skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I found this part fascinating.

"Yet to me, literate programming is certainly the most important thing that came out of the TeX project. Not only has it enabled me to write and maintain programs faster and more reliably than ever before, and been one of my greatest sources of joy since the 1980s—it has actually been indispensable at times. Some of my major programs, such as the MMIX meta-simulator, could not have been written with any other methodology that I’ve ever heard of. The complexity was simply too daunting for my limited brain to handle; without literate programming, the whole enterprise would have flopped miserably.

If people do discover nice ways to use the newfangled multithreaded machines, I would expect the discovery to come from people who routinely use literate programming. Literate programming is what you need to rise above the ordinary level of achievement. But I don’t believe in forcing ideas on anybody. If literate programming isn’t your style, please forget it and do what you like. If nobody likes it but me, let it die."

I am a little skeptical of literate programming (especially how it would would work on multi person teams, a circumstance Knuth doesn't face) but when someone of the stature of Knuth is so emphatic, common sense dictates a closer look.

The LCC compiler (Fraser and Hanson) seems to have been developed using literate programming and it is a beautiful piece of code.

I was wondering -- has anyone on news.yc attempted literate programming?
The Ro-ad Phenomenon: an alternative to regular drug use for finding a "new perspective"
I do grant that web browsing probably will get better with multicores. I’ve been talking about my technical work, however, not recreation.

What??? Web browsing is only for recreation? Perhaps, he meant that it is recreation for him...
Sees end to "blogging" would be more accurate.
Agreed, except there was something else in this article that was interesting. The presence of a free alternative was alluring enough to prevent people from making a deal they normally would make, if only for the sake of keeping the "freeness."

In theory, this royally screws up the idealogical basis of the freemium model. If the presence of the free option kept them from entering into any transaction with a cost, even if there was a clear benefit and the cost was low, that's a problem for freemium.
GitHub Becomes A Gem Server!
The answer is simple: No.
yeah it's sexist. beats me why it actually got 2 upvotes, and didn't go negative. people here suck i guess.

i only posted it because someone posted ageism and i wanted to see what would get more downvotes (i thought sexism would, lol). major fail...

BTW I'm not sure that sarcasm is a good way to deal with sexism. Why be semi-subtle? Can't you confront it head on?
"...so let us make a tiered network!"
Guide to Web Hosting: Part 1 - The Oversell
That's a good question. I looked into this recently too, but haven't decided yet whether to go with "Amazon FPS" or "Google Checkout". Search on those terms and you'll get some relevant comparison hits. I'd love to hear about other services, if any look viable. Shared experiences would also be welcome.
Businesses and startups are different, but not from each other
As the website says... send me an email. :-)
We just need to buy more tubes.
Backups for Criminals

Is Airbus a company of criminals? They have a perfectly good reason for wanting to keep their data out of the hands of the US government: Every time the US government gets some information about Airbus, Boeing has it the next day.

Sadly, industrial espionage is something which many governments are actively involved in; wanting to make sure that your foreign competitors don't have access to your trade secrets does not make you a criminal.

Isn't it possible to encrypt already and then backup?

Yes, but if you do that, you lose the benefits of snapshotting (performance of incremental backups, convenience of full backups).
Unique Baby Names
Unique Baby Names
Has anyone ever seen Tara Ploughman and Nick B in the same room?
Can't. They're full.

http://www.thetubesarefull.com/
Nope, you're right, it's not in an obvious place until after you've registered for the free account. It's $34.95/yr.
Is eager (strict) evaluation with optional laziness better than pure laziness (e.g., Haskell)?
Throws a pebble in the pond.
Twitter to the rescue
Guide to Web Hosting Part 2 -- Uptime
Overcoming the Fear of Failure
But...more people will do this due to Twitter's 140 character limit! Also if you use a twitter search you can quickly gleam and tally up marketing data and monitor brand in a quicker fashion; demographics are easier to obtain too!

I don't understand why this community nor the digg community does not see the immense value of indexing short conversations of millions of people? After all it's information and what does Google index and make billions from?
I find it hard to believe you haven't learned anything in two years. Unless you're a genius, you're probably not approaching it the right way.

As for student loans, I had a 16 month internship between 3rd and 4th years of university that paid well, so that allowed me to cover my loans from the first three years, get a ton of experience and save up for 4th year. I graduated without debt and some money in the bank, but the price was, a living very cheaply for a very long time. For example, I am 24 and I still don't own a car - that's more cheaply that many people can tolerate...
Anyone here do any music software design?
I have been playing around with various environments etc for the last 5 years or so - on and off. I have tried diving into supercollider (http://www.audiosynth.com/) a few times but have never put anything hardcore together. I have also played with chuck and pure data. Anyone play around with any of these?
Are you allowed to take a leave of absence, without any penalty?
> Then I wrote a book about the pressures of school!

I thought you write about how you got screwed by Zuckerberg.
I wrote some about Facebook, too, but the majority of the book is actually about school. The topics are related.
Read again. No, they haven't. David goads; PG apparently feels the need to defend himself. I presume that it's because he's answering DHH -- the argument itself is pointless, and DHH's points are sophomoric and trivial. It is devolving.
The first two years are typically gen ed and are often not aligned with a student's particular interests. This can make someone feel like it's a waste of time. If they feel that way, then they aren't going to be in a receptive state for learning, even though technically the material is new to them -- it holds no interest.

"If the colleges were better, if they really had it, you would need to get the police at the gates to keep order in the inrushing multitude. See in college how we thwart the natural love of learning by leaving the natural method of teaching what each wishes to learn, and insisting that you shall learn what you have no taste or capacity for. The college, which should be a place of delightful labour, is made odious and unhealthy, and the young men are tempted to frivolous amusements to rally their jaded spirits. I would have the studies elective. Scholarship is to be created not by compulsion, but by awakening a pure interest in knowledge. The wise instructor accomplishes this by opening to his pupils precisely the attractions the study has for himself. The marking is a system for schools, not for the college; for boys, not for men; and it is an ungracious work to put on a professor." -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Extremely valuable? Why? Because DHH deigned to comment on our little forum? Can't be for any other reason: he's not saying anything interesting or useful, anything less than obvious.
"Narrow" is a relative term. PG is not as narrow as DHH.
Yea, I agree. You shouldn't think about it as a quantitative thing, like "I expected to learn 12 things this semester." If nothing else, you've learned how to deal with projects you don't exactly enjoy. You've also learned how to network with others and how to present yourself in front of a group, hopefully. At least those are some of the "soft skills" I've learned outside of the course curriculums.

As far as debating whether or not to drop out, I always figured you should have something to drop out for _prior_ to dropping out. Don't just drop out and then look to start something. Drop out because your "something" is taking more time than school.
Polite?

You're giving him more credit than he's due. He is not polite. Passive-aggressive arrogance is not the same thing as "polite".
Good morning hackers, seeking criticism
http://kleevr.blogspot.com/2008/04/screaming-tangent.html

Please rip it all to hell if you've got 5 minutes to burn. I'm young, overly ambitious, and (I hope) prepared for a taste of real criticism from those whom I hope with time to consider me a peer.
Perhaps this list of billionaire dropouts may have some relevance to the topic at hand:

http://www.pennylicious.com/2006/10/09/billionaire-dropouts/

Also listen to Steve Jobs talk about dropping out in his commencement speech:

http://www.google.com/search?q=steve+jobs+commencement

Dropping out is one of the worst things you can do if you want a job, and one of the best things you can do if you want to make sure you won't end up in one. Essentially you throw yourself in the deep end with nothing to "fall back on".
(clickable) http://kleevr.blogspot.com/2008/04/screaming-tangent.html
Apple Pie Recipe
Two crust apple pie recipe.
I think the Waste Management company is brilliant, and deserves respect. If you spend a hundred bucks for something that doesn't work, you would ask for a refund. I wonder why companies didn't do this before. Capitalism is dying because companies are no longer run by owners, but by "managers".
Why do you care so much? It's not like DHH is going to be banned for saying things you don't love.
Web 4.0 Is For Wankers: Stop The Madness!
I for one, wouldn't have clicked if I didn't see the authors name on the title.
No dude, I wish I could've seen your post pre-edit. There isn't a language barrier. I'm just wickedly sleep deprived. I was just trying something.
Yay, I'm glad to see Presdo's officially launched and getting the press it deserves! It's dead simple - I came across it when a friend used it to coordinate an after-work dinner and instantly grokked it.
http://openphotovr.org - 3D photo albums.

I didn't invent this pitch myself - it's how other people tend to describe my project. Strangely, all three words are (strictly speaking) false. There's no 3D, only image interpolation. The project is not limited to photographs. And it has no reified concept of "album". A truthful pitch would sound like "images connected by fluid transitions", pretty boring.
I didn't get a chance to play with supercollider when I was studying music. Wish I did, but the class was after I left school. I knew a couple guys who were into that stuff, but not me personally. I'm getting good enough at other concepts in electronic music that the idea of designing my own soft synths is a long term goal.

Every now and again I find myself thinking something like "being able to program a sine or square wave into my filter frequency and make table for how that interacts with MIDi data would be neat." I find myself knowing what I want to do from the perspective of altering the sound, but not what to do in the environment I use to make the sound change right. That'll be something I learn later. It would be really cool to be able to design custom soft synths from the ground up.

I want an orchestra of them all undulating in different waves at maximal volume at some 21rt century avant garde concert, and to figure out the acoustics of the room, and to program it to make the room shake. Get some super low bass tone at that frequency and shake the damn building like Tesla, and then make horrible sounds that sound like the speakers getting tortured, then drenched in reverb that modulates in and out of being compatible with the natural reverb of the hall, while the horrible screeching noises build and the room's shaking grows louder and louder. Then I want the speakers to catch fire and the sprinkler system to dowse the audience before the low bass causes the ceiling to fall.

Damn I gotta figure out some music software design.
I also went this path, and never ended up getting a degree worth noting. I'd recommend against it.

Sure, I've made a good living since then and have never had a hard time getting a job when I wanted one (I've mostly consulted and ran my own businesses), but there are a lot of opportunities closed off to me. I've gotten recruitment letters from Google, among others, based on my Open Source work and a book I wrote a few years back, but I suspect strongly (and with ample knowledge of the Google hiring process and requirements) I wouldn't actually be able to get a job at Google today (maybe three or four years ago, but the "elite university" bar has become far more important these days).

So, if I ever really wanted to try the everyday normal software developer lifestyle...ya know, go to work for about 40 hours each week, eat free food, enjoy subsidized massages, call the ergonomics team when my bottom feels funny in my chair, make enough money to buy big TVs and a Prius but not enough to buy property in the valley, etc. I almost certainly would not have that option. I could contract for any number of small and large businesses, and I have, but being an "employee" with all of the good and bad that comes with that, at any place where I would consider working, is unlikely.

Having those options is nice...at 18 or 19, it's hard to know exactly what one will want out of life. I'm content with the path I've taken, but I'm sure I wouldn't regret having spent my college years at a good school instead of screwing around at community college, either.
I occasionally scan job postings, and when I come to the letters,

SAP

...I just instantly close the page. I don't even know that much about them, but everything I've heard suggests they are IBM minus the illustrious history.
Ohh...

I said I didn't think you were wrong, because I didn't think you managed to use language well enough to rise to the standard of communicating something that would be able to be judged right or wrong. Then I suggested that maybe you were really really really high. Or sleep deprived. Or using a highly technical language I did not know.

Then I thought there was no way someone who actually spoke english as a first language would of wrote that and decided I was an ass making inappropriate fun of someone who didn't speak english as a first language and was making an honest effort to communicate. I don't want to discourage non native english speakers going out on a limb and trying to talk, so I deleted my post.

Knowing you speak english as a first language, I feel better about saying you didn't make any goddamn sense to me with that word jazz.

It's cool I guess that you're thinking so unconventionally that your post would fit in an ee cummings journal.
You'd think that, but about three years ago the Dutch minister of education (Maria van der Hoeven) suggested ID should be taught in schools as well.

I was flabbergasted.
I presume you're referring to age/gender discrimination.

At least people generally recognize that sexism is wrong. There is a lot less raised consciousness when it comes to ageism.

You start college early, and everyone says you're too young. And then later, ironically, you find when you hit 30 that the thinking has recently shifted when it comes to start-ups, so then you're too old.
Whats kinda crazy about approaching sound design, at least from a programmers point of view - is all the concepts you have to learn about sound and then learning how other programmers decided to implement these concepts and then sort of procuring all the universal approaches in a specific area. This was my major hold up along with there being really really bad documentation for supercollider. On top of that, most of the code is insane when you try to take it apart and learn from it. I actually thought of digging into the C++ and learning it that way, but that code is pretty bad too. What other stuff are you into right now?
That is hilarious. In fairness though, I can't think of a good way to explain Twitter to a CNN-style audience, and I use it.
Five important security apps for Linux, Mac OS X and Windows
Oh, I wasn't disagreeing with you at all. I liked everything you said and thought I was just adding to it. In fact, I originally said something like "All this is by way of agreeing with everything you said" and then took it out because it seemed redundant!
Awesome, thanks for reposting.

That movie (it's a B-movie) was based on a short story by Phillip K Dick. And, I used some BNSF grammar.
AOL Sites Break Traffic Records in March
Jared Diamond talks about a few tribes in Papua New Guinea and how vengeance is nothing out of the ordinary to them; it's more of a responsibility.

He also briefly mentions the role of government in all this and how the tribes seemed to have approved of a government when it was put in place since in reality, they don't want to do any of the killing.

At the very end he relates this to the human desire for vengeance and how the tribes may be on to something.

I recommend it - he writes well and it's a good read - definitely feels shorter than the 8 pages.
Where has all the dark fiber gone?
What's missing from this rant is evidence. The author comes accross one incompetent programmer from Argentina and then goes off to state that Asians and Argentin[i?]ans have the wrong mindset to be a developer?

It may be true that $20 an hour programmers from Argentina can afford to be sloppy since they are, after all, dirt cheap, but I would've liked to see some more examples.
I don't know... I'm not a marketing guy, but I think you could still find a way to play up the high quality of your security without looking a bit... "fringe". The "truly paranoid" bit isn't so bad if you combine it with a different second phrase. However, something else might be even better at evoking a "yeah, I need that" response in more people. To me there's also a bit of contrast: in my mind, the "truly paranoid" aren't going to trust anyone else to do their backups anyway.
The tribes of Papua New Guinea are stuck in a local maximum of violent rivalry that precludes the cooperation necessary to form a new state. This is normal: new states were almost always imposed by existing states. Modern justice systems are better overall, but tribal warfare offers people a way to satisfy the primal desire for vengeance, which in our societies can go forever unsatisfied.
Three Emerging Digital Careers to Watch
2010: D-day for the Internet as it hits "full capacity"?
It's not programming, but all the stuff I'm working on right now is a kind of additive minimalism. I would say my influences on this project were Fennesz, Squarepusher, and Phillip Glass.

I play relatively simple melodic patterns, repetitively but with variations in rhythm based on additive techniques. Then, I polyrhythmically layer these patterns, add lots of knob twiddlings and effects. I like to find patterns where you can play with peoples harmonic perception by slightly altering the pattern additively. For example if you have 10 eighth notes in 5/4 that imply C major, you can add a 3/8 group that repeats the d-b-d part, and with no other change, the perception of harmony changes from an embellished C chord to an embellished G chord, and the groove changes, but the pattern stays basically the same. You can structure long pieces in various forms that way, maintaining a link to old sounds like fugue or early renaissance music (whatever the source material for the polyrhythmic lines is), and consciously manipulate form. Sometimes, I edit away most of it and just leave the few moments when the way the patterns interacts creates really interesting music. Then I drench the simple lines in electronic manipulations.

It's kinda a homebrew musical style I've been dreaming up in my spare time. I don't actually know how to play any of the instruments I am using (except keys and laptop) and I'm new to digital performer to record so I get to learn that all as I go too.
When $100,000 Makes You Go Broke: The Invisible Hand Forces Americans Into Debt
"Capitalism is dying"? Where did this come from?
I wonder why companies didn't do this before.

I can shed light on one aspect of it. In large companies, if a failure is too big, it gets rebranded as a success. There are many strategies for doing this. (In one I saw, the failed project was spun off as a separate group to leverage all the "value" that had been created.) Absurd as this may be, it works, at least internally (and most failures are never made public).

This used to puzzle me, but I think there's a simple reason for it. It's ok to discuss minor failures because these can be blamed on middle managers. Huge fiascos, on the other hand, can't be. A huge fiasco was a huge project to begin with, and huge projects are sponsored by executives. These leaders are, like Madame X from the Flintstones, "much too important to be lost". Ipso facto, they can't fail.

What this means is that if the failure took place at the hands of a vendor, they will probably get away with it. Trying hold the vendor accountable makes you look bad. You can't brand the project a "success" and at the same time claim they didn't deliver.

So Waste Management is unusual among large companies, which (I believe) are frequently taken to the cleaners on these enormous software projects. What's hard to explain is why they decided to take such public action. Perhaps they have a leader of unusual courage or integrity.
Is this YC's algo?
Submission hits New/New
submission is graduated based upon a set level
Level can be found by the following ...

Points count, but they count more when given by a user with higher Karma

Comments count, and might be weighted by karma of those who left them (to help rank the overall submission)

Time between comments, probably counts, although this is a little neglected with some stories on the main page have no comments.

(update)
Sites that have made the front page before (or frequency) might have a "trusted" status and the level needed to obtain the front page lowered.

Pg, anywhere close?
Perhaps- I dropped out of college to start my first venture. It folded unexpectedly early, and afterwards I found myself without another idea I found compelling enough to put 100% into. Rather than going back to school I decided to try my luck at seeing if I could get a day job, and while my lack of a degree definitely closed a couple doors, the failed startup experience was enough to get a few offers and a job at one of the big-name large companies. It turns out that even big companies will often see startup experience as more valuable, even if as in my case the startup folded alarmingly quickly.
Next step: WYSIWYG interface to the same functionality.
Again, DHH says "what you can't say" on HN ;)

http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html
Not sure why you havent done useful things already, there's a ton of things you can do as a student, and IMO, dropping out should not be one of them. Why didnt you be a part of an open source project? Why didnt you write useful little applications for yourself? Why not try and get an internship? The problem with dropping out is, if things go bad with your buisness, you dont have the cushion of getting a regular job, all you are left with is the scars of a failed buisness, all your friends in good jobs, no college degree and not sure of income and the lack of social life you have as a result of all this.
We should have algorithm hunts weekly on hacker news, that'd be sweet. Ahh, I sense a voice telling me I should get back into IRC...
The Future of the Internet — And How to Stop It
Woz is awesome, but do you have a non-real-player link?
Would you do me a favor?
From the article: "I also must confess to a strong bias against the fashion for reusable code. ... you’ll never convince me that reusable code isn’t mostly a menace."

???