skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
1.HTTP uses a TCP connection. For that matter so does SMTP and IMAP and the proposed REMAP.

Yes, of course. He is not claiming that TCP is bad, but rather that it is too low-level. i.e. One wants an application protocol (e.g. HTTP, SMTP, IMAP) rather than a transmission protocol (e.g. TCP).

The HTTP verbs should be sufficient for email, so why not leverage them?

It's not yet clear that people prefer tags to folders. After all, monkeys don't expect a banana to be in two boxes at once.

Heh, dare I reply? Tags can be used as pigeonholes, and this can be enforced if desired. But why? Tags are so much more useful because they are not pigeonholes.

Here is a classic example:

Does my app config go in a system directory or an app directory or a config directory? the executables? the daemon? the log files?

The classic approach is to put system-level config files under /etc, log files under /var/log, executables and daemons in various locations, etc. Some newer approaches (HomeBrew, GoboLinux, etc) keep everything organized per-application.

Instead, keep every file in the global folder / namespace. Tag the executables as exe, the log files as log, config as cfg, and also tag everything with the app's name. Possibly the version, etc.

A file is uniquely identified by its tags and its name. Any combo can be used, so long as it doesn't already exist.

You don't have to make painful decisions about the unique place in the tree that a piece of information should exist. Just tag it appropriately and move on. The tag system could even create an optimal concrete hierarchy based on tag and tag association metrics if needed.

But the server will have to know it to send it. Granted, IMAP is for receiving, and SMTP is for sending, but something in the chain has to know MIME.

I'm not sure if this is GoF, but this sounds like the classic gateway pattern. You put MIME gateways at the edges of the new email network. MIME-only servers must go through the gateways.
It's a loaded question. What's high-functioning about persistent high unemployment, for example?:

http://yglesias.thinkprogress.org/wp-content/uploads/2009/05...

And how do you intend to do objective comparison on standard of living? How do you weight the unemployment figure above, for example, in such a measure?
True. On the other hand, with things like i2p, encrypted connections between private servers, and the ubiquity of cheap hosting services, individuals do have the option of easily establishing their own secure communication channels.

I doubt it will erode Google's market share or traffic much (or at all), but only because the average computer user is neither informed nor interested in privacy and security.

But it's still not a good idea to over-centralize the internet in principle. My own Google usage has fallen off a lot lately just for the sake of not relying on a single service for too much.
At least there's some hope:

http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flashplayer10/features.ht...

"Flash Player 10.1 abides by the host browser's "private browsing" mode, where local data and browsing activity are not persisted locally, providing a consistent private browsing mechanism for SWF and HTML content. Private local shared objects behave like their public variants as long as Flash Player is in memory and local shared objects created during private browsing are removed when returning to public browsing mode. Existing shared objects are preserved but inaccessible until private browsing is turned off. Libraries in the Flash Player cache, like the Adobe Flex® framework, are unaffected by private mode. Supported in Firefox, Chrome, and Internet Explorer. No developer action required."
So your argument is that it's ridiculous?

Why can't people buy their way to be being hear, if I own a newspaper can I write editorials about the candidates and issues? If so, why do we only allow the extremely wealthy to do that? You're disenfranchising people who have some money, but not enough to own media from being able to be heard. How is buying advertising not a public forum?

Do you have problems with PACs?

If we can't trust our politicians to make small changes to reduce their power, how the hell can you trust them to make fundamental changes to the system?
A lot of people brag about their polyphasic sleep schedule, but what they don't mention is all the times they doze off and the massive sleep deprivation they're in denial over. And yes, it's possible to "function" with chronic sleep deprivation for years at a time--that's what sleep apnea does.
And the difference is what? Living under the same roof? Making babies? I'm asking seriously.
And how many raised their hands when he asked if their children would have a lower standard of living?

Perhaps he simply had a reserved audience.
Maybe you would be happier if you chose to use the site differently?

It seems to me that a lot of the complaints about the voting system revolve around how it impacts what gets on "the front page" and what stays there. I have been a member here for a few months and only very recently figured out how to intentionally pull up "the front page" (I'm quick like that). I typically click on the "new" option and refresh that several times during my visit. Then I read what gets my interest. I'm not much of a crowd-follower and never have been. It really doesn't mean much to me if something is "popular". So what? Lots of things that are popular are pure dreck -- which is apparently the basis for why the voting system is being tweaked to begin with.

Off the top of my head, I don't know of a comparable site with comparable size which has tackled a similar problem. It seems to me HN is a victim of its own success in that these problems apparently arise out of how much traffic/membership has grown. Either the people that run it will learn and grow and adapt or it will hit a fail wall and seriously degrade. I've left some sites which hit that wall and which I felt were no longer worth participating in. In the cases I know of, a huge limiting factor was the head honcho. My hope is that the experiments being done here will yield good results, resolve the problem(s) that inspired them and HN can go on to new, grander levels of success.

Oft quoted remark in some forum I used to go to: "Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell." My hope is that HN continues to have goals other than just "growth". Presumably, these irritating experiments are being done in the name of keeping some of the qualities which got HN here to begin with and are a search for a means to keep the baby but dump the bath water.

Here is to hoping it all works out.
I'm always glad to see developments in energy monitoring, but every time I see a tool that monitors a home's power meter it just leaves me wanting to see more.

It seems that what we really need is a cheap electrical socket monitoring device so that we can get real-time data about each appliance in our house read out to a central web-app. It doesn't seem very useful to know your overall electricity usage - your energy bill tells you that. If we're going to do something about using too much power, we need to understand what the culprits are.

I know that there are socket monitors on the market, but why do they all have expensive screens and buttons and stuff? It seems that they should be 10 times cheaper and feed their data straight to a web-app.
http://www.thinksketchdesign.com/2009/02/11/design/green-des...
There is a limit on how much people can donate to campaigns, all of the recent hubub has been about corporations acting on their own without coordinate with a campaign.

How do the wealthy vote with their money? They are not buying votes, they are merely trying to influence other voters -- hence it's a free speech issue.
The count in the loop slows it down quite a bit:http://tips4php.com/2010/01/best-way-to-traverse-trough-an-a...
Foreach is easier to write, and faster to run :)
This is exactly why you invest your money into a string of growing companies or lend it temporarily to young families buying their first house.

Of course, that mechanism is in trouble the minute the market starts to contract or collapse.
PG constantly fucks around with the voting process to do things other than the obvious time-decay voting system where fresh content and fresh votes get a temporary boost.

Recently it's seemed like someone on the backend is manually demoting posts from the front page. That's better than the old policy of deleting them and sometimes hell-banning the poster, but it's still pretty anti-community.

Something that's gone on for a long time is that you'll get your account disenfranchised -- the voting buttons all still show up, and your votes get registered (can't vote again), but the points don't get added: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1029776
> When you need to pull an address out of a web page, itertools does absolutely nothing to make that easier, nor does any other functional programming technique.

I'd say an approach like "iterating through all nodes, filtering for the one(s) you want" is quite functional. Add lazy iteration to that, so you're only parsing/consuming as much of the document as necessary, and on-demand, and you've got a really nice, _functional_ solution.

[edit: toned it down a little.]
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I don't think that pg's goal is growth for growth's sake:

"When we launched in February 2007, weekday traffic was around 1600 daily uniques. It's since grown to around 22,000. This growth rate is a bit higher than I'd like. I'd like the site to grow, since a site that isn't growing at least slowly is probably dead. But I wouldn't want it to grow as large as Digg or Reddit—mainly because that would dilute the character of the site, but also because I don't want to spend all my time dealing with scaling."

http://www.paulgraham.com/hackernews.html
Ask HN: New features for my Excel Add-In product ?
Hi,

Back in the mysts of time I asked for feedback on my new Excel Add-In product and the response was awesome.

Things are going well but I am looking for new features, new problems to solve with my next release. Of course I've had discussions with my users but I thought some of you might have good suggestions also.

I'm looking for a new problem the add-in can solve.

www.querycell.com is the product url.

All suggestions appreciated.
That one gets me every time. And they say Eternal Darkness was the first game to mess with the player.
I like Lessig and I like this article but does this really belong on Hacker News? Articles about technology are fine; articles about technology and business are okay; articles about technology and politics are okay, but this story ...?
Thank you. But I suspect you have misunderstood me to mean the opposite of my point (ie I knew that and I agree with you). :-D
if you think science can be wrong you're the one who misunderstands it. science can not be wrong. science also can not be right. science provides us with more or less consistent interpretations of sensory data. Newton was not proven wrong. his predictions were subsumed by a more general case.

likewise if we discover a physical phenomenon that violates our current understanding of thermodynamics we don't throw that understanding out. anything that succeeds it needs to explain all the data that it explained + the new stuff.
There's always Jython for occasions like this one...
If it makes you feel any better, I never could have guessed this would get so many votes. I've just had a hellacious week so far, came across this in my email, and thought a couple of other folks might enjoy it too.
Well, I spend 8 hours a day with him and frequently talk to him in the middle of the night. Anecdotal, technically, I guess.
Like the mainstream media supporting the "Saddam Hussein Weapons of mass destruction" line. Well that turned out to be true, so no problem there.
Ermmm.... I was just seeing if you would catch on to it? :-P
The speed of light is exactly 299,792,458.0000000 (and so on) meters per second. This is because this is actually the definition of the meter now, so my string of "0"s that are significant digits is justified. 299,999,999.999... is therefore superluminal and you are correct.
Zero One Infinity Rule
This may be the funniest thing I've read on HN. Will take a lot to top this one.
Exercise for the student -- find the contradiction here:

The point of the article was that creating a sufficiently powerful language, that doesn't offer easy ways[1] of extending the syntax, does not warrant the criticism that the language has 'too much syntax'.

Evidently, you are as inexperienced with DSLs as the author.

Of course you can "do it all" in any Turing-complete language, but theoretical possibilities are often much less interesting than practical impossibilities. In Python or Java, creating new syntax is so hard it might as well not be possible.

Insufficient knowledge is probably why you mistook the sense of the statement you are replying to by 180 degrees.
Dumb question. What exactly is the difference between a hell-banning and a normal banning?
Is it worth all that trouble just to keep the domain name?
I find Prototype.js to be really depressing, and one of the most ironically named libraries ever. The whole point of it is to bludgeon Class-based bullshit into the only pure Prototype-based language anyone uses. It's named after the concept it's designed explicitly to stamp out!
Life's a Beach: Google Summer of Code and the Abelian Sandpile Model
I don't really disagree with any of that as such, but it doesn't really mesh with the common usage of the word "faith", especially on something as utterly fundamental as the Second Law of Thermodynamics. From a standpoint of Bayesian confidence, even a cursory understanding of physics would probably lead one to assign the Second Law a likelihood of one minus epsilon, where epsilon is taken to mean roughly "the likelihood that I'm crazy and hallucinating this whole thing".

As an aside, if you're going to be talking about Bayesian probability, you should know better than to call "100%" confidence just "very difficult"...
Disgusting, and telling of how un-savvy those VPs were.

Yeah, and in the middle of layoffs too! We could've kept 2 more engineers employed with that money. (One department voted that everyone take a 10% pay cut instead of laying people off. And yes, this is while those resource shenanigans were going on!)
jeff18, I would be interested in hearing your rebuttal to Myth 5. I agree with you that Adobe is not pushing HTML 5, but it does still seem to be uncertain just how much support Adobe will give HTML5 via Flash and their other products.
Heh.... so can we start calling this "votegate"?
The first step to asking for more money is to save enough to be able to do so.
There's no set "rules" about being polyamorous, it's more of a community, but it's a community that doesn't include fundie Mormons and probably never will. They wouldn't fit in--polyamorous types are usually progressive vaguely-hippie types and the fundie Mormons are very traditional and quite frankly sexist (and don't always respect age of consent, etc., which polyamorous people do).

A lot of people have the idea that any type of polygamy is inherently sexist, and while that's true for traditional polygamy, it's also true for "traditional" monogamy. The historic Mormon polygamy that the fundamentalists get arrested for practicing was indeed sexist, but so were the 19th century monogamous marriages practiced by most other Americans. Contemporary monogamous marriages aren't nearly as sexist, and there's no reason contemporary polygamous arrangements--i.e. polyamory--are necessarily sexist, either.

Polyamory (and the various "open relationship"/non-monogamous lifestyles related to it) are less tied to the ritual of marriage and are often more equitable to women than traditional polygamy. I actually know some polyamorous people who live under the same roof and make babies, for instance. But some people just choose not to mind that much when their partners have sex with someone else, as long as it's safe and consensual. As I said, there's no set rules, other than it has to be safe, sane, and consensual for all parties involved. Which is worlds away from fundamentalist nutjobs in Utah marrying dozens of 13 year old girls.
FFS This is "sales 101".

Know your client before the "get to know you" meeting. Anticipate. Try to outline reasoned solutions to their problems from their perspective before the RFP request.

Solution latency, or lack there of, even in a "rough form" is a deal maker/killer.

As an aside, who actually uses briefcases anymore?
Could he just mentor a replacement for a portion reduction in his equity instead of him taking a major role in the company? a new partner would get the ball rolling. He would still be available for consultation but out of the business loop and this way he could continue doing his Arch. study.
Regarding "CPU hogging," there is nothing wrong with a graphics-intensive program using the CPU -- in fact, this is necessary to continually refresh the screen.

It only gets out of hand if the software does not give time to other applications who request it. In Chrome, if you minimize the window or switch tabs, then the CPU usage returns to normal. So, I do not classify this as "hogging." It would be interesting to see what happens if a second CPU-intensive task is running simultaneously, but note that here different users will have different preferences on priority.
Nitpick: Doesn't Lua use a prototype-based OO system?

Insofar as Lua can really be said to have an OO system, that is.
There are some good points, but:

1. HTTP / HTTPS - please don't... There are stupid/broken transparent proxies in many places that will effectively block this protocol. Also custom TLS connection gives some hope for domain-specific certificates instead of ip-specific - there is enough problem with them in HTTPS as it is.

3. People still don't know how to set the encoding (or what the encoding is) and will happily send you Greek in latin1 or something equally silly.

4. Would it really work for mailing lists where conversations naturally fork into many branches?

5. IMAP supports labels... even if it's crazy number-based labelling where every client needs to set its own names for the labels. We'd just need to make it not suck this time ;)

So it's not all that bad in IMAP - there are many areas where we can do worse by accident. But yes - it would be nice to have server-side text searching...
The approximate budget for the intelligence community (the collection of sixteen agencies dealing with intelligence as part of the federal budget) is something in the neighborhood of $75 billion. Signals intelligence gets over 90% of that budget. The NSA is the largest of the signals intelligence agencies (the other ones being the National Reconnaissance Office and the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency).

So let's assume that the NSA gets the lion's share of nearly $70 billion, say $30-35 billion, as its annual operating budget. It also gets access to things money can't buy: classified technologies, crytographic techniques, secret knowledge of physical infrastructures, etc.

Google, on the other hand, has no (or extremely limited) access to state secrets (either those of the U.S. or of foreign countries), and it has an annual income of about $6.5 billion--one fifth that of the NSA.

The NSA doesn't utterly dwarf Google, but on the other hand they have some substantial advantages that Google simply cannot match.
Doomed industries have to stick together.

OK, that's totally snark. Let me try again: the traditional media industries are very incestuous in both intellectual and business senses. For example, the publishers' pretty much sole marketing resource is trying to get books approved by tastemakers like the NYT reviewers or to get them into the best sellers lists maintained by, again, the NYT. In return, they spend most of their advertising budgets doing big media buys at the same tastemakers.

Both sides think this is totally above board and would never influence reviewing decisions. Everyone knows that crass lucre only affects massive multinational companies in bad industries like pharma or cigarettes rather than good industries like journalism or media, after all.

Relatedly, both publishers and traditional media are mostly missing the boat with their online strategies, because they're wedded to the physical distribution model, the cost structure they've built to support it, and the revenue models dictated by that cost structure. They're largely resistant to disruptive innovation on top of that, despite the fact that it would present absurdly huge advantages to their business. (For example, upwards of 80% of sales of most books happen within a 3 month release window. That's insane for content that does not rot, but the publishing industry puts out so many books that it is impossible to physically stock them all, and the large channels rotate at a dizzying speed. If they were to embrace online distribution, aggressive crosspromotion, etc, they could still be selling appreciable amounts of books written in 1986. That is pretty close to free money -- they've already got the rights to the book and have long since paid their sunk costs on the book. There is just a massive organizational and cultural failure to take bold steps like this.
Well, it depends on the cost. It is our corporation's name, and we have printed promotional materials. The biggest issue is that we have thousands of members using our DNS servers that are using the domain. Changing it would require them to change their DNS settings, or have their site go offline. A big pain to say the least.
You're assuming that I don't have other clients. That's the #1 difference between someone who makes money, and someone who works at the mercy of their employers.

> 1. Sure, but bartenders have people skills

No they don't. They serve drinks in very loud, noisy bars where everyone is drunk. That's the kind of bartender that makes $75k+

Furthermore, so do I. That's how I charge $150/hr.

> 2. According to last month's data, our pool of potential employees has 10.5% unemployment, and you can afford to live on food stamps?

That's begging the question whether or not I am employed. I am employed. I have other clients. I do not live on food stamps. I am currently making my asking rate on a regular basis and have been for nearly a decade, or else I would not be asking for it. If I were not able to make this rate, I would lower it. This is very simple logic, although it may not be if you are viewing it through the prism of desperation. REJECT the prism of desperation. It will handicap you for the rest of your professional life.

> 3. There are many talented and desperate ways to reject your application, but you've probably heard them all.

Really? The only one I've heard is "we can't afford you.", or "we found someone cheaper", which really is not my problem at ALL.

You need to get those cojones, or you will be continue to be taken advantage of. Business people actively LOOK for weak willed developers. But - believe it or not - they respond positively to developers with balls, because they are so unaccustomed to hearing it. This is a basic tenet of human nature that many developers do not realize because they are too busy preoccupying themselves with machine logic.

At some point, you need to tell yourself that you've learned enough fucking machine logic. You're not going to be writing assembly language for these people. You're building applications (dev and integration work, basically) that will make them money. That frees up your brain to think of other things like human interaction and how to sell yourself.

Humans are not machines. Business is not a logical process. It's human interaction. When money changes hands, it's from one human (or group of humans) to another, no matter how deep the abstracted technical logic has been built to be.
Hellbanned users don't know they are banned. They still see their own posts and comments, but no one else does.