skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Reposting comment from a similar thread

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.
Front page is a positive feedback loop. People upvote the stories they see.
Where Has _why Gone? (He is not Jonathan Gillette)
Pastebin for debugging javascript / html / css
To be honest, that would probably be one of the best weird memes I've run across.
sorry, I forgot the smiley face after my comment.
I know that's just what I was wondering
people are logical and reasonable? since when? :)
This article was from 1999, so it's not clear what the current practice is.
I'm confused: the benchmark notes explicitly say:

Programs may use kernel threads, lightweight threads; but coroutines, cooperative threads and other programs with custom schedulers will be listed as interesting alternative implementations.

However, the Haskell docs for Control.Concurrent note that in Haskell,

Concurrency is "lightweight", which means that both thread creation and context switching overheads are extremely low. Scheduling of Haskell threads is done internally in the Haskell runtime system, and doesn't make use of any operating system-supplied thread packages.

Which makes the comparison with a C implementation that uses kernel threads pretty unfair: presumably a C implementation that uses green threads / fibers would be much more competitive with the Haskell implementation. Comparing apples to oranges isn't very informative.

As an aside, choosing a language based on how fast its green thread implementation happens to be at passing tokens around a ring is utterly silly.
Of particular note in the outdated camp is that Java completely overhauled concurrency in 1.5 http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.5.0/docs/api/java/util/concurrent... and they're using all of Java 1.1...
http://www.galois.com/ is a mostly haskell shop.

It's definitely an interesting language; but I would see it as more competitive with C, C++ or Java as a language for building high reliability components.
I put this up a while ago but recently did an update so you can live preview your code.

people have been posting some really cool things in it recently

http://pastebin.me/8c1380ade220896f88387af0dcc588c2
(you have to wait a while, its pretty resource intensive)
Every other post for the last 2 days has been about _why. Rants, links to his work, random posts he's made on Twitter, more rants, and even eulogies. The threshold on the number of front page posts it takes for sarcasm and spoof submissions to become acceptable has been reached, thus, they shall commence :)
Okay, we're taking it a bit too far now. Really? A web search?
Thanks, the front page looks much better now.

Edit: The erlang crap is still there.
Wow, never saw that before. Hope its not just another AIR clone :P
Stephen Wolfram on how Alpha is being refined technically
Appropriate... no. But it has made its point. One article about _why was welcome. Two... maybe. But the rest should have been comments to the first thread, not submissions.
If Erlang is so great, why hasn't it taken off?
I just read "What makes Erlang so great?", posted here on HN ( http://www.clickcaster.com/item/view/what-makes-erlang-so-great ). The question it makes me ask is, if it really is that great, why don't I see more of it? Sure I see people commenting on how wonderful it is and whatnot, but other than that, where are the applications?

It seems similar to how Lisp is wonderful, as is Smalltalk, and Haskell. But none of those "took off", for various contested reasons. What's the reason Erlang hasn't (yet)? Or am I just wrong that it hasn't taken off in the first place?
Corporate Blogs: Trends And Examples
Can't this problem be solved by looking at a photo of _why and comparing it with <insert random candidate here>?
I'm interested in all three of those subjects, particularly the first. Does that mean I shouldn't hang around HN anymore?
Themepunks - Short Fiction by Cory Doctorow where Y Combinators are prevelant
You can compile your app with the threaded runtime, in which case the threads are scheduled amongst the available CPU cores.

Edit: The benchmark in question does just this, with 5 cores. So while the docs you cut-n-pasted are technically accurate, they do not apply to this particular run of this particular benchmark.
read the search query
Actually, it is: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=774673 , particularly http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=775578

I agree though, dick move. Then again, this _is_ Zed we're talking about.
Oh man, that's funny. So you purge articles about a programming language, about a legendary hacker, and about me off of "hacker news".

Yet, every other day you've got those crap posts from the Mixergy guy, random posts about idiotic sexist dating theories, a billion VC posts, and everything from techcrunch.

Apparently, "normal" at HN means "douche".

Keep on rockin' in the free world brother,

Zed
I don't understand this... he looks happy because he may have accomplished something?
What's your favorite language? Would you still be irritated if the front page was full of articles about that language?

Personally, if the front page was littered with good articles on Scheme and Haskell, I'd be delighted.
I'm merrily flagging all the more egregious not-news ones, like this one.
Exoskeletons Are on the March
Well, fair enough: presumably GHC is creating 5 kernel threads under the covers, whereas the C implementation creates 503 kernel threads. Therefore the C implementation incurs approximately 100x the context-switching overhead. Once again, apples to oranges.

the threads are scheduled amongst the available CPU cores.

Actually, the per-CPU idle stats suggest that the Haskell program ran entirely on a single CPU, so it wasn't actually utilizing all 4 cores anyway.
The voice of Yakko Warner?

Explains a lot.
I have a question about the CPU column:

> 0% 0% 0% 100%

This was a Quad Core CPU, so my first impulse is to ask, does that mean it was running on only one core?
And if that isn't enough, here is their CD.
http://www.cdbaby.com/cd/tcwwak

Note the familiar figure on the cover.
Twitter now support Geolocation in their API (and soon...)
If only. He's like this all the time. And he tied scarves around his monitor stand. And he brought in a fog machine.
Building your own Textile Parser in Ruby
I meant how the code that runs the languages is constructed. For .NET, this would mean the internals of the CLR. For some versions of BASIC, it might be how the interpreter is constructed.

I really didn't mean how code looks in the language. What I meant was how the language/platform is architected/constructed.

But hey, voting is fun enough without all this silly definition stuff.
Dirty Coding tricks used in Production Video Games
I am curious what qualifies as true CPU concurrency vs. threading tricks/shortcuts in the implementation of a language. If you look at java-6, c++, pascal, c, and ocaml, those are the top performers that actually utilize all 4 cores, where as haskell and erlang use 100% of one CPU. Also, in the interesting alternative programs section, the top performer is java (by cheating that they mention Haskell probably does behind the scenes)
This thread, combined with others combined with the javuh repository on sourceforge combined with all of the friend hosting create enough to bear it out. So there we have it.
"_why's name is Jonathan, when in fact every person here who knows _why says it isn't"

What about this?

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=775733

Kylie Gillette -> snapd.net -> Registrant: Layered Technologies TheLuckyStiff Why
Then maybe people who disagreed with it should have flagged submissions. The flood of erlang articles is pushing away legitimate articles
Also worth nothing that what GHC does in 8 seconds, Ruby does in 48 minutes. This is why I always chuckle when people get super-excited about multi-core concurrency in langauges like Perl, Python, and Ruby -- at best, you will make your app 4-8x faster. But by moving to a different language, you can make your app 360x faster.

Something to keep in mind.
I don't think it will be dramatically more likely than losing customers because you've written it in a language other than .net and the shop is all-Windows (which is a pretty high percentage of small/medium businesses, as they haven't yet reached the point where the cost of Windows server solutions becomes a big number).

We occasionally lose customers because we don't have a Windows version, and our products are smack dab in the middle of Linux' stronghold (web servers for shared hosting).

I do think it worth noting that Fog Creek builds their apps in a meta-language that compiles to PHP and .net, for this very reason. Given that they are historically a heavily Windows software oriented shop, I think it's worth considering why they would go to so much trouble, and do something so batshit crazy as to write a whole new language, just so they could reach those non-Windows deployments.

In other words, I don't know. Launch with what you know and what you can build quickly. When you have customers, and are talking to new customers, you'll find out quickly whether you made the wrong decision...and it will be in time for a course correction. Rewriting in a new language three months in is a 1-2 month job. It'd be a setback, but not crippling...and getting started right away is better than letting analysis paralysis set in.
I don't mean to be pedantic, but you need to be a bit more specific about what kind of valuable feedback you want. If you think along the lines of "if I had X information, I'd be able to do Y with my site."

If you're looking for user comments, put in a clearly marked link to a feedback page. Make sure that you ask what the users would like to see (offer a few example suggestions next to the form).

You could also use a javascript-based use tracker to see how users are using your site (I think there was a company that implemented this a while back, but you could probably make your own in a few hours). You can also use some web analytics packages or A/B testing to see what is actually being used on your site (i.e. what the users like about it).

EDIT: isharan mentioned ClickTale in his post, which was the company I was thinking about with the UI tracking.
We call them our children, not 'problems'. And they provide us the reason FOR getting up in the morning.

/this is an old dead thread which I shouldn't be replying to
You'll be ok. I've never seen anything endanger your ego :)
Package Managers – Linux’s Killer Feature?
You kidding? That's the funniest thing I've read all week.
I perhaps should have explained a bit more clearly. The Austrian school relies on mathematical proof, as opposed to experimentation and the resulting analysis with statistics. Yes, statistics is math, but hardly anyone who finds logical rigor psychologically satisfying gets the same enjoyment out of a p-value of .082.
That's funny cause you say it's funny but you really think it's not.
I'd never heard of him before, so I looked him up:

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

I did like the article though, even though there wasn't much to it. One of these days when I have some time, I'm going to write a LISP/Scheme compiler for .NET/CLR...my goal is to get Arc running on .NET, specifically for IIS7 since it has better support for MVC applications.
Aside from telecoms, where it's been running systems with over 99.99% uptime for decades now, Erlang is also used in production by 37signals and GitHub. Amazon SimpleDB contains Erlang components. Powerset, acquired by Microsoft to become one of the technologies behind Bing, built their load balancing application server (Fuzed) and distributed datastore (Dynomite) in Erlang.

So it depends on what you mean by "taken off". Plenty of large and small companies have been using it successfully for years. In the last two years the number has started growing rapidly.
Its actually pretty hard to get valuable feedback from a lot of users. Either users don't think too much about how the site could be improved or they're just too lazy to type it all out.

But yeah, being a little more specific would help. Looking for UI feedback? (Try this http://www.clicktale.com/) General feedback about the company?

The best thing to do is make it easier for people to give feedback.
Ask HN: How is Erlang better than Prolog?
Enquiring minds want to know
Enough Erlang
How about a nice cup of STFU about Erlang? Enough already...

-- MV
But by moving to a different language, you can make your app 360x faster.

If your "app" is a toy microbenchmark with an under-specified benchmarking methodology, then sure. You could also make your "app" 360x faster by switching to a userspace thread implementation.
Just think of today as a no-procrastination holiday...

We can all catch up on meaningful hacker news when the reddit-ers evaporate overnight :)
I haven't followed this site for very long, but is purging articles about which people are obviously interested a common practice? If so, for me, this site's value just went to zero.
UserVoice [1] and GetSatisfaction [2] are the big guys in customer feedback.

[1] http://www.uservoice.com/

[2] http://www.getsatisfaction.com/
If the penalty to writing my blog post is a whole bunch of Erlang posts then I approve!
Time to write an "HN community is a ghetto, fuck you all I'm too awesome for you guys" rant.
Wow. Today is Erlang day at HN.
Yes. It was compiled with the threaded runtime, but the nature of the problem is such that all but one thread should be blocked at any given time, so the Haskell runtime scheduled them all on the same core.
Zed,

Post a will-you-be-my-friend article looking for a co-founder. They will love you again.

-t
I think the point you're missing is that no one was calling convention a "softball for the less manly application developer."
Wait... there really is a robotics company named Cyberdyne? And they are building human-robot interfaces for exoskeletons?

That's pretty scary....
Yeah I find it hard to understand.
Wishful thinking, but good luck.
You'll notice they all add up to 100%... In this (artificial) test, only one thread is doing work at any time no matter on which core that thread is scheduled. I don't know if it was deliberate (i.e. a clever optimization) but if you're going to use your threads like that it makes sense, avoids cache misses.
I think this is because a thread was never actually blocked.
Indeed, but clearly they are adjudicating ...

That's not true. It may seem counterintuitive, but they are doing the opposite. They are specifically not adjudicating it, but rather taking the "better safe than sorry" approach. I understand your position, but I think you're lacking some useful context.

There's a lot of established case law in the United States (going way back to when Prodigy and Compuserve were in their respective heydays) about what types of behavior make entities that provide fora for online content more like libraries (and thus more or less held harmless for content inside) and what behaviors make them more like newspapers (that exercise editorial control over their content and thus liable for the "speech" that they allow to be published, even if the "speech" is user-provided).

IANAL, so I'm not going to rehash all of this law here; instead I will direct you to the Safe Harbor provision of the Online Copyright Infringement Liability Limitation Act, which I think will rebut you far more directly than I can.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OCILLA#Knowledge_of_Infringing_...

Suffice it to say, the "better safe than sorry" approach taken here by Yahoo/Flickr is a very common, standard technique for limiting liability online.
Even weirder: I have some movies on while I code today.

The movies? I'm watching the Terminator series.
I don't know, but while gathering material for a mildly snarky reply I was surprised to learn that romance novels (often thinly-disguised porn) are probably the biggest-selling e-book category, followed by SF and fantasy. Readers like escapism during a recession, and e-books are cheap enough to be a guilt-free discretionary purchase.

http://www.teleread.org/2009/04/08/romance-novels-are-big-in...
Twitter to add real-time location API
There is a Scheme implementation called IronScheme that runs on .Net: http://www.codeplex.com/IronScheme
The plethora Erlang articles is simply an effort to drive out the people that keep posting lame stories that have no place on hacker news and return to more technical stuff that we all want to read. If it means we don't have so many mainstream articles being posted here here then IMHO all Erlang all day is a small price to pay.
I guess you have to define what "taken off" means. I'd agree that Erlang hasn't taken off in the way (say) jQuery has, but the use-cases and audiences are pretty different.

There are many applications written in Erlang (ejabberd, RabbitMQ, CouchDB, SimpleDB) that are the fundamental component of larger apps - I'd say this is a "taking off" of sorts.
"Commercial apps don't do things like that."

They do. Companies go out of business. They kill products. I went through it in a couple situations when I worked in IT.

In one instance, a vendor was sued by another company and had to immediately pull distribution of an app that we depended on, and the alternative was unusable. That particular example also provides an example of the value of OSS: the app was open source, so we were able to keep using it and tweaking it for years.
Sounds like a perfect feature for Twitter to have. Will it be a separate property on a tweet or will it impact the 140 character limit? From the post it sounds like something separate, just making sure.

Hopefully you can easily turn that feature on and off; sometimes I wouldn't want my location known.
At the moment it's simply driving out any and all articles of interest.

Hacker News is effectively worthless at this point in time. I'm sure it'll recover, but it won't be thanks to spastics upvoting Erlang articles like they're going out of fashion.
Yeah a mini player would be great. Currently I just have a shortcut so that I have quick access to it.

http://img18.imageshack.us/img18/4366/mugasha.png

Wish I could bind play & pause to some keystrokes.

The menubar item is great because the icon doesn't take up a spot in the dock either.
Erlang Cookbook
That's pretty cool! Thanks for the informative response.

Yeah, when I looked at the definition of the problem, it sort of made sense.

Le sigh ... dammit, I should give Haskell more of my attention.

I just hate camel casing and type errors :( And if I'm going to procrastinate about writing For Reals code in a language, various lisps have that covered already.

Although, I'm writing a For Reals app in Ruby (w/merb) at the moment, and it's turning into a bit of an uggo. Maybe I'll procrastinate about finishing it, and give Haskell another go.
I only come to HN for the lulz.
Erlang:  Historical timeline
I don't think it is possible to implement continuations on top of the CLR.
I've often thought that a government based on proxies, given only to personal acquaintances, with a hierarchical structure where 12 proxies at one level would elect you to the next level, might work better than our present representation. (Then again, maybe the old Athenian idea of choosing legislatures as well as juries by lot might work better too).
"The reason you use widely published encryption algorithms is because they've been vetted for poor assumptions. They need to be open to be vetted, not to be secure, and we've found that's always been a good tradeoff."

True. Most people (including Schneier, Ferguson, Rivest, etc) agree that the NSA is secure. This is because they have a veritable army of cryptographers at their disposal. Peer review is the most important part of cryptographic development. The key part of this is that there is probably no other entity in the United States that can satisfy these requirements. AT&T certainly does not have an impressive cryptographic department and they shouldn't pretend like they do.

"The reason security through obscurity is usually bad is because it causes people to make poor assumptions - "He'll never guess I encrypted it with rot-15 instead of rot-13," but for a given secure system, adding obscurity will make it harder to break. But it's the poor assumptions that do you in, not an inherent flaw in adding obscurity."

I don't think anyone would argue that the obscurity in the algorithm is the weakness. However, obscurity can never make a secure algorithm more secure. If your algorithm and key space are sufficient to prevent decipherment before the heat death of the universe, the two months it takes to reverse engineer the protocol are as close to zero as makes no difference.
#daniellindsleyrocksdahouse
I built a startup from 1 (myself) to over 2 million users
And now it's time for me to take on a new challenge :) I program almost any language, I've done everything from administering servers, through developing high-load apps, to copywriting and marketing. So if you need an experienced CTO for your startup, who has 5 years of experience with software and business development - let me know. Email in my profile.
Erlang: Efficient memory management for concurrent processes [pdf]
Nothing has been purged. I'm not sure what the poster is talking about.
Plus Rock Star programmers always smashing their guitars (aka computers) as part of the performances, which seems to be where image #2 is heading?
Always a good choice.

"Code with me if you want to live."
Sure it is. They're already using it with F#
A cursory glance at the front page would tell you that nothing has been "purged".
He posted his real name/email address on Hacker News in the early days.
But it's over a year old - surely you can upvote it, then!
Lightweight threads are a much better fit for many applications. If you are writing one of those applications, this benchmark shows that you can get great performance using Haskell... with only a few lines of code.

I am sure C would do better with a proper userspace thread library, but nobody has submitted such a program to the shootout yet. "If it's so easy..."
Is Cirqueti dead?
assertEqual(daniellindsleyrocksdahouse(), True)
Liveblogging Bizconf Day 1
I do too, but right now a directory of Erlang-related articles is on the front page of HN, along with a niche-interest article about patching Erlang for a future version of OS X.

This was cute the first time, but now it's kind of inane.
By being rewritten in Erlang?
Getting Started With Erlang
10 folks who got rich during the Depression
Kamaelia - The BBC's Erlang-like concurrency framework, in Python
A Real Time Free Vs Fee Example: Rosetta Stone vs. LiveMocha
I am a great developer, so I know how to identify other great developers. Not so with designers. Sure, we work in the same economy but I'm not connected.

btw, I'm not looking for "cheap". I'm looking to find someone good without going paying the overhead of an expensive firm.
Scheme! You can fit an interpreter on a black board.
HN's immune system is Erlang it seems.
Meet AppBoy – iPhone, Android & Blackberry Apps Discovery and Crowdsourcing
Sorry, my mistake. Carry on.
There've been far, far more spurious Erlang stories on the front page than posts about _why - who, after all, is actually significant in the hacking community.
I think it's ok to use the up and down arrows to express agreement. Obviously the uparrows aren't only for applauding politeness, so it seems reasonable that the downarrows aren't only for booing rudeness.

--pg

It seems many people have responded to you though.
MenuetOS: Written in Assembly, fits on a floppy, has GUI