skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I could see your point of view for the most part until this post. You think there are some people fated to be in the "leading" class and we need to just let them lead?

Personally, I question the need for government at all, but above all I find one must be practical. What works... works. I think a real, advanced anarchist system has never been allowed to be tried (for obvious reasons) but without testing it I'm not convinced it couldn't work.

I certainly don't approve of a people who have, frankly, produced a pretty awful system condemning someone else who also has an awful system (which has a different set of plus and minus points).
The only (halfway good) reason you could have for stuffing this in to your .htaccess at all is that you don't have access to your httpd.conf.

It's halfway because any service even remotely viable would at a minimum be hosted on a slicehost or something like that.
Well, according to Martin Fowler:

"The second is that smells don't always indicate a problem. Some long methods are just fine. You have to look deeper to see if there is an underlying problem there - smells aren't inherently bad on their own - they are often an indicator of a problem rather than the problem themselves."

http://martinfowler.com/bliki/CodeSmell.html

Granted, you don't have to agree with Martin Fowler. I'm just making the case that it's not unreasonable for me (or the article's author) to define code smells that way.
Poprad hidden explosives incident and Dublin bomb alert
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MagicJack to Disrupt Mobile Carriers with Sub-$100 Fem-to-Cell
I don't think Andre said that abstractions are useless.

I agree with most of your other points, but it's difficult to get past the confrontational tone. Be more charitable :)
Panasonic TC-P46S1 HDTV
Hi,
This is not a new crib. Another recent complaint is here http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=905520, and I responded to that asking him to try Zoho Discussions (http://discussions.zoho.com). Though not a mail listing software, it is fairly advanced and is capable of handling posting through emails too.

Regards

Dhan

PS: I work for Zoho and manage the Zoho Discussions product
+1; I think many devs that regularly rotate thru java, python, ruby, javascript, etc. have to over-parenthesize (and engage in other least common denom-type stuff like inserting line-ending semicolons and parens around method args even wehre optional (ruby);
I didn't expect that the current Mayor of London, Boris Johnson would do a decent job when he got elected. Surprisingly enough, he actually does.
If you have to hyphenate it, it's "femto-cell".
The entrepreneur’s bill of rights vs. the venture capitalist’s bill of rights
Intel Atom versus ARM Cortex-A9
Forgive me, I see that I have miss-interpreted the article. (I skimmed it). Reading it again, I see that I do agree.
With any hardware made in the past couple decades, it's entirely about software. Plus, asynchronous, multithreaded programming isn't required for a perfectly smooth interfaces.

Consider the enormous amount of instantly responsive software on 1 to 4mhz 6502s (Atari 2600, NES, C64, Apple II, Atari 8-bits, etc).. Every current platform, even the phones, can emulate those at multiple times real-time speed, so the hardware is certainly capable of it.

In the 2600s case, it didn't even have video memory and a video chip to help the CPU. The programs had to be timed to output straight to the TV at the exact speed and time the TV needed data. No threads or asynchronous events to help there.
I think you haven't differentiated macro's in the algol-family sense (compile-time string substitution for the 3 purposes of #def inline functions, #ifdef conditional execution, and #def constants, with full-on CL/scheme/clojure-style macro's.
The ascendancy of the non-private person
America as Texas vs. California, Part II
Let's take a library implementing http as an example. To be a good abstraction, it should let you retrieve a page in one line of code:

page_string = urlopen('http://google.com')

There are a lot of default choices made for you here: all the headers to send, to follow redirects or not, what to do with cookies returned if there are subsequent request to the same domain, etc. There is also information thrown away, like most of the response headers. You may also want to get access to the response as an I/O stream instead of loading it at once in memory.

A good library will be transparent in the sense that it would let you modify each and every one of these defaults and access the information under the covers if you need to, I see no way around this even as the industry matures, or you will get into the Larry Page's sort of trouble desperately trying to modify your user agent string.

I wonder if there is a generic way to make libraries as transparent as possible in a uniform way, perhaps having language support for "default" parameters and a syntax to alter them. Yes, it goes directly against encapsulation.
Microsoft's body-sensing, body-busting controller
Actually, I would believe that and I'm not a salesman: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Windows_Services_for_...

Microsoft actually has a UNIX emulation layer for Windows.
Private Company Valuations: RockYou, Inc.
Just tried this in Vista and it completely hosed up my desktop. Had to boot taskmanager, run a DOS prompt, and delete the folder. Otherwise explorer kept hanging and rebooting.
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> Great teachers, he concluded, constantly reevaluate what they are doing. [...] But when Farr took his findings to teachers, they wanted more. "They’d say, 'Yeah, yeah. Give me the concrete actions. What does this mean for a lesson plan?'"

Way to miss the point. :/
Some of these are "obvious" to the Perl veteran but more because they're idiomatic than that they look like anything you'd see in another language, so this is great for relative Perl newbies. But even for the experience Perl hacker, there's a few clever items in there that make it worth a quick glance.
As soon as you start measuring something and attaching organizational outcomes to the results, you encourage gaming.
Static analysis of malicous PDFs (Part 2)
I don't have experience with your specific example, but it seems you are complaining against the opacity of relational databases, not the ORM itself. I agree, relational databases are very opaque.
But measuring the duration of a tone or a light coming on for an interval -- this is of interest to me as a musician. And 1/100th of a second is way too short to notice reliably.
Next, Mr. Taylor announces it’s time for Multiplication Bingo. As Mr. Taylor reads off a problem ("20 divided by 5"), the kids scour their boards, chips in hand, looking for 4's. One girl is literally shaking with excitement. Another has her hands clasped in a prayer position. I find myself wanting to play. You know you're in a good classroom if you have to stop yourself from raising your hand.

Patrick (http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=patio11), this one paragraph helped me understand why your business is so important more than all the discussion about it here on hn over the years. You may want to pursue using it in your marketing efforts.

Your business is a perfect example of what Guy Kawasaki calls, "Make Meaning". One more way for you to inspire the rest of us. Respect.
Apparently it does this to Vista x64, as noted in the article comments and on the CNet article.

EDIT: Spelling.
Summary: Texas is better at education than California.

My response: They're sure as hell better in technical areas. Texas has put a lot of money and effort into funding and licensing STEM teachers at the secondary level (and maybe earlier). At the AP CS exam reading every year, Texas is always very well represented, and I'm always a little jealous of the level of support they get just in terms of state standards and that kind of thing. (Another state you might not expect is Georgia, actually. The state universities there have done a lot to raise awareness in their feeder schools---i.e. the high schools in the state---of the importance of computation and CS.)
Lockheed, the Startup with Nuclear Missiles
One pertinent example of this: Tom Kyte (Oracle guru) argues against treating Oracle as a black box. If you try to ignore Oracle's internals, you'll tend to end up doing things in extremely suboptimal ways. Say, for example, by not using bind variables in your queries. The more I use Oracle the more I agree with Tom Kyte.
The fact I can give you the link:
http://bjs.ojp.usdoj.gov/index.cfm?ty=tp&tid=19
more or less is the difference, and American is on the right side of the difference.

Note that the 1700 refers to death penalty killings, which American is unique amongst developed countries to still have, and is as bad as China is this. The fact it puts them on a list with, for example, China, Iran, Yemen, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia should be a reason enough to get rid of it.
>And guess what, you do have a choice (modulo some paperwork) to live where you want.

Actually, not so much. For most countries you can't just go there, you would have to either marry in or get a job there. Getting a job can be harder because most countries have rules in place to force their companies to hire their own citizens.

I do wish it could be a lot easier to move between countries so that countries would be forced to compete with each other. Of course the countries would do what they could (as they do now) to make people think they are better off than they are now.
Why Eiffel is my favorite language
Microsoft and HP show off 'slate' PC
Re Sensitivity to brightness: Human eyes can see single photons (well, one is too few, but ten will definitly do it). Which means that if there is some light - any light at all - we will see it. Not the direction (if we are talking about single photons) but still. Oh, well, there will never be a TV good enough :)
Ask HN: What is the role of an Engineering Manager?
So I am the technical co-founder of a startup and we have a small team. So far I was just busy designing our architecture & writing code; doing very little project management. I pretty much expected my colleagues to manage themselves and build a great product.

It seems that ain't gonna happen. I have been asked to be a much more proactive manager who actively keeps tabs on the developers and pushes the project forward.

The problem is this. I don't know what to do. Honestly, I have never wanted to manage people in any way; I just wanted to keep myself busy with tech.

So I am asking my fellow HN readers here for some tips. I would like to know how I can manage people & projects without being too pervasive.

Thanks in advance.
Well, I was hoping to get some free parts for my RepRap project. Oh well, I guess I'll just order them tomorrow.
Django-forum
the simple clojure install is coordinating JVM 5 or 6(almost always sun, tho link below mentions openJDK), emacs 22 or 23, slime, swank, ELPA, etc.

http://thoughtadventures.blogspot.com/2010/01/setting-up-clo...

http://measuringmeasures.blogspot.com/2010/01/clojure-quick-...

http://groups.google.com/group/clojure/browse_thread/thread/...
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I think the issue with Eclipse is the latency in whatever Java uses currently for drawing widgets (SWT?).

Right click a project in Eclipse on your Core 2 Duo, and time how long it waits for the context menu to show up. Then right click any other IDE, text editor, or non-Java app, and attempt to do the same.
Flagged because it's a dupe (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1034750) and it's just a different view of the control panel.
Canada has the plug pulled on thousands of sites
Good example.

it should let you retrieve a page in one line of code

Agreed, but not the property of abstractions I talk about in this post.

A good library/language would let you cast the response of urlopen to whatever it is you need - a String, an IOStream, even a DOM object, maybe even do it automatically using type hinting/inference. Parameters are just an optional dict of data to go with the request, could easily be passed an optional variable.
It is easy to prove that humans can perceive more than 60 frames per second: wave your hand in front of a fluorescent light. They flicker at the same speed as your electricity (in the US it's 60Hz) and you can easily see the motion break down.
Alternatively, you could just put the e-ink on the "bottom" of the computer. No need to manufacture additional surfaces.
Robbery getaway is foiled by GPS
Glide - The First Complete Online Operating System
Erlang, the next Java
Well, one use is you can access the contacts of your contacts, so it helps you get information about (and get in contact with) a lot of people...

But I agree it seems weird to add 50 'strangers' to your list... We don't know anything about each other really.

EDIT: Although I have seen a few people do it on LinkedIn already, they post message in groups and tell people that they want everyone to add them. They gather thousands of contacts that way, I wonder if it does them any good tho.
This is one of the reasons that open source is great thing. If you encounter bug you may go as deep as you need to. No inaccessible black boxes in your way.

When I encountered bug using MS software in my projects I could go only as far as their bug tracking site that had my bug an it was more than year old. This happened to me twice.

On the other hand when I found bug in prototype.js I could fix it myself. They even accepted my patch and included it in future release.
I'm not a fan of China's government either (though I hate the US' about equally), but I really think this argument is vastly more complex than you're presenting.

For example, you think it's clear cut that US citizens being able to get some link on the Internet puts them above China citizens. There are many problems with this line of reason:

1) People in China can get on the web as well. Due to how the firewalling work, most probably don't even realize it happens. Just sometimes they try a link that times out. Happens all the time. Are you sure it isn't already happening to you?

2) Are you sure the information you're seeing is true? In some cases you wont have any way of completely proving one way or another.

3) For some countries, seeing the info doesn't affect anything because of the level of indoctrination the people go through. For example, you can point out what ever you like to a Scientologist, you wont change their mind because their indoctrination will prevent them from believing you or your source. Are you sure you or the citizens of your country don't also have this problem?
If an ORM user can be fairly confident fairly quickly about the SQL generated from each of his ORM calls, it's a good abstraction. In my experience with Django's ORM, that hasn't been the case. Fault may be mine :)
Making internals transparent is a very bad thing when it encourages users to write code that relies on implementation details. On the other hand, a certain amount of transparency is critical so that users can easily develop a mental performance model, and so that it is clear how they can extend the abstraction (e.g. by writing plugins) when necessary. One of the most difficult parts of library design is to have enough of the good transparency without ending up with a brittle system or a system that users have to wrap in order to break awkward dependencies.
I like the social auth login features.

Is there a good/clean way to integrate social auth with an existing django authentication db? E.g. providing generic views to let current users link their accounts against their google/twitter ID, and letting new users sign up with whatever auth mechanism they prefer.
What apps to expect in 2010?
Ask HN: What are the more interesting things you do at a programming meetup?
The programmers meetups I attend are always composed of presentations. Just wondering, are there any interesting stuff that you do during meetups?
The Hypersurface of this Decade (Bruce Sterling)
768-bit RSA, now officially not enough
Joining should be moderated by how long you have been on Hacker News, not karma :)
Tracking spaceships? http://i.imgur.com/H55EO.jpg
Yes, the library designer have to anticipate what you could possibly need to alter and expose it as optional parameter. Just looking at how Python's urllib/urllib2 have evolved with versions shows this is no easy task (otherwise the developers of the standard lib would have get it exactly right the first time).

And it gets tougher when you actually want to modify behavior (like handling http redirects). The support for modifying behavior in popular languages is basically events, inheritance / interface implementation, and composing pre-built objects to get the desired behavior. This leaves me wanting to have a better way.
For the clueless like me:

http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/10/01/the-25-million-demo-yex...
Standup desk
I am getting back pains and would like to try a standup desk - any recommendations / warnings?
I need something around 110cm (43 inches), but most desks I have looked at are not tall enough.
Librelist. I'd recommend to the OP that he/she pass on any criticism of Google Groups on to Zed. Looks like that project is ready to be the GG killer. :)
Even more notable is that the Intel-based netbook is running at 1.6-GHz clock frequency the dual-core Cortex-A9 development is running at 500-MHz.

I don't get why people keep saying this. One is x86-based, the other is ARM-based. Why should you be able to compare cpu frequency? Is it notable that a Core 2 processor performs better at 3.2GHz than a P4? And that's even in the same general CPU architecture.
This isn't surprising. Big companies see that their employees can't easily leave so they take advantage of it. Of course when the economy picks up people are going to leave, but this will be happening to lots of companies so they'll have plenty of available talent to replace their losses.

The company I'm at made a huge profit last year. Half as much as the year before, but still a massive profit. In my year end meeting the manager who gave me my embarrassingly awful bonus check told me "we're lucky to be getting anything with the year we've had"!! Of course the CEO didn't get hurt much. It was pretty interesting. I never see anyone in the office after 5pm since that day...
Introducing Cramp
Unison 2 Color & Contrast
They closed temporarily to make upgrades
You can't expect that you program will perform well in any platform. Considering "little heads" is a good way of thinking about systems if this is the current implementation and if the bottleneck is there.

There might be a future when accessing the disk is as fast as accessing main memory, but we should better not design software thinking about this possibility for now.
Find out what the problem is first. A stand-up desk may make it worse.
Tipping my toes in mongodb with ruby (common SNPs between two populations)
I had a completely different take on this then everyone else commenting; our software can be treated as an opaque black box too, and that can be detrimental.

My company recently started a new code review process: to save the reviewers time, changes are first reviewed by a non-programmer UX designer to verify that the UI behaves as the UX designer intended. The UX designer tests the application and either rejects it or approves it. If rejected, it goes back to the developer for more work, and if accepted it goes to the technical lead for code review. The theory is that the code reviewer doesn't have to confirm proper functionality, because the UX designer has already done that. (Our tech leads tend to be overloaded.)

The problem is that the application code is a black box for the UX designer. She can give it input and see if the output looks right, but there's no way she can determine if there is any particular input that will produce wrong output. At best she can expend a large amount of effort giving random input, but unless she can cover the entire possible universe of input (generally not possible) she can't guarantee correctness.

The code reviewer doesn't have this problem; the application is not a black box, so he can examine the code to determine the common cases and edge cases, and find unhandled cases. A code reviewer can determine which input will likely break the application by inspection rather than by trial and error. That's much more efficient, and we have a lot more confidence that correctness can be guaranteed.

Unfortunately, the code reviewers aren't doing that... they're not looking at correct functionality at all, because the UX designer supposedly is doing that for them. The process does not recognize and accommodate the opaque black box problem, and as a result the Quality Assurance team (who have the same problem but they do a lot more random testing) are finding bugs we completely missed.

Interesting note: our QA team have been dealing with this problem for a long time, and they've been quietly self-training as programmers in order to be able to read and understand our software changes. This has made them a very effective QA team, especially when they include suggested diffs in their bug reports. They're a pleasure to work with.
Windows was listed as POSIX-compatible (passing the POSIX conformance test suite) as early as Windows NT 3.51, and perhaps earlier.

I was not referring to add-ons that can make Windows more POSIXish, but Windows itself.
Ah, I thought you were using to site that 'Sun has a very good range of hardware that goes far beyond SPARC'. Yes, Oracle are marketing SPARC, because they're going to own it. It doesn't mean that it has a future and people will start running new projects on SPARC again.
Abstractions are not only necessary for portability, they are necessary for understanding increasingly complicated software systems.

Say I write a program in Python. Python is implemented in C, but I don't have to care about C. The C source of the Python implementation is compiled to x86 machine code, but I don't need to know how that works either. Machine code is miplemented using logic gates, which in turn are implemented using electronics. Again, stuff I don't need to know about.

I write my program using a text editor which uses KDE, and below that, X Windows. These are both complex software systems, and again I DON'T NEED TO KNOW ABOUT THEM. Underneath X is the graphics card. This presumably uses some sort of memory-mapped display, but I don't know the details.

Back in the days of CP/M systems with 64K of RAM, one could understand a computer system in its entirety. It simply isn't possible now.
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