skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I said nothing at all about anyone being cretins; sounds like you are being a bit defensive. The post I was responding to said specifically that he used scores as "which comments to keep an eye on" and to avoid "getting lost in the text". But actually reading the text is the only way to absorb the information. The biggest problem I have is with following a comment back to its reference when there are a lot of intermediate comments - allowing comment levels to collapse, like emacs outline mode, would help.
From MIT: Project Gaydar
They are all talking about discussion groups, not book clubs. Why doesn't someone (who knows a lot more than me, or I'd do it myself) start a Amazon Associates bookstore with books for hackers? I would definitely be interested in that. If anyone knows of something like that, or a good hacker study guide, maybe leave a link? Before someone recommends it, I've already seen esr's "How to Become a Hacker" http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/hacker-howto.html . I'm looking for more practical programming study that would be useful for hackers and programming.
You can do that in something like python in 2x less lines.
Why the Evidence of Water on the Moon is Bad News
Nice!

This makes python quite less boring.
Sure, I agree... And if you go in #javascript on freenode for a few minutes, you'll see endless questions about why their event handler doesn't work. Endless answers "use a closure".

I just wish people would read a book on the language first, then the behavior would be pretty obvious and expected.
Why not port it to JVM?
Someone asks in the comments why patents work better in pharmaceuticals.

A book I read recently claimed it all came down how precisely and clearly the patent is defined and delineated.

Imagine you moved into a lush valley with a new town in it to do business. If you found all the best spots had been taken and fenced in then that would kind of suck.

Imagine now that people had secretly claimed land, and done so in a way that even they didn't know what the boundary was. "That land over there" or "the thickest part of the forest" and yet these secret, vague claims could be legally enforced. Imagine investing money to build on that land, trying your best to avoid accidentally stepping on anyone's property.

The first case is chemical compounds, it's either got those atoms in that arrangement or it doesn't. The latter is "selling shoes over the internet" and other alleged software patents.

Though having said that I think patents are still broken and lead to the promotion of some very strange behaviour in the medical field. But in software they are appallingly bad.
I like the idea. The dot is basically shorthand for what we use the score for, minus a kind of "attractor" effect whereby two high scores, one higher than the other, skews my mind one way.

Anyways, have definitely noticed a distinct difference in how I read thread. Instead of skimming scores, I now skim text.
One prob w/ lack of score: I misinterpret time as score.
obligatory Jefferson quote

“I find that the harder I work, the more luck I seem to have”

but I do completely agree that its easy to go back into a safe little world of "oohh im busy coding new feature X", when in reality it isnt needed, its just delaying you from doing the important(and hard) things.
Essentially all the 'enterprise' distributions.
I think lisps, such as common lisp, do this too, since they also allow you to manipulate the repl lexer besides defining your own DSL.
I can do it in LZW in 10 times fewer bytes than you can do it in Python :) I think comparing statically typed languages to dynamically typed languages takes more than counting. You also have to test and maintain the system. Others have to make sense of the code you write, etc. And now show me your 2x fewer lines of Python code :-)
Enhanced Vital Energy, doubled edged sword for mind/body
Right, if it is luck, then trying more often increases your odds. I think this is often why hard work pays off.
I recall once — jokingly — comparing Michael Arrington to Ellsworth Toohey. Ironically enough, pg's experience meeting him was more or less identical to that of someone meeting Howard Roark for the first time.
A pretty good example on how two people talk on the internet much less polite then they'd never do in real life. Should be a cognitive bias name for this.
It's a common misconception that programming languages must deal with side-effects. A program can be a pure function if it is a single function that takes parameters when it is run and it returns a set of results when it exits. Interactive programs which take a sequence of inputs or generate a sequence of outputs as they are running have to deal with side-effects.
Would you be playing against them or would you just ride the wave they create?
Also, it should be topcolor, not orange...
There are two types of people in the world: people who think that success is due to learning and work and people who think that success is due to luck.

Or perhaps a third type who simply think that success is due to "being right," no matter how you get there.
Unfortunately, the analogy breaks down when Klinger walks in with a dress.
Yeah? So how come British Telecom's got the patent for it:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2000/06/19/bt_claims_ownership_...
> The year we started, our gross margins were 4.6 percent. Today, they're in the teens.

Does this mean that they earn 8.9 million every year? Or the headline mentioning "89M $" is already a "clean income" figure?
Look at SICP lectures number 7a and 7b they are quite good at explaining this point.
This is only bad news if you think that manned missions to the moon are a desirable goal. If you think of manned space flight as sucking resources away from much more interesting autonomous robotic exploration of the solar system, then you want the moon as inconvenient as possible to build a base on.
Without prejudice against her conclusions, a few things came to mind while reading this.

I couldn't help but think that it's easy for someone like Caterina Fake to keep cool and chill out: she's already made her millions from Flickr and she's got no one to impress. Her investors (if any) and colleagues already believe in her, she believes in herself, and quite frankly she doesn't have much to lose.

Also, I did not find the description of Watson and Crick to be particularly surprising, nor the implicit comparison to her current founding team particularly valid. Anyone who's done serious research (or undertaken a major creative endeavor) knows that you need to give yourself time to breathe, be creative, and think about the big picture. Ironically, as I write this, I'm beginning to think the comparison may be more valid than I first gave it credit for ...

Finally, I was reminded of a Steve Blank quote something along the lines of "In uncertain times, people tend to look down at their business cards and do whatever it says on the title line." I think as founders, when all else fails we fall back on doing that thing. Those of us who are technical founders will write code and create features; those of us who are more business-oriented will build new strategies and obsess over details of the business; those of us who have to do both will, well, do both — and not particularly well.
I just meant that C# isn't that good and never will be as good for quick scripting. Only if you don't know anything else.

But I've changed my mind. For math, he'd better take mathlab-octave.
I was sent this a few weeks ago as a "Thank you" for proof-reading a book coming out soon. I've started it and it looks good. I'm really looking forward to sitting down and reading this properly.

Comments here have encouraged me to do that sooner rather than later.
I did exactly the same thing indeed, and probably tons of other people we can no longer count because of lack of score on your comment ;)
That just reminded me of this piece, written by Michael Johas Teener - one of the people who was heavily involved in Firewire development.

http://www.teener.com/firewire_FAQ.html#Why_the_4-pin_connec...

(No word on what he thinks of the FW800 connector.)
I honestly haven't ever had a problem with the speed of HN.
See comments at http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=837842
That's so dumb. Of course you need to work on the right thing. I'm actually confused. She mentions Edison and how he has tried so many experiments and fails, suggests that he worked hard, yet seems to imply that his hard work was somewhat irrelevant. He was successful because he found the right thing. I am puzzled as I am wondering whether she thinks that her readership is ten years old or have no common sense at all.

You need to work hard to understand the little things and incrementally advance towards the solution, or the right thing. You might discover something on a day in which you did little work, but surely you have been working for many years perhaps to arrive to that day.

Working hard is if anything underrated as society puts more emphasis on talent and innate ability. It is hardly over rated and as our society becomes complex by the day, it will perhaps never be overrated.
Might I suggest starting an additional thread whenever a change like this happens? There's a certain point beyond which I quit reading comments in a single thread. If I saw a thread on the front page that said something like "we're using orange dots to keep track of scores", I'd have been a lot less confused.
And I am absolutely sure that if we got rid of patents tomorrow innovation wouldn’t be reduced at all

I don't think this is true at all. While most of the bad press about software patents comes from frivolous patents and companies that troll with their portfolios, that doesn't mean there are no legitimate software patents.

Consider the patents held by MPEG LA (MPEG codecs, Firewire, H.264, etc.) These patents represent years of R&D work by their member companies and describe inventions that are non-frivolous. Surely these companies deserve some kind of protection for their work to encourage them to continue to invest in such research and publish it.

One of the difficulties in the software patents issue is where to draw the line---how to define what is a "software patent" and what defines the patentability of inventions in that class. The debate on software patents is shifting more towards this issue, and articles that make sweeping statements like "software/internet/hardware patents have no benefit to society and should be abolished" add nothing to it.
This whole post was quoted in the earlier article on this that made the front page so it contributes little other than opening up the debate again without any framing.
If we're talking about books, I prefer fiction.
To work hard is the only way to build great things. You can get rich by accident, but you can't build great things by accident. Only working hard.

Still it is very important to realize that it's better to improve the quality of your work and work 6/8 hours a day and find the time to relax and enjoy the life. To work very well and focused for 6 hours a day without interruptions I think can be considered to work hard as much as working 12 hours a day with a lot of breaks, environmental noise, and so on.

Usually I work from home, but I have a company with five people working together with me, and from time to time I go to work on the office in order to organize the work, solve the hardest tech problems, and so forth. When I'm at the office I'm a lot less focused because I receive many questions, I can't just have my usual working patterns, and my productivity is something like 20% compared to my working at home productivity.
- I don't think you get to skip to the part where you know which things to worry about without worrying about the wrong things.

- This advice will be much more believable if Hunch even scratches the surface of Flickr's success.
I belong to a number of health-related lists. The debate about the healthcare system raged on endlessly on some of those lists. Any time I said that there are other differences between the US and other countries besides who pays the medical bills, it was largely ignored. So I was happy to see this article -- and never mind that it is also getting ignored as there are no comments on it (other than mine now).
I don't really understand your point, but will note that Klinger's dresses are a good example of someone working extremely hard at something and getting nowhere. :-)
This article is not even wrong.

It must either be a slow news day or they are hurting for readers.
This is a good article, and as a person who works long hours, I would like to suggest a distinction. If you are very into what you are doing, long hours do not seem "hard". Hard in the article seems to include a good dose of freaking out. Lets avoid that.
“If Edison had a needle to find in a haystack, he would proceed at once with the diligence of the bee to examine straw after straw until he found the object of his search.
I was a sorry witness of such doings, knowing that a little theory and calculation would have saved him ninety per cent of his labor.” -- Nikola Tesla

Edit: Please note that I have quoted Edison many times when encouraging people to not give up in the face of failure. So I am not against the idea that one needs to keep working at some things. But the idea of "keeping at it" can be a trap that prevents you from reassessing your approach and finding something better.
Ask HN: Link to a site designed using a CSS framework (Blueprint, 960,etc)?
I'd like to see an example of a creative use that a CSS frameworks has been put to in the design of a real site.

Does anyone know of any sites that were designed using a CSS framework (Blueprint, 960, etc)?

If so, a link would be appreciated. Thanks.
I read the 89M as a topline gross revenue -- so 11.57M if that "teens" (i.e. 13%) figure applies to the past year. He's more or less admitting he can't scale while retaining that, but it's still a nice chunk of change to reinvest into growth.
수정발진기 회로 - Google 검색
I think it was just a funny reference to the episode.
To go mainstream, free software needed to become open source.

Anything Free software is Open source (But not vice versa).

Am I wrong?
I disagree -- to me, signal-to-noise looks somewhat lower.

I also found a thread which seemed to have devolved into the trading of personal insults without getting greyed out. I didn't like that.
I think you'll be entertained to read through his archive, "not even wrong" is a very apt description of most of it.
To make manned space flight seem so undesirable is disingenuous to the breathtaking reality of the first manned moon landing. It disheartens me to see that the accomplishment that once inspired a nation is widely and apathetically looked upon as a waste of resources.

Stephen Hawking puts it better than I do:

Robotic missions are much cheaper and may provide more scientific information, but they don't catch the public imagination in the same way, and they don't spread the human race into space, which I'm arguing should be our long-term strategy. If the human race is to continue for another million years, we will have to boldly go where no one has gone before.
Sweeping statement do have merits.

It might be helpful for you to read the book "Against Intellectual Monopoly". http://www.dklevine.com/general/intellectual/againstfinal.ht...

It talked about many historical cases where the patent and copyright system failed and as well historical evidence of free market providing immense innovative pressure.

Just because an argument is in the extreme doesn't mean it have any merits whatsoever. Sometime, it have lot of merits.

For example, James Watt use the patent system to force his competitor away from the market, instead of using his time to invent. When his patent expired, Watt got rich anyway!

The early American book publishing industry benefited immensely from book piracy of British authors. British authors got paid anyway, sometime even better than the royalty rate they receive at home!

The movie industry moved to California to escape Thomas Edison' movie patent.
Funny works for me. I'm guessing that's it as well.
> Maybe the first time you see it, for at most two minutes once in your entire life.

To the contrary, the main problem I've seen and experienced with Perl is that it's very hard to look up syntax. If I had no idea what that code was doing, I would be hard-pressed to Google for "@{$xs->[3]}". I've seen co-workers lose hours to debugging because they think that they find themselves in situations where an X is being evaluated in a Y context, or where they need to dereference a nested something but don't realize that this is what they need to do, etc.

I'm not saying that Perl is unusable because of these things. I'm merely saying that these problems do not exist in other languages, by and large, with the possible exception of C++. They don't run into these sorts of problems when they use Python, which people can just kind of pick up and start using without requiring a deep understanding of the language. (I love "Why I Dislike C++ for Large Projects" for an example of why this is true for C++: http://www.mistybeach.com/articles/WhyIDontLikeCPlusPlusForL... )

I hope I don't come off as a Perl-hater. Although I'm mostly a Pythonista, sometimes there's a Perl module in CPAN to do something that I can't find a library for in Python. This community is probably Perl's greatest strength, which is argued quite eloquently in the OP. Similarly, I often use C++ when I need to write something that runs really fast and/or needs to interface with a low-level library. Both languages can definitely be useful even when other languages are available.

My criticism is simply that Perl (and C++) requires a much deeper understanding of the language to use effectively than most other languages. I have co-workers who have used Perl as a scripting language for years, but who have very little understanding of what references or contexts even are. This often bites them and they lose hours of time trying to figure out why they can't seem to pass a list of hashes to a function, or something. (Similar things often happen with C++.) And this doesn't happen with languages like Python, which make it much easier to write programs without deep knowledge of the language.
can anyone explain the browser bug they are leveraging?
Maybe it's some config he only uses in gvim.
In other news, scientists discover the human brain's learning algorithm performs better on new problem instances when measures are taken to prevent over fitting on the initial learning examples.

That aside, I feel like any act which exposes your mind to ideas and experiences which are wholly new would have the same effect, eg I would be genuinely surprised if there wasn't a similar effect after someone read the Sandman comics that Neil Gaiman authored for the first time.
I think you are using the numbers to judge the comment, instead of finding an interesting comment, and forming your own opinion.
Remapping capslock to another control will make editing even easier and faster. Especially when you realize escape can be entered with ctrl-[ and sometimes ctrl-3.
I think we can have an intelligent debate without having to call her post 'dumb'. I'm surprised this comment was voted so high.

This is the quickest way to lose any debate...

and besides: it's often the most obvious that escapes us. Smart people fall into these kinds of traps all the time. I found the post to be enlightening in that regard.
Are you implying that random Google results might be wrong? ;)

Next time I'll try to remember to use Wikiquote, to obtain the definitive wrong attribution.
Franz Kafka Selected Shorter Writings
Oh, dear. My topcolor is a light blue that looks good with orange but would be invisible in dot form.
Sounds like this guy sells a lot more than just diapers (such as car seats), the title might be a little misleading.

Pretty interesting story, thanks for posting.
That seems hard to believe. It is very nearly impossible to hold the bicycle for more than a few seconds when it is standing still, but I can ride it for half an hour (traffic permitting) with no problem.
Android Open Source Model Has a Short Circuit
Oh, I don't know. There are definitely startup companies where the correct career move is to strive for a Section-8 discharge.
See also http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=839635
It's using the :visited css pseudo-class. If you put visited link in a different color in your css, you can then check what is the current color of the link with Javascript, and from that infer wether the link has been visited or not
Manned missions don't catch people's imagination anymore either. "Space-optimism" of 60-70s is long gone. Now is the time to do real work in outer space.
Not really a browser bug:

<style>
.first:visited {background:url(visited-ycombinator.png)}
.second:visited {background:url(visited-twitter.png)}
#layer {text-indent:-10000px}
</style>
<div id="layer">
<a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/ class="first">first</a>
<a href="http://www.twitter.com// class="second">second</a>
</div>

That code will hit a PNG file if you visited the link. Now just replace the PNG for a pixel beacon which logs every hit and it's done.
Just because an argument is in the extreme doesn't mean it have any merits whatsoever.

Perhaps, but my specific problems with this article is that I don't think it advances the argument in any meaningful way, and it doesn't provide evidence for its conclusion---other than a single example of a patent troll, and the claim that an NYT story about another company promotes an "urban myth".

The general problem with sweeping statements is that they very susceptible to attack because they lack the precision you need to build a proper argument.
It was a risk though, because I had to trust that I understood the problem domain well enough to invest a lot of time in the parser/interpreter. - First comment on blog http://www.moserware.com/2008/04/towards-moores-law-software...

Solving a problem is hard. Generalizing it to a class of problems is harder. Encapsulating it in a language with specialized syntax and semantics is harder still.

I think this is one reason that DSLs are not that popular, and is one reason why most new languages mimic existing languages like crazy (apart from for user-familiarity to ease adoption). The exceptions, like brainfuck and lolcats, use familiar semantics; and are only novel in syntax.

As for a Moore's Law for software, I'm going with Fred Brooks' Law of "No Silver Bullet". Complexity is hard, the best we can do is abstract away foundational concepts into components, as we understand them, and then SOTSOG.

The TCP/IP diagram syntax is really cool - but because it's clear, not because it's short; I think the parsing code in C would actually be shorter than the ASCII art.
Since this was posted: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=846746

I haven't had much exposure to Kafka but am enjoying what I've read so far.
I guess that's one more IP to block in the firewall.
NSW seeks to build 'unhackable' netbook network
Did Cooking Give Humans An Evolutionary Edge?
A hypothetical redesign of a high-profile portal Web site
Did the Y! team ever got to see this?
It's just a filter. By reading only high scoring comments you will get a combination of insightful posts and annoying witticisms. Only rarely do you get a false positive: a post that with a high score that is inane or simply wrong.

By reading every post you'll certainly find the "diamond in the rough", posts that don't get the recognition they deserve. But you'll also have to trudge through loads of posts of little merit. Given that there is an infinite amount of information on the internet, those 2 minutes can probably be better spent on wikipedia or reading the top post in a different HN thread.

Additionally: HN isn't just about opinion, it is also for a large part about fact. And insightful facts almost always rise to the top. On the bottom of threads you often find things that are wrong or subtly wrong.

Judging by the numbers may very well be the most efficient and reliable way to get to insightful content.
Microsoft boffin puts brain into e-coffin