skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Almost every single industry in america is oligopoly and defending oligopolies with the free market capitalism argument is completely illogical and unfair.

If companies (private or state owned) are making huge profits at the cost of tax-payers money, then capitalism or socialism doesn't make any differences...
But I still hate my selection of cell companies. Just because people are dropping their land lines doesn't make the cell company selection any better.
Coworking with Ourselves
Computers are more than just it's CPU's # of Ghz's.

A top PC from 2004 might look like:
CPU: Intel Pentium 4 3.0 C @ 3.24 Ghz - Northwood Core
512MB PC3200 DDR SDRAM (400 Mhz)
160 GB Harddrive ATA-100
GeForce 6800
17" CRT Monitor

Now we would expect 8 times as much RAM and disk space. Far faster CPU's with for cores and a huge L2 cache. 4 - 8x as much RAM on a graphics card with 2700 GFLOPs vs 54 GFLOPs of processing power. And our monitors are both larger, lighter, and have a higher resolution. But, what's most interesting is we are far less CPU bound in 2009 than we where in 2004.

PS: A single i7 core would crush a Northwood Pentium 4 clock per clock even limiting it's self to the same instruction set. An 3.4GHz i7 has more floating point performance than a 2004 era graphics card (69 vs 54).

Note: I am ignoring the Prescott as it took a Prescott core overclocked to 5.2 GHz to soundly beat the performance of a 64-bit Athlon FX-55 that clocked at 2.6 GHz. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentium_4
I'm not convinced that the answer is simply "functional programming". Don't get me wrong - I'm a big fan of functional programming, however I think that the bulk of evidence shows that the number of people willing to use functional languages is still relatively small.

I think we're likely to see more continuation of the trend of quasi-functional features leaking into imperative languages.

I also think that we'll see more of a shift towards features (such as type systems) that provide stronger correctness and safety guarantees.

And finally, I think the victor in any future programming language fight will be something that enables greater degrees of parallelism and concurrency (especially of a distributed nature) without significant additional effort.

So I think that will be what the masses want. As for me, none of the current crop of functional languages coming through particularly excite me. There don't appear to be any particularly "disruptive" technologies emerging into the PL mainstream, and even at the fringes there are only a few notable examples that I think could hold promise for more than the next 3 or 4 years.
For what it's worth, I disagree with this idea, or any idea that basically requires a lot of glue code without adding any real value.

This requires BOTH the API maintainer AND the caller to add code, all in the name of avoiding some theoretical violation of encapsulation. The extra code risks bugs, is harder to maintain, harder to read, harder to understand, and may accidentally limit the usefulness of the return value in some critical way (which would make the API temporarily unusable while some bug is opened to have the API expanded).

There's a lot of things they could try first, including simply adding documentation to tell the caller what must not happen to the collection that is returned.
Choosing an anti-virus program for Windows 7
I agree with your code example. Does that even require jQuery?
The people doing more advanced jQuery are too busy doing, well, advanced jQuery to blog about it.

As a side note (or should I say down vote?), this guys blog has been posted to HN before, with the same lack of quality. It is a perfect demonstration of sheep mentality and really symbolizes everything that turns me off about the online tech/programming community right now.

No I dont care to see your facebook

No I wont follow you on twitter

No I dont care about articles titled "99 must-have problems (but a bitch aint one)"

Please try to post something _you_ find interesting or original and not try to just get hits to your site.

Sorry for that, but I do feel better now
That's a whole lot better, if that was the message then it somehow got lost to me.

Again, apologies for the tone, but it really seems to be a trend to make a mistake, 'blame someone', then blog about it.

What I would suggest you do, and this is meant very seriously, is find a cheaper hosting provider (EV1/The Planet is about half of what you pay right now) and spend the rest on getting a part-time sysadmin that really knows his stuff.

The difference in $ should be minimal, then look over the guys shoulder at how it is done, but keep doing what you know is your 'level' anyway. That way you get the best of both worlds, excellent care and you don't break the bank, at the same time you'll learn a huge amount.

And if your startup grows you just might have found an employee for the future.

Spend some time looking around, your best bet would be a guy or girl that does sysadmin duties for a larger company using UNIX that wants to make some extra $ in their spare time.
Why? There are no discussions there.
A moderated usenet group with the moderation being a 'reletivly' simple filter works well. For misc.writing.screenplays.moderated the moderation is basically just no cross-posting. It's public, a few spams slip through but are easily ignored (other than when a writer has a lovely snark reply). Getting a moderated group is non trivial but no too difficult.
Ouch.

They'll notice when your application is faster and more robust. You don't use a key-value store to impress your users.

Robustness can also lead to easier development, more features, better service, whatever.
Isolation or Quarantine: An Interview with Dr. Georges Benjamin
A Diary of the Great Depression
Ok, point taken, but there are definite advantages to 'rolling your own'.
Bill Gross: One of Our U.S. GDPs Has Gone Missing
Bad idea. Some consequences:

* People would stop voting.

* Crime would probably increase.

* People would be less friendly/helpful to strangers in large cities.

* People would be less willing to drive (causing chaos in cities without sufficient public transportation).

* People would no longer care about environmental issues.

* Entrepreneurship would decrease.

* Stock trading would decrease.
Solar Projects Are Going To Need Plenty Of Water
Wow, XML/SWF Charts may have just saved my life, I don't know for sure, but it's definitely a possibility.
Best advice of this century in it's class.

I don't know why we are still wasting our time with calculus while I see a lot of people suffering in their daily life because of their lack of understanding in probability theories and statistics.

Statistics is easier and even more fun to learn than calculus.
Google adds free turn-by-turn navigation, car dock UI to Android 2.0
I overshot myself a bit with "without having any skill at all". I meant "without skill that they must had to get comparable salary from engineering type of job".

Also I didn't mean CRUD jobs because they are probably same as everywhere else. Smart person with a bit of social aptitude can pass them fairly fast.

I don't think that during work you would be using skills that you were tested for during interviews. Any highly profitable branch that does not require skill has to have high barrier on entry. Because if not, soon all people would d it, and that would make it less profitable.

If job actually requires skill then barrier of entry need not to be so high because lack of skill will quickly become apparent anyway. For example barrier of entry to my college was fairly low (it was technical and not many people actually wanted to get in because math is hard so the college set their barriers fairly low to not put people off, this also probably had to do with the way the school was financed). Semester later one third of the students were gone. After first semester only half remained.
I'm sorry about all of you, guys who think this is a stupid question. You are all romantic people, saying there exist good teachers, and teacher is a friend of a student and blahblahblah. But the reality is - most of the teachers are BAD. I know much more examples of bad teachers, who even demotivate students, instead of inspiring and teaching them. And it is better to use a program, made by a good teacher, than to be taught by a bad teacher in person.
And that is what the good teachers should concentrate upon, writing good pedagogical strategies for a teaching computer program. And don't be so ignorant - think about Chinese - they would need hundred millions of good teachers, which is not possible to have. And believe me, I had good teachers and I know what it means. I learned math, which is the most complicated thing to learn, and I still believe math teaching can be automatized to a big percent, without all these sentimental tears of joy about how good the human teachers are. Don't be so narrow-minded. In the future, there will be robots.
Could you please stop posting these inane itworld articles. Good stuff gets pushed of the new page because of this.
How to Tame Your Data in Seven Steps - Don't Trust Your Gut
If you can cycle your commute then you're getting fit and can save on your gym time (and membership fees).
This strikes me as the first (user-centered) thing I've seen that is hands-down better than the iPhone experience. Yes, Android has an open app distribution policy, yes, there are multiple phones and carriers. But I haven't heard anyone say "I have to have an Android phone because of this killer app," and this seems like it could do that.
Do you have the clout in your office to switch from a 5-day-8-hour week to a 4-day-10-hour week? The effect on your working day is negligible, especially as it can often take you out of rush hour traffic and you'll likely leave and arrive home around the same time (supposing you don't live in an area where the rush hour is more like three-hours).

You then have an extra day, essentially a 3-day-weekend every week. This can actually dramatically decrease costs, not only time wise and fuel wise, but if you have children who have to go into daycare or to a babysitter after school then it means lower childcare expenses. Not only that, but having a friday or monday off means you can get groceries and such done during the day and well out of the supermarket rush hours; you wouldn't believe how empty stores can be even before a major holiday.

Swapping, not only yourself but your workers too, to a 4 day week could keep you able to be there directing people, it'll at least take 1/5 of your wasted commute time and it could potentially shorten your commute dramatically if you commute time gets pushed outside of rush hour. It could seriously raise the happiness level in your office, and thus the productivity ('a happy worker is a busy worker'). Hopefully this is a suggestion that could work for you.
The Trials and Tribulations of the Blackberry Desktop Manager for Mac [Part 2]
I don't know if your reasoning explains the observed facts.

However, my grandfather is quite happy being a Diplom-Ingenieur of mathematics.
Android grabs attention at Sprint conference
Depending on the kind of transportation, audiobooks, or a kindle with some good PDFs.

If you can manage the latter then you can look at what stuff gets posted to HN that ends up on scribd, put them on your e-reader and you'll have your commute fly by, you might have to take detours :)
Slate has a reputation for knee-jerk contrarianism in its writing, not surprising that they tried to go for the same attention-grabbing schtick when writing about software. Sad but typical. This is a good reply.
No. Seriously, why do you think that would even be possible?

All transfers have tracking information and source/destination information. Not only would your withdraw request be denied (insufficient funds), but also they would identify that it wasn't an internal transfer.
The pain that it solves is also solved by (i) turning on the radio (traffic), (ii)Google maps, (iii) visiting Pandora's blog. Additionally, Google is getting much faster with implementing real-time search results.

My conclusion is that Twitter solves a problem (which isn't as deep as a relevant search problem). Also, because twitter solves the problem, there's no room for the OneRiot's of the world.
> has to be higher than the overall compensation of all other options.

It has to be better than the next best alternative. (Opportunity costs.)
Everyone who is interested in the evolution of low level C based languages owes it to himself to track the OOC project. It looks nothing short of spectacular.

http://ooc-lang.org/
1. Become a freelancer.

2. Get a spacious car where you can work in the back,

3. Get a high-speed UMTS/HSDPA subscription.

4. Get a driver that earns at least 50% less per hour than you.

5. Work from your car and bill the time.
Ask HN: Why are languages seen as tools but DBs aren't?
There's a lot of commotion going on about different database technologies other than the good ol' relational model. This typically ends up with people taking extreme positions either on a pro-SQL or a anti-SQL side.

To me this is just like the old programming language wars. But, there's a lot of wisdom to be found that languages are tools and one should ideally pick the best one for each job.

Why can't we come to a similar conclusion about database models?

[edit: This is an honest question. Is there's some critical difference that I'm missing?]
wow... sup with the hate? 10 upvotes? damn!, probably they used Silverlight to use IronPython or something like that...
The great molasses flood? Try the great beer flood of 1814! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_Beer_Flood
Are you sure you replied to the correct story. This story is about teaching more statistics and less calculus to students as it is vastly more practical for them.
Elev.at is an API that converts legacy/proprietary XLS files into XML
I now have 50Mbps, it was easier to move to a town that had it already.
I know I've implemented a fair few of those functions on a more ad hoc basis in number of projects. So it's really nice to see someone putting it all together in a simple package. I'll certainly be having a closer look at the source code and trying it out on my current project.
These are consequences of a greater understanding of probability and statistics.
"Internet really needs to become a public utility operated by the city/state on cost, rather than to line the pockets of greedy corporations..."

That's great, until your city decides to start filtering/adding caps/blocking your favorite protocol/etc, and then you don't have any other choices.

I wouldn't mind cities becoming ISPs if people vote for it, but they shouldn't become the only providers.
Seriously. People literally use one stretched example of how a tweet helped them, and then preach it to 40 year-old pr panelists, which then get regurgitated at 140 conferences. An endless cycle of shit.
Why Is Toyota Selling a $400,000 Car?
Myths about Wall Street pay days
Who Will Be the Green VC Giant?
Hum, not to be pedantic, but it should be written Qt4 and not QT4 (which would be QuickTime 4)
What's A Non-Programmer To Do? (How I keep myself busy.)
I wrote a comment for Hacker News back in August in response to a guy's question about what a non-programmer should do in a startup. My response received 164 up votes and is the tenth most popular comment of all time. In this article I add some depth to most of my previous twenty bullet points.

Original comment thread: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=779378
No, as the article shows, the internet really needs to become a commodity that's easily delivered by many parties.
Schools should have separate programs for students who want to pursue academic research and who want to work in the industry. Recently graduated with a CS degree, I found that most school courses didn't help much me to land on a job. It's really the internships (which was part of my program) I did during my school years helped me most to land on a job.
> At Microsoft, a new PhD in computer science makes about
$90K, while Microsoft pays newly-minted lawyers $140K. And the gap grows after that.

That really shows who brings beacon to MS. :-)
Hmm. Maybe what I really meant was: this has been submitted at least twice before, three and four months ago or so, and in neither case did it generate any discussion.

I hope it does this time, because it's been shown to be interesting enough to be "discovered" by more than one participant.

And I do. I've never understood the US schools emphasis on calculus, and building it up to be such a huge deal. I first did calculus aged 16 in Year 10, and it was just another part of the syllabus. One more step to understanding the way stuff works.

Replacing it by another "BIG IDEA" seems not necessarily to be a Good Thing(tm). Perhaps there should be more of a plain, and less of a pyramid.

I agree that more elementary stats done earlier would be a really Good Thing(tm), but replacing one pyramid with another does not seem to me to be so.
You shouldn't necessarily pick the best one for each job, depending on the size of the job and a lot of other factors.

http://journal.dedasys.com/2007/12/12/programming-languages-...
I wrote a comment for Hacker News back in August in response to a guy's question about what a non-programmer should do in a startup. My response received 164 up votes and is the tenth most popular comment of all time. In this article I add some depth to most of my previous twenty bullet points.

Here's the original thread: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=779378
Perhaps this is an indication that a single, all encompassing program is impossible to fit to every student. Perhaps a range of programs could be offered, and students and their parents could chose the education program that fits their needs best. A choice in education, if you will.
Ask HN: Is there any press-release service that you can recommend ?
Reocities.com is now starting to be full enough to be of actual use to people, I've restored well over 500K accounts and I would like to announce this somehow.

There seems to be a great glut of companies that claim they are specialists in getting your message out there but I wouldn't know how to tell the real ones from the wasted money ones.

Is there a service anybody here has used that they can recommend ?
Salmon Protocol for Distributed, Real-Time Content Expands with OSS
You're entirely correct, mistake on my part there. :)
Blaming Intel for how the world is
Biggest mistake I ever made was not focusing on one to exit. I thought once I bootstrapped the first business to a mid-six figure subscription level, that this was easy and I should fund all my other ideas with the proceeds...

Meanwhile I used close to a million dollars over the next few years developing a whole lot of stuff that is unlikely to ever see the light of day. Plus, the lack of attention to the primary money earner caused it to suffer.

My advice: Choose one that you are most interested in. No side projects that have any possibility of making money. My new side projects are all hardware related or blue skies science to reduce the temptation.
The whole point of corporations is to be greedy. That's the main distinguishing point between them, charities and governments.

Using 'greedy' as an insult to corporations is like using buoyant as an insult to ships.

I am strongly disagreeing with the grandparent post's sentiment that the ISP should be closed down for being "greedy" and "lining it's pockets".
Safari Books Online 6.0: A Cloud Library as an alternate model for ebooks
No. it’s not a fraud.

SEO is not a dubious thing in itself. It mostly isn’t a scam the way snake-oil is. It’s proven and established fact that a website can employ a host of legitimate techniques to climb their way to the top of a search engine result page: on-page optimization, terrific and viral content, string of PR activities, buzz marketing etc, among others.

However, the SEO market has no dearth of companies that promise unrealistic results and rip fortune off their clients. They aren’t aware of, let alone be capable of, anything further than submitting a site to a bunch link farms and filling up a web page with unnatural keywords.

There was a time when the field of medicine was swarming with quacks. But that doesn’t invalidates the veracity and effectiveness of medical science itself. A trained physician can do wonders to an ailing body.
I'm a huge fan of riding one's bike around. However, if it's one hour by car, it's likely to be significantly longer by bicycle unless traffic is really bad.

I'd probably look at moving close enough to where I could ride my bike.
Following the same "logic" you have:

* People would follow healthier lifestyles.

* People would avoid gambling.

* People would avoid bad marriages.

* The government would be more efficient.

An understanding of statistics wouldn't realistically change all of these things. In practice, people can always be swayed by a powerful rhetoric, emotions, and cultural habit. Statistics lend more weight to arguments, but only a tiny fraction of people will go back and verify a statistic for accuracy.
There's a huuuge cultural bias against computer science here, which is killing it. Downstream, this results in very few girls, athletes, etc. having an interest. They pursue medicine, business and traditional engineering instead.
Eh, maybe they should be blocked. Is it possible to look at the very very very small minority of users in an area that use tons of bandwidth, see what they're downloading, and make a correct decision to block them?

There may be technical challenges I'm unaware of, but it seems like this would be very unlikely to affect reg'lar people.

If there aren't practical challenges, are objections just about the spirit of the thing (gov monitoring over people's internet use)? Or are there objections to illegal file-sharers being blocked?
Listen to college lectures in the Great Courses series. Your library probably has some. http://www.teach12.com/
Hey cwan, don't you think that 9 submissions simultaneously on the new page is a bit much ?
Freaked out?

Perhaps the translation services will arise out of our desire to communicate and converse with more people, not out of fear. It's an opportunity, not a threat.

As a side note, the desire to think that others act from fear really oversimplifies a lot of social behavior.
The argument made, was that a service will by default be better when profit for the owners is no longer a factor. This is largely a philosophical argument, even though it's framed practically, so I will counter it philosophically;

The argument fails to incorporate some very basic and well understood market mechanism. A company whose products consumers are forced to buy (either because they are subsidised or because they have a government-enforced monopoly) are less inclined to invest and take risks in development. Why take a risk when people are already buying what you have today and can't go anywhere?

Another factor is political interference and the ensuing ICan'tBelieveItsNotCorruption. What happens when the pipes clog up before there's budget for increasing bandwidth because more people than expected are downloading and seeding torrents? Is the memo that says that it's mostly porn and piracy anyway, and we can just block the ports going to be ignored over pumping money in new bandwidth? To help people get porn? Protect the children, save money and get re-elected -- all in one firewall.

Yes, absolutely, a government run business can be more efficiently than a private one, and sometimes if can get some infrastructure in place where it simply isn't practical for for private actors to work. But it's never because they don't have to make money for their owners.
The 2 OS-level (as opposed to app-level) features that are better in Android are the widget-customizable home screen and the notification panel. But yeah, this is probably the first killer feature.
Efficient Market Theory and the Crisis
I forget the term, but the current system is government and corporations teaming up to screw the citizens. It's basically the opposite of communism. It's not capitalism because competition is outlawed.