skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I went to that camp and to the Military Academy where it is located. Where the frak were you, man!? My counselors were all like bad caricatures from a Will Farrel movie.

Then again, if I hadn't been so traumatized, I wouldn't be the person I am now.

(Division 7. Cabin 54.)

EDIT: I've been thinking about this more -- figuring out "the rules of the game" and changing or subverting them is the game. Or, the metagame, at least. It's the essence of the power of evolution and of intelligence. Once you have a process that can subvert "the rules of the game" you have a transcendent process!

EDIT: Another example of what was mentioned in the article: Julis Caesar vs. Vercingetorix at Alesia. Vercingetorix commanded superior numbers situated on the huge plateau/hill-fortress of Alesia. The fortress and its terrain would give a huge advantage to the defenders who already outnumbered Caesar's legions. Common wisdom was that Alesia was simply too large to be besieged. So what does Julis Caesar do? He does exactly that!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Alesia

The roman legions there built 18 km (11 miles) of fortifications in just 3 weeks. Then they went and did it again for another set of outward-facing fortifications.

EDIT: Yet another example, this time from my own life. Foosball. I learned foosball because I wanted to show up this annoying guy I knew. So I developed the conventional foosball skills, learned to pass to my front men, stop the ball, and make a set shot. The annoying guy kept beating me, though. He'd never make a set shot! He played the game wrong, always keeping it in motion, never stopping it to do a set shot. So long as the ball kept bouncing around in the opponent's half, it would eventually go in. Eventually, the two of us became a team, and we could often stymie other players. I could use my conventional skills on defense to keep the ball out of the goal, and to pass the ball up to annoying guy. It was very hard to stop our passes because I didn't even have to pass to my teammate. All I'd have to do was get the ball to the enemy's half of the field with enough energy so that annoying guy could keep it bouncing around. We beat so many guys who were convinced they were better players than us. And they were, by those conventional measures. They had more shots, faster shots, better reflexes, better ball handling. But we would beat them.

Then I started applying this to my solo game. Basically, get the ball to the other half, and make a quick shot. taking a shot before the other guy has the time to get settled in gives you a big advantage. It doesn't look as skillful or seem as sporting, though.
Bid To Have Your Whole Genome Sequenced On Ebay
Seriously, Wikipedia? You deleted Fravia's page for a lack of notability?
Are you reporting that he has passed? Or merely the death of his wikipedia presence. He has been battling cancer...
...patent filings. It's not hard to do once you learn how (get the Nolo Press book "Patent it Yourself"). You'll do a better job than most patent attorneys and save yourself a lot of money.

I have that book. It's quite good (and very encouraging), but I find it not very helpful for software patents (eg. it wouldn't help much for patenting PageRank). I agree that "most patent attorneys" wouldn't do a good job on a software patent, but the idea is to go to one who specializes in them (another plus for the Valley) - like the one that Google used (it's on the patent).
Reminds me of The Practice Of Programming, by Kernighan and Pike, a truly excellent book. They cover some of the bum steers of C efficiency quite well there. A classic.
Various groups of people care more or less about how you say something versus what you say. This forum is further to the first than other programming forums out there.
I guess this depends -- I've heard some people switching from Blackberry/Treo claiming they type faster on iPhone after they got used to it. (my rate seems to be about the same).
It's a good article, but man the design of that site is lousy. The home page (miltonglaser.com) actually resizes my browser window to be a little rectangle (!), with complete lack of consideration for the ten other tabs I have open. All the content is scrunched up in a little ribbon on the left with absolutely no left margin. The text is too small, and the contrast is just barely enough. It's pretty, I guess, if you ignore all the whitespace on the right, but the usability is lacking.

This guy is a graphic designer. So what the hell is up with his site's graphic design?
I don't understand why this would be downvoted. I wasn't rude or obnocious in any way, I just stated my opinions on the post.

If you think I'm wrong then tell me why rather than trying to silence me. This isn't reddit.
Yeah. At my first summer job, I would routinely stay at the office after my boss left just to work on the product, because I believed in it, and because he supported me, and because I admired and respected him. When I returned to work for the guy the next summer, his company had evolved/expanded and I got a lot less "face time". I was pretty much working under a COO, who believed in telling me "keep plugging away" as his version of moral support (I couldn't do more important work because I was simply "too young and inexperienced"). Anyway, I hated that second job, and I came into work late/left early whenever possible... I'll never work in a situation like that ever again.
The sharing thing is terrifying for "regular" users. Privacy is almost always seen as a plus. The UI is radically more complex than necessary.

There's a thousand things wrong. It could be better.

Bonus hint: Check my profile.
They didn't delete the page; they replaced it with (an inauspicious) redirect to "Reverse Engineering".

The discussion that led to this is here: http://bit.ly/10rqEV.

I can understand they logic behind this article being put up for AfD. It was written poorly, in POV style. It did do a poor job of establishing what was notable about Fravia (you'd have to know something about his particular reversing subculture to know why any of the claims in the article were interesting).

And finally --- and most importantly --- the article did lack independent sources establishing notability. Independent sourcing is not optional on Wikipedia.

I don't think this is a place where the system failed.
Userplane Going Out Of Business
Fair enough. I won't argue with the fact that Haskell is not yet ready for TweedHeads.
"What do the more seasoned Java-ers (Javites? Java-ists?) think will remain most relevant from Java-the-language and the existing environment?"

If you can package your code up in a jar file, in a way that the "API" you want to export is easily callable from Java, then you can deploy to pretty much any platform and every other language on the JVM will be able to interact with your library. Beyond that, learn to read Javadoc well enough so that you can download an arbitrary jar file and call the classes and methods that you need from the language of your choice.

That should take you a pretty far.

"Java-ers (Javites? Java-ists?)"

We prefer "cubicle dwelling code monkeys." Or just "Blubbers."
Can someone please explain the difference between having your whole genome sequenced, and the product by 23andme et alia?
I've screwed over an airline that didn't keep its promise to fly me somewhere on the date/time agreed on. And yet somehow I sleep just fine at night. Odd, isn't it?
Well, I am giving them credit for 1000 pieces of data per person.

Even if one person is curating 100,000 a day, it's still way too long of a time frame.

I just object to someone throwing around the word trillion, related to something people do by hand. I understand it's probably not a straight out lie, but it's a dumb statement regardless.
ALL of his blog posts are about extremely embarrassing oversights on his part -- they're all about what an idiot he is. The punchline is always "the first third of this post was hopelessly stupid".

They all have an implied "why the fuck do you listen to me anyway?" tone in the final paragraph. Jeff Atwood knows, deep in his heart, just how much of a pretender he is.
I'm just much more accustomed to composing essays on a computer, as I've been doing since fourth grade. I can write sentences out of order and edit them when I think of a better way to say it. It's much harder for me to write a good essay by hand, and it's not a skill I have ever had to use outside of school.
Many might mistakenly think that genomes are already being sequenced for $1,000 by companies like 23andme and decodeme, but these companies do not offer full genome sequencing. Instead they only analyze a few hundred thousand hot spots in your dna called SNP’s that can tell you lots of interesting things about your dna, but not the whole story. Fully sequencing every single one of the approximately 3 billion base pairs of your dna is a completely different scenario and the price of doing this is coming down rapidly.
How to work on cool stuff
Their rarity is clearly true. As for the grandiose assertion of superiority, it's worth noting the context: Lisp programmers never develop the social skills needed to work effectively as a member of a team.

Fred Brooks didn't see Lisp as a silver bullet, which a "vastly more productive" language would be. I'm sure he talks about functional languages specifically in his retrospective essay "Still no silver bullet" (or something like that).
Having your genome sequenced means reading every 'letter' of your DNA. 23andMe, on the other hand, tests your DNA for 'SNPs' which are defined variations in human DNA.

A great explanation of SNPs comes from 23 and me's website: https://www.23andme.com/gen101/snps/
This argument is as old as the hills. It's probably true in a lot of niche situations. But the fact is, most C code is faster than higher-level language code, because:

* C programmers have more freedom to arrange data in memory to exploit locality

* C data structures need less bookkeeping

* C programs manage memory manually, and so lack GC overhead

* C programs can easily swap in different allocators for different work sets

* C function calls are usually wired into the code, not indirected through (several layers of) tables.

That's to say nothing of bytecode interpretation overhead, which is probably a straw-man argument.

I buy the instruction scheduling argument for inner-loop numerical and vector scenarios, but even in performant code, that's usually less than 10% of the total, and from what I've seen, both C and HLL code tends to delegate that to machine-specific assembly libraries.
I think your conclusion about business users may actually be inverted in certain markets.

Eg small business in Canada, pre-iPhone the networks have been smoking us on data rates on Blackberry/Treo. iPhone has forced this down. (Pre-iPhone my Treo rate for 8M was pretty similar to my iPhone rate for 2G)

From this perspective the iPhone turned out to be a far more productive small-business smartphone for me than I expected.
Write "come code." Hmmm... Well, you win money for it.
Microsoft has marketed many brilliant ideas.

But the brilliant ideas that they marketed were not theirs; and the brilliant ideas that were theirs they didn't market.
How are link shorteners monetized? I'm just curious because it seems everyone wants to start a niche URL shortener.
I think Nudity and XXX should be the same button. You can use that space, to add another button for stuff like Youtube and flash game sites.
You are saying that if the G1 were any thinner, you would like it less. Is this what you intended to say?
You should redirect them to amazon using your affiliate link and hope.
SF startup Mashery kicking butt in API market
Note: It runs only on JRuby
I meant crappy for the end user, why go to this site, if you can go to eBay directly. Or better yet go to Craigslist which has a ton more <$1K vehicles than eBay.

And yeah they may have 500K uniques due to this promotion...but how many of them will come back?
Bill Gates v. Warren Buffett On Competing With Google: Charge The Moat
Let's take a power-amplifier-design approach to that (work back from output).

Let's also say that by 'piece-of-data', we're talking about the famous pirate unit, the piece-of-eight, a.k.a. byte.

So, we need an output of 2e12 bytes, produced by 100 experts, in, let's say, 200 days (about a metric work-year ;-).

That's 10e8 bytes/expert.day. A 100 MB table of reliable non-trivial data per day. Not totally out of the question, but finding twenty thousand of those ...
Unfortunately, the debugging interfaces on Linux and OSX are very different from Win32, and very different from each other.
Here's a simple way to disprove him: name one brilliant idea that Microsoft has had.
You say that based on what? Did you read it?

"The only thing a Ph.D. means is that you're not a moron, and you're willing to put up with the bullshit it takes to slog your way through a Ph.D. program somewhere." If he instead said that it is neither necessary nor sufficient to have a Ph.D. for task X, I would actually agree. But that would be too banal to catch attention.

"Microsoft has never had a single brilliant idea in its entire history. Microsoft has achieved success largely by seeking out and destroying other people's brilliant ideas." Depending how you look at it, seriously?

"The idea is very nearly irrelevant." If he instead said that he as an investor has no time/ability to tell good ideas from bad ones, it would have been reasonable, but this way it is insulting to people that work with ideas.
I'm using Haskell + CouchDB. The bindings are simple enough that I've been able to hack fixes for them pretty easily, and just as importantly, Haskell's GADTs are much easier to translate into JSON than they are into SQL rows (at least I thought so). Turning around, you can spit JSON back up at the web layer after some mapping, filtering and processing, so it's not as if you'd wasted effort by writing JSON instances for your data.
It was pulled by T-Mobile, not Google. You can still get the app if you aren't on T-Mobile.

And of course, you can install any .apk you like.
While I don't have enough experience in really low-level tuning, I know that sometimes people get so focused on optimizing their current implementation that they fail to see that their overall design has trapped them in a local maxima. Problems like inappropriate algorithms are usually more obvious in higher level languages, because there's less detail obscuring them. That stuff needs to be right before getting to fine tuning. (Prototyping in another language first helps.)

C and C++ are quite fast locally, but sometimes that works against being fast overall.
Rules say: "Entry must not contain parts of other people's work including without limitation other people's or company's applications, software, codes, trademarks, logos, copyrighted materials (i.e., no sampling of other applications, or any other types of third party materials allowed) or other proprietary materials."

So apparently no frameworks, no open source libs, no non-MS libs at all, no jQuery (even though it's supported by ASP.Net--it's still third party--unless you link to google hosting it, and then maybe it's not part of your entry?).

Confusing.
My own recommendation is that a company should lose its rights to a patent if there is not at least one product released by the company in x years.

Why bother? It would be trivial to game.
Bah, just take a http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?SufficientlySmartCompiler and have any unnecessary rounds of copying removed while still retaining purely function style in the source code. Right, this wasn't so hard?
Much as I take his overall point - that a close to the metal language is not always best for performance - the author would be well advised to take a look at the C99 restrict keyword.
I disagree with some of the Authors points.

The language is a tool, the efficiency of it really depends on how the programmer who designs and implements a program. You can have a horrible coder write something in C that would be very slow and inefficient, and given the same problem to good programmer and you can arrive at a faster and more efficient result using a bash script.

The reason why lot of people (including my self) believe that C/C++ is a high performance language is not because it fast for all applications, but gives the programmer more control instead of leaving all the fine details to the compiler to second guess. (@tptacek's reasons are perfect for this).
Surely the word is 'innumeracy', not the phrase 'mathematical illiteracy'?
not every website on the internets is created to shake things up and change the world...

this website serves a single purpose: get people to click onto the ebay auction and get an ebay affiliate cookie placed on their computer.

it succeeds.
I didn't think it was all that passive. It's frustrating to read a comment that's nitpicking the article by making the exact same point as the author, but using big-O notation as if that were the issue. Hint: it's not. The point is that whatever purely functional data structure is being used, either the whole thing is being copied on every single recursive call or some tricky behind-the-scenes magic is going on to make destructive-looking actions not actually destructive. Either way, you're nuts if you think its approaching C speed.
Maybe, but on the flip side, you could argue that a lot of high-level languages are trapped in hash tables, and are missing a lot of opportunities for fast tree-walking implementations.

It's tricky to really push on high-level languages because for every argument against one, there are 3 other languages that don't exhibit that problem. If there was a platonic ideal of a high-level language to argue from/with, this would be a more useful debate to have.
At least the site looks great on the iPhone! :)
This post is full of errors. For example, Paxos is not about the Byzantine General's problem, Paxos is a consensus algorithm for the non-Byzantine case.
Laconica is theme-able see http://laconi.ca/trac/wiki/ListOfServers for some examples. It can also integrate custom Plugins which allows you to do a good range of stuff. http://army.twit.tv http://bleeper.de http://todaysmama.com/connect are few of the larger laconica communities that have custom themes and plugins implemented.
As someone who works with ideas, I agree with him very much that ideas are a dime a dozen. It's the work on the idea that is valuable - and therefore the people who do that work.

Unfortunately the term "idea" is flexible. At one extreme, it can mean a precisely worked out and implemented design or concept (like PageRank), or at the other extreme, it could mean a wish (like "wouldn't it be cool to fly like a bird!" - which would be awesome btw).
When you run a site with many users, you have a responsibility to safeguard your users' data. Part of this is having reasonable security, and part of that is having a reasonable admin password.

As far as not "really" needing to post this, that's true of any breach of security with no obvious user-observable consequences, regardless of the kind or degree of the breach.

edit: Besides, as is the case with the softcore porn in a technical presentation, I'm more worried about the fact he says it's no big deal than the actual security problem. I think "I screwed up totally and apologize for having failed you, this will not happen again" would have been more appropriate than (paraphrase) "I screwed up but this is pretty inconsequential."
I have a friend at Intel who works on their realtime raytracing efforts and he swears by C/C++. Indeed, his arguments mirrors yours and go even farther. There's all sorts of magic you can play when you've got access to the actual bits and bytes. For starters, they do things like stash data in the low-precision bits of floats and the lower three bits of pointers. I wholeheartedly concur with his opinion that in raw performance terms, C/C++ is the fastest.

The problem with his argument and yours is that C is NOT faster for The Rest of Us because it it amounts to premature optimization just by virtue of using it. And because it takes so much effort to get C code to just work, the WHOLE program ends up being slower than the corresponding code in Haskell, OCaml, or perhaps even CLisp. Having worked my last job in a company where the programmers preferred C to C++ and C++ to Python, it startles me how utterly slow our system was. And ditto for the previous job.

At my first place, we had a streaming video server that had blindingly fast compression routines, but it was all held up by a UI loop that harked from the prototype days. Thus the argument that C/C++ is/are the best languages for fast code is moot. It is only the fastest if you've all the time in the world to write it.
I see how it can be funny, but the Disney homepage has some music playing, which kinda gives away that you're not doing anything work-related.
Mainly there's nothing amazing about it that makes it seem worthwhile to get past my initial dislike of the interface. The minimize/maximize/close buttons aren't where I expect them to be, the applications feel strangely constrained, and I hate the menu bar being at the top of the screen. The Dock icons seem represent a whole bunch of different things (launchers, folders, open documents, running applications) and it's hard to tell the difference based on appearance. Also, the Dock takes up a lot of screen space, but I don't like hiding it. I think I'm trained to expect a whole lot of information on the screen, and the Mac aesthetic prefers the opposite, at least in the default configuration.

It might help if there were more evident ways of customizing the interface. I learned how to customize the hell out of my KDE 3 taskbar just by clicking around. To give OS X a fair shot, I would probably have to buy a book or follow some how-to articles on the web on turning OS X into a more productive environment (like Tog's "Make Your Mac a Monster Machine.") That seems to reflect poorly on the interface's explorability.

Anyway, according to the prevailing attitude, if I haven't fallen head-over-heels in love with OSX by now, I'm just not a Mac person. Therefore, my faith in a big payoff, a more pleasant and fluid way of doing things, is gone.
San Diego Hackers: Django Meeting This Wednesday
Google is just as fickle. If Google doesn't like the links on your web pages you get PageRank slapped. If your Google Ad Words don't get enough clicks they pull your Ad Words ads. If Google doesn't like your web site they kill your Ad Sense account and don't bother paying you for ads already delivered. All of these penalties are final and without appeal.

Don't trust the cloud. Appreciate its gifts but don't expect it will always be so.
Define "people". How many, how diverse? Are these 'people' in your target audience? Can you extrapolate the opinion of those 'people' to hundreds of thousands of other people?
Neat idea, but how much did it cost him to drive across the country, especially assuming that he normally stayed in a hotel room?

When I travel by driving and stay in hotels it usually costs > $200/day between gas, food, and lodging, so assuming he bought the car for this I'd guess they spent a few thousand dollars for those 500K hits.

A cool idea to be sure (and good job on the local news thing, the spreadsheet/assignment editor is a good one to remember), but was this really all that cost effective?
One issue that I see is that they only (seem) to compare with gcc, which is not particularly good. It would be better to compare against something like icc, which has better register coloring, SIMD support, etc.

This might redeem C a little.

However, the real reason C will not go away any time soon is that there is no replacement for low-level software yet. Nothing eles has quite the same minimal dependencies.