skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Slandering a startup with a substantial amount of funding whose clients apparently include Google & eBay through knowledge you have from a fluff article is the height of arrogance and lack of self-awareness. It's disrespectful commentary like yours that gives thoughtful skepticism a bad name.

Sorry, but when you throw out the word "bullshit" after spending 5 minutes analyzing the work of people who seem to genuinely want to make a positive difference in the world, you deserve ridicule. I stand by my reply and will take the karma hit since I see negative folks like yourself as poison to a community of entrepreneurs like HN.

People who have run startups know that the know-it-all who learns about their company in a 5 minute overview and says with authority "bullshit" are the types of people you quickly remove from your life since they are not going to provide any valuable, honest criticism.
I think it's even more meta than that.

There's "asking everybody you know how to do the bits of your job you're expected to know how to do", which is bad.

There's also "having a network of friends who are specific subject matter experts, and knowing which ones to ask in specific cases", which is _enormously_ powerful.

There's also a much smaller group of people who have such large and diverse social networks that they can ask pretty much _anything_ completely indiscriminately and get the right answer (look at jwz's blog for his "dear lazyweb" questions). If I had an opportunity to employ one of _them_, I'd jump at it...
Indeed. It's worth putting one's self into the shoes of the people in the article and thinking about what you would actually do. Unemployment at 57 and living in overpriced housing in an expensive area of the country doesn't seem like an unlikely fate for many hackers.
Trying to escape from Google Buzz: The Adventure Continues
ScaleWell offers $1,000, free office space for Chicago entrepreneurs
You know the "send in the puppet" trick for dealing with abusive customers? (Pretend the customer is talking to a puppet, your only job is to manipulate the puppet such that the customer and the business reach a mutually satisfactory conclusion. If the customer curses a blue streak at the puppet, no biggie, the puppet doesn't care.) If you feel like comment threads are getting you down, send in the puppet. Hah, silly trolls, spending all that time tearing into a puppet. The puppet doesn't care.
Can't you just have the YC alumni ban or temp ban people from HN when they post nasty comments? Seems like you accomplish two goals: (1) You don't have to read nasty comments about your writing and (2) you help slow the decline of HN. If it's a site wide policy and someone other than you is doing it, you'll probably be able to avoid accusations of censorship.

Of course, that only works if the comment falls into the obviously nasty category. I suspect the comments that annoy you the most fall into the subtlety nasty category.
In theory, the information a Haskell compiler has available should allow it to make better optimizations. Things like drastic whole-program optimizations aren't viable in C because the compiler can't guarantee safety and doing the optimizations by hand would render the code base completely unreadable. This is why, for instance, FORTRAN can easily outperform C for certain classes of program.

In practice, the overhead of supporting Haskell's other features means it's still generally slower than most popular compiled languages, though not by much. I have much higher expectations, however, for improvement in Haskell optimizers than I do for nontrivial static analysis for impure languages becoming viable.
Isn't that a bit like saying that it "can outperform equivalent assembly"?

No; as shown in the link, this work allows idiomatic Haskell to outperform idiomatic C. Obviously it's possible to write C which is a direct translation of the generated assembly, but such code would be nearly unmaintainable, and certainly very difficult to reason about.

And why can you not prove the equivalent C correct?

Proving the correctness of C code is possible, but (in my experience) significantly more difficult than for Haskell.

After all, you're doing that proof by hand either way. A Haskell compiler will only help you prove that your program is well-typed. If you're mutating buffers then you're in a monad like IO or ST and the the compiler will throw it's hands up and tell you that correctness is entirely your problem.

I don't mean that the compiler will automatically generate a proof for me, but that authoring a proof will be possible in practice -- as opposed to C, where it's possible in theory but nobody actually can.

I'm a bit confused about why you think operating within a monad causes problems for proving correctness; to my knowledge, verifying code which uses monads is no more difficult than code using any other data types.
TeamRebelde chat group - amigos.. ,amor,musica divercion concursos y mucho mas
I was hoping this would be about Bloom filters.
This is not true in general. It depends on how you are coding the buffer mutations. Doing operations in IO does not remove any type safety. If you are treating blocks of memory as arrays of untyped values, then you are removing type safety, but there is no reason to believe that the author is doing this.

Personally, I have found C libraries a lot easier to use from Haskell. A few "newtype" and Storabe instances later, you get a library that is impossible to make crash. You write the rest of your program in terms of that (in pure Haskell), and you are pretty much guaranteed enough safety to not segfault.

(I've specifically worked with a third-party financial analytics library that is quite crashy if you call certain functions in certain order. I used the type system to prevent myself from doing that, and now I can write complex problems that don't crash. Great success.)
It's number of visits.
If you look at Unique Visitors stats google.com still first:
http://bit.ly/8UDhHK.
What is real amazing about these stats is not the visits itself, but the growth. Thinking about the future, FB will pass google under every aspect.
Things like drastic whole-program optimizations aren't viable in C

Well, LLVM can do this, actually. If you treat C like a programming language instead of portable assembly, you can do interesting things with it.
Actually I'd say this has potential to replace power plants by localizing power generation. Most of the energy savings is probably from not having to transfer electricity through long distances. Localization usually has the trend towards more efficiency, as it is evident also in food production.
Hi,

I'm the author of the article mentioned.

It's a reasonable assumption to make that I'm just a shell with no knowledge that relies solely on my peers to prop me up and get the job done - however I think the level of network utilisation required if that were the case would be categorised as "abuse" and I would fairly quickly lose all my friends and colleagues.

The other thing to consider is that the network of peers I have available to me has been built up through sometimes years of social activity and sharing - do you really think my network would support me if we didn't have that mutual trust? I respect their knowledge and skills and they respect mine. That's why we're colleagues.

My peer network includes some of the smartest minds in my professional globally - you don't build up a network like that without having some skills and knowledge of your own to contribute back into the network.

What you describe is NOT a network but a ball-and-chain arrangement.

Finally - and I don't mean to boast but it needs to be said so we're clear - I'm well respected on my own merits as an experienced and knowledgeable professional independent of the wealth of external knowledge I have access to. Obviously I'm just talking for myself here so I can't substantiate any counter-claim that people who regularly access their peer networks probably ARE good at their job but I would like you to consider a more optimistic stance.
I'm not I am rendering graphs in flash.
Are low interest rate credit cards your credit card?
Phoenix Banking
TruWest Credit Union provides personal checking and savings accounts and great rates on mortgages and auto loans
Interesting. It's worked for Ron Conway, though maybe it only works when you have very high quality deal flow.

I couldn't get any sense of the terms with a cursory glance. How much do they invest? How much do they want for their investment?
My link empirically demonstrates that all 7(!) constructs behave differently, regardless of what foo.class says. I personally have been burned by the differences between them, so I'll continue to support people differentiating between them, even if the interpret lies.
http://rapgenius.com/7749
It may be infeasible to do all the effect analysis though. You have to reconstruct high level semantics. That's just not going to fly in general, though it will do well in some simple cases.
What would the consequences be if you dramatically amped up the censorship here? Certainly it would improve discourse at the expense of inspiring lots of hatred...
Am I the only person who's shocked by the idea that one of Scribd's developers was repeatedly taking down the website by pushing code live without testing it or understanding the queries it ran?

I guess maybe he's just exaggerating for entertainment value... It's good to see that he's sharing his mistakes for others to learn from, and going into detail on why things went wrong. However, it's really depressing to not see any attention paid to the root causes - WTF wasn't he testing his code?
This is why I love Foxtrot
The SheevaPlug dev kit is distribtued by Globalscale among others, and is a Marvell reference design ( http://www.marvell.com/platforms/plug_computer/ ). The GuruPlug looks like a nice boost in terms of connectivity, but I'm waiting for the version announced at CES this year with a 2.0 GHz processor ( http://gizmodo.com/5440702/marvell-plug-computer-30-the-tiny... ).
It might also inspire unrest à la reddit when the HD-DVD keys were posted to the site.
I disagree. I think the repetition is critical, at least for me, simply because I tend to apply more of messages I recieve again and again. On paper what you say makes sense(repetitive content = noise) but in practice there's still value in repeating certain messages.
These instructions are a bit outdated - the project skeleton can now be created using the "lein new" command.
Wasn't "Discovery" the big thing 3 or 4 years ago? Isn't that why bing is the decision engine?
Discovery means very little without context, and when you look at what Facebook is doing, it doesn't require for you to 'discover' what friends are doing, but just lets you 'know' what your friends are doing/seeing/etc.
worked for cuil
Probably I don't understand gambling world well enough: What is 'other side' to being professional poker player and sports bettor?
I for one, welcome our new Facebook overlords
Pre-owned games pose much of the same problem on the console market as piracy does on the PC market. The end result of both is the same: people play our games without a single bit of money ending up with the people who made the game. In the worst case, we end up paying a lot of money to keep servers online, while getting no money at all from the sale. In the worst case, we end up paying a lot of money to keep servers online, while getting no money at all from the sale.

I find it hard to believe that he's making this argument with a straight face. When someone pirates a game then you have two copies of the game online. When someone purchases a used copy of a game then, sure, the publisher doesn't get any more money, but the servers still have the same level of traffic on them.

This is like saying that selling a used car that's still under warranty is bad for the car manufacturers because they now need to maintain the car, even though it has a new owner.

If your original price can't cover the cost of the services that you've promised to provide then clearly you need to raise your prices.
The nature of some games is not conducive to replaying it. Games with story driven plots tend to lag when replaying it, although the experience may be worth the price of admission. For instance, I played through Bioshock once and thought it was worth the money. However, I have yet to replay it. I, for one, support this. This is content they could simply release as DLC for everyone, but they choose to give it out for free to people who buy the game new, making an incentive for users to buy new.

No matter how fun a game is, there's a certain segment of the gaming population that will trade it in after the first run through, and another segment who only buys games used to save money. I see no problem with companies monetizing this segment of the population.
Does this include gmail, docs, etc?
Caviar problem. See also: William Devaughn.
I don't know why, but gamma is one of the most confusing topics in all of image processing. Most software screws it up, and I'm not surprised at the results shown. Unfortunately while I applaud the awareness-raising, the explanation here left my head spinning, despite writing code for one of the apps he highlights as doing it right! If you're in the same boat, I'd recommend Poynton's Gamma FAQ:

http://www.poynton.com/GammaFAQ.html
> 400 years of brutal slavery and genocide inflicted on an entire race of God's chosen people?

You make it sound like the `God's chosen people' part is relevant to the moral discussion. If the Egyptians had been the slaves and Israelites the slave holders, would that change things?

What about if it was the Americans and their black slaves, a couple hundred year ago?

Would infanticide be justified then?

I don't even see how the Egyptians moral crimes are relevant. The party that is primarily punished is the only innocent one: children.

That's before we even consider whether the death sentence is ever justifiable.

> Two moral crimes, good sir, now who's to be the judge?

As the old adage goes, two wrongs, good sir, don't make a right.
Hrm.. I just tested out Gimp-2.6.8 and Eog-2.28.2 - both had wrong, although cool looking results :S
Eric Brasseur's Articles
There is something very wrong with this article. It has a publish date of Oct 2008, but then talks about the intel atom processor and nonsensically explains how apple tried to 'keep it broken'.
But according to wikipedia, the Atom processor wasn't released until Dec 2009.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Atom

Lots of other nonsense in this. Can anybody gleam what is going on here?
Ask HN: Help Refine this Idea for a Crowd-sourced Translation Site
Kudos to a great use of the Grooveshark API.

I once wanted to use their API in a class project where we had to make a web mashup. It took until 2 days before our deadline to finally get access; and we had since moved on. Since then I've been idly wondering what else I could use it for.
the explanation here left my head spinning

Then here's a simpler explanation:

We need to blend pixel values X and Y.

Normal image-scaling algorithms perform the operation (X+Y)/2, because this is fast.

However, the correct operation is ToNonLinear((ToLinear(X)+ToLinear(Y))/2), because X and Y represent a nonlinear scale, similar to how adding a 60db and 60db sound doesn't result in a 120db sound.
Are projects like Gimp and ImageMagick not yet aware of it, don't consider it a bug, just haven't gotten around to fixing it, or what? In some brief trawling through bugtrackers and mailing lists I haven't been able to find any discussion on the subject, but it's somewhat hard to search on variations of the widely used terms "gamma", "scaling", and "bug".
Common Lisp Pain
I already knew all this.
Thanks for posting that tidbit -- it's a nice way to separate yourself from the conversation. Really, we shouldn't feel attached to what we write (we are not our works) but it's difficult to fight that part of human nature. I think this is a clever, practical antidote.
In the company of escorts
Http://www.filehippo.com/download_seamonkey/
The primary reason for this problem is twofold:

1. People writing image scaling libraries are big on speed. Many, like libswscale, are intended for realtime video playback on systems without graphics overlay acceleration. They contain truckloads of shortcuts to cheat wherever possible in the name of performance.

2. A "correct" method requires one of two things:

A. Performing one LUT per input pixel to the tapfilter, plus one LUT per output pixel (see http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1142084). This completely eliminates any possibility of SIMD. Other LUT schemes are also possible, like LUT[pixelX][pixelY].

B. Converting the entire image to linear 16-bit colorspace internally, then converting it back. This adds a slow preprocessing (and postprocessing) step and halves the speed of image processing.

Since both have huge speed impacts, most people writing graphics libraries don't like to do them.

Oh, and standard GPU-accelerated overlays can't really do either of these.
You can add more than 1 Amazon account to a Prime account. For example, I go in with 3 other friends; we can all use our own accounts, split the $79 (making it $20 apiece), and get the free 2 day shipping. Truly it's awesome!
Not anymore…

http://www.urbandictionary.com/api.php
Next up:
Students create an ∞ mpg car after dividing by zero!
Please guys, read more carefully. He never claims that it releases "no emissions". He never said that it releases "no carbon". He said that it does not involve "carbon-releasing combustion". He specifically says that it releases about "half the emissions" of combustion, so there ARE carbon emissions. Nothing magically dissapears. There is less heat loss than with combustion reactions. Less heat loss = more energy density = less emissions per kW. This is fuel-cell 101.

His exact quote: "The ceramic core acts as an electrode. At high temperatures, a hydrocarbon fuel, ethanol, biodiesel, methane, or natural gas on one side of the cell attracts oxygen ions from the other. As the ions are pulled through the solid core, the resulting electrochemical reaction creates electricity. Though the technology consumes hydrocarbons, Sridhar says, it doesn't involve carbon-releasing combustion, so it emits only about half the greenhouse gases of conventional energy sources."
Comodo Time Machine System Restoration Software
Comodo Time Machine rescues your computer in the event of system crash, malware attacks or any other problems. Comodo Time Machine quickly and easily restores your computer..
Somewhat OT: is it just me or does anyone else find it utterly ironic that scribd, a site dedicated to helping people avoid dealing with the PDF browser plugin mess, is intentionally going through the trouble of converting their source document to PDF just so they can display it in their viewer?

There's dogfooding, and then there's this. I'm not sure what to make of it.
The approach that helped me is thinking in photons. 50% in pixel values is only 25% of the photons that 100% in pixel values represents (approximately). Linear light measures just means converting to photons before you do any operations, and then converting them back to the encoding.

I almost wish gamma was a more obvious encoding process, like gzipping a file, rather than a simple function. That would save a lot of conceptual pain.
This is why, for instance, FORTRAN can easily outperform C for certain classes of program.

Not quite. To quote the master:

<pengvado> gcc fails to optimize it because gcc has always sucked at arrays
<pengvado> that's *the* benefit of fortran

The benefit of FORTRAN is due to array and aliasing issues in C, not really whole-program optimization.
I try to be open minded; I try to appreciate the style; I try to pretend it's not just a glorification of criminality, immorality and shallowness, but with every song I listen, I get closer to the conclusion that it's the same goddamn piece of rap.

Would anybody care to prove me wrong?
It's hard to leave a mischaracterization of your ideas unanswered on a forum where people know you participate. I don't worry what people say about me on other sites, because I don't even know what they're saying. But here I do know, and everyone knows I know. Which means in effect someone can call me out here, by phrasing a comment in such a way that if I don't respond it seems like it's because I have no response to make.

I think perhaps getting rid of points will mitigate this problem though.
To relate the adjective "super" exclusively to speed, seems a tad shallow, no?
I hope my downvoters enjoy the beauty and art of "Bitches ain't shit but hoes and tricks / Lick on these nuts and suck the dick / Get's the fuck out after you're done"
they just use a "panel multi-sourcing" method. http://www.compete.com/resources/methodology/
Looks like Jason Fox is fated to go work for Big Blue in the future.
I think you are not listening carefully. 60 minutes said that "no emissions" was the holy grail, NOT that Bloom Energy achieved zero emissions. In fact, Bloom themselves talk about greenhouse emissions in their materials. 60 minutes is just playing the typical bait and switch game.

So, calm down a bit, dude.
I've been talking about this idea at startup parties for the last two years. Great conversation piece. I'm pretty psyched someone actually did it, and at the same time kind of disappointed you guys aren't looking at a site I made instead.

On the plus side, yet another real-life example for the "ideas are everywhere; it's all about execution" entrepreneurship file.
“Pop” means “shoot” and Wayne seems to be saying “we shoot so many people that you might mistake the frequent outbursts of our guns for the rapid popping of popcorn”

my only complaint about rap lyrics is the excessive use of over-exaggeration
Sounds like you are not open-minded at all, no matter how hard you try.

I tend to prefer rock, blues, and jazz, but there is definitely something to be appreciated in a lot of rap music. Tupac Shakur, Bone Thugz and Harmony, Notorious BIG, Wyclef jean... these are/were very talented and musical guys, and not all of their songs feature violence or misogyny.

Rap music, like any other kind of music, takes knowledge and experience to appreciate. When you understand why rap music is rap music, and what makes it different from blues and R&B, and how those forms evolved into rap, you'll start to appreciate the music.
I enjoy pop. But I find the lyrics behind rap to have a lot deeper and personal meaning.
Insanity in the software industry
I've been a TiVo subscriber for almost 7 years now and hope they're around for a lot longer. As a Cablecard user, I've given up on-demand and PPV in exchange for having my own set top box. The change to SDV will only make things worse. I'd hate to give up my TiVo in exchange for a box from Comcast. My TiVo has a nicer UI, better recording options, and allows me to stream Netflix.
China PLA officer urges new Internet control agency
Also: "eBay's boxes run on bio-gas made from landfill waste, so they're carbon neutral" - so at least in this case, they specifically say there are emissions, but the net emissions are zero because if they weren't using it as fuel, the same amount of carbon would eventually be released into the atmosphere as the waste degraded.
Part of the issue is that people have been trained by two decades of Photoshop and expect the results of the 8-bit algorithms. Gaussian blur for example looks very different in linear light, with light areas of the image blooming out over the darker. If you've spent years working with the 8 bit gamma space algorithms, that's a bug. Instead, I've ended up implementing both algorithms, usually with the more correct one labeled as 'defocus' or 'camera blur'.

Rescaling and in general resampling is a lot simpler. These days it's pretty inexcusable not to do it in linear space. Here's my own exploration of that problem from a couple of years back:

http://petewarden.typepad.com/searchbrowser/2008/08/why-font...
If You Didn't Write It Down, It Didn't Happen -- Take Notes
Borked Shift key or laziness? Where are the double-quotes coming from? ;)