skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The phrase is from Horace, Carmen 3.2, line 13.

http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%...

Whether it's ironic or not is hard to say. It doesn't really sound like it. First he urges a boy to become skilled in war, then he pictures the boy's fiancee begging him not to fight against the enemy's star fighter -- a lion of a warrior. Then the poet says, "it is sweet and fitting to die on behalf of one's country," and goes on the describe the heroic qualities of personified Virtue in face of opposition.

Horace did claim to have himself thrown away his shield and fled from battle when in the service of the republican cause (the side of Brutus) after the death of Caesar. But he's also picking up on a theme used by early Greek poets, like Alcaeus, so it's questionable how much of this confession is literary trope and how much is historical evidence. Furthermore, Horace had been fighting on the losing side, and he later found it necessary to receive pardon from the victor Octavian (aka Augustus), so better to sound like he supported the republicans only half-heartedly. On the other hand, it might well still be true that he ditched his shield and ran.

The poem dates from after his military experience, and belongs to a collection of poems called the 'Roman Odes' that celebrate Rome and the emperor Augustus.

I think that's mostly correct, but it's been a while since I studied these things.
Well, I am actually in favor of the opposite of prescriptivism, when the current prescription causes so many problems.
This was pretty fascinating to an outsider. When I read the blog, it didn't make any sense and seemed to be missing some crucial background to make the pieces fit. But it still got voted, by a big margin, to the top... It wasn't until I looked at the comments here that I understood what it was all about. I had no idea that this was such a big deal in the US, and that even techies are so engaged in the celebration (it's my impression that most techies don't tend to be overly flag waving in every day life).

Over here in Sweden we don't have a similar holiday, which is probably connected to the fact that the veterans from our last war died well over a hundred years ago (not counting UN peace keeping operations).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_involving_Sweden
JSConf: the best JavaScript conference on the planet
Sure, and other companies win big by doing lots of things. Still worth restating though that doing 1 thing well can work great.
The 'common traits' tend to be awfully vague, and have little predictive value. This is what's important: anyone can write a book in hindsight and extol the virtues of the latest fads, but if they were able to take their traits and make predictions based on them, that would be a little bit more serious than writing another 'management guru' book after the firms have failed.
Netbook Apps Demand Dedicated Development Techniques
You will be very surprised to hear my suggestion: kill the off-topic articles mercilessly. No politics/economics and no fluff.
Well, for what it's worth, I inferred that what you were saying was that Apple, betting everything on a single, high end product was risky, and that if people decided to start focusing on value purchases, or Apple couldn't convince people that their brand/product was so much better, that they would have come crashing down.
I doubt the correlation between length and value is that strong. Brevity is the soul of wit; let's not penalize high information density.
An iPhone app which would actually be worth buying it and costs < 4$
For a company that claims to position itself as the information organizer of the internet they should definitely do better research on stuff like this.

Even the smallest item like that should be properly researched, lest you accidentally damage some minor player.

It makes you look sloppy and rude at the same time.

It's an excellent chance for google to show they mean it with that slogan of theirs.

Ken Thompson and Rob Pike being involved in this I'm sure they'll do the right thing, both are pretty sympathetic characters.
You don't put your real contact information on fake letters you send.
"An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind." -Gandhi
Let's see a vote of committers before we pronounce what 'the Community' wants. ('The Community' is not just whoever shows up in a comment thread.)
What My Five-Year-Old Son Taught Me About Marketing
For example, shared offices often use one IP address. If someone locks safe search there, it is locked for everyone.
But as a small company that strives to offer a real alternative to Google, we can deal with an IP based implementation.

So how does the DDG solution actually solve the problem?
I wasn't looking for a whole "soul of Hacker News" thread here. I'd just like people to stop cluttering the comment threads with things that reinforce the behaviors of the "shitcocks" of the site.

The rest of my response I'll take offline to you directly. Why clutter the thread further?
So if a handset manufacturer manages to build a better iPhone then suddenly Apple will sell no more iPhones? I don't think so. None of the handset manufacturers have the Apple ecosystem: App store, iTunes Store (video+music), nice desktop integration, OS X.

A phone with worse camera, less memory, slower processor, more expensive etc. than the rivals, from Apple I think could still outsell them, because of the Apple ecosystem. Oh wait... ;)
That's almost always true.

Except people who say 'effect the changes' instead of 'implement',
Affect as a noun I can only think of as in affectation
Of course, I engage in the practice myself. However, my point was about the subject of the post, homophones. If you have a way of distinguishing them while speaking, they aren't homophones. If you have a way of distinguishing them when writing, you have a poorly constructed phonetic alphabet.
For every place where user-generated content exists, you need people to police things. If you have a community, this can be crowd-sourced to some extent, but on a blog it is usually the blogger him/herself taking up that task. This is not a very fun way to spend your time, it's not particularly productive. The internet already has enough forums.

Also, I expect google is big enough that any feedback they need to know about will bubble up in various places around the net where some person at google will find it.
Sure, you'd need to make sure the scale was right, and maybe a cap at the top. Maybe max 10 pts per vote, distributed over the current userbase range of karma.
Full size image: http://feltron.tumblr.com/photo/1280/239368807/1/tumblr_kswq...
This may be a dumb idea, but how about requiring some minimum length of comment? Are there circumstances when someone legitimately should just use 8-10 words? I don't know what that minimum length would be though.

At least in this case if people want to be strident or acerbic, they have to work for it.
I think functional programming never took off because the world around us is made of stateful, interacting objects.

Pure FP uses a completely different paradigm, so there's a huge impedance mismatch when you try to connect FP programs to the real world or run them on real hardware.

I've written my share of Lisp code, but it never seemed to be a good fit for things other than AI and propositional calculus.
I honestly think this is the best way to do it. I've been a lurker on hacker news for a while now for the occasional article that doesn't involve business tips (most of them are bogus). In addition to what you said I think that maybe that users could be sorted into groups by upvote/downvote correlation, and that users with a higher correlation to you would have a greater weight on the tiering of your articles.
Fortunately, reliability isn't that much of an issue for distributed source control. On the few occasions when GitHub has had an extended outage, we just put up a temporary shared repository on a random server and everyone pushed/pulled from that until the outage was over.

For security, it depends on just how much security you think you need for your source code. What's the attack model? Do you have competitors who have so much to gain from reading your code that they'd risk industrial espionage? Is there sensitive data checked into your source control that would put you at risk if there were an accidental leak?

Personally, I don't think anyone has much to gain from reading my company's source code. GitHub has much more to lose from a privacy breach than most individual customers, so they have the best incentive to secure their systems. They also probably know more than I do about keeping the repositories secure. On the other hand, if I had an exceptional need for security, I'd want to hire an expert myself and keep full control over the servers and processes.
Counting Unique Users in Real-time with Streaming Databases
He specifically said he wanted his computer to be sexy. The exact quote is "and while they’re sturdy as heck and are well built and last forever, they’re not really all that sexy. I wanted sexy." He literally said that he was choosing form over function there, and it has nothing to do with operating systems.

Suits and dresses aren't sexy, the person wearing them is. Suits or dresses may make them more or less sexy, but hanging on a rack they're devoid of such ability.

Can a laptop someone is holding do the same? Perhaps that's what I'm missing. If I see a beautiful woman holding a laptop I'm 0% likely to notice what brand it is, or likely that it even exists. My guess is that my wife wouldn't notice whether George Clooney was holding a Macbook Pro or a Lenovo x60 either.

I say exactly what I'm thinking. You read into it and assume I did not say what I meant, I cannot help that. I wasn't commenting on Macs at all, and I came to that thought before the word was ever mentioned in the article, though to be honest, I probably wouldn't have had trouble guessing where it was going. Nobody ever says "Lenovos are great, but they aren't sexy, so I got a Dell."

But regardless there's a much broader point there, as this probably applies to a range of things from clothing, to cars to laptops.
Thanks for clearing things up for me. :-P
> it takes courage to enter into the armed forces and be one of the people who sacrifices their personal goals to protect our civilization

Remembrance day commemorates WWI.

Soldiers who had the courage NOT to enter the forces in WWI
were shot.

The aim of WWI was not to protect civilisation, it was a disagreement over the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman Empires' role in the Balkans.It got somewhat out of hand because the various armies had not noticed that technology had moved on a little since the battle of Waterloo.
Just an update. Got no response from twitter, so we went with @split_the_bill
World War I and World War II are wars that were not sought by many of the parties involved, and I think they deserve special consideration.

Most of the other wars that have produced countless veterans were wars of aggression though.

I know two vietnam vets personally (I don't have that much exposure to the US other than online and from when I lived 'nearby'), and neither of them is at all proud of what happened and sincerely despise politicians and everything associated with that era. They didn't have much choice about being there though, and at the time they thought it was a good thing.

The lesson I guess is that you should not let stuff like this blind you, and you should always be on guard that you do not become someone elses tool.
So is C dynamically typed when it converts an integer to a pointer?
Mind, that code example there seems pretty readable.
The linked parallel qsort example is really pretty. Channels are a wonderful concept. I'm already missing them in other programming languages. So elegant.
I'm starting to feel like this advice isn't so great anymore.

Everyone is trying to do less and what we end up with is a million little apps that do one thing really well, which is great, but you're still dealing with a million separate apps. The iPhone wasn't just a really great phone, it was a phone, an iPod, and an 'Internet Communicator' but because those things were combined in such a great package it really spoke to people and made it something they would want. Of course the App Store is what is driving the popularity now but that is still because customers can come to one place, the iPhone, and get tons of different uses out of their one device.

I think we're starting to enter an era where users are more interested in packages of functionality that are easy to use and work really well over a bunch of tiny solutions.

Maybe I'm wrong, but I know that I prefer products/applications that let me do lots of things reasonably well in one place instead of getting the 'perfect' thing for each problem I have.

What do you think?
Oh, you're teasing! :) Which people do you write for?
I've actually stopped casually referencing or recommending HN in a silly attempt to guard it. (Note, I don't mean this in the "this band was great until they sold out and got popular" way.) I'd actually be happier if the number of users regressed.
We are beta launching www.nixty.com. I've got a # of interviews scheduled with people in New England to demo the product and get initial feedback. If you live in New England and are interested in seeing NIXTY, then shoot me an email at glen at nixty.com. To borrow Fred Wilson's term, our BHAG is to become the "educational operating system of the web", just as Amazon is the default shopping system and google is the default search operating system -- we want to become the default educational platform for individuals, trainers/educators, and institutions.
Failed Doomsday Predictions
I think this is by far the best idea that I have heard on this thread. We know that the ability to remove features based on karma is there (due to the inability for new people to downvote or most people to start polls), so why not remove the ability to upvote for people under a certain threshold of karma.

I think this would also alleviate the issue of having people upvote stores on the front page as a sort of bookmarking feature. I have strong opinions that many of the upvotes on the front page come from new people who are using it as a bookmarking feature and not a bestowment of karma to a good post.
The wars that are generally found on pedestals are not wars of revenge, but of defence.

Non-violence works best when you are a large majority against a small, civil minority, which was the case in India, as well as for the civil right movements Ghandi inspired. Ask Chamberlain how well it worked against a large, angry, un-civil nation.
I'm afraid that won't work for long. People will read it once and then comply. Maybe the second and third time they'll stop to think about it for a few seconds, but after that it'll get enshrined in muscle memory, without people actually reading the statement, let alone think about it.

I believe the posts are only part of the problem, though. The post obviously needs to exist, but it's the votes that make a comment insipid or insidious. Votes are multipliers: nobody cares about a stupid comment with few upvotes and a great comment with many upvotes is an even greater comment. It's when the votes are distributed the other way around that problems start.

Furthermore, a poster that gets downvoted will probably learn from the experience whereas if he gets upvoted, he's encouraged.

The problem and the solution therefore probably lie in the voting system. There's a few options I can think of right now:

* Giving high-karma individuals more voting power. Maybe tiered or maybe on an analogue scale. This has the problem that not all karma as it is now is deserved. (Take mine: I seem to get most upvotes for snide remarks and snarky questions, not for the posts where I want to make a point.) That said, karma probably still is an indicator of quality of posts, so it may work.

* Make upvoting cost a bit of karma. I don't think this will work well, since you'll end up with a closed economy where only the top X% of the users can really participate. And X will be decreasing when more players come in.

* Give a certain amount of points each day to spend on votes. (I'm not a user of that site, but I believe Slashdot uses it. Is that correct?) This will make upvotes a scarce resource, making people be more careful what they upvote. Of course, if unused points get deleted at the end of the day, people may try to spend unused points on things they wouldn't normally upvote.

* Up the current karma-limits. Right now you need X karma for feature Y, but with the influx of new users, karma has inflated somewhat. It's much easier to get to X if 10 people read your posts than it would be if only 1 person read it.

Just a few things of the top of my head. I'm not the smartest guy here, so it may not be a whole lot, though...
That's all nice, but what do you do when you get so many custemer emails that you don't have time for coding anymore? I used to answer support emails within the hour and our users loved it. But as we grew it started to take it's toll and slowed down development. I still answer all customer emails everyday but now I do it once a day at night. It takes about 2 hours a day, so it's still manageable, but at some point it won't be. Suggestions?
It's no surprise 37signals is based in Chicago (I just did a whois) if they think Chipotle does Mexican food "well".
Maybe "appears" is key here...
In-N-Out in California reinforces this very well.
I'm guilty of this also, although yesterday when a consultant educated my boss about the existence of Virtualization (which my boss apparently knew nothing about) and I replied "oh yeah, I've got VirtualBox running on my dev machine, I do all of my coding on VM's", I realized that I am doing him a great disservice by not interjecting more. Part of my problem is that my boss tends to interrupt people when they are talking, which puts me off a little bit when I'm trying to explain an alternative technology or method to him. I don't think that he intends to be rude, and at first I thought that he was picking up on what I was saying and making a quick decision, and that is why he tended to shift the conversation or ask an unrelated question. I now realize that he probably doesn't always follow what I'm saying, he just thinks of something else and blurts it out in the middle of my explanation, so I need to be more forceful in getting my point across so that he can make a fully educated decision.
BackType Is Hiring Search And Software Engineers
I just wish they wouldn't show me the same pre-roll over and over. If they do that more than twice, I leave, and I don't come back.
I wouldn't say we have an exceptional need for security, but we do have reservations about dropping the only thing that has any real value in our company right now into what looks like a helluva honey pot.

I'm not sure I can even properly enumerate the risks -- if I could, I'd be able to make a calculation pretty easily. Espionage seems absurd, but who am I to say that that's not a possibility?

That said, we're getting by by cutting back on our extraneous costs, which means exactly the opposite of "hire someone ourselves and keep full control".
I guess an online ad view is more valuable because it's better targeted, and has more potential since it is more interactive.
We recently migrated from self-hosted SVN repositories to GitHub. It's proven quite beneficial in terms of allowing access to developers at off-site locations. With GitHub's use of SSH keys for authentication I haven't had to worry much about security, and as far as disgruntled employees go it's easy to revoke access to the repository (i.e. set it up so everyone has their own GitHub logins and then you can add/remove access as needed).
Symptoms of Successful Entrepreneurs
doesn't github provide a private, off-site option for this reason?

edit: http://fi.github.com/
Wow, Reddit is totally the new 4chan now. Awesome.
Why I'm searching beyond Google
If the original notice doesn't have real contact information, it is invalid. Once pointed out that the notice is invalid, there is no reason and no liability in not following an invalid notice.
Do you work on search? What is the vibe like inside Yahoo right now?
peter has a great site. i would add though that the best way to digest CSLR is to read it yourself. there's a lot of meat in there that can't be easily summarized
Yeah, which is outrageously, painfully expensive:

http://fi.github.com/pricing.html

I'm not trying to have my cake and eat it too -- I recognize that there's a different risk profile to outsourcing hosting of any service compared with doing everything in-house. I just want to make sure I'm not veering too far off the tracks in this case.
Chipotle is a national chain that is highly-profitable. Consider it the Starbucks of Mexican food. Not as good as the "local" place, but consistently okay everywhere you go.
It's really meant for schools and businesses. However, if someone locks safe search for their neighbors, that is OK with me.
I am working on AppRabbit.com (sorry, just a landing page right now), a database web app composer. I'd love to be to Microsoft Access what Google Docs is to Word and Excel. There are numerous other offerings available right now (including Zoho Creator), so I am really focusing on being the simple, straight forward, and functional. I'm doing it on my own right now, but I'm not apposed to taking on a cofounder. Truth be told I'm not much of a designer or a UX expert, although I'm moderately handy with jQuery/Ajax, so I could really use some help in that regards.
Natal launch details leak from secret Microsoft tour
Especially considering how much his language goals and appearance resemble Erlang (which itself borrowed period termination, among other things from Prolog, so it is probably a common root thing).
I'm supporting a system that protects copyrights and that seems to work well, for the most part. It's not perfect, but better than not having it, in my opinion.

Sounds like your issue is not with the DMCA, but with copyrights in general, which is entirely a different argument to be having.
I agree as to "investing", but as to experimenting with and trying out, I don't see why not. And the site running on Go seems to be puttering along nicely...
You don't necessarily want to be forceful, but you DO want to be concise. The biggest problems I see programmers/engineers/IT folks have is they tend to ramble on and on about the topic at hand. Managers, and non-technical people, want a relevant, but concise, explanation. Think elevator pitch. What can you explain in 1 minute? In 5 minutes?
I would be careful about taking Pinker's argument too uncritically. It relies on a very particular selection of secondary academic sources, such as Keely's "War Before Civilization." But Keely's book, while a reasonable response to the "myth of the peaceful savage", has been criticized for creating a "myth of the warlike savage".

http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/content~db=all~content=a791...
Taco Bell has at least fifty menu items (not to mention their multi-brand restaurants). In-N-Out has, well, burgers, fries, shakes and soft drinks.

Okay, In-N-Out does a great job. But a Taco Bell kitchen is about the same size, yet produces a substantially larger menu.

How do they pull it off? Middleware. At In-N-Out, they make food out of potatoes, buns and refrigerated beef. At Taco Bell, they make food out of ingredient bags which are processed and packaged off-site. In-N-Out is something that a chef can respect -- Taco Bell is not.

But it's worth pointing out that In-N-Out can thrive only because their market doesn't demand a wide-ranging product. Sometimes markets move in that direction, and the artisans -- who cannot abide using middleware, who want to make everything to their high standards -- have a hard time competing.
$35,000 to tour Bill Gates' house
Then the original DMCA notice (with fake contact information) is invalid and doesn't need to be followed.
Oh crap, there goes the neighborhood.
http://sixrevisions.com/usabilityaccessibility/20-websites-t...