skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I thought I would try a couple of the suggestions here. What I was looking for was criticisms or alternatives to (Java) exception handling, an interest of mine. ArXiv may have the the paper but their search interface is pretty primitive. Google Scholar gave much more useful results after tinkering with search terms.

My usual approach to finding papers in a new area of interest is to google around until I find a Wikipedia article that looks like a good starting point. I have found Wikipedia itself to be pretty hopeless for searches. In the article or some of those that it links to, I usually find researchers working in my area of interest. Of particular value are survey articles because of the large number of references. Then I follow the authors to their research departments and projects and co-workers. That usually provides a week of reading.

If I'm looking for something serendipitous I read the comments here and follow the links.
Let's say someone makes an average of 20 calls every day. Since no one answers their phone anymore only 5 of those get picked up. That's 15 voicemails to leave and 5 calls to take. Those 15 calls/voicemails took at least 30 minutes probably. That's 30+ minutes per day his assistant can save him. So 2.5+ hours of his week he can save, just by making you wait 30 seconds for his assistant to transfer the call when you do pick up.

It doesn't seem arrogant or lame in that scenario. Now, if they make you wait more than a minute for the called to be transferred that's not cool in my book. They should be ready to immediately handle any calls that do get answered.
By my count of an enumeration in The Wall Street Journal (in an OPED) there's currently well over 5 billion in academic "research" at stake annually. Paul Jones, the top dog in the CRUtape Letters, himself pulled in 22 million in the period in question.
Zed's an idiot. He made up a fantasy about what he thought _why might be doing, and proceeded to insult _why and generally be a jackass without knowing what he was doing.

At the time I commented here saying Zed and _why were foils in many ways. I still believe that. _why was all about encouraging creative expression and absolute artistic freedom, and about making people excited about things. For all that he had a vibrant personality, his work was never about himself. It was about the people he wanted to excite. Zed, meanwhile, is a similarly hard worker, but in Zed's world everything is about Zed and there's a right way and a wrong way to do everything, and Zed is the one who decides. _why was fine with the fact that not everybody wanted to do things his way. Zed's most famous for yelling and belittling other people, this article included.

While I respect Zed's intellect and like that he's working for one of my favorite companies, he's juvenile and embodies a lot of the parts of this scene that I despise.
I don't how much attribution the marketing of PageRank vs the actual effectiveness of PageRank (and undoubtedly other things never made public) deserves in the overall success of Google. I can't really think of a way in which we could easily come to such a conclusion either.

Ask Jeeves (or maybe Yahoo) tried a big "The Algorithm" marketing campaign and that clearly got them nowhere. I think if we're talking about marketing the "I'm feeling lucky" button was more of a boon to virality than PageRank.

Choosing PageRank was probably a slight lapse in integrity in my post, but undoubtedly there's been a whole bunch of other examples in Google's history which do fit the mold (GFS, MapReduce, Pregel, etc).
You're kidding, right?

Evidence of absence is not proof. Imagine if this argument were used in other contexts: "there are no papers published in peer-reviewed journals about intelligent design. This proves that there's a conspiracy in the biological community!"

In fact: there are a few published papers which challenge popular climatological measurements and papers, and they are cited as often as possible by ... I don't want to call them denialists, but I'm not sure what else to call them.

So, wrong on both counts.
Too bad it's not like the Dread Pirate Roberts. I wonder if any of the students of the wandering professor will take up his name in the future.
It's rather poetic to think that when you die in real life, all your digital work vanishes too. But were there people who really thought that's what happened?

I hadn't heard about this detective work until just now, but there was never a great mystery in my mind. Not to be a jerk, but I think it was obvious at the time that this was just a person who really valued his privacy.
No, it doesn't answer why they felt they had to "hide the decline" instead of discussing and justifying how the recent divergence is congruent with their claims of its usefulness as a proxy when there were no (accurate) temperature readings. These are not the actions of honest men.
Richard Hamming: You and Your Research
Yes, I had the same problem with the initial challenge. I could patch virtually and programming language implementation such that it would be possible to write a 5 line web app, but that doesn't really say much about the language.
Building a Sweet Forking Server in Java
The oldest Mac system that I remember using was System 7.0. The screenshots took me back to the good old days when I was child in elementary school, playing around with Kid Pix. I remember I used to love using the "explode" tool.

Apple sure has changed a lot since then.
This bothers me too. I don't know how tree-ring data is interpreted, but it's safe to assume that it's not a simple size of rings -> temperature mapping. How are the myriad of factors that contribute to tree growth accounted for?
I used to get this from time to time in a previous job. I always (without exception) immediately hung up. Sometimes I got remonstrations from whoever was trying to place the call and I would respond as gently as possible - if Mr X (it always was a Mr) wants to talk to me then they will pick up the phone and call me. If they can't be bothered then I can't be bothered to hear from them

This is not arrogance but a matter of common civility.
Ask HN:  What hosting do you use for personal projects?
I'd like to set up a webhost just to play around with during my spare time. I'd like some kind of virtual private server so I can have root access and customize it to my heart's content.

I don't need anything too expensive. Does anyone have suggestions?
> Especially troubling is the way the current divergence is addressed. The argument looks to me like "we can use this data as a proxy for all periods except those where we have direct measurements to verify correlation" I find that weak at best.

+1

Yes, I know that "+1" a weak comment. But I wanted to draw attention to this particular point because I think it's really crucial, and so far I have not seen it well addressed.
In that case, he could just dial the number, put the speaker on, and continue doing his important work.

The call will either flat out after a minute or three, or someone will answer and he can talk to them immediately.
The Unusable and Superficial World of Beer and Alcohol Websites
> CO2 level is not a measurement of climate, of course.

LOL.

Well, that's it. I'm done. Have a nice weekend, folks.
For pure shortness, I think HTML + JavaScript won here:

http://arclanguage.org/item?id=979

The Haskell example is interesting, though, because it shows a working webapp in Haskell, and it's not even that scary.
Do we really need a new rosetta?
Walking through some Rosetta challenges got me thinking: Is it time for HLL forum?
so a better linkedin?
I designed the architecture I wrote about in this blog post a few years ago (in my 3rd year of university I believe) -- There are technologies now like Erlang that are probably more suited for threaded servers, but this design has worked pretty well for my online game.
Reread my post. I didn't say that the absence of papers proved anything. I said that the scientific process has been sabotaged in this instance, making things more unclear than they should be.

You are slick though!

EDIT: Perhaps you're honestly confused. I'm a bit doubtful on that, but in case you are. We know that the process has been sabotaged. Not because there are no papers, but because many of the details of the sabotage were revealed in the ClimateGate emails.
I found that minimizing transformations on your data is a principle you apply when you productionize. For most of the development cycle, you want to keep things as debuggable as possible (at the possible expense of performance), and intermediate data products + debugging hooks are a good way to do this.

This brings up a much bigger question of when to productionize, though. Most programs are never actually "done", but at some point you have to release to the public and hopefully get millions of users. You need to make the performance/maintainability tradeoff sometime. The later you push it off, the more productive you can be in the critical early stages, and the better a product you can bring to market. But if you push it off too long, you miss the market window entirely and don't get the benefit of user feedback.
Google really should publicly explain their stance on this - their (and other search engines') role in the internet is just far too important for it to be left to some internal policy.

I would advocate some form of regulation of this type of thing - but the chances of us ending up with something worse than the status quo is probably a bit high.
I can't believe they are capable of manually inserting a disclaimer for Michelle Monkey, but not of manually lowering the rank of Michelle Monkey. (if(!"monkey" in keywords) {results["monkey"]["rank"] -= 100})
I'll try to say it with some more detail.

Let's assume you have a sample from trees in one forest in say, Siberia, going back five thousand years. Do you know all of the environmental factors and how they've changed over that time period? Or do you just know how well the trees grew?

Assuming somehow you did know all of the environmental factors. Can you say with certainty how each of them affected ring width? Or are you relying on some sort of statistical correlation (which may be useful, but is NOT the same as causation)?

Let's assume that you know the micro-climate details and have established a very strong correlation between input factors and ring growth. With multiple or hundreds of factors I find that hard to swallow but let's say you did it. Now tell me, how many forests just like that do you need to sample to have some overall picture of global climate? Ten? A hundred? Does the data even exist in the numbers required? And how would you calculate the number required? It seems to me in order to be able to determine sample size you'd have to have a pretty good model of how the climate operated to begin with. And since this is the thing to be demonstrated, you can't also have this as a given -- that's circular logic.

As I understand the response to this, it relies heavily on statistical measurements and such. That's all fine and dandy, but it's a qualitatively different type of discussion than a theory-experiment-verify discussion. It's much more like a epidemiological study. And these are notorious for meaning much different things than researchers want them to. When all's said and done the only thing you may be proving is the statistical likelihood that certain trees will grow certain ways over the next few decades. Or you may have spent a lot of time proving or demonstrating nothing of any value at all, unfortunately.
I wrote a firefox plugin to help solve this problem. See https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/45524/.

So far it only replaces the link on portal.acm.org with a google scholar search. Contributions beyond this are welcome.
"Why might the science be wrong? Because it's moved from science to an identity issue. Us vs. them. This guy isn't helping."

This is exactly why I choose to avoid the whole global warming climate debate thing. It is so hard to find any sort of unbiased information because everyone who talks about it has an agenda and forces it in your face. An Inconvenient Truth was actually gag worthy, an hour and fifteen minutes of Al Gore masturbating his ego over his crusade, five minutes of ridiculous cartoons, and maybe fifteen minutes of actual statistics. Obviously a station like Fox News or a talking head like Sean Hannity is going to push a right wing viewpoint to the death, so there is really no point bringing them up in any serious debate about basically anything. Even this posting, I just have a hard time taking this particular blog seriously given the "Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal", as the description, whether it is intended to be humorous or not.

The whole global warming debate is not as clear cut (if you can call it that) as something like stem cell research where the issue was basically science vs morality/religion. Both sides have their own statistics, both sides try their hardest to refute the other sides' science, and even the people who actually agree with each other that there is global warming often have different opinions on what can actually be done (if anything) to fix the problem. When something like the climate-gate situation becomes public, it makes it even harder to actually take any of the science seriously, because one can only assume that the studies, experiments, and modeling is being done with the intention of proving one side right or wrong, which will undoubtedly lead to all sorts of unintended cognitive bias.
It still doesn't give a scientific reason why it is okay to truncate the tree ring temperature graph at 1960 and paste the real thermometer temperature graphs on top of them, except for the fact that it makes one hell of a picture. That's the "hiding the decline" that most people are concerned about. This article completely dances around that.
i believe the focus is on collaboration
Go to http://www.guidebookgallery.org/screenshots if you want to see more (also: screenshots from many other operating systems of past times).

GUIdebook sadly only goes up to 10.3 Tiger – would be really great if someone would pick up the work.

(I especially like GUIdebook’s comparisons of different system components like here: http://www.guidebookgallery.org/screenshots/splash I would argue that it’s immediately obvious which is the classy OS :)
A more appropriate way (and what a lot of VCs do when talking to entrepreneurs pitching them) would be to have your assistant set up a call time via email, then make the call yourself.
Except that these two code examples do two very different things. The Haskell version actually uses a continuation to run multiple requests The Javascript version modifies local mutable state. The Haskell version does it via server interaction, which makes it much more useful to modern web apps.
For VPS: I'm using Slicehost currently, but have seen some good reviews of Linode. I think I'll likely give them a spin in the new year instead of Slicehost - you get a bit more for your money, and can customize more from what I understand.

I believe they both have quite good support from both community and company perspectives. Lots of good articles and tutorials.

Some comparison links:

recent: http://journal.uggedal.com/vps-performance-comparison

older: http://journal.dedasys.com/2008/11/24/slicehost-vs-linode

The companies:

Linode: http://www.linode.com/

Slicehost: http://www.slicehost.com/
Semantic Editor Combinators
But these are fundamental design issues. You can't change fundamental design when you "productionize"; coming up with that design and implementing it is the development cycle.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=915515

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=852405

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=625857

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=229067

http://www.google.com/search?q=hamming+%22you+and+your+resea...
Most startups aren't an invention like electricity. Many new companies these days are pretty easy to re-create once you have a working model to look at - ie. a less competent programmer can probably recreate your site in less than half the time it takes you to make it the first time.

Hopefully you have some other competitive advantages besides just having a good idea. It's those things combined with great execution and some luck that will make you succeed. If its that easy to rip off your idea and do it then being first isn't going to that much of a difference compared to execution and some kind of marketing advantage.

What's more interesting to me as an angel investor than the idea is what problem you are trying to solve. Your first idea of the perfect answer is probably wrong, but if you're trying to solve a valuable problem, you're smart, and you have some other competitive advantage then I might be willing to bet that you'll find the right answer.

With OtherInbox we were in 'stealth mode' for 9 months. We had about 200 alpha testers during that time, but our learning accelerated much faster after going public. In hindsight, I think we would have been better off being more open about it right from the beginning.

Note: Just because you're not in stealth mode doesn't mean you have to drop your pants and tell everything. Every company has confidential information and trade secrets.
I went to art school and was a designer for a short stint, where Macs completely ruled supreme. I learned and completely grocked the living hell out of OS7, 8 and 8.5. Despite their incredibly archaic architecture under the hood, they are still probably my favorite operating system. Interface wise, OSX has actually been a step back in a lot of ways.
It looks great and I've seen it in action via Hack Wars. I was always curious about server creation and execution in many aspects. I have to agree, "There are technologies now like Erlang that are probably more suited for threaded servers" but, the game you've created using this architecture definitely does great and can handle a bit of a beating.
I really didn't find this particular query to be odd at all. From the subject being searched, I can only infer that this is a person who is neither web developer nor a programmer. It would seem a logical leap to presume this is a current or soon to be college student curious about what all of these terms actually mean in relation to what they want to do.

I know that while I was in school I was(and still at times) confused about what it all meant - IT, CS, Web Dev, Software Engineering... Although this searcher will likely start to become more comfortable with all of these terms and disciplines as well as begin to understand how they relate and how they differ, it is a bit daunting when you first start out to identify what term actually describes what it is that you actually want to do.

MIS, CS, IT, Web Design, Software Engineering - college programs, that although may describe the overarching discipline, don't really fully represent what niche in the technical industry they serve to address... For example, I have a BSCS, though by far the majority of my project involvement has been done with back end web application development using established frameworks and site design on top of mature platforms - little "Computer Science" being done here (in the 'study of the theory of...' sense).
Linode for general stuff.

Amazon EC2 when I need a sudden burst of computational power.
Usually universities have electronic subscriptions for most journals based on the IP range of the university network.

I ssh one of the computers on campus. cd to my public_html directory and use elinks to download the pdf.

I think many people do this trick because I keep finding good papers in various ~username/ folders indexed by google.
A few different places, depending on the situation:

1. Google scholar

2. Authors' personal websites

3. EBSCO Academic Alumni Edition via my alma matter's alumni association

4. Email requests to friends who are currently enrolled at major universities

5. Visits to the local university (Minnesota) library, which offers terminals for free public access to journals
I understand the impulse, but stalking _why's family has much more to do with selfish, lurid curiosity than any legitimate concern for _why's safety.
I'd hold that line if the person calling were important to me, i.e. they were the VC, or press or the president. If they were selling me something I wouldn't wait.
I usually don't think about performance. nostrademons sounds right: "minimize transformations when you productionize." I don't have experience with productionizing.

So far when I've found myself scaling one piece of my pipeline up, I do one of two things: 1) I switch key pieces from arc to scheme or C. 2) I add a periodic precompute stage to reduce cache misses.

Like pg said somewhere (update: http://ycombinator.com/newsnews.html, /15 Jan), the goal isn't optimizing but keeping performance mediocre as you scale up.

Update: After reading http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1005145 I see 'productionize' isn't a big-bang, stop-the-world step. By the new definition I find I do rewrite things for performance fairly often.

The image in my head now: a ball of mud (http://www.laputan.org/mud) with rewrites as layers. Older layers that have proven themselves harden and fossilize as subsequent rewrites focus more on their performance without changing semantics. But even they aren't immune to the occasional tectonic upheaval.
It took a non-negligible amount of work to recreate _why's work in the wake of his disappearance. There's something very much against the engineering ethos in that. It's like burning books or destroying art because you're having a bad day.

Sure, Zed has worse marketing than _why's "happy fuzzy" persona, but I agree with him in this case. From the comments on the github page, it looks like tryruby was rewritten, the code was never recovered.

It is a bit ironic that the hardest artifacts of _why to recover were the projects aimed at teaching Ruby to children (tryruby and some of the books).
Wow.. I had never come across it before!
Honestly, I bet if he had left a note, people still would have tried to track him down and find out "what really happened."
Lots of successful startups spend time in stealth mode.

As another commenter pointed out, it's a lot more nuanced than writers want to let on. Writing is about drama and hyperbole. Real life is about finding balance.