skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> it means that the things that make lisp (and other functional languages) safer and easier to use would be supported in hardware-- therefore not slowing things down as noticeably.

Or, at least, forcing every language implementation on that hardware to use the same safety mechanisms, making some apples-to-apples benchmarks impossible.

It would be interesting to see what a C implementation for that hypothetical modern Lisp machine (CADDR?) would look like.

A close parallel is AMPC, which compiles C to JVM bytecode.[1] The vendors say it's standards-compliant, and I actually am pretty sure it is, but it doesn't do a lot of the nonstandard things C programmers have come to depend on. For example, the 'struct hack', where you pack data of multiple types into a struct and proceed to index into it as if it were an array (usually an unsigned char array), flatly does not work, due entirely to the runtime type checking done by the JVM. This always seems to lead to major debates over whether it's a very good compiler.

[1] http://www.axiomsol.com/
I think this is a bad example.
If a company hires a person to do X (where X is not 'cleaning the bathroom'), than that person should do X.
If one does not do what he/she is hired to do than that person just wastes time and is not earning money for the company.

Who would you prefer to hire? Someone that 'cleans the bathroom' when it needs to be cleaned or someone that just ignores this and earns money so you could hire a cleaner?
Fun With jQuery Deferred
One treats shit rather gingerly when one holds it through paper towels, I daresay. Its appearance was in line with my expectations of that category of objects.

I do not debate the nastiness of a shit-encrusted public bathroom stall.
Actually it does, in so far as people like him are likely to be very common in Google compared to other places.
Aren't these accounts precisely what generate Facebook's revenue?

That's precisely the point. If the "real name only" stance is non-negotiable, they would ban these accounts, forgoing significant revenue in the process.
Interesting point here. It's all about how you present yourself.

Fact: you are one guy doing this on your own. And that's the only fact they need to know. Everything beyond that can fabricated to build confidence and brand perception. Don't get me wrong, I'm definitely not saying you should lie or be dishonest in any way, but their perception of you (and your business) is entirely what you make it out to be. If you say you're doing this as a side project and you're blatantly advertising it as such, you're selling yourself short. Side projects die, and nobody wants to pay for a service that will die in the foreseeable future. On the other hand, if you advertise this as a one-man bootstrapped profitable business that you pour your life and energy into, then you create a whole different perception. People will support that. People will be impressed, and they will talk - as long as you can deliver what is expected. And there's some free word-of-mouth marketing for you. They will also be more understanding if you make mistakes, as long as you accept the blame and correct those mistakes. People are naturally understanding - especially when they're dealing with other people, not a giant faceless bureaucratic machine.

So I say fuck that. Don't hide yourself. Be open. Share your numbers with the world. Tell the world who you are, and tell them you're serious about what you do. If you aren't confident about your product, others will see that - and they won't be confident either. Don't make it a side project, make it your baby. Nobody will love your product if you don't love it first.
I was having a deja-vu with this post...
> "On the other hand, if the market were more open, who's to say favoring content or metered billing or whatever wouldn't emerge as optimal strategies."

Dial-up ISPs ditched hourly billing and went to flat rates as competition proliferated.

During the brief moment that phone networks were classified as Title II, and DSL technology and market penetration exploded, no-one went to metered billing.

As long distance competition flared up in the 90s, it too abandoned metered billing for monthly rates and overages.

As cell phone usage expanded in the US, it became quickly dominated toward monthly rates and overages.

History suggests that metered billing [1] is not something that plays well in the US market.

[1] Where 'metered billing' includes monthly packages with usage caps so low that metered charges dominate the average monthly bill.
Skype have completely ignored Linux users for years now. That their attitude toward Mac users is similar doesn't come as a big surprise.
I think it's cool. I played with it for Android (not the voice input, but the text based input and the voice output). I was with a Russian and Turkish colleague (I speak American English). We found that the translation was pretty good--but that the speech synthesis was pretty bad for both Turkish and Russian. Has anyone checked it out for Chinese, Japanese, or Spanish?
Email on the way!
What is the estimated GBs of text data on wikipedia.com?
It's possible that quite a lot of those lines of code might support mostly unnecessary UI-type stuff, eg. the interfaces that let you configure how long the lights remain on for after you remove the key which Top Gear take such pleasure in criticising.
But yeah, it is kind of scary. I'm not really sure I want my car to be "smarter" - keeping it simple seems good. But I guess it is a credit to the industry that AFAIK there haven't been any software disasters that have led to brakes failing and people being killed or similar.
On UA sniffing, browser detection, and Alex’s post
Baseball stats show June 5th was Ferris Bueller's day off
It doesn't sound like CN has really changed their attitude much. The news in this blog post is fantastic! But it sounds like the money is coming from Gold subscribers, not CN. Reddit is either already bigger than Wired - or probably will be soon...they have > 1 billion pageviews / month. It's totally crazy that they run the site with about 5 people.

I've been there for almost five years, and I have to say I've loved every minute of it. Back then it was smaller and nerdier, and now it's all big and popular but you can still find the same cozy space in the smaller communities (/r/coding, /r/compsci, for example).
Riak Search is in fact great to work with.

Something comparable for Cassandra exists with Solandra (https://github.com/tjake/Lucandra/). A major difference is that you'll have to post your documents manually to the Solr Instance running with Solandra while Riaks post-receive hooks automatically do that for you.

Also: the setup is by far not as big of a pain with Riak
Do you see a causation there?
Demand Media: Being 'the best click' on Google
No. Every piece of software that deals with time in any kind of sophistication needs to have logic to handle it.

I used to work on a share price alerting system where you could say "if the price of stock X goes up by 10% during these hours than alert me", that creates a nightmare when it comes to DST changes. Do you use the timezone of the person who setup that alert (what if they're now in a different timezone do you change ?) or do you use the DST rules of the country the share trades in.

Imagine you have a calendaring app and someone from another country sends you a meeting request for the future that's past a DST change in one of your countries, but not past it in the other. It's possible for the time to be ambiguous unless you specify DST handling rules. What happens if a country changes DST rules (this happens far more often than you think) how do you adjust previously set appointments ?

Imagine your Google Analytics, what timezone do you save analytics data in and do you adjust for DST (the answer is PST by default, and if you change it, historical data won't be adjusted so you end up with a mishmash of time data).

In any scenario where you have to handle timezones it's complicated enough as it is, DST handling makes it a nightmare.
Allow me to say this is why I love HN. :-)
Is it hard for women to find VC moneys? Is it their own fault?
They also usually inflate the requirements a bit on purpose, on the basis that they will get fewer unqualified applicants that way. They get lots of unqualified applicants without doing that because "everyone knows" that employers inflate their requirements a bit on purpose.
And trust them to take the software away as well...
Who says being egalitarian and being evil are mutually exclusive?
Well it looks like there's at last a place where Europe is ahead in the startup game.
Kick-start your web development with HTML5 Boilerplate
Yes but for the entire country!

That's a lot of real estate under one time zone, it may be silly to have summer and winter times but having one time zone for a country approximately the same size as Canada (5,000km wide) seems silly, Canada has six time zones.
Couple it with a tablet, load up wikipedia and you're ready to beam aboard any passing Vogon spaceship.
The friends of mine who have cared for the mentally infirm and invalid held a graphic design degree and a CNA with a high school diploma, respectively.

I do not debate her devotion to her education or her job duties, but the misfortune of modern youth is that our educational backgrounds often bear no resemblance to what will bring value to an employer.

If her resume says "BSc, Disadvantaged Female Chimpanzee Sciences, Harvard," it might well be that she studied hard. However, her studies are likely to have done little to improve her value to most employers.
No, I personally wouldn't work at Zappos. But their reason to hit the phones is to understand the business and its customers. Unless edw519's father's company was in cleaning or maintenance, cleaning bathrooms won't help you understand its business.

While I currently have no concrete plans for my own business, I imagine that on the first day, I will be working from my home, which I currently clean myself. When it gets big enough to need an office, it'll be big enough to pay for cleaning (likely through the facilities' central management).
Absolutely, but that is no counter argument to yason's statement. There is no such thing as winter time. As far as I understand it it's just that Moscow's time zone is UTC+3 and they are changing that to UTC+4. It's not that unusual that a country is in an another time zone than it should be geographically, look at Spain for example.
Social Media Analytics Research Toolkit 2.1.0 - PostgreSQL 9.0.3 FTW Edition
This holiday season I was in State College, PA and the local Schlow Library was a great place to work and much quieter and more comfortable than the coffee shop. - http://www.schlowlibrary.org/ - Since then I try to find a library when I am on the road.
Ho-hum. Want to be really forward-thinking? Follow the example of China, which discarded 5 time zones for a single national time in 1949. (We'd then adjust the office/retail hours to mimic local daylight, rather adjusting the numbers on the clock.)
The only thing here that's surprising to me is that there are still people left who don't expect Apple to be totally indifferent (at best) toward developers on their platform.
Maybe, but from their last report:
"Apple sold 4.13 million Macs during the quarter, a 23 percent unit increase over the year-ago quarter."
"You're sitting in a chair. IN THE SKY!" and paraphrasing... "Are you not amazed you're partaking in the miracle of human flight, you non-contibuting ZERO?"
I recently bought a messenger bag. Does that make me an alpha male or a sissy? But I have learned by personal experience how women accumulate all that crap ion their purses.
Your massive bill would be smaller if you were able to buy into a community-rated health plan.
http://status.heroku.com/

They're aware of the issue as well.
Now, yes, but before your HSA was that full, you could be on the hook for a large deductible if something went wrong. Regardless of whether "traditional" insurance is a sensible economic model, staring that deductible in the face before your HSA can cover it is a large incentive for some people to stay with coverage that's a little more comprehensive.
That's a really good observation. I am also launching a free service geared towards a specific niche audience and we are trying our to acquire more and more users. I think that in addition to getting some press on tech blog like TechCrunch, we should probably target industry specific bloggers more since that is where our true customer may be.
>>Bolla says that alioth blew it, by not asking SBCL for full optimization<<

No he doesn't.

The spectral-norm Lisp SBCL #2 program is Lorenzo Bolla's program - look at the program source code

http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u32/program.php?test=spect...

>>he does in fact get different timing with the optimization in place<<

He get's different timing but the only explanation he provides is "So, different numbers on different boxes, which is not at all unexpected."
On the last picture on the page, I think there should be a bubble coming out of pg's mouth, "One of you has betrayed me. Judas, did you add unnecessary features before launch?"

</joke, don't mean to offend anyone>
I still find it hard to believe that a website with no income whose sole purpose is to allow you to throw virtual sheep at your friends can have more value than all the real engineering companies in America put together - at least for any sane definition of value!
Did Abraham Lincoln Invent Wind Power?
One timezone covering enough longitudinal variation to want five timezones is a dumb idea. Doing the same thing in a country with enough east-west span to cover ten timezones would be an incredibly dumb idea.
A fairly large percentage of them, and many of the ones whose direct job responsibility isn't infrastructure (like me) frequently have to deal with the consequences of building for scale as they develop features.
This service might not be targeted at web savy folks
The speak feature really would have came in handy when I was in China for the big earthquake in 2008. I thought I'd be ahead of the game and use g-translate to pre-save some fullscreen images of phrases I wanted to use while I was there. My favorite loss in translation moment was when I tried asking a Monk if I may please take his picture, only to find out I was asking him if I might take all of his personal pictures.
27 GB with markup: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Database_download

Probably 1/10th of that is real text data, so no more than 3 GB.
Thanks very much. If you have any specific questions I'll do my best to answer them.
Foot binding?

Not saying things might not be generally 'equal' for women in China now, but things are generally 'equal' for women in the West. For certain values of generally.

Seems to me societies have traditionally objectified/oppressed women world over.
No one's arguing (well, not much) that the employers don't have a decent reason for this. The problem here is that the incentives of employees and their employers are becoming more and more at odds with eachother.
Software is often written with the assumption that time always goes forward, because, well, that's how time works. However, according to the rules of daylight savings, time actually goes backwards once a year.
Though it's slightly unsettling, you have to figure that with the millions of cars on the road, that code must be pretty solid considering that there aren't more car-software related incidents occurring.

Any idea what language they use in these vehicles?
Actually the farmers in my family have to reprogram their clocks twice a year to avoid DST, since cows are incredibly sensitive to their milking schedule and the twice-a-year hourly shift really screws with the herd.

I would go so far as to say that farmers hate DST more than programmers/sysadmins do.
Since it's China may I assume a good portion of the handbags are the same counterfeits you buy for $10 on a street corner in Manhattan?
And your data center network or transit provider couldn't suffer latency problems?

The real difference is that in your own data center you feel empowered to fix problems and in the cloud you feel helpless.
Can we all just have a 24 hour clock based on GMT, no other timezones, and no daylight savings time?

It seems a whole lot easier to change our time format just once and get used to it... instead of half of us changing the clocks twice a year, the other not, drawing all these weird lines all over (grumble India grumble), and keeping track of it all.
Unix-like systems like Linux and OSX handle that very well.
The hardware real time clock ticks in UTC, file timestamps and the like are stored in UTC. The OS knows everything about time zones and DST and therefore can display the time the way you expect it.
Ah, a port of Perl's module... good to know.

Makes you wonder how soon it'll be before languages that are out of favor but have great libraries written for them are mainly viewed as targets for mining ideas and techniques, like how the various open source kernel developers use each other's kernels as driver documentation.
Is there any way that the code can be run? If I write some php code can I run it somewhere? This is only a text editor with highlighting? It would be cool if it had everything related to a project, running, debugging etc not only a plain editor :(
Tell HN: Vulnerability in Mexican CENEVAL System.
I know this is probably irrelevant to many of you, but it's kind of important for the Mexican members of HN.

There is a giant vulnerability (more like overall lack of security) in the registry for the CENEVAL Exams (CENEVAL is the national Center for Evaluation and has many standarized exams)

It is described here: http://blog.nsovocal.com/post/3185118332/como-ganar-en-el-registro-de-ceneval-o-como-tener-una

Almost every university and high school uses these exams and it can compromise their systems too (Tecnológico de Monterrey uses many of the passwords in their own systems). So if you're a mexican developer, please contact universities you have relationships with.

Also, maybe pass around this tweet to inform others: https://twitter.com/#!/benbeltran/status/35072833528930304

Thanks for your support :)
Hmm, I wonder if this announcement comes on the heels of momentum where users are not renewing the gold subscriptions. I'm not sure of that and I'm purely speculating, but I think the average initial subscription amount was about $10 and those would expiring around now. Just guessing.

This sort of action would be a good way for CN to rope back in any doubters that their $$ will benefit the site.

edit: I know they indeed beefed up investments in hardware and I was referring to hiring more devs.
I live in the Pacific time zone, and for a long time I've been tempted to reset my clock to Pitcairn Island time, which is just like Pacific time, but without observing daylight savings.

Haven't made the jump yet, but it's only a matter of time before some stupid DST error fills me with enough rage.
Analysis: World of Goo’s iPad Launch
If you haven't already, I recommend you read what patio11 says here (and on their blog), they are in a very similar market with similar customers.
One of the most in-depth write-ups I've seen on YC anywhere on the web.
For the English version approximative 14GB archived, see this link for more information:

http://dumps.wikimedia.org/
Actually in the Japanese OEM market (and remember, many PC manufacturers are Japanese), extra bundled software is huge - customers demand as much bundled software as possible, and a machine without it wouldn't sell.

You should see all the crap that's installed on a Japanese laptop, it makes the American ones look completely spartan. I personally think it's bizarre, the machines are unusably slow, I pave mine as soon as I get them
What, why? Does waking up at 6 have any different intrinsic value than waking up a 3.5 or 11 ? Ever since time zones, there hasn't been an intrinsic meaning to time (who uses sun dials?) We should all just be on the same time, the whole world around.
It's argued to be part of the problem, though. When doctor's visits are expensive, minor problems escalate because they aren't caught early enough to be cheap to deal with.

At least, that's the argument. I don't claim to be an expert in these things.
Why are timezones a good idea? 12:00 is not solar noon for essentially everyone.
Ask HN: Getting started with GitHub
As a soon graduating CS senior who feels a calling to the startup scene - I felt an appropriate learning opportunity would be try contributing to open-source projects on GitHub.

However, I am not sure how to start. I feel that my skills aren't yet up to the level that I could contribute solid code to any of the large projects.

I am web developer at heart, so I have a strong knowledge of the main technologies as well as some django, drupal and others. Are there any particular projects you can think of that I would be able to contribute to? Any other relevant tips or advice that you think that I need?

tldr; How should I get started on GitHub?
Towards a new model for funding innovation and content for the public good
Reddit has been down for two days maybe that was the kick in the pants they needed.
You're assuming your conclusion ("want five timezones"), and calling the alternative 'dumb' and 'incredibly dumb' isn't much of a reasoned justification.

Why is adjusting the clock numbers better than adjusting local practices?

Why does a single time work well for China... and the US armed forces globally?

Shouldn't we be optimizing for long-distance collaboration, now that we have the telecom technology to do so?
What do you mean by "we"? First, you'd have to get all of the states to sign off on this, including the weird ones that half-follow and half-don't-follow the conventions. I'm not even sure if this is something the Federal government could just demand.

Oh, and then you also have to convince every other government to implement, too.
But it is close to TechShop!
But the pitcher plant does not draw the line. If there are mice in your house (or outside, if it's tropical enough that the pitcher plant can survive outside) a large enough pitcher plant will eat them.

If you maintain that a pitcher plant owner has a moral responsibility to prune back the plant before it gets large enough to eat mice, that's consistent and defensible; I was just curious if the different perspective from a table would bring a different conclusion.
thought this too, when he said the kitchen kept getting messy. why didnt those slobs pick up after themselves? "oh the ceo's got it"..
At the moment PHP, C++ and Ruby can not be compiled or executed. All three require a substantial backend, but we are working on it.
Hope that Berlusconi in one of his delirious of madness will do the same for Italy. But I want to stay always in DST, that in Italy means more daylight.
Offer HN: Office/Network/Datacenter design work
Ask/Offer HN: I am a technology designer with RLS in San Francisco - we design structured cabling systems, networks and datacenters for medium and large enterprises as well as health care facilities and education.

We have designed things like:

Datacenters for Google

Corporate campus, network and datacenter for Lucas Arts
Presidio

Technology spaces for Cisco

All technology systems design for San Francisco General Hospital

Brocade's new corporate campus

El Camino Hospital's technology implementation

and many more

I'd like to see if there is any interest in the startup community for systems/facility/office design services packaged specifically for small groups that plan on growing their companies over time.

I would like to offer our expertise to the HN community regardless of how small you may be, hoping that as you grow and need more space, bigger networks, your own datacenter etc... that you have one of the best firms in the nation for your needs.

We are a small consultancy with a lot of experience.

Would there be any interest in these services?
If by "automatically", you mean "after thousands of man-hours have been taken to implement and debug the process" - and then only for so long as the system remains precisely the same.

Like it just didn't, in Russia.