skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
So, in 2008, you made a comment (below, emphasis mine) about reader macros (yes, which I realize are not identical to macros; please understand that I use a couple reader macros in my day-to-day coding process and am not naive as to their implementation or function) that, at least to me, pretty strongly supports the narrative that Steve is painting: that the goal I somehow "have fewer features that people are less likely to use wrong as otherwise it gets confusing".

> I am unconvinced that reader macros are needed in Clojure at this time. They greatly reduce the readability of code that uses them (by people who otherwise know Clojure), encourage incompatible custom mini-languages and dialects (vs namespace-partitioned macros), and complicate loading and evaluation.

https://groups.google.com/forum/m/?fromgroups#!topic/clojure...

FWIW, this is the same argument that comes up often, from many different members of the community. The namespacing argument is commonly included and sounds technical, but is also trivially solvable; as in, was already solved in a comment during the primary-cited discussion of reader macros on the #clojure IRC channel, but was then dismissed due to the real reason: that reader macros make your code less understandable to other people who know Clojure (the exact same form of argument Steve is talking about, one layer removed).
"the White House unexpectedly cut short the time period for the petition."

Any ideas what was expected time for such a petition? Lets hope the stir this move caused will push a similar petition that hopeful won't be "down for maintenance" this time.
I think to me it might've been more reassuring if it came from someone other than Tao. I tend to put Tao more in the Galois-like depressing category, given how much he had already accomplished by the time he was 20 (he was promoted to full professor at age 24). There's no amount of hard work that can replicate his trajectory unless you go back and start it at age 8, and even then it's unlikely.
Why the heck in this day and age does it take longer than 24 hours to get 25k signatures? There are a million americans on Facebook and Youtube every day?

That said, please stop pretending the petitions mean a darn thing. We don't even have popular vote in this country. Representatives love to insulate themselves behind that.
This has actually potential. Faking the opponent's social media followers/likes and "informing" the media about it could become a new tool in the dirty campaigning tactics arsenal
As Google Fiber rollouts begin, here’s what cable will watch most closely
Agreed: Many groups block FB; if you want any corporate or business use, you probably don't want to require FB logins.
What is your coding voice?
But you still have race conditions. The sender would have to ensure that the locks are setup before the receiver calls read() for the first time. Since pipes are often setup by the shell you have no control over the startup times. Sure you could have heuristics such as the receiver waiting a few seconds just in case locks show up, but that just makes things slow and unpredictable.

I stand by my assertion that this can only be solved well (ie 100% predictable behaviour no matter what order things start in or how long they take to intialise) by a new system call/ioctl.
Excellent HTML5 presentation
Yegge: Software has its own political axis
This may be totally off topic. But Flickr? While the story may be true It seems to be another new marketing things under new management to generate more buzz.
pretty hard to crowdsource something like this, just how many people are there out there that would even know how to tell if a given image represents a "new" species or not. Not many.
After reading Steve Yegge's post on Software Politics (he called it Notes from the Mystery Machine Bus) I wondered what my own place is on this supposed scale.

So I slammed all his 18 questions into a form and built some Javascript to tally up and preset the results.

It was an interesting observation for me. I'm curious how others score and if they think it's representative of their programming view or if not why etc.

I submitted it yesterday but it was a dropbox link and I'm not sure people were comfortable with that so now it's on a github page.

My result was:

Liberal <---------------------|-----------------------+---------------------------------------------> Conservative

Or as a totally unscientific number: -24

I wasn't entirely surprised by this as I'm more of a "get it done" programmer then a "engineer for the moon". That said if real money is at stake (Transaction systems etc.) then I tend to turn to a much more conservative stance etc.

I always try to balance the investment of time versus the expected ROI on a project. I prefer to "fail fast" and get something running so the users can beat it to death and we can get to writing the real solution.. :-)
'iPhone 5' bares all, strokes tiny nano-SIM in pics
My main annoyances are the monkeying around with both the traditional process lifecycle for GUI apps, and the saving/loading of documents. I gather there has been some refinement of these (or at least more options) in 10.8, which I'll try a couple of point-releases in.

http://arstechnica.com/apple/2012/07/os-x-10-8/18/#automatic...

http://arstechnica.com/apple/2012/07/os-x-10-8/5/#document-m...
What is this new class of nobility entitled "Rightsholders"?

They must have something special, as they get to dictate how things work legally, and extra-legally.
I went back to digg a few times and was very bored to see lots of Gawker Media's crap, TorrentFreak's rhetoric, HuffPo's methodical pandering, ExtremeTech gaming another audience (sadly they didn't abandon HN for digg), BGR who are just shameless spammers, etc.

I think the new digg has amazing potential, but I think it's going to be wasted and turned into a funnel for low quality blogs and splogs to manipulate ... again.
Does the concept of a package confuse you? Check out this Java tutorial
Yegge has a bone to pick with Clojure. It's about his feeling towards the community, the language and the direction Rich Hickey is taking it [1]. It's funny, reminds me of "In which Everyone had better shape up" [2].

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2466731

[2] http://wondermark.com/333/
What if I have two friends with the same name?
1) You know, now that I think about it...no. I don't see anything particularly clever about intentional flamebait. I'm sure it drives plenty of traffic that wouldn't otherwise care to visit the site, but not particularly clever.

2) Please avoid attempting to refute one anecdotal statement with another.

3) I'm famous. The Marco himself has taken notice.

http://twitter.com/marcoarment/statuses/234122334645137408
I got zero.

I'm not even sure why I bothered. Mr Yegge's post is bunk. His idea is interesting only insofar as it manages to so successfully get and keep people's attention. If he doesn't like writing software, he should perhaps switch to picking the articles for popular downmarket weekly magazines.
The fact that there are nut jobs that believe something extreme that have high page rank does not mean that a more moderate position is false. Meanwhile, the argument that science cannot "prove" anything undermines the idea of science being valuable at all.

http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=MSG+glutamate

That search result is littered with articles in legitimate sources testing MSG in various contexts, showing random negative effects on hormone regulation and brain function in general. Are these important effects? Maybe not; but you have to look at the effects in question.

What is quite clear, though, is that tons of actual scientists have studied MSG and have turned out actual papers showing actually statistically significant effects, albeit in models that you might disagree with under dosages you might consider absurd. Others, of course, might find them highly reasonable.

You can't, however, just wave your hands and dismiss all of this work: to do so is just ignoring science, and apparently trusting some combination of your gut feelings on the matter and Google's page rank algorithm to establish truth. There is science out there, and that science should be discussed.
People game the Yellow Pages too. Why do you think all car services are named something like AAA My Stupid Car Service?
Spirals, functional, emacs here. Methinks his editor wars predictor will not do so well :P
Ryan's anti-science beliefs

What are his anti-science beliefs? Seriously curious ... will Google it, but appreciate your thoughts.
Give HN: domain names
Doing a little fall cleaning. Would you like any of these domain names?

tapbrite.com

paypic.com

brightswipe.com

yakpay.com

cardnick.com

cardnik.com

googleisfunny.com

outcastventures.com

ringermobile.com

Let me know, and I'll transfer them to you.
I pulled out two articles I found interesting. You are welcome to do the search yourself and see the large number of other articles showing other interesting things. This said, I ate MSG yesterday (I have not eaten anything yet today): I have no skin in the MSG game, I'm just bothered when someone makes obviously false hand-wavy comments about entire bodies of work. MSG might very well be harmless, but the argument will need to be more interesting than "no real reaearch has shown any negative effects from it", as that is clearly false: do the pubmed or google scholar search.
That seems to depend on the presence of ids. Can my example page (with correct uri and fragment syntax) work in this scheme? There is no id associated with the part that I tried to link to.
Cool concept. Is there not a way to streamline the process even more? Is it possible to generate a magnetized link that sets the file location for you?
Are non-US citizens allowed to petition on the "We the People" site? The top signed petition here is by some right-wing Japanese history revisionist to remove monuments to Korean sex slaves abused during WWII [1]. Maybe it's a good thing that the administration ignores this site.

[1]https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/remove-monument-an...
80%? Every attempt I make to use a Vim emulation mode doesn't get 20 seconds without failing to replicate Vim behavior on even fairly basic things.
How countries reward their gold medal winners. [infographic]
Anyone know how much time was supposed to be left? As Karunamon says, I don't think they would be particularly worried to have to respond. Their responses on other petitions have been pretty laughable. But it does seem odd that would cut the time short.
No, I avoid the race condition by:
1) Reader sets the lock before reading any data
2) Writer writes a byte to the pipe
3) Writer waits until pipe is empty (FIONREAD ioctl)
4) Writer checks for existance of lock.

This should be race free.
What really makes me sad is that 40-45% of the country is happily going to vote for R+R just to try to punish their neighbors.

How does a vote for Romney punish your neighbors?

Just because you are supportive of a smaller federal government does not mean you do not care about your neighbor and others in your community. It's divisive comments like that from both sides that prevent opposing viewpoints from coming together to solve some of the big problems of this and future generations.

Conservatives call liberals socialists who want to destroy America. Liberals call conservatives hateful and herp-a-derp. The extreme talking points and spin on both sides prevents meaningful debate that might actually result in some solutions.
Science writing: lite and wrong
Unfortunately, for security reasons, browsers only give you the base of the filepath, so all you can pick up is the filename. Even if you had the full filepath, though, I don't think the format of a torrent file lets you specify the file location.
Since they have literally never answered a petition in any useful way (Read: action was taken, or real explanations given, rather than talking points repeated), i'm not sure why it even matters except so advocacy folks can say they are doing something.

All that is happening is that people are pretending to give an air of legitimacy to a process that has none.
would love to have the last 3 m8
You are aware that there are millions of Japanese and Korean Americans who would care about this issue, right?
Buddhism: a lecture by Jorge Luis Borges
In a follow-up, the author posts similar images submitted by readers.

http://persquaremile.com/2012/06/13/your-images-of-income-in...

Two of these images show a border between rich and poor areas. The visual effect is striking.
At least Gates' business satisfied some customer needs. Myhrvold's business is forcing other businesses to pay up through abuse of legal system.
The article does mention Etsy. There's even a link to a research report on the workings of IV.
I have to agree. Being a genius is very important if you want to be a mathematician. Tao is an excellent teacher, but I still don't know that someone as smart as him can really appreciate this. His perspective is nicely idealist, but is highly unrealistic for normal people. For example, he writes, "Professional mathematics is not a sport ... mathematics needs all the good people it can get." But if you want to be a professional mathematician, then you do need to play the sport, because you aren't going to get a job anywhere, let alone at UCLA, otherwise. It is a very competitive field.
Maybe ratio of green to gray would be a better metric. Too much green or grey not good? Still, seems pretty tenuous until a country is beyond a certain level of development.
OpenData: 3D Visualization of Olympic Medals, Medals/capita, Medals/sunshine
I've had to optimize code because it ran too slowly on a Cray supercomputer.

Mind you, I think my optimized version may have been a bit clearer than the original, though more mathy.
How India's favorite TV show uses data to change the world
It is worse than under Bush Jr?
Love the disclaimer!
Its doable yeah, but its a lot more work.

First you have to handle the header specially (want it in the result but not in the comparisons).

In order to compare by uid you need numeric uids (-n), but that means you can't also get the readable username, so you need a custom output format.

Then you need to ensure the output format is such that nothing with possible spaces or control chars can end up in a column before the data you're looking at, as then finding the right column is hard.

Even then, extracting the first command line arg like in the example will fail in the case of a binary name that has a space in it (as there is no way to know which spaces in the commandline corresponds to actual spaces in the arguments or just delimiters).
I prefer algebra, eat my corn in rows, but I am better at analysis... does that mean anything?
Hmmm, looks from outer space can be deceiving. The rent I pay for my one bedroom apartment in Ball Square is obscene.
Show HN: finding stuff on craigslist sucked, so I made an app
Dejamor Keeps Your Sex Life Sexy Every Month
You can't get "signatures" with the 'like' button by using facebook or gmail connect.
The governments of the world only respond to two things, statistical polls and bullets. You cannot Like Button your way to social justice.
Hmm did you get zero because of a Javascript error? I hacked this together pretty quickly didn't test on every possible browser etc.

I think there is something true at the core and he sort of over thinks it all. In my 30 year career I have seen this dichotomy (think Mainframer's -vs- PC Devs) over and over.

The part about which language was what is BS IMHO..
With the upcoming campaign, I think they may want to close any potential finger pointing with "proof" by the other side that they are not doing what the people want. The fact that it's on the President's site makes it an easy target for the opposition.
Communicate: ask your team to find out who wrote it, and why. Ideally you're using git and can use git blame to find the author. Benchmark the difference, because maybe there's more going on that you expect at first.
Obama's Mailing List and Unsubscription Rate Optimization
Great idea and it is HN-worthy. Thanks for sharing.
This may be the result of some weird personalization specific to the author, which I suppose may be interesting itself. I do not see similar results at all (one result from coolibar for sun hats and 1 result from amazon for womens sun hats).
No, there are only a million Japanese in America. Also, I highly doubt any Koreans would support removing a monument dedicated to Korean victims of WWII.

At 1.3Million, sure, it's possible, but I don't personally think there are enough right-wing revisionist history Japanese-Americans to have generated this much response.

Anyway, the facts support my assumption directly from the petititon. The vast majority of Japanese names on the petition do not list their location, while a handful directly report they are from Japan: Taizo H - Tokyo, Kuniko N - Fukuoka.
Weird I have pretty different results to your search. Odd outlier outcome of Google personalization or perhaps even malware?
See how everyone has their own favorite teacher / explanation? Let's aggregate them all.

http://www.reddit.com/r/newschool/comments/wmu5q/read_this_h...
You realy have to ask why it was optimized in the first place. Now if that optimization has been negated by the enviroment then you can ask yourself the next question. Does the code need to be or envisaged in the near future to need changing for a reason other than making something that works into something that works and is readable but not as fast.

Both question are important and if you answear no to either then your best leaving the change to a time when you have to change it. Reason being that you may have a margin in the enviroment negating the optimization today, but that may change before you need to change the code for a reason of business. You could end up beutifying it and losing that optimization and then end up hitting that wall a few months/years down the line and have to reinvent that optimization.

Over all the most important aspect about reading code is to understand the structure and by that this part does this and that part does that. If your calling a optimized load of code in a function then if that code is sexy looking or not it will still have the same look from anything that calls it.

So as a rule, if you don't have to touch it and don't need to touch it then ask yourself why your touching it and are you workbombing yourself with something in a less busy period that will drag on over into a busy period and cause you regret it down the line. Also make sure your doing it for the right reasons, beyond putting a flag ontop of a mountain so to speak, what are you gaining. If something works and does not need to change then changing it just to make it pretty is like arguing all programmers should be wearing size 0 dress's to many peoples minds.
Yes please! I'd like to take the dive into Arch Linux at some point, this kind of post would be super helpful.
This was posted at 11:30AM on the 9th; the deadline was the 9th (some references below)... maybe the deadline was just "exactly X days from posting" and expired in the middle of the day?

As in, this might be neither malice nor incompetence: this could very well just be an implementation detail of the expiration system and how it displays the deadline, causing some people to be confused.

> 10,477 signatures required by August 9th to require President Obama to respond.

http://www.dailypaul.com/245374/sign-petition-to-require-tsa...

> If 25,000 people sign the petition before August 9, 2012, the White House will respond.

http://reason.com/24-7/2012/08/07/tsa-we-the-people-petition...
Under Bush it didn't seem so bad because our expectations were so low.
So in other words:

983 billion, billion, billion, billion, billion

If every human that ever lived had made a thousand git commits every second of their lives to the same git repository, we would still expect no collisions.
Unfortunately, I can't reproduce these results. I'm not saying they are false, but that maybe they have to do with personalized results for the author. Did you try logging out and doing the same searches? There was a maximum of results from the same page that could be shown (I think it was about five), so I'm not sure how you can get this results.

Also, there's another issue. Even if you get the same webpages all the time, that doesn't mean that those aren't the same results. Especially when webpages today have a lot of different content. I.e. diversity != quality.
I tried "sun hats" and got the ad from coolibar and only one other result out of ten on the first page. So, I ask for some more facts, not just anecdotal evidence of failure. Do you visit coolibar regularly? were you logged in or incognito? I tried both and got similar results. How many searches did you perform to come up with these anomalies? Have you seen this behavior before or perhaps it was just a bug?

UPDATE: It appears we have been spammed. To answer my own question, I think he has been on coolibar. This person is launching a site that is a directory for hats (first link above blog post). His lack of any response says it all. Clever ploy ...
Objectively, perhaps slightly. It's not hard to find quotes describing this administration as the worst yet at responding to Freedom of Information Act requests. For example:

http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0312/73606.html

Subjectively, it feels much worse - because the administration ran on a platform of transparency and openness, which they failed to deliver on:

http://www.whitehouse.gov/the_press_office/TransparencyandOp...
By an objective tally of bullshit occurring under each administration's watch, I think we can safely say that, yes, it is.

At least W didn't try to pretend he was something he wasn't.
Everyone hating on this: lighten up. I am pretty sure they know that these correlations are nonsense. It is still a funny site.
That greedy, glory-hunting toolbag should be out lobbying to abolish patents, not own them all (software, at least.)
Thank you for being a voice of reason and rationality. This community among many others has a tendency to attribute things like this to malice or, more often, conspiracy. I can't tell you how many times I see people thinking along these lines and I just think to myself "Has anyone ever heard of Occam's Razor?".

An online petition is meaningless to the government if they want to ignore it. We also forget that a petition is more like a very strong request or a demand but no one is obligated fulfill what the petition requests. So even if this petition got a million signatures all it means is that we presumably let whoever is in charge of watching these petitions know that x number of people feel this way.

One last major point I want to make is that the government is far more inept than people give it credit for. It's funny how people see the government as either completely incompetent or as some all powerful entity that can exert power over anything and do anything. For example, we have people that believe the USPS is totally broken and the US government is too incompetent to fix it's own postal system. Then, by the same token we have others that believe 9/11 was a massive conspiracy that was masterfully executed. In both cases the problem comes down to the government being run by fallible humans who make mistakes.

Very very last thing to think about: to some, the TSA petition was incredibly important and it's being taken down has been, in their minds, morphed into some kind of conspiracy to keep the people down. Now I ask you what about the other petitions on the site? To some people the TSA petition isn't important but some other random petition is. There are lots of petitions that are just as important to people that do make their signature goal. The point is, people will do gold medal worthy mental gymnastics to explain what they either don't understand or to justify something to themselves.

Not everything is a conspiracy. Coincidence is real.