skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
My wife is from Dalian. I've spent a lot of time there, -nice city.

I just returned from Shanghai and Sanya. There are a lot of dark apartments in Shanghai at night. I know a few Chinese who own multiple apartments, some more than 10, most of these are empty. There are limits to how much they can invest overseas, and I believe investment in real-estate is greatly increased by this.

I feel they have a real-estate bubble of incredible proportions. Everyone talks real-estate too much, and there are too many advertisements for new developments. I don't think this will end well.
Kudos to the author on this book. I think it is great that Haskell will have such a "fun" book to teach the concepts of programming in Haskell. That should lower the learning barrier a bit. More so since everything is layed out in easy to understand terms.
http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u32/which-language-is-best...

Not true according to these microbenchmarks and certainly not in my own experience.
The Softbank 30 Year Vision [pdf]
KyMaLabs' Momentomail now supports Yahoo accounts
India's Plan To Block .xxx Shows The Pointlessness Of Specialized TLDs
Clojure always said its designed for concurrency and he said that Clojure has great primitives for parallelism. Most people just dont know the difference.

Well, here's the difference (according to Wikipedia):

Parallelism - a form of computation in which many calculations are carried out simultaneously, operating on the principle that large problems can often be divided into smaller ones, which are then solved concurrently ("in parallel"). There are several different forms of parallel computing: bit-level, instruction level, data, and task parallelism. Parallelism has been employed for many years, mainly in high-performance computing, but interest in it has grown lately due to the physical constraints preventing frequency scaling.

Concurrency - a property of systems in which several computations are executing simultaneously, and potentially interacting with each other. The computations may be executing on multiple cores in the same chip, preemptively time-shared threads on the same processor, or executed on physically separated processors. A number of mathematical models have been developed for general concurrent computation including Petri nets, process calculi, the Parallel Random Access Machine model and the Actor model.
Because it's 40 hours wasted. 40 hours = one full working week = for (I think) the type of professional we're talking about $2000.

I guess we can differ in opinion on what is 'reasonable' but I say that requiring what you're proposing is too much for me personally to take any such employer serious.

(on the part of the 'past initial screening', the employee can't know or verify this. If there are 50 applicants, and there are 15 selected in the 'initial screening', is it reasonable to ask for 150 hours of unpaid labor from these people? I posit it's not.)
I believe that beyond work/life balance there is a difference between hard work and madness.

Many startups (and companies) need to go to a psychiatric hospital, they are very unorganized and the team leaders doesn't take full responsability and respect for people times.

Another thing is being really focused and concentrated on moving forward in your 40 hours week (not checking HN too much...) and doing extra hours when it's really necessary.
You can flag just about anything.
Our approach to stopping Spammers at the source.
When will we see the first high frequency posting (HFP) bots physically located near the ISPs of popular authors?
That's not enough. It's not enough to be able to kill a link, there should be a disincentive to having posted it in the first place.
Oprah Winfrey Not Guilty Of Copyright Infringement
Genetics plays a part. Diabetes in Asians is a different disease; the excess fat in Asian men is stored in the muscles rather than around the belly. 150 generations of eating rice will change things. By comparison, food like potato (now a stable) have only been around in northern Europe for 6-8 generations.

For example: http://itc.conversationsnetwork.org/shows/detail4528.html
ACM Irish Collegiate Programming Contest 2011 UCC
So long as your timesheeting, invoicing and accounting systems aren't drastically inefficient (ie. you can raise, issue and track an invoice in under 5 minutes)...

What systems do you recommend? Excel spreadsheet for tracking + invoice template is really inefficient for me.
AFAIK in Japan there are gadgets similar to color in concept, that will bip if someone nearby has set its gadget in the same way (preferred color and such). So the concept isn't new after all.
From the last release of news.arc (which may have been a while ago but should be somewhat close to what news.yc is running):

; Ignore the most recent 5 comments since they may still be gaining votes.
; Also ignore the highest-scoring comment, since possibly a fluff outlier.

https://github.com/nex3/arc/blob/master/news.arc#L2301
Amen?

Perhaps you could implement a cost-refund system where it costs x karma to submit an article. If that article receives x number of upvotes, then you get them all back -- otherwise, they're gone.

For each subsequent article following a situation in which you did not get refunded, the cost doubles.

So, the scenario would be like this:

- new users can submit articles after they've attained 5 karma points, which are spent upon submission.

- If the article gets upvoted 5 times, the karma is refunded, and the cost is still 5 karma to submit.

- If the article does not get upvoted 5 times (or is flagged more than upvoted, or whatever) then the user loses the karma cost, and their next submission costs 10 karma. If the user doesn't have 10 karma, they can't submit.

There is a low entry cost, and good submissions aren't penalized, while bad or negative submissions are penalized progressively. There is no point at which the user is 'banned', but they have to earn progressively more and more karma to keep submitting. For high-karma users, this should allow them the luxury of gambling some karma on things they want shown, while lower-karma members have to be more mindful of whether they think this is worth gambling their karma on.
Why open the door to negotiation? If you're in a position to charge $75/hr with confidence, then charge $75/hour. With confidence.
YMMV. I find that stuff I write in Ruby is faster than that I write in clojure. I suppose it depends on the problem space, if your problems are greatly speeded up by mutability and C bindings then clojure is not a perfect fit.
It's a simple port that avoids mutation entirely. The fact that it's only slightly slower than the Python version says a lot about Clojure performance.

In anycase, the OP was clear, the goal was to write a comparison of the original design, not to write the fastest Clojure program (and there are many ways to make the Clojure version faster, yet it's not clear to me how to best Norvig's design in pure Python).
Not really, but ok.
Raising an Accidental Prodigy
HTML5: A Matter of Good Form
In ruby: http://www.randomhacks.net/articles/2005/10/11/amb-operator
An awesome Ruby and Rails feed bundle for Google Reader
People who grow interested in participating in the bitcoin market because of this or other articles about the currency should be aware that at its heart it is a very speculative market. The price of a bitcoin in USD has risen dramatically through most of its life while lacking economic fundamentals for why it should.

Indeed, the money supply in the bitcoin market increases steadily over time, this should be inflationary, causing the value of BTC to fall. The fact that it doesn't speaks to how thinly traded the BTC markets are, and that there are simply more buyers than sellers interested in BTC - primarily due to articles about bitcoin that drum up interest, and due to speculators participating in the market.

Bitcoin values are very loosely coupled to fundamentals - you can't buy food, energy or commodities with it. In general you need to transfer it back to a fiat currency to do anything classically useful with it. Currencies that either rapidly appreciate or rapidly depreciate are both ill suited for any kind of real commerce - people need relatively stable pricing to conduct any kind of direct business in fiat money. While there are certainly examples where fiat currency runs away in either inflationary or deflationary ways, central banks, charged with protecting their currencies often take dramatic steps at times to prevent moves either way.

In these ways bitcoin currently resembles either a pump and dump scheme the tulip bubble. Which it is depends on whether you believe the people driving the rises in pricing are intentionally exploiting the press and thin nature of the market, or if most of the participants are simply along for the speculative ride.

Of course, it is in the rational best interests of anyone who holds bitcoin to disagree with this assessment. That said, I do genuinely welcome any kind of informed debate on the issue.
That's not really true. Toy Story 3 was the highest-grossing film of 2010... so there has to be a segment that would be interested in live-action movies. :)

Basically, Top Gear is popular because it isn't all those other car shows. It's mainstream by popularity, but it's not mainstream in terms of typical car enthusiasts.
> interesting, on-topic, and frequent comments

submitted early during a discussion's lifecycle
I am planning on moving to Germany in the next year. Any resources for finding a job in Berlin?
Hadn't seen this- and I am definitely a cranky fan.
However the system relies on upvotes to see good articles from the bad ones.
So the system would still rely on upvotes but perhaps not give karma? #my2cents
How will you do that? I don't even have wireless.

Jokes aside, the current financial system has the exact same problems, and infact can be worse, especially with username:password based authentication. If someone skims your ATM card and gets your pin number too bad, you've lost the money.

Or you could have your wallet pickpocketed, and the thief would be gone without you even knowing the money was missing.

What about credit cards? Protect consumers with chargebacks? yes. However these same consumer protections also hurt merchants, who are the ones that pay for chargebacks and frauds. Because there are no chargebacks bitcoin is very attractive to online merchants.

If users are not comfortable being responsible for taking care of their btcoins they can always use the bitcoin banking services like mybitcoin.com

Fact is bitcoin is money, clever thieves will be able to find clever ways of stealing money, it's been happening since money has been happening.

If you're looking for a perfectly secure currency don't hold your breath, cause one hasn't been invented yet and isn't likely any time soon.
With Internet Explorer I see only an empty chessboard. Is it working only wiht Chrome/FF/Safari?

Just before anyone start a rant on decent browser, this is my office PC and I can't install anything else than IE :-(
Quid: Using semantic clusters to locate opportunity
How Lisp works and how to build a Lisp interpreter
1)Hard money, once you receive payment in bitcoin it stays with you, meaning no chargebacks(Paypal, credit cards, looking at you).

I read this as: "If you give bitcoins to someone in exchange for goods/services and they don't deliver, you're screwed, your money is gone, there is no-one you can talk to". That sounds like it's good for sellers and bad for buyers.
You have recourse by contacting authorities.

E-gold's centralised system was not what I was debating. It was the exchange of e-gold to fiat currencies.

Alpaca socks I will assume are created by the person who actual sells them. Dealing with other suppliers who won't accept BitCoin was the obstacle I was detailing.

I don't debate that you can launder money in USD but it is easier in this system. There's no paper trail, well there's no identity linked to wallets.
Facebook Questions Can Work — Crowdsourcing Can Dazzle
It's also making people tall. Every-time I'm in South Korea the difference between the height of High School kids and even people 10-15 years older (read: folks who didn't grow up under any kind of severe hardship or food shortage) is remarkable. I'm a fairly average height American guy 5'9", and often find myself looking up to youngsters over there.
There is an insane amount of money in drugs. Some of this money can be used to erect barriers to entry against such profit seekers. I don't know that that's the case, but it could be speculated at least.
Moving to Amazon EC2 from a Single Server
The problem is that increasing costs for unpopular content doesn't necessarily mean that your content was bad, just that people weren't paying attention to it. If you're ahead of a tech curve, that doesn't mean your contributions are bad per se. It means that other people didn't appreciate them at the time.

So if you do implement a system like that you're basically codifying the herd mentality much more strictly than it probably should be.
Nobody is saying exercise is a bad thing, we are just saying it isn't the best thing for making you lose weight.

I lost about 15 pounds earlier this year and it was entirely by changing my diet (and by changing my diet I mainly just cut out beer and pizza on the weekends which were a staple of my friday & saturday nights, and switched in sushi for the nights when i didn't want to cook and ate microwave food, that's it)

Now I'm going to the gym for 4 weeks, and I feel great. I have put on a little bit of muscle but I just plain feel better. But I'm working my ass off in the gym and my weight hasn't gone down 0.1 lbf, while I burned off 15 by just changing my diet and never stepping foot in a gym.
You are welcome - happy to (attempt to) help!
Where to find a business partner
I used to encounter what I thought might be bots auto-submitting my old raganwald blog to reddit. The only person losing karma was me, since I no longer got to submit my articles at a time when they were interesting to reddit's readership. Big whoop!

My thinking is that if I write and give my work away, it is no longer up to me to decide how it is to be used. That's because my words are free as in speech, not just free as in beer. Of course, copyright violations are a different matter, but I can't tell people whether to submit a post to HN, I can't tell people whether to bookmark it, or tweet it, or whether to use it as part of a corpus on guessing the sex of the author.

If there's a race for meaningless karma by bot authors, that is irrelevant to me as an author. IF it is a problem--and I do not grant that it is a problem--THEN it is HN's problem, not my problem as an author.

I give my words away. That inevitably means someone will use it in a way I didn't intend. That's the point.
Even bad code would make for an interesting discussion topic during the interview. The code may turn out not to be as stupid as the interviewer thinks after all. Or maybe it is, in which case it's great to talk about lessons learned. I think every developer has some bad code floating around out there, including the person conduction the job interview. They'll understand. And if they don't, that's a great litmus test for the type of company you are applying to as well.
"More goods and services" is practically the catchphrase of the community.

We are well aware of this fact.

How can I help bitcoin out? Sell something on the market!
Check the seller's reputation before buying. I think it's a lot better this way.
How the Ipod turned us into Loners
Which version? It's working with IE7 and IE8 but I haven't tried yet with 9
>no paper trail

There's a lot of information in the blockchain. I'm not sure bitcoin is really that great for laundering.
I've always seen "2K" or "4K" or "nK" used to refer to the X axis. My sources:

https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Image_resolut...

https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Digital_cinem...
here's hoping they do nice segment tearing tesla apart in their usual witty style :)
Personally I find the programme tiresome and don't watch it any more. So often they are pretending that events and quips are spontaneous when they are clearly heavily scripted. I'm British for what it's worth.
Also: why does anyone care about kharma? I look at votes on a comment or an article, but I don't really care how much kharma any person has. Do people really look at it as something to maximize?
Why? I haven't read a good argument against bots. Your article doesn't present an argument that HN is harmed. I haven't read a good argument that anyone is harmed.

If a bot had its own novelty account, say "ragnawald_speaks" that submitted everything I wrote, what would be the harm to HN?

People keep talking about "spam." How is it spam if a bot submits an article that has an excellent chance of making it to the top ten? That's the opposite of spam, it's all signal and very little noise.
If people think that a bot auto-submitting a feed with excellent signal is spam, then I have something very serious to tell them: humans are pattern-matching machines too.
There are a few systems like this already, e.g. SETI@home (try to analyze signals to find aliens) or Folding@home (model protein folding to help with cancer (?) research)
It's one thing to make fun of it in a humourous way, it's another thing to write a script (and follow through with it) claiming it broke down, overheated and ran out of gas before they had even driven the car.

"But in the real world, it doesn't seem to work" was already decided before the cars were even delivered. It's cool to make fun of flaws, it's not cool for something percieved as a review show to decide something is flawed and write the script about how flawed it is before they have even tested it.
Location based tracking service provider
Is there a service out there who provide a module or app for IOS/Anroid/etc which will do background GPS tracking for you and push updates to your server?<p>I'm thinking of something which does for GPS what urban airship does for push messages.<p>If it doesn't exist, should i make it :)
1) see this http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2386956

2)In the near future there will be anonymous bitcoin exchanges, immune from government actions. http://weekly.co.nr/index.php?q=article/anonymous-money-need...

3)If people have no faith in the $ then that system will not work, the reality is than money is what people accept for goods and services, every currency whether bitcoin, USD,or gold is backed by the goods and services people will accept it for.

Right now there are merchants that accept bitcoin for goods and services, it's users do the same, I've hired someone paying with bitcoin. It works just fine.

4)Short of banning cryptography (good luck with that) there is nothing the government could do to prevent people using bitcoin whether it's used for the purchase of illegal guns, drugs, sex, hit contracts etc. The worst the governmet can do is target the exchanges, but as I said before that's not going to be an issue either.
Microsoft finds 1GB of extra space on Xbox 360 DVDs
Use an escrow service such as clearcoin, clearcoin.appspot.com
or USD 0.0079

Also, each category has its own prices. Some categories post/comment/vote costs at current Bitcoin exchange rate are USD 0.0000000079.
Samsung installs keylogger on its laptop computers
To be clear, I don't have a fundamental issue with the concept of bitcoin or the technical implementation. I just see a lot of people who grow interested in obtaining it without knowing what they'll do with except for selling it to someone else. If people want to trade their USD/EUR/GBP/JPY for it as is often suggested by the bitcoin community, or decide that they want to consume electricity in order to obtain it well more power to them. I just think it's good for them to understand what a thin, speculative market it is.

Rationally, people not wanting to speculate in the currency should hold off obtaining any until there is something they want to purchase with it right then.
Start-up nations (The Economist)
Funny that he mentions John Gruber:

http://daringfireball.net/linked/2011/03/29/dalrymple-open
What happens if blogging tools become their own HN post bots?

The last few Dave Winer posts I've seen here have been submitted by davewiner. Since he's a dude who rolls his own blogging tools, I'd be not at all surprised to find that he wired up the ability to simultaneously publish and post a link to HN.

I can see good reasons for doing this for one's own blog, but if this practice were widespread or built into normal people's blogging tools then it would (among other things) cause the "new" page here to be useless.
What about candidates who are currently working (for a competitor)? Taking a day off to interview is bad enough.
> people have less and less time for cooking and this means worse diet.

Why exactly is this? Surely Capitalism has created a wonderful system where we all have more money and time due to technology?
Can I get some feedback on a new site from HONEST users?
Depends what the exchange rate between USD and Flooz is, the current exchange rate is about $0.77 for 1Bitcoin.
The Moment Before the Beatles Walked Across Abbey Road
I wrote some thoughts,. one of the important things from a CDN perspective is that Radian6 was not just built in Canada but funded here as well.

http://startupnorth.ca/2011/03/30/salesforce-acquires-radian...
Yes, pebble beds are an example of a reactor with a negative void coefficient, since as they get hotter the substance in the outer shell of the pebble expands increasing the distance between the radioactive elements.
That's also why lithium batteries include circuitry to shut down when they get to x%. When they say they are at 25% then they are really at 25% of what is "safe" for the technology. It's not like if your laptop drops to 0% you can't boot it again. Don't you think that when they say it had 25% charge they are talking about what the battery was reporting?
You can easily get karma, if you know how to game HN and the users.

If you post anything in a thread with a clear bias towards something, you can just post something in the same vein, and, depending on the popularity, people will upvote the hell out of you.

Another is to just post something in a very popular thread, and you're bound to receive a lot of upvotes. Even people who would normally have been downvoted through the floor would wind up with a lot of karma. (EDIT: The same applies to popular comments: that's why you see so many people responding to it, because they'll earn some extra karma by piggy-backing on the specific comment.)

I think people take karma way too seriously. There isn't any perfect solution except to change your mind set about what the karma is and does. Compared to reddit, HN is much more rewarding, because there aren't idiots who keep downvoting you for no reason other than latent misery and hatred towards mankind, or whatever may possess them. Downvoting sends very bad signals and stifles the incentive to participate in the community a lot, so the comment would need to be very inappropriate to warrant a negative karma score.

The only suggestion I'd like to make is to make per-thread karma inversely proportional to the popularity of the number of thread upvotes, so the comment karma (quality) isn't a function of the number of views in the thread. (Perhaps the same with child comments versus parent comments.)

If pg can do this retroactively, I think we'll already see some interesting changes for the better - albeit no end-all solution.
I don't think they're for sale, actually.
When I tried to start a game, it put me in a game that was in progress already. How can I just start a new game?
Will a social recluse build the next social network?

Quite possibly, if only to mop up the "long tail" left by Facebook.