skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Did I say it did? I don't even know what metric you would even use to suggest a Moore's Law application in this case.
He's wrong about it all. I refuse to listen to that propaganda crap.
"You're using ad hominem instead of logic. And I expect you still haven't said the real reason you are so strongly in favor of drugs, because none of the reasons you have given have made any sense."

Ok, let me rephrase it: "if 'someone' wants to be a dopehead scientist, then go for it." The rest of the quote still applies and is not ad hominem.

No sense to you, perhaps. Something about not using illegal drugs and not using legal drugs illegally makes sense to me. "Off the label" prescriptions are not always legal, btw.

Does the reasoning that it's ok to use Ritalin to give smart people a mental edge imply it's ok for athletes to use performance-enhancing drugs? Why not, if steroids and growth hormones are legal for other uses? Others in this thread have implied that steroids are idiotic.

Because you are all smart people, you realize that once a few people start doping up on Ritalin and getting better results on grant applications, journal papers, and other tasks, that everyone will pretty much have to join the dope show and take the same drugs. Taking these drugs will become a barrier to entry in order to do science. Eventually, those who want a new mental edge will have to find a new drug, then everyone will take that. That will only go a few rounds before people start destroying their brains and their bodies. Scientists will become junkies and that will do no good for anyone in the long term.

Ultimately, if someone wants to take Ritalin or whatever to give them a mental edge, nothing I say here will convince them otherwise. Personally, I don't understand why anyone would need mental enhancement pharma given the assumption that they are already brilliant to begin with. Maybe that's a bad assumption for me to make (oh damn, that was ad hominem :)
Meetango.com,the twitter for activity/events streaming.
Want to stream your activities/events and find people to join you?
Meetango.com is the twitter for local Activities and Events where all answer to the same question: WHAT DO YOU WANT TO DO? Meetango.com makes real life meetings easier, connecting people with common interests to do things together, always focusing on fun, friendship and even dating.<p>Post an event or an activity in Meetango and:
- find or invite others to join you
- find inspiration about activities and places to go
- meet people with similar interests in a real environment
- know what your friends and other people in your area want to do
- be notified about what your friends want to do<p>If you are a developer there is an API that you can use to develop apps on meetango.<p>We are a brazilian company focusing in WEB 2.0.
The plan pricing works perfectly for me. I'm currently a micro and likely to move to small in the near future. It's nice that it'll only be a 5 dollar increase a month versus a 15 dollar increase to Medium.
It's a much less noble cause, but I've made a similar argument in regards to professional athletes using steroids.

Sure steroids can seriously screw up your body, but some of these guys are making millions of dollars a year for their physical performance. There's nothing immoral about letting these guys trade long term health for shorter term physical performance and loads of money.
My professors griped exactly the same way about us. And when I became a professor, I griped the same way. In any country you choose, the professors are griping about how ignorant the students are. It's not just "stupid Americans."

But it gets better: professors of X cannot believe how silly professors of Y are on subject X (how would this prof do on an applied technology quiz? A biology quiz? More to the point how would he have done when he was 20?). etc. etc.

But man, when I read that some of the students think 1975 is a plausible year for the A-bomb, I feel old...!
Whatever his motivations are, the numbers don't lie. The Gates Foundation has the largest endowment in the world, by far, and they've got a pretty aggressive plan to spend it all. Here are some projects they've funded, a number of which seem pretty damn unsexy: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_and_Melinda_Gates_Foundati...

And if you want to talk about maximizing social approval rather than benefit, check out the red iPod program. =P
Google's previous April Fool's caper -- a sewer-based ISP -- wasn't too different from some real-life proposals:

http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2007/Apr/01/goog...
Some corporations made hefty investments in big iron. That doesn't make them economically viable today. I still believe that performance, energy conservation, space utilization, HVAC optimization, etc., etc. are reasons for updating to the latest hardware and the operating systems that they run. From a strictly hardware standpoint, the old stuff gets hairy to manage and maintain.

You can keep driving that 1979 AMC Matador, and you can keep rebuilding the engine, and patching the rust holes. But after you've spent thousands on the upkeep, you could have bought a new car that gets better gas mileage and won't strand you on the freeway half-way to work on a rainy morning. Any corporation that didn't look to the future, is the corporation where you'll find the dinosaurs. And that doesn't say much for corporations like State Farm.
Pius is absolutely right. You might look to funeral homes, religious organizations, and Hospice for some ideas on how to handle the topics of terminal illness and death in a tasteful manner. But the core idea isn't a bad one.
Everything is shit
This is on the right track, but once again we have the chicken-and-egg problem. You're using your knowledge of history and geography to sort through news feeds, trying to tease out which stories are meaningful. But students have little reason to practice that skill unless they believe that there is meaning to be teased out in the first place. And how are they to know that? It's all I can do to find a reason to read a news feed -- in fact, I don't do it. I get pointed to the most interesting news by reading the blogs of half a dozen news-junkie bloggers, who watch the papers and the TV and link to the articles that are actually significant... often placing them in a larger context at the same time. Otherwise, I ignore the news. I'm already depressed and fearful enough.

Those who haven't yet started reading news blogs, though, might find it hard to fall over them by accident. What they will find by accident is CNN and the like, and why should we be surprised when students think that CNN is a waste of time? It is a waste of time -- pseudo-scandals, celebrity gossip, mindless stenography, yammering talking heads, scare stories with blood, flames, and explosions...

Give the students a reason to believe that news is valuable and important -- perhaps by raising their political consciousness, as the author of the original article did -- and they'll learn the skills they need to find valuable and important news.
Case Western University is where the brightest kids in the nation are attending, now that is a piece of news I haven't heard about.
Actually, you have my apologies. I didn't click on the text on the first page so I thought that was it. You didn't deserve that comment. After going back and clicking through, you made some valid points. The swears take away from the presentation, however.
Nomads at last: Economist special report on Wireless communication
Here is some evidence against using these drugs for recreational/non-ADHD use:

http://www.cesar.umd.edu/cesar/drugs/ritalin.asp

http://www.biopsychiatry.com/methylphenidate/ritalin.html

http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/4870.php

http://amphetamines.com/methylphenidate/brain.html
The difference with athletes is that they're playing already circumscribed games. Since everyone has to obey artificial rules, there's no harm in making the rules prevent damage to the players. In fact it's hard to think of a sport that doesn't already have rules of this type.

Winning in games is by definition relative. But winning at ideas is absolute. The faster you find a cure for cancer the better.

I'm not advocating using drugs to help you think better, btw, but there's more of a case there than in sports.
Actually, it should be:

for_each(&spam[0], &spam[spam_length-1], eggs);

I need to take the address of the arrays, not their contents, and if I'm going to use the same definition of spam_length as the author. This kind of mistake is why one should avoid native arrays in C++ - the abstractions provided by the STL are more expressive and no more expensive.

The STL algorithms have no concept of length of a sequence, they only deal with iterators. This is the definition of for_each that Stroustrup provides in The C++ Programming Language:

template<class In, class Op> Op for_each(In first, In last, Op f)
{
while (first != last) f(*first++);
return f;
}

Notice that first and last can be pointers or STL style iterators, and that f can be a function object or an actual function. The template parameter In resolves to int* at compile time.
Thanks for the constructive feedback; I think that all of those suggestions would help.

The slideshow at least partially addresses some of these issues, but if that contains the more effective message, then Ogilvy's point about finding an ad that works and repeating it may well apply.
So, what's the next step?  Let's network.
Some people reading this are kicking themselves for not having applied to for YC. Some people reading this got rejected yesterday. Some people reading will be rejected in a couple weeks. And all of us have a lot of rejection on the horizon or under our belts.

Get used to it. Let's hack the system.

Two of the main things that YC provides are connections and other smart people to bounce your ideas off of. Let's build that.

I've set up a few things to further that today:

- A Hacker News LinkedIn group. You can connect by going to my profile and connecting from there. I've not found a reliable way to send a link other than that. Add a line to your "Groups and Associations" with your news.YC nick. I'll add everyone in with over 20 karma -- just enough to establish active community members. (If you get rejected, it's because either because the info isn't there, or your profile isn't public. Just add it and re-request.)

http://www.linkedin.com/pub/7/8a8/6a3

- A mailing list for entrepreneurs. The contents will remain private (though I'd still use some caution when posting your secret sauce). This isn't for general news. You can bounce business ideas off of others, ask for help in establishing connections and look for partners, co-founders, etc. there. If you can, subscribe with an address from your startup. If not, I'll send you a follow-up mail to figure out what you're hacking on. This one is for people that are already working on a startup, not just passively interested. We'll be incorporating soon, and we'll consider swapping minor stakes (1% or so) with another startup or three where we see there could be a mutually reinforcing relationship and where we value your input. If others consider the same that might be a cool way to pull the community together a bit.

http://lists.directededge.com/listinfo.cgi/startups-directededge.com

- I'm in the process of setting up a small web-app where we can store extended Hacker-News profile information with stuff we know about (i.e. "connections to angel funding", "friends that are driver developers", "ajax") and stuff we're looking for other people that know about, and an index of those. This should allow for some info swapping and ideally will suck less than LinkedIn for such things. Paul, if you're reading and would consider that as a patch to the news.YC source, I'd be fine dusting off my lisp chops and doing it that way, otherwise it can live on our servers. Once it's up I'll post source code for anyone that wants to extend it and work with us. I'll mail the list and possibly repost here when it's ready.

Now, let's get back to kicking ass.
Very usefull service and very simple to use, i believe that it has a lot of potential to become THE toll for activities and events planning. Go there and take a look.
"It's comforting in a way to know that I'm not going to have to remember random bits of information if it doesn't interest me."

The very specific example in the article was the fact that not one single student knew that their government was abducting random people around the world and disappearing them into holes in which anything could be done to them, and there was no legal process for anyone to challenge the practice in any way.

Does that qualify as a random bit of information?
Tempting as it is to suggest that those who advocate spending tax dollars to send humans to Mars "try" breathing vacuum for a while to see if they can "overcome" that significant obstacle to Martian colonization... I think it's actually more polite to just say "no, I'm afraid you're wrong".

No. I'm afraid you're wrong.
I use it (in production), and the only real advantage to me are more current packages.
TV Ads Don't Work Anymore, and Seth Godin Explains What Does in the Classic, "Sliced Bread."
Seems like Debian/Ubuntu is the popular choice around here. Same with me. OS X on my dev box, Ubuntu on our backup server and Debian on our live server. I've used Fedora/Red Hat for a while as well, but just don't like/trust the package management like I do with apt.
I'd like to suggest that we network a bit to see what can be pulled together. I just submitted a story with some of what I'd like to see happen:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=160398
Slavery was illegal too: so by your logic, to free a slave was to abuse him.
In my opinion you should choose what know best, assuming what you know is at least a semi-popular production server OS, especially if you have some decent experience already with said OS.

I recently looked into (Open)Solaris for DTrace and ZFS, but unless I want to put in a lot of time understanding the differences between Solaris and what I'm familiar with (recent GNU/Linux), I don't want to be in an "oh god what do I do something is wrong?!" state. In the end, I don't see enough value in DTrace/ZFS to relearn everything, because in the end it's just infrastructure.
Facebook Is Not Really That Special
I couldn't find the group rms posted at all. There are already a few members that have joined the new one that I created. I created a post here with some possibilities for networking:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=160398
That is the understatement of the millennium. The Polynesians actually did colonize the remote islands of the Pacific with nothing but canoes. No problem.

The difference is that they found fresh water and air on, e.g., Easter Island. To say nothing of the edible plants and the fish. And it took them at least several hundred years to cut down all the trees. By contrast, I estimate that the Martian forests will take approximately 0 years to be totally harvested -- which is just as well, because the Martian lumberjacks will be scared to take out an axe lest they accidentally slice open their pressurized suits.
Steve Jobs, to name just one.
I read National Geographic this month, too. Which is why I chose the Atlantic, because island-hopping is not possible.
62% of bands on MySpace are inactive
I recently did some research only to find that 62% of bands on MySpace are inactive. I posted the php and ruby scripts and results here:

http://www.tonyamoyal.com/blog/

Enjoy!
That's a good point actually. I'm just becoming familiar with YCombinator, and not questioning the selection process. I think this community and the selection process is working pretty well.

Hoping communicating through YNotCombinator can show that I am a "good person" and help me attract a good team. Since my stuff is pretty far along, I'm at the stage where the idea, and proof of concept are fairly mature, and I need the team and attention.
As a counterpoint, I was told that Yahoo, when they went to pick a fantasy sports site to acquire, decided that since they were Yahoo whichever one they chose would instantly have the most users, so they didn't care about user base. In fact, they chose the one that had the most compatible tech so that they could integrate quickly, and the fact that it had few users at the time just meant they got to purchase it for far less. CBS shelled out a bunch later for commissioner.com (the market leader before Yahoo bought their way in, and which Yahoo had passed on) and now is a distant third.

That clearly wouldn't apply to something like YouTube, but I wouldn't be surprised if even Google's logic is sometimes similar when acquiring small companies. Look for the product that's easiest to integrate and use their marketing muscle to push it to number one.
They're the best thing since sliced lists.

That said, I've started to consciously cut back on my use of list comprehensions. They are powerful, but there's a temptation to cram too much into one line - which makes debugging harder, and reduces readability. Breaking things out into a for loop often makes things clearer again.
Hmm. According to cltl (I didn't have time to look this up earlier), 'dynamic scope' is a misnomer/helpful abbreviation. It refers to two things: indefinite (as opposed to lexical) scope, and dynamic (as opposed to indefinite) extent.

Scope refers to where a binding can be accessed. Indefinitely scoped variables can be seen from anywhere in the program. My understanding of that is that in effect, there's only one dynamic scope. It may or may not override the current lexical scope, and there may be a mechanism to shadow and unshadow variables as they come in and out of extent. But it shouldn't make a difference where in the source code a binding is made. So I would expect your first example in that post to give 3, if define creates indefinite scope.

Extent refers to when it can be referenced. Dynamic extent means that once the binding has been unmade, the variable is no longer available.

> (define bar nil)
> (let ()
> (define foo 1)
> (set! bar (lambda (n) (+ foo n))))
> (bar 2) ; => 3
> foo ; error: unbound variable 'foo'

That doesn't seem to hold up either. The binding is lost, but the object remains.

(Incidentally, if you (set! bar) before you (define foo), you get an error: bad define placement. I'm not sure what, if anything, that signifies, but it seemed interesting.)

ref: http://www.supelec.fr/docs/cltl/clm/node43.html

"in my example the two foo's could represent completely different memory locations and it would still work."

My understanding of closing is that once you create a lambda, it holds a reference to the lexical scope it was created in. You can modify that lexical scope and the lambda will still 'see' the changes, even if you were adding a new binding rather than just modifying an old one. So I don't see a conflict with define being lexical here.
Ok, suppressing my first impulse to shout "bullshit", so just asking: how is Java making threads expensive? Because of the startup time of the virtual machine? That is hardly a Java thing, it is a problem that is shared with scripting languages and other languages that are running on a virtual machine. Within Java threads are dead easy, though. Not as easy as in Erlang, but to be honest, it is very rare that Multithreading becomes necessary in a web application anyway.

Second, how do processes help writing web applications? I don't think he understood what frameworks are made for. Not saying that some Java frameworks are not bloated. Most frameworks I know also have only one hook, the method that has been mapped by the routing. What alternative to the "hook approach" does he suggest? What is the essence of the article, except "different is better", without saying how "different" would look like?

Back to the "expensive threads" issue: maybe it is an issue if you want to run CGI scripts from Apache. If you run scripts from a server written in Java, it is not an issue, because the JVM is already running.
I guess I don't really understand the point. What ever happened to learning for its own sake?
Video-The truth according to wikipedia [45 min documentary]
"There's a perception that being a computer science major leads to a job as a programmer and you sit in a cubicle where you type 12 hours a day and have no interactions with other people"

Sounds pretty accurate to me...
In my wanderings I see CentOS more than anything else. A lot of people here mention Debian which I haven't run across at all and of course Ubuntu is pretty frequent as well.
It was a good post, but the phrase "smelling their own dog shit" was a pretty awkward change of tone and contradicts "Facebook is pretty good at what it does". It kind of came out of nowhere at the end.
For some reason, I am reminded of this article:
Social Software: Stuff that gets you laid
http://many.corante.com/archives/2005/02/16/social_software_...
I was lucky enough to have a history professor in high school who taught in such a way that opened our eyes to more than one way of seeing any historic event. He listed sources for us to read from around the world. There was also a lot of optional reading, this source is more difficult than this other source. If you're not interested, stick with Miller, if you want more depth, read Blum, etc. I took from that class a new interest in history as well as current events. Of course, this was in the 1980s before the media became so readily available via the net. It's almost at a saturation point. You can get information so easily, why even bother getting it in the first place? I can always do it later, and so on. This might be a common attitude among todays students. I have a 12 year old nephew who is heavily shielded from the outside world by his parents. His father won't let him read Harry Potter because someone dies in the book. It's sickening. When I was 12 I was reading Stephen King and loving every minute of it. Shielding your kids from the world isn't necessary at age 12.
Did you buy into the google IPO?
I ask because its not clear how special you thought Google was. It's easy to remember stuff this way and not count all the failures you also had a good feeling about.
"How else do you explain that 30% of americans can't remember the year of the 9/11 attacks?"

I dunno, but I'd say at least 15% of Americans are smartasses who deliberately give wrong answers when asked stupid questions by pollsters.
Actually, entering my first job at a large software company, I was pleasantly surprised by how many people maintained lives outside their jobs. Fixing up houses, teaching Sunday school, racing bikes, volunteering. I believe a hobby is not really a hobby if its what you do for a living. And when Halloween
rolls around, I'm reminded how many people have real responsibility (e.g. Children)
Certainly, I only bring up the sports example in attempt to strengthen the case for mental enhancement. Interestingly, your argument comes to bear on drug use in school since competition there is also relative.
gentoo on ~1800 virtual machines.
Mainframes still do a lot of heavy lifting. Like processing the world's credit card transactions in real-time.

VisaNet is four strategically-located mainframe supercenters for financial transaction processing. 3000 transactions/second. 50 million LOC. Uptime and five-second-transaction time crucial.

"Authorizing..."
Gentoo on Xen host.
This is what my phone looks like:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:ATTtelephone-large.jpg

Is it clunky? Better question: Why in the name of high-holy Jesus Christ would I care what my phone looks like?