skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is very heartening. Gracias, el gringo!

[And, personally every cop I've met has been really nice to me. And the debt crisis doesn't really affect me yet. I'm just paranoid, I suppose.]
Yes I think they have a Maserati problem. Or rather, they could have a Maserati problem if they simply flipped the right switch, given the high traffic and community/fanbase they now have. Most startups would love to have their problem.
Having a a backup plan is a good idea, I hadn't thought of that. Thanks!
I must say that mathematica beats every other option hands down in terms of language power, but trails waaaay behind when it comes to price. I'm happy with Wolfram's student license though :)
SA also wields the banhammer with wild abandon. For people who don't toe the line, the $10 turns into a subscription. The army of mods needed to keep the revolving door going is large, but I think they like their jobs.

Unfortunately the last several years of SA have revealed that this model doesn't really scale either, at least with regards to maintaining a vibrant community and avoiding the Digg effect. I think they should have started raising the rates about 2004.
Microcomputer prices have been dropping for decades. Yet for some reason we keep buying them, usually more and more every year. Consumer price deflation is not something to fear or try to prevent; it's a necessary step in clearing market imbalances.

http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com/2009/10/deflation...
"Just up and asking your customers to give you money like this has got to change your relationship, just like lending or giving money to a friend, right?"

When taken out of context, that sounds remarkably absurd. ;-)

It's an interesting development, simply because most businesses throughout history have demanded that you give them money before you receive service. Or they bill you afterwards with the full force of law behind their threats. Very few will give you the service first and then ask nicely for money.

I'm hoping that it works out, simply because if it doesn't, I'd bet that we won't see very many businesses using this strategy in the future. OTOH, I have no plans to subscribe - Reddit just isn't worth all that much to me.
Bret,

Thanks for chiming in here. At our startup we are trying hard to reassure users we're not going to misuse the Facebook access they're giving us. Even though we're asking for a fairly limited set of rights, the permissions screen that appears after the Facebook Graph login is quite intimidating. The design has a warning stripe across the type that is reminiscent of a danger sign, and combined with the copy, inspires a feeling of alarm. See http://developers.facebook.com/docs/authentication/ for a screen shot. It would be better if the screen were friendlier and less evocative of danger.

Another way to improve the user experience would be to consolidate the login form and permissions to a single screen. Twitter's oauth login screen does this well. Screen shot: http://followfridayhelper.com/images/help-login-via-oauth.pn...

Additionally, the oauth tokens should be long-lasting by default. We originally set up our site to not ask for an extended-life token, because we wanted to reassure users that we weren't going to be posting things on behalf when they weren't using the site. But this ruined the user experience. A short time after logging in to our site, a user would initiate an action, but because their token had expired, we had to pop open a new Facebook login window, interrupting what they were doing. Users were annoyed at having to constantly re-login to Facebook. So we now ask for the extended life permission. While this improves the user experience, it adds another intimidating message on the Facebook permissions screen, implying we're going to be posting on their behalf even when they don't initiate it.

Happy to chat more about what we're doing and give additional feedback.

Lee Semel
They had Google AdSense there when Reddit first launched, before they made their first ad deal with Federated Media. I'm not privy to what the numbers were, but I imagine they weren't good.
It's comforting to think of the government as bumbling, backward and behind the times, but you should NOT think of the NSA this way. They have been on the cutting edge of the technology for the past 10 years, they are building a massive data center in Utah for cyber-security purposes (http://www.informationweek.com/news/government/security/show...), they recruit heavily at hacking and security conventions, and they have multiple public private partnerships with heavy hitters in the tech world (http://247wallst.com/2010/02/04/an-unprecedented-public-priv...).
To my mind, the whole NoSQL thing is primarily about "polyglot persistence" - building systems on more than one storage system. I think large scale apps that use more than one db system are becoming the norm. NoSQL means acknowledging that different storage systems are good for different features.
A lot of the decline in prices in food and furniture and other items that have to be transported is due to the oil bubble in 2008.

An easy example is milk. It now costs less than in did in 2008 because gas is so much cheaper.
I'm making my own typeface mugs, via a national photo company. They allow printing "photos" on cups, so I'm making simple typeface mugs in different typefaces.
About time somebody recognized that all of us are "rights holders."
Wow, I feel really late to the game. Had no idea what MVP stood for and had to look it up. This looks like a pretty awesome approach to test the market for new product ideas instead of building blindly and hoping it sticks. This also reminds of the "ghetto testing" practices I've read about, especially within the social gaming realm.

Can anyone recommend other articles about MVP? The article's author also mentioned that he used HN as a good starting place; does anyone have links to those posts?

EDIT: Looks like the original post was just from a week ago, and I actually read it :) It's here for anyone that's curious: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1482834
Android is an OS not a phone.
when we heard this story we had to look it to remember it
so we included the Wikipedia link

That reads kinda confusingly. Honestly, I'd lean towards just taking that bit out altogether, to me it interrupts the flow of the story you're trying to tell.
The problem of resizing all these images is an "embarrassingly parallel" one, right? You don't care about how fast any individual image is resized, only how fast they're resized in aggregate, and each image is a nice small chunk of work.

The author spends time tuning the number of workers and the number of OpenMP processes per worker for GraphicsMagick on his 16-core machines. Isn't this type of tuning a waste of time? Even using just two cores instead of one seems to introduce inefficiency. Wouldn't he have been better off just using 16 workers, each compiled without OpenMP so that it would run serially (and more efficiently)?
Oh, for christ's sake.

We should impose a must-be-marked-at-all-times lethal health hazard on our own territory for the hell of it? We're not at war here.
Let me start by saying I don't like the GIL. It's limiting and buggy (last week we discovered a bug involving GIL and on-demand imports for constructing Unicode objects...it's hiding pretty well). However, if I were to judge it as a design decision and not as something I can "fix", I would seriously say I'm neutral about it.

Why? It's pretty simple: since the language doesn't have any acceptable way to provide concurrency with threads, I'm going OS on its ass. And so should you, "complainers" or not. The solution is probably not ideal, and it's cetrainly A Bad Thing to many of you, but Unix programming showed the way. That's right. We should be doing more of it (in this context). A lot more of this (again, in this specific context). I’m talking about fork(2), execve(2), pipe(2), socketpair(2), select(2), kill(2), sigaction(2), and so on and so forth. These are our friends. They want so badly just to help us.

Sure, it's not always nice. Typically, if you want to share a large amount of state, you'd have to do it manually, which would result in code not so pretty as the Python lovers usually write. That may be a disadvantage to them. This point is moot, because I remember my professors screaming to us to avoid shared state as much as possible when doing concurrent programming - if you need to do it, you should rethink your solution before you rethink your tools.

I've agreed with Brett on multiple occasions in the past about this; people seem to think that changing the way Python is implemented to encompass more and more of certain features the way they like them would somehow make the language more powerful and popular and all around awesome. That's not true. Most of the "complainers" are people that chose Python because of its power, not wanting to actually learn anything other than an API. Well, folks, you can't have a single tool for every job.
e-texteditor is probably the best editor on Windows. I miss it a lot when I switched to using Mac, especially the split-screen feature. Textmate sucks at that, and I have to resort to use Divvy to arrange my file windows.

E is totally well worth the price.
Plus, quora is not really living up to it's promise of a high quality question/answer social site. Most questions and answers are as inane as on yahoo answers and the only difference is the more pleasing UI but that wears off pretty quickly.
I've seen these so much they don't even face me any more.
If you enjoy debating philosophy (especially value based/govt philosophy), Liberalism and the Limits of Justice by Michael Sandel builds up and absolutely destroys around 10 of the most common premises for these types of debates. A hundred other issues are dealt with along the way and this will change the way you think about this type of philosophy.
In 2006, nearly half the population of Toronto was a "visible minority". It's estimated that more than half are now. Similarly, half of the population is foreign-born.
"contact us page" tends to be synonymous with "the boring details page", so if your company has operating hours, put them on there. It drives me bananas when I can't find them or have to call to find them out.
I agree: it's good to have and to express opinions. But as you point out there is a real difference between "wouldn't it be cool if..." and "you really should be working on this problem of mine" instead of doing whatever it is you currently think is more important.

I don't even really know who is right about a Python GIL. When working with C, I have a strong preference for separate processes and mmaps. When working with Perl (which I use a lot more than Python), I've never really felt much urge to use threading. Aesthetically, although I haven't really used it, I think Erlang's message passing approach is much better than native threads. But maybe Gustavo's right --- better threading would indeed allow lots of cool things to be done.

That aside, what saddens me about the exchange between Gustavo and Brett is the misconnect. It strikes me as obvious that the key for Gustavo here is to show that it's in Brett's self-interest to improve threading in Python. I didn't see any attempt of this. Instead, he seems to be taking exactly the tack Brett just finished saying was ruinous to his morale.
Ask HN: Anyone here at Euroscipy '10 in Paris?
I am and would be interested in meeting people from here.
The C Book (HTML Book on C)
"Potentially rogue binary" in Sprint Evo
Business Telephones
Small business telephone systems are perfect for both small business and home workers who want to be able to differentiate between business and personal calls and make the most of the incoming and outgoing lines available.
Flat Screen TV Installation in Los Angeles
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What helped me understand deflation was, as with so many things, the Planet Money team from NPR.

http://www.npr.org/tablet/#story/?storyId=96993728
It's not a list of skilled professions. It's a list of skilled professions that are in demand in Canada. Restaurants have to be managed in person. Programming is not on the list most likely because Canadian firms have been outsourcing it to India.
There are really only TWO decisions that google made that made them successful. When something works, people like to go back and look at complicated things and say that those are the reasons it worked. The reason that google beat the others were really very simple and they had to do with the front-end only:

1. They were the simplest to use at the time. All the other search engine things had a lot of frills and pages and ads and so on. Google was just very plain, and as a result, simple

2. By default, they included ALL the words you typed in. Competitors at the time were trying to maximise search results by searching for each word individually, which led to a lot of irrelevant results. Just by including all the words in the query, google had a much better hit rate

All the rest was unimportant. Those two simply front-end decisions made the google search engine loved by the geeky anti-corporate people who ruled the web at the time (slashdot, linux advocates), and they recommended it to everyone who was joining the net. By appealing to the geeks, who then acted as the authority figures to the normals, google was able to take over the search market back then.

It was really not that complicated.
Bertrand Russell: A history of western philosophy.

I haven't read it all but what I've read was both informative and witty. Note that Russell, kind of similar to The Economist, is "opinionated". Must be that British style...
I don't even have a Facebook account yet I'm using Quora.. so surely they have another way to sign up.
What's unstated here but recognized by unrevoked is that Sprint had skyagent purposefully on their phones so that they could easily gain root access and keep their phones under their command.
It's interesting too that despite the author's posting of an Analytics screen shot (of visitors I take it) there is no proof that the auto following itself has brought about the spiked traffic. For all we know it could be due to the author posting spam-links in other social media platforms that has produced some mild interest.
It's a great step and an excellent example for the rest of the world, but for us, Brazilians, it will make little to no difference.

Absurds taxes and the cost of a proper lawyer make the legal way so expensive nobody follows it. You heard a nice song and want to use it on your TV commercial? Go ahead, nobody's looking.

It's not that we go out killing and stealing, we are just more "community driven." Lawsuits and other legal actions are so rare that they look an exclusivity between big businesses themselves, but unethical moves are frowned upon by everybody, which makes for a parallel law-enforcement.

And this law-enforcement is definitely not concerned about copyrights.
http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Sequences
Godel, Escher, Bach won a Pulitzer Prize; I think that counts as serious. :)
Surely the traffic/load isn't that variable? Seems like even a VPS provider (linode/slicehost/etc) would offer far more bang for the buck.

The pricing for bandwidth alone on EC2 is simply insane.
India's growth fantasy
> left-fold and right-fold are not the only two. If you're dealing with commutative and associative operators, you can group them up in a binary (or n-ary) hierarchy for parallel execution as well

Unify isn't a functional language, nor do I particularly care about execution speed at present -- I'm writing it to test a concept I call Viewability. Having said that, the next version of Unify may well be more functional than the current one, and if so it could havre a way of tagging operators as commutative or associative, so the compiler can produce efficient code.

> map is obviously parallelized in a purely functional language

It's obviously parallelisable. It can only actually be parallelised if you have more than one CPU.

> My opinion is that fold, otoh, is better limited to use with commutative and associative operators for clarity and transparent parallelization.

I think it makes more sense in those cases, yes.

In fact you could make fold a method with multiple implementations depending on the type of function, e.g:

/* version that works with any function */
(fold ((Function f) ar) ...)

/* version that requires a function that is associative
and commutative, and can do appropriate optimisations */
(fold ((AssComFunction f) ar) ...)
"Siddhartha",
"Steppenwolf" - by Herman Hesse.

"Atlas Shrugged" - by Ayn Rand.

"Mrityunjay" - by Sivaji savant (originally in marathi/hindi language.. based on the character of Karna from Mahabharata.Not very sure how good the english translation is though.The title means - he who has conquered Death.)
"The Virtue of Selfishness"
"Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal"
"Philosophy: Who Needs It"
"Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology"

All by Ayn Rand. Whether you end up agreeing with her or not, she will definitely will make you think.
Because the Reddit userbase they have cultivated is (IMHO) not a good one to advertise to.

The userbase is anti-consumerist. They HATE things like Coca-Cola. They hate TV. They detest adverts etc etc etc
Provides a good reason to downplay having a fancy interface - avoid tipping off the competition.
Subscriptions are a funny thing. But first, I'm an AdBlock user, and I recommend it for my clients (http://www.robsheldon.com/adblockplus).

If Reddit immediately offered a subscription service and changed nothing else about their site ... I probably wouldn't subscribe at any price. Reddit is a bit of an occasional guilty pleasure for me, and if it went away, I would write that off as one less distraction. I'm aware that Redditors on the whole have accomplished some pretty great things in their own right, so something like that ought to exist, but I just couldn't justify the cost to me.

BUT! If Reddit required a paid subscription in order to post a comment or story, I would actually be more motivated to spend money on that. It would dramatically change the nature of the site, into one that I think would be more attractive -- to me.

That's just me though, and I'm not a very good example of any kind of business model. ;-) (Nor do I think Reddit actually should do this -- it would be a bad business move.)
I sense from this comment that you are trying to do what a lot of my Indian friends seem to do.
They try to weigh work vs. benefits scenario.

That's not the right way to live life.
You need to find your passion in work.
It's a lot like finding love.
You might fall a lot of times, but remember, when you find about what you are most passionate about, and what you really want to be and do, you will have much more fun and lead a much satisfying life, than worrying about the news, and quiestioning some of your best decisions.
Also, hate to repeat it, but you probably need to really hear these:

Grass always looks greener on the other side.

All in all you just need some focus.
You say you do some Js hacking.
Why not buy this book, Jquery in action, second edition. Hack some cool shit, and real soon you will be able to see a new world, a world where you control a lot of the browser through very little code.
A world, where you can make whatever you want using awesome jquery ui interactions, and make those web apps you always wanted to.

If you are devoid of ideas (which I doubt), shoot me an email.
If you don't mind my answering this...

Above here, I said that I would pay you $5 a month, and I would...but the only reason for that is that you I've talked to you on here (hacker news) before. To me the people runnign reddit are real. To me, you're a friend and I'm throwing $5 into the can that is duct-taped to your kegerator because you let me drink it for free...

...but for most people? What does reddit offer me that I can't get elsewhere? Honestly, a lot of the submissions have gone completely to shit. /r/pics? /r/askreddit? /r/iama? I'm not saying that it is your fault, but there isn't, at least to me, any value there.

Granted, and I'm sure you could look in your logs to see how much I visit your site (it's a lot), but if it went away...would I be sad? Uhhh...maybe a little bit, but not really. Personally, beyond having talked to you here, I don't feel much of a connection to you guys, and I don't feel much of a connection to the community.

Again, I'm not saying that this is exactly your guys' fault, just that it has happened.

One service that I do pay for is usenet, even though I almost never use it (my provider gives me 10 gigs a month and I think I have about a half a terrabye of available transfer hat has just rolled over for the last 5 years or so.) I pay for it because it makes me happy to see what the people at my provider (easynews) are doing. The reason that I signed up to begin with is because I saw them as a mirror on sourceforge. To me, although this is probably completely incorrect, they're fighting the good fight, and I want to support that.

But what are you guys doing to make me voluntarily buy you a beer every month? Reddit doesn't give me anything that I can't get from here, or fark, or slashdot, or my own website. Again, I'll pay you guys $5, but I'm the exception.

To me, you have to ask yourself what you guys have done to make yourselves stand out. If the donation is strictly voluntary, what motivation do I have to give it.

I'll tell you that one reason I am a totalfarker is that Drew Curtis seems like a real guy to me. Other than you, I have no idea who is behind reddit (spez and kn0thing, but I haven't talked to them in a long while).

Again, please don't misunderstand what I'm saying. I love you guys, I'm addicted to your site, I love it...but am I the norm?
The Happiness Hypothesis by Jonathon Haidt is great. It intertwines philosophy and psychology while providing a lot of insight on how a life is well lived.

http://www.amazon.com/Happiness-Hypothesis-Finding-Modern-An...
>gouged by ticketmaster

gouged by promoters, rather.
The great thing is, Brasil does not exactly have a government that will cave to US or content company interests on this.

Wish our legislators would look at this as a good example to follow when revisiting our copyright laws, but not likely, buy them a $500 dinner and get a draconian bill passed, what a great investment.
Neither deflation nor inflation are a problem. Instead it is the speed at which they occur.

Having prices move to their natural supply/demand equilibrium is a good thing.

The problem is if they move too slowly.

For example, if I believe a house is worth $100,000 instead of $200,000, I will wait until it reaches $100k before buying.

Now whether this happens in 1 day or in 1 decade is the problem.

If it happens in 1 day, everyone will start spending again in a matter of months, if not days. If it happens in 1 decade (aka Japan), then people will hold their money until price reaches the natural equilibrium.

Thus, the US should stop trying to artificially prop up housing prices. It only delays the inevitable.
The copy-on-write semantics are a function of fork, an OS call (which is why it's available in python as os.fork), not a function of python. So if your OS supports COW for forked processes, python will have it.

Check the man pages for fork(2) and vfork(2) for fork related COW information. There's some interesting stuff in there.

As a side note, there's an interesting write-up on the portability of fork between UNIX and win32 in the perlfork man page (forgive me for mentioning perl in a python related thread), and the hoops that needed to be jumped through to emulate fork on win32 and keep it compatible with real fork from the visibility of the perl script itself.
I believe he was responding to your "I am not sure why anyone cares about startup time." While you may have been referring specifically to Moose, it's possible to interpret that as a blanket statement for all programs and languages, even in context.