skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Actually it's a sign of strength when it's not unPC to make fun of a group. I wouldn't want that to change.

(I wrote about the phenomenon in "What You Can't Say." Search for "English.")
One of the first articles I've seen that discusses Perl 6 from the point of view of somebody who (a) ported a substantial existing code base and (b) is not already part of the inner circle of Perl 6 implementers. It was encouraging to see that somebody in this position would find working in Perl 6 enjoyable and the grammar features "life changing".

That said, two of my takeaways from this article were that Perl 6 currently is very slow and fairly buggy, two characteristics that I personally would NOT associate with a project being "Really Really Release Ready".
I'd like to second SICP and specifically the accompanying book - available online at http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/full-text/book/book.html
People use Linus' kernel version because of his track record. Don't like it? Fork it.

The day Linus starts failing miserably is the day another mainline will emerge, and everyone will switch to that. Nothing here to worry about.
I can't help but think the specific problem mentioned has a specific solution.

It's only three letters: ORM.
I think he forgot that it was "designed by developers FOR developers". I've never had a problem with the way it looks. Some of his points are valid, but you can think of better ways to do things on 99% of sites. Including his - which is a blog, just for him, yet had a "Login" link on every page.

His idea of paying for answers (near) instantly would be handy though sometimes.
I have had the exact same experience and I highly recommend it especially if you want to go on and get an advanced degree.
"just messing around with a concept, testing the waters"

this might be exactly the best way to start something like this.
By what measure is 65k a small amount of money, from what i remember the average wage in the uk is ~26k, and many full time workers earn much less than this.
Two good books which are in the sort of style you seek are:

The Little Schemer <http://www.amazon.com/Little-Schemer-Daniel-P-Friedman/dp/02...; and

Clause and Effect <http://www.amazon.com/Clause-Effect-Programming-Working-Prog....

Also a help is that the languages they use ('use' is a more appropriate word here than 'teach') — Scheme and Prolog, respectively — are much more mathematical in nature than typical mainstream languages are.
> Arguably, lisp should have given us a world filled with little languages, but it hasn't taken hold.

Arguably, ruby does this. Look at RSpec, Sinatra, and Rails (Rails 3 especially).
Growing Your Business: Tips From the Founder of Blip.tv
Right, so all of those work now through the existing financial system, but they take a long time to clear (I believe ACH is several days).

I imagine a startup (would it have to be a bank? I'm not sure) could build something where the transfer is semi-instantaneous and disperse the risk among it's other customers somehow in a more equitable manner (perhaps charging a fee?). It might, of course, be difficult to compete against the credit card, which seems free to most consumers (but is subsidized by the merchants and those borrowers who don't pay in full)
I don't think it's any coincidence at all that the most successful open source effort ever is the same one where there is the greatest force of personality in charge, who insists on maintaining top-down control. I'm not convinced that lateral organization between developers can ever work very well.
I'd rather not promote this content by linking to it.

Thank you for that link, it's a great overview.
There are no comments

Sold!

Well, obviously not since I'm participating in them, but wow are comments over-rated.
I've been running this for a few months now and have been having a lot of fun toying with it. The built in WebSocket stuff is really cool, and the template language is easy.
Why Would Someone Write A Book That Gives Away Their Secrets?
I'll grant that the "idiot" part is less damning, for exactly the reasons you mention -- maybe it's possible that he was young and naïve, and maybe it was possible that he could overlook the potentially dramatic consequences of signing that contract. But honestly? If you're precocious enough to be taking investments from strangers to build a business, you're precocious enough to read and understand a simple contract. I'm not inclined to give much sympathy on the basis of ignorance.

As for the sleazebag count, I'm not sympathetic at all. If it turns out that Zuckerberg did sign the contract in good faith, and that he did subsequently ignore it when Facebook blew up, that's pretty crooked. Maybe you can argue that he simply forgot about the contract, but that goes back to idiocy -- wouldn't you remember the guy who gave you $1,000 to buy a 50% stake in your company?

No, something is fishy here, and if the contract is real and not signed under duress it doesn't speak well to his judgment. Considering the history of claims against him, I'm not willing to assume that Zuckerberg is a boy business genius while simultaneously forgiving huge legal gaffes like this one.
I, personally, appreciate the lack of pretension.
> First, you need to stop thinking in terms of 'algorithms' and 'spinning'. It's irrelevant and confuses the discussion.

This is HN, not a court of law. It is entirely appropriate to use technical language here. I think if you understood what 'spinning' was you'd see that it was relevant to the legal situation even if these exact words may never be used in a legal action (although the very pre-existence of concrete spinning programs would actually be relevant as evidence that a deliberate process of copying had occurred).

> why 95% of legal chatter amongst technical people on the internet is meaningless to lawyers

I'd argue that a similar percentage of lawyers' technical discussions are meaningless to the reality of technology. As we move forward I'll wager that the lawyers will be the ones needing to do a greater percentage of the adjusting if they are to remain relevant.
This is an entertaining and timeless story. "Trolling" is, alas, inevitable due to the transferable nature of patent rights. (Troll-like cases are perhaps 1/20 of patent infringements filed.) But, the victims of trolling are not entirely without blame -- small inventors and start ups are frequently told to "scram" by large companies when they are informed of their potential infringement. Without a bankroll, contingency litigation is the only option for the small guy.
Nope. Opened it in IE and there is a big banner ad right at the top next to the TC logo advertising "environment defense" with an "Ad Council" logo to the left of that

And it links to something through doubleclick.

And there is another ad below the header (for me, right now, it is for www.makemytrip.com)
What about all the services offering provider.com/~username.

Scrolling status bars used to be all the range in the 90s, I wonder how long until url hacks allow for scrolling address bars with this.
I did not like it. It may be easier for the eyes (if the ads are there, I think it's not gonna be any better) but it's not usable. I like the top flash bar - it's informative, but not when you're logged off, duh. I also usually search and view questions via tags, which are missing. It looks like a forum - I don't care WHO posted the answers, I don't need it in big ugly phpBB layout in front of me. In contrast, the points each answer has allow me to easily skim through the garbage to find good answers, for "old" content.

Nice try, but he needs to have a clue of what he's trying to design.
From the perspective of someone who is looking for a first programming language or a language that is dead simple to use for basic tasks, I think Ruby is a great choice.

I think this is primarily because the syntax can be very intuitive, especially compared to something like perl. Ruby code is generally readable even to someone who doesn't know Ruby (there are some exceptions of course, as Ruby can be very terse in the right hands).

There are also a ridiculous number of gems that are easy to install and use. Need to do document classification? There's a gem for that (classifier). Need to access a database and want to do it through Ruby objects? There's a gem for that (sequel).
Degrees are like checkpoints in life.

While not required (at least at good companies that look for talented people rather than degrees), they serve as a nice launching board (and as a negotiating point for salary).

If you are passionate, then school is a great idea to get a breadth level exposure to the field.
Thats due to the fact that C++ is still without a standardized thread library, which works across all platforms.
Thus new students who start by C, C++ dont have proper exposure to the concepts of writting multi threaded applications.
I guess it is single biggest argument against C++
Welcome one and all. We had a great time last year and look forward to another awesome event program via the über-cool cat, Mr. Jeremy McAnally. OG will be putting together another what-the-hell-do-i-do-in-nashville event guide in the coming month. See you all soon!
Ask HN: Data Archive of Hacker News
I was wondering if anyone had prepared some sort of data archive for Hacker News. Something fairly simple, having the attributes id, title, url, user, score, last time score changed etc.?

I was thinking it would be an extremely interesting and valuable dataset.

I had some sample idea that I would like to try:

1. Is there a best time to post on HN? (I know this is very SEO, but I think it's an interesting question nonetheless)

2. It might be fun to cluster the data (perhaps all articles with score > 5), and see the top X articles in every cluster. I think that'll give you a wide variety of extremely good articles to read.

I know that this isn't the most enlightening or groundbreaking work, but I'm sure if we had the dataset, we would be able to come up with some interesting ways to analyze the data and come up with some nice results. (In fact, if anyone can think of some other interesting ways to analyze the dataset, can you post anyway, I'd like to hear them).

I was actually putting together a little script that scrapes HN and puts the data into a MySQL database, but that doesn't seem to be a good idea since it would hit the servers unnecessarily. Also, I'm not sure people would like me doing that.
Cow Clicker
I don't like frameworks, but they have their place. If you know enough to create a framework, you should better do itself. However there are two situations when they are necessary: (1) people who have not enough knowledge to build one and don't want/need to acquire that knowledge; (2) quick applications where there is no justification for the time invested in working at a lower level.
Instead of frameworks, we need better and richer platforms with better and richer libraries, support for a variety of good languages, etc.

Seems like this is what .NET and the JVM are trying to achieve. MS is putting up a lot of different languages (C#, VB, IronPython, IronRuby, etc) and the JVM is experiencing somewhat of a rebirth with languages like clojure and scala (not to mention good ol' boring java).
Besides your hyperbole "most successful" I point to FreeBSD for a quite successful open source project which is not controlled top-down by one person. Apache httpd (or other apache projects) also come to mind.
To be totally honest, I added hello world last and I was just too lazy to edit all the other numbers :)
Send me an invite?
>> "Former prime ministers can earn a fortune, however, just look at Tony Blair. Retired MPs can also cash in, to a lesser extent, on their time in office.
"

Right. Which IMHO is a bad idea. PM's are paid a bad salary, but know that they can go work for big.co after they're done being PM. That leaves them wide open to corruption.
> The track record for things like this isn't encouraging.

I hope to be extremely surprised but I'm not counting on it. I won't predict massive fail though. I simply predict it won't get passed the vaporware stage.
Great idea. It would be cool to actually construct a web of stories that mention one another or that have similar themes.
I have no idea how FreeBSD is managed. Is it explained anywhere? I'd love to see how it compares to linux.
Who are you to question his investment in dragon-backed currency?
I didn't say it was small. It's certainly small for what an MP/PM entails. Even a middle manager in some average company would expect to be on £65k.

So there is a massive disconnect between what members of parliament get paid, and what they would get if they moved into the private sector business world. The issue is that voters as you say, are on average paid a lot less, so they don't understand this point.

Personally, I'd like to see the PM paid £1m or so. MPs maybe £250k. I would expect them to be less corruptable and more focussed.
and the arguably most successful company (apple) has the same force of personality.
Ask HN: Feedback on Hackthonia.com
Slowly launching http://hackathonia.com to help organize, promote, and capture hackathons. Currently using with just one event, but would be awesome to gather feedback while continuing to improve the utility. Thanks.
The idea isn't to customize it now. It's to customize it together, as a community, during the beta phase. Remember that the site is about a week old, most MVPs don't look nearly as good on their first week, nor have nearly as much traffic driving them right away.
K&R2 is the best example that comes to mind. The solutions to the exercises are not included in the book, but there are many websites with various solutions and discussion.
Python parsing library CodeTalker now even faster
I learned many concepts by spending years designing, building, redesigning, and rebuilding many... many... many... times. Then I got this book:

3D game engine design: a practical approach to real-time computer graphics
By David H. Eberly

and my universe was changed forever. Pick a project that you think is worth it and go through the pains of building something that you think is beautiful. This is how you become a good programmer because your art will drive you.

Keep in mind, to become a professional is to put away the art brushes and grab a shovel because most of the problems professionals deal with are not programming related but rather drama-driven-bullshit.
Remove Nested Patterns with One Line of JavaScript
They gave a presentation with an accompanying paper a few years ago to explain how the project works:

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-4400856579609253323

http://www.watson.org/~robert/freebsd/2006eurobsdcon/eurobsd...
As they view it, it's not an unnecessary barrier. It's there for a few specific reasons: 1) Make sure there is enough interest to get the site going. 2) Build up momentum for the grand opening.

Don't forget, all these Stack Exchange sites are thought up by the community, but then deployed and paid for by Stack Exchange. They don't want hundreds of "ghost towns" around the web, they want to only create a new site if they think there's a reasonable chance it will grow into a site as vibrant as Stack Overflow. That's what the whole process is about. Time will tell if it's a good process.
While I think FreeBSD has created a great piece of software I don't think you can say that they are as successful as Linux.
This is untrue. First there is a stable boost::thread library available for a while, and second threads made it to the standard as well as futures.

I don't think the problem is the lack of a thread library, concurrency requires more than just being able to spawn and wait for threads.

Things like tasks managers, concurrent containers and transactional memory wrappers are better answers to the problem.
I recommend Gil Fronsdal's audio series "Introduction to Meditation"

http://www.audiodharma.org/series/1/talk/1762/
Need help with my latest project, funny pictures from Africa
Hey,

Am a 21yr old software developer from Africa and I've just launched a humour site containing funny pictures from Africa.

I need ideas on how I can improve, market and monetize it.

Thanks.

site: http://www.lol256.com
I fear for the person who has to decode the second one with a name like "srng_get()" however.
I'd like to make two points:

1. The majority of users will have a very specific interaction with the site: finding answers to specific questions via Google, and that's it. Most users have no interest in being part of a "community" around these topics.

2. I agree that OpenID as a requirement is annoying, it even stopped me from using the site for a long time. But Jeff and Joel are sticking to OpenID on principle, because they believe it is a better way of doing things. Can't really get mad at people who "sabotage" a bit of business to stand up for something they think is right.
Original link: http://googlepublicpolicy.blogspot.com/2010/07/business-prob...
Link: http://www.lol256.com
"stench of phpBB" is the most compelling thing I've read in some time.
In a Partnership of Unequals, a Start-Up Suffers
Wouldn't "hyperbole" imply that the statement isn't literally true?
Nice idea! Congrats for the venture!

A small feedback about the site. The email signup UI is the coolest I have seen. However, I would like the string "you@example.com" to be retained when I click in the text box and then click outside. Currently, it disappears when out of focus after clicking inside the text box once.
Should you let a VC invest in your seed round?
Why are we paying attention to Gartner?
Survey reveals profoundly mixed feelings about the iPhone 4.
Keep in mind the author-icon/info-on-left concept isn't exclusive to phpBB, it's used by most forum software. It's used so frequently because it's what the user expects which is what drove this layout: making the site easier to use for first time users coming from Google.
By the way, if you, say, gave birth at home, how do the authorities come to know about your children? Do you have to register them somewhere?
I know there are a lot of hackathons happening out there. Does Hackathonia aim to be a platform to launch and run them? I think there could be some useful tools around hackathons, helping organizers organize and promote them, helping teams get involved in as many as they want to get involved with, or helping sponsors find a hackathon to sponsor that suites their mission. From the page you've got up now I'm not sure who you are aiming to help or how.
Sum(4)(5) = 9 //JavaScript
Doh! Did not realize the link would not function in the description, so here it is again: http://www.hackathonia.com
There might be comparable forks to Linux out there right now. Does anyone switch? No. Linux is the windows of Unices. You can't dethrone it just by coming up with a better fork.
I think the site has been around for all of 2 weeks, at the most. Give it some time, it will (hopefully) grow.
Is the Recent Google/China Agreement Related to Lenovo/Android Annoucement?
Does anyone here find the Android/Lenovo (LePad) announcement (http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2366781,00.asp) to be curious in light of the recent agreement between Google and the Chinese Government? (http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5ioPgFfry30khmWIMEIkRGbDkbARQD9GRMGT00).

To be more blunt, has China given Google a leg up in its competition with Apple by fostering this relationship with Lenovo.

I'm not trying to suggest this is illegal or inappropriate -- though there is relevant debate to be had on those topics. I'm just noting the curious timing of the announcements relative to the players and their interests.
So will too many fap breaks or a bad meth habit.
More basic as in working straight from the Erlang REPl, sure. Web programming is no way to learn a language, if you ask me. But I wouldn't go down much further in the web stack if you're coming from a PHP background, as it's nice to have something done quickly (And from my limited experiments with Nitrogen, you soon get some pretty neat results).
Ruby is like fan fiction. When you read fan fiction you recognize bits from other stories - ok, he got that one from Lord of the Rings, that one from Harry Potter, that one from Star Trek and that one from Star Wars.. most modern SF is fanfic of Asimov's Foundation trilogy and Gibson's Cyber books..

But Ruby is really GOOD fan fiction, only in software. You can tell Matz has been around the block, programming wise.

Over and over in Ruby there's a nice answer to a stupid problem some other language had.

Like you can tell the fanfic author read all the seminal works, you can tell Matz programmed in all the other annoying languages and said to himself MY language will address THIS bullshit!

Also - one wonderful thing about Ruby is over and over the answer to a problem is to do it SIMPLER. First time I've ever seen that in a language. You learn to have faith in it, as opposed to the other languages who seem determined to screw you and will only grudgingly do as you say if you absolutely, positively give them no other choice.

When they finally get the isomorphism figured out and map ruby onto the Smalltalk compiler and speed it up by a factor of 20, it will rule.

TLDR; It is teh awesome and chicks dig it.
The "trouble" is only when you want a single process to monopolize the entirety of CPU resources. In today's (and even yesterday's?) processing environment, there are often tens if not hundreds of processes running at once, and 5 or 15 of them may be "performance critical".

Are multicore architectures not able to distribute this sort of load?
In workplaces, it tends to happen because it is something the developers control rather than other peoples control (i.e. marketing, sales, support, ...). Control makes some people happy.

In my personal projects, it happens because I delude myself into thinking that the optimization is the "next big thing" and thus I am blinded to see it as a premature optimization. Of course, over the years, I have tempered myself when I think I've discovered the "next big thing", I try to be objective and think of it terms of an investment and cost; sometimes, it works.
We're using Hackathonia to manage the Hackathon at SocialDevCamp Chicago and we're excited at the progress. I think Hackathonia is a concept whose time has come because it will help Hackathon organizers and participants manage hackathons easily and build up clout over time. Pete's really passionate about this and I couldn't be happier to see SDCChi as the inaugural event to test this site.
this is sort of discrete math with haskell examples

http://www.amazon.com/Haskell-Logic-Maths-Programming-Comput...
Venture Pimp: ChumpDump culls your Twitter list and has a good time