skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Well okay let me elaborate on my question.

pg has stated that code brevity is one of the main design goals of arc. But what is pretty obvious is that code brevity is not the only consideration. It is desirable to be able to write very short code, but it should be readable as well. If you write very short code that is difficult for other people to read, that is bad enough. If you write very short code that ends up being difficult even for yourself to read -- then we have a problem.

The above ruby code snippet is a great example of code where reducing the length not only did not reduce readability, but actually increased it. I know some people have complained about it being obfuscated on this board. But to me, and I am sure to a number of other people on this board, it was easy to understand, intuitive even.

so .. in arc, what would be a similar way to create a list of numbers from 1 to 100, and to evaluate the sum of that list?
because I already spent(translation: am in debt) $100k on it, might as well get it, and I come from a family of masters/phd graduates so I need to get it.
Study casts doubt on anti-depressants
The Web gives boomer caregivers a boost
Starting Salaries For Most IT Pros Will Climb In 2008
ABC thinks you're an idiot
I think you misunderstood the significance of this research. Nobody is claiming that the circuit is alive or intelligent. The method used is a fairly standard genetic algorithm. The fascinating part is that the evolved circuit is unlike anything designed by humans. For example: "A further five cells appeared to serve no logical purpose at all — there was no route of connections by which they could influence the output. And yet if he disconnected them, the circuit stopped working."
While I'm not an American, it will be very interesting to watch how Mr. Lessig is able to raise awareness of government corruption and to see how successful his efforts are. Here in Canada, the government seems to be looking into updating copyright legislation in some, shall we say, suspiciously biased ways. If his methods are successful, I hope we can adapt them to the Canadian system.

The Canadian who seems to fill a similar spokesperson / visionary niche as Mr. Lessig is Michael Geist (http://www.michaelgeist.ca/). He was the figurehead in the fight against the recent proposed copyright reforms here and had a great grasp of the situation and how to organize a grass-roots opposition to it.

As an aside, I find Mr. Lessig's presentation style quite interesting. For online presentations, where one can't use the flesh and blood presence of the presenter, the frequent updates are a huge attention magnet. It would be a pretty big departure from the 10-20-30 rule, but I wonder how well a business pitch made in this style would work. Another example of a presentation of Mr. Lessig's that exemplifies the style (and is beautifully and passionately presented) is available at http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/187 . ("How creativity is being strangled by the law")
Yes. I know I'm making progress when "lines of code" starts DECREASING. Sometimes, the most sophisticated code is surprisingly small.
altavista.digital.com was a reflexive habit two years before Google was. Now, there are kids who have never heard of it.

There's no doubt in my mind that if Google had failed to keep up with SEO spammers, someone else would have replaced them just like they replaced AltaVista. The value proposition would be simple: No more poring over search results to find the one non-spam page you were actually looking for buried on the fourth page.
Armed robbers nabbed through text messages
Scott Aaronson reply to "Don't become a scientist!"
"Failures are like skinned knees - painful but superficial." - Ross Perot

+1 for the reminder of Perot's infomercials during his 1992 presidential run in which he delivered his sales pitch for president (charts and all)
"They can make the same revenue with 5 million regular viewers, each worth $40 to advertisers. Given Facebook’s admittedly somewhat ludicruous valuation ($300 / user), that seems a trifle."

That doesn't make any sense. Nobody thinks Facebook should be able to make $300/user. They're valued based on future growth potential.

Making $40 in ad revenue per user is pretty tough. If you assume $10 CPM, that's 4k impressions per, or 11 a day. Not impossible, but not trivial either, and totally unrelated to Facebook.
Given the rising cost of energy, companies include it in the cost of ownership. So, if you had a server which was 13.5 times more powerful and consumed the same energy then you'd definitely save money. Unfortunately, SPARC would cost more up-front.

So, for a fast growing company, using x86 may reduce opportunity cost. For a large, steady company, a rolling replacement programme of SPARC may be the best option.
Is there any reason to not still have the Google banner at the top of your site? Do you do this as a benefit to your visitors, or would Adsense cannibalize your affiliate income?
Yes, it is. April 1st, or the closest pay-day thereabouts.
The neurobiology of the Mona Lisa's smile
It's not even about revenue. Harvard doesn't set tuition to maximize revenue -- it's only a drop in the financial bucket.

As for offering content online, MIT has been pretty progressive in this regard, and they offer ocw.mit.edu. But having advertising would undermine the credibility of a university. I think it's better just to take the (small) hit, and make it ad-free.
From the article: build an online audience in the millions, sets tuition to zero, starts broadcasting (and archiving) every lecture at the highest possible quality

This has been running in the UK since the 1970s ( http://www.open2.net/ ) and enrollment was free. 180000 students are currently enrolled.
I think I have a pseudo explanation for why we can't predict what the future looks like (and I also mean that literally).

Change happens from the bottom up, not from the top down. When a new radical idea takes hold and is adopted, it gradually becomes part of the system and is no longer a paradigm. You can only iterate so far on a current design before something else comes along to replace it.

If you took the standard car design in the 1950s and tried to use it as a basis for what the future brings, well...you'd get roughly the same thing that you'd get if you took a Toyota and used it as the basis for what cars look like in the future.

Have you ever noticed in the music in futuristic sci-fi movies? It's the same thing. You can't imagine what music sounds like in 50 years any more than you could have imagined rap or hip hop in the 1940's.
Then lets say you packaged that up as a library. Another guy did the same thing, but it worked a little different. Now random code breaks.
actually, brackets represent a block. A block is converted to class Proc with '&'. If the object that '&' is used on is not a block, Ruby will first attempt to convert it into a Proc by calling to_proc

A Ruby block is always associated with a method, and cannot be captured in a variable without converting it back into a proc. This is done by 'removing' the '&'

def return_block &block
return block
end
Fair enough, although it wasn't my intent to imply an apples to apples comparison. I admit that I don’t have a great sense of what reasonable numbers are here. Certainly, the type of site I propose ought to get far more attention from its users than your average internet site. Whether this translates into > $40 / year advertising revenue, I don't know.
Right. Which is exactly why the most powerful startups provide potential paradigm shifts.
That question is somewhat interesting just a little off-topic in this thread.

In Arc, that line would be:

(reduce + (range 1 100))

which is nice, but not much different from Scheme. Pretty readable.
I'm waiting for a company to release a truly generic virtual machine that works in the browser and standalone.
What ever happened to the maglev train that east coast cities were competing for? Did the funding for that fall through after they spent years talking about it?
GA Evolved antenna - looks like paperclip twisted in bunch but proven to have low power draw, high gain
http://ic.arc.nasa.gov/projects/esg/research/antenna.htm
Ivan Illich actually writes about a plan for education via online social networking in his book Deschooling Society. He talks about finding other people with similar interests using a computer and then meeting up to study with them. He actually describes it as a web, which is pretty impressive considering he published in 1970, 20 years before the term was even coined.

I think it would actually be a fun experiment to get a bunch of people on this site together for a week or so in summer, maybe read through five or so books over the course of a week living together. I think that would potentially be a better model for education than just putting lectures online.
What's more significant is the theft of the Yahoo text ad model/patent, and the multi-billion $ payoff for its use. I don't know exactly how they pulled that off, but the patent's worth must be around $100 billion.

As a postscript, that patent came from Overture (which came from the Idealab incubator), which itself was a billion-dollar buyout. I wonder if a company will in turn buy its use off Google for even more?
You misconstrued what the article was claiming... "capitalism sucks (... the gov should regulate even more)" is not the same as "market capitalism is inherently biased towards outcomes that enrich owners of capital at the expense of nonowners who innovate."
From the article: 9. Dirty

I describe it as a deferred garbage collect.
Perhaps you're right about my misinterpretation... the overall implication I took from it was that a genetic algorithm was applied to a circuit that could be rewired itself; this increased the level of complexity possible and from this (and this is where I sensed the implication that we have something akin to a biological system that is living) we have the result of something that is autonomous and sensing in a way that it can interact with humans the way a dog might (as highlighted in the first paragraph). Also the use of the word "creatures" in the title sort of threw me off...

There's much I don't know about genetic algorithms; perhaps more background in that area would help. I thought that the benefit of using genetic algorithms was to create novel designs that are unlike anything a human being would normally create.
The reason I choose to continue with Ruby instead of moving to a language like Scheme has a lot to do with the community. There is so much activity in the Ruby and Rails communities that you can almost always find help with what you're trying to do, a library to make something easier, and great blogs with lots of little tricks. I just haven't seen that same level of community with languages like Scheme.

I'm not saying that you should choose your language based solely on the size of it's community (otherwise I would be pulling my hair out with Java) but the advanced features of Ruby, the expressiveness, and the community together make it a great place to be as a programmer.
RIP Microsoft: 2007

http://paulgraham.com/microsoft.html
Podcast on the fallacy of monopoly (IBM, Microsoft, Google, Wal-Mart...)
given the title of the blog (Charity Focus), their past articles, and the tone of the current one - "We are favoring the interests of one class over another"; I don't feel that I misconstrued the article.

I'm actually surprised this got up voted on a site populated mostly by the can-do, think outside of the box so I can move up the food chain crowd... is YC News readership changing?

I could be wrong, but I feel another subtle message the article is giving is: "there's no point - just give up. the evil rich men will always outsmart and bully you no matter how hard you try or how clever u are"
It will speed up OpenOffice's launch from 15 to 7 seconds.

"Modern machines will probably beat the raw timing of these numbers in even cold-start times" (my machine takes 10 secs to load OpenOffice)

So the improvement will be even less than the 8 seconds from the old tests. Sure, it's nice, but hardly "drastic", as the article's title claims. Thanks for passing on this tip (and for taking the word 'drastic' out when posting :)
Don't ever say you're not that smart.
Age is still a mindset. I'm 25, but could pass for 33. Likewise I know people in their early 40s that could pass for 27.
Rapleaf: Reputation Lookup and Email Search
There are biological, psychological, and social differences between a 25 year old and a 45 year old, none of which are in favor of the 45 year old.

For example, the highest prize in Mathematics is the Fields medal, awarded every 4 years to the most outstanding mathematician under 40. Only once was there a problem with the age limit as all the important work in mathematics is done by young minds, anyway. The almost exception, by the way, was 41.
Auditing worked for me!
Apple's terms are that you can burn limited copies to CD for personal use. Their imperfect ability to enforce those terms with technology is irrelevant to the iTunes Terms of Service and the Usage Rules.

If you don't want to deal with encumbered media, don't buy it. The original Hymn was a cool technical hack, and I salute it on those grounds. The "modern" Hymn tools are less cool. In neither case were they a "good idea"; it's hard to lament their passing.
Virtual wouldn't be the same. Most of what you learn in college, you have to learn in person.
Assumptions the article makes:
1. People are stupid, they cant and dont adapt.
2. The market system is rigid and exploitative.

Can we expect the three people who were hired instead of John Ulviden to make the same "mistake" he made? Probably not. If they were people looking out for their own self-interests, they would factor in the "mistake" John made and make sure they dont step over the "acceptable" amount of sales. What sort of an effect does this have for Adidias? They reach a high-point in sales due to the energy and creativity of John, but then because of what they did to him, their sales are no longer going up. They have just lost the opportunity to have John take their sales to the next level.

And what sort of an opportunity does this present to a competitor like Nike for example? They would probably want John for more than one reason: For his abilities and also for the relationships he has with the customers he won over for Adidas.

Heck, why ramble when there is such eloquent exposition at hand:

"In addition to these endless pleadings of self-interest, there is a second main factor that spawns new economic fallacies every day. This is the persistent tendency of men to see only the immediate effects of a given policy, or its effects only on a special group, and to neglect to inquire what the long-run effects of that policy will be not only on that special group but on all groups. It is the fallacy of overlooking secondary consequences." - Henry Hazlitt in "Economics in One Lesson"

http://jim.com/econ/contents.html
Google Heads Under The Sea With Cable Investment
"We notice the ripple and take the lake for granted"
from "The Social Life of Information" by John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid

“We don't know who discovered water, but we know it wasn't the fish.” Marshal Mcluhan
Terrible.

Didn't get Yes, ACDC or Stevie Wonder.
The real issue is not "burning" but "low-contrast."
I am looking for a link, you don't have one do you?
Which is fastest: Nissan GT-R, BMW M3, or Porsche 911 GT3?
Not so fast.

The claim was that scala is special. However, the argument doesn't support that claim. It's a list of "me-toos" and hyperbole.

For example, every language with multiple inheritance has some mechanism to deal with diamonds. Type inference is useful/interesting, but it doesn't result in "highly productive".
Here is a paper describing how it works: http://cgi.sfu.ca/~gpeters/tapper/AAAI054PetersG.pdf .

Basically, they start with the durations between each note, normalize for differences in tempo, and then create a string that for each note indicates whether the duration goes up, down, or stays the same between each note. Then find the edit distance between that string, and the strings in the database for each song.

You might have to read that a dozen or so times to make any sense of it, but it beats reading the paper if you have work to get done.

If you want to look into it further, http://cgi.sfu.ca/~gpeters/tapper/tapper.cgi .
My units doesnt have millilightseconds. :(
is YC News readership changing?

Unfortunately this was in fact mostly voted up by recently arrived users. But I'm not panicking yet; overall the quality of the top stories was good today.
An introduction to Solitons
Oh, I might have been wrong, thanks for your reply.
!!|sed 's/hulu//g'
Maybe i should get out more...
This would explain why it appears different every time it looks at it.
lighthouseapp.com looks like a good hosted solution
The article doesn't propose a pure-virtual model, for exactly this reason. But imagine that for your favourite Harvard class, there is a corresponding regular meetup taking place in your hometown (and maybe other associated social events), and an online forum where the 20,000 people taking the class can discuss what's going on, seek help, and so on.
For me, perl's killer app these days is the one-liner.

Where python has (for me, at least) muscled in on perl's niche as general-scripting-language-of-choice, perl remains unmatched as the most terrifyingly useful extension to the command-line that ever there was.
I love "freemium" business models, but only when the negative externalities aren't seen by the "users of the basic version" and especially when the positive externalities _are_ seen by the "users of the basic version".
This alone doesn't make a very good argument, unless you're arguing against any sort of protected intellectual property.

I mean Ford's cars might get better gas mileage if they didn't have to avoid patents by Toyota. Project Gutenberg would have a lot more free books if they didn't avoid copyrighted works.

I think the poster was looking for solid flaws in the system regarding software. For example, the frivolous nature of things like 1-click (though I think Amazon has had a hard time keeping that from being attacked right and left).
"He began by congratulating the nascent Ruby on Rails community (and, by extension, himself), citing a litany of impressive achievements: 500,000 downloads of the code"

That's about how many downloads PHP gets every couple weeks.
Funny, I had just finished reading this when I saw the post.

After reading this, the phrase that came to my mind is "hustling backwards".
This is why I've learned to give only as much as employers expect and occasionally 5 or 10% more. All my best ideas stay with me, for my own projects. I've made the mistake that the company's and mine interests were the same far too often and gotten burned by it. The problem I'll run into is how to align my interests and those of my employees when I'm running my own shop, but I'll worry about that when I need to. Right now it is too soon for those sort of worries.
See http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/3882
Adobe is rather smart to use the traction behind Flash to take on Microsoft, but it's not that easy. I don't know if many of you have tried .NET, but it's quite a powerful and well-designed platform (surprising for Microsoft). It also has the smartest languages of any mainstream development environment (F# and C# 3.0). Flex and Air cover maybe 1/10 of the features .NET has and it's going to be a few more years at the very least before it's a serious competition to Microsoft.
You can still take something positive away from this article if you look at it as a compelling argument to work for yourself.

Charityfocus had an interesting story, but they spun it with the kind of sad, defeatist attitude that is antithetical to the hacker news ethos.
Friendfeed gets $5m - congrats Paul Buchheit
Language design philosophy: more than one way?
Maybe for art school. Wasn't the case for engineering. Real people may be nice to have, but I learned basically everything from the books/internet and reviewing homework/test solutions for what I got wrong.
Since the owners of the company didn't create any wealth by creating the company... they just magically were born owning a shoe company and never worked a day in their lives. </sarcasm>

What happened to this fabled John is pretty crappy, but that is a risk every employee has always had. The only way to avoid that risk is to put your own capital on the line and be an owner (a founder is an owner, even if it only costs him $10 for the domain name).

If anything, this article shows why capitalism does work well. If we weren't using capitalism, John couldn't start over again. If we were under communism, and the State fires and blacklists you, you are screwed. All jobs belong to the state. If we were under feudalism, and the Lord 'fires' you (most likely by taking your plot of land and possibly just killing you), then you're only choice is to try and find another Lord to take you in. How is that better?

I'd bet the author wants a benevolent state to give us all jobs that pay the same amount. That is all fine and dandy, except then what would even be the point? At that point we'd be living on Airstrip One and enjoying our daily Two Minutes Hate.
I've never heard of auditing... unless you mean you were audited in the conventional sense, and it was so depressing that life felt ok by comparison!
These are great. They'd be in the 98th percentile (at least) of what you could see in a day of walking around galleries in NYC.
I find it strange that a salesperson is named to be the one who creates wealth. If they could create wealth at will, why do they always want exclusive rights to their "territories"?
In my hometown there were only a handful of smart people my age.

In fact, it wasn't till I got to college that I understood what smart even was. Till then my sample had been so small that I couldn't distinguish smartness from the idiosyncrasies of the few individual smart people I knew.
It's not about profit? For virtually all schools, it is.

I think these discussions are highly distorted by just focusing on the top couple schools that are the exception to the norm and affect very few people anyway.
It turns out not to be a problem in practice. I could list the 20 things I hate most about Ruby and the 20 things I hate most about Rails, and this wouldn't make either list. I don't know that I've ever seen it happen.

And on the "technically, could it happen?" side, sure, it could. You can also write a Java library that, in weird cases, could screw up other Java libraries, but the Java folks (even as much as they love to try to keep you safe) don't care, either.

Besides, "each" is quite standard in Ruby. Defining it to mean something other than "call the proc with each element, in order" would be weirdbad, like a C++ programmer defining operator+ to mean subtraction. If you do something weirdbad like that, your library deserves to lose.
In art school I learned practically nothing from the other students. But I learned a lot about programming from conversations with Robert Morris.
I voted it up because I think it's a great reminder why we should want to be owners and not employees. That is the part of the attraction of a startup... it's definitely more financially secure than a job, from which you can get fired. At a startup the worst you can do is fail and have to get a job.

John got the shaft in the short term, but Adidas got rid of their top salesman. John will recover and probably excel, while Adidas just guaranteed that their salesman will never try and achieve anything great. The most obvious effect of an action is not the most important, as stated above.
There's an article on this, which calls it "cognitive lock-in":

http://publications.mediapost.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=Artic...
Now that is a valid reason: meeting other smart people who can inspire you and teach you things that the classes don't even begin to cover.

If only there were a way for prospective students to know how good their school is for this ahead of time. I'd pay double for a school that puts me around people like that.