skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Looking for Pre-Beta testers for new search engine
Hi- I'd like to get some feedback on a new search engine I'm developing. I'd like to ask you to give up Google for 1 week and use this engine instead. Please drop me an email at kapauldo AT gmail if you're interested in what will surely be a fun experiment. I'd like to possibly submit this to a startup competition next year, so I need to keep this closed. I'll ask you to agree to a Friend-DA (don't tell anyone about on your honor).

Thanks,
Kevin
F#. I work in a primarily Microsoft-based environment, and I wanted to learn a functional language, so F# is a good choice for me - I can actually put it to use at my "day job".

jQuery. A great javascript library.
Yes - this is one reason why we do this - it's basically a "backup" plan for our merchant processing. Either of the options can be turned off in a template in just a few seconds if needed. We also do it however since some users are vehemently "anti PayPal" and won't buy anything through PayPal - we don't want to lose those customers, so an alternate option is essential.
While I'm mostly far right of center by US or U.K. standards, I find a whole bunch of U.K. papers interesting.

While I obviously prefer the Torygraph, which first broke this story (and what can you say about the paper that employs Matt http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/matt/?cartoon=6798426&cc...), many others like The Guardian frequently deliver very interesting stuff such as this.
Cool, it was no longer possible to live without an ad blocker for me. Not that I hate advertising so much, but the CPU usage (and battery life) was disastrous with all this flash ads around.
I prepayed for a 3 year reservation for a small Amazon EC2 instance and I am very happy with that decision because I frequently deploy customer projects to AWS, and any experience from my own projects is a big help.

I also permanently rent a small VPS from RimuHosting. I like their customer service and their low costs.

And, the elephant in the room is Google AppEngine. I have several deployed apps and an effective price of free is difficult to beat. Surprisingly (to me) I have had no customer interest in deploying to AppEngine. I have had ongoing problems using JRuby+Sinatra on AppEngine, but the Java support is fairly much hassle free.
So, so many people miss the point(s) here.

Firstly, in my direct, personal experience, just writing a candidate to write a program that compiles and runs gets rid of up to 90% of applicants. People here on HN are exceptional, but around 90% of recent applicants for a position I advertised couldn't write a FizzBuzz program that compiled and ran.

Secondly, these are the starting points. From here you can ask what problems the program has. Yes, it's exponential in stack and runtime. You can write an iterative version that runs in constant stack and linear time. More subtle, and more probing, is how do you write a recursive version that also runs in small stack and time.

These are the starting points, the initial cull. Don't assume they're the be all and end all.
I htink it depends on when someone lived in NYC and which train they took. If you were here during the late 80s early 90s, you heard a lot more of "What the fuck are you looking at!?". I saw at least 3-4 fights start that way.

Now this is a purely anecdotal correlation, but I noticed less and less of this kind of crap at the same time as crime was purportedly going down in the city. I know that there are a million ideas floating around about the reason for the drop in crime (abortion, "broken windows", etc.), but I'd like to see at least one of them incorporate the "chill out factor". Maybe for some reason NYC residents just became slightly less aggressive ?....Nah that's just crazy talk :)
The Life and Survival of Mathematical Ideas
Are they really using the macid system? I don't believe that. Happstack is nice, but I wouldn't trust my data with Happstack's storage system.
The Art of Mathematics
Ask HN: anyone here moved from academia to corporate?
After a dedicated career in university I am now trying to get a job as assistant professor (neuroscience) but the market is a bitch and so far has been really difficult despite the fact I have a damn good CV.

I am starting to consider that maybe I should take this as opportunity to explore new ways in life. I am thinking doing something completely unrelated to acquire new skills (and maybe some money) and then start something by myself again. I met someone who works for McKinsey recently and I am tempted to give it a try.

Has anyone here done a similar step? Namely, realizing that a career in university may not be the best for them and explore new area? How did it end up?
nope, i just got the same "virus scanning" link.
maybe it only appears on the first click. regardless, this post should be deleted.
Thank you so much! I've had informal ideas quite like this from working on my "HTML rewriting system" part of my (unreleased) Common Lisp web framework. I now have a very specific search term to acquire more formalized knowledge which should speed up some future developments a lot because I won't have to independently come up with solutions to as many of the problems now.
Anything that doesn't travel at 299792458 meters per second will not be a viable weapon in space. Two spaceships coming toward each other will be hundreds of thousands of kilometers away when they start firing on each other. The time lag will be over one second for lasers, so if the two ships are maneuvering randomly many laser shots will actually miss. Kinetic weapons will take minutes or hours to get there, making them essentially useless. With missiles (I'll assume missiles are nuclear here), not only are they slow but you can also set up computer controlled lasers to fry their control circuitry. Nukes require very specific detonation conditions and if you fry the explosive material it won't explode like a conventional weapon, it will just fail.

Also, with ships punching a hole in the bottom is enough to sink one - most ships hit by a one-shot-kill missile take a few minute to do down because they're sinking, not exploding. In space, this doesn't exist. You have fuel tanks and engines, but those can be safely put at the back of the ship, and in a battle you'll just rotate your ship so that the front faces the enemy.
Ηχοσυστήματα Hi-Fi 
To Ηχοσυστήματα Hi-Fi που ψάχνετε βρίσκεται εδώ και στην καλύτερη τιμή της αγοράς!
http://piratepad.net/
Another Reason Why I Wish All My Friends Had iPhones: Blipr
That's a problem for everyone. We (like many other organizations) use third party recruiters, and the latest ad one of them has put out very clearly indicates that they've been quizzing (unsuccessful) candidates about what we asked, and are now trying to coach candidates in them. Unfortunately said recruiter is non-technical and a) the ad now makes no sense (e.g. if I ask "what is a deadlock?" it doesn't translate into "must have 5 years of experience of deadlocks") and b) some of the canned answers they've been giving to our questions are wrong, so we get a stream of candidates all parroting the same wrong thing.
It's a real shame that App Engine doesn't support long running requests that Tornado is great at serving, but I definitely agree with you. Platform as a Service is such a breath of fresh air. Heroku is also a great choice for Ruby.
When reading about voting systems, I'm always reminded of Arrow's impossibility theorem, which everybody should be aware of:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrow%27s_impossibility_theorem

In short, no "fair" voting system can satisfy these three criteria:

- If every voter prefers X over Y, then the group prefers X over Y.

- If every voter prefers X over Y, then adding Z to the slate won't change the group's preference of X over Y.

- There is no dictator.
Don't think of changing direction, think of changing velocity. Space is a Newtonian movement system, so accelerating 20 meters per second in some direction is just as easy at 0 km/sec as it is at 10000 km/sec.

As for missiles, I really don't like the idea. If I were tasked with building a 22-nd century warship, I would put a few hundred automated anti-missile lasers everywhere, which would fry the missiles before any of them get close enough to darken the hull.
Never knew about this - thanks for the most interesting read.

Is the 2nd factor a problem with the voting system or with the psychology of the voters though?
Rabbitmq (and AMQP in general). It's just simple, straightforward message passing.

My C++ process creates a queue, and binds it to the key "yummyfajitastasks". My python process (a django webapp, in this case) sends messages with the key "yummyfajitastasks". My c++ process receives them, does work, sends messages back.

Combine this with JSON or some serialization method and you've almost got erlang style messaging, except you can write part of your code in python, part in C++, part in ruby, etc.
But I could just write 'arc' for Java, and the above example would fall out.

In terms of language design, if you were to write news.arc for Java, would you expect a solution to the challenge to just fall out? This probably says more about MzScheme+pg vs Java+you than it does about arc, however.
And to relate specifically to Instant Runoff Voting, IRV fails to satisfy monotonicity. It also fails to satisfy the Condorcet Criterion (a commonly held desirable property that the person with the majority #1 votes should be ranked 1st).

There exist `better' ranking systems such as ones involving markov chains (http://www10.org/cdrom/papers/577/), but I'd imagine that the Oscar Committee requires their voting/ranking scheme to be palatable to the general public. Using IRV is a good step in the direction of `better' voting, while still being explainable in a few sentences.
I've loved playing with Heroku and I'm excited to deploy my real project to it once we finish a stable version of it.

I've also liked working with Rails, because it has made things like i18n, testing, and implementing new features so much easier.

Finally, I've enjoyed using beanstalkd for my message queue. It's tiny and fast and it just stays out of the way. I'm using a new library I made called Peon (based off of an AMQP-based library called Minion) and it's a really easy, scalable way to bring long running tasks into the background.
Text Laundering - Confuse Duplicate Text Detectors
Curry's Paradox
This is a desirable property of a voting system. If we prefer X over Y (X > Y), then adding Z can give: Z > X > Y, X > Z > Y, or X > Y > Z. Adding Z ought not change the ordering of X and Y.
I really enjoyed playing with it, but I think it won't shine until higher level libraries are ported/written for it.

There are basic URL dispatchers and template systems, but nothing as battle-tested as Django (yet).

Easy access to streaming data was pretty nice! As is the event system but I'm afraid as a mostly client-side programmer I take that for granted.
What if the Nexus One isn’t sold by Google?
I always wondered what HN would look like if we used preferential ranking, and almost started to work on something earlier this month.
We started using Windows Azure with our latest project. The Message Queueing and Schemaless Storage are very cool. It completely changed my opinion of the 'Cloud'.
Seriously, you have an attention span of less than 1 minute? I AM dumb but I got it within a couple minutes of playing it. Give it a chance, it's pretty fun and addicting. I think about 78.123% of people are more like me. BTW, there's instructions at the bottom, but if you've only gave it one minute, then you might not have noticed.
Http://www.ydetector.com/
Beyond Realtime Search: The Dawning Of Ambient Streams
"Perhaps the biggest news coming out of Copenhagen: Presidents and Prime Ministers recognize that greenhouse gases are a problem they have to deal with. The naysayers of global warming are finished."

I suspect its more likely that this is the last hurrah of the Global Warming believers' power struggle.
I love this framework. A few year ago I started learning RoR but I hate the Ruby syntax. Django and Python is beautiful.
- Play! Framework - finally something close to Rails productivity for Java developers. And supports Scala too.

- Redis - the fastest NoSQL engine around. Easy and elegant.

- Solr - Indexing for the masses. If it only had real time search...
(16) Home on Get Glue
Software technology: I spent most of my time implementing my own tools and tech using haXe, Leo, wxPython, SQLite. haXe+Leo is an amazing combination for maintaining code.

Not a software technology: http://www.c-thru-music.com/cgi/?page=prod_axis-49

This thing is amazing, especially if you aren't already an experienced keyboardist; it makes all the note relationships easier to learn so you get to the "fun" part of playing faster.
RackSpace Cloud ($10 per month for 256MB instance w/o traffic). RSC allows me to follow modern administration practice ( http://vlisivka.pp.ua/en/modern_administration ) even at my own private host.
-VirtualBox (http://www.virtualbox.org)

-ASP.NET MVC

-Visual Studio 2010
One would hope so, but many observe that AGW/CC is Too Big To Fail. 5 billion plus US$ annually is a lot of "research" money to give up and the potential for power and money is just too tempting for a number of governments and businesses. E.g. any bets on the U.K. or NZ repealing the laws they've passed on this?
I feel good about all of these questions except the OO design one. I would rather declare types and write functions that operate on those types; granted it's the same, semantically, but if I focus on nouns personally I start coding stupid stuff.
Another example is from French. The phrase "Je vous en prie"...effectively means "You're welcome" it actually carries more information. It also says: and our relationship is a formal one, such as staff to employer, and I'm in the subordinate position.

It sounds as if you are saying the lack of a short code in a language makes a concept untranslatable.

But that doesn't seem right. In 1943, I couldn't translate a document about nuclear reactors into French or Spanish because the only languages with words for "nuclear reactor" were English and German. Does that make "nuclear reactor" untranslatable?

Of course, once the concept became relevant to French speakers, they borrowed or created a short coding.

From what you've said, you can translate "je vous en prie" to "you're welcome and I mean that with the respect a subordinate accords his superiors". That just doesn't have a short coding in English because the concept being encoded is rarely relevant to English speakers.

In programming terms, (map f lst) translates to c, it's just not as short.
Not sure it will help, but I had two three-year post-doc contracts. During the second I was doing external consultancy, and as my University contract was coming to an end, the company with whom I worked most closely offered me a job, which I took.

After many mergers, split offs and other coporate movements, I (and some colleagues) did a management buyout, so now I (part) own the descendant.

It's working well for me, but I think my position is a bit unusual.

Still, if you want to get into the commercial world, see if you can do some external consultancy while still employed by the University. They will want a cut, but it will give you a taste of what's wanted, and what it's like.
How does that work when we get different stories at different times? You might be able to come up with a system in which everyone votes on the day's top stories, and then they're ranked, but that would be tedious and would not clearly produce a better result than what we have now.
اصدار جديد للدنغل y6 بتاريخ 20\12 2009 وعودة قمر عربسات للعمل وباقات جديدة
Just link it here? Why so secret?
Pes2010 - mobile9
You suffix both C++ and Python with process, this makes me question how this is any different than using a socket?
heh. no problem. if you're interested in this kind of thing check out http://lambda-the-ultimate.com from time to time. just skimming the conversations can keep you up to date...
LOl That was actually pretty funny=-)
as everyone else is saying - this is pretty awesome, but you need to have some kind of auto mode running or something that shows people what it does.
23 Useful adobe air desktop application
"Is Global warming an economic or a enviromental issue?"

Neither, it's a political issue.

And from a commenter on ESR's latest:

# Some Guy Says:
December 20th, 2009 at 6:57 am

I think that the main thing history will take note of from the copenhagen conference, is that China saved the world from a global, communist government.
I write the first as

void func(int x) { if (a==b) do(c),do(d); else do(e); }
Asteroid Apophis to pass closer than any other near-earth object - video
On paper? Or with a computer and compiler/interpreter?
This is a political comment, not a scientific one. And I know it sounds cynical.

Once you started framing the political discussion around the idea of giving money to dozens of corrupt third-world regimes the jig was up: the U.N. will push and push until something happens, if for no other reason than it lines the pockets of hundreds of little petty bureaucrats and warlords all over the globe. We're already seeing some countries pay for and organize "protesters" at the summit. The west is like a big piggy-bank, and this is a lot of folks' chance to cash in. If it takes twenty years they're not going to give up on this. The idea of free money is extremely difficult to give up.

I don't think where the science goes has anything at all to do with the political discussion at this point.
One of the best articles I've read in a long time... well done. NYTimes for the win.
Heather Brooke fought long and hard to break the story, but in the end the Telegraph obviously had deeper pockets. But you have to give the Telegraph credit for the way they reported it - Labour one week, Tories the next - with both parties receiving an individual public shaming, hence not being able to simply point fingers at each other like they usually do.
Amazon Elastic MapReduce and Hadoop Streaming. You just write a few lines of python (or your language of choice), upload your data, and it takes care of the rest.
An interesting experiment to try is to spend one day walking around making eye contact with everyone who passes by, and another walking around not making eye contact with people.

In my experience, my day always ends up being better when I'm making eye contact. Not only do I not bump into people (because I can tell where they are going), generally you get better responses from people, as they see you as being more approachable/honest/etc. People remember you.

On the flip side, if you have a desire to be invisible, walk around not making eye contact. Hardly anyone will remember who you are.

That's purely anecdotal, but try it for yourself.
I'm curious about the origins of language in East Asia then. I was always under the impression that Chinese dialects heavily influenced both Korean and Japanese (and visa versa) so I'm a little confused by considering both of those to be isolates.

I know the word order is vastly different and the honorific system obscures the language, but what about more fundamental tendencies of Mandarin such as the heavy dependency on chronology or the kind of general sounds of the phonemes. I know, for instance, that it can often take a second or two for me to differentiate Mandarin from Korean or Japanese when it being spoken quickly and loudly (such as when you first turn on a movie).
But it is weird to just stare at people, you have to also smile and say 'hi' or 'hello'.

then again, that might vie into the range of basic human hospitability.
I cannot really do that because I've just finished my first postdoc. Despite scientifically it went extremely well, my contract got terminated pretty much the moment I told my advisor I wanted to look for a position as assistant professor (They don't like people moving on to become their competitors, I guess. Don't get me started with what are the things I hate about academia).

I have been thinking of starting an internet business of mine in the past year but did not get far yet because I though it would feel more like a "plan B" than a genuine choice and I wanted first to make sure I'd do it with the highest motivation.

Thanks for your view.
It's nice to see someone from a big public-facing operation straightforwardly describing the mistakes made during a tech project. I learn a lot more about real-world development from reading about the hacks and errors than I do from the much more common "We used this technology because it gave us this cool feature" style of writeup. It's also more dramatic.
It's the same Guardian Media Group, ultimately owned by the Scott Trust, that's currently slashing and burning its regional media properties in print, TV and radio to keep the heavily loss-making Guardian afloat.

I hear their Manchester regional arm MEN Media, not content with closing all its small weekly newspaper offices, turning its local TV station Channel M into an infomercial, repeat and music video channel and cutting half its staff, is now up for sale. [1]

The MEN Media weeklies, which this time last year had busy newsrooms in each town, are now literally reduced to having a journo sitting in a public library waiting for people to go to them with stories for one afternoon a week. It's a shame for a newspaper that started out as the Manchester Guardian.

It's all very well pumping money into this kind of thing, but how will it pay for itself when the more popular and profitable MEN is gone?

[1] http://goo.gl/bTGJ
The iPhone/iPod touch version has sound effects.
I know I'm not alone in knowing the real _why, knowing that he was okay, passing that message on and I trying to stop the stalking/detective work. While I'm not sure he wanted people who know him to do so, I think it was the lesser of two evils to tracking down everyone who might know him and exposing them and bothering them.
I'm willing; I'm off work for the next week, so I'll finally be diving back into SICP and thus, Emacs. I should at least be able to give you some feedback as to how well it can find needles in those particular haystacks. E-mail is in my profile.
Besides passwordmaker there's also the PwdHash firefox extension; I've been using that one for a while.
Feedback Wanted--please review my iPhone App---Free Promo Codes
QuickCalcs is a new style of calculator for routine calculations using Imperial Units (ft/in) but can be used for metric values. This is my first version and am looking for feedback on what changes to incorporate an upcoming version update. Average 3GS loading times would be helpful. Here are some Free Promo Codes so if you have a few minutes it won't cost you anything (not that its very expensive $1.99). Any feedback would be greatly appreciated. It's not going to win a Turing award, but it runs and looks cool!

Thanks
C

PS Maybe leave a comment of which code your using so people know which have been used.

Codes

1 34N6ANAHHK7A

2 TWE37H97XWFR

3 3WK6HAJLR66N

4 N493JR647YPW

5 LR9P3HJ6PRAJ

http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/quickcalcs/id339451285?mt=8
I oversimplified my example.

In fact, my C++ code doesn't listen to a single queue, but many. So that simple messaging piece is equivalent to either having many separate sockets open or multiplexing many communication channels over a single socket. I also don't need to worry about message boundaries, AMQP handles that for me. Instead of building a state machine with boost::asio that parses messages, I just call "get_next_message". [1]

Also, I can have one-to-many communication if I want with no code change on the part of the sender. Suppose I have a third ruby process which is also interested in "yummyfajitastasks". I can create a queue, and listen for messages with the key "yummyfajitastasks".

The ruby process might also be interested in "sorbitstasks" (which the c++ process is not), so it could then bind it's queue to the key "sorbitstasks. So now, "yummyfajitastasks" -> c++, ruby. "sorbitstasks" -> ruby.

Messages are persistent (if you want them to be) as well.

[1] The c bindings are a bit ugly, but you can wrap it fairly easily.
How to add subtitles to any movie