skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
OMG, we have a HN contributor who understands the use of tone!!!!

May I offer you a complimentary ticket to the @LAUNCH HackAThon taking place on May 23-25th here in San Francisco?
Post-Scarcity Prophet
"Here we are using tail recursion to keep inserting the records."

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think he means tail recursion. It's recursion, yes. But does tail recursion even make sense in an asynchronous setting?
I can never really figure out if I think Calacanis is awesome or if I think he's terrible, and for that I think he's pretty awesome.
FWIW this is the same in ruby (nil and false are the only non-true values) but I believe this comes from some older language, does anyone knows which one?
Oscar Weekend Inspiration: 5 Start-up Lessons We Learn from Movies
DuckDuckGo FOSS Donations 2010
jmount, a good majority of it is from one-off posts that I find entertaining and socialize well on FB and SU, but aren't really representative of what I want the site to be about.

For the stories that I do spend a good amount of time on that are serious, they seem to die... like I'm screaming into an empty room and waiting for feedback.

And yes, I'm absolutely in denial that I might just not be interesting to read :)
While that line obviously can not extend downwards forever, it would not surprise me at all that the Kindle eventually comes with an $X credit good for about 2 or 3 ebooks as well as the semi-free price tag, which is close enough to paying you that it fits, I think. The market is enormous and once the hardware is all-but-free hooking you in with a few "free" ebooks is a no-brainer. Ebooks aren't free but their marginal costs are almost indistinguishable from "free".
And yet despite all this amazing intellectual capability we seem somehow unable to balance a government budget, year after year after year. Hmmmmmm....
Instagram Web Interface
Anybody know why Instagram doesn't have a web interface? I made this one up 2 nights. It doesn't do everything that the app does (yet), but at least you can view your feed, your photos and popular photos.
Interesting article - I really liked the updated example at the very end, demonstrating a new pattern (for me) for handling exceptions that get thrown by wrapping the DB inserts in their own function.
Everything is amazing and nobody's happy.
True, with the difference being humans (and our predecessors) had to wait hundreds of thousands of years for the fossil fuels to form under the immense pressure (and additional energy input) of the earth.
Dropbear -- Low-Memory Replacement for OpenSSH
It's also 40% off.
Master of blunt indeed. I'll admit you're exactly right--the active ingredient in those two differing styles is the same. But it all boils down to a difference in philosophy. There's something to be said for being blunt and never pulling a punch. There's also something to be said for trying to be a peace maker. At the end of the day, the ideal mix is somewhere in between. I guess I just find always jumping to the 'full-contact sport' mentality distasteful.
Let's say:

Free 3G-Kindle for a 30$/12 months contract that includes 2 books a month and a newspaper subscription. Seems a pretty good deal to me.

180$ for the Kindle at current price, 100$ for royalties to publishers and Amazon will keep 80$ and the money extra the user spends on buying extra books.
At least for the examples provided in the article true/false behaves like Ruby.
There are a number of ways to get Prime for essentially-free or even straight-up free. Students can get it free for a year [1], and Amazon Mom [2] provides it essentially free for parents of young children. You have to buy $25/month of qualifying goods, but we have not found this to be a challenge if you're still on diapers. (And Amazon is quite competitive on diapers.) YMMV.

It seems to me that Amazon is desperate for you to have Prime, but as what is basically a loyalty program, it doesn't work for them if they simply give it away. The customer has to feel engaged somehow, either by paying for it, or feeling like they're getting something really valuable for some promotional reason. I personally suspect that as the Amazon Mom's year ends or the student's year comes up that the announcement will be made that out of the goodness of their heart, Amazon has decided to simply extend the program for another year or something, and that as they can work out reasonable excuses to give you a free Prime subscription they will continue to do so. Just my best guess based on the business situation.

[1]: http://www.amazon.com/gp/student/signup/info

[2]: http://www.amazon.com/gp/mom/signup/welcome
Microsoft’s Effort to Build Apps and Reward Engineers
Those are all good resources. On top of that, Xach just posted[1] the number of times that libraries have been recently downloaded from quicklisp. I have been having fun checking out the most downloaded libraries.

I prefer common-lisp.net for finding a project's webpage and mailing list, but cliki has a useful section that lists projects by category.

[1] http://blog.quicklisp.org/2011/02/project-download-stats.htm...
I found the original source of the malware release. If anyone wants to look at it, Googling for "Blackhole RAT" and visiting the result titled "Blackhole Rat Problem" will return the same result I found. You'll have to change your UserAgent string to GoogleBot or similar because it is a registered forum.
As an entrepreneur, I like it when investors need little to no social proof to make a decision.
Sounds great, just signed up to try it. Two questions:

1. What's with the "j"? Makes it sound like it was written in Java...

2. Any thoughts of turning the website converter bookmarklet into a Chrome extension? Would be cleaner and seem more secure for users.
It always cracks me up to see Calacanis accuse someone else of grandstanding... That's classic.

On the investment side, I think it's interesting how some of the older notions of control and influence by investors in a startup are changing. Surely this is one of the best times in recent memory to start a tech company.
ESR doesn't mention the famous 1960 paper:
"The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences" by Eugene Wigner.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Unreasonable_Effectiveness_...
I know what enumeration types are. Symbols are not directly an 'enumerated type', but can be used to implement them. Like symbols can be used for many other things. Thinking of symbols as elements of 'infinite enumerated type' is misleading or useless. In Common Lisp symbols are not just a name, but part of a namespace (package), have a value, a function, a property list, etc.. They can only be kind of enumerated if they are part of a package. Symbols can also be not interned in a package, then you can't enumerate them.
This strikes me as a worst-of-both-worlds approach. I've come to prefer explicit booleans vs. C-style truthiness, but if you're going to limit falseness so strictly you ought to make it a type error to have anything but a Boolean in the if statement. Even a run-time type error would be fine, Erlang mostly works that way ("true and 0" results in a bad argument exception, unfortunately the "if" construct is less picky). Making an interface such that any object can declare a reasonable definition of truthy and therefore the if can take anything seems like another valid choice, I've had good success with that in Python. This intermediate approach seems to combine the badness of both approaches, not the goodness.
Is it actively developed? The latest version is from 2009... I wonder if it have a version of 0.2, is it too far away from the last release?

It would be interesting to grasp what use it proves.
Not to disparage your post, but it contains only an inkling of substance. Some people managed to get 1600 QPS on GAE, that tells me absolutely nothing. What was their usage like? How much did they pay? What was their latency like? What did they think of GAE? Etc etc.
I think he highlighted a key point, which is that funding seems to be less about product than it is about who's behind you.

It's kind of like credit - you can't get it until you don't need it.
YC's greatest hack is their ability to invest without social proof from other investors.
At 10% of gross revenue, these donations would indicate DDG pulled in ~$19,090 in 2010.
Or if you are using Objectify:

@Cached
public class MyEntity {
@Id Long id;
...
}

:)
Firefox 4 and Beta 5 Becomes Available for Android and N900
Firebug - I'm used to it, it works. Inspector doesn't have as many features as Firebug, either. Nor is it extensible.

All that aside, I'm not convinced that Google won't just forget that they have a browser.
Studies have shown the kindle is not robust enough for most classroom settings. Lack of note taking, slow page turning, etc. slowed down classes and caused students to eventually print out assignments:

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/businesstechnology/201...

http://www.fastcompany.com/1727292/apple-ipad-officially-pas...
The thing I hate about kindle (hardware) being a loss leader is that it requires Amazon to keep it locked down so that you can ONLY buy content through them.

I'd rather pay for it up-front and actually have an open e-book market on the back end. As opposed to having to root/jailbreak it and/or go through painful file conversion processes to read other e-books.
By "own the game" they mean "own a license to play the game". Why should ROMs not be legal if you already own the cartridge?
I don't believe in Zeus because Zeus doesn't have a falsifiable historical event like the resurrection of Jesus to back up his existence.
http://hackerstreet.in/item?id=1394
This is the best essay on this subject I've ever read.
There are several examples in the manual:

http://www.seas.upenn.edu/~harmony/manual.pdf
More electrical outlets.
Secret passage-ways.
A hangar for the Bat-fleet.
A maze for the Minotaur.
It's funny the first thing I thought about when I heard about thunderbolt was "awesome! Now I can build a ghetto NUMA system". But I guess others are concerned about security.
Note that Amazon's new free movie/TV-streaming service for Prime members isn't available to Amazon Student or Amazon Mom customers unless they pony up the annual $79 fee:

https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html/ref=hp_...

So students and moms probably won't get Kindles for "essentially-free or even straight-up free."
I'll be laughing when Lion is released free of charge. (I have no sources, just a hunch.)
My impression is that it's an application you have to agree to install. Which means the only thing noteworthy here is that it mimics a Windows trojan. There is no security exploit which allows it to be installed with the user unaware. Nothing special here it seems...
The only complaints that I have about it are that it's missing "next/previous" buttons, and that it needs a redesign.
I think it's more of a "please store all the pictures and home videos you want, but don't use it as a HD video repository" tact.
To note, they don't care to make money on the device, thats why you can read your kindle books on Android, iPhone, PC, etc.
He even mentions that it would blow up the stack ... so, no TCO is applied, which does not exist in javascript (at least not in V8). But tail recursive it is, as the recursion is the last statement. What he implements in the variation is a kind of pseudo-trampoline through setTimeout ...
Yes, Django slugifier turns ぬびばざべ to an empty text. Maybe that's because my language is set to tr-tr, I am not sure. One possible downside with icu is that, afaik, you can't run it in Google App Engine.
Yes, this is necessary. Now, build up a few more of these patterns, start watching them intertwine with each other in ways that require you to manually interleave them, come to the realization that building your glorious asynchronous stack on top of a fundamentally synchronous language was a bad idea.

In languages that are not fundamentally synchronous, such as Erlang, you do not leap through hoops to manage this. You simply write a function that performs your insertions in the straightforward and obvious way, and the runtime manages it with no blocking at any point.

I actually don't like the frequently-made assertion that "a pattern is automatically a weakness in the language", but it does apply here. As the Node.js community laboriously builds up the patterns necessary to work in this paradigm, recapitulating the work done in numerous other async-on-top-of-sync-language libraries, it probably is worth keeping the assertion in mind. You shouldn't even have to think about this, let alone argue which way is the best way to do it.

(Somebody modded this down. Maybe I should make it clear that I'm actually speaking from experience on another asynchronous project written in Perl on top of glib's asynchronousness, which isn't fundamentally different from Node.js'. I'm not speculating, I've been on the receiving end of this complexity explosion. It will happen.)
Note: the talk is from May 2010.

I wonder if Steve (or rather, jedberg or someone else at reddit) were to give the talk today, if 'memcache' and 'memcachedb' would both be replaced by Redis?
Hacker News Feeds, Rolling Time Windows, and Diamonds In the Rough
Oh wow, that's surprising and somewhat disconcerting. Do you have any sort of reference? If true, it's very serious.
I am sorry but I did not get it.
A different way of looking at it is that YC's created their own social proof system and gotten investors to buy into it.
As do I. But that takes courage, a trait that few have, AngelList or no.
They Still Make and Sell New Dot Matrix Printers
I've played with jMockups demo and as a Balsamiq user I can say that one of its best features is "low fidelity", specifically lines that look hand drawn and comic sans font. That combo is what I consider most important in mockups: when you give that to a client, it's very clear that it's not a product, it's a mockup.

If you can make that kind of low fidelity, I think you would have very good mockup tool. Of course, seeing what you have right now, I can understand your thinking in pursuing high fidelity route.
> On a sidenote, Buffett's frugality is reminiscent of Zuckerberg's lifestyle.

Could you expand on this?
Alternatively: The kindle 2 was what, 300USD? I think that's about what it sold for the majority of the time it was released.

So a reduction from 300 to 100 is 66% off, while a reduction from 300 to 140 is a little bit over 50% off. If your guess is 66% off and actual is on the high end of 50%, that's not a bad guess in my book.
It was $139 at the time of the predictions IIRC.
There is also continued work on coroutines (based on Stackless) in Pypy: http://codespeak.net/pypy/dist/pypy/doc/stackless.html
Now try to make good and sell at that valuation. I dare you.
unsure the circumstances, but i just got one free year as it was offered during checkout, and days after the announcement i was sent an email saying i can watch streaming videos.
Our company website (http://www.stochastictechnologies.com/) and my resume (http://resume.korokithakis.net/) runs on GAE, on one instance. However, the script has a sort of mod_rewrite, so it requires that you declare your URLs beforehand. If you'd like to check it out, see https://github.com/stochastic-technologies/static-appengine-....
It isn't locked down at all. You can read ebooks from o'reilly, baen, pragprog, and many other non-Amazon stores on it right out of the box.

It simply doesn't implement competing DRM schemes.
Abstractions are absolutely necessary imo. Code like that is too long to be easily maintainable.

http://groups.google.com/group/nodejs/browse_thread/thread/c...

Also, that guy is responsible for nodetuts, which I'm very thankful for!

http://nodetuts.com/index.html
Real-time pricing for gas
I own a Kindle but rarely buy Kindle books from Amazon. There is plenty of high-quality free content as well as eBooks from other publishers like Pragmatic Press.
I disagree, this is only an issue if you have almost no visitors, and then you can pay a nominal fee and keep instances awake. This is definitely worth the development time you will save and the ability to move off GAE easily if you need to.
Speaking of rooting/jailbreaking, I put together a simple guide for those who want to jailbreak their Kindle and use Luigi's standalone terminal:

http://tinyapps.org/docs/kindle_standalone_terminal.html
While we're at it... this piece of ruby is about operator precedences. Not strictly in the truthy falsey department but still slightly in topic.
The participants are 1, nil, or, ||, assignment and puts ...

puts (i = nil || 1) => 1
puts i => 1
puts (i = nil or 1) => 1
puts i => nil
puts i = nil || 1 => 1
puts i => 1
puts i = nil or 1 => nil
puts i => nil
Correct, the price on the latest generation has remained constant so far.
It's a concise tid-bit on an intellectually interesting, semi-esoteric, but still useful language. I think it qualifies pretty well, personally.
Also available from Berkshire's website:

http://www.berkshirehathaway.com/letters/letters.html
Facebook is choosing to raise more, and stay private longer, to go for an even bigger prize.

Their upside isn't just via acquiring new users, but making more money from existing users. They've wisely avoided trying to max the revenue per user, preferring instead to extend and cement their lead.

But at some point, after maxing adoption, maxing stickiness, and performing many small experiments, they could find a profit gusher as large or larger than AdWords/AdSense, that they and only they have the network to exploit.

And, Facebook's peer-affiliation/communication services seem inherently more sticky, for average people, than the habit of using Google search. (The difficulty of switching away from Facebook is more like that of switching away from GMail or the deep-inventory Google ad networks.)
Archiving Tweets with Python
The average person just wants to survive. The problem comes when they believe, whether it is true or not is irrelevant, that their survival requires someone else to die.
This is cool stuff, developed by the same group that first did Unison (a synching utility that I have grown addicted to).

The basic point is being able to define maps between data structures and then being able to update either end of the map and see the results transformed on the other - which is what Unison does at the filesystem/machine level; this is the same concept taken to the data structure level. It's hard stuff to get right, but it is so tantalizing.
There is alternative firmware:
http://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=105847
all three: Firebug (my main one), then Chrome tools, then IE dev tools (really). This helps me support all three browsers accurately.
EPUB is not a competing DRM scheme. It's the standard for virtually every other reader and store, and the kindle doesn't support it.
But he's blaming the browser.
The bet Bryce is making is that the more profitable deal flow for OATV involve companies who are looking for different kinds of investors than they're likely to find via AL.

> The only companies not on AngelList are the ones that don't quite understand how the service works.

Investors aren't the only ones prone to herd mentality.
You have a point, but what I'd really like to see is something more "meta."

First a little background.

I had a discussion with a business guru around MIT once about marketing. He related a story (possibly apocryphal) about Larry Ellison of Oracle and how he would run into meetings of Oracle's sales guys in the early days and berate them for not lying enough. "If you don't lie nobody will believe you!"

Anyway, this guy was saying that this is exactly true. If you don't lie people won't believe you.

I've kind of seen it myself in the business world. I also think that it explains much of what we see in the world with regard to religion, political ideologies, superstition, etc.

The problem is that the primate social part of our brain interprets uncertainty, skepticism, doubt, and even caution as signifiers of low primate social status. Huge, gargantuan claims, boldness (even if wrong), and certainty are seen as signifiers of alpha status.

Thus a certain-of-themselves idiot or nutjob is of higher social status than a cautious, skeptical, rational person.

Salesmen exploit this by intentionally telling audacious lies (of a sort) in order to elevate themselves socially in the perception of potential buyers. People buy from alphas, not betas.

What I want to see is a detailed neurological and psychological deconstruction of this. I want to see it hacked, targeted, dismantled. That would be progress.

To give an example, a spray-on pheromone that fucked with this subsystem of the brain in some way would be awesome. (Not sure if that's possible since humans might not react this way, but just an example of the sort of thing I'd like to see.)
Lisp: nil and the empty list '() are equivalent and are falsey. C: 0 is falsey, the rest not.
Chrome devtools. Because for me chrome is far better browser.
...forced to educate himself...

He wasn't referring to himself with 'chill out'.
When you fail to show the true value of it to the buyer.
An important factor is how much you feel in control of your fate (whether the control is real or imaginary is less important). Tech startups feel it's much more up to their skills and creativity to make it than a lowly employee working for the Man in a big bureaucratic multinational, even if statistically they have about the same chance. It's similar to why most people are more afraid of flying than driving, even though the former is much safer statistically.
What could "Poe" be?
Nice try, Watson.
With $38 billion in cash, Warren Buffett looking for deals
Which is a completely separate issue from the claim that the kindle is a locked down device that can only view content bought from Amazon.

In my experience, every DRM-free ebook store I've dealt with has been happy to sell me a .mobi.
Yes, it's exciting problem. I think it's good he's articulated it.

Yet in ways, this paper seems like a confession that he's reached something of a brick wall with the problem.

If you look at the bidirectional link, http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/1526, he goes over a series of partial solutions before discussing his (very general) approach. I suspect that a workable system might be better through putting together all the classes of partial-but-well-behaved solutions rather than attempting a fully general solution.

Another thing that interests me is bidirectional code that operates on itself.
Prime is already amazing, but this would just blow minds to pieces.
Which websites dropped the most in the latest Google algorithm change?
One is not better than the other. There are people who follow stocks that Warren Buffett buys. And then there are people who stick to their own strategy. In a marketplace there's room for every type of investor. One could even go contrarian and only invest in companies with zero social proof.
Atomic antennae transmit quantum information across a microchip
Sorry for negative comment but you can learn some things from http://mixtape.me/
I was thinking this exact same thing, and I really hope that isn't the case, as they are pretty awesome.
Some people I know use Google Finance to invest. With ETFs specifically you can watch daily inflows and outflows to and from specific sectors.

Is there a Google Finance investment philosophy?
yeah but JC the smart ones HN that understand tone usually get downvoted..:)
Whenver I see an article on HN.
I regularly complain about off topic stories about politics or other topics that wind people up.

This, however, seems fairly pertinent to the 'business' side of HN.
Let’s Calm Down On The Google-ITA Deal
The programmer and the princess frog.
It's right. You expected more?
Meh, I could nitpick at the language all day but I still use it. Call/cc probably isn't happening anytime soon.
Apple’s iPad Still Has No Competition
I dont think reddit's stability is as bad as it looks. Just that Reddit's community is pretty vocal on it. IIRC, they have availability in high 90s (may be jedberg can confirm).
It is my impression that the operator is already in money, he's doing this for the hell of it.