skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
OK, since I have retired to travel and write, I'll chime in here. The writing part is fun, and being able to do it on my own terms (i.e., not kowtow to a publisher/editor's need to sell books by the pound rather than by content) was worth it to me.

The travel is even more so. I'd taken vacations before, but always came back wishing I had 1 or 2 more weeks more. With a day job, it was hell asking for 5 weeks or so. Now, I just go. And I no longer come back wishing I had another 2 week. The indignity of having to ask for permission always annoyed me, but I didn't realize how annoying it was until I didn't have to ask.

Ultimately, I think you have to ask what it is that drives you. Some people like being bosses and being able to lord it over their underlings. Those people will never retire, and they shouldn't. Their self-worth is dependent entirely on other people being subservient to them and their goals. But many INTJ types (especially engineers) don't have self-worth tied to the opinions of other people. Such people historically do very well in retirement, and retirement is not a bad goal for them: http://retireearlyhomepage.com/mbti.html
Claims for Facebook making billions seem exagerated to me.

Google makes billions by knowing what you are looking for and offering more relevant ads.
Now consider how much more Facebook does know about you and what it can offer for advertisers.
As to apple. I've always wondered if the magic there will continue after Steve Jobs dies.

Apple did just fine while Jobs was on medical leave for six months or so.
The actual best way is to move to the country where it's spoken and get friends (ideally a sexual partner) who speak that language exclusively. You'll gain proficiently very quickly. Of course, it's going to be harder to do that with Arabic.

I've never had a lot of luck with Rosetta. It often came away with the wrong meaning of the words, etc. I prefer knowing a little of the basic grammer to see what's going on first. This makes it easier to learn other related languages.

I learned a good amount of French in a few days because the verb forms and latin roots are so similar. Rosetta is like asking a native speaker the rules of their grammer. Can you say why you speak the way you do - other than "that is/ is not right"? I can't very well.
Hacking is finding the exception to the rule. No more, no less.
If you think Europe looks like the US, you're doing travel wrong.
These are mostly valid points, but they're so far down the list in importance that for most men, they approach irrelevance. (The list would more accurately be titled "Downsides to transitioning from female to male", so maybe its contents are more relevant for that subset of males.)

The chief problem with masculinity is the things men are told make them "real" men. The message is that you're not a real man unless you have boatloads of money, are strong, have sex with lots of women, intimidate/dominate others, never show emotion or "softness", etc.

This messaging is ubiquitous — far more so than the things in this list — and extremely dangerous.
You've not looked at them have you (the VMs)? The JVM is entirely a class-focused JVM. The CLR is a general purpose VM. I can access arbitrary memory in the CLR, but cannot on the JVM. I write as someone who has attempted to build a byte-code assembly file that would allow direct manipulation of binary arrays for the purpose of efficiently loading OpenGL vertex buffers that mix floats and ints. Cant be done in Java or in Dalvik (at least in 2.1). Easily done in CLR. Also, the handling of security and exceptions is different. I've also read all the JSRs with respect to this problem, related problems, generics, stack-based variables etc, and I'm also aware of the optimizations for stack-based elimination in 1.6 and 1.7.

Also, I admit I only read the first patent, but I believe it doesn't apply to Android simply because the Dalvik VM does not apply its security at the object level but the process level, thereby nuking the patent. As for mono, I doubt they would worry since they would simply point out that "class" and "object" have been used for determining security access since at least Windows NT. Or mono can simply turn off object level security and rely on the OS to do it. The whole list is replete with holes and workarounds.
At this point...only Facebook can kill Facebook.

For reference, see Yahoo.

Google didn't kill Yahoo. Yahoo did.
"Reality Is Just A Crutch For People Who Can't Cope With Drugs."
If you're an Erlang advocate, I'm not going to convince you of the utility of eventing in any other language. I respect your decision but am uninterested in choosing a programming language based on a concurrency model.

That said, your (admittedly hypothetical) example is hideously broken. In EventMachine, and written properly:

def receive_data(buf)
@buf << buf
while have_complete_request?
begin
send_data(handle_next_request)
rescue => e
log(e)
end
end
end

Notice the single exception handler bracketing the entire request. (This code is wordier than I'd like because I hoisted the exception handler out of handle_next_request to illustrate it).

The mistake you made (and it's common to a lot of evented code) is in driving the entire system off raw events. Don't do that. Buffer, to create natural functional decomposition.

Evented code is rarely as simple as synchronous code, but there's no reason it has to be needlessly choppy.

That said, I think this design is overvalued. Yes, it's true, you (probably) can't always wrap an entire request's processing in a single exception handler in any evented Ruby library I know about. But I wouldn't wrap an entire request handler in a single exception handler in any case! If I was preparing to deal with a database exception, I'd wrap the code making the database call in an handler for the database exception. If I was preparing for a filesystem exception, &c &c &c.

Incidentally, I've been doing very, very, very large scale evented systems for going on about 10 years now (large scale: every connection traversing tier 1 ISP backbones), and, sorry, this stuff has never blown up on me. I may have been shielded from exception drama by working in C/C++, where exceptions are not the norm. I was a thread guy before that. Threads definitely did blow up on me, a lot.
I know. I also hope they are using process level security, not class level security, which will completely bypass patent #1. Google people aren't stupid.
That's a very interesting take. I hadn't considered Google being worried about getting commoditized out of the market. That's a very strong motivation. Another is that if speed is a do-or-die feature, then they want to be able to control all of the factors which will make Google faster or slower. They can compete on tech, and so of course they want to compete on that footing.

Whether you think of them as evil or not, corporations rarely act out of one motivation. There are usually many many desires that get advanced or thwarted in the course of a particular act.

A company may buy a startup out of a desire for the tech or team, to work out the bugs its M&A pipeline on a relatively unimportant acquisition, to encourage other startups to focus on the acquirer's platform, to deny a competitor use of the tech or team, and to give a department within the parent a unsubtle hint that they are not doing their jobs. All at once.
FYI this is the founder/CEO of Newsvine
I agree, which is why I oppose net neutrality.

The example I used may be contrived, however I think the essence is true that an ISP could meddle with Google's traffic and send search traffic to a competitor.
This article is a good wake-up call, but even if Rails itself is now (since 2.2) thread-safe, I need to be fairly sure that all my libraries are before I can enable threaded request dispatch in my Rails app. That's a lot of code inspection / thorough regression testing / inevitable bugs.

The Brightbox team tried to tackle the related problem for moving to Ruby 1.9 with a crowdsourced library review site: http://isitruby19.com/ Does anyone know of a similar site where people can report whether libraries are thread safe? (The code for Is It Ruby 1.9 is available on github - http://github.com/brightbox/isitruby19 - so it would be easy enough to set up a clone, but I can't commit to maintaining such a thing.)
That's a bizarre attitude. If you cookie cutter travel, you'll get cookie cutter memories. I travel my way, my style, at my pace, and at my speed. When I travel, I get invited into people's homes for tea, get introduced to their families, and get asked to stay. I get chefs coming out of retirement to cook me dinner, because I'm in a position where their hospitality really means something to me, and both they and I appreciate it.

There's no way I would give up travel. If you think travel sucks, you're doing it wrong.
In some ways the Dalvik VM is more different. Its register based for a start.
They are machine washable. I don't wear socks with mine (KSOs) and wash them once a week -- works fine for me. Other people have found that soaking in the sink with 2-3 Efferdent (denture cleaning) tablets also works very well to control odor.
Yep, agreed, another gem.
I think if the glue melts from a simple tumble dry I'm sure as hell not going to use a heat gun on them.
Android based Java is the topic of the lawsuit. I think it will push them more towards iOS
Kids in India typically grow up speaking at least 3 languages, and sometimes 4 or 5. My grandmother spoke 6 languages. Most common would be Hindi, and one or two regional languages, and possibly English. In the south it's more likely to be Tamil, Malayalam, Telugu or Kannada instead of Hindi, but there are others too. As you grow up you end up learning more languages at least at a comprehension level because you travel around for work.
that's how I got to know many Yahoo! engineers. I'd report back every time I found something that would crash the official client.
Nonsense. If they are few actor, they can always make more re less implicit arrangements.

The internet providers fucked up the internet already, you just don't realize it. Neither does a lot of people here, cheering about "the cloud". Instead we could live in a p2p wonderland, where each node would be responsible for it's own data. It would be much more efficient money and energy-wise, and it would totally brush the privacy concerns away. What makes it impossible ? Asymmetric bandwidth rates which are 10 times greater for download than for upload.

Moreover, as someone stated elsewhere, it is preferable to have no rules but internet providers that fear sanctions would they discriminate traffic, than to have rules that explicitly allow discrimination.
I don't think HN is humourless, it's just that it's only tolerated if (a) you have something insightful to say anyway and only use humour to spice it up and (b) your joke is subtle and clever.
There was a 1991 episode of "Married With Children" where Al Bundy creates "God's Shoes" which look exactly like these shoes. There is nothing novel or new about this idea.
"Larry doesn't care about openness or community -- he holds them in contempt. What he cares about is winning. And this was his way to prove it."

That's a better way of putting it than anything I came up with. To give credit where credit is due, his approach has produced for the firm. And his disdain for communities like Linux (e.g. Oracle's Linux distribution) and OpenSolaris (e.g. the leaked memo) has not cost the firm much on the public markets thus far.

But the same was once true of Microsoft, and now they have felt compelled to attempt a difficult, long term rehab of their public image. Which makes one wonder whether a similar effort from Oracle is not an If, but rather a When.
http://www.daniel-lemire.com/blog/archives/2010/04/01/extern...
In 2007 there was a big scandal on Absolute Poker where employees cheated internally and took millions off of players. In 2008, it was discovered that something similar was happening on UltimateBet. They refunded considerable amounts, I received a four figure refund but knew people getting as much as a quarter million back.

These two sites were semi-boycotted by the online poker community (twoplustwo.com is the HN of online poker) but this ultimately didn't work. The reason being that recreational/poor players didn't know about the scandal and continued to play there, which made the games so easy to beat that many players tossed their morals aside and made a killing.
Because when I hit the limit I want to finish my sentence and then edit down to 140 characters, not be forced to edit down straight away and forget how I was going to finish my point.
As much as I would like to believe that this case could bring sufficient attention to the absurdity that is software patents that it would compel a remedy, I think it unlikely.

Frankly, this is likely to be regarded as business-as-usual outside of technology circles, and as long as large technology providers are extracting substantial revenue from their intellectual property in this fashion we can't expect much change.

Economics are, generally, the only real change agent.
I bring them into the shower, or soak them in sports detergent for an hour or so (squish them a few times). Twice, if needed. Rinse, dry over air purifier / fan overnight, and they're practically new-smelling, even though I've got pretty funky feet.
I like twitter's solution of letting you type past 140 but giving you a visual indicator that you're over the limit (and a letter-count). Facebook gives you no feedback at all until you hit submit and get the "too long, jerk!" error message. Then you edit down a bit, try again, it's still 3 letters too long, etc.

I could see them not having a letter-count display shown by default (since most statuses are comfortably <420 chars), but it'd be nice if a "20 chars too long" thing appeared below the text box once you started typing too much.
Yes, that tweet actually uses five shorten t.co links which only return the text not the url as the user have made link with texts not url! Normally t.co shortened url get expanded automatically in the Twitter since they introduce the TweetButton. In this case, the text that shortened using t.co showing here! I guess there is no validation practices are not in place in terms of shortening using t.co.

Check my reply here http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1604037 Simple as that!
I would prefer a ribbon campaign across the web. Too many startups and small businesses are in jeopardy. I don't understand why all VCs are so quiet about this. Perhaps they are scared of future black lists from the telcos?
Why would the law be complex? You only need one simple line of law stating:

We find this principle to be self evident, that all internet traffic is to be treated as equal.

That is it. No complex case law, no little print, no arcane law language.

"Any rulemaking by the feds will involve backroom deals between companies large enough to send lawyers to DC "

Are you saying that you are scared of big companies, therefore what we should do is surrender and let, possibly one of the most defining aspect of the internet, be done with by the big guys, who have suitcases and suits?

You might say you are being pragmatic and that is the reality, but only if the "bunch of people" keep silent and let the big guys get on without noise, you know, a bit like the "bunch of people" did with the War in Iraq. The corporations might have the money, but the "bunch of people" still have the political system and the power to set the debate. No politician would like to loose his job, and if some do then they will think twice in face of vocal public pressure.

As for your other points they are a matter of speculation. I would need to employ my imagination. I am sure there are many smart people on here who might be able to get around the internet prioritization with some code, who have all sort of programming abilities to overcome any technology obstacle. Maybe even if such tiered system would come to pass, some clever guy would come with some code which would make the ISP think that a certain site should be prioritized. The vast majority of people however might perhaps have to live with the reality of the way things are. In China for example, some people might use route-around technologies, but, the vast majority live with a censored internet.

As for AOL and all the rest, the internet, at least in popularity, is hardly even 20 years old, if we take the year that it took off to be 1995 when people started hearing about it in vast numbers. So AOL is really a baby learning how to crawl in the grand scheme of things. Only very recently, if not only now, has the internet become a serious medium with vast power of empowerment and, we must assume, vast powers of control.

So you can hardly compare the past to the future. You hardly can say well even if we live in a dictatorship someone will still write a pamphlet although he might be imprisoned for it.

You can argue about the substance of the matter. Dismissing the entire debate as something childish however and entirely misguided without providing any reasons but rhetoric is hardly reasonable.

I might be wrong, I might be very wrong, but personally I think we should fight and if in the end we lose, then we do so with dignity, not in 40 years or so tell our children of that thing called the internet and then feel sad of how all the baddies turned it into a one way communication platform.
You have the weird assumption that government works for the people. In fact, government will likely help Facebook extend their monopoly in return for easy access to all the data that facebook collects on you.

If you use facebook often, especially from a mobile phone, then you are leaving a data trail for everything you are doing in your life, and everything your friends are doing. It is easy to apply that against you if needed, which is why a government will be happy to support facebook.
And in evidence for the "Pretty Sure They Aren't" statement, here's Miguel de Icaza shitting his pants (not):

http://tirania.org/blog/archive/2010/Aug-13.html
Free and Low Cost Design in the Cloud
All this guy is saying is that the Apple stores weren't going to get Apple booming. And they didn't, the iPod and it's successors did. Does anyone really think the Apple stores are what saved Apple?
Let alone in which to fit.
(j/k)
When Polymorphism Fails
According to your title, you are trying to say that, Every person can solve every other person's problem. But not his own problem. That may not be true and that is not what author is trying to say.

He is talking about the (smart) people who can solve other's problem. But not about all the people.
Brilliant talk by John Cleese on creativity.
Sometimes there just aren't two valid sides to a story.
But reading the overview felt like reading Joseph Conrad’s _Heart of Darkness_: I’d reread the same paragraph over and over, because the words would evaporate before they could stick to my brain.

shudder
>why they don't implement a simple script to stop typing beyond the limit is beyond me...

I'm thinking that once you've written out the text you seek some place to post it and so this sort of thing increases interactions on the site, after all you're already there - you make it into a message to several friends or start a page about it or whatever. Alternatively people put it on a blog and then link their blog into their profile in someway, again increasing the information available on that person, strengthening interactions and widening the link graph.

Just my initial thought, no inside info.
The Rails Plugins site (http://railsplugins.org) that we built at Engine Yard has 406 registered plugins, and a criteria for thread safety (http://railsplugins.org/plugins?criteria[]=2).

The way it works is that the author can specify whether or not he thinks it's threadsafe (yes/no/maybe), which is then verified by users who can specify whether they agree. If a user marks a plugin as not-threadsafe (or not-Rails 3, or not-JRuby, or not-Ruby 1.9), the author has 7 days to help the user come around before it sticks.

So far, there are 60 plugins marked as threadsafe (which means that either the author said "yes" and nobody disagreed, or the author said "maybe" and all the votes so far say yes).
Here what he says in the blog post, "It is one thing if they don’t have capacity to solve those problems – we are not talking about that category of people. We are talking about people who have demonstrated that they can solve those problems when they are presented by other people."
http://searchyc.com/user/pg?only=comments&sort=by_points...
It's too soon to say what the general consent on that issue is. The next few days will be very interesting in that respect. I wonder what IBM will say. If I'm not mistaken, their current java products (they've got their own branch of the JDK) are covered by license agreements, probably made in the Sun era. So it's unlikely that they're in immediate legal danger. Still, they might hedge their bets differently for the long term. I wouldn't really count on it, though, considering that there's no decent alternative right now, and generally IBM takes a long while to wake up.

Most of the industry doesn't exactly mess with the JVM, so they don't really care whether it's free-as-in-beer, free-as-in-speech or something in between. I think that this includes academia (where Scala is from) and consulting agencies (where Clojure is from). There's no real hard-core GNU free software crowd behind them.

I hope that I'm wrong, but I think apart from a small flock of hackers, nobody will care too much. I do think that the efforts to port both Scala and Clojure to other platforms (CLR / LLVM) will increase a bit.

A lot also depends on what Google will do. If they throw down the gauntlet and put lots of effort and money into a migration towards a different language, then the whole IT market will look quite different. But I think that's too much money wasted, to there'll be some underhanded deals and Google and Oracle will become fast friends again. If Google doesn't want to loose face by settling de jure, Oracle might drop the case and there'll be a de facto settlement.

So to summarize: From my limited knowledge right now, I don't see big practical reasons to avoid JVM-based languages. People were quite content using Java, even before Sun made their Open Source initiative. We'll just regress to that state.
YAPC::NA Presentations (Perl Conference)
The worst part is the technology is out there but it's hard to sell since most people are deluded by the establishment.

P2P/DHT, zero-knowledge, plausible deniability, ubiquitous wifi, and IP telephony. It makes it even more disheartening. Instead the fads are cloud computing, no encryption, and default settings anti-privacy. So sad.
I shouldn't still be surprised by this shit, but the claims of patent 5,966,702 are basically "There was some data and we normalized it". Seriously. WTF?

Can we start putting questions like these on 1st year bachelors exams, so we can finally prove that someone "reasonably skilled in the arts" can figure it out?
You need to make new friends.