skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You could work with Common Lisp. It can handle rationals, arbitrary precision, it has macros, useful debugging tools, solid environments, it compiles code on a function-by-function basis to highly performant bytecode (or machine code or C, depending on which implementation you're using).

I don't know, all the cool shit you can do with Ruby, PHP, etc. can be done with Common Lisp and you won't suffer from shitty performance or inadequate meta-programming facilities.
"Many Chinese died to bring you this iPhone".
A better thing to do is to not use raw integers to represent money at all, create an immutable money object, use integers to represent units and a currency string (cents/USD) inside the class. Use the money as the primitive it is, giving it the appropriate numerical operations added/subtracted/multiplied/allocated. Money is not an integer, or a decimal, or a double, or any other number, Money is Money and should be represented by an appropriate abstraction of its own.
We're using his definition of dynamic languages which is PHP, Ruby, Perl, Python. Let's not fuss about definitions, let's be constructive here, hm?
Very very good point. Even though science now knows differently people Still tend to think that problems in the mind are...ephemeral and they exist outside the physical.

This can be very frustrating to anyone who faces a neurological condition.
Finished: _Germany 1866-1945_ by Gordon Craig. Various others in parallel.
Racial Equity Requires Teaching Elementary School Teachers More Mathematics
The bar for political posts on Hacker News is higher than the bar for other topics. Off-topic: "most posts about politics".

It should be the case that when a political post on Hacker News survives flagging, that post is of exceptional quality.

Most of Nate Silver's 538 posts are like that: they're interesting not just because they advocate a sensible position, but because they use interesting methods to do that, methods that hackers find congenial.

Even though right-leaning libertarianism makes my skin crawl, a lot of libertarian posts find a good home here too. They advocate a vision of society that is nurtures entrepreneurialism, and even assigns it a central role in the social contract.

This post doesn't live up to either standard. It takes a viewpoint that any college freshman selected off the UMich campus at random could be expected to have, and articulates it using a rhetorical and logical style that any college freshman selected off the UMich campus at random could be expected to use.

Meanwhile, the post has managed to spark a vigorous debate on HN about whether it's fair to compare the WSJ to Nazis.

Posts like this suck the air out of Hacker News. It's one of the great features of HN that we tend to reject them. I hope you'll reconsider whether material like this has a place here. There are many other communities on the Internet that are better suited for it.

[edit no offense to college students --- I think my point is clear, if clumsily written]
UAE BlackBerry users hit with malicious spyware disguised as a software update
I reply immediately to emails that require a reply at work. Within a day at home. Texts I generally reply to within minutes whether they require a reply or not. Voice mails I never reply or listen to. If I get a voice mail, I look through the missed calls, guess who left it and then seek them out either in person or by calling them back. If checking voice mail wasn't THE worst UI experience on earth, that might be different.
Optimizing Search Engine Rankings with Microsites
Would Y Combinator fund a porn startup?
Would Ycombinator fund a porn startup? Why or why not?
Constellation is unlikely to meet it's deadline - if it completes at all (not enough impetus or funds).
I studied Mandarin for a few months, and this looks like a really cool service. Not sure if it would have a negative impact on handwriting - the repetition is really key.

I have to say that the writing style aggravated me. "We were but swaddled babes, greenhorns looking about ourselves at the vast and splendiferous plain of entrepreneurial possibility that lay before us." - this sounds like you are poking fun at yourselves, which is cool - but I don't think you are. Which makes it not cool.

This would largely be solved by toning down the thesaurus usage, I think. You used a lot of cool sounding words instead of their simpler, clearer alternatives.

Anyway, that's just me. I do think the product looks pretty awesome though. I wrote a few characters on the demo, and it went really well. It seems like someone who has zero knowledge of chinese wouldn't be able to use the demo at all, though.
Prime Time Hack: The Birth of Facebook Video
I just saw a discussion about commercial vs. government space travel on XKCD IRC yesterday. I'm curious; did whoever submitted this read or participate in that chat and investigate? Is commercial space travel that popular a subject these days? Or was it just a coincidence?
Love the idea, how do you intend to generate revenue? Didn't notice anything mentioned in the article.
Here: http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/vilayanur_ramachandran_on_... is V.S. Ramachandran talking about hand amputees who feel their ghost hand in a painful fist. Using a mirror and their remaining hand they fool their brain into opening the fist.

Here's hand pain that's clearly in not in the hand.
Django in the real world.
1) The Moon contains metals that can be used to make useful things. In the long run, it would be cheaper to make the parts for orbital colonies there, instead of making them on Earth and boosting them into orbit.

2) There is evidence that there is water and oxygen on the Moon. Again, it is cheaper to collect these on the Moon and send them out to the orbital factories and space-based solar collectors than it would be to do so from Earth.
Nevermind - I just noticed the monthly pricing model. My apologies. Would be curious, if you don't mind sharing, what % of users convert to paid subscribers.
Ushahidi: Crowdsourcing Crisis Information
Yes!

GPS can be configured at the start of a trip. Any music player shouldn't be used more than pause/skip while driving. Hands free calling needs to be mandatory.

People just do not have the spare cognitive capacity to attend to both driving and gizmos.
I really would have liked some more background to his statement on Tokyo Cabinet's tables other than saying that "they basically suck." I've never heard this before and couldn't find anything on Google to support that.
I feel compelled to point out that the word "propaganda" is neutral. We usually associate negative things with the word because what the word describes is something we usually consider distasteful. But propaganda in favor of good things (or in neutral terms, things you support) is possible.

It takes self-control to not object when a cause you, or any reasonable person, supports is labeled propaganda. But if the label fits and we want to think rationally, we must use it.

For the record: http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/propaganda
Those are not socialist governments, they're social democrat governments.
Even though right-leaning libertarianism makes my skin crawl

Ouch. I think I just became collateral damage.
WordPress Switches to Hourly Pinging, Tells No One
Computer agents have been discussed a long time ago. It's a good someone's putting some time into making them a reality.

http://www.atarimagazines.com/creative/v7n11/MailChauvinism....

"Licklider's messages and examples on the screen now involve fill-ins and subroutines and modeling. He shows how he can program his computer to make dinner arrangements when he goes to a certain city: if the first person invited can't have dinner, his computer scans the list of his other friends in the same city and issues dinner invitations to them . All this in a simple conditional language."

but wait, there's more,

"Agents will handle "augmented telephone calls," stacking the calls and pushing them through automatically. Agents will pay your bill, checking them against the appropriate invoices in standard electronic forms. They will sniff out information a friend may have set out: his birthday, gift preferences and sizes, party invitations, information he would like from whoever knows it."
That's because the states are not truly socialist societies...
I agree. I rarely check voicemails but return calls.

Maybe a visual voicemail or transcriptions would help.
As a bonus, this strategy also makes it (relatively) simple to handle multiple currencies. By using raw integers, you never have currency information attached so it's a lot tougher (and messier) to keep track of the currency.
I thought political polemics were clearly not HN material.
And there are still plenty of opportunities out there for Valley types: Facebook widgets, iPhone apps, Twitter tools, and cloud services are exploding.

That's where they lost me. Laid off? No money? Kids starving? Make a new Twitter app!
Webbynode Sold out/Invitation codes
This really sucks, and we’re sorry for this hassle – but we’re currently sold out for new customers (doesn’t affect current customers). But don’t worry there’s some good news:

We’re open if you haven an invitation.

1. Open for those with invitations.

If you wanna get a Webby ASAP, you can get invited, we put a nice invite system together so if you a have a friend who has a Webby ask them for an invitation.
2. Invited people get VIP Accounts, and save 15% off.

We know being out of stock and not being able to get a Webby when you want it sucks, so we’ll be giving invitees 15% off for the life of their account.
3. Join the waitlist, and we’ll send you an invite

If you don’t know anyone who can invite you, add your email in the box below and we’ll be happy to send you an email to let you know when we have more Webbies for sale. In the meantime, annoy your friends until they share an invitation with you.

Its terrible to be sold out. We are already waiting for a big order of servers we placed and should be here in less than 10 days before we can start provisioning Webbies again. Thanks for your continued patience and support
Or, you could use an editor more advanced than notepad.exe and use a "toggle comment" command which which allows you to switch between

//line 1
//line 2
//...
//line N

...and...

line 1
line 2
...
line N

...with more flexibility than using a syntax trick.
Code Snippet Resources and Repositories
If the purpose is to encourage good comments, I think the effect would be preserved if scores only appeared to the original poster. And by making the change, readers would score comments more effectively.

I've also been reading Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely, and he discusses how initial estimates anchor our opinions. That is, if I see a comment scored as X, I may be inclined to believe that X is close to the true score. But do comments actually have true scores? Perhaps they should be scored by the individual in a ternary fashion (up, down, no vote). In the past, I've voted down insightful comments because I thought they were over-rated.

*

My thoughts:

-Getting a comment grayed out is pretty embarrassing; this wouldn't change that.

-Would the incentivisation disappear if only the poster could see the score?

-Groupthink would be discouraged

-I'm not motivated by the vain glory of having a highly rated comment [i.e., I'm not motivated by other people knowing my comment is highly rated]. I'm motivated by making an intelligent contribution to the discussion that, hopefully, others recognize as intelligent. I'm also motivated by increasing my overall karma score. I see it as a game of sorts.
Governments all have varying degrees of centralization and socialism; the word "truly" in the phrase you quoted is not mere rhetorical flourish, but a critical word.

Nothing stops you from democratically electing a government that gathers more power to itself. The US just did, after all.
It would depend how directly involved with porn it was. As a rule investors won't touch pure porn companies, regardless of how they feel about any moral questions, because they can never grow into anything more. But there seem to be a lot of successful companies that are one step removed from porn.
The Philly Startup Leaders Manifesto
Sure, we live in prosperity, but at what cost? I'm sure the slave children working for Nike agree with you.
No hard numbers, it's just that I barely got a Sinclair Spectrum emulator to run on a 10MHZ 286. A Spectrum is about 3 MHZ.

I got an Atari ST (8MHZ 68000) emulator to just about run on an old 60MHZ (or so) 486.

But it's possible I was getting something wrong: The overhead to deal with, say, an Amiga emulation, might be a fixed overhead, meaning it's 20 MHZ to convert instructions, so a 100MHZ machine would run an Amiga at 80MHZ.
Paul Boutin (paul.boutin@nytimes.com) was a Wired senior editor until we fired him in 2001
I remember a while ago there was a debate raging about how California public schools should deal with young ESL children. Should they immerse them in English-only courses (good for English-learning, bad for 'everything else'-learning and putting them at a disadvantage) or should they start in Spanish and slowly transition them to English-only courses? It was an interesting discussion, but was (understandably) framed around the idea that the children were part of a growing problem which badly needed a solution.

Simultaneously, I (a native English speaker) was sitting in a required high school Spanish course (two years), which was progressing at turtle-like speeds and effectively useless unless you were in AP Spanish.

For the life of me I can't understand how these two 'problems' can exist in a school system and administrators can't put two and two together. Now at 28 I'm actually learning a second language, and I can see both how useless those high school courses were, and how much I would have benefited had I learned a language when young, while surrounded by other children who were 'native' speakers of that language.

My kids will most definitely be raised bilingual, and I hope to expose them to a school which facilitates language learning from the get go.
The disconnection between the writer and reality is really striking.

If you're laid off it is never 'good for you', and it certainly isn't good for the industry.

Plenty of talent that was thrown out at some point in this crisis due to no fault of theirs is not going to try their hand again at a job that left them with 0 security when times were hard, that talent will be lost forever.

And if you have a mortgage, kids to put through school or college and the usual family expenses then being laid off is a crisis, not 'good for you' in any way because making a facebook or a twitter application is not going to put bread on your table in time for your house not to be repossessed.

It's ok to suggest that for some individuals there are opportunities in being laid off but for the most part any forced leave from a job that you may have liked and performed well in and that kept you alive is a tragedy.

It could easily ruin someones life for years to come.
I wouldn't mind discussing it. Right now our conversion rates are fairly low, even considering our space: around 1-2%. That could be due to a lot of bad design we have on the front and try it pages, and the lack of a tutorial. All those things are the front burner, but it's just taking time. I think if we tweak it, we can substantially increase the conversion rate and our revenue. Right now its a sustainable business model though, which is great news for us because now our biggest concern is to boost revenue.
yeah because offshoring has nothing to do with programming
With a large board there's a lot of anchoring that's going on.

It'd be nice if there were another way to encourage them.
Hey, that's what I am doing right now.

My previous company shut down. I got 4 job offers withing 2 weeks, and right now I am transfering my H-1B papers.

Since that takes few weeks, I am working on something fun. A sms backup system, that automatically backs up all your sms, and makes them search-able from a small portal.

Using Python for the backend, and java/objective-c on the client side.
I choose python b/c I would like to learn it better, as in all my jobs it has been all java.

So, I probably won't make any money out of it, but I will come with some solid server side Python experience that I can put it on my resume.

Meanwhile I still have to tell recruiters "sorry I already accepted an offer". Got a call from google, and fb.

Bottom line, if you are good, there is really no recession for you. And getting laid off is not that bad. (this is my first time). My previous company was going no-where, and my skills would have been better used somewhere else, where I can produce real economic value.
Somewhat similarly, as a stopgap in '07 I built a Django (well really, Python and duct tape) Sarbanes-Oxley SOD system over a month or so.

I had to deal with well over a million records, but fundamentally it was a pretty simple ask, laying a 2d matrix of rules over user and permission records from 30 different systems. I even hooked it up to SAP and various AS400s through MQ, print queues and various other things.

It was a total stopgap move - so a whole bunch of vendors bid on the "real" system, one was selected, and now almost 3 years later and a few million dollars spent, and the "real" system still isn't working.

"Web 2.0" frameworks have a lot of applications in business, the ORM + presentation layer tools give you most of the groundwork you need, but as the article says, the key is in the polish and the business oriented design.
If you find yourself competing with the Internet, find a way out.
Hey trefn, sorry about the flowery language. I've always thought that high Victorian prose sounded humorously formal and stiff, so whenever I'm writing for fun, I use that style.

The lack of a tutorial is something we haven't overlooked, it's just not done yet. You're right that people that don't know Chinese wouldn't be able to use it though, which is a fairly substantial problem. We need to fix that soon.

Thanks for checking it out!
In a world with Tor and cheap anonymizing proxies, the criminals are not using open wifi networks anymore.
We have 2 common apps on the android/iPhone app store. GRE review and GMAT review. Search for Watermelon Express on appstore/android market and you will find them.
I am not sure about their service in Europe, but it has never been a problem for me in US. I have multiple AMEX cards.
What do you call London or Washington when you speak Chinese? That is the quoted author's point.
One of the more unintuitive but real ideas to come out of science and psychology is that everything in your head is very real. You are your brain.
Nokia 6600i slide Unlocked
Nokia 6600i slide Unlocked does not come only with leveraged imaging capabilities; it also sports an elegant and compact design, which resembles the one seen on the Nokia 6600 slide, and which, the company says, is meant to attract quality-conscious.
It seems that you and trefn both reacted similarly. I didn't really take into account a specific audience when I was writing it and I actually only posted it to HN as an afterthought, never thinking it'd hit the front page. Next time I post, I'll try to make it more to-the-point.
If they can get away with deleting my books, what's to keep Amazon from correcting newspaper articles?

Envision your five-month-old edition of NYT or WSJ, where it quotes Tim Geithner saying the stimulus package will take effect "almost immediately".

Then one day you find that quote corrected to read "within a year".

Paging Winston Smith ...
Iliad Smalltalk web framework
Early Molecular Manufacturing Products
This is also an old trick to test whether your code was compiled as a C++ or not:

2//**/2
== 1) ? "C" : "C++"
20k+ lines of wave protocol code released today (wave federation day)
Why did you not provide a link to the Wikipedia page?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vinland_map#Authenticity_contro...

I see nothing "proving" that it is a forgery. In fact, the wikipedia page presents an unclear picture, very similar to the article and the expert. Without definitive proof that it is a fake, further evidence like this is helpful. There isn't always a smoking gun.
I have to say that usually it is marginal talent that has hard time finding a job.

Crisis like this is when the chaff is separated from the wheat. They filter out people that shouldn't be in he bussiness.

I remember my car mechanic was a DBA back in 2000. He read a SQL book, and a 3 months class, and bam, he was DBA for some company, which eventually went under. He admited me he didn't know what he was doing, but at the time you will get hired right away if you new something.

He owns a car repair garage now, and is pulling up to 500k of profit a year. Who knows, maybe he would have been a great DBA with enough experience, but in this case he clearly profited more by doing what he was good at.

Kinda like CS 121, which was the hardest class in college, and a lot of people failed. They usually switched majors, to bussiness, or information systems, or something else they could do.

I thought it was good, as those people were evidently there b/c they had heard all those stories about startups and being rich, while had no passion or abilities for programming whatsover.
It's just that it's SpaceX's 2nd successful launch, and nearly as important as the 1st last year. It's just recent news.
Not an Upgrade -- An Upheaval
http://www.cato-unbound.org/2009/07/13/clay-shirky/not-an-upgrade-an-upheaval/
Except when changing lanes or making a turn, I think using gadgets are okay. I think banning the use of gadgets entirely when driving, would be a bad idea.
> A better thing to do is to not use raw integers to represent money at all...Money is Money and should be represented by an appropriate abstraction of its own.

Good point. This makes me wonder though whether it is ever acceptable to use primitive math without some kind of units, except maybe in pure math. You are always counting something, be it dollars, or people, or widgets sold, or hard drive seeks.
Boeing says they have commercial customers: http://www.boeing.com/defense-space/space/bls/deltaHistory.h...
I think you've hit the nail on the head. All of the parts, while impressive, amount to only a part of the story. You've got a better approach to IM & email. You've got an API that provides real-time collaborative editing. You've got an API that leverages Google's front-end tools (Google Web Toolkit) and the scalability of Google's back-end tools (AppEngine). And you've got an API to integrate it all together. Each is nice and useful in its own right. But if they are combined together...

I'll be very interested to see if Google releases some facsimile of Google Docs that are Wave-enabled and allow for full real-time editing/collaboration. Combine that with the email & SMS killer, and I believe Google has a viable alternative to Office + Exchange + Windows. The unifying element of the Wave acts to capture a company's workflow. In the end, business will want to use this instead of the MS solution because it provides more business value that the sum of the parts (IM + email + office suite + workflow), and it does so in a way that MS cannot. Companies can extend the Wave to add further business value to the whole approach with the Wave API. Finally, with the whole thing being open-sourced, companies will be able to run their own servers (something I think is critical to mass acceptance of the technology within corporations).

It is an ambitious project. I hope Google succeeds. I am watching it closely, and look forward to my own invitation. I already can see a number of areas where I would like to build my robots & gadgets.
The skills required to quickly find a new job aren't even related to the skills required to execute on a software team.
Saying "GPS can be configured at the start of a trip" applies the waterfall model to road trips.
Worth to note that the author is Andrei Alexandrescu. A must read for C++ programmers!