skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If you're going to quote something, quote it in such a way that it doesn't change the meaning.

> one of the worst ever in existence

Do you disagree with this? As far as I know the grounds for putting people in there were not good, and the torture that occurred in there was brutal, in fact it was so brutal that many prisoners tried to commit suicide. Would you commit suicide if I cut off your legs and arms? Probably not. Apparently these prisoners thought that what was happening to them was worse than cutting off their legs and arms. Can you name a prison that is worse? Yeah, Auswitz, for example, but that's not a very high standard to compare to is it?

> (The track record I was referring to was prior convictions and sentences for people whose computer crimes included intrusion in .mil systems.)

Right. Which ones?
How to talk to women? Couldn't resist.
would there be an audience for such software?

I believe it will be hard to get audience from most existing forums, as I see most phpbb, invision, etc. aren't rushing to move f.ex. to vanilla. Most of this software is outdated and bloated, yet they have a huge ecosystem (extensions, tutorials) and userbase used to their functionality. Such product should at least provide an easy convertion schema and default themes similar to existing competition's defaults. Still it would take very long until it gained a reasonable market share IMO. If you're looking just for new market, it could succeed.

I'd see sth like that as extensions to existing platforms, yet I believe it wouldn't be fun to code that :)
ExtremeTech's 2011 Best Value PC
By all means, have a nervous breakdown. Argue your case with passion even though you know it is futile, just so you can say you tried. Engage in the necessary structural destruction of your life required to transcend into the next chapter; either that, or be trapped forever. You clearly aren't satisfied, and you will never regret being true to yourself.
Vinge's "superhuman intelligence" rhetoric bothers me because it suggests that intelligence is a one-dimensional quantity. I don't think this makes sense except in the context of specific domains. For example, a basic calculator has superhuman intelligence when it comes to arithmetic, because it can evaluate arbitrary expressions much faster than a human can and doesn't make mistakes. But it's dumb about everything else.

Update: The child comment by binaryfinery points to where Vinge addresses this. Sorry, I failed to add the disclaimer that I only skimmed the article.
What's your point? How many Pointcasts there are and how many Facebooks there are is irrelevant. All that matters is whether groupon is a Facebook or Pointcast.
By this logic, people should have registration numbers tattooed on their foreheads, so that if one commits a crime (or just looks at you wrong), we can immediately find it.

Makes perfect sense, right?
The decision to use "j" was made quite a long time ago by Guido. There as a fairly short discussion about it and he made his decision. As other people have said, this is a bike shed issue. BTW, Guido's MSc is in math.
Hah, funny how such reason and logic didn't make it to the top of hacker news. Great link, thanks.
Facebook Platform Updates: Promotion Policies, Facepile and More
Make Twitter your voice blog using KooKoo and Twitter API
Hacking it, russian style
I don't think a company needs to be located in the valley to know that there are "tons of scary smart people at well funded startups working lost of projects in their space"
Speaking of Tron and HTML5, wrote this a couple of days ago: http://shazow.net/linerage (most fun with 2+ players).
There are lots of scary smart people all over the world. True, there are more scary smart programmers in SV. But that doesn't mean companies can't find them elsewhere.
"I'd see sth like that as extensions to existing platforms, yet I believe it wouldn't be fun to code that :)"

Agreed. :P

I don't see why people couldn't theme a forum like this, too. Perhaps also some sort of data migration tool.

Forums just kind of need a revamping!
It's true - that gym contains a higher-than-average level of startup folk. I've met others. Hi Earl. =)
Feel the mighty power of the hacker ethic
Translated from German from Der Spiegel.
Aww thanks dude. I'm not sure how the analogy works - (self-aware = bionic man?) but it sounds like a compliment! =P
"A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush."

And said bush is surrounded by a ring of fire. And explosives. And zero humidity.

Regardless, we don't have all of the data - hard to tell from outside
>> Big companies take forever to get anything done
If you think your startup hasn’t done a lot lately, take a look at bigger companies. Long release cycles. Projects that go nowhere. I’ve seen and heard of startups collaborating with bigger firms (which will go nameless) that drag their feet, bring in tons of VPs and ultimately are not worth the time. If you’re going to work with a big guy, be prepared.

Would anyone care to elaborate on this?
Ten-year Treasury yield is 3%. $6 billion invested today for ten years would return $8 billion. Their valuation could be several billion more than $8 billion in less than 2 years. You might be right about the coupon sites being a novelty, or maybe Facebook, Twitter, or Google (or, some as yet unknown competitor) will "monetize the long tail"...

But... the founders, employees, and other insiders of Groupon have already been handsomely paid off. For them, the chance at several billion dollars more in a few years time is worth the risk of rejecting the Google deal.
Good point. Can't say for certain. Perhaps you're right -- because, no, they didn't actually tell me that. I just assumed...
I bet you said the same thing about Facebook when it rejected that $1B Yahoo bid 4 years ago.
I sell about $100 worth of software for every ten people I can convince to click on a link in an email. That number astounds me. I hope to do more with it next year.
just put the name "drop table" in the form.
It's a Holy Grail. It's a mystery!
Or somewhere in between, but what really matters is who ends up making money in the transaction.

If there are more Pointcasts than Facebooks that would infer that it would be statistically more probable for this company to be overvalued than undervalued.

Pointing to outliers and using those as examples of good decisions doesn't seem very wise. Sometimes you get lucky and hit it big, that's how the game works. Sometimes that risk bites you down the road, a la Pointcast.
When will people learn that the right place for the power button is not right above the second-most commonly hit key on the keyboard? :/
The implication is that it is far more likely that Groupon is a "Pointcast" than a "Facebook". But the statement that there are "far more Pointcasts than there are Facebooks" is impossible to falsify.
Why Big Web Companies Don’t Come out of Europe, Plus More Spotify Promises
LOL for some reason I feel less smart after reading that comment ;) had to look up each word
If there's work to be found, there's a relationship.

After a break for school I tried to find work in the Boston area just as Route 128 was dying. There were precious few openings available that I could commute to ... as I recall, I managed to land only one interview (with Polaroid). Eventually I was recruited by a friend into a company he'd licensed software to try to save it, but the recession killed it before we got far enough.

I then moved to the D.C. area (mid-'91) and had no trouble finding jobs until the dot.com/telecom crash (telecom was pretty big in that area, I was in fact working for Lucent when it started its descent from 106,000 employees to 35,000...). The less said about that period, the better.
another plus for rejecting the goog: if groupon continues on and goes public / stays independent but super-profitable, then there is one more company that can serve as acquirer to all the great stuff produced from this community and others, especially ecommerce type startups. more fat wallets as acquirers = goodness all around for hacker news and friends. just sayin.
The backend system is written in python using tornado (which is absolutely amazing to work with). I also pushed a lot of logic to the client (jquery).
A Vacation from Technology
True, we don't have all the data, but we do know that those two bush birds are already producing millions of dollars in profit a week.
It has surprisingly bad reviews on the App store - enough to put me off even though I want something like this and my threshold for just trying stuff is usually quite low.

Also, although I'd rather it was a universal app, having to pay twice is not fatal, but not being able to prototype iPhone apps on the iPad seems like a pretty weird and artificial limitation.
Check out http://www.boonex.com, they have a pretty much real time forum.
Supposedly Google is already there, although I suspect it's more like offering than demanding. 6% of Internet traffic is from Google, and you can either pay someone to send that to you or you can receive it directly from Google without payment. Note that Google is not really getting anything for free since they have to carry the traffic over the GBone to each ISP.
Groupon has just missed their bebo moment.
Craigslist doesn't innovate. It's full of spam and scams. It's not that convenient to use. They are only alive because they are popular, not because they are good.
Here's a real holy grail of software engineering that might actually be attainable without getting Strong AI.

Significant code reuse without using a lot of hacks. I think Lisp and Ruby made great strides towards this, but I don't think we're quite there yet.
I can't stress how fantastic it is being free from the chains of handcrafted levels. You can really iterate and refine the core mechanics all the way up to end of production. It's liberating!

For some genres interesting levels are a must though. My own current project is looking at how to generate platformer levels that are both interesting and possible to beat. I've got a pretty powerful algorithm up and running, with a pre-trailer up at http://www.pwnee.com
Provably secure, stable, error free code.
I did, actually, which is why I no longer trust my own opinion on these things.
Wearing Juicy Couture Necklaces
Something smells fishy here.

Fr something that has allegedly sold more than 1M units, I soulve seen at least one in the wild (in NYC). It did nt take long iPads to appear.

Who exactly is buying these?

Frankly I think if anything Samsing has shipped 1M units, which of course means something entirely different.
You can also find continuation-based web frameworks in Common Lisp and Scheme.

http://common-lisp.net/project/cl-weblocks/

http://common-lisp.net/project/ucw/

http://docs.racket-lang.org/web-server/
Evan Doll is the bomb! This is how I learned too.
Wikileaks "takedown" fiasco underscores pathetic state of Internet "journalism"
I'm looking into integrating twitter in the near future but I figured I would launch my mvp for now and get some feedback.
On the surface, Groupon probably is not that bad of a deal for businesses compared to the cost of acquiring customers through local advertising. The problem is that businesses get a bunch of customers who buy once, and go away.

That's not a great value proposition for every business, but you would be surprised how many local businesses would take these deals any day of the week. Groupon will find its sustainable niche of businesses to work with, the bigger question is whether consumers will continue to flock to those particular deals.
I would think that it would make a terrible super-yacht. The interior would have to be completely redone, and I think the average fuel consumption for a non-nuclear powered aircraft carrier is ~ 6 inches/gallon.

The only appeal of an aircraft carrier from a usability perspective is it's intended purpose of landing aircraft (otherwise you'd be much better off with a cruiser); so unless you are planning on landing aircraft (and have both the necessary crew and an aircraft capable of a carrier landing), it's sort of silly.
Weird. I still go to Craigslist for local listings and jobs. Is this just FUD?
I remember watching this with my family a long time ago. Always interesting to see what people will come up with. In the later years it really started converging to a few solutions, but it was always nice to see the really out of the box designs succeed or fail.
FTFA: "Let an ultraintelligent machine be defined as a machine that can far surpass all the intellectual activities of any any man however clever"
Have you looked at http://www.ninjapost.com/ ?
I hope Chrome OS has an option to swap ctrl and search.
Or more like 35-40 from what I've head, seen and experienced.

In my case, I was able to unintentionally run a bit of an experiment: starting around 35 or so I found it harder and harder to get work ... until I scrubbed my resume of all evidence of my age, which worked since I don't look my age and generally remembered to not talk about programming PDP-11s in interviews ^_^.

I did this in the middle of a job hunt and the change in responses was remarkable.
Well, I made a new cloud computing platform using my new federated REST database and my new message queue and my new Subversion sharding layer and my new unit testing library, all in a language I didn't know when I started. Then I made a web site and management console for it that runs on it. And a network API and a command-line tool because you need those.
Given your response, you might be surprised at the number of angel (or even Series A) investments made almost exclusively on the basis of the individuals involved, sans any tangible product or traction.

The thing that holds Kickstarter projects together is putting one's own credibility on the line. The people who pledge, understand that it would not be worth me publicly destroying my reputation for $2000. And since I haven't solicited pledges above $64, I would argue that I'm taking on a much greater risk than any individual contributor.

I view Kickstarter primarily as a tool for customer discovery, to gauge whether a project is worth my time. It has the added benefit of building momentum behind the project by creating a small army of people who are, quite literally, invested in it.

There are probably other names for this process, but I like to call it IDD: icon-driven development.
Bill Maher is my hero. Sorry if my swearing offended you, but it's just who I am.
"Craigslist", not "Craiglist".
The small part of me that was mildly curious about Chrome OS when it was announced has been completely absorbed into the remaining part that sees no use case for it.

I hope I'm wrong though.
It's a classified service it only works if there are lots of people using it. Popular is Good in that niche.
I'm afraid you've confused a language with a particular virtual machine that runs it. That's like criticizing CSS because Internet Explorer implements it badly. The article proves nothing other than one particular JavaScript VM isn't as efficient as Erlang, not exactly a big surprise considering that's not what the VM was written for.
Good point. You could use it for unmanned drones.
Hmm, good point. That makes sense.
I'd say so. It's all I ever use for buying/selling. Already had two big hits for xmas presents.

I haven't even heard of the other ones listed in the article.
Its the kind of thing you buy just so you can say you have one. Probably one of the more unique chat up lines.
Considering how much more popular the Galaxy S Phone is in Korea than outside of it, it's entirely possible that the Galaxy Tab is similarly popular there.

I suspect that's true, as you can't presently buy the Wifi only version in the U.S. (but apparently you can elsewhere).
Why Hiring Is Like Playing Blackjack
Secure authentication over plain HTTP.
Actually, the bulk of those limitations are a thing of the past:

http://googleappengine.blogspot.com/2010/12/happy-holidays-f...
Not to mention the engines are removed and the pumps and other equipment is considered "generally unserviceable"
Actually that could be super cool. You could have your own fleet of unmanned drones able to do your bidding on a global scale.
I'm on lecture 11 of the Standard CS193P (Fall 2010) series and loving it. I watched lectures 1-8 in a row over a few days while testing out the examples and changing a few small things to get the hang of Objective-C. Then I took a week off to play around with the UI viewcontrollers and built a skeleton of my app: http://www.chir.ag/ktype/research:articles:progress_20101116

Now I'm back to watching the video lectures and learning how to use Core Data, Persistence etc. so I can actually make my app functional. In my particular case, I will end up using almost everything (OpenGL ES2, CoreAudio, Core Data, Gestures, GameKit) so I'm really glad this course exists. I tried learning Core Data on my own through online tutorials and it made no sense. I'm barely into the lecture but it already makes so much sense. The lecturer is very straight-forward, barely makes any mistakes (I love spotting those), and does not bore me. He also goes over many small gotchas, minor differences (nil vs. null), and best-practices.

I plan on catching up to the latest lectures over the next few days and then jumping right into coding up my app.
If they are pulling in $2billion a year as the stories are saying, $6B is nearly chump change. Plus it keeps the humans involved in Groupon rather than Google trying to replace it with algorithms.
The Biology of Perception - Why DNA is not the brain of the cell
Except if you did manage to think of a use for a fleet of unmanned drones you wouldn't need an aircraft carrier to launch them anyway. A field would be just as good.
> And you can build applications that run on OS X and Linux with VS.

It would be every bit as pretty as driving a train over a road...

VS is a space shuttle. Very complex, very impressive and with a very limited usage. To its credit and unlike the shuttle, it can do one thing very well.

It all depends on your priorities. If all you do is write Windows software, VS is the best. If what you do is web apps that will run on Unix-like servers on platforms like J2EE, Django, Rails, Flask or anything like it, you can tweak it until it becomes barely usable. Of course, only as long as you conform yourself to running your workstation on an environment profoundly different from what the app will run on production.

Priorities matter. I wouldn't use a Formula 1 race car to launch a satellite, regardless of how much they are impressive vehicles. Compared to what it takes to launch a satellite, they are, really, quite unimpressive.
You seem to be implying that this wikipedia page states that "begging the question" is improper English.

It's not.

From the page itself: "Some usage commentators deem such usage incorrect".
Angry Birds On Android Projected To Generate $1 Million Per Month In Advertising
Probably a wise move if you're making $0.5 billion/year 2 years after inception. They should be careful though, they don't have the kind of lock-in that many big Internet companies do. You could easily compete with them.
They did Unix in the 70s; C was pretty nice then too.
Naturally, but we do need to keep the distinction.
And this isn't one of them!
Since we're all bragging, I finished my MSCS at Stanford with over a 4.0 GPA, wrote a game that was a finalist in the CS248 competition, had my first paper published, TAed CS210, launched my startup, learned Django and CoffeeScript and JavaScript, wrote a charting library in CS/Raphael, started learning how to be someone's boss, and moved across the country and forced myself to make friends. All in all I feel good about the year.
10 years ago Julian Assange was doing cryptography in OCaml
If it is over a year old most likely there are a ton of people who haven't seen it, and those who have may not remember it completely.
I feel Groupon has had great success so far due to the economy.

Businesses are looking to make any kind of money while consumers are looking to save as much as possible. Groupon offers this to both users.

I spoke to a family friend that owns a restaurant and ran a Groupon offer, they are less than pleased with how it turned out. Never have they seen so many "customers" come in and not leave tips for their waiter/waitress and none are repeat customers.
> shows off that C#/.NET done in a proper way is a very platform.

I could agree C#/.NET is a very platform, if I could understand what that means.

With lots of work and a talented team like SO's you can do a lot of extraordinary things done. The fact that SO stands apart as "C#/,NET done right" shows how much work it is to build a website on that stack.

Not everybody needs to be a Facebook.
Odd, it works fine on my Firefox 3.6.2 on Vista.

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.0; en-US; rv:1.9.2.2) Gecko/20100316 Firefox/3.6.2 (.NET CLR 3.5.30729)

It's also using all four cores on an 2.4GHz Intel Q6600 and only hitting 25-30% CPU which is not bad IMO.
Also, the only aircraft this thing can actually handle are Harriers and helicopters. And nobody will sell you a Harrier. So all you've got is a yacht with an oversized helipad, which is no better than any other billionaire.
> Forums just kind of need a revamping!

That's absolutely true, I was happy after punbb appeared and later vanilla, but I know how hard it's to make even simple updates when you have a big community. I help run a 7yr old huge automotive forum and even a phpbb2->3 upgrade caused riots, I have no idea what happens when someone would switch a huge community from bb or invision to an exotic platform :)
Chart of the day: U.S. corporate tax revenues
I have visions of _Snow Crash_ running through my head.
Horizontal Gauge Block,Measuring Block, Measurement Tools
Oracle Launches Sparc Super Cluster
Oh I always know why I'm being downgraded. During whiteboard coding sessions, I often need hints. But given these hints, I get to the answer most of the time. In this economy, everyone is looking for "A" players. My blog post says that. "Today’s interviews seem heavily geared toward software engineers who rarely need to look stuff up. Those who code at an alarmingly rapid rate, who get complex code compiled and running the first time around.". So sorry, but this does not describe me. Nor does it describe the majority of good programmers out there ! But interviews do seem to screen for these whiz kids. Joel Spolsky said it right -- top notch "A" player software engineers don't apply for jobs. They don't need to. Jobs find them. But does this mean that B or B+ players are utterly worthless and unemployable ?
I recall a study which found that among the IT community only 3% of males make unvanted advances to women

You're missing some important numbers. How many made wanted advances?
You can create a C Corp with legalzoom. That said, at my last company we incorporated in delaware with the Company Corporation and had to spend about $10k when we raised our series a on restructuring all that and documenting things.
I am using all CPU's on Firfox. I suspect it's more of a codec issue.
Ghost Diagrams (tile pattern generator in Javascript/SVG)
See also "xv6" (http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/6.828/2010/xv6-book/index.html), (roughly) a reimplementation of v6 UNIX for SMP x86 used by MIT's operating systems class.

They're even writing their own version of Lions' Commentary for it.
Mystery meat is never gorgeous.