skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Do NOT click this link if you ever want to be productive again
muhahahahahah!!! ... sniff... sob
Muhahahahah! ... sniff ... sob
Apparently, I should have been more sensitive to the way people would interpret this challenge and picked my words differently.

A few other languages, including Scala and Stackless Python, have lightweight concurrency capabilities. AFAIK those languages do allow you to spawn millions of processes (or actors), but they don't handle garbage collection, scheduling, IO, distributed programming and native code interfacing as well as Erlang does.
FriendFeed: I Think I Get It Now
Gotta love the end: "Several lines of timeouts mean the packets are being held up, clogged or lost somewhere along the way. Blame the terrorist group or national intelligence organization of your choice." :)

Test results:

www.president.ir loads fine in my browser, but I tried:
"traceroute www.president.ir"
5 times, and I ended up with timeouts from the 23rd to the 30th hop. Close to the destination (destination's IP = 80.191.69.11), but not quite reaching it...
I just set up a new linode, This is like 30usd a month for 512Mg ram / 300G BW, support rocks as its via irc and other users, and you have total control over the setup, plus it supports rails although I use LAMP. But its great having the control and worth learning how to set up the server as you like. I also use vitrualmin to as a control panel, makes very elegant sys.
I didn't vote anyone down, because I don't want to hog this whole thread, and some cool places turned up that I personally wouldn't consider but might be great for others (Madison sounds nice), but I think he's referring to the fact that Columbus is 1) bigger than the listed target size, 2) doesn't have a good climate, 3) is flatter than a pancake, and 4) according to him at least (I wouldn't have a clue) isn't really that great for startups/hackers anyway.

Truth be told, I think my idea of 'topography' is different than a lot of people's. This is topography:

http://www.welton.it/photos/innsbruck/innsbruck_panorama.htm...

While I'm fine with places not quite that dramatic - Padova only has some low-lying hills (5-600 M) nearby - I'd go crazy without some nice places to go biking/hiking.
Ask YC: good Internet Marketing forums?
Does anyone here go to any forums with internet marketers? I'm about to sign up for Yahoo and MS ads and I want to make sure I sign up for the most free money. And I want to lurk and see what the bleeding edge of buying ads on the internet looks like.
That's the cheapest 512 meg VPS I've seen... I might switch instead of upgrading my VPS on slicehost
that was so lame. olivia munn is no top caliber talent either. where did they dredge this up? are only the good writers on strike? how do i sign up to get contracts for producing these turds?
http://jobs.alleyinsider.com/

I bet programming pays more though.
digitalpoint.com is mostly good enough... it at least got me a free $50 for MS ads when I spend $5.
Twitter-proxy: Any Interest?
In terms of development, maybe it's not better than what you have on the desktop. If you're really productive in your environment (terminal + vim OR IDE), then it definitely doesn't make sense to develop on their JS editor.

But in terms of hosting, it's a lot cheaper to host your Rails app using Heroku than getting a VPS. Both money-wise and time-wise.

I only listened a few minutes into the podcast, but I think one of the founders mentioned that at its current state Heroku is great for people who want to make apps for their friends, like 1-20 people. But these developers don't want to buy a VPS plan and manage the application themselves.

Their future goal is probably to get hosting for apps with 1000+ users, so they can make some money.

But you're right, for developing an app, I'll probably stick to the desktop. Maybe one day Heroku will get so slick that we can do all development straight from the browser and hit "Publish", like Weebly.
I wouldn't bet on it. Like tearing down hutongs, this is about presenting a clean shiny appearance while the rest of the world is watching.
" I also like the idea of an extensible grammar (and syntax too, right?)"

Yes, that's what I meant (you change the grammar, resulting in new syntax).

Some examples of what you can do with camlp4:

http://martin.jambon.free.fr/pa_memo.ml allows to define memoized functions very conveniently:

(* normal *)
let fib = function 0 | 1 -> 1 | n -> fib (n-1) + fib (n-2)
(* memoized *)
let fib = memo 0 | 1 -> 1 | n -> fib (n-1) + fib (n-2)

Automatic generation of

* typed JSON marshallers (http://martin.jambon.free.fr/json-static.html)

type json mytype = Foo | Bar of int * int
(* just add "json" to the type declaration to create to
create the json_of_mytype and mytype_of_json functions *)

* serialization with S-expressions (http://www.janestcapital.com/ocaml/)

* pretty-printing, type-safe marshalling with structure-sharing, dynamic typing, equality... (http://code.google.com/p/deriving/)

* list comprehensions, heredocs, string interpolation, lazy pattern matching, "do syntax" for monads (very much like Haskell's)...

Here's some OCaml code that relies on a rather large syntax extension of mine which allows you to generate (or verify) SQL schemas automatically and build composable queries using a typed relational algebra (the type system ensures that all queries are valid; if you change the schema and break some queries, the compiler will tell you what's wrong --- broken queries just don't compile):

TABLE user users
COLUMN id SERIAL AUTO PRIMARY KEY
COLUMN name VARCHAR(64) UNIQUE
COLUMN age INT NULLABLE INDEXED
COLUMN password VARCHAR(64)
END

TABLE comment comments
COLUMN id SERIAL AUTO PRIMARY KEY
COLUMN title TEXT
COLUMN text TEXT
COLUMN created_at TIMESTAMPZ
COLUMN author SERIAL FOREIGN(users, id)
END

let minors x = SELECT [User_age < (Some 18)] x
let pauls = SELECT [User_name LIKE "%Paul%"] users
let young_pauls = minors pauls

You can read more about this extension at http://eigenclass.org/hiki/typed-relational-algebra-in-OCaml
Already a verb (or at least a gerund):

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=greenspunning
Yes, good clarification, though I would say private messages instead of just contact info.

So, I propose two independent features that seem simple:

1. Private option on comments the receiver can turn off.

2. Weighting of points based on whether the moderator responded to the moderated comment. This requires a reflective pause in the person's action if they want it to have greater significance, reducing knee jerk moderation noise.
And it wouldn't work if there were more than one form or link on a page. Or if the user clicked the back-button.
I like the idea but it will just end up with tit for tat down modding. It would only work if the down modders idenity was hidden from the person.

I actually think you should get a point for commenting in the first place, this might get more people commenting and joining in.
Yeah, I see your point. pg probably uses a better weighting for submissions, and there usually aren't too many responses to read through.

I do see this weighting scheme being useful for the best comments list, or a meta list weighted entirely this way.
Dude, that's too impressive. Prolly the best looking Appjet app I've seen to date.
Interview with Michael Shiloh of OpenMoko
not really but a good read I never really thought about how many reads and writes there were. However I suspect that twitter profile pages and user pages do not hit the database much and most likely store the data for these pages as xml.
Microsoft's completion of Vista SP1 fails to excite users
Ask PG: Link to comments in RSS
Like many of you, I read Hacker News through an RSS reader. The Hacker News RSS only has title links, no preview or link to the comments page (unless the item has no URL, like this one). To go to the comments page, you have to navigate to news.ycombinator.com, find the item you want, and click on comments. PG: can you please add a link to the comments page from the body of each RSS item. Thanks!
The proxy is probably a good idea but I don't think the problem is as hard as it sounds, especially if you can relax the latency and/or message ordering requirements. If you build a hierarchy of queues and are smart about using reference counts you won't have nearly as many reads and writes as the article indicates.

Tibco and others have been doing this sort of thing for 20 years (only they call it Subject Based Addressing) for pretty demanding customers.
i thought the pearl was the hypothesizing of the twitter architecture. i mean, it's not really brand new and earth shattering, but i thought it was interesting.
I see links to comment pages for all items, so perhaps it's your RSS reader?

But it would be nice to see the submission text.
No. Unless the investor is someone who will be a strategic angel (great name to push for future funding). The amount does not seem anywhere near competitive.

Any joe out there can invest $2k, if he's even a slightly serious angel, he would put more in.

-Andrew
> It helps keep the framework of society together.

A joke, yes?
+1 :-)
I don't see links to comment pages for all items... using google reader
I just started working on a small app with my friend and it's nice to know that we at least did some of the right things from the start.

I always start my projects by closing my eyes and going through all the steps that a user will take before they are "into" the application. Ever since I started studying HCI I love to do this sort of meditation. Some people say "OM" I say "usability" :).

We haven't purchased outside sourcing, we're just using one of our own servers. I think we will before launching the beta.
Here's the proggit discussion of io:
http://reddit.com/r/programming/info/64mgk/comments
I agree! There's something really sinister about that Willie Wonka-land campus in CA..

brave new world..? can't put my finger on it, but it's a weird place!
I don't see links as well.
I'm using Google Reader.
ENN: Google to help green technologies amass scale
I brought this up a while ago here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35363

I was using Google Reader, and there was no comments link, but have since switched to NetNewsWire (OS X) where everything works correctly. It doesn't look like it'll change.
NYSIA Shuttering Startup Incubator
I used to use Intype on my windows box before I made the jump to Ubuntu. Now I use VIM and never looked back. Intype is definitely not bad imho.
Nice nice as far as PHP frameworks are concerned. The best I've seen are CodeIgniter and Symfony. I just recently launched a CodeIgniter app. It was a breeze!
Answer to human brain's evolution in a fingertip
Do the US elections trigger recessions?
DEMO 08 Conference: The Five Best Presentations (Video Clips)
I'm using Vienna (OS X) which as far as I can tell works perfectly for every one of the other 200+ feeds I subscribe to - but not for Hacker News. It looks like simply replacing the <comments> tag with a description tag containing (only) a hyperlink to the comments page would fix the problem. Many readers ignore the <comments> tag.
agreed, its a little shady, but there is some good info there
How to lose fans and (falsely) influence people
A while ago someone (sorry, forget the name) created an alternative feed which shows a link to the comment page: http://harumi.ath.cx/newsyc

Works fine with Google-Reader.
Boten Anna
Ok, so same question, different form.

Is anybody managing servers in-house?
When PStamatiou points out that you can have a cheap, low power PC for less than $200 (I'd make the majority of them diskless, for less than $150 now), what kind of break-even point is there? Has it been worth it to you to deal with hardware headaches for the $$? At that sort of price, You're paying amazon or linode or something to deal with the hardware problems, to have generators, etc.

What if I would host, on my in-house datacenter 1 other app, in exchange for having some other SysAdmin from YC host my app?

The DNS issues with using EC2 as a webhost were really (EC2 servers are not directly addressed) pretty unfamiliar to me before I wrote this parent post.

I think using in-house cheap processing and S3 for storage/major bandwidth isn't a bad idea at all. Any suggestions?
Don't Mix Right Startup With The Wrong Investors
Facing Free Software, Microsoft Looks to Yahoo
"Among this year’s worst news, for me, was the death of Bobby Fischer." - Dick Cavett
Maybe the lack of parallelism in OCaml's threads at the time he wrote that?

There are now at least two solutions to obtain speedups on multi-core and multi-processor machines plus scalability by allowing seamless distributed processing: the JoCaml extension, which integrates the join calculus (http://jocaml.inria.fr/), and coThreads (http://cothreads.sourceforge.net/), which comprises shared-memory (with extensions like STM) and message passing while keeping backwards-compatibility with the original Threads library.
I'm not sure I'd lump Objective-C in with C++ :/

C# and VB run an awful lot of Windows software, too.
Which century is this article from? It could easily have been written in 1957.

Fusion reactors are several steps up the plausibility ladder from perpetual-motion machines, but AFAIK the number that have actually produced a net energy surplus still stands at zero. Zero is a very bad number. If fusion were going to matter in my lifetime, you'd like to have seen one prototype that worked by this point. It's most likely going to take decades to go from a prototype to a reliable working unit, and even that process is not guaranteed to be a smashing success: working solar cells have been around for over a century, and in a modern form for over 50 years, and despite the decades of effort they're still a marginal component of our energy infrastructure.
Nokia turns people into traffic sensors
> Has it ever been easier?

Yes. I remember many years ago I wrote a web application for a swiss banks financial intelligence unit. It was only used by a handful of people and they wanted a really rich user experience, so I wrote -- in one day -- the complete application again as a fat client. It was simply better in every way. The main client said, "That's it! That's what we want!" The director of IT said, "That's a fat client. We can't have that in the bank." The web app was never terrible, but the fat client I made them was much better and easier to create.

Everyone here who is arguing that web applications are 100% as easy to produce as fat client applications are arguing out of ignorance.
The url looks like "LOL language"
Google Translation + Gmail help people communicate
NetNewsWire shows link to comments
Top 100 Facts About Paul Graham
I think Basshunter is great and all.

But what the hell is it doing on YC news?
Ask YC: Your Favorite RSS Feeds
Could you share some really good feeds you have with me? Science, technology, design, green technologies, and even stuff that completely out of all these categories.

What are your favorite RSS feeds that you read daily?

Here's some of mine:

* slashdot
* macrumors
* airfarwatchdog for my city
* steve dekorte
* del.icio.us/popular
* CSS remix
* FaveUP
* pain and glory in the IT world
* Coding Horror
101. Paul Graham was right that Microsoft is dead.
http://100factsabout.com/Stupid/Websites
Seriously, this is Brilliant. I've been wondering what would be a good protocol to aggregate "web 2.0" (which is what people need) and I think this is it. The only thing missing is a way to combine the different feeds together into a single application. Is snap recursive? I.e. you could feed feeds into a feed? Can snap become an FPL?

Now, the trick is to make the standard catch on. I wish you guys luck!
And I do still think an explanation for modding has merit. I know, it seems insecure to want an explanation for people's reactions. We macho geniuses are supposed to know it all and have perfect control of the room (especially if pg is around)...or at least we need to give that impression; and what better way to learn how than to get private feedback on hacker news?

Also, why are people modding the grandparent up?
Time for more Paul Graham facts!

Paul Graham's Kolmogorov complexity is Paul Graham + 1.

Paul Graham can search a list in O(-1).

You don't need Unicode because Paul Graham can be spelled in ASCII.
There are comment links in the rss feed. Some readers show them and some don't. If anyone can give me the exact syntax that would work in the latter, I'll try it.
By inserting the term 'journalistic', you're refuting an argument I didn't make. I know net neutrality is not about being able to say what you want about political issues -- it's about whether a network is owned by the people who built it or the people who create content on it -- and the content guys have convinced you that it's some kind of moral struggle.

Just reread the wiki article without reference to medium, and then explain to me why I should be allowed to purchase a pen and piece of paper, given that my ownership of a medium of communication would allow me to control what content is placed on that means of communication. It's a difference of degree, not kind.
That's an interesting idea.

News.YC does support sending arbitrary messages to other users. It's just only turned on for us and YC founders. I could turn it on for everyone. Would anyone want that?

The advantage/disadvantage of using messages is that they wouldn't be tied to a particular comment. There's also the disadvantage that everyone would invoke whatever that quote is about every system evolving till it adds messaging...
To tie a message to a comment the sender would include the link.
I'd wait till the next round you raise, and just include him in that. It's not just that £1000 is not worth the trouble. It would look lame to many potential future investors to have done a round that small.
Idea: wikiable applications, such as a forum
How not to write Python code
Regular Expressions Cheat Sheet
Simplifies to: Don't get the wrong investors.

Looks like the co in question was EC Cubed and the lead
investor was Battery:

http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0EIN/is_2000_April_11...
Yahoo is also experimenting with XMPP
Where do you see a delete button?
I think it's a great concept - the web and digital tools are making both distribution and production costs much cheaper. However, no one (well, not until now) has really been tackling the middlemen - producers, talent agencies, etc. that still cost way too much and create barriers to entry.

Professional networking and casting assistance (crews and actors) has a lot of potential for growth. Great work getting together something I've been thinking a lot about but haven't actually worked on yet :)
Microsoft's Colossal Strategic Mistake: "We Need to Be in Advertising"
Results 1 - 10 of about 153,000 for ruby install error. (0.23 seconds)

Results 1 - 10 of about 166,000 for python install error. (0.26 seconds)

Results 1 - 10 of about 264,000 for java install error. (0.22 seconds)

Results 1 - 10 of about 145,000 for gcc install error. (0.25 seconds)

This metric seems flawed.
Getting a .ca Domain is Bureaucratic, Baby
DRM - in a nutshell
Major Apple event rumoured
The privacy implications and “unintended consequences” of participating in Facebook are shocking.
Yahoo Board To Reject Microsoft Offer
You know, that would actually be an amusing hardware-hacking project.

If you made a keyboard that had every character in every language spoken in the EU, you could even file to make it a standard with whatever earnest standards body is in charge of such things. No linguistic minority should have to use control keys! It would be like giving peanut butter to a dog.
I hope this definitively kills Micro$oft.
I very highly doubt that.
Yeah thats not exactly possible. I do wonder, however, what this effectively does to Yahoo's stock price.
doubts can be dangerous :)
see for yourself

http://finance.google.com/finance?q=yahoo
Heh, Google's stocks are moving http://finance.google.com/finance?q=NASDAQ:GOOG
"the $31 per share offer "massively undervalues" Yahoo,"

Now I'm no mathematician, but when microsoft made that offer, I believe their stock closed at 19.10, which I believe is significantly less than $31. The mere offer from microsoft caused their value to jump 50% in a day. Monday might be ugly for YHOO owners.
This is normal in a a takeover situation.

The reason being that a company that you control is worth a lot more than a bunch of shares that pay you dividend, but offer you little or no control over the company.

The pundits know this and drive up the price, expecting to make a profit when Microsoft buys them out.
Yahoo stock is trading around $29 a share, yet Yahoo's board say that Microsoft's offer of $31 a share "massively undervalues" the company?
I got several letters from the "Domain Registry of Canada" and the unsolicited offers, coupled with the incredibly high price of the offers, coupled with the wording used (that sounded like I HAD to deal with them, and fast) made me conclude that it was a clumsy scam.

I'm shocked to discover they supposedly have some kind of legitimity...
DIY Short Range Personal Radar: $30
Yahoo's board rebuffs Microsoft
Well even though this is a normal takeover situation. The price Yahoo is going to be asking will most likely be above 60 Billion. I think that might be too much gable for MS. I am sure Microsoft made the offer with levy for a much higher demanding offer. The question is how much levy.
MIT Class - Building Mobile Applications with Android
The course page: http://people.csail.mit.edu/hal/hack-android/
I think the pain with Rails right now is hosting for hobbyists.

For businesses, there's hosting pain, too. Rails is certainly easy to set up on a server, but then you... have a server. Complete with the hardware, scaling and security pain that comes along with it.
Just a heads up: Ghosts in the Machine is used in the header, but the end of the video reads Ghost in the Machine. No 's'. Not sure which version you were going for, but you might want to read through and double check all that.
Innovative Lisp
Ask YC:  Get paid to read your email?  Your attention is worth something right?
The idea is not to get rid of traditional spam (spam filters already work well), but rather, to have an auction for your attention from email senders just as there is an auction for your attention from advertisers.
What this stock price says to me is that investors are betting that this story, even if it's correct, is not the last word, and that Microsoft (or someone) will eventually get them.
Just imagine all those Yahoo services ported to Silverlight. I think it would be very impressive actually.
venturebeat * nytimes * slashdot * technologyreview * ft * gigaom * techcrunch * robots.net
They're lesser idiots than the people who bought it.
Strictly speaking, Pitman is wrong. The technical innovations he describes came with Lisp Machine Lisp and ZetaLisp. But if you consider all three as a sort of family, then he's right: there was a lot of new stuff in CL. The problem was, a lot of it was bad, or at least done in a kludgy way.
I agree that buying Yahoo probably wouldn't work out as Microsoft hopes. The interesting thing to me is that their mistake here derives from their "evil" nature.

Microsoft looks at Google and thinks: "These guys are a threat, so we have to get into their business. Google's business is advertising, so we have to get better at that." But the source of Google's power is not what they deliver to advertisers; it's what they deliver to users. Advertising is just how they monetize it. But because treating users well is so alien to Microsoft, they can't grasp something like that.
Unit testing isn't a bad idea, but it's not an incredibly prolific one either. Maybe I haven't gotten the proper intro to testing, but what I've seen (mainly in rails blog articles) is a joke. If I'm going to test a function I want to test the entire domain of inputs -- assertEquals(square(2) , 4) is totally useless.

I'd be happy to have someone show me an example of a useful rails-related test.