skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
While it does bear some consideration I think that some of the first acts of aggression in both world wars were attacks against underwater telegraph cabling, I'd be a little hesitant to jump to conclusions too quickly. There are a number of reasons why and how suchs cables could be taken offline. Sosuke mentioned one in particular: power issues. One of the first transatlantic telegraph cables was fried when the first operators, thinking it would take tons of power to "push" a signal all the way across the Atlantic, fried the cable and much of the equipment on the far end. While these aren't telegraph cables, the principle is the same. They may well have been taken offline because of recurrent power issues at one end or the other.

Then again this maybe a prelude to another country in the Middle East getting pummeled. IMO, it's hard to say at this point.
Static typing considered harmful
Sure, but then you're not working in Java any more. You're just using it as object code.
Attn TechForward, nickb just wrote your marketing copy for you:

"TechForward registration ... $9"

"Not having to deal with scammers on eBay ... priceless"
Guide to Seed Fund Incubators (Y Combinator Clones)
Huzzah! A solution is found! Fires up Azureus, starts leeching torrents. No no, don't thank me. Just doing my part to save the planet!
The writer-editor relationship
The only thing (as far as I can tell) that was delayed is the deadline for the Developer's Challenge. And that is because a major SDK update is coming very soon and they want to give developers more time to utilize it.
So you are predicting a war before the cables are repaired? That seems rather far-fetched, to say the least.

I think it is far more likely that this is just a coincidence.
It's too many to be a coincidence. I don't think a war is coming, I think it is much more likely this was a test for the CIA or whoever to see if they could actually cut this many cables if they ever needed to. Or the CIA will repair the cable in such a way to let them monitor communications.
very interesting.

network and graph theory are definitely interesting topics. but what you've covered is most definitely a lot of interesting math. im an engineering (just a freshman), so all i get to see is integral calc. but theres definitely a lot of interesting math out there. combinatorics is also pretty nifty.

a very nice structured list. i might have to go pick up some books...
I think it is interesting good luck with the site. I think having tags so you could filter to experience you are interested in would be good. Like sports, travel, relationships or whatever. Then if I know I don't care about say sports, I could more easily find things I am looking for.
I use Django. I don't have this problem.
3-4K hits a day is significant?

Did you miss out some zeroes?
Powerful Programming Languages, Take Two
So let's say it's 50 years into the future. You and your startup team get together for a weekend to crank out the next killer app. (Surely you haven't given up startups by now, have you?)

You all put on your neural helmets and begin to have a conversation about where the users are, what strategies you'd like to use, and the types of things you'd like to do in the future. At the end of this discussion, the computer creates a 10-minute neural "video" of your agreement along with a working application. Any newcomer to the team can "watch" the neural video and not only understand the application, but also understand what decisions were made and why, and how things should change in the future. The working application consists of 40K lines of assembly, automatically created during the discussion. To change the program, you just need to repeat the discussion process you did to create it -- ie, no assembler language knowledge is needed. Of course you _could_ go in and hack the assembler if you chose.

Conversely, at the same time, Arc++, The Next Generation is out. For this same amount of work, the code needed is this:

Floog()

Which of these is the more powerful programming language? Why?
context is everything.
Trying to keep this non-partisan, it seems that big pieces of the base of each party came out with their own guy this time around. There was Huckabee for the evangelicals, Paul for the A/W Libertarians, and Obama for the black vote. I guess you could even count Clinton with the feminists. In the past, each of these goups were considered the bedrock of their parties. The primary was so open that each group had their own guy, but in general it didn't seem to matter much. Machines beat bases.

You are right that there is a huge difference between the way a politician runs and the way he governs. That's probably a good thing. I think with emotions so high over various issues people are going to be dissapointed when they don't get the simple answer they wanted, no matter who they choose.
From what I understand, they wouldn't only screw themselves up...

Some open-source Yahoo projects could be screwed also.
Scheduleonce has been neglect by major media, and that was a mistake
I have noticed that learning math from lectures (and similar means) versus learning math by reading a math book are very different skills.

Learning from lectures may be very good to get a handle on the basics. You may learn the facts faster, and keep motivation up.

But to learn beyond the basics, especially areas that are less likely to be covered at your local community college, you should learn how to learn from a book (this is different than learning from books in other subjects).

Perhaps, if you take some lectures, you may want to read a chapter or two ahead of the lecture, to get used to reading a math book as a primary source.

Good luck! Math is beautiful!
"Surely neural interfaces can render most coding obsolete eventually."

I am skeptical of that. I think that a good programming language can be a great help for making ideas precise and exploring their ramifications. We may have some vague notion of what seems a great idea, but when we go to express it in a precise way find out that there are significant obstacles that were not at first evident. So, the read-eval-print-loop of a good "exploratory" language might still be very useful, even in a world with neural-computer interfaces.
Absolutely depends on what you are doing.. 3-4k hits (unique visitors) a day for an ecommerce website at a 1-2% conversion rate is 60-80 orders. I with an ecommerce startup. With that volume I'd be driving a lambo.
My guess is the NSA. They finally think they're able to tap fiber and like fools are running around willy nilly splicing in taps to undersea cables in that area in order to stop the tur-ists.

Should we quietly do them one at a time so no one will notice? Heck no, then the tur-ists would win!
Given your criteria of "consistent and easy grammar" I would put Python before Ruby. There may be other measures that make Ruby more 'concise' than Python.
Easiest ways that we found are to buy AdWords (or equivalent) and try out a few campaigns and to buy users from an existing source. Be mindful of the quality of these users because they may not match the exact demographic that you are looking for unless you are very particular (willing to pay $$).

We also found that it is both more difficult and more valuable to organically grow a user base that finds good utility in your service. These users typically need more word-of-mouth (including via respected blogs) or viral messaging. A good way to get people in the door is to offer a free basic service coupled with a clear path to upgrade later to a premium service when you've ironed out your business model and service offerings.

Last, we've found that a good way to keep people interested in the service itself is to keep the technology open source. This builds a very involved community, ensures that if the service is valuable that it can continue, and provides excellent references later on when you will be asked if can support large numbers of users.
Wouldn't a good neural interface create some abstraction of a read-eval-print loop that would seem natural and not part of some other language?

I mean, don't we do the same thing when we have conversations with other humans? Let's say we're going out and the other person wants some things from the store. Surely we are both capable of discussing what's needed from the store without having to formalize it so much, right?

So I take it that perhaps you feel that machines will always need a more formal conversation than humans? I find that a little difficult to believe, what with machine translation, OCR, voice commands and such. (None of which are perfect, but all of which are getting closer to being very useful)

I guess I would be interested in what part of a neural interface would not be able to provide the stimulus a programmer is already receiving from his programming IDE? And if the neural interface can make it the same stimulus, surely there would be room for improvement, no?

This conversation is continued in a new post -- http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=109286
If it's running Vista, the manufacturer should be paying me.
Unique visitors? Sure, that's good.

But that's not what 'hits' usually refers to, I think.

And with an ecommerce startup, sure, that'd be great.
If you believe in the great nano-hardware apotheosis, 50 years from now you won't program, you'll advise. Startup hackers will write essays like pg does now, except their audience will be swarms of semi-cognizant nanobots who will decide on their own if their suggestions are worthwhile. Only the efficient ones will have their choices passed along to the next generation. There will be great religious wars at the atomic scale as the bots try and decide where best to put their molecular parentheses. All this will happen so fast it will be unnoticeable to humans, most of whom will be too busy keeping each other entertained.
Remember that scene in "Independence Day" when Will Smith punched that alien in the head and yelled "Welcome to Earth!"...

Welcome to Vista.
My crystal ball doesn't work much past the Great Singularity, so can we limit the discussion to somewhere half-way between here and there? At the extremes, a lot of discussion falls apart. Plus, I don't want no nano-bots arguing over parentheses. Little buggers should be using braces instead. : )
I'm confused by the distinction between "scenes" and "safaris". Personally I'd like it if everything were called a safari, cuz going on a safari sounds like much more fun than... making a scene.

Oh, and how about a "random challenge" link?
We do: http://www.acunote.com (Agile Project Management)
+1 to SEO

Best way to get early free traffic is with good SEO. Organic traffic is free, optimize for it! (read semoz!)

Submit your site and it contents to every online directory / listing service possible. Submitting our product data to Google Product search (froogle) has worked out great for us (tons of free traffic)
Precisely. They felt that it would be unfair, with a week or two left, to say "oh, and by the way, here's a major update".
Create a persona of the audience you think would like you're offering. Coders? Single moms? Rap enthusiasts?

Find out where they spend their time online and hang out there. If it's a forum, post a lot and have a signature link back to your site. If it's a blog, comment a lot (intelligently) and eventually drop a note to the blogger for some coverage or feedback.

SEO, SEO, SEO. As part of your persona thinking, figure out what your audiences searches for and be high in those results. Don't guess. KNOW. Do keyword research.

Social media aggregators (digg, etc) require that you be funny, controversial, or useful. If you can tweak your initial offering so that you (or better yet, your ever-changing content) can meet these criteria, you can perform well.

Word of mouth/virality. If having 10 active users doesn't result in growth, you should improve your product until it does.
That is partially historic. The name scenes comes from the phrase "mob scene" (I didn't know what else to call it) When I was first working it out in my head, I wanted something where people can do the same thing at the same time in the same place (like a mob). But as it evolved, each scene didn't have to be time and place specific.

A safari came later. I wanted to group scenes together like a list, or trail that I can check off as I completed it, or that others can complete as a walking tour since scenes can be location specific. As you can see, safaris are still less mature than other parts of the site. I'll have to do more work to make the two more distinguishable.

What's a "random challenge link"? You click on it, and every time, you see a different scene?
Looking on Charity Water's site, backing out the math, your per-week cost is a little less than $0.02? If you're looking to mimic to some small extent the success of FreeRice.com you're going to want to make the action trivial - looking at that puzzle makes me want to go away, where clicking a definition on FreeRice is easy, right or wrong. If you want clicks / click traffic / impressions ($), make it easy to click.
Eureka! It Really Takes Years of Hard Work
Is the Federal Government processing its budget with google now? :-P
Wasn't this puzzle originally invented by Henry Dudeney like 100 years ago?
You've already got a single point of failure; your email address.
AOL snags a startup, reminding everyone that they're still buying
Standing on the Shoulder of Giants - a post about entrepreneurship
Hey, I like it! Creative, wacky, something different. Good luck! Don't get how the name is related though...
make it look more like iminlikewithyou, less like my physics303k homepage

definitly needs more flash, bigger pictures, better graphics, make people want to stay around and browse people and their dares and whatnot. I didn't really look around enough but if u dont have flickr and twitter integration, get it done
I'm not familiar with how they've done it in PostgreSQL, but DB2 does support XML indexes. You just have to write an XPath statement to represent what is stored in the index. Then you can write an XQuery statement and the query engine will use that index. It's quite fast.
Yeah, that's why the "real" government projects are such outstanding successes. Because pour millions for over a decade only to find out at the end that your components don't integrate is a GREAT idea.

True, a lot of the applications developed today are crap. But a lot of the large scale applications can benefit the same way from test driven development, user stories and iterative development. The problem is a lot of folks overreact to agile and think it means doing no design or thinking at all. That's simply not the case.
When someone makes a mistake, instead of just showing Sorry! Unfortunately, your sudoku solution was not correct. Please try again! and taking them to a new puzzle, you should point out the error.

When someone completes a puzzle, in addition to Congratulations! You've solved a sudoku puzzle successfully and helped provide a weeks worth of clean water. you should provide some random statistic about clean water in the world and perhaps how well you're doing relative to other players.

The scoring system doesn't work either (or perhaps you were expecting cookies to be enabled without mentioning it)?
I occasionally submit posts that I wrote myself it if I think its relevant to the Hacker community. I'm not sure what the protocol is, but I read the ToS and didnt see anything against it. I'm only doing it if I think people will find it interesting, but feel free to let me know if I shouldn't!
If they're so into long term, how come they're so late to the game in terms of internet stuff? There's a difference between "don't have as many people breathing down their necks as everyone else does", and the actual corporate culture at Microsoft. The first thing could be a very positive thing, the second is not a point in their favor from everything I see.

I think the vision of Microsoft as this white knight that will come along and gently put some breath into Yahoo's sails is to ignore the nuts and bolts reality of how Microsoft has approached this sort of thing in the past. I could always be wrong, and they've learned their lessons, but only time will tell, and I wouldn't bet on it.
I work in a Smalltalk shop, where we extend and maintain an application that has been around over a decade. During the maintenance part of our job, it would be really nice to have type declarations on variables. For maintenance, the more dependable information we have, the better! The fewer things that can escape as runtime exceptions, the better! Not having static typing makes new development faster, but maintenance is harder. What would be ideal is an optional typing system like Strongtalk. As parts of the system mature, they would become statically typed. This gives us the best of both worlds.
I didn't get what the vote thing does. At least it didn't have any effect for me.
Searching For Online Video's Holy Grail
Guesses on what happens when you get people from Random House and McKinsey running a company, plus a CTO from Accenture?
Guesses on what happens when you get people from Random House and McKinsey running a company, plus a CTO from Accenture?
I think the Pastafarians have already proved this ;)

(The image about halfway down)
http://www.venganza.org/about/open-letter/
I did a couple of things with it; it's fun, like turtle graphics for grownups.

Don't rush out and buy the book right away; the website has plenty of content to get a feel for it: http://processing.org/learning/basics/index.html
???, Profit!
So I guess the original post is really a philosophical question. Because unless "concise" can be quantified and describable, there is no way to judge a choice of design of language is better than the other as science, because no refutation of theory can be designed and verified. The original post only discover that shortness doesn't mean powerful, it can be cumbersome given a choice on a simple rules in grammar, then create a big mess for maintenance.
Do you mean less powerful, or less pleasant? The Arc' language would still have all the same semantic power for the syntactic length. It'd just be a royal pain in the behind to use.
I have this problem. However I am using Java, and I work for an organization that is split into DB and Dev teams. We interact a lot - it's not like there's some huge dividing line. But the developers adapt to changes in the database - we don't push objects out to the database. So maybe we've set ourselves up for this problem.

This brings up a new question,though - is version control for a database another palliative for a broken system? In other words, if you have to version the database along with the code, have you already made a mistake?

In my case, there's no avoiding this "mistake", so I will definitely be discussing this idea with the DB team, for sure.
Sloan School of Management at MIT uses PostgreSQL for their "dotLRN" based system... http://dotlrn.org

Harvard's Leadership for a Networked World uses PG - http://lnwprogram.org

DIYPlanner.com uses Drupal/PG - http://diyplanner.com

PowerfulIntentions.com (lots of forums, separate user pages, etc. all dynamically generated from PG database) - http://www.powerfulintentions.com
"how to prove it" is by Velleman
I've had great experiences using processing.
It's been sweet for prototyping multimedia stuff - live video processing, physical computing, data visualization, toys.
The libraries make it quick and painless to get graphics floating around.
Typing isn't the major cost of having lots of extra characters. The cost of having lots of extra characters is the separation of concepts from one another in the code. The closer the important parts are to one another, the easier it is to scan the code looking for defects or to make updates.
There's a new Oreilly book out on it called 'visualizing data'.

I'm only a few chapters in, but it's quite good so far. Covers the basics, a few good sized 'real' projects, and quite a bit on integrating it with java.
along these lines check out:
Vector Calculus, Linear Algebra, and Differential Forms: A Unified Approach by Hubbard and Hubabrd

http://www.amazon.com/Vector-Calculus-Linear-Algebra-Differe...
I'm not sure about underwater, but one way to save lots of money on a datacenter would be to build it on the shore next to a deep body of water and a massive bandwidth supply. That way you can chill the datacenter using Lake Source Cooling, which cuts power consumption by ~80%. If you're ever in Ithaca there is a huge LSC plant on Cayuga Lake that's insanely cool to walk around in.
Originally, it came from the idea that people were doing the same things at the same time, like a mob scene. So, "mobs in the city" became mobtropolis.
Vista SP1 Released to Manufacturing
Yeah, I have to admit graphic design is lacking, though I've just been doing what's passable.

I can see how flickr integration would be a boon. How does twitter figure into it? As far as I can tell, you can't post pictures in a twit.
Angel capital and the HotorNot approach
Google works to torpedo Microsoft bid for Yahoo
Well, if their intention was simply to splice monitoring gear into it, do you think that they would have done it so visibly? Think anything unencrypted and important is going to go over those cables in the near future?
An enclosed structure located where you're describing would be under incredible pressure from the water above, unless it's close to the surface. Also you would need people to man it. They wouldn't last long without sunlight. Finally, hard drives, switches, and other items fail all the time. You would need a storage area for food, water, shelter, and replacement gadgets, as well as toilets of some type.
It isn't necessarily a coincidence, but couldn't it be reasonable explained that when the first few went down it lead to a higher level of strain and utilization of the remaining cables, thus making them far more likely to break themselves?
What makes you think there's a very real chance of that? Microsoft already has patents on practically everything to do with software. What difference has it made?
Ask YC: Negotiating with Friends/Family/Fools for the first round.
Hi,

We're about to close a 70K EUR Round with friends (in packages of 10-20K), which we plan to use to test our marketing assumptions, and launching the first city, for a finished product.

Bigger cash seems to be available only with strings attached (e.g. 100k now, 1.5MM later for 40%), and there are few good Angels in Europe.

It's not just hard to pitch, it's much harder to find someone to pitch to.

Our current self-valuation, which we think is very reasonable, even when accounting for interest and risk, is 1.5MM.

How would you guys go for arriving at a valuation with friends?

We're prepared to give them a significant discount, but we'd like to avoid haggling.

Do share your experiences!
Suggestion to Arc fans: do not do XML examples, as C# 3/VB 9 and LINQ to XML will leave you in the dust.
Software should be copyrighted, but not patented.

So physical stuff like valves can be patented, but not software? That seems arbitrary. After all, it's usually the design of the valve that contains the invention. What difference does it make if you print one out? If you mean "nothing should be patented," just say that. One could make a case for that argument. But there's nothing special about software.

How did we end up in this mess?

What evidence do you have that we're in a mess? Have you ever been prevented from doing something you wanted to because of patents?

The fact is, for all the noise people make about them, software patents just don't matter much. Large companies accumulate patent portfolios to protect themselves against patent suits. Startups file for them because investors and acquirers are impressed by them. But they don't decide which startups win.
Nothing in Biology Makes Sense Except in the Light of Evolution
In our case Google AdWords, online directories and SEO helped a lot. But the most valuable reference marketing was a lot of friends who are active in forums and chat rooms and can recommend your site in a proper context.