skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Hey, it's been done since IdeaStorm (and it's the whole point of uservoice), but it's always a nice idea. The problem with Votebox is that the search is terrible.

I'm sure the things I want (propogate folder renames across all users/machines and the ability to change permissions on nested subfolders to make them private/restricted to only certain users) are in there, somewhere, but I couldn't find them no matter what combination of phrases I could think of.
Um, if by "innovative concept" you mean "almost exact ripoff of uservoice", then yes, I totally agree.

It is a little cleaner and much closer to the rest of dropbox's site than they could get uservoice. I'll be interested to see if they regret reinventing the wheel and thus having to spend time solving problems uservoice has already solved.

There are obviously some benefits (same login as the main site, they can implement any feature they want, looks more like the rest of dropbox)
Fair enough--I should have said inspired by rather than wholesale copied. I do see a remarkable parallel there between the KMT having lost one country due in part to extreme economic disparity, redistributes wealth to maintain control in a second; and the later economic disparity you eloquently describe between China and Taiwan that inspires the reverse.
I love how dropbox let's any user add software they developed to work with dropbox, to the "AddOns" section of the wiki:

http://wiki.dropbox.com/DropboxAddons

I'm working on a printer queue right now that I'm going to link to up there.
Latest Hot US Issues: See NFL Network, We Can Do It Too
Are you serious? A scary picture means "Maybe he's on to something"?

For the record I didn't find the picture all that scary so what does that mean?
Look at primitive recursive functions.

E.g. see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primitive_recursive_function
The first major mistake was using a C derived syntax

Personally, I'm not that interested in the particulars of indentation/block delimiting. I'm much more interested in what one can do with blocks. This has much more bearing on the power of a programming language. If this is the 1st issue discussed, it's a poor portent for the rest of the article.

The next mistake is having a separate declaration and assignment operator.

Is this really so different from having a separate comparison and assignment operator? Or having 2 or 3 flavors of comparison?

The final mistake was not providing generics.

This is a work in progress.

C++'s templates is one of the things that make the language head and shoulders more useful for me than C...One of the things I've found makes me most productive in Python is that any time I need to perform a task I simply pick the data structure that does what I want

I think you can have completely generic collections in Go if you give up type safety for it.

In terms of features which I believe are overhyped the most important one is the "goroutine".

It's my understanding that one can use "goroutines" to implement your own rather powerful control structures. I'm not sure one really needs exceptions if you have goroutines, channels, and multiple return values. On the other hand, there are very compelling reasons for not having exceptions, given goroutines and channels.

Further, the handling of interfaces, though interesting, appears to be an implementation of C++0x's proposed concepts...I view this feature as something that is most useful in the context of generics

Thsi makes it seem as if you view programming somewhat through the lens of generics. This treatment of Interfaces gives you one of the best things about "Duck Typing" languages, but in a statically typed language: "emergent" interfaces.
Any chance Votebox could be open-sourced? I'd love to use it on my own projects.

And yes, I've used Uservoice. Not a fan, personally.
True, but the amount of money Rorck gave up was minuscule compared to the amount Hank Rearden gave up to keep Readen Metal as product rather than a scientific curiosity. Did the reviewer even read the book?
I know that finding the above is something very hard. I was lucky enough to find just such a person a while ago by chance. We hit it off pretty well even though I am a product/systems guy and he is a programmer. I actually decided not to apply to this years YC because I am waiting for him to finish his masters in cs and I would rather try it next summer with him than find someone else I trusted less. We even have a third person that we both feel the same about as well and want him in it with us too.

Might sound a bit cliche, but I pretty much know that we can put together the right team in short order. It is a different feeling when you just KNOW the people have your back.

Be open to it and network, you never know. I was not actively looking and it just happened.
Hey, both of you in this thread... thanks for the info. Now that I know about the transcripts, I have a lot of reading to do :)
I love Playdar. I can't wait to fix up our network over at the coworking space I run. We're going to have soooo much fun with this thing there.
He seems to be criticizing Go for not being Python. My understanding is that Go is designed with an obsessive need for speed and concurrency in mind. It's a little silly to compare it to Python without accounting for that.
http://www.daringfireball.es/for-english-readers/
Functional Programming for Everyday .NET Development
Al-Jazari: Medieval Hacker (1136-1206 CE)
It's pretty neat that the "-->" just happens to look like an arrow. The converse of x = 0; while(x ++< 10) doesn't really make any sense though.
Swimming in OpenCL
Microsoft readies shared classroom server for 2010 debut
Geesh, calm down puritan. The only thing remotely sexist about JWZ's famous quit is that he said "get him laid" rather than "get him/her laid". Pull your head out of the dark ages and wake up to the 21st century.

Like the old song said "Sex is natural. Sex is good. Not everybody does it, but everybody should". :-)
Amazon Will Set Up Asia Pacific Cloud Infrastructure in Singapore
RMS is going to be sleeping on a friend of mine's couch (no joke). Apparently he prefers to stay with graduate students, rather than sleep in a hotel.
Not to mention Apple had 3 co-founders, not 2.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ronald_Wayne
The article references the book "Impro". I agree -- it has a really fabulous chapter on status, and how to use it in interaction. While the book is focused on improvisational theater, the exercises they do will teach you a lot about how people use these same techniques in day-to-day life.
"I'm not sure one really needs exceptions if you have goroutines, channels, and multiple return values. On the other hand, there are very compelling reasons for not having exceptions, given goroutines and channels."

I continually find exception handling to be a huge source of frustration; especially Java's checked exceptions. If I explicitly test for something in my method before calling another method, should I still have to catch, rethrow or declare that I throw its exception? If I don't check for the exceptional case first, then aren't I now using exceptions for flow control?

Unchecked exceptions seem a little more logical to me, but they still seem to cause disagreement on how they should be used.

The fact that they decided to put exception handling on hold here for now is really encouraging to me.
Curry spice 'kills cancer cells'
Constructs like concurrency should not be granted their own syntax, especially when they can be cleanly implemented using the other constructs of a language, look at the C library libtask as an example.

See the paper by Hans Boehm from PLDI 2005, "Threads Cannot Be Implemented as a Library": http://www.hpl.hp.com/techreports/2004/HPL-2004-209.pdf

The abstract explains the argument:

In many environments, multi-threaded code is written in a language that was originally designed without thread support (e.g. C), to which a library of threading primitives was subsequently added. There appears to be a general understanding that this is not the right approach. We provide specific arguments that a pure library approach, in which the compiler is designed independently of threading issues, cannot guarantee correctness of the resulting code.We first review why the approach almost works, and then examine some of the surprising behavior it may entail. We further illustrate that there are very simple cases in which a pure library-based approach seems incapable of expressing an efficient parallel algorithm.Our discussion takes place in the context of C with Pthreads, since it is commonly used, reasonably well specified, and does not attempt to ensure type-safety, which would entail even stronger constraints. The issues we raise are not specific to that context.

As far as I can tell, goroutines are similar to the block mechanisms and runtime system in Grand Central Dispatch, which is the same concept of concurrency in Cilk (http://supertech.csail.mit.edu/cilk/ and the paper "The Implementation of the Cilk-5 Multithreaded Language" in particular: http://supertech.csail.mit.edu/papers/cilk5.pdf).
According to sloccount, bsdiff + bspatch is 425 lines of code. I've written smaller applications, but that's probably my smallest useful application -- at least if you consider being used (albeit unknowingly) by millions of people and being responsible for saving hundreds of man-years of waiting for downloads to complete to qualify as "useful".
It isn't reinventing the wheel if you do it better.

This is more like refining an octagon into a wheel without having to pay rights usage.
While you can't run the Broodwar API on battle.net, it is possible to run bots on ICCup. But dont expect anybody to join the game, since you will not be running the antihack.
Startlogic Uptime Stats & Startlogic Reviews for September 2009
Startlogic uptime monitoring for September 2009, reviewed by www.StartlogicReview.org: 100% over the Internet
echoing noonespecial - His family MIGHT agree ...
The site has been transferred to a new sub-domain to handle the traffic
Facebook status update provides air-tight alibi in robbery case
Verizon is not doubling the fee to protect itself from broken contracts. If that were the case, they would simply demand that the subsidized portion gets paid back. They are trying to lock customers in and penalize people for switching.

This will be a short-term win. In the long term, it may reduce new signups. If you have a huge subscriber base and limited competition you can afford to milk them for all they are worth.

It's still a crappy thing to do.

The $1.99 charge is flat out unethical. I used my cable box to rent a movie once, but it didn't download properly and getting my $2.99 or whatever credited back into my account was such a pain that I never did it again. It made me question my whole relationship with them. If my carrier charges me $1.99 for a mistaken button press that I cannot disable, I would do everything in my power to drop them.
Goals and Mechanical Rabbits
The Mario competition was held at the CIG 2009 conference. There has been talk of holding a StarCraft competition at CIG 2010. http://www.ieee-cig.org/
Not all scientific theories are equal. Some just manage to scrape by an explanation for the known facts without providing further testable predictions - while this isn't inherently bad, I place a lot more confidence in theories that explain facts that they weren't specifically invented to explain.
would love to know your URL as well :)
Made this comment on the blog too:

Please don't take this personally, but you're not thinking clearly about this. Allow me to explain:

First, it's important to realize that value is created through partnership. Basically, the net value of the two products when coupled can be greater than the sum of the two individually. For this reason, you shouldn't imply that profits from your partner imply that those profits subtracted from your profits -- it's quite likely you have both made more together than either of you would have made without the other.

Consider a Mall. The mall operator can charge more for rent in the mall than it could for an equivalent store in isolation because there is value of bringing consumers together. The store owners make more money as a result of partnering with each other and a portion of those profits goes back to the partner because the two have collectively decided that it is a better strategy than for the mall owner to charge an entrance fee to visitors.

Second, it's incorrect to compare the success of any one band or even a sample of bands to the success of myspace, google, etc. Rather you have to compare the success of the two industries collectively. As users become exposed to a greater variety of music and musicians, they will become more selective in their tastes. So some bands who are truly exceptional will be vaulted to success by this plethora of users and their use of social tools to communicate with each other. And more mediocre bands who used to be able to eek out a modest living will no longer because users find more awesome bands than they used to (and have a fixed amount of attention to give).

The fact is, there have never before been so many awesome bands heard by so many people and it has never been _easier_ to get into the business than it is right now. So while it seems that you're band might not be one of the best in the world that succeeded, you need to realize that you at least got the same shot as everyone else and a better chance at success than you would have had 20 years ago.
There are different tournaments for participants that want to focus on only a subset of the game. For example, you could hard code all locations for the tournament 3 contest and focus on macro.
You should be able to understand that, even if you don't speak Spanish.

"Daring Fireball in Spanish is a personal project unassociated with the original version of Daring Fireball, but it's version authorized by the author, John Gruber"

Instead of trying to understand the idioms or exact meaning of each word, try to read the whole thing for "global comprehension".

I routinely read Lisp papers in French without French education or experience, mainly because I grok the domain vocabulary, and the rest I try to synthesize from my Portuguese and brief exposure to Latin.
mom and pop brochure sites are not the sort who would be using spdy anyway, they'd just use http.
All of the replay files will be made publicly available after the competition, see the rules page.
Why schools can't get good teachers
That's hilarious. I don't quite get the dates for ANSI C, though. The draft date looks correct, but Wikipedia has it being ratified in 1989.

Incidentally, here's a great thread that just shows the more things change the more they stay the same (from 1988): http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.c/browse_thread/thr...

Quotes:

"This process could go on forever, but there is a strong desire
to adopt a "good enough" standard in a timely fashion rather than working
toward a "perfect" standard that is too late to matter. Many of us feel
that the current draft is "good enough""

"C is rapidly catching up with Pascal as the second most well known language but it has a long way to go before it becomes as well know (and perhaps as useful)as BASIC"
Wouldn't spdy capable browsers declare this capability so the server could immediately redirect to spdy:// those clients that support the protocol?
This is why I don't understand copyright law. Aren't data facts? Facts can't be copyrighted, right? Where a business is located is a fact. How can they say how someone else can use that fact?
We have to define what we mean here, this isn't a Gen X or Gen Y or whatever shit issue. This is likely a 10 year cycle going on.

I remember catching the blurred end of chatrooms, where AOL and Yahoo had untold numbers of chatrooms. These seemed to die off rather fast when MSN and AIM messengers appeared on the scene, although I believe I had ICQ when it was still in its first version, which puts a good 8 years between the founding of ICQ and the founding of Facebook, and I'd say roughly a 10 year gap between the popularity of IM and fully formed social networking sites like Facebook.

I bet between 2015-2020 there will likely be a new upheaval in the social networking area, likely due to a major change in the way we access the internet. Just how growing internet usage made usenet and chatrooms impractical due to connectivity issues. Usenet users typically either only knew people who were online or didn't know anybody online. Chatroom users might have only known a handful of people with an internet connection, which made it easy enough to coordinate meeting up online. This died when people knew 50+ people who were online, and ICQ, AIM and MSN with contact lists made it easy to organise. Now virtually everybody you know is online, and a site like Facebook allows you access to all of them.

The revolution now is likely to be access to the internet, things will revolutionise when people spend a large proportion of their time online with full unrestricted (IE no office firewall) and portable internet access (a la iPhone and Blackberry).
Who said anything about periodicity?

I was saying that it is evidence that the dinosaur asteriod was not just a random asteroid. Some external force disturbed potential asteroids and shoved multiple ones into the inner solar system. That fits with Nemesis. But would fit with other theories as well.
Karam
Karam Industries is manufacturing Horizontal Boring, Milling, Drilling & Facing Machine, Under Crank & Over Crank Shearing Machine,All Geared Precision Centre Lathe,
I hit that web button quite often (I have a verizon phone). I just hit "End" and I've never been charged for data. Of course, I don't have a data plan in the first place, so that's one way to avoid it.
* No decentralized, redundant, internet archive. Solution? I dunno. I've been banging away at it for years.

* No easy way to search my personal web/reading history. The problem is not just collection, it's relevance. I want to go back and find a book recommendation on design I saw in a blog post sometime in the last week. I dunno where it is or if I bookmarked it. Solution? Google Desktop / WebMynd plus some radically different ideas about search.

* I can't use Amazon EC2 with Mosso CloudFiles quickly, cheaply, and at scale. Solution? Cloud peering.
See http://idea-ne.ws for a slightly lighter take on new ideas.
Counting yesterday, the ratio of Android to iPhones is about 1:200 among people you don't know. Early adopters are nice, but are not really a market niche you can depend on to cover the bills. Android may actually gain some traction, but there is a significant risk that it could end up popping and then flattening out...
1. Startup marketing: should be easier to get a list of all blogs that you can contact. Also I found that the contact forms are next to impossible to find on a lot of sites

Solution: site that lets you generate a list of sites to contact. With direct links to that site's contact us page.

2. New Season TV updates for basic cable, you know what I'm talking about you watch a TV channel and they keep repeating the same shows 20 times over.

Solution: site that let's you "follow" a show + channel, and get notifications when that channels starts airing a new season.

3. Where are they now? Where are all of those celebrities, politicians, musicians that have retired from the public eye? What are they doing now?

Solution: IMDB like site for retired personalities. Would show things like,

Name: John Doe
Famous For: Congressman from XX from 19xx-19xx
Latest TV appearance: Youtube link
Current Occupation: Lobbyist for ______

or

Name: James Doe
Famous For: Actor(Movie #1(amazon link) - Movie #2(amazon link)
Latest TV appearance: Youtube link
Current Occupation: retired in Florida, spends his spare time working on his bikes.
lasers to shoot down mosquitoes and eradicate maleria

better...belief persuasion. existence would be so much less traumatic if belief in some kind of afterlife or reincarnation could be instilled after childhood.

for serious this time: ...

nah, who am i kidding. i'm educated, certified, white, and working on my own startup. i live the most charmed existence imaginable (other than the no afterlife thing). i think it's better to scratch more worthwhile wounds.
Was it via this product?

http://www.ailive.net/liveAI.html
This is a cross-post from Slashdot.

Is this taboo?
Wow, this looks awesome. Even if I don't make it into the competition, I'd love to play with the APIs.

I've always wanted to get into RTS games but I am just not very good at the mouse--I always get bogged down by failing to click on the right units and issue the right commands at the right times, and I've fond that once you make a few mistakes you usually don't recover, or you are back to square one.

Board games and turn-based games don't share this problem of course, but they aren't quite the adrenaline pumpers either... not worse, just different :-)
* Carpool coordination. This problem turned into our next homework assignment for my collaborative work class. I'm thinking of something that lets each team member mark down their home, adjust it on a per-day basis if they'll be somewhere else, mark down which days they can drive, and plot optimal routes. Extra points for a mobile app that can read my GPS coordinates and tell me where to go. More points if it balances driving responsibilities well enough that nobody feels taken advantage of.

* Too many notifications. I have to login to a half dozen different systems to keep up on what's happening. That's too much. There are notifications I just want to see, some I want to add to my todo list, some to my calendar, some I don't want to see again. A single-app solution for all of this would be brilliant. Email is too heavy: I want notifications, not correspondence. Bonus points if it's on my mobile.

* Some way to extract the most valuable points out of a meeting. A possible solution might be a 'real time digg' that lets people vote speakers up and down when they agree or disagree with their point. Correlate that with a copy of the transcript and emphasize sections with higher scores. Possibly two-dimensional voting for 'We need to remember this' and 'I agree with this'.
11 Ways to Influence People Online and Make Them Take Action
I've been using LaLa a lot - mainly on their site because their facebook app doesn't show the content on lala.com. You can gift songs on facebook using them. I think this isn't as good as a proper music service. If everything on lala.com were available on facebook, I'd use that more.

Their fb-connect integration is really great.

All that to say that the service doing well on facebook is just an application on the facebook platform, and one focused on fb-connect off facebook.com

That means it is currently all up for grabs. Any application could do the same thing. I don't think LaLa replaces the myspace experience because the fat middle and long tail of bands aren't curating the experience for the band themselves. Myspace is dwindling in popularity, with a replacement yet to be determined.
Hotels have standards, grad students not so much... (sorry, it had to be said :)
The Confetti Machine Returns to Nasdaq
1. Plastic bags are all around.

Solution: Make paper bags and sell those. Use less plastic. Spread awareness.

2. Web hosting/downloads (read the solution).

Solution: Make all the servers a network of bittorent peers.
This way load balancing, and bandwidth problems can be solved.
Downloads can be stopped and resumed.
After some time the server need not host the file at all.
There will be virtually no down time.
If web sites can be served using the bitorrent technology, awesome!

3. I have a lot of old books.

Solution: Some web service to exchange old books free of cost.
Seriously, I really miss HN's quality. A year ago when articles like these wouldn't even reach the first page, now it is a top story.