skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I didn't say white people haven't innovated in music. I said that virtually all new pop genres have come from black americans.

Techno was influenced by 20th century minimalism, but it wasn't inspired by it. Minimalism started becoming a significant influence in the second wave of techno.

From your later comment, punk and some other rock sub-genres are good examples of genres that have not stemmed directly from black american culture.

Note -- I don't think this is something fundamentally having to do with race, but that there's something within black american culture that has driven a disproportionate amount of innovation in popular music.

With the genre-mixing thing, I didn't mean that genres aren't interesting from the start, just that often the phase where they begin to cross-pollinate often produces results that are as if not more interesting than the advent of the genres themselves.
Micro was pretty well established before experimental schools of thought came around.
It turns out the system works fine with SQL based alters. We do have to do real work to deploy expensive alters (apply them to standbys, fail over, repeat, or worse) but in general it's cheap to change schemas.

Unfortunately, it's very manually intensive to roll back schema changes, so it's one of the few places where we put old school process in place (a DBA who reviews all schema changes prior to deployment)
An Embedded Forth Interpreter in 66 bytes (1991)
Jesus people

I hadn't realized Christians were necessarily language prescriptivists. If we were necessarily language prescriptivists, I would have to tell you that "em" should be written as "them", or in the alternative written as "'em" to emphasize the omission of the first two letters. I might also go on to mention that you mean systemic, not systematic. Systemic means occurring across a system, systematic means planned and ordered, as in a system.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_prescription

But we're not necessarily language prescriptivists so, whee, you can write how you want to write and we can understand what you've written because it is communicative even if not "correct" as defined by reference to static "authoritative" definitions.
"Newspapers have historically derived almost all of their revenue from advertising"

That's actually not true. As recently as the 1960s, big newspapers made nearly half of their revenue from subscriptions:

http://onthemedia.org/transcripts/2009/02/06/03

As far as ad revenue goes, I don't know if it's true that online ads are less effective than print, but I know that there are a heck of a lot more of them to compete for advertising dollars. Advertisers still pay for reach into a target market (which is why you can get crazy high CPM rates for things like travel forums), but today there are simply a lot more sources for undifferentiated eyeballs than there were in the 60s.
Oh boy... regardless of the strength of the argument here, I'm going to be sending this to virtually everyone I know.

- a Canadian in America
"I am having somewhat of a hard time figuring out how this "stimulus plan" helps the economy, as it appears it's intended.

If a startup is able to reach profitability within three months, this startup surely wouldn't need Mark Cuban's money to move forward and create jobs at some point in the future."

Not everyone has a bankroll sitting in a savings account ready to start a business. Mark's idea solves that.

And even if a person does have that bankroll, he may not want to invest it in the new business. Recessions don't end overnight because people hoard instead of spend money. The worse things get, the more people want to save for the long term, which prolongs the recession. Mark's idea solves that case, too.

Mark will fund promising ideas which need the cash now and can put it to good use. The cash he gives will be mostly gone by 90 days. That cash is a direct injection into the local and national economy.

So what gets accomplished is:

1. a possible wealth generating/job creating business is started

2. spending occurs when the natural inclination is to save

Both will have stimulative effects on the economy.
Twitter to begin charging brands for commercial use
Yeah, this is a great book. Evidently it is also on Obama's reading list.

The book talks about a few different ways to "nudge" people into the "best" behavior. One of the key points is that a default choice (for ANY consumer choice, whether health care, options on a car, or how to invest a 401k) is far and away the option most likely chosen. So the book's authors argue that it is the responsibility of politicians to help people make the right "default" choice.

One great example is a particularly nasty curve on a road -- Lake Shore Drive -- in Chicago. It's a major thoroughfare along Lake Michigan, and cars were always going too fast when they came up to a sharp curve in the road. After trying all sorts of "slow down" and "sharp curve" signs, city planners opted to paint lines on the road perpendicular to the flow of traffic. The lines were set at regular intervals, but near the curve the lines were painted closer together. This gave drivers the impression that they were going too fast, and caused them to subconsciously slow down. This dramatically improved the traffic flow on this particular stretch of Lake Shore Drive and reduced accidents and fatalities.

I won't comment on whether or not I agree with of all this book's theories, but it is well worth a read, and certainly shines some light on more subtle aspects of human decision making.
Worth pointing out that the fiscal accomplishments here are largely the political legacy of the Liberal Party, which is significantly to the left of the Democratic Party in the States.

Stephen Harper, the current Prime Minister, is much closer to Bush than anyone else and is governing with 35% popular support. Many Canadians also find the election of Obama inspiring given their government.
writing fast-running code in these languages can be painful/ugly

Seriously? The OCaml implementation is about as fast as C and -- if you were to look at the language shootout -- fast OCaml code is digestable for pretty much anyone with even minimal exposure to the language. The OCaml execution model is simple. Now, with Haskell you might have a point.
Open source camera under the hood: from Verilog to PHP
You've missed the point. My work was fine, and he knew that. He said that only to establish a power relationship because that was how that company worked. I learnt that when a) all my colleagues reported being told exactly the same thing (what, everyone wanted everyone to be fired?) and b) when I later became a team lead it was right there in the course materials (tho' I never did it myself).

Up until that point I had thought my manager and I were friends; he did me a great service early in my career by revealing the truth about how organizations operate.
TED Talks 2009: Elizabeth Gilbert on a different way to think about creative genius
"The US Government isn't good at things like this."

Why not? Can we make it better?
also curious as to the scientific process for measurement of urine spillage.
Crunching the Data for the Tree of Life
Well I have read some nonsense in my time but that just about takes the prize. Come on! This is the Daily Mail - a UK comic with a mission. The mission is largely to divide the world into substances that cause and cure cancer. They are also happy to peddle the "dietary supplements" of so called nutritional consultants (sounds technical and medical doesn't it - but we are in this context talking about charlatans and patent medicine peddlers).
Handshake closeups, women with glasses wearing headsets talking to 'customers' on the phone, and cute, racially ambiguous twenty-something women sitting in grass being happy.

Yes, it's the office of the future and an ad for PMS medication all rolled into one.

Honestly I'm not sure where this comment is supposed to be going. I just wanted to agree about how stupid stock photography is in certain contexts.

edit: Unnaturally happy-looking couples smiling at each other on a couch. Old couples in bath tubs on the beach. You know what I'm talking about....
How I know the Apple TV won't succeed
I think the issue is more that they're polluting the social network and the quality of links.

I'd bet that most of the "followers" that these bots attract are other bots that auto-follow anyone who follows them. Nevertheless, that increases the number of pages with a link to their site, from a high page-ranked site, and thus they profit. That's obnoxious and rude, to say the least.

This kind of noise isn't nearly as offensive to the service-user as email spam (for exactly the reasons you mentioned). However, Twitter could potentially be an interesting data set for study and experimentation, and these schmucks are souring the integrity of that data. Link-spamming is basically just a special case of this kind of general data-abuse.
Followup: According to its karma, my comment apparently contributed nothing to this conversation, or was at least a net negative (doing more harm than good), so I'll be sure to keep my thoughts to myself next time.

(Note: I am not complaining about karma count. You can reset my total karma count to 0 if you'd like. I'm complaining about being ridiculed for answering an open question honestly.)
Unfortunately, in the real world requirements are often poorly understood by not only the development team but the customer (making it impossible for the "hacker" to create the right software), and only after continued use of the in production software are requirements truly fleshed out.

I'm not sure if you have had to re-engineer an app before, but it's not pretty regardless of how well built it was. This is what I consider maintenance, considering most applications have to be continually adapted for ever changing requirements.
Just to follow up, all of Apple's big successes have come not from customer surveys and other standard marketing techniques, but when they step out in a bold new direction, satisfying the desires of the engineers themselves, as well as pleasing The Steve.

Apple TV appears to be floundering. It really does give the impression of being a device that Apple created to sell content on the iTunes Store, rather than to meet the desires of consumers. This is not how Apple created smash hits such as the original Apple ][, the Mac, the Laserwriter, the iPod and the iPhone. I forsee a bad ending for the Apple TV if they don't return to their strength - innovating to scratch an itch.

Is this a sign of what will come in a post-Jobs era? I hope not! Perhaps the fact that the survey itself has been taken down so quickly is a good thing.
For me, personally:

No guaranteed memory safety.
No discriminated unions.
Verbose syntax
No metaprogramming/macros.
Costly polymorphism (compared to templates, but not as bad as Java)
Few employment opportunities compared to the mainstream.
Palish said,
"According to its karma, my comment apparently contributed nothing to the conversation, or at least a net negative (more harm than good)."

I wouldn't be so sure about that. I've noticed many otherwise insightful comments being downmodded to zero over the last few months, mostly (I think) because people use downvotes to signal disgareement than incoherence/irrelevance.

And even if your conclusion about net negative contribution were valid,

"So I'll be sure to keep my thoughts to myself next time."

might be a suboptimal reaction.

Just something to think about.
Method Cards - Case Studies - IDEO
The new Animal Collective album, Merriweather Post Pavilion, would be a good place to start.
The benefits of this project cannot be understated. This is a pretty forward thinking initiative and looks like it could pay dividends for everyone. Having google-analytics-like insight into energy consumption in your home would really bring new perspectives to people who would have never been able to access these kinds of insights. I'm really excited about this one.
Already posted: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=473821
Barack Obama's Internet Strategy
How can someone disagree that Snaptalent felt more personal to me than various other job board sites I've visited? That was literally my first reaction, and was in response to joubert's open question, "How is this different from the other gazillion job boards?"

So it feels like a slap in the face to be ridiculed for answering a question honestly.

(Yeah, I do let my emotions get the better of me sometimes. I view this as a strength in certain situations, such as in social interactions, where apathy is definitely a weakness.)

----

Edit: I just realized I didn't say "Snaptalent feels more personal to me", which is what I meant. Damn. I said "Snaptalent feels more personal," which is valid to downvote because you can certainly disagree with it.

This is why "letting my emotions get the better of me" is probably more of a character flaw rather than a strength. Being emotional can sometimes be a strength, but you have to be sure you know exactly what you're reacting to, which I didn't. Sorry. I'll leave these two comments up because otherwise it would feel like I was running away if I deleted them. We don't get to take back our mistakes in real life, so I won't take back mine here.
Comments by Greenspun on this idea discussed at length here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=465890

Also already posted:

Here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=464236

Here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=464001

Here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=463600
I've stopped taking Mark Cuban seriously long ago. The guy got lucky once, and mistakes it for business genius, it is that simple.

Sure, if you have a couple of billion lying around it is easy to tell other people how to solve their problems. But unlike say Warren Buffet I've yet to see him do something that commanded my respect.

I'd challenge Mark Cuban to follow his own plan, pretend he's broke for 60 days and then show that by his own measure he can make it work.

If he succeeds with that he'll definitely have me take him serious again, but I doubt he could and until that happens this is just another "I'm rich therefore I blog" addition to the S/N ratio.
the fiscal accomplishments here are largely the political legacy of the Liberal Party

This isn't the right place for a debate about Canadian politics, so I'll just say this and leave the topic here: There's considerable disagreement about whether the Chretien/Martin Liberal government was responsible for the country's strong fiscal situation or whether they merely reaped the benefits of the policies (e.g., NAFTA and GST) put in place by the preceeding Conservative administration.
The knowledge needed to operate successfully in a market is widely dispersed:

http://www.econlib.org/library/Essays/hykKnw1.html

This problem seems non-fixable. Also, in modern states power is separated from accountability, so rational decisions are not incentivized:

http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2007/07/why-whe...

This is hard to fix, but maybe slightly more possible.

In general, these are hard problems.
At the top level in CxO roles, it is normal to have it written into your contract that if you get fired you will go on getting paid for so many months/years, all your options will immediately vest, etc. Scam, or equivalent to tenure for college professors? Varies, I guess.
That's true, but I wonder what I would buy for the money that helps me grow the business faster within 90 days. Employing people is excluded, renting office space is useless in that time frame, so the only things I can imagine are buying rights to something or buying actual physical merchandise.

Buying services, i.e outsourcing much of the work, is just a way around the no employees rule. Labour cost is probably the biggest chunk of most growing software startups' cost and that's excluded.

My conclusion is that it needs to a be rights based business. Buy rights to something, add value quickly, and resell the results.
The problem is not to write something that works, bottom-up, as you type it. Any half-decent software engineer can do that. The problem is maintenance : when you start to modify existing code, a function many other functions rely on (I assume functional style, without side-effects here). And sooner or later you'll have to alter your code, whatever the reason: spec change, performance issue, bug, new problem to tackle, you name it.

The simplest thing I can think of is if you have to alter a function to handle correctly some corner cases. You didn't think about them when you wrote the function in the first place, so basically your function was buggy all along... Now you have to test all the functions that rely on this function again. What if they relied on said bug and you didn't realize it ? With tests, you just run the tests (and hope they were well designed...). With your technique, you do the same, by hand, function after function...

Or to remain in a very bottom up style, what if you realize that one of your underlying brick was poorly designed ? It just doesn't address well the new problem at hand and need little enhancements... Anything that relied on this brick have to be, well, updated to use the new functions, and of course checked again. Again unit-tests come in handy...

Note that I'm just making the case for unit-testing, not test-driven developement itself...
Buzznet - vibrant entertainment social network
Need iPhone Application. If you can work for $2 per hour. This is an urgent hiring.
Now that is a pretty concise language :)

Here is my own forth implementation, it's not quite 66 bytes but perhaps a little easier to read:

http://ww.com/forth.c.txt

Forgive me for the style, I was young and didn't know what I was doing ;)

An interesting holdover to modern times is that Java bytecode is somewhat related to ucsd pascal p-code, which in turn owes some of its history to forth. All three are 'stack machines', with Java and p-code having only the one stack, forth has two.
Does a weak application hurt applications in later rounds?
Twitter is cool because you make an account and start doing whatever you want.

How do they tell the difference between individuals and "brands"? Will I have to pay for a commercial account if I start tweeting constantly about how much I love Apple? What if I only use Twitter to advertise my free software project?

Anyway, the article is low on details, and I just don't see this working out too well.
Could someone explain to me why the NY Times is considered to be high quality news? Most mainstream news sources I have read, and I include the NY Times, offer precious few facts per article. Analysis of those facts is non-existent, replaced by snippets from press releases or quotes from "experts". I guess it's supposed to be intellectual if you get commentary from both sides on an issue, even if both sides are giving you crap.

Now compare that to the Economist, The Wall Street Journal, and more niche publications. There are facts! Graphs! Background information! Articles on topics other than what happened yesterday!
Maybe... Anyway, I take it as a given that in any such discussion, there will be some obnoxious people (the ones that dismiss arguments as "obviously stupid" without even thinking about them). I just ignore their attitude and try to extract ideas, information and inspiration. Personally I tend to start all sentences with "I think that...", "Maybe..." and so on, but I seem to remember PG writing somewhere that doing so is kind of lame ;-)
fixed that for you.

Now for every moron there is someone who will weigh in on the other side, but it might take a while, so unless your comment is days old I don't think you should take a downmod that serious.

Simply do the same, whenever you see a comment moderated down unfairly mod it back up again. Assuming there are more decent people than jerks I think in the long run the decent people should win out.

cheers!
I have noticed more regularly that good things are being missed... not sure what we can about it.
MyWebArchives – An Open Repository
MyWebArchives is a collection of articles, documents, tutorials, resources mainly related to LAMP and open source. MyWebArchives mainly consists of two parts, one for Tech Archives and another for Tour Archives. Tech Archives is related to technical topics and Tour Archives is related to nature & tours.
accept less crap ?

The 'new' page scrolls by so fast that it is pretty hard to keep track of all the links submitted.

That would go a long way towards getting rid of some of the frustration experienced by the 'old hands' here.

Maybe introduce categories, say 'real hacker news' and 'the rest' to begin with ?

Another easy to add feature would be something that checks the intersection between the vocabulary of the 'new' submission with the last 100 or so older submissions, above a certain threshold there could be a 'your submission is similar to 'x' message, are you sure you want to submit' confirmation.

Compliments to RiderOfGiraffes for spotting all those dupes btw!
Zumbox creates an all-digital alternative to the U.S. Postal Service
Thank you. Yeah, that's a good way of looking at it. (To be clear, my comment was fairly downmodded, because I misspoke. But what you're saying is certainly a good thing.)
I just don't see this being embraced by more than a handful of companies. Some brands are still just trying to understand how to use this for marketing purposes. Then you have the headache of policing the personal accounts that promote brands of employers.

As much as I would like to see a unique web company succeed, this doesn't exactly inspire confidence that they (Twitter) have a solid 2009 revenue plan.
So, that opens the door to a free competitor that does not charge. The wheel turns once more...
A setting in my profile which specifies the maximum width a line of text can be. Reading the long lines is annoying, but i like to keep my browser maximized for other purposes.
Canada 2008 real GDP growth rate: 0.7%

US 2008 real GDP growth rate: 1.4%*

Whats the point of not having bank failures when you earn less? Or another way to put it: whats the point of not loosing money if you don't have any to begin with.

A more extreme example: During the 1930s, there was one notable country which did not experience an economic depression. That country was the USSR. As it had a command economy, the planners decided against a depression and that was it. However, they could not allocate agricultural resources effectively and had a famine instead. So, back then, it was very easy to say the the USSR is great as it has no depression but whats the point when they have no food.

* Source: CIA world factbook (search google).
Gizmo5 Launches OpenSky, Free Service to Call Skype From Any VoIP Phone
Too bad MBAs don't tend to start businesses. Most programs are feeder streams for finance and consulting these days.

That's my admittedly non-statistical impression. I'd be very curious to find out what the actual statistics are and how it compares to the general population.
MooTools 1.3 News and Updates
One Giant Leap for Robot-Kind
I believe that the only way to make customers pay for articles again is in conjunction with hardware (such as the Kindle) and an online store (such as iTunes). I hate reading long articles on my monitor. (I do it because there's no other option than buying the paper - but for one article?.) I'd be happy to pay in order to be able to read a good article on the subway. Not $1/article, mind you, but even a few cents per article would turn into a nice sum of money for the newspapers.
Morrant - Discount cricket equiment shop
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Economics of Information Security