skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
you've already identified a bunch of things in our plans for cleanup and tuning.

As far as push goes, I talk about it here:

http://dangerouslyawesome.com/2010/02/mailroom-gmail-on-the-...

but the gist is this:

In order to accurately update badge icons over push, we’d need to store email addresses and passwords on a server somewhere, and that’s a security risk that we can’t figure out how to justify. I know I wouldn’t want that info out there, and I have to imagine that our users wouldn’t like it either.

We're hoping to find a more elegant way to do badge counts over push, but in the mean time, aren't offering it. Suggestions welcome.

And that website's launching this week to answer a lot of these questions, solicit feedback, and share some of the totally awesome testimonials from the userbase so far.
Except it's "stuff I queried", which is pretty random. Or at least not predictable before being tried, which is nearly as good.

Besides, geeks like to shrink things. I wouldn't have been surprised if it used "rand(YC application videos)", to save a character.
I consider very offensive the american difference between Hispanic and White.

You're not alone.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08VCkyG_C2s#t=01m10s
remail is 100% native search, because it's storing all of the mail locally. we can't quite touch that, but now that Remail is open source...maybe we'll take a look at what they've got going on.

One of the issues that I've had personally is that I can't search across multiple inboxes. Maybe using some of Remail's guts we can figure out how to make that work.
"Our programming model does not have to match how our computer works."

I think one of the biggest intellectual hurdles with functional programming is that we know, deep down, that modern computers don't work like that. They do have side-effects and changing, carried state. It's a revelation to realize that the programming model you use to write programs doesn't have to match how the computations will be physically carried out.
> Ars is being dishonest with their advertisers, who are paying for attention, not rendering processes. So, once again, fuck'em.

No they're not. Advertisers understand perfectly well that only a fraction of rendered ads actually gain a reader's attention.

> Second, if they're paying a tenth of a cent to render a page, they need a better host!

This was very obviously a made up number, not the thrust of my argument. Whether it's a tenth of a cent or a thousandth doesnt matter.

> Third, I would imagine that the cost they might be trying to cover is the cost of writing the article, not the negligible cost of serving it.

Again, probably true, but not the point of my argument. They have to cover costs with revenue, whether those costs are hosting or paying their staff.

> In any case, fuck'em.

I actually enjoy reading Ars, and therefore, would prefer not to, thanks. Especially when not fucking 'em is as easy as letting their ads render.
This is awesome, thank you for this
Doh. Ok. It's fixed now. For good. Really.
SF Chronicle accused of SEO spamming by sex columnist (site NSFW)
It just seems incredibly irrational to accept not knowing very important details. In reality, I'm sure many smart people ignore these details. It amazes me that they accept "you can have a piece of the pie" without asking "how much of the pie?".
Ok, so lets assume that there is an implied agreement upon visiting a website and ad-blocking is therefore closer to "bad" than "good" on the ethical spectrum. Now lets consider that all advertising is intentionally manipulative and deceptive. Where does advertising fall on the ethical spectrum? My point isn't that you shouldn't use advertisements to fund your site. I'm just saying that this 'ethical' argument doesn't matter.

You see, even if you believe that advertising is perfectly ethical and that filtering is unquestionably unethical, I'm still OK with that situation. And I would still block ads. Because in terms of ethics, adblocking is so insignificant it doesn't even register.

To further illustrate: taking more than a living wage while people are starving all over the world and directly causing pollution are both unethical (to me) and I do both every day. I do my best to minimize the damage but I'm not willing to completely give up my lifestyle. And in my mind, these are things that matter way more than implied agreements concerning filtering on websites.

So concerning advertising, I'm not willing to experience everyones obnoxious ads if I can help it. The ethical concerns are a joke. I'd consider becoming a vegan before turning off my adblocker. That is more important to me yet still not important enough that I've changed my behavior. (Steak is too yummy. Sorry Mr. Cow.)

I also use readability and a text summarizer tool, too. Computers and the net are convenient that way: I can take what I want, mix it how I want, and leave the rest.

P.S. Companies like Vibrant Media have ruined the internet.
You might include something more explicit about function composition (e.g. the power of currying).

Closures might be another thing to mention. For instance, you could show how they can be used to implement objects (which should be familiar to C# people).
I love that this got posted because of a comment on 'Japan: It's Not Funny Anymore' article which argued that the Japanese smoke too much and as a result, it discolors their plastic game cases.
I agree, but to prevent it from cluttering it could be implemented as a drop-down menu.
I agree - which is exactly why I'm asking this community for feedback before I make this demand first thing Monday morning. :)
There is, of course, a corollary to this in that you can often afford to lose more than you think. Most people don't realize this, and hence, never take any risks.
Are there any software packages out there that do? Word doesn't, and I don't think that InDesign does.
While I wouldn't call DBZ's plot unique, it wasn't bad.

You might have experienced a bad, emasculated version which was aired in America, stripped down to nothing but fight scenes and completely devoid of anything involving adult life. That version really sucked.
He went on to say that they were so focused on revenues in the early days of Zynga that they did some things he didn't like. He then mentioned the Zwinky toolbar and said he installed it on his machine and couldn't get it off. And then went on to say that he told his developer to take that lead gen offer down.

That really isn't the impression I get from watching the mentioned clip:
http://techcrunch.com/2009/11/06/zynga-scamville-mark-pinkus...
I agree that a trip home might be a good idea in his case. There is another possible step for someone living abroad, though-- adaptation. It doesn't have to be any harder than it was at home. People can change. It's possible to adjust to one's surroundings on a deeper level, in a way such that daily life is no longer a struggle.

I say this having the majority of my adult life living in a country far from where I grew up.
Can we fix online advertising?
Mate, I've been to Bangalore and while there are more bars than elsewhere in India it's a far cry from, say, New York where I'm living in alcohol sodden bliss ;)
Completely false. Consider bees. Almost all females in a bee colony don't reproduce, but if the other females left the whole colony would collapse, no work would be done.
Wow, the clang error messages are really good. I've never seen a compiler produce such user-friendly error messages.
Linux Software
> The purported explanations are really unconvincing, the analogies very strained.

Isn't that what you're supposed to do when "analyzing" literature?
What does this do that you can't do by calling native java code from JRuby?

All Clojure code can be called from Java by doing (pseudo-code):

Var my_fn = Var.find("str-utils/join");
my_fn.invoke("a","b");
You should now be able to write most of your app logic in Clojure, and use Monkeybars for a cross-platform Swing GUI.

See http://kenai.com/projects/monkeybars
On the original jacquesm bet, I suggested we use the apparent revenues of Facebook-as-a-division. That might be tricky to measure depending on the acquirer's reporting and integration plans, but as I suspect any acquirer will be -- (1) a giant public company with detailed quarterly reporting; and (2) eager to keep 'Facebook' as a separate brand/division -- I think it's ultimately resolvable to sufficient confidence for someone to concede (or defer to a poll result). However, if you prefer for an acquisition to mean "bet's off (no action)", I'd be OK with that, too.

Just express a preference before an acquisition happens, or my preference -- calculate it as a division -- should stand. (I like FB to make this revenue target standalone; I like them as part of Google/MSFT/Apple/Disney/etc.; I like them in a box, I like them with a fox; I like them in a house, I like them with a mouse.)
"I don't think it's particularly stupid because the actions of an individual choosing to block ads will have a negligible impact on a site, whereas viewing the site without annoying advertisements will provide a more favorable experience for that user."

Adblock plus gets almost 1,000,000 downloads per week (you can check this out on the Mozilla website). This is no longer just a few individuals blocking ads.

It takes no effort for you to view an advertisement. Viewing something that may only take a few seconds of your time will help the site you are visiting and keep them running. Now that you are blocking it, the site will never know if you like or hate a particular ad and will continue to show bad ads.
Interestingly, I like tables in LaTeX better. Not because I like the syntax of LaTeX, but because it is much easier to get a program to spit out LaTeX tables (and have LaTeX use them automatically) then dealing with WYSIWYG.
Indeed. But it's a pain to use compared to writing LaTeX source code.
"You may not see that as unethical, but at the very least, it's unreasonable."

OK, but the assertion was that it was unethical, not that it was unreasonable.

I agree that there's a downside and I may end up spiting myself, but it's not unethical for me to do so.
Memes are sticker, spread faster, and far more powerful than genes. It's the negative memes of the male segment of civilizations that beget violence; it is to a great extent negative memes that have suppressed women over the years. What's good is that the memes composing an individual can actually be altered -- mutamemic activity. What's bad is that mindsets are set pretty early on in life; you can't change much in the vast majority of people until much later. In this way the lines between innate determinism of biology and determinism/influence of culture are blurred.

It is probably difficult to understand the historical effect of women being cut out of the academy, and otherwise ignored, unless you read some accounts of it. Simone de'Beauvoir's "memoirs of a beautiful daughter" and "the second sex" may explain much to you.
I tend to avoid naked recursion whenever possible. It is not much better than loops. Combinators like foldr, filter and map reduce the cognitive overhead.
A simple 'high braking pressure' sensor that overrides the throttle would be simple enough to be almost immune to any software glitch.

Fair point. Though pretty much any Engineer (myself included) will tell you that "almost immune" is pretty much a synonym for "bound to happen" :)
This poor person is suffering from culture shock. I'm an immigrant let me explain.

Culture shock is not OMG they eat X here. Culture shock develops slowly from the stress of being away from home and living in a strange land. You are long over people eating X or what ever, and then one day you're just sick of it all. Not exactly ALL of it, but you tend to fixate on the defects of the strange place you're in and you're in a perpetually bad mood, very similar to the stressed out shitty mood someone quiting smoking is always in.

Some of the points he makes are valid. There is lard in bread, I think that's MUCH better then the hydrogenated fats of margarine. Lard may not be good for you, but it is better then the alternatives.

And smoking is definitely bad for you. And as an European I feel that American corporate culture bleeds far too far into everyone's personal life, much like how the author feels about corporate partying in Japan.

The no-real friends thing also strikes me as something I can say about Americans, who from my perspective seem to have trouble forming deep adult friendships.

But the author and I have two options, get over it or go home.

The curious thing about culture shock is that it never strikes in the very first moments of awe when you just arrive. It takes a little while. But then you tend to get over it and then many months or some times years later it hits you again, and this time it is WORSE. And many immigrants/ex-pats never got over the second wave. They (we!) just end up pissed off at the host culture.

* EVERY JAPANESE POP SONG IS ABOUT THE SAME THING *
Yeah, that's kind of every pop song period. And this attitude is a classing sign of culture shock.
The alternative is just to be good. Then you have nothing to hide, and nothing to worry about.

In the case of Zynga, hocking malware to your users is not good. They indeed had something to worry about.
Composability in general is a major attraction of functional languages. Haskell has an especially strong focus on it.
How about using an application to illustrate the power of FP. Combinatorial parsers are a neat non-trivial, but (hopefully) understandable, choice.
Man, this guy's list of reasons for hating Japan is pretty much identical to my list of reasons for loving Japan. Non-smoking, tee-totalling vegetarian? Sounds like a real fun guy.

Got to hand it to him on the comedy shows, though, they're awful.
I'm torn on closures and currying/composition.

Great concepts, sure. But in an hour? Might be too much to get their heads around.

One of my code samples is going to be lifted from this great blog entry: http://diditwith.net/2008/03/14/WhyILoveFARefactoringTale.as... where he basically covers some of these concepts by way of example.

I think no matter how I do it, it's going to look (to them) like some hand-waving and magic. Can't really help that, I don't think.
Verizon Bills A Dead Man, Says "Death Certificate" Not Enough
Absolutely. There is no free lunch. Typesetting is a difficult job and unique typesetting is still considered a innovative profession. Latex is a wonderful tool for doing it, but you still need skill, creativity, and drive to use it masterfully.

That being said, Latex defaults have more typsetting heritage influencing their design than anything WYSIWYG tool. If you can handle the tradeoffs selected, it's a fantastic default route.
I never said they should not! Only that their duration will be negotiated in favor of the incumbents - and they are the guys who'd usually profit from longer terms.
WP is behind a paywall? That sucks.

What's Frank Ahrens like as a reporter generally? If this is the quality of his usual stuff I'd be tempted to pay up.
Dupe of http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1162731 .
It has nothing to do with an advantage to a company of not having Canadians watch US programming, it is completely based on Copyright owners, which is MUCH more complicated than I could have imagined.

For instance, you'd think that because Comedy Central broadcasts the Daily Show, they would have the rights to distribute that show online in all countries, but The production company of The Daily Show, provides only the rights to broadcast the show in the US.

This way, the producers get to sell the same show again in a different region. If Comedy Central were permitted to broadcast beyond US borders, it would limit the amount the producers could make on the show.

I believe it has has less to do with advertising to the consumer, which is revenue to the broadcast company, and more about the revenue to the production company, which is paid by the broadcaster.

If we end up in an environment where you pay directly for content, this would probably change, as you'd possibly be paying directly to the production company and cut out the middle man. But I suspect that is all a long way off.
Maybe you could try ConTeXt. I don't know if it has this problem though.
"Imprisoning people for nonviolent crimes = Jobs"

No. He is saying that pot should be legalized.

It's funny because I have heard so many pro-pot legalization people that our prisons shouldn't be filled with people that do drugs. I have not heard of one person that is in prison for personal consumption of drugs. Most cops won't even bother.

The people in prison are the dealers.
The custom software just parses this https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal tools and sends the selected keywords by mail to his writer. Nothing exceptional.
> How can we make ads not suck?

If there was some kind of nonprofit "respectful advertising alliance" that enforced consumer-friendly practices and provided a whitelist to import into adblock plus, I might use it. It would be hard to define what is consumer friendly and enforce the rules, though.

The only site I've disable adblock on is Reddit. This is because their ads use inside jokes and are sometimes humorous and always non-intrusive.

I don't see what is so nice about Google ads. They look crappy on most sites and are rarely useful in my experience. Also not a fan of Google's tracking with adwords.
There is a Greasemoneky script which exactly does that: http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/58915
District 9 was a great movie I am glad it won the BitTorrent Oscar ;) I am surprised Avatar was downloaded so many times considering that it wasn't a very good movie aside from its visuals.
Me too, of course. But every now and then you've got something a little strange to do, like slice a immutable list, and you're recursing.

The thing about recursion is that for imperative guys, the first place they go is the for...next loop. Whereas in FP the first place you should go is the built-in stuff like map, fold, etc. But the second place is recursion (with the tail calls done correctly), not for..next
The best hands down is OSQA the english CNPROG fork, written in python. See http://osqa.net and, for an example of the site actually running: http://meta.osqa.net.

The developers for OSQA are currently building a tool to import a StackExchange dump. Two thumbs up for simple migration!

There is also a promising one in ruby called Shapado.

For a comprehensive list, evaluating project health and pointing at demos, check out this StackExchange answer: http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/2267/stack-overflow-...
Ask HN: Sports footwear - distribution, shipping etc.
So, I play a bit of sports. And where I'm from footwear in particular is bloody expensive and selection is poor. Expensive isn't always the end of the world. I can always seem to hit eBay and buy myself a pair of footy boots or Nike Air Jordans for about half the price of what I pay here.

So, I say to myself, there's a potential market here. Hmmm, Maybe. I'd like to test the waters, but from what I can gather this is extremely difficult.

I'm interested in purely sporting goods, but I think this is applicable to any business where you dip into "real products" i.e. stuff you need to ship and this definitely falls out of the realm of my expertise.

I don't think this will end up an empire and to be quite honest, I'm more interested in serving a need and I'd like to use proceeds to help development in the various sporting organisations I'm part of.

First of all, my options seem to be:

- Buy stock. Stock++. Sell stock. Stock--. Ship. (I don't want to be in the stock business. Large up-front investment)

- Drop shipping. This seems in theory a brilliant idea, but seems difficult to find drop shippers in this particular market.

- On-demand orders. I could list items that I've sourced from other websites that ship to my country and essentially broker the sale plus markup. Ship to me, re-package and re-ship. It makes the shipping really long (and not forgetting customs headaches), but it seems like an "easy" way to start, but full of work.
- Be a pure aggregator. Put the customer in touch with the various sites, either broker the exchange or look at affiliation. (hey, hacking related!)

Does anyone have any knowledge or experience of these industries, in terms of product sourcing, distribution and shipping that they'd be willing to share publicly or privately?
According to Keynesian theory, government spending improves money circulation throughout the whole economy in a way very similar to how bypass surgery improves blood circulation in the whole body. If you distribute money to people who need it (generally, the unemployed,) they'll end up spending it on important services (the hope is) which will end up in the much needed pockets of those providing the sevices, who will spend it on much needed services, etc. Government spending is a mechanism for redistributing the wealth in a way that saving won't swamp, for the economy is a sociological phenomenon.

However, it is to be argued that distributing money randomly in public works isn't exactly the best way to handle it. The previously unemployed are not the most likely to build businesses to find sustained employment, to create wealth for the economy. Random public works are not so likely to create wealth for the public. There's the possibility to do much better; unfortunately the simplified Keynesian analysis doesn't capture this.

One example of a terrific project is microfinance. These loans give people a chance to create actual sustainable businesses. The loans are repaid at a rate of nearly 97.7%. What this shows is several things. The first is that the capital of microfinance can keep on giving. At this repayment rate, the capital can be given out 30 times before it's at half of the initial amount. There's thus a huge multiplier effect there. Furthermore, the repayment comes from the proceeds of the operation. Hence, in 97.7% of the cases, the businesses that are funded will keep on going -- another huge multiplier effect. On a giving basis, there aren't enough dollars in the world to solve poverty: with a system like this, there might be.
Knowing the mind of God: Seven theories of everything
Isn't clean code valued in the Ruby community?

As a contrast, I had the impression that the Python guys care more about this in their code. They also avoid eval and other runtime code generation. (Though I do not if that's related.) It seems these two languages are further apart than in their culture than anything else.
Why Be an Ethical Company? They're Stronger and Last Longer
I didn't know they made that. Wow! That's amazing. Adding that to wish list right now.
"It is well-known in our community that there is no scientific, firm way of actually completely verifying and validating software".

Mr Rizzoni, "expert in failure analysis" must have never heard of Ada before.
Or, of its use in Airbag steering computers, where the code is mathematically proven to be running correctly.
Oy, if I had a yen for every time a westerner made some off-base criticism that belied their understanding of Japanese language, Japanese culture, and Japanese psychology...
Here's their youtube video of the ultimate employee control device.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kofSYRB-vh4&feature=playe...
Functional programming make testing easier.
Functional programming make threading easier.
Functional programming make understanding things easier. (i.e. easier to understand something that will never change vs understanding all the possible permutations of something)

(Sorry for my bad english)
@Kevin Proud of you dude! Your first time on HN and you made it into the Twitter stream. Glad to have u here in blog land!
Now I'm curious as to what the startup did.
Six Months of HackerNews Front Page Data
Honest question: Is there something about Ada that makes it easier to mathematically prove that the code functions as intended?
I think this is the kind of article that you scroll through until you find a paragraph with some interesting words, read until you get bored, and do that again until the end.