skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Working through SICP. Did you make it?
For a variety of reasons, including an excellent comment about CS pedagogies from a few days ago, I've decided to learn scheme and work through SICP this summer. I remembered a thread (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=428248) where a bunch of HN people were going to work through it together and I'm curious about your experience.

Did you make it? If not, why? What resources did you find particularly helpful? I've got the pdf book and links to the old MIT video lectures and newer berkeley video lectures. What else should I have? What version of Scheme/Lisp/other language did you use? I'm trying to decide between MIT, UCB (STk), and PLT Schemes. Did the group experience work and was it helpful? What was the most difficult part?

Here's some further explanation about my language options. Tell me if you think I'm off base here. I listed those three Schemes for the following reasons. MIT because SICP uses it. UCB because the berkeley video lecture series uses it. PLT because I'm going to take a languages class in the fall from Matthew Flatt who is one of the members of the core PLT team. Another goal for the summer is to play with Impromptu (http://impromptu.moso.com.au/), so something that will ease that learning curve would be nice.

Thanks!
This author has a really strange concept of what the "back button" should do - probably very different than what most developers (this crowd?) would think.
Ask HN: Is Google really slow right now?  (or is it just for me?)
(or is it just for me?)
and on Macs, it costs $20 for drivers to use the back button on mice without vendor software.
Note that I'm not talking about words. Words are only a tool to further knowledge, intelligence, and organization.

The guns are an implementation detail. The tools you need are generally context-specific. Malone: "You wanna know how you do it? Here's how, they pull a knife, you pull a gun." What if they're destroying your culture, your economic substrate? Bringing a gun to this party is like bringing a knife to go after Malone. (The Untouchables.)

Knowledge, intelligence, and organization are fundamental. These are the fundamental means of defense, which the populace has given up.

The Nazis accomplished an impressive feat of data processing to collate the identity information of almost all of the Jews in the territories they controlled. If the Nazis lacked that, far more lives would have been saved than arming the Jewish minorities. A gunfight is one of the outcomes they would have wanted. It would have been a propaganda coup for them! And if the Jews had been an unorganized mob, so much the better for them.
This should be applied to SaaS as well: something needs to be done about GPL parasites hiding "in the cloud".

If you're building on top of GPL, users of your cloud software should be able to download your code, examine it and modify/deploy on their own servers.
He wasn't saying college felt like prison, just that it was a worse financial deal.
its slow for me too. not just google.com, but google-related services. doubleclick ads, analytics, etc.

edit: seems to be back up to full speed for me now.
Game Web 2.Over ?
There are some grown-ups who play with scratch too; on the project page they have a numerical procedure for speeding up the built in functions like square root and sin to implement collisions off round objects.
This is precisely the problem with /classic -- even old (classic?) users use the main home page, so they're going to vote up stuff they see there. The front page is so path-dependent that taking out certain votes after-the-fact is never going to make big changes.
I've been a ham operator since I was 10 so I have a little experience on the subject. Interference can come from anything. Lots of power supplies for surprising devices are culprits. The little cheap universal AC/DC adapters are one of worst offenders. Power-lines, bad transformers, any business that has massive electrical devices.

TV's, (especially older) microwaves, vacuum cleaners... pretty much anything can cause interference. One of the worst culprits are the cordless handsets.

The biggest offenders aren't devices that use the same rough frequencies, it's ones that either splatter all over the place or have harmonic issues (multiples of frequencies, a 500MHz device can splatter 1,000MHZ, 1.5GHz, etc)

It would be nice to have more spectrum for use for digital devices. Hopefully in the US they continue moving the TV stations off and eventually provides more spectrum for growing wireless devices.
Yeah, everything; maps, gmail, etc!
"In fairness, we could have written a threaded poller in C and ended up with the same ease of management, but it would have been a heck of a lot more code."

What's the equivalent of Greenspunning when you find yourself trying to duplicate the features of Erlang in some other language? Do you just say "Greenspunning Erlang," or is it only proper to use Greenspunning when the other language is Common Lisp?
It is amazing what a contradictory situation the United States has landed itself in when it comes to college education. One the one hand, I can attest first hand to how amazing the college level educational system is here compared to other countries. On the other hand, the US is probably the only country where you have to incur 10-20 years worth of debt to get an education!

Maybe the tuition component of college expenses can be justified: you get a world class education, you pay a high price for it. But the textbook prices are just insane. If Wiley can make a profit selling a book for $10 in Asia, how is a $150 US price on the same textbook reasonable?
Not necessarily. If they did do something like that it would be a pain to TrueSwitch but hardly the end of the line. All they'd have to do is embed a hidden a hidden iframe and parse with javascript. Then the webmail provider would have to implement iframe busting, then TrueSwitch would switch to an ajax request that parses the source and it would essentially turn into a massive arms race that I don't see the webmail provider winning.
Ask HN: Video Screenshot Software for Documentation Purposes?
Can anyone recommend a free software tool that will capture the actions on my screen and output it to a standard video format? Currently working in Windows. Thanks!
In 2.4GHz band, there are only three non-overlapping channels (1,6,11). For the optimal use the wifi and baby monitors need to far apart.

Current wifi access points detects these interference and do not settle in a channel where baby monitors are operating. For better performances people should start moving to 5GHz band.
I am responding to edw519 who, as far as I can tell, is implying that having an accounting job is like prison, not the guy quoted in the article.
OMG it's happening all over the world: http://search.twitter.com/search?q=&ands=google&phra...
There's a clear difference between dictating what someone else should have as primary in their life, and declaring something to be moral or immoral.

You may choose to take immoral actions, but those are actions that are not best for you.
Because he is applying formula #1: go to college -> get A job -> make money

Nowhere in there does it say he can get more than one job, start a side business, etc. He's stuck using a broken ideology, but that is apparently all he was taught during those years in college. Poor soul just doesn't know any better.

But you are leaning towards a more logical, reasoned formula. Formula #2.
Working at a warehouse and delivering pizza to pay off $35,200 would take years, and effectively make his degree worthless by the time he finished.

Declare bankruptcy, bootstrap your own biz, and wait out the next 7 years and he'll be good to go.
>> "We have found that it is rare for the user data frame rate to exceed 10 percent of the total frame rate,"

Do not know how they came to this conclusion, beacon frames are the only periodic management frame.
I'm surprised to read that the Campfire servers does a mysql connect on each poll. I built an internal tool for my company similar to Campfire but allowed tabbed conversations in the same window (so that you can have a visible thread running with a few people without bothering others).

To store messages I used a simple PHP script that wrote out a json object per line to a file named with room+date. To poll for messages when you opened the client it would query the poller script with the room name and it would return all the json objects for the current day as an array plus the length of the file. On each subsequent poll the client would send the room name + the file offset - the server script would then open the file, jump to the offset and read in the rest of the file and return it as an array (empty if no new content) plus the new length of the file. It scaled really well (not that we had Campfire sized loads).
>There's a clear difference between dictating what someone else should have as primary in their life, and declaring something to be moral or immoral.

Rand does both.

She declares putting family over work as immoral:

"If they place such things as friendship and family ties above their own productive work, yes, then they are immoral."

Then she says family and relationships are not (should not be) primary in a man's life:

"Friendship, family life and human relationships are not primary in a man's life."
It was 8 years ago and was a humanities degree.
Lighten up, kyro. It was a little witty, wasn't it?
Largest field experiment in history devoted to studying tornadoes
From where did you watch? Was it hard to get tickets?
It really depends on the section. The editorial assumptions and standards are very different between, say, the Health section and the foreign news.
my mom is using it (1200 mg / day, 400 mg each morning, afternoon and evening)

her neurologist prescribed it because my mom got stroke and got clogged artery near neck. she got little oxygen to her brain. the mri shows black areas in her brain.

my uncles (a lot from my mom's family are doctors) describe piracetam as merely vitamin or nootropic, it doesn't cure anything

i'm not sure whether it's safe to completely dismiss piracetam for her. last year her dose was 2400mg/day. after hearing my uncles i decided to reduce it to 1200mg/day and never seeing the neurologist anymore (his prescriptions are mostly vitamins, dha, ala, omega3, etc) because i don't see value in it

anyway so far, nothing bad happened after reduction. it's probably safe to be completely independent from nootropic and using diet + exercise as natural alternative
Same here:

ping google.com
PING google.com (74.125.67.100): 56 data bytes
64 bytes from 74.125.67.100: icmp_seq=34 ttl=40 time=330.224 ms
....
^C
--- google.com ping statistics ---
247 packets transmitted, 14 packets received, 94% packet loss
round-trip min/avg/max/stddev = 294.648/313.224/331.038/13.395 ms
Sweetcron: The Automated Lifestream Blog Software
Yep, and half of the sites I'm trying to visit are affected as well, probably from Google Analytics or any of the other dozens of Google things everywhere.
Pinax seems to have everything you need. It's a set of components for Django (Python): http://pinaxproject.com/

Django already handles user registration; Pinax adds OpenID, email confirmation, and password management. It also does photo management, tagging, threaded discussions, site news, and a lot more.
I used some of these to study for exams in another class that covered some of the same material, and found them very useful.
Demo of a stream: http://www.yongfook.com/
Yes. At home, I had to muck with the channel on our router/access point so our cordless handset wouldn't interfere with it. Nothing worse than losing network connectivity because the phone rings...
Ask HN: Any one else having problems accessing Gmail and Google Search?
I haven't been able to execute a search query or access gmail for about an hour now.
CBSE Result 10th 12th
Your example of New York is a particularly funny one since there is a pretty big divide culturally and economically between NYC and the rest of the state. There are a lot of people in the western part of the state who feel they contribute just as much wealth yet do not benefit from the "large social safety net" you speak of.
They've also been denying service to requests that "look automated" more often lately. I assume that's an automatic response to a DDoS - must be a growing problem for them.
I think we shouldn't underestimate the fact that kids are told over and over by teachers, guidance counselors, etc., "Go to college." These (well-meaning) people often don't realize that what worked for them twenty years ago might not be relevant anymore. In many parts of the U.S., there just isn't that much productive industry (of whatever kind) to support all these new graduates.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=608866
At the end of the article it reveals that the guy is 30. Unless he went to school very late, there are probably other reasons he's underemployed. It's hard to believe he couldn't have found an accounting job over the past 7 years.
I hope this is as good as it sounds. I built a simple "lifestream" for myself using the Planet Venus aggregator[1], and I've been thinking for a while about building something more complete. It looks like Sweetcron might have all the features I wanted, which would save me from doing it myself.

1. http://www.advogato.org/person/mbrubeck/diary/96.html
Google services has been steadily getting slower and slower for me. I can't recall the last time when google maps loaded the entire map successfully: 1-3 fragments are always missing.

I also stopped using gmail and switched to Mail.app. Gmail completely deteriorated for me: too often I'd press "Send" and it would just sit there forever with "Still working..." on top.
Too Much Targeting + Too Little Fungibility = Minimal Revenue for Facebook?
OpenDNS was having issues resolving Google yesterday. It looks like at least part of the problem today is DNS related. Anyone else experiencing that?
This does raise an interesting question; how do you reconcile the conversion power of highly targeted advertising with the realities of running massive nationwide or global campaigns?
disabling google analytics on our site for now.
Earned not will earn. And a degree in what?

Here in the UK the govt. has the goal of getting 50% of people to have some sort of degree. When a degree in media studies from an ex-poly is the norm, what then? The brutal truth is if you don't get into a Russell Group university then you would be better off going straight into the job market at 18. Don't shoot the messenger.
hmm.. maybe the reason I can't checkout anything from googlecode.
i've given sweetcron a shot.

i liked it, but it was developmentally raw and hasn't been updated in a while. i played around a lot, and then tossed it for a wordpress install with a lifestream plugin.

the reason why is not because i didn't like sweetcron, but because i wasn't active enough in the social web at large for it to be interesting. a page full of twitter updates is fairly lame.
DIY festival
The VC's Secret Glossary
He was talking about Norway's social safety net, and just used NYC to illustrate how small Norway's population really is.
it's fast (ok like usual) here in Tunisia
I worked through the first chapter slowly, and then quit and focused on school. Now I've bought the book, I'm still in chapter 2. Did I make it? No, I'm still working on it.

Advice: Ars longa, vita brevis, so work fast.

The only tool I found useful is the web browser in counter strike source, so I can combine two kind of stimulation at once... this is probably not of interest to anyone else.
Always had a fondness for this FizzBuzz in Perl...

use List::Enumerator qw/E/;

my $fizzbuzz =
E(1)->countup
->zip(
E("", "", "Fizz")->cycle,
E("", "", "", "", "Buzz")->cycle
)
->map( sub {
my ($n, $fizz, $buzz) = @$_;
$fizz . $buzz || $n;
});

$fizzbuzz->take(20)->each(sub {
say $_;
});
Seems fine for me. Maybe keyboardr got dugg or something: http://keyboardr.com/
I don't think that writing a threaded poller in C would be trying to duplicate the features of Erlang. Epoll / kqueue (and historically, poll/select) are in c, made to be used with C. That being said, the 283 lines of 37S application code is impressive to me. It would be fun if they opened up this bit of infrastructure (or at least its functional spec) so we could add it to the programming language shootout.

To save you the googling: "GreenSpunning is the ad hoc implementation of domain-independent language features in a language which lacks the feature; it can range from a simple one-line function or macro to the canonical description of GreenSpunning: a "half-assed implementation of half of CommonLisp''. "

http://c2.com/cgi-bin/wiki?LevelsOfGreenspunning
Here in Europe (Poland) it's also very slow. I was convinced it was a problem with my ISP, but now it is getting scary.
google sucks @spain too...
BOSH is a technique to enable the techniques that this posts' gp mentioned over http
"Most of the application is in the minds of the developers. Take away his source and ask a developer to re-write an application and you are guaranteed to get a better program."

Well, not always. What about the edge cases the developer has long since forgotten? Unless you've also got a good test suite that covers those cases, you're exposing yourself to the risk of missing those edge cases in a sans-source re-write.
Cap-and-trade bill to pass house energy committee within a week
It would not take years.

Practicing frugality and taking every last dollar would help the problem. He's got like 7k worth of credit card debt, which could be paid off in as little as 6 months if he really busted his ass delivering pizza at night. This is assuming he pulls in roughly 250 a week in tips and wages. and continues paying his 300 a month towards the credit card.

Continuing, once the CC is paid off he will take that pizza delivery money and the 300 he has been paying and "snowball" that into the pay off of student loans.

Listen to Dave ramsey's show and it's amazing some people pay upward to 45k in debt off in a matter of 18 months on a 24k salary. It's entirely possible if you have determination, but I don't think this guy does.
something needs to be done about GPL parasites hiding "in the cloud".

Companies and individuals that disregard the specifics of the licenses they are bound by are demonstrating a general lack of care and attention. We already have a solution to this problem (which is ironic given the license in question): the free market. As consumers become aware of the alternatives, they'll move towards companies and products that are more open.
Even with keep alive long polling, you have to reconnect frequently. With alive long polling, you also have the trouble of managing open, persistent connections.
Most of my work is on unix. However once in a while I would like to verify my stuff on windows just to see what things work and what things fail. I'd pay a few dollars a month for occasional VNC/RDP access to a windows desktop where I could compile and test short programs. I know of some services out there that offer things like this but they are overpriced for my level of use.
Ask PG: Leader board ranked my comment karma
I think comment karma is a much more accurate way of representing the quality of contributions a particular user makes. And I don't think factoring in submission karma really adds any significant value to assessing that quality. A lot more thought is put into sparking interesting conversation than submitting an interesting article, but often times, the karma doesn't quite reflect that, as submissions can get voted up to relatively high amounts, making any comment karma gain seem insignificant, and recognizing/rewarding users inaccurately.

So, an alternate leader board would be appreciated.
Why is this "hacker news"? Because the Jobs worship here is palpable.
Andrew Moore is brilliant.
Even site that have google ads are now effected. Just tried to do to Techcrunch.com and it is hung on the loading of doubleclick ads and pagesyndication.

I also noticed for the last few days the formatting of my google search results are broken. The first result's title is off to the right after the ebay logo.
Hm..I would say both. A good community encourages good content (and discourages bad content). Having said that, the real content of HN is, ofcourse, the discussions!
do you yahoo now? :P
Obama's plan was to reduce emissions 14% by 2020 with a 100% auction. The new plan is tentatively to reduce emissions 20% by 2020, but with partial allocation of credits in the beginning. So better for the environment, but with less cost to businesses, and less of an increase in energy prices. (But also with less money raised for taxpayers.)

Other sources are saying they will compromise at 17% with partial allocation.
Maybe Wolfram Alpha is fighting dirty :)
Youtube is fucked right now.
Yes, the article is quite conservative, but on the upside, you can clearly tell he's talking not only to the people listening to his speech today, but also directly to readers who may be revisiting this speech in 2032.

As you know, we seem to have a fascination with reading long ago predictions of the "future" that is now today... and we really like to laugh at them.

I believe his tone is one of "I know you're reading this in 2032, so I'm going to try my best not to be silly."
What a terrible title. The researching doctor clear states:

antioxidants in general cause certain effects that inhibit otherwise positive effects of exercise

It's like claiming "food found to cause heart disease," based on a study of cholesterol. It's true, but totally overblown.
Youtube too.
I'd say Clojure. Clojure is very small (Scala seems quite complex).

The concurrency support is fantastic. I've never really had the patience to understand programming for multiple processors in other languages because of the complexity of locks. Clojure has lockless concurrency (via STM)- writing applications which take advantage of multiple processors is trivial!

The following shows easy it is to split work between two cores (if you have them). This code counts to 250,000,000 but does so on two separate threads. It takes half the time of performing the operation on a single core.

(def agentA (agent 0))
(def agentB (agent 0))

(defn my-inc2 [v]
(loop [x 0 result v]
(if (= x 125000000)
result
(recur (inc x) (inc result)))))

(defn split-my-inc2 []
(send agentA my-inc2)
(send agentB my-inc2)
(await agentA agentB)
(+ @agentA @agentB))
i tend to agree, but i'm probably biased. i submit maybe one thing every two months -- all my karma is from comments. i'd love to see what a leaderboard looks like without submission karma. and a leaderboard of just submission karma.
Yes, yes it is. I thought it was the apocalypse or a really bad firewall rule.
I had a discussion 3 weeks with coworkers. I thought the reason why Google Apps and others are not making that progress fast enough is not purely technology limitation on the web platform. Google are in fact may be very careful not to put themselves in the same pair of shoes as Microsoft did to get sued on basis of anti-trust.

Of course now we all heard from Techcrunch that DOJ has interested in building possible case against Google.
Well, I'd also add that adding a blog to a site can accomplish some of what he recommended (like adding a page per day).

Also, using mod_rewrite and clever routing can accomplish things like folder names with keywords.
actually I was asking in sincerity.