skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I am not sure if this is the best advice but: have you tried to implement a scheme yourself? I found doing so gave me a much better understanding and appreciation of SICP. Also you might consider starting with "simply scheme", "how to design programs" or "the little schemer".

If it makes you feel better I am currently going through the same thing with "the art of prolog". It is just such a huge departure from everything I have ever done before that I am constantly running into the same barrier you spoke of "I wouldn't have ever even have asked that question". But that is why I am reading it - to flex my head. Once I fully understand it I know I'm going to miss that feeling just like the first time your muscles hurt form a hard work out or conditioning session. Once they develop - unless you injure them - it's never quite the same rewarding burn.
If you use alpha transparency, it will render quickly on Windows, slowly on OS X, and molasses-like on Linux, with the same hardware on all three.

As good friends with the Linux Flash maintainer, I can say the primary problem here is that Flash has to be extremely picky about the APIs it uses; even if there's a very fast API that does what it wants, if that API results in crashes due to bad drivers on 0.5% of machines (and Flash can't detect which machines that 0.5% will be), Flash can't use it. This results in all kinds of horrific platform-specific code and platform-specific results.

On a related note, the primary reason that Flash video playback is slower than people expect is because it does forced software YUV->RGB conversion, as the rendering pipeline does compositing in RGB, which is needed for (for example) overlays on the video.

Speaking of which, if you want any specific feedback forwarded to said Linux maintainer, I can do so ;)
Isn't it much more likely that they buy a digital distribution service like http://fuga.me ?
It got killed, most likely because it spawned a huge argument about politics and was therefore deemed inappropriate for HN. You can find that sprawling brawl here:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=810399
">>There are plenty of alternatives around, but I don't have to propose alternatives to be able to criticize something.

You can't list an example that has worked for a big population in an industrialized world -- and given them an open society."

Well, to use my car metaphor: You are just saying that because I can't show proof that electric cars have worked in a country on a large scale we can't build electric cars.

With this way of thinking we should abandon any attempt to of modernizing anything and only use proven things. new things can't work, they must be proven first but when we don't try we can't prove anything. Perfect Catch 22.

"It seems like complaints that someone should do something about cancer, because it isn't nice."

Your are saying that cancer is natural and we aren't allowed to do anything about it.

"The problem is how -- just complaining that the world could be better is not really interesting (I expect better on HN)."

I showed you one alternative, Parecon,

http://www.zmag.org/zparecon/parecon.htm

which is a whole economic system based on participation and cooperation of everybody not just a few big players and you ignored it.

Also I don't complain, I just say that there are alternatives. You are only blocking any thought there might be of an alternative solution because in your opinion capitalism is either a natural law or God given but not made by man.

"But on a direct question, you had no alternative.

You really seem emotionally involved and complain about the world system, which you would probably have to kill a large fraction of the world's population to change."

Again, stop ignoring my suggestions. There are many alternatives. I offered you one, Parecon and you have chosen to ignore it but don't lie to me that there aren't any.

Also stop suggesting that there must be a kind of genocide involved in change. That's ridiculous.

">Are you a fatalist?

Read what I said -- do tests of different organizational models but far from where I live, please. The failure modes are too scary."

There are several organizational alternatives on a local level, the most popular throughout the world are parallel local currencies that don't allow capital accumulation. But you are right: You are plainly scared! You are afraid of anything that might mean a change. You're irrational. You won't even buy an electric car when 90% of the population will drive one.

US corporate capitalism and soviet state capitalism both installed industrialization by brute force but that has happened 80 or 100 years ago. The same model implemented in China and elsewhere would kill the planet.

Also studies show that capitalism is only good for a small percentage of a population both on in nation and on a global scale. Moreover capitalism just broke down this/last year, don't you see it? It's now completely financed by tax payers. How can you ignore that and tell me that capitalism works fine?
And then there are people like me, who are hungry and desperate for real food (not milk chocolate and corn syrup) who pass by a vending machine, despair at every single product on offer, and just drink some water.

Happy that I live somewhere where "fast food" includes very very healthy options (like made-that-day rice balls with red beans).
I disagree. Most languages you can take a guess at without learning them. It's horrible things like this operator that will catch people out.
That didn't prevent him from writing Camping...

http://github.com/judofyr/camping/blob/fa8802511fd745dedcbea...
I think there are two reasons for the paucity of Perl applications for non-technical users:

1. It is horribly painful to try to write non-Web GUIs in Perl

2. It is horribly painful to maintain large codebases in Perl

(speaking as a longtime Perl developer and big fan of the language)
wow, what domain can be that valuable to your business?
We use varnish at vg.no (online newspaper) Its quite effective for unpersonalized content. We run 2 varnish boxes, each of them sees ~2-3k requests / sec. Backend sees only
~30 req/sec..so pretty good cache ratio.

For personalized content esi seems to be the way to go, but havent tried that yet.
In other news: a Ferrari is faster than a four-door luxury sedan, hummingbird wings move faster than those of an eagle, and a racing horse is faster than a pair of pack mules hauling a wagon.

Varnish is cool, but it's not a replacement for Squid. It can address some aspects of the problem space, but nowhere near the majority of them.

This also fails to discuss the configuration of the proxies. The thing is...Squid operates on a huge number of platforms, and the default configuration favors compatibility and reliability over all else. Asynchronous IO, cacheability and expiry rules, memory and disk usage, etc. all make a big difference in performance, concurrency, and cache hit rates.

There are arguments to be made for using Varnish in some deployments, just as there are arguments to be made for using nginx or Lighttpd instead of Apache. But, there are also trade-offs.
Madness. I've paid as much as $1000 for a domain name (and would probably go a bit higher for one that I really felt like I needed)...but I would never give away equity for one.
"That's due to technological progress

Afaik, the industrial revolution needed capitalism. Any references otherwise?"

So there was no industrial revolution in the Soviet Union? Do we have to rewrite history? You are right though without knowing. The Soviet state capitalism which already resembles the current US state capitalism forced industrialization upon the rural country.

>around 1 billion people starve today, that's not a small percentage IMHO:

This have the usual idealist problem -- you have to kill people to help them...

"Let us split that value up, a bit. About a billion is hungry, according to Wikipedia (not the same as starving -- did you fake there?)."

I don't care what Wikipedia says, the UN says "starving" and the press is reporting "starving". Any jerk can edit Wikipedia.

Also stop suggesting genocide or killing people as a solution. The current system kills people in massive numbers. We have to stop THAT!

"You can't solve the problems of Bangladesh without military intervention -- see Iraq, how that goes."

Did you just suggest to go to war to solve the hunger problem? Sorry, you are downright criminal minded. I can't go on discussing with you. You seem to love the idea of killing people.

P.S.: "Consider East Germany. West Germany tried to integrate it and really, really failed."

Have you actually been to East Germany? You can't see any difference to Western Germany now, it's much more wealthy than any other country from the former Eastern Block.
Would a site specific browser with some clever caching not be a good compromise?

A SSB could start out as an offline Wikipedia reader with no offline content. As and when online content is retrieved it is cached locally forever.

When an article is to be viewed the local copy is displayed. If there is an Internet connection the Wikipedia reader can utilise various HTTP mechanisms to determine if the local copy is stale, updating the local copy as required.

As a basic MVP that could work, albeit with an initial heavy reliance on an Internet connection. As and when problems with this model are identified they can be addressed and solved. For example, it may be beneficial for the reader, when online, to retrieve not only the currently-requested article but also linked articles up to X links deep. Furthermore, it may be feasible to intelligently analyse a user's usage history and retrieve further articles, whilst online, such that relevant content is more likely to be available to the user when next offline.

To begin with, using such an application would be little different from using the online Wikipedia. Over time the local cache would grow and the application's reliance on an Internet connection would decrease.

Could this be a viable opensource project?
Have you watched the videos online that cover this text (there are actually a couple of different sets with different professors, but Abelson and Sussman is probably the way to go)?

I haven't worked through the whole book, either, but I found having someone explain things made it much clearer, and I've made it more than halfway through without running into any serious roadblocks.
I had never heard about CGN before you mentioned it. Thanks.
CGN is certainly not where we want to end up. I believe it is time to start pushing the local ISP harder for IPv6. /rolls up sleeves/
... learn Java. Give yourself some worth and wealth before you become enlightened with Lisp :-)
8 SEX Positions Women Love??[PICTURE]   
Unlike men, women can lose an orgasm almost in the midst of having one.
You're Killing Me, Zappos
Will another digg/reddit style application, create competition
There are two popular news posting sites where one can read unique news. Users upvote, downvote to their views. But lately Digg been accused of being biased and users moving to Reddit. In Reddit, the level of simplicity is great, its simple ( one page submission, unlike Digg ), load time is better unlike Digg.

Put in your views
SCO: not dead yet?
why would one go to purchase a domain via equity, even the domain is worth millions.

Bad choice.
Why is Taleb getting all this mainstream attention? - my (partial) answer is that he is ambiguous enough so that everyone can write his own interpretation and the conversation is going on. This is very much alike the web 2.0 thing. And it is what Henry Jenkins calls 'spreadable media'.
MRAM(1) will bring memory latency down a good bit, if it catches on and advancements keep getting made. Its still going to lag behind the speed of processors though and the system bus will still be a general I/O bottleneck (especially if the MRAM is not on chip).
SSD and MRAM may cut down the I/O latencies, but they will never eliminate them, so asynchronous/concurrent operations through lightweight threads will still be important.

He also forgets things where independent processing is desirable because it eases modeling the system which you're modeling, eg a friend used Stackless Python to code that zombie outbreak simulation and each zombie got its own green thread because it simplified the simulation.

Of course, he has a point in that the language should allow green threads to be added as a library, rather than being built in, but most languages would actually allow this. Also, Erlang may have lightweight threads, but its still SMP-aware.

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetoresistive_Random_Access_...
No, that's the point. I defy you to name a place that's half as bad as San Francisco, and SF is just a standard American big city that way.
They are both still quite similar in spite of the outward differences.

There must be a much better way to do this sort of thing.

Diigo has some nice unique features.

They all suffer from:

- no good filtering for the user, everybody sees the exact same site

- clique forming around a subject

- immense group think issues

/. also has some really good bits (meta moderation), a good 'friends' system

But none of them allow you to import you own rssfeeds into the stream, there is no 'inbox' feature.
a) I'll take that back about Matt -- he's not an idiot -- he just writes code naively, and accidentally became a prominent BDFL after SixApart repeatedly threw away their own accidental prominence.

b) Dave isn't an idiot -- he's a poisonous egomaniac asshole that successfully weedles his way into anything tangentially related to any of his pet projects, and proceeds to do whatever he can to be credited for other people's work, impede progress, and fuck people over. It's his designs that are idiotic.
How can I make my OS scheduler better if I happen to be using a proprietary, closed-source, operating system...
Not sure his design is much better, actually I prefer the original. Look at Amazon, ugly as shit and works amazingly.
To be honest it's not advisable to rely only on search traffic. I say that as a SEO. Returning visitors and often even type in or direct visitors are much better.

Many spammy sites rely solely on Google/search traffic.

http://hubpages.com/ for instance.
Yeah I agree - What are they planning to offer and charge for that Google website optimizer doesn't already offer for free?

What is interesting is that it from the guys behind Crazy Egg - Which is a simple but great tool for click tracking
Awesome redesign!
It can address some aspects of the problem space, but nowhere near the majority of them. [...] There are arguments to be made for using Varnish in some deployments

Since you, presumably, have some experience with Squid and/or Varnish and the 'problem space' could you perhaps discuss or opine more concretely on that? It can be surprisingly difficult to derive useful information from indignant metaphors about Ferraris and eagles.
This Is Your Lifelog. Gordon Bell...
I'm sure Bill Gates really cares.

The point I was trying to make, and which seems to be lost on you, is that it is perfectly possible to have people associate you with insecure code or even to outright dislike you and to sleep very well at night and have half the world kow-tow to you.

The people at your work are no doubt in IT, they probably don't realize that if Bill Gates had not done his thing that they'd be in a different job today.

All this from somebody who is also not impressed by some of Bill Gates' legacy. But I still give the guy his due.

Any of us would wish to do half as good as he did for himself and his family.

The rest of the world will not remember Bill Gates as the guy who had a hand in the worlds most insecure os (at some point, the situation has changed a bit), or the guy whose company did some really dirty business deals.

They'll remember the billionaire that gave away a fortune through his foundation to cure all kinds of diseases.

Gates won the PR battle long ago. It's just us IT guys that see the rest of the story, and mostly because they are forced to work with stuff that they would not work with if they had a choice.
Why is it harder to maintain codebases in Perl if you follow the "Best Practices" book?
Paging dcurtis...
The question about "male hookers" is fair but the reason is probably more physiological than anything else. I mean most males simply can't sleep with unattractive women (and I hope I don't have to explain the reasons for that - maybe there are medical workarounds for that but I have no idea about the efficiency) while women can. The demand is probably unbalanced, too, but I'm sure it's not completely, um, satisfied on women's side.
As long as we can still acknowledge that there are differences and deal rationally with them, the humanity will be all right.
That's all paper and pencil thinking. I would humbly suggest looking out your window. By your same reasoning, the longer a person is unemployed, the more they would desire becoming employed and the more motivated they would become. The reality is the opposite: they become more and more defeated, they feel more and more hopeless.

There have been some very interesting studies done on this by a Stanford professor with children from the projects. (I'll look it up if you're interested.) The feeling of despair and hopelessness sets in very early.

I understand the theory you're presenting; however, I have found the opposite to occur in reality.
Atom : RSS :: PSHB : <cloud>

Dave will never stand by and let a perfect solution replace an old poorly-specified ill-used mediocre one that he somewhat-falsely claimed to have invented. Instead he'll repeatedly change the canonical version of the spec live, without changing the version number or telling anyone (much less preserving the previous versions). It's super effective, at least for creating drama.
"Code is strings" in exactly the same sense that "Speech is vibration of molecules."

The problem with eval-ing strings is that it doesn't scale. It's great for building three identical modules "B," "C," and "D," but the moment you want to do something interesting, it breaks down. The complexity of manipulating programs as strings grows far more rapidly than the complexity of things you want to do.

For example, String#to_proc adds some syntactic sugar to Ruby like implied parameters so you can write things like: some_array.map(&'+ 1'):

http://github.com/raganwald/homoiconic/blob/master/2008-11-2...

The implementation is hideous:

http://github.com/raganwald/homoiconic/blob/master/2008-11-2...

That's because it's trying to manipulate and eval strings that represent program syntax where it should be parsing the strings and manipulating data structures that represent program structure.
actually on reddit, if you are not a registered user, you see the same content.
I was in a dealership a few months back to see what options there were. I told the sales man basically I want to fund out what you can offer me. My price range is highly variable I want to make a value/price decision. the salesman immediately tried to find out what my price point was. I tried to explain my price point was dependent on the car. I wanted to know what I could get for how much. the conversation was going nowhere. After word I wondered why they couldn't sale to me. A real-estate agent shows knows different features have different values to different people. these guys couldn't figure this out. what was the problem. I figured that they sale by figuring out what the maximum a person will spend then work their "negotiations" from there. so I doubt this will change anytime soon. And on the issue manufactures can hurt by sales reps poor reputation. have a list to this podcast(or read the highlights) on franchising and the auto industry

http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2009/06/munger_on_franc.htm...

or this one with a sales manager and a professor of economics after the prof had a bad experience buying a new car

http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2008/06/cole_on_the_mar.htm...
I agree -- was immediately looking for the dcurtis navigation and then realized it wasn't him.

Dustin has redefined the blogazine. He should be flattered.
New iPods leak early: iPod Touch 3G and iPod Nano G5
as an emacs junkie I use backtick for my screen control. Works fine till you try to paste blocks of SQL containing loads of said backticks - easy way to fubar a screen session.

Perhaps its emacs' fault but finding an easy to use key or key combo that isn't already in use is far too hard!
Well, he's a little busy flying for a month straight: http://30dayflight.com/ :)
Yeah; I think he should be in the air about now? Also, does anyone know if jetBlue ever got back to him on his request? The 30dayflight page for the letter wasn't updated.
I don't follow you. Do you mean to imply that when you are a registered user you see different content or that registered users and non-registered users see the same content ?
A good deal of your critique is a rehash of concerns people expressed about RSS in the first place. They generally did not come to pass because either they weren't real problems in the first place, they were easily addressed, or general advances in technology moved faster than their onset.

You are concerned about the inefficiency of fetching all the items in a feed when just one item changes. Is that a real issue? Consider your use case. How much data is really being requested? If it is a real issue, the server might want to limit the # of entries returned based on the if-modified-since header. As for the load of all that traffic hitting the server in the space of a few seconds, ngnix can push a lot of requests on modest hardware and the load on whatever application logic is involved in generating the feed can be knocked way down by having it cache all feed requests for a second or two.
Several reasons:

- sigils make it difficult to scan code

- there is poor IDE support for perl

- it can be very hard to figure out what arguments are being passed, or what arguments a subroutine or method expects.

- it's common to pass around a hashref (a.k.a. magic blob of data) as an argument. Finding out what the proper internal structure of this is can involve jumping around a lot of code

- there can be spooky 'action at a distance' effects. For example, the URI module calls 'require' deep within a private internal class. This can crash your program if, for example, you've forgotten to properly implement the STORE method for a tied hash in a completely unrelated part of your program. For another example, using unicode in a regex somewhere can cause files to be pulled from disk, suddenly slowing your app by three orders of magnitude.

- not everyone has read the best practices book, including the authors of very widely used CPAN modules

- Chasing up and down inheritance chains can be very unpleasant. See MovableType.

Again, nothing wrong with Perl, it just has certain features that make it a bear to work with when the project size exceeds a certain threshold, or when there are multiple programmers.
my general lack of interest in shopping (or being from europe--difficult to judge from the inside...), i have never actually heard of zappos before the amazon acquisition. could some guys from the us briefly explain what's so great about zappos? i looked at the--admittedly kind of old-fashioned--web-site and it was not really clear what they are selling/doing that made it special...

thanks in advance!
There really isn't a substantive difference. The navigation is pretty much the same. The "Our Customers Love Us" is annoying and distracting. If anyplace, it should be at checkout, not when you are navigating.

I think that our co-founder, Steve Dekorte, did an awesome job creating a truly innovative design for our shopping site: http://stylous.com/