skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Growing up, I was always sad that my parents signed me up for sports camps but never for Magic: The Gathering camp.
I found some words which are not commonly used (ken - range of knowledge; Ex. beyond one's ken).

At least they're words not used by anyone I know.. but maybe that says more about who I hang out with than whether they're commonly used..
To clarify for other readers: I believe he means the JVM, not the Java language.

I haven't been keeping up with Mono's development, but if they have C# 3.0, it blows away Java right there. C# 3.0 is a functional programming gateway drug, but encourages high readability even for non-functional developers. However, that's not a fair comparison, as there are other great JVM languages such as Scala and Clojure.

As for Mono or the CLR vs the JVM, there has been a lot about this written on the net. You can find discussions about garbage collection, module systems, JIT performance, security, library support, etc.

Here's one example: MSIL is more rich than Java Byte Code. This makes writing compilers easier and can lead to better performance via unsigned types, objects on the stack, unsafe pointer use, etc. See: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/95163/differences-between...

I'm not an expert on the CLR by any means, but I do quite a bit of C# development on Windows. I greatly prefer C# to Java, but couldn't really care less about CLR/Mono vs JVM. I'm really more interested in LLVM as a compile target for interop and optimization of open source languages.
Is it possible to apply to YCombinator with the idea of starting a university because that would be totally awesome.
No offense taken! I honestly didn't expect my comment to be voted up so high. Your point in that paragraph is valid.

I was just struck by the contrast between this and when you state later on that people who attend elite institutions generally do not share where they've worked ;-)

Your essay did make a nice point though, one that I did not previously consider!
Ask HN: Reading more Ask HN posts
I found the ASK HN questions really useful but since there is no way to currently sort by only those posts; here is a easy way to have Google list them all out for you:

Paste this into the Google search box exactly:
site:news.ycombinator.com Ask HN
I think you can download them, you just need to login.
I'm not a subscriber so haven't read the whole thing, but I suspect startups were responsible for very little of that 14% of new business hiring.
>I don't think hiding comment scores will have that effect, though it might make it more difficult to recognize when it happens.

Comment scores make group beliefs far more obvious. Common knowledge of group beliefs is a necessary condition for groupthink.

>The one thing in this experiment that might (I intuit) help discourage groupthink related behaviors is hiding one's own score from oneself, because people will then be less emboldened when they're being idiots just for expressing popular opinions.

The thing we need to be afraid of is public praise or shame for writing a well-received or poorly-received comment.

>Unfortunately, this will also (I intuit) discourage people when they're being smart from as readily taking another look at whether what they've said is idiotic when others recognize the idiocy.

I disagree. When people are called out publicly for unpopular beliefs, they tend to commit to them even stronger.

Consider the following two stories. In Story A, Joe is downmodded on a comment with no replies and his low score is public knowledge. Joe becomes unhappy and stubborn. In Story B, Joe is downmodded on a comment with no replies and his low score is private knowledge. Joe wonders what might have caused so many to individually downmod his comment. He replies to his comment and says "Just curious, I noticed that a lot of people seem to be downmodding my comment. Is there some sort of flaw in my argument that I'm not seeing?"
You can add "pwn" to any you tube video to get a download link, e.g.:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=foobar

http://www.pwnyoutube.com/watch?v=foobar

Google Video also often offers download links.
I think it could be difficult to do within the assigned timeframe or the ressources that ar eprovided without completely rethinking the "University".

Something in the style of Academic Earth but much more interactive and community oriented could be very interesting. The only problem is that the content is quite expensive to produce when it isn't available through existing institutions.
In order to be censored you need to have a right to express yourself in the first place.

What sort of a right. Government given? UN given. God given or some sort of other metaphysically given right? There is nothing in the definition of censorship that says it must be an unjust and indefensible violation your widely recognised right.
Actually, if you hit yourself in the head really hard very soon after, it won't be committed to long term memory. Blissful ignorance! Now why does my head hurt?
To Ev and Biz: Click Arbitrage Tips for Twitter
Every new laptop keyboard needs time to get adjusted to. It took me about one day with the new Macbook/Pro keyboard, and since then I type quicker on it than any other keyboard. Maybe it's because the short pressing distance, or because the keys are really separated, I don't know.
> Pretty surprising, given the Thinkpad reputation for quality.

Why is that? The reputation of ThinkPads was created while they were owned by IBM. It's just taken a while for Lenovo to start screwing with the brand that it bought.
From the answers to the questions I am inclined to believe in the "made it all up" theory. But at a 99% confidence level I can reject the possibility that it was made up with a simple simulation of the type described.

How am I so sure? Well we're given all of the probabilities for all of the answers. We can therefore calculate what (assuming independence) the likely odds are of different numbers of correct answers. We're also given the number of students who got each number correct. Here is the result (I'll give the program that I used at the end):

0 right: 46 vs 32.56
1 right: 158 vs 147.61
2 right: 246 vs 273.73
3 right: 265 vs 278.71
4 right: 177 vs 174.46
5 right: 80 vs 70.58
6 right: 22 vs 18.74
7 right: 6 vs 3.23
8 right: 0 vs 0.35
9 right: 0 vs 0.02
10 right: 0 vs 0.00

The argument is that we should be suspicious because those two sets of numbers are too similar. The tails are not heavy enough. Now I admit that graphically it does look close. But if you look, the tails _are_ heavy. Is that difference significant?

We can use a confidence testing to answer that. The null hypothesis is that the distribution comes from a simple simulation and should be close to the theoretical numbers that I just gave. The alternate hypothesis is that the tails should be heavier and the middle lower.

Let's look at the middle because it is easier to calculate. Theoretically 0.55244 of the test population should get one of those two numbers correct. It is claimed that 511/1000 did. How likely is that?

Well in the null hypothesis each student is an independent observation. Each observation is a 1 or 0 with average 0.55244. The variance of an observation is readily calculated and turns out to be 0.2472500464.

The number of people getting one of those two answers after 1000 observations is therefore approximately normal with average 552.44 and variance 1000 * 0.2472500464 = 247.2500464. The standard deviation is the square root of that, which is 15.724. That puts the observed value more than 2.63 standard deviations out. at a 99% confidence we can conclude that the numbers were NOT generated by a simple simulation of the type described.

For the curious, here is how I calculated the theoretical distribution of answers:

#! /usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;
use Math::Polynomial;

my $ans = 1;

# Number from the % of students who got each question right.
for my $x (qw(.28 .26 .27 .1 .14 .61 .43 .11 .23 .29)) {
$ans *= Math::Polynomial->new(1-$x, $x);
}

print "$ans\n";

__END__

(5.295902595984e-07 x^10 + 2.07154949414e-05 x^9 +
0.000345419801607472 x^8 + 0.00322944050567802 x^7 +
0.0187445906666514 x^6 + 0.0705826597827996 x^5 +
0.174464060957845 x^4 + 0.278709766012616 x^3 +
0.273731283943492 x^2 + 0.147609870020204 x +
0.0325616632239042)
Citation needed.

To make the roads safer, the speed limit needs to be lowered to 25 on city roads. Licenses need to be suspended for running red lights and for speeding.

Instead, the cities just want to make a quick buck off of offenders. (Even this has backfired, as it turns out that cars can't speed, only drivers can, and the Constitution requires that the driver be offered a trial. Oops.)
Welcome to the RSS Ticker
Most votes are positive. That means that the longer a comment has been there, there more votes it can expect to have. Then by having more points and more visibility it has the potential to attract more points. Early comments have an advantage over later ones.

I don't understand why you assume new = shit.
Is there ?

The ultimate user experience is the one that gives a user what they want. If that is stuff ranked in a different way than someone else then by giving them that they'll feel more at home.

I think that sort of thing (extreme customizability) is analogous to what drove the PC revolution, power to the user.

The web is an exercise in bringing back the centralization of data and code, no need to also centralize the kinds of user experiences.
Is that with the XSS protection (the built in functionality) on or off?
Clickable:

http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=site%3Anews.ycombinator.com...

http://searchyc.com/%2522Ask+HN%2522

http://searchyc.com/%2522Ask+HN%2522?sort=by_date
http://press.redhat.com/2009/09/09/microsoft-and-patent-trol...

The Open Invention Network (OIN) learned recently that Microsoft was planning to auction off some of its software patents, which we understand it marketed to trolls and some other non-practicing entities. It also used marketing materials that highlighted offensive uses of the patents against open source software, including a number of the most popular open source packages.

This isn’t some fanboy’s blog, this is a Red Hat press release.
I never argued that life is an exciting ball of non-stop enjoyment. Sad things happen.

(And I may be a bit odd here, but I am not the jealous type. If you want to sleep with someone else from time to time, then do so. It's fun.)

So my point is... I'm not even sure what we are arguing about anymore.

Ending a healthy person's life without their consent "can be" less severe than intercepting their email... because life is not always 100% enjoyable? I still don't buy that.
Can we please stop using MD5?
That's highly dependent on the fractions of users using it and not using it.
MD5 is not the problem here, SHA1 is also vulnerable to the extension attack. They should use HMAC.
@old-gregg

Awesome reply! Thank You! This helped me narrow down some candidates. I am in your debt!

Edit: clarification: I didn't find a laptop with a screen that met these specs but it help me choose a desktop monitor.
Needless to say I still stand by what I wrote. And I take this as further evidence that I had struck a chord.

No, you are just wrong. As dons told you, "There are reasons why Haskell is not popular. These aren't those."

(You didn't "strike a chord", it's more like you just pressed random keys on the piano. While some people consider dissonance music, most don't.)

All programming languages must have a side-effect somewhere, or else you would never be able to see it.

This is technically true, but not on the right level of abstraction. Our current computing machines work solely on mutating chunks of memory. This makes every program one big side effect.

But just because computers work that way doesn't mean that the application programmer needs to view them that way. The application programmer can imagine that the computer as an evaluator of pure functions, and program accordingly. The runtime will turn this idealized view of computation into something our current computers can run.

But that's the runtime's job, not yours. As far as you're concerned, there is no such thing as side effects. That is what everyone is referring to when they mention pure functional programming.
Not Found

The requested URL /redesigning-education
was not found on this server.

EDIT: Hmm. Worked the third time of trying.
You are doing it wrong if you don't get paid at least 3x for every contract.

Before starting, after a significant milestone, and before handing over final code.
TechCrunch now hosted on Rackspace (As oppose to MediaTemple)
I can't seem to find any basis for this other than "entity x recently learned from anonymous entity Y that Microsoft might do something bad"

That said, the point here is that the patents in question in regards to Mono are the cornerstones of Microsoft's own development efforts. So they aren't going to sell off their ADO.NET related patents because it's the core of data access in their entire development environment.

For the scenario in which a patent affecting Mono was sold to happen Microsoft would have to auction off pieces of the .NET Framework itself and that's just not going to happen.
Thanks, that's perfect.

EDIT: Oh, and I realized what I meant about not being able to click the background: the number next to the answer should be clickable.

EDIT 2: Also, it only shows the "click the correct answer" message the first time. I'm not sure if that was your intention.
You're in completely different businesses, though. At this point, Twitter is a medium (as in new form of media). They may change their business, at some point, but right now, they have created a new broadcast medium, and they're doing what all media people try to do. Get as many viewers as possible. That's why they've had so much interest from other media companies and celebrities. CNN and Ashton Kutcher don't really understand software as a service. You're in a software as a service business.

Being technologists, I think that we understand the software and technologies quite well, but I think that it's easy for us to confuse the completely separate businesses that are being built using those technologies.

100 years ago the blacksmiths like my grandfather became car mechanics. The technologies both involved metal and fire, so the people that understood metal and fire became the people that fixed the horseless carriage. There really wasn't a mental divide for people involved in those businesses because the technologies were so similar.

In another 20 years, I think the distinction between software as media and software as a product ans software as a service is going to become a lot clearer. Until then, we're going to have a lot of confusion about this.
These are all problems (to someone), but these aren't the reasons why people don't use Haskell. You are projecting your minor complaints onto the world as a whole, and that simply doesn't make for a good blog post.

1. I have written a bit of Haskell software. I have never suffered any performance problems by using a tree instead of a hash table. O(1) is nice, but O(log n) is very small for very large ns. "You are not Google", but even Google does fine with trees. If you are actually experiencing a performance problem, try HsJudy. If this doesn't solve your real-world performance problem, then you can complain. Right now you sound like you just read the Wikipedia page for "hash table" but have never had a dataset bigger than 10 elements.

2. Lazy evaluation does have consequences, sure... but so does strict evaluation. You are trading one set of problems for another set of problems. What's nice about Haskell is that you can use strict evaluation when you think it's required.

3. LGPL is not a problem for me.

Any software I would distribute to outside users would be GPL'd anyway. Any software that is worth money to keep secret is not distributed anyway. (Not everyone is like this, of course, but like I said... this isn't a problem for me.)

Anyway, you should just say you don't like Haskell if you don't like Haskell. Instead you are trying to say that it is objectively bad, which requires more proof than your blog post provided.
I'd like to not see the score till I've voted.
I agree with you, but I've seen it repeatedly. People firstly don't understand the real differences between personal assets and business assets, thinking that because they own the business they can move things around freely.

Then people don't really, really read the fine print and understand the details.

Sometimes the fine print, or even not so fine print, is designed carefully to appear clear, and yet still not get the message across. In the UK people have started to tune out the "Your home is at risk if you do not keep up payments on loans secured against it." becuase they are hearing it so often.

It's easy to gloss over things you don't want to hear, know or acknowlege, and sometimes I wonder if entrepreneurs aren't especially prone to that.

If you listened to all the naysayers you'd never get started - there is a tendency to ignore the negative, focus on the positive, and push on regardless.
Jesus Christ, this guy needs to get a life. I write OS/systems software and I don't care as much about my OS as this guy. I've had flame wars over design decisions but seriously, my OS is there so I can do work. If I'm not doing work, it's failing. The perfect OS is just there, being invisible, helping you do exactly what you want, when you want it, quickly. Just pick whatever allows you to do that and move on with your life.

P.S. Hardware matters too. You use a computer with shitty caps made in Taiwan and you know what will happen.
No it doesn't. Vala is piled on top of GObject. Basically it's a translation tool that converts a language similar to C# to C, badly. It doesn't have the advantages of an optimising compiler, JIT and decent tool set.

Having worked with C# for the last 6-7 years, I can assure you that it's scarily fast, doesn't necessarily suck up memory and there no penis waving. People use it to get real work done, which is why it's so popular.
Science isn't about collecting reasonable sounding ideas. It is about collecting useful ways of understanding the world that have been stress-tested until we can have great confidence in them.

The paper is the first time anyone has been able to provide solid evidence about whether the evolutionary mechanism you outline really happens. It's the difference between a note in Fermat's margin saying that he has a proof but the margin is too small, and Andrew Wiles writing up a several hundred page proof. Now that it has been demonstrated how to show which mutations are irreversible, the door has been opened to using molecular genetics to provide absolutely definitive answers to questions about the evolutionary tree that we don't have good fossil evidence for.

Furthermore the ability to test specific questions about the functionality of putative reconstructions of particular prehistoric genes does a lot to improve our confidence that we're reconstructing them correctly. We've now been able to compare versions of a gene from 440 million years ago and 400 million years ago and gotten specific enough answers back that suggest we've got both versions of the gene right. Monkeys and apes split perhaps 30 million years ago. How accurately can we figure out the genetics of that last common ancestor?
MacRuby is a pretty interesting project. I'm not a huge ruby fan, but it definitely does have some syntactic advantages over Objective-C.

Objective-J is walking a similar line, and thanks to its JavaScript base it has many of the same things MacRuby brings to the environment. MacRuby probably has better immediate performance potential, but Objective-J has more flexibility in future language design decisions.

It's a good time for those of us interested in Cocoa and its related projects.
Besides, doing so would a PR debacle of epic proportions. Microsoft wants developers to use their technologies (duh). Does anyone seriously believe that they are going to stab those developers in the back after publicly promising to do nothing of the sort?
Sort of true; monads like Reader/Writer/State can make pure computations appear impure.

Making impure computations appear pure is another issue, to which monads are orthogonal. (It boils down to making sure the program can only ever see the "current" state; then it doesn't matter whether something is actually mutable. I don't have a good bite-sized explanation, but I will try to find some relevant papers for you.)
VB.NET vs C# - A 15 Point Comparison
Well the comparison between VB.NET and C# is the most debatable issue in .NET community and people treat their languages like religion. Its a subjective matter which language is best. Some like VB.NET’s natural style and some like professional and terse C# syntaxes. Lets discuss them briefly:
The "Debian shootout" suggests the JVM is consistently faster, but more of a memory hog.

http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u32q/benchmark.php?test=al...
Is it just me, or are flamewars these days just not what they used to be?
Charlie Brooker is a pretty well known personality in the UK and he makes TV shows and writes columns in this kind of ranting hyperbolic style, in no way is it supposed to be taken seriously.

I'm a fan, his shows like Newswipe and Screenwipe are worth a look if you can find a copy.

He had a great line in his tv review at the weekend, was something like "the tv show presenters had the kind of chemistry that would get a swimming pool closed for 25 years"
I had an even more extreme situation: 15 years of self-employed bumming, startups, small-business and I did very little programming.

How I got a full-time programming job:

Find industry that I was interested in.

Research company that I was interested in.

Brush up on industry and company specific domain knowledge.

Tailored my CV to be relevant to company.

Get interview(direct personal e-mail to person responsible for hiring).

Nail linked-list building and recursive tree traversal in the interview.

Show industry specific knowledge in the interview.

Get job.

Note: industry specific knowledge was as important as programming knowledge.
Also, http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/startupswiki/Ask_YC_Archive
Because Apple makes it very clear in their TOS that they don't want that. And obviously, the iSinglePayer app is politically charged. The developer of the app decided to develop it anyway, and now he's claiming he's being censored.

It's kind of silly, actually. People seem to think they have some fundamental right to be approved into the AppStore, which is simply not the case.
I don't think this story and the post you're referencing contradict each other. The difference between the magazine's audience and a band's audience at a show is relevance. At a live show, you're selling to a group of potential buyers (whether they will pay or not) who have qualified themselves just by being there. As an obscure musician advertising in a magazine, you're just trying to scream as loud as you can in a crowded channel where there's no reason for anyone to pay attention to you (you definitely don't want to prematurely optimize for this case).
The Troubled History of the Denver Airport Baggage Handling System [pdf]
There's a third one a little while down the road, having been involved in a bankruptcy you will find - especially states-side - that your credit rating is now in the basement which will make it almost impossible to do anything other than to get a job. (and even some employers use credit scores to decide who to hire).
>> "they have created a new broadcast medium"

You're in PR right?

I still think the moment twitter try to turn on ads, they're doomed. Monetizing twitter is extremely non-trivial IMHO, especially after providing it completely free for so long.

Also for most people twitter is just the network their 3rd party twitter client is using. Monetizing that is really hard.
That would be valid if customers had to use the App! If it was compulsory. But, people only use the Apps they want to, the ones they download! So, if you don't like the counter, just don't download it.

There must be a way to stop this rejection-crazyness.