skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>Certainly his philosophy was no better than junior-high-school grade.

He was well read and educated, you may disagree with his philosophy, but to say it was 'junior-high-school' grade would be incorrect. From wiki:

'Mao was a prolific writer of political and philosophical literature'
'In China, Mao was considered a master calligrapher during his lifetime'
'Politics aside, Mao is considered one of modern China's most influential literary figures'
P4merge is pretty awesome for merging.
Thanks for the links, Simon! There's been a lot of discussion regarding the function on the original commit, located here:
http://github.com/jquery/jquery/commit/a5b2940e2d35dfb710131...
My daughter competes in the local Lego League (Lego Mindstorms competitions), and these are all the rage on that circuit. Great stocking stuffers if you have kids...
IGoogle
Actually, in the original German, Marx used the words Socialism and Communism interchangeably in many of his writings. (Kommunismus and Sozialismus) It was Vladimir Ilyich Lenin who first differentiated between the two and started using socialism to refer to a transitional state between "lower" and "upper" Communism.

Of course, the socialism that most people refer to doesn't correlate with any correct definition (more closely "democratic socialism"), but what do we expect from the "unwashed masses". ;)
Looks interesting - an aggregator + enabler of Mobile Phone Apps irrespective of Platforms.
I've never heard "sieve of giraffes" before, and I'm coming up empty in searches for it. Can you explain?
Thats a simple way to look at it (binary East vs West), but it does simplify the math. Your conclusion is true but rarely applicable. A better conclusion is that there is only a 5% chance of a more than 25% west coast bias, and there is most likely a 30% east coast bias. Which brings us back to the original question of why that might be. The best hypothesis so far is physical proximity to Rich.
Sometimes it helps to look at examples of bad resumes. Some real gems here: http://resumedoctor.com/WorstResumes.asp.
Restrictions of GPL prevented people from creating commercial Git GUI programs (see GPL FAQ http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html). Did they create their own Git implementation from scratch?
Is mathematics (theorem proving) an art?
"Ruled Ineligible": My Experience with NYC BigApps
3D game development involves a lot of very basic linear algebra (small matrix operations) and the occasional application of advanced linear algebra (conjugate gradients and similar solvers).
Nice ideas,but he conflates 'must have' with 'wants'. I learned many years ago, working for 7-11, that selling what people wants is way better than selling necessities. People will nickel and dime you for every percent of margin on necessities, but will happily pay silly margins on wants.
Yes. It's huge in engineering, for example: http://commons.bcit.ca/math/examples/civil/linear_algebra/in...

According to one of my linear algebra professors from back when, a lot of computational linear algebra was developed by the Soviets in the mid-20th century as a way to carry out optimized central planning. So I guess another application would be, socialism.

No idea if this is true or not but it's a good story. Also goes a long way towards explaining why so many linear algebra textbooks are translated from Russian.
Amen. I was irked by the "purity" factor as well. Adam's (ato's) response in the comments is dead on: "I needed an Atomic counter. Java has one. I used it."

One of the biggest draws of Clojure is that it runs on the JVM so you get access to Java's libraries. It is baffling to me how someone could describe using Java via Clojure as being a no-no.
Drunk Cycling
I don't understand why the size lines aren't straight?
Blackboard and Desire2Learn settle litigation and form patent agreement
I understand. A couple of suggestions:

1) Document this better! I figured it out eventually, but there were a couple of people looking over my shoulder who wanted to "just click continue", which would have resulted in an ugly surprise later on.

2) You could auto-expand my image to cover the bleed. Basically, just take the last few pixels on each side and expand them out to the edges. That would almost always be better than plain old white, right? This is basically what I did manually with Photoshop.
gabor's a fairly enterprising guy.
The GPL generally doesn't block a proprietary program from calling an open source one via a shell pipe. If it did, most commercial software running on a Linux system would run afoul of the GPL licensing of the core system commands (cp, ls, bash, etc.).

Furthermore, there are a number of more liberally-licensed binary-compatible reimplementations of Git available now (Grit and JGit spring to mind) that could be used as an alternate access layer, if you were less concerned with 100% compatibility with the latest Git features.
OK, while we're on the topic of useless numerology:

How old are you in HN years? (ID of your most recent post / ID of your first post)

me: 1000140 / 174632 = 5.7 HN years

edw519 (current leader after pg): 999538 / 9357 = 107 HNyears

RIP, nickb: 685017 / 2649 = 259 HNyears

mechanical_fish: 999416 / 22714 = 44 HNyears
...Not to mention that Giulani bought bus and train tickets for huge numbers of homeless in NYC and sent them out West....
"The mobs of the great cities add just so much to the support of pure government as sores do to the strength of the human body. It is the manners and spirit of a people which preserve a republic in vigor. A degeneracy in these is a canker which soon eats to the heart of its laws and constitution."

Thomas Jefferson: Notes on Virginia Q.XIX, 1782. ME 2:230

(yes I will probably get down-voted on this one)
That's a weird way of looking at it.

1) The cost of living is still outrageous even for couples without children, and the gayest areas are among the most expensive. SF attracts homosexuals due to the culture and history.

2) What does raising a family have to do with "looking down" on anyone? All the parents I know in SF raise their kids to be as gay-friendly as they are.

Also: you are aware that some kids are gay, right? Most of them figure it out very early, it's only homophobia that makes them suppress it until university.

You're right that there is a political side effect of de-prioritizing children, since most gay or lesbian couples are childless. But that's also fueled by the high concentration of childless professionals in SF. It is a snowball effect that will accelerate until the city's unlivable for people with children.

I just don't think it's a conspiracy. One might argue that the real conspiracy is gentrification, where family-friendly neighborhoods are swept away to provide yuppie housing.
This seems to be a very poor substitute for a VM + changing the display settings. Includes tiny resolutions, difficult to read and doesn't work with local copies.
That's a rather generous description of the downsides of San Francisco. Parking and traffic suck in a lot of places, and the one-way streets aren't so bad once you get used to them.

The two worst problems of San Francisco are still the filth (both the rubbish-in-the-streets form of filth and the human form of filth) and the ridiculously high cost of living. The first means that you can't walk down the street for more than a couple of minutes without some weirdo either pestering you for money or trying to sell you drugs. The second means that having a reasonably nice place to live (say, a three or four bedroom detached house with a backyard -- the kind of modest middle-class dwelling that most modest middle-class families inhabit) is completely out of reach for all but the super-rich.

San Francisco is a great place to be at a certain stage in your life, but unless you do become super-rich it's an awful place to stay.
Why no comparisons of the big ones? Akamai, Limelight, CDNetworks...
You keep conflating San Francisco with the greater Bay Area. This mistake was my central point. San Francisco proper is a small part of the Bay Area. It has a more storied history and is the more widely-known, but it is far from being the most significant city when it comes to defining the culture and norms of the area. SF gets the press, but Berkeley, San Jose, and numerous cities up and down the peninsula contribute just as much to this tech hub as San Francisco.
Heh. Then my philosophy teacher was full of it. (Not that it surprises me) Thanks for the correction. :)
Xobni came to mind ... they weren't so very much at the mercy of Microsoft.

One of Xobni's biggest barriers to entry is the difficulty of developing for Outlook. However, that difficulty doesn't exist for Microsoft itself, so Xobni's always run the risk of MS simply packaging all their features into Outlook itself:

http://www.xobni.com/blog/2009/11/18/xobni-and-the-outlook-s...
It's actually very difficult to forcibly put someone in a mental health facility in California since the 1970s, when a lawsuit by the ACLU succeeded in giving many mentally ill people the right to discharge themselves from care (this was a reaction against past abuses within the mental health system). Many facilities subsequently closed down for lack of sufficient patients, and in fact California lags in the provision on mental health services today.

Then, San Francisco is relatively tolerant of 'weirdos' and always has been...while many other cities, especially to the south, are not and give the homeless a fairly hard time. San Diego, for example, is reputed to keep itself free of homeless people by giving them a bus ticket out of town, and I've heard the same thing about other jurisdictions. And so they end up here.

This is only one reason among why the city has problems. Look back through the history of SF and you'll find it's always had a seamy underbelly, right back to the days of the gold rush.
To be fair, this does combine in stats (X% of users...)
Google is not a San Francisco company. It has offices there, but no one can honestly claim that it is anything but a SV peninsula company. Nice list, but other than Dolby (and maybe, just maybe Twitter) these are all small companies whose significance in the long-term is quite questionable. Your list is about what one would see walking through any SV office park...
Thanks. The long-term trajectory of programming tools seem to favour developer ease over raw efficiency, as computers get faster but programmers don't (though possibly this might change as Moore's Law diverts from speed increases to multi-core).

Therefore, XML became more popular than ASN.1. I think the successor to XML (and SOAP etc) will be more human-friendly than XML, rather than more efficient.

That's not to say that extremely efficient techniques don't have a place (they do) or they're not cool (they are).
Sure thing.

It's a word-play off three concepts. The First is the famous filter for finding primes, the Sieve of Eratosthenes. Sieve of Eratosthenes

Then there is the concept of "Interesting Numbers" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interesting_number_paradox (every number is interesting).

Finally RiderOfGiraffes' nickname, since they've demonstrated to me that once you start looking at those little commentid fields it does interesting things to my obsessive-compulsive tendencies.

Sorry so obtuse. My head's been down in code all day long. If I could post in binary it might be easier :)
Not since Safari 4, IMO. Ever since I upgraded it became very laggy (especially when opening/closing tabs), and does not have the same solid & nimble feel that Chrome has.

That being said, although Chrome performs the core browser functions better than safari, it's still rough around the edges.
First 7 digit palindrome, if that helps ease your pain.
This is a difficult question (GPL is difficult!), that's why I referred to GPL FAQ. See this answer: http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#GPLInProprietarySys... or http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#MereAggregation

Thanks for pointers to other implementations!
I've been looking for something like this for a while now - it's difficult to convince people that Git is worthwhile when there isn't a complete GUI for it. This is cross-platform too!

This looks like a serious contender to GitX, which I've been using for a few months. The widgets obviously aren't native (I'm on OS X), but they're certainly passable. Plus, they seem to have a good idea about usability.
It might get adopted quickly on a niche platform that relies heavily on webapps, and needs the efficiency because it is a relatively low powered device.

Like a phone.
Yeah I did an eight-part "tips on effective one-person startup teams" today that I thought was awesome. Lots of practical tips and stuff people probably haven't read elsewhere, startup-centered, easy-to-read.

It sunk quickly with only 3 votes.

So perhaps I'm not the best one to judge, eh? (grin)

I'd buy the book. And a couple other folks, including you. So that's 3. Another ten thousand or so and you've got a best-seller.
I believe that tenacity leads to luck, simply through more tries:

Chance II springs from your energetic, generalized motor activities... the freer they are, the better.

[Chance II] involves the kind of luck [Charles] Kettering... had in mind when he said, "Keep on going and chances are you will stumble on something, perhaps when you are least expecting it. I have never heard of anyone stumbling on something sitting down."

http://pmarca-archive.posterous.com/luck-and-the-entrepreneu...
They're picking the lines at "nice" percentages, so the lines won't necessarily be straight (different widescreen ratios, etc. get combined)
Yes, I can see how this might trouble you. I mean, you've paid good money for a 100% performance SLA.
When I see articles like this that show a deep understanding on the present state and the future of programming, it makes me sad.

Because if these kinds of ideas were articulated 35 years ago, I'd expect that by now we would have progressed much more.
Interesting line on non-sequiteurs you have there. I like how you seque from suggesting that providing health care to those without insurance makes poorer, to discussions of feral humans and crimes, as if these were all somehow caused by extending medical coverage to people.
Because those aren't self-service and thus small Webmasters won't even consider them.
San Diego, for example, is reputed to keep itself free of homeless people by giving them a bus ticket out of town, and I've heard the same thing about other jurisdictions. And so they end up here.

Ah, yes, the time-tested principle of solving problems by pushing them off onto someone else. Didn't work so well for me as a kid when I tried to clean my room by piling all the crap in a different room, but I guess it's okay for cities to do it.

Of course, the problem isn't having poor or mentally ill people living on the streets, the problem is that middle-class people might have to see the homeless which is obviously unacceptable.
Weird. I swear I ctrl-F'ed that page for Vogon.
I really think that this "only execution matters" thing is ridiculous.

Startup ideas are worthless in the sense that you're almost certainly not gonna be able to get anybody to pay you for one. If you want to prove that they're worthless in any other sense -- in particular, if you want to prove that you can't improve somebody's chances of succeeding in the startup world by giving them a good idea -- you have a lot of work to do. In fact, I bet you can't do it, because I don't think it's true.

Now, I have almost no experience in this area -- my conclusions are mostly a priori. But I don't think anybody else really does either, and in particular I don't think Paul has actually seen enough startups succeed or fail to judge the value of ideas. How many YC startups have "succeeded"? Depends on where you set the bar, but at this point in time the answer's somewhere between "not many" and "none".

And I'm kind of surprised that you're using this as an example of how idea doesn't matter; in my eyes, it's just the opposite. This succeeded because it was a great idea executed decently, not because it was a decent idea executed spectacularly.
My understanding is that both "Theory X" and "Theory Y" have largely been superseded by "Theory Z," also known as "a bit of both."
When the universities' reputations were established, SF dominated the Bay Area. Till suburbia spread down the peninsula in the 1950s, what we now call Silicon Valley was mostly agricultural land.

San Jose's population in 1940 was 69,000. SF's was 635,000.
Doesn't look like anyone else has mentioned _Threads_ (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0090163/) a British, very harrowing, gritty look at the outbreak and aftermath of a nuclear strike.
The original numbers are BS for the simple fact that people don't walk the same distances that they drive. So dividing up statistics between walkers and drivers on a per-mile basis will skew the results.

The people that 'walk while drunk' are most likely the people with a short distance between the bar/party and their destination. If their destination is far away, then they are probably drunk driving instead of drunk walking. How many people would walk to a party that was 5 miles away instead of driving? It's a very self-selecting answer and seems intellectually dishonest to me.

update: To me it feels like the entire reason for coming up with such a statistic is to generate controversy by saying, "drunk walking is more dangerous than drunk driving."

It makes more sense to view such statistics on a 'per trip' basis (i.e. x% of drunk walking trips end in death and y% of drunk driving trips end in death). This also doesn't take into account the number of dead people per accident too, but that might be skewed by practices like teens piling into a car with a drunk person behind the wheel.
An Old-School Board Game Goes Viral Among Silicon Valley's Techie Crowd
is there somewhere else where this convention is used?

if the Id of the most recent post is an exponentially growing function of time then the time between any two posts should be proportional to the log of the ratio of their IDs.. so

shouldn't it be log(ID most recent / ID first post) ?
So how do they know the mass?
Having a car in SF does suck. But you wouldn't think of having a car in NYC would you?

Fix: Ride a bike / use public transit / live near work.
The A to Z of digital music startups in 2009
Ask HN: how/where do I hire a good web designer?
I'm looking for a smart, quick freelance web designer for a small project. Where do i look/post an ad?
I think you are being a bit naive here.

Think about this. If everyone saves all their money, who is going to do the spending? How is anyone supposed to earn money?

The only people you can trust to earn money from are the people who aren't saving all their money.

If you save your money in a bank, how are you and the bank supposed to make interest if everyone starts saving and no one takes out a loan??? Your savings rate will drop towards 0 in a situation like this. If companies act in the same manner, why should they issue any stock??? What is the benefit for them if they prefer to save up and use their own cash instead of share holder cash?

What happens in a situation like this is that the stock prices don't grow at all as you can see here in Japan for nearly 20 years:

http://www.progressdaily.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/10/Nikk...

I recommend you think about these points for a while before discussing this matter again.
See my reply here to see why that is a naive point of view.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1000181
Oh, I didn't mean that as a dig against llvm. I would say llvm and the jvm are solving different (but related) problems.
Indeed, that's some poor use of statistics by the freakonomics guys.

Another example: during the Battle of Britain, 1547 British aircraft were shot down. Of these, the pilot was (I'm guessing) not drunk in 1547 cases. By the same logic, and assuming that one out of every 140 miles was flown drunk, this proves that dogfighting while drunk is infinitely less dangerous than dogfighting while sober.
Webster and Page here. Yeah, it's crazy. Cars on Webster St get consistently broken into, but cars on Filmore are safe.
me: 998366 / 243 = 4108 HN years

There may be earlier ones - I couldn't retrieve comments before about Jun 2007, so I went by my earliest submission:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=243
I liked your story, though i am not really a hacker.

Regarding your story, it illustrates an issue I have been thinking about lately. Some background on myself so you know where i am coming from. I started in biotechnology running mass specs in a small molecule analytical lab. Later, when i moved to an area with very little small molcule r&d I took a job doing web development.

Here is my observation. In highly technical fields there are a lot of people like those on the 'Black' team who would rather make someone look bad by knocking over a box because they can than patting them on the back and telling them, hey nice code - we can't find anything wrong with it. I saw similar behavior in Amgens R&D department time and time again where the people tearing each other down were very smart and passionate about thier jobs but unwilling or unable to be civil to the competition.
I like to think of it as Hofstadter suggests; theorem proving is mechanical, but there is a very beautiful art in selection of the axioms.
would have been nicer if the post was a little bit more programming related.

Since it's somewhat an anniversary, can you tell us what kind of traffic HN is getting? users wise, pageviews wise. Or is that a trade secret?
When was it confirmed that nickb had passed?
"Also goes a long way towards explaining why so many linear algebra textbooks are translated from Russian."

I think you're detecting a false pattern there. Russians generally do kick ass in Mathematics. In the West, Mathematics was held back by the Bourbaki fanatics, while in Russia they were never afraid of marrying the pure with the applied, the beautiful with the useful.

There may be a lot of Linear Algebra books translated from Russian, but there are also a lot of other books by Arnold, Kolmogorov, Fomin, Gelfand, etc that were also translated from Russian and that were not on Linear Algebra.
It makes more sense to view such statistics on a 'per trip' basis (i.e. x% of drunk walking trips end in death and y% of drunk driving trips end in death).

You'd really need to take the level of drunkenness into account, too. If you give me three beers I'll be too drunk to drive, but not "drunk" in the usual sense of the word. You'd have to give me another ten before I start being dangerous at a walking pace.

The biggest problem, though, is the random assumption that the same proportion of miles are walked drunk as are driven drunk. I personally have walked quite a few miles while drunk, but have driven no miles while drunk, and I hope I'm not the only one.
Building Blocks (and customer love)
I made it up.

But for exponentially growing ID, log(ID most recent / ID first post) is proportional to age of account & that's boring -- the nonlinearity is what makes the measure 'fun' (I use the term loosely). It agrees with some notion of the 'good old days' when Startup News was a fishbowl we could all look in on, and early HN participants were Founders not only of startups but also an online community.

I agree though, there are probably more interesting measures one could come up with.
Suggestion to HN: replace [pdf] [scribd] with [G Docs Viewer]
Based on fitting a simple logarithmic curve, plus some fiddling, I'm thinking 2e6 will happen in late September, 2010.
HCM - Nhân viên nhập liệu bán thời gian
Chức danh/Vị trí: Nhân viên nhập liệu bán thời gian...
A VM + changing the display settings does not provide you with the same information.

This lets you see, at a glance, how likely it is that the each component on a page will be visible without scrolling.
I think the article misses the point.
Drunk drivers kill other people.
Drunk walkers kill only themselves.
> Are you saying the Sonic Cruiser was incompetently designed?

No. If it had been designed on the basis of looking cool, it would have been. And probably wouldn't have flown.