skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Plus I didn't realize it was possible to set the font size to .0000000000001 pt.
Good question, I went on a hunt and, while the specifications an headers are out there, I didn't come up with anything that could actually run the code.

AMD did a demo last year so I'm looking into what they used for that.
I would be surprised to hear about any SF-based, consumer-facing web start-up who didn't follow comments about them HN. Not to mention a company that is in the customer satisfaction industry.
Kelvin's hydroelectric generator
What's universal is that you can never please everybody at once, and you should never try to. You can't be yourself much less do anything of slightest importance without considered negative by at least some people.

Also, what other people find negative and positive is certainly out of your control.
Well, I would disagree - the problem is that there is no apparent mutation in the given example. There is hidden mutation, in that the list comprehension mutates its variable. This is probably done for efficiency, but I would claim it's a bad design decision.
> Most programmers on this forum, especially those working open source, are opposed to software patents as currently implemented. They make it impossible to do anything non-trivial without running the risk of being sued for infringing what should probably be considered a basic technique.

You raise some valid points. But you're not really disagreeing with me, are you? You say "as currently implemented", which means that you agree in principle to the concept. And if, if you recall, the comment I was replying was questioning whether royalties should exist at all; they weren't suggesting that it be "tweaked", rather that it be abolished altogether. I'm saying that's a pretty extreme view, and used the similar case of software patents to make my point.

In any case, I agree that there is a tradeoff, and it's true that in some cases -- especially software patents --we've gotten to a kind of silly season. But I don't think all patents -- even the majority of patents -- are egregious.

Perhaps I was too restrictive in specifying software patents. A new question: do you not agree with patents in general? I think it's much harder to argue that, for instance, a pharmaceutical that invests billions of dollars on a new treatment shouldn't be protected from a competitor simply copying its product and putting it to the market.

I'm basically arguing that the concept of intellectual property is a valid and fair one. Obviously there can be debates about details, but the principle, in my view, is sound, and even the most ardent of open-source adherents agrees as much, else why the meticulous emphasis on the precise terms of licenses like the GPL? If you don't believe the creator has "ownership" over something that can be copied at zero cost, how can you argue against, for instance, Tivoization?

> The musical analogy would be something like copyright of chord progressions

I would have thought that the musical analogy is copyright, which refers to an expression -- a somewhat nebulous term but which is nonetheless amenable to common sense judgements. To patent chord progressions would obviously be silly, because there's relatively few of them that sound good. And yes, I am 100% confident that my songs (shameless plug: http://www.myspace.com/thesignalsuk) are sufficiently distinct from anything else that I could argue that in a court of law and prevail! They are indeed original expressions ;)

To answer your questions:
1) You mean from patent infringement? Yes, I would think so.
2) No; I work in a hedge fund. To open-source our strategies would be commercial suicide. I suppose that gives me a different outlook from you. ;)
Since that's Clojure's motto, let's see how it does:

user=> (def fs (vec (for [i (range 10)] #(+ i %))))
#'user/fs
user=> ((fs 3) 4)
7

Looks good.
This is essentially the idea that we've been applying to seed funding firms with. The market for products for the elderly is huge, and software firms largely don't care about it. So, I think it is a great idea (haven't looked at your implementation yet).

I'll share with you one insight we had from our brainstorming sessions: we thought it would be a good idea to make the product a desktop email client that runs on startup rather than a web page (tagline: "Outlook for the elderly. Except it doesn't suck like Outlook."). I just remember how difficult it was for my father to learn how to find the browser, open the browser, go to gmail, remember his password, etc. And yet for many users, email is 90%+ of what they use their computer for. There's no reason it should be complicated (or use small fonts!).

However, making a website probably entails less up-front investment and allows you to test the market. It's a great idea, and I wish more people would focus on this underserved market.
It used to be thought that you could judge someone’s character by looking at the shape of his head. Whether or not this is true of people, it is generally true of Lisp programs.

from pg's On Lisp
Mashups: The end of one-size-fits-all software
For years, developers have been crying, "Separate your business logic from your presentation logic!" and yet who maintained both artifacts? The IT department. Mashups finally resolve this state of affairs and empower users to create solutions for themselves - a kind of usability nirvana.
Ask HN: What percent of IE6 users are large companies?
I know a lot of large companies I've worked with still use IE6 because of some dated proprietary software or the sheer scope of upgrading everyone.

Anyone know about how much of the IE6 population is composed of these users?
Ask HN: Where do you host your personal projects?
Hi fellow hackers,

I am looking to start work on a new personal project and was looking to use version control hosted online.

Any recommendations for svn / git hosting ? Good / Bad experiences ? Best bang for the buck ?

Thanks in advance!
Does it make you sad that this is the same answer you'd have given if the language in question was Java?

Just rubbing it in.
forgot one -- ask for tips/donations.

i kind of think that most monetization solutions will fall under one or more of these overarching concepts. i might've missed one or two though.
Downgrade plan for Windows 7 PCs
Perl 5.10.0 gives three different sets of answers.

Map works as the original author expected:

@fs = map {sub {$_ + shift}} (0..9);
print $fs[$_](3), " " for (0..9);
>>> 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12

A Perlish for loop, or rather a statement with a "for" modifier:

push @fs, sub {$_ + shift} for (0..9);
print $fs[$_](3), " " for (0..9);
>>> 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12

The same loop, unpacked into a more universal syntax:

for (0..9) {push @fs, sub {$_ + shift}}
print $fs[$_](3), " " for (0..9);
>>> 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12

Here's where things start getting awesome. Let's name our loop variable $i, rather than using the Perlish default $_.

for $i (0..9) {push @fs, sub {$i + shift}}
print $fs[$_](3), " " for (0..9);
>>> 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3

And now let's write a C-style for loop.

for ($i=0; $i<10; $i++) {push @fs, sub {$i + shift}}
print $fs[$_](3), " " for (0..9);
>>> 13 13 13 13 13 13 13 13 13 13

I am not sure why the last two versions work differently; I'd halfway expect the bottom version, but the "for $i (0..9)" loop leaves me scratching my head.
Except there will be wireless internet everywhere, and by the time you get home your camera will have uploaded your images.
obligatory slicehost post.
Disclaimer: I'm not a Rubyist.

I think saying "Ruby is a freedom language" is a cop-out for foregoing good design. It excuses us from having to think through if the design makes sense, because we can always throw up our hands and say "Ruby is a freedom language." But I also think that's not an entirely true statement: Ruby doesn't let programmers jump to any random line of code. (I did find a neat module that implemented gotos and labels, but I think it only works at proc granularity, not line granularity.) It doesn't let programmers muck with the the stack frames or manage their own memory.

The reason for these non-freedoms is that past experience has shown us that in some domains, some language features are high risk, low yield. I see the freedom of Ruby as a chance to experiment with many different ideas for language design, and the practical value of that is the languages we design in the future will have those lessons baked in. But by defaulting to the idea that it's a "freedom language," we resist learning.

I say this as a non-Rubyist. I wanted to learn a dynamically typed language, and I chose Python. I don't have the time now to delve deeply into two languages. So I'm commenting on this as an observer, but I'm an observer who sees the value in Ruby, and potential implications to future languages.
This may just be cynicism, but since you assign point values to the work it seems like there would be a general downward trending as you get more into the project. I know at the start of any project I largely undervalue the difficulty of implementing a feature or fixing a bug.

Similarly, it seems that there is a large spike in point values right after showing the project to someone else. I know that, again, in my experience, after showing my projects off I tend to far over value the difficulty of new features. Typically that's because I end up spending 75% of the time leading directly to that showing off a project is to fix all the bugs and make it stable. After I've spent a long time fixing bugs, I start adding the difficulty of fixing the bugs that will come out of the feature to the difficulty of the implementing the feature. After a little while I stop doing that, and the difficulty would go down for the same feature.

Not saying anything about the post, or the quality of work done. I was just pointing out my observations on some of the statistical foibles.
"Finally, is it your position that the hacker ethos considers it frivolous or morally wrong to collect revenue for patent royalties?"

for software patents, certainly.
Workarounds:

fs = [(lambda n, i=i: i+n) for i in range(10)]

or

from operator import add
from functools import partial
fs = [partial(add, i) for i in range(10)]
Thanks for the compliment, but [citation needed]...
pivotal looks interesting. thanks gabor!
The problem is that many of Microsoft products are very nice. Things like Office have no competitors, unless you take massive cuts in usability and features.
When I visit the site, it says: "Alternate HTML content should be placed here. This content requires the Adobe Flash Player. Get Flash."

Do all elderly people have Flash?
>Let's also not forget the SEC has not proven it's abilities to catch bad behavior...

Given that it was warned about the Madoff fraud for 9 years and did nothing, I would say it proved the opposite. It's interesting to see Gheitner use the Madoff case as justification to expand the SEC's authority.

http://www.usatoday.com/money/markets/2009-02-12-markopolos-...
Google and Microsoft Engage in Yet Another Pick-Me Face-Off for Twitter Search
Choosing a web development stack: PHP, Rails or even ASP.NET?
Given that the average lifespan is around 75 years, a 50 year copyright represents the vast majority of a person's adult life. For the artist, I don't think there's much difference between that and perpetuity. And those artists it does affect, such as Sir Cliff Richard, have not exactly been fans of the limit ;)

As for how to apply a continual update model to music, I'm not certain. I'm not a musician, so I couldn't venture a guess. But it seems to me that there isn't going to be a lot of money to be made in future from licensing past hits. The software industry manages okay, but perhaps you're right and music can't use the same model. In which case, musicians need to find another model that works, or slowly be consumed by a world where copying is increasingly cheap and increasingly hard to prosecute.

As for patents, it's my position that people should not be able to patent software. Fortunately for me, that's still the case in the EU.
Opera has been one of the very well disciplined and feature-rich browsers for the longest time. It was atleast twice as fast as anything else about 8 years ago, on dial-up (ah, the good old days).

It was pretty impressive what they had at that time : email integration, ability to identify as one of the other browsers, the cool tabbing system and even themes! They definitely beat the competition (navigator 4.7, IE4/5) hands down. Too bad they couldn't get the scale then.
This is true, but I felt why it interfered with discussion was more relevant.
Rather than "where do you pitch your ideas", my question is more about just discussing them informally. Discussions that could start by "wouldn't it be nice if...?", "I was playing around with this API and thought...".

Like a book club for just discussing ideas :)
Scientists pinpoint the 'edge of space'
I run this site:
http://isitnormal.com

It gets quite a bit of traffic, mostly from search, but it has proven very hard to monetize. Tried adsense, but my content was too risque for them. Was using an ad network called clicksor for a while, but their ads are very intrusive and didn't perform well enough to justify the bad user experience. I even tried the adult friend finder affiliate program for my "unsafe" content, but it performed absolutely horribly.

Would love to hear more ideas from the HN crowd. How does one go about finding private advertisers without a salesforce?
http://splashup.com/
What is the best free svn GUI on the mac?
Any suggestions?

I've got svn set up with xcode, but xcode support is lacking. I can't find a way to tag commits.
This isn't one of the 'some'.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_of_the_bikeshed
The problem is latency and the cost of moving data. If I'm sitting on, say, AppEngine it is expensive and impractical to use Amazon SQS with it.

Fast-forward 5 years when you company is large and dataset larger. You'll find yourself dependent on all of the features of your chosen vendor and you never look at or know about other vendors. The cost of moving is simply too high and mix-an-match doesn't work.

If you stay nimble and limit yourself to intersection of the different cloud's features you'll be ok. That's not going to happen for a lot of larger non-tech companies.
from	Paul Graham

to	Ian Lamont

date	Wed, Apr 8, 2009 at 9:22 AM

subject	Re: 2nd anniversary of "Microsoft is Dead" essay - new factors to consider?

A lot of people misunderstood that essay, and asked how I could
claim a company making so much money was dead. Obviously I didn't
mean Microsoft was bankrupt. What I meant was that they were no
longer a factor one had to consider when doing something in technology.

That's still true today. The big stories in the 2 years since have
been AWS and iPhone apps. Microsoft's mindshare has continued to
slowly erode.

Thanks to AWS, someone starting a startup today thinks more about
Amazon than Microsoft. An online retailer! It would have seemed
almost impossible to people in 1999 that anyone would be saying
that in 2009.

--pg
No; and the user interface is entirely built for the Flash player, which might limit it somewhat in its reach. Our thought is that they are unlikely to need PawPawMail in the first place if they have a home computer that they are completely capable of using without a small degree of setup by a friend/manager.
My "website" is a digital brochure for my business. Ask me how I make money from brochures if you want.
Nicely done, I think this is an exceptionally good idea. The interfaces for the product look great.

My one suggestion would be to do some work on the interface of your website itself. Given what you've done on the application interface I'm sure you guys are capable of better. (Had this link not been from HN I most certainly would not have given this product the time of day, based on the website.)
Thanks to pawpawmail, I now know that the pawpaw fruit looks awfully like a green peanut.
I don't think it harms anyone, but perhaps it's a bit dishonest. I'll go back to trying it the other way and see if I can't get the same level of kind interest.
Writing simple python setup.py commands
The sperm bank should grant her a full refund, providing that she returns the defective product.
Twitter API: With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility
I've only tried one, but Tigris' own SCPlugin works well. It allows Subversion commands to be run from the Finder, and can badge Finder icons with current state, etc.

Though for things like tagging, I've grown accustomed to using "svn cp" on the command line, so I don't know if the GUI can do it.
Not sure about "best," but I use SCPlugin, which I find to be not as good as, but a reasonable approximation of, TortoiseSVN on Windows.
Probably SLIME, though I have never seen a shot of the window borders or any of the emacs decorations.

If this was indeed Emacs, the author doesn't seem to know of the M-( parenthesis matching keychord. You can see him type the opening paren, types the code which is autocompleted just find, but he also types the closing paren manually. M-( will give you matching parens and put the cursor in between.
Google Code.
I am not sure why the last two versions work differently; I'd halfway expect the bottom version, but the "for $i (0..9)" loop leaves me scratching my head.

$_ is dynamically scoped, so you are not capturing anything in your lambda. The reason they appear to work is because you are binding $_ dynamically to the right thing when you are printing the list.

Example:

my @fs = map {sub {$_ + shift}} 0..9;
$_ = 42;
say $fs[0]->(1); # 43

Oops.

Perl 5.10 lets you lexical-ize $_, but you didn't do this. Try again and let us know how it goes ;)
"provided by a meat tube" made me spit my tea on my keyboard and laugh out loud! sigh I'm so immature.
I would encourage anyone who thinks this was cool to check out the physics libraries available nowadays. For example with the free library Box2D you can do stuff like this and more in a matter of hours. It works in Flash too, so if you can think of something cool to do in a web app with physics, it is not difficult at all.
It's a useful idea but I think solving the "email is hard" problem is secondary to the "managing a computer is hard" problem.

I've tried setting up fool-proof systems for elderly family members in the past. All the applications and URLs they would ever need were sitting right on the desktop, anti-virus and windows automatically patching themselves, etc.

It only ever last a few weeks until they started downloading attachments from their marginally more savvy friends for it all to come crashing down.

From my experience I would say extending this into a suite which allowed full remote (with no RDP setup required) maintenance and solving the end-to-end problem would be more compelling.

But this is definitely a good start.
These fruits actually taste really good too. As a native to Missouri, I have eaten these several times right off the tree while on hikes. They taste quite a bit like a banana and have huge seeds.

It is also North America's largest native tree fruit.
That was my point when I started the thread. The Python decision is objectively justified for technical reasons. Yet a large number of people viscerally feel it's wrong. I blame human irrationality - but then, programming languages are meant for humans, so shouldn't they accommodate our irrationality? Otherwise, you get something like Haskell. ;-)

BTW, there are other cases where Python has gone the other way. Multiline lambdas, for instance. The case against multiline lambdas is essentially that they look ugly - they let you embed an indentation-sensitive block in what might be a parenthesized expression, which means you need some dangling delimiters. But they're certainly useful, as Scheme/Lisp/Ocaml/etc. have shown.

It's similar to the compare-constants-from-the-left idiom in languages where assignment is a valid expression (notably C). If you always write "if (NULL == foo)" instead of "if (foo == NULL)", you eliminate a whole class of bugs. But I've seen very few programmers do this, because it "feels" wrong to a lot of people.
Blekko's ambient cluster health visualization
Is iShoot the number one selling app (in volume or revenue) in the app store? Do you have Mob War's specific numbers?

This is what I mean by "evidence". The reason I ask is that most developers (other than publicly held companies) don't discuss these details with the general public.
It would seem to me that forcing said person(s) to relocate geographically to carry out that work would cut down a large percentage of the actual exploits. Not an all or nothing result, but largely beneficial, nonetheless.
I think making it a desktop client is a great idea. My father is still inherently a little less trusting of "the internet" and web browsers, but he's fine with using an application for email. It sounds sort of silly.. but if that's what it takes to crack the elderly market, it's worth looking into.

Great idea for a product!
Also entertaining: its flowers smell like rotten meat.

see http://www.hort.cornell.edu/extension/commercial/fruit/mfrui...
Please...

This isn't really new as Apple has been using this technique on the iPod line for years. The mini, nano, and shuffles all appear to be made with this technique. Additionally, the biggest issue with using a single piece of aluminum for an iPhone body would be that the aluminum itself would block the RF signal for the GSM and Wi/Fi radios which is why the current iphone back is plastic as is the little corner area on the back of the iTouch.
Why isn't this in faq.html? It appears to be launched.
SISC Scheme ( http://sisc-scheme.org/ ) has continuations and runs on top of the JVM.
My friend uses googlecode. Its free and uses svn.

http://code.google.com

http://code.google.com/hosting
I think an appliance is the ideal end-product. Gift gramps email in a box, a very limited, PawPaw specific notebook. All it does is email and photos.
Thanks! I agree that the website itself needs some work; the landing page is intentionally underdeveloped to direct active users to their interfaces, but it needs an overhaul. Anyone have any specific design tips for implementation?
Solve the simplest problem that tons of people have. Excellent invention in my opinion.
I'm bound to make mistakes when talking about this stuff but my wife got her masters in nutrition, is published in journals and for what it's worth she's a big fan of the raw food diet. We both followed it closely for about 6 months but eventually we decided it just wasn't convenient enough. There were certainly some benefits to it that I miss but I phrase these much more conservatively than what most gurus would have you believe. For example, I never felt any sort of natural high or extreme mental clarity - just comforted knowing that I wasn't poisoning my body with HFC etc. YMMV.

Here is my best argument for why a layperson should go raw: it forbids you anything that even resembles junk food. Raw may be flawed but clearly it's way healthier than how most people eat. You can say it's a crutch or psychosomatic or whatever but for me once I got into the mindset of it I just stopped noticing unhealthy food. Almost everything in the modern dining world is cooked.

The major downside - because it's so damn restrictive (plus we're practically vegan) is that raw gets to be time consuming. It's really impractical for people on-the-go. Sure you can always just eat an apple or some carrots but that gets boring and so you end up dehydrating your own bread etc and turning down practically every social dining opportunity. In a way that is a Good Thing because there is a lot of harmful junk in modern food, right? But it takes real dedication and eventually we decided a totally raw intake just wasn't worth all the effort.

A cooked food diet opens up the floodgates to all sorts of unhealthy temptations. But in the end it came down to priorities like convenience. If you're thinking of going raw your best friend is the blender: there are a million nutritious ways to mix a surprisingly delicious smoothie (secret ingredient: jalepeños).