skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Let me clarify slightly - a desire to improve the world on a large scale (like what a startup founder wants, which is what we are talking about) is synonymous with a "lust for power." If a person only wants to improve the world on their own small scale, like picking up after litterers or doing community service, then obviously that is not a lust for power.

The definition of power is the ability to actualize ones will.

When we approve of what someone is doing, we call use the positive term, "they are trying to change the world." When we disapprove, we say they are on a power-trip. It's the same thing though. Since Watsi is small and their mission is something that virtually everyone agrees with, everyone is unanimous that they are "trying to change the world." But if you look at a larger charity, that has more controversial missions, such as the Gates Foundation, you will see a lot of people of accusing the foundation of being on a power trip, of abusing their privileged position to play God with the lives of the poor and weak.

There is a distinction between desiring money versus status versus influence/power. There is also a distinction between being ambitious and having ambition. The ambitious person has a vague sense they want to get ahead or improve the world. The person who has ambition has an actual reality they want to see realized. But there is not a distinction in motivations between the person who wants to change the world versus the person who wants power. The difference in terms comes from the outsider looking on, who will choose the positive or pejorative term based on the consequences of the actions.
Kano – Make a Computer
Before on HN:

https://hn.algolia.com/?q=Visual6502#!/story/forever/0/Visua...
Creating ELF relocatable object files in Linux
заработок без вложений от 2 до 35 евро вдень в проекте Whitepinsplus
I am working on a docker alternative called cims which allows 'services' targeting arbitrary 'platforms' to be deployed, managed and stored in any way decided by the 'cloud provider' in question. Currently, unixish 'Cloud providers' have an optional storage abstraction interface in place (to make writing them easier), though windows, erlang VM, or embedded platforms (qemu or android) could similarly be implemented as 'cloud providers'. The scope is therefore more of a generic building, packaging, distribution and infrastructure abstraction/management paradigm than an OS-specific virtualization workflow tool (like docker). Right now the main unixish storage provider is ZFS, but we've also tested linux loopback and linux md. I'm currently hiring a bit of a BSD enthusiast so we may just wind up adding jails (which I've used before). One benefit of the approach is that services can be benchmarked across different platforms and infrastructure can be operating system heterogeneous (security benefits). Docs at http://stani.sh/walter/cims/ ... background at http://stani.sh/walter/pfcts/ ... hoping to get the OK to open source it real soon now.
Creative Commons made an ideological decision to make Commercial licenses the default

Of course they did. They also made an ideological decision in creating the licenses in the first place. This connotation of "ideological" with "bad" is obnoxious.

they promote them as "Free Cultural Works" to make them sound more appealing.

Yeah, just like people say "free speech" even though you often have to pay to get your speech across.

Or maybe it's not about money at all.

But I'm sure you were just unaware of that. It's not like HN talks about it every other month.
Yeah, it's definitely chafing people the wrong way (to say the least), I'm just surprised Yahoo would think that was fine, to do to the people who keep their site alive.

If I had my stuff on flickr with that license, I probably wouldn't care either, but still it's bad PR they definitely don't need
Don't forget Clojure
Judas kiss.

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kiss_of_Judas
Don't forget that the empty set is also the subset of the empty set, making them equal. ;)
> The future of programming should be one language for all layers of the stack, from the database to the model to the UI.

http://www.red-lang.org/ (a Rebol-like language) promises to do that. And perhaps right down to the OS (if I've understood it correctly).
Just neglecting to continue to develop a piece of software isn't exactly "inflicting billions of damage" on "humanity". Letting IE stagnate was a dumb move, but it's not like MS had a moral imperative to constantly improve it. Shame on the marketplace if it took a while for a feasible competitor to emerge.
We just finished his first baseball season (t-ball). The present he wants most for christmas is a hover-ball, and he has tennis lessons every Friday. On the days he reads he typically spends anywhere from 10-15 minutes depending upon his familiarity with the book.

Programming teaches you how to think and break problems down into manageable tasks. It also requires you to be able to teach yourself in order to master it (or rather a subset of it). It also changes you from a consumer into a maker.

Literacy is a barrier for a self motivated exploration of knowledge and interests. I wanted to remove this barrier as quickly as possible so he can begin exploring his interests earlier.

* Edit

Ah yes, more outside stuff.

On thanksgiving we played in a hammock under the stars in the country. I asked him which star was his favorite, he said "the colorful one, but its actually a planet". Of course it was just a star. But I like him dreaming about the stars so I said nothing and smiled.

He spent most of the night chasing dogs in the grass, laughing. We built a fire and roasted marsh mellows.

We went driving around the ranch in jacked up kind of gas golf-cart. He drove the tractor with his hands while sitting on his grandpa's lap. And he used the front-loader to lift me in the air.

He explored the barn by himself, much to his surprise thinking I would require him to have a chaperone. When I went to check on him a few minutes later, I found him in the loft trying to persuade a bird to come close.

*

He gets a lot of outside time. But all this stuff I just wrote didn't seem relavent to this post.
> Writing NetBSD Sound Drivers in Haskell

http://www.blarworld.net/hackernewsgen.html
No facebook account here either. Would be nice to be able to sign up with email or log in with google.
I still have a lot to learn, but been off rails a few months and miss nothing -- http://www.ajostrow.me/articles/getting-over-rails
Your comment excludes a large group of pensioners: those that retired from state-funded employment, such as teachers or other public service personnel. Their contract stipulates an ongoing obligation that the state has to them once they retire, and many states (all?) don't have the legal right (or the realistic ability) to discharge their debt to their pensioners in bankruptcy. No potential employee would consider their future pension a discharge-able debt, and thus, they would not realistically consider the loss of their pension to be a risk to be accepted.

In other words, their in-kind exchange is: they work as instructed in return for immediate pay and a future obligation based on the time they worked.

Disclosure: from Illinois, where many public service employees are getting the shaft.

EDIT: additionally, teachers in Illinois expect to receive a benefit from the Teacher's Retirement System, and as such, they weren't contributing to federal social security programs. There has been an ongoing concern that the TRS funds will vanish and all those teachers would be without the usual post-retirement income that this country's social and taxation policies have all but guaranteed. Yeah, they are basically made to forego debt owed to them by the federal government in return for debt owed to them by a state government. The same state that brought you Rod Blagojevich, George Ryan and Dan Walker, prompting at least one person to suggest that they need to build a governor's wing at the prison.
Considering that all double blind medical studies are compared against a placebo, its really important to know who in the group the placebo would effect.
Which is why Docker is an ultimately bad idea; OS-specific binary images are the wrong level of abstraction for managing the deployment of code that's otherwise completely portable.
If there's a big enough reduction in property taxes, the market will adjust, absent other dominating effects, and your landlord's margin will be reduced.

Also consider that the vast majority of the landowning class consists of a person or family that owns one SFR, and most-to-all of their wealth is tied up in it. Those are the people that will get hurt if they can't keep up with property taxes, and it includes most of the middle class that isn't renting. I rent too. My landlord is not wealthy. If he can't cover his property taxes, then I'm the one who gets the boot.

And lest you think this is mostly a theoretical consideration, there were enough cases where an unfortunate retiree was forced to liquidate that it prompted the California electorate to pass Prop 13, which froze property taxes. If real estate values increase rapidly, for whatever reason, a property tax that rides that slope creates terrible injustices.
Microsoft is converted to love ! Can you imagine how THAT is amazing?
I really dislike that patterns using * wildcard required using the letters beforehand. The game requires A* to match a row with zero or more A's, but this is absolutely incorrect, as A* will gladly match ANY string, like QQQQ.
Ever read the study of atmospheric flight on Venus? It focuses more on sustained flight than gliding to a landing, but it's still the first thing I thought of.

http://media.cleveland.com/science_impact/other/Landis%20Ven...
Actually the markdown page on his site mentions exactly that as markdown's intention.

> The overriding design goal for Markdown’s formatting syntax is to make it as readable as possible. The idea is that a Markdown-formatted document should be publishable as-is, as plain text, without looking like it’s been marked up with tags or formatting instructions. While Markdown’s syntax has been influenced by several existing text-to-HTML filters, the single biggest source of inspiration for Markdown’s syntax is the format of plain text email.
Higher density data as well. Given I have the ability to scan high amounts of data quickly, it makes more sense to go for the time saving function.
I'm not sure I understand how it's "self replicating"? An empty file, compiled or not, won't replicate itself. The Makefile to compile the empty c file is also rather large, but even it must be executed in a loop.

Can someone explain the basis of this contest and how this c file is "self-replicating"?
Worth adding that it's said that since 2004, when archive.org first noticed the page.
Cool. I hope they now try giving the virus to health workers in west Africa rather than mucking about with US trials while thousands die out there.
Because while 8 characters of hexadecimal stored directly as themselves as individual bytes occupy 8 bytes, each pair of hexadecimal characters only encodes up to 1 byte of binary information.

00 -> FF only covers 0-255, which is the range of binary values representable in 1 byte.

The bit length they're talking about isn't about how many characters are in the human readable IDs (hex) but instead the technical range limit of the ID numbers.
> My hypothesis is that you discovered that this syntax allowed an elegant, unifying structure to the internal implementation

Your hypothesis is almost right. The important bit is that it is not about an internal structure, it is about a public structure that is accessible to macros. It is about the language AST.

Before there was syntax, I had defined I would like to have Lisp-style macros in Elixir. For that we need to have a regular syntax because when you are composing AST nodes you don't see keywords.

As an example, imagine you have code generation where you may generate a function called `add` and we treat `def` as a keyword. You would do something like:

quote do
def add(x, y)
x + y
end
end

Now let's say the function may be public or private. You would try to write it like this:

kind = :def # or :defp

quote do
unquote(kind)(add(x, y))
x + y
end
end

And now the parser would be unable to parse the code above because there is no longer a `def` or `defp` keywords where the parser would know it could skip the `do` bit. Therefore having an uniform syntax means you can generate and transform code without worrying about special cases, without evaluating strings and without resorting to special functions/methods for dynamic code definition. You can just compose code!

I also believe this matters a lot to the end-user, positively, for two reasons.

1. Consistency. The language is consistent and you can extend it in a consistent fashion. For example, Elixir code is written inside modules. `defmodule` is not a keyword, it is an identifier as any other in the language:

defmodule MyModule do
end

We also have defprotocol, which is implemented as a macro, and looks exactly the same:

defprotocol MyProtocol do
end

If we made defmodule a keyword, we would put ourselves into a corner as we would either have to make defprotocol a keyword too (for consistency) or have defmodule and defprotocol looking slightly different (causing confusion).

2. The second reason is that enabling such AST macros allows us to extend the language in different and interesting ways you can't do cleanly with other languages. One example I like to give in talks is the assert macro in our ExUnit test framework:

assert foo == bar

Different to many unit test frameworks, we don't need `assert_equal`, `assert_more_than` and friends. As a macro, `assert` navigates the AST, which is quite uniform, and extract information from the code.

Another example I gave at my talk at ElixirConf is that we could even extend language constructs like our for comprehensions. Someone can implement a `parallel` macro that transforms a regular for comprehension into one that runs in multiple Elixir processes (leveraging multicore):

parallel for user <- users do
fetch_user_data(user)
end

This only works if parallel can look at the code and transform it in multiple ways.

TLDR: The unifying syntax is an important part of Elixir macro system which brings consistency and provides an extensible foundation to the language that can be leveraged by its users.
I think what they were referring to was a quine
I wonder what's stopping anyone from slurping up all Flickr's CC-licensed photos and beating Yahoo at their own game. Certainly not copyright law.
I'll be darned if I can find the URL to the story, but it is a brilliant application of giving the customer what they wanted.

The short of it is that when you dropped back to the command line, early versions of DOS didn't clear the memory. That meant that the program really just went into stasis, but in practice it meant restarting; see, the program ran off the floppy then, so to save or load to another disk was tricky. Because memory would be executed from the same address, you could insert this disk with an empty executable that would get DOS to send execution to that address, which happens to be the program already in memory.

This had the huge boon of allowing you to drop to the command line, do something, and the resume working! Apparently they sold the disks for like $5 (or pounds) each, and the customers were extremely pleased. And the programmer was got a kick out of having rather impressive return per byte written :)
And it's also relatively close to markdown (biggest change is links).

The asciidoctor project also has browser extensions for rendering which are really nice. For the lazy: http://asciidoctor.org/
yes, but is using an external program (make and cp) really count? I wouldn't consider that really as "self-replicating".
No more just blindly having to listen to other people's stock tips without knowing if they are buying or selling the stock themselves.
> Learn to do the job yourself.

How?
The hidden local costs of deforestation in the tropics
Profiling ZSH startup time
In general, social science isn't very scientific. People generally just argue for what they believe, and use multi-syllabic words and some math occassionally to back up their arguments. "Mean" people tend to engender cults of personality. Cults of personality tend to focus on pleasing the leader rather than gettinf accurate reports through. As such, they can rarely organize enough accuracy to produce quality technical items. They can still 'succeed' on an uneven enough playing field. At the moment the playing field is massively tilted to make bets made by big players appear to be good ones at least until they get to the 'greatest fool' , currently the New York Stock Exchange. This process periodically corrects itself. It started to in 2008, but the Bush Administration replaced the helium in the bubble with more bubbles full of hydrogen. Maybe we can get up the cliff before they explode, maybe we can't.
In practice robots.txt is just a suggestion; even Google doesn't fully respect it.
CIMS – Cloud Infrastructure Management System
+1 insightful ;)
If you also look into the Makefile accompanied, it's just copying itself to smr file and giving it executable rights. So smr.c when built outputs it's source code.

The makefile is not large. It's a makefile for all the entries for 1994 competition. And it's only 4 lines for smr.c
The paper is just excellent and at just 5 pages, including about one
page of references, it's well worth the time to read. If you do any
amount of reading on parallel and distributed computing, then you've
probably read something where at least of the mentioned "sins" came
to mind. I see #1, #2, and #5 so often that I nearly expect them.

Though it's not really "cloudy" per se, I think there's an eighth deadly
sin, "Ignoring Architecture and Infrastructure." If you want to get
repeatable and comparable results, the system and network architecture,
as well as the supporting infrastructure, can make a huge difference.
every self replicating entry in the competition is compiled with other binaries.
The article isn't talking about running clinical trials, it's talking about making GCMS equipment and the like available.
RNG Party Tricks
Finally an answer to the "infinite monkeys on typewriters producing Hamlet" problem.
>And these were aimed at at the parent:

And they were questions.

>Are you actually here to discuss

Yes, that is what questions are for. Why are you here? You don't seem to have any intention of trying to contribute in a productive manner.
Honestly, I would recommend looking for another job. I was in a similar position recently and took advantage while I could, but it really starts to get the best of you. Also, considering we're in a development renaissance right now, why would you want to miss out on the possibility of advancing your skill-set and doing something interesting?

It sucks to change jobs but trust your gut.
pg could have done this thread a major service and defined the central term of his essay's thesis
Php.tools – tooling for formatting, testing and code coverage
On the other end of the audio stack, I highly recommend this multipart video lecture about microphone design. The guy is a legit microphone engineer who knows what he's talking about and explains it really well. Some of the principles, like how directional vs. omnidirectional microphones work, are actually quite intuitive and much simpler than I would have guessed.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=ihAG6cMpUlY
Funny enough, I do a lot of Emacs Lisp. Maybe it's "only" a scripting language in this sense, but I'm sure many people who have been using Emacs for over 5 years start using it to automate their workflows.

One day, a Lisp will rule the world. Maybe it will be called C# or Java.
What is the basis for the sorting on the reviews page? Doesn't appear alphabetical or by reviews - I assume it's in order of affiliate payout?
I think you and pg are talking past each other. Here's the first sentence of his essay:

"It struck me recently how few of the most successful people I know are mean."

There's probably a disconnect between the most successful people pg knows personally, and the handful of tech CEO's you know only from reputation. I'm willing to bet not even pg knows (or knew) Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, and Larry Ellison personally. Who does he know?

"I only know people who work in certain fields: startup founders, programmers, professors."

There are hundreds of successful startup founders, and you can name seven mean ones over the course of almost 50 years. I'm sure if we worked together we could come up with a few more, but it's a small, countable number. Y Combinator probably funds around seven successful startups every year, and that's not even counting the programmers and professors. I'm willing to bet PG's experience outstrips anything that you or I know purely from reputation.

Plus, I think some of your examples actually support pg's argument. Take Uber, for instance. The technical implementation of Uber is trivial. What enables Uber to survive is their ability to pick and win political fights with the taxi cartels, which is exactly the kind of place where pg would expect mean people to succeed. Oracle and Microsoft won, not based on technical merit but based on enterprise sales and deal-making.
Shameless self-promotion: MixRank's API has all of this and much more available, including Appstore. Email in profile if you're interested.
From the article:

"For patients, however, the notion of genetic testing for placebo responsiveness might be less equivocal. Many people, notes Brown, “don’t believe drugs are good for you. They believe in the power of self-healing.” And for at least some of them, the reality of self-healing might literally be a self-fulfilling prophecy."

Doesn't it seem more likely that when placebo's work it's in situations where someone already had a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy which was making them (psychologically) ill? Their proposition seems to be that patients may be sick in the way it's ordinarily understood, but some are able to 'self-heal' themselves by believing they are receiving a legitimate cure. Sounds backwards.

My understanding is this sort of scenario is common and well documented: a person believes there is something wrong with them, and subjectively it's the same as that thing actually being wrong with them; then they are given some treatment which they believe fixes what's wrong with them, and they feel better.
Although I agree that physical labs are essential, I also think it's dangerous to assume that the decision making process in tertiary educational institutions is driven very strongly by a desire to minimize costs. When you're selling a scarce Veblen good, creating and maintaining a luxurious and sophisticated image far outweighs efficiency in terms of overall success.
How Tripping on Mushrooms Changes the Brain
I really don't want to be _that_ guy that brings up archlinux, but…

"X is now rootless with the help of systemd-logind, this also means that it must be launched from the same virtual terminal as was used to log in, redirecting stderr also breaks rootless login. […]"

https://www.archlinux.org/news/xorg-server-116-is-now-availa...

This is obviously not a feature of archlinux itself, but an upstream x.org feature.
That's household income, women started entering the workforce in the 70s so that many households started becoming two-income. Male median income is flat.
Is Firefox really that bad? (2009)
Aren't a lot of them using "treatment as usual" as the control group? It's ethically difficult to withhold treatment from a group of people which is what you'd be doin with the placaebo control group.
My apologies for a bad choice of words. I meant to convey that maybe the writer has become cynical or jaded, perhaps even bitter.
Hm, I used to work for Clyde Hutchison (and Ham Smith)... They told me that it didn't work when they made a naive decompression. Was there something they missed?
Oh.... SLOW job.

I must get a new pair of glasses.