skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Thanks for the feedback all.

@smicallef

Yes the idea of Microsoft proving a similar functionality is scary, but I feel a little bit like "if they were going to do it they would have done it", also they have access to protect. But maybe I am in for an unpleasant suprise, certainly a risk.

@tzury

Yes there is an interesting marketing proposition here in my opinion. I can either market to heavy Excel users who don't use SQL yet or market to SQL users who occasionally find themselves using Excel. It's an interesting one. At the moment I am leaning more towards SQL users, they can immediately see the possibilities. hmmm.
As a US citizen, I'd like to apologize for our inane immigration system. Hopefully we can get it changed in the next couple of years.
Excellent article. Good summary, good links. I'll be passing that link to people when they come on the HN IRC channel telling us they have a "great idea" that they can't tell us.
You really want to make judging code a part of an innovation competition? I know some have gone that route. But personally, I can't think of a more subjective thing.

Most commercially viable web applications find their success through execution of their idea and connecting with an end user audience. So it seems, to me, like the best way to judge their likelihood of success in the "real world" is by reviewing the end product rather than the integrity of the code.

If they didn't write tests, if their authorization code is full of holes, if there are XSS vulnerabilities everywhere -- end users are going to find these. They're also going to comment on them, and these comments will affect other ratings and overall public opinion.

I'm a developer myself and of course I have my opinions about the 'right way' to write code. But judging from that perspective isn't part of the contest for a reason. Not that it's wrong, it's just not the perspective that we're approaching it from.
Create your map of human sexuality
I don't think it's a good article at all. A good article would be giving actual numbers. This author deals in conjecture which he presents in a way that makes it sound like fact. Take this paragraph...

"The United States is home to groundbreaking medical research, but so are other countries with much lower cost structures. Any American who's had a hip or knee replacement is standing on French innovation. Deep-brain stimulation to treat depression is a Canadian breakthrough"

Now if you really wanted to present the facts you'd hunt down actual figures (e.g. how many breakthroughs were made in the U.S. vs other countries). Instead he presents a handful of breakthroughs and then treats them as proof that the rest of the world is on par with the United States in medical breakthroughs.

Beyond that he quotes figures that are designed to be misleading. For example, he claims MRIs are much cheaper in Japan (which they are). But what he leaves out is the Japanese government did this by (a) arbitrarily cutting how much the Government will pay for an MRI and (b) purchasing MRI machines that have an inferior image density. So the result is you have technicians with inferior equipment rushing through MRIs because their sole customer (the Government) has arbitrarily set a really low price.
Indeed, almost all of these practices seem idiotic for a modern search engine to pay any attention.
Principia Discordia, 1st Edition
I'm nowhere near as qualified as that team — but wouldn't it be better to not mark it, at all?

Whatever landmark you place, people will explore. Whatever warnings you place, people will ignore. At least with no markings, and the spot being remote like in the middle of a desert or something, you've got a chance that nobody will ever find it.

And that's if future generations are somehow less smart than us, otherwise they'll most likely know the human history, and still be able to measure radioactivity anyway.
Biggest news:

Probably the first thing to mention about the release of
Slackware 13.0 is that it marks our first release with an official
64-bit port!

Nice.

Also, they switched from KDE3 to KDE4. And version number == 13; lucky number.
Anyone got any updates on the various gnomes? Anyone of them close to the finishing line?
You have a million dollar idea in your hands. If you get the promotion and customer care right, you'll be very successful. Especially if you incorporate tzury's idea. There are countless departmental "applications" that use Excel, and being able to query data directly solves a problem that many encounter at some point or another. It's usually frustrating enough, to get people to pony up money for it.
So basically the one person that knows the most about the subject at hand can not be trusted to edit wikipedia directly, but must go a longer roundabout way?
I think it would be fitting to have in a repository of algorithms; you don't?

Maybe I didn't understand the purpose of the website from its frontpage. (Which is a failure, either mine or the frontpages.)
I don't have any secrets in my bookmarks, but I'd like the awesomebar to be turned off (i.e. just get simple url-completion.)

Thanks for the tips!
Is that a preference that I need to add, or did you mean browser.urlbar.maxRichResults?

No, setting maxRichResults to 0 totally breaks the bar (no completion at all when typing.)
Greg Chaitin: Algorithmic Information Theory (free ebook) [pdf]
That's the policy. Because making exceptions for 'the one person who knows the most' doesn't scale.
That probably makes sense. They should remove the "wiki"-part of the name, though.
Creating an Early Stage Series A Pitch
Ask HN:What do you use for searching for scientific articles
I've been using google scholar but I'm getting tired of not getting results I want - especially the first results often seem only distantly related to my query. Plus I seem to always get an awful amount of noise - only citations or unreferencable sources.

Is there a better alternative for searching all scientific articles?
Pay off now, or pay off later?

The incentive structure for a CEO or other executive at a large multi-national oil firm is likely such that he/she would much rather have a lot of oil drilled in the short-term, rather than a smaller ammount of oil in the short-term and a larger total ammount over the long-term. The same goes for the board members and investors.

"Long-term" here is decades, possibly generations, not next quarter. That means that a large chunk of the profits may be realized well after you're retired (or dead), which is not so great for your bonus structure, promotion schedule, or the ROI timeframes that most investors are concerned with (but fantastic for a nation-state). Furthermore contract structures over that kind of timeframe become a bit unpredictable, especially contracts with a sovreign nation, so better to get what you can now and get out.

This kind of long-term thinking is where corporations fall short. Even if it's the best interests of the 'corporation' to invest in the long term (which clearly ended up being the case here), it's not in the best interests of the individuals working there. Very few institutions are capable of that mode of operation (nations, monarchies/family dynasties).
I'm sorry, you passsed my "who cares?" limit after the first few words.

Sources vary. Some media outlets have different standards than others. Like everything else, don't stereotype! By impeaching an entire news organization -- it's just idiotic. I'm sure somewhere there's a good Fox news reporter writing a good story. So let the stories stand on their own merits instead of trying to convince people not to listen to anything anybody from place "X" has to say. That's simple-minded.

This is just simple logic.

I'm reminded of the fact that the National Enquirer broke every major news story about John Edward's love child. Each time they were trashed by the mainstream press -- if I remember correctly, the first story hung out for weeks while nobody else would touch it and the Edwards' campaign mocked it -- but each time their story turned out to be totally accurate. And these are the guys who run "Elvis visited me in a UFO" stuff.

I'm not saying I like that kind of story, but it proves the point that impeaching entire news organizations is idiotic at best.
It's something I really worry about sometimes. Technology is progressing so fast. We are digging out and conserving everything we can find, potentially damaging it in ways that might be preventable in the future.

This progress gets faster and faster; I worry that we damage most of the available history-in-the-earth because of our selfishness instead of leaving it to our descendants. Well, of course by that logic one would need to wait forever. But I wonder if others feel the same?
The story is incorrect. Knuth's comment was not removed because it was uncited. It was removed because Wikipedia has a policy that articles should not mention Wikipedia unless there's a good reason for them to.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Self-references_to_av...

There was a time years ago when every time some public figure mentioned Wikipedia, that fact itself would make it into their Wikipedia article. That was lame. Wikipedia is not an encyclopedia about Wikipedia.

When User:Staecker removed Knuth's comment, it was with the edit summary "rm self-reference" which is shorthand for "removed unneeded reference to Wikipedia", and has nothing to do with the quote being uncited.
Not slide or page 26, no.

From PEP 342:

Also, generators cannot yield control while other functions are
executing, unless those functions are themselves expressed as
generators, and the outer generator is written to yield in response
to values yielded by the inner generator. This complicates the
implementation of even relatively simple use cases like asynchronous
communications, because calling any functions either requires the
generator to "block" (i.e. be unable to yield control), or else a
lot of boilerplate looping code must be added around every needed
function call.

It looks like 2.5 fixed that particular issue. (I'm not holding my breath on tail-call optimization, though...)
Twitter Isn’t Over-Hyped; It’s Just Misunderstood Tech
Ok, I'll bite. The author says:

It may seem to Americans that U.S.-style free enterprise -- private-sector, for-profit health insurance -- is naturally the most cost-effective way to pay for health care. But in fact, all the other payment systems are more efficient than ours.

To which you respond:

That misses three obvious points about the American system: First, healthcare is tax advantaged, which causes even the most standard health issues to go through middlemen. Second, the supply of doctors is kept artificially low with very heavy licensing requirements. Third, the FDA approval process is very lengthy and expensive. Implying that the effect of a bloated, inefficient system is due a cause of free enterprise, private-sector, and for-profit insurance leaves out these well known points.

But many of the other systems are also in the same situations, and thus are comparable. In Holland (a country mentioned in the article, and where I'm currently living), all of those three things are also true. Same goes for many other nations listed in the article.

So while you're claiming that the author can't use America as a free-market example to bash on, that's not the real point.

The general debate out there is that a lot of people are saying "we don't want socialism" and "the free-market is more effective" while refering to the American system. We can sit around a debate whether or not it's really a free-market, whether that's possible, or whether or not it's even desirable. The authors point is, free-market or not, the system doesn't produce the same results when compared with many other systems, which are accused of being less free-market. That's a compelling argument for change, specificly change in the direction of the type of healthcare that the other countries are currently practicing.
Apache.org downtime - initial report : Apache Infrastructure Team
> Since "standard" users are not going to learn SQL your market is narrowed to developers only.

Power users aren't _that_ narrow a user base. There are an enormous number of data miners (analysts, integrators, etc.) out there who work in Excel because they must, or because they're used to it, or because that's the format that their data arrives in, or because it's a nice visual tool that allows them to easily inspect intermediate results---but who ultimately need to run reports across multiple large spreadsheets. SQL is astonishingly easy for such people, and I've watched dozens of data experts learn it from scratch (with help).

I'd beg you not to add wizards to your product, and instead focus on treating power users rather than being all things to all people. (Your syntax highlighting is good, and little red underlines on unparseable SQL would be good.) Trying to train users to use (or avoid using) SQL with wizards is a dangerous business for a piece of software to be in.

This looks incredibly useful. I'll check it out more thoroughly on Monday.
Java-style annotations in Ruby (with basic implementation)
You can get Excel to run SQL queries already, although it's more painful than your method. See e.g. bottom of http://forums.whirlpool.net.au/forum-replies-archive.cfm/697...

I could see a lot of one-off usage (for occasional Excel users) and a few requests for a refund under the 30-day guarantee.

That said, it looks like it'd make the job a lot easier. The first thing I do when I get a big excel 'database' is convert it to something else!
Is this a java-inspired monstrosity, or something worth completing and packaging up as a gem?
Hi, I have a pdf version of "Nobody Knows Shoes" which was available as a free download from _why's website. I'm not really sure what kind of license it has, though - can't find it in the book itself and website is down, obviously.

What should I do with it? Should I put it online somewhere?
BTW, I would really love to purchase a paper copy, but his lulu store is closed, too.
My argument is not so much against the politics of Fox News (although let me say they sure got some wild-ass nutbars on that channel!) but against that whole mediocre genre of "technical" reporting in which I'd include BBC as one of the worst offenders. This is, after all, "hacker news" not the dumbed down mainstream soundbite news.
I use screen on my servers to avoid losing history and for running non-daemons, but I find it convenient to have "physical" tabs to remind me of where I am.
depends on your field. eg IEEE, ACM for computer science. If you're at uni use the library resources
You can't delete anything from CPAN.

I've never experienced what you describe.
As a data point, creating 100,000 coroutines in Lua uses about 183 MB* , which works out to about 1.9K apiece. This seems independent of the function included in the coroutine -- "return 3" and a function with several pages of code use the same space. It's probably a small stack, a closure for "upvaues", and a function pointer.

Note that this doesn't include memory for the IO connection, but the original question was about the space overhead of coroutines themselves. How much do Perl and Haskell use without the IO handle?

* On an AMD64 running OpenBSD 4.6. On an i386 (32-bit) system, it took 142 MB.
I interviewed someone last week for a European multi-national. He was a dream candidate, with much more experience than me (I wasn't interviewing him as a manager, but as a potential colleague) and for much bigger companies than me (Yahoo! to name one) and I probably over-compensated in the technical interview because his resume put mine to shame, but he answered all the questions and we had a good chat about various technologies relating to the position. The only reason he wanted to leave San Fran was because he had to as he is an Indian and having visa issues - so now a European company gets the talent. Thanks, America!
MSN bot and robots.txt
And even if they did use it for their CV, so what? Who really cares? Does that really hurt wikipedia?

Unless the information is clearly (1) false or (2) not in a neutral point of view, then it's perfectly good information about the subject.
You're confusing shells and terminal emulators (if you can call them that under windows).

You can use the "Powershell ISE" thing as a tabbed "terminal", but Powershell itself will quite happily run under the windows console "terminal emulator".
You make two points. First, you say that "free enterprise" is not the only problem and you cite things like the artificial restriction on the supply of doctors. Then you suggest simpler fixes for the US system.

Your first point does not persuade me, because I live in Canada where we also have restrictions on doctors. We have thousands of foreign trained doctors driving taxis because the powerful medical lobby won't let them practice. My wedding photos were taken by a Filipino cardiologist!

We buy and sell the same drugs you do, from the same companies. So our costs ought to be the same as yours. Yet somehow Canadian pharmacies are selling brand-name drugs to Americans for less than what your pharmacies pay!

It may be valuable to split hairs and say "it's not the free market at fault." To which I reply, American markets aren't free and never have been. Your "free market capitalism" is actually a series of interconnected oligopolies where a few powerful players control the market and use lobbying to errect barriers to free enterprise.

Like your patent system. Or your Disney/Bono laws controlling copyrights and copying of creative works.

I'm prepared to believe that free market capitalism might work, but I am skeptical that such a thing has existed or will exist in the USA during my lifetime.
Why just 15? I have folders with folders full of bookmarks in mine. Generally I have links to sites like you mentioned in a folder called "Common" and, when needed, I access it from there. My root-level bookmarks tend to be more internal (i.e. admin tools for working on various web apps) and bug/task oriented like nimbix said.
To make smarter systems, it’s all about the data
How mobile networks flunked my summer roaming spend
They note toward the end of the essay that the best deterrent may be the illness suffered by the first explorers of the site and that in fact, that may be a cheaper warning system than everything they've discussed building.

In any case, if we can make the arguably optimistic assumption that technology won't suffer any major setbacks in the next 10,000 years, cultures at the end of that time frame should have figured out how to safely explore a radioactive waste site. Even we know how to do it today, if you count sending in robots as exploration.

As the writers say, as long as the radioactivity stays contained, the damage it can/will cause is relatively self-limiting.
I don't really get the fascination around Slackware. As a distro it is probably the least featured among all of the distros out there. It doesn't even have automated patch management for Christ's sake.

Only real use I see for it is using it, once, to fiddle around and learn how Linux actually works. After that you just wants something which works and move on to Debian, Fedora or whatever.

Also obligatory demotivator link: http://invalid.ed.ntnu.no/~jostein/qupload/files/slackware.j...
I find a good app helps... Papers for OS X is an excellent interface to repositories such as ArXiv, PubMed etc. There is also an iPhone version which will download articles direct over the air.
VMWare hopes to be on top of the cloud
"But for a few quirks of fate - international depressions and world wars - it would probably be the main power source for getting us around."

No. The containment requirements for steam, plus recycling the water, vastly outweigh the same for the internal combustion engine.

Flight requires internal combustion, because the power-to-weight of steam is just to low, even though, yes, the raw power of steam engines is generally much higher than internal combustion.
Thank you for posting this.

Since the domain is registered at GoDaddy, it's trivial to set up a redirect. Just select the domain and click the "Forward" button.

By the way, for someone who prefers to remain anonymous you don't make it very easy to post anonymously on your weblog.
Papers is a great application for searching multiple article repositories and organizing your collection of journal papers.

http://mekentosj.com/papers/
As I see it, Slackware is like a clean canvas, where you can easily paint whatever you'd like. I turned my gf's laptop in a perfectly functional media player, at the same time without sacrificing those things she needs for University and stuff, like OOffice, firefox, the likes. My desktop suits my needs of development and research, the usual stuff you'd expect from a "geek". And it's still blazing fast. I'm not making the point that you can't achieve this level of versatility in any other distro, far from that, but Slack makes this considerably easier to deploy.
I have no doubt that expelling and turning away top Asian talent is bad for American business innovation, but there is another problem here. The advanced degree system is not designed to benefit the individual. I think the amount of work one must put in and the financial rewards one reaps upon graduation are out of sync. PG says as much in his essays.

For a business, they know that if someone has been willing to put up with eight years of crap as a student, they're likely to put up with many more years of it as an employee. Maybe there needs to be a visa program for Asian students without advanced degrees who are starting businesses.
Ask HN: Upgrade to FF 3.5 or will I regret it?
I'm still using Firefox 3.0. Will I be happier with 3.5?
Slackware is really about just being able to install what you like, whatever way you want to and it will just work. There's no need to have installed by default random daemons like Cardbus.

Unlike ubuntu the other day, which felt like installing a mail server along with docbooks.
An alternative to a physical monument on Earth is a device based off-planet, probably on the moon, that beams a laser movie to the site every few weeks. It could project a short film which shows humans digging at the site then dying gruesome deaths. This device has to survive, and operate autonomously for thousands of years, but I'm sure this would be possible if it was maintained by a self-repairing robot.
How To Spend Your Money To Maximize Your Happiness
I agree 100%, I don't think it is wise (at least initially) to water down your product with wizards, etc. Focus on that niche and focus hard.
My biggest bugbear with 3.5 is that it can't seem to handle multiple username/password combinations on one site, even if the cookie info differs. That is, if I use the username "Jem" twice on one site with different passwords for each, one will always try to overwrite the other.

I also have issues with it automatically capitalising login data in forms when I don't want it to (jem -> Jem), but I think this is related to the first issue.
It got replaced with the Cocoa/GnuStep port.

Maybe this is a good place to ask: any idea how to make the Cocoa 23.1 port behave like the 22.x Carbon port for dragging files from Finder windows into Emacs?

Under 22.x, that would open a new buffer in the most-recently-used frame containing the file. Under 23.1, dragging to an Emacs frame pastes the contents of the dragged file into the open buffer. (Also annoyingly, dragging to Emacs' dock icon opens a new frame on the same Space as the most-recently-used frame, but luckily (setq ns-pop-up-frames nil) fixes that.)