skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I agree. It's puzzling. I mean there are economists who claim to be able to calculate the cost of climate change over 40 years. I urge everybody who believes them to check the 1 year predictions made by the same people.

We're told that if 80 % of scientists agree on something we cannot just dismiss it as nonsense. I would agree with that if even just a few of them had credible methods to simulate complex systems. They don't. Each of them models just a tiny piece of the system and their methods work only within that very narrow context. So what science did the IPCC use to join all those partial models?
40 Tips for optimizing your php Code
A modern saint and sinner
Having worked for a top-line VC firm and sat through _a lot_ of presentations I agree with the article. Standing to present feels weird. The general atmosphere in a VC meeting is that everyone around the table is having a discussion, the slides are there to facilitate the discussion.

John.
There's a difference between what people want to read and what they want other people to read. I know of no precise word for this. Altruism is too charitable, and hypocrisy too uncharitable.

Imagine yourself inside the head of, say, an abortion rights advocate. A story appears with a headline saying that abortion is just as common where it's illegal. You don't read it; you already know that; but you upvote it as a way of saying "hear hear." Now apply the same rule to articles about Bush, Ron Paul, the RIAA, police abuses, etc, and you've filled up most of the frontpage of a site.
One of the World's Foremost Webmasters says "WTF" to the changes made to Hacker News

http://www.centernetworks.com/y-combinator-hacker-news

Allen Stern, webmaster for CernerNetworks states, "Considering that Y Combinator is all about the startup, this makes no sense. They have a couple other updates to the app as well. First, they will be looking for trolls on the comments for each post which is a good move."

Stern had nothing to say about how the system will handle ill advised postings of blatant political oppo hit pieces by Hacker News leaders.
That is astonishing. It's basically a large book.
Ask YC: How do you handle locking in your app?
A simple scenario:

At 1:00, Jane pulls a record into her browser: Lakeside High School, 123 Main St., 555-1111.

At 1:05, Fred pulls the same record into his browser.

At 1:06, Fred changes the address to 123 Oak St.

At 1:08, Mary changes the phone number to 555-2222.

Questions:

How to you handle the database locking?

- Pessimistic, lock the row at 1:00 and don't let Fred have it?

- Optimistic, let everyone take anything they want, but don't let Mary update?

- Column level locking?

- Special processing in you app?

How do you maintain state?

- Using sessions?

- Keeping a "before image" of the row? In the client? On the server? As a separate data base record?

I realize there is not one correct answer. Just curious how other YC'ers handle situations like this.
I have severe doubts about this kind of voting system, weighted by moderators or not. A post that was voted up by 100 people and down by 100 people (assuming equal weights) will look exactly the same as one that nobody ever touched. It ruins the effectiveness of voting as a ranking mechanism.
There are a good number of videos and what seems like a fairly active community.

[edit: but that number is high]
i use the blueprint framework, which also takes care of typography btw. it's great, well-structured, and I encourage everyone to take a look at it
I noted this the other day:
http://www.samizdata.net/blog/archives/2007/10/samizdata_quo...

"I belong to a Facebook group called "Che Guevara was a murderer and your T-Shirt is not cool". It has 10,935 members."
What reddit taught me about startups: making more money (really??)
Why would you keep a before image on the client? Isn't this dangerous?
"Maybe" is one option too many

http://www.zeldman.com/2007/06/20/remove-maybe-from-invitati...
"Most people aren't smart at all."

Very correct. In fact, nearly half of all the people you'll meet have a "below average" intelligence.
> So, 'ad hominem' attacks are not allowed, and therefore nobody should ever take me seriously? That's a pretty amusing argument,

It's a pretty reliable argument. When someone concedes that they don't have a rational argument, they're usually correct.

They may still be correct, but are useless for determining that.
Correlation is not causation
"There have been studies showing that people who were able to get into elite universities -- but chose not to attend them -- do just as well in the work force as people who got into those universities and did attend them."
I don't know how this article got so many upvotes. It's mainly name-calling. In the one place where it actually says something, mentioning this ocean salt cycle idea, there are no citations or other substance to back it up.
> It's not as if good scientists would suddenly be out of a job if global warming turned out to be a hoax.

I note that Danifong persists in his\her belief that only certain sources of funding are a source of bias. A critical reader would have noticed the suggestion that there are sources of bias that have nothing to do with funding.

And yes, we have cases where folks have had their research funding threatened for suggesting that AGW is not as St Gore suggests. I'm sure that there are rationalizations to support that behavior, but ....

As far as the evils of a PR campaign are concerned, I note the AGW dog and pony show. Mote/beam and all that.
What in the Web Are They Thinking?
PG, I'd be interested to know why you chose to implement a voting/rating system for stories on news.yc. That is, did you consider a "weightless" submission system like, for example, MetaFilter, where front-page postings are a privilege that every member has equally. I've been a member of MeFi for several years and the effect of "gaming" has never really been an issue there, because there is no reification of trustworthiness in the form of a "karma" score. Certain members there certainly have name-recognition based on their history, but this gains them nothing in terms of influence on the focus or direction of the site as a whole.
DZone, which is linked in the article, has up and down votes that they keep track of separately. That way, they don't cancel out. Instead, you get an idea of the total positive and negative sentiment.
The greatness of up/down is that recommendations are simpler, though arguably reddit's recommendation system doesn't work... so, I'm on board .Slashdot moderation!!
Discovery Acquires How Stuff Works For $250 Million
Seems to me like we're confusing the users and the system. The users want to read the best material for them. The system only has two states: yes/no. If people are voting _knowing that their vote will influence what others read_, then they aren't working for the best interests of the users, only their own best interests. As you indicate, I don't think there's a word for that, but if there is a recommendation-consumption impedance mismatch (a gap between recommender interests and reader interests) then the system will always swing out of whack. That's true no matter how much it is weighted, because all you're doing is switching the impedance mismatch from a user-to-user scenario to a user-to-editor one.
I would. By voting up a link or a comment you improve their visibility. This should bring more people to the discussion and that's good if you are passionate about the topic (no matter if you agree or not, or not quite sure).
The client sends the before/after values, and you only update the ones that have changed. If people are changing different fields there's no conflict.

Yes, the client could fake it, but such faking would not open up new capabilities that the client didn't already have.
the notion that humans could affect earth this much is laughable. we could smother the surface with nuclear explosions and the world would repair itself as an organism, never mind something as negligible as human CO2 emissions
What! This is the third or fourth time this has been posted!
Jiglu widget helps drive your visitors to your great and old blog content
It's a series, actually - look at the archives on the right hand side.
> using continuations to enumerate possibilities seems like using a sledgehammer to swat a fly

I just want the fly dead.

> Am I understanding correctly that your goal is just to arrive at the tail call of 'contract_sentence' in two parallel ways?

No, not two ways, dozens, and I don't know beforehand where multiple possibilities will turn up. So, I can't enumerate all possibilities in an array.

Think of it as finding all paths from the root of a tree to every single leaf, where the tree is being made up as you walk it.

My current solution involves a lot of administration and makes my code brittle and hard to extend.

The solution I posted to the toy problem at refactormycode.com works, but continuations scare me and I don't quite trust their implementation in Ruby.

So I was hoping for a third option, or some advice in general.
I understand, but the problem is hard to describe succintly.

But if you run the code, you'll understand at once what it does.
Is Windows a virus? Apple.com think it is.
What do you mean by "faking" it? Example please.

Are you not too concerned about this because the real validation happens on the server anyway?
The issue with distribution is getting power from where there is wind to where there is not. It is not about just making the generation system distributed, though that would also be a good thing.
Mechanism Design for Grandma
someone can correct me but most of the time optimistic locking is ideal (since for most apps, the same data typically has a low chance of being updated by different people). Anyways we use that in addition to transactions

pessimistic locking in general is really tricky

http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/websphere/techjournal/0603...

I forgot to add that if you're using a good framework, it typically already has a built-in mechanism for optimistic locking
MySpace's new S.F. office will be key to redesign plans
Using Javascript, the client could as well only send the fields that have changed.
Social networks don their platform shoes
How long do you think it would take to re-write the early version of most startup sites? Most of them aren't doing things that are inherently difficult, but rather new/unique/interesting/right-place-right-time. Twitter?
Torrent Informatics
XTorrent is my favorite torrent client. It's such a joy to use-- a tiny, native application that offers a best-of-breed implementation of the BitTorrent protocol. Everybody loves BitTorrent, and I love it too. I'm not the only one. By some estimates, torrent data may account for as much as 35% of all internet traffic.
Hierarchical Temporal Memory: Concepts, Theory and Terminology [PDF]
To the argument about reddit suffering from "Vote up if..." syndrome, we've thought about building a "poll" submission type (like a self-post) that would create an actual poll on reddit as the submission. We'd like to see fewer of these polls on the front page, too, but still give worthwhile poll a chance -- they're just in the minority.

We figured this would make the poll have to earn the "up vote" instead of just sucking people into clicking up because they "want Bush in prison." It could even graph the results! Histograms are sexy.

Incidentally, newsvine has something like this. We're in the middle of getting new reddit online, so who knows when/if this would actually happen. Perhaps voting up/down will already be dead by then ;)
> 1. If a method can be static, declare it static. Speed improvement is by a factor of 4.

Wow!

function Prime1() { ...calc one million prime numbers...}

static function Prime2() { ...calc one million prime numbers...}

Prime2() will calculate the prime numbers 4 times faster then Prime1()? Cool.
If you have some intelligent argument to make, go ahead. However, it doesn't look like you do.

At the moment you look like the person with his fingers in his ears spouting out endless "If X then Y", that you seem to think somehow 'proves your point'.

Did you read the article? Read any other scientific articles on the subject? Or are you just a 'believer'
I had up and down ratings on http://www.klipboardz.com and then decided to switch them out for a system that just rates on number of times the story is read and the number of comments. I think it's a better system than most social sites. The only problem I expect is burying content, but that isn't a problem since the site is so small.
Video Chat Service Aims to Follow YouTube's Path
> Set the maxvalue for your for-loops before and not in the loop.

What does this mean?
You know the issue with getting people to subscribe to Americanism around the world is the way we go about it. Chinese culture, for example, is just as hegemonic as our culture is. I was in Dakkar, and I could go to a Chinese restaurant. It is getting that way across sub-saharan Africa as well, the Chinese are everywhere. Even in Zimbabwe people love Jet Li, Jackie Chan and Chow Yun-Fat. The story is the same in South America or Eastern Europe. Yet everyone hates us, and can't wait to learn more about China.

Why?

I travel a lot and have struggled with that question. I am frustrated because I am challenged to think up a reasonable answer to it. I think part of the reason though is the difference in the messages. The West, and the Arabic world for that matter, send messages like the one in this article, 'Our way is better because look at how the other way sucks'. Where as the Chinese or the Japanese send messages like 'Our way is better because we do x, y, and z'. The focus of their message is ALWAYS on their own positive values. If they had their way, the developing world be oblivious to the very existence of America and the West or Christianity, Islam and the Middle East.

Articles like this encourage people to go out and get more information on Che. The flip side of that is that they invariably come across information on Batista. Then, at the next dinner party, they are fairly well informed on why the Cubans would turn to iron-fisted despots like Che and Castro to improve their lots. Then you end up trying to argue that the United States would never again get in the business of forcibly maintaining the power of a system like the one that existed in Cuba prior to Castro. And they, rightfully, point to George and Condi and ask if you really believe that.

I am without answers. I am frustrated. And I am saddened. I know that there are people in the United States who have what many would consider to be wise values. Respect for others, quiet confidence, wisdom enough to properly weigh the need for strength, flexibility, and balance in most situations. What escapes me is that, somehow, what bubbles to the top are people who preside over profligate spending, gross neglect and DISRESPECT of others (Katrina), and the careless employ of strength without regard to flexibility or balance.

We are trying to win hearts and minds. Our leaders of the past 20 or 30 years have made it necessary for us to write articles like this. They have made it necessary for us to send 160000 guys with guns to 'win' those hearts and minds. I don't know much about how hearts and minds are won, that said, it seems to me that something is woefully out of place.
Is it just me, or does his account (and his last one http://reddit.blogspot.com/2007/10/what-reddit-taught-me-abo...) contradict a lot of what Aaron wrote about reddit?

http://aaronsw.jottit.com/howtoget
Currently I compare the changed values, and if mary and fred have the same permissions, I let mary see the changes that fred made that she did not, and say 'would you just like to change this row (phone)'. I'm working with a small data set, and also I keep history, but I change the value of a hidden form element (mine is a web app) when <input name="phone" onChange="THIS()"> THIS is invoked, for example. and if mary never changed address, but the value in address is different than the value that she passes in, it gives an error condition and lets Mary figure it out.
I use it for writing some papers, otherwise I just use asciidoc.
quick, someone make a complimentary service to do divorces the web 2.0 way.
3998-byte executable reduced to 45 bytes
it means that this:

$maxvalue = 100/10;
for($i=0; $i<$maxvalue; $i++){
// Some code
}

is much faster than this:

for($i=0; $i<100/10; $i++){
// Some code
}

because the value is calculated once instead of ten times.
h43t, are those goods identified uniquely - do they have barcodes already or they are generics that are shipped and repackaged later on? (I presume latter)
What To Expect After Your First Meeting With A VC
After you have had your first meeting, VCs may be slow to respond. There are a few potential reasons for this...
Ok. The same comes again at point 15:

> Do not use functions inside of for loop, such as for ($x=0; $x < count($array); $x) The count() function gets called each time.
Anatomy of a Web Site Launch: GotCAST.com
Browser Javascript Speed Test: Opera the fastest
I usually use optimistic row level locking for typical structured data in a 3NF data model. If there is so much contention for a particular record that pessimistic or column level locking is necessary there might be a problem with the design of the data model or workflow. There are of course rare situations where pessimistic locking is justified. The canonical one is multi hop flight reservations.

Handling semi structured data (documents of some sort) is way trickier and depends a great deal on the particular data format and patterns of use. Merging is desirable but very hard to achieve in many cases.

One other thing that is worth thinking about is how the locking strategy scales. The most popular idea these days is to seperate read and write operations so all writes go to one DBMS server and the reads are distributed to replicas. That's ugly to integrate after the fact, so if you expect your app to grow fast you should probably design it like that from the start.
Quite possibly, though presumably lap dancers are always trying to maximize their earnings, so any behavioral changes are likely to be subconscious.
That's not necessarily true. If the compiler is smart enough it won't recalculate the value of a numeric expression which doesn't contain any variables. On the other hand, dereferencing a variable isn't without cost. Of course, in most cases you'd be dereferencing variables anyway in the test clause, so the original idea, compute loop limits before entering the loop, is correct.:

mbp:~/test doug$ time php -r 'for ($i=1; $i<100000000/10; $i++) {$x++;};'

real 0m5.930s
user 0m5.867s
sys 0m0.026s

mbp:~/test doug$ time php -r '$maxval=100000000/10; for ($i=1; $i<$maxval; $i++) {$x++;};'

real 0m6.999s
user 0m6.907s
sys 0m0.029s

mbp:~/test doug$ time perl -e 'for ($i=1; $i<100000000/10; $i++) {$x++;}'

real 0m2.520s
user 0m2.496s
sys 0m0.010s

mbp:~/test doug$ time perl -e '$maxval=100000000/10; for ($i=1; $i<$maxval; $i++) {$x++;}'

real 0m2.537s
user 0m2.499s
sys 0m0.014s

The results are a little different with Python (maxval1.py computes inline; maxval2 divides in advance and uses variable inline)

mbp:~/test doug$ time python maxval1.py

real 0m2.134s
user 0m1.761s
sys 0m0.276s

mbp:~/test doug$ time python maxval2.py

real 0m1.890s
user 0m1.588s
sys 0m0.278s

Java shows even more of a difference (again, maxval2 sets variable in advance):

mbp:~/test doug$ time java maxval1

real 0m0.174s
user 0m0.116s
sys 0m0.040s

mbp:~/test doug$ time java maxval2

real 0m0.531s
user 0m0.125s
sys 0m0.041s
4 amazing startups: Expresso, Monoface, PamFax, DevSapiens
Solving the Voting Problem: Recommendation-Consumption Impedance Mismatch
YouTube videos arrive in Google Earth
The concept of an internet "troll" makes little sense if you care about substantive debate
According to Wikipedia, "An Internet troll, or simply troll in Internet slang, is someone who intentionally posts controversial or contrary messages in an on-line community such as an on-line discussion forum with the intention of baiting users into an argumentative response."

There are problems with this concept. First, it is based on intent (why do you care about someone's intent?!). Second, it discourages discussion on controversial topics. Third, it seems to imply that debate is bad if it upsets some people.

So essentially, by accusing people of being trolls and discouraging them from further posts, you get discussion groups where posters have similar views and where debate is restricted to mostly minor issues.

That doesn't sound good at all.
An iPod Has Global Value. Ask the (Many) Countries That Make It.
Google Tops Feed Reader and Social Bookmark Rankings
Sure, Earth would recover. It would be pretty bad for humanity in general, and you and I in specific, though.
how much would wikipedia be worth then?
Neat! Optimization is fun. But you can also shrink code by going to higher-level languages... (yes, I know, it won't run as fast and will take a lot more memory when it runs, but still...)

mbp:~/test doug$ cat tiny.pl
return 42;

mbp:~/test doug$ ls -la tiny.pl
-rw-r--r-- 1 doug doug 12 Oct 15 11:31 tiny.pl
Zero to Riding the Rails in Four Months
It's one of my favorite sites by far. A bit of an aged brand but definitely a nice site.
I try to establish

1) when Mary got the record,

2) whether she got the same record as Jane and Fred, and finally

3) whether Mary = Jane or not!8-))

[Hint: the example was not properly stated.]
Suppose two people are updating info about a T shirt:
size=M
color=green

Suppose Al is in charge of color and Betty is in charge of size. They both get the form at the same time.

Al sends
oldsize=M newsize=M oldcolor=green newcolor=blue

Betty sends
oldsize=M newsize=S oldcolor=green newcolor=green

The server ignores Al's oldsize/newsize and Betty's oldcolor/newcolor because the values are unchanged.

You end up with size=S and color=blue no matter who sends the update first.

By "faking it" I refer to the fact that the old values are user-supplied data. Validation of the new data is a separate issue. Someone could "fake" an old value. This merely means they would change a value that they were already authorized to change. Messing with the "old" values on the client side has no hack value. That's why I'm not at all concerned about it.
Review of using Trac for project management
I think College towns with a progressive culture but with few companies to absorb the graduating students are best for startups, eg: Ann Arbor
Oops. Mary = Jane. Sorry. I guess I should have used pessimistic locking on brain synapse 7E8B32.
That's ridiculous; China will of course emphasize their positive values for the Western world. That veil is all they have to maintain legitimacy on its people. A country that severely limits on what you can and can not see in media, a country that forcibly removes its own citizens with causes that makes American imminent domain laws like child's play, a country that has consistent human rights violations, a country with a ruling oligarchy that has time and again shown it's willing to barter political power with the incentives of capitalistic greed.

Yeah, of course that country is going to put out its best face. It bans people from spitting in the streets and have shuttled the homeless and the beggars from the cities just so that a piddling game can be held so that the world can be dazzled and fooled.

I'm also not quite sure why people in foreign countries liking Jet Li somehow makes it that Chinese culture is spreading. That's equivalent to saying people like Schwarzenegger and equates that as American culture.
That's true. However, depending on the needs of the application, you might want to take things a step farther and engage the client in a dialogue about values changed by others. For that purpose it helps to tell the server what the values were when the client loaded the form.