skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
http://www.telescopictext.org/text/fCvNOyBqKSJAh

My "telescopic" thoughts on making this an interview question. When completely expanded, it does not have a grammatical flow in some parts because I couldn't edit text once created and I did not want to start from scratch.
Bitly Hires Peter Stern as CEO
Thank you for proving my point with an ad hominem. Clearly because I disagree with minimizing the emancipation of an entire race by comparing it to a software project, I am unqualified to make such a remark. What a fantastically logical argument you have there.

The important part that all this circlejerking seems to miss is that BitCoin has not accomplished ANYTHING yet. However everybody is ready to chalk it up as a humanity-changing experience with the article's comparison the most nauseating fucking example of worth inflation I have ever seen. If BitCoin ends up disrupting every currency in the world you MIGHT, repeat MIGHT, be able to make that claim.

But not a single moment sooner.
Do you have to spend it right away?

Making a bad investment for the sake of investment strikes me as foolish. It's not clear how good an investment it would be, but it should be clearer a year or two down the line
Hey Sprinkles, I'm reading your comments and trying to figure out if you support freedom or not...

If the government is robbing its citizens, and forcing the poorest of them to pay a monstrous inflation tax, why is a FREE CHOICE alternative to fight government oppression a threat to you?
This is either a reinvention of ASTs or it's Graph Reduction.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abstract_syntax_tree
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graph_reduction

:)
Or who might need this to work for languages with characters outside the A-Z range...
With RIM in a downward spiral, maybe MS wants to have full control of the mobile phone stack, and then market it heavily to the corporate sector (i.e. make Nokia+WP7 the next Blackberry).

As others have mentioned, this is also a way of keeping their money in Europe and avoiding taxes by exporting it. RIM might have been a better strategic alliance, but they are a Canadian company, so it would be hard to buy them while keeping the money within the EU.
This stuff is legitimately important. Being so dismissive of it is dangerous. We have a real shot at solving a problem thusfar unsolved. Also, its not just a software project, any more than the push for those things were just paper being signed. If you end up reading the article and disagreeing with my points, let me know.

Also, I am clear in the article that it is only if it succeeds will it be considered that.
In Clojure, the default collection for data modeling is the map (and has literal support). Unlike javascript, properties are namespaced so you can extend someone else map without fearing a nameclash.

Records (which are objects with a user defined types) are maps too so the upgrade is easy (and yes you can add you own fields to an object).
http://vimeo.com/6624203 Conc lists as video. Titled Organizing Functional Code for Parallel Execution; or, foldl and foldr Considered Slightly Harmful (Guy Steele)
I plugged viemu into VS, now I've got all the nice IDE stuff but with the vim editing model, which I'm completely addicted to now.
chop it, fiends cop/
2 for 5, come shop/
DGSE come, we call it the fence hop/
b@sh, iftop watch the digits rock/
derivatives based on the brown of the slop/

http://pb.rcpsych.org/cgi/reprint/21/3/184.pdf
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_intelligence_agencies_o...

/trap or die/
I never said I have enhanced productivity over using a debugger. I said I have no worse productivity.

There's a debugger, there's a REPL, and in general lots of tools which I use if I see the need (the NYTProf profiler would be one). Using a debugger in this scenario (with an interpreted language) just doesn't give me any enhanced productivity over what I'm doing now.
Getting Collaboration Right
Why does the countersuit have to be about patent infringement? Just sue them to be a nuisance. I'm sure Apple's lawyers are good enough to be a thorn in Lodsys' side.
thanks, great advice!
Let's put it this way... who knows whether Bitcoin will amount to much at all. But the horrors of inflation are just as serious as the horrors of tyrannical governments and slavery. Inflation causes capital miss-allocations in the hundreds of billions of dollars, possibly even trillions. Eventually you have to put a price on this and say that millions of man years worth of effort are either out right wasted or lost in opportunity cost.

This is hard to grasp, because it's the productive output you don't get and will never see that's at stake. What are you missing out on? Things real people want: better healthcare, cheaper/healthier food, more time away from work with their families. What did you get instead? Multiple housing booms, useless dot com companies, acres of useless tulips fields. I am not saying the latter have no value, but rather that they are pursued because of inaccurate market signals and come at the cost of non-investment in more valuable, life saving and life improving pursuits.

Inflation is just as deadly serious as mass graves, because at massive scale that's what it quietly causes.
...which is why it will be made illegal soon. Governments aren't interested in granting liberties. It tends to make law enforcement more difficult, and law enforcement tends to be lazy in the first place.
I would prefer a world without software patents. If that is not possible,
* At least the courts should charge exponentially high prices for each extra claim you want to make beyond a limit.
* All publicly listed companies will have a cap on total number of patents they can apply for (probably proportional to R&D spending) after which the price increases exponentially.
* Any person or institution found patent trolling should find further litigation exponentially expensive.
All these and more measures won't solve the problem... but at least increases the threshold for trolling behaviour...
It's still not an alternate to the Java, since there are more upper-case characters than the 26 your regex matches. But I'm sure there is an appropriate Unicorn character class you could use instead.
I am not dismissive of the problem nor of BitCoin's potential. I am dismissive of you comparing BitCoin to some of humanity's greatest achievements like it has actually earned such a distinction. Maybe someday it will. Until then do not dare to put BitCoin in the same league as emancipation or women's suffrage.

Good grief. That is the most offensive thing I've read on Hacker News in ages. That you would even consider drawing the parallel is nauseating regardless of how you qualify your forward-looking statement. Simply by mentioning it you have already made the assertion and you know that. You are not stupid and you did it on purpose.

Disruption of currency will NEVER be an achievement for humanity on the scale of ending the suffering of a gender or a race. That opinion is seriously flawed.
5-3-1 is awesome. I made some great gains on my DL. 525 1RM weighing 195 :D

Doing Huge in a Hurry now to put on a bit of size and cut down before a vacation to Mexico.
Humble title for James Gosling at Google
Look forward to more significant contribution from him at Google.
It will be tough to enforce though...
You might be able to find a SIP provider that is cheaper, I used to use one here in the states that was about $5/month.
For the first time coordinating across timezones is so darn simple. Thank you for this.

- Day / date boundaries can be more intuitive
- Day and night too

Can you tie this up with skype (as a small quick plugin), Google Calendar and MS Outlook?
These lines can be easily blurred, think Red Hat, Ubuntu, Twiki, any of the current crop of Hadoop or NoSQL based startups...
>It may come as a shock to some people...

Outside of your strawmen, I don't think you're shocking anybody.
Hey Jon,

You can email me at brian [at] fitocracy <dot> com.
Syrian secret police is issuing forged Facebook certificate
Nice post. Remnants of "maxcode" still creep up in our daily work so Max's name is well recognized at PayPal to this day.
It (probably) refers to a measure of correlation being 0.54 on a scale of 0=no correlation to 1=perfect linear relationship (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pearson_product-moment_correlat...) rather than a confidence interval, which is what p<0.05 refers to (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P-value)
"For the past few months, we’ve been pretty quiet, because we’ve been hard at work."

They are building a product whose success requires overcoming network effects. 90% of what they need to work hard on is not being quiet.
Success and Succession
"It is only a small exaggeration to say that the Spitfire was the plane that saved the free world."

There are many other reasons why Britain was never invaded in 1940: the Dunkirk evacuation saving the trained part of the army, the extensive early warning system, including radars, the preliminary work on the Enigma machine brought over by escaped Poles etc. Chief among them, I would argue, was the fact that Hitler didn't really want to fight the British after France fell, and didn't expect he would have to. The lack of investment in submarines and strategic bombers, the half-hearted and late starting planning for Sea Lion, the minimal commitment to the Mediterranean front (North Africa, Malta, Gibraltar) etc. only make sense in this light. The fact that, with proper planning and resources allocated, the German military was more than capable of taking on the British in an across-the-water operation was proven earlier in the same year by the successful operation in Norway, and next year by the capture of Crete.
That's more research than I want to do for free on a Monday morning, and one might ask the same question about patents in general. The current system is broken, but simply abolishing it is to throw the baby out with the bathwater. There's a reason the patent and copyright systems exist in the first place, and simple abolition would just exchange new problems for old.
It adds no value to the discussion.
> But the horrors of inflation are just as serious as [...] slavery.

Do tell me how. That is a hilarious assertion. I really hope you're kidding.

Somehow, the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer doesn't quite have the same ring to it of publicly lynching people because their skin is a different color. Problems with a market aren't even on the same level as buying and selling humans because they are a minority.

I'm not a member of a race that generally suffered from forced slavery, and even I am offended that you would draw the parallel.
I'm a little confused - why would losing your laptop for example cause you to lose your bitcoins? Wouldn't the current value of each user be stored in this chain they mention?

Shouldn't there be a way to back up your bitcoins? Seems like it would be very vulnerable to an EMP attack, right?
I joined in February, but I haven't used Fitocracy yet.

My feedback on why it hasn't grabbed me yet:

1) Design - as Goronmon pointed out above, the design doesn't feel fun or encouraging.

2) Performance - it's laggy right now, although I expect that will improve soon.

3) User Experience - It's hard to figure out how to get started, or to get a clear picture of how it all works. I'd suggest including lists of activities, rather than making people type into a blank box and look for autocompletes.

The activity feed is interesting, but it still feels like a list of data, removed from any context.

4) Perception - Right now, it seems like a place for fitness freaks and gym rats. That might be intentional - but I'd much rather use a site populated by out of shape geeks working to get fit.

If Fitocracy can make exercise game-like and enjoyable, it will win. The hardest part is getting started each day (getting up to run, going to the gym instead of the pub after work) - that's where Fitocracy can make a difference.

Good luck, guys - I hope this becomes something great!
There are only three ways to get bitcoin:

1. Create (discover) bitcoins using your own computer. This is slow and requires a lot of processing.

2. Provide a good or service in exchange for bitcoins.

3. Receive them as a gift.

That is all. I've ruled out theft, i.e. stealing someone's wallet from their computer.

That answers your first question. The second question, about how the supply evolves, is more complex. My understanding is cursory, but I'm pretty sure the bitcoin.org web site addresses it in depth.
Your revision doesn't handle non-English uppercase characters. Character.isUpperCase() does.
Maybe we just need to change the patent system itself.

I believe people game the patent system by trying to be as general as possible when creating patents.

I believe this stifles progress, I believe stifling progress is wrong, I believe stifling progress hurts us as a country in a time when we can not afford it.

What if a patent's definition changed over it's life time based upon what the company is actually using it for?

I think this would solve a couple problems.

1) It would force the company to actively invest in "idea's" that they own if they are actually makers and not scammers. (Yeah!!, progress continues)

2) It would open up the patent system to redefining the shelf life of patents.

We could call this new system "Shit or get off the pot!" patents.
I don't video chat more often because when there are bandwidth issues, skype decides it will drop the audio portion of the call and devote the remaining bandwidth to the video portion which seems to keep working fine. YMMV but that's how it works for me.
Thanks! I did not know the widgets on the home screen can be modified by developers. That could be really useful. Very good to know.
IPhone 4S Will Be Released in UK on November 21st? [Report]
Oh no, that isn't possible. There were so many pseudo-reactor-experts, explaining the safety of those types of reactor in detail. And now those darn fuel rods just melted without appreciating the "don't panic, it's all exaggerated" - wall of texts :[
>> You can hardly expect politicians to understand the ramifications of the legislation they're proposing.

> That anyone would ever say this in a non-ironic sense is flabbergasting.

Legislators write the laws and then courts figure out the ramifications. Laws get written because of some catalyst, but I wouldn't expect anybody to be able to understand the full ramifications until the law is in place for a while and people have started testing it in the legal system.
I don't think I understand your argument. You said this:

> a software idea can be thought up in a few minutes and implemented in the same.

This is only true for trivial pieces of software. I agree with you that trivial pieces of software should not be patentable. But you're saying that no piece of software should be patentable, regardless of how complex or innovative it is, and there I strongly disagree.
We use different definitions. My trees are acyclic connected graphs with one root.
It'd be nice if the person you sold it to at least had to use the patent before they could start suing people.
"I'm reading your comments and trying to figure out if you support freedom or not..."

It's shit like this that makes it difficult to take libertarians seriously.
I appreciate that you can't write entire projects to compare, and for your article overall, just asking you (and other authors who write similar articles) to give people familiar with the incumbent a bit more to chew on.

Nobody writes code to see if a string has an uppercase character, that code was written long ago. Regex may be something that Java imported, but it's right there in the JDK so I have no reason not to use it. How do the two languages look when you're validating email addresses against a whitelist of domains from a config file or URLs for parameters based on some business rules? How do you handle an I/O error when you're halway through writing a file? These are the small problems we know we'll have to do over and over again, but not be able to stash in a standard library (or use someone else's). Pointing out that JavaBeans are silly doesn't hold much weight either, I use lombok :)
Bounced Welcome Emails: Your customers are telling you “no thanks”
Also one of the theories on why the bought Skype. Apparently MS has a lot of cash internationally that they need to dispose of...
Climate science critic sees paper retracted due to plagiarism
Longterm economic servitude under the rule of banking-government complex has a small chance to be broken with this tool. Recall that the shortsighted among us also were fussing and fuming when email went from being in the domain of academic geeks to the unwashed masses.

Some people just dislike change for the better, I guess.
They dug their own hole.
Excellent news. As someone who's meaningfully affected by the incomprehensible-to-the-news legal battles in the tech marketplace, Groklaw has been indispensable in helping me understand the meaning of the various wars and their many small battles. I was an infrequent visitor to Groklaw but my visits provided very valuable information.

Seriously, imagine trying to understand "SCO v. World". "Oracle v. Google", OOXML, software patents, etc using the posts provided by ITWorld, NYTimes, Washington Post, etc. Groklaw didn't make me comfortable about the state or outcome of the battles, but it did make me comfortable that I had a good layman's understanding of the battles.
Did Facebook trademark "like" on domains?
It seems like there is so much potential for business around "Like" button but no one is doing it. Is it because FB has a trademark on the word "like" ?
Is Facebook Sitting in an E-Commerce Bubble?
That must sound incredible in person. Even the youtube version is amazing.
Looks a bit like my Fexl (http://fexl.com/code), though Fexl has a much smaller grammar and footprint. I'm not sure I have all the "capability" and "distributed" stuff though, and I definitely don't have threads, much preferring "fork" (i.e., O.S. level blocking system calls with timeouts are my friends).

(Incidentally, GA Tech is my alma mater.)
Great points, this misrepresentation of fact reminds me of a history class in which we discussed the British tactics against the Zulus and a girl actually claimed that "Africa had no war before white people came". I laughed really hard and eventually she was corrected that Africans knew how to and did conduct wars long before white people arrived.
The fact that the fuel rods melted was always a possibility but not necessarily any worse than any other outcome. It's the fact that something is leaking that is the problem, not the melting of the fuel itself.
Inflation is not a tax.

Furthermore, a rise in the dollar-denominated price of gold is not inflation; inflation is a rise in the nominal price of things we actually buy.
Diaspora had a lot of momentum and was endorsed by famous names, but failed to engage with and target the target market - which is mainly software folks and freedom beards running ARM servers. Only once you have a sufficient developer community (a high enough beard count) can you hope to take on the unwashed user masses and industry pteranodons. Probably one of their main mistakes was not to use the accumulated funding to support someone in the role of a community manager. To engage with developers and early adopters you need to have regular and informative communication, and Diaspora's blog output has woefully fulfilled neither of those criteria.
Let's see... Jobs is on his way out of Apple, depending on what kind of disciples he has, Apple may or may not survive without him. He's just too important for Apple, at least in my view.

RIM just announced a recall of Playbook. They're going downhill fast - perhaps if they get DalvikVM running flawlessly, that can be their lifeline until they can get their Flash based apps going/ported - IMHO, a long time in the making before any of this happens, so I think they're due for a downhill roll for a while before they come up, if at all ...

Android and Apple are pretty much eating everyone's lunch for now. Android's strength is its 'openness' (however ill-perceived that may be) and Linux. Apple's is its control over hardware and software.

MS could be looking to become like Apple here... control the hardware as well as the software. It might work - but in my view, they are at least 2-4 years away from having a platform as stable as iOS or even Android, which is relatively new.....

It's a tough call. Probably money well spent, but they can't afford to fuck up the execution. It's gonna require Ballmer to not sleep at night and lose whatever hair he's got left....
I read long ago that the Spitfire cost (in terms of labor hours) twice as much to produce as the Me-109, although the two airplanes had a rough parity in combat.
Clearly you have never dealt with a government.

You are hedging your entire startup on the government not getting involved and freezing your accounts, by the way. Smart move! (Clever promotion, might I add, especially with that little footer.)
How about this:

All programs can be rewritten to be expressed in Haskell. All Haskell functions can be expressed as equations in the typed lambda calculus. The lambda calculus and its variants are all subsets of mathematical equations. Therefore, all programs can be expressed as mathematical equations.
Hey Jayson,

Thanks for the thoughtful feedback. Responses below:

1) Design is certainly something I'd like to work on improving. As noted in the OP, I handle the design for Fitocracy which is a bit funny, since I was pretty much a total beginner at this process 6 months ago. We'd like to eventually have a full-time designer on board.

2) If you think it's bad now, it used to be 10x worse a month ago. I'm not even exaggerating here. That being said, better site performance is absolutely something we're working on as well.

3) UX is also a top priority that we want to hit hard on ASAP. We know there are quite a few shortcomings right now but we hope to make the experience more cohesive and simple over time.

4) You're right that the core users skew more toward people who are already quite active in working out. We've found that they're a pretty key demographic at the moment, but we do hope to make the experience more enticing and useful for absolute fitness noobs down the line.

Thanks again,
Brian
Is there any info regarding the age of most of these patents? Take for example the Lodsys patent on in-app purchases. I remember reading that the patent in question was filed in 2003, as part of a chain of patents starting in the early 1990s.

I ask because I suspect most of these patents were approved long before these ideas were obvious. Note: I dont necessarily support software patents.
Clarity of purpose. Focus on functionality.

My favorite sites get this right: Hacker News, Facebook, Google, Craigslist, Techmeme, Berkshire Hathaway, Dropbox, Espn (though I can't stand its automatic video play function).

Imo, many areas of design (e.g. graphic design) screw up functionality.

"Design is how it works."
Diaspora will be the Hurd of social networking.
“You know the thing about chaos? It's fair.” - The Joker
Diaspora is an open-source, decentralized system. While there may be a canonical installation on a big official "social network", there can be some meaningful separation here between the engineering and the marketing, and I think it's good that they're trying to get a decent foundation in place before they go all over trying to market.
Tl;dr try someone out part time before hiring them full time.

Ignoring the link bait title of the post, I think the OP's suggestion is good. However, it's usually not possible. People are working full time and don't have extra time to work on your side project.

Interviews should include the same activities the interviewee will be doing during their job. Programmers need to program. Designers need to design. Sales people need to sell. It's actually quite easy to do this effectively in an interview and plenty of companies do that quite well (i.e. They don't suck)
I hardly see how an even partial but substantial meltdown wouldn't result in a breach in the containment vessel and thus in a leak.