skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm not an American so I have not witnessed the exact situation being outlined in the article, but as I was born in the Australian countryside and grew up in the closest thing that Sydney has to a ghetto, I do think I have a grasp on seeing this from the inside, and I think I've seen the kind of people who largely result; the best summary to me is "Ignorant, and proud of it".

I find the notion of organising a social structure around making these people feel better about their uselessness abhorrent, I find the notion that those distributed amongst them capable of greater things being sentenced to living their lives in the immediate presence of these people, as a close-knit good old fashioned "community" as a pretty good argument for euthanasia.

And in case I come across too much someone swimming deep in the dunning-kruger effect, if I am or were afflicted with the same unfortunate situation with regards to my abilities as the group in question, I would still not wish that anyone who had the capacity to make the world better ought to be held back on account of not wounding my pride. I live in the world after all. Feudal serfs had it a lot worst than the modern ignorant and proud of it, and I believe this is largely because the world is a much better place on account of the very meritocratic values the original article decries.
the data model here is actually more powerful than just map reduce.
TomTom in Amsterdam is hiring. Looking for junion and senior Java/Javascript/Flex/Scala/Lucene/GridGain/Hadoop/Mahout folks to work on next-generation location services. Ping me at eric.bowman@tomtom.com.
Post the link. Add an HN comment.
Why do they have to be recent graduates?
Thanks for your input, but I don't buy this argument. Public discussion and actual working software releases are two completely different things. In addition, considering cash on hand, I expect Microsoft to innovate and bring new ideas to market, not simply re-invent the status quo within their own platforms.
This is a nice article. I've felt like there's been too much language advocacy and (inevitably) bashing on HN recently. And it's direct, too, not just incorrectly inferred. (As the Perl guy in the beginning of the article did when the author spoke about ML.)
4 lines of C in 60 min? He must need to learn how to type.
You're making a common mistake by assuming that a person would buy an iPad (or anything) for one specific reason and that it must be the best possible option for that purpose. People don't actually work that way.

For instance, you say it doesn't replace a portable music player, but that is only going to dissuade people who are specifically looking to buy a portable music player that fits in their pocket, in which case Apple will gladly sell them one. To everyone else it is still a potentially positive feature.

Likewise for everything else. Each supposed failing only matters to a fraction of the potential audience, and then to a variable degree. The degree to which readability in direct sunlight matters to a person is a function of how much they intend to read in direct sunlight. I don't know about you, but most of my reading happens indoors, at night, by lamplight.

an interface so superior...every iPod since has stuck with it

Not true. The Shuffle and Touch models, along with the iPhone, have never had scroll wheel interfaces. The scroll wheel was an exclusive feature of the iPod, but it was not the singular force behind its success.

the iPhone had a killer feature - a mobile web browser that actually worked

The iPad has this same browser on a larger screen and with better performance. That alone is a fairly compelling feature for people who might otherwise buy a netbook primarily for web-browsing.

It doesn't support the codecs that 99% of the video files people view today are encoded with

Is there data to back up that claim? It seems a bit...exaggerated.
Surprising Facts about HIV/AIDS in 2010
I would not look to what societies spend energy on as a definition of value. There's a wisdom of crowds, but there's a folly of crowds too.

If your perspective focuses on English, then yes, you can notice lots of e.g. sociolinguistic and geographical diversity. But what do you see when you look beyond it?

You can ask a similar question about American cultural hegemony, or the Internet. What kinds of expression do you lose or diminish by co-opting millions of viewers into the Hollywood frame of mind? Or the Facebook news feed?
Thanks this is really valuable information. I've actually been concerned about this culture issue as well.

One of the reasons I'm seeking out this role is due to startup collapse based on poor revenue. Would this failure be a major point of contention or are companies willing to look at this as a learning experience?
Protecting Your Email
I don't know what you just said, but I'm glad someone is on top of this stuff. Keep up the good work!
This account reminds me of a company manager who oversaw their external printing jobs. He would visit different printery/bindery operations, not your kinko's sized stuff, but large Lith-o-man type offset presses.

He said he had all different types of metrics he used when evaluating a potential vendor for his jobs. But what it usually all boiled down to was how clean was the press area.

If the presses and surrounding area were grimy and tools, supplies etc. were scattered about, he knew the jobs they did would most likely not meet his expectations.

If however the area was clean and the press operators keeps things in order, he could count on that vendor to produce a superior product.
It would be nice if instead of telling people how to hack their system to support $foo, they just made packages for $foo. Then the article would be "apt-get install clojure clojure-mode cl-swank slime".
This article is out of date. [1] is the more common fork and it describes ELPA and Leiningen which are now the easiest way to install clojure into emacs.

[1] http://github.com/technomancy/swank-clojure
Agreed, but it's not like Hacker News has a job section for these sort of things (very tongue in cheek here by the way)...
We also need more application (front-end) and platform (back-end) developers. People who are comfortable in both worlds are definitely welcome.

Have a look at the job link posted by ohlol for descriptions of these positions as well.
This looks very similar to Lua's coroutines:

http://www.lua.org/pil/9.html

(click through on a right-arrow on that page and the pages following it to get more details and see some examples)
Jobs, and the team he hired, including Jon Ive, were the driving force behind the iMac, iPod, and iPhone designs.

If Apple felt no need to hire Jobs because they had Be, why would it be reasonable to presume they would still create the same game-changing products that were primarily created by the team Jobs hired, who were not employed at Apple prior to his arrival?

Even Tim Cook, Apple's widely respected COO, was hired by Steve in 1998.
So you should be in favor of dropping capital gains to 0% then for everyone, right? Probably income tax too for that matter, because that discourages people from working, and unemployment is the last thing we want to have.
You have a neat idea here. I am particularly fond of how unoffensive the advertisement delivery actually is. Best of luck to you!
Haha sorry about that. The short version is:

1) These graphene transistors are faster than CMOS transistors of the same size, but CMOS transistors of the same size haven't been used for most purposes in about a decade. Modern CMOS transistors (the kind used in your Core 2 Duo or Core i7) are roughly twice as fast.

2) 100GHz transistors => ~1-10 GHz processors, not 100 GHz processors.
Google seeks to patent new Web app tech
offtopic:

since when do "ask hn" topics link to a frakkin blogpost?
There would be stagnation if the economy is a closed system. But in a world with multiple economies, the ones that channel income into accumulating more income-producing assets will grow their income faster than the ones that don't.
Android / iPhone / Web / Backend

We speak scala, Obj-C, java, python, Thrift, whatever gets the job done.

#1 productivity app on Android, and TechCrunch/MobileCrunch named us(3banana) one of the top ten apps on Android.

Please shoot me an email at hn@snaptic.com

Looking for folks to come hack with us in South Park, SF.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=953052
It's kind of a bummer that people feel that these endeavors are worth satire. While the titles may be a bit pithy and perhaps misleading, these X in Y lines tend to be really interesting reading, and let you glimpse into someone else's domain expertise.

It's too bad they didn't just say 210 lines of C and still show it. I would have still checked it out, and been interested.
I bet his surname is misspelled more than almost any other celebrity. I see it with the "e" all the time.

(My own surname is Ramsey, so it always leaps out at me.)
Implications of Easy
How exactly are they reinventing the status quo when it predates the status quo?
I'll toss in a recommendation for Mochi Media. They were very accomodating to me during my brief stint with them 2 years ago. The briefness was my doing, not theirs.
Parallel Data Mining from Multicore to Cloudy Grids
"Soak the rich" doesn't work. I recall seeing an interview with Ronald Reagan when he was a movie star. He stopped working after a certain point each year because he was taxed so high that he would rather have the free time than more income. Whenever they create luxury taxes, such as on yachts, the rich just put off getting a new yacht. Who really suffers? The working stiffs who build boats. They get laid off.

I don't know what the answer is. But, as I understand it, punishing people who have the most leeway to make other choices pretty consistently fails to get the desired result.
Many of the people who commented on the post called out the author for the Apple example as coming out of left field and not being relevant to an otherwise well thought out post.
Actually, yes. I prefer a flat tax on consumption.
Recent graduates need opportunities to work together with the "stars/ninja's/samurai's" so they can be the next "rockstar" programmers.
I understand that your product is a resume tool of some sort, but a) you demand that I hand over my personal information before showing me anything of the tool and b) you don't give me any compelling reason to sign up. No sale.
The book 'The Big Test' explains the rise of intelligence testing and the origin of the word 'meritocracy'. Prior to intelligence testing, college admittance was very influenced by whether your father had gone to that college. The hierarchy was determined by the status of your school and the senior society you were a member of. The senior George Bush he uses as an example - a Yale man and member of Skull and Bones. He mentions another remarkable fact - until around 1910 or so, 90% of corporate CEOs were Episcopalian. A very interesting book.
more heat-maps using vecto and ch-image
my worthless suggestion:

i don't think the "old-schoolers" will ever respect the "kids" (actually they don't seem to be that young) in the r&d labs until they get their own credit in the "street" (market) - so things like integrating with windows/office/etc will always be hard if the managers think the direction goes against their interests, so..

.. put all the "edgy" projects into a special branch of the organization that depends only on the 'man' and:

- give them full freedom to pursue the markets they see fit (this means they can go against established products etc)

- let them adopt their own internal processes and tools (ye, that means macs and linux and ipods)

- give them their own name if you don't want them initially associated with the microsoft brand

- after proven success, start merging with the rest of the organization in a selective way (throwing away old processes that don't really work anymore, promoting the new guys into top positions, yada yada yada)
I love the metaphorical photo. Other than that, it is a fairly dry bullet point list of statistics.
It is primarily an effort issue. I have been trying to get an effort together to do precisely this, create standard build for media codec related open source products. used to build proprietary H.264 codecs earlier, so we know we can pull it of technically ! Just need to find time. Also plan to file a PIl case to force companies collecting patent royalties in India to stop doing so, it is technically illegal for MPEG-LA, GSM consortia and similar IP vampires to collect patent royalties in India.
On a related note, there are some geologists who believe the Earth has increased in volume/mass over millions of years:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expanding_Earth

For instance, dinosaurs grew very large because the Earth was much smaller with less mass and gravity.
Want to be a  mentor to a HN Startup? [gdoc]
is ellison really not a visionary?
Form leads here: http://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=tgPKuNIdWWOPUpj2ZnF8N...
for your viewing pleasure.

I'm hoping this can serve as a list of people on HN who startup founders can approach easily for advice with any of the thousand given problems we face daily.
A Conversation With Google's Chairman and CEO - mainly about China
Yeah it gets a bit crazy. At work we can't link to matlab because it is covered by ITAR.
I'm not saying that it's a bad thing. I'm just saying that it's not like Apple created some whole new experience from the ground up. They had the idea to take the current user experience they had (the iPhone/iPhoneOS) and supplement it (larger screen/iWork), but I feel like people are praising Apple as if they had created something entirely new.

If Apple had created the iPad as something completely orthogonal to both the MacOS and the iPhoneOS yet still managed to make a compelling product, I could see them worthy of heavy praise. Other than that the iPad is maybe a good idea, an innovative idea even, but not some ground-breaking landmark thing. Maybe I'm completely wrong, but that's the way that I feel (i.e. people are giving Apple the same amount of praise for the iPad now as they would have, had Apple done something even more praise-worthy).
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1105398

I've been thinking of doing this for a few weeks, so I did it.
Tilera's "KILL" cores are probably a bit under 3 mm x 3 mm, although I don't think massive multicore is a good idea for many applications.

http://gamma.cs.unc.edu/EDGE/SLIDES/agarwal.pdf
On the other hand, what about someone that goes from a laptop/desktop to an iPad without the iPhone step?
Alternately, you must need to learn how to RTFA.
Like most of the other technologies we trust everyday without even thinking about it, this will mature (or be changed to something else that is equally or more advanced) and probably become more reliable than old-style brakes.

The question is, was this put on a production vehicle too quickly, without enough testing?
Sorry, should have qualified 'discussing'. By the time Microsoft started talking about it, they had a functioning system. The turn around was pretty damn quick.

As far as innovation goes, read up on Dryad. They do a few pretty interesting things. It goes above and beyond what MapReduce does. The computation is expressed as a giant dynamic directed graph (the graph can change during computation). Each node is a program that feeds into other programs, but fault tolerance and all the other messy bits of distributed programming are abstracted away from the programmer. Think of it as a more generic MapReduce that allows a broader set of computations to easily be performed (put another way, MapReduce provides a subset of the computations possible with Dryad. I suspect given enough cleverness you could get MapReduce to do everything Dryad does, but it'd be pretty hacky)

Also, check out the LINQ support. It is probably one of the coolest things they've done with it.
Indeed. I thought on it more after posting and it is a challenging problem. They would need to identify the subgraphs with the highest activity-connectivity products, then migrate them towards the same hardware. Dependencies would need bidirectional links, so that updates can be distributed in batch mode rather than being fetched on demand. Especially hot data might need to be continuously distributed in streaming mode.

And HTTP needs a mode for reassembling out-of-order snippets. Which use snippet independent data compression. Oh, and everybody gets a pony.
I could have gone my whole life without seeing that photo...
A good rule of thumb is to prefer technomancy's emacs stuff over the alternatives :)
Reddit in just a few minutes without writing any code: http://code.reddit.com/

duh.
The Third & The Seventh: what one person can achieve with computer graphics
Submitting to HN as I thought it was an awe-inspiring example of what a single person can now achieve with computer graphics. Worth viewing in full screen.
reproduced without permission: http://pastebin.com/m6a6fda19
My understanding is that the earth's atmosphere used to be far denser and the oxygen concentration far higher. This is what allowed giant roaches and the like to exist at one time. Dinosaurs evolved in a different world than we live in.

I'm not real up on this information -- it's my sons who are really interested in it, not me -- but this detail sticks with me because I used to really be bothered by giant spiders in movies. One day, while watching something on TV that talked about dinosaurs and other historical critters, they showed a very large spider and said "If this spider were alive today...(it would the size of a house cat or hunting house cats or something)" and I said "If it were alive today, it would be on life support." My sons cracked up. And I no longer get freaked by giant movie spiders. They can't exist in earth's current atmosphere, which is why they don't exist on earth today.
Agree...after a long day of frameworks and VMs, I thought a ~210 line reddit+webserver was kinda neato.
"Every single billionaire can "afford" to be taxed at a 99% rate."

And they should be taxed at a 99% rate, if not higher.

Leave them with a million dollars, tops. That's fair.
do your own thing - why work for someone else?
With platform as a service like aws,appengine,heroku you can build your own salesforce/google/ebay from scratch with no money/hardware/scaling bs
> In a forum full of entrepreneurs, it seems no one has any empathy for a company releasing a new product without all the bells and whistles. There's a huge amount of hypocrisy here from a group that espouses "Release early, release often."

Part of the problem may be that Apple does not present it's products as half-done. They may improve certain features that you're looking for; they may not. You don't know. There's no roadmap for future development, and the only feedback that users get about what features that Apple is focusing on comes at these SteveNotes.

Even when they release a product that is half-done (e.g. the original iPhone; no MMS, no SDK, etc) they try to present it to the world as a complete and final product (i.e. "We don't need a SDK! You can make everything a webapp!"). It's little wonder that people get upset (i.e. With the original iPhone people were upset at the lack of a SDK and Apple/Steve trying to push the "all iPhone apps are webapps" angle didn't give people a solid clue that they would eventually release a SDK).
"What's to prevent any company from copyrighting a small passage of code and then rigorously suing everyone and their brother for it?"

Independent creation is a strong defense to copyright infringement. Compaq famously did this when they duplicated the functionality of the original IBM PC firmware, by using a strict "clean room" process. Even though numerous segments of code were no doubt duplicated, because there is often a single best way of writing hand-optimized assembly language, the provable independent creation made it a new work under copyright law. As far as I remember, IBM didn't even bother to sue.
sending c++ up in space - i's wouldn't want to sit on the spacecraft
> there's no reason to believe that Apple wouldn't have released an MP3 player or a phone, or that it wouldn't be stylish.

I agree completely, and I have no doubt there was plenty of good talent at Apple before the Jobs II era. But it's that certain, genuinely rare element that Jobs brought to the company that turned its experiments from good products into iconic successes.

To take this fun exercise down the rabbit hole: I'd even suggest that Jobs-less, Be-powered Apple would have had a Newton Phone on the market a good deal earlier than 2007, maybe not long after Palm's first Treo. Maybe a little iffy at first, it would have gone through a few revisions and could even occupy a spot on the market next to Palm today. I'm sure it would have been a nice product. I don't think it would have been an iPhone.
Better to just take their money away rather than tax them on their income or even their consumption.
So this seems to make open-source software aboard a spacecraft illegal. At least the software specifically intended for spacecraft operation. That's a shame.
I would like to find out more about your role, how you like it there etc.
government delights in shooting its own foot
Lisp's unreadable code compression features are obviously superior, and have been since the fifties.

We lispers can express any program in a single line. Some prefer that style because it brings out all the parentheses.

All of this is possible because code is data.
Cool Engineering / Code Visualization Video from Twitter
Any one out in Tx?
Ted Talks' subtitles available for download
"Most people in the US pay no taxes at all. The $250K threshold hits lots of hard working professionals and entrepreneurs who are by no means "rich" and who work extremely hard."

Let's see now... when the median family income in the US is $40,000 per year, an individual making $250,000 per year is undoubtedly rich.

They might not be super rich, or even very rich. But they're rich.
How they did that without a Lisp Machine and a massively complex keyboard, I will never know.
Comprare to some very interesting languages (Haskell, Erlang, Scala) Python is more widely available and allows you to produce good, portable, well-performing code quickly and easily.

Scala code compiles to Java bytecode, and performs comparably to Java code. It's just as portable and performant as Java, which means very portable and fairly performant.
Don't espouse the platform too much. Maybe it's stable now, but there were plenty of issues early on. I got a Mac around the release of MacOS 10.2.

If you mounted an NFS or Samba share the filesystem driver would 'beachball' the entire operating system if the server ever became unresponsive. There were numerous times where the smbfs driver caused kernel panics too. The only improvement to this offered in 10.3 was a dialog that would popup asking if you wanted to disconnect the share whenever it deemed that the server was unresponsive. Though the 'timeout' that it was using to display this dialog was too conservative. Sometimes it would popup just to disappear right away when it finally get a server response. [Note: these shares were mounted over a LAN, not spanning across the internet or something] The issue hurt me the most when I left a share mounted at home when I closed my PowerBook, only to wakeup the PowerBook at school/work and have OSX require a forced restart because the server was no longer there.

{edit} I know that all platforms have issues, I just get annoyed when people act like they don't.
Or because you don't need #include statements separated with newlines in Lisp.
Not really, it was more a poor attempt at humor.
use lisp macros or prolog dcg's
being downvoted on a site all about startups for suggesting to do a startup!
It's not the step I'm referring to really, so much as the expectations of the form factor. I've never had a smart phone, but I don't think I would sit down and try to do what I do on a laptop with it. However, were I to buy a netbook, that's exactly what I would do.

It's a small point among many, but from the human perspective I think it will significantly impact their reception to the iPad.