skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> So 2.5+ hours of his week he can save, just by making you wait 30 seconds for his assistant to transfer the call when you do pick up.

You're doing the arithmetic wrong. You're saving 2.5 hours but it costs each person who answers 30 seconds or so.

You're also doing the valuation wrong. Yes, you're willing to spend my 30 seconds to save yourself some time, but the relevant question is whether I'm willing to spend 30 seconds to save you that time.

It's like asking everyone you see for $1. From your point of view, everyone should give, because it's only a dollar from them and the end result is that you'd have a pile of money. You'd much rather be rich than let them keep their dollar. However, the relevant question is whether they think that it's worth a dollar to them to make you rich.
Does down vote mean "disagree" now? This message may not be what we want to hear, but it seems like a legit comment.
Minnesota Court Issues New Ruling on Reliability of Urine Testing in DWI Cases.
In our October 17th, 2009 blog posting we discussed an unpublished ruling by the Minnesota Court of Appeals with regard to “urine pooling” http://www.kanslaw.com/blog/minneapolis-dwi-lawyer-mn-court-issues-ruling-on-urine-testing.html. In that ruling, the Minnesota Appellate Court upheld a lower court’s decision excluding defendant’s expert testimony on the issue of whether urine testing is a reliable method for determining one’s blood alcohol concentration at the time of testing.
What? OCR and pattern recognition software can easily be implemented with a trained neural network, but has nothing to do with actual AI.
> What's uncivil about asking you to do me a favor by waiting 30 seconds?

My time is worth more to me than your time is worth to me. If you want something from me, you'll have more success if you value my time as highly as I do.
Ditto. I've been building web sites SO FAST. It's brilliantly designed.
Clojure.

It's the first Lisp that, to me, is both fun _and_ practical.

Java libraries aren't as simple as the Python counterparts but the maturity of the JVM vs. Python VM kind of balances that out.
LLVM. It is a ridiculously well written and well documented codebase. The transformation/optimization framework is remarkable and surprisingly approachable. The compiler intermediate representation is easy to work with both in the emitted bitcode files and in llvm's internal data structures. I find it a joy to work with.

Its also cool due to all of the other great technologies that are taking advantage of it (Mono, Parrot, Adobe CS4, Apple)

I think once llvm and clang become mature enough, the FOSS community will completely supplant gcc with this technology.
The Java example I gave didn't use them, and is more concise. I think it's pretty readable.
Haskell and the Cocoa Touch framework (sadly, not yet in conjunction).

Haskell isn't really new, but it still is the best programming language I've worked with (yes, "best" is personal in this case). I don't think any other language allows me to write programs that are more concise.

The other thing that 2009 brought me was iPhone Development. Although I don't like Objective-C that much, the Cocoa Touch framework is excellent. Once you get a grip on it and on the design patterns your code tends to get very small, too.

With both these technologies I shared the same experience: at the start they look incomprehensible and working with them made me less productive. However, only after really learning them I started to full appreciate all the things.
One thing I noticed about France vs. the US is that in the cafe culture in France means it's fine to "stare" at passersby as you sit, slowly sipping your espresso. (Often, all the chairs face the street -- such as in this photo http://www.luminous-landscape.com/images-99/cafe-thumb.jpg). No one minds you "staring" as they walk by.

In America, if you watch passersby on the street you can tell they get uncomfortable.
Many indians are as dark skinned and would probably have the same problem. Do you also refer to them as "black people"?

In the U.S, "black" is a race, it's not a skin color. About 70% of "black" people in movies and music have light skin color that would probably not have the same camera problem.

So technically, saying "black people" would be wrong. The technically correct term in this particular example would be "dark skinned people".
Our approach to design and development processes
Riak - System Architecture
Local storage, canvas, mobile location and websockets/long polling. I'd been away from the frontend for quite some time (2006-2008, an epoch in web standards terms) and learning these tools was a big part of 2008/09.

While I'm not convinced of any flash-killer status, I've definitely seen/done enough to keep me interested.
The problem is that the type error occurs at runtime, which is exactly what static type checking is supposed to prevent in the first place.
How is this not off topic?
> [...] but that's about it.

Ever opened a book by Knuth? Or heard of Turing and his machines? Or lambda calculus?

(Though one may argue that theoretical computer science is a part of mathematics, and not a natural science.)
Just make a google group - I'd join it.
I suggest you read about Software Transactional Memory, if you like that kind of fun.
With the low number of apps, the good news is that good Palm Pre apps get noticed a lot more easily.

There are opportunities to be the big fish in a smaller pond.
Why is sorting cited as _the_ computer science problem?

There's a lot to be learned about the boundaries between P and NP. For example find polynomial algorithms for linear optimization. Or it would be nice to know, if randomization --- which helps in practice [0] --- really does help in theory, too.

[0] E.g. a quicksort that selects a pivot at random.
Personally I like nuanced writing, too, though.
See for example http://arstechnica.com/apple/reviews/2003/04/finder.ars

While OS X may be prettier than earlier MacOSes, conceptually, it's much closer to Windows than to the MacOS spirit.
Cataclysmic event? An incoming asteroid or the Yellowstone super volcano erupting - both cataclysmic I suppose with a finite chance of occurring. Both of these would probably have a chilling effect over the short term (couple of hundred thousand years).

Runaway warming following some massive release (from somewhere) of a greenhouse gas - possible one supposes but it does not look as if anything like that has happened during the last few million years.

The most likely medium term scenario based upon the rather limited historical climate data we have is that we will slowly move into another ice age. Now that will be cataclysmic for folks living in the Northern temperate zones where most of the current world economic activity takes place.
WebDF would be the end of all things productive for me.
Cool, then I'll give it a look. Thanks.
Where have you heard this? I've seen a black co-worker use a Natal without any noticeable difference in skeletal tracking.
Appengine-jruby: Google App Engine API Wrappers and Tools for JRuby
You've done a good job.

I've been looking through the sources and found the "patches" directory. It would be cool if you had comments on top of every patch why it is needed.
I'm just about to start using Twilio at a pretty large scale and am really excited about it. I called them to ask a few questions and their cofounder called me back, always nice to hear a response like that.
I suspect that the tracking is 100% software-based. It would probably be prohibitively expensive to have optical pan and zoom. I'm so glad that modern cameras generally have an option to disable digital "zoom". It's really just a euphemism for premature cropping.
hosteurope.de

dirt cheat: good vps with loads of ram, disk and traffic for $20 or $30 per month.
It's from the artist who formerly brought you GDBM and NDBM.
when was the last time a phone got popular because it was being sold without a contract? most people are not able to afford it. also, it reduces the saleability of the device to the carrier.

of course, this is a biz perspective.
CouchDB. A schema-less database just makes so much more sense for what I'm doing. (and it is extremely easy to use from python, due to couchdbkit).
Why is the image mirrored?
Is there a Google Wave / Group for this? My email is the the profile.
Seaside and Smalltalk are awesome. Sadly the last few months i had to resort to hideous creatures like telerik and asp.net to cobble up complex grids of some sorts. I wish there were more widgets for Seaside. Perhaps I'm missing a community site somewhere for these?
You just lost all credibility for recommending Dreamhost. They're down more than a hooker in red light district and overload their boxes to an average load of 10+. I would not use them for any hosting again.
Swedes avoid making eye contact with strangers like it was the plague, a lot of effort is put into not getting caught looking at someone on public transportation or as you pass people on the street.

My friends from CA were really bad at keeping eye contact during conversations and was really off putting at first as I figured they weren't interested anything I was saying, so I kept switching topics until I figured out what was happening and asked them about it and if I was staring ("little bit").
> If you get a negative response, that person is just trying to save you both some time.

Really? So I should be thanking the nice man for saying, "Fuck you! Get outta my way you mutherfucker?" After all he was just being considerate and trying to help us both out.
1) buy company
2) use code and people for other projects
3) open source the code
4) profit???
Yeah, external factors like those mentioned obviously play a part, as do internal factors, as taught to us by playing Civilisation - fat happy democracies don't like making war very much, or for very long; it's expensive and you have to get off the couch...
I'm not sufficiently familiar with Japanese, but I can relate two specific stories from my own experience.

While travelling and working in Sweden I picked up enough of the language (alas, now gone) to converse reasonably well over dinner with people I hadn't met before. They were fluent in English, my colleague was fluent in Swedish.

I asked about the word "varsågod." It seemed to have many translations, often different for different contexts, and I was wondering how they all perceived it. The consensus came only after about an hour of back and forth. There is no translation, even when the context is known.

The best I've come up with is "All is well," but that really, really doesn't cover it. Sometimes it means "You're welcome," sometimes it means "Here you are," and there are other contexts.

And the English translations don't carry the extra meanings, the baggage. It just feels untranslatable. No translation I've seen or heard carries all of the meanings and nuances.

Another example is from French. The phrase "Je vous en prie" is often translated as "You're welcome," but it's also very, very formal. You'd hear it from staff in hotels, perhaps, and perhaps in the very best restaurants.

But the point is that while it effectively means "You're welcome" it actually carries more information. It also says: and our relationship is a formal one, such as staff to employer, and I'm in the subordinate position.

There is no way to say that in English without spelling it out explicitly, and once you've done so you've lost the sense of the original anyway.

It's like explaining a joke. Once you've done so you've given the understanding needed, but lost the humor.

Similarly with so many things in translation. To carry all the meaning properly sometimes you have to explain or describe the meaning, and then it's no longer actually a translation.

The thing I find most interesting is just how many monoglots claim that this can't possibly be true and give many excellent reasons, while so many polyglots simply accept it as fact. My wife is fluent in French and works copy-editing translations from German (and other languages) into English. I've seen this problem "in action" as it were, and it's why good translators cost so much, while mediocre translators don't.

EDIT: corrected the Swedish word - thanks. My spoken and reading Swedish was always better than my written.
opencl (if you've not heard of it, it's a way to program graphics cards - very like cuda, but cross-platform). we had some numerical code in matlab that was taking too long to run. i managed to get a speed-up of 80x by moving it to a gpu - and the gpu in question is not even the latest generation, but something we picked up on newegg for less than $200. and i suspect that's just for starters - i haven't even profiled it yet to see how to make it faster.

using opencl isn't that much harder than c. obviously you need to understand a little about how gpus work, and there are all the same issues about allocating memory, segmentation faults, etc. but the compiler and runtime are quite solid, and the docs more than adequate. now that i am past the worst of the learning curve i'm looking around for more slow code, because it's an easy way to get more speed.

also, django, but others have mentioned that (it's such a breath of fresh air if you're used to using java...). next year, i hope to play with llvm some (although it will have to be on my own time - can't see how to do that at work...)
What about the links where the information is basically just an announcement (see the links related to Google's public DNS servers) and a ton of discussion is then generated here over 'what this means', etc?
Yes. I've been using 1P for over a year now and 80% of my passwords were generated by the password generator. They are impossible to remember. The other 20% are passwords for web-based apps that I access on other computers from time to time.
It works well on my Droid, except selecting a column highlights the whole playing field for a second. I don't know if there's a way to disable that...
Διαχείριση λήψεων: Πρόσθετα Firefox
You absolutely need at least one carefully expository level to demonstrate the game mechanics. Play Wario's Woods for the NES, and you'll know what to do. Your textual description is awful, but I'm not sure how you could do it better -- so ditch it! Show, don't tell. Tell them just enough to inspire them to try it.

Graphics. You don't need 3D anything, you don't need to turn the blocks into animal species with a story. You just need it to feel like someone considered it more rather than doing what the tools made easy -- taking stuff out will go a long way.

You need sound effects, if not music.
> Many new companies these days are pretty easy to re-create once you have a working model to look at - ie. a less competent programmer can probably recreate your site in less than half the time it takes you to make it the first time.

I agree about re-creating the site. But not about re-creating the company. You say yourself:

> We had about 200 alpha testers during that time, but our learning accelerated much faster after going public.

You have to re-create this learning experience, too. Otherwise you may be cloning accidental complexity, but miss the spirit.
I'm not currently using xmonad (thinking about it though) but I do know that at least one google/chromium developer (est...@chromium.org) is an xmonad user, so you might get some joy by asking on the chromium forums, or filing bugs for specific things.
Node.js. Event driven I/O is so so sweet. I have sharpened my javascript fu over the last year or so, and being able to bring it server-side is surprisingly fun and easy.
WebDF could be the end of humanity.
Never taken a photo in Photobooth on the Mac? They mirror the image that shows to you so it appears like your screen is a...well...mirror. I'm guessing when they record they save it as you saw it on the screen.
In the first place the rule that all the libs should be standard libs is non sensical from the point of view of comparing languages power, so I think we can safely suppress it and still consider the attempts valid.

Proof: if you want to measure the power of a language with this test, enforcing that everything should be in the standard lib, and a language fails at it, adding some code to the standard lib will change the power of the language, but this is not possible because the syntax, semantic and behavior of a language (i.e the language itself) is not changed by additions to the standard library.
Change, how so? Would you care to elaborate?
Amichail, I am very happy for you. You were able to make a new puzzle game with gameplay on the order of Tetris and that is a very rare achievement. There can't be more than 10 puzzle video games that have gameplay as compelling as Tetris or Bejeweled or even BreakThru and derivatives. BreakThru is called Big Money on Popcap. Dropzap's similarity to that definitely NP-complete game is what makes me think your game is also NP-complete.

I think the guy saying this is better than Tetris is being a little hyperbolic, but maybe it's just because I consider Tetris to be (by far) the greatest video game ever made.

I don't mean this to be in any way offensive, but I always kind of looked at you as the official mascot of the site. "I think 1 is the optimal number of amichails." http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=925382 It now looks like you are going to find success.

Have you given any thoughts to the eventual design/theme? Robots? Dinosaurs? Demolition? Or keep it purely or mostly abstract? One incentive for a theme or improved design is that you can use that version 2.0 to justify a new round of reviews on the app review websites.

Now all we need is a social news site that uses DropZap scores to determine story order! :D I'd settle for a high score page where people get to link to their personal or business site.
Greatest hacker movies of all time.
4-6, but under highly exceptional circumstances that are probably impossible to reproduce in peacetime.
Gandi here too, great service.
I too prefer to read those articles with many comments. (I usually read comments first, and then decide based on that if I should bother reading the article). However, I do not think the ranking needs to change, the number of comments is clearly visible on the home page, it's easy to just skip those links with little or no comments.
Cataclysmic is pretty unlikely. Do you think there is 1%+ chance of some major coastal cities becoming uninhabitable or requiring significant engineering to hold back the rising sea?
Call me ignorant but what are some of the features in 1password that Keychain doesn't offer?
I think you meant to type the composite word "varsågod" (and not "Be so god" ^^), it's not a phrase. A similar problem exist with "lagom" which roughly means something like: "enough, not to much or to little.", with a strong positive meaning. It also goes the other way too as computer engineer doesn't have a good exact translation as the English "engineer" is more nuanced than the Swedish "Ingengör".

If you feel like procrastinating and want to have a laugh at how ambiguous and strange Swedish can be I recommend Mastering Swedish by slay radio: http://www.slayradio.org/mastering_swedish.php
Like, such as, like, Miss Teen USA South Carolina, such as.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lj3iNxZ8Dww
Gruodžio 20: Kas yra naršyklė?
In Global Catastrophic Risks [1], many of the risks considered, including unfriendly AI and nuclear war, are argued to have a higher probability of causing catastrophe than climate change.

[1] http://www.global-catastrophic-risks.com/
http://brightbox.co.uk all the way
I had a boss who I went to lunch with and we discussed hiring. He wanted to keep things secret. "In academia, if it's good you want to publish; in industry, keep it a secret."
Should work with floating windows. Just keep the ALT-key pressed.
Beating the Arc Challenge in Clojure
Is Poker a Gender Bender? | The Princess Of Poker
Objective-C and Cocoa, not new but my new favourite development environment. I love the documentation, in my opinion the best documentation of any language.

I love the way Apple doesn't care what anyone else thinks about their language and has ridiculously verbose 40 character long method names to make code clearer.

Love it!
Why write it in Clojure, as opposed to, say, Scala or JRuby?
Five Most Addictive Games On Facebook
They took extensions away from Chromium for a few days and re-enabled them a bit ago.
The US Air Force was established in 1947.
The cost/benefit equation of war has changed drastically since the Romans kept themselves in a perpetual state of conflict in order to fund the republic with its spoils. Especially in this century, the cost of war implements has increased rapidly relative to the possible benefits from engagement.
When was the last time a phone got popular because it was being sold with a contract? It's more like they get popular regardless of how they are sold.

AT&T was considered a bug, not a feature, of the iPhone when it launched.
or at the very least implement OpenID login
So basically this doesn't meet the challenge requirements, the code looks ugly, and yet this is one of the most upvoted stories on HN today?

Would anyone have cared if this was done in VB? I realize Google has done lots of cool and impressive stuff, but Google-fandom should only be able to go that far, and this is way beyond.
Saying that JSMin is banned still implies JSmin itself ws explicitly banned, which is not correct.

It would be better to say 'non Open Source' as that's the reason why JSmin, Microsoft Windows and other apps for which you can get source code but aren't OSS aren't allowed on Google Code.
Interesting question and I suspect difficult to get a sensible answer to. I am assuming that you expect the 20th Century warming period to continue to raise Northern hemisphere temperatures to the levels experienced around 1,000 years ago. Certainly we know that Greenland had a lot less ice then - although we do not know where that water was. I am not sure if we have any information from Northern Canada or Asia. Regretfully I have not heard about any useful data from the South. Was the sea level higher a thousand years ago? Even extrapolating from coastal site evidence might not help as many land masses were still (and are still) rising gently following the last ice age.

There is not a lot of evidence that sea levels are rising substantially at the moment - you had best ask an oceanographer - I would stick with the science rather than ask a "climatologist".
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But if you look at it another way, a significant portion of what's used in the arc examples would not reach the bar of what's included in the standard libs of some other languages. The fact is that what is in the standard lib of a language is a totally arbitrary decision, and measuring any language's power in a way that's dependent on whether or not a necessary library is in the standard lib is silly.

The real test should be, "How short can you make this code using libraries available for the language which would be generally useful working on some other task as well."
I think the real question is: why would we let them get up there in the first place? I know that I, for one, would want anything that can drop bombs on me from space shot down before it can even get into position, no matter who's trying to put it up there.
"Burrows"?

"Burrows"?!

I must also disagree with the idea that the x86 ISA and BIOS that created the commodity server encourages hardware innovation. If it did, we would not be in a x86 world. If we look back, the hardware market had much more innovation in the 80's.
Currently working through Joe Armstrong's programming erlang. I'm interested in functional programming and concurrent programs and erlang seems to fit really well.

I also find Clojure very cool :)
Awesome. I hit the level cap at least 3 times before coming back here. Please make the web version unlimited, I would like to play more and don't want to drag out my phone while I'm at my computer.
Helma NG (Server-side JavaScript).

Easy to get started, fast, stable, the community is helpful and it is easy to read their source code if you get stuck somewhere.