skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Disclaimer: I live in Canada's poorest province.

I've never heard of the "money available per square kilometer" indicator, though I'm sure it exists. Of course that would be low, Canada is the 2nd largest country land-wise and has half the population of California.

You are correct on the state of rural infrastructure although are things much different than in rural Alaska or Appalachia? Things are at their worst on Native reservations, but again I don't know if that is any different from the American experience.

On the banking front, I bank for free, although it is not with one of the "big six" banks mentioned in the article (you are correct - they operate as an oligopoly) but there is choice in the Canadian market.
This would have to be implemented in a very sophisticated way. For a start Coke is a business, but then so is a start-up with three employees - are you telling me they should pay the same?

It must be the case that Twitter will offer bells and whistles to big companies and charge for them - otherwise entrepreneurs simply won't use it to build their businesses.

Also you have to think about a company's revenue streams. A car manufacturer, which could conceivably make a sale from a click-through, stands to benefit a lot more than a publisher that gets money through ad revenue.

I can think of about a million other problems too.
Not in banking they can't!
Has anyone developed any interesting Twitter mashups out there?
here is a nice view of the 'gdp per square kilometer' for the world:

http://www.econbrowser.com/archives/2007/01/the_distributio....

It is a very good indicator of infrastructure and standard of living.
How is this a different way of thinking? She's talking about genies being responsible for the creative process.

"Can we do this differently? Can we go back to some ancient understanding about the relationship of humans and the creative mystery? Maybe not. Maybe we can't just erase 500 years of rational humanistic thought in one 18 minute speech. There are probably people in the audience who would raise legitimate scientific arguments and suspicions about the notion of basically fairies who follow people around rubbing fairy-juice on their projects... The question I kind of want to pose is, you know: Why not?"

Is this a giant analogy? I don't know. (Maybe my genie is on winter-break.) I don't need any non-scientific imaginary constructions to deal with the real world.
You are right, a more sensible title would be a remote program loader in 66 bytes :)

The authors reasoning on why to call it 'a forth implementation':

"Is it fair to call it a Forth even with all three instructions? After all, it lacks a data stack, headers, either the inner or the outer interpreter (I vacillate on this). It relies on the host (but, then, which target Forth boards connected to a PC over a serial line do not rely on their hosts to at least some extent?). It is extensible and even the main loop can be extended to test for codes in addition to 01, 02, and 03. So, is it a Forth or not? I lean toward "yes." It has the Forth attributes of simplicity, economy, and (I hope) elegance. What, though, about linking together calls to earlier routines in order to build later routines? The most obvious approach is to build simple assembly language routines on the host and download them to the target one at a time and test them. Then download higher level assembly routines that call those earlier ones. This is the most memory efficient approach. If you do have extra RAM available on the system then you can use the 3-instruction Forth to build and test a full Forth, and then use it. Either way, starting with a 3-instruction Forth you get to work in an interactive, Forth-like environment."

I don't really go for that explanation, it is redefining (pun intended) too many words.

By his reasoning anything that implements load, store and call is a forth implementation.

It actually gets mentioned with quotes in this list, indicating some skepticism of it being a 'forth' implementation:

http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.forth/msg/10872cb68...
What webhooks are and why you should care
I call bullshit. This entire article reads like someone being pissed because they tried and failed.
I think this is a business variation of the infamous rule 34: namely, no matter what kind of pure internet business idea you've thought of, someone, somewhere has already tried it.
I can't link to the article from my iPhone, but do a search for "startup forgotten founders" for some very useful advice on handling this situation.
Forth is quite often written in this bootstrapped way. Getting to interactive is the key in Forth (like many repl languages/systems).

Edit: Here is another minimal Forth (asm) implementation I was looking at a while back: http://www.annexia.org/_file/jonesforth.s.txt
The Sunday before thanksgiving is the biggest day of the year for people using call cards? Not saying it's a lie but that sounds weird to me.

I'd have guessed New Years Eve/Day, Christmas Eve or something like that.. or perhaps even the first day of the work year or whatever.
Governments aren't good at things like this, but I don't agree with the generally proposed reasons. I think governments simply can't operate with enough discretion, and when they do operate they are trying to achieve some political end, rather than a profit.

I think governments can be quite efficient at achieving their goals, its just that the goals of politicians and bureaucrats are not aligned with the market.
(He's the main designer of Erlang, FWIW.)
I think you are both right. IMHO, a B-tree is a structure, but generally it's more of a meta structure. When you are doing something with a B-tree, you generally care about the contents of the tree, not the actual tree. The tree just happens to be the facility to efficiently manipulate the information that you really care about.

Also IMHO, code is data as well. So the definition of the b-tree operations (algorithms), the tree that they operate on, and the application data within the tree are all just data (some of them just happen to have a more direct effect on run time operations).
America’s Diet, Too Sweet by the Spoonful
The making of Tourdust
No, music is in a rut. I listen to plenty of new (or new to me) stuff via services like Pandora and Rhapsody. Most genres have gone completely stale. Hip hop is pretty much retreading the exact same territory once again. Rock's become largely cliche, with most of the good material being put out by bands that have been popular since I was in middle school. It's just a down cycle. It happens.

Recorded sales and concert attendance, as well as just turning on your radio, seem to indicate this. 2008's concert attendance was slightly down, and the top 10 acts were all ancient. In order Bon Jovi, Springsteen, Madonna, The Police, Celine Dion, Kenny Chesney, Neil Diamond, Spice Girls, Eagles, and Rascall Flats. With one exception they're either country (which has been in a rut for 30 years) or older than me.

That's a genuine rut my friend. The wheels are spinning but nobody's going anywhere.
this one ?

http://allensblog.typepad.com/allens_blog/2005/08/the_proble...
I don't think it's a bad thing. I think the result is generally cliche crap, but some people like it, so whatever floats your boat.

I just think it's strange to apply inconsistent standards to the same genre. It's ok that the music is precision-engineered on a computer, but not the vocals? Have it one way or the other.
Thanks for all the feedback guys - I think I'm going to operate the site on the .me primarily but make sure I have the .co.uk .com and .me.uk point to the same place just in case.
Correct, you haven't. And you're saying that Joe Armstrong doesn't "understand programming much"...
#1 just because its a fuzzy distinction does not mean a distinction should be attempted, the comments about binary trees is useful here

#2 thats a core concept behind functional programming thats seperate from oo, most people dont realise that with object methods, the object is an input to that function, not just its parameters

I explained on irc for #3, but for everyone else, those type specifications are not data structures, there is no coupling nor any methods invoked, they are purely type specification that describe the datatype, useful for (optional) static type analysis and documentation, they arent equivocal to typedefs, which are datastructures (those are records in erlang).

#4 it is not everything in one file, it is everything related in one file, again this is just the ability to separate the data from the function that act upon it

It might be worth taking a second to see if you actually understand the points he is making as opposed to attacking them, before you edited in the counter arguments this was just an ad hominem attack.
Source: Apple asked Google not to use multi-touch in Android, and Google complied
OO concepts are occasionally cool and useful. Note the use of the word occasionally.

90+% of the time, when you create an object, what you really want is a struct/record. Most methods should really be static. Most of the power that does come from OO comes from its ability to foster a hierarchical type system in an extensible way.

OO smells like something that was invented to give "business" types the illusion that they can understand code without reading it in detail. "This is 'like a' Chair."
This is also a good point. Having state actually tends to being a "bad" thing to do. Of course, the entire purpose of the object is to capture some invariant, but an object doesn't make that clear. Many objects contain instance variables that should actually be parameters.

Yikes guilty as charge here as I currently have a unhealthy fascination for the use of instance variables if not all in most of my objects. Thanks for the heads up.
OCaml's great, but my understanding is that you have to use imperative features in order to get C performance.

For most programs, you don't care about getting C performance, and functional OCaml code does an excellent job.

I should not have said that writing "fast-running" code in Ocaml is painful and ugly, since normal OCaml code runs fast enough for most purposes. What I meant to say is that writing optimized code in OCaml can be painful.
Uh, you only really make 2 counter arguments out of these 5 points.
For a clearly delineated API/Module, often the essential data types are the public classes - the code is whatever is behind interfaces.
I just wanted to clarify the other comment to this, erlang was was written at erickson to solve specific problems, it was driven by a business need, not communities or research.
A very unique talk for sure.
Wired.com Grails case study published
A good approach to the subject, not declaring that one is superior to the other but rather each has it's own pluses and minuses that should be taken into account depending on what it will be used for.
Seems specifically chosen to penalize Canada. Just from eyeballing it, even the poorest inhabited parts of Canada are comparable to the US.
Bad ISV Marketing Ideas from the Department of Stupid
Yeah, I saw the other comment clarifying that. (And if it were a random dude ranting, I wouldn't devote much effort to understanding his way of thinking. It's the earned credibility from Erlang which got me -- an OOP fan -- past the headline to try to see through Armstrong's eyes.)
In my experience most often the public interface is an instance of the Facade pattern and its state is spilled in an object graph behind it.
You might be referring to this:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=353264
From the inventor of Self-organizing Map (aka Kohonen network) himself:
http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Kohonen_network
It has an established reputation as a newspaper for intellectuals, i.e. every "intellectual" you know is reading it.

They also write at a 12'th grade level, according to MS Word. (Compare to the NY Post, for instance.)

I think that more or less explains their position in the market.
I have to say that I agree with this only as long as we're talking about languages that don't have excellent OO capabilities. C++, Java, C#, and most others failed to impress me with their approach to OOP. But then I got to work in Smalltalk, and it dawned on me: "this is what OOP is supposed to be like."
The problem is that once they stop calling it Darwinism, what do you call it, to keep it distinct from ID? They can't just call it evolution, since IDers don't all deny common descent, old earth, etc. and can thus claim the evolution label for their theories. It has to be called something like "evolution only by natural selection" or "natural evolution" or somesuch. But then this sounds too restrictive and gives popular credence to the ID rhetoric of "why are evolutionists so cloes minded?"

An added problem is that ID doesn't even have to appeal to a god or aliens. They can just restrict their theory to a more Lamarckian idea, that animals genetically engineer themselves, either intentionally or by happenstance. Once they do this, then the theory fits entirely within a naturalistic paradigm.

So, I'd say the essay is right. Darwinism has a problem of rhetoric on its hands.
Seth's Blog: Which parts are you skipping?
The economy is in trouble, but depression still seems like quite a stretch to me.
Will Mark Cuban Fund Your Startup?
Do we have to associate evolution with Darwinism?

For that matter, why do we keep associating ID with Creationism?

Fuzzy words lead to fuzzy arguments.
I notice it on almost every top 40 song. It's absolutely shameful that a professional would need it as a crutch.
Startup Company Culture
Knowing how many fuckups and bugs which have happened trough the years because of incorrect handling of times and dates, I can't believe he advocates that they should be

"ubiquitous ... data structures representing times (which)
can be manipulated by any function in the system."

Obviously the thought of a one single encapsulated DateTime class which manipulates time and dates (correctly) for us is a horrible idea.
No drag and Drop on web browsers hahaha. Seriously, who is this guy Alex Payne ?

Have a try at Nuxeo ECM for example, you will see
Twitter has a lot of mindshare (I can't believe how much I see it mentioned on TV or mainstream newspapers). However, in terms of user base they are still pretty small (6 million?). There will be more competitors, especially since making your app work with Twitter is relatively easy.
They are - with a very few exceptions - not your friend and should be seen as a very savvy business partner that could very well kill you to protect their investment, as they should.

How often is it good business practice to have a pissed-off founder out there? You're opening yourself up to talent raids, exposure of company dirty laundry, negative press, and future problems for all your portfolio companies.
So long as people continue to confuse explanation with description-we'll have confusion. Math is description; science is description with comparison and the contrasting of said description(s).
Then what is explanation? I have no clue but to say it is part of consciousness, and,in the case of homo sapiens, partial consciousness.
To say that us(humans) with our four dimensional rules of calculation & perception can "know" the how of everything is no more proposterious than to believe the earth is flat.
Put another way-scientists who too often reject a new theory put forth that challenges current theories or assumptions-it reminds me of religious zealots defending any challenge to their dogma
The rhetoric he uses is related to how you react to the environment, not the environment itself.
This is downright wrong. We aren't poor at all, we are just less irresponsible.

Some facts plagiarized & reworded from a variety of sources:
(And just to make things easier, and less prone to stock market crashes I've leaned towards 2005/2006 numbers. Things just get worse for Americans as you bring that year forward.)

- 1 -
As of 2005, the median family in Canada was worth US$122,600, according to Statistics Canada, while the U.S. Federal Reserve pegged the median American family at US$93,100 in 2004.

- 2 -
In Canada the average amount of personal debt per person is US$23,460. In the U.S. it's a whopping US$40,250. (2005 numbers)

- 3 -
In Canada the average amount of personal debt per person is US$23,460. In the U.S. it's US$40,250. (2005) Here many people view non-mortgage debt as a unwieldy burden that needs to be paid off right away. $23k is not really that much in the grand scheme of things.

- 4 -
The average Canadian worker puts in 35 hours of work per week, while Americans put in 38. Only 30 per cent of Canadians work 45 hours a week or more, compared to 38 per cent of Americans. (2004) Now I happen to work more than 45 hours a week, and I don't find it a problem at all, but when you're looking at standard of living you have to take this into account. Also we get almost 17 vacation days a year, and we take, on average, nearly 16 of those days. In the U.S., the average is 14 days, but Americans only take 11.

- 5 -
Our future obligations are funded (mostly), while America has $55+ trillion (net present value, meaning this will be much higher in the future with interest) or $184,000 per man, woman, child in total FEDERAL obligations, let alone state debt and future obligations as well as a crumbling infrastructure.

- 6 -
There are plenty of banks in Canada for Pete's sake.
See for yourself:
http://www.yellowpages.ca/search/si/1/bank/Toronto,+ON
To say that we are 'enslaved' by our banks is just irresponsible internet talk; unless you mean we actually make our payments on time, which we do.

- 7 -
Our student loans are much more under control too.
Average Canadian student debt, among those who borrow AND graduate from four-year programs, regardless of how long it takes to actually graduate: $22,700

Now don't get me wrong, there are somethings that really, really bug me about Canadians (drug use here among people under 30), but when it comes to our financials we are on (relatively) solid ground.
Because it makes it easier and safer to get programmers working together as a group.

Making OO the ultimate dogfood.

Whenever I encounter any kind of new "thinking", the first question I ask is, "Who is it good for?"

Ultimately, OO was made for us, not our customers. True, anything that helps us helps our customers, but I'd prefer to ask a more basic question...

If we have so many programmers that we need new technologies to work better together, are we doing something fundamentally too complex to begin with? Most of us aren't working on the space shuttle. We're doing relatively simple bread and butter apps moving data through logic. Before we surrender to OO, maybe we should take a closer look at why we need "easier and safer" ways to work together. For most of us, a simpler approach than OO often makes more sense. I suspect that's OP's biggest point.
As a disclosure, I've been using Ruby for the past three years, and it's about as object-y as you can get. However, Ruby opened my eyes a bit to exploring other languages. Point is, as I started looking at other languages in depth, I found myself using objects a little bit less, especially in the design pattern sense. Some problems in the traditional 23 design patterns just disappear in dynanmic languages. After programming in Lua and Javascript, I find objects nice, but optional.

Nowadays, I sort of just use classes to scope and namespace. I keep state in classes when it makes sense.

To counter the point about state, Erlang programs do have state. They're just contained locally within a function. Since Erlang has tail recursion, you just call the same function recursively and pass the state variable you want to keep at the very end of the function for the lifetime of the program. Because it's tail recursion, there's no stack overflow. Also, Erlang threads can keep 'state' inside of the Mnesia database that comes with Erlang.

State is only evil when it's shared. Because state is contained locally in a function, a single Erlang thread can do whatever it wants, whenever it wants with those variables. Threads communicate through message passing. Therefore, no need for locks, mutexes or semaphores. Along with the low overhead of thread creation (~300 bytes) they're part of the reason why Erlang has great concurrency properties.
I must say I really like this idea. I don't know why it took so long to kick in, though, it's quite simple. Finally sites don't work just as servers, but also as clients, information reflectors, mirrors or whatever.
It's 3 pages of text, really less than that since it's a numbered list. Couldn't you just post the text directly in HN, or a link to an ASCII text file hosted on a website? All this downloading/flash is ridiculous.
I think the latest version Melodyne is absolutely amazing.

A lot of amateur composing/producing on computers is heavily restricted by a relatively basic set of tools. While the tools may have deeper option sets, hobbyists may take years to discover them. It's rare that a program comes along which allows you to have in infinite amount of sounds to choose from and allows anyone to think of creative ways to recycle existing recordings. When the program is as easy to use as Melodyne, it gives a lot of power to the amateur.
My assumption is that the cost of producing a digital copy is significantly less expensive than the paper version. (I'd appreciate any links to studies on this.) If it's true, then advertising should not be necessary to defray cost.
But almost every top 40 song isn't music by a musician, but entertainment (of which music is only one component) by an industry (of which the "artist" is but one small, though highly visible, part).
90+% of the time, when you create an object, what you really want is a struct/record.

I don't. I've been fortunate enough to use a language that doesn't force the "everything's an object" mantra.

The two real advantages of OOP (from my POV anyway) are encapsulation (minimal interface) and convenient syntax: the first parameter turns to be a prefix so it resembles human language, a question of usability really.
Dentist - Clarksville, TN | Hillcrest Dental Office - Dr. Garrett
Dr. K. Michael Garrett has practiced family dentistry in Clarksville TN since 1981. Dr. Garrett is a member of the American Dental Association, &nbsp;Academy of General Dentistry, Tennessee Dental Association, Tennessee Academy of General Dentistry and Clarksville Area Dental Society.
pay the assistant $15/h to set up appointments/get coffee/make you look lie a hot-shot, pay the software engineer knowledgeable of the latest mobile platform $2/h
things like that are so insulting
If the pissed off founder and the investor are at loggerheads then that is a very difficult situation, which comes up with some regularity, unfortunately.

How it is dealt with depends very much on the situation, I think that the recent 'moves' of Monty and some of the other people from MySQL are a good indication of what it can look like on the outside but I'm quite sure that the indoors conversations were quite different.

The reason why is exactly the one you quote above, to avoid exposure of company dirty laundry, negative press and future problems. But I'm quite sure that in spite of all that it has gotten a little bit harder for sun to do acquisitions and for Monty et. al. to get acquired again with a future startup (not that he needs to, he's got enough cash to call it quits anyway).
Don't be too disappointed if a single submission gets a lukewarm or confused response on HN. The upmods and comments on here are a lot less consistent than what you're used to. ;) Just keep writing. It's really valuable.

Also, it's clear to me why your daily routine might sound like science fiction to the median HN reader: A lot of programmers have never seen a system like this. As those of us who were online during a specific half-hour period a couple weeks ago can attest, even Google doesn't have a system that's remotely as reliable as this: It appears to be possible to break all of Google search, worldwide, in ten minutes by misplacing a single character in a text file.