skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: An instant personalized info dump for the web.
So, Hacker News,

I was sitting with a couple of friends last week at their office and we were going over a bunch of notes and potential solutions for their website. At the end of the session I wanted to make a quick note of all the tabs I had open, just dump the relevant google searches and URLs with notes on what they'd be good for.

But this wasn't my computer. I had my iPhone but I wasn't about to retype all the information that was already on my screen, on my little phone, just to get into Evernote. I could have logged into Evernote or Backpack from there and copied it in, but I didn't want to go through the hassle; I eventually went through the similar hassle of logging them out of GMail, logging myself in, sending us all a message, then logging myself out. That was clearly less than optimal; in addition to the time and many clicks and loadtimes (and 'no, don't remember my password' boxes) I had to wonder how many cookies I was strewing all over their machine.

What would have been nice is a box that I could navigate to on the web and enter text into, which would accept any input I pasted in. It wouldn't let me see it afterwards, of course, because it wouldn't ask for auth first; I'd have to log in later and see all my items. I would just need some unique (google-invisible, I guess) URL.

I've got my own server, so I could host an install; I could also of course simply reserve for crux.myawesomeapp.net and have someone else do it. Does this thing exist? If not, what do others do for this kind of thing?
The national anthem is sacred, but that doesn't mean I can't resent its being co-opted to advocate certain political positions.
> I thought that was what a wiki was for. Once your newspaper for a given day is annotated, how do you search it in the future?

You don't. The asymptotic approach of storage costs to 0 has made some people believe that everything is worth saving.
Complacency is a disease
Can never be reminded of this enough.
You're too hardcore for me, man. Is a 50+ letter password really worth it? My tiny brain barely remembers the 5 or 6 passwords I always choose to use.
In my experience if someone can't program it's not becuase they have the wrong static structure, it's that they're unwilling to dynamically metaprogram their thought processes and fundamentally reshape their mental models.

Either way, the point is the same: 90% of people (if not 99%) are averse to the kind of abstraction we're talking about. I have no idea how many are unable and how many merely unwilling; I'm not even sure the distinction matters or how you go about deciding it. (By the way, where did you get that phraseology? It sounds like NLP.)

Same goes for actors and boxers and cops. This seems, almost tautologically, true of any industry. Why is this meme so prevalent?

It's because the demand for programs vastly exceeds the supply of good programmers, which is the fundamental theorem of software economics (at least in our lifetime) and skews everything about the industry. Obviously the mediocre outnumber the competent at any activity, but that usually doesn't become the dominant fact about that activity. For example, there are many more bad musicians than good ones, but the demand for music doesn't vastly exceed the supply of good musicians. If it did, Lord knows what sorts of contraptions people would call instruments and mass-distribute. "We can't have pianos around here - how will we hire 100 musicians to play them in the future? And if guitars are so great, how come they're not more popular? Better to be a blubby-music-box shop like everybody else! Our clients expect it!"
and its not like they need a cell phone to remotely detonate stuff...they can always lay down a wire and detonate it that way.

Or a pressure sensitive switch.
"Article 8.
Everyone has access to help and support for a product."

How does that work? People can only release software if they also have the wherewithal to provide support? That's nuts.

If you don't like some product or the terms on which it is offered, don't use or buy it. Don't claim to be entitled to the services of others.
JavaScript is adequate (and not that bad)
Possibly. But right now many two word quips get more points than longer, well though out, responses. If karma really has no value (over the few point levels currently defined) I guess it doesn't matter. But I always assumed that in the future karma points would be used for additional features.

Perhaps the upper limit shouldn't be 10, but the total number of words in the post. So a two word quip, only gets you two points. ;)
why do people care so much about species going extinct? Millions of species have gone extinct before....millions of species will go extinct again. Its the cycle of life.

I mean sure its pretty horrible that a whole species goes extinct...but why does it matter if there are 300 species of goat or 299.

For every species that goes extinct, another 2 spring up to take its place. Adapt or die. Why should we coddle the inferior species? Let the nature take its course. Remember, if the dinosaurs didn't go extinct, man wouldn't have survived.
"isn't that what all governments like to do, because it gives them an excuse to spend large?"

Well, if you are talking about irresponsible governments full of bureaucratic self-serving idiots (which would be most modern governments), then yes. That is what all governments do.
I think the phrase "I think I'd fit better with team #1" is probably what you're looking for. When you get right down to it, "fit better with" just means "I made the decision based on personal factors", but the phrase implies that you're considering how said personal factors would influence your ability to do useful/good work... which is at least slightly deeper than merely picking the people you like the most.
This is the leading book on AI:
http://www.amazon.com/Artificial-Intelligence-Modern-Approac...
In Lua I've done stuff like maps of functions to tables of functions for permuting different methods of computation... kinda wacky but it does what I need.
Yes it does seem as if someone took some very complex transistors and used them as a knobs on an abacus.

The recent discovery that it may be possible for a single neuron to store a memory makes it all the more likely ( http://www.livescience.com/health/090125-memory-cell.html )
I've written code in almost everything under the sun and don't really give a damn one way or another.

That said, choose Java.

If you have to choose between C# and Java, go with Java because the JVM runs everywhere and the dotNet runtime runs only on Windows (excepting Mono).

Go with Java. You can run everywhere there's a JVM and you have access to better libraries.
DNA is more complicated than that. I don't fully understand the process, but I believe it works like this:

You can't read the atoms in DNA one after the other and make a list. You chop the DNA into pieces and pattern match sections (fragments) against markers. Then you try to put fragments together by matching overlaps.

But if you have sections that repeat, or have a lot of the same atom over and over, you can't directly read those.

Usually when they say: "we published the DNA" they mean the "coding section" - those are the sections that can make proteins. But there is a lot more to DNA, non-coding, or junk DNA that can not be easily (or at all?) read.

So for the comment above yours, I think what they have is fragments, but no overlapping sections, so that can't put it together into a whole. It's not like a file with gaps - it's random pieces of it, of random lengths, in a random order.
I have a twiddler. When I lived in boston, there was a crew of guys at MIT in the late 90s/early 2000s who were into them, so I bought one. I can't stand it. It doesn't seem to work well with my hands. I have large, rugged, yet sensitive hands. Even so, I could type way faster with my thumbs on a SideKick keyboard than I could on the twiddler. It seems to work better for typing text. It was bad for programming. Maybe I didn't spend enough time customizing my environment.

Also, they aren't made anymore.
I am pretty sure he is - the whole conversation was far more nuanced then he makes out.

Even even ignoring that, I think part of the point that was made (in that and other podcasts) was that a lot of the "agile" practices are another form of "methodologies" to allow mediocre developers to deliver adequate code in corporate IT shops (nothing inherently wrong with that, just a world away to what fog creek does, what jeff does and probably what most of the contributors to this site do day to day).

(note that mediocre is NOT the same as bad, although in context it can be "damning with faint praise" but that's not the context I mean here).
http://www.aldaily.com is quite good. No discussions, but plenty of diverse links about art, literature, and general cultural observations.
30 Essential Controls
If we can design regular logic in neurons, we can (eventually?) do some of the fancy neural nets

Well, yes, if you can make logic gates out of neurons you could eventually implement a neural network with actual neurons, but it would be little more than a perverse pun. Unless I'm missing your point...?
Microsoft Songsmith Cheerily Documents the Collapse of the World Economy [Video]
Speedcrunch (calculator)
We'll see what you say in three weeks.
Well things seem to be going well. Dodged a bullet this time !

I am very interested to see how things maintained - increasing popularity is inevitable...
from an article on japanese fiscal policy in the 90s:

"In the end, the September 1995 stimulus package did add significantly to economic growth in 1996. Not only was the actual real GDP growth of 3.6 significantly higher than the 0.9 percent recorded in 1995, it was at least 0.9 percent higher than the growth forecasted for 1996 by all of the major international institutions and the financial consensus...This stimulative effect can largely be attributed to the fiscal package, although the decline in the yen also stemmed the decline in net exports (by -1 percent of GDP in 1995 and by -0.4 percent in 1996)...There was actually no other source of positive impetus to the Japanese economy in late 1995 and early 1996 that can be identified except discretionary fiscal policy."

here's the rest: http://www.marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2008/12...
Three things I particularly like in this vs. my past use of just a Python shell:

- persistent history over sessions

- syntax highlighting

- variable side window lets you see current values of the variables that are in scope (View->Variables)

There's a lot of other features, too. The built-in functions list is extensive.
Then maybe enough others like you will take notice a little later on and correct it. Just don't worry about how everyone else votes--they're not the ones you get to decide on.
#38 was the first podcast I had listened to, and before doing so, I had not heard of Uncle Bob. Now having read his blog post, he comes across as a pretty sour fellow with a bone to pick. As others have pointed out, his nitpicking at this particular statement is not very fair. He also implies that J and J give bad advice and shouldn't be trusted with your business, which just reinforces the idea that they guy maybe just has a chip on his shoulder.

He appears to be selling his services as a consultant, so it makes economic sense for him to belittle his free "competitors" with this sort of nonsense. I don't buy it.
Ask Edward Tufte: Moderating internet forums: What's smart, not what's new
Sorry :) I've seen terrible scanned versions of it posted before, but this particular source was never posted. The scanned versions are difficult to read and I figured others would enjoy seeing a clearer version.
The globalization of addiction
None of them are reliable. But for different reasons. GoDaddy is best, but has issues, too.
I am really excited to see what the TechCrunch Tablet brings. For $300 it's in the price range of the iPod Touch, has a bigger screen, can be used with an external KB/Mouse if needed.

Once the tablet drops I will be one of the first to spend $300 on it. Much more value for my money than a netbook, in my opinion.
Are those really your only two options? What were your reasons for narrowing it down this far?

Off the record, I lean away from Java.
Even if the new site is not at all better, it may still find an audience if users unfamiliar with existing Q&A sites can be directed from Wikia. Surely users cannot have perfect knowledge of every possible site out there, and will be highly influenced by what is pushed at them?
3 years? In 1995 Larry Ellison and quite a few other people were completely convinced that thin clients (or network computers) would win over desktop PCs with all applications being hosted on an external server and running off of central databases.
Adobe and Apple Working on Flash for iPhone
So input requires knowing unique URL -- what about if the retrieval did too instead of it being behind a login?

If interested, see: "What's a private pastebin and how do I get one?"

http://pastebin.com/pastebin.php?help=1
Oracle and Sun both. In 1999 the startup I worked for actually beta tested some of Sun's thin client systems. Ahh... bad times, bad times.
http://books.google.com/books?id=Poy_16kUIV8C&printsec=c...

In 1914, London had 16 murders from a population of 7.1 million. That's a homicide rate of .22 per 100,000. By comparison, Detroit had a murder rate of 46 in 2007. That's 209x the rate of Edwardian England. If New York reduced its homicide rate to that of Edwardian London, it would save the number of lives lost in September 11th every four years.

Historical murder rates for all of England from 1900 are here: http://www.parliament.uk/commons/lib/research/rp99/rp99-111....

As for murder rates going further back, Gregory Clark has a chart of this in his book Farewell to Alms. See page 127: http://www.amazon.com/gp/reader/0691141282/ref=sib_dp_srch_p...!

The homicide rates seem to be around 20 per 100,000 for 1300, then about 5 per 100,000 for 1600, and then under 1 per 100,000 after 1800.

In other words, American cities have murder rates unseen since medieval times.
A little bit of a good product, a little bit of luck, and a little bit of attention on HN.
Not intended to be at all--
BART signs up for 20 years of Wi-Fi
Name of author: Abu Ja'far Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi. Name of work: al-Kitab al-mukhtasar fi hisab al-jabr wa'l-muqabala ("A Handbook of Calculation by Completion and Reduction").

John Derbyshire examines al-Khwarizmi's work in chapter 3 of Unknown Quantity: A Real and Imaginary History of Algebra [ISBN 978-0-452-28853-9], which I just finished reading a few days ago.

The first part of al-Khwarizmi's book concerns finding the roots of first- and second-order polynomials of one unknown. He classified the polynomials into 6 fundamental types, with all positive coefficients. Keep in mind, that negative numbers did not exist at the time, though subtraction did. He showed how to manipulate polynomials into a suitable one of the 6 types by adding a term (al-jabr, completing) or subtracting a term (al-muqabala, reducing).

Says Derbyshire, "al-Khwarizmi has no literal symbolism--no way to lay out equations in letters and numbers, no sign for the unknown quantity and its powers." The problems, the fundamental types, the procedures are all presented in words.

Interestingly, Diophantus 600 years earlier did addition and subtraction of polynomial terms using "a rich literal symbolism to aid the manipulations."
Ask HN: Is PHP more scalable than Ruby or Python?
Edit: I just realized how generic my post was... so I want HN to weigh in on something a friend said:

"PHP is more scalable than Ruby and most languages"

//start old post
Let me preface this with: I'm not trying to start a language war.

I have very little experience coding, but have learned enough (some may say 'caught') PHP to get by.

I want to take it a step further but I'm getting thrown in a thousand different directions. I want a language/framework that's fairly straightforward and somewhat scalable.

I am looking at Python/Django, but getting pulled towards Ruby/Rails by friends - and some people saying that PHP is more scalable than either Python or Ruby and I should be looking at the Cake or CodeIgniter frameworks.

Can someone push me in the right direction? I want to invest the time in a language but I'm not sure which to start with.
//end old post
Ask PG: Bug or not?
Ran into an interesting situation earlier today with points and comments:

http://1.media.tumblr.com/UC8UYzO4Ojesg36wKZujzL94o1_250.png

It seems that a certain post was rapidly upvoted then downvoted -- which then resulted in it being ranked higher than some positive comments (ignore that pun).

Looking around, I couldn't find the link for reporting bugs, and I assumed I shouldn't send this to the ycombinator info email address.

Thoughts anyone?
I can't really think of a specific example but it seems that a whole host of things about humanity would be different if forced sex was the main method of procreation in the ancestral environment.
Posts are ordered by a function of both time and points, so they won't always be in point-based order.
more users -> more mods, whichever way
Great business model!
Any mainstream language you choose will be scalable enough.

Spend some time reading online rails and django documentation. Either one will be fine for you to learn.

My personal opinion is that Python is easier to learn for a beginner, but not by much. Ruby has http://hacketyhack.net/ which is a fun way to learn, and Python has http://www.diveintopython.org/ which is a tremendous (and free!) resource.

I say flip a coin and roll with it. They're both great languages and both frameworks are great for learning.

[Errr... The submission changed after my response was entered, sorry if it seems a bit off-topic.]
Don't worry about it. Manager #2 realizes you have choices to make, and won't take it personally. Just be cordial in your reply, like cperciva said.
We get that the book is immensely valuable, and it's great that it's offered online. But this is something that anyone can find with ~5 min of Google searching.
The very first hit on Google for "SICP" is this page, from which your link is taken:
http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/

It's had the #1 PageRank for "SICP" for years.
OpenTable: A Killer Platform You’ve Never Heard Of
New owners of eBaum's World fire ebaum and his staff
right, but centrally planned economies don't naturally occur in the same way that free exchange does. It is contrary to reason that if I make something and my neighbor makes something and we decide to trade that a third party must be involved by law who will take a percentage of the value of the exchange. You can make the argument that by providing the legal framework that makes non-violent exchange possible (police, contract law) as well as the infrastructure that facilitated our exchange (roads) that the third party deserves a small piece.

This would be a devastating argument. If I had a choice in the matter. In a free market system of courts and transportation I would pay a fee for use. This is fair. But to tithe a percentage of my productivity regardless of how much or little I make use of said system seems fraudulent.
Just made a very similar thread to this!

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=460456
I think it's entirely valid to not add karma to a comment you agree because it's reached the karma you feel it deserves.

Similarly as people have pointed out you don't need pile on the down-modding simply because you don't agree with something.

I would almost say that unless something is actually disinformation, spam or trolling you shouldn't down-mod it, even if you disagree. Upvote the comments you agree with or write a persuasive argument instead.

One thing that I like about Stackoverflow.com is the ability to see how much people down/up mod.
Okay, it's pretty much not something that is going to help production, but it's very, very clever. Nice work.
_I_ can build a remote-triggered bomb, but I am not going to be building it using a spread-spectrum frequency-hopping or ultrawideband trigger because I am not a RF hacker. This does not make the distribution of jamming equipment to local law enforcement justifiable, but let's keep the discussion grounded in reality. Remote-triggers for bombs that use common off-the-shelf RF tools exist and are well-documented, ones that are jam-resistent are not common (if they exist at all...)
I went to The Evergreen State College, which is the only public gradeless school I know of. Instead of grades, everyone writes narrative evaluations of themselves and their cohorts. Nearly everyone takes one fulltime multi-disciplinary course at a time.

What often ends up happening is that professors will attempt to be rigorous by tying awarded credit in a section of the class with the % of the work you turned in -- but then if they take credit, they excise the portion of the evaluation that would have described your failings.
That's true; Ruby and Python would both be worth learning. I'd push you toward Python, though, mainly because it has more traction outside of web development too (e.g. system administration, etc).
Why are you worried about scalability when you're just learning to program?
FREE Coloring Pages - Alice in Wonderland
Norms, Minorities, and Collective Choice Online
> Organized public works, at home and abroad, may be the right cure for a chronic tendency to a deficiency of effective demand. But they are not capable of sufficiently rapid organisation (and above all cannot be reversed or undone at a later date), to be the most serviceable instrument for the prevention of the trade cycle.

-John Maynard Keynes
I decided to change it up to 'is php more scalable' - realized how generic my question was. Checking out your thread right now.
Thanks for the summary and the great quote by Henry Ford. What he said is so true.

The scary thing is that for most people, their lack of understanding the bigger picture means that when things get really bad, it will happen fast. I'm shocked by how many people simply don't even somewhat understand the way the US financial system works (I can't even say I fully understand it), and by how many of them treat bills and debt as their absolute, life-long moral responsibility. To the bankers, it's all a big game. To the average consumer, it's their entire life.

The most important thing I see missing from all this is education. Financial education should be required by every public school (and should be taught by the parents) to help prepare people for the "real world" of managing debt, credit cards, loans, and even mortgages and investments.

If everybody understood that filing for bankruptcy (I did after losing 3 investment properties to sub-prime) or downsizing and living a more simple life was perfectly OK to keep your family fed (I went from $2.5k /mo expenses to $800), then we wouldn't have people killing their families and committing suicide because of a few financial issues.
I'd like to keep it in mind and I find it fascinating. Plus, in the future I don't want to have to tear down what I've built and rebuild again just because it wasn't scalable from the start.

Basically I know enough PHP to get by and if it's possible to code some awesome, and scalable, apps in PHP then I might as well expand my knowledge of PHP instead of starting with something new and completely foreign.
The more I read about it, the less I am convinced that capitalism is all ponies and manna from heaven, like some here believe.

And it's close to its end, anyway, at least as we know it. No, I am not some raving conspiracy theorist. Automation and innovation almost guarantee that the world in 100 years will look drastically different than it does now.
Turns out they do not get a lits of URLs from there.

cf. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=460426
Yea, that's how it is. But is that how it should be?

It seems plausible to me for net positive comments to be ranked vs each other in that manner and net negative comments be ranked separately, such that positive is always shown higher than negative.
It's good to hear that.