skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
What about a wizard-style code generator, instead?

I'm thinking of a machine-readable algorithm collection (with options and trade-offs defined) that rather than being executed, generates source code.
> Every programming language has shortcomings.

Name a language with more. I'll wait.
I think having this thought is one of the fundamentally human experiences, as every time I talk to someone about this idea, they tell me that they, too, had it at an early age.

Thank you for confirming the ultimate weirdness of the universe for me.
Maybe he'll pay you for writing his 3rd post.
The Noisy Channel is all right, I just meant a direct link to the article would have been a better HN submission.
Hey Errant - not sure if you're still following this thread, but you got a hell of a lot of some bad advice.

Most people are really "mine mine mine!" oriented, they're telling you be careful of the split, watch out for getting filched, etc. That's all well and good to some extent, it sucks to be burned. But you're doing services work - there's not too much you stand to lose later.

I'd recommend you don't mess things up going for a slightly uneven split, or overkilling the details. Like mseebach recommended, going sole proprietor is good for low liability. After that, don't kill the goose that doesn't exist yet. Getting experience in business and consulting while making cash is a good thing. If you make 10,000 GBP over the next year doing this on the side, and technically you maybe could've should've gotten 12,000 GBP - who cares? Trying to get a 35/65 split, or overhashing details means the project won't get off the ground. If it's a stellar deal for your partner - even better, he'll be motivated to get you a lot of work. If it turns out to be a bad deal for you, you can move on later.

My advice would be different if you'd be building significant assets or investing money. But you're doing services - just get going. I'm guessing a lot of the people who say, "Charge more! Get more of the split!" aren't really big winners in life. No disrespect to them, but we're talking about grabbing at pennies here. Just getting into business is the most important part - be as amicable and easygoing about it as possible. Yeah, there's a good chance it'll end poorly someday, as most partnerships do. But hopefully you'll get good experiences, make some cash, and most importantly, learn a heck of a lot in the process. Don't sweat the pennies, getting into action is where you get paid now, and learn what you need to get paid even more later.
It would be helpful if he used Cyan for Turquoise and Magenta for Pink, since those are the accepted terms when speaking of color primaries.

Also, there is a difference between how one sees color and how well one is able to distinguish one color from another.

The CIE color model was based upon, if memory serves, testing done on 25 white french males, about the worst possible test group so far as color acuity is concerned. They should have chosen asian women, who have the highest color acuity as a population, that is, the ability to distinguish shades from one another.
Given there are thousands of IRC networks around, < 500 supporting the protocol is a drop in the sea. And many IRCD's need a plugin that doesn't come standard for it. Hardly out of the box. And by non-stanard, I simply meant it wasn't in IRC's RFC.

I'm not claiming Freenode was standing to make a profit from this; you did: "* It makes money" — I also mentioned that you stand to lose money if a major network doesn't let users use your client. I'm not claiming this is your motive for wanting people to use Mibbit. I don't know what you think. Just that from an outside perspective, its a possible thought.

And I don't see the Opera comparison. Opera doesn't force users to proxy through their own servers. Its a completely transparent tool, right out of the box. Users have to actively set up a proxy for Opera to use it. With Mibbit? It uses the proxy by default, no way around it for the users.
Well, let's get real here. We know where this is going. Microsoft really needs to either a) give up on the browser business or b) rewrite/scrap IE. The previous PM of IE (can't be bothered to remember/google his name, maybe Dean) basically had a breakdown and a "please don't be mean to me" serious of blog posts. It's silly that a company like MS cannot build a browser that lives up to standards set by a project like Firefox (maintaining compatibility with badly written corporate apps targeted at IE5/IE6 is a non starter -- very simple technical solution).
This is interesting stuff....the smart bar had me going into deep thought about how Facebook could eventually just turn into a social web browser. Anyone else see that?
If you look at relevance and search UI as if they are orthogonal issues, you are missing all the ways an interactive UI could be used to help the user get relevant results. One non-web example is Google's own Stock Screener (it is about limiting the results to the ones we are interested in):

http://www.google.com/finance/stockscreener
It's too early to search for anything besides large expo sized events. Smaller events are often only announced a month or even a week before they occur.
I'm writing some Django middleware that auto-appends this exact thing onto all 'non-local' URLs. Keep on the lookout!

Also [url=http://damienkatz.net/2005/03/clicky_instantl_1.html] Damien Katz [/url] did a PoC (that works really well actually, albeit semi-dated) in 2005 of this concept.
Should it mean anything that the majority of these would be less than a year or two of one students out of state tuition? Can we say completely symbolic?
Congrats on the growth - that's great stuff!

We're one step and a few phone calls away from doing trailer deals, sponsorships ("lit by InFocus"), charging admission or membership

How does that not violate the whole "public display" clause of the fbi warning?
No, that chapter is not from Concepts, Techniques, and Models but most of the programming models mentioned in that PDF are covered in more depth in CTM.
I think you're over-generalizing. I'm only claiming that interface has a big effect on behavior you see in a particular place, not how the behavior got there. I certainly don't believe (and didn't mean to imply) that seeing an "attractive" interface causes a behavior change in an individual.

I also disagree that comparing operating systems is "simplistic". What operating system a person is using today is based on a huge number of factors, of which "attractive" is but one tiny piece -- a far more complex issue than what web chat you use.

What you're observing is what I'd call the same effect. People are lazy about sticking with an interface they know. AOL opening up USENET meant a bunch of jerks could screw things up, using the same interface they'd had. Digg/Reddit predate HN, and the jerks there aren't going to learn a new interface to be jerks to a smaller crowd here. Similarly, you're not going to change OS (and with it, interface) easily, so other effects dominate, and I'd expect most jerks, overall, to be using the most popular OS, overall. I don't know if that's true, but it fits my mental model.
Please tell me I’m wrong about your understanding of the GPL and your intentions. It’s probably no mistake that Matt doesn’t want to acknowledge such issues. For it he did, he would have to acknowledge the fact that Automattic, a commercial entity that owns WordPress, exploits the GPL to promote it’s distribution, uses plugin and theme developers work to build upon WordPress, and then uses the GPL as a barrier to prevent anyone except Automattic from benefiting financially from the work.

How is this any different from what Sleepycat and MySQL do? I thought this was the playbook for open source business models.
A New York man sued dating website Match.com on Tuesday for misleading members by posting profiles of prospective dates who are unable to respond to any interest in them because they do not have a paid subscription.

Charging for the ability to send messages is pretty standard practise on most dating sites. It's how they make money.

Unsurprisingly, this is just another typical American greed lawsuit.

As a sidenote, Match.com does engage in some slimy practises too. For example, your subscription will get automatically renewed, and your credit card charged.

If you ask about this, they'll say it's because they want to provide you with "uninterrupted service", which is, of course, a load of bullshit. In the event that your subscription runs out, you can have it back up in like two minutes.
Thanks Chris, the central theme of our analysis was how fb could be moving more quickly in that direction.
Great example jayhawkbabe - part of why twitter has done so well is the easy by which awesome clients like tweetdeck multiply its power. Fb needs the same!
Same here http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=665661
archive.org will host datasets.

To preprocess wikipedia, I have used the following software: http://sourceforge.net/apps/mediawiki/wikiprep/index.php?tit...

To remove boilerplate from gutenberg requires painfully constructed heuristics. It would be great to have software released to do that.
A Personal Note on Iran: How Information is Spreading
You can use that now http://webchat.freenode.net/
Twitter Plans to Offer Shopping Advice and Easy Purchasing
Here Comes the Intercloud
I totally agree with you, but as a musician, i would go even further and say, when you're a succesfull musician or actor, you can make big bucks pretty easily. AFAIK, this is just not true about game developpers, who even if they are successfull, will probably earn just as much or a bit more than a regular programmer.

The average record deal pays the artist about 12%.

The "ridiculous" rates being paid by the games distributors that have been mentioned in this thread are 45%.

Going it alone in music and games is harder, but in both cases it pays much higher percentages on sales. I suspect it is easier to go it alone, or use a hybrid model, in game development, but I'm not sure about that.

I think you have a sugar-coated view of the music business if you think it treats people better than the games industry. As someone that started out working in the music industry in the early 90's and moved into technology, I'm absolutely certain that it doesn't. Software developers have it easy compared to musicians, and even the game industry treats developers dramatically better, on average, than the music industry treats musicians. You should realize that the average full-time musicians salary is about $21,000/year (or was when I worked in the industry; I'm sure it's gone up a few grand due to inflation). The average full-time software developer is making something like $80,000 (much higher in expensive markets like Silicon Valley).

All the same evolutionary pressures that are making the music industry more tolerable are also occurring in the games industry. Indie developers can get their games in front of players via all sorts of paths, including mobile app stores, aggregation sites like Kongregate and Heyzap!, the various console stores, as well as traditional shareware models and channels. These are pretty much the same things that are happening in music (and a lot of the same players, Apple in particular, are involved in building them).
The /. comments on this were rather good too. Points made:

1. Most sites have a terms of service that says you will not give you login information out to anyone else, or allow anyone else to login to your account. So by requesting this information the City is asking potential applications to violate a contract. Especially since they specifically mentioned Facebook and this is in the Facebook ToS.

2. There are a lot of things that are illegal for employers to ask for (sexual preference, groups that you belong to, ethnicity, etc) and most of these things are present in someone's Facebook profile. So by requiring access to Facebook, you are requiring them to hand over access to information that it is illegal to require...

3. Lots of people use the same password for multiple accounts. Their Facebook password could be their online banking password. That puts an employer at a HUGE liability if one of the employees breaks into this information to do some identity theft. Even if some 3rd party gains access through another method, you could be investigated as the possible leak and/or theif.

4. By requiring users to provide this information (i.e. passwords to personal accounts) you're only going to end up with employees that will easily give out secure information. The vulnerability of your workplace to social engineering attacks will go WAY up because anyone that would be smart enough to question whether there really is a 'Bob from IT' that 'needs their password' are people that wouldn't fill in their information into the application.

5. Employers that do this open themselves up to possible lawsuits from people for requiring information that no one will ever truthfully fill out and then using it as some sort of 'we can fire you at any time because we know that you lied on your application' carrot over someone's head.

Edit:

Also, I could give my Facebook login to this employer. Deface my Facebook account, then claim that the company/ did it b/c the company had access to that information.
Considering size and especially battery life limitations, some of those requests seem a little bit pie-in-the-sky, though I'd love to be proven wrong.
I think any discussion of colour without mentioning the sensitivity curves of Cone cells is pretty incomplete. We don't somehow have perfect knowledge of the frequency of individual photons and build up 'imaginary' colours from that, we just map activation levels from our 3 (usually) types of Cone cells to a continuous space.
Amazing. The author complains of not having a business model, spends most of the post describing the one he would like to be given by someone else, and yet never makes the connection between the two.
Few things embitter people more than being this close to money they can't have.
Basically, "biological" describes a system that works decently, and which has grown through incremental changes, and yet is a poorly architected mess inside. It describes something that appears to be great from the way it works and the way it looks on the outside, even if the internals are a mess that require 10 years of schooling and residency to fully understand and maintain ;)
It is, explicitly said by the FSF:
http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html

GPLv3:
6. Conveying Non-Source Forms.
You may convey a covered work in object code form under the terms of sections 4 and 5, provided that you also convey the machine-readable Corresponding Source under the terms of this License, in one of these ways:

b) Convey the object code in, or embodied in, a physical product (including a physical distribution medium), accompanied by a written offer, valid for at least three years and valid for as long as you offer spare parts or customer support for that product model, to give anyone who possesses the object code either (1) a copy of the Corresponding Source for all the software in the product that is covered by this License, on a durable physical medium customarily used for software interchange, for a price no more than your reasonable cost of physically performing this conveying of source, or (2) access to copy the Corresponding Source from a network server at no charge.

c) Convey individual copies of the object code with a copy of the written offer to provide the Corresponding Source. This alternative is allowed only occasionally and noncommercially, and only if you received the object code with such an offer, in accord with subsection 6b.

GPLv2:
3. You may copy and distribute the Program (or a work based on it, under Section 2) in object code or executable form under the terms of Sections 1 and 2 above provided that you also do one of the following:

b) Accompany it with a written offer, valid for at least three years, to give any third party, for a charge no more than your cost of physically performing source distribution, a complete machine-readable copy of the corresponding source code, to be distributed under the terms of Sections 1 and 2 above on a medium customarily used for software interchange; or,

c) Accompany it with the information you received as to the offer to distribute corresponding source code. (This alternative is allowed only for noncommercial distribution and only if you received the program in object code or executable form with such an offer, in accord with Subsection b above.)

FAQ mentions it: http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#RedistributedBinari...

Also, take the quiz to test your knowledge of free software licenses! http://www.gnu.org/cgi-bin/license-quiz.cgi
Google Maps: What’s Here?
That's not the same as writing in an intentionally inflammatory manner to garner attention and get responses. There's a difference between your opinion and how you choose to convey it. For me, trolling is entirely a question of the latter and not the former.
"There are plenty of ways of going to college without assuming a lifetime of debt. But no one is going to bring you a bunch of money. It's up to you to find it."

I am, currently, going to college. I have quite a bit of debt ($8K) and expect to get about double that by the time I'm finished. If you can show me a way to pay for college without debt, and I actually get the money, I will pay you $25 for every $100 I receive. So, if you can show me a way to get $200,000 for college (which I would have to come up with, somehow, if I weren't fortunate enough to get some scholarship money), you would get $50,000. If you can show me a way to get $20,000 to pay off my current and future debt, you'll get $5,000.

I can predict in advance, with fairly high probability (although I would obviously be delighted to be proven wrong), that you won't be able to come up with any way for me to get that sort of money, even given that you probably have more experience than I do, and even given an immediate large financial incentive. The reason why is obvious: $200,000, or even $20,000, is a crapton of money, especially when you're young, have no to little experience and are working hard as a full-time student. Most adults- people who have had full-time jobs for ten or twenty or thirty years- pay for items that cost that much on credit, because they can't afford it otherwise, even though they get socked with finance charges when they borrow.
Can't comment on the article, since I don't know that much about the Wordpress scene. But man, the author is a whiny critic type. Here's just a few from his last 10 articles:

"Twitter Peaks To Media Overkill, Is Real Time Search Dead", "Comment Systems Comparison Update: Disgusted With Disqus", "Swoopo May Be Most Profitable, Ingenius Online Business. But Is It Legal?", "eBay’s Problem: Biting The Hand That Feeds It"

Yeah. This guys appears to be a loser who creates nothing of value, and points out holes in other people's creations. One of the hardest things about trying to do something of value is learning to mostly dismiss people like him. It's still a challenge - no ones like to be criticized. But wow, it's easy to talk a lot of trash when you're not doing anything. One of my favorite quotes -

Teddy Roosevelt:

"It is not the critic who counts: not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes up short again and again, because there is no effort without error or shortcoming, but who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself for a worthy cause; who, at the best, knows, in the end, the triumph of high achievement, and who, at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who knew neither victory nor defeat."
They didn't modify netcat, apparently. There's no patch on the right. The left column is just original source tarballs, probably for convenience/versioning/archiving purposes.
I agree with all the points here except for the part about bit flags. Bit flags are still arguably the best way to store "sets" of non-duplicate information. For example, if I wanted to aggregate the kinds of nodes I'd want with John's API, I'd have to accumulate them in an array, then use apply() because I can't pass that array in. Then there's the problem of duplicates, and also easily being able to check, add, and remove. All these operations are of course possible with an array (even if they contain duplicates), but it seems a bit much to go down a route where all these operations are inherently O(N) when there is an O(1) solution that isn't that hard to learn. Additionally you can easily construct shorthands for often used combinations: ElementsAndText = Element | Text. In the array world, you're going to be having to concat arrays to achieve a similar effect. It's also really nice that you can say "ALL" just with 0xF...FFFF (-1) and be assured that it is future proof, whereas in the array world if new nodes creep in in the future, you have to now go back to every instance where you called this and add a new parameter. I suppose the "easy" fix for this is to just say that if nothing is passed in it means "all", or alternatively have an ALL constant.

We recently tackled a similar issue in Cappuccino and our solution was to create two parallel ways of specifying this information that were transparently convertible: a pure bit flags version and a strings version, such that (Selected | Highlighted) is equivalent to "selected+highlighted". You can pass in either the string form or the bit form to the methods, and you can convert between them as well. All in all, none of the "JS people" using our framework seemed to mind the use of bit flags.
they do everyday in democratic schools > http://www.sudval.org/index.html
At the time I wrote that, #startups on freenode was muted, with the topic line (and frequent op posts) stating that mibbit was banned by freenode, and the new #startups is on irc.mibbit.com.

That may still happen, depending on whether freenode learns to actually trust a human being (see the rest of this thread), and on what axod and swombat decide.

Edit: And you can come to #startups on irc.mibbit.com already. :)
Well then the effect you're describing has more to do with population density than interface?

When things start getting crowded, people start generally becoming rowdy - it seems to be human nature. You can have a small home party with 10-20 people and it's fine. Throw in a hundred gate crashers and it becomes a nightmare.

The thing with the internet is the anonymity that is afforded by such communities means that there is less of a barrier for people to become jerks. Look at YouTube or 4chan.

Youtube has a huge population and the comments are filled with volatile diatribe. Conversely, look at Vimeo - it's a much nicer interface, yet it doesn't have the same community issues that Youtube has.

Now let's look at 4chan. It has a simplistic user interface, but with extreme anonymity and a large enough population, it's the cesspool of the web.

I just don't think your "pretty interfaces = bad" argument has any merit.

Digg wasn't half bad when it FIRST came out, but as more people flocked to it, the quality went down. Ask a few of the old HNers and they'll argue the same about HN since it has grown in size, they argue that the quality has gone down. I mean, we see a thread complaining about it almost every other week it feels like.
dont forget async. urlfetch and the task queue!
A new repository for Ruby's Net::SSH
What do you envision as the use case for this?

You are not insane, but if you don't have a specific use in mind, you're bordering on being an architecture astronaut.

Simple scheme implementations sans closures/callcc exist in ridiculously short amounts of code (100 lines or so), for just about any underlying language. But none of them is very useful. An interpreter such as you describe is practically guaranteed to make this too slow for any real use.