skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Incidentally, I just finished reading Knuth's original article from which his now famous quote originated. If you'll forgive the large copy and paste I think it is insightful to see the quote in context.

The original quote from 'Structured Programming with go to Statements' Computing Surveys, VOL 6, No. 4, December 1974 on page 268 is:

"The improvement in speed from Example 2 to Example 2a is only about 12%, and many people would pronounce that insignificant. The conventional wisdom shared by many of today's software engineers calls for ignoring efficiency in the small; but I believe this is simply an overreaction to the abuses they see being practiced by penny-wise-and-pound-foolish programmers, who can't debug or maintain their "optimized" programs. In established engineering disciplines a 12% improvement, easily obtained, is never considered marginal; and I believe the same viewpoint should prevail in software engineering. Of course I wouldn't bother making such optimizations on a one-shot job, but when it's a question of preparing quality programs, I don't want to restrict myself to tools that deny me such efficiencies.

There is no doubt that the grail of efficiency leads to abuse. Programmers waste enormous amounts of time thinking about, or worrying about, the speed of noncritical parts of their programs, and these attempts at efficiency actually have a strong negative impact when debugging and maintenance are considered. We should forget about small efficiencies, say about 97% of the time: premature optimization is the root of all evil.

Yet we should not pass up our opportunities in that critical 3%. A good programmer will not be lulled into complacency by such reasoning, he will be wise to look carefully at the critical code; but only after that code has been identified. It is often a mistake to make a priori judgments about what parts of a program really critical, since the universal experience of programmers who have been using measurement tools has been that their intuitive guesses fail. After working with such tools for seven years, I've become convinced that all compilers written from now on should be designed to provide all programmers with feedback indicating what parts of their programs are costing the most; indeed, this feedback should be supplied automatically unless it has been specifically turned off."
Infographic: 30 years of personal computing
I read the article. And then I commented, providing information NOT PROVIDED IN THE ARTICLE. Namely, a correct legal citation to one of the most famous color trademark cases, and a link to the court's decision.

edit: could the down voters please explain yourselves? Am I wrong in assuming that some people would like to read the actual case mentioned in the article, instead of just a couple sentences about it?
I was aware of BART's actions before this, and now that there is going to be an organized rally in defense of free speech, I will attend...peacefully and in red.
There's a difference between "influence" and "bad influence", and between "influence" and "running it into the ground".

The union quite reasonably objects to cutting 120,000, because there's no need to. The postal service could be quite solvent if Congress -- which is not the union and not, so far as I know, acting at the union's behest -- would take away the idiotic mandate to fund 75 years worth of benefits.

In other words, this is something the union should oppose.
I was still the loser who didn't go out and blow money at the bar. Worse yet, the area was like 70% male and I couldn't get a date as a laborer to save my life.

That sounds almost exactly like my last programming job. Except it was more like 90% male. :-)
I understand the paradigm, and I think it's a mess compared to good old OO. I don't want prototypes. With Ruby and Python's OO, I can do everything the prototypal paradigm can, without any of the syntactical insanity, so the argument of prototyping being powerful doesn't hold up.

And yes I do think CoffeeScript is saner.
Techcrunch is getting into the social commentary business?
It's a funny juxtaposition with Syria.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_reactions_to_the_...
Keeping Up with the Kardashians Season 6 Episode 8
Both are in other words have been fired. "I confirm that two of our members who are on the photo-language newspaper published in China recently is no longer our staff," Slosar said.
People really like to try to make him look bad; I mean, is it just me or does this article portray him to be some clueless dimwit that was standing on a goldmine and didn't know it until his face hit the ground so hard that he finally saw the shiny gold stars?

The reality is that it's very difficult to know what ground you're standing on until you dig deep enough to just see it with your own eyes. Predicting the future and investing in that wishful vision is a much more risky strategy than just acknowledging the current moment and trying to lead it closer to where you'd like it to go. I do not know whether he looked at the situation in this type of manner or not, but that's how I justify facebook's success.

As a side note, I wish people would stop pretending they never drank out of a big red cup before.
Derbyshire's line began at Ewood Gear
Derbyshire, 25, spent worst flavour on give with Execute Association sidelong Metropolis Port.
Yet this is changing rapidly. As the digital ecosystems become news channels themselves, news papers as we know them will die slowly but surely.

You think it only centralization of economies (communism) that's unsustainable? Its not. At the heart money is just another kind of information/data framework.

So the parallels although hidden behind a fog of semantics and retorics are really quite profound IMHO.

So although government might see broadcast media as the best way to control sentiment, it's slowly loosing it's grip of the population. A couple of generations from now and traditional newspapers are going to in the history books. They simply provide no value that newer social ecostems can't do better
Or the linkbait business.
python, statement separator: not "sometimes", but "usually"

python, multiline comment: not quite. print '''foo''' outputs "foo". This is a string literal, and """foo""" is more popular.
When you submit or comment your item automatically gets one point, but that doesn't contribute towards your karma. If you add up the points on all your items, then subtract the number of items, you should get close.

But there are also aspects to the algorithms that aren't made public. Our host occasionally makes changes to help fend off voting rings, spammers, trolls, and other nasty and undesirable things.

Finally, there is no feedback as to things getting upvoted.

My recommendation is that you try to be informative, helpful, add value, and not care so much about the karma. Whether or not people see your contributions is largely luck anyway. Just try to work it out if you get downvoted to the basement - try to see why people think you added no value, or were wrong. The guidelines suggest not complaining about downvotes, and I'd agree. It doesn't help, and it makes boring reading.

And you're welcome. Just join in, and be useful.

Good luck!
And Instapaper works offline.
How should a Professor Incentivize Classroom Attendance?
People don't play Call of Duty on a DS. Most of those DS games don't require precision or complicated dual analog stick controls. There's no reason why something like Pokemon can't run on an iPhone with good controls.
Well, if some big thing like this passes you by so closely, it's not difficult to understand how it can really end up haunting you. Especially if there was a lot of money and treachery involved.

Most developers (me included) know from personal experience how awful it is to watch someone you consider to be an asshole or a rip-off become very successful. Most of us also know how it the feels to discover that some company recently took off like a rocket with one of your ideas; usually they got the same idea independently, but if they actually copied it from you - that's a very special kind of pain.

That being said, I think it's important to remember the huge success of Facebook is not just based on the initial idea. There were many social networks before Facebook. As painful as it may be to some, the most important thing Facebook did was taking the company from the initial idea to where it is now and from where I stand neither the Winklevosses nor Aaron can really claim they did that.

As a developer and an ideas man myself, this is kind of a hard reality to face as well, because it means that in the end business practices and marketing are exponentially more important than concepts and programming.
Ipod Touch still costs more than a DS Lite, and isn't really a kid-focused device.
Nintendo should hedge their bets and do both for now. As I see it there are 3 possible outcomes:

1) Dedicated gaming hardware/software sales decline

2) Dedicated gaming hardware/software sales remain flat

3) Dedicated gaming hardware/software sales increase

#3 is very unlikely. Most people just don't want to charge and carry around multiple devices if they don't absolutely have to. For those who do chances are they might also have a SmartPhone. Sell them Mario for $39.99 and $9.99 on iOS. They'll buy it. Don't do straight ports. Make unique touch-centric iOS games.

#2 isn't good enough. Nintendo just launched a new platform. Sales should be increasing (dramatically) not staying flat. Developers probably aren't going to flock to a fledgling platform just because it has Nintendo's name on it. (GameCube, N64)

#1 is the most likely and Nintendo doesn't have a SmartPhone. They wouldn't have released the 3DS if they had one in the pipeline. They're probably several years away and no matter what they do it will likely not be able to compete with Apple, Samsung, HTC, etc so it will have a small installed base. The same problem the PSP phone has today. They also have an OS problem. They would have to use Android, probably heavily customized, and launch their own Android market app because you can't put Google's Android Market on a device targeted at kids. Then what? It's not a great portable gaming machine and it's not a great SmartPhone. Doomed to fail.

Doesn't hurt that Apple would probably throw a small fortune at Nintendo to develop exclusively for iOS. Apple and Nintendo share a lot of the same values. Seems like a perfect fit to me.
What I learned whilst watching this for 5 minutes, was that a lot of escort agencies use Google Maps and Google Earth to advertise.

I don't know how maps are classified, and whether data about businesses are adverts or just facts about places. But in the UK adverts have to be "legal, decent, honest and truthful, to the benefit of consumers, business and society".

As such, it opened up a whole new world of spam-fighting to me. Google must be scrubbing this dataset as quickly as others add stuff.
what? are you claiming that the unions would have a problem with raising the price of stamps by a cent?
This seems to be a fantastic project. I wish more libraries were designed this way. Library's usability is just as important as performance or feature completeness.
PayPal's Peter Thiel reveals plan to launch floating country off San Francisco
"Google requires code reviews for nearly every commit, and they get to hire the top 0.01% of programmers. Imagine what the rest of the world is like, without code reviews, testing, or good programmers."

Yet even with our quality of code we are still struggling with our massive code bases. C++ build times alone are reason to find an alternative. We hope that Go will work at scale while having many of the productivity advantages of scripting languages.
They're mad about prices of their rents but strangely they don't care about the price of the settlements. Or the injustice of them.
Under variable interpolation, there is nothing listed for python, but the equivalent is this:

count = 3
item = "ball"
print('%(count)s %(item)ss' % locals())
Wouldn't the constrained that output area should be for a rectangle cause a problem?
It's a (not so)funny juxtaposition with Gaza.
http://english.aljazeera.net/focus/gazaoneyearon/2009/12/200...
Anyone else notice you can't comment on the article?
But the question is wether that justify the high evaluation . I thing ms and apple are going to get their act together before that prize is ver realized. But that's just me.
> so maybe, a lot of people can stop worrying about being second.

Indeed.
Canonical Launches Ubuntu One Music Streaming App For iPhone & iPod
The sole reason that the current protests are a consensus right now is because the protest leaders have framed this as a nationwide, non-political, issue.

Rest assured that the majority of the protestors are much aware of the moral and economic price of the settlements and would rather see them taken apart. Current estimates put the total investment in settlements in the West Bank and Gaza over the years at more than $50B. Trust that the general Israeli population would very much want to see those amounts of money invested in health, welfare, transportation and education within the '67 lines.

Stating that fact upfront would have marked the protests as "yet another leftist campaign".
Paket - paket prewedding honeymoon di Bangka Belitung
paket - paket prewedding honeymoon di Bangka Belitung
Terabytes of Downloadable Patents (USPTO/Google)
It's dark, but is it matter? If it's not definitely matter, name it something else that doesn't bias the search for a solution.
You can. If you scroll down and wait a little bit for it to load you will see the previous comments (11 at the moment) and will have the usual way of commenting through Facebook.
Is it a (hyper)intelligent shade of the color blue?
Yeh my bad, my browser was being a dick.
We clearly have different notions of the role of the press, so I don't think that's even worth debating.

On the "put it behind you" argument: I think it's sad, but people talk about Facebook pretty much every minute of every day, and I have no ability to make them stop. I ignore 99.999% of what is said. I certainly don't go looking for it. Yet every now and then the press will write something inexcusably wrong that I cannot ignore and that merits correction because it is part of the public record. I've never heard anyone else with direct knowledge speak up. So even though the events of 2003 and 2004 are well behind me, I'm still involuntarily immersed in their effects, and I value my ability to sleep at night very highly.

(No one seems to ask why TechCrunch is posting a six-year-old video of Mark in the first place. Shouldn't they get over the fact that he started it? It's certainly not news, nor is that fact that his views have changed over time.)

Your statements about idea ownership leave me baffled. This isn't about an idea, it's about a product I actually created and publicized.
It's a funny juxtaposition with the rest of the world.

One has to be extremely ignorant to fail to comprehend that Madrid, Cairo, New York, Tripoli, Tel Aviv, Damascus, Athens and London are all part of the same story.
When Daring Fireball (or any other blog) merely links to something elsewhere, it usually doesn't make sense to submit the DF post to HN: instead submit what DF linked to. In this case the DF post is superfluous to anyone who isn't directly following DF's feed.
you didn't read the article!!! the writer was joking!!!
what he really said was: israel is the only example in the ME FOR FREEDOM OF SPEACH AND TO THE FACT THAT PEOPLE SHOULD NOT BE AFRAID OF THEIR GOVERNMENTS, GOVERNMENTS SHOULD BE AFRAID OF THEIR PEOPLE!!!
Using this with DictShield (https://github.com/j2labs/dictshield) or Colander (https://docs.pylonsproject.org/projects/colander/dev/) would be very cool methinks
Take the settlements apart? You do realize that amounts to ethnic cleansing, correct? Neither the majority of the Israeli population nor the protesters believe this is a good idea.
what's happening in syria is a revolution (attempt)against a totalitarian regime

what's happening in israel are protests

not remotely comparable
this is how a protest looks like in israel>>>
zero violence but with much deordorant

enjoy yourself:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HwYv7KZMz6o&feature=relat...
Here's the previous story, since Jonathan didn't link to it in his blog.

How to use Jonathan's card to buy yourself an iPad - http://sam.odio.com/2011/08/12/i-took-625-jonathans-card/
They are insane if they raise prices when volume is going down. The only thing that will happen is that the volume will go even further down.
It's a combo of equity and money. We'd like to do a 20% employee option pool total (so maybe 12% for the first 3 employees total)... then enough money for them to live off of (aka just base pay).

I'm just really wondering how people tend to recruit. Do they recruit via referrals, networking, or... job sites? Founder dating.. etc.
Quickly judging by the look, I thought "hey, Armin Ronacher just released another library!", but this one seems as well thought out as if it was designed by Armin himself.
He made the opposite statement: Austrian economics contributes to ending poverty. If you have time, watch this documentary by Milton Friedman: http://freetochoose.tv
HN karma doesn't expire.

I've no idea what you mean by "a more realistic value", nor by "should be value within the karma".
If fearmongering were illegal, politicians would struggle to find words.
I'm shocked to see Marco criticize what is essentially the "Apple" of the home gaming market. Both Nintendo and Apple have changed their industries on three separate occasions:

>> Nintendo|Apple brought home gaming|computing to the masses with the NES|Macintosh.

>> Nintendo|Apple revolutionized mobile gaming|phones with the Game Boy|iPhone.

>> Okay I run out of steam here but Nintendo put out the Wii which halted the home console race-to-the-bottom, while Apple changed portable music with the iPod.

The above hints at how Nintendo and Apple play similar games. They're very skilled at disrupting industries, they create products that appeal to consumers' emotions (whether by nostalgia or design aesthetic), and they don't make dumb business decisions.

I'm not saying Nintendo is fine. It's clear that Nintendo faces stiff competition, but that's true of any consumer electronics company. What, Nintendo only sold 4.3 million 3DSes in its first five months? That's not much worse than the 5.27 million DSes they sold six months after launch [0]...or the 4 million iPhones 2Gs Apple sold 6 months after a price cut. [1]

Nintendo is a great company. The 3DS price drop shows they're considering their future place in consumer electronics. Marco's comments on their situation aren't novel or insightful, so this is kinda-sorta a fluff article (one of several we've seen recently from him and Gruber).

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nintendo_DS_sales

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:IPhone_sales_per_quarter_s...
Pros and cons of living in SoMa as a Startup
read the full artcle : http://t.co/L1sIhak
Romance Novels, Filled With Passionate Love and Torrid Sex, Mislead Women
It's an interesting character study. Jonathan takes the high road and redirects Sam Odio to the public discussion which I think is a great thing to do instead of getting caught up in a personal confrontation. Then Sam Odio responds with:

I think you took my olive branch and stomped on it.

In the light of what happened, you can say a lot of negative things about Sam Odio, but at least he's consistent.
I have a solution that is guaranteed to save the post office money: crowdsource the delivery of mail. How does it work? Mail is sorted and placed in bins by USPS. Individuals who work close to or drive by the post office on their way home can stop by and pick up the bin for neighborhood/apt complex/building/center. The person who picks it can either drop the mail or let others come pick it up.
So what you're saying is : "difficult problems are difficult to solve whatever language you use"?
If you are correct, variable rate mail will find few customers and flat rate mail will survive.

Regardless, you still fail to explain how forcing technophilic companies to subsidize technophobic companies is good for the economy. Would it also be good to force companies with computerized ledgers to subsidize companies with paper and pencil accounting ledgers?
it looks like he took the olive branch and shoved it up Sam's ...
Most blogspot bogs are not blocked in Iran. All of them are blocked. And wordpress blogs, too. Facebook, youtube, twitter, BBC, CNN, tinyurl, goo.gl, megaupload and thepiratebay are a few more examples. Moreover, having a satellite dish is against the law, just look at the pictures in this Persian website:
http://www.asriran.com/fa/news/176720/%D8%AC%D9%85%D8%B9-%D8...
But, in my opinion, these aren't the main problem. The main problem is internet bandwidth limit for home users, i.e. 128 KBit/s. Yeah, that's right: 128 KBit/s.
I have a server in the US and bypassing their filtering system is not a problem for most Iranians but how could you watch a video in youtube with a 128 Kbit/s connection?
I don't agree with what Sam Odio did initially, but I also wouldn't exactly call publishing a screenshot of a private email from someone the "high road".
Revolutions happen when people are not allowed to protest.
The postal service is being forced to make a massive prepayment for decades of pensions all at once. No regular business would even think of doing that on it's own. It's congress behaving stupidly as usual.

Also, it needs to stop the practice of employees purposely retiring early and then being hired back by friends as contractors. So they get both retirement benefits and then a second paycheck. If they leave, make it so they cannot be a contractor, would solve an expensive labor abuse.

I mail and receive small packages weekly that would be unaffordable (and mishandled) by UPS. I'd hate to lose Saturday delivery but it would be a bearable compromise among alternatives.
i'm looking for a place to stay as well. month to month lease or something like that.

thanks.
I'm truly sorry that you got nothing of value from this article. Far from being a sudden, empty insight, this is an idea I've been thinking about for years, and in fact I've told that story many times to many people (and it generally gets across what I consider to be a powerful idea).

I've also used the technique many times myself. I've run 3 businesses, and it's an exceptionally powerful tool in negotiation. Not, of course, applied bluntly like an imbecile (like the "boss" mentioned in one of the other comments), but subtly, at the right moment, without emphasising it. Letting the other person think, talk, and say what you need them to say rather than trying to goad them into it is an essential business skill. You probably use it without even thinking about it.

So, really sorry that you personally found nothing of value here (many other people did, from the looks of it) but I don't think the personal attacks were called for and they're out of place on a normally respectful forum like HN.

It is sad that your pointless name-calling now dominates what was a healthy discussion. I wonder how many people didn't post interesting comments and anecdotes because they saw your territorial markings at the top of the conversation. You should be ashamed of yourself.
more pictures from the israeli protests:
jews& arabs were protesting together and no one got shot:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YlTJgx2cePE
Hm, I guess a lot can get lost in translation. :(

That "olive branch" comment wasn't intended to be negative. I was saddened by his reply. To address your point: I am not looking for a personal confrontation...just wanting to reach out and make sure he's OK.
Amazing, cheers.