skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
On the plus side, we now have the green light to land humans on Venus without fear of contaminating any telepathic swamp-dwelling aliens.

The argument still holds for Mars, though.

It is fun to watch the SF writers relocate the dragons as the edges of the map get filled in. Europa is the new Venus. Clarke shifted the stage in 2010 without missing a beat.
Innovation happens spontaneously and you'll get the irresistible urge to implement it. If the promise of a patent is your only incentive then you probably won't do a good job at it.

However there are people who may not be so ingenious, and pour nothing but a lot of time and effort into something. These may be the ones most interested in patents. However in a patentless world they still have the advantage of understanding their work the best, and that gives them an edge.

That being said, I believe anyone capable of understanding another person's complicated work has the right to duplicate it. In the end whoever can innovate faster, whoever is better at making it better, and whoever understands the concepts best will come out on top.
My favorites:

A Hunger Artist [https://records.viu.ca/~Johnstoi/kafka/hungerartist.htm]

A Country Doctor [https://records.viu.ca/~Johnstoi/kafka/countrydoctor.htm]

The Metamorphosis [https://records.viu.ca/~Johnstoi/stories/kafka-E.htm]
It doesn't have to be an image -- you can put a title attribute on a <span> and still get a tooltip!
Feeding a squirrel while wearing a tank top is a good move. Draws attention away from the fact that you're trying to draw attention to your buff physique while at the same time emphasizing your sensitive caring side. Not that there's anything wrong with showing off your buff physique. Unless you're Tim Ferris, in which case highlighting how big a poser you are is probably the last thing you need. The squirrel is genius though.
Please let me know what programming language you don't need to learn to use.

I have frequently been able to debug or explain unexpected behavior in programs written in languages I had never used before. Javascript, C#, Python, windows shell scripts, PHP, ASP, Emacs Lisp, and Visual Basic 6.0.

Common Lisp, C, and bash are the only languages I had to really "learn" before I could read code. Perl is the only language I feel like I have to re-learn every single time I have to read it.
I can't even listen to music while I program, let alone an audiobook. So my suggestion is: Just give up.

Everyone's mind is different, of course, but I'd hypothesize that even if you can listen to a book and program "simultaneously", your language centers are probably doing a lot of task switching, thereby impairing your creativity. You might find that if you just focus on the programming you will ship faster, thus leaving you time in the day to enjoy your audiobook while running on the treadmill. Win-win-win.
> …or imply that it's "hatred of Microsoft"…

Especially when you know that Stallman explicitely stated that Microsoft isn't the enemy, proprietary software is.
Given that DSLs are hard, it does not follow that sticking "foundational concepts" into "components" is a better strategy than DSLs. If you write a DSL, you are standing on the shoulders of real giants. If you rely on components, you are going with the recently formed current conventional wisdom, and you are standing on the shoulders of relative peons.

Note that Fred Brooks argues for conceptual integrity, provided by a single human being, as the most important guarantee of product quality. If you use components, then you are accepting a system partitioning that has been decided many layers above you. If you design languages, then you cut out most of those layers. This gives you far more control over product quality.

Yeah, it's hard. Quality is hard. If your primary goal is anything other than quality, you will probably not produce a product with much of it. That's the real reason why there's no silver bullet.
Maybe it's just me but I don't remember any but I definitely remember the bad ones.
Giggle. It was my little joke that it used to say 'by by'. Maybe I'll have to think of a new username now the adjacent 'by' has gone. It's only an invented username. I know HN likes real names, but I didn't want to be completely public.
It shows you can still make money on the internet even if your product is full of shit.
Fair and funny.
I'm not sure what this has to do with the topic at hand. Except perhaps to illustrate why I should seek advice on "how to respond to criticism" from Ferriss: He's had a lot of practice.
I don't know what kind of answer you expect ... of course if you're "in the zone" you won't be paying attention to an audio book. The higher concern for me isn't that you'll miss important parts of the book, but rather that you'll make errors while working or be less productive.

Try listening to it when you're driving, working out, eating, etc.
That was fast. I knew OS X and FreeBSD were very similar, but I didn't expect to see GCD in FreeBSD until at least the end of the year.
The important content of a book probably constitutes only a small fraction of that book.

One could imagine audio alerts before important points.

The listener could even indicate the minimum importance threshold for audio alerts.
Sorry, maybe other folks around here know you...what have you done similar in scale to John Carmack?
Scientists claim to have mapped unconscious human thought
I have two good friends from the science fair circuit that worked for him at CSHL. They both (separately) said he has been a huge jerk for many years, a jerk of legendary proportions. Except they used different words for jerk. They said he frequently made off-color jokes and had some "interesting" theories, but that they didn't really think he was actually racist. Neither friend liked him, but they both really respected him - especially his stance on patents.

[The last time I put something like this on HN - something anecdotal and mildly negative - it was about Billy Mays, and he died a few days later. If Watson dies this week, it's not my fault...he's old.]
Now we need only wait until some enterprising person releases 'Baby Kafka' for expectant mothers.
Intel LightPeak Demo (video): 10gb/s throughput
I wonder how much software is written just for FreeBSD or Mac OS X - i.e. how much traction does this news provide for the GCD movement?
With a neuroscience background, I can attest that this is yet again another example of hyperbole in pop psychology. However, it is interesting to note that PG said in one of his essays that the human mind constantly constructs a model unconsciously of the world around it.

That rang true to me because I've always noticed a phenomenon that occurs when I go to the mall. I get extremely tired (mentally) after just 2 hours. Why? My hypothesis is that I've taken in an unusually high amount of stimuli in those 2 hours by seeing, and possibly not even being aware of, thousands of items, prices, and faces.
Yes, you're correct, that did sound more like linear types. I was trying for a simple description of why mutability can be regarded as an optimization/implementation detail given certain guarantees.

That said, Haskell does allow more than just "the state of the world"--for instance, the State monad can contain whatever you like and (if memory serves me) is a strict superset of the IO monad.
As much as I like fact-based smackdowns, this seem a bit thin to me. Particularly the big conclusion:

“The U.S. has had one spectacular achievement in preventive medicine,” he says. “It has had the largest drop in cigarette consumption per adult of any developed country since 1985.”

But didn't we just learn, a few paragraphs back that:

"For four decades, until the mid-1980s, per-capita cigarette consumption was higher in the United States (particularly among women) than anywhere else in the developed world."

So the one big comparative success in preventative medicine may just be a statistical fluke based on the larger number of smokers. How do the stats compare if you ask what percentage of smokers quit? If the percentage is the exact same the US per-capita drop would be higher simply because more cigarettes were smoked intially.

I'm also not sure being "more likely to recieve medication" for a short list of problems is necessarily a good thing if lifestyle changes could have a better effect (both from the perspective of the patient and of taxpayers funding the treatment).
Who need XSS when you can simply ask?
I already patented it -
1, a system of using a simple picture to represent a complex idea

2 a specific inplementation of 1 where the picture involves green grass.
Why does it have to be X or Y?

Spending a billion to send a probe to Mars to take a few happy snaps leaves us with one less billion to spend. At some point, there has to be a trade off -- a billion here, a billion there, it eventually adds up to real money.

Subsidize unsustainable businesses based in and around Detroit?

I'm not the biggest fan of one-gang-dig-hole, another-gang-fill-it government make-work projects, but I never thought I would have to explain that to someone defending NASA. (I suppose if you wanted to try something, you could try small business development grants. One million is 100 chunks of $10,000, which is seed funding for a hundred startups, right? Well, there's one million -- I wonder what you'd do with the other 279 million the Pathfinder mission cost. Decisions, decisions.)

Same question in Africa, really - once you've given out all the clean water, vaccines, and malaria nets you can, then what?

I'd settle for clean water, vaccines, and malaria nets, which are clearly not being implemented in a scalable manner in the status quo. (Well, OK, I'd settle for DDT because I have no tolerance for killing little kids to have environmentalists feel good about themselves.) Heck, I'd settle for feeding one kid and tossing the rest of NASA's copious budget into a volcano. That would be a net improvement of one life. (More than one, if you count the people who won't die studying the responses of spiders to microgravity and other useless trivialities we cook up to pretend that the Space Shuttle, et al, are anything other than slush funds for defense contractors.)
Hardly the point that was being made..
It seems to me that with software what the sftware does is usually just solve a problem. Patents are to protect the method of solving a problem, in RIM's case mobile email wasn't a method of solving a problem, the lack of mobile email was the problem. In software the method of solving the problem is the source code, and that should be protected, which it is, by copyright law.
Open Source CMS Application, XML-Based Image Gallery With GalleryCMS
See also:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=826628
Let me summarize as I'm beginning to think that Perl is a member of your family:

- You don't write code for novices

- You don't think language design has an impact on overall maintainability of the code, maintainability is all about the abstractions and naming conversions of the programmer.

- You would insist that any code you wrote should be maintained by a professional programmer.

- Readability of an algorithm has nothing to do with maintainability, if you name everything right the reader is a fool if he doesn't get it.

All I can do is wish you luck.
It seems to me that if there were one data source I would expect to not be consistent with Benford's law it would be polling data. Benford's law is usually seen in numbers that follow some skewed distribution. Polling data groups around maybe 45% depending on the number undecided. I don't know what I would expect, but polling extremely close races, or polling close to the election, I would expect to see lots of high digits (6 7 8 9). I wouldn't expect many 41 or 31 (those questions are uninteresting) so the 1s come from mostly 51s.

He may be right, but I'm going to need a little more convincing if someone wants to assume that polling data would exhibit Benford's law.
High speed trains don't capture the human imagination in the same way as steam trains. Volvos with air bags and seatbelts don't have the same response as 50s Studebakers.
And tunnel boring machines aren't as picturesque as 1000s of slaves chipping away at rock with stone tools - it's called progress.
Good luck asking authors to identify which parts of their book can be safely ignored.

Seriously - if you're coding then that is what you should be concentrating your attention on. Listen to an audiobook while you're cooking, exercising or whatever. [edit] mechanical fish puts it well (currently) below:
Good bank account for a startup?
Does anyone know a good bank to have a business account with? I have a some websites that pay for themselves with ad revenue, but they don't make a lot of money. Currently they are attached to my personal account, but I would prefer to have them in a separate account with my LLC's name on it.

I had a business account with Bank of America, but they charged me $13/month for having too low a balance.
What does that have to do with what I was talking about? If accomplishment matters, I'd say that Caterina's launched one of the twenty largest web sites and, more importantly, made it scalable and beautiful, and that Hunch is one of the most attractive web sites I've ever used.

The point of the post wasn't "Oh, look at me and how smart I am." The point was, "Smart people can do the same task in different ways."
Excellent! Took me a while to work out what was going on there. I'm going to blame it on the apparent removal of the comment that started it though.
People could do this for conversations too! Imagine zoning out while your wife chats away, and then, bing!, you're alerted to the fact that she's about to tell you she's pregnant! Awesome!

I'd set my importance threshold to somewhere above "I think we should get the new curtains in puce" but below "and they only cost 500 dollars".
This is an important distinction - the difference between production code that takes care of all of the edge cases that make things work in practice and the straight-forward implementation of the basic idea. But I think that's besides the point. The production implementations of TCP could probably be simpler and easier to understand if they were implemented in a similar manner as what's in this article.
This typifies the trap I think a lot of us fall into sometimes, particularly programmers. We get so caught up in trying to find technical solutions to a perceived problem that we don't take a step back and ask if what we're trying to do makes sense at all.

Why do you want to listen to an audio book AND program at the same time? If both require your full attention then do them separately and so you can give it to them.

If you really are only interested in a small number of "important bits" in your audio book then maybe an audio books is not the right form for that information. Text is a lot easier to skim read, maybe you can even find a plot summary somewhere to speed things up. Or maybe you want a heavily abridged version of the audio book where it just tells you the important plot points, but that doesn't sound like very much fun.
I guess you could eradicate traces of sensitive files doing:

dd if=/dev/zero of=DUMP

Until the drive is completely full. Rather hacky though!
Duct Tape Programmers and the Culture of Complexity in Software Projects
On Elitism
If he was porting it to the JVM, one could just as easily ask "Why not .NET?" I get the impression that his choice of VM is, with respect to his project, arbitrary and not important for his goals.
The Importance of Living Life (On Rajeev Motwani)
This is an excellent illustration of a core principle of security: anything relying on "educate the user so that they know better" is doomed to failure.
Ask HN: What would use an automatic print-and-snailmail system for?
Hi,

I'm planning a service that puts content on paper and then sends it using snailmail. Read a short intro about it over at http://eiman.tv/blog/show_article.php?id=34

What do you think about the service in general? Can you think if a better use for it than I can? Feedback wanted!
what is this ????????
I use wells fargo but they hit you with similar things if your account is low. There are things you can do to get around it if you want to spend some time talking to the teller. (something about setting up a monthly automatic transfer, etc...)

I'm not recommending wells fargo or anything, but I don't think it matters that much. you are talking less than $20 a month in most cases, and with wells fargo, and I believe most banks, that includes the ability to send checks from a web interface, so I don't think it's that unreasonable.
Money spend on Aid in Africa probably dwarfs money spend on space research. Sub-Sahara Africa has swallowed more than 15 Marshall Plans with no signs of development.

Africa will never develop with external aid (it will only become more welfare dependent). The model that Africa should follow is the Chinese model. Africa needs to start making stuff and exporting stuff cheaply and African governments need to be stable.

It is sad for me to see that textiles in my country (South Africa) are imported from China. The reason for this is that the government is controlled by labour unions and it costs more than twice as much to employ someone from SA as someone in China. The cherry on the top is that unemployment is 40%+.

In summary: 99% of Africa’s problems are caused by African governments. You can throw money at the countries but development will not take place until the governments are removed.

> I'd settle for clean water, vaccines, and malaria nets, which are clearly not being implemented in a scalable manner in the status quo.

HIV/AIDS is the big killer. People may die from Malaria or TB but AIDS is the underlying cause of 90% of the deaths. Even problems such as Cholera (which is caused by unclean water) a large part of the people die because they have decreased immune system.

As another example – the most recent Cholera outbreaks in my country were at border camps for illegal immigrants from Zimbabwe. The cause of these deaths may have been Cholera. But the true root cause of it is Mugabe.
As with most things in life bank fees like this are more often then not are negotiable. Make an appointment with the branch manager or business specialist at your BoA branch and voice your concerns about fees like these, and how they would make it difficult for you to continue banking with them.

For anyone thinking of opening a separate account for business the first place to start would be the bank you use for your checking/savings account. Not only do you have an established relationship (if only in paper form) but the will work harder to please you if there's a chance they'd lose your non-business accounts too.
$ cat foo.c
#include <stdio.h>
int main(int ac, char av)
{
int x = 3;
x = x + x++;
printf("x = %d\n", x);
return 0;
}
$ make foo CFLAGS=-Wall
cc -Wall foo.c -o foo
foo.c: In function ‘main’:
foo.c:5: warning: operation on ‘x’ may be undefined
$ ./foo
x = 7
I spent a lot of time researching this and chose the HSBC Business Direct account:
http://www.us.hsbc.com/1/2/3/business/checking/direct-checki...

For savings, ING has a new business savings account that I'm looking at:
http://business.ingdirect.com/products/ofb_savings.asp?s=Sav...

Hope it helps!
> but you can pay people to produce Free Software, lots of people do.

Yes, of course. But the subject here is not whether or not it is possible to pay people to develop free software, the subject is whether or not paying people to develop closed software or software under a different license than the GPL is somehow morally repugnant. I think it isn't and it shouldn't be, and any person that pretends to say this with high standing in the open source community is not helping open source but hurting it.

It is insulting to large numbers of programmers that do both.

If de Icaza has decided that you can't change microsoft from the outside but that he stands a better chance of effecting change from within - and he seems to be successful in that - then that's fine with me and it should be completely his freedom to do so without being spoken of in derogatory terms by RMS.

> This is promoting Open Source (though only as a subordinate of proprietary software) but not Free Software which, for some people, is a very important difference.

So what ? Let the marketplace decide which is better. If 'real' (as in gpl'd) open source is better then that should stand by itself. Personally I will not touch any of microsofts code with a 10 foot pole because I suspect a catch, but I'm not going around calling people names.

It's the worst way to handle this sort of thing. The best would be to judge the offering on its merits and if there ever is fall-out from the licensing issues to use that as the reason to brand the code 'unusable', not to resort to personal attacks.

It's petty, mean, childish and a whole bunch of other things beside, and it hurts the open source movement as a whole.

This is not a war, and to resort to words like 'traitor' attempts to divide and hurts all of us.
Mutability and immutability aren't really on a continuum. They represent different semantics. Haskell embeds mutability semantics within immutability semantics by using monads. So mutability is "100% available" in Haskell, you just have to tag it as mutability.
Consider the patents held by MPEG LA (MPEG codecs, Firewire, H.264, etc.) These patents represent years of R&D work by their member companies and describe inventions that are non-frivolous. Surely these companies deserve some kind of protection for their work to encourage them to continue to invest in such research and publish it.

Let's take the case of H.264. Why is copyright not sufficient enough to protect their innovations to whatever degree of protection they choose (using licenses like GPL, MIT, or whatever they choose)?

The problem is there isn't just a patent on H.264 there are hundreds of patents on various aspects of it. This isn't done to protect the years of R&D it is done to create a patent minefield for any future competitors.

They don't let other more well understood industries operate in this way. Ford can't patent round rubber tires, hydraulic power steering, and using friction for braking. Good luck making a car now, but this is exactly the challenge a next-gen video codec would face.
I can't find it, but there was a guy doing the same thing (but with .doc as well as pdf) about a year ago on here. I think he had some sort of monthly subscription option as well as a 'per-use' fee. Try finding out how he got on.

[edit] This is apparently going to extend into Sweden: http://www.freepostit.com/Home.aspx
Funny Money: Rule Change Makes Apple Revenue Appear Larger
Well, you're a good sport about it.
Just curious, what is the point of this post?
(Really sorry if this is already discussed, but I don't have time to read 300+ comments in depth)

How about allowing users to set two thresholds for themselves: (1) show only comments above X; (2) begin greying out below Y

What precisely X and Y are or could be I'll leave to the experts.

But this would let everyone decide their own absolute or relative threshold of comments they want to see. Those of you with plenty of time to spend on HN can have fairly low X and Y, whereas those of us that only want to spend a little time on HN each day can have just the popular presented to us. Voluntary herd membership (or rejection), if you will.

Variant along the same lines: An absolute number account setting indicating "I want to see only the N highest-scoring comments/parents".