skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I know him, and I know others who are closer to him are looking into it (who all live nearby) - so I can assure you lots of people are chasing this up (I won't say any more). (of course any more information would be welcomed).
The previous ternary hack in Python (which was still relatively elegant) was:

a = ("False", "True")[condition]

It's a little fugly -- but if you know the basic semantics of Python, it's quite readable. It is nice that we have a proper ternary now, though.
Also see the chat log here:

http://www.nabble.com/-scala--Re%3A-URGENT%3A-Please-read-if...
According to the article (and the one linked in it), the percentage of people that prefer MP3 quality is rising, that's all. It does not say these people would actually be able to tell that the recording they prefer is an MP3.
> without a database

Why?

I can understand not using a database if this was improving the performance.
you do not earn anything outside the platform society provides for you

What an interesting statement. Sounds to me like you're saying the individual is there to serve the societal structure, instead of the other way around.

As a simplification, I would certainly hate to live in a place where society made decisions for me. I'd much rather live in one where I made decisions for society. In other words the government is made legitimate by the informed consent of the natural legislature -- the people. The people do not exist to serve the government. Individuals exist just fine without governments, but not the other way around.

The entire structure of a democracy is that, at the end of the day, it is the person that is ultimately sovereign. Democracy isn't some club used by the majority to tyrannize the minority. If we were talking about Jim Crow laws, this would be immediately evident -- you can't simply take things from people because a greater number of voters want to. But somehow because we're talking about rich people the message doesn't sink in.

Okay. I allowed myself to get sucked into this. Sorry. I know better. It just seems like you guys are so close, yet I know in my heart you're not going to come to any kind of understanding.
Actually I think the more common hack was

a = cond and x or y

which had the downside that if the second part (in this case x) evaluates to False then a ends up equal to y even through that's not what you were trying to do. Sometimes this is a problem and sometimes not, but it's been irrelevant for the past few years.
If you want A but incent B, you get B. I'm not so bothered by Office Depot pushing service plans, but the link in the article revealed an interesting case of incentives gone awry. Since salespeople were measured based on the percentage of laptop sales coupled with high-margin add-on services, it was in the employee's best interest NOT to sell a laptop if the customer wasn't going to buy accessories. Thus, the laptop magically was out-of-stock.
My analysis doesn't prove this, but Hauser's Law doesn't prove the opposite.

That sounds inconclusive to me.
I don't know Tony personally, but I'm very familiar with his work. He's a brilliant programmer.

HN is the only reason I learned about Tony's suicidal message on IRC within an hour of it being sent. Hopefully someone who personally knows him seeing this will be able to help.
The Bird’s Worm vs. The Mouse’s Cheese
Understood. Topical, content-laden jokes only.

The Erlang response does sound like good and proper geek humor though. Well played HN, well played.
Read Google's Tipjar and Save Money
We're married for 12 years, have 2 kids and overall we're quite happy. Just because my wife is always right about the house and kids, does not imply anything how deep our relations are.

In fact I have more time to hack things because I can leave a lot to my wife. That's how successful companies get built
People don't post more info on Erlang because people don't use Erlang as much.

.NET, Python, and RoR have much wider use.

The better question is, why don't people use Erlang?
Doesn't seem too unpopular right now.
Life in a Lightbulb
It may seem unbelievable on HN, but there are many shockingly stupid and hopeless tech startups in the Bay Area. Sometimes it's hard to tell upfront how bad things really are until you get hired. I signed up for a job last summer that I thought was going to be really cool. Awesome product, super fun "space," cool seeming co-workers and so forth.

However, it turned out the boss was a sociopath and psychopath. The company was being sued by multiple customers. The boss was being sued by multiple former employees for harassment and withholding wages. The engineering manager was a pathological liar. The software was largely smoke and mirrors. It looked GREAT but was totally rotten on the inside.

I persisted for 4 months but really all I got out of it was poor health and a bad attitude. I also missed a number of opportunities to work with other companies I had previously interviewed with. I really wish I would have quit after 3 weeks.
Honeypot caught a dozen in an hour

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=512351
Given how popular Erlang was three or four years ago I think that its current popularity is quite stunning. Back then the learning curve was quite a bit steeper since we lacked Joe's book, lots of interesting and informative blog posts, and the current variety of modules and systems to examine and play with.

Info about Python, Rails, .NET/LINQ, and even Java is the sort of stuff that helps a large portion of the programming community get things done in their daily tasks. For most people languages like Erlang, Haskell, Clojure, and Lisp are interesting diversions that they might one day aspire to be able to get paid for, what info that is out there is mostly provided to share the joy of the language and the problems it can solve rather than trying to keep you from going postal at your day job.
Lewis Hamilton controls F1 car via Blackberry Storm (vid)
TheFunded.com @ MIT Media Lab: VC Model May Be Changing...
Making it so all the top 10 natural results are AdSense-holding pages?

Actually, that's probably the one area Google won't go for, but it results in a smaller pool of people to make money off of, as consumers can't get the right answers to their questions.

The key needs to be high-quality content delivery. Without that, you leave yourself vulnerable to being banned.
I'm assuming from reading this that its a 'distro' in which case you might want to get it listed at something like Distrowatch.

Other options is to get a news story written on it. You then want that to get posted on something like /. and digg.
A Conversation with Twitter about the Future of Technology in Government
People do, but most problems can still be solved just as easily by the standard set of programmer tools. Most desktop apps don't need to scale across multiple processors (yet) and most web services can get by without needing serious scaling muscle. Some of this is starting to change, which is why languages like Erlang are being noticed and talked about (and even used) at the bleeding-edge. Revisit this question in four or five years and the question will probably be more along the lines of "why are people still using <insert current popular language here>?"
Yes.

Now we will go through the obligatory 30 posts of belly-button gazing while we ask ourselves: is it really okay to tell an Erlang joke like this? What if we keep it up? Should we have inside jokes? Doesn't it turn people off? Do we want everybody and their brother on here? Why not Haskell jokes, or Scala? Won't the site turn into some kind of vote-em-up chaotic monster with barbarians at the gate instead of the happy, friendly, hacker-oriented place we know and love? Etc.
I wonder if that alone is worthy of a home based business?

He's done all his real work in qualifying markets to attack. If you did this then sold it to the zillions of people who want to make money with blogs, you might be on to something, and save yourself the google rath.
Erlang ain't gonna let you down (vid)
Browsing from blackberry I thought I was on the wrong page. Lulz
The Tipping Point and "Good News Matches"
> What an interesting statement. Sounds to me like you're saying the individual is there to serve the societal structure, instead of the other way around.

No, I think one can't exist without the other, but what I'm saying is things like trade and property don't exist outside the social structure setup by society in today's world.

> Individuals exist just fine without governments, but not the other way around.

Actually, no, they don't, because there are no individuals, there are just lot's and lot's of people and we can't get along without some form of government. With no explicit government in place, crime rules. We can all agree that criminal rule is not "getting along fine", and in fact we have, it's why we create governments to begin with.

No man is an island, we are tribal creatures, and always have been even before we were man.

> Democracy isn't some club used by the majority to tyrannize the minority.

Actually, it is exactly that. We've put protections into place in many circumstances to force a super majority to be required, but it very much is tyranny of the majority. Look at the laws around us we're all forced to obey and tell me it isn't?

America is NOT a society based on individual liberty and freedom, it IS a society based on the moral whims of the majority. If this were not the case, there would be no victimless crimes and the default position of everything would be legal and getting something made illegal would be a huge battle. This is the exact opposite of what were are now.

Interesting and enjoyable comments from you though, thanks.
ejabberd may be one of the best-known Erlang applications, but Wings3D is my favorite -- a robust, intuitive open-source 3D modeller inspired by Nendo and rivaling the polygonal modeling capabilities of commercial offerings.

(I actually sort of wish it wasn't written in Erlang, as then it might attract more developers.)

http://www.wings3d.com/
If I were pg, I'd try to find out how obedient HN users are. I'd write - now 'ADA', wait 3 hours then 'EVERYONE Lisp!", wait an hour, then 'Machine Code!" and so on...
Integrating Java and Erlang
Very true. I've seen that hack before, but I guess I mentally settled on my first example (probably due to the irksome possibility of x=0\False).

Unfortunately, there were probably more hacks than our two examples. Thank goodness Guido (etc) settled on a real ternary semantic -- we were heading into Perl more-than-9000-ways-to-do-something territory!
pg the Problem isn't that fluffier stories are up its that people are hungry for more of everything. I read Hacker News, Reddit, and even Digg in that order mostly every day and if there was another site that provided interesting stories and or decent comments I'd add it. It is the pursuit of information that's driving me mad.
The Great Depression wasn't characterized by a single stock market drop. It was characterized by massive volatility, just like we are experiencing today. Up 6%, down 20%, over and over.

The economy will be down for the next decade or so, and that's all there is to it. After the Dow loses half it's value, a 6% up-tick in the market is absolutely nothing worth dwelling on.

As for your actual analysis, your three points are glib and facile. A quote from Bernanke isn't going to have any long-term effect on the market, nor will a good quarter from Citigroup. Any profits Citigroup has are on the back of the American taxpayer.

Give me billions of dollars and I'll post a profit too.
Learning Scheme helped my Python by teaching me some new (to me) idioms, besides the first-class function stuff.

For example, it is natural in Scheme to declare a lot of local information, including local function definitions. These have the great advantage of knowing about variables within the local environment. So rather than declaring an external function with heaps of parameters to pass in local state, you just declare a local function which automatically gets access to the variables in the surrounding scope.

The same idiom works neatly in Python too, but didn't occur to me previously.

* * *

Also after learning Python and Scheme, Ruby felt a bit like a cross between the two, and quite comfortable.
Justin Meyer - JavaScriptMVC : jQuery Enterprise
I recently learned that Justin Meyer was seriously thinking of integrating JavaScriptMVC with jQuery, maybe even creating a completely new fork of jQuery, much like jQuery UI. To learn more about this as well as JavaScriptMVC in general, I hooked up with Justin.
It Is Truly a Planet Facebook
Favoring one particular language is hardly hacker-eqsue!
How about a ruby/lisp flamewar? :-) J/K.

In all seriousness though, I've recently moved to Clojure from Ruby. I'm not looking back. Clojure is significantly cleaner, faster, and has better libraries than Ruby.
Man do I love Erlang. I rushed over to HN as soon as I heard a new Erlang community had popped up!
Ask HN: What should be the next Topic of the Day?
Today was Erlang, what should tomorrow's geeky, non-"interesting" topic be? And the day after that...?
Tens or hundreds of billions of pages -- but many, many fewer images. Images repeat across a site, and change much less often than text. Header and navigational images are easy to pick out and also relatively easy to OCR. (These images are not trying to be inscrutable, like CAPTCHAs.)

Further: Google has an intense interest in OCR, adopting the open-source 'Tesseract' project, spending millions on scanning first catalogs then books and journals, and most recently announcing they are OCRing bitmaps in PDFs:

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/10/picture-of-thousand-w...

Finally: any reasoning based on Google being miserly with cycles is going to be wrong. (They invest a lot in efficiency, yes, but that's so that they can spend cycles freely to collect data.)

It's possible they ran an experiment and found text in embedded/header images was no better than inline text. (I doubt they would find such a thing, because generally indicators of sustained effort -- careful design, site longevity, good writing -- are also indicators of site quality.) But there's zero chance the CPU cost or scale deterred Google from testing the idea.
You paint a very bright picture for stratups and a dark one for VCs. While as an entrepreneur myself, I wish that was the case, in reality though, the two are tightly coupled.

Even though startup funding-needs are smaller these days, very few entrepreneurs can find a team who would work for free all the way to profitability. In fact, VCs today are able to get more equity for less money.

But the fundamental problem is that the average time for exit is getting longer, mainly due to the poor stock market condition, where IPO have almost disappeared and corporates are willing to put smaller amounts for M&A.

Once the market will bounce back and stratup will have a more promising outlook, I'm sure you'll see VCs happy to invest and startups happy to take the money.

Mor Sela
Co-Founder and CEO
http://www.ProCompare.com
No way, man, write yourself a web framework: http://nanoweb.si.kz/manual/mod_bsp.html
Something that took us 12 months to learn...
And let's not forget the THD characteristics of tube amps. Even-order harmonics ftw.
You realize that the United States had no federal government for 12 years, from 1775 to 1787, right? And that for a large part of its history, people were responsible for their own crime control?

I could go on -- at length -- about various places where people did just fine without government structure. In the old west, for instance, marshals might not make it through town but once every couple of months. Didn't seem to slow down westward expansion that much. European traders worked all over the world just on a handshake and a promise for centuries.

Anthropologists studying tribes tell us that there are a few things that distinguish true tribes from modern cultures. One of those is the idea of private property: what is mine is mine and you can't take it from me unless under very unusual circumstances. In very primitive societies, the chief or the tribal elders can come around and just take what they want. It's only after we had the concept of private property and contract law that we saw significant economic and cultural growth. It was observing this state of nature that eventually created the political theory that is the bedrock of the country.

In communist China, just after the revolution, they would have "people's courts". These courts basically consisted of a mob of people who would bring in rich people, describe at length how they "exploited" the workers, and then strip them of all their goods. Sometimes for good measure they'd send them to jail or kill them. It was great political theater -- the crowds loved it -- but what were the results?

This was not a time of record growth, or even a time when the lives of the average citizen got that much better. All they really ended up doing was just replacing the folks who got rich signing contracts and respecting property rights with the folks who got rich being politically connected and doing whatever they liked.

Just some things for you to consider. I know I don't want to see any version of people's courts here in my lifetime.
Rails Template Generator
Question: How to secure an exam administered on student laptops 
Our school, all medical schools, are moving to digital exams. The only way I can think of ensuring they would be secure is to boot every laptop from a live CD or over the network.

The National Board of Medical Examiners, meanwhile, is pushing QuestionMark, which only runs its "secure" browser on Windows. I'm just a student helping the faculty; I don't have a copy of Windows. Would anyone be willing to run the "QuestionMark Secure" in a Windows VM and see if it protests?

Feeling awkward here, but would greatly appreciate the assist.
The day Erlang got popular on Hacker News
Apple orders 10-inch touchscreens for mystery product
I was going to mock up a fake story, "Hot Girl Seeks Erlang Innards Private Tutoring", but thought better of it.
that's odd, i thought this link would just take be back to the HN homepage
Man that is a time waster as bad as HN. I started looking for the county with the lowest population. So far it appears to be Hinsdale, CO at 790. The key seems to be small and low immigrant population. My next project will be to find the county with the lowest immigrant population. Largest is no contest. LA wins hands down.

EDIT: it's also HN OT, so I've probably undone all the good work done by the Erlang people.
Welcome to the cutting edge.

[The magazine's subtitle.]
That would be like hanging out at City Lights because some dead writers used to. Sad and stupid. Dave Eggers started a magazine in the same office that Wired started in! He was so excited! Later he started 826 Valencia across from a furniture wholesaler and an empty lot. Guess which one succeeded?
"Then why are you here?"

Well, I did remove the hackernews rss feed from my homepage today. I generally like this site, but I find the comments to be on the verge of elitist. I think it's sad that you guys think I'm part of the "riff raff" that needs to be filtered from sites like this, but congrats, you guys filtered me out.
To paraphrase jwz: "How does this software get me paid?"
In your case quitting sooner probably would have been appropriate. I was assuming that the company was basically a good company in her case, and that she hadn't done enough research on the company before joining. I still believe that.

Other things like figuring out that your boss is a psychopath and pathological liar can take more time than just one or two meetings. I wouldn't want to work for somebody like that for a few months. But I wouldn't be bragging about it. If I got another job quickly, I wouldn't even think about putting it on my resume.
I think forcing them to boot over the network to access the test is your best bet. While QuestionMark may run in a windows VM on some machine the vast variety of different Linux/BSD distributions will make setting up that VM a nightmare.
How is DevHub different from single-page creators? (Squidoo, HubPages)
While these pages are great for single topics, they do not have much flexibility beyond that. But what if you want to just as easily create a standalone, monetizable website that goes deeper into subtopics and has its own look/feel?
Instead of declaring a local function, you can use let (http://docs.plt-scheme.org/reference/let.html)

e.g.:

> (let fac ([n 10])
(if (zero? n)
1
(* n (fac (sub1 n)))))

3628800
No federal government does not mean no government. Everywhere you find people you will find some form of government they have setup to resolve disputes even if that government is no more than what they consider a fair arbitrator. If we all agreed on everything we wouldn't need a government but that just isn't going to happen, ever.

Yes, for short periods of time small groups of people can get along without a government. That is not relevant, we're talking about a country here and you aren't really suggesting that we could get by just fine without a government are you? Government means any ruling body, not just the feds.

I don't want to see those kinds of kangaroo courts in place either, but the privilege of property, and it is a privilege, is not absolute and never has been. When necessary, we've always had some means of seizing it for the good of the many over the whims of the individual. This is as it should be. We should respect property rights as much as possible up to the point that they start hurting the many too much.
When PG says jump, we don't bother with asking; we just jump til he says, "Woah! Too high."

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=512280
That would be like hanging out at City Lights because some dead writers used to

I actually think that's why most people go to City Lights. It certainly is one of their main marketing points.
I found out who the hiring manager is at Avid and at another company I didn't write about. I updated my post to reflect it.
Never give hiring managers a reason to take your resume off the "in" pile and put it into the circular file. Switching jobs "too often", which is ill-defined of course, is a red flag.
Ask HN: Are there any decent crypto mailing lists left?
I can't find any. The ones I know of aren't mailing lists anymore. Any help? Thanks.
Well, it wasn't exactly the topic of the day. It was the community being smart asses. It was a nice laugh though.
Ask HN: Other angel investors besides YC?
My friend and I are bootstrapping a web/mobile app startup, but Y Combinator isn't a good fit for us (we both have wives, and can't easily pick up and move to the Valley). Are there are any similar angel investors you can recommend?
Is this a parody film?
PHP/Erlang (actually quite cool -- makes a PHP thread an Erlang node)
techstars, dreamit ventures, capital factory -- same idea techstars is in colorado, dreamit in philadelphia.
I have missed this side of HN. Feels like christmas.

HN should have esoteric/alternative articles like that at all times.
5 Critical Skills That Entrepreneurs Need by Jerry Kaplan
What were the mainstream publications that mentioned HN?
The Digital Divisions Are Dead At Big Media