skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I see single-implementation languages as things to fear.

Well indeed, the point isn't some much single-implementation languages as language in which I, the naive user, do not have to choose between implementations.

>> Unless I have some strange, specialized need, I want one implementation that is guaranteed to work.

> I'd love guarantees of perfection too..

Hold up. I would hope my language doesn't imply 'perfection' but "least-common-denominator-works". I was too strong with "guaranteed" but works in the "fairly normal" use-cases is good.

Even in a language running on a really advanced GC, like the Oracle JVM, you can't ignore your garbage.

Wait, who's "you" here. I the poster stand by the claim that I, the naive developer producing something really simple like a GUI to, say, move one file really shouldn't worry about GC. I the advanced developer producing something like an object-database indeed have to worry about GC.

- I would note with a Ruby instance copying one very large file from one to place another, you do have to worry about the GC, since MRI never gives memory back to the system, EVER. One of the founders of Twitters personally described to me discovering this to his horror, WELL into Twitter's period of trouble. Not at the start... and this was someone dealt DAILY with the system. DAILY...

Forks are based on common code. We're talking about separate implementations, with different teams and different goals.

I call BS here. What common code exists between Rubinius, YARV and company????? Seriously, I've been slackly following Rubinius for a while and unless they've added something recently, they have no common code. Rubinious has been trying to create a common test framework but that doesn't imply any common code. My impression is Rubinious doesn't even use the YACC code from YARV/MRI. Prove me wrong, it's happened before...

In a lot of ways, Rubinious' common test interface highlights the dead end of Test Driven Development as well as it's negative impact on Ruby. Software tests can't in themselves prove SHT, I mean they can't prove the equivalence of anything.

The thing about C++ is that it's a standard, not a piece of software.*

Well, that is indeed a good point. But the point highlights the problems of Ruby, which has nothing like a common standard.
No chemicals are involved in transforming the potato into a good plastic replica.

Nonsense. A potato is made of chemicals, and the ingredients they list, including vinegar and glycerin are most certainly chemicals. I know they're trying to say that none of the ingredients are very dangerous or hard to come by, but it's just silly to describe a chemical reaction and say the reactants aren't chemicals.
I have every confidence that Zynga will succeed. Don't get me wrong, I hate them with a passion, but they are incredibly smart and have a very successful model. Their games are built to be addictive, not fun. They've taken everything that made people lose months of their lives to WoW and condensed it, according to recognized psychological principles. They're cynical, but they'll manage to succeed regardless of what gets thrown their way.
Well, by attending a traditional institution you're really paying firstly for experts to take partial responsibility for your learning, enough to stake some of their reputation on it, and secondly for entrance to a club of peers of similar ability to learn with.

With more and more material available online, I can see how taking full responsibility for your own learning is less daunting than it once was. I'm still curious as to what will replace the role of peers of similar ability in this self-learning model.
Isn't it:

Quality, price, speed pick any two.
I like Squishables site, and I love stuffed animals, so I really wanted to love my Squishable cow.

But it's kind of an impractical stuffed animal. Hard to hug, takes up a lot of shelf space and falls off a lot. Not quite as cute as I'd hoped. Though I got my mom the giant squishable moose, and she loves it, even though the dogs are terrified of it.

I'm especially a fan of how they make it seem like it's okay for adults to love stuffed animals. So I'd order from them again, if they come out with some less rotund animals.
note to self: do NOT put mad cow victims in the wood chipper
The coating is environmentally harmless and non-toxic, and easy to clean using only water or a simple wipe with a damp cloth. It repels bacteria, water and dirt, and resists heat, UV light and even acids.

How can you use water to clean it if it repels water?
Pincus: Just copy what they do and do it until you get their numbers
I would accept that definition. But I can't tell if the owners of squishable have accomplished that.
OCaml has first class mutability and is usually considered a functional language (I am sure you can argue that of course).
Come to think of it, a friend of mine was asking me for a site just like this, for movie trailers. I looked around and found there was no such site for movie trailers (that I knew of). So, you could be the first, if you were so inclined. :)
Testing on Android Sucks.
If they do, then the universities really have it bad. Universities should leverage what sets them apart from autodidact studies. Mainly the social aspect and all the advantages that it entails.
For there to be "Good Parts" of OOP, there would have to be a single kind of OOP.

P.S. Smalltalk.
A Google search uses hundreds of machines in parallel for a few milliseconds; if it was done serially it would probably take a second or more. Now imagine applying the same idea to IDEs; compiling, testing, code indexing, refactoring, etc. could be done dramatically faster in the cloud than on your desktop.
Seriously, yes. South Korea censors the North Korean websites and some illegal ones (heavy porn, for example) too. I think there are no known such instances against the free speech rather than NK-related ones, but I'm afraid that there might be in the future.
Ze Frank: Ideas are Brain Crack (2006)
Considering how the large corporations easily reach the annual cap (currently $6.5 Million per year until at least 2015), the footnote that the 10% maximum increase in royalties does not apply to the cap is a bit disconcerting.
HN is like CB radio
well I think asbestos was marketed to consumers. that is why my house siding is made of it. And as long as I am not sanding it and breathing the dust I have nothing to worry about.

I do wonder what this really could mean for society if something like this took off.
The phrases that irked me were:

"I have yet to meet a database that isn’t a key/value store"

Dimensions that are "somewhat orthogonal"

"It suffices to say that MapReduce is all about giving programmers an efficient way to consume data without needing to know how or where it is actually stored."

I don't think that definition suffices, and it misses (or buries in 'efficient') the rather central point that MapReduce is a programming model for distributing computation.

I'm all for non-relational databases where they're appropriate, and Cloudant sounds like it is doing great things. But I think that there's a risk in presenting toy examples in a way that seems to sell them as the solution to common use cases that really could be solved more easily with old-school tools.
Will be there.
Considering their clientele is passionate enough to send in video and photos of them doing ridiculous poses with their squishable toys (and adults, no less) shows that they do have a fanbase. The only other places that I know of that has such outwardly passionate users is Threadless, who last I heard they were making around US$40 Million a year selling t-shirts that they didn't even design themselves; and ThinkGeek, which makes about 80 Million selling geegaws and doodads for geeks.
what he said.
Great to see that MIT are addressing the most important problem with OCW: organizing the knowledge intelligibly.

I'm currently having fun with their introduction to programming that uses Python: http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/electrical-engineering-and-comput.... (Get the lectures on iTunes U.)

Granted, I don't know if that's the best gateway drug to programming, but it has the irrefutable advantage of assignments that apply the information. You always feel morose watching OCW lectures where the lecturer talks about an assignment that you'd love to do.
Silica is one of the most abundant oxides in the earths crust. Our bodies have no problem dealing with it.
I didn't realize OCW was meant for teachers... I thought it was for independent learners all along.
Ask HN: How to lose 200+ GB of personal information :/
So I bought a new external hard drive (Western Digital Passport SE 750GB) about a week ago and I'm excited and all giddy to be able to transfer it from my old Western Digital Passport. I open up my folders to back up all of my personal data to the drive: documents, music, pictures and videos.

Lo and behold a pop-up referring to a virtual drive appears on my screen! It appears to be Western Digital's software called "SmartWare". I was like "Sigh... more bloatware that I don't want." I skimmed through the settings, configurations and the files to find a way to remove those programs from my external hard drive as I didn't want that annoying screen to be popping up every single time I plug it into a different computer.

I discovered that to remove it I had to install the bloatware then disable the VCD (Virtual CD drive). It asks me for a password. I enter in my usual with the prefix "wd", right? And it doesn't let me disable the VCD! So I removed the password in hopes that will make it work. But no, apparently, there was something running that was preventing the VCD from disabling. I promptly opened up task manager to see what it was and nothing was affecting it! But this is not where the problem starts. The problem starts when I restart my laptop in hopes to fix the problem. It didn't and it got worse.

I plugged in my external hard drive. This time no hard drive appeared. Only the VCD. So I opened up the VCD and it asks for me a password. I enter in my password and it doesn't work! "What the ... fuck!" At this point, I'm just blazing mad. On that hard drive contains my memories of friends, family, and all of my school work and games! What am I suppose to do?! EVERY SINGLE FILE THAT IS IMPORTANT TO ME IS ON THERE AND I CAN'T ACCESS IT. Frantically, I searched online for an answer. However, all I found was "you'll need WD's help. It's AES 256-bit military grade encryption" or "you'll need to reformat your drive."

Now I don't know what to do. I submitted an e-mail to the WD support team in hopes of help but if they don't do anything, I'm so screwed. Please help! I have no idea what I can do.

tl;dr my files are locked due to terrible external hard drive software.
How do you wash your teflon pans?
Arizona Tragedy Highlights The Mystery Of Altruism
Peter Serafinowicz, one of the two guys that created and wrote the show (he also plays the tall scientist in it), also made the music for it:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Serafinowicz#Composer
Classic Adlerian Psychology
What about aluminium oxide, does that count?
Not your normal HN fare, but the part about the main drives of people I found interesting from a startup/app perspective. Are these things you're paying attention to in your startup? Are you doing them for your own financial gain, or to create true value for the world?
>Is that known and understood?

Since mad cow disease, the neural and consumable parts were, yes. The cause was not, hard evidence that prions were the cause took a while, and a lot of people didn't / still don't believe it. But a lot of people still think the sun goes around the earth, so that's not a very good measure of something's accuracy.

So lets take this from another stance:

You have a chronic, deadly, incurable, unknown-cause disease that turns brains to mush. Lets study it without respirators prior to animal testing of aerosoled forms! That's sure to end well!

edit: why do people go on down-vote sprees? This whole line, and a few bystanders, just got nailed within a minute of each other. Is it a mis-placed sense of justice? Do I have enemies? Do they honestly think it works?
> Prions are fundamentally different from other diseases in that they're very dumb

Anthropomorphizing such things is a silly because it confuses people. There is no intelligence in one or another. It is hard to discuss which one is more "advanced "because it is a function of how you define what " advanced" is.

One can postulate that advanced means : "how well it can spread".

Clearly prions can spread well enough and are very hard to eradicate. Perhaps then are more advanced than a virus. A virus has a lot more machinery involved while prions are just information based.

Their folding state _is_ the infection mechanism. There is nothing else extra required to infect, just a different configuration of an existing protein. That is truly fascinating. Even more fascinating is that the configuration state can be spread to other proteins without the need of DNA or RNA mechanisms. This is as efficient as it gets, it beautiful, deadly, and terrifying, all at the same time.
Did My Zodiac Change?
Wait so, basically, you encrypted the single most important hard drive to you and didn't write down the password anywhere?

You'd think the software would, you know, make noises and flash big bright red lights at you before it let you do that ... ask fourty-two times whether you actually want it.

I'm guessing you also don't have a backup?

Well, hope you get it working somehow eh :)
Time to Move on From the P Value to Bayesian Analysis
I had many interviews, for small and large companies (10 years experience, Java), never had such questions, I don't think I would answer them correctly unfortunately.

It looks like they are for graduates/junior positions when there are not so many other things to talk about.
The Divine Hooters Chicken Wing Monster
In larger-scale chunks (ie, dust). There have been a lot of questions how nano-scale particles react in our bodies, some of them apparently very differently, and not very much science because the creation of them in relatively large quantities is such a new development.

So yes, lets add new things to food without the testing we require of drugs, and lets do it on a massive scale.
You will never disprove a conspiracy a priori. I think that what you need to do is ask them what the best evidence for a conspiracy is, and then provide a rational explanation that does not require a conspiracy. Them, go down the list of suspicions that they have and do the same.
In essence, Google Chrome is dropping H.264 to keep up with Apple, while Microsoft fired Bob Muglia because they're trying to keep up with both Apple and Google.
I didn't forget the password. It's not accepting the password I created :(

What pisses me off the most is that I never wanted to use this bloatware! I just wanted it to store my files! I never asked for an annoying "Please set up security for you HDD and register your product!"
Hedge Funds' Pack Behavior Magnifies Market Swings
Web development is a feedback process because clients don't know what they want and they ask you to build off of their feelings, not specifications. So constant communication with clients is required. If cost of this is high for you, then you may not find this service profitable.

The good thing about wordpress theming is that while not every client knows what they want, most clients will be happy with the same couple of things. For this, I recommend building a theme that could act as a starting point for all projects... I mean that has all the luxury features a client could want, so you just remove the parts you don't need later on.

Having your product set up ahead of time as I described above is one way to get around wasting time when you're working with clients.
Not loading here... server overload?

내나라 (naenara) literally means "my country".
As I already posted in a reply above, what makes prions so fascinating is that they are pure information. It is a mis-shaped protein and it is the particular state of it being mis-shaped that allows it to mis-shape other nearby proteins and transmit that state.

I find that very interesting. It is akin to an cell automata -- a glider perhaps.
Because your stock is overvalued and you want to sell as much as you can in both private and public markets?
In my experience at one of those traditional institutions, those experts often couldn't care less about any responsibility to undergrads. Their job is to do research, and to get grants to support that research. The number of professors for whom teaching was clearly a nuisance was one of the most depressing parts of the experience.

Having similarly capable peers is really the primary advantage, especially if those relationships carry on after you finish.
well why couldn't he just SAY that?
The heck do ya mean? ;-)
Yup, an appropriately shaped stick seems to be claimed in claim 1. You might be able to hit that "adapted to float in water" - does "adapted" require a process in patentese, or can you simply discover a "pre-adapted" stick, for example?

Good find. For certain values of "good".
Alternative ebook distribution & sales with Gmail, GoogleDocs & Paypal
Let me clarify that a bit further -- I'm not excluding languages which offer mutable data structures, even in standard libraries. I'm simply excluding languages where the use of these data structures are de-emphasized.

This isn't a precise scientific definition of a functional language, but one that seems to quite cleanly differentiate languages like Haskell and ML from languages like Javascript and C#, all of which have first-class functions.
Phrases like that, and the ever-repeated-in-advertising line of "... and it's all natural, so you know it's safe!" have always bugged me. More-so the natural==safe connection, though. This, in a world that's clearly out to kill us and eat us.
"IDEs are big honking applications that take a while to load, use up all your computer's resources, and come loaded with features that you don't even know existed."

This is why I hate Eclipse.
A Simple Way To Think About Recursion
Theremin simulator built with a Microsoft Kinect
I'll be there, and really looking forward to meeting everyone.
Check the last two pages. It only took 4 years for a re-examination to cancel all 20 claims.
Google was down for me for about 4 minutes today. I'm in San Diego. I don't recall what time it was exactly but it was approximately 6:15ish pm Pacific Time.

It wasn't just the search engine either, the first thing that I noticed down was my work email (Google Apps based). Not only could I not reach google or any of my Google Apps email accounts, but I couldn't reach any app engine sites including (irony?) downforeveryoneorjustme.com.

Not sure what the outage was or how local it was, but I did actually see what the submitter here saw as well -- he isn't crazy. My internet connection was working fine other than the inability to reach seemingly any google powered site, traceroute to www.google.com failed though the ip resolved correctly.
Discovering Pricing Structures to Make a Million Dollars
context: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2080049
FWIW, I just bought the giant cow beanbag[1] for my seven year old niece. She loves it (sleeps with it, carries it room to room with her).

[1] http://www.squishable.com/pc/giant_beanbag_cow/Squishable_Wa...
Most Employees aren’t Focused on Startups
Re: "there's going to be a lot of young, early employees that are able to cash out and become angels or work on their next huge startup."

This process actually started happening a few (2) years ago, and has been picking up the pace increasingly in the last six months. Much of the recent rounds of financing has been going to early stage employees who are selling off as much as 30% of their holdings in these "Pre-IPO" rounds.

If the IPO windows doesn't open up again, fairly soon, many of these employees will be fully vested and onto their next thing before their company goes public.
you lost me about three paragraphs in. if "simple" relies on dropping terms like "preorder traversal" without elaboration, it ain't simple. i could tell it was probably funny, though!
But the water will stick to whatever you're trying to get off the surface, which is the the whole point of using water to clean things...
I should mention that I still have my receipt and I registered my HDD with them yesterday.
The Weakest Link
I hadn't seen that, it looks like they're moving into lots of different types of offerings. I'll have to look around the site some more, since my brothers have started providing me with nephews.
Emacs + SLIME, ASDF for "packaging" systems.
400 models of cars would have a problem if they could not standardize on a single kind of road or petrol.

The accessory issue is about a standard connector and protocol.

There are heaps of iPods and iPhones, but one connector and protocol.
Just keep the dang thing unplugged until you hear back from WD. They have smart people there.

...and you still have your old Passport, right?
I was one of his early readers, and used to love his stuff on productivity and personal development. I even tolerated his articles about astral world, lightworkers, law of attraction, etc. But when he posted a glowing "review" of a scam like Site Build-it, complete with an affiliate link, I've decided I've had enough and hit "Unsubscribe".

Lesson to be learned: never trust someone who became successful by telling others how to become successful.
Groupon valued at 15 Billion?
Why did Abraham Lincoln give the Gettysburg Address instead of just saying "Let's go reunite the Union"? Why did Martin Luther King Jr give his "I Have a Dream" speech instead of just saying "Blacks should be equal to whites"? Why does Steve Jobs give huge keynote speeches instead of just saying "We're making a new iPhone/MacBook/iPod"?

Sometimes stating things simply up front undermines your point and you need to get people to understand your train of thought.
The author has overlooked the Economics contribution to problems such as these -- game theory and public choice theory in particular.
I didn't believe this at first. Sadly, it is real:

http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sec...
Asians don't have the genes to compete on sports. So entry to college is essentially going to be based around academic scores and music. Asians are also physically can't compete with caucasians when it comes to labouring, so a position in the office offsets that disadvantage.

Some of the hard work put into training the children is simply trying to overcome whatever physical disadvantage their children have.

This isn't particularly good in societies which are predominantly Chinese, because hyper competitiveness leads no where. There is nothing to hack.

However, in Western society, I'd think a moderate form of authoritative parenting is useful.
Actually that would be quite a breath of fresh air, because one of the biggest problems I remember in my experience with outsourcing to an Indian agency in '04/'05 was the complete lack of feedback or collaboration. They basically expected us to give exact details specs, and provided no evaluation of the product as they went. The code was alright, but it was as if they were doing a school programming assignment, seemingly without consciousness of the fact they were building a product that required people to interact with it. I can understand this as a strategy to maximize billable hours, but it doesn't do shit for building repeat business.
Indeed I do. However, I copied everything over to my new one then formated it and gave it to my brother for his birthday.
You could give pre-tests to people and organize them into "classes" which they will stay with for four years... along with ways of sharing personal info with each other (Facebook friends perhaps)... with a once-a-year in-person meetup weekend.
Tunisia: The First WikiLeaks Revolution?
I'm waiting for the 9" EVO 4G Slide ;-)