skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
TELL HN: OMG CENSORSHIP
THE SOVIET YC IS DELETING ARTICLES!!!!

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=776782
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=776111

This is very anti free market!
A decent overview of the curriculum from FT - "South Park meets Harvard Business School": http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/6886ab5c-8cdd-11de-a540-00144feabd...
Initially, I thought that the "unplugged" idea was kind of silly, but after I read about the parity check magic trick I changed my mind. What a good way to explain parity!
http://skitch.com/nothingmuch/bhdwp/hacker-news-new-links
Computers becoming the new crystal ball
Surviving the DCAA - What You Must Know
Defect Prevention As Opposed To Defect Detection
Stick to linked in rather than FaceBook. Some people prefer their facebook to be friends and family and find it intrusive if you poke your head into their life.

You will get better results and won't run into this problem on linked in since that is what it was designed to do and everyone is in a biz mindset there. Also you can try Plaxo if you need contact info.
The extremely small amount of time I have to work to earn a big mac seems grossly disproportionate to the labor involved in sourcing, manufacturing, and serving a Big Mac.

Am I really generating N sandwiches worth of value every few minutes?

Or am I (systemically) skimming value off the top of what's produced by individuals who are being paid disproportionately to the value they produce?
This meta crap also displaces other stuff.
Hackety Hack had (at least elements of) Try Ruby in it. Presumably someone could use those bits, possibly with camping, to get Try Ruby back up.
To Startup CEOs: You Can't Outsource Marketing
Their "global average" is under 40 minutes. I guess they're only counting the 73 cities in the study for the globe.
Hacking the Twitter API: Bet Your Followers
So Smart: Electric ForTwo Arrives This Fall
>and wtf are there so many erlang posts on the front page (again)?

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=775727
I posted one of the Erlang things (the second, I believe). Mind you, I certainly wouldn't have done that had there been 13 or even 5 up there already (and my post actually was of something new). Anyway, I think you're making a mistake to personify this into a "segment of users" trying to tell the rest what to do. My guess it was a lot more random than that.

The real lesson of HN, and the thing that prevents events like this from knocking it off the rails, is its aggressive but unobtrusive moderation. When chaotic stuff happens that gets out of control, it gets corrected. This is also the answer to your human-nature-based critique of the community (i.e. left to its own devices, it would degrade in the way you describe, but it isn't left to its own devices).

Edit: now that I think of it, maybe HN is kind of an instance of the "libertarian paternalism" that's recently become popular in policy thinking (as in the book Nudge).
You are right. Google for Jonathan Gillette and _why and you can find all of the digging done today. He has been discovered.
I had forgotten about 99designs; thanks. There's some pretty impressive stuff on there that's exactly what I'm looking for.
Can someone explain what is the horrible to pack an integer into void* pointer? A void pointer takes 4~8bytes, an integer takes no more than 4 bytes. As long as the program don't passing value from little-endian to big-endian system, it should be all fine except the semantic meaning?
Quantios is hiring: help reshape the college admission process using data
Help requests that make me want to cry
There is a lot of labor in "sourcing, manufacturing, and serving a" [large number of] "Big Macs".

However a single Big Mac does not cost so much. It's efficiencies of scale basically.
I like this riff on my odd misspelling best.
Comparative advantages and division of labor allow consumers to afford big macs and mcdonald mochas. Your input is greatly apperciated.
Yah, that's quite a meaningless average. They should really weight each city for the population it represents.
Also automation
He actually had no website - just really cool technology - augmented reality better than what I have seen but a few years ago!

The meeting was actually organised by the city to set up a cluster for our industry, obviously nothing came of it after that debacle!
More on Don: http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/exec/de/Box/default.mspx

FWIW, being a Distinguished Engineer is a big deal. The guy running my team is a DE and he's probably the brightest person I've met at Microsoft...I consider myself fortunate to work for him. I've met people who've been full time (I'm an intern) for a few years and never met a DE.
Of course, you're comparing apples and oranges because the price of a Big Mac is determined by the local market for Big Macs. In some places, McDonalds is considered upscale food because it's American, because it's less common, etc. In some places, the quality of McDonalds is much higher (kosher burgers in Israel, I think).
Daily Beast: Is LSD Good For You?
break the pay wall:

http://www.google.com/search?q=These+are+extraordinary+times...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KolibriOS deserves a mention too, GPL fork of MenuetOS.
Poll HN: Java vs Erlang, is Erlang worth learning?
I don't think I have to extol the virtues of Erlang to this community, but it is probably worth mentioning that Java has a pretty sophisticated concurrency library in 1.5 and 1.6. At my job and in my personal project, I'm using Java. We all know that maintenance is the bulk of effort and the question that arises is that given 10 years of experience in Java and the java.util.concurrent libraries, is Erlang so awesome that it is worth learning to integrate and if so, under what circumstances? Adding Erlang would add additional complexity and dependencies and so basically is it so efficient that the decreased cost per concurrent user justifies the additional cost and risk?
Yes, Erlang is so much faster it will save $$$
No, Java is fast enough so don't pay the price
Erlang may be the death of this question.

Thanks for your response pj. Paypal seems to get a lot of negative press- is it unjustified?
Code generation with X-Macros in C
Erlang is also the death of a lot of fluff articles of late.

The thing with Paypal is that they aren't quite so flexible and they have high fees, 3 to 4% or more. My only complaint was that they are very pro-consumer, meaning they side with the credit card company when the purchaser of your goods complains, but this is normal. There are charge backs with credit cards too if you do your own processing and payment management.

Paypal is the only payment system I've used. I wish their system was easier to customize.

You may want to check out Amazon FPS, but I haven't used them.
I found the Damp falling through the geometry holes kind of interesting. My current company does fluid-flow simulation, and we have large meshes coming in from CAD with precisely this sort of problem. Our solution was to create an algorithm to remove the holes. It probably would have been hard to brainstorm the idea of fixing the geometry algorithmically, but I bet it would not take too long to write up something. Even if the algorithm is very inefficient, you could let it run over the weekend. A throwaway app is probably a small price to pay for clean geometry.
Just to eradicate bias, what did you think of Speed Racer?
A classic essay related to your question: http://www.econlib.org/library/Essays/rdPncl1.html
I always figured that operating systems kept a few hundred MBs of HDD space secret to prevent catastrophes when the stupid user downloads too many "films" and hits nominal zero.
Am I really generating N sandwiches worth of value every few minutes?

Yes, you really are. We're programmers and businessmen -- our value scales waaaaaay the heck out of proportion to the amount of time we spend on something. I think that is awesome. (If I was a big proponent of income equality, I'd really hate it. I can do an honest day's work while sleeping by setting a system in motion to do it for me -- no manual laborer will ever be able to do that, which suggests that I will make rather more money than them, by a lot, and the gap is going to get larger over time.)
Alpha still has an annoying bug where it processes input perfectly but and then doesn't compute anything. I tried this 3 months ago: "4.7L/100km to mpg" and the result is still the same - Alpha elegantly rephrases what I've asked for but then tells me nothing. Google just produces the answer.
Reminds me if the time I was in as CS teachers office at uni getting course changes approved. Wasn't till after I left his office that I realized what was wrong with it.

He didn't have a computer. He taught mostly post grad stuff, how to build a Turing Machine etc. that I never took so I didn't get around to finding out what he researched.

Any way he managed to have a high level CS job with no computer in his office, well not in plain view anyway and certainly not the centre piece on his desk.
Xeon 5500 (Nehalem) servers: round-up
You have two questions in your post:

1. Is Erlang worth learning?

2. Is Erlang worth integrating into my project?

The answer to #1 is most definitely yes. The answer to #2 may or may not be - I don't know enough about your business to make the call.

Oftentimes, the real reason to learn a new language is that it changes the way you think about programming in your existing languages. It may not be worth switching your company over to a new and untried language, but it's probably worth learning the techniques that gave rise to that new language. You can and probably should do Erlang-like programming in Java; it's just that it'll be syntactically more verbose and perhaps not as finely performance-tuned (though the performance gains of using HotSpot vs. BEAM will probably make up for that).
Yes Erlang is:
1. so much faster to execute
2. much faster to code with
3. much faster and easier to maintain your code definitly
4. much smaller size of effective code compared with Java
5. MOST IMPORTANTLY: Erlang has the ability to adjust your running code and patch your system while it is up and running! and maintain versioning for your patches dynamically, this means that you're guaranteed 99.99% of systems availability. Erlang is a pioneer in Soft Real Time computing. Virtually systems written in Erlang never go down. it has been designed for the telecom sector at the beginning and was tested rigorously for that at Ericsson Labs.

hope this helps..
These really fit into what is known as the Gatekeeper Theory of the media; that is, a journalist receives billions of points of information and has to decide which are the most important to share.

Formally, this is done through an Inverted Pyramid style of news story writing - the most important information is communicated first, and the further into the story you go the less important the information is. In theory (and like anything, in practice things like personal experience and bias come into play) this means the story can be ended at any point and the most important news will be conveyed.

Where the story ends depends on News Hole (also what a lot of bloggers probably call MSM journos). This is the amount of space that needs to be / can be filled with news. The beauty of the internet is that it removes many of the factors that traditionally limit newshole, primarily the amount of space that can be supported by advertising.

And ultimately, it's this final point which may address the '3 key parts' identified in this article. When space is abundant, that information can be shared. And since it's often easier to write a longer article than a shorter one, in many cases the information discussed exists in early drafts and is later cut for space, meaning a lack of cutting provides extra information while actually saving time.

Don't get me started on the Janus view of the press, and how it will influence online media, however.

Credentials - Australian Press Council Prize Winner 2000; University of Queensland Journalism Prize Winner 2002. Google or Wikipedia key terms to find links to more detailed papers.
The video isn't playing with Firefox 3.0.10 on 32-bit Ubuntu 9.04 with Flash 9.0r31 and IcedTea (not sure what mechanism is being used to play the video), either.
Certainly the best article on HN in the last 48 hours. Very cool stuff. In my part of the U.S., some public schools are talking about shortening the school week 4 days because of funding problems. I've been thinking about what kind of things I can do on a Friday to step in to teach if that happens. This is just the kind of thing that could work.
Unfortunately, it wasn't far enough away.
(Don't upvote this, but): lots of YC posts being dead-ed
It seems that posts mentioning a certain concurrent language are being marked [dead] pretty aggressively, and perhaps automatically.

Discuss?

(I'd prefer that you not upvote this, so it stays off the front page. That way 1) it doesn't seriously pollute the YC experience, and 2) it's discussed by people who hang out in /new or /comments, who are more likely to care in the first place).
Ah! One of my favorite topics!

Inkboard was a fork of inkscape that was an experimental collaborative whiteboard. It uses XMPP, and some pieces of it were merged into Inkscape proper well after the fact.

Coccinella is a perl/tk IM client that uses XMPP to do whiteboarding.
I've never complained about a post not belonging on HN before ... so, before I do, can someone explain why this belongs here?

If it involves some breakthrough technology, cool, but give me some background info–not just a trailer.
OpenTable had $56 million in sales and a capitalization of $400 million at IPO (http://stocks.investopedia.com/stock-analysis/2009/reservati...).

The difference is large enough, in my opinion, to suggest that the article is just including the standard party line of bitching about Sarbox. OpenTable may have issues but I doubt the "reporting structures" are a major one. I'd suggest that the larger concerns about many Silicon Valley startups are about simpler issues like growth, profitability and defensible competitive advantage.
That article is DATED and obsolete. You don't need Apache, mod_lisp or any of the long laundry list of tools.

The game has changed boys and girls; these days you seat Lighthttpd or Nginx before a farm of Hunchentoots or SymbolicWebs, all sharing a Redis backend for session management, you use X-Sendfile for serving static content, and you rape the interwebs at 300k r/s off of a single $20 VPS account.

Lisp web could get really raw sometimes. But nothing is stopping you from firing up Hunchentoot on your localhost and developing for the web like you would write any other app (though you might wear out your Alt, Tab and F5 keys ;-)

P.S. Unix is not even a requirement; I hacks me farm on Win32 and deploys nightlies on some Linuses spread over 3 continents.
yes its cool that you can do this sort of concurrent oop in scheme, but man, there is an awful lot of boilerplate there.
if you want to do something like this, a language where it is less of an idiom would seem to be a smart path to follow ( i say this as someone who really likes scheme ).
Well, your post was just [dead]ed within 2 minutes of being posted, so either someone's either really on the ball or it's automatic.

FWIW, I don't really like this aggressive [dead]ening of all posts on a topic, regardless of their individual merit. There's good stuff that's getting killed along with the bad. But then, I have real work to do, so I can't really bring myself to care all that much.
> This isn't my analysis ... I'm just repeating what I learned in this guy's class: [redacted]

I am also not a lawyer and I am interpreting the law as written on my own, so my opinions probably differ from top law professors. I am a a little disappointed at the argument from authority, but I can't say that I wouldn't have done the same given the situation.

> I'm not sure what you mean by "correct" in this domain.

Thats a very good point, and I think that by correct I mean "most morally correct in the bounds of the law". Certainly, what Yahoo did was legal, but it was also unnecessary. As far as I can tell, the photo posed them no liability, nor were they legally required to remove it.

> No, actually it confirms what I said and explicitly debunks your claim

You are correct. I was wrong in saying that it countered your argument, and should have said that it provides a wider berth for Yahoo to retain their safe harbor status. Their actions were unnecessary in the eyes of the law (as written).

> What makes you think there was no such notice?

The LA Times article says that Flickr removed the image "due to copyright-infringement concerns". That doesn't prove that there was no notice, but citing "notice" sounds a lot better than citing "concerns" and I would expect them to do so.

> I'm not sure why you're still arguing

I'm not sure either. Partly, this thread started with the blanket statement that "'fair use' is not a right", which while correct, is a bit of a troll and got me emotionally involved. More generally, I feel that your implicit argument that Flickr did nothing wrong is pervasive but incorrect. The way in which they handled this case combined with their legal liabilities suggest that their actions were based on the popularity and political views of the photograph posted.

As you mentioned, if one cares about their rights, they should host their own content. I couldn't agree more, and this is a clear public display of the disadvantages in relying on corporate services.
Twitter Marketing - Use TweetAdder to Automate Your Twitter Business
Wasn't hackety hack about teaching kids to code? It's kind of mean to yank down that project after lots of people advertised it and get others to use it. Do we expect kids to have a full copy of the git repo and know what to do with it? What about the website?
Well, I assume they're usiing straight-forward, direct-to-memory framebuffer manipulation. No X protocol to get in the way, no unavailable GPU drivers. Simple alpha transparency shouldn't be hard to do. When did Porter and Duff write their paper, '83?
Which means that the codebase is now 6 million lines of mathematica.
Technology in the Trash
About a decade ago a group of contract software developers (of which I was one) decided to figure out how many seconds it took each of us to earn a cup of coffee (working for a bank, nothing was free!).

For the person who earned their coffee fastest, the machine hadn't even dropped the cup into place before he'd earned it.
Ow! White on black burns my retinas. (No, I'm not Mort from Family Guy).
I was surprised to see that they have a very nice mobile version of their site for iPhone (and presumably others, although I only checked it on iPhone). This is a cool resource!
Does his OS go to XI?
[M]ost of the wealth being created today is unearned, a "free lunch" that should, by rights, accrue to society as a whole. "A fundamental implication of modern research on economic growth is that past advances contribute far more to today's economy than current activities."

http://raisethehammer.org/article/818
The data is also a good indication of brand consciousness in a country. People are paying a premium for the American brand.

In Beijing, a big mac meal could cost double or triple what you could get at a local restaurant. It's seen as high class (partially because it is so expensive) and parents treat their kids to a happy meal on their birthday.
If you feel an article isn't appropriate, you should just flag it and hopefully a moderator will delete it.

From the guidelines:

http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Please don't submit comments complaining that a submission is inappropriate for the site. If you think something is spam or offtopic, flag it by going to its page and clicking on the "flag" link. (Not all users will see this; there is a karma threshold.) If you flag something, please don't also comment that you did.
When I saw the character in the wheelchair I immediately thought of the Poul Anderson story "Call me Joe":
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Call_me_Joe
I haven't heard anything about Poul Anderson being credited as the inspiration for this story.
Not so fast, Twitter: 'Tweet' isn't yours
Thanks for all the responses!
Linux has a format-option to reserve space for just that occasion. It defaults to 5% for root.

One random link which discusses them- http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=215177
I'm guessing this is before taxes (since it works out to about $15/hour in Toronto, which seems right without deductions). It would be interesting to see the tax burden taken into account.
What I find amazing about Wolfram Alpha is that _despite_ sitting down with a pad of paper, and a spare 30 minutes, I'm _still_ unable to get most of my _completely domain relevant_ queries answered by it.

For example - I want a graph of the price of gold versus the price of silver over time. This should be _precisely_ what Wolfram Alpha is good at. In the Demo they even show the ability of Wolfram Alpha to show the price of gold.

The following does not work:

Price of Gold versus Price of Silver
Price of Gold Divided by Price of Silver
Silver Futures Divided by Price of Silver
NYMEX:SI versus NYMEX:GC
NYMEX:SI NYMEX:GC
Graph Price of Gold
Graph Price of Gold Over Time

Now, switch to google, and type in

Price of Gold

and the first hit is: "http://goldprice.org/live-gold-price.html

And 10 seconds later I have an overlayed Price of Gold/Silver Chart.

If Google is able to go Head-Head with Wolfram alpha, in the Wolfram Alpha _domain_ - then it's got a long time to go before it's a query engine of choice for people.

But - I admire them for their perseverance, and it will be interesting to see how it evolves over the next few years - the good news is that the barrier to entry is likely to be insanely high by the time they finally get it working...
Is there a penal code for HN?
What is the extent of the disciplinary measures applied to anti-social behavior on HN? Is there more than one gradient level? Do they expire with time?
I don't think I've ever said this, but not Hacker News. Too content-free.
Cocaine Contaminates Majority of U.S.Currency
He mentions his friend Dustin in: 12 Oct 2002 http://www.advogato.org/person/whytheluckystiff/diary.html?s...
This furthers the belief he is Jonathan Gillette as the band Jonathan Gillette was in contains a Dustin. With all the other evidence I am calling this a case closed. It is interesting to note how different he seems from _why. Maybe the Fight Club analogy (read above) is not too far from the truth.
Facebook Syndicates Page Updates To Twitter, Still Holds User Updates Hostage
Heh I think it looks like paint explosions kind of like the Sony ad.
Awesome. Another great resource in this mold is the book The New Turing Omnibus by Dewdney.

"Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes." - Dijkstra
While US cities only recycle about 30 percent of their waste on average, Seattle recycles 50 percent. This impressive figure is largely due to their sophisticated recycling complexes which are able to process everything from food scraps to motor oil, but it is also a product of greater awareness among individual citizens about the impact of trash. Since Seattleites pay by the load for garbage removal, they already have an incentive to waste less. Biderman believes that if more people were exposed to information about how much waste they produce and its impact on the environment, they would be prompted to change their behavior. “In this closing of a feedback loop, I think there is an essential opportunity to raise awareness,” he says.

The more urban an area, the more likely it is that it has a sophisticated waste management systems. For the most part, any densely populated cities that are near the coast tend to have pretty good recycling systems.

Where this project could gather more interesting data would be on the interior areas of the country . . . places where the big-box WalMarts and wide open spaces lull people into thinking that the solution to waste management is to just dig another hole, cover it up, and hope the problem all just disappears.