skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Hey Tichy,

I'm a developer at BarterQuest, and I stumbled upon this post from you recently. I wanted to try and clarify some of the things mentioned in this post and in your comments.

During our Invitation-Only Beta Testing period, we are requiring users to sign up to do most activities on our site. This is mostly due to the fact that we want to measure how our site performs with signed-up users who will have access to all of our sites features.

As it relates to the article linked here, BarterQuest has a patented Matching Engine, which depending on what you have to trade and what you want to trade it for, among other things like specific attributes for your item, it will calculate the best matches for you, so you won't have to be searching all over the site for that item you're looking for. Of course, you'll be able to do that too, but we're confident our Matching Engine will be able to do the job for you. Right now since we're still in testing, the match results won't be plentiful, but as time goes on and we roll out of Beta testing and more users post more items, it'll be relatively easy to get accurate matches.

I encourage you (and to sign up during this testing period. Right now the site is totally free of cost, and if you're able to complete a successful trade during the testing period, you'll get free trading for an entire year. We also have some additional bonuses for signed-up users as well, which will be announced in our blog (http://blog.barterquest.com) soon.

We hope to see you there!
Review of "JavaScript: The Good Parts"
Cuil And Counting Crows
Yes, with regards to energy conversion - electricity in, heat out. In a processor, the energy _is_ used to perform computation, but it is not "consumed" but converted to heat.

(The phrase 'consume energy' actually only makes sense if you're talking about nuclear reactions)
I made a friendfeed room to have some fun with Cuil. Post the search terms and the associated images found by cuil. Should make for a good quick laugh :)

http://friendfeed.com/rooms/funwithcuil
spend more time on design/making and fixing higher-level issues

Of course, there are "higher-level issues" that you can't express in Java. Java convinces students (and professors, sadly) that the only kind of OO is single-inheritance with interfaces and no MOP. Java convinces students that programming is all about making the not-really-static types match. I won't even mention what a hack functional programming is in Java (and I'm sure most students never even hear how to hack in FP to Java). Checked exceptions were widely considered a huge failure. Honestly, I think most of the time you'll spend with Java is going to be time spent working around its retarded limitations. Do we really want to teach kids that programming is about dealing with limitations in your tools?

At the very least, limiting yourself to Java limits your ability to learn programming. Java isn't a very good language. It is missing features that were widely considered "a good thing" 20 years before its invention. Note that I don't care about teaching memory allocation and freeing the memory, that's monkey work, not computer science. So I'm not advocating teaching C. But languages like Lisp will let you teach all the computer science without workarounds, and still have all the "safety" of Java. (Plus, Lisp programmers get paid a lot more than Java programmers. Surely that's a selling point?)
The Pentium has 70-something errata, each of which had to be found and worked around by somebody. Now consider the range of microprocessors and microcontrollers used in handheld devices, appliances, and other electronic equipment.

I personally have run into compiler issues for Lattice FPGAs where it was outputting incorrect binaries. And I couldn't run on another chip until the problem got resolved, because hardware was being developed in tandem with the firmware and we had already progressed beyond the point of component selection.

I understand that this is beyond your experience. These are obviously not the droids you are looking for.
This article would be better if it had some numbers in it.
born and die in one second
nice try

u try to find my site c4-antipro.com , with words c4 antipro 2 pages results and no show the site, with words c4-antipro neither appears

lol lol lol lol lol lol x1000000

good engine !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! xD

now try to find something with word google
xDDDDDDDDDDDD

What happens there?

How many i ned pay to my site can be found on the last page even?
The Cloud Computing Dogfight and Recent Implications
Good idea...but not quite sure that would work for my company... :) http://astartupaday.wordpress.com/about
Slinkset is very cool, I was playing with it earlier today but probably should dive into it a bit more to see what all it can do.
From your post: "As noted in the teachings of Paul Graham and Jesus"

Found it funny :-)
I didn't realize Paul Graham was an orangutan.
It is sad that this discussion is about the definition of the term 'hacker', instead of the article's topic: some programmers care about the business core (a concept also touched on by Eric Evans (DDD)) while some others don't.

It is a good reminder, as often we're going too deep into the rabbit hole while writing code, forgetting in so doing the real business requirement.

Working on the business core resonates with Agile principles.
That's true, but you can't say no to a big client just because you happen to have some donation money floating around.
Doesn't that make sense?

Before the launch, weren't they in stealth? Shouldn't it take time for the index to catch up?
I don't get it. We aren't building any new highways (easy to check) yet our expenses are going up. WTF?!
With Security at Risk, a Push to Patch the Web
Free speech is not a type of speech. It's a policy about speech.

So the question reduces to "How can speech be corrosive?" Corrosive is not a very precise word, but I can guess what Paul means: he means when people are deliberately intellectually dishonest, as for example Fox News seems to be. When someone (a) deliberately misrepresents what an opponent is saying (b) as if he were attacking something that is a hot button for the audience, and then (c) replies with rousing platitudes.
This is done for contracts between insurance companies and hospitals all the time. There are also contract compilers and DSLs for financial instruments.
1.9 will introduce native threads, which aren't much better.

What? They're not only "better", they're actually _threads_, i.e. are able to run in parallel, you know? What are Ruby 1.8 threads good for, except for sitting on sockets?
Fixing the Internet Traffic Jam
Did you see Paul Buchheit's comment?

“Maybe Cuil isn’t supposed to be good. They must know that the results are bad, but they launched anyway. Maybe they aren’t trying to build a full search engine, but just want to demo their crawling+indexing technology with the expectation that someone will buy the company and plug in better ranking.

...

—Where “someone” = MSFT, who has already shown that they are willing to pay a lot for non-functional search engines."
Trains are not so bad. A major problem is the lack of a local area support network of public transport.

Example: there is a train from Los Angeles Union Station to San Diego. But how can one go to LA Union Station? From Santa Monica, Venice Beach, West LA, Pacific Palisades, etc. it's just plan impossible. The Metro bus is a joke: it takes over an hour, and likely you need a previous bus with added waiting times in between (and buses are unreliable because they have no exclusive lanes to avoid heavy traffic). A taxi is very expensive ($60+). You need a friend to drive you there. And once in San Diego the situation repeats itself.

Same situation, but a bit less bad, in the East Coast: nice trains from Washington DC to NY and Boston. While Boston and NY have very decent local transport systems, Washington's doesn't really go anywhere. Again one is stuck with $60+ taxis to go anywhere.
Of course, this has potential uses in porn as a "wish fulfillment" technology.
no problem.

your application would do the same thing as some of the other apps, yes. but the point isn't to develop an awesome FB app, its to provide another outlet of passive advertising for your web app, bringing people in to try it and hopefully love it.
This is certainly much less significant then giving preferential page rank. Google controls what over two thirds of people see through search. If it doesn't appear on the first 3 pages of a Google search, exposure is very limited.

It's a shame that my original comment got voted down (didn't even know you could do that). I'd rather people share their opinions rather then voting down; the topic is worthy of discussion.

I really don't mind bundled software either. In fact, I don't mind preferential treatment being given to Knol. What I do mind is Google opening itself up to a lawsuit. A significant lawsuit against Google would have large negative effects in my opinion. I'd just like Google to show a little bit more discretion.
Producer/consumer where there are multiple I/O bound producers (examples that come to mind: RSS reader, web spider, multiple-file search). They can also be a useful abstraction for things like waiting for events from multiple sources, or running quasi-realtime simulations.

I agree, though, that real threads would be a significant improvement. Or better yet, MxN threads like GHC.
Asus Eee Video Update | My Philly Network
The key details for us is pricing and here it is (it matches PayPay for most transactions and beats 'em for tiny transactions):

For Transactions >= $10:

2.9% + $0.30 for all transactions

Volume Discounts

2.5% + $0.30 for all transactions for monthly payment volume from $3k-$10k

2.2% + $0.30 for all transactions for monthly payment volume from $10k - $100k

1.9% + $0.30 for all transactions for monthly payment volume over $100k

For Transactions < $10:

5.0% + $0.05 for all transactions

https://payments.amazon.com/sdui/sdui/business?sn=cba/o

This seems workable for micropayments. A $1 charge would result in $.10 fees. 10% yes, but with something like PayPal the fees would be 33%.
That's a different argument than the one that was made in the article; the argument in the article, that Java isn't used for complicated projects and that engineers need to be able to debug compiler or processor bugs, is an incredibly poor one.

I've done a lot of performance optimization of Java apps in the last 6 years and I've never once had to look at bytecode or think about processor instructions or OS issues; I've had to think about memory allocation and consumption, synchronization, algorithmic complexity, caching, query plans, database denormalization, etc. Obviously optimizing a C application is a different world, but it's definitely not the case that even the majority of software engineers ever need to dive that close to the hardware these days given the rise of managed/VMed languages like Java, Ruby, Python, and C#; it's good to hire someone who can do that or who can learn to if your application might need it, but in general it's just not as important as a lot of other skills, and I think it's pretty incorrect to say that engineers who can't do that will have no job prospects in the US.
The bigger digg gets, the less likely it is that news will immediately hit the front page. The bigger twitter gets, the more likely it is that twitter will be the first to report on breaking news. Plus the speed of that spread will increase.

Think of it like 6-degrees of kevin bacon. With more people, the degrees to hear about the news decreases. As news sites get built on top of twitter to find these breaking stories, we might all be one or two degrees from the original source. That is astoundingly fast and connected.

Of course the USGS is going to be the fastest - they have a computer hooked up to a seismometer.
How Hard Could It Be?: Good System, Bad System
They need to hurry up, otherwise there won't be any developers left to try the new thingie out, only 60+ old ex-taxi drivers who position their monitors facing a corner, fire up an anti-virus in "perpetual disk scan mode" and fall asleep in front of "SQL Query Designer" inside of Visual Studio awaiting for 5:00PM to go home.
Online diploma mills: DOJ list shows hundreds of bogus MBAs, PhDs
Forgive me if I don't hold my breath.

Vista took 6 years starting out as a "complete rewrite" with ambitious features that were pared away one by one to leave little more than a facelift for Windows XP. Don't get me wrong - I hope Microsoft is able to pull this off - but I don't hold out high hopes.
phew, good thing we only have to patch the "web" and not the rest of the internet.
Reminds me of a discussion I read a while back about a power struggle in Microsoft between the 'backwards compatible' group mentality and the 'reinvent the wheel to be better at whatever cost' group mentality.

It seems to me the 'reinvent the wheel to be better at whatever cost' is winning (and indeed during that discussion they were in the early stages of winning), but that Microsoft's reputation as a whole keeps going down since that time.

People used to like windows because it just worked, and ran all their favorite software. The more they make it harder for people to do that, the more Apple and Linux will continue to eat their lunch.
No, not really. But by comparison to Dell's usual Stalinist aesthetic it's fairly nice.
in theory, this sounds pretty good. a from-the-ground-up os rewrite could be really good, taking the realities of the current computing landscape into account. nobody has greater resources to make this happen than microsoft.

alas, this is microsoft we're talking about. so the first version will be called "my little operating system" or something, and they'll find plenty of ways to screw it up.
Does someone have a greasemonkey script to filter out all these stupid Cuil posts yet?

We get it, Cuil sucks.
Maybe that's because it's only supposed to return relevant results. Seems to be working well here.
Minor nit-pick. I work around (but not with) ada code, and a common pattern is that if you can get your ada code to compile; it's pretty likely that it's safe.

If you're just saying Ada doesn't guarantee that the program does what you really need... no language can do that.

C is the 2nd most unsafe language I've worked with, asm being the first.
dupe:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=261258
How pathetic. (you, not cuil). Go and make fun of Facebook instead. It's a fucking MESSAGE BOARD WRITTEN IN PHP. At least Cuil is trying to build something not trivial and useless, facing real competition and going after real money.
The compilers? No.

Everything around them? Oh dear god yes.
The word "cuil" has become just another flag word for me - if I notice the word in a title or post, I skip it.
because is easy and powerfull
less code and more app
Bug in HN parsing... i know which funct too. I'll delete.
Hey man, dont forget Clusty, that thing is just as good as Google, if not better sometimes.
Here's the source:

(= active-threshold* 1500)

(def active-rank (s)
(apply + (map [max 0 (- active-threshold* (item-age _))]
(cdr (family s)))))

A story's score is the sum of the difference between the age of each comment and 25 hours.
Except that the bigger twitter gets the more noise there is, and the more value there is in gaming it. For example, there's nothing to stop me from twittering "earthquake in Canada" right now - you might unfollow me after finding out it's not true, but others might echo it on down the chain.

Even more plausibly, I could have twittered that I was in a plane at LAX after I saw the first twitter messages, even though I'm 3k miles away. How would you know? I could probably give a vivid description of being in a just-landed plane in the midst of an earthquake.

An example is that a journalist interviewed a woman who twittered that her OB-GYN was in her vagina when the earthquake happened - it's a nice vivid detail, but how do we know it's actually true?
List of 10,000 fake diploma buyers published
The list, which the US Attorney refused to release, includes Military, CIA, NSA, US Marshals, senior White House officials, NASA engineers, Nuclear plant engineers, and many many others.
"In essence, he said that today’s Java-savvy college grad is tomorrow’s pizza delivery man. Their skills are so easily outsourced that they’re heading for near-term obsolescence."

That would only be the case if there was a finite amount of programming to do. Since there isn't there's room for local and outsourced programmers.
So when a customer buys a ticket, the airline is in such bad financial shape that they can't use some of the cash from that ticket payment to buy the future fuel for that customer's flight? That is pretty dire.
Not immediately obvious, but this article is written by Chris Crawford, programmer of various games (war games) in the early / mid 80s.
Sorry for the poison of my comment, but it is annoying not to be able to, at the least, hide articles.

Your idea, and the way the ranking engine currently works, leads to the problem they're having on IMDB where people are strategically rating a movie (Shawshank Redemption) to punish another movie (The Godfather).

I don't want to be forced to up-vote other stories I don't particularly care for in order to punish one story. It feels like voting in a US or Canadian election, where you vote for the other party to punish the current party. But what if the other parties are just as bad as the current one? What if they're worse but you still want a way to punish the current party?
As soon as their search results aren't terrible, I'll be rooting for them. But right now it's all sizzle and no beef.
Good. My biggest beef with the "YC is a cult" story is that it didn't even try to be funny. He could have at least made some kind of photoshopped illustration using pg's head.
An interesting story on Atomic Spacecraft here http://www.damninteresting.com/?p=679
music to my ears as a free software zealot. microsoft is going off to build an os "done right"...where have we heard that before??

wait for the concessions and half-baked reversals. they're obsessing with a whole new kernel, that will likely be the first decision to get dumped as they watch MSFT drift down to 18 with no new product on deck to rally sales.

then having ditched the "rewrite" plan, they will spend a year spinning their wheels trying to locate the best two or three ideas from midori to graft on to vista, people might just jump to mobile platforms full-time, or the console market might start seriously eating into pc sales, or everyday people start using ubuntu, etc etc etc.

the market just isn't going to stand still for five years while microsoft tries to relearn how to build big systems. microsoft is chasing google, they are chasing apple, they are chasing oracle, they are chasing nintendo, they are chasing linux....

its going to be fun watching this company feign relevance while going the way of DEC
Dear Yahoo, Where’s the relevance?
why do you "hope they pull it off"? their time has passed. none of their own users at home or in business are even interested in products past xp. they don't represent a positive force in the market, they continue to cling to dead ideas like drm...i'm not sure at all why anyone other than employees or shareholders would be cheering for them.
Personally I think it's surprising they haven't decided to build on top of FreeBSD or Linux yet. Apple saved so much time and and resources by doing this with OS X.

Of course at some point someone is going to invent something better than Unix. Who knows, maybe it will be Microsoft (haha... you never know). But I think they would ultimately stand to be more successful if they didn't have to keep reinventing TCP/IP stacks and filesystems and could focus on something a little higher level.
I wonder if the second developer could write FizzBuzz...
Note: unix also began as a skunkworks within a monopoly...
a better search would be to find a specific website with the same search criteria and see what page of results it shows up on the specific search engine.
* sigh *

A design flaw in BIND is a bad thing; but there are certainly worse scenarios. A remote code execution bug in BIND, for example, would allow everything this bug allows, and more; while remote code execution bugs in Apache, IIS, OpenSSH, OpenSSL, the BSD or Linux IP stacks, Cisco routers, Juniper routers, etc. would all be worse. (A few years ago I would have put Sendmail on that list, but these days there's more diversity in MTAs.)

This is bad, but it's not the end of the world. Unfortunately, "not the end of the world" doesn't sell newspapers.
but what is the problem they are solving ?? the network stack of freebsd (for example) is perfectly adequate for saturating any modern outbound connection under heavy concurrent load. unless you grow the pipe bigger than the device can fill it, better networking software is just an academic exercise. and its not like freebsd is standing still.

if i were msft, i would just take freebsd7, graft a win32 managed runtime on to it, call it mibdori and ship it
Ask YC: How to prepare for interviews?
I am a recent graduate. I am looking for a job in C++ or Java. What's the best way to prepare for interviews at Google, Microsoft, Apple etc.
Thanks,
wtf is there to talk about???

"do you drive all over the city taking pictures??"

"yes"
What Startups Can Learn From Haruki Murakami
DUPE: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=261437
The broad generalizations in Dewar's opinions are unhelpful. If you want to write software for military airplanes, then you should go ahead and learn Ada (whatever that is). If you want to build applications for the web or for "low-tech" enterprise, then you'll probably be better off learning Ruby, Python, Java et al. Both are perfectly viable ways of making a living and there is plenty of demand for both types of programmers.
You know this could also be used for censorship. If someone wanted someone to disappear from a photo this would be more convincing than airbrushing them out. This is a really neat program though.
The Great Northern Railway, built by James J. Hill, a great visionary and businessman:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Northern_Railway_(U.S.)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_J._Hill
Whatever Joel (and the Starbucks employees mentioned) might think, the "expediters" do actually speed things up. Asking people what they want BEFORE they get to the head of the line means that by the time they arrive they've figured out what they want -- rather than weighing their options at the one point when they are in the critical path.
Goddamnit. People say "principal" instead of "principle" so ridiculously often that I came to think it was the right spelling in english. Thank you.
Make sure you get 8 hours of sleep.
Well, the biggest misconception about MacOS X is that it was built on top of FreeBSD. It's actually built on top of Mach that they perfected at NeXT (Avie Tevanian was one of the creators of Mach at CMU). FreeBSD was added as one of the sublayers.
> "...the more Apple and Linux will continue to eat their lunch."

Apple & Linux have merely started to nibble at their bread crumbs ... maybe if Win7 screws up, then they'll start to eat Microsoft's lunch.
get enough sleep, a while ago i went to a google interview after an all-nighter. it felt like 100-hour long. read more about data structures and algorithms, and make you can explain it in laymen terms.
I'm cheering for them because I enjoy developing on their hardware, and I hate programming for the PS3.

Also, relax. It'd be great if an OS team made something that was technically interesting. Everyone, regardless of whether or not you use their implementation, benefits from their research.