skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Dude, sorry, don't mean to move the goal post, but I have an excuse. I'm doing all this laying at home with pneumonia doped up on codeine. I really was just trying to understand your point.

If that is demonstrably false, then please do demonstrate, because I don't believe that for a second if we're talking about the real world and not some abstract ideal government.

Governments have a monopoly on the markets I'm allowed to trade in and will jail me if I try to trade outside of their markets, so they clearly provide the platform and law and rules upon which all trade is based.

This is to my benefit, without those laws and rules someone could just take my property by virtue of being bigger and badder. The government is at least the big bad that I have some say in how it's structured rather than some random company which I have no control over.

Conservatives like to point out how redistribution of wealth has failed over and over again, but look around man, the entire civilized world is liberal, heavily liberal in American terms, so it certainly has not failed as far as I can see.

This idea that America has somehow succeeded where others have totally failed is something I just find absolutely absurd. Not being number 1 is not failing. Every other government in the world is not a failure.

As far as I'm concerned the measure of the success of a country is how happy it's people are, not how much money it cranks out. Happiness is not measured in dollars.
That's what happens when you make something in a new and unproven language.

And I think that it deserves tremendous respect that you have done so. You could have hacked HN in python (or lisp?) in a weekend with the knowledge that it would scale, yet you decided to go with Arc. Very bold. And a great way to battletest a new language.

It's great to see people eat their own dogfood.
Yes, "named let" is lovely, but perhaps less obvious for the non-cognoscenti. It also doesn't translate into Python, etc.
It'd be interesting to see the stats on how much it affects the site's traffic!
BoilingPage -- See what's hot among people that twitter
Operating System Interface Design Between 1981 and 2009
A Google Founder’s Gift - Money and His DNA
Wow, had no idea this was written in Arc. +1 to what mixmax said. It's the only way to keep pushing the envelope.
Because typing is not natural, if you don't pay attention to ergonomics carefully, you will have issues. Your hands were not built for it.
Everyone loves the Nike Companion Cube...
People may have a right to kill themselves, but they don't have a right to kill themselves on a whim or without discussing it with their loved ones first.

My grandfather died from a terminal illness with unbearable pain. Had he decided to end his life rather than ride out his illness, I wouldn't have denied him that right. Maybe I would have tried to talk him out of it, but, witnessing how much he suffered, maybe I wouldn't have. I certainly wouldn't have prevented other family members from trying to talk him out of it.

I don't know whether Tony's wife and young children were aware of his intentions. If they weren't, surely they have a right to try to talk him out of it. In the absence of such information, launching a search party was the right thing to do.
thats fine but at least let us do this:

http://news.ycombinator.com/news/!erlang
A Dirty Pun Tweaks China’s Online Censors
actually if you click on that link now the result is kinda funny
The server goes down, and when it comes back up the front page is filled with stories about Erlang. Coincidence?
Sybase iAnywhere for iPhone Creates Security Challenges
Bummer. Maybe you should consider rewriting in Erlang... :)
The richest people in the world have gotten poorer, just like the rest of us
I talked to an old guy that ran a large trucking company some years back, and based on his own experience he gave me the following advice: Never start a business with people that have the same qualifications and interests as yourself. He had once started an unsuccessful trucking company with three other trucking people. The result was that they had amazing trucks that were always in perfect shape, but sales, marketing, finance, and all sorts of other things didn't get done. And they failed. His current company was started with an accountant. So try to find a partner that finds the stuff you're uninterested in interesting.

That said, finding a co-founder is hard - you don't know whether it'll work out before you'e tried it. So the best advice is probably to test each other out, maybe by doing a small project first, and seeing how it goes. Additionally you should have a written agrement on what happens if it doesn't work out.

And most important of all: Don't take it personally.
Boldness drives innovation
I too suffered from this... both the laugh and then the concern of missing something good.
Patriotism is not something you're going to have a reasoned debate on. Also, I upvoted you to "make you whole", and you got downed again. In this case, it's not likely about the quality of your arguments/discussion.

One of the more insightful Overcoming Bias pieces I've read:

http://www.overcomingbias.com/2007/02/politics_is_the.html

"Politics is an extension of war by other means. Arguments are soldiers. Once you know which side you're on, you must support all arguments of that side, and attack all arguments that appear to favor the enemy side; otherwise it's like stabbing your soldiers in the back - providing aid and comfort to the enemy. People who would be level-headed about evenhandedly weighing all sides of an issue in their professional life as scientists, can suddenly turn into slogan-chanting zombies when there's a Blue or Green position on an issue."
Why was the site using a 32-bit environment to begin with? Opterons have been cheap for years now, and all new Xeons are capable of 64-bit operation.
come on, where is the erl love? jk... please stop
Why did you have to ruin the last good site on the internet?
no! please dont stop.
have never been to austin, but I imagine its very hot there in the summer :)
This is brilliant social engineering, and rather amusing!
Drug Dealer Makes Forbes Billionaire List
Speaking of bugs, pages don't load for me when I'm logged into my real account (without the 2). The front page cuts off after "1.</td><td><center>" and comments pages cut off right after the first sub-table opens. The leaders and submit pages load fine.

I thought it was just a sign that I should get back to work, but maybe my account got put into some sort of inconsistent state?
> I would argue that his strategy couldn't be any worse for beating the odds than anyone else's

You're trying to have a better strategy, not one that "isn't any worse". Sigh.
As someone who spent a long time in that boat, $0.02:

Saying someone doesn't have a right to kill themselves implies that they should be forced to go through with whatever pain is so severe that they don't want to live. It's not fair. Forcing them to live through that is a terrible sentence.

Now, I'm all for getting people out of that situation, but you can't get out of there by force, you have to finish processing the origin/cause of the depression.

As for responding to a suicide message on IRC, it is a call for help. Their compensatory abilities to fight the depression have been exhausted, and they need external help. The proper thing to do is respond.

For programmers it can be pretty bad, especially in open source projects. Most of their daily lives are connected to very distant people with little emotional connection -- it's pretty draining if you don't have other parts of your life to counterbalance. It takes up time and energy that could be used for activities which provide better emotional support. The lack of basic emotional feedback for all the effort put in can really make things worse.
Lighttpd would serve both static files and the application. Reddit uses web.py with Lighty+FCGI, and I see no reason that you couldn't run your Django app on it. I use Apache + mod_wsgi for the Apache modules, but I'm taking a good look at lighttpd+FCGI to get more out of my server for my Django and Trac installations.
How to Acquire an Elite College Education for Less Than $7000 by Joe O'Donnell
Honestly, I'm a heavy user of Reader and have been wanting a conversations feature for a while. Sharing with other Reader users feels strange without it.

I've also never used FriendFeed or even looked at it.
... why can't you just add more application servers?
Why work when the printing press steals your labor
What chip in put out in the last 2 years or so couldn't run a 64 bit system? I'm pretty sure most of the AMD chips could...
Edit: By chip I mean one for a desktop CPU, e.g. Atom don't count.
Atom 330 is also 64-bit.
Mike made the swoosh, not the other way around.
Aesthetics. Marketing, including domain names, is terribly important. Why did all of the Facebook clones which existed pre-Facebook fail? Is it because of the unwelcoming black screen of ConnectU or ConnectU's name itself? Were Zuckerberg or the co-founders connectors? Was it what Facebook did right or what ConnectU (OK, or houseSYSTEM) did wrong? Domain, logo, look and feel all play a factor in brand and they all matter -- at least to some degree.
On the other hand, things may be better with your contribution, even if she doesn't agree. Playing second fiddle in order to keep peace is just laying down, not being productive.
Erlang versus Clojure? Rich Hickey explains.
What makes Erlang processes tick?
UMPCs: Too Big for a Small Package
Confusing money & wealth is a big part of what the modern economies does.
If you think college is about the books and classes, you're missing the point. Most of the value is from meeting tons of new people your age with backgrounds very different from your own, learning to live on your own, and getting the piece of paper at the end that employers think qualify you for a job.
I'm torn between blogging about this phenomenon and the goal of keeping Hacker News unknown.
I thought 32-bit addressing gave 4GB of addresses…is there some sort of flag that's taking one bit? Not trying to be a smartass, just curious about the discrepancy.
Kitten. I hate voice mail.
While I agree with a lot of what you are saying, I would suggest (beginning by) asking the professor why he/she is disallowing global vars. In the follow-up email, perhaps explain to the professor the difficulties that you and your tutoree encountered because of their inexperience and suggest that students be allowed to use global vars (and their aesthetic code layout of choice). Either in this email or the 3rd email, if there's still no success, you can probably outline your position without turning them off.

In spite of the difficulty, it sounds like you are offering a good resource for your student by fostering and supporting their passion for programming.
If you have a Rails background and couldn't stand classic ASP.NET, MVC is a godsend if you're ever forced to write a web app on the Microsoft stack.
i've never quite understood this (although i haven't looked too hard). what happens if (s)he wants to leave and you don't buy the shares?
F Erlang
F Erlang
Read this item: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=512145
It's made in Java not Erlang...
I've had people tutor/apprentice under me from time to time. I usually find them sincerely grasping for help in IRC, and I rescue them from the denizens of #C if they cannot get help. What'll usually pique my interest is that they did try to google/research something before they asked the question.

I've got only one student under me right now.

Frankly, part of what makes me do it is unemployment. It keeps my mind off of bills and the need to find a software gig.

The above email is already sent to the professor. I'm fully aware that there was a more diplomatic way of approaching the matter, but experience tells me that nothing I could've said would've changed anything.

Instead I'm opting for a direct and forceful approach in the hopes I shock them out of ignorance of what they're doing to their students.

I don't expect them to change the project requirements, but I hope this makes the professor realize how much their students are struggling and perhaps start explaining the language before slapping code on the projector.

Thanks for the advice and note of agreement.
I don't know Tony at all, and in theory I do support a person's right to end their life if they wish. However, if I were in the channel at the time, I would do exactly what the channel participants did - immediately try to contact Tony, people close to him (or anyone that might know him), and the authorities.

Somehow there is a distinct difference between philosophising about the right to suicide, and a very real, specific case of a fellow human being in distress. I don't know why I feel this way, but I have a very deep feeling that this is the right thing to do.
Supply and demand will solve that, if profitable enough. Further, the current navies would have little interest in protecting these micro-countries being competitors as they are.
The advantage would be living with people who shared the same values as I do and not being obstructed by the federal laws most of us would find distasteful.
Seems easy enough to just say "farms with more than X animals".
You aren't running this in the standard language/caching/db setup, then?

You're storing EVERYTHING in memory? Isn't this kind of.. well, stupid, frankly.
Why don't banks just open up their software offerings and give you an API to accept transactions?
Doom9, another forum I visit, does this for 5 days to force new users to read the FAQs and guides before asking their question.

It works well, IMO.
I looked at the page. Unfortunately, it would not have helped me during the brief time I felt suicidal. Knowledge of fundamental evolutionary facts changes one's perspective about things, such as the statement "some part of you still wants to live"--which then becomes not an argument, but an obvious, irrelevant fact.
Some Brutally Honest iPhone App Sales Numbers: $32k Spent vs $535 Revenue
I don't find Haskell to be less expressive than languages like Perl. I will admit that I haven't written enough Erlang to really get a feel for expressiveness.
Edekor
edekor
It does give 4 GB of addressable space, but many things are memory mapped by the OS, and so on a 32-bit system you end up with anywhere from 2.8 to 3.5 GB of addressable memory.
I think it is a mistake of some sort not to think of the companies themselves as machines. After all, what use is a tractor apart from the farming it can do in the future? Same goes for a farmer. Same goes for a farm.

Our economies create real wealth from nominal by taking into account future wealth creation. You can call assets (eg stocks) 'nominal' (not real) if you want because they are paper assets. That's correct in a sense. If the market decided to value them lower tomorrow on a whim, no real wealth is destroyed. These assets (in the stock example these are the companies behind the stock) go on creating wealth as usual. Future wealth creation is not disturbed.

On the other hand, if the company alters its wealth creation patterns (eg by going out of business). Real (future) wealth is lost.

Basically, I think you need to take into account future wealth creation in these definitions. Call it reverse capitalism (in the Marxist sense). Future wealth controlled the means of production.
Objective-J: Objective-C in JavaScript, written in JavaScript
JavaScript with all the class inheritance stuff for good GUI practice.
Great. Now you've actually gotten me interested in knowing what Erlang is all about... and I've already got enough side projects to do in my spare time.
The OS sometimes reserves quite a chunk. For example, Windows XP really only has 2.25GB available. Putting more RAM in is pretty useless unless you switch to 64-bit.
That's a good idea. I think I'll give it a try. Thanks.
What is CSS - Cascading Style Sheets Tutorial, Using Cascading Style Sheets
I think that more people don't commit to Erlang because they're afraid that it's just "the cool thing" - for now. It seems like more and more people are becoming aware of the importance of learning at least one functional programming language, but perhaps aren't sure which to commit to. I personally was a bit torn: Erlang has some great features and is production tested, Clojure is Lisp-esque (kill two birds with one stone) and has access to the Java libraries, OCaml is blazing fast, Haskell seems to be the pick for the "eggheads" and has lazy evaluation (purists seem to gloat over this one), etc... I think it comes down to risk...
Check out god -- it can restart mongrels when they reach a certain memory size:

http://god.rubyforge.org/

(if that's the issue)
I have had classes where I stumbled through with cargo cult code. (Basically, I had a choice between thoroughly learning ML in a week or just winging it.) The experience was thoroughly unpleasant. While your email was extremely rude, your point is very important, and I hope you are able to convince the professor.

He may believe that by giving students a strict outline for how they are supposed to write code, he is making it easy for them. More likely, he wants their code to be easier to grade. In the latter case, of course, he should just write a program to automatically evaluate their code, which would save everybody lots of time. (I think most of my CS teachers did this, although they also scanned code for comments and such.)
Also, unless your DB tables are in-memory tables, you are using a very fancy interface to a file system store (that is usually in a nontrivial format.)
So by 2GB he meant usable, not addressable? I understand that addressable RAM != 4GB due to graphics card memory, BIOS, etc. but 2GB is way less than you could get on a 32-bit server. I just wanted to understand if there's something I'm missing.
...and learning a new language every few years isn't an inefficiency?
Toisanji, your dropbox public folder may stop working if too many people look at that picture (limited bandwith).
Sign of the Second Coming?
I don't think it's memeworthy. Too much of a "you had to be there" thing.

I just can't think of a situation where it would be funny to say "quick everybody lets talk about Erlang."
At Risk: Universal Online Access to All Knowledge
ah! i don't know how that happened. i can't seem to edit it!
I hope so too, goodluck!
I too was wondering if there had been a major Erlang event or something. Glad its all cleared up now
I kind of love this, despite having little or no interest in Erlang. It's like that sequence from _The Wiz_ where Richard Pryor keeps declaring different colors to be in style and everyone shows up wearing them. pg should come along every so often - once a month maybe - and just announce that all submissions should be about an obscure language.
The note at the end about the lack of advertising, the lack of a free "lite" version and the $4.99 price point are, IMO, the red flags (aside from the whole "not everyone is going to get rich off of the app store" thing). Honestly, the advertising could probably be skimped on if there was a free version and a lower price point. I'll drop $2 on an app if it seems decent, but I probably wont' spend $5+ unless there is I think it will be exceptional.
Quoting Steve Jobs:

"Look underneath the covers of an overnight success story and you usually see a lot of work, a lot of years."

I remember reading this on Time or Newsweek, back in 1996 or something. Marc Andreessen was on the cover of the magazine. It was quite an inspiring read.
You could probably do what Stephen Colbert does and direct everyone to vote for you in various contests around the net. The Paul Graham wing of the International Space Station perhaps?
Stack Overflow Live
Just one additional reason, to add to your own: the original intent of YouTube, as I recall, was to OCR video for search indexing, which was a lot more complicated and processor-intensive than even OCRing pictures. Google bought YouTube; obviously this tech, laying about somewhere in their archives, came with the acquisition.
Is that because dropbox limits the views for that or for some other reason?
dynamic languages end up using more memory, because extra information has to be stored about each item (I.e. Type, tc info, etc).
Is developer.apple.com down for anyone else?
Requests have been timing out for awhile, I'm wondering if it's a problem with my pipes or if I should just wait patiently for Apple to get back up.
If I'm not mistaken, "to battletest a new language" was the purpose of building this.
looks down: http://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/developer.apple.com
Thanks for the heads up and the link, I'll use that from now on :P
Reia: a Ruby-like scripting language for Erlang
Keep in mind that mzscheme is battle tested. Arc is "just" a bunch of macros on top of PLT Scheme; what gives HN its [under]performing character is that foundational JIT compiler and 3m GC.
So... what's it translate to?
It'd been a lot better if the joke didn't involve the entire front page.
That's not a made-for-adsense site. It's heavy on SEO, and looks indeed like high quality content, but for a different purpose. The content on a made-for-adsense site is designed to look good enough to fool Google, yet not helpful enough so the visitor has to click on a ad link to find something better.
Judging by the number of Erlang stories on the front page (19 out of 25 currently) I would say that's your problem right there...(wholly in jest, half in earnest)
SerialSeb: Why I’m not signing the Software Craftsmanship manifesto… Yet.
I wouldn't be surprised they tested it. I agree with you on that.
What's a good place to start learning about this, if you wanted to try it out? The site you linked to?

I have a suspicion I would suck at this or would not be willing to stick it through long enough to be successful - sounds like a lot of busywork - but I'm definitely curious to know more.
Nick Carr and the Cloud-Network Disconnect
add +10 mhz to the heap
Usability is a serious concern, because most navigation is done with one button, Click, Double-click, Triple-click. Click-and-hold. http://support.apple.com/kb/HT3458
The one exception is stepping through playlists - with the volume controls. It's modal (modeful?), so you have to track of the state of the device to know the meaning of the controls.

This is terrible UI design, and very unlike Apple. A symptom of Steve's absence?
Everyone in the media/blog industry write with an eye on optimizing advertising revenues. The difference I guess is how much you care about what you write and how much you care about your readership (your integrity if you will).
Six Ways to Avoid the Dreaded IRS Audit
I agree with your "sensationalist" remark. I don't like it myself, but at that moment that is what I felt. I still feel it a little bit. I guess I'm an underdog champion and I don't like seeing "noobs" ostracized in that way.

I wish I had a solution to provide to the larger discussion - but I'm not that smart.
I've been driven to the new page for the first time.
Flagged for blogspam (the original link is http://www.streamingcolour.com/blog/2009/03/09/the-numbers-p... and I don't see much value added by the Mobile Orchard post), yet it has 11 points. Something is not working here.
He may believe
She.

I'm aware the email was rude. Experience has taught me that diplomacy has no effect on the tenured.

She doesn't encourage commenting code, and I have to keep reminding my student to include comments to explain what a two-letter variable is doing.

Laziness abounds.
Napoleon Hill talks about his meeting with Andrew Carnegie [video]
Ok, now HN is full of Erlang ... What's going on??
An Intelligent Personal Assistant for Task and Time Management
Yeah, the app isn't even written in Erlang!

(Seriously though, I don't think this is spam.)
Ask HN: Can't we have the Erlang stuff just for new and non-users?
Just browsing the site? Get to see Erlang.

Logged in, but only a member for a week? Get to see Erlang.

Logged in, but been a member for a while? Get to see regular programming.

This way everybody wins. The new users will think the site sucks and is too technical. And the old users will get to enjoy HN again.