skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The footnote on the entry page is telling: This classic shows why the design of the data structures is the true heart of programming, and why language choice is almost irrelevant. (In hindsight, this is obvious after considering how we program humans: textbooks can be written in any language; the tricky part is presenting the content clearly.)

I recently have concluded the same thing. I suppose all programmers reach that conclusion at some stage in their education. However, in context its pretty entertaining: a programmer explaining why C is better -- because for him, certain benefits of C outweigh certain deficiencies -- while simultaneously pointing out that programming is the art of manipulating data, which is largely an abstraction that lies above the particular representations in language X (well, mostly).

That being said, I thought he did a good job. I would have been proud to write this page.
They are planning to enlarge the Canal. Though I do not know whether it will be large enough for carriers. (Probably not.)
Thanks for the link, I always like an excuse to read what Cliff writes.
My neighbours in opinion space are more interesting than my neighbours in physical space.
It's also interesting, apropos of the recent interest in StackOverflow Careers and the discussions on HN, that this guy has a pretty spectacular StackOverflow rep and still was having trouble finding a job. I wonder if he knew of the Careers/jobs portion of StackOverflow and if he used it at all. Of course it's anecdotal but seems odd if Joel's theory stands up that this fellow had such a hard time getting a job.
Right, but what is the lesson here? Do whatever it takes to succeed? I'm not picking on you, just wondering what to take from that fact.
The link leads to a section with several pages. Each page is about a hiatus in a director's career and contains a video with a longish paragraph about the delay. Reading is involved and it is akin to a slideshow (with videos instead of images).

I think "view a video slideshow" is a bit better.
Actually, it's good they killed the Orion.

Can you imagine a streak of detonating nukes all the way to LEO?
I can't tell if you're kidding, but I don't see what legal compulsion FB, MySpace, et al can receive from the Chinese gov to kill accounts.
News from Russia. When it rains it snows.
This interview addresses that:

http://www.techworld.com.au/article/260022/-z_programming_la...

We needed an easy-to-use configuration language, and the only configuration language available at that time (1993) was Tcl. Our users did not consider Tcl an easy-to-use language. So we created our own configuration language.

Given how different Lua ended up, though, I imagine there was more to it than that.
His lack of team experience really would be a big downer for getting a job. Glad to see he found something.
Snoop Doggs How the West Was One Tour
Pay no mind to the people who commented before me.

The phrase that follows the comparative preposition "than" is not necessarily a reduced clause. It's actually almost always a simple noun phrase, taking the default accusative case.

"I am taller than him" is Standard American. If you were to say "I am taller than he" you'll sound like a twat.

Doesn't make sense? So what. Language isn't about making sense, it's about getting points across. There's plenty more in English that's even more confusing (exceptional case marking? oh yeah, baby, figure that one out).

Hell, even if it WERE a reduced relative clause there are plausible reasons why it could still be "him", namely, "nominative" and "accusative" are structural case, not semantic case, so they get assigned depending on the assignee's position in the sentence structure, and you could easily reduce a clause and, in doing so, put its subject into precisely the structure necessary for accusative case.
I also went for a job with a military contractor a couple of months ago. The first thing that the interviewer asked was "what are your views on the Afghan war?". I gave him my views, but stopped myself after a few sentences as he looked increasingly horrified. Needless to say, I didn't get the job, but I wasn't disappointed because a job which required me to become closely involved in a cause that I didn't believe in wouldn't have suited me.
Score Two Wins Against Software Patents
1 month in singapore, and he is saying that they only spent 1 day in the office? come on
I was arguing against

> What matters is what a teenager trying to decide what to do with their lives thinks a programmer/hairdresser/any other job "looks like"

because I think if that matters, they're making the wrong decision.
Have to give Andrew credit - he's not using kitty gloves on Chandra, asking him the same questions multiple times to nail down responses.
I think did say something like "an occupation that individuals can reasonably think of as a career path".

A real profession is a self-supervising, self-educating specialty. The model of the professional is the accountant, an individual who, hypothetically, answers to both his supervisor and the strictures of independence imposed by his professional association. Even union carpenters, electrician and plumbers partially fit this description - a qualified contractor, for example, will should and sometimes actually will refuse work that involves not meeting the building code.

Many specialties in this society have lost their professionalism, have lost the independence that provides a lot of the value in their wages. This is ultimately degrades our social relations - it results in people caring about their bank accounts and not their personal achievements (the last bubbles were furthered by the degradation of accountants and real estate appraisers).

I suspect that this process is related to children who would rather be like the people they see on TV rather than being like their mothers and fathers.

Unfortunately, all this degradation seems to be a self-reinforcing process.
> For example, US's GDP is slightly less than the EU's but our CO2 emissions are double the EU

The biggest reason for this is France which generates the majority of its power (80%+) from nuclear power stations.

The environmentalists were extremely successful in the 70ies and 80ies to ensure that the USA does not use nuclear power. Since then their coal power stations have done untold damage to human health (particulate matter, mercury, sulphur emissions, etc...).
They have plenty of defences. However, a ballistica missile re-entering is going very fast and is therefore very hard to intercept. It is also not a threat that carrier battle groups have been designed to combat.
Not to drag this way off topic, but 6k isn't really very spectacular; I'm neither a great programmer nor a prolific contributor, and I have a much higher rep than that, just by answering about one question per day for 11 months.

If he had 50k, in my opinion, then it might be a commentary on the meaning of the reputation, but not so much as is.
Probably taken care of by filing at least one bug. Then the consulting line is easier to accept, as long as that bug was fixed.

That said: I'm neither a lawyer nor an accountant, so take that with a large dosage of salt
The author of this sorry little polemic is whining about, in part, the justified criticism of an extremely poor paper whose publication and subsequent political use by the Bush Administration caused the resignation of half the editorial board of Climate Research.

"Some journalists are digging even deeper into the sources of Soon and Baliunas’s funding. Their Climate Research paper includes acknowledgements to NOAA, NASA and the US Air Force, as well as to the American Petroleum Institute. Yet NOAA flatly deny having ever funded the authors for such work, while the other two bodies admit to funding them, but for work on solar variability not proxy climate records, the topic that has caused such a storm."

http://www.sgr.org.uk/climate/StormyTimes_NL28.htm

And now here we are on "Hacker News", where this axe-grinding swill keeps getting endlessly posted by the same axe-grinding posters to "Hacker News" and voted up by folks who frankly haven't taken the time to begin to look into the actual science.

("Hacker News"? This particular little niche website is fast becoming Wall Street Blog West. People who came for the tech are leaving because of the increasing emphasis on how to make a few fast buck any old way.)

Meanwhile, as an experiment a few days ago I posted an article from FactCheck that concluded "ClimateGate" is overblown nonsense, and that, "The American Association for the Advancement of Science released a statement "reaffirm[ing] the position of its Board of Directors and the leaders of 18 respected organizations, who concluded based on multiple lines of scientific evidence that global climate change caused by human activities is now underway, and it is a growing threat to society." The American Meteorological Society and the Union of Concerned Scientists have also reiterated their positions on climate change, which they say are unaffected by the leaked e-mails."

http://www.factcheck.org/2009/12/climategate/

"Hacker News" response: ~crickets~

It was obvious that facts are the last thing Cato and the Wall Street Journal and the axe-grinders here are interested in.
It is true that if you use something, you should configure it.

However, "Break the Internet" should not be an available option, especially not the default option.

Malware avoidance, spelling correction, etc. are all good things. However, DNS is not the right way to achieve these things.

Also, these things assume that you're only using the web. Let's say I open my IRC client, and mistype the domain of the IRC server. Guess what? Now I'm trying to connect to OpenDNS ad server as if it were an IRC server instead of getting an error instantly.

Don't screw around with DNS. Resolve the names, and that's it. If you need extra functionality, put it somewhere else, like the browser or the search engine or the OS.
That's true. But it's more meaningful from the societal level than the personal. As an individual looking for interesting or useful things you don't already know it's usually far more efficient to read a few books than to spend the same amount of time getting to know people outside your circle.

Now if you want to learn something that a large number of people don't already know then goes treasure hunting. But, suggesting people need to talk with a wide range of people to grow as a person is simply untrue.
My friend, you've stumbled on "The Secret!" ;)
The Value of Sharing: Social Engagement
On the ocean? I was really hoping for under the ocean :(
I'm guessing that civilizations on some other planets probably have a much easier time of colonizing space than we do. We have the misfortune of finding ourselves in the only vaguely-habitable rock in our own solar system, but some other systems must have multiple habitable planets, even multiple life-supporting ones.

Imagine if the moon had been several times bigger -- it would have an atmosphere, and thanks to panspermia might even have picked up enough life from Earth to give it a breathable atmosphere. The Apollo Project would have immediately been followed by a project to kill and eat the local wildlife to see what it tastes like. Or suppose we'd evolved on a moon of a Jupiter-like planet in the habitable zone -- there'd be a whole bunch of other equally habitable moons just a short flight away.

Instead we're stuck on a big rock, looking at a bunch of other rocks which are fairly useless to us. Sigh.
("Hacker News"? This particular little niche website is fast becoming Wall Street Blog West. People who came for the tech are leaving because of the increasing emphasis on how to make a few fast buck any old way.)

I agree. I found it depressing that your comment was down-voted to the negatives.
I think this guys problem is that he knows mostly .net, and that's it. He might be pretty good at it, but shoehorning yourself into one technology stack is not good.

Anyway, It might be a problem of the location also. I know that in Boston people are having trouble finding jobs too. It seems that in Sillicon Valley there is always demand for really good engineers.

If you are really good, you will find something for sure.
Hypothetically speaking, given his situation, do you think he would have ponied up the (soon-to-be) $100 to sign up for Stackoverflow Careers?
Asking works in Britain, too. And the road names are sometimes hard to find for someone used to German standards (i.e. me).
Based on the users currently on StackOverflow, he ranks 747th by my count. Assuming there are 100K+ users on StackOverflow, I think that makes it a pretty spectacular reputation statistically speaking. Answering a question every day for 11 months is also pretty spectacular if you ask me.

He may not be a Jon Skeet but he's clearly head and shoulders above the great majority of StackOverflow users. He's exactly the type of programmer that I think Joel would say would have a good use for the Careers portion. So I find it interesting that he had such a hard time finding a job ASSUMING he knew about and utilized the Careers section.
Lua is much closer (not visually) to the C/Java family languages, which makes it more approachable.
>>Actually, it's good they killed the Orion.

Extreme, world changing (in more than one way) and mind blowing (also in more than one way!) technological marvels might not be your cup of tea?

Edit: I might add -- if you can't handle tea, stay with the boiled water...

>>Can you imagine a streak of detonating nukes all the way to LEO?

I can imagine it -- all the way to Saturn's moons, by way of the asteroid belt. What a beautiful dream.

But certainly, a careful analysis of the failure modes might be considered prudent. An infrastructure outside the atmosphere would easily arguably be worth at least a small increase in cancer risk.

(Today is a different matter of course, since it would be detrimental to lots of very expensive satellites' health.)
ye thats just crazy. I remember seeing photos somewhere at some point of the TC guys at Fusion and there were just heaps of them. Should find the link
A Pattern Language for Parallel Programming
This is interesting if it doesn't get culled by spammers.

Somewhere in Manhattan, Joel Spolsky feels a shiver running down his spine. Best of luck to both of them, though.
Is it just me, or does this guy act annoyed at answering completely reasonable questions?
I still think it is a valid question. If you purchase an "unlimited" data plan - just how restricted a service are you prepared to accept?

Until some sort of consensus is achieved for the term "unlimited" I can't see how anyone can have a sane conversation about such plans. Of course you could just go with the normal English usage...
Previous discussion: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=494066

(Adding this because it's relevant, not as a passive-aggressive way to complain about a repeat. I think more people should see this video.)
If you live in apartment complex and you and a neighbor get on bad terms, he can give noise complaints up the wazoo (not the obvious 'he was partying all night' but 'a few loud noises woke me up at 2am /unprovable types of claims) about you, get you evicted and you have a much more difficult time finding a new place to live in.
Yes, I recall that the actual apps sales cut for Apple is relatively small. Combine that withtheir seeming reluctance to create an app store in the first place (remember in the first year it was all about web apps), I'd say that the app store isn't that high on their priority list. But then again their business model has shifted (marketing iTouch as a game device) so things are probably a bit different
Never thought it would be that hard to find a job as a developer. I seem to never have enough developers.
Yes, I was rather startled by the housing-development-writ-large look of much of the view, as I'd only seen pictures of older Prague architecture before.
... you must have nice neighbors.
Removing Barriers to Creating Amazing Things
he always does that, he has a really good BS detector and most people tend to give in after you ask them the same question 3 times
I would like to give him the benefit of the doubt, but I don't think I'll ever buy the joojoo product because of this interview. He appears to be dancing around nearly every question, and his body language is shady. I don't trust the company.
There is some sound information in this. I've been planning on writing about the the curve in using Tornado, as it is deceivingly simple. It does take diving into the code to really pump out a polished site.

I've been working on a stub project which serves as the foundation for the tornado sites I've built: http://github.com/gmr/Tornado-Project-Stub

The nice thing with it is that it makes going from 0 to a working site that covers all the basics very easy.

I've chosen some different methodologies for dealing with daemonizing and logging than Evite, but that's the nice thing about the Python standard libraries; many ways to skin that cat.
There are a vast number of people--hiring managers and developers alike, good and bad--who haven't heard of Stack Overflow, or Joel Spolsky.
If Fermi's Paradox comes from a limiting factor "removing" civilizations (a physics experiment, etc), it should need to destroy a whole solar system and not only a planet.

Maybe the economic hurdles are the limiting factors? Economics seems to be closely related to game theory. I bet a lot of the principles apply to all civilizations.
I gave this a try and couldn't get it to work as I'd expect based upon previous experience with Tornado. I'm waiting until they polish up a 0.3 release to adopt using it.
yeah agreed, when he came on in the beginning I told to myself, man this guy looks like such a snake oil salesman
Reminded me of the ultimate:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uwlsd8RAoqI

(Jeremy Paxman interviewing Michael Howard).
Why do you use Foursquare (or Gowalla)?
What is the appeal of Foursquare/Gowalla? Is the value in the competition, or exploring new places? What makes you pull it out of your pocket to check-in?
Holy cow, no kidding.

"Can you show us a YouTube video on this right now?"

"No, I'm not connected to the internet right now. [pause] Are we running out of time?"

"No, we've got as much time as you need to show this stuff. So, you're going to connect to WiFi right now?"
I'm really curious if Michael is going to buy one...
Two observations:

1. Can't imagine a more horrible way to launch a product.

2. In a lawsuit context, why on earth is this guy, as the company's primary witness, allowing himself to be subjected to detailed questioning on the merits of the case in a public venue? Not coming off as very credible either.
Excellent discussion; I had no idea this had been posted before. Thank you!
I feel so...connected...that I just wrote that and got my question answered by the guys in the center of the tech scandal. I almost feel...important! They said my name! I am somehow part of this!
Offtopic, but it seems really odd to use twitter to do "realtime" chat. Maybe I'm just biased ;)
Стартовая страница Firefox
> shoehorning yourself into one technology stack is not good

on the contrary, specialization is how you get to be more than a trivially replaceable cog in the machine.
he's spent a lot of time doing interviews and has gotten exceptionally good at it. He knows what questions the viewers want and makes sure to get the answer/rounds back to the question.
I'm surprised this question would get asked--first because of possible legal problems with asking questions political in nature, second because in my experience the employer doesn't really care what you think as long as you do the work. Also, there are quite a lot of left-leaning folks working for military contractors that may or may not support a particular action but are professional enough not to let that get in the way of their job.
Q: What is the best Christmas gift your boss gave you?
I completely agree. Everything about his appearance just screams shady.
Those developers must never google any programming questions then.
it's not a chat, it's more of a viewer commentary + a way to ask questions.
It's a pretty clear link. Take a look at about 8:58 in Hans Rosling's TED Talk

http://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_reveals_new_insights_o...

Practically every country has gotten out of poverty at the cost of carbon emissions. The link isn't perfect but it is very strong. We need to get on a different curve. There doesn't seem to be any other way.
If I was being sued, I'd be dead worried I'd say the wrong thing. To me, it seems like it could just be that.

But come on HN, you're judging someones integrity based on their appearance?
From http://www.zideck.com/blog/article.php?id=1:

> Well, not everything is an object. And I'm not talking about Java

> primitives, either, which should be objects. For instance, functions

> are not objects in most languages, and when they are it is confusing.

> See Javascript for further info on how this doesn't work.

....

I stopped reading here. It works very well.

(how the heck do we do preformatted text on HN?)
I'm slapping my forehead for not picking up on the reference.
I just can't get myself to trust him, why is that?
at the end of every interview, Andrew asks "so how can people connect with you" people usually give out their emails, or twitter account, or phone #.

I'm actually looking forward to see what contact method this guy decides to give

oh and you got another question asked
Sequences in Clojure and in Heron
Oracle and IBM databases: Disk-based vs In-memory
ok, it's "Real-Time Conversation". I still don't find it useful :)
In other words,

We are way bleeping far away from colonizing space...

The problem that low gravity significantly accelerates aging isn't often mentioned but it serves as a pretty decisive hindrance.

I mean, even a permanent settlement is a long way from colonization. We have permanent bases on Antarctica. We aren't planning to colonize any time soon.

That part of the Jetsons will have to wait...
I guess I should revise my statement. It's not really appearance as much as presentation. Body language and confidence of your answers.
Space access can be much cheaper, even without nuclear launch.

They talked of building the Orion the same way as submarines, iirc. I've read Henry Spencer argue that modern rockets and payloads are so expensive to make because they have to save on every gram.
That's pretty cool! But only useful for the few of my friends that would know how to run a perl script (and have LaTeX installed) unfortunately LaTeX is a rarity at Swedish schools and I need to make it super simple and install-free to make some of my classmates use it.
Rethinking Voice as an App
demo fail
interview fail
joojoo fail
There seems to be a fear of what reducing carbon emission would cost the world require giving up our modern lifestyle however, if we chose to mitigate at the least painful manor we can still do a lot.

EX: Coal fires in China burn 109 million tons of coal a year, emitting 360 million metric tons of CO2. This contradicts the ratio of 1:1.83 given earlier, but it amounts to 2-3% of the annual worldwide production of CO2 from fossil fuels, or as much as emitted from all of the cars and light trucks in the United States.[44] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal Stopping that would do more than requiring every American to drive a hybrid to work and yet it's ignored.
He seems really evasive and disingenuous. It could be nerves, but I doubt it.
You don't piss during commercials then, I take it?
Especially considering something like this takes lots of time just to take the stills. (For instance, on the Dresden panorama linked elsewhere on this page, if you look along the bridge on the left side, you can see two different appearances by the same woman cycling.) Real-time at this quality is a very long way away.