skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Thanks!! I missed your post the last time. This will be extremely useful as I have just started prototyping an electronics product I hope to get released soon and your I think links will nicely fit my needs.

Can you comment on the regulations you're talking about as I'd like to prepare for future hurdles as best as I can. I'm guessing you mean compliance with FCC regulations and such?

For the OP: I have spent about €400 on parts for building two prototype units. Most of the parts were ordered on Mouser and with a few random bits and pieces on ebay. Of course, I'm not building processors or anything like that, but rather consumer (EDIT: well, not really consumer, more like specialized electronics.. I don't expect to ever sell these in an average electronics store) electronic devices (can't release details just yet, as I am in talks with potential investors). Curts links may prove extremely useful here.
Mostly, this. I've seen Java go fast and work well and scale and do other "enterprise-y" things, but there is tons and tons of awful software out there.

I just feel like there are better choices for most projects.
Sharing devices are the future of marketing
It's time for atheists and agnostics need to "come out of the closet". Something like 10-20% of Americans are non-religious, but they don't realize how many others are out there.

They are expected to keep their beliefs to themselves, yet believers in any random religion are allowed to express their diverse beliefs. Polls show that Americans would prefer to elect a homosexual president over an atheist president.
A search engine has many moving parts and we found that the existing technology worked but with great pain.

Lucene/Solr is great for search but it's useless without a fast datastore. Additionally, you can't expose it to the open internet so you need to build a REST API wrapper around the DB/index.

One particularly acute problem we had at Octopart was search across a frequently changing schema. We have 15M parts in our database so it was a real pain to change the schema. ThriftDB uses the Thrift serialization protocol internally to maintain a flexible schema so you can change the schema independently of the underlying data.

The current implementation of ThriftDB takes advantage of solr in smart ways to simplify app development dramatically. At Octopart we found that we were spending a lot of time building custom search solutions. Now we're using the same backend technology to search for electronic parts on Octopart and comments on Hacker News.

Using ThriftDB for search is like going from a compiled language to a scripting language. It takes care of a lot of issues so you can focus on app development.

Hope that explanation helps! Please let me know if you have more questions.
Can you elaborate into how that could be a problem?
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Get on Facebook, Twitter and email when you really want to.
I suppose that's because it would be easier for people to move around to where the bigger slices are as well.
rkalla's comment about the "negative carpet-bomb style" that this article follows got me thinking: The story focuses on something that seems ridiculous when taken out of context - and no doubt reminded many HN readers of various childhood memories (including me). But it brings up the following question:

What is the best way to go about teaching children of greatly varying abilities/talents/developmental speeds? If you put 2 or 3 really smart and talkative "bullshit-detecting" kids in a class of 25 other regular kids, will all their BS detecting help or harm education of the other 25 kids? If teachers end up allocating a large portion of class time to the 2 or 3 smart kids, wouldn't this detract from teaching the other 25? (And I have to say, I'm at the moment thinking back with embarrassment at the number of times I pointed out exceptions that rendered a teacher's assertion incorrect - was this a good use of classroom time taken as a whole?).

In reality, public schools teach to the middle. It could be that most kids aren't ready to learn independent thinking skills before age 15 or so, and that trying to encourage this is just a waste of time. Or perhaps it could be taught to all at an early age. I don't know, but it's an interesting question.

In my mind, there's an obvious solution which is to some extent already done. Segregate the bright, BS-detecting kids into classes more appropriate for them. Encourage them to continue along their path of independent thinking and accelerated learning without disrupting the education of those in the middle.
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Because Wall Street runs the government. Haven't you been paying attention?
Uh, yeah. Adrian Lamo is the guy who ratted out Bradley Manning to the feds.
I hadn't been aware of ChaiScript until now, but its C++ binding techniques are similar to what I developed for my LikeMagic project, a (mostly-)language-independent C++ script language binding project, with Io as its first backend language. Interesting case of parallel evolution; I'll have to contact the author to see if he wants to collaborate on ideas - we even happen to use the same BSD license for our two projects.

https://github.com/dennisferron/LikeMagic
Sir, please email me to guali.mexico@gmail.com ... Ill be glad offering some job for you :)
Power. It works.
There are two components to this. On one hand, there's cost-shifting so that students who would otherwise default (and be chased by the government for the money) aren't as screwed. On the other hand, this arrangement has students paying much more money for the same thing in the average case.
"That's just semantics" is a common way of saying "you're arguing over semantics instead of the point." When arguing semantics is disguised as a genuine rebuttal, it's a fallacy.

If I say the sky is blue, and you assert the sky has no color, you're not actually contradicting my assertion you're disagreeing about the meaning of the word 'sky'. That's arguing semantics instead of addressing the point.
One downside of your suggested placement is it would push down page content about 20px. But I agree that the footer is sub-optimal.
C / C++ are fun :)
Client Performance Monitoring with Boomerang and CouchDB
>"But, the option is there, as it could happen."

And you know someone is going to use [awful library] to solve [big problem] and it will "work".
Ask HN: Anyone in LA want to do a mini HN cafe meetup?
I don't see any outrage there...
ThriftDB uses Solr internally so I don't want to give the impression that we've built new full-text indexing technology. Our goal with ThriftDB was to solve the search infrastructure problem. We wanted to give developers access to fast, scalable, on-demand, cloud-based search.

Here's a link to the ThriftDB docs in case you'd like to learn more:

http://www.thriftdb.com/documentation
SAL and VCC are for making C programs correct. This is related but not the same thing as making the C compiler correct. These source-level tools assume that the compiler translates the programs correctly.
To clarify a bit... Small meetup today to grab coffee (or beers) and take HN offline for a bit (same topics but in real life and in real time.)
Well this is as far as I got in about an hour for adding a /hn tag to Unscatter.com - http://www.unscatter.com/search/?q=%2Fhn+facebook

Javascript paging still isn't and it needs to be prettied up, but I figure not bad for about an hours worth of work. And a good demonstration of the framework Unscatter.com is built on being suitable for rolling out new apis pretty quickly.

I'd wrap it up today but I got family stuff today, should be complete by 6/20. Until I finish the javascript and layout /hn won't be advertised on the sidebar, but anyone is free to start using it, I won't be turning it off.
Microsoft to buy nVidia
I love Python as a language, but I am frustrated by its dynamic typing. I'm surprised there has been more research into static type inference for Python (and JavaScript). Google App Engine's Python libraries implement manual type checking of API parameters (with typeof and exception raising) to make the APIs harder to misuse.

The Boo programming language is heavy influenced by Python, but includes static typing and type inference. Unfortunately, Boo requires the .NET Runtime.
o the lulz-

pg today:
"Sorry this took so long. For a while we hoped to implement our own search, but it became apparent that would take a lot of work to do right"

pg 392 days ago:
"The explanation is a lot less involved than your question: what makes users happy is not features, but the quality of the submissions and comments. So I focus on the latter instead of the former. The result is a spartan site with good content.
There's a YC funded startup that may solve the problem. If they do I'll use them. But frankly the issue is not at the top of my list. This is a classic example of how one should give users what they want, not what they say they want. Lots of people say they want search, but I would be suprised if there was a single user who'd left HN because it lacked search. Whereas if I let the frontpage get filled up with crap, or the comment threads filled up with mean or stupid comments, people would start leaving pretty quickly. So almost all the time I spend thinking about HN is spent thinking about how to avoid that."
-source: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1329334

To your credit you did come back with the YC investment product, but please don't disguise the fact that you didn't think search was necessary in the first place. Seems pumping up your investment was the impetuous that changed your mind. Nothing wrong with that at all, just let's keep the story factual. This is a classic example of how one should give users what increases value of a portfolio sister company and dressing it up as something else, not what they say they want.
The UK has a visa waiver for transit passengers (they're not that idiotic, they want Heathrow to keep being the big hub that it is; you do get to talk to an officer, but you generally don't need to apply in advance). Generally UK immigration is bad (like having to turn up and give your fingerprints every time you apply for a visa, so no application by post; in my case, that means a flight of 1,100 km and back every 6 months). Here's a blog post according to which being on a dissertation defense committee also requires a work permit (according to possibly overzealous HR): http://timesonline.typepad.com/dons_life/2010/10/world-class...

Most Schengen countries are more or less straightforward per se, though I'm not sure how his case would pan out (here in Norway, according to the immigration authority's webpage, "researchers and lecturers" are exempt from the work permit requirement, though I'm not sure how broad that category is).
The frontend is not verified. This part parses, checks and lowers C code to a Clight. There is no formal specification of C itself and that would be the first step to verify the frontend.
When I first read what "hellban" is my first thought was "6th sense".
I find myself in a double bind about the idea. On one hand, it's a pretty passive-aggressive way of dealing with problem users. On the other hand, I can't think of any better ideas. The thing about problem users is that if you don't take care of them quickly enough, they tend to gather a following that ruins things for everyone else.
I wish those people were more forthcoming. I am deeply and devoutly religious, but I don't blame many for their reactions to religion given its common course. I was always taught to ask questions. My teachers, parents, and other role models were generally welcoming and did not seem afraid of inquisition (in fact, they would invite it, and invite us to explore other religions -- the opposite occurs in most Christian denominations), and I think that played a big role in my continuance in the faith.

There is a deep, endless reality to pure religion, found in many sects. Most, however, follow their religion because it's part of their tradition, and it's something that makes them comfortable. They have a very superficial understanding of its components and mainly practice (to the extent that they do practice) to help themselves feel better. Of course, when challenged, they take the intellectually lazy out of belittling and discrediting the source instead of ever considering their questions on a philosophical level.

That is not pure religion. Pure religion is a rigorous, demanding, constant program of self-improvement, discipline, learning, and love. It can be found in many sects to the degree that its practitioners embrace and internalize the principles espoused. Pure religionists love inquisition and they love learning. They are also generally more intellectually active and less likely to tout religion as a badge when pursuing political office (not that that happens very often either), etc.

To you atheists, we know you've had bad experiences, and we know that there are a lot of people out there trying to embarrass religionists, but please remember that there is a non-vocal minority, much smaller than the general religious population but still not insignificant, for whom religion is deep and serious, and not a matter of silencing curiosity to make way for comfortable lies about ourselves.
I think my spam filter does a pretty good job at being dismissive, and I am thankful for it.
To be realistic: The frontend is not verified. Only very few optimizations are done. It only seems to have a PPC backend.

However, i still think verified compilers are the future. It will just take two or three decades until we see them at LLVM quality.
Awesome! It would be great to start a discussion about ranking algorithms in the HNSearch developer forum (http://groups.google.com/group/hnsearch). We'd like to implement some ThriftDB features to tweak ranking algorithms automatically but that won't be ready for a while.
Well, I'm not for or against Java or any other language. I agree that there can certainly be "bad" choices for specific problems, but it's absurd to think that Java specifically (or COBOL) is some kind of scalability magic bullet.

<offtopic>
It's been a while since I worked with PHP, but when looking at performance or distributing work I can appreciate the desire to migrate to a different language. I've always seen PHP as more of an over-ambitious template language (even though smarty and so on exist to perform this function on top of PHP). Basically I'm not surprised by your story.
</offtopic>
See http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2619898
You get paid for making the right thing, not the most thing. If long hours is accomplishing that, and making you happy, go nuts. But it's not the only, or necessarily the best, way to get there.
I doubt that will happen but would love to see it
Would you mind emailing me with your ideas? andres@octopart.com
Yes, by "that's just semantics", I meant that it doesn't matter which party you call the customer. The thrust of the argument is still that Groupon is screwing over merchants and that I'm not convinced that merchants will continue to work with Groupon.
Yes, the situation today is an extraordinary dilemma. I'm not sure why hypochondriacs are so common today but I would speculate that this it is because many people are starved for attention.

But you have a situation where a doctor, who is a highly professional but not a research scientist, confronts a growing number of individuals who have gotten a mass of scientific information from the Internet but are proportionately even less likely to engage in a rational process of determining what malady they have. Some of these patients probably know what's wrong with them much better than the doctor but what percentage is it? What is likely to happen given a health care system which measures the doctor's visit times by the second?

Perhaps there should be online exam for patients wanting to diagnose themselves, including basic test of inferential reasoning? Hey, there's a startup idea for you - a website which prepares your diagnosis using language your doctor can understand.
Comment scores are back! (in a convoluted way, through the API). I can see that at this time that the top comment of this page currently (tptacek's) has 58 points:

http://api.thriftdb.com/api.hnsearch.com/items/_search?filte...
I haven't even gotten into ranking yet. I took the example url and rolled with that. I think the first thing I'll focus on is seeing if I can also offer /hncomment and /hnlinks to help people search different types, then work on the algorithms for all 3. Once I have /hn display looking good I can roll it out to the other 2 pretty quickly.
I can report that some elements of the US Immigration/Visa system have gotten much smoother in the last 15 years. In particular, coming from Canada to work at Netscape in 1996, I was turned back the first time, and the third time, because the inspector did not like my paperwork (The first time, kind of made sense - it wasn't particularly well prepared. The third time, though, had been prepared by a law firm. The inspector indicated that my Diploma wasn't clearly from a University Level organization. They were the only inspector in 12 years to ever make that comment and refuse entry on that basis)

For a while, in 2000-2002, they were kind of snarky when they had seen that I'd come in multiple times on a "Temporary Visa", though perhaps that was just to remind me that my trip to the US was, indeed, temporary. Eventually, after 5 or 6 minutes of grilling, the would grant me a multiple-entry TN Visa.

Since 2008/2009, though, the process has been streamlined to a single letter with a single diploma, (literally) five-seven minutes waiting in their waiting area at the airport, and one minute at the counter, $50 Payment, and I'm good for another 3 years. If I want to, I can even apply by mail.

So - properly accredited Canadians (2 Year Diploma+, letter from an employer properly formatted) who want to work in the United States as Computer Systems Analysts, have a system that's as streamlined as you can get it, without having completely open borders.
Interesting middle ground between Swig+(C++)+$scripting_language and pure C++.

A key weakness I see here is the lack of a standard library for Chaiscript.

If I choose to use my preferred approach of Swig+(C++)+Tcl, I get a command line REPL shell and Tcl's excellent file I/O stuff, regex, string functions etc for free (the Tcl pieces I mentioned are never the efficiency bottlenecks in the sort of compute-intensive programs I write).

I don't see enough here to convince me that it's better than pure C++ or swig+scripting language.
We're not quoting him because he's a cult leader. We're quoting him because it was a reasonably insightful blog post that is relevant to the topic. I, in fact, have no clue who Steve is, and found the posted link a valuable addition to the discussion. If you believe it was not so, I'd love to hear your reasons.
I'm on the other end (hire folks remotely). New folks are impossible to hire because there's no way to judge how much you do in an hour.

If people have past projects I can see: "they built X app for Y price." But if you're new, all I see is an hourly rate, which means nothing.

You can solve this 2 ways

1) lower your rate so low that someone hires you, and build up your experience so you can charge more

2) show examples of your work, with prices. "I built this. If you wanted a site just like this, it would cost you $XXXX (XX hours)".

No one does the latter. I wish they would.
Most economists will trumpet the increase in societal or collective well-being but will never give you a straight answer about who accrues the gains, who accrues the losses, and what amends -- if any -- should be made towards the economic losers to encourage them to support the proposed schemes. When asked about these matters, most economists claim that these are outside their science. Then they are surprised that people refuse to go along with their plans for maximizing societal well-being.
MetaFilter has been doing this for years too and it works ridiculously well. You have to see a list of potential matches before you can commit your post. So +1 to that.
I'm already working on integrating the api in unscatter.com using a /hn tag - http://www.unscatter.com/search/?q=%2Fhn+facebook (currently only functional)
Exactly.

How do I find this comment through the API? How do I find its replies?
I don't know if engineering is the world's second oldest profession, but its interesting to know what google says is the world's oldest profession: prostitution!
Sounds like sharecropping
The nines and tens are the path, not the destination. It's foolish to argue that any one language represents perfection, or even close.
Will this effect usingmiles.com recent $2.7 million round of funding? http://techcrunch.com/2011/04/06/usingmiles-raises-2-7-milli...
>>This does not argue against all technical progress, it argues against ignoring the cost to future generations.

Creative way of reading Andi's comment. Congratulations. I can see how someone could formulate a position like that, given that he/she is used to argue with people with certain opinions.

The problem, as I noted twice above, is that the other comments shows that Andi is a crazy Luddite which argues against cities. No facts, no references -- lots of claims. (There is a lower environmental impact with half the population in cities than if you spread them out all over the countryside. At leasts without doing a Green Khmer reorg...)

Here is a link:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2601330

Now I have repeated that point three(?) times. You have acknowledged it without touching it twice. I've given a link. Enough.

And yes, it is theoretically possible that the Chinese commit a country-wide economic suicide by not starting to clean up e.g. pollution from coal. But stupidity is not the common sin of the Chinese leaders... (Strip mining and destroying inner Mongolia is another matter.)

Or are you claiming it is economically efficient to not clean up and accept health problems for a large part of the work force? Sure, the Chinese leadership is competent and would be cynical enough... That would be interesting -- do you have references?
Both the article and you are talking in terms of extremes.

Some people work 14+ hour days regularly because they are excited about the work. There is nothing wrong with this. Working 14+ hour days because you feel like you must do so to "keep up" is bad. In general working well past the point where you are productive is bad.

Some people want to slack off and punch the clock, and do not give a crap about their work. This is bad. Some recognize when they've done all of the productive work they can today, and seek to use the remaining time to balance out their life. There is nothing wrong with that, either.

Basically it comes down to reasons and effective self-evaluation. If you're working 14+ hours while being useful and engaged, great for you. If you're doing it as some badge of honor and hacking together crap because you're tired, you really aren't helping.

Know yourself, and your limits. Use them as tools to do the best you can. The only people you should fire here are the ones who refuse to do this.
Tackling my first Clojure project, a Graphical HTTP Benchmarker in Clojure
Even "telecommuting", assuming it's normal "work" and not just meetings or chat, is not technically allowed under a normal VWP. But.. it happens a lot anyway.
But for "disease most doctors won't see in a lifetime of practice" it generally is appropriate (or at least some form of dismissal is appropriate), since the patient is generally wrong.

NB: "generally" in this case means approx 99.9% of the time.