skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The system he is suggesting is exactly what /. had, and that didn't work out too well. I have a theory that the decline of any great community begins with a conflict. In the case of /. when the SCO matter started, the issue was so black and white that there was no need of discussing it - and the community itself was so homogeneous in their opinion on this matter that there was no real discussion going on. In the case of HN, I think we're seeing a variation of the same thing - it's Apple vs everybody else, and the issue is so polarising that the discussions are almost never real discussions, they're just a bunch of people trying to prove they're right. And that is where the rot starts.

I am as guilty of this as anybody else - since I find myself rarely able to comment on any technical discussion on HN, most of my posts have been on these topics, where one does not need any more than an ideological standpoint from which to talk. Perhaps the recent precipitous decline in the quality of the comments is directly linked to the kind of stories that we've been discussing, and the kind of people who tend to comment on them.
For debugging my haskell code I first determine if the bug is in a pure function or IO. If it's in IO I use typical print type debugging (either running the IO action in ghci or just rerunning my program repeatedly).

If it's in a pure function, I load the code up in ghci and use it to replicate and explore the inputs that lead to the bug, and try out fixes. In a complex function I'll often promote (de-indent) any 'where/let' helpers to toplevel definitions so I can try them in ghci and narrow down which is behaving badly.

I have not missed gdb in haskell, but then most of my gdb experiences have involved asking for a stack trace and discovering the stack's been smashed by the bug. Or using gdb to chase down some unexpected mutation of a variable deep in the code. Not problems typical to haskell.
Perhaps -- but then it was about points and not about ideologies.
Who wants a ticket to Strange Loop 2011
I have been a lurker here, but this is my first post.

I posted this on reddit (http://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/ju81v/who_wants_a_ticket_to_strange_loop_2011/), but it isn't getting the same traction probably since there just isn't the same 'hacker' crowd that would appreciate this...

Here is some verification, http://imgur.com/nzwuT. The correct url for Strange Loop is https://thestrangeloop.com

If you need further verification, or are skeptical. I can put Alex in contact with you or you can reach him from the strange loop website.

I really want someone to go to this because it is a great event and I am really disappointed I can't go.

Here is the text from my post.

I am unable to go to Strange Loop 2011 this year.

I contacted Alex Miller from Strange Loop about cancelation, but I feel bad abbout getting a refund from him since he would incur payment fees. Plus more importenly, I took up a spot when someone else could go (like you!).

So this is where you come in!

I want to give one of you a chance to go to the sold out conference. I went last year and it was awesome. I highly recommend it.

Also, it would be great if I could recover at least part of the $250 I spent on the ticket for early registration.

Check out the site, schedule, and speakers at https://thestrangeloop.com

Also, Tomorrow August 26th is the last day to book at the hotel at the reserved rate, so hopefully I can find someone today if anyone is interested.

Send me a PM (or leave a comment), if you are interested and if you want to give me some money for the ticket, let me know :)

~animedbz
Thanks for providing the correct link. That field isn't user-editable for me at the moment. I hope a curator can fix it. Arthritis is playing havoc with drag-and-copy here.
- "College is expensive": Pretty US-centric point. It's very affordable in Canada and most other countries.

- "I know many great programmers who didn’t study Computer Science and some who didn’t go to college at all": I know far more great programmers who did study Computer Science. :)

I'd say undergrad is more about learning how to learn and the discipline required. "Take only classes you're interested in" may be very counterproductive to that, depending on your interests.

In the end, it depends on what kind of "hacker" you want to be. If "hacking" together WordPress blogs with a bunch of plugins is your cup of tea, you're probably better off not even having a Highschool diploma. If you want to build a graphics engine, a hugely scaleable system, or the next generation JIT programming language, you'll probably need a solid Computer Science education (whether you acquire it self-taught or otherwise).
Here are the 6 tips:

1. Let people deploy their strengths, instead of trying to train their weaknesses

2. Set clear goals and hire specialists with the skills needed to meet those goals.

3. Make sure the goals are anchored in reality. Don't set arbitrary goals.

4. Give immediate feedback

5. In addition to structuring work around your strengths,
also try to focus on the things you enjoy

6. To help assess your strengths, ask people to write a "reflected best self letter"
I hope I'm not the only one that is now picturing a bunch of Greeks destroying plates...
If you're purely interested in the pursuit of understanding for understanding's sake, college is not a cost-effective use of 4 years of a hacker's life.
Verizon passes on Galaxy S II for better Samsung phone
He never did strike me as a bottom.
+1

I am a teacher. You keep going for the students, then suddenly there is silence, no work, the background noise comes up like a compressed audio channel. Strange embodied meat things we are.
It would be well within the 'persona' of Anonymous to hack their site and replace it with the text "Buffering..."
(Not parent, but happens I found Linux at ~12 anyway, so here goes...)

First brush with Linux, a friend had actually bought (yep) Linux-Mandrake (want to say 7.2ish?), and I simply kept bugging him until he lent me the discs. After that Red Hat (came in a book), then Knoppix around 2003-4 ([ab]use of my HS computer lab's cable line). Got a laptop for b-day senior year, that got Ubuntu (abuse of neighbor's wifi).
you win the thread
Why does a ticket to f8 cost $400?
Yeah, on the first point here in England there was outrage recently when it was proposed that universities here could raise their fees from the max of £3,000 (~$5,000) to £9,000 (~$15,000) per year.
Unofficial Homebrew repository
Ditto here. I made a third person multiplayer shooter when I was eleven with Klik & Play. It was one of my first experiences with anything that might be considered "programming," but K&P was so good that what I made turned out to be pretty fun. Would love to see a modern adaptation.
Hey, I may want it, will have to co-ordinate some things, website is https://thestrangeloop.com/ , not strangeloop.com though.
New Apple CEO Tim Cook: 'I'm Thinking Printers'
Start hacking on the kernel, maybe you will :).
AAPL didn't tank.
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3Aemmap...
For Greatness, Get the Hell Out of the Way
“Get the hell out of my way!” – Ayn Rand

“I don’t think life is absurd. I think we are all here for a huge purpose. I think we shrink from the immensity of the purpose we are here for.” – Norman Mailer

I have a sign on the wall directly in front of my desk. I posted this sign to my wall nearly a year ago. It reads, “A business that cannot run itself is not a business for me.”
I think a better way to put this is that for example type errors are the first to bang really loud in any decent language.

But Haskell does not help you with other, much more subtle and dangerous bugs. For example, a function not being tail-recursive despite you believing it to be.
Ask HN: Good articles around metrics
Hi - I'm looking for some articles on different metrics startups should be focusing on.
Yes, you are right. I should have copy/pasted it, I'll update this post.
Even in the US college isn't necessarily expensive if your parents can't afford it.
I received extremely generous financial aid at MIT, so it was essentially free.
"undergrad is more about learning how to learn" I was told that exact thing at a job interview once and it rings pretty true.

I also think that without college, I would be at best a mediocre programmer. I never would have been pushed to the limits that I was in school. I never would get a job to push me to those limits without proving myself first.
Does Real Alternative rip out the codecs from a RealPlayer install and repackage them? If so, that is clear copyright infringement but suing over a link to the infringing software is asinine. If Real Alternative doesn't include any code from RealNetworks, then the case is even more chilling. If that is the case, when will they go hunting for VLC?
Most of the broad strokes in this post are reasonable, but the idea that you should only take a class because you want to is misguided. It seems like solid advice on its face, but there is not a always a direct mapping between enjoyment and benefit. Indeed, thinking back on my own time as an undergraduate (CS@UIUC 2011), several of the most beneficial classes for my career were ones that I did not enjoy at the time. Degree requirements are designed to capture these high pain/high reward classes. Of course that is only if you decide to go the college route. I'm all for people who want to enter industries like programming or security forgoing it. But if you are going to front the time and money, I think you should stick relatively close to the curriculum. Not only is an 18 year old freshman is unlikely to get curriculum right, but if you're going to design it all yourself you shouldn't be paying for it.
Rules for an Effective Business Plan
Javascript Developers are better Lovers (and why ninjas are the new rockstars)
DNF.CA sued by Domain Consulting Group Inc. aka Domain Name Forum
Terry Matthews: Ottawa’s declining corporate presence
Given the tone of language, it's most likely Larry Ellison; Oracle's head honcho.

http://www.macobserver.com/tmo/article/Larry_Ellison_Discuss...

"Q: Another person who has a certain mythology about him is your friend Steve Jobs. Everybody seems to believe they know the book on Jobs: heis brilliant but hard-driving, overly sensitive. Do you and he ever talk about that?

A: We almost decided to wear T-shirts: 'The Mercurial Steve Jobs' and 'The Arrogant Larry Ellison.'

Steve Jobs is my best friend, and I love him dearly, and heis one of the most remarkable people on this planet. You watch him create Apple, then in one of the worst human-resources mistakes in the history of Silicon Valley -- the only thing worse was when the French fired Napoleon -- they fire Steve Jobs and Apple almost completely disintegrates. Then he comes back and he saves a company that was on life support.

I never see this quoted about Steve, but they once asked Andy Grove who he most admired in the PC industry, and he said, "One guy: Steve Jobs. He invented the PC industry."

You know, we live in a very egalitarian world. We donit like heroes. And Steve is one of these heroic guys whose accomplishments are of such epic proportions, and it gnaws away at our egalitarian sense of the world."
This was my guess exactly, actually.
It depends crucially on what you're trying to study.

Universities haven't had a monopoly on books for centuries. Their monopoly on good lecturers is getting smaller by the second, thanks to e.g. Open Courseware.

They're still the place to run into professors, grad students, etc. outside of class. That can be very important. Serendipity is a nice thing.

They still offer a critical mass of fellow students. That's often a big deal for your education, and it's certainly most of the fun. Plus, as many have pointed out on HN over the years, there are precious few places in the world where you can literally live next door to a bunch of fellow hackers, all of whom are young and nearly unemployed and used to living cheaply and ready to embark on a project with you on a whim. (Trust me: After you turn thirty, this never happens again. Everyone has these tedious families and jobs and lives that intrude on their hacking time, and they're all out of sync, such that when you are free they are always busy. ;)

Finally, universities have infrastructure. Laboratories. Lots of laboratories. Those you really won't ever get your hands on again. College, and even much of grad school for that matter, were worth it for me just for the labs and shops alone. I built hundreds of tiny lasers!
This is not the original title. Mods must've changed it. It was "Real Networks are destroying my friend's life" or something along these lines.
Joel Spolsky "It seems like any time you try to measure the performance of knowledge workers, things rapidly disintegrate" http://www.joelonsoftware.com/news/20020715.html
Yeah, programming languages, of course what other kind of languages are there?
Ask HN: Is there a site where people looking for biz dev partners can meet?
I currently own a net based company and am looking to branch out into some new ideas. Unfortunately my biz partners of 13 years are looking to head a different direction. Therefor I've been on the hunt for potential other professionals to hook up with.

Is there any type of site out there that makes the intro?
Today, we are celebrating 20 years of Linux, listening to the kernel : http://www.linux.fm
I would love to hear more about your experience! I'm interesting in doing a startup in Canada but I'm not sure about the whole legal issues.
"It's about an old man who was cut off from computation [snip] and now has access to it... And this guy's dad being able to use a computer for the first time, after decades of being unable"

You have to read a lot into the post to come up with that interpretation.
Actually, "meme" was coined by Richard Dawkins in 1976 (The Selfish Gene). Although, the meaning in popular culture has morphed from the generic definition (any self propagating idea) to refer to fast spreading cat videos and the like.

I remember the episode of The Screen Savers when Kevin Rose did a segment about Slashdot - and even hinted at morphing the concept more toward what he created with Digg (giving users more power to source stories - voted up purely on their merits).

/. has definitely had a big impact in the way we obtain our news (more targeted, and with social interaction). But I, like most people here, I imagine, left it long ago in favor of Digg, Reddit, or HN.
Planet Discovered, Made Entirely of Diamond
You may find some value in:

http://www.startupwithme.com/

http://www.noodleshare.com/

Neither is exactly specific to finding biz dev people, but both are about connecting like minded people who are working on cool ideas.
I know many great hackers who studied CS too, but almost none of them are great programmers _because_ they studied CS. They had to become great programmers on their own.
Mathematics is a system of learning and reasoning, arithmetic is the process of actually computing an answer. While it might be nice to be able to compute compound interest in your head no one is seriously proposing that anyone do multivariate linear regressions with a pen and paper, we simply have much better tools for computing the answer.

In a modern society with large amounts of non-human computational power it's far more economical for humans to focus more on math and less on arithmetic.
Take a look at http://www.partnerup.com.

Might be a good fit for what you need.

Also, joining the right groups on LinkedIn will probably expose you to people with similar interests that you could network with.
> Speculation: it may have been taken away for "abuse", either automatically or by an editor who disagreed with too many of your flags.

Hmmm I guess no good deed goes unpunished:)
Steve Jobs’s Path Towards Resignation
As mentioned in the article, one problem is that people use the down arrow to disagree. Perhaps there shouldn't be a down arrow. Instead there should be a few buttons, such as "Off Topic" and "Offensive". I think presentation can help guide those people who aren't consciously being cynical and combative.
Agreed. The sole reason I use a Mac is because it's BSD + a far far superior replacement to X Windows. Among countless other subtle perfections.
The Problem with the Startup Craze… by Steve Jobs (2000)
This is what the HP Touchpad deal did to my deal aggregator's traffic.
Commander.js
Yep, I'm sure every school is like MIT.
The Story Of My Honeymoon Adventure
Wedding is a great blessing of God. We all try to make these days, a very happy days of our life. Butt unfortunately these days turns into bad days of our life, you simply cannot get one second alone with your new spouse. However, the honeymoon is a completely different story!

While I can obviously remember my wedding day itself, many of the events that happened that day are a complete blur. We still watch the wedding video and look at each other as though we are seeing things for the very first time. By the time the reception was over, we were both looking forward to our honeymoon. I knew it was going to be special, but I could never have dreamed of the trip we were able to have.
Nevgi Web Solutions
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For more information please visit: - http://nevgiwebsolutions.com/
Why Apple employees avoid getting in the elevator with Steve Jobs
Excellent analysis. SXSW explicitly looks for diversity as part of its selection criteria, so it's disappointing that the progress in getting more women to submit proposals isn't matched by the panelist ratio or the actual selected speakers.
I try not to pay attention to articles about Apple here, because it really does bring out some strong emotions. Logic goes out the window and everything reads like a love sonnet written by a retarded monkey. It's stressful and unfun.

Reddit solved this problem, kind-of-sort-of, with subreddits. If all you care about is programming, visit the programming subreddit. Unfortunately, the comments on Reddit are extremely low-quality (even on /r/programming), so it's not actually worth visiting. But maybe this could save HN for a few more months.

I have a friend that says an addiction is something you do not for enjoyment, but because you have to. I sort of feel this way about HN now; I come here out of habit and feel weird if I pull away, but most of the articles aren't that enjoyable. The ones that are are easily ruined by jackasses (someone called me "an internet toughguy" for suggesting that he might be misusing the debugger).

It's probably time for moderation or something like Stack Overflow's editing and flagging system. It's too easy to post bad comments (look at my history, I do it), and while one bad comment is OK, 100 bad comments is not. If we could just kill the flamewars or edit them to be nicer, the would could be a better place. People will whine about the integrity of the site, but you know what? Who cares. We already have too many users. I don't think anything else will save HN from becoming another Reddit.

Or, maybe HN is "done" and the cool people have already found another place, and we just aren't invited.
Emacs for iPhone
The Onion: New Apple CEO Tim Cook: "I'm Thinking Printers"
I agree with this. Especially as we drift further away from Tim Berners-Lee's web towards the web as the evolution of network television and the entertainment industry.
Such a creepy name. "Fate".
Cool. That is interesting.
As far as I know, Tim Cook has never publicly discussed his sexuality, though there has been much discussion on the topic. All of the articles about it only cite "two well-placed sources" as evidence.
No they won't: VLC doesn't have "Real" in its name. A lawsuit over trademarks would be too obviously abusive here.
They will artificially limit their career

What languages provide more jobs opportunities (i.e. career options) than C/C++[1], C#, and Java?

[1] no, I'm not saying C and C++ are the same thing, but I haven't seen a C++ IDE which isn't also a C IDE.
One of the things that I find pleasing when writing Haskell is the idea that I don't have to think about the context in which my code might need to run.

For example, a common pattern that I find myself repeating in many languages is downloading a bunch of webpages asynchronously and collecting the results in a consistent order. To do this in Go I might wire up a channel and collect the results that way. In C# I might use the BeginAsync functions and possibly locks to collect all my results. And what if one of them times out? Throws an exception?

In almost every language I have had to specifically think about all these situations, making sure I have handled all of the exceptions and timeouts properly and by the end of the day I usually end up with a mudball procedure that is really good at asynchronously downloading webpages, but it is far from reusable.

In Haskell, once I'm done writing my function "downloadWebPage", I just lift it into the context of the problem I'm trying to solve. If I'm trying to download a page asynchronously, I'll use "asyncDl = forkAsync downloadWebPage" to make it a function that downloads a page asynchronously. If I need to handle timeouts, I'll use "timeout 200000 . asyncDl" to make a function that returns Nothing after a certain amount of time. What if I wanted to do this for a list of web pages? Well I just use mapM run the asynchronous, timed out webpage download function over a list of websites.

What if I want to use any function instead of one that download websites? Well you make a library: https://github.com/jb55/async-util

What I find in Haskell/Lisp that I have not seen in many other languages is the idea of a combinatoric API. One where combining functions is your main tool for building abstractions rather than more rigid computation paths. The amount of code that you do not have to write when programming this way is something that you just don't see in other languages.
As cofounder of the company that's ticketing f8 2011, and as someone who has worked closely with Facebook on the event for some time, I find the $400 ticket price very reasonable. It's more affordable than Google I/O and WWDC, by an order of magnitude.
Why can't you use monads in ruby? A monad is essentially just an interface, right?

The original question was about the mechanisms, not the style or libraries.

I don't really know haskell, so correct me if I'm wrong.
Relentless Quality
I wouldn't say that my CS degree taught me to program, but it gave me a fundamental understanding of things that would otherwise be black boxes, which has helped me to estimate the correct fork in the road on numerous occasions. This understanding also helps me write more performant code than I might otherwise. So I would say that it's still useful. It gave me a good mental framework to build off of.
Which still leaves mouse pointer images all over the document. Horrendous.
They also chose to study CS on their own; I don't see the separation. Perhaps these individuals would have been mediocre programmers had they not studied CS.
Steve Jobs Biography: Writing the Final Chapter