skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Does anyone remember...?
What the site is called that lets you listen to two songs, then rate which one is better? I'm sure there's more than one, but any help is appreciate.
Another example of why keeping a personal diary or log is a great thing.
I think defining things as "true" and "false" is just as shackling though. You end up generalizing something that shouldn't be reduced to Boolean logic. You can't understand Wikipedia by looking at its bytecode, just as you can't understand a human by reading their genome. They're more than the sum of their parts.
RKelly: Call Javascript from Ruby
How is building something people can use (or possibly misuse) the same as remaining neutral?
That which lasts is self-correcting.
Tracing the Evolution of Social Software
It would be so ironic if it happened to Steve Ballmer.

Karma served piping hot it would be.
Public transit made easy
Talking ..... ~160 bits/second
Did you make this site? If I were the creator, I would not show it to strangers until I seeded it personally with 100 or so tracks. Nobody likes an empty party.

EDIT: typo: "current for forever" => "current form forever"
Python Gets Security Plaudit
Lucene: The right tool for the slob
Argentina defaulting can hardly be compared to the US defaulting. I am no economist, but I doubt the US economy would ever be the same if it suddenly decided not to repay any of its foreign debt.

Argentina's GDP today is about 1/60 that of the US, and it is hardly a huge player internationally. When they defaulted, 93 billion 2001 US dollars were lost by its creditors. The United States foreign debt (omitting Medicare+Social Security obligations and, unfairly, the more direct debt to its public) is 4000 billion 2007 US dollars.

That's a monumental difference, and not paying it back would be a historic violation of trust bordering on an act of war. Argentina _did_ get in a lot of trouble for its decision to default, and it doesn't seem very likely that the world would forgive a similar, but 30 times larger, transgression from the US. It is not an option. If anything like that happened, it would be indirectly (such as being caused by a dollar crash)
Monty Python REST joke
Your Web Startup Is A Basket Of Fail
Sounds like grad school.
Play Chess with God
That has always sounded like anecdotal evidence to me. Reading on a monitor should in that case be like reading paper in very good light, although with lower resolution. What is the qualitative difference between emitted light and reflected light?
On Asking Questions
Emacs comes with a built in emacs aptitude test...
That's very keen observation indeed!
You might have a hard time getting orchestras to donate their work. Who knows, though.

At any rate, once the recordings from the 1950s go into public domain, almost the whole body of classical work will be available.
Dvorak: The Sun-MySQL deal stinks of Larry Ellison
Rules of thumb
FreeBSD 6.3-RELEASE is now available
Thanks guy for your comments. Helpful and interesting.

I found a piece about backup, that is a must read:
http://www.jwz.org/doc/backups.html

I especially like this one:
""
Put one of these drives in its enclosure on your desk. Name it something clever like "Backup". If you are using a Mac, the command you use to back up is this:

sudo rsync -vaxE --delete --ignore-errors / /Volumes/Backup/

If you're using Linux, it's something a lot like that. If you're using Windows, go fuck yourself.
""

Maybe this is a good end for this thread ;o)
What happened this morning?
N.Dakota judge: 'host -l' constitues hacking.
Tables Vs DIVs
Hacking Perl in Latin | Lingua::Romana::Perligata --
After hours of "Takedown", I find myself a hazard on the road.

At least there is this tiny impulse to swerve right into the smug moron in BMW and see him fly off the 520 bridge into freezing waters. SPLASH
Soulja Boy Tell 'Em.
D is a great "systems language", but Walter is marketing it wrong: he should have catered to influential and growing community of C/Linux devs, as opposed to dying breed of corporate drones who do C++/Windows. I have been one of those drones myself, and they aren't interested: they're moving to C#/.NET. DigitalMars does not even have a typical Linux-friendly download, instead there is a zip with mixed bag of Win/Linux binaries, WTF?

The name sucks too: it's not search engine friendly, try googling for "exceptions in D" for instance.

Sorry for the rant. I just want D to succeed.
You're absolutely correct here. Wouldn't most users consider the fact that it ignores database research and history a feature of MapReduce?
> He stood up to the government coz of what he believed in.

Yeah, what he believed was that the Holocaust didn't happen, and that Jews are filthy and evil and controlling the government and everything else. Glad he stood up for what he believed in.
Brain Chemical that reduces sleep
It's certainly a step up from C++ or Java. Notably, it has anonymous functions and lexical closures. I'm not a big fan of static typing though, especially with explicit type declarations, but I'd certainly like to see D replace C++.

If speed is a concern, everybody's favorite language benchmark[0] shows D being about 20% slower than GCC. Within 100% of GCC are implementations of ML, Ocaml, Haskell, Common Lisp and Scala.

So what should you use if you want speed with your power? My first recommendation would be a good profiler.

[0] http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/gp4/benchmark.php?test=all...
Startup Lessons Learned from Feedjit Founder
After years of Visual Studio I forced myself to learn vim and it wasn't so hard. By "learned" I mean crossing a line where my productivity is on par or better than Visual Studio used to be.

Emacs, however, is nowhere as easy. I am trying to repeat my vim experience by forcing myself to use emacs (part of my CL adventure) and I feel like I need a third hand to hold Ctrl or Alt all the time... Even vim-style navigation without arrows calls for constantly pressed Ctrl.

Not trying to start a war, just sharing my experience. After all it was other peoples "vim tales" that inspired me in the first place.
Thanks for having a look :) If you're an an ameter orchestra, or even most professional orchestras then all of your money is made from people coming to your concerts. Thus - if you had a way of getting free publicity by getting your name out there (and sharing the music you and your fans are passionate about) you'd be irrational not to.
I suppose reflected light matches better with the ambient, while with emitted light this is difficult to get. Matchng both, brightness and color.

Also, I don't like to read on white background (neither screen or paper), and on the computer nowadays the more usual background is white... I like yellowish backgrounds.
Amazon Looks to Crowd to Find Next Bestseller
Would You Take a Tumblr With This Man?
Which notebook to get: MacBook, MacBook Air, MacBook Pro?
Ask YC: Why is YC's layout table based?
I'm a big fan of HTML, and I really don't understand why Hacker news is using tables instead of lists.
Lists make a lot more sense than tables in this case, also the CSS will be easier to modify.
You got it wrong: LCDs, due to their incredible sharpness, created a need for antialiased fonts. Predating CRTs with their universal slight blurriness didn't need it, it was kind of "built into the hardware".
No, he had to be in exile in the first place because the played "The Soviets" when the bearucrats prohibited it.
In the interest of full disclosure, one could reference

http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Bobby_Fischer

All I kept thinking as I read through this was, "How could someone so brilliant say things so hateful and illogical?"

I don't know. There are probably many theories (mental illness jumps out as one possibility).

As far as Bobby Fischer is concerned, his downfall and later public pronouncements were tragic, but not as tragic as the loss of a human life. May he rest in peace.
No. He played A soviet in a Serbia in violation of an embargo.

If you're going to argue that embargos are wrong, please start with the one against South Africa under apartheid.
However ridiculous it might be that Apache isn't using Lucene to run their own search (and I'm not sure it's nearly as bad as this author does), Lucene remains a useful project that's deployed in several very high volume web applications, and probably a whole lot more less prominent ones. It may not always be the right tool for the job, and it is probably frequently abused, but you can't blame the hammer if the user decides to hit his nail with a rock.
First tech hiring freeze due to mortgage mess
Chess and the Art of Term Sheet Negotiation
Huh? You can't do subpixel rendering on a CRT, so it would have been impossible to implement before LCDs.

Normal antialiasing has existed since long before LCDs.
Brilliant people seem to go crazy kinda often.
Time-Warner's Being Smart Not Greedy
I think it was generally understood that he was mentally unstable. He went on and on about the Jews, but he was 1/2 or even 100 percent Jewish himself, and he was aware of the fact. You can go to any insane asylum and tell the people that they are "embarassing themselves" but it's a little disingenuous.
This came up a while ago. pg's answer was "Because we're smart enough to realize that html is object code?"

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50154
PG might tell you it's because html is object code: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50159

But then you'll note that his code is full of tab, tr, and td macros so it's not like html tables are completely abstracted out. So a better answer might be that he puts a premium on quickly getting things out that work and ignoring details that the user never knows about; I'm guessing you didn't know the page was table based until you looked at the source. I'm also guessing that it's as easy for him to make arc changes as it would be for you to make the corresponding css changes (were the page list based).
The number of 1x1 squares on a chessboard. The number of squares on a chessboard is 204

1, 8x8 square
4, 7x7 squares
9, 6x6 squares
16, 5x5 squares
25, 4x4 squares
36, 3x3 squares
49, 2x2 squares
64, 1x1 squares
Clive Thompson: Paper explains how the "engineering mentality" produces terrorists
Yahoo Announces Support for OpenID
Except defaulting on the foreign debt would also mean defaulting on the entire national debt. That would pretty much screw up the entire US financial system.

Of course, what's more likely is inflating away the debt (i.e., devaluing the value of the dollar, and thus all dollar-denominated assets). There may not be foreclosures, but there will be a clearance sale on US assets. 90% off! Everything must go!
SoCal Geeks Ready for the Spotlight
Fair enough. If that is your evaluation of the article, then that's cool. I usually try not to completely write off people that I know are smarter than I am in a particular area (Stonebraker), just because I don't understand or agree with all of their arguments.

I think the article is much less of a fanboy article and more of an academic "thought provoking" article, though. I think their tone is a little too adversarial, but I believe they are essentially arguing that people can learn a great deal from older DBMS technologies and apply that knowledge to their applications...without always reinventing the wheel. They're arguing that people not forget the past when they look to the future, because combining ideas from both 'camps' might lead to a better solution. A "Best of Both Worlds" approach. Where would we be now if most of the Lisp discoveries and lessons had been assimilated into the programming culture sooner, for example?

I personally think the original article is more in the vein of suggesting deficiencies in using MapReduce for most applications than saying it is a complete dead-end. They acknowledge that "MapReduce may be a good idea for writing certain types of general-purpose computations." They say they are excited by its fault tolerance, etc. They just think it is being misused in many instances where other technologies are superior. I strongly agree with them on that point: there are relatively few use cases where MapReduce is ideal. And even when it is appropriate to use MapReduce, it should usually be augmented by other technology as well. They cite several deficiencies in the MapReduce approach that are completely valid, and I think your 30,000 foot overview of their criticism is misleading.

I think too many people are missing the forest for the trees with the original article (which is partly the fault of the authors, since they could have worded some of their arguments better.) People seem to think that just because Google is doing something that it is the optimal solution...but even Google uses BigTable to get around some of the deficiencies of MapReduce. And what is BigTable? A column-oriented DBMS! And who is one of the world's leading experts on and proponents of those? Why, Michael Stonebraker, the ivory-tower moron who wants to use RDBMS for everything!

As bayareaguy noted: "You have to read the original article very closely or you'll miss their point: in terms of distributed database research, MapReduce is a step backwards."
In addition to that PG article, you might also be interested in this video lecture by MIT Sloan professor Thomas Malone, where he discusses his book The Future of Work, which is right up that alley. http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/229/
Apparently he's kind of the guy behind "e-lancing"

"In Thomas Malone's optimistic view of the future, the human values of creativity and freedom ultimately triumph, and business leads the way. This explosion of possibilities in work, and everyday life, will flow from the increasing ease and decreasing expense of communicating. Malone sees parallels between the emergence of democracies in political and business worlds, and technological advances in communications. He notes that in the age of the Internet, businesses are growing decentralized, markedly departing from "command and control" organizational models to newer environments where "workers seek advice instead of approval.""

And not to make this the longest comment in N.YC history, but to your microgeography point, you'd like this video with Sandy Pentland of MIT: http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/494/

"Alex (Sandy) Pentland performed a unique experiment in a large German bank, tagging its employees with special badges that tracked individuals' interactions, down to head nodding, body language, and tone of voice. His research, conducted over a month, looked at how face to face interactions played into the overall organizational flow. The patterns he uncovered in the data collected from his name badges and from email and more traditional documentation, demonstrated the significance of social dynamics in workplace productivity. Certain individuals acted as information bottlenecks; others as polarizers, group thinkers, or gossip mongers. Pentland shared information about these patterns of communication with individuals."
I enjoyed the hell out of your WYCS essay, and the care with which you wrote it shows. I'm not contesting the arguments made in that essay. If, in this thread, however, you're contending that all ideas are completely relative, and that we don't have any right to pass judgments on them, then I have to disagree. If you're arguing that people should be allowed to speak freely in society at large, no matter how strange or offensive their ideas might be, then I agree. I don't think speech of any kind should be banned, and I fully appreciate how difficult it is to come to genuine truth. Aside from the existence of the self, what is truly knowable, anyway?

Be that as it may, in order to assess the quality of a community-driven site, one has to place value judgements on its content. Sometimes these value judgements fall short of perfection, but they're necessary and unavoidable.

It is interesting that you raised the prospect of filters yielding false positives. If you were talking about my judgement as an individual, then I'll admit that I'm blinded by the human condition, but I'd like to point out that I relied on blanket labels to avoid getting into a discussion of minutia of specific posts on Reddit. If you were referring to filters integrated into the software we'll use for our startup, our approach to avoid the "garbage" (we can agree that there is garbage out there, and avoiding it is a good thing, right?) is to narrow the focus of the site, rather than to build in karma-based influence restrictions and enhancements of individual users.

Hopefully I'll be posting a link here fairly soon, so all of my vague mumbo-jumbo will make more sense, and it'll take less imagination to see how our site could be used for negative purposes and how that might be limited.
UPDATE: Apparently Alamo rents to people under 25.
Ask news.yc: best book for learning Java for web applications?
I'm an aspiring web application developer with a strong though outdated programming and computer science background.

I picked up the basics of Ruby on Rails in a few days, and like it, but the websites it creates still feel a bit slow for my taste.

For comparison, I'd like to check out GWT - but need to catch up with Java first. (I know C and C++ from the old days well but got distracted from hacking before Java became mainstream.) Can anyone recommend a good book or resource for learning Java for web development, with a view to using GWT?

Thanks for any advice.
I'm not sure if this is your site or not, but I'd like to see an (easily findable) list of the Top N rules, either per category, or for the whole site. I get terribly frustrated when things are rated and I can't sort them.

Edit
I see the link to sort, but it's not intuitive.
Well, I've just ordered a MacBook Air. My wife has a MacBook Pro which I love and I have held on using an old PowerBook 12". I don't like the MacBook (sorry to anyone who has one) as I find it too heavy and in a tactile way I just don't like it. The MacBook Air looks so cool and will be the light laptop that I've been waiting for. So what if it does have a few things - it has everything I need
Slide Gets Big Funding?
Erlang library which eases working with grid computing resources like Amazon's EC2
CSS implementations used to suck != CSS sucks now
On Bobby Fischer
Failure Now An Option
There are imperfectly organized firms because the market doesn't provide perfect answers, it helps us to gradually create knowledge. As people here may know, firms are gradually coming to play a less dominant role in the world, and small, agile startups a larger one. And this change is happening not because someone decided it should, or anything like that: it's part of the free market.
QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter by Richard P. Feynman
Bayesian inference
Slide raises $50M at $500M Valuation
I am sure there will be many jokes made about Java being slow or something of the sort.

That being clear, if you wish to use Java on the server side, check out Struts. There are plenty of books, tutorials and so forth.
If you want to use GWT I have no clue about books but there is plenty online.

I haven't done too much with RoR, but I would wonder what you mean by it being slow? What exactly are you doing and how are you doing it? I use a lot of Python/Django, and do some pretty crazy stuff, and the response times are not an issue.
"it works in all browsers"

Call me a fanboy, but I consider "works in <b>all</b> browsers" a misfeature. "works in all reasonably standards-compliant browsers" is a much better goal, I say. If people didn't support obsolete and/or mediocre software like that, we would all have had almost fully standards-compliant browsers 4 years ago.
That is. Table is 'not optimized object code' compared to lists. So you should ask: why your object code is not optimized (and it slow loaded and slow rendered on my PC :).
If by Time-Warner being smart you mean making another play at the ISP game after AOL is shifting entirely away from being an ISP to being a content provider...

I am not exactly sure this makes any sense to me. AOL's revenue from the ISP business was dropping rapidly enough a few years ago for them to entire shift their business to online content resulting in huge short-term losses in hopes of better long term gains. Now for TW to shift into a tiered internet that I don't see a market for does not seem like a smart move to me.
MacBook Air battery replacements take only minutes
I think because it's easier... for him. I don't like it either though.
smacks head

Not this again...

The answer being who gives a shit? Does it look fine in most browsers?
You're right, I realized that the page was table based by looking at the source.

Programmers love to read beautiful code, As a web designer, I love to read beautiful and meaningful HTML.
;)
How old is your computer? I've found news.yc load times are close to instant.
I am interested in the topic, but I can't read that article with the crazyness on the sides.

I will have to copy/paste and then read it, which is ridiculous.
MySQL, JBoss, Zimbra...What is an open-source company worth?
Tables are embedded in the Arc code for news.yc, as brett mentioned, but probably it could be rewritten in a few hours for a list-based layout. Of course, changing the layout would require an Arc developer, which is the disadvantage to not using templates. You may have noticed that most hackers seem to think web design is unimportant and/or should require a programmer for each change.
I think PG must have known, what I only ended up finding out myself after trying too hard to make everything CSS, is that it doesn't always need to be.

I kinda wish I could have an outter body experience +add that with time travel, and go back a few months so I can kick my old self in the ASS(twice) for wasting hours trying to make a forums page in all CSS, only to give up and accomplish it with tables, in what felt like seconds compared to the time I had spent previously.

CSS is of course a really good thing, especially if your building a big site(my site still mainly CSS based), But there's no need to spend unneeded time on things that the end user won't see,notice or care.
It is not my website, I am sorry. I understand the current presentation is bad.
Silicon Nanowires Turn Heat to Electricity
Replacement for Hubble Space Telescope Will Use Copper-based Communications Systems
I am not saying that embargoes are bad in all situations. Trade embargoes against certain countries make sense.

But I hope you will agree with me that branding someone a traitor just because he played with another dude is kinda extreme.
High-Def Is in the Air
3-D Design for the Masses
> The number of squares on a chessboard is 204

The number of squares on a chessboard is infinite, if you don't limit yourself to edges already drawn for you.
Who gives a shit? Hackers. And, y'know, with this happening to be Hacker News and all, it works.
Because it's Hacker News, not Designer Gallery.
JavaScript Genetic Algorithm
Ugg, really?

90% of facebook spam comes from their crappy little apps.
Python : A simple genetic algorithm
was anyone really that worried about having to replace a permanently dead battery? the main benefit of an easily swappable battery that doesn't require tools is the ability to carry multiple charged batteries on long flights or whatever. battery 1 goes dead, you just hibernate the machine, swap out the battery with a second one (which takes 10 seconds on any normal laptop), and resume working.
90% of the spam 3.3% of the valuation...

... Spammers should get a better deal really :-)
CSS is used for two purposes: for styling and for layout. In my mind, the value obtained by using CSS for larger site layouts is not much. Usually, the claim is that CSS layouts help you re-target the content for another device and stuff, easily. Based on my experiences, I think that's a grand dream not likely to come true. You have almost completely re-think your UI when you are developing for a different device. Re-using CSS layouts is nearly impossible for that.
Because you should read news not the source code.
It's somewhat funny that all the great hackers I know in person tend to suck at chess. Did you noticed the same?