skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Like many, I never played Meridian 59 but knew it as a major inspiration for arguably the first popular MMO: Everquest.

Here's the earliest video I know of EQ, and it has a very M59 feel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oFKrlynZNtU&list=FLrvKUlysHt...
I don't think these camps are mutually exclusive. For example, I believe that Thiel is right about the past 40 years, but we are starting to get back on track again (thanks in part to Larry Page) and the next 40 years will be much more broadly innovative.
You may want to take a look at F-Droid before launching a Play Store competitor: https://f-droid.org/
I think some of the sites escape semicolons only. Pure script loading isn't broken, but trying to code in the txt may break.
Can anybody figure out a date for this?

We changed the url from http://www.foia.cia.gov/sites/default/files/DOC_0000872751.p..., which has redactions.
I think his point is that DNS doesn't require the TCP or HTTP overhead.
There are more steps and layers involved with an HTTP GET and reply than with DNS resolution.
I have fond memories of this game too. :) I'll always remember how at some point it was possible to edit the game binary and create a character with maxed out stats that could kill the strongest monster in the game (the ghost) in one hit. :)
There's a reasonable argument that the entire industrial revolution was just the result of cheap carbon, and we've been running on that ever since. The Haber Process allowed us to get out of agriculture (and thus have time to make all of these breakthroughs) and then electrification (courtesy coal/gas) got us out of having to do manual labor. So we had lots of free time! And we used that to develop transistors and MRI machines and spaceships and everything else. But the returns to that free time seem to be diminishing rapidly, and we still rely on power growth to get GDP growth.
Why, oh why, Earth, must you rotate 365.242 times per year? Why couldn't it be 100 or 1000?
Just by glancing quickly over it it's difficult to draw big conclusions but, while the concept certainly feels promising I'm not sure about API - transduce require 4 parameters and it feels like you really need to know what happens inside to make use of it (that append function feels especially off). But maybe it's just me not being able to switch to functional way and it's simply a matter of spending some time with it (and do some serious work with it).
Interview with Martti Malmi – Founding Father of Both Bitcoin and Identifi
For one, Erlang has much better latency, as it has process-local garbage collection. In Akka, if the gc has to do a major collection then all threads must be paused.
Agreed. The problem is, what you're asking him to do is really hard.

Why was OOP considered a good idea? Before OOP, programs were just structs and functions that operated on them. But as programs got larger, that approach broke down. Someone on a team of programmers would create an instance of a struct, but would initialize it in a way that some function (written by a different programmer) would regard the struct as having an inconsistent state. Or some function, which was meant to only be a helper function for other functions that were the API, would be called directly by some ignorant and/or lazy programmer. The result was increasing chaos as programs got larger.

OOP was viewed as the fix to that kind of problem. It was somewhat successful as a fix, too.

So the problem with most of these pro-FP articles is that they show you small examples. But the pre-OOP style worked fine on the small examples, too. In fact, almost any style works on small examples.

And showing that I can write the same thing in fewer lines by using FP isn't the answer, either. It's like saying that your algorithm has a smaller scaling constant than mine does. That's fine, but first let's talk about whether your algorithm is O(n^2) and mine is O(n log n). That is, if your approach scales worse than mine for large problems, then showing me that your way is more efficient for small problems completely misses the point.

But to build a convincing case for that, you'd have to do something like having a team of competent OOP programmers write a large-ish program (say, 10 person-years of work), and have a team of competent FP programmers write the same thing, and report on the results. Oh, yeah, and have the teams maintain the programs for five years. That could be a convincing paper, because it would address the actual issues.
You seem to take targeting ads as an essential operation that everyone will agree is essential.
Most blogs that describe tips and best practices when applying to YC have one advice in common - "Get customers", "Prove that someone needs your product", "Get signups, email addresses" etc. And while that is a *very8 valid and important point, for some of us though its harder than that.
Even if one has a prototype, the companies they work for have strict policies that prevent doing business on the side, let alone the fact that the H1 visa also explicitly prevents you from having any other source of income or starting a corp. The only options would be to go all in and go to their home country to develop the product further, at which point they've abandoned everything they've worked hard for all this while, - or - wait for a green card, which is elusive if you are from one of the populous Asian countries. What other options does one have? Have any H1s successfully made it to YC? Could they describe their experience?

Also, please correct me if I'm wrong here, but despite assurances from YC folk and Sam himself that you can and should apply even if you have just an idea or prototype, blog after blog suggest you need to be much further than that to get through the tough competition.
Aiwip.com: Free printing for Students
The name is not at all unfortunate.

But pandering to anti-intellectualism is extremely unfortunate. Irrational fear of new terminology is a major stumbling block to progress. There is a wealth of new things to discover that will require new modes of thinking, new concepts, and new terminology.

If devs wish to remain stagnant in their knowledge and their practice, that's fine. But in doing so, there's no reason why they should offer their opinions on matters they've chosen to ignore. I hope they'd have the intellectual humility to simply listen, rather than contribute noise to the discussion.
Same article posted by same user three hours ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8336810
Who would need mass address books?
I would argue Ultima Online set the bar for MMOs long before Everquest. The UO servers had 3000+ players online vs the 300ish of Meridian 59.
But I tried your link recently and it no longer works.
Faker (for ruby here https://github.com/stympy/faker) originally for perl, available elsewhere also
FYI, the shutting down announcement: http://blog.twitpic.com/2014/09/twitpic-is-shutting-down/
Show HN: The Best UX Links Each Week to Your Inbox
using twitter as a compiler(as a service) is pretty cool
I'd hope that the same community that takes "concatenation" and "list comprehension" and "mutability" to be household words would be able to get over some jargon weirdness so long as it's explained adequately.
As a UX Designer, I’m constantly reading UX articles, playing with new tools, watching videos, and looking at amazing portfolios – I wanted an outlet to share. Lately, I’ve been inspired by other curated daily and weekly emails and wanted to create one dedicated to user experience design. Let me know what you think...
I'd really like someone on any side of this debate (and there are certainly more than two; for example, some people are advocates of "FP in the small, OO in the large") to write an article that does describe how their approach handles the challenges of designing and maintaining a large system.

I think such articles are rare because they're much harder to write than something like this. In complex systems it becomes very difficult to explain all of the tradeoffs and constraints that have led to the design you've ended up with, and it becomes harder to evaluate that design.

FWIW, at this point I agree with the author that modern FP has strong advantages over OO. One reason I feel this way is because extensive experience with large OO systems has shown me lots of ways in which OO causes problems. However, I admit that I don't have a similar level of experience with large FP systems. I'm sure that as FP gets more popular and more large FP systems get built, we'll find plenty of things to complain about on that side of the fence too.
I used rot13 for my last name, trying normal words as input until you get a normal word as output. Sparks fun conversations when people find it a strange last name and you get to explain that there is a secret meaning.
Poe's Law strikes again.
It's not my point of view, but it sure is for the incumbents.
Thiel is focused on lagging indicators and this results in excessive pessimism.

For example, the average price of energy is a lagging indicator. If you're focused on this then you'll completely miss all improvements in the cost of clean energy until the day when it's better than the average price of all energy. In fact, in the early days it's just making the average price more expensive.

If you want to know where we're going rather than looking in the rear-view mirror, you need separate metrics for watching new tech while it's still new and more expensive.
Prevent what? Better pedigree data for the NSA, FBI, BKA? Fuck that noise.
Increasing rental property prices due to market forces is a good thing, because the same market forces should result in more rental properties being constructed. Unless, of course, something is prevent the latter.
I agree some progress has occurred since 1970, but the pace of totally new ideas has slowed considerably. We're in the Age of Moderate Improvement.

I have often wondered what made the West so great during its golden age of innovation (and to answer what we're missing today) and think it can be attributed to a single-mindedness in our culture and leadership towards a common goal.

The Industrial Revolution (and American Revolution) would not have been possible without the overwhelmingly popular Age of Enlightenment (a cultural movement of intellectual reform that emphasized reason over tradition). Such multi-national cooperation and exchange of ideas had been previously unprecedented. The intellectuals of each country banded together because they had a common enemy (entrenched tradition, religion, and monarchy).

Similar patterns (large-scale cooperation towards a common goal) can be found in the Second Industrial Revolution, the Atomic Age, and the Space Race.

So the question remains: what singular goal(s) do we have today?

The Internet has a great deal of potential to be used as a vehicle for a new intellectual revolution that may drive a new age of progress. I've seen a few hints of this in the OSS community and Silicon Valley but so far neither have found a common goal that resonates strongly enough.

tl;dr : The want of progress is not specific enough to inspire. We need a new, overarching goal to drive the next age of progress.
I would imagine that a 14% price increase to the end user will absolutely move the needle. That's massive.
It could use some examples in the landing page.
I don't like the idea of doing this on a website. Why not just do it offline? Why fetch the data from a server where it could be captured and logged?
Except it doesn't do addresses, especially postal codes, which is what I'd use it for. Making up names is not the problem, finding a matching postal code with street name and a house number (this database is published and many sites check it) is the issue.
Was your paragraph intended to be Kafkaesque, or was it just a coincidence?
I can only imagine who will move into the office space
The tale of the Manson tapes
this company is LEGIT!
Nice, anything like this available in Python or C# land? Or even a simple desktop app rather than a webapp?
I'm aware of it, and it is good, but the key feature of app stores is that they are platforms on which people can make money.

It also doesn't represent any sort of coherent product. About 50% of what I intend to do is to integrate a few of the things on it into a polished bundle, a bit like the way Android itself contains a few random other projects at a lower level.
[0] http://scottchacon.com/2011/08/31/github-flow.html
I was thinking of things like deploying auto-scaling SOLR clusters for hundreds of dollars, vs tens of thousands for dedicated search infrastructure years ago - maybe a bit more than 5 years, but that's the gist.

Twilio. Maybe Twilio is within the 5 year window too.

Mobile apps in general - the hardware infrastructure in peoples' pockets lets us do stuff with software that was not on most peoples' radars 5 years ago.
really smart people work here
Probably a nitpick, but i disagree with this statement

"Evolution doesn’t care about you past your reproductive age. It doesn’t want you either to live longer or to die, it just doesn’t care"

I've heard this statement a few times, and it appears to be untrue. Menopause, in particular, is evidence of this - that humans evolved to shut down reproduction at a certain age rather than allow it to peter out - perhaps because grandparents are so relevant in the evolutionary prospects of their descendants.

This next part is most certainly a nitpick, but the statement "nature/evolution doesn't care", while not meant literally, does fall into the trap of assigning intent or purpose to evolution (in this case, more subtly, through the presence of absence of caring, rather than the non-existence of intent).
Can someone explain a little bit more? I think I've been spoilt rotten by the web API world.

Don't telcos provide MMS gateway like how they provide SMS gateways? What is actually happening under the hood here?
Yes I get the picture. Thank you.
Uber was cofounded by someone with a large exit. This number does not represent the actual finances available and is likely misreported. I have a single exception to the low initial raise as well. Still anecdata and does not really refute the point. There are successes, but there are way, way more failures; early investors hate to reinvest pre-traction.
I'd also add homoiconicity and referential transparency to those :P
Facebooks down
I never played M59, but heard about it endlessly as "the good old days" when I played EverQuest.

Every few years I Google for happenings on the EQ server I frequented in 1999. There have been all sorts of mergers and consolidations, but it appears a number of people are still playing regularly 15.5 years later and still arguing about the exact same things.

It's like dropping onto Skull Island[1].

1: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skull_Island
Not to mention, whatever we are doing as a society seems to have dramatically reduced the rates of crime (especially violent crime).
Sorry, I meant, "What would you get from an iPhone 6 4" over the current 4" models?" Trying to determine what's actually important in the new models aside from screen size, beyond the feeling that you're not buying something "old".
Oracle's Larry Ellison on CNN Fortune
Scotland already has its own parliament which uses PR, however this did not stop the SNP wiping out the opposition in the last round of elections hence the current situation.

I think Scottish people are going to have a cold reality check in the coming years no matter what happens. The sameness of the existing UK political parties is not because of some broken voting system or the "Westminster Elite". It's because the Labour and Conservative parties traditionally differentiated themselves on economic policy, and the hard left economics of old Labour lost the battle of ideas so thoroughly that it took Blair's "New Labour" movement to make them electable again. Ever since, the UK has been stuck with:

1. The Tories, who have a nasty authoritarian streak and represent the worst of the old British class system but post-Thatcher have a reputation for managing the economy well and are at least willing to be honest with voters about financial reality.

2. Labour, who have been trying and largely failing to find a new political identity after socialist/communist policies like strong trade union support became indelibly associated with economic failure.

3. Lib Dems who also lack any obvious political identity and never really expected to win anyway, they always represented the protest vote. When they accidentally ended up winning votes in the general disgust with both Labour and Tories in 2010 they had to enter coalition and immediately realised their promises to voters were unimplementable.

So three parties, none of which want to rewind the country to the disaster of the 1970's and thus struggle to differentiate themselves from the Tories. Oh, there's also UKIP which at least is differentiated, the problem is lots of people think their difference is for the worse.

Result of all that is the "neoliberal consensus" Scots and other people in the north hate so much. But this state of affairs is the consensus because the alternative was tried and turned out to be way worse.

Everything is made more problematic by the fact that the UK political system and culture expects The Opposition to disagree with everything the government in power does by default. So the last few decades have witnessed both parties repeatedly try to claim the other party is completely wrong whilst actually largely agreeing with each other and doing the same things once in power. This mock disagreement results in a fake, plasticky sort of politics that ends up creating disillusionment.

Eventually the UK political scene will change and the parties will find some fundamental difference that divides them once more. Maybe over the issue of Europe. Or, people will get used to the idea that maybe politicians violently disagreeing about extremely basic things isn't a healthy or normal state of affairs, and a genteel consensus about the best way forward is actually more civilised.
> Corporations get taxed ~15% + 14% hotel tax. Individuals
> get taxed ~30% already on their Airbnb income

Greatly simplifying things:

(Big) corporations in the US get taxed 15%, and then when they pay dividends to shareholders, that gets taxed again as income for the individual.

In fact many small businesses are incorporated in such a way that they skip the 15% tax rate and pay taxes on all of their income at the individual owner's tax rate.
Actually there have never been so many publications per scientist as there is now. Nearly every metric that is measurable, have been growing exponentially for the last century (no. of scientists, publications, research institutions etc.). There are some indications that we are nearing the top of the s-curve however.

Which begs the question: why is all that research not resulting in equal exponential innovation in our society?
Just wanted to thank you for taking the time to write this.

Explaining how SAFEs work in the context of the actual process of raising money - meeting with investors, figuring out a price, needing to raise more etc was eye-opening and very useful.

Thank you again for all your comments here!
"BLUECHECK" is a registered trademark of 3M: http://tsdr.uspto.gov/#caseNumber=78959070&caseType=SERIAL_N...

I don't really know what this means for you. I'd be interested to hear from anyone who has some idea.
Asm.js on status.modern.ie
Using static variables like

static width_is_auto: bool = true;

should work.
And yet over 3B (billion) people are below the poverty line...

EDIT:

Luckily, weapons systems are much more effective than they were in the 1970s, so I guess we will be able to fend off the poor.

EDIT2:

Look, downvote all you want...the elephant in the room is that the rewards and advances in technology are not and can not be distributed evenly. Even in a first-world nation such as the US, so many of the products listed in my parent post are out-of-reach of anyone without significant financial means. CT scans, for example--what does imaging matter if you can't afford it?

You think that the starving huddled masses are just going to sit outside the walls and go "Man, sure wish I could live there?". That's never how history has worked out, you nitwits.
Maybe the low hanging fruit have been picked but I think there will be a steady stream of innovation in the near future - more efficient and cheaper renewables, better battery tech, better cures to disease etc. I think the next big shift will happen when the remaining 4-5 billion people are empowered with high quality education and computing devices and the potential of the whole of humanity can be put to use.

It's a numbers game, more brains working on innovation=more innovation. This global levelling of the playing field and equal access to technology and means of innovation is playing out slowly, maybe too slowly for it to feel like an "acceleration" to us who live through it. Give it another 10-20 years. Right now it's like we're running at 20% capacity when you look at the total number of people on the planet, at how much of that potential is not utilised.

China will take the lead, already has started to in some cases (in the case of AI, Andrew Ng's jump to Baidu was interesting) - http://www.forbes.com/sites/roberthof/2014/08/28/interview-i...
Has technological progress slowed since the 1970s? I think there's evidence technology is moving along quite quickly:

We've gone from expensive, slow, geographically-constrained telegrams and short-range, anarchic CB radio to gigahertz communication, carrying gigabits of data in the pockets of 1.5 Gigapeople.

We have the ISS, in space, 257 miles above us, 24/7, docking several times weekly with spacecraft from several continents. We have GPS. We have a world-wide data network and speech-controlled word-processing and publishing so billions of people can write and deliver a book, paper, speech, etc. with pictures and diagrams complete with automatic language translation. The days of hand-staining long-exposure slide film for use in a projector are over.

We eradicated smallpox. We invented MRI, robotic surgery, Tamoxifen, Raloxifene. We have successfully transplanted hearts and lungs, livers, intestines, hands, arms, legs and even faces, bladders, ovaries and penises.

We've gone from one farmer supplying 57.7 people to 155 people.

Yes you can point to vast stretches of mediocre scientists and companies who are also-rans. That's just a condition of humanity. Not everyone can sequence the entire human genome. If someone wants much more miraculous results out of the natural world than what we have today, you're seeking mystical discoveries, not technological ones.
This is the argument I would use against FP. It's an open question -- to some degree.

Couple of notes. First, have you seen what real-world large-scale OO looks like? Dude, it ain't pretty. We're swimming in projects that are staffed at 10x or 20x the number of coders they probably really need, and a lot of time is spent in support activities.

Second, maybe the real question here isn't one of scale, it's how the model falls apart under strain. A good encapsulated system should offer you a bit more defensive programming protection than an FP one. But if you're using compsable executables, while testing at the O/S level? Meh.

I know why we went to OO. And let's not forget OOAD, a beautiful way of joining analysis and design about the problem with the solution itself. I'm of a mind that OOAD might live on even once the world moves to mostly FP.

I think maybe that OOP was a stopgap position; a place to try to build a firewall against the encroaching overstaffing associated with Mythical Man-Month management. Now that programming is a commodity, however, we're seeing diminishing returns. Don't know.

I am much less convinced of the "We need OO for large scale projects" argument now than I was two years ago. I expect this trend to continue. We might be able to solve the scaling problem with things like cyclomatic complexity limits on executables, or DSL standards. Not sure of the answer here, but I think we're going to find out.