skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I understand what's meant by this statement, and I agree with the intentions, but it oversimplifies matters. It's not necessarily true that the next-least-convenient path is invalid.

For example, suppose I want to argue against the statement that we have been visited by poorly-hidden aliens. I could go find all the compelling arguments that we have been so visited, and refute them. Alternatively, I could examine all possible poor hiding places, and demonstrate that there are no aliens in these places. I can refute the arguments, or I can disprove the conclusion.

Both of these approaches are valid. One is necessarily more convenient than the other, and thus is not the most convenient.

The larger point (that refuting a poor argument is meaningless) still stands on its own, and that should be a law in political discourse.
Pimsleur method is the best I've used and I've used a lot of them. Complete all 3 levels and you'll be nearly fluent.

http://www.pimsleurapproach.com/
Mint.com Founder Happy To Sell To Intuit, VC Conspiracy Wrong
I've heard that people love it but haven't made the leap yet. What does it do that makes it significantly better than grep?
No, ZFS has checksums. It detects errors but can only repair them if the data is mirrored.
I've been thinking about that for a while, if only because if there was an official place for meta-discussion, I could make people stop cluttering the real threads with it. On the other hand, maybe this feature would make the site more attractive to the kind of people who like meta-discussion, when I want it to be less attractive to them.
Like it not, MS Office is the de facto standard for basic tasks in a modern office.

If Open Office were really good, it would have replaced it instantly because it's free.

However, people keeping using MS Office for a reason -- and, as someone who has prepared more than one long complex document this month, that reason is that OO isn't up to snuff.

Commence downvoting!
The language examples you gave deal with communicating with us. Animals have been shown to communicate with each other as well, and we don't yet know how complex those communications may be.

Also, apes do exhibit evidence of a concept of 'self'.
But it also serves as an advertisement for fitness, fitness in terms of energy and thought you can devote to staying in fashion.

Ahh, but not entirely. One of the cardinal sins of fashion (at least for heterosexual men) is looking like you're trying too hard. Spending too much time trying to look good (or, say, buying a subscription to GQ) is actually an indicator of low status since only low-status men need to expend effort on looking like they're not low-status -- this is what my favourite fashion site magnificentbastard.com calls "The Principle of Artful Dishevelment". You want to indicate that you have naturally exquisite taste (and plenty of money) but that you're not sufficiently status-conscious to spend an hour on your hair before leaving the house.
One interesting line out of many in this article:

[WoW runs on] over 13,250 server blades, 75,000 cpu cores, and 112.5 terabytes of blade RAM, [...] 1.3 petabytes of storage.
yeah. and the water thing only works if you can target relatively high-value customers. But at $0.50 or so a 'click' if you are at a tradeshow or some other concentration of 'high value' customers, it's probably a better deal than paying as much for adwords.

Adwords itself is an example of how some companies are willing to pay tens of dollars per 'click' for advertising. Branded dirt won't usually work, but it might at a nursery tradeshow.

But yeah, nothing but 'free content' is going to work if you are spamming the masses with your advertising. But, I believe that many content creators are willing to create content to advertise themselves. Especially in the technical world, writing has almost no hope of paying the same as technical work, but people still do it.

I suspect the problem will not be that nobody is willing to write content for free, but that we need a new way of vetting the good, credible content from the bad.
I've read this story elsewhere and as a UK citizen where this alternative to parking meters (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pay_and_display) have been standard for a couple of decades it's somewhat amusing to read of the confusion and chaos that having to walk to the ticket dispenser and back to the car can cause.
If you have more of anything than other people, they want some of it and will use equality/friendship/politeness as a means of demanding it.
"Owning property," at least in the United States, is just a fancy term for describing renting property from the government. The price you pay for the property buys you the contract, property taxes are your rent, and anytime they feel like it they can evict you (eminent domain). And like all landlords, even those as generally hands-off as the government, at the end of the day, they make the rules.
Can anyone guess how much Mint's founder will walk away with? (from crunchbase it looks like they took about $30M in funding and sold for $170M)

I've always figured $10M was walk away (from life) money. ($2M to buy a decent house - $8M to invest so that even with a modest return of 5% you'd still be making about $400K a year)

I'd say that's a great 2 years of work, I don't need Google Money and I'd be fine with that.
Thank you. Good site too.
OCaml's syntax is denser than C. There is less to type when you write f 1 2 3 vs f (1, 2, 3), and it gets even better once you look at the larger features like function definitions.

Bit surprised you think Lisp is more dense. I just wrote a Lisp compiler in Lisp, and found it more verbose than ML (although only by a little bit). I find the lack of syntax in Lisp very annoying, particularly since it's not necessary -- you can write macros over an AST, which is how camlp4 works.
I don't think it would necessarily be a net win. The kind of code that really matters (e.g. techniques for suppressing fluff posts, trolls, and flamewars) I deliberately don't talk about or release publicly. And if some random person wrote, say, a feature-request feature for HN, I'd probably have to spend more time cleaning it up than it would have taken to write from scratch. Plus I'd have to turn into a project manager. Life is too short.

I am happy to incorporate specific fixes, though. I greatly appreciated dfranke's warning about the security hole he found. And if someone wanted to try profiling HN in order to make it faster, I'd be interested to hear what they discovered.
He makes it clear throughout the article that he knows nothing about fashion, and even admits in the first paragraph that he has no interest in clothing or fashion:
"I want simple, good-looking apparel that covers my nakedness and maybe even makes me look attractive."

Here's a partial list of reasons people wear what they do, which the author misses (though some are mentioned in the comments):

- To enhance one's body (appear more attractive, muscular, thin, etc)

- To indicate a lack of concern for fashion.

- Peer pressure to conform to what others are wearing.

- Self expression of any number of things.

- Aesthetic taste.

- A sense of moral obligation (modesty, patriotism, etc).

- Entertainment.

- Marketing.

- Safety.

It's interesting that the author fixates on the motivation of status signaling above all others.
I agree with this assessment of the situation. I still think that what 37signals is doing is way more interesting (not just their business, but their blog, and the community they're leading), but who am I to criticize either of their careers? They've both had success beyond my wildest dreams.
I don't think that's it. I love learning new stuff but if the new stuff is somewhat like but still different than the old stuff I have a much harder time giving it its spot.

For instance, in python I'm not usually tempted to put ';' at the end of a statement, except on lines with function calls. For some weird reason that f(x); goes completely automatic.

And every time I see my fingers do that I have to remove it again, and plenty of times I simply miss it.

It's like a violin that you've gotten used to over the years, the next violin may be a very good instrument but it will never be the one that you have this finely tuned connection with that you built up over the years. That takes years!
To me, the most striking thing about this is that the HTML 5 spec is that 'no man or woman has given substantial feedback before' (to paraphrase). HTML is critically important to the infrastructure of the web and you'd expect an army of people publishing reasoned critical feedback.
Help StackExchange With Colors
This would be even more interesting if it pulled some of the "shiny lights" reward mechanisms that MMOs (and casinos) have going for them. I'd love to be able to hit a "you did 10 write-test-fail-write-code-pass cycles in a row" achievement, or something similar. It would only be truly addictive if the points you earned had some sort of in-game use, though--perhaps you could spend them to raise your questions on StackOverflow, or "buy" coding tools for free fom participating companies? Or perhaps companies could use them as a metric, and give programmers salaries proportional to their code-karma? ;)
Actually, that seems exactly right. People do exaggerated versions of what they're afraid of to get over the fear all the time. Phobic about being near snakes? A class that cures you will involve handling snakes, rather than merely being close to them.
Thunderbird is a shame and it was left behind by Mozilla, just try to fill a bug and they will tell you it's a feature... may be in 100 years it will add a pair of features.
My screen is something like an 8-foot diagonal (I use a projector, and a screen that pulls down from the ceiling). Our couch is maybe 6-feet away from the screen. So yeah, it is big enough ;-)
Well, since some of it is useful, give that it's own spot and leave the flag and kill options in place to control the meta discussion should it get out of hand.

Just like in wikipedia there is the 'talk' page, it's out of band but it is not out of control.

That seems to be a good middle ground.
why is what 37 signals does cooler? what do they do? they sell software and have slowly scaled, they aren't trying to go public or take over the world. They aren't even that innovative on the web.

there are probably hundreds of companies in an almost identical situation.
In the same vein, AdoptACon.com - trade prisoners like playing cards
VW Redefines car with a 170-mpg diesel hybrid
The DoubleClick Ad Exchange: growing the display advertising pie for everyone
Well I might contribute something to the world, that is neither my flesh nor my bones, maybe a poem or a song or a widget, or a scientific discovery. What would anything in this world, that's not human, contribute besides its flesh and bones?

Joy to man? I in no way advocate killing people's pets.

But to answer your question, I would rather die quickly sooner then slowly in agony later.

I would much rather die quickly much sooner, them be ripped apart by predators, or die of starvation or a horrid disease, or exposure.

And as to dying now, I have a distinct concept of now, and while animals can plan for the near future, I've never known a dog who's plotted for years.
A lot of .dmg's have that same thing, but as someone else mentioned, doesn't solve the whole problem. Naive users will drag it there, but then also drag it to the dock.
I think you're putting undeserved of weight on the term "revolution":

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

Regardless I don't see how your quote is "out of context"; I don't see anything in your original post that would indicate the sale benefits anyone other than the owners/executives of the company.

Your reply reflects precisely the attitude that the author of the article is calling out; that many founders set out to create a company for the sole purpose of selling out. The reason this is harmful is that in most cases the sale is to a company who is uninterested in the new, innovative ideas that the original founders incorporated in the product (the same qualities which drew in early adopters and other customers).

This has a negative effect on the overall progress of the industry involved as it prevents "big changes" (I'll try to avoid loaded terms) from happening and allows stagnation to continue.
Thanks. I'm ridiculously excited.

Yes, that's very true, and probably the single largest reason why I went with no-starch press rather than just distributing a pdf or the mediawiki. (well, that and it was no-starch who approached me, not the other way around.) Heck having copies printed probably wouldn't be that expensive, if I printed up a few hundred at a time. (I have access to cheap labor, a machine shop, and ebay. Tell me I couldn't bind a book myself.) They are a tier down from O'Reilly, but worlds above self-publishing, in terms of credibility.

I wonder if you could use the same incentive that we use to pay authors (which is to say, personal credibility and authority) to pay gatekeepers? I mean, there's nothing inherently expensive about doing it, you just need a person with good sense, good ethics, and a reasonable knowledge of the subject matter at hand.
The RAM is the standout relative to everything else -- that's a lot of RAM.
This is a more accurate description although it's not news as this has been policy for about a year now!
When an email client arbitrarily adds a "Re:" it messes it up.

I'm pretty sure Thunderbird uses the Message-ID and In-Reply-To headers to create the threads, not the subjects. But some people don't always use the Reply function, or Reply to an old email when they want to start a new conversation. Maybe Gmail has some logic to get around these limitations.
A man who does not care what he wears spends no effort on what he's wearing. A man who wants to appear like he doesn't care what he's wearing may spend effort on what he wears.
Personally, I have no respect for Donald Trump. But that doesn't mean I should respect Curtis Jackson or 50 cent or whatever. I am going to follow his advice and be intensely realistic -- he just packaged the worst stereotypes about being a young black male and sold them to dumb white suburban teenagers that were looking for some thrills. Now every black male (including president Obama) has to worry about everybody thinking they used to be a drug dealer in their youth. If I was black I would hate his guts. Now I just don't respect him.
Wow, great to be able to search so easy for trademarked names!

A couple of days ago I've received my first DMCA notice by Hasbro for my free Android Game "Connect Four Online". Reason was that the name "Connect Four" is trademarked.

Too bad, it was already in the top-30's and now it is suspended. I hope for google to accept a new version with a changed name and update it.
If they don't know where it came from, how do they know it's older than T. Rex? And I thought dinosaurs were basically reptiles, which keep growing their whole adult lives, so how could a young adult be almost full-grown if it never stops growing?
Er, that's no man or woman from Microsoft, no?
Sup (http://sup.rubyforge.org/).
Their linkbaiting is brilliant.
Ignorance?
Be a Jetpack Test Pilot
Yes, one should always be able to count on the principal authors of scientific journal submission being the ACTUAL authors who decided what to include and what not to include. Any other situation sacrifices scientific integrity for convenience (or bribes).
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=829258
Chumby Guts - the innards for $99
How FlightCaster (YC S09) built multi-platform scalable apps on Heroku (YC W08)
Emacs crashed on M-x mini-map-mode, in Clojure Box.

I pasted the link content into .emacs, downloaded highlight-current-line, and changed the font to Courier New (don't have Consolas). Do you have any ideas?

edit: As far as I can tell, it crashes even with clojure-mode not loaded. Emacs 23.0.91.1, btw.
I had a thing as a kid written in Turbo Pascal that converted RBBS email to Proboard email and back again. I got a call about it from some BBS operators back in the day. I think it is safely abandoned, was insanely specific, and of use to maybe 2 or 3 people on the planet.
> Life is too short.

Possibly. But if you really want this to go I'm sure if there is one spot where you'd have no shortage of people willing to help out it would be HN.

Also, where would Linux be if Linus had decided that he'd have to make each and every change himself ?

I understand that you wish to keep the 'secret sauce' secret, that makes good sense. No need to make it easier on the spammers to figure out how to bypass the various features that keep the junk in check. Otherwise HN would turn into a useless linkdump in a heart beat.

But stuff like article tagging would be tremendously useful, especially in combination with a filtering function.

The feature request thread has lots of good ideas, if you want I can spend some time to make a digest.

I realize you have lots on your plate but that is precisely the reason why 'life is too short', if the end result of that is that HN feels stagnant (and in some ways it does, even though I can see there is some subtle tuning going on behind the scenes and by the number of restarts) then that seems like a lost opportunity to me.

HN - and arc - are clearly your babies and you get to make the calls, but I'm sure there are enough people of caliber here to help out, and if you tell them 'not good enough' when they present a patch I'm sure they'll try harder, that way you could simply do the quality control end of that.

It'd still be work, but a lot less work than building all those features yourself.

Another thing that came to mind the other day is maybe you do not want to risk eclipsing digg by building a HN that is too good, is that a factor here or rather not ?
I agree 100%. Like the peacock's tail, if it was easy, it wouldn't be worth doing. It has to be hard to look good while not trying too hard to look good. It's all part of advertising exactly how high your social IQ is.
For large code bases, it's worth setting up OpenGrok: http://www.opensolaris.org/os/project/opengrok/
This is too bad. I was really hoping that Mint would be able to handle some things in a slightly sane way now that Intuit was involved. For example: I get paid $X per month, direct deposit to my savings account. I then transfer $Y to checking, and $Z to investment accounts (NOTE: not buying investments yet, just staging it). According to Mint I now have an income of $X+$Y+$Z for the month, and have spent $Y+$Z. When I by investments that amount also gets added to both income and expense totals.

It seems to me that doubly entry bookkeeping was invented at least 1000 years ago, and handles the whole funds transfer thing just fine without misreporting income. I certainly wish the Mint team could do so as well.
That's a really good one actually.

Just being able to measure how many - and which - flags were 'good' flags and which were not would already help.

I flag 10-15 stories per day and very occasionally a comment (maybe three times in all so far or so), but I'd have to track all those stories to see if they end up getting killed or not. Most of them are easy calls, the outright spam. But there are border cases where it would be good to know exactly what the guidelines are.

Especially since 'bad flagging' seems to be a problem, if there is a lack of clarity there then by resolving that 'bad flagging' as an issue might go away.
I read the parent comment out loud and my wife said "Wow, what a waste!"

Which was kind of funny. Now, can we figure out something fun to do which will also make use of this type of capacity for something good?

Actually, I have several ideas. Let me get back to you...
For Haskell, there's also this: http://hackage.haskell.org/package/jsmw It's _sort_ of like a JavaScript backend.
Just because they're not planning to change it doesn't mean they won't.

My experience in a small startup acquired by a large multinational is that all the unintended things -- the processes, procedures, standards, overhead -- add up to massive unintended change.

Example: we had an integration process between salesforce.com and our core product underway when we got bought. Sales guys would be able to hit a button and orders would flow directly into our product for execution -- eliminating overhead, reducing errors, and improving yield by allowing better forecasting and delivery.

The large multinational conducted a review, and told us that in order to avoid running afoul of corporate standards, we'd have to migrate our sales tracking to SAP, and integrate with SAP instead. The project was put on hold. The hold grew longer when it turned out that currency issues in the large multinational's SAP implementation would prevent us from billing certain foreign customers in their local currency. Then we realized our budget wouldn't permit us to use this radically more expensive product, and there wasn't a magic SAP budget out there for us to tap into. A year later, we were still using salesforce.com, without a connection to our core product.

I'm all in favor of acquisitions, and this will probably be a great thing for mint -- contrary to (say) the rant from 37signals today. But don't expect that it's not going to change things.
It is. If only their products or support were. They were snippy with me when trying to get support for Basecamp (which kinda sucks, but we're too lazy to move elsewhere) because my email replies weren't working. Turns out it's because they come from an Exchange Server account. You're basically dirt to them if you don't use gmail.

They've built a rinky-dink startup entirely on the back of their blog about how to do startups. That's ironic, but brilliant.
Absolutely. Fashion isn't just about what color you're wearing.

It's also about what cut you're wearing. Mass-market retail (walmart, kmart, jc penny, et cetera) sells clothes in a few sizes, and generally the sizes that most people wear. They're extremely generalized, and don't really fit most people well (even loose clothing can fit well - it's about how it hangs on your frame).

For example, most people can wear Levis jeans. Most people look decent in them. But they don't truly fit them.

Go for a pair of G-Star Raw jeans, you'll pay eight times as much - but they will fit you perfectly.

And if pink is considered a status symbol, they've never seen the bridge and tunnel crew ;)
I spent a not-insignificant amount of time a few years back writing poker bots. It's one of those projects that's really easy to do, but really difficult to do well. It didn't help that I dove right into coding without the benefit of having read any of the academic research on the subject (i.e. http://poker.cs.ualberta.ca/).

I will say that the time spent made me a better poker player and taught me some nifty things about AI and game theory to which I wouldn't have otherwise been exposed.
You are absolutely right here. I guess I want to point out that I was not wrong but simply vague (I guess I need to have a bit more peer review on these things). I never said to put it in the cookie, I did say session (I meant server side).
Not really. That's 1.5GB per core, and 8.5GB per slice. I'd say that's right about average, especially for a gaming server.
What you all (including the OP) are missing is that "Real Men Wear Pink" is a pun. Pink is not a color, it's a brand name -- for a very high-end men's fashion line:

http://www.thomaspink.com/
I was sort of just speaking for humans as a whole. Personally I don't think it's ethical. I'm a vegetarian.
Isn't this exactly what a lot of people wanted to hear?

Disruptive technology is exactly that: disruptive.

We are so used to thinking, "New is good, older must be bad," that we forget that we can evolve to the "best of both worlds". Some changes take a little time. Give this baby its 9 months to be born.
Someone joked a while ago that they suspect you are tailing the logfiles to see who votes you up, I thought it was rubbish at the time, but after seeing this comment and the number of votes I'm beginning to doubt ;)