skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
What is nasty about pointing out this difference in scope?

Wasabi is an app-specific dialect of VBScript used by one company to deploy a bug tracker to small teams. HipHop is a general-purpose PHP compiler whose output is used at scale by the world's largest social networking site.

I can write a file system that will work fine on my computer, with my workload, and maybe even write an essay about how productive that makes me. But I don't think you'd want to install it.

These two projects are not in the same league - they're not even in the same sport - and so I am baffled to see Wasabi come up in this thread at all.
Thanks, I didn't know about ' for links.
Engadget editor: Why I turned off comments
Seems to me that given the inevitability of piracy in this new format, publishers will likely not see any substantial net gains from the higher prices, which may in fact simply offset the cost of piracy on the platform.
I generally loathe videos online. Transcripts are almost always better.

But this one is an exception. I recommend watching it.
From a technocratic point of view, yes. From an emotional point of view, no. People are more forgiving of one another than of machines. Machines are supposed to be perfect.
It actually annoys me when people don't use git now. Git has clearly won among current dvcs. If something comes along later that's head and shoulders above dvcs, then I'll be happy to switch. But for now, random folks' views on why their tool is marginally technically better doesn't outweigh the enormous benefits of everyone you know using the same dvcs.

And it annoys me when people use BitBucket over Github. It's like your one friend who insists on not having a Facebook account and sticking to his Livejournal because Livejournal is supposedly better at some random thing, but in reality, you strongly suspect he just wants to prove he's not a follower, an independent breed cut from a better cloth than the rest of us.

These days, whenever I need a new little tool, its official repo is usually on Github. This lets me pull it into my project as a submodule and still contribute back in a very efficient way. As soon as it's mercurial, I can't, simply because I don't know mercurial and I certainly have zero intention of attaining the same mastery of it that I have of git. And, frankly, I don't want to attain any mastery of it.

Moreover, of course, you can't just mix repos willy nilly. Maybe there's a way to use mercurial as a submodule of git repos. But it's gonna be a dastardly hack.

So, please. Just use git. Competition is good, but so is standardization. I get that you have highly nuanced opinions about the various merits of dvcs, and I'm sure you're right and I'm wrong. But it just doesn't matter, because the benefits of mercurial don't outweigh the beneficial network effects of using git, and that's never going to change.
True, but if a human driver causes an accident it's treated as a one-off thing. If a software bug causes your auto-driver to veer into the oncoming lane under certain conditions, the manufacturer will be pilloried even if the raw number of accidents is less than what human drivers cause. Irrational, yes, but that's the way it is.
That is a good point. But certainly some of the folks PG observed had always user Macs as well.

It would be interesting to know how many people he had interviewed at the time he wrote the essay.
The author documents a drastic change in browser use to view his site from 2005 to 2010. Mac goes from 18.8% to 78.9%.

But I am hesitant to trust his website as a reflection of the entire "Hackers, Creators, and Nerds" Community.
Facebook General Counsel Tells Lawyers He's Looking for a Fight
A similar situation devastated Audi in the '80s. Hopefully Toyota will learn from history. The Audi problem was more severe because acceleration happened during the transition from park to drive, which is a far more dangerous situation.

[ http://www.multinationalmonitor.org/hyper/issues/1987/05/wat... ]
Just curious -- how many investments do you make in a year? and what kinda stuff are you looking to invest in?
Review of the new ThinkPad Edge 13
Papa Jobs and the prodigal Apple (iPad) fanboy
How do I get both files side-by-side in Emacs so I can go through them thoroughly (some of us prefer that to reading diffs, you know)?

git show branch:path/to/file > /tmp/file

I want the history of my codebase to be easy to get a feel for

So never delete branches. You'll know if they're "done" if they've been merged into your master branch.
"Pay me $100 million by noon tomorrow or my car virus will be unleashed"

Does your software take into account bad sci-fi premises?
The next level after caching relates to paging and virtual memory. Submission to an item explaining this in a humorous fashion here:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1032528
You say you think the mistrust is misplaced, then proceed to (in my opinion) explain why it is not misplaced in your last sentence.
Except it is still the case that the reason you gave applies to non-intellectuals as well.
Damnit - a cool project name wasted on a php to c++ compiler?? DJ Kool Herc is disgusted with Facebook.
They probably just use a python script and type

from php import cppCompiler

not sure why that took 2 years
Longer version of the same thing: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1094653

That submission has lots of comments already, I'm pretty sure that was the original.
This is truly the PHP solution to the problem. Design a virtual machine that uses runtime information to generate highly-optimized native code? Nahh.... just regex the source into C++, compile with g++, and enjoy!

(To be fair, some language implementations have achieved good results with this method; notably Chicken scheme. But I was expecting something better and potentially more useful to the language implementation community at large.)
Corporation to run for congress following freedom of speech verdict
This is the comment where I link to Norvig without adding any insight of my own.

http://norvig.com/experiment-design.html
I agree with you, it certainly makes sense in my opinion to question the credibility of predictions based on a history of bad predictions.

For example, I am ridiculously bad at estimating how much time implementing features / fixing bugs would take. Most of the time I'm really off, at least by a factor of 2. Surely my manager should take this fact into consideration when asking me how much time something would take me when planning the timeline/schedule (he does, in fact).
"By augmenting the capabilities of HTML, Flash has been incredibly successful in its adoption, with over 85% of the top web sites containing Flash content..."

And how much of that is just ads?
I think this is getting us nowhere, but ok, I'll try again.

Flying and books incite us to wonder. A computer can assist us in wondering. It can enable us to explore ideas. That's the potential of the computer and that's what Alan's Dynabook was promising.

Sure, we can rip out functionality until we have a computer that is so pretty and simple that a monkey can use it, but that's not fulfilling the promise that computers hold. That's not what Alan was talking about.

Forgive us all who dare persist contentedly with balloons

You're forgiven. (Just not tolerated well on a place like HN. :-)
I have noticed a similar trend on my college campus. The Mac to PC ratio seems to be about even. It's a brilliant strategy for Apple to target students. Get 'em hooked young, get 'em hooked for life!
A baseball star funds a gaming company. What could possibly go wrong?
Dear Python
Phoronix Test Suite 2.4.0 su Ubuntu e Debian
I'm an art major and in my art related classes, Macs seem to make up about 90% of computers. However in my gen eds, the number drops to about 40%
Everything is easy if you have experience with C++.

I fail to see how PHP is clearer than Perl. It may have fewer special characters, but everything is done with oddly-named functions that take positional arguments in an inconsistent order, return error codes instead of throwing exceptions, and randomly spew warning messages.

From a language design standpoint... there is no design. Perl may not be perfect either, but the design has been flexible enough to radically modify as the community sees fit. Or rather, how you choose to modify it, as most modifications are modular and only affect a single lexical scope. Oh.
Why product doesn't determine price
BT's These Hopeful Machines
If this is adopted widely hosting costs will drop off considerably, no?
I think they come from this:

http://www.mypersonality.info/personality-types/population-g...
Incidentally, it doesn't have to be evil governments doing this.

If your employer uses Watchguard firewalls, they can proxy SSL connections, replace the SSL certificate with one signed by the firewall, and act as a MITM to filter and report the connection contents. If your employer has pushed out certificates by, e.g. active directory and group policies on Windows, then the site will appear padlocked without warnings and you will be none the wiser unless you inspect the certificate. I'm assuming other firewalling products can do similar.
Why shouldn't ads be relevant? Turns out it's how the majority of the web is making money.
Yes, that is rather depressing, but I should mention that it is not only an American problem. You can find pretty much the same dynamic in most other countries. In fact I am sure that in many other countries the lack of education is an even bigger problem.
Top Ten VC Firm Websites By Traffic
Awesome! We have been considering getting funding to market our product and this list may prove useful. Being in Canada makes this much harder since most investors are looking for people within a reasonable distance of themselves.
Mobile and Travel: Nearing an inflection point?
Wikileaks Closes Operations Temporarily Due to Budget Woes
"don't come even close to the top 1% of intelligence (and are often even dyslexic)"

Meaning dyslexic people are stupid, which among other things that Edison and Einstein were stupid. Nice.
This has interesting implications when considering SSDs versus traditional hard disks. SSD reads are faster, writes are slower, and space is at a premium.
Friedman is one of the worst sources of opinion I've ever read. The World Is Flat (which is, admitedly, his only substantial work I've read cover to cover) is filled with unwarranted conclusions and groundless generalizations and altogether horrible metaphors. I've learned to just tune out when he's mentioned.
The 2005 stats are from visits to ycombinator.com (I think that was before news.ycombinator.com launched). The 2010 stats are a breakdown of the 38 people interviewed for http://usesthis.com/
I'm not sure of how much value the anecdote of the Raphael painting could be to a more worldly product - I've never understood the "economics of art". But I thought I'd put it out here because it is intriguing enough.
Yes it can. My guess is that if someone breathed it it would coat the inside of the lungs, and they would quickly die.

In smaller doses it would cause Silicosis.

For this reason this will never be sold to consumers, although it might be used in a factory, but only with very strict controls.
Actually it's more like ... one drunk driver can cause one isolated accident (assuming his license is revoked, he learns his lesson or he's dead afterwards). One software bug can cause 10000.
I have most of it in my head but that needs periodic refresh :)
On iPads, Grandmas and Game-changing
Thanks for the commentary! I really appreciate it!

We are still probably going to update the game, and have already done some work on it in fact. This was just the 48 hour milestone :)

I will certainly take your comments into account!
Quite a lot of drama involving China in recent weeks. I wonder what's next? Chinese made laptops contains trojans? Chinese made iPhones contain spy chips? Chinese made clothes stitched with wiretapping chips?
C++ is known to be fast, so what advantage could a more complex solution provide?
It should be repeated at this point that Ben Stein is an idiot who has reduced himself to marketing Internet credit protection scams on TV. After he got kicked out of the New York times (because the Times thought he tried to associate the credit protection scams with their newspaper) he has really lost all credibility, and one should not worry too much about what he says.
Also, check out Cascading.
I wish I could find more of these, but ruby and python are indeed tiny compared to PHP: http://www.zacker.org/files/market_share_graph.jpg

My judgement call is that the battle is over. I may be wrong, but I am on the right side of wrong. If I turn out to be wrong in the future, I'll look back and still think I made the right call given the data I had.

It has been a while since I decided to learn python and django. At the time I thought they would take over. Well, I was wrong. They have not - PHP has continued to grow faster than they have.

So this time my call is that PHP is the thing to stick to, particularly when I see moves like this one facebook has. In any case, this choice I made is the safe one. I can't lose by making this decision.
Sometimes, the plural of anecdote is data [or at least a significant data point].
I wish more blogs would take your view. People go to all the trouble of writing articles carefully, putting them on a dedicated domain with a nice design or template, and then I scroll down and there are:

"nice article I wrote one like it at http://buyviagra-cheap.example.org

and "HOW TO INSTALL THIS???!!!!!?!!! IT DOES NOT WORK!??"

Invite readers in, tempt them with an interesting article and then leave them in some internet shady backstreet area. It doesn't need free speech, delete the tripe, edit the rest mercilessly (but note that they have been 'edited').
> If you have CPC ads on your site, you have to optimize for failure: the ad has to be more enticing than your application/content or you don't get paid.

I've been saying that for years, nobody believes it.

But it is definitely true, if you're a destination site and your clickthrough is lousy then you are in a good spot to do subscriptions. It means your product is better than that ads.
CNNIC would only ever see the public key, and you can't decrypt encrypted data using the public key--you must use the private key to decrypt the data, something CNNIC would not see--so no.

As mentioned, CNNIC's inclusion only allows a Man In The Middle Attack. That is, CNNIC, i.e. the Chinese government, pretending to be a site they're not, and using their status as a Firefox (and other) -authorised root certificate provider to further trick the user into accepting the bogus SSL certificate as originating from the hijacked domain.
He posted the details of the problem (3 months ago) on slashdot: http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1430048&cid=299...
Ten Smart Reasons to Learn about IP Law
Report from the BBC: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1092284
So, does this mean that PHP has officially forked? I mean who is going to want to keep writing in the interpreted version as opposed to the hiphop-able version? How many changes are there? I've only seen mentions of ditching eval, but there is probably more. Will people be debugging their code in both vanilla PHP and HPHP?

How well does this support other projects, like wordpress (for example)?

Another issue this raises is who is now in control of PHP? Not in legal terms, but in terms of mindshare. It's one this for a student to write a PHP translator, but quite another for Facebook to do it. I'll be interested to see how Zend responds to this. At least when Google started unladen swallow, they had Guido working for them.
There have been some attempts at making an IDE for Laszlo, but as far as I know, none of those projects are still maintained, except for the NetBeans OL plugin. It doesn't have a UI designer, though. OpenLaszlo is really a great open source project, but the facts that there was no good IDE for it for a long time, that the only current IDE is a plugin for NetBeans, which you may or may not use, and that there is still no UI designer for OpenLaszlo are all major obstacles for it's widespread adoption.
People do not pay for technical advancement. They pay for solving their problems.

Yeah, I get it. My point was that it isn't easy to find something people are willing to pay you for, no matter how simple that sounds. Also, technical advancement typically involves making something difficult and costly, easy and cheap, so I thought it was reasonable to assume that people would pay for it. I was either wrong, timed the market wrong or failed in my marketing efforts, which is admittedly not my strong point.
lawmakers don't have much to do with it

Traditionally they don't, but they could if they wanted to. If the Supreme Court rules that something is not legal, the legislature can make it legal. The Constitution can also be amended, making the issue of constitutionality null.

Some of the most powerful Constitutional protection is in the form of amendments; the Bill of Rights. Technically, the freedom of speech is implicit in the text of the main body of the Constitution. (Any powers not specifically given to the Federal government falls to the States and People.) But the explicit text of the First Amendment has made it much easier for the People to retain their right to Free speech and press.
It is not a logical fallacy nor ad hominem to take into account the number of times someone has been incorrect about a specific subject matter in order to estimate how much one should weigh the probability of said individual being correct on future related matters. That is, unless one has complete and correct information about the future.
Well, this still makes sense to me. Couldn't this just be due to the reduction of the sample set as people go up in age(I.E. they die)? More people are going to make it to 20 years old than 40 and so on. This will also be amplified by population growth so it should be increasingly skewed towards younger people having more stable data.

Also, the older generation is more likely to have the family structure where the man works and the wife stays at home. I would think there would be financial incentives for a wife to over report her age for senior benefits and her husband to under report so as not to be forced into retirement.
"Notice how SQL forces the pipeline to be written inside-out, with operations that need to happen first happening in the from clause sub-query."

That temporary table is unnecessary: you can rewrite the query as

insert into ValuableClicksPerDMA
select dma, count(*)
from users, clicks, geoinfo
where users.name = clicks.user
and value > 0
and clicks.ipaddr = geoinfo.ipaddr
group by dma;

Perhaps the reason the SQL is running slow is that the join is on a string, users.name = clicks.user, instead of an id.

Also, why the disregard for the optimizer? We trust optimizers to allocate memory well, we trust optimizers to generate code well, and we can analyze the database to see which indices partition the data the best. Having an optimizer means that you just rerun ANALYZE and the query gets rewritten if the data changes, versus changing the procedure long after the fact to reorder tables. (And if you want a specific table order, just use cross join or something to prevent that.)
This comment shamelessly replies something vaguely relevant to the highest scoring root comment in the hope of attracting trickle-down karma.
What advice would you give a younger person like me? I don't have the network built up yet and my main pool of potential cofounder is whoever responds to my online ads.

Finding nice cofounder for me could potentially take much longer than 1 year for me if it requires building a network. At the same time I feel I'm ready, and I'm in the moment right now (this isn't even my first startup). I've moved forward irregardless of a cofounder and have even taken this semester from school off. Waiting could mean losing the ability to work on this idea and the idea is very dear to me. Plus I can't wait--that's how excited I am. I only took school off because I knew the startup would win if they got in a fight.

I'm not sure what to do if not having a cofounder makes me immensely unattractive to fund, because I'd have to go back to school in the summer or I lose health insurance. Conflicts will probably arise then, and it would prevent me from spending the time I want with my startup.
Google app store for Edu Apps - platform as a service?
So the answer is learning software!
Also consider the possibility of Android-base phones, iPhones, (soon) iPads, netbooks and (in my case) small laptops (my Thinkpad X41 is not a netbook, but the screen resolution is 1024x768).
I'm glad this was posted, although I do find the article to be a little confused.

Certainly, what the writer is getting at has been the Achilles heel of the whole take-your-vitamins movement: just because some chemical is good to have in your body, does not mean that taking that chemical in pill form is a helpful thing. While she does not mention it, this idea seems to be particularly applicable to vitamin C. It is certainly an important part of general health. However, if I understand the research correctly, beyond the small amount necessary to prevent scurvy, studies have shown no benefits at all to taking vitamin C supplements (corrections are welcome!).

So: the first few paragraphs suggest that, while high vitamin D levels seem to correlate with good health, that does not mean that supplements help. Correlation does not equal causation, etc.

That is all fine. However, she then goes on to cite studies, all of which were concerned not with vitamin D levels in the body, but with supplementation.

Furthermore, she rather strangely says that the Women's Health Initiative study "found no overall benefit", and yet also found that vitamin D + calcium supplementation correlated with reduced incidence of hip fracture. How is that not a benefit?

In any case, I welcome the direction that research seems to be going. Whenever there is an easy way to improve the health of large numbers of people, it is a good idea to find it.
According to the Unladen Swallow's team [1], LLVM's "just-in-time infrastructure was relatively untested and buggy" when they started working with it. So, I think not using LLVM was a pragmatic decision. In addition, debugging C++ code is much easier than dealing with intricacies of dynamically generated machine code.

[1]: http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-3146/#performance-retrosp...
This is the soon-to-be-dead spam post linking to a page selling cheap replica watches.
Woz != god. Woz != says so therefore it most likely is so.

However if he can reproduce this quite easily then there is probably a software bug. And Toyota can't afford a recall. Honestly this just has to be taken to courts, its the driving force of our economy.
They're relevant for site owners, sure, but flash ads aren't a very good argument for, "without flash, users won't get the full web user experience". Presumably nobody will refrain from buying an iPad because of flash ads not working on it.
Reddit Clone in 10 minutes and 91 lines of Clojure
You know, Macmillan books still aren't available to buy from Amazon. Through Amazon, via third parties, but not actually from Amazon.
Installing packages is faster, too, because Homebrew also works hard to avoid package duplication. No more installing yet another version of Perl as a package dependency when you already have a working install of Perl built into OS X. Best of all, Homebrew has a basic philosophy that you shouldn’t have to use sudo to install or manage software on your computer.

Finally! At last! I hope this takes off, because I've been manually ∂ownloading and compiling everything in order to avoid conflicting versions, redundancy, et. al. that come with Fink and MacPorts.
This is where I point out (as I did on the original) that the author is shamelessly stealing an old idea from David Moser: http://consc.net/misc/moser.html (which, btw, is well worth reading for anyone who hasn't seen it already).
Details about Facebook's HipHop for PHP