skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Might I suggest that you look into a language with Actors before saying that Actors are difficult to figure out? Personally, I'm a huge fan of Io[1], which uses Actors extensively.

Io has an incredibly minimal syntax that you (or any smart 17 year old) should be able to pick up in under a weekend - less time, if you/they have experience with a language that uses prototypical inheritance (such as JavaScript). This is pretty big, since the language doesn't impose itself or get in the way of any of the concepts that you're working with, to potentially confuse you.

With Io, if you've cloned an object, you have an actor that can perform asynchronous actions for you. Its as simple as:

foo := self @bar // asynchronous actor that returns a Future.

[1] http://iolanguage.com/
"Imagination at Work" - You probably shouldn't use that phrase next to a light bulb on your home page. I'm not even going to bother to do the search, but I'm 100% sure that GE has that trademarked.
I'm not involved with them in any way, but their faq says that though their product is amazon specific ATM if you want to work with rackspace or a private install to contact them directly.
See http://iolanguage.com/ for a magical balance of simplicity and expressiveness
perhaps this: http://www.google.com/relief/chileearthquake/ and this: http://mashable.com/2010/02/27/chile-earthquake-person-finde... will change your mind?
Surprisingly Jason has kept quiet on this specific case even after a couple entreprenuers have pointed this out. hmm....
Bill in UK may disallow public wi-fi
Gini Coefficient
I would add: The Entrepreneur's Manual: Business Start-Ups, Spin-Offs, and Innovative Management by Richard M. White. It is out of print and by Chilton (the auto manual maker) and is dated, but a very fun read. Business is nothing new as this book will point out.
Apple never should have allowed this stuff in the first place, but if other companies see Apple making a change for the better, and then only getting pummeled for it, what incentive will they have to change?
Why do you think the kids work there? Is it voluntary or involuntary?

Suppose it's voluntary. If so, then if you stop them from having that job, they will believe you've hurt them, by taking away their preferred life option. Correct?
Why conservatives are probably not stupid
Gangsta Rap would have that effect on me.
If you wish to create a program from scratch you must first create the universe.
I don't mind reading about programming, startup politics, etc. but things like this paper and the aforementioned javascript ![:alnum:] thread are the things I love the most on HN.

I also love how much really good intelligent discussion happens here on things like PDFs that don't have a built-in commenting system.

So, thanks!
I think that a smaller fee like $150 would not really be a problem. This may be viewed as an administrative fee to have a paid person review each application.

When the fees go up to $1000 and over, then it becomes problematic, because then the application fees are obviously a source of profit. And if the angels or the entrepreneur forum or whatever make money from the application process they have little incentive to actually make investments.
Apple didn't allow this stuff. Their suppliers did, while trying to hide it from Apple. Unlike most companies, Apple actually bothered to investigate their suppliers and uncover these abuses rather than simply taking them at their word.
I don't feel like an expert here, but this just seems... wrong.

Some of the arguments made about actors are silly - like, "..extract from it the missile launch codes and launch the missile.." What exactly stops any other function or method from doing something like this? This has nothing to do with actors.

The middle seems to be very specific criticism based entirely on Erlang's model (which I'm not familiar enough with to comment on specifics) and then attributed to the entire theoretical model.

And then the rest of it rambles about pure functions, which again has little or nothing to do with the actor model.
I think they should focus on showcasing the directory more than the video itself since it really does a better job at showing you the possibilities.

http://flavors.me/directory

I really like the looks of these pages, although it seems to me it all boils down to how clever you are designing your background image.
IANA security expert, but stuff like this makes me believe it is never possible to secure native code. If you want a secure system, build a VM using a strict language like Haskell.

Is that a fair statement?
NPR's All Things Considered has a short interview with the CTO of CereProc: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1240872... The voices aren't perfect but they're definitely better than anything else I've heard. Ebert's voice isn't demoed in the interview. I'm guessing Oprah wants to be the first to show it.

This combined with improved subvocal stuff like http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xyN4ViZ21N0 would make silent, covert voice communication possible. No more annoying one-sided conversations from cell phones.
Summary: irrational fear of Skype.
The most famous actor-model language, Erlang, was designed primarily for phone networks. How would you create a system of millions of nodes with fault-tolerant, hot-swappable, gradually-updatable code without actors? (Keeping in mind that REST is an example of the actor model.)
Totally agree that a smaller fee isn't such a bad thing and could be reasonable.

But then I think that an entrepreneur is paying $150 or less for the opportunity to meet investors who might or might not ever invest in the company (actually they are prob more likely to not invest in terms of odds). So its paying for something that has a negative value, just a chance that they might be interested.

Also on the other side the investors should be cashed out entrepreneurs who have enough money to sustain themselves and are looking at companies to invest in and profit off of. Only seems fair that the investors should be footing that bill (even if its just administrative) and others like Chris Dixon agrees http://twitter.com/cdixon/status/9727260471

Hard to justify when the fee is such a small amount but it still feels wrong to charge entrepreneurs anything for an opportunity to pitch an investor group.
Ask HN: What % of YC companies were "pro"
Hi guys,

I'm curious to know what % of YC companies or founders (last season lets say) came from professional working backgrounds at successful companies. I've read the bios of some founders. It seems quite a few came from engineering positions at Google, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, etc.

Are there a lot of these guys? Are their companies more successful than guys out of undergrad/grad school?
I had read the first article already, and this one provided an interesting commentary. What struck me most, however, was the striking parallel it makes to a distant, hazily defined, mmo game that a friend and I talk about creating in our twilight years.

This game would simply be a massive simulation of a fantasy setting, replete with deep and meaningful (in an in-game sense) game-object detail, but which would offer no prefabricated achievement structure. The trick, as we see it, would be to actually get people to play this "game". Without any transparent and crudely imitable notion of "advancement", we doubt that anybody other than space cadets like ourselves would enjoy the game. Essentially, the game would be about being in the world and living there, and not about winning contests and completing quests. It is not as if there would not be things to do - quite the contrary, the player liberty might be overwhelming - too many people would ask: "What do I do in this game?" - translation: "how do I succeed here?"
I'd buy a couple 327xs if they come up in an auction!
Initial Thoughts on Yahoo’s Ranking Challenge
I don't see how a chance of a positive outcome has a negative value.
If the money is really just to test applicants' seriousness, they should donate it to charity.
Free Market: How Property Rights Saved Chile And Destroyed Haiti
There is definitely room for improvement there http://abstrusegoose.com/244 :D
torch = flashlight (for American readers)
I doubt organic brains can rely on that many bits when firing their neurons.
The story of Mel, a Real Programmer from FOLDOC
As I've said before, I think that fees for pitching is the beginnings of a market that will replace a web of insider influence and is a healthy thing. The fees will go down because of competition to the point where they'll cover the actual administrative costs plus some profit to cover cost of capital etc.

The insiders are whole-heartedly against this, because it threatens their influence. Its a scene right out of Ayn Rand.
The Real Roots of the Crisis
You mean which have some kind of post-school work experience? Certainly the majority. Maybe 80%. Though interestingly some of the biggest successes (e.g. Loopt, Dropbox) were started by people straight out of school.

Young founders have more variance. They often flame out, but when they don't they often do really well. For that reason we've made a conscious effort not to get conservative and fund only startups that seem safe.

When we first started, we had no choice but to fund risky startups, since those were the only ones that applied. Now that we're better known we get a lot of applications from older, more legit seeming founders. It would be easy to start funding only them and ignoring the 20 year olds, but that would be a mistake. The median 20 year old is going to fail, but the best one is Sam Altman.
I am a security professional, but not a developer. You're half correct. Your suggestion of a VM with Haskell would result in a system that could still be made to fail. The methodologies would just work differently.
I guess one could write an acme mode for emacs ;-)
Most "achievements" are ways to mark time until we die, and make us feel better about what we spent our lives doing up to that point. Whether they are artificial or perceived benchmarks or 'real' accomplishments is not as important as what we do after we think we've accomplished something, no matter how big (starting a company) or small (high score on Minesweeper, because there's always something else to 'achieve.' Achievement porn or success - the definition (and the embodiment) is up to you.
NYC is not the best place for a startup
Just a small piece showing the inverse link between economic freedom and the protection of property rights to the destruction caused by natural disasters.

The free market can prevail, even with services and certifications that are considered "too big to handle".
Well, trivial in relation to a company rebuilding its product on a new programming language or paradigm.
"When any sincere individual or group of people asks for my assistance in pursuit of their [...] dream, I will strive to help them in any way that I can, be it small or large."

I'm not familiar with Rajeev, but it's a good rule.

I think it's even better with the one small edit I made above.
LOL that blog post certainly didn't do anything to dispel the notion that conservatives are less intelligent.

I actually think of it like this: being liberal doesn't necessarily make you more intelligent, but being more intelligent makes you increasingly likely to be liberal. This is why the student bodies at all the top colleges in the US are overwhelmingly liberal. No, it isn't because the teachers there are lefties; the students were that liberal the moment they stepped on campus and smart people are much less likely to be manipulated than dumb people. Once you reach a certain level of intelligence where you are able to process news from a variety of sources and interpret it critically, you easily see that moderate liberalism is right on almost all issues where there is some notion of an objective right or wrong. This is why top colleges can be over 90% democrats.

Now if you aren't intelligent enough to understand the world, you could become either liberal or conservative. It really just depends on where you grew up and your experiences. It's sort of like taking a multiple-choice test with two possible answers. If you are bright and can understand the material, you will choose the liberal answer the vast majority of the time. If you are not smart enough to do so, you have to guess at the answer. Half pick the correct liberal choice while the other half picks the incorrect conservative choice.

The only intelligent conservatives either are libertarians who have simply done the mental gymnastics necessary to conclude that other human beings do not matter or are people who have been severely indoctrinated into conservative teachings at a very early age.
Great word.
You can now include CoffeeScript files as modules in Node.js
I'm going to be _really_ grateful to you guys if this ends up being true for me. Going out to get some now :)
Support Chile the Web 2.0 Way
I'm pretty sure he meant "not actually private", in a sense of something like "any organization dependent on the government for survival can be regarded, to some extent, as being effectively a branch of the government".

Of course, by that standard, I'm not sure how many "truly private" companies exist, since it seems to rule out (among others) any company that relies on intellectual property law, including trademark enforcement to prevent bootlegs and cheap imitations.
While the story is true to some degree that "We didn't care", I think it all ties back to government agencies that allow businesses to operate on a very risk tolerant threshold; More than the free market would have allowed.

Take for instance, the FDIC, which allowed banks to only hold some kind of ridiculous percentage, say 10%, of all demand deposits, and the fee the FDIC charged to "insure" banks holdings was very small. There is not an insurance company in the world that would allow anyone to lend out 90% of their money stock and insure it all for almost nothing.

The government sets up safety nets which allow people, who are inherently risk conscious, to stop caring about risk.
Ask HN: open standards for mail storage?
Hi all, I was wondering if there are any standards/documentation for storing mail, either in the server, or in e-mail clients? I am specially interested in how companies like Xobni are able to crawl the data from the user's mailboxes.
A poor man's crawler could be probably with an IMAP client, but that doesn't sound particularly efficient.
Disregarding the means, who are these teenagers and why are they — as opposed to other people of different ages possibly behaving badly, or "badly" — considered so unsuitable for many places?

In thirty years or so it's these same teenagers who will be making and governing the new rules. I wonder if, upon their time, they will appreciate a more free acceptance of people themselves.
Note that Apple is prominently linking to this document, one of their supplier audit reports, from the front page of apple.com.
But that isn't my stack. What about nginx, memcache, and more recently a nosql tool like couchdb.

I got the impression the first is rocketing in popularity, the second is ubiquitous, and the third is inevitable at scale. Why start with anything less?
> disrespect to adults

Seriously? People see it as a problem? I see it as a normal symptom of being a teen.
Fuel cell of the future promises cleaner energy
tether their laptops to their iphones are complaining

Uhm, you don't even need an app for tethering—it is supported
by iPhone OS itself.
Very cool technology, can't wait to hear what it sounds like compared to his real voice. The only downside of course is normal folks don't have isolated audio of themselves speaking. The company really needs to figure out how to isolate it themselves so home movies and voicemails could be used without the background noise affecting quality.
It's an abuse from a Western point of view where we are comfortable enough to ban child labor and even consider it "exploitative".

For the family of that child, it's a disaster. For the Chinese economy, it's one less cheaper worker to drive the engine of progress. If the child find any job at all, it may be prostitution, scrapping metals, and other much more less savory work. He may be lucky to find a higher paying job for his family.

Now, it's perfectly in the right of Apple(Or the CEO officiating the policy) to do this, as they have the right to dictate whatever voluntary contracts to their suppliers. They may have even seen the temporary profit margin loss as a win in the long run.

But where is the moral justification for banning child labor, and a voluntary one at that?
I hope these youngsters don't also, in addition to generally being in wrong places, make the huge mistake of taking on photography.

In the light of recent news from the same country, that could really get them in trouble: a loiterer and a terrorist.
flat = apartment; jam = jelly; elms = maples (i think)
Are you using boto on the backend?
Excellent analysis, must have been quite an exciting project to hack skype into bits to understand the countermeasures.
he claims that they are a charity, says NY Angels is a non-profit: http://www.metamorphblog.com/2010/02/is-ny-angels-a-paytopla...
How is it immoral to ban 7-day overtime child
labor?

Edit: Quit downvoting him you morons, he brings up an interesting point of view with interesting arguements and should not be punished for doing so.
Some of the stupidest and worst-informed people I've ever met have been liberals, and some of the most intelligent and thoughtful people I've met (and I've met quite a number) have been conservatives. I spent four years at Georgetown, which is probably one of the most politically active schools in the country, so I think I have a decent sample of both the left and the right (albeit biased towards the intelligent end - but not as much as you might think, trust me).

This isn't a particularly robust article, but the point he makes is probably correct - intelligence makes one more likely to go to university, and going to university exposes one up to far more liberal influence than conservative. It certainly matches my experience. My experience has also been that the vast majority of liberals move at least a bit to the right after they grow up and have to support themselves.

(No one's ever totally objective about this stuff, but for what it's worth, I'm a moderate, to the point that I didn't feel I could vote either way in the last election.)
I keep waiting for this much-hyped anti-Apple backlash to materialize, but there seems to be a distinct lack of outrage outside the rarefied world of the blogs.

The only people I know who even have Google Voice (closed beta) are exactly the ones the original poster was talking about. It was AT&T, not Apple, who disallowed Skype. Tethering, again, really? You really think >5% of iPhone owners even know what that means?

As long as Apple dominates the market with one platform there will be people lining up to write apps. And you want one reason why Apple is dominating? The apps have QC.
Only risk takers or the poorly informed would run public, untracked/unmonitored WiFi spots anyway. When the police come a-knocking because someone downloaded child porn over your connection, they're going to be taking all your computer equipment away as evidence whether they charge you or not - and that's not a reasonable risk most businesses should be taking.
It is interesting though how much he emphasizes culture. I think that today we are seeing more and more large companies take such a primary focus on it. For Zappos it is their priority. Google is also very notable for this.

It used to be all gesture with out real motion. Think Enron with values like "Integrity" chiseled into marble in their main lobby.

This is something I am very excited about for our future. More thoughtfulness around company culture.
We get over 100 folks applying to each event in the Open Angel Forum.

As an angel investor I sort through this AS PART OF MY JOB. I don't need $150 to filter out the bad ones--I can tell in two minutes if something is really bad.

TechCrunch50 doesn't charge either and we get 1,000 folks to apply for that. Again, IT IS OUR JOB to sort through these. We don't need to charge the startups.

This is a really lame excuse in my mind. If you're not willing to sort through applications--which take minutes to process--why be an angel investor or run an angel group?

Open Angel Forum is now in four cities and we are coming to New York City in April. We should be in 15-20 cities two years from now and I think we can do enough by having the lawyers, accountants and headhunters pay to attended/sponsor to cover any costs.

David is a nice guy, but he's lazy I think.
Chile con carnage. Pictures are rather reminiscent of the Northridge quake, and, sadly, SoCal is overdue one of these nasties..
a. Where is the assurance that the labor is voluntary?

b. "one less cheaper worker"; perhaps encouraging the supplier to pay wages to adults that will allow them to raise their children?

c. "Drive the engine of progress". Well, or serve as corduroy on the road that party insiders take to the bank.
I'm not from the US, so it seems to me the argument from the article falls down on "it perpetuates the established political order". Haven't there been both liberal and conservative parties in power in the past?

So you would still have to explain why universities would tend to be liberal.

Anyway, nothing good can come from this discussion here. I hope it'll be flagged to death soon.
We allow adults to work insane overtime, but not for children. Why?

Isn't it still voluntary that children choose to work insane overtime?

Isn't the employer providing compensation for the children, which they accept in the first place?

Do you begrudge an employer who provide you food and shelter and a chance to live another day in exchange for some work?
What did Tim Ferris do with his soul?
All programming languages should have a quick reference page exactly like this. It would make learning and working with them so much easier.
"It's possible there are some other ideas from OO worth salvaging, but more likely I think OO is just an evolutionary dead-end."

I don't know why it is that some functional programmers insist on putting a diatribe against OOP in every little thing they write. I understand where they're coming from, but can they just not fathom that there could be a different way of doing things than what they're used to?
My attitudes usually fall strongly in both camps (very conservative on law and order, very liberal on social issues/gay marriage/etc) but I see having a liberal outlook as being like having a scientific outlook.

Self-defined "conservatives", on the whole, appear keen to keep things as they are and not experiment with society or civic systems. Self-defined "progressives", on the other hand, seem more willing to try out experiments to see if they result in quality of life improvements.. this fits well with a scientific mindset, IMHO, so I'll probably always identify as idealistically progressive, even if many of my opinions become conservative due to experience.
I don't think you can substitute love with points.

Though given how many relationships break up over World of Warcraft, maybe points are better than love. (I don't know how many relationships break up over WoW, but I could imagine it's a few).
PiCloud dev here.

Nope, but we probably should.
Even the liberal US media is ridiculously conservative by European standards, so it's certainly a US-centric point they're making. Sadly, they won't figure that out and instead believe the US system is the one the world gravitates around.
Unfortunately, if you are brushing your teeth, you are not really making progress. You are just slowing down the decay of the status quo. So if you reward yourself with points for brushing teeth, you are still kidding yourself.

On the other hand, maybe a game with decaying experience points would be a good idea. If you don't do anything, you lose experience - evil. Could be gamers wouldn't like it, or else it would have been tried.