skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> What's the deal with so many people hating DMs on Twitter?

How many people do you follow on Twitter? I manage an account that follows a few thousand (I use DMs for content submission), and I have to wade through so many useless DMs.

I agree with Tichy, reading this unfortunately made me disinterested.

I will say though, the design of the site is nice. I especially liked the footer graphic, which was a cute touch to the Twitter bird, if a bit cliched.
Fossils Shed New Light on Human Past
Yeah, but this video succeeded. Therefore, its "production values" were just fine. How good the video is, qua video, is irrelevant. Talk about a bicycle shed!

I'm beating this dead horse because I know that a lot of great hackers would feel intimidated about having to make a video of themselves, and it would be a pity if that dissuaded anyone from applying. Of course YC have already made all this clear.

It's better, in fact, that the OP had low "production values" because it shows that there isn't much of a barrier to entry here.
What? No 36-bit? What if I actually used a Symbolics 3600? ;-)
It is, but federation doesn't work yet. They're saying they're aiming for the end of this month for working federation on the sandbox, which I eagerly await :]
I usually buy from these guys: http://eshop.macsales.com/shop/apple/memory/.
Ugly truths on display at Pacific Science Center
You host your own ssh server, or a 3rd party's?
I'm using RootBSD and I haven't run into any major problems.
You can run FreeBSD on Linode: http://www.linode.com/wiki/index.php/BSD_Howto - However, last I checked, FreeBSD under Xen didn't support SMP (or 64 bit).
Coffee warehouse
mybestcoffee how about having a cup of coffee from the best online coffee store , where you can have all the major brand of coffee?
The language specification and the compiler would have to be proven correct first. Which is increasingly difficult with higher level languages and with optimizing compilers. The critical aspect is that the MACHINE CODE has to be correct. That is one of the reasons the problem is so hard.
Oh, I could not get the pdf, would please mail me a copy machese AT gmail, thanks.
The answer to your very good question is beyond the scope of what can be covered in an HN post, so I would suggest that you look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purely_functional for a quick answer, or http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~rwh/theses/okasaki.pdf for a more in-depth answer. After that, you'll know what to Google for. I particularly recommend the discussion of tree updates in the Wikipedia article to start with, since it has good diagrams.

That said... multidimensional arrays continues to be a sore point with functional programs, as far as I know. A variety of purely functional structures exist that can replicate some parts of the performance guarantees of traditional arrays, but I am not aware of anything that can cover the full gamut of uses for a multidimensional array. Usually in this case there is a functional structure that does what you really need, but ISTM that when you find yourself needing a multidimensional array, it's because A: it's huge B: you need fast O(1) updating and C: you need fast O(1) access and that combo is just killer. (And nowadays, D: you need cache coherence control comes up too.)

Oh, and if I'm reading your question correctly, Erlang process isolation is not really related to your question. However, I will point out that in Erlang, two processes will not access the database "at the same time". Two processes will send messages to the database Erlang-process, which will serve them in order and send back the replies. When processes and messaging are cheap you change how you do things; a lot more things get wrapped in processes (files, socket connections, foreign libraries, pipes to externally running programs ("ports" in Erlang speak, rather unfortunately), etc.) than you'd expect. It's the fundamental primitive for avoiding contention, it gets used a lot!
http://johncompanies.com/ does FreeBSD VPS hosting. I haven't used them myself, but they've been around for years and years and seem to have a good reputation. Their prices are a bit higher than Slicehost/linode, though.
In x86 terms, AMD64 offers a couple extra registers that should improve cache hit ratios and reduce a little the memory bandwidth consumption.

At least I hope it would.
Advertisers are paying on the expectation of return. And that expectation is based entirely on contingency. They have no claim at all on the public's co-operation. Have they paid the public to watch the ads? No. They merely expect that they will.

But of course those contingencies can change, such as with use of ad-blockers. Anyone who uses ad-blockers is perfectly free to do so. And the advertisers have no 'right' whatsoever to complain.

For a commercial organisation to feel affronted that its customers don't do what it wants is, at the very least, complacency.

If a community wants to agree to fund something, let it do so clearly.
In March I was shopping around for a new job. It was common to be asked why I was changing jobs (especially in this economy...). A big part of my answer was that I wanted to try something new. I wanted to make sure that my resume didn't pigeonhole me as a Python web developer. Even though I had been in that field for my first 4 years out of college, I had worked in very different domains previously and I wanted to keep my options open in the future. I enjoy Python web development, but to avoid being too narrow I decided that my next job would be with a different language in a different domain.

Most people understood that desire. A recruiter at one company where I interviewed disagreed with the strategy, though. She said it's ok to play around in a few different domains when you're young, but at some point you need to pick one and stick with it. That way you can be seen as expert in that domain and you can be considered eligible for higher level roles with more decision-making responsibility.

I suppose I can see her point, but I sincerely hope she's wrong. I want my horizons to always be broad.
HTC Touch Pro2 Get Serious about Communication
I don't completely disagree, but realtime is not a holy grail - after all, we had chatrooms long before we had reddit, digg and the like.
I follow about 63 people on Twitter. Don't really find the majority of users that interesting. But you follow several thousand so it doesn't really matter that I only follow 63 people.

That being said, we're definitely interested and proactively working on ways to provide value for users of our service and those that receive messages. I would say about 50% of the campaigns are sent via DM and the rest just to the public timeline. Our most valuable clients tend to use the one which makes the most sense to them.

We do have a few users that just spam their followers (per our definition of spam) and the updates listed in the other post will hopefully curb them off the site. Additional ideas would be great too.

I'd love to see Twitter provide more granular control over direct messaging and allowing you to follow a user but not accept DMs from them.

Thanks for the constructive criticism!
Yes, I use OpenDNS now, but it fails like others.
I'm hoping someone will build a projector with an embedded computer and a USB port built in. Just plug in a flash drive or SD card and display a PDF file as a presentation. No messing with laptops or cables or display settings.

If it had a well-designed, simple interface (remote control with only five or six buttons) and a high "just works" factor, it could be the Flip video camera of projectors.
There's a real gem in there:

> You'd be surprised how much the tools, models and techniques of one field can apply in another.

That goes for anybody, not only for people in academia. I don't know how many times I've profited from being able to apply an idea from a totally unrelated field to software problems.

I remember reading the 'simulated annealing' paper long ago and thinking, "wait a minute, if this is possible, what else is possible ?", and I haven't stopped doing that. It's paid off numerous times.
In Clojure, you can handle this with STM holding the state of the world, where changes are wrapped in transactions. Rich Hickey's talk on the subject is here: http://blip.tv/file/812787

The first half is sort of a description of the Clojure philosophy, the second half is building an ant simulation very similar to this game of life but with STM instead.
Using Django Forms With Pylons
gmail has a contract too, it's called an SLA. why should j-random business trust the part-time IT guy hired from craigslist more than the engineers at google?
Sure I dont mind reading an article on Vim (or even Emacs), but please, try to add something instead of linking to other resources.
Oh, well: "Verifying the kernel—known as the seL4 microkernel—involved mathematically proving the correctness of about 7,500 lines of computer code in an project taking an average of six people more than five years." Observing that that is not practical was pointed out by Bruce, too. In this case there was a lot of examination.

(Frankly, sounds pretty dull to me.)
Prelude> 1/sum ([1..1000] >>= \x -> [(pi*x)**(-2)])
6.003647956020607
My experience has been much the same as yours. Although I have to wonder how many web-apps are going to have their functionality subsumed by wave.
Some critics say new ICANN agreement may not provide enough accountability
WebMynd Status
Thanks a lot for your answer.

And yes, a lot of people are trying to recreate intelligence without life ... the problem is ... intelligence is a function of living beings. You don´t see, on nature, intelligent rocks,for instance. But you do see intelligent insects, like bees.

So first of all, i think we need to create some kind of rudimentary life and then develop intelligence on it.

DNA is the base of life. There´s patterns, a language behind the DNA ... so i do think we can use "programming" to create structures like the DNA to form artificial beings.

So i think it´s really possible to create life (artificial) and intelligence (rudimentary) with our current technologies, but we cant do that with our current paradoxes , our way to do things. We need new forms of think, we need to start thinking like gods, not like humans. Sorry by the poor enlgish.
I never thought I'd say that, but now that I use Django Forms with Pylons, I don't want to go back. I've converted my startup's forms into Django forms, and it really fits together nicely.

The glue code I posted is just a few hundred lines, so it's not a problem to maintain. And I know that Django won't change things on their end without plenty of advance warning.

No more @validate decorator for me, that's for sure.
I'm not trying to convince anyone; I'm pointing out that you can get started with basic tasks without having to know a ton of commands.
On the other hand, spending time and money on this sort of relatively harmless government scheme just means that there is less time for the government to do all the other sinister and terrifying things that it was planning on doing, no? So from the position of someone who is worried about increasing state power, it seems to me that you could argue it both ways.

> I put forth

You "put forth", seriously?
A lot of feedbacks from kind hackers, I could only conclude that there is no silver bullet.

Though I think the best work-around is hosting a server outside of mainland china, and then tunnel through ssh or vpn. An EC2 might works here, but I've not tested it. If someone tested, please share us your hacking.

Thanks all.
You missed my point. The word "if" was not accidental. If you hadn't worked in any other languages, then you needed to try something else for perspective immediately. I went out of my way to point out this had nothing to do with PHP particularly.
Hackers Target Google Wave Invitations
Hey, a use for Wolfram Alpha! [ http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=sum%281%2F%28n+*+pi%29%... ]
Spotify launches offline mode for PCs
Why We Need a Theory for Software Engineering
If nothing else, finding other people working on the same idea is a validation of the idea, since they think it is worth working on too. If you think you can do a better job at it than they can why not try it yourself?
Jesus, does this really require such a long article? Just open the interpreter and check it out. Took me 5 minutes when I decided to figure it out.
RE: the US/UK difference in fatality rates --
Demographics is everything: young people cause the most crashes and not nearly as many young people in Europe can afford to own and drive cars. Control for age and fatalities per million vehicle miles balance out in the other age brackets.

The only real 'solution' to distracted driving is to start building an America where we don't have to drive everywhere. Get people out from behind the wheel. Cars are inherently dangerous and Americans are forced to use them far, far too often.
I realized that one of the bolded phrases on the site is to Direct message all Twitter followers. That's not really our "intent" and so it's probably best for the service to not try and advertise it that way.

We're considering exactly what to replace it with :)

Thanks for pointing this out. It didn't seem immediately apparent to us that we were "coming off" that way.
Well, it satisfies the "free" part, but probably not the "will" part, which implies reasons for actions. I'm not actually sure humans have free will under my definition, but I think we probably do. It could be that some algorithm that's much simpler than an actual human could predict in detail what a given human will do without simulation, in which case I'd be forced to admit that humans don't have free will by my definition.
It's not just about the money, though. How is free/open source supposed to gain traction, if not by people saying "hey, this is good!" If no one "markets" a piece of software, how you know about? How did _you_ find out about the tools you use?
People often need to solve the problem of finding a house where the number is readily apparent.

In some/many places, one could find that house by interpolation. (In the US, even numbers tend to be on one side of the street and odd numbers on the other. And they're almost always in-order.) With an apartment, things can be more complicated.

That said, there are instances of "vanity addresses", where "<some number> 5th Ave" appears to not be on 5th Ave.

I don't know what one does in Japan, where the numbers are supposedly assigned chronologically. (Hmm - I wonder what triggers number generation and if they ever reuse or allow transfers.)
For this project, that's assumed. Provided you have some kind of formal semantics, you can define translations. And in fact, Adam Chlipala's work on certified compilers show that it's not impossible.

http://adam.chlipala.net/papers/CtpcPLDI07/

(there are subsequent papers too, but that's probably a good place to start).
Sloppy Dualism on Bad Astronomy
Anecdote, but I've had great experiences with G.skill memory. I have maybe a dozen machines with that stuff in them and they are working great.
My brief look at it with slicehost vs linode indicated that 64 bit was a significant memory-eater:

http://journal.dedasys.com/2008/11/24/slicehost-vs-linode
But that is on a notebook. The numbers the server folks put them through are much higher.
A view does not intrinsically have worth just because of it's existence. Scoble is a tech-evangelist; someone who uses technology and not someone who builds upon it. As someone who builds things, I value the perspective of folks who will build on Wave.
Ask HN - What's your best startup idea?
Ask HN - What's your best startup idea?
An online dating site that uses collaborative filtering on large datasets of people (perhaps Facebook as a dataset). Then inform potential couples when they are physically close to each other via cell phone/geolocation.
Notes migrations are already happening all over the place -- only it's SharePoint that many corps are moving to, for better or worse.
Sorry about that, it didn't register that GP's question was tangential to GGP's UWB-focused links. Regarding IR, I agree that interference is the biggest issue. The electronics also get harder as you approach THz frequencies, but that could be worked around if IR radiation weren't so pervasive. Interference is probably the reason you can only get up to 1Gbps or so, even in a lab (and you'd need 10.2Gbps to transmit HDMI 1.3, for instance).
Your comment made me smile. I had a thought of a fictional programmer so editor-centric, they decide on their programming language based on which one will help them improve their skills at vi. (Which is a misinterpretation of your comment. vi has roots in ed, so some of the cool esoteric stuff is invoked in the same way.)
Well, there was 'larger' :)

And don't forget the 1100 / 2200 series. 9 bit bytes...
This just made my day :) Thanks
So, uh, time-to-market? I needed this yesterday. ;)

It seems that you can purchase interleukin-6 from Cayman in bulk, 96 wells for about $350.

Nootropics are an interesting legal and academic subject. The question is: will this be fully legal and open or prescribed and scheduled only to those with learning disorders? I can easily see this being banned from use on the SAT, GMAT and academia in general. Similar (and often abused) nootropics include Adderall (amphetamine salts) and Ritalin (methylphenidate) which are DEA/FDA Schedule II, both of which are prescribed for ADHD and severe narcolepsy, as is concentration drug Provigil (modafinil) under Schedule IV.

Either the government (and perhaps academia) will go its regular course and prevent individuals from gaining an unfair edge by scheduling it, or there may be a slim chance of it being OTC. I have a gut feeling it's going to get scheduled.
The problem is that most old projectors ship with VGA. Imagine you bring a shine laptop with HDMI/DisplayPort in the conference room, only to know that the old projector there drives VGA / S-Video only ... I think that's why business laptops still sport VGA when consumer lines have long ditched analog and adopted digital standards.
The only time I can say that we 'scored' we weren't so much concentrating on 'being a startup' or 'making it big', we were trying to solve a relatively simple problem (how to put live video on the internet) in the simplest possible way (1 click download and launch).

Nothing else I ever did before or after came close, but if there is one lesson to take away from that whole period it is keep it as simple as you can.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=757204
Why does F5's blog keep ending up on Hacker News?
The Wikipedia of genealogy: a family tree for the entire human race, which everyone can edit and add to.
An unsolicited dating site ?
Red Bull gives you Wiings..(now with added memory boost so your grades follow you skyward)
Open Ph.D. – An Experiment in Higher Learning
The one I'm working on :D

(This is true for the duration of any startup idea that I happen to be working on)
Weird... I expected little size variations in the working data. Code size should be neglectable when compared to it. The only data that is affected is pointers and, unless you have a lot of pointers and a little data being pointed to, the difference should not be measurable.

Of course, the programmer could be using register-size integers for all the data.
Direct person-to-person electronic payments.
Too bad you can't actually check against the full academic report unless you pay or happen to have a university that pays for access to the publications.

http://www.fasebj.org/cgi/content/abstract/23/10/3629
Try pepper spray.

You will never forget. ;-)
What is the difference between software as a tool and something mechanical as a tool? Mechanical devices, for which there are many patents, take a state of matter and change it to another state of matter. Why should you be able to patent a circuit board, but not a set of program code that does exactly the same transformation to a set of bits?

Why are mechanical engineers able to patent their devices, but computer engineers are not?

I understand the ramifications of software patents. But the problems with software patents are the same for patents in every other field. Why is software special?

Why are we narrowing the conversation to software? Patents for software, like any other field require research and development, they save time and money, they make things more efficient, they improve life for countless individuals, they do require risk, innovation, and yes reward to survive.

That's what patents are for. They are to reward the risk takers. In the case of software patents, the reward goes to the programmers who take the risk to write all the code that will be patented. They aren't "abstract" ideas, they are lines of code that are concretely typed into a computer. They convert information from one form to another. They control the physical world in previously unidentified ways.

To say software patents are invalid or software can't be patented really puts software programmers at a disadvantage relative to other fields of science and innovation. Why should pharmaceutical companies, civil engineers, mechanical engineers, and all other disciplines have the right to patent their inventions -- but not software engineers?
Perhaps interesting in that context is that Twitter seems to have started to track clicks for users of the web site. (Clicks go through a referral page so Twitter can count them).

I don't recall them announcing anything about what they want to do with it, but it seems like it could become part of a commercial offering.

Unfortunately it only works for users on the web site.
"If a nasal spray can improve memory, perhaps we're on our way to giving some folks a whiff of common sense, such as accepting the realities of evolution,"

I think the newsworthiness of the article may be overshadowed by this neutron-bomb of a statement. Maybe it was taken out of context? :-)
Variable Cost Living Sadly Doesn't Work
Desmopressin is available over the Internet for about $25 a bottle. As a nasal spray it can stimulate the hypothalamus and improve memory retention. It's dangerous, though, because it interferes with normal water retention.
Not sure how to monetize this, but the idea seems very cool for me, it would be great to meet my whole family, and how do we get in Brazil :D
Because there're unqualified hackers here.
It's definitely worth learning enough to use, just in case your preferred editor isn't available. I tried it, but couldn't get used to switching modes, I kept messing up my file and having to backout and fix things; so I memorized a subset of vi that would let me get any editing done that I absolutely had to and went back to using emacs for regular use. Note that the default version of vi is not always vim, some systems use elvis or other vi clone, some of which have different advanced features and keybindings; for use when nothing else is available, concentrate on the basic vi commands.
These are not machine proofs, so they are not getting round the halting problem.
I really like that. There really isn't anything out there like this?
Get people out from behind the wheel.

You'll probably get this. In another couple of decades, it may be illegal to drive manually on public roads ...
In fairness, the MBPs and MB's now both use the MDP connectors.
Rocky Mountain News: Post Mortem by Editor
He's missing the Apple Display Connector.
No, more like attacking the online dating site from a different perspective. More like "increasing the probability of chance encounters with likely mates". It's not unsolicited because both people have to agree to meet on the cell phone notification.
You need parentheses around the -1. Otherwise the series is divergent. I presume you do not live at a divergent address? :)
One Billion Neurons
> Some may argue that there's no guarantee that such proofs apply to real world systems.

I would argue that those who would argue that have probably not spent a lot of time doing any real-world formal verification.

People seem to like arguing about its utility in the abstract without ever doing it.
A Culture of Sharing: Free Software in the Field of Computer Music