skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Abstract out how? For instance, this is valid code:

(if (empty? x)
foo
bar)

edit: lolz. failed at example. fixed.

foo is the result of if x is empty, and you can tell it is not a function call because it has no parens. Whitespace is merely a style consideration, as it is in C++ or Java.

There are ways to save time/trouble within the language. For instance, in Clojure

(foo (bar (baz (quux x))))

can be rewritten as

((comp foo bar baz quux) x)

There's also stuff like apply, ->, and ->> in Clojure, which have similar purposes (flattening out the nesting a bit). And for anything particularly syntactically onerous, you can always add sugar with macros.

Ultimately syntax is more about ease than it is about power or simplicity. I think it's worthwhile to try to look beyond that into what the code is saying rather than how it's saying it. You have to do this anytime you learn a significantly different language anyway, right?
My morbid curiosity with Coworking Space Closings
Eat, Pray, Geek in Bali
What benefits have you noticed from coding this in rails instead of PHP? Does it run faster or more efficiently?
> don't think of it as of a number!

By the same token, you shouldn't think of a real "number" as a number, but as an infinite sequence of rational numbers. Yes, all of the reals are infinite sequences of rationals.

Also, a rational isn't a number but an ordered pair of integers. (Technically, the set of the rationals is the set of all ordered pairs of integers (excluding the ones with zero in the second position) with an equivalence class defined on them.)

The integers are also not numbers, but the naturals with a sign adjoined to them.

Finally, the naturals aren't numbers but sets of sets, with zero the empty set and all further integers built inductively from that.

So... what does it really gain you to look 'inside' the numbers you use?
> then I pounce with an upvote, giving it a second vote in a short period of time. Is that gaming the system?

One person, one account, one vote, and no co-ordinated voting by a group. Thus, no cheating.

It's also noteworthy that someone else thought the content was good enough to post.

Voting, logging into a different account, and voting again is obviously cheaty. Having ten different accounts to vote would obviously be cheaty. Having a facebook group who upvote articles submitted by their members is obviously cheaty. Paying for upvotes is obviously cheaty.

It's a shame Atlantic decided to cheat. They had good content.

Is that pushing another worthy submission down that really deserved a better chance?

HN POWER USERS read the [new] tab, and not the front page, so it doesn't really make much difference. There are a few people that I have bookmarked and I check their submissions once a week or so to see if there's anything interesting there. Admittedly this is sub-optimal.
Every time I hear about the inevitability of the singularity, all I can think about is what a precariously balanced collection of hacks actual computer programs are at their core, and how far off that is from true intelligence. Am I just pessimistic or are we a complete paradigm shift or two away of even getting close to true AI?
Termgraph - bar graphs in your terminal
I have a Philosophy Ketchup list as well, it's too bad that you halted at the start. Nothing is more painful than a boring book.
I did not read the full post, but the basic gist reminds me of the book 'How to sell at margins higher than your competitors.' I wasted a lot of time in my early 20's reading business advice books, but that book is well worth the time. It transformed my perspective on prices, what customers you want, and how to sell. Although it was written for salespeople in commodity markets (think lumber supply), it transformed my small software company. I highly recommend it.
I designed the Go site, so I just wanted to point out some things.

The Gopher is the logo and our brand identity. He was designed by Renée French, an award-winning illustrator. Perhaps you think his presence is amateurish, but I disagree. We are professionals, but we are also a community and we like fun. The gopher is emblematic of Go as a project.

I gave plenty of thought to the typography and colors. There is a spare color palette, and I chose complimentary blues and yellows. I chose a consistent set of font sizes. You may have a different aesthetic taste to me, but you can't say that no thought was given. Also, the darkest text on golang.org is #222. There is no pure black.

The previous design had a max-width for all docs, but it was widely criticized by users of the site. That's why I removed it in the redesign. The users are happy, and I'm not one to disagree with them. If you find it hard to read you can just make your browser window narrower. This was a UX decision.

Ultimately the site is a resource and I certainly spent more time concentrating on UX than the visual appearance. It may be simple and it may not have enough gradients (or whatever) for your tastes, but the design is consistent and well thought out.

Thanks for taking the time to write up your thoughts. I know your heart is in the right place, but in the end you did come across as presumptuous and holier than thou.
Using Datomic from Ruby
>Also strange to say 'Alien' every time they say 'planet'. What else could it be - a planet right here on Earth?

To be fair, it could simply mean an exoplanet, a planet outside of our solar system. I suppose "alien planet" is more intuitive than "exoplanet."

We've grown quite accustomed to the planets in our backyard, so I think the word alien is quite evocative here. I was born about 2 decades after the first moon landing, but the first confirmed exoplanets weren't discovered until my lifetime. That's pretty fricking amazing to me.
Does this mean Arc could be sued by Yahoo?
Agree.

Or, at the very least, send a short email to PG with the names. And I guess Reddit has a useful contact for this kind of organised voting ring.
Another variant of "build a better mousetrap and the world will beat a path to your door"?

I thought we'd debunked that old chestnut enough times by now. Most of the most successful startups have used some techniques which later (or earlier!) got classified as "dark patterns", "cheating", or what have you. I have at least 2-3 articles on swombat.com that specifically cover the idea that in many contexts where the appearance of success is a precondition to success, you should "fake it till you make it".

Entrepreneurship is about finding and exploiting business opportunities. Finding loopholes in the world of promotion and marketing is an important part of that art.
Father Sends Son’s Model Train Into Space
attach your images with your gf and send it to all you friends with email, and then everybody will post a comment, I mean email.
This is something that is rampant right now on HN. As someone who writes his own new content for this specific community, the voting rings are just big turn off. I dont participate in them, and will not upvote when a fellow engineer asks me to do so (disclaimer: I have done it three times, but stopped because it felt wrong). I do, however, don't think that it will ever be stopped. It just pushes me to write better stuff and to improve my use of analytics.
Top of my list are Node.js and Clojure.
Pretty much everyone who's been banned from Facebook or G+ wants this, although they may not realize it.
I've often wondered why it is that a 400 comment, 200+ point submission submitted within a few hours sits below a 60 comment, 100 point submission submitted 8 hours ago.

I don't know if it's flagging, or user trust - but it's not clear to me that there is a direct relationship between score+age+comments and how high profile a submission is.
Explanation by way of example:

Teen pregnancy. School stabbings. Teacher abuse scandals. Classroom mayhem. Flat test scores. Declining graduation rates. It's enough to make Japanese parents wish their kids went to school in America.

(That is pretty much verbatim from an essay I wrote in college. I use this trick a lot.)
A water rocket made from household bits and bobs
Can you point me to previous discussions on HN about this well-known problem, I can't seem to find any using Google search.
ISPs hosted email servers for individuals for years. I don't know why hosting a social networking server for Customers would be any different. I don't know enough about the tent.io API to decide how I feel about it, but I think that history with SMTP, NNTP, etc, shows that decentralized protocols with servers hosted by a diversity of third-parties (instead of a single Facebook, Google+, etc) can work.
> Unless someone has already done it it, it would be very interesting to see the break down of front page stories by source and by poster.

It would be fascinating to see who posts what.

Sometimes people only ever post from one source. Some people only post from a small selection of sources.

The list of sources you give is odd. Some of those have god quality content. Others, not so much.
I disagree. The software will get easier over time until it is literally plug-and-play. But it won't happen without projects like this happening.
So decentralized email (you know, "email") doesn't work?

Your mom/sister/dad/cousin are going to use a service that allows them to post status updates, instead of just using Twitter. Just like your mom/sister/dad/cousin use Gmail for email, and not their own server.
Well, that or they would go crying to the exchange operators, and if they're influential enough, they'll get their sales of Google at $20/share reversed.

We would see a lot less of these disruptions if exchanges would make everyone live with the stupid exchanges their computers made.
Send me a UNIX, too!

Do I have to prepay postage? Should I send you a self-addressed envelope?
Except sometimes you CAN throw manpower at a problem and solve it more quickly. All projects are not the same, and all problems are not the same. It largely depends on how parallelizable the work is and how competent the overall system architecture is.

Point being: lets not turn platitudes into rules:)
We are launching a hosted version very soon, and expect others to as well.
> "It's more about the collective voice and reiterating that you can't treat your developer community like crap."

But they can. The rode the 3rd party ecosystem all the way to the top, and now you're no longer needed. They can do whatever they want, which really sucks, and is kind of a dick thing to do, but even collectively you (plural, as in the whole of Twitter's dev base) have no sway over Twitter now.

I'm not condoning Twitter's actions, but IMO petitioning them when it's clear that this is the result of a major strategy shift, is just wasting your breath. It will aggravate you and be ultimately useless.
Tentd seems to be based on Ruby and Rack. Since it's based on Rack, I'm assuming then that it operates over HTTP. Which leads me to my current frustration...

Why does everything have to be built on top of HTTP? Sure, I know you're going to say, because it works, and works well that's why.

But think about it. The reason why we have all these centralized services in large part is because of HTTP. HTTP has made it really easy for someone to build a centralized service, or application, like Facebook or Twitter. Before the days of HTTP, if I wanted to build a service, I probably would invent a protocol like Telnet, Gopher, SMTP, IRC etc., which is often naturally decentralized, instead of programming a web application.

Perhaps if we want more decentralized services, we should focus on frameworks that make it easier to construct TCP/UDP based protocols.

Just a thought.
I saw, and experienced, this approach in school and see no value in it for improving your understanding complex numbers. The point of the approach is to teach students about abstraction and formalism, and complex numbers happen to be a convenient place to do it. But the formalism is a barrier for building up a more convenient mental model about what is really going on.

Before disputing this, in any calculation that you've ever done by hand with complex numbers, do you naturally write it as (a, b) or a + bi? I always do the latter, and it saves me both time and conceptual effort.

And a random note. If you go on past advanced Calculus, you'll encounter two subjects that take Calculus and go back to the basic foundations and build them up. The first is real analysis, for which you have to learn all of the ways that things fail to work out like you would want them to. The other is complex analysis, where you wind up learning all of the ways that everything has to work out amazingly perfectly.

The difference between the two subjects is that "differentiable" in the 2-dimensional structure of complex numbers is a far, far stronger condition than "differentiable" is for the real numbers. Indeed there actually exist functions that you can construct which are infinitely differentiable everywhere in the real numbers, but for which on no interval can you extend them to a function that is differentiable in the complex plane.
Credit to Mapquest for opening their data to all and giving OSM a big push forward.

Correct me if I'm wrong but Google Maps started with public data. Data you tradtionally could find in public and university libraries and from government sources, even before the web existed. And then what they found crawling the web. They saw the potential value and have just added to and improved it a great deal.

But they did not start from zero. Nor has Apple.

Do not underestmate the "free" contributions to this type of data. It is not insignificant. It really should be open. In my opinion.
"Checkout this Amiga, promoting the quality of graphics it can produce."

Actually, those were, and are, good graphics.
This is a quote from Jeff's response:

"To be crystal clear here, our intentions are that we will not charge for development that happens under the “App Explore” product (i.e., the free version). Usage of the Appcelerator platform (Titanium Mobile SDK, Titanium Studio, Analytics and Cloud Services) at this level is permitted for all applications, both commercial and free, with no financial obligation to Appcelerator."

Again, APL code on Github. APL is a permissive and "biz friendly" license as we all know.
You are assuming that additive inverse is unique. Also you are assuming that -1(-1) is some value at all; you could write an extremely similar proof that leaves you with 0/0 = 1 and it would be faulty to conclude that 0/0 actually is 1.
And there's also IRC as an example of a decentralized service that is still alive.
This might be (just a little) too pessimistic.

The sweet spot both Tent and Diaspora are/were aiming for is one where most users use somebody else's service, but a few crazy neckbeards choose to self-host.

The neckbeards who actually care (often quite unreasonably) about privacy, etc, provide a very useful service to the ordinary users - they keep the central service(s) honest, ie, keep them from turning into Facebook. Because it's possible to escape, because the neckbeards keep that possibility open, the ordinary users are not captured.

At least, that's the theory. Diaspora didn't execute on it. Tent, well, we'll see.
New proof-of-concept bootkit targets UEFI and Windows 8
why one server? the whole point is that you can communicate seamlessly with people on other servers.
Would be great to read another list for: 10 Things I, As a Entrepreneur, Wish More Developers Knew
Though I believe the idea is that Tent be more like an email server: email hosts are able to offer their own features and interfaces, yet remain interoperable with one another.

Most people don't host their own email service, but most people do benefit from using email – and the best part of it is that there's no monolithic Email Inc. that could someday go bankrupt and bring everyone's emailing days to a close.
Thanks for a detailed explanation. The one on matrices helps too even though others also posted the same idea.

>> We have a universe of discourse that has a bunch of atomic things. A "set" is then a collection of things

This is where I get stuck. In set theory, they define numbers (and addition) starting from a set and element-of operator. I cannot imagine a bunch of atomic things without imagining numbers/counting first. (PS: "collection" would be another word for a set, so does not help to define it.) So it seems to me that unless set and element-of are left undefined (as others here have suggested), natural numbers are more fundamental than sets.

>> 0,9999... = 1

What I am getting is that the "limit" is implicit in the statement above even though often unstated. The ellipsis is what signifies the limit there, being otherwise not mathematically defined.

>> Call that collection A

I get the precise definition of sack B. I am missing it for sac A. I understand what happens on a given cube, and that cubes in sac A are numbered 1 though infinity. Is there anything to say about the numbers written on two different cubes in sac A?

Basically what you are saying is that sac A cannot have all possible combinations like sac B is defined to have. I am not sure why that is. I see that you just added a comment on another related comment from me. I'll read that first.
I don't see how the tent protocol has any hope of scaling to large numbers of users / servers. The notification traffic for anyone with a significant number of "followers" is going to be significant. I think the view that the tent spec authors are taking is a bit too simplistic if this protocol is intended to be Twitter or Facebook-scale.
FYI. In most European countries (and presumably elsewhere) the agency model is tightly regulated because the employee pays model (i.e retainer fees) is ripe for exploitation of people desperate for jobs.
> Why does everything have to be built on top of HTTP?

Port 80 is already open.
Their "answer" does not even say whether or not they contacted the client and had the app pulled and if so, under what pretense.

BS.
My point isn't about throwing manpower at a problem, it's about diminishing returns. The notion that if you put two people on a problem they will be able to solve it twice as fast is a logical fallacy. That's a fact, not a platitude. That being said, if you put 100 people on the problem, you may be able to solve it quickly, but even then you will eventually reach a point where adding more people does not add any more benefit. That's what I wish more non-technical folks understood.
Decentralized protocols seem to work well for things like email and web sites though. I think the idea is that most people will use a provider to run the server, but it is possible/easy to switch between providers. The lack of lock-in and network effects at the provider specific level mean that competition can do its thing and people won't have to put up with shenanigans like retroactive privacy changes a-la Facebook.
Ig Nobel honours ponytail physics
I'm sympathetic, but I think the approachability problem says more about programming culture than it does about parens. People optimize for the ease-of-use case (read: syntax) over factors which have much more fundamental implications throughout the lifetime of a piece of software.

I mean, learning syntax is really not where we spend most of our time while writing software, right? All else being equal, the amount of time it takes to learn new syntax is orders of magnitudes less than the time you spend, in aggregate, finding and fixing bugs. So it's a misguided trade-off, and (fortunately or unfortunately) I don't think swapping square brackets for parens (or whatever) is going to change people's preferences for what looks and feels easiest for them.
Regarding 4, don't believe anyone who claims it's an intuitive result; it is simply a properly of real numbers that you cannot have nonzero infinitesimals and that any two distinct numbers have a number between them that is not equal to either (infinitely many in fact). You can construct alternate number lines that do allow nonzero infinitesimals and then .9999... actually is not equal to 1 under that number line; this number line is a strict superset of Reals just as Reals are a strict superset of Rationals. Most of the practical properties of real numbers would still apply to this new number line; it is actually only a historical convention note that .999... is actually equal to 1.
You say decentralized services never work, and then give an example of the most successful one: email.

I don't know why you are assuming that everyone will have to run their own.

Also, it seems very cynical/naive to think that just because such systems aren't currently working/won't currently work with given social structures, that this will always be the case. Do you disagree?
Oh, so when it suits your argument it's an MVP, when it doesn't, it's half baked. Got it.
Right, but this is Apple's own product. They had to be already set up for testing on 10.5, and made a conscious decision to stop.
Isn't 4 rotations 4i? Why is it i^4
Jeff, has deployd considered adopting a JSON-based media type like Collection+JSON or HAL or JSON-LD (and there are others, or you could roll your own) so that the JSON APIs are properly RESTful?
Additional item:

The demo that was thrown together is not ready to release into production!
All ports should be open between servers. (Edit: Ports should be open if you want. I'm not saying you should run without a firewall, but on a server the firewall is under your control, not your ISP's.)

A few of the DiSo protocols were based on XMPP instead of HTTP.
One minor correction. The integers are more naturally defined as an equivalence class of pairs of natural numbers, with (a, b) equivalent to (c, d) if and only if a+d = b+c. (Your approach does not eliminate the equivalence class issue, because you have to specify that +0 and -0 are the same.)

In this formulation, you define (a, b) + (c, d) to be (a+c, b+d). And you define (a, b) * (c, d) to be (a * c + b * d, a * d + b * c). After a little work you can prove that both operations send equivalence classes to equivalence classes.

Then you can embed as follows. The natural n gets mapped to the integer (n, 0). The integer m gets mapped to the rational (m, 1). The rational r gets mapped to the real (r, r, r, r, ....). And the real x gets mapped onto the complex number x + 0i.
Could have been worse; could have been Flash.
I would argue that evolution overall often looks like a "precariously balanced collection of hacks". So, it would be irrational to expect evolution's solution to the problem of intelligence to be any different.
So everybody agrees, except for the people who don't, who must therefore also be cranks (or something else equally dismissive).

I don't care how "settled" the science is on any subject; it doesn't necessitate diluting the discourse. I'm no climate science denier, but I'm still willing to listen to an opposing argument on that topic or any other without resorting to ad hominem. If you don't have something of value to add, please close the browser tab and get back to work.
EU Officials Propose Internet Cops On Patrol, No Anonymity, No Obscure Languages
For clarification, what's being discussed here is a new interface between kernel space and user space programs, correct? As in, if someone wanted to leverage "MegaPipe", they'd have to compile a kernel to support it?
Very few people will be able to use non-HTTP protocols from their company networks. A significant number of home users behind NAT won't be able to use them without configuration steps that normal users simply won't make.

To that add the fact that there's actually minimal benefit for most protocols to using something other than HTTP. Obviously there are protocols that are much better run over something other than HTTP, but most protocols, probably including Tent, aren't like that.

http://cr.yp.to/sarcasm/modest-proposal.txt
Is that accurate that they never pay? I thought they refused to discuss it. I didn't mean to suggest that it refuted your point either way though, as I generally agree.
Irony: there have been numerous rumours that there are mailing lists of YC founders that systematically upvote each other's stuff on HN.