skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is incredibly thought provoking on many different levels. I need to ponder more about it, but I'd recommend anyone to read this fascinating article. The fact that the game starts with a quote from Andre Breton: “The purest surrealist act would be to go into a crowd and fire at random.”, surely puts it in a difference play already.
A First Erlang Program
I hate the Erlang days around here.....
It's getting ridiculous guys. Let's pick a new geeky topic and go with that.... I say home-made Multi-touch tech.
Adding Concurrency to Our Erlang Program
I this particular one would be quite easy to find due to else clauses.
Natural User Interface Group - Make Your Own Multi-Touch Table
I hope that soon we can stop focusing on increasing average life-expectancy (mostly controllable through diet/prevention) and focus on increasing maximum possible life-expectancy.

EDIT: I also think it is remarkable that average life-expectancy has increased despite a large increase in obesity.
It's not his name. Zed posted a link on Twitter to somebody named Jonathan and insisted it was _why. It wasn't.

We're talking about why the lucky stiff. We don't know anything about the man that wore the mask. He was very good at keeping his personal life a mystery. So calling him why the lucky stiff makes sense, at least until/if we learn more about what's going on.
BTW this is 10 years obsolete. I appreciate an Erlang mob as much as the next hacker, but there must be better Erlang links than this.
Interesting. Where are you from?

EDIT: Oh, I could actually check your profile. Some people fill those out.

"Going on about <something>" is an idiom I've encountered in Texas and seems common throughout the Southeastern US as well. You can get the essential meaning by thinking of it as a shortening of "Going on at length about <something>" with strong implication of excessive length, though it can be (and often is) used to apply to whole discussions among multiple people.
If you found it interesting then you really need to read http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del,_Escher,_Bach ...and indeed, pretty much everything else he has written.

It seems to me that the long slow debate between these two philophers (add in Daniel Dennett on Hofstadter's side) turns on the fundamental philosophical question of where consciousness begins and ends, which has considerable ramifications beyond the field of artificial intelligence. I reject Searle's argument for reasons too long to go into here, but he is a very interesting philosopher in his own right.

While I'm on this topic, I may as well also mention Stanislaw Lem's essay Non Serviam excerpted here (http://themindi.blogspot.com/2007/02/chapter-19-non-serviam....) from A Perfect Vacuum: Perfect reviews of nonexistent books. Much, perhaps most, of Lem's output is concerned with the nature of consciousness and autonomy explored through the medium of fiction, just as Philip K dick tends to explore the same questions from a psychological standpoint.
Between 2006 and 2007, mortality rates declined significantly for eight of the 15 leading causes of death. Declines were observed for influenza and pneumonia (8.4 percent), homicide (6.5 percent), accidents (5 percent), heart disease (4.7 percent), stroke (4.6 percent), diabetes (3.9 percent), hypertension (2.7 percent), and cancer (1.8 percent).

This is reported as good news, but in itself it doesn't tell us much. People still have to die of something, and if they're not dying of one thing they're dying of another.

If a plague of crocodiles started eating all the first-born sons then this would show up in the statistics as a huge drop in the cancer mortality rate, but it probably wouldn't be good news.
Weighing Kilograms
(I wrote the original Dropping Django post)

I wrote a quick comment at http://uswaretech.com/blog/2009/08/a-response-to-dropping-dj...

Maybe I wasn't clear enough, or maybe this is just guaranteed flame war territory. But I think this comment sums up what I was trying to say better than anything: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=773510

I'm going to try to write more about our URL routing and authorization soon.
"If you meet swombat on the road, kill him." -- Tara Ploughman
I personally just want to see a return to more technical topics and less human-interest pieces - if I wanted those I'd turn on the 6 o'clock news.

I love reading random stuff on languages/tools I don't even use - it expands my breadth and is always fun. I've never written Erlang, but now I may give it a shot.

This is what HN is great for, let's keep it that way.
There's always tomorrow. Some days Erlang is just what the doctor ordered.
Obama: Keeping Us Guessing - Associated Content
Ah, that's not actually our project -- that's an old(er) site of mine that I use for client work, etc. The front login never got completed.

The comment there was a bit tongue-in-cheek. It's for some old JS that once upon a time faded in / faded out a "coming soon". Bleah.
Tic-Tac-Toe in Erlang: Game Space Symmetries
Not like either except for the speech component. Yours can be done using the speech open src sft but the accuracy will be bad unless you buy or make a good acoustic model. Very painful.
Internet Black Market -- 2
Today's flood of Erlang links was by request, to mitigate the flood of _why links:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=775727
I kind of like the erlang marker - as soon as I see a front page full of erlang, I know that people are fed up with whatever used to be there. Once I know that, I can easily help the cause if I agree.
That's it! I'm shutting down Woobius and deleting a bunch of architecture projects.
SIFR with "professional" fonts isn't free either.
that or 4chan got bored this afternoon?
From the article:

For current projects, such as Team Fortress 2, the Cabal groups are made up of 12 or more people, and rarely fewer than eight.
Is The Left Hand of God the next big fantasy novel?
Thank god, I hated the sonofabi—Swombat! It's you!

Also, asking questions about where you are is not Buddhism, it is Nihilism. That is something a Nihilist would do. A Nihilist who was just jerking people around and playing a long con on everyone.
Yeah, I'm not a Java fanboy by any stretch of the imagination, but an 10+ year-old benchmark running on an obsolete JVM running on an obsolete OS, running on obsolete hardware (multi-core what?) are not horribly relevant to making technology decisions today.
A true budhist would throw a hissy fit first and then let his software fucking rot, right?

The only difference between the disappearance of these two from the ruby scene is that _why will actually be missed.

Fuck Zed Shaw.
Except you also incur roaming charges for receiving calls, and expecting people to call an overseas number (let alone keep them up to date on your whereabouts) really is pushing it.
Yeah I understand the reasoning behind it. But, for me personally, I would rather we didn't cover one subject spam with another.

Or if we do let's at least change the topic each time so we can all learn about something new instead of just reading love stories about Erlang every couple weeks.
needs moar erlang
Do you know or are you guessing?

I've called him, emailed, etc. but no answer. He went radio silent a few weeks ago, was back in contact, and now again radio silent.

If you do know what's up, maybe fill us in. Some of us here in Ottawa are a tad worried.
I feel the conflict within you. Let go of your hate.
Erlang concurrency: why asynchronious messages?
It appears to be working, too.
The actual reason: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=775727
Go build something with it, like a phone switch, then we'll talk.

Kidding aside, I think the fact that Erlang got thrown into the production ring so early is perhaps a hindrance to its growth in some ways. They can't just go fiddling with the language at this point without some serious breakage, whereas newer languages like Scala and Clojure would probably not create major problems should they go through a few incompatible versions. Yes, people are using them in production, but not for things like phone switches!
He keeps calling him Jonathan all the time, but it's not at all sure that's his real name (see: http://ozmm.org/posts/his_name_is_robert_paulson.html).

And even if it is, it's kind of a dick thing to do, given that we know that _why never wanted to be known as anything but _why.
Sure, I don't like it either; I was just explaining, in case you had missed the, uh, rationale behind it all.
The Innards of Erlang... Part Deux
Real Time Twitter Search Engine

Needs both Javascript and cookies in case you are wondering. Looks like just another useless site I will have forgotten in 15 minutes.
Um, Python?
I agree with your frame being quite awesome! Glad you saw the better opportunity and took it. Good luck to you!
Google for Erlang
Ken-Thompson-esque Delphi compiler trojan found in the wild
Whilst I am out of gaming now, It does look as if Valve are truly enjoying their work in a way that no other established outfit is.
well said. I have no idea why _why did this, but its fine and I wish him well. _why knows all his public works are easily findable. He knows he didn't remove them from the world, he just removed himself from them. Maybe he won the lottery and can afford to buy as much drawing supplies as he needs and wants a clean break in life. His actions render no meaningful interpretation of his beliefs or motivation.

If I win the lottery, in whatever form, I'm not hanging out on the internet anymore either!!!
I heard he lived in a building with a roof and windows - but it MAY be rude to randomly knock on his door.
Really hope that email doesn't get caught in a spam filter...
Erlang is Munctional
According to Sophos, the company, the trojan infects Delphi compilers and their output in roughly the manner described by Ken Thompson's famous "Reflections on Trusting Trust:" http://cm.bell-labs.com/who/ken/trust.html
It's kind of dumb since all it takes to get the _why stuff off the front page is for people to upvote other submissions that are arguably more relevant (and current).
Seagate: If Flash Drives Get Too Cheap, We'll Use Patents To Make Them Expensive
Um, Perl6 (Rakudo)?
Has anyone noticed that SML/MLton is gone from the newest round of benchmarks? It used to do quite nicely on the concurrency benchmarks, IIRC.
This is funny. 30 people really voted this article up just because of "Erlang" in the title.

The article is from 1998 and the benchmarks were done on Win95. The CPU was a 200MHz Pentium MMX.
Perl6 (Rakudo)
Yes, but the acoustic model (or models if you account for male/female and different accents) can be improved with all the input that the service gets over time. The bad accuracy can be fixed by human intelligence using Amazon Mechanical Turk.
There is a nice demo in Nvidia's Cuda SDK:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xh2q_p6hQEo
is this another wave of innards of erlang articles to help HN with concurrency?
An utterly commonplace article in itself, but to see this written by Don Box is surreal.
Sathya Sai Baba - Life Love And Spirituality
Discussing all things relating to Sathya Sai Baba, India, Life, Love & Spirituality.
Not in the short term. Smoke and suchlike very computationally intensive to simulate well. I threw together a very rough version of this in After Effects after reading the authors comments on the TNW page (by very rough I mean just loading a bunch of similar plugins and specifying crude parameters) in order to get an idea of how long it might take to render 3 minutes' worth, the result being 'several hours' on a fairly decent quad core machine - and clearly the author has put in a good deal more work on this.

Now you could offload a lot of this work to the GPU with some planning, and employ numerous little tricks and dare-i-say-it hacks, but I'd say the earliest you'll see this running in real time is when the 2015 32-core Mac Pro hits the streets.

edit: I'm being pessimistic. 2012 is more likely.
Motorola W490 Heather Grape T-Mobile 
Motorola W490 Heather for T-Mobile an easy-to-use flip phone that offers great style and a little bit more fun for a great price. Thin and sleek, the Motorola W490 makes it simple to slide into any pocket or purse. color screen and built-in MP3 music player.
Okay, anyone want to tell me what's going on?
Last two days we've seen an influx of crap about some guys twitter posts and some movie trailer.

Did PG ask for an erlang flood? If he didn't, it's cool anyways, some of those posts are interesting regardless.
How about a truce? Can everyone just stop posting both _why articles and Erlang articles for a while?

[Edit: I'm serious!]
Some of us are, but me, I'm flagging the damn things.
You guys are being a little too unnecessarily apathetic.
also of note: Smalltalk VisualWorks 35.86 seconds vs JRuby 6 minutes

That's conceptual more of an apples-to-apples comparison.
see what you started ejohn.org?
I just hope that it doesn't become a weird meme, where submitting an Erlang article is the equivalent of expressing disapproval of the current trend in headlines.

"Oh no, people are submitting the same old Erlang articles, the current focus/glorybaiting must be getting annoying!"
Purge Complete: No more Erlang, _why, or Zed
I think we've cleared out all of the crap about _why and Zed. Shall we call it quits and get things back to normal around here?
Whats a tweat?
Why we'll never hire another rockstar programmer - 8-bit b.us
Can we quit with the Erlang postings - or rather if a point must be made (and one imagines that the real issue is voting up all the _why stuff) can we post new and thoughtful Erlang stuff ;)
What surprised me the most on this graph was how well java performed (bearing you buy enough memory ;))
It would be much better if there were actually a discussion for each posted item.
That was pretty much my reaction.
No Escape: Male rape in U.S. Prisons
Ask HN: Will my target audience reject a .net solution?
I'm building an application whose target audience will be small-to-medium web application companies (software-as-a-service companies).

Because I am developing this solution myself, I'm planning to use something I know well, which in this case is ASP.NET (possibly ASP.NET MVC). I've tried numerous times to devote the time and energy required to learn RoR or Django, but I just don't have the time to reach a level of proficiency that I feel is necessary to support a commercial product. So, I'm thinking that I'd rather lose a little credibility with my audience and be able to sleep at night knowing that I can fix any issues that might arise. On the hand, I am worried that an ASP.NET solution might cause too many of my target audience to turn their noses up and reject the app on that basis alone. Maybe I shouldn't worry about that because I may not want those types of customers anyway?

Then again, Stack Overflow was written in ASP.NET MVC and has been well-received. But one could argue that it was largely based on the credibility and reputation of the founders and wouldn't have mattered what is was written in.

Thoughts?
Damned fools who don't get why _why was awesome and worth reading about.
The Crazy 3d technology behind James Cameron's Avatar
It's what Twitter calls the short posts people make on that service.
Agreed.

the _why guff (not the original news all the "eulogies" etc) was getting a bit heavy but this is much worse.
Oh G-d. I really need to get around to fixing the levels on that video before it gets linked again. Sorry, guys.
Is "local wise-woman" an euphemism for a woman of negotiable affections? I don't understand how a woman possessing wisdom can help your fever.
Yes, it seems like logic and reasoning escaped HN when those started getting voted up.
I've found that a lot less people care what you develop something with than whether what you developed is something they want to use.
Look guys, I know you're ticked at all the _why articles, but the Erlang flood is just pissing me off. Do I have to love Erlang to be allowed on HN now? Is this news.erlang.org? I don't mind the occasional article, but this is getting pretty ridiculous.

If it's your intention to drive people like me away, then congratulations, it's close to working. Fortunately, most days here I actually see good content.
Innards? You mean language specification? Or how nice the source code looks of an implementation of the language?

For .NET you have two implementations (MS CLR and Mono), but for lisp it's just Lisp, even though different implementations are leagues apart.

If we talk implementation, I think SBCL is great because it's comprehensible and very feature rich. CPython's source looks nice, but Python doesn't do much, so I don't consider that an amazing achievement. GHC? Bit of a mess internally, but stable. Ruby? Regular mess.

If we talk spec, it's very different. Haskell is (mostly) well defined (in exactly the way C++ isn't). Ruby is still a mess. Python is mostly sane, with a bunch of weird decisions made early on. .NET is pretty great.

But look, I'm just making a bunch of assertions. Nuance is no fun, anyway. Let's just vote!
If pg asked for it, OK.

But personally, I'm flagging the Erlang spam.
Here's the reason: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=775727
The Debugger as a Design Tool: Reduces the search space
Zed is making the same comments that I would, so I upvote. Simple as that.
The fallacy in the Netflix algorithm
yeah, at over 8x the memory, it beat an aging Smalltalk VM by 4 secs ;)
we should add a feature request to limit title keywords per hour... that would solve the problem (probably by fixing the _why issue in the first place)
It's okay - it's really an awesome video. I don't know why people whine about it...
The company that I work for and those that I have worked for in the past would never reject an application because it was written in .NET. We would only reject an application that did not fit our needs.

I think you are right to stick with what you know.
Haskell has amazing potential... But it's hard to argue with Erlang (running Ericsson's 24/7 real-money business), OCaml (running Jane Street's 24/7 real-money business) and so on. Is there anyone with serious performance and reliability requirements that's bet the farm on Haskell (yet)?
Is Erlang a Parallel Language?
I think that customers are going to focus on the "fit and finish" of your product, not what platform it's running on. If you write it in ASP.NET, most Microsoft-based businesses will be able to run it, as well as any non-Microsoft-based businesses that use Mono.

Just make sure to test your app on both Windows Server and a couple of flavors of Linux/Mono, and each of those combined with the major database vendors (MSSQL, Oracle, MySQL, PostgreSql). If it works well with all of those "out of the box", I think you'll have a lot of happy customers.
I'm voting up every article which is NOT about erlang, so there!
Read "witch" or "herbalist" or "evidence-based medical practitioner unwilling to go by fads and humours".
Yes, I like that CUDA stuff. However I think you need their Tesla engine for the most impressive eye candy, which runs about $2000 last time I looked. Of course, this time next year etc. etc.
/me calls it a day

You know, my friend, I believe that face to face we would have a lot less differences.
Looking Inside the Citrix Netscaler and Client Access Gateway Ent SSL Payload
Load Testing Tool written in Erlang
Ask HN: How do you collect valuable feedback?
My next idea is to have a "is this good enough?" link on the bottom of every page link to a feedback form but that seems rather unprofessional.

Offering feedback@email does not yield results. An online form asking for user input won't yield specific improvements other than bug fixes.

How do you collect valuable feedback?
That's actually a good idea. What would be better though is an "mini" version of the site with just the player controls and basic navigation functions. Would look super slick in the menu bar :)

Almost like digg in this case: http://fluidapp.com/i/menuextra-digg.png
The first time was pg's idea to get rid of the traffic spike that was killing the server and the content.

This time... it doesnt seem quite as vindicated reasoning.

You know: this could be a meme.... beware ppl :D
I'm sorry, this Erlang link is actually useful and thus I can't upvote it in good conscience.
and flag the _why stuff
Seattle is not really Midwestern. I would say, if anything, it's more European. I'd say it's a nice place to live. My wife and I are both from WI and we like it here.
Oh christ. You people need to get laid.

Go outside, live a little then come back and talk about hacking again.
Erlang Scheduler: What does it do?
I downvoted the parent for snarky ad hominem that adds nothing to the site. I downvoted this comment for complaining about comment voting and perpetuating the notion that voting should be about whether you agree or disagree with it. They are just bad comments.
We are looking into Appcelerator Titanium to bring a more Native experience to the desktop. It's also cross platform.
here's two more videos from _why from his OSCON 2005 talk: http://bit.ly/1atNHU ("Sinking Symphony" and "Foxes Tall and Small on Modules")
I don't understand this. The articles about _why sometimes were a little weird [analyzing him] but there were enough people in HN interested in it and _why was one of the greatest hackers in the ruby world.

The last time there was a deluge of erlang articles, it was to scare away a new wave of newbies. In this case the erlang articles are pushing out legitimate articles and very few of the erlang articles have any real discussion going on. I don't think, the tactic of erlang article flooding was appropriate this time.
HiPE: High Performance Erlang [pdf]
Just like anything else, I think people get a bit overzealous about unit testing and assume it's going to solve all of their problems.

I think unit testing is best used to make sure that your core functionality still works between revisions. It's foolish to think that you're going to write a unit test for every little case that may come up in your code...that's something for valgrind or a fuzz test to take care of.
How is this related to Erlang??
New Web App ‘Makes Sweet Love’ To Bing APIs, Lets You Search As You Type
Model forces Google to unveil 'skank' blogger
I strongly suggest you read the article before commenting.

Pretty much right at the beginning he redefines health care to exclude things he admits work - diet, exercise, sleep, not smoking, etc.

No he doesn't. That was a bad choice of title on my part when I submitted the article. I should have titled it "Medical Care Doesn't Affect Health (on the margin)". But like most people, I use the terms "health care" and "medical care" interchangeably.

The bigram "health care" does not appear once in the article.

He also admits that increased social status improves health while claiming that increased medical spending does not. But it's well known that the rich can afford better health care, and doesn't explain how to (or cite any papers that) control for this.

This is simply not true. He cites a number of cross section studies which compare rich/poor/etc people receiving more medicine to rich/poor/etc people receiving less. He also cites the RAND experiment which was actually a randomized trial addressing the same question.

Lastly, he only considers length of life and totally ignores quality of life...

False. The RAND experiment studied various health measures, not mortality.
The text file mentions another band, The Child Who Was a Keyhole.
On their Myspace page
(http://www.myspace.com/thechildwhowasakeyhole)
it lists the band member Jonathan as guitar/vocals.
Here is a picture of them from 2004.
http://b7.ac-images.myspacecdn.com/00457/75/36/457046357_l.j...
Here is a picture of _why as we know him.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/scottlaird/31366517/
Those guitars look oddly similar...
Eh Midwestern was probably the wrong word to use. We're in Phoenix now, which is basically just urban sprawl. She dislikes SF because it seems too foreign compared to the thousands of strip malls and subdivisions we have here.