skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The culture has changed entirely. I'd argue that there are groups just as good nowadays. The music industry has just branched out far more.

Radiohead, My Bloody Valentine, Neutral Milk Hotel. Of Montreal. Nirvana, The Flaming Lips. Belle & Sebastian. I'm naming a very slim set of music: I'm ignoring everything that's not rock. And yeah, they're different from the 60s bandset, but different isn't always worse. Radiohead's music is more complex than any 60s musician I can think of save Zappa, and his work picked up in the 70s and 80s.

Back then, outside activities were encouraging people to all group together. Now it's all divided. You wouldn't get the guitar virtuosos of the world - and they're better now than they ever have been in history - playing next to pop acts - which are arguably catchier than the stuff back then, thanks to the science of pop writing. They're separate fields; they've split off. Now, instead of a focused field, things have split and branched and turned into a hundred thousand separate branches.

I think that I like modern culture better than I would have liked the 60s. I like the Decemberists. I like that they're quirky book rock. I enjoy Harry and the Potters. Neither one is The Beatles, but nowadays instead of 20 big names I listen to a hundred small names and each one has something to fascinate me.

This nostalgia pisses me off. You never have a period of "bad stuff." Not in anything. You just have periods where the good stuff is more focused and easier to find.
I have tried to search for MySQL vs. PostgreSQL benchmarks and most of them date to 2007. Are there any recent benchmarks that compare these databases?

I personally use MySQL and I think it's an OK database (performance and installation wise) and I think it's a bit risky to jump on PostgreSQL when most others use MySQL (e.g. Flickr, Facebook, Yahoo, Google just to name a few).
I stopped reading there: "Juan Domingo Perón, the Argentinean dictator". I'm from argentina, and he was not a dictator, but a president elected democratically. The guy obviously doesn't know what he's talking about.

(just in case, let me say here that even those who were very opposed to Peron in argentina never called him a "dictator". they would call him fascist but not a dictator)
Even more shameful that they can't run their operation on that much money. I appreciate it costs money to retain good writers, but $1bn a year? Surely that's enough to run a newspaper on?
The article presents the problem as mostly organizational and not with the actual software. Maybe the parent comment was a little off topic, but it also serves to further illustrate the problem.

The parent commenter was familiar enough with the product to know he wanted to use it, but the project and its strategy is so disorganized that he walked away empty handed. Now he's unknowingly spreading misinformation to other people who may be deciding whether or not to use the product.

This is really a perfect example of what the article discussed. MySQL tries to present itself as an open source organization but does not function as such, resulting in confusion and frustration among contributors. The fact that consumers are also confused over what they can and can't do only goes to show that these mixed messages have permeated the entire organization.
News & Information about Home Audio Reviews
All of the great equipment that you have for your new home theater won't work as well if you don't set up your theater properly. The home theater design will make an impact on the quality of the video and sound.
Functions in Ruby aren't first class citizens...

You can assign them to a variable, and you can write out a function literal. What more does it take to be a "first-class citizen"?

...for a given function you can't request / modify it's syntax tree

And what language does let you do that? Macro systems like let you do it at compile-time, but when you use the phrase "request an AST", it sounds like you're doing it at runtime...
A decade ago with Blink 182 and Brittany Spears? Or 10 years before that, with Mr. Roboto?

Most people will always remain largely tasteless. That's nothing new. Popular music will always be worse than the real cutting edge, because pop music hit its peak and now it's in recline. The Beatles were that fusion of cutting edge and pop, and now that they're done music is changing again.

I agree with you about the rest, though.
You are forgetting that most consumers don't know how to get the information themselves. Actually it's a challenge just to get them to care. but for those who do, it's surprising that telling them to get cfls or led lights or even a programmable thermostat is a surprise. New homes need a central stupid-easy component to help remind consumers. The real target market for all these businesses is not necessairly the end consumer...it's the homebuilder and the utility company
I think this fear is overblown. You already see educational institutions and individuals paying different prices for box software compared to business users. Large and medium-sized businesses also probably wouldn't cheat the fee system. Again, look to boxed software: would a major company run pirated copies of Office 2007? It would be pretty easy for them to, but it's not a huge expense and if anyone found out than it would be extremely embarrassing. (It would be much easier to find out about businesses cheating with twitter just by having some superficial distinction like a badge or icon on the twitter site for paid users)
Because access to the WSJ can be charged to its readers' expense accounts. Customers are a lot less price-sensitive when someone else is picking up the tab.

Given that the financial climate will presumably lead to some corporate cost-cutting, there's probably an opportunity for someone to undercut the incumbent business-news providers (WSJ, Bloomberg, Reuters) in the next two years.
It's because society is predominantly white. We see anything coming from the outside as cutting edge because we stick to our own slim category.
Because having thousands of real users running your code gives you insight that automate tests simply cannot match.
O'Reilly Labs: RDF For All of Our Books, Plus Bookworm Ebook Reader
Great point. We're definitely not a design oriented team... a lot of effort has gone into classification and monitoring, not so much on look. We'll probably be considering upleveling the design next (thanks everyone for the comments)
Okay, yep! We secretly agree. I thought you were saying that all genius comes from non-humankind. I agree that there's an objectivity to taste and that we all approach it.

I'd differ, though, in saying that we are our own standard. The greatest art is that which most reflects its creator.
Dunno why you're being downvoted: that's a good counterargument. I'd have debates with this over a teacher. "There are no absolutes" is an absolute, and as such it's not entirely correct, because on occasion there are absolutes.
Regarding the learn Objective C part, can anyone reccomend some good tutorials on memory management? I still need some rules to follow regarding what to release, what not to, how to release it, and when. Is there a simple model I could keep in my head while programming so it all makes sense to me?
Uh, here's how a hash table is commonly built. Ruby's may be optimized, but the jist is the same.

You have N buckets, a hashing function for key => bucket #, and each bucket has a linked list of value pointers. You hash the key down to a bucket number, walk the list until you find your key, which will give you your value.

To get all the keys, you need to walk all the buckets' lists, which is O(n).
How many of you actually Police the new section of HN? I will flag maybe a couple stories per week, anyone with a much higher rate?

Maybe the site should encourage those with higher karma to spend more time policing (the put up or shut up method).
The Woz: Dancing With The Stars
very interesting, thanks. I could like to simulate the problem in order to check how my simple algorithm performs compared to others described in the article.

EDIT: I analyzed a bit the differences between Yale University algorithm using M conters and my algorithm. It is interesting that while the Yale's algo gives you all the top elements with a given minimal frequency it is O(M) because you have to decrement M counters for every new element not matching any of elements in the M registers.

My algorithm even if randomized (so you are not sure you track all the top M elements, but the output will be an approximation of that) can bring the M-probably-top-elements using O(1) time for element. The memory used is O(M) in both the algorithms. I wonder if the algorithm I proposed was described or not.

Note how you can trade time for accuracy selecting more accurately what element to drop to add the next one. If you sample three elements dropping the minimum of the three the accuracy will be a given one, but if you sample ten elements it will be different. I wonder if somebody is able here to analyze this algorithm more in depth.
> And what language does let you do that?

Io does.

http://hackety.org/2008/01/05/ioHasAVeryCleanMirror.html

But functions are first class objects in Ruby (with some quirks regarding the difference between a proc and a bloc).
Why no multitouch on the G1? Because Apple said so.
Better title: "Market analyst speculates $99 iPhone Coming This Summer"
Evolve 2009
Great Britain was very close to complete banking collapse on October 10th too. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1127278/Revealed-Day...
How can it have a range of 300km/185 miles when it's effectively tethered to its water supply?

How can you call the water "fuel" when it's simply being used as a reaction mass, and the energy supply is at the pump?

I could go on, but it seems singularly pointless. Cute toy, great fairground ride, useless as a "jetpack".
Attention Ye Olde Internet Nerds, Potential Gig Opportunity
If it has mutable state of any kind, then I expect it would be considered data, for his purposes (concurrency by avoiding shared mutable state).
Also, documentation is hard to find on the mysql.com site. If it weren't for google taking me directly to the page I need on a search for "mysql [searchterm]", I'm not sure how long it would have taken for me to find the doc I needed this morning on their site. It's as if they've decided to ditch the main community of their users. :)
I think the original article misguided some people. It all looked very simple, update the code and put it in production. That _is a horrible idea_, as some have noted.

What's not horrible is having thousands of tests, on dozen of machines, 9 minutes to-live, with selective updating of users, and rollbacks, as this article has explained.

The original post was too light on details, I guess. Its intention was not to be comprehensive anyway, the focus was why recently changed code should be put in production ASAP. But it looked like the author was simply FTPing after commit. And the whole "SOMEONE IS WRONG ON THE INTERNET" thing kicked in.
Already posted:

Here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=473496

Here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=472975

People - do your homework, especially if you're new here. Search first before posting:

http://searchyc.com/

Otherwise you just look lazy, stupid, or both.
Imagine that? Who loses when online instruction wins? Professors. This has been a problem for innovation in education for decades. Established interests have a seat at the table, but not kids. Did anybody ask students about their experience? The beauty of online learning is that it is a supplement to core instruction that can be paced to meet the needs of students. As a replacement to AP english it probably is not as effective but when schools cut out German, what's a kid to do? Clay Christensen notes this in his new book, Disrupting Class - I'd encourage anyone thinking about innovation in education (especially as it relates to online learning) to read this important book.
Gawker and TechCrunch are at one extreme, The Economist and The Atlantic are at the other.

Both of those extremes are easy to monetize... Now that I think about it, I'm not sure how financially stable Gawker and TechCrunch are.

But my point is:

Popular rags are cheap to produce and can live off ads.

Intelligent content, on the other hand, can find paying cosumers.

I think the problem with the NY Times and others like them, is that it's hard to find a sustainable business model for the middle ground that they are on.

-EDIT-

Yet a third way is a non profit news paper like The Irish Times, funded by a grant I believe.

I hear the Seattle PI is going into chapter 11, if I was stinking rich, I'd turn it into a non-profit.
For example, if you call up your local utility and ask for your neighbor's consumption, they will tell you to get lost. If Google can get access to this data, they will have a powerful and unfair competitive advantage.

Most utility companies don't know what your energy usage is until a guy comes out and looks at your meter. What Google is doing is developing a web interface for more intelligent meters which are being rolled out with Obama's stimulus package.
What are you talking about? He keeps complaining that "Where are my friends?" won't make money, and ignores the questions "Where are my customers?" and "What can I spend money on near me?" What, exactly, am I misunderstanding?

Generally, instead of complaining about how people are voting, it's more productive to say why you disagree. It's not like I just spit out a pointless troll, I addressed the substance of the article and said why I disagreed. If that rubs you the wrong way, or you think I missed something, say why or actually take the time to enunciate what I got wrong. Otherwise, please stfu.
I'd like to see a breakdown of how many apps never make the $100 back for the developer (or $100+ if you bought a Mac just to write iPhone apps).
I would imagine he's possibly downmodded because the headline is intended to be a subtle joke.
to pump water up from one lake to another when demand is low, reverse the flow when demand is high

I can't imagine that being an efficient way to store electrical energy... sure, it's cheaper than huge batteries, but what's the % of the energy retained?
Already posted: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=475099

Also relevant:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=444051

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=451398

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=451381
Then why do such an exhaustive automated test?

Why not have your local tests, automated or not, cover the common cases and error conditions to catch programmer stupidities? Then let the actual humans do the strange corner cases.

If your design is even close to correct, testing repeatedly tested code is pointless. If your design is corrupt and your implementation is sloppy, no amount of testing is going to save your ass.

I do very rapid turns and I am a one man team. I can turn my system in less that 30 minutes and have the user testing it in a live situation on the other coast. If I want 10 turns a day, I can easily do it. Low coupling, high cohesion, clean correct design, and disciplined implementation makes it possible.

I agree that doing things in small chunks is a great way to do it but doing the equivalent of a weeks worth of global automated testing for each small change seems like a silly exercise. That is except for the server hardware salesmen and system admin people.

The sales commissions and payroll look rather good. The production of real value is questionable. Bang for the buck is as important for testing as it is in any other part of product development.
I would say why if you had manners. I was obvious right on that too.
I think there are some significant differences between the "Austrians" and the "Chicago school" folks, no?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Austrian_School#Analytical_fram...

The latter are considered mainstream, even if they're certainly very biased in favor of the infallibility of markets and/or inability of governments to do anything useful. The Austrians aren't, and tend to take things to even further extremes than someone like Friedman.

I am sorry if I mischaracterized your shift from socialism to libertarianism - I was thinking of a different sort of socialism, not the nordic sort, which isn't very extreme, all things considered.

Also, don't think there isn't some commonality between various branches of economics. Most everyone, Krugman included, is basically in favor of free trade, for instance. Generally, though, they talk about the stuff they disagree about, so it tends to be more visible.
Given my experience with how often MySQL master/slave replication breaks, and how often tables corrupt themselves, I would argue that MySQL doesn't have native replication, either.
I've heard "get 'em paid or get 'em laid"
I think we are both on the same page as to what the issue is, but we disagree about the solution =)
Federal Reserve: "Within 24 hours the world economy would have collapsed"
Um, exactly what words in

"#LINQ in C# is cool
#Python doesn't quite need it as it has generatior expressions, sum(), len(), sorted() and itertools.groupby()
#so let's just wrap a nice SQL-like interface over them in order to make them more familiar"

you have trouble understanding?

I'm trying to wrap a unified and familiar SQL-like, LINQ-like interface over gen. expressions, sorted(), len() and suchlike and you remark that gen. expressions, sorted() and suchlike exist. Wow!
No, social security was a good example and a good idea.

Does anyone remember the parody of Gore on SNL saying "Lockbox"? Does anyone remember why?

See, GM is in trouble (and claiming its workers cost $75/hr) because it had huge pension obligations, but instead of saving some of its revenue for when the chickens came home to roost, it'll will just bank on the company's revenue growing without bound (like homeowners banked on their property values).

The only problem is when this doesn't happen.

Now, the government, instead of spending its money wisely and saving it for the social security insolvency that hangs over our heads, decided (under Bush II) to issue one-time "tax rebates" to stimulate the economy.

Anytime we actually have money to pay into social security, we use it for some stopgap measure like paying down our trade deficit, tax rebates, etc. If we followed a rational funding policy for Social Security, both in good times and in bad (like when you make steady payments on a mortgage) then we wouldn't be worried about it.
This document helped me out a bit: http://developer.apple.com/documentation/Cocoa/Conceptual/Me...

Also, this has a few rules you can follow: http://www.stepwise.com/Articles/Technical/2001-03-11.01.htm...

Just remember that adding elements to containers bumps their retain counts. So the following is a common pattern for me:

MyClass *c = [[MyClass alloc] init];
[arr addObject:c];
[c release];

If you're returning an object from a method, you probably want to autorelease it.
how does ticketmaster operate? ie- where can local merchants, music stores, or others sell tickets in addition to ticketmaster? I'm assuming it's only for smaller shows and such.
We can swim that far!! Lay on your back. Kick with your feet. Swim... Breathe, it keeps your chest elevated and your nose out of the water. Boats are coming if we need them, we'll make it.
This is usually when some blue eyed optimists calls on all the good upstanding old timers to vote up the good stories!

Bitter realists like myself suggest it may be time for a new new new social news site.
You give them increasingly shitty news reporting.
Couldn't an RSS feed also work in this situation?
As a side note, you don't need the line continuation characters if you wrap the expression in parentheses.
Ask HN: Industries Ripe For Disruption?
After seeing the ticketmaster/livenation merger post, there's probably a long list of industries ripe for disruption. ie- ticketing, riaa/music,etc. I'd love to start putting together a list of other industries, so hence the reason for this post.

Please post reasons and/or a piece of information that provides insight as to why that industry is ripe for disruption
Sorry for the somewhat snarky tone here (and the Epic Formatting Fail), but I can't help it.. the coincidence was just too fun :)

You mentioned that Eminem is lyrically impressive, and I thought I'd like to see that.

Google pointed me to www.eminem.net, which has lyrics for many of his songs.

Right at the top of the list, there's an album called "Encore", which just happened to contain this little gem of a song called "Ass Like That".

Here's how it starts:

-----

Ohh Baby, The way you shake it
I can’t believe it, I ain’t never seen an ass like that
The way you move it, you make my peepee go DOING DOING DOING
I don’t believe it, it’s almost to good to be true
I ain’t never seen an ass like that
The way you move it, you make my peepee go DOING DOING DOING

-----

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XsRoe1bJQkk

Now compare this to Prince's "Little Red Corvette", which starts with these words:

"I guess I should have known / by the way you parked your car sideways / that it wouldn't last.."

I always thought that Eminem was just a record-company sockpuppet, cashing in on how white people have a strange tendency to equate sounding angry with having attitude, and that, in turn, with artistic merit.

Just another part of that evil, evil trend that started with Nirvana's "Smells Like Teen Spirit", continued with Linkin Park and the like, and will apparently never end.

> I didn't like rap for a long time. Last week something clicked and I finally just understood what I was supposed to be listening for.

Well, I started listening to rap as a kid, around 20 years ago, and I can assure you that Eminem is not what you should be listening to (or for).

Please take some time to check out these instead:

A Tribe Called Quest ("People's Instinctive Travels & The Paths Of Rhythm", "The Low-End Theory")

De La Soul ("Three Feet High & Rising", "De La Soul Is Dead")

Jurassic 5 ("Jurassic 5", "Power In Numbers")

Public Enemy (eg "Shut Em' Down", "Can't Truss It", "Give It Up"). Chuck D has attitude. The real kind.

Somewhat rap-ish: Spearhead & Michael Franti's solo work too.

.. and some old-school classics like:

Funky Four + 1 - That's The Joint (rap music's pure essence right there)

Spoonie G - The Monster Jam

Sugarhill Gang - Rapper's Delight.

Grandmaster Flash & The Furious Five - The Message.

And maybe just for the heck of it, The Fatback Band's "King Tim III, Personality Jock", where it all started.
When my partner and I built Warbook, we didn't do any market research. We saw an opportunity (Facebook Platform) and a game design that worked (Utopia) and just -built it-. We went from idea to whiteboard to code on day one. 4 weeks later we launched a successful game.

Start small, get feedback, and iterate. That's how you make a kick-ass game. (http://lostgarden.com/2007/02/rockets-cars-and-gardens-visua...)
Um, what's hard to understand in:

"#LINQ in C# is cool
#Python doesn't quite need it as it has generatior expressions, sum(), len(), sorted() and itertools.groupby() #so let's just wrap a nice SQL-like interface over them in order to make them more familiar." ?

It's getting the above-mentioned features as easy to use for the SQL-familiar programmer as possible.
My point was just that it's still the mindset of those in the newspaper business that their goal is to create an "Web newspaper," which I find similar to wondering a few decades ago whether jet fighters could ever become "flying tanks."

I don't think consumers will find much value in a 'real' Web newspaper, because the web has so much more to offer. Real-time news, real-time sports scores, live video feeds, user interaction, the list goes on and on. Newspapers have always been an imperfect media outlet restricted by their medium and distribution. The Internet promises to alleviate many of these issues. This is why I believe it is quaint to hope that we will someday have "real Web newspapers."
Now that would have been a story worth telling your grandkids about!