skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The short answer to the articles final question is "Yes, many philosophers have considered this question."

If he's really interested in philosophy, he'd have come across these already, but the fact that he's asking the question would indicate he's not. That's ok, of course, but the question seems a bit odd.
As a query, have you looked into lisp at all? I've seen (through HN) examples of stuff like derivatives expressed quite elegantly using Lisp.

Using C for maths programming sounds fun and all, but I'm sure there's got to be a better way of doing things.
What is a good optimization algorithm? A data-driven method.
The checkbox and label "French" appear on different lines in my broswer, which is confusing.

Try putting all the checkboxes on the next line, or putting each one in a CSS nowrap block.
scipy wraps a lot of fortran functions under the hood. You could cut the knot by wrapping your friends fortran functions and driving them with python. I do this a lot with C. It's a very effective way to develop scientific applications.
They don't consider plants to be sentient like animals.
sorry maybe youre right. I was not able to confirm that from a source i would trust
They don't mean object as in object-oriented, but rather as in compiled (but not linked) .o files.
Priorganizing!
I think the principal problem is: who the hell wants to work with embedded systems? I'm a CS graduate student and I don't see any reason why you would want to go in to that field. As far as I'm concerned, let the Chinese do it.
why on earth would that be modded down...
Boot On BTRFS With Debian
P=NP, relativisation, and multiple choice exams
Because there's lots of good, interesting work available, primarily because of attitudes like yours?
Chi Sono Io è Importante
You'll find sporadic spots of unsecured wifi. There are many restaurants and coffee shops that also have free wifi.

If you can handle being online at unpredictable times, it won't be much of an issue.

If you want to be able to go online at a moments notice, that will be a little tougher. You can get pay as you go cell phones, but I'm not sure about the data plans. Some car rental places will rent you a mobile broadband hotspot, but I seem to recall that when I've seen the pricing it was fairly outrageous.
But you also have to go way out of your way to make it look good. And with pure semantic HTML there are layouts that are flat out impossible. The only way to do certain things with CSS is by cluttering one's clean HTML with random divs everywhere (killing the markup/style separation in the process)...

Where the author suggested outputting audio when confronted with a "blind" header, I thought more along the lines of returning pure semantic markup. And presumably the abstract code that compiles down to html is purely semantic so it would be trivial.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-27080_3-10299378-245.html
http://tech.yahoo.com/news/nf/20090801/tc_nf/68153
Ask HN: How would you monetize a social media site?
Apart from traditional ads, what avenues would you pursue to monetize a social media site's traffic? Assume loyal, returning visitors.

1. Subscriptions - based on the freemium model, where the basic features will be free for everyone while paying subscribers will get access to premium features

2. Job board

What else?
Google chrome style for Firefox 3.5
I think HTML is intermediate code, not object code, not source code.

Just like you could code assembly by hand (and plenty of people still do) you can code HTML by hand. But in reality most html is generated by machine and then 'rendered' into a visual representation, the final binary end-product.
Well, it was a dystopia.
Ah, but consider the apple. The purpose of an apple is to get eaten so that the seeds get geographically distributed. The apple is ready to fall--else it won't taste good--so you are not killing it. This is true for most all fruits.
URL Shortener for HN w/ Bookmarklet
Hi HN,

I wrote a URL shortener a while ago, http://qst.me, but it failed to take off other than my friends and I using it. It's pretty neat, you should check it out. You can do URL's or blocks of text.

This morning I figured it needed a bookmarklet. That way, in Firefox, you can just add it to your bookmarks toolbar and by clicking on it, it'll take the URL you're at and shorten it.

Here's the simple code:

javascript:(function(){var%20winloc=window.location;var%20toloc='http://qst.me/create.php?url='+winloc;window.location=toloc;})();

Another nice feature about my URL shortener is that a URL may look like:

http://qst.me/249

However, you can see stats on it (how many times it's been clicked and where it goes) if you just append a dollar sign to the end:

http://qst.me/249$

Enjoy!
Here are clickable links for those:

http://qst.me/

http://qst.me/249

http://qst.me/249$
what are the people? tell me about them.
When I hear the word "leverage", i release the safety on my browning.
I agree with this.
However, I would like to mention a somewhat implicit point in this. REAL programmers (TM) are usually ready to change their works context if it is necessary.

This observation struck me quite hard, especially now with the software project where I need to interact with lots of other students on a programming level. Usually, when there is a technical problem with the build scripts, library dependencies or other hard problems, the group divides into two groups (one small group and one large group).

The large group just stops doing anything and goes "well, someone will fix it. I don't know anything of this, I never touched this, I will just stop until someone fixes it."

The smaller group on the other hand grows highly active in such a situation. They ask around if someone is working on this, and if no one does so, they just go "Bleh, I hate this, I know nothing of this, where is the ant documentation, git's hard reset and coffee?".

More abstract, the better programmers (let's call them developers :) ) accept that their work context extends from the simple code cutting into fixing the build script, getting dependencies to work and handling other technichal things while the coders just don't accept this and go 'not my context. Stop work'

The funny thing is, very often, the larger group starts to complain about the smaller group, because the smaller group just knows such a lot of things already and they just assume that everyone knows these things (hey, a master's degree programmer who does not know the decorator pattern, despite having java as a primary langaige...), but no one from the smaller group actually starts learning things out of their context... meh.
I think his point 1 was your point 2.
So here is a challenge, TC, rewrite the press release for "Akamai and Delve" in a way that you find acceptable.
Yeah I found those... yahoo and cnet is nice but not really specialized on security. And absence of such sites in the google results made me suspicious
Aaron, I believe you're getting confused because you haven't established for yourself a clear notion of basic morality or ethics. Many philosophers have covered what it means to act morally -- Aristotle, Socrates, Kant, and even Jefferson and Franklin. There's even a word for the effects-based moralizing you went through: consequentialism, which most people associate with Mill and Bentham. This usually leads to various forms of utilitarianism.

Being firmly in the deontological camp (rationalist ethics) myself, though, I would recommend you check out Kant, Nagel, and the many advocates of the non-aggression principle (pick your author). I believe our intrinsic notions of morality are mostly deontological, which makes some sense as non-aggression and other subforms of the school allow a person to act morally with local information, rather than requiring global knowledge for every act, as much of utilitarianism requires in the final analysis.

If you would kill one innocent person because you thought that action might save five innocent people, though, then you are probably (and unfortunately) a utilitarian. Do consider both sides though.
The author has a point, and I think the "free as in freedom" comments are clearly missing that point. But I wouldn't say it is explained very clearly. It's framed as an attack on what appears to be a straw man. Finding a frame of reference to interpret the tirade is hard[1], and the point about the costs of work must be extracted from the rest.

[1] Hard to do well. It's pretty easy to make vague assumptions and proceed from there.
Simply charge them for it. I don't understand why not. I haven't read the latest stats on how big Facebook is, but lets put it at 200 million real users. Let's say that Facebook says that it now costs $5 a month to use. You get all of the same features you have now, unlimited everything, just like now. If only 5 million stayed and paid that amount, thats $25,000,000 a month.

I would much rather have $25,000,000 a month in real cash, than having other people give me money and have part of my company. Facebook is unlike Twitter. There are a bunch of Twitter clones out there, and Twitter is fairly easy to copy. If Twitter started charging for its services, 99% of the users would migrate somewhere else. I think Facebook has a powerful enough application that other companies couldn't touch it for years, and people would pay for it.
Stuff you should do because it makes good business sense and won't piss off your userbase:

- permission marketing

- voluntary surveys

- text link based advertising (if it's done subtle)

Stuff you could do (but that may infuriate some of your users):

- regular advertising

- affiliate programs

- text link advertising (done wrong)

Stuff you should never do:

- sell email addresses

- sell other user data

- popups / unders
You are missing one very important point. If facebook were to do that there would be a free alternative with traction within 24 hours and the 195 million that go away will pull the remaining 5 million with them. Facebooks sole raison d'etre is the fact that they have a userbase that has a high probability of including some people that you know.

See 'metcalfe's law' about the value of telecommunications networks.

It's very easy to destroy a community that was built on 'free' by starting to charge for it.

It is always easy to solve other peoples/businesses issues in five minutes, in practice things are seldom as simple as they appear to an outsider.
Zuse and the first computer
lisp is also nice for testing arguments, like 0 < a0 < a1 < ... < an < 999, ai ∈ integer

(and
(< 0 a0 a1 ... an 999)
(apply and (map integer? (list a0 a1 ... an)))
(foo bar))
why is this for HN?
Facebook's value is because of it's increasing users. If it's paid and 195M leave (according to your estimates) then it's real value will be eroded and it's revenue ($25M your estimate) will continue declining and it will be history within a year or less! Take my word for it. Don't you think they would have thought about this a million times over at facebook?
Totally depends on the client base. If it's high-end, you could charge a one-time fee to participate. If it's low-end, you could go with the freemium model.
I think one of the problems with seeing "HTML as object-code" is that it leads to lousy markup. Headers implemented with font elements and explicit line breaks. horizontal margins with blockquote elements. That approach makes sense when HTML is seen as plain object code that drives a browser to lay thing out a certain way.

It does not make sense when one of the most important readers of your site is effectively blind: Googlebot.

I've used both approaches, good semantic markup and sloppy made-for-IE. Choosing good semantic markup has never come back to bite me in the ass. Sloppy markup has gone two ways, more often been a time saver and soon thrown away, but sometimes come back as a horrible thing to maintain and extend.
Well, it seems that apple provided a patch for it so I'm guessing it's real. Also everywhere there was talk about the details of the bug it was cited as buffer overflow.

That said, this is only one example, I'm personally aware of 10's of examples ranging from character sets to configuration files and protocol buffers so one more or less isn't going to make much difference.

For instance, and this is just one of many, mod_rewrite for apache had a buffer overflow issue in 2006.
Firefox: it's just too darned expensive
Please also consider the role of mutual consent in your world view -- it's important! The servers and cooks work in that restaurant because they want to as compared to their other options for using their time. We could speculate about how great it would be if they could do whatever they wanted without any concern for serving others, but that isn't the nature of the resource-constrained world in which we live.

And, believe it or not, those people working in foreign sweatshops want you to buy their products. They work there because that factory job provides higher pay and a generally safer work environment than the rice-paddy (or wherever) they otherwise would have been working. I think they would find it a bit patronizing and naïve if you were to tell them they should leave those jobs behind. To people in poor countries, a job at a factory is part of the path to a better life. For the country itself, it is part of the path to industrialization and prosperity.

Also remember that just because you could make something better, it doesn't necessarily follow that you must to act morally. Much of a rational notion of morality involves avoiding acts that cause harm to others or that violate the person or the free will of other individuals. All acts are not only moral or immoral. Some actions are supererogatory -- morally praiseworthy but not morally necessary.
Somehow Smalltalk did not make his list. Nor forth.

It would be a more interesting debate if there were some hard evidence of the relative efficiency, measured in total development/maintenance/opportunity cost comparing C with other useful languages/environments.

The discussion seems to be limited to "C is the only choice because it is close to the metal" and "so what".
You're right, and thanks for checking my ire. I probably exaggerated the merits of the tirade because I was so annoyed by all the smug comments that so clearly missed the not-so-sophisticated point about the cost of work. I still think it's an interesting rant, even if it could have been better structured and less ranty.
Ugh, not the "real men" argument again.

Real programmers use the tool that is best to the job, rather than using one that appeals to their bravado.
The linked comment seem to state that if you consider HTML object code, then you don't have to worry about accessibility. This is obviously wrong - HTML does not become more or less accessible whatever you call it.

However, used in the right way, an abstraction on top of HTML can improve accessibility. For example IE versions before version 8 does not support display:table, which lead many developers to chose table markup rater than CSS (because the share of IE users on a given site typically is greater than the share of disabled users). But with a higher-level language you can write:

(flexible-grid
(row
(cell (width fixed 200px) "This is a sidebar")
(cell (width spring) "This is the main content")))

And for IE-user you render this as table-markup, and for everyone else (Firefox-users, small devices, Google etc.) you render as accessible non-table HTML+CSS.

Some developers claim to find table-markup much more intuitive than equivalent CSS. In that case you can choose a language like:

(table
(tr
(td (width: 200px) "This is a sidebar")
(td "This is the main content")))

...and still render it into clean, accessible HTML for everyone except IE<8 users. Win-win!
I think a math museum is a great idea, but Mr Whitney seems to be represented as being just a little OCD.
Discriminating Between Interesting and Actionable Info
I doubt that very much. There is a point of diminishing returns, I agree. If the charge were $1, less people would leave than if the charge was $100. But, the value of facebook or other social networking sites is in the social aspect.

For pay services have competed favourably with free services. Ringtones are one example where people opined that paid services would fail because free options would emerge. And yet, people still pay and download ringtones.

The catch to making people pay the $1 or $5 is to make it easy. If you require them to pull up a credit card or some such, you will lose people. If there was a simple way to pay such that the money came out of some account (PayPal or some such) then you'll get the $1 in a heartbeat.
Nothing in particular, I just wrote it this morning and figured the HN community would find it useful.
The Game Shoots Hard On Jay-Z and Fan | Hip Hop MVP
You get all of the same features you have now, unlimited everything, just like now. If only 5 million stayed and paid that amount, thats $25,000,000 a month.

But the major draw of facebook, for most people, is that they can keep in touch with their family, friends and colleagues - the people who make up the 200 million people. If my peeps leave as part of that 195 million, why would I still stay?

Gotta think big picture leftnode.
Yes, but from what I've seen the pay is bad. Also, requirements on large initial investment makes it hard to create a startup. Sure it might be fun to tinker around with that kind of stuff, but it's no a field I see a promising career in. I might be wrong though.
IMHO there's one more thing that's often missing from the articles about "embedded systems". What kind of embedded systems are they talking about?

Your microwave controller is an embedded system. So is your mobile phone. And so is a crazy, industrial, programmable controller with hundreds of I/O ports controller for an assembly line. It takes about the same time to write the microwave program in C and in asm, but you'd be insane to program something like iphone only in assembler.

Also, it's a bit suspicious that there's no verilog and similar languages on those graphs...
It's very hard to just shut off the lights on a free service or otherwise take away features to create a premium tier. I can't even think of a viable way to do it. Do you set a time table? 60 days and your account goes dark if you don't pay? I don't think I would be over estimating to say they could easily lose 50% or more of their users in one day Even people who would be willing to pay would have an intense feeling of bait & switch. It would be a disaster.
One thing to check about - SSL certs. Should you want one, you may find yourself SoL. A lot of US companies can't do business with Libya (& Iran, Iraq, Cuba, Sudan etc. etc.) which can mean any cert requests for .ly are banned.

I can't see that bit.ly have one, so you'd maybe have to handle SSL logins and other stuff on a different cctld.
It's a functional language written in lisp.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qi_(programming_language)
The only way that I know of - also known as the freemium concept - to convert a large userbase of free users to a paying userbase is to provide a lot of new features under a premium banner that you only get access to when you pay.

Over time the weight of the new features starts to be larger than the 'simple' free version. The free version is the hook that you use to get people to use the service and to stave off encroachment by competitors.

If a free competitor should arrive on the scene that offers part of your premium features for free then you can choose to selectively offer those features to all your users (not just your paid users) but here you have to be careful not to erode your paying userbase because it is possible that people are paying for just that one feature and they'll possibly cancel their subscription.

This is not as trivial as it sounds.

For the record, I manage a website that has an active userbase of about 100K people a small percentage of those are paying users.
He goes on to quote Toynbee on Rome: "The economy of the Empire was basically a Raubwirtschaft or plunder economy based on looting existing resources rather than producing anything new. The Empire relied on booty from conquered territories... With the cessation of tribute from conquered territories, the full cost of their military machine had to be borne by the citizenry.
Different nutrients are processed differently by the body, fully in line with thermodynamics.

Take 100 Calories of sawdust (cellulose). If you eat this, how many calories did you consume? Did consuming these calories contribute to fat accumulation? Because the answer to this is no, does this cause a violation of the 1st law?

Your body doesn't merely "absorb calories" from food. It absorbs and transforms chemicals, and directs these chemicals through various pathways. Eating a low carbohydrate diet doesn't "shock his metabolism" into being less efficient, it simply uses different pathways for nutrient absorption.

Also, regarding the referenced study: All four diets tested were virtually identical regarding the % calories derived from fat, protein, and carbohydrate.

http://content.nejm.org/content/vol360/issue9/images/large/0...

Moreover, the low-fat diets weren't particularly low-fat, and the high-fat (low-carb) diets weren't particularly low-carb.

So what happens when you feed a group of people the same 1600 Calorie diet for two years, and then measure their weight loss? What exactly are you demonstrating?
Dangerous?! Do you even know anything about fusion?

If anything goes even the tiniest bit wrong with a fusion reactor, it simply stops. That's why it's so difficult to make one.

The only danger here is to their investor's money... But I wish them luck!
You're right that the App Store distribution channel does not limit a developer's marketing ability. It does, however, limit the pricing. The App Store is structured to directly reward high sales with exposure, creating a feedback loop that drives prices down. As an indie developer, I can support a modest marketing budget that creates modest sales if I can charge $29 for my app, but I can't do it at 99 cents.

Not all distribution channels are created equal, and this particular one is so biased toward high volume/low price that an indie can't get any traction.
DabbleDB is one of those products that I will probably never get to use despite being potentially very useful. Why? Because my company won't let me store proprietary information on somebody else's servers.

If you continue with this project, I would encourage you to consider letting people license the software to run on their company intranets. I know a lot of companies don't want to bother with installation support and such, but to me this seems like a pretty obvious market -- there are countless CRUD apps I could really use at work but just haven't had the time to build from scratch, and if DabbleDB had a not-outrageously-priced intranet solution, I'd buy it in a heartbeat.
Facebook's core value (as with most social networks) boils down to network effect...if they impose any real barriers, they cease to provide value to new and existing users.

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

You do realize your example essentially says that if ~98% of your fb friends left, you would still choose to stay & pay fb $5/mo?
Building A Real Mobile Web
A highly misleading chart, as it shows growth rate but the discussion centers around the overall economy. That doesn't reflect the actual composition of the GDP, just what has grown over that period of time. I suspect that military spending, while a significant chunk of the US economy, does not dwarf all other sectors combined as in the way some people are reading it.
Hard science, thermodynamics, and the low carb myth
As I note in my comment above, the App Store is not merely a neutral distribution conduit, it is also (by far) the primary discovery medium. The vast majority of app shoppers buy from the top lists. And the top lists are systematically structured to promote high volume, which causes devs to lower their price. That's why even the EAs of the world are calling on Apple to at least go by revenue rather than units.

The App Store is 'simply a delivery medium' only in the same sense that Fox News is 'fair and balanced'.