skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Your statement seems to imply a couple of different things. Perhaps I have misjudged what you meant, and if I have please correct me. However, for the sake of discussion, here are the things your statement seem to imply to me:

1) the fact that you are playing something in the background suggests that you don't feel it it important.

2) Having something playing in the background, where full and undivided attention is not being given to it can have no positive influence on a person.

I don't agree with either of those things. In fact, I would say that in many cases the opposite of both is most certainly true.

As to the first, what a person has playing in the background at work or at home often very rightly defines the character of the person, and gives you great insight into what they believe, and what they hold dear.

Regarding the second, I believe there is ample evidence to show that non-primary stimuli (call it subliminal, if you wish) can have a profound effect on the minds of people (either for good or for evil).

I would be very interested to here your view on this, as well as the view of others on HN.
in cl, you can use defsetf to almost do the same. as a matter of fact, taking a cue from arc, you can write a macro like:

(defmacro deftable (name)
`(progn
(defparameter ,name (make-hash-table))
(defun ,name (k)
(gethash k ,name))
(defsetf ,name (k) (v)
`(setf (gethash ,k ,',name) ,v))))

now you can do:
(deftable client), which creates the hashtable, and then

(client 'phone) will retrieve the value,

(setf (client 'phone) '4444444) will set the value.
Personally, I always downvote based upon human worth. Upvotes? Only if I think you're hot.
Disagree by constructive counter-comment,
reserve down-mods for disapproval.
I don't mean to distract from the thread and discussion...

I know someone who still has a PDP-11 in his summer house and it is functioning....

I'm impressed. Name dropping and such usually doesn't work on me... but for some reason this does.
http://ltlprints.com Larger then life, they specialize in wall stickers
HP unveils a printer that connects directly to the Web.
I use feed43 a fair amount, and am pretty satisfied with it. It's certainly not user-friendly, but once you get the hang of it it works.
A new landmark in computer vision
By this point it should be clear, don't post anything on Facebook that you don't want to be public. It's not that complicated.
Google Researchers Teach Computers Out How To Recognize Images Of Landmarks
Ironically, this article violates its urge to "meta-discuss sparingly" by meta-discussing for a whole article. (Attempts to point out the same irony in this comment will suffer from the same problem.)
it is definitely more verbose and uglier. but in practice it does not seem to be a problem. for instance, comparing to arc, if you had notfn for ~, and testify, you could write all as:

(defun all (test seq)
(funcall (notfn #'some) (complement (testify test)) seq))

doesn't seem that bad.
I think not many people feel attracted to you right now.
Without putting much thought into it: "Downvotes mark comments without merit"

If something has educational, thoughtful, contrarian (encourages discussion), etc merit it's welcome on HN. If a comment has nothing going for it; is just lame, or a pun, or an unnecessary meta comment, then a downvote makes sense.
Actually, there should be no correlations between votes and agreement.

Upvotes should reward civil comments that feed the conversation constructively.

Aggressivity, and empty posts ("cheerleaders", etc.) should be downvoted.

Flags are for grossly offensive or illegal content.

That was the original intent IIRC: encouraging civil conversation. Tying votes with agreement leads to groupthink. We should encourage diversity unless we want to become a close-minded community, reinforcing it's own biases.
They're all Turing complete after all ;-)
I know. My self-appraisal of my own human worth just went down the toilet.
I'm not a Clojure expert, so I can't directly address that, but from the little that I know of Clojure though, I think you can do that by binding a function to a var, and then changing the binding of the var. (Can any Clojure experts exlaborate?)

Regardless, every Lisp that I am able to comment on (newLISP, elisp, Scheme, CL) can do that easily, so I doubt that Clojure would have difficulty with this.
Once a comment is +5 or higher. I think down votes can record peoples disagreement without cluttering the page. This can counter people up voting into the strataphere because they agree rather than because the comment has merit.
Coding Horror: Monty Hall, Monty Fall, Monty Crawl
Ask HN: Offshoring - At what point does cost trump productivity?
This is a continuation of the thread: Top Indian CEO: Most American Grads Are 'Unemployable"

While an interesting read, I think the post and most comments misses the very real (and important) discussion every startup/company must face up to - At what point does cost trump productivity?

For me, I run an angel backed startup in the valley, and there is absolutely no question that the top talent is found within 50 miles of where i am. There is also no question that working together with them in the same place leads to far more cohesion and productivity.

However, there are some very practical questions - Cost and competition. An average bay area fresh grad costs at least $60,000. If you are hiring talent with experience (like we are), competition from other firms will easily drive it upwards of $140,000. There is the big problem with hunger. Talent with hunger here typically have their own startups, or are already working in great companies.

As such, if you can hire a talent who is really hungry for 1/3 of the cost, but who is more raw and would not be as productive cause of remote working- would you do it?

And what positions would you consider to be candidates for offshoting, which ones would you never ever offshore?
I believe Hacker News capitalize the first word of the submission title no matter what. Which brings "IPhone" quite often.
Koogle - Kosher Search Engine Launched By Orthodox Jews
Restricting the size of w (and therefore also n) does not make it linear.

Lets say you have restricted w to 32. Then you also know that n <= 2^32. If you now for instance are using mergesort then you also know that the number of recursions are at most 32 (since you split the input in half each time), i.e. it executes within at most 32n operations. So with that logic mergesort would also be linear.
Thank you Grellas. It is really insightful and informative advice, and immensingly helpful for me to think more.

I will incorporate your suggestions and guideline into my decision. Thank you!
this is why I need to read the comments in hn :)
Florida Launches $250 Million Tech VC Fund, Managed by Non-Techies
Even though it's cheap I wouldn't consider it because of the pricing model you are using. It just feels wrong.

As I said above: human beings don't use logic when assigning "value."
This problem could be on AT&Ts end, or some communication provider in the middle. I have a similar configuration set up for my work extension (not related to Grandcentral/GV). The GC/GV system basically works as a man in the middle, and it relies on ISDN or SS7 (I believe) signalling to indicate that the call wasn't completed in a message right before VM picks up. Incoming callers can hear the first second of my personal VM before my work VM takes back over.

If the connection signalling is being stripped by some intermediate link or network misconfiguration GV can probably fix it, or trouble ticket their providers to do so. When you submit your info, make sure you tell them:

1) The cell # affected, including if it's a "blue" (refers to Pre-AT&T, pre-Cingular, AT&T Wireless) number or "orange" (Cingular) number if you know.

2) The local area of that #

3) If the number was ported and from where (eg. from Sprint or T-Mobile)

4) Where you are (in course terms physically, and whatever detail you can provide network-wise) when the failures occur

5) Whether the transfer to VM occurred because your phone was busy (you were calling out at that moment), unavailable (off, underground), directed to VM (you pressed END while it was ringing), or it rang the 30 seconds away and then timed out.

This should be enough to give them a fighting chance at a test case or correlating it to another ticket (e.g. Los Angeles AT&T customers ported from Sprint) and getting it fixed.
Do you mean the written language?

I actually think it has advantages and disadvantages. An address has a neighborhood, a block number, and a house/building number. The neighborhood name puts you in the correct vicinity. There are signs showing the block numbers, though I never got the knack of finding them.

The advantage over street names is that the first part of the address, the neighborhood name, gives you a rough idea where the address is located. Knowing a street name in the US may tell you very little. Streets can and often do extend all the way across town. Older streets can zig-zag or have disconnected segments.

The disadvantage is that in the US, if you know a street name and a cross street, you can often find one of the streets by wandering around randomly. Then you can go up and down that street looking for the address or the other street. Wandering randomly in Japan is fun, but not a good way to find an address.

Another disadvantage I've encountered is that you have to be very careful of neighborhood boundaries when consulting a map. Looking for block 12, you follow the numbers across the map 8, 9, 10, 11, 12 but you don't realize that the block 12 you found is in the adjacent neighborhood, and the correct block 12 is all the way on the other side.
I've been using Bing as my browser default since it came out. By and large, it's on a par with Google for most queries. I do find myself going back and forth from Google search for programming questions because of the Google groups search and blog search. The Python and Django Google groups are very active, and quite helpful. I also have found a number of links to content on programming questions via Bing that I wouldn't have found using Google alone. So, I find myself using both search engines quite a bit.

I've been planning some recent travel and the airfare search on Bing was excellent. Up until recently, Kayak was my primary airfare comparison site, but Bing's tools won big for me. They felt a faster and more responsive. You can also get airfare trend graphs and get "buy now prices increasing" or "buy later, prices decreasing" recommendations. Bing is now my primary airfare search tool.

Either way, it's great that Google is getting a little pressure to compete in search. It's been the defacto monopoly for several years, and that's bound to cause some stagnation. I think the competition is going to make search better all the way around, and it's that reason that I'm going to keep Bing as my browser default.
On a tangent, anyone come up with any reasonable solution to simulating the iPhone's hardware environment from XCode (it so needs a slow-down plugin). It's nice to run stuff on my CoreDuo but painful to see how slow it runs when it's actually on the iPhone.
I'm unclear on who google voice is for....is this service useful for someone with a single phone line who doesn't talk on the phone much? can I use it to circumvent cell phone charges?
I think they should be used for disagreeing with things that are wrong.
http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/8tiip/opera_uni...
Exactly !! The process of college education is not to make drones out of people but to imbibe the culture of learning.
This is an important issue, but the WSJ is a mainstream paper. This article doesn't go into an in-depth discussion of the technical issues, and it also assumes very little familiarity with the nature of Chinese Net Censorship (which is rather more complicated than the "Thought Police"/1984 picture painted here).

Here's one good link which discusses the Green Dam programme in more detail: http://sun-zoo.com/chinageeks/2009/06/15/ai-weiwei-all-thats...

Edit: Actually, I don't think that's the article I had in mind (it came up on RSS a few weeks ago). But it was from that blog, which has several good discussions about this topic.
Oh, come on, folks. It's a perfectly reasonable comment -- Lisp is powerful and expressive, but it is not an intuitive language for beginners.
I expect people will continue to get older for a while.
The last part didn't seem entirely literal to me.
You could add something to the effect of 'say nothing you wouldn't say to our face'.
If Google can do this for China, how come it cannot do it it for my "safe search" image results when I am at work.
I don't know how you feel about counter histories; but, based on the keyword density of your post, I'll go ahead and recommend "The Shock Doctrine, the rise of disaster capitalism" (by Naomi Klien).
It's unlikely that even positive "customer feedback" can overcome the laws of physics.
Click on your country in the top right of the page; it will take you to a new page where you can select your market.
NYT: Blogs - Bits - Forget "Speed." The S Stands for "Sales"
An interesting point.

You wouldn't even have to be a direct employee. An immoral IT worker could probably gain access to at least some anonymous info by working somewhere on the pipe (ISP etc.) for organizations that route emails externally (encrypted or not, the contents and origin are not necessary).

There's most likely some data mining you could do on http stats too, instead of just email.

Spooky.
This is potentially dangerous stuff. If Activision leads the way in not producing PS3 games and sees a profit boost, then there's huge risks for Sony that other games companies like EA will also stop publishing games to the PS3.

This is a risky situation for Sony and they've already lost some of their classic Playstation-only games that would have actually forced people into buying a PS3. The biggest one is Final Fantasy, with the next one being released on Xbox as well as PS3, I saw little reason to even consider the PS3 when I went to buy a console and with games like Mass Effect and Halo as Xbox/PC only, the choice was easier.
Hacker News RSS Feed with Full Text Articles
It is actually a lousy system: http://www.nytimes.com/1996/07/16/world/tokyo-where-streets-...
I don't really understand. Vonage has had many of these features for years. I've been a customer since 2002, and I love it. I've had the same phone numbers for 6 moves in 3 different cities. And, I was able to get an 800 number so I don't have to worry about area code changes when I move.

I can also use Vonage with a regular land line handset, which seems impossible with Google Voice.

Besides, I'm starting to get a little paranoid about how much of my personal life resides on Google servers. I'm feeling the need to diversify a bit.
I think the article counts as "sparing".
And for something a little different
http://www.stickertweet.com
Is it cultural, or is it just the result of the boom cycle making it easier to make a rupee by following rather than leading?

My gut instinct is that the sad state of Indian IT is purely a result of being supported by clueless management in developed countries thinking they can easily save big bucks by outsourcing. India is just filling a demand.

After a decade or two of Indians growing up in this economy and seeing the failures first hand, I predict things will have equalized quite a bit, and the smart Indians will all be saying "Why work for clueless bosses when we can do better and we have huge markets of our own?" Of course that process will be kickstarted by Indian expats witnessing the failures of enterprise IT firsthand in the richest corporations of the world.
Thanks for a very thoughtful reply which has encouraged me to reassess my initial impressions of the book in a way that is fairer to the material. It's difficult to separate a novel such as this from its circumstance and reception and I certainly have erred in that way rather than perceiving its inherit qualities.
You offshore repetitive work, and/or work that is administrative and common to all companies. You in-house leadership, development, and creative work, and anything that is specific to your company.
Don't post anything online that you don't want to be public. Ben Franklin's saying 'Three may keep a secret, if two of them are dead.' holds true for the Internet as well, nothing is private online. Encryption can be broken. Secrets can be hacked.
Thank you for following up before judging. I'll try to summarize more clearly. I offered to give the original talk for the opportunity to get feedback on new ideas and the opportunity to present JUnit Max (although it seems to me the chances of significant sales are small). I also told them of my need for revenue, to which they replied they had no budget. Then they asked to expand the talk to a much larger audience and record it. I said "no" to that, which triggered the post, because I haven't been in the habit of creating less than the most value I could imagine.
healthcare might be an economic stimulus I guess....
Ajax survey 2009: jQuery and MS Ajax are almost tied
No more free labor
I only got free admission for speaking at RubyConf.
Counting the seconds until someone flings a takedown order. Aggregating full content without permission definitely exceeds the bounds of "fair use".
Venture Capital 101 (VIDEO)
Sadly, I'm a critical care nurse, and I've worked with a lot of doctors that aren't really capable, but they practice medicine because they were able to memorize really well and follow checklists.

The person who graduates at the bottom of his medical school class still gets to write "Md" after his name.
How Placebos Really Work
The only three local tech employers of any note are Fire Mountain Gems, Harry and Davids, and Musician's Friend. I wouldn't recommend this area to a programmer unless you are willing to travel, in which case it's paradise except that you are travelling, or you have a product. In either case the local "exchange rate" is dramatically in your favor.
The Domestication of the Savage Mind
Upvotes mark value

Downvotes mark lack of value

Downvotes should be far more rare than upvotes
The British computer science teaching in Higher education is very high standard, but I can't get a job here myself.

The BCS (British Computer Society, whose President I met in 2003), sets targets for University CS degrees in the UK. "BCS accredited".
Notable information omitted from the title: the survey was of .NET developers.
Maybe you don't upload a thing, but people tag you in photos (and you have your tagged photos marked as private).
With a huge population of angry men who can't get wives, this is a really dumb move from the view point of helping preserve the power of China's ruling party. They have enough riots and discontent as it is.
This is true, but I think mcav's point was that this is not how they're used. People should do this, but when you're on the receiving end of votes, you should remember this to explain why you got them.
May I hate both the CEO of the anti-creative drone shop HCL CEO and the pompous elitist and medieval university system?
i think it uses ajax.
+1 on the jazz! Miles Davis is my favorite to listen to while coding.
This. At my workplace we had legacy code written by people who either didn't understand or didn't care about this stuff, and now our databases are full of crap that we literally have to guess how to correctly convert and render.
"If all those Ph.D.s are wrong the country would be in serious trouble."

Yes. And yes.
stickerguy.com is awesome - I've used them many-a-time.

The website sucks, but they're cheap!
Both. First it does a local fold on local inputs, then it does a global fold across all of the local fold results.

i.e. Assume we have three nodes and one key, "our_key", and values for "our_key" are distributed across the 3 nodes:

node1 : our_key : [ 1, 2, 3, 4, 5]

node2 : our_key : [ 6, 7, 8, 9, 10]

node3 : out_key : [11, 12, 13, 14, 15]

and our fold function ( which must be associative) is +. First we fold each node:

node1 : fold(+, [ 1, 2, 3, 4, 5]) = our_key : [15]

node2 : fold(+, [ 6, 7, 8, 9, 10]) = our_key : [40]

node3 : fold(+, [11, 12, 13, 14, 15]) = our_key : [65]

When each node is done with its local inputs, the key-value pairs are redistributed so that each key and its values are on a single node. In this case, assume our hash function moved "our_key" to node 2. Node 2 would now have:

node2 : our_key : [15, 40, 65]

And we would fold against that and get:

node2: our_key : 120

This is how we achieve massive scalability. The nodes can do all of their processing in parallel without any intercommunication except for the key-redistribution phase.

Two key things to point out are that HashFold does the folding as the data becomes available (we don't wait for all values to start folding... this reduces memory usage because we don't need to store the list of values, only the result of the fold as it progresses), and the framework described here is sufficient to perform any computation that MapReduce can do which should make the transition easier (as a lot of major data processing tasks are currently framed for MapReduce)
Completely inappropriate.
Sure, that sounds reasonable. But you've still chosen C to talk to the hardware.
UTF-8 uses less memory if your string happens to contain mostly characters that UTF-8 can represent in a single byte (like english text). I expect UTF-8 will actually use more memory if you're working with e.g. japanese, arabic, etc..
How To Upgrade Windows 7 Beta To Windows 7 RC
I think it's a reasonable statement, if the following premises are accepted:

1. It is easier and quicker to develop a correct solution in a higher level language than a lower level one.

2. Expressiveness / abstraction come at the cost of time and space efficiency.

Thus, if time and space efficiency are not a concern, then the higher level language should be preferred.
Designing Twitterrific 2
It's been working at least for a few months without getting shut down.
Does my response to jganetsk help at all?
"Programming for the PS3 is no easy task given the strange design of the cell processor and short comings of Sony's SDKs and frameworks."

Isn't the Xbox 360 processor based on the Cell design?
I'm always surprised by how the Monty Hall problem (and other similar problems, like the Bellhop and the missing dollar) messes people up. It's really terribly simple when you consider that Monty is adding information by acting non-randomly. The 3-door problem seems counter-intuitive to most people, so it is easier to imagine 10 doors-- after you choose, Monty opens 8 other empty doors, leaving one. It should be evident in this case that your choices are either a) to keep the original door, with a 1-in-10 chance of winning, or b) take the other 9 doors (8 of which are open) with a 9-in-10 chance of winning. Clearly, the winning move is to switch, and there's nothing counter-intuitive about it. People tend to let the details of the set-up get in the way of their seeing the structure of the problem. It's a cute puzzle, but it really shouldn't have confused Erdős.
official response from nokia siemens:

http://www.nokiasiemensnetworks.com/global/Press/Press+relea...

"...The restricted functionality monitoring center provided by Nokia Siemens Networks in Iran cannot provide data monitoring, internet monitoring, deep packet inspection, international call monitoring or speech recognition. Therefore, contrary to speculation in the media, the technology supplied by Nokia Siemens Networks cannot be used for the monitoring or censorship of internet traffic."