skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
First, when I got to this tab, after bulk opening all the interesting links, my first reaction was that someone had their domain name hijacked. I'm not sure what that was my reaction, but I think it is the layout of the "New & Interesting" which looks about like a domain squatters link operation. Maybe if it was somehow integrated with the billboard above it wouldn't look pasted in.

Second, the billboard frightens and confuses me. Giant popups shoot out when I roll over the buttons at the bottom, but I can't seem to click on the buttons. The buttons hilight green to show they are active, but they won't click.

I see a screencast button, but I eschew those because I like to go at the speed of reading.

I can't see enough without an account to bother creating an account.

I suspect many of your features require an identity to function, like listing my equipment. Perhaps you could just create the identity as a cookie on me, then when I decide to create an account associate it at that point. Sort of "all strangers get an account", but you have to "create an account" to make it permanent.
If you went up to my grandma and started telling her why she needs to buy a $100 book that tells her how to get rich, with enough convincing she would seriously buy it from you. This is because my grandma is not very money-wise and is especially vulnerable to that kind of thing. I doubt she is particularly unique in this respect among grandmas.

Do you see the problem here? Do you perhaps realize why I might want to discourage salesmen like that from coming in contact with my grandma? Look, it's just a guy selling a book, right? If my grandma decides that she needs it then that's up to her, right?

Why is it hard to understand that there are people out there who can be taken advantage of legally but shouldn't be? There is a point when you cross the line from providing value to taking unfair advantage of others. It's reasonable in the latter case to call it a scam, ebook or no ebook.
I can throw a playing card more than a hundred feet.
I know this, but I'm thinking the freshly baked pizza with fresh ingredients must taste fresher than a microwaveable frozen pizza...

edit: Now that I think about it, they even have rising-crust frozen pizza. And we even eat some sometimes. I don't know what I was thinking!
Lately we're finding good arguments for the idea that people start declining in abilities earlier than we thought.

I got the impression that the research was going the other way. A lot of current research reporting seems to indicate brain plasticity is broader and longer-lasting than we thought.

Course. I'm 27+ so a bit of bias might be creeping in.
IF you are coming from a Java background, I strongly recommend you to use clojure. I have never tried clojure myself. But, it is a functional language that is built on JVM. So, it basically supports all the JAVA library you may have used before.
I'm glad they got it right by saying that they aren't trying to do search better than Google. Making your competitor the standard for comparison sets you up for failure.

It's the reason an iPod-killer, Google-killer, Twitter-killer, etc will never be one.
I've noticed that newspapers (unhelpfully) will directly link to the home page of a university, but rarely link to commercial websites which they feature. I think this is an editorial policy to artificially maintain a veneer of journalistic impartially, but the effect amounts to lipstick on a submarine.
Unfortunately, the reason that we are in this recession is that people took too much risk. We have been living with a net negative national savings rate for a while now. That consumption of capital is partly what has allowed this downturn to occur. We need to be saving now more than ever.

Also, there is no paradox of thrift. When people save, it does not mean that they do not produce, merely that they are refraining from consumption. And at a savings rate of five percent, we are hardly refraining at all.

Normally the higher savings (refrain from consumption, higher interest in future goods over present ones) would cause businesses to invest more in longer term production, i.e. making more future goods. Thus a higher savings rate is responsible for a higher future standard of living, and more risk taking. So attacking the savings rate and saying that we shouldn't be so careful is a terrible idea.

That said, businesses are still likely to take too much risk because of the low interest rates. The way that the higher interest in future goods signals the companies is normally through lowering interest rates, which the federal reserve has done recently even though there has not been a corresponding increase in savings. This imbalance between business expectations and actual consumer desires is what causes booms and busts.

So please don't tell me to be risky with my money. I'm not saying that taking advantages of opportunities is a bad idea. I like the idea of being an entrepreneur myself. But telling us that a five percent savings rate will cause our depression to get worse is like telling a sick person that taking a 15 minute nap will make them more sick. They probably need a lot more sleep than that, and encouraging otherwise may prove disastrous.
This looks much simpler than the old days, I may use this on some diskless machiens.

If you use AoE, do remember that anyone on your ethernet can have their way with your data.
The main reason for this major change is that even in the presence of information-sharing provisions of treaties, Switzerland refused to provide any information on most account holders that were evading US (or other countries') taxes, on the rationale that evading non-Swiss tax was not a criminal offense in Switzerland. Cooperation was virtually nil, especially in the tax arena.

Depending on the scope of the changes, this could be huge news.
PyPy and Psyco
What happens if we extend life to, say, 150 and what we get is this long, 100-year decline into complete cognitive paralysis?

I think if they can make you live forever, they can also probably preserve your brain, too.
I don't buy it.

I suspect that it is more related to dull/stressful work environments than age (at 22 you're either still in college or fresh out from it).
That's what I've heard too - our brains are supposed to stay in good shape much longer than our bodies.
Gobby: collaborative editor supports multiple documents and multi-user chat.
There is a Montreal based company called Gamerizon that is currently developing a Scheme based game called QuantZ.

Check out their website for the demo video and screenshots of the game:

http://www.gamerizon.com/

Btw, they are now hiring.
The line "Java itself will diminish..." did feel a little Middle-Earth to me.

This is not so much a criticism, but I'm not entirely sure what this article is trying to say. He seems to be saying that Java and C/++ were really a springboard into a new way of looking at problems in computing.

I think the problem I have with this is (1) I don't think we really know what that "new" thing is yet, so it's hard to really judge the legacy of Java/C++ --

and (2) a lot of these emergent languages have been around a long time... So perhaps it misses the factors that have somehow turned the tables. Perhaps the issue with Java isn't the way it handles primitives, but something else more fundamental altogether.
Leaf is a data constructor for the type Tree, it's not supposed to be a generally reusable entity, and it wouldn't make sense to treat it as one, just like it wouldn't make sense to treat a constructor in Java as reusable across classes. There's not really even anything there to reuse - it's just a symbol attached to a very small bit of structure, linked to the data type Tree.
Poll: How old are you?
I just read this comment http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=516949 and noticed that a few wellknown usernames talked about their age, and were in their 40's and 50's. I was surprised because I thought the crowd here was mainly young.

So I thought I'd make a poll to see how old you guys all are.

Don't pick more than one ;-)
under 15
15 - 19
20 - 24
25 - 29
30 - 34
35 - 39
40 - 44
45 - 49
50 - 54
55 - 59
60 or over
So essentially, the positive legacy of Java is that the JVM has provided a platform for other languages to compile to (and has funded the continued study of dynamic language optimization that began with Smalltalk and Self), and that techniques such as garbage collection are finally mainstream.

The article doesn't seem to explicitly mention the legacy of C++, but the implication seems to be, "We now know ... not to make that same mistake again." (Maybe I'm being overly cynical.) Passing on some aspects to Java is part of it, of course.
Thai Passion. My absolute favorite weekly lunch spot, and the best late night eats downtown.

Go on Thursday at lunch for the curry of the day. It's the best panang curry I've ever eaten anywhere (and I live in the valley now, where I live within walking distance of five good Thai restaurants that all serve panang). It's not as good when ordered off the menu, as it hasn't had as long to simmer...the green beans aren't supersaturated with deliciousness the way they are at lunch on Thursday. All of the curries of the day are awesome, but panang is my favorite. Mus mun on Friday might be preferred for folks that like yellow potato-filled curries...but if you can't be there on one of those days, any curry at this place is awesome.

Marakesh Cafe and Grill is another good lunch spot...always crowded at lunch. The falafel sandwich is a lot of food for not much money, and it's almost always delicious. The lunch specials are also often very good (rarely vegetarian, though, unfortunately, so I mostly ordered off the regular menu). Not fancy, just really good food.
Terry Prachett: Why Gandalf Never Married (1985)
I talked early NetApp into covering all the side walls of the main conference room with whiteboard.

One of the interesting behaviors that I noticed that no one else seems to have commented upon is that the level of activity around a large expanse of whiteboard is related to overall mood.

When things are going well, folks are drawn to whiteboard, looking for interaction and information.

When things are going badly, they'll avoid it.
32 here. There have been a few other discussions around this: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=63294
If I'm 25, do I select 20-25 or 25-30?
>"We're a country that can barely handle a free-market debt system -- I don't even want to know what we would do with a liberalized drug market."

There are a ton of packaged assumptions and a nice non-sequitir in just this one little sentence. That's sloppy rhetoric. It would take a page to unpack and discuss them all with clear thinking.

>"Then again, I am one of those people who doesn't do drugs, drink, smoke, or eat processed foods"

Probably most of the people that advocate drug legalization aren't regular users, and many of them have never used drugs. Rather, they support legalization because of the effects of prohibition on society. I wouldn't impute selfish motives to people that disagree with you without understanding them first.
> Unfortunately, the reason that we are in this recession is that people took too much risk.

Actually, we disconnected risk from reward.
I only hope that my age will not keep me from learning new things. The most important thing when learning is to keep a good attitude. I believe that the brain can be trained to get smarter at all ages.
20 here and I like the community here because people of all different ages can talk without any form of disrespect or judgement based on age, experience, or any other factor.
(On my classified website) I only see scammers active in MLM who are making money with ebooks... ;) Sad...

The perception of ebook is pretty negative (low quality)... Amazon will improve this perception I hope...
Wait a second.

You're in Italy and you're going to a vending machine for pizza?!
I sell software, digital images, digital videos and digital audio files. Do they count as digital goods?
How To Choose a Dating Service - Dating
Doesn't the recent port of many languages to the JVM somewhat nullify his concerns?

I am curious, because I don't know much about programming language implementations yet, just enough to know what I don't know.
More like they took the wrong kind of risk. The problem was that people were expending their future incomes on present consumption-- e.g. by borrowing money to live in luxurious houses. It would not have been so bad if they'd been been borrowing money to invest it in productive assets, like more efficient machines for their businesses.
If you conspire with your doctor or your lawyer to commit a crime, then your discussions in furtherance of that conspiracy are not privileged.
YouTube - Canal de brux3d
But do you make money?
In my opinion, that would be a pretty poor decision. Most functional languages have not actually been tested on a 20 CPUs. You have no idea how optmized it will run there. You have no idea how it will scale.

You can't have strange hardware, and then decide to go with experimental software. Stateless programming can be done in any imperative language, and there are lots of languages that allow you to scale to 20 CPUs, but are very mainstream.

Parallel-Processing is not much easier in functional languages. But optimizing to place specific tasks on specific processors is much easier in low level languages. I'd say your design decision is wrong.
Why "server" instead of "servers"?
Very interesting post. I've actually been following that same exact idea - I check over the error logs to see if any users encountered an error, email them an apology and let them know I'm working on it right now, and then email them once it's worked again thanking them for their patience.

Also, for questions which have been posted, I email the author (if they've given us their email address) and ask them if they're satisfied with the answer. If not, we'll spend some more time researching it and contact some special authority.

We've done that for one week, but the results have been mixed. I still think it's critical, but it's only one factor - you need the initial userbase just to get the new users to post.

EDIT: It also occurred to me (thinking about to pg's "If you measure it you'll improve it" quote") that I'll need some substantial reporting as well. To that end, I'll be writing some rake tasks today so I can plot the data over time.
Lua actually fits his criteria quite well, IMHO. It's fast, written in fully compliant ANSI C for portability, and very explicitly designed to be embedded in C / C++. It's also been in use in industry (such as at Petrobras, a big Brazilian oil company) for over a decade, as well as numerous games (http://www.lua.org/history.html). While the language isn't hard real-time, you can control (and just pause, or completely replace) the garbage collector.

As per the OCaml example, you could either change what C type Lua uses for its primary numeric type (it uses doubles by default) or use C userdata (a garbage-collector-managed pointer to a C struct), since the collection of numbers probably has some algorithmically relevant characteristics beyond just being a huge set of numbers.
Ah, sorry, stupid mistake on my part. Pick 25 - 30

It should, of course go like this:

under 15

15 - 24

25 - 29

30 - 34

35 - 39

40 - 44

45 - 49

50 - 54

55 - 59

60 or over

There seems to be no way to edit poll choices :-(
First option is "under 15". From this you can infer pretty straight forwardly that the next option "15 - 20" means ">= 15 and < 20". (why would he skip the age 15?) ( But you have to read the last option pretty liberally :-) )

Now that I think about this, I realize that there is always one guy in every class who sits in the first row, lifting his hand to ask a question like this :-)
25-30

Take the limit as 25.0000....
Oh my, yes. Then we would truly have a silent spring, wouldn't we? Perhaps if we wrote a book of some sort, that would stir up people to save the mosquitoes.

Probably we can say the laser causes egg shell thickness depletion, Nobody who knows enough statistics to laugh at us will be heard, if we create enough public outcry.

I don't share your concern that this will cause an ecological problem. I do share your concern that it's a little silly, if you truly want to have an effect on mosquito populations in mosquito heavy areas.

If only there were a substance that's so safe, you can eat it by the gallon, that actually took care of the mosquito problem without needing to have sharks with frickin' laser beams attached to their heads, to do it. Surely if such a substance existed, we wouldn't let millions die from malaria, while we played with lasers. This is impressive, technologically, but it's like ... I don't know, 'using a laser to kill a mosquito', I guess.
Excellent point. The alternatives given should 15, 16-20, 21-25 etc.

Given this you should pick 20-25 (21-25) if you're 25.
Correct.

This is why I'm not really a big fan of stimulus incentives that essentially hand out money for people to spend - i.e. stimulate consumption.

What we need to stimulate is innovation + production (better, quicker, faster, cleaner ways to doing things).

N.B. Stimulating consumption isn't necessarily a terrible idea when it has a downstream impact on production. In fact, this lets the market drive innovation, which historically has been a good idea.

The problem is the credit environment really screwed with this -- "Wealth" was appearing that wasn't tied to some genuine increase in production. Usually this works. Extend some credit, someone builds something new/cool and we've created wealth. It doesn't work when it just leads to increased leverage.

.. And so this vanished, because it wasn't really there.

Everything has a cycle + I think it's time to turn away from stocking the consumption boiler and boost grass-roots innovation.
Someone better than me at math should say how many votes we need to have a 95% accuracy.
Absolutely 100% agree.

As I mentioned in my other comment - this is why I'm pretty suspicious of measures that are to (simply) stimulate consumption and not production. At best this is really an extremely short-term stopgap.
"When people save, it does not mean that they do not produce, merely that they are refraining from consumption."

Every transaction has two sides. Either somebody has to consume what you've just produced, or it goes into inventory. Inventory storage capacity is finite, and you see these major price crashes and production cuts (like in housing, or oil) when inventory reaches levels that are no longer sustainable.
It's may be a problem of training. A lot of people stop learning new things when then leave university so their brain could become less efficient.

Correlation don't imply causality. There is not enough facts to convince me.
I'm 34.

There's a similar poll from Dec. 2008 at Stack Overflow: "How old are you, and how old were you when you first started coding?":
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/327973/how-old-are-you-an...

Looks like that crowd is fairly young (twenties and thirties).
" All future languages should learn from this: either create a culture where you can be refactored (as Python and Ruby have done) or allow competitive species to thrive. "

If that is the case, then .net is a great platform and I think he hasn't done justice by not mentioning it. More and more languages are being made compatible with .Net giving the programmer the choice to use libraries written in other languages in the language of their choice.

But I don't agree with him at the first place. Unlike C++, Java was proprietary and it went in the same direction most of the proprietary stuff leads to. As he himself points out, many C programmers moved to C++ and we saw an era when much of the code was written in C++. But now, how many programmers are fondly moving towards Java's newer versions or towards Groovy, JRuby, Jython etc?
European Conference on Machine Learning
A lot of these "bleeding edge" tools seem very exciting - the automated testing, profiling, etc.

But I'm torn on the abstractions - 280 North's cappuccino in particular - but I think on the whole they're going to flourish. They're obviously crucial towards building any sort of reasonably complex application in Javascript.

It's hard to find the analogy - I tend to think of the transition from Asm-to-c. A lot of hardcore machine language believers complained at the lack of controls and speed they had to endure when using C. But complex applications simply cannot be managed across developers with any hope of progress when done in assembly.

In the end it'll be a compromise certainly, with frameworks like Cappuccino slowly edging out the underlying javascript.
Intersting fact: Many US customers want to get a "local" nationality to be no more American so that they can escape from all the US regulation.
I hear Nigeria is quite the place...

No, on a more serious note, if you need a secret account, something about your attitude towards finances is wrong in the first place.
Do we really need journalists? We already have political parties.

Newspapers in 1900 published political speeches in their entirety. Over the years political reporting has cut down on the politicians' own words and created an important role for journalist as meta-politician, an intermediary between citizen and politician.

We read the newspaper to find out what Labour say, what the LibDems say, what the Conservatives say, and instead we get the journalists version. If it is just neutral reporting we could go instead to the parties websites and get their views directly. If the political news has been spun by the journalist we are more strongly motivated to go to the websites to get the news straight from the horses mouth. The journalist owes his position in the system due to the need to own and operate expensive printing presses in order to disseminate information.

I've been making this point for a few years and at first it was a pretty stupid point. The websites of the political parties were crap. But my point makes sense, and on checking again today I find the websites are much improved.
Optimised to fail: Card readers for online banking
'The end of the banking secret' was yesterday's headline of 'le temps', the most serious newspaper of the french speaking part of Switzerland. I didn't read the paper, but I watched a debate on television. The main thing that changes is that Switzerland drops the distinction between tax evasion (not mentioning some of your money) and tax fraud (forging documents). Now both are illegal.

This article is weird, it quotes the times of london as its source and gets the capital of Switzerland wrong (it's Berne, not Zurich).
Interestingly enough, it seems that most respondents fall between 20-25 with the next largest group being 25-30.

>I was surprised because I thought the crowd here was mainly young.

Maybe there is something about being +40 that compels one to disclose one's age?
Here's a histogram of ages, as they appear right now in the poll. It seems they follow a poisson distribution peaking around 27.

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And these kind of polls make me feel old at 25... I hate them :-)
Poken: Tiny RFID thingies that share all your personal data with others
16. And I kid you not, I feel old when these 11 year olds are besting me with their jQuery and CSS skills and whatnot.
Being almost 40 I would say that the opposite is true ;-)
Well it looks like your original conception was correct: 89.5% of users are younger than 40ish

Under 15: 0%

15-20: 8.5%

20-25: 33%

25-30: 31%

30-35: 12%

35-40: 5%

40-45: 5%

50-55: .5%

55-60: .5%

60+: .5%
“Mother Nature doesn’t do bailouts.”
I just read this comment ... and noticed that a few wellknown usernames talked about their age, and were in their 40's and 50's. I was surprised because I thought the crowd here was mainly young.

Hey bub, who you calling not young?