skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The presentation on the site doesn't do the language and its design justice, so I'll fill in a bit here.

Qi is a programming language with a "powerful" static type system, which can be useful. Other generally usable languages with "powerful" static typing include Haskell and Ocaml. Some people want "powerful" static typing. If you are one of those, then like me, you should be interested in Qi.

Qi has been implemented in Common Lisp. Qi code is translated into Lisp code, and Qi code can also call Lisp code - there is interoperability. If you code in Lisp or intend to do so, you can use Qi as well, and still reuse existing code and functionality.

However, few people use Common Lisp. Some of the most popular platforms do not support Common Lisp.

Shen is intended to be the next evolution of Qi; Shen is a "redesign" of Qi to reduce the effort required to implement Qi on a language. The idea is to implement Shen on popular languages, like Javascript, Python, etc.

There are three notable benefits that we can look forward to:
1. Single language across many platforms.
2. High-level language available on platforms, like the web browser, mobile devices, and so on. Haskell today doesn't run on mobile phones.
3. Qi/Shen is like a cleaned-up Lisp. Some people prefer that to languages like Javascript, to Dalvik Java, and so on.

What's pending is its implementation on the non-Lisp languages. Performance and reliability could be concerns, given the differences between its original host language, Lisp, and other languages. If the performance and correctness tests for these turn out well, there is good reason to be excited.

The release of Shen on Common Lisp is of lesser consequence. Qi already runs on Common Lisp. Releasing Shen (which is mostly a more "portable" Qi, but retaining the syntax and power) on CL just proves that Shen has been completed with nearly no errors.

Currently, there's a group working to implement it on Javascript, but they postponed the delivery to late October.
Its success would be noteworthy.
"a terribly-led company, sitting on its laurels as first-mover and squandering opportunities to move into new markets"

As a former employee of that behemoth, I can only say: you hit the nail on the head.
>A pointer is a particular kind of reference (a value type that enables indirection), and C++ references are another (not very different) kind. A reference in C++ amounts to an immutable pointer.

A pointer is a memory address. That's all it is. It can contain any valid memory address for the system.

A C++ reference is essentially a hard link to another declared object. As far as the compiler is concerned, a reference to an object is the object, and therefore has all the attributes that the original object has.

Pointers are like a house street addresses. They do not directly allow the user to see anything about the house, but they tell the user where the house is.

References are like what people call a certain house. I may call the house I live in "home", but my friend Bob may call it "cube13's house". Both myself and Bob use different terms for it, but we both mean the exact same physical location.
YC, what is it worth to me?
I'm trawling through the YC application. Yeah I hate it just as much as business plans yet find it much easier to complete. It wasn't aimed to bore you but gather key information.

However it still has me thinking is YC really worth it?

We're funded through a convertible note of $100,000 from a local property investor (in the NE of the UK).

We're in the middle of an intense build and the relocation to SF will slow it down and provide some distractions. Also, we should be complete at this stage.

I'm the only co founder and have paid freelance designers, not because they don't want to join the project but because I didn't see them as a fit.

I like my idea, I don't want to pivot. Not because I think it is a billion $ idea or anything of the sort. I just really dig the idea.

All of the above seem like reasons why YC isn't a fit. However I still find myself thinking FK it I'd change every single one and I really would.

It has an special atmosphere surrounding it and I would hand that investment back, take on 2 co founders and pivot my idea to hell to be part of it.

Yet I still find myself thinking... Why?
Don't forget... c is the speed of light 'in a vacuum'. Light travels slower through gas, water or glass. Light has even been slowed down to walking speed in a laboratory. The speed of light is not constant. The speed of light in a vacuum is. We assume.
> Eg: A pointer amounts to an int.

Is there a reason why this analogy is invalid? I found it to be quite useful in using, understanding and explaining C pointers.
Ha, yeah, noted. Thanks!
It is completely true, less than 1 percent of all users were the users who were actively using/dropping/collecting items.
I think this is more geared towards the narcissist in all of us. You read your own timeline, not your workmates'.
Great explanations.
Yes, if you pick an idea that people definitely need, and you execute well, you'll make money. It's riskier if you try to make something completely new (like Color) - if you just need money, then pick something that's a clear win.

One example is Offline City Maps. I think almost anyone can go download the Route-Me mapping library, download OSM data, and make an offline city maps app that makes a few thousand a month.
PayPal does NOT have single rate pricing. AmEx is 3.5%... See the disclosures at the bottom of the page here: https://www.paypal.com/webapps/mpp/website-payments-pro

That being said, we'd love to do that but you need to be of a certain size to negotiate with AmEx. Working on it.

Also - we are keeping the same rate for international credit cards, which is something that the other guys don't offer.
The Top 5 Things That Bother Me About This Headline
Using Apache Mahout recommendation engine to personalize your web application
My only response is "sweet, now I can quit trying to do that banner-across-the-top-photo-thumbnails thing on my burlesque identity's page". Anything else is lagniappe.
I often receive friend requests from people who I have recently met through work, going out, friends of friends, etc.

It seems like it would be a good way for these people who know a little bit about me to quickly learn a little more about me.
I've heard a lot of people on HN call Facebook a toy, which at some point was probably a fair criticism. This is the first thing I've seen from Facebook in a long time that truly feels like important and worthwhile work.
It pretty much is a digital scrapbook. I think allot of FB users will like it. I personally don't see a need for it though.

However I can see the people who currently use scrapbooks and are on fb, really use it on fb.

As a business decision, I think it's a good one. It will keep some of their customers engaged. I am curious to which demographic will really like the feature.

I am banking that fb thinks that the "popular" users will really use it. By "popular" I mean user(s) in any fb graph, that have the most profile views from other users in that same graph. The users that in a fb graph, people want to keep up with the most.

Those users I think don't necessarily have to be early adopters. They are just popular.

FB as business to grow just has

1.) Maintain Users
2.) Have Current Users use the site more and create more content on it

That is probably why we are seeing more and more features to keep users engaged.
Bearing in mind 'spooky action at a distance', shouldn't we be expecting to see some kind of mechanism that would imply some kind of particle accounting behind the scenes, that might appear as objects or information moving faster than the speed of light?
In-Depth Demo of Color for Facebook (Scoble interviews Bill Nguyen)
Nice post Joe. Good to see you sharing some of that knowledge.
That's a good point about legality. Thanks.
Facebook f8 Konferansı’ndan ilk görüntüler
> So does the same line of reasoning in #2 apply to Apple iOS and Android devices? Why aren't people in an uproar about that? (I take that back, they are in an uproar in the Android world).

This line of reasoning doesn't apply to iOS/Android because there is more than one major player. On the other hand it's basically impossible to go into a retail chain and walk out with a PC that runs something other than Microsoft Windows (unless you're buying a Mac, but they are still only a small portion of the consumer PC market).
Imperative Pseudocode to Pure Functional Algorithm with Gale-Shapely and F#
> Practical implications?

Using ion propulsion and gravitationally assisted slingshot trajectories, you'd get to Proxima Centauri about 173 days 12 hours sooner, which sounds pretty cool if you ignore that that's 173 days of a 19,000 year trip.

By nuclear pulse propulsion (EDIT: invented, but still theoretical, thanks adrianN) taking 85 years, you'd get there about 18 hours sooner.
Not sure why this is downvoted, it's a valid point. It has become less of a utility. Facebook messaging is akin to AOL e-mail. Let me access my data and interact with my friends in a Google-way of efficient minimalism please.
I'll leap on your downvote train. That was also my initial reaction to reading the headline. Perhaps that means it was a bit of a glib summary..?
Cool. I didn't know this! Will definitely check that out.
Because the board in older companies usually consists of people with MBAs from expensive schools who just don't get technology (hint: it's not about cutting costs, it's about building technology).
I agree. The ebay site looked like a throwback to the 90's until a couple of years ago. On top of that it was very slow. Not only startups were chipping away at their business but also Craigslist and Amazon.

The Skype acquisition was simply botched, as someone else mentioned. It is incredible that someone would screw up the legal due diligence on a multi-billion dollar deal.

Also she obviously used the Ebay IPO to get herself appointed on the board of directors of Goldman Sachs.
Not just the bootloader, from what I understand, the whole OS needs to be signed : drivers in particular or anything else that could talk to the firmware. So, they need to be signed too. With OSes such as Linux, I don't even know if it's technically possible to do that from a license point of view.
They did qualify that this isn't an example of the original intent of Hungarian Notation

"The following tips will help you corrupt the original intent of Hungarian Notation"

But it's not really that clear if you've not heard what proper Hungarian Notation is before.
Ask HN: I'm a beginner, who should I use for analytics on my site?
I'm slowly learning to code and building a site for the first time. Right now, the site is free. Soon, I plan to charge a one-time fee for access. I don't have very many users/pageviews yet.

I want to use a free analytics product to get some pretty basic information:
How many visitors go to each page? Where did they come from? Where are they located? How long did they stay? (I'm probably missing some obvious ones.)
And eventually, something that helps me understand a bit about who is purchasing and who is not.

I'm using PHP and MySQL, and I'm looking for something that is as simple as possible. I strongly prefer ease of use to advanced functionality.

I've seen Google Analytics, MixPanel, Clicky, SiteMeter, KISSmetrics, and others mentioned on HN.

Who would you recommend for a beginner, and why? Is it worth trying more than one at the same time?
EBay to launch open commerce platform at Innovate DevCon
That is such a well known result in physics that the likelihood of it occurring here is almost zero. I remember first reading about it and the scientists basically said "we broke the speed of light" without looking for further explanations. These guys seem like they generally don't believe that they have broken the light barrier, but they need help figuring out what they actually did do from the broader community. Due to their very humble attitude, I bet they examined the literature and ruled this particular possibility out very early on.

I bet you there is a systematic error, but I don't think it's this one.

My general rule with physics is that if I can think of it, then a real physicist will laugh at it's triviality.
It will be interesting if/how this affects Facebook as a platform for apps.

Apps appear to be more visible in this design, as well as having more of a purpose. Perhaps part of the motivation of this design was to encourage developers to make use of the Facebook platform.

It may be a good opportunity for web apps to make their users more public about their choice of apps. While apps can currently publish to a user's wall, I prevent this from happening because it seems spammy and pointless, but I wouldn't have an issue with an app having a dedicated space on my profile where it displays specific information.
If you learn something like haskell from books instead of blogs, the explanations are usually much much more comprehensive and cogent. Both Learn You a Haskell and Real World Haskell are excellent in that respect.

I find more and more that blogs are great for discussing things you already have deep knowledge of, or of finding leads to resources for learning them (book recommendations, etc.), but there's no comparison to books for really learning something well.

Blogs are just too piecemeal, and the articles are usually written in a few days or a week, versus up to a year or more for books. Hence the quality of pedagogy is just much higher with books than blogs.
Goldman Sachs Invests $25 Million in ZocDoc
Point made. It also seems to be the common topic discussion on this thread though.
Phase velocity vs group velocity.

But it's pretty easy to check that everything is alright with group velocity. If there is zero neutrino production at t=0 (in the reactor's frame of reference), and then the production jumps up, there can be no doubt about the group velocity.

Bizarre effects relative to superluminal phase velocity only appear when you start generating particles before t=0 and you mess with the medium in between. Then the "superluminal" illusion is created by quanta created before t=0.

TLDR: I find it bizarre that seasoned professionals could be fooled by phase velocity or a similar effect.
Pesca deportiva
I was with you until you mentioned Bartz as an example. She was actually really good as the head of Autodesk. Yahoo has languished, but at least she didn't make any company killing decisions like Fiorina or Apotheker.
Wouldn't this also violate conservation of energy? A particle with any mass, traveling at the speed of light, would have infinite energy. And accelerating a particle to that speed would "push back" on the earth with infinite force, so it might also break conservation of momentum.
Facebook: Live From F8
Dropping Science on The Big Bang Theory
Yeah, I've had issues with this from the start. (And being listed negatively on sites like http://www.mywot.com)

I'm not quite sure what's causing it - suspect maybe email bounces for undeliverable mails could have something to do with it.

I'll have to look into how I get myself off this blacklist though . . . I'm guessing it may one of those things that it's easier to get yourself onto, that it is to get yourself off of!

I do find it kind of ironic that a site that's about trying to prevent spam, gets itself blacklisted for spam =)
The best way to answer this question is to ask the people (a) whose circumstances were like yours and (b) who know about YC from personal experience.

Off the top of my head the closest match in your case might be Oliver Cameron of Everyme:

http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=olivercameron
Quantcast is pretty good as well. I tend to use them and Google (both free)
Aren't neutrinos everywhere? How do they know the neutrinos they measured are the same ones they fired?
Do you have any other ideas for small personal educational software? Or do you know any websites where I can find problems teachers are having that can be addressed with software?
I suppose I should also clarify: I'm not starting the business under a false name -- i.e,. I'm using my real name, credit card, address for my google apps account, web hosting, etc... It's just that for signing the blog posts and things like that I'm using the "nom de guerre" of Bob (actually it's not bob, but you get the point). Let's say my name is Chuck Norris - I'm not ready yet for someone googling "Chuck Norris" to see my project appear - yet.
Deep Spotify Integration Brings Free Music to Facebook
I can't get over how bad a title this is.

Also, blogspam.
I think quite simply in terms of the numbers. YC results in a lot of successful startups. YC won’t guarantee your success, but statistically speaking, your chances are much higher.
Couldn't it be that the lack of interaction with the electro-weak force allows neutrinos to exceed the speed of a photon in a non-vacuum environment? Or is the article saying that the neutrinos exceed c?

edit: More questions, since photons are massless they should be unaffected by gravity except in the sense of following the curvature of spacetime. Could the non-zero mass of the neutrino mean that if you changed the experiment so it fired away from the earth mean that the neutrinos would travel "slower" than photons?
Facebook Music announced with Spotify, Rdio, MOG, and more
if the demand is international and there are plenty of viable US options, why build another US-only product?

I'm not sure "there are plenty of viable US options" is entirely accurate. I've tried a bunch of options, and found them all to suck to one degree or another. We're currently using PayPal Web Payments Pro...it also sucks. But, at least their pricing is sane and comprehensible, and I don't hate life when dealing with them fro chargebacks and such (it's all on the web, and no faxing is involved, as was the case with every other merchant services provider I've ever tried or contacted, including supposedly modern options).

Merchant services is shockingly archaic in the US. It may be even more shockingly archaic in the rest of the world, but it's definitely not good here. I'll definitely look into this when it becomes available.
Global Meltdown: Investors Are Dumping Nearly Everything
I'm using the devise plugin for rails which seemed to be the most popular choice at the time.
(https://github.com/plataformatec/devise)

I've pretty much just gone for the default settings, which I'm guessing must include a limit on the length of the password.

The password is definitely hashed in the database though.

(Thanks for the all feedback you are giving too btw =)
Well, the least you can say is she won't be as bad as Carly.
Irrelevant, since those runtimes are already written. And yes, I am a primarily a C programmer, although I've been mostly doing C++ recently.
Global Markets Sell Off on Significant Economic Concerns
Now all they need is a text-to-speech feature to fully rip off Qwiki in this new(ish) innovation.
Health insurance costs to rise again next year
Worry About a New Wave of Layoffs
Jewelry Box: Mac OS GUI for RVM -- manage Ruby's and gems graphically
Brain imaging reveals the movies in our minds
Meg Whitman is, as far as I can tell, an incompetent moron.

Examine the skype acquisition: the way I understand, Meg/ebay acquired skype without buying the backing technology / p2p tech which remained owned by Joltid / Niklas / Janus. Ebay then went on to not pay some of the earnouts of the skype acquisition which I'm sure made Niklas / Janus think highly of ebay [1]. It literally boggles the mind that she could be stupid enough to acquire a company without owning the backing tech; it would be like a company buying an OS that came without ownership of the kernel. Niklas / Janus then used this to earn a bunch more money when ebay went on to sell skype.

For some background:
http://gigaom.com/2009/09/01/ebay-skype-sale/

[1] http://techcrunch.com/2007/10/01/skype-ceo-zennstrom-steps-d...
We implemented a library that could create complicated AJAX interactions by writing 0 javascript, instead just adding a few extra HTML tags to code.

I don't understand what this means. Can you please explain how this works?
Android SDK Tools release 13
Thanks! Maybe the author of the article will agree.
Ring structure! (The microphone.)
I think you're probably right. Although the article did remind me about something I noticed with my younger cousin. He was visiting (about 11 at the time) and would play Halo with his friends online. They would play custom games though and make up their own rules. A lot of them were similar to games I remembered playing outside (cops and robbers, tag, etc.). I played with him a few times and found it incredible boring (since most of the time they were just arguing with each other about who should play what).

I thought it was interesting that this kind of play moved into the digital realm and I could see how the lego-like nature of Minecraft kind of relates to this.
Disgusting. Who would put their life story on Facebook? A crippled kind of human. Life is not pictures and facts, and this product pretends it is.
sure (and upvoted) but I was just using "incompetent as incompetent does" as the guiding rule, not really looking at past records etc. What exactly did she do at Yahoo anyway that made the situation there better? AFAIK the good engineers at Yahoo are running out the door as fast as they can. Not sure that is the sign of a thriving company (but then I have zero upper management experience etc and am just a dev and so could be missing something very obvious - and hence the question).

That said, feel free to substitute Bartz with anyone else you consider an incompetent CEO. Doesn't affect my post much. My curiosity is about what the hiring of CEOs at great cost then firing them (also at great cost), and replacing them with even more dubious people, reveals about the system and the forces at play.

For eg: if Apotheker was let go at SAP then what made him a good choice for HP?If he couldn't be an effective CEO at SAP which is an enterprise software company, then how is he a good choice for turning HP into an enterprise software company? I just don't get the logic there.

Why aren't the people who made that decision now being fired along with Apotheker? How are such decisions taken, and more importantly how do such poor decisions survive the scrutiny of investors etc?
Hmm. I see "ENGINE=MyISAM" in the code. Nowadays I can't stomach using MyISAM for anything I care about not having some sort of corruption. Given sufficient time and scale, I've seen far too many issues with MyISAM.

It'd be great to be able to specify that in the code so the user can opt for InnoDB (or engine of their choice). Perhaps a pull request is in my future...
Tips and Tricks to Make SQL Server Management Studio Awesome
The article seems to be saying that the neutrinos appear to have exceeded c. If it were just neutrinos moving faster than photons through some non-vacuum environment, that would be completely non-notable - experiments have already succeed in slowing light down to almost nothing, after all.
Yup. Pretty much. You do need to know the inbox name they were originally sent to. This is to prevent someone from just wgetting all the emails from id=1 thru id=99999.

(Security thru obscurity I guess =)

Thanks for the feedback =) I actually thought this would be a lot easier when I started before I started digging into it. I guess this is probably thru of a lot of things - they look easy enough until you have to actually start doing them!
No.

Non-zero rest mass photons will break a lot of theories.

Plus, the "speed of light" is not merely an experimental result coming out of an interferometer. It's also a theoretical result, e.g. from Maxwell's equations - that's the one referred to by special relativity.
An alternative is that neutrinos and photons travel a different distance because there are extra dimensions that affect the two types of particles differently. These are the so-called space-time foam models.
Awesome selection of cheap books