skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Thanks for taking time to comment. How did you work your struggles with discipline? ie. I have tried meditation/yoga/working out many times only to relapse and give up week or month later.

This pattern has repeated so many times in the last 5 years I have reached a point I don't want to try anything new because of the fear/knowledge that it won't stick.
More importantly, this suggests a potential direction for UI to take in a wider range of applications. I know Clippy was a dreadful failure, but maybe the tech just wasn't up to it yet. With all the extra cores that are coming on line in modern computers, we are going to have processing cycles to spare, and this would be a way of using that power in a way that would directly benefit the user experience. To give an example, in my flat, my PC is always on and always has a webcam plugged in - I'd pay good money for a program that identified when my flat was getting messy and started to nag me to clean up. Something like that that actually works, I'd be willing to spend 100E on without even thinking about it.
Everything You Need to Know About the Mobile Ecosystem
Remember that there is nothing more important than your life and desire to succeed at a startup or in corporate America or anything else is just conditioning and not necessarily important at all.

That's something I cannot come to terms with. I really want to succeed. I know I can succeed if I just became disciplined and focused.
"They are the balance to morning people, who are said to be more optimistic, proactive and conscientious."

...

"It was the morning people who were more likely to agree with statements such as “I feel in charge of making things happen” and “I spend time identifying long-range goals for myself.”"

...

I'd say back to the drawing board it is...
The solution is pretty clear, simply make it easy to do what the author suggests in their article, in a safe and repeatable way. You define your new schema, and you define the tranformation rules to run on the old data. In turn, the database applies these lazily. There'd be some formality necessary to prove certain operations could be applied lazily to provide a consistent view of the data. People are doing this by hand now; it should be part of the system. One can imagine a mathematical model that involves deferred relational operators. The constraints that would be imposed would probably be that certain operations would not be permissable until others complete. For example, it might be necessary, when running one of these lazy migrations, to "flush" the remaining untransformed rows to the end before you are able to apply another one. The upside is your migration scripts run instantly, becuase they have no side effects until the next transaction.

The CAP theorem I think often gets rolled up into these "NoSQL" discussions erroneously. One can still model data relationally but materialize it in a way that reduces ACID compliance to survive in the face of network partitions. Arguably this is a red herring though. In practice, the "network partition" problem to me seems to be only really worth worrying about if you are Google or Amazon and are running cross-data center data storage. For the majority of the world this is not something that needs to be worried about. (See: VoltDB's choice on the matter.)

Edit: By the way, I'm not saying any of this is easy. It's hard, really hard. (I couldn't do it.) But the point here is that it's easy to get caught up and think these 'new' document databases are solving these problems. They're not. They're putting you back down to the assembly code level and forcing you to do these things yourself. The whole point of the RDBMS is to provide an abstraction layer. They're removing this abstraction layer and heralding it as a step forward. It is, in a bizarre sense similar to how it's a "step forward" for you to be able to access the registers on your CPU, but it's surely a step backwards in many ways as well.
But he's talking to a class of Princeton grads. Being stuck with few choices is not a problem most of them will have.
New IBM Supercomputer is Cooled by Hot Water
There is no "one fits all" solution. Even if Army has worked for you, it doesn't mean it'll work for everybody else.

For instance, Army would be the worse recommandation you could give to hypersensitive folks, who are paying their exceptionnal creativity with almost perpetual depression. They are invaluable assets to the society if they manage to find the right channels to express themselves. The training of an infantry man seems a wasteful pathway to this kind of personnality.

Army has also the tendency to reveal great men only under great circumstances, when bureaucracy is eventually bypassed because of the dramatic scale of the events, and everything has to be rethinked. Napoleon arised during the French Revolution era, Churchill and De Gaulle during World War 2, but they would never have without the right context.

My cousin went to Irak and he doesn't think about it as a worthwile cause today. He left the ranks as soon as he could, and he is glad to be back in the civil life where he finds the opportunities to grow as a human being much more interesting, at least in our current times.
Chrome OS, Android 3.0 in Q4 - Is There Room For Both?
As I said, it is relevant, but not in a "yeah, but..." kind of way.
A Fascinating Look at How Information and Personal Data is Being used As Art
Terrible reviews on Amazon. Apparently, they're just as loud.
Counter-intuitively, it's often easier to implement a more powerful, more elegant language in a less powerful one than the other way around. Often, good language design is correlated with elegant syntax, which contributes to this.
RFC-compliant email address validator
Outsourcing marketing and copywriting is very inefficient for a startup. The first thing any decent copywriter/marketer will do is an extensive amount of research about your product,market,customers,competition,etc. Research is probably 50% of marketing, and all of this research will cost you a lot of money.

You already know your product better than anyone- you should be its best salesperson.
As I said below (or possibly above) this material is only energy-dense when it's in its most compressed state. To get the energy out you have to expand it again, at which point you find that you need a vast apparatus to store your energy.

Remember, the state of the art in energy storage is a metal tank filled with liquid hydrocarbons. It's pretty damn hard to beat for price, reliability, safety [ * ] and energy density. What we really want is a more efficient way of producing those hydrocarbons out of water, CO2 and energy.

[ * ] Relative to most ways of storing large quantities of energy, that is.
It's a working Lisp-1 with proper support for lambda conversion/reduction rules. It's a long way from being a usable Lisp, but it's theoretically feasible to take it there.

It says a lot about about his work that I am very excited to hack on it for the rest of the day, and I am not easily impressed by toy Lisps :-)

Tip of the hat to the author for doing the right thing, imo.
Hmm, Joyce's Finnegans Wake? You did say "probably back".
Graffiti Stencil Software (GPL, written by a 15-y/o)
The main message of this article is the importance of investing in yourself. Ferriss chose to do that through Angel Investing and the knowledge he would gain as an advisor. Going to an expensive MBA program isn't the only way to do it.
You can learn a lot more about it here on HN where it was discussed endlessly 8 months ago:

http://searchyc.com/submissions/dyson+fan?sort=by_date
It could be mitigated in some cases as long as the garbage collector is working fine. For example, in a tail-recursive function that uses a first/rest pattern to go through an array a new copy would normally be allocated with each recurse. If LispHP can do some form of tail recursion elimination, it will theoretically take up constant memory and hopefully the GC takes care of the practical part.
If you don't have $120K to invest in startups, I recommend spending ~$1,400 on a few very good books: http://personalmba.com/manifesto/
I smiled when I came across that line because I frequently use it--even down to the 80-year old number.

It helps put things in perspective, especially with respect to fear. We fear so many things and not do it. And yet, a lot of the fear is just imaginary--something the 80 year old you can see looking back but the current you cannot.

So I ask myself "what would the 80 year old me think of it?" and if it says to do it, I try to do it.

Example: you want to take a temporary crappy job to get back to your feet but you're afraid friends will see you working there and lose respect.

Present me: afraid I'll lose my friends, ego hit

80-year old me: proud I followed my dream!

Now I totally understand if this doesn't work for you and don't expect it to work for everyone or even most people. But I just thought I'd provide some background on how people who do use this to motivate themselves are using it.
Hmm... maybe in conjunction with HipHop for PHP? http://github.com/facebook/hiphop-php

I guess if you were allowed to run compiled binaries you could just as easily use another Lisp, though -- except maybe if you needed to integrate with existing PHP applications. That might be a good use case.
You seem to be commiting the common geek error of assuming that people are generally logical, and that they agree with your basic values. They aren't, and they don't.

College degrees are demanded, even when irrelevent to the job at hand, because that is a traditional way of getting better people. Most employers will accept and follow this as a cultural best practice because they don't have any reason to spend the time questioning it, and it is so engrained in our society that it is unlikely to get pushed aside by logic anyway. "College is useful" is as obvious to most people as is "1 + 1 = 2". If I show you a proof that the latter is not true, you will assume that the proof is flawed, not your belief. Most people are like that about most of their beliefs.

I do absolutely agree with you that college degrees are overrated most of the time. I think that you're overoptimistic about public illusions being shattered and all that though. The college industry is enormous, both economically and culturally, and will not go down easily.
However women tend to keep the kids, and therefore take an undue portion of the future economic liabilities coming from the relationship.

In this case they also get child support and, often, alimony.

However most of the time men don't actually want custody of the kids. When men choose to contest it, they usually wind up with the kids.

Source?

For the simple reason that, having a more dependable source of income, men are typically in a better position to raise the kids.

This isn't 1950 anymore. Women now outnumber men in many professions and are earning more college degrees. Of the couples in my office only one has a stay-at-home wife. In many of these couples the wife has a job with more authority and a better salary. Child care is being outsourced.

It's true that either side can lose out in a divorce but it's just not true anymore that divorce favors men.
But the OP asked for parsing just for a specific type of tag (which is regular). Not an area of text between open/close tags (which is not regular).
All kind of ways you could write the br-tag are regular.
Regarding the question about whether it's fair to call this an AI library...well it's kind of a valid question. But really this is game AI which is isn't trying to be Artificial Intelligence, it's just the subject of making game agents perform behaviours and look intelligent - or even just functional. But is your question really even an important question? Much of classical AI can just be reduced to search (which is why prolog is so popular in university AI courses). Is search AI? Is it any more AI than putting together control flow statements? There is a lot of stuff that can happen in those condition and behaviour nodes. And yes in trivial examples the control flow is fixed, but the "learning" is done by hand by the coder/designer (is it any more "AI" to have it done by a evolutionary algorithms?). And more advanced versions of behaviour trees can incorporate much more sophisticated selectors than just "pick the first that works".
Tell HN: Newb vs Noob
I just learned that there is a definition for both a 'newb' and a 'noob'.

newb: A term used to describe an inexperienced gamer/person/etc. Unlike a noob, a newb is someone who actually wants to get better.*

noob: A noob or n00b is someone that lacks intellegance or common sense, most people think that noob is a word used only in the online gaming world, but in reality it is becoming an ever popular word with teenage society.*

I've always thought of myself as a 'noob' in many things I attempt to do. But after finding the word 'newb' and looking at its definition, I can safely say that I'm in the latter category.

Here's to all the newbs on Hacker News!

*Source: http://www.urbandictionary.com/
You seem to be pretty dismissive of our irrelevance on the solar scale.

For me it is always humbling; being an infatessimably small part of the grand scheme.

Far from feeling meaningless it sets me free :)
A private trivial deb repository is very easy to setup.
http://wiki.debian.org/DebianRepository/HowTo/TrivialReposit...
In case you, like I, read through that list and wondered what the hell the Federalist Papers had to do with statistics, I've saved you the trouble of looking it up:

Mosteller and David Wallace studied the historical problem of who wrote each of the disputed Federalist papers, Madison or Hamilton. In 1964 this paper appeared on the cover of Time magazine, the first time a paper in the field of statistics received such attention. The Federalist Papers study was conducted in order to demonstrate the power of Bayesian data analysis and required a great deal of computational power for that time.
Ok, so what'd he need an MBA for then?
Apple Pie isn't American
It's more like 3, since 2.5 is still pretty popular and doesn't work with 2.7 or 3.1
"[C]an one change one's chronotype from evening to morning?"

I used to be a night owl, but I eventually synced to my wife's morning schedule. When I had no other structure (school, work) I found that I had a 26 hour day, which would precess through a normal day over time.
When I was doing remote software consulting I would literally get up at 7pm, go out clubbing. Not drink, come home at 1 or 2 am and code till about 9am and then talk to clients for a few hours and then go to sleep. It was totally k-rad awesome. I find that if I work regular hours after work I can't enjoy myself because I am totally burnt out from the work day and just want to go sleep. Doing the most stressful act of the day, talking with clients, right before I went to sleep was perfect.
Start-Up Airlines in a Struggle to Survive
I think it's because many of us believe there is life after death, and being able to reflect positively about your mortal life when at its end is a good sign that you're off to a good start for the next!
Absolute 13.1.2 Screenshots
Many less choices doesn't mean no choices.

I lived and worked for two years in the Philippines amongst some of the poorest people in the world. These people were constrained in many ways as you describe in job choices, educational attainments, opportunity for travel etc. But regardless of how poor they were they still had the choice of to be kind or clever, to forgive or seek revenge, to pursue worthwhile activities or fritter away their time/money on drugs and alcohol, etc. There were many many very happy people I met in the worst of slums.

The most important choices we make in little have absolutely zero to do with how much money we have.

For a more extended essay on the topic, read "Man's Search for Meaning" by Viktor Frankl who survived a Nazi concentration camp.

To pull one quote off its Wikipedia page:
"Fundamentally, therefore, any man can, even under such circumstances, decide what shall become of him – mentally and spiritually. He may retain his human dignity even in a concentration camp."
I immediately went to see how he implemented lists too with this kind of concern in mind. One way around the list issue is to write/use a C extension that provides a true linked list data type. I checked and there is such a thing in PECL, though who knows about quality.

Of course, because of the whole shared hosting thing you'd have to fall back to a pure PHP implementation if the extension isn't loaded.
In an ideal world, I'd be both a morning and an evening person. I've found this works best for me. Unfortunately, this can be challenging to pull off, because it requires taking a long nap in the middle of the day, and this practice is held in even lower esteem and even more discouraged by employers than evening people.
I alternate between the two, and while I have to admit I get more actual measurable work done during the day my best work was invariably produced during long and undisturbed nights.

It's mostly an attempt at normalizing my interaction with society that forces me in to a 'day' pattern, if not for that I'd be perfectly content sleeping days and working nights.
Nice Kim Jong-il photo caption in article:

"It is not known if Kim Jong-il is a fan of Justin Bieber's music"
Little's Law
This makes perfect sense and it's a cogent explanation besides.

Do you know of good libraries for this type of work off the top of your head? bonus points for native java
Ask HN: What payment platform can accept pledges?
Friends,

I'm considering building an app where people can pledge money towards a particular product before it has been created. Similar in concept to KickStarter but driven more towards direct pre-purchase of consumer goods. The one thing that seems different than a "regular" pre-order here is that the product's creation is conditional. It may never be created and therefore the customer wouldn't be charged.

I've looked at various payment processors (recurly.com, cheddargetter.com, chargify.com) and it isn't clear to me that this kind of payment is possible with their systems.

Have you had any experience taking pledges?

1) If so, what service did you use (or did you roll your own)?
2) If I have to roll my own, any advice on potential pitfalls?
Since Lisphp is a new dialect, you don't need to worry about backward-compatibility. You should get rid of car/cdr entirely. There is no inherent reason for using linked lists for anything - even s-expressions. For example, no one has ever complained about the lack of car/cdr in Parenscript (although to be fair, Parenscript is not homoiconic, just a translator from CL to JS). Having a good backquote-comma templating syntax is more valuable.

You should even get rid of a custom type for Lisphp sequences and use PHP arrays directly. Ditto all other datatypes. Then if you use PHP's calling convention you should be able to call PHP code directly without needing USE and FROM, and more importantly PHP code can do the same to Lisphp with minimal pain. That way writing Lisphp libraries for others to use becomes viable.
FWIW, there's an implementation of a doubly linked list in the SPL.

http://www.php.net/manual/en/class.spldoublylinkedlist.php

LispHP seems to use ArrayObject, though I'm not really sure how its performance is (googling indicates iteration is slow).
And under a very permissive license to boot.

Also it's actual code, as opposed to most 'hacker news 'news''.
> ...unless you can demonstrate that a requirement to share has equivalent ethical validity to a requirement not to share.

You assume these have no equivalent ethical validity. But you fail to provide a rationale for your assumption. So, why should anyone accept your premise?

In fact, both are equally valid: If you expect others to keep their promise to share something, you should keep your promise to share something, too. If you expect others to keep their promise NOT to share something, you should keep your promise NOT to share something, too.

Both are derived from the Golden Rule and are thus equally valid.

Consequently, if you feel entitled to break your promise NOT to share something, why should anyone else respect their promise to share something?
[Album] Naomi - The Big Shapes (2010) - wWw.NhoMaiNhe.Com
"Cockney" is a good term to search for. It's a London accent you'll hear in Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels. Michael Caine has a Cockney accent.
The compelling thing about CouchDB is the ability to take a copy of the database offline, make changes, and then sync back up with other copies of the database later (or never).

If this isn't a network partition I don't know what is.

Of course thinking like this is totally unlike what most relational users are accustomed to, but this use case is only becoming more prominent as applications spread to diverse and occasionally connected devices.

I have a hard time imagining practical offline APIs without the full MVCC document model. Once you see this use case's value it's hard not to want to write all your apps so that they can be replicated offline for disconnected use.
Ask HN: How to avoid being absorbed?
Hello everyone.

I've been reading HN for a long time but this is my first question here. My brother has this brilliant idea for a start-up related to business world and we really believe that it has a bright future once it starts. I've been actively developing it for a month and currently all we are missing is a good design. As we are working on it, it will be up and running in 2 weeks, I will be more than happy to announce it here first.

There is something we are afraid of. Our idea can be stolen / integrated easily with the current big business networking web sites. And another thing is, that our idea can make us the biggest business networking web site ever. However in order to prevent being absorbed, this may sound stupid, I thought that we only focus on just doing the idea and not doing the networking part so big ones would think "they did not add that feature in a networking site, lets stay calm for a while". But then, this really sounds stupid.

So, help us out with that. What should we do so we don't get absorbed? Should we patent the idea? Is there any other ways to protect ourselves and the idea?

Thanks in advance.
The list of 9 over simplified points is not what I'd expect from somebody with Dr. Cowen's background. When I first read the blog I thought, "Really, is some 20 something programmer questioning Grove, cute."

I don't agree with everything Grove has to say either but to dismiss things without analysis is not justified either.

I'll pick on point #3 about "scale, scale, scale". Cowen states that Germany does not have the scale of the USA and is a big exporting success. Germany does have scale in the luxury auto market. See: http://blog.polk.com/blog/new-vehicle-sales/0/0/audi-outpace... Germany also has scale in many other industries it chooses to compete in.

I'd like to have a more in depth discussion with him on Grove's essay. He should at least give it the same amount of analysis and thought that Grove did. This blog post does not do it justice.
I think it's actually quite neat that it tries to stay close to the lisp code that you see in examples and books about lisp.
The Peter Principle has been superseded by the Gervais principle: http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-o...
In the article, "They" in your first quote refers to evening people, so I'm not entirely sure I understand what you're trying to say here.
I'm in the habit of taking a lunch time siesta myself. I've found it best to get in the car and drive to a nice shady spot so my clients aren't wondering what the heck I'm doing.

A 20 - 40 minute nap in the middle of the day works wonders.