skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A long time ago the HN audience consisted mostly of people who knew at least that much.

Every online community has this myth: that in the beginning all the members were as intelligent as Einstein, as humble as Gandhi, etc., etc., and that over time hordes of newcomers arrived and the quality fell drastically. But having been in on the ground floor of quite a few of them I can say with certainty that it's a myth.
By "really aggressive" I mean something in their Javascript pops-up and nags at you for rejecting their cookie.
It's 2010
If any, Solaris is the only counter-example to Linux - not FreeBSD.

>I'm not sure why you'd say that is.

That was my attempt at classifying the corporate umbrella of Solaris to be THE cathedral vs the bazaar of Linux ... and, as you say, the middle ground of FreeBSD.

I dont have context here, but it was very surprising to read your comment about FreeBSD being closer to the cathedral model. I was aware of GCC and Emacs being unapologetically so, but I thought BSD had a more open development model - the myriad flavors of BSD being a proof of that.
Now very easy to Share, Collaborate And Communicate With Glasscubes
26C3 starts. Today: Hacking GSM, Eavesdropping Quantum crypto etc. Live streams!
It just occurred to me that flying is becoming like medical care - there will be two classes of people. Those who can afford to fly like a first class citizen (I.E. In Private Aviation, bypassing all the TSA nonsense) and everyone else. Anybody that matters will fly privately, and therefore doesn't really care what type of misery the peasants who fly commercial have to put up with.

Single tier universal health care tends to result in the poorest members of a society ending up with the same health care as the richest - which works out very well for those at the bottom tiers, but not as well for those on the top, who have to lift everyone else up to the levels that they would like. Two-tier health care ends up with some going to the Mayo Clinic, and others getting "Enough to keep you from dying immediately" health care.

I think we'll continue to see segregation of quality of air-travel, with the lower tiers getting "increasing security so we don't see your planes exploding in the newspapers" while those who can afford it will be flying in Gulfstream IVs.
I'm negotiating a employment contract at the moment, I think I will remove US and Canada from the geographic zone (I'm European). The legal risk is too high there.

Moreover, some insurances now charge you more if you go there because of the legal fees and the lottery that the legal system is.
But adding random friends just to add to your Mafia Wars gang is alright?
True, it's not on the scale of Stalinism, but there is continuity. Russia is a corrupt, authoritarian police state and it has been one for hundereds of years, almost without interruption.

I'm sure that the privatisations of the 1990s went horribly wrong. But the idea that the rule of law and democracy make it impossible to right those wrongs is a symptom of that authoritarian tradition.
If something doesn't interest people here it shouldn't get many up votes and not really be seen, obviously for an article to be sitting up the top it must interest a fair section of the community.
It's true that the FreeBSD process is far more likely to result in an ideal design, but Linux's approach of "build it fast, replace it fast" might average as a win in terms of total number of tolerably performing features per development time, and volume of the search space explored.
Ask HN: What are your experiences with Amazon SimpleDB?
More specifically, does anyone use SimpleDB for a web application? I was experimenting with it earlier today and found that round-trip queries take about 6-7 seconds. On this basis alone I turned to MySQL.

Unless you need storage (in which case you should probably turn to S3), why would you use something that is just so damn slow?
free speech is not an absolute right

Then you are indeed lost.
Oh great and I'm going to fly to the US with a stopover in Detroit soon :-(.

If only they could lay off the security theater.
Make sure you are understanding what you are reading.
Its that time of the year again. New Year Resolutions?
Learn Lisp and implement a sufficiently big project using it.
(Its been the same for the past 3 years now)
World hottest news
Sports cars
SBCL is very impressive. Until recently[1], it was far and away the quickest implementation for a dynamic language. Considering we have yet to see invokedynamic or tail calls on the JVM, I'm rather unsurprised by SBCL's comfortable lead in performance.

[1] LuaJIT 2
The question you have to ask yourself is whether the extra security measures would prevent something like the latest terrorist attempt from occurring in future, and the answer is usually "no". The news reports are claiming that explosives were smuggled onboard in the guy's underwear, so in the near future security checks at airports might be about to become a whole lot more degrading than they already are.

When I visited the US some years ago I went through a machine which looked a bit like the inside of the TARDIS, which was supposed to sniff for explosives. Obviously that mustn't have worked in this case, or perhaps it was all just pure theatre and the machine never really did what it was advertised to do.
Eclipse + java6 would make a marked difference, agreed.
The worst thing is that even though this story received a lot of attention in Russian media and people are well aware and furious about it, there is nothing that will be done about it. Neither the president nor the prime minister nor the parliament nor the government nor anyone else with any power in this country have done or are going to do anything about it. As if it's normal.
The UI elements are good. I checked the demos. (the charts which I wanted to see isn't complete yet). But The question is that, is this style-able? I ask this coz one of the UI frameworks I used, Sproutcore, isn't stylable.
In that case, see my comment in the goals thread and linked article - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1013899
If you use it from an EC2 node it is typically faster, in the experiment on http://atbrox.com/2009/10/27/unstructuredsearchforsimpledb/ I got around 20ms query latency.

Regarding reasons for why to use it check out:
http://perspectives.mvdirona.com/2009/11/03/OneSizeDoesNotFi...
and an important psychological principle backing this up is cognitive dissonance. if you keep doing what you're doing, you'll rationalize your behaviors to yourself.
Digital Revolution: Kindle Ebooks Outsell Real Books on Christmas
Demonstration of Bonnier R&D hand held tablet PC concept
FYI: This article is over a year old.

Luckily, it appears cocotron is still active: http://code.google.com/p/cocotron/source/list
The corruption allegations were ignored, but Medvedev did fire some prison officials. :/ http://lawandorderinrussia.org/2009/russia-fires-prison-offi...
Fido isn't for airport security. It's for small applications where you want to inspect explosive traces in particular situations. As far as I know it's single use, and you have to replace the polymeric/chemical sensor on each application.
Clinton's deficit also benefited from passing in 1993 "the biggest tax increase in American history"(http://www.factcheck.org/treasury_tax_expert_to_bush_clinton...)
The economy then proceeded to have the longest expansion in American history thus disproving all Republican tax-cut theories, though no one seems to have told them.
I seem to be ghosted (submitted stories do not show up for others, not even in my own threads page) and don't know why. I could not submit stories a few days ago for a long period of time (more than 12 hours) because I was "submitting too fast". Also the site is super slow since then and I don't think it's like that for everyone else.

I also submitted this question with a bugmenot account but that did not get through either. Sorry for posting this here, I just don't know how else to reach anyone...
I couldn't really tell what their technology is, but it looks like a deviation of ion mobility or gas chromatography. Either way, it probably isn't robust enough for widespread use, since it looks like it has to ingest a sample, and that just isn't practical when you have hundreds of people waiting in line.
The rule is meant to be a deterrent. I doubt there is any terrorist who has a bottle of liquid explosives and reads the TSA sign and thinks, "damn, I guess I gotta throw this away".

While I'm on the topic, I read recently (can't remember where) that the proportion of successful detonations of a liquid explosive was actually pretty low, since many potential terrorists are killed in accidental explosions. As a side anecdote, we once had an FBI officer bring in a canister of some unknown liquid explosive for our group to test using our equipment, and I remember he was carrying it with the hand he "didn't use much" just in case it detonated.
I think it is stylable via CSS:

http://www.amplesdk.com/tutorials/adg/style/
Well, staying at a boring job is not very healthy to career too. The worst case is losing one's job when economy is down.

Quitting job is not the solution. Finding interesting jobs (as an employee or founder) is perhaps the solution.
Donald Barthelme’s Syllabus: 81 Books
I think it's reasonable to post your own article, but it would be nice if it had a link back to this item so people who found it could then come here.
Technology makes individuals more capable, and so makes nutjobs more dangerous. Liberty makes police work harder. How do we convince society that these, our finest values, are more important than tweaking absurdly small risks? Didn't people used to be braver than this shameful display?
If you're into hip hop then i'd be happy to give you some stuff for hiphopgoblin to work on. http://github.com/zackster/Hip-Hop-Goblin
As the page you link to says, Twitter uses OAuth.

Facebook Apps use OpenID.
6. And the LORD said, Behold, the people is one, and they have all one language; and this they begin to do: and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do.

7. Go to, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another's speech.

Genesis 11:6-7 http://www.omniglot.com/babel/english.htm#kj
You could try jumping in all the way... http://ycombinator.com/ideas.html
Hm, I live in the former Soviet Union and I can tell you that socialized medicine here was also two-tier: great care for Communist Party officials and crappy care for everyone else. Nowadays, we have private clinics for the rich and public ones for everyone else.
The UK is much worse than the US. Be sure to write that one out of your contract too.

I don't understand what you are talking about with respect to insurance, though. What kind of insurance are you talking about?
If they public clinics are adequate, the why would this be a problem? Of course rich people are going to spend money on things poor people can get for free. It may or may not be objectively better, but they will feel better about it. It's their money, so who cares?

(You reference the former Soviet Union, so I don't think you want to strip people with wealth of their money. So I am not really sure what you are getting at here.)
I flew ORD-LHR on Saturday morning. "New security rules" were referenced -- they couldn't show the airshow anymore (the thing that counts down to arrival and shows your position; but personal GPS devices were allowed, as always), you "had" to stay in your ticketed cabin (as before, and continually ignored as before), and you weren't allowed to get up to stretch or congregate near your seats. This rule was, of course, completely ignored (just like the fasten-seatbelt sign). The flight attendants are indifferent, and just read from a card. After the meal is served, they usually take over a few rows in the back and watch DVDs. If a terror plot is going to be averted, it's not going to be averted by people being paid barely above minimum wage (who can be "furloughed" at any time), who have to deal with 300 annoying passengers a day. I had a job like a flight attendant once, and it gets tiring telling 100 different people "that's not allowed" every day. So eventually, you just stop doing it. International flights tend to have the most-senior flight attendants, and that means they are burned out from enforcing all the other silly rules.

Basically, these new rules are yet-another-example of the government doing something so they can say they are doing something. Healthcare and airline security are the same in this respect.

(Side-note, I was told at check-in for my return flight that I may not be allowed to fly back to the US today because my passport has a crease in it, and they had to type in the number manually. "Since it's the holidays", they are giving me the privilege of flying back to the US. A great way to treat your top-tear customers who fly 100,000 miles a year and whose creased passport has been accepted by 10 different governments. What's next, exit visas?)
The thing is, they're not. I doubt public health care could ever be "adequate."
Aren't there several examples of it being adequate? It seems like it's just the US that can't figure out how to do it. (We know how to do it, actually, but our elected officials don't want to give up the "donations" from insurance companies. Until we get rid of those, America will never have decent healthcare.)
> invokedynamic or tail calls

Neither would improve Clojure's performance.
"You can use your phone to unlock and
lock your bike, change gears and select how much the motor assists you."

I'm guessing that "changing gears" is something that people in Copenhagen do rarely, perhaps using a wrench, like when you first get the bike or hook up a trailer. I miss flat cities.

On the other hand, a voice control gear changing app might be fun. I picture a dude on an all-white bike (tires too) wearing a clear-vinyl trench coat, telling his bike to "gear UP!" "gear Down...". The future is now.
I think SBCL's speed is orthogonal to invokedynamic and tail call elimination. Those features would not speed this benchmark up very much.
It's interesting to note that the increasing security measures onboard planes carry the exact same problems that occur with DRM. These new rules will only affect innocent consumers.

Someone planing to launch a terror attack is not going to be swayed because they are told they are not allowed leave their seat. It will only affect innocent people wishing to use the toilet.
Can you give an example of a loop in an algebraic syntax please?

(All I can think of is CFG style, like "A -> (aA)?" oh, of course, there's also "a*" - still, it would be interesting to see an eg.)
It's only more efficient if it regenerates enough energy from braking to compensate for the extra weight you're carrying which is highly unlikely, particularly extra weight on a wheel since that requires 1.5-2 times the energy to shift compared with the same mass added to the frame (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bicycle_performance#Kinetic_ene...).

You might still benefit if you need an electrical boost provided by energy from the grid but normal bikes hit a pretty sweet spot, so I'm thinking this is mostly gimmick.
There are. I'm from Denmark where we have public healthcare, and I've never paid for anything healthcare related, except subsidised medicine that will typically cost me around $5 when I see a doctor and he gives me a subscription.

Interestingly, even though healthcare is universal and completely free total spending per capita on healthcare is less than half that of the US.

So yes it can be done - not only adequately but much better and cheaper.
I find CSS to be far more readable than SQL.
Did you read his argument, or are you just upset that your favorite country was lumped in with your least-favorite country? I think, for the very limited category described in the article, that this is not outrageous.
ach, I clicked the wrong button and upvoted by accident.

Anyway; I think your latching on to one phrase for your own aims. "Belittle the holocaust"; well if that isn't a sentence to garner a sympathetic audience I don't know what is....

I read the sentence not as an assertion that Russia suffers the same atrocities as those of the Stalinist era - but rather as a statement about how people in power still have not learned all of the lessons and still commit acts of crime and violence against others.

The conditions described (if accurate) are certainly pretty severe and the level of corruption (again, if accurate) awful - only one section of Government seems to have replied seriously to any of the accusations.

So, no, it is not Stalinism and not the Gulag; but the strong similarities are there. And the obvious connection must be drawn.

I have travelled in Russia both personally and on business and some of the areas of government I have seen are extremely corrupt and brutal. The association to Stalinism would seem justified in my limited experience.
I don't know much about optimization, but...it looks like he's timing the Clojure version with Clojure already loaded, but timing the SBCL version with SBCL not loaded. Would that change the measurements much?
Has Hackers News Become Less About Hacking?
Just a question for the people who have been here longer and contribute more than I do. It used to always seem I could find some of the most cutting edge links about many aspects of technology and hacking. Now there is a lot of content, most of which is awesome and I usually click on anyway, but it's not as tech/hacker centric. Is this good? Should it maybe be split into two news portals? I dunno.
Bikes don't need to be light, the bike + rider combo needs to be light. If you are 200 pounds, the difference between a 20 pound and 30 pound bike is a rounding error.

Anecdote: I don't notice much change in bike handling even when I have 40 pounds of groceries on the back. I do notice the difference between my 22-pound utility bike and 18-pound racing bike, though. Not because of the weight, but because of the very different geometry. (I think this is why people think light bikes are fast - racing bikes do feel faster. But it's not their weight, it's the very tight geometry that would be unsuitable for a touring bike.)
What's wrong is that they measured the performance of Lisp programmers vs Java/C++ programmers. This is fine but you're not comparing the merits of the programming language. The Lisp programmers would win even if they were forced to program in Java.
"sends it to all of your Facebook friends" implies, to me, that every single one of your friends gets a wall post. That means a notification, which they have to click on to discover the content.

Farmville lets you send invites to all your friends. But I assume you have a choice about it - invite all your friends, or none, or choose some to invite. And it's always one of those "you have an X invitation" things which you can ignore because you know the content without looking.
Hm, I wonder if that is due to socialism in the former Soviet Union. This is what I'm talking about: http://mises.org/story/3650
As for my medical experiences - when I was in public clinics, I had to frequently bribe doctors for service and pay for my own drugs, anaesthesic, etc. Furthermore, the subway is usually full of posters asking for donations for people who have life threatening illnesses that the system won't help cure.

Reply to child poster: I meant that the problems with Soviet health care were caused by the fact that the Soviet Union itself sucked, not because of something inherent in socialism.
So far one of the interesting things I noted was the TSA keep talking about being "unpredictable" in the security measures.

Theatre in that form might have more effect; random security measures might confuse or throw off potential terrorists.

(I still think it's all pretty silly but that struck me as at least a slightly less than inane idea :))
Facebook in Latin
Write a computer program. Any computer program. Then do that again.

(Note: you will probably fail if you write something that someone else wants, rather than something you want. So decide what you want, and write that.)

Ignore the advice to not write another blogging engine, or whatever. You need to learn to program before your programs can change the world. So learn first, change second.
The arrogance of his comment is what will bring down IBM in the end.
In CUDA kernel to PTX compilation is performed when the project is build. In OpenCL it is performed at runtime. That is "initialization overhead" which cause result to be different. You could use cache to avoid it.

So the reason of the performance differences is caused by the OpenCL's design. In OpenCL it is unknown on which hardware the kernel will run, so the compilation is postpone to runtime. I could hardly see any reason why NVIDIA would want to make OpenCL slower.

There are two major differences between CUDA and OpenCL:
-OpenCL is industry standard while CUDA is NVIDIA's platform
-OpenCL is a regular C library, CUDA in addition to that is extension to C language

CUDA kernel code will be much nicer, it will takes less lines and looks much better. The cost is it requires a special compiler (nvcc).

Example CUDA code: (run a kernel)
myCudaKernel<<< grid, block, sharedMemorySize >>> (... arguments);

Equivalent in OpenCL:
clSetKernelArg (...); // for each kernel argument!
...
clEnqueueNDRangeKernel (...); // run kernel
... which was supposed to sniff for explosives. Obviously that mustn't have worked in this case, ...

You're assuming that he had actual explosives. From what little I've read so far they've said that it was some kind of "chemical", which expands the possibilities quite a bit beyond explosives.

Either way, I notice something that might be the beginning of the end of the "air travel safety" spectacle: this whole episode is hardly noticable on the front pages of (Swedish) news papers. That hopefully means that increasing regulations in the area will no longer be a way of publicly showing that "you act against terrorism", which should mean fewer new arbitrary rules. Hopefully.
Well removing is actually making the social graph better as most of the people removed aren't people that should have been closely connected to the user.

One problem is though I guess that there is no set way in which people decide where to cut off there graph. Some people will have friends of friends that they met one and work colleagues just because they work in the same building whereas others may limit to close friends and family.
Nah, that's not what's happening. The (time ...) special form is what prints the timing results, and it's squarely in the (big-test) function. All is right under the sun.
The only reasonable way to have full control of your (personal) data is to have it a home, stored in hardware you own (or at least fully control). That means no Facebook and no Gmail, unless you trust them to not use you data for anything you didn't expressly specified.
Organizational change vs the russian revolution
I don't think so.

Denmark is one of the richest countries in the world, and is the least corrupt country in the world according to transparency international. If you need medical attention you'll get it. Besides Denmark doesn't really have any affiliation with the former Soviet Union - it's always been a member of NATO. So i'm not quite sure what you're implying?
No it's not true.

I've self posted a number of times and I've yet to see a post saying "hey, dont self post"; sometimes they flopped, sometimes they did really well. No one complained :)

Indeed the guidelines actually encourages some types of self posting: if you want to add initial commentary on the link, write a blog post about it and submit that instead.

(and indeed this very submission seems to meet those guidelines exactly :D)
Ask HN: How can I move to USA?
I want to move to USA in the next years and I would like to know which steps I should take to do that.

Currently I'm self employed and I'm not looking for a job in the US. I'm from Italy and have no family if that makes any difference.