skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've felt this way for several years -- we've went from engineering to something more like witch doctor.

The problem is, of course, that all abstractions are leaky, and we've piled abstraction after abstraction on top of the hardware. So it's not unusual to have four or five levels of stuff between you and the machine. Adding to that is the problem of multi-cores: it's not just one machine operating anymore. Each piece is deterministic, sure, but as all the pieces interoperate in real-time that determinism can be so hidden as to be effectively non-existent.

Languages are going to be able to help to some degree, but at the end of the day machines are just going to keep getting more and more complex and our understanding of them shallower and shallower.

It'll be interesting to see if there is a major hardware refactoring that takes place anytime soon. I imagine for AI to work we're going to need it.
There is a fundamental difference between a hardware "API" and a software one. See http://www.loper-os.org/?p=37
Hunter's point and the Filmore district are also heavily African-American.

But when I was there during the 97-99 boom there was a noticeable lack of African Americans in tech and web companies.
Without reading the article, which is probably addressing a much more sensible point than the title would have us believe: Coz bandwidth costs money?
There's always the language Forth.
They're "all mouth and no trousers", as a British saying goes. Zed has a wardrobe full of trousers.
Too! Too much recursion!

"To much recursion!" would be proper if you were, say, offering a toast on account of having loads of recursion. Like:

The Good King Lisp raised his glass and toasted with the Knights of Lambda, "To much recursion!"
It's funny because just yesterday (while driving or walking the dog... one of those times when the thoughts just wander) I was thinking about how one could start a series of tweets of the kind "This tweet is the copy of the previous tweet" with a way to start and stop the series while all still being true. And then thought there could be other kinds of challenges around that theme. Apparently there are.
The feelings of specialness combined with frequent impulsive decisions with often bad consequences and the easy enemy making and feelings of persecution... those remind me of sociopathy.
What's faster - a supercomputer or EC2?
Search User Interfaces book
There's no way to solve for x with the information given!

Instead, take the ratio of your comment's parent divided by the (grandparent + parent), and you get x. I think.
DropBox direct links listed as an attack site by Firefox
The Marmite equation.
What's a good name for the thing you threw together in an afternoon? "My side project" seems to be the most common right now, but is there a better term? Is there a distinction between "my side project because I'm bored" vs. "my side project because I want to not work a regular job someday?"
Read and write. (You can scroll by dragging)
Bet that won't last long.
Nice. Incidentally, similar techniques are often used in security breaches. I remember it both from the recent paper that guesses your SSN from you date of birth and other data (where it is used to extrapolate your SSN from those of dead people with a nearby date of birth), and in the recent paper on the rogue CA certificate, where it is used to guess the timestamp on the certificate to the exact second.

I highly recommend reading these two papers -- both attacks required a great deal of ingenuity to pull off, especially the second one.

http://www.pnas.org/content/106/27/10975.full

http://www.win.tue.nl/hashclash/rogue-ca/
Not only did they use an existing code base, they used one that they had developed themselves, so it's more like they 'developed an interesting demo based on their existing open source social network software in 40 hours' ;o)
Link to the Google Analysis:
http://safebrowsing.clients.google.com/safebrowsing/diagnost...

Here's the text I see:

------------

Reported Attack Site!

This web site at files.getdropbox.com has been reported as an attack site and has been blocked based on your security preferences.

Attack sites try to install programs that steal private information, use your computer to attack others, or damage your system.

Some attack sites intentionally distribute harmful software, but many are compromised without the knowledge or permission of their owners.

--------------

Anything we can do to help?
The First Machine Learning Paper (1956)
Personally, I would have no problems working with him. I expect people to call me out when I do stupid things, and I expect people to tell me what they think.

I don't think Zed is much more abrasive than Linus, for example.
Hard to believe it's even used by real law enforcement: a lot of the information isn't even accurate.
It’s Time We Stopped Rewarding Projects with Crappy Documentation
Video library software, footage library demo
blinkx Partners With Encyclopaedia Britannica
San Francisco, CA, Feb. 20, 2008. blinkx (LSE:BLNX), the world´s largest video search engine, today announced a partnership with Encyclopaedia...
I agree with the startup vs. project vs. other is more interesting and your distinction is an important one but more is needed.

Is a buying a corner-store or laundry mat mean you are running a startup? I think there are several other qualifications needed.

1.)	There needs to be the intention to hire more than yourself/family as employees.

2.)	There needs to be the intention to pay a return on investment to investors.

3.)	The organization needs to be structured as corporation.
worst case scenario: One more codec we have to encode videos in if they were to be supported by the <video>-tag: Safari uses h.264, Mozilla uses Theora and Chrome now uses any of the newly acquired codecs to save on h.264 license fees.

Before this, we just had h.264 and Theora.

Better scenario: Google opensources some or all of the acquired codecs and gives a free patent license (I don't think they can give the patents away to public domain, can they?) at which time, we'll have Safari on one side and Chrome / Mozilla on the other which basically is the same as we had today, but reversed.

Best-case scenario: As above, but the HTML5-guys agree to actually mandate the use of one of these new codecs forcing compliant browsers (this then may include Safari) to implement them and thus we only need to encode the video once (assuming youtube supports the new codec aswell, because we'll need to still fall back to youtube for IE).

Or anything in between.

Just don't get your hopes up.
Yes, but it's not Apple versus Google, it's royalty-bearing standard from MPEG-LA versus non-royalty bearing standard from Google.

Since Apple has argued repeatedly and publicly with the MPEG-LA to liberalize their royalty rates for viewers and smaller users it's not certain they'll stick with the H.264 Camp despite their hardware commitment, their patent involvment, it's head start and its small technical advantage.
The only reason Apple is raking in so much profit from the App Store is because there is no real rival to it. Like I have said on many other HN threads, when the smartphone market matures, Apple will have to become more transparent. If it doesn't and keeps doing stuff like rejecting really useful apps like Google Voice then not only developers, even consumers will start abandoning the device/platform.
That was the funniest thing I've read in a long time.
Does The United States Have Its Priorities Wrong?
this is out of print and very rare :-)
Trolls aren't always someone who responds in a negative and strong way, though. The "best" trolls are the ones that you're not even sure are trolling...
it just requires an excise tax which is difficult to pay

For anyone interested, it's not actually very difficult to get the NFA tax stamp. The cost is a flat $200 per regulated item (each automatic weapon or sound suppressor counts) but for an individual you do have to get approval in writing from a local Chief Law Enforcement Officer; a local Chief of Police or Sheriff will do. A great deal of local agencies are not too keen on having citizens with NFA weapons, however if the weapon is to be transferred to a valid trust, there is no requirement for local approval (1). Of course, you then have to wait for the BATFE to actually get around to processing your application, which can take months.

The real problem with NFA automatic weapons is scarcity - only automatic weapons manufactured prior to 1986 are allowed for civilian ownership, so interested parties are limited to existing stock.

(1) Note that a state or locality may, and often do, have more strict regulation (or outright bans) than the federal government.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Firearms_Act
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firearm_Owners_Protection_Act
That is a very good definition.

A startup is a startup only when it is in the stage of starting up. After some time it is either a business or dead.
Google's Android Jumps to the Living Room
I think the completely comprehensible system has always been an illusion. There's always some cutoff level below which people don't understand (or don't care to understand) the system they're working in.

The old Apple 2 hackers had a great understanding of assembly, but that's because it was the top level of the system to them, the stuff they worked with daily. I doubt most of them understood the PLA that decoded the instructions, or the behavior of the dynamic NMOS logic inside the 6502.

The 6502 instruction set was essentially the API of the processor, and it wasn't above reproach any more than current software APIs are. Many people wished for different addressing modes or additional instructions to simplify common coding tasks.
Project works for me. Website ? Webapp ? Proof of concept ? (if you plan on fleshing it out)
A word, which like many other words, has attributes assigned to it variously by different people, most in a totally arbitrary fashion, and which regardless of definition does not assist in separating customers from their money.
similar story about the netflix warehouse in Hartford, CT. http://www.courant.com/community/hartford/hc-netflix-0722.ar...
The city essentially kicked African Americans out starting in the 1970s under the guise of redeveloping the Fillmore District. Since then, it's been a matter of economics. SF has the smallest % of African Americans of any major US city (6.5%). This is smaller than cities typically thought of as "white:" Minneapolis (17%), Seattle (9%) and Portland, Oregon. (7.9%). Even Portland, Maine has a higher percentage of African Americans (6.6%).

As others have mentioned, Oakland is where African American people live in the Bay Area.
I'm so glad to see this!

I hope "strings and other types" talks about blocks and how they are tagged. He better go over closures too.
Completely anecdotal, and kind of a throwback to the Netscape days, but in recently redoing our site, the main things that I had to fix to get things working with IE 8 were actually bugs in our HTML. There was only one issue that we had where the fault wasn't ours.

I'm sure that IE8 is still comparatively the bottom of the barrel, but the gap seems to have narrowed pretty significantly. (Incidentally, IE7 still gave us large enough problems that we decided to just set things up so that it degraded reasonably when using IE7.)
Right: there are multiple possible benefits of "NOSQL" (nonrelational): (1) scalability; (2) better performance, and (3) easier coding and development especially with agile development methodologies. With certain of these products, notably the document-oriented stores (MongoDB&CouchDB), development is more natural as object<->relational mapping goes away. That is a nice benefit even for the smallest of projects.
The gym shooter's blog diary - was a .NET programmer, no gf since 1984
"New webapp" works for most things discussed here, I think.
I see what you mean. It was possible to connect several accumulators to run simultaneously, so the peak speed of operation was potentially much higher due to parallel operation. Modern CPU's can do similar things, but that's normally hidden from the coder. IMO, they are a little more capable than a pure accumulator as they can do IO operations with any other node of the system.

I guess the real distinction is if each node could do conditional branch operations. Honestly, I am fuzzy on how a system without RAM could do branch operations anyway. It was first demonstrated as a stored-program computer on September 16, 1948, running a program by Adele Goldstine for John von Neumann. This modification reduced the speed of ENIAC by a factor of six and eliminated the ability of parallel computation, but as it also reduced the reprogramming time to hours instead of days, it was considered well worth the loss of performance.

So, I think they where having the same problem. I think the original design was much closer to a modern GPU with stream processors than a CPU, and they use the term processor even if they are fairly limited.

PS: Still, it was approximately a ~32bit machine (10^10 > 2^32) which is cool.
How Different Groups Spend Their Day
http://www.nytimes.com//interactive/2009/07/31/business/20080801-metrics-graphic.html
I'm pretty sure it' too late for this advice but starating at a young age(in my case, 7) surely helps
"Their core user base for the iPhone seems to be not geeks, but teenage girls."

I tend to think of the core Apple demographic heavily overlapping the Daily Show with John Stewart demographic. And can you imagine how much fun Stewart could have with them, and how quickly Apple could go from the hip and cool tech company to the uncool, busy body, Sarah Palin censoring books in Alaska libraries company?
I wondered how internet usage featured in this, so I referred to
http://www.bls.gov/tus/
In there it says "Computer or Internet use may be coded as work, education, volunteering, or relaxing, depending on how the respondent identified the activity during data collection".
So the answer is that it is spread all through depending on what the user was using the internet for at the time. This includes shopping.
It was a very interesting article, but the final piece tries to imply that happiness should be equated with strong economic indicators.

When they say the US is 114th overall for happiness, they are talking about the Happy Planet Index. They don't link to it in the article, so here it is for those interested:

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

If we look at the index, we see that a large majority of the "happiest" countries are nowhere near the top GDP and income-disparity performers.

So I think the article is good save for the very end. Happiness does not (necessarily) follow a good economy. There are far more factors in play.
It is one way to network. You can do it without a blog, too -- call up old clients/bosses/etc that you've overdelivered to and ask them what they've heard on the grapevine. (Works better if they remember you as someone they sincerely enjoyed working with and that they would recommend to friends.)
casual vs ambitious?

The first could always turn into the second.
fixed, sorry about that
I've said it before on HN, but I met Zed at RubyFringe and thought he was very polite and professional. I wouldn't resent working with him at all.
I like Wikidpad. http://wikidpad.sourceforge.net/
"Is Wikipedia heading for bust?"

"How America Will End"

What's next, news.yc -- wouldn't-the-world-be-such-a-wonderful-place-if-all-humans-suddenly-vanished speculative stories upmodded to hell, as on Reddit?
Food Drink: Things You Need To Know About Broccoli
Just signed up and the site is cool.
And... if you don't need lots of communication between nodes, I'd guess EC2 probably is the best way to go in terms of $/computation too.
What's faster, a sportscar or a truck ? It depends on what you are trying to move.

A load of bricks will be moved faster by truck, even though in an absolute sense the sportscar is faster...

If you are doing vector processing and have a hard-to-parallelize problem then a supercomputer is probably the only way to go.

Otherwise EC2 will possibly be faster (it still depends on lots of subtle factors, such as how compute intensive vs communications intensive your application is).

The only way to know for sure is to do a limited benchmark on the core of your problem in order to figure out which architecture works best.
Among nasty byproducts of high density meat production: Multi drug resistant bacteria. New strains of the flu.

I love meat. I'm not giving it up, but I moderate my consumption due, in part, to stuff like this.
This is silly because of the ease of URL shorteners.

1. Use a link with a unique keyword hash (you can check) eg http://bit.ly/hn_comment
2. Take the action, get the link
3. Make that link with the keyword hash

Note, I didn't edit this comment to change the link. Clickable: http://bit.ly/hn_comment
Apple Goes Crazy, Starts Making Movies
Every once in a while, I fervently wish that I could upvote an HN comment more than once.
Real hardcore hackers don't need components.
Now that's a clever way to support and promote Listia!

I guess books would be the things I would list most frequently if I were to sign up. I always try to get rid of some books when I move to a new flat (which I seem to do every (second) year or so). I'm not sure my books would get as many bids as this little gem though :)
Why YouTube is Expensive, or Slow, or Both.
The (Not So) Simple Pendulum
It's simply the only way to break MS-API monopoly.

Would MS not be so entrenched and unbeatable in the desktop apps market, other approaches would work.
I don't think it could do branching at all, the 'if' or its equivalent was not yet invented. One way to get around this is to skip instructions based on status bits.

It was equipped with a FOR like instruction.

http://www.columbia.edu/acis/history/eniac.html

I think one of the best ways to describe the ENIACs parallel use of the accumulators is to think of it as SIMD, each accumulators could be slaved in order to run the same operation in parallel on multiple data items.

Your stream processor analogy is pretty good, that's essentially what it did.

EDIT: found this on the branching:

"ome time during the ENIAC's development, the project's engineers and mathematicians (possibly including its female programmers) discovered that with some minor modifications they could perform what would be considered a conditional branch--the IF-THEN statement in modern programming languages. Those associated with the ENIAC had called this "magnitude discrimination." Partly by chance, the control signals on the ENIAC were essentially identical to the data signals, both of which typically were 2 usec pulses placed at ten usec intervals. By connecting one of the data lines of an accumulator into the control line of another, the ENIAC's operations could, in principle, be controlled based on the content of its data (technically known as data-sensitive operations). Certain aspects in the machine's design made necessary a slightly more complicated implementation. Nevertheless, the ENIAC was probably the first electronic machine to support the conditional branch instruction."

From: http://oldsite.library.upenn.edu/special/gallery/mauchly/jwm...

EDIT#2: just posted a pdf on a java simulator of the ENIAC, it comes with lots of details on the guts of the ENIAC:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=743743
may be nerdy guys are better accepted in SF
Felt like I was reading Rorschach's journal.
Works in Chrome 2.0 on Vista.
Absolutely, it feels like you're just working with hashes and arrays, as opposed to SQL-tables masquerading as such.
The Top Entrepreneurs of the Last 100 Years
Maybe I'm missing something (probably fond memories and press) but it just sounds like a company that got too much money, spent it poorly, got additional subsidy from DARPA, then fell apart when the gravy train stopped.

It's interesting to think what Hillis and the others could have done if it was run as a well funded research project for a fraction of the money they spent on expensive leases and gourmet chefs.
Didn't get any love:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=741639
Am I the only person who doesn't really like "returning"?

a) it's no fewer lines & no fewer tokens
b) rather than looking at the bottom of the function for the return value, you now have to scan back to the top

I think this suggestion of using 'tap' in this way is awful. Use 'tap' in the way that the name suggests: to tap into the middle of a string of code, generally temporarily, generally for debugging.
Flagged. Please don't give this an audience here at hn.
"Apple requires you to be 17 years or older to purchase a censored dictionary that omits half the words Steve Jobs uses every day."
Transforming the Law into Code
"A-po-lo-gi-ze? Here, have an apple you little ape" - Steve Jobs using his mental dictionary
If they're looking for free marketing, then yes.

I'm sure he'll find something worthwhile, tho, because of his presence. So overall, it will help him.

If he wants a management position, not so much, IMO.

What qualities does he bring that would make him a good leader? It's his way or the highway, he's always right, everybody else are idiots, has a taste for drama...

Yep, just what any struggling organization needs. Dissent is fine, what Zed brings - just in a blog - would suck to work with.

I think he's a good programmer and self-promoter, but nothing of his that I've read would lead me to put him in charge of something. In a few years, when he's matured some, maybe.
This TechCrunch article was written by the founder of LaunchBox, making it essentially a press release. When TechCrunch covers YCombinator demo day, they send a reporter rather than asking PG to do a writeup.
Even though this guy probably has the same profile as many HNers, I sincerely doubt people on here would go on a shooting spree because of it.
he should add telnet support
I believe the complexity comes inevitably with code reuse and abstraction. Once you've got your ethernet driver working, you discover that your routable point-to-point packet exchange is useful in many places, so you extract an IP component, and before long, you're writing web applications in a high-level framework in a dynamic programming language again.
Great Geek Debates: Star Trek vs. Star Wars
Key value stores in ruby
I got a high y value close to the y axis.
Not an ad hominen at all. ajg is not trying to deny the main proposition, i.e., that there's a shortage of women.

The point is that the shortage doesn't affect all guys equally. The guys with better chances aren't likely theorizing and writing blogs about the shortage.
Goldman's 42 $100MM+ Trading Days In Q2 (just 2 days of trading losses)
Handling the unexpected - Type safe functions in Javascript
I think a big factor in that is when something gets posted and whether or not it gets traction immediately. If that doesn't happen it will be gone before someone notices.

I completely missed it yesterday. The 'new' page gets filled up so fast sometimes it's not even funny. And that's when ignoring the spam. One thing that would help here is a minimum delay before the same user can post another link.

Your comment here got more 'points' than the original posting.
I think he's alluding to "Why I (A/L)GPL":

http://www.zedshaw.com/blog/2009-07-13.html
What about using the DMCA where search-and-seizure laws aren't working? I seem to remember there being stories awhile back about airport security searching people's computers unlawfully and getting away with it. Is there any way to claim they violated DMCA in doing so?
To add to this, try a convention I read about--possibly here: only answer questions with wiki posts.