skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It seems to me that there could be a version of Python that is solely optimized for speed, and allows full compilation. I haven't given this a great deal of thought, but I bet that if you defined a subset of the language that is Python-like, but doesn't allow the full introspection and fancy class manipulations, and other cool features, you could have a fully compilable language that would rival C in performance, but kick C's butt in readability.

Maybe it's not a binary switch (performance exclusions switch, for example). Maybe it's a setting with various degrees of performance. You need introspection? We'll give you that, but now you can only compile at the 2x performance level (or whatever). You need certain libraries that aren't written for performance? That's going to cost you.

Then again, it's quite possible that I don't know what I am talking about!
hah this is really interesting. If you built it you might as well publish it. I think a monetization strategy is to find crappy sites on the web and help them to simplify their marketing message. We do software requirements and we receive hundreds of pages of documentation that we have to filter through. An algorithm that worked to help prioritize what we read first would be worth $$ to us and our clients.

Your system is also possibly a solution to tl;dr

I ran your program on your why section (which is too dense to read) and this is what it came up with:

1 (1.000000): The project started out as a simple text generator using Markov Chains, but I wanted to do something more useful.

2 (0.974359): After looking around, although it seems that a lot of people have tried using compling to detect plagiarism, summarizing is something relatively few people have done.

3 (0.611111): It's interesting to consider what exactly makes a sentence important, and if it's even possible to find an objective measure of 'meaningfulness'.

4 (0.222222): I'm interested in computational linguistics.
The disadvantage at this point is that our current capacitance technology is less energy dense and slower to replenish than a fossil fuel tank. What happens when your daily commute doesn't fit comfortably within the vehicle's range?

Energy technology should ultimately improve our versatility. Putting batteries in a car doesn't achieve that goal just yet.
I appreciate what you are trying to say, but one part of what you are saying jars. You are saying that phrases like "manipulate" have a negative connotation, and you also say that this is linked to whether the influence is "valid."

I don't know that the two are coupled in this manner. If I observe a politician making an election promise, is it only "manipulation" if he has no intention of attempting to fulfil his promise? What if he promises something and follows through with it? Is it manipulation if he personally doesn't care about the issue but is only doing it to get elected? What if he cares about some other issue, but promotes this issue to get elected so he can pursue another agenda he believes in?

I think the "validity" of influence is a very murky point to debate. There's what a politician believes, what a politician believes you believe, what they believe you might believe if told they believe it... Ultimately I find it easier to use the word "manipulate" to describe what happens when one person attempts to influence the behaviour of another for their own ends, whether I agree or disagree with those ends.

Getting away from politicians and back to regulated professions, Chiropractors and Doctors are both regulated professions. They seem to hate each other's practices. I believe each is sincere in arguing against the other, and I have a personal belief about the efficacy of one vs. the other, but I would also describe them both as attempting to manipulate public opinion about the other's profession.

I wouldn't say that one is manipulative and the other isn't purely because of my belief that one is right and that the other is wrong.
Think long term adjustment to the mentality of the site. If that link was worth something, why would the buyer just give it away? It's possible that the buyer would try to sell it and compete with the original seller, and all subsequent buyer might follow, but that would be something the original seller could take into account in pricing their product.

I agree that the link shortening aspect of this site cannot be it's product. Emphasizing that at all can detract from the truly novel idea that exists in selling and buying micro-properties of internet knowledge. People need to see the incredible nature of a site which allows you to sell information which has high demand and low supply, but has no other method of paid distribution. For everything too small to put in a book, and not small enough to just give away. I think its brilliant.
This resonated with me:

"Personally, it feels like my Facebook stream is becoming an email inbox. I get a lot of messages, a few of them matter to me, and there are lots ... that are just spam."
That's actually being done by Better Place.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Better_Place
So it's funny that this happens today: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2407969
They're against 'low quality' patents when it suits them, which is quite often.

On the other hand, whilst they haven't [yet] tried to enforce it, the recently-awarded "Google Doodles" patent is the definitive example of a junk patent - ludicrously vague, of no value whatsoever in advancing human enterprise and preceded by prior art that covered broad swathes of the contemporary internet before Google existed, including some companies they really would have been paying lots of attention to[1]. Really, the patent lawyer that persuaded them to apply for that deserves a slap.

Whilst I'm sure Nortel actually have done a lot of worthwhile research in the process of building up their portfolio, Google is also in the process of giving people 900 million more reasons more to apply for patents for anything and everything.

[1]Rudolf wishes you Merry Christmas from Yahoo 1996
http://replay.waybackmachine.org/19961223150621/http://www8....
We've already had .ly casualties. Look up vb.ly
> Why does one language require portability and not another?

Because more than one language implementation was measured for that language but only one language implementation was measured for the other languages.

If only one language implementation was shown for Ruby it would be Ruby 1.9 - not JRuby

If only one language implementation was shown for Lua it would be Lua 5.1.4 - not LuaJIT

If only one language implementation was shown for Python it would be Python 3 - not PyPy

PyPy and LuaJIT are being treated more favourably than other language implementations.
> it’s by far the greatest protocol to “push” content from a server to client

Except it's messy and ugly. Well, it's somehow feels on par with HTML, where browsers have to support all sorts of weirdness, though. Further reading: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2069810
Winforms is explicitly a drag and drop Win32ish API. A better comparison is WPF MVVM vs Cocoa MVC.
One thought - even though your product isn't niche, you can market it as though it were. Eg, instead of "a plugin for websites" you're selling "a [solution] for small accounting firms with their own website".

I face a comparable problem (I'm a business coach, which means my clients are pretty well any business). Especially for professional services, talking the talk and appearing more specialised than you actually are (as long as you can actually back it up) helps open more doors.
This is hilarious. I wrote a button hover algorithm just like this years ago in Lingo for a shopping CD-ROM. What comes around, goes around...
WTF w/ Marc Maron - he is a comedian that has been around forever, though I had never heard of him but interviews other comedians every week. The best episodes so far are the ones with Carlos Mencia, Robin Williams and Louis CK.

Also - Monocle Weekly - These are the guys that make Monocle magazine.
Hi all,

I have spent almost one hour reading all of your comments and replied to as many as I can. Needless to say, I don't expect everyone to agree with me. Actually, I was expecting quite the opposite, if the strong tone of the article is anything to go by.

Again, let me reiterate that I am NOT against design contests per se. I am against companies who take design lightly and try to patch stuff when things go astray. Do any of you think that changing the visual style of the chat pane will solve the several issues of the new UI?

Folks, this is a program used by millions of people, including computer un-savvy people who are having serious problems with the new UI. Forget logos, the problems here are functional first and foremost, and it is not a design contest that will solve them.

For those of you saying that this is a chance for young designers to get their name out in the world, allow me to tell you that there are hundreds of other ways to do that. Free or open source projects that need UI designers are not hard to come by.

Also, I am under 25, and by no means an old timer who is trying to spoil the party.

Cheers,
US indicts China space co. execs in radiation-hardened satellite chip scandal
The worst part is I think you don't even get it.
One other thing, if this can summarize articles down to their essence, you could create a site which takes HN articles and distills them down to the key points.

Again, solution to tl;dr
When I start to become too busy to read Hacker News, I simply stop reading it. I removed it from my RSS feed long ago (who can actually read 1000+ submissions per day, and remain employed?), and only visit the site manually now.

A page or two later, and I'm usually done. Great things usually stay fairly sticky on the main page, and truly fantastic things will generally be mirrored elsewhere.

YMMV.
> 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.

You are right, I missed the deconstruction. Thanks!
Because then you'd have to implement your own presence, discovery, and routing mechanisms. You get all of that (and more) for free with an XMPP backplane like ejabberd. Even if you decide it's better to roll your own, you'll then have to come up with a consistency and clustering model in order to scale it.
Can Android be stopped?
Even in Haiti, people trust Wikileaks more than the government
but you can't fold a paper more than 8 times
"... and with better test coverage at that."

Oh wow. I thought he was serious until he was suggesting there exists software in the world with a more comprehensive test suite than SQLite.
I think it's a good idea but am relunctant to think that people would actually pay for files, especially for something they've never seen/used before.

Nonetheless, maybe check out: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2406614 (http://gumroad.com)

He/She also did the same thing over the weekend. :)
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Your previous comment had nothing to do with the disadvantages of the name and everything to do with making a clever, ironic joke, which, by the way, was negative to begin with ("for when it fails".)

Unless you think that "Milk" is a bad name because a random iPhone app's name can be used in a roundabout way.

I hate to be so critical, but Reddit-style comments like this really don't belong here.
Point one:

> I also think taxes are needed.

The cypherpunks would tend to disagree with you. Remember, taxes aren't inherent to any system of monetary value, they're just laws that say "pay us x or go to jail".

Point two:

"During the financial crisis, many on the left expressed concern about a deflationary spiral. I don't claim any economic expertise, but the concern seemed valid."

Deflationary spirals are an economic theory, and have never yet been seen in the wild.

The only "problems caused by extreme economic freedom" are the groans and reactions of centralized monetary control as liberty is restored to the people.
I'm not directly comparing two technologies, just comparing the rate of change in them. 1024 to 1080 is an increase of 56 vertical pixels.

That has to be one of the slowest changing metrics in modern computing.

What I meant by careless is that if you shop a typical desktop dcreen by price you will get 1920x1080 at 22/23/24 screens; you can buy 1900x1200 but you need to carefully find one because they are uncommon. Sure you can both 'care' and buy a screen like you have. But you can't not-care and have a chance at ending up with the higher resolution.

And you can get that res. for 24" £130, but a significant jump needs 27" or 30" screens - and 27" start with the same resolution! You need £730 for a 27" with higher resolution and £1200 for a 30". And that 6x multiplier gets you 1.5x more vertical pixels.

(How is that high-res small-pixel people 'winning'?)
The submitter messed up the title, yes. But the actual article cites the vb.ly case as the first to fall (just clarifying in case you were making a point toward the author, not the submitter).
This doesn't seem like a good match. With different hardware and prices of electricity out there it would be hard to make the system fair for everyone. Also, although minting coins is an important feature of Bitcoin, it seems there's a certain amount of miners needed to offset threat of fraudulent transactions; going significantly above that amount is just wasting planet's resources.
This could apply to any domain name that expires and finds the renewal agency and system offline due to physical disaster such as war.
Yep I am. Next I will probably add a walkthrough, going through the process of improving a design. I also want to add more resources. I could also expand it to include info on color, balance, etc. For now I'm listening to feedback to see what it's really missing.
If you, as a designer, truly feel the work you are doing is better than a design competition, then don't submit your work to a design competition. If you're really that good, freelancers offering services for cheap, near-free, or even free shouldn't bother you at all << This is exactly why I wrote the article. You guys are talking money, I am talking ethics.
The point is that with sufficient pathology you can do high-level things in a low-level language, but not the inverse.
Great unsubstantiaed link-bait title + only $32.00 paywall for the secret to everlasting life. What fun the internet's become!
I've always wondered what kind of ambient value HN adds to Y Combinator. As an advertising tool for PG's operation, it's exceptional. But as a serendipity generator, it's also pretty remarkable. Curious to know how many people who have gotten stuck while working on Y Combinator projects managed to get unstuck thanks to finding the right link at the right time.

Theoretically, any number of filters could do this (RSS, twitter, etc.), but none of them have quite the same feedback loop as the comments sections here. Personally, it's becoming rare for me to open a link without simultaneously opening the discussion link. In terms of that serendipity, I wonder if it isn't (just) the suitably interesting variety of topic which produces it, but the way that a particularly astute set of replies prompts thinking from a variety of angles.

That, more than anything, seems to be the real cause of prompts with regard to whatever problems you may be struggling with.
Not quite true: http://sichantalpo.wordpress.com/2007/02/19/folding-paper-in...
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Well let me give you a pointer on what and for who they are solving problems.

I think the numbers are something along the lines of this:

90% of users on Skype don't have much more than 5 contacts in their contact list.

95% of all messages are. "Can I call you?"
Admittedly, I didn't log in and actually try your site but from the looks of the landing page, why couldn't I just march down my timeline and essentially do the same thing? Where's the added value? Also, I can't see ever paying to use this. Sorry if I sound harsh...
No, you're not weird. Just at a different point on the Life Curve.

I've been a developer for about 20 years. When I got out of college I lived in a crappy little apartment in a crappy neighborhood in a crappy town. And I loved it. The job paid me to do stuff that I was already doing for free and even though I didn't make much, I spent even less, so I was piling up more money than I knew what to do with. Now, more stable and with a wife and family, I couldn't imagine living like that ever again. It lost its appeal a long time ago.

Why do we work? If we're being paid, what's wrong with spending to make ourselves happy? You think a computer and a website are important to you, they think Ferraris and cruises are important. Neither is "better," just different and reflect different priorities.

Don't castigate people for spending what they can afford: it's their money to do with as they wish. Especially don't think for a second that there is some nobility in being poor, or thrifty. Few people are poor by choice and the thrifty often would not be if they could afford to spend.
There's a lot of discussion here about comments and votes, but only one or two remarks in this thread note the clearest differentiator I see between "old guard" and newbie users: the meaning of the up/down arrows.

Old guard would prefer to vote on a "Contributes/Detracts" axis, while new users vote on an "Agree/Disagree" or "Like/Dislike" axis.

Arguments about this erupt in threads, with newer users generally saying, "It's a democracy, this site is what the majority want it to be, and if most of us want it like this, your loss." But such an approach devolves into pop pablum.

I believe most other ideas here would be unnecessary if the meaning of the up/down arrows could be resolved either socially or algorithmically.

The "correct" solution would be to offer a quadrant, with contributes/detracts on one axis, and agree/disagree on the other. But that would require a rewrite.

Instead of a rewrite, I'd experiment with temporarily changing the arrows to say something explicitly supporting well reasoned comments:

17 points by uptown 1 hour ago [ contributes | detracts ] link | parent | flag

Some would undoubtedly still interpret these as a rightness axis like "agree/disagree", so perhaps an even more familiar pair of terms:

17 points by uptown 1 hour ago [ content | spam ] link | parent | flag

However, the term "content" might lead to voting up every valid content remark, so the positive word should be something with more of a value judgment, while still being a word that can apply to points of view with which one disagrees:

17 points by uptown 1 hour ago | interesting* | spam | link | parent | flag

The idea with the vocabulary choice is that a neutral comment would not be clicked on, and "interesting" is directly in the HN charter.

I think this type of vocabulary is more in line with the desire to see well reasoned or contributory discussion flourish.

* Mouse over the word "interesting" could tooltip: "This comment made me think."

// This account is ~400 days old, but a prior anonymous account is ~800 days old, giving some perspective on the trend over time.
Very refreshing, a time tunnel straight to 1994.
This is one of those things that struck me as genius before I even hit the link, and thought, "Holy crap, why haven't I made something like this?"

Than I read the text underneath the Flash portion. Maybe that's why.
EDIT: Single click, long delay, resulted in double post. Edited this one out to save page space.
This is a silly argument. Egypt's Internet went almost completely dark despite a lack of overt Western involvement.
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You are right, the user-base is far too large to be properly accounted for; and that is the root of the reason why there are so many articles about FB's decline is that some of us wish for it. Think about it: who writes these articles? The same basis of geeks, bloggers and web designers that consider that FB has become overpopular and loaded with a plethora of useless features (game apps, "like" buttons for pointless activities, etc.), and that some users tend to update their statuses too much and too often.
Which is the main reason why smaller, and arguably better communities like this one can thrive.
It is all a matter of who gets to call the shots regarding what the Internet should be like.
(all the following was a mistake I misread the comments somehow as part of his own post)

He's said some pretty brave things for someone who says he can't afford an attorney. Maybe he shouldn't be admitting that?

Is it legal for Amazon to ignore DMCA requests of any kind? "Safe Harbor" laws do not allow them to set restrictions like "only on law firm letterhead" do they? Some lawfirm should set up a $50 DMCA online form that faxes to Amazon.
Instead of mirroring, you could proxy. (Solves "storage"/"mirroring" issue; doesn't solve "nasty stuff served up through your server" issue.)

In general, though, there's no way around it, except of course by restructuring gifexplode as a bookmarklet or convincing image host(s) to partner with you:

They can then include the code on the pages they serve up themselves, allow XHR requests via HTML5 or flash mechanisms, or give you base64 data smuggled into a JSONP.
There are 20K unique User-Agent strings in the logfile, which gives an extreme lower bound.

$ cut -f12-100 -d' ' lpthw.Apr.04.2011.log | sed -e 's# "-"$##; s/^"//; s/"$//;' | \
sort | uniq -c | sed -e 's/^ *//' | \
sort -k1,1nr | tee ua.txt | wc -l
20122

UA is still far from uniquely identifying so this is a gross underestimate. If the IP field were hashed instead of 0.0.0.0 a better estimate would be possible, but the order of magnitude of the claim (100k) seems right to me.
This is something I don't really understand about the way so many tiny Ruby projects are structured. Do you need six folders to hold about 200 lines of code? It's organized, but it seems like it's more work to get a grasp on the whole program. Is this something enforced by rack or rubygems?
Hey, angry -

I'm not quite where you are (I haven't broken free and gone completely independent yet), but I sympathize with the feeling. I also tend to be very critical and don't very much like to solve problems I don't perceive as problems (e.g. writing yet another CRUD app).

My best guess, and this is honestly just a guess, is that this is a similar situation to a rut. The best way I've found to get out of a rut is to start saying "yes" to things I normally wouldn't do. That introduces a level of "randomness" to an otherwise stable system and can break me out of what I perceive as a local maximum.

Try coding something that you believe you understand but whose implementation will take some figuring out. For example, a couple of years I wrote a genetic algorithm that evolved an arithmetic expression to approximate a square root in C++. After a hell of a lot of wrangling, I got it to work but thought to myself that I spent more time fighting C++ than I did fighting the problem itself. That prompted me to start working with Lisp because Lisp is better suited for that problem than C++ was. I never had an itch to work in Lisp before, and that certainly wasn't my goal, but I think that the experiment was fruitful because it led to a challenge I genuinely want to meet.

You never know when you'll run into an interesting implementation wrinkle in an otherwise "solved" problem, and that can provide plenty of itches you might never have seen at a first glance.

tl; dr -

If you don't have an itch, and haven't found someone else with an itch you'd like, then you need exposure to more itches.