skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
the interface of the comment page should be more friendlier/organised. the reply comments should be folded/hidden so that if we like the comment and want to see what other people reply to this awesome/crappy comment i can do that by clicking a button and all the reply will be shown, everything should not be visible since it is very time consuming if there are more comments on a topic.
Glad to see someone trying to help Canadian funding efforts.

Your about page is pretty weak on actual information about who's organizing this (i.e. you) and your background. I'd love to see those details.

No harsh criticism intended, but at the moment it kind of comes off as: I've rented a conference room, but I still need people to pitch AND people to invest in those pitches. Some indication that you've got some connection to one of those 2 groups would be encouraging.

I've bookmarked the site though, I'll keep my eye on it.
The common case should be short and implicit, and the uncommon case should be explicit. Here, the common case is wanting to create a new variable inside a function, rather than stomp on a global. Instead, JavaScript forces a programmer to explicitly state something that he wants 95%+ of the time, with a nasty failure case when he forgets.
you definitely need to unlearn your MBA.

That's a bit of a falsehood. It's arguable that any degree gives you any real practical skills. I hear a lot of techies like Joel Spolsky on podcasts saying that CS degrees don't necessarily yield great programmers. But should people with CS degrees unlearn everything from school? No.

Your degree is like a tool in your back pocket. An MBA can provide you with particular set of knowledge (depending on your area of study), some of which are useful to teach you how to -run- a business. I don't see why there is any need to unlearn that stuff. Revenue recognition rules, economics, financial modeling, business law, corporate taxation, how to write a business plan... all of those have some use in the real world, regardless of the size or type of business you run.

That they are overpriced today for what you get is a totally different story.
which IRC server do you guys use ?

I have long wanted to set up an private IRC server for our workplace, but got lost in the zillions of complicated IRC server setups.

Do you use it over VPN .... or have you set it up to use some kind of authentication ? It would be great if you could help.
What do people on HN think of the idea behind this startup? Do you think it has the potential to be huge and/or a good acquisition target? Would you apply/Are you applying for this job? Why or why not?

It certainly sounds like they have everything (business case /tech etc) well laid out. If I were a potential employee I'd have liked some information on what kind of equity a new employee could expect - RethinkDB set the standard here (http://www.rethinkdb.com/jobs/), but other than that very very minor quibble i think this is as good a recruiting pitch as I have seen.

(Due Disclosure: (a) Amit Rathore is a good friend of mine. (b) I have nothing to do with Runa or this ad. I am just curious as to how people here perceive the opportunity).
or creates a new global variable otherwise

That is the worst possible result. Requiring an explicit local or global keyword is reasonable, defaulting to local is reasonable, defaulting to global is insane.
Oh snap! Nice try with the University line, except for the fact that I am a designer and have been designing for 6 years now. I've seen all kinds of clients, so I know what I'm talking about.

I'm not going to argue further though, because apparently you're incapable of arguing your point without condescending remarks.
I am white, grew up middle classed, able-bodied, raised christian, in the US, had two parents, and I am a man. What am I supposed to do?

Should I feel guilty? Should I make all efforts to use affirmative action to always hire women/minorities over men? Should I no longer meet with like-minded people and talk about our experiences in computing? Should I quit my job and go into teaching social studies in public school instead?

The article makes a few interesting points, but I am not convinced of the correlation and they are grasping at air. Plenty of us weren't rich kids, and not all rich kids went into technology. Not everyone with a computer at home went into technology either! My younger sister has had a computer available for a longer percentage of her life than me, and isn't in technology either.
I much prefer this to posting a question on a forum/stackoverflow etc type site. Probably my own impatience, but I want an answer now.

IRC is actually growing a load. It's pretty widely used. The fun thing is, I don't think anyone really realizes it, and it's still considered 'old stuff' by many.

If you look at the numbers, twitter usage is about the same as one of the tiny IRC networks in terms of volume of messages. Of course it's apples vs frogs comparison, but still... More communication is done on IRC than twitter and all the other "hot" new things.

#startups is good on freenode (If you can stand freenode and their 'ways')

#linode on oftc is great

#googleajaxapis is cool on geekshed

#mibbit is great on irc.mibbit.net :)
Where I work we use IRC as the main way to communicate (we all telecommute) and I have a window open all day long. The secret? Tell your IRC client to make a noise whenever someone mentions your IRC nick and then ignore the IRC window until it makes the noise. Works like a charm and allows me to focus on the task at hand.
I spent a good deal of time this past week putting my first serious blog post together after reading Steve Yeggie's You Should Blog: http://sites.google.com/site/steveyegge2/you-should-write-bl...

Here it is: http://joshpearce.posterous.com/children-have-bad-business-s...
So we're showing off the power of HTML5 by locking it to iPhone only... Nice.
Dealing with Stage Fright
A Concise Guide to the 8 Best States for Incorporating
I always say hello when I join the channel and someone usually says hi back.

This is especially good when there's only a few people talking, as fewer people => more interesting conversations (usually).
It's stated on the "Destiny" page with a note that they will provide relocation assistance.

http://www.workatruna.com/destiny.html
The ability to send code snippets and URLs alone makes chatting this way worth it.
As someone who has done UI for iPhone and iPad apps, I have to mention that you can get pretty small before it becomes difficult to tap what you want. And rarely is the touch sensitive area represented solely by the bounding box of the icon you're trying to hit.

It's difficult to tell from that image how big they actually are. And there's no way to know that the actual release will look anything like that. However, a coworker of mine last summer was working with Win 7 touch, which was basically Windows 7 running on a touch sensitive monitor, and he seemed to think it was relatively easy to use.
Map of the Internet IP4 space (2006)
HN has really changed. This question is an example. This is not readdit.
This reminds me of a book I thought of writing, titled "The Limits of Certainty and the Quest for Authorization."
The Plight of Afghan Women: A Disturbing Picture
Groupon And The Problem With The Daily Deal Religion
That's true. It would be helpful to have dynamic reloading as an option with the JVM.
It's not a useful comparison. Companies aren't run like governments, where democracy is usually held as the ideal. The comment wasn't useful, but it was inflammatory. I don't think the commenter had bad intentions, but I agree with stanleydrew's judgment.
Try yoga. You may be surprised at the world that opens up.
See the paper by Hans Boehm from PLDI 2005, "Threads Cannot Be Implemented as a Library": http://www.hpl.hp.com/techreports/2004/HPL-2004-209.pdf

A bit further discussion: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=939364
Why not innovate instead? Or go after Apple where Apple is weak? AppleTV is a great target. Microsoft could own the home theater PC market a lot easier than they could catch iPad.
The problem I have with blogging is the opportunity cost. While blogging may help me as a coder. Does it help more than me actually writing code, or commenting my existing code, or reading an article, or a paper, or spending time reading other peoples code?

I suspect more than anything blogging helps you become a better blogger, and then there are some minor secondary effects. I'm not convinced that if I have zero readers that blogging is the best use of my time.
The article is only looking at a few of the shops. The good ones pay their developers based on performance with some tied directly in to their group's PnL (top firms like Getco, Goldman [on their HFT platform only], Jump, etc) pay their experienced guys over $500k, with some of those guys on over $1MM. The Sergey A. case, where a guy makes over $1MM guaranteed, is not that uncommon. Of course, right out of school they pay low 6-figures, but after 4-5 years of proven track record, if the firm doesn't want to pay $300k+ in compensation, their competitors will. Then its the developer's fault for not making sure they are in the market and getting compensated market rate.
Upstream Canuck Retail Visits are UP
Our company uses #disqus on freenode (private) for development and general chatter.

I'd like to change the channel for internal chat and use #disqus for public use though.
I work for a major online retailer, and their mobile shopping patent application appears to have lifted screens from our mobile shopping app. I've forwarded this story to our head of merchandising to see if we will submit our prior art on this...
The evidence against Sherrod was not mistaken so much as manipulated to project an anti-white bias that immediately got her fired.

The evidence "against Sherrod" was not about Sherrod at all. It was about demonstrating that her audience (the NAACP) is tolerant of racism, as long as it is the right kind of racism. From the original article:

In the first video, Sherrod describes how she racially discriminates against a white farmer[...] Eventually, her basic humanity informs that this white man is poor and needs help. But she decides that he should get help from “one of his own kind”...Sherrod’s racist tale is received by the NAACP audience with nodding approval and murmurs of recognition and agreement. Hardly the behavior of the group now holding itself up as the supreme judge of another groups’ racial tolerance.

Go read the article - Sherrod is nothing but a minor anecdote in what is primarily a criticism of liberals, the media and the NAACP and a defense of the Tea Party.

http://biggovernment.com/abreitbart/2010/07/19/video-proof-t...
Why today's Model of Distribution needs to go away
Be Young, Do Stupid - Aspiring Entrepreneurs Are Awesome
I was encouraged by a group of Singaporean entrepreneurs who came to visit the Valley, wanted to share a blog about it.

Do you remember when you'd read HN and dream about startup life and working on tech?

If you've gotten there - congrats. Give back to those who consider you the lucky ones, and don't forget that feeling!
Even if it's my grandma's startup selling it. Even if it's the girl scouts selling it.

Seriously, when your user knows and willingly enters what has a good chance of becoming an abusive relation (depending on your upgrades, being unable to migrate their data, forcing you to support ancient versions because they don't have the money to upgrade), I believe it's fine.

But I would prefer another model.
Blogging has been a really positive experience for me. I started with 0 readers 2.5 years and write about a pretty specific niche within investing. I didn't really promote myself. Basically, the first 6 months of blogging I focused on just creating original content. I hated that most blogs were just links to articles by the MSM. It paid off and other well known aggregators started linking to my stuff.

Since then it's been a really wild and rewarding ride. I've had a chance to consult on stories for reporters at the Wall Street Journal and posts featured in the Financial Times, NYTimes, WSJ. I've even been contacted by some of my heroes (really great investors who've been written about in books like The Big Short).

Now, in a couple of weeks I'm being flown out to interview with a firm that I never dreamed of applying to. All because they read some of my posts and enjoyed them.

The key to me is just to start writing. Write all the time and strive to continuously improve on it. I think that if you produce good content, people will come. Most of my most popular posts are things I've worked really hard on. Some examples include me reading 5 years worth of message board posts to track down everything that person X said or visiting the library to dig up a physical copy of a report from the 1980s to scan and then post. If you create value, readers are going to keep coming.
(a) Does Krugman actually know that, say, GS is making record profits principally from high-frequency trading, or is he just invoking them as a boogeyman because they're already ill-favored by his audience and because they are known to have invested in some high-frequency trading?

(b) What does it even mean to question whether "one thirtieth of a second faster" merits profits? As Krugman well knows, the markets aren't inherently frictionless; when you trade, you trade across a spread between bid and ask prices, a spread representing a premium to your trade that is taken out of the market by middlemen. HFT cuts the spread and hurts those middlemen, but also reduces friction in the market.

Krugman's argument seems to reduce to the notion that the only people who should profit in a trade are principal buyers and sellers; people with a long-term strategy or outlook on an instrument who are trading for a reason. But HFT or not, a huge swath of the market consists of entities that exist solely to connect buyers to sellers and to facilitate price discovery, and it's naive (or disingenuous) to suggest otherwise, or to pretend that markets would work effectively in their absence.
Smalltalk's blocks came from Lisp. It's called lambda in Lisp and is arguably the most important idea in Lisp.
I can see an obvious cost to X, after many years no-one has produced any evidence of value to X, therefore X should be abolished, if it can be done at reasonable cost.

Investors providing capital should not care what time of day their trade goes through because it will settle at the same time anyway. So this 'liquidity' is worthless.

The purpose of shares is to raise capital for productive investment, in return for income to long term investors who provide the capital.

Both non-computerized traders, and computerized HFC traders have an obvious cost, they extract return from the markets that would otherwise go to investors. This reduces the returns for investors.

What if we create an exchange where market participants submit orders which are crossed once a day? You establish a fair matching system and clearing price algorithm. In that environment there is less money going to minute traders and so there would be better returns for investors.
Don't fall victim to RMS's propaganda--as another poster pointed out, grep, ed, sed, awk, etc. all predate GNU's braindamaged implementations.
Hi nivertech,

I'm sharing one of the lessons we learned building our own programming language. I love how many language designers there are on HN!

We're working on an invite system, so everyone can benefit from Skynet! Skynet is better when you use it with others, so the invites will work for groups of friends.
I really think tablets aren't all they're cracked up to be. They're just touchscreen netbooks with a sub-par input method. (Touch keyboards cannot match hardware.)

I'm quite content with my Dell Mini running Ubuntu. It does everything I need it to.
Even more worrying is the clear indication that Apple is switching to E-Ink display technology for next-gen devices.
Sorry, but I dont get point of using an Obscure language like Clojure.

Also how are they different from directed edge a YC funded start up.

If they are doing predictive analysis/machine learning stuff, It makes sense to use Java, Python and C in that order since Java is what Hadoop is written in, while python and C allow very low dev time and latter provides extremely fast execution.

Using an unproven second class language like clojure shows that the team behind this project has a little experience in statistical modeling and related fields.

No one case which lanugage you use if its FP or ruby or even worse fortran. In statistical modeling it finally boils down to fast execution of some sort of huge matrix multiplication.

Really the only concern w.r.t language is readability/ compatibility with existing systems and low dev. time
I think there are too many people on the internet who are making money telling others how to make money on the internet.
Obvious question... blog link? :-)
Print article: http://www.printthis.clickability.com/pt/cpt?action=cpt&...

Readability: http://lab.arc90.com/experiments/readability/
The fact that Ballmer is talking Windows 7 makes the whole idea doomed to fail.

Why not Windows Mobile 7 (or whatever they're calling it these days)?

I have never been a fan of Windows Mobile-- each WM phone I had prior to the iPhone, I wanted to smash into the ground.

Windows Mobile 7, however, actually looks pretty nice, and it seems like a fresh UI (even though it is Zune-like). It's not my taste in design, but it seems much more well suited to a slate interface than Windows 7.
hahahahahahahahahahahahaha

(Sorry but I couldn't resist)
the first thing I thought of was:

coco the monkey
this is hilarius :) happy sys admins day! at least we sysadmins have some humor too.
Sure. Happy to work with you and conorgil if interested. See my profile for my email.
should also see txtGate http://github.com/niryariv/txtgate for a good model of turning a single device into an sms gateway and data collection device. Good luck, keep us updated.

I should mention I first saw txtGate here on HN because the developer is a member. More of a proof of concept than anything else, but a great idea.
The Machine Stops, by E.M. Forster (1909)
Fwiw I liked the title. As someone ramping up on vim, it definitely caught my attention, and was cleverly related to the rest of the article.
learn to listen and be patient for the complaint, for there is the opportunity.
I started blogging purely as a way of improving my coding skills, and I was pretty cynical about it. From blogging I've had good feedback about how I can improve, and the mere act of keeping a blog has kept me motivated enough to keep learning and keep posting. In my opinion, definitely worth the cost.
Ask HN: Replacement backend for RRD
I am currently re-engineering an stats tracking, analysis, and alerting application which is based upon rrdtool. There are currently roughly 20k data points being monitored every minute and pushed to rrdcached. I'm seeing a substantial performance impact as the quantity of data points grow, even though I am running it on a fairly big box, as the initial implementation of our app targeted roughly 1000 data points.

Ultimately I'd like to not stress about scaling the application to 100k data points. I've thought of using Redis, PostgreSQL and Hadoop/HBase, all which are tackling different domain problems. One of my concerns is if I remove the lossy trending of rrd, the size of the data footprint is substantial at 20k data points (20k * 1440 * data lifetime * per-row-overhead).

Do you have any suggestions on a data backend, preferably something lossy like rrd?
The anecdotes I liked most:

"In designing the cockpit, we worked with the project pilot who went through system by system with each of the engineers in order to whittle down the number of discrete controls in order to justify every one that the engineer thought was necessary. In the flight control system the number of caution and warning indicators was reduced. Some of the engineers wanted a first level warning of every first level system, but we simplified the number of cautions and warnings. The objective, among other things was that it was a Navy airplane and the Navy didn’t want a pinball machine in the cockpit. They didn’t want a pilot being distracted while he’s being shot off the catapult." - Vincent Devino

"The Tomcat’s air-to-air weapons mix was just unmatched. The Phoenix gives you up to 110-mile range. It launches and...[after a programmed number of feet] the missile turns on its own radar where told to look. It was a launch-and-leave situation. You can launch six and track more than 30 targets. One step down was the Sparrow, at 20-25 miles. Then you step down to infrared sidewinder. Now you’re talking feet-you’ve got that 25-mm gun, with about 600 rounds of ammo, so you have a full minute of firing time. It was sort of a fighter pilot’s dream on an intercept [mission]. That capability has not been matched, and won’t be. We don’t have it anymore." - Charlie Brown
If there are 10 people who want move to street x, having 14 sellers all selling identical apartments, at identical prices is no different than having 50 people selling identical apartments at identical prices or 200.

The difference with HFC is they don't provide any actual liquidity that matters. They don't hold the apartments across different move in dates.
First, I skimmed the article and it doesn't surprise me to hear feminist rhetoric like this.

My parents are only middle-class and got a Sharp MZ-700 in 1985, when I was 7. It had MS-BASIC (loaded from tape!) but had no decent games. Then, I got a C64 from an aunt and uncle in 1987, and it was great. A disk drive and freezer cartridge in 1988 and I learned 6502 programming.

So I was hacking since 8, but not especially privileged. Some of my friends had computers too, but they never learned to program. I did.

[EDIT] My parents weren't scientists, University educators or or computer scientists as in a lot of Silicon Valley cases.
Occam.

And a whole pile of others.

Did you use a parallel programming language?
How do you unplay a Game
Why do dating sites charge?
An overview of the business models on the internet today.
I'm Swimming with Information Sharks
Yes, and the informant carries full responsibility for putting his family members in danger.
What would compel you to sign up? Do you have any other ideas besides the option to save wods?
Now there's an interesting question: how can you teach some low-hanging fruit of rationality to someone with maybe half an hour to spare? The best attempt at this I've seen is Carl Sagan's article "The Fine Art of Boloney Detection", from his book The Demon-Haunted World. Sagan was an engaging writer, and does a good job making it easy to understand. I found a copy here:

http://dannybhoy1.tripod.com/baloney.htm

It would be even better if we had effective sound bites. I suppose we have "Correlation does not equal causation", which rhymes nicely, but too many people think it means that correlation isn't evidence for causation, which is wrong. I guess this is a problem with soundbites in general.
DHH is too overconfident. Even if it's true, how can you talk about MBA, if you never got one?