skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If you guys keep this up you'll have a nice coffee table book by the end. I just hope you're taking some high quality stills. Nice work!
Yes. lionhearted's example illustrates quite well the reason today's schools are generally incompatible with good education.
Even Google didn't become Google until they hit upon the whole adwords/adsense idea which wasn't even an original idea of theirs. In the early stages, world changing ideas are probably more found by intuition than logic.
Don't knock Kai's Power Tools man ... at the time it was one of the coolest things I'd ever seen.
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Yes, most programming is a matter of solving a sequential design problem - what comes next in process of building this structure? Threaded programming are more like solving a logic or algebra problem - given certain initial conditions, what could or could not be the case?

I'm not sure whether we aren't good at threaded programming or whether threaded programming is inherently harder.
You're both right. By separating the Javascript from the HTML, you make it easier for the site to degrade gracefully. (Though you still have to design specifically for graceful degradation if you're serious about it)
I agree (as much as I can without actually being a designer), and I think a lot of people have lamented the loss of Fireworks when Adobe gobbled up Macromedia. It's also worth mentioning that Inkscape is a good tool if you're on Linux or Windows.

That said, regardless of how mediocre or abysmal Photoshop might be for graphic/web design, it's what most people seem to be using for it these days.
I still use CS2.. many of the printers I've worked with in the last few years still use Illustrator 9 and photoshop 7
Wow. That's exactly me.

I'm a self taught(obsessed?) programmer, barely finished high school, quit collage the first month. And I just started with Arc Lisp. It feels so right and has improved my programming in other aspects. The good thing is that now I'm in nerdvana doing what I love for a small but cool company.
Is it just me or is it sad that they seem to be blaming the entrepreneur's for not wowing the judges. TechCrunch was the gate keeper of the event, it is their responsibility to find the game changers.

Don't blame the entrepreneur's because you forgot to post in the guidelines, that your business must change the world or won't be accepted.

I have a hard time believing that people how are trying to change the world appear like that from the moment they launched.
This is on the front page: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=828992
Thanks for the reply, that's too bad that it doesn't exist, but I appreciate knowing now instead of looking for it all the time. :)
I think the model we use is wrong. My current belief is that the probability of races and deadlocks occurring is a function of the amount of shared data and that conventional shared-everything threading implementations make this far more common than it ought to be. In its extremus this points to a distribution-capable asynchronous message passing architecture á la Erlang, or at least something like Hoare's CSP.

The related criticism that there's too much mutable data is correct in many ways, but can also be seen as a way of reducing the "data frontier"; if it's immutable then there are no concurrency implications.

Now, that said, transactional models don't fit well into that mental model. There can be problems with them--write sync was mentioned in the article--but they seem to be less inherently buggy.
Ask HN: What do you use to store code snippets?
Quick one here, I'm on the lookout for a web based solution to store all of my code snippets I have created / gotten from other projects / found online etc. Up until now I have used MS Word, I know I know...

I am thinking about a wiki of some sort but would love to hear any of your choices and suggestions.

I would need the the following:

+ The ability to categorize snippets.

+ A nice code viewer to quickly grab the code I need.

+ Search

+ Hosted on my server.
thanks I'll kill it. I looked. The thing is I always seem to be posting the wrong one. Last time it was sans "www" this time with. It depends on who originally posted it & what url they post. HN submission doesn't cater for this.
Yet another instance where the music industry is completely off their rocker. How do they think their product gets sold?
If someone suggests a band to me, I want to hear them first, I am not just going to pop onto itunes and buy their album.

If the music industry makes Apple pay for the song previews they either won't exist, or they Apple will pass along that cost to me.
Please note that my initial comment was a reply to a comment on herd behavior, not a statement that oak tree hacking in non-kosher. In any case, I would much rather read about oak trees than yet another retarded TechCrunch article...
Abstruse Goose: A Mathematician's Apology
In "Reinventing Comics," Scott McCloud talks about how digitized information leads to result that all our content becomes "unpackaged" from their original mediums - a comic, a piece of writing, a pop song, and a movie don't all have to be treated in fundamentally different ways anymore.

I think that in turn, this opens the door to a lot of creative possibilities for mix+match usage of media. It suggests an approach to publishing which is equally unwedded to particular mediums.
I thought that applying for a job at Google was applying for a job in advertising ...
Would you like a 3D modeler in Common Lisp?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirai_%28software%29

or, more modestly, just an MP3 player?

http://vintage-digital.com/hefner/software/shuffletron/

How about two implementations of Perl6? :-P

http://perl.net.au/wiki/Elf

http://www.nntp.perl.org/group/perl.perl6.announce/2009/08/m...
Not if you use VLC...
I tend to debug on paper fairly often. I print out a pile of code and go off to a quiet room and digging through it seems to make more sense to me sometimes than staring at the monitor does.
There's no longer a Kirk's on California. The Palo Alto location moved over to Town & Country village a couple miles away. Kirk's has a few other locations in nearby towns too, though, so I suspect it was more because the California Ave. location was getting old and run down than financial troubles.
There are two major effects going on that are hurting publishers.

1. Consumers don't need companies to move content around for them so much anymore. When companies were in charge of this job you could control them with things like copyright laws. Now you can't.

2. Advertising is being turned upside down. A lot of advertising is/was probably really over inflated anyway, companies paying a lot for ads that don't do much for them. The move online exposed publishers to more competition & easier scrutiny. The online move may have made ads less valuable too. It's complicated and opaque. Advertising always has been that way. When a business model is built on advertising, you have two points of failure: People stop reading, advertisers stop advertising. Either one kills the whole thing.

Since these two things happening at the same time but aren't really related, a lot of people are going to understand things wrong. Lately a lot of journalists that are normally smart when covering politics or wars are covering 'The Fate of Publishing.' They are misreading a lot of things. Their interest was sparked when cheques started bouncing and their articles are an insight into the kind of mistakes smart people with a vested interest are going to make.
Greg Linden's review: http://glinden.blogspot.com/2009/09/book-review-search-user-...
Because identity theft is india's major problem ?
No offense, but I had trouble reading this because I got so distracted by the inane amount of waste on day 9 (JFK->SYR->JFK). I wish the US wasn't so obsessed with the all you can eat buffet of life...
Staying on that subject of UI, why hasn't the iPhone UI been successfully copied?

Jason Fried has said that "the copier doesn't know why the original looks the way it looks.", therefore superficial imitation is insufficient.
Might not be good for the VC either, and some are smart enough to realize it. Google was VC funded but believes strongly in Data Liberation, AFAIK.
In climbing, a great property to have is to be able to identify if a knot is tied correctly by just glancing at it. Figure-8 is obvious. A double bowline is fairly easy. Not so sure about other knots...
In that light (which I think is great), your competitors might not even be web-based!
But people still buy magazines and newspapers all the time. pg, and many others, might not personally find value in that, but enough people do that it's still propping up a rather large industry. Why not sell content to those people?

Making money from advertising is fine, too. I mean, someone out there probably has an idea for advertising that can actually give more value back to the advertisers. But, I don't see any reason not to make money off of as many different revenue streams as possible: make money off the content from people that are willing to pay for it; make money from the people willing to pay for tools which will give them free access to content; make money from people that want to aggregate content (and help them to do it); and make money from people that don't mind seeing an ad once in a while.
Rethinking long tail theory
You also get more than just the content (and the medium) when you purchase software:

a) Peace of mind that the software won't harm your computer. There are situations where it does harm your computer, but at least you have someone to blame or try to seek redress from. You can never quite trust an executable file you obtain from someone other than the publisher to the extent that you can a legal copy.

b) Somebody to help you if you have problems with the software.

c) If you are really lucky, people working to make your software better even after you've already paid for it.

These selling points may not be important to a lot of people here, but they do add value for some users, and "media" types of information don't offer them.
Interesting take on netflix, amazon etc... seems to quash considerable element of Chris Anderson's arguments with real data...

Will be interested to see who win's netflix's competition too...
Would've loved, say, a dozen of these lasers every time I visit relatives back in Taiwan.
Where is the "silicon" in Silicon Valley?
How Should Mac Apps Be Distributed?
Actually identity is a HUGE problem in India. Each department from the DMV equivalent to the one that provides subsidized food to the poor to the passport office require different forms of identification. Since corruption is frequent and bureaucratic bullshit as rampant as anywhere else, this makes getting anything that requires govt. involvement very difficult and expensive for poor people. The hope is that these IDs will replace all forms of identification and store information that will let all these departments use the same card.

By the way identity theft is a huge problem too but not in the way that you think. The government subsidizes a lot of stuff for poor people (sugar, kerosene, cooking gas) and naturally there is a per person quota. Crooks use identity theft to claim this stuff on behalf of poor folks and sell it at higher prices in the market. Although the problem has become significantly less serious since India liberalized its economy (due to various reasons), it is still a significant problem.
Never trust a man who thinks every paragraph of his blog is worthy of an individual permalink.
This does inside seem strange. There are several different uses of music at play. Incidental music within film, ads etc needs to be paid for as one artist is benefiting from the work of another. Trying to get end users to pay for this is clunky and perverse, however. Surely the onus rests with the appropriator (i.e. the film maker).

30 sec song previews are a completely different beast. They are ads for the music. Why ask Apple or others to pay for promoting your own product??
http://www.tiddlywiki.com/

It has tags, search, and there are many useful plugins (you may want to have syntax highlighting: http://tiddlywiki.org/wiki/Syntax_Highlighting).

It's all javascript so it runs locally in your browser. No need for a server. But you can't also host it on your server if you want: http://tiddlywiki.org/wiki/Server-Side_Solutions.
Why is the section "What's New in Python 3" the last section?
I studied Philosophy and Political Science in college and I hack for a living. There's nothing that says you must have a formal education in a particular discipline to do something as a career.

I say pursue the discipline you have the most interest and ability in.
Microsoft Sues "Malvertisers"
It seems like it's a feature of the blogging engine he uses. All his posts are marked up as such. It is easier to make specific references that way.
Strechable, breathable, and washable circuits
Poll: Is the digital music 'revolution' over?
Reading reviews about how companies at TechCrunch50 supposedly weren't 'world-changing' left me wondering about the music world.

Is this it? I've been waiting for the labels to collapse; the haven't. I love Pandora, but it still caters to the labels. Is that the end to the digital music revolution: Labels continue to collect royalties, we get iTunes and Pandora?

Has the paradigm-shift I've been waiting for happened, and I just didn't see it?
I'm so sick of this change the world bullshit. Most of us are just trying to get by.
Could someone summarize it in a paragraph or two? I've skimmed the comments here but it doesn't help a massive amount - too many details. I don't really care about seeing it if it's down, but what is it?

(Edit: http://feedblog.org/2008/01/18/sublime-text-high-level-navig... seems to have a summary of sorts.)
[8:26pm:~/dnscache] DIVISION:tqbf [0:9]% nsping -t 0.005 192.168.1.254

NSPING 192.168.1.254 (192.168.1.254): Domain = "local", Type = "IN A"

- [ 2 ] 109 bytes from 192.168.1.254: 135.227 ms [ 135.227 san-avg ]

- [ 3 ] 109 bytes from 192.168.1.254: 81.386 ms [ 108.306 san-avg ]

...

Not at AT&T apparently.
Palm announces first quarter results:  164.5 m net loss, 823k phones sold
With respect to game entities, the industry flirted with inheritance hierarchies when they started using C++ in the mid-90s, but in this decade it's mostly shifted to a compositional approach where an entity is just a structure that ties together different components.

In my latest game project I made two major decisions about entities that really helped later:

-Representing entities as property lists + a unique id.

-Generating some of the entity logic based on state transition systems I make and export from QFSM.

The first part means that I can start with JSON as my map format and reuse them at runtime without a difficult "parse" step, by having the spawn code just dump more fields on top of the original object. There's some clunkiness in that I end up with a lot of potential for name collision, but so far it hasn't become something dangerously complex.

The second part is something I'm pretty proud of, as it came from the realization that the major problem with entity state is not the states themselves, but the transitions between states; those have to be kept well-formalized or you lose track very quickly. Implementation as an FSM is not exactly correct because an FSM navigates its way through the entire graph on every pass, while an entity fits better with a continuation-style approach, where on each frame it starts with a transition to use, does processing within that transition and logic to choose the next one, and then releases execution until the next frame. If I ever want to do multiple transitions in a single frame that's possible simply by calling transition() recursively.

Generating the code to choose a transition means that I barely have to think about that part: I draw up the graph, export it, and then add some lexical macros to my code to wire it up. I decided to use this system for the main loop as well as entities as it gave me more guarantees about how the code path progresses, the timing of different events, initialization/cleanup, etc., and the results were really good - the code factored itself quite naturally and I'm experiencing an absence of many types of bugs that normally haunted me in the past.

The next thing I want to try, which I'm not doing for this game, is to generate code for managing components as well; I have a lot of boilerplate for registering and unregistering the components at spawn/despawn right now, and the components aren't formalized very well; they tend to manipulate fields on the entity somewhat abusively. If I can clean that up, it'll probably be even easier to work with.
I am really annoyed with this memo. Not that most of the startups were good or bad at TC50. Likely bad. Just the researcher or commentator philosophy to harp on people who are at least doing something. Writing about it and interviewing people is one thing but to take action and build a business is extremely difficult.

Until Sarah does something (not even important) but anything, she should keep her opinions to herself.
They want royalties even on 30 second samples
Just tested it under wine, the basic functionality with the 'minimap' seems to work fine, haven't got round to testing macros etc. though.
> but I'm not writing an API - I'm working in a living structure where the map format and drawing format may change from day to day, and I don't want to make updates in half a dozen files if the rules for aiming change.

I find that I am always writing APIs, and it's not always clear which is going to be 'public' or 'private'. That is, I generally work bottom-up, and my lower-level classes present a sensible API that I can work with directly, e.g. in irb. This makes the design of higher-level classes easier, if I've done the low-level API correctly.

> I want a single "aim" method that behaves differently based on type.

Hm, you mean like _char.aim_? Where char may be a Monster, Soldier, or ?
Excellent point,

It's worth having Objects represent a particular hierarchy of characteristics that you would like to concentrate on and to allow other characteristics be represent by containment and list objects. I've programming in c++ w/ QT lately and it seems like it actually has most of what I've gotten used to in Ruby if I represent a significant amount of the data structures with hash and list templates rather than trying to represent everything with the class construct.
Brilliant use of ANW's "Process and Reality" (considered by many as a meta-physical text) providing philosophical mappings to Clojure's approach of state, time etc.
Pretty much every synchronous protocol on the Internet benefits immensely from parallelizing. Compare mtrr to traceroute. Bulk DNS lookup is almost entirely I/O bound, and so async sockets are pretty optimal.
Rubinius 1.0: The Ruby VM That Could
Kids: Never trust the guy who offers you free candy.
The use of actors with mailboxes that annoys the author is:

1. Take a message from the mailbox (that may have been queued for a long time).

2. If the mailbox still has more than N items, then throw away the message.

This is a really dumb way to approximate a fixed size mailbox, and doesn't allow for an immediate refusal.

The questionable Scala code is pulled from recently written O'Reilly book on Scala. I haven't read it myself, but it's probably not as good as "Programming in Scala" (Odersky et al), which covers Actors+Concurrency in Chapter 30.

Needless to say, Scala also has access to all the Java concurrency primitives and libraries. I believe there's a Scala STM library as well.
Yes, it did. See the Cato report on the results here: http://www.cato.org/pubs/wtpapers/greenwald_whitepaper.pdf
Oh, that's a good call, I will have to check that out. Are you from this area as well?
Did you finally get health insurance?
Previous thread: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=827733
This is my pick for "mistaken Onion headline of the day".
The referenced blog post: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=822354
They probably took advantage of some neighborhood association clause. You would at least think that they would have asked the residents first, though.
True story of a physicist who thought he was an intergalactic sci-fi hero
"... What would a content site look like if you started from how to make money? ..." ~ http://ycombinator.com/rfs1.html

If you start from this statement and read the rest of the article I think it's a good start to better understand the parameters of the article. Post-medium publishing is an area I'm working on and I must say reading this article gives me another way to think about the problem.

"... If free copies of your content are available online, then you're competing with publishing's form of distribution, and that's just as bad as being a publisher ..."

Instead of looking how to make money I was looking at "solving a what users want" and still exploring the "and willing to pay for" bit. In this case users want "instructions" to build stuff but the cost of magazine producers is pretty high and the alternatives are primitive. Not making the "instructions" free or at least freeium-ish means a "chicken and the egg problem" ~ http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000054.html

So I'll have to explore these problems from a couple of different perspectives. Having read the article though I can think of how to get users to pay by letting others create, use or modify as well as access to tools and low-rez "instructions".

One example I can think of post-medium publishing is http://stackoverflow.com but I didn't see the same emphasis on how to make money. Just making SO the place to look for technical programming answers.

I do like the way you identify readers who pg has passed to read the article. It's like looking at the names on papers circulated at post-grad level to see who's read the latest ideas.
You get a +1 for mentioning mtr (I Googled "mtrr" but assume you must mean mtr). Never heard of it before - downloaded via MacPorts and.. great stuff - I recommend checking it out to people who use traceroute and/or ping frequently.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MTR_%28Software%29
Does anyone know if they recorded this as well? I've heard the Q&A session was also quite good.
"... When a business model is built on advertising, you have two points of failure: People stop reading, advertisers stop advertising. Either one kills the whole thing. ..."

Excellent point.
http://www.teachingcopyright.org/
A better question, perhaps:

Has a digital music revolution /actually happened yet?/
Good karma implies that they must never disagree. ;)
How Drupal Helped Attack Sotomayor or Drupal: The An Equal Opportunity Offender
Those people just don’t understand the Valley and what makes great start-ups great

What makes start-ups great is that they are your business, not you working for someone else. They are your passion not just your job. They are your nimble flying car to your entrenched competitors' oil tanker juggernaut.

Changing the world... has nothing to do with it.
"... It's why I can't give away water with advertising on it. The cost of physically distributing it will eat into any profits I make on the advertising. ..."

I can think of a lot of plastic bottled drinking water that invalidates this.
Please implement Markdown next: Markdown is such a perfect match with your email-based submissions.
At least Hacker News is a little bit more professional/moderated/on topic.
Music and the canvas element
Thanks! I did lose points for this w/o clarifying..

I run multiple sites on a single instance (we're a webhost)
We don't do shopping carts/ssl for our clients, because that would cost 1 - Small Instance/month, which is cost-prohibitive for them.

We are using the 1 static IP for our own SSL certificate.
It is of little interest to me because I have never used the Microsoft stack, but if your startup does, Bizspark is the deal of the century and comes highly recommended by some of my developer friends.
Brad Fitzpatrick needs to prove he cares about the web?

To Dave Winer?

This is ridiculous.