skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This traffic comparison seems to somewhat support that http://goo.gl/FdQi3 Swoopo started tanking when bigdeal started rising, but bigdeal hasn't been anywhere near as well trafficked as swoopo was in its prime.

I find it irrational that people got more worked up about Swoopo than they do about gambling/lottery business models. Unlike with gambling you are able to purchase a product before an auction ends and use all the credits you had used on it. It's a pretty transparent model provided you think it through. It's recreational consuming that leverages a host of psychological principles really well - love it or hate it.
Grab a (recent) version of Ubuntu and don't upgrade.

This only sounds like a joke, but it's not. Ubuntu is perfectly fine with the idea of not upgrading for years. Hence LTS releases.
What have you built recently?
Philosophy behind Ruby on Rails
20K
git clone git://github.com/MacRuby/MacRuby.git macruby
I think RIM are going to do a Sega/Psion. They can't compete on devices and will wind up delivering cloud-based services for other mobile platforms alongside running a nice little business licensing QNX for embedded stuff.
Shortened links get the lg.cx domain. IMHO, goatse ruined the .cx ccTLD for business use. Besides that, I don't see the benefit of using this service instead of simply using any shortener of my choosing to link to a Google Map (but perhaps I'm not part of the target demographic?).
Could taking a computer science course change your life?
Perhaps not British though? A friend of mine (Australian) works in a company with offices in the UK and US selling education/health website software. In Aus and the US, business works as expected, you go in, make your case, get an answer yes/no and you're golden. In the UK they were finding that a great many places would agree to buy and then default at the next step.

They eventually learned to do the initial sell in a much more sideways manner as when confronted with 'do you want this or not?', British clients tended to just say yes to get them out of the office - even if they had zero intention of taking the product. Caused a lot of confusion until that was identified.
I think he meant that not being in California is an advantage because you don't have 3 hulking giants (and more) taking practically 100% of the available engineers. Whatever is left is fiercely battled for by the smaller companies.
Financial wealth is know to follow a powerlaw distribution, this is probably the same.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_law
This is now a semantic discussion - which is not necessarily a bad thing, we should just know that up front.

To me, the statement "programming without assignment" implies programming without making multiple assignments to the same name - mutation or re-assignment. I don't know if the programming language community has agreed-upon semantics for the word "assignment," but to me, it implies re-assignment and mutation. What you call "assignment" I think of as binding - that is, the lvalue gets bound to the rvalue.
Google/Slide launch Disco - another ugly product
At the same time, the top-50 (or -whatever) institutions have the least incentive to rock the boat: they're usually rolling in "buying power" :) and their faculty are relatively likely to be among the winners of the game as it's currently set up (negative-sum game though it is). I think it's safe to say that if the top 50 were sufficiently motivated to make closed-access journals go away they would already be gone by now.
MS does supply a product in each category, but most MS dev shops that I have seen will more often than not be using some of: svn instead of Tfs, nUnit instead of MStest, castle or ninject instead of unity, nHibernate instead of EF, etc. And targeting firefox/chrome with jQuery. As far as I know there's no clear leaders in the distributed cache niche, and there is a fair amount of interest in noSQL stores like mongo, couch and ravenDb.

Where the open source choice is more functional, cheaper or just more familiar, it often gets used instead. This is good.
A great source of economic info is Calculated Risk. http://cr4re.com/charts/charts.html?GDP#category=GDP&cha...

I'm relatively unfamiliar with this stuff, but do you really think GDP can grow exponentially? It looks like we're at the bottom of the skyrocket to the moon on your graph.
I think it comes down to what you have planned for the future. I can think of several people who bit the "liberal arts" bullet, to get a well rounded education, worked in a random industry, then ended up going back to a graduate school/law school/etc due to lack of opportunity. From random sources I've read, the average salaries for a science degree are simply higher.

Here's a comparison by Worcester Polytechnic Institute I found: http://www.wpi.edu/academics/Majors/LAE/bavsbs.html. They emphasize that the BS option would be more for "hardcore" science.
Plenty of countries where gambling isn't state control have very healthy gambling industries.
Yahoo Research haven't come up on my radar before either, whereas I've seen reams of material from Microsoft Research and Google.
Some people just want to work in small companies. I get recruited from Google and Facebook regularly. I'm not ready to work in that kind of environment. I know lots of people who aren't. I work with several of them. We want to do things those guys aren't going to do.
Of course, but I can't use any of those languages to implement commercial audio units so I'm happy to have something in the one language in which I can.
I wouldn't pay for Twitter. Period. I don't find it useful at all, nor do I find any meaningful content on it. Maybe I'm still just not getting Twitter, but for the most part, or I'm not following the right people on Twitter, but it's definitely not worth money.

Maybe when I actually find it useful, my opinion will change.
Not really. Linus's comment was direct and to the point: your attitude does not make sense and I don't like it. And here's why my way is better:...

Your comment was a passive-aggressive declation of stupidity in the other party.

The two are not the same.
My experience is that the easier to bookmark a page the least likely I will get back to it (except the two dozen or so in the bookmarks bar in Chrome).

I built for my own use with Google App Engine this service I call "ting" (sample search: http://ting-1.appspot.com/rt?rt=startup) and with each link I want to save I enter tags and a summary; this way I know I only save pages that I really believe will be useful to me in the long run. (I also cut and paste the link, making it even more time consuming)
> If high frequency trading is so needless, why does the entire market go into shock when the traders panicked and left on may 6th 2010?

Because HFTs, who enjoy the privilege of walking away from the market at the worst possible moment, had largely displaced traditional market makers who make expensive commitments not to do that. Nobody specifically chooses to do business with them, they're exploiting flaws in the way trades clear to front-run them and become unwanted middlemen.
Is Node.js here to stay or just a passing fad?
I'm not sure I understand your point: what prevented you from watching the numerous auctions they had going at any one time to see how it worked? What also prevented you from revisiting the hundreds of closed auctions they made available for review to see what final selling prices were? Or reading their help/FAQ's, all provided in the open? Seems like this was all in plain site. Also you use the term "gambling" - can you cite where the law explicitly states this auction model is gambling or even why the mechanics of it make it "gambling?"
Not all ideas can or should be taught in (elite) colleges. The framework to analyze any idea should be and generally is taught at colleges.

Repackaging and selling things is foundational to creating value. The insurance industry is perhaps the quintessential example. They create no direct expected value, and yet they create societal benefit by creating risk-adjusted expected value.

What is manufacturing but repackaging?
Facebook Vs. Startups
Hi guys,

I've been following news on ycombinator for sometime the crowd on here is quite intelligent so I had something that I would like everyones opinion on.

Is it still possible for a social network startup to make an entry in to facebooks realm? (I always believe that it is not possible for one company to completely monopolize a business) I refer to facebook realm as a universal social network type thing rather than other websites like badoo, myspace (current state), hi5 etc...

If so what would you imagine this social network being able to do and how it should look like, what strategies should use, image and ideal people behind it (major tech guys, university students etc... to get the attention required)

Many people are going to say it's not possible, but let's assume it is even for those people who don't believe in it being so.

Everyone promote this thread, let's get everyones feedback so we can all benefit from the information, I appreciate your responses.
Comments link to a good LtU discussion that counter his claims and confusions: http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/678
#GoogleIsntOpen
Google often boasts that it's "open"... What do you think?
I remember this bug report. Since October 2010, Linus has posted a "me too" reply, then helped pinpoint the issue, then explained why shifting the blame to Adobe is wrong, then provided a workaround for everyone, then ran a benchmark proving the new memcpy code is crap, then helped people having issues with his workaround, and then finally went agressive towards Andre Robatino, whose previous comment is simply daft.
You can make your point without ass kissing or insulting/being overly aggressive.

See, in your post, the "You're an ass with overgrown ego" doesn't help your point at all; it's just provocative and seen as aggressive.

Try to remove that phrase from your post and you'll see that there's no difference at all. In fact, you would have wasted a little bit less of everyone's time. (See how easy it can be to be aggressive and provocative; even thought it wins nothing at the end.)

Anyway, if I understand your post, you are saying that either you gets things done or you're ass kissing the ego of people. First, that is plainly totally wrong. You can be productive without being an ass. Secondly, not being aggressive, is not the same thing as ass kissing.

It's like fighting to win a battle or a war. By being aggressive, you fight to win that small battle.. but if the contributor is pissed enough and decide to not work with some asses, everybody loses.
Color plans to permanently block objectionable users?
Im on border of Leeds / Bradford.
When the collapse of Facebook presents systemic risk (or the illusion of system risk depending on your perspective) to the US, I'm sure it will get a "bail out" as well.
That's what I used to do but this is more convenient plus there's something nice about creating a content page with notes about linking into a maps application.

And yes, I'm bringing .cx back. Too soon? It was either that or Libya.
Engineering vs. Liberal Arts is an odd debate, because most college students major in neither. The most popular majors in the USA are things like business, marketing, communications and psychology.
The technical terms are 'variable assignment' and 'single assignment'. 'Assigment' is generally considered to mean the former unless it's qualified.

From a pedantic perspective, you can't really disagree with the statement 'haskell supports single assignment.' But equally as pedantic, most actual text reads 'FP doesn't support variable assignment', including the original article above.

I don't have a copy of the Ravi Sethi book to see what the exact text of his exact statement was.

Now that I've seen this image on wikipedia:

https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/File:Fp_no_de...

I'm really tempted to waste some more money at Cafe Press.
You've got to understand that it is very hard for highly technically proficient people to be nice to everyone.

Of all the arguments for being brusque on the web, this is the one I find most unappealing... as well as the least applicable for the matter at hand.

As far as I can tell, there's nothing about Linus' reply that depended on his admittedly high level of technical competence. In fact, it seemed he was saying "don't rely on being technically correct, consider the consequences"... in a way that got people's attention.

"I'm smart, so it's OK to an asshole" is about as shitty as an attitude as "not my problem, I'm just going by specs" - in fact, it's kind of similar. ... I bet all the up-voters thought they were the "highly technically proficient people"!
-module(opine).
-export([opine/0]).

opine() ->
io:format("I ~s the new website.~n",[gen_opine(random:uniform())]).

gen_opine(R) when R > 0.2 -> love;
gen_opine(_) -> hate.
Friendly HN tip: You don't need to use @ (and it's considered good form not to) when replying to someone. We can see who you're replying to from the nested comments.
I really like the idea of the General Education Program. In fact, I think you'll have the most impact and do the most good by focusing only on this program.

There are many different websites that do what you do, i.e. providing a college education online for free. Khan Academy targets the technical subjects (and a younger demographic), opencourseware has thousands of lectures online, etc. To put it bluntly, if I want to learn biology or computer science, you've got nothing that I can't get anywhere else.

But listen to this quote from the your website: "The purpose of the General Education Program is to educate students about what we—as human beings—know about ourselves ... the curriculum will help you prepare to be reflective, confident, productive citizen of your local, national, and global communities". This is pure gold; I haven't seen this anywhere else. This is not education for the sake of getting a job, but rather for the sake of becoming a well-rounded person.

This program isn't finished yet, but once you can complete it and polish it, I think this will be a huge resource.

I can't speak for everyone, but if you build it, I'll come.
interesting, I would say this is no different to any other inovation we have had in the past. Look at the car for instance it doesn't matter how fast it can go according to it's speedometer or what version of gas you buy, you are limited to the speed limit on the road you are travelling on at that time. So mobile Telco's will need to play a more direct role in delivering content more efficiently, for instance why have all the infrastructure laid out and bandwidth paid for for all the $$$ flying past which they can't get in on. Why not host something, apps, search, whatever and make mobile data, faster and more efficient. Hell how come no matter what TV you have you can get a decent picture without any download issues. Maybe we are too focused on hardware and not delivering stable, fast, realtime content.
They were, but the actual damage done by the tsunami was to wreck the fuel tanks for the diesel backup generators, which were intended to keep the cooling systems operating if the grid power supply failed. The failure of the backup system led to failure of the cooling system, allowing the heat to build up inside the reactors, causing the pressure explosions around the reactors and seemingly inside one or two of them, if reports about cracked containment chambers are correct.

A seawall was supposed to handle any large waves, but among other problems, some fuel tanks for the diesel generators were immediately behind it - not really the ideal place to put any component of your backup system. There's a before & after photo here: http://everist.org/pics/Fukushima/Fukushima_fuel_tanks.jpg

The reactors themselves would have been hard to move, but would likely have been OK had the backup systems been more robust - and being external and modular, they could have been made more robust, and ought to have been.

Even if it were an all-or-nothing proposition, the additional data gathered in the years since the plants' construction was sufficient to justify a re-evaluation of risk; if the risk were sufficiently probable but impossible to mitigate, then decommissioning would be the appropriate response. Sure, that would be very expensive, but much less so than a post-disaster situation like this. Going ahead with a plan that's known to be flawed because you've already put a lot of money into it is known as a 'sunk costs fallacy'; the amount you've already spent has zero bearing on the future probability of failure, so if the latter is unacceptably high then the size of the former is no excuse for inaction.
It's been my experience that most programmers don't care. Apps work without input validation/output sanitation. They see this as extra work so it's not a priority to them. Unless mgt makes it a priority (and fires guys who don't do it) or they learn the hard way, they'll never care.
I think that there is a hint of why when he mentions almost in the last line, further acculturation...
Zynga contributed to the economy's growth? Really? Farmville increased average worker productivity?
This suggests to me some new security features that could be implemented for CyanogenMod on top of the one in the article.

If an app is in the BlackBox, it is denied access to all permissible activities.

In the WhiteBox, it's allowed access to all the permitted activities.

In the GreyBox, it's allowed access to selected permissible activities.

All attempts to access permissible activities are logged regardless of the Box.
he has passed up a valuable coaching opportunity

???

In the comment I read, he goes into detail about why it's wrong.

His next comment that starts "Bullshit." goes into 500 words of coaching.

He is backing up his arguments with developer-level people here, not newbie coders who are still figuring out how an array works.
It's not even about a secure source of income. Unless you're a founder, simply low-single-digit employee number doesn't give you enough equity to beat even a low-end finance job. Simple math: if you do your business, 9-to-5 only, you'll be in the 150-200k range within 5 years of graduation. If you decide to manage and make it up a rung or two, join a financial startup, or just make "tech lead/architect" double that income.

Unless you're a founder, having a five-year startup exit strategy that pays out similarly to the income you could have obtained in a straightforward manner in finance is a microsoft/google/facebook/twitter-style long shot. And, the latter two haven't even IPO'd yet to allow full vested share liquidity...

All my friends consider it a fairly soulless industry. Though they joke about patent troll/NPE firms in the way most techies joke about financial firms.
>The business wasn't distressed and was doing great.

As tpateck pointed out, the correct scenario is that the owners are distressed, aka, need to sell to get through the estate tax.

The businesses are fine.
Announcing restrict mode for JavaScript
Now we know Torvalds is regular.
That cleanroom process has things in common with journal peer review, but it's a different process with a very different objective. As to speed specifically, I was envisaging a relatively small group of readers who are competent to understand the papers they're targeting and who are highly motivated to upset the journals, while journal peer review relies on a (hopefully!) wider and more diffuse group of people each of whom is a highly-cited leader in the area for which he or she is asked to review, and for whom a review request is a tiresome social obligation. So the cleanroom process would obviously be relatively labour-intensive (and thus slow) but it shouldn't involve the epic delays involved in begging reviews from scientific (or engineering) eminences.

As to which papers are important, for an effort like this to accomplish its objectives - bring some direct relief to the public, and bring some hurt to journal publishers - it's necessary to have a generally good sense of which papers are important or highly in demand, but not a perfect one. In particular, the objective in this case isn't to second-guess which papers ought to get published by journals or become popular with readers, but to give readers some papers they most want and take control of those papers from the journals.
This brings to mind the X session management protocol (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X_session_manager) that never seemed to be used be in modern Linux applications. Issues that others brought up regarding memory consumption could be addressed with more consistent use of this or a similar protocol. While intended for saving state on logout, there's no reason the window manager/session manager/something else couldn't just direct an application in the background to save state and then kill it when memory gets low. That said, it's probably a bit too late in the game to establish such a policy. Users would be more likely to blame the desktop environment for killing the program and losing all of their work instead of blaming the application for not saving the state to begin with.
The blog post touched on it briefly with regards to PyPy but I wanted to ask here since I'm sure someone knows a lot more than I do on this. I didn't follow unladen swallow very closely, but it seemed like an exciting project from the get-go. Its sad to see it go, but it appears its not in vain.

I want to ask: What lasting effects did the work that went into Unladen Swallow have on any Python implementations (or any other languages)? What "legacy" was left?
I believe you can follow 1000 people who don't follow you. So I think the Grandparent post was saying 20 accounts, each following a different 1000 people = 20K people followed, equals 50% firehose.
I mean, they're really promoting Hadoop + Cassandra in this article, but if you're scaling your application(s) you really need to ask the "Cassandra or MongoDB?" question - for a good slice of developers, MongoDB will be more appropriate. Here's a good run-down that explains how to choose between the two: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2892729/mongodb-vs-cassan...
Being that rich means having the luxury to make "bad" business decisions. If you don't use your money (for example on revenge) what's the point in collecting it in the first place?
Site Tweaks Newegg.com Used to Raise Online Sales to $1.3 Billion [2006]
I don't know why this is so entertaining. Puppy! You're a snack!
The primary legacy of Unladen Swallow (this was something that everyone agreed on at the VM summit at PyCon) were: a) improvements to LLVM for all users of its JIT, things like valgrind and GDB integration, lifting that 16 MB of machine code, and fixing various bugs, b) developing a cohesive set of benchmarks for the Python community, and c) drawing more attention to the idea of a fast Python.
My old boss built more or less this: https://github.com/pallan/gem_import_export
They mention that Warner Music is also Metallica's label, but in my opinion this would probably not factor into a business decision to purchase a record label. Warner is a huge label, and in many ways has not adapted to modern times. If Sean were to purchase Warner, I can't imagine him allowing the label to continue operating as it has. Maybe he would shape it in way which would be more appealing to how people wish to consume music. Who knows, maybe even music start ups will have a much easier time with legal problems and costs? That would be cool.
Hey all, my co-founder and I got our first quantum of utility for this project.

The basic idea is a no-registration-or-app-required way to make a link to an address that you can actually customize.

Overall, we'd like to explore the territory between Google Maps and check-in apps. Any thoughts?
12 Year Old Develops His Own Theory of Relativity
Really? You've actually (and verifiably) tried this or not?