skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Working with strings in Erlang hasn't been much of a problem for me. The re module's ( http://erldocs.com/R14B/stdlib/re.html?i=0&search=re: ) regular expression handling is pretty decent, and it takes binaries, iolists, and of course normal strings (just lists of ints).

Erlang strings are just lists of ints, but it's important to know the speed consequences with dealing with the ++ operator, or lists:flatten (which is supposed to be pretty slow, or so I've heard - never personally benchmarked). Binaries, on the other hand, are more like typical strings in other languages, and don't have the same performance penalty.

I'd say: play with it, do some benchmarks, and see how it fits for you. It's pretty easy to tinker with things on the Erlang Shell (like any REPL) so go for it. If it doesn't work well enough for you, ask the Erlang Mailing list, which is pretty good at ferreting out speed improvements (recent relevant optimization thread: http://www.trapexit.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=19541&post... ).

And if all that fails for you, then you at least know you gave it a shot and can rule it out.

Personally, I think the language is freakin' awesome.
I don't know for sure, but I've worked for medium sized companies that don't have it.
The content on those sites is also frequently scraped from other, more legitimate sites. Next time you see a Wordpress spamblog, try doing a (quoted) Google search for some of the post content.

Another tactic I've seen, simpler than the one described in the linked article, has simply been to link to a target site from all of the SEOer's content-scraping blogs. The core principle of what makes this all black-hat SEO is the same, though: they're building sites with the intent to manipulate search engine rankings, rather than sites which anyone would want to visit.
Maybe it was at treehouse.com instead of particletree.
Is PRK better?
During the grace period they would be decreasing result quality. I don't care if all the junk cluttering up my searches will be gone in a few months, because I'm not going to wait a few months to try to find the information I'm looking for.

Allowing money to influence rankings (selling "mappings" is basically selling pagerank) would also potentially decrease quality; I am much, much more inclined to having websites ranked only by their quality and the quality of information in them, which is the way search should work anyways.

Oh, and a way that this could be broken: One person wants to be at the top of the results for a single, fairly common, search term. They start a bunch of "funnel" sites (hundreds, maybe), and manage to get most of them into the top ~40 pages[1] for that search term. Then, in the marketplace you've proposed, they buy up all of them from themselves, at as low a price as possible. The resulting increase in pagerank (which they're buying from themselves, so only paying google for the privilege) pushes them up to the top of the rankings for that high-value search term.

[1] Random number. Could be higher, could be lower.
Exactly. Remember when file-sharing first became popular? Everyone used Napster, which had one centralized indexing server. If someone wanted content removed, they could just ask Napster and it would be gone.

This wasn't good enough for the RIAA, which shut Napster down completely. This caused the programming community to come up with an un-blockable alternative, and now everyone uses un-blockable encrypted BiTorrent with DHT. If you want something gone, there is nothing you can do short of shutting down the entire Internet.

(It wasn't un-blockable initially, but some greedy ISPs tried to block it, so now it's encrypted UDP instead of cleartext TCP. Now the ISPs can't block it reliably, and they waste their own bandwidth because UDP has no concept of a window size.)

So oops... now it's super-easy for people to distribute child porn, all because the music industry got greedy.
More Details On Skype’s Big Move To The Web
I think it is very revealing...
The Cloud Explained: Review on CloudBusinessReview.com by Tony D. Baker
Actually, by the same logic, you already own the money to pay the costs. You just need to perform the right actions and labor to convince people to take it out of storage for you.
I'm still not sure how a decentralized DNS would handle registration, if domains were free-for-all, what's to prevent squatters from ruining everything. What if someone's domain is totally abandoned? Is there any way for someone else to take it?

From what I understand from the dotp2p wiki, there's still going to be a registration party, OpenNIC (which is an existing alternative DNS root that runs .geek, .free, etc. I'm guessing it's a DHT but it would use some public key crypto so that each entry needs to be signed by OpenNIC.

But this still leaves OpenNIC as a central point. It wouldn't be a point of failure, but it would prevent scaling if it was taken over.
Jason,
I think you need to get over yourself.

When you say the types of things you say, and behave the way you do, the internet will react in a very predictable fashion.

It's nothing personal. It's a reality that I think you need to accept, and it's clear that you haven't because you still say things like 'keep hating on me...I love it'.

You don't. You are just saying that.

Saying things like that, makes you look like the kid on the playground that bullies everybody and when one day he gets kicked in the balls pretends like it doesn't hurt and goes above and beyond to show that it didn't hurt, but goes behind the locker and cries.

Not cool.
True - this one wasn't though. It was content created by cheap labour. Scraped websites are less of a concern because they are easier to detect algorithmically. Mind you Google doesn't seem to have entirely solved this problem either.
Samsung claims 7 hours battery life compared to 10 hours for the iPad, but it seems satisfactory in the reviews. Not sure if it will last one whole day without charging, especially if you used to watch movies on a road trip, for example. Any experience with the battery life?
Seth Godin @ TED: "We're just waiting for someone to lead us"
Easily Fix Samsung Galaxy S And 3 GPS With GPS Optimisation App
Womens Ugg Classic Short Boots 5818 jester red [5818 short jester red] - £68
upset because of the honey, not because of the bees

TFA: "He and Ms. Mayo also fear that the bees' feasting on the stuff could have unforeseeable health effects on the hives."
I think most talented employees care about freedom and flexibility, including freedom to not have to worry about things which are necessary but not interesting.

Being forced to do something which isn't a major benefit to the company would be close to a deal breaker (e.g. filing TPS reports), regardless of salary, unless you had other options. Whereas doing something unpleasant which is clearly important (coming in on christmas morning to fix a security problem) is painful, but much more acceptable.

Really, what seems to work the best is to offer "sensible defaults" for most things, and then let employees make their own choices if they wish. Stuff like offering a budget to buy your own desktop/laptop/phone, but "a lot of people like the 15" MBP HD, and we have a couple already configured if you'd like that". Having social events on the weekends, after work, etc. where employees are invited, but certainly not mandatory. (for this, informal usually works better, especially if some people are clueful enough to try to build links across departments, like the engineers also inviting people from sales).
"Big Bear's Sunspot" reminds me of the eye of Sauron.
Why does my physical location make a difference? I'm free to go home as I please during the workday. If I duck out of work at 3 PM so I can go home and use my own laptop to work on a personal project, should it not be owned by Google? If I work on it in the mornings and come in at noon, should it not be owned by Google?
They're trying to make it a smaller part after having such a large part of their profits come from finance burned them during the last crash.
duplicate http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1970193
India: Facebook recruiting from the IITs; attractive offer
With respect to your first point - the idea is that these spam sites are cluttering up things already anyway. A result which has them de-listed after three months is better than the current situation. You could possibly find a way to eliminate the grace period altogether if you could find a way to demonstrate the value of particular keywords to those who would buy them. All google would really need to do is release more information about keywords. And think - they only keep that information guarded now because they want to make life harder for spammers.

With respect to the second point - again, the answer is to keep incentives properly aligned with desired outcomes. In this case I suggested that the price for a mapping be increased if the marketer already has sold to a stable of quality sites (as determined by other aspects of the PR algo).

With respect to your third point - I agree these sorts of issues will have to be sorted out. This particular one would be easily avoided though - just place constraints on how many domains they can register as funnel sites. Yes they can try to game - but now being caught has a real risk - the loss of their legitimate income.

But there is no doubting that there will be real difficulties of the sort you mention. Nevertheless, I think the general gist is good - however the final form, black hats need to be incentivised to work with the system, not against it. And this can only be achieved by bringing them into the fold somehow.
Ask HN: How come there is no Kickstarter for investing?
I am willing to invest some money into risky startup-stage businesses. Naturally enough, I would like to invest in as many projects as I can in order to diversify my risks. Sometimes I am willing to invest/donate into a company that could serve an important social role or bring change without actually expecting profits. I suspect there are plenty of people like me.

The success of the Kickstarter site is stunning. I would like to see something similar for investment projects.

I am wondering why there is no such project.
So, is anybody here actually using any of this "self-healing" stuff in practice? How's it working out? I've been fascinated with this since I saw an IBM Tivoli seminar on "Autonomic Computing" a few years ago. It strikes me as the sort of thing that "when it works, it's bad-ass." I just wonder how reliable it turns out to be in actuality.
I live in a high-rise in downtown Chicago, so my ISP is some local company that services multi-tenant buildings: https://www.am3inc.com/default.cfm

Yes, affiliate params were being passed in the URL to the forward page.
Ask HN: Why doesn't the HN user's submissions list show number of comments?
The irony is that in this day and age of $3-per-month offshore VPN services, you can say, "yeah, I won't contribute any code to open source projects" and just start contributing under a pseudonym. Nobody will ever know. (Maybe I already do this!)
The style of writing shouldn't affect your degree of belief in the actual statements. (Unfortunately for humans it does.)

What's your view on certainty? What's your view on humility? What's your view on essay writing? (e.g. Paul Graham's vs. standard school view) What's your view on journalism and reporting? (e.g. he-said-she-said who really knows vs. here's some facts vs. Fox News)
Let's not put up straw men. I'm surprised you have so many upvotes for such an absurd argument--not that there aren't valid ways to disagree, but I don't follow your logic.

The issue is whether there is speech that is objectionable, and whether free speech has some sort of nearly universal limit if properly considered (yeling fire in a crowded theater, for example) and whether creating a law-free zone might have unintended consequences.

I don't see how a straw man implying that all laws require draconian enforcement really benefits the conversation. So we let child molesters do as they please because somehow any law enforcement would mean total and constant invasion of privacy? Not sure I follow the leap.
Quora: How valuable is Hacker News karma?
Hi,

I need someone to add a login/user registration process to CompassionPit.com (build on pylons + cogen) as well as add a wordpress blog (i have no idea how you're going to accomplish this since the web server is "paste") but if this is something you can do, shoot me an email with an estimate
>I spend most of the time feeling uncomfortable in some way (temperature isn't right, have to use the bathroom, worried about getting robbed) and it costs money!

That's exactly why you should travel to learn about the world outside of your immediate cocoon.
Research Methodology Writing Guidelines
Writing the research methodology is one of the most challenging procedures in research writing. As it is important to the writing of the paper, students need to ensure that they do a good job of writing it. Knowing how to write research methodology will educate them on this.
Practice with strangers.

I know there's Toastmasters, etc., but having had the same problem, what worked for me was simply forcing myself outside my comfort zone and talking more. Say hello to strangers, mention the weather, silly stuff like that. Soon enough you find yourself more confident.

Actual exercises that they teach in "active listening:" paraphrase what the other person is saying ("so you're telling me that I should be sure to attach the cover sheet to my TPS reports from now on? OK, I will"); listen closely and think of 3 questions to ask.I'm a firm believer that before you can be a good talker you need to be a good listener.
You could provide them with a Mirror.
http://46.59.1.2/mass-mirror.html
Dup: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1965683

This was flagged and deleted.
Wikileaks encrypted "Insurance" torrent contains BP, Guantanamo documents
You mentioned quality, location and price for each product/service, but not the times and ages? The engineer must be willing to leave a cellphone beside their bed every night, to be woken up at any hour to fix a problem which may or may not be related to the computer systems they work on during office hours. They must be over 25 yrs old, i.e. "mature enough", but under 34, i.e. with plenty of energy to work 12-hr days, "still not cynical", etc. Their track record must be in 2-yr blocks of uninterrupted service.
Hehe, I like how all the way at the bottom they mention the fact the bee's glow in the dark now. If that's not a significant mark against artificial foodstuffs I don't know what is :)
Here's a quick, dirty, temporary hack I threw together today. It's a script that manages entries in your hosts file (it can do things like merge, pull from web pages, etc).

https://github.com/ghettonet/GhettoNet

Feel free to fork and improve.
I am a programmer, I was near sighted, and I had the surgery done in 2003 or so. Beforehand I couldn't see the big E on the eye chart (I can't remember my old prescription but I think it was around + or -7, whatever nearsighted is). My eyesight had been that way since I was in third grade. After sitting up from the operating table I could see the patterns on the wallpaper which was an incredible sensation.

When my vision stabilized (a week or 2) one eye was testing at 20/15 and another at 20/25 or so. I got a touch up (the doctors are super paranoid and call it an adjustment) in that eye which brought it to 20/15 as well. It stayed that way for many years but in the past year my eyes have gotten a bit worse. I now wear glasses when driving at night but I still don't for normal life.

I would 100% do it again. Not being able to see sucks.
Note: (the Guardian's) title is inaccurate - this is actually about the .ch registrar:

'An email sent by Denis Simonet, president of the Swiss Pirate Party, to international members of the liberal political group said: "Some minutes ago I got good news: Switch, the registrar for .ch domains, told us that there is no reason to block wikileaks.ch."'
Even though I'm certain no comment of mine precipitated this wild overreaction, I'd still like to make it clear that I never intended to encourage anything but academic discussion among Snap developers when I responded to Greg's comment on github.

cdibona's candid description of the situation certainly does not warrant a Marxist interpretation.
I'm saying, kids are being abused, even if there aren't pictures of it on the intarwebs. The internet is not the problem.
I think ownership and time are the major impediments. As an investor in a company, you're going to invest more than the small amounts that change hands on kickstarter, which will probably mean you want some degree of assurance in return for your money. So there's the equity part, which could be tricky to try to automate. And time wise, the projects that come up on kickstarter seem to be much shorter term than a startup would usually be, which just underscores the need for equity as a more formal commitment.

I'm sure there are ways around these issues, and I think it would be great if someone (you?) sat down and figured them out. But these are the reasons why it hasn't already been done, imho. If you can make it work, I'll definitely use it!
No personal experience, except considering the surgery myself. My feeling is that they will eventually perfect this surgery and the long term results are unknown. I'd rather wait until they are much more precise.

Someone I know had this and now needs to wear reading glasses all the time just to use the computer, whereas before he did not. Of course, he's in his forties.

Your eyes are one of the most valuable things you have.

http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8...
Economist: WikiLeaks is more of a legal hack, than technical hack
Against? That's awesome.
Silicon bubble shows signs of reinflating
Be sure to get the best doctor in your area to do it. Don't skim on the cost. It's your eyes. I did mine 6 years back in UCSF. I researched the lead doctor. He's a professor and the Medical Director for the UCSF Department of Ophthalmology. He was one of the early investigators of laser eye surgery in the beginning. He's the guy who teaches and trains other doctors to do eye surgeries. Lasik is one of them. He did all the operations himself and had done couple thousands Lasik cases. Not one failure. Mine turned out great.
>College isn't about me getting a job. It's about me becoming a better person. Liberal arts is geared towards making me more diverse and thoughtful than I would be otherwise. It's working.

I'd really, really like to agree with you. Unfortunately, for myself and a lot of others, college is about getting a job. Why did I go to school and get a computer science degree? All of the employers in my area simply expected a B.Sc. in Computer Science or something related before they'd even consider you as a programmer.

I actually disliked a lot of my computer science curriculum -- I felt that it shortchanged the actual craft of coding and working in teams to build large systems, but I had to do what I had to do in order to get the job I wanted.

EDIT: I also believe that the necessity of liberal education in college is declining as more information becomes more widely available. Yeah, when you had to go to the university library to look up philosophy and history, liberal arts courses were necessary to make someone a well-rounded person. Today, however, there is such a rich variety of liberal education available for free on the Internet that one can make themselves well rounded without stepping foot inside a formal educational setting.
You aren't going to get clearer than glasses for your main focal point--both glasses and the surgery are going to get the image properly focused onto your retina--there's no improving past that.

The main question is, how bad is your vision currently?

I would say that for me, lasik is unquestionably better than glasses. But I had horrible eyesight and even with the smallest frames my lenses were almost a 1/4 inch thick at the edges. At that much correction they really skewed things at the edges of the vision and my peripheral vision was practically non-existent because I just couldn't see anything when not looking through the lenses. I was pretty much a non-functioning human without my glasses on. I hated them and wished to get rid of them at all cost.
I just did a followup test to see just how the re:replace function did with converting a 16kb text string with a BBCode parser I've written in Erlang, and on my crappy laptop it did 1000 conversions in 12 seconds. Further, I'm not running the high-performance version of Erlang, nor did I do any attempts at parallelization optimization.

Surprising to me was that the performance difference between binaries and strings wasn't too much different.

Module: https://github.com/choptastic/Yabbie/blob/linux/site/src/lib...

(keep in mind, this is built with the Nitrogen Web Framework in mind, so if you want to run it stand-alone, you can comment out the include lines and it should work just fine).

(nitrogen@127.0.0.1)9> bbcode:benchmark("l4d.txt",1000).
[{binary_time,12841.423},{string_time,12888.905}]

So 12000 milliseconds for 1000 iterations each. A few millisecond difference (46 millisecond difference) isn't much of a difference.
A decentralized DNS has nothing to do with solving the (presumed) problem. The solution is a registrar (and DNS) that is not answerable to any nation state.

The corollary to this demands an answer: are nation states that afraid of information (and the truth that may lurk within) ?
Not mine. But, a nice detailed writeup here: http://valerieaurora.org/lasik.html
(Valerie Aurora is a kernel programmer)
I know even with just contacts the increased field of vision was a huge advantage when driving, playing tennis, and some other common activities for me over glasses, but this may have been partially because of my very strong prescription. I'd say this, coupled with the ability to instantly have vision whenever you wake up and so forth are the only real advantages..
Your first sentence is sort of what I mean.

The medium and the message are not unrelated; the first isn't just one of many possible carriers for the second. This isn't 1910 any more, and any reinvigorated modernism must coherently respond to post-modernism.
I can't wait for all the new logistical & security issues that come from a decentralized system. It will make the old DNS system seem like Fort Meade.
How is this different from Foursquare's checking in for discounts? In the very brief period that I toyed with that app (I failed to find any use for it), I could never find a deal. Maybe Facebook will be better at snagging them?
Wide lines like from syslog, frequently you want one event per line and not to have wrapping occur. The -S switch to less is a boon here.
Getting Creative Things Done: How To Fit Hard Thinking Into a Busy Schedule
From my doctor, Lasik actually is better for your eyes than wearing contacts. The chance of getting your eyes hurt due to infection from dirty contacts is higher than Lasik operation goes wrong. Contacts also restrict oxygen to your eyes which can cause health problem.
Because on HN, downvoting is becoming a way to signify disagreement, rather than the intended way to remove low-value comments from the chain.
It's against federal law. To invest in private securities you need to be an "accredited investor" in the eyes of the SEC, or an insider.
It is impossible to disentangle "bored of life" from "bored of being old" with current technology. It is very easy to imagine that people pretty freely conflate the two. Put an arthritic 80-year old on the verge of death from any of several conditions popping thirty pills a day in a fresh, healthy 18-year-old body and ask them if they're still "bored of life" in a month.
Research the Vision Correction Center in UCSF.
It might have to do with the IRS definition of an 'Accredited Investor'.

http://news.ycombinator.net/item?id=1730480