skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'd be embarassed if I had 1,000 Facebook friends. I have an almost-absolute pure-passive default allow policy on Facebook (that's the benefit I get from it over LinkedIn, where I am default deny), and I have something like 100 friends. I know almost all of them face to face. Many of them are actually friends of mine.

Almost 1500 people follow me in Twitter. I know very few of them.

The two are entirely different services. I get that the author is comparing the Facebook wall to Twitter, but I don't use Facebook for the wall (in fact, I find Facebook news updates almost intolerable for the same reason he does).
Malthusianism is fundamentally correct - if population increases exponentially, the point at which we don't physically fit on the Earth (let alone feed ourselves) is only a constant number of years away.

Of course, (almost) no one believes this will actually happen. Instead, it will be either contraception or war/famine/disease that will end the growth. There are no other possibilities, so let's hope it is the first of the two. :)
By "don't close your tags", I mean "don't close your tags when the HTML spec does not require you to." You still need to close your <a>, <div>, and <span> tags. You don't need to close your <li>, <th>, <tr>, <td>, <dl>, <dt>, and several other tags. You don't even need to open your <html> and <head> tags, if you're not doing funky stuff like putting comments in them.
The sentiment here seems to be overwhelmingly positive. Call me a cynic, but this reminds me of "magic_quotes" all over again: a "feature" that tries to help, but masks the fundamental problem.
Is Beezid a Scam?
Babies not as innocent as they pretend - Telegraph
The site lets you search twitter lists or the people you follow on twitter, rather than all of twitter.

see the homepage http://sparse.ly
'Viral' does not mean "exponential growth without marketing". It means, "transmitted from person to person like a virus" -- which might result in accelerating growth, but the essential part named by the word 'viral' is the mechanism, not the result.

Also, Weissman is speaking of whether a service is in-and-of-itself 'viral'.

There's the related but somewhat different idea of "viral marketing", where some aspect of a marketing campaign is designed to get people to pass along the marketing message. A shocker or stealth marketing campaign that's so interesting people pass along its details is 'viral', even if it's for a non-viral product like a blockbuster movie.

Your tool to help users tout your service is a mild form of 'viral marketing', but it doesn't make your service 'viral'.
Funny Films
Funny Films like Accidental Heroes and Zach and the Bikini Girls are available for free and On-Demand at Stay Tuned TV.
Perhaps you could solve the technical debt issue with delayed payment. 50% now, 50% 2 months later - 10% per bug still in the original code that has not yet been fixed.
Academia is indeed relaxed. Most academics I know have their .forward file point to their gmail.
that's interesting that you don't see spam on twitter. i stopped having follower emails sent to me, because so many new followers were spam.

the @reply spam is unavoidable, but rare enough that it's just mildly annoying, not a serious issue for me.
If you were to offer a hardware system a modbook might be a good choice...

http://www.axiotron.com/index.php?id=modbook

You could do the video and hand written guest notes on the same device.
What took them so long? Plans for Fusion was announced when AMD acquired ATi, and that was 2006. And now they announce that they are shipping them in 2011, five years later?! Meanwhile Intel has already released several integrated CPU+GPU solutions (Pineview and Arrendale/Clarkdale)
Indeed. But Hindley-Milner [1] type systems have trouble expressing commutative stuff in general.

[1] I hope I got the names correct.
blocks and lambdas in Ruby?
What is the fundamental problem it masks?
I don't think anyone is trying to get around anything or cheat the system. Obviously, everyone's situation is slightly different. I have never been in this specific situation before, so I was curious how others might interpret the language or how they might approach it. Its not iron-clad. Businesses owners are not heartless beasts. I think if approached correctly, many would be willing to sign a waiver. Also, I don't think it is cut and dry. There is room for interpretation (I didn't post every word of the agreement, so how would you know for sure?). That's what the court system is for, if it comes down to it.

There are other alternatives as well, such as working somewhere else (if you think that is the right move), or just couching the idea for awhile.

I think hope is good anyway. Nobody here really wants to be a mindless drone for some company for the rest of their lives. We're all learning here.
If the problem you're addressing is a lack of right-wing sites made by insane cranks, mission accomplished.
I always run ssh on a really high port, which does a decent enough job of keeping the password guessing bots.
Why, that's backwards! In the U.S. we have castes related to social networks.
I do have shell access at HostGator, but when I got it there was a $5 charge (perhaps they waive that now?). I was imprecise in my wording; when I said "shell," I really was thinking "root." Certainly, if there are things you want to do for your blog using shell, HostGator is an option.

Their $75/mo single-core DediKiddies seemed less desirable to me than an arbitrarily resizable VPS with 4 virtual cores (which MT and Linode have).

Also, it's too late for me to edit my original comment, but HostGator did not have VPS when I left them.
google is going the way of older internet giants.

Their main focus is search and adwords ...and more recently snooping dns.

Now instead of letting facebook do their thing and google offering competitive ads, they choose to do facebook thing.

Now what? They are going to clone all the sites that their users spend more than 15minutes on?

They`re going to spread their peanut butter too thin.
We're all Google Buzz virgins right now.
1) Management and the product team often have some idea of how valuable a certain task is. The dev team is responsible for how long it will take. Often we will invest too much time in something that's not that valuable, since management is not aware of just how long it will take. Or we will under invest in something very valuable because management doesn't realize how easy it is to knock off. If management can just put a price on the stuff it wants done, then I think developers will be able to pick off the stuff that gives the most bang for the buck, which is what we want.

2) Paying for performance makes a big difference in developer productivity. That why startups get so much done - they live or die based on how hard and more importantly, how effectively they work. As we've grown from a couple developers to over twenty developers, I think our pace has slowed. I'd like to see it more like the early days.

3) The best sales people can make 2X what a developer makes. As a developer, it would be nice to be able to make that much money. But the company cannot do that right now, because it cannot accurately measure my performance.
Alex Payne — Good Things
Of course cremation saves more space and is certainly cheaper.
Ask HN: Better Regex Support for JavaScript?
My understanding is that regex in JavaScript is fairly crippled. http://www.regular-expressions.info/javascript.html lists a number of missing features. The most salient of these seem to be:

# Lookbehind is not supported at all. Lookahead is fully supported.
# No atomic grouping or possessive quantifiers

One way to fix this would be to write a regex engine in JS. Does anyone know of any such projects? Alternatively, does anyone know of any other ways of supporting fully-featured regex in JS?

(Making a request out to a web service written in a language with better regex support is the default option, but I'm hoping to find something with less external dependencies.)

Thanks!
Looking for a few software engineers in the Boston area
This is so true, yet when other people ask me for help it is so easy to say "read the api docs" even though I have gone through the same process and frustration.

The whole process of learned a new tool or language requires a lot of work. Sometimes the people who are new to it will give up because they simply were unable to understand some small issue. I suppose it is up to both parties, the leaders and the new developer. The leader has to encourage and support while the new developer must be willing to work hard and not give up.
Clojure gen-class intro and how to use it
I don't know, he's been pretty enthusiastic about a lot of things, and, anticipating snarks, not just his own work.

To take one of your examples, he was quite enthusiastic about Twitter, championed it in the early days and staring building on it.

Even earlier, I seem to recall him being supportive of Ev Williams and Blogger way back when it was, arguably, a competitor to Dave's Frontier and Radio products.

I think a lot of people don't appreciate the amount of expeience the guy has in the tech industry or what it has taught him. He embraced the web back when a lot of geeks were still in diapers, and before that had a decade or more as an entrepreneur/developer in desktop software.

He's definitely opinionated, and can be abrasive, but his stance is generally that of an advocate for both users and small developers. He likes accessable interoperability and hates it when big companies come in late and try to coopt standards to their advantage by pushing complexity to shut early innovators and upstarts out of the space.
Interesting:

Who is your favourite young tech entrepreneur at the moment and why?

That would have to be Daniel Brusilovsky. Daniel has done everything from work for Qik to write for TechCrunch and he’s just 17.

This interview's old, but that would be the TechCrunch possible-extortionist. I knew he did the Teens in Tech conference, but I didn't realize he was that intense. In fact, I don't think he actually is an entrepreneur; I don't think he's actually started any companies or anything, just been in the environment.
If the native executable is larger than bytecode, no. Now that you mention it, it would be interesting to compare dex vs. Thumb2 code size.
Anonymous hacks Australian Government in response to Internet censorship
So my comment was deleted from the blog but comments in the vein of "Cool story, bro!" are kept? Definitely not a community I want to participate in again.
The ION seems to be pretty good, but decoding HD video doesn't work very well without using the GPU.
I think finding people who can manhandle an abnormally large, heavy, drill shaped coffin into place will be harder and more expensive than using machinery - there's a reason why we don't dig graves by hand any more.

Families do pay for the coffins, but they also pay for burial costs as well (so they'd also be paying for space and a portion of the machinery).
And to change the speed without changing the pitch, the "scaletempo" audio filter works pretty well:

$ mplayer -af scaletempo filename
If they use a litter box, add some sand to it. For some strange reason, if they shit in sand they'll never shit anywhere else. Maybe it's some remote gene from back when they existed solely in deserts, but I know my two cats repeatedly ruined my sandpit as a child. You've literally got to replace all the sand and wash the pit out if you want them to stop.
that there is in fact no objective truth that can be expressed.

Trivially self-contradictory. Of course, you can word it like, "I don't know of any such objective truth", but then it's not a very compelling idea.
Google Groundloop?
Apple loosens SDK restrictions, allows VoIP over 3G
It's try to buy, and if that fails, try to compete. At Google's size, it would be very, very, very difficult to spread their peanut butter too thin, and their Superbowl Ad indicates that they are focusing on what everyone knows them best for and only dipping their feet into other pools that they can't buy into.
the interesting thing for me is how much facebook users (or at least, the ones I am 'friended to') seem to want facebook to be more twitter-like. in both of its last two site redesigns, the twitter-esque 'status updates' feed has become more and more buried in the nav, now requiring two clicks from the main page to access. many facebook users seem unaware that it even exists, and complain about it regularly. instead facebook forces users to use the nebulous 'news feed' by default, which doesn't even manage to get things in chronological order (sometimes).
1) I think this is just a symptom of bad management. Again, I'm not arguing that the market situation is optimal for individual companies, just that equilibrium is reached in the market as a whole, more or less. Sometimes this is accomplished by companies with poor management going out of business because they can't accurately judge the priorities of projects.

2) I think there's a lot of reasons that startups get more done, like just having fewer people.

3) If the best salespeople make 2x as much, it's because they're 2x as valuable. I also doubt that the best salespeople make 2x as much as the best developers, but if so, it's likely because they're twice as valuable. If you want to make that much, go do sales. And if you can't because you lack the skills, perhaps that tells you something about the value of salespeople :)
If I remember correctly, there was a more tricky problem in implementing monads without the type system - sometimes which monad is chosen for an expression, depends not just on the arguments, but the expected type of the result. Ex : "return 3" might be [3] or an IO action with result 3. The compiler decides this based on the surrounding context. In dynamical languages one would have to manually specify which kind of 'return' you mean.

This surrounding context inference feature, which is useful for type classes other than monads, has the unusual consequence that you need to specify more typeinfo in a dynamic language.
I think that there is a distinction being passed over here: There is a difference between a viral product or server, and viral marketing.

Viral marketing is where company creates a campaign that is of interest of its own accord in hopes that it will garner attention and that attention will pass on the the product or service that being advertized.

A viral prodict is what this guy describes.

I think that a conflation of these two ideas might lead to the confusion that this guy is talking about.
Starcraft II Marketplace: There's a map for that.
Part Time Careers Can Make Big Money
Many people seeking part time careers have never considered the prospect of working from home. A great way to make a living, work from home jobs are now more available and accessible than ever before. If you have been struggling to find the perfect part time career, working from home may be the solution you’ve been looking for. In the next few paragraphs, I’ll talk briefly about the advantages I have enjoyed working from home, and how you can get started in an exciting part time career without ever leaving your home.
Of course they lie, they are completely open minds designed by nature to experiment with the world in order to survive, and therefore pursue any strategy they find will benefit them.

Random fun link: Learning from children: strategy, tactics and games in times of rapid change [http://news.noahraford.com/?p=203]
Clojure (being a lisp) uses macros and some dynamic variables to manage this sort of polymorphism. The clojure library provides a defmonad macro to let you define the functions required (m-bind and m-result are a must, and m-plus and m-zero are optional).

Unlike haskell which can choose an implementation based on the return type of return and bind, you do have to spell it out. The macro with-monad will wrap a set of expressions up in the correct monad, and the domonad monad comprehension form is also able to accept an optional monad name (useful if you aren't inside a with-monad form, or if you need a different monad)
Ask HN: What's the classic work on dataflow programming?
There is a huge literature on dataflow programming, starting from around 1970. On the assumption that some of this work must be interesting, I've made several attempts to find the good stuff. Surprisingly, everything I've found so far is lame: very hand-wavey and presenting no compelling results. Most of it falls into one of two categories: (1) pictures consisting of boxes and lines connecting the boxes; (2) references to obscure languages that supposedly implemented dataflow principles, without saying anything substantial about either the principles or how they were implemented.

Am I looking in the wrong places? Or was this really a huge research dead-end? Can anyone point me to some worthwhile material?
I have found on twitter that spammers come after me after I tweet something @ a high profile tweeter. Perhaps this is a factor in the differences in your experiences.
>What would convince me that 2 + 2 = 3, in other words, is exactly the same kind of evidence that currently convinces me that 2 + 2 = 4: The evidential crossfire of physical observation, mental visualization, and social agreement.

From http://lesswrong.com/lw/jr/how_to_convince_me_that_2_2_3/

I should note that Eliezer does not argue for moral relativism. Although there are no moral laws written into the fabric of the universe, humans all have very similar brains. With the exception of some outliers (sociopaths) most of our moral intuitions are very similar. There's also the caveat that culture, religion, and philosophy (among other things) can work as an "off switch" for these intuitions.
5 years to absorb a newly acquired company's expertise and design a new kind of CPU with it doesn't sound that long to me. Intel does have integrated graphics, but it's very far from true video cards.
I don't like his argument that you can just un-follow spammy friends. What if you still want a few major updates from them? Facebook allows you to slice the information semantically instead of just by tag or source.
See also, Kevin Kelly's The Quantified Self: http://www.quantifiedself.com
Music Sales Slowing at Apple iTunes: A Lesson on Price for E-Book Sellers?
Two billion-transistor beasts: POWER7 and Niagara 3
check out a decent implementation of dataflow in mozart/oz there are papers on the site that describe the rational behind it.
Dead end - I believe certainly not. This is just beginning.
Also read 'concepts, techniques and models of computer programming' by peter von roy and seif haridi
That book will show you exactly how to make sense of dataflow and where its correct place is.

if you look at the oz kernel code there you can see how it was implemented very clearly. The book holds your hand right through the whole process of setting up dataflow in a (kernel) programming language.
Paul Graham Mixergy Interview
yeah, i think 45% is crucial. i wont get any offer at this rate, at the same time it sounds unrealistic. it almost sound like my friend desperately need my help or otherwise the company goes down.
could you explain more why the company would most likely to remain private ? I mean isn't it possible that if this company moderately take off, maybe some bigger rival will offer a buy out?
I mean, this rate, 45% is like when you build a start-up with 2 founders right?
for future references, we are not looking for angel investors etc. because we have the minimum capital and clients are there to make the ball rolling.
I'm guessing (by looking at his character), at some point my friend will sell this company to bigger rival who is interested in. this is what i get from this 45% offer, it is like he's trying to say "let's build it together with 50-50 sharing revenue, you'll do most of the works, I provide clients and capital, if it works we can sell it and retire young" ....
Explaining the OAuth Session Fixation Attack
A Guide to Branching in Mercurial
My intent in writing the piece was to completely disassociate any rate of growth from the method, or means, by which the growth might occur - by describing instead how that occurs and how word of mouth ("dude you have to check this out) is very very different from virality (as described above, "when a person uses the actual product, they cannot help but spread the message"and "like a virus").

No real value judgment for or against word of mouth or viral, just that they are very very different, and require different ways of thinking about apps services.
There are a couple of ways that a Fusion-style core can be used.

You could take advantage of the high-bandwidth, low-latency connection between CPU and GPU to get higher performance, especially in GPGPU applications, but GPGPU hasn't really taken off yet. There's also the limitation that now CPU and GPU are sharing the same heatsink.

You could use it to offer a low-end system with good integrated graphics, because there's no longer a penalty for the GPU sharing the CPU's RAM. However, this approach pretty much requires a new socket, which probably eliminates any potential cost savings from not having to buy a discrete GPU. This approach also sacrifices some in flexibility, as adding a discrete graphics card later on makes the on-die GPU worthless unless you have a good asymmetric SLI/Crossfire system, and even then you're limited to the features supported by the on-die GPU.

The approach taken so far by Intel and AMD is to use it to make a better low-power platform. Intel's obviously been way ahead here. Ever since the Pentium M, AMD's had trouble keeping up in the mobile market. ATI's GPUs haven't been that great for the mobile market, either. It was obvious in 2006 that this was going to be the hardest approach for AMD to pull of, but it also seems to be the only one that might pay off.
This is essentially one person's long rant about why they don't like Facebook (especially the "Poke" feature!). I think some of the anger is misdirected; if you don't want your worlds colliding, don't add some people as friends. How hard is that? Or just don't use it.

Lighten up, man. It's a website, not a government or a religion or a philosophy. It's a fucking website.
Indeed. Gmail is just about the only successful pine killer I've ever witnessed.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases
The Advantages of Being Helpless: Human brains are slow to develop
The advantage of implicit conversions over monkey patching seems solid, but I'm not an unqualified fan of implicit conversions either. As a Scala newcomer (i.e. never written a significant app in Scala myself), I find implicit conversions hinder reading code closely enough to be able to modify or extend it. Although the original author may know which import has added some implicit conversions, why, and what they do, this isn't easy to discover after the fact.

It seems that the Idea plugin will show the implicit conversions that are actually used, but it would also be nice to see all implicits in scope at any time.
Google Now Taking User Phone Calls About Nexus One
"“Poke” is the dumbest and worst feature ever invented for a social network. "

Really? Because I think plenty of people (primarily teens) would disagree. Imagine you're 16 and there's a cute girl that you're too nervous to talk to but maybe if you just poked... Oh wait. You did it. Can't take it back now. Will she respond..?

I'd love to see how many relationships were kindled this way. I know this isn't really crucial to her argument, but she spent a whole paragraph ripping on pokes.

Edit: Corrected author's gender.
That's why you need to stockpile 9mm Luger and 5.56 NATO ammo. In case of truly large-scale natural disaster ammo will quickly become standard (and possibly only) exchange equivalent. In other words ammo will replace money.
Could you explain the point you're getting at?
A Calculus of Writing, Applied to a Classic