skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think programs that are proofs (as in COQ) is a cool idea. It seems economical, in that you get two things (a program and a proof) for the price of one.

However, my experience is that adding extra constraints to a problem makes it harder and more complex to solve, whereas separating out different aspects (divide&conquer) makes it easier. Jack of all trades/serving two masters etc. That is, you'll write better code if that's all you're doing; and you'll write a better proof if that's your sole purpose. "To hit a bird on the wing your whole mind must be on that bird..." etc.

Ironically, the power I personally find in a mathematical approach is that you can freely separate out constraints in any way you like, regardless of usability or performance, in order to show some quality clearly. Combining the proof with code pushes in the opposite direction - and for me, when it's at the max complexity, this pushes it over the threshold.

I still think it's cool though, perhaps mostly because it provides an automatic test of theorems.
Aggression is an unattractive quality

In certain delineated contexts, it is most certainly attractive, as my girlfriend would attest. It's unattractive if it leaks. One could argue that it's not true aggression, unless it is so.

Autarchy vs. Autarky

Good one!
Right you are. Even though Jeff has never said anything that inclines one to think he actually understands what NP-completeness means, (I suspect he still thinks it's like porn) I must say his remark about computers operating at the speed of light did lead me to read the wikipedia article about optical computing, which is way more interesting. :)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optical_computing
> Enforcing different standards of quality control is unproductive ...

Not only that, but it's poison for attracting new developers.
'NATO' and 'SCUBA' are pronounceable. The Economist contends that'BBC' and 'IMF' aren't acronyms since you can't pronounce the words they form (you just sound out the letters).
Smartphone and Netbook, meet Smartbook (but haven’t we met before?)
My favorite: Actionable

It used to mean: "affording grounds for legal action" -- that is you can be sued for it.

Now, marketing folks (and politicians) use it to mean "something they can do".
Sure. Then you simply require hit-and-run commits to be well-commented and also include good docs.

Just because it's not currently maintained does not mean it won't be maintained in the future.
A great Reddit posting.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reversible_computing Reversible Computing could drastically lower heat output. Of course, it would probably have many effects more profound than that, as well.
> How do you create an honest society?

How about wiping out all forms of artificial scarcity?
To paraphrase what others are saying, and to add a folksy image to picture what's happening ...

Electrons in a wire move like a snail on valium. The signal, on the other hand, move fast. It depends on lots of factors, but the figure I use is 8"/ns. It's wrong, but close enough for (most) Government work. For reference, light in air travels at about a foot per nanosecond.

So how does the signal travel faster than the electrons?

Image a long tube that's just big enough to have a ping-pong ball roll down its length. Now fill it with ping-pong balls. Have someone put their hand on the ball at one end, and tap the other end. The signal travels really, really fast, but the balls have travelled almost not at all.

The signal does take time to travel because the balls are compressible. In the case of electrons in a wire, the electrons can get closer together (or further apart), and that creates a push (or pull) force.

All that can be made more precise, but it's a good working model. Good enough to make calculations if you're careful enough, and remember that it's just a model.

And all models are wrong, but some models are useful.
Mobile Internet makes its way into cars
"Gender is a word to be applied to grammar, not people. If someone is female, that is her sex, not her gender. (The gender of Mädchen, the German word for girl, is neuter, as is Weib, a wife or woman.)"

That's doing some pretty hard core identity theory without a license. What would Judith Butler say?
It's a good point. You can mitigate this by asking your designer to leave a PSD file with various UI components and teach you the basics of how, for example, to create new buttons in the site style. Of course, this doesn't help with brand-new innovative features or artwork in the same style. Artwork is where you feel this problem at its worst!
Agreed; there are some people who cannot grasp the concept of evolving language, often forgetting that much of the language we use today was considered "incorrect" as recently as ten years ago. The irony of this prescription is that many of the writers whom we consider the most influential and talented are often those who do not constrain themselves to these rules (and in doing so, often develop new phrases and structures that become part of regular language).

Some of the advice given in this article is simply wrong. As an alternative to this article, I'd suggest Paul Brians' site, (http://www.wsu.edu:8080/~brians/errors/errors.html) which points out legitimate errors while recognizing trends and usages which have become acceptable.
google doesn't. You tube might use CDN's though.
Ask HN: Trawl for DSL debugging anecdotes
I'm looking for some (serious) anecdotes describing debugging experiences of domain-specific language programs. In particular, I want to know about particularly thorny bugs which caused you lots of headaches. I'd like to know how you cracked the problem-- what techniques/tools you used: did you 'home in' on the bug systematically, did you use a special-purpose debugger, etc. A very brief stream-of-consciousness reply (right now!) would be better than a carefully-worked-out story. If you want to keep it private, my email is in my profile.

(Motivation: For my Master's research I will study DSL debugging. DSLs get lots of hype---from Paul Graham, Dave Thomas, Charles Simonyi, Sergey Dmitriev, the Ruby crowd and others---but debugging issues are rarely discussed. This trawl is inspired by Marc Eisenstadt's "Tales of Debugging from the Front Lines." In fact I ripped the text above from his paper.)

Thanks!
Wikipedia to Scientologists: Edit this, suckers
Yeah, some of us are late on this story. Considering a second HN post just above this one (The girl who cried webmaster) refers to the same story, and the original post on that blog was deleted, I have no backstory. Can someone fill us in?
This is not going to help you write better any more than naive grammar checkers will, many of which did things like check for passive voice. If you want to write better, check out William Zinsser's On Writing Well.
Supporting svn and hg is in the works, just didn't have time.
I've seen like 2 episodes of this show (a bunch of kids, a room full of 5th-tier investors, and a college professor arguing with them) and I have no desire to see a third.

It's kind of sad because I think a reality show about a real small business (funded or otherwise) would be riveting.
This begs the question, when are people going to stop misusing that horrible phrase?
This is honestly the worst article I've ever had the displeasure of reading on Hacker News. I'm all for realism, and the odds are always against us. That's fine, but he's basically eliminating everything he can. He's more pessimistic than "realist". Honestly, if you want to read about pitfalls and things to do/not do as first time entrepreneurs there are hundreds of better articles that have been posted here.
It's fast enough and the results are good enough that I made it my default search engine for the day. This is no small feat, most of the new engines (Cuil, et al) don't get this far.

------------------------

My 90 second road-test

I actually prefer the search results UI to google's. It's clean and I'm really digging the smart side-bars.

1a. A search for "python" yields a sidebar with sections for "Overview, Community, Software, Development"

1b. Google gives me a list of results

2a. "Zurich" yields a sidebar with "Weather, Map, Real Estate, Travel, Restaurants"

2b. Google gives me an embedded map, and then a list of results.

------------------------

It's a small difference which obviously Google could replicate but at this point in search, the results from all the big players seem to be converging at "very good" so UI is really the only place to innovate anymore and I have to give it to MS on this one.

We'll see how it holds up to daily use but so far, I'm quite impressed.
Those sorts seem to like more government, not less. I suspect it's more an artifact of the time - government still tends to tread rather clumsily in the tech arena, making a lot of geeks warier of it than they would otherwise be.
If you are in a hurry and do not have the patience, then you will only get frustrated if you try to learn from scratch. I suggest you go with ready-made stuff - like for CSS, take a look at BlueprintCSS (it makes CSS a hell a lot easier) -- go for minimalism with nice typography. Then get a good photo and in some minimalist design and it should be good.

Or better yet, ask your friends to do it ;-) there are guys out there who are trying to build up a portfolio and will be willing to do simple jobs for free.

Just curious, do you have a URL for your site?
> there's a horrible horrible groupthink that goes on here. An obsession with the latest fad... ...Buzzwords over basic utility...

As far as I can see, HN is populated by desperate prisoners (of the 9-to-5 cube farm variety) driven mad by fantasies of escape (through earning "fuck-you money".) In that light, I find it somewhat easier to forgive the universal obsession with get-rich-quick nonsense.

> Back when I was writing demoscene code

If we can bring the Age of Cruft to an end, these days could come back.

> These days people struggle to handle a few thousand users of a text based website on a quad core system with gigabytes of ram.

http://www.loper-os.org/?cat=19

> Although the S/N here is often quite poor, it is at least an order of magnitude better than other places I know about

I'm still looking for the secret pure thinking-people haven which surely lurks somewhere on the net. I might eventually take a crack at building it myself.
Well, "network" had a different meaning back in 1961. :)

Stranger is one of the few (only?) Heinlein things I haven't read, mind. Need to get around to it.
That's not identity theory; it's just a definition. That said, you can use "gender" in situations where using "sex" would cause uncomfortable atmosphere, correctly or no, so there's no way we're getting that distinction back.
Feedback Loops in Software Development
Pasting in your welcome note, it misinterprets "have a fancy". But overall, it seems pretty good (e.g. it picks up a repeated "you you" in joel_feather's pricing comment, which I never would have seen).

I think this is pretty comparable to Word, and what you're really offering is that same functionality on a different platform viz. blogs.

It would be very cool if when explaining things like "passive voice", it gave an example of a revision of the specific text in question (instead of a random example). Of course, that's hard to do (approaching AI), so you'd probably get Eliza-like responses much of the time. And you only need to be comparable to Word anyway.
To be fair, this is their style guide, and the editors can choose the rules they want for word usage in their magazine, and they are generally done so to help make sure their writers use a consistent style.
For that matter, it's very rare that any random asshole really is some special snowflake of a talent who can't be profitably replaced by someone with social skills.
In the UK we're just getting redirected to ciao.co.uk, here's a link for reference that shows a screenshot of the shopping pages they're seeing in the US - http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2009/05/microsofts-bing-hides...

If anyone has anything that shows it more thoroughly I'd like to see it?
It's interesting to see Health care IT and SaaS as two separate categories; both of which our startup (http://www.carecloud.com) falls into!
Most the non-IE browsers work pretty well and get updated quickly to fix problems. IE needs the workarounds and for that you can use conditional comments (http://www.quirksmode.org/css/condcom.html).
Interesting, but what does this have to do with programming, software, computers, hacking, etc??

Is HN just a slightly-more-programmer-oriented version of Reddit?
Understanding Engineers
I didn't actually watch the whole video but eh do we really need to keep re-inventing the wheel so that there can be yet another [insert language] interpreter?

Scheme has a natural tree structure to exploit anyhow, show me a C++ interpreter in 15 minutes and I'll be impressed ;)
This statement seems unfair. I'll back up my claims:

1. I help you find errors in your writing. Despite the limitations of spellcheck and misused word detection they are still a valuable safety net to have.

2. The style checker is useful for helping you write better. Writers like to come up with massive lists of pet peeves. Memorizing these lists is too much for a human. After the Deadline automatically flags this stuff. It isn't the same as a human editor but it does help.

3. A good copy editor will flag and revise most cases of passive voice and hidden verbs. After the Deadline doesn't rewrite these for you but it does flag them. This is a useful service to call your attention to these things. See: http://jaffeerevises.com/Nominalizations.htm

4. After the Deadline explains your errors when you make them. When you write in passive voice you can click "explain" and learn what passive voice is. If you use the wrong indefinite article you can click explain and learn why it is wrong. I see these as teachable moments and by giving you snippets of grammar info when you need it, I am helping to make you a more aware writer.

BTW I recommend Write to the Point by Bill Stott. Will checker out Zinsser's work.
I love the poem in the "Detects Misused Words" demo, and it will appeal to early adopters. Good marketing. It doesn't pick up all the misused words (only about half), but that would be a big ask.
What string theory is really good for
Is Bing better than Google, or just another search?
"No offense, but if this is your darkest hour, you need to be living a much wider spectrum of human experience!"

I'd say that about someone who would make a comment like this. Things that are unbelievably difficult for one person can be easy for the next, and vice versa.
That's the mistake - maybe people actually only do 9 requests per article. But the think they do a lot more. I personally think I do about 1000 spell check requests a month, but I don't know because it's not something I've ever thought about.

So you may have very concrete data on actual usage, but have you also looked at what users think about your pricing?
I don't know, I agree that the evidence presented is sketchy, but the number sounds right. You're certainly far more likely to fail than succeed.

I didn't think the article was terrible at all.
HN is business-oriented as much as it is programmer-oriented.
It does soon ramp up, $1500+ month maybe? At that point, it could become worthwhile to just dedicate your own time to implement the feature. Not that I like the idea of that when this service seems to do the job well, but not many startups have $20k+ a year to spend on spell checking...or should I say, no sane startup would spend $20k/yr on spell checking!
Are you talking global warming, or climate change? Rising temparatures aren't the only symptom of the latter, after all...
The 31-Year-Old in Charge of Dismantling G.M.
Couldn't agree with #4 (Exorcise BigCo Demons) more, haven't seen it written about much, feels like a fresh point worth considering.

Whole startup org charts (or use-of-proceeds slides) are based on the same stale shake-and-bake playbook, which is probably why so many of the resulting companies have the obligatory 4-person marcom team with the VP/Marketing, the Dir/Marketing whose job depends on managing booths at conferences, the PR/AR person who adds the obligatory budget line item for Gartner and Schwarz Communications, and "Sr. Marketing Manager" whose job it is to project manage the people that team outsources copywriting to.
> So all I have to do when a new browser comes out is add another string to the switch statement

That's not future proof. That's exactly the "increase maintenance" the author was referring to.

Perhaps you only have one or two web apps you're responsible for, or plan to work on them for the rest of your career. I have dozens that I've authored over the years, for several different companies, and I have no desire to go back and revisit every app I wrote, just because IE10 came out, and I need to add a string and function to each one to handle it.
Sure, tolerance is probably a better word, but think back to when you were starting woobius... weren't you just itching to take that risk no matter what the consequences?

I've often wondered if you can acquire this quality that stops people from committing to building a startup. This ability to delude yourself, to be relentlessly resourceful, to "get shit done" without being too concerned with whether it will work or not. Self-doubt is _really_ _really_ hard to get over.
Bing makes the advanced search "clickable" but always in your face.

Google gives you the advanced search options pane, and then shows you how to format your search query so you can create the advanced search on-the-fly next time (such as by adding -, +, quotes and the like), as they see the command-line interface to their search as superior.
So the reason this is the worst article you've read here is that it's too pessimistic?
Engine Yard Adds JRuby Support
So he just happens to know a person who worked at the same company as the girl claimed? And him being a programmer, he NEVER talked to her about programming before he quizzed her?

Seems made up to me.
Doubling down in business
Take a look at Acorn (http://www.flyingmeat.com/acorn/) by Flying Meat. It lacks some of the more esoteric PS/Gimp features, but overall is substantially easier to use and has all your critical features (layers, filters, color adjustment, etc.). Oh, yeah, and it's cheap, too (free demo, $50 to buy)...
Best commencement speech?
Ah, I didn't get those. Fair enough.
Fewer than half of all businesses started last time this statistic was taken will survive four years (presumably the number is lower during this business cycle). But simply being alive (or even nominally profitable) isn't the same thing as "success". It's just "not failure". What are the numbers on successful exits? Remember, we tend to read only about the successes; when we read about "failures", it's more often than not the failures of those companies lucky enough to have gotten on our radar before.

In any case, the article isn't making a case for "not doing a startup". It's making a case for being realistic about outcomes. This is a good thing. If you're going to fail, fail fast so you can move to the next thing.
I see you and Ph0rque. Congratulations, you are now bing famous!
For designing the layout:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pen
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graph_paper

For working with images:
http://flyingmeat.com/acorn/
What is he talking about in #5? I simply have no idea what he means. Can anyone explain?
Orwell: Politics and the English Language
Transmission delays suck, but this is something that the brain has evolved to cope with (consider the speed of an action potential vs the speed of electrons in a CPU and the distances between neurons in a typical mammalian brain vs the distances between transistors in a CPU). So I think there there are strategies we could use to deal with larger silicon, but I do agree that there will always be an incentive to keep things as small as possible.
Adobe gives web designers more power with Flash Catalyst
Study: Young adults haven't warmed up to Twitter
Agreed. If you really need pixel-perfect layout of your content, then use images like Wolfram Alpha does. Your time is probably better spent on content and usability though.

Or for another aspect -- all displays will render colors differently, but it would be nonsense to try to compensate with different color schemes in your website.
"English is what English-speaking people speak." "Correct" English is a different matter - it serves no higher purpose than to keep you in your place.

I would like to see a guide that gives compelling reasons for how each rule increases clarity. George Orwell's guide comes to mind: http://www.resort.com/~prime8/Orwell/patee.html

A mass of Latin words falls upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outline and covering up all the details. The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink.

Wikipedia summary: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politics_and_the_English_Langua...
ComScore Media Matrix - Big News In Internet Measurement
I'm a little disappointed that Pypants hasn't graded itself. Got something to hide, hmm?
Your comment about a low appetite for risk reminds me of the entrepreneur Bob Reiss who wrote the book "Low Risk, High Reward," which was all about controlling and offloading risk in a startup. His central thesis was that good entrepreneurs are actually quite adept at getting others to take on the risk, or structuring deals so as to convert fixed costs to variable, and that no good entrepreneur actually enjoys having more risk when they can take on less risk.
StatSheet Two Year Anniversary - Staying Solo and Loving it
General Motors declares bankruptcy
It seems that they have never actually followed their own advice, however.

Search for initialism at economist.com: 0 results (http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Aeconomist.com+initiali...)

the acronym for CCTV has become an oft-used pejorative (http://www.economist.com/world/asia/displaystory.cfm?story_i...)

Institute of National Remembrance (IPN, in its Polish acronym) (http://www.economist.com/world/europe/displaystory.cfm?story...)

etc., etc...
I don't think you ever get over self-doubt. It's just another thing you have to overcome day after day. One strategy, as you mentioned, is to delude yourself. My cure is a dose of self-deprecating laughter with my co-founder. "We are such idiots for doing this..."

Risk is not something you tolerate nor is it something you have an appetite for, instead it's just something you get used to. It's analogous to getting your sea legs on a boat.

I think what you are calling an appetite for risk is actually a desire for adventure and the excitement of discovery. Risk is just something that tags along for the ride.
You clearly did not read the article you're critiquing, because he spends screens and screens of text discussing exactly the difference between climate and weather.

In short, climate is predicting that a candle will make the room warmer. Weather is predicting the exact swirls and eddies of the flame.

Further, your objections to computer modeling are incorrect. Of course you can get a computer program to say whatever you want, but you can't make a computer model say whatever you want. Computer models are a subset of computer programs constrained to attempt to model reality according to some set of assumptions. You can make equations say whatever you want too, but that doesn't make Maxwell's laws incorrect.
Investors Tranche Fundraising To Reduce Risk
Semi-accurate? It's totally, totally inaccurate.
Why pick one or two? All of them are a joy. I get paid to play with software and computers.
China's economy stabilizing; export orders tick up
It's like sound: the air isn't moving that fast.
A two line fix to compile in something like smartheap typically makes that memory allocation penalty go away. Not that it's hard to avoid unnecessary allocation/deallocation.
Java's Original Sin
Slightly more pageviews for slightly increased ad revenue?