skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The element bar guy was awesome and the negotation was fun to watch. I didn't understand the final deal though. The 4% royalty made sense when the VC was wanting to completely buy the company out from under him (100% equity) but once he talked him down to 30% equity I'm not sure what the 4% royalty was about anymore.
Are you seriously defending the thesis that it doesn't matter whether a teacher is smart, bearing in mind that just about the only thing IQ is good for is predicting good academic performance which is exactly the sort of thing we're looking for (for once!)?

"A ditz who can really connect to the students" sounds like a mortal threat to my child's education, not something to be celebrated!
That's an interesting insight but it goes too far. For example, Mint.com/Intuit and Facebook can survive independent of Google.
Common Lisp defines a mildly large language with a standard of 1000+ pages.

Implementations use both non-portable and portable libraries. There are also several libraries that span several implementations.

Also the implementations serve different purposes and may use widely different implementation strategies - so not all libraries might apply to a certain implementation.

The choice is there for a reason. Some libraries might start on some implementation. If it is good, then it will likely be ported (if necessary) to other implementations.
No, it's probably a scam:

"'There is almost no money left in the fund,' an investor said. 'Koenig has an American Express black card through the company that he uses on partying, girls and high living. Most money is missing and iPorn.com is not worth what he says it is.'"
thesixtyone has a pretty good microreward system with their quests and user levels. I ended up micro-manging my next songs and listening longer on that site than I should have...

http://www.thesixtyone.com/
Simonyi's intention was for the notation to encode semantics, not data-type. Some say it was Petzold who popularized what's now called "Systems Hungarian"
Try listening to Matz talk about his experience with Lisp and (subsequently) his inspiration to make Ruby. Basically, he said Lisp sounded great in theory... but actually when you have to use it it's a huge pain in the ass. And Matz is a pretty fucking smart guy, so it's not just that too many people are too stupid to use it. Lisp actually has problems. But nobody is willing to talk about them.

(I'm trying to hunt down that talk, but not having much luck.)
I want to be able to write:

cache(key_name, :ttl => 30.seconds, :dependent => ModelClass) do
model.expensive_operation
end

and have that cache expire whenever any instance of ModelClass is updated.

With macros, every call to cache() can be expanded into:

ModelClass.register_expiration_callback(keyname)
do_cache(...)

Without macros, there's no way to catch deeply nested cache calls. I fake this by scanning the source for calls to cache() on startup right now.
Porn is a big/booming industry

Not really; porn is having all kinds of problems as a money-making enterprise: http://www.portfolio.com/culture-lifestyle/culture-inc/arts/... (link is dated but those trends have not changed).
Fungus-treated Violin Outdoes Stradivarius
If adding a shell script to your development environment results in pain every time you need to set it up, that says you haven't automated setting up the environment. One great way to automate it is to put all such scripts (surely this would not be the only one?) and other files in a version controlled repository; then you just have one more thing to check out.

(If checking out one more thing results in pain, you should think about automating the checkout too... This line of thinking has resulted in me keeping everything in git and using a single `mr` command (google will find it) to check out all my respositories when I'm setting up a new account.)

Revision numbers are not impossible with DVCS; bzr has repo-local revision numbers. But once a number becomes longer than 3 digits, I cut and paste it anyway; if I'm already pasting, the longer size of git's sha1s doesn't matter.
is "weighing" a metaphor?
And these super-Earths have much stronger gravity. And as we all know superman's strength and ability to leap tall buildings was due to the fact that he was from a planet with stronger gravity.

As the character changed over time he gained the ability to fly and became yellow sun powered.

This moment of geeking out was brought to you by comic books!
I would highly recommend the book "The Paradox of Choice".

Here's something I wrote about the concept a while back:

http://journal.dedasys.com/2006/02/18/maximizers-satisficers...

As Steve's article suggests, I don't think lots of more or less equal implementations is that great in the long term. IMO, having one main one and some experiments floating around works better.
Ahoy, Mates Convert ye pages to Pirate with YQL
I rarely use it myself, but it's been useful in the few cases where I wanted a shorthand to note something about how the data should be used.

And I, too, think it's counterproductive when it gets overdone to your example's extent.
The Role of Drug Geeks in Society -- A talk by the Erowid founders
Well one of your biggest audiences might well be here or even Proggit (not sure of their TOC's for things like that).
Is it a portal?
It's more than just a portal.

Does it integrate with existing systems?
That is one of the core competencies of the platform.

Is it still in development?
There are specific applications which will be rolled out as they are available for release. The platform on which these applications are being built on is the focus of our launch.

No problem at all, happy to answer any and all questions!
I agree, but it's interesting that the name doesn't even pass muster.
Make an OKCupid account: http://www.okcupid.com/
It's well-known that there are canaries in Ordnance Survey map data.
It may not be for you, but it was for me in the beggining.

I already went through 3 distros - Kurumin, Suse and Ubuntu, and the only reason I still have a Windows partition is to play some games that I couldn't (or didn't bother to) make work under Linux. I can tell you, the bar is very high to start. Ubuntu made it lower (and lower at each version) but it is still too high for mainstream.

And it need not be. The whole problem is always understanding the differences. If I pick that distro or that distro, what changes? What do I lose? What do I earn? Unable to find answers, one doesn't choose lest one chooses poorly.

Lisp implementations are the same.

Thank you for your answers. Allow me to add just two more.
If one says Arc is not CL, but a whole new kind of Lisp that tries to solve some of those problems, what exactly are the differences? What does Arc advance as a Lisp standard?
The "backward compatibility issue" means simply that the Common Lisp is a very large language, so it is slightly more scaring at first. Also, some things are strangely named for historical reasons.

Regarding scheme vs CL, I don't want to start a flame war, I like both languages. It seems to me that CL is more dirty-hands, product-oriented and agnostic, while Scheme is sort of a beautiful thought experiment, meant to teach things. [Yes, I know you can code practical things in scheme too]

CL gives you more rope to hang yourself with macros. Which is a things that most hackers appreciate, anyway.

There aren't many style guides on CL, but Peter Seibel's book is a good start. But in the end I think you should try to play more with code and worry less about lisp theology :)
I do not understand why weighting would be of any good. Does the laptop ever leave your hands?
This doesn't explain why nature is freakier, it's just a collection of freaky pictures.
TechCrunch50 founders’ feud: “It’s over” for the startup conference
Um, I'm not entirely sure why you think teachers only work 6 hours a day. I know a few high school teachers, and between lesson prep, grading, meeting with parents, etc. they work way, way more than 40 hours a week.
Thanks. I'll have a go. I'd be really surprised and impressed if the git repos is smaller than an svn checkout,

EDIT: Here's the results...

Subversion repository: 80M
A Subversion checkout: 172M
Git version: 121M

I'm surprised the subversion checkout is quite a bit larger, but it's not really enough to make me care all that much yet...

I do conceed that git compresses things well, although it's still quite a bit larger than the original svn repository.
To stop me buying a legal copy and then immediately selling it as my own data. You don't have to tell the users that the data is there, simply generate a postcode that doesn't exist - then when a new postcode mapping product comes on the market, check for that postcode.
What? Why? You can write your own CAPTCHA or use another provider...Unless I'm missing something?
> My prediction: Google next purchase in this space will be Akismet.

Im not so convinced - it depends a lot on what technology Akismet can provide. I mean yes they get a hell of a lot of content daily - but any more than Google get from Blogspot and other sources? I cant imagine it is enough to warrant a purchase based on that.

So, the tech. Im still not overly convinced about it; on my blog it is constantly flagging clear spam as "maybe". The thing is the posts are near identical in content week on week so the tech is a poor learner!

Google's email spam tech is killer in comparison, so I highly doubt they will be interested in Akismet.

Unless of course the intention is just to cut out the competition or offer an "spam api" of their own to the Akismet user base.
I saw that talk and I can tell you that he looked very confused. He was just in the need for an excuse to develop just another scripting language. You could see that he had not much experience with Lisp and that Lisp was not something that he actually needed. I think he knew Lisp mostly 'in theory'.

If you think that he is a pretty smart guy, then I would say that there are many Lisp implementations that are way ahead in terms of implementation technology - Matz's Ruby implementation is in the Lisp world several decades behind the state of the art. Ruby is one of the slowest scripting languages and has a very much ad-hoc design. It does useful things for many people, and that counts. But from the technology it is Ruby that is a huge pain in the ass. Just see how people struggle to write a decent compiler for it. Instead it is just another simple interpreter with a C core for the interpreter implementation and parts of the library. Ruby is fast where you stay in with the library functions that are implemented in C - otherwise it is a pain.

The better Lisp systems are also written in Lisp and their performance is sometimes 10 to 100 times of what Ruby offers - while Lisp offers also lots of dynamic features and the code as data paradigm.
Microsoft Research Releases Javascript Optimization Tool: Doloto
And is very expensive and restrictive in how you can use it.

We licensed the Postal Address File (the list of official correct addresses for each house) and we had to add encryption to our product to stop people being able to extract the raw data from the code.

The same applies to Ordnance Survey map data - there are a lot of apps that aren't possible/easy in the UK because of the cost and licensing of the maps that the taxpayer paid for.
Education ought to be about more than academic performance. I see what you're saying, but having teachers that can't work with students is just as much a problem as having teachers that don't know their subject.

Then, of course, there are the teachers that can't do either. I TA'd a writing class with a teacher that was both ignorant and disliked, who was kept on because of tenure. Not a nice position to think of.
I have to call Bulls*t on that. Again, they have a prep period to do things in. That's 5 hours a week for grading, lesson prep etc... (and the reality is most teachers get their lesson plans off one of the hundreds of web sites that provide that service now days). As for meeting with parents, last I checked that doesn't happen too often. My parents never met any of my High School teachers.

It may very well be 7 or 8 hours a day. I'd concede that's possible. But over 40 hours a week? That (including the prep period) would be nearly 14 hours a week devoted to grading papers. I just don't think so.

Edit: Thinking a little more on this. Average Class Size in California is about 23 students per teacher (http://www.laalmanac.com/education/ed09.htm). Lets assume 2 assignments per week and just to make it fair lets assume they're typed essay based assignments (that the teacher has to read through and grade rather than multiple choice). A teacher has 5 periods so that's about 115 students or 230 assignments per week. The average words per typed page is about 600 and the average adult reads 250wpm (http://ezinearticles.com/?What-is-the-Average-Reading-Speed-...). Even under that heavy workload you're only looking at about 9 hours worth to grade it all and honestly that's with an unrealistic workload. No teacher assigns two full page typed essays every week.
Let me elaborate, Ikea is a PRIVATELY owned $30-40 billion company.
In fairness, in the linked post, only the x-height of each character is 3 pixels. The task the designer of 3x3 set for himself was to create a typeface where each character could only be 3 pixels high and wide at most. That said, the work in the linked post is a very clever and precise exercise in optical illusion. It works wonderfully and is ideal for cases where a design calls for legibility at such a tiny size.
You also need it to generate a "addresses within X miles of Y" type list for a website.
Fungus is the new computer. There's nothing like that feeling a beginning programmer has when he realizes that he can give the computer a few simple instructions and, in a matter of seconds, the computer does something that would take thousands of man-years of manual computation.

This is why biotech is such an interesting field. If we can give fungi and bacteria simple instructions and let them execute those instructions in massively parallel fashion, we can accomplish amazing feats.
How does that help? If a foreign government spy agency had access to your laptop, and replaced a binary with their own custom build - how would free software save you?
Tokyo Cabinet and Tyrant have B-tree support.
I read somewhere how the porn industry is usually ahead of the others and leads in innovation in many areas(especially billing/bandwidth etc.).
HN has a lot of biases. We're more economically conservative than average, much more pro-motivation, and there's a lot of contempt for the arts here. It's a shame, since otherwise this is a terrific community.
I'd like to know the methods for estimating this number. Malnutrition deaths, children that were able to be born because their parents felt secure enough to have another child, food-shortage violence deaths, there are many indirect factors when you're talking about affecting scarcity for a population.
Omce birth control becomes free or affordable, and societites move out of agrarian only production, that is untrue.

Reliable birth control pretty much leads to voluntary replacement only reproduction
Here is an example from my experience:

Sometimes when I'm developing, and ready to commit something I notice I've made a few unrelated changes/bugfixes. I could just commit the whole thing at once, but that makes merging a hassle because I probably want to merge those bugfixes to trunk much sooner than any code which implements a new feature. So, I would need some way to commit only certain diff chunks from each file.

I understand from "http://www.gitcasts.com/posts/interactive-adding that git can do that. So far it hasn't been incentive enough to switch, but it's one example of the pain of subversion.
UK postcodes are equivalent to the 5+4 US zip codes.
They list part of a street, typically 10-20 houses.
Guile is some random Lisp implementation, designed for scripting.

'Lisp' is a family of languages and the basic design was done by John McCarthy starting in 1958. He did not design a scripting language.

I was talking about 'Lisp', not Guile.
That's exactly what I am trying to do. but I am hearing all those omens about Lisp but I sense I need to understand it better before I dive myself into it. There is absolutely NO market for it where I live so, if I would learn it, it would be for personal gain. Not that it is a problem, but without a market compass, I feel like I need a map.

Thanks for your answers.
Beautiful design, really makes me want to use the app a little more. Would be nice to have some sort demo login or video walkthrough like mrduncan mentioned. May I ask who designed the site?
in what sense was it doing good? I dont think any of their current content has been seen by anyone much (It is old NYT's I think... so I dont know if they do it under contract for NYT?)
Debugging Networked Multiplayer Games
The official .NET class design guidelines only cover public interface: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/czefa0ke(VS.71).aspx

_privates is common, but in my experience at the largest of all C# shops, the explicit this.privates is more common. I use Resharper to enforce this style, but then again I use Resharper for every damn feature that wonderful wonderful magically tool provides.
1. choose your lisp dialect: do you want to learn CL, Scheme, Arc, ...?

2. randomly pick an implementation of your chosen lisp. It really makes no difference as a beginner. I speak from experience. You can always switch later in a painless way.

regarding CL, choose an open source implementation if you don't fear things like emacs. If you prefer a more polished IDE, choose a commercial implementation.
well, there is a limited demand for widgets. if i make cheaper widgets, i'm taking away sales from my competitor. isn't that the same?

your observation isn't something unique to finance. capitalism, or just business, is inherently competitive. guy A wants 1 widget; your factory and my factor can't both sell our widget to him. isn't that also a zero sum game?
No, they didn't come close to "hacking recaptcha":

Update – Just to be perfectly clear, anon didn’t hack reCAPTCHA. It did exactly what it was supposed to do. It shut down the auto voters instantly and effectively. The only option left after Time added reCAPTCHA to the poll was a brute force attack. Ben Maurer, (chief engineer on reCAPTCHA) comments on the hack: “reCAPTCHA put up a hard to break barrier that forced the attackers to spend hundreds of hours to obtain a relatively small number of votes. reCAPTCHA prevented numerous would-be attackers from engaging in an attack. In any high-profile system, it’s important to implement reCAPTCHA as part of a larger defense-in-depth strategy”. As Dr. von Ahn points out “had Time used reCAPTCHA from the beginning, this would have never happened — anon submitted tens of millions of votes before Time added reCAPTCHA, but they were only able to submit ~200k afterwards. And to do this, they had to resort to typing the CAPTCHAs by hand!” One thing that Time inc. did that made it much easier for the anonymous hack was to allow leave the door open for cross-site request forgeries which allowed anon to create a streamlined poll that never had to fetch data from Time.com.
I would think that the human input is improving the OCR algorithms. I assume that every human correction trains the OCR in some way. With enough corrections the OCR should at some point learn to distinguish between the characters it couldn't before.
And don't mind losing a few friends.

(Yes, I've won several games of Diplomacy. The bitterness can last a while sometimes.)
I guess it depends on how fitness is defined. I would say a person can definitely have good cardiovascular fitness while being fat. They could also have strong muscles, low blood pressure, low cholesterol, normal glucose levels and generally be healthy. I would describe that as being fit.

Seems like weight should be considered one indicator of fitness but not the most important one.
Posted: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=826060
You misstate the arguments of some green farming techniques. For example, rejecting monoculture on a patch of land is low risk/high yield. 15 different crops (not 15 varieties of one crop) is much less susceptible to total failure due to a single catastrophic event than a monoculture.

Secondly, is high yield even a good thing? Many crops produce more yield but do not produce more (or produce very little more) nutritionally valuable product. Corn being the exemplary plant in this case. Germ size has barely increased, while starch has grown considerably. Which is great if you're feeding cattle, but biomass from starch doesn't necessarily mean protein-rich biomass, rather it becomes animal fat. Delicious animal fat, to be sure, but not necessarily a good yield/nutrition trade-off.
Fisker Working on $39,000 Plug-in Hybrid to be Sold in 2012, Made in USA
4chan users were never able to successfully break recaptcha without some significant brute force techniques as detailed in the blog post, so there is still a lot of hope yet for recaptcha.
Isn't it a law in ecology that a population will grow to the limit of its scarcest resource? In some countries that is food, in many modern societies now it seems to be time.

We know that the population can't grow exponentially forever, but other than a recent dip in fertility rates, we have seen a fairly steady exponential growth.

http://www.iiasa.ac.at/Research/LUC/Papers/gkh1/chap1.htm
- Documentation: Is yours not auto-generated? We document our code pretty extensively here and have never had a renaming problem. Use the right tools and code flux won't ever bother you.

- Exposed APIs: I don't think the OP was talking about public APIs, which are admittedly much harder to change after the fact. There is plenty of code that is still easy to refactor underneath. That's why we have APIs, right?

- Existing installations: Barring API changes, what changes internally would affect your customers?

Renaming stuff is still really simple.
CL on Lispbox is what I have now. Which means I use (use being a overstatement) e-Macs with a Lisp extension.
A sketch for a location-based timeline representation of a field recording
I am not sure why you are being down voted, unless people are equating this with being able to 'think' your reality into existence.

We can't magically effect the world around us with our thoughts, but it is the thoughts that control the actions we take, so in a very real sense it does need to start from the mind.
Two things:

1) Not everyone knows about every idea that is (or was ever) implemented on the web. I had never heard of yubnub.org before your post, and had I come up with the idea on my own I would have implemented it on my own like they did.

2) They have released the source for it; meaning that I can run my own local version.
This is from memory so take it with a grain of salt:

2048 is the port you're forwarding.

Machine B:

machine_b$ mkfifo /tmp/tunn
machine_b$ nc -k -l 2048 < /tmp/tunn | nc [machine_c] 2048 > /tmp/tunn &

You should now have a working tunnel. Everything sent to B on 2048 will be sent to C:2048
I've never understood how this applies to arbitrage. Without arbitrage, the parties to the transaction would capture the money lost to arbitrage, and in a modern market, the same information would be learned. If I offer to sell 1000 at $3.03 and you offer to buy at $3.04, we can split the difference. If someone else gets the information of that spread faster than we can resolve it ourselves, they don't "lubricate the capital markets" or anything. They just get our money.
Yea, but you need to combine it with a db of address->long/lat pairs.
Good advice, but still be prepared for trouble, if your former employer can be capricious in that way...especially if your new venture is in any way related or similar to your former employer's.