skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I remember watching the very first space shuttle launch in England with our group of exchange students. They were very upset that the "bloody yanks" were going to pull a major space undertaking like this off.

At the time it was fun to see how worked up they were but I'm glad this big waste of money is finally coming to an end. The cost of putting humans in space (and where the shuttle goes isn't really what I consider "space") is just too high.
Ask HN: What to buy a designer as a gift?
My partner's birthday is coming up in a couple of months and I'd like to get him something designer-y. It doesn't have to be something with strictly work utility, but that's certainly an option. He already has a Behance Action Book (http://www.creativesoutfitter.com/Products/Action-Book/4) so I don't think I want to get him a sketchbook or something like that. Any suggestions for something else? If you're a designer, what would be a really cool, unique gift for under $50?
It says "non-Microsoft platforms". It doesn't say "all currently supported non-Microsoft platforms". So, this may just mean "we're not going to ditch the Mac".
Soul-Searching in France After DSK's arrest
Patent trolling is a highly effective business model, but it has to make no sense in order to work.
Not as pretty as the Saturn V rocket. I always get a thrill watching footage of one of those blasting off.
Manual interaction? Sorry, but I'm still very skeptical. Pausing in a debugger does not require materially more "manual interaction" than endlessly running your program to spit out some printed statements--it just front-loads the manual interaction so you're doing it sooner and, if you're doing it right, doing less of it. A debugger allows live autopsy, which is far more valuable than this silly print-statement thing--when your print statement does not return as expected, you are not much better off with your print statements than just seeing the broken output of the program.

Couple live autopsy with live edit-and-continue and you've got a recipe for a considerably more effective way of debugging code.

And "your code is too complicated and unmaintainable if you need a debugger" is preposterous on its face if you've ever...oh, I don't know...written a driver? Or any other remotely complex (you're conflating complicated and complex) task with a significant number of interlocking parts? (Hell, one could just as easily say that your code is too complicated and unmaintainable if you're barfing print statements all over the place.)
That valuation technique is definitely crazy. It's completely backwards. You figure out what the company is worth and how much you're willing to part with, and then you sell that part for its portion of the total. You don't decide what the company is worth based on what you want.

At least, not if you want everything to be fair. The way they did it, 1 side of the other is getting the short end of the stick.
Getting Brisk going on CentOS and rocking a Terasort
Real URL without top frame:

http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2011/05/the-future-o...
As the blog post points out, this does look to be a consequence of "IfIsEvil" (http://wiki.nginx.org/IfIsEvil). The behavior of calling the script, not rendering it, and displaying the actual file is very strange though, especially since the if statements appear mutually exclusive. Maybe someone with nginx experience can explain why that would happen.
Dissecting shared libraries
Thing is, logging and debugging are not in opposition. My current web app is...well, verbose is probably putting it mildly. But when developing locally, if something goes sideways I just say "hey, stop here" and I can introspect the entire kit and kaboodle without even having to re-bounce the debug server (and certainly without stopping it to bung in a bunch of print statements).
Even assuming what you say is true, that "minority" of non-bullshit healthcare is very important.

Chemotherapy is a crude and harmful way to eliminate cancer, but I know several people alive today because of it.

Without insulin injections, mortality of type one, childhood-onset diabetes would be dramatically higher.

Viagra.

Vaccines for numerous diseases are still incredibly effective and one of the most successful innovations of the 20th century.

And innovations continue. Fifteen years ago, a patient diagnosed with Macular Degeneration would be told eventual blindness was certain and the possibility of ever finding a cure was very low. Google macular degeneration stem cells to see how that has changed.

Yes, there's a lot of healthcare focused on controlling risk factors like high cholesterol and we don't really know how much that's helping, but I'm not sure I'd marginalize everything else by calling it an "elephant in the room."
Gli spot Coca Cola, piovono le critiche dell’UNC
Da più di un anno è stata lanciata, ma la campagna pubblicitaria coca cola (che invita a consumare la celebre bevanda ai pasti) genera ancora critiche; le ultime piovono dall’Unione nazionale consumatotùri che attacca: Lo spot va cambiato !
I agree with him... if the librarian exists online and not in an old building 5 miles away. And kids have computers. That's not enough to lure them to a library. Many libraries have Wiis and Xboxes these days. That's not working either.
The future of the library
Craig Grannell wrote an answer to the Lodsys blog: http://reverttosaved.com/2011/05/16/lodsys-responds-to-troll...
Hey guys, it's Sarah-Jane, Community Manager at Context.IO. Yup, you got it. We don't host dedicated mailboxes that your application can receive and send emails from, but since we make the contents of any IMAP account available to your app, whatever is received in that account is like your app receiving it. For the sending part, we're leaving that to Mailgun and other services that focus on this.
I work the same way. But you have to be careful... My first reaction when I'm faced with a tricky problem is to sit there and think about it for a few minutes, rather than jump to action (with possible disastrous results). But it can make you look kind of dumb, just sitting there staring blankly in the face of a problem.
In the long run though, people have learnt to trust me, since that couple minutes of thinking often leads to great results.
You're taking his post a little too personally, business is business.

In the end if you're not fighting your own corner compensation wise why do you expect your boss to do so?

His incentive is to keep you happy enough to stay and be productive while spending as little money as possible.

If the OP is genuinely happy with the job itself there's no downside to simply voicing his actual dissatisfaction as long as he presents his employers, especially as he's presenting a clear solution to the problem.

In your solution he's got to spend a bunch of his spare time applying for jobs first, which could all be a waste of time.

Also your point about references makes no sense. If they're petty enough to be asses now, they'll be petty enough to be asses in the future.
Looks like this submitter might need an education:

http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=aghilmort
This email is inaccurate on one item: the Google contact actually gets the add contact request when the AIM user adds the Google contact (not when the AIM user sends the first message like the email states)
Capital doesn't automate, it entangles.
Interesting perspective. I consider it UI noise/bloat and it has always annoyed me ever since it was pushed into the gmail UI. When I'm in my mail-client I want to do email and that's it, etc etc.

I thought starting to aggressively add non-core features was one of the key things which made people hate Yahoo and Hotmail? So how is Google doing with gmail these days:

- Talk. I'm Google Bob. Do you want to chat with this contact?
- Buzz. Yeah how about that?
- Whoah! Wait NO we will not let you download this calendar invitation for
Outlook. Please sign up for Google Calendar or forget about ever responding!
Teehee
- OH HEY PLEASE USE CHROME
- Dude! Dude! I'm Google Voice and you should seriously use me to call!!
- Oh wait, you're from outside the US? Sorry you cant!!
I'll just leave the voice UI all here for you though. lol.

IMO it's getting pretty nasty.

Not saying you are wrong, but I never really though about it that way. I value purity and Gmail is getting messy. If Google Talk had been an actual stand-alone application and not ... crummed in stuff I didn't ask for, now then maybe I would use it. Then it wouldn't be invasive UI noise in my mail app.
Good luck doing a job or phd interview on google talk. My understanding is that skype has patents on a myriad of things related to live audio/video. Plus it works really really well and does screen sharing too (which means you can do presentations online). It's not just the network effect here. It's actually a better-than-the-rest product (and i sure hope MS won't make it a mess). Plus, its not less free than gtalk .
Wouldn't that make it a new language called Trep?
Well, this is one hell of a Gotcha! for everyone who is using in-app purchasing. Wasn't it the responsibility of Apple, Google, MS, to inform developers of this? Hm, I wonder if HP has a license for webOS.

And does this apply to desktop in-app purchases? What about in-app web app purchases? Does Facebook and its devs need a license?
I'm just getting a page saying "This Account Has Been Suspended"
Web development tricks: Getting the best out of Firefox
Libraries aren't going anywhere. I think they will transition from relatively large storage place facility physical books, to a hub for study. It's already happened, really. All my collegiate library studying took place via online databases like EBSCOhost, but this much is pretty obvious.
What is more obscure, and will be more interesting to see is how the library evolves culturally in the coming years.
Assessing and Managing SaaS Risk - 2011 Survey
What surprises me greatly in this sordid tale is not an aging man chasing after women (all too common) but the lenience shown to this guy from by the French in full view of past alleged assaults: he had an affair with a subordinate ("these things happen to all couples" his wife wrote) and he allegedly tried to rape Tristane Banon, a young journalist in 2002, among others. Such stories would finish off any politician in the US, e.g. think of the famous case of Anita Hill where just the allegation of "inappropriate discussion of sexual acts and pornographic films after she rebuffed his invitations to date him" was almost enough to derail Clarance Thomas's Supreme Court candidacy.

An then, of course, we have Berlusconi, whose affairs with underage girls are well-known and widely jokes about in Italy.

I think this area, at least, is one where the US leads Europe, but it's hard to explain why.
In fact, since there's no way to figure out what the company is worth, you come up with a number that you can get away with, looking mostly at what other companies getting similar investment are getting.

That's rational.
which one is the best replacement for skype?
i've used ekiga and it's pretty good but dont know others.
i want to introduce it to some noobs
French Hadopi “3 Strikes” Anti-Piracy Company Hacked
There's a big exception to the "vim will be installed" rule: Windows.
If we were able to say why, definitively, something went viral, then viral wouldn't seem so unusual or special, would it. We're all left to guess when something like this takes off in an organic, viral way. What's more interesting than guessing at that is what the fallout will be for business--and the publishing model. That's what this story explored.
DIY Canadian Citations: Our 2011 Update
Lodsys comments on iOS patent infringement, receives hate mail, death threats
Yeah, I love nginx and its syntax is great for the most part but it's easy to fall into the trap of thinking that you're writing in a turing-complete language. Something as simple as using multiple conditions in an if statement and redirecting to https if x-forwarded-proto is not set becomes a huge pain:

https://gist.github.com/974486
The NASA budget is a mere drop in the bucket compared to the defense budget and entitlement programs. In my opinion, I don't think it's getting enough funding. The future of the human race is among the stars.
Although Fexl does have built-in functions for long int and double float values, it is possible to do without them.

There are a couple of ways to define integers as pure functions. One is unary notation, which is equivalent to the "3" example you cite above. So you'd have these two constructors:

\zero = ( \zero\succ zero)
\succ = (\N \zero\succ succ N)

And then the "add" would be:

\add == (\x\y x y \n succ (add n y))

Or, using the ';' (right-pivot) to avoid nesting on the right (though sometimes that can be too clever by half):

\add == (\x\y x y \n succ; add n y)

That works fine for some applications. But you can use binary notation as well, defining an integer as a list of bits, with the lowest-order bit first. Then the "add" function becomes:

\add == (\x\y x y \bx\nx y x \by\ny
\sum=(add nx ny)
bx
(by (cons F (inc sum)) (cons T sum))
(cons by sum))

Where inc is:

\inc == (\x x (cons T null) \b\n
b (cons F (inc n)) (cons T n))

I think I transcribed that right, but I haven't tested it in a while. It's all surprisingly fast -- I was actually doing long division of 100 digit numbers years ago in reasonable time in this notation, including the conversion to decimal notation by repeated division by 10.

One of these days I need to link a big number library into Fexl, but it hasn't been a priority for me. (Actually I need to think seriously about dynamically linked libraries, with linkage control done in Fexl itself. This can be sandboxed for secure applications, of course.)

Oh and here's my old division function, which again I haven't tested in a while, so no warranties expressed or implied:

#---------------------------------------------------------------------------
# (nat:div x y) divides x by y. It yields a pair <q,r>, where q is the
# quotient and r is the remainder.
#
# The result satisfies the equation x = q*y + r, 0 <= r < y.
#
# NOTE: If you divide by zero, the function yields the pair <0,0>.
#---------------------------------------------------------------------------
\nat:div==(\x\y\:
x (: null null) \bx\nx
y (: null null) \by\ny
by
(
# divide by odd - recur on x only
nat:div nx y \q\r
\r=(bx nat:2x1 nat:2x r)
\d=(nat:sub r y)
int:ge0 d
(: (nat:2x1 q) (int:abs d))
(: (nat:2x q) r)
)
(
# divide by even - recur on x and y
nat:div nx ny \q\r
: q (bx nat:2x1 nat:2x r)
)
)
Two comments.

These microbenchmarks don't really do it for me. It would be much more interesting to see a real test application being benchmarked. Something with users, objects, pages that have content.

It would be more fair to look at the code, complexity and performance drops when you actually build something more real.

Also, I know Erlang is awesome and super fast. But personally I would rather spend the money on a good horizontally scalable architecture and extra hardware if that means we can build apps in a more mainstream language like for example Python or Ruby.
I hate St. Louis...I think I have bad memory associations with it because we had to go there to the Children's Hospital for my sister. It is also the only place I have ever been mugged - twice! - despite having frequently traveled to much more dangerous places. The second mugger even took my clothing at gunpoint. And the muggings occurred within 80 feet of the St. Louis Arch and several cops. Don't go near the Arch around dusk. The Arch seems like a safe place, but it is on the periphery of a more dangerous area.
As a C/C++/C# developer I can't imagine giving up IDEs for vi. vi is my editor of choice for quickie edits on Linux but for project work it's Eclipse and VS. I've used IDEs since UCSD Pascal but really only recently got convinced they are a real productivity enhancer.

If I ask myself why I use IDEs I can really only come up with Intellisense, if I worked in a language that doesn't allow a high degree of completion, browsing, etc. I could easily go with something simple.
I think this is an important function of libraries too. It's a nice quiet place and with enough work room to read and relax. With that said, other than at Universities, I doubt many people think that's a valuable thing. The value of libraries is hard to quantify and in policy discussion that's not a good thing for libraries.
RSA Animate: Ken Robinson - Changing Education Paradigms (video)
HN comments trying to find 'unbiased' news (if any)...

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1506578
Agree about the defense budget, makes me mad every time I think about it. Entitlements is a management problem but the size of "defense" is just insanity.
As I was playing with it, I was thinking about how it illustrates the way magnifying different aspects can give a different feeling to one's writing. Like: can I get better emphasis by keeping a particular facet short and direct, or does it pay to expand on it?

So I think it's not just about keeping it simple, but seeing where simple might be better, or where depth might be better.
The Perils of Closed Worlds
Oh America, oh... dear.
Although not cross-platform, FaceTime has one killer feature: it passes the mom test. Skype has passed it too, but not with as many flying colours as FaceTime.

Mom push button, mom video chatting with grand kids. No intervention from grand kids required.
If s/he's a bit technically oriented this might be a great idea (http://www.flight404.com/blog/?p=131), it's on my to-do list for a long time and is absolutely awesome. The dice cost around $80, though.
What sort of datastore would be a good pairing for this? Seeing as it doesn't matter how fast a server is if the datastore can't keep up. Redis? Riak? CouchDB?
Original (unedited) 55 minute talk is here http://www.thersa.org/events/vision/archive/sir-ken-robinson
Print statements aren't meaningful tests, though. Hence the eight hojillion xUnit ports for pretty much every major language.
If we accept this kind of shit, there will soon be hundreds of leeches asking for their share of our money. And then even the most wealthy developers will feel the pain. I say squash those bugs early. If Apple, Google, and MS pay, they are stupid.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Jb12mzrgEM

We've been working on a project to capture the last flights of the Space Shuttle Program. It's meant a lot of time out with the bugs, heat, sun, gators and ever present pad security folks.

Once the sound hits, the maniacal laughter you hear is me!

Now we wait a couple of hours to see how our cameras faired. We're at the media center 3.2 miles from the Orbiter, our cameras are at 500-600 feet... I feel for them.
That would probably depend on the terms of the IP licence. Does it cover downstream users, or not? If you're a platform, you get (hopefully, if you were properly advised) what you paid for. What you then represent to your downstream users to bring them to your platform should be honest, though. Prospective platform users presumably want to known whether this is a good platform for their business, i.e. IP-sandboxed, reliable, safe, with large footfall.
It presumably wasn't in fact IP-sandboxed. By that I mean that the upstream licensors have been selfish in their negotiations, or the platform doesn't indemnify you against claims, or even at least offer to coordinate a circling of developer wagons. What's interesting to know if whether they've nevertheless held it out as an IP-safe platform; if not, caveat emptor probably applies, and developers are now presumably kicking themselves for not making IP safety a part of their due diligence before contracting with apple, etc, for a platform on which to build their business.
Realities aside, it's tremendously regrettable that indy software developers and inventors are supposed to have to worry about third party IP rights, particularly over their usage of major commercial platforms for their business.
Scala daddy wraps his Java baby in Red Hat-ness
Yeah, let's blame Amazon for renting servers to people who might use them illegally, until they came along there wasn't a choice and everyone hacking into servers illegally had to do it from their own IP addresses at home.
There's an old saying "Success is a journey, not a destination".

I mention that because, if you give yourself a bar [ie go public] now, you may change your mind later or fall into the spiral of continually raising that bar before ever crossing it. As an example of the former, you may see that your company can thrive without public funding (eg koch enterprises). As an example of the latter, you may measure success in terms of a favored lifestyle [which will always scale up to your income level -- you can never get too many rooms in a mansion or too many acres in an estate or too many floors in an apartment complex.
Maybe, but you'd also be ignoring other basic staples of western healthcare like vaccinations.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK2284/
A list structure is already a 'dictionary tree', except it has lousy performance in access. (only really visible on large data sets).

* (second (assoc 5 '((1 2) (3 4) (5 6))))

> 6

The lousy performance doesn't matter, most of the time, because you have other data-structures for data, and your compiler generally is only interested in sequential access (constructing a parse tree out of it).
The lisp code already being a tree makes parsing fairly simple...

So, I guess my point is that I don't see the point of this?

The only reason to really upgrade to a dictionary would be if you wanted to have non-sequential access to the contents of of your large-scale code-data-structure... generally the lists aren't large enough to merit it. You can do all of the dictionary operations on a list, and they are 'fast enough'.
----

I feel like the rationale here is created by conflating the idea of a cons and a list. I think generally, a list already accomplishes what the author sets out to accomplish.

They are a single step higher level than conses, and give you a hierarchical structure with the possibility for named associations. I don't really see how using something more complicated and memory intensive to build this basic data structure qualifies as an improvement...
The Nine Kinds of Students
Lisp is already made of trees. A Lisp program is a pre-order traversal of the abstract syntax tree of a yacc'ed program in another programming language. This fact is WHY Lisp is powerful. By eliminating yaccing you can create new syntax on the fly without having to recompile your compiler.
With an online library how are you going to "serendipitously" find new books from other domains you don't know you're interested in?

I remember when I was 14 or 15, I was going to our small-town's public library once every 2 days or so, I was reading all the SF books I could find. The thing is that the SF books shelf was just after the history books shelf, and, even though I liked history, I never would have thought of reading history books if it weren't for me passing in front of that history books shelf each and every time.
Daily Forex News
Provides forex trading news, currency forecasts, analysis, education, and strategy.
Finally, a sane voice.

The notion of an editor 'war' is laughable. I'm sure in five years or so someone will innovate in the graphical editor arena and the pendulum will swing back. And, lo and behold, all of the bloggers and Tweeters will gush about their "10x" productivity increases. I never seem to get those sorts of massive productivity gains, as the hard/slow parts of development take place in my mind.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1791749

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1800876

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1802072

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1805419 <- This has the most comments.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1858254

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1882297

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1886532

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2025766

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2033198