skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I certainly wasn't trying to insult Vidly, more try and understand the rationale for such a startup existing.

Here are some possible rationalisations for such companies existing, such companies betting on acquisition by a limited number of buyers & other concerns:

- Smaller companies can sometimes do things better.

- Smaller companies can sometimes do things cheaper.

- Small companies can fail, so they can try riskier things.

- Small companies may not have as much of a brand to protect, so they can try riskier things.

- More features can be put to market test by multiple indipendant companies then by the 'parent' alone.
Individual features can be put to market test and good ones have a better chance of being discovered.

- Features can be tried multiple times by multiple companies, with the best one ultimately emerging.

- Startups (using a certain definition) have a 1/x chance of succeeding at launch. Success/failure is binary. The risk of faling completely is extremely high. Therefore, a 10% or 20 or 40% chance that Twitter will disappear while they rely on it to survive is not as scary as it is for an established company. If your chances of success are only 1/5 anyway, going to 1/6 is not too bad. Basically, startups are structured to handle that sort of risk.

These reasons may or may not add up to a net efficiency gain overall, better features or whatever. Redefining what companies do themselves vs what they outsource is an interesting part of how economies evolve. Outsourcing innovation (even if it is just a small feature) might be a good move, sometimes. The market gets to decide.
Besides the fact that whoever sent out the DMCA notices would go to jail for 2-4 years (perjury sentence in the state of california), this probably wouldn't work because the owner of the allegedly infringing content (the person who received the notice) can just "instantly" file a counter-notice with themselves, or just not file the counter notice at all (probably don't need to send it to yourself if you're the owner, though I'm not positive on that one).

Then they can go after the sender, and lock them up for a while.
Three Reasons Why Not To Sign Non Disclosure Agreements
You answered your own question. On Google's scale the cost of maintaining the extra machines justifies writing the application in an effective language.

E.g. when you have an app written in C and it's 10x more effective than a Python implementation (which is quite realistic assumption) then you will need only 100 servers instead of 1000.
Best I can tell, they have it wrong. They might be interpreting size differently than I expect but Carbon should be around 220pm and Water around 310pm.

Rough estimates for diameter are based on molecular mass and density; density being variable. I'm curious how they did their calculations.
If I were to build a simple brochure site for someone I would try as much as possible to get away with just building a static site, especially if the client isn't willing to pay for someone to upgrade the site regularly and won't need to update content much. Lack of maintenance will eventually lead to the site being exploited and the host shutting the account down.

Alternatives might be a hosted CMS service such as wordpress .com or using some sort of desktop management system for updates of the static site.

I have also recently built a simple site using the Scanty blogging software (running on Sinatra) and hosted it on Heroku's free plan. Scanty is super slim on code and doesn't get targeted like Wordpress and Drupal, but you still have to keep an eye out for security updates.
I'm just surprised at how similar the Guardian article is to the Boing Boing article (http://www.boingboing.net/2009/11/08/rupert-murdoch-vows.htm...).

Admittedly the Guardian article does link to the boing boing one, but both make reference to the US's $1 trillion activity out of fair use, the US's proclivity to ignore the UN/WTO, all the money that China makes out of sending plastic junk to the US, and the supposition that Rupert Murdoch will soon be Howard Hughes.
Hacker News Chicago meetup Tuesday (11/17) at 7pm
Chicago hackers: Please join us for the next Hacker News Chicago meetup on Tuesday, 11/17/2009, at 7:00pm at the Hophaus (646 N. Franklin, 312-280-8832, http://www.thehophaus.com/). Please join our mailing list (http://groups.google.com/group/hn-chicago) and follow us on twitter or identi.ca (@hnchicago) and let us know if we should expect you.
It was meant to be interpretive. And, the implications of 'addiction' in this case weren't necessarily negative.

Generally, I find the entrepreneurial process addictive in the sense that it fills an emotional need (neither good or bad) that more structured areas of business leave empty.

Palahniuk removes layers from his characters to make this point. I think entrepreneurship accomplishes something similar with business.
It does have an iterator syntax: http://golang.org/doc/go_spec.html#RangeClause

It just wasn't used in that example to keep the number of new constructs down.
Well, the shootout entries generally blur the line, using lots of type declarations.
And how do you get enough eyeballs on your qwiki that advertisers will want to post to it?
I’m way too impolite for this world. I would just ask if anyone wants the roll and if nobody says anything just take it.
6.5 TB of gzipped text is a lot. Uncompressed it could be a few multiples of that.
Apache SOLR 1.4 is finally out
The Secret to being a Rockstar Programmer
How does "unladen swallow" fit into running Perl, Ruby and other dynamic languages?
You, sir/madam, have been quoted. I'll throw that one up on the about page later tonight.
Samsung bada (Open mobile OS)
15 minutes? I don't think that's common.
That's because they were both written by Cory Doctorow.
But twitter itself is a small startup :/
Chrome. Closure. Go.

It says great things about Google that these all clearly started as projects that they assumed nobody would ever have to Google. (Although http://www.google.com/chrome is now #1 for [chrome]).
Displaying RSS or Atom feeds in PHP with under 10 lines of code
I am the one answering questions. I have to pay (i.e., look at ads) for the privilege of doing so. Then, my work is used to lure in eyeballs that look at the ads.

Just sayin', it's not sustainable. Why shouldn't I get a cut? What do I get for continuing to answer questions on Stack Overflow (instead of on free mailing lists, or on my own blog, or in a magazine)?

Karma is nice and all, but the only reason I bother writing here is because there are no ads.
Yet another language? I wish people would focus more on making some existing languages "better" than inventing something completely new.
Yeah, but said guide is just the FlyerTalk wiki in PDF form (I imagine).
Scoopler.com seems very usable... live search is a feature google doesn't have, and would be slow to adapt to.

Thinking about how I normally google.. I tend to browse clusters of linked information, in a sequence of relates searches/refinements.. there's no reason I really need to leave the page to do that..

So theres also room to revolutionise the UI.. perhaps text that zooms away as you traverse links in your walk through the graph? But that might be too radical for some users, it would have to be subtle.

With the current page as is, I think this is a nice product.

Another feature that could differentiate even further is geo-location [orthogonal to the search terms] That would bias news according to proximity from my location, as inferred by my ip address. But Id want a non-intrusive way to turn on or off...

Nice.
Cyclomatic Complexity in Languages with Closures
Is there a reason why so many languages are nearly impossible to search for? (C, C++, Go, etc.) I mean, surely someone must have figured out that this is not the best naming trend quite a while ago.
Here's what's happening here, Douglas. You're thinking, "I know how to quote my queries so they aren't injectable. I don't need to parameterize them."

Let's stipulate that you're right.

You are not the only programmer on your project --- at least not if your code means anything. Someone else is going to either (1) extend or (2) cargo-cult your query. And when they do that, one of two things is going to happen:

* They're simply going to forget to quote properly. For instance, they're going to add an ORDER BY clause, and they're going to accept "ASC" and "DESC" as input from their jQuery auto-loading Ajax table widget, and you're boned.

* They're going to quote using an unsafe quoting function, for instance with regular expressions, and they're going to miss truncation and character set attacks.

I can tell from your "that is absurd" comment that you aren't going to be sold on any of this. That comment is also a pretty big tip-off that you're not particularly experienced --- and the only reason I say that is, I have never worked a pentest where a client quoted string queries that didn't turn out injectable. You might be the one exceptional app in the world that gets it right, in which case, thank you for proving the rule for me.

People who use prepared statements and who religiously keep user input completely out of query structure (for instance, by mapping table and column names, so user input simply can't be put into query structure) don't have to think about any of these problems. Why anyone would elect to think about them is beyond me.
Great idea. What did you built it with?
Why are you sticking up for ESR? He's elected to be a public figure. He richly deserves all the critiques he can get. What about him makes you --- a demonstrably smart person --- feel the need to defend him?
SCOTUS Scope of Patentable Subject Matter in Bilski
I am just wondering how same link got posted twice ...
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=934140
....Both point to http://golang.org ..
Looks interesting! I feel that an improved C is what's mostly lacking in the programming language landscape nowadays.

So now Google's got its own OS (two actually), browser, and now its own programming language. Anything missing yet? Their own editor / IDE?
Hm, it could be a self-challenge - make web search good enough to know what I'm talking about when I look for Go?

I'd expect: the game, then the language. Certainly not go.com
Google Releases New Programming Language: Three Developer Reactions
Four Thoughts on Discipline in Trading
Maybe its a branding exercise in disguise. You can't search for ["Chrome", "Closure", "Go"], but for the first two you quickly get what you're looking for if you associate the company name: "Google %s".
Their own editor/IDE?

I wouldn't imagine this as something that they'd release.
I can't find any sort of reference to a Google sponsorship. Am I missing something?
I'd have to disagree with the title "Python meets C++". There's very few features that have been brought over from either of those languages.

It looks like C with some very carefully chosen additions: memory safety, concurrency and maps.
You're missing my point. I'm talking about combining efforts with all the language communities (ie. Python, Perl, Ruby, etc). Focusing the energy rather than dissipating it over many VM projects.

Parrot is designed with multiple languages in mind where as "Unladen swallow" is designed for Python.
I just finished implementing an image processing service with a URL-based API
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=%22[[INSERT_PROGRAM...
We (the Go team) all work at Google :) See also http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rKnDgT73v8s
I am not so interested in Go as an implementation platform, so much as I am in the idea of a bridge for web programmers to real C.
I agree. From the FAQ:

"Go is mostly in the C family (basic syntax), with significant input from the Pascal/Modula/Oberon family (declarations, packages), plus some ideas from languages inspired by Tony Hoare's CSP, such as Newsqueak and Limbo (concurrency). However, it is a new language across the board."

Two of the designers were Rob Pike and Ken Thompson, both instrumental developers of Unix/C and Plan9/Inferno. Thompson created the B programming language that C was based on.
Syntax looks like Pascal meets C++
I would expect not in so tiny a size, no.
You are exactly right. Turing completeness is irrelevant when comparing languages, because it is a property of both. Turing complete or not, good luck programming your graphics card with Tcl or having boilerplate-free Java. It just isn't possible.

But the way I see it is, "it's not my problem if people want to write boilerplate all day" or that they like Java. Using Java does not take anything away from me, except possibly contributions to the community. (But then, the fanbois are rarely contributors to the community. This is true even for me!)

You will never convince axod that Java would benefit from new features. He is happy to be in a minority here (a "smug Java weenie"), and that happiness is worth more than potential increased productivity.

HN is a weird place for programming discussions. People here seem to think that making a website that people will visit and look at ads on is somehow correlated to code quality. It's not. It's just that you will enjoy making that website more when you aren't manually writing your own delegation functions, or writing "Foo foo = new Foo()".
> immediately file a counter-notice and your content should be immediately...

No, because by putting your content back up the host is opening themselves to liability if it turns out you are wrong. Nobody is going to do that

>sue the person who filed the complaint

The person who filed the complaint is a mailinator address, or in Russia/Iran/Cuba or works for a corporation with more lawyers than you .
Whats a one liner to describe the Y-Combinator to someone new to FP?

'An generic implementation of a fixed point attractor'

Hmm.. not quite it.

um.. 'DSEL's ? no-one calls them that.. 'DSL' has taken hold, although overloaded somewhat [eg graphical symbol set over UML, or language-in-a-language, the conventional meaning]
Since I saw this the other day:

http://duckduckgo.com/?q=go&v=
This is a very common situation in Chinese (and possibly other) culture. There is a whole intricate social dance over how to deal with the last piece of any dish, wherein its considered impolite to take it. All parties are supposed to offer it to someone else, often to the point of physically taking the food item and dropping it on someone else's plate.
I was ready to be dismissive until I read who was behind it. This is part of the Bell Labs legacy. Kickass.
What is this series? Gotta love the Great War :) Best of luck to you too.
Purely social meetup in London: Wednesday November 18th
Greetings,

I will be travelling through London between giving talks, Oxford on the evening of the 17th, then London on the afternoon of the 18th at 15:00 at the Institute of Education.

I do have an appointment in the morning, but would expect to be able to have lunch in London on the 18th. Anywhere here up for a lunch? I believe, just for starters, that the newly refurbished Royal Institution has an acceptable canteen.

13:00 ??
^^ Conspiracy Theorist ^^
Yes, but it is all dynamic content, which it why it needs so many resources, if that is what you are getting it.

Also, Akamai offloads a lot of the traffic from us.
I also suspected bell labs the moment I saw the page... not sure where that idea came from. Maybe from this? ;) http://plan9.bell-labs.com/plan9/img/plan9bunnyblack.jpg http://golang.org/doc/logo-153x55.png

[edit: creepy thought... Go logo == the Glenda bunny being thrown at something?]
Oh, you never know. They release a lot of the not-business-specific infrastructure they improve, which an editor undoubtedly is.

I'd argue their secret sauce, and the parts they wouldn't want to release, are
- the insane scaling stuff
- all the intelligent things they do with the insane amount of data they have, and the insane rate at which they can process it
I use C when I have a program with tight timing and/or memory requirements. I see that this is a GC language, so am I right in assuming that it's not suitable for soft or hard realtime systems?
I'd consider the asking to be impolite (since it wastes time with a silly conversation), so I'd just take it, since, other than modest latency, it's not a scarce resource.
> The "use government" route is fraught with moral hazard and unintended consequences.

Actually, "use government" to fight pointless bureaucracy sounds at best as a joke.
It's like several people got the same idea... http://ooc-lang.org/ is also an improved C really.
Start Up School video

Please share the answer.
AT FIRST GLANCE:

Annoyances: braces; variable declarations more verbose than in C

Flaws: no discriminated unions; no generics or parametric polymorphism

Doubts: no exceptions; no macros (as far as I can tell)

Edit: I take back the verbosity claim. := does inference
Edit2: interfaces replace generics, but are
type-checked at runtime, apparently:
http://golang.org/doc/go_for_cpp_programmers.html#Interfaces
I'll be there. Funny sidenote: ChiSec is Wed, Nov 18 at Hop Haus as well --- no RSVP required.
Garbage collection, type inference, built-in maps and arrays, immutable strings, concurrency support. Very nice!

Best of all, no header files!
You keep entire backups of Reddit servers in your apartment? Is anything sensitive on the backups?
totally off topic but how did this submission get past http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=934142 2 minutes later?
Excellent, thanks for organizing Mr. CCG.
10 Geeky Laws That Should Exist, But Don’t
crescendo,

Actually YouTube integrates with both Facebook and Twitter now. Go to My Account > Settings > Sharing and you can link your Facebook and Twitter accounts.

Once you upload a video, it will automatically update your status for both services.

I use YouTube for my uploads mainly because it's one of the built-in upload options for Android. I believe this is true for the IPhone too.
No macros indeed. Unions types will probably happen sooner rather than later.
It's legally the safest and easiest route. If your company name is already trademarked, you don't need to worry about someone tacking a common word on the end and stealing it. This is why so many Microsoft products have such generic names -- and all of them include at least one prior trademark. Google is at least trying to keep a flat namespace instead of Microsoft's nested hierarchical mess. If nothing else, it would help prevent duplication of efforts because of potential naming conflicts.
Desktop Computers
There is also a Chicago Lean Startup Circle on Nov 17 7pm at ITA, 200 South Wacker, 15th floor ( http://www.meetup.com/Chicago-Lean-Startup-Circle/ ).

See http://leanstartup.pbworks.com/Meetups for other Lean Startup meetups and gatherings.

The LSC newsgroup http://groups.google.com/group/lean-startup-circle
Thanks, dannyr. I wasn't aware they'd added that feature.
GC pauses are current unbounded, so I wouldn't use it for that sort of thing, no.
Bram Moolenaar (vim) is a Googler.
Our kind is so dominant on the net that our interests eclipse the original concepts. Try googling Java, Python, Lisp or Ruby - not much about Indonesia, snakes, speech impediments or gems to be found.
http://golang.org/doc/go_faq.html#Concurrent_programming "Do not communicate by sharing memory. Instead, share memory by communicating."
Cool, but now I'm in a pickle. HN or Lean Startup Circle (http://www.meetup.com/Chicago-Lean-Startup-Circle)?

I'm working on a side project http://chicagotechcal.com to help try and coordinate events which hopefully will reduce overlaps. I hate missing awesome events like a HN meetup.
ha, you beat me to it.
"No, because by putting your content back up the host is opening themselves to liability if it turns out you are wrong. Nobody is going to do that"

No, the point of DMCA is the provider is agnostic to who owns the content. Its the making a decision on who owns the copyright that opens them up to litigation, because they would lose safe harbor protection. Incidentally, NOT putting the content back up would be a violation of the DMCA, which also opens you up to litigation.

"The person who filed the complaint is a mailinator address, or in Russia/Iran/Cuba or works for a corporation with more lawyers than you."

So they're either a 1) liar, in which case your content is back online and you're back where you started or 2) a big corp who can threaten to get their way? Welcome to the fundamental problem with the DMCA: it can be abused.
Ars Technica on Go

http://arstechnica.com/open-source/news/2009/11/go-new-open-...
This is even better: http://16systems.com/numbers/index.php it does not generate, but it does validate credit cards.
http://web.archive.org/web/20070109023445/http://reddit.com/...
Music is actually a terrible example because it has qualities that change mood and percetion all by itself. Its effecs also vary so widely for individuals as to make comparisons nearly meaningless.
I like C, maybe it is Good Enough, but don't you think C has some real flaws that could be fixed in a newer language?
Doubt it will be successful, no beards: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rKnDgT73v8s
For me it's a mix of not wanting to ask, and not wanting to ruin my appetite. These two combined forces are usually enough for me to leave it in the basket.
Is there anyone on HN who works as a programmer in this field who would be willing to share some of their experiences?
I think there's ~30 years of C code that isn't going away and that is going to remain the bottom layer of most programming stacks, and it's good for devs to be able to drop into it.
...and the strictness operator for ensuring that a function is applied to a value correctly.

($) isn't any kind of strictness operator -- maybe you're thinking of ($!). ($) is a plain old function application operator.
But Rhino has the same performance issues as Python and Perl and Ruby, doesn't it?

According to one benchmark ( http://ejohn.org/apps/speed/ ), Rhino is generally several orders of magnitude slower than Spidermonkey and Tamarin. Which probably means that it is also orders of magnitude slower than Python, Perl and Ruby.

Since JavaScript was suggested as an alternative to Python to act as a reasonable substitute for C++ and Java for performance reasons, suggesting a JavaScript implementation that seems to be dramatically slower than even Python seems nonsensical.

While JavaScript is a lovely language, and I'm all for it being used more on the server-side, Rhino only solves the lack of libraries problem when compared to Python...it does not solve the performance/memory problem of using Python at Google scale.

Unless, of course, things have changed dramatically since any of the benchmarks I found were run.
I really enjoyed this post on n+1, but I'm struggling to find an example as it relates to other industries and businesses besides food. (this is no reflection on the post, just my own personal struggle to try and apply it elsewhere)

Can anyone think of something?
"Go has its own model of process/threads/light-weight processes/coroutines, so to avoid notational confusion we call concurrently executing computations in Go goroutines."

I like this not just because it's CSP reborn -- new languages should be introduced with their own delightful disambiguating nomenclature.
...and has his own experimental C language replacement: http://www.zimbu.org/
Why can't you ask for more rolls even with one still remaining?
The asking is pure signalling. Never once did anyone actually say to me that they wanted the last piece. Like adding please, saying good bye or thank you.
Nap Nanny Rating
This is the thing that Nana mentioned Kelly used on her colicky girls. My Mom said this Nanny thing is what enabled me to sleep as a baby.
Right on, good to know, thanks :)
Yeah, I'm on Linux. I've only been learning Japanese since the beginning of the semester, haven't done any kanji in class. It's not Linux's fault though, I wouldn't have known better anyway. I just went by what it said on J-PREP: http://www.j-prep.com/reference/home?sub=tru&ss=wakaru&#...
Ken, iant and I have beards thank you :) Rob, gri, Russ and Kai are sadly lacking.