skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I would argue that concurrent programming is something new. If you have 2 processors, then the worst thing that can happen is you get 50% of the machine's power per application - and if you have other processes running, they can use the other processor. In practice, on a dual-processor machine, you can completely ignore concurrency and often still get excellent performance for the majority of users, just by letting the OS worry about it for you. Particularly in the case where there is one long-running task in the background and one interactive task in the foreground, the user will get the best experience possible with no extra effort on the programmer.

The difference now is that with 32-cores (on the Sun T2000 for example) or more, unless you have a very easily partitioned workload (e.g. serving simple web pages), if you don't think about concurrency up front, your app will suck. With 32 cores, naive approaches to locking will rapidly drag performance into the mud. Working on massively multicore kit if you need a single task to dominate the system is a hard problem. Things are about to get interesting...
Thanks for that link, I don't think I'd have seen that story if not for your submission.

For the last year and a half I've been reading everything I can get my hands on that Seymour wrote. (Some of his more technical books are out of print and hard to find. Amazon tried for about 6 weeks to find his book with Idit Harel for me, but came up empty.) I didn't know that he was in the middle of a new one when the accident occurred. The possibility that his new, unfinished book is trapped inside his head, incommunicable to the rest of us, is a sad irony.
What about occasionally duplicating effort in order to run a test? It seems possible the information gleaned from the test could outweigh the cost of duplication of effort.
Except in reality, it doesn't. In reality, an eye for an eye is a very good strategy, with examples ranging from biology to military history to the results of iterated prisoner's dilemma tournaments played by computer programs.
Just wanted to point out. You and your brother cannot possibly have had the same stimuli. You were his elder brother (say) and he was younger to you. People sometimes resist each others ideas. My friend took to piano lessons because his brother hated it. Sibling rivalry factors ever so little especially at the early stages of growth, and it tips everything later on.
When I'm searching for a solution to a problem, I often have to click through to several results before finding it (assuming I find it at all). In that case, clicking through is not an endorsement; clicking through and then not clicking anywhere else might be, but it might mean I've given up, or it might mean I opened several results at once and found the solution in any one of them.

It might be more accurate in other search domains though.
To be honest, I still don't get it. He says, "Such and such will help you understand closures" and then a few lines of python, then suddenly, "because start_pos is a closure".

Which, really, still doesn't explain what he means. That and for the love of god, I hate things such as Clojure. Call me a stick in the mud, but I like languages in which I don't have to mentally expand 80% of words.
looks a lot like citeulike.org
Postgres-R source code release
Closures and objects are equivalent (featuring a nice koan)
obligatory: http://www.phdcomics.com/comics.php?f=1040
I guess the "Turing" part of the name was a bit hopeful. Are the attacks actually doing OCR, or are they brute-forced against a database somehow? (or maybe those are the same thing these days?)

I guess anything that's widespread enough will make cracking it valuable enough to get someone to work around it, but it seems like we could probably come up with something that was quite a lot more human-y requiring?

Language understanding? Whatever it is that AI PHD students are failing to solve these days?
I hope so. Magic quotes are evil.
The Clang Static Analyzer
Why are lawmakers pondering this problem? Its none of their business.
Articles that always seem to bubble up on HN:

1. Paul Graham was wrong in that essay, and also he's an idiot.

2. Anything by Jeff Atwood

3. Jeff Atwood was wrong in that blog post, and also he's an idiot.

4. How I made my startup (succeed|fail) by working 114 hours a day and eating only cardboard and pocket lint.

4a. How we built a web app in 4 minutes for only $0.37

5. Being a (programmer|hacker|founder) is teh awesome.

Not saying that all the articles are on those subjects, but they are HN gold, that's for sure. If you could somehow work some of these topics in to your question, it might do better.
I get what you're saying. But I think "screen_name" is used here to indicate the IM links that some sites let users put on their profile. They then create the little ymsgr:sendIM?user_name hyperlinks so that you can IM that person.

So, that IS actually something that would go on the profile page, right with the phone number.

I'd always heard that normalization should only be done at sane data boundaries. IE, if you have a bunch of fields that always go together, they should be in the same table.
Well, I don't think that's necessarily true.

Writers and musicians: have you been reading the internet at all lately?

Doctors, lawyers: these activities necessarily involve working on/with someone and involve a massive amount of trust due to the amount of responsibility involved. This is why there are necessary qualifications before you can call yourself a doctor or a lawyer. Once you have those qualifications, it's not so hard to find someone to pay you for it, although even then people do it for free. (aid work, pro bono legal work)

Carpenters: you're way off. I know fully trained carpenters whose main job is something else and they do carpentry in their spare time. Don't forget the results of that labour aren't as readily duplicated as anything in purely digital form, so visibility isn't going to be anywhere near as high. You can't just upload that chair to WoodForge.

Chemists (or any "hard" science): uhhh, grad school?

MBA: yeah, you got me on that one :)
Is Social Media The Ultimate Buzz Kill?
Still fails to address the proxying of captcha's off to be solved by unsuspecting people.
* setup porn/warez site
* proxy captcha's from the target site to the porn/warez site
* let real users solve the captchas for you.
Hundreds of manhole covers disappear
This is relevant for context: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manhole_cover_theft
Eh, it's an attempt, but that is all.
Start-up Journeys - Join the experience
Then I might suggest subscribing to the New York Times. Can the rest of us keep our Hacker News feed?
The thing with screen_name was just an example of how normalizing could help with speed. It wasn't meant to be definitive. Plus for the profile page you could just get the data from that other server.

>I'd always heard that normalization should only be done at sane data boundaries. IE, if you have a bunch of fields that always go together, they should be in the same table.

No, not exactly. It's too big of a subject to explain in a post like this, plus there is tons of text on it if you search.

But, basically normalization removes duplicated data from the database. It's also used to allow multiple X to exist for a single Y without having columns like X_1, X_2, X_3, etc. And finally it's used to show relationships between things.

There are some people will will simply split a table into two tables along logical boundaries (but still, just one row in each table). This is not normalization. It can be done if some data is accessed rarely, or because the database can not handle such a big table, but it's not because of normalization.
Also, I think the Get Well, Seymour! page [http://papert.media.mit.edu/] is a pretty awesome gesture from his Media Lab friends.
>Can the rest of us keep our Hacker News feed?

The Hacker News RSS feed is in the same place it has always been.
Uhm, the point was that this isn't hacker news.
Mulling Over Our Ruby On Rails Full Text Search Options
I understood your point. I disagree with you because this isn't Hacker News for you. The main Hacker News page is never going to be 30 perfect stories for every single hacker in the world because it isn't a customized page so it can't be perfectly individualized. Hackers like different stories. More than 50 people liked this. Hacking doesn't have to be in python. The hacking Mr. Mortenson is doing is incredibly noble.

Why do you find this story to be so objectionable?

From the guidelines:

>Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.
rofl - best idea I've heard yet!
Apx Alarm
Unbiased reviews about the Apx Alarm home security system.
Back on Solid Ground
Doesn't at least some part of you think, "If it was so easy, it would have been done at some point in the past 15 years? There are all of these absolutely brilliant minds working on this problem - why haven't they done this before?"
Well, Google CodeJam is about to start. That's a lot of duplication of effort, that should be worth it.
It is actually nice to see a female founder and software entrepreneur. Startups need more of them.
A Paean to Scheme
Ugh. The nuclear waste metaphor is really lame.

Try this: My goal is to perform an inorder traversal of a binary search tree which stores integers. I wish to multiply each value in the tree by its index in the inorder traversal, so the min item is multiplied by zero and the maximum item by n-1.

How would you write this algorithm? In most languages, you can use mutable state as you are traversing the tree: create a variable called, say, 'i' which is multiplied by the current node, added to the current sum, and incremented after visiting each node.

In a pure functional language, you can't do this. Now imagine how you would implement it: you write a recursive function which accepts the current value of 'i', calls the left subtree, visits the node, increments i, calls the right subtree and returns the sum. But wait: you don't know how many elements were in the subtree, so each recursive call has to return the new value of i. Now you have the problem of "threading" the state of i properly through the different calls, and this is error-prone.

Monads help. You can think of a monad as passing an invisible argument to every function call, and then when that returns, doing something with it. In the case of the State monad, the invisible argument is the current state. The way it is threaded is as follows: when the previous function returns, take its state and execute the next function.

The exciting part about monads is that there are other possible threadings. The Reader monad, for instance, says the following: when the previous function returns, execute the next function. (Throw away the state.) This allows, for instance, read-only configuration data to be passed through your program without specifying it in every argument to every function that might need it. Functions can locally change the configuration data for their subfunctions, but they can't change it for their parents.

Was this helpful? I can continue, if you wish.
Lowes Coupons
Commentary on how the find the best Lowes Coupons.
> I understood your point. I disagree with you because this isn't Hacker News for you

If it gets bad enough, then eventually people will start moving on to something better, that is actually about hacker news, and not the political article du jour. This article and discussion were both extremely off topic. And it's not just any off topic, it's politics, which brings out the lowest common denominator in most forums it's introduced in. I mean, how can people vote up stuff like "The system we are part of is not the best. In fact it is arguably the worst system since the caveman era." ? Apologies to rokhayakebe, but that's not serious, interesting discussion, it's hyperbole typical of thousands of other internet forums. I would prefer to try and keep HN from becoming just like all those other forums, although perhaps it's a vain hope.
Marxist revivalists who are again predicting (or perhaps just rooting for) a collapse of world capitalism are not: (1) credible; (2) Hacker News; (3) "our friends".
Get redy
getting that into my new wepons
TI battery charger achieves faster, cooler charging in mobile phones, portable electronics
Texas Instruments introduced a 3-MHz, switch-mode battery charge management integrated circuit for portable electronics that can be charged from an adaptor or a USB port.
Sdf
dfd fdjdj
Well... we've had this discussion before, but my attitude is that politics and economics will show up here because they don't violate the guidelines and I think it's great. You think that having articles about economics and politics (which do indeed generate conversation of lower quality than the rest of the site) will inevitably pollute the rest of the site and drive away users. Right now economics and politics stories are a small percentage of stories here and I find the negative response rather annoying. If they get to be too much, PG can change the guidelines or the voting mechanism.

I'll agree that the discussion in this thread is rather mediocre and is evidence of the phenomenon you are concerned about. But I've seen great discussions about politics and economics here and I like hearing it from the perspective of the users here. I've learned things and I just don't understand why you think we'll be better off not learning about these issues from each other. It reminds me too much of a generic rule for pleasant banal conversation, "don't talk about religion or politics."

We disagree about whether such discussion about things we are less knowledgeable is inevitably bad for the site. Ultimately the answer is unknown and I would like to see the limit pushed as far as possible to make the test of not degenerating into the lowest common denominator harder. I think it can be done, though downvoting stories may have to be enabled eventually.
Making Sense Of Dichotomy
The thing is, I'm not a dog, but a person, and I am actually quite willing to listen to people I disagree with as long as they are polite and reasonable.
Payless Shoe Source Coupons
Commentary on how the find the best Payless Shoe Source Coupons.
Web Banner Design
AJ Square Inc offers excellent web banner or banner ads design. Our Design Team provides attractive flash banners, animated banners, free banner templates and free web banners.
Easier Capistrano Deployments from Github
hi reda alex
You are talking about a poor man's global load balancing :-)
It's definitely worse in some departments/fields than others. While we didn't have anything like the rotation that you mention, we were not expected to do research the first year I was in physics grad school, since we were all TA's. That's in contrast to people I knew from the EE dept., who had to have an advisor picked out before they set foot on campus and were expected to start research the first day of school.

It's my understanding that in the biosciences, it's the norm for students to do rotations of a couple weeks in every group in the department to help them pick an advisor during their first semester/year.

And if picking and advisor is like picking your parents, your research topic is definitely like an arranged marriage. You have to learn to love it...
99designs: Connecting designers from around the world
citeulike is pretty neat, thanks for the tip
stty erase ^d
I would like continuation please (pun intended :-) )
I think it is a funny irony that the leading-edge-tech-megacorp Google gets all of its revenue out of small textads that every experienced internet user ignores and only get clicked by people who mistake the advertisement block of a website for its content.
Today I was told, via spam email subject lines, that Elton John died in a rocket crash and James Brown died of a heart attack. Almost fell for it.
Things we did right: "didn't focus on internet marketing" - Things we did wrong: "didn't do enough marketing"

:/
Directory for Seniors in the USA
This must be some new method of doing boolean algebra and discrete math I'm not familiar with.
Great site for Senior Citizens in the United States. This site is a valuable resource for all seniors looking for advice on health care, insurance, pets, travel, exercise, relationships and dating, fda alerts, emergency information, and various articles covering all of the topics mentioned above.
Good for Lego, and shame on MIT.
Only 24% of Apple Retail Stores Still Have 3G iPhones
Damn fool! How will you hide when you make asinine replies to people on Y combinator in a lame attempt at humor?
Disgruntled Microsoft interviewers are the prime suspects.
"... Take the lowly subject of 'manhole covers'. The humble manhole cover reproduces many of the dilemmas of computer-security in miniature. Manhole covers are, of course, technological artifacts, access-points to our buried urban infrastructure. To the vast majority of us, manhole covers are invisible. They are also vulnerable. For many years now, the Secret Service has made a point of caulking manhole covers along all routes of the Presidential motorcade. This is, of course, to deter terrorists from leaping out of underground ambush or, more likely, planting remote-control car- smashing bombs beneath the street. ..."

I remembered this bit reading the "Hacker Crackdown" by Bruce Stirling ~ http://www.mit.edu/hacker/part3.html The caulking involved bolting the manhole covers down with a super glue adhesive to secure the thread to the bolt to the concrete & steel forming a very secure join. Anyone ever seen one of these?

You can listen to it here ~ http://www.boingboing.net/2008/01/13/podcast-of-bruce-ste.ht...
Last year I got a call from a Google recruiter. After an initial polite exchange, they wouldn't consider me at all because I never finished college. This blog article is a nice feel-good piece, but I think that their Googley advice should at least mention their actual education requirements.
SK Telecom Should Hang Up On Sprint
The Entrepreneurial Coder is cool
Gold plated computer keyboard
That's odd you should say that. OtherWeather looks rather 37 Signals. Are you planning on changing the design?
Hulu: Plenty of NBC Shows, But No Olympics
Lincoln Named Geek Capital of the North (of England)
Well look at the demographic of the HN user and the obvious becomes even more obvious.
A few years ago, before the anti-capitalism movement ran out of steam, before May Day you would see crews spot-welding manholes in the City, London's financial district. The eco-terrorists liked to tear up the cables, I suppose if they were still around today they'd be carrying (petrol-powered!) angle grinders to get at them.
Lawyers were doing pro bono work long before open source. Many firms require associates to do some. Many lawyers I know do this happily.
US faces global funding crisis, warns Merrill Lynch
So how would we say that Paul is a better programmer than John?

Too easy.

If I had a fixed priced project that had to get done ASAP, I was responsible for all maintenance out of pocket, and I could have one person work with me, whom would I pick?
Twitter Needs to Keep Shopping
Trick the mind, not the person. Symbolism may convey something you can't understand through normal conversation.
Amarok, the windows media player alternative
Me too. I found it fascinating. I also didn't read it for school, but ironically 'borrowed' one of the copies from the English class that was currently studying it.
This pattern has been repeated tens of times:

You find something new, you think you can explain everything with it, then you find out more, and realize how much you don't know.

"You don't know anything, until you know what you don't know."

In particular science and religion have bounced like this for millennia: new science arrives, everyone disses religion. The science gets better, people realize how little they actually know, religion looks good again.

And repeat, over and over.

Example, the brain: it's explained and understood, no more soul, suddenly the brain is more complicated then anyone realized, hello again soul.

The same thing happened with the atom, solar models, cosmology, pretty much every scientific breakthough. (Actually cosmology is currently at the "we know everything stage", and is just about to slip into the "world is more complicated then we realized" stage, hello again creator - watch for it.)
Perhaps he repeated himself for effect? I certainly found the repetition effective.
Amazon's MP3 Store: Tiny or Miniscule?
I agree with you, davidw.

Except we're beginning to have a new problem here at hn.

The only thing worse than threads about politics, religion, drugs, or popular culture are the comments about how they're not "hacker news".

We're starting to sound like a committee that gets together and spends most of our time writing the agenda.
Ok Here it is Guys will post a video of stuff running over the new couple of days and some of the first pics of me generating the first Video from the PIC Chip using a bunch of resistors.

http://www.videogamekits.com/CD/Blog/
Coolest 2GB ThumbDrive Ever
You missed a few:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=72463
I enjoyed my PhD right up until near the end, supervisors from my experience aren't as bad as the guy in this made out, mine were very helpful.

The only time I stopped enjoying my PhD was in my last year when I had to totally focus on one small niche and that got a bit boring.

Looking back I wouldn't recommend it unless you want to stay in academia afterwards, or if you're really interested in the tiny area you will inevitably focus on.

Anyway I submit in two weeks and the experience has shown my that I need to go commercial. Then I can enjoy playing about with whatever I like in my own time for fun!
Either way, we win!
Ask YC: What is Y Combinator's position on startups who want to focus on non-US markets?
i.e. We want to apply to the YCombinator winter program and we do not mind moving to the US for 3 months (if accepted of course) but eventually my business will be aimed at users in Asia/Australia, so we will want to move back to our home country. Will YCombinator accept such applications? TIA!
WebInno18 in Boston Last Night
Or maybe just four? :) http://www.fwfr.com/
It's much more fun to square off right vs. left and have at it.

But it's not hn.

Davidw is right, in my opinion.

Perhaps the reason we keep having this discussion is that the board continues to serve up material that we find innappropriate? That people vote based on emotion, not on whether it is good material for hackers, and political stuff has the most emotion-laden content of all?

This is a nice seque into our other favorite topic: how rating systems are broken. I'm afraid these two are highly connected.
Why Hacking Exists
The Register paints a grim future for the Tech Sector
My advisor was great for the first eight months. Then at the start of the first summer, when we were supposed to be doing research, he went to India for 4 months (and they didn't have the internet there much back then). I did some self-directed research, but mostly I golfed.