skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Good question. I think a big issue is lack of relevancy.

I have an Industrial Engineering degree from a school that had extensive internships with local companies. You went on two 6-month internships as part of the curriculum. Going into it, I thought that the internships would motivate me to do better in my classes, but the opposite happened. I returned to school each Fall realizing that most of the coursework had no relation to what I would be doing on the job. I still enjoyed the engineering science classes (well, except Fluids) but the core curriculum stuff felt like a waste of time. I never cheated* but I honestly wouldn't have felt guilty if I had.

* I did take a guy's algebra final in exchange for a 12-pack, though. Eight years out of school he rose to VP of Accounting at a mid-size company, so I don't think he hurt his career.
Common Errors in English Usage
Pure marketing stunt. Most Blurays are probably higher quality even if they are "only" 1080p. But they have bitrates hovering somewhere between 10 to 20 Mbps, while YouTube apparently uses <1Mbps even for 4k.

Incidentally it could be interesting to see some kind of visual quality vs bitrate vs resoltion -chart, ie what would be the optimal resolution for some bitrate.
One I made up as a kid:
Very-close veins -> Varicose veins
I highly recommend adding your email to your profile. I get emails from HNer's sparsely (about once a month) and they're always detailed, specific, and respectful of my time.
That's why, if it's public, then people will know they're cheating.

I toy with the idea of verifiable quests. For example, Take a picture a day (I can verify that they have from flickr). Blog once a week (I can verify this from their RSS feed)... although each one of those requires custom programming.

Maybe give more XP for those things that can be verified.
Another way their evolution could have affected them is if their reproduction strategy was different than ours. If they had extremely large numbers of offspring (instead of the few we humans have), they might not emphasize individual survival as strongly as we do, and might value competition and risk-taking so as to keep only the fittest children.

I don't know how seriously I can take this kind of speculation, though. Unfortunately, we only have one data point to work with when it comes to technologically advanced species.

For more on how different other intelligences could be from us, here's some entertaining sci-fi:
http://lesswrong.com/lw/y4/three_worlds_collide_08/
Previous posting:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1387771
'Hollywood Accounting' Losing In The Courts
Your last sentence. There's a million dollars there.
I don't think you actually read what I wrote, or if you did, you willfully misunderstood it.

"The problem is that if the work is not distributed uniformly among the queues, some threads will be left idle" - this is why you use work-stealing queues! The very nature of work stealing queues is that the worker threads aren't left idle - they steal work from other threads' queues.

And CGI is not anything like the GC I talked about - if you have a process per request, where are you going to put your shared state?

But much of this discussion is besides the point. Don't forget, the OS scheduler is at its heart an event dispatcher when there are more runnable threads than CPU cores. The thread stack is little different than context provided to a triggered event. You want to have the same number of runnable threads as CPU cores in order to avoid the kernel cost of a context switch. You can do that by having multiple single-threaded processes, or multiple threads in a single process. While neither choice of partitioning affects the degree to which you can use an eventing style to serve requests, one - the separate process model - makes it much harder to share state. And therein lies the reason why I believe that optimal performance lies in threads, rather than processes. There are other good reasons for using processes instead - but it will be at some cost to efficiency.
http://www.Flattr.com
Many early adopters will get fuzzies [1] from participating, and paying-in, and delivering shares to their favorite sites, even if they don't get net payments out. Whether that is enough to break-out into a larger audience is the question. But it could be self-sustaining at a small level -- as a mutual appreciation society, with a sort of competition going on among the Flattratti for each others' shares -- even without a breakout.

It's easy to predict something novel will fail; most truly new things do.

[1] http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Fuzzies
First Batch of DARPA's Synthetic Blood Delivered to FDA
I must admit, that article is way too long for me atm. Maybe that disqualifies me from posting here, but it also seems to me that the DK effect is more of a "fun fact" than a life changing realization. I have adopted the "I know that I don't know anything" wisdom long ago, and also subscribe to the "all code sucks" theory, so I try to shield myself from (what I think is) the DK effect a little bit.
Admin can afford a vacation after switching to GMail
And there are also enough 'prominent examples' for impure imperative languages. For instance, OpenMP makes parallelizing some loops in C/C++ a walk in the park, and I have parallelized some of my programs by adding only a few pragmas.

I'm curious -- were the programs that were easily parallelized with OpenMP largely data parallel to begin with? I haven't used OpenMP extensively, but I'd suspect that the ease of parallelizing a program with OpenMP probably varies inversely with the amount of explicit coordination/synchronization/update of shared state that the program requires.
This models works: Fark has had premium users for a while now.
Google INTERCAL Style Guide
People cheat because they're immoral when no one's looking. I don't see that we need to try to justify it any further than that. Someone can get something valuable without working for it by lying/stealing, and they can probably get away with it, so they do it.

Sure, academic institutions reward cheating. What institution doesn't? Shoplifting has lots of rewards too. There are rewards to cheating at almost everything. The only things keeping people from doing it are conscience and integrity, and it's not news that many people (intelligent or not) have small supplies of both.

Cheating was rampant in my "honors" classes in high school and all through college as well, and more novel forms of cheating appear to be no less rampant in the business world. It bothers me, but I don't think we need to hunt for justifications for it. It seems easy to understand from where I'm sitting. Just be thankful we don't all have Rings of Gyges.
Actually, YouPorn is powered by Perl and Catalyst and regularly makes the top 25 domains. Not sure if it beats the BBC main site though.
Beard-second, and other (real) unusual units of measure
companies invest in their business units and let them run at an operating loss for long term viability all the time. I call bullshit. The reddit guys need to do a better job selling their plans to their bosses.
A startup that I'm positive will be huge :)
Also note that Google can do beard-second and donkeypower conversion:

http://www.google.com/search?q=beardsecond

http://www.google.com/search?q=donkeypower
I'd do it if it fit my situation.

Unfortunately (depending on how you look at it!) my opinion doesn't count, because I have no reason to take up farm work- I am gainfully employed elsewhere for better wages, in school, and pretty far from most farms. Even once I graduate, and have to find a new job, economically it's wiser to remain unemployed and search for a job.

I am unhappy about that, and it's tempting to say "screw what's smart" and work in the fields for a while after I graduate. Especially to show that we Americans are not all wusses. I just have to figure out how much that'd screw me over...
Yup, I donated.
They are so open and honest, they don't pull any tricks. The consistently listen to feedback.

I see lots of people bashing reddit and from a glance at the Frontpage I can see why. But the real good stuff is in the subreddits.

I'd also donate to HN too, if asked.
The author, USCG Rescue Swimmer Mario Vittone, is a nut. He once submerged himself in Lake Erie in the middle of winter to prove that it takes about an hour for your body to reach hypothermic levels.

After he did it I asked him "How did it go?"

He replied. "I survived, but it was close!"
It's tricky to keep track of all these internet memes.
Quick note - this is a follow-up to the blog post:

http://conversionvoodoo.com/blog/2010/04/test-your-horizonta...

Anybody rolling out left side buttons / left side forms?
I have to say I am a bit surprised that so many people seem to be upset about the Facebook signup.

Personally I love the fact that I can use FB, as I dont' really care that much about my facebook account.

Anyone got any theories on why that is?
This overlay displays the horizontal distribution of attention on the average website?

That's about as helpful as telling me the average age of an Internet user. Or a visitor to my site views 1.4 pages on average.

It's a statistic, sure, but it's not very actionable.
If you know what stats you want to collect before parsing, the memory usage is very low. The most resource intensive part in this application is loading the filtered logs for all machines into a sorted set (which is necessary to get all the events in chronological order). That key is only temporary though.

That said, Redis 2.x supports virtual memory so it's less of a problem for a longer-term data-store.
I bought a t-shirt from kn0thing at startup school a few years ago, but I can't really see paying for reddit now. I wish them luck in finding a business model that works for them.
I don't want to kick someone when they are down, but this just stood out to me:

And reddit's revenue isn't great. The good news is, our traffic continues to grow by leaps and bounds.

Talk about doing it wrong.

When you have growth but no revenue, it's probably because you aren't asking your users to pay. That should be every website's first option - ask people to pay for the service they receive.

Paying users are great, un-paying users are a liability.
> And how has regulation changed this?

I don't know. Nor am I aware of any study which shows regulation's effects, or lack thereof. I'm just saying that if regulation has benefits, they should be compared to the drawbacks before we forfeit them. If it has no benefit, of course get rid of it.

Anyway, as I said, I don't know a thing about pharmaceutical regulations. If you do, a few pointers would be welcome.
As an aside: If you're not willing to make that substantial kind of change to your system at this point, I would at least recommend basing your messaging system on something that's designed to do it (i.e. a message queue) as opposed to a relational database. RabbitMQ has had quite good reviews from what I've seen, with clustering and persistence available.
Oh, jeeze. I did not even see that. Thank you very much.
Ask HN: What do you believe is true even though you can't prove it?
In the last ~week we've have a number of religion/belief/lack-thereof posts, this question is simple extrapolation.

As said in the title, the question is: "What do you believe is true even though you can't prove it?"

Maybe you can explain with an answer as to why?

(Let's not debate with each other, but rather sit back and listen to each other.)

Thanks to michael_dorfman for the tip on the exact question. :)
For all the griping we do in the West about corruption and inefficient government, I think we should all take a few seconds and be very thankful it (mostly) functions and our officials are (mostly) not corrupt.
I wouldn't necessarily say that. I find it interesting that some segment of the internet finds this site useful, or it wouldn't have existed for as long as it has. Perhaps a small rural town finds this the easiest way to quickly browse their town's happenings?

Of course, I agree that it's about as readable as minified Javascript, and the first thing I thought of when I saw it was the "million dollar website". But you'd have to think that the guy that put it together had used SOME other part of the internet (at least Google) and still decided that this was acceptable for his community.
My poor eyes.
Not quite.

Sometimes, free users increase the network effect; also, sometimes the longer they use the system, more likely they are to pay for it eventually.
The problem is twofold: Adblock being used by many of the users, and half the ads when you're not are self-ads that sell nothing.
The CEO Summer Reading List
Interestingly, a search for "ostensibly xkcd" shows the comic in the first link:

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=ostensibly+xkcd&v=
Unless you join their premium program, the link for which, sadly, is broken.

http://www.youtube.com/premium_register
You think you can make billions on a programming language? The only popular language that I can think of that isn't free is C#, so people are going to have options.

You talk about it as though it would be easy, but promotion, debugging, libraries, support, tutorials, HOLY SHIT it's not easy.
From the government agencies I've done work in, I think it would be easily distinguishable from somewhere like Boeing. The government guys are the ones using Windows 98 and still trying to get the approval they started 9 years ago to upgrade to SE.
Conduct Workplace Violence and harassment program
Educate employees on workplace harassment issues by conducting programmes to avoid the work place violence and harassment. For more information, please visit the website www.lchresources.com/
It's very actionable - knowing where the sweet-spot of user attention distribution lands can help you implement a test.

EG - Check out http://whichtestwon.com/archives/2208 - BabyAge moved their "Add to Cart" button right into the hot area, and drove up actual SALES by 17%.

Purpose of the chart is to help you see in a design exactly where users are naturally looking, and build a test around that.
Several years ago I had to do something similar (10 of thousands instead of millions though).

Our problem was that we were making a composite image but sometimes the 'background' image content was shifted to the left or right. (e.g. All images were the same size with a white background but some were made from different source template and so the actual content sometimes started at pixel 25 and other times at pixel 35.) To make it worse they were all JPEGS.

I ended up writing a program to find the bounding box of the content (with a fudge factor to account for the JPEG dithering) and identified the bad images to be fixed by hand. It was a nice diversion from SQL and ASP.
Well all these points are not against E-Mail but against E-Mail programs. The E-Mail system is a priori not made for being dynamic, broadcasting and flexible. It should be a simple straight forward messaging system like mails, i mean real. And it is and it is good.

All these things, the entry requested from E-Mails should be handle within an application.
I would love it if totalfarke...(err, I mean, "reddit gold members") also got labeled (perhaps after a review by a mod or something) as "definitely not spammers".

Just today I was being told to wait 10 minutes between postings...even though I'm definitely not a spammer, and have very positive karma (2000 after about 3 months).

Personally, I would pay $5/mo for premium reddit.
pleugh
I am sure it has been said before, but it might not be a bad idea to try what Linux is doing. The BKL is used less and more granular locks are starting to take its place.
There is a couple of not too bad looking admin skins listed in this article : http://net.tutsplus.com/articles/web-roundups/top-50-web-gra...
More likely, you'd be unable to consume the caffeine in a such a diluted form fast enough to exceed the rate at which the liver clears it - it takes time to empty out the stomach of all that water you're consuming along with it. Remember that humans detoxify caffeine much faster than most other mammals, too.
I love this photo! Classic geek with braided ponytail dressed in black sitting next to a uniformed guy (we hire both!). Both guys have 17 inch (or is it 15 inch) monitors that are switched off. Neither are looking at their screens. A quarter of the screen real-estate up front is taken up by NSA logos. The intelligence sign on the roof adds a certain irony. We can only hope the whole set is staged.

http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE66807I20100709
Randy Komisar, VC, on Women Entrepreneurs [video]
It seems likely they aren't actually making a profit yet. 4 engineers, servers, etc seem like they could be costing way more than a few ads bring in.
Kids haven't changed much have they?
Yeah, I'd be vomiting it back up long before I got to 113 cups of coffee. I normally run about a half gallon (8 cups) a day.
I'm skeptical that allowing threads in the interpreter is really the right away to achieve good concurrent performance. Xavier Leroy makes the case better than I can:

http://caml.inria.fr/pub/ml-archives/caml-list/2002/11/64c14...
Enabling faster compiled code if it can prove it can't be null? Makes sense, and a useful trade-off for essentially polluting the language with yet more keywords. But that still means you can force it to read things as never being null, even when they could be, and I still don't trust developers (despite (because of?) being one).

Unless I'm reading that wrong?
I don't believe in discussing Religious Beliefs in HN, because I'm already spending enough time on here instead of working on my start-up, learned from time spent reading threads that do not have to do with entrepreneurship or technology.
Anybody got a web design company? I think I might have a likely customer for you.
Hmm, there's a question: are there any predators on Earth which use the "large numbers of offspring" strategy? Seems to be more common among prey animals than predators.

This kinda makes sense. For a rabbit or fly, food is plentiful and the biggest threat to your survival is predators, so it makes sense to have loads of offspring in the hope that some will survive. For a lion, predators are nonexistent but the biggest threat to survival is lack of food, so if you have too many children in the same territory you run the risk that they'll all starve.

Exception that "proves" the rule: frogs are incredibly fecund predators, but tadpoles are herbivores.

Hmm, I guess I'm forgetting spiders.
What tools did you use and how long did it take?
Do you have any links?

The article suggests you won't be able to swim so struggling to take your clothes off seems like very bad advice.

Several layers of clothes, and even a semi-waterproof jacket or anorak will trap water - and air which would help with bouyancy.

A fraction of a degree could be all important - there is a tipping point where a fraction means living or dying.
Said by whom?
Unless you have some inside information, what on earth makes you think that Conde Nast is to entirely to blame?

The people over at reddit have made two thing clear: that Conde Nast won't increase their budget unless they increase their revenue. And that their current budget is not enough for them to run reddit the way they would like.

I'm certainly not defending Conde Nast, nor will I blindly defend reddit. And I certainly don't expect any company to run a site the size of reddit out of charity.

I will donate, as I've been a long time reddit user who enjoys the site (though somewhat less as time goes on).
I don't think LALR/LL(k) implies automated refactoring is easy and anything else does not!!

Obviously non-context-free grammars are a problem, but a GLR or PEG grammar is still perfectly refactorable.

You forget that refactoring an intuitive grammar to LALR involves totally mangling that grammar and making it more difficult for everyone.

If the language is expressed as a GLR or PEG grammar then tool makers have it easier I reckon - easier to understand grammar.

The way to really ensure it's easy for everyone is for the compiler write to provide some abstract yet intuitive representation of the underlying grammar.

It really isn't an either/or, it's a case of both at once, I think!
I think that GIL is pretty tangential to multi-core. If you want something to execute in parallel on SMP system it is always better to have it in separate address spaces. This is even more true in dynamic language runtime, because almost anything you do (such as accessing global namespace) requires some kind of synchronization and for CPU-intensive code slowdown from this synchronisation tends to be larger than from sequential execution with GIL for almost any significant number of concurrent threads (such as 3 threads on Core 2 Quad on Linux 2.6.2something)
I think your example undercuts the concept.

"Belief" is usually contrasted with "knowledge". If science has proven something, there's no need to believe it-- you simply know it.

So, a more focused question might be: "What do you believe is true even though you can't prove it?"

EDGE asked precisely this question of some interesting people, with interesting results:
http://www.edge.org/q2005/q05_print.html
Seriously. Is Steve the #1 person in technology today? Most popular, maybe.
I don't know, I think paying money for nothing in return to a big corporation is a little bit insane, actually. $5, in the right hands, would go a long ways in Africa or various other places in the world where people have real, urgent needs. Or if that's not your thing, there are all kinds of real charities out there. Hell, if you want, you can send the money my way and I'll put it in my daughter's college education/future fund. She's even cuter than the reddit alien and doesn't have such extremist political views ("pacifiers for all!" is probably the most controversial).

Joking aside, I think there are a lot of people in Africa, Haiti and, sadly, many other places in the world, who would get a lot more out of a few dollars than my daughter, who will hopefully never experience anything like the sort of privation many people see every day there.
Can any savings be had by committing to a data center instead of paying the amazon hosting rates? I fear if they're at yet another crunch point, the next one will be too much. Granted the pressure to "do more with less" is always there, but something has to give.
cough

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NSA_warrantless_surveillance_co...

cough

It's also important to update the ECPA because it would apply to ANY federal agency. There were a series of links to HN where cell phone companies built backend web apps for law enforcement officials to track people's phone location without warrents as long as they told the phone company it was for an emergency. In other words, it was being used by police to track the location of labor union protestors in one instance, the article confirmed.

The law needs to be updated due to a multitude of issues, such as Amazon.com being requested by the Department of Revenue to give them access to customer purchase history. Even on a basic level, is this something that programmers or web developers on HN want to be developing or maintaining?
HN is for anything interesting to "hackers." From the sheer number of comments on the previous posts, it seem it is interesting to them.
Thank you. My mistake. :)
Reddit is very loyal to its userbase, but isn't moderating them too much. Thus, it is becoming hard to market toward them because there isn't an easy in for someone offering products. Either they need to shape their audience more, or figure out the right types of products (these may not even exist yet, but I'm sure there are plenty of things redditors want that don't yet exist) I would also look at what people are giving for arbitrary day as an idea for advertisers.