skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The Product Guy's Weekend Reading (June 20, 2008)
More efficient? Citation needed...
When will they move beyond C/C++?
How widely are those deployed? Can you get away with ignoring submissions from servers that don't have them set up?
I personally think that this is one of the dumbest ideas for a debate in a long time. There are so many other venues for debate. I assume that this is in an attempt to get 'young people' to gain some insight into politics, but all that we are going to get is well formulated responses from each candidates representatives. Unlike an actual debate the nominees will be able to take several minutes to compose their answers and check against previous statements and their advisers.
making predictions is a notoriously tricky business

Was it too tricky for a physicist like Lord Kelvin, the founder of Thermodynamics, to see that birds are heavier than air?

Was it too tricky for Edison to see that direct current loses the battle at long distances (because of resistance issues)?

How about Einstein rejecting the possibility of using nuclear power 10 years before he started working on just that?

Aren't these examples of narrow-mindedness of these people, who otherwise invented great stuff?
>"All programs are pretty obvious. Algorithms, not so much."

How do you expect anyone to respond to something like that? Are you suggesting programs are not algorithms? Can you point to an authoritative reference explaining the difference?

I gave my informed opinion on patents, unfortunately this site is turning into reddit just like reddit turned into digg.
Seems fine to me. No lag, search is snappy.
Is Php.net down?
That robber is definitely not stressed.
I suppose he wasn't talking to Google.

Anyway, not everything can be solved in 90 days.
As I understand it, the problem is that the web server stores the user session state in continuations, and old continuations need to be discarded regularly to keep the server from filling up. The error appears when the user tries to do something that requires a continuation that has already been discarded.

The easiest solution, then, is to simply increase the length of time that the continuations are held -- hence increasing the number of continuations held at once. If this were as simple as changing a number somewhere, I assume PG would have already done it. Hence it is likely that the server is already retaining as many continuations as it can at any one time, expiring them as it goes.

So the obvious solutions are: Get a heftier web server; rewrite mzscheme's continuations to take less resources; or rewrite HN to not use continuations. The first cannot be done with source code alone, the second has yet to be accomplished by Scheme's brightest minds, and the third is unlikely to appeal to PG.

(Edit: Not that I want to discourage anyone from improving Scheme, arc, or HN... just pointing out that the solution is harder than a simple bug fix.)
This suck, somebody should fix it, i would do it if i wasn't a web dev rookie and a lazy incompetent fool. So that just leaves us with all the other smart people here. Any ideas?
Being able to program against multiple cores/processors/machines is one of the biggest "unsolved" problems facing us right now.

It's not much of a problem if you use correctly use multithreading. See also: Erlang
No. I tried it now. It is still getting scribd.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=223195
Umm, exactly how is this not being handled properly? I've just tested this locally and it works exactly like its supposed to.
Inflation In One Page
Music for the HN YC community - Mugasha
If you want your app to run on majority of cell phones out there J2ME (Java 2 Micro Edition) is currently your best bet. It may not be as feature rich as IPhone SDK or Google Android but it is probably the most ubiquitous platform for cell phones today. You can download a free WTK (Wireless Tool Kit) from java.sun.com and there are good tutorials on the same site for J2ME beginers.

One thing to remember is if you make use of any of the even a little bit fancy functionality of the cell phone through J2ME (SMS send/receive, Phone book integration or location based services) your app probably won't work on real handset outside the emulator - at least in US. All cell phone carriers here are control freaks and they have turned off all those permissions for any "not officially blessed" third party app. This is the main reason for the lack of any worthwhile mobile applications in the first place!
Could anyone elaborate on which sections of code weren't open sourced originally? That'd be interesting to hear.
"I'm not a biochemist, but I understood that protein folding actually has immediate application in understanding disease and drug design....what problems in compiler optimization make it a thousand times more useful than protein folding and associated medical problems?"

Short answer:

Compilers are used for real work, every day. Nobody is using protein structure prediction for anything practical, and they likely won't be for decades more. At this point, it's blue-sky research.

Long answer:

"Immediate application" is one of those bits of academic-speak that really means "is related to", but sounds better to grant review boards. While it's true that protein folding is important (after all, most biological processes are mediated by folded proteins), it's not true that protein structure prediction is important. It would be great if we could predict protein structures accurately, but we can't, and until we can, it's not a practically useful discipline.

Even the very best, crystallographically determined protein structures are barely sufficient to do rational drug design, and predicted structures don't come close to that level of quality. For example: we can sometimes (very rarely) predict very small (<150 residue) protein structures to within 1 angstrom RMSD of their experimentally determined shapes (i.e. >2 angstrom resolution, in the best case). However, the interactions important to drug binding, protein design, etc., don't start until a tenth of that (scales of ~0.1 angstrom).

Throw in the fact that the vast majority of proteins are much larger than 150 angstroms, and that we keep creating cheaper, faster, more automated ways of getting actual experimental information on structure, and the role of protein structure prediction looks increasingly marginalized. It's definitely a cool, fun problem -- just not a very practical one.

For whatever it's worth, my first papers were on applying the state-of-the-art method (you've heard of it...I think you're paraphrasing the lab's PR) for protein structure prediction to genome annotation. To call the approach useful was/is a stretch, and that's for a much easier application than drug design (in fact, we were trying to find a practical application for protein structure prediction, and it was the most likely thing we could think of!)
"You miss the point [avi] files don't need a common platform. IT IS a common platform. [avi] is ubiquitous and full featured, there's no need to change file format in order to share it.
The author's arguments is if [youtube] is a service to host files then do it - host the files, don't convert them to an inferior format. Heck instead of [flv] why not just convert them to [mpeg2] to begin with and save the intermediary.

See how ridiculous that sounds?

Also, Scribd doesn't just host pdf files, they host others too. If you had to write software to translate multiple source languages to one language, would you compile down to a language you control every aspect of (ipaper) or one you do not control (pdf)?
I think this is an excellent article, the point about seeking confirmation instead of the truth strikes a chord for me. It seems like you can boil a lot of this down to making sure you don't lose touch with reality and focus on making a profit.
Inconsistent (or lack of) coding style. Yes, I'm serious.

A lack of coding style doesn't just make it hard to read code; it is indicative of the mindset of the author. It speaks of being sloppy; of not caring; and of not expecting people to read the code. (It also tends to be an indication that the code was revised many times without any clear vision; but that's a secondary point.)

The author of this article writes " If I ask a real estate broker about a house, his first reaction should not be his opinion on the quality of the paint, because that is not going to help me as a prospective buyer. I can easily have someone else repaint my house, but I cannot easily change its foundation. " Maybe he takes a different view, but if I turned up to look at a house and saw paint peeling off the sides, I'd probably drive away without even looking inside -- not because I care about the paint, but because I care about the general neglect which the paint indicates.

I don't care what style you use; but if you don't care enough to have any style at all, odds are that the foundation isn't very solid either.
Google Trends Launches - Apparently I’m Techmeme’s 3rd Most Overlapped Site? (No Way!)
You will be promoted to "web dev advanced" if you fix it. The best way to learn is by breaking and fixing (or fixing broken things)
Wait I see what you did there.

Awesome you waited all this time to comment on a post, just to not argue the authors point? I read the article it never seemed to argue the point of the service its whole point was about the necessity of changing file formats. Nice Red Herring, you're even getting points for it.
Using PLT Scheme for Game Development
"if you use correctly use multithreading" Good luck doing that 100% of the time!

As for Erlang, I'm pretty sure it wasn't meant for numerical calculations, and since it's interpreter, it can't really be used for all real-time apps. Although it's process model is novel, the implementation might not be perfect for everything right now. Correct me if I'm wrong on this (which I might well be, since I have not spent too much time writing Erlang code.)

I think what the parent meant is that writing multithreaded programs easily and quickly (not to mention bug-free) is hard, hard enough to be called a problem.
In the Sun release in May of last year, it was something like 4-5% of the code and most of it had to do with graphics stuff: font & image rasterizing, etc. which makes sense. I think that's why most of the developers didn't care much one way or the other.
Look's like it's down, or something.

http://downforeveryoneorjustme.com
Google Website Trends
Google has added website traffic comparison to Google Trends. No blog links, just the direct link.
tell them that IE6 is a virus, you wouldn't be liying
I'm a heavy scribd user and i think that is great to share documents, you can create groups and start discussions, find similar books and people that share your tastes.

You can't do that with acrobar reader.
How to start a company while on a visa in the US
Summary:

(1) People, people, people

"Most of our competitors were very poorly run," he tells Fiona Bruce, for The Money Programme.

"They did not understand how to bring in people with business experience and people with engineering experience and put them together."

Klunder says it was Mr Gates' ability to understand the business as well as the technical side that gave Microsoft the edge.

(2) Importance of product iteration

"Most of our competitors were one-product wonders"

(3) Making your venture relevant

"She says of Microsoft that "because they were the operating system, everyone else in the industry had to deal with them".

"Microsoft's clout was, by this argument, unavoidable."
Foxit works with ie6. Foxit works with windows 95 systems. It just works. Seriously, save yourself a lot of pain and install foxit on every windows box you possibly can.
There's a big difference between "System and apparatus to display 'hello world'", and say an encryption algorithm.

Yes it's a blurred line, but I'd say most programs are todo lists, rather than complex algorithms of scientific merit.

For example, say the software that runs facebook - that's pretty much going to be 'grunt work' - lots of building blocks, shoved together, to make something work.

But a compression algorithm, has more of a basis in mathematics entropy etc.

My sincere apologies if this once again disappoints your view of what comments on hacker news should be.

(I have several software patents, but I firmly believe they are a terrible idea).
I think it's caused by people posting questions without searching for the answer first.

This has been addressed repeatedly already.
That is a fallacy. (Several, actually: irrelevant conclusion, affirming the consequent, etc.) Man, I miss the old Hacker News crowd. They would never let you get away with making fluff statements that prove nothing.
No, you can't do that with acrobat reader, but you can do that with this fancy thing we call "the web". You can even create a site in which users can submit documents they would like to share with other people so that the group can discuss the contents of the documents; the documents themselves can stay in their native pdf format and remain hosted on the authors site. Alternatively, you can decide to annoy your users by filtering attempts to share such documents through another site you are trying to pimp...
I know. This guy is way too comfortable.
Disclaimer: I haven't looked at the source yet.

My particular example was for browsing the thread list. Let's s/continuation/browse context/. You can generate exactly one browse continuation a minute, and hand that one out to everyone who visits the page during that minute. It contains the effective state for that continuation. So it's a little out of date... big deal.

Let's say a browse context is 1 kilobyte (which can fit a list of several hundred IDs and scores). With 1 gigabyte of RAM, you can store 1.9 years worth of browse contexts.
EBay Tries to Buy a Little More Love from Sellers
It seemed like a conflict of interest of sorts for you to be pointing out Facebook's trademark troubles, when you were the one causing them, without disclosing that.

Sorry if I was (and still am...) a bit harsh, but from where I stand it seems like you're another bitter Facebook competitor. You and ConnectU and Zuckerberg may have had similar ideas around the same time, but Zuckerberg executed it successfully, and I don't think that means you're entitled to anything.

As far as generic trademarks go, what about trademarks like "Apple"? It's also worth noting I had never really heard the term "face book" before thefacebook.com; it seems like it was mostly a Harvard thing)
pdf : http://www.fee.org/pdf/the-freeman/hazlitt1104e.pdf
Ouch.

Explain my hypothetical case to me using the constructs of this "article".

1. I sell widgets. My factory can make 1000 a month.

2. On Tuesday, I sell 100 widgets at $1 each.

3. On Wednesday, my widgets are featured on the news.

4. On Thursday, I sell 800.

5. I realize that I'm going to need more widgets! I decide to start selling them for $2 to cut demand a little, and to profit a little.

This is a demonstration of inflation, yet it has absolutely nothing to do with the money supply, but everything to do with the demand for my widget. For macro-sizing, see: oil.

Here's a better one-page explanation of inflation:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inflation
Businesses that make $180MM profit in 9 months from a $10MM investment:

- Terrorism

- Ransoming the children of a business tycoon

- A web 2.0 youtube-like social network mashup
I think his question is how this might be interesting to the technical crowd versus the general population of the internet.
Comments. I've gotten used to dealing with (and refactoring) sub par code and bad architecture, but I'll never get used to comments saying things like "add one to x".
WebMynd and Heroku Hosting Giant Robot Building in Dolores Park for FireFox 3 Launch
Some of the things and people you may see at the event...

The construction of a giant FireFox Gran Paradiso Robot
Cryogenic Liquid Nitrogen icecream making
Trevor Blackwell and Anybots robots in the wild
Kite flying
General picnic activities
Free food and drink (but all are encouraged to bring extra)
Speaking for myself, I don't really think the story is about a bad pitch. Business is business, you sell your company any way you like, and people buy or they don't buy. We may laugh at the false bravado, but we are probably laughing at the hard-sell penny stock promoters while they are making millions.

Any way, I think this story is really about how to burn a referral source. IMO, if you are approaching a VC directly, you use any pitch you want and I say good for you. But if I refer you to a VC, I want you to think very hard about what your pitch says about ME before you make it.

I think that is a very serious matter, and that is the issue I have with the anonymized founders in the story. They clearly did not consider what their referral source would have to say about being associated with their pitch.
Firefox 3: Tweak the AwesomeBar's Suggestion Algorithm
Hmmm, let me get this straight. The author wants a service that allows developers to quickly and programatically convert proprietary format documents (MS Office, etc) to standard easily viewable formats (pdf, flash) for FREE to 'die' because he has somehow missed the obvious text-selection tool in iPaper (even same icon as Adobe uses)

No, the author wants a service that converts from open and easily readable formats like HTML, Office and PDF into hard-to-use junk format of Flash, partly because it doesn't do select/copy/paste via browser and re-implements the wheel in process and he wants it to die because it's a fucking pain whenever someone sends you a link to THAT as opposed to a normal HTML page or a more consumable PDF/doc/etc.

They should have written a high-quality converter of "everything-to-HTML". I haven't seen a single Scribd "document" that couldn't benefit from being a normal HTML.

I don't touch Scribd links. Reading text in Flash it's not convenient, it's slow and plain moronic: it's like filming a video of a page and uploading it to youtube (analogy not mine).

Yes, I want them to die too, because I see Flash as a proprietary and badly implemented anchor that's pulling us back, into "platform" days, when instead of developing software for people you had to "target a platform". I want no freaking "platforms" from nobody.

I am happy Apple doesn't put this plague on their phone.

There are startups that change the world, make it better. Then there are those that simply make money without doing anything impressive, just helping people out here and there. But then there are companies that try to profit at someone else's expense, and Scribd is one of them - Scribd is clearly in Adobe's army of flash developers, and they're looking to ruin the web for all of us, because they're imposing "Adobe tax" on everything web-connected: crawlers need to understand that junk, new hardware needs to have a "player" for it, new browsers, new OS'es, etc.

Fuck Scribd.
This should be a lot of fun. Liquid Nitrogen icecream making and lots of YC folk and Mozilla luminaries. Come ready to make a giant robot!
Oh, boy. I get to be cantankerous again.

>While 40W may be small compared with the bigger picture, it is still energy that is completely wasted

The bigger picture is all that ever matters when we're discussing fungible goods such as power. The concept of an "order of magnitude" is fundamental to engineering discussions. 40W is just not significant when talking about the power consumption of an average American. Because of this, when you multiply 40W times the number of Americans and compare it to the total power used by all Americans, it is still insignificant on the important scale. It does not matter that if we all unplugged our TV sets when we're not watching them that we'd save enough electricity to power 10k households, because 10k households is insignificant when compared to the number of households in America.

>and Americans just got a lot more exercise from getting up from the couch and walking to the TV.

No, they didn't. A lot of Americans just got a tiny bit of exercise each. They're still all fat and out of shape (1). You're playing with the third decimal place here, or worse.

>Again, this is an issue that should be solved with better product design.

Due attention to the concept of orders of magnitude directs us to work on the things that matter, not the things that are marginal. This helps us overcome the all-too-natural urge to moralize over every trivial action. In point of fact, this issue _should_not_ be solved with better product design if that effort is better spent on things that really matter. If you could decrease power transmission losses by 50% over high tension lines, for example, you'd swamp the contribution of eliminating appliance standby power consumption many times over (I would guess).

Finally, this principle effects every aspect of one's life and is probably a very good indicator of the kind of person who would succeed in a startup environment. If the "We Must Do Everything We Can" principle invades you or your startup, you will be doomed to failure. You will not have a reliable way to sort out the important from the unimportant, the central from the peripheral, nor the vital from the irrelevant. You cannot afford to be fiddle-f@#king with trivial layout issues when you really need to be getting a product out the door, for example.

(1)This is just a bit of rhetorical license. Not all Americans are fat, nor out of shape.
(It's a girl).

Apparently the alleged burglar was a neighbor, and may have known that the home-owner would be out for a few hours, since he was having an operation that morning.
I'd like to see nicknames anonymized on submissions and comments until you vote them up or down. This would make votes count more on the merit of what they are saying than who is saying them.
Oh, yeah. Sarcasm detector. That's a real useful invention.
Bootstrappers Beware
I'm perfectly willing to back up my statements.

The general problem we're looking at is that fnid's (and the accompanying closures) are manufactured all over the place, and most of them don't need to stay around for very long.

However, there are some of these--in particular the ones created for sending a comment to be posted in a thread--that probably deserve a guaranteed lifetime on the order of hours, not minutes. Putting them into a different fnid queue is what I'd call a relatively easy fix, and that'd handle 95% of the complaints about expired links.

The other 5% are due to trying to reply to comment for a thread you opened a while back. I actually don't know why that's even coded the way it is. The reply link could easily just refer back to the post id instead of an fnid.

edit: I would probably be willing to fix this stuff myself, but as of late it seems pg's not been paying that much attention to news.yc. Also, last time I threw up a patch, I got burned pretty bad.
Could you write old continuations to disk? That way older continuations would take longer to resurrect, because they would come from disk, but at least they would still be around. You could probably store them for a few days before expiring them from the disk cache.

I guess this could totally thrash performance by causing a lot of disk I/O, but I have no sense of how likely this is. If you had some statistics about the rate of continuation-cache misses and how often cache evictions occur, you could probably get a good idea whether it's feasible.
Everyone is doing it, go on and do it too!
Internap anyone?
One of our clients is interested in speaking with internap customers & users. You can see their complete listing here:

http://tinyurl.com/5r5s83

Easy way to make a couple bucks. Respond here if you have any questions or concerns. Sorry for the spammy spam.
Note to readers: this is a patent application, not an issued patent.
Cray has also developed a new language for parallel programming http://chapel.cs.washington.edu/