skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Would it be possible to write a proxy that converts IE6-HTML/CSS into good-HTML/CSS?

Then you could upgrade $(Initech) to IE7/Firefox, and slap the proxy between the users and the legacy web apps, and everybody's happy. When the internal developers upgrade the legacy web app, they can either keep it on the un-IE6-proxy, or upgrade its output and lose the proxy. IE6 can go away, we can stop wasting time with IE6 compatibility, everybody's happy, world peace, the end.

Disclaimer: I don't understand the nature of IE6 bugs very well at all, and I don't know if this is turing-complete or AI-complete or what.
Learning to love the one you're with is fine, however that does not necessarily lead to the type of "mind warp" he's describing.

I like JS enough to blog about it, but I confess I haven't found in it that marvelous thing that makes me see programming in a new light. So it may be that although Javascript is where you want to use your FP chops, Lisp or Ocaml is where you want to acquire them.
Are you an avid watcher of that program? If not, I suggest you take the time to watch the program a day or so before. This way you can prepare yourself for the interview style the show uses, and can see how they sign off on guests(i.e. you don't want to be seen doing something stupid as the camera zooms out).
Photrade Tips - BE SURE to CHECK and SET YOUR PRICING (Carefully)!!
You're 9 on the list btw.
I never really went through any stages, i just started using python and suing functions seemed better for some reason than using classes. Now im learning scheme and i am sort of starting to get it.
You'll laugh until people see what you're car looks like.
Without being an expert, I'm pretty sure that OCaml is more strictly functional than Erlang and Javascript, though they all support functional programming to one extent or another. With languages like Javascript and Ruby, you can program for years without really learning functional concepts. I think OCaml is the opposite; the paradigm of least resistance is functional, even though you can program in other styles (OO, imperative).

In terms of functional purity, Haskell > Lisp/Scheme/OCaml/ML > Erlang > Ruby/Javascript > Python > Java > etc.
http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/index....

Java is #1 in the industry. I'm not saying I like it but your school is just trying to make sure you can easily get a job after school.
+1. I also have resorted to the highlighting hack on many an occasion.
Not sure if it works on BlackBerry but I've used these on WiMo:

http://www.secretgeek.net/pocket_scheme.asp

http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.scheme/msg/0cde2c56...
New map IDs the core of the human brain
The point is to measure your contribution to the community. The perks are just a way to ration certain features.
Tcl came out of Berkeley, and I believe Rasmus was in Canada when he hatched PHP.
Yeah, memory handling of Ruby is severely broken. Enterprise Ruby might help you.

If you use thread-based model for handling web requests (JVM or .NET application), you won't have this problem. I think even Python processes would share most of their memory.
James Dyson Tells Us What He Thinks About The iPhone
Built for Google App Engine? I think it will kill your request if handling it takes more than 8 seconds. Not useful yet.
Did the “Enron of Norway” Pull a Fast One On Microsoft?
Psh, they could have started another project or two at the same time. Why build one app when you can build two?
Unless it costs $0.25 to grab that dime.
Government launches data mash-up
The UK government has launched a competition to find innovative ways of using the masses of data it collects.
This has been covered elsewhere, but the job of a university isn't to give you what you want. It's to give you perspective and a different way of thinking. If they teach only Java, you're missing out on a lot and you'll only be prepared for Java. On the other hand, if you're taught Haskell, Scheme, Smalltalk, Forth, C, etc. you'll (hopefully) learn how to pick up any language easily and always have a job, even when the industry-standard/popular language changes.

But anyway, no arguing about this because it's been beaten to death (and I just woke up from a nap, don't anger me! :P)
In unique stellar laboratory, Einstein's theory passes strict, new test
This answer is not super helpful, but anecdotally: this is how our product works; it's a Wiki engine running on top of Subversion that parses, stores, renders, and indexes valued "tags". We're using it right now to manage firewall rulesets; our customers document firewalls and rules in a Wiki, and to pull in relevant details from that documentation into their rulesets.

We wrote our own (in Ruby); it wasn't hard enough to do that we'd have considered outsourcing that part. So, one contribution: consider just writing it yourself.

Another contribution: this approach rocks a lot.
Yahoo web properties gets more visitors from Google Search then from Yahoo Search
You're better off going with a coat on. You don't need to wear a tie but a coat w/ dress shirt would look better in this type of situation than a shirt & tie with no coat.
How I set the Axis of Evil up on Twitter
A careful review of The Official Blog of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad with some friendly blogging tips. The writer sets Ahmadinejad up with a Twitter account!
The problem is that people who call themselves "moderates" and people who call themselves "liberals" tend to have the exact same positions, and people don't realize that.
Why doesn't Google just buy Viacom?
No, since the big hard project might require lots of money to do. Normally, money has strings attached (must be paid back, must give equity in a company with potential for liquidity, etc) which restricts what you can do. Do you think pg could have started YC w/o his ViaWeb $$? Or could tlb start AnyBots? Sure, you can work on stuff like that in your spare time, but huge projects usually require a bigger commitment than fits into spare time. Not having to sacrifice time or focus on earning money gives you a whole lot more to throw at a problem.
Naturally enough, the "New citizenships (per capita) (most recent) by country" is lead by Canada, a country with very a very open immigration policy. Likewise, Japan, which makes it very difficult for foreigners to nationalize, is near the bottom of the list.
sounds fair, given that LinkedIn recently got a $1B valuation.
Heheh. Touche
"Strawman" implies a fictional or marginal debating opponent. You may believe that burnout is more rare, or less rare, but it's not fictional. People really do (try) to work 80 to 100 hours a week, it's not really that rare (I have several friends who are doing it right now), and it really does burn people out.

Fortunately, burnout is usually cureable. And it's a great learning experience. One learns how to avoid it in the future.

A serious medical condition with myself, a family member, or a friend.

Insurance. Yes, the insurance market in much of the USA is hideously broken, and so it might cost quite a lot. But I assure you that, for most people, it is easier, cheaper, and surer to get disability insurance than it is to become independently wealthy.

(For many people, it's probably easier to become a citizen of a country with a better insurance system than it is to become independently wealthy. I wouldn't recommend that strategy to just anyone, but if that's what it takes to stop worrying...)

I'm afraid of having to significantly limit my interests to fall within relatively limited amounts of expendable time and money...

Well, some people solve this problem by having no outside interests at all, working 80 to 100 hours a day until they become rich. That's one method.

Other people take out insurance: They work a little, but then they play a little. That helps hedge against the prospect that you'll die of a stress-induced heart attack, or succumb to RSI and become disabled, before you get rich. If that happens you'll never get to play at all. Or, if your hobby is "having kids", it gives you a chance to pursue it before you grow too old.
Now they just have to find a way to make money and stop operating at a loss :)

I agree, though. Getting a stake in it isn't just about the money. They both (microsoft and facebook) have powerful allies .
> They'll probably just add a "Flash" link under "more v", and that's it,...

Just like they do with PDFs? /sarcasm
I've used twiki a bit, and my main gripe with it was that it was pretty slow. And there were some issues with mod_perl if I recall correctly.
Ask YC: Best practices for implementing access control?
Hi

I would like to implement some kind of access control. I already have user authentication built, and the next step is authorization. How would you do it? Any good articles discussing the security? Any good pointers about maintenance and administration?

I've done some searches but I thought to ask hackers who probably have done this.

Thanks!
It's the most boring nation too. While it feels a little like a utopia in many ways, its imperfections make it endlessly dull and unbearable for those not from there. I enjoyed the dull predictability of it for a day or two but then couldn't wait to leave.
For me it was the same.

Python offers it all, functional, procedural, object-oriented. So you just choose hwta fits the problem best and dont worry about politics.

Personally while learning Python I was also learning functional languages and I started to naturally drift towards a more functional style.

My functional code is just much more modular and natural than my OO-code.

Classes I to represent some data every now and then but it is not central to my designs.
I want to move to the US but it's against US law. I don't see that as "fucked," however, but just a country choosing its own immigration policies.
To whoever did so: thank you for including LOLCODE.
Don't quit your day job (Forbes piece on successful side businesses)
Yahoo's Incomprehensible Mission Statement
Since 37signals makes an API available for most of its services, it would be theoretically possible for someone to come along and build an alternative IE6 compatible front-end to 37signals' products. I expect, however, no-one will, demonstrating that there is no economic reason to support it.
some may get you turned down from a job

This is not something I worry about. If someone won't hire you because of a medical condition, you didn't want to work for them anyway. Better to find that out before you're entrenched.

some are blackmail material that could end a marriage or political career

Why keep records of things you don't want people to know about?
Sure, but then we wouldn't have known about it. PR and marketing are way more important than building a good product nowadays, alas.

It's like how implementation trumps ideas. You can have great ideas, but with no implementation, nothing happens. Ditto for building a good product. You can build the world's best product, but if no-one knows about it, it's not getting used.
I disagree. Building a startup is about having an idea and implementing it, not about B+ trees.

If knowing obscure details of data structures made you rich, I would be rich :)
Snarky, but not a good comparison, because it is much, much easier to learn SEO than programming.

Email me if you want my list of web sites...
Oh, is that like all those armchair quarterbacks who came up with complete "solutions" for Twitter's problems?
brainfuck was in there. Cool, that means it's a "major" language now :D
Not even a surprise--thats how the casino biz works. High rollers are there for the resort to create buzz and bring people in. Just like Mercedes puts an SL convertible on the showroom to bring in gawkers, and some of them leave with a C class. Amex spreads rumors about a black card---it increases the wannabes signing up for credit cards.
Kiva's warehouse robot system
AOL Increasing Dial-Up Fees
yeah, im learning django now and models have to be classes and views are functions. You generally have to understand both functional and OOP to be good. Im not a fan of any of the pure languages. Multi paradigm is my choice, but i still would prefer functional to oo solutions to problems.
That would be because those PR people are normally event organizers. The company organises event as well as build apps, which is what those 'pr' people are normally working on.
The real problem with the new one is that it's circular. The old one was merely vague. The new one says "we do what we do."
New longevity drug mimics caloric restriction in mice
I totally agree, except the date one. I feel like many people don't take the time to make their URLs look good.

I do like when I can go to /2008/06 and see all the posts from June.

Here's some more interesting reading on URL design: http://shiflett.org/blog/2008/mar/urls-can-be-beautiful
Most likely management have deemed the product to not be making enough money (or instrumental in making money) for it to be included in corporate strategy. Also, the developers have probably tired of it so won't continue it in their free time. Be grateful it is open-source!
One possibility is that the Hackers want to know where to life after cashing out.
Yeah, there's something about karma that makes people go crazy. Maybe it has something to do with people wanting validation. I don't get it.

I know pg uses this place as a kind of 'extended interview' for YC, and I"m guessing he uses karma when evaluating someone. If karma really does corrupt perhaps it'd be best to hide it from users? I don't really have an answer. I'm simply not convinced this idea of costing karma to down vote someone is a bad idea.
A former IE dev: Why I switched to Firefox
Try hanging out at warriorforum or forums.digitalpoint.com. As for the get rich quick aspect--that's just how you go about selling that kind of information. I'm sure it beats getting rich 10 years later.
FWIW, the first one I clicked on was this:

http://www.w3counter.com/globalstats.php?date=2008-05-31

Not that it's the best source of data, but.
Did he say that? I can't really imagine it is the end of the world for him. Or if it is, maybe it is a healthy experience.

At least I am sure he can afford a psychotherapist, if all else fails.
It's a fact that the average person in Portugal would be in the bottom quintile in the US. You can make more money as a migrant farmer in California than you can as a white collar worker in Mexico, let alone the rest of Latin America.

So in the case of immigration to the US, the things they think match reality. This is actually a great example of people doing things they think are in their best interest that actually are.
I meant illegal to emigrate, not immigrate. But I actually do consider US immigration policy to be pretty fucked up.
Thats a big win that they open sourced it!

I don't know that it was a money issue. I feel like many of their products don't have a business model, per se. I just feel like it wasn't important enough to have developer cycles spent on it.
Indeed. For example, look at what Cubans are willing to go through to get out of Cuba: a high risk of dying on a voyage, and an large suicide rate.

Using statistics from the Cuban Health Ministry and Donate-Armada's own study of suicides in 1984, when she was working for the Health Ministry, the study argues that the island's people have been emotionally shattered since the failure of President Fidel Castro's plans for a record 10 million ton sugar harvest in 1970.

``It was the first break in the collective conscience regarding the revolution's ability to provide coherent answers to economic problems,'' said Donate-Armada, a psychologist who left Cuba in 1993.

The island's suicide rate nearly tripled after that catastrophe, from 8 per 100,000 people in 1969 to 23.2 per 100,000 in 1982, the study reported.

So bad was the crisis that in 1979 the government classified suicide statistics as state secrets, the study added, and began hiding them under other categories like ``violent deaths'' or ``other unclassified physiological illnesses.''

http://www.fiu.edu/~fcf/suicidepidemic.html

According to the WHO, in 1996, Cuba's suicide rate was 24.5 per 100,000 for men and 12.0 in 100,000 for women.

For comparison, in US the figures are 17.9 per 100,000 per year for men, and 4.2 per 100,000 per year for women.

http://www.who.int/mental_health/prevention/suicide/suicider...

However, one should keep in mind Cuba is an atheist state, while in US many people are more religious, which could lead to underreporting.
I imagine they spent 2 hours coding and and the rest of the time for marketing (like producing the video)?
clojure disagrees?
http://clojure.org/state
Aren't there libraries that handle that kind of stuff for you?
I don't think I'm willing to be trapped into an "anyone who thinks X is crazy" kind of statement.
A lot of that has to do with Javascript's environment. While it is a functional language, it's living in a decidedly procedural world. The DOM is defined in IDL, for goodness sake, and even the really cool libraries like jQuery don't make much use of the functional paradigm. So there's not a lot of clever code to study that doesn't look like C, basically.

Nonetheless, there are all sorts of clever things you can do with closures in Javascript to avoid big declarations of global variables, etc... You just have to dig really hard to find the sample code that appears in the tutorials for lisp, haskell, ML, etc...
I know that's your intent, but each wave of new users is only going to pick that up slowly -- if ever.

And it's not just the word 'vote' that's a problem. The UI/functionality doesn't completely support that intent: they're "comments" that can be erased when the next person votes the other way. They're reported like a poll -- a summary number. But downvotes sting more than respectful disagreement, because they imply transgression.

The coarsening of discussion, the anguish over piling-on, the long threads about proper voting, the karmic games -- they're all worsened because the 1-bit message 'this comment is bad' and the 1-bit message 'I disagree' are forced into a single 1-bit channel.

(Forcing "this comment is good" and "I agree" in the same channel isn't problematic the same way, because neither sentiment conveys opprobrium and triggers defensiveness.)
Dang, I tried 4 different ways to counter that but I ended up disagreeing with myself. I think the "what they think is best but isn't" is a bigger issue with the moves people don't make - ie staying in an economically depressed town or country instead of moving somewhere you'd be better off. I have family that resisted moving to a big city for years because it was so expensive, then when they finally moved they couldn't believe how many jobs there were and how well they paid.
That's awesome. I remember someone telling me that costco spents a unbelievably high amount of money on its warehouse management. I believe a lot of that goes to paying its employees. This may be able to substantially reduce its costs.
Can humans beat the Google Algorithm
Attention class
That's surprising (but great news!) that your IE6 visitors are that low.

I agree, I'd imagine they have comparable numbers to make a decision like this. It'd be interesting info to know (anyone from 37signals out there? ;)
I don't think it's been updated for PLT Scheme 4, so watch out for stale info. I remember it being a very good read though.
Infogami is precisely what you want.

www.infogami.org
"Python offers it all, functional, procedural, object-oriented. So you just choose hwta fits the problem best and dont worry about politics."

I find the idea that Python offers it all surprising, for example my understanding is that anonymous functions can only be one line and you cannot write generic functions a'la CLOS.

If that is the case, while Python may offer a terrific language for Getting Stuff Done, you may want to consider learning other languages on the off chance that they actually do more in each of their respective areas. Then, when you return to Python you can apply what you've learned.
I know one of the developers there. It's a great company. They actually aren't doing too much technically difficult. It's making it work extremely reliably that is really hard.
With their numbers, they could've done THREE!
This is now fixed: comment forms now last for 30 minutes.
Fixed (long ago).
We have this now.
Ask YC: Built a great social media site, but need a recommendation engine. Any ideas?
I've developed a website / Firefox toolbar that allows people to surf the web by topic or within specific domains. I think it has huge potential and that I'm on to something big here, but its usefulness relies on having a powerful recommendation engine behind it, something I cannot build myself. It's similar in many ways to stumbleupon (at least in regards to how the rec engine needs to operate. new content is introduced by users who fave websites from their toolbar and should be introduced to more and more users as it gains popularity within a period of time).

I've talked to a few recommendation engine providers (loomia, strands, etc). Strands is the only company that may be able to provide a back-end recommendation service that could work for my service (great API, content agnostic, ability to filter by item tags).

But still, I'm not sure a 3rd party service like this could ever provide the flexibility that I would eventually want (For instance, how could I control the rate at which new content is spread and eventually stops being recommended? how would I address potential issues of gaming?).

I'm not that knowledgeable about how rec engines operate. If anyone here understands the technical details regarding rec engines (or has experience building them) I would love to hear what you think. A third party system could potentially allow me to launch this thing very soon and would alleviate many scaling issues. But maybe it would be smarter to try to get a team together and build it from scratch so that I have complete flexibility.
Why I'm not using Lisp
You have to understand where we're coming from on this. The present-day law on gay marriage was changed due to the wording of the original law, written in a time when gay marriage wasn't even being considered, which happened to say something like "two persons" rather than "a man and a woman".

The Republic will not fall because Adam marries Steve. What consenting adults get up to on private property is no-one's business but their own, certainly not the Governments. But it is under threat when law is made through legal chicanery rather than the democratic process. That is why Conservatives are up in arms about gay marriage.
What's interesting about this is that people are still using dialup!

Did a quick Google search ... "10 percent of U.S. Internet users on dial-up"
Bloody hell, no one expects browser makers to actually fix bugs!

Respect to Opera for blogging about this.