skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A mini redis in 411 lines of Python
I didn't see it as a lament. It read more like a warning not to try to tinker with the economy by investing in business in the hope of creating jobs. One could easily read this article as being pro-Free market. It's just saying "Stop trying to game the free market, that doesn't work."
Reading some of the other comments, I think I need to note that there is an important difference between this article, mine, and pg's.

When I wrote my article in Feb 09 Eliezer commented on HN with something like "hey! I already did that!"

Since my piece (http://www.whattofix.com/blog/archives/2009/02/technology_is...) received such a high rating on HN, I did a bit of research to determine who came up with what idea when. Mainly because I am vain, yes, but I was also interested in how several people come up with the same thing around the same time. I hadn't read anything along the lines of what I wrote. How many more articles were out there?

Not many, as it turned out, but that's not the point. The point was I learned there are some distinctions in how people see the problem.

Eliezeer makes the point that electronic goods "super-stimulate" -- an importatnt piece of the puzzle. I believe when people argue "but no, this isn't really the end of the world" they attack this piece first.

What Eliezer missed at the time in his piece is that this is an evolutionary process. It's not just that digital goods can stimulate just like drugs. The killer part is that there is a survival of the fittest process going on where the digital drugs keep adapting to optimize their hold on our brains. This was the point I made.

I think it's an important distinction and deserves re-mentioning. There is a good and scary reason why pong from the 1970s looks so dumb yet we spent 30 minutes playing it, while games from 2010 look so awesome and we spend 30-40 hours a week playing them. Our games today will be pong to somebody in 2025.

PG makes the point that this is accelerating. Not only are various electronic goods competing for time on our brains, not only are these goods evolving to self-optimize, the evolution process itself is accelerating.

So the timeline goes 2007: it's a drug, 2009: it's an endlessly self-optimizing drug, 2010: it's adapting at an accelerated rate.

Ouch.

I'm not trying to yell the sky is falling, and I remain an optimist for the species as a whole. I just don't think waving your arms around (with a game controller in your hand, no doubt) while you say something like "nothing to see here folks, please move along" is going to cut it anymore. We have some work to do.
this was on the homepage two days ago. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1546135
I've found Terry Tao's blog (in particular the stuff linked at http://terrytao.wordpress.com/career-advice/ ) fascinating and helpful.
Speaking purely for myself, I only signed up a month or two ago.

I came from Reddit (surprise, surprise) and despite not being an entrepreneur or a hacker/developer/programmer I absolutely love the site as I am an aspiring entrepreneur/developer witha vested interest in new technology.

I made a point of reading the rules relating to submissions and comments and I actively abide by them simply because I respect the fact that HN wants to maintain intellectual & relevant discussions and not become a haven for trolls and lolcat fans.

I recently went back to reddit to see if I was missing anything and it was honestly like going from having an informed discussion with a mature professional, well established in his field to having a conversation with my thirteen year old cousin who's two key interests in life are practical jokes and boobies.

Don't get me wrong, I have a lot of love for Reddit but at this point it is more of a guilty pleasure than anything else.

HN got quite a bit of exposure on Reddit recently due to some of the older users complaining about the Eternal September that they are experiencing and it was there that I discovered this wonderful part of the web.

I may be new and I may not be as well informed as a lot of people on this site but be nice to me please as one day I plan to take over the world.
I thought exactly of that, too!

Just didn't get around to working it into my comment. :)

I remember reading that, wondering who is today's equivalent of the Victorians. (The Victorians, of course, were the historical equivalent of the Victorians.)
"presuming everyone wants to live on a single "instance" of AwesomeUniverse2000"

Looks like you have worked out their business model then - unless you pay you have to share it with others, go for the upgrade and you get to be selective.
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Updated. Please set your Paypal username, that will allow to show the Paypal links.
But even an MP I didn't vote for, I can still write to, or show up at their constituents meeting or whatever. They're still going to pay attention, a) they don't know how I voted anyway and b) they want my vote next time!
Also keep in mind that out of the 2000 comments, I imagine a large number of gold members didn't respond. I know I didn't.

The users of reddit are wide and varied. There is a significant number of redditors who have demonstrated their willingness to pay reddit, me among them, and don't regret it.
...but are more expensive, or tied to a specific country.
No Arxiv paper should be talked about on any non-academic website.
>In many of the discussions about people giving up "TV," it turned out that many just turned off their cable and consumed video through Hulu, Netflix and other online sources.

So you mean they've been superseded by more addictive technologies? :)
> First of all, business is about providing value to customers, not jobs to neighborhoods. ... We don't want a thousand people making a iron boiler for a steam engine anymore.

The value-to-customers part is the truth, but not the whole truth.

If a government's economic policies don't result in jobs being provided to neighborhoods, then three things are inexorably going to happen:

1. A non-trivial number of (usually) young men with too much time on their hands will do things that we really wish they wouldn't but that we have a very hard time suppressing, especially when they can use communications technology to their benefit: Street gangs. Drug cartels. Jihadist groups.

2. People will blame their governments because they perceive that Bad Things -- unemployment, drugs, crime, terror -- aren't being fixed;

3. Disruption will result, because people won't passively accept Bad Things indefinitely:

(a) In a democratic society, the government will be thrown out and policies will be changed -- possibly not for the better -- and with switching costs in any case;

(b) Even in a non-democratic society, there will eventually be unrest as people get mad as hell and refuse to take it any more (cf. the Honda strike in China, but then there's North Korea as an apparent counterexample);

I'm a life-long moderate Republican, but it's only been in recent years that I've come to appreciate that, unlike some conservatives, liberals 'get' these fundamental truths of human nature.

I wish these truths were otherwise, but to paraphrase Lazarus Long, you don't argue with the weather, you deal with it. (That's one reason I'm encouraged by the favorable reports I've been reading about the educational policies that the Obama Administration is pushing.)

ISTM that some liberals have unrealistic views of how we should deal with these truths -- some of them likely would be happy having a thousand people making a boiler -- but that's another debate.
"Are you unwilling to trade freedom for happiness"

For the claim of happiness promised by authoritarian control - I would certainly not be happy to make such a choice.
Funny you should say that, the only people I know that spend 100's of hours gaming are women.
Were people offering actual jobs? Seems more likely they only wanted to interview "her", which is a pretty reasonable thing to do. Doesn't give "her" much power.
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disappointed that HN doesn't have some way to reset or recover forgotten passwords. (that I can find.)

forgetting a passwords happen, especially with remember password features in browsers as standard.

i'll just have to use this account until my next memory problem....when I will create wtf2.
Yes, and it is my impression that the downmodding has become very aggressive recently. It's not for rude posts only anymore. Just looking at the above poster: he adds a polite request for explanations to improve his posting, and yet his reply gets brought down.
Javascript might not even be the best language for the browser. The browser programming model was set in stone years before significant applications were built in the browser. If we had a choice about the browser programming model, then it seems likely that better programming models would have emerged based on the experience.
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Having recently gone through the Developer category and being fast tracked, I'd like to comment on this. Basically, it really does speed things up. It takes a couple months being fast tracked. This was amazingly helpful. Removing the expediency only means that to get a visa, you need to get approval from an additional agency. Basically, it makes sure that the company offering you the job can't realistically fill your position with a local person. The idea is to ask "Why can't you fill this position with a Canadian?" This makes sense.

We went through that this last time, mostly through miscommunication, and the process was still very painless. It helps if you are specialized in a certain industry. You also need some form of degree in the field you are being hired for. Part of the reason I encourage people to continue their education and to make it clear self-taught doesn't open as many doors as education.

In the end, obtaining a Canadian visa is a straight forward process. The only assistance available covers everything you need, and walks you through. My wife did it for me, and we didn't even need a lawyer.
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Cyber “Forensics” Startup Gets New Talking Point (and VC Funding)
Exactly. We have airplanes for cross country travel. The train technology that exists in other countries could make even Boston to Toronto doable.
>Also from their latest blog post, it looks like they're just spending the 'reddit gold' money on more hardware!

And hiring a designer! Because, you know, that'll fix their load issues.
I don't think Americans should make yet another sacrifice to appease big business who would rather use rail capacity for freight instead of passenger traffic. For once the American citizens should be the priority here.
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When I came out of high-school some years ago I had the same problem. I really wanted to learn the math needed to do 3d-programming so I could to do fancy demo-scene stuff (see www.scene.org), but the high-school level math just didn't cut it and I didn't manage to learn it by my self. I started at a university to study CS, and took some calculus courses there. It was a fairly advanced calculus course which focused on proofs, and I worked really hard on it through cooperation with others and the help of great teachers. Although this experience lead me to end up doing a PhD in math, it was this first more advanced mathematical experience which made me able to really _get_ it. It took a lot of hard work, and after helping some younger people with high-school level stuff, I now see that the math-books at this level often suck. The "proofs" are more heuristic justifications that unfortunately often simply hide the real point of what is going on. My advice would be to take a proof-oriented math-course at university level. Even if the curriculum is not the math you would like to learn (for example a calculus course might be ideal even though you would like to do discrete math stuff for CS), I do not think that mathematical maturity needed to go on by your self is possible to get in any other way (except if you are a genius).
make the contact options right at the top. The site looks too cluttered to me. I don't like the way the photos are used at the top. Try another jscript image gallery.
Or as mentioned in the comments

(frequencies "abcaaabcccaabrrcb")

with some optional sorting if that's required.
Excellent font. I was slightly disoriented after hitting the [Blog] link, and expected to still be at your site, but ended up at postereous - no biggy, just threw me for sec. I started adjusting the size of my browser to see why the background image wasn't aligned properly.
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Humans now power Ask.com's engine
Does this means our Big Bang generation will be mocked like the Earth-is-flat believers?
People need to slow their fucking lives down. cross country travel by rail is much more enjoyable than flying, even if it takes 2-3 days. Give me wifi and a sleeper, and leave flying for those who haven't figured this out yet.
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Very interesting. Reminds me of Paul Steinhardt's Ekpyrotic model that proposes our universe is the result of two colliding three-dimensional worlds: http://wwwphy.princeton.edu/~steinh/npr/

For anyone who actually read the paper, if there is no big bang and no beginning, what does this model imply about the universe 14B years ago?
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In my experience the best managers function as a support position tasked with identifying and removing the barriers that stand in the way of the work getting done.

The worst managers want to exercise control over what gets done.
In the real world you seldomly have an exactly nailed-down specification of anything. If you're lucky enough to do something as basic as parsing URIs or JSON, you have, but normally not.

Writing a recursive descending parser isn't hard, as you said, but it's again something that needs testing, you need put some effort into it to get good error messages from it - and why would you repeat such a task? Also you often need to write a lexer -- another burden of which Perl 6 grammars free you.

Regarding your thoughts about abstract languages: Perl 6 provides tools to make experimenting with them rather easy, which helps learning about them.

I've made the experience that a reasonably good programmer can write some 20 lines of Perl code, and it does what he wants. That doesn't imply that he can write a 20 lines grammar that does what he wants, without doing some debugging and corrections first.

Writing grammars is a skill that just has to be learned, line any other skill too. Providing tools that make it fun and rewarding to play with parsing stuff is the best we can do.
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Rather than socket:sleep(), you probably want to use socket.select to multiplex IO. (I'm assuming you're using LuaSocket, though that's not entirely clear.)

As with select(2) in general, this doesn't scale up past 100ish idle sockets - it has to do a full scan over all sockets to check which are ready for IO, and the latency eventually dominates. (Not a big deal for most uses, but problematic for web applications.) If that's not an issue, though, it's quite easy. Lua is very underrated, IMHO.

I'm working on a Lua library (octafish) for doing libev + coroutine and/or callback-based servers. It's been on the back burner for a bit, though - a couple other projects have been crowding it out. I'll put it on github once it's further along.
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Okay, I get that. It really didn't bring anything to the table. I will remember that. It wasn't meant to be antagonistic though. Just for the record.
Is it in Americans' interests that more freight should go by road, at a higher cost, so some Americans can travel by train? It's not a simplistic 'big business bad, passenger trains good' argument.
The OP forgot to mention the F1 Visa (student visa). I'm starting my company on F1.
Yeah, I flagged the link too. Seems completely off-topic to me.
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Nothing wrong, just that it is a difference to donate somebody else's organs.
I totally agree.

chromatic is currently writing a book called "Modern Perl", which teaches Perl the way we know it today, idiomatic, safe, structured Perl.

We just need more of such efforts.
> but be nice to me please as one day I plan to take over the world.

That's a fairly common goal around here, so please be nice in return ;)

As for the changes, yes, they're there. I spent a lot of time half a year ago to try to get my finger behind whether or not HN is changing and the answer is a definite 'yes', but it's definitely not all bad. New people bring new perspectives on subjects, the 'tone' of HN is guarded quite zealously and even if there are (a few) more trolls on the whole it is surprising how well the atmosphere holds up.

At the beginning of the year I predicted that HN would split, this has now happened in the form of the 'Ask' section being given its own spot. Probably in the future there will be more such splits if and when they make sense.

Personally I wouldn't mind seeing all the 'tech rumours' separate from the subjects related to coding.

Even the most rudimentary newspapers know to split their content up in to a sports section and the rest so I can skip that bit without having to bother reading all the headlines.

Have you found http://news.ycombinator.com/classic already ?
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Culture in any group is a malleable beast. The strictures required to keep it from changing are far too oppressive to support the type of innovative and creative thinking that the site wants to inspire.
NY and Massachusetts Seed Venture Capital Deal Sizes Drop Nearly 60%
photographing sky burial is disrespect to the dead and illegal

http://news.bbc.co.uk/chinese/simp/hi/newsid_4600000/newsid_...
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I'm in very much the same boat, though I am a hacker/developer/programmer.

I'm still using reddit more than HN, but I can see myself slowly gravitating towards HN. One thing that really does make reddit more bearable though is to unsubscribe from most subreddits. Once you drop askreddit, iama, pics, wtf, reddit.com, funny, etc, etc, and you're left with a nice core of coding, programming, (language-of-choice-subreddit), machinelearning, compsci and webdesign, you actually start seeing the more intelligent side.
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Sometimes, even jQuery can’t save you from yourself
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ever since moving here from reddit (nearly 2 years ago), I loved (and still love) this place. Lately, this goes so far as to me usually reading the comments before even looking at a linked story.

The quality of the comments here is absolutely fantastic - like the Usenet back in its glory days.

I really, really hope this keeps up for a very long time.
When to let go?
Hi everyone I'm just kind of curious 'bout when is the right time to let go a project. I'm running this site for more than 16 months already and didn't really attract a lot of users. When do you think is the right time to close down shop? Do I need to shut down the site or I am just overreacting here?
> I think the world would be better off if people were compulsive about maintaining good finances, hygiene, business schedule etc. Better yet, compulsively making sure they did the best they could for their family.

I imagine they would, but that sounds like a hard problem to me. I suspect it's AI-complete; the only way to do it would be for post-singularity AI to control the destiny of the human species.

I've never seen the attraction of grind-y games like WoW or Farmville. (Caveat: I've never played farmville; I have played WoW and found it pointless). Perhaps games could be created that taught people useful skills, e.g. something like Guitar Hero that teaches you to play an instrument.
The Potential of the Net is far more than today's Colliseum
Shops that got burned on unmaintanable spaghetti Perl 5 10 years ago aren't even going to look at Perl 6.
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From 15 hours ago, http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1549363
As soon as you have evidence that its not the right direction. Confirm your instincts with friends/advisors. Maybe there's obvious pieces your missing in the never ending value puzzle.

Contact me at messel at gmail dot com if you would like specific feedback. I can make time later this week.
As long as it benefits you in one way or the other, I'd keep it going.

Once it becomes a burden, without any benefit (be that statisfaction from having a user base, or monetary gains or whatever else), then it's time to let go.
> In fact, at a molecular level in the brain almost all addictive substances and activities have a physical component.

Surely you could remove the "almost" from this sentence and it still be right. ALL deliberate behaviours are caused by brain activity, and therefore have physical components because the brain is a physical object.
First off, is everyone running your Linux distro? ("sudo pkg_add erlang" works for me, though.)

Besides, are you seriously implying that the hard part of getting started with Erlang is installing it? A lot of developers aren't willing to sink time into learning a language that actually has new ideas, you know? Hell, it's not even OO. :)
time efficiency: Throughput of updating is more than 100 millions query-per-second

elapsed time to store one million records is 0.9 seconds for hash database, and 1.1 seconds for B+ tree database

How to not do benchmarks: Cite performance numbers without ever specifying what hardware you're running on.
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Boy you guys are going to kick me in the ass for this one, but here goes:

Hacker News is chit-chat. You know, like a few geeks standing around the window and watching the construction workers instead of working.

At first (3+ years ago) I thought this was awesome! I live in a rural area and HN was like being part of a super-secret club on the net.

Later on -- much, much later -- I realized that people who stand around the window watching the construction workers are not actually doing anything useful. Although they feel like they are having a blast.

But the difference is -- and this is why it took me so long to figure it out -- if you are standing around at a window jaw-boning it's pretty freaking obvious to you and everyone around you that you're goofing off. Whereas if you're on the computer? Talking about Erlang innards? Making sure that no humor slips in? Talking about the benefits and drawbacks of some new startup model? It all gives the illusion that something terribly important is going on.

My new rule is: click all interesting-looking articles at wake-up. Click a few comment threads. Commenting is failure, as it always just sucks you into more commenting. Then? Try to close the site and stay away from it and do something useful with my life.

If I'm on the computer, my time on HN is the leading reverse indicator of how productive my work is that day.

Later gators
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