skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> If you're not spreading the cost of caring for old/sick people among young/healthy people then what's the point?

Er, what? Insurances isn't about getting one group to pay for another. It's about paying a premium proportional to the calculated risk that the insurance provider will have to pay out on what it insures against. The fact that the premiums paid by lower-risk individuals ends up paying for the car that higher-risk individuals need is incidental.
This isn't a problem in the UK; "guys" seems to be a pretty generic term (or at least I've never seen a group of girls take offence to it)
It's no more constructive than the last few dozen times this exact sentiment was posted in this manner.
The fact that bad comments show up as dead is however a good indication that HN is coping with them well enough. As long as this pattern of voting down the worst comments remains the same, the commentary here should hold up fine.
The First Seven Questions Any Product Plan Should Answer
Whoa dude. You really need to get off the computer for a little while.
You're missing the key points. The most important determining factor for the hardware footprint and overall throughput performance for the vast majority of web applications is not in the front-end but in the database. It doesn't matter if you write your front-end in C, PHP, or even LOL code the database calls are still going to dominate the hardware needs and performance characteristics of your application by a factor of 10-100. Spending your entire development budget to shave 10% or 1% of your hardware and performance overhead down to 5% or 0.5% is silly, which is why nobody does that.

Moreover, going down the list of low hanging fruit in terms of reducing cost and rendering time per page-view the option to switch to a "more efficient" language is so far down the list that it's almost never reached. Indeed, it's often more important to switch to a language that makes it easier to scale out to more hardware than it is to switch to a language which is abstractly faster at individual optimizations (again, macro-optimization trumps micro-optimization). The biggest performance improvement efforts tend to be orthogonal to development language entirely. For example, tuning your database design and DB server parameters, using extensive caching, cutting down on http request overhead, etc.

It's telling that a company like facebook (which has no shortage of developer talent) chose to spend its efforts on making PHP faster by building a new compiler for it rather than moving away from PHP to some other hypothetically more efficient language.

Efficiency is an important factor in web development, it can affect end-user performance, costs, and profitability. But it's rarely as significant as many people make it out to be. It's more important to build something that people care about than it is to build something extremely efficient. For the vast majority of sites, increasing the popularity of your site by 10-100x is far more important than reducing the server footprint by 2x, or even 10x.
Scrum-ban: using a kanban like system for task management
Oh sure, I'm not saying I'm an old-timer. But I've still noticed it, even in the two months that I've been around. I like the fact that this place isn't Reddit, and I'd like it to stay that way.
Hello danh,

actually rlwrap and readline are not doing at all the same thing, but are instead solving the same problem. In fact rlwrap uses readline itself in order to wrap another executable missing line editing support.

Linenoise instead is intended to be an alternative to libreadline itself in order to provide built-in line editing capabilities.
Cash flow is king.

People always talk about 'cash is king', but more importantly...'cash flow' is really king.

If you get them to focus on generating cash flow early, then from there you can lead into getting a prototype/lean product into early customer's hands early.

You can be 'profitable' and still go bankrupt.
Adobe Flash Builder 4 released
Yes absolutely; but the mods can only do so much (I imagine) and a few do seem to be leaking in the gaps.

A lot more comments are at -4 recently - mostly one line agreements and silly meme's (this is the stuff that used to be "dead")

The problem is the commentary between there and the "good stuff". I contend that this has declined too (though I have no empirical evidence except my own opinion).
Hello. I'm have some experience with OSC in AS3. So, it's really easy to implement OSC support in HYPE framework. I'm just testing some new interactive apps now and using HYPE as frontend for it. If it's needed i can wrote some AS3 classes for it. What do you think about it, Branden?
As I said above, "I'm not saying I'm an old-timer. But I've still noticed it, even in the two months that I've been around"

It's not that I think it's becoming Reddit, it's that some people seem to think it should be. I'd rather they didn't try. Subtle difference.
That's quite cool. That's some of the cleanest PHP I've seen.

When I've tried to write long-running applications in PHP I always get memory leaks. How do you handle this in Kelpie?
> You are not immortal. You will die.

Spot on.

I keep saying that but that's not a very popular point of view here.

HN is rife with 'uploaders' too, people that think that within their lifetime they'll be uploading themselves in to a computer so they'll be immortal.

I really don't get how people can delude themselves like that, given 0 evidence some enormous extrapolation gets made which then attracts a lot of followers.
He takes a lot of time explaining why Palm is dead, but his analysis of the assets falls somewhat flat. Sure, Palm is in a terrible position, but a case can be made for Google, RIM or HTC buying them - Google and HTC could be interested in the patents, RIM could see Palm as a step towards a less business oriented audience. I think it's more a question of finding the right price. Maybe you can't find a buyer at the current market cap of $1B, but what about a price that's closer to book value?

It's an interesting view of a former insider, but the arguments why Palm will go bankrupt don't feel conclusive.
Edited with a clarification
I don't think complaining to new users about HN turning into reddit helps. If you want to help, the best way would be to set higher standards with your own behavior, not by bitching about it.

Personally I don't like discussions on politics / crime / sports or on the latest hypes / fads for that matter, but I'm also guilty of commenting on such articles, because they are the easiest to read / reason about on a slow monday morning and I'm sometimes a lazy son of a bitch that's looking for cheap thrills from my morning news :)

And it also helps that I sometimes see a mindbogglingly high-quality comment on such topics that changes my perceptions and while it's many times just useless intellectual masturbation, I can't live without it :)

I keep coming back for the comments, the actual links are the least interesting to me. The only worrying trend on HN to me are the cheap ad-hominems / jerkiness that are so prevalent on reddit. Fortunately those comments are downvoted efficiently.
According to Wikipedia "guy" used to mean a person with a strange appearance, after a Guy Fawkes effigy burned on bonfires. So it appears meanings can shift, but "guy" in every other situation other than "hey guys" is unambiguously male, I think.
Old timers acting out because of their xxx karma and ancient join date giving a perceived right are actually a bigger problem than newcomers who obviously don't know the rules.

For a while I played a game where I restarted new accounts from zero every time I managed to get a negative-scoring comment because it forced me to work "from within" and gain support for all of my views, rather than to post any screed I wanted. I haven't done that in a while, it might be fun to try again.
I believe danh is saying that rlwrap does the same thing as rlfe, another readline wrapper mentioned in the post above, not that linenoise is just a wrapper.
Wow, your first edit makes it even more clichéd than usual.

Also, the edit revision history only makes your post all the more reddit-like.
The Android UI XML isn't actually that difficult. Designing layouts is more straightforward than CSS. Use Linear and Relative layouts with margin, padding, gravity, weight, and "dip" units. Throw in some transparent PNGs and things look half decent.
Remind them that it's gender-neutral term.
I think that the recent political submissions are a bit of an exception in that they are directly relevant to a lot of startup owners (and businesses in general) in the US.

A discussion of the merits or what the bill should have been doesn't really have a place here, whereas a discussion of the effects it will have on our businesses does. Unfortunately it's too easy to fall into the former (I am guilty of this). Hopefully people are downvoting those.
Looks good even though most people use A4 paper, start their week on Monday and have their lunch between 12:00 and 13:00 :)
In my opinion his post was constructive and it doesn't really matter that his account is 65 days old. He could be in read-only mode before, or just developed the understanding he presents in those 65 days.
If you'd been paying attention in those two months you'd know better than to refer to comments spatially instead of by familial relationship.
FYI: it's possible to use HN without being a member.
I find it very disturbing that you find photos of a blog's author very disturbing. If you have nothing meaningful to say , don't say anything.
So, why would you want to use the CRT as a DLL? The article doesn't make that clear.
If your account is less than a year old, please don't submit comments saying that HN is turning into Reddit

My account is close to 700 days old and I still wouldn't submit comments regarding that. I consider myself fairly new with respect to HN
Thanks Josh! :-D

Yeah, it's probably going to have memory leak issues. It's pretty much inevitable unfortunately. I've thought about having the server monitor the memory usage and periodically respawn processes. I believe apache uses a similar technique.

I'm open to ideas on this issue though. :-)
This is sort of like people who go to burning man, then go around talking about how the first year they went was the last good year.
Faster Internet in Asia – Courtesy Google
Surely the main downside to declaring bankruptcy isn't what it does to your present assets but what it does to your future prospects.
How To Quickly Generate A Large Data File On The Command Line (With Linux)
I attempted to be as non-bitchy as possible. Sorry if it came over that way.
I read this as "I saw news about healthcare reform here today, and I hate it when the government provides services to people in need, so please stop talking about it and maybe it will go away".

Am I right?

Personally, I like this sort of stuff (law, politics, general interest) on HN. But perhaps that's because I dislike the other social news sites, and want HN to be my one-stop shop for interesting reading.

Unlike on Reddit, I occasionally enjoy reading the right-of-center opinions of people here. If we remove the partisan materials, I won't have the chance to read that.
Kimberly Wyatt Loaded Magazine April 2010
Check Kimberly Wyatt topless for Loaded Magazine April 2010 scans. The Loaded Magazine April issue is on standstills now.
Could you suggest a better method of tracking updates?
TL;DR.
Except the Americans. People who simultaneously refer to Saturday and Sunday as the "weekend" and start their calendar weeks from Sunday are, truly, exceptional.
Source? The Undercover Economist?
The biggest threat I've seen to HN quality are submissions like this one. Do you really think a submission like this helps in any way? Stop whining and post ariticles that you find interesting.
To quote Bill & Ted's Bogus Journey, "The best place to be is here, the best time is now" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IHBwryfycvk
Because it is putting your family on the hook for your medical costs in the case of catastrophe.
Sort of. Being glib for a bit, I think it is more accurate to say that "hey guys", "you guys" and similar are compound gender-neutral terms.
> You can't easily do even basic things like copy and paste.

Yes you can, and you have been able to since PS1. PS2 CTP 2 has method completion and a split input/output frame too (and I'm a Linux guy).
tlb, your site is blocked by the Chinese firewall. What did you do to deserve that?
A large part of Bash is based on piping to text filters. Powershell is based on piping to where, which filters objects by their properties. Ie, content is separate from presentation. It a common criticism of Unix by people who know it well.
Yeah, I'm quite intrigued to see where you're coming from.

Please show us last weeks, for example..
Not really. In fairness, it's probably a bad day to have posted this.

Don't get me wrong, I love reading that kind of stuff too. But I'd rather get it from the other sites, rather than on HN. I guess that's our point of contention, but that's cool. I knew when I posted this that there'd be people who'd have the PoV that you have, and I can completely understand where you're coming from. Part of me would like to agree.

However, I'd also like HN to stay as it is, and not to end up as a repository for everything your or I find interesting. I think it'd lose something at that point.

But to re-iterate, I can completely understand where you're coming from. However, I (respectfully) take the other side.
The post is relevant, but only because this will affect startups. Most of the discussion here isn't relevant to HN - the discussion should be trying to fit this into the context of how the bill affects startups/small businesses.
It's hosted on Posterous.
Cool--any chance you'd add DDG?
1) If you're not being abusive, you don't need to track changes.

2) You shouldn't respond to or quote children from the parent. That's why we have threads!

3) You'll be locked out from editing the post pretty imminently (see point 1)
You can't see anything in the virality/amazing growth of chatroulette that you could take away from? This latest part is quite brilliant. Now people will go on chatroulette hoping to be famous in front of live audiences, youtube vids, etc etc
I'm just confused as to why you have such strong opinions after 2 months here.
Our about page is now dedicated to this quesiton: http://duckduckgo.com/about.html
Can we also be a bit more judicious with the submission and upvoting of anything related to SEO? Some days, HN looks like a mini version of Sphinn.
It's pretty common in the US, at least from my experience, for people to implicitly use Monday as the start date for the week.
What liberty is being sacrificed?

(Example: I went to the pharmacy to refill a prescription, but it was a few days early and my insurance company would not pay. The cost of the drug to the insurance company is $18 -- I pay $10, they pay $8. Without my insurance, though, the cost of the drug is $85. That's the free market at work -- liberty indeed.)
Gender discrimination linked to poor project management
No, but I'm going to do a whole new FF add-on.

You can get https search in Firefox by going to the https site and clicking 'Add to Firefox' at the bottom.
Agreed. Much as I like the guy, I think that was Rand's fault, when he posted on the SEOmoz blog about liking the place.
Panasonic Madrid, Olympus Madrid, Numark Madrid: www.madridhifi.com
He found out that it's not a "financial black hole" in any sense of the word. The opposite, it's an OPEC-killer:

http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2010/03/17/how_iraqi_o...
Partly it's because I've been around as a reader for a lot longer than I've been registered. But mostly because it's been bugging me for a while, and thought that even if stops one or two people, it would have been worth it.
Ooops, indeed, sorry for misreading.
In the year and a half(lurked for quiet a while) I have read this site it's always had the kind of interesting stuff your saying that it shouldn't.

I have found most of the time that something that interests the HN community usually interests me, maybe that is just because my interests align with the site really well but I certainly wouldn't want this to change in favor of a few narrow areas.

I think HN promotes having a broad knowledge in a lot of different areas rather than reading about the same stuff all day.
Er...

Not exactly.

My point was more that you will find a lot more fresh ground if you look farther afield.

Of course, there are a lot of great apps like Twilio that are concieved to make developer's lives a great deal easier - so I dunno.
How did the advertising on Reddit go? Was it good value for money? Did it result in a good amount of traffic? Or was the main value in feedback from redditors?

Any insight would be really valuable :)
I've noticed that after being zapped like this, a lot of electronics manufactured in the last decade often just need to sit unplugged and self-discharge for a while. Real frustrating when you uncable it, fill out the paperwork, throw it on the cart, and take it down to maintenance, only to find that in a week when they get around to dealing with it shit starts working on its own.

Real common with power supplies that just don't work after an abrupt building power outage, but I've had it happen with protection circuits on ethernet and firewire ports too (though it took a lot longer).
Skype founders raise $165m for new fund to invest in disruptive European tech
Ask HN: Resources in one cubic mile of sea water
One cubic mile of sea water contains — besides the 130 million tons of salt — 6 million tonnes of magnesium, 25 tons of gold, 135 tons of silver, etc.

Can some one point out to me a source which will validate
(or invalidate) above statement?
MRI is looking for a replacement for readline because of its GPL license. How does Linenoise work with Unicode?
I enjoyed learning salsa dancing a lot, and it helped my confidence, and ability to just approach people (well, girls, specifically). Plus, it's actually fun. My wife and I still go occasionally, these days:-)
When the project ends… Where's my money?
See, now that's constructive! If you're going to complain about interlopers, identify the source.
Hello, thanks spicyj, I'll try to get this fixed asap.
India to launch cow urine as soft drink
The single most important thing I'd tell new college graduates is to not buy a new car. Time and time again I've seen so many people acquire moderately paying entry level employment and then immediately go and yoke themselves to a huge debt that will deeply affect their finances for the next several years. Better to go without a car for a while, if practical, and then buy used. If possible pay cash, but in any event avoid anything that takes more than a year or so to pay off if you have to borrow money.
If you read the post he links to by Tom Ptacek [1] (one of the go-to guys for security around here) you will see the reason this is considered a bad "alternative".

He has also discussed this in depth here in the past if you search back over his comments (tptacek)

1. http://chargen.matasano.com/chargen/2007/9/7/enough-with-the...
Just tested, at first it appears to work without issues. I think the problem can arise if some encoded unicode char looks like an escape char or other key combination, don't know if this is actually possible or not.
The Three Reasons Hybrid Clouds Will Dominate
I thought it was very valuable, and I am currently writing it up in a blog post :). I was just waiting for the #s to settle. I'll post all of the exact numbers.

The short version is about 3c a click, low bounce rate, lots of feedback, users definitely sticked, and it probably helped me get on the front page of reddit the other day.
Windows Phone 7 Series: The AnandTech Guide
Here at 73primenumbers.com, we're always on the lookout for this kind of paper-based innovation!
Redis weekly update #2 - Real world hashes, refactoring, and fixes
Expats and US health care reform insurance?
I write computer software and do techy things in Europe, as a US citizen do I need to pay for this US health care reform? No.
ahem

http://github.com/windsurfer/Pocket-To-Do
The Sizzling NYC Startup Interview Series, RocketHub
Sunan International Airport
This beautiful building you are seeing below is of Sunan International Airport. The Sunan International Airport is the biggest airport serving to North Korea
Interesting. This reminded me of a thought that I had when I was watching Avatar in 3D: the 3D effect was always focused on a specific part of the scene, and if you focused your eyes on a different part, it looked blurry.

After I thought about it, it made sense: they can only create the 3D effect for a specific focus, otherwise they'd have to provide an individualized effect for every viewer.

I wonder if/when we'll see a solution for this.
Does  Enlargement Really Function?
Penis enlargement is the process of creating the human penis larger than before. There are a range of reasons for which one could wish to try and do this.
But it's not possible to contribute to HN without being a member.

If you haven't done so and gotten feedback via voting and replies you aren't a member of the community qua community.
Good analysis of the 3D focus problem: http://blogs.suntimes.com/scanners/2009/12/avatar_3d_headach...
Not directly related to shyness but I think this video might possibly help:

http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/alain_de_botton_a_kinder_g...

I think it's important to remember that most people are insecure in some way, it's just that different people show it differently. So maybe the loud extroverted guy is really scared to.

Good luck with stuff, work on it and you will improve. This is not something you're stuck with, it's just a hard work to sort it out.
and the letters TL; DR.

Can someone please kindly tell me what that means? I never saw that before coming here.

Thanks.
Actually, they do this: they call devs when the price seems 'off' on initial review. Subsequent price changes are not reviewed I think.
Reminds me of the 'PocketMod': http://repocketmod.com/
Ditto, at over a thousand days. But I'm not a terribly active poster.
Gold measured in Seawater in 1990 - "just 1 gram of gold for every 100 million tonnes of sea water (Earth and Planetary Science Letters, vol 98, p 208)."
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg12717242.800-science-g...
"Too Lazy; Didn't Read"

Basically it means "Summary", followed by a one- or two-sentence summary of your (much longer) post.

I think it originates from SomethingAwful, but I may be incorrect.
Could you clarify that? If submissions stop (or at leas the good ones do), there's not much community left, is there?
Your site is vulnerable to XSS attacks.

http://cloudomatic.com/?s=<script>alert(1);</scr...;

(Tested on Firefox 3.6)

Please fix it.
CSS Beginners Do’s and Dont’s Part 2
It's possible to contribute to HN without being a member.

For instance, you can talk about it around you, share links with people outside of HN, either via mail, twitter etc.

I've been doing this for months before being more active, submission/commenting-wise.
How are Python's scoping rules less clear? They are identical to Javascript's (and Scheme's), except that instead of defaulting to global scope, they default to local scope (which can be overridden with `global foo`). Also, it has one extra kind of scope, class scope. I would agree with you if you said Python's class scope is rather strange, of course.
I love the way the post on the blog is under the category "Useless Tech".

I wonder if there was a patent for the machine.
This is decidedly inappropriate for Hacker News.
i don't think i've (knowingly) heard any german rap - is there anything you'd particularly recommend?
Misleading title. Should be 'Bunch of morons in India to launch cow urine as soft drink.'
Too long; Didn't read.
To save everyone else the trouble of translating units: 1 gram per 100 million tons is approximately 47 grams per cubic mile.
But the community can change as the submissions change to appeal to a broader base.