skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Sorry, the word "product" was missleading.

Well, obviously the US is not specialized in producing physical goods, but it is the world-leader in the service industry. The best Software is developed in the US, the most knowledge created in the past 100 years came from the US. The service market is much bigger than the product market already.
Ask and you shall receive: http://tenonedesign.com/stylus.php
Mind your boomerangs
When your team sort of grew up with FreeBSD (or any other OS) you want to lean that way. Also, when you're shipping an appliance you don't have to think about licenses. Those are the two reasons we stick with FreeBSD.
Not a physical benefit but I suppose it could be argued you're showing support for bsd style licenses. That seems trivial but possible.
[Python, Ruby. Haskell. Erlang] "they’re keeping the parts of Java that run well and mixing it with impenetrable syntax."
... honestly???
Language syntax hardly matters at all. It's just a matter of personal taste most of the time. It's a useless boring discussion.

Many languages seem to be converging on using the jvm as a runtime, which makes java pretty damn relevant.
Good material, it's a dupe, though.
I think the gp was suggesting the message could be more "personal". It was my first thought too.
Thank you - those are good points.

Just for the record, Chrome has a "Create shortcut" entry in the document (or whatever that is) menu. Use it to create an app-shortcut just like a prism page.
Most of the time it's that question that bothers you more when you're using something GPL. If I do X should I release the code or not? BSD eliminates that nagging question from the back of your mind.
I agree. But given a wider pool of top spots implementing a competitive strategy is in the best interest of the corporation.
So, from an individual stand point and you are on the edge it's bad for your own competitiveness but think in terms of a system having a wide edge will aid into profitability of the company.
Quantitative data time.

In research quoted in Software Estimation by Steve McConnell, for completing a medium sized project (in that research defined as 10,000 to 100,000 lines of code) there was a local minimum of calendar time with teams of 5-8 people. To reach that level of calendar time again you needed a team of at least 20 people. However there is reason to believe that 50,000 lines of code delivered by 20 people will have more duplication of effort and less quality than the same delivered by 5. Which makes the relative productivity of the small team even better.

The reason is simple. The natural loose and open structure of a small team breaks down if the team is too big. Depending on the specific people, it tends to happen somewhere in the range of 6-9 people. Past that you have to manage lines of communication carefully, which results in process and overhead with reduced productivity.

The lesson to draw from this is the following. If you want the project delivered as cheaply as possible, let one programmer work as long as it takes. If you need it delivered quickly you can increase team size to 5-8 people. If you need stuff delivered faster than that you'd better swallow hard, accept a several-fold increase in costs, start hiring, and do careful planning because you'll need it.

(You can pass the small team limit in practice by having different teams on different pieces of software. But they had better be really different. When people have to interact closely, they are part of the same team no matter what the org chart says.)
Ask and wikipedia answers: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_the_United_States#Ma...

And that's not counting agriculture or services. Here's a full breakdown of the economy (not all of which is applicable to exporting):

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_the_United_States_by...
No, not at all.

I think this is an incredible interesting, and often overlooked subject. I've even seen hashes that resolve collisions by sticking tries in the slots instead of linked lists for chaining. That way the "I'm checking for a collision" operation part of the hash becomes "give me the memory location 100% of the time I want". It essentially eliminates hash collisions in the classic sense, and the tries in the hash slots usually don't get very big/you can delay resizing the hash for quite a while (just use a different method like when the first trie hold more than n strings).

Some of the optimizations you mention make a lot of sense and I was generally responding with the more naive variations of the two concepts. One thing to keep in mind is that tries grow in memory amazingly fast. So fast that the rest of your system will have to start swapping out just to keep the trie in memory. A list of a quarter million tokens, average length of 6 will probably eat about 300-400MB before optimizations. If you restrict the tree depth to 4 or so, and stick hashes on the end, you can keep it around ~100MB. But a quarter million tokens is not really all that much, real life applications will usually involve millions of token. And a naive trie will rapidly outgrow the memory on 32-bit systems. It's the classic tradeoff, memory for speed. However, hashes are not really all that bad speed-wise. So the tradeoff isn't quite as good as one might hope. If you have to go to a trie from a hash to eek out an extra few percentage points in performance, you're likely having bigger problems.

In practice I've actually only used a trie a couple of times over a hash. Mostly because in the applications I'm using, I never have to grow the hash which is the most expensive hash operation. But also because there are already so many very good hash libraries in most languages particularly persistent hashes which can be very memory efficient. The practical different in speed between the two is really not that noticeable for most applications unless you are doing billions of lookups a day (in which case you probably are looking for a different setup anyway involving some kind of database).
Knowing Google, they will A/B test it. They could even tie in Google Voice and connect you directly with the hotline.
Encapsulation and the rule of thumb to avoid temporary variables in methods is OO's cut-rate version of functional programming. It has the advantage of being more easily accessible to minds accustomed to structured procedural programming.

What's more, is that it works "well enough" to at least be seductive. In Smalltalk, I can edit a method in the debugger and throw away the top part of the stack and restart in the current context yet only rarely deal with side effects. Granted, this is probably not good enough for something like a VOIP sever process relying on shared nothing assumptions for a robust concurrent architecture, but this may be one of the reasons that many OO programmers aren't eager to make the leap.

(Similar to explaining the utility of unhampered closures to some Python programmers: you can do a whole lot even with Python's limited blocks. Why is more needed?)
Thanks. That makes sense.

I am not familiar with limitations of GPL license over BSD license. What limitation does GPL license have that you don't have to worry about with BSD when deploying your app on a Linux server?

Edit: Answered elsewhere. Thanks.
Android-based TV from Swedish company
Speed Up Mozilla Firefox By Up To 80% « My Internet Brain
When to scrap a doomed project
He meant the five that run on the JVM (the part that runs well).
Sorry, my bad. I clicked on it from Google reader and submitted via bookmarklet and wasn't paying close enough attention.
Finland postal service to open mail and send scanned email copies
Sandy, Jim and Karen work at a downtown community centre where they help low-income residents apply for rental housing. Sandy has a bad feeling about Jim: She notices that when black clients come in, he tends to drift to the back of the office. Sandy suspects racism (she and Jim are both white). On the other hand, she also notices that Jim seems to get along well with Karen, who is black. As the weeks go by, Sandy becomes more uncomfortable with the situation. But she feels uncertain about how to handle it. Test question: What should Sandy do?

If you answered that Sandy's first move should be to talk to Karen, and ask how Jim's behaviour made her feel, you are apparently a better anti-racist than me.

If this was real Sandy would probably find that conversation to be awkward and racist as fuck.
What I want to know is: ignoring the vendor lock-in part (and yes, that's huge) and the very Microsofty way that you have to do everything once you go that route, how does C# factor into the discussion?

The CLR is clearly inspired by the JVM, and the latest iterations of the C# language itself have added a lot of syntax to achieve various dynamic techniques. Yet, sometimes, I feel like I'd be better off with the Java platform and a dynamic JVM language.
In certain languages you can accomplish closures and objects without enough rope to hang yourself in truly spectacular fashion.

Seems a reasonable personal preference when put that way.
Intro to Computer Science and Programming (no experience required)
Facebook limits employee stock sales on online trading sites
I love reasons like this, they make non-geeks look at us like we're insane. I've only used curl personally, so this wouldn't be enough to switch, but it's an excellent point.
Most large multinationals will have traders in their treasury teams. If you've got large reserves of currency in lots of currencies you need to manage currency and deflationary risk.
Prime example: NetApp uses (and contributes back to) FreeBSD.

http://www.prweb.com/releases/2008/06/prweb1042664.htm (minor mention)
The title was off putting. But actually I found this a well written piece, worth the read.
Until now you could run only one test per page. While this is the way it should actually be...

Um, no.

A/B testing is a balancing act between theory and pragmatism. Everyone wants to get the perfect answer, but we need to get it fast enough to make useful business decisions. When your website doesn't have that much traffic this means you need to make compromises. Running multiple tests at a time on a page is such a compromise.

The one time you absolutely cannot justify multiple tests at the same time due to predictable interaction effects is when you've assigned users a sequence and use the sequence number mod n to figure out which version they get. That's bad, so don't do that. Even if the tests are on different pages you'll get interaction effects. Assign people to each test randomly instead.
The paperless office, my old friend these 35 years. I wondered where he'd been.

Odd that Mr. Dilger forgot "The critical faculties of hordes of bloggers and journalists."
Every time I see the phrase "stopped reading at X" I downvote. You may be even right about brochures, but the "stopped reading" people in general are bad at understanding someone else's thoughts, are rude towards the author and usually don't get the entire article except the point they stopped at. It just looks bad. I'm sorry.
That's a nice breakdown... I've been a curl user, and never really knew what the major differences were. And it doesn't seem overly biased to me. Many thanks to the author!
Using Electronics To Break In a New Violin
Sociology Research Papers Writing One Becomes Aware of Social Process
If you are a student or just visit sociology courses, you might be required to write different types of research papers. It is very seldom that a professor forces his/her students to produce sociology research papers on the specific topic.
Interesting you should mention those technologies, as they both originated from Sun and have been ported elsewhere. While FreeBSD's ZFS is a solid port and probably the best non-Sun implementation, it's actually a few versions behind.

It might be worth checking out OpenSolaris, despite its future seeming to be up in the air, with Oracle's acquisition of Sun.
Is the message, Let not your mesage resemble white noise?
The title should be amended to point out that this is from 2003.

My summary of the difference has always been, "Objects make good nouns while closures make good verbs."
Ask HN: Please review "Pivotal Tracker for SEO" - SEOaholic.com
We just soft launched http://seoaholic.com.

To a more technical audience, we call it 'pivotal tracker for linkbuilding' - enter your site, your keywords, track your performance over time, and get link suggestions, but most importantly, it provides lightweight CRM so you can manage your efforts over the long haul.

It's early stage but we have active users (and take credit cards) - so it's time to get the HN community to give feedback.

Technical stats: written by HN:barmstrong; in Rails, Resque (the Redis-backed queue from github), and MySQL.
Erlang.org traffic no longer exponential
I'd like to set up a workshop in which black people are invited and asked a single question, "Do you approve of affirmative action and federal, state, and municipal set-asides for minority-owned companies?"

Yes?

They you are a full-fledged, outgoing, non-bullshit advocate of state-sponsored racism.
I would have agreed a few years ago, but the interface has come a long way, especially with the 2.5 alpha:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f2/Blender_2...
This kind of radical apple fanboyism is one of the biggest things keeping me away apple products. The biggest reason is that I'm poor.

But I have to say I like the impact apple makes on the industry. Lots of people are worried about all kinds of pads being uncreative and mind dumbing because apple is showing them to that direction. But there has always been mp3 players that don't require you to use iTunes. And there has always been laptops that let you choose your desktop backround color freely, not just from handful of options.

So people, don't worry. There will be cheap and crappy pads you actually can open. And there will be Apple's iPad. There will be kids who get a cheap and accessible pad when they are young and they became hackers. And there will be rich kids who just play games on their iPads. This whole pad thing might change the way computers are used, but not the way people go on with their lives.

PS. It has always taken a couple of decades for any industry to mature. After that things like usability and reliability and ease or repair starts to matter to the sales.
I do like that the poster is open minded and educated enough to realise that both are reflections of each other. I particularly like the koan at the end.
it's not a zero sum game. The definition of zero sum games is "A situation in which one's gains result only from another's equivalent losses.". There are many aspects of a stock market that make it NOT sum to zero: the fact that things can go up or down in value with no one buying/selling (aka GAPS) itself makes it a positive/negative sum game. Not to mention taxes, broker costs, IPOs and all other 'game moves' that inject and/or take money out of the 'game'.
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And I can't say I agree with their notion that talking to the one whom you believe to be the source of a problem dehumanizes the victims of the problem. This group seems to be focused primarily on coming up with ways to call things racist.
Apple iPad already Jailbroken
For me, it's not really about the kernel but the whole OS, userland included. I agree it's still mostly matter of taste, or maybe more honestly, what you're used to.

Some people really like apt-get/dpkg but I prefer working with "make buildworld/installworld" and the ports system on FreeBSD.

Also, though it's not something I've taken advantage of much, I love how on FreeBSD I can "cd /usr/src/bin/ls" and hey: there's the source for ls! If I wanted to, I could hack it, and run "make install" right there. I prefer this over (for example) source packages with Doogie's Build System on Debian.
Apple Sold 300,000 iPads On the First Day
Is Hacker News a realm of modesty? It seems to me that there is an implicit assumption here that the world is organized in descending order by programming mastery, something like Lisp/Erland/Haskell -> Ruby -> Python -> Perl -> Java -> VB -> the entirely unwashed.
I bet they didn’t want to put numbers out so early (this one is straight from the horse’s mouth) but some incredibly idiotic analyst was spreading his stupid 700,000 number all over and mainstream media was picking it up all over.
To clarify, I meant that you coudln't run multiple tests per page _using_ VWO. Of course, it has been done previously.

Yes, running multiple tests is risky and we discourage it because even if you gain speed, the interaction effects may dissolve any results you get.

Again, your last point is excellent. Assigning user ids and then choosing variations dependent on it is a poor strategy. In VWO, we assign variations randomly and then remember (via a cookie) which variation did the user see.
Racism is either a serious charge or it's not. And if it is, as everyone in this room clearly believed, then it cannot be flung around casually without giving the accused a chance to explain his actions.

This is sophistry. Racism can be a trivial by-product of natural or culturally inculcated xenophobic tendencies and shortcuts taken by our brain when processing complex social information. At the same time, it can also be a subject of tremendous acrimony, tinged with intense emotion. In other words, it is something trivial that feels serious.

Racism should not be a serious charge. My experience as a culturally mainstream North American of purely Asian ancestry is that everyone has some degree of xenophobia which can often feed racism. Life is full of such mental barriers. The only way to get over them is to forge friendships and do positive work.

Acrimony and negative feelings only perpetuate the mental barriers.

(I will attest that a healthy and positive romantic relationship is a great way to get over such feelings.)
Earthquake Notification Service (Worldwide)
I think it has been - Blender foundation is a participates in Google's Summer of Code: http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Dev:Ref/GSoC/2010/Info
Yep, dynamic and functional languages will never succeed because of their complex syntax and features. That explains why nobody writes software in C++.
Not being from your country, I'm not particularly qualified to comment on this, but I will say something:

When you have two equal groups of people, and one is given an advantage such as the ones you describe, then this is discriminatory and wrong. But I believe in your case, you have two groups of people, and one group is not equal to the other, in that they have only recently been allowed full societal rights, and come from a line of people that were not allowed full access to the educational system as other groups.

Observing the society, this seems to have had a clear effect in that the one group has a much higher criminal rate, much lower educational rate, etc. It would seem to me that to fix the societal problems caused by having such a group of people living within the country, certain steps would have to be taken to try to accellerate the rate of these people.

The thing is - it has really not been long since african-american people in the United States have been treated as equals. It took a while for MTV to play the first black song, did it not?

A group was disadvantaged and it shows. If you believe the group should just "walk if off", I'm sure it will work with time, it will just take a whole lot longer. In the meanwhile, you're going to have to deal with high criminality, dependence on on the social state, etc by this group.
Well fair enough, if you want to send a package to a far-off area, you should pay for that too. Pay a premium to sent to or from remote areas. That's what happens with UPS, right?

I haven't used a land line in a long time, especially for long distance, but aren't the rates different by state?

Perhaps, like with electronic connections, when the price difference becomes small enough, they can make one flat rate because the simplicity pays off more via customer satisfaction. But international calls, for instance, still cost extra.
Nokogiri [An HTML, XML, SAX, & Reader parser]
It was pretty obvious, I think. And I will remark that the NY Times at least once wrote up the people doing interest-only mortgages as bold financial innovators.
A modern digital TV is a big monitor with a tuner slapped on. It's so blindingly obvious that we need to slap a computer on there, too, that it's surprising this hasn't already happened.

The reason isn't "interaction between commercials and Android handsets" (yawn, back to the future called, they want their TV back) - it's so we can run applications on it, that can talk to the internet and make the TV experience interactive.
IPad Peek: See How Your Website Looks on the iPad
Somehow I don't think it was meant to be satire, but I agree with you.
With macro and closures, you can implement your objects as you wish; so in this way of thinking, you don't need to "build it again and again"... it's just that depending of the problem, there are better ways. (i.e. sort_by vs overriding operator< or building a functor someone?)
Boston Consumer Web Innovation Cycle Leakage
It's one of those things were it is easy to go too far and end up doing more harm. In essence you make a great point. Unfortunately there are situations were overzealous beurocrats end up taking it too far.

And on the other hand there are situations where simple schemes are just not implemented....

It's a sorry mess of a minefield all round.
Netflix Streaming Coming to iPhone and iPod Touch, Too
Single-purpose industrial gadgets

Not with the current App Store model. We absolutely drool over the potential of the iPad/iPhone/iTouch for our applications, but there is absolutely no enterprise support. On top of that, you can't take over the device, or at least limit access (necessary in some cases), so that's a problem for some domains, too.

MS and HP could take a big chunk of this market with the Slate, if it is accommodating to single use applications.
That doesn't look exponential either before or after the bump-up.
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Your price may be too low, increasing it may spur sales
http://www.erlang.org for your click convenience.
Wikileaks gun camera video of civilians shot in Baghdad 07/12/07
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I find using specific shebangs is a good habit if you don't know exactly which generic POSIX shell features/syntax you can rely on. In years past I would all too often use #!/bin/sh for the shebang only to find out later I had accidentally used a BASH specific shell feature, which is fine if /bin/sh happens to point to /bin/bash but can break if it points to something else.

OTOH, I believe the error handling tricks discussed should work with any POSIX shell so I've updated the shebang line in the code snippets to use the more generic #!/bin/sh.
What level of discourse?

I couldn't find it.

It's just a long rant about languages the writer doesn't understand and won't even try to.

> A dynamic language is one which – if you’ll pardon the really poor definition – is able to change at runtime.

Really, it does not deserve much attention.
What is your point?
Video will be posted at 16h UTC latest, according to Wikileaks press conference. It shows this incident
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/13/world/middleeast/13iraq.ht...
and supposedly shows a military helicopter shooting a van rescuing two Reuters journalists.
And how "penetrable" is "public static void main"?
I haven't run into any problems (yet) obstructing signal propagation in my scripts but as you point out it's not The Correct Thing To Do. For the sake of correctness I'll be updating my error handling code. I find doing the correct thing often saves me from debugging strange edge cases.

(replied to on blog comments as well)