skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Systems research is easy to criticize, but much harder to do right.

For starters, systems research deals with the real world. The real world is messy. How would you comprehensively represent every interesting workload in an analytical model? How would you derive it from real world applications? It is impossible in the general case (halting problem), and really, really hard to do even in specialized cases. If you think otherwise, the field of worst-case execution time analysis awaits your contribution eagerly (try modeling L1 and L2 instruction and data cache interactions in a multicore CPU).

Thus, in many cases evaluating different interesting workloads empirically is unavoidable. In such cases, 100 pages of setup, methodology, and analysis are a feature, and not necessarily a sign of mediocrity. There is a great danger of overlooking substantial flaws in brief descriptions.

So, yes, mediocrity can lead to inflated sections, but a good PhD committee will not led that slide. In your page cache example, I would absolutely expect to see significant experiments and analysis; I would probably not be convinced by just a few selected benchmarks. Presenting benchmarks well requires many more pages than a succinct proof might.
Call me carazzzy, but word of mouth??
Its good to see 2 major frameworks learning/borrowing from each other rather than trying to one-up each other.
Playing with this some more, I would also want to be get more transparency on what the business model is for this product.

Open source is great when it's running on your own equipment cos you know who's picking up the running costs (you).

Clearly this product will need resource to run and scale with growth and I would want to know how they company intends to pay for this. If it works I don't mind paying for something like this like I do BaseCamp, CampFire, GitHub - but would want to know what it might look like upfront.
I'm the 1st non founding employee at Twilio, Kevin (my husband) and I have turned our lives upside down so I can work on this startup, and it's really all I think about. I read Hacker News every day and post about the best of what can I bring to the table - which is the Twilio service and the apps our developer community creates.

The community here at Hacker News is VERY efficient at voting down crappy submissions, so I trust that if I am a spammer posting useless content it will be relegated to the trash heap right away.

I've updated my profile as you suggested, and I'm working on recovering the password for "dmor". Seeing as you needed to create a new account to make your point (aka "trolling") you might consider taking your own advice.
Isn't André LaMothe doing something similar with his XGameStation (http://www.xgamestation.com/)? Or are they related?
Faster, NASA, Faster
Speaking of comparatives, a fellow grad student here at the University of Maryland is working on a phenomena called the comparative illusion, which involve sentences like the following:

More people have been to Russia than I have.

Think about that one for a bit. LL did a post on it, btw: http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/000860.h...
"Lisp programmers know the value of everything but the cost of nothing"

Functional programming is a good paradigm but not a panacea, and imperative programming isn't crap. It has its uses. I like FP, but sometimes I'm embarrassed by how some people put it on a pedestal, like for OOP before...
In all probability a new language would emerge. But just think of the cognitive load in knowing every single language. Ignoring the many and varied grammatical rules that languages have for a moment and just consider vocabulary.

Lets say you need around 3,000 words for a normal day to day conversation (though I suspect that it might be higher). That 3,000 words in Chinese, 3,000 words in German, 3,000 in Farsi. You get the idea. There has got to be more than 2,000 living languages in the world - admittedly some of them have only a handful of speakers - so you will need to remember 6,000,000 vocabulary items.

That alone is a nightmare but remember that not all words have direct translations from one language to another, English does not distinguish gender the same way that Arabic does. Japanese has different number words for different types of objects. So where some languages use only one vocabulary item others will require several.

English has, as I understand it, the largest vocabulary with more than 300,000 items (we didn't just steal people countries when we built the empire we stole their words too). Take it from me, no one knows them all.

6,000,000 - you don't stand a chance.
Coincidental to this topic, I posted a roughly recollected memory of my first ever encounter with a computer.

http://connecting2u.blogspot.com/2009/12/basic-stuff.html
Never know how this will play out. Would they Become another Google (who refused yahoo's offer and became better for it) Or Friendster (refusing googles offer but lost out to Myspace & facebook) . Only time will tell.

And I Do not understand this views of "Getting aquired is bad" for start up. I think it is up to the founders to decide what is good/bad for them.
You do realize that agave nectar is basically pure fructose, right?

Also, MSG has been unfairly accused. Wikipedia says "a statistical association has not been demonstrated under controlled conditions, even in studies with people who were convinced that they were sensitive to it".
Wow, I thought Novamente was written in C++. Your post makes a lot of sense.
Most Admired:
Bill Gates - he's the only one I can think of who's truly top-notch from both a technical and a business standpoint

Who I wish I were:
Steve Chen and Chad Hurley - they went from idea to $1.65 billion in a year-and-a-half
More moderation (sucks, I know :(). I've seen enough communities to know you cant really code round this sort of thing.

On the other hand I do think there are a minority of people using this more aggressive tone (or rather are causing it to spread). So that makes it a little easier to deal with - having a jerk flag is a good idea, then you could start to limit the site for those with a high jerk rating (i.e. longer cool off times for them, delays between their comments, when they submit a comment it asks them "are you sure you want to post this hint hint"
I was wondering about the same thing. Here's the text:

------------

1. It is desirable during every existence proof of a mathematical quantity
to be led, at the same time on the way to the result, to the actual
existing quantity.

2. A boundary between arithmetic and analytic areas of mathematics
cannot be drawn.

3. The concept of the semiconvergent series is a relative concept.

4. Out of the impossibility of perpetual motion of second
kind comes the proof of the second law of thermodynamics.

5. It did not succeed, the justifying of psychology on an exactly mathematical
basis.

----------
One bug I did notice (slightly off topic but this seems an appropriate place) is that people can work around the cool off delay for replying by clicking the "link" button on a comment. This has given me a textbox and let me reply to the comment way before the cool off.
"1. No one denies that the climate changes.

2. Most people don't deny that the earth seems to be warming."

This article seems to do just that, by implication if not by outright statement. If they're saying that the Medieval Warm Period has to be treated as a global phenomenon rather than a localised effect, then they're basically insisting that no change has happened.
I did a few hundred rounds with lingt. It's fantastic. Here's a couple of comments:

1) Perhaps there are theoretical reasons for this, but it surprised me that the characters are always presented in conjunction with their pinyin. I would have thought it would be better to train for recognition of the characters unaided by the pinyin, some of the time.

2) It was taking a long time to respond to my input, at times, and this was resulting in input I didn't intend. E.g., I would go to click "I don't know" right near the end of the allotted time, and this would get translated into a click on the subsequent round. Usually, that click would be in the wrong area for that round. There were also a couple of times where the answer it offered was clearly wrong, based on what was presented on the screen. If you want to find these cases, you may be able to get it from your analytics. My username is throwaway, and this happened between 8pm and 10:30pm EST last night.

3) You need a better way to highlight availability of the vocab lists, and more information about what each list contains.
will it response to RFS5 http://ycombinator.com/rfs5.html ?
On your second point, I think some people would characterise the current situation as aggressive geo-engineering rather than doing nothing.

I don't think there's any such thing as "avoiding any action until we know what's going on".
Dminor - Microsoft Research's data-modeling language
Who Sent the First Christmas Card?
Still, it sounds like philosophical wishy washy. What does "exists" even mean? If a "set of possibilities" exists, you could equally say "the future exists".
I first learned programming in language called CoolBasic. It's simple basic like language meant for making simple 2d games. It doesn't have any command line functionality at all, and a program always has exactly one window where everything happens. It had built-in commands for loading and showing images, playing sounds, making game objects and moving them, collisions between them, tilemaps, etc. It has it's own IDE with integrated manual (with tutorials, explanations and examples of all commands).

While it was impossible to do anything advanced in it (without using dll-files), it was really easy to make a simple game with it.

The current version of the language is outdated (uses directx 7 for graphics, no hardware acceleration, etc.), but a new version is in development. The language is made by a finn and does not currently have official english manual, but the next version is supposed to have (there are some translations made by the community).

http://www.coolbasic.com/index.php?lang=en
An interesting thought experiment. Ignoring for the fact that it won't/can't happen ...

I've been in groups where most people spoke several languages sufficiently fluently not to care (and in some cases not to know!) which they were speaking. Every time this has happened the language in use changed according to the topic being discussed, sometimes in mid-word. Sometimes one language just makes it easier to talk about something than another.

In one book I have read it says something along the lines of:

One speaks of love and such trivia in French, of food
in Italian, of tragedy in Russian, does business in
German, and addresses the servants in English.

Although the book itself is a parody, the passage rings true (although perhaps not in specifics).

Similarly, I regularly program in AWK, Python, C, C++, and ARM assembler, and I dabble in Lisp, Lua, OCaml and Haskell. In each case I reach for my most comfortable tool for what I'm working on, and it's not always the same one.

So I think if everyone were equally fluent in every language, there would be a pidgin arise, a language that is a mixture of the others, possibly with sub-languages for specific subjects.
In Forth the BLOCK mechanism for file access is unlike any other programming language, for example. It doesn't even really have a concept of a filesystem or files; you load pages into memory yourself.
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Isn't it strange that so very few smells have their own words to describe them? Supposedly, there are thousands of them, but, with the exception of the formula "it smells like X", almost without exception they don't have proper names.

It's like that tribe in South America somewhere that didn't have words for colors, except in expressions as "colored like the sun" etc.
The Tandy 1000 was an MS-DOS clone. GWBASIC.EXE was a separate program that you ran at the DOS prompt, then you could start writing your program. You could probably also do something like GWBASIC <your program name>.

But when I was a kid, that never felt like a "real" program. The real .EXE and .COM programs were compiled and ran straight from the DOS prompt, and I wanted one of those.

You're right, I had friends with C-64s and Apples. For the C-64, BASIC was basically the whole "interface." Running a program involved running a BASIC LOAD command. Not so on the early DOS clones.
There's more than one translation for words with synonyms (although people keep coming up with more synonyms).

And I use a custom js-based keymap that works on all os'es, and teach students how to enter accents.
This is a fascinating article. We are in constant dialog with our customers about how much the systems we provide should do automatically. They always want it to be entirely automatic, and we keep telling them that they need to keep their staff engaged, alert, and prepared for emergencies.

This is a fantastic article to help them understand, and I'll be researching the incidents mentioned. I already knew two of them, the others will be invaluable.

Thank you - I wish I could up-vote you many times.
I disagree from the article. There is no paradox in automation, just a simple sensationalism desire from the authors.

Everyday, there are thousands of accidents in the world(mainly cars) just because human errors,like distractions, and if no automation existed there will be dozens of airplane accidents everyday, given the enormous number of flights.

It's not human intervention what is needed, it's just something as simple as a proper error reporting system. If an accelerometer fails and nothing happens, just report :ACCELEROMETER FAILED and problem solved.
That a GPS failed, just report: GPS FAILED, and problem solved. Just change the redundant accelerometer, GPS when in land-port.

This is what human beings do, when one eye-ear-inertial information has nothing to do with the other, we got dizziness sick.

If someone designed the system badly, is not fault of automation, it's fault of the engineers. Debugging and testing is important.
Not much. I'm personally a huge fan of Slashdot's moderation system - one where there is both a minimum and maximum "karma" on a post, and the context of this rating is also recorded (e.g. +5 Insightful).

There's certainly room to improve on this model - I for one would like to see a "-1 Uncivil". Either way, where Reddit and Digg have repeatedly struggled with designing a sustainable commenting system, Slashdot's has stayed relatively constant for years, and the moderation quality has also been similarly consistent. This is not a trivial accomplishment.

IMHO the problem with "raw" upvotes and downvotes is that it is very difficult to circumvent the mob mentality, and that this system absolutely fails to scale with the population of the community. IMHO the Slashdot system works far better for large communities than what the competition seems to have going.
Very interesting response. Thanks for taking he time to reply. This was such an unusual submission that I thought it might be flagged or ignored. I really like that quote as well.
I remember a childhood friend told me that it was the smell of ozone and I guess it always just stuck. Seems kind of silly now that I think about it.
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True. I did not consider the cognitive load. It was just a random silly question that popped into my head. Setting aside the fact that it is impossible what do you think would happen to languages? And what impact do you think this change would have on other things (economic? international relations? education?)
goog is on a buying spree msft on a language release spree!
This is an excellent talk, that might provide some insight: http://web.mit.edu/esi/symposia/symposium-2009/wunsch.html
If they have funding (presumably they do) then it isn't that simple for the founders I think.
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Some further comments after playing with this a bit more:

4) The entry mechanism is going to be confusing for many people. Most people don't know how to enter a "ü" for instance. The fact that it is case sensitive is also going to be a problem. Also, the focus shifts are confusing. If you click on "I don't know," the focus is still on that button when you go to the next round, not the input field. Similarly if you click on "pause."

5) You need some way do disambiguate when there are synonyms in the vocab list.
I don't think they are arguing the first point, or really the second part. It is my interpretation, which could be wrong, that they are saying that world was warmer in the past and so warming isn't necessarily cataclysmic.
yelp may be onto something but i think they dont realize that goog can kill them by applying a "mapquest".
Block files are for when Forth is the OS and you want a quick simple way to divide up your storage. Forths that are hosted on eg: Linux all let you use the regular filesystem.
Openoffice3.2 RC1 Released
They're not saying that automation doesn't reduce accidents. They are saying that the accidents that occur now are sometimes caused by the human operators becoming deskilled because of the automation.

When you say:

" ... it's just something as simple
as a proper error reporting system."

you make it clear that you don't work in automated real-time systems. I do, and it's more complex than you seem to think.

I know of a case similar to the grounding of the Royal Majesty. In that case, again, the GPS antenna became disconnected. There was a proper error reporting procedure that was defined and documented, and yet still no one fixed the antenna, and still everyone trusted the AIS/GPS system even though it was reporting as broken. In the same way that Windows users are "trained" to click "OK" on every pop-up dialog, so they were "trained" by their day-in, day-out experience to trust the system even though they'd been told it was broken.

You also say:

Debugging and testing is important.

I don't think there would be many who would disagree with you, but are you suggesting that the systems described had had no debugging or testing? Of course not. They had been debugged and tested. Exhaustively. And knowing something of the field, most likely rather more than you imagine.

Bugs remain, and when they surface, humans need to be able to take over swiftly and accurately. Increasing automation makes it less likely that they do so. Even if you've had extensive and intensive training, if you don't use it for six months then you are unlikely to remember it all in an emergency.

That's the message of the article, and I endorse it, because I personally have seen it happening.
Line numbers. My father was a computer science teacher, and when I was very young (5, or 6), I used to look at the example programs that his students had written, and that he was grading at home. The exercises were were written in Pascal, and I just really had trouble grokking how the computer knew in which order to execute things. Even just the simple question of being able to identify where execution was going to start was a non-trivial exercise.

Line number based BASIC is much easier for a child to understand. You start at the top, and start reading. I remember that in my head I had an image of me writing 'stories' for the computer to read.

A (very) few years later, the question of order of execution was obvious to me, but I clearly remember those times in the lounge room looking at print outs of Pascal, and not being able to figure out what the program was going to do.
You're thinking like a movie critic more than a business owner. The quality of the reviews counts for squat if the cash flows are positive. In the end, Google thinks it's a financially sound acquisition aligned with the company's vision. That is what matters.
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For reference, since the documentation and paper on this language are inexplicably not linked anywhere on the MS website:

Research paper describing a preliminary version of Dminor:
http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/adg/minim.html

The readme.html from inside the archive, with a basic overview of the language and some samples:
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1643240/dminor_readme.html

Please note that the readme is made available under the terms of the license that applies to the rest of the package. IANAL but reposting the readme seemed acceptable based on my reading of the license.
http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/downloads/cd60cdb0-353f-...
I am surprised nobody mentioned processing yet.
This is FUD designed to mess with my operating system and confuse people. http://www.losethos.com

I'd say you got big balls.

God says...
mercy dissipation he sobriety begotten locking abuse What
shining naturally dishes owed officers breadth manners
plainer fastings Revenue confounded passions told broken
wander proof motions unstayed transmitted gnashed tempt
Willeth IF Foundation recesses indicating execute prevail
suffice lancet swelling dismiss feels damnable main atrociously
subjoinedst walked processing bond covenant slackened
Heal sober banquetings relics ascribe nails teeth Narrow
terribly arranged arrive Let mysterious Jews ascended
compacting am ninety

Turn the other cheek and try not to laugh. God's laughing, I'm sure. What a moron!

If I were a Jew, I'd be ashamed of the holocaust. Anyone who's read the Bible knows the Jews must have fucked-up if they get punished. They keep doing it!

Actually God said He wanted to compact them. Ba ha

God says...
vicissitude prayers mimic misery lifter sublimely guidance
censers initiation feigned blood abode abstinence classics
weights flagitiousness bashfulness tamer Pages feels plot
month darkenings obscurely occupying admitted Hart hung
fragrance abase Paul zeal fig blasts Victorinus dared
disgraceful perhaps Helper garland off wanted sat suppress
wax serviceable unjust thirst Forsake seven deal Testament
wordy ascension University regarded distributest author
Divinity Thrones appearance spectacles persevering Monad
avenue header important censured proffer truth birdlime
Evil flour proceeding US threatenest sharpen affianced
undo glow choleric threats predict injurable weigheth
million made skin stomach blottedst audience lineage receives
cares lancet blessest weeps dares salted distance indulgent
termed smoothing services murdering corruptions burnt
neither again Grace subdued dispensing conclude Number
range awful banished business triumpheth whatever heathen
ftp engage love e they theft seducers tilde madness consciousness
death command veiled descend informed Epicurus
Well, the debate is very shrill, so it's probably hard to find someone who's not invested in some sort in one side.

But "The Skeptics Handbook" is very sober and seems separated from the author: http://joannenova.com.au/global-warming/
IIRC, it's the same with Vitamin C since it's water soluble (i.e. excess escapes through your urine). Just note that -- like everything -- it is possible to overdose, so don't down a whole bottle of Vitamin C/D pills in a single go. It's just in these cases your body can readily deal with excess (as long as it's not too much excess).
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I like the quality of acquistions Google makes or tries to make. I guess their success rate is much better than others.