skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There is symmetry, but the point of the symmetry is that it's going in a different direction. So a very broad, liberal interpretation could be this: Lisp makes everything data and Haskell makes everything a function (code). I don't know how useful this generalization is, but it's an interesting way to look at it.
What I learn for my startup : say something shocking about an unsolved mystery and gain attention for free.
Noob answer:

In a strict language, you write an expression and it's perfectly clear when it will be evaluated.

With lazy evaluation to know if or when an expression will be evaluated you have to follow it through possibly many layers of function calls (which may have been written by somebody else) looking for a place where it needs to be evaluated. Along the way it may become embedded in other expressions which complicates the problem.

How do you know when an expression needs to be evaluated? I don't know if I'm smart enough to understand the answer to that question:

http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Haskell/Denotational_semantics#...
Thanks for that.

Unclear...you recommend Python and DJango?
"But most important, learn by doing. Start building something, no matter how unsignificant it may appear, right now. You will learn on the fly ;)" That is exactly what I want to do, I want to build a site like this one. How long do you think it would take to figure out how to learn a language with the capabilities to do that? I am a quick learner and am persistent.
(A bit of) Decision-making for startups
But we're hoping that, as in past influxes, the new arrivals will with some prodding from the existing inhabitants learn the local customs.

I'm absolutely smitten with this form of social hacking. To me, this seems to be the most revolutionary part of the site. That controlling "free" speech is not an impediment to open speech and that community members can be taught, through participation, to behave according to some simple constraints.

My apologies if this is an inane realization. It just doesn't seem to be said often enough in on-line communities. Lassez faire doesn't work and it's possible to also encourage the worst, trollish, impulses. This is the first clearly positive example I've seen. If there are others please let me know!
Ah yes, I was thinking this morning that the article's interpretation of the study results was leaving out this selection effect.

The study, by itself, doesn't tell us whether hiring low digit ratio traders would be more profitable for a firm, or even if the average lifetime earnings of someone entering the trading profession would be higher for someone with a low digit ratio.
HotIndianStartups.com
Guys,
Check this out

http://www.hotindianstartups.com
377 square feet. I still cannot understand why some people get 5k square feet for a family of 4.
Strange that you left out the follow-up for that, I thought it was the most insightful part of the article:

It seems to imply that the enterprise's orientation toward control springs fully formed from the minds of an army of petty controlling middle managers. I don't think that's the case.

I suspect it's more likely the result of large scale system dynamics, where the culture of control follows from other constraints. [...] Once you have GAAP, Sarbox, domain-specific regulation like HIPAA, quarterly expectations from "The Street," decades of MIS legacy, and the talent acquisition realities that mature companies in mature industries face, the strange attractors in the system will pull most of those shards to roughly the same place. In other words, the IT enterprise is about control because large businesses in mature industries are about control. On the other hand, the web is about emergence because in this time, place, and with this technology discontinuity, emergence is the low energy state.
I'm curious about a satellite connection. I spend a lot of time in southern Spain where we don't have landlines. We do have GSM so we get _slow_ internet.

Can you shed some light on satellite internet? Who are you hosted with? Hows the speed & reliability?
Does anyone else feel like HN is actually ahead of the zeitgeist than other sites like Reddit and Digg? Obviously the focus is closer with technology/entrepreneur articles but I keep finding stories I've already seen on HN hitting Reddit and Digg up to a day later.
hmm, that spike was before techcrunch covered YC (they covered it in December) ... no idea, then :)
wtf is a generation anyway? I'm gen-Y but my sister who's 4 years older is gen-x? Basically these articles are corporate HR people bitching about people realizing that they've become disposable--the corporate/employee contract has dissolved--and responding accordingly.
You physicists should really read up on your PKD novels. He was onto this years ago.
prove that with sufficient caching you can serve arbitrarily large numbers of requests with arbitrarily slow languages

I love the way that's worded, but I do have a serious question: how do you do the caching in a way that keeps content fresh? For example, you couldn't just cache this page with the comments because then I'd think mine didn't show up. Or do you add it to a comments cache in memcached or some similar mechanism as well as saving it to the database? Or simply expire the cache on save assuming that there will be more reads than writes?

It's always seemed hard to do good caching for a site whose content is constantly changing as people comment and vote on items and it'd be nice to see how complex the model used here was. The latest source I know of is at http://ycombinator.com/arc/arc2.tar. Will there be an update with new source?

Oh, and congratulations on an awesome site!
my startup will have threaded comments. I started making my own comments engine, but realized I'd just be making Disqus (YC startup).

Disqus is very easy to integrate with your design, has a fantastic feature set, Facebook connect and great development team.

Some issues are that it won't integrate with your accounts (obviously) and it can be quite slow sometimes.
Usually crawler traffic.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=390965
They are common.

The problems they don't solve is how to allocate the assets between currencies. Also part of my money is in fixed income papers. So even when not trying to beat the market, there are some decisions I would like to leave to a professional.
It also looks like it was made in MS Paint.
"...it is hard to think of anything else that we depend on so heavily yet know so little about."

Except for the power grid, communications infrastructure, medical system, food system, water system, the internet itself, monetary system, etc.

It's not really the lack of knowledge about search engines that bothers the author. What makes it stand out is its novelty and the fact that it's visibly controlled by a few entities.
While some parts here are interesting, this is pure silliness:

...it's a realization that the fun part of the web is probably more behind us than ahead of us

tehehe. I guess, with time, we'll see...
Jobs will always be synonymous with Apple. Just like Jordan will always be remembered as a player and not a owner (successes are not anywhere near, he was just the first example that came to mind.)

Sure he was tied to Pixar and Disney but his absence won't be FELT. They said when he was CEO of Pixar he was in the office one day a week whereas with Apple it's my understanding he was there much much more often, like a full time job even.

So now that Jobs isn't CEO, how often did he check in at Pixar HQ? The fact is it doesn't really matter.
I've been noticing it for a while, but it became ever more evident to me when I read this (http://www.adbusters.org/magazine/79/hipster.html)

Namely, Gen Y is beginning to segment into those who'd rather keep up with the jonses and be immersed in culture (typically younger members of Gen Y), those who'd rather be more involved in social matters (the median), and those who are more focused on establishing their lives for the future as THE primary goal.

And the amazing thing is, it's incredibly migratory. The younger groups who follow MTV culture either phase out of it, and move into the second category, or cling to the pop lifestyle and migrate over into one of the other two, using pop as a blanket for wherever they go.

It makes little sense right now, I plan to research it rather fully this summer.
I think what you're getting at is that there's a distinction between predicting well, vs. just guessing, and having your guess turn out to be correct.

This is true. In the case of repeatable events, over time, the former will do better than chance and the latter will do as well as chance.

I'm talking about the former, not the latter.
Swamp gas from a weather balloon was trapped in a thermal pocket and reflected the light from Venus. Obviously.
Don't pay too much attention to the article - Macleans magazine's core demographic is primarily boomer. This is just a feel-good article for them.

[edit] Now that I think of it, this is terribly ironic. An article complaining about how Gen-Yers all want gold stars and reassurances that they're good... written for boomers who want gold stars and reassurances that they're good :)
A resounding a perfectly clear - NO. You can't even compare Reader to any of the other shuttered projects Google closed. Reader is a mecca for information for Google to use in their secret sauce.

If you're a newspaper company, would the pure cost be worth knowing exactly what columns your subscribers are reading? Absolutely.

Google Reader is a internal service where ads will only muck up what they have going for them.
Are there any good standard tools already out there that handle this type of tracking?
"Java is big like west Texas is big."..... is an interesting analogy used in the article.
I really dislike scribd.
Social Networks Grow: Friending Mom and Dad
I'm a bit surprised that Google doesn't have an employee agreement in place preventing this. Many can extend well past your employment.
Dodgeball looked really cool and it's a pity that Google just let it languish - especially since social networking seems to be gravitating toward real-time, location based services.
1) Any idea how many page views per month?

2) Is all the HN data (comments, submissions, users) backed up and stored off the machine it's running on?
Dear Drupal, Happy Birthday - and thank you
god forbid...if they did, they would have run all of those businesses into the ground by now.
I remember using Drupal constantly when I was primarily a freelance web developer - its fantastic.
for something big that lasts a while, it almost always makes sense to optimize. the problem is that usually when you write something, you don't know if it will get big. You might write five or ten webapps that go nowhere before you get a hit. The optimal strategy, I think, is to throw hardware at it in the prototype stage, and then, if the program becomes popular, efficiently rewrite the slow parts as you grow.
Pretty_print_inspect and semi-intelligence
Apple the religion, Steve Jobs the man
Jobs is Apple. But Pixar? Pixar is more John Lasseter and Andrew Stanton, directors of their blockbusters.

Without the passions of those guys, Pixar wouldn't be where they are now.
The former.

Your comment stated that you would have felt better if the Java installer had said something different, in particular less; so I said the same thing about your comment. It was sort of an ill conceived parody, you understand. In conjunction with feigned shock (the "OoO,") at your apparent linguasexuality, I thought it was pretty funny. Seems I was wrong, or just too vague.
What happens when both sides are almost exclusively using robots? Will war become a game?
Microsoft Office 14 screenshots
This concept of the extended mind was first raised in 1998

I wonder if a Google search would turn up an earlier example.

Yep, there are definitely earlier examples of much the same concept with the same wording to be found in a date-restricted Google Books search.
so glad Visio is getting some additional love. Please don't totally ruin a very handy app!
We're with HughesNet. It's bad (200 kbps) at peak times, better at moderate volume (500 kbps), and pretty good at off-hours - 5am (1.5 mbps). We pay about $80 month but it's our only choice besides dial-up. It seems they now have faster connections if you're willing to pay more (http://go.gethughesnet.com/plans.cfm)

Reliability is really good. It's hardly ever down, even during major snowstorms (just have to clean off the dish). I'd say we lose connectivity maybe a few hours a month.

The worst part is the low daily bandwidth limits (425 MB in 24 hour periods) and then they throttle the service (<20 kbps) until you're into the next 24 hour period. They don't tell you when you're getting close. Since we started using a bandwidth tracker to monitor ourselves we haven't had any problems but the first few months were painful and frustrating. They do have three non-monitored hours (4am to 7am local time) so you can schedule downloads accordingly.

Not sure if they're international though. Be careful of on-line reviews. They're almost all negative because I don't think folks realize the technology is always going to seem more limited than DSL or cable. Coming from either of those (or a T1 etc.), you just have to reset your expectations.
Every generation has its great engineering challenges. While you may have invented TCP and wired up the planet, Gen Y'ers are here inventing HSPA and wireless-ing up the planet. New technologies will always come along, and there will never be a shortage of difficult technologies to implement.

To think that because you guys started this whole internet thing means there's no difficult work left to do? That's absurd.
As best as I can tell, it says the universe is holographic because all the information on the inside (a volume) is reflected by (or a reflection of) the information on the edge of the universe (a plane).
This makes it "holographic" because our 3-dimensional world is also expressed in 2-dimensions.
You are right of course, but who gave those two such autonomy? Jobs knows that autonomy is what makes Pixar so great. Will the other Disney "overloards" realize that or just grind Pixar into the ground like they did with their own (once brilliant) animation studio?
I agree, but knowing the bounce rate of that page doesn't necessarily indicate that the login form was the issue.

You may be surprised at how high the the "cart abandonment" rate is on ALL e-commerce sites. With nothing to compare to, perhaps they just assumed those people were a lost cause.
Here's another question:

How do you handle billing?
What other big name entrepreneurs are that accessible?
Fog Creek Open House (Friday, January 30th - 12-1pm)
While I would hate that, Reader's disappearance would strongly boost my productivity :)
Robots will lower the threshold for war.

Bombs are not precise, and even solders tend to be a bit too generous with the machine gun.

But robots can be much more accurate, can be mass produced, and nobody cries over them.

Less collateral damage and no risk to your own soldiers - perfect.

In the future we will very likely see an industrialized nation trying to pacify a non industrialized trouble spot with robots.

The more interesting question is, what about technological equals.

Presumably that concerns only entities cable of producing sophisticated robots.

That might actually include developing nations like India and Pakistan.

China and the US are just too economically integrated to have a full on war.

But India and Pakistan might decide to settle Kashmir with robots.

What we would have then is most likely robots pushing people off land they consider home.

That's gonna be bad.
Improving OpenGL ES performance on the iPhone
The 2x payout is a good idea. If the kid grows up a screw up, they still won't starve on minimum wage. If the kid grows up to get a mediocre job making 50K/yr, suddenly they are pretty well off. If they push themselves and earn 100K...they get 200 which is quite good.

Good motivator for them to work their ass off
Part of the Pixar/Disney deal was that Lasseter be put in charge of all Disney animation ("Chief Creative Officer"). Disney Animation Studios is presumably in good hands now... once they flush out all the stuff that was in the tubes prior to the merger.

(Edit: ...assuming, of course, that Mr. Lasseter's hormones remain OK. This is another case of a particular individual succeeding where a group failed, so there are similar risks.)
Also, somewhat related to this, does anyone know if newmogul.com runs on the same code or does it just look identical?
I get the same feeling whenever someone tries to generalise a whole group of people, merely because they were born within a few years of each other.
Business Lessons from African Mobile Technology
[London] Songkick is hiring: Web App Developer
Songkick is looking for a gifted web application developer to become a core member of our small but extremely talented technical team.

We are web startup creating a site for live music fans to make it easier and more fun to discover and go to concerts. This Guardian post (http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/pda/2008/apr/02/elevatorpitc...) is a good overview, but there are even more exciting developments underway behind the scenes. We’re 18-months old and growing fast, with a 11-person team (all big live music fans ourselves..) based in Shoreditch, east London.

Backed by experienced investors in web and music companies including Y Combinator, Dan Porter (co-founder, Ticketweb), Stefan Glaenzer (ex-Chairman, Last.fm), and Index Ventures (investments include Skype, MySQL, Last.fm and Viagogo), and well capitalised for the next 2 years.

This is an opportunity to work on some very hard, very intriguing problems; projects in 2009/2010 and beyond include mobile platform integration and large-scale data acquisition projects (our CEO and CTO have backgrounds in machine learning which is indicative of the way we approach data challenges).

SALARY + START DATE + PERKS

Competitive salary + generous stock options. Start date ASAP. Perks include monthly concert tickets stipend (use-it-or-lose-it), great location, and charming multi-national colleagues hailing from California to Rio Grande via Bedford and Schwäbisch Hall.

WHAT WE’RE LOOKING FOR

- proven experience building awesome web apps

- ability to work in a flexible manner, building prototypes fast and evolving these into scalable production-quality systems

- ability to turn round solutions to problems incredibly quickly

- ability to easily pick up new technologies and incorporate them into production software

- in-depth knowledge of Unix systems, MySQL, Apache and standard development tools

- love of music, particularly live music

- a good degree in Computer Science/Engineering/Physics/Math or a related subject

Also a big plus would be experience of:

- Ruby on Rails

- email marketing

- building mobile applications

- agile / lean development practices

- test- and behaviour-driven development

To apply please send your CV, URLs of cool things you've built, and a short email introducing yourself to joinsongkick [at] songkick [dot] com by 31st January 2009. Tell us about the most recent concert you’ve been to if you like!
thanks a lot - really handy information. I'll look for some global providers. Doesn't seem unreasonably priced, either.

Good luck with your venture/startup by the way - sounds fascinating.
The largest spike looks like decision day. (That's the day YC sends out emails notifying the people they'll fund.)
probably the same code - it's open source.
Sorry, but if you say "In Haskell, data=code the way that code=data in Lisp," you're implying a symmetry that isn't there: once you read the article to see what the two language qualities being contrasted are, they turn out not to be shaped anything like each other.

I find it hard to imagine what the general case of data=code would even mean. In order for data to be code, some programming language implementation has to understand the data and be able to execute it, in which case the data was already code (or transformable into code) to begin with.

Another thing: what the article uses to distinguish Haskell from Lisp -- using functions in a way that looks like a data-structure -- is something I do in Lisp all the time. So this just isn't a distinction.

I'm not trying to pick on either Haskell (which I'd love to learn someday and which is obviously not Lisp) or the article (which makes some interesting points). It's just that most of what people say about Lisp in blog posts is kind of uninformed, and drawing this kind of distinction is harder than it seems.
"...with sufficient caching you can serve arbitrarily large numbers of requests with arbitrarily slow languages."

Only if the dataset is small relative to the traffic rate, and if the data mutation rate is relatively small to the size of the dataset. There are plenty of systems that do not have these properties.

I agree the speed of the language does not matter as much as people used to think... but the shape of the data matters a lot more than people think.
The big downside is what happens when they go belly-up?
Seems interesting that we're seeing several findings all coming out around the same time that revolve around detecting and using quantum-scale principles. The first is the idea of quantum propulsion that was described in a previous link here on HN, and now this. I wonder, if this pans out as a verifiable way to detect the quantum "foam" of imaginary particles if it could also be used to to detect evidence of the extra microscopic dimensions predicted in string theory.
Ahh! I didn't know that. Thanks!
They have an API that lets you access all your data. You can back it up nightly as XML files and just port it into something else if you ever want or need to.
"Rubin looks at the world through the lens of probabilities. A good decision might have bad results. But if you have the chance to do it all over again, you should make the same decision."

Only if the same exact information is available the second time around... Life can be similar to poker etc., but sometimes quite different.
If you so desire, you can get all your site's comments out of DISQUS using their API: http://disqus.com/docs/api/
Concise and precise analysis. Most sites don't have the comment volume to merit threads, and a threaded discussion is not truly a "conversation" as the author wants to paint it.
notice the trend in the world diving into a recession as google reader gains more and more features?
Quantum propulsion?

I missed that one. Got a link?
Yes, I totally agree. But the question I was responding to was just, "What parts of Haskell have weird syntax?" All of this cool stuff would also be possible with c-like syntax.
My comment was a little harsh. It's great that they offer that, and I'm probably rushing to judgement. But honestly the idea that at some point in the future when my site is humming along and I'm not thinking about it I'm going to have to drop everything and port the comments to a new system to avoid losing them makes me want to just implement my own comment system and be done with it.
Ask HN: How do you handle NDA'd projects and VCs?
I know VCs don't generally sign NDAs, and that your idea isn't so special, etc.-- but how do you handle discussions with VCs that are about work you're doing for an external client that's highly confidential, such that it wouldn't be the startup's call to disclose it? If it's a source of revenue and a major consumer of engineering time it would obviously be of interest to the investor, but you're under NDA and can't discuss it. What do you do in this situation?
Simply Ridiculous: The Official Bro Code – Part 1 (Articles 1-40)