skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There wasn't anything exclusive about doing something easy like a conventional retweet button, and this upgrade. They should have done the former then the latter.

The main advantage, by far, of this retweet implementation, is that twitter controls everything. The value of the retweet data is astounding. It might make their service viable - compared to the tyranny of chronological views of everyone that could be their downfall.

We need to find good content, and bubble it up. You can't just have realtime to do realtime search. You need content. Currently, twitter has an extremely poor estimate of what is good.

Let me take this opportunity to also gripe that favorites should be MUCH more prominent. They need to incentivize them by showing a count or usernames next to each tweet. And let me reorder tweets based on their being marked a favorite.
They are rolling it out to some users.
I am curious if someone could explain how a project in Go would compare to a project in Python or Ruby + a fancy array of custom C modules? This implies that it is possible to implement the nicer features of Go (for example concurrency support) in the modules supporting these languages. Or instead making kickarse fast compilers for higher level languages?

Is it too simplistic to say that at one end you have expressive languages designed for humans and at the other you have low level languages designed for speed?

edit: not meaning to insult humans who like fast languages.
Ask HN: Biz dev tips?
As our startups grow, my co-founder and I are moving into more operational and business development roles. We are at the point where forming partnerships and cutting deals is a full time job. I would love to hear any suggestions folks here have on how to best reach out to potential partners. I've had terrible luck cold calling. Also, any general advice on how to close deals would be helpful. I know that this is a super-general thread, but biz dev seems to be a role at many startups but I haven't read many great posts on the subject.
My biggest issue to the new retweet feature is that I can no longer add a comment with my retweets. Most of the time this is a deal-breaker for me.
I read that, but the blog post is dated September 21st. I guess I expected their beta testing of the feature to last only a couple of weeks and that they would have enabled it for everyone by now.
Om Malik seems to be the king of expert sounding valuations that signify nothing. There was an article at the peak of web 2.0 that went something like

Myspace (x users for y dollars)

Youtube (x1 users for y1 dollars)

...

Therefore users are worth (z+z1+...)/(x+x1...) and we can use that as a metric to value other sites.

But ignored all the cases of sites with x<i> users worth zero dollars.
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I think the date on the post is wrong. If you go to the main page, the date is 11/10.
If you ever find yourself arguing about definitions, the quick sanity check "Wait, am I a lawyer?" is often helpful. Because arguing about definitions is a productive use of time... if you are a lawyer. If you are not a lawyer, then it probably substitutes for productive work.

See: "Web programmers are not real programmers.", "X is not a startup.", "That development methodology is not Agile. ", etc.

(This pathology is particularly attractive when an industry doesn't know how to measure their productive work, because having discussions about definitions looks like it makes forward progress somehow. I mean, 12 people times 6 hours in a meeting means you've spent the equivalent of three full days! Clearly that had to do something!)

On the subject of data and journalism, the New York Times is doing just about everything right (in its own lights, anyhow): they're collecting and making public data that would otherwise be housed in a forgotten CSV file somewhere, they're making it easily accessible via visualizations, they're carefully curating the data so that it tells a narrative, and they are leveraging the heck out of their brand and web presence to make the whole thing work. (Obligatory disclaimer: the NYT is a crusading liberal newspaper, and they produce crusading liberal data visualizations. Just because I'm not a crusading liberal doesn't mean I can't appreciate the art, though.)
White folks tried calling them "Native Americans" once, and a lot of them still do it, but a lot of American Indians have been calling themselves American Indians for so long they don't really care anymore. "Native American" is a name white people made up to make themselves feel better.

It will become more of an issue as more people from India immigrate over here. I imagine that in some parts of the country, "Indian" already means Indian more than it means American Indian.

Also, the more accurate adjective is "indigenous" or "aboriginal", not "native".
This has been discussed fairly exhaustively, but here is a quick summary:

You cannot really go wrong with python or ruby. Both have a number of solid frameworks for you to try (rails, django, pylons, sinatra, etc). Try a number of them and build some trivial app in a few of them.

I also recommend getting familiar with javascript and a library like jquery or mootools, if you plan do dive deeper in the web dev.
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Dropbox.com blocked by Google?
Of course it would be make work jobs. But the pay is aimed to be lower than ~98% of the jobs out there. Even McDonald's pays more than $6 an hour. The idea is that this would be a job of last resort. A way for people who can't even hold down a job at McDonald's to at least learn what it means to work. The other point is that it allows people who can't hold down normal jobs not to starve, will not giving them an incentive to go on welfare just because they would rather not work at all.

We'd be better off paying people $6/hr to get training in a marketable skill, or to search for work matching skills they already have.

Government job training programs have a long history of not working at all. For entry level jobs, the best training is on the job. At a low level, the basic skills needed are: getting to work on time, being reliable, not dropping the f-bomb on your boss, etc. The point of a guaranteed job program is to be that very basic step into the workforce.
I've you're not sure, IMO, install Django and follow their tutorial. Pythons a great language, Djangos a great framework, projects can be hosted for free on Google app engine and the Django documentation is excellent.
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I wouldn't call Austrians anti empirical.

Many modern Austrian schoolers are scholars of economic history. Also, economics, specifically macro is very hard to study empirically.

I would call them hard headed

Personally, I would argue that economists see themselves too much as scientists, not too little. I would prefer they place themselves closer to sociology, political science & farther from biology & chemistry. Less deference to abstract first principles.
Kinda related, but why is dropbox.com or getdropbox.com coming up as attack site? I'm using Firefox.
Don't forget Russ Cox, who I believe stuck with Plan 9 longer than either Rob or Ken.

I'm excited to see CSP in Go. I've been advocating its use for concurrency since I learned about Plan 9's channels, but most people paid no attention.
As a web designer the idea of this terrifies me. Imagine having to hand code corrections for all the different interpretations of this 'feature'.

I like the idea of improving the tactility of the internet. But I'm afraid that I don't trust the browser industry to get something like this right.
HFT = http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algorithmic_trading + http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complex_Event_Processing
Despite the large amount of enthusiasm for language design, modern mainstream programming languages don't fall far from the C tree. The best that Microsoft, Sun, and Apple have to offer are just variations on that theme, with the addition of predictable object models and conveniences like garbage collection.

Hey, give MS some credit for F# here! And it's got out of the box support in Visual Studio 2010.
Debates on relative productivity are endless. I used the only numbers I have available that are backed by actual quantitative data rather than opinion. I'd love to see more up to date numbers.

However even if you assume that the difference is much smaller, say a factor of 1.2, then you can afford an extra 2.3 computers for every developer. Oddly enough in the various companies I know well with small teams of experienced scripting programmers I've never seen that high a ratio of webservers to developers, so even so switching to Java doesn't make sense.

On the question how many people can work together, needing to talk about data types is such a small portion of what people talk about that I would be shocked if it changes where the cutoff is between where small teams break down, or where large teams become as productive as that peak. That said I fully agree that Java is designed to let large teams cooperate, and that's likely to matter when you have teams of 50+ programmers. However if the productivity difference really is a factor of 2.4, and we assume linear growth in productivity for large teams, then you'll actually need a team of 50 or so programmers in Java to match the team of 5-7 programmers working in a modern scripting language. Given that, if you're working in a Java team below that size you should seriously ask yourself whether having a team size that requires getting that many people working together is a self-inflicted problem.
On a mac:
open -a Safari http://news.ycombinator.com
Ah, that makes much more sense now. Thanks!
It's not anti-empirical at all. It's just anti-numerology and against using induction when induction cannot be done. Compare Rothbard's history of the Great Depression ( http://mises.org/rothbard/agd.pdf ) to the typical paper by a Harvard economist ( http://www.economics.harvard.edu/faculty ). Frankly, if you consider the Harvard papers to be more empirical, please inform me what form of crack you smoke, as it must be very high grade.
He's reinventing Display PDF, badly.
Lets not get too caught up in the specifics of particular policy. I was just trying to point to the fact that there is a genuinely hard problem with inevitably messy solutions. Your solution is also messy. Maybe it is better. but it is not uncontroversially better & it does not give a solution with no perverse incentives.

I also agree that the political system does not produce optimal decisions. I agree with you. But there is a big gap between sub optimal & random.
You can always retweet the old-school way. It is not deprecated.
2 weeks, tops.
Nope, not doing it.

The font is way too small. Is there any way to make it case-insensitive? Or perhaps tell someone how close they were, or if they matched any of hte parts of the name?
I'm doing the JLPT 2, but I average around 85% on the practice tests as of about a month ago, so I'm not worried about passing.

It'd be really nice to do the 1, but my scores on the practice tests were embarrassingly south of 50%, and I totally bombed the 1 last year, so I'm doing the 2 this year to at least have some sort of piece of paper that says I've got some Japanese ability.

For finding partners, you might also want to try http://language-exchanges.org/ -- it's not a for-pay site, and doesn't have experienced teachers, but I've found it to be a good way to connect up with people.
They said in the FAQ that they "felt" LLVM was "too large" and "too slow". I would have liked to see this statement backed up with data.
They might have been referring to relativistic effects. Wikipedia has E^2 - (pc)^2 = (mc^2)^2

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_in_special_relativity
Dropbox.com blocked as a malware site
Since it is effectively a free and anonymous hosting service (files hosted can be shared publicly via HTTP), I can easily imagine it being used for distributing malware.
Dropbox claiming not hacked, mistagged by Google: http://twitter.com/Dropbox/status/5610900563
You can even leave out the "-a Safari" to use the default browser.
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I agree with your statement about favorites. I think, if they promoted them, they would be a great way to help rank content. I think this, combined with retweets could really help bubble stuff up to the surface.

Part of the issue with retweets is that the whole network will become more noisy and people will have to get used to that, I think this is partly a mistake. It could be fixed by allowing users to favorite cool things and retweet things they REALLY wanted to surface.
Instead of ranting in response to this mostly-dead HN thread, I posted a blog entry: http://www.jacobrothstein.com/cloud-mapreduce-vs-hadoop

In short, the 60x speed gain in comparison to Hadoop isn't fair, and in more reasonable tests the speed gain was moderate (<2x).
I view pagination as a limitation of books, not as a feature. I can read something much faster by scrolling (although I greatly prefer reading on paper). It also makes it so that if part of the "page" is obscured, that's ok, because you can just scroll around it. You may be sitting comfortably at an angle that makes it difficult to see the bottom of the screen, but with scrolling this is no problem. I'd much rather read near the top of my screen than the bottom. I put insane amounts of bottom padding on all local HTML pages I create for documentation for precisely this reason.

I'd be interested to see a book on a spool so you could scroll it. It might be found to be more enjoyable.

I think the ideal reading environment would be an infinite vertical space with a minimap (see Sublime Text) rather than a scrollbar. It gives you a great sense of where you are in the document and it's a much more reasonably-sized click target.
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I know programmers at one of these kinds of firms, without degrees and making $200-500k per year, including bonuses. It's all about talent.
My teacher in High School was very strict about stroke order, and I studied shuuji for about 2 years so stroke order is less of a problem for me than just remember what 篇, 旁, etc goes with what kanji.

Also I get performance anxiety when people watch me write for some reason.. :/

One of the nice things about using the reading trick that I talk about in the article up there is that it impresses the bejesus out of native speakers when a hard-looking kanji like 状態遷移系 comes up, and you can use the 旁 to pronounce the whole thing (even if you have no idea what it means laugh )
I agree. I think python is easier to master in a shorter period of time, and you can definitely do some damage with it. Rubyists love Ruby but I've never really seen the light.
Aaah, ワプロ馬鹿... Both my girlfriend and I have the same problem, and she is Japanese. There's a writing game for the Nintendo DS that I've had some success with, but it's really hard to make time to practice writing. I've tried keeping some of my daily notepad-jotting in Japanese, but most of it is at too technical of a level for my lousy writing skills to keep up.

Let me know if you come up with anything good.

And I know exactly what you mean by people who think that RTK is the end-all be-all of learning kanji. While a lot of the stories and mnemonics might be useful, and knowing meanings is genuinely useful, it takes a lot more than that to master the language.

Do you work in Japan? I'm heading back to Tokyo in January, and would love to meet up with some HN people there.
From the (supposedly malware-filled) forums:

hi guys,

google falsely blacklisted the entire domain as a result of some users hosting malicious files as public links. your files are safe and nothing about dropbox is malicious. this happened as a result of the switch from getdropbox.com to dropbox.com. the dropbox.com domain hadn't earned a positive reputation and thus a single user hosting malicious content resulted in the entire domain being blacklisted. we're working with google now to resolve this ASAP.
They could make a setting to only show retweets if more than N people have retweeted it. I'd love a similar setting for my current stream that relies on favorites.

Come to think of it, I could make that in a few hours...
Could possibly speed up traffic too since there will be less delay from slow reaction times. But I'm not too sure how turning will work if a long truck and a compact car are in the same road train.
Heh. I could figure out the translation, but needed to Google for the meaning: http://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/状態遷移系
Well, it is personal, it is also seriously obfuscated - it started off something like

for(split(//,'*)))*1)11.41))9291:.3+*A11:1:3)/+,))9:'

and of course that was part of the fun - since I had received it in paper form, I had to type it all in to figure out what it said (no I couldn't parse it by sight), which heightened the effect.

Anyway, point is - once a geek always a geek, and the right person for you is somebody who appreciates it, not runs away from it.
I think the positive priming caused greater affect than the "! :P", and I propose the hypothesis that it's the "loaded terms" that determine tone, largely.

They are most effective if applied to the issue at hand; but they are also effective if a fragment makes them appear to so apply (Any reasonable person who takes your advice would be a fool); and even their mere presence in the visual field will affect the reader (disguise, weak, fool). A strong example of this is swear words.

Your priming passage includes warm, life-affirming terms and fragments (as distinct from their denotation): "genuine", "compliment",
"really are good", "I'm impressed with your". I'm suggesting it's not just that you were priming the reader with that logical interpretation, but that you were directly influencing their emotional state with your word choice.

I really do think the first-quoted commenter in the article was being sarcastic. Although he later claimed he wasn't, I find that hard to believe. I don't think it's just the words that are used; but that those words naturally emerge from a person's attitude. If they have a kindly approach to others (or even if they are just feeling happy and optimistic at the moment), it will be reflected in their word choice.

Unfortunately, optimistic, cheerful people tend not to make good engineers, given Murphy's Law, so there's sometimes a relative absence of good-will and affirmation online - including here, on HH.
I like the article's advice about "graduating" communication (a better word than "escalate" which suggests opposition); but I'm ambivalent about the other suggestions. If the tone is wrong, adding emphasis can just make it seem more sarcastic (by being over-complimentary in an ambiguous situation). But if they convey a tone of warmth in their own right, then that problem doesn't arise.
Yeah, this was most disappointing (I'm otherwise giddy). I hoped source tabs were dead and buried.
It also probably violates the license of most of the fonts you'd want to use with it.
a fallacy disparaged as "presentism"

Want to go really meta? People who say "presentism" think the game is borked because it requires judging historical cultures against the standards of modern day people of good will. I think the game is borked because it requires judging your answer against the standards of academic liberals, who are invariably the ones who hear the question asked and answered.

This question has nothing to do with the culture of America or Europe in 1491 and EVERYTHING to do with the culture of the anthropologists you know in 2009. Answering the question is just a signaling mechanism to remind the people you're talking with that you're all members of the same tribe.

I have an expensive piece of paper certifying to my membership in the tribe of We Intensely Dislike Making Absolute Value Judgments, Because Only Evil White People Do That.
It's much harder to grab a share of attention on the internet than with traditional media. The barrier to entry is none: competition is many. Murdoch's too traditional, he's going to be owned by the progressive technologists while he pretends he can use his traditional methods in a new medium.

The internet shifted the game more towards merit. No merit, good luck getting people to your site.
Thanks gord, we are working on a host of new features that we'll be pushing out soon. I'm sure you'll like them!
Within your constraints, I would vote for Python too. It is an excellent general purpose programming/scripting language with libraries for every imaginable task, object-oriented programming patterns, and some basic functional programming features.

The separation of application code from web server is also a nice feature of Python based web applications. PHP is really easy to hit the road running but larger applications get clunkier and clunkier because there is little proper separation.
IMO, Thats no reason to make me type two extra chars each time I import.
Interesting. I had a much easier time picking up Ruby than python.
Of all the copyright-holding businesses affected by the Internet, it seems to me the foundries are among the coolest. Their work is rampantly pirated. Only a tiny fraction of the people using SIFR and image replacement have actually licensed their type for embedding on the web. They could be hassling hundreds of sites over this, and they'd be well within their rights to do so.

What I get off this comment is that you think it's "obsolete" to suggest people should pay for typefaces. But typefaces, even moreso than music and movies, take years and years of painstaking work to create, and the truly useful faces are created by a tiny group of people who've dedicated their lives to the craft.

Why do you oppose paying them?
Because it's just HTML, JS, and native browser type support.
Agreed, it will be a while for the reviews and word of mouth to spread to really see if it'll ramp up or down.

I have one and love it... also started a site dedicated to it (shameless plug)

http://www.droidforums.net
> refers to anyone in America

You mean everyone in the US?
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By orders of magnitude.
I think the point is even better than a joke: there is a danger in allowing things like, e.g., operator overloading (or redefining methods in the standard library), because programmers have different feelings about what the code "obviously" means.

If in your language, + means string concatenation by convention, then + darn well means string concatenation. If in your language + means "contextually appropriate depending on what arguments you pass to it", then

"abc" + "def" => "egi"

doesn't strike me as obviously wrong.

More broadly, consider a language in which we teach initiates that "Plus adds things in the way you'd expect!"

map = {}

map2 = map + {"key" => "contents"}

What are the contents of map and map2 now? Uh oh. More worrisome:

map = MemcachedWrapper.new

map2 = map + {"key" => "contents"}

What just happened?
Question popped into my head: why is Colin Winter wasting his time with idle chit-chat like this? Is he bored of Unladen Swallow already?
This is the million dollar question isn't it? Should we just leave it to go to ruin? Should we look into developing a new industry using the talent that's there (Pittsburgh)? Should we demolish it and turn it into pasture?

One of the best proposals I've heard was to give tax incentives to alternative energy and electric car companies to setup shop in Detroit, thus following the Pittsburgh model. It already has essentially a decent infrastructure that could be renovated, it's close to good shipping lanes, and property is literally dirt cheap.