skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I went to a home improvement store to get some roller blinds cut. I needed these to be cut to exact measurements, because I have trouble sleeping. I bring the blinds to where the machine is and press the button. I note that the blade on this thing is just held on by a screw clamp to a piece of metal marked out like a ruler, so I could get any length I requested. Well, this girl shows up and tries to tell me that the machine doesn't do fractions. WTF? Is our math education so bad that we have people in the workforce who don't want to deal with 5/16ths?
Hours aren't the most important measure. You can do things face to face that you can't do remotely.
Not all Ask YC posts are bad: Ex. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=150077
nice. unfortunately my workspace is too "open" even for that.
Your ideas are intriguing to me and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.

you still haven't answered the question and now you're sarcastically insulting me. that's called trolling.
The main argument against using 'bloatware C++/Java' for teaching is that the language obscures the relevant idea/lesson at hand and so makes the learning process unnecessary harder.

But the problem is that you have to define what kind of learning experience you wanted to achieve in the first place. If you use assembler as a teaching 'language' (or some similarly lowlevel language) you would show all the nitty-gritty details of what's going on, but you would probably be attacking too many points at a given time. If on the other hand you'd use a more abstract language than 'C/C++/Java', then you may loose some details along the way, but you will be able to focus much more on the algorithmical/computational part of what is being taught.

So in the end it's all about what you want to learn/teach and only after that's been decided you can choose the appropriate language to best transport the lessons with.
In economics they call type [1] positive and type [2] normative - the implication being that economics only deals with positive questions and tells us nothing about normative questions (how should the world be). When I studied a bit of sociology they took an approach borrowed from philosophy in categorising methods (and effectively split up type [1]): they were interested in how the theory (substitute argument here) addressed the questions of [a] what is the nature of the problem (ie ontology or how the world is), and [b] what can we know about it (ie epistemology). How you answer questions of type [b] determines whether type [1] statements can "be tested by experiment" - ie not everything that is in the world can "in principle be tested by experiment". For example, often whilst we can say that A is generally followed by B, and so infer that A at least partially causes B (whilst causation does not imply correlation we usually infer it does if we have some plausible mechanism in mind for why it should), but that in itself can not reveal precisely to us exactly why A causes B - ie how the mechanism works exactly.
Most writers tend not to explicitly reveal their views on [b] and so we are left to infer them.
As to identifying type [2] statements, the verbs "want", "should", "prefer" are dead give-aways but the problem lies when they are dropped from the sentence - eg cabalamat's example becomes "Everyone likes cats". Using [b], we can ask whether it is possible to know this, which might help identify it as a type [2].
Linux Declared Hacker Proof
appealing "to the man", perhaps?
OK, this is the second time I posted a comment to a previous comment I made to Friendfeed about a month ago. I think this time it's more justified to repost because the picture in the link above does what I was blubbering about some justice:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=123975

I still will maintain that the application-as-node approach to building a social network is the right way to go because of the inherent connectedness of the web and the fact that there are good reasons to want to connect highly specialized web apps together.

The reason for stronger networks to form this way is because the applications provide a nice medium for two people to connect, as opposed to simply connecting because you know somebody...(as in "I'm connected to my sister on Facebook, but we have no similar interests, as opposed to the cutie who has an interest in Karsh Kale concerts -- WE should be connected!")
You haven't asked a question since I answered your last specious one [1], but if you do, you can expect a response in the same tone.

[1] Specious point: because we cannot pinpoint the parties harmed by our unauthorized use of other people's content, we should assume, until proven otherwise, that any such use is harmless. So, because you can't reason through who is harmed by GPL copyvio (hint: the developer and the community), by your logic, we should stop enforcing the GPL.
Thanks for the reply

Sound like the reason you state is basically Joel Spolsky's Law of leaky abstractions. http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/LeakyAbstractions.htm...

I started programming in PHP, and can relate to the experiences you've had with java. It's great for actually getting stuff done right out of the box, but I suspect a lot of stuff is being hidden from me. Since you seem to have gone through this process, in your experience, does this give problems later on in a production setting?
Perhaps it could also work as a help to peer review in academia, or even used to rate the standard of debate in journals?
> it is, in fact, the major failure of Lisp.

I won't even mention macros, but I'm curious as to why you think s-expressions are a failure? It's one of the things I like BEST about Lisp.
The Worlds Of Blogging and Journalism Collide (In My Brain)
Lastfm's user profiles are public and show what they have listened to in the recent past - so maybe you could make a site where you add your lastfm username, and scrape the info from lastfm and use that.

There might be legal issues with this approach though.
Keep in mind, revenue sharing/generation might not be as important as you think. Think of Revver vs. Youtube. Reading this may help:

http://www.bubblegeneration.com/2006/10/research-note-peer-v...
I looked and discovered you were using Jetty, does that mean you're using SISC or JScheme?
Of course. That's where the "good enough manager" comes in. There's a time to be together and a time to be alone. Good management and scheduling can make this work beautifully.
I like s-expressions too, but --- and I'm asserting this without a shred of evidence, appealing to the better angels of your common sense --- most developers, Peter Norvig notably included, believe other languages benefit from having more notation. For one thing, to a point, increasing the level of notational "richness" of a language improves comprehensibility of code.
the question is, quote:

In the movie downloading case, who is being hurt when they wouldn't have bought it anyway?

You haven't answered that.

Note also that I didn't say any of the stuff you are calling a specious point.
Who's Your City?
Ask YC: Startupschool Afterparty?
Hey, so I know we have wikis going for meetups and such. Why don't we all try to agree and collaboratively come up with a spot in Palo Alto close to Stanford. Would be good to keep the discussions going on afterwards in a fun environment and all hangout. I'll be glad to coordinate and help make arrangements/volunteer time to make this happen.

AIM is jlbxk8 if you want to chat.

@pg- did you guys have anything planned already? don't want to overlap.

-jlb
My answer remains as it was before: the producers of content, who sell to a dwindling number of honest buyers as a result of a growing number of dishonest freeloaders who believe content should be priced at its marginal cost. That's an externality of downloading and using content you would not otherwise pay for.

But I think this argument is a red herring. Fewer people today buy DVDs, now that they can be easily downloaded. Ten years from now --- barring the success of BD+ --- it will be trivial to download DVDs, and fewer people still will buy them. I don't think reasonable people dispute this fact.

The drop in content revenue comes directly out of the hide of the content producers. The issue isn't "the people who wouldn't buy the content anyways". The people who gorge themselves on content they wouldn't otherwise buy don't buy any content. It's ironic that they excuse themselves by taking yet more illicit content.
Pre-VC funds for Indian Startups
You keep bringing up things I haven't said, and not answering the question directly.

The fact is, if I download a movie that I would not have bought or rented if downloading was not available, then the producers do not have a dwindling number of buyers. They have the exact same number of buyers as if I didn't download it. I say this means no one was hurt. You still seem to disagree, but still have not pointed to an actual way anyone would be hurt.
If you're looking at building your own crawler in Python from scratch, here's a benchmark of SGML parsers:

http://72.14.205.104/search?q=cache:LYoRD1GTP2UJ:www.oluyede...

We've been playing with sgmlop (http://effbot.org/zone/sgmlop-index.htm) for parsing and urllib2 (http://docs.python.org/lib/module-urllib2.html) for fetching.
How to get backlinks with high google pagerank.
Software Doesn't Rot, But What If It Could?
http://paulgraham.com/submarine.html

At least a reasonably interesting discussion ensued on HN. But other than that, I don't think those books are as big an issue in dating as the article tries to make them to be. Hm, except perhaps if you happen to be a "bookslut"? Impressive how they even manage to tailor the article towards the intended audience of their client (I presume).
The third worst, ironically, is the one complaining about the problem

Why is that ironic? No solutions are presented. No value is generated. An individual starting a company or hacking on a problem does not grow as a result of having read the story. It is self-referential, self-aggrandizing, and as you point out, among the worst entries in the derby.

It sounds as if vote-weighting has a good deal of merit, based solely on the three pieces of evidence presented.
Acid3 Worthless? Certainly not, sir.
PG owes you thanks for taking the time to rant a bit on the way out

I disagree, and here's why. PG is clearly benefiting from this bully pulpit as a means to recruit startup founders. Especially in the midst of Startup School (the periodic anti-September of YC) and a waning interest in risky ventures as the economy contracts, it serves as a barometer. Plus the type of crowd that sailed in from TechCrunch has been revealed (if that is the right word) as generally free of merit. I do not believe that judging news.YC as if it were yet another social news site (YASNS, if I have to use the phrase ever again) is appropriate, and hence the rant is perhaps less valuable than it would be on, say, reddit.

As BrandonM noted, it's still the best source for news that interests this particular subset of the public. However, as another poster noted, perhaps the interesting observations that previously lay unnoticed have been exhausted, and the hard work of turning over new stones, starting new companies, and learning new things must begin.

There's only so much you can learn in the library. Eventually you need to get in the laboratory or out in the field. I suspect that is as much to blame for the change in interest levels as anything else.

(JMHO)
As a side note, amichall, I notice that of your last 30 posts, two were about your startup, and 17 were Ask YC posts which, frankly, seemed pretty random. You might want to start trying for quality over quantity.

That's what voting is for. I can't read minds.
Good Ask YC posts are among my favorite on HN. Many news stories offer little meat for discussion--they're straightforward. My feed reader catches most interesting news, already, so for me, the discussion provides the greatest value.

To keep the baby not the bathwater, what about putting up the submission-level down arrow, but only for Ask YC submissions?
No, what I'm saying is that if you, yourself, focus on making one or two really good posts, instead of five or ten mediocre ones, not only will you be helping yourself, but you'll also be helping out the rest of us.
I don't understand your argument. You seem to be saying that nobody is "hurt" by your download, because the marginal cost to the copyright owner is zero. But that's true of all downloads, not just yours. By your logic, how are producers ever compensated?

The answer to your question is, everybody is hurt, because every illicit download robs content creators of the incentive to create, and content producers of the incentive to distribute.

It's clear that in your case, when you download a movie you have no intention of buying, the stolen incentive is not great. But it is not zero: your download clearly helps establish the climate that facilitates other downloads (for instance, by drawing ad revenue to torrent search engines, or simply by creating the social proof that enables otherwise honest people to rationalize downloading).

In the end, even insults to the market as small as yours can become overwhelming when multiplied by the tens of millions of actors.
I just haven't noticed it before, I thought maybe HN was trying some other algorithms and something odd was going on (I didn't think it was interesting or relevant to HN - a small step away from digg like "top 10 things you can do with ...").

But thanks for the down votes, will make the digg and reddit refugees feel more at home.
That doesn't sound pleasant, and no one would want to work that way for long. But no one does work that way in Lisp for long. Any decent editor takes care of all that. And it's not like that fact is obscure, either! The parenthesis objection is always the first thing to come up, and the editor rejoinder is always the second... it's the ceremonial opening of The Lisp Debate.

Why do the parentheses always come up? E.g. Crockford advocating Javascript: "You get lambdas without having to balance all those parens." But balancing all those parens is easier than balancing all those parens, curly braces, square brackets, commas, and semicolons that one is used to in other languages (again, assuming a decent editor). This is so obvious to me that I wonder whether the parenthesis business is a stand-in for other things that people really don't like about Lisp. It's harder to pin those other things down so people single out Lisp's most visibly distinctive feature - parentheses - instead. (This has the bonus of being instantly convincing to the ignorant.)

I'm not saying people should like Lisp, or that if they're intelligent enough and give it enough of a try, they will like it. I know at least two brilliant programmers who meet those criteria and don't like Lisp. (Interestingly, both favor Smalltalk.) I don't know of anyone who's quite gotten to the root of why.
You may have something here. Maybe part of the reason that some of the older users (myself included) are becoming less satisfied with Hacker News is that we're starting to get restless. We already know that we want to work on startups, we already have some great tips and resources, we already know the power of high-level languages, and now we are just biding our time, waiting for... what?

I know that describes me, to some extent. For me, I think the original Startup News was liberating. It was a fresh voice I'd never heard before saying that I don't have to graduate school and go get a job in industry; I can actually do what I want and make a lot of money doing it. After a year of hearing that and getting some helpful tips along the way, perhaps it's just time for me to go do.
A Journey to Baseball’s Alternate Universe
I think it would be great if it did. For most people (perhaps I am taking the developer viewpoint though).

In cases of embedded (like old phones, old TVs etc), well, I wouldn't not want it to actually rot (in that case the environment in which the software runs has not changed).
Ionising radiation, and non-ionising radiation - I assume the general public still does not know the difference?
Hmm.. good point. I didn't really consider brute force to be viable.
Is it actually necessary on some of the harder puzzles? Or can they be deduced solely using logic and without 'guessing'?
"I want the process of reading news to be like an old friend telling me gossip that he will think I'm interested in hearing."

Do you know such sites? I'd love to read like this too.
I thought you were leaving ?? ;) HN isn't that bad yet !
Suppose I don't tell anyone I've downloaded. Then it wouldn't create a climate. Let's assume for now, for clarity, that I do nothing to contribute to a climate. I never post to torrent forums, never help people get torrents, I never seed, I never upload, I never encourage anyone else to download, etc... I have not said anything to defend taking actions like those to create a climate that legitimizes downloading.

A download only "robs content creators of the incentive to create" if it prevents a purchase (or chance of a purchase). I am not defending all downloading, but I am saying there is a possible way of downloading that doesn't do this. If the condition I specified holds (would not have been bought either way), then the content creator isn't hurt. He gets just the same benefits an incentives as he would have in a world without that kind of downloading.

He may be hurt for a different reason, but not for lack of a purchase because, by premise, that purchase wasn't going to happen in any case.

What conclusions should be drawn from this is not obvious. Agreeing it is true is an important starting point before drawing conclusions.
Cool. That makes sense; I didn't account for the fact that auctomatic has 6 smart people to get things done. :)
waiting for... what?

Hard to say... but lord knows I hope that you'll have a better idea as a result of perusing the better offerings of the site. I have found it useful to compare my performance against the theoretical optima that I see documented here, rather than just the work of other developers, in order to push myself. Hell, that's why I went back to grad school in the first place (and went into methodology, eventually succumbing to math envy, as it happens).

perhaps it's just time for me to go do.

If you look on the front cover of your copy of SICP, the little yin/yang has 'eval' and 'apply' halves. Another endlessly useful shorthand metaphor, IMHO... It's always tempting to go too far in one direction or the other, but fortune seems to favor those who balance the halves.
I take this as people starting to accept programmer == professional, with rates priced accordingly.
Speaking of disgreeing, I found a lot to disagree with in this article. But since I see many of my objections have already been stated by others adding comments, I will restrict myself to a few comments:

1) I have been surprised at what a _variety_ of definitions I have found the for terms PG uses to describe fallacies. People do _not_ agree on the definition for, say, "ad hominem". See, for example, the differing definitions on the following sites, which purport to give definitions for the major fallacies:

a) http://theautonomist.com/aaphp/permanent/fallacies.php#adhom

Ad hominem fallacy - (against the man). Ad hominem is the attempt to impugn an argument by attacking the arguer's character, motives, personality, intentions, or qualifications.
b) http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/mathew/logic.html#hom..., which gives not only a very different definition, but a much wordier one.
c) http://www.galilean-library.org/manuscript.php?postid=43794

No two give the same definition!

2) That " u r a fag" is NOT equivalent to " The author is a self-important dilettante." has already been mentioned by others, and it hardly requires more substantiation.

3) I am by no means convinced that the proposed hierarchy of disagreement even sets an "upper bound". There is too much overlap, the boundaries are vague (as has already been pointed out by others), and it is much, _much_ too easy to make your argument _look_ like DH6, when it is really nothing like it.

Surely this is a common experience. I have often seen some public speaker make a rousing speech to encourage people to do something, yet the _entire_ speech had only either exhortation or fallacious arguments, yet his intended audience swallowed it whole, taking it for a DH6 level refutation.

4) Finally, it is too easy to sink to a low level of non-argument, lower than even DH1, without fitting into any of these categories. If you don't know how to do this, go into advertising; you will learn quickly;)
Of course they would say that. They're MetaFilter users.

Sometimes it's hard to draw the line between a relatively useless ad hominem attack and a meaningful critique of a group. How do you distinguish between what you just said here and DH1?
Might seem like offtopic, but it's not:
Have you seen the movie "Thank you for smoking"?
Lambda functions and closures added to C++.
Creative Labs: Where No Good Deed Goes Unpunished
I am glad that people are thinking of Aquainas in this connection. In fact, I _still_ think his book on logical fallacies is one of the best. For example, he is the _only_ one to get the defintion of "amphigology" right.

Unfortunately, when you look at the link where you can find it online at http://www.corpusthomisticum.org/dp3.html, you will see why so few people still read this book:(
Insert rant about nothing being Hacker proof, etc. etc.

Headline should read: "Particular Linux install/config remained unhacked for X amount of time under Y conditions."
You could make that DH0.
Integrity. You're doing it wrong.
I concede that you can define an arbitrary set of circumstances where, in a vacuum, you download a file without perturbing the universe in any measurable way. This isn't a starting point for drawing conclusions until you answer the question of "how those circumstances could ever occur".

Furthermore, it's not persuasive. You're avoiding the obvious fact that these innocuous downloads --- those that not only involve people who would not pay for content, but who are also so hygienic in their downloading practices that they do not contribute to the climate --- are a tiny minority of all downloads.

Finally, if we've really arrived at the crux of your argument --- that you can personally define one form of illicit download that imposes no costs on society --- then you've already lost the "debate" (such as it is). We're talking about Torrentspy, a huge contributor to the climate you're meticulously and artificially trying to avoid helping.
A somewhat different perspective here --> http://www.life2point0.com/2007/01/so_you_want_to_.html
Thanks - very much. It is an honest question - if this is a "community", wouldn't you think community members would give me the benefit of the doubt? I have never seen C++ used in my entire career. I'm MIT 6-3A '76 - maybe I'm sheltered in only hanging out with excellent programmers.

(aside: the gutless wonders who downvoted my original question did not respond to me directly at yc@culver.net - I suppose those folks are having their teenage fun trying to destroy this community? I have a proposal: whenever any of the "anointed " members of this community downmod anybody, they should be <b>required</b> to provide to the original poster a) their EMAIL ADDRESS so that the poster could respond, and b) their REASON for their action. In addition, I believe that NOBODY should be allowed more downmodding than upmodding - that is, you have to have "upmod points" before you're allowed to downmod - even if you are a Chosen One in the Secret Handshake Society of the YC Cult.)