skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The top modded comment on this story is an anonymous user directly accusing Groupon of sockpuppeting online discussions citing evidence that is refuted downthread by a non-anonymous HN user. Not OK. This is a form of incivility.

Words matter. If you don't know someone is a paid shill for another company, use words that indicate that.
> I think it is useful to distinguish work from difficulty. IMO, on current hardware, writing a compiler is easy and, for most languages, not too much work.

I disagree, writing a compiler is a lot of work, it's just easy work for people with experience. An expert climber might climb a modest mountain in 6 hours where a novice might take all day and, assuming they don't get lost, still only make it halfway up before turning back.

Put yourself at the keyboard of someone who has never written a lexer. This programmer's idea of text processing is to use find-and-replace, shell globs, or maybe an ad hoc regex with grep or perl. They are used to programming sorting algorithms or writing polymorphic triangles and squares that inherit from the shape class. Their idea of a hard programming assignment is to solve the 0/1 knapsack problem with dynamic programming, where, as hard as it may be, the answer is still just a couple of functions.

They have to write code to accept the entire character set. Every single one of the letters, numbers, special characters and whitespace that is valid in the language must be handled, or else the lexer isn't going to work properly.

You have to write code to recognize every single keyword, distinguish identifiers from literals and different types of literals from each other; and you must drop comments. Generally it's a good idea to also tokenize every single operator. Even small languages can easily have dozens of keywords and operators, plus a number of different types of literals, many of which the programmer may have never used before (Bit shift? Octal literals?). This means writing the lexer will involve frequent references to a language specification they have no experience reading.

And that's just the lexer, easily the most straightforward part of the initial phases.

This seems like nothing to someone who has done it before but I assure you it is not for a novice. While none of it is supremely difficult, indeed many algorithms are much more difficult conceptually than any one piece of a lexer, there are a lot of little details that must be addressed and it's a lot of grunt work if you have no practice doing it.

If you read the Crenshaw tutorial, you'll see that he chooses a language that does not require much (any) work to lex. The language you learn to compile has no whitespace and uses single-character keywords and identifiers. This lets him delay lexing to chapter 7, but as you can see for yourself-- that chapter is pretty long-- 2300 lines and a lot of it is code.
Jony Ive is a great designer, and I guess if there's any company other than an outright design firm where a designer could be CEO it's Apple, but there are lots of points against Ive. There's no sign he's ever run any other aspect of the company--his team designs the products and designs the manufacturing processes, but the software and hardware technology are completely separate from that. Cook has had his finger in every pie. I don't know that Jony has ever been as commanding as Steve or Tim. But most importantly, Jony Ive is such a good designer that he's needed in that role without the distractions of the CEO role. Tim as CEO can still do the COO job plus whatever additional duties come from being CEO. That's what he's done for over a year now, off and on as Steve has taken leave.
Is it really up for discussion when someone says "I actually share an office with this person and know they aren't a shill"? I don't think it is up for discussion anymore.
I would hardly equate use of a pseudonym with "strong anonymity requirements".
The problem is that you're trying to change people

Sure. But people have changed tremendously over time, right? Often, it's by focused effort (social engineering, more or less). Until around 150 years ago, slavery was legal in the US. A good chunk of the population saw absolutely nothing wrong with that. 50 years ago, significant racial discrimination was commonplace in many parts of the country, and now it's dramatically improved.

I'm not saying a person should live forever off one bit of work. I'm saying that software has a very unique financial model. Also, I can't help feeling that this future of open-source, funded hacking ultimately leads toward a career which is a bit like a non-stop NPR pledge drive. :-)
I am not sure if you understand the complete situation. Presently, the body that looks into the corruption cases against politicians and other Govt. workers is directly under the control of Govt. (you see the conflict of interest). The idea of lokpal is more than 40 years old, which says that the person/body investigating these corruption cases should be an independent body and (at least theoretically) should not be under the control of those being investigated. I don't see any problem with having a Lokpal. Of course, the lokpal can be corrupt. But atleast a non-corrupt Lokpal can investigate freely. Whereas, right now investigating Polititians and Govt. works is nearly impossible.
These days you'll probably need a valid SSN that maps to the name you want to use as well. Good luck accomplishing that without ripping off someone else's identity.
Would Awk be useful for end user plain text databases? I want to keep a listing of all my books but I would prefer not to use a database and to use something that works in the Unix console.
Contrarian view of Steve Jobs’s decision
I thought Google+ was more like twitter. It seems Google+ envies facebook's "intimate friend groups" that cause people to upload personal photos and events. Alas they don't realize that people are under "social fatigue" right now after five years of frenzy. They are copying something that is already going out of fashion. Anyway it's crazy. I only registered to Google+ with my real name because i want to develop apps. Google+ is not my identity.
My semi-educated guess on the Amazon tablet
It's a fair point, nobody has to use it, that's true.
But what I don't like is that there are exceptions like for "Madonna" and maybe others as well.
According to an interview with Jony Ive in Objectified, part of industrial design is designing the manufacturing process. Of course, implementing and enforcing that process involves the ops team.

On your second point, you're almost certainly right. Aside from the appointment of a certain Mr. Sculley almost 30 years ago, Steve's track record in hiring the absolute best people to work with is as good as his track record in shepherding innovative products into the marketplace.
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Was it suggested that all of the assumptions of the classical model are correct?
A required reading from my course on Advanced Storage Systems at CMU, http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~15-610/READINGS/optional/zhu2008.pdf

Really good paper which describes in detail how the deduplication works.
I'm not sure how much of that is improvisation on Eric's part or how much of his original meaning was preserved in the paraphrase, either way I doubt he is involved with the development of G+.

Not that there was much wrong with what was said, but if you're after some real insight here is a recent interview with Bradley Horowitz were he touches on psuedonyms, and basically says that the service will be more inclusive as it matures: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j5sRC67s9fg#t=26m25s
Speaking as a caucasian male with a name that's basically unique in the world (there is only one person who has my name but that might have been a typo in the article as every where else he uses a different last name), having my name improves their ad targeting considerably.
The fact that this will be offered for credit at accredited universities with physical campuses is really intriguing. Often efforts like this have difficulty getting the institutional buyin that will lead to real change.

As a side note, they could have chosen a name with a better acronym -- FU already has meaning attached to it for a lot of people.
In my view the naming issue is just a distraction. The bigger problem is that Google+ was always living off nerd hype whereas facebook(its main competitor) didn't come into nerd limelight until several years after launch.

I really wasn't talking about any specific issue. Google+ is dead because it has little traction/engagement and most importantly, no focused plan of growth.
I think if you're the COO at Apple, of all companies, you're used to making the impossible happen.
You may want to try reading the links you post:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yoga#Reception_in_the_West

Let me save you the trouble while I'm here:

"...legitimizing yoga as a purely physical system of health exercises outside of counter culture or esotericism circles, and unconnected to a religious denomination."
Imagine if newspapers in the time of the American revolution rejected all articles and letters without real names? There would be no revolution as it was largely argued and coordinated through the press. Even the Federalist Papers was written pseudonymously. What Google is saying is nothing of import should happen on G+.
The Awk Programming Language[1], by Aho, Kernighan and Weinberger, has a whole chapter on using Awk as a relational database engine. (They implement a small query language in Awk itself.) It's also a great book period.

[1] http://cm.bell-labs.com/cm/cs/awkbook
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I was wondering - with the current amount of abstraction and similar (sometimes redundant) metadata on almost everything - what percent of duplicate blocks could be found on a standard desktop system?

I don't think it would be useful, I'm just interested in the level of "standard" data duplication.
The following stroke me as a very strange: "Hurd borrowed heavily from the founders’ playbook". Really? How? Where? Why? WTF?

Does any of HP-alumnis here thinks that Hurd was a "HP way" CEO?
What does the fact you are a Caucasian male have to do with your point?
In what metric?
The GUI of SPSS is better then R (which doesn't have a GUI, though interesting competitors are available like Rcmdr and Deducer).
In terms of everything else (performance, graphics, statistical tools, programming language), then from what I understand - R is the winner without a doubt...
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Ah, thanks for the correction. I've made a note at the end of my original comment. Either way, storing some data is how Google chooses to do business. Whether legally required or not, this fact should give pause to those who need anonymity and are considering using Google's services. Google isn't trying to capture the segment of the market that requires strong privacy and anonymity. That's all Schmidt is saying.
I prefer anonymity. Google knows too much about me already, I'd prefer they stop trying to make every fact about me known by the servers that serve me pages. I don't want every link on the internet an opportunity for the authorities to stop that click event.
I totally agree with you. The best part of the article was the thought-provoking title. :)

The HP I grew up with is (has been) gone and unless they get back to their innovative roots I don't believe they'll survive. Time will prove me right or wrong.
What can $5 get you? Prototyping class, donation and free software.
That article debunks the claims you were making on this site last week about other services not being affected at all.

Google: If your profile is under review, you will not be able to make full use of Google services that require an active profile such as Google+, Buzz, and some social features of Reader and Picasa Web Albums. For example, on Buzz, you can't create content, on Reader you can't share items with other users or follow other users, and on Picasa Web Albums you can't comment on photos.

Compared with:
"That is just a vicious rumor. They explicitly said the no other service of theirs will be affected." http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2907098

"Other services aren't affected. Period."
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2907104

Having core features of other services disabled is clearly an affect on those services.
So, my question to you is: when did they "explicitly" say no other services were affected? And if they never did, why did you claim they did?
You could take the first 2/3 of this, and title it "Why simple mathematical notation might turn you into an atheist"
I respect your trying to bring attention to incivility on HN, but in what way is the user anonymous? Their account seems old enough and has plenty karma to make me respect their opinion.

Also, in my case, the GP expressed the same opinion that I had after seeing those comments on the OP.
Its because the root motivation most people including myself see is that its about control. And things that try and control other things are evil.

Years ago Google was a disruption force towards existing controlling organisations. Now Google are trying to prevent disruptive technologies eroding their market share.

Hence they have joined the ranks of the old guard such as Microsoft, IBM, Apple etc... those desiring control, and hence arguably evil.

Just the nature of business, they don't really have a choice, and many respects are bound by law to become 'evil'.
Be that as it may, do think the primary reason for insisting on real names is to target ads better? they first need a sufficient critical mass to implement that, their reasons are different, at least in this early stage.
Don't miss the moiré patterns in the wires.
If so, it is an identity service run by an advertising company.
This is an important countervailing concern to the 'just don't use the service' argument in the G+ real name controversy. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2932331

I'm more sympathetic to this type of argument after reading Jonathan Haidt's book: http://www.amazon.com/Happiness-Hypothesis-Finding-Modern-An...
The idea that a journalist should out someone who is gay to celebrate gayness is wrong.

In fact, the idea that someone should be outed for the benefit of gays is the exact origin of the concept of "outing."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outing#History
> In the modern world, we've created the Intellectual Property construct in an effort to apply what we think of as 'natural' rules to intangible things.

Here's the disconnect: many people find those rules utterly unnatural. I could dig out the famous quote about ideas not being amenable to notions of property, but I suspect you already know it.

Incidentally, I tend to agree on the downvoting thing. I'd rather explain my position and engage than try to drive away people I disagree with.
I don't get how this is OK on HN but the articles on the "right to video police" are not. Isn't this article also politics?
07.46.199.184 [28/Sep/2010:04:08:20] "GE...

07, huh? :)
Obviously you're taking things to an extreme (but understandable, given the initial remark you're responding to) degree. A better wording would have said something like "A CEO should know a little (or a lot) about all the c-level roles". These are the people they'll need to work with and delegate to.

Tim Cook wouldn't benefit from a more thorough understanding of the janitor's role. He would benefit from understanding operations, marketing, finance and technology. His ultimate responsibility is to recruit and retain the best people for those roles. He doesn't need to be world-class at each, but he needs to be able to identify what world-class looks like for each c-level role.
Why would you want to do that? It looks like xml all over again. No advantages of user-readable format and no advantages of a real database. Talking to sqlite CLI tool is probably a little bit more useful.
I wonder why Oracle changes that in the first place? Is it their attempt to compete with Red Hat on RHEL? Basically, this means enterprise users will have to move to Oracle's Unbreakable Linux. (Which, is ironically, based on RHEL)
I've recommended Steve Blank's "The Four Steps to the Epiphany" several times but I didn't know that the blog author has published Running Lean, a (PDF) book on customer development just for web startups. I'm going to order it right now. Thanks for posting this.
How to Download Mac OS X Lion From the App Store Again
As a former employee of Agilent, I have to say that the saddest thing about the HP story is that another company got away with the name. To the extent that the real Hewlett-Packard still exists, Agilent is the real Hewlett-Packard. (The company spun itself into two parts in the 1990s.)

And so it's painful to read all these stories about how the HP Way is dead dead dead, about how the company founded by Bill and Dave has been trashed, et cetera. In fact, the company founded by Bill and Dave isn't quite dead. It just donated the HP name -- and entirely too many unfortunate employees -- to this now-completely-different company that has since been run into the ground.

Agilent, as far as I know, is still chugging along. Unlike this thing-now-known-as-HP, it still makes test equipment, descended from the test equipment that Bill and Dave built in their garage. I suspect that, in true HP tradition, its products continue to be fairly expensive, culturally distinct, equipped with voluminous and sometimes mysterious documentation, occasionally quirky to the point of hysterical laughter, and utterly indispensable in their particular niches.
To add some context: he was asked by a war reporter (Andy Carvin) about people living under totalitarian regimes and their correlation with the G+ real name policy.

So basically the answer is that if you are endangered by reveling your real name, you shouldn't use it, at least not at this stage which is prudent advice.
Agreed. Just because I may be anonymous doesn't automatically mean I'm evil.
Our right to anonymity trumps google's (or atone else's) right to "down vote" the "evil".

What's described is the archetype slippery slope. What's evil shifts and grows ever larger.
I once read another formulation of this problem, a PDF by Nick Bostrom: http://www.nickbostrom.com/papers/pascal.pdf. It depicts this problem as a dialogue between the mugger and the mugged, which I found more entertaining to read than the HN link, and the PDF’s description still preserves all the important attributes of the problem. If you find the HN link boring, try the PDF.
Yeah random acess on hard disks is awfully slow. And if you have dedup you can cause lots of random access...
If you have a little bit of data the hashtable used for dedup can also be to big to fit into memory. Then ZFS puts it onto the disk and it is even slower. Luckily there is a feature to use SSDs as a cache device in this case.
Let it go, it's 2011. Every time someone uses Awk in this day and age god kills a baby seal.
This is no more cognitive than any artificial neural network we have until now. The only innovation is lower power consumption. So, it's just a power-friendly artificial neural network simulator. I would really like to see details about the abilities of these processors (why aren't they available anywhere?). When they say "programmable synapses" do they mean they have a programmable weight? Real synapses are not nearly like that, with very intricate computational abilities that come from the dynamics of presynaptic release and postsynaptic binding. How are they going to simulate something like this: http://www.sciencemag.org/content/329/5999/1671.short

"Cognitive" sounds just like marketing fluff here. Scientists should not adopt this marketer-speak.
I get the general vibe that pre-Carly HP was an engineering firm, and after that, it's been an enterprise IT firm.

Would that be a reasonable vibe, or is that wholly skew from reality?
They are TFU i guess.
And why do you think that? Awk is simply the best tool for many tasks.
But there is no Ham Radio aspect in this one!
At least for my naked AT&T DSL, there's a 'fake' phone number (0-xxx-xxx-xxxx) associated with the account. Usually, the automated prompt won't recognise that number, but human representatives are fine with it.
XML? I keep databases in user readable/writable format that I also parse with awk. The whole point of awk is to parse human readable text. No XML nonsense. Just text with a non-rigid structure.
Given the number of different ways that this policy can be used for "evil", Google's motto is beginning to sound religious and righteous rather than moral. That is, the decision is not justifiable. Its just dogma. Rather like a Christian Crusader saying "Don't be Evil" just before murdering a town of Muslims because, after all, if you aren't Christian, then by definition, you are evil, and eradicating evil is what we do. This is how Schmidt's "sticking to his guns" comes across to me. When "Good" means "What we think Good is", then "Don't be Evil" is the epitome of evil.
Linus Torvalds hasn't done too badly for himself, as far as I know. But if you really want huge profit, you need a model that doesn't rely on copyright, like SaaS. Google got where they are with a combination of the Google Search and AdSense software-based services, neither of which rely on copyright.
That (continues) to say much more about the inner brokenness of the Word "file format" than attempts to reverse-engineer it. That's a quoted term as the format has little to do with a typical mark-up-version-saved-to-disk, as was standard on such modern formats as ... WordStar and WordPerfect in the late 1980s.

Granted, it doesn't help you much when you've got to interact with someone using some random version of a borken instance of MS Word.

I'm aware that MSFT have moved to an XML-based markup, and that support may have improved. I find the word-processing model (with its assumptions of a static, un-shared paper-based document) fundamentally broken. Most of my communications are in text files, Wiki documents, or on the odd occasion, Google docs or similar which allow simultaneous shared online edits.

It's also curious that nearly 30 years since its release, there's no simple reader for MS Word. Yes, Microsoft released one such. If you hit space (or any other character), say, to scroll through the document as you would a 'less' pager or PDF viewer .... a dialog appeared telling you that this was not an editor. Which you had to dismiss. Every. Fucking. Time.

And somewhere deep within Redmond, someone is still wondering why MS Word DOC format didn't become a universal document interface interchange format.
On the largest scale, you will focus on vision and direction.

Read: Golf.
Ars Technica should be ashamed of themselves for
1) considering to write a piece like this
2) actually editing it for publishing
3) actually publishing it.

The end result may be that many people will start to believe that Tim Cook is gay.

How many people here even thought about Cook's personal life before reading the article?

Does anybody think his (or anybody elses) sexuality matters? If so, I'd like to hear why.

The press needs to start taking responsibility for what they are publishing. When a publication openly discusses things like 'and a recent tasteless photograph that I will not link ', or 'Whether or not you agree with what Gawker published in January', providing a link or not, the reader is likely inclined to search for said article or photo. It is as bad as writing the initial article yourself.

Though I don't see a way out of this, I think that in this situation, Ars took the wrong route, and I hope their editors pull the article.
It is happening right now. Recent example: http://www.indiegogo.com/SBCL-Threading-Improvements-1
> … Within 6 months, I moved to another provider ….
>
> Is there any chance AT&T will allow customers to do the same as I did?

The first quoted sentence illustrated why the answer to the second is often 'no'. In my market, and I think many others, there is no alternative to AT&T for DSL (I don't know about landline service; I don't have it), so they don't feel any need to keep us happy.
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