Turned out the cool club was just in my head.

But, my god. I think I'm going to need a month-long refresher to actually read through this.

Thanks for the link. Bookmarked.