skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The article is written by Bryan O'Sullivan, author of the criterion[1] and text[2] packages and co-author of Real World Haskell[3]. If he's not the world's foremost expert on Haskell performance, he's certainly in the top 5. This benchmark undoubtedly takes laziness into account.

[1] http://hackage.haskell.org/package/criterion

[2] http://hackage.haskell.org/package/text

[3] http://www.realworldhaskell.org/
Startup founders who got funding and later wished they hadn't
Did any members of the community here succesfully get funding but later wished they hadn't? And why?
Reposted from the blog itself: This is a very interesting idea, and a great discussion of its merits.

There is something compelling about the idea that seed financing is such a fundamental part of wealth creation in our new economy that it should follow a process, on a scale, comparable to a small business loan. On the other hand, 'the network is the wealth,' and as you point out - their lack of active participation in companies' outcomes limits their value. You would expect quality entrepreneurs to expect better terms from these guys compared to an investor with more value add. There is an extreme contrast between this method and the model of more formalized networks currently in favor.

As you indicate, it would seem that those companies that would benefit most from this model would need it the least. If all a team of entrepreneurs need is a check, that implies they already have a strong network in place to help them advance the business. If that is the case - they probably have lots of options for funding. If Right Side is aware of this, then its methods for selection would certainly involve social network analysis, selecting prestigious founders, and offering trouble free and favorable terms. By spending less time assisting companies - an expensive process - can Right Side afford to give better terms to attract solid entrepreneurs to apply for what amounts to the venture equivalent of a streamlined small business loan? It will be interesting to see if this is the case.

This model might shine at picking out great teams from disadvantaged regions - basically everywhere outside of the Bay Area and Boston. It may be that this model can select strongly connected teams from cash poor regions whose networks can sustain the business, even if they don't permit easy financing.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dare_Obasanjo deleted for non-notability....
This real life shrimp could have been on Avatar [video]
It looks like every day that passes, Apple is trying to really demonstrate they're the new Microsoft.
10 Evergreen Topics for Google Traffic
Or this one: http://twitpic.com/2xamg
Feels a bit too "precise" for me. Ubuntu is supposed to stand for togetherness -- this feels a little colder than I'm used to.
ok! (i didn't mean it as personal criticism - i am currently debugging/tuning my own recursive descent library (lepl) and am having a world of pain with memoisation, which is a similar problem...).

bryan, if you see this, more info on what makes that lib so fast would be greatly appreciated!
Why the downmodding? Because you don't like sound arguments and facts? Further confirming the greatness of your species, I guess.
Related: "Carnival Booth: An Algorithm for Defeating the
Computer-Assisted Passenger Screening System," Samidh Chakrabarti, Aaron Strauss.

tl;dr Anything other than random is arguably worse.
Demise of nuclear is being exaggerated
Ubuntu introduces new theme and branding
Website Redesign of Startup CEO - what do you think?
This is security through obscurity. To quote Bruce Schneier:

Security is both a reality and a feeling. The reality of security is mathematical, based on the probability of different risks and the effectiveness of different countermeasure... Security is also a feeling, based on individual psychological reactions to both the risks and the countermeasures. And the two things are different: You can be secure even though you don't feel secure, and you can feel secure even though you're not really secure."

The body scanners give the reactionary populous a reason to "feel" secure; even though the chances of a terrorist being caught by body scanners are slim. (see http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2010/01/german_tv_on_t...)
That train wreck has already happened to North Carolina once. Hurricane Floyd. The great pig feces flood. Only cat 2 winds but 20 inches of rain.

* 51 storm-related deaths in North Carolina, 90 on the East Coast, making this the deadliest storm sinceHurricane Agnes in 1972, where 122 died.

* 30,500 hogs, 2,000 cattle, 250 horses, 2.1 million chickens, and 737,000 turkeys lost in North Carolina.

* Four hog waste lagoons burst and 47 overflowed; 24 water treatment plants flooded.

* Over 7,000 homes were destroyed; 17,000 rendered uninhabitable, and at least 10,000 people were displaced in NC alone. Almost 70,000 people in the state applied for emergency assistance.

* Overall damage in NC exceeded six billion dollars, making it NC's most costly natural disaster ever, exceeding Hurricane Fran in 1997. New Jersey also listed Floyd as its worst natural disaster.

* Thirty-seven counties in eastern NC with a combined area of 18,000 square miles (an area twice the size of Vermont) flooded.

* Ten states were declared disaster areas...."

http://www.cfspress.com/overwhelmedbyfloyd.htm
Yeah: http://www.schneier.com/essay-241.html
The title here seems to be inaccurate. The title of the post--based on the Google cache--is "What’s in a parser? Attoparsec rewired (2/2)". It's not actually about building parsers so much as comparing the new Haskell attoparsec parser to C parsers.

I'm glad to see this improvement being made in the LL parsers in Haskell. They're much more natural to write than parsers with a bottom-up parser generator. I believe Happy is the major parser-generator for Haskell and since it uses YACC-like syntax for the grammar it starts to feel like I'm writing C into my Haskell code. Parser-generators always feel a bit ugly, but they usually yield the most efficient and fastest code.
I'm obviously not saying humans don't have a single trait in common with some predators. Humans have blood, for example. Get over your indignation at being challenged and think about what you say. That'd be nice.

To answer your question, these are simply the most clear-cut traits that are present in herbivores versus omnivores and carnivores. The "front-facing eyes" is an out-of-date meme from high school textbooks.
Looks like someone accidentally added a digit to the date...
And every day that passes I hate apple more and more..
Ask HN: Do I have a minimum viable product?
Hi HN, I got great feedback previously so I though I'd ask again:

I launched a web app for creative teams to collect and plan features of the products they are building. It's supposed to be a low-friction, easy-going tool for quickly getting the scope down, focusing on textual ideas / requirement.

The questions I have are:

1) Is this a problem a tool can help solve, or are you happy putting your ideas into Word / Excel and getting things done regardless?

2) Do you find my approach useful when designing YOUR products / services?

3) If so, what are you missing that would make the tool useful?

I just showcased my app at Mini Seedcamp Prague where I was a finalist, but the group was most VC-focused; I am interested in the opinion of fellow hackers and people "in the trenches".

Thanks!

URL: http://www.playground-hq.com
While this is certainly disturbing, I kinda wonder how much of the info being sold in this way is legit. I mean, if you scam your buyer by providing false info, what can they really do about it? Call the cops and tell them you got scammed while trying to buy stolen CC info online?
Exactly! I find Wikipedia most useful for things that are obscure or trivial.
Very nice and professional.
The one thing that strikes me is the color of the 'get started' button.
That copperish-gold I find pretty horrible.
Isn't green the international color of 'get started'?
I suppose copperish is better than using red, but I'd rethink that color scheme. Same with the grey button, as I discovered that a surprising number of non-techy people think grey means inactive.

Overall, really clean and well laid out.
Shorturl auto-discovery - A standard for URL shortening - Are there others?
Two most overused software marketing terms - "Easy" and "Simple"
Really? Features? Lemme guess - C++ has a "Object-oriented" features, Java has "strong typing", and .NET has "enterprise scalability".

What's a language feature, exactly?
Unintended Consequences: Twelve Years under the DMCA
Article says the first Google result when you google "search engine" is 5th place.

For the same search, Yahoo places itself as #1 and Google #2.

Bing's takes the old school award: #1 is Dogpile, #5 is Altavista. None of the big boys from today are in the top ten, not even Bing themselves. I like that, its like they've got a small ego.
AFAIK YouTube used H.263, not VP6.
This isn't an attempt to expand their influence, but a frantic effort to mitigate the serious fuckup they have done in mobile space up until the end of last year: Android platform fragmentation. Both hardware and OS versions are far too diverse to present a coherent development platform. This is the sink hole that swallowed J2ME, Palm, and almost ingested Windows Mobile. This is exactly where Apple took the opposite approach - one screen size, one input type, one memory size, one CPU, one OS version. They bumped up CPU and memory recently so that makes two platforms - a newish and and oldish one, as smooth a transition path as there could possibly be.

Google is now trying to take all successful apps and have them work well on one "golden standard" platform which is Android 2.0 and Nexus One/Droid. If they are to have any hope of avoiding the fate of J2ME they will have to herd a lot of cats - both developers and OEMs - towards something resembling an actual uniform platform.
I don't think the majority of muslims like to be associated with islamic terrorists just as germans don't like their association with hitler, or we white americans like our association with past slavery.
It's called Matroska. And practically everyone promoting Ogg pretends that it doesn't exist.

My theory is that the difference is one of control. Having talked to many Ogg evangelists, this seems to be the problem: Matroska allows you to use video and audio formats that Xiph doesn't like. Ogg does not.

Every Vorbis/Theora video I've ever seen, which isn't distributed on the web, is contained in Matroska. Ogg is the "default" because of Mozilla, not due to some Xiph conspiracy. There are three reasons Matroska isn't more heavily used:

1. Ogg is the dominant format for free audio. I've tried to use Matroska for storing audio (.mka), but most tools have poor or no support for it. I believe a large part of this is because Matroska's metadata support is even more poorly documented than Ogg's. At least Ogg has some de-facto standards for how metadata should be included; Matroska,̶ ̶a̶s̶ ̶f̶a̶r̶ ̶a̶s̶ ̶I̶ ̶c̶a̶n̶ ̶t̶e̶l̶l̶,̶ ̶i̶s̶ ̶c̶o̶m̶p̶l̶e̶t̶e̶l̶y̶ ̶f̶r̶e̶e̶-̶f̶o̶r̶m̶ ̶(̶a̶n̶d̶ ̶t̶h̶u̶s̶ ̶u̶n̶u̶s̶a̶b̶l̶e̶)̶ has some standard tags, but few libraries can read them. The Matroska developers should sit down and either a) document the existing system or 2) figure out a new one. Then, help get support into common media libraries such as GStreamer or TagLib. Once I can store audio in Matroska, it's easier to encourage its use on the web.

2. Mozilla doesn't like depending on platform libraries, even if they're cross-platform, since history has shown that they tend to be more trouble than they're worth. Look at the Mozilla C++ style guide; half of it is dedicated to avoiding C++ features as simple as namespaces or exceptions because some obscure platforms don't support them well. Therefore, they won't support GStreamer or QuickTime, and support for any format has to be included in the Mozilla repository directly.

3. Since #1 means Ogg must be supported, and #2 means there's a huge disincentive to support more than the bare minimum of formats, Matroska is seen as too much trouble to support. I think this won't change until more users request it.

For what it's worth, here's Mark Pilgrim's opinion on Matroska, after I requested at least a sentence or two be included in his new HTML 5 book (which covers such unused fossils as AVI and XVid):

> Could you add a paragraph on the Matroska[1][2] container format to
> the list of containers?

I could, but no browser supports it (even those that support
Theora-in-Ogg), so there's little point. Then again, I do mention AVI,
which no browser supports either, but that's mostly because I think
most readers would be familiar with it. Few people have heard of MKV
except Free Software hippies and movie pirates. :-)

If it actually lands in Firefox or some other browser, I'll revisit
this decision.
Am I the only one thinking "the hell with privacy"?
I understand the need for a certain level of privacy.
However people watching these monitors see hundreds if not thousands of people a day... Do you think they care a second about who wears a pacemaker, or a gastric ring? They might notice it, but they will forget it the second after, and most certainly never meet the person again. So tell me, how is it a privacy violation?
No one ever said the Patent office was useful, competent, or smart.
I don't think this is quite a skiplist, but it is amusing that someone's trying..
I'm getting the same impression. This feels like it's trying to be more corporate.
Lawyers are barred from making legal arguments directly to the jury. Judges hold the prerogative of instructing the jury on the law. Lawyers only make arguments about evidence, motivation, etc. to the jury.
Didn't know the name Ben Huh until now, thought this was going to be about someone that is successfully changing employer every 3 months. Anyone doing that?
Seems like I have been saying this a lot lately but regardless I'm going to say it once again.

It's amazing what you can patent.
Thanks for posting that video. That was 50 minutes of my time well spent.
Not emulate, but blow right past Apple in the user experience we deliver to our end users

You gotta admire the guy's ambition.
You're barking up the wrong tree. It's unlikely that 'the next person that wants to stop blogging' reads HN (yes I know about spolsky and al3x). In response to this story, you could ask us not to vote for such stories or even urge us to flag it. Although such metacomments are discouraged, it's still more useful than wildly addressing a bunch of people that probably won't be reached.
Larry Sanger (co-creator of Nupedia and Wikipedia) forked it into Citizendium in an attempt to re-infuse a healthy respect for elite, specialist, academic, or otherwise expert knowledge. Hasn't really taken off and Larry Sanger is now emeritus.
I wanted to know more about a standard way for finding a shorturl version for any page I'm looking at. I found this proposal that is supported by some but it's not clear what the adoption rate is. Do other HN'ers know of other such standards?

I've also found: http://alanhogan.com/tips/rel-shortlink-for-short-urls

I want something like this for Chrome 140 http://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/cdecnlepkfcnhkame... . Instead of using the is.gd version I can use the one the site wants to use.
An interesting subset of the make-your-victim-opt-into-something-illegal-or-embarrassing-so-he-won't-tell scam genre.
A dispatch from the startup frontlines
I don't think it's Alex's responsibility to analyze in advance how every thing he tweets might be interpreted.

Let's just say we have a serious disagreement there. He essentially tweeted about private future plans of twitter, something I'm pretty sure you cannot do. If you are an employee and you tweet about strategy, you have a responsibility to think from all angles. Otherwise you risk hurting the company you are working for out of negligence--never a good thing in any employee.
America, the Fragile Empire by Niall Ferguson
Do you really value your customers or do you just want their money?
Its funny Jquery really came out of nowhere, and 90% of the time I can grab a plugin and not even need to write flash.
How can I delete this submission or change the title? I changed the title on the actual post because it was obscure and hard to understand.
Totally OT: I've seen your office in Sitterson:) I'm taking COMP380(I think).
Are you sure? There are two different technologies being used in various countries for scanning passengers.

1. millimeter-wave

2. backscatter x-ray (low power)

It is not clear whether mm-wave photons can be biologically damaging. However, there are plenty of articles from the UK claiming that UK body scanners (at least some of them) are x-ray, not mm-wave. Are you saying all of them have it wrong, and that the UK is using 100% mm-wave scanners?
It's already accomplished the community aspect. Why not try to branch out into new areas with a fresh new look?

It's the same Ubuntu. They just need to start wearing a suit once in a while.
How the air security organizations got into buying these machines without thinking through the implications is what I find ridiculous.

I can understand a muslim women's (or any women really) objection where there religion says they have to cover their bodies, and now we tell them to go through a machine so we can see what their bodies look like.
The international dateline; or more precisely the antemeridian. It's a nontrivial problem, that even plagues the more famous gis applications (such as Google Earth, which cannot render a polygon that crosses the antemeridian properly).
Ubuntu: Now with grape flavor!
First, again again again, we are not just talking about "killing animals for food." We are talking about torturing them for their entire lives and then killing them.

Second, you say you think "killing [animals] for food is OK." Can you please at some point contend with the fact that this killing is completely unnecessary? Can you contend with the fact that the "killing" we are talking about also has catastrophic effects for the environment, both in localized ecosystems and in the atmosphere of our planet?

You can make simple declarations all day ("Killing things for food is OK"), but that doesn't amount to justification at all.
CC hackers rely on selling hundreds and thousands of numbers a time to make any money. It makes sense that most of their business comes from repeat customers, in which case scamming them isn't in their best interests.
Nice. My .emacs file (and support files) is apparently one of the most forked Emacs Lisp projects :)

I wonder how many peoples' emacs installs I'm going to break whenever I commit to that repository now...
Fish dicks. In his mouth. He' a gay fish
Guilty until proven innocent.
I am disgusted at how quickly people give in to this.

Go through the scanner/rectal screen to prove your innocence.
If you've read his blog before (when it was kanyeuniversecity) you'd believe.
Very nice, but obviously still ways off from something like PostGIS which includes several hundred geometry operations.
Except it did use VP6 and VP7.
Obviously true. However Islamic terrorists are clearly a subset of Muslims. So our liberal society is left with a choice between refusing Muslims their basic civil rights, or giving Islamic terrorists an easy way to bypass the expensive machines that we spent a fortune on to catch them. (Machines which, incidentally, are more used on non-Muslims than Muslims for the simple reason that the terrorists are able to use people who don't look like our stereotypes of what Muslims look like if that helps them bypass security.)

I find this kind of predictable policy failure amusing.
If you took half a second to look through the "New pages" feed, and saw not only the hideous quality and dubious nature of nearly all newly created pages, but also the vast quantity of new articles created every few minutes, you might rethink your position on keeping all deleted articles. Many new articles deserve speedy deletion.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:NewPages
I really do hope this pans out so long as ubuntu stays free and for the most part[1] open I'll support what they are doing for linux and operating systems.

[1]: So long as the base for ubuntu is free and open I'm happy and if they create software that costs money but it is not required to have a non-hindered user experience I'll consider them open

edit: I really hope that the orange starts getting toned down
@rjurney - interesting points on finding great people in hard-to-find places, as well as competing based on more favorable and simpler terms.

If they do want to address the market that way, I think that the message would need to come across better to attract the right kinds of applicants. Right now the message seems to come across very process-focused, which I think will tend to turn a lot of folks off.
Damn right. And considering everything he's accomplished, I think he has the right to be. =)
How do you rate the performance of engineers?
My current job is to manage an IT engineering department at a growing international airport. Our responsibility ranges from anything like designing a simple network to building datacenters, establishing best practices and standards and architecting complicated high availability systems.

The activities the engineers have to undertake are also broad, from drawing up standards for the cabling infrastructure to the designing various systems but also reviewing consultant designs and verifying contractor implementations.

While I realise the activities are broad and diverse all of them are performed by a relatively small team of people so each of them get involved in pretty much all areas.

In order to be able to monitor the progress, the workload and to report to upper management I am trying to work out a [KPI] system that can give an accurate representation of each engineer's load and progress, in numbers.

I've read a bit on the subject and apparently support guys are measured against the number of calls resolved and developers in terms of volume and quality of code written but the work of this team is so diverse and the outputs so different that I am yet to find a model that is representative for it.

The model should produce some meaningful representation of the work performed but also of the quality of the work. Since there is quite a bit of creativity involved in the process the numbers should reflect an exceptionally good design that is submitted late vs. a mediocre effort submitted on time. Oh, and by the way, the system should also be easy to implement in order to allow engineers to evaluate themselves without too much overhead.

What would you recommend in this scenario? How should a work package be structured to allow for such a system?

Sometimes I am feeling that I am trying to establish KPIs for poem writers. It simply would not be fair to rate them by the number of poems written.
Last time I flew I had to deal with the body scanners so this week rather then flying I drove from Boston to Toronto. I ended up arriving faster then when I flew and I didn't have any of the hassle crossing the boarder (and I brought a cake, something that would have worked on a plane).
If the grassroots community feels Ubuntu has sold out to the corporate world, things will change (edit: and not for the better). I'm not sure one distro can be everything to everyone -- that's why we have so many.
?! Not exactly sure why I was down-voted... This was a sincere question. Did I miss something obvious?
That's an example where they didn't win, but I know of no reason to think that they knew they certainly wouldn't. It was definitely not obvious at the time that copyright could not apply to interfaces as a whole, and Microsoft's prior consent to a licensing arrangement suggests that both parties had at one time considered it a real possibility.

I'm not saying Apple should have won or that that case isn't in some ways relevant--only that it wasn't certain that they would lose.
Congratulations on being unable to pick up context!