skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Hello HN, take a look at my new (beta) app BonMp3?
Hi HN,

First off, it's been great following you since September. I really feel like I've learned some valuable insights into technology, business, science, and so many other topics from you. And attending this recent Startup school was probably the turning point for me, when I resolved to make something that people want to use, that people love.

I've always been really interested in music. I played bass and drums for years growing up, though between you and I, I never managed to develop a good sense of rhythm. My older brother was seemingly infinitely talented in every instrument he touched, and played in local bands for years. Of course I was jealous.

It's been a long time since those days, but I've finally settled on my contribution to the music scene. It's a music distribution service that bands and musicians can sign up for. Nothing too different so far, however, instead of the status quo of a ~70% return on album sales to the musician, we're targeting 90%. We're also going to donate most of that other 10% to the Save the Music Foundation for the first six months, and 1% for each month afterwards, as long as the service is alive and kicking. We like to call it music distribution with a conscience.

I really don't plan to make (a ton of) money off of this site, or quit my day job, which I'm hoping will help differentiate us from the competition. The business infrastructure behind music is showing signs of aging, inefficiency, etc, etc, and the vision here is to show how simple and efficient music distribution can be, and (hopefully) that it pays to put the musician first.

Anyway, I should probably give you the link so you can tell me how beta my beta service is. In case you haven't gathered so far, it's pretty solidly in the beta category. And by beta, I mean it should all work but is still facing some big development efforts:

http://bonmp3.com/

Thanks HN!
You have to be logged in to google groups to be able to read this.
I was mostly joking when I wrote the parent comment. I've read Joshua Block's Effective Java which spends a long time discussing the challenges of properly implementing equals.

Generally speaking, Eclipse gets it correct. Implementing equals properly boils down to following a set of rules - something that computers are exceptionally good at.
Urg... miscommunication somewhere.

The point of my Enron example is to show what the Stalinism/gulag example is trying to do. In my view, they are trying to say "things haven't changed as much as you think." Of course, there are other ways to put this, but the author needed to balance out the sadness/horror/etc... he felt with being historically accurate[1]/sensitive.

[1] As some here have argued, he may have thought the historical analogy was accurate enough. Just from some of the replies, it can be argued that this view isn't totally nonsense.
Watch UFC 108 Rashad Evans vs Thiago Silva Live Stream Online
'The Department of Mad Scientists,' by Michael Belfiore - Review
Because the CL code to create the string is completely inefficient. It starts that he prints a string with format, using a format directive. Instead of (FORMAT s "~a" string) use (write-string string s). Also, if the result string length is known, one can just allocate a result string and copy the source string repeatedly into the result string...
1) crap articles rise only as large as the brigade. If they have hundreds or thousands of coordinated voters, they'd be better off at bigger audience sites

2) they'd leave a clear repeat user ID/IP trace. So moderator can automate detection of anomalous upvote coincidences

3) if they faked new IPs while upvoting and rotated user IDs we'd have a more difficult detection problem. We can look at growth trends of upvotes for derivatives that are anomalous. Coincidental upvotes would show up.

4) if the upvote gang rotates IDs, IPs, and upvote intervals the HN team is faced with a fun challenge. Something Digg, Stumbleupon, etc have likely faced in the past. Chances are, your attention isn't worth it. But a dangerous piece of malware may be.

Interesting question. What if they faked credentials from low activity members that were compromised?
I used to agree with these principles, but in the long run it will cause HN's demise. It was fine when we used to be a low-traffic website, but I think these guidelines don't scale very well. The most upvoted stories are the ones which everybody agrees upon, not the most interesting ones.

But who am I to complain? I don't contribute that much either.
Yeah, as the other posters have said, they're different things.

OpenID allows users to log into _YOUR_ site with a single login that they can use for other sites that support it. An alternative is your regular user/pass login (which you'll have to implement anyway for users without openid).

OAuth allows you to get data from your users accounts on other websites (twitter, yahoo, gmail etc) in a secure, supported way. An insecure and brittle alternative would be to ask your user to give you their login details for a different site on your site and then screen scrape their account.
Government grants to buy a home
http://pastebin.com/m63016d1

This is Kent M Pitman replying to
cba...@2xtreme.net (Christopher R. Barry)
There are other Lisp compilers which are about as fast as SBCL. For example on my Mac, the 64bit LispWorks is for many tasks faster than SBCL. SBCL is faster for some numerics, but 'typical' Lisp programs are running faster in the 64bit LispWorks. Then there is Scieneer CL, which is also forked from CMUCL, like SBCL.

There are many more compilers for dynamic languages that people usually don't know. I would be careful to claim 'fastest', given that only few advanced compilers in that area are known to people.
Getting Started
Sometimes it takes the server a minute to catch up; have you tried refreshing after a minute or two? I've noticed this as well, but usually the vote shows up if I wait a minute and refresh.
Regular-expression derivatives reexamined
Downvote for sharing opinion? Huh
Stephen Fry on the Blackberry
I'm surprised this has been voted up. Generally I've found anything that suggests you aren't fully in charge of your own destiny, and that hard and smart work necessarily translates to success, to be somewhat taboo round here. (Which makes sense given the audience but often strikes me as a bit cargo-culty)
JMatch: Iterable Pattern Matching
The best interpretation of this drivel is that you want people to accept your claims of superior productivity just on your say so but not ask for any evidence because asking you back up your unsubstantiated claims of superiority would be "bean counting".

The obvious interpretation is that he's saying something like "the usual definition of productivity is flawed and myopic, and gets in the way of realizing the power of Lisp". The paragraph you quoted (implied as a representative sample) is indeed pretty much content-free, because it was a gratuitous flourish at the end.

Of course there is indeed a lot of assertion couched in flowery language there, but that's not the same as "because I say so and if you disagree you're a poopyhead" which is what you seem to have gotten from it. You also seemed to miss the part where he argued that multiple major concepts in modern software originated on the Lisp Machine, which would seem to more than qualify as "building something better".

I'm assuming you're not naive enough to think that "better" equates to "successful", which is another issue entirely.
Check out some of the new CSS3 properties like Opacity!
Mathematica is widely used in the financial sector. Don't let the square brackets, prefix notation and fugly symbolic shortcuts fool you: Mathematica is lisp.
> CSS isn't a logical language, and they don't really have enough in common to compare them.

s/CSS/Lisp/
Why DJ Hero failed
I like it overall, though it does seem a little bit too bright. Perhaps the text needs to be darkened a bit so that there is more contrast.
I think it's interesting because it looks at how they've misunderstood who their market really is.
It's clear that it's inefficient and I'm no expert in either CL or FORMAT but it's not just inefficient, it's staggeringly inefficient. 2 minutes to make a few hundred k string on a 2+ghz CPU is hard to fathom, even if one assumes the method is imperfect, generates piles of garbage, etc, etc. It'd be interesting if someone could explain how this actually happens.
For those who click the link and think "Ahhrg Java -close-", read on. This is a very advanced pattern matching system that's far more powerful than the one in O'Caml/Haskell.

Pattern matching tries to find values for the variables in a formula such that the formula produces some value. For example if we define:

type list = Pair(int,list) | Empty

case v of
Pair(n, rest) -> ...
Empty -> ...

Now the pattern matcher tries to find values for n and rest such that the expression `Pair(n,rest)` evaluates to `v`.

JMatch extends this in several ways: it lets you define your own pattern matchers, and it extends pattern matching to cases when there are multiple ways of binding the variables.

If we have `lst = [1,2,3]` then the pattern `x in lst` has multiple solutions: `x=1, x=2` and `x=3`. Similarly the pattern `x in lst && y in lst && x <= y` has 6 solutions. You can iterate over the solutions of a pattern:

foreach(x in lst && y in lst && x <= y){ ... }

In general you can have

foreach(<boolean formula>) {...}

given that you have defined pattern matchers for calls in the boolean formula.

Iterating over the indices/values of an array:

foreach(x == arr[i]){ print(i); print(x); }

This iterates over all values of x and i such that `x == arr[i]` is true.

syntax slightly simplified (& types omitted) in examples

Check out page 8 of [http://www.cs.cornell.edu/Projects/jmatch/jmatch.pdf]. It's a Lisp (sexp) pretty-printer in forward mode and an un-pretty-printer (aka parser) in backward mode!
Is this article still relevant? It's from 2005, isn't it? I wouldn't know since I'm not a rails guy
Did you read the post? He's coming from Italy!!!
RedLaser, born of Occipital's "chip on their shoulder"
Well, yes, you could argue that Python is Lisp too, but my point stands: if Lisp, as in, CL, really was a huge productivity boost, organizations that have demonstrated their willingness to adopt niche languages where well-suited to their problem domain would have adopted it, but that isn't actually happening. If anything Haskell and APL are nichier (if that's even a word).

The big Lisp success stories all start from the premise of a bunch of programmers who are already hugely experienced in Lisp happening to do this project in it (e.g. Viaweb, Orbitz). But when people with 20 years experience in C complete a project successfully, it isn't blogworthy news...
You don't have to guess about this. Item ids are sequential.
Clickable Link: http://bonmp3.com/
Hmmm; I've only read The Wall Street Journal since 3rd grade and studied some Austrian economics on my own, and I understood it (well, I'm not sure why raising interest rates would cause an increase in inflation, but I'm getting some traction on that from first principles).

Yes, it is verbose and very heavy on the jargon, but if you know the jargon i suspect it's clear enough. I suppose it also helps if you've been thinking about the same problem, who's going to buy the trillions in new debt the US federal government plans to issue in the coming years.
His advice could apply equally well to what it takes to become a good programmer. Spend the time, don't be satisfied, never give up -- but, spend the time.
> the idea that the government has no intention of reducing the deficit.

Close. How about this: reducing the deficit would be extremely painful and therefore postponed as long as possible, and then undertaken in a half-hearted manner.

How much of our current financial stability relies on banks having access to zero percent interest rates and being paid interest on the reserves they hold? How much of the apparent recovery is based on stimulus/deficit spending?

I hope the answer is "not much", but I'm afraid the answer is "a lot". Banks are sitting on reserves, not lending. The P/E ratio for the stock market is somewhere up in bubble territory. Unemployment may have bottomed, but it is still at terrible levels. We have states in the U.S. and nations in the Eurozone that are hinting at defaults.

I think with continued signs of instability, we'll continue to run high deficits (financed in part by Fed purchases). We'll undertake austerity measure when the living-off-debt chickens start coming home to roost. Not before.
I don't think it is any more. One would take a look at http://guides.rubyonrails.org/ instead
Don't know, it's not my argument. I was objecting to what seemed to be an attempt to make an issue of osipov's feelings on the matter. Arguments whose topics include the emotional state of one of the participants rarely end well.

There also seems to be a lot of presumptive sorting into binary opposition; osipov disliking the author of the article doesn't mean he supports the "other side", and my objection above doesn't mean I agree with osipov (in fact I don't, though it sounded like you and rbanffy assumed I did).
Or more directly, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-hidvElQ0xE

From HN Guidelines (http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html):

"Please submit the original source. If a blog post reports on something they found on another site, submit the latter."
Seven Reasons Why it Should Be & Water,The Elixir For Belly-Less Life
He made only a side comment about how bad he was with putting emphasis on too many words during his speech. I feel I have this problem in my speech. Anyone know a good place to read more about "smooth" talking(not the evil kind)?
Oh boy, an ancient article about programming on an ancient version of Rails.
How would he go about rigorously analysing them over the lengthy time periods required? Maybe I'm missing something obvious but automated analysis is necessary and simply looking at the distribution of keywords over time wouldn't be enough. And, for instance, a gradual change in the way YC headlines are composed might be enough to misrepresent any apparent changes in content over time. In this case, personal opinion is as probably as informed as any form of analysis.
I'm not sure if the idea of giving the full sign up form up front in the home page is a particularly good one. First, it makes the page layout go bad. Second, I miss out reading the section on "How it works" and "Features". No way a user is going to scroll down so low. Third, it scares the users away, imho.

One more small pick: The logo in the home page points to http://dev.bonmp3.com/Home (oops, is it the dev version?!)
I wonder if [HN spam filtering] could filter spam-tagged items out of the new page.

It already happens, I'm quite sure. Every time I visit HN, I first visit the main page, and then visit the new page. I mostly only flag egregious spam. I see some of that disappear as I flag it.

I also like using noobcomments view

http://news.ycombinator.com/noobcomments

every once in a while to double-check for comments that plainly deserve flagging. It's too bad that noobstories view

http://news.ycombinator.com/noobstories

doesn't also allow convenient flagging.

After edit: pg in the child comment below corrected me to point out that the noobstories view now does have flag links, and I can see them now as I follow the link.
I'm an offender, in that I participate in these metadiscussion "What is the true best topic of HN?" discussions routinely, but personally I would like fewer of these topicality discussions and good suggestions for new filtering features to be on the main page. They could live as comment threads under the existing feature requests thread

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=363

and if participants aimed their comments and suggestions there at subthreads that have already brought up the same issue, it might be more clear which features are most in demand among regular participants.
I think that's a rhetoric argument.

You could argue that just about any story was deeply interesting or a sign of some bigger underlying trend.

I think the rule of thumb should probably be 1-3 stories about none-hacker/startup related post per week...

And the deep story should be a hacker's perspective on a regular story.. basicly nothing that would ever make it to reddit's front page.
Ask HN: How to become a better programmer?
My questions is: what abilities are required to effectively build complex web apps and services?

My current knowledge is limited to PHP and MySQL, with no real understanding of OOP.

That said, what would you suggest my next step be? Should I take a stab at Ruby? Javascript? Python? Frameworks?

I would appreciate any suggestions.
(dev link) Fixed, thanks :)

Originally the sign up form was behind a tab. I moved it out because it seemed like a superfluous click, but you are right about sign up forms being scary on the front page.
It would establish context for your remark if I knew where you suggest someone who was born in the United States should go to avoid decline and a bleak future.
I added flag links on noobstories about a week ago.
Yes, but Catharsis commented on the video in the post, so it's not equivalent.
Thanks. My eye missed that just now as I posted the link, but there the flag links are.
New world human freedom site to God Jesus the holy spirit
Logic Lunch Counter
I've been to LHR and I'm going to partially disagree with this. The people that work at ATL, ORD, LAX, LGA, and IAD are morons compared to the people that work security at LHR, or FRA for that matter.

TSOs are very often lowest-rung idiots.
I'm a small government, anti-tax guy, but discrimination against bricks & mortar businesses seems quite unfair. Why should the tax I pay on a new computer vary based on how it is delivered to my home? Also, a sales tax is probably the fairest known model of taxation and is least susceptible to manipulation. To further the "Amazon should tax" argument, one could also make the case that the sales tax becomes quite regressive when upper-income people shop online but poor people (because they don't have credit cards, etc.) primarily buy from a local store.

Certainly, Amazon must resist collecting sales taxes until all online/catalog retailers are required to collect them -- anything less would lead to a shareholder revolt.
I've thought about aggregating all online conference talks, keynotes, workshop,etc videos into one site. Would this be useful to everyone here?
Meta-posting is not the answer. Especially when the questions you're asking are subjective and your own answer to both is "I dunno." At least have an opinion! Otherwise you end up with aimless and impotent discussion. That, more than anything, seems to be what kills sites like this. People start spending their energy talking about the one thing which is not new to any of them and equally familiar to all of them, not because it's so very important, but because it's so easy to. Sure, community standards are important, but discussing them without the power to enforce them or the will to drive them one way or the other doesn't do much for the site.
It's important to differentiate between the technical ability to build web applications and the craft of programming. It seems you are interested in the former, in which case I would recommend learning a popular framework (Ruby on Rails or Django). While you are learning a framework you'll pick up the base language just fine.

If you'd like to learn the more general craft of programming, Peter Norvig has some excellent advice: http://norvig.com/21-days.html. You'll find some language recommendations in the appendix.
I've been down-voted enough recently that I've considered not coming back. One time I feel I added a comment that wasn't helpful or necessary, but the rest was all my honest / best opinion on whatever was being discussed. I don't know, unhappy people with too much time on their hands? Laid off coders maybe? If it's a trend it's a shame.
Yes, but that's a different issue.

Votes are definitely not always counted even though you get the illusion that they are.
Python is a primarily imperative/OO language. Good python code consists of writing loops and building objects. Syntactic abstraction consists primarily of looking up strings in obj.__dict__. Whenever more complicated metaprogramming is needed, strings are parsed.

"obj__parent__name_eq"=foo

is django for

obj.parent.name == foo.

Mathematica is a primarily functional language. The primary abstraction method is patterns (macros), which allow you to modify/build up the parse tree before evaluating it.

http://reference.wolfram.com/mathematica/guide/Patterns.html

I've programmed Python and Lisp, and have begun writing some projects of reasonable size in Mathematica. There are only a couple of major differences between Mathematica and lisp. One is syntax: f[a,b,c] vs (f a b c), as well as some infix syntactic sugar. The other is that arrays are used far more widely in Mathematica than in lisp (but that may be due to the problem domain of mathematica).
I wasn't interested in the game because it looked too much like Frequency and Amplitude, and I'm in the Harmonix camp.
I appreciate your marketing mojo, early limited but heavy donation encourages rapid adoption by caring enthusiasts. Of course giving 5% forever would be incredibly generous but would cut into artist rewards.

Will check out your app, much respect the Jekyll and Hyde founder (day jobs). That's where I come from.
Thanks for your interest.

I really have to see how the economics play out, but I'm always open to raising the donation bar.
...and I get down-voted for that?
HackerHackerNews.com seems to do a good job of separating the more sensationalist articles from the drier articles. (This is what I perceive your complaint to mean).
I recall the grassroots "Delete your MySpace Day" from a few years ago. While it is likely that relatively few people actually deleted their accounts, the meme distributed the implicit message that MySpace might not be cool anymore. Since then, we've seen many articles about how it has become an online ghetto of sorts. Although Facebook is clearly more entrenched and better in so many ways than MySpace, it must be scared of such a backlash. Perhaps they are using C&D letters to quell such grassroots uprisings?
Sorry tax happy states, probably because it's an unconstitutional violation of the commerce clause. Perhaps it's time to cut worthless social programs.
"Plan 9 is clearly superior to Linux. It has cleaner interfaces, one person can understand it, lot's of things are unified that were disparate etc. etc. "

I have no argument with this,

"Everyone who uses both extensively berates Linux at every turn."

I seriously doubt this. Please provide any evidence you have.

If the makers of plan 9 were to say "Linux is crap" at least they have the credibility to say so. It is noteworthy that they would never say something so stupid. Linux (and yes Plan 9) aren't the acme of perfection. But neither are the "lisp os" es. Raising ancient lisp systems to some unreachable pedestal of perfection , especially by people who've never seen or used on and have just read about them, is dubious

This is just a blogger with lots of crummy blog posts and no code. At best he is incoherent and at worst deluded.

To repeat my point was not that Linux is the best OS ever. But for me (or anyone else) to go around screaming that everything that is popular is all delusion is pointless (and strictly imo) shouldn't be paid any attention.

"The previous winners of the "Language of the Year" award are shown below.

Year	Winner
2008	C
2007	Python
2006	Ruby
2005	Java
2004	PHP
2003	C++"

And the point is? Most of them are fine languages and worthy of "langauge of the year" at least when measured in terms of popularity.

"Popularity means nothing"

Popularity is not everything but it sure isn't "nothing" either.
I think you meant to link to this: http://highscalability.com/blog/2009/12/16/building-super-sc...