skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The argument that torrent users degrade the network for other users is tenuous at best, and I wish someone would start calling people out on it.

If the ISP says I have a 6m/768k broadband line, then I should be able to saturate that limit to my heart's content, with whatever I want to download/upload. If it degrades the local network somehow, that is the ISP's fault, not mine, and my neighbors are free to be angry at the ISP for an unreliable connection.

What is the point of having a connection that you can't use to its potential? If torrent users really are degrading the network, then lower the speed caps for the given price tier, as you have obviously oversold capacity. Or, better yet, upgrade the network. Laying a guilt trip on people for 'using too much of something they paid for' is just retarded.
I'm a little worried that he thinks it's a good idea for the computer to sign the "legalese" contract for you... I realize very few people actually read them, but do you really want the lawyers to know that not only will you probably sign something without looking, it's the default setting on your machine?
Ask YC: Need podcasts for new commute
I just got a new job and it more than doubles my commute time. I've got all the standard big name podcasts, TWIT, Diggnation, TRS, etc. What others do you guys recommend to help me wile away the hours in traffic?
The author claims that if a language has features that allow patterns to be automated, there will still be patterns. Perhaps that's true, but the logic seems to be that more-than-necessary code-duplication is acceptable because eliminating 100% of code duplication is impossible -- certainly not a hacker's worldview. That Ruby needs to explicitly bind a variable to the result of an expression in an if statement due to lack of ability to implement effective anaphora does not excuse Java's need to manually implement what in Ruby is just "include Singleton".

(Whenever a post comes up defending Design Patterns, it's also obligatory that someone pull out this link: http://blog.plover.com/prog/design-patterns.html .)
For every excessively verbose identifier in CL, I can give you another that's excessively short. I won't defend any of CL's design, it's horrible. But it's not a major problem for actually using the language, you can rename whatever function you want, or have your editor type it for you.

As for the parentheses, I don't see any excess.

(let (foo bar) ...)

and

(let ((foo 0)(bar 1)) ...)

are both useful. I would hate to have to write:

(let (foo nil bar nil) ...)

just because you're afraid of a few parentheses. It is easy to type and easy to read. (foo nil bar nil) is, IMHO, nearly unreadable.

Edited to add: Another reason I like the ((var binding)...) syntax is because it keeps the core language as unambiguious as possible. If I want to have an Arc-like binding operator, I can just write one and use that:

(my-let (foo 1 bar 2 baz 3) (+ foo bar baz)) ; ==> 6
I agree with most of what you say. But consider again those cases where an individual legislator "puts his own interest first". In those cases, our system of government put officials in a situation where they have a conflict of interest. That is a flaw in our system of Government and should not be blamed on the malice of any individual. Whatever you do in a conflict of interest there was no single, clear path to follow, so no one can blame you too much, and if you choose the wrong path it's an understandable mistake.

If you don't want people to use power, don't give them power. It's not, individually, their fault.

I do not wish to defend out and out corruption, but that's relatively uncommon compared to simple conflicts of interest. Most people are selfish, and there's nothing wrong with that, and what's going wrong is asking them to make terrible choices between themselves and others.
Totally. Our lawmakers are given an incentive system that often puts their interests in direct opposition to ours. People over time will trend toward their own interests.

It's not so much that we cannot give them power (or want not to) as that we must do so while aligning their interests with ours. One example (and I'm not sure I support this) would be to force all campaigns to be government funded. Find every possible reason why lobbyists give money and stop it.
Informative, well rhymed, but very dorky :-)
Sorry to hijack the discussion, but are there any good Clojure frameworks? The JVM is fine, but programming it with Java is too horrible to even discuss :)
At first, I read the title wrong...
waldrews: I have some freelancing bandwidth if you have an interesting project. My email is in my profile while yours is not; send me a line and we'll chat.
I agree with the article except for those 2 paragraphs:

"Norvig once wrote that the existence of design patterns is a sign of weakness in a language. I think he was wrong there. Sure, certain patterns are only necessary because a language don't allow to archive a certain goal directly by some build-in concept. But if you build it in, you would quickly discover other patterns 'a level above' instead of getting rid of those pesky design patterns. So we always have patterns, it's simply unadvoidable."

The problem is when you have to "hand-compile" a pattern repeatedly because the language doesn't let you abstract it away. Closures and macros let you codify most of those patterns once and for all.

"A concrete example: Java uses the "Iterator pattern" quite frequently. Now in functional programming this pattern is quite useless. We simply write map and fold functions and don't need no "iterator". Hah! But hey, isn't "writing a map and a fold function" not also a design pattern? All we need to do is to call it the "map and fold"-pattern. Using this pattern is common knowledge for every user of functional programming languages - so it's good to teach this pattern novices in functional programming right from the beginning."

But I don't have to reimplement map and fold every time I need to use it, I just need to call it. Whereas most of the time what we call a "design pattern" is something you have to reimplement all across the system by hand.
What's the point of having documents on Scribd? They could just have it in HTML/text on their homepage. Scribd is stupid.
The more of a free market, and small government, we have, the less there is for lobbyists to buy, and the less decisions for politicians to make. Moving in that direction will at least lessen the problem. :)

That's kind of what I mean about power. For example, if there are people in charge of the economy -- with power over it -- that's a problem and people will want to pay them to use the power to their benefit. But there needn't be anyone with power of that sort.
they'll appreciate if for the sheer hokeyness of it, which is a whole interesting aesthetic itself (look at many of the shows that Adult swim puts out).
Why would I take CSS advice from someone with such an exceptionally ugly blog?
‘24′ Actress Gives Birth to Boy
Unlike on “24,”” star Mary Lynn Rajskub wasn’t in a particular rush when it come to childbirth.The actress gave birth to a baby boy two weeks after her due date, reports People.
bought the app because i enjoyed so much of their work on my jailbroken 1.x iphone.
here's a short list of enjoyable generic podcasts:

this week in science, never not funny, this american life, the sound of young america, jordan jesse go, wait wait don't tell me
The argument that torrent users should be able to use all the bandwidth they've paid for is totally disconnected from ISP economics, and I wish someone would start calling people out on it. Wait, that's what I'm doing right now.

ISPs are built on statistical multiplexing. They pay something like $40/Mbps/month and resell that bandwidth for around one tenth that price. If ISPs had enough capacity to satisfy all their customers simultaneously, they have to increase prices or decrease speeds enormously. If 6M service suddenly cost $200/month, then any kind of multimedia on the Net dies immediately. Statistical multiplexing benefits almost all Internet users (whose traffic is bursty), so it's not going away.
Worth reading, but, the punctuation. was very, odd.
Looks like they've scanned the text
Is BT throtteling bad? Maybe.

Do I want the FCC to regulate it? Definitely not. If the US govt. wants to crack down on ISPs this way, I would prefer that they at least do it through congress. Giving government more power is in general a bad idea. When this power is given to unelected bodies like the FCC (in a system based on "rule by the people") its a recipe for disaster. We already know that government bureaucrats are not the smartest of the bunch when it comes to IT. Do you really want to give them even more power to regulate it in the hopes that they don't do something stupid? I would rather leave it to corporations which have at least some incentive to act rationally.
Thinking that you can design your own crypto system is the flaw. If you can say "I did X so now that doesn't apply to me", then you're back to thinking it's OK for you to do it - in that case, it's not OK for you to do it again.

Yes, that leaves nobody who can invent new cryptosystems. That's fine. I guess we'll have to get some smart person who doesn't think they can invent a good crypto system to do it, and who thus spends many years of careful, skillful analysis doing the best job they can instead. Oh well.

;)
Rails + Jruby
This is (another) reason why Biometric ID cards are not a good idea.

As a government official who wants to roll out ID cards, would you rather one that's available now, or one that's going to be out in 3-5 years and be more expensive, but which the vendor alleges will be an unquantifiable amount "more secure"?
The "innovators" accepted by DreamIt then have the option of teaming up with the accepted "strategists" to help out with the business side of the fledgling company.

That's an interesting idea. I think that quite a few hackers could use a non-technical cofounder (provided the person is very good at their job), especially in markets like enterprise software or financial services. I'm not necessarily sure this is the best way to pair up technical and non-technical founders, but I'll be curious to see whether the program is successful.
Arc:

(let (foo bar) nil ...)
Immediately from the title I knew it was going to be about Design Patterns.
Yahoo Is Still Searching for, Well, Yahoo
Feedback on Q&A apps in FB
F.C.C. Vote Sets Precedent on Unfettered Web Usage
http://code.google.com/p/google-guice/

(Disclaimer: never tried it)
Ask YC: How do you enable users to use their own domains with your application?
For example, wordpress.com, blogger.com allow you to use your own domains with their application. This proceed as,

1. You create a blog at whatever.blogspot.com

2. You point a CNAME from your domain say mycname.mysite.com to ghs.google.com

3. The dns changes propgate and you can access your blog at mycname.mysite.com

So what can I do to enable users to use their own domains, with my application, which will be on a subdomain on mysite?

[Edit: Layout]
Just because it's on techcruch covering a YC company doesn't mean it should be on HN....
Sorry for straying from your request but when I was doing 1-2 hours each way, Sirius was the best thing that ever happened to me.
Help an (aspiring) Hacker
Lambdas & Closures in PHP 5.3 alpha1
Warp Widgets is the most innovative framework I've seen in a long time. It support static type checking for the EL: http://code.google.com/p/warp-core/
Oh, and GWT is my #1 choice where applicable.
I take your point (that it's possible to patch binaries) but I'm still very sceptical about the problems of this unnamed photo-sharing site. Seems a bit suspicious that the author knows about it but nobody here can guess who it is.

I've just re-read the original article and had to laugh at this:

'...a good source code control system would have avoided this problem... If only they had thought to buy one.'

Saving the source code to a floppy disk or printing it out and putting it in a safe place would have avoided this problem, not to mention using CVS, Subversion, or one of the other free version control systems.
Alternatively, I've used that book to _prevent_ all sorts of nonsense. It can be great when you have a manager who is inexperienced with software development (sad, but too common in some places).

"No, we shouldn't add an offshore team to meet our deadline, and here's why..."
‘Nip/Tuck’ Creator Filled with ‘Glee’
“Nip/Tuck“ creator Ryan Murphy will lighten up a bit with his next project, an hour-long comedy on its way to FOX.
And if you recognize some applications of your fold look the same over and over again - you can code this 'meta'-pattern again. If you pretend that fold was first - then map and filter are good examples. (Though I suspect map and filter came first and fold was a generalization.)
> I miss that 960.gs, i put that in my list now..
Keep it up…..

Maybe this blog is his side project after his Dell tech support job.

edit: check out http://hiddenpixels.com/about/
Thanks. Any idea by what % spam has reduced due to this?
Don't your believe in authority arguments?
out of curiosity, can you provide a good comparison of seam vs grails?
PySpread: A spreadsheet that accepts a pure python expressions
Foxconn Releases Test BIOS Fixing Linux Crashers
It's up to the startup how much they involve the "strategist", but from what I've heard from two groups in the program, this is definitely a helpful resource. DreamIt seems to have created a good atmosphere among the companies it has funded, with the major downside that it's in Philadelphia of all places (but that was the point of starting it I guess).
Create a sense of urgency
Toyota Announces Segway Competitor
Raytracer written inside of Second Life
Calvin and Jobs (comic)
Superficial, flawed, simplistic.
2 tipjoys already, thanks so much!
Yuil is dead, but 4hoursearch is now online (source code available)
though don't rely on that too much, better do some extra work. that's probably what lots of us did when we had financial issues in our youth.
MySQL: How adding another table to JOIN can improve performance ?
Fotbal | Fotbal intern | Liga 1
Troll? At least I thought at first. But the last commment was too reasonable.
But, but, but it's on mit.edu!

I know what you're saying and had similar thoughts. I suppressed my concerns thinking "some of this seems wrong but this is on mit.edu so they must have been through many checks".

Same lesson to be learnt as http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=263599 ?
Ironically, I found it hard to concentrate on the article.
I grew up on simpleminded infix notation, and am overjoyed to have moved on.

Perhaps we could see a macro example just slightly more complex.
Oh I realize how it works. It's the same reason my university parking department could oversell parking spaces. Not everyone is going to be on campus at once.

Thankfully not every user is using BitTorrent. But some are. If the statistical model assumes that no one will ever use all they are alloted, then the model is broken and needs to be re-calibrated. If this results in a price increase, at least that is transparent, rather than traffic shaping and individual throttling, which denies people something they paid for, and basically amounts to false advertising:

> "Speeds up to 150x faster than dialup![1]"

[1] But you can't actually take advantage of that rate, because it'd be rude to your neighbors.
Poll: Categories for YC News?
YC News contains articles that can be categorized as
'tech news', 'useful', '4 entrepreneur ', 'fun', etc. It can save ones time to know the content type before clicking the link. Just wanted to know whether idea is relevant enough to become a feature proposal.
Yeah, it may be useful
No, I don't need this
smugmug?
picasa?
Man with rifle and 10 pounds of pot caught driving 90mph while masturbating
I think the idea is to keep all posts relevant to this community. If in fact there are too many "fun" posts, the posters should be asking why they're putting it here (especially if it'll be on Reddit).
Looks like they are funding blogs: http://www.beanstockd.com/

That's weird because blogs don't often make exits, so there's very little chance that DreamIt would be able to make money off that investment.
I don't follow politics, but Obama at least seems to have tech on his radar. I couldn't find a thing on McCain's site.

A techie may have Obama's ear, if he's on Twitter and Scribd.
My parents are DEEAAAAAAAD
Boo for killing the almost homophone by inserting "Steve" in the title.
I agree, however the reality is that you can not change the state of things. If you have too much data, you need to filter the list.
It seems like a nice step up from the current Segways.

A lot of work must be done in making these socially acceptable. Segway definitely failed at that. I think Toyota has the capital and brand to take it to the next level.

Hopefully they put the resources towards it because I'd like to see what happens with this.
% spam has probably increased by this, as it is only a barrier to entry to mass-mailers that aren't spammers. Examples are: Paypal, EBay, airlines (although a lot of airline email looks like SPAM to me). You have to verify your identity with state-issued documents for some (all?) of those programs. There are a lot of restrictions (contractual and technical) applied to the messages that are sent through such programs. They are too expensive and risky for spammers to make money using them; in fact, they are too expensive for almost anybody to bother signing up for them.
I know this is probably an unpopular answer, but I'll answer anyway (I'm not a framework sort of person).

None of them... Write your own. This is what I did for Mibbit, and it worked out very well.
Of course it depends on what you're writing, and if any frameworks out there are up to the job, so maybe this advice is unhelpful for you.

You might however be surprised just how easy it is to create your own custom framework.
The Atropos WordPress Plugin
Very cool, especially the video of the hands-free gracefulness.

The small size is also cool, but I suspect these research/demo models have terrible battery life... EDIT it gives 3 miles, at 3.7 mph http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2008/08/01/...

bet: they pay no patent royalties to Segway.

Also, why not have a seat on them? Seems like so much work, having to stand all the time. :)
Meh. The first comic was mildly funny. Not so much on the others.
or filter the users
Some places take them... at a punitive exchange rate :)
http://www.quotegarden.com/censorship.html
I think this is the crucial point. Probably the people who clean hotels do not usually buy Roombas. If a lawyer buys a Roomba, they are saving time that is worth 100/hour (or whatever). If a hotel buys a Roomba, they are saving time worth 10/hour (or whatever). A very different calculation.
jj.am.
I hope that I am so famous and successful one day that people find it amusing to lampoon me using classic cartoon remixes.
I think I've made $0.03 since I started typing this.
It's old. I am proud of myself that I realized this before checking the date on the article. Nobody references the Bible nowadays in polite company.
I see a bit of overlap between that article and mine. Feel free to check it out for a different perspective: http://jtame05.wordpress.com/2008/07/02/how-to-work-80-hour-...
The actual title is "Toyota Announces Segway Killer". It's kind of like saying "Toyota Announces Apple Newton Killer".
I've tried both 960.gs and Blueprint. I didn't find either all that useful outside of the reset they both come with. And it felt dirty to have classes with names like span-12 and grid_8 in my code.
Web Startup Legal Concerns
I am constantly thinking of new ideas for a start-up to put out on the web, but it seems like my road-block is worrying about legal repercussions and liabilities. Does anyone in the community have any advice? How many web-startups form LLC types of business organizations to protect themselves? Are there other ways? I would greatly appreciate any advice the community might have here to help out a fellow comrade.
Don't be unfair. #3 is pretty good.
Yahoo Chairman Bostock: Jerry Yang's Our Man
Old, but still useful
My plan for Apple TV
Step up? It has 1/4th the speed and 1/8th the range. I dig the no-hands version, but at that speed and range it would be much quicker to just walk.
Philadelphia is a wonderful location to be these days... and DreamIt has been an amazing experience.

-Pete Groverman
TapInko.com
Can anyone link to the pdf?
I think we had this poll already a couple days ago.
Go incorporate and don't worry about it. Even then, you usually don't need to incorporate until you start getting traffic.

People generally don't sue folks with no money. What do they have to gain from it?
People Want to Pay
I don't know if a railroad funded by a railroad tycoon's other subsidized railroads counts as not being subsidized itself =P.
Well, to be fair, non-blog businesses don't often make exits either. There have been a more interesting blog "exits" lately than I would have expected, so it's harder to write them off for trying.
I'm trying to figure out why Calvin is even used, and all I can get is the lame almost-ryhme in the title. Calvin could be anyone or no one, all the character does is stand there and say "What's the punchline, Mr. Jobs?"
If you want hands-free and FAST then Exkate sells electric skateboards that do 20 miles an hour over a 12 mile range.
Mass-patronage model: sell music, not copies
Well he uses Moe, which is another character from Calvin and Hobbes in the strip. Overall it's mostly Jobs though. Also, Jobs doesn't take on any of the characteristics of Hobbes, who is usually the voice of reason, which I think would have been clever.
Even the Giants Can Learn to Think Small
An Innocent Abroad - Social Networking in the non-Anglophone World
So you think it could be like http://garfieldminusgarfield.net/ ?
Tell users to CNAME their domain to your own and then render pages based on the incoming HTTP "Host" header?

I feel like you've answered the bulk of your question. Are you looking for something more specific?
Even people who think they can invent good crypto spend years of careful, skillful analysis. :-)
An implementation could be a tipjoy button on last.fm or alike.
I don't take it personally that nobody upmodded this comment. The thread is stale by now. You and I are probably the only ones left reading it. ;)

Anyhow, you're welcome to the free advice. I hope you get somewhere!
It's got a better hit rate than 90% of the college newspaper comics I've ever read. Not that that's saying much.
Faced with the choice of too many new users diluting the site (by upvoting junk), and too much bad content, I'd rather be accepting of new users, and very, very ironhanded with regards to acceptable content. If we allow any content and any users, new users who are more interested in [pics] and why McCain or Obama is a dork, and that kind of extraneous junk will eventually dominate the site.
"joke"?
This just seemed like a rehash of the power of compound interest.

Just remember the rule of 72 (for when you need to estimate these sort of figures in your head), and read a chapter from a finance book on the time value of money so you can do the actual math when you have to, and you're set.

For example, if someone tells you they'll double your money in 10 years, you can compute the annual interest rate needed to see that kind of return. Assuming that your interest is compounded annually, just say that (1+x)^10 = 2 and solve for x. Or, to get an estimate, you know 72/7.2 = 10 so the interest rate needed is ~7.2%
What mibbit does is significantly different from what most "CRUD" type of apps do, though. I mean, you have templates/views like everyone else, controllers, but then your 'model' is an IRC server, right?