skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The problem lies with the question 'What is the English language?'

Is it what we speak? write? what we find on the web? in what social context? Given some constraints, then perhaps yes, you could write a formal grammar and have a parser accepting this language.

Maybe my answer doesn't seem helpful, but my point is that language isn't a static, fixed and closed set.
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Ask HN: How much are you able to post about your company non-anonymously?
I've read a lot of your comments on HN, thank you for sharing all this. I know you probably have better problems to worry about than your website, but I think you can back it up in the wordpress admin panel and import the backup file to wordpress.com which is free (if you need to minimize your costs). You may also need to copy your wp uploads manually, I don't remember frankly.
How To: Spend your investors’ money
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You have existing customers right?

Pick the customer who believes you the most, and ask him to honestly tell you why this product is important to him. What kind of disasters does the software prevent in his business. How does this software affect him personally.

The problem right now is your company is very engineering focussed and doesn't have enough domain understanding. You need to cut back on your engineering focus and spend more time with your customers.

Also talk to potential customers who are one notch bigger than your current ones. For example, if you are dealing with 5 person company, talk with 50 person company. Their problems are magnified. Enterprise sales require people who understand their problems and require some kind of software integration. Usually, if you have integration or plugins preconfigured, it is a selling point because customization is very expensive.
Absolutely not. You might have a chance with something like Lobjan, but I doubt it. This is the heart of why statistical AI stole the show in language research.
LastPass Disclosure Shows Why We Can't Have Nice Things
wow thanks very much for the comprehensive list! I've installed many of those apps and am liking them very much!
HP needs to push the web angle even harder. If WebOS were the chromeOS of phone it would have something to really differentiate itself. To do that they have to go all-in on making the browser really kick ass. The biggest problem with the mobile web today is the browsers are not nearly as good as the desktop counterparts. If HP/Palm would make it a priority to have a javascript engine that comes close to desktop counterparts, to support all of the cutting edge html5 features, and continually iterate on that, I'd definitely strongly consider making a switch. They should drop native apps all together and instead suggest developers use WebGL and html5 (keep the App Catalog but make it just be for app review and discovery).
Your thought reminded me of one of my favorite PostSecret Postcards. This website actually allows you to order them, so I bought one and have it hanging in my cube at work. Sort of reminds me not to stray.

http://postsecretcollection.com/PostCards/b3897ff62dc048b187...
cardiotrainer appears great even though I already have an oregon hrm I think I will use it. Thanks
Through all the FUD you raise some good points, but perhaps tone down a bit of the apocalyptic rhetoric?
We typically don't release the exact numbers of people that work on projects, but I've believe we've said in the past that hundreds of engineers work on search quality.
I've heard a lot of good things about it, mainly from people used to CMD though. When I checked it out, I didn't find a lot to do with it. I didn't feel like learning a new shell language that only works on Windows. The lack of familiar helper tools such as diff, grep and sed didn't help, and I don't know whatever Windows equivalents may exist. I'm sure if I was using Windows PWSH would be great, but like many of us I don't have any interest in using Windows as a webserver platform.

Now that there may be a prospect of using PowerShell on other platforms, I wonder why I'd bother? Day to day tasks I'm perfectly happy doing in bash, and anything more complex, I'd just as soon use Python, Ruby, PHP or Perl.
The blog is in Wordpress but the main site is hand-coded by me. It died once before and donations brought it back to life. If nothing else, I will FTP it down to my netbook before the hosting expires. I would be much more interested in information on a) how to get more traffic to my various websites and b) how to effectively monetize them.

I suspect the real money will be in a webcomic I plan to do and another site that my sons blog on that we have additional plans for. I have considered posting this as a question, but I completely suck at that so haven't bothered. I continue to read stuff here to work on that angle of things.

Thank you for your support.
A simple, small, and powerful CSS Grid System — Gist
Major Flood Coming Down the Mississippi River
There's a studio at Google where people can record videos. Compare an early video I did: http://www.youtube.com/user/MattCutts?blend=5&ob=5#p/u/6... to more recent videos I've done like http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WJ6CtBmaIQM . The first video I did at home, while I believe the second video is from the same studio where they made the search quality video. The production values are much higher on the second video, even though the quality of the content itself is roughly the same.
The bias wasn't slight -- in fact, it made it tougher to get through the whole article. It felt like the whole time I should be picturing the Indian flag waving majestically in the background, as India single-handedly picked itself up by its bootstraps and liberated its neighbors in wars of conscience, and literally rocketed itself into space, all via an army of Indian engineers (the gifted superior students), doctors (the snobby rich kids), and lazy good-for-nothing B.As. Viva India, who can do no wrong.

Even when the article makes a minor allowance for less-than-stellar engineering performance -- why did it take longer than expected to develop nuclear power? -- the answer given is not anything to do with engineering, but only that Indians were too peaceful under Ghandi and simply didn't feel like going nuclear.

I'm a big fan of India and Indian innovation and potential. I would just have liked to read a more balanced article that didn't bother with the nationalistic stuff. Viva Indian engineering in the 21st century!
I don't really understand your answer - conversion should be point 1 for every design, call it graphic, call it web, call it interaction, but you suggest it's some kind of "pro" service.
In my opinion it's not, a design that doesn't convert doesn't have any business value. For what reasons someone should pay for a website if that website doesn't have any mean or any return?
You understand that this is exactly what I'm talking about? A customer buys something that has no use and no impact, of course he wants to spend less, and he is damn right.
And that's also why I say that a designer must be a designer, if you have no clue about human interaction you're simply not a designer - can you imagine an industrial designer crafting some crap without any idea about how the user will interact with it? No, it's totally laughable, that's why it doesn't happen.
Educational requirements are invariably soft; I don't even have a high school diploma, but that's never disqualified me from a job.

We're in discussions regarding the purchase our small company, where I serve as (a technical) CEO. I'd be joining the purchasing company as CTO; nobody yet has asked me about having a degree in anything.

For most jobs, what educational requirements really express is the minimum level of skill in written and verbal communication, analytical abilities, and a sufficient level of proficiency in the trade in question.

When everyone in you field went to college, nobody even bothers to question whether you did, too.
An Interview with Taiwan’s Rockstar Start-up
you will need more than a single testflight link for that distribution scheme to work.
author here. so, this was an object lesson in not running every single one of your services on a single ec2 micro instance. sorry about that.
Eric Schmidt said he chose a 70/20/10 model to organize 70% of its resources to "core search and ads," 20% to related interesting businesses, and 10% to new ideas. Since 2005, though, some other businesses may have entered the "core" 70% (http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Search-Engines/Google-Reveals-Its-P...).
Yes, they of course involve the OS, but are much lighter than overhead from spawning a thread. Furthermore, what's the point in considering bad OS implementations? Linux is free and does a good enough job, so that should be the baseline for considering performance.
This is a particular method of training: like a kata. Obviously you aren't going to be able to build every sort of application in a week, but if you take it on as training, then your big applications will go faster too.
Well, who has more debt? And what if we compare her to a high school graduate employed at a similarly low level rather than an unemployed dropout?

There are PLENTY of reasons why it might not be worth it to spend as many years in education as society allows.
Why does lots of columns and tables make this approach awkward? Sure you might need a couple computed columns, and a little table de normalization, but IMHO most of where NoSQL gets it's performance is from de normalization.

Regardless of how many elements compose the key the calculation is the same. I'd be surprised if you couldn't approach O(log(n)) time with a good SQL implementation, some computed columns and/or indexed views.

Just wondering was the b-tree implementation you did a pure B-Tree or was the data structure itself modified in some way. eg. storing the number of elements to the left or right?
something similar + benchmarks
http://stsdb.com
The trouble with living inside of a walled garden is that new innovations can be blocked rather easily.
What guarantees that the high school drop-out's industry is "as flaccid as a used balloon"?

As a high school drop-out in the computer industry, the industry does not seem the least bit "flacid" to me.

Of course, I also had comparatively wealthy parents and an otherwise privileged upbringing, very similar to that of many individuals that comprise the lowest unemployment bracket.
The Crowdsourced Panopticon
Codifying asymmetry: How Apple became Jobsian
> difference in data structures

Always good to have more tools in one's arsenal in that case. I'll drop one of you a message if I write a Lua binding for it (using LuaJIT+embedded k/v for data services atm).
Agreed. The Pre's battery life was atrocious.
I wasn't aware of this huge project [1].
This one seems to be only a smal part of it [2]. This really looks awesome and game changing! I'm very excited to see if I can contribute.

[1] http://openfarmtech.org/wiki/Main_Page
[2] http://openfarmtech.org/weblog/2011/03/open-source-micro-fac...
I'll do both (report here & there).

I just tried the top five HN links. All exhibited the problem.

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/powershell/archive/2011/04/16/powers...

http://www.logolounge.com/article.asp?aid=lnPf

http://code.google.com/p/leveldb/

http://www.technologyreview.com/computing/37525/?p1=A2&a...

http://openfarmtech.org/weblog/2011/05/solar-fire/

For each, I clicked on the link, and then clicked my newly made Readable bookmark, which I had set up using the default settings. Then I went to Firefox's File:Print Preview. I have it set on the default settings (Shrink to Fit, Portrait). For each of the five articles listed above, the result was that only one of the displayed pages had article text on it, and this was not the entire article, since it would not fit on a single page. Sometimes other pages were displayed, sometimes not, but if there were any, then they were blank pages.

I am running Firefox 3.6.16 under Ubuntu 10.4 (Lucid). I'm perhaps a bit behind in my patching, but, in any case, this is not a new problem.
Stallone would agree with you: http://news.celebritywonder.com/2008/01/24/Sylvester_Stallon...

Would you want to overclock your body in an isolated area, in what would seem an artificial way?
It's not really about the language, it was more about the API's available. I write iPhone apps also and the frameworks that Apple has developed are far superior and far more reaching than anything Palm/HP has done.

Their API's available to the browser extensions are basically just opengl related.
Solar thermal power has always looked much cheaper to me, compared to photovolcaics.

Even Google recognizes its potential. They invested in a solar thermal power company a few months ago: http://venturebeat.com/2008/05/13/brightsource-snags-115m-fo...
Easily reproduced. Tried on the following page:

http://www.go-hero.net/jam/11/languages
I don't think of this as a problem. Tornado is just a small and lightweight non-blocking HTTP server with a couple of convenient libraries. There are some pretty awesome, elegant solutions to the problem you point out, and I like to think of these as extensions to the small Tornado framework.

One really cool one is http://thomas.pelletier.im/2010/08/websocket-tornado-redis/, which demonstrates how to use threading to support Redis pub/sub.

For heavy computational tasks that aren't time-critical, you could have an accessory worker thread that chugs queued computations (yay first-class functions) in computational downtime.
Node.js is only available for WebOS 2.0 (~90% of people are on older versions of WebOS).
Thanks for those links, it's good to see others using runit, I'm afraid because if its lack of popularity it's been overlooked as a sysv replacement in favor of systemd, upstart, and others. Runit's maturity should be a big edge, when thinking about a replacement PID 1.
Depending on what you mean by formal definition, "broad-coverage parsers" might be want you want to look into. It's the subset of NLP research that aims to be able to take in any sentence in $language, and produce some sort of structural parse of the sentence. Such a parser is essentially a "formal theory" of the language, for some definition of formal.

Two of the more widely used parsers are the Stanford Parser and the Link Grammar Parser. Both use a hybrid of symbolic and statistical methods, starting with an underlying structural theory of grammar, and then training the specific parse decisions from a labeled data set.
Employers used to give out aptitude tests all the time, prior to the rise of disparate impact lawsuits. Who knows how much better we could have gotten at testing these sorts of things if colleges hadn't essentially been granted a monopoly on employment psychometrics.
Interesting. For http://greenfelt.net we have a single PostgreSQL DB and store all our games in one big table. For the score based games (like tetris) we do everything with Postgres's great expression indices to segregate things into daily, weekly, and monthly high scores ("DATE_TRUNC('YEAR',date at time zone 'UTC')"). We use Postgres's windowing functions to get the ranking numbers.

We don't have very high traffic though--we manage roughly 3000 games/hour at our peak times with our one DB server.
Nonlinear Forecasting: noise vs. chaos (1990)
You're right, I don't have much of an argument for relational databases here.

I am concerned about the complexity of this approach though and I don't think the concessions we're doing away with are that terrible. How meaningful is it to be rank 5623 vs. rank 5249, or even rank 2519? I don't think people can make much sense of ranks beyond 100, but maybe I'm wrong. I would rather break rankings into smaller groups. Which is more interesting, being ranked 23,528 worldwide, or being the town champion? I think the latter is much more meaningful to a person.
What does this mean? This is not useful to the discussion either.
They have a TED Talk which is exciting to watch as well

http://www.ted.com/talks/marcin_jakubowski.html
Remember that modern implementations of kernel threads are designed to be general-purpose. So, while a threaded model would solve the problems, it also incurs necessary overhead (that works towards solving irrelevant problems). The event-driven approach can be thought of as minimalistic user-space threads for this context. Libraries like Python Eventlet (http://eventlet.net/) and CML (http://cml.cs.uchicago.edu/) are trying to reabstract this into the conveniences of thread-style programming.
Then do you have any alternate solutions? I highly doubt that all those men will be satisfied with sexbots, no matter how realistic the Japanese will have made them by then.

Polyandry seems like an idea that has potential. I'll leave the implementation details to the experts though.
Google's got it cached: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:https:/...
I'm no expert really, but in case someone else doesn't jump in I'd have thought Google Adsense would work pretty well with your content. Also maybe Amazon Affiliates links to relevant books etc. I'm sure with that and a little SEO you'd easily cover the costs of a cheap VPS quite quickly.
Failure Cascading Through the Cloud
In the world of software, the best doesn't always win. What wins is; ubiquity, ease of use, & random market factors. x86 isn't the best architecture out there, Linux isn't the greatest kernel ever developed, PHP can be pretty horrible when used incorrectly, Wordpress's code is complete crap, and yes, JavaScript has some quirks. Some really really smart people at Microsoft, Sun, and Google have all attempted to add another language to the browser, and all have failed so far. The only language that has been successful is something that was created in a few weeks at Netscape. And now, that language is invading the server, and it's going to win. Every single big company on the web is toying with Node right now. During 2011, HP is going to ship tens of millions of computers and phones that has Node as a core component of the OS. The performance goals that the Node dev team are aspiring towards are mind-blowing, and you know what? I think they are going to get there.

So, to answer your question, what are the merits of Node? The "Ease of use" vs "Performance" ratio is going to be off the charts. You may feel more productive in another language. But there are millions of people who are going to enjoy the ease of use to fire up a high performing HTTP server in 3 lines of code.
I liked webOS, it's a shame to see it like this. :(
maybe "over specialized"
This is the only sane post I've read about this incident. All the major tech sites blew it way out of proportion. LastPass did everything right, and yet every headline was along the lines of "LastPass has been hacked, panic!".

They deserve better, especially seeing as how transparent they were about the whole situation and how they handled it.
I had a Pre for two years, just got the Nexus S and my wife has an iPhone 4. Without question, the biggest UX differences between the platforms are:

1. General responsiveness (iPhone leads)

2. Notifications (iPhone trails dramatically)

3. Web Page as a 1st class OS object. (WebOS is the only one that does this)

This third point is NEVER discussed. With Android and iOS, you have to go to the browser and then jump to a particular tab. When multi-tasking, this forces you to do more clicks through two different mental models. In WebOS, everything is a card. When you're trying to pull ESPN back up, you seek ESPN, not 'browser'.

Given google's position on the web, I am just surprised they haven't done a better job of this. It makes sense that Apple is making webpages 2nd class citizens, they want a 30% cut.
Zenith Solar is certainly more advanced. Thanks for pointing it out.

The difference between the two projects though is open source vs proprietary. Zenith looks very impressive but Solar Fire is meant to put solar power cheaply and easily into anyone's hands. They are both worth following IMO
Very helpful benchmarks. Anyone know why there should be a premium per employee for a platform as a service company? Why is PaaS any different from any other startup with regards to a per employee burn rate?
You would deprive all of the tech sites with the ad revenue generated by the lemming rush! How cruel...
A favicon. I just want a favicon. Every single bookmark in my bar has an icon, and no words, and ALL I want is a favicon! Readability doesn't have it; neither does Readable. Makes things much uglier, no matter how pretty the text is. A golden star to whoever hacks it first.
Why Your Personal Information Wants to be Free
The problem, in the steps you said you followed, is the "Print Preview" step. File >> Print Preview will show you a preview of how the entire current page will look like, when printed -- but that's actually not what you want to print.

What you want to print is only contents of Readable's overlay. To that end, please use the Print link, shown in the menu at the bottom of the overlay -- unfortunately, there is no "Print Preview" available.

The technical explanation for this is that Readable's overlay is actually an IFrame -- and browsers support printing the iframe contents as if the iframe were a window onto itself; but they will print the iframe as an element in the main page, when you're printing that instead.
Thanks for confirming. Read my reply here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2526937
How to be a good articles cooker
I worked with PowerShell in a past life, and found it quite useful and reasonably pleasant[1] (esp. when coming from standard Windows Shell), however it's this:

In PowerShell you can directly instantiate .NET and COM objects

... that I think will keep it from being especially useful on non-Windows platforms.

Windows has COM objects for pretty much every language/app/platform feature pre-2003, and .NET objects for pretty much everything since. To be equivalently useful, then a ported version would need to find the equivalents on their new platform. That sounds hard to me, especially on platforms like Linux where you have a half-dozen different desktop API possibilities and where the historical focus is on text files, not APIs, for configuration & control.

Without object models to leverage, a PowerShell port will be limited to replicating everything with wrapper objects: starting from Bash functionality, then coreutils, and then slowly working up.

[1] TBH I wish they'd added features to IronPython instead of making a new syntax, but such is life.
Actually, I think that LastPass overreacted. Seeing the possibility of a breach, and alerting customers is definitely the right thing. But they went so far as to lock customers out of their own data -- it was two full days before my wife was able to get into our bank account.
LSD is very effective at making people feel like they're purple clouds. Making people feel good is not a bad thing, but it isn't the same as actually changing their biological age.
Foundry Group - Rico Suave's
So far this month, my google adsense account has racked up 3 cents in earnings. It's not usually that pathetic, but it's not great either. If nothing else, I need more traffic.

I'm working on stuff. But I've been working on stuff a long time and I'm just really frustrated. I can figure out a cure for an incurable medical condition but can't pay my bills and can't figure out marketing (or some such). <insert crossed eyes> It's not a happy place to be and not one I desire to remain in.

Peace.
Thank you for the link. I envy you your reading material.
How much longer do I have to wait for a brain controlled keyboard? It can't be that far off.
It's less cool therefore it costs you extra money. That's why engineers in finance cost more than non-finance engineers.
I created something similar in Ruby: https://github.com/peterc/pismo