skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
stopping non-hackers from coming here fosters frustration, and decidedly deteriorates a community of hackers over a period of time, a "flush" seems to only be a reaction from some under appreciated ego's
http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=erlang&a=*C.erlang-...
Obviously, people can't talk about what they want here. Only those articles which you deem kosher.

Seriously. Get a life.
Really great demos. Very tempted to rip some 1/8 copper pipe out of the back of the fridge to make the steamboat.
Five Unsung Heroes of Seattle's Tech Scene
Thanks for taking the time to go through the process. It's our main goal, to make the whole process as quick as possible. Which is why we didn't bother with a screencast, but seems we need one! Thanks for the tips, will put one together next week.
So, A Client Walks into a Bar
Replacing Apache with Yaws (Erlang webserver)
HN Meta: A Eulogy of Sorts.
What a sad day.

I've always thought that this community was something different. I love coming here; the intelligence; the discussion; the connectedness.

I don't personally know a single one of you, but I've admired many of you in your ability to form smart and reasoned arguments about many things.

Today however, you've shown me something else. Today I learned that you're not much more than any other community, despite your qualities. Today I learned that the same thing that destroyed reddit will likely destroy you - that as the site grows, the community fragments, cliques form, and conflict begins. In this race to assert opinion, good people withdraw and are replaced by those of lessor quality. The whole thing slides downhill like some sort of slow moving train wreck.

It seems that despite the best intentions, communities naturally self destruct. I was hoping that pg would be able to create something that could buck the trend, but it seems that this isn't the case. We are what we are, and we will act as we always have.

I won't say good-bye or promise never to post again or any of that crap that you normally get as reaction to events like this. What I will say is this small event is a rather depressing addition to my experiences of the day.

I honestly started to believe that this community was different, but now I see it's just like every other community, and will more than likely follow the established trend.
I think you are missing some of how Erlang views the world re:if statements. Erlang uses pattern matching rather than assignment, so the statements in the if are Guards.

From Pragmatic Programming in Erlang:

At least one of the guards in the if expression must evaluate to true; otherwise, an exception will be raised.

Often the ﬁnal guard in an if expression is the atom true, which guarantees that the last for m in the expression will be evaluated if all other guards have failed.
He mentioned a "multi heap" system. If he was using an allocator that knew which address ranges he'd allocated from, it's not unlikely it'd work. Alternatively if he used an allocator that'd do suitable sanity checks - free() will need to be able to find the length of the block, for example, and if the length doesn't make sense...
Why doesn't iPhone/iPod touch have wi-fi timeout to increase battery life?
Turning it on and off manually is really annoying.
ZoomQuilt
Campfire loves Erlang
If so his original approach of putting the controller id in a region allocated for the purpose and putting the pointer to that region in the event would have worked just as well and he wouldn't need to do what he did.
3D glasses would make the player and pose detection much easier, actually
As I write this there are 10 articles out of 30 on the front page that do not have the word Erlang in it ... call me crazy, but any community that feels the need to promote their language to this extent is kind of an instant turn-off for me.
Video appears in paper magazines
I use paypal. It's quick to setup and has Paypal IPN which is essentially a call back to your system to let it know that the funds have been received or an order has been made. You can also set up free trial periods and things like that. It's quite easy to use.
Mozilla beats AT&T and NBC? How did that happen?

Edit: okay, not entirely . . . apparently AT&T Interactive is 23rd.
Intro to Erlang Part 1
I like the art, but your javascript (prototype.js) is throwing an "invalid array length" error.

Update-- In fact, the video ain't playin' (FF 3.013, Fedora 10 2.6.27.25-170.2.72.fc10.x86_64)
Ryan Tomayko's git-sh: Git mode for Bash
Yes, why is there an Erlang day?
Mozy for my brain
what exactly is the problem, or an instance of the problem?

and wtf are there so many erlang posts on the front page (again)?
im glad i saw this. the linked paper [ http://www.csbmb.princeton.edu/ncc/PDFs/Neural%20Economics/M... ] is quite intriguing and seems relevant to a lot more than netflix
Twitter Gets Another New Design
What is erlang?
Let me pull something completely out of my butt:

Each word is an element; the transition rules are simple substitution with synonyms; multiway system; at each step, it examines to see if the pattern has resolved into a pattern it knows how to recognize.

I know, I know, that's naive and not robust at all. :(

I'm just sayin'. I'd have had a hard time seeing how you'd use ca to write cell phone ring tones -- and not just completely random ones, either, but the way wolframtones does it.

The dude has a serious affinity for that stuff. It's like he's ONLY able to see the world through CA. (Still, probably a net win for humanity to have one person like that in each field at least).
I think you just answered your first question with your second. I guess the difference between my take on it and the OP's is that I didn't have shiny hopes that HN would turn out to be exempt from typical human nature in the long run.
Anyone posting a new variation of this complaint should explain why they are right to say the sky is falling now, when the lineage of people proclaiming the same thing goes back almost as far as HN itself.
That's not just a GUI -- it looks like it supports alpha transparency. That's certainly more than I expected out of a floppy disk.
I believe a certain segment of the community has decided to "purge" another segment of the community from existence because their articles (the _why ones I think) are "not relevant".

Why this group can't figure out to use the flag button is beyond me.

The symptom is the Erlang abundance.
3D will be cool... but CGI characters still weird me out.
Ask HN: Advice on creating a POS system?
I've created an awesome database application that is great for small businesses and one of the niches I'm considering selling it to are retail stores that want to put their inventory online.

This market is dominated by POS software systems. Every retail org has one, just about. I was wondering if any of you have created a POS system and whether or not it is difficult to create this type of functionality for an inventory management system.

Anything I need to think about or resources you can recommend?
Ask HN: Why is all the news about Erlang today?
Seriously, why ? Am I missing something.. ?
Ask HN:  _why can't you reddit if its in Erlang?
Discuss.
That may be one way to implement iterators, but it's nothing like the method C# actually uses. See e.g. the series starting at http://blogs.msdn.com/ericlippert/archive/2009/07/09/iterato...
Building Multi-Language Web Architectures using Erlang and Thrift
He mentions that number like he thinks that's a good thing.
surely you mean _why forks day.
They're trying to chase away the _why articles; or so I'm told.
Perhaps my "just wrong" was an overstatement. I guess my real objection is that they should use a different keyword than "if". Like in ocaml:

match x with
[] -> 0 |
_ -> 7

Same semantics, but it doesn't look like a C/Python if statement.

They could also use if, but require an else clause (like Haskell). Like it or not, syntax does matter to language adoption.
I wonder how life expectancy by age has changed. This figure most likely applies only at birth.
The things RE _why were getting too "feely," and the Erlang thing worked because it's about as far as we can go in the other direction. Just a temporary blip riding the wave of an inside joke; things will subside after awhile.
Because you need asynchronous messages to implement common telephony protocols.
I'm still wondering exactly what the problem is. What's wrong with a bit of an Internet flash mob?

I thought part of the reason people were eulogizing _why is that he injected a bit of whimsy into a field that's often far too serious. I don't see any problem with HN being covered with Erlang articles for one or two days of the year, just like I don't see any problem with Google including easter eggs in their product, or Slashdot being covered in fake stories on April Fools Day.

For those of you shaking your heads in disappointment - how do you feel about urban flash mobs like, say, Critical Mass? Improv Anywhere? I guess I just don't see why this represents the downfall of HN.
There is always a tipping point. These "purges" seem to be great examples of tipping points. Are they? I'm not sure, but they are certainly more pronounced than any previous issue.
Multics didn't "fail"; rather, the Bell Labs guys decided they didn't want to work on it any more and went off to do their own thing. Multics eventually reached a useful state and was in use in various places (by such customers as the US DoD) until around 2000, when the last Multics system was taken offline. However, Multics ran on an extremely small set of expensive Honeywell computers, which is why it did not reach great prominence.

Plan 9 lacks adoption for an entirely different reason. It is very portable, and in the earlier days (~1995) ran on Suns, SGIs, Alphas, some 68k machines, and the PC. As non-PC hardware has become less widely-used, the other ports were not kept updated. However, compilers exist for the MIPS, 68k, ARM, AMD64, Alpha, x86, SPARC, and PowerPC architectures, and it is not particularly difficult to port to a new machine. Unfortunately, Plan 9 was only available via closed license until 2000. Had it been given freely from the earliest days, it very likely could have taken what is now Linux's place as the primary free OS.

The reason UNIX is so widespread is because it was the right solution at the right time. It was freely available to universities and, like Plan 9, pretty easy to port. The interface was simple yet powerful, and the introduction of pipes meant you could write stupid programs, then chain them together for powerful functionality. It really served to end the days of "One OS per Computer" and the kind of monolithic programs one found on such systems as VMS, where every program was an island.

The original Unix was put together in a thoughtful fashion with an eye to both hardware efficiency and powerful features. However, it was unfortunately written before networks and graphical interfaces became widespread--those portions were "hacked on" later, giving us network sockets and X, two systems often considered the worst parts of Unix.
Everywhere Communism has been tried, the perpetrators really believed in it, really wanted it to do better -- for its predictions to come true, and for capitalism to be swept away by something better.

Even if there was cyncism among those who grabbed power, they then elevated Communism's texts and ideals in all official communication, celebration, and education. So generations were given every chance to try "Communism in good faith".

But it still didn't work. It turned out more corrupt, more polluting, more poor, and even in many respects less egalitarian than capitalism.

To claim all those proud earnest efforts weren't "in good faith" is at best a form of the "no true scotsman" fallacy.
Maybe if you read some of the articles about Erlang you'd understand why we're so excited about it.
This is great. Computation exists outside of computers, and this seems like a great approach to highlight that idea. I only read http://csunplugged.com/~csunplug/programming-languages-0, but it gives a pretty good summary of the basic issues involved with programming a computer. The ideas are relevant and interesting, and the absence of an actual computer is barely noticed.
The problem is that this Erlang crap actually displaces other stuff, making it difficult to find the articles some of us would actually like to read.
You're reading this on a site called "Hacker News" and you have to ask that? How about: the challenge.
http://news.ycombinator.com/classic is slightly less flooded.

(Last time it was supposed to scare away newbies. This time I see a lot of <30-day-old accounts posting the articles to start with.)
I think that any time things called "purges" start happening in a social context, it's a bad sign.
I don't see it like that at all...

I see it more that the _why articles had their run, Erlang is having its run now, and in a day or two, something else will capture the HN fancy. There've been long runs of related topics on HN before. Erlang is a bit of an in-joke on HN because there was a similar run last March. It's no worse than the "Paul Graham Ate Breakfast" article that got several hundred points a couple years ago.
It's tweet sweats, as in "I was tweeting so much I started tweating all over my shirt".
Ask HN: Please stop.
I credit the community for deciding that an appropriate protest would have to revolve around Erlang. It could only, really, happen here (...twice?).

Seriously, though, if it's true that the origination of this protest is a few fluff pieces, can we agree that a handful of fluff pieces is better than two pages of ... whatever you want to call this?

I enjoy Hacker News because individuals that participate in the site act more like a community of geeks, not a mob.

Forgetting the community: contributing fluff to combat fluff on a resource you love is sort of like getting into a fist fight with yourself. In the end, you've lost.
Erlang? Thrift? Tasty!
It's not about promoting Erlang, it's about getting all of the _why articles off the home page. Whether you agree with it or not, it has nothing to do with Erlang.
Ask HN: What if HN was biased against submissions on very popular topics?
Keep track of trending keywords, and if X% of frontpage topics are about one topic, make it tend not to rise on the front page. Perhaps a small bias for something with 3 or 4 topics already popular, and a larger one if the threads increase.

This might be able to solve the "_why problem" and the "Erlang problem" if they recur.

Thoughts?
> Suffice it to say, the "better safe than sorry" approach taken here by Yahoo/Flickr is a very common

"Common" does not imply correct. I will grant you that its common.

> Safe Harbor provision of the Online Copyright Infringement Liability Limitation Act

The Safe Harbor provision of §512(c) requires the provider to take down content given 1) notice from the content owner, or 2) the presence of "red flags". References to red flags in the DMCA suggest gross infraction, which in this case would look like a Flickr account dedicated to reproducing copyrighted content. This does not appear to be the case [http://www.flickr.com/photos/khateeb88/].

The "red flag" provision was also added to §512(d) for link indexing sites. There is more descriptive text attached to this "red flag" and it explicitly counters your broad "better safe than sorry aproach":

catalogers would not be required to make
discriminating judgments about potential copyright infringement.

Without a takedown notice from a copyright holder, or an account dedicated to reproduction of unlicensed content, this is no legal reason for taking this content down. It is hopefully the work of a single moderator, and not corporate policy.
Which I started doing when it got out of control, but I'm apparently in the minority. I don't really care one way or the other, I just don't read what I'm not interested in.
I disagree with the article. If his point has merit it might be that the data for the Netflix algorithm is the wrong or, more probably, incomplete. That doesn't invalidate it, rather it means the factors are more complex.

Netflix can't know that he leaves Chaplain DVDs on his player unwatched for a week, but it does know that he returns low-brow stuff faster. That faster turn-around probably indicates a behavior. If that data wasn't exposed in the prize, then maybe Netflix will look at exposing it for the next prize, or adding it themselves.
I have read Eoin's Artemis Fowl trilogy and found it quite good -- but it's not anywhere near the same writing style used in Hitchhiker's Guide. If they wanted the same Hitchhiker feel they probably should have gone with Terry Pratchett (though I doubt he'd accept, he seems to quite enjoy his own Discworld universe). I'm sure it will be good, just different from what people expect from the series.
The highest-ranked Erlang articles have only about 100 votes. It's just so easy for one group of people to vote 20 or 30 articles onto the front page. There may be more users who'd rather see something else, but (a) there are no downvotes on posts; (b) highly-scored articles can no longer be flagged down by the community; and (c) it's a lot more work to find and upvote "signal" than it is to increase the flood of noise.

So I choose to see this as an overly-successful protest by (I hope) a minority of the community. After all, the typical "best" articles have over 200 points, and the original _why thread had almost 500.
Creating Dynamic Websites with Lisp and Apache
No, as far as I can tell this was the second time in recent history that this happened. The first was to scare away a flood of new users that threatened to radically change the generally congenial culture here on HN. The _why articles were getting a bit excessive, but I'm not sure it raised to the level of an attempted purge.
Australia's dotcom pioneers: Where are they now?
I'm a geek, but I don't know a line of code to save my life. Does this make me a non-hacker? The wrong kind of poster? I lurk here because the threads, especially anything YC/VC/Start-up, are really informative and genuinely useful. The Erlang thing is a yawn, even though I have no idea what it's about. I'm with the OP, sure it was funny, but maybe time to move on.
I am seriously not being facetious: I like the Erlang articles.

If you don't like them, don't read them. Come back tomorrow, they'll probably be gone by then. If you don't think they're the "right" kinds of articles for HN, well that's just one person's opinion.

If you are ascribing malicious intent to the people submitting and upvoting these articles....well, I don't know what to say. Maybe lighten up a little?
Cool, but can I run Erlang on it?
IronPython and IronRuby, yes. F# is statically typed.
A tweet for carnivores.
That's great and all, but it's not exactly an answer to his question.
I find that I can visit this site daily and find a good six or seven things worth reading ... all done without salacious headlines.

I don't think the bar is set at coder, programmer or developer. I don't run, nor do I desire to run a start-up, but I read plenty about them here because the quality of submissions generally means I'm going to enjoy the post. And the items that fall into the "non-startup, non-development" category are often very interesting...even the ones I disagree with philosophically are often good reads.

I wonder what makes a hacker, exactly?
"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."

Agreed!!!
Twitter had been in talks to buy FriendFeed too, co-founder Stone says
Oh in that case I approve.
Python Vs. Erlang for MMOG (2007)
I really like the story about the programmer faces to match the frame rate. I enjoy solutions that employ humor and human aspects.
Aside from yourself and a few other notables, the Erlang explosion has it source with new users: under 500 karma. This is not the established community; this is a new segment of users that - with due respect - has no business telling the rest of us what does or doesn't qualify for a quality article. When they can use the flag button, they can feel free to contribute.

_why articles had their run, Erlang is having its run now, and in a day or two, something else will capture the HN fancy

Um, no. And you know this, don't you. I was no fan of any of the _why articles, in fact I think I only up-voted 1. The Erlang submissions are a direct intent to flood the site with seemingly "worthy" articles in an attempt to drown out other users. It's an attack by one clique against another, and it's something that I would think wouldn't have a place here on this website.

It's no worse than the "Paul Graham Ate Breakfast" article
Except that that article was 1) a single article 2) making the exact opposite argument that you're making.
New Mosquito Repellents Beat DEET
The dual meaning of this acronym is always hilarious :)
Here's my favorite war story, from a GameCube launch title.

QA discovered that if you rapidly toggled back and forth between two menus in the front end you might get a hang, though it could take 10 minutes.

I was eventually able to reproduce it in the debugger, and it was bizarre. A local variable getting corrupted to strange values, but there was no memory corruption visible at all, just the register was incorrect, when it was only ever assigned to once.

No matter what test cases I tried to cut the code down into, it didn't crash. Inspecting the disassembly everything seemed fine.

Finally, I noticed something strange. The suspect variable was in r19, which thanks to the allocation strategy was very unusual, it was most often unused. That gave me enough of a clue to create a cut-down test case that included all the function arguments and local variables without the code, to make sure I got the same register allocation.

I was able to write a single main.c that set the variable once and sat in an infinite loop waiting until it changed. Bingo! _Something_ crept in and changed that value, and it sure wasn't our code. There wasn't much of an OS on the Gamecube, but there must have been some interrupt that wasn't cleaning up its changes to r19 like it should.

I sent off the minimal code to a Nintendo developer support engineer, and monkeyed with our code to avoid having so many local variables in that one function, which fixed our problem. The Nintendo engineer fessed up that it must be their issue, but then the report vanished into the Nintendo bunker, never to be seen again...

Despite being a nightmare I'm glad I escaped, there were some sheer moments of coding joy in the game industry.
How long do you have to work to earn a Big Mac?
Earlier this week I kicked off Italian Graffiti Factory, which is an overly-pretentious name for a site that is focused on bringing together co-founders and helping them to get and stay motivated. For the alpha stage, the site is going to be very specifically focused on helping co-founders to come together to build a prototype and submit a killer application for YC Winter 2010.

If you're interested, you can check it out here: http://www.igfactory.com
Installing Cherokee on Mac OS X Leopard
I thought I'd hit the way back machine.

But really, even before why worship HN seemed really piss poor lately. Until few weeks ago I hadn't visited in long time and they types and quality of articles was way down from what I remember.

I've only ever been interested in about 20% of what's posted but recently I felt compelled to read only 1-2 postings a day. And the mix of articles that were uninteresting had shifted from Haskell this / circle jerk around my new startup to really poor fluff.

funny pics get 40 votes http://8bitb.us/why-well-never-hire-another-rockstar-program...

videos http://www.apple.com/trailers/fox/avatar/hd/