skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
No, it's probably not because our country starts with "can"

The real itch is that some of these services are available as long as I drive an hour south and get past the border and find open wi-fi.

Pretend you're an avid soccer fan. It's as if the world cup was on TV, and your friends are all crowding around it. All you get is the commentary and cheering when the ball is scored, but you can't actually see the game, since they're blocking the TV.
And then when your friends ask you "Wasn't that a great game?", and all you can say is "Uhh...I think so?"

It's so close, yet so far.
I'm not sure I can consider Instagram and applications similar to it "post-Facebook" when they still depend on Facebook. It's true that the connections between people could be figured out or cached, separating the network from the Facebook integration, but the fact remains that they had to take the social network from something they have supposedly moved on from.
Theoretically "I agree" comments should be downvoted, which should provide the required disincentive.

But I do tend to agree with you. Limiting upvotes isn't as important as discouraging useless comments.
The 2 separate screens vs one large one has a lot to do with how many window managers, especially on Windows, work. If you have a decent way to divide up a big screen it may be preferable to 2 screens, but if you have apps/ windowing that works better taking up a full screen then 2 screens would be better.
If we have moderators, it's preferable to disallow commenting from moderators. Moderators should act as the facilitators. Having mod power and be able to comment just giving too much powers to a few people to voice their opinions.
What makes you so sure you know where to draw the line? Hotz is in the same kind of legal trouble that motivates Anonymous to be anonymous. And give that they are anonymous, how can you be sure that they aren't otherwise respectable hackers? Or is it your belief that Anonymous' tactics are unacceptable in a way that disqualifies their members' otherwise acceptable hacking work?

From Sony's perspective: Anonymous is going after their website, but Hotz is undermining their actual products! Who's worse, particularly when neither had much direct provocation?
I'm a huge fan of the Angels and I've been a part of Halos Heaven for several years now. That's the SB Nation fan site / blog for the Angels. It's a great platform for building a community, and there have been moves to further legitimize the platform.

It's great to see this Engadget exodus ending up at SB Nation. I have a feeling they'll do very well there, and have the cachet to make positive changes to the site as a whole.
Significant evidence != an article about some dude using Twitter in the classroom. The plural of blogpost isn't 'data', just like the plural of anecdote isn't data.

Do you have a _study_? You know, one of those strange things where two different approaches go through this bizarre process of comparison.

So far most of the evidence for tech in the classroom is either inconclusive or tends to connect it with negative outcomes.
Restricting the problem to a fixed size input makes factoring an O(1) operation; so I still don't see what all the fuss is about.

Unless you know a way of extending this to handle an arbitrary amount of I/O then it's just a way of implementing nondeterministic finite state machines; which are no more powerful than deterministic finite state machines.
What I love most is seeing how they go about thinking and producing the effects used for computers used by characters in the film! From the films that do it really poorly to the films that attempt something realistic, I always wonder who's in charge of it, how they think about it, what tools they use to create it, etc. For the films in which it's poorly done I always figure it's the assistant FX designer's kid who has 4 months experience in Flash. For the good movies I always wonder if they grab the DB administrator for all the film assets and ask him some nerd questions :)

From the article:

In Tron, the hacker was not supposed to be snooping around on a network; he was supposed to kill a process. So we went with posix kill and also had him pipe ps into grep. I also ended up using emacs eshell to make the terminal more l33t. The team was delighted to see my emacs performance -- splitting the editor into nested panes and running different modes. I was tickled that I got emacs into a block buster movie. I actually do use emacs irl, and although I do not subscribe to alt.religion.emacs, I think that's all incredibly relevant to the world of Tron.

It's utterly fascinating to me that people have jobs like this.
Mistakes Google made in scaling its organization
I wish these guys luck but I'm skeptical about how much traction they'll get.

There is a lot of inertia with Web properties. Big sites take years to die. Hell, Myspace still has ~60 million users (You can't explain that).

Despite all the clamour about the "AOL Way" all evidence seemed to point to AOL being fairly hands off when it came to Engadget (according to Patel and others) so I'm not sure there was ever really any problem to solve other than chafing under the corporate yoke and a "grass is greener" desire for something smaller they built together.

Not that there's anything wrong with that.

Like I said: good luck guys. It's a crowded space so you may well need it.
I have many friends and family members who are in k-12 education (mostly teachers but some administrators and executives). Their edu experience ranges from 10-40 years in different socio-economic districts. Every one of them says the single largest factor in determining the success of a student is parental involvement. It doesn't matter if you give a kid the latest smart phone/iPad/laptop if that kid gets home and is never asked about what they're learning in school, how their homework is coming along, when parent/teacher conferences are scheduled, etc. I think it's high time we find a way to motivate parents across the board to take a more proactive role with their children's education (perhaps using some of the state education money per child as a monetary incentive for parents who meet certain "involvement" milestones).
Show HN: What else can b-schools do to support startups? (piece I wrote)
This tiff seems to highlight what's perhaps the problem: is there really agreement & understanding on what HN is supposed to be about?
Names are important because they allow you to use your own internal karma system (I will read comments from certain people no matter what their score).
One problem mentioned is the overloading of what an up/down vote is - what about separating "good/flag" and "agree/disagree"?
The problem with postel's law in terms of webdev is that there is no reference browser implementation. For the longest time end-user clients were the only tools web devs had. This led to such a huge disconnect between the theoretical standard and the practical standards that even when validators came around it the gap was so large that almost no one bothered with ensuring their html was valid.

What woudl have been helpful, and still would be, is the ability to toggle a browser into "strict" rendering mode during development testing.
>He immediately and emphatically replied "none".

This raises the question, what counts as "completely controlled"? What is typically meant when they say "Built X qubit quantum computer?"
Pure democracy doesn't necessarily scale, which is why we elect representatives and have electoral colleges and such in real life. Maybe HN's reached the point where a pure vote system is not enough.
Yea, it is another matter altogether.
The original, longer, better article that one was cribbed from: http://www.indystar.com/article/20110320/LOCAL01/103200369/G...
As of right now, there are 533 comments in that thread. How many people are actually going to read through all of them? I know I stopped after the first 20 or 30 comments.

There is another deficiency in the HN commenting system that rarely gets spoken of. And that is its preference for early relatively high-rated comments in long threads.

This is related to the echo-chamber problem on communities like HN, where uncontroversial highly-rated comments tend to garner more upvotes.

The effect is that comments which got upvoted early tend to dominate long threads, and later comments (no matter how insightful) are relegated to the bottom.

HN tries to address this issue a bit by putting new comments near the top for a brief period of time. It's a nice try, but isn't very effective.

So, I knew that coming so late in to the discussion, my suggestion would probably be drowned out.

Instead I chose to create a separate post, and have it compete with other posts rather than with 500+ comments in that giant thread.

I don't think I did anything wrong. And some people do appreciate my suggestion, as evidenced by the upvotes.

Still, in respect to your objection, I've decided to delete this article and post it as a comment in the original thread.
The Future Of Startup Finance
"However, a willing and interested student can learn so much more with newer, more powerful tools."

This is complete bullshit. To stay within the grand-parent post's framework (although Knuth is perhaps a reach), you would reach a fixed point where adding nifty tech isn't going to make your experience studying Knuth that much more productive. It would be nice to have a decent laptop capable of running a compiler and whatever IDE or not-so-integrated environment you prefer; a well configured device from the last 5 years would be fine. An iPad isn't going to solve any problems here.

Lazy students are lazy because they don't want to think hard, solve problems and learn. This is largely a constant and is not going to be affected by being given a iPad.

To quote Jack Vance (why not?): "Whatever you have heard about me, dismiss it. I do not regard my class as a confrontation between the clear light of my intellect and twenty-two examples of sloth and willful stupidity. The exact number may be only half that, if we are lucky, and of course varies from term to term."
> Gotta rid the world of IE6-IE8

By "world" do you mean US only?
> Is it possible to objectively measure the impact of changes, as opposed to be being persuaded by articulately argued complaints?

Yes, if and only if "good" and "bad" comments are defined (intensionally or extensionally).
I think the larger problem is that comments that aren't emotive, but are reasonably insightful get ignored. HN quickly trains newcomers not to bother with them, and to go for pithy zingers.
Why are we upvoting this comment? It adds no value.
How We All Missed Web 2.0′s “Netscape Moment”
The GameSpot.com to GiantBomb.com migration was/is a similar situation. Many of GameSpot's top editors left around the 'Gerstmann Incident' to form Giant Bomb. It hasn't had a long term effect on GameSpot's traffic, and despite great content, GiantBomb hasn't really taken off[1].

My feeling is that for established media style sites, unless the people breaking away are doing something _very_ unique, it's the URL that's more important.

[1] I'm not privy to their data and goals, but traffic wise they aren't getting closer to GameSpot. It's just my impression.
yes, but we do have to pay for that extra percent or two. Our beer costs twice the American price.

I got a startup idea, why not compare all the things americans have that canadians don't and vise versa (aside from tech)...haha

who can fund it? I see zero's all over the place
Would you accept remote freelancers?
"The history is not 'extremely short'. Nuclear has been in operation for decades."

In the context of highly unlikely events and the mathematics of probability, a period of decades is an extremely small sample. Consider that some of the types of events we are discussing may only happen once in a century. Clearly in this case several decades is not enough to fully gauge what the true risks of nuclear are to humans in the long term. One worst case scenario disaster would tip the scales quite heavily.
gridspy, I thought about this as well. But does this create an echo chamber problem?

You would give lots of chips to someone who makes cheap "mother###ker" comments and then that give that person more power in controlling the site.
You are stretching what the author wrote, rather than the author stretching the word "tablet".

If you read the essay, the author begins by describing IBM's strategies for responding to new competition, and how Microsoft learned from them. The prediction by Gates about the iPhone is a mere illustration of this. It could have been any example of similar posturing and have been relevant. That it is about the iPhone is incidental. This particular illustration was probably picked only for how it juxtaposes nicely against Mundie's similar posture about the iPad last week.
>Big sites take years to die.

Engadget does not have to die for the new venture to succeed.
I think the best you can do in news.arc is to experiment with various forms of throttling (i.e., the first link/comment vote = 1, the second slightly less than one, and so on). Beyond that, it might require you to play the role of benevolent dictator and kill user accounts that consistently engage in nasty behavior. The most extreme option would be to shutdown HN and spawn a small number of child HN-style sites, each with a narrower focus.
Festo Smartbird
"The solution to social problems is rarely purley technological."

Maybe so, but automated recommendation systems have been used rather successfully on sites like last.fm.

This is just a logical extension of the idea to comments and articles.

"The amount of work it would take to implement such a system would be quite large, and would tax the hosting resources of HN significantly for little benefit."

I think the algorithm is quite simple, and shouldn't be very hard to implement.

As for taxing the resources of HN, that might not be much of an issue either, depending on just how much it taxes HN's resources and how many resources HN has to throw at the problem.

Finally, whether this is of "little benefit" or "much benefit" remains to be seen.

Clearly the problem it's addressing is a serious one. And if it does manage to solve it, that would be of great benefit.
It it possible that the average quality of material on the net is dropping for the same reasons that we think post quality is dropping here?

Emotionally charged rants get attention. Careful reasoning gets eviscerated by pedants. So people are learning to write for the audience.
I've always loved the math of rhythm. I also always loved the logic of the different rythmic notations - whole notes, quarter notes, 16th notes.... So orderly.
Not sure why this is interesting. Writing exploratory prototype-level AI code with a 60-pound weight tied to your legs is hardly pleasant. I think most people will find the Python [1] and Lisp [2] versions of the code more useful.

[1] http://code.google.com/p/aima-python/
[2] http://www.eecs.berkeley.edu/~russell/code/doc/install.html
And that's a rubens tube
Having moved here from the UK I think Canada is worse off than the UK on balance.

The UK doesn't have Pandora but it does have Spotify, and Canada has neither. Last.fm is gimped in Canada, compared to the service in the UK. Lovefilm in the UK has a wider selection for online streaming than Netflix does in Canada. As pointed out, you can't buy the Kindle natively in Canada (you have to import it from Amazon.com) but you can in the UK.
It looks like you'll be getting your sequel. http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xhkp04_tron-the-next-day-fl...
incidentally, if you look up the "top 100" movies on piratebay right now, you'll see tron legacy show up as #3. i think this goes to show just how popular this movie is--the visual effects were incredible.

was there any information on how they created the younger version of kevin flynn?
eli_s, I would submit that the hive is able to distinguish good from bad around the origin but once points get very high, votes are self-amplifying.

In other words, what gets 500 votes isn't much better than what gets 300 votes. But what gets 100 votes is much better than what gets 5 votes.
Unfortunately, SSE - especially in integer-land, so I suppose we're talking SSE2 and beyond - often requires more specialist care and feeding than any automatic method (compiler or run-time) can provide.

Some cases aren't hard to pick up (e.g. bulk operations on big arrays) but others require trickery of the kind that compilers usually don't (or couldn't) have.

This isn't made easier by the notoriously non-orthogonal nature of the SSE integer operations and the rather limited number of ways that you can get in and out of SSE-land (to, say, affect a conditional or get something into a GPR).
alextp, what if you use ML on voting patterns instead of comment words?

(also what if the ML only provided feedback while one is typing the comment?)
Avoiding invisible failures
Screen estate and productivity
dupe: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2398520

and that was the original, without a useless packetstorm frameset a la 1994.
The biggest obstacle is that the lessons don't integrate technology. The technology is expected to graft onto the existing lessons and make it better in a vague and nebulous way.

As ctdonath's post indicates: The old lessons work just as well given a text book and paper. The new lessons, one that could not be performed without the technology have not been developed yet.

I mean, this is a bit like complaining that the socratic method is not enhanced by pencil and paper.
I have been programming for last 8 year, however, both python as well as app-engine was new for me. Below after few posts i have written how i learn python so i dont want to repeat here. However, i think python on app engine is boon for python beginner like me. Since i have worked on cake-php and ruby on rails i found webapp also somehow similar. My website www.lolzwow.com is live and getting good number of hits, however, i don't have to pay a penny and statistics shows that free quota can handle still more traffic than what i am getting now. So, python app-engine is a good gift from google to python community. Thanks Google
Never heard of Agda, thanks for the pointer. From what I read, it seems that Agda proofs are written declaratively, rather than interactively using tactics as in Coq. From experience, Coq's tactic-based proof system is very nice as it "unravels" the proof term in a way that makes it more manageable than balancing lambda terms in one's head.

Regarding the question of totality on slide 40, a naïve analysis would say that the deconstruction "let (y : ys) =" could fail (if the list returned from reverse were empty), and thus the function would not be total. Of course this is not the case, since reversing a non-empty list returns a non-empty list, but this requires that reverse be dependently typed.

(Slightly off-topic: the Mercury logic programming language supports just the right amount of dependency to allow this specification of reverse, and would deduce totality for this function.)

Back on topic, yes, most practical functions can be rewritten to be structurally recursive. The most brain-dead easy way is add a "time-to-live" argument to the recursive function. This argument is a Peano number initially set to a value higher than the expected number of recurrences. (In the example from the slides, one could choose the total number of windows on the screen.) The function is then modified to decrement the time-to-live argument on each recurrence, and to return a dummy value should the time-to-live reach zero. It's then trivial to prove that the function terminates, and usually easy to prove that it does what it's supposed to do before the time-to-live zeros out.
> Travelling alone can be depressing.

It can be. It can also be awesome. I recommend staying in hostels as a way to save money and meet people.
Events That Shaped the Internet, Part 2
That's when you start selling orange dots. And then orange dot removers.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v3yJomUhs0g
> Apple won the first battle for the smartphone. Now google is winning[...]

Hardly. The Nexus series of phones have not exactly been tearing up the sales charts. Google is probably close to last in the battle for the smartphone.

But that's OK, since Google is not seriously in the smartphone war. The companies in the smartphone war are Apple, Motorola, HTC, Samsung, and so on. Google's role is, to continue the war analogy, that of an arms supplier. They provide arms to some of the combatants.
A bit of a silly headline, considering that the very essence of a Black Swan is that it cannot be anticipated or predicted in any way.

The article text does a slightly better job of clarifying this fact, but still a little misleading.
Here is a product page on the contraption: http://www.festo.com/cms/en_corp/11369.htm

And here is a shorter video of the bird in flight: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nnR8fDW3Ilo
It's hard to tell since I don't have an equivalent control device, but I believe I do. It feels like with the limited screen real-estate, where my code takes up about 60% of the screen and a terminal for the rest, I can focus a lot better when I do.

Every so often I'll still get distracted and start browsing HN, but that usually means I need to relocate or take a break from the computer.
Not to rant, but I don't understand why every mention of a Java project on here gets some kind of snarky response about Java. If you don't like Java, then don't read the article, and don't spam the comment section with "why would anyone want to use Java?"

Obviously if someone is clicking this link, it's because, for whatever personal or work reasons, would like to see a Java implementation of the algorithms, and if they want a discussion of them, would click the comment section. They are not clicking the comment section, however, to hear about how you don't like the language.
Have you considered "getting away" somewhere else in Georgia? Find a town with a lot of trails/hiking/parks, rent a cheap room, eat well, and spend some time alone with nature, a few books, and headphones.

CouchSurfing - http://www.couchsurfing.org/ - could also be an option.