skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Listen to our Customers
Thanks Tony,

I think you hit on the key point, it's not about the quality of the food, it's about making people happy. It's a great concept and I hereby license it under whatever open source license covers this sort of thing :).
Coro basically allows you to write:

foo();
bar();

instead of:

foo( cb => sub { bar() } );

Behind the scenes, it's basically the same thing. It's cooperative so your code does not get preempted where you don't want it to be; the locking is implicit.

But you can switch to preemption and explicit locking if you desire. At that point, IMO, it's time to ditch Perl / Python / Ruby and use a language with a sane STM implementation, because locks suck.
I often rate articles on "stupidities per paragraph" or even, in extreme cases, "stupidities per sentence". This is the first article I've read that can be accurately described with "stupidities per character".
I kind of thought you might be. But who am I to pass up a chance to poke fun at myself? No sense letting you poke fun at yourself all by your lonesome. ;-)
I'm going to pick up Blueprint this evening and start learning how to use it. I've tried to keep everything as simple as possible. Perhaps this will make it easier to do that.
Somehow i'd think that this is the exception rather than the rule.

There's quite a few inner city schools where kids drop out because people just generally do other things when they are able.
Arduino based platform for handheld pixel games - Meggy Jr RGB
Importance of exercise
Importance of exercise
"My computer is messed up. It keeps saying X."

"It's right, believe it."

"Umm... really? Hey, that worked!"
Glad I did this when it was easy. Someone was using my site's name, I emailed Twitter, 5mins later it was mine.
But the cultural problem you're talking about is caused in large part by the structural problem. Students slack off because the system passes students along with impunity. Why bother studying math when you know you will get promoted anyway? The only way to fix that is to allows schools to kick poorly performing students out. There are plenty of students who want to do well but the system crushes them.
Nice try blaming unions for an education system that's failing students!

See how I turned that around on you? Simple answers are not to be found when talking about education.

You are falling into the conspiracy theory side of an education discussion almost immediately. You blame unions, then the government ("new legislation that restricts....").

It's frustrating really. I've rewritten the last part of this comment half a dozen times now. It's not worth arguing.
And it took him only one year (almost to the day: http://antoniocangiano.com/2009/03/11/introducing-redis-a-ke...).
Don't waste time with ctypes, use weave or sip or swig :OP
excellent points. thanks!
Most jobs exist because there is a need in the market for something. So, most projects are going to be focused on what needs to be done, and not what one would enjoy doing. There is an overlap between the two, but the over lap little (< 10% maybe). I guess this scenario is the cause for the state of affairs of most jobs.programming included.
Everyone I know who leads the kind of lifestyle this article is touting is a drop out, yes. Trouble is, they dropped out of grad school, not high school.
Interesting. You're the second recommendation I've been given for Munkres. This list of recommended books in topology:
http://www.math.cornell.edu/~hatcher/Other/topologybooks.pdf
suggests some other books over it, however.

Personally, I've just started reading Hocking & Young (Shocking and Fun!) and it seems quite good so far.

I've made some substantial progress in _Counterexamples in topology_ and it's really good... It's not really a textbook, just a thing booklet that goes over general topology, then goes through a lot of examples and provides all these really nice charts of topological spaces based on properties. I actually made a graph, mostly based off it:
http://christopherolah.wordpress.com/2010/03/09/compactness-...

Oh, and Needham's _Visual Complex Analysis_ (in list) is awesome! Best math book I've ever read.
Thanks for that! Do you have any idea what scream this is: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B3WimCPUkQY

It's from the Terran Academy in StarCraft, and I've heard it in other places but don't know the name of it.
I was wondering, and please forgive my ignorance, how do you debug with vi(m) or emacs? They are just text editors, right? Or am I missing something here...
No, but high contrast images look better...
But quality food is nice too! Thank you for being such a good cook. It's a little nerve wracking on our end too--if the food fails will people be rummaging through our kitchen? But once I tasted the lasagna filling I knew the meal was going to be a big success.
A word from the poster.

I didn't expect to see the focus of this article on a debate between open and closed and between google and apple.

I found it interesting because I have followed Tim's blog, if only sporadically, for some time now. I have a lot of respect for him, as he is a visionary , and has worked on some of the relevant technologies of our time: 1) Author of one of the first search engines 2) co-author of the XML standard 3) technically very savy fellow.

What I have been wondering about his tenure at sun and his subsequent decision timed deliciously to leave sun just before he became an oracle employee is how it might foretell
the future of the sun technologies and how oracle decides to treat the sun legacy.
Point being? I hope I'm missing something, and mentioning the writer's other activities and associations isn't a substitution for evaluation of the content.
This should be titled "How I learned to stop being afraid and love the new upcoming mad max world."

I wonder what those new and exciting jobs will be in that post apocalyptic world the author pines for. Sexual slavery? Hunting rats for meat and fur? The technically inclined can scavenge parts from rusting machines built in the magical old times and try to fashion some kind of working vehicles out of them. Maybe the more artistically inclined can try being jesters to the local warlord.

The relative prosperity of our current lives depends on the incredible interconnectedness of society which allows high efficiencies by having people specialise and become very efficient in some very narrow areas of expertise. Just think of an ordinary $600 computer and imagine the tens or hundreds of thousands of engineers whose specialised knowledge went into making it. It is only a highly complex and interconnected society that can come up with something like that.

And if most people start "living off the grid" or disconnecting from society, or if we stop training our children how to live in society (which is what school is supposed to be for), you better get ready for types of poverty that you have never imagined even in your worst nightmares.

Oh and if everybody starts dropping out of school and society, good luck coming up with those "dirt cheap fuel cells."

It is very disturbing how a lot of people are getting a bigger and bigger hard on for some kind of an Armageddon event.
Stallman Does Dallas
I don't get what you're saying to be honest... When you have 2 actors that are executing "independently", you're just doing (very-pseudo-code) this: (assume recv == wait_for_N_bytes_or_timeout_after_M_seconds)

case recv(10, 5) in
timeout -> handle_this_and_throw
data -> do_something(data)

in do_something you've already made a progress to another state (unless you want to handle the FSM explicitly, then nothing is preventing it) and can throw to cleanup.

In an event based scenario:

def got_some(data):
buffer += data

switch(current_processing_state):
case state1:
buffer = try_to_handle(buffer)
case state2:
....

Now you might have enough data in the buffer to handle it, or you might not. You cannot check it before, because each state might need different amount of data. Try to insert timeouts into this code in a way that also closes the in-state resources now... yeah... forget about throwing exceptions really. Any internal exception thrown by bad code is very likely to hit your code in a bad way unless you handle all possible exceptions in every state separately.

I see more code and more complexity in event style. Care to provide some counter-example? (and I'm not saying it's not possible - just haven't really seen one yet)
I've checked out recipepuppy.com before but not foodguts.com, which I think is terrific (although I'm not entirely enamored with the domain name as descriptive of the content) and will definitely use it in the future.

I could see that site having more social features and the ability to customize the content by moving and resizing boxes and having a my.foodguts.com with all your favorite content to quickly navigate the site. From a business perspective, recipepuppy.com might make more money but as a user, I can see using the content of foodguts.com more often.
to continue his human monkey analogy: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pSm7BcQHWXk
'Enriched' e-books: Will they fly?
FCC releases some details of its broadband plan
You could learn to love the mundane aspects of your job. Seriously though, no one expects you to be creatively invested in that fix to the contact form, but that's the work people need done.
It'd be great to have one of these in London, there hasn't been a significant HN meet here since the SongKick organized ones a couple of years ago.

Although given the premium on space in London, finding someone who can host a large dinner party might be tricky. Still maybe booking out a floor at a restaurant might be a possibility if people are interested.
Not surprising. Most Americans consider themselves middle-class: poor people think they are lower middle class and rich people think they are upper middle class. This is why "the middle class is disappearing" is such an effective political message: most people identify with the middle class.

It probably doesn't help that the American class system is vague. There's no official threshold between the classes. In some countries, the "upper class" is, by definition, descended from nobility, so even a British billionaire would still be middle class.
China Uses Rules on Global Trade to Its Advantage
His point was that he was lazy, and wanted to be able to memtrace his production apps using the distro-provided rubies. Not recompiling was the whole point of the exercise.
Overcoming obstacles (David Belle)
Apparently, with Citibank, HSBC and Wachovia, you can do this onlinem via the phone and e-mail.
Yeah, I have a Dell too and haven't had any real problems, but this illustrates my problem - if I were ordering a new one I'd now be asking you what exact components you have, checking all kinds of forums, and in the end just have to hope I haven't ordered the wrong combination of graphics card and bluetooth module.

Whereas if there were a company that made it their business to put together tried and tested components I'd be all over them like a rash.
Yes. We need more bank failures! We should get to the point where a bank failure gets the same attention as any other bankruptcy.

The book "Just get out of the way" (http://www.amazon.com/Just-Get-Out-Way-Government/dp/1930865...) has some interesting ideas on how to apply the lessons of now-developed nations to developing ones: Don't copy the bloated institutions the rich world has now, but get inspired by what made them great in the first place. Often these were simpler policies. (Of course this also applicable to developed economies, again.)

The author also advocates ridding banks of any (even implicit) government guarantees, to make customers look out for their money instead of relying on glorified ponzi schemes. (Which banks are in a lot of developing countries.)
I dropped out, then got two bachelor's degrees at Carnegie Mellon.

I could have gotten a GED, but in that case, why? I can't be drafted either way, and I don't particularly want to manage a McDonald's.
Thanks very much...those settings don't seem to help much, but they've led me to the area of the documentation that I haven't looked at before. I'll read through it and learn a bit more about the compiler settings.
You need a visual overhaul
I'm missing:
"Understanding Analysis" S. Abbott - great book on the foundations of Real Analysis, esp. for an honors course
"Introductory Functional Analysis" E. Kreyzig
M-x gdb

Screenshot: http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/tour/images/gdb.png

If you want to debug a Lisp, you can't do better than Slime. Not sure what the state of the art is on Clojure debuggers.
Is SXSW a movie festival?
Then use Helvetica. What's the point?
Isn't this sort of the opposite trend of what publishers are doing with movies, albums, etc.? Get it on-line if you want, but if you want the real experience, buy the physical copy and you'll get some extra features. Does anyone know how well this strategy actually works?
Arial has a better license than Helvetica. Ability to reuse freely is more important than intrinsic artistic value. Helvetica is the font for the rich and wealthy; Arial is the same for the rest of us.

Personally, I don't like Helvetica except in logos that start with A. (American Airlines and American Apparel have good Helvetica logos. Outside of that, though, it doesn't excite me.)
I agree that Apples reasoning for charging for the Touch updates sounds shady, but you're comparing a touch (NOT a phone) to a nexus one which is a phone. If you compare it to the iPhone the updates are included.

Did you really buy a Nexus ONE to replace your touch and don't use the phone portion of the Nexus?
Wow. Very few people work in this area. Interesting to know that you are working on CRM. I would be interested to know your experiences so far selling the solution.
What you you think a "thread" is? A thread of execution? An OS thread? A lightweight thread?

Without defining thread, your question is pretty close to meaningless.
"It's very hard to get away from, even in start-ups (which you'd think would be a breeding ground for creative company organization schemes.)"

That's because you can't get away from human nature. Most people can't lead. They need someone telling them what to do and keeping them on-track. The ones that do become managers, presidents, ceos, or run their own company.
That's disappointing, given Obama's repeated public support for transparency. Calling it a national security issue is absolute rubbish.

What scares me is that this will impact people's lives in a significant fashion, and yet the public doesn't really understand the ramifications.

I don't think that most people in the United States know that treaties are considered the law of the land under the U.S. Constitution. Moreover, negotiation of treaties is a "presidential monopoly". Just like an ordinary contract, the details are hammered out in negotiations between the signatories long before a presidential pen signs the treaty. (http://post.ly/T22n)

This is the phase where the "meat" of the treaty is decided. After it's been signed, congress is only involved through ratification. "[The executive branch] alone negotiates. Into the field of negotiation, the Senate cannot intrude; and Congress itself is powerless to invade it". What that means is that treaties can be enacted, and U.S. citizens can be constrained based upon negotiations that take place between the President and the heads of state for other nations.
Normally, when laws are passed in Congress, the public has the ability to comment, lobby, and become involved in the process. It doesn't always work, but on big-ticket items, people have a chance to at least voice their concerns to their representatives before a bill is passed. An example is the pending health-care bill. Whether you're for it or against it, the issue has been debated in public and voters can hold their representatives accountable if a bill is passed that doesn't reflect the majority of voters is any given congressional district.

There's no such accountability in the ACTA negotiation process. Of course, with copyright and MPAA heavy-hitters deeply ensconced in the DOJ, I'm not surprised. (http://www.p2pnet.net/story/20865)
"What annoys me is being thrown on to projects without asking what I am interested in doing. I don't intend to do a shit job, but you're not going to get my best work if I'm not creatively invested in my work."

You can find creative interest in anything. I always end up learning and enjoying some part of a project thrown in my lap.
Tell HN: iCombinator back up
Hi all,

Apparently iCombinator.net has been down for the past couple of days. It should be resolved now.

I've also fixed:

- "Next 30 Stories...". Looks like this was also not working for a while. back up! :)

- Instapaper-ing HN items (such as these 'Tell HN', 'Ask HN', etc. stories) will now work. It had previously been trying to instapaper the relative iUI url.

Enjoy and sorry about the downtime!

(thanks to @stephencelis for the heads up!)
When did Neal Stephenson start writing for Time?
A statement's author does not cause it to be true or false. The article could have been written by Albert Einstein and it would be just as wrong.
Perhaps this could work well with results based on publicly available data sets (like the Protein Data Bank at www.rcsb.org), but I'd be surprised if this isn't done already to a significant degree. Labs post programs (or their biological equivalents, protocols) on their websites all the time.

Don't forget that data can be polished as well - for a hypothetical cheater, you'd simply be moving the "messaging" work from the finished project to the source files you mention above. There's a lot more to trusting a paper then just trusting the figures; you're trusting the scientific process that a lab is undertaking, and it's almost always impractical to require proof of every stage of that process.

Another downside is that not every scientist is ok with giving access to all of their hard-earned data - that opens up analyses and potential scoops to other groups. This is especially true in biomedical/clinical studies, where data is very expensive to gather and can take years to analyze. Not saying raw data is never shared, but there is a balance there.

Finally, scientists greatly prefers testing a published claim by pursuing a follow-up hypothesis rather then redoing an existing analyses. That way you kill two birds with one stone. It's inevitable that some irreproducible results slip in with this system, but if the claims are significant enough sooner or later someone who's trying to build on the claims (and failing) will go looking for more details and the fraud is exposed. The fear of being exposed in that way is what keeps the system honest, and to a large extent this system works.
Ok, i'm thoroughly disgusted. How bad does your asthma have to be in order to resort to parasitic infection as a cure?
I hate my hayfever, but you can count me out for this remedy.
Alright; would you prefer me to redo it with pieces of information each worth 7 bits?

'The first piece cuts it down to 2.3 million people...'
I could see something like Facebookbux taking hold. Assuming FB actually launches a payment system, and their effective fees aren't too high.

I think one reason FB's payment system has been so long in coming is that they've been thinking through all the implications of being a parallel currency.

I'm guessing at that, but it seems likely.
All this food talk and no pictures...so sad. But what a cool thing you've done here.
Interruptions - absolutely the worst thing ever (Im surprised it was only #9)

I have the somewhat mixed fortune to be currently living with my parents (hmmmm) - which has it's advantages but, man, the interruptions. I have to go to a coffee shop or my girlfriends at weekends just to be able to do an hours coding in peace :D
I am not even sure what it is (does it refer to telephony, or voice recognition), but I am pretty sure I don't care. I want a mobile internet device, not a telephone.
I'd rather eat a bug than ever use SWIG again.
Ask anyway and mention that it's a replacement. They're supposedly flexible.
A college professor once gave me some great advice: "Never fall in love with a typeface."

She definitely wasn't talking about font elitism, but I think it applies there too.
I had mine set to 4A90C8, a kind of teal, towards the blue side. I am however colour-blind.
God bless the old-money trend of eating terrible-tasting things because they're expensive?

Assigning labels to things that don't really need to be labeled is silly.
I detect the start of a delicious new Internet meme! Nice to know that it's not just 4chan that starts them.
Of course not. But my choice to buy the N1 is influenced by both my experience with the Touch and my girlfriend's phones, first an iPhone 3G, and now 3GS.
Writing concise sentences
What's the value in rainbow parentheses? I have coded Lisp for years, and have never wondered where I need to add parens; it's intrinsic in the structure of the code. Braces are the same way -- you know when you have the right number. No need for gaudy colors just because nested parentheses are new to you...
Arial’s R is so incredibly ugly.

Monotype should have sticked closer to the original. They are not exactly a sleazy company, so they presumably felt like they had to change a few things here and there. Other foundries were not so considerate and sold straight Helvetica knock-offs which looked exactly like the original.

Arial is not bullshit, but it sure would have been nice if Windows would have come with nicer default fonts from the beginning. Helvetica is fine, if a bit bland and old-fashioned. Yet it would not have been much of a improvement on Arial.

(Nowadays Windows is doing much better. Windows comes with quite a few seriously beautiful fonts which are optimized for usage on screen and are all original creations just for Windows. ClearType is also very good if a bit rude to the fonts. Love for typography still doesn’t seem to permeate everything Microsoft does, though. I routinely catch them using the wrong quotations marks.)
I agree. Though I would be cautious stating that someone wanted a recession _and_ effected [sic] it.
Not wishing you that, but I'd bet your disgust would disappear if your hay fever got worse to the point of keeping you out for a entire season.

It's all about one's perception of how bad it is. Think of fashion models that ingest similar parasites so they can lose weight. Having a parasite is bad? It's even worse to not have a job.

What about people that smoke in order to eat less? Can you think of a better example of choosing the lesser of two (perceived) evils?
Agreed, Calculus by Spivak is essentially a bridge to Real Analysis.