skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
No, because that is solving the problem from the wrong direction. There is no reason there needs to be all these seperate communication protocols for essentially the same method of communication.

Do we need another skype or facebook coming out with their own proprietary instant messaging scheme, while perfectly good protocols exist.
Yes, ALGOL-derived languages contain English words, and chunks of code can be read as English if you imagine the right words being inserted, but the same is true of Scheme code, and to about the same extent. In fact, it's true of most programming languages. The languages that it is most true of -- languages like Ada, Cobol, Inform, etc. -- are not notable as good beginners' languages.

Here, for example, is typical C code, right out of K&R:

for (count = 0; count < MAX; count++)
printf("\narr[%d] = %d.", count, arr[count]);

To read this in English, you need to fabricate a lot of words, like this: "Repeat for several times, first initializing count to zero, as long as count is less than MAX and, after each step, taking count and adding one to it: call the printf function with the arguments...". How is that exercise any worse for the equivalent PLT Scheme code?

(for ([count (in-range 0 MAX)])
(display (format "\narr[~a] = ~a." count (vector-ref arr count))))

An English translation of C's "while" statement is easier; the "switch" statement is harder; a C function declaration is nearly impossible without sounding awkward. Yes, actual ALGOL would be easier translate to English than C, but there are even less people starting with ALGOL than with your hypothetical assembler -- which suggests that the real reason people start with the languages they do is primarily because the languages are popular, not because of the degree of similarity to English.
No. I come here to peruse postings submitted by intelligent people. I recommend you transcend the stereotype associated with that oh-so-overused-and-now-meaningless term. Instead - what is a 'hacker' to you? Smart + curious + rebellious? Smart + curious + ambitious? Or (heaven forbid) someone who has 'branded' themselves as a hacker for marketing or ego purposes?

My experience is: beware of anyone who projects such labels onto themselves; more often than not, they're the charlatans.
"(b) Detroit auto companies have historically been very profitable."

Have you ever heard that phrase, "past returns not a guarantee of future returns"?

To Detroit it applies triply. Autos are no longer a growth industry, the US auto market is no longer free of foreign competition, foreign customers are no longer interested in US-made cars, and the union-guaranteed benefits to Detroit autoworkers are no longer financially sustainable.
(It might, but a judge has not yet been given the chance to say one way or the other)
Their click share is about 5%, way behind Google and Yahoo. The trend would have to continue for a long time to count as a foothold...
Does The Universe Actually Look Like That ?
Largest registered traveler service, Clear, craps out
Very tired "joke".
it isn't that easy, pure democracy can be just as evil. What is best is for the government to derive their consent from the people.
Many of the ads you see on "Nairalists" are copied from Nairalist. It's an "interesting" battle if you're not involved, I guess, but it's not a very fair one. :-(
My first instinct is to add test Z. Since Y correlates well with X, Z would provide more information.

But if Y is correlated to X, that might indicate something about its sensitivity.
I believe you are interpreting what I'm saying in the wrong manner.

The Iranian government is autocratic and has probably abused its power to maintain that power. I take that as a given in any discussion of recent events. But that fact alone does not mean they will lose their power. Unfortunately, it probably is up to them, since they have most of the power in Iran.

In order for the Iranian government to lose its power, it must either relent and cede some power in the hopes of maintaining what some of what they have, or the Iranian people have to revolt. Both are more likely to happen if there is solid evidence that the election is rigged.
I hope you're not saying that the farm subsidies are meant to encourage new technology? If you are, what technology would that be?
for all of google's "dedication" to HTML5 I still can't watch that video without flash. (I assume, staring a blank white space.)
What to build and what to borrow
T-mobile also charges IM's at SMS rates if you use the built in apps...
I assume you're referring to the second sentence of my comment.

The idea of protesting against bad governments, all the way to armed rebellion, is perfectly okay with me. But I intensely dislike the idea of appealing to a foreign power to settle an internal dispute, especially if the appeal gets prompted by same foreign power. The classical conception of sovereignty, now sadly defunct, had an apt name for this technique: treason. Today it's called "color revolution".
Taxpayers (or at least voters, not the same) are free to vote for people who wouldn't give these loans. Unless you think that the entire idea of representative government is wrong, of course, but then I'd like to see proof of another, better working model.)
Conversation with an Iranian about the current situation
This is an outstanding idea and distinct from current GoogleDocs or other wiki implementations precisely because it's asymmetric (one owner, many commenter/editors). I think you could enable a business model based on remote copy editing by 3rd party labor where the owner has the ability to accept or reject the changes. I can definitely see this as being offered as an alternative to the basic browser WYSIWYG editor for blog and wiki systems where the user ask for help with final edits or copy editing. I see a lot of potential for this. We did some research a while back for a wiki startup and this supports a mode that some prospects were asking for which wikis today do not support: an individual owns the page and can accept or reject additions/edits. This is different from the wiki model but appropriate for many projects (or as a finishing step where a lot of peer review/development has already taken place in the wiki).
An E-Z Pass Model for Web Content
bad programmers can write assembly in any language.
"Many websites can become faster with little effort, and collective attention to performance can speed up the entire web..."

This is true - I have been working with many over the last 3 years to help them improve web site performance. Most sites will see a huge performance improvement by just concatenating (bundling) their JavaScript and CSS. Tools like; YUICompressor and www.rockstarapps.com Eclipse tools simplify the process.

One issue I have found is that developers always leave performance tuning of all projects to the end.
Why not weapons? With a competent instructor, the accident risk is lower than for any of your suggested alternatives.
Did they change the audio from the originally posted video? I just watched it and I didn't hear him claim to have developed anything he was showing.
I like it. The interface is clunky, but it's text based, so that's okay. Really, what a great tool. Regex expressions can be a real pain to build.

I think a lot of the comments are being overly critical. To take something as complicated to build as a regex and put a web interface on it is actually an amazing feat.

I would like to see the strings it generates as a single length of text, rather than concatenated variables. Of course I could do this myself, but it'll save countless minutes on all the programmers who use the tool, because ultimately, that's what they are going to do.
This article exemplifies one problem with the Linux/tech crowd. All that text and command line output - and not a single damn graph on the page! One graph showing speed differences would eliminate the need for tons of text on that page.
This is starting to be kind of obnoxious behavior from google. They only want the web to be faster so people can click back faster and search again and they can get higher throughput on their searches and thus generate more revenue from their advertisers.

Google added yet another browser to the list of compatibility issues web developers have to endure so they could shave a few milliseconds off javascript. Now they are nagging us day after day to rewrite our websites to scrape a couple more milliseconds off our load times so they can generate even more revenue.

How about Google subsidize all web developers with a $10,000 grant so they can dedicate themselves to implementing the acceleration features they are asking for?
It's obvious what the hidden message is here: "We can't compete with desktop applications and operating systems, so we're going to turn the tables on everyone by putting everything on the web where we can kick ass. Err... 'Let's make the web faster! Isn't that a neat idea?'"
"3.- Use abstractions only when necessary (YAGNI and KISS)...You Are Not Going to Need It (YAGNI)..."

I would revise this to say "Use abstractions only when you can see a valid future use." I've spent days and weeks literally just thinking about how to architect a solution and wrapping my mind around all the possibilities. Months later, after making those decisions and writing the code, I inevitably need to add new functionality. Often, I can accomplish my new goal with a ridiculously small amount of code and it really gives me joy for the rest of the day.

I could have taken the easy route initially and just done "what was necessary", but I would have paid for it ten fold later...and sometimes do when I take the shortcut (which is thankfully rare.)
Bravo if you can accomplish that with perl. I haven't hacked in perl in a long time but, from what I remember, you would have to resist using a lot of perl's shortcuts in order to make it speak for itself.
Article is so full of it pitching DB2 that it's not even funny. Oracle, as an active MySQL contributor (InnoDB) would of course maintain and support it for the lower end niche market, probably adding an easier migration path up to the full Oracle installation but nevertheless, it makes no sense for them to kill the product with millions of installations which is not competing with any of their products. Nobody gets Oracle for a php startup.

Unlike Virtual Iron, which I think is in a direct competition with VirtualBox so why keeping the worse one?
Taleb makes an interesting argument regarding this in The Black Swan: If you flip a coin five times and you get five heads, what is the probability that the next flip is a head?

You have two options: either you trust your (unproven) assumption that the coin is fair and that you just witnessed a very unlikely event and say "the past outcomes do not affect the probability of the next throw, it's 0.5."

The other option, on the other hand, is to conclude that your assumption that the coin is fair is false, at which point you estimate the next throw based on the previous sequence and say "1.0".

None of these are right or wrong, it just depends on what prior you trust.
To be fair most sites should be supporting WebKit already, and Google often provides toolkits and source code for general purpose public use.
I still don't see why Oracle would kill off MySQL. I mean, they kept Berkley DB around. Could it be that just because two pieces of software are both databases doesn't mean that they do the same thing?
Guess that puts the lie to Ray Ozzie's criticism that it's too complex for anyone to do an implementation of.
if it takes more than 5 minutes for the other programmer to have a high level idea of the design, assume that the code is not readable.

I'd argue that a high-level description of the system being easy to grasp is kind-of orthogonal to whether the code is readable or not.
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Does pgMyAdmin (or whatever the phpMyAdmin equivalent is called) still suck?
When it gets a different name.

I have a theory the difficult name drives people away before they ever give it a chance.

Looking at Wikipedia, it seems I might not be far off. Before you read anything about the features, there's an entire paragraph explaining the name: "The mixed-capitalization of the PostgreSQL name can confuse some people on first viewing..."

Given a blind choice, I suspect any SQL newbie deciding between which one to try first, would go with the friendly sounding "MySQL" vs the intimidating "Postgre(s..ql?!)".
The flip side of that question, though, is how often you add in abstractions that you either never use or to code that you don't really need to change. Planning for the future, as it were, is only a win if the amount of time you save when you guess right is larger than the amount of time you pay when you guess wrong and do unnecessary work (or make things more complicated than necessary, thus slowing down all related work, etc.).

I'm all for properly refactoring code, but there's something to be said for the fact that trying to guess what you'll need in the future usually equals guessing wrong, unless "the future" is really close in time (i.e. a week or two away). Personally I've had plenty of those "glad I abstracted it this way" or even "I wish I'd abstracted it initially" moments, but also plenty of the "wow, good thing I didn't sink too much time into this 4 months ago because I would have never guessed I'd need to change it this way" moments too.
It is their money.
I skimmed the original story when it came out but this wave thing just hasn't grabbed me. Can someone give an elevator pitch for what's exciting about it, please?

edit uh, this http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2009/05/google-wave.html makes it sound like a "realtime wiki." Isn't that very similar to Y-com's http://etherpad.com/, that pg now uses to write his essays, and has (or had) patents on part of the tech?
Actually, I was hoping to bring up farm subsidies as a failure of spending government money on something that should be handled via the private sector.
I wonder if there is any first-hand user experience out there. The short summary of clinical trials looks very promising so far.
No. I read to see if I'm like them.
Oh, if only Chrome and Safari worked identically, then what you said would perhaps be a valid statement.
I understand that the government funds lots of projects as you mention, my point is that I don't think the government should fun these types of projects and it's going beyond the intentions of the founders.

I suppose I'm in the minority, having a small government is better than a fat government.
That's just engineering nihilism speaking. :-) Surely the code you wrote last week was not 90% crap?
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Google Wave Joins EtherPad in Real-time Collaboration
What is sad to me is that he clearly really wanted to be on TED, and if TED asked him to talk about his real work I'm sure we'd all love to watch it. But instead he spent an hour following a tutorial of some OTHER random new cool photogenic technology and TED decided that was good enough to put on their website, even though he personally added absolutely nothing to this technology.
I tried to buy Berkeley DB last year and never got a reply. I think Sleepycat has gone on a long snooze.
on front page: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=671291
> Instead of shooting weapons

Why not weapons?

The Rochester Youth Study, one of the longest study of youth behavior, found that who kids learn to use weapons matters from a lot. Kids who learn from parents and authority figures are far less likely to use them criminally than kids who learn from other kids.

This didn't effect didn't translate to less criminality in general - kids who learned about guns from parents were just as likely to engage in criminal activity, they just didn't use guns.
A calculus for causality?
Mind blowing ideas on probability theory (perhaps new only to me). A quote on the ideas applied:

Should we, in salary discrimination cases, compare salaries of equally qualified men and women, or, instead, compare qualifications of equally paid men and women? Remarkably, the two choices led to
opposite conclusions. It turned out that men earned a higher salary than equally qualified women, and SIMULTANEOUSLY, men were more qualified than equally paid women.
So now the programmer has THREE problems.
I'd restrict that further. "Use abstractions only when you can see a valid present use."

I've also spent days and weeks thinking about how to architect a solution, and then been wonderfully gratified when I can add new functionality with just a couple lines. More often, however, I find that the new function ends up being something totally unexpected, which I would never have thought of at the time I was writing the code. And then I have to throw away all those carefully crafted abstractions, because they just get in the way and slow me down while the software changes in unexpected ways.

It's easy to remember the successes. But more often, initial overarchitecting just results in lost time and wasted effort. Worse, it can be actively counterproductive if you don't have the courage to throw away dead code that's no longer useful.
The last time I checked, DB2 Express had some pretty substantial restrictions on a license agreement, and both Microsoft and Oracle provide free versions of their DBs with similar restrictions. I don't see a compelling reason for a business to choose DB2 over SQL Server or Oracle as a MySQL replacement -- let alone something like Postgres, which is the most logical (and cheapest) alternative.
True, but running nginx + apache + mod_parrot seems like a big extra in the middle when you could have something much more lightweight and less memory intensive running parrot for you.
When you don't know the difference between a protocol and a markup language I don't you should be in charge of writing tech PR.
Bing and Google Agree: Slow Pages Lose Users
What's exciting about it is that it brings communications power back to you.

See email, IM, shared text, blog comments, published pictures, all in one place - one interface, one site. Do away with long chains of email quotes, accidental reply-alls.

Watch the video, it's long but you don't need to watch all of it to get a feel for how wave works.
can this be done using osx?
Just in case anyone's interested there's an competitor called http://www.redliner.com
Hard disk: _ 100 MB/s
Ram disk : ____________________ 2000 MB/s

'K?
One thing I've never been able to figure out is how to get all elements of the page to render securely. It seems in every browser I've tried, Gmail pops up a message asking if I want to display insecure elements. Is this safe, since I don't know which elements are displayed insecurely?
Is there a way to see which users are currently online on his test server so we can add them to our waves and help eachother test/play with gadgets?
"Windows"? "WEP"?

Current Windows (Vista) allows you to tick a box and see the WPA key as you type it (once) (it's masked by default).
Is he actually handling the multi-user communication, i.e. sending the gadget updates to the server and between clients properly the same way that Google does it? If so, then he did the hardest and most important part.
"One of the most difficult social tasks is to join an activity that is already in progress." Basically that means going up to a group of people who are chatting. There are techniques for doing this but theory is cheap, execution counts.

Can you please give some tips on how to do this? This is something I definitely need to learn. A friend once invited me to a programmers/founders meet, which was in a bar. [little dark, loud music] I was a little late, tried "hard" to get into the already chatting crowd. They had formed a tight circle, standing, with their backs to me from every fucking angle. The friend just smiled at me and nodded and didn't do much else. I went around them like a moron, not finding any gap to step in, felt really foolish and frustrated, faked a phone call and fled. In my defense, I think I could have 'got in' only by pinching someone's ass. I rationalized it thinking "Fuck them. I'd better be coding right now anyways."
Drizzle is not a valid choice for apps that require things like stored procs and triggers, which they removed. Of course, not every app requires what they remove; MariaDB is a fork by the core MySQL team, if those features are needed and MySQL cannot be used.
Using Russia as an example against the value of democracy is a bit absurd.
I switched my Rails development from mysql to postgresql for a few projects now. It's really nice to have sensible index usage, and good in-db fulltext.

I don't have the same comfort level though. I'm not sure how much is my familiarity with mysql, and how much is pg being legitimately harder.
Celebrating The Birthday Of Alan Turing
Not in my opinion
The statistics is completely wrong - and the conclusion is (probably) completely right...
One issue I have found is that developers always leave performance tuning of all projects to the end.

Yep! Here's how that works:

1) You hear "premature optimization is the root of all evil" parroted everywhere.

2) You decide to leave the optimization for the end.

3) You develop code that performs suboptimally, sometimes even abysmally.

4) You develop more code on top of it.

5) You repeat the previous step until the codebase is big enough that optimizing away root causes of performance problems is too painful.

6) By this time you have to deal with releases and bugfixes and feature requests and maintenance and whatnots, so you settle for the advice from Coding Horror, where Jeff told you that throwing hardware at performance problems is cheaper than investing programmers' time in solving them.

7) Profit! Er, no, wait, that's the other list of steps...
Quick Start with Brazilian Portuguese 
Quick lesson in Brazilian Portuguese.
So the logical thing to do is to create a gene therapy correcting germlines with this variant and provide it to juvenile delinquents (or simply confirmed carriers) before they reproduce.
Ask HN: How to get started with making a twitter app?
I want to make an app that scans twitter for content, even based on their search. How do I go about that? I am a designer so I don't have much experience with engineering but I'm willing to learn I just don't know where to start.

If anyone is a programmer that has the time and wants to partner with me, hit me an email. I'm excited about the idea but I could really use help with executing it. It involves connecting people that express things with people that can provide solutions to them.
I'm more or less fanatically liberal. But I happily set that aside while visiting HN.

Please don't bring in such broad attacks. I almost voted it down as well (despite agreeing with the sentiment), for the exact reasons pointed out by radu_floricica.

Let's maintain a high level of discussion for HN.
The right place to insert performance tuning is probably between #3 and #4. It makes perfect sense to leave optimization until you know what you actually want to build. It also makes sense that a piece of code will be no faster than its slowest component. So write the slow version first, but don't build anything on top of it until it's no longer slow. Don't pile crap on top of crap.
Great, now all you need to do is integrate it in a service like fanstory.com or fanfiction.net. Users could then point out all the writing mistakes perspective authors make as they read, beautifully and elegantly. Beta-readers would love it.
Wall Street vs. The Creative Class
Talk about out-of-this-world salaries...