skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Color me skeptical. Geese and pelicans fly within a few wingspans of each other and at relatively low speeds. I am not sure I would want to fly in a flock of jumbos a few hundred feet apart at mach .85. Mythbusters did a show on the benefits of drafting semis. The conclusion was that the savings were substantial, but the following vehicle had to be so close that the danger was also substantial, 2 feet IIRC.
Here's to the crazy ones, the misfits, the rebels, the troublemakers, the round pegs in the square holes... the ones who see things differently -- they're not fond of rules... You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them, but the only thing you can't do is ignore them because they change things... they push the human race forward, and while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius, because the ones who are crazy enough to think that they can change the world, are the ones who do.

Steve Jobs
I'm not an enterpreneur, I'm a dirty hack
I'm starting to suspect that many more stories are being submitted just to get karma. One example is people dredging up old vaguely-related articles and just dumping them here to see if they can get a few points.
Its not about "computers" but rather about "computation".
Switzerland is not part of the EU and french isn't that easy to learn for italian speakers I believe.
I agree, I like the mix. Some stories are about hacking on cool new technologies, with some stories on startup problems, acquisitions, announcements, etc also.
Yes the Netherlands is probably an option. But settling in Paris without being a native french speaker is notoriously difficult. That's what people tell me anyway, I never tried.
"On Google Code" != "Google open-source project"
Before making any suggestions I would ask what is the definition of a better programmer? Since this can be a bit subjective I will suggest that you strive to become an 'expert programmer'. It is difficult to even define what an 'expert' is, but normally one would recognize an expert as someone that effortlessly accomplishes a task. Some characteristics of experts from psychological studies are:

1. Experts such as chess grandmasters rely on a vast store of knowledge of game positions. They tend to organize this information in chunks, which can easily be retrieved from long-term memory. The same is true for other experts from sports to mathematics.

2. They also typically engage in years of effortful study, continually tackling challenges that lie just beyond their competence

In my opinion you need to accumulate both, ie, expand your store of knowledge, as well as continually striving to handle situations where the task in hand is beyond your ability.

At this point in your experience my personal recommendation is to actually focus on number 2, for example refactor some PHP code into OOP, to give you another angle of programming as well as tackle JavaScript for the same reason.

The 10-year rule states that it takes approximately a decade of heavy labor to master any field. As one that has gone through a couple of 10 years:) the best advise I can give is 'learn to program' rather than learn 'to-days-popular-framework-or-language'. Think about it as similar to writing a book, knowing English will not turn you into an author. Practice will as well as motivation.
Indeed: http://www.businessweek.com/the_thread/hotproperty/archives/...
Learn a new programming paradigm. For example, if you are a OOP literate, learn FP.
I have the same impression - less hacker stuff, more startup/business/tech celebrity/drama/fun stories.

I am experimenting with something that may help. Here is a URL to the RSS feed of Hacker News, filtered to contain only hacker stories:

http://www.lemmatica.com/emit_topic?key=aglsZW1tYXRpY2FyDQsS...

There is an automated text classifier behind it and I'm continuously training it for hacker stories. The classifier and my definition of what are hacker stories are, of course, imperfect, so there will be errors (I'm training the filter with some delay, usually once per day). If you want to filter your own feeds like this please ask me for an account.
Distributed Vs. Fault Tolerant Systems
I actually quite like how the associations are named the same as they are in ActiveRecord. It seems like it would make migrating to Mongo a bit less futzy-abouty than with MongoMapper.
Googling around I see Ehud Lamm got waay excited about it in 2003. http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/classic/message5496.html
Actually, the question you are asking is "Why mathematica and not Common Lisp or Scheme + some libraries?"

Mathematica is lisp + a bunch of a math libraries + vendor support + slightly different syntax + renamed functions. The syntactic differences:

{a b c} -> '(a b c)
f[a,b] -> (f a b)
a == b -> (Equals a b)
(* comment *) -> ;;comment

Since there is no advantage to different syntax and renamed functions, people choose mathematica over other lisps (and grumble about the weird syntax).
This is the wonderful thing about Hacker News: it's always reminding you to work when you aren't.
$12K/month, but unwilling to quit his job to start a company. Must be a sweet job.
Small point, but

If the complexities that its retail competitors have mastered really are an insuperable difficulty for Amazon, it could contract with a commercial vendor that specializes in these calculations, like Vertex, as Netflix does.

What the hell is Stross's point here? If Amazon has deliberately masterminded an enormous sales tax loophole they undoubtedly are not confused or unwilling to deal with the complexities of tax law. By ignoring the obvious subtext with which the Amazon spokesperson suggested "simple" and "fair" taxing schemes for all business models Stross is only making a fool of himself while undermining the entire shoddy article.
Sales taxes are paid by the customer, not the merchant. I'm sure your state requires you to pay the tax on that laptop. It is you that are depriving your state of income, not the out-of-state merchant.
Sales taxes are paid by the customer, not the merchant. The merchants are required to collect and report the taxes, their customers are the ones who pay.
New Rules for Entrepreneurs
Rule No1: There are no rules.
" discrimination against bricks & mortar businesses seems quite unfair."

One rationale is that the Company in Nevada isn't using any services in California, so they shouldn't pay taxes for services they aren't receiving. I think that's ingenuine - it's a good reason not to pay _property taxes_ in California - but Sales Taxes are supposed to paid, they are called "Use Taxes" - and most larger business pay them, but individuals either don't bother or don't know.

The debate is over anyways - Amazon will be collecting sales taxes in all states within two years. In the meantime, their behavior has been both ethical and legal - and they enjoyed a competitive advantage - for a while.
There is one tiny little feature on the BlackBerry that makes it extra addictive - the tiny red LED on the top of the face. Every time you get an email, sms, IM, missed phone call, etc, that LED starts blinking.

When my iPhone is sitting on the table, its just a thin black slab. Do I have messages? Did someone call? No one knows. OTOH, the BlackBerry will start blinking and you just HAVE TO check what the blinking is about and until you do, that blink is like an unopened present - it could be anything.
See someone might say the same thing to your "go work instead" point. Haven't we heard that before too?

Repetition works because we are not all on the same page. We all have our aha moments at different times.
I see the problem you're trying to solve, I'm not sure I like the implementation. Simpler I think would be a way to create lists of users on the fly and see only their Tweets to follow a conversation.
Until the last two paragraphs, I didn't read this as an argument that Amazon should voluntarily pay more -- rather that the loopholes allowing Amazon (and their competitors) to do this should be closed. That's the stronger case.

Still, I think it's legitimate for Stross to call out Amazon for special attention, and leadership, given their size and emblematic association with cross-state e-commerce. Amazon gets the largest advantage from the current loopholes; if and when they relent in their opposition, the issue can be resolved in a way that treats all businesses equally.

So despite the ostensible call at the end for Amazon to unilaterally start collecting sales taxes, it's still really an argument for updated treatment of all such businesses.
I don't know why you need my real name but if you google the number and google my id it will become clear what they refer to. My website is SpaceAgeCoding.com. Excuse the website-it's a work in progress.
Can BB be also used as a hardware modem to share internet connection with the notebook?
Ask HN: Does Web Traffic Always Equal Income?
This is a follow-up to a post I did a few months ago. I didn't listen to you guys then so I thought I'd ask the question again and hopefully get a better answer :)

I have a technology management blog. Post stuff about agile, programming, management, and other stuff I like to write about. As part of that, I do articles on all sorts of crazy stuff. Whatever I find interesting.

A while back I posted about a female pole-vaulter, whose name will go unmentioned, because she was becoming an internet sensation. Just a cute girl who somehow became popular because of the vagaries of the net. I thought it was an interesting story about how the internet changes the nature of celebrity.

Over the months, however, Google has started ranking my post higher and higher in search results. A while back I asked you guys what to do about it. The best answer I got was to use robots.txt to tell Google to ignore it. I was tempted to do that but didn't. Laziness I suppose. But I also didn't like the idea of censoring myself. As much as I dislike the idea of posting cute-girl-pics-for-traffic, I dislike the idea of being forced to pull stuff from my blog even more.

Now I'm reaching the critical mass point. I received an email from my ISP saying that my traffic is going to go past my limit this month, and it's mostly all this one article. WebAnlyzer shows 89,000 hits on this article up until yesterday. That probably translates into 20,000+ or so visitors. And the number keeps increasing.

So I'm spending the afternoon researching what other sites with this person on them are running as ads, hoping to find something that will "pay the rent" as it were, to keep this article up.

Here's the question: is there any hope here? Does high traffic automatically mean income? Or put another way, are there situations where you can have boatloads of traffic and not make enough to pay for the bandwidth? Do eyeballs really mean all that much every time?
not in any interesting way. it's just two or three sentences that don't add much.

i agree with the original comment: this should have been submitted directly from the source.
actually when I watched it grow, within a day it was around 100,000 members. it grew impressive fast.
Shouldn't he be angry at all the shoppers...

He might as well be angry at rainclouds.

Tax policy is often designed to allocate tax burdens where they are easy to measure and enforce, rather than where they 'theoretically' should be triggered. Requiring millions of shoppers to record and pay their 'Use Taxes' would be an onerous requirement; requiring merchants to collect 'Sales Taxes' is relatively easy and indeed already traditionally done, even by Amazon.

So it makes perfect sense to focus on bringing cross-state retailing into the sales tax regime, rather than scolding shoppers about use taxes.
Aren't planes at cruising altitude flown mostly on autopilot? Computer controls don't suffer from the sluggish reaction speeds that make following closely risky for humans driving on a highway.
Speaking from my own experience, and that of several friends, you need very little French to show up in Paris and just get on with it. Numbers, how to read street signs, what the different kinds of shops are, that sort of thing. The only thing you need good French for is if you need to deal with the local bureaucracy (unless you are or are with a pregnant woman, that is the root password to the French public sector). If you have lived in London or New York, you could get a long way in day-to-day life in Paris on intuition alone.

It's a lot easier obv. if you already have a job there (I did, at a French company with a significant UK presence), but that's true of anywhere. It would be a lot harder to show up in a small town without good French, and some places will be practically impossible unless you are French, but that's a political thing.
Learning a C language (i.e. C/C++/Java) is great advice for increasing your programming knowledge. You'll learn how software works at almost it's lowest level. I wouldn't advise learning some architectures assembly language unless you really get C and want to really dig into low level programming. It's a great skill, but if you don't want your career to go that way there are better places to invest in your education.

OOP (as mentioned in the question) is a great thing to learn as well. Depending on if you have any experience with OOP I always point people to the book "Design Patterns" by Gamma et al. It changed the way I build software in so many positive ways I doubt I could even list them all.
On what do you base the proposition that "a sales tax is probably the fairest known model of taxation?"

I would counter that sales tax is probably the most regressive known model of taxation, aside perhaps from the notion of a "flat tax."

The poorer you are, the heavier the burden a sales tax imposes. When you're living hand to mouth, you're spending all of your income to survive, and so essentially a sales tax is like an income tax for you. As you rise on the scale of wealth, you tend to buy much less in proportion to your income, and so you are taxed a smaller percentage.

Poverty is not a failing. Greed is not a virtue.
Why would your want your app server to serve static content!?

Point apache or whatever traditional web server, which is really good at serving static ocntent in an efficient manner, at it and be done with it.

To answer your question: No, I don't think serving static content should be something your web framework does. It sounds inefficient and less flexible to me. For example, if I have a web server in front of the framework, I have more control over caching and load balancing.
If someone's here reading hacker news and clicking on stories about achieving goals, chances are they are precisely the people who need to be told that more and harder work is much more important than tricks and systems.
""Linux: written by amateurs for amateurs." - D. Presotto"

This is (in a strict sense) true and is not the same as "linux is crap". Linus was certainly an amateur when he wrote the first version of the kernel in the sense that was the first OS kernel he wrote) and many people who contribute are not tenured professors(or whatever your definition of "professional" happens to be). The fact remains that an "amateur" teenager in Finland ran rings around the "professionals".

"That the technical merit of the language doesn't determine it's popularity. So choosing what is the "better language" is rendered pointless."

I agree. But that is the point isn't it? You can't choose "the better language" anyway. The mythical Lisp OS isn't really "better" either unless you've made up your mind up front. So why go on and on for years (the blogger not you)about "everything popular is crap and Lisp is the ultimate leet cool thing forever and forever and anyone who doesn't accept this is an idiot" instead of focussing on actually writing some code?
Yep, easily: http://www.jaredcompany.com/docs/JaredCo_Tether_Guide.pdf
And allows you more flexibility with caching and load balancing too.
Yes, but the level of income varies dramatically.

I've worked on sites that generate on average from $0.001 per visitor ($1 RPM) all the way up to sites with less volume but generate much higher revenue per visitor ($1.25).

My guess is the type of traffic you are talking about here is the former unfortunately. In other words, you may have been able to monetize those 20k visitors at $.01 per visitor (or maybe a total of $200). If you are getting over 2,000 visits per day, you can throw AdSense on the page and see how much you make.

What types of sites make lots of $$ per visit?

Generally product related sites, coupon sites, sites that sell something, etc.
Ontario.

Toronto for 2 years, Northern Ontario (Sault Ste. Marie region) for 3 years.

Better invest in some warm winter clothing ;)
Ask HN: How do you organize your code on your machine?
Currently I have a Code directory which is littered with all sorts of stuff and in general is pretty unorganized. Between small code snippets and fully-fledged projects, the whole directory is a complete mess.

So, how do you organize your code?
Military aircraft, including long range bombers, routinely fly in formation so it would seem a better first test would be there.
"For purchases made out-of-state, states already have a mechanism for collection: use tax. I find it a bit disingenuous that he doesn't even mention this."

Mention: "In California, the State Board of Equalization estimates annual tax revenue losses of $1.085 billion from unpaid 'use taxes,' which are supposed to be paid for out-of-state purchases."

But you're right, he spends very little text on this idea.
My good code I push to github. Everything else I occasionally delete or archive to my dropbox folder.

http://breckyunits.com/code/how_i_organize_my_dropbox
10 best new Firefox add-ons of 2009
Pardon me if this is a noob question, but whats the point (value) behind karma points?

I ask because is there really a tangible difference between a poster with say 300 karma points and another with 500?

Also, since (typically) older posters have more karma points isnt the whole system skewed in favor of those posters who have been here the longest (you can make the same argument for those who post vs those who submit).

Basically what do HN users derive from having huge karma point tallies?

(edit: aside from the obvious that is)
Sounds similar to where I was a few years ago. Here are my tips:

http://breckyunits.com/twelve_tips_to_master_programming_fas...

Feel free to email me if you want to talk further. Good luck!
Student loan stories from PBS's expose show _Now_
Stross only has <1000 words here, so he leaves out other parts of the case for Amazon paying sales taxes. These include:

- Amazon has commissioned retail sales staff -- via their Associates program -- in every state

- if distant sellers have a cost advantage from arbitrary tax loopholes, then real non-replenishable resources (like fossil fuels, clean air) will be consumed chasing those advantages. If prices indicate the real inputs to a sale, resources are better allocated.

- a broader base for the sales tax would mean less pressure for the rate to rise to make up shortfalls (partially due to commerce moving online). Yes, governments are voracious and irresponsible but dynamically in the long run, more entities paying means a lower rate, and a larger constituency to lobby against rate hikes. Currently, Amazon could secretly be cheering every rise in California sales taxes. (That is, we should prefer to have Amazon on the "pro low taxes for everyone" team, rather than the "pro low taxes just for those with intricate interstate legal arrangements" team.)
Why should the tax I pay on a new computer vary based on how it is delivered to my home?

The tax you are legally required to pay does not vary. You simply choose not to pay whats required at the end of the year.
Great article; I agree with him wholeheartedly.

To those who think that faucets are supposed to be like double-doors, I understand, but usability is not always about idealism or philosophy. Sometimes it's about consistency. If most faucets operate one way, wrongly or rightly, then doing it differently forces the users to do it wrong the first time (or first few times) he/she uses the product.

The book that comes to mind is "Don't make me think" by Steve Krug. He did not advocate perpetuating "wrong" convention, but the point is still valid: don't waste the user's time by designing something to behave differently than "expected".
Whether you don't see it or not is not relevant, I'm seeing it and that's good enough for me.

Belief doesn't enter in to it:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=871202

It persists to this date, you just have to work a bit to see it in action.
Infamous Chinese pirates launch Ubuntu that looks just like Windows XP
You need to remember that clojure vectors are NOTHING like arrays. They're persistent ultra-wide tree structures. I was curious if you were right and vectors were the wrong choice, so I profiled the code.

I had the big-test function run several times to actually show the real numbers (you need to prime the JVM to get a real indication of its speed):

~/Projects/palindromes % 〕bin/run-tests

1000 X ' amanaplanacanalpanama '
naive : (skipped)
fast : "Elapsed time: 449.397 msecs"
"Elapsed time: 182.432 msecs"
"Elapsed time: 149.721 msecs"
"Elapsed time: 162.804 msecs"
"Elapsed time: 159.086 msecs"

http://gist.github.com/264369

CPU SAMPLES BEGIN (total = 205) Sun Dec 27 10:52:27 2009
rank self accum count trace method
1 1.46% 1.46% 3 301336 clojure.template__init.load
2 1.46% 2.93% 3 300339 java.lang.Class.forName0
3 0.98% 3.90% 2 301445 clojure.lang.PersistentHashMap.containsKey
4 0.98% 4.88% 2 301456 clojure.lang.RestFn.invoke
5 0.98% 5.85% 2 301486 clojure.lang.PersistentVector$TransientVector.editableTail
6 0.98% 6.83% 2 301487 clojure.lang.PersistentVector$TransientVector.conj
7 0.98% 7.80% 2 301465 clojure.lang.PersistentVector.chunkedSeq
8 0.98% 8.78% 2 301489 palindromes$ext_centers__96$fn__101.invoke
9 0.98% 9.76% 2 301498 clojure.lang.PersistentList.first
10 0.98% 10.73% 2 301482 clojure.lang.PersistentVector$TransientVector.conj

I do see a lot of vector activity, but no smoking gun. As other people have pointed out in this thread, SBCL is notorious for being very good at recursing down big data structures. It's also notorious for being totally terrible with lots of other common tasks. I suspect this is just a case where the algorithm runs in such a way that languages that compile down all the way have a big advantage.

I've asked some more experienced hands in #clojure on freenode to take a stab at it. There are a lot of recent optimization developments in the clojure-1.1.0 release that I don't know how to use well yet. Hopefully someone there can tackle it.
Or, to be more accurate, one scientist and his team suggested that planes could save on jet fuel by doing this.

In other news, there was once a math professor who suggested blowing up the moon:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Abian

"Scientists" want the darnedest things. It's almost as if they think for themselves, take great joy in impractical or even silly ideas, and are as likely to be crazy as anyone else.
hey, can you shoot me an email? j@jasonlbaptiste.com yours isnt listed.
While that's certainly true, is there an item in he linked that serves as an example of such a non-google project?

I thought it was odd that they would omit Guice, Gin, and GWT from a list that includes Android and Chromium.
I'd probably start really simple at first with just organizing the content, which is a big step all by itself. The point would be to get something out that's useful to people. I'd certainly add playlists, favorites, etc. soon thereafter though.