skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Of course, i never check in my comments/asserts to the main branch, since i'm not sure whether my understanding is correct

I also add my own comments when understanding/using/changing other people's code. I do eventually check them in though. After all, why not?

* If the original author is no longer available, you're now the best authority on the subject; chances are your comments will help anyone in your shoes sometime later, including yourself. If you're really unsure, add that information to the comments.

* If you're making changes based on your understanding of the code, you or someone else will be testing those changes, thereby validating or falsifying those assumptions. If, after testing, the bugfix/feature/task works, so do the comments.

* If the original author will be available at a future date, you can get them to do a "comment review" (cf code review) when they get back.
correct usage of carriage return and spaces are hard to get right for users who are not used to type writing.

thats about it. teach them that and you get 80% readable ascii.
It's been taken up by a new maintainer, and works remarkably well (though I'm not sure I'd trust 'real' data to it). I've run it on a media server at home for the better part of a year, across hardware upgrades and linux installs, and so far, so good.
What would be really is interesting is the same study but with the first group being told they're hard-working and the second group not being given any praise at all. That would help test how far the "praise/incentives diminish performance" theory really goes.
> I must say that it really is totally unintuitive to have put 2 spaces at the end of a line to get a linebreak

Agreed!

One way I get round that is to run text through a Markdown parser first then do a regex to replace \n with <br />

That seems to work fairly will ~99% of the time.

(I do like Markdown though - compared to, for example, BBCode. It degrades fairly gracefully, ignoring the line break issue, so you can just write a chunk of text and it looks good but formatting is fairly easy to pick up and eventually intuitive for more advanced users)
Completely agree. The current design does a great job at "delivering the news" in a straightforward fashion with minimal user effort.

The new design of the home page looks pretty interesting, I'll have to use it for a while to see how it works. First impression is too much imagery, not enough content and not enough content organization. Splitting content in text vs. video doesn't help to get a quick idea of what's going on in business/politics/local/...

From recent experience, I'm not a big fan of CNN news reporting due to too many must-see "man bites dog" story, too many irrelevant "breaking news" and too much recycled content with new headlines slapped on. Reading CNN has mostly become a matter of figuring out what content is worth reading. The best redesign will not change this (unfortunately).

Any guesses what "NewsPulse" will be? A real-time news aggregator?
But that would be an improvement....which would cause them to lose the right to claim being the world's worst website...
I thought this was unfairly killed last night when it first appeared on HN.
The Gambit Scheme lib you're talking about might just be termite (http://code.google.com/p/termite/). It sounds like an interesting lib, although it doesn't do everything Erlang does.
At the end of the day it's just another immature way to poke fun at what is, ultimately, a reasonable OS.

Im kinda impressed that HN is open minded enough to have killed it. :D
Apple vs Nokia, the patents involved listed
Five of the patents relate to wireless data:

5802465 - Data transmission in a radio telephone network

6359904 - Data transfer in a mobile telephone network

6694135 - Measurement report transmission in a telecommunications system

6775548 - Access channel for reduced access delay in a telecommunications system

7092672 - Reporting cell measurement results in a cellular communication system

Two of the patents relate to speech coding:

5862178 - Method and apparatus for speech transmission in a mobile communications system

5946651 - Speech synthesizer employing post-processing for enhancing the quality of the synthesized speech

Three of the patents relate to security and encryption. The first two relate to UMTS, while the last relates to UMTS and GSM:

6882727 - Method of ciphering data transmission in a radio system

7009940 - Integrity check in a communication system

7403621 - System for ensuring encrypted communication after handover
I think it's actually designed for those who do not understand or do not care what an operating system is.

There are people who are totally fine with being completely clueless about how their computers work. Microsoft targets them actively. This is not evil per se - it's just market strategy.
clickable links to the texts of the patents:

http://www.patentstorm.us/patents/5802465/fulltext.html

http://www.patentstorm.us/patents/6359904/fulltext.html

http://www.patentstorm.us/patents/6694135/fulltext.html

http://www.patentstorm.us/patents/6775548/fulltext.html

http://www.patentstorm.us/patents/7092672/fulltext.html

http://www.patentstorm.us/patents/5862178/fulltext.html

http://www.patentstorm.us/patents/5946651/fulltext.html

http://www.patentstorm.us/patents/6882727/fulltext.html

http://www.patentstorm.us/patents/7009940/fulltext.html

http://www.patentstorm.us/patents/7403621/fulltext.html
the problem with replacing backslash with <br/> is that there are also the kind of users that make
to much
carriage returns whenever they feel
a sentence is finished.

this turns out to be just as ugly.

how do you get to the 99%?? i would say there are more people pressing ENTER when they really want a line-wrap then people writing textwalls.
Immature, perhaps, but still somewhat funny.

I noticed the original author avoided any mentions to STDs. That's a plus.
An article from a German periodical that covers the same topic can be found at http://www.sueddeutsche.de/finanzen/492/491855/text/

It says a considerable amount more than the BBC article at the expense of not being in English. I read German, and I can personally attest to the machine translation (at least from Google) being sane.
I suspect that video adverts are more profitable than banner/text ads.
All they need is a to enter a US postal address to create a US iTunes account. Not that hard.
Get a digital fingerprint of your work & have a copyright at thesame time
So he would be better educated if you took away his money?

Isn't that kind of his point?
Perhaps someone should also teach them about the correct use of capital letters and how they make sentences easier to read.
But we believe the way to get around this issue is to build ZFS as a module with a CDDL license, it can still be loaded in the Linux kernel. Though it would be restricted to use the non- GPL symbols, but as long as that rule is adhered to there is no problem of legal issues.

I can't believe it really is that simple ? If so, why hasn't anyone mentioned this before ?
i dont know much haskell, but "variable assignment" is not the first thing that comes to mind if i think of functional programming.
These discussions still continue to amaze me. Of course, THIS is a technology oriented site, and most people here CARE about their operating system and everything their computer does in greatest detail.

Still, whenever the subject is brought up, there is a certain ignorance about the fact, the demographic group described above is a tiny fraction, and that most people just want to use their computer, generally just for the most basic stuff. So they naturally do not care about system architecture, and they do not even understand the advantages other OS could offer them, and why should they have to?! Most users are content with Windows, and I think that is alright...
wow, really wish i had this back when i was on windows, begrudgingly formatting my hard drive every year. would have saved me so much time and hassle. nice work!
I wish I was optimistic enough to mod you down.
Yep, but Nvidia has the necessary staff at hand. The situation for out-of-mainline modules is certainly getting better (thanks to symbol tables, etc.) but I still get that sinking feeling if I have to compile a kernel module.
Google Has Different maps for India and China 
Google Has Different maps for India and China [Arunachal Pradesh Controversy] - India map shows Arunachal Pradesh as part of India, while Chinese map shows AP as part of China.
Many were killed in a Sioux City crash landing; the pilot Captain Al Haynes, still buckled into the ruined cockpit part of the wreckage, when informed that over 100 died exclaimed "My God, I've killed 100 people!". His rescuer replied "No, you saved 200". This flight crew is regarded as heros too (and rightly so).
It was a freak failure of the DC10 triply-redundant hydraulic system, yet the flight crew, steering the plane using only the two remaining engines' throttles, put the nose wheel on the centerline of the runway.
Japanese Truck Decoration - Dekotora
The Decotora or Dekotora is an abbreviation for "Decoration Truck" - a kind of loudly decorated and illuminated truck which one can see in Japan. Dekotora owners use various art designs based on traditional landscapes, manga or gundam characters or kabuki actors along with computer controlled neon lights for decorating their trucks.
And the FDP is not really libertarian. We should call them liberal, but in the old, European sense of the word --- not in the American sense, where it just means socialist.

(Anyway, every party in Germany is a socialdemocratic party in some sense.)

The FDP (free democratic party) had its best showing at a federal election ever, with around 15% of the vote. (So did the socialist party with around 12% or so.)
Scheme hits the App Store
Not quite - it's primarily focused on safely retrofitting unit testing onto legacy codebases, since restructuring code to make it testable can easily break it.

His definition of legacy code is code that doesn't have tests, so you can't fix it or replace units of it without unknowingly introducing bugs.
I disagree with this. The debugger is a very, very precise tool and it can be used to gain very, very precise insights into certain code, however, very often the debugger is just too precise. It is pretty much like trying to understand a large chip by looking at how gates flip and flop.

Of course, if the code is horrible enough, then you might need to switch down to actually tracing line by line and opcode by opcode, potentially even using a debugger, but for most sane code, I think it is possible and faster to understand larger blobs of code at once.
They're also very honest about their problems. The @htc on Twitter has openly acknowledged some of the early bugs with Hero, particularly in regards to the blocking on network IO when signed into Facebook and the Twitter 32 bit post limit. He's kept us all informed regarly while HTC engineers work on problems and told us as soon as the updates have come out.

He isn't always in a position to say something - people have recently noticed a bug in the messaging app that when fixed increases the battery life remarkably - but as soon as he does he tells their customers.
Amazon's Working on Kindle Reader Software for Mac, Too
Study Says Economics Not a Driving Factor in Cloud Computing Adoption
As you can see though there are only 8 or 9 steps for the psystar thingy and the 30 others are for the mac os install.
Modern Beats
Excitement For Hardware Keeps Sergey Brin Up At Night
Will SUN continue as an independent unit within Oracle ?
I always find it interesting that people who have extra money won't just donate to the government. Instead, they advocate the government take it from them and from others. It's not a coherent position.
What is the point form?
I'm all for making a UI as simple and helpful as is practical. But at some point we reach diminishing returns: we invest so much in being helpful that it exceeds the cost of users misunderstanding. With Jeff's suggestion at the end, it may even be that pre-supplied question text causes enough badly-presented questions, or questions with the boilerplate itself left intact, that it makes the situation worse.

So I think it's worth playing devil's advocate: is there some point at which we're justified in expecting the user to just grow up and read, or give a little bit of thought to what you're doing? Why do we, in the software industry, beat ourselves up so much, when the rest of the world is given a free pass?

I mean, whether it's figuring out how to use some kind of glue, or operating the PBX system, or planting a garden, and on and on, we expect that the user is going to read something about what the heck he's doing. Why not with computers?
That's more of an argument for an estate tax than a tax on the rich in general.

I'd have to check my dad's portfolio before I could take a principled position on this issue.
I've posted this in the comments:

There's also a loss of information in the example. The user typed "\\<path to shared folder>\c". Markdown produced "\\c". I do understand it was interpreted as html tag. But I feel it had to be ignored - there's no "path" tag in html.

Edit: It was difficult to get this comment posted properly on Coding Horror - had to use &lt; and &gt; It's much nicer here on HN. KISS at its best!
Real world oil companies collusion http://www.cyprus-mail.com/news/main.php?id=48041 (was on holiday here and just read this in the paper version of the paper)
Thanks for downloading Yoono
Bleah. This calls for some deconstruction: http://blog.rupamsunyata.org/2009/10/23/score-5-privileged.x...
Their Numbers Are Dropping - the Cellphone Refuseniks
1. Your first point is incorrect, when a massive amount of gold is found there will be inflation -- but it won't be runaway, prices will quickly come to reflect expected future increases in the monetary supply whereas when the government prints it there is no limit. That is why people advocate tying it to something tangible. To limit their ability to inflate.

2. You can define that you accept taxes in the following currencies; and then when defining contracts you can specify what you will be paid in. The legal judgements would support that.
reminds me of this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OS-tan
In this case, he is demanding that it be taken from those who had the temerity to earn it to further the political goals of those who did not.

And EUR 500,000 is hardly a "fortune" - that's about GBP 400,000 which is the price of an ordinary family home in the South-East of England, or the price of a two-bedroom flat in central London. So effectively, this is an upper-class heir to a family fortune advocating higher taxation on the middle-classes and professionals.
It is a coherent position: they only want to give up their money if enough other people do as well to accomplish their goals. It's a classic public goods problem, if you assume they feel that everyone would be better off with the additional government funding.
I posted the following I finally got rid of my last personal computer with Windows on it:

>Dear Windows: Sorry, but it's over. Sure, we had some good times, but you're too high-maintenance and you never really opened up to me.

http://twitter.com/RyanMcGreal/status/2012302023
Cyber Sports - Why ESPN has No Chance
The Internet makes the long tail of sport unreachable for the likes of ESPN.
If you had a proportional voting system, you'd probably get more parties. (Parties with a chance to get someone elected.)

I don't know if that's good or not. Germany uses a strange in-between system, and it also has a threshold, i.e. you need 5% of the votes (or alternatively win three districts) to get into parliament.
I don't understand how you could've possibly come to this conclusion. The net effect of one rich dude donating money to his government is not the same as the net effect of all rich dudes being taxed. So there's no logical contradiction.
"By reusability, I mean is how reusable (composable) is a piece of concurrent code that you write with each of these languages/paradigms? In the case of Java, it is almost never reusable unless it is completely encapsulated."

How is this for reuse in Java? (And do note the "state" field...)

http://github.com/richhickey/clojure/blob/master/src/jvm/clo...
MIRROR (site appears to be down):

I believe I have got the first Scheme application past Apple review into the iTunes App Store. It is yet another Reversi clone, called Reverso. It is a combination of 90% Scheme and 10% Objective-C, written with Gambit-C Scheme. James Long has already shown how to compile Gambit-C for the iPhone, and I started from there. My Scheme code is compiled to C by Gambit and later by GCC to produce native ARM code, bundled in a static library, which is ok with the iPhone SDK license agreement. The Objective-C then calls the library as a pure C library. The Scheme code deals with position evaluation, alpha-beta pruning, transposition tables, move legality, different strategies and so on. The Objective-C code deals with sound, animations, GUI, user preferences, basically everything that calls the iPhone OS API. Reversi was chosen because I like strategy games and it is much more algorithmic than artistic, and I am no artist.

The performance of the code is excellent. I used some Gambit-specific declarations, only fixnum arithmetic, pre-allocated a large heap, and called the garbage-collector every time the user needed to think. The search is not memory intensive, but the transposition tables are. I did not write a specific hash function but relied on Gambit-C’s table type. The boards used during search were retrieved from a pool (the newest Gambit-C has made subu8vector-move! a public API), so they did not put pressure on the garbage-collector. In the end it was a very successful experiment. Developing with Scheme is orders of magnitude more productive than with most other languages. Gambit-C is also one of the best Scheme compilers out there, and made my job a lot easier.
Fighting the web robots
I'm not entirely certain that "working for a living" and "understands economics" are meaningfully correlated. "Working for a living" and "being able to understand the basic concept of fiscal policy", maybe, but full-blown economic policy is something rather different.
Actually libertarian is pretty close to the right translation for the FDP since the word liberal has been redefined in English to mean the political left (though not socialist, which in the US has also been redefined to Marxist-Leninist). Libertarianism, in American English, is closer to a classical laissez faire liberalism which the FDP proclaims.

(Note: I'm an American that's been living in Germany for the last 7.5 years.)
LINKS:

Reverso: http://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewSoftwa...

Gambit Scheme: http://dynamo.iro.umontreal.ca/~gambit/wiki/index.php/Main_P...

James Longster - Scheme on the iPhone: http://jlongster.com/blog/2009/06/17/write-apps-iphone-schem...
"Turning to the high jump, McAllister said photographs taken by a German anthropologist showed young men jumping heights of up to 2.52 meters in the early years of last century."

Does this mean that people were jumping 2.52 in the early 1900s?! If so, did they use the Fosbury Flop and it faded out after that? Because if not, they probably jumped that height with the Scissors-Jump, which seems highly unlikely...
Genuine Posts are Images of Our Minds
How much do you want to bet that the people proposing this are worth at least one or two orders of magnitude more than EUR 500,000. To quote from the article "The group say they have more money than they need", and very few people with a net worth of just above eur 500,000 fall into that category.

44 people have signed a partition to propose a tax law that will negatively affect 2.2 million people, am I the only person who sees something very odd with that. This is nothing but a bullshit PR move by some rich heirs to try to buy some good will.
Was happy to see this flagged as misogynistic bullshit the last time it made the rounds; here's hoping for a repeat.
Rendering Fonts in Today’s Browsers
How to change redirection limit in Firefox
Tell HN:  Hackers and Founders Meetup this Sunday after Startup School
If you're in town for Startup School, we'd love to have you stop by. We're making the meetup on Sunday this week so people can come after startup school if they're interested.

We usually get together, have a couple of beers (or water, cola, whaterever) and talk about HN topics, shiny new technologies, our startups, etc...

More info here: www.hackersandfounders.com
New URL Shortening redirection service
URL shortening, a special kind of URL redirection, a technique on the World Wide Web where a provider makes a web page available under a very short URL in addition to the original webpage address. A long URL is hard to remember, where the short URLs were introduced to make Long Urls Shorter. Every long URL is associated with a key which are assigned to the short URL that holds the original web address.
Most important software launch of the week.
Oh, yes. You are mutating variables. You shouldn't do that anyway in a functional setting.

Python's syntax forces the language to guess whether you want to make a new variable or use the variable of the same name from the outer scope. The heuristic they have, says that if you assign something to the variable, you get a new one by default. You can declare

global x

before to assign to the variable in the outerscope.
From a European perspective, I was surprised by the fact that California is home to some of the most powerful US industries and countless wealthy individuals while at the same time, the state is broke.
Linux: Linus Says, Linux Not Designed; It Never Was
Pretty fantastic look into how Linus see's technology design, versus evolutionary engineering. F'ing awesome.

Linus' outlook on optimal engineering reminds me of Kevin Kelly's swarm and emergence writings.
OK. I thought libertarian meant more or less Anarcho-Capitalist, which the FDP aren't. I guess the FDP is pretty close to the Economist on most issues.
The evil bit is conditioning people to expect computers to constantly break, crash, not work. Microsoft has taught people to expect that, and some people have just accepted it as fact - computers crash.

When you're the market leader, you kind of have a responsibility to represent the industry in a good light.

"Have you tried turning it off and on again"? Is a horrible horrible tech support answer (Checkout IT crowd if you haven't watched it), but it's so common. We've become accepting of computers, and software crashing, and IMHO a large part of the blame is squarely with MS.
I like the mac ad: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AtvloPFYocw
By the same logic, web designers are just web developers who are incapable of doing the other 90% of the job.
Windows 7 is the best operating system on the market.
To be accurate, your summation should read: "this headline should read: fringe group of 44 wealthy Germans demand higher taxes on German people deemed wealthy for a period of 2 years, strangely making the news."

"the rest of the country opted to kick out the socialists from government in recent national elections, replacing them with a libertarian party running on a tax cut platform"

The rest of the country was not a target of their demand. In fact, it was the rest of the country they want to help with their own money.
Agreed -- I was the one who posted it first.