skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Speaking as someone who grew up surrounded by a Fox News target demographic (religious conservatives), I'll also note that many of them hated Fox's entertainment programming for undermining family values through violence, indecency, poor role models, and all the usual complaints directed at anything edgier than "Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood".

Murdoch's news outfits may be blatantly biased, and overlap his own ideology to some substantial degree, but the primary goal is pandering to the audience's sensibilities (read: profit), not promoting his politics. Step back and think about it. Has commentary on Fox News ever convinced anyone to change their mind?
While you are correct that we don't have any actual information to show that in this thread, it would seem plausible (if you compare the amount of money that the U.S. spends on research and the air force vs. e.g. Iran) that America's doing most of the heavy lifting here.
Well it doesn't seem to work on Iron (which is essentially Chrome) on Windows for me.
So, you have "heard", really, I am amazed. You must really know a lot about it.

Repeating your broken popularity based measurement applied to different group of people does not make it any more correct, sorry.
Someone should build a social and pedagogical programming environment for kids on the web. The main problem here is the frustrating fact that one stupid browser doesn't support an HTML tag that's now 4 1/2 years old.
Perhaps he has, in fact almost certainly. (btw sp: referers(sic), yes it's not referrers!)

Some fictitious scenarios:

1) they give away the news, only ad revenue from 100% of current readers who are mostly too cheap to pay (that's me!)

2) they sell the news to 5% of current readers, targetted ad revenue doesn't alter as these readers buy stuff, and buy stuff online to boot

I'm going to go ahead and assume that most people come to the prestige newspapers The Times (of London) by a search for the papers name - now they're not going to delist themselves just stop putting all their stories up online. Indeed I'd expect them to have lead summaries still in SERPs. If most paying customers and most ad following customers come via the reputation and not specific stories then it seems there's little to lose.

Even if it works but not as well as liked it's only going to work better if more news centres follow suit - the less freely available well written news online the greater the value of pay news (and the less they'll need to charge).

Personally I think Murdoch can probably pull this off for some of his larger news providers - do I like it, not one bit.
Kids are not fooled. Programming a computer and calculator are also not the same thing. While I enjoyed hacking on my graphing calculator as well, the limitations of the calculator (no color, small screen, no keyboard) made it fairly limited for learning any broader concepts about programming.
There are some very nice programming environments for kids. MIT Scratch (http://scratch.mit.edu/) immediately springs to mind, for example.

Any particular reason it needs to be web-based?
Sort & Save ordering of JqueryUI Tab: An hack
I'm not sure the same outcome will hold. I would expect this to produce fewer views of Murdoch's sites, but I would expect the demise of piracy to produce more sales, because I don't think TPB and similar sites function mainly as search engines, and I think that distinction is important. Now, if YouTube were to be stopped (and all similar sites), I would expect that to hurt music sales in an analogous way to removing sites from Google.
Good. Hurry it up then, I enjoy schadenfreude.
It's not in the bag yet

When Murdch originally bought the WSJ he said he would bring the pay walls down on WSJ.com:

"(WSJ.com) is an excellent site but we charge for it, which limits it to about a million in circulation. We are studying and we expect to make that free, and instead of having a million, having 10 or 15 million people in every corner of the earth keeping up to date minute by minute with all business and economic news from around the world. We think that will attract very large sums or, relatively large sums, anyway of advertising revenue."

http://paidcontent.org/article/419-nws-dj-murdoch-we-expect-...

I'm very curious to see what convinced him to do a complete 180. It was only two years ago when he made that statement.
Snarl - A JavaScript Bridge for JRuby
Nothing will ever stop a hacker from programming and figuring out a machine, especially age.

I started when I was a tot during the days of DOS on an IBM box. At least kids these days have the internet, we were left to fend for ourselves.
The point is access, not completeness. Kids have access to more devices that are easy to program, just less so their computers.
Scratch is definitely a cool introduction to the world of programming. But I worry that in its attempt to make programming accessible sets up kids for a rude awakening. Most "real" programming isn't like that at all. Yet the kind of code I wrote in the 80s in Apple BASIC isn't so different "in kind" from a lot of the code I write professionally today.

Sorry for posting so many comments: I'm a teacher so the issue of computers, programming, and education fascinates me to no end :)
Yes, because every kid (at least in the 'developed' world) nowadays has web access but not every kid can install software on the machines they are allowed to use (for instance in school, the library or their parents' machine).
Some are probably still incubating.
This guy is correct, of course. But he comes across quite rudely. Sometimes it is better to not be right at all than to be right at any cost.

Actually, I'm a bit surprised that this article has been voted to the top of HN. It's not particularly interesting or challenging from any perspective that I can think of.
Open Office Mouse makes Malbolge look simple
Yes indeed I did, lol. Thanks
Do you have any references for that? I looked through some Haskell documentation and didn't see anything warning about those functions being unsafe (although there does seem to be an unsafeHGetContents in System.IO.Unsafe).

Is there's something I'm missing that says "hey, this function uses unsafePerformIO behind the scenes" or whatnot? Being not very experienced with Haskell I'm a little worried about library functions being unsafe without me realizing it.
World's Tallest, Most Expensive Fountain
"Business Method" Patents To Be Heard by Supreme Court
Well, the press would be terrible. ;)
Monads are a great academic hallelujah and I hope they lead to the discovery of some new, unfamiliar programming paradigm that benefits all programmers.

No they're not. They are a very simple abstraction; instead of sequencing computations implicitly with syntax like ";", you sequence them by calling a function. The result of the previous line of code becomes the input to the next line of code.

All programs logically flow this way, and "monads" merely let you take advantage of this property in arbitrary code.

Finally, because I want to be able to write tests for my programs, my procedural IO code looks very similar to the Haskell version. Arbitrary IO right inside your application logic is going to create an untestable nightmare. ("Oh, I know! Mock STDIN and STDOUT!" No thanks.)
His idea than random surfers are worthless to advertisers seems very odd to me.

I'd think that the random surfers are MORE likely to click an ad. After all, they aren't committed to your site -- They got there by accident. If a related ad is there, it seems likely that they would follow it more readily than someone who went to that site specifically to get their news.
It's actually fairly easy to do what he wants today.

ipython -pylab

[...boilerplate...]

In [1]: n = arange(255)

In [2]: plot(n, 88+80*sin(n*pi/128))

http://imgur.com/oSd62.png

As for the "imaginary diffusion equation" (I assume he means the Schrodinger equation), here is a simple program which solves it on the torus:

from pylab import *
from numpy.fft import *

def freeSchrodingerSolver(input, dx, dt):
np = input.shape[0]
k = arange(np)*2*pi/dx #Coordinate system in k-space
k[np/2:] -= np*2*pi/dx #FFT puts negative frequencies
#on right side of array
return ifft(exp(complex(0,-dt)*(k**2)/2)*fft(input)) / np

I really doubt it was easier to do that on a ZX Spectrum.
Features versus Benefits
So that means Google is only going to index the first paragraph of the story? (Otherwise it would violate Google's rule against showing different content to the GoogleBot versus visitors)
Nice work. Have you considered offering your speed improvements as a patch to jQuery?
This is a different article. It's a follow up to the one you mention.
More users offload laptop work to smart phones
Even worse - it was submitted by the author himself. Can we just flag it and get rid of personal rants on HN?
PC users open doors to such worms as Conficker, Taterf
That's not unreasonable. My point was, make them dead easy to find for those that want them. But yes, there's probably something in having one at the bottom.

Not an easy one to test, though ;)
How to compost your own s**t "A composting toilet and humanure for the garden"
Java's standard library has no way to read a file with one function.
Now that's an impressive hack. You, Madam, win the internets.
> Teach children to draw on a canvas in javascript.

I've thought a few times that this is the modern equivalent of the immediate feedback "plot via BASIC".

It's even better, given the fact that JS is a decent language and the results are more easily shareable with your friends.
The question is would you have spent that much time picking apart his code if you had liked the guy ?
I've used BeautifulSoup before and I've gotta say that it was kind of a pain; surely easier than writing regex myself, but I've had a much more pleasant parsing experience with other methods, like XPath in scrapy or jQuery API.

BeautifulSoup is also only kinda-sorta-maintained from what I recall, so it's probably better to use something else.
I'm confused about something. I thought newspapermen (Murdoch and that AP guy in particular) had a problem with news aggregators, which to me means things like Google News and Digg and HN, and maybe even RSS/Atom readers. Are they actually mad about having links to content from Google results pages? Or is there some misunderstanding here?
Doomed Dome: The Future That Never Was
Should unit tests talk to a data source?
Sure, there's not much there to offer. Underscore just delegates to the native implementations of "map", "forEach", "reduce", "reduceRight", "filter", "some", "every", and so on...

I bet that jQuery would do the same if they could, but their arguments are incompatible with the native versions -- instead of passing in each element as the first argument to the iterator, jQuery binds the element to "this" for each pass through the iterator. In addition, you can return false from a jQuery loop to break out of the iteration, something that's not supported by the native forEach, and that wouldn't work for "map", in any case. Changing any of this would be a major, backwards-incompatible change...

For what it's worth, in Google's Closure Library, they delegate in the same fashion. See "goog.array.forEach", etc.
Sounds like his main complaint is that there's no Apple logo on the back.
This was an annoyance for me, until I started using AutoPager.

If you use Firefox, I highly recommend it: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/4925
It’s laudable because even though scams are obviously bad from our perspective, they were lucrative that nobody significant in the startup world had made them officially evil.

Sometimes it doesn’t matter who you are if you can make things better.
I haven't seen the Android one, but there are a couple of EC2 management options for the iPhone that I am aware of

Ylastic's console is designed to be iPhone ready
http://ylastic.com/

And the one I use is this one from David Kavanagh

http://www.directthought.com/launch.html#directEC2

There is another one called ElasticPod. The webpage is down, but the app is there in the AppStore
17 Hours of JavaScript from the Masters
Looks like you will make -4 on this post, but you are so right. He actually convinced his staff to work for him for free, all because he has a lot of Twitter followers. The world is a sad (but amusing) place.
To the extent that a single case can prove anything, what is being done here in fact strengthens the case for dynamic typing, for it shows that a dynamic language can reap the benefits of static analysis too, WHEN it is beneficial.

You don't know that dynamic typing + static analysis is better than just static typing. Closure definitely does not catch everything. Hell, even just using the [] operator on a non-array object, Closure breaks down.
Nice, but very simple. I don't think there's a way of passing a Ruby object in to the Javascript and calling methods on it, which is a shame.
Those look correct to me. The function returned by cons is just a switch that holds two values in a closure, and interprets what you pass it as a signal to determine which to retrieve. You could just as easily rewrite it to pass it 0 or 1 instead of car and cdr.

If you evaluate (car (cons 1 2)) and (cdr (cons 1 2)) on paper using substitution, you'll see how it works.
The article is billed as a tutorial on haskell IO, so I presume a knowledge of haskell syntax as basic as (.) and ($) is assumed. But I agree that this probably isn't such an effective introduction to IO or haskell.
A Math Geek's Ride to the High Court in Landmark Patent Fight
It's the same browser as the other phones have. It's also the same rendering engine that the iPhone's browser has. (But there is no Apple logo on it, so clearly it's inferior!)
How does AutoPager work with sites (such as certain hardware review ones) which paginate content above the fold? I.e. how can it tell when I've finished reading and need to page?
So far oomkiller has not fabricated "facts" in favor of his argument.
I was making a remark regarding dropping his content from Google. Wouldn't you say one of the important aspects in new media is getting your content visible to search engines in order to monetize it?
I don't see these two roles being mutually exclusive, nor do I see your statement to be a given ("if someone cares enough...").

The experience of sitting down with a Sunday paper is very different from that of reading a specialized outlet with a specifically targeted audience. The Sunday paper is a curated aggregator. Nine in ten stories (and probably much more than that) relate to subjects I don't have very specific knowledge of, and I'd be lost if I tried to keep up with reporting that expected significant topical familiarity.
I doubt Google's rules apply to News Corp.
It's just getContents (and brother hGetContents).

Using getContents is fine for a quick way to slurp in a file, but it's like doing a read without checking for -1. Since haskell is lazy, figuring out why an underlying read failed can be fairly confusing.

If you think your program is doing IO and there's no IO type getting in the way, unsafePerformIO is lurking in the darkness.
I wonder if we are ready for taking care of our own humanure in other ways that would be considered a "regression" in terms of urbanity, progress, etc.
Classy External Hard Drives
I've found this addition to BeatifulSoup useful: http://code.google.com/p/soupselect/

which lets you use CSS expressions to find what you want.
The age of mega content sites
Another option is to run the source through Tidy with XHTML output and then treat it as XML.
This has been said before, but bears repeating. I like reading articles on Google News more than on most "non-aggregator" news sites just because Google News makes the news readable. What a lot of content creators don't seem to understand is, I don't care where the content comes from if it's a pain to read it.
I have always wondered how they can charge per page view for ads yet the advertisers be OK with this practice. Apparently they just turn a deaf ear to this problem and the consumer/reader suffers. You'd think they'd realize that if the person didn't click the ad the first time, they're likely not going to click it on the next page.
I don't see that it is that much harder now. Boot your mac, open a terminal, type python, and start programming. Does it take one more step? Maybe, but it is a joke to say that is somehow more difficult.
Hacking with CouchDB
Relentless – The Difference Between Motion And Action
Are there decent tools to debug and check JS for you, so that you don't have to rely on the browser built-in support (which is incredibly forgiving but also doesn't tell you what is going on)?

A massive advantage of BASIC was that it would tell you it was wrong as soon as you typed something with a syntax error in it, and it put a big flashing "?" (or similar) right there until you fixed it. Can JS be made to do that?
Happy 5th Birthday, Firefox
All great points, so I'll throw one more out there. Not all fish have the same tastes, needs, or swimming abilities. If the "niche" that you are filling is occupied by a huge number of fish, is it still a niche? ;-)
Schneier on Security : Laissez-Faire Access Control
EA Buys Playfish For $300 Million, Plus a $100 Million Earnout
Murdoch could block Google searches entirely
You make a lot of great points and in some cases I will agree with you.

The cut to Zen club had little to nothing to do with its brand or the photoshoot. While it was "helping" - I will agree - he owned the gym and blurred the lines between what was his partnership and what was the gym - and wanted an equal share cut between him AND his gym.

2. Absolutely true.

3. I asked to meet the lawyer plenty of times. If he was the best partnership lawyer in town, I would think a google search would turn his name up. It didn't.

4. You make a good point and I realized those risks. That said I wasn't confident enough that I wouldn't get screwed as I had already set the precedent for how I could be pushed around. Plus, its not like HE was quitting his gym to go full time with us, he simply wanted it done faster and didn't care if it put us into harms way.

5. Yes, yes and yes. I was stupid for not getting my e-mails and records off the servers first, but its like at this point my friend didn't even trust me. This was an emotional response.

6. The investor did not put up $250,000, in fact, he barely even marketed the product to his own consumer base (so far, Nov 2009), which was the only reason I was playing along because I thought it would work (which is still a mistake).

7.I agree here too. There were other comments as well. He was taking a business coaching course run by the Joe Ansaldi and a couple of times said to us "There is a science to making money. Like you hear sometimes, step 1, 2, 3, profit. Works every time" There were similarly scammy things he said that rubbed me the wrong way.

You have a completely unique and valid take on the situation. My emotions blurred a lot what happened and while accurate from my perspective, wasn't necessarily everything.

Thanks for your input, as it is posts like these that help me get the full story and stop my inner-brooding on getting pounded in the rear by business partners (my failure was from a long series of my own mistakes).
Many plants like spinach leech toxins from the soil so over time the soil could heal.

I think the biggest obstacle to this sort of thing would be that it would be seen as "giving up" by the government. They have the ability to block it too because of zoning laws.
Excel where your competitors suck
I've heard the Rent the Runway team is looking for a full time drupal developer in NYC. contact me if interested - phil at kartme.com
The left fold: weekly programming article digest: 2009-11-09 edition
AutoPager does an optimistic pre-fetch of extra content, meaning that while you're reading page 1, it's loading page 2; once you hit page 2 content, it begins fetching page 3, etc. It's likely a bit more complex than that, but ideally, with AutoPager in effect, you shouldn't ever realize you stopped reading page 1. :)
It's not what people have actually paid for, it's what they think they've been paying for. They think they've been getting news for a quarter or a dollar, when their subscription price goes up because they arn't just paying for distribution anymore, but rather all the things that advertising used to pay for, will they not perceive that as an increase in the cost of the news?
Entrepreneurial Journalist: Andrew Ross Sorkin
http://news.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=99/12/10/0821224&...
Steve Blank: Relentless – The Difference Between Motion And Action
10 unwritten rules of cell phones at the workplace
StackOverflow for Startups
Damn Cool Algorithms: Spatial indexing with Quadtrees and Hilbert Curves
Well, it's still two impressions. And if the second page has different ads then you have a new chance to click on one.

Also, some advertisers are interested in brand awareness; they don't care much about whether you click, they just want you to see their logo as many times as possible.

And look at it this way: if you have a long page of content, your ad is gone once the user scrolls down. If you have several short screens, your ad stays in view much longer.
"While Sorkin basks in Wall Street’s attention, his image at the Times is more conflicted. His rise at the paper was jet-propelled—he was a kind of legend before he was 20. And he was one of the first at the paper to realize the centrality of the web and also one of the first to realize that on the web, a journalist’s personal brand can sometimes be more valuable than that of the institution that employs him. With his DealBook e-mail, read by some 200,000 people, plus the blog, with 2.5 million unique monthly visitors, plus the weekly column, breaking news scoops, television appearances, and 60,000 Twitter followers, he is one of the Times’ most visible players. Media ubiquity is a strategic decision. In the cubicle jungle of the Times, he’s an entrepreneur. “All of it is self-reinforcing,” Sorkin says.

Still, part of Sorkin’s problem at the Times is that he’s a new sort of creature at an essentially conservative institution, albeit one that desperately needs new models. He’s not a Timesman, exactly. He’s his own creation, and he doesn’t genuflect to Times traditions."

^ this is interesting, he has already started to garner resentment by other journalists at the Times, but he seems to be doing well for himself and is really building a brand
This article seems a little misplaced. They talk as if it was the technology alone that allowed Madoff to scam, but the human factors were at least as important.

http://finances.unanimocracy.com/money/2009/01/07/harry-mark...

Markopolous, a guy who didn't work at Madoff's company sent letters to the SEC several times, was convinced Madoff's returns were a scam. Several other financial firms on Wall Street didn't deal with Madoff either. They didn't know what he was doing, but they were convinced it wasn't legal.

Markopolous's letter is so detailed about the different ways Madoff was lying is proof that either 1) the SEC is incompetent or 2) the SEC was bribed to not investigate him too hard.
From people I've observed, I would say that at least half are attempting to subdue the anxiety that they are somehow missing out on something that is going on. As if they couldn't be the 10th person to accept a party invite, or couldn't bear to not be the first to know that somebody is pregnant or getting married or breaking up, or whatever. I think the OCD comparison is accurate. Not for everyone, but for a substantial subset.
IPhone worm cripples handsets with Rick Astley