skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
For example, I see you are a Perl hacker. In Perl, even my simple (42 + "foo") example results in "subtle loss of information."

Sure, but I don't call "+" addition, it's just Perl's "plus operator" which happens to be defined over numbers and strings.

Personally, I don't see why every language is trying to copy Haskell's monads. A monad is not some deeply important concept, it's just an abstraction that happened to be very useful in the context of Haskell's type system. Without Haskell's type system, it is not quite as useful, and it's possible that other abstractions would be better.
XHP rocks so fucking hard, it isn't even funny. It is just so much better than alternatives.

IMHO, It is the only PHP tool I use at facebook that is better than alternatives in other languages. I'm looking at you, django templates!

The notation perfectly represents the objects, with no cruft associated with object oriented programming. That is really rare. You could argue that the markup syntax is cruft, but it really helps code readability to have two types of syntax, for code and for markup.

$b = <span>quotes and variables</span>;
$a = <div>omg, I can't "believe" how easy these {$b} are</div>;
They do somewhat more I think - from the brief demo video it looks like content embedding is performed much better - both in terms of UI and functionality.

Also, Google's strengths in recommendation generation may make your "status stream" more relevant and interesting than Facebook's. Time will tell on this part.
This actually is a novel idea. And it saves space. Pack more deads per square meter.
I'd like to know how much he got for those patents before I pass moral judgement. As Calvin and Hobbes put it, the disturbing thing is not that every man has his price, but that the price is often so low.
I read his point to be "More harm is done trying to be fair, instead of acknowledging that life is unfair in ways we cannot change."
Rock Legend Van Morrision's website hacked
So writing software to allow someone to cause a server to return the string "Set-Cookie: " with the wrong unique ID after it is "conspiracy to commit wire fraud" now.

I don't like people that try to scam affiliates out of their money, but I also don't like the precedent that this sets. How long until the author of an open-source web server is liable for the child-porn someone serves with it?
Maybe I should have qualified that point with a "in this economy" ... I have a lot of very close friends who are photographers, videographers, florists, etc.–almost every bride is low-balling them and squeezing budgets.

I'm not saying some people won't pay $99 ... I just think its slightly above a "no brainer" price. Also, I don't think this qualifies as a "substitute" for a real (i.e. paper and ink) guestbook–most brides will still want that.
Sure... but I wish I could still read him sometimes. There is no blogger I enjoy to read these days (mostly they are too techinical...)
Which ones? That's a vague statement.
I don't know. You could equally argue (at least to a judge) that everything that can be coded in binary is actually an integer.
At <http://bloggingheads.tv>, their in-page flash video viewer offers 1.4X pitch-corrected playback -- but they may be accomplishing that by toggling to a second pre-accelerated video server-side.

It's crazy that more sites, and especially sites with lots of lectures like Google Video, don't offer this option.
I do like the variety of AMA posts on reddit, but the amount of crap to wade through in the comments is getting quite tiresome. They seem to be posted to HN a lot more lately also?

You can get an RSS feed of the subreddit here: http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/.rss
Great product idea!

But I have one recommendation that I think, though it would certainly take effort, especially if your company is mostly Mac programmers, would pay off bigtime. Offer hardware. Knock together an Atom-based system that comes preloaded with the software (obviously this would not be an OSX machine, a free stripped-down Linux distro would probably be a much better idea) that can be sold to the professional videographers or photographers, or even venue owners. This would open up the people that don't own Macs and, more importantly, the market of people uncomfortable with computers who wouldn't feel comfortable with investing this kind of money and importance in a software product and their computer.
Any pre-requisites? crypto noob here
And why should they? Their commitment is over. On the flip side the system should be setup in such way that a developer could quit or fall under the bus without serious implications for the business.
This is a big article, so I'm just going to pick out one piece of it:

> "If we do that to ourselves," Lanier says, "it'll be very hard or slow or impossible to change back. If the Internet gets stuck in place with something like permanent anonymity, that changes culture and personhood and society and culture forever. It's a big deal."

I think a good middle ground here is not anonymity, but pseudonymity. Someone with a pseudonym is still a person with a reputation and a single face. You can ban a pseudonym from a forum if that person is a useless troll. You can get to know other people by their pseudonyms.

And at the same time, pseudonymity gives people most of the good parts of the freedom that's usually associated with anonymity. People can speak more freely than they'd be able to do if they had to put their real name on everything. People who were abused as children and never talked about it to anyone can find support from friendly semi-strangers behind the mask of a pseudonym. People with unusual philosophical or political views can air them without worrying about becoming pariahs. People who are in some closet or another can speak with other people who understand. There's a lot of good that comes from pseudonymity. And yes, it is a huge change in society, that we have this additional kind of public identity; I just think it's a good change.
That is, it is impossible to generate malformed webpages while using XHP.

While the purist in me thinks this is great if everyone else uses it, the immense amount of productivity lost when I first started using kid templating (e.g. http://turbogears.org/about/kid.html ) really burned me on this whole concept.

Sometimes I really do want to make a quick test page without crossing all my i's and dotting all the t's. Importing non-perfect markup from a designer is a big pain, too, in this kind of templating system.

And, though it's unfair to say so, some companies do well enough without 100% valid XML markup:
http://blog.errorhelp.com/2009/06/27/the-highest-traffic-sit...
very, very cool. i can't wait to dig into this more... it looks like even the basic examples are cool, but there's lots of stuff under the hood waiting to be discovered.
If hardware were included, I think this would be perfect for the exact reasons you specified. The number of people comfortable enough with computers to deploy something like this for such an important task is vanishingly small when compared to the number of people who would pay a little extra to a videographer to bring a ready-made kiosk unit to the wedding.
I agree that there are some people well networked with VCs that are strong individual contributors. I think there are specific venture funds/investors who go out of their way to know such people (I mention two of them in the blog) but there are also many VCs that mainly know "future VP engs" - some of whom are happy to get their hands dirty, but most of whom want to manage rather then write code...
A lot of folks looked at it, went "Cool!" and hand wrote their own, buggy, insecure encryption software. Basically it didn't say enough (or, for that matter, very much at all) about library design, which Practical was much more about, and as a result there was a rash of one-offs that were trivially broken due to e.g. short circuiting equality comparisons, to pick something recent.
These are really great tips! :)
I started the podcasting program at Tulane med school after Katrina. The informal consensus then (late 2005, early 2006, until the present) was that 1.5x was about right.
Saving 14 bytes per request is something only a very few sites need to think about...

For the rest of us, clarity and semantically correct code are much more useful.
Yow. Would be less expensive to have a drill to make the hole with, then lower the coffin in, then to build the drill into the coffin.

Or to cremate.
What Do We Want? Our Data. When Do We Want It? Now
That's a lot of complexity. Pay structures for sales people tend to be reducible to a couple tables or a formula.

There's also a more subtle difference: a sale is a discrete event, so there is a known point at which we can determine the goals have been fulfilled. Software is a living thing -- its quality can only be inferred with time. What about bugs? Flexibility to adapt to changing business requirements. Ie: if I anticipate that we will need to change out component x so i don't tightly bind to it, how do I get compensated for my foresight, when this adds a minimal amount of overhead to my development practice?

By incentivizing the completion of objectives, you are asking for the buildup of technical debt. The objectives of a salesperson (not customer relationship manager or marketer) are necessarily short-term. The objective of a healthy development organization (as I see it) is to consistently produce high-quality software that meets business objectives in a predictable and transparent way.

Programmer productivity structures almost always have or create the development goal of "meet short term objectives quickly", which is a kiss of death for long-term growth and programmer satisfaction once you have to deal with the organic mess all of the shortcuts have created.
Here is a link that links directly to the video:

http://www.justin.tv/clip/256d3b4ba66875ae

The interview starts at 8:40
This is a worthy cause, but I am skeptical. For one thing author has neglected engineering debt - it's far too easy for me to add features by sacrificing code quality or worse yet design quality (even adhering to the coding standards). There should be a way to measure engineering debt and take into account. One idea I have here is that a piece of code should have an owner that has incentive to keep code in good order, and that owner would accept money from developer who is making changes to compensate for the damage - if a change requires two week to cleanup a smart code owner would charge 2.2 weeks, thus coming out ahead and providing incentive for the developer to do a better job. But then the problem is that each piece of code becomes a monopoly with extortionist prices. There are two ways to deal with monopolies - regulate their prices or introduce competition (by direct action if needed).

The other problem is that this may get quite expensive. Why should a business pay more when it could pay less?

Nevertheless it would be interesting if somebody tried this.
I believe most countries have a minimum depth that bodies have to be buried at. That is going to be hard to achieve with these kind of coffins.
This seems like a great way to make the software industry more like the sales industry; short-term gains at the expense of long-term relationships. (Has a sales person ever made you want to have a long-term relationship, or have they wanted you to buy something "right now"?)

There is only so much time in a day, and that time can be spent in certain ways. You can implement a new foobarbaz feature, or you can write some tests to ensure that the gorchquux you wrote yesterday works correctly. The tests don't really add any value, right, because the feature is already there. Just add the next feature, because the user can see that (and now you get $200,000!)

The problem comes after repeating this cycle a few times. With no design upfront and no ongoing effort to make the codebase maintainable, eventually there will come a feature that you just can't add. Moving something out of the way will knock the whole pile over. Changing one line in the config file will require your newly-hired team of 10 testers to work overtime. You will be so encumbered by your technical debt that you can't add new features, you can't fix bugs, and you can't get the codebase into a state where you can do those things.

The only solution then is to redo everything. (Remember Netscape after the big rewrite? Neither do I...)

Lately, I have been on an "overengineering" kick, and I don't regret it at all. As the requirements change, my software can quickly adapt, without becoming less clean or maintainable, and without taking much of my time. This means that my software has lasting value instead of the usual "it solves my exact problem right now".

Before I type anything into the editor, the thought in my mind is, "how can I make this require less code and less developer attention later". Right now, I have plenty of time. Who knows what I'll be up to in a few years when the foo system needs that new feature. (Usually people plan the other way; I'll do this later, I'll have plenty of time tomorrow. Every time I've said that to myself, I've been wrong. So I've stopped planning like next time, I really will have time to do it right later. I won't, so I'm going to do it right now.)

The incentive structure outlined in the article encourages the opposite. It's already very difficult to "do things right". Paying someone money to not do things right is not going to make it any easier. The result will be software that is even worse than what we have now; and it's well-documented that most software is pretty bad. Shudder.
> Do you mean "we, the people" or "we, the people who think in terms of Nash equilibria"? ;)

The latter, of course. WE ARE A NEW PEOPLE! WE WILL PREVAIL!

More seriously, I don't care about how big the company is either, as such -- but I do worry about a company that gets so big and so diversified that it may become anticompetitive and stifle innovation. Remember when Microsoft had the power to hold back innovation, and we were stuck with IE6 for years and years? Didn't that just suck?

Google is being a lot better about this, mind you. They seem to genuinely care about interoperability and making it possible for competitors to beat them by being better. And they've got good products and smart people and a non-broken management structure. I feel good about Google. Nevertheless, a Google-dominated web is something to worry about. I hope that there are always viable alternatives. Not because I think Google is evil and corrupt, but because I worry that they could become so.
The $200,000 should be for documentation, then, not features.
Sadly, developers also have a history of being able to game the system a lot better than sales as well, partially because of the measurement problems pointed out in the article, and such a system usually ends in failure.

Also, the bounty scheme has largely failed in the open source world, perhaps because they bounties never saw $450,000, and I personally doubt the model could be effectively applied to an even smaller team.

Sure, many people would like to have more money, but sadly there is a lot of devwork that is of little 'financial value' that has to be done and that would surely suffer with such a system in place, driving the overall quality lower as it doesn't create a sense of improving the product, instead pushing for being awarded the largest or best bounty.
I'm guessing the reason RSS isn't cracked down on more is because not enough people are using it. That makes cracking down on it not worth the trouble.
I tried all three of my blogs, personal, tech and gardening and got three different answers. I'm definitely a T but all others are up in the air. For what it's worth, I float back and forth between INTJ and ISTJ. My personal blog was ENTJ, my tech blog was ISTJ and my gardening blog was ESTP. That last one seemed really odd and I dug in a little further.

It appears that my gardening blog has been hacked at some point and literally hundreds of links for viagra and other fun stuff has been added to my page. No wonder the TypeAnalyzer thought I was a doer. Now I'm off to try and fix it.
i'm not quite sure an interview about me is HN-worthy so I am not upvoting this. dont want to give the impression that i had anything to do with posting this here
Then why post it here? "It could exist in a future phone at some point, it doesn't involve you. But here's a link, for you to read." If I shouldn't care, then why should I care?
it is indeed one of the coolest things i have used. the fact that you have all the HTML stored as objects and available for manipulation makes all kinds of crazy post-processing (just before rendering) possible.
Why should it matter that they're physically indistinguishable? Would it be more excusable then?

Caste is just another uneducated, thoughtless distinction to discriminate against other people.

Caste is as correlated with cultural identity and upbringing in India as religion, nationality, and skin color are in other parts of the world.
I'm going to give it a try, simply because of this: Facebook Lite site was written entirely with XHP.
Michael Furdyk - Millionaire at 17, now helping people with TakingITGlobal
It would actually probably be a good idea to keep those ribbons around, with links to the story of the CDA. An awful lot of people don't realize that the law passed with lots of support from people who are, inexplicably, still in office. Even when it was unanimously struck down by the SCOTUS with an uncharacteristically strong decision warning the legislators to not even think about trying such a law again, they immediately did so and continue to do so on a regular basis, suffering no ills from it. In discussions of the possible involvement of the FCC and other government bodies in the future of the Internet, net neutrality discussions and the like, it would be beneficial for everyone involved to have a strong understanding of the CDA and its stillborn children, and knowledge of the Internet censorship laws that keep being passed on a regular basis (but struck down by the courts once someone has enough money to fight them... I've lost count of how many times "virtual child pornography" has been made illegal and then failed the judicial test).
Probably as soon as someone creates a web server especially for child porn, with a list of features designed expressly to help child porn traffickers, and marketed as the best child porn server out there.

I'm not thrilled about this either, but this guy didn't write this software for any other purpose or market it for any other purpose.
This is a well intentioned idea with horrible consequences.

Suppose 3 UI changes go out. How do you decide how much each increased users? Remember that money and ego are on the line.

Perhaps one was trying to drop support calls and the other increased users. Users went up, support calls stayed the same, and the team trying to drop support calls claims that they would have succeeded had the number of users not gone up. How do you resolve that?

You thought that developers saw QA as a roadblock before? Wait until they see QA keeping them from the check they think they are going to get!

And what about the developer with a half-baked UI change to improve conversion which is going to suck. How do you gently break the news that you're not even going to let the developer try to get that dangled reward?

I see no end of the potential for conflict. If I worked in an organization that announced a policy like this, I'd start shopping my resume around. Because I can see the pain coming and would like to avoid it.
Google's Guide to Reducing the Filesize of HTML Documents
seems to me that if they went to the trouble to make it understand xml syntax and error out on invalid code, they should have just made it auto-close tags. on pages where there are heavily nested divs and other things, auto-closing the tags would make the code smaller while still generating valid xhtml and not bothering the developer with such trivial things.

echo <div><strong><em>blah;
HN Tools: Search HN user tweets/trends with Sparse.ly
It cuts the other way, too. If someone tells me, "I must have a diamond" then I know that person values her friends' thoughts or her appearance to strangers over her own rational thoughts. Not interested. (Alternatively, she has no rational thoughts. Also bad.)

It sounds quaint and old-fashioned, but a man should give everything to a woman he hopes to marry, and demand nothing in return, without worrying about whether or not it's sensible. It doesn't make sense until you realize that she only wants to do the same for you. She will commit to unconditional satisfaction of your wants.

This makes life seem even more meaningless than I usually think it is. One person does whatever he thinks the other person wants, in exchange for that in return. A silent existence devoid of interaction, sacrificing your happiness so that the other person is happy to sacrifice their happiness.

All that's left after this is reproduction. Is that all human relationships are about?
you're full of shit. my stack supports oauth and atom. havent seen the need to do anything with pshb yet, but if i do i'll support it too.
"Without Haskell's type system, it is not quite as useful, and it's possible that other abstractions would be better."

Sure! I'd be happy to agree with this statement.
One last feature of XHP, which has been invaluable to us at Facebook, is that you can define your own elements which can condense a complex component into a simple XHP tag. XHP has a rich collection of declarations which let you define new elements, configure their expected attributes, as well as describe their content model.
I prefer to disagree. Monads are an important concept [1], that crop up in a lot of different places. (Or express differently: That help to better organize your code in a lot of situations.)

Functors and pointed functors and arrows are also quite important.

[1] Though not the most important one.
Has a sales person ever made you want to have a long-term relationship, or have they wanted you to buy something "right now"?

I've had sales people try to make me want to have a long-term relationship. Of course they were selling themselves at the time. ;-)
I presume that integration will be what they are aiming at with their operating system.
I read this post and the post that it was critiquing and both came to the same conclusion: Knowing the who/what/when/where throughout history is only useful when understanding the Why as well.
Those interested in the art of human rationality should check out these two excellent sister sites:

http://lesswrong.com (click on the about page, and then start with the post sequences linked next to "about", not with the most recent posts)

http://www.overcomingbias.com
There seems to be a dichotomy between the font sizers favored by designers, particularly of Wordpress themes, and most readers: the former like smaller font sizes that look better when taken as part of the whole graphical packages, while the latter like larger fonts. I remember Joel Spolsky saying somewhere that he thought part of the reason Joel on Software succeeded in attracting visitors was/is because of its large font relative to many other software development websites. He was joking—but only in part.

Incidentally, the small font size defaults caused me to buy the CSS upgrade at Wordpress for The Story's Story at http://jseliger.com . You tell me if it looks better than most other Wordpress blogs you've seen based the size of its font.
Introduction to the wire-speed processor and architecture
That's what happens if you teach the facts devoid of the relations. The history classes where they taught relations I got something out of. The others are just useless footnotes in my education.
As somebody well-versed in Haskell, I can attest that a dynamic type system does look different to me than no type system.

With a dynamic type system you get your errors at least at runtime. With no type system your program just behaves wrong.