skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is a plan I could sign on to (for the most part), but as Winestock said, such a plan would never get support.

It is not a coincidence that Presidential elections are as close as they are. Politicians essentially buy votes to get elected, in the form of government programs.

The problem in this country is medical entitlements - not so much Social Security. Social Security in theory funds itself, although Social Security's funds have been raided to fund other programs which now jeopardize its future.

Politicians will not address medical entitlements, because they will lose too many votes in doing so. Ultimately it's these medical entitlements that will bankrupt our country, and in the process, cause the greatest transfer of wealth in the history of the U.S. - not from the rich to the poor, but from the young, to the old.

Most people who support medical entitlements do so for "selfish" reasons, in that they want those entitlements to be available for themselves, their family, and/or their friends. They say things like "health care is a right," although it obviously is not a right. Health care is essentially the result of man's labor, and to say you have a right to health care, is to say you have a right to impose your needs on another man. Which of course is silly and inconsistent with the American constitution.

Still - people will assert their right to medical entitlements, and politicians will oblige, which in the long-run will pull money away from business investment (not all businesses are rich with billions in cash). The added financial burden will either stifle entrepreneurship and innovation, or it will send it oversees.

Of course, anyone who stands up against medical entitlements, like Paul Ryan, will be referred to as a villain who wants to murder old people. To quote the President: "throw grandma off the cliff."

That's my long-term prediction, anyway.

In the short-term we will continue to go through up and down cycles. Each down cycle will bring fear. Each up cycle will bring relief. There will be booms and busts in America's near-future, although the booms will be short-lived, and the busts (like our current bust) will be longer-lived.

To the extent innovators, like many of the people on HackerNews, are able to create great innovations, we can postpone the day of reckoning for our country.
Sorry, we didn't mean to ask advice from one person. We're hoping to get feedback from anyone. What's the best way to do this? Sorry again!
Big DIY: The Year the Maker Movement Broke
And thanks for taking the time to point out our mistake! Otherwise we wouldn't know what we're doing wrong.
"My period of greatest creative output was during my corporate years, when every meeting felt like a play date with coma patients."

Love that line.
Surely most of the software running this site is simply HTML with some basic data movement and storage going on in the backend.

I'm not sure this really even qualifies as 'software' ;)

It could have been written in php/asp/python/perl etc and would have functioned exactly the same, be about the same lines of code, as maintainable, as prone to bugs and so on.

In fact, I seem to remember Reddit rewrote from lisp to python in a weekend?...
The usual strategy is to make it very exclusive, but let it be known that it exists. Exclusivity is a powerful motivator. Start with one group of very interesting and highly motivated people and move outwards.
Interesting. How long do you think before HTML5 video can displace Flash and other proprietary players?
At one point I ran a social network around cars. Basically people would upload pics of their ride and attach all the gear that went into the car. I personally didn't own a car or know much about them, so what to do?

I ended up going in person to a bunch of meetup groups in the SF area with a Polaroid and digital camera. I'd ask dudes if they minded if I took pictures of their cars for my website. I'd take a bunch with the digital camera and then take one with the polaroid. I'd then write down a user/pass on the back of it along with the site's URL. Then I'd go home that night and build separate profiles for each car.

We got hundreds of user profiles this way. After a couple months we had a decent little community. Enough to scare our largest competitor into making an offer on the site.

When it comes to social networks, it's often much easier to market outside of your terminal.
Jiffy is awesome!
I think you make a fair point. Yes, that is true. It is a high-risk investment for other employees, and different people can take different level of risks.

It would not be fair to ask a late thirty person to take the same risk as a early twenty person. People have different financial concerns in different stage of lives.

I think a good founder need to consider that. It is just not right to ask everyone takes the same risk as the founders do.
ironically, Yahoo Mail is now rewriting chunks of their C++ backend in Java, because thats what new grads are taught these days instead of C++.

Back in 2003 pretty much all of ymail was in C++ with this crazy templating language that generated C++ code. Now it's all PHP and Javascript on the frontend. I assume that's true for other properties as well but i don't know first-hand.
My understanding, and I could be wrong here, is that Intellectual Ventures lists the companies that bought protection from it as 'Investors'.
Mulberry laukku
* Do your best to summarize the implications of the US downgrade on Friday.

* Maybe put together a quick video for easy sharing.

* Use the free $80 AdWords gift certificate to run a 5-day , high-CPC campaign (strike while the iron is hot).

* Put up AdSense for a small amount of income and put links to your main site or other projects to take advantage of the traffic.

I'm no expert in finance, but take a look at some relevant KhanAcademy videos [1],[2],[3]

[1] http://www.khanacademy.org/video/treasury-bond-prices-and-yi...

[2] http://www.khanacademy.org/video/banking-12---treasuries--go...

[3] http://www.khanacademy.org/video/american-chinese-debt-loop?...
I plan on picking it up after I finish ZATAOMM
Irrespective of should or shouldn't, it isn't. And Google knows it now, and should have known it then. They could have licensed the relevant patents - after all, that appears to be what Apple did in the case of Loadsys and the reason they are not being sued, and it appears to be what Microsoft did with portions of the Nortel portfolio which is why they were concerned enough to participate in its purchase.

With Android Google stepped into a mature market for the first time and appears to have committed rookie errors - it's not the stuff in the Nortel or Novell portfolios which is generating income for Microsoft - and a lot of Microsoft's patents were created through old fashioned in-house R&D - exactly the sort of innovation which should be protected.

<cynical_speculation>It may have been in Google's interest to turn Andorid into Open Source in October of 2008 due to the liability incurred when Microsoft acquired Danger's patent portfolio earlier in the year. Particularly in light of Google's antipatent corporate culture and Andy Rubin's role in creating Google's phone software.</cynical_speculation>
Amazon now owns the service I mentioned, shelfari, and ties in directly to wish lists and purchases I believe.
You failed. I blame title and tone.
Is S&P in the business of politics (re: sending a message), or accurately stating whether the US would be able to pay its debts?
I get frustrated because I am pretty horrible (in my mind) at these kind of math puzzles ("Given N numbers , [N<=10^5] we need to count the total pairs of numbers that have a difference of K. [K>0 and K<1e9]..."). My frustration is compounded when I know that I won't really need to write this kind of Project Euler-style programs in 90% of jobs.

Your company is a web app, I can write web apps; why am I solving problem sets from undergrad Discrete Math to demonstrate competence? Why not have the tasks be like "Use AJAX to pull down a users last 10 tweets and display them on a web page"?

Maybe it's because the only samples are generic and not submitted by the companies, but I was hoping for a bit more relevance to the intended job duties than yet-another-interview-puzzle.
Approximately half of these are people reporting the where-abouts of people with outstanding warrants. I agree that those should not have been released.

The other half appear to be neighbours slandering neighbours out of personal grudges.
It's safe to say the many of the workers who tried to stabilize the reactors will meet early ends due to cancer, etc. Beyond that, we'll learn that from public health statistics.
This helps for campus placements where you can't Realky get others to code for you.
With certain "provable" professions, like programming, where it is possible to prove talent/fit directly -- as opposed to by proxy with a college degree or past experience -- do you see college becoming less relevant as online education and online hiring improves?
@geius:

3) Health care: it is screwed up because of the economic model. A single payer system is much more efficient with the government overhead at 5% vs private at 20%. Allow the govt to negotiate drug prices. Currently it's prohibited by law. Streamline the FDA without losing effectiveness.

4) Social Security is in decent shape. Dont cut benefits. If necessary, raise the retirement age. That's a fair trade-off for improved health care.

+ Fix campaign financing to remove the "hidden" corruption that is distorting Congress. Roll back anti-trust a hundred years to the age of the trust-busters. Roll back Republican/Bush deregulation so that banks aren't too big to fail, so that Rupert Murdock doesnt own all news channels. Cone down hard on regulatory capture. (The govt gang that was watching BP should be in jail.)

Edit: Oh yeah taxes. Roll back the Bush tax cuts. My share of the tax cuts was $300 on a 6 figure income. At the time I wished Bush has gone for deficit reduction. The $300 made very little difference to me. Close the loopholes. The oil companies dont need subsidies.
They've been working on a new GC for Mono that is better for ASP.NET and similar type of applications. By default, Mono uses the Boehm GC, but since 2.8 you can choose the new generational GC (--gc=sgen command line parameter). As far as I know it's very close to being deemed production-worthy.
But, but, so pretty and elegant!

quick_sort([]) ->
[];
quick_sort([H | T]) ->
quick_sort([X || X <- T, X < H]) ++ [H] ++ quick_sort([X || X <- T, X >= H]).
Previous submissions:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2791565

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2793205

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2796291

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2798214

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2798498

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2830149

Interestingly, none of them have any comments ...
If you haven't looked the source, and therefore don't know what it does or how long it is, how can you know whether it would be the same length translated into other languages?
Not taken that way. I expect the real number is somewhere between the 20 billion from this article, and the 1.5 billion the Pentagon responded with in their reply. 1.5 billion is probably the line item in the budget that says "tent AC", while different calculations assuming sundry costs can reach higher, and some of it probably is PR inflation.

The main point not being the specific final total, but rather that the cost, and other logistical costs like it, would be reduced or possibly eliminated if troops weren't in the field.
Huh? Estimates on deaths due to the Chernobyl disaster are in excess of 1 million people.

In that case, even in the immediate aftermath, a couple of battalions of soldiers and firemen died within months.
Maybe post the ratings from the other relevant agencies as well? The US is still rated AAA by several other nationally recognized credit rating agencies.
It was done in one big rewrite.
Support for solving programming challenges in Bash? Killer feature!
Is It Ever Worth It To Set Yourself On Fire?
The future of the search engine? more alternatives but not killing what we are using now.
Isn't this what we did originally? Why did you say we asked only a single member? Thanks again for your help! Someone changed the title.
He can't, so he is just making an assumption (whether from experience or not, who knows). But I would be interested in some information about the HN codebase...

Is it shorter? Less error-prone? Simpler?
I agree with this. Creative bursts usually come at midnight when I force myself to switch everything off and go sleep or when I'm stuck on an aeroplane with nothing to do at all than sit and stare out of the window.

I however, won't miss staring at people while in line at chipotle. I also disagree with the sentiment that innovation itself is dead because of readily available distraction.
Yep. This talk has made me want to watch and read everything Kay had ever done. He and Steele have laid out the clearest case for inventing new languages that I've heard.

Have you, perchance, heard Steele's "How to Grow a Language" (not too relevant, but also a great talk).
We tried changing the title back (to include "Ask HN," which we had originally) several times, but the update times out. We're not sure who edited the original title. We thought it was you at first. :P

Thanks again for your help!
90% of the Decisions You Make Don’t Matter
Ebook-Deal
I do not like un-necessary editorializing of material. If there is no title, sure, make a relevant title, but if the content producer has decided to present her material in a specific manner, its her call.

I do not agree that we are not her audience. We wont be discussing the issue at hand otherwise, would we? and that was her intent I suppose: To stimulate a discussion about teaching methodology among us, who care.
I doubt it, their userbase is 50% bigger than it was a year a go. I think the last number they released was 750 million.
This advice should be shown to every kid in high school that's considering to pay someone to build his web start-up.

OP, I hope you realize that the costs to maintain the website will, in the long run, probably be a lot higher than the costs of building the initial website.
My advice is the same: Learn to code. Your view of what makes a good start-up will change for the better after having built a few small websites of your own.
Hi Swanson, totally agree to your comment. We're going live in a week's time where hackers can solve real-world problems. Mind dropping an e-mail to team@interviewstreet.com ? Would get back to you once it's live.
If you're expecting sustained inflation then don't hold debt. Take your cash and buy rental properties with the crazy-low mortgage rates we have now. If we get sustained inflation then rental rates will go up while your fixed-interest mortgage payments will stay the same. Profit.
Mbt schuhe günstig
Company Pays Seven Figures for .XXX Domains
Name Administration has paid a reported seven figure cash sum to acquire a number of keyword .XXX domain names from the ICM Registry.
It certainly qualifies as "software." What possible definition of "software" would exclude a web application?

Obviously, literally any software could be identically implemented in any language. Lines of code don't really matter, but I strongly expect that the Arc code of HN is much more concise than an implementation in php/asp/python/perl would be, even if you used a web framework. PG prides himself in the conciseness of the HN code, and Arc seems to lend itself to concise implementations of web apps.

As for maintainability and bug proneness, both depend more on the programmer(s) than the language.
You've done an excellent job of summarizing why Google does what it does: extremely few languages, and all code must pass readability review (or be written by an author with readability for the language(s) used) before it can be committed.

Though reading code isn't just it, language interop everyone knows how to use is important too. While all the fancy JVM languages have Java interop, it's still a huge pain for every old Java developer who wants to call your Clojure library. They'll end up learning how to do it separately for every language, every time, multiplied by the number of developers who aren't fluent in these languages (most).
The potentially employee should definitely be thinking "if the time comes". But I think a founder should probably be thinking "when the time comes" - being certain of eventual success is a powerful contributor to succeeding so long as it doesn't make you unrealistc about the work required to do so.
Visualising Wikipedia search statistics (in R)
Because 90% of the population uses Microsoft Windows?
> Not to mention the rarity of these processed minerals elsewhere is not due to the scarcity but rather due to the heavy processing & costs required to extract them.

This distinction is only important if we consider a future where technological advances significantly bring down the cost of extraction. Here and now, the only thing that is important is the amount that is extractable for a reasonable price. (Or, more specifically, the shape of the supply curve.) If there were a trillion trillion tons of the stuff behind an invisible force-field that we couldn't get past, that would nominally remove the scarcity but it wouldn't practically matter.
Stack Overflow is down for maintenance, so here's a cached version:

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:QfU7Ls3...
https://github.com/nex3/arc/blob/master/news.arc
Actually, there's very little HTML in the news.arc codebase. The front-end bits are mostly functions that generate HTML in a rather abstract way.

Also, at a certain level of skill, you can rewrite just anything in a weekend — but that doesn't mean the code is as clean, as lean, as maintainable or as correct. It just means you've approximated the most obvious functionality in the software.
"If I'm working on any sort of problem needing a programming solution, and someone suggests we use lisp, I buy that person a copy of "The pragmatic Programmer", and tell them to read it closely."

Then I'd recommend you go back and read it closely yourself, because there's an entire chapter on domain-specific programming which includes tips on implementing mini-languages to write code close to the problem space, which is a very Lispy suggestion.
Lines of code is probably the wrong term for me to use. Since it's bogus. (Depends on how much the language provides, libraries, etc and doesn't necessarily capture program complexity).

A more accurate term would be "Required programming effort".

Would you agree that it would take a similar amount of effort for a proficient PHP programmer to write HN, as a proficient Lisp programmer etc?

FWIW, I have just looked at the source and IMHO I'd expect it to be extremely similar in PHP/other languages.
Thanks, I didn't actually read the TC post all the way though (I just went to your site directly) so I missed the part where you addressed this in the article. Glad to see you understand my perspective.
Doesn't ITA count? (Powers Orbitz, acquired by Google for a fairly significant amount of money).

Also see here: http://www.franz.com/success/
"lie", "things that are irrelevant" ... Opinionated words. I have not read the pragmatic programmer, but I fear that you just gave it a bad rap.
.. the Arizona publication?
Well... I guess he was a born teacher and cannabis helped a lot.
that those tanks are used to assert and defend economic dominance

And the need for the assertion of force to defend economic dominance in turn cements the need for the military machine and perpetuates the military-industrial complex. We are essentially in agreement. I think it would be better for the US to concentrate on economic dominance through sheer commercial and industrial awesomeness combined with forward-thinking research and exploration.
NYT editorial on secrecy re Apple Store in Grand Central
http://so12.edublogs.org/files/2011/03/bill1-2ecvk9b.gif
You're connecting the two examples too much. While releasing this information may well have malicious intent, robbing a bank to give away money (as this information was hacked -to leak-) isn't exactly malicious. Leaking information that can be a warning or making an example of, now that can be. Intent depends on intent, and the intent of the example bank robbers was to hand out free cash. (and banks are insured...)
For a book about "MOAR CODEZ!" you're giving Rob Sobers short shrift.
Favorite comment: "You're supposed to cover technology, for god's sake. Know the difference between the Web and the Internet."

(Apparently the original title was 'The Internet is 20...')
"actively enabled" doesn't necessarily mean "actively conscient of the full consequences"
A concerted national effort on removing our dependence on foreign energy resources would be a beneficial way to target our resources for the next 30 years or so.

You missed my point. Sure, space exploration won't cure our economic stagnation in the 1 to 30 years time frame. But it will decide if we are a first, second, or third-rate power in the next 100 years.
> It certainly qualifies as "software." What possible definition of "software" would exclude a web application?

My point was that it doesn't do heavy algorithm lifting, processing etc. It's not a phong shading ray tracer or anything.

It's moving data around, storing it and displaying it. It's mostly plumbing work - getting data from one place to another.
"My disgust at Google's ineptitude here knows NO bounds"
I see what you did there. Nice try.
That's a strange way to establish someone's credibility!
Several people in this thread have provided examples.

As for me: I got great grades in elementary school, high school, college, and grad school. I got terrible grades in middle school, on purpose -- I knew they'd be forgotten once I got to high school, and I thought the busy-work required to get good grades was boring and didn't help me learn. The point-accumulation systems we call "grades" are a terrible proxy measurement for actual learning.
Ubuntu Eth0 Missing
Join a community that provides startups with candid feedback on their product
Fine is usually more than enough since fine is usually better than 90% of what's out there. I've been reviewing design shops for a site redesign and most of them not only have less-than-fine* websites, but their clients' websites are equally less-than-fine.

* i.e. bland, uninteresting, a mess under the hood, mildly unusable, ...
I'm late to the party again.

To understand the importance of closures it might be interesting to look at this poster[1]. Look at the node in the top left that says "Functional programming". Every paradigm that descends from that node depends on closures. THAT's how important they are.

[1] http://www.info.ucl.ac.be/~pvr/paradigms.html
I stupidly forgot to set it to autoplay (you had to press "s"). I've updated it so it starts automatically now :)