skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This, from one of the eulogies, made me grin:

In chapter 1, the narrator tells a story to "get you in the mood" for the Poignant Guide. "Here's something poignant to get you started." It's a story about a dog who he found and adopted, named Bigelow, only to lose him right away.

In chapter 5, the narrator reveals that he is a Preeventualist. Preeventualism seems like a fairly new philosophical doctrine, asserting that the nature of all predictive thought is optimistic -- even dystopian futures are "optimistically" predicted to come true. Therefore preeventualists just "focus... on the understanding that hope will always prevail in any sort of thought". I'd never heard of preeventualism before, but it made sense that someone on the cutting edge of Internet programming would also be on the cutting edge of philosophical discourse. And it was cutting edge -- no wikipedia articles, no podcasts, nothing. Just one page of actual information on the preeventualist homepage, and that shout-out in the Poignant Guide.

But it's a pretty compelling philosophy on the face of it, and they have a preeventualist youth group responsible for maintaining the web page (which is probably why it went down with such frequency). You can see other examples of preeventualist thought if you know what you're looking for: Anathem is pretty preeventualist, and if you start to think seriously about Long-Now style timescales I bet you'll become somewhat preeventualist yourself. (You'll start to mix up words like "molding" and "embroidery".) And of course there's always Ashley Raymond's blog, which sadly doesn't get updated at all. In fact, there's only the one entry, in which Ashley Raymond talks about his time with his dog, whom he called Biggles, whose "accusatory gaze often hinted at how wrong my pronounciation must have been".

Wait. Biggles? Bigelow?

So I did a whois on preeventualist.net, and sure enough, it was registered to _why the Lucky Stiff. Conclusion: the dude FABRICATED AN ENTIRE PHILOSOPHY FOR A THROWAWAY JOKE IN HIS STUPID BOOK. And it wouldn't be so stunning except that I BECAME a preeventualist in the time between discovering the philosophy and discovering that it was "fake" (if such a thing can be said of an idea).
If you honestly think that CO2 is the one and only cause of climate, ignoring solar cycles, and other effects, and furthermore, if you believe with certainty, that the CO2 cycle is phase shifted ahead in time, compared to temperature, when it's just as likely that it's lagging, than you're right, we really have no point in talking.

Also based on your response, I think we now know what "other climate measurements" you were referring to.
No its not 'harder' to learn. You just have to understand the concept of applicative evaluation and prefix notation. Then recursion and higher-order functions. That is four things. (Macros can be considered advanced). In the end, all functions evaluates to a value. Thus functions are considered to be data. This value (data) is then passed on to the next function as arguments, and so on.. Anonymous functions is also something which kicks ass, and you miss such features when programming in C. This is one reason why C programs should be left as simple as possible, with as little abstraction as possible. (Fortran? Come on!)
> Science is NOT about consensus.

The entire scientific method is built around consensus. As science is a process subject to continual refinement. Almost all propositions put forth by science are ultimately incompletely, inaccurate in some cases, or limited to specific situations we can test.

So, the scientific process (and the method itself) rigorously challenge all propositions. Some simply fall apart under the weight of their own inconsistency, which is what happens when results can not be replicated. But those which can be replicated achieve consensus until a more accurate proposition can be made.

Thusly, Newtonian physics was supplemented and updated by Relativity. Wave-particle duality gradually replaced competing theories. Et cetera. These are consensus opinions. They are not facts. They're the closest models we can get based off our observations. The core of the scientific method is that things are given a continuous opportunity to be falsified.
I try not to have a 'fundamental design'. If you rely wholly on caching, you have no intermediate data structures, and code becomes easier to change in dramatic ways. This is the ideal I've been striving for.

Check out arc's defmemo function. Given the ability to memoize (or cache) function invocations, changing your data structures can become simply a matter of refactoring your function boundaries and deciding which ones perform caching.
"The challenge of groups of people working together effectively is fundamental to human endeavor"

I think we can safely assuming they are tackling that challenge :) It is really difficult to see past all of the fluff on that site though.
It's interesting and important to read the comments below that article. What this shows is that seeing a smoking gun in the "nature trick" email alone is misplaced, but also that the interpretation of what's going on with those tree rings is not nearly as clear or uncontroversial as the global warming alarmists want us to believe.
Core Values Drive A Startup’s Success
prgmr.com is very cheap and has worked well for me for the last month (which is when I signed up)
I've used Rimuhosting VPS http://rimuhosting.com/ for a while now and they have been nothing short of excellent.
Can you give an example of an actual case when you needed this sudden burst of computational power? I'm curious what sorts of things people are actually using it for in real life. (instead of "well, you COULD use it for ....")
So science is like some big dinner party where really smart people decide what best model substitutes for reality?

I always thought it was more like a dinner party where really smart people were usually wrong and engaged in petty groupthink, and the guy who was able to show they were wrong (by reproducible experiment) eventually changed their minds (after quite a bit of trouble, and sometimes by having to wait until they retired or died)

Have you heard of the book "The Structure of Scientific Revolution", probably one of the top ten books on science in the last hundred years? Wasn't the entire point of that book that the way science is sold to kids, ie, a linear process where one good idea comes out and naturally replaces another, was a complete fable? In reality science gets "stuck" in various paradigms and it takes quite a bit of pushing to get them to change.

I've been observing your comments, and I wonder how you make these two things fit together.
Linode and slicehost are quite expensive if you price out the RAM and disk you get per dollar, but they do let you rent quite small instances. I've found the main difference in favor of Linode to be nice monitoring tools and graphs.

Serverbeach occasionally runs specials on rented dedicated that offer very good value if you need a somewhat larger box.

An EC2 small instance is also surprisingly good value if you can commit to a year up front.
I agree, that is better. It only works when you know well in advance that you need to talk to someone though. You still have to handle all the other unscheduled calls somehow.
At least one of those images (http://winmac.emuunlim.com/Images/Screenshots/OS8.jpg) is a terrible Photoshop job.
I recently purchased a linode account for the same reason and am really enjoying it. For $20 I have a linux server to toy with and have been learning a lot from it. The one really nice thing about their setup is the management console that makes deploying whichever distro you want really easy and then monitoring really easy.

Also as Jaddison said, they have some a really solid community and the support is excellent.
It's also run by fellow HN user Luke Crawford:

http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=lsc
This post is a very, very nice proof of my feeling, that FP is usually not used due to the hassle of getting data into the program in a functional language.

I mean, c'mon. Who was not confused by Haskells IO?

And now, compare this with "foo = input()", or "bar = scanf("%d");". Bam. All the benefit of nice functional notation for the algorithms superseded by the hassle of getting data from the outside into the program (or, the very small hassle (seen relatively) to do so in imperative languages.
I use my home computer for this purpose. There is a simple WAMP setup on the main OS (winxp) for quick and dirty stuff, and then I have VMWare running a 512 MB RAM image of Ubuntu Server to let me play around with more interesting stuff. So the cost is effectively free.

If something then turns into more than a personal project, I use the home setup as a development/staging server and then push it out to a hosted server.
http://www.aclweb.org/anthology/
Top Board Games of 2009
The lack of any kind of single page view for posts on that site is really irritating. Anyone know a decent plugin that fights this annoying trend?
Which is sort of the point. I hate when people do this too but people started doing it because other people put them on hold. So it's basically being preemptively rude to someone else to keep them from being rude to you.

Whether it's effective depends on who has the power in the relationship. As you say, if the President really did call I suspect he would wait (and if he didn't he'd be a fool). But when someone else calls him they're probably asking for money which means he has the power in the relationship and can hang up.
I've been very satisfied with RootBSD so far.
What's uncivil about asking you to do me a favor by waiting 30 seconds?
I use high-capacity EC2 for problem sets in my bioalgorithms class. Basically whenever something's taking too long for my liking on whatever machine I'm running it on, I'll throw it up on a beefy EC2 instance and let it run there.
Because of the pixels? This OS was before my time so I can't really see your objection here.

*I exaggerate a little, but I really didn't have a computer until right around this time, and it wasn't a mac.
Is anyone a little disturbed about that website? From the title "Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal".

On the sidebar:
"The Rise of Atheism, Global Atheist Convention".

This guy is some type of Atheist cult member.
Oddball Gifts for Uber Geeks
>The problem is....archaelogical climage record extrapolation is nowhere as sure fire....

Then pray provide us with some science supporting your point.

If you cannot, when you just keep bleating you are "troubled" over and over, you really look like someone just pushing an agenda without any support whatsoever.

And oh, what's needed now is a "slam-dunk" on the issue. A "slam-dunk", of course, was never needed when any of the corporate interests (who are the ones really astroturfing and dissembling on this issue) set out to basically rape ecosystems for their stockholders. Do you also call for "slam-dunks" from these corporate interests, or just when it's convenient for your political ideology?

This whole discussion is reminiscent of the tobacco industries continual two-faced insistence on "slam-dunks" when it came to any encroachment on their ability to reap profit from suffering.

>I have no more emotion invested in whether the planet is cooling or warming than I do variations of the gravitational constant around the time of the big bang. Whichever way the facts lead will not change my underlying concern. So I really don't have a dog in this fight as far as the science goes, at least not to the degree that some others do.

Right. And in your disinterestedness you personally posted three anti-warming editorials to Hacker News over the last three weeks. Not three science articles - three editorials espousing a single view.
There's a fundamental difference between living your core values and telling them to the world.

Living them demonstrates unmistakenly and predictably who are really are.

Telling them is no different from all those bullshit mission statements on bulletin boards ignored by millions.

Wikipedia defines "mensch" as "a person of integrity and honor" and "someone to admire and emulate, someone of noble character". By its very definition, you cannot call yourself (or your company) a mensch.

Once you start living your core values, you won't need to advertise them. Plenty of others will do that for you.
Oh please. People are responsible for their own actions; as long as you don't lie to them, they accept the responsibilities when they do business with you.

And there is nothing wrong with killing of inefficient businesses.
There's A Fly In My Urinal
Thanks! The second comparison link is mine, which focuses a bit more on memory, as opposed to performance. And that's where Linode and their 32 bit systems win over Slicehost and their 64 bit systems. The latter chews up a lot more memory for something like Rails, so even if Slicehost only looks slighty more expensive, they end up being significantly more expensive. Which is unfortunate, because they seem like good people doing good work, and who treat their customers pretty well. However, Linode are that way too, and are also cheaper, so it's just not that difficult a choice at this point in time.
Oh No!

(I love KidPix)
Same here. Irony is, some people in certain cultures don't respect you if you pick up the phone and call saying you are the owner of the company. As I posted in the OP, we closed a deal after putting my friend in between the deal to act like my secretary. Until we did that, we weren't perceived that highly even by the secretary at the other end.

But seriously, I am not letting a deal go because I am irked by a practice like this, no matter how annoying it may be.
This really drives home how bad the space-based ("Aurora"?) theme of 10.5 and 10.6 is: when we look at this in ten years, I think the screenshots of 10.5 and 10.6 will have aged the worst.

There's something timeless about the earlier Mac OS versions. 10.5 and 10.6 are just kitschy.
Productionize usually means "rewrite". I think that software engineers in general have become too averse to rewriting code; as long as you do it with the same team that wrote the prototype, it's often a good idea to throw away everything and start from scratch.

The development cycle for me is much more about collecting requirements than coming up with a design that satisfies those requirements. That's what iterative design is about - you try something out, see if it works for the user, see what other features are really necessary for it to work for the user, and then adjust as necessary. Once you know exactly what the software should do, coming up with a design that does it is fairly easy.

My current project is nearing its 3rd complete rewrite since September, plus nearly daily changes that rip out large bits of functionality and re-do them some other way.
Easily solved: when they put you on hold, transfer the call to YOUR assistant (or some willing co-worker if you don't have one). When the caller comes on the line, your accomplice says "OK, please hold the line and I'll get him."
Turnabout is fair play.
Not quite. Web development is more like architecture plus structural engineering plus construction, but it's not physics.
I want to caveat my choice by saying that I have been through the following options before settling on my latest and honestly greatest choice by far:

I used and cancelled; lunarpages, dreamhost, mediatemple, globat

I switched to HostGator Alluminum reseller program (but do not actually resell the space)

I house each project in its own cPanel so that I can modularize each project and have any join or access it if necessary. Helps me track bandwidth and start from scratch fast on new things. It also affords an infrastructure I have not seen elsewhere.

I support this decision after using Pingdom on my sites at MT then hostgator and seeing large latency differences. I feel it was a good sample set as the sites were identical (PHP\MySQL) on both services.

However that being said I am going to be using Engineyard for the first time now that I have a RoR project.

My older php\SQL sites will remain however on hostgator.
Marshall McLuhan predicts newspaper's demise in 1965
How dictators watch us on the web
This has nothing to do with hacking, nor is it news. Why is it here? Someone wrote about a personal annoyance. Am I the only one who thinks it is a waste of time? Perhaps if some kind of technical solution was offered it would be more relevant.
By your logic, any noise in measurement is evidence of instability in the system being measured.

Sorry, but that's nonsense. A simple thought experiment: use a blind man to visually measure the location of a rock. Does the fact that his answers are noisy provide evidence the rock is moving around in an unstable manner?
It's surprising how little you need for a truly good setup. Me?

* $1000 - One 30" monitor
* $2200 - One 15" Macbook Pro, fully kitted
* $100 - One DualLink DVI-DisplayPort adapter
* $1000 - One virtual development server running Linux
* $250 - Amortized cost of the build cluster
* $200 - Miscellany (keyboard, sound-dampening headphones)

That's, what, two weeks of salary at retail prices? And the only thing that really needs to be replaced on a regular basis is the Macbook -- two years should be fine.

Considering the potential productivity drop by making someone work on inferior hardware, I cannot understand why you would skimp here. I will tell you that if I ever work someplace that tries to hand me a nineteen inch monitor, or even two of them, I will shell out for my own thirty-incher and bring it to work with me.
But Arc itself is is exactly this "patch of a programming language implementation".

Also, everything in programming could be much less concise if you wanted it to be. Consider addition. It's an operator in your language. Then it's a CPU instruction. Then it's bits going through logic gates. Since it's a common thing to use, the complexity is abstracted away in many places.

If you are writing web apps, it makes sense for your web app libraries to abstract the web stuff away like this too.
Wow, that was really a trip down memory lane. The first mac I ever owned (a Mac Plus) was System 6... inits and cdevs. I had a lot of fun learning to program on one.
In effect, they are asking for a favor in the middle of the favor.
As far as I can tell, even the best in the biz haven't the slightest idea of what drives the startup's success. Plenty of startups with superb core values fail, and plenty of startups with no discernible core values succeed. The truth is, nobody knows. Just because it sounds nice, doesn't make it so.
If your start-up has nobody that is competent at operations (which really is a lot more engineering than IT/systems administration), it deserves to fail. Incidentally, I can tell from my personal knowledge that the "big successes" amongst Internet companies (i.e. those who have achieved a product/market fit on competitive, multi-billion dollar markets) have had a very strong operations engineer amongst either the founders of the first five employees.

If you use Rackspace to host your machine, that's an acceptable way to save money on hardware and networking gear (while you're still in the early stages).

However, you can't and shouldn't expect Rackspace's engineers do your operations for you. It is your responsibility to understand how to tune your operating system, application server, database et al. specifically to your application.

If you expect others to turn your application into an Internet service, you're analogous to a "business guy" on Craigslist posting about his "next big idea" that he wants somebody else to build.

The big point I meant to make is that if your site is down because your hosting provider is, it's still your fault (for not having a DR site).
How are the myriad of factors that contribute to tree growth accounted for?

The short answer is that they are not, because they are not known.

That's the point. If they were known there wouldn't be nearly so much controversy. Climate history modelling using tree-ring data as a proxy is incredibly immature. It may have value but the degree to which it has been relied upon is all out of proportion to the validity of the current state of the science (which is probably true for much of climate science at the moment as well).
all you need is to buy Dell, HP or even Lenovo. Or do you have exact numbers that show you CANNOT get hardware with the same specs as Apple's for a fraction of the price...?
The criterion for tests like this is whether you're relying on stuff you'd expect any language already to have, or not. Features fall on a continuum in that respect. You'd expect any language to be able to add two numbers; you couldn't expect a language to have a library for parsing some format you'd just invented; other features fall somewhere between these extremes.

I honestly didn't think any of the things I did in the original Arc challenge required features that wouldn't already have existed in a language that had been used for web programming. All it does is ask the user to input something, then show it on another page. It's practically the hello world of stateful web apps. It seemed reasonable to expect any language that had been used for web apps would already have had convenient libraries for doing such basic things.
If you don't need a full time operations engineer, you should become competent as a part-time one. Both Google and Techcrunch share the fact that they have paying advertisers who expect their site to be up and delivering their content.
Watching Hacker News argue about climate change is like watching the blind argue about colors. Please stop. In general you have no idea what you are talking about.

Again and again and again and again there are comments along the lines of, "I did five minutes of Googling about this issue and I've come up with a fatal flaw in climate science!" Do you really think that the tens of thousands of scientists who do their life's work in this area are all fucking idiots? Every last one of them? You are late to the party. How greenhouse gases work has been thoroughly explored. The science of whether we'll get a substantial human-caused climate change from increasing the amount of atmospheric CO2 by 35% is done. It's over. The science now is in determining/predicting just how much it will be, and in predicting the effects.

Every thread about climate science on Hacker News is one giant facepalm. Every thread. Please stop.
> I always thought it was more like a dinner party where really smart people were usually wrong and engaged in petty groupthink, and the guy who was able to show they were wrong (by reproducible experiment) eventually changed their minds (after quite a bit of trouble, and sometimes by having to wait until they retired or died)

I think this is the thing I said. Ideally the change is purely a matter of data being presented and reproduced, but human politics inevitably creep in. But either way, saying "Science is not about consensus!" is at best a misunderstanding and in some cases it's actually a tactic for climate change denialists.

But I'm not sure how my comments require me to reconcile the information you mentioned from "The Structure of Scientific Revolution" with my viewpoint? Could you explain, please?
I have had the same problem with the challenge as the gp ever since I read it. I'm a bit perplexed at what exactly Paul's point was.

So I write a templating module for OCaml that lets me beat or tie the Arc challenge. I compile it and never have to look at it again. It becomes part of my toolkit.

What do I have to do in order to win the challenge? Get my module accepted into some standard library? Why would what some language committee decides be important in terms of how expressive the language is?

It doesn't make sense to me. All it shows is that Paul controls Arc and has configured it to deliver small answers to questions that he finds important. I'm not sure it says anything about Arc or any other language for that matter. It might say something about functional versus imperative languages, but perhaps we already knew that?