skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Murder is still wrong in all of the above. In the first case it was basically the person’s choice to get killed.

> Your honor, he stole babyfood from my store!
> Yes, but did he steal it to sell it or because he's too poor to afford it and needed to feed his baby ?

Having a need and stealing to fulfil it is still wrong. It does not matter what your motivation is – it is still not your property. I have respect for a person who break the law in the above case and face the law. But he should still receive his punishment.

To act as if he is not guilty is wrong – he is just as guilty of the crime as any other person who stole baby milk formula (whatever their motivation is).

A good example of moral relativism that I hate is so called “hate crimes”. Do you really care what the person’s motivation is when he murder/assaulted you?
Oh hi Alex, I didn't expect you to notice this little comment here especially so late.

I don't think I really deserve the praise as I am not normally this watchful. I just did behavioral surveys of people with high reputation gain rates in order to figure out how to get 10k rep without spending too much time.
Google CEO Eric Schmidt On Newspapers and Journalism
The people do not currently vote in their own interest. Having them give $3/mo as well as their vote will not solve this. This project assumes that people are well informed enough to know whom to support. They are not, and that is why a campaign well funded by special interest is more effective at getting someone elected than giving the people what they need.
The cutoff is only 45 days, we'd be literally flooded with dupes if that was done.

I think this was one of PGs recent optimizations to keep HN responsive, it makes good sense to archive articles when they're no longer being updated.
Knight Foundation rethinks its stance on for-profit deals
A few years ago a very close friend of mine killed himself. Reading this today has brought up a lot of old feelings, and one new one; I feel like I really need to reach out and tell you that what you're going through and what you're about to go through will be very difficult, but you will come out the other side.

Suicide is one of those things that I don't think we can ever reconcile in our minds. I've never resolved the questions raised up by my friend's death, but I promise that you do learn to find a quiet place for the feelings that I'd imagine have you mentally turning in dizzy circles right now.

My thoughts are with you. If you'd like to talk please don't hesitate to get in touch.

Take care, Emmanuel.
I can imagine a world in which blog posts are filtered for interestingness. Filtering twits may not actually be possible. All text processing algorithms break down when you haven't got any text to feed them. I'd argue that it may not even be possible for another human to decide what's actually interesting to you, 140-char snippet by 140-char snippet, at which point you know a computer isn't going to do it anytime soon.

In fact, if you think you have a bright idea on this front to do a startup on, I'd challenge you to try the "human filter" first, and look at the accuracy you get. (Don't pick your clone; I'd suggest taking someone not entirely unlike you, but not your bestest buddy either.) If you can't even get that to work, forget it.
Self-project that needs a lot of help:

http://github.com/fizx/skynet-for-twitter/

The idea is to integrate the libbow classifier with an open source twitter client. You vote tweets up and down, and future tweets will be scored based upon similarity to past good and bad tweets. Then, there's a slider in the settings panel that lets you select the percentage of tweets you want to see. The client will only show you the top N% of your tweets.

As the README says: "I have no idea what I'm doing in Objective C. This is a proof of concept for my personal use. Changes are super-welcome! Other Twitter client authors, please, please, please integrate this sort of functionality! I don't want to maintain this app; I want the good ideas to get adopted everywhere. Then this can die."

I'd love some help on the UI/Obj-C side, as well as a little more time to play with it.
Has to be said
http://despair.com/connot.html
Just thought I'd share a funny story:

Kodak founder George Eastman was once asked about the origin of the name of his camera. "Philologically, the word 'Kodak' is as meaningless as a child's first 'goo,'" he explained. "Terse, abrupt to the point of rudeness, literally bitten off by firm and unyielding consonants at both ends, it snaps like a camera shutter in your face. What more would one ask!"
[http://www.anecdotage.com/index.php?aid=14554]

Btw, we named our site "kakool" for the same reason Eastman called his company Kodak - lots of K's, which comedians agree are funny letters :)

From: http://classic2.reference.com/browse/wiki/Inherently_funny_w...:

In Neil Simon's play The Sunshine Boys, a character says, "Words with a k in it are funny. Alka-Seltzer is funny. Chicken is funny. Pickle is funny. All with a k. Ls are not funny. Ms are not funny."

# In an article in the New Yorker published in 1936, H. L. Mencken argues that "k words" are funny. "K, for some occult reason, has always appealed to the oafish risibles of the American plain people, and its presence in the names of many ... places has helped to make them joke towns ... for example, Kankakee, Kalamazoo, Hoboken, Hohokus, Yonkers, Squeedunk, "Stinktown" and Brooklyn."
# The Star Trek: The Next Generation episode "The Outrageous Okona" features Joe Piscopo as a comedian who, in attempting to teach the android Data the concept of humor, refers to words ending in a k as funny.
# The Monty Python sketch "Are You Embarrassed Easily?" includes a list of alternately ordinary and humorous words: shoe, megaphone, grunties, Wankel rotary engine, tits, winkle, and vibraphone.
# In The Simpsons:

In the episode "Homie the Clown", drawing from W. C. Fields, Krusty the Clown tells Homer during a lesson at his clown college: "Memorize these funny place names: Walla Walla, Keokuk, Cucamonga, Seattle." Upon hearing the word "Seattle", Homer bursts into laughter...
The dialogue so far is USB-IF telling Palm they are in the wrong and their customers not having a feature they paid for. Palm doesn't have the sales to keep this up, and, given the lawsuit happy lawyers, is in danger of a class action suit by Palm pre owners.

There is obvious bad blood between the companies, but Palm needs to start doing what's best for its customers. The realization that Apple can keep this up far longer than Palm would be a good starting point.
I could do without the sensationalist headline. In fact I've pretty much come to hate any headline that says "X doesn't scale". It might be fair in some circumstances, but most of the time it's an indication of an uninformed or koolaid-driven opinion.

Scale is all relative, the only thing that scales infinitely are problems where the parts are all independent. Therefore you need to pick a solution that will scale appropriately to your needs. For the vast majority of applications in existence, the properties of SQL databases scale just fine for their needs. Where advanced SQL doesn't scale, you can often squeeze several orders of magnitude more scalability through a variety of optimization techniques including sharding and denormalization. A "NoSQL" (for lack of a better term) database might have better "scalability" out of the box, but will also tend to require more work up front wrangling data sets and more bugs than well tested SQL databases provide for the same data management functionality. Some people think this is offset by the lack of a parity mismatch between OO code and relational data sets, but I think that is more a symptom of people who don't really grok the relational model and the power and assurances it provides.

Increasingly as we move to more and more cloud services there is definitely a need for new approaches to more scalable data stores. However there's not going to be something that comes along and is both more scalable and equally as powerful as the relational model across the board. It's going to require tradeoffs to solve different classes of application-dependent scalability profiles. However the relational model is a solid and proven theoretical basis for describing the majority of data we have. Sure you have some edge cases like graphs and trees, but most data is not better described by key-value stores. That's just wishful thinking.
The world isn't black & white, it's lots of shades of gray, and orthogonal to that there are lots of colours, there is not 'one truth', there are as many truths as there are observers.

This isn't a mathematics problem where the outcome is '1' ('guilty') or '0' ('not guilty'), there are an infinite number of degrees in between.

Let's just say that I hope you will never be put in a position where your assumptions are put to the test.

For the record, (some of) my family lived through World War II in a pretty uncomfortable spot and plenty of what they did was against the law of the land at that time, but that didn't make any of it wrong.
The problem here wasn't the patent system. It was that your potential investors insisted on you having one!

You make it pretty clear that you only went through this "revolting...process" only because you wanted investment money.
Humans are the ultimate generalist
Teradata, Oracle RAC/Oracle Exadata,Vertica, Netezza, etc.
Concur.next — Crosstalk
I wear very vibrant colors in life- lots of yellows, oranges and sky blues

This carries through in my designs-

So usually start with a color and may see a site with a scheme and alter it or use one of the color scheme choosers in google
Numbers act as a sorting mechanism for me. One Orange dot can't accomplish that.
Campaigns are about issues and appealing to people's interest. The people's interest are a politician's primary concern during election years, but the problem is that after the election lobbyists go to work and the politician's primary concern becomes the lobbyists' interests because they are the loudest voice and can make or break a politician in the next election.

I agree that people do not currently always vote in their own interest, and one of the reasons for this is that lobbyists are able to convince people that they don't want something they should. That's the power of propaganda. Lobbyists don't just lobby politicians -- they lobby the people too. One of the systems primary services will be to debunk lobbyist propaganda.

Also, $3 per month isn't a hard number -- $3 just shows how little money it would take to change the game -- compare that to how much extra we are paying in taxes to pay for unnecessary expenditures.
Doing a chemical run-around of 4 billion years of brain filtering evolution might not be the best idea. There might be a reason you're having a hard time remembering that shit ... it might just be shit.

Food. Exercise. Sleep. Skip the gimmicks.
This is true not just for depression, but really for anyone who experiences (by choice or not) reality in a non consensus way-- autistics, women, pot smokers, gays, etc. The fact that this is such a problem is a huge failure of science; pretty much to science what pedophilia is to the church, except that because the issue is epistemological it's going to take more than a change in leadership to make the problem go away.
I am so, so sorry. My thoughts are with you, yours and Dan's.
John Cleese divorce tour: the first review
Dan had such a charm to him. He always had this mischievous twinkle in his eyes, and was so gregarious and affable. He was tall and the kind of guy in the room that everyone just gravitated towards, yet he wasn't the least bit intimidating. He was such a giving person, always lending a hand wherever he could.

I'll miss him so much.
The U.S. Constitution's first amendment provides for "the right of the people peaceably to assemble".

Try doing this in front of the White House without a permit.
In Atlanta, Georgia, for example, the mayor has veto powers over permit requests. Try waving the constitution in front of an Atlanta police office as he's dragging you to jail.
I hope your app is creative, but your code is readable ;).
I hear alot of people saying good things about Things on the mac, haven't played with it in awhile. I use a crap load of filters in GMail to make my life sane, but I too am running into the "how do we keep track of all this stuff" when it comes to biz/app. Just started using Google Sites to at it wiki style. Debating on something like Pivotal Tracker but I dont think we're that organized yet. I hate introducing a tool/process/app that is more work than what problem its trying to resolve.

Deep down, can't beat a good moleskin these days really.
"Clearly advertising to smart people is in demand."

I think the point is that advertising to smart people is not effective; they will research and find the best product regardless of advertising.
Morpheus: Y Combinator-Like Incubator in India
To compare, I use a Mac and a FreeBSD box linked with synergy at work. Use uzbl on the FBSD box, safari on the Mac.

Frankly, I can't begin to fathom why you would willing use IE when the Chrome plugin, Firefox, Chrome itself, Safari, and various smaller webkit browsers are available to you.

I've never really seen the advantage of using Emacs unless you're a lisp hacker. Seriously. Also the keyboard shortcuts on Emacs are rather similar to a lot of the universal shortcuts on OS X, which you don't appear to use either.

So either potential mutual benefit you could derive from using Emacs is being left for dead.

Also, you're a developer and you're using the very browser that's holding back our ability to build universal and standards compliant web sites/apps? Seriously?

You're just a part of the problem, regardless of vocation.

As for editing, I use Textmate/Gedit for code, vi for unixy stuff.

>> Developers are usually smarter than to use a browser with appalling performance and a plethora of bugs (that never get fixed) when much better choices are just a few clicks away.

>So the problem is that I'm "not smart" (enough). Okay - so I'll ask a dumb question. Are those the only relevant criteria for choosing a browser? Or, are they merely always dominant?

rubs face Okay.

You're knowingly using a browser that is buggy, slow, insecure, and is holding back the entirety of the web app dev community.

Relevant criteria? That's all there is to the matter! Unless you're being paid to use that abhorrent bucket of bile I can't fathom a legitimate reason to utilize it as a developer. Standards compliance, stability, performance, security...yeah...uh, what else factors into your choice of browsers, the phase of the bloody moon?
"Gravity Tractor" Could Deflect Earth-Bound Asteroids (2005)
Judy arrays are really great. I have a local cache implementation in erlang which uses them: http://github.com/cliffmoon/cherly

Even with a small number of items they are relatively fast, however they do not really start outperforming ordinary hash tables until you get above around 100,000 or so items.
Load each with a single text file that contains a) your name, location, and the date and b) an invitation for people to add their name to your list and place the USB drive in a random public location.

Label each with a tiny sticker that says "Private: Do NOT Read!"

Place each in a random public location.
Yes, I think so.

I recently had to explain to someone what "_" means in Perl (not to be confused with $_ or @_). It was simple for me to answer, because I had the experience. But someone seeing it for the first time wouldn't exactly be able to Google it, or look it up in a man page; who would think to look for it under "perldoc -f stat"? What's more, this particular short-cut, while useful, has a side effect: if someone maintaining the code inserts a stat on a different file in between the original stat and the "_", then the source of the "_" changes. For a single character in a script, that's a heck of a lot of barriers for a new programmer.
Okay, how do they get from a nickel per customer [ed, they're claiming google style revenues of ~$0.05 per user], to hundred-billion dollars. Perhaps their hiring policy should include the ability to use a calculator. 6 billion x 0.05 /= $100 billion. Unless some fucktard divided instead of multiplied (hello, that's a grade #1 fuck up).

$100 billion dollars in local advertising assumes $16.6 per person on the planet, or over $333 per American citizen. I highly doubt someone did their math right, I'd guess more $100 million, not billion.
Cushing Academy eliminates library and sells books
I've always thought Sean Barrett's take on Judy Arrays was a really good exemplar of casual computer science writing:

http://nothings.org/computer/judy/

There are a few potential disadvantages to keep in mind about the Judy approach. Its author argues that approaching the problem as engineering means accepting that complexity is how you get good performance; simplicity is for theoreticians. But this complexity leads to things like a data structure with 20,000 lines of code designed on the assumption that a cache-line is 64 bytes being used primarily on machines with 32-byte cache lines; a redesign optimized for 32-byte cache lines would come close to starting from scratch.

...

If your data is strictly sequential; you should use a regular array. If your data is often sequential, or approximately sequential (e.g. an arithmetic sequence stepping by 64), Judy might be the best data structure to use. If you need to keep space to a minimum--you have a huge number of associative arrays, or you're only storing very small values, Judy is probably a good idea. If you need an sorted iterator, go with Judy. Otherwise, a hash table may be just as effective, possibly faster, and much simpler.

Furthermore, there aren't many ways to improve Judy, but there's a lot of room to improve hash tables ... read the article for the rest of this (very good) graf.

Oh, and if it helps his credibility any...

http://nothings.org/computer/knuth.jpg

:)
I have a few friends who have more than a thousand facebook "friends" but if you were to ask at least one of them how many friends he considered "close", he would answer probably none. Personally I see Facebook just as something of a way to keep in touch with contacts - I really don't see it as anything more than that. Not that I really care either way, I'd be more curious about the question of how many facebook friends the average user would consider to be friends let alone good friends offline.
A Perfect Strategy to Fight Credit Card Debts
I am so sorry to hear about this. My sincere condolences to all of you who knew and worked with Dan.
my thoughts go out to all his friends and family. nobody should be taken away so young.
Tom, I am sorry for your loss. When Garry told me, I couldn't believe it, I immediately checked Dan's last login time on IM and it was just 4 days ago.

Dan was the kind of person who would be there to help when you needed it. Dan helped us get into YC, he took the time to review our application and even recommended us without us even knowing about it. Dan believed in us despite never have even met me personally--We may not be where we are without Dan.

PG is right, The world is a poorer place without him.

Tom, if there's anything I can help you with, anything I can do please do not hesitate to ask.
The twitter app I built http://tweetarium.com would benefit from something like this. With regards to twitter pulling the plug on third parities, while it is a worry this could happen, it's risk you factor when building on any platform.
Expert systems will one day be able to predict
the outcome of litigation with a good degree of accuracy.

Objection, Your Honor. Move to strike. Speculation.
We used SSH + screen + vim/emacs for a ton of code reviews and collaborative work at Linden Lab during Second Life development. Even with Second Life + voice in constant use for distributed standups and design discussions -- and SubEthaEdit in use for some text sharing -- SSH + screen + vim was invaluable.
Heroku has been hyped up far and wide as being some kind of magical scaling solution. Just give Heroku your app and it will scale infinitely on EC2, right? Wrong. As they've admitted before, they haven't done anything to scale the database. Adding more app servers is trivial by comparison.

This isn't a knock on the Heroku folks; to their credit, they've been open about the DB issue. But you wouldn't see this most basic piece of information in media coverage from TechCrunch and many others. Unfortunately (?) for Heroku, the press has been writing checks in their name that the company can't cash.

Edit: Literally seconds after I made this post, blasdel posted about the same DB issue: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=859545
Heroku : Ruby/Rack :: Google AppEngine : Python/WSGI

But there's a huge problem -- AppEngine succeeds at seamless multi-tenant truly-distributed clustered hosting thanks to BigTable. Heroku needs to support standard Rails apps, so Postgres is the best they can do, and it's a huge hole in their offering.

You just can't make Postgres (or Oracle) scale on an ideal horizontal the same way you can distribute IP, DNS, HTTP proxying, HTTP serving, memcache, message queues, or bigtable. You can't expose Postgres as an ideal service that just keeps up with what you throw at it.
If at all possible try to differentiate and make your application work with other ways of exchanging messages (such as IM).

That way you're not completely dependent on just the one platform. Ebuddy is a nice sample of a company that did that right, they started out as single platform and now support a whole bunch of them.
Site seems to be back up, any better idea what happened?
Please don't use a fixed width text-area and <br> on every line. It looks horrible if the text needs to wrap-around.
"The Lean Startup is a trademark and service mark owned by Eric Ries"

His ideas sounds awfully similar to YCombinator's.

Grounds for a patent dispute?

Does pg really own Lean Startup?
Not just history. Actual international courts are extremely inconsistent. They are basically a way of judging losers with a little bit more legitimacy then just hanging the enemy king.

War crime charges as they are legally defined could probably be proved about any leader of a country at war, nt just Omar Al Bashir or Saddam Hussein. Almost certainly George Bush (and many other recent world leaders) would at least meet the criteria for trial.

If a domestic criminal justice system functioned like the international one, it would be deemed as non-existent. We just do not have an international system, but we pretend we do.
If it makes money, it's a business.

If it doesn't, it's a hobby.

Amazon, Google, and Yahoo are businesses. Facebook and Twitter are, to date, very large and elaborate hobbies.
I second that. The only two people I have known who died by their own hand were both incredibly radiant, ebullient individuals. Nobody saw it coming either time. For some, the higher the highs, the lower the lows, it seems.
Just want to point out the comment by "vkrm20" at the bottom of the post. It's very simple. 20% entails a percentage of what you put in. This guy missed such a simple fact.

One should not arbitrarily assign percentages to other arbitrary percentages. What makes it possible for me to say I expended 20% of my effort writing an essay? And if i did that then the 80/20 rule as I see it, would apply relative to that 20%, not the arbitrary 100% of my "possible efforts".

Scope, Scope, scope.
I think that point is highly focused on the decisions people would self report. I've seen studies where perception of a fictional brand is significantly increased through repeated banner advertising. I'm sure some high IQ participants in the study would report no impact, but have been influenced at a pre-verbal level. The psychology of repeated exposure is well documented.
If you view advertising as subversive and dishonest, then yes, advertising to smart people is less effective.

Not all advertising is dishonest, and instead informative. Hopefully the new media technologies will let this type of advertising thrive.