skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I agree with Aaron, but I don't think he'd go this far. Programmers concerned with performance need to understand caching and the cost of a cache miss. That's about on the same level as PB and his read heads. The level of detail in this article goes well beyond that and is unnecessary.
That would also work, in theory. It would also future proof the currency against developments that could make oil worthless, though I don't see that happening anytime soon.

At least right now, it makes a lot more sense to trade in an energy containing commodity than pure energy because it's easier and more familiar to people.
A coup... a violent overthrow of the government. Do you think that would help the value of the dollar any? People would fight tooth and nail to sell them at whatever they could get.

Please, leave the reddit talk on reddit.
Joules are not equal. The sea is full of them. You have to look at entropy, too. A Joule of electricity would be a more practical measure.
5 Cool Google Tools You Should Know About
The CDBaby rewrite was well-known in the Rails community.

However, I don't recall anyone in that community telling him that it might not be such a good idea.

Anyways, compare Derek's current observations with this: http://www.oreillynet.com/onlamp/blog/2005/01/cd_baby_rewrit...

and

http://www.oreillynet.com/ruby/blog/2005/11/migrating_to_rub...
"It's the way they think the world will live in the next century - if there's any world left!"
Yes, but he could have made his argument more convincing. It's too transparent.
Depends on where you access google from.
Regular expressions are equivalent to finite automata. (At least in their purer forms like the one defined in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regular_expression#Formal_langu...) That's not very powerful.

Edit: The expression in the articles seems to use some 'practical' extensions.
That was my reaction immediately as well:

"Then, as version control started to creep into the web development community"

Mmm... ok what community was that.

Well I guess it explains a lot of things today.

Any tips how I can avoid these people?
Financial projections?
Private companies like Facebook or Reddit don't disclose their financial statements, so is there anyway to project advertising revenue?
Is Reddit privat?
Because it wouldn't be portable. Imagine paying for a restaurant dinner with 2 barrels of oil you had to haul over there.
It's owned by Conde Nast now, and Conde Nast is a subsidiary of the privately owned Advance Publications.
What would telecoms be like if no license was required?
Perl 5.10 Advanced Regular Expressions
> It would make much more sense to have a currency directly fixed to oil.

The price of oil goes up and down too much. People wouldn't want to loan or save a currency that changes value so much. The beauty with gold is the price would be stable, as to date no one's come up with a way of getting lots of it quickly and easily.
I'm by no means an expert, but a lot of mainstream economists don't seem to abide by this view. They could be wrong, of course, because mainstream doesn't always mean correct, but the burden of proof is on the 'gold bugs'.
Yes, I refer to those. They have been my first contact with Lisp. The Wizard Book (SICP) was useful later on.

I did only remember the German title (Metamagicum). Thanks for finding the English one.
As a response to a comment in your code:

xor :: Bool -> Bool -> Bool

xor = (/=)

Look forward to type classes which let you define the various shapes and lights as instances of Shape and Light!
How do you even think about this stuff? It's almost orthogonal to reason. The only useful engagement point I can find is observing the characteristics, especially the limits, of my own experience.

I think there is some 'metafeeling tone' everywhere, and that the intensity of it is somehow associated to our concept of complex dynamic order. Although it is a continuum, in parts of the universe that sport a dramatically greater amount of complex order than their surroundings, the feeling of such surroundings is lost as imperceptible line noise. Thus, isolated selves.

I think stars feel, although I can't see how their feelings could be much more interesting that those of a pot of boiling water.

The universe is more interesting. Since it is 'everything', it holds all the complexity, all the order, all the chaos, all the information flow, everything that you could relate to consciousness, or to interesting consciousness.

Yet, at a macro level, and at any timescale that can be humanly grasped, I suspect the universe is a rather dumb thing. AFAIK, there is not a terribly complex interplay going on between the top level parts, and I imagine interesting subparts have independent consciousnesses of their own, that the universe is essentially blind to: I don't think the universe is more aware of us than we are of the neutrons in our bloodcells.
Source code is still nearly universally viewed in non-proportional fonts.
Scrum in 5 minutes
Let's just start assuming that whenever I make a ridiculous, extremist statement that you think is insane that I am being extremist to make a particular point.

A violent revolution would certainly be bad for the dollar. But if we were somehow able to bloodlessly kick out all the evil sociopaths in the government and replace them with individuals that wanted to help society as a whole, that would be very good for the value of the dollar. Unfortunately, this is impossible because of the overwhelming military firepower of the government and what appears to be an inevitable tendency towards corruption in democratic leadership.
To correct myself: It was a little bit harder than it seemed at first. I forgot to prove that my solution was optimal.
>Doesn't tarnish, separate parts can be rejoined, scarce, hard to get more of it

This was important before the Information Age, but now there is no reason to have a lot of physical currency when you can just have ones and zeros. It's easier to use pure energy, the item that embodies scarcity, than something like gold that is much less useful. So it would make much more sense to use oil as the backing currency, or even pure electrical power.
PARC opens incubator, may change plodding reputation?
I approached it by following my guru's advice, after having fun with Python, OCaml, Erlang; learing Lisp was pain first and then fun. Paul's book explained a lot, as well as Successful Lisp. And yes, browing HyperSpec a lot makes sense!
> Regular expressions are equivalent to finite automata... That's not very powerful.

True. I was using the (incorrect) terminology of the article, wherein "regular expression" really means "irregular expression". Regular expressions are fine and can be matched quickly; throw in backreferences and you have a tool which is both very powerful (and can detect primes) and can be exceedingly slow.
This essay needs to be corrected. There is a major historical error. Several times, it is implied that Aristotle's work held back European thought for hundreds of years, up until the seventeenth century. This isn't true. Aristotle's influence was absent from Europe for several of the intervening centuries, only really returning with the influx of ideas from the great Arab philosophers like Averroes.
Great question. I'd also like to hear what people say.

I use Google Analytics for site stats, it's pretty informative once you understand where everything is.
metrics is a big field. my personal list:

1) raw pageviews
2) account signups
3) consistent account activity
4) inbound links
5) revenue
i hate gAnal. it doesn't significantly slow down page loads but it does slow it down. i like how my current host has a version of urchin installed on the backend. i also bought copies of mint so that i can keep track of stats faster and better.
Why Europe's Mobile Startups Sing
Compilation of suggestions submitted for Arc
I know! Have a currency directly fixed to integers. Say, integers below X, where X is some reasonable granularity for the foreseeable future. There are exactly so many of them, and bank notes already have serial numbers, so it's technically possible! :>

People still keep searching for and mining gold. That was silly two thousand years ago, but they have the excuse that they didn't know better. I read that current methods used for mining gold in some countries (e.g. Argentina) are especially hazardous for public health and the environment of local populations.
Netflix: Flex To The Max
Yet that doesn't even address consciousness. Just behaviour.

I don't mean consciousness as in functioning state of the brain (i.e., as opposed to unconsciousness), or about the ability of a representational system to picture and reason about itself. I talk about the feeling of being (I wrote a semi-serious comment about this in this thread: search for metaesthesia).

You can rightly claim that this is not observable beyond the first person, and thus it's out of the scope of science. But I guess we all have a personal unscientific take on it, or we can make up one as good as any other when so prompted. That was what I was asking you about.
User Bases, Pricing, Revenue, and the Value of Users
I'm betting that 1 of the 2 votes for this fluff was a sockpuppet.
From the reports I can read on that page, the citations refer to sentences of the form:

CA produce complex/unpredictable results[n]

[n] Wolfram, S. NKoS

So yes, it's referred to a lot but I don't see anything very deep.

I think the problem people have with this book is that it was hailed as the second coming before it came out and that SW had been in his basement for the past 5 years discovering CAs that ran the universe.

What it actually turned out to be was a thousand pages of examples/cataloguing CAs and the /suggestion/ that this is how the universe works rather than anything to prove it.
My take is that consciousness is probably unique to humanity. Yet other great entities, probably have something better than consciousness. Because of the limitations of our own consciousness and what our language allows us to express, we won't ever be able to comprehend the supreme state of existence that makes up what a star has that is better than consciousness. It just doesn't make sense to me to look at a star and somehow perceive ourselves as better or different than that dumb object because we think.
the next step is to move to osx :)
I think the goal of the electric car should not be how fast it charges or how far it goes, but rather... when will the car be able to drive indefinitely off the power of the sun coming through the frame of the car?

That should be the seventy-year goal for electric car design. This is a good start though. But where does the electricity that charges the battery come from?
Really that's what I thought when reading this essay. And I agree that some of your essays are exactly what philosophy should be. But most are advice about startups rather than philosophy (although you can still see they were written by a philosopher), and some state specific observations. Maybe the philosophy essays deserve their own directory?
I wonder if those 'irregular expressions' are already lambda isomorph (or say Turing complete if you like).
Top 10 Reasons Why Java Sucks
"... framework authors are not application developers ..."

Rolls eyes, shake heads. I'm not sure #2 argument holds. Wouldn't it be better to have a few system developers working on core code and the app developers assembling from pre-built blocks?
Google Prepping A Second Life Competitor?
Open Source God: 480+ Open Source Apps
Mashable is the king of linkbait!
Only social animals can be intelligent?
And because it is the information age, it is now very easy to structure your finances so that your wealth rises and falls with the oil price, instead of the dollar. Or gold, or euros, or uranium. Whatever you want. Financial freedom is here (for a fee).
Demo: Feedhub Looks To Organize Your 'Other' Feeds
You'd have to trust governments to not ever raise X. Because they will, and then you're in exactly the same situation as we're in now.
"We do know that if the Fed starts printing money, Weimar style, and dropping it from helicopters, Bernanke style, we will probably have big inflation."

http://www.forbes.com/markets/feeds/afx/2007/09/21/afx414376...

How are we not printing money Weimar style? =)

http://www.idorfman.com/Charts/bernanke-helicopter.jpg

OT: if i had millions of dollars it would be so worth it to drop 10-20k out of a helicopter in a major metro just to see people's reaction.
In the rails API docs (api.rubyonrails.org) next to each function you can click 'show source' to see what's going on under the hood. I hardly have to do this.

But when I do, it's usually just 5-20 lines of code that's not that complex to grok. (but you're right, not many comments inline) It would not be fun to try and decipher RoR internals as a new ruby programmer.
Am I missing something here? Why would I pay $399 for this "new" IDE, when the existing competing products are either free (Radrails & Netbeans) or cost about 1/5th as much (Textmate) ?
"The Big O" - writer muses on the temptations of computer science
I would agree. (and I'm a diehard ror guy now)

I had this crufty old php4 app that started gathering dust because it was so painful to touch.

The thought of rewriting all of it in ruby was just too painful, as well. (and not worth the effort) Like Derek's story, it wasn't just the customer-facing site but all of the little helper scripts, admin control panels and everything that were in PHP.
I don't know what motivates people on reddit (don't they all upvote you automatically, like the people here?), but Diogenes' criticism of Plato was not simple whining, it was criticism based on a serious philosophy (cynicism) which stands in stark contrast to Plato's.
Not sure what you're referring to there, but the feudal ideas of class determined by birth and lack of social mobility were adopted from the Republic (though the ruling classes certainly took some liberties in their interpretation; some analyses of the Republic suggest it wasn't meant to be quite so rigid).
Give a OLTP Laptop and Get One
What problem do you have with 'millions of years'?

Forget about proof. Just consider this: Imagine small changes, occurring continuously over millions of years. Would they still be 'small' changes after a while? Of course not. They would be small_changes * millions_of_years = big_changes

Or do you disagree that millions of years passed?
It's been a while since I read the Clouds. IIRC, it was a lot of scatological and Mae West style humor (i.e. "Is that a sword under your tunic, or are you happy to see me?").

Aristophanes has literary value, but he was just exposing holes in Plato's logic for comedic and theatrical value; he was not himself a serious philosopher.
MyLifeBits: Digital Memories and Ubiquitous Computing
Not a very thoughtful list.
This seems fake. The typography of the article doesn't match the ads, and the ads are too concentratedly picturesque.
Wow. This guy just rewrote my exegesis of a Perl one-liner from about seven years ago. He links to the original, but his much more verbose explanation adds little.

http://montreal.pm.org/tech/neil_kandalgaonkar.shtml

Every now and then somebody rediscovers this, and in latter years it's made the social news sites regularly. And it's not even hosted on my own site! That's HTML somebody else made from a mailing list post, long before I ever blogged. I guess I peaked early.

Oh, and DUH: the point is not that one should use regular expressions for computation. It's to underscore that regexes are automata. And, it's kind of fun to unravel some of the obfuscation.
"Conclusion. By stepping back and adopting the Great Programmer's point of view, classic problems of philosophy go away."
Glad to see that the "Buy One for Yourself, Donate One" idea is back; I saw a talk they gave in February where they said that idea was off the table (http://blog.seeksift.com/2007/02/28/one-laptop-per-child-hac...).
You're simply restating what you said before.

The germanic tribes already had class structure before they crossed over into the former imperial territories. And in any case, every settled agricultural society in history (Egypt, India, China) has had so far as we know a rigid social hierarchy. That of medieval Europe was by world standards comparatively porous. So unless you can point to some specific evidence that the germanic tribes that ruled early medieval Europe were influenced by the Republic, we should assume that they were just doing what they would have done anyway.
That's to be expected. A lot more people linked to the site when it was launched as "Startup News". The name change to "Hacker News" was less of a story, so fewer inbound links will have that title.
> Why do people make ajax websites like that?

Because it's a get-rich-quick scheme.

> This is capitalism at its finest.

Twitter? Facebook? I absolutely agree.

> There is an idea that the richest country doesn't need more help, doesn't need further luxury.

Are you talking about Norway? Or Luxembourg? Or Switzerland? They're all richer than the US. In fact, with the current drop in the dollar, and if Current Account is factored in to the GDP, the US is not in the top 20. (Income from debt is not the same as earning it.)

> We are the richest country because we have the most productive people.

Nope. Most European countries have higher productivity. And more vacation to boot.

While it's true, increased productivity is great and valuable, I'd argue very little Web 2.0 increases productivity at all. Quite the opposite. YouTube, for example, has opened up whole new worlds of ways to waste time.

I'm sorry if this comes across mean. I thought exactly the same way at 19. (And I'm from Berkeley too.) But please travel a bit before you spit out more of the platitudes that you're fed every day as an American. When you come back and trip over the homeless on Shattuck, you'll understand that America has squandered its inheritance like a trust fund kid.
FWIW, I do remember a reference to early Catholic structure based on the Republic, but it'll take me a while to go back and find that reference.

We've gone off-topic, though: the main point here is that Diogenes' own philosophy is worthy, even though society at that time found it less palatable than Plato's.

People ignored it (and still do) because it's less certain than Plato's "reliable" model of patterns, and also because it means giving up material comforts.
Also, it's been Hacker News for less time than it was Startup News.
Photoshop Elements: a Stripped-Down Version of Photoshop Aimed at Amateurs
He lost me at #1. Technically, there's so many things Rails and Ruby can do that PHP can't. If he means it pragmatically (they're both data/web connect-o-thingies), then he has a point.
The article is from 2004. Any news in the meantime?
It comes across as not just mean but mistaken.

You didn't even respond to his statement. He said America has the most productive people. You replied that average productivity is higher in Europe. That is a different measure. European countries don't have so many super poor people as the US, which makes their average numbers look better, but they also don't have Google (or Microsoft or Apple or Intel or Cisco...).
I don't have personally any problem with 'millions of years', and I don't say that the evolution theory is wrong, but for me it simply stays a nice theory, which can't be proven, and which isn't able to explain everything.

I do believe that the universe is millions of millions of years old, but I also believe that the humans arrived last (much later than any animal). And that humans have many attributes which can't be explained by an evolution theory.

Please offer me something more intelligent, I simply refute to think that some monkey thought by himself:
"And now let's develop/incubate/whatever self consciousness, to be finally real humans!". Sorry, but that's too stupid.
5 Keys To Social Networking Success
Investors are flocking to fund social networking startups. How can you identify a good investment? Here are five key characteristics, backed up with real-world examples.
Mobile 2.0 Startup Ecosystem
Mobile Web expert Rudy De Waele has posted slides of a presentation he did last week in London, at the Mobile Web 2.0 Conference.
Resting long on startup's early laurels is sure way to lose enthusiasm
The formative years of startup companies are like an aspiring sports rookie about to go pro. All of their potential is still ahead of them, and they have the chance to be the greatest of all time.

Yet in a short period of time, they are either going to be known as one of the greats or just another third-string bench warmer who never made a name for themselves.
MuseStorm Debuts Widget Engagement Platform
Does someone want to make a VM of the software? It would be cool to try out (Not sure if it requires the OLPC firmware): http://wiki.laptop.org/go/OLPC_Trial-2_Software_Release_Note...
"(if you want function pointers, just use function pointers, and forget all this modern "object oriented" garbage)"

Why not use just functions as first class data?
Solar is not the most efficient means of producing electricity, so why should that be the goal? The cost in energy of manufacturing today's cells means the cells need to generate electricity for 20 years before they return their energy investment.
There's a plug in the wall.
Playing with fear is playing with fire
Not gonna happen IMHO. Facebook is about interacting with other people. Not about clicking on adverts.

Google on the other hand is about finding stuff, which can sometimes be achieved by clicking on an ad.
And make a lot more money
<<So many things Rails and Ruby can do that PHP can't>>

Meta-programming? What else? Do you mean the language or accompanying libraries?
Pownce vs Digg: Who Will Kevin Rose Back?
I ran it on VMWare maybe 6 months ago. It was ridiculously slow.

http://wiki.laptop.org/go/OS_images_for_emulation
Ha, inbred are we? First link I clicked at random even had PG's photo!
> needs to be corrected

It's only an opinion, and it's situated in a certain culture and situation.

If you look closer, quite everything needs a 'correction'.

If you want something perfect, humans are the wrong place to search for.
I think the author is talking about primarily static projects with minimal db usage-- Running svn update doesn't execute any db schema changes or data migrations!

Looks like most of their work is promo sitelets for ad agencies. Not the most challenging stuff technically (at least on the backend).
There's a difference between hating OOP because you'd prefer to see all the underlying details, as with C and function pointers, and hating OOP because it's a clumsy metaphor when compared to the abstractions offered by Lisp and similar high level languages.

For the web guy, it seems clear that he's a purist and doesn't want to compromise. Sometimes I wish more people were like him.
"You could conceivably lose half your brain and live. Which means your brain could conceivably be split into two halves and each transplanted into different bodies."

Unfortunately this does not follow. In most cases, if you lose half your brain you would die. If by chance, after losing half your brain you continue to live, that means the physical half that is gone was the less essential part. I am not a neurologist but I'd guess it is very unlikely that if you lost the part that survived you could still live.

Regards,

Atakan Gurkan
Hopefully the version digits of Arc will converge to e.
Paul Krugman once pointed out that since the US went off the gold standard, the Consumer Price Index has risen more quickly than the price of gold. In other words, the gold-denominated prices for things that Americans actually buy and sell have been subject to deflation.

"I know we paid you 25 grams an hour for your last six-month consulting contract, but if you want us to renew it, we just can't afford to pay more than 23..."
"work with and offer equity to a development partner who already has a team, management processes, track record and infrastructure in place. Lowers some risks and shortens time-to-market."

Has anyone here done this? Thoughts?