skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Have you read on intelligence? Jeff Hawkins, talks about how everything we do is about detecting whats different in the patterns.
"massive corporate boondoggles that sank millions or billions of dollars"

In the billions? Those are very rare in the private sector and quite common in government.

"Though we can never show it"

No, you really can't, especially in light of how many private online services existed before the Intranet was fully opened up.

"Private industry is notoriously short-sighted, and have absolutely no interest in the kinds of projects that DARPA (and government in general) can afford to focus on."

Oddly enough, they manage to accomplish quite a bit of long-term work without throwing tens of billions at any given blue-sky project by one company.

"BTW, 'a relative few of these military technologies turned out to be really useful' is a gigantic understatement."

No, it is not. Most of DARPA's work has had no civilian application at all. That decades of work after DARPA made the Internet useful and that GPS was opened to civilian use doesn't change that simple fact.

"As I said"

As I said, myself.
But so is JSP, ASP, Mason, etc.
I agree and since the link doesn't seem to work for me, I can't comment on the article.

Perhaps learning music changes the brain in a way that is different than say, learning how to cook French food or to fix a computer?
Typeface Designers Wrestle With the World of Pixels
Yes, Roberto Ierusalimschy posted a more complete list of changes to the email list:

http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.lua.general/61505
Ask HN: What iPhone or App Store data/analysis would be interesting?
When we (Bump, YCS09/Sequoia) started out developing on iPhone it was really frustrating how little information there was on some aspects of iPhone development and the App Store. The companies with the most data seem to be the least willing to share it. Although a bunch of the smaller developers shared lots of helpful data and great analysis. We have a lot of interesting data from the last 9 months and 8 million downloads and are happy to share a lot of it with the community (there will be some proprietary stuff we can't share but will try to err on the side of sharing).

One of the things we are willing to share that most others don't seem to be is our download stats. I have a couple ideas on analysis, like tying downloads to PR. But I want to make sure any research we do is useful. So let us know what you would like to see and we will try to accommodate.
Hey ajross, do you know any good sources for reading up on different I/O paradigms?

It's one of those things that I've read about different methods here and there, but I've never come across one good source that compared and contrasted the various techniques.

The short answer may very well be no, since it somewhat depends on the programming language one chooses to use. As you'd likely handle I/O differently in something like Haskell, versus python. Anyway, I'm just curious Thanks.
Scheme from Scratch - Bootstrap v0.6 - Pairs
What sort of exposure level is a baggage x-ray? Those must be significantly higher than standard human x-rays.
Another story on valve that I read indicated that they do lots of testing and iterative design in house in the early stages, so they seem to have an internal 'release early, release often' culture, at least as compared to other large game company cultures.
A second battery is a solution to a different problem. In most laptops, you cannot just switch batteries without turning it off first, which is likely to disrupt work.
If it feels convenient it is convenient.
COMET.
A few Interesting Ratings System Observations
Nor is the writer saying that.
The trick is that the solution that works best with your environment tends to be a solution that resembles your environment. The iTouch/iPhone ARE OSX, so they obviously work very well with the Mac computers this author is using. Granted, the app may be cool, a lot of his problem was driver-related.
That's the first thing I thought as well. That poor kid.
I'd be curious to see a poll of HN readers asking how many enjoy/excel at both programming and music.

I'll never win any awards for either my code or my compositions, but I love programming and I love playing music (rhythm guitar and drums, mainly).
For an image to be a number, I demand a one-to-one correspondence between images and numbers. Lacking that, I merely say that an image can be represented by a number, but this is trivial. Hence, I repeat: we're not even discussing the same thing.
The scary thing is, the article states this is the SECOND time this happens. You'd think they'd learn.
haha, -3 for my lame Kanye joke, really?
Calculated risk
Also:

* this is the first time they have ever heard of the service you provide (and they don't subsequently search for free versions), or they aren't aware that free versions exist. For example, although I am a blogger and a web professional, I did not know that externally hosted backup tools for blogs existed. This might make advertising difficult, however, if you are using Adwords, since your competitors will make themselves known.

* you have convincing sales copy, your site is well-designed & high quality, etc. (i.e. you're good at sales)

* what you provide is higher quality than free alternatives (more stable, more reliable, has support, etc.)

* what you provide is differentiated from your competition (e.g. through superior features)
You probably underestimate the added-value that (most) webapps provide over open-source tools or the code-it-yourself approach.

We pay for Pingdom's service because:

* our time is precious, we'd rather not do it ourselves.

* we don't want to be monitoring our monitoring tools to make sure their work.

* they provide a lot more features (reporting, API), which we actually need and use.
I find I code more quickly and elegantly when I'm listening to music - especially ambient music without a lot of sharp edges that throw me out of flow state.
Not to mention that for website availability monitoring you may want tracking from multiple geographical nodes (east coast, west coast, midwest, etc). Add on reporting, compliance related information storage, etc, and you're talking about a service worth paying for (to some people).
Which two numbers? It's quite difficult for a six digit and four digit number to be twin primes. Some zany Danish date format?
I suspect it may be a waste either way; at least some of the tl;dr complainers seem to have trouble doing more than skimming such an essay.

Therein lies the real problem.
"Dear Mr. McGreal" would be great - but I'd be worried if my mother or friends started addressing me that way. :)
France Télécom / Orange Exec Confirms Apple Tablet Is On The Way
The economist is the best magazine today. I just got a subscription for christmas, and I'm delighted with the print edition.
Cheap flights to pakistan
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I think you're right on with reporting. So many people need data laid out for them to hand to their boss, or just so they can understand what's going on. Getting data to tell your story, or the "real" story at all, can be worth a lot of money.
It's sad when I find the same news on hackernews that I just saw on the front page of the free subway newspaper.
Cheap flights to pakistan on pia
Flights express provides cheap flights to Pakistan, Dubai and other great worldwide destinations. We also deal with travel insurance to make sure your journey is safe. Flights express has hundreds of comparable fares to Pakistan and Dubai.
Well, the MacBook hibernated (and the Windows XP VM running in Fusion even went into standby first), but reconnecting the power supply didn't bring it out of hibernation, which is the behaviour I want. I had to hit a key to wake it up. I had ruled out using a MacBook as a server, mainly because I want to operate it with the lid closed most of the time, which might cause it to overheat (an issue shared by some models of other brands). If I can find a way to run Linux, keep the lid closed, and bring the laptop out of hibernation when power is restored, I'll be happy.
Postgres Upgrades - Ten Problems and Solutions
Impossible? Danes write dates as dd-mm-yy according to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calendar_date, so your birthday can have at most one leading zero and thus is >= 10100. 9973 is the largest 4-digit prime number, and 9973 + 2 is 1) not prime and 2) not a 5-digit number.
"I think the assumption that all writing is or should be an attempt to change someone's mind is misplaced."

I'm more fond of writing that seeks to get people thinking and talking about things than proving this or that is The Truth.

A problem with limiting writing to persuasion is that it requires you to first pick a side or figure enough out to know when something is better or worse than something else. But what if you can't? Often what's needed is more discussion, more people kicking around more ideas.

Sometimes getting people rattled is what's needed to provoke interesting responses to move things forward.
I'm wondering if we have any other illustration / animation types lurking here at HN and whether they have other suggestions about what to read, watch, etc., if we may want to get a little better at illustration. Any suggestions, guys?
It isn't snake oil - it works and works well in the right situations.

Sequential code is very readable, but not efficient at scale. If you run a single thread (without the event based approach), each request must wait for preceding requests to finish entirely before running. That can be extremely bad for latency. On the other end, say you run a thread per socket - that's not effective as the memory usage for reserving thread stack space will limit your maximum connection count.

Event programming is useful in that it effectively performs cooperative multitasking without the overhead of thread stack space. Multiple requests can be running in parallel without fully blocking each other. Within a single thread they do serialize, but only by the length of your callbacks. If a request has to do I/O, it will queue up the operation and then yield so that other callbacks can run. Ultimately, it is reasonably fair scheduling-wise, eliminates time wasted on blocking I/O, and is more memory efficient than threading when handling large numbers of simultaneous requests/connections.
Add padding to the bottom of the page so that it is not obscured by the floating chat portion.
I think the more reasonable standard might be this: if you wouldn't use a phrase or word in communication with your own colleagues, don't use it when talking to customers. If I got an email from a coworker talking about "synergies" and "visioning", I would likely reply with a direct and blunt request that they STFU and use real words.

That being said, having worked for a company which prepared business training materials for online MBA programs, I can tell you that the use of weasel words is literally part of the curriculum for any biz-school-trained managers. It's up to us, the somewhat-business-savvy geeks, to gently steer them back in the direction of real communication. (At the same time, we should probably listen when they tell us that "EPIC DATABASE FAIL!" is not actually a good way to describe what happened in an outage report.)
Not quite. One can encode anything into a number. Decoding is what it's hard, especially so if one does not know what the encoding scheme was. I suppose this is one of the reasons why NSA needs astronomical amounts of computational power.
That phrase is what makes leaders, IMSO.
No, the male equivalent to "the rules" is having a steady job and wanting kids.
On behalf of Stephen Wolfram, "Ouch".
I definitely have lightweight servers in mind, where prolonged 100% CPU usage would be rare. These would basically be headless Linux servers where X11 isn't even running (samba, mail, web, DNS, etc.), with the bonus that a keyboard & display is readily available if you want to log on locally and fire up a window manager for some reason (pretty graphs and the like).
I submitted the link. I've been reading about multiplexing asynchronous IO because I'm writing a distributed filesystem of sorts. It seems like a good fit for both the indexing hubs and the storage nodes, and it pairs well with Lua's coroutines. Also, I'm not convinced that the "nasty state bugs" from reorganizing around an event loop are necessarily worse than the ones that come from using threads with shared state.

I know what you mean about an event loop complicating error handling from callbacks, though. It feels sort of like writing in continuation-passing-style.
"Tunnel splitter also provides transparent redundancy if ISPs go down. It uses a custom protocol on top of TCP to make sure all packets get delivered. If 10 packets have already been sent out through ISP1 before it is determined that it went down, they will be resent out through another link, so your tunneled TCP connection will not drop."

This is absolutely INVALUABLE to online poker players where if they disconnect in a big pot they can lose hundreds or thousands of dollars.
How Internet Standards Are Born: Discussion with Cisco's Eliot Lear
One thing that disturbs me is how incurious people seem to be about their hardware. I was talking with two people who make their entire living from iPhone apps, and they didn't know it is an ARM device.

Part of it is surface-mount components, part of it is that the hardware is being pushed down the commodity stack. But I wonder what kitchen innovations we are missing because few people tinker with the bare metal anymore.

For 30-odd years hackers built their own lightsabers. Now they've pretty much stopped. I can't decide if that's inevitable or not.
Manchester United Needs  £500m
25 Odd Interview Questions
Well, I suppose the next time Mom doesn't want to pay for a second ticket, she should probably go ahead and put that tag on him.
Re "A tool library is an intriguing, possibly beneficial idea. But whether it's actually worth what's spent depends on facts not in evidence: how many people use it, how efficiently is it run, what's the cost of the next-best-alternative, do wealthy homeowners need the subsidy? Anything well-intentioned looks good in a vacuum; it's the tradeoffs that matter."

It's quite often busy. I don't think I've been there once without having to stand in line. I see their (inventory tagged) tools quite often.

By eye, it's run damn efficiently. Really, it's sheds. There are some sharpening stones on motors so when you check in a tool that needs sharpening, they wipe it down (if you didn't) and give it quick once over (if needed). It's in the back yard of a branch library that would otherwise be given over to maybe 3-5 parking spaces. It appears to have damn little administrative or operational overhead. Honestly, it looks like a gem.

"Given the way municipally-originated projects are run, I doubt a rigorous cost-benefit analysis has been applied. "

In this case, the benefits are very widely appreciated and the costs are so low that a "rigorous" cost-benefit analysis could easily double or triple the budget.

Their big "wastage"? Their big "perk"? Their biggest aggregious waste of taxpayer money? That would appear to be the candy bowl they sometimes have out so that patrons can grab a cheap mint or cherry sucker during their visit. Or, for all I know, maybe the people who work their fund that out of pocket.

"I'd have more confidence that it was earning its keep: willing customers would be paying its costs plus enough profit to keep the owners interested."*

I loan my personal tools to neighbors when the need arises. I'm very pleased when they come back on-time, cleaned, and not damaged. I don't expect to make a profit on a bike stand or a shovel or the exotic wrench - I'm quite happy to see those things get use rather than sitting on a shelf.

Similarly, the tool-lending library sure looks to run on the (damn) cheap. It's one of those things that "just plain works" around Berkeley. (Another that "just plain works" is our one funky playground where, yes, parents have to sign some paper before their kids are admitted but once admitted, kids as young as you can imagine are allowed to use tools, including power tools, and get to constantly rebuild the playground. Here: http://www.berkeleyside.com/2009/12/29/adventure-playground-... )

"Municipal projects can survive for years based on little more than "sounds nice", "employs some people/friends", or even ego-stroking "how Berkeley can we be?"

Yes, they can, but if I could take you on a walking tour of the place, you'd believe that the Tool Lending Library is just obviously sane. Best I can do on this here interweb thingie is: http://www.yelp.com/biz/berkeley-public-library-tool-lending...
Apparently she says some very anti-semitic stuff. See the video.

http://mreugenides.blogspot.com/2010/01/roxxxy-anti-semitic-...
You're also probably ok without an EPA license in Russia or India. The complaint's probably valid in the context where it matters. But either way--taxing 300% or 3,000%--that's a travesty for an organization that's purportedly dedicated to preserving the environment.
FWIW, the C10K Problem page (http://www.kegel.com/c10k.html) compares various approaches to handling tens of thousands of simultaneous clients. It's from 2006, but is a good overview of well-understood techniques.

Also, some observations on server design from Jeff Darcy (http://pl.atyp.us/content/tech/servers.html).
Great work on compass-colors, Chris.
Is there really a Pingdom equivalent in FOSS land? I'm not sure - I do not use it, but I've seen many cases where open source advocates claim they have "equivalent" software, but in reality they just have base-level libraries that are half-way there.

e.g., a DOCX-parsing library is not the same thing as a MS Word competitor. Having the libs to do something is not the same as having a turnkey solution ready to fly.

A better thought is this: why is that people are willing to pay money to not use free, open source software? It's either a triumph of marketing, or a strong commentary on the quality of your open source project.
Imbrium, btw (or Mare Imbrium) is the second largest basaltic plane formed by lava on the moon.
The abstract doesn't talk about this, but one school of thought suggests that entrepreneurs aren't necessarily risk-takers, they are just overly optimistic.

I think that is true. If you're overly optimistic or over-confident, you're more likely to do things that others consider as risky (because they don't seem risky to you)
Lets continue with the pingdom example. I work for a small startup and the reason why we would pay for a webapp to do these things is because it is not a part of our product or one of our core competencies. So settings up and managing these things is a waste of developer/sys-admin time, and in the long run, it turns out to be cheaper to just outsource it.

Its the same reason we pay for github rather then set up our own git server, and the list goes on.
No, I haven't. I heard an interview with him, though, that makes me think we're thinking about similar ideas.
This is also the philosophy @ Pixar - you can't release a movie twice, so it had better be right the first time. You achieve this by having 1000's of internal reviews, checkpoints, and pivots along the way where you trust your employees to challenge problems they see.
I think the leaderboard is a very good reward for the people who spend quite a lot of time on submitting quality links and contributing to discussions with good comments. every upvote on Hacker News (especially in the comments section) is hard-earned IMHO. the community upvotes quality, and that's one of the main reasons why I love to read links from Hacker News and take part on discussions here. for me it's really rewarding when I see that one of my comments / submissions got an upvote (note: I'm no karma-wh__e by any means!)
Valve can't afford to release bad stuff and patch it later - a large number of their games are single-player, and lack significant replayability. The first run-through for most players is the only run-through... you can't correct the bad experience later. It's a little bit like how you can't release a bad movie, correct it with a "Director's Cut" later, and expect significant numbers of people to come back and re-watch it.

As for Valve's multiplayer games, they do release often. Team Fortress 2 gets sometimes weekly updates (balancing and bug fixes mostly), with large content releases every few months.
Music also goes deeper than pattern matching. Often, it is a game of awareness! A really good musician also becomes aware of complex secondary effects, both in the mix of sounds produced and the effect those sounds have on the emotions and "kinesthetic sympathies" of listeners. (By "kinestheic sympathies" I mean a gut reaction people can have to the physics of movement implied by asymmetries in rhythm. "It don't mean a thing, if it ain't got that swing!")

Awesome acoustic musicians are aware of little nuances, and can exploit them to great effect, much as a great chef can bring out a little edge of nuttiness or caramel in a dish that enhances the whole. Sometimes these effects can be stretched out over time, and at 2 or three levels of granularity simultaneously. (The tasty thing you are doing this time through, is also setting up a resonance with something you are doing the next time, which is part of an overall structure of drama and anticipation you're setting up over the whole song.) I've started delving into pop influenced by electronica, and find there are many of these exquisite things in electronic music as well.

To bring this back to programming: there is also a game of awareness that can be played while programming. There are may levels of granularity, and many parts coming together in ways one might not yet be aware of. Often, it's bringing such things into awareness that results in that great refactoring.
Have you tried out the multivariate experiment type in Optimizer? Unlike the "classic" A/B test, there's effectively no risk of exposing the fact that someone is part of an experimental group to normal users. (Of course, HN types could still pick out the telltale JS fragments in the page source, but that's a risk with any testing that has a client-side component.)

We've been pretty happy with GWO's combination of being a) free, b) easy for marketing+management types to use for reporting, and c) integrated with our Analytics and AdWords accounts.

Just out of curiosity, though: are there competitive hosted solutions you would recommend over GWO? More options would be a good thing to know about...
Indeed. About a week ago, I wrote an extension to load modules in a proxy for hot code loading. It's pretty closely tied to get/setfenv. It's still too new to share, but I'm going to see if I can get it working with 5.2. Requiring the debug library (for debug.[sg]etfenv) will be a dealbreaker for some people.
Unless it is very cheap, few people will buy it, it will be a commercial failure, and there'll be another half-decade of people complaining about GM killing the electric car before somebody tries again.
ASP, I'll agree; it occupies the "PHP" slot in Win32. JSP and Mason are far less likely to be available on a given server, and JSP requires a separate server to be running in addition to the webserver (tomcat or whatever).
It's not just the medium. A game with plot and direction won't be the same when replayed. Imagine someone trying to repeat a joke to make it sound funnier, when you've already heard the punch line. So, danger of over-generalisation, but certainly games like TF2 can be improved with updates, extensions rather than revisions.

Perhaps that's his point about bugs vs new features. Releasing often works when you are adding more good bits, not so much when fixing broken bits that should never have been released in the first place.