skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A story about starting businesses gets political responses and gets marked dead for political reasons. Bye bye free speech and impartiality on Hacker News. Why can't people just reply to the large on-topic part?

PS I would reply to the post itself, rather than your comment, but I can't.
short answer yes with a maybe, long answer no with a but.
I'm pretty sure the two sides are identical.
arc has failed

Failed at what, exactly? Being a toaster?

You guys all seem to be projecting your own expectations about
"language and community" onto Arc, none of which have to do with the
stated goals of the project. What part of
making-a-better-Lisp-where-better-mostly-equals-shorter-programs don't
you understand?
You May Soon Know if You’re Hogging the Discussion
Nope. kqr2 had it right, the approach was to move parameters into tables that the user could edit. Asking the user to spell anything out is not in the cards for that example.
Energy: "Drill baby drill"?
I disagree, or agree only superficially. IT departments start off as innocuous places where the guy who knows how to fix the copier hides, but as things grow they're responsible for maintaining the security and availability of the company's information assets. So long as the data is not of strategic value it won't rouse the attention of the executive level management, but as awareness of the value of the data grows (read: data loss, security issue, or regulatory violation) you can bet CIOs will create policies prohibiting use of external systems, and crack down on violators.

So, I think cloud computing will afford a small window of flexibility for companies, but will ultimately get rolled in to the larger IT picture. If so, however, it will probably increase flexibility in IT department policies, which is good news for everyone -- IT executives look good if they're flexible, leaf nodes don't get any joy from telling people no, and the IT department customers get more of what they need with less red tape.
Most economists (~90%) think free trade is a huge net positive for the world. Paul Krugman, the most prominent living left-wing economist, is a unabashed supporter of trade. Obama demonizes it. Krugman is much closer to McCain than Obama on free trade.

Obama wants to raise taxes because there is no place to cut a $3 trillion budget. In fact, he wants to add many new expenditures to that budget. Many smart people seem to have gotten caught up in his class-warrior socialist rhetoric, but the truth is we all lose when government punishes the productive sectors of society through taxation.

Subsidies? Every economist I know and most environmentalists are against corn and ethanol subsidies. McCain had the balls to make a stand against them at a debate IN IOWA, a notorious corn state. Obama realizes that handouts win votes, and spinelessly sticks by them.

Healthcare? The big healthcare problem in the United States is cost, not access. See http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2008/09/getting_re... . McCain wants to address the cost of healthcare. Obama is all about access. I think Obama is wrong on the issue.

Energy: Obama promises to subsidize various technologies out the wazoo, but we have seen little return from previous billion-dollar efforts.

Your last sentence illustrates the religion-like fervor that has developed around Obama and the intellectual bankruptcy of his movement. I won't be voting for McCain, but I have no illusions that Saunt Obama is going to save the world.

I'm sorry I stated the case against your savior. I hadn't realized that Hacker News had turned into reddit, and that any comment against the one with the Kennedy smile was worthy of downvotes.
Match his tax bills more closely to his cash expenditures?
Incorporate in a country like Hong Kong which has no corporate taxes for income from outside of the country.
Recently, Bernanke seems to have come around to accepting that asset prices are important to monetary policy, breaking a long-held Fed orthodoxy, dating back to Greenspan. Contrast his speech in 2002, where he outlines the"don't burst a bubble but clean up the aftermath" philosophy:

http://www.federalreserve.gov/BoardDocs/Speeches/2002/200210...

with this recent speech in October 2008:

http://business.smh.com.au/business/bernanke-signals-new-app...
I mailed a FedEx letter once.

I don't believe that running successful business is like winning the lottery. If I did, I wouldn't spend so much time learning about how to form and run startups.

FedEx is a tremendous success story. Created an entire business niche where none existed before. You can either have more of that or less of it. I know where I stand.
> its success doesn't have much to do, from what I can tell, with the actual design of the language.

Wow, really? This seems way off base to me. The only reason I care about Clojure is 'persistent' data structures that give us some chance of writing code that /just, maybe, possibly/ will execute usefully on the 1024+-core boxes we're going to be using shortly. That's the only reason I care about it, and I'd say that's fundamentally the design of the language.
How do you think it should be fixed/organized? I used to live in DC; I cried myself to sleep at night thinking about government waste.
7 Fantastic Internet Hoaxes
Stoners, Vegans and a Junky Elephant Conquer BitTorrent
The enduring appeal of the pitchman.
BMW To Become Linux Powered Car?
Facebook definitely sounds like a decent place to work. Them and Google are places I hope to take influence from if I ever make it to having an actual physical office space :P
Free trade is generally a net gain for the world, but it also tends to increase consumption which is not necessarily a good idea. For example if local industry is more carbon efficient then we might increase global pollution for little real gain. Ditto for cases like Mad Cow disease etc.

Due to differences in regulation I don't want to see Chinese drug manufactures shipping drugs to the US. I don't mind if US or EU companies manufacture in China but the potential harm from contaminated drugs IMO outweighs the potential cost reductions.

Granted for bulk goods like Lumber, Steel, and Oil it's probably a pure net win.

PS: I find it offensive that Bill Gates has a lower effective tax rate than I do, but I don't see that changing any time soon. I am for an all inclusive flat tax with zero tax breaks of any kind, but I don't see anyone jumping on that bandwagon. AKA you don't treat stock ownership different than home ownership, and there is no cap on Social Security, and there is no charitable giving tax break etc. (Federal, State, and Local tax inclusive.)
less complex languages - i.e, languages that abstract away difficulty

That is a very anomalous definition of complexity. In truth, a language that is more complex may or may not be more abstract. For example, Prolog operates at a very high level of abstraction, and it is far less complex than a language like C++.

C++ is less complex than C

C++ allows programs to be written at a higher level of abstraction than C, but it is not less complex than C by any reasonable definition of "complexity". In fact, it is the very existence of the C++ tools for abstraction (classes, templates, virtual functions, MI) that cause much of C++'s language complexity. Perhaps you are conflating the complexity of the language with the complexity of a typical program written in that language?
i guarantee Matt will cringe when he reads this in years to come. some valid critiques of the worker-bee lifestyle, but a completely off the mark sense of true utility, value and cross-generation contribution to such. any small amount of serious study of historical "effort" would cause an about face hear. there is little else to say.
This Space for Rent -- to Advertisers, if Not Retail Tenants
I think it's fair to say that Ruby is "quirkier" (less internally consistent, more special cases) than Python.
i say it's high time we start downranking people who link nytimes articles...
Nifty, though having used both languages I don't know why you would want to use Java instead of Objective-C. Plus it's not the language that matters most, it's the Cocoa libraries, which you'll still need to use anyway (I suppose that could be an argument for using whatever language you're comfortable with, but I feel Objective-C is particularly well suited for Cocoa)

It seems a little ridiculous to convert Java source code to Java bytecode to XML, then use XSLT to convert to Objective-C source code, but I guess if it works...

Also, there's a few inaccuracies:

a) Apple isn't just planning on adding garbage collection to Objective-C, Objective-C 2.0 already has it (though it's not available on iPhone, for whatever reason)

b) He says it's a downside that there's no strong compile time type checking, but really the warnings the compiler gives you that your class hierarchy doesn't implement a selector are pretty much equivalent to the Java compiler telling you it can't find a method. Just enable -Werror if you want to treat warnings as errors.
Just like the write off consumers receive when they buy goods, right?
Whoever? :)
Here We Go Again, Bush Orders DOJ To Probe Democratic Registrations |
I agree there is an advantage in moving back to India. However these things are never easy (wife, house, assets, etc).
Excellent - thanks for the link. I'll redo the analysis with the new data.
Thanks for the shoutout, Arjun. Whether it's an official HN meetup or not, definitely come by Hops & Chops. We're at Linda's on capitol hill every week (same place, same time), and there's always old & new faces to hang out with.

It is at a bar though, so 21+.
A few reasons I could guess,

Lots of hedge funds are commission based so if they lost money, they get nothing. With so much action in the market lately with such large swings, why not take some chances. Worst case you lose more, in which case it will effect you the same as liquidating would. Best case you make money.

Plus I imagine many managers are like gambling addicts. They see a lot of possible good gambles and want to take a shot. All the better with the current risk/reward formula.
Google: This Is Your Brain On Advertising
Time to found Lacuna, Inc....
No, you need first rate engineers to come up with stuff like this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kalman_filter or this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phase-locked_loop. I'm sorry, but a scalable web friend contact app is not first rate engineering. I found it funny that they had such rigorous requirements for something so mundane as well. Pearls before swine, I suppose.
To be fair, I think he never really had any idea what the exhibition was like till he took a position. I believe it was purely a political position. The only people defending the photographer were a bunch of hippies & the girl in the photos & her parents.
I don't expect much intellectual truth and reconciliation from academia. What will actually happen is the Fed will continue to informally create money ( via guaranteeing debt MZM rather than actually printing greenbacks) to get through the crisis, and we'll either end up with prolonged stagnation or a return to "the great inflation". As non-optimum as this is, I'd rather have Bernanke at the helm, than say Ron Paul. The Austrians don't realize that you can't just let MZM collapse and have everything turn out hunky dory after a bit of pain.
varnish is a lot faster!
Please try to keep the technical arguments against seperate from the fundamental.

The open nature of the internet, the cost of infringing on free speech, the dangers of putting in place mechanisms of censorship (to me this is no. 1) etc. are unrelated to the technical issues:

Bittorent will still be available, there will be false positives, this will affect download speeds, etc.

Both are valid forms of criticism. But keep the seperate.
People have their own definitions of winning. If I want to be a millionaire and I have 1000 dollars in savings I am a loser. If I want to own a home and I rent an apartment I am a loser. The parameters of the game are not well defined and the rules are not universal.

I had an interesting conversation with a co-worker from the Midwest and for the first time I understood how the defition of winning and happiness differs. I don't think there has ever been a time in my life where I needed something and couldn't have it whereas my co-worker had to work hard for everything he has. His definition of "winning" is having a nice place to sleep, being able to eat a nice meal, and go out every once in a while. And once he has that, maybe a little bit nicer place to sleep, a little bit nicer meals, and going out more often. What other people have is not important to him, therefore, in his world everyone can win.

My definition of winning pretty much requires losers. I don't understand how you can consider yourself a winner unless you are more/better/faster/stronger/etc. than someone else.

Some people have their scale of success calibrated to be absolute (my co-worker), and other have it calibrated to be relative (myself). I hypothesize that the absolutes are happy more often but the relatives have the drive to achieve a greater magnitude of success albeit less of the time, which explains why some people are happy with (relatively) little and others are unhappy even with extreme wealth.
Not in melbourne. The general public and arts community came out strong to defend Henson, as did Malcolm turnbull
Due to "free-trade" policies (rather, mandates from the British), Ireland was a net export of food during the Irish potato famine.
Sure Obama demonizes free trade.

And, of course, Warren Buffett is a socialist because he wants to spread the wealth around.
I think the end (goal) of Facebook is not exactly a noble one but the means can still be impressive. Managing 110 million users (or 110 million of any high-maintenance node for that matter) is no picnic. Their engineering blog has some pretty interesting stories about the challenges they have faced.

If you are into changing the world by willing society forward with ground breaking [insert impressive thing here], your talents would be wasted at Facebook (despite Mark Zuckerburg's stated belief that fb can change the world by allowing people to share with each other and understand each other better).

I think they are solving complex problems (which is respectable) for a largely trivial mission.

Would you say that Google does not require first rate engineers? I would imagine that the most important part of their operation is scaling. They have admitted themselves that the difference in search results returned by the search engines is virtually nil, so their strategic advantage is really being able to support a lot of users (for the search engine as well as other internet services).
DC’s Apps for Democracy: Helping Coders Help the Man
Yeah. But it looks like they have Nginx in front of Squid, so Nginx would still be a bottleneck if they used Varnish. It seems like the cache ought to be at the front of the stack.
In what country you have to continue paying full salary of a fired employee?
the tin foil folks here in russia think that google has (cough) somehow persuaded the regulators to block the deal, because google thinks they can acquire the same company (or, in fact, some other company) for a much lower price in a few months, when the crisis takes its toll on russian economy.

sounds unconvincing to me, though. i suppose google could just walk away instead, citing the general uncertainty in the markets.
Inspiring.

But if consumers won't spend money on anything a startup offers, how does that startup succeed?
Javascript Calendars for Lazy Webmasters
Cellphone Banking Helping To Fight Poverty In India
Web-app version of Markov-Chain domain generator (be gentle on the server)
Here is my associated blog post:

http://codeismightier.com/2008/10/web-app-version-of-domain-...
Slime Mould intelligence points to a new model of AI
I hope someone buys the patent off of them and holds it idle.
I personally feel that a language core should be the work of a single person.

Even 2 persons should not work together on a language core. The quantity of communication required if 2 persons work on a single language is so large, that hinders and messes up the development process.

The core set of axioms that form a language are almost fundamental as the laws of nature to that language. Just imagine theory of relativity being developed by several scientists together... almost impossible.
Why Every Startup Should Have A Mascot ...
There's a radiolab episode that touches on this:
http://www.wnyc.org/shows/radiolab/episodes/2007/06/08

You're right, it's really not too far of a stretch to say we're talking about Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind here...
You're probably building the wrong thing and it can happen in any economy.

I'dont know about you guys at US but consumers are not ceasing to exist and if they exist they usually buy something and some things even more than in good economy. (Eg entertainment does pretty well in hard times.)
BTW Worio returns decent results for search queries.
Why taxes are damaging to startups
Embrace the new Microsoft .NET Logo
Where is the competition? All this 'MS is finished' talk. Fine. I understand the reasoning. Makes sense. I just don't see any potential replacement.

OSs may eventually fade into the background. That's a possibility. But that has nothing to do with MS.

The Vista launch & the netbook sales as described in the article would have been a great opportunity for any competing OS to play. But none are there to rise.

Apple plays a different game. 1. Do we really think one company will do all the hardware & all the software of all PCs (or even half of them)? 2. They would need to cut margins. No reason for them to do that.
.
Linux had a run with the Eee PCs V1. Heard it got good reviews. But it didn't stick.

Anyway, it looks very possible that Vista is just a below average product that gets below average sales & the next windows will be released, Vista forgotten, & nothing (bar a couple of years of slightly reduced sales in one department) changed in the long run.

They were weak for a couple of years.It might have been a good time for an attack. But noone was there to do it.
I would make the code more efficient. It is firing off an AJAX request after practically every keystroke. Each request took ~20 seconds. The page is also taking forever to load, probably because of all the requests being sent to the server. Why not just have people press enter to initiate retrieval of a result? That would improve user experience a ton.

You should also queue AJAX request and only allow one or two at a time from the browser. That way, if you are really attached to this request after every keystroke feature the server can handle the load slightly better.

Why do you need to make an AJAX call for a 1 character string? I typed in 't' and an AJAX request was fired off. That was 20 seconds ago and I am still waiting.

It also appears that when the browser receives a result it runs several more AJAX calls recursively on all of the returned items. All of that should be done on the server. The overhead of all those HTTP requests is just too much,

I would do the following to make this better:

1) Have a minimum query length for search

2) Don't do a request for every keystroke

3) Make an AJAX request queue

4) Do all of the recursion on the server, don't open a new HTTP requests for each recursive call

I think this will be a lot better for server load and usability. Right now it is horribly inefficient.

I have no use for it but would be pretty cool if I were looking for a domain name.
Did they? All I saw was a few dozen people outside of the Arts Centre. Anyway, I think he expected public opinion to be even more against then it was.
"Reading the technical questions made me realize how crappy a programmer I am, algorithms-wise"

The good news is that this is very fixable.

I could answer the questions in the article without effort but this is a very different situation from about 3 years ago when I wouldn't have been able to answer even one of these.

I really started hitting the Algorithm books(Skiena, Cormen, if anyone is interested ) about three years ago and am now comfortable with thinking "algorithmically" - at least for sequential algorithms.

Studying algorithms to a fair degree of competence is very feasible even for non CS folks - I have no degree in CS and am entirely self taught. The tough part was working through proofs - As I was reading about unit tests for the answers , either in the original article or the reddit comments, I forget which - I was thinking it might be better to write down a formal proof that the algorithm works.

If I face tough questions on parallel/concurrent algorithm, I'd probably take a while to answer or fail completely - I need to look into parallel/concurrent algorithms in the coming year.
That assumes that you have all the money in the beginning, correct? Makes perfect sense in that case - the market goes up on average, so if you invest early on, you get a better price.

But most people don't have a large pile of money sitting around, and earn it over time. AFAICT, dollar-cost-averaging gives you a better return than the alternatives of buying a certain number of shares monthly, buying the best performing stocks, or holding all the cash and investing it when you think it's a good time to invest.
"hack on cool, new things, to push boundaries, to explore, and so on"

That sounds pretty good to me, actually.

I don't see why aiming for "fun and experimentation" would put me in a different position from other language designers. It's not like anyone does this for a living. I bet most of them started out working on their language in the spirit of intellectual adventure, then gradually got dragged into being motivated more by duty and eminence, till eventually like poor Guido their time was all taken up thinking about character sets. That sounds to me like something one ought to resist. Doesn't it to you?

Amusingly enough, you can see the pressure in action all over this thread, e.g.

http://news.ycombinator.com/edit?id=343663

I'm pretty good at resisting though ;)
Just as an idea is worthless without it actually being implemented, a new innovation is worthless unless someone actually feels they need it.

Good for him!
Can't access as of 6:45 PM PST. I want to go to Slicehost headquarters, give your slice a hug and tell him everything is going to be OK. :(
I just registered 1300 domains beginning with "ass."
Actually it's on a Linode right now. Linode gives more RAM and hard disk space, so I'm migrating over. Slicehost might give more support but I don't need it.
Is the SecDef asking something like Dell's ideastorm?
From the article:

"No, I think it all needs to be changed. We need to rethink the 1947 National Security Act, which laid out our present national-security structure. The national-security institutions that we have today were essentially created to fight the cold war, and they reflect lessons we learned in World War II. So the Defense Department, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the CIA and the National Security Council all came out of the National Security Act of 1947. It seems to me that there needs to be a new National Security Act that looks at the kind of complicated world I've described and says: how would we write a new National Security Act to update the institutions and the framework?

But the problem is more than structure. We need to think about how to do these things in a completely new way. I don't think making AID bigger once more is the solution, any more than I think re-creating the old United States Information Agency is the answer to our strategic communications problems. To rethink USIA, we need to bring in some 23-year-olds—maybe the guys from Google, and those putting out news over the Internet—and ask them: If you want to reach the rest of the world with a message, as actually we do, how would you do it? How would you structure it? And is there a way to partner what happens in the private sector with the public sector? That needs to be our approach to development and all these things we are trying to do on the "soft" side, the civilian side of U.S. security policy"