skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Not really. I would have though that: 'do it a lot and you'll get better at it' is fairly self evident. Obviously testing of some sort would help us to determine how much better one became.

I'd go so far as to say that it would be very difficult not to improve at something you were doing over a period of time.
Thanks. It's good to have a take on this subject that really does gratify the intellectual curiosity.
# This works as well...

my %number_hash = map {$_, 1} @list;
Most certainly to low, GitHub has over 1 million users alone. https://github.com/blog/455-100-000-users

I believe TCS, a large indian offshore company, employs over 100K programers (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tata_Consultancy_Services)
Academics have always based reading decisions on recommendations from colleagues. This trend has accelerated since email and the web were invented, as your colleagues can communicate with you through more channels, and more recommendations go back and forth. Social review always has been a big part of research discovery, and it's become more important with the advent of the web.

Search engines play a huge role in driving research discovery, and their ranking systems are fundamentally based on crowd review - calculations using links, as in the case of Google and Bing, or citations, as in the case of Google Scholar.

One might wonder in theory whether a search engine could do a good job of ranking academic papers, or whether recommendations from one's colleagues is a viable way of discovering papers. But when you look, in practice, into how academics operate day to day, those channels are the ones that academics increasingly use to discover research.
I always wonder why creating synthetic nanorobots to replace organic ones seems more attractive than learning to control what we already have inside. Maybe it's because of the natural repulsion to biology that most people have...
Looks interesting, but isn't number of cores, OS, 32/64 bit, and swap space configuration/hit ratio information pertinent to this benchmark to make it usable?

At the very least, I'd like to know what type of Amazon instance is being used.
Google Restores Adsense After Appeal to Consumer Bureau (Australia)
I think community based schools will start cropping up. They'll align with some subset of online course material and there might be a local teacher to help coordinate but otherwise, it's the students themselves helping each other. The local tangible presence would not only allow for that interaction / project based element I'm so fond of, but also to help pool resources for equipment.

If we're going into this brave new world of private, decentralized education we may as well do it in such a fashion that your own financial status doesn't prevent you from participating.
It is pretty amazing how complicated our bodies are, but I think the expiration date is there to prevent overpopulation - if our ancestors didn't die, the planet would be overpopulated with lazy apes who don't evolve cause there's no need to :-).

Once we're smart enough to fully control ourselves and our environment, immortality becomes an advantage - sadly, I don't think we're there yet...

Edit: by immortality, I always mean living longer than ~400 years. I'm pretty sure it's impossible to live forever (sooner or later, you'll die of an accident anyway), but living longer and living without any disease should be great...
I missed your response yesterday.

> You've got your history wrong.

You're right. I was careless there, however I knew about WebKit's root, and I use a custom fork of WebKit for one of my own projects... And I never remember which version of GPL and LGPL imposes what restriction, so what I meant by pure GPL was the most restrictive kind of GPL.

> There's no evidence that without KHTML they would have done a "proprietary browser from scratch."

No, there isn't. But Apple is a company that doesn't do open source projects unless they have a very good reason for that. With the current hindsight, yes, It's clear that using an open source browser was the best choice for them. But at the time, no one knew that WebKit (and Chrome) would be such a success (with the huge adaption of Chrome on desktops and Safari on iOS's). That's just the way they did and continue to do their business. So while my assertion was just a guess, it's not a baseless one. We can never know.

> ...the license does not seems to affect the amount of feedback or amount of uptake.

No comment on that, because my experience is far less than you. I just feel that it must be easier to talk a non-technical manager into using a BSD/MIT/Apache-licensed codebase than a GPL one.

Again, I agree that my comment above was sloppy and I should've made my points clearer and spell them out as my thoughts, not facts.
Call me a skeptic, but I don't think those simulations can ever replace real-life situations.

The human body is bewilderingly complex that it it still a subject of thousands of researches worldwide. How can you simulate something you don't completely understand?

Plus, in the case of medicine, one needs to know also how to interact with a patient. Is he/she telling the truth about his/her symptoms? Is there something the person's not telling that might affect your diagnosis? What about educating the patient about the disease?

These are real day-to-day situations that can never be simulated.
On a related note, “Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid” was good, though rather slow going. I figure most people here will have read it, but in case not, Hofstadter basically contends that any sufficiently complex system is capable of consciousness.

He almost goes so far as to say that a complex system actually necessitates consciousness. In much the same way that it’s difficult to prevent a language from becoming Turing-complete, perhaps it’s just as difficult to prevent biological systems from tending toward self-awareness. I’m inclined to agree, and this gives me a couple of hopes: first, that we will someday make an AI that most agree is genuinely conscious; and second, that we will find a way to gradually replace a brain in its entirety with a non-biological substitute, so that we could live forever—in mind if not in body. Far-off dreams, but what’s the harm?

If there are any neurobiologists in the room, take it away. :P
Let's Build an MP3 Decoder
In Asia, you are expected to act "drunk" when you are drinking with your colleagues/boss. You aren't expected to actually get that drunk, though you can if you want. The higher your station, the less drunk you'll want to really get because you may have to take an important call.

In Canada, people drink socially, and a smaller number drink alone (much like anywhere else). If someone doesn't want to drink at a dinner or outing, everyone else respects their choice not to drink and doesn't press them. Waiting to drink depends on the social context.
While I want the best deal possible, I'm not desperate enough to go the free route... ;-)
I think that if enough people run the script that will make it a very useful dataset. Its not particularly useful with just my own three tests that I ran personally.

Doesn't 613MB RAM identify the Amazon instance? Its the free one.

Almost all of the VPSs provide 4 virtual processors, but this will only test one.

Most people are using 64bit, but the idea is to make it easy to get several datapoints (possibly using slightly different configurations) so that you can get an idea of the average performance of the provider.
It appears to reach from around the 50% mark on the graph to the 90% mark.. so 39% looks ok to me
Memoirs From the Browser Wars (2003)
If that were true, then the Camba should have been roaring drunks and alcoholics. And yet a major point of the article was demonstrating this NOT to be the case.

In fact, the article makes the case that it's a group's drinking CULTURE that has the biggest effect on alcoholism.
Again, at its core, the blog post was about how Khan Academy was originally intended as a source for homework help; that we've begun to use it for much more than this; and that this risks perpetuating the underlying problem.
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This seems fairly straightforward, uncontroversial, and I must admit that I'm surprised by how energetic (and in some cases, vitriolic) the response has been.
The wedding industry is huge - planners, photographers, musicians, florists, etc. If you can get these people to link to you, you'll start to do better in organic searches.
I read through the entire HN thread from yesterday and did not find anything offensive or even that rude in any of the comments (bar perhaps the top comment). But even the top comment was calling out the posters opinion on Scoble's revisionist recollection of events which Scoble doesn't respond to, he only complains that HN has a bad attitude.

The reason I like HN is that there are people here who will happily and readily call out bullshit when they see it, and even if they are wrong, the HN community can debate their opinion - seldom is someone flat out wrong, they will generally have some kernel of truth/value in what they say.

If you read the Google+ comments (which I did yesterday as well), there is very little 'high value' comments there. Between the pandering 'I agree with you Scoble' to 'I don't know what to do' comments, there is a lack of intellectual discussion about the topic.

Scoble wanted to call out how 'toxic' HN is, but all he's done is convince me further that HN is the place to go for smart discussion.
Neither does small claims court. In fact, some places in the US explicit forbid lawyers from small claims courtrooms.
That was the iPod gameplan. By the time the Shuffle came out at $50 to compete with the $50 SanDisk stuff, they had already dominated every single price segment above that.
Creating a Website Business Plan
> I'm pretty sure AT&T/Cingular was the largest wireless provider before the iPhone.

Verizon was.
Speed running web games with Python
Mark Zuckerberg, the Hacker Way and the Art of the Founder’s Letter
Maybe a little SciFi sounding but I can imagine in the near future there becoming a market for obscuring a person's search and online social behaviour results. With the proper attention paid to timing and location, it would be a fairly simple matter to blur realities between who a person is and what a program has randomly searched for: e.g. provide your login details to a program that spends the next couple of years inserting random data on your behalf.
I think you should have a pagination resource that understands a resource and returns a paginated URL.

it would accept parameters. I think having a template requires the client to understand a format other than hypertext.
US to scaction Sweden if they dont prosecute Pirate Bay.
I thought it had more to do with European CS departments often being considered part of math while American CS departments were often considered part of EE. That would account for some difference in the habit of buying hardware in the beginning (say 60s and 70s): EE already had to buy a lot of that while the math department did not, so it was a new thing for a department that generally did not have high capital expenses.

But I don't think the ability to buy hardware is as relevant as the different mindset between mathematicians, who focus on more abstract problems, and engineers, who focus on more concrete problems, especially today when hardware is cheap. Being an American-trained computer science and spending some time working in Europe, it definitely felt like more emphasis was placed on formalism vs. engineering.
The School of the Future
I wrote a tool to do proxy based host chaining a last year. It has support for some more complicated things such as different usernames and/or ports per host. It will also autodetect whether ssh -W works ane fall back to remote netcat if not.

https://github.com/ryancdotorg/ssh-chain
Spend Time Wisely - Token Timer for limiting TV
Summary: Current peer review is not 100%; we need to think in terms of authors' motivations (tenure); try a hacker news model, possibly layered with badges-of-approval from editorial board.

The quality of peer review is only as good as the editorial board and reviewers make it -- often this is a lower standard than we expect. This article lists several extreme examples of poor practices by a (previously-)prominent publisher:

http://blog.mathunion.org/journals/?no_cache=1&tx_t3blog...

The key to shifting academic quality control away from the present archaic model is through author's motivation. The replacement needs to be a system that improves and filters incoming papers, and at the same time earns at least as much prestige for the authors who participate.

One idea is something like a combination hacker news and stackoverflow with academic articles in place of news articles / technical questions as the object of discussion. Papers can be changed in response to comments. High scores for either a paper or an author on such a site could replace the prestige granted by acceptance into a top-tier journal. Points are awarded for reviews, and researchers are respected for their scores (closer to tenure), so there is more positive motivation to review than in today's system (which is: it's rude not to review when asked).

I think that alone could work. Some academics might balk at a lack of editorial boards. Fine, let's allow some editors in the mix. An editorial board is an aggregator. They choose what content fits their filter, and may open a discussion with an author on improvements, possibly bringing in reviewers. In the end, readers will see a prestigious badge of the board's approval on high-quality articles, and there could be a page or rss feed to browse the articles meeting this standard. This can all exist on top of the hacker news / stackoverflow system, which itself could be built on top of an arXiv-like system.

Several of these ideas are motivated by thoughts from the blogs of Tim Gowers and Michael Nielsen.
A watchdog thread can be running every n milliseconds. This is very low load on the system. [...] If the loop has not moved onwards since the last sample or two it can be deemed stalled. [...] But you can move the other events in the affected loop to a fresh thread; you can go sideways when you’ve detected a blocking task.

Congratulations, you just invented (a very inefficient version of) pre-emptive multitasking.
hmm, at Caltech (my school) the courses are very much divided into either lecture courses or lab courses, and the phys/chem/bio majors probably have 2/3 lecture classes and 1/3 lab classes. The lecture only classes could very easily be put into an online format.
He's talking about the supply chain optimization. One example is the dram chips used to build the iphone came from Samsung. They were sourced at quantities so large they are actually cheaper for Apple's iPhone than they are for Samsung's own phones. Streamlined products where the only segmentation is storage space make this possible. They can actually request such a large order their competitors can't match and get squeezed to the end of the manufacturing line while also paying more. To match they have to spend more. This hurts even more if your'e not controlling the distribution.

To the average non-techie all they have to decide is what color and storage size they want. This makes the device friendlier to consumers and takes away stress of understanding the hardware choices. The customer is actually happier if they don't have too many choices. People pay as much for this as they do the curated apps.
ONLY law enforcement will love this. Everyone else will want to run to the hills.
A more featureful version of that hack:

https://github.com/ryancdotorg/ssh-chain
Ask HN: Better to release a premium feature as free beta or wait to launch?
I'm about to launch my SaaS site which I intent to monetize using a freemium revenue model. I'm working on the "premium" feature that I intend to put behind a paywall. Now I don't wanna work on the monetizing work right away. First I want to get the site working and gather traction before I go that route. I have 2 choices, I can:<p>a) Release with the Premium feature in 'beta' mode and once its stable, put it behind a paywall and risk alienating my free customers who got used to having the premium feature for free.Gives me the advantage of attracting more customers who are impressed with my premium feature that they can access for free.<p>or<p>b) I can launch without the premium feature (less impressive launch). At a later point when I am convinced that the site is a viable business, I can launch the premium feature with a 30-day free trial. This way, I never take away functionality from existing free users and hence don't alienate anyone.<p>or
c) Release the premium feature in beta mode, set the expectation that this will eventually be a paid feature and deal with the griping when I eventually move it behind a paywall.
(article author)

Spot on except for the bit about being inefficient; presumed performance is very much the thing that makes the complexity worth it.
Yes, what you describe is true. We also had a good discussion a few days ago about scenarios where REST doesn't seem to work well. The specific problem is when things start getting too chatty. Its very difficult to expose a flexible (fine-grained) REST API and at the same time give you all the data you need in the least amount of calls. It takes quite a bit of work up front to figure out what your model is going to be and figuring out if that model will work for most of your consumers. Getting the 'pattern' down as you described is half the battle.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3538585

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3538134
In my opinion its definitely worthy of discussion the economic impact of using this stuff.

I am not a downloader. I have plenty of money to spend on things. But I won't buy products that are a rip off or that causes me any unnecessary trouble.

I used to buy games. Not a big gamer, but occasional. Lately though DRM is a big hassle. I get all the Humble Bundles since there's no DRM. Other than that, no thanks, even though there's at least $1000 worth of games I would buy right off if I was confident it wouldn't give me troubles.

Same with BluRay. I returned my high end BluRay machine after discovering it was abysmally slow because of DRM code. I would actually RATHER watch 1080HD, but I am stuck with 480 on DVDs for now. Oh well, DVDs are cheaper anyway. Sucks to be them, but if they don't give a crap about the experience and convenience of paying customers, then they deserve to die as companies.

tldr: A lot of people are put of by DRM and would buy more without it. DRM may have a net negative impact on sales.
It's a good alternative to Flash. I don't think people really advocate the effect as a replacement for normal scrolling paradigms. There are some specific cases where it might make sense to do it and it's great that those pages will no longer be forced into Flash.
Nitpick: don't call an animation lightweight when it's half the size of the entire jQuery library.
>why would you in this world as a startup do anything else?

Because the tech's immature and irrelevant to your core competency? The paragraph at the end of the HATEOAS page sums it up pretty well for me - and seems to be struggling to make the case for the benefits of "full REST". I despise the enterprisey verbosity of SOAP et al, but given the choice between an inefficient but well understood standard with good tooling support and the new hotness that no-one quite understands properly yet...
It's also worth noting that academia.edu is a for-profit enterprise. The domain academia.edu was purchased prior to the strictures put in place to ensure that only qualified educational institutions could register .edu domains, and has been grandfathered ever since. Academia.edu itself launched in 2008 apparently.

The author of this piece very much has a horse in this game, and as a result I very much view his writing with a skeptical eye.

There are serious and substantial problems with social models of publishing, especially when organizations/institutions start tying promotions and/or remuneration to metrics like impact factor (which itself is a proprietary formula).

We should keep in mind to reward good science because it's good science, not just because it's popular.
Hacker News is international
Someone posted a link to the 'European Hacker News' recently (Hackful). My feeling was that it's a nice idea, but it made me think of a quote from Kenneth Clarke:

> where some way of thought or human activity is really vital to us, internationalism is accepted unhesitatingly.

My feeling was that hacking is international - the stuff that gets shared here, and on github, and through the open-source movement, it's completely internationalized, like few other industries are.

So I don't really see a place for the European Hacker News, or the Indian Hacker News. Only one is needed.

----

Optional longer quote follows:

[The Catholic church in the 11th century] was powerful for positive reasons. Men of intelligence naturally and normally took holy orders, and could rise from obscurity to positions of immense influence. In spite of the number of bishops and abbots from royal or princely families,

the Church was basically a democratic institution where ability -- administrative, diplomatic and sheer intellectual ability -- made its way.

And then the Church was international. It was, to a large extent, a monastic institution following the Benedictine rule and owing no territorial allegiance.

The great churchmen of the eleventh and twelfth centuries came from all over Europe. Anselm came from Aosta, via Normandy, to be Archbishop of Canterbury; Lanfranc had made the same journey, starting from Pavia. The list could be extended to almost every great teacher of the early Middle Ages.

It couldn't happen in the Church, or politics, today: one can't imagine two consecutive archbishops of Canterbury being Italian. But it could happen -- does happen -- in the field of science; which shows that

where some way of thought or human activity is really vital to us, internationalism is accepted unhesitatingly.
I find URL templates smelly. Once you stick a place holder in the URL, it's no longer a valid URL - it's something that requires custom mangling before it can be passed along.

In your example, I need to know that the x is something that requires replacement. How is that fundamentally different from just putting in your documentation (and, in the 405 if not passed) "this resources takes query param baz" - which is not HATEOS?

Also, this doesn't cover the case of optional parameters. Specifying optionality in a template is horrible (something like "bar/?baz=x[&ogle=y]" to borrow the pattern from man pages), and specifying individual URLs for each combination of parameters is impractical for more than a few.
Hi Tyler - nice comment. Also, wonderful work on www.thecostofknowledge.com!

I agree that discovery and credit/prestige are the two key things to get right. I'm sure that the kinds of systems you're talking about, voting systems, will be part of the research discovery/credit process in the future. It works for web content, and also for very esoteric content on the web (MathOverflow etc), so it should work for research papers too.
With -W, the articles examples could be rewritten to

Host ruapehu
HostName ruapehu.example.com

Host aoraki
ProxyCommand ssh -W %h:%p ruapehu

Host tongariro
ProxyCommand ssh -W %h:%p aoraki
Or pie got larger, which seems more likely.

Most of the price of the device is negotiated with the carrier, not the consumer. So a "free" device is really $600, and a "$199" device is $800.
I've exaggerated a bit - I've had sips of more than 3 beers in my life. I've had tastes of lagers in the UK, a couple German beers, and a few others over time - a swig here and there, etc. 3 was basically full (or near full). There's just nothing appealing at all with any of the types (closest I could probably do would be a cider, which isn't really a beer though, right?).

If that's your experience, I'm fine listing you as "doesn't like beer."
It's great to see mobile inventors and startups mentioned during SB.