jkeisling/hacker-news-corpus-2007-2022 huggingface dataset:
Doesn't work in the latest version of Chrome (Windows 8 v. 40.0.2214.91), but works in IE.

Interesting concept, but not sure how predominant album color helps me discover music.
> * If an entrepreneur's goal is just to get rich via exit, regardless of the viability of what he leaves behind *

That's the Silicon Valley business model.
That's exactly my claim. Otherwise why would Percy Spencer have been carrying it there, and why would he have been surprised when it melted?

Unboiling an egg is quite mundane when compared to what else you could do with egg-unboiling technology. (I'll leave that speculation to the other fine comments on this post)
Previous discussion on bitly blog / reddit with some comparisons to zmq: http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/117dsj/nsq_real...

And also a great article that compares / contrasts NSQ along with a lot of other alternatives: http://www.bravenewgeek.com/dissecting-message-queues/
I'm not sure why an interpretation which would lead to a better HN wouldn't also be worth having?

I just flat out disagree with your analysis of my first two "net negative" comments. But I doubt anything would be more boring to read than the two people discussing the quality of a couple of comments.
Oh wow. Preferred ignorance as entertainment. In hindsight, it is so obvious that this would be a preference in our information overloaded lives.

I agree with you. That sounds like much more fun.
> one thing I've never understood about these kinetic launch vehicles is that, if something falls from orbit, it tends to burn up. But if we want to launch it from ground to arrive at orbital altitude with orbital velocity, then we have to launch it faster than orbital velocity and from thicker atmosphere.

The kinetic launch vehicles achieve orbital altitude but not orbital velocity. They require a rocket engine to accelerate them to orbital velocity. This is no different from Blue Origin flights where they get to space, but then fall back down to earth (relatively slowly).

To achieve "orbital" altitude you need to start with enough kinetic energy to make it to the Karman line (100km) with zero (or more) energy left. The kinetic energy a tthe start of the trip needs to equal the potential (gravitational) energy at 100km (neglecting friction).

Gravitational energy is U=mgh so, for 1kg and 100km (g = 9.8m/s^2)...

U = 1e3 x 9.8 x 100e3 = 9.8e8

Kinetic energy = 1/2mv^2 so...

9.8e8 = 1/2 x 1e3 x v^2

Solving for v...

v = 1,400 m/s = 5.04e3 km/h (3355mph) or roughly mach 5 (if I got all my units right)

Launching a projectile at mach 5 will result in a significant amount of heat, but nothing close to the heat from orbital velocity (6.8 to 7.9 km/s => 24,840–28,080 km/h)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravitational_energy

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinetic_energy

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orbital_speed
I remember reading in Scientific American (wow, decades ago) an early article on A.I. using a, then new, trained neural network. There was a small comment at the end of the article where the researcher noted that as they "killed" (destroyed somehow?) the neural network, they started seeing early patterns that it had trained on output.
> pretend I care about the product

This form of hypocrisy is a recipe for burnout.
I generally could care less about the color of an egg yolk but there’s one exception: the egg in ramen. It’s not that it tastes particularly better, marinating anything in soy sauce for a couple days will make it taste delicious. It’s often said we eat first with our eyes. I enjoy the contrast of colors. The dark red/orange looks much more appealing than a pale yellow yolk floating in a bowl of soup.
Note that there are plans to integrate crossbeam's channel implementation into the standard library. This won't change the public API but would at least vastly improve the implementation. A similar thing was done with changing the implementation of `HashMap` to be a wrapper around the `hashbrown` library.
It's always seemed a little odd to me that there is such a culture of secrecy around salaries. It seems so counter-productive: it means that salary doesn't really reflect competence, effectiveness or anything else related to the work someone is doing - it just reflects someone's ability to negotiate well in an interview. I think that's a shame.
Thanks for that info. That's a great start for what I'm looking for.
Three times?
Buy and iPad. use ipad strictly for consuming content - reading HN, facebook, twitter , Instapaper etc.

use your computer strictly to create stuff - code, write, design, photoshop etc etc. If you want you can install some software to block sites and apps on your computer.

This will reduce the distractions enormously. If you find yourself on ipad all the time you will feel guilty that you didnt create anything today and thus will be motivated to do something abt it.
"The question is, is there any factual proof that the claim is a fabrication, or is it all a big conspiracy theory?"

That's not how most legal systems work. The prosecution is the one with the burden of proof. That said, for all I know, Assange may indeed be guilty. Perhaps we'll find out.
Actually, they repeat the call to action many times throughout the page, in the long sales letter format.
So, you're one of those folks who proposes the extinction of all life on ethical grounds?

That's a strange kind of ethics, to me.
So you rationally came to the conclusion that life is suffering, and rationally determined that suffering is bad and should be ended, but realize your own reluctance to end such suffering. What, then, do you think to be more likely: you are rational about all these things up until what, from this view, seems like an arbitrary point; or there's another piece to the puzzle - a sort of joy in realizing the absurdity of this existence and seeking contentment in spite of it?

Disclaimer: you're free to believe what you want, and it's neither my business nor my concern whether or not you pass on your particular genes, I just can't resist this discussion.

Related reading if you're interested: Albert Camus (The Stranger, The Myth of Sisyphus), Sartre (Nausea, Being and Nothingness)
So what you're saying is, you don't mind causing other people -- your coworkers -- severe distress if their "reasoning" is faulty according to you?

But, of course, that's not really what's happening. As you can see in the data, "adults" is actually "men" only when "work" is "software". I can assure you that medicine and law are no less stressful work environments than software, yet for some reason women seem to want to work in those professions more and more (as well as in science in academia and other fields of engineering) while they're fleeing software in droves.

I think you should consider the possibility that you're contributing to a hostile environment that you simply can't feel because you haven't tried really putting yourself in other people's shoes. Because if that's what's happening and you're wrong, then you've just been part of something really terrible. If, on the other hand, you're right, then all you did was to "unjustifiably" adjust your behavior to relieve the suffering of some of your fellow humans.

Even if you're not convinced that this big difference in ethical outcome merits changing your behavior right away, I think it at least justifies truly listening to what women are saying, and trying really, really, really hard to examine whether you just might be doing something wrong.
Interesting book, I'll have to check it out.
body{margin:0 6em;}

There, ftfy
Nevertheless, this is a good example as to why performance on real machines often needs to be implemented, rather than speculated, as the the architectural complexity can lead to some interesting peformance characteristics

I don't really agree with this. In the old days, to really get an idea of how fast something would run, you had to count cycles and think about pipeline hazards and whatnot. Today, you can simply estimate the number of misses at the various memory levels -- this is often not that difficult to do -- and get a good idea of the program's performance.

So architectural differences used to be much more important back when I/O didn't dominate as much as it does today.
That's a really good point. There definitely are shades of gray. There are companies where one can have a voice and build some great things. One doesn't have to be the founder to be part of an entrepreneurial effort.

It doesn't always always have to be about money. Open source software gives people to build something, break some new ground and make a change. I guess that's the same drive that gets people to found or be part of all kinds of efforts that extend beyond software and startups.
History is full of precedents where a certain kind of deal routinely has the parties trying to screw each other, and then gradually this kind of deal becomes based on trust, and everyone is better off. Attitudes like yours get in the way of this process.

If you're a founder and a VC screwed you, you may have made a mistake, but you're not "stupid" and you should warn others and not be overly embarrassed about the whole thing.
How much of this applies to transparent object persistence? Things like Rucksack & Elephant (in common lisp) let you use objects in RAM but automatically read and write them to disk to keep them across system restarts and crashes. These systems are also essentially using RAM as a cache explicitly. Could performance be improved by taking advantage of virtual memory?

What they do is if you use foo.bar, and bar is not in RAM then they load it into RAM. If you do foo.bar = baz then they store the modification to disk. So they are keeping a copy of persistent objects in RAM and on disk.
It's perhaps even more trivial than that: no one can effectively estimate competence.
Doesn't Google have a feature:

[x] Never show me any more results from foo.com I hate that site. Remember my preference.

If not, it should do.
Is this a fake account?

I thought this was Jason's HN account: http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=jasonmcalacanis
If it was just the 20-30 MB JVM tax, I might be with you. But in applications that allocate and deallocate a lot of memory, the GC of every JVM implementation I've used also hoards memory from the system (well there are a few implementations that give it back, but they cause app performance to nosedive).

If you're building a piece of software that needs to co-exist with other memory intensive processes, the JVM's policy of taking memory and rarely giving it back can cause unnecessary swapping. Heaven forbid you need to run multiple JVMs on the same machine (like with hadoop).

Then you start having to do silly things like specifying how much memory your app is allowed to use which makes me feel like I'm on classic MacOS.
CCD has impacted me - less than others as I only have a few hives. The numbers are astounding - 50-75% dead hives over winters are not uncommon. It puts an incredible amount of strain on the entire beekeeping system.

I believe that CCD has multiple causes and dimensions. Bees are very specifically evolved, and much like any overtrained system, have weaknesses. A population of bees is always under stress - varrora destructor (a terrible kind of bee mite), various bacterial, viral, and fungal infections, other bees, predatory insects/animals, and more. Bees constantly fight to overcome these threats.

Now, with the introduction and high usage of pesticides/herbicides, we've pushed them over the edge. More so than glyphosate (RoundUp), I think neonicotinoids are the most dangerous chemical. Active in low PPM, long lasting (decade+), and just dangerous enough to bees to make a CCD incident possible.

Bees' direction finding is really incredible - imagine driving hundreds of miles away to a building with only the angle of the sun and a heading to work with. Neonicotinoids make bees "drunk" for lack of a better term - they cannot find their way back home. Only the oldest bees go out to forage. That way, if they get lost or sick, they're more likely to die and they've already achieved much of what the hive needs of them. If less foragers return, you have less food for the hive, so less new bees are made. Over time, as the bee population ages, you're left with less and less foragers, less and less bees, until you open your hive one day and find a handful of dead bees, a dead queen, and starved larvae. This is a classic depiction of CCD.

As for the ethical treatment of bees - as insects, I don't believe they have an ethical or moral component. They are put under great stress every year to pollinate almonds - it is the greatest bee mixer/spring break in the world. It is also how we get all the bee diseases/pests spread quickly. I'm more concerned about the treatment and sales of honey. Supermarket honey is very suspect - overcooked, mixed, strained to remove any "impurities". Sometimes it isn't even real honey or has been relabelled to be local when it isn't.
In all honesty i feel like this is an issue of a breakdown in community. If you are a part of a community with a level of trust, it isn't that much to ask a friend to borrow a saw, or a cup of flour, etc. I'm not sure any sort of app or website can replace that level of trust and sharing.
Maybe there is, but it works with the chemicals they currently use. I'm sure the geological engineers would welcome suggestions.

Additional information:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydraulic_fracturing
(Hi David!) Well, yes it's money, but the complication is that fracking has that effect only in some places. The contamination is much more a function of the geology than the fracking process itself. Pennsylvania has been hit heavily with contamination. Most wells drilled are safe: http://mitei.mit.edu/publications/reports-studies/future-nat...

There is an annoying combination of legal and commercial pressures that prevent the companies from going "actually it's more dangerous than we previously said" without it seeming like "it was a lie all along this is TERRIBLE".

The crucial take-away is that there is a bunch of additional geologic due diligence that the gas companies could be doing that would actually enable them to continue fracking. But the boom is driven in part by the utter dirt cheapness of it now and they're afraid of hopping off the wave.
> That's exactly my point. People should know how to use computers effectively, but that doesn't translate to "should know how to program" just like knowing how to read and write does not translate to "being a novelist"

No, people should know how to use computers which does translate to "know how to program" but not "be a professional software developer", just like knowing how to effectively function in a world with written language does translate into "knowing how to read and write" but not "be a novelist".
Thank you for providing an example.

I look at that and I see a couple of things. First, this is procedural programming straight out of my old, old COBOL books. Batch processing - read some files, process the data, output it. That graph is pretty, but no different from the structured analysis and design that was forced on me in the mid 80s.

That stuff was a nightmare to work with. No real search, endless 2D layout issues, no way to reuse, a very little bit of information conveyed in a lot of space, no way to debug, and so on. And, if your program is anything but batch/data flow oriented, good luck.

I see maybe 100-300 lines of JSON in the image. Or Lua. Whatever. A modest amount of paste code to tie already written components together in in/out chains. Now, I get that your diagram is more easily 'groked' than JSON, and that is a benefit. But what if I want to search for things? Use awesome tools like sed to batch change stuff? Perform static analysis? All that graphical stuff just falls apart. Oh, perhaps there is some DOM, and I access that, but then I'm right back into the incredible power and expressiveness of text.

More importantly, I'd like to see the flow diagrams of all those nodes you are connecting together. I am prepared for egg on my face here, but are those written in NoFlo, or text? I'm guessing the latter.

So, how is this different than LabView? I completely understand the value of being able to quickly plug together pre-existing components when you have a tiny interface (you just have in/out nodes, basically, in that diagram). A small solution for a small problem, and I don't mean that dismissively.

Despite the article's claim, and as many have already said, this stuff has been around for decades. There are definitely places for it. But having lived through it, I tell you SA/SD died a very deserved death.

Sorry, this isn't directed at you, you were just the person kind enough to provide an asked for example.

The other major thing that sticks out for me is that that graph is just a high level, block diagram of the program. Well, "just" not meant to be dismissive. The original article talks about the horrors of programming where changing one thing means changing 10 other components. They are not describing programming, they are describing hacking spaghetti code with no design. If that is the way you program, or the way the code base you are working on is coded, then I can see why these flow diagrams seem so revolutionary - a design is being done, and software is broken up into discrete components. That's pretty fundamental SW engineering. But the magic is not in the 2D visual display, but in the idea of small components that do one thing and that are not intimately tied to other components. So hey, if the tool helps you learn or use that method, good, I guess. How you reasonably scale it up to anything large is beyond me (I've done entire avionics systems in data flow diagrams, and it ain't pretty at that scale, believe me).
>I don't want my employees to have to learn everything just-in-time.

You can require knowledge without using dealbreakers like "you must know b-trees". A better alternative would be to say "you need to know 30% of the following group of things: b-trees, tcp/ip vs udp, ..." and so on.
i remember getting rejected at the screening stage because i was not able to explain how an sql index works (i'm not a database guy although many people would think this is general knowledge). The next job i got was to build an r-tree for goespatial querying purposes into a database engine. i knew exactly what r-trees and b-trees were, i was exceptionally good with algorithms, but i had no idea what an sql index was. for me it was very ironic and i had since refused to go through tech interviews.
So we should donate to this because... it has "Reddit" in the title? The project description has no mention of how the funding will be used, just that whatever is planned will cost ~$50, followed by a meaningless message containing "facts" about water quality with no direct relationship to the campaign at hand.

I do believe that access to potable water is one of the world's largest issues, but I'd much rather donate my money to an organization with a clear plan.

(Also, does this money simply go to Charity Water, or does "Trey" run this campaign & project himself? I couldn't find anything about that, but I'd be concerned that the majority of his projects haven't even raised over $80 in funding. http://my.charitywater.org/p/myprojectsview?project_id=ET.IR... )
Yes Zucker absolutely ran it to maximize profit. CNN broadcast Trump rallies 24/7 in 2016 because it was good for ratings. CNN was a major factor in Trumps nomination and election to president. You just cherry pick events that suit your narrative. All of these companies are businesses and they're in it for the profits. They may put on a liberal or conservative face, but it's just to exploit a niche in the market. They're corporations with shareholders at the end of the day. Which is a strong constraint on what ideas they'll explore and what issues they'll cover.
Should be able to get rainbow table with fucking octarine for that money…
I guess this makes us HN readers savages!
drivingmenuts used the word "burn" in a comment in this thread, which for some reason brought an apt metaphor for this whole debacle to my mind.

It seems to me that the group behind this are not much different from arsonists: They light a torch to someone's property for the sole pleasure of watching it burn.

A lot of the commentary around this incident has focused on Gawker's poor security practices (and rightly slow, there really isn't an excuse for many of them). But how many buildings in real life are totally immune from being burned to the ground by someone with a match and a can of gasoline and the will to use them?

What prevents arsonists from running amuck in our society is not technology for 100% fireproofing every last building, but rather astute law enforcement and effective legal system.

It's interesting to me to observe that many people seem to think the fault lies with the victim, when perhaps the "fault" lies with a law enforcement system that is seemingly incapable of investigating and prosecuting people for these kinds of crimes.
Gawker saved passwords. You should never, ever store user passwords. If you do, you're storing passwords incorrectly. Always store the salted hash of the password -- never the password itself!

What? No... Gawker stored hashes.

EDIT

It really galls me that Jeff can make an entire post around such an easily verified and debunked lie. Was he too lazy to check? Does he know what DES3 crypt is/does? Or did he think it would simply look good as the first of his three points in order to make a sensational story?

Gawker really doesn't deserve the trash talk they're getting, their db architecture was far more sound than a lot of others out there... and, as Thomas points out, their use of "archaic" hashing techniques is in some ways a blessing. Their db designers definitely get a "PASS" even if they didn't use something like bcrypt which would have given them an A++ on this assignment.
While you're logically correct based on that assumption, what happens when a corporation breaks a law? It's one thing if an individual within the corporation, but what a violation occurs due to a collective action taken by the company? Who goes to jail? Who exactly pays the fines owed?
Does the need to post a comment on Gizmodo really justify polluting the world with yet another username and password?

Let me see if I understand this logic correctly: password reuse is a critical internet problem because it puts all of your sensitive stuff into one key, your re-used password.

And the way to address this problem is to put all of your sensitive stuff into one third party whom we trust more, for purposes of our conversation we can just call them "the monopolist".

I don't think so. How about a distributed password system where I personally own the code and it kicks off a unique key for me for every web site I sign up to? After all, I've gotten pretty good about carrying around important things in my life. I use something called a wallet. The concept has been working fine for thousands of years. Whereas the idea of having somebody else keep secrets for folks really doesn't have that great of a sterling track record, as the Gawker situation shows.

This was a great article in that it's starting to show people how screwed up things are. But the conclusions (to me) seem all out of whack.
It's a symlink to itself, which github isn't doing a great job of handling.