skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I completely agree with the content in this sideshow, except I think he left out a important part of the H2 discussion.

H2 is a complicated/inefficient/explosive way to move energy, but it's very clean (as a energy transfer medium). At the moment, the way H2 is generated is very unclean (using Methane, or using the power from coal and other dirty power sources).

But if the origin of the energy is totally clean (hydroelectric, wind, solar), you can use that energy to break water down, then transfer that hydrogen in to the vehicle. Breaking down water is not so efficient, but it's still clean. I think this is the ideal (maybe dreamlike) goal of the H2 Camp.
Looks quite nice, but I'm worried by this post (http://groups.google.com/group/mochiweb/browse_thread/thread...) which indicates the framework is abandoned.
Polymorphism, and really, all of Object Orientation is a bit older than "a hundred years".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_Forms

Plato was a Smalltalker.
Iirc, it isn’t even assignment, it’s a monad extraction.

e.g.

a <- [2]
…

gives a the value of 2, unwrapping the List monad (only works if the return value of the function is a List of some kind).

The above could also be written:

[2] >> (\a -> …)

It’s been a while since I’ve done much with haskell, so forgive me if I’ve mis-remembered something.
Old versions of BASIC used LET for assignment, but Microsoft BASIC and other BASICs of that era dropped it as being unnecessary.
I accidentally downvoted this...
hydrogen refinery would look same when on fire as when not. - except for the heat wave distortion, plumes of smoke from burning paint, drooping steel gangways, showers of electrical sparks from the shorting electrical system, and workers leaping from the upper levels.
That is very cool. But i'm not surprised. High reliability, distributed computing and maintainability is key in financial sector. I just can't wait for the code to be posted on some torrent site I'd love to see it.

My own personal trading system is written in ADA with spark for reliability and determinism. So I'd love to see what drove them to decide on the technologies they've used.

EDIT: The absolute best part is at the end of the affidavit. The guy tries to defend himself by saying he was just moving some open source code off the system. After tarballing it
up with their proprietary trading system, and encrypting it.
Who wouldn't believe him?

On another note, if anyone wants to hack on a (soon to be) open source trading platform, get in touch.
One of the most fascinating posts on HN in a long time with a headline that is almost completely non sequitur. "Erlang scores a marketing coup"? Seriously?

This is a story about industrial sabotage at Goldman Sachs!
Aw :(

I think I’ll live with 1 less karma ;)
There is no debate. Hixie removed the relevant portions from the spec. There is now no required codec. Unless the landscape changes significantly, there will be no required video codec.

It's unfortunate, but it isn't the catastrophe that the article implies. The vendors that are going to support Theora out of the box are going to do so anyway, and the vendors that are going to support h264 out of the box are going to do so anyway. Standardizing on either wouldn't have done nothing but dissociate the spec from reality.
they demanded full integration between compiler and whatever else they were running on their system

Which is what everyone should be demanding. What's the point of software that you can't program yourself?
I'm confused about something he says in slide 22:
"Solar and wind power are rounding errors"

Is he saying that they are currently just very limited compared to other energy generation methods in use, or that they're completely unviable?
"But if the origin of the energy is clean (hydroelectric, wind, solar), you can use that to break water down and then transfer that energy to the car."

Using electrolysis, right? How pure must the water be? One can't use seawater, as that would produce HCl instead of H2, right? Desalination consumes a lot of power, but it may be an option if enough hydroelectric / wind / solar power is generated.

I wonder if one could use the water stored in the ice caps for electrolysis. An enormous source of relatively pure water could perhaps be an economical and scalable source of H2. Just speculating.
I can't really say since I don't have the 7th edition. In general though, they usually add another chapter or two to incorporate recent developments in the field. These are usually interesting but almost never actually used in class.
The only reason for the price difference (in used copies at least) is that all classes require the new one now, so there is no demand for the old one.
Yeah, I noticed on my Android that the wikipedia website didn't have this massive box at the top with text that said "TRY READING THIS ON WIKIPEDIA MOBILE" anymore. There at least one decent wikipedia browsing app for android, but they don't do integration systemwide (I'm not sure if this is a limitation of the android "intent" framework, being able to have an application handle content for an entire website or not) so clicking on a wikipedia link always brought it up in the web browser and not in the wikipedia app.

This is a much needed change, and will only serve to help me waste (?) more time browsing wikipedia finding interesting stuff.
How do HN readers feel about net neutrality?

I generally oppose it -- why prevent google from making a deal to offer me free access in exchange for blocking bing ?
Yes, I do believe that DHH and the Rails community has done far more to advance web development than the Apache Software Foundation.

Yes, if your community has done the one good thing of popularizing the MVC web framework idea, you too can claim that it is better than the place where the earliest web server was built and the open-source web development platform that powered the Internet for years without a viable competitor was incubated. Especially if your only reason is that you are unhappy with having to submit reports to the people who are providing you legal protection at no monetary cost.
Ruby at the moment
Ask HN: Proof, order of operations and functional languages
Hi,

I am wondering how to prove (or possibly disprove if I've missed something) that these two approaches are equally comprehensive.

Imagine that we have three functions (someFunc, someFunc2 and someFunc3) and these are each a substitute for a mathematical operator (e.g. * , +, -, /).

Now I have code like this:

someFunc(w, someFunc2(x, someFunc3(y, z)).

If I perform all the permutations of switching someFunc, someFunc2 and someFunc3 with a mathematical operator (e.g. *, +, -, /) will I have performed all of the same equations as can be generated using mathematical order of operations (e.g. w someFunc x someFunc2 y someFunc3 z)?

Is there a proof for this or some area of research/theory that is relevant? I feel like I'm missing something basic but my research hasn't yielded anything, perhaps because this is so basic.
I find the concept absolutely AMAZING!
I'm curious, what about this do you find evil?
Will a machine replace you?
He means that solar and wind power (and other renewable energy sources) represent only a tiny fraction of power generation in the US. Therefore, using them as a justification for the "clean" generation of hydrogen just doesn't make the case.

He is right that they are indeed "rounding errors." The DOE's own data shows that "Wood, black liquor, other wood waste, biogenic municipal solid waste, landfill gas, sludge waste, agriculture byproducts, other biomass, geothermal, solar thermal, photovoltaic energy, and wind" contributed to only 3% of total energy production in the US in 2008. [1]

[1] http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/electricity/epm/table1_1.html
Are you implying that I thought he was a paedophile? My comment expressed the exact opposite sentiment. I've always believed him to be a genius and a gentleman, and everyone I've met who has worked with the guy has corroborated that.
Reference counting really isn't that hard to follow. Cocoa's conventions are pretty straightforward. You need to release (or autorelease -- which by the way is great) for every call to alloc, retain, copy (inc. fooCopy), or new (inc. newFoo). Everything else is autoreleased. Exceptions are documented.
Projected Growth in DTH Services in India Show a 30% Hike by 2012
As per the available reports and projections, the DTH market is likely to grow by 30% by 2012. As of now, the DTH market in India has a very low penetration level. Though DTH services have been in India for many years now, the major portion of its growth falls under the last leg.Only in the past 3 years it has seen some growth however,the growth experienced now is not sufficient enough for the DTH service providers to boast about their success. Interestingly,
I looked for it earlier, when I originally read the article, and landed up with some Henry Ford quote which is way out of context.
Disclaimer: I'm a proud Canadian, but also a realist.

I study in Waterloo, ON and have often heard it being called Silicon Valley of the north. I had the pleasure to spend this summer working in California, in the heart of the true Valley. If people really think Canada has anything remotely similar to the scale of this, they are delusional. The only real Valley-sized company Waterloo has is RIM.

I really look forward to that changing over the next few decades, but we're not there yet.
Ask HN: Is there a hacker news search function?  
Also, does anyone remember the article talking about the website that has every single ipod application on it for free? Thanks..
#13: gOOgLE, BOB, BIOS, LEGOS (flip it, reverse on a calc)

You have enough hints now...
That sounds about right (we started Wednesday evening and had the current code by Friday evening, it just took us some time to get our setup.py scripts right :) ).
Given the low density, it's questionable to me whether it's better to use electricity to make hydrogen and put it in a tank compared to just putting it in a battery in a car. Bypasses the production losses and the low ICE efficiency.
> Google's snarky messages would invite people to download Chrome

Actually, I'm surprised Google hasn't tried anything like this yet. Given how many ie6'ers use Google everyday, I bet a nonintrusive, hide-able message on search results pages encouraging them to 'upgrade' to Chrome would go a long way towards increasing their marketshare.
This stuff send like useless navel gazing to me. So, the future is just a massive increase in advertising? Wow, that's innovative. Also, who is going to be able to afford to advertise without revenue? Are advertisers going to advertise their advertising? Is the future of the Internet going to be a meta-circular vortex of nothingness?
Why not just a watch?

Or a keychain, or a ring?

Or an ID with rfid in your wallet?

Why the intrusiveness?
As far as serious work goes, I only got as far as really simple stuff to take care of the quadratic formula, etc. I was all about the text adventure back then (slow, memory-leaking DrugWars-style game, but people liked it!).
Good point. I suppose this will depend on the trade volume - no one will set up an exchange for the low-volume stuff so one arises on top of the nearest thing such as ebay. If volume is high and exchange must form tho.

Imagine the news roll: "Canadian citizenship was 5 points up today on soaring energy prices and the new healthcare proposal". Hilarious, but also kind of makes sense.
Consumer Electronics Teardowns
I am far more likely to lose all of these things than the lower quarter of my arm.
Trend to Watch: Asia Rising
http://searchyc.com

and

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=site%3Anews.ycombin...
Do you have specific reasons for not wanting a chip if so would you share what they are?
good luck with that ;)
In turn, why prevent Google News from making a deal to offer you free links to news in exchange for throttling (say) HN until your browser times out?
Launchly.com:latest startups
djb is also the author of one of my favorite database libraries: http://cr.yp.to/cdb.html
At least until the Yakuza find out about it.
Unless they can embed a cell-phone in my skin, I'd rather use my phone as an ID card / cash / credit card. For someone that wants to steal my identity, it is much easier to slice off my arm than to guess my password.
While you have a legitimate opinion, I would like to make the counter-argument:

Why allow an ISP to force one service or website to pay for "enhanced" access, while another service gets a free pass?

If you run a website, you are already paying for your bandwidth to your ISP and the customer of the ISP on the other end is already paying for their bandwidth. By throttling websites until they pay for "enhanced" access to customers, the ISPs would be getting paid twice for the bandwidth.

The consumer ISPs could then charge exorbitant rates -- should they so choose -- to companies (such as Google and Microsoft) if they want their website(s) un-throttled. Meanwhile, the ISP could run their own "competing" service, pay nothing, and make a run at unfairly overtaking another service (for their group of customers) because the other service couldn't/wouldn't pay up.

Doesn't seem quite so fair to me.

Also:
"Areas where less than 50 percent of households have no access to broadband will be considered underserved and eligible for grants."

Perhaps it's just me, but it seems there is an extra "no" in there?
"Some critics even contend that it's not possible to advance Theora without inevitably hitting a patent wall."

This article and the HTML 5 codec issue in general really illustrates the stifling effect that software patents are having on technical progress.

Are there any compelling reasons left to keep software patents around? It seems like they're doing way more harm than good.
Interview with Sam Odio, Founder of Divvyshot (YC W09)
I'll chime in: I read The Hobbit to my 7- and 4-year old kids, and they loved it. We're also reading (and enjoying the artwork of) The Adventures of Tintin.
Srsly. To elaborate, it mentions only that Erlang was used in some Goldman software.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_speed_record

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fastest_production_car

(these pages actually lead to some great wikipedia tangents, thanks for landing me there ;-))
Perhaps when your entire community has only been around for a few years it is natural for it to suffer from drastic nearsightedness?

Even if every major ASF project currently "sucks" (which is debatable, but whatever, I'll concede it), you can't create an argument which throws out everything the ASF has done up to now and have it sound logical. Which is why I read this while engaging in a perpetual eye-roll.
Wow, that's some wild speculation at the end. "Shouldn't all market participants be aware that there is some rogue code in cyberspace that can be abused by the highest bidder, who very likely will not be interested in proving the efficient market hypothesis?"

Doesn't the new owner of this "rogue code" still need money to make stock transactions? Was GS's interest in running the code proving economic theory, or was it making a buck? If you whistle the code into a pay phone, does it launch the nukes?
Actually I think this guys way analyzing a business sounds pretty good to me. Forget the price, do you want to wake up running this business (or doing this idea etc) tomorrow after the deal is done. Not sure if it had anything to do with 'free' even though he tried to tie it in.
(Where/When)'s Startup School 2009?
Allow me to summarize: I wasn't mocking Bing. There are two valid approaches, and ours just happens to be correct in almost every case.
A lotus seed pod.
Point of view is worth 80 IQ points
My problem is the misuse of facilities that is happening in the country where I live.
I found this interesting and useful (it actually explained Divvyshot better than the site itself).

What I found most interesting was his first company which made big money just fixing PCs. I hear lots of similar stories to this (a simple idea making a nice amount of money). Is this something that just comes from the scale of a US audience (in Australia simple ideas just don't seem to make anywhere near that amount) or is there another key?
Standardizing on either wouldn't have done nothing but dissociate the spec from reality.

So now web designers have to deal with incompatibilities introduced in the last century, as well as ones introduced in yet-to-be published specs.

What is the point of standards if everyone is going to ignore them? The HTML5 committee could have saved a lot of time by not writing the spec and instead concentrating on a free reference implementation. (When browser vendors have to implement a spec on their own, they are going to cut corners to make things easy. If they can just cut-n-paste from a reference implementation, they will probably just use that.)
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=494520
This is what Don Lancaster at http://www.tinaja.com/h2gas01.asp has been saying for a long time. One quote "Please also note that because of the staggering loss of exergy, use of
electrolysis for bulk hydrogen apps is a really, really dumb thing to do.
It is the equivalent of exchanging two US dollars for one Mexican peso."
This could probably be considered anti-competitive (using their search monopoly to push their other products). Even though the courts may rule their way, why should they bother?
Didn't they just recently announce there will not be another model, which was supposed to happen, as well?
One thing I can't stand about the hydrogen debate is how people link it to "fuel cells are bad." Solid Oxide fuel cells happen to be quite economical and successful by using other fuels like propane and gasoline. There are disadvantages with every energy technology, but the trick is using them in the right combination that makes the most sense. No need for unproductive flame wars.

And the quotes from "smart people" are ridiculous. Wow, you quoted someone else (and most likely out of context) to make your point stronger. Good for you. Do you want a cookie?
Details on Marc Andreessen’s New Fund
I'd recommend reading the code in the Python standard library. If you're into web stuff in addition to Django I'd say the web.py[1] and Trac[2] sources are worth reading. If you're looking at a larger project, the Mercurial[3] sources are good. Also sign up at Google App Engine[4] and build a few trivial applications. You'll learn a lot.

1- http://github.com/webpy/webpy/tree/master

2- http://trac.edgewall.org/browser/trunk/trac

3- http://mercurial.selenic.com/hg/hg/file

4- http://code.google.com/appengine/

Oh if you're into Django check out http://7days7apps.com too.
I completely miss the point of the article. I do not know what was normal nation-wide, but I went to a State School (Oklahoma State University) and most of my peers worked through the summer to save up to have a little spending money for the next year.

Yes, a few, mostly those with well off parents, spent the time traveling or taking unpaid internships. A few others, mostly those that were both intelligent and worked exceptionally hard, got paid internships. But most of my friends and myself went off to the summer work this article speaks so derisively off.

The other thing this article seems to forget about is that if you have the time available it seems to talk about then it is a great time to do study and development on your own. It was a great time to read about the things you heard about but didn't have time to go in depth during class or to look at subjects not normally taught in schools, or at a minimium to read about the subjects that were coming next semester.
I run OpenWRT on my Linksys 54G v3. The web interface works great, and if you want to get into the internals, you can. I even rolled my own firmware with openvpn on it so I can connect to it from my laptop without worrying about anyone sniffing my traffic. The vpn slows my connection down, since the cpu is only 212mhz, but it's more than acceptable to me for browsing. If I have to do a big download, I'll disconnect the vpn so I get full speed. I've had it this way for almost 2 years now, and no issues at all. I'm very happy with my current setup.
This is ad hominem and abusive, and insulting to the people and the man-centuries that've gone into the projects at the ASF.
Introducing our new venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz
Film/video post-production guy here. Agree about software patents but I'm not so sure about the licensing in this case. The thing is, h.264 really is very very good at what it does.

I don't think it's so bad to reward that with a license fee, and the patent administrators are benign dictators. There are lots of exceptions to allow startups to use it, there are sub-inflation caps on the fee increases, and the maximum license fee per hardware device is 20 cents. Online is a bit more complex but still very cheap. full terms here: http://www.mpegla.com/avc/AVC_TermsSummary.pdf

On principle, I lean towards a totally free software solution. But pragmatically, this is a very fair approach to administering a patent for a technology which delivers a lot of value, and and I think h.264 will persist for that reason.
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-8860158196198824415

http://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/wadler/documents/steele-oopsla...
Toy ray tracer in Python
Just How Successful is the iPhone App Store?
>despite their inability to write decent high level >compilers (like, say, natural language coding), or come >up with a methodology which prevents common software >bugs, they think they can reproduce the functions of the >human brain with a tin can.

Horrible premise to start with. Just because one hasn't achieved perfection in a particular field, he/she should not try to aim high in other related fields?

Who's to say focusing on a broader spectrum won't be of help in regards to the overall picture or help find solutions to challenges that haven't yet been solved.

Little substance is right.
Wow that actually causes a mild fear reaction. It's like seeing something with many eyes and historically many-eyed creatures haven't been particularly friendly.
I remember in sixth grade when they revealed to us that "3 \cdot a" and "3a" were additional notations for "3 x a" (three times a) and encouraged use of those notations on homework, I happily wrote "a3" as well because multiplication is commutative.
Or methanol (under the right circumstances): "Pure alcohols burn with a nearly invisible flame in daylight." (http://www.energyquest.ca.gov/transportation/alcohols.html)

Which was done in (yeah, I know) an episode of CSI:Miami: http://csimiami.wetpaint.com/page/207:Grand+Prix

Though, of course, hydrogen is far more exciting.
Forgive my ignorance, not having been to a US college - what happens if you just buy the old edition and (say) copy the pages from the new one in the library, or make some handwritten notes? I'm assuming they don't do a loyalty check on the contents of your book bag when you attend class. Do the book problems vary from edition to edition, limiting your ability to do assignments, for example?

Don't mean to be snarky but I get the impression that the relationship between US textbook publishers and academia is really the worst of all worlds, and seems like a case of the free market gone wrong, with few colleges working to offer a competitive (ie cheaper) option to students who don't want to pay ridiculous prices for books.

Mind you, it's great for autodidacts like me who can pick up slightly older textbooks for less than the cost of printing. Now if only Spivak would do a new edition of his calculus book...
> why prevent google from making a deal to offer me free access in exchange for blocking bing ?

I have no objection to you making that deal on behalf of yourself or your company.

I do object to my access provider making it "on behalf of" me.

I'm paying for access to the whole internet.