skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I did not like this post. Of his four insights:

* two of them are common to almost all high-level languages (Python, Ruby, and Tcl all have regular syntax that deliberately improves on C/C++, and dynamic types practically define "scripting" languages),

* one of them is spurious (Visual Studio programmers don't care how much precious memory they waste as long as Intellisense keeps working, and plenty of C programmers use vim), and

* the only insight here that has enough valence to be interesting --- on the scoping and binding rules of variables --- is covered so superficially that it's hard to tell whether the author actually understands what he's saying. You mean "learning lisp" didn't teach you enough to evaluate Python's closures, or Ruby's block/lambda idiom?

This article won't be a total loss if it prompts somebody to write a more knowledgeable and useful article on the lessons a Lisp education brings to bear on modern languages. I'd love to read that.
A few simple axioms and a whole lot of C code.
I'm missing a foot (don't BASE jump kids!), but I can't imagine how difficult it would be to be without an arm, much less two. I have to wonder if they'll ever be able to get the reliability of this arm design sufficiently high that it won't be a constant maintenance burden for the user. I break some aspect of my prosthesis every few months, and it's a pretty simple design. This arm has perhaps perhaps three orders of magnitude more components.

Furthermore, the market for these will be quite limited as insurance companies are unlikely to provide one for an amputee, especially one who has an arm remaining. I'm told it's very hard to get the Otto Bock C-Leg (http://www.ottobockus.com/PRODUCTS/LOWER_LIMB_PROSTHETICS/c-...) paid for now, and it's "only" $40K for a complete system. The likely segments are those who have military injuries or workman's compensation claims (the same thing, I guess) where the burden to restore one to "normal" is much greater.

For me, I'm much more interested in schemes to attach lower limb prosthetics to existing bones (a tibia in my case) as most maintenance issues are related to the socket rather than the foot or other parts.
Calling All Psychics- Get Paid to Predict Future Events with Predictify
YC is in other countries. 5 of the 20 startups in the current batch have non-US founders.

In fact, non-US founders seem to do better on average than US founders. I'm not sure exactly why; probably because they have to be more committed, and commitment is the biggest predictor of success in a startup. But whatever the reason, YC clearly works internationally.

I think software/web startups are basically international now. It's all one big market. Now all we need to do is explain this to the governments.
Funny, I completely agree with BrandonM's list except for this one. Yes, it has been covered at least a dozen times. And yes, it would be easy to google what you're looking for. But I never mind these threads. Remember lots of people come and go, so OP probably never saw the first dozen or so threads. And there's a big difference between an impersonal search engine and real hackers answering YOUR question. I've done it myself, without reservation. I think that repeating the answers to these noobie questions every month or so is a small price to pay to make them feel welcome into the community. Who knows, your cordial response may encourage them enough to stay and maybe change the world someday.
Offices and The Creativity Zone
Do you have any recommendations for specific firms to use?
How you build it will depend on the service you host it on. So with AWS, you'll use EC2, S3 and perhaps most importantly, SQS.

Fundamentally for a crawler, you will need the following:

1. A list of URLs to crawl, perhaps even ranked in priority of crawling. This is a database of sorts.

2. A set of crawlers that figure out the most important URL on the list and fetch it.

3. A parser and HTML storage service. The parser will also feed new URLs into the list.

Each of the above pieces are easy to do on their own. The trick is how you glue them together. I would suggest something like the following as a starter for using AWS for crawling:

1. A MySQL list of URLs with some kind of priority ranking. This can be a cluster of EC2 instances that store and prioritize the links. Early on, you can ignore the prioritization aspects.

2. The URL cluster will dispatch queue messages of URLs to crawl in the desired crawling order.

3. A cluster of EC2 instances check the SQS queue for crawling messages and fetch the URL specified in each message. As the message is being processed, it's locked so others can move on.

You can make the whole thing dynamic by adding crawling instances if the queue gets too long. You can also have instances that determine the crawling priority for the next time (one metric is number of backlinks to a page). Another set of instances might be parsers or do the actual analysis of the crawled pages.

Which language to code it in? If you're going for maximal speed, perhaps you should consider a compiled language. If not, Python or PHP or Perl would do just fine. Personally I'd do it in a scripting language to begin with and invest the time into a faster crawler later if warranted.

And good luck!
DropBox out of space?
IOError: [Errno 28] No space left on device
Automated vulnerability auditing in machine code
I think the inherent problem is this:

Why does someone go to prosper to get a loan?

Whatever the answer, it's not good from the lender's perspective :)
Nutch is good and I would second it, but I would suggest to NOT build a crawler - its not trivial and inadvised in a startup, that is unless your startup is just about building a crawler.
Max Levchin met Peter Thiel when Thiel was lecturing students on international finance. They started Paypal almost immediately.

This is almost certainly not what you meant -- but the original Paypal business plan did revolve around international finance.
I mean maybe the author(s) copied part of the work from something that is not public domain and then claimed wrongly that the result is public domain.

In my case, having to change the word list later because it turns out that part of it was copied from a proprietary source would mess up my puzzle.
But I am qualified! I designed a cryptosystem just last week, and nobody's broken it yet!

Moreover, the PDF that I published on my personal website sounds very erudite, and doesn't contain any obvious spelling errors. I have over fifteen years' experience in the lab [1], have authored nearly a dozen scientific publications in prestigious journals such as Physical Review Letters and Cancer Research [2], and have seven years' experience as a semiconductor process technologist. [3] So I don't see how you can dismiss my work out of hand, particularly since you, as a security professional, have an obvious conflict of interest. [4]

[1] At least two years of which involved making photocopies, washing glassware, and ordering pizza.

[2] This is actually true, for reasonable values of "nearly" and "prestigious". You must also remember that being Nth author counts as "authoring".

[3] Also true. And so relevant, too!

[4] Notice that "the desire to toot your own horn" never seems to count as a "conflict of interest".
I think that at least some bipolar people would gladly trade the increased creativity during the highs for greater stability, and I think it would be a good thing if they had the ability to do so.
Even better, aggregate them and RE-SELL them on prosper :) If they default, you send the default up the chain!
Bjarne Stroustrup discusses the education of programmers
Russian intelligence sees U.S. military buildup on Iran border
Russian military intelligence services are reporting a flurry of activity by U.S. Armed Forces near Iran's borders, a high-ranking security source said Tuesday.

"The latest military intelligence data point to heightened U.S. military preparations for both an air and ground operation against Iran," the official said, adding that the Pentagon has probably not yet made a final decision as to when an attack will be launched.
Heroku - Simultaneously Develop and Deploy Automatically Scalable Rails Applications in the Cloud
Lighten up.
While noting that nobody else is going to toot your horn for you, I'll say that cryptography was just the first thing to come into my head, for obvious reasons. I can't tell from the tone of your comment, but if you've worked in semiconductors, cancer research, and cryptography, let me be the first to proclaim that you have a bad-ass resume.
> I think the karma system will work things out in the end

Karma systems have an awful track record, from my experience. It is not a solved problem.
Scaling Out MySQL
Video: Tim Berners Lee on the Semantic Web
As one of the principal posters in that thread, I obviously agree with you.

Do folks not understand how teaching works? How coaching works? How leadership works? How a community works? This group isn't just a dusty library, filled with books that may be out of date and librarians who tell you to be quiet and RTFM.

People like having their questions answered by real humans. They crave contact. They crave personality. They need to know that someone is out there, listening. The voice of an actual human telling you what to do is often more real than your own voice, or the disembodied voice of an old book.

Yes, the questions are almost always the same. That's how teaching works: You're surrounded by novices, and once they stop being novices they leave and are replaced by another group of novices. The secret to being a good teacher is to take enough joy in helping others -- and, less charitably, in the sound of your own voice repeating itself -- to be able to do it again and again with only minor variations.
On my desktop at least, there is no system error that I fear more. Numerous times this error has caused programs trash the open files.

Only programs I know that handle it: emacs, postgresql, centericq

Notable offenders: firefox, bash, almost everything else.
I agree. He's seeming to gloss over the fact that the whole point of higher level languages is that they exchange some simplicity for power.
I recently built a crawler of my own in Ruby after trying, and ultimately deciding against, Nutch. Depending on what you want to do with your crawl there is a very good change that you'll be able to write a small crawler that is much easier to extend on your own, and you'll probably be able to write it in the time it would take you to install, setup, and configure Nutch.

As I said I used Ruby and specifically Hpricot for the page parsing. I'm starting to run into problems with Hpricot right now though and I may actually try a python version with Beautiful Soup very soon. Let me know how it goes for you and maybe we can share some code.
I can't believe that they haven't realized this yet... Someone please ping them.
It's surprisingly restrained, though. I noticed the same thing on reddit. This particular essay seems to wedge trolls.
You just linked me to a thread I wrote half a dozen comments in? Did you read it? :)

Certain types of making fun of things make for valid comments. In this case, I was pointing out the striking similarity between what he said, and 1984.
What if you use BSD-licensed code, only it later turns out that the person who added the license wasn't the copyright holder? What if you ask someone if you can have something, and he says yes, but later it turns out it wasn't his to give away?

The license is irrelevant; you are worried about people claiming something is under X terms, when it's not. The answer to this is: do your legal due diligence like everyone else.

(The only wrinkle is that in some jurisdictions it's not legally possible to put something into the public domain. This does not seem to bother most people.)
TysBlog.com - Tips, Tricks, Rants, and Reviews
Oh, I totally lied about the cryptography. :) I have a copy of Schneier on my shelf that I occasionally put under my pillow at night... does that count?

All that I know about cryptography is that anyone who claims to have written their own unbreakable system, but hasn't had that system vetted by other cryptographers, is nearly 100% likely to be completely full of it.

The semiconductors and cancer research are true. It sounds so much more impressive than it actually is, though, which is kind of my point. Yeah, I've worked in several fields, and I like to think I learned something from all of that time, but if I wrote a crypto paper I would still be talking out of my ass. Hell, if I wrote my own cancer research paper I'd be talking out of my ass -- my role in the cancer lab was mainly "physics guy who knows how to change the light bulbs on the multiphoton microscope".
The Subprime Primer
I think the new UI is much better and user friendly.
Vote them up.
My girlfriend loved Harry Potter when we first met but I've since turned her on to much higher quality stuff (fantasy and otherwise) and she seems to be responding well. At least she doesn't have any literary pretensions like some girl who prides herself on having read pushkin probably does.

If you pride yourself on having rad certain authors you're reading them for the wrong reasons. You don't read great literature because it's "Great Literature". You read it because it is good.

I suppose it's to be expected. Even in the intellectual world Sturgeon's Law applies. 90% of everything is crap.

(Btw, if you havn't you should read Theodore Sturgeon's More Than Human)
This idea sounds controversial, but I think folding news.YC into a section on reddit (at least in name) would prompt people to post the irrelevant fluff on reddit, and keep news.YC on topic.

I'm sure there are many reasons not to do this, but the idea still has merit, IMO.
You're absolutely right. I was stretching a bit with that one, and looking back, I'm not really sure that I should have included it, because I have many of the same sentiments that you do.

That said, I have seen similar Ask YC posts that do cover the exact same ground as old ones and annoy me a bit more than that one. I guess I was trying to use that one as an example of such a submission, although it wasn't really a good example.
But more than a little more qualified than you are in this area, if you want to play that game.

At least the guy giving the "warning" argued from something a little more substantial than "look where this was published." And now your entire argument has further devolved to "look at the resume of this guy", instead of on the paper itself.

No wonder PG has to tutor some of you on logical thought.
Error in reasoning. You obviously need to read PG's recent article.
Sorry about that, I somehow missed the reference. As for the comment thread, I did read it a few days ago, but I don't typically go back and re-read comment threads. Also, I don't tend to recognize names until I've seen them a lot. I was making the (apparently wrong) assumption that as a relatively new user, you weren't familiar with Hacker News karma-assignment trends.

I had already voted all three of the posts up, anyways, because I felt the highly-negative karma was a bit unfair.
So then, I made a half-assed analogy:

programmer : semiconductor engineer :: surgeon : researcher

Was I talking out of my ass? Because of the three CS fields I mentioned, I barely work in one of them. =)
you are the first person to give me an honest non-knee jerk response answer. thank you.
Sorry, there appears to be an incompatibility between us. Whereas you've wired your brain directly to Paul Graham's website, my thoughts and ideas are in fact dictated by a combination of Eric Sink and Joel Spolsky. Because we are parroting different web personalities, I see little chance for us to resolve this debate.

I humbly suggest that we simply agree to disagree.
Question: are two word comments like "Well Said" really necessary? Not to nitpick or anything, but come on, really, what do they contribute?
here's why in case anyone is still out of the loop.
http://www.gasandoil.com/goc/news/ntm23638.htm
pg, what is your opinion on starting something on the lines of startup school in international locations?
mmm metacomments..
This update will have more of an effect of my day-to-day life than the 1.2 -> 2.0 update. It is good to see that the Rails team is confronting serious issues (like the Migration numbering) quickly and not letting them fester.
maybe the competition who followed the law. maybe no one. i'm not sure.

regardless of my opinion of who is hurt in the GPL case, i do have one in the movie downloading case. you seem to too, but you still won't say who is being hurt.
Scholars have known for ages that the best way to get the riff-raff to leave you alone is to make what you're doing seem extremely boring. :)
My personal experience has been that I am much more productive when programming in python. More gets done easily, and the code is very readable.

However, I realised this only after I had spent order of magnitude more time on doing the same thing in C, and burnt myself plenty of times during the process. My point is that you find out how productive you can be in one language when you have used another language to do the same thing - then a comparison becomes somewhat meaningful. I had read a lot about how python makes you more productive, but I experienced it only when I started coding in python to achieve tasks that I used to code in C earlier.

The same goes for shell scripts that make my life easier. Shell scripting became a hellish experience when I was using a solaris machine for some time - but by writing a python script instead of a shell script, I could be pretty sure that it would run in linux / solaris / any other *nix.

So, I still believe that we are essentially in agreement regarding productivity. Efficiency is another matter though - inspite of psyco etc, python tends to be slower in some tasks and it might be well worth the time to code them in C.
I don't get all the love for lisp. In my lisp experience I remember being in debugging hell trying to count out between 18 and 19 close-parentheses to add some parameter I'd forgotten. Bad memories.
People missing the reference was kind of my guess, but I wasn't sure. Thanks.

And, yeah, I knew that asking why the downmodding would be downmodded. It's ok. It was worth it.

And I expected you had read the comment thread and just didn't remember my name, but it was still funny ;p
Increase Web Traffic, Search Engine Optimization, and more.
"The idea is to give the students a broad view of computer science during the first two years ("making them ready for their first internship or project") and then using the next two years to go into depth in some selected areas. During the first two years, the students get a fairly classical CS program with a slightly higher component of software development projects than is common. They have courses in hardware and software (using C++), there is some discrete math, algorithms and data structures, (operating and network) systems, programming languages, and a "programming studio" exposing them to group projects and some project management."

And bang, just like that, we'll have raised a whole 'nother generation of Java/IT "programmers".

Java and C/C++ are horrible languages with which to teach computer science. "Programmers" more and more are becoming technical fast-food-workers. Trying to reason using horrible, imperative bloatware like C++/Java moves "programming" more and more away from even an engineering discipline.
Startup school is even more international, because it's less of a commitment to come to the US for a weekend than for 3 months.

Sure, you have to fly and find somewhere to stay, but you have to do that from most places in the US too.
glad someone mentioned it. there is no point in NOT brute forcing a problem such as this when it doesn't really take all that much brute force to begin with. What good is a sudoku solving algorithm? Algorithm's are to eliminate the need for brute force when brute force would take too long/require too much resources.
In my dating experience, having interests that matched on paper never correlated with a successful relationship. Often it's a red herring that leads you to try and make something out of nothing. The girl you fall for despite having nothing in common is often the keeper, because the only reason you would fall for her is that there is great chemistry.
Probably because nobody feels implicitly attacked in a specific way and doesn't feel the urge to be impulsively vindictive.
Manufacturing’s comeback chance
I agree. It's a clever hack, but instead of spending the time learning how to use this and then using it for all of your regular expressions, you could just learn regular expressions yourself. It's as simple as learning the syntax and then keeping a handy bookmark to some of the less-commonly used special characters, in addition to plenty of practice.
There was an article on the San Jose Mercury News last year that talked about the percentage of foreign-born founders of successful startups in the Valley was around 40-50%. If I find a link, I'll post it.

Anyway, they interviewed a number of foreign born founders, and the consensus was that it took so much risk to move to another country as an immigrant, the risk of founding a startup really seemed small in comparison.

Having grown up in Central America in the 80's myself, I'd also postulate that you're able to think outside the box a bit better as well. Why? Because to the immigrant, everything in a new country is so profoundly different to begin with, that you barely see the boxes that so many other native-born people are hung up on.
What sort of music are you after?
Uh oh, you got technical on me!

It's been a long time since I've studied this stuff, but for what it's worth, your argument feels incorrect to me. It might not be possible to address that effectively here, but let me try.

Let's call a particular run of the Turing test a "Turing dialog". Say a Turing dialog D consists of alternating statements C1,H1,...,Cn,Hn where C stands for "computer" and H for "human". Say a "successful Turing dialog" is one that succeeds in fooling the human participant - that is, Hn is something like "I think you're human".

You're right that for any Turing dialog D, D is finite and therefore an algorithm exists to reproduce it (a simple lookup table will do). But such an algorithm is only good for one specific D. To build it, you'd have to know all of D in advance.

To pass the Turing test, we need more. We need an algorithm, which, given any valid prefix of a Turing dialog, i.e. any sequence C1,H1,...,Ck,Hk, knows how to produce Ck+1 in such a way that the dialog will end successfully. That's not the same thing, is it?
I'll believe it when i see it. This same thing popped up all over the place during the first web-bubble.
Monster-trucking on the moon in a newfangled $2 million buggy
there could be multiple solution - one can start the yc shop in Canada and/or BRIC - the talent market in these countries is huge - the other option for pg is to see whether they can start franchising - the most important thing in this model is connections with VCs - if someone can bring VCs on board then even few investors, entrepreneurs and hackers can come together and start a clone.