skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
First off, I apologize if I offended you somehow. However, my points are still as valid as they were the first time I made them- except maybe I don't disagree with everything you said. I didn't realize you were saying you know one context in which a debugger makes more sense rather than every context. I thought you meant most which I view as a fallacy for many reasons. The first of which being you don't know every context. But enough of that, I understand what you meant.

You are right in the respect that sometimes the underlying concept can't be understood clearly from comments -and your method could suffice. I didn't mean to imply that comments are always the best thing imaginable one can add to his code. That is far from true. However, in my years of coding I have found comments to be very helpful.

I have used plenty of debuggers and some are better than others; however, claiming I have a lack of experience is ridiculous. Especially claiming I have the experience of some egghead Wall Street ?quant?(I've never heard of that word). You do not know me, you have never seen my code, and you most certainly have never seen me use a debugger. I wouldn't be so quick with those assumptions yourself.
My take on this (we have a bit similar situation) is that you pitch one long-term vision that you believe in. In your case, it sounds it is the platform, and the first product is a step that takes you towards that vision.

When you are unsure about your long term vision (which it sounds that you are) you can also learn a lot for your thinking by pitching different versions to different people.
No, I've used bzr before, and much prefer git.
Proposed simple REST (and OAuth) based standard for financial transactions
"Prediction #10: Man will See Around the World. Persons and things of all kinds will be brought within focus of cameras connected electrically with screens at opposite ends of circuits, thousands of miles at a span. American audiences in their theatres will view upon huge curtains before them the coronations of kings in Europe or the progress of battles in the Orient. The instrument bringing these distant scenes to the very doors of people will be connected with a giant telephone apparatus transmitting each incidental sound in its appropriate place. Thus the guns of a distant battle will be heard to boom when seen to blaze, and thus the lips of a remote actor or singer will be heard to utter words or music when seen to move."
The Bet by Anton Chekhov

You can read it here: http://www.eastoftheweb.com/short-stories/UBooks/Bet.shtml

It shouldn't take more than 10 minutes. It's so fantastically misanthropic, I cannot recommend it enough.

The prisoner's polemic against society at the end is just legendary.
I like it a lot; however, it seems that if I type, my name, for example (my actual name) it doesn't check it. It seems like there is a very limited list of domains? Although I like it so far.
The Freehackers Union
> "He will live fifty years instead of thirty-five as at present – for he will reside in the suburbs"

Clearly a fake article. Language is anachronistic. Also life expectancy in 1900 was not 35 years, but closer to 50:

http://www.demog.berkeley.edu/~andrew/1918/figure2.html
Why do you prefer ARM over x86?
Finally got around to reading some Tolstoy -- Anna Karenina.

It was terrific. Great book!
Here's a scan of the original article, found by Googling the title:

http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_sGYULzoQCgA/RiR7L_dyCLI/AAAAAAAAAd...

This comment says that it's available on microfilm:

http://paleo-future.blogspot.com/2007/04/what-may-happen-in-...

Here's a source article with more information:

http://paleo-future.blogspot.com/2007/04/next-hundred-years-...
I basically discovered Vernor Vinge.

A Fire Upon the Deep, by Vernor Vinge

A Deepness in the Sky, by Vernor Vinge

The Peace War, by Vernor Vinge

Marooned in Realtime, by Vernor Vinge

Hyperion, by Dan Simmons

Mrs. Perkins's Electric Quilt, a fun book about some math and physics problems
Jeremy Hammond (xec86) Does it again
Firstly let me just say "Get a Haircut!"

Secondly does any of this sound familiar?

"I am very open-minded to other people's opinions, and i always enjoy a good intellectual discussion. but if there's one thing i hate, it's ignorant narrow-minded people who immediately dismiss other people's opinions without even thinking. I believe that regardless of what you have to say - even if it's stupid or hateful - you should still have the right to say it. i believe that ideas should have the right to be exposed to the public - to have free competition among other ideas. if an idea is truly damaging or hateful, then let the people think about it and decide for themselves. in addition, who decides what gets censored or not?"

Obviously Mr Hammond feel's the need to procrastinate and make those decisions for the rest of us. Free from Jail for hacking ProtestWarrior but heading back by all appearances for another bout of incarceration soon and by the looks of his appearance now compared to how he looked before prison life is doing him a world of good.

Hammond completed two years in the federal pen in late 2008 after his conviction of stealing 5,000 credit-card numbers from another Web site. The possible connection to the far more-damaging attack on Irving's site is tantalizing.

Readers might like to remind the proud and bragging father of Jeremy and Jason Hammond of his epic failure as a parent:

Jack Hammond
1271 Pleasant Ave
Glendale Heights, IL 60139
(630) 790-3008
We have one of these where I live (Huntsville, Alabama), and it is huge! You really cannot appreciate the magnitude of it (size and engineering) without seeing it in person, much like the Hoover Dam.
WebKit has a great feature that lets you just drag the lower right corner on any textinput. I use it in Chrome all the time, I hear it's in Safari too.
I've built a platform company in the past, and it's probably one of the harder startup genres to master. One of the problems is its very hard to impress upon your listener how cool your platform really is. Even with fancy demos, we never felt pitching our platform was received as well as it should--the listener simply doesn't appreciate the work that goes into the foundation.

Investors will take the time to try to understand if you can get them hooked on the market opportunity. Unfortunately, its typically hard to convince them that your platform, even though its very cool & innovative, can overcome the intrinsic inertia people have in adopting new tools.

Personally, I would be focusing on the applications you can build with the platform. That's what we ended up doing at Metreos (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metreos). Our pitches contained 10% platform and 90% real world application examples.

Every company is different so please take this with the requisite grain of salt. Good luck!
Sure it not perfect

- very handy when starting new projects
- easy to generate project files for Idea, Eclipse etc.

I used ant in the past, maybe it is more flexible, but also requires more work to set up initial build file. I find Maven just easier to use.

What I liked the most is consistency across project files, project structure.
De-Tweeting
How will the signal cross oceans? Deserts? Yellowstone National Park?
"It very well may be that society is optimizing an objective function quite different from the one that you claim it should."

What is it optimizing for? Shouldn't it be intentional, and therefore apparent? If we're willing to throw so much money at saving so few lives, I don't see how it can ever make sense to allow lives to be lost that could be saved more cheaply. Sure, defending against terrorism helps to prevent property losses as well, but I still don't think we come out on top.
I wonder why he missed storage of information. Is that so much harder to imagine than transmitting it directly?
Death of a Salesman. This is yet another book that you are forced to read prematurely in middle or high school. At the time, it was a frustrating exercise; upon rereading it at age 25, I thought it was fantastic.

I also enjoyed The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time. It was very creative.

Sadly, I had no books that yielded a personal intellectual epoch this year.
Zeitoun by Dave Eggers. A sad story about a guy named Zeitoun in New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina.

Wars, Guns, and Votes: Democracy in Dangerous Places by Paul Collier. Someone smart thinks about how to move failed states toward democracy in such a way that it sticks.

Dreams from My Father by Barack Obama. A good memoir, but particularly interesting because he wrote it before he was famous.

Cliff Walk by Don Snyder. An English professor gets fired and becomes a carpenter. Great if academia irritates you.
I'm a fan of reading biographies and Open, Andre Agassi's biography, was a very intriguing, enjoyable, and surprisingly well-written book.

The only other book I read this past year that stood out to me was GK Chesterton's The Man Who was Thursday. I thought this was a very well written allegorical spy novel that had some very quippy dialogue.

Next on my reading list I would like to read some Vladimir Nabokov since I've never read any of his work. Has anyone else here read any of his books?
I'm a huge Stephenson fan, but I felt let down by the Diamond Age's ending. It felt like it was missing 30 pages.
I tried them once and I thought they tasted pretty bad. I'm not sure how I could have screwed them up (shake, spray on hot griddle).
Lower power consumption, I'd guess.
Cinema was already invented in 1900. Good guess with the electric stuff though.
I wonder if they sell these in the UK?
RSS. It has been available for years, but has not reached mainstream yet.
I think the big leap here for him was seeing live events vs. pre-recorded films. When these predictions were written, silent films would have been commonplace and live radio broadcasts weren't around. News would have been distributed via newspaper, sent world-wide by telegraph.
i'm surprised that you don't dynamically extend your database if you have a miss. did you try that? if so, i'm curious why it didn't work out.
Started and finished Super Freakonomics on a flight just recently. I enjoyed it a lot.
Wow, what a great read! It was interesting how many things they accurately predicted without (obviously) knowing what they would be called. All of these ideas were presented with none of these words:

immigration
baby boom
Panama Canal
tract housing
agribusiness
physical education
Acela high speed train
airplanes
rockets
space shuttle
television
fax
internet
satellite TV
genetic engineering
welfare
cell phones
radio
Moog synthesizer
air conditioning
fast food
xrays
ultrasound
i'm not sure what it will lead to, to be honest. my best guess is that there's some new kind of interface (3d?) that will exploit the extra power.
*eye roll
Charles Stross, 'Accelerando'

Stephenson, 'Anathem' (first 150 pages slow)
Do home servers count? Certainly not mainstream yet in the UK.
2010 Technology Predictions
more scifi recommendations: http://twitter.com/akkartik/status/7210697378
How to speed up massive data analysis by eliminating disk seeks
I'm certain I'm re-inventing the wheel with this approach, but I obviously haven't been researching in the right places, since I hadn't run across this approach before I cobbled it together.

I'm expecting an education on what I'm missing from the HN community!
"Prediction #16: ... Spelling by sound will have been adopted, first by the newspapers."

Language varies too much and too quickly. Wasn't that why we adopted spelling in the first place?
>There just aren't enough smart people with the desire to work a screener's job in the US.

I think this would change quickly if you advertise effectively and increase the pay.
Yes. As a reader and speaker of the English language, you are absolutely required to read Lolita as soon as possible. It is one of the best novels ever.
I don't like the baby bird analogy, or the use of the term "spoon-fed" here. It makes it sound as if people should be ashamed for wanting things to be simpler.
Heh, Prolog?
AT&T wants out of landline business
buildr combines the advantages of maven with the advantages of being built on top of rake and scales to managing multiple projects. Groovy's Grails build system and Scala's sbt also both look good to me, although I have not yet taken the time to try them. The only reason I can think of why systems like buildr aren't more popular than maven is that most Java developers appear too unwilling to learn a separate programming language and would instead rather torture themselves coding in painful XML-based DSL's like Maven.
"Educators say that, for adults, one way to nudge neurons in the right direction is to challenge the very assumptions they have worked so hard to accumulate while young. With a brain already full of well-connected pathways, adult learners should “jiggle their synapses a bit” by confronting thoughts that are contrary to their own, says Dr. Taylor, who is 66."

Socrates' mind will always be fresh.
The Recovering Programmer
I disagree. I think the Iran could easily turn into the functional equivalent of a constitutional monarchy. Britain is still, on paper, ruled by the head of the Church of England after all.
Unless I misunderstand you, isn't that basically the same thing we do in English?
Article editors will be as lax as today ... #13 == #26
Citizens of the US will begin to publicly insist on being told what to think.
As I mentioned elsewhere in the thread, buildr manages dependencies just like maven, including the ability to download sources and javadocs, and also has an ant integration library that works really well. Finally, buildr supports generating eclipse .classpath and .project files for eclipse, though the IDE integration obviously isn't as good because the project is younger and has less community support.
Forgive my ignorance, but can you explain how Microsoft games the system with H1-B's?

re: tax breaks for increasing the number of employees, here's a fairly balanced posting on the subject: http://business.theatlantic.com/2009/10/would_a_payroll_tax_... - of course on a more fundamental level, payroll taxes always has struck me as odd considering essentially it's a tax on companies for hiring folks.

For me, a permanent reduction would be a far greater incentive to hire people because at least for me, I hope that I am hiring someone for more than a year or two which is when presumably the tax breaks would expire.
I did the same about a year ago and overall I'm quite pleased. After a year they're bugging me to renew whois-cloaking thing on namecheap, but orders of magnitude less irritating than godaddy in all sorts of ways.
Likely not. Just like we don't get/want spray cheese.

All sounds a bit yuck to me.

I get the powder stuff. You can buy it from Tesco. Comes in a bottle, which is about 1/4 full of powder. You can store in the cupboard for ages. When you want pancakes you just open the bottle, fill it up with fresh milk, shake for ages then start cooking. Really tasty as well.
Why Gowalla and Foursquare are kicking Google’s ass – The check-in model
(The links here bring you to my notes from each book, and the ISBN number for each so you can find it easily at your favorite library/store/whatever.)

How We Decide - by Jonah Lehrer:
Brilliant book with one clear message: our emotional brain is faster and usually smarter than our logical brain. Our emotions are trained by years of logic and experience, retaining it all for real wisdom. Many decisions are better made by going with the gut feeling. Gets a little too technical with deep brain/neuro/cortex talk, but brings it back to usable points.
http://sivers.org/book/HowWeDecide

The Investor's Manifesto - by William J. Bernstein:
Absolutely my favorite author and advisor on the subject of investing. Anyone with any money to invest (or already invested) please read this book. Such clear thinking, using only facts, and using numbers not guesses. Modern portfolio theory: use passive indexes of the entire market, no speculation, no stock picking, and avoid the entire fee-sucking financial industry.
http://sivers.org/book/InvestorsManifesto

Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives - by David Eagleman:
Fiction. Awesomely creative think-piece of 40 different short stories of what happens when you die. To be clear: the author is not pretending this is fact! The framework is inspiring for anyone: coming up with 40 different answers to any one question.
http://sivers.org/book/Sum

The Talent Code - by Daniel Coyle:
A great book showing that deep practice - (struggling in certain targeted ways - operating at the edges of your ability, where you make mistakes - experiences where you're forced to slow down, make errors, and correct them) - is what really makes you improve at anything.
http://sivers.org/book/TalentCode

Influence - by Robert Cialdini:
Classic book on the psychology of persuasion. I read it 15 years ago, thought about it ever since, and re-read it now. How to get a 700% improvement in volunteers. How to sell more by doubling your prices. How to make people feel they made a choice, when really you made it for them.
http://sivers.org/book/Influence

The Time Paradox - by Philip Zimbardo and John Boyd:
See my in-depth article about this book at http://sivers.org/time
http://sivers.org/book/TimeParadox
Pretty much spot-on apart from the strange (and repeated) prediction of giant fruits and vegetables (I guess you could say the green revolution provided similar quantity, if not on a per-fruit basis) and the failure to predict the popularity of air travel.
Well at least for reasonably populated areas, how's that?
It's the reaction everybody has with Rand. To be completely fair to her, she introduces a lot of people to ideas they haven't grappled with before. I'm still glad I read her, even if, three years after, I disagree with all but a strand of her ideas.

I doubt it's worth having another HN debate about Rand, though. We've thoroughly exhausted that discussion.
"When I listened to Mozart last year, I thought classical music was all about the composer. Today I realized the performer matters just as much"

That's certainly true to an extent. But some performers won't suit your taste, and if you judge the music because you picked a poor performance (like you might get on the cheap imports), you might miss some incredible music. I can't stand Karajan's Beethoven, good thing I didn't start listening with him.

I can't tell someone exactly why I like Mozart best when Marriner's conducting, or why Serkin just does the Emperor better. But once you know you like a composer's work, then you'll start to prefer some performances over others.

The great part is that this slowly changes all your life, and that really great music never gets old and you can repeat the same chills you got when you were 20. It's a lot like Sherlock Holmes that way!
thanks guys! I was wondering if someone already made an a/b tests purely on color schemes. that would be very interesting.
Maybe not as high brow as some of the other suggestions here but I really enjoyed Stephen King's Under The Dome. It's basically a story of small town political corruption and the human tendency to be easily exploited by dictatorial types in a crisis.
hi, can you guys email me so we can talk about this.
Risk, the science of politics and fear by Dan Gardner (absolutely fantastic book, I already mentioned it on here earlier in the year).

The Game (again). I read this regularly to remind me of a few things - it's the book that originally got me fascinated in human interaction.

Nemesis (Richard Mullers theory) after a recommendation on HN.

A couple of Obama's books (seemed logical to read up on him)- dreams of my Father I especially liked.

Snowball (though still chugging through that).

In Search of Schrodinger's Cat - a book all about the evolution of quantum theory (and one that gives me my favourite quote of the year: In 1905 Einstein actually published 5 times. The fifth being his PHD dissertation; yes those three individually genius works, which shook the very foundations of physics, were published my a man called Mr Einstein. Despite the artistic license I still love it as a quote :))
I got the impression from some of what I was reading in the run up to Y2K that this sort of approach was common in the mainframe world.

Obviously, many sites had lots of data (often a lot stored on tape) and limited main memory (especially back in the days in which it was core).

You might start here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mainframe_sort_merge ("It is very frequently used; often the most commonly used application program in a mainframe shop.")

Show the old dogs that new dogs can learn old tricks ^_^.
Your comments are very insightful. I know this because I try to read the whole comment before judging. Unfortunately, even in fairly intelligent audiences like HN, it is common for people to form judgements based primarily on first impressions. Someone who reads only the first sentence (or even the second sentence) of any of your comments in this thread will think that your are hostile and condescending, which is probably why people are fighting back instead of listening to the insight that you share later in each comment. Your comments will generate more interesting conversation, and are more likely to be truly heard and understood, if you are more careful with your early words.
Floating in the Digital Experience
The best book I read in 2009 was The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins. It's surprisingly accessible (I've never taken a biology class), and talks a lot about evolutionary game theory which I found fascinating.

Some other books I read last year:

How the Mind Works by Steven Pinker. It was a great book, Pinker's writing is accessible and entertaining. Much more so than On Intelligence by Jeff Hawkins.

More with Less: Paul MacCready and the Dream of Efficient Flight by Paul Ciotti. I really enjoyed this one, it was the story of the first team to cross the English channel with human-powered flight.

What the Dog Saw by Malcolm Gladwell. I liked this one better than Gladwell's other books. There is less theorizing and arguing a point and more telling stories, which is what Gladwell excels at.

The Mind's I by Douglas Hofstadter and Daniel Dennett. If you are patient with what is sometimes (in my humble opinion) pointlessly arguing semantics, some of the sections are interesting.
Ad hominem is the last resort of a lazy mind.
Has Our Freedom To Be Sexual Turned To Pressure To Be Sexual?
Apologies, but the mobile version of the story that is linked to here got me so frustrated I almost threw my mouse across the room. Can't highlight text, can't copy text as a result, and the article itself looks like garbage.

Here's a (better) link to the original article:

http://money.cnn.com/2009/12/23/smallbusiness/batter_blaster...
About Open Source Stewardship
I like James Brian Quinn's definition innovation: the reduction to practice of an invention in a culture. The focus of the question was on the expensive and geeky but the larger impacts may come from the re-purposing of 'simple' technologies for basic human needs.

Gerald Weinberg is dying of a rare form of cancer, thymic carcinoma. He used twitter to announce he was still alive http://twitter.com/JerryWeinberg/status/7271106797 and he is using a special blog http://www.caringbridge.org/visit/geraldmweinberg/mystory to allow his family, friends, and many readers to follow his condition, leave tributes, and make donations.

There are things that the "mainstream may get" before the HN community that are worth paying attention to as well. They may not be a source of "change your life" wealth, but they may change the quality of your life.
The Tarantino Mixtape
Well-written comments are generally helpful. And the people who write well-written comments generally understand the concept of brevity.

Badly-written comments are worse than no comments at all.

Badly-named variables and functions are worst than that even.
Same thing for me. They tasted awful. Threw the rest of the can away.
dont know if 'very big and heavy' is how i would describe the air