skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm perplexed

Work (value creation) can be more or less efficient. As stated, an inefficient workman blames his tools, instead of the way he is going about his work. In this case, and often in other cases, the customer base forms part of the toolset. The workman is saying that his tools are not doing what they are supposed to be doing, and that it is their fault.

Here is more on this phenomenon: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Locus_of_control

Internals tend to attribute outcomes of events to their own control. Externals attribute outcomes of events to external circumstances.

In the present case, the customer base would be seen as uncontrollable (only susceptible to external control) by the inefficient workman, and controllable (susceptible to internal control) by the efficient workman.

work must be done to create value [...] regardless of [...] talent and abilities

Yes. But do you mean, as Marxists contend, that variance in ability plays little or no role in variance in the efficiency of the work?: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labor_theory_of_value#Marx.27s_...
spam ?
Yeah, it would seem that they are giving up a lot of income because they have a fairly lowtech method of highlighting the best sellers.

They should look at poaching some of the google talent or look at acquiring a startup that does something similar if they cannot build it internally.
Think Wordpress has stopped growing? you may be surprised
http://www.google.com/trends?q=wordpress%2C+movable+type&...

vs movable type
SearchYC Performance Enhancements
Pylot 1.2.0 released - python tool for web performance testing
They check for placebo: see the pdf http://www.centreforthemind.com/images/savantskills.pdf
I think the commenter meant something different from the original author. I think they meant that you spend more time thinking about how to write it in Lisp.

I'd contest both points, really.

First, I think if you're sufficiently comfortable in almost any language, you can translate pretty fluidly from idea to implementation. There are real differences, but they're overstated. In that respect, Lisp's "hardness" is really not being deep into the language and natively breaking problems down in a way that maps to functional languages.

Second, and I think your point, is that getting to that point where you've got the problem broken down into its components is the hard part. I think there are tasks where that's true and ones where it's not, and again, that's largely language independent, though the amount of time needed for the more menial aspects does vary.
Yet when you consider the growth in non-trivial things you want to accomplish, then the complexity returns.

No longer are people satisfied with a joystick that can be read as two resistance values and two open/closed buttons - now you need a DirectX DirectInput Device with throttles, reconfigurable buttons, force feedback, a USB joystick driver to communicate with it...
I was thinking that this fits more along the lines of tragedy of the commons.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons
> I have to wonder why that, culturally, seems to be linked to Asians?

This is a complex issue, but the shallow explanation is the test taking culture. There have been reports of widespread (and sophisticated) cheating in the national Korean university entrance exams over howevermany past years that I can recall. I was told that this is because Koreans basically get one shot at the exam. It practically makes or breaks your life. So everything you do in life, up until that point, is in preparation for the fight.

I must stress again though, that this is a shallow look at the problem.
miniature versions of this happen in american high schools (especially magnet high schoos), where the children of recent immigrants will have to deal with a parent being angry if they do not get A/A+'s in their coursework.
I've found SearchYC to be very helpful. I use it quite a bit to look up old information I only vaguely remember or to find people. Glad to see it's only going to get better - congrats Mike and Jerry.
There are better ways, but when your objective is to be quick, at the expense of accuracy, tests are the "generally accepted" method.

If you don't want to sacrifice accuracy, I think the answer lies in neuroscience :)
By who? Then you're getting into subjective territory. What if the examiner doesn't like the student or is having a bad day? Both of those have been shown to have subtle effects on that sort of thing. Even a teacher who considers herself fair will subconsciously lean toward grading students they dislike worse than ones they like. Or what if the student knows the material but isn't a very good talker?

Tests are considerably more objective, which is why they're the least bad option. I'll take an objective measure over a possibly superior but significantly more subjective measure any day if accuracy is the goal.
Stimulus Bill: What The Stimulus Bill Has For Everyday Americans
Was Bronx Science like this? It seems to me that the tech track magnets would be a little more enlightened, but I could be wrong.
Market distortion that favours diesels ? You should come and have a look then:

- higher road tax for a diesel, in some countries 200% more than a gasoline car of the same weight
- extra requirements such as factory installed particle filters on diesel exhausts
- extra tax penalties on diesel fuel

Europeans care about clean air very much, and most European cities I've been to compare favourably with the American cities of similar size that I've been to. (Detroit, Los Angeles, New York vs say Paris, Madrid, Amsterdam and Berlin).

In former eastblock countries the situation is worse though.

As for the rest of your arguments, you should test drive a BMW 5 series diesel and we'll talk about power, handling and more of those items you mentioned.

And let's not even get started on reliability, diesels are in a completely different ball park when it comes to that. Here a diesel car that has 200k on the clock counts as 'just broken in', the same chassis with a petrol engine would count as being at 60..70% of its economic lifespan.
That's almost like saying, when a fish is suffocating because his pond has become deprived of oxygen, "stop eating plankton and start eating rodents; that's the way we lions roll here in the jungle."

In all seriousness, I can guarantee that this is far from an isolated case. If he is 10th or 12th in his class, just how many are there, between him and the 1st, who basically live with the same thing, but either don't write about it, or worse, write about it, but never get heard?
A system that a corporation tells me is "completely trustable" is not one I trust completely.
It's hard to take that seriously. Guy is a non-sensical MS fanboy, much like the 13-year-olds who believe that their allegiance to Microsoft makes them wise just because MS has more desktop marketshare than competitors. Article is ridiculous, dude is an anachronism. He should be returned to junior high so that he can have a second shot to mature out of this phase. My feelings do flash about.
Fortunately, such treatment is less and less prevalent in China, especially in more developed areas (the student is from a poorer province, where a top-tier college education often means a rare ticket to the prosperity for the whole family.)
Would something so simple as making a deposit that is released upon return not help?
Clever use of Arduino. I think it would be more useful if it rang when other members of your team pushed stuff to github (or wherever), for the project and branch you're working on.
yeh I was going to say lowest common denominator, but if they are running reasonably expensive dev tools then that kinda evens out
New StartUp Makes Pizza Box That Turns Into Plates and Storage Device
I worked for a guy who wouldn't buy even modern machines for developers using the logic "if they write code that runs really fast on a 486, think how fast it'll run on a pentium" (yes, this was that long ago). This completely ignored that we couldn't use SIMD instructions/MMX or chip specific optimizations which exist because they are significant faster and more efficient than the alternatives.

Even if you use the latest and greatest machine for development, by the time you release the machine is out-dated in some respect.
I was going to say: but a project like tarsnap, by its nature, is going to have a particularly high ratio of ideas to loc.

However, even in a language like C, whose basic building blocks are much simpler than those available in a Lisp, and even when writing a routine program with no fancy math or theory behind it — if one finds oneself having to write lots of loc per thought, then one is doing it wrong: and one stops and thinks, and works out a way to abstract out the drudgery with more sophisticated data structures and preprocessor macros, or whatever.
Isn't Tragedy of the commons a variant of the prisoner's dilemma ? It has a high number of prisoners, but the payoff matrix is the same. Similar to an arms race too.
try this:

http://www-s.ti.com/sc/ds/bq24103.pdf

Application notes for chips like that have tons of useful information.

Be careful, badly handled / charged LiPo batteries can go in pretty nasty ways.
There are better options. For example:

1. A conversation.

2. Real-world problems.
I don't think things are failing so blaming "the current approach" seems misguided. I can't think of a single area where things where better 100 years ago than they are today in the US. Most trends are fairly positive over the last 30 years.

EX: People talk about an increase in the dropout rate but it's slowly falling across the US. (http://nces.ed.gov/ssbr/pages/dropout.asp) Edit: more recent numbers http://nces.ed.gov/FastFacts/display.asp?id=16

Violent Crime is falling: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_the_United_States

There might be an long term increase in the unemployment rate http://www.data360.org/dsg.aspx?Data_Set_Group_Id=248 but if so it's swamped by swings in the economy.
I meant they could do it based on past data.
I always love hearing about behind the scenes updates, thanks for posting.

As a more dev-heavy optimization, it might be possible to return cached results (user-search:PG), and then trigger a backend server to refresh the cache, possibly even using ajax to inject the new results.

Thanks for the site, it's my top choice for searching HN.

As an aside, I'd love to see a standard for integrating site-specific search into a larger search engine. Imagine if you could go to Google, and type in

"Site:News.ycombinator.com user:e1ven" and it would send those as post-requests to the search engine designated by robots.txt on the host?

That would make search dramatically "deeper", by letting google act as a front-end to each site's results.

-CPD
You should qt-faststart that .mov so it starts playing immediately!

Available in ffmpeg:
http://svn.mplayerhq.hu/ffmpeg/trunk/tools/qt-faststart.c?vi...

There are native versions for OS X and Adobe AIR out there.
Agreed. If the bike doesn't get returned, simply charge the account for the cost of a new bike.

It would also be helpful (and maybe costly) to implement some RFID solution to keep track of the unique bikes and the user pairs. If a bike is damaged, the rider can fill out a form online and the company can charge-back the previous user if its not standard wear and tear. This would cut down on the vandalism of the bikes.
That's exactly how it works (well, you can use a debit or credit card) and in fact, if you're not a subscriber, a hold of 150€ is placed on your card until you return the bike.

But I think they have to put an artifically low hold of 150€ on the bike (instead of the real cost of 400€) because far fewer could and/or would use it if that much money was held.

A lot of the bikes are stolen from people who rented them (and in this case, maybe the person doesn't have to pay the 150€ if he/she can prove it?). Some are stolen from the trucks that are used to regularly transfer bikes across the city to even the distribution. Some people figured out how to hack the kiosk to give them multiple bikes for one payment (that has since been patched). Also, people can of course get them with stolen credit cards and by breaking the lock. You can see how the thefts can add up.

I don't think the system is doomed though because people in Paris absolutley love the Velibs and want them to stay. I'm sure that they'll figure something out, whether it's higher rental costs, extra security or something else.
64-bit -> more registers (8!) -> fewer memory accesses, so it might even out a bit.
Ugh. This is why I hate the grading system. The basic premise the entire system relies on is fear of failure, which, to me, seems to be completely counter-productive to learning. When I am actually learning something, for instance programming, I don't learn by marginally getting better and going to a slightly higher level before, still succeeding at every step — I learn immersing myself in something completely over my head that I don't understand, and absolutely, miserably failing. When I finally get it, not only is the experience extremely gratifying, but I actually learn it; it's very difficult to forget something you now understand that only moments ago looked nearly impossible. In school, doing this is not only discouraged but nearly impossible — fail a class for even a few weeks and it will be very difficult to get your grade up and be able to get in any more honors classes; essentially, through the grading system you're labeled satisfactory (A/B, depending on your standards), average (C) or a failure (F), even though the only way to learn is through your mistakes.

I think a good indicator of how well you're learning something is to ask yourself, "If I asked myself about this subject 6 months ago, would I think I was an idiot?". In school, I can think of maybe 3 subjects that's true in, but not by much. With something I'm teaching myself through failing, like programming, I would probably think I was an idiot less than one month ago.
As far as combining size/importance; maybe something like newsmap: http://marumushi.com/apps/newsmap/newsmap.cfm
I agree with you. We know that our planet and the qualities that it possesses are appropriate for sustaining life. Who's to say a form of life couldn't arise on a planet incapable of sustaining life as we know it. Would that life, then, view our planet as incapable of sustaining life? If it did bump into us, would an intelligence arising on a planet "incapable" of supporting life even see us as life forms?
So true. I can take my laptop home. I can take it to the coffee shop. Tomorrow I'm taking a bus up to Tahoe to do snowboarding. 4 hour bus ride will allow me to get plenty of work done on the way (thank you git!).

30" display + Aeron is definitely well worth it for office productivity, but frankly 4GB+2Ghz+2cores is plenty of juice for my typical web dev load which includes Photoshop/Illustrator/2 Parallels Instances.

When people make these arguments about 2x performance increasing dev performance by a similar factor I call bullshit. Frankly I spend less than 5-10% of my time waiting for the machine, and even when I do that I'm still thinking, which is what developers should be spending most of their time doing anyway.

Better approach to developer productivity is incremental process improvement. Analyze problems. Automate checks to prevent them in the future. Spend time refactoring. Maintain a test suite. Set up continuous integration. Over time these things make the difference of an order of magnitude for programmer productivity.
'LOLs' (and related cats) are fine on reddit, but not on here =).
True, but I think the bike theft issue is a much more easily solved problem than keeping jerks off the internet. If they could just cut the thefts in half, they'd be making a profit again. That could likely be accomplished with a minimal amount of clever thinking regarding security.
You can trade money for time. But for that to make you happy, you have to know what you want and yet not have time to do it.
Again it usually happens when parents are not well educated. They only realize the importance of education, but they're not educated enough to evaluate their children's progress, so they often have to rely on the not always reliable association of good grades with good progress.
The http://stackoverflow.com community might also be helpful for this.
Fun, but I think I still prefer the angry red test failure bear:

http://blog.last.fm/2008/08/01/quality-control
Besides viaweb (aka Yahoo Store), are there any major commercial applications or websites written in this language?
Sorry, I should've been clearer. Yes, this is what's commonly known as the tragedy of the commons, but that is more-or-less a (large) multiple-player version of the Prisoners' Dilemma, which is easier to analyse and harder to condemn. There are differences, but the underlying principle is similar enough.

Too often these days people simply say "Tragedy of the Commons", wring their hands, and say that people are idiots. I was trying to make it clearer that game theory really does predict this behavior, that it's not irrational, that it is to be expected, and you have to change the rules to change the behavior.

Exactly how to change the rules is left as an exercise for the interested reader.
I wasn't motivated by fear. It was more like trying to be high scorer on a video game. Which is also somewhat of a stupid motivation, but probably not as stupid.

I think the problem is not grades per se but the difference between what they're supposed to measure and what they actually do. That difference can be small (I can remember college classes where it was), but it takes an effort.
The Definitive Primer to the Pirate Bay Trial
Can anyone translate, or at least summarize, the comments from the original article in Chinese? I tried using Google, but none of them made any sense except the first one (which was apparently written in bad Chinese by an American)
I can't think of a single area where things where better 100 years ago than they are today in the US.

1) architecture 2) divorce rates 3) illegitimacy rates 3) inner city crime rates 4) the strength of civic organizations 5) the entire education system 6) taxes 7) black male employment rates ( http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=950CE1D81E3CF... ) 8) average firm size 9) the non-existence of several hundred nuclear weapons pointing at our cities 10) the financial/monetary system

There are of course many things that are better about 2009 than 1909. But it is foolish to see history as a unidirectional march towards progress ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whig_history ). The reality is much more complicated.
Clever.

They should make a quick video demonstrating the "transition" of pizza box to plates and storage container. Would help people visualize it better.
Sweden's Aftonbladet buys 700 iPhones
The first sentence is probably true. But the causes for this divergence are so complicated that I don't feel like I understand the question well enough yet to explain why it happened. For example, there was the court squabble that caused long trading voyages to be banned just at the wrong moment. If long distance voyages were a sufficiently powerful driver of European economic growth, that alone could have been enough to screw China. Especially since this was something of a zero-sum game.
Hard core projects like Thrift and Hypertable are hosted on GitHub as well. GitHub makes code sharing/review much easier than before.

Sourceforge is mostly a place for people to upload/download a tarball or something. There is little reason to host a repo there.
I can't figure out if you're just a very clever troll or someone that has something to contribute, if the former, then congratulations, well played but it does not really help the conversation, if the latter then maybe you should try to make your point in smaller steps so that lesser minds like mine can make sense of what you are trying to communicate.
test drive a BMW 5 series diesel

2009 X5 35d vs. 2004 X5 4.8is: http://www.motortrend.com/roadtests/suvs/112_0902_2009_bmw_x... http://www.motortrend.com/roadtests/suvs/112_0504_2005_luxur...

35d 4.8is

hp: 265 355
lb/hp: 19.3 14.1
0-60: 6.7 5.9
1/4 mile: 15.1 14.3
60-0, ft: 128 114

http://www.motortrend.com/roadtests/suvs/112_0902_2009_bmw_x...

Though the engine produces a stunning 425 lb-ft of torque at just 1750 rpm, the forward surge doesn't feel dramatic. [...] X5 owners shouldn't feel too cocky [...]

Press the pedal to overtake [...] and the engine note invades the cabin. [...]

We often hear tall tales of European diesels, stories of ridiculous fuel economy, supercar acceleration, and unmatched utility. [...] the truth isn't quite so dramatic
Study takes step toward erasing bad memories
There's also a tradition of respect for parents, and parents like good grades. Indeed, at younger ages, grades are reports to parents.
Experiences Of A Newbie iPhone Developer
Agree - chrome is now my default browser purely because it can bring up a window so fast I can barely see a delay, even if I have bogged down the machine with compiling or other intensive tasks. A couple times I have caught myself firing up Chrome to do a quick check on news or mail while waiting for FireFox to start!. It is that fast and pleasurable to use. Frankly, I don't know how Google did it.

I suspect the answer is, as much as anything, that Google simply isn't willing to sacrifice control of any corner of the browser to make the user experience fast and slick and that includes optimizing right down to the fine details of the UI toolkit.
Orbitz has used it for awhile. See http://www.paulgraham.com/carl.html. I found over 50 companies that also use it. http://www.pchristensen.com/blog/lisp-companies/
In this case ... the customer base forms part of the toolset.

I do not subscribe to this theory. Toolsets can be changed, improved or mastered. I can do none of these with my customers. I can only do it with the things I use to create my services. I use tools to create services to assist my customers. Calling my customers "tools" does not help me.

The workman is saying that his tools are not doing what they are supposed to be doing, and that it is their fault.

I disagree with this analysis. The workman is saying that there are (usually a small number of) customers who require that the services be more complex in their implementation than might otherwise be expected. This is not the same thing. I know that around 80% to 90% of my customers never provoke the inbuilt protection systems in my code. The protection systems account for about 50% of my code. I have measured these things because I work in the defense industry. I know that around half my code is there because up to 20% of my customers don't use the system the way it was intended to be used. Whether this is lack of training, lack of awarenes, or malice doesn't matter. I don't "blame" them, but I know that if my customers only did what they were shown in training, and didn't do what they are trained not to do, 50% of my code would be unnecessary.

But do you mean, as Marxists contend, that variance in ability plays little or no role in variance in the efficiency of the work?

Of course not. I mean that for every worker, some of their work is producing features and facilities, and some of their work is protecting against inappropriate actions. The balance between these two might change with the abilities of the workers, but I suspect not much. It's a pretty constant ratio across my programmers. To assume what you seem to have assumed from what I have said is, again, perplexing. Perhaps we constantly talk past each other, but I'm finding it difficult in general to understand your mindset.
((by "cellis") (id 482420) (score 3) (sockvotes 0) (type comment) (ip "redacted") (time 1234739856) (kids (482439 482438 482436)) (text "Besides viaweb (aka
Yahoo Store), are there <i>any</i> major commercial applications or websites written in this language?") (votes ((1234740917 "redacted" "redacted" up 2
) (1234740355 "redacted" "redacted" up 1) (1234739856 "redacted" "cellis
" up 0))) (parent 482242))

Depends what you count as major.