skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
From reading Odersky's book Scala's notion of currying functions i.e. f(x:Int)(y:Int) is differentiated from partially applied functions. Here is his currying example using a partially applied x():

def x(a:Int, b:Int) = a + b

val y = x(1, _:Int) // y is a partially applied function

y(2)

==========

Much better looking than his snippet:

def x(a:Int, b:Int) = a + b

def y = Function.curried(x _)(1)

y(2)
not sure if I'm more annoyed by the dumbass crackers or webmasters...
Intel Larrabee to have 32-cores, ship in 2010
Ipower vs Fatcow : web hosting comparison
Ipower vs Fatcow by ipowerwebreview.org .We had been reviewing ipower fatcow for few years now, and ipower service uptime is showing better figures in uptime statistic table.
The people subsidize it because they believe doing so makes everyone (including themselves) better off that way.
Oh, c'mon... these guys are not your average armchair statiticians newbies. One of the authors:

"He studied economic history at the London School of Economics before training in epidemiology and is Professor Emeritus at the University of Nottingham Medical School and Honorary Professor at University College London."

The other:

"Kate Pickett is a Senior Lecturer at the University of York and a National Institute for Health Research Career Scientist. She studied physical anthropology at Cambridge, nutritional sciences at Cornell and epidemiology at Berkeley before spending four years as an Assistant Professor at the University of Chicago."

Their board http://www.equalitytrust.org.uk/about/board :

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molly_Scott_Cato (Phd)

http://www.shef.ac.uk/geography/staff/dorling_danny/ - Danny Dorling was educated at The University of Newcastle upon Tyne in Geography, Mathematics and Statistics leading to a PhD in the Visualization of Spatial Social Structure

http://www.penguin.co.uk/nf/Author/AuthorPage/0,,1000074828,... - gained a BA in Oriental Studies at Oxford, received a Harvard MBA before returning to Scotland to manage the family paper mill business, transforming it into a more open company, for which he was given the ‘Scottish Business Achievement Award’ in 1998. His St Andrews PhD was on the subject of employee ownership

http://www.uel.ac.uk/ssmcs/staff/rustin-michael.htm

Not saying the book is right, but I'll be damned if we have to teach correlation/causation to these people.

edited: The Wikipedia article on "Correlation does not imply causation" cites a "a widely-studied example, (where) numerous epidemiological studies showed". Just a friendly reminder :)
Fluke isn't really fair. Yes there was luck, but once that initial luck happened there was a lot of hard work by Kevin, me, and all the early employees to build upon it.
Why did it cost $10,000?
I sympathize with you. But I cannot help wonder why you thought you would get a visa if you know they are generally given to 500,000-1M investments? Did you know it would be a longshot anyway?

Good luck with your startup!
Charlie Stross: Login 2009 keynote: Gaming in the world of 2030
With reference to Zope: it should be noted that the Zope 2 of old and the modern Zope 3 are themselves on opposite ends of the magic/non-magic spectrum.

The Zope community learnt many lessons from the magic used in Zope 2, and radically altered the fundamental patterns for Zope 3 away from magic.

These days people who live in Zope 2 environments (eg Plone) make extensive use of Zope 3 technologies and patterns via the Five (2+3) bridging mechanism.

Ie, in the Zope world at large, "non-magic" is now considered best practice; its not fair anymore to consider today's Zope a framework that changes the essential nature of the language.

Its been interesting to see the initial Rails elation getting tempered later by grumblings about the pricetag of such magic; the Zope world had gone through the same thing but a few years earlier. Today's Zope has already learnt from this and moved on.

In fact the community has even been able to combine some of the philosophies of Rails (eg avoiding XML sit ups) with the Zope 3 paradigms, to create the Grok framework which remains wholly Zope 3 compatible. This really has the potential to strike a good balance.
USB is serial.
You'll now have to change your HN profile from the "built digg for $10/hour" to "$20/hour + equity" :)
Why is this listed as [scribd]? It's a pdf at Microsoft and has nothing to do with scribd.
This is very sad news.

its main focus was on Microsoft's Flight Simulator.
So this was a game review site, I had initially thought it was a place where you physically go (the false cockpit kind of training place).

Lesson:
"Some have asked whether or not we had back ups. Yes, we dutifully backed up our servers every day. Unfortunately, we backed up the servers between our two servers. "The hacker took out both servers, destroying our ability to use one or the other back up to remedy the situation."
There's more to it than that. For context, I'm a little-l libertarian and personally not overwhelmed by a great need for equality, but suppose we take it as a given that this is a Good Thing and should be aimed for. There are a lot of questions: When? At what cost? Who? And perhaps most importantly, how?

Communism in practice boiled down to a three-fold plan: Take the money from the rich and give it to the poor, let the government take over managing the money now that there's no rich people to do it, and give the goverment managers perks that turn them back into rich people in practice, if not on paper. This is what you might call the simple approach, "naive" in the sense that a simple algorithm is "naive".

It turns out to work absolutely terribly, of course, because it fails to take into account higher order effects. Of course with a first-order analysis, if you take all the money in the world and spread it out equally to all people, all people have the same amount of money! The problem is that the analysis can't just end there, for reasons well explored elsewhere.

Perhaps there are smarter ways to do this. It's hard to know. But I am fairly certain that whatever the smarter way is, it doesn't involve just taking money from one person and giving it to another. That has been shown to be all kinds of corrosive to society. (Somewhat ironic, as it is promoted as a cure.)

There are other approaches. We could take a long view of equality, listen to the Singulatarians (even, or perhaps especially, the "weak" Sigulatarians), realize that we're still in a transitional period of wealth generation and that breaking our economies now to spread wealth now may be a terrible idea, as opposed to letting the economies run with a bit of inequality now but attacking the problems (either of inequality or the secondary/related problems in the essay) with orders of magnitude more resources later. Perhaps later we can or should trade economic efficiency for wealth equality, but we can't afford that yet. The wealthiest country on the planet can't even afford that choice for its own citizens, let alone share with the rest of humanity. Maybe the "how" can only be answered in 30, 40, 50 years, and trying to do it now is as stupid as setting up an interstate highway system in 1870.

Or maybe we recognize that rather than tearing rich people down, we should be looking at how to bring poor people up without tearing anybody down. This is possible, but only if you have the correct view of the economy as a non-zero-sum game, which is unfortunately still "uncommon sense".

So, even if we do agree that equality is a desirable goal in and of itself, we are not constrained to take the stupid view of it and believe that we must go with Communism. We could try smarter things, and realize that instant success is not possible and any plan that promises it is therefore flawed. Of course, this is predicated on a willingness for large swathes of the population to think about second-order effects so the odds of this happening are pretty low.
Owen said: It’s a bit of a myth that it’s all young coders. There actually lots of people in their late 30s and their 40s. I’ve been a programmer for 25 years and I’ve actually worked hard to keep up with new technology.

That's quite encouraging. Sometimes I think one could be forgiven for getting the impression that if you're over 25 and you haven't made it in start-up land, then you may as well quit.
Bootstrap++

It's nice to hear a success story like this from time to time as reassurance and that it's not entirely impossible possible achieve. I am walking down the same path as you guys are, and I hope we come out as successful as you. Good job!
Rephrased: Diversity sucks.
It'd be a lot more structured like a course that you could work through. Lessons that would walk you through each part of a learning module. One lesson might consist of a video (from iTunes, Standford, or MIT lecture), test with feedback, discussion area (like HN) where questions are asked and answered etc. There would be a series of lessons like this that would contextualize some of the free stuff out there and also provide peer to peer learning.
Yes, there definitely has to be an integral community moderated system, so that the best content rises.
1969 was the absolutely best year to be born a geek.
Definitely not alone. I read the majority of the article just to find out what it had to do with PHP at all.

Apparently, in "PHP circles" they don't like object oriented design because PHP isn't Java. I'll go inform the Zend Framework and PEAR communities that they're doing it wrong...
This is an excellent lesson in the security problems inherent in trusting proprietary software

This sentence made my day, given who is using it and how often it's being used.
Stack Overflow is stupid
I've seen all the hub-bub around the net about Stack Overflow and thought, "Wow, there must really be something cool there." I've even ended up there a few times hunting for a coding answer, usually not finding what I need.

Today, however, I did find the perfect answer to my question, the only problem was that the answer that helped me the most wasn't the top rated answer. Since this second placed answer was so helpful I went through the process to sign up for Stack Overflow solely for the reason of voting up that answer so it could help someone else, only to discover that I don't have enough reputation to VOTE!

What is the point of the site if I'm not able to share a helpful answer with the next person to hit that page? Now I have to spend a ton of time on the site asking questions and answering them to get reputation, or do you have to have reputation for that too?

I'm completely shocked at how un-user friendly the site is.
The other day a beggar was asking me for money and I thought "He's just going to spend it on drugs and booze". Then I realised that's exactly what I was going to do with the money - who am I to judge this poor guy?
Or the BBC Journalists who can't tell the difference between a Hacker, a Cracker, and a back-up process that's Knackered.
Immigration law can get expensive in a hurry, and (as an aside which I hope is unrelated to the current discussion) the people who most need it are the least capable of assessing providers and the most likely to get taken to the cleaners by unscrupulous folks.

If you accessed the Internet from outside of the US you'd be bored to tears of ads, in every language, promising a shot at the US Visa lottery for "very reasonable application fees".

Edit: Incidentally -- if you'd like to sit down and discuss your (three page) application for an engineering visa in Japan with someone who speaks English, that will run you about $2,000. You could do it yourself, too (my company and I always do), but for people who are inexpert at the magic words, the lawyer is worth the money. You're paying them largely for their savvy and, ahem, "I'm important enough to have a high-powered lawyer on my side" rather than for their ability to read and fill out forms.

The visa process has rather little to do with you and rather a lot to do with your host country. The letter in support of my most recent application says "Patrick" once and variations of "Japan" about fourteen times. It was written by an HR officer who understands how the game is played.
They did backup - but the hacker (attacker) killed the backup server too.

How do you handle that? I mean, your server has to be able to write to the backup server - so the attacker can also.

It would need to be some sort of append only filesystem, and who does that?

I use ssh to copy the tar to a different server - remotely distant. Which I thought was enough, for fires in the datacenter, or going out of business without notice. But who protects backups from an attacker? With ssh they can attack the remote machine easily and remove the files.

Maybe I should add a cron on the remote machines to chown the files away (and hope that server also isn't vulnerable).
You don't say where you came to Singapore from. I'm guessing that it took you and your family sacrifices to put together $65,000. In a place like Silicon Valley, such a small amount of money (by USA standards) would not last long. If you were to go to a more affordable part of the USA then you might as well be working from where you are now. If your ideas are good, then register a .com domain name, and market it solidly. At the very least, your burn rate will be much lower and you will have more time to make your vision a success.
A brief review of David A. Black's Ruby 1.9 screencasts plus an announcement
How was the webmaster a "dumbass"? They had backups, but the hacker (yes I know it should be cracker - too bad - that battle is lost), took it out.
Just click the first link "Alan Kay: The Power Of The Context [pdf]" instead of the second "[scribd]" link.
I won't lie to you, I'm pretty impressed that Urbanspoon caught on like it did. Congratulations on the successful venture, I'd love to join the club.
Twitter gave more details on the issue:
http://blog.twitter.com/2009/05/replies-kerfuffle.html

So, I was part of the people confused by the feature discussed here. I understand that what was causing the problem was when you wanted to see all the replies of the people you follow but also all the replies TO the people you follow. Makes sense now...
It would be ranked by the system, all responses from the commnuity are collated and ranked using an algorithm and the highest ranked is sent to the requester.
Pull, rather than push. (For instance, set up a cron script on your home PC to SSH into your production box and download a backup from time to time (rather than having your production box push a backup elsewhere).
Lawyers just love immigration law. They can charge like wounded bulls for what you can essentially do for your self. One friend spent $30,000 for a business visa app and failed to get it. Another just went ahead by himself and successfully got it. His costs, only filing fees and a bit of form filling, photocopying, printing.
Poll: How Long Did You Lurk Before Signing Up On HN
Simple question, how long did you lurk as a guest before actually signing on for an account
0 Months
1-3 Months
3-6 Months
6-9 Months
9-12 Months
Longer Than A Year
How about "your backup server has to be able to read from your real system"?
Nokia 5730 XpressMusic Video Walkthrough
As I believe I said in the interview, the second developer we hired at digg was older than me (I was 45 at the time we hired him).
"Auction Site" Swoopo got $44800 for a $2500 computer. See comments for explanation
The Way swoopo works:
Users pay 75 cents per bid to use swoopo. Penny auctions start with a product at $0 then each bid increases the item price by one cent. Bidding at the last second won't help because it resets the timer to 10, 15 or 20.

$44800 computer:
58950 bid were placed, at 75 cents each that's $44212.50 + the final price $589.50 for a total of $44802

I researched the site a bit and generated some statistics including the top 20 biggest consumer fails / swoopo wins, the above being the most profit they've made.
http://blog.jimmyr.com/Auction_site_Swoopo_a_scam_or_a_bargain__13_2009.php
The Way swoopo works:
Users pay 75 cents per bid to use swoopo. Penny auctions start with a product at $0 then each bid increases the item price by one cent. Bidding at the last second won't help because it resets the timer to 10, 15 or 20.

$44800 computer:
58950 bid were placed, at 75 cents each that's $44212.50 + the final price $589.50 for a total of $44802

I researched the site a bit and generated some statistics including the top 20 biggest consumer fails / swoopo wins, the above being the most profit they've made.
http://blog.jimmyr.com/Auction_site_Swoopo_a_scam_or_a_barga...
Look up Koza's work with Genetic Algorithms. There are lots of little "game worlds" about the same complexity as Core Wars.
yeah, this is not the first time swoopo has come up here.
this may be a dumb question, but what kind of information is this? "local search" feels commerce- or service-centric.
The Future of DRM - Flexibility
Says a bunch of people born in 1971...
Related submission linking to more detailed content:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=606474
"Unfortunately, we backed up the servers between our
two servers."

It sounds like two servers ran the site and backups were jsut swapped between the two, that is a hackneyed setup.

Besides, all it takes is burning the backups to DVD once every blue moon to prevent massive data loss.
Ask HN: Help me create my own feelSpace belt
First, some background on what it is I am looking for:

http://feelspace.cogsci.uni-osnabrueck.de/en/index.html

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/15.04/esp.html

Basically, it is a belt with a bunch of vibrating pads going all around and an electronic compass. Whichever pad is pointing north, vibrates. The end result is that "the tactile perception of the vibrators [disappears] whilst conscious information processing is displaced by a new 'sense of direction'."

I have wanted one for a long time. At first I hoped that modular components would be easy to find and put together. Apparently not so. I then toyed with the idea of making it out of old nokia vibrating batteries and an electronic compass component, but I quickly realized this is way out of my area of expertise.
So then I thought, no problem, I'll hire someone with the right skillset. Except, I don't know what the skillset is, or where to start looking.

I figured there would be someone in the HN community who'd be able to point me in the right direction.
Both people who've only ever had State jobs, tho'.
So? This is the second notice: that the most salient part of my post, is that it's more relevant to consider relative distances and population densities. The US taken as a whole seems forbidding to rail. Specific regions of the US can appear quite hospitable. Gerrymandering left as an exercise and opportunity to display academic integrity.
Market Applauds Recent Results of 3 Financial Stocks
Can you talk more about point 9 on your post? I asked the same question in the comments there.

Partnering with huge brands is obviously a great move, but everyone could do it if it was easy. All the other points, while not necessarily easy, are doable. I'd like to hear a bit more about how you guys hitched those rides.
Amazon doesn't verify ownership of blogs when it sells feeds
First, we don't know what his idea was. Obviously he believes in it to have dropped so much cash on it already, but there are all sorts of things that people believe in (FSM FTW). That's not to slight his concept, since we haven't seen it, what's the point in passing judgement.

And actually, your point illustrates quite effectively why there is illegal immigration. If the system is broken, people will try to work around it, rather than through it. Bureaucracy for the lose.
"Information" here refers to any kind of information and when i say "local" i mean information relative to the country i.e. Nigeria. Nigeria as a country has very little information on the web, so i would say this service can be likened to Google local search but with a wider perspective.
I don't want to sound callous, but just duplicating your data once does not constitute a sound backup strategy. You need snapshots and failover redundancy. It's good to have RAID 1 style redundancy for high availability, but if you or someone malicious writes bad data to your primary, you've hosed your backup as well.

They had some backups yes, but there is great room for improvement here.
For that era anyway...it could be that 1990-1992 is another "golden age" of birth years, but those kids are still 17-19, so we'll have to wait a few more decades to spot the trend :)
a small subset of markdown would be enough, namely blockquotes...
I feel for you ... the U.S. visa and immigration process sucks. My wife's parents were denied a visitor's visa to come to our wedding (from Taiwan).

The system is broken, discriminatory, slow and unfair.
You don't understand.

I am all for charity (I give a fair amount myself). Any of us could fall on hard times. But I am against being forced to give money to these sorts of causes.

What if I, personally, feel like there is somebody else who is more worthy of my charity (those in the third world, those who were never given a first chance, those with genetic diseases, etc). It should be my choice who to help.

The problem I have with government welfare is that they tell me that if I don't contribute I will be thrown in jail (and if I refuse to go to jail, they will kill me). I don't like having that sort of threat hanging over my head - even if I was planning to do what they want anyways.

I have no intention of joining the KKK - but I would be just as angry if the government told me I couldn't do that.
Surgeons are very very expensive, so their time is too.

Surgical instruments, on the other hand, are easy to replace ;)
See http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=609997

The salient point is that even if I'm happy to subsidize that sort of lifestyle, I don't think the government should make the decision for me (especially not at the point of a gun).
Chrysler dealerships closing list
I was 31 when I started Delicious as a company. That probably rounds down to 25 though.
I'm sure other Visas can be tough, but I got my spouse visa in Japan in a few weeks from the time I started. A couple simple forms, less than $100 in fees, and a couple trips to the immigration office.

The US is ~$1,400, 6 months, multiple appointments, and a stack of paperwork for the same thing. Really pathetic. There's no excuse (no, not even volume).
Not really. There are plenty of examples of that, but this is an example of someone applying for a special kind of visa that they were obviously not qualified for and then not getting it. I'm sorry for them on a personal level, but at an institutional level, the system worked just fine.
Duplicate: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=608345
Some rather deep and mathematical ideas about programming in there. Does anyone have thoughts on the last paragraph?
Unless you're suggesting that the tax-rate be 0% then the "point-of-a-gun" argument is disingenuous. All taxes are at the point of a gun. You can't simply argue from this position when the target of the funds is something you don't support.

If you think all taxation is inherently illegitimate, that's fine, but such a position is not strengthened by your disapproval of the target of the tax funds, no matter how silly or frivolous you think that target is. If, on the other hand, you think some taxes are reasonable -- that is, it is acceptable to apportion according to a majority in some cases -- then your argument needs to address the inappropriateness of the target of the funds, not the legitimacy of the taxation itself.
Magic often means a minor increase in convenience now in exchange for an increased risk of a confusing debugging nightmare at an indeterminate point down the road.

Once you've been burned by it a couple of times, you become very wary.

I think python is somewhat of a refuge for people who have learned the dangers of magic the hard way and decided it should be avoided when it isn't necessary.
If you are an entrepreneur this is just one more fuel to your fire to get there.
Building a World Class Startup (The Nigerian Story)
Socialism Coming Back To Haunt U.S.