skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm currently in the process of writing a C-Minus compiler in Haskell using Parsec for a compilers course. I'm working on the code generation phase now, so I'm mostly finished dealing with Parsec.

Parsec is indeed very nice, and I highly recommend it for pretty much any kind of parsing task. It certainly beats the pants off flex & bison. The biggest drawback I've found is that it has no support for error recovery. Once an error has been detected, Parsec prints it and aborts. It would be nice if you could make it recover by skipping to the next language element and accumulate the errors.
Sentencing commission ponders extra jail time for proxy users
The Kindness of Strangers
I'm not sure that was the intent. Security is hard. Most of the time these "simple" solutions are applied in the thought that we can fix our security problems easily. I think the author was just pointing that out.
Is it wrong to dislike when features are removed from a website? Is removal of features and reinstating the single stream of everything, a la Facebook circa 2004, "amazing"?
DYI: How To Set Up An Auction Using Craigslist and Google Docs
More PITA. Now you'll have to test your webapp againt another sucky browser.
First, 700,000 isn't "huge" for Facebook. They gain about that many new users in a day.

Second, the number of respondees or the proportion responding a certain way are irrelevant if the sample is biased. The poll is designed in a way that practically guarantees bias: a self-selected sample, a hot-button issue where one side cares much more strongly than the other, and the viral hooks of Facebook to make sure it gets spread far and wide.

It's worthless if you're looking to draw any real conclusions about how Facebook users feel about the new homepage. It's not worthless if you're looking to exploit people's confirmation bias and get an article all over the web.

So, YMMV, I guess.
I think it's more cost effective to just design components that are more efficient. I believe there is a whitepaper that was published by Google's datacenter engineers that points this out. I can't find it right now.

Edit: Sorry about the appeal to authority... It can be explained in simpler terms. It's more cost effective to put less energy in the system initially than trying to gather some of the wasted energy after the fact.
Take a look at Redmine (http://www.redmine.org/). We're using it for all our internal projects. The git integration is a bit sparse at the moment. You can't browse around branches. But the basics are there.
It is never wrong but saying you 'hate' Facebook because of it? Really?
Ask HN: Where can you find Government Startup Resources & Grants?
Do any of you know good sources to find government grants and other resources for starting Internet technology-based startups?
It is, of course, worth noting, that The Economist's on line edition has gotten gradually more and more free, with time.
I've seen a ton of useless Ruby shells, and while this one looks much better, I think it's still going at it the wrong way. You should start by trying to replace irb, not bash.

IPython worked it's way into my workflow because I wanted a richer "real language" REPL, and now I end up using its shell capabilities sometimes. If I had started out trying to use it as a shell it would have failed at that miserably, even though it's the best implementation I know of.
Reference for ~700,000 new users per day

http://www.insidefacebook.com/2008/12/16/facebook-now-growin...
Do academics exaggerate startup risk and belittle creativity for their own benefit?
Having people succeed on their own without a university education is definitely not something academics want.

And so it seems only reasonable that they would exaggerate startup risk and belittle the creativity involved for their own benefit.

In this sense, for academics to succeed, their students have to fail.
What are the advantages of this over Castle Monorail?
Scaling = Increasing capacity indefinitely by adding more nodes.

Caching is not scaling because by definition, it depends on a backend to provide it data.

If the backend is a database then sure, you can increase capacity by ~10x (assuming a ~90% cache hit rate), but after that, throwing more caching nodes at the problem won't do a thing if your database itself isn't scalable.

All a cache does is increase speed at decreased costs, but it is not in itself a scaling solution.
My comment shouldn't be taken literally. The point is that even if the poll is "worthless" or grossly inaccurate (it is a poll after all, not a scientific study), there is clearly discontent among the users. I've heard people in real life, seen twitter comments, and read blog posts about how people are threatening to either ban facebook or check it less frequently. But guess what: it doesn't matter. People will still use Twitter which is the whole reason facebook made this move to begin with, and I would be surprised if facebook retreated. Facebook used to be the new time consuming activity on the Internet and now Twitter is. Who knows, maybe Heyzap or thesixtyone will be the new ones.
Linq is freaking sweet. I miss it every weekday I have to write C# 2.0 and every weekend I write Python. Anyone interested in pragmatic programming languages owe it to themselves to learn a bit about Linq and why it is so pleasant to use.

The best way to learn Linq is with the 101 samples [1], but I might be bias because my friend wrote them [2].

[1] http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/vcsharp/aa336746.aspx

[2] http://www.microspotting.com/2007/12/anders-hejlsberg-intern
Well done. I love what I do... I hope that is what it means to run a start-up.
Cognitive enhancement drug may also cause addiction
GigaPan is hiring programmers
GigaPan is growing! GigaPan.org is witnessing significant growth in the community and is now actively hiring full-time software engineers to join the core development team of the website and the panorama stitching application. Applicants interested in joining now at the ground level should have all or some of the following experience and skill set:

GigaPan web site:

* Strong web development background

* Django experience is strongly preferred

* Javascript, DOM, AJAX, database and Linux experience

* PHP, Actionscript 2.0 / 3.0 and Flash experience is a plus

* JSON-based Web API use/design (GDate, Maps etc.)

* Software QA processes

GigaPan stitching and image processing software:

* Strong C++ experience

* Comfort with mathematics and image processing

* MacOS and Windows development experience

* Qt user interface experience is a plus

* Software QA processes

Please send your CV to jobs@gigapan.org and we will contact you further.
Another point: of Facebook's 175 million active users, 700,000 represents 0.4%.
"I hate it and if it doesn’t change I will only check it once in awhile"

Way to take a hard stance. </sarcasm> I think that this redesign, like the others, will face opposition from nearly everyone at first and once people get used to it they will like it or at the very least accept it. I think that quote says it all. The user is unwilling to stop using the site despite hating the design.
Please, if you're going to act as a proponent of responsible statistics, don't exaggerate like you did in your first line. (EDIT: wow, this is not an exaggeration. An adjacent link confirms it. Currently eating my words.)

True, 700,000 is not a staggering number for Facebook, but is a statistically signifiant portion of their most active users. I wouldn't put money on the figure of 94%, but I think it correctly indicates a strong trend.
That's not true: he was able to write the right software at the right time[1], when nobody else had will/time/whatever to scratch their own itch. The Mongrel HTTP library is today the de-facto standard for running Rails applications, and on it companies like Engine Yard based their business.

Like was previously said in this thread, he's a passionate hacker, and puts his passion on his sleeve. While I don't particularly appreciate the excess of harsh in his posts, I consider it no different than Torvalds writing "You're full of shit" on LKML.

The main problem here is about the "people" perception about whate they find "written on the internet", and their constant need of finding an hero to follow: in this scenario, if you're a respected and known developer, you simply cannot ignore your influence on the "crowd" and you have to measure the harshness of your writeups.

I think that the one that best described this situation was Antonio Cangiano, on his blog post "Let's all grow up": http://antoniocangiano.com/2009/01/28/lets-all-grow-up

[1] http://markmail.org/message/g6e4loorw3p7plsk
"When Google came on the scene, a lot of people said search was a solved problem."

That's true, but I think one big advantage of google was that for anyone used to the existing search engines it would only take like 3 seconds to notice google was better. It wouldnt be the same thing today for, say, a better flickr.
Thank you for this link.

It also reports 13 million users log in once per day. That, in the context of Facebook, is what I'd call an "active user". These, overwhelmingly, are the people who are taking this poll. 700,000 therefore represents about 5% of the core userbase.
I really dislike these posts, which are all the same "Person who skips college retires at 24" or "College really needed? This man makes 400,000 a year!"

Of course college doesn't guarantee that you'll come out making $100k a year or more, but also NOT going to college is the same.

As happy as I am for this person, I hope no one gets the wrong idea from these posts and just drops out. Having an idea is one thing, putting it together and having it be a success is another. If anything, I would say the YouTube and Facebook guys had it right, they made the product during college, released it during college, succeeded during college, and subsequently left college. Thats the way to do it IF ANY.

And for some people, school just isn't there thing. Anyways I'm rambling, I think my point has been made.
Facebook users have complained about every change from the notification feeds onwards...
Perhaps using sub-addressing and the '+' or '-' character like GMail or qmail.
Ask HN: Do you enjoy programming or do you see it as a means to an end (start a business)?
This is something I've been asked personally a number of times by both people within and outside the tech industry, and I was curious what the opinions/feelings of the Hacker News community were.

Do you enjoy programming? Is it just a way to build your vision, but you don't find it fun (enjoyable)? Both, perhaps? Obviously, this might not be just a black/white issue for a lot of people, too.
The one thing you're forgetting is that this happens _every_ time there's a new website redesign for Facebook. Its actually very typical for this to happen in general. People despise change will complain about a new design even if the design is much better. In a couple of weeks no one will even notice or think much of it.
Here, "active user" means "registered account". It's not a good indicator of who is actually using the site on a regular basis.
selection bias is compounded by the fact the costs of voting. i like the redesign, and i was going to vote YES, but it's not a Facebook poll, it's an application. I'd have to sign up to use the app, allowing it access to my user data, just to vote. No thanks. I bet most people who like the redesign don't want to jump through all the extra hoops to vote yes.
Out of curiosity, what individual problems did you run into with TurboGears, web.py, and Pylons that caused them to "fail the test?"
This is a somewhat old article.

It's also very, very long.

It's also one of the greatest newspaper feature stories I've ever read. It was passed around the writers' circles I was part of when the Post ran it years ago.

Here's the gist (from memory):

1. Guy has a gift for connecting with little kids.

2. Guy has good sense of humor.

3. Guy decides to do magic shows at pre-school birthday parties for a living.

4. Guy targets the richest community of clients for his service.

5. Guy figures out what people are charging for pre-school birthday party magic shows and charges DOUBLE their price.

6. Guy markets his shows by hanging out around shopping malls where parents and kids wandered by, having fake conversations on his cell phone about non-existent work.

7. Guy works 10 birthday parties a weekend, charging $200 for a 30-minute magic show.

8. Parents feel guilty about dropping $200 on a 30-minute preschool magic show, but the kids ADORE the guy's funny act and tricks that blow up in his face. He's got a gift.

There's a great subplot about the magicians deep, dark secret, in fact it's what prompted the Washington Post reporter to shadow the guy for a few months. Parents were wondering why the magician kept showing up unshaven, with dark circles under his eyes, and why his gear was so beat up if he was making so much money.

I'll leave the surprises to those curious enough to read the whole thing.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=515463
nothing in and of itself is enjoyable to me.

i can have lots of fun programming, and also absolutely no fun. it depends on what i'm doing and why. same thing with reading. same thing with sports. same thing with anything.

edit: also, zombie thread http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=515463

edit2: beatten by amichail
> 700,000 therefore represents about 5% of the core userbase.

Your math here is really flawed. Facebook's daily uniques are a magnitude smaller than their weekly and monthly uniques. Since this survey has been up since the redesign, you would have to compare 700k to the number of uniques over that period of time. I can assure you that number is much greater than 13M.
Out of curiosity, are there any legal stimulants that are non-addictive and generally low risk to risk free?

I quit smoking a couple of years ago, and my brain never fully recovered from quitting. I've felt mentally slower ever since I quit.

I've occasionally taken Modafinil, and whenever I've taken it, my brain resumes back to my smoking baseline. I don't feel amped up on it at all, just normal.
Hey aditya,

I was responding specifically to your confident assertion that "no one is bringing it together," which is a bit of a stretch, in fairness to the many projects that already exist. Lots of people are doing this sort of thing, both at the local level and national level: EveryBlock, the Sunlight Foundation, MySociety in the UK, independent one-off projects...
Thanks, I've heard Zope is huge and that must be the mental overhead you were referring to. I take this to mean that it was at once a large project, but jusdging be the 124 to django and 4 for Zope + Grok I take it that it has fallen out of favor. Why? Does it make anything too difficult? Is it too closely married to ZODB, ie. are there problems with ZODB?
I didn't exaggerate anything. Two years ago they were growing at 200-300k users per day. Dave & Ami were using those numbers in public talks. So, let's be generous and say instead that 700k users represents two or three days worth of growth rather than one.

It actually doesn't matter with respect to the more salient point, which is that talk of "statistical significance" is irrelevant because the calculations require an unbiased sample. As I outlined above, there are at least three strong reasons to suspect this poll is irreparably biased.

Self-selection alone is typically enough to condemn a poll. Look up the history of Gallup if you want to see the real-world impact of self-selection in polling.
If you don't enjoy something about programming, I don't think you're a "hacker", to put it bluntly. The something doesn't have to be writing code, but might be solving problems with computers in a more general sense.
Ah, good point, I completely misunderstood what you said.
It's worth noting that those of us with the Facebook for iPhone app can just decline to update it, and retain an interface more like the pre-redesign Facebook. I find it much more useful.
For what it's worth, I like the new layout.

In particular, I like that I can just type whatever I want as a status message instead of Facebook deciding that my message should be 'XYZ is <fill in>".
I was going to say the same thing. Alias accounts would be awesome...
blah+mymail@mailops.com
blah2+mymail@mailops.com
etc.. would all point to mymail@mailops.com
This would be really useful if you could implement that.

edit:
Also, having the mails (subject and body) display as a xml feed would be ++, some of these temp email sites offer this, but only show the subject and a link to the message which isn't part of the feed.
Twitter as a protocol: Evolving tags as a trellis - symbiotically develop and mine content
If you're doing something that meets the criteria...

http://www.nsf.gov/funding/pgm_summ.jsp?pims_id=5527&org...
Officials hoard valuable money funded by taxpayers.

Reddit snark aside, I'm kind of glad about this - innocent people are going to get trampled in the rush to webtwoise masses of data, it's rumoured to be happening already with allegations of robberies planned on google maps/streetview.

If it's a national security issue to release details of government buildings, then isn't it a personal security issue if overhead plans of your house are suddenly massively public?
I'd bet you a dollar that at least 3/4 of the poll-takers are dailies. These are the users who really are taking this personally.
Generally FB takes "active" to mean "logged on within the last 30 days." That includes new users and returning users, but not users who haven't been on for the last month.
The reboot of journalism
Notable complaints: beacon, ToS, this. Beacon was a terrible idea. They shouldn't have backed down from the ToS because it would have blown over. 'this' remains to be seen.
The title of this link misreads the story a bit to re-cast it for Hackers. Yes, the guy's a dropout, yes the guy works two days a week, but I think his approach to how he positioned himself as THE pre-school birthday party magician is what's most interesting.

That and all the wonderful, wonderful writing. The adventure in Atlantic City is a highlight.
Guided tour to iPhone 3.0
Why is that label important?
First of all, Facebook is not just engineers. Believe me, they have plenty of interfacers designers, and they are masters of UI. Very very few sites have the kind of depth and subtlety that Facebook has built in its recent iterations.

What the users say about their opinion of the new design is completely irrelevant. Users who are used to something will always resist change that removes something they are used to. The proof will be in the usage statistics. Eventually Facebook will saturate the market and at that point they may end up with more to gain by maintaining some level of familiarity. But for now I think they are making the right moves to increase engagement, and I believe the numbers will bear me out.
Poll: Do you smoke?
I do not know why I am asking this. Perhaps because I have been trying for the past year to stop and have not yet. In the process I have come up with countless of theories, but they may be useful for something else as they do not seem to work for smoking. I think smoking is psychological and very intriguing. I believe that the process which underlies the cessation of smoking is the same process which makes an elite athlete spent countless of painful hours training, or a renown writer immense itself. You see, I think smoking after a time becomes part of ones Identity and to get rid of this very strong attachment, there must be a rather basic something which may be applied to many other things. Now I may be boring you but I stopped smoking weed about four years ago, by that time I was smoking every day and had been for perhaps 2 years. Although some of you may say that weed is not that addictive, at times I did have a strong urge to have a splif and so would if I could find any, while at other times I felt completely comfortable being next to others smoking while I didn't, or had one only due to being pressurised but not attach much importance to it. I don't know, I think there is a great hack which may be achieved by hacking smoking. :)

Thoughts?
Trying to Earn More Money? Stop Wasting Your Time
yeah -- didn't mean to underplay what all these people have been doing, it isn't an easy problem to solve (possibly why you're all working on it, right? :)

The point I was trying to make was, the data is out there (especially with Twitter) - if you're an interested hacker and you understand your unique local problems, why not figure out a way to build the tools that will help your community based on all the public data sources available, as opposed to waiting for EveryBlock (or anybody else) to expand their coverage.

I'm sure you've thought about the problem more than I have but de-centralization and encouraging communities to build their own tools seems like a much better longer term model, no?
Interesting "Me - I'd like the unwinding to be done so as to lose as little money as possible. If you agree, how do you propose to do that without hiring good people?"

Interesting how in the financial industry, there is a working assumption that skilled financial people require a lot of money to hire and maintain. Yet the financial industry is quite happy to save money by hiring H1-b's for their lower costs while arguing that they can provide equivalent quality.

Yes, one would certainly like AIG's unwinding to be done competently. Does that mean that it has be done by the same class of people-seekers who seem to have gotten us into this mess and who expect their every profitable or unprofitable action to be "bonused" to the hilt?

Possibly not.

The Federal government, for example, has a large and highly competent workforce that it pays much less than the financial industry pays its "whiz kids".
Yeah, people who are happy with the new layout (or don't care) are not likely to install an app just to respond to the poll.
One-Click To Watch March Madness In Your Browser
How EDGAR met the Internet
I don't think there are any central nervous system stimulants which don't have the potential for addiction, legal or not...
I share links from HackerNews quite a bit. Its the best news aggregator out there!
Wish I could upvote this x100 - Great idea, it's exactly what I need! Well done :)
I'm curious where this guy is now after three years. Is he still doing this gig or have his flaws caught up with him?
Facebook App URL: http://www.facebook.com/apps/application.php?id=73264827040
"Hacker News" ?
The danger of "Mark-to-market" is that one market decline can set off another which sets off another and pretty-soon you have a world-wide-financial collapse (oh, perhaps I'm exagerating...).

The individuals who create contracts which involve mark-to-market values might not care about these contract's potential to set off systemic collapse. The state or the regulators or "the people" jolly-well ought to care.
I haven't used Python since 2004, and never became an expert. But isn't is possible to achieve most of what LINQ does in Python? I know in Ruby it's possible to call sort with a block (http://snippets.dzone.com/posts/show/2120). IMHO, that code resembles the spirit of LINQ. That's without even touching on the ActiveRecord portion of Rails which achieves a lot of what LINQ does too. There's got to be a way to do this sort of thing in Python too, even if it requires a third-party library.

UPDATE: Here's a better example for Ruby syntax compared to LINQ.

http://intertwingly.net/blog/2005/09/29/Ruby-1-8-vs-LINQ
Thanks for the summary. This useless fluff piece lost me after the first page.
Maybe because the average human is inherently lazy and doesn't want to re-learn how to use the new UI? Or maybe because the average human is pleased when something does never change? Or, maybe, because the average human loves being a whiner? :)
The Camblr Strikes Back: more Starwars nerdery
... get a billion or die trying!

I don't buy the "create big companies to create many jobs" mantra. A one man company creates one job, and leaves one more job available in the market for someone else. That's a contribution in my book.