skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That stream of people supposedly represents people you already know but aren't friends with on Facebook.

I agree with OP in that Facebook that greatly taken away the ability to find people who are into a specific topic. I would like to find people in my area who like the film "El Mariachi". There is a Facebook page for it here: https://www.facebook.com/ElMariachiMovie I can see that 30,000+ people are fans of the film. Great! However, I can't see any of these people (let alone their proximity to me). The best I can do is maybe post something to the page, which will NOT appear by default, and may or may not get lost in the noise about other posts about actual Mariachis or maybe Mexican restaurants with the same name. The functionality related to one of my favorite books is even more bare (https://www.facebook.com/pages/The-Man-with-the-Golden-Arm)!

This leads me to believe that (in the wake of privacy concerns) Facebook is no longer designed to help you meet strangers. You might find someone with similar interests, but it is likely to be a friend of a friend. This might be intentional. It's not necessarily bad or wrong, but I think it is important to call it out.
Not at all. Surely the obvious first step in talking to someone about an app is to figure out how much they already know about it.
The slippery slope is a fucking fallacy!

Until it isn't.
Inject: CommonJS compliant JS dependency management for the browser
(Just to clarify: I'm not disillusioned about karma or anything petty like that. I’m ok with being downvoted for not being civil. I’m disillusioned about the general attitude displayed here. That attitude made me want to not be civil anymore.)
Similar build quality is going to demand a similar price. Apple memory upgrades are about the only thing remaining that really is overpriced, but their base hardware is pretty reasonable. And you can definitely dual boot it or just wipe the OS and reinstall :)

Also, if you're not dead-set on having a brand new machine, you could get a used one on craigslist and save a couple of hundred.

Other than that, the only laptops that I've seen come close have been Sony's, and they tend to be even more expensive.
How Much Should Kids Sleep? Nobody Knows For Sure
Video: Peter Sunde's talk at Wired 2011
I think there's some significant selection bias on HN, particularly against Windows and Microsoft. It seems a disproportionate amount of the people here are using Python/Ruby on OS X, so naturally you'll get more articles about moving to that sort of stack and away from .NET and the like than the opposite.

In reality, .NET is actually a very interesting platform. LINQ is actually really cool and C# is largely a better language than Java. If this isn't enough, you can always use F# which is a very nice functional, statically typed language based on OCaml. On top of this, MSR produces interesting research in programming languages, which can easily be subsumed by their product languages. There is actually a healthy exchange of ideas between Haskell and the .NET languages, for example, even going both ways. (Haskell recently got some features from LINQ, for example.)
Also, http://www.shelter-kit.com
One approach to scaling GA I thought was both appropriate and funny was a migrate function that randomly sends a sample to another node. Because you only need to send to a single node occasionally it scales vary well. But what's cool is it's like an infection they either take over the place or get eaten fairly quickly.
Torrentfreak is not a reliable news source by any means. It has a strong agenda and that article spun the findings of the paper.
sounds like they have some twitter envy?
I was always perplexed by Facebook's decision to get rid of the birthday gifting system (on someone's birthday, you could pay FB $1 to give them some sort of picture as a gift). It wasn't popular among my friends at first, but it eventually got to the point where every time it was someone's birthday, they got at least one gift from someone.

I can only imagine that if Facebook had pushed it hard enough, it would only have become even more commonplace. When you have 500M+ users, each of whom has a birthday once a year, and each of whom has numerous friends to wish him a happy birthday, $1 gifts are nothing to balk about.

The opportunity they had reminded me of the story behind how the diamond business itself created the profitable tradition of giving engagement rings and wedding rings.
I think Spolsky would agree. And my style is similar to his - Management Fiat is not the way to go, but it is my job to help ask the right questions to move the disagreeing engineers to find the right solution. Sometimes all it takes is having the two folks explain their positions, a la rubber-ducky-debugging (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubber_duck_debugging)
I tiptoed around this a bit, but I think F# is great. I have little experience with it, but I work with someone who has been using it pretty extensively for a bit and we've talked about it a number of times.

This, however, is where the environment/culture issue (that I also danced around) comes into play. In most .NET shops it would be extremely hard if not almost impossible to bring in another programming paradigm like functional, let alone mix it. This is perhaps a bit ironic considering most of the same places use javascript, but if they could write C# instead of javascript on the client side, I'm certain most would (in fact when ASP.NET first made this somewhat possible it was the norm until people got bitten by all the pitfalls).
My attempt at feedback: If you are trying to promote a game you made, promote the game. I have no clue why there are all these pictures of you with random girls, but I can tell you that it lost my interest far before I ever read a word about your game.
Which all seem to follow the exact same pattern, ie. only counting the cost of materials that you have to buy. From that link:

The Soft Courtyard House
This design draws heavily on bamboo, which is readily available in China...

The Recycled Materials House
As the name implies, this two-story structure uses locally- and regionally-available recycled materials, both to reduce costs and to promote sustainable housing practices. For example, fly ash residue from local coal-burning factories supplements the concrete medium and replaces the more expensive cement component.

The composition of these L-shaped corner walls would be rammed earth and bamboo. In an innovative twist, the formwork that produces the rammed earth walls can be disassembled and then reassembled to create the roof.

Not saying that these aren't all excellent ideas, but if the original article is 'misleading', then yours is too.
Mirror link: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?sclient=psy-ab&...
Mono for Game Developers
>> Music is so cheap. All of the original demands 10 years ago have been met. Guess what? piracy is worse than ever. It reminds me why you never negotiate with terrorists.

All the news I've read regarding streaming services (they have existed a lot less than 10 years, mind you) is that they are decreasing piracy. Do you have any other data points?
I've spent the past few days trying to implement a little utility app in Clojure/Clojurescript for work, and here's some of my initial impressions. I've been going back and forth between the approach explained in this article and the Clojurescript One workflow. Disclaimer: I'm a bit of a Clojure noob and primarily a backend guy, although I have some experience with jQuery.

- In Noir I was able to make the jump from "getting started" to "building my own app" fairly quickly.

- After getting a somewhat-viable backend, I hit a pretty steep learning curve trying to figure out how to hook in some Clojurescript.

- I started looking at Clojurescript One, however, I've found it to be a bit of a firehose. I'm intrigued by their development ideas, but I ultimately just want to pick and choose a few things that I can integrate into my existing Noir backend. The Clojurescript repl is pretty sweet though.

- I think I might just use the Domina library in isolation, and use the cljsbuild approach in this article. I will try to revisit Clojurescript One later as I gain a little more experience.
They didn't say EE (electrical engineering). They said electricity and magnetism (E&M).

The AP physics curriculum has AP Physics B, AP Physics C (Mechanics), and AP Physics C (Electricity and Magnetism). At my high school (a fairly well-off public high school), in the AP Physics class, we were supposed to do both Mechanics and E&M, but we fell behind and had only just started E&M by the time the test rolled around. Some people just took the mechanics test; I took both, and got a 5, but the college I went to didn't accept AP Physics for credit, just for placement in the honors physics track. In college, E&M was the second-semester physics class in the honors track.

So, I don't think it's too unusual to expect a talented high school student or first or second year college student to have taken an E&M course.
I remember when I felt as he does about strict.

I also remember the day that I made a trivial error that strict would have instantly caught, and took out Bloomberg's ftp server as a result. That was also the day that I was converted.

It is important to know what strict does and doesn't do. It is not a panacea. But that said, it is a very good default to have on. But most days it catches problems for me, and they are usually real bugs. Keeping it quiet involves very little work. And my experience seems typical.

I believe him when he says that he has lots of working scripts that don't use it. However I also believe that a habit of using it would improve his productivity. And based on past experience, I'd be willing to bet that if he put strict on those scripts, he'd find and fix at least one real bug. (And probably a lot more.)

Given how useful strict is, why shouldn't it be a default "best practice" that gets recommended? This is not nagging. This is sharing useful information that makes people's life better. I've had people thank me for it.
$8 that I cannot give for the buttons because PayPal is being itself and won't let me buy anything with my perfectly valid credit card.

Stripe?
I'm sorry, but I have a hard time believing that anything is harder to scale than Twitter. With an audience of 175 million users, a Twitter field of 140 bytes makes for 22 gigabytes of uncompressed text per person-tweet. If everyone Tweets ten tweets per hour, that's 220 gigabytes. A one-TB HD would only be good for 5 hours or so, meaning Twitter would need to buy a good 3000 hard-drives per year. That's probably more than Amazon has in total.
Lolita the book is protected because it fails the third prong of the Miller test. Nabokov's Lolita is considered to have "serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific" value. However, that test sets the bar at a completely arbitrary level:

What about Adrian Lyne's 1997 movie, Lolita? It has artistic merit, but arguably not as much as the novel.

What about girls' dancing and gymnastics? Should photography of those activities, even including women's international gymnastics competitions, be banned just because, viewed with an eye toward prurience, they might qualify? Certainly the activities have artistic value, but how much?

What about purely fictional depictions of minors, either in manga (see the case of Christopher Handley's manga possession) or even in fictional stories that may not be deemed to have serious literary merit?
It is actually cached: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:0eRMUuc...

What I usually do is to find the cached version is (using this as an example) write "site:site:paraschopra.com/blog/entrepreneurship/validate-startup-idea.htm" in Google. The cached version appears in the right when you hover on the ">>" arrow.
So, because their product is not up to your arbitrary set of demands, you feel justified in pirating it? Couldn't they meet those and you could just come up with more demands?

I don't buy it. Hiding behind a list of demands that must be met in order for you to be okay with actually financially compensating the people who financially backed, created, and then distributed said content is just posturing. At least, that's how it looks from the perspective of someone who a) doesn't pirate and b) doesn't buy media when the terms are not to his liking.

I've met a few people who pirate songs and then buy band merchandise in order to get proceeds to the band (more than otherwise, if I am to understand it correctly). Those guys are cool guys, and they back their moral rhetoric with their actions. Something tells me the majority of pirates are not like these guys, though (admittedly) I have no facts to back that up - just the anecdotal evidence of knowing quite a few pirates, most of whom, to put it bluntly, really don't give a fuck - they just want the content.
I think two things are interesting here. 1: "when
does Erlang GC a process' heap?" and 2: "where does
Erlang keep a process' data?".

1: Erlang GCs a process' heap whenever that process'
heap gets full, or when you call
erlang:garbage_collect() explicitly.

2: Erlang stores most data associated with a process
on the process heap, there's one such heap per
erlang process. Binaries are a special case. If
they're large (> 64 octets), the heap only
contains a reference to the binary, the binary
itself is stored in an area specifically for
binaries.

1+2 can result in a lot of binary garbage left lying
around. Here's how it can happen:

a) A process creates a relatively large amount of
unused heap space. This could happen by
temporarily using a large amount of heap, e.g. by
calling binary_to_list() on a large-ish binary,
doing something with the list then dropping
it. For arguments' sake, let's say we made a heap
(for one Erlang process) with 30M free.

b) Now the process moves on to a new phase: creating
large but short-lived binaries. Let's say 1M
each. Those binaries don't live on the heap, only
a reference to them does. So they only consume 8
(?) octets on the heap.

c) If the references are the only thing using the
heap, then you can make 4M of them before filling
the process heap. But since they're 1M each,
they'll eat 4T of the binary heap. i.e. you'll
run out of memory.

As you found out, setting 'fullsweep_after' to 0
doesn't help, since a GC is never triggered. But
explicitly calling erlang:garbage_collect() does.

You can investigate a bit more using
tracing. erlang:trace/3 can generate a message
whenever the target process is GCed (the
garbage_collection entry in flaglist). If my guess
is right, then you should see that your processes
holding all the binaries are never (or rarely)
GCed. Tracing the GC is cheap, you won't notice any
performance difference if you only do it on a few
processes.

The process_info BIF can also tell you quite a bit,
e.g. the process heap size.

Disclaimer #1: my knowledge about the details above may
be wrong or out of date. But the mechanism is known.
I've seen it in embedded systems and handled it in similar
ways to your approach.

Disclaimer #2: obviously I'm taking a guess. It's possible
you've run into something else entirely. That's why I
suggested some things to look at to confirm or reject my
suspicion.
Perhaps I can narrow down exactly what you're looking for. What are you looking for in terms of:

-screen size (any preference toward matte or glossy?)

-weight

-CPU and video card

-battery life

-cost
Don't miss the unforgettable followup: The Story of Mel, a real programmer.

http://foldoc.org/The+Story+of+Mel
"It seems as though the whole philosophy of .NET centres on catering to the novice... .NET, and specifically C#, both coddles you and then scolds you at every turn."

Perfect summary and exactly how I feel about .NET.
What I meant is that the opportunities are at Eve Online. If you're the third-largest exporter, you do make up a large part of the employment market. Sure, it's a small market - but it's still a large chunk of that market.

And Eve is more than just a bunch of hackers - heck, they employ a lead economist. (http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=virtual-wor...)
This nature-inspired and free book also contains some chapters on genetic algorithms: http://www.cleveralgorithms.com/
Policing a community is where humans excel and policies/computers fail.

I ran a community once, with around 30k active users. Definitely not big, but we faced the same problems. Our solution was simple, aside from adhering to the law: "Mods delete what looks icky".

We felt that automated systems would always fail (users would use "4" instead of "a"), and strict policies always led to debate about whether something was allowed or not.

Instead we tried to recruit mods that knew the community, the direction it was heading and were able to keep a level head. Sure, someone went overboard once in a while and deleted o.k. stuff, but we'd just remove their mod privileges and reinstate what they deleted (thinks were removed from the database 14 days after they were marked as "deleted").

We were never accused of harboring pedophiles, or going overboard with removal. Those that complained about free-speech were always radical political groups well outside of "acceptable" for most communities.

The key is to find moderators in line with the community, in a benevolent dictator way. No idea if reddit could find enough of those, but it worked well for us and should scale with community size, as reddit has a larger pool to recruit from.
"But more importantly, the problems I'm solving can't be more easily solved using another stack."

Can you expand on that a little - what are the particular characteristics of the project that make it better suited for Windows than for a web stack of some sort?
I have tried Freshbooks. Nice service, but it only does the invoicing part, leaving me to do the packing list + labelling myself. The service I want/should program myself does both automatically.
I would go with www and redirect anything without www to www. I used to be against this, as the www is mostly unnecessary. However, if you ever want to serve static assets at a subdomain of your site, this is a big win.

The reason is that any cookies you set for the root domain (without www) will be sent on each request to any subdomain. So if you want to server images from images.domain.com, you'll get all the login, tracking, etc. cookies sent along with each request. 99% of the time, this is wasted bytes.

You could argue that the widespread use of CDNs for static content makes this point irrelevant, and perhaps you're right.
I don't think that he's quite as inspiring to learn EE from as to learn CS from, though he's certainly an excellent teacher in any case.

I'm kind of sad, however, that they cancelled the graduate-level sequel to SICP that he was going to teach this semester and that I was going to take. I had even paid my tuition of $7696 for the class (MIT ain't cheap!). I'm one of the first victims of MITx! I still think it's a great thing anyway.
Man, that's a drag. I'll start shopping around for other options that can integrate. PayPal is just a starter thing anyway. Sorry about that!
I have met several avid Perl developers in my line of work and at conferences that have been abundantly helpful. IRC users, on the other hand, can be somewhat of a disaster. I was working a script and couldn't find in the documentation of how to set a custom error code with "die". I decided to ask in #perl on freenode, but I was constantly "trolled" with some of the users spamming "Have you considered reading the documentation?". One of these users did in fact answer my question (just use exit), seconds before I was banned. When I pm'd the user who banned me, he explained to me that I had "not answered his question whether I had answered the documentation". Heh.

Ironically, the user that banned me runs a blog whose most recent blog post was regarding "Exit statuses and how $? works". So I guess my question wasn't so stupid after all.

I have heard that #perl on OFTC is slightly more sane and helpful, but can't attest for that personally.
They might be the next Steve Jobs. You do not know that. Our culture handicaps a lot of people by promoting mediocrity and conformity and groupthink and putting artificial walls and ceilings around what a person is expected to do, nothing more or less.
In Germany: After digging out the first stone, the neighbors called the building authority and declares a full stop to your efforts until you hand in hundreds of papers and plans done by an architect and approved by a constructional engineer -.-
As an outsider to the perl community, looking in. I see an identity crisis. Is perl a shell scripting language, a web framework to scale, a OO Monolith EE system? Talk to different people you will hear yes. The fact that use strict exists is a flaw in and of itself. It divides a community on the "correct" way to use the language.

As an outsider, I don't have a niche that perl fits, that something else with a clearer purpose doesn't already cover. I appreciate it for it's contributions to language development, but that's about it.
> Reduction ad absurdium, bored.

It's a valid question, is it not? The protection of artists must fall along some continuum: either no protection whatsoever, the strongest protection imaginable, or somewhere in between. So where do we draw the line?

In the last few days since I wrote my response to you, I've read up a lot on the history of copyright, and why we have it in the first place. And the line drawn by the framers of our Constitution and our early courts was this: Speech and ideas cannot be property. Giving people control over them endangers free speech and harms the public. But failing to do so disincentivizes authors. Thus, the goal was to give the minimum possible protection that would encourage the progress of art and science.

All the evidence suggests that the amount of protection that exists today far exceeds that minimum level. How can we justify that?

> They're not guaranteed success in the current marketplace, either.

Exactly, and that's great. That's how it should be. Copyright law wasn't created to force people to buy artists' work. It was created to prevent people from profiting off of someone else's work. It was created to promote progress in art and science. But today, it's clearly not. I've gotta run, but I'll leave you with this example:

Every 20 years, when the copyright on Mickey Mouse is about to expire, Disney spends a ton of cash to convince Congress to retroactively extend the length of copyright terms. They always succeed, but the consequences are grave. Something like 99% of copyrighted material is no longer commercially viable more than 10 years after its creation. But since copyright terms are continually extended, all of these works remain under the control of their creators, and are never released to the public. Entire decades worth of movies from Hollywood in the 1920s an 1930s have been left to decay, because their owners have no incentive to promote them, but the public isn't allowed to access them. Our entire history is evaporating before our eyes so Disney can keep making money off of Mickey Mouse. So to recap:

1. A great many historical works of art are being lost.
2. New artists are not allowed to re-imagine old stories and art from a century ago, because it's still under copyright. (Ironic, because Disney created its art by re-imagining old fairy tales.)
3. Content companies like Disney have no incentive to make new art, because they retain control of their old art.

So where's the progress? How does this system make art better?