skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think Scoble has 20/20 hindsight disease:

... the small, seemingly unimportant platform today that gets early adopters excited will become the large, dominant platform of tomorrow ... How long did it take Visicalc to happen on the Apple II? Or Aldus Pagemaker to happen on the Mac?

Most of promising technologies doesn't become dominant. For one thing, there are many small, seemingly unimportant platforms, but only one can dominate.

But I like his 5 reasons for targeting a nascent platform. Even if its market stays small, for a DHHian business, that may be right-size. Assuming it endures...
It might be an unpopular position to take here, but I really think that what I think of as "language snob languages" (Lisp, Haskell, Erlang, OCaml . . . not Ruby or Python, though) can't ever be mainstream because the barrier to entry is just too high even for competent programmers. There's a network effect problem to be sure, where people don't use it because the docs/frameworks/examples/toolkits aren't there, but part of the reason those things aren't there is that the language doesn't appeal in the same way to people who want to build those things and the languages themselves have enough of an impedance mismatch with how people think about things to keep a lot of otherwise-competent engineers from investing their time in them.

In other words, it's not just about tools or marketing or docs: some languages, while certainly more useful in the hands of a skilled expert, are so complicated and require so much dedication to perfecting their use that they can't possibly ever become mainstream.

The high barrier to entry for those languages is not just because of docs, tools, lack of standards, etc. It's just an inherent part of those languages, and what makes them so powerful is exactly what makes them difficult to get started with and what keeps them marginalized.
The USA rewards innovation and has the least friction applied to people trying to innovate.

This doesn't have anything to do with the question of whether the average student in the US is learning anything.

I can walk into any building in Silicon Valley and the Indians will come close to outnumbering the natives (and if the battle were held on a syllable-by-syllable basis, a clear loss for the home team.) It seems to me sometimes that Silicon Valley built something great based on widely available, merit-based, quality public education. Then around the 1970s they stopped funding that and started to rely only on prodigies from wealthy families, or outlier freaks from America, and the educational product of all the other countries.
How about freedom of association? I heard that they tried that once. Seems like a good idea.
Crazy plan to dam the Mediterranean and flood central Africa
Sorry about 2. I mistakenly assumed "long time" meant you'd had an account for a long time.

I don't know what to say about 1 and 3 other than that I disagree.

Edit: I'll say one thing about 3, lest I seem to be secretly agreeing with your nasty straw man. Lower IQ is a factual claim (which no one here has disputed - are you saying it's false? or just that it's offensive to talk about?). This by no means implies lower intelligence unless you equate IQ with intelligence, a leap that I personally find rather dumb. lexlibra did use the word "intelligence", but the thread was entirely about IQ, so this seemed more like a careless word choice than an expression of racist hatred.
It doesn't seem to be working, it just redirects to www.facebook.com
The black-white IQ gap has been almost entirely explained by controlling for SES and other factors.

I used to think the same thing. But when I actually spent some time reading and evaluating the evidence, it turns out that is far from the case. The official scientific consensus is that the jury is still out. But there is certainly a strong case for the genetic basis - see this article in Slate for example: http://www.slate.com/id/2178122/entry/2178123/
Yes, YouTube had that limit long before the acquisition.
Yeah, I'm not sure what the hell he's talking about either. The fact that specific funds exist for both iPhone and Facebook applications kind of obliterates his point.
"Snobs" sparked off this chain of reasoning for me:

- Snobs have overly critical attitudes (by definition).

- Overly critical attitudes cause perfectionism.

- Perfectionism causes procrastination, because if you haven't actually done anything, you can't be criticized (especially not by yourself).

So it seems inevitable that language snobs would not produce much work (note: there any plenty people using the languages listed who do created finished work - one could claim that these people, in general, are noted for not having overly critical attitudes, and hence are not language snobs).
No. We only have one nation wide test, which is a marticular exam(consisting of atleast four subjects: math, natural/social sciences, Finnish, English) in end of the high school. Even there they only publish(with your permission) if you passed or failed. At the ceremony where you get your final report and certificate, they usually state in loud if you scored Laudatur(10) or Eximia(9)(in scale of 4-10) and thats about public at it gets.

In elementary you only get grades at the end of the school year, and for first years you only get stated that if you're good or not so good in some subjects. At junior high to high school you usually get grades(4-10) on single courses which are then averaged and rounded to annual grades. So particular exam scores are not so important. If you're a good and active student, a one bad exam won't affect your annual grade so much or even at all.

So grades aren't public, but usually other students and teachers know who is doing well and who isn't.

And I would add that none of our exams are multiple choice. In social sciences they are mostly essays and open questions, in languages vocabularity, listening, grammar, and writing tasks, math is math, and natural sciences are math and essays/open questions. So you cannot probably even fully compare your answers since sometimes there are more than one right answer and a way to answer it.
...would prevent any further such attempts.

Presuming he is smart enough to understand the implications.
"Intelligence as defined/measured by IQ tests" is just a verbose way of saying "IQ".
A 12 Step Program for Value Destruction - Umair Haque
I never had a blue box, but I would have loved to have had one as a child.

I did once manage to hack a pulse dial phone into making a call by tapping the receiver disconnect button, which is pretty tame by comparison, but it seemed tremendously exciting at the time.

I think I also used to dial random 3-digit numbers starting with * or # just to see what would happen.
Ask YC: Good language/DB combination for distributed naive Bayes classifier?
I want to create a classifier which can run on multiple hosts and have all of the hosts be eventually consistent. erlang looks tempting, but I was wondering what would be a good db to pair with erlang for this? or is erlang maybe not the correct idea?
Some Thoughts on the Open Web Foundation
Right, it likely wasn't a bug if it is a single bit and this only happens once in a blue moon. A machine can only transmit perfect 1's and 0's for so long before getting one wrong.
A Trick For Caching And Expiring Static Web Resources
Constructing a fair 3 sided coin
Same

Edit: K, this is bizarre, but try signing in at facebook.com, then exiting (without logging off). When you go to new.facebook.com it'll bring you straight to the new layout.

I guess it's the sign-in step that fudges things up.
Part of the reason surely has to do with the economy. In Finland, two sectors are highly subsidized via R&D: Information Technology (Nokia) and Forestry (which is highly scientific).

Interesting article: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20071127....

These two drivers for the economy surely reinforce the importance of science and math in school. Students are more focused on areas of study with practical applications (jobs) in their own country - hence high math and science scores. And where you have more competition you have a positive feedback look (Kenyan Runners: http://gladwell.typepad.com/gladwellcom/2007/11/kenyan-runne...)

My two cents anyways.
Cassandra, HBase, or HDFS with hadoop if you like java (almost as fast as C++ for numeric stuff). CouchDb if you like erlang (terrible for computations though).
>perhaps relegating the race/gender/IQ trifecta to the same status as religion and political discussion, or to accept the likely degradation in discussion.

I'd prefer to accept the degradation. "X racial subgroup is better/worse in some way than y racial subgroup" is one of the unnamed Things You Can't Say and I see no need to censor it here, even if the discussion makes me uncomfortable.
1. I agree on your point about classification. Moreover the whole topic of language capabilities is overrated. There are many many decisions one should make during a work on software project and the choice of language is just one of them (maybe even it is not the most important one).

2. But life, business, and software are full of trade-offs. If you can accept a little imperfection here, some cruft there, and sloppy duplication there, they you can hire from a bigger pool of employees, deploy to a wider range of platforms, hit more markets more frequently. The key point that the penny pinchers miss is that while using inferior tools has a cost associated with it, so does not using those tools. The important thing is to Always Be Shipping. </quote> (press C-f, type inferior tools)

The article does not reflect my opinion (EDIT: but accidentally I agree with the above fragment). I was trying to make a short version (summary) of the article and as Joel (joelonsoftware.com) said:

the trouble is if you put something up without writing a long enough post to actually make your full case, uhmm, you just get misunderstood, was sort of what I concluded. </quote>
Nofollowing isn't enough to stop determined SEOs with lots of time on their hands. A nofollow link is still decidedly better than no link at all, because it gets a couple of clicks of traffic and maybe, maybe will be picked up by someone else as a follow link.
I downvoted it, not because of political correctness, but because it seemed like linkbait. The account was only hours old and the post expressed no view of its own.

Also, the reference to "Third World" immigrants struck me as gratuitous, and suggestive in a negative way.
Bacteria, Pancakes, and David X. Cohen
The single assignment cargo cult
Right, sweeping it under the table is never a good idea, but I don't know what else can be said about it that hasn't been beaten to all hell and back here and everywhere else. It's not like opinions are going to change, and I, for one, get nothing out of it.

It is informative to know how other people think about these things, so you have a point. I do worry, though, about what type of people will be attracted here by this type of meme.
Are You Popular?
...wow.
Ask HN: Which services have figured out a way for revenue after gaining users
Im just curious. A lot of people say, they will figure out a revenue model, once they start gaining user base. Which of these companies have done it? Most of the cool sites I know of are still free and dont make much(if any at all) and they all have been for few years.

Im trying hard to think of a company which gained lots of users and started making money. They keep saying "we will eventually", but nobody so far???

PS: Related question-A lot of startups (including the one Im bootstrapping) doesnt seem to care much about any revenue, but if the startup fails to get acquired(but does have significant user traction ), what are the options?
Pssh, [insert name of company] is the new [insert name of company] anyway.
I just happen to love this font: http://www.squareamerica.com/images5/ib73.jpg

Nobody seems to get it right ;-)
I suspect the bias will be more on finding apps that better their platform. but we'll see..
That webpage crashes Opera 9.51, whenever I try to close the page or navigate away. I can't even see why, as the code looks innocuous, but it does. I'd tell the author in comments there, but I can't without changing browsers.
Impressive... in Argentina 3 local pesos buy 1 dollar, however we are almost equal in the Big Mac Index? (even we are in the good side of the bar) What is that supposed to mean? Big Macs are very cheap here? Or is there any economical meaning for that too?

Edit: ah, not cheaper, but more expensive, because of the inflation. I see...
Incidentally, Mercurial does this now too. (for the archives)
It's articles like these that make me wonder whether the NY Times knows it's insulting its subjects:

Nadia also writes her own stories. She posted “Dieing Isn’t Always Bad,” about a girl who comes back to life as half cat, half human, on both fanfiction.net and quizilla.com.

Nadia said she wanted to major in English at college and someday hopes to be published. She does not see a problem with reading few books. “No one’s ever said you should read more books to get into college,” she said.
Introducing the 100 Billion Zimbabwe Dollar Bill
But many families can get by with one of the parents being out of town for the better part of three months.
Bad user base from what perspective? From the eyes of someone who likes the conversations on Hacker News, sure. From the perspective of a company that makes their business selling ads, probably not so much.
Nah, no way. Google believes they're smarter than everyone. They could make a digg-like algorithm trivially.

They only pay big bucks for userbases.
C is more difficult than Lisp or OCaml, but it's extremely popular.
The article seems to boil down to timeframe and the idea VCs want to make money now. (nothing new there)

If you really are passionate about and believe in what you are doing, you'll do it anyway even if the market/segment is "small".

Small markets can often be the most lucrative (loyal, willing to pay more, etc.), especially if people love the products you make.

There is nothing wrong in making apps just for the iPhone etc., people like Tapulous are doing well by it.
Take a look at kdb+ (see http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=257771) a language environment with built in database capabilities and distributable. (I'm just learning it so I may have accidentally misrepresented it).
"you gotta build apps for mainframes and DEC’s, because that’s where the market is, not in that Apple II toy."

faulty comparison

"He forgets that the small, seemingly unimportant platform today that gets early adopters excited will become the large, dominant platform of tomorrow. It might take 10 years, though, which is too long for VCs to care about."

lets get real, the only thing that makes iPhone somewhat better (in some cases) is the UI. Where is the difficulty others making similar UI?
Tumblr killed the story

URL - http://forfraksake.com/post/43627508/digg-is-dead
agree except the sports part.

most of the discussion are of low quality and can be done with a smarter audience on HN or some other newsgroups.

But sports teams are good. it really encourages self-discipline, work ethics, and a competitive spirit.
and only two years ago it made world news when they created a $100,000 note: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/5032826.stm
Life's hard that way, aint it? Everybody always misunderstanding everybody else.
Sadly, cutting out my blogorrhoea has no statistically significant effect on my logorrhoea.
Nietzsche may have done it first.
If IQ was just an arbitrary measure, that is, if the purpose of the test was to determine how well one takes the test, than this whole thread would be of no consequence. It is because IQ is purported to be a measure of intelligence however, that this conversation makes any sense at all.

So, to suggest that lexlibra was not saying in summation "Blacks are more stupid than whites", and somehow conflated IQ and intelligence ON ACCIDENT, is absurd. Lexlibra used the word intelligence because thats what lexlibra meant. And this can be further confirmed in his/her subsequent comments.
Google. That's the one everyone points to.

There're a bunch of other ones that look like they're not making any money, but actually are, usually through advertising or corporate deals. Reddit. FaceBook. HotOrNot. PlentyOfFish. LiveJournal. MySpace. Skype. YouTube (though I believe YouTubes revenues are less than Google expected when they bought it).
You have to go to www.new.facebook.com
You can get an account now without a school e-mail.
People who work hard to convince us that nothing matters are afraid that actually, something might matter. Convincing others is a way to seek validation and assuage those fears.

In short it matters to them that nothing should matter. :)
I'm not sure I agree . . . pointers in C throw people for a lot of loops, but aside from that the types are as simple as you'll let them be and I'm pretty convinced that most people have an easier time thinking in an imperative fashion than a functional fashion. The functional nature of Lisp just throws most people for a loop at first, because it doesn't match the naive breakdown of most simple programming problems. Likewise, the type system in OCaml throws a lot of people for a loop.

Mastering pointers, worrying about memory leaks, dealing with the loose typing, etc. are all things you need to do to write code well in C, but you can kind of muddle through as a beginner without those. You can't even get started with Lisp until you figure out the right way to break down your problem, and that's a huge barrier for most people. To put that another way, it's easier to mentally model what your algorithm should be in C than in Lisp (for most people), even if the actual implementation is a pain to get right, and its the mental model that's a barrier to entry for more "advanced" languages.

That said, C is certainly a harder language to learn than Python or Ruby.
But they're adding checksums right? Anyone see any holes in that?
You can also find a lot of his material on his blog, which I submitted to HN a few days ago: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=253540
Microsoft pledges love and money to open source
Web Giants Are Stretched. It's Time To Tighten Up.
Probably a result of the common forward-publishing-date that a majority of the publishing industry does (magazines you receive in July dated August 2008, etc.) This story is probably set to be published and released on the print version tomorrow, the 27th.
They used this iron to sell pencils blk ? Jesus, what an abuse of hardware :)
Heh, nice find. The media likes to criticize its subjects. e.g. http://www.techcrunch.com/wp-content/fortuenstevesmall.png
First It Was Song Downloads. Now It’s Organic Chemistry.
Finding and Fixing a Home’s Power Hogs
Oh, they definitely know it. The deadpan diss is a Times specialty.
Don't forget to search emule, very obscure media is where emule excels. Also, remember to share with the entire class! :)
I remember using Red Gate ( http://www.red-gate.com ) to do this for a fairly large SQL Server database. Which DB are you using?
Looking for the good in Windows Live Events...
Sounds like a sensationalist gossipy version of Founders at Work. I'll skip it and wait for FAW2.
Lisp Plus Plus
It used to be that you had to be signed up as a developer to go to new.facebook.com, not sure if this is still in effect
How to make 3D glasses | Daily News Blog
TechCrunch Party Thread
Who else was there? Finally met alaskamiller. The party was great, the afterparty was insane. Share your stories here.
Key Moments:

-Chamillionaire shows up. Mc hammer as well
-Afterparty with @danielha, sarah lacy, brian solis
-Kiss on the cheek from julia allison :-D
-Very cool companies demoing. Including free etching
-Arrington referring to my roommate as: "oh youre that fucking guy!! (Who always gets more tickets)"
Implementing a blog in Common Lisp
if you have any intent of getting money out of a startup or running a successful business, you need to design and build with the revenue model in mind. even if its a purely ad-driven model.

companies have fund success building first and monetizing later, but its the exception, not the rule.
They even make sure to decorate all the rooms used in the system identically with the same lighting so as not to ruin the effect
Daniel Ha of Discus, Aston Motes of Dropbox, Ivan and Abigail Kirigin of Tipjoy, Patrick of WebMynd, Scribd guys, Justin Kan of Justin.tv, the boys of Snaptalent.
snaptalent guys were there? wanted to say hi.
"The overwhelming majority of programmers have only used languages with multiple assignment. Multiple assignment is the de facto standard, and single assignment is one of the things that makes Erlang weird to new programmers. "

So what? "But it feels weird!" is not an argument. It is an excuse.

It's like when people dismiss Lisp because of all those parentheses; you get over it, and eventually find more interesting things to focus on.
I suppose the nice thing is that they will probably never realize they are being mocked.
Functional Programming in the Real World
It's a nice start, but this isn't a one-size-fits-all solution. This will be a difficult problem with certain majors.

I've taken several economics classes, and you have to purchase a new book for the semester in order to get a key card inside of the book. This will let you activate an online account, which will open up Flash-based homework. This is all linked into the school's grading system. Many classes _require_ the student to go through this registration process, or you could be dropped from the class entirely.

And economics is just one example. I had the same setup in several business, psychology, and engineering classes.

I'm sure this may work for some of the books, but I wouldn't really look at this as the end of expensive textbooks.
I remember that from an economics class. That is definitely a way of adapting the model to prevent piracy -- kind of like how desktop software is easy to pirate, but SaaS isn't. The electronic component needs to be actually useful to be adopted by teachers. I've bought other books with some kind of electronic component (chemistry, physics), but I never scratched off the keycode to maintain the resale value of the book. Economics is the only class I've had where the software component was required to complete the homework. Damn capitalists.

The biggest barrier to book piracy being useful is new editions. Often older editions (and older solutions manuals!) are available online, but in engineering, at least, they change the order of the problems to deprecate the old editions.
200mm was fair for a site with 50mm uniques, msft currently has the text ad deal with digg, wonder if that was a major factor. i dont buy the :lack of culture line...
nuclear energy is safer, per watt generated, than any other scalable energy. Even if you include hiroshima and nagasaki in nuclear energy's death toll.
If we were talking about purely functional languages, then I would agree. But Lisp isn't purely functional; it has assignment and loops and arrays and all the rest. You can program in the subset of Lisp that allows the same "mental model" as C and get the same results without worrying about pointers or buffer overflows. So I think Lisp is strictly easier.
Nasa opens up space image library
I hope the publishers eventually embrace digital downloads, but DRM sucks and they're never going to go for non-DRM because of the obvious reasons. I bought a digital download of a textbook once (it seemed like a good idea at the time), and it took me hours to slowly print the book to .pdf because there were enforced delays to slow down the process.
> it's mainly devoted to proving that African-Americans have lower IQs because of inferior genetics

No, it isn't.
parenthesis hit the nail on the head. If I was asked to give the most concise definition of mathematics I could, I would say it's the study of structure and relations.
I'm waiting for Coders at Work: http://www.codersatwork.com/
:D