skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"have you failed? No. You wanted to show us your favorite line of Ruby code, and you did."

Actually, I wanted to discuss how Ruby's open classes promote language innovation from the fringe, not to try to impress you with how clever that line of code is.

"The next time you show a feature of a langauge, maybe make it solve a problem, or create something real, rather than just showing how few characters it takes to do something banal."

And there you have why my article failed you: you think it is about how useful that line of code is, or how clever it is, or what problem it solves, when I think it is an example of how Ruby is different from centrally planned language.

Is it great code? Of course not. Symbol#to_proc may even be an evolutionary dead end, AFAICT it's just a way to make OO code pretend that it's functional code.

Your criticisms point out that I need to work harder on establishing and communicating my theses, thank you.
A Tribute to Findory
Yang breaks silence on Microsoft takeover
This got me thinking. Can a clever digital barter system make money obsolete? Did anyone try it?
Wasn't k the only language that solved the sudoku problem in under 100 characters?
It's not a position to evangelize Flash. The idea is to convince people that publishing their documents in Flash using iPaper is better than PDF, etc. Their new platform has some nice features, but unfortunately I'm not in the business of publishing documents.
"Supply side economies of scale" - Google must enjoy extraordinarily low costs per hardware, given the sheer amounts they keep. Based on their volume, their discounts must be at least around 90%. I wouldn't call that a "reasonably small scale".

"Lock-in" / "Network effects" - I would argue that both come into play by the sheer fact that almost all web sites are being optimized towards the way Google's algorithms (are supposed to) work.
The Brash Programmers at 37signals Will Tell You: Keep It Simple, Stupid
Hollywood and the Internet
I'd apply for this job if it wouldn't feel like betraying my friend who is trying to compete. Congrats, though!
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/uibook/fog0000000249.html

It's a book, too. But it is in pre-book form.
I'd consider this if I didn't have another 10 months of college.
"At the time of its release in December of 2005, a single chip, eight core, 32-thread, 1.2 GHz UltraSPARC T1 server performed similarly to a two-socket, four-core, eight-thread, 1.9 GHz IBM POWER5 server, performed similarly to a four socket, eight-core, sixteen-thread 3.0 GHz Intel Xeon "Paxville MP" server, and exceeded the performance of a four socket, four-core, four-thead 1.6 GHz Intel Itanium server. Arguably, this made the UltraSPARC T1 the world's most powerful general-purpose commercial server processors, when considering multithreaded commercial workloads. ... One customer has published results showing that a MySQL application running on an UltraSPARC T1 server ran 13.5 times faster than on an AMD Opteron server." -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UltraSPARC_T1

In October 2007, the T2 made significant improvements ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UltraSPARC_T2 ) - most notably a 10-fold improvement in floating-point throughput.
This article is completely missing the point of what makes Google successful. It might have been having a better product that helped them at first, but right now the single most important factor keeping people coming back to Google is: habit.

Everyone is used to going to Google to search. Heck, you often hear people use the word google instead of search. This habit is hard to break. Switching to the competitor is not just a few keystrokes away. It takes breaking the habit of reaching for Google whenever I need to search.

It takes more than a slightly better product for folks to break this kind of habit. It's the same reason why Google has trouble competing with established search engines in other countries, even if Google has better results.

When Google came out it was a LOT better than everyone else, so people switched. Now the competitors are barely catching up to Google, or at best making incremental advances over Google: not enough to get people to switch.
I want to work at every YCombinator startup at once! It's not fair!
"If the things you would spend your money on are part of the very system of wealth you contribute to, then you don't need money."

Better to talk about currency than money. You are right, its place is where what you want to consume and what you (want to) produce are different goods. I don't see why the web would change that basic principle. You may contribute your expertise to Hacker News, an open source project and a couple of Wikipedia pages. But surely you don't want to consume only your own products. But maybe the producers of your desired "goods" (whether purely informational bits and bytes or real physical apples or oranges) derive no direct benefit from your aforementioned products. You will necessarily arrive at some medium, whether you call it credits or miles or dollars.
Why graduate? You'll learn far more in 10 months at a real job than you will in 10 months at school, if you're working at a decent place.
'Google has been searching the web for nearly 10 years, which is far longer than our major competitors.'

As far as I know Yahoo has been around for just as long as Google. Cool article though.

Side note: I think it's cool that both Google and Yahoo came out of projects started by Stanford students.
Yeah, people tried and try it all the time. Then they arrive at some imaginary medium/currency other than "money". Only, if it's a medium for exchanging goods or services, it ends up being money no matter what it is called. And if you try to get rid of a medium altogether (one-to-one bartering), you end up with a vastly less attractive market exchange.
I think that I would hire a proper evangelical preacher. That would be ballin.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PPxPciXcJvc
I think this is a bug: different users can keep voting down the author of a deleted post by visiting this URL for that post, where "username" is your name, even though the post no longer appears.

http://news.ycombinator.com/vote?by=username&for=123462&...

I wonder if you can submit a link to YCombinator that simply loads 100 images when viewed, where the source of the image is that url, repeated for each of the members on the leaderboard. This would trigger an unintentional downvote for that post number if a user on the leaderboard visits it. Or maybe it could be a flash, ajax, or dynamic html script that constantly visits all the variations of the URL to account for 100 leaders matched up with posts of a certain user or all the post ids that are stories on the main page, for example.

Has anyone ever tested this or viewed the source code of this site?
How insecure routing redirected YouTube to Pakistan
http://10-reasons-to-do-whatever.blogspot.com/
We've got one article ( http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=123263 ) in which memory controllers are being brought on-die to increase speed. We got another article ( http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=123158 ) which describes adding another tier of memory controllers to increase throughput.

The latter could be hard to design if you were retro-fitting a tree of pipelined memory controllers and you were concerned about interoperability. However article makes it look like an attempt to bodge extra address lines.
"people are still worried about connection charges"

Don't count on that for too long. Over here, the web didn't take off on a massive scale with broadband, but with the introduction of flat rate subscriptions. Mobile web flatrates are a reality already. Next, carriers might compete on price for their flat rates. At some point, connections charges might become a non-issue.
Thank you, exactly!!!
A more in-depth look at the same stuff:

http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=Cluster+Computin...
I turn 25 in exactly one month on the 25th. So confusing. And I have 25 kids but I don't know where they are.
The case of the 500-mile email
The article also failed to mention Branding (which is related to our habits). If you aren't using _Google_, you're using some other "crappy" search engine.
For those who think the above is pretty tame and have been using it for years, we've got a series on our blog where we introduce and discuss a new method every day.

http://blog.rubyenrails.nl/articles/category/daily_method

Here we create a to_proc method for Hash:
http://blog.rubyenrails.nl/articles/2008/02/26/a-hash-is-a-f...
Getting the public to pay attention to good science
That would be hard, actually-- at least without resorting to formatting tricks.

I spent about 10 days cleaning up the code. By the time I released it, I was only cutting about 30 lines a day. And that kind of work has rapidly diminishing returns. I'd have a hard time getting it under 1400.
Breaking: Diebold Accidentally Leaks Results Of 2008 Election Early
Larry Lessig: On why I am not running
Michael J. Ross reviews "Practical PHP Web 2.0 Applications"
UltraSPARCs are rather specialised for general purpose processors - one could make the arguments that GPUs, which massively outperform x86 CPUs several times over in terms of FP performance, were faster even than SPARC, but it's very much a different beast.

Also I haven't looked this up but isn't UltraSPARC much more costly?

Basically: Apples and Oranges etc.
Great book on the subject:

http://www.amazon.com/How-Body-Shapes-Way-Think/dp/026216239...

How the Body Shapes the Way We Think: A New View of Intelligence

by Rolf Pfeifer, Josh C. Bongard
He didn't exactly "break the silence". His answer was a long-winded version of "no comment".
This is pretty much it.
I think it's more about extra chip selects and reducing bus loading. AFAIK, standard DDR2 memory controllers only support so many ranks on the bus, so MetaRAM introduced some muxing to make four or eight ranks look like two. It's a clever hack.
The mystery of “ambition” and how it correlates with success
No. But it is the answer to this question:

http://www.amazon.com/Ultimate-Secret-Getting-Absolutely-Eve...

One of the best lessons of my life. (And apparently Andy Grove's, too.)
I am aware of Niagara, and I am skeptical that it will beat Nehalem. Certainly a Nehalem system will beat a Niagara 2 system in most benchmarks for performance and price.
Or if you are on windows, also:

http://www.christopherlewis.com/WGet/WGetFiles.htm

With the latest version here: http://www.christopherlewis.com/WGet/wget-1.11b.zip
Secondly, the output of the hash is essentially random. This conflicts with InnoDB's preference to store rows in primary key order.

I don't know what kind of lock granularity InnoDB supports but if there are times when you actually want this behavior in order to reduce lock contention.
Spammers crack Gmail Captcha
Parable of the Shoe Salesman - Capitalism rewards wealth owners, not creators
Physicists: Database admin as philosopher manque
This article was inspired by links I found in the Hacker News. So I thought I'd submit it.
Actually I started using flex for a custom project at work, to talk to a server in C++. Makes life extremely easy (if you have the eclipse flex builder plugin). Extremely well designed and the dev tools are fine too. Theyve put a lot of thought into it. Documentation is pretty uptodate with lots of samples online. The lack of a "wait" got me a bit scared at first but very easy to get used to.
Elegant.

So how do you break out of these things?

I'd think the best way is to recognize that these "prevailing paradigms" are just models for the world that only have some degree of applicability.

If you want to create the next paradigm shift, you need to figure out where the current paradigm breaks down. Look for the rough edges: the places where the solution doesn't quite fit the problem contour.
I was talking about the fact that they are making that change on the core language. Providing the flexibility is different from putting it in the language.

Anyways, I don't really care, saying anything other than 'I love ruby' is shunned anyways.
Postgres ( http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=109387 ) and MySQL ( http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=118791 ) would both run faster if they didn't avoid patented methods.
patents are fine for some industries but for software they do more harm than good.
I tried three diff songs, it failed on all of them. It even failed on "Happy Birthday..."
I use iGTD (a great GTD-style application for the Mac) to manage most of my life. For real dev tasks I use Jira, everything else goes into iGTD: Phone calls I have to make (call mom, return recruiters message), errands I need to run (pickup dry cleaning, drop off library books), work tasks (write arch doc for phase 5, review code for project X), personal projects, home tasks (run laundry, spent an hour reading a book and drinking tea), etc... Being able to switch between viewing tasks by project and by context is a HUGE win for me, and having a single repository for my tasks, with easy hot key input from any application is great.

My stress level has gotten so much lower since I started using iGTD.
Google fires up this year’s Summer of Code
don't even think about it. Go to college. 10 months is nothing.
Why isn't this listed under the jobs section of News.YC also?
Network Solutions, ICANN Sued Over Domain Front Running
http://www.risk-services.com/Second_Edition_Conrow_Book.jpg

:-)
and you won't have that piece of paper. sucks. it's still important -- maybe some people can get by without it, but not every one can, and a lot of people are worse off for not getting it. besides, working at a startup and graduating from college are not mutually exclusive -- get a little creative and you can do both at the same time.
I'm really not that smart and I'm doing just fine without it. The only people that wouldn't hire me are people I don't care to work for in the first place.
Speed up your Linux System with Preload
I think the joy would be in selling failed freebie business models =) ~still misses Kozmo.com~
If the tech industry had a race bias ( http://whydoeseverythingsuck.com/2008/02/race-and-technology... ), would this create a bias in facial recognition startups and would this create a bias in facial recognition software?
Regex Woes
"It's not about websites"

I only mentioned websites to be fair to Perl.

"CPAN is the key to Perl. Lots and lots of code that Just Works."

The problem with CPAN is that a lot of times the stuff on there only just works with certain platforms. Besides, with Google, the advantage of having a CPAN is neutralized.
Interesting. Thanks.
I subscribe to the series and enjoy it. I hadn't seen Hash#to_proc, I look forward to considering the possibilities carefully...
I would like to know if words sufficiently similar sounding to "GO" and "STOP" evoke the same impulse in the circuitry to accordingly output the voltage. I'm guessing that they will if the signals are sufficiently similar.

There is a difference between symbol and signal; as impressive as this story is, it is important to make this distinction because the article seemed to imply processing on the symbol/semantic level as opposed to the signal level (which I am assuming is the dominant modality of interpreting the words "stop" and "go"); there were also hints of awareness as in:

"It appears that evolution made use of some physical property of these cells—possibly a capacitive effect or electromagnetic inductance—to influence a signal passing nearby. Somehow, it seized on this subtle effect and incorporated it into the solution."

As an example of the difference of symbol/signal, a chimpanzee can be trained to obey traffic lights according to what they represent. The chimp will no doubt have the capacity to do what the lights command, but what would it do if it saw a red light while in the middle of an intersection? Would it be able to separate the symbology of "don't stop within the intersection" with the signal of "stop now" and end up either inside the intersection or directly after the intersection obediently waiting for another light to show up within its field of vision to tell it to continue?

The fact that he's used the process to create controllers for robots does not mean, to me at least, that there is the beginning of awareness forming at this stage; the controllers are more likely computed as opposed to rationalized; I suppose you could say that genetic algorithms are a form of rationalization, but feel free to show me how this is the case.

This is nonetheless an amazing break through in that we have what looks to be an "emergent entity" that responds to commands and the creator is baffled about how this happened. I'm hesitant to use the word "evolved entity" at this point because I don't see an imperative drive for survival for the sake of survival in the same way members of the five kingdoms display. I think the distinction is relevant given the nature of what has emerged and how it emerged (through genetic programming which uses the concept of evolution as a schema to describe the process accurately).
Couldn't get Smoke on the Water? Psh...
Get it done. It becomes an increasingly important signal to anyone you're working with/for and anyone you date.
Apparently not "Row, row, row your boat" though.
From the comments: "Oh I'm thinking about getting into web design. There's lots of money in it and I have this program called coverpage or something which makes it really simple, I wont need to do anything."

What's worrying is that he could become professional. The ability to read HTML is becoming less significant.
300-mph train would whisk travelers from Vegas to Disneyland
Besides the lack of the details (it just doesn't make any sense to fire your top salesman), I just find the article's conclusion to be stupid: "capitalism sucks (... the gov should regulate even more)"

Correct me if I'm wrong, but a real life example of the "shoe salesman" is Ross Perot.

"He soon had the highest sales in the company and hence received the highest commission. Then in 1961, IBM executives decided to set limits on how much commission a sales person could receive each year. It did not take even three weeks for Perot to reach his yearly maximum, which caused him great frustration. Additionally, Perot had some new business concepts that he wanted IBM to implement. IBM management was extremely resistant to trying his new ideas. Frustration related to the cap on his commission and the insult of deciding not to implement his business ideas, resulted in Perot leaving IBM in 1962 to start his own company. His company, Electronic Data Systems (EDS), was based on the very ideas that IBM rejected."

Don't get me wrong, capitalism is not perfect; but it does favor creativity, risk taking, and persistence (in the face of adversity).
This sounds like the perfect application for a technology that really needs a pilot project here in the U.S.
[SF] Scribd is Seeking an Evangelist
Scribd is seeking a motivated individual to encourage adoption of iPaper and the Scribd Platform. Requirements are great interpersonal skills, a good understanding of Web 2.0 and the current Internet landscape, and enthusiasm for Scribd's product. Hacking skills are optional. Job is a full-time position in Scribd's San Francisco offices. Scribd offers competitive salaries, health benefits, and generous stock options. Please send resumes to trip@scribd.com.
It got "Hey Jude". At least, that was the 2nd of the possibilities it mentioned.

I think that's kind of amazing.
> It also commits you towards a product/strategy direction when it may be better to not file, and stay flexible.

No, it doesn't. Filing a patent application doesn't obligate you to practice it.

Trademarks are use it or lose it.
bloggified now:

http://thoughtfolder.com/2008-02-25-a-detailed-explanation-o...
Once again Google plays down the significance of the PageRank patent. Is search amongst the giants really as similar as he says here? I know that Google has had to do a lot of tricks to avoid gaming of PageRank, but isn't PageRank still the core?
this is sarcasm I suppose?
Good to know, I'll put it on my to-watch list.

And you're definitely right: animated/CGed media is no longer "kids media". I think it's kind of paralleling a similar trend in comics/graphic novels no longer being "kids stuff."
While 10-15% was generous, 5% is "worth it". However, "worth it" isn't the relevant standard - the claim was "can make you highly productive". 10-15% isn't a "highly productive" difference.
That seems sensible, I'll keep that in mind in the future, myself, to avoid unnecessary down-modding. Thanks.
email, delicious, google reader, working off to do lists with igoogle. on breaks i watch videos on youtube, hulu, chat on meebo, and browse facebook occaisionally.

off-line i mostly read newspapers and books...patiently waiting until kindle comes back in stock
Okay, that makes sense. There is a LOT of noise on some of those news/link aggragator sites and I can definitely appreciate the urge to try and keep News.YC on a higher level.

Thanks for filling in a newbie. :-)
" Pixar movie lover (in my opinion the best story so far)"

After looking up what movies Pixar has done, I'll definitely check this one out. I remember quite liking the few I've seen.

Thanks for the recommendation!
Good to know. I'll look into those.

Thanks!
Why isn't University free?
Keeping it simple is actually quite hard. As an engineer, almost every impulse of mine is to add more, more, more! I'm designing a consumer electronic device and the trick is to make it look simple to the user by making it quite complex inside.
There can also be another morale: always be a owner.
I completely agree. The common wisdom is that modern passenger rail would fail in America. Really, I think that it can be a huge success, but only in local links.

Recent discussion in my area (Eastern Washington state) has broached the idea of a fast light rail service among the Spokane/Coeur D'alene area (tech center of E. Wa.) down to the Tri-Cities (which have a DoE National Lab and the Hanford Nuclear site) and the Moscow/Pullman access which has two big state universities (WSU and UI). Those kinds of local links can work and be a great thing for economic and intellectual interchange, I think. Trans-continental railways probably aren't the best solution for cross-country travel anymore, but locally I think they're the way to go.

Just look at the UK: light rail is a huge boon for commuters going to and from the London orbital.

Then again, IANARE (I Am Not A Railroad Engineer).
Yahoo’s Yang Finally Breaks Silence on the Microsoft Takeover
"saying anything other than 'I love ruby' is shunned anyways."

Well... I welcome criticism of Ruby. Please say whatever you like in a comment right on the post.

I've never shied away from writing about the things in Ruby that irritate me. How else will we progress if we don't scratch when we have an itch?
Forget global warming: Welcome to the new Ice Age
I'm at exactly 1337 LOC! (1091 without CSS)

http://source.vortices.appjet.net/
That's hilarious! One thinks of a lot of possible hangups with email (delivery delays, spam filter false alarms, etc.) but rarely maximum range.
I was reading a forum post a few weeks ago that referred to the decocker on a certain model of handgun. It was, of course, helpfully filtered to become the "deer".
I actually didn't see it yet... I've missed a couple opportunities randomly, maybe I'll get there this weekend.

Not having seen it, I have predecided that I will like There Will Be Blood more. But we'll see.
distellamap
"The patent office is doing a horrible job at determining which patents to grant."

This could also be because, as Charles Duell, the head of the Patent Office pointed out at the end of the 19th century, "Everything that can be invented has been invented."

...

Okay, so the internet is now telling my that that's probably apocryphal, (http://www.quotationspage.com/quote/22779.html)but it still makes for an amusing quote. And I'm not one to let reality get in the way of humor. :-P
Physics and finance is more profitable ( http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/print/1294 ).