skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I do not see a single reason why strongly typed language compiler couldn't have unsafe flag, to compile with undefined symbols, and to make your program fail/rise error/perform some other action when such symbols are evaluated or called.

And I understand why this behavior would be unwanted in production systems.
Not even remotely the same.

When I got involved in the early 90s, sci.math (to name a random example) had over 100,000 regular readers. Participants ran the range from beginners who didn't understand Calculus to tenured professors to random kooks. (Sometimes those categories overlapped - eg Alexander Abian.) Conversations regularly were complex meandering affairs where participants frequently kept 3-6 different threads of the same conversation going in the same posts.

I am not aware of any discussion forum today that is online with anything like that readership and range of participants. I'm also not aware of any with that tolerance for complex conversations. (You can do it with email - I have - but when people mix top posting with bottom posting with interleaved posting, it turns into a mess. To do it like Usenet did you must use interleaved posting.)
Apple’s Grand Vision: Some thoughts on iCloud and the future
Yes - high inflation (i.e. too high, not 5%), substantial currency devaluation (not hyperinflation but worse than a mere annoyance), and especially high unemployment - higher than we have now under the market-focused orthodoxy. But it needs to be compared to a useful control. For example, if it's limited to the 1970's, it would be hard to isolate from the impact of the oil crisis. And if it's limited to the US/Britain, you need to explain why the high-spending tiger economies can be discounted.
The simple things that you're describing are all in gmail.
Free licenses for Linux parallel programming tool
Useless since now Google charts are SVG-based: http://code.google.com/intl/en/apis/chart/interactive/docs/
Except that you can develop just as fast in Python if you knew what you were doing.
Yes, I completely agree, the SEO and traffic alone are reason enough to do it. The long run is something that is hard to consolidate yourself with as its hard to motivate yourself by always looking at the long run. Therefore seeing the shortterm benefits is often key.

Awesome, glad you gave one of the sites a go. Hope it works out for you. :)
I can really identify with the sentiments lined in this post as one of the things I've added to my life is trying to learn the piano, an instrument which seemed all but impossible since I'm not a very coordinated person, especially when playing with both hands.

So far, I'm two weeks into it and progress has been surprising. Sure, I have difficulty getting both hands to work together, but it's coming together rather nicely and my brain is getting a workout as it's trying to coordinate the two hands. Add to that the confidence it gives me in not only approaching a task where I can potentially fail, but transforming those failures into the grit and determination to succeed. I can definitely see this learning process paying back through the confidence it gives me.
They target pretty different components of the advertising industry. For example, I kind of doubt Coca-Cola spends a lot of money on Google ads (nobody uses Google to find a Coke). On the other hand, Facebook could be a great tool for promoting the Coke brand. It's much more analogous to traditional TV advertising.
Analemma: SVG charts with Clojure
http://google.com/?q=ununquadium

If I was a domain squatter, I would crawl the internet looking for words/ngrams and register .com domains with them. Which is probably what someone did.
They could use algorithms to implement a 'dating' site that matches companies to potential customers. "Hey, we can bring you 10000 university educated males who recently divorced and do not buy your stuff yet. If you offer them X, our algorithms predict 25% will buy, and 45% of them will become repeat customers."

I do not see why Google would have to include a coupon in such an offer, though. If they have the tech to do this, and, given the privacy concerns, dare to use it, they already can sell targeted ads. Coupons, IMO, only serve to attract less well-off customers, that typically are worth less.
Weren't your flyers used for client acquisition?
I wish the universe would be a one, huge database with myself having SA access.
I agree with the general gist of your comment, but I think your "bottom line" is overly harsh.

I went to college from 20-24 (I had worked for a gap year before then), took about 6 months off to finish a volunteer project I'd started in college, worked for another 2 years, took another 18 months off to work on a startup (that never made any money), and then have been working since then. I just hit 30. My social security statement looks like $money, $0, $0, $0, $0, $money, $money, $0, $money, $money, $money. Except that each time I hit $money again, the amount is double what it was before. My net worth is doing fine - if I didn't live in the Bay Area, I could probably buy a house free and clear in most parts of the country.

Your 20s are the best time to take financial risks. After you get kids and a mortgage, you have responsibilities that really do make it difficult to spend any length of time without an income. But in your 20s, you can live cheaply, you don't have anyone depending on you, and you're still figuring out what you want to do with your life. Taking some time off from the corporate meatgrinder can pay some big dividends in increased skills and self-knowledge that make it more than worthwhile later.

Just be smart about it. Don't throw good money after bad, know when to call it quits, keep in mind what you want to gain from the experience, and remember that there's nothing shameful about getting a job.
A major problem with web-based UIs is the lack of sane defaults. The default for HTML is a document with basic formatting. You need somebody with good design skills to create an App that doesn't look awful.

On the other hand, frameworks such as UIKit provide all you need for a nice-looking UI. Developers just need to worry about the application code, and worry about UI design much later in the process.
Pretty amazed that you got permanent residency in under 8 months. That'd be amazing in the US.
Thanks for pointing this out. I was about to believe the post was correct, but it seems it isn't. However, just to be sure I understand you correctly:

Is the module functor compiled only once, or once for every parameter type? I'm asking because if it's compiled only once, the generated code might be significantly less optimized. This might not play a role for complex parameter types, but could miss lots of good optimization opportunities for simple types such as int or char. How is this solved in those languages?

Also, is it just OCaml and Coq, or is this possible with other strongly typed languages (such as Haskell) as well?
Great advice. There are two prototype videos of my game Shadow Physics on youtube (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bb5DjyoDObA), which is the popular one that demonstrated the concept to the wider public and gained enough interest to secure funding and allow me to work on it full time. The other is the original 3 day prototype I hacked together during TIGJam (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jcjxo9svhxw). Not as impressive to anyone but myself, but it proved that the tech and concept were viable and got the entire project going.

These were both made after about a year of me talking about how awesome the game would be, but of course no one quite got it until they could see it in action. The power of a strong prototype is immense.
Canvas has some advantages, like working in IE, and easily exporting to PNG.
Exactly!

Even HN (one of the best web forums, IMO), is still clunky compared to usenet. Usenet made it so easy and efficient to follow topics you were interested in while ignoring the crap.

I think I'd be willing to give up the ability to upvote comments/submissions in exchange for a good usenet interface to HN.
Show HN: Weekend Project - My MVB (minimum viable business)
Thanks for that, as a result I had a look at the GCC man page section re: Options Controlling C Dialect and also the one re: Options to Request or Suppress Warnings.

Haven't done any real C coding in years, so it's good to know about those options.
Ask HN: How do you manage projects
I have a question for the startups here. What process do you use for managing/scheduling projects. I work for a startup where the CEO is a non programmer and,each time there is a new feature request from a customer or an idea for a new project, his only input seems to be "Get this done ASAP". Because of this it seems like the to-do list keeps growing, and I've been working 14-16 hours a day, 7 days a week for the last 3 months. Of course, if I ask him for time off, all he does is wave the to-do list at me.
How do you manage schedules.
The system this company is using is too chaotic to be successful.
Evening HN'ers, Thought I'd share my weekend project with you and see what you think, I run a few events in the UK (Conferences, Barcamps, Hack Days) and I decided to take my learnings and see if I could help other people who want to run events (we have a reputation for doing things a bit differently).

I'm still learning rails so projects like these are as much about learning a new language as they are looking at a potentially new business.

I hope this interests someone and if you have any questions, let me know
Google had topline revenues of $8.58 last quarter. Ahem. Facebook is thinking of making $4 Billion in revenues this year. So Facebook would have to make roughly 10X in revenues.

Anyone can say anything on Techcrunch. This article has no facts.
Have to disagree, even though I'm a big gmail user and I do like it way better than the other webmail systems. A thread in gmail looks more like a pile than a real thread - it's nowhere near as smooth as navigating in a newsreader. It presents newer messages on top, and I sometimes find myself confused when I can't tell if certain text is new or quoted in an old message.

And there is no "kill thread" - you can set up a filter, but that's a longish operation and I don't think it lets you say "I don't want to follow this particular discussion" as opposed to "filter out this subject/author".

It all comes down to gmail being a mail system, not a forum system. And goog's forum system, groups, is pretty sad.
My Lisp Experiences and the Development of GNU Emacs
Transcript of Richard Stallman's Speech, 28 Oct 2002, at the International Lisp Conference
Javascript is an implied part of DOM scripting. HTML5 is an umbrella term covering all of these technologies and is much more than text layout.
Why not structural typing?
It sound like your describing Positive liberty vs. Negative liberty, and yes coming from the UK I do find the rules in mainland Europe at time strange.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Positive_liberty
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_liberty
Google display advert revenue this year (aka YouTube, Doubleclick, etc.) will hit around $2.75 billion while Facebook will likely hit $3.5 billion.

Google's search ad business is safe, but Google's content network could face a major challenge if Facebook launches a competitor. As most people leave Facebook logged in, Facebook could do much more accurate ad targeting as well as avoiding the huge fraud problems that Google faces.
Note that there is an interesting counter-argument in the following HN comment:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2622491

This argument is also applicable to your concrete example, and explains how you can achieve modularity in a strongly typed language even in that case. The type system just has to be flexible enough to allow for module functors.

In other words, the original article's argument holds only for strongly typed languages whose type system is too primitive.
There's no fair and objective way to measure the performance of programmers, managers, doctors, lawyers, chefs, marketers, or actuaries, yet we have no problem with giving them performance reviews and performance-based raises and promotions. In government, we have soldiers, FBI agents, CDC researchers, traffic engineers, and prosecutors, all front-line workers who are paid and promoted according to their performance. Soldiers don't become SEALs through seniority. In all of those fields we find it adequate to rely on the judgment of peers and superiors, augmented with whatever metrics are deemed useful.

It would expose teachers to injustice and favoritism, sure. So what? Those are professional hazards we all face. It is teachers themselves who inform us that grades are always imperfect measurements of performance yet must be accepted because they play a constructive role in our system of education. It is in school that we learn how favoritism and personal animosity affect the official story of our performance. Those are important lessons because they prepare us to work in a world where judgment is necessary but perfect justice is never achieved. Don't you find it ironic that teachers refuse to submit to any unscientific and less-than-perfectly-just evaluation of their performance when they themselves teach children to accept such evaluations as an inevitable fact of modern life?
This makes a lot of sense strategically- as an excel power user it's hard to imagine google docs really ever catching up with excel, but that's not how most people use office. Excel really is a fantastic product, and when used with the excellent analytics plug-in is so awesome for analyzing web analytics & SEO data that it actually makes me glad to be running windows (and I'm not sure I could ever move entirely to Mac/Linux because of how developed these specific niche products are on windows).
Although google clearly could build something of this quality for web analytics data mining, they seem to be moving in the opposite direction, and making the GA interface less powerful (for reasons which are understandable albeit not really admirable)
What I would like to know is: has there been another time when a startup announced a huge deal, was subject to a deluge of negative opinion, and it turned out that the skeptics were right?

Let's be honest -- there's a lot of hate going around, as there tends to be when many startups go big and experience success.

I, for one, am skeptical about Groupon -- as are many here. But, in reading the comments, I am having a tough time separating the genuine skepticism from the generic hate. Both claim to be basing their opinions on rational, informed analysis.
I love the simplicity provided by a good REST API.

ESRI's REST platform is a good example of a nice, clean API. Very easy to diagnose and resolve issues, especially with tools like Fiddler.

A really nice feature to have in a REST API is the ability to run operations in an HTML form. With this, you can re-run requests in the browser and tweak parameters to help you diagnose issues. Very useful.
I prefer Charles: http://www.charlesproxy.com/
Very Informative post. It would be much better if can share how would you scale it in future and what's your business model.

Thanks and best of luck!
All the media backlash against Groupon is going to make it a very entertaining IPO day.
I disagree. The different between building software and baking a cake is that we've had thousands of years to perfect a few dozen types of cake. The recipes are well-known and easy to follow.

Building software is very much in its infancy and many magnitudes harder than baking a cake.

And any manager who thinks just having the right ingredients, people and recipe will guarantee a good cake has never baked a cake, anyhow.
Schumer Pushes to Shut Down Online Drug Marketplace
https://massivedatasets.wordpress.com/ from a Danish Technical University course with the same name
...no. That's not how it works. Your wallet has a pool of private keys. Addresses are the corresponding public keys. You can send or receive from any address you have the private key for (minor simplification, but doesn't affect my point).

There is no transaction necessary to send money from a completely new address, other than the transaction itself. All of your addresses point to the same wallet.
Scaling is easy for this, I have a team of people we use for events who have agreed to come onboard and help with any contrats we get for this.

Our business model is to charge people for organising, hiring or providing items or advice
Accessibility and complexity are two very different things which you seem to conflate. The percentage of a device which a user of any given capability can understand has undeniably dropped.

With a new computer, like a modern automobile, you can't hope to understand how it works. With an old automobile, for example, two screwdrivers and a socket set could get you at the internals. You can't take a soldering iron to a new computer and expect to make anything useful happen.
Looks good. I'll give it a try, thanks.

One problem I have is dealing with viewing my Comet connection (long-lived XHR). I stream JSON to the browser and Fiddler picks up and is able to display all this data, but prevents it from being received by the browser. Would be nice to not have this problem so I can see my JSON events in Fiddler and in my UI.
People log into Facebook to see their friends' drunken photos from last night.

People browse to Google to find information - which lends itself naturally to ads about products and services.
A problem for who? How does this parallel the auto industry situation at all?
I scanned the post, and I have no idea what service you offer.
2010 Census: Ethnic & Racial breakdown within the major Metro Areas
It should be noted the Motl is a prominent physicist who is very smart, very sure of himself, very outspoken, and sometimes very wrong. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lubo%C5%A1_Motl for more.

That said he makes good points, and knows physics much, much better than most of the people proposing digital theories.
Show HN: (version 2) my customer validation page, a simple analytics solution
Thanks, these are good tips. Could you point me to a resource on setting up Analytics to track individual keywords? Right now all referrals from AdWords look the same to me ("referring site: googleads.g.doubleclick.net").
Reading this it became clear that it probably makes sense to build a "boxcar for growl" - unfortunately I didn't find such a thing with a quick google.

Still it seems to be history/central inbox for your unread notifications doesn't just make sense for your phone - it makes sense everywhere you receive notifications.
Following: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2597125
Oh those magazine type-in games were utter turds - many did I type in that didn't work properly (partially due to my abysmal typing accuracy at the time).
really M$!!!
It would have make sense if they painted TUX though.
By extension, Rails is built on a house of cards - a language team that does not intend to support it, and doesn't care if they cause a majority of their international users a great deal of pain. That would be, as I said before, disappointing and frustrating.

While the MRI team benefits enormously from the international success of Ruby that is largely attributable to Rails, you are right that they are not technically obligated to promptly fix egregious performance regressions. A certain portion of the developer community might feel that it is irresponsible not to support your user base.
Domain Dollars: Pay.com Now Up For Sale
Great job!

Also, there are many other Javascript visualization libraries besides the Google Chart API that you might want to know about (if you did't). All of them are open and can be locally run.

Check out e.g.

http://vis.stanford.edu/protovis/

http://flare.prefuse.org/
Making Time
Lulzsec Attempts Nintendo Hack - No Customer Information Lost
1 or 2 years is a more likely timeframe.
How the smartphone is killing the PC
GOOG-411 is an example of this process. Google got voice samples and users got a service. When the voice training parameters stopped getting better the service was shut off.
Sharing this primarily in-light of the discussion in the latest Sony-hack story[1] on HN. Something being discussed was how common is shoddy enterprise security. Seeing a hack attempt against Nintendo fail by one of the same groups that hacked Sony recently was pertinent.

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2621844
OK - I have no illusions about winning the contest, but just for fun I gave it a go by adding support to my existing Android app, SocialMediaTicker. My app is designed for when your device is charging or otherwise idle and is a bit of an eye-candy display. It's a 3D, interactive ticker-tape type display that scrolls facebook feeds, twitter streams, news headlines, photos, rss feeds, etc. Click once to stop an item, click on it again to call up the full photo, story, rss feed, etc.

For HN, I added a headline search capability and also made it part of my experimental Twitter Trends mashup where the search terms for content automatically come from the currently trending topics under Twitter. This can be hit-and-miss for HN as oftentimes Twitter trending terms don't match well to the topics found under HN, but other times I've been surprised about what pops up.

If you want to give the mashup a try, I'd turn most other content off, turn the mashup on, sit back and watch what happens! Configuration of all content can be found in the preferences menu. By default HN is off.

To give it a try on your Android, download the app here:

http://www.socialmediaticker.com/SocialMediaTicker.apk

Feedback appreciated!
Is there a photo of said rocket engine? I scrolled through the blog but didn't find anything specific.

Filming the launch from an Arducopter was pretty cool though.
Also

JavaScript InfoVis Toolkit
http://thejit.org/
Filming the launch from an Arducopter was pretty cool though.

I thought so too!

Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X_1PpBMtGrA#t=2m36s
Quantum Physics & Natural Language Processing (pp. 8-11)
With these sorts of stories, it makes me wonder if Google's relevance could drop in the future. Success through the system seems to be gamed.
What is most important is if your business works (gets traction/clients). The name and branding is only secondary.

Explain to the other company that you agree and will change your name shortly. Start thinking of a new name and get some more clients to get some cash. If you have a good business, than it can also work without a name.

It is sad to have wasted so much money just because of the name. But look for marketing solutions where you don't need to pay anything. If you already had some clients, propose some advantages if they get you more clients. etc.
http://www.excitingevents.co.uk/
Show HN: HNSearch PopDots (Potential HNSearch API Contest Submission)
Can you let us know if you had better luck with Charles?
Hmm I have come across many a codebase in countless languages where there was no way to discern that type of information from the naming convention. Even accessors in say C# or Java are perfectly legit to do any side effect they want. In fact I think it is worse in those situations - because side effects are not modeled. Indeed, no language has found a way to model non-termination in the type system, hence the halting problem.

Honestly I just haven't experienced this very often in Haskell... When I do it is usually a 'doh moment and a simple fix.
Some Thoughts on Cancer from a Hacker
A simple graph showing the popularity (as determined by the HN community via points) of whatever 'topic' you search for. This is nothing fancy, all on the client side (so it's hosted statically on github).

I didn't want to spend too much time on it, but feedback is more than welcome (there's still some time before the submission deadline :)