skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
From On Lisp by Paul Graham (pages 59-60):

If your code uses a lot of new utilities, some readers may complain
that it is hard to understand. People who are not yet very fluent in
Lisp will only be used to reading raw Lisp. In fact, they may not be
used to the idea of an extensible language at all. When they look at a
program which depends heavily on utilities, it may seem to them that
the author has, out of pure eccentricity, decided to write the program
in some sort of private language.

All these new operators, it might be argued, make the program harder
to read. One has to understand them all before being able to read the
program. To see why this kind of statement is mistaken, consider the
case described on page 41, in which we want to find the nearest
bookshops. If you wrote the program using find2, someone could
complain that they had to understand the definition of this new
utility before they could read your program. Well, suppose you hadn’t
used find2. Then, instead of having to understand the definition of
find2, the reader would have had to understand the definition of
find-books, in which the function of find2 is mixed up with the
specific task of finding bookshops. It is no more difficult to
understand find2 than find-books. And here we have only used the new
utility once. Utilities are meant to be used repeatedly. In a real
program, it might be a choice between having to understand find2, and
having to understand three or four specialized search routines. Surely
the former is easier.

So yes, reading a bottom-up program requires one to understand all the new
operators defined by the author. But this will nearly always be less work than
having to understand all the code that would have been required without them.

If people complain that using utilities makes your code hard to read,
they probably don’t realize what the code would look like if you
hadn’t used them. Bottom-up programming makes what would otherwise be
a large program look like a small, simple one. This can give the
impression that the program doesn’t do much, and should therefore be
easy to read. When inexperienced readers look closer and find that
this isn’t so, they react with dismay.

We find the same phenomenon in other fields: a well-designed machine
may have fewer parts, and yet look more complicated, because it is
packed into a smaller space. Bottom-up programs are conceptually
denser. It may take an effort to read them, but not as much as it
would take if they hadn’t been written that way.
What version of Android does it run? I have a similar budget phone (ZTE Blade) and this was an issue under 2.1 (I would get warnings about being low on space) but I haven't even thought about it since I went to 2.2 a while ago. I believe most larger apps install themselves automatically to the SD card now? Enough do it that it doesn't bother me anyway.

I actually have no idea how much internal space my phone has, which I take as evidence that it's not an issue for me. Google tells me it's got a shockingly small sounding 150MB of internal of memory.
I found that when I removed the second password field users thought they were signing instead of registering. This lead to users creating multiple accounts and panic-y emails about lost data.
Or, to put it bluntly, if you are not killing people, you are not pushing hard enough.

I may be a weird person, but since when strapping yourself to a tank, the size of a building, filled with high explosives and riding it to orbit could be expected to be a safe thing?

If astronauts wanted safety, they'd be accountants.
Funtastic! On behalf of HN, I award you, sir, with the best link posting of the day award!
Cloud Hosting Affiliate Scheme Launched
Your glass will always be half empty with an iphone in it.
One nuclear disasters is one too many. If we can't engineer and operate a zero fail nuclear power-plant including various natural desaster scenarios maybe we should not use such technology.
There are a few countries where those who are connected with the current government are doing rather well - certainly well enough to have $100K. Some of those governments might soon be suffering from an outbreak of democracy.

If you were living in one of those countries it might be worth putting $100K into a business (especially if it was just recycling money that you could get back) in order to have a free escape to America card.

I think this visa is an excellent idea - much better than the current H1B crap. But it's going to get stopped if it ends up being a way for Egyptian dentists and Dubai real estate agents to escape the mob.
The Hindu : News / The India Cables : Pro-U.S. tilt in Cabinet shuffle
for example, getData() could be written something like:

getData = fetchDataFromSource . validateData . ProcessData

See http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Function_composition
Yes, that's part of the same bug, as I understand it anyway (to be clear: I'm not sure that anyone's claiming that there are problems with Earley's recogniser, which is really the core of his paper). Scott's "SPPF-Style Parsing From Earley Recognisers" gives an overview of the bug and its implications.
It's not "tin foil hat" it old news that's just being ignored.

http://news.cnet.com/2100-1029_3-6140191.html

Tin foil hats wouldn't be quite as silly if mind control rays were real and already used in the field.
Best Laptops for Women | Technorox
we're going to have Richard back in here eating his toenails

I find this incredibly disrespectful. I considered flagging it because I think it's on the order of insulting someone's spouse, but I don't think that's exactly what "flag" is for.
The official plan is to have it replaced completely with renewable energy technologies by 2020.
Introducing FastJson
100% of that 194 MW isn't used for electrical power generation. The total MW output is split between propulsion and the generators. If I had to guess, I'd say that bulk of the wattage is used for propulsion. Moving a carrier through the water at 30 knots is no small feat.
As always we mention TarSnap, I can't but be amazed Mr Percival, having all the infrastructure in place just sort of a GUI, passes on the gold mine of the millions of Windows users that couldn't care less about the mere existence of a command line, but still would pay for a backup tool as good as TarSnap.
15 Minutes of Fame? Meh. 15 Minutes of Journalism Is Where It’s At
>Lying for the sake of truth is a bad idea.

This isn't lying, it's accurate according to the information that we have acquired over the last 60 years on the use of nuclear technology. Should these predictions turn out to be incorrect then the information we have needs to be updated. I'm hoping it turns out well, there are of course no guarantees but the chances of things going even further south are low.
Wouldn't you also need "free hardware" to avoid the risk of your device being used against you? If you're not willing to trust the software on your phone, why would you trust that there isn't a tracking device built directly into the chips on the phone?
I love startups, but currently work for a ridiculous one...
Fascinating. Dropbox is e first really popular "filesystem in the cloud" so it stands to reason that we are going to start to see services built on top of it. Rally, it is a piece of the old "everyone will have a server" dream. Except, instead of having to define as new protocol for evry service, you just use JSON over http. There is a lot of potential here, much can be made of a publicly available everywhere filesystme.
Ideas From SXSW: What You Missed This Weekend
Do you know how http://www.snapengage.com/ takes screenshots? I'm not sure if it's HTML or an actual image, but it might be work looking into.
What's the point? =/ If you're going to make something, at least try to innovate rather than stick some symbols in a table (which most people could do in 10 minutes).
I can certainly look at offering a privately-hostable version eventually. It's running on a typical asp.net stack, so shouldn't be too hard to install elsewhere.

I'm currently focused on getting the public service out there, but if you're keen to get Jooplicate running locally please drop me an email andrew@equin.co.uk . It would be useful to know what kind of requirements you have.

Thanks.
Dudes, this is so not REST
great post. i have a YC2011 application ready to go, and, as a single founder, have been wondering if I should apply. Yes, I know, it’s next week. I too expect to be rejected but think it is worth the shot. And, to follow up on the end of the post, personally, YC isn’t about the money or the mentorship. It’s all about who you know. All I know is that I have the next big idea, execution is 100% of being a business and I think YC offers a lot of those resources that you can’t find in a lot of other places.
> I would love to hear from someone that's done a purely functional application with a large surface area that has been subjected to a real-world business environment to comment on the subject.

I worked at a betting exchange where the backend was written entirely in erlang. There were a lot of areas in the code where we had to deal with incredibly complicated business rules.

For example, we were not allowed to allow customers to gamble money they didn't have in their account but we did want to allow them to sell out of a position. This meant keeping track their minimum possible gains from all their current positions to figure out how much money they could safely be allowed to use. Money laundering regulations meant we also had to keep track of where different pools of money came from (eg different bank accounts, paypal etc) and these pools could not be allowed to mix (eg you can't deposit money into the site using paypal and then withdraw it into your bank account). Users are allowed to pick their own odds so we always had to be very careful whether money gets rounded up or down. And then there were promotions giving extra money for new members or for large deposits and any bets had to be taken from bonus pools before other money pools.

Functional programming is a very overloaded term so I will talk about specific things that made this easier. I personally find it much easier to construct complex data structures and maintain invariants on them when using algebraic types + pattern matching rather than objects. The use of immutable data structures made it much easier to verify that no operation ever changed the total amount of money in the system and to safely implement highly concurrent systems. First class functions were used throughout the code but we probably could have replaced most uses by objects with little change to the overall structure.

I think that in general OO conflates the management of code and the management of runtime state. In erlang modules are the unit of code management and processes the unit of state management. I would also point out that an entirely purely functional program is impractical with current software and probably not desirable in general.

Bear in mind that most of the advocacy for functional programming tends to from people who have only just encountered the idea and are extremely excited. There are much more nuanced viewpoints available if you dig a little eg Rich Hickey's ideas on the separation of state and identity: http://wiki.jvmlangsummit.com/images/a/ab/HickeyJVMSummit200...
You think you've got issues : my sci fi series TAU4 is getting all your emails, as Google alerts!
I am learning a great deal! check me out at vjwaks.com or on Amazon books.
VJ WAKS
TAU4
HAMMERSPACE
Los Angeles, CA
Gotcha, hadn't seen anyone trim the MM part before.
How would you handle validation errors in this case?
That's not RJ45, it's properly called 8P8C.
Social Development & weapons propelled Human Achievement
Sure, as I said you can find RegexKitLite superior for a variety of reasons, but that's different from the original complaint that the iOS SDK ships without regex support.
I'm not entirely sure that is as negative as it sounds. My average consumption is about 4KW/h per day. I just checked with my parents and they, with a multi-computer a home office, use about 6KW/h per day. So lets take that as an average.

Our systems account for about 2KW/h per person, per day. So that is about 30% of our own energy consumption.

15,000 ppl @ 6KW/h = 90,000 KW/h

3,000 ppl (20%) generating 2KW/h = 6,000 KW/h

That's 6% of the towns energy generation.

Which might not sound a lot, true. But on the other hand commercial renewable energy production in the UK accounts for about the same amount (8 ish percent I believe). So if everyone did it that would double renewable energy production.

I find that significant :)

I admit to "over egging" the ease, and being extremely optimistic in terms of the coverage and uptake of such a mass social movement :) but I still think it is something we all should try.
4chan founder to Facebook CEO: you’re doing it wrong | ZDNet
Short Hair Styles
Hair plays a very important part in our appearance. It is not only a marker of beauty but the hairstyle also reveals a lot about a person’s attitude, his or her personality and appeal towards the opposite sex.
Yeah because it's best to under-react to nuclear danger.

I know the trend is to reassure everyone everything is a-ok, but as others on HN have pointed out, things are not a-ok, and we won't know for some time.

We should continue to overreact for the good of everyone.
Obama "IP czar" wants felony charges for illegal Web streaming
Talker offers free group chat
Talker has been out for a year now. Today it's opening a free plan with unlimited users. Real competition for Campfire is coming!
There is the joke that even a broken watch is correct twice a day. I do think his communication style, his use of hyperbole, and his unwillingness to bring the listener 'along' work against him in most situations. However, he does have a self consistent line of reasoning as far as I've been able to discern for all of his positions.

But lets step back from the messenger for a moment and look at the message. Richard's rant on cellphones is predicated, in part, that they can be used as surveillance devices. The engineering of a cell phone network is such that it presents, perhaps as an 'attractive nuisance'[1], the ability to extract surveillance data. This has nothing to do with whether or not the software in the phone is "free", rather it has everything to do with how that software is used.

So a question that does not come up often, and I have yet to see in print, is this, "If all software was 'free' and 'open' how would that change anything?" So if the source code to the handsets is "free" and the source code to the base stations is "free" and the PSTN software is "free", what changes? SIP based phones have the same surveillance capabilities as GSM phones and one can put together a nominally 'free' stack for such a phone network. I'm afraid I don't have any good answers here.

[1] http://definitions.uslegal.com/a/attractive-nuisance/ although in our case the 'children' here are Law Enforcement Officers (LEOs) who don't have the resources to send someone out to follow you around.
This an unique initiative in IaaS cloud providers, getting affiliates and make them earn $. Sharing and making friends
To fairly clarify, while they may not have created any new product categories with the above examples, they certainly did succeed in redefining product categories, in addition to dominating. :) Perhaps the biggest thing the iPod had that other music players didn't have was a successful online music store. Likewise, iPhone and the app store and multitouch. Carry that over to iPad, compared to what tablets were previously.
We might be getting close to this point: Maybe we should just give up on the term REST, since it’s become so diluted as to mean nothing more than “HTTP API that’s not as hard to use as SOAP”?

This is a shame, because RESTful APIs are (for me, anyway) usually a joy to build and to use.
I don't like apt-get. The way they break up packages is annoying and sometimes leads to debian-specific forks. I also hoped that Debian's vastly larger community would mean discovering several good packages apt-get (which I'd port to OpenBSD), but there really hasn't been much that OpenBSD doesn't already have. Disappointing.

GNU coreutils. The BSD userland (the core system) is much better integrated, which affects a great many things. In particular, I really prefer BSD top.

When I installed some recommended package so that closing my netbook's lid would make it suspend, it didn't work. I read the source, and it was so obviously broken (among other things, it was suspending on lid-close AND lid-open) that I just wrote my own. Usually I contribute patches, but...eh. Other stuff that tried to "automagically" configure itself, but didn't work quite right, and interfered with manual configuration.

"This project only has a man page because we want to note that man pages suck, look at the info page instead." I hate empty man pages, and it's particularly annoying because the documentation on OpenBSD is phenomenal.

I prefer /etc/rc.conf to /etc/init.d/ , though that's fairly minor. (I usually run daemons via runit anyway.)

There are probably several other things that don't come to mind at the moment.
We (http://labs.linkfluence.net/) are a research company based in Paris, working on communication and product-oriented strategies by analyzing, segmenting, and mapping conversations which take place on social web communities. We develop a lot of technologies to harvest and analyse web data. We are looking for 2 developers (1 senior + 1 junior). More details are available here : http://labs.linkfluence.net/jobs.html
Why did you choose the name "Y Combinator?"

The Y combinator is one of the coolest ideas in computer science. It's also a metaphor for what we do. It's a program that runs programs; we're a company that helps start companies.

http://ycombinator.com/faq.html
Interesting. I think I get stung by this as well - I've been struggling to understand why my clear, detailed, fluff-free emails aren't effective. The naive solution seems to be to pad your emails with bullshit, but I think this would often make them so long that they just don't get read.

One solution I've found is to talk to people in person, but this isn't time-efficient; another is to write a numbered(!) list of questions at the bottom, to force people to think about the things I want them to think about. But neither of these seems particularly elegant; has anyone come up with something better?
Why Scvngr's "Chief Ninja" Is the Talk of SXSW
Given the way GSM works you'd also need 'Free cell towers', 'Free GSNs' and a 'Free network'. Not that I even know how that would be possible. You'd also still need 'Free airwaves' because you can triangulate from your own broadcast signal in some cases.
The article does mention that Stallman uses a "rather slow" Lemote Yeeloong laptop because it's the only laptop with a free BIOS.
So, you would prefer living near tens of square miles of moon-like wasteland created by ever-growing surface coal mines, eventually even having your house demolished to allow the mine grow more again, in order to feed that power plant?

In a country like this, with smoking power plants nearby: http://krajina.venku.cz/exkur2a/ex2a-01a.htm

Or rather just tolerate this:
http://www.vyletnik.cz/images/profily/users/1969/jaderna-ele...

(Please note that these images are very real, and we're going to need to extend either the mines or build some new nuclear plants, at least locally, in the Czech republic.)
Fukushima plant operator to evacuate control room personnel
Well, I've seen most posts/stories critical of MS going up highly.

Not so for Apple comments/stories.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1800253

http://mattmaroon.com/2010/11/23/i-quit-hacker-news/
Talker group chat is now free
The problem is that Nasa don't seem to have a reason for having astronauts there - other than without the astronauts there would be no interest and no Nasa.

You could make it safer by replacing the Shuttle with an Apollo era capsule and sticking it on the front of every commercial ArianeV / Atlas IV launch. Wouldn't be any point in having the man there but it would be safer manned spaceflight.
Software as web
Are Cookies going Wooky?
The NYT has decided that indie book sales don't count.
Open-source developers, please provide a roadmap!
You seem to think that convenience and privacy are somehow mutually exclusive. For a non programmer right now, which often has the choice between convenient proprietary spying software, and hard-to-use free software, I can understand. So does RMS, by the way: "Few people are willing to make the sacrifices he will for the goal of software freedom, Stallman acknowledges".

But in the long run, those issues are orthogonal. Encryption doesn't make user interface suck. Neither does the licence.
SpaceX looks like it may do a great job in the currently envisioned outside contactor role. The Constellation program under Mike Griffin would have done a great job, but now that's billions of dollars wasted. Keeping the shuttles going would have done a good job in the interim at least, but now the upcoming, indefinitely long gap in national manned spaceflight capability threatens to erode the workforce. Having NASA's programs totally reworked every time there's a new president, on timescales smaller than those of developing new spaceflight capabilities and programs, has been a disastrous recipe for waste. Yet, it's hard to knock its record of accomplishment in the 60's when it had a clear mandate that was kept stable for long enough. If only it could be shielded from the whims of political leaders.
HTML5 canvas performance test
I can see the argument, but I disagree. What if I wasn't in the mood for humor / look at this cool thing? What if I were interested in legal troubles, and not pretty pictures?

Besides, the point of summary comments on short articles is to pre-filter, not post-filter. Without something like that, I have no way of knowing if it'll be a tweet or a novel, and at the time I didn't have time for much longer than a tweet.
I'm not advocating a 'return to grace', but you picked a rather selective definition of 'grace'. Looking further back (or elsewhere) than subsistence agriculture, hunter-gathering is potentially a pretty leisurely lifestyle: the 'original affluent society' (http://www.eco-action.org/dt/affluent.html).
I wonder how much more business tarsnap can get, just by packaging a couple of debs, not even talking about a having a repository.
Ice. Ice, baby.
Personally I find shaving in the mirror challenging :-)
Apparently they have a special exemption. It's illegal for dell to let somebody in Russia download a driver but it's OK for the US government to pay for Russian rocket launches.
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I attended one of the earlier "Startup School" events a few years ago at Harvard. Unfortunately, things didn't work out for my startup concept (I ended up working for the government, of all things), but I found the meeting inspiring.

Here I was, a twenty something attending a free conference, sitting a few feet away from and talk to Steve Wozniak. A few minutes later, I'm in the middle of a fascinating conversation with Chris Sacca, only to head back into the lecture hall to listen to a really impressive series of speakers with alot of passion and great ideas.

Honestly, it was an amazing event, and pg managed to assemble a great group of really approachable and interesting folks on a Saturday afternoon. I found it inspiring, and while I'm not involved with them at all, it sounds like YCombinator is an institution that makes a meeting like that happen everyday.
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