skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
In "The Practice of Programming", Brian Kernighan and Rob Pike use the Markov Chain Algorithm to illustrate a number of lessons about software design and implementation. I used it as my "Hello world" program when learning a new programming language.

In Python, the implementation is surprisingly succinct:

import sys
import random
import collections

MAXGEN = 10000
NONWORD = ""
suffixchain = collections.defaultdict(list)

w1 = w2 = NONWORD
for line in sys.stdin:
for word in line.split():
suffixchain[(w1, w2)].append(word)
w1, w2 = w2, word
suffixchain[(w1, w2)].append(NONWORD)

w1 = w2 = NONWORD
for i in range(MAXGEN):
suffixes = suffixchain[(w1, w2)]
next = random.choice(suffixes)
if next is NONWORD:
break
print next,
w1, w2 = w2, next

To use it, just run:

$ python markov.py < english_corpus.txt
I read an enjoyed Lyons' article on Kurzweil last week. Despite its critical bent, found it to be quite even-handed and informative. I did not, however, notice that the author was Dan Lyons of Fake Steve Jobs fame.

Lyons clearly has a knack for turning personality defects into leads to stories. His article is as much about the eccentricities of Kurzweil as much as it is about his theories themselves. Also, journalism is not the same as philosophical discourse, one should include character details as context for the ideas. One need not study the ideas in a vacuum. In all honesty, that makes the stories all the more enjoyable.
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Is anyone interested in the value provided by Firehost? They seem to have the expertise.
Apple broke the provisioning/code signing process for iPhone apps
MySpace Reduces Staff by Nearly 30%
Thanks for your comment. As for your arguments, I am somewhat unconvinced.

1) This is impossible. What exactly is impossible? Getting Digg and Reddit to adopt it? Maybe, but there are a variety of uses that I can think of that have nothing to do with digg reddit or HN.

2) This has been tried before. So what?

3) Twitter and Facebook do this already or something similar. So what? First of all, both facebook and twitter have totally different business models and really have no incentive to include reputation. Further, the mere fact that there exists a large competitor in the market doesn't mean a small venture that may be more simple, targeted, and agile cannot succeed.

Maybe I am being naive, and if so, I fully expect to hear about it. However, I find your arguments unconvincing, and I would be greatful to hear other people's thoughts on them.

Thanks again for the comment.
Watch A Kindle DX Survive A 30-Inch Fall
1) This is impossible. What exactly is impossible?

Getting anyone to use it. How will you get users?
Oh, funny, Daring Fireball just linked to my developer's account of his experience with this:

http://daringfireball.net/linked/2009/06/16/app-store-trend
"The downside of course is that it's dead easy to clone these simple apps"

Yes, it's easy to clone the features of these apps. So don't compete on features, compete on user experience.
Twitter reschedules downtime in response to Iran situation
Slicehost support is top notch -- also getting started on a box is absurdly simple with PickledOnion's tutorials.
sniff

I miss you, Softlayer :(
I was just telling someone last night that in my experience, 90% of the people using Basecamp are just using it for the threaded messaging, and if we could improve on that and offer it as a separate product, we'd do pretty well.

This is fantastic and I'll almost certainly be using it.
IANAL, so all this is layman wisdom:

Yes, there are some checks in Germany.

First of all this law has to pass the "Bundesrat", the representation of the 16 "Bundesländer" (states of Germany).

If this council passes the law one still has the opportunity to "go to Karlsruhe", which means appeal to the Federal Constitutional Court that is located in Karlsruhe.

In the german online community this has been the hot topic of the last weeks and the german pirate party (http://piratenpartei.de/) has mainly focused on this issue .
Ah that does clarify it a bit, now I understand, thanks!
We have the "Bundesverfassungsgericht", our constituational court. It has overruled some laws in the past. I don't know if anyone has filed a lawsuit against the censorship yet. Let's hope for the best. I am really curious how the Pirate Party is going to perform in the upcoming elections...
Why did you switch to Rackspace?
Does anyone know if this will work behind logins? Or does the site have to be visible from clixpy.com?
Now for Facebook to do the same thing.
Talk to prospective customers, see what they would pay for which capabilities before you write any code. The risk is not whether you can write the application, but whether you write an application folks want to use and pay for.
Unanimous consent doesn't work in groups of more than just a few.

Fortunately, this is not true. Markets work because they require unanimous consent. Note that this doesn't mean everyone participating in a market has to make the same decision -- you and I can buy different models of cars and consent would still be unanimous.
An excellent point. I finished the masonite cutting around midnight on Sunday, the garage where I did the cutting was too dark for a good picture, and I wanted to see if it was going to work.

It did look cool with all the contours showing.
My developer was having the same problem and we thought it must have to do something with the code. Thanks for posting this.
You will be gratified to know that the first suggestion that "the girlfriend" made was to cover it with a rug.
That's the power of branding..
Yeah, this piece illustrates why Python is such a success and Lisp is not. Lambda may be the ultimate imperative, but certainly not the most convenient in many cases.
I think External Event is What We Are All Afraid Of: when the system must be rebooted, softly or hardly.

The cache and temp data is lost, the heavily imprinted / written data persists, and the function remains the same but probably some bugs fixed.
Will you call it whuffie?
I think the list you speak of is called "Hacker News."

Glad you liked it. I actually went and stood on the platform for about 30 seconds this morning, just to experience the joy.
I think thats certainly an issue. Right off the top of my head I see two distinct paths by which one might drive adoption:

1) There are a variety of smaller sites that utilize reputation type systems. For examples, take a look at all those tech help sites (one called it exchange comes to mind). These all fit into the Question/Answer model. I think there is some merit to exploring blogging as a second option. Specifically blogs can use reputation threshholds for posting, filtering, and comment prioritizing (putting the good ones at the top). Basically those are the primary areas where I'd like to look to start building a user base, but I think there are many more out there.

2) As one commenter recommended, the service could be expanded to include more than just simple +/- karma type scores and move to more complex stuff like Kiva loanability etc. This is pretty self explanatory, add a service that makes life easier for these sites, and they'll ask their users to adopt it.

Finally, I realize openid is a different beast but it boils down to similar idea, universalize your identity. Login and passwords are, of course, prevalent everywhere, so there is a huge market for this type of service and it seems to be picking up some steam. Our target market is smaller, but if it proves nearly as useful to users within that space, it has a chance of being adopted as well.
Ask HN: last.fm for classical fans?
As a fan of both last.fm and classical music I've found that the two really don't mix well. There can be far too much relevant metadata about a given classical track (performer(s), composer, work, movement, conductor, recording date, etc.) to fit into last.fm's Artist/Album/Title system and the various attempts to reconcile the two leave a lot to be desired. Does anyone know of a last.fm type service/community that is geared towards classical music? I'm mainly interested in being able to scrobble my tracks, browse my listening history and use that to discover other things I might be interested in.

If such a site existed, would you make use of it? What features would you like to see?
US State Dept. Helping Twitter Stay Up For Iranians
Pascal Costanza (the OP) is a smart guy. He's behind the ContextL and AspectL frameworks, and he just published an interesting paper on implementing hygienic macros within an unhygienic macro system [1]. But in this instance, it seems he clearly missed the point of the Ants exercise.

[1] http://p-cos.net/documents/hygiene.pdf
You can buy the naming rights for 1m whuffie
You can write bad Python code too. Lisp is no longer one language, there are many Lisp variants that don't have CL's looping construct.
Physicians do not routinely gives patients placebo (except in research), nor would it be ethical to do so routinely in clinical practice.

The article you linked really talks about parents who are trying to market "Obecalp". Neither I nor any physician I know has ever heard of it.

There is a significant "mind/body healing process", but neither homeopathy nor placebo is a legitimate or ethical part of healing.
This reminds me of the tale about the US spending millions of dollars to build a pen that would work in zero gravity. After it was made, it was noted the Russians simply used pencils!

The parallel here is to get a chair without wheels. I find all these calculations interesting as a geek but in terms of the efficiency of the task, "fail" :)
You're not serious? The loop macro is the most Pythonic aspect of CL (c.f. list comprehensions). Your trouble handling that loop has nothing to do with lambdas.
How Tonido can help Opera to triumph browser wars-an Open Invitation
There's something wrong with this whole line of thinking. Perhaps its the measuring of productivity by loc, or pages of documentation written (shudder). Or maybe its the strong negative tone of the whole document.

Maybe it's me, but if a manager can't figure out the good and the bad performers in the group and figure out how to get the most of the resources available, then perhaps the most useful change would be at the management level.

Get to know your people. Look at their code, talk to them about ideas. Are they producing? Is there resentment among the group?

Please don't measure productivity by loc/day or worse yet pages of documentation. Short and sweet can be much more productive than overly verbose and redundant.
Yeah, I'm a little worried about that.

For better or for worse, we do own the place. I've thought that I might add a single flat sheet of masonite under the contours as protection, but that would involve another trip to the store and pulling the whole thing apart again, so maybe not.
Getting people to use it is FAR from impossible.

Let's look at it a bit of a different way. If I understand it correctly, this could be used to identify trolls and such. Makes me think about the NIN rant of last week.

So, let's say you built your first go of this on top of something like the Disqus API, and convince a few sites to use it.

Maybe create a few simple plug-ins for forum services, etc.

All far from impossible.
Don't go the 'boil the ocean' route where you try to grab everything at once. Piggybacking on OpenID is a decent idea (as mentioned already), but personally, i believe that OpenID is far from a success (it isn't mainstream yet). You could potentially create a system that piggybacks on Facebook Connect, Google Friend Connect, etc. and as long as you have a simple enough way for to hook into the service, I think you could get some traction.
This sounds really interesting! Any chance you want to throw it up on github etc?
Arguments are Overrated
I'm still waiting for the obligatory "Jeff Atwood: Destroying the Web since 2002" comment
Another link to same story: http://www.reuters.com/article/rbssTechMediaTelecomNews/idUS...
Looks a lot like Tonido, with the hassle of having to keep the browser open.
I am familiar with this "chair without wheels" technology you mention. The slope is steep enough that the tilt is still annoying, but a chair with legs of unequal length might have solved that.

The efficiency was, however, very close to 100%. You're just measuring the wrong thing.
True. PickedOnion's tutorials are really helpful, especially if it's your first time setting up a "real" server. I later went with Linode for my personal websites, since they're a bit cheaper, and I felt more comfortable with setting up a box now.
This slightly overstates the case. Structured announcements ("I will have done X by date Y") give you a chance to fail in the eyes of people whose opinions you value. That helps. I have an online friend who used this idea a couple months ago. To make himself achieve his weight-loss goals, he announced that he'd be posting nude pictures of himself on his blog at a set date. I'm not sure how well it worked (he lost weight, but not as much as he'd hoped), but he did actually post the pictures.
The difference is, the light switch switches on the light regardless if I believe in light switches. Thus it is comparable with conventional medicine rather than homeopathy.

And even though - just like with regular medicine - I don't have to know exactly how it works for it to function, I also don't have to have false beliefs how it works.
There is significant beauty in communication through written language.

I would hate to see that destroyed.
While I never got a call regarding my app, after hearing about app rejections for no reason and waiting 1 month to get a response I was nervous after my first submission. It only took 5 days to get approved, maybe I just got lucky, or maybe the approval process isn't as bad as it is made out to be.
Reddit has an ...ardent community, and I suspect regulars there may gain an unrealistic impression of the amount of FP hype there is out in the wider world.
Disk, right? RAID 1+0 at Slicehost is pretty unique, afaik.

I'm not saying that makes them objectively better in every way, but it's just an answer to your non-question. ;)
There are several.

Slicehost has been doing Xen hosting longer. Linode is older, but they were using User Mode Linux (not nearly as good as Xen) for a long time. Slicehost got the mindshare by getting to Xen hosting first.

Slicehost is local to all their data centers. Whether in St Louis or Dallas/Ft Worth, their employees actually work there. Linode's employees all work in South Jersey, 2 hours from their Newark data center and inaccessible to their other data centers. Kinda indicates that they have other people setting up a lot of their stuff.

Linode is often out of stock or having limited stock. This might just be that Slicehost doesn't tell us how the sausage is made and Linode does.

Linode tops out at 2880MB. Slicehost offers instances going up to 15.5GB. That's a major difference if you want to try scaling up easily and there is a huge difference between trying to get your site to handle traffic on a 3GB server and a 15GB server.

Backups are a nice touch.

The Rackspace name lends a "they're the big game in town" to their service.

They aren't that much more expensive. Linode charges a constant $0.0555. . . per MB of RAM. At the 2GB level, Slicehost is charging $0.634 per MB of RAM. That means that if you were to get 2GB servers from each, the Slicehost would cost you $130 and the Linode would cost you $114. It is cheaper, but it isn't so significantly cheaper.

Slicehost can more easily upgrade your plan. Linode has to switch your box should you want to move plans. Often Slicehost can move plans while keeping you on the same box.

--

Now, none of that may matter to you. It doesn't to me and that's why I'm a Linode customer. However, for many these are considerations. If you're running a business, having instances top out at 3GB is a concern. Would you pay a 13% premium for Slicehost just for the knowledge that you can upgrade beyond 3GB of RAM should the need arise? If I had a person project where downtime for migration would be embarrassing, I would.

Likewise, some might care that the Slicehost people actually work in the area rather than colo-ing boxes with places like The Planet.

I'm very happy with Linode, but I can see why many would choose Slicehost.
Oh the irony.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/31388177/ns/health-cold_and_flu/
I have had family members suffering badly for years under traditional (and various kinds of alternative) care who suddenly improved dramatically (and so far permanently) with homeopathy. I don't know why that is. It could be explained by the natural tendency for the body to return to equilibrium, it could be that they just found a placebo they could believe in, but the bottom line is that they are now fully healthy, the treatment had no side effects and it was relatively inexpensive. On the other hand, the harm from traditional medicine was extraordinary.
...And people have already called the PSP a "dead" platform because of the ease and rate of PSP game piracy. Its definitely turned some developers off, and made others decide to "half-ass" their ports to the PSP, for fear of losing money on the platform.
Hey that's my app!
Funny to see this making the rounds.
Opera Unite and Gears LocalServer are completely different. (I'm using the LocalServer API for the application I'm writing at work.)

LocalServer saves a set of static files (e.g. HTML, JavaScript, CSS, images) from the web. When the browser requests those files later, they will be served from the LocalServer disk cache instead of the remote server. So the pages will load faster and can be available offline (if the pages are designed to run without accessing any other network resources). It's like a browser cache on steroids. For an example application, see the latest version of WordPress, which has an option to load the admin UI into a LocalServer cache.

LocalServer lets you serve requests from disk to browser on a single computer, while Unite lets you serve requests from one computer to another over the internet. LocalServer is useful for offline work, while Unite is useful for communicating on a network.

If you used Unite for a single-user application (where the client and server are all on one machine) then it might provide some of the functionality of Gears LocalServer. But I suspect that the use of a central proxy server in Unite would eliminate both the performance benefits and offline features for this scenario.
Yes yes a million times yes. I've looked at Sass before but its HAML syntax made it less than appealing. This is beautiful, its just a smarter CSS, leveraging everything you already know about CSS but with the things you wish CSS had.
This is not a good sign. They hire suits to take charge, kick out the founders, and now they are going to run it like a startup.
If you follow CLL, Rich and Pascal have had a back and forth on the newsgroup on more than this occasion.
Actually Tonido is the real under dog, but glad to see Tonido's concept is catching on. I wonder how many people are already using Tonido.
Amazon releases Kindle source code
Very clever approach. But my big concern is that the floor is not level to begin with. If it's because the wood flooring was laid poorly, then fine. However, if it's because the floor structure itself is bowing down due to the weight, then I would be very concerned. Hope it's just a cosmetic deficiency and not structural defect.
The third way is to announce something as complete. That gives you a real sense of motivation to get it done (see Vikings, burning boats).
Twitter is a bad example: in that case it's the community that makes it valuable, which is much harder to "clone".
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Link? Or actually, never mind...
Some of the links on the pages are broken. If you get a 404, remove the trailing "%20".
DNSSEC Webinar with Kaminsky, Cricket and Rose now Viewable On-Demand
This locks vs. STM debate is a lot like the old malloc vs. GC debates. "Look at my fancy new Java code. I just do foo = new Foo(); and everything is taken care of" and then a C++ guy responds with "so? I can do foo = new Foo(); delete foo; That's only one more line than your fancy GC system. My version is also faster because it doesn't waste time on GC".

Locks vs. STM will play out about the same way. It's hard to demonstrate all the things you don't have to care about with GC. Making a good demo that shows you don't need to worry about memory leaks, double freeing, memory corruption, etc is hard. The same is true of making a good demo for STM that illustrates all of the problems you don't have to worry about compared to locks.

I think the ants demo is a good idea technically. Now it just needs a set of "rules", similar to what Rich just posted.
The localserver in Gears is to serve offline, local content to your browser for specific websites that are written to use Gears. It doesn't do anything even close to what Unite does.
THE IMPENDING DEMISE OF THE UNIVERSITY
Try getting HTML-formatted email. Useless.
Ask HN:  Recommended way to receive customer payments when just starting up?
What do YC startups recommend?

PayPal? Google Checkout? Credit Card? (merchant account), Other?

Which provides the minimum hassles, delays, transaction fees, etc.? Which do customers prefer?

Any positive or negative recommendations based on experience would be much appreciated.
Think of it as a way to pay a nominal sum of money in order to not care what any of that means.
I hear WWDC10 will unveil Grand Central Teleportation.
Holy crap, Kas Thomas got it right. (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=656107)
> Physicians do not routinely gives patients placebo (except in research), nor would it be ethical to do so routinely in clinical practice.

Wikipedia says otherwise (and here is its source):

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/entrez?cmd=retrieve&db...

"The authors sent a questionnaire to 772 randomly selected Danish clinicians and asked them about their use of placebo interventions. Sixty-five percent responded. Among the general practitioners, 86% (95% confidence interval 81-91) reported to have used placebo interventions at least once, and 48% (41-55) to have used placebo interventions more than ten times, within the last year"
Hacker cracks TinyURL rival, redirects millions of Twitter users
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Ehsan Akhgari: A glimpse of hope
I'm pretty sure the source has been posted since at least 12/2007:

http://www.blogkindle.com/2007/12/kindle-source-code/