skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Seriously, though, if you just remove pics (add pics2), funny (add humour), worldnews, atheism, politics, and maybe reddit.com, you'll tripple the quality of discussion you run into.

It's easy to classify the big subreddits as "Reddit", but that's just not the case. The "community as a whole" is an ephemeral thing. You can't really judge it by the tone on some of the, admittedly larger, subreddits.

Seriously, you say how much better the community at HN is, but you dismiss the subreddits I mentioned, many of which have more users than HN. HN itself was originally supposed to be a subreddit, but the admins wouldn't give Paul what he wanted. Reddit itself is more of an umbrella than a group.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_Illinois/NCSA_Ope...

Looks a lot like a 3-clause BSD, but it's a cross between MIT and BSD. The point on LGPL is that if GCC were LGPL, Apple would be able to link it to Xcode.
Right. I think the argument was more along the lines of the Niche Exclusion Principle[1]. Once the existing complex organisms have had time to adapt "perfectly" and fill "all" of the low-level ecological niches, the barrier to entry becomes dramatically higher. The odds of evolving complexity were already abysmal. The presence of an additional barrier makes it almost impossible, since the new, unoptimized design would have to compete with the established species.

It's a debatable argument, with obvious parallels in the startup world.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Competitive_exclusion_principle

In ecology, the competitive exclusion principle is a proposition which states that two species competing for the same resources cannot coexist if other ecological factors are constant. When one species has even the slightest advantage or edge over another, then the one with the advantage will dominate in the long term. One of the two competitors will always overcome the other, leading to either the extinction of this competitor or an evolutionary or behavioral shift towards a different ecological niche. The principle has been paraphrased into the maxim "complete competitors cannot coexist".
Woman Suing Farmville for Privacy Breach Is Still Using Farmville
This sounds like major overkill. If the only problem is the data in the iframe url, couldn't they POST the data into the iframe?

Create the iframe with some JS that POSTs a form containing the data to the canvas app. The resulting iframe url is the same but without any query parameters.
My Master's Thesis covered exactly that. I'm currently working on commercialising the idea, so you can expect a "HN - Review my startup" within a year :)
If you want to have everything built you are going to have to use multiple people: 1 for the enclosure and then another for the electronics and software. Look on elance.com and guru.com use people ONLY with recommendations and experience in what you want to do. Also in the req doc place a code or phrase they need in the subject line so you know they read the req doc.

To buy parts: digikey, mouser, arrow

There are a ton of good prototyping firms in the US that will make you a prototype within a week, once you have a design.
The free incoming is currently set to expire on November 1st, exactly when this starts. I'd like to see the free incoming continue, but this timing looks like a bad sign. :-(
I mainly meant "improve" in terms of conciseness and readability. I didn't see any need for optimization because the snippet runs instantly:

$ time python -c "print sum(x for x in xrange(2, 1000) if sum(int(y) for y in str(x)) == 7)"
9324

real	0m0.138s
user	0m0.012s
sys	0m0.012s
"If some species were able to actually harvest the output of a star to anything approaching 100%, wouldn't it be exactly the type of thing we would never see?"

You'd still have residual heat. Some have suggested that what we'd see is awfully similar to red giants though I rather expect we'd still see something odd about them.

Besides, the one you really should have focused on is star-traversing ships. They're visible from a really long ways away.

"I would expect the universe to look exactly the same whether it was bustling with life or we were the only ones."

Allow me to re-add in the word "intelligent" to your "life". The universe looks the way it would be expected to work if absolutely nobody ever makes it off their planet to any reasonable degree, or there is no other intelligent life out there. Or we just happen to be the "precursors".

Part of the problem with this debate is that most people are still participating in it with very 1960s ideas about the limits of technology, very Star Trek ideas about what technologically sophisticated aliens will be like. Of course the Federation could be floating around out there without us knowing, with its starships powered by magic, its technologies powered by magic, and humanoid aliens scattered about everywhere due to magic. (Yes, I know about the episode in question.) But that's not what it looks like. In reality, a modern conception of what a technologically-sophisticated culture would do results in a lot of things visible from a very great distance, the ones I previously mentioned before. And we see 0 of them.

Personally I do not put much stock in the idea that intelligent life is abundant and easy and not a single one of them ever decides to go to another star. For such a society it just isn't that hard and the payoff of being the first in a star system is incomprehensibly enormous, well out of proportion to the difficulty of getting there. Something about standard story of easy, abundant intelligent life is very very wrong, and the most parsimonious explanation is that intelligent life is in fact not easy or abundant.
It actually looks like they controlled for income, see the link above.

It looks like its actual IQ that has the highest correlation.
Lots of business practices are considered legal but sleazy, and above-board companies won't engage in the them even if they increase profits - from high pressure sales tactics to child labor where it's legal. Why is it that companies like Google and Microsoft are given a pass on using their many-million dollar legal budgets to push the US tax burden onto the rest of us?
Digg overtakes Facebook; Both cross 20 million U.S. Unique Visitors [2007]
As long as someone has an understanding of another language (basically someone who knows the basics of programming), I think this book would be a good book for them to start out with.
"Don't be evil" != "do no evil"

Many people confuse the latter for the original statement, when it was in fact the former.
I think it speaks to the fact that today's technology lets you quickly make products that people want to talk about. I don't think it's necessarily a condemnation of TechCrunch or that Facelette is impressive (the latter of which is definitely untrue).
I would agree that APIs are more of a kind of UI than a "something else" where the rules are different.

They can afford to scale up their complexity more than graphical designs because textual reference lets you bury stuff very deeply, but the user still has to deal with the "conceptual load," which in a big API can be pretty intensive.
Yes. Though often you can just ask for some feedback off-the-record.
I think launching on weekends (if your usage is lower then) is a viable alternative. You can be fresh compared to doing stuff in the middle of the night and you can give everyone a day off during the week to make up for it.
> Maybe it is the lawyer in me, but why wouldn't any international business do whatever it could legally do to minimize its taxes?

Evil is a moral judgment, not a legal one.
Actually they were around $22,400 according to the comment just under that. Still, I wouldn't be able to tell you whether or not they operated at a loss. You'd have to ask jedberg.
You can definitely get a lot out of using better abstractions, as the success of MapReduce has shown. I'll list a few ideas, with the warning that they may be half-baked:

* Strong, stern type checking has always been kind of a pain in the ass, but it's very effective at catching miscellaneous stupid errors. If debugging in the cloud is hard enough, then maybe overbearing type systems are the lesser of two hassles.

* Interactive programming is a big win. One of the best things about Lisp is the REPL, and how well-integrated it is with the editor. (At least, if you use something like SLIME.) If I'm programming on a distributed system, I definitely want to be able to quickly test out my code, preferably in a concurrent environment. You could solve this by having a bunch of servers for this, or with some fancy simulation environment, or a bunch of virtual machines, or something. The point is, I want errors to show up fast.

* Really good log analysis. Ideally, any framework you're using would automatically log everything it does, and then you would use some nice tools to figure out what happened, and where it went wrong. Maybe the Loggly guys will come up with some good stuff.

* Data-flow oriented abstractions like what Apache Pig offers. Pig lets you define a directed acyclic dataflow graph, in which each edge is some operation like "group by field x", or "filter by function f(fields)". It compiles all this into MapReduce jobs and runs them on Hadoop. It's probably a lot harder to mess up a query in Pig than with raw MapReduce, for sufficiently complicated queries. I'm not sure how much of a performance hit you take, though.
Trademark tarnishment claims explained and illustrated
It's funny that the HN crowd talked about something like this 4 months ago, and it took holman just a few hours to ship. Only goes to show that ideas are cheap :)

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1472597
Google App Engine: Announcing the Matcher API for Trusted Testers
This may be all true. But then the public as a customer doesn't get what it's trying to buy.

If the students don't understand, how can they become educated?
I happened to come upon a novel idea

A derivative idea. Not that this takes away anything from the service. Most ideas and successful implementations aren't of the kind we've never seen before.
And how would you recommend that the US tell Ireland to change its laws?
I think this is somewhat akin to http://www.usertesting.com/ except nothing is free there.
And the only downside is, getting a polite answer a la "Sorry, we can't give you feedback." So, always ask for feedback.
>> Even more practically, the GPS could use the timing information to slip in spoken directions at less distracting moments, like a human companion might.

I really like that idea. Of course, the GPS tends to be a bit of a nag, so it might be hard for it to find enough pauses.

I don't have my GPS integrated with the car, so I can just let the GPS audio compete with the car audio, and adjust GPS volume to mess with the intrusiveness factor. After listening to the original sample... wow that would annoy me a lot.
SmartTwitter Posts Your Tweets On Facebook, Minus The Noise (attributed to HN)
First posted here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1813624
Great, I just signed up for a new account yesterday. Are secondary accounts not allowed?
If I recall correctly, Arrandale does not yet have support for OpenCL. It's in the works, but it's not there yet. In terms of raw performance, Arrandale is competitive with the 320M (maybe a wee bit slower). Overall, Arrandale will be attractive to Apple with OpenCL support, since they no longer need two chips -- just the CPU package which has everything it needs (graphics, memory controller, etc). That allows space for better thermal solutions, more memory or SSD storage, a larger battery, or other functionality.

Hence the decision to stay with the current nVidia 320M and Intel Core 2 Duo -- once Arrandale supports OpenCL, we'll see Apple transition. Not only for the MacBook Air, but also likely in the MacBook, low-end MacBook Pro SKUs, and the Mac Mini.
I know about combinat56 but their website and their self presentation turned me a bit off.
Wasn't judging, just pointing out that your claim of elevated consciousness and the implication that cannabis was somehow 'better for you' than alcohol was illusory. I was commenting on the tone of your writing not on you yourself. Yours is just the most recent generation to rediscover acid, cannabis etc. You'll make exactly the same mistakes that they did in the 50s, 60s, 70s .... Anyway, no offence intended, to you or any other sentient being.
Nice, this made it to TechCrunch via HN: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1816945
Vulgar has a very negative connotation to it. The main thing I associate with "vulgar" would be swearing, crassness, or uncouth behavior. I haven't seen the word vulgarization used really, but it inherits that contexts from its root word to me.
These points all individually look like good advance, but I can't stress #8 enough.

GET. A. JOB.

I'm a full-time college student attending a relatively cheap state school. I work nearly full-time as a software developer (full-time summers, every chance I get during school). I can afford to live on my own and pay my own tuition.

Though I can't tell you where I'll be five years from now, I'm sure that having zero debt and years of work experience won't hinder me.
Why Being "Interesting" Sucks
Yup. Also it's not solving the problem of app developers sharing the UID's intentionally. After the decryption at app's server side, they can share uid as usual.

I am not sure if fb has rules for not pushing uid's with 3rd party services - other than that, I don't see how this solution avoids the problem.
Ah, well from experience, I'd suggest its barely noticeable.
They are making the claim that 'complex life only happened once'.

They're saying that on Earth, complex life only happened once:

"It suggests that complex alien life-forms could only evolve if an event that happened just once in Earth's history was repeated somewhere else."
For the last several years in my experience the last word has been censored.
Custom-build Android phones
My expectation would be that more intelligent children have more demanded of them, and go on to choose or take more stressful careers. Are there any studies correlating stress levels and drinking? Personal experience would suggest a relationship.
Go is supposed to be minimalist.

Every language is designed according to that rule. No language designer thinks, "Let me just slap some extra unneeded stuff in there." They just differ on what they consider necessary.

In Go's case, I think many of the things they've omitted from the language are actually useful features and they've just pushed the complexity onto the users. For example, no exceptions just ends up meaning "if err != nil { return nil; }" everywhere.
I wonder what it would take for some nation or über-nation to set the goal to terraform Mars. That would be a goal worthy of mankind in the 21st century.
"Don't be afraid to build things for the sake of building them"

Completely agree here. Plus, it's only after you actually build out an idea that it really has any transferable value. There are definitely going to be ideas you have that seem a little off or even stupid, but don't let that stop you. Otherwise we would live in a pretty dull world of gray color and political correctness.

Push yourself a little. Always Be building.
Sorry, this is in VERMONT. I can't seem to edit this post.
I do think D is probably closer to where my heart is. I think my ideal low-level language is a bit like C + some of ML's type system. I think it may be possible to get that without being as heavyweight as D, but I'm not sure.
Of course, any moment now there will be a blog post from somebody who signed up for 300 disposable credit cards and used 300 disposable email addresses to get a supercomputer for free.
Relational DB changes don't have to be particular show-stoppers, provided you're willing to accept a few constraints:

1. No select * in SQL; name your columns in selects and inserts (prevents the select result set from changing or the insert from breaking when you add a column later)

2. All tables need table aliases in join queries. (Otherwise, adding a column can cause a naming collision and introduce ambiguity into a presently non-ambiguous select.)

3. Transactional columns can be added, provided they have defaults or are nullable

4. Columns can only be dropped in two releases, one to remove all references to them and the second to actually remove. (You may want to rename the column first during the second release and drop it a few minutes/hours later once you're sure no one is relying on it.)

5. Modifying a column requires some care (to insure that you don't lock the table too long during the modification). Here again, you can probably add a column of a different name, gradually populate it, then rename into place later, add a new table and left outer join to that, or wait for a future downtime event (rarely required in practice).

It's not necessarily "trivial" to accomplish, but it's also not deep, black magic.
It's too bad that Swype persists with their bizarre OEM-licensing-only model. Would love to try it on my N1, but they can't be bothered to provide it to the unwashed masses as a normal purchased download.
Asthmapolis Wins Twilio + Union Square Ventures Contest
To play the role of "guy who links to a relevant wikipedia page" again, the conflict between the fact that we've seen no observations of intelligent life out there and our estimates that our life is not unique is known as the Fermi Paradox (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox). Once again, you may already know this, but it will hopefully be interesting reading to someone else.
I agree completely. I had a note to discuss that (and globals, eww!) but I cut it because honestly that post was too long already.
Jobs did say at D8 that Apple chooses technologies that are in their Springs and not their Falls. Java has had far to many Falls....

Seriously, Apple does not need Java and I think the market for Java apps has become few and far....
Going crazy coding
I feel fine downvoting comments with high scores that I disagree with, especially if there is no particularly strong argument in them. If they have low score then I leave them alone.
Web as content, web as distributed apps.

It's not really a surprise that Mozilla and Google view everything web-related so solipsistically: that's all they care about.

Apple, Microsoft and the Linux universe all have other interests beyond the web. Mozilla views these other interests as heresy: web is future! web is all-powerful! web rules all! and as such deems everything else "bad."
I like this. Ask what you can improve, not what you did wrong. You won't stress the interviewer as much.
Here's what I do: go to www.mises.org, and search "education". That'll keep you busy for a while.
http://search.mises.org/search?q=education&site=default_...
I think everyone (who has ideas) had this flash across their mind when they saw facetime for the first time.
Wow that's... Cool but not that great of a deal. You need to create a new account, and you only get 30gb of bandwidth. If you exceed any of the limits it all converts to paid services. Plus, it's only for a year.
Good for learning ec2, but I'll stick with heroku or google app engine for my freebies.

As an aside, I realize how crazy it is to say that a year lease on a vps for free is not a great deal. This is an amazing, magical time for web developers/programmers.
And I signed up September 30th. I guess I'll just open a new account, and pay the $0.03 again to reupload my stuff to S3.
Wow 2009 called and wanted your shitty irrelevant website back.
Machine VM + Cloud API - Rewriting The Cloud From Scratch
I have often thought many of the review my startup postings are not startups but projects. I am happy that someone was brave enough to write this.
Me and many others that have used languages with "proper exceptions" for years are very happy that Go lacks them.

Control flow in code with "proper exceptions" often becomes as convoluted as code using COMEFROM.

While Go's approach to error handling is not perfect, I find it much clearer and manageable than that in any other language I have used.
> prepare to [have] a night of adventure.

This is exactly why we don't deploy at night. In what other line of work do you schedule complex work when you're going to be tired?
Likewise in French! But we still use the word "vulgarisation" to describe popular science books, in a good way.
That thought occurred to me; maybe Apple decided not to renew their license.
1) Good point. Using the backdoor of the app store would just be easier for them to do (I would imagine).

2) Maybe they will be bringing along the big guys, in the future. Java is being deprecated (http://bit.ly/cFp0GX) in the future the may require apps to use the standard API.

3) ARM chips are getting much better. The A-15 is going to be multicore and be up to 2.5 GHz (http://bit.ly/bhVKBP). It is totally possible for apple engineers, gotten from PA Semi, to string together more cores to make a more powerful process. Difficult and costly, but possible.

The problem I see with this line of thinking is that ARM is only a 32 bit arch right now and I don't know of any plans on changing that. Also, having the big guys convert their software over to using ARM instructions over intel (point 2) would be really painful, I think. LLVM and some good virtualization might help mitigate this, but I would have to research that more.

Also, I'm probably completely wrong and I'm fine with that. You have very good points and I appreciate all of them.
I really don't understand why we allow these things. Letter vs. Intention of law should matter, right? I don't think a lot of the tax code and business rules were written with the idea that a company would actually span continents or maybe not even have a physical presence.
Yeah, at the time, I found his explanation uncompelling:

which means you should have the choice to do efficient things, if you know what you're doing.

That directly clashes with other design choices in Go. For example, taking the address of a variable on the stack implicitly puts it on the heap (at performance cost) to protect you from accidentally using the pointer after that function returns.

If you're worried about it and you really care: don't pass a pointer, pass a value.

...and pay the performance penalty of doing not just a copy, but a deep copy, simply because the language doesn't have const.
At a company I've worked at we didn't do it because it was an opportunity to be sued. You have to word it very carefully or it could be considered discrimination. Easier just to avoid the risk altogether.
How to Approach a Venture Capitalist to Fund a Startup Business
> You'd still have residual heat.

What? No. If there is residual heat you aren't capturing all the energy.

> In reality, a modern conception of what a technologically-sophisticated culture would do results in a lot of things visible from a very great distance, the ones I previously mentioned before. And we see 0 of them.

This appears to be the crux of your argument. Can you go into or point to a place where I can find out more about what these ships would supposedly look like?

I think the fact that we will almost certainly need a paradigm change before we can really conceive of interstellar travel combined with the radical shift in conceived ideas following a paradigm shift, current guesses about what a super advanced culture's vehicles act like doesn't really hold much weight for me.
Isn't it pretty easy to make a new Amazon account..?
Creating a Simple App Using jQuery Mobile
But I suppose you won't be able to run it on iOSXI
Except you can STILL go out to the internet and play those silly free flash games.

And Flash Developers can now release their silly flash games on the iPhone/iOS App store.

If either of those facts were not true, you might have a point.
What is the dollar value of all this free stuff?
ConcertsTO - Change the way you look for concerts (in Toronto)
If you exceed any of the limits it all converts to paid services.

That's not how I read: "You also will be charged AWS’s standard rates for any use that exceeds the free usage amount provided under the Offer."