skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Hi
this is exactly what i was thinking and your application looks great! i once was thinking about the same idea .
even using the Scratch method for conditions and loops
wish you best lock ! what framework/tools do you use?
http://spoon.net/Developers/Studio-Pricing.aspx
allowing Spoon apps to be executed without any device driver installation or administrative privileges

Isn't this what Google was looking to do with their Chrome Frame for IE? Sounds like an acquisition may be in order.
I really wish HN would adopt some of Reddit's features - ability to choose how comments are sorted for one, and the ability to collapse comment threads.
Isn't this the same group that years ago had downloadable virtualized copies of all the major browsers?

Ah, yup, it used to be http://www.xenocode.com/browsers/

http://google.com/search?strip=1&q=cache:xenocode.com%2F...

They had firefox virtualized in 2007
http://web.archive.org/web/20070810063157/http://www.xenocod...

I'm curious if they are technically allowed to distribute IE though.

I still have the old versions saved that did not need any of their "library" installed which leads me to believe that this new approach is just a control mechanism to make you visit their site.

It's a shame their IE9 doesn't work on XP though, that would be a real coup.
If you randomize the values, the expected running time of your algorithm will be O(nlogn). Worst case is still O(n^2). Additionally, the adversarial argument presented is voided because it relies on deterministically placed elements, which allows the adversary to actually choose them on the fly.

In general, a randomized algorithm is better than its deterministic counterpart.

Citation: I'm a 15-451 (Algorithm Design and Analysis) TA at Carnegie Mellon and I just gave this lecture in recitation.
I have been using this for doing the browser compatibility testing. I use it on my windows machine. Its simple and works great..It worked better that IE tester. The only problem I noticed so far was, my anti virus( AVG) treats this as a virus and pops multiple messages.
Why StackExchange Will Eventually Fail
One of my clients wanted to be able to send an email "blast" to all 50,000 of their customers via their intranet application. They wanted to be able to include an attachment with the email. I wrote the code and told them it was ready.

A frantic call came in at midnight. The whole email system was down. Unfortunately they had attached a 2 MB PDF file to each email. So our little underpowered Exchange server was desperately trying to send 100 GBs of emails downs our T1 (plus dealing with all the bounce-backs).
In typical cases the "killer adversary" will still be able to make a good guess at when the pivot is being found, and drive the quicksort routine into bad behaviour, even when the pivot selection is randomized. (Of course that means that the resulting array will typically not produce bad behaviour if it's sorted with the RNG in a different initial state, whereas for nonrandomized quicksorts the adversary produces an array that will reliably provoke quadratic-time behaviour.)
What changes do you think should be made to enhance the quality of content and get more people to vote?
Most people just consume. I think a very small fraction actually comes to the new page and vote.
Is him, @unclebobmartin.
This is pretty much what I showed them. All the captured data, described how the apps work, what makes the data so valuable, etc. Like I said, they got it , but still made the case it was a lot of work.
Wait, so .net is boring because he hasn't been taking on new projects, and just has old ones?

While I suppose changing languages can fix that, so can just taking on new clients in the language you already use.

And you are never 'stuck' with a language unless you let yourself think you are.
MacBook Air suffers another bout of 11.6-inch display rumors -- Engadget
Verizon CEO confirms plans for tiered data pricing -- Engadget
Same uncle bob that starts his presentations with physics stuff. See his comments on light and uncertainty principle, from a few days ago:

http://thecleancoder.blogspot.com/2010/09/uncertainty-princi...

He even twitted about this very post: http://twitter.com/unclebobmartin/status/25396579220

His twitter profile points to his object mentor page though. So the confusion is understandable.
There are some research projects (in rather early stages) that develop SMT techniques for translation to languages without big parallel corpora (essentially by bootstrapping such corpora, assisted by active learning). This could be of particular importance to keep smaller languages from disappearing, otherwise less and less works in that language will be available (yes, I'm aware that there are many people who consider language death a good thing).
This is amusing:
http://translationparty.com/#7966687
Realtime Analytics with MongoDB
Qualcomm's Peanut challenges ZigBee, Bluetooth
Interesting. I should have been more explicit - my figures are for the U.S. only.
How YC neighbor Anybots pivoted from robot hands to office telepresence
> it relies on deterministically placed elements

Did you read the paper? If you provide McIlroy's adversarial comparison function to a (no matter how genuinely) randomized quicksort algorithm, then typically it will provoke quadratic-time behaviour, and the final state of the array will be such that passing it into the quicksort function would have produced that same quadratic-time behaviour, given the same random choices.

(See the paragraph beginning "The adversarial method works for almost any polymorphic program recognizable as quicksort".)

What the adversary can't do, of course, is to produce an array that on a subsequent run, with different random choices, will again provoke bad behaviour. The average case of quicksort is O(n log n), and nothing McIlroy's adversary can do will change that.
Go further: company email should be from an actual human being, not from The Company. Anonymizing company statements makes it way to easy to be insensitive.

I've spent years deleting Official Company Email that has no name on it. It can't possibly be important if nobody said it.
Yep, it was created by me and my partner in all things startup (he lurks on HN, doesn't comment much). It was inspired by Hacker News, although we cover any sites people wish to add.

Please, visit and upvote the resources you like, and add any resources you can think of. There are already a few gems there, for HN and other sites.
And if you absolutely must stop your customers from responding to you, do not use a domain name that does not fit the RFC standard for useless domains, or you may inadvertently be setting yourself up for trouble:

http://blog.washingtonpost.com/securityfix/2008/03/they_told...
I agree and thank you for speaking what was on my mind as well. Anyone with moderate javascript skills could have a site like this up and running within 2 hours. I'm not even a fan of google instant though, oh well, to each his own.
Fastest Animal In The World
Nah, some things are okay automated, such as the warning that your flight appointment is in one day.
You're unhappy that people aren't going to the New page so you wrote an observation that can only be seen by going to the New page ;-)

In all seriousness, it took me quite awhile before getting into the habit of going to the New page, but now I do it after going over the main page. It was actually only after seeing a comment that "people don't go to the New page" that I started doing it, so it was one of the rare times when a "reminder" post didn't annoy me and seem like whining. These types of reminders are legitimately helpful IMO.

I'd love to see new items integrated into the home page, personally. Like a split screen, or just have them listed at the bottom of the page, or just in a narrower column somewhere, or whatever.

But I'm not sure that that would have any effect on your other issue, which is the type of thing being voted to the top. They get there because people start by going to the New page; they don't get there on their own. So although giving more attention to new items might get more people to take notice, I don't think it would have any effect on what makes it to the top.
Yep. Spoon wont last in the wild for long, if it actually delivers.
At that price virtual machines sound like a steal. You could even buy a bunch of special purpose netbooks.
Power density in the datacentre.
One of the factors that I've noticed lately is that due to the quantity of new submissions, it takes only 30 minutes or so for an article to drop off the first "new" page.

I try to check the "new" page periodically, but I must admit, I don't scroll beyond the first page-- so, the article referenced above I missed entirely, and it seems like I wasn't the only one.

Which means that the problem may not be that "nobody is reading the new page much any more" as much as "things age off the new page too quickly for most people to notice them."

As for potential fixes: off the top of my head, I haven't the foggiest.
Lua, Erlang, Haskel, ML, Go, Smalltalk, Algol, Modula 2, Modula 3, Snobol, assembly language.... After a while, most languages begin to look similar.

But, if what you want to do is to learn about programming languages, the thing to do is to write one of your own. Language design is among the most difficult of human intellectual tasks because the language elements must be composable to create larger, more capacious elements. A common error is to "add a statement to do X" rather than creating a conceptual framework that works with other language elements to allows X (and other things) to be performed.

A book worth reading on the design of language is Alexander Stephanov and Paul McJones, Elements of Programming. A talk covering some of the material in this book is scheduled for the Stanford EE Computer Systems Colloquium for November 3rd (http://ee380.stanford.edu). The lecture is open to the public, webcast live, and archived for on-demand viewing. Eventually it will be out on YouTube, iTunes, and elsewhere.

And while we are on the ideas of language design, you might want to look into some of the theories of natural language. George Lakoff's ideas in cognitive linguistics seem to apply to programming languages as well. Language, in his view, is motivated by metaphor.

I also think anyone who is serious about programming languages needs to have programmed in several assembly languages and to have experimented with macro assemblers. Macro assemblers provide a powerful tool for creating nonce programming languages at the assembly level.

I would also suggest that learning about optimizations would be of interest. At some level, optimizations are about mapping programming language concepts onto real machines for efficient execution. There is a dymaxion tension between programming languages and computer hardware with each influencing the other. Today, the need to efficiently map programs onto multi-core machines has renewed interest in parallel programming languages.
Forgive my generalization, but I see HN as a handful of groups with some overlap. You have hackers/programmers, business marketing, pure entrepreneurs, and investors/angels. There are people who fall into multiple camps, but stories tend to fall into one of these groups. I think the point you're making is that topics along the lines of hackers/programmers seem to have fallen off in favor of some of the other areas. Correct me if I'm wrong.

Personally, I visit the "new" page as often as the frontpage and find many interesting stories there.
I see your point, but I don't know if an order confirmation really needs to come from a human, if you mean being manually sent out. Unless you just mean that it comes from a customer service agent's email address, with their signature block, etc.
This makes even less sense than Intel buying McAfee. Sure, there are ways that ARM could be integrated with Oracle's products, but they don't need to buy them to do that.
Doesn't look plausible to me -- Oracle's Sun business uses Sparc and x86 processors. If the chip-maker purchase is supposed to complement Oracle's existing products, they should rather buy a x86 or Sparc company. Unless they plan to throw away the existing Sun designs in order to replace them with efficient ARM-based servers (then why buy Sun).

They could buy ARM just for the dividends, but then they could also buy a fast-food chain.
"Oracle to possibly buy ARM" is a pretty strange summary of the article, which actually says (1) Ellison says that Oracle might buy some chip-making companies, (2) stock in ARM rose, apparently in response, but (3) one of the two sources cited by the article says that it's very unlikely that Ellison had ARM in mind and the other goes no further than that it's possible that he had.
I depend on trying to keep up with you guys, to keep from feeling lonely. Pathetic, I know.
AMD is mentioned as an alternative target and that makes a lot more sense than ARM.

* ARM is not a chip manufacturer, it is a CPU architecture design house.

* Oracle runs on big to medium iron: x86, Power (IBM), SPARC, and HP (Itanium, PA-RISC). They don't run on ARM and I would speculate that it would be a major effort to port to it. Oracle already owns SPARC.
Similar to http://www.vmware.com/products/thinapp/
How is this different than VMWare, Microsofts, and Citrix exisiting application virtualization products?
But most people are just awful. Especially negative, lonely people.

Kidding, but that's the kind of thinking that makes lonely people what they are. Its like depression; when you have it, it feels just too hard to do anything about it.
Someone will surely buy them some day, but doesn't seem logical that Oracle would. My money is still (literally) on Apple buying them in the next couple of years.
Then his estimate wasn't too far off, although his error bars were in the wrong direction. Facebook is making 9-figure profit, not 10.

FWIW, I believe that $50-100B is where Facebook's market cap will plateau. More than Amazon, about half of Google. I'm not at all in agreement with dhh on this one.
This needs to be presented at Fun With Algorithms [1]. Also somewhat related is the bogosort algorithm [2] which was designed to be awfully slow (average case performance O(n * n!)).

[1] http://fun2010.dia.unisa.it/

[2] http://www.tcs.ifi.lmu.de/~gruberh/data/fun07-final.pdf (pdf)
To be constructive, if my generalizations are correct, then HN could support some form of tags or categorizations to identify the kind of story being posted. People could focus on the areas that interest them and not see stories that don't appeal to them. This could also be a way to identify "gossip" and track its appeal to parts of the userbase. Just an idea...
This sounds like DC. I remember when they used to have vendors all over the national mall. Then the turf battles started, and a few homicides later it became illegal to set up a table to sell souvenirs. I think even the street performers need to have permits if they intend to play a trumpet or something on the street in DC.
Just be careful. I've used to test against their IE6 and few things (CSS related) weren't working. Had to use MS own virtual IE6 for a more proper rendering.

Awesome service.
1. If this is true, whatever mechanism the loneliness uses to spread is probably also the cue for some people to disengage. You know, when things get kinda rough and you talk to people, they sort of pull back a little, as if you don't have as much to offer. They somehow know something's up...probably from a slew of very subtle nonverbal cues.

2. I've often felt that Facebook creates more loneliness because it encourages a sort of fake, communal happiness. People generally want to put their best foot forward since their thoughts are broadcast immediately to everyone. And if someone deviates from this often enough they're shunned. I really don't know what the solution is, other than to not use Facebook. It's almost like FB has a spiritual 'cost' associated with it.
It's obvious: feature a random article from the new page on the front page like Reddit does (a different one each time you load the page), so it gets some exposure.
Can someone comment on the implications of this for Google, Apple and Microsoft if such a thing happens? All major software companies in the non-pc space are mostly dependent on ARM.
You don't have to pay to use this thing - only to develop for it.
Legal row over who can use 'pod'
Why on earth would Oracle buy ARM, they're not exactly the kind of processors that Oracle would benefit from owning.

AMD, maybe, but that might come a bit too dear even for Oracle.

If there is one party that I think might buy ARM at some point it would be Apple. Or some other mobile devices manufacturer.
A game-changing fill for the LHC
Agreed. This Didier Scemama ought to be laid off!
And let's not get into "intelligent pressure pads". The number of times I've had to run a red light at night because the pad doesn't register my bicycle...
Angelgate helps me show Unscatter.com's value
It depends on time you can spend on HN to, really with the speed HN moves these days it's hard enough just to keep up with some of the top stories. Only when I really have hours to spend do I get time to get past the stuff that catches my eye on the front page.
Still, it misses basic things like split windows.

(A now ex-TextMate user, back to (Mac)Vim.)
There needs to be a place to actually apologize, toss a textarea in there and show previous apologies below :)
I hadn't even considered the possibility that they implemented that part themselves. I just assumed they were using something like Crossover as part of their product. Now that is impressive.
Chinese Company's Device Turns IPod Into IPhone
This would need to include the voice of the drill instructor from Full Metal Jacket. Or allow users to pick a voice that best suits them. I can only imagine a call like this: "What, you incompetent maggot? You couldn't finish that code because an episode of Battlestar Galactica came on.... Turn off that boob tube and start writing some code, you filthy useless piece of shit"
No, actually it does rely on deterministically placed elements. And its analyzing unix qsort which is a deterministic algorithm.

Unless I'm misunderstanding the paper (which I could be).

The argument relies on the fact that the adversary can choose the elements on the fly. This requires the input be deterministic so that the adversary knows what elements are where. If you randomize the input, the adversary will have no knowledge of the input and thus is not able to choose which elements go in which index. This would be randomly generated.

For more information on the adversarial method see:
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs/academic/class/15451-f10/www/

Recitation 09/08 explains this problem in depth.
Maybe anyone could, but it was Feross who did so. As well, I'm sure he still went through the YouTube interview process. YouTube Instant was just his foot in the door.

What's with the sour grapes?
> Rejecting the idea of "genuinely bad guys" leads to the conclusion that they should be punished

The idea of individual punishment also was emphasized in Zoroastrianism and spread its way into the global human psyche. Punishment is a very natural tool for us but it's clumsy. I would elaborate more but it takes a lot of words to explain a different paradigm and uncover hidden assumptions.

I'm not saying you're wrong; I just want to note that thinking in terms of punishment is not the only way to think.
I do not like this design at all. It is simply not personal taste, yet I must applaud you for taking the time and energy to do that.

HN with new look is something I think of at least once a day during one of at least 15 visits to the site.
Oracle owns Solaris now. Why would they not want to lock their customers into Solaris?
I read HN quite a lot, and I have to say, I rarely get around to reading the New page. Honestly, it takes me a lot of time to just go through most of the stuff that hits the front page (including comments), so I usually don't have the time to check out more articles whose quality hasn't even been vetted.

I think HN really should implement a way around this. The most obvious is to randomly show new articles on the front page, give them a chance to collect some points (if they're good, of course).
I don't remember having such issues with spoon, it is more common in IETester though. Do you have some examples?
Then how about making earpods/headsets that don't suck and fall apart? (To be fair, I've heard that the Apple in-ear ones are decent, at least to start.)
ARM is not a chip manufacturer, it is a CPU architecture design house.

So is AMD after they spun off Global Foundries.
In Zuckerberg We Trust
Rather than hot air, what we see is quite a bit of circumstantial evidence and some strong allegations from 3rd parties about what was going on at these meetings.

Is it anything conclusive yet? Of course not, but it would be foolish to write this story off as "hot air" at this point.
It's frustrating to be told your browser is unsupported, and not be given a list of the browsers that are.

http://spoon.net/UnsupportedBrowser.aspx
I agree with you, this story makes little or no sense.

But he seems a serious guy that knows what he's talking about: http://uk.linkedin.com/in/didierscemama

[edit: typo]
We're running the latest stable version of Mongo (1.6.3) compiled from source and it is definitely stable (we're running 4 shards, 2 servers per shard, 2 config servers and a bunch of arbiters plus mongos on all of our servers that access the DB).

I don't necessarily think stable and actively developed are mutually exclusive.
It looks great, but I don't think it will be adopted. The alternatively colored rows should be implemented, they help a lot.
"in relation to almost everyone's ethical standards"

And here is the problem. Comparing people to the dominant ethical standards is not a good measure of their goodness or badness, it's a measure of how conformant they are to others' ethics. (Enter Godwin's Law, stage right.)
I get permission denied when trying to view that page. Would be interested in seeing it.
Copacabana apartments
Copacabana Apartments - Rent a Copacabana apartment for short or long term stay.
Here in downtown Seattle the traffic lights are timed for pedestrians. One can walk from one end of the city to the other without waiting for a light to change.
The idiomatic usage you want here is "paternalistic", e.g. http://www.thefreedictionary.com/paternalistic

That said, when you used "paternalizing" what you meant was crystal clear to me.
My friend's car is an automatic. He likes it because it takes away from him something he doesn't care about (control) and saves him something he thinks of as hassle (changing gears). But me, I hate automatics because they take something I value away from me (control) and saves me something I don't think of as a hassle (changing gears).

Please don't destroy the internet for everyone - some of us like the control we have in choosing our sources, and are not particularly bothered by the hassle of having to choose which bookmark to use to do so. Much as I can see the value a magic button would have to a lot of people, it would be a torture to me.
It's a poor error message. What they really mean is your platform isn't supported. Windows browsers all seem to work.
huh? which article are you commenting on?