skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"minicab rape" was a frequently enough occurance in London that there were frequent public service announcements before movies just last year, asking people not to take an unlicensed cab, showing how you risk getting raped otherwise. ("minicab" here is any other cab than the usual bulky black London cab).
Parrots and Mirrors
Using crowdsourced librarians to outsmart Google
I see what you're saying. As a different way of looking at it, I've always considered that Desire for Meat (bread/poultry) = Biological, Desire for Hostess Cupcakes = Psychological. And while you shouldn't fudge with the former, the latter can be manipulated with things like this "target fixation." Least that's been my experience, and I was a chubby teen.

It's all very unscientific, and you may be right. But I have this feeling there's room for a distinction between biological/psychological food needs and the ways we cope with each.
Permanent link: http://blogs.zappos.com/blogs/coach/2008/11/12/day-561
Primitive? Poetry is probably the most developed form of lossy compression there is.
I'm always seeing Lordie, which my brain translates backwards to "get a lordie". Odd url, for sure.
Recession Advice for Entrepreneurs: Stay Calm
Head East, Young Techie
Tar PM: Appending Data to tar files instead of storing it in a database
Gullible Twitter users hand over their usernames and passwords (Twitterrank)
We launched on the same day.

Not that I'm putting much weight on these outside measurements. Just sayin'.
I don't know about how much of a bias HN has. A lot of people are openly critical of HN products when they honestly don't like them: I'm often critical of Reddit, for instance, which was one of the first big things here. And in many cases, I don't know what companies are YCombinator and which aren't. Meanwhile, a lot of services that do get a lot of praise here aren't actually part of the incubator program.

In this case, Disqus is simply more used. I've never seen IntenseDebate outside of its web site, though I prefer its aesthetic look a bit more. I don't like the colloquial "Easy Tiger" message when you're not logged in, though, so it balances out.
As you say, the particles are random(ish), and this is exactly what makes them hard to describe completely with a simple function. "Random" means "the simplest description of it is the literal one", and the literal description of the position, orientation and motion of that many water molecules is a lot of information.

If raindrops were perfect crystals at absolute zero (and there were only one isotope each of hydrogen and oxygen), they would be a lot less information in them.
Really? Huh! In that case, you guys have clearly come out ahead.
To answer your second question, you might want to look at concurrent garbage collection.

Here's the obligatory wiki link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garbage_collection_(computer_science)#Stop-the-world_vs._incremental_vs._concurrent
Some of them prefer that you have a degree, but it's true that you don't have to have it.
That's news to me. It seems like majoring in anything else would be a waste of time because you would have to take more irrelevant classes.
Its almost like you are some sort of CS professor who wanted to ask rhetorical questions about garbage collection, but then didn't answer them.
When I read this a few weeks ago, I was surprised by its simplicity and sense and obviousness.

http://www.drbass.com/temptation.html

Indeed it is the same core idea(s) driven at from the view of meditation, of positive thinking, or the "you see what you are looking for - think of 23, see 23 everywhere" experience.

As such, I suppose HN and similar sites are about promoting the "think of opportunities, see opportunities" side, while all web forums talk about "not feeding the trolls".
Heh, no harm no foul. I don't understand the whole down-vote thing, but at least it's not as bad here as it is at reddit.
Whenever I think of taxi medallions and taxi licensing, I think of a corrupt protectionist cash raking scheme that make taxis way overpriced.
Gawker media boss Nick Denton: Buy my blog, please
The genius behind Steve Jobs
Actually, I work full-time for Google Research (and have written all of the plop code, so far). Google happens to have sponsored a bunch of summer-of-code students through opencog.org, one of whom I supervised, but he coded in C++.

I think that the idea of a Lisp system that learns Lisp programs via probabilistic modeling is intrinsically interesting regardless of who funds it, but that could be personal bias ;->.
If you were using the iPhone you would see what I mean. They specifically setup a mobile version of their site. However when you click through to a url for a specific story on their site, their system doesn't know how to handle it and just forwards you to the front page of the mobile version. It leaves you no way to get to the story via the url, because their system is detecting the iPhone Safari useragent and just shunting that traffic to the mobile version. It needs to know I'm trying to get to the specific url that I am trying to view. If that URL isn't available in an iPhone friendly version, then just show me the regular page. If it does have a friendly version, then show it to me in that version.

So when I say "yet another site that doesn't correctly forward urls when surfing via iPhone" I am absolutely correct. Their site is broken and it should be fixed if they actually want people on mobile devices to browser their site.
No, you're wrong. Read my other reply. Their site is broken.
Any sufficiently ignorant programmer is indistinguishable from a CS professor asking rhetorical questions?
Python, Telnet and GUI-fying Legacy Apps
Don't we already have polls for this sort of thing? If he care about what we think he'll ask us.

Besides, it would make a better Facebook group than a website.
Or how much thought goes into it.

I remember reading about a study about a very different style of development from years ago, where automated testing was NEVER done, but instead formalized models of the program were created and mathematically verified.

If I remember correctly, the final result was a similar level of quality to an extensively tested system developed today, and the code tended to be of somewhat higher quality thanks to the extra thought put into it. (But I'm only going off vague memories here... I might be misremembering)
The Durable Internet: Preserving Network Neutrality without Regulation
just get a really fast proc with a lot of mem, and you won't have to worry about shit.
There ought to be less heavy-handed, less obviously anti-consumer methods of regulating taxi services than what we have today.
Angels, Angels everywhere but not a penny to be spared - Web 2.0’s despair.
Eventually, learn arbitrary programs from data, e.g.

Input: (learn 'fib '(x) '(((1) 1) ((2) 1) ((3) 2) ((4) 3)))
Output (defun fib (n)
(if (< n 3)
1
(+ (fib (1- n)) (fib (- n 2)))))

as well as standard machine-learning tasks such as supervised classification.

For what it does right now, see the examples at the bottom of the quick start guide:

http://code.google.com/p/plop/wiki/QuickStart

For more technical background see e.g. http://metacog.org/main.pdf (my dissertation). I will also add a list of relevant publications to the wiki...
Every pet store should have puppycams
Started: 4 hours ago
Views: 2,292,884
To see a world in a grain of sand,

And a heaven in a wild flower,

Hold infinity in the palm of your hand,

And eternity in an hour

William Blake, Auguries of Innocence
Hackers live longer
This is NOT "Google's Plop" - It is hosted by Google Code, along with thousands of other open source projects. It was part of Google's Summer of Code, as were dozens of other open source projects. Neither of these things make it "Google's."
I agree, on both points.
You can remove the branding with CSS rather easily. I've looked for any guidelines on that in their TOS, but I don't see any. I removed the big Disqus logo on from my comments page, but people can still see that it's Disqus.

Their guidelines for use don't seem to mention whether they're OK with people removing their logo; they just say that you can customize it with CSS. Whether that's ethical I guess could be an entirely different debate... that being said, if they explicitly mentioned that you cannot remove branding, I'd put it back.
Hmm, nlogn(60,000,000) ~= 1,560,000,000 ops per sort, before your coefficient. If you want that done at 16.67 KHz (1 million times/min), you'll need some work. You can do it, in certain cases, with certain hardware & good skills, but it's tricky.

I'm still not buying that the requirements are really that high.
Or if you believe Vonderplanitz, many times people are craving fat as a building material and bodily lubricant, and instead drink water.

Anyway, I claim urban myth on your post ( http://www.snopes.com/medical/myths/8glasses.asp ).
Yup, something like that. I also write the intent of the app and that gives them a line of attack. "Easy to use tool? This is NO WAY easy to use! I ripped out my hair to understand feature X"

In the HIT form, I give them a nice big text box to write their comments. Then I ask them some specific questions and give them radio buttons / check boxes to reply with. They've told me stuff that I would have otherwise never imagined.
Can you change the buttons and the layout?
But it is! I really am lucky enough to get to do machine learning research at Google and code in Common Lisp!

See http://research.google.com/. Another way you can tell that this is an official Google project is the 'Google' label on the right-hand side of http://code.google.com/p/plop/, which is only added to code developed at Google that has been open-sourced.

Cheers!
Four words: WebEx on a phone
Short answer(s): no, and yes.

Longer answer:

Memory management is hard in soft real-time systems like video games, no matter whether you use GC or not. If you do any dynamic memory allocation, you're going to run the risk of eventually hitting an malloc() or free() call that blocks your main thread.

However, avoiding memory leaks is especially important for gaming applications, especially if you're targeting console hardware. Game code tends to create very large numbers of tiny objects during each session, and need to be able to re-use the memory taken by those objects quickly as the game context changes. GC is a great way to protect yourself from leaks, if you can avoid long GC pauses during gameplay.

There are a large number of strategies for keeping GC from blocking time-sensitive threads in your program. The solution you describe is a little like generational garbage collection (which AutoZone, incidentally, does). In generational GC, rather than scan the entire heap on every pass, you focus on recently-created objects, as they're most likely to be garbage.

Also, using GC for some parts of your application doesn't mean you have to use it everywhere. You might divide your application such that real-time threads use a more deterministic memory-management system, while less performance-critical code gets the productivity and stability advantages of GC.
I meant no offense. The work does appear to be interesting, but not for the reason indicated in this post's title.
Spammers turning profit despite small response
It seems to have gone semi-closed source. Apparently http://www.projectpier.org/ is the open source fork/successor.
Taxi regulations generally involve limiting the number of taxis. This has two effects (1) they are more expensive than what a market price would be, and (2) you can't always get a taxi when you want one.

So taxi regulation definitely cause drawbacks to customers. Do these drawbacks outweigh the advantages that you enumerate? This could be determined experimentally, by allowing unregulated taxis to offer their services in the market alongside regulated taxis. Unregulated taxis would be obliged to clearly state that they were unregulated, and customers would be able to choose between the two.

If proponents of taxi regulations are right, customers will choose the regulated taxis over the unregulated ones.
I'm not sure what you're arguing here. I don't disagree that if two companies are providing the same value and one has no regulatory burden, that company will succeed while the other will fail. That in no way proves that deregulation is bad, it merely proves that regulation was, apparently, unnecessary in that instance.

I just don't see the debate here. If you provide X under regulation Y and I merely provide X, if the average consumer doesn't care about regulation Y then you will fail because I can afford to provide X cheaper than you. If the average consumer only feels warm and fuzzy with regulation Y, I will fail because we are obviously not providing the same (perceived) value.

All your Southwestern analogy proves is that price and route regulation is really stupid and wasteful.
When it rains it pours, eh? We just need to weather the storm ;)
Primitive meaning the concept behind it - capture a moment in time with words - is a very old and simple one.

Don't get me wrong: poetry has become incredibly sophisticated. And it's still as enjoyable to write as it was long, long ago.
If taxi medallions cost a million dollars (one sold for $600,000 last year -- http://www.autoblog.com/2007/06/01/nyc-taxi-medallion-sold-f... ) then they are clearly an example of rent-seeking behaviour that rips off the public. Why would a taxi medallion cost $600,000? Because, due to the artificial shortage of them, you can force customers to pay $600,000 more than they'd pay if market fares operated.
As far as I can recall, you can change just about anything. If CSS can't do it, you can always fallback to a little javascript, but it's pretty simple to customize.
Awesome.

I wish I had more than that.
I think you mean:

(if (search "lisp" (submission-title submission))
(incf (submission-score submission)))
That's not an exclusive or though. If you have a proof of your code's correctness, I'd still like to see it being regressed against any changes to the code. Ideally the more different methods you have for validating that your code is doing what it's supposed to be doing, the better.

I'm actually quite disappointed to see my original comment with a negative score. I'm going to assume it was just badly phrased, as I don't seriously think that anyone believes that more testing of software results in a decrease in quality.
PNG vs JPEG
I imagine much the same way that Friendster feels. They REALLY had all the pieces in place.
I'm probably just being a wet blanket - but I think it should be left up to Obama and his kids to choose.
Most of the responses here focused on the disk/data aspect. What about the actual network? IPv4/TCP has a minimum overhead of 40 bytes per packet, with a seven packet overhead for the connection itself (three for making a connection, four for closing the connection). Adding another packet for the actual data (with say, a payload of only 20 bytes) and that's about 220 incoming bytes across 5 packets (two from the client for the connection, one for the data, and two for closing the connection---I'm concentrating on the incoming side as outgoing should be similar). Multiply 220 bytes by 10 to get a rough estimate of bits per second (close enough and makes the math a bit easier and if we're a bit high here, that's better than being too low) times the number of connections per second (16,667) gives us around 37Mbps---a T3 basically.

Now, to handle a potential 100,000 users at the same time, that's 6 T3s (12 if you want to handle 200,000), and that's with only 20 bytes of actual data being shipped between client and server. Just the networking side is going to be expensive, so I hope the idea is a good one.

One the data storage side, I worked on a project (http://www.x-grey.com) where I had to potentially store a bunch of records. I ended up storing them all in memory in an array. When a new record came in, I would insert it into the proper spot. In theory, I was able to handle about 6,000 requests per second on a 2.6GHz machine (although I found it rather difficult to actually test it properly, which is why I say in theory---in practice it may be more or less, but for what I was doing, that was way more than good enough). So yes, I would recommend keeping everything in memory and avoid the disk as much as possible. But then you have issues of coherency if you have multiple threads/machines that need to update this structure (in my case, that 6,000 is ONE CPU doing the work; I sidestepped the whole concurrency issue by ignoring it).
Whatever you guys are making, if it kicks ass, nobody will care about this nonsense. You certainly have the attention of the HN community now, so don't waste it. It's time to stop fucking up.
None taken. Thanks!
A Scary Line Has Been Crossed For VCs
The VC model is broken
For what it's worth, I was quite unaware that I was posting a dupe. I ran across the article through my RSS feedreader and, feeling that it might be of interest to the community here, posted it using the Hacker News bookmarklet. It was not until much later that I saw that it had already been posted (usually the site catches duplicate submissions automatically). I would have retracted my submission, but it had already gained too much traction.
[Edit] LXR doesn't have call links or graph. It helps but only a bit (it can be done with egrep on command line.)
About my network math---100,000 users per minute equates down to 1,667 requests per second, so are you sure you need 1,000,000+ hits per minute? Or are those 100,000 users really sending down 10 hits per minute?
I think it's fantastic, and I've definitely seen a dramatic pick-up in commenting activity on my blogs (business & personal).

That said, I've also seen a number of comments get through recently that are essentially spam, which has been a bit of a pain.
Brad Feld and the Boulder-based VC's seem to use IntenseDebate. Again, biased for the home team. :)
What is the theory of useful information? According to algorithmic information theory, the less compressible something is, the more information it has. But, the sort of information I'm interested in implies that there is a fairly large ratio of bits to compression. I.e. this text is much more compressible than a random string of letters, and conveys much more information to me than a random string. Is there a precise characterization of this sort of information? It isn't simple the compression ratio, since AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA is very compressible, but conveys very little information.
Cloud micropayments? I'm calling some VCs right now...
No one reads this story, so you shouldn't even check it out.
Disagree. There are certain industry where the argument holds true; investment banking for example (you're likely a sucker if the only way an investment bank will give you an internship is if you work for free). But there must be some industries out there where the market rate for an intern is literally "valuable experience". You could ask a bunch of people that worked in jobs like this, after the fact, if they were happy with what they got out of the experience (i.e., did it help you get a real job later on), and I wouldn't be surprised if the yes/no ratio was similar to those with paid internships. My supporting evidence for this assertion is that the practice is widely taking place today. Certainly it would have been exposed as a fraud and a ripoff by now, if that were the case.
Something of a campaing, supporters logged in and editing placards. An online drive mimicking 125000 supporters who were present on the scene when Obama got elected.
Perhaps those iPod killers just not good enough.
Can a blind person whose vision is restored understand what she sees?
There's even more information if the quantum information is deemed important; in excess of 2^(5 x 1020).

Ultimately, one should come away with the understanding that obviously not all that information is important.
http://code.flickr.com/svn/trunk/uploadr/
> "The researchers also noticed that few of those with the "bad" version lived beyond 85 while those with the "good" form were likely to live to 100. "

Without specific numbers, these claims are meaningless. Just how "few" people with the bad version died before 85? And how "likely" are people with the good form to live to 100?

This would be more credible if they linked to the actual research paper or study.

Edit: The title here is also somewhat misleading. The article didn't mention that hackers have a higher level of this gene than average
...until IntenseDebate's functionality is integrated into WordPress.
The Kung Fu Panda quote there may be one of the best I've heard for situations like this.

I'm not sure if that's fantastic or horrible.
Oh dear, I hope axod wouldn't have used IF with a single then-form. That's just asking for trouble. :-)
Are you worried about the return value or something?
You biggest problem by far is getting a million hits per minute. Getting a million hits at all would be a fairly rare accomplishment.
Maybe one day if you're bored, you could tell the rest of us how you were able to swing a job at Google Research working with Lisp?

I don't know about these guys, but I've always been under the impression that if you're at Google, you're using one of their "Big 4" languages.... Heck, even Norvig is using Python! (I know, he was using it before he went there... but still).
probably one murder away from being shut down
Australia's mandatory internet filter to block up to 10,000 websites
This could've been stated more strongly: The only time JPEGs are superior to GIF/PNG is for photos (like taken with a camera).
I'm dubious. Intelligence is not determined by one gene, but by the interplay of many, and there's nothing in this research to suggest that the other myriad intelligence-related genes have any biologically-based effect on the aging of the brain.
wish something like this was around in 1990. Father died from cancer that year.
> Another way you can tell that this is an official Google project is the 'Google' label

Neat, that's nice to know.
The answer? Because some of us actually like tech.

More than a wage commensurate with your intelligence? So much that you are willing to not only explore it on your own but solve any problem, no matter how mundane, that anyone places in front of you just because it's tech? For decades on end?

Rock on.
No. I'm worried somebody will add another form, without realizing it has the opposite meaning (i.e., else) from the INCF call. Traditionally, if you have only one then-form, you'd use WHEN.
Ah, they just use outside.in .. still cool but not as amazed. Someone needs to make the same thing for Canada. A very cool idea :)
I have a Lisp OS that I'm developing, and it has a real-time garbage collector.

The way it does this is that the garbage is detected using the weizenbaum variant of reference counting instead of some form of mark-and-sweep. There are a couple reasons that people tend to prefer mark-and-sweep over reference counting:

1. The reference counts have to be maintained on every assignment operation.

2. Reference counting can break if the heap-allocated memory has cycles.

The first issue is basically what you described when you asked 'is it possible to make a garbage collector that can somehow run "continually"'. The answer is yes, and the way you do that is with reference counting. However, this extra work means that you have a performance hit when compared to mark-and-sweep GCs. It's an example of the classic tradeoff between low latency and high throughput; and most applications are better off with high throughput.

The second issue is the more fundamental one, because cycles in heap allocated memory mean that the reference counts on those memory cells will never drop to zero; hence they will never be reclaimed. Most GCs that use reference counting fix this problem by also using a mark-and-sweep pass to collect cyclic data structures. Of course, this would still not be a real-time collector, so it doesn't fit my needs. Instead I changed the language to not allow cyclic data structures to be created in the first place. The way I did this was to simply make my Lisp dialect purely functional.