skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The genius of Perl is... CPAN? Huh?

Perl has some very ingenious design features (most notably regex literals, which I'm pretty sure Perl had first), but a collection of modules -- no matter how sophisticated -- is not genius. It's very useful, perhaps more useful than anything else in its class, but it's also very obvious.

Access to CPAN across multiple languages is the main thing that makes Parrot interesting. I don't mean to say it's not useful, just that genius is the wrong term.
It's so social! promote yourself as a presenter/show/dj/artist, i like it!
Oh dear, looks like someone had a vivid flashback to 1998.
What does "the genie is out of the bottle" mean? Does it mean: it is now possible to do X.

If that is the case, then the "genie" has been out of the bottle to do a variety of criminal activities for the duration of this last recorded leg of human civilization.

Isn't the whole point of having an enforced civil order to whack the hand that reaches for the bottle?

The plaintiff's points were quite clear and reasonable.

"In fact, I'd be willing to sign a copyright assignment form allowing them to hold the text for this specific purpose."

Sounds like 'the olive oil' business model.

http://www.superchefblog.com/images/marlonbrando_godfather.p...
foobar / fubar is military slang
I could be over simplifying but this theory doesn't seem to stand up to basic scrutiny.

If Siegel's theory were true than people wouldn't die from lack of sleep. At least, not if they were given enough energy to sustain themselves without going dormant. But that doesn't work, people do die from lack of sleep. So how can someone make the argument that sleep isn't serving some vital purpose?
Communication isn't a human invention.
Can anyone familiar with the scripting world give a quick rundown on what cpan has that equivalent tools like setuputils.py don't have?

I'm not a perl guy, but have found cpan to actually feel like a library - you get differences in quality and no standard approach to anything but it's a vast resource.

Should other platforms emulate it? What are the key features they'd need to emulate?
Welcome to the wonderful world of queueing theory (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Queueing_theory).
Sending astronauts to space also is a clear sign your space program is real. It is also retarded in most cases.
You're joking, but that'd be more affective genuinely delivered than "So, what do you do?"
Loving mixcloud.com - definitely one to keep an eye on!
high-quality man hours ... expected to actually produce

So, a bit like these velocity points in Pivotal Tracker, only... even more detached from reality?

I'll let you in on why measuring mostly anything related to code in weeks is wrong: It promotes short-term thinking and code debt, not unlike what we have seen in the banking blowup.

Yes, there are classes of tasks that can be solved in a week-timeframe. But those are not normally the ones that make or break your project.

For a small, contrived example: You can hire a low-skilled worker to provision new servers. You can then measure how many servers that person gets done per week.

Or you can hire a high-skilled worker to build infrastructure for provisioning servers with a mouseclick.
This will take months. But once finished you have saved yourself an ongoing full-time salary and can assign the high-skilled worker to other tasks.

Good luck determining that high-skilled workers "weekly velocity", though...
What does "the genie is out of the bottle" mean?

What I meant was that since digital content is trivially copyable and since DRM is circumventable we have to learn to live in a world where anything that can be digital is likely to be copied.

Sounds like 'the olive oil' business model.

I'll have to ask you to explain that since I have not seen The Godfather.
Gates Foundation aims to facilitate banking to the poor
I have been testing this while it was in beta and I loved it to every bit. Nice and sleek. With so much interesting content it will definitely be the next big thing!
If you don't agree, name your guess and be ridiculed.
How 78% of NFL players face financial ruin within 2 years of retiring
Six of those were mind-blowers, but the solution to one should be obvious to most hackers.
I've asked this question before, and though I haven't gotten to the point where I could direct you to the best place to start, it would probably be in one of these books:

E.T. Jaynes, "Probability Theory: The Logic of Science"

Judea Pearl, "Probabilistic Reasoning in Intelligent Systems"

Bayesian Data Analysis, 2nd ed by Gelman et. al
Online Casino
http://www.gamingguide.net
Just been trying this out. Loving the music. Sometimes it's difficult to figure out which track you're listening to.
I have been using http://play.it so far - it has mainstream streaming music. Like a jukebox, but allows you to skip a certain number of songs per hour. No radio announcers if desired. It also allows people to create their own streams out of their library.
Emulate having 16000 different modules all capable of doing something useful.
A simple change could dramatically improve hospitals and American health care
Soon after he left Ohio and returned to California, a black parent from Shaker Heights went on TV and called him an "academic Clarence Thomas."

Perhaps part of these kids' problem is that they have parents who think that being compared to Clarence Thomas is an insult.

Such theorists often cite the 1994 publication of The Bell Curve, which argued that blacks are intellectually inferior to whites, as evidence that negative stereotyping of African Americans still exists.

I don't think any of the critics, nor the author of this article, have actually read The Bell Curve.
Ramming Microsoft down IT's throat
I think Thomas Broyer's comments in the post are a good rebuttal. It's also important to note that even ppk appears in a comment to consider writing a more constructive post, after further reflection.
Please, by all means, elucidate your "non-PC" ideas, with relevant, broad-based (not cherry-picked) evidence.
PHP: Trimming excess whitespace in form data
Great stuff. Good business model.
As a note, CMU wanted Gates to be here so badly that they literally kicked the campus police out of their building so that they could tear it down and build the Gates Center. The campus police now reside in a building that is almost off of campus entirely, a few streets away.

http://bit.ly/DQr0J
Especially if you're doing things like operating on people:-/ No restoring from backups, or rolling back to the latest working version if you fuck up.
It is probably not that difficult to propose something better. The problem is that the current solution is implemented in IE, Mozilla and Webkit. A new solution, however much better, stands the risk of never being implemented in IE. And even if it is implemented, it will take years bere it is reliably supported.

This is the dilemma the HTML5 people have to deal with.
Amazon’s growth is shaking up retail
"Understanding a pointed finger may seem easy, but consider this: while humans and canines can do it naturally, no other known species in the animal kingdom can."

So chimps can't follow finger if it's beneficial for them? Or dolphins or crows?

My friend was afraid that someone might want to hurt her dog by feeding him something nasty, and since there is much more right handed people she taught her dog to avoid treats given with right hand. Dog gladly accepted treats given with left hand.

At first I was amazed that dog can discern between left and right side of human or the world. That's not something that comes easily even for humans.

After the dog refused to take treat lying on the inside of my left hand I turned the hand by 180 deg along wrist-elbow axis and placed treat on top of my hand. Dog accepted the treat without much hesitation. Dog did not understand the concepts of left and right, just relied on placement of the thumb on the human hand he saw.

That's how I circumvented her little security measure and hacked into her dog. ;-)
And I suspect that the better repayment rate has a lot to do with social pressure

Thats certainly a large part of it, but there are two other things that tend to help out:

1) If one person can't pay back, the rest of the group helps.

2) The promise of bigger loans in the future.

I agree with you about the interest rates.
They don't have access to a strong magnetic field (except the earth).

When you assemble ferromagnetic atoms together one at a time they tend to line up with each other, even if the applied field is weak to nonexistent. This is why the orientation of the atoms in an iron bar aren't random from one atom to the next: instead they form "domains" where all the atoms point in one direction.

If you are building a tiny enough iron bar it's probably pretty easy to have the whole thing come out as one domain. And bacteria aren't very big, so the bars of magnetite that they're building inside themselves are pretty small.

Are you suggesting they are aligning the magnetic moments of the iron atom by atom? Is that really possible?

Absolutely. This is how all crystal growth works. One atom at a time. You may not be used to thinking about chemistry in this way, but that is what chemistry is.

Of course, you shouldn't think of the bacteria the way you think of human model-makers, consciously assembling tinkertoys. That kind of tedious fiddling is for people like us, who are long on understanding but short on design time. The well-designed bacterium uses chemistry instead: Metaphorically, you throw properly shaped tinkertoys into a bucket and shake it around and they assemble themselves. ;)

In fact, if you take a liquid and chill it below the freezing point, what usually happens is that crystals start to form in more than one place, and then those crystals expand atom by atom until they bump into each other and fuse. For example, this is the reason why there is more than one magnetic domain in the typical iron bar. If you grew your iron bar under perfect temperature-controlled conditions from a single seed crystal, you might be able to grow an entire bar with one domain. That is what the bacteria are doing, but they get to cheat because the bars they are growing are so small, so they get to quit while they are ahead. :) If you try to grow a meter-long, centimeter-thick bar like this, you'll find that you've got trouble with temperature control, trouble with impurities, trouble with rust (as I said), and that because you're operating at a temperature above absolute zero there's always some randomness going on, trying to scramble your work.

Having said that, it might be possible for humans to do this. We do similar things with silicon every day. The chips inside your computer were cut from a single crystal of silicon 25 cm in diameter and perhaps 1 meter long:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boule_(crystal)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_crystal

But understanding the detailed atomic behavior of ferromagnetic materials is actually quite a hard problem. Lots of difficult thermodynamics. Amusing chaotic systems problems. I basically hit the wall in my graduate course on the subject. ;)
Great to listen to - looking forward to all the new music I'll discover.
Summary:

- Scribd is a publisher, not a service provider, and therefore should not be granted the DMCA's safe harbor provisions.

- Scribd knows that they publish copyrighted material.

- Scribd profits from publishing the copyright material.

- When a content creator requests that content be removed, Scribd retains a copy of that material for use in later identifying copyrighted material, without the permission of the content creator.

- Additionally, Scribd allows authors to upload their works to the copyright protection system in order to be recognized when uploaded by a user, but Scribd requires the content creator waive their right to sue Scribd before they may do so.

- Case law originating on the west coast is popularly interpreted as granting companies like Scribd safe harbor provisions.

The book that resulted in the case, "Stocks and Bonds, Profits and Losses", is a children's book written in 1984 (published 1985) which is now out of print.
Not entirely relevant but this is the latest in a long ling of Gamasutra articles I've seen in the last year and.. man, they do a really good job.
We are already working on ways to solve this, just didn't make it into this release.
Ask HN: Review New Social Network - prospectvista.com
Hi Hacker News,

I'm the lead developer of a new social network - Prospect Vista - that is launching today. I'd like you to review it.

Prospect Vista is a business social network. It allows for businesses to advertise for free with image, sound, or video advertisements. It has many of the networking features you'd expect a social networking site to have - businesses can network with each other, comment to each other, have a public forum, etc.

However, it is also useful for consumers. A consumer can create a request for proposal. For example, if a person needed a lawyer, they could send out a request to all lawyers in the community. From there, lawyers could respond and the consumer could select the best response and go from there. Businesses can also create requests.

We built it to be monitized from the start. For $10 a month or $100 a year, businesses can upload many more commercials, have longer/better quality commercials, have a public forum, have requests delivered straight into their account, and see some statistics on their profile (who's viewing their profile, by gender, by industry, and more).

For now, the first 100 or so people to register will get all of the premium services for free, for life, because we want to help spread the word.

We started building this in June of this year, and are officially launching it today. As the lead developer, I'd love for you to tear it apart and find issues. You won't hurt my feelings, I'm more interested in making a good community.

Thanks in advance!

http://www.prospectvista.com
It was meant in the sense that if he/she is a parent at the moment than he is a poor one. I would never tell someone not to have kids, it would be hypocritical on my part.
abennett exists only to submit itworld.com stories which are frequently just FUD: http://searchyc.com/user/abennett?only=domain&sort=by_da...
Clickable links -

http://www.prospectvista.com

http://www.prospectvista.com/profile/view/4 - My businesses profile

http://www.prospectvista.com/profile/view/2 - A profile with a video

Thanks!
Link to actual class: http://oyc.yale.edu/economics/game-theory/
Facts About Entrepreneurs That Will Likely Surprise You
Things we never need to hear at another gamedev conference
The article says the site was formerly home to the campus mulch pit. Are they lying?
I can't say with certainty now, but when I was a genetics student in a fairly decent University, I remember we laughed at "The Bell Curve". It wasn't considered classic scientific reading.

There are a million places to start if you want to find a critique, but you can start with Gould's "The Mismeasure of Man".
Ask HN: Are "Rate my Start-up" posts OK on HN?
I saw quite few "Ask HN: Rate my Startup XY" posts here lately. Are they considered somewhat spammy by HN crowds or is it a valid form of getting feedback here by general opinion?
Slightly off-topic, but what does it say about Bill Gates that his foundation is called the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation?
If your child has an average or higher IQ, then IQ stops being a factor and attitude, values, and work ethic play a bigger role.

No. If you're willing to believe IQ is genetic, you must also believe IQ is is a stronger factor than work ethic - otherwise Jews would've been selected for work ethic instead. It certainly sounds like an easier variable for evolution to optimize.

Not sure if you got my point about Koreans. If they have genetically above-average IQ, what selective pressures contributed to it? That's one possible way to test your explanation of Jewish intelligence.
I would like playing a recording not to pop-up in a new window. YouTube doesn't pop the video out.
CPAN isn't just a collection of modules. It's the world's largest collaboration platform. Sourceforge.net, launchpad.net, and github.com are just puffs of smoke by comparison.

CPAN is 16,000 interoperable modules, most of which have comprehensive test suites AND test results across dozens of platforms. CPAN is a tradition of testing and test reporting. CPAN is a dialogue between users and developers.

Lots of languages have reasonable libraries. Some even have de-facto collaborative communities. But only Perl has CPAN.
Yeah, Francisco's post is linked at the bottom. But don't mistake this rant for useless. Francisco's thoughtful post was largely ignored. PPK has some pull in the community, and being pissed off may have an impact that rational conversation would not. Note that the HTML 5 editor was the first comment on the post.
Don't know what the official word is, but personally I find them an appealing point of difference for HackerNews. We are, after all, meant to be a crowd more interestd in the cutting edge of technology and I quite enjoy being able to provide feedback to developers in various stages of production.

Plus I've discovered some seriously awesome sites through them that otherwise would have passed me by.
In a way I believe that was part of the entire point of HN in the beginning!
Thanks anyway. I figured it was worth a shot.
Database Storage Performance Testing in a Hurry
They are generally funded by coalitions of multinational telecommunications companies (AT&T, BT Group, Telstra, Bharti, etc) and built and maintained by specialized marine fiber-laying companies.
As I was clicking on the link, I was thinking "I wonder if it's just another one of those bogus stories about the Kauffman Foundation statistics." Yep.

(Bogus because the surprisingness comes not from the numbers themselves, but from confusing the concepts of entrepreneur and startup founder. The first paragraph is a prime example.)
We've looked into both solutions, pop out and inline player, but the one thing we want to achieve was continuous playing whilst browsing the site. Doing this inline, is technically more difficult, so for now, we made it pop out.

Certainly will look into inline though.

Mat
I think that is a particularly cowardly approach. 99% of the proposed spec is not implemented in IE. Has no plans to be implemented in IE even. To say, "Oh, but we'll look ineffectual if we don't have at least one thing that works in IE" is to say that you'd much rather appear to be a useful spec than to actually be a useful spec. Something that sucks this bad has no place being encouraged.

If the spec had been sane from the start, Firefox and Safari would probably already implement the sane version.
What's your plan for dealing with potential lawsuits from the RIAA?
The point here is that the current API is basically a double negative.

Rather than saying "I want to be a drag source" and "I want to be a drop target" you are saying "I don't want to not be a drag source" and "I don't want to not be a drop target".

It's bad design.
It would be interesting to know how well the black students did in fields of study that are typically (on average) normally higher for blacks. Such as music, dancing, and sports. There is a difference in races, why do we assume the difference is bad, and that's only on average, there are always exceptions. So maybe it is the attitudes of the students and the parents, but what would change those attitudes? That's the next question to pursue, I think anyway.
I love mixcloud.com, everybody should join up!
awesome app - keep up the good work guys
First thing I wanted to do was figure out exactly what the site was. I clicked "About" but my question was not answered. Instead I had a screen with only a video on it, the first 10 seconds of which are nothing but a logo.

Something as simple as "The YouTube of Radio" on that page would've answered my question in a fraction of a second, and I would've been back to the home page to see if I wanted to use it...
The number of fake/new accounts created to comment on this post is incredibly disturbing.
Perhaps this is a tangent, but the notion of ...creating a cozy home for unproductive people... resonated with something I learned from a kiteboard instructor, of all people:

When I was learning to kiteboard I was out one day for a couple hours, had a good session and decided I was ready to get out of the water. I wasn't exhausted, but I was getting tired.

My instructor came speeding up next to me and asked me what I was doing. I explained I was getting tired and wanted to head in. He tossed his really nice new kiteboard my way, told me to give him the old beat up kiteboard I was riding and to go back out. I was reluctant but he pushed me and I caved in. My session went from good to great, and I think my kiteboarding skills improved more in that extra hour than in many of the days prior.

Later that night I was telling my instructor how well I did on the newer board and how I had been ready to give up for the day. He told me "Sometimes you just have to push yourself that extra 5%, even when you think you can't." That statement has been a guiding principle throughout my life ever since.

Any time I feel like I'm in too much in my comfort zone, not challenging myself to learn new things, or feel I'm incapable of doing something, I remember my kiteboarder's adage and try to push myself just a little bit more. So far it seems to have worked well.
I kind of like how hype machine does it. But even still, the player disappears when you leave some pages.
Instapaper does it for commercial use. If the iPhone app does it client side, then it is probably legal. If it's server side, probably not.
FCC calls for formal net neutrality rules
Yeah, kinda skeezy.
Protecting the powerful is a feature, not a bug
What amazes me is that in relatively short lists of things on internet I often see duplicates. May this be lists of jokes, arguments even photos. Copies are usually close to each other, often on the same mid sized page. Is there something in creators psyche that causes having a blind spot on such duplicates?

Example from this article:

4. More than half (51.9 percent) of respondents were the first in their families to launch a business.

11. Entrepreneurship doesn’t always run in the family. More than half (51.9 percent) of respondents were the first in their families to launch a business.
"My goal would be to teach them how to get through school with the minimum possible effort"

This is commendable. You don't have to agree with what they are teaching, but declaring school as evil sets a bad tone. Instead of learning from your mistakes, your kid(s) just inherit the animosity. Unless you enjoy homeschooling* then schools will always have aspects of it you won't like.

You don't practice the same learning for the 12 years. You reach a level and move onto the next challenge. Just like no one takes 12 years of handwriting or 12 years of algebra. A good school would recognize you've mastered the subject and send you on to the next one. I finished 3rd grade reading 5th grade books. In the 4th and 5th grade I was outside playing basketball while the rest of class had to complete their reading assignments.

I agree that the importance of being a kid seems to be lost on the current generation. Schools are expanding and playgrounds are being paved over. 24-hour news has turned child abductions into a national epidemic instead of what they really are, isolated incidents.

* I don't mind homeschooling, but I don't have the time nor expertise to commit to it.
Like any long running system, it's the pause while the garbage gets collected and data is rearranged for more efficient access.

The animals that "never" sleep are actually just failing-over to the other processor while the GC happens.
Arguing that C attracts the smartest developers is pure trolling, there is no possible way to back up that assertion.

I would argue that the smartest programmers are always attracted to whichever tool is best for whatever job they are doing, be it C, Perl or VB. (Ok, maybe not VB).