skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The Scholastics beleived that humor resulted from the sudden realization of one's own superiority. When one suddenly 'discovers' that one is better than a person or situation, one laughs. When you listen to this joke you sudden;y realize how foolish the 'pragmatic scientist' is and laugh.

I think that it is absurd to claim that humor's purpose for human beings is as a means of establishing hierarchy, but it doesn't surprise that might be used in establishing it.

All said, this article was a waste of my time.
I think I remember that Leeeeeroy Jenkins was not the leader of the group, but he was the only one to have chicken.
Fiction books have gotten sort of boring for me in the last few years. I used to read 20 or 30 fiction books a year, but lately, if I read 5 or 6, that's probably a lot.

On the other hand, I've been reading a lot more technical books.

I think it's because there don't seem to be a whole lot of new ideas for me to find in fiction anymore. I suppose I could read non-fiction as well, but the Internet has made me sort of wary of any non-fiction that's not peer reviewed. With a technical manual at least, the worst that can happen is that something's out of date or poorly worded.
Also don't forget cogen, a library for network oriented, coroutine based programming using the enhanced generators from python 2.5. I recently used it as a front-end concurrent WSGI server in my Google Summer of Code project.

Besides state machine simulation, corotine has many other usages as well (eg. implement concurrency), it is a very powerful tool that not many programmers know. For those who are interested, I suggest a tutorial:

http://www.dabeaz.com/coroutines/
PHP Bullshit Meter
I loved this part:

> The Modernists felt little obligation to entertain their readers. That was just the price you paid for your Joycean epiphany. Conversely they have trained us, Pavlovianly, to associate a crisp, dynamic, exciting plot with supermarket fiction, and cheap thrills, and embarrassment. Plot was the coward's way out, for people who can't deal with the real world. If you're having too much fun, you're doing it wrong.

I'm currently reading Arabian Nights. It's a really, really wonderful book. There's some great lessons in there and it's hilarious. When I read it in a cafe, sometimes I wind up laughing loudly out loud and people look over.

But the book was poorly translated for a long time. I'm reading Husain Haddawy's translation, and his introduction talks about translating a classic. Apparently some of the translators of the past thought the dirty, rough, common language of Arabian Nights wasn't fitting enough, so they took a lot of liberties to make the language more difficult to read so it would appeal to more educated people. Haddawy's version feels like a friend is a telling you a story: No fancy language. The sex and violence are crass. Things are described in simple ways.

And it's really, really good, and highly recommended. I like books I can learn from, where reading the writing isn't made an extra intellectual puzzle and challenge to get satisfaction from the book. A basic swashbuckling type story like Musashi by Eiji Yoshikawa or The Three Muskateers by Dumas is really good. They're fun, readable, intelligent books that aren't difficult. And despite not being difficult, you still learn a lot of lessons from them. Good for relaxation time, for those of riding our minds pretty hard at work. I can understand how there's a pleasure in conquering a difficult book, but I personally prefer to get all the enjoyment and lessons out of a book with simple writing and interesting themes and characters.
What a load of Malarky.

Is the cup half full here or half empty ? It's both for me too, but it's often not aggression.

I think it's pretty normal for a boss to tell a joke as an effort to show calm and relax his/her employees. It's a good leadership attribute. I've seen women bosses do this - often. Most are not trying to assert control, but rather to fullfill the role most employees deserve - a boss whom shows strong leadership yet is approachable/approving/inspires/empowers.

I myself am cautious joking around when the bosses are present - not because of a lack of desiring control, but rather as a sign of respect to others and to myself. I want people to know I take my job seriously and rarely does joking around all the time accomplish this.

Interestingly enough, when I lose respect for the "bosses" I tend to joke with them more, but again not for control or aggression - rather to lighten the weight/mood under the circumstances - the respect for the person is not lost even though respect for the persons role has been.

So is joking or a lack of joking a form of showing aggression/submission or is it showing respect and caring ? I drink the half full glass thank you.

I've been reading these kinds of studies for over a decade and the more your read, the more you live the less you believe BS articles like this.

If your interested in the motive. Money, Name Publishing etc etc.
Read John Robins "Diet for a New America", it's interesting how all the facts in life are sold to corporations for a reason.

T.
What do you hate not doing?
Are you trying to prove your better than me with that joke? Am I supposed to sit here and take that sort of abuse?
If a single wrong transaction can make you lose a lot of money, monitoring the outputs will always be too late, right?
If the list is so small then list them all instead of pointing to the 'big fish.'

This gives rise to the very real concern that the automated 'systems' that inform and execute on behalf of the 'few' may in fact wield too much control over the decision making process.
The post is dated 2007-04-07 18:35:22, which is almost 2.5 years ago. I suppose the world moved on since then.

I found the post interesting. Coincidentally I just used one of these number to letter sites last night, looking for an 800 number to buy. Didn't even occur to me that they hadn't just brute-forced the solution.
Ask HN: Best links or comments of the day or week?
Hi, I've just found two useful HN links:

http://news.ycombinator.com/best
http://news.ycombinator.com/bestcomments

Is there an easy way to filter the best links or comments from 1, 2, ... 7 days ago? Don't you think that it could be a time saver other than the anti-procastinating settings in the profile?
http://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&q=market+failure

My guess is it's doing as well as any social science, probably better.
"track the indices"

I believe you mean that their managed funds use an index as a benchmark.
I think you are right and have Worse-is-Better to the post. We are still telling and learning from 2000 year old stories so it probably doesn't hurt to play dress up :-)
Some days science just takes the fun out of things.
The easiest way to 'catch up' with stuff from a while ago is to go to the 'news' page, then follow the 'more' link several times.

I know of no way to go beyond the end of that list though.
Even if you had a "I need to get this resolved NOW" option that costs $100, I'd be delighted. I've had one false positive and I was never able to get it resolved and I never knew why it occurred. I'm not a huge blogger, I just run a few small unique sites that all adhere properly. I don't even know which site at the time was to blame.
Bug in HN Noprocrast (if you use noprocrast don't read...)
There seems to be a simple way to get around the noprocrast feature, the only thing you can't do is edit postings / vote but you can still read the site, comment and submit.

The way to do it is when you get the 'back to work' message hit the '/logout' url, this will log you out, you can now view the site like you normally would. Then when you want to comment on something or reply simply click the link, make your comment, go through the password prompt and your item/comment will be submitted.

Hit /logout to continue the cycle.

Fix: Logging out during a noprocrast timeout should be disabled.
From the fact that I laughed out loud at this headline, I conclude that nreece has aggressed against me! I demand restitution!

Or, er, not. :)
I think it would help if he understood how these trading systems work in the first place. You can't even compare writing correct code with monitoring the profitability of the system. It's like comparing football with driving.
It's about using the right bait for the fish. The promise of an effortless long/easy/healthy life is pretty solid bait for humans.
Decentralization of _why's Projects
That started for me about fifteen years ago; as I said at the time, "When Science Fiction starts getting boring, all that's left is the Real World." The only times now that I read more fiction than nonfiction is when I am stressed out and need to relax more than think.
Why is price-unification good? Price-competition is better for consumers.
Because passion is a key part of hacking, and the way the question is phrased might be a good way at approaching some of the issues that arise when conceiving a start-up.
Our preference for a story line is known as the narrative fallacy; it's perfectly okay for entertainment (and there is nothing wrong with entertainment), but importing it into other things is a recipe for error. The article doesn't talk about nonfiction though - the title was changed for HN from "Good Novels" to "Good Books".
When you say 'I think it's because there don't seem to be a whole lot of new ideas for me to find in fiction anymore' you're on to something.

From http://hnlk.wordpress.com/2007/09/24/you-mean-its-all-been-w...

The last script writer/novelist on Earth committed suicide. Every conceivable plot had already been conceived, written and published. Every story remade twice over, rebooted, adapted, re-imagined, reinterpreted, stolen, sequeled or turned into trilogies, double trilogies or franchises that kept going where they had gone before. Every cartoon and comic book hero had his/her own movie trilogy.

The chain of suicides, however, had not started until the advent of the Internet Plot Database. AJAX programmer and Star Trek fan Ziek Omeldoff in writing what appeared to him at the time as an innocuous little web application, did not know he was in fact heralding the end of literature, especially the genre of science fiction that he so loved.

The IPDB rivaled the famed Wackypidea in its community driven model and Goggle in its search capability. Every conceivable plot was indexed, cross referenced and searchable by idea, time, setting and a myriad of other simultaneous parameters.
I tend to agree with Alaric here, but reading this inspired me to take a look at design patterns, ironically.

I've never studied design patterns per se in my two decades of programming (mostly lone hacking) and I think it's about time I took a brief tour of 25+ patterns I'm likely to stumble upon or reinvent anyway, and learn names for them. Then I'll question everything and use my own judgement, as usual. (Is there a good non-dogmatic book on the subject, or does http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Design_pattern_(computer_scienc... do it justice?)
It always bothers me when people complain about the number of jobs. Saying we need to create jobs to end the recession is like saying we need to create supermarkets to end the famine.
It's like someone took a 17th century Dutchman and brought him to 20th century America.
Avid biker and long time lurker here, and I believe that (a) this article belongs on reddit, not on HN, (b) there has been a recent flurry of submissions with no connection to hacking or hackers and a low barrier to entry that generates inane discussions, (c) telling someone to downvote is itself trollish, because to rely solely on the downvote to express one's opinion is to expect them to remain silent and accept the opinion of the masses, and I suspect the parent is making a statement about the recent voting by the masses on HN.
I cannot stress how important this is! Matt, if you can give one thing to the AdSense team, let this be it. $100 a call, $80 an hour, whatever it may be. If I'm out $1000, I'll pay $100 to try and get it back (especially if I stand to lose $100 within a week of waiting). Snail customer support when it concerns accounts that hold money is not good.
good question!

I came to this site thinking there were hackers here - boy was I wrong...

I am not sure if pg realizes his hacker site is becoming a generic and mainstream news server. Before your know it members will all be arguing over Meg Ryans 3 headed child.

vamoose!
T.
I hate seldom being able to do anything about hating not doing something I want to do.
Do you realize that the reasoning you provided could be used to justify any submission, and therefore is unsuitable to use when deciding what belongs on HN?

A hacker should be able to tell apart a scientific argument that rules certain stories in and others out from empty rhetoric that appeals to emotions.

As an aside, hackers' concerns are not the same as those of people doing startups, and it's a mistake to equate the two. Lots of people involved in a startup are not hackers by any stretch of imagination, and vice versa.
The novel is finally waking up from its 100-year carbonite nap. Old hierarchies of taste are collapsing. Genres are hybridizing. The balance of power is swinging from the writer back to the reader, and compromises with the public taste are being struck all over the place.

About damn time if you ask me. Maybe I can finally emerge from my genre fiction bunker. The world is confusing enough without novelists "vaguing it up" for the critics. Perhaps not all difficult novels have nothing to say (beyond "Look how stylish I am"), but most do. That particular emperor's in his birthday suit.
Indeed, Gawker has been covering the Times' questionable trend pieces for over a year now: http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Agawker.com+new+york+ti...
Which is where his entire opinion fails. Google may be purchasing ad space, but THEY are defining the price. They are also earning profit from my ad space. On top of that, apparently they can refuse payment for past money owed if they wish. It's ludicrous and there needs to be a way to communicate with our "customer" to get them to pay their "bill" (or, you know, reinstate an account we have with them).
Oh joy, gimmick accounts. You can keep those to reddit, thanks.
Erlang programming is like this all the time.
Was that really a game about the spread of influenza?

By GlaxoSmithKline?

I'm not sure if "sheesh!" or "yikes!" is more appropriate...
That's what I do. I wonder if there is a better way. May be that filtering submissions X days old could be useful and easy to implement.

This site is addictive for me and I would want to check it only once a day or less, without missing anything good.
NYC Helmet, I’m Giddy With Excitement
Do you realize that a comment from your hn name is a logical impossibility?

From the hn guidelines:

"What to Submit"

"On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity."

"Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic."
Been here long?
Oh yeah, software state machines are silly, considering that microprocessors are very efficient state machines. It's funny how algorithms that make perfect sense in Assembler can become so slow and convoluted in an HLL. Coroutines, continuations, and GOTOs are some remedies for this high/low-level disconnect.

I wonder, are software FSMs ever really necessary?
I've evolved a self deprecating style of humor, mostly because I like to make people laugh without unintentionally stepping on anyone's toes.

Does that make me a dissociative schizophrenic in a power struggle with myself? (actually, after typing that out, that kinda describes who I am to some extent. "whoa." -keanu)
You know, I saw your handle, and it reminded me of something. Maybe it'd be interesting to you.

The samurai used to meditate to on their deaths daily - they felt it gave them purpose. The idea was that you'd try to live every single day so that if you died at the end of the day, you'd feel it was a good day.

And whenever I remember this, I think a little about the fact that in not too long, I'll die, and most likely be completely annihilated. So I try to look around and take in my surroundings and appreciate them, eat a meal slowly that day, and call someone I love that I haven't talked in a while. Then I work on something meaningful and important to me. Thank you for reminding me of this.
Italy's antitrust watchdog is investigating Google
(disclaimer: I'm not a .NET programmer so maybe I'm talking out of my ass. Feel free to correct.)

One major difference between .NET thread pools and GCD is that the former are used in a high-level, garbage collected language, while the latter are built on top of C. Call me old fashioned, but if I'm CPU bound then I'm going to explore moving the bottlenecks to C first, and THEN look into parallelism if they still aren't fast enough. GCD follows that order, .NET has it backwards. (Although I hear the JIT is pretty good, and VS supports OpenMP which is nearly as good as GCD.)

There's an argument to do things the other way: stay in the high-level regime, make things parallel and buy more hardware, but this strategy is more prevalent (and useful) on the server, rather than the desktop, and in that case going to threads is just postponing the inevitable, you need to go fully distributed.

There will always be value in good, fast serial code, and nothing is going to beat C at that in the foreseeable future.
1. Why does my country have the right to be occupying Iraq?

A1. Because if the country just thinks about "rights," then the people with means can have what they want, while the people without want the meaning of have.

2. Why should my country not support an international court of justice?

A2. Everybody supports justice. Your country must believe that that court is not just justice.

3. Is my country not strong enough to achieve its aims fairly?

3A. If all agreed the aim was fair, then why the strength to achieve the aim?

4. When the leaders of a country cause it to do terrible things, what is the best way to restore the honor of that country?

4A. Collectively forget about the terrible things in that country.

5. Is it possible for potential new leaders to raise questions about their country's possible guilt, without committing political suicide?

5A. If committing political homicide, then yes.

6. Do I deserve retribution from aggrieved people whose lives have been ruined by actions that my leaders have taken without my consent?

6A. According to the aggrieved people: yes.

7. How can I best help set in motion a process by which reparations are made to people who have been harmed by unjust deeds of my country?

7A. Open a commercial franchise and employ those people. Sell those employees DVDs and iPhones.

8. If day after day goes by with nobody discussing uncomfortable questions like these, won't the good people of my country be guilty of making things worse?

8A. I don't know, because day after day everybody constantly discusses questions like these, yet they are good people and their country belongs to them. Maybe you belong to the country, and maybe you are good because it's inconceivable to you that you could be any other way.
My wife and I toured Dachau today. While I don't have answers for his questions, his questions help form an answer to my own: is humanity 80 years wiser, or just 80 years older?
Wherein Twestival screw us over with their egregious unprofessionalism.
Sad but true it's a real life business model that works.

People really click on those links and buy the advertised mediations. Sometimes only a few per thousand but if you send a million of emails...

Most of these life style drugs are not real medications like the stuff sick people need. Also most of them are cheap generics or even counterfeit or fake drugs. These might be even dangerous.

That's the reason the only channel you can sell them is outside the proven medical sector.
I'll ignore your snarky comment and quote the same guidelines then:

"A crap link is one that's only superficially interesting. Stories on HN don't have to be about hacking, because good hackers aren't only interested in hacking, but they do have to be deeply interesting."

"What does "deeply interesting" mean? It means stuff that teaches you about the world. A story about a robbery, for example, would probably not be deeply interesting. But if this robbery was a sign of some bigger, underlying trend, then perhaps it could be."
The last administration in Washington FOUGHT against science: Stopping stem cell research, blocking basic research into global warming (and solutions), etc.

California tried to go it alone on stem cells, at least.

We get what we vote for.
Will the Real MySpace Users Please Speak Up?
Of course, if you have concrete questions to ask the candidate that gauge their problem solving ability, motivation and attitude 5 minutes is not enough. If you are only looking for a likable candidate for a technical position, you are doing it wrong to start with. But then if you're a marketing type, like Seth Godin, you probably can't tell good and bad developers apart without working with them. So maybe somebody else should be making these technical hiring decisions.
Yeah, except for the fact that the person had been with AdSense for a year and there was no recourse after the trigger was hit.
8. You write a blog post about burnout.
I did something similar at Arbor; single producer, multiple consumers, high-volume message buffer (individual TCP connections off a monitored ISP core network). When I got in the door, it was SYSV semaphores. Don't ever use SYSV IPC. We needed an event loop, so we could do fine-grained timers. Instead of using locks, we did a distributed commit scheme (using an atomic increment), just as if we were synchronizing over the network.
Google doesn't have a phone support for Adwords either. That's another story, though. Google wouldn't have Adwords customers were it not for AdSense, so I think your point fails in that sense. Google "traps" your money, whether make legally or not, and you never see it again unless you manage to appeal "correctly." Furthermore, there is no proof whatsoever that Google returns all of that money to advertisers. I've never seen a trace of evidence they don't just mark that as profit.
It's a shame that he doesn't paint something more compelling than ketchup. Photographers can create truly astonishing work based only on what they get through a lens. With his technique he could produce even more impressive and thought-provoking images, and that would be worth much more artistically, IMO.