skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
My brother said that go to shortcut was F11, but F11 is volume control on my mac. F11 was screen brightness on my brothers older generation MacBook Pro.

These is some of the inconsistencies that I'm really surprised to see, but kinda go hand in hand with the inconsistency with command-line from linux.

I agree with your comment about getting more adept. However, with Microsoft, I find that you learn as you go. Keyboard shortcuts are listed, menus may be longer, but show you the functions you can use. It is more cluttered, but it is a platform that allows you to learn. Macs (and of course Unix) force you to go look for the solutions. This makes for a cleaner interface, but doesn't provide the opportunity for discoverability.

Personally, I'd rather spend my time learning a new language than a new OS.
'... I'm skeptical about the idea that the current generation is in any way inferior to past generations.'
I'd say that a rating based on the number of favorites makes more sense. It's less arbitrary than the five-star system, in that it tracks the nominal level of interest in the video. People don't generally favorite a video at random, so any favoriting at all is generally a good sign as to the video's content.
From the descriptions I've seen, NeWS https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/NeWS might well've been exactly that better alternative. But as usual, Worse is Better.
http://www.yakeze.com/chat/hacker-news/

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Sounds impractical from the standpoint of making your money back. Also the idea of having an equipment free-for-all is terrible. Equipment can only be used by one person/team/company at a time, so you need to make sure there's a reasonable economy to allocate the resources fairly according to supply/demand. You could maybe set it up so that the equipment is rented at some rates, but all tenants get a certain amount of free equipment rental per month.
Yo chromeframe, I'm happy for you and I'ma let you finish but Lynx was one of the best browsers of all time.
It would be nice if the article reflected that sentiment.
The essay is less about arrington berserkers than it is about why pg writes the way he does, even though the discovery started off as a question about arrington berserkers.
Cortera: Turning The Business Credit Rating Industry Upside Down
I can't see a relationship between polymorphism and structural pattern matching. Both could be label "dynamic dispatch", but the mechanism is very different. While polymorphism can be implemented efficiently via vtables, i don't know of a method to this with general pattern matching.

Vtables means just one indirection thus no more than one more memory access. Pattern matching is like parsing.
I get a very similar feeling with techcrunch, it is as if techcrunch is the tabloid of the upcoming web culture. Rather than real journalism it is often lacking in value but techcrunch thinks it can make up for that by being first without verifying sources or even thinking about the content they are producing.
Flash got it's biggest install jumps when MySpace required it for uploading pictures.
Github Rackspace Move Is Happening This Sunday
I think a lot of hackers, myself included, have a hard time with persuasion. I've found that my first instinct is often to respond to a coworker's proposal with something like, "Here are 10 reasons why that's a horrible idea." That ends up being counter-productive, so I'm trying to learn how to suppress that instinct.

Unfortunately, people's egos get hurt easily. You can't tell them what you think. You can't disagree with them blatantly. You have to slowly and carefully guide them from a place where they're 100% correct to a new place where they're still 100% correct even though they now think completely differently about the problem. It's not easy, and the hacker in me always considers it a huge waste of time and effort. Why can't people just accept that their first idea was wrong and move on?

One method I've found effective is to just link to a few articles on the subject. The hope is that 1) the author of the articles is better at persuasion than I am, and 2) my peer's ego is more open to taking advice from an expert than from me.

If you're Steve Jobs (or Mike Arrington or pg), then you are fortunate enough to have little need for this persuasive cruft in your life. If the rest of us want any chance of influencing people higher in the pecking order, however, we need to cradle their fragile egos.
I could write that way if I had to [...] It makes the same point [...] But written this way it seems like a defense of present-day union organizers rather than an attack on early ones. [...] If I believe everything I said in the second version, why didn't I write it that way? Why offend people needlessly?

I disagree that it makes the same point. I'm sure it's intended to make the same point, but it doesn't - "written this way it seems like" == "it makes a different point", as far as I'm concerned.

The code example isn't a perfect parallel: you can cut down code but still have it perform the exact same functionality - it either follows a certain execution path or it doesn't. That's not so easy to do with writing, since there is no "hypothetical perfectly unbiased reader".

I don't think it's about offending people or not, it's about whether or not the reader walks away with the point you're actually trying to make. It should usually be possible to avoid both "offensive" and "fawning", and settle on "neutral".

Of course, the problem is that "neutral" is often the most boring to read.
Forcing www in the site url
"I really don't see why, as the article claims, the fact that opinions are subjective and everyone has a different one makes the 1-5 star rating any more useless than a thumbs up/thumbs down"

Because you're implementing a system that on paper has a lot more resolution than what you're really getting. Imagine buying a 1080p HDTV and then showing solid colors on it only - not only a waste of engineering effort but also building subsequent systems around the validity of your 5-star ratings will also be fundamentally broken.

Also, based on their data there's a very concrete reason why the 1-5 star rating is worse than the thumbs up/thumbs down. With the thumbs up/down system you have a single dimension of data ("likedness"), whereas with the 1-5 star rating system they're only getting data from people who like the video (and almost none from people who disliked it, look at the distribution). This makes the data practically useless for determining the quality and user preference for a video. Consequently ranking algorithms just won't work on the star system - the difference between video #1 and #100,000 can be an average rating of 4.8 and 4.92.

"Those are subjective and different for everyone as well"

So are movie ratings - but it's still a very useful metric to a lot of people. With a large enough sample size you get the lowest common denominator preference measure - which may be what YouTube wants.

"the problem is that people can't be bothered"

I object to the labeling of basic user behaviour as laziness or some type of stupidity. Users will behave how they behave - assigning value judgments to this behaviour just makes you a prick, and disconnects you from your users (who also happen to be your customers, yay!). If your users aren't using your system in the way you intended, you need to fix it. Trying to pawn off your responsibility in the equation as "lazy users can't be bothered" simply is a cop-out.
no, they are not 'bad on purpose'. Peter Norvig shows how to get from quick bottom up prototypes to optimized code. The purpose is to quickly and cleanly as possible get a first version going and then improve that.

Common Lisp programs make heavy use of side effects from imperative code, over destructive operations to the CLOS object system.
Yes, I'd like to go as big as possible. Perhaps this is not "sexy" enough in being a vapid web 2.0 inanity to get people on HN excited, but I'd like it to be a startup that solves a problem for people. Just turned on its head a little by solving the problem of productively, ie. not dead wood, employing as many as possible.

edit: of course I need people to run this for me - my visa allows only passive investment.
Would be a pity if Kurzweil's predictions follows the path of fusion energy - always, eternally, twenty years away.

At any rate, I question the practicality of /physical/ immortality. If we're swapping out blood and organs with effectively superior equivalents, why shouldn't we reexamine the necessity of a fully human-equivalent body? If the entire purpose is to establish life support for the brain and preserve and augment the human sensorium, then why keep blood? Or the liver? Or the stomach?
You can't betray the processor, though. At least of x86 you would need to write

condition = x < y

and a compiler would create a conditional jump.
Everything you said is right. The best way to judge a programmer is through a combination of talking with them, reviewing their code, and using a finished product they made.

With that said, most hiring managers are deluged the moment they announce a job opening. You cannot practically do a code review on every applicant. When staring at a stack of resumes you need to be able to tell who is worth the time to do an interview and possibly a code review on.

When I see a certification on a resume, it tells me a couple of things:

1. They studied at least enough to pass that test. As someone who has passed many of these tests, I am well aware that for most certifications this is a low bar indeed, but that is more than the nothing that many resumes have, especially for entry level positions.

2. They care enough to take the time to do this. I know they are doing it primarily to impress hiring managers, so again this is a low bar but it is more than nothing.

Especially when dealing with entry level candidates, it is a valuable data point in determining who gets an interview. I would never recommend making a hiring decision based on it, but, especially at the entry level, it is a good way to help pick out people for interviews and possible code reviews.
Lua a nice start, here is a walk-through that I have saved from somewhere:

- lmathlib.c, lstrlib.c: get familiar with the external C API. Don't bother with the pattern matcher though. Just the easy functions.

- lapi.c: Check how the API is implemented internally. Only skim this to get a feeling for the code. Cross-reference to lua.h and luaconf.h as needed.

- lobject.h: tagged values and object representation. skim through this first. you'll want to keep a window with this file open all the time.

- lstate.h: state objects. ditto.

- lopcodes.h: bytecode instruction format and opcode definitions. easy.

- lvm.c: scroll down to luaV_execute, the main interpreter loop. see how all of the instructions are implemented. skip the details for now. reread later.

- ldo.c: calls, stacks, exceptions, coroutines. tough read.

- lstring.c: string interning. cute, huh?

- ltable.c: hash tables and arrays. tricky code.

- ltm.c: metamethod handling, reread all of lvm.c now.
You may want to reread lapi.c now.

- ldebug.c: surprise waiting for you. abstract interpretation is used to find object names for tracebacks. does bytecode verification, too.

- lparser.c, lcode.c: recursive descent parser, targetting a register-based VM. start from chunk() and work your way through. read the expression parser and the code generator parts last.

- lgc.c: incremental garbage collector. take your time.
I really have to meet those guys anyways. Everywhere I go in Vancouver, I seem to be hearing about them these days. Always good things. It seems like they are successfully kickstarting the startup scene here. Their events are usually more packed than the ones I went to in Seattle, which says something of the growth.

Three or four years ago, the Vancouver startup scene was pretty anemic. There were some gaming companies, a few startups, and a dearth of any events to spread ideas between them.
Ask HN: Contractor Vanished, Now What?
After 6 months of development and thousands paid with no milestone notes or evidence of progress, a biochemist I've hired has become completely unresponsive.

His most recent communication suggested that he'd like the right to pursue development of devices identified using the intellectual property (discovered under IP agreements and disclosure agreements that specifically transfer all related IP to my corp) in exchange for notes and prototypes of devices I've already paid him to develop.

My response was to say that doing that would be counter to the agreement he entered into and that he has no right to do so. I have further demanded the notes he's holding hostage under provisions stipulated in this agreement but I have received no response.

The contracts call for arbitration in this scenario, but I'm not sure what courses of action I have available to me.

This is a bit random, I know, but I'm curious to hear if anyone has successfully navigated a similar scenario. Naturally the moral of the story is "get milestone updates, even if they're non-working prototypes." Expensive lesson learned.

Any thoughts would be most appreciated,
scamware? ;)
That's a very good point about it being bundled already. However, has Gears really been pushed that much by Google? I mean, even as an advanced user, I know that it exists and that various web apps use it, but it seems to be in the background and not all that advertised. I don't even use it myself.

I think a new browser engine offers a lot more opportunity for more tangible, up front enhancements to a user's web experience than client-side offline storage would, at least in an immediate sense.
The members of your network have to already exist as isolated nodes. As isolated nodes, they may not realize that they are actually part of a bigger network that just need to be connected. It is your vision's job to identify these opportunities.

Your social network software's job would just be to connect them.
Here let me add some syntax sugar:

if(condition)
{
print "true"
}
else
{
print "false"
}
This is a strawman defence. PG is defending Arrington's curtness when you meet him in person and accepting the facts as presented (since I have no personal knowledge), the defense sounds reasonable.

However, as many others mention below, most people dislike Arrington because Techcrunch has no journalistic scruples. The way they attacked Last.fm without even bothering to properly check into facts was yet another example of this.
You're making a leap here. The chance for someone to fix a bug does not make developer certifications useless. The chance for someone to catch a bug during review, before it harms anyone (which is what I was referring to) still does not make developer certifications useless. The latter does, however, decrease their marginal utility. This is why it's an apt comparison to engineering: an engineer can't "patch" a defect in his design once it's been produced, but he can have other engineers look it over beforehand.

Now, what I mean by "certified" varies a bit across disciplines. The professional engineer cert is a general certification, which is generally much less useful than specific certifications for particular disciplines. The considerations in electrical engineering are considerably different from those in, say, structural engineering. While there is also significant overlap, you're not going to get a general-purpose "engineer" who can verify both.
A first step to this exercise is the expand the statement to make sure that your rephrasing is expressing all the original ideas.

Idea #1: skepticism about the idea that one generation is inherently better or worse than another generation, specifically with regards to the WW2 generation

Idea #2: People have a tendency to rise to meet external challenges as it becomes necessary. So if Generation Y had a challenge as great as WW2, we would rise to meet it, and if the present day union leaders had a challenge as great as the historical labor movement, they would rise to meet it.

What else?
There seem to be a few cases where it's far more than 2 or 4 times as long. I've found deleting takes ages - a couple hundred items can take a minute of "CPU" time. Discussions on the forum mirror that.

I think it's great for many individual users doing tiny operations that don't interact with others, which my use case is. But you will be surprised by some of the performance characteristics.

See this example:
http://gaejava.appspot.com/
While you can evaluate elegance and simplicity in your head that doesn't work for edge cases and side effects. That's were talking and writing and sketching are helpful. I don't encounter much code where i can hack with the flow. Mostly the task is either utterly boring or too complex for my little head.
Universities Spar Over Disappearing Electronic Messages
The issue is not with GAE, but his code. It may look simple, but actually it is not using the data store as one should. Putting a single entity repeatedly does not scale, this is well documented. In the case of the example, a sharded counter is needed: http://code.google.com/appengine/articles/sharding_counters....
Currently resources are not scarce except in the economic sense. But a growing population will eventually surpass ANY POSSIBLE resource base. Robin Hanson's most recent post on Overcoming Bias http://www.overcomingbias.com/2009/09/limits-to-growth.html discusses this in some detail.
without verifying sources or even thinking about the content they are producing.

That's why I dislike Arrington. Because he heads a culture where cramming the news out the door is more important than taking reasonable steps [1] to ensure it is accurate.

There is a reason print media doesn't do that much any more! Because eventually you print a lie that does someone (or a company) serious untold damage.

In my mind the Last.fm debacle was a prime example of TC coming very close to crossing that line.

[1] that's important, no one would ever get a scoop if we needed verification signed in triplicate and investigated by a neutral third party :D
Digital Realty, Uptime Debate Tier System
Oh your reply just crystalized one of the main problems I had with pairing. See, I use emacs and a bunch of command line tools. Almost everyone else in the shop used visual studio. I think one other guy used some editor he liked. So to pair with someone I had to use visual studio, which is like asking a master carpenter to use a hammer and saw that were picked up at Wal-Mart instead of the tools he had spent a decade mastering.

So in order to pair effectively, everyone has to use the same tools. And that's going to be a big problem for people who don't like those tools. I don't think the article really hit that point.

EDIT: Oh and your little aside: I would suggest any appraisal of the general practice of software development that doesn't portray it as almost totally broken is far from accurate is fabulous. Love it.
Would be interesting to see Netflix data on this. Does is look the same as YouTube? If not, why?
VHS has been around for a year, and bootstrapped ourselves into our 45W space. Our goal is to get into a bigger space in 6-12 months, as resources allow.

We've talked a lot over the past year about our future, our relation to other similar ventures like Hacker Dojo, Workspace, ..., and where our values lie. We're always looking for more people passionate about hacker spaces and growing our community.

We really agree that top notch tutorials and courses are key, and we've just started scheduling regular kit nights, featuring projects like a laser spirograph, tv-b-gone and minty boosts. We also try to do hardware hacking every tuesday night, and software nights every thursday. I also use VHS's facilities to organize a Super Happy Hacker House every ~6 weeks.

If you haven't already, you should check out the hacker spaces design patters PDF, it has lots of tips for building a great hackerspace.

VHS has a public night tonight - feel free to drop by and check out what we offer. Tonight is a triage/cleanup night where we're going to go through our vast donations and tidy the place up.

http://hackspace.ca
I see what you're saying, and I agree to an extent, so i hop my comment didn't sound religious. All I meant was, if someone is typing, and someone else is watching, and no one is talking, then you aren't doing what any reasonable person would call "pairing".
Let me guess, it includes WinFS too!
What's wrong with Twitter?
I'm curious to get some feedback here. Sorry for the loaded question but I'm hoping to gain a sense for what this group thinks about Twitter and their partner ecosystem. To begin with if you use Twitter (or identi.ca) are there limitations that should be explored via the platform or third party? If you did try it but don't anymore what happened?
Most sites that have Gears support don't force the user to install Gears to use the site. There is no pop-up telling the users that they should get Gears to run the site - Google docs just has a nice little link at the top that says "Offline". There is no impetus to click it, and I bet many users don't even realize this feature exists. When the plug-in becomes required to use a site, and the user is presented with a pop-up telling him so, I think that changes things quite a bit.
EV ‘Charging Corridor’ Links L.A. and San Francisco
I agree... I think it's quite likely that once we have the tech to replace all the components of the human body the possibility will also exist to do away with it entirely.

I would definitely opt-in for a robotic body! I think I would prefer if it still looked human, but we can debate that in 30 years or so!
In 20 years i'll have my own jet pack and rocket car too.
Rosie, can you get the door please?
I've started naming my App Engine apps bemmu1, bemmu2... so that if I decide to discontinue an app later, I can just reuse one without having an old name still attached to it. It doesn't really matter as the name would not usually be visible to a user.
My home network uses names from Alien (ash, jonesy, mother, nostromo, ripley).

A pal's network used jazz musicians (mingus, monk).

Once upon a time some MIT machines were named after cold cereals (frosted-flakes, sugar-smacks).

A work friend, Chuck, passed away after a long illness. He was scheduled to receive a new computer and I ended up getting it instead. So naturally...

This is chuck.domain.com (Linux i686 2.6.30-gentoo-r6)

chuck login:
Too imprecise. The claim was that a segmentation by birth year would not be expected to correlate with bravery, smarts, or hard work, not that there's no segmentation that correlates with any of those qualities.

Your proposed version is quite PC, to be sure, and I'm sure most humanities majors would defend it tooth and nail (cheap dig, I know :) ), but that in itself suggests to me that it's not what pg had in mind...

For one, I'd expect a lot of people here, including pg, to believe that startup founders excel in all of those categories, even if it's simply selection bias that causes it.
I'm really interested to see how other networks keep up with iphone's notorious data usage in the coming year.

Then we'll really see whether it's ATT being incompetent or if this device truly was a paradigm shift (sorry) in how people are using their phones which threw everyone (and their networks) for a loop.
Why not just build a clone and "flash in" the contents of your brain?
Nice! I believe the very first phone on the list, the Motorola DynaTAC 8000X is the famed Zach Morris phone.