skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
So we should conclude that communism and intellectual thought are equivalent? Ridiculous.

Look, it's a fact that ideas, when misapplied by powerful individuals or institutions, can lead to needless suffering. You could point to large scale suffering resulting from communism, from a misplaced belief in ethnic or cultural superiority, from capitalism, from religion, and so on.

The fact that various beliefs (whose social implementation results in suffering) have been propounded by intellectuals does not warrant the conclusions you are drawing. I am tired of this tendency among some HN readers with a bee in their bonnet about communism to just drag it into any discussion and use the deaths of large numbers of people as currency for laying out an irrelevant political argument.
I can't tell if you're trolling, but that's not the point of the karma system; that being to vote up "good contributions" that you would like to see more of at HN and vote down "bad contributions" which you would like to see less of at HN, regardless of whether you agree with them or disagree with them.
How do you feel about the argument, put forth by some Christians, that Darwin is responsible for the holocaust? The evidence is that Darwinian thinking was a clear influence on Hitler's plans to purify the race.

I hope you think it's absurd. If a madman and a thug takes inspiration from a theory, it's hardly the fault of the theorist.

Most westerners are able to see the absurdity of blaming the Holocaust on Darwin, but they fail to see the absurdity of blaming the Holodomor on Marx. This is probably because the intellectual climate here has been poisoned by decades of cold-war propaganda, which created a paranoid sense that all socialism would necessarily devolve into Stalinism.
Was wondering: Why not use flash for this?

Jeezus, Flash bashing is getting real old.
Playing to Learn
Exactly. Have a look through the IRC logs from when the core devs were discussing namespace separators, and let's see if the author of this quote still feels the same way.
How IT shops become bureaucracies
We can rely on China instead.
I have a CLI application that's IO-bound. I'm extremely excited. Furthermore, I'm sure this is exciting to anyone who has deployed Memcache, and now has an application that is CPU-bound.
I didn't realize that the Show Options -> Fewer Shopping Sites existed :) Thanks
I don't think he's laying out the whole flash vs HTML5 argument in that post. He says:

If HTML could reliably do everything Flash does that would certainly save us a lot of effort, but that does not appear to be coming to pass.

which is probably referring to how HTML5 does not have: efficient vector-based animation, support for audio mixing, strong tool support and ecosystem for creating interactive content, a pathway to run C code (Alchemy), etc.
You can optimize on multiple fronts. Just because facebook needs to scale data access doesn't mean it shouldn't scale processing time too. As the post mentioned, this has had a huge impact. [i work at facebook, comments on this site are my own opinion, and I'm not intimately involved in the project]

But generally I agree about new projects. If you have a favorite language, use it.
Awesome idea- I definitely envision a training or keyboard-visible mode with translucent letters showing you where the keys were and some kind of visual feedback of where you were touching.
Google Apps Drops Support For IE6
I'm uploading the first 10KB of the file and identifying that on the backend - from experimentation, 10KB is enough to identify most common files. Flash lets you do this easily, whereas I'm not aware of any other web technology that would allow me to do it at all.
Yeah, you can't just combine two keyboards or the sequencing and modifier keys are off. Isn't it ridiculous that we can make tablet computers but keyboards are still run with this ridiculously old tech?

I'm not sure how hard it will be to mock up hardware and get the sequencing right.
But there is no call to action buttons or anything interesting to click below the fold.
Are you serious? I'm not trying to be flippant, but I literally can't tell if you're joking or not.
Well, there are still issues with transparent PNGs and gamma settings for GIFs. But your main point is true... eventually the tech will work itself out.
How templatey is the generated code? How big are the resulting binaries?

Amazon's original core platform (obidos) was written in C++ and deployed as one monolithic binary. I've heard that one of the major things pushing their Java rewrite (dp) was that the binary no longer fit comfortably into memory!
If the Woz says there is some sort of software malfunction I think those talking Toyota puppets blitzing the airwaves should take a moment, pick up the phone and ask Woz for his input.

What happened to the good 'ol days of harikiri (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seppuku)? I'm not really suggesting that Toyota top brass should start sharpening their knives ;) But if anyone following this story over the last year or two can say that there isn't a coverup afoot here, I'll eat crow. The proverbial heads should be rolling at Toyota.

[edit] typos
Or you could just make a move saying that the place is too loud, and that "we should just go over to my place".
Not a big surprise. We've hit a point in the I/O bandwidth-to-spare-CPU-cycles ratio where this now saves us time getting bits into RAM.

IIRC, the latest Firefox (3.6) is now compressing files on-disk using HFS' built-in compression to cut ~20% off launch time.
While I hate math books, I love how math professors write about anything else :OD
Sadly that resembles most of the ASP/PHP code I've ever worked with.

The very low barriers to entry of PHP and ASP means you have (had) a lot of very inexperienced folks writing code.

That said, I agree with the original point that PHP can be very productive. No compiles, no builds... just edit code/refresh browser to immediately see the effect of a change. That's nice if you have the discipline to not do stuff like the linked example.
Engadget has written 54 articles about the iPad in the last 12 days. I'm honestly surprised that they are surprised their audience are idiots.
One reason I don't is that it would attract attention to HN, and one of my strategies for staving off disaster has been to keep a low profile, so that most new users are people who hear about the site from friends.
Yes I am serious. The most widely used and supported web language is likely to remain the dominant language on the web and will not be surpassed by tiny niche languages.

That statement is one I would describe as reasonable.
Hmmm, getting nasty there

Both companies had huge investments in a code base and found a geeky way to keep their code base while reaping modern benefits.

Most things are toys compared to face book, Google or Twitter. That doesn't make them pointless.
The database for the cloud age: FathomDB (YC W09)
I just had to register on HN to say how much I completely agree with this statement:

"Ditto for both Boston newspapers. It can literally ruin your day reading some of the comments below even mundane articles."
The Most Efficient Way to Type
This absolutely backs up my own findings-

I've been working to decrease the mailserver backup times.
Our Zimbra mailstore was taking over 8 hours to backup; I started compressing teh files before writing them to disk and it made a huge difference. I was able to bring the total time down to 3 hours.

I attributed this to two factors- The first was, as the article mentions, that the machine has so much CPU when compared to disk, that the smaller data-transfer helped more than the CPU overhead hurt.
I found that this is true for gzip, but bzip2 slowed it down. An implementation of parallel-bzip I found online spreads the bzip cost over multiple cores, reduced this further, however. This leads me to believe that something closer to the OS, which would adjust the compression level dynamically with CPU load, may be a wonderful product.

The second factor was that the compressed files were in tarballs, so didn't create nearly as many files. Zimbra creates one file per message (a maildir like format), so this means hundreds of thousands of files need to be created and sized on the disk. In the archives, however, I am able to store just a few, large files, reducing the overhead of individually creating each message.
I don't have a dog in this fight, but who asks a blogger what his/her blog does for anybody? Why do you care? If you think he's wasting your time, don't read his stuff. If you think he could make his point in a better way, by all means give constructive feedback in the comments. But if he doesn't "do much" for the rest of us, we're just as capable as you to figure that out and stop reading. I'd rather have thousands of blogs out there that don't do ANYTHING for me than squash the few that do by insisting that they all must serve the greater good.

I found this article insightful, funny, profane, and in bad taste. For me, the first two outweighed the second two. You reached a different conclusion. I'm not right, you're not wrong so far. We just disagree. But when you ask him to defend the usefulness of his published opinions, in my mind, that's wrong.
There does not have to be a conspiracy here (even of silence) but you are correct - if the Woz says there is a software glitch then a software glitch there is.

If the Toyota guys can't find it then - yes - they should ask someone who can find it.
This is the comment decrying the drop in quality on HN, and ask for fascinating articles about Erlang.
Our mission at Adobe is to revolutionize how people engage with ideas and information [..]

We are continuing to focus on enabling our customers to do their best work, and helping them reach people effectively and reliably around the world

[..]

Please note that the comments aren't currently working and we're in the process of fixing right now.

Oh, Adobe. Hello? Hello?
If I give it an Office 2007 file, it identifies it as a zipped XML file. While this is technically correct, it's probably not the most useful answer. This can probably be corrected with just file extensions, but looking up XML namespaces would be an interesting idea.
I can't see a lot of use for this as a webapp.

If I were going to use this, I'd want it where my unrecognized files are. If you could connect this to a right-click in my filesystem, or have it as a browser extension that intercepts downloaded files and tells me what they are (ie: built into firefox's download manager, or the download bar at the bottom of chrome). Or get it to interact with my email somehow. Next to attachments, have a link saying "what is this?".

Not sure if any of those are actually possible, but that would upgrade your side-project from a "cool idea" to something that I would actually use.
There is no need to switch to PHP only for this reason, but there is a huge number of apps already using PHP. It will be a great benefit to them. Also, it will become another factor for people considering developing a new application: if a language can quickly be converted to C++, this is easier than writing extensions in C/C++ directly.
The Two Sides of Psychopathy
Gives one second thoughts about the idea of self-driving cars zipping down the highway like a fluid in a pipe, never colliding or bunching up in traffic jams.
There are a lot of challenges in creating a moon base or Mars base beyond getting stuff into orbit, which is quite routine in the commercial sector.

NASA should have no shortage of interesting challenges even if they outsource launch services to get more bang for the buck.
NASA does some great things with planetary probes, etc., but their manned launch systems have always consumed prodigious amounts of money.

By contrast, the money SpaceX has spent to almost complete the development of their new NASA-funded launch system is approximately 1/20 of the projected cost overrun of the internal manned launch system NASA has been working on (the Aries I).
ActiveState: No More Stale Lunches
Comparing Pig Latin and SQL for Constructing Data Processing Pipelines
Chrome 4 Beta on Mac OS X: Anon and NULL encryption cipher suites
Agreed. What I do works for me and I'm glad there are others with the time/patience/masochistic-tendencies to view and moderate things to make them more pleasant for me. :)
Maybe something useful could be "Fix this 'corrupted' file".
Agreed. How can he say "For example, the recent Nexus One from Google will rock with a great experience in the browser with Flash Player 10.1." with a straight face?

Aren't there a few more Mac users who would like "a great experience in the browser" than Nexus One owners?
Why Design Matters
I think it's especially hard on HN due to the nature of the site. Since HN is a site dedicated to discussion, it becomes important to ensure that open conversations are happening. Strong opinions shouldn't be banned just because they get a little hostile, and weak opinions shouldn't be banned just because they're a little fluffy. There's such a huge gray area that it's an impossibly difficult problem.

Contrast this with Engadget, who can enforce discussion that aligns with whatever site policies they choose to adapt. Or you can take this even further, like on my blog, where openness means nothing and I can just delete anything that's not a question or an anecdote that adds to what I've written.

In an open discussion forum, your biggest problem will be always be open discussion.
Do you wear socks with them? Do you find that your feet feel colder?
Don't take a drop of advice from Teresa Nielsen Hayden -- it's all either blatantly obvious or outrageously poisonous. She is absolutely the least-moderate moderator on the entire English-language internet, and has proven herself adept at training subordinates to follow in her footsteps.

pg is already more than capricious enough already, I shudder to think of how ridiculous things would get around here if he started taking lessons from the dark master.
Ustream.tv seals $20M from Japanese telecom
U.S. Cattle Herd Falls to 1958 Low as Losses Climb
You just added a comment to a story.

How is your comment on HN not exactly what you're dismissive of?
You can't "write an essay on making online community scale" because community doesn't scale
I can't wait to try to try this out on a large PHP codebase like Drupal and then run some benchmarks. It'd be interesting to see how much faster it is when compared to vanilla PHP vs opcode cached PHP.
I foresee many a class action lawsuit followed potentially by a congressional investigation of not only Toyota, but of the larger automotive industries continued encroachment of electrical systems and their software components in the most fundamental aspects of the automobile.

I can only hope for a mighty public outcry and backlash against these opaque practices. It's one thing to convert more systems from mechanics to electronics. It's another thing to wrap the entire thing in secrecy and obfuscation. Ralph Nader should be leading the charge on this.
hehe I like the commentary. very friendly and responsive.

Whats next on the agenda?
Don't be ridiculous: of course there are circumstances under which a police officer is above the law that dictates he should identify himself.

If he's in a firefight and forcefully shoves you out of the way when you walk up asking for his identification, he has no obligation whatsoever to show you his ID. If he is in hot pursuit, you have no business stopping him to ask for his ID. If he has just broken his leg, you can't honestly expect him to identify himself. How many more examples do you want?

I understand the parent is being irrelevantly pedantic, but your comment isn't making it any better.
Added myself finally. Thanks!
I am wondering how open source contribution from apple or MS would look like if there where no GPL but only BSD licensed software..

For Apple, probably the same. Most of their open source software is under the APSL, or (more frequently) BSD or Apache 2 licenses. I can't think of any (L)GPL'd project started by Apple.
That statement is indeed reasonable, but some of the other stuff you said wasn't. For instance, your assertion that Ruby and Python are "tiny niche languages" is false.

You also used hyperbole like: "Nothing will take over from PHP. The battle is over." It seems hard to believe that this was being said with a straight face.

I know how you like to jerk the Hacker News community around at times, so I thought it prudent to ask if you're being serious. :)

* http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1038779
I know this is from physorg, but after the second paragraph I was reading it in a Billy Mays voice.

Still, it sounds interesting, and if it works as they say it does, I imagine it will become quite ubiquitous.
It can't be much worse than exposure to the chemicals in most of our cleaning products.
>preverbal

proverbial
This is the best analysis I've seen yet.

There's a lot of open questions (about the price elasticity of e-books, for example), which will undoubtedly get sorted out over time--but it's important first to lay out how the interests of the different players don't always align, and the Apple vs Amazon distinction is a good point to keep in mind.
You might want to consider that that things like non-computability and so forth are relatively recent mathematical discoveries. At the beginning of the 20th century most educated people still believed in a Newtonian universe and the idea that everything was calculable, cf Russell & Whitehead's Principia Mathematica. Einstein, Godel and others demonstrated that things were not so cut and dried, but even Einstein had difficulty with the random-seeming nature of quantum mechanics. The boundaries between linear and nonlinear behavior (in mathematical terms) remain somewhat obscure.

I suggest that it wasn't rampant intellectualism that caused the 20th century to be such an abbatoir, but the influence of industrial and technological change on the ancient human practice of warring with ones' enemies, combined with new technologies such as motion pictures and speedy photography which helped to make us more aware of the costs of war.

The US civil war was particularly bloody and gruesome, even though there was nothing resembling the 'scientific socialism' you decry; one might also point out that in the Viet Nam war, the opponents of communism had no problem with dropping napalm and various toxic defoliants all over a country to which they had no territorial claim in the first place and seemed perfectly willing to engineer the lives of others by force in the name of freedom.
Lancet accepts MMR study 'false' - Link between vaccination and autism
To be fair, plenty of us had second thoughts the first time we heard that idea...
Just skimming the list of The Setup I count at least eight people who always used Macs. That’s more than twenty percent. Which means that if you interviewed them five years ago you already would definitely have gotten a different result then PG. Five years ago.

Not a kosher comparison.
Facebook's lack of engineering prowess continually amazes me.

There were quite a few other options aside from writing a translator.
As a bit of a followup: an even worse case (i.e. less likely to get a nice, fan-created lyrics page as one of the first-page hits) is when I know the name of the song and google for something like: joy division warsaw lyrics.

Expected result is something like: http://www.joydiv.org/shadowplay/joyd/warsaw.html

What I actually get are a bunch of sites with names like mp3lyrics, songlyrics, musicsonglyrics. It might be that the word "lyrics" in my query is boosting that sort of stuff to the top? From what I can tell, Google also penalizes old / rarely updated sites, which probably hurts these kinds of pages--- the page linked above was last updated in 2007, but it's still the best result for that query.
I wrote a PHP->C++ compiler and bits and pieces of the standard library many moons ago (BinaryPHP: http://sourceforge.net/projects/binaryphp/ ), and it really wasn't terribly difficult, even for a complete compiler novice. We didn't do the fancy optimization that HipHop does, but it worked fairly well at the time. The actual compiler would probably only take a month or two (disregarding real optimizations) for a talented developer or two, but the runtime (assuming it doesn't share anything with PHP proper -- don't know if this does or not) would take much, much longer.

Doing it for Ruby or Python would be fairly straightforward to get running initially, but doing Perl<=5 would be impossible (for all cases) due to it being proven impossible to statically parse.
Glam Media Raises $50 Million In Private Equity At $750 Million Valuation
He explains his name here: Heh :) We're generally called microsofties. I'm a big fan of linux, in fact the first time I used Windows in a serious capacity was when I joined Microsoft (they hired me knowing that I knew nothing about their products). We still joke about it.

Seems fine to me.
I wish someone would invent some sort of C-like language that wasn't as complicated.

Maybe it could even compile itself on the fly to machine code to continually optimize itself!
I am sad to see Facebook helping to perpetuate PHP.

On the bright side though, even if HipHop yields a 50% speedup, it is unlikely to be faster than Python, Javascript V8, or LuaJit.

http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u32/chartbox.php?s=eNo9ktu...

edit

What's with the downvotes? I can't mention my opinions on php?
> from a "sane" language (PHP) to a less sane, but twice as fast language (C++)

C++ is much faster than PHP, not just twice as fast.
No, There's Still No Zune Phone
It is really easy if you already have experience with C++. Also, it is not very different from UNIX shell, and it is clearer than Perl, so I don't get why people complain so much about it.
[citation needed]

What evidence do you have that Wasabi is a toy? I seriously doubt you have any knowledge on the topic either way.
It's important to note that the above-linked code could be written in any language that has printf or something like it. That includes Lisp, Python and Haskell.

Of course, people who know those languages don't write things like that. I think it's due to pg's "Python Paradox"; I'm inclined to think outsourcing is actually easier with "smart" languages because the percentage of bad providers will be very low.
Sounds very promising. I've done OK over the years using MacPorts, but like the idea of not installing Yet Another Perl dist, etc.
Is there a moment to "clear" the H.264 issues? I have the understanding that the people who own the copyright are making plenty of money off of it and it quite a popular format. I don't see why they would give that up.
AOL should do everything they can to aquire GLAM, seems like GLAM has the business model in place that AOL is desperately trying to develop.

Who are other suitors?
Can't you just not look at the comments for two days?
Even *nix utilities have suffered the feature bloat problem. Many have so many option flags that they exhaust the letters of the alphabet, both upper and lower case, and move into the --wash-my-car-while-you-are-at-it styles. The saving grace is that for the most part, these obscure options are completely out of sight if you don't need them, but they do clutter up the man pages quite a bit.
How to Sell Ads Online. Simplify The Advertising Process (7 of 7)
Self-driving cars don't have to be safe in an absolute sense, just safer than human drivers. I think in some ways that is not a very high bar.
duly noted. thanks!
I don't think you quite understand how Wasabi works. Wasabi compiles VBScript (written mostly like normal VBScript with some conventions to ease the work on the compiler) to PHP. At least, that's how it originally worked. Now it compiles the same code to .NET IL which runs on Windows and Mono. They're not writing code in some obscure language.

If there's some company out there that doesn't want to hire people capable of writing their own compilers to more easily add cross-platform support to their software the guys at Fog Creek aren't going to want to work there anyway.