skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm a vi user, but only use when I ssh to a shell. When I'm in vi I usually switch to my laptop keyboard unless it's just a few keys :) Have never bothered learning the vi (or emacs) gestures.

I never timed, but it never felt like I was typing very slowly once I got used to it. The gestures like opening/closing a window, exiting an app, copy and paste etc is really handy. Especially as they apply across all apps, not just within a specific editor. The gestures are also configurable, and supports different OS modes. Most importantly, it reduced the pain in my wrists and fingers (might just have been a side effect of typing slower).

Bought it about 6 years ago, have been using it since. Was pretty disappointed when I heard the company has closed down. And a few years later when I heard about the iPhone pinch gestures, my first thought was - this must be the reason!
Four or five years ago I saw a similar demonstration at Sensor Expo. The robots were picking loose Starburst candies off a belt moving in one direction, and arranging them into colored words on a belt moving in the other direction. Blew my mind.
Yes, but computing power + memory has also increased dramatically over the past 8 years.
That's funny. I worked at that company for a period of time, and left a couple years before the crash to start my own company. It has done well, but at the time I assumed the startup route was much riskier.
They might have a top-secret business plan under which they grow to a certain critical size and then start earning money like crazy through a specific channel that requires critical mass to become viable, in which case more power to them.

However, if they don't have a secret revenue ace-in-the-hole and their business plan is merely to get really big and then, you know, like, start thinking about how to make some money somehow...I certainly wouldn't risk my money on that.
Google Android, not an actual android. Letdown.
Because that was the philosophy from the beginning ... don't change the language until it's too late, make sure to cripple all new features to maintain backwards compatibility, leave the problems to the tool-vendors to solve.

Actually this philosophy worked better for future-proofing the platform in a weird way. God knows how they would've crippled the JVM if their generics support wasn't made through type-erasure for example.

And so the JVM bytecode is pretty light, now only if they added tail-calls and continuations. But I don't think that will happen too soon.
It's not all that consistent, no. But for me what it cues is Perlis:

"Algol is a blight. You can't have fun with Algol. Algol is a code that now belongs in a plumber's union. It helps you design correct structures that don't collapse, but it doesn't have any fun in it. There are no pleasures in writing Algol programs. It's a labor of necessity, a preoccupation with the details of tedium."

From http://www.eecs.berkeley.edu/~bh/ss/foreword.html.
I believe you're looking for the word "ingenious" :)
It's using an old CSS history hack. The part where it asks you to "see where you friends have been" is a complete sham. It just wants to get your facebook credentials to viral-market itself across your address book.

The best it could do is cajole your friends into using it, and then surreptitiously tell you where it thinks they have been .. a gross violation of privacy.
won't modifying the rank by mixing in a time factor make comments with a good score move away from the top over time even if they still have a good score? while the math is trivial with your suggestion, it tends to be biased in favor of volume of upvotes (regardless of the ratio of upvote/downvote), then biased in favor of new comments (again, regardless of upvote/downvote relevance)? while this will solve sorting requirements for some applications, it's not really solving the problem that most comment voting systems have where volume of votes is rewarded over quality and/or newer comments are never positioned well enough to gain any traction over comments posted in the first hour. if you end up hacking your formulas a lot to fix these shortcomings wouldn't it be just as easy to say the problem is not trivial and then leverage the complicated but statistically sound formula suggested by the author?
So has the speed of Windows XP.
Well, I didn't, but I didn't think begging for votes was really accepted behavior either.

The goal around here, AFAIK, isn't to get the most votes but to have a quality discussion. This guy is just begging you to get links to his site voted up, probably so he can get more eyeballs/ad revenue.
The EU and MySQL (effect of owning Open Source on M&A transactions)
Merchant Silicon and Lawnmowing Revisited
I plan to get both, assuming the H1N1 vaccine will be available here.
2009 Halloween Costume Ideas
A top 10 list of great Halloween Costume ideas for 2009.
Breast cancer: Men can get it. KISS member Peter Criss beat it.
both of you need to be on the internet "more often". It's a CSS history trick at least a few years old.

http://jeremiahgrossman.blogspot.com/2006/08/i-know-where-yo...
that your browser allows a gross violation of privacy is the point.
Given that Guido is the "benevolent dictator", how does this proposal process work - he proposes it, and then he accepts it?
* It has to be as fast as possible, so interpreted languages are out.
* You don't want to micro manage memory, so C is out.
* You don't want to require programmers to have a degree, so C++ is out.
* You want fast startup and not depend on a big runtime, so Java is out.
* It has to run on most systems, anything with a C compiler, so D is out.
* You want to have fun making something new.
No existing language really meets these demands, so let's create a new one that does.

Actually, Lua meets every point except the last one...it's byte-compiled, garbage collected, refreshingly free of exceptions-to-exceptions-to-rules you have to memorize, it starts and compiles faster than many other major contenders start, it runs on literally anything with an ANSI C compiler, and it's been in production use for over 15 years.

I use Emacs, but a Lua-extended vi could be very nice.
I'm interested. Can you name some OS features (Not UI effects) that take a lot of CPU that have been added? :/

What are some of the 'tons of features'?
If those sort of tweets get into search results simply based on "newest", you can be sure it'll be used extensively by marketers trying to spam their way into search listings.
Isn't that what compilers do?

I actually am thinking of writing a compiler for a custom language that will be translated to Java. It will be a lot like C#, but simplified, with a lot of the cruft removed (like the requirement to define a Main class with a static main, or the requirement that all code should be wrapped in a class, but reified generics is something I want although I'm not sure if it's feasible).

I don't like Duby, I don't like Ruby for that matter. Mostly because the syntax is not as extensible as I'd like and because the variables don't have lexical scope.
BERT supports binary data natively, you don't need to encode it like with JSON-RPC.
I don't see mention of them in the changelog: http://docs.python.org/dev/whatsnew/2.7.html
Sure you can reduce the price of physician time by increasing the supply, but that isn't practical for several reasons.

1. The high price is largely due to the need to pay off education loans. Physicians commonly finish training $200K+ in debt. Even if there were more physicians, they would have to charge almost as much just to make ends meet. To solve that you first need to find a way to cut the price of education.

2. Very few people want to be physicians, and fewer still have the intelligence and talent to do it well. Treatment by a quack is often worse than no treatment at all.

3. The only way to get a lot more physicians in to industrialized countries is through immigration from developing countries. However the political climate has turned against immigration (I think that's a bad change, but it's unlikely to reverse any time soon). And importing physicians leaves those developing countries bereft of medical care they desperately need.

4. Most physicians already work long hours. You can't squeeze much more out of them. Or if they do work longer, quality of care suffers.
he proposes it, listens to the feedback, and makes his final decision.
I think it's a pretty bad idea. The more IDEs hide code from people, the more verbose code will be produced.

Much easier to just setup a simple macro system to run over source files and replace things before compilation.
We had it in July or so. It was kinda like a normal flu :/

You might want to take a look at the bottom right panel of Fig 2: http://www.biomedcentral.com/1741-7015/7/45 ;)
First, FriendFeed is not going away. - Paul Buchheit
I thought I'd jump in as the author of the original post.

The context is that I'm trying to write an introduction to Bayesian stats for people who know calc and matrices, but may not have taken or understood math stats. Specifically, I want to (a) use the notation that's commonly used in the field (e.g. in Andrew Gelman et al.'s books, Michael Jordan et al.'s papers, etc.), and (b) not confuse readers with a long introduction to sample spaces and a sketchy description of measures, just so I could introduce precise random variable notation only to abuse it.

The big problem with trying to define continuous densities is you never get enough measure theory in an intro to probability (e.g. DeGroot and Schervis, Larsen and Marx) to bottom out in a real definition. It's not that complex, so if you're interested, I'd highly recommend Kolmogorov's own intro to analysis, which has great coverage of both Lebesgue integration (so you can understand the usual R^n case) and general measure theory (so you can impress your friends with your knowledge of analysis).
> Creative people are likely to be friends with other creative people who turn out to need portfolios themselves, and this creates a rapidly expanding circle... our users derive a direct benefit from showing off their portfolio, which in turn is free marketing for our service.

If you're a startup looking to get noticed online, I'd suggest taking this to heart. Marketing is much easier if your users have a strong incentive to market your product for you.

> We don’t subscribe to the "Release Early, Release Often" philosophy. Admittedly, we’re perfectionists to a fault, but when you’ve got 158,000 pleased users, you can’t simply disrupt things with a series of bells-and-whistles updates just to follow a silly motto.

I don't think that philosophy is meant to apply to applications with hundreds of thousands of users. It's meant for the early product development phase when you have very few users. You can, however, do bucket testing, like Google and other larger players, and release updates to a tiny portion of your users to see how they react.
...but to have a quality discussion

Some articles & videos speak for themselves. See http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html .

What to Submit

On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.
> It's just not easy to write imperative programs without throwing exceptions somewhere along the call chain

With checked exceptions it is also not easy to be a good OOP citizen and not break encapsulation, since checked exceptions become a part of your interface.
"Windows 7 has become the biggest-grossing pre-order in Amazon's history worth even more than the most recent JK Rowling book, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows."

That's cute and everything, but Win7 Pro costs 12.5 times as much as the Harry Potter hardcover. That means Win7 could have an order of magnitude fewer pre-orders than Harry Potter and the statement would still be true.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Microsoft-Windows-Professional-Full-...

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Harry-Potter-Deathly-Hallows-Adult/d...
Thanks for CAPM 101. Alpha is hard to get. No kidding. But nobody here is talking about stock picking. I'm talking about diversifying well outside of equities, as harry browne described in Fail Safe Investing, and slightly overweighting asset classes in accordance with macro conditions.

> a simple diversified portfolio does very well.

It does not, if by simple you mean S&P. A naive equities dominated portfolio does not do well against inflation over any given 30 year period. Please also remember that stock markets did not begin in the "post war era." There's a lot more history.

The efficient market hypothesis is the rallying cry of the lazy. It did not take a genius to a be a little overweight commodities this decade. It did not take a genius to re-weight some out of stocks after parabolic moves up in the late 90s. That's all I'm talking about.
Immigrants Create Jobs and Win Nobels
> I'm not sure I want search results to be littered with tweets.

Granted. I hope they find balance, and imagine they'll AB test to see what users want.

> How do you apply page rank/relevance etc to 140 chars?

Some combination of freshness, quantity of retweets, pagerank of any linked pages, bit.ly stats on links, historic tweet quality of the user, similarity to trending topics, follower count of user, follower/followee ratio, incoming links to the page from blogs, etc, etc, etc.
I'll have to disagree with you there.

Type foo = new Type() is a bad idea? why?

Shape myShape = new Rectangle(); seems pretty logical to me. If you want to use static types, you can't really argue against that syntax.

single inheritance sidesteps lots of potential issues, and interfaces are cleaner IMHO

>> "but it will stop people from writing good code."

I'd also strongly disagree with that. Arguing that Java prevents you from writing good code is nonsense. As much sense as saying using French prevents you from writing a good story. I've seen some brilliant code written in Java (If you steer well clear of 'enterprise' etc).
The difference is that Amazon had a clear way to make money: make their revenue stream bigger. That doesn't and won't work for Twitter, because Twitter doesn't have a revenue stream to make bigger.

Saying they're the same thing is like saying that the U.S. and Afghanistan are the same, because they both had elections. Well, true, but in one place the elections were not rigged, and in the other there's a good chance they were. "They still had an election!" of course, but there are significant practical differences.
This was a great comment. I disagree with a bunch of things in it, but regardless of that, I feel vindicated in this thread for prying it out of you. =)

Serial numbers: I'm not sure if BIND 9 just made this problem go away, but back in the dark ages when I managed BIND for a couple thousand zones, you had to manually bump the serial for every change you made. AXFR relies on the serial in the SOA to decide whether to propagate a change.

Performance: I think people are way out of whack on the performance implications of DNS. I've spent years hammering DNS servers, and while it's true that BIND 8's terrible memory management will drag down the performance of the rest of a server, the actual request latency BIND adds answering queries is so low that you can use it to statistically detect whether sniffers are running, as a proxy for user->kernel latency (which shoots up when your ethernet device takes the hardware MAC address filters off to go into promiscuous mode). So, for whatever it's worth: I don't buy that there are serious performance problems with server selecton.

Supporting djbdns: meh, I was curious, not challenging you. Obviously don't do it if your customers aren't asking you. You're wrong about the security implications of BIND, though.

Thanks again for replying in such detail.
If noise keeps you out of office space I would imagine that the neighbors near your proposed garage would be similarly affected.
I was hoping that they made it faster than XP. Change some fundamental data structures or disk format that would make it operate an order of magnitude faster.

The real problem with XP is the slowing down of the OS over time. It seems commonplace for people to just give up and reinstall after x amount of time. I hope they can continue to keep it as fast as a fresh install of XP.
"I don't think that philosophy is meant to apply to applications with hundreds of thousands of users. It's meant for the early product development phase when you have very few users. You can, however, do bucket testing, like Google and other larger players, and release updates to a tiny portion of your users to see how they react."

Totally agree with you there. That's actually something I really want to start doing after we release our new version. We've never done any type of A/B testing and it just makes sense.

On a similar note, I was talking with my friend Eric Friedman last night about this very topic. He suggested creating small buttons that people could click on, but weren't actually active and gave a "Coming Soon" message and then tracking the frequency in how often they were clicked. You could release these little buttons to 2-5% of your users and then see how they performed. And then build features around the buttons that were clicked more frequently.
Several Scheme implementations as well as some lesser-known small Lisps qualify.

I think writing a new general-purpose language is something every programmer should try at least once, but don't fool yourself; there's probably an existing language that does what you want.

Now, back to work on that language idea I can't get out of my head involving pervasive generic functions....
For example, "x = print" is invalid syntax in Python2.6, unless you include "from __future__ import print_function" at the beginning of the file.

Well, you're not changing any syntax there. Print moves from a statement in 2.6 to a function in 3.x, and if it's a function you can just assign it like any other function. In other words, after doing "x = print" you still could not call "x 'hello world'", you'd have to use "x('hello world')".

(not that I disagree with your overall argument)
Really isn't this the point of Hackernews? to promote and link other sites (even you own) and to enable intelligent discussion? If it wasn't added here I for one wouldn't have learned about it or wegame.com.

That being said, I liked the interview. Though, I don't agree that failing at a business makes an individual more qualified to create another startup. I've met a few entrepreneurs who probably should just pack it in...

Really I think the key is that this guy made good connections and left and impression. If he had made the same connections (somehow) without failing first in a business things might have played out similarly.

Though, the fact that he had the wherewithal to start/fail at 15...kudos to him.

On another note, one of his points is similar to another current topic "eating/buying you own dog food". I suppose it's easy when your a 15 year old male and your market is video games...
You're only correct if you ignore patients' longevity and quality of life. Those may not show up as line items on a budget, but they represent real costs to society. When setting public policy it's a mistake to ignore those factors or treat them as externalities.
Haven't read the whole paper yet, but it doesn't seem that deep. If you asked any theorist if a TM can do something interactive, they would have said no, and I would imagine that most people who know about TMs would understand this. "A TM can do anything" is shorthand for "a TM can compute any function."
Ok, you are smarter than me. You win.
I've heard of Pets.com and I'm in Europe :)
Well, there are two sides to this, sure it's lame.

But if you think about it a little longer, it also allows you to make some money of this technique. If you can figure out what other sites people have visited without asking them about it you can target your advertising to that.

Sleazy, sure. But it would work, and I'm sure there will be people doing just that.
I started an Oil and Natural Gas E&P (exploration and production) company when I was 25.

And no, I didn't have an "in" to the hydrocarbons business (a lot of people ask). My background is Stanford CS.
From the description, it seems like this project has the same goals as Gnome's new language, Vala:

http://live.gnome.org/Vala

Given the syntax choices, the main advantage I see in Zimbu is that creating a new language is more fun than porting an existing one.
Microsoft's contribution to economic stimulus for PC makers:

From http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windows-7/get/upgrade-advis... :

On the other hand, if you're running Windows XP, or any other operating system for that matter, we recommend that you experience Windows 7 on a new PC. The Laptop Scout can help you find a great PC fit for you, or you can browse through these featured PCs that can run Windows 7.

And further stimulus for local computer services shops:

...And while we don't recommend it, should you choose to upgrade your current PC from Windows XP or another operating system to Windows 7, we recommend that you get help with this process from your local computer service provider. You'll need to back up your current files and settings, perform a custom (clean) installation, and then reinstall your files, settings, and programs.

But just think how that last quote can be spun with a little excerpting-without-context. Microsoft says, "[W]e don't recommend... upgrad[ing] your current PC from Windows XP or another operating system to Windows 7".
Ask HN: Amazon S3 vs Rackspace Cloud?
API, pricing, reliability, customer service... what was your experience?
Birdbrain iPhone Application | Apple Iphone Fun Site
Halloween at the workplace is ridiculous
I have a TrueCrypt volume that i keep on my dropbox and it has worked fine for me for over a year. It was very easy to set up in Ubuntu.
Please explain further.
Ok this is just iLike and Lala widgets embedded in the search results. It's not a new business model, it's not new technology or a new experience. It's the same old music you can find anywhere else. Can we move along now?
the "benevolent" part means he won't make any decision based solely on his own preferences, even though he has the authority to.
> And its popularity has more to do with Sun's marketing campaign than anything else.

If you can do proof by assertion, so can I:

Java's popularity has more to do with properties of the language than marketing.
Actually Perl 5 does have compile-time macros. First you can implement them with source filtering. See http://search.cpan.org/~smueller/Filter-Simple-0.84/lib/Filt... for an example to make that easier. That is how Switch was implemented by Damian Conway before it got pulled into the core. But you can also do them without source filtering using http://search.cpan.org/~flora/Devel-Declare-0.005011/lib/Dev.... For an example of how much that can change the language, look at http://search.cpan.org/dist/MooseX-Declare/lib/MooseX/Declar....

That said, my point about Perl seems to have been unclear. I'm not saying that Perl has a reputation for ugliness because people change the syntax on the fly. I'm saying that layering macros in Perl is problematic because they interact badly with the syntax.

This is why wise Perl programmers avoid source filters and modules that use source filters. Experience has shown that they are very fragile, and don't play well together when you start stacking them. (I'm guessing that fragility is one of the reasons why http://search.cpan.org/~elizabeth/ifdef-0.07/lib/ifdef.pm limited itself to stuff embedded in POD.) Unfortunately some things can't be done in Perl without core support or source filters. For example it wasn't until Switch.pm was pulled into the core that it could be done without source filters.