skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> I get the distinct feeling that no matter how I respond to what you say, you'll find some way to extend the argument.

Well, yes. Sorry.

> The difference you note in line counts for implementing a singly linked list is not because of any real difference in capability of the language to support parametric polymorphism[…]

Hey, I said that much!

> since virtual methods and inheritance-based subtyping is something ML doesn't support at all you cannot fault C++ for its less-than-optimal support for those features in comparison to ML

Fair enough. I'll revise my stance.

> "First class" is a well defined term in programming language design and implementation.

Not in Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:First-class_function Could you point me to an authoritative source which would clarify the issue?
And yet some people do. I'm not one of them.

As explained elsewhere, it's not really the karma, it's the being asked for up-mods. Some people resent that, and for them I provide a way to punish me.
A better way[1]:

- use a long (but memorable) phrase

- theme it to the site you're logging in to

- make up a word that fits in the phrase

- include some math (for special characters)

I've managed to convert some "normals" onto this method and they report good results.

1. http://www.errant.me.uk/blog/2010/03/choosing-a-secure-passw...
Is there a good way to track a story like this, given the lack of broad appeal and sporadic updates?
That's what I've been doing for years. If it's good enough for my credit cards, then it definitely will be good enough for my passwords, won't it?
Vim Splits: A Guide to Doing Exactly What You Want
seriously? i clicked on this link thinking it would be satirical, but boy was i wrong..

to compare zuck and roark like this is quite ridiculous. saying that we need less privacy in our society is an opinion and if you so please give up your privacy. but to be zuck and fool people into giving it up is quite another thing. it not only attacks our right to privacy but also our right to choose.
I thought that was a bit of dry humor.
"I hope we're really close to a Responsibility tipping point in regards to online security, by which I mean a general acceptance by internet users that they, not the site they visit, must take primary responsibility for their online security."

What does that even mean? Should I be fuzzing any site I think about giving my e-mail address to? There's not even a feasible way of knowing if someone's administratively accessing my account.

On the Internet, like in life, you have to end up trusting somebody.
I think it is important to realize that he's saying this in the context of a game.

Unless you claim that everyone who has ever revelled in magmaflooding a colony of dwarves is literally a racist/totalitarian/sadist...
>Each lookup costs TWC $45.

Then they should be allowed to charge that amount (or, say, rounded to $50 per case) to the people who request it, no matter who it is. If it's the Justice Department, then it should come from their budget, law enforcement is not the responsibility of individual companies, unless it's them that are being accused.
It seems to me that the major problem is that there is no gradients in security.

With my online bank I am forced to go trough the same tedious process whether I want to check my balance or transfer money.

I think that is part of the problem in getting users to care about these matters.

My own thinking on this is "The Ghost Protocol" peer 2 peer negotiation where trust is build over time rather than defined by a login. This wont be happening anytime soon but the username/password approach isn't going to cut it moving forward IMHO.
Interesting. I would scrap the "save links for later" part of the pitch. That's not very interesting to me as a user. Yes, your product is a subset of Facebook, but you should start thinking about how to differentiate it. One good company you should look at is Plancast. They do events (which Facebook does), but it's a different use case than Facebook events. Feel free to ping if you want to bounce ideas, good luck!
"- you start irb

- you start a text editor (vim, textmate, emacs, …)

- you do a few tests in irb

- you copy and paste to a text editor

- you clean things up in the text editor

- you copy and paste back to irb

- you make a mistake

- you fix things up in the text editor

- you hesitate copying and pasting, because it’s painful now

- you write some tests

- you exit irb and run the tests to do your experiments"

Totally reminds me of those infomercials where people sprain their wrists trying to open a jar or crack an egg all over their kitchen.
I don't know how the game works so this may not even be part of it, but it's incredible if such a high density population was able to keep growing for 50,000 years without being constantly devastated by disease and epidemics, despite not having any hospitals.
"Occasionally surprise the novice, or you'll continually surprise the expert."
IronPython seems to have quite a following at programming meetings.
Jobs wants to keep the walled garden pure of corruption.

Says not to eat of the fruit of the tree of porn, lest the consumer lose their innocence.

The serpent of webkit/safari tempts you.
1. A common seed stage is 250K-750K and they are currently way below it. Since they are going open source, there is no better way to achieve it.

2. 250K+ for 4 people will give them the opportunity to focus and advance fast without financial side effects.

3. Since when the J. Fried camp is so worried about specs? They want to build a tool to scrape the data, store it local and make it avail. via standard protocol. Nothing to invent, all the tools are in place, but a lot of hard work on the boring integration/config details and testing.

And to the point again: if such thing work I guess it will not be that hard to include a tasks and project management layer that will hurt Basecamp.
My midichlorians multiplied after watching this video! :)

Participating in TetuanValley was great fun, I highly recommend it to any entrepreneur in the Madrid area.
I built something exactly like this in Rails for a client, and it was cake. As long as your affiliate commissions aren't excessive (like the 70% commissions in the porn industry), you really don't have to worry too much about click fraud either.
Do we need physical startup incubators?
News: http://english.aljazeera.net/

Current Affairs: http://inside.org.au/
I think spam is the appropriate metaphor for modern legalistic bullying. It's obvious that the cost of initiating a legal battle is rather small, vastly disproportional to the cost of defending oneself against the hostilities. The asymmetry practically encourages such absurdities as seen here. And, it produces the same broadcast vs. conversation pattern.

The problem is that finding a way to increase the cost of initiating legal kungfu would be from the start itself subject to a crippling ambush.

I don't think bartl's suggestion would quite work, precisely because the ROI is so heavily tilted: lawyers will simply find some way of mitigating it.
Thankfully systems like 1Password have made this process automatic and still secure, across multiple devices. You can even put all your passwords on your iPhone :-)

That said, for things like PIN numbers for credit cards, etc, you can come up with some reasonably secure but still not easily guessed systems, such as using the last digit of each quad of digits on the card or two pre-decided groups of two. Different PINs everywhere, hard for anyone else to guess, and not hard for you to figure out :-)
Did you find such a Lisp-to-Ant compiler?
I really hope they succeed. But I question why it costs an average of $45 to figure out what subscriber a given IP address was assigned to at a given time. In principle that is a question whose answer should be automatable. And once automated, it should cost much, much less than that.
It costs us $500 per IP, thank you.
Thanks for the awesome information. It certainly does work and faster than my methods before.

http://www.cheapautoparts.com/
1) I am not speaking on the behalf of J. Fried. I don't care who that is.

2) I have said that before and will say it again. Sure seeding is way above that. But those seed money go to startups which make money. The VCs make more money off it. Nobody is getting money from this.
Think of a compiler as a program that:

- takes source code in one language as an input, and
- turns the input into an assembly language output.

Now, ignoring the specifics of the input language and whether the assembly output is in fact bytecode for some interpreter or JIT compiler, or machine code for a CPU, this is a quite well-specified procedure.

Such a feat can surely be accomplished in any language. Source code in, binary instructions out—how hard is that?

If the input happens to be the compiler source code itself, that doesn't really matter. The same translation occurs.

If the language used to write the compiler is the same as the compiler itself takes as input, that doesn't really matter.
But what could I do differently to prevent my bank, or employer, or sites I shop at, or anybody else, from leaking my data? Isn't it pretty much their responsibility to make their site work properly? It's my responsibility to not get taken in by phishing scams, sure, but what am I supposed to do about a bank accidentally losing a CD with accounts on it, or getting their database server compromised?

If anything, I'd suggest it should tip over into the other direction, with much stricter liability and penalties for those sorts of information breaches. If somebody promised something and failed to deliver it, that's a pretty classic case of fault. Now if, on the other hand, they said up front that they might make my data public if they felt like it, then that's another story.

In Facebook's case, it feels a bit like the flip-side of their recent proposal to make TOS legally enforceable. Perhaps make 'em legally enforceable in both directions, then, as a real contract with obligations on both parties?
"It's another to get in front of a movement that's predicated largely on hate"

37 signals, Getting real: "Have an enemy - pick a fight": http://gettingreal.37signals.com/ch02_Have_an_Enemy.php

Apparently Mr. Fried just picked them both. To his behalf, he picked the right one. In a way, Basecamp is "Facebook for project management", and Diaspora distributed paradigm can threaten both.
Apple Video Ads 1997-2001
Talking to Porgy
The script is a fascinating read, very biting and sharp.

"a little wget magic" - Sorkin must have had some techical advisors.
Itconversations.com
Spacecollective.org
Well.com
The written method is old, but good. It makes VIM a usable Lisp environment, and it's good for any interpreter with a REPL. Recommended.
Yeah, sinister unforeseen consequences like the free market choosing the most effective and efficient energy sources. Oil has a lot of externalities that shift many of the the costs of using it as a fuel to others. A free market cannot work correctly under those circumstances.

Tax it enough to make up for those shifted costs, and you won't need to specifically fund alternative energy, as the free market will do that for us.
Writing on a piece of paper is exactly what I do. With one difference, that I find having them in the wallet a really stupid advice. The ones I use the most, I remember, and just in case I have them securely written at home along with lots of other ones, in a place only I know. Why would I carry them around where there's a chance someone can look at them (even when obfuscated) and I won't even know that they have been copied?
The idea that software patents don't exist in Europe and the related idea that the MPEG patents are "software patents" (as defined by?) seems particularly pernicious.

You'd think all the highly paid lawyers working for the large European companies that MPEG-LA have sued would have brought this revelation up in court.

(I liked how they say "apart from patent issues" and then list two other major problems that H.264 poses to Firefox, both due entirely to patents.)
Exactly! We agree here. This is why they succeeded.
And this is why the old anti-raising money arguments of J.Fried do not hold. And his "anti-evil" strategy also doesn't work here. So he picks the "no product" PR strategy (again, when Google had a full product, albeit free and competing with Campfire, it was the "evil" PR strategy).

It's a PR to stop a competing trend, a paradigm shift that sooner or later threatens his core business.

His subtext is sorta "listen, don't give them more money because it will spoil them and there will be no product."

I see no other way to start such a project than a few geeks sitting and building it, and nothing will help them more than a few months freedom from financial distractions.
Is Outsourcing Exploitation?
Most working scientists I know at least browse the table of content of each new issue of their favourite journals, and read at least the abstract of anything that sounds interesting. So if you have something genuinely interesting to say and get it into a well read journal there is no reason to assume people won't read it. Also journals are indexed and archived in ways that personal web pages aren't, meaning if you get published, it will be a lot easier for scientists to find your article, both now and years into the future.
I still enjoy the method I picked up from patio11: a sentence with a few numbers thrown in and maybe a mispelling that only I'll remember. This works exceedingly well as I also speak Japanese and throw in wrongly transliterated japanese words into the mix. I can have 2-3 passwords (throwaways and "OMG never use this outside of the most secure sites") and remember them all easily.

Ex:
howdoyoudoandwhatdidyoudohavetodayfordinner?345
Hiking the Israel National Trail «
softwarerebellion.wordpress.com
And I also believe that the inferior ruby mode gives you a ruby REPL in emacs anyhow.
First off, the "another failed phone OS" comment is ridiculous. webOS is largely what HP was interested in. It's been developed in a few years by a fairly small team and has obviously added a significant amount of value to the company and the resulting sale price. It seems like a great OS to use; I don't own a palm device. Both critically and financially it has been a success.

This whole discussion is speculation... Once can objectively state that RIM is pretty far behind in delivering a modern mobile OS, even those targeting enterprise customers. I didn't even mention the fact that application development for the platform is somewhat of a nightmare, something that will be increasingly important to a CIO.

Regardless, arguably, the consumer market is in fact a lot more important to the company both today and going forward than you've made note of. Look at the company's marketing material: it is generally centered around media playback or BBM.

Buying Palm, porting BBM to WebOS, and slapping the Blackberry logo onto the Pre and Pixi would be a pretty easy way to improve their position in the consumer market.
A Google alert? Try
"Time Warner" "Uwe Boll"
Booyah: Accel Picks a Location Startup and Gives It $20M
Some more I didn't see mentioned:

[videos (interviews/lectures)]
http://mixergy.com/
http://videolectures.net/Top/Computer_Science/
http://video.ias.edu/all

[photos]
http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/
http://www.petapixel.com

[development-related blogs]
http://enfranchisedmind.com/blog/
http://www.catonmat.net/
http://duartes.org/gustavo/blog/
http://benlynn.blogspot.com/

[meta]
http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/startupswiki/Home
http://chneukirchen.org/trivium/
http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/
Even if diaspora fails completely, all the investors will have still gotten something else for their money. The fact that diaspora overshoot their initial 10K goal by such a wide margin coupled with all the ensuing publicity the story is getting, is sending a loud and clear signal to Facebook that people are very dissatisfied with the current Facebook direction.

In fact, they're so dissatisfied, that they're willing to put their money where their mouth is, which is a very strong signal to send to Facebook.

Even if diaspora goes nowhere, it might still have a positive impact on Facebook.
Ye gods! I'm a philosopher! Hope that doesn't get out.

Great quote, by the way. It's a keeper.

For some reason when discussing the meaning of philosophy I am always drawn back to Mel Brook's History of the World Part 1 : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tl4VD8uvgec

The point being, in humorous terms, just the same as the article -- philosophers have a tendency to be somewhat detached.
"those that can are usually oceanographic research vessels that can't carry the payloads needed to repair things"

I don't see why they'd need to carry the payload in/on the vessels. Couldn't the payload be dropped or lowered from above?
"TWC has a six-month retention period for its IP lookup logs, and by the time TWC could turn to law enforcement requests, many of these requests could not be answered."

That's an interesting piece of information. If TW can delay things long enough, all the evidence will be gone.
map <C-j> <C-W>j<C-w>_
map <C-k> <C-W>k<C-w>_
map <C-h> <C-w>h<C-w>_
map <C-l> <C-w>l<C-w>_

Try these. They expand the window they move into. You'll love them.
They originally gave themselves 3 months -- that's a vanishingly small amount of time to produce any kind of fully working product.

The first revision of Facebook (then Thefacebook) was written in about one week, IIRC.
I'm sorry to hear that your karma is actually leading you to self-censor. I really feel it shouldn't. Like the writer Elizabeth Gilbert said so eloquently in her brilliant essay on writing: "Don't pre-reject yourself". Let the HN market and community evaluate what you have to say. More frequently, however, it's more likely the comment will just exponentially fall down the page, below the active fold. In real life, I constipate my self expression, even with friends. Not so much here - and it feels great - to be able to express and to semi-anonymously connect with the HN community. And the times offline I just spontaneously go up to a group of strangers and connect with them are the best. Approval seeking is the opposite of sexy. Kind of like karma seeking. And, if your karma is high enough and/or you don't care about it, it doesn't affect you. And your karma will probably increase because you truly don't care. Life lesson there - substitute with fears and confidence building.

Don't hold back - please unleash your voice. Submit stories. Sometimes you get only a few upvotes and I like to think that you were able to connect someone to something they didn't know about. And that is the power of HN. A community of connectors. Even if it's just a link, you never know where that link may end up. It could be passed along until it provides an insight, a technique, a bit of value to the end receiver.

The counterpoint. I can't tell you how many times a comment being upvoted many times has affected my mood when it's been an otherwise mundane day. Especially when I dash off a quick comment and hours later see it's been upvoted to the mesosphere. Nothing is black and white, I guess. But the point here is - the higher the karma goes, the less it matters.

http://www.elizabethgilbert.com/writing.htm
I've recently invested some time in learning to use vi proficiently, beyond the basic hjkl movement and i/Esc

I've installed the Vrapper plug-in for eclipse as well... but since I find eclipse to be full of features but bloated as hell I've done some research on how to use Vi/m as an IDE.

I recommend to everyone eager to learn Vim, this free book

A byte of Vim - http://www.swaroopch.com/notes/Vim

There are a number of Vim scripts to ease developing, and thus making Vim become more of an IDE. For example:

Vim trinity
http://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=2347

includes the useful NERD_tree, taglist and srcexpl

NERD_commenter
http://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=1218

mru.vim
http://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=521

xml.vim
http://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=1397

There are many more plugins, and a lot of language-dependent plugins to help you develop in your language of choice, be it java, ruby, python, C, etc

I guess a great part of HN users are already masters of Vi/m, but I thougt this could be helpful for those still in their path to Virvana
IBM Model M keyboard Simulator
Sure, they are art, but that's not mutually exclusive with pretentious self-importance.
I think stat/learning classifiers could work, even with the brevity of tweets. However, as the author says, one persons gold is anothers garbage. You'd need a platform/system that would allow for personal classifiers for each/every tweet consumer.
Here is a notable exception of a non-peer-reviewed paper which did have "some" impact: http://arxiv.org/abs/math.DG/0211159

As a place to stake one's claim(sure beats making anagrams as in 17th century) and disseminate knowledge arxiv seems like a good place to be.
I deleted my account three weeks ago, just before the media went nuts over it.
I find LiveMocha particularly interesting for their use of crowdsourcing --- which has evolved quite a bit since I joined. Basically, they have generic course templates in English, and then give people "MochaPoints" (which as far as I can tell are completely useless) for translating the course into their own language, or making recordings of phrases, or even just evaluation others' translations. And of course, MochaPoints are prominently displayed on every profile, making you aware of the pecking order and incentivising you to increase your own points.

This isn't a perfect approach (it's heavily biased towards people who like learning by memorising phrases, rather than people who like learning by picking apart sentences through detailed study of grammar --- I don't think crowdsourcing explanations of grammatical points will ever bring satisfactory results, anyway), but it works well for people who like it.
Now I have a better understanding on how the LLVM can be used as a backend for the GHC and the benefits that come out of it.

I'd give this kind of a post 2 thumbs up if I could.
They didn't back when I was a member. That's great if it's indeed the case...
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> but I do know that a government and regulatory pile-on to “fix” Facebook’s privacy issues will feel just as wrong as when the Cordlandt Homes was altered from Howard Roark’s original vision.

Yes, a thousand times yes.
> It seems incredible to me that someone would consider funding a profit-making venture to be an act of philanthropy.

I've traveled a little bit - for-profit investment seems to improve quality of life more consistently than purely charitable philanthropy.

I think there's two reasons why - first, for-profit investment is carefully measured with a clear goal in mind. Charities almost never measure their results against a control group, so it's not clear how much the charitable donation affected things relative to where the area was heading anyways.

Second, for-profit investment has the chance to become self-funding after a little bit, while charity is often more focused on shorter term consumption. There's exceptions, though - libraries and universities, in particular.

But if your goal was to have the next generation of a poor area have as many of its children grow up to have happy, productive lives possible - $100 million in for profit investment seems more likely to do that than $100 million in pure donation. Maybe the pure donations have a greater effect of quality of life over the next day, week, month, and year, but over the next generation, investment seems to drastically outperform charity in improving quality of life.
Everything...and "More?" - Google's new UI