skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Cool. An unrelated minor idea:

*Note: Please clear your browser cache in order to see the changes*

To avoid having to ask your users to refresh just append a version number (either manual or your SVN revision number) to all JS and CSS files, like so:

<script src="/js/something.js?1234"></script>

You get caching just like before, but when you push new code everyone sees it right away.
I guess we're going to see a lot more of "why my start-up failed" posts these days.
BBC considers offering iPlayer technology to Channel 4 and ITV
Telstra's privatization has done much more harm to Australia's internet than good (Just look at the cost of Internet in Australia VS what it COULD be).

Privatizing Telstra, which owns the infrastructure (and resells it to competitors), and selling it directly to consumers (through BigPond) was a recipe for disaster.

The single act of not part taking in the trials doesn't make up for the huge mistake the Howard government made in privatizing Telstra. (I'm all for privatization, but the Howard government should have separated the (wholesale) Infrastructure and retail businesses before selling it)
I wouldn't. I would much rather a private company with experience in determining online identity provide a service like this.

A. It would be an optional service, so you would only use it if you wanted to. (Unless gov't got involved somehow, but my whole point is that they shouldn't be involved.) If it were a gov't run operation it would probably be impossible to opt out of. A recent example is the Australian filter. That's not working out very well, neither would this.

B. A private company has more to lose if it were to screw up implementation and design than the gov't would. I would trust my privacy to a company before the gov't because I could weigh customer reviews and go to a competitor's service if it was better.

C. A gov't can say screw you guys, work with my standards for verification. A private company would be forced to work with others or fail.
I think the video should be shorter and 40 seconds into the video, it was the same screenshot and it was an explanation.
I would rather prefer to see some action in the video, than pay attention to the explanation :)
Belated IE6 24-bit PNG support, w/ background properties
Good call. We were doing that before, but I completely forgot. Doh.
Fixed. Sorry for the inconvenience.
I agree, probably HTML+DOM+JS isn't going anywhere, at least for the next 5 years, so who cares about an SVG rendering engine today? Probably someone who is focused solving the wrong problem and burning money unnecessarily, because there are enough issues to handle with a web startup.

I think this Objective-J is the wrong thing.
Better yet, you can run a JavaScript interpreter in there. Firefox, even.
However, your complaint seems not to be about closures or shared activation objects per se, but rather about the lack of block-level scope.

Bingo, reread my first comment.

If closures "trapped" outer values at their current state, then no matter how you called thing.set(), it would always return "foo" from thing.get().

No I don't want hyper-static environments, this would preclude the very useful encoding of objects with mutable state as closures.

Since "j" is created inside a set of braces, you seem to suggest that there ought to be multiple "j" variables created... every "while", "for", "switch", "if", and "else" would have to create an activation object, which would get quite expensive and complicated.

Do you think Ocaml heap-allocates a frame for every scope entered? How is it about as fast as C++, then? :-) Activation frames would need to be created for only those blocks that directly construct closures, findable by simple static analysis. Almost all other languages with closures do precisely this.

As a rule, the introduction of lexical scope doesn't make languages perceptibly slower. For example, the historical transition of Lisps from dynamic to lexical scope was accompanied by fears very similar to yours, and Scheme played a major role in convincing people that lexical scope worked fast. Modern Scheme compilers are quite clever at eliminating unneeded activation frames and closures, sometimes even converting closures into inline code. It's a well-researched topic. (See http://www.paulgraham.com/thist.html, a great retrospective by one of the best implementers... search for "tied up" for an amusing paragraph about exactly this. The year was 1982, I was busy being born.)

And to reiterate my point from another comment, all code that relies on function scope could be converted to a hypothetical lexically-scoped-JavaScript by a trivial transformation: move every var declaration to the toplevel of the containing function (which coincides nicely with Crockford's advice). This demonstrates that function scope is not more useful than lexical in any practical sense.

In short, I know how JavaScript works, I know how it could work differently, and I consider the different way superior both in theory and in practice.
Have you ever wondered how every fund manager has a fund in the top 25%? It's easy, they launch several funds in one sector, then after a few years merge them all into the top one, and use its historical performance for the marketing materials not the average of them all.
Honeybees are found to interact with quantum fields
Well as the article pointed out Objective-C is supposed to be a better C. Do you see anyone who knows C care about this Objective-C? Obviously the original is around now for almost 40 years.
"... it deserves a bit more attention although ..."

Agreed it is worth the read. Evaluating who is best for particular tasks seems to revolve around simulated stress and rigorously tested 'competency'. Not an easy thing to simulate in Startups.
"... I feel like I put in all the work (in school) to not have a job... I'm going to have to be a little more flexible now and take what I can get ..."

Welcome to the world of the recessions. Where a job, any job is better than none. The good thing is, recessions do not last forever.
The existence of nothing is equivalent to the existence of everything; neither can exist without the other since their respective definitions can only be expressed in relation (as a negation) of the other.

Both existence and a lack thereof are a part of the one same entity.

This entity mirrors itself infinitely both in "space" and in "time".

It mirrors itself in "time" by alternating between the states of existence and a lack thereof.

It mirrors itself in "space" exponentially by necessarily drawing a border around itself because the very existence of both existence and a lack thereof must give rise to a lack of existence and a lack thereof, if and only if it is to adhere to its own rule, to which it must by its own definition, which itself must exist by definition in the first paragraph.

This process of progressively expanding the "borders" of existence continues ad infinitum and gives rise to what we know as reality.

As depicted in the following moving picture: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RH45ffITujI
Golden ratio, quantum mechanics... Those bees are quite sophisticated.

BTW: *.box.sk == old school
Interesting article, but the headline is a bit misleading:

"At this point Shipman departs from safely grounded scholarship and enters instead the airy realm of speculation. The flag manifold, she notes, in addition to providing mathematicians with pure joy, also happens to be useful to physicists in solving some of the mathematical problems that arise in dealing with quarks, tiny particles that are the building blocks of protons and neutrons. And she does not believe the manifold's presence both in the mathematics of quarks and in the dance of honeybees is a coincidence. Rather she suspects that the bees are somehow sensitive to what's going on in the quantum world of quarks, that quantum mechanics is as important to their perception of the world as sight, sound, and smell."
Understanding the Matrix of Self-Management
WS-Deathstar for the REST of Us: A Story of Ruby, WSDL, and Salesforce
I wonder if there is a market for providing real, verified identities. Not requiring them, mind you, but streamlining things if you provide it:

like the Clear security program in airports that lets you skip the lines.
To discover truth and beauty and then then share them through empathy in design and argument.
Horrible headline.

The part of the article that talks about quantum mumbo-jumbo is prefaced with this:

"At this point Shipman departs from safely grounded scholarship and enters instead the airy realm of speculation."

It also says,

"But she tends not to have much professional company when she reveals what she thinks is responsible for the bees' response."

I'd be happy to put money down that this turns out to be bunk. Not that I know anything more than the person making these claims, but purely informed by history. Many, many scientists (including most famously Roger Penrose) have claimed that quantum phenomena exist in the biological world. None of these claims have been proven.
here's a tip: quit calling yourself a CEO.
you're a start-up entrepreneur. you're one person and if you're lucky you get to put together a team of 2 to 10 others that you work "with".
There's no tomorrow.
Agreed. The suggestion is (and this does not differ widely from my all too long experience in such matters) that the only valid evaluation is "How does someone perform in the job?"

Is it therefore implied that we should hire on criteria that is not task specific (like will someone's personality fit in with the team) and then be prepared to fire them quickly if they don't work out?

The problem is that hiring is a lengthy process - we are all adverse to the idea of it becoming a continual process.
At least in the current version I definitely prefer RTM. No chat box, "understands" if I write tomorrow...
Usually these type of inverse problems are severely ill-defined. There can be many 3D configurations that give the 2D images, and you need to use some knowledge of the world (or some regularization) to select which one is the most plausible.

A typical application is when they measure brain signals at the surface of the brain and then try to reconstruct what happens inside. Have people thought of using genetic algorithms and other stochastic methods ? Probably yes.
No kidding. The first part, and even the alpha sounds cool, but the quantum part is bunk. She seems to have skipped chemistry: what physical mechanism can a bee use to detect these fields? After all they are made of proteins. What chemical mechanism would do it?

Plus saying "detect quantum fields" is meaningless anyway.

There is no such thing, it's a mathematical abstract, it's not an actual thing. There are many kinds of fields, saying quantum field gives some information about the type (for example that it's discontinuous), but it's not a specific field.
You could rephrase it as "why continue to exist?"

I think that's what the original meant.
The trouble with fewer better wagers is that wagers - even very good value ones - can lose. So if you're only making a few of them there's a significant probability of losing overall. Your expected value may be high, but your standard deviation is even higher.

I'd much rather have 10,000 independent bets each with a 0.5% edge than 10 independent bets each with a 20% edge.
To do good better.
Hey David,

We would be interested in having your feedback on the official mailing list where we could discuss your concerns. The problem with the first two chapters is that we're trying to address the needs of a wide range of readers. We wanted to cover the major differences between CouchDB and an RDMS from “10,000” feet.

Again, thanks for the feedback - we would love to have you on the mailing list.

Noah
I am into negative philosophies, it often is a lot easier to say certain important ideas are false than to establish an overarching truth. One negative philosophy is that determinism is incoherent as a philosophy, since philosophy implies choice. While simple sounding, that idea is actually very, very deep and cuts through every discipline I know of. It forms the basis for my views on capitalism, technology, metaphysics, etc.
It's not a typical case, but e.g. Talkinator is cheap to run and potentially reaching millions of people.

http://mailinator.blogspot.com/2008/08/benchmarking-talkinat...

"In my benchmarks now, on my quad-core desktop the talkinator server can push about 39000 messages per second. Keep in mind this is processed messages as in decoded, packaged, and queued for particular recipients."

The typical architecture for web applications is pretty inefficient.
Privatisation without proper deregulation is little better than maintaining a state-owned monopoly.

When privatising, only one approach makes sense: Selling off all shares and ownership stakes held by the government in the incumbent operator and taking serious steps to make the regulatory environment as amenable to new competitors as possible. If that means selling off the retail side and the infrastructure side separately, so be it.

It's not privatisation that was the mistake, it was the half-hearted politically timid way it was carried out that left Telstra as an effectively monopolist entity with the regulatory environment to help it remain one.
Lots of the parameters could be adjusted using some kind of gradient descent. Have you looked at using differential evolution?
Well, it's two different things, obviously. "Why continue to exist?" is personal but "Why does anything exist?" is much more interesting. Except, I'm starting to think it's a loaded question, as your parent, I think, was implying. Due to our innate perception of things coming into and out of existence.
The platform operates on Amazon EC. They did not take or try to take investment. And at least one person worked hard on it. This does not sound like failure. It sounds as if the product is either something that people do not want, or something that does not have commercial application in it's current state.

File this one under "find a job elsewhere and keep working on the project if it is worth working on".
How does philosophy imply choice?
>Scalability is the last thing you need to be worried about.

That's what friendster thought too.

Friendster became very popular but couldn't handle the scalability part and ended up dying a slow and painful death...
Arun Sarin next Yahoo CEO?
Actually, there are some interpretations of quantum mechanics under which the wavefunction is an "actual thing", for example De Broglie's pilot-wave theory and Bohm's developments of it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bohm_interpretation
I'm sick of sensationalist headlines, but this does put across one of the problems emerging technologies have that people often miss: the social issues are often just as, if not more, important than the technical ones.
Ugh, really?

Here's a simple one that usually works: care about other people, contribute to the world around you. After that, the rest of life figures itself out pretty easily.

If you want some sort of logic or math proof on why this is, remove head from rectum.
from the apple dictionary:

USAGE 1 Hoi is the Greek word for the, and the phrase hoi polloi means ‘the many.’ This has led some traditionalists to insist that hoi polloi should not be used in English with the, since that would be to state the word the twice. But, once established in English, expressions such as hoi polloi are typically treated as fixed units and are subject to the rules and conventions of English. Evidence shows that use with the has now become an accepted part of standard English usage: : they kept to themselves, away from the hoi polloi (rather than : . . . away from hoi polloi).
Differentiate Between Dr. Pepper and Mr. Pibb?!
Beat Quake in Under an Hour ?!

Really? Are these the skills you really need?
Sony lays off 8,000, strong Yen cited
The other way to think about it is we all interact with quantum fields all the time. A photon is a quantum field. Interacting with electric, magnetic, or an other force is interacting with a quantum field. Nothing new there.
[/Disclaimer: I read the comments above and declined to read the article. ]
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Exactly. The idea that bees could somehow be experiencing a six-dimensional manifold doesn't seem crazy to me.
The way I see it, identity verification is one of those dull, expensive, necessary things that will have to be done for the network economy to function. A private player will always have incentives to screw with it Imagine getting a message like "You must be logged in to facebook if you want to buy groceries. Do you want to let the dietsnoop application see your purchases (Y/N/there is no cancel)?"
When you swipe your card at the grocery store?

And to go through your objections one by one.

a. Any identity validation system has to be a universally accepted standard with strong penalties for misbehaviour on the part of validators, relying parties, and authenticating individuals. If it's less than universal, it doesn't work nearly as well, a bunch of people can opt out, and the effectiveness drops drastically; and we're back where we are now with a bunch of different standards and competing providers each with their own agenda.

b. Microsoft Hailstorm? Yahoo IDs? Facebook's multiple data wankeries over the years? All the times that people have horked 100s of thousands out of other people's bank accounts by having the bank email a password reset to an email account?

If past is prologue, the cost to businesses of screwing up their identity verification is relatively low. Which is fine if all they control is some crap email and a few digital photos, but rapidly becomes unfine if it's your bank account, or your deed to your vehicle, or your house or your ticket to New Zealand; or (going 15 minutes into the future) your house keys, your medical records, your ownership of businesses, etc.

c. But as mentioned in my response to a. a body that can set standards and enforce them with real teeth is exactly what is needed. The other side of that is that any private party that had the wherewithal to pull off the introduction of a new economic system (weak identity authentication is the foundation that credit cards are built upon) is going to be or be rapidly on the way to being a heavily regulated entity.

I'm not saying I'm necessarily enthusiastic about the prospect of the government holding the root signing keys to everything; I just think it's inevitable. And the thing is we need to be talking about it now, so that over the next 6 months to two years as the economic crisis plays out and the necessity of doing something is brought to the fore; we can push the discussion towards sane alternatives.

We have a window to affect the policy discussion, but that window is closing rapidly, and there are lots of people who would like to close off certain avenues of discussion. You want peer to peer disconnected transactions? You have to convince people that those matter more than law enforcement, garnishments and debt collection. Anonymous transactions are going to be a tough sell; so are pseudonymous transactions. Hell, we're probably going to have to fight to keep J. Random Moral Prude from putting a kill switch in everybody's wallet that will limit purchases to socially acceptable ones (more of a worry in the UK and commonwealth nations).
(the apple dictionary being the 'New Oxford American Dictionary', just to be clear)
You're definitely spending more than $100/month in terms of time, but in terms of servers/bandwidth, you can support a million users pretty well on $100 if you don't use the standard web frameworks etc which are woefully inefficient.
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congratulations on the new job!
> Good God. You actually used the word "epicures" to describe "people who like a lightweight, multi-featured browser." That's taking things a little too far.

yes, that is it. it was silly. maybe not quite obviously silly enough though.
Reality of Taiwan
Gmail now has Task Manager | TechJaws
Is a $1 salary paid all at once or in 4-cent installments?
Cloud Computing: Will data integration be its Achilles heel?
The many "gotchas" of internationalization
And another stupid idea goes down in flames (I hope). We need more govt. failures like this. At least until politicians get tired of promoting idiotic politically expedient barely half-thought out ideas.
Microsoft Office to debut online
Pulitzer Prize Makes Nice With The Web As Print Media Stumbles
Actually, I've tended to find that CFLs last longer with dodgy electrics than incandescents do. I lived in a flat three years ago where no incadescent lasted more than 6 months, but the flourescent bulbs were fine.
Not against changing syntax in general, but in the case of LISP, it seems hard to change it without messing it up.

I guess I don't like more and more "special signs" (like @, [], <>, #) invading the code.

I've witnessed it with Java where a lot of new syntax was introduced. The thing is, these are all new concepts adding to the complexity of the language (annotations, generics,...). I prefer to keep things simple.
Titanium: An AIR like Open Source app
A daily look at in-demand tech skills
Good Ajaxian write up here http://ajaxian.com/archives/appcelerator-titanium-breathing-...
I fall into the 5%. If it's something I really want to try... I'll look harder for a temp e-mail domain that you haven't blocked yet. New ones spring up every day.

Why make it harder for me, as you are just pissing me off?

If I like it I'll give you my real details, but the Internet is full of spammers and crooks and by default it seems prudent to assume that all websites are run by those types until proven otherwise.
Storing Files/Directories In Memory With tmpfs
On reading this the first time, i had a strong urge to flag it, but just somehow stopped myself from doing it.

Not to say, i do not wish you well in your venture, but you might appreciate that certain recruiters might start using this forum for their objectives.

It would be great if you could add more information about your company and yourself. I guess the community might be more responsive if they come to know you are a hacker looking for good programmer(s) to build up something interesting and/or profitable.
Video introduction to Digital Ecosystems
Two things:

1) I don't really know that this feels like an ivory tower tone. I mean, it was grounded in legit research or anecdotal evidence, not a lot of "this is how it ought to be" talk.

2) I'm pretty sure instances where someone is singled out to have dodgeballs thrown at one's face would be in the 'bullying' category, not 'teasing' which the author admits can be a difficult distinction.

Just saying.
The Global Entrepreneur