skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I use fairly sophisticated filtering to block things that are shaped like ads, to block URLs matching certain patterns, and to control JavaScript behavior.

I honestly don't mind ads if they're sane, which is probably why Google is successful (their text ads tend not to be annoying at all). I understand the need for ads, to give sites revenue for the content they produce.

The problem I have is advertisers who are so eager to push their message on me, that they have absolutely no respect at all for me. Shoving things in my face, making loud, constantly animating, colorful abominations? That gets you on my permanent ban list, and may ensure that I never, ever return to your web site.
Google Gets Mini-Sitelinks
Luck ?
Digg Blog: Item-Based Collaborative Filtering
Cato produces some of the best work in the Think Tank world. I've seldom seen anyone out-argue them with evidence. As far as conflict of interest goes, they famously turned down a donation from Fannie Mae during the bubble because they didn't want it to look like they were not legit.
Is there an API for the issue tracker? I could think of a use for this right off the bat...
We might talk about polynomial time like that's reasonable, but few useful algorithms are worse than X^2 * log x.

After all, the man issue is not the size of the algorithm but how long f(N) takes and all to often we see N > 1,000,000,000 which limits what's reasonable.
Sounds like fun -- I'll come crash the party.
You can always make something up.

See: Sending a man to the moon.

Granted it might be hard to sell a rail project like the space race, but looking back on just how much of our GDP we where spending to play golf on the moon was insane.
No worries, I'm sure it'll be flagged down with a vengeance.
Ask HN: How much traffic do you get from hitting the HN front page?
Just curious.
neilc: "Akl would certainly not claim that "Turing was wrong" -- the submitted title is obvious flamebait."

Akl: "The consequences to theoretical and practical computing are significant. Thus the conjectured "Church-Turing Thesis" is false. It is no longer true that, given enough time and space, any single general-purpose computer, defined a priori, can perform all computations that are possible on all other computers. Not the Turing Machine, not your laptop, not the most powerful of supercomputers. In view of the computational problems mentioned above (and detailed in the papers below), the only possible universal computer would be one capable of an infinite number of operations per time unit."

Me: It sure sounds like he's claiming Turing, in the Church-Turing Thesis, is false.
I think matrix multiplication is O(N^2.71), and there are a few problems in abstract algebra that have doubly exponential algorithms.
They're certainly are this generations Sourceforge. I couldn't care less about git[1], honestly, but github is extremely nice.

[1] Obviously some things would be more difficult with say, svn, but my point is, I use git to use github.

(edit, missing word, edit2, stupid asterisk formatting)
A lot of the time I just want to ask a question, or get a prescription for something obvious, and scheduling an appointment is overkill. Luckily, my sister in law is a doctor, so I can just instant message her. It's much more efficient.
Founders Fund will make at least 12 $50K Seed Stage Investments
In most of the OO languages I've used, declaring a variable in a loop header scopes it to the method, not the loop.
Show your site then answer your own question.
The Next Disruptive Technology in Design
Safari Charlie finds possible iPhone OS vulnerability
They should have made the resolution higher on the images so you can zoom more before the other images appear.

It would also be cool to have a zoom effect within each of the images where as you approached a pixel image, the window on the subimage zoomed out to reveal the whole picture. Like a lens coming into focus.
Coming Soon™
Exactly. Actually the site nextbillion.net did a case study a few years ago about this subject. I cannot find the exact link right now, but I am sure it's somewhere in the site :)
Twin studies show that identical twins reared apart are highly similar in terms of (for example) IQ. Much more so than fraternal twins reared together (or apart for that matter)

This indicates that genetics certainly play a very important role here. It might not be PC to say so but the science is pretty clear.
Google's Earnings Positive But In 'Uncharted Territory'
I'm curious why you consider C to be safe but Haskell not. Seeing as C has no bounds checking on arrays, runtime type-checking, or garbage collection, I'm tempted to argue to the contrary.
discussing semantics is distinct from say discussing how semantic differences across time influence thought. the former I would not define as philosophy, the latter I would.
discussing semantics is very easy to categorize. I file it under "discussing semantics".
Yeah I have some problems handling git as I'm used to svn. It'd be nice if they expanded to the other version control systems that are out there. Wasn't there a rumor not long ago that they had registered svnhub.com or mercurialhub.com? My memory escapes me.
> How do they make Gemstone so fast?

Gemstone is like a smart memcached + relational db. They call it a shared page cache, but it's basically like memcached but not just a cache and with brains.

A transaction commits through the cache to disk and the same object format is used by every layer removing the need to constantly re-serialize. The client talks to the cache, the cache talks to the back end store when it decides it needs to page something in.

As for change tracking, I'm fairly certain there's a write barrier at the vm level, change anything and the barrier is broken causing the object to added to a commit list.

As for larger than memory queries, no different than a relational store, you work in batches paging in data as necessary. If you're talking about a single transaction that modifies more than will fit in ram, I have no idea, I've never had to do something like that.
"Every month more than 70% of those folks use Facebook apps."

Do not be fooled by this impressive statistic. They are actually counting their "native" apps like Photos as Facebook apps. That means that if you upload a photo you are included in that 70 percent. That is like saying that anyone who used Safari on their iPhone used an iPhone app. By their definition it may be accurate but it leads you to believe that FB apps are more successful than they actually are. They are not dead but I would not say they are thriving either, at least not the vast majority of third party apps. There is a lot of junk in the app directory because the barrier to entry is so low.
It's the Ruby 1.9 each implementation that seems confusing to me. I don't have a natural feeling about a new scope being created for local variables first referenced in that block. I am much more used to method, object, and class level scoping. In most of the simple Ruby code I write, you can tell the scope of a variable by looking at it's name. I can see where you might need the block scoping with closures, but I actually find the second example more logical. In the first example, I can't imagine which memory address would still be holding the 1, and what it's name would be. I can easily see how the value at i would be 2.
Watch Out, TwitPic: PhotoBucket Is Coming At You With TwitGoo
Can you elaborate on where you're seeing the most bottlenecks in your performance profiling? I'd be very curious to hear what sort of performance issues a site like github runs into.
Twice Blessed: Language and Cognition
The article sources this statistic to an official EU document(?):

http://ec.europa.eu/publications/booklets/eu_glance/44/en-3....

Look near the bottom of page 52...

Edit: I can't seem to connect to the Japanese statistics page, but that too is sourced, and I can't imagine they'd just flat out lie about the contents of a publicly available document...
Zynga isn't an outlier. Virtual Goods certainly isn't a new business model, and they're definitely not the only ones doing it on Facebook.

Besides, from all the anecdotal data I have, successful apps using virtual goods typically get 1/3 revenue from direct sales, 1/3 from CPA offers, and 1/3 from ad clicks.
Matrix multiplication is a great example of this, there has been a lot of research into in sparse matrix multiplication because N^2.71 is still fairly difficult.

Edit: There are a lot of known algorithms that would be extremely useful if they where faster.
Oh, ok....bidirectional != roundtrip-able

Now that makes sense.
Ehhh I think it'd be wise not to jump to conclusions. I'm a pretty avid gamer myself, and this year has seen an absolute drought of interesting games.

At any given point in a normal year I would have a want-to-buy game that's coming out shortly. So far in 2009 I have not bought a single game simply because none of them are that interesting. I was looking forward to both HAWX and Resident Evil 5, but playing the demos for them convinced me not to buy.

The movie industry has been through this before - prompting predictions of the end of cinema as we know it. Except then Hollywood started producing movies people wanted to watch, and last I checked the industry is thriving.

I'm sure the recession has something to do with it - but I don't think it explains all of the 17 percent drop.
Eurostar checks are very tight and even on busy days it won't take over an hour of queuing at Gare du Nord. Usually there aren't so many trains to board so it's much easier to organize. I suffered a whole station lock-down on a busy Sunday night due to a large piece of luggage left near the security checkpoint. It delayed my trip only 2 hours, including the delays of not being on time for the cleared route. Another thing is trains don't usually have busy schedule of airplanes so they usually wait for people if something like that happens.

Also there's no fuel around to use as explosive material.
Austin, TX. Right now it's actually pretty fast.
Raising Bill Gates (a.k.a. Trey)
Seconded. This is a pain to deal with, and integrating it with Github would be oh so nice.
sweet! bunch of entrep's and beer always great.
I agree. I was not into Facebook a few months (maybe a year) ago... Expecting to see some good apps, I was actually very surprised to find out that almost all of them are junk... Seriously, I just ignore all app requests now.
Good call. Quote from the PDF in the meantime:

"To give a sense of what programming in Boomerang is like, we will define the lens implementing the transformations between XML and CSV composers shown above.

First we define a lens c that handles a single <composer> element. It uses a number
of functions defined in our XML library, as well as primtives for copying (copy) and
deleting (del) strings, and for concatenating lenses (.).

let c : lens =
Xml.elt NL2 "composer"
begin
Xml.simple_elt NL4 "name"
(copy [A-Za-z ]+ . ins ", ") .
Xml.attr2_elt_no_kids NL4 "years"
"birth" (copy NUMBER . ins "-")
"death" (copy NUMBER) .
Xml.simple_elt NL4 "nationality" (del [A-Za-z]+)
end

Using c, we then define a lens that handles a top-level <composers> element, enclosing a list of <composers>. This lens is defined using the features already described, a primitive for inserting a string (ins), as well as union (|) and Kleene star.

let cs : lens =
Xml.elt NL0 "composers"
begin
copy EPSILON |
c . (ins newline . c)*
end

..."
My wife and I are on our second week of the slow-carb diet, and it's going pretty well. It takes some experimentation, but you can find foods that taste better and still work with the diet (lentils are nasty). Our favorites are edamame, asparagus, mexican black beans (with lime juice!), bean soups, and lots of vinaigrette salads.
The only thing intrade.com has under "Legal" is which supreme court justice will be the next to leave (Justice Stevens leads at 35%).
Philip Greenspun wrote a piece called "Women in Science" about this issue, which is at http://philip.greenspun.com/careers/women-in-science . I think the emphasis on "women" is wrongheaded, especially since the majority of Ph.D.s in many humanities subjects—including English—go to women these days, but the essay is worth reading as long as you can ignore the sexism and pay attention to the discussion of incentives.
Ha! that hit the sport for me. Good point.
Ask HN/PG: Asterisks around something make it italics (except in indented code, apparently). In the above comment I had to remove a literal asterisk in the text because I couldn't figure out how to escape it. Backslash doesn't work, and two stars in a row doesn't work. Any ideas?

Update: Okay, so putting spaces around it ( * ) works. But the asterisk in question was inside parens without spaces.
Apache isn't that great for serving static content; I've read about plenty of people who use Nginx for static and Apache for dynamic. Now you can use Nginx for everything.
Tag a Tune's input-agreement is even more clever than the ESP Game's output-agreement
Check out the paper:

http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~elaw/papers/tagatune.pdf

Basically, output-agreement doesn't work that well with more subjective domains such as music. Input-agreement is an improvement in that respect.
The word 'should' is notoriously slippery. Your comment seemed to suggest that the 'torture' aspect could be a feature rather than a bug, because it would be considered by those contemplating a criminal act. If I misunderstood your comment, I apologize.

Solitary confinement is the choice of the jailers; at the time it is applied, the jailers have complete control over the situation. If it fails to deter or to reform, instead only causing pain and perhaps even greater psychoses and criminality, then that is a failure of the criminal justice system.

Calling it 'confinement torture' emphasizes the essential point -- at the scale it is applied, it is intentionally inflicted severe pain. Leaving off 'torture' makes it sound minor, like being grounded. A caning or stoning would at least be more honest.

I wouldn't necessarily disqualify punishments from use simply because they are painful. But I would subject them to a higher standard of evaluation. We should be very sure the benefits outweigh the costs. And driving someone crazy -- perhaps making them more violent and antisocial, perhaps causing permanent psychological impairment -- looks to me like it outweighs the benefits...

...unless the pleasure others receive by applying punishment is also counted as a benefit.
Account banning?
When I post comments with my account it does not show up when not logged in (catz). Is the account deleted or banned?

If so, why? I cannot see any recent comments that are inflammatory. Can't the system at least show when you are banned or not? It is irritating to spend 1 hour on a comment just for it not to appear.
A prescription for the newspaper industry
As much as I hate it when video game folks claim their industry is recession-proof, I have to agree that it's probably mostly other factors at work here.
Managing Ruby Gems in Leopard
"Perhaps there's a lesson in this for the parents of other curious children who, from the start, require the freedom to meet life on their own terms: It is that there is no statute of limitations on the dreams you have for your children. And there is no way to predict how much delight you might feel when those dreams are realized in a far different way than you could have imagined."
I honestly don't understand how treating women as unclad ogleables is a good business practice.
It was bound to happen, I suppose. I wonder if it will happen to Linux too, although I think it would be hard for malware writers to target Linux using conventional methods if users stick to using only open source software.
if true, this is a definite rite of passage for our beloved platform. maybe mac users will have to install antivirus software soon?
Let's presume that the 80/20 rule holds for bandwidth usage. 20% of customers use 80% of the total bandwidth. According to Time Warner, Comcast, etc. it's more like 98/2. So, much like voters approving a taxation scheme where the top 1% of taxpayers get tax increases, wouldn't most consumers be in favor of a scheme where they'd pay less on average?

So, what's wrong with the TW plan? They don't provide any evidence that the net effect of their changes would not be a significant increase in revenue. Is $15/mo + $1/gig better for them than $40/mo for everybody? Why was the marginal cost set at $1 vs. ten cents like Amazon? TW's marginal cost of delivery is negligible once coax is run into a house.

Please note that I'm trying to analyze this from a political perspective.. They're a regulated entity, so the economics of what they're doing are only an input into the political reality.
I aggressively block all the ads I can, with the exception of the google text ads. I might start blocking those too.

I have different browsers I use at my client's offices, on which ads are not blocked, so I see the ads then. I occasionally unblock ads specifically, if I want to see what types of ads and how many are running on a specific google search. Almost all ad-clicking I do is "market research" and does not result in me buying anything.
Antivirus software doesn't seem to help PCs much.
GitHub does look cool. However, I'm wondering what advantages Git will give me over Subversion for small and medium-sized projects?

I guess I'm really asking what's the advantage of distributed version control over centralized for Joe Coder. Distributed VC seems quite different, and I'm wondering whether it's worth the time to learn. Or should I just get on with writing code using the VCS I'm used to?
How is it a win-win for the defendants? Being a martyr is only fun if there are 72 bisexual women (or men, whatever your into) after said martyrdom.

A conviction would be a bad thing for the actual people involved I would imagine.
Yes, but that is for an N x N matrix. It is more useful to express the complexity in the size of the input, in which case matrix multiplication is N^1.5 or better. (As far as I know, the best known algorithm is pretty close to linear, but it's not known if a linear one exists.)
I'm guessing that Periodic means "safe" in terms of popularity and visibility, not ease of programming.
I don't know if there's a "deep meaning" to Tim Ferriss, but on the surface he certainly seems like a douche geyser.
Is it really a joke? The guy might actually be the pompous jackass that he appears to be. EDIT: OK, I see it's published on April 1st. :)
Increased R&D spending is vital to the software industry
I read advertisements from time to time. I click on them from time to time, especially on Google searches when I'm looking for a company/service that solves a particular problem. I almost never click them on any other site.
AbiCloud: The Enterprise Open Source Cloud Computing Platform
Thanks for being a voice of reason in this thread.

People don't seem to understand that subsidized does not mean cheaper, nor do I get how exactly they think faster and better technology (aka extremely high-speed rail lines) are somehow cheaper to operate than their predecessor - standard Amtrak service.
Video games are a cyclical market.

http://trends.google.com/trends?q=video+games%2C+santa+claus
> Basically, we're a gateway to your future self: email us
> anything, and we'll mail it back to you at a future time
> and date of your choosing.

Isn't 3mindMe a gateway to your past self?
Ask HN: SEO Mystery - What's this 'MarchSEO' guy up to?
Rule #1 on the web: Anyone with "SEO" in their username is not to be trusted.

Some guy named "MarchSEO" is posting links to one of my stories on lots of social news sites. I don't know who this person is. I think it's some sort of SEO scam, but I'm not sure exactly what the scam is. Help?

The situation

Exhibit #1. I published a story Tuesday about the Pittsburgh Samaritan:

http://www.windycitizen.com/news/04/14/2009/pittsburgh-samaritan-chicago

Exhibit #2: Someone named MarchSEO posted it to some random site called BizSugar:

http://www.bizsugar.com/NewsandPolitics/The_Epic_Tale_of_the_Pittsburgh_Samaritan_pics__video/

Exhibit #3: They've posted it to about 6 other social news-type sites. Check out the Google results for "Pittsburgh Samaritan"

http://www.google.com/search?q=pittsburgh+samaritan&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a

My article (thankfully!) is the first result, but almost every result after that leads to a social news site where this "MarchSEO" character has posted the story.

What the heck is happening here? Could one company own all these sites and be trying to muscle everyone else out for this weird search?
Such as importing my Google Code Issues :)
Somali Pirates Are Getting Rich: A Look At The Profit Margins
That's like saying a seatbelt doesn't help crash victims much.

The trick for both is using it.
In the interest of comparing, using your simplification, here's a Smalltalk version...

englishList: aList
^ aList size > 2
ifFalse: [ aList join: ' and ' ]
ifTrue: [ (aList allButLast join: ',') , ' and ' , aList last ]
I had that same impulse when I first heard the stat. Do you have a cite on that definition, though?
Last time it happened for one of our sites it was ~1500 visits or so. I'm sure it various depending on content/interest/day/etc.

Though I'm not sure why you'd be so keen on the actual numbers. This isn't the sort of site where you're really looking to get pageviews-- it's more about the great feedback and comments really.
Ah, alas, I'll be on the road.

Been thinking of planning a hacker dinner in Mountain View in a few weeks though.
what I'd like to know is whether or not they are looking for "viable" businesses(those that'll be able to generate revenue) or "cool" businesses(those that won't make money, but will have something that'll drive more traffic to facebook)
This botnet story seems to suggest that installing antivirus software isn't a high priority for most torrent downloaders.
I can't provide a reference that says that the 70 percent figure include native apps, however, historically they have made no distinction between native apps and developer apps when they count usage stats.
I'd be interested in it -- i love having EM running in the web server...
I don't think seeing ads helps your "market sense" or any other type of good sense. The ads are generally designed to make you spend money, and usually that doesn't involve making you smarter.

That would be like watching television commercials to learn how to make cars. It's not even good information on how to sell cars; most of car commercials are for cars made by companies going bankrupt, the last thing you want to do is copy them.

That doesn't mean that you might not want to monitor the ads your competitors are running and occasionally survey what else is out there; but in general, if an advertisement is spread across part of your computer screen, thebn fewer brain cells are working to make you money. Unless it is YOUR advertisement that you are working on, of course.
Very interesting. Perhaps next time I'm back East I'll try them out!
Time Warner Cable shelves plan to cap Internet use