skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
My favorite in that vein was a complaint about the quality of... CattleMax, a software package for tracking cows. It's a frontend for a database with fewer than ten tables. Somewhere in eastern MT are a couple of ranchers who'll be rich, if they can just get someone to write, support, and advertise this software in exchange for 10% of the net profits. Unfortunately, I am not that someone.
Here's a cool thing you can do in Scheme if you feel depressed that nothing is written in Scheme:

http://www.pawfal.org/fluxus/

(P.S. I love Scheme and did everyday things in Scheme when I had the opportunity to for a while. But right now I'm really enjoying Clojure and I think that Clojure might replace Scheme for me, because of Java libraries, and because of the really concise, consistent, and pleasant syntax, especially for maps and functions.)
Not that it adds much value as a comment, but I'm sitting in the panel now waiting for it to start.

(If only there was a web service you could use to send short, meaningless comments like that. Just 140 characters or so, say.)
Did this article just open with "Semantic web makes most people shut down" then follow with "Here's a basic overview of Semantic Web"? That doesn't make any sense.

Also, a press release style blog post about a semantic web company isn't really a quality post for HN.
I've worked with Scheme quite a bit and I've concluded that it's an academic language, not a business language. It definitely lacks a large, vibrant community with mature libraries. There is also too much variation among the various flavors of Scheme which fragments the community. It also lacks good language constructs for managing large software projects (namespaces and such). You have to have a Scheme-enlightened text editor in order to be productive. Despite what people say, it's not as pure and minimal as you'd think (I think there may be five different variations of let).

Instead of pouring a lot of effort into Scheme, let it stay an academic language. It's fine for learning about functional programming.

I moved from Scheme to Ruby and haven't missed Scheme. Sure, Scheme macros are very powerful, but I found that the DSLs that you can create in Ruby are adequate. Ruby also has the advantage of being a multiparadigm programming language.
You would get a lot of value out of BlueprintCSS, right away.

Your colors do nothing to improve the site. Ditch them. Use black, white, grey, and a single accent color of your choice for text only.

What's the deal with the DOCTYPE?
Actually, one of our customers started writing "Thank you!" e-mails one or two weeks ago. I guess my boss managed to convince her that twenty hours of support per day is not the norm.
Open letters are about politics, not logic. What an individual critical thinker such as yourself believes has no bearing.
I don't like pet-peeve rants because they rarely tell you how to find something original that works. They're very quick to tell you what doesn't work, and perhaps a little bit of why, but they don't really give much insight into how to find good alternatives.

For example, if you have a lot of faces in your film, how do you make them "pop" and stand out without using lots of teal?
I dunno, the CSS color scheme of this site is definitely orange (and almost teal in the background, at least on my monitor). I think this is a bigger conspiracy than we imagined.
I did, but I still don't see how redis and MySQL differ in how they handle either type.
Take a look at Juggernaut. It's an event server based on EventMachine that provides nice integration with Rails. Streams events to the client via Flash.
Apple's HTC patent lawsuit is a bluff | Betanews
Maybe, but part of the value of async programming is never having to thread, so none of this really lights me up.
>now I'm not going to accept anything they said

I don't think anyone is refusing to accept anything he says. They're just disapproving of his motives, which is fine.
Only when it doesn't mean please.
No. A very small percentage of people will actually trash their employer's database. It's unethical and likely illegal. As an employer, I would stay as far away as I can from anyone who professes to have nothing against destroying one of my critical databases over a disagreement. The likelihood of running into another person who is going to quietly destroy a database is so highly unlikely that it's not worth it to take this risk.
There's also Tab Toolkit which is similar and very cool:
http://www.agilepartners.com/apps/tabtoolkit/
"When people are free to do as they please, they usually imitate each other." http://despair.com/connot.html
I know people tend to say this as a response to everything around here, but I think it's genuinely a good response to this:

You should try Clojure. It's cleaner than Scheme except for the pains that come along with the JVM, but those redeem themselves by giving you access to zillions of libraries (which was your other complaint). And it has a good community and an awesome benevolent dictator.
> It's not hard to get a 1 in 10 chance of 9.5x return or a 1 in 100 chance of a 95x return
Does 2x on $100 leave me a total of $200 or $300.

> What you want is a 1 in 3 chance of a 30x return within 5 years
Obviously, that will be hard to find. If you did 100 of those, you'd be getting a 10x return in 5 years.

My original question to the poster stands. Are you looking for a real long shot, or something with a decent chance of paying off?
Are Amazon Seller Ratings Trustworthy?
Free download SnowFox DVD Ripper
Free download SnowFox DVD Ripper
Me too, congrats!
They have poor information sources for their prejudice
now

Yes to that part. We should base our choices on our current situation, not an idealized view.

I don't see what harm better information sources
driving their prejudice could do.

That loses too much nuance. I can see that it could do harm, but think that increased information could also reduce prejudice. In the particular case of movie reviews, I see the added risk as low, and the potential benefit as small but significant.

The debate on privacy dangers is secondary, if Netflix
refuses to release useful data in the future then that's
the primary danger

No, I mean secondary in the sense that we need to sort out the what the actual privacy dangers are before we try to come up with workarounds. If the outcome is that Netflix embeds some small print requiring all users to allow the release of 'suitably anonymized' rating data, has this changed anything? We still need to determine the actual risks. Perhaps the privacy advocates so right about the dangers that even an opt-in system should be prevented.

I was working on a project with the data, and the FTC
ruling appears to have put a stop to that.

People already using the data set internally will likely be unimpacted. The Netflix terms of release presumably still apply, and prevent most commercial usages. But research papers that need to cite a publicly available data set will be adversely impacted, and the legal 'cloud of fear' will likely prevent the release of future data sets.
What happened with Real Player?
Well, do you need to make them pop? Really, are we so far gone that we believe viewers can't identify people in a scene without making them 'pop'?
Akin to color compression, various recent popular music is clipped into a fairly narrow range of frequencies, and with Auto-Tune filters applied to the voices.

Listening to music with a (larger) dynamic range and with little or no Auto-Tune can make the differences apparent; you start noticing similarities to the flanging effect used with the voices of the Goa'uld in Stargate series.

Like reel-change marks in the old days, once you notice this sort of stuff, you're doomed.
Killer app: A sheet music display app that can recognize the 2nd to last measure and turn the page for you. Would also work if a parent could stand 30 feet away in the wings and flip the pages via Wifi or bluetooth.
Online reputation can certainly get you a job; why should it not lose you one?

If you participate in an open source project, you are likely to get a boost in an interview with a knowledgeable company. It certainly does with me when I've hired someone. Now, if someone at the company goes and looks at your code in that open source project, and says "Yikes! That's some pretty awful code!", then you've got a problem.

People have been getting jobs and losing opportunities due to reputation forever. This is just an extension to existing processes; nothing really new.
Open-Source Collaborative JVM Scripting Environment
Features:

- Support of many popular JVM languages with syntax highlighting and code completion for most.
- Advanced script editing interface based on structured notebooks as popularized by the Mathematica system.
- A WYSIWYG HTML editor for documentation.
- An infinite, zoomable 2D canvas for arbitrary layout of components, container nesting and more.
- Full workspace automatically persisted in an embedded HyperGraphDB database.
- Support for importing 3d party libraries in multiple evaluation contexts.
- Based on the JSR 223 standard for language interoperability - all languages share the same runtime context.
- Real-time collaboration and exchange of components and notebooks via a P2P network.
The big infrastructure providers such as Qwest have labelled this a 'Dream':

http://www.redorbit.com/news/technology/1836098/fcc_set_to_a...

Just won't happen - the population density of the US is too low.
And when I got the ability to color the top nav at some N karma, I unthinkingly set it to teal (or cyan, in my words.) Now that I think about or, it really does make the Y "pop"...
Join the HN March Madness Pick'em (use an algorithm to fill out the bracket)
So: PLT Scheme is a great system with great FFI and a lot of really good libraries. It's flexible and has a very fast interpreter—approaching webkit's interpreter, even!

But: “Objective-C is a great example of what is going on. Obj-C is a cool language that implements fancy message passing, but it has ugly syntax and doesn't really offer anything new to the average programmer (Python works just fine without message passing, doesn't it?).”

What I can't stand is people who don't really understand their underlying languages start to talk about them. I mean, are you kidding me jlongster? Objective-C's system is bad but Python's system is okay? Why not say you love the taste of chocolate but hate the taste of cocoa? They're performing the same function for the runtime!

I want to like Python, but its community of people who just refuse to understand how other languages relate to their favorite language really frustrates me. I'm not sure I can even count how many times a pythonista has challenged me, “What do you mean Python doesn't have real lambdas? _You don't even know Python!_” Given how important a community is to a language (see also: common lisp), it's difficult to overlook stuff like this.
Here's an alternate explanation for the phenomenon (linked to from the blog post):
http://prolost.com/blog/2010/2/15/memory-colors.html

The origin of the idea is to preserve skin tones and other "memory colors" (stop signs, taxi cabs), regardless of how the rest of the scene is rendered (bright or drab).

So it's not that film colorists are intentionally making everything teal and orange (or actually maybe the lazy ones are now that's it's become something of a cliche.)
Hence my claim about the near-impossibility of the task.
Fear is an innate human emotion, deeply rooted in our fight-or-flight mechanism. It's a key survival characteristic.

To overcome fear by rational thought is going against nature, and difficult at best. When confronted with violence, it takes almost zen-like concentration to purge the associated fear.

Our susceptibility to fear closely parallels that of hunger, sex, or advertising. The mind is hard-wired to have specific reactions to certain stimuli, and power comes from the ability to impose those stimuli. Terrorism is just one example.

I agree that the solution is to place rational thought above implicit emotional responses. However, the past has taught us that the public's reaction is almost always hysteria rather than logical analysis.
Top Things That Annoy Programmers
Dancing with Elephants - advice on third-party apps
I've been hacking Arc for a while now and we've been using calls to 'language servers' to deal with the poor library support. Basically, we wrap calls to Perl or Python up and send it via http to a local server that does nothing but eval the code and respond. That's gone a long way toward fixing the library problems (although it makes me, at least, less likely to develop actual Arc libraries since I can just wrap a call to Perl much more quickly). It's a relatively unique solution to the problem, I think.

Unfortunately, the language is really fucking slow. I wish I had an interpreter written in C.
As per the wikipedia[1]:
"By the time he was 26 years old, his net worth was $40 million".

Wow!

Its not very clear how. From the follow on link it appears that this was from investing in stocks.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carlos_Slim#Early_life
duck duck go just became my #1 search engine.
That already exists with the iPhone today, where the 3GS often runs CPU-intensive apps much better than the earlier models. Segmentation is unavoidable as long as hardware is improving.
Yeah, it's even worse than the Wilhelm Scream: http://revision3.com/filmriot/btsdslr#seek=286 (text description if you can't see the video: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilhelm_scream)
that doctype is wild
And that's the problem with trying to appeal to paranoid users: they can always find something else to be paranoid about.
Does anyone know if there's a company like System 76 in the UK? Dell's Ubuntu range seems to have vanished. Having someone else worry about hardware compatibility and edge cases would be awesome.
Reads like a concept for a Cory Doctorow novel to me.

I dislike that the author is simply stating all these amazing and utopian things that are going to happen without much in the way of facts to back it up. It sounds like his dream more than anything concrete.
pg just walked in. If you want to see any of the Twitter backchannel for the session, search for #seedacc.
hmm, so the "twitter ads" might actually not be on twitter, but other sites ala adsense. interesting. my guess is, this is the proving ground for the tech behind it.
It's couched in pretty exciting/revolutionary/utopian language, but are the ideas really more likely to become mainstream now than at any time in the past? Seems like today's spin on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turn_on,_tune_in,_drop_out
NeuroBranding(TM) [PPT] - Using Neuroscience to Help With Sales and Marketing
Yet 3 out of 10 students dropped out of high school

I hate this statistic. I've known several people that dropped out of high school to get a GED instead. (It was faster for them and they were sick of school.) Others had to drop out of school because their family kicked them out of their house at 18. Both of them got GEDs later.
I'm not really sure what you're talking about; his whole point referring to Objective-C was that the reason it's popular isn't because of any of its particular language features (i.e. "other languages are equally powerful"), it's popular because Apple took it and built a whole bunch of great libraries with it for its computers so that, if you want to program applications on a Mac, and you want to use things like Core animation and all of that, you're probably going to end up using Objective-C.
Twitter Announces @Anywhere Platform
This is exactly what one would expect.

To the brain, beliefs are beliefs, whether they concern god, angels or motor oil.

Not all cognition about religious things involves a "mystical experience". In fact, theologians tend to be an incredibly dry bunch and study their creeds with all the emotional investment of an accountant.
Do you mind showing us how? I googled everywhere and only came up with a highlight-parentheses minor mode hack which only highlights the parentheses at the cursor.
Hitwise: Facebook passes Google in U.S. visits
Programming languages don't have speeds
Beyond The iPhone: A World of Opportunity (An absolute joke)
See if you can implement an improved information system if they have a really bad one. Their cause of failure: bad information. On the other hand maybe they have some good information that can be useful.
I might respond to something like this.
If you're doing method calls over HTTP+eval, then I'm very surprised Arc's speed is the choke point in your application.
I'm gonna go with "probably not".

The article starts with a standard argument that schools suck, then launches into a libertarian utopia forecast. I'm not sure how you can have both a information economy AND people who can't put in the time at a school to learn.

Schools aren't some evil conspiracy to teach conformance, they're the only way to teach basic info to lots of kids. And if kids can't sit through it long enough to learn, the majority won't self teach either, no matter how much you want them to. So what do those people do?

There are other models for schooling, but covering classic reading/writing/math/history is still pretty important, and modern schools do a reasonable job of providing that the majority of kids.
YC meetup vs. Jaron Lanier? Maybe I'll be late.
My first question about this thing is how "leaky" the abstraction is. If you frequently have to make allowances for how C is not _actually_ a language with an object system, that's going to be a problem. But it seems like it should be possible (with liberal macro use) to make a relatively leak-free abstraction, and if this is it, that's pretty cool.
Confirmed: Marketplace only way to get apps on WinMo 7 Phones
Thanks for the feedback. I've already got this change planned.
Eep. I had mine set to #00bbdd until 10 seconds ago...
Hmm, if it's on the local box and not actually going over a network, like the poster implied, I don't think it would be so bad; assuming it's just a call to do some oddball library thing here and there, and not in the computationally intensive portions.
Their idea reminded of a similar concept I heard once: open source scientific papers.

It works like this: you put up the .tex source, the data files, the R, Octave, etc. scripts, and if people download and run the scripts, they get the exact paper as a result, including all the graphs. This way one can check that the graphs really show what is claimed in the paper and that there has been no bug or "polishing" of the results.
I'm among those students who dropped out of high school to accelerate my escape. I guess the phrase drop out hasn't dropped its negative connotations, so the author was using it to grab attention. But the essay is really about alternative paths to life goals, which is what many 'high school dropouts' are after.
I also work largely as a sys-admin, but I do some desktop support as well.

I get a lot of vague emails. "My internet is down," is a favorite of mine, as it could be a network outage, a local computer misconfiguration, a page being inaccessible, or simply the user getting an error page from the site because the URL they bookmarked doesn't exist anymore. If it's an email problem, it's probably because they didn't read the error message.

I also loathe when people walk over to my desk and say, "I hope I'm not interrupting you. {insert problem}". Now I've already been interrupted, so my train of thought has been derailed (worst when programming). I then have two choices, help the person because I am now not so busy with something else that I can't help but reward their behavior by doing so, or brush them off and try to get back on track with my previous task and risk being a bit of a jerk in the process.

Either way, I've already lost out. I'd gladly take a vague email over a confused user walking over to my desk.
Carlos slim country of origin is leban (to which he returned just few days ago) and not mexico.
Out to Sea -by- Richard Steed
should it be "the Erlangs from the eventboys"?
In the audience. Pumped. Is the meetup for YC only or can us lowly hn-ers attend as well?
so, can those of us writing in interpreted languages still fight about this?
I'd be more interested in that as well, but I wouldn' call this "bullshit." I enjoy it for the same reason I enjoy reading and rereading Max Ehrmann's Desiderata, Rudyard Kipling's If--, etc.

Truisms blindly followed are not worth much, but the reevaluation of truisms in the context of your experiences can be very worthwhile.
Amazing post. This deserves its own thread.
I wrote that tongue-in-cheek. Objective-C is superior to Python in so many ways, but why is Python more widely used? The average programmer can get along fine with Python, and Objective-C just looks more complicated. I'm saying this from the view of a typical programmer.

What is written in PLT, and who uses it? I'm not talking about great technology, I'm talking about putting that into practice. I use Gambit Scheme and I think it's the best system out there. But I'm challenging Scheme programmers to make great things, and put them to use, and give people a reason to learn Scheme.
> And that's why I wish there was a popular social platform that didn't measure anything. I doubt such a platform will ever exist - we clearly want the explicit hierarchies, even when they drive us crazy - but it sure would be a relief.

The social platforms measure and proudly display everyone's friends, followers, karma, and rating in order to provide some level of trust within the network. Displaying these stats is just the most basic way of showing that user A is trusted and respected by many. I don't think it's enough though. Here on HN, we value each other by our comments and our accumulated karma. And there is a direct relation between these two. But is it really enough?

I might have more karma on HN than someone who headed the $10B research department at a large tech firm. I love that online I can be on the same standing with this person when we discuss a topic we're both passionate about. However, if people start to judge us solely by our karma, then I will certainly have an advantage and I don't think that would be fair. Karma is a good start but not enough. In real life, just knowing that so-and-so is the CTO of XYZ or Prof. Emeritus at ABC.edu is enough to make us stop and listen (regardless of whether we agree or not). Online, we use karma for the same reason i.e. to decide if we should even read the 10 paragraph post by some user named 'nld445'.

My point is that stats like friends, karma etc. are certainly useful but they do not carry over from real-life into online life or one online system to another. Attempts have been made to make universal online avatars with rating but nothing concrete yet. Twitter actually managed to bridge the 'real-life to online' gap by their 'account verified' star. If there truly was an easy way to merge how well-respected and noteworthy a person is in real life into the online world, nobody would care about the number of followers someone has. What I am certain of is that the one-dimensional karma system we have is not even close.
Yeah, I set mine that way as soon as I could, too. I wonder how common that is?
Woman Is the Youngest to Cross an Ocean Alone
Hi there. Thanks for taking the time to look at it (and to comment!). I'm still working out the best way to call out its differentiating feature - which is really aimed at people/businesses accepting bookings, rather than people making them. Once you have an account on the site, you can configure details of the business(es) for which you accept bookings, and when people send you a booking request, the interface asks them to provide information that you need to accept the booking (e.g. what type of booking you're making, at which location, etc.).

In fact, the whole app that you've looked at is really just meant to be a big funnel for the actual service. The paid part is a comprehensive web-based app for managing bookings for a small business, aimed at being used at the front desk (and indirectly by clients booking through the site).