skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've been around long enough to have noticed several of these cycles. I could go for weeks seeing nothing interesting, then go nuts for a couple of days reading and posting. I don't know if it's me or hn, but I simply describe it as the natural ebb and flow of an organic entity.

Come with an open mind and have fun if there's interesting stuff that day. Get back to work if there's not. Either way, you win.
i expect my context and my attention within it are treated with absolute respect. godly.

if im making a comment of political relevance id like it sent to my rep for me rather than filling out forms and/or repeating myself on your site.

the relevance and the routing would be a function of where i am commenting, i.e. im on a political site that you have made a relationship with.
Its the "oh, this is cool!" design philosophy.

There was a top gear episode, Clarkson was talking about driving...the quote is something like

"THIS, now this is fast driving. Boring, smooth, not a lot of tyres screeching...boring, efficient...

now THIS, this is TELEVISION driving, car going sideways, tyres smoking something furious! WAAAHOOOOOO!!! FUN! See the difference?"

This is like...television design, its fun and loud, but not very effective.

I'm sorry, this makes no sense at all.

Carry On.
How about ranking by how other users who have a similar voting pattern to the current user vote on an article? So, for example, when the page is rendered for user x, each user who has upvoted an article has their vote multiplied by the similarity between their voting pattern and user x's voting pattern before sorting with the current algorithm. Each user then gets a semi-personalised view which, hopefully, is to their taste.
I've been in the industry long enough to remember the issues with the Mac OS when it was still cooperative. Having continuations is sort of neat, but selling it as a threading solution rather ignores decades of experience that pretty uniformly point towards it being incredibly problematic for that purpose, to the point that I wouldn't touch it with a ten foot pole. There's a reason all OSes use preemptive scheduling. All the benefits of cooperative scheduling come with gigantic tradeoffs that dwarf the benefits, such as the ability of one cooperative unit to suddenly stop cooperating and halt the whole shebang, which pretty inevitably happens. (It doesn't even have to be a "crash", just a fiber that wants to, say, find and replace a string in one pass but suddently gets passed a multi-gigabyte string. This sort of thing happens all the time, and if you think you can avoid it... I don't believe you, but you're free to try. The problem space of reality is a lot spikier than anyone can imagine.)

Also, if Ruby really does schedule an I/O-locked thread for its full slice regardless of it being locked, that's Ruby's problem, and "fixing" that is not an advantage of cooperative scheduling. However, I doubt Ruby works that way. Somebody please tell me it doesn't.

It's a great tool for many other tasks, no question. But it's really questionable to use it for scheduling. If you feel it's the best tool, be sure you understand the tradeoffs before diving head-first on the basis of one article's breathless summary. There are reasons this approach has been abandoned for scheduling, and why virtually nobody is proposing that it come back for that purpose, even with all the recent interest in such matters.
didn't get much out of the content, but that http://www.amazonpayments.com/offer is pretty nice
Like all news, you get lulls. Sometimes, there really isn't much going on, but we will it with things all the same.
I don't think the point the original commentors were making was "don't question requirements." It was:

(1) Sure, the problem was somewhat unrealistic/simplified. It's just an interview question; you're not being asked to actually build the damn thing, just sketch how you'd build what the interviewer is asking you to implement.

(2) Making an initial observation about the difficulty of actually assessing frequency of word usage is great and probably better than just talking about implementation techniques, but the interviewee kept coming back to it, even when the interviewer wanted to move on. That is just obnoxious.
There are 5999 spaces between words. But that still leaves him 1 character short.
Using Lisp (and Erlang) in a game server - Neuroarena
Well in that case you can tell your kids to go and study in a good university in a country where higher education is (almost) free...
I don't really understand why people still keep paying huge amount of money for tuition in american universities when they could get the same or better education for almost nothing in a european country
I've been to a American university and I've studied in France so I have seen the differences and the 21000$ tuition/year university wasn't better than the free (500$/year but 15$/year for people with aids) university..

So you don't need to save that much money for your kids but just teach them well enough so that they have an open mind and are willing to go out to different places to get what they want...
Towards the end of the article and in the comments there is some ideas for expiring a cache entry. This would allow for a specific life of the cached output and then make room for an updated version of the output.
Now I know how European countries pay for their very nice public transportation systems.
"Having free time was great, but in my contract was specified that everything I worked on in my free time belonged to the company."

Wow that is sick.
OK, I'll bite. What's wrong with Twitter?
I was in the Navy in the early 00s. Ditto.
Global data is bad; only the memoization code needs to access the cache; why expose the cache more broadly than that? More explicitly, one problem with overexposure is namespace collisions.
Sounds like a good plan!
Amen. And, don't inflict pain on others just because your editor sucks.
How to write a blog post people love
Agreed, if third-party apps did not exist for the iPhone, I would not have bought one.
What's wrong with mixing tabs and spaces?

The proper way to code is to use tabs to indent, and spaces after to align. So, no spaces before tabs, only after, and tabs should only indent to the current indentation level of the code (obviously).
> Guaranteeing profit is not why patents exist in the first place. They exist "to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts."

...and the way that they promote the progress of science and technology is to put a PROFIT MOTIVE in place, so that folks have more effective reasons than pure altruism to engage in research.

Yeah, YOU might dedicate your career to finding important genes, instead of launching a software startup, because you care that much about other people.

...but what VC is going to pay for your lab and staff if he can't make a profit off of it?

Bottom line: intellectual property is a government created kind of property, but it aligns incentives, and results in
the progress of both science and technology.
Only Bertie Wilberforce Wooster could give such an awesome and useful response! </Obscure? Wodehouse reference>

This is awesome. I might be in the bay area some time soon myself (but probably not coinciding with @rjurney, sadly) and will definitely drop by Hackerdojo.

p.s. @rjurney Rotee on Haigh St. in SF for awesome Indian food. (It's been more than a year since I tried it though).
If I think about the pain points from the perspective of the person supporting whatever issue they are writing about a few ideas spring to mind.

If you could take your app one step further and actually connect the reader to their representative that would be great! Getting people to follow through is the toughest part when asking for this type of action. (I seem to recall a click to call service being reviewed here on HN a while back that could broker a two way connection like this.)

It would also be great to know how effective an article/person/web site/etc. was at getting people to contact their representatives. This information can be really important to smaller - grass roots - efforts.

An example: www.letcongressknowaboutlyme.com The site creator is trying to collect information via email.
But no thank you.
At the end is what I consider the real argument:
"You didn't do anything to create it, just discovered something that already existed."

Patents are for inventions. Patenting genes is like patenting Pythagoras' Theorem, and then arguing that everyone who uses that theorem must be licensed. Or like if whoever determined that oxygen has 6 protons then patented it and argued that everyone else must pay a license fee to breathe.

If you take the argument to its logical conclusion, you should realize that it's absurd.
As much as I like Rob Pike, that's a pretty horrible patent to try to rationalize. Pretty weak rationalizations too: They let me do the research I want, they get to patent it; And: Heaven is boring.

I suppose there's a contingent here that doesn't mind patents on basic techniques, but let the karma suffer, my momma taught me right from wrong.
Patents were to cover inventions not algorithms... copyright covers the implementation of a piece of software, a patent is not needed if you look at a piece of software and copy it then you've violated copyright. There is not copyright on physical inventions, hence the "need" for patent protection.

The main issue is that sure it's great to be compensated for your work but it is not a right. Patents and copyrights are to encourage people to produce & that is all. The software industry does not need patents to encourage people to innovate, so by definition we don't need patents in software.
This is good advice, but aside from 111 Minna, the SF bars listed are crap. I'm assuming they are listed because they are all about a block from Moscone.

If you want a safe brewpub style bar, go to 21st Amendment instead of Thirsty Bear. Irish Pub, go to Irish Bank instead of The Chieftan. SF style dive bar, Zeitgeist instead of Tempest.
Yup, they're there because they're close to Moscone, and I agree on your recommendations.
They would be, if the commercial transaction leaves their identity behind. Pimping is a "cash or stash" business.
A nice read about this is "Three cups of tea".

There's a passage in there that goes something like "Thank you, Dr. Greg, for offering to help us build a school. We talked about it and before we build the school, we decided we need to build a bridge." So they built the bridge instead...
Dijkstra Prize in Distributed Computing
Formerly called the "PODC Influential-Paper Award".
This is strange... Suddenly everybody agrees with raganwald. Who's been posting those negative comments then? In my experience, technical interviews are always about passive-aggressive attitudes and open demonstration of "I'm smarter than you are, now prove me wrong" mentality.

Every single interview I've been at was just like that. I remember one guy asked me "do you even write unit tests?" to which I gave up and honestly answered "why are you even implying that I don't?". This was one of the first questions and the dude had absolutely no ground for phrasing his question this way. For god's sake, ask me about my favorite book, or about my favorite computer scientist, or about my favorite programming language - there is so much you can talk about figuring out what kind of an engineer I am.

A typical programming interview is a sham: an interviewee googles questions and an interviewer googles answers, and the job offer comes as a positive probability of them googling the same thing.

And the most ridiculous thing of all, is that more often than not, after drilling you on various hashing techniques and optimizing tricky algorithms in space and time and quick-sorting bible on a whiteboard, they'll assign you to a high-school level job - pushing SQL statements and HTMLizing the output, web 2.0 style. Yikes.
Have you had much success recently with the "old-fashioned way"? If so, could you be specific about which method(s) in particular were effective?
Stephen Wolfram’s Introduction to Wolfram Alpha (screencast)
Changed the example (and updated processing.js) to include mouseClicked().
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zen_and_the_Art_of_Motorcycle_M...
I also don't buy his line that AT&T never threatened to sue anyone over the patent. Maybe not in the strict legal sense of the word, but if my company receives a letter from AT&T's legal department saying "hey maybe you guys should license this technology that you're using, which we have a patent on", then I'm going to pay attention. Why else would anyone give AT&T money after receiving this letter if not for the implied threat of a lawsuit?

Edit:
It seems like he has the patent number wrong. US Patent #4555755 appears to be for a multiphase AC control system - http://www.google.com/patents?id=CFg7AAAAEBAJ&dq=4,555,7...
I was in a fairly similar position (graduated in 03).. after a few months of frustration, I just started my own business. Was making less than my friends that got jobs the first year, but quickly out-paced them.
You are right, web-site's design and a web-site's user interface are not the same. If anything the UI is just 'a space where stuff can happen' the design should be responsible for handling whatever is happening.

As long as HTTP reigns supreme as a transfer protocol, so will formatting source files as text...
Just time the thing out after so many cycles.
First Steps Towards Post Scarcity
And rightly so, the whole history of antitrust law is completely full of injustice. It is impossible to tell what is legal or illegal because it is not defined, it is merely a tool for the government control successful companies.
I posted a review our app post, and within a few minutes it was pushed back to the next page, we only got a few comments while it was on the front, and then it's lost. Kind of sucks =( It could also just be that the app didn't have that much to talk about
Wrong. He's warning you about relying on applications that you can't modify. Just because the app runs in a browser doesn't mean that it is magically immune from bugs. If it's free software, the community can fix the bugs. If it's not, everyone is at the mercy of one company.

It's the same argument as always, just with a spin that you may not have thought of before.
I've also seen companies fail precisely because the founders were unwilling to give up any control. They may have thought they were choosing between 100% of 10 million and 5% of 200 million, but by being unwilling to give up any control at all they doomed themselves to 100% of 0.

In fact, I'd say that the most common mistake I've seen/heard about is often people focusing way, way too much on their personal stake and control, thus crippling the ability of the business to expand.
When you talk about shifting the rights problem one step further away, I wonder what exactly you mean? Surely the issue is the same regardless of the application layer in which the font's path data is being presented? The only issue being of course that the font's path data is publicly available. Am I missing something?
This is _Hacker_ News, we want to know _how_, not _what_ ;-)
I second the recommendation for Rotee. Fantastic, and right down the street from Toronado. Memphis Minnie's is great, too.

... and, hah, the reference was not missed by someone with the last name Wooster ;)
Richard Stallman, in an alternate universe, trades places with Turd Blossom.
smart move on craigslist, they get to skip the "controversy" and in turn get to make money off ads that used to be free.

And this won't do shit to lowering prostitution, there are dozens of other sites in that same space
i meant to upvote you, clicked downvote by accident, seems to be no undo -- sorry about that
"We can't" has got to be a blatant lie. It worked two days ago.

Let's say they changed the architecture so that @replies go to a dedicated queue, and not to the public timeline queue. The solution is simple, then... make two copies when posting, one for each destination. But I don't think this is the issue, since supposedly mutual followers will see the @reply in your public timeline. So I really don't get it.

Twitter--. They are either incompetent, or are lying.
Yes, there are frequency lists. This is the most useful, easiest-to-carry one I've found so far:
http://www.amazon.com/Chinese-English-Frequency-Dictionary-M...

Access to the official vocabulary classifications is through the HSK program:
http://www.china.org.cn/english/MATERIAL/105441.htm

But there are words, then there are idioms, and there are sentence patterns... if you can afford it, the Pimsleur series is unsurpassed for mastering a series of basic sentence patterns.

The John Francis books are useful orientation. If you're studying, the New Practical Chinese Reader series is extensive and helpful.
"profound views but never let it out" - sounds like an intp to me (http://www.intp.org/faq.html). there's a chance there's a lot of intps around these places. intps like to hack, i know i do. probably some intjs as well - they get more stuff done. being business and such, there's probably some entjs around here too - who wouldn't fit that description at all. sprinkles of other types is my guess, but im guessing a lot of 'engineering' and 'executive' types.

detailed profile: http://www.intp.org/intprofile.html
When I was an intern, I would ask questions to a "mentor" at my company. One day, he looked at my problem and just smiled a little, and said: "It's non-trivial, but I'm sure you'll figure it out." I took the hint, went off and indeed figured it out.
Actually, that's the law: if you're employed as a programmer, any programming you do in your free time is copyrighted by your employer. At least in the Netherlands. (More info at http://www.iusmentis.com/copyright/crashcourse/ownership/ .) And yeah, that's pretty sick from an employee perspective, but great if you want to protect yourself as a company. When I was employed, I actually read my contract, so I had a side-note added with exceptions. If you're involved in any open source project, that's probably a smart thing to do. (Again, at least in the Netherlands, but I'm pretty sure that's not unique, since copyright laws tend to be very old.)
Ironically showing the url in the browsers status bar is automatically disabled in Firefox because for goatseed reasons.
Megacorps with good names and good positions are looking to hire low cost, high output college grads to bootstrap the next generation workforce.

I'm really not sure why you're getting downvoted, but this is absolutely correct. A few of these megacorps are facing potential retirement of 60-70% of their workforce within the next 10 years, and it's not just on the order of a few hundred retirees, it's tens of thousands.
I mean, one thing they're investing in is the company being well managed and communicative. It's up to the CEO and co. to make it happen, and there's a level of trust there.
pretty good advice for me as a CS major hoping to gradaute in 4 years
Ask HN: Should I create an API for iTunes apps?
I spider iTunes to get content for my app directory. I'd like to make that content available to others through an API. Is this something that's of interest to anyone?

The API will give developers access to iPhone app descriptions, price, links and other details available in the app store. It'll also include videos and tags that aren't.

I'm looking for any feedback on whether this is of interest to anyone.

I list the proposed features and benefits here:
http://www.yappler.com/api

note: I posted a similar question yesterday about coming up with the idea but what I'd like to know, is if the idea is worth continuing with?
I'm confused. We'll no longer see @replies from people we don't follow? If so, that's awful.

Good thing Twitter bought Summize, as it's quickly becoming the most useful part of Twitter. Search "to:username" gives you this exact functionality.
I hope, for your own sake and that of your loved ones, that humanity's interests overlap with your own self-interests, for it's better to serve the greater good by accident than not to serve at all.
Well someone requested it as a demo because they are creating an interactive canvas program in which the text being displayed will change every time the script is run. Obviously that makes using images impossible. With regards to using images for the glyphs, it's slower and requires more KBs across the board.
...but what VC is going to pay for your lab and staff if he can't make a profit off of it?

Plenty would, but you would have to use the more traditional method of patenting called "never releasing your research".
You Don’t Need To Lie To Sell Products
Well, yes. there's only so much land to go around, and the majority is taken up by these countries (left out desert countries like Sudan, Algeria, etc. because they have little risk of over-expansion). North America is only three countries but is the third-largest and the fourth most populous continent. Three countries alone make up nearly all of Asia, the largest and by far the most populous.
AFAIK, Ruby marks I/O blocked threads and does not schedule them. However, if you have a native extension that's blocked on I/O, it may be scheduled--so there is a potential problem.
How does the server know the CVV2 code that was generated by the Emue card? Or, given the card number, and other variables like time of day, is the CVV2 code determined by some function?
Yep: http://www.google.com/patents?id=UOMZAAAAEBAJ&dq=4555775

775, not 755
As these things go, it's probably more complex than that. Still, I'm also very interested in why this won't work for Twitter's (current) architecture.
I wouldn't trivialize the scaling issues at a company growing 100% monthly.

The scaling issue was technically the second excuse. They initially said it was a user experience issue.
Twittjr, or using a PC-Jr to browse twitter
Tell her to ask the professor or TA during office hours.
That's a bit of a silly comment on the page. Halliburton, Sodexho, Serco (et al) schtick is services. They would happily train teachers if that was what the government paid them taxpayer's money to do.
Or the cost of supporting the feature in the real world exceeds the value of the feature to their business.

But I really liked the part of your post where you were like, "assume they have queues like this, and then all you have to do is that!" Because I'm sure you're right, and to a competent developer, everything at Twitter is that simple.

I am however a bit confused about the "lying" part. Uh... why? What would be motivating them to decieve you?
You've posted this, what, 3 times now?

You may be asking the wrong crowd. Try e-mailing some of the app review sites etc. to see what they use currently and how it can be improved.
The key is that power over information can be taken away from the community at large. That this is done in the accepted legal and commercial framework is a little beside the point.

First, there was no rule of law, and the citizen had no protection but to supplicate to the most powerful.

Then, there was the rule of law, but the laws were written by someone else.

Then, there came democracy, and citizens had some sort of indirect input to ruling themselves.

Afterward, commercial interests found that they could exercise power over others using the framework of markets, and monopolys and other abuses had to be curtailed.

Information was not so easily manipulated and aggregated when our country was founded, but the importance of what happens to information and who has control over it has increased as our ability to leverage information processing has increased. As a result, we are becoming aware of new, hitherto unrecognized rights. We're going to have to fight for them. I'm not sure if we need to do this politically, commercially, or with a combination of the two.
Ouch, I shouldn't have sent you that twitter invite then. Sorry :-P
If only all teachers would like like you TAed, we'd have more kids who have learned how to troubleshoot instead of circle the right answer on a multiple choice