skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
An influential quote that stuck with me was when Chang stated (when referring to Walden by Thoreau) that "if you really try and you want to do something, then go for broke". This means a lot to me because while growing up I was always told that you can never put all your eggs in one basket. So, accordingly, I focussed on developing a wide breadth of skills, but subsequently I never felt like I had mastered any to the point that I could develop a profession in. At twenty two I am starting to realize this fact and while scary, I am glad that I still have time to narrow my focus. I am on my last year of college so it is late to be prodigious in any field, but that does not mean I cannot be the best. I just wish I was told to go for broke growing up rather than to "not put my eggs all in one basket" because now rather than feel I have nothing to fall back on, I feel scared to dive into one particular field (but maybe that just comes with the age and the crossroad I am at in my life).

The greatest thing that you can grab from this interview, though, is the parallel (not implied) between why he stopped playing golf at such a young age and the ethos that he runs his restaurants by. Claiming to be a fairly competitive individual, he said that he stopped playing golf for mostly two reasons, 1.) it was no longer fun to do competitively and 2.) he knew that he would not be the best. Whether he acknowledges this or not, he has gone the other direction with his restaurants. He was asked by Rose if he desires to have a restaurant that is "Michelin Star" caliber but strongly stated that he did not wish to do so. The laid back demeanor and attitude reflects the way he runs his restaurant. The moment you strive to be the best, the fun and enjoyable elements can disappear quite fast (I can speak from personal experience myself playing competitive golf as well). He has simply worked hard at his trade with the focus of doing well and living by a few simple principles (not to mention a little luck thrown in). You have to decide yourself whether it is worth sacrificing some happiness to reach the end goal you desire (Chang had said that attaining a Michelin would come with a stress level they do not need).
I think the core problem there though is not trying to find new and innovative ideas to create incentive in huge companies, it's that understanding that big companies are not in sync with average human desires.

I do recognize what my statement implies though: that our entire society is set up in a way to create average workers with average desires for big companies with average outcomes. Large companies and bad education systems are only symptoms of the need for a complete restructuring or evolution of how we see ourselves in society.

I'm not naive to think this will happen anytime soon, but I think this is the way that we are headed given the internet and the fact that power is slowly being re-routed down to the masses in ways that were previously unthinkable.

We, and people like us, are on the leading edge of a dramatic change in the history of the human species. It will be interesting to see what the world is like for our grandchildren.
It will be incomplete in the sense that it will contain axioms with no formal proof. Technically speaking the TOE is this axiom.

However, you can even prune these axioms by selecting for the simplest one that conflicts with the least data.
You detect them like Unix detects a symlink loop: it punts on the problem and just errors after 8 symlink traversals.

The equivalent is a crawl depth limit, which could be a hard limit (dumb) or a function of page-rank (smart) and the trustworthiness of the inbound link (smarter) and also the data quality & diversity of the traversed pages (best).

There are very good reasons why Googlebot seems to hit you from one IP at a time -- it's a long-running thread that is making all sorts of decisions about your site as it crawls.
For me, the biggest win about DVCS are offline commits. I (unfortunately) live in a country where powercuts aren't uncommon. Also, broadband here is expensive, and slow (I've only got a 384 kbps connection) so not having to hit a central server for each one of my vcs related tasks helps out a lot.
What about PING, isn't it already a kind of push standard for blogs? The only thing missing is the ability to request pings, currently only the blog admin can add ping recipients.
The degree of Hackerness on HN has been going down since that techcrunch post, now days it's a lot like reddit a few months before the condenest sale. Of course, this is my subjective opinion.

These days the challenge with any community is that once the masses find out about it, it's all downhill in a matter of months, unlike years before.
First, I don't see how any attempts to "deal with" the S-expression syntax in Lisp are going to be particularly successful. Many of the strengths of Lisp are emergent properties of it having an unambiguous, consist, arbitrarily nestable prefix syntax. Lisp really is not Lisp without it. (Similarly, much of the expressive power in Forth comes from using postfix syntax and the stack for argument passing.)

Second, I strongly disagree with the post that OCaml has "the worst imaginable syntax". It's syntax could be nicer (a couple imports from Haskell syntax and a "...to end of line" comment marker would go a long way), but for being such a powerful multi-paradigm language, it has nowhere near as many edge cases as C++ or Perl. It seems to have been designed with a priority on reducing ambiguity (which has the benefit of making compilation just about instantaneous).
You can also add your own syntax forms (Lisp macros, but a little harder due to transforming a typed AST rather than S-expressions) with camlp4, though I have not personally done this (yet!).

I started writing a Lisp interpreter in OCaml this weekend. I'm experimenting with adding infix read macros (e.g. . for function composition) to the language, among other things, and I have been thinking about this a lot lately.
Who Should Solve This Internet Crisis?
They share might not grow any longer - but there are still a lot of people offline.
To bring up one point out of any number of points one could: the velocity of water through a tube is roughly log(x), where x is the distance (length of the radius) away from the centre of the tube. So at x=0, i.e., at the exact center of the tube, the velocity of the water flowing through the tube is log(0), or negative infinity.

The problem with blanket statements like "the universe is discrete" is that nature doesn't give a hang what we would "prefer". She is what she is, irrespective of wether we like it or not. Spacetime may or may not be infinite. I suspect so, but even if not, there are infinities everywhere you look. Nature likes her infinities, even if you don't.
Conspiracy theorizing is fun, but it's a lot easier to believe that he's just a talented investor.
Because AltaVista was the least awful of the search engines. If you ever found a good site, you had to bookmark it because you knew you'd never find it again with a search engine.

I don't have a good actress comparison, but let's use online maps. I knew that Mapquest was slow and ugly when I was using it, so I jumped ship (fast) to MSN Maps, which was slightly faster and much prettier (still the best looking maps, I'd argue). I didn't have any complaints about it - it was like Google (the search engine) is now. When Google Maps came out, it didn't do everything MSN Maps did but it was so much easier to use for 95% of the time that I quickly jumped ship, again.

If something is going to beat Google, it has to change the game completely, like the the accelerometer did for games (iPhone/Wii) or like Google Maps did for mapping (fast live draggable views). What would that be for search? That's the $100,000,000,000 question.
You could well be right (that a highly critical attitude does not prevent writing of useful code).

But relating it back to "snobbery" - which I think is a highly critical attitude and "therefore I'm better than you" - I don't think PG was damning the other dialects, but was criticizing specific aspects while appreciating other aspects (maybe: "this is really cool, but the syntax is annoying", "they had a great idea here, but implemented it stupidly").

I haven't read the essays in question, so it would be an interesting test to have a look...[time passes]... I just scanned the articles under under "lisp" on PG's site, and didn't see any criticism of lisp - only praise. While I'm sure that his criticism of Lisp exists, praise also does, so I think his highly critical attitude towards lisp dialects was not in order to claim that Arc is fundamentally superior, but to improve on some specific aspects.
Apostrophe-s is rarely a plural! I wish I had a downvote.
It's a little cute hearing multi-billionaires talk about how tax cuts must be the answer to, you know, everything.

I don't think new business are worried about paying taxes, they're worried about dealing with them period. Making taxes trivial to deal with up to a certain point would be much more of a jump-starter.
i'd prefer to see her tackle that one, rather than some tiny insignificant facet of it, as she's chosen to do here.

Except that by doing the latter, she is implicitly doing the former. You don't make big changes in life, you make lots of small ones.
How much do you think: input the right keywords, get results in the top 1,2,3, has to do with the feedback system of using google over the past few years?

I agree on the don't make me think part.
How is this hacker news???
Miasma: a new framework for web applications
Virgin Galactic Launches the White Knight 2
Heh. I'm not amongst the top 10k, but I've been cursing yesterday, trying to use search to find out in what version / gem of ruby {|[]| } is a valid block (with just being random variable names). And a week before that the same problem when trying to find out what &@/ ment in a mathematica script.

Search engines tend to ignore symbols in normal search, and while you can search for symbols in google's code search, that doesn't include any documentation or pages where they explain a particular syntax.
BTW: your comment comes up 6th on my google search for 'python gecko'.

When logged out, the search results are slightly differently ordered.
Audi started in germany then went global.
Is cuil starting in Ireland?
I believe this is none other than news.YC's ojbyrne, am I correct :)?
A bit skeptical at first - this tool is pretty handy when you have to speed read through articles.
I love the concept, but I don't know that it motivates folks that don't have a business to get out there and start one.

It takes a special kind of mindset to want to strike it out on your own without that safety net.
I still think Python is a good choice. The syntax is relatively clean and forgiving, it has a self-documenting interpreter, you can dive in * without having to understand a whole build system (e.g. make, linking, etc.) upfront, and it has an excellent standard library, so you can actually try to do real stuff with it even as a beginner.

* Dive into Python (http://diveintopython.org) is a good introduction, and is available free online.
You can buy them right now from any number of websites. The sticking point is cost - about $100 per bulb. If the money that Philips is devoting to R&D can reduce the price to a reasonable level, they have a good shot at replacing compact fluorescents.
"it has nowhere near as many edge cases as C++ or Perl."

Understand that comparing to Perl and C++ for syntax is like comparing some smell to that of rotten eggs. If you would like to compare syntax, use LISP or Python or for functional languages, Haskell etc. Don't start at the bottom and say that "X" is better.
Ask YC: list of what languages sites are written in?
I've been crawling the web lately looking for existing implementations of a project I want to work on, and I started wondering what languages big sites like Amazon or eBay are written in. Different languages can call for very different implementations, and I'd like to know which are worth pursuing.

Is there some list out there of what web apps are written in? I'm sure many sites are written using several languages, but often there are telltale clues like .do or .aspx, not to mention information from employees.
They could really use a bookmarklet to auto load the article to be read.

But, after a little bit of tweaking, I was able to get my speed up to 500 wpm without too much trouble.
This tickles me.
:)
Yang Still Needs To Make Nice With His Biggest Shareholders
I don't think we ought to excuse Cuil and provide them more time before we judge the search engine. They've had all the time they needed and put out a press release saying so.
Fair enough, but OCaml is a multi-paradigm language (which just happens to have an excellent functional language built in). OCaml's version of the C++ STL is much cleaner, for example.

Python supports functional programming somewhat, but it has an uneasy relationship to the rest of the language (i.e., Python lambdas are quite weak, apparently for parsing reasons), and Guido has said it will probably get cut eventually. It's a pretty good syntax overall, though I dislike having to explicitly specify "self" so much in classes.

Common Lisp (more so than Scheme) is also multi-paradigm, but that's already covered here; I think it's a better syntax overall, but I would love to see the features of ML's type system integrated with it.

I would compare OCaml to Oz/Mozart as well, but I don't have any significant experience with it.
Advantages of obtaining proof of concept for your startup
Funny, Cringely just wrote about the same idea: http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/2008/pulpit_20080728_0053...
How much value is there in learning sed when you go to languages like Perl or Python for such tasks?
Not only that, but to specifically test for an OS that supposedly they don't care about and give it crap data?!
The Five Percent Solution - Who Needs Another Chat Client?
Secondary prediction: the boycott will be about as successful as the Amazon One-Click boycott, or the various attempts to boycott Wikipedia, or all the people who refuse to read the New York Times because it makes you log in.
Facebook will struggle to dominate on a truly global scale.
I think that's how Google made some distance in the early days. I was using it and telling my friends about it when everyone was still using Yahoo!
yet another example of why one should 301 redirect to a normalized www. or non-www. address.
No, but at least I suppose that pages are bounded by size, because of the memory of the generator, or of the viewer. Say the maximum size of a page you can build is N, then there is a maximum finite value of different pages / urls you can fit in N too. So, even if you have infinite time, with your finite computers you'll have finite amounts of pages.

Now, if you are going to have pages and urls that are bigger in size than the memory of even the biggest computers in the world, so that you can't hold them in memory at any time, then the point above isn't useful for you (and in this case you are right). But urls bigger than memory are probably useless, even if webpages bigger than memory aren't.

And if you have to have urls that are finite... then my point holds: even in infinite time, you won't have infinite amounts of urls.
Anyone who doesn't know what DRM is doesn't even know to think about open vs. closed. They don't know what proprietary is either. They still might know about Apple's zealously guarded secrecy.

Also, if they buy an iPod and start using iTunes, they find out what DRM is the hard way.
I'll make you two a deal. If you submit hackerish stories to HN, I'll keep an eye on your profiles and vote for them.

I'm serious. I'd actually see more hackerism here.
The "killing" that they are making is by running ads for OTHER Facebook apps. Isn't that just passing the VC around?
Cuil Can't Find Itself
Why Java Isn't Shit, Part 2 - Conservatism
Does every company need to make a smartphone in order to survive in the new marketplace? I hear Quaker Oats has a really sweet handset in the works...
Motion to table!
He's a hacker with food. I had Momofuku Saam last week while in NYC and it was amazing.
Because it is more focussed on the startup and entrepreneurial side of HN. Just because an individual concentrated in another sector of business other than tech does not necessarily mean that his approach and advice on startups and running a business are no less valuable. Most of all, besides a chef, he is a great business man and the approach he takes when addressing his market could easily parallel a startup. Some of the major common blunders that individuals find themselves in is creating a product that does not speak to a market. He had said in the interview that if his customers demanded fish and chips diner, he would turn the restaurant in a fish and chips diner and would be perfectly content with dropping the finer dining aspects of the business.

In terms of entrepreneurialism, sometimes that best advice or ideas can come from other trades and then making them applicable to you. If you cannot see that, then you might have a little trouble yourself when it comes time to create a start-up.
Hackers are not limited to working with computers. What do you think chefs do in the kitchen when working on new dishes? It's hacking.
This will positively not work.

I live in Romania. Starting 1999 (IIRC) and ending 2006, there has been some very similar legislation in effect. The only result was a tremendous drop in income tax (which, admittedly, had been very high) since everybody and their grandma opened a small business, quit their job, and immediately came back to the same position as a consultant paid by their own company. Many employers applied gentle pressure in that direction since it got them cost cuts as well.

The clinch is that all these new small businesses contributed absolutely nothing new to the overall economy - the result was a net loss in taxes without economic growth to offset it - which is why the corresponding legislation was abolished in favor of a flat tax on income, profit, and so on (which, in turn, was quite successful at jumpstarting the economy.)
"X is dead" is dead
It's the diggification of Hacker News.
Google has indexed 38 so far: http://www.google.com.au/search?q=site%3Aianab.com%2Ftrillio...

Tackling the data quality & diversity of the traversed pages (best):

Producing English text with the 40 bits, by driving a generative grammar or a markov/travesty generator, would make it harder for Google to detect that the pages are auto-generated. It's unlikely to infer the function f(URL) -> text (or even to attempt it), but would limit the recursion for the other reasons you mention.

(guessing) sites like hackernews are indexed primarily by recursion (few direct inbound links to specific stories).
http://www.spreeder.com/plugins.php
This article sounds as if it was written sometime last century. In 2008, there is no excuse for a programming language in which "hello world" is longer than:

print "hello world"

The compiler/interpreter should handle the rest.
Edit: This is especially true if the language is used as a teaching tool for first time programmers.
I know that, but wtf really, The whole tax system is retarded...ooh I know lets make it hard for people to give us money.
There is one on the Plugins page.

http://www.spreeder.com/plugins.php
There's this one too - http://hoptoadapp.com/welcome.

Haven't tried either one yet.
I think this says something significant about our "society." I think this reveals where our notion of community has gone.
Thanks to all. I ordered an eeepc 900 with Windows XP from costco.com.
Irony is that Chang would've likely failed to get Thoreau to eat at his restaurant.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_David_Thoreau
Google Code Jam: Numbers
What's the other 75 Percent? Blogs
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Boom to Bust: Startups that go Belly Up
Top 10 Greasemonkey scripts to improve your productivity
And yet huge quantities of code have been written by productive hackers in both of those languages. Which is sort of the point of the article: the "micro" qualities of the syntax of a language are irrelevant. You get used to them quickly and forget about them. Arguing for one language over another on the basis of how the syntax looks is basically worthless.

That doesn't refute your point that LISP derives "macro" functionality from its syntax that doesn't really have anything to with the way it looks or types. Arguing for LISP due to its expressive macros is fine, but nitting about all those parentheses isn't useful. Arguing against perl for the "smell" of its odd reference syntax is likewise silly, but pointing out that that syntax allows neat autovivification tricks and more expressive scripts is cool.
Hah, I did the same thing, with the same results.

I'm also not impressed with the 3 column results page...a quick list of pages is much better for me.
And I would guess that the larger the muscles involved, the more important physical reaction is. So if you're talking about moving your fingers (as in the ruler example), then mental reaction is going to be more important, but if you're moving your whole arm or your legs, the physical reaction is more important.
she's describing a framework where decisions are made based on ego and pride

So, how does your company hire people? Double-blind standardized testing?

Humans don't make every decision based solely on ego and pride. But ego and pride are always there. Just because you don't mention their names doesn't mean they've gone away. And it's not like they can be surgically removed, even if you wanted to.

What the article describes is how to acknowledge that your ego and your pride may be tending to steer you in a certain direction, so that you can compensate for them.
This entire article is based on the statement that "90% of bandwidth is being used by 5% of users for p2p sharing". Seems baseless, am I the only one that is disappointed with the reporting of our newspaper industry?
Let me tell you sonny... let me set you straight
You kids today ain't never had it rough
Always had everything handed to you on a silver plate
You lazy brats think nothing's good enough

Well, nobody ever drove me to school when it was ninety degrees below
We had to walk buck naked through forty miles of snow
Worked in the coal mines twenty two hours a day for just half a cent
Had to sell my internal organs just to pay the rent

Let me tell you something, you whiny little snot
There's something wrong with all you kids today
You just don't appreciate all the things you've got
We were hungry, broken and miserable and we liked it fine that way

There were seventy three of us living in a cardboard box
All I got for Christmas was a lousy bag of rocks
Every night for dinner, we had a big 'ol chunk of dirt
If we were really good, we didn't get dessert

Didn't have no telephone, didn't have no FAX machine
All we had was a couple cans and a crummy piece of string
Didn't have no swimming pool when I was just a lad
Our neighbor's septic tank was the closest thing we had
Didn't have no dental floss, had to use old rusty nails
Didn't have Nintendo, we just poured salt on snails
Didn't have no water bed, had to sleep on broken glass
Didn't have no lawnmower, we used our teeth to cut the grass

What's the matter now, sonny, you say you don't believe this junk?
You think my story's wearin' kinda thin?
I tell you one thing, I never was such a disrespectful punk
Back in my time, we had a thing called discipline

My dad would whoop us every night till a quarter after twelve
Then he'd get too tired and he'd make us whoop ourselves
Then he'd chop me into pieces and play frisbee with my brain
And let me tell ya, Junior, you never heard me complain
I am not sure I like this use of decorators.
Flickr Co-Founder Open About Yahoo's Fail