skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I wonder if not getting first class functions is a consequence of already knowing too much, though. If you're thinking in C, you might get bogged down in thinking about passing around function pointers, but aside from implementation details, first class functions are not intimidating when the functions applied are familiar: "Take this list and do X to everything in it: square each number in a list of numbers, or convert every word to lowercase in a string list, or negate every bool in a bool list, etc.".

Euclid's algorithm is a really good example, by the way. Thanks.
No, What I want isn't possible with CSS adding turing-completeness to CSS, or using massive javascript hacks, and special-casing every browser out there. And even then, you'd end up with inconsistent behavior across websites.

I want to be able to -- for example -- on my blackberry, just drop the navigation into a button that I click on to show the links. I want the titlebar of a site to drop all the images -- don't even download them. Data is expensive in Canada.

I want to have the list of subscribers turn into a simple link to a new page, and only display the body of the article I'm reading. Anything else can be hidden in a menu in the browser (file->navigation->list of links, perhaps?)

And most importantly, I want to configure this on my end. I don't want to be constrained to the web designer's lame ideas about layout
I like this... we chose to go against standard advice and will be officially launching to the public on Tuesday. Our sneak preview has been up for a while but I really hope there will people around to spread the word!
"serious development in something like Ruby "

As if Ruby is a more "serious" language than Java or C#?
Wow, freaky tingles up and down my spine from that last paragraph.
Fine, don't change the language. Keep using the same thing for 10 years until it becomes obsolete and then wonder why you're unemployed (hint: nothing to do with outsourcing).
50,000 lines in one file? Who does that.
I don't think doing serious development in Ruby has anything to do with Ruby being a more serious language. The point is to use it for a real project as opposed to yet another blog in X minutes.
Hello there. Thought I'd follow up as we have some additional news from our vendor.

The fact that this "should not have happened" doesn't help our customers out, and doesn't make us feel particularly better about the incident we had on Friday.

Just one of our six clusters was affected, but it was a bad day for customers on that cluster, and for that I personally apologize to them.

We're working hard to make sure that this issue is entirely resolved on this, and our other clusters as well, providing Extreme with the core dumps they've requested.

Details below:

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

08/16/2008 03:53:58.16 <Noti:EPM.wd_warm_reset> Slot-1: Changing to watchdog warm reset mode

08/16/2008 03:09:42.05 <Warn:DM.Warning> Slot-2: Slot-3 FAILED (2) Error on Slot-3

08/16/2008 03:09:38.62 <Warn:DM.Warning> Slot-2: Slot-3 FAILED (1) Error on Slot-3

08/16/2008 03:09:29.23 <Warn:DM.Warning> Slot-1: Slot-3 FAILED (2) Conduit receive error encountered

08/16/2008 03:09:25.17 <Warn:DM.Warning> Slot-1: Slot-3 FAILED (1) Conduit receive error encountered

08/16/2008 03:09:25.17 <Warn:DM.Warning> Slot-1: System Error 0: Conduit receive error encountered

08/16/2008 03:08:22.29 <Warn:DM.Warning> Slot-1: Slot-4 FAILED (1)

08/16/2008 03:08:02.94 <Warn:DM.Warning> Slot-1: Slot-4 FAILED (1)

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The above warning messages are caused by “System memory depletion” and “watchdog timer” triggered “restarting slot 3 and 4. After crashed, slot 3 and 4 created “core dump file”. We need that files for detail investigation.
Is lisp obsolete yet?
> What magical feature of an IDE "allows you more freedom to explore ideas and experiment faster"?

Refactoring.

Code completion/validation/formatting (make fewer errors, and reformat external code to suit you).

GUI design (a lot of times you will have to make GUIs, no point in avoiding it).

Code analysis (on-the-fly code analysis and error-detection (syntax, compile, and run-time) = less creep-in errors, easier to spot errors earlier, and less compiles = more productivity).

Performance bottleneck detection.

Testing made easier (simpler an faster to build and do unit/integration/etc. tests)

Framework/Design-Pattern skeletons (got an idea, think pattern X may help, try it out quickly = make a good/bad decision faster).

Teamwork features (version control, changelist management, build management etc. made easier).

Etc. Etc.

Who said anything about more LOC being the/a measure of productivity?
Python is now Blub! Run!
Anyone have details of the kind of software being used here? In my experience, much "educational" software is embarrassingly lame, often over-priced, not available over the Internet, and made unmanageable by various copy-protection schemes. I'd be interested in the exceptions to this, particularly if you happen to be developing your own :)
Not a bad treatment of the subject, but I still prefer "The $25000000000 Eigenvector" (http://www.rose-hulman.edu/~bryan/googleFinalVersionFixed.pd...)
I think it's best to agree to strongly disagree :)

An ex-coworker was arguing how great IDEs are, his comment being "The IDE makes it so you don't have to think"
I think that's the best argument against IDEs I've heard so far.
Because it's that good.
..or you could just remove styles and increase text size.
Now I'm motivated. yawns
Ask HN: Questions For & About Startups
Hey folks, Luke from Startuply here. We're going to start a new series of posts designed to help figure out what it's actually like to live and work at different startups. How, you may be asking yourself, are we going to figure that out? By asking the people that work there.

We need your help come up with a set of questions that we can trick (jk) our favorite startup folk into answering. So, what do you want to know about a company when you're considering applying for a job, or pondering whether to accept an offer or not? We're going to try to stay away from basic product info - as in "what do you make" - and focus more about the life & times of the team itself. So, help us out by suggesting some tough, interesting questions that you want real answers to, and we'll work on pinning down sneaky execs for long enough to get a straight answer out of them.

Fire away in the comments, and vote on suggestions that you like.
I find it a little bit annoying if every tiny project is called startup.
I think that was actually the intention of CSS, and you can also somehow tell Firefox to use stylesheets of your own liking. I can't tell you how, because I have never needed that feature.
Okay :)

If we ever meet in person, I'll buy you a beer/coffee/meal, and we can debate such things as in general I'm liking the comments you make on a multitude of topics.

An IDE is just a tool and like any good tool can help those that don't want to think, think less, and for those that do, think more?
OK, honestly, what kind of schedule & hours do you guys (and ladies) really keep?
What, no decorators mentioned?
What was your biggest time waster?
PostgreSQL is not multi-threaded and uses System V IPC. Threads are certainly not the only option.
Why would someone sacrifice their secure job with good benefits and plunge into the startup world?

Have you ever watched Scoble interview startup founders? It's completely unscripted, yet he does a remarkable job (in my opinion). You can tell he's passionate about discovering neat technology, and he always gets excited over some cool features. It's very authentic. You might want to check out his style. This is a good example:

http://www.fastcompany.tv/video/a-really-useful-way-take-not...
Technorati: maybe you could've tested a little more
all i did was click on Technology tab about 10 minutes ago...
I think your idea is great.
Though you cannot make a startup out of a button (some have tried to make a pot of soup out of it see @ http://www.amazon.com/Button-Soup-Bank-Street-Level/dp/05533...).
Well, I have used VS in a professional environment (working at a semi-large software house). Part of the point I was trying to make is that VS is not just great as an IDE, it is also great as an editor, and that these particular features do not exist in any UNIX/MacOS I have come across.

Your claim that most of the things exist in virtually every editor is simply not true --- many editors have many features, but none have all the features AND work well (fast, stable, etc.). E.g. Eclipse has most of the features, but I find it rather sluggish.

Saying things like "I am almost positive ... you've never opened VS before" is a personal attack, childish and not true.
Could you clarify the question? How should a small startup approach a big company for what? What's your objective?
The Bench Burner: New Yorker profile of Judge Richard Posner (2001)
One of the most important things you can do is appear credible. Most big companies forget that they did their most interesting things when they were just a few people with an uncertain future. When a big company wanted to visit us in our early days, we got a bunch of our friends to come hang out in the office so we looked bigger than we were. Along the same line, an introduction is much better than a cold call. (What big co? I'll help if I can.) And find a way to convince them you'll be around for awhile (we had to have our investors call a ceo once).

Getting a meeting, by the way, is about 10% of the work. Big cos often have difficult political landscapes and multiple decision makers. You have to figure out who wants what and convince them all they will get it. Also, big cos often except a discount for 'taking a risk' by working with a startup.
Pandora’s Woes: RIAA Would Rather Artists Make Nothing
In retrospect, did you do it the hard way, or the easy way (whatever each constitutes in your context)?

What will you do differently next time?

How transparent are the founders in their info-sharing?
Why not join a company to get a few years experience and get an idea of the type of behavior that clients typically want.

You'll be surprised by how much it is personal relationships that are important, and not necessarily results, though obviously everything counts.

There's a huge business in consulting, and domain specific knowledge is something that can be hard to pick up unless you go in with an existing outfit.

I think the best advice I could give a new graduate is to do your best to join a big consulting company. You'll learn a bunch of things. The money can be pretty good, and the lifestyle can be fun if you are young enough.
People who use IDEs that add code for them.
For the last several months, in an attempt to use the Mac OS that came with my Macbook I've been trying out text-editors and IDEs available for this platform as a replacement for Visual Studio, in an attempt not to broaden my personal horizon and not be a platform-nazi. (Okay, MacOS is not UNIX..) So your claim is false, I actually have tried out many other tools to reach the approximate conclusion I described in the original post. I'd be happy to report that I found a good replacement as it would weaken my "dependence" on a particular platform (Windows).
Yes and no; I have yet to see a single site that works when you swap the CSS layouts out.

The thing is that CSS tries to separate layout and content, but you still have to encode the way that you want stuff to be laid out in the page at some level.

<div id="header">
...
</div>

only works when "header" means the same thing across all pages. Since this sort of spec for shared meaning doesn't exist, CSS isn't transferrable between sites in practice.
you'll find that a lot of unix programmers use tools such as cscope when they need to navigate around large code bases. If you're a vi sort of person, having one terminal in cscope, and another on the command line to compile/checkin code, and another for the debugger gives a totally acceptable result. Of course, as always the optimal solution for a development environment depends on many things - language, host is, target, type of application etc...
It's specifically at two points of the build--firstly, when VS6 is starting the compile (and trying to find modified files, I suppose), and during the link step.

I think the IDE is doing something with the toolchain to give it an incredibly high priority (and therefore build faster). The only evidence I have for that is a) command-line compiles take longer than they do through the IDE (using msdev to process the dsp file, not using nmake/cl/link), and b) windows messages (e.g. Send/PostEvent) don't seem to be processed during the link stage.

Regarding the Intellisense bit, you've reminded me of our "process" used to fix VS when it stops compiling files correctly: try deleting all our non-source controlled files (which includes the VS specific databases for things like classwizard, object files, etc) and see if that fixes things. If not, then restart.
Consumer Beware: Online Education Scams and the U.S. Government’s Recommendations
Diploma mills have been able to succeed because they can easily set up a legitimate looking website that describes training programs or academic degree programs.
1- how will you make money? What if that doesn't work? What about your plan C to generate revenue?

2- What is your exit strategy?

3- What if Yahoo, Google or Microsoft launchs a competitive product?

4- What would you do if you were not startupping?

5- What other startup do you like?
Give it a rest. I'm a hacker, and this satisfies my intellectual curiosity. If you don't like it, don't vote for it.
So your dogma here is that everything obeys physical laws that are never broken. Although things seem to always act in a certain way, we have no reason to believe that all laws will always hold. Of course, that is an assumption I must regularly make in order to be sane, but it is nothing more than that: an assumption that the experiment I carried out yesterday will (all things being equal) have the same results today.
College, more than being proof of a person's intelligence, is proof that you can jump through the hoops deemed appropriate by your "higher ups" (aka professors). Understandably, some employers consider this a desirable trait in employees. I call those employers Fascists :P
Musician Ryan Adams' Success Secret
How did you meet the people you work with in your startup (past jobs, school, randomly, etc...)?

How do you solve disputes within the team?

If you were not doing startups or technical things, what types of things would you pursue?

Was the original idea for the startup the one you stuck with?

Was there any AHA moments within the team that were notable?
I think we're all a little tired of the off-topic police. +1 for giving it a rest.

"Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity."

I'd argue that we should simply flag accounts as hackers, thereby, by definition, greenlighting anything they post, except I wouldn't be one of them.
When Starcraft 2 comes out, Dan and I may have to shut down the business for a while...
If you have paying customers, how did you find them? And how are you planning to get more?
building (or fixing) something with my hands definitely feeds a slightly different area of my brain than building a website. i think it's part of the reason why sketching is so important for designers - to take you out of your head for a period of time. it's also why i've been seriously considering getting one of these: http://mindstorms.lego.com/
Let a hundred Facebooks bloom
I thought if you're seriously in competition, your hair should be always on fire?
Vint Cerf: If you thought the internet was cool, wait until it goes space age
Yes. But just think about the propaganda potential of deliberate reality-misrepresentation!
Are we in a bubble? This company got over 8 million in funding
Source:
http://www.crunchbase.com/company/redux
Source:
http://www.crunchbase.com/company/redux
The data structures are not static. It's effectively an in memory database, so the data keeps changing.
Shift + Ctrl + s
"I'm positive you've never open VS before" isn't a personal attack, "I'm positive you're ignorant and ugly because I dislike your opinions" is a personal attack. I have no troubles with Eclipse, but I don't use it for big projects so maybe it does get slow. Nonetheless, the features you listed (tabs, searching, project browser and refactoring) are in every halfway decent text editor; I think Notepad++ has most or all of those.

Also, you're adopted and your parents don't really love you
We don't know their business plan. It might be so novel an idea that they can post huge profit margins, but at the face of the website it's very hard to grasp what they could do.
It seems bizarre to me that someone would engineer a protocol that makes connections resilient against nosy ISPs, but not resilient against the lowest common denominator of organized crime.
Brain Scanners Can See Your Decisions Before You Make Them
Whether it's fair or not, I can only knowledgeably critique what I
know. However, I've heard (and propogated) this basic comment
describing the robust solid development experience that is Visual
Studio for more years than VS.NET (or, obviously, 2008) has been
around.

(Not that VS6 is terrible--I still think it's a serviceable IDE for
small to medium sized projects. However, it doesn't scale well to our
large projects, and, personally, I've found that IDEs in general
foster a lazy attitude towards improving personal workflow)
Hackers like good long-form narrative journalism even more than they like Ron Paul. Thanks for explaining your downmod; I've cancelled it out.
So how would you do it? I have a large graph on which a number of clients run queries, complex analyses and updates at the same time. I've been pondering various solutions like shared memory, memory mapped files, relying on the disk cache, memcached, etc. But they're all either not performing well because they cause a lot of serialisation in and out of process memory, or they cause overly complex designs or both. I do appreciate any advice I can get...

[edit] Traditional DBMS architectures like that of postgres ,to my knowledge, rely on shared memory or memory mapped files (I'm sure this varies). They swap on disk pages in and out of memory and those pages retain their on-disk structure. There is little if any translation into in-memory data structures. Yes I could do that, but it's incredibly complex. Every single data structure basically has to be implemented on top of a byte array. I wouldn't be able to use any existing libraries for trees, lists, sets, hashtables, etc.
If what Seth says is true, you might want to plan a second event of some kind for about three weeks from now.
Rails thread unsafety (active record specifically) was the last block on making multi-threaded apps. JRuby, Mongrel, were multithreaded before that. Mongrel has semaphore around main rails call. I assume once you remove it with Rails 2.2 and jRuby it should be multi-threaded. What am I missing?
BMI was invented to license artists to radio stations when ASCAP's fees were too high. ASCAP refused to lower their prices at first, they'd assume that nobody would want to listen to the unproven artists that BMI was signing. Fortunately for BMI and the world, people liked the upstarts just fine.

The time is ripe for another market entrant to modernize music distribution.
"Ryan Adams is one of the most prolific musicians in modern music. In the last eight years he averaged a release of one full studio album per year. In one year alone, he released three albums!"

wtf.

"In other words, consistency is required for success... What we can take from this is a new perspective on our goals."

wtf
It's cool how their unique visitors peaked the month they closed their Series A, and looks to hit zero within a month.
I would hope not. Since hair grows at a speed of 1/2 inch/month and burns at a speed of 1/2 inch/minute, you'd either need to start out with a lot of hair, or risk spending most of your time applying a flame to fledgling hair sprouts around your body. Or dispensing Rogain furiously. Both which would waste time.
In Windows 2000 and XP, Control Panel -> Accessibility Options -> Display -> Use High Contrast.
These start-ups aren't being acquired and almost no one is IPOing, which means the only ones who will take a hit for any of these weak businesses will be the investors.

There may still be a VC bubble and its about time the kool-aid wore off, but from what I've seen the experianced and high quality VC's are not investing in these types of companies.

*correction, I just read the Crunchbase profile, and there are some good names behind this company. Hopefully the team is strong.
This opens the bookmarks sidebar in my firefox. Exactly which functionality are we expecting here?
Agreed. All of his arguments are weak and because they are built on false foundations.

I develop games with C#. The libraries we have are very thin and do not really benefit from IDE designer support. However, VS still makes my life a whole hell of a lot easier. The debugger is superb. Complete integration with my bug tracking and source management tools. On the fly error checking, saves me from a bad compile.

Especially with Resharper http://www.jetbrains.com/resharper/
If you do any C# development, you MUST try resharper and train your fingers to press alt+enter and ctrl+shift+r a lot. It makes Visual C# much more like JetBrain's other product, IDEA IDE. When your IDE is this good, you never be able to go back.

I have worked two jobs in the past which were at Linux shops. I've used VIM quite extensively and become reasonably proficient at it. It is pretty good for editing all types of text. Too bad that I spend most of my time editing only one type of text: code of a particular language. Visual Studio is EXCELLENT at editing each type of text it supports, but it sucks something awful if you give it a new type and don't write plugins to handle it.

Part of my job is writing VS plugins which is certainly no fun because of the COM legacy. Future versions are getting more C#-ish, nice, managed extensibility APIs that will be closer to that of Eclipse.
Clicking on their mystery link enough times almost gave me a seizure. Don't even try it.
I liked the idea of the acunote script, and tried it out. But I like my script better :) It allows you to open items in new tabs and use keyboard navigation in the comments.
(1) What are you doing?
(2) What is important to you?

If (1) doesn't directly contribute to (2)....

For CEOs, "What are the last three important things about engineering/development that you didn't hear from the VP-Engr?

For VP-Engr/managers, "What are the last three important things about the biz that you heard from your reports?"

In both cases, the followup is "What did you do with that information?"
Ah, there I see it it in web developer toolbar Options | Options | Keys setting list. Nice key combo conflict.
How many monitors do the programmers use?

Not because I need a bunch of monitors, but it seems like a rough indicator of how much programmers are valued in the company. A company looking for code monkeys isn't going to find the marginal return of another monitor worth the investment.
I wonder if consumers will just tune out at some point, and if at some point artist will come up with an alternative organization that just cut the labels out of the loop.

/Allan
5M, if you read the sources linked from crunchbase.

Does seem pretty derivative, but might be a useful idea. Perhaps the website is mostly intended as a demo for their backend, which some bigger-viewer site could buy them for.