skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
When I wrote nanoc about two and a half years ago, webby, staticmatic, jekyll, … did not exist, and I was looking for a way to publish a web site on a VPS with very limited resources.

I didn’t find anything that fit my needs. There were only very few static site compilers back then, so I decided to write my own (yes, I realise this expression is way too common). Soon after I released v1.0 in april 2007, other static site generators started popping up: StaticMatic and webby had their initial release a few weeks later.

Yes, there indeed is a lot of duplication in the static site compilation world. On the “about” page on the nanoc site, I give a list of static site compilers written in Ruby. The list is likely incomplete, even though I try to keep it up-to-date as much as possible. It also only contains site compilers written in Ruby, and omits site compilers written in other languages. The list currently contains the following:

* Hobix

* Jekyll

* Middleman

* nanoc

* RakeWeb

* Rassmalog

* Rog

* Rote

* RubyFrontier

* StaticMatic

* StaticWeb

* Webby

* webgen

* Yurt CMS

* ZenWeb

The diversity in static site compilation tools is huge. Static site compilation newbies are likely to be overwhelmed, and this is not a good thing. Can we fix this, please?

About a year ago (I don’t recall the exact moment), I informally contacted Tim Pease, author of Webby, and asked whether he would be interested in combining our efforts and merge nanoc and Webby. He unfortunately had no interest in doing so at that time (I’m not sure why).

I believe that combining the individual developers’ efforts is the way to go here. Every static site compiler out there has its own strengths and weaknesses. If we want to get rid of those weaknesses and combine those strengths, these projects need to be merged and individual developers need to work together. There are three goals that can be achieved this way:

1. Combine the individual tools’ cool features.

2. Get rid of weaknesses by seeing how other developers approach the issue.

3. Reduce diversity and make it easier for newbies to jump in.

I have no plan of action describing how to approach this problem yet. I have little experience as project lead for open-source projects; few of my open-source projects have dedicated contributors. Given that the other static site compilation tools are one-man efforts as well, I suppose that their developers have little more experience than myself (apologies if I’m wrong).

So, if you are the developer of a site compilation tool and you’re inspired, do contact me (you can find my e-mail address at stoneship.org/about) and we’ll see how we can tackle this problem. Time for some brainstorming!
Writing iphone music - by the producer Spencer Sternberg.
Dominion, meh. Play Power Grid or Small World.
If you want a quick economic game, try Chinatown. It's everything Monopoly should have been.
Global Domains International Review
I've heard plenty of talk about GDI so I have made a decision to write a Worldwide Domains World Review to elucidate precisely what this opportunity is all about. What's GDI? - Stands for World Domains Global.
Good point. Even without intentionally aiming for this, a good recommendation system for news would automatically drift towards confirming readers' beliefs (because this is what they will say they like).

Most people don't hold extreme points of view on any subject though, it's just that zealots are most vocal.
There's always someone that's missed it. Highly recommended library for ie6 + png.
I dunno about fair game, The Verve would probably disagree: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitter_Sweet_Symphony

Basically, they sampled the "orchestral riff" from Rolling Stones, and in the end got sued and were forced to pay all royalties for this song to the Rolling Stones, even though the lyrics and music was new.
I upmodded this for comedy value. This is really how Java programmers think. So what if the code is wrong in corner cases, it was auto-cut-n-pasted!
I got started when I was in my early teens, most of it in a local computer store (where the salespeople would let me play with stuff I couldn't afford as long as I would explain to the customers what it could do).

As for your second question, I wished I had learned about 'structured programming' earlier, that would have saved me a couple of years. But then again, learning it only after a few years of 'spaghetti basic' definitely made me appreciate it more :)

Best of luck, it's going to take you some time but you'll be glad you did it, the ability to program computers isn't going to make you smarter per-se but it will give you an amazing new tool to help with all kinds of other things. The net result is very close to actually being smarter. It's like being able to use a powertool.

Jacques
Paraslim Force
These ingredients united make a very powerful detox agent that will clean your colon and help you rinse out out all the bad toxins stored in your body and will also burn fat at an augmented rate.
How do people handle including this javascript within an IE conditional statement in rails? Is there a way to handle it with rails helpers or do people just add it to their views manually?
Champa packers and movers 
Packers Movers offers Packers Movers Service in Champa, Packers Movers in Champa, Household Shifting Services, Loading Unloading Services, Car Carrier Services, Relocation Services, Transportation, Packers Movers Champa
humanity's greatest asset, by far, is our ability to learn from others' mistakes as well as our own.
I was growing up in a not-too-well-off school in Chicago, and found a book entitled Make Your Own Videogames in the library. Sadly, neither my family nor the school had a computer. Happily, I found that you can emulate BASIC code with graph paper, fourth grade arithmetic, and a lot of patience.
PHPMD - PHP Mess Detector
I got started when I was 8 (in 1998). My friend bought polish magazine called something like "Programming tutorial with Borland Delphi 2" and he pulled me in this fun.
And so began my bloody thirst for knowledge.
Yes! I read How to Design Programs when I was 13, and it turned my world around. I then read Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs, John McCarthy's paper on Lisp, and the rest is history.
You think that's bad? I'm in Jordan, and I'm paying 70USD/Month for 2mbps/512kbps down/up ADSL with a 10GB monthly cap. Each additional GB is another 7.5 USD.

(downloads after 10pm and before 7am are cap-free)
Learning from bad graphs and weak analysis
I got started with BASIC on a Bulgarian clone of the Apple IIe called Pravetz 8A which the Soviet Union imported in humongous quantities in the late 80s. http://www.pravetz.info/en/pravetz-8a.html

Needless to say, that's the wrong way to start now.
When I was 19 I decided to start a t-shirt printing business and print tees/hoodies for high school clubs. I got this big idea that I needed a cool website. With more time than money, I sought out google to teach me "how to make a website". HTML and CSS days later, I got introduced to PHP. I then spent the next 4 years learning to spaghettify "scripts" into Frankeinstein web concoctions.

The problem, at least as I see it, was that I always just trying to "get my next idea implemented". Granted that's how I learned quite a bit, I think the thing that finally helped me the most was when I decided I wanted to fully commit to programming - and so I sought to learn for the sake of learning. TO consume myself. It was then when I met kohana, and jquery, and frameworks, and ruby, and Hacker News, and MVC, and OOP, and yeah the rest is history - true love.

So my advice. Take it seriously. That doesn't mean it has to be work; consume yourself! You'll be good!

edit: I wish I knew about frameworks and the power of just shutting up and learning from and trusting in people better than me. I love jquery. If people 1000000000 times better than me are working on jquery, it's more than I'll ever be able to do. Have to appreciate that.
Ask HN: Which Lisp book should we publish first?
Hi all, I'm an editor of a Chinese press. For now, there's only 2 book about lisp in China: HtDP and SICP. But both of them are not really "lisp" book. Do you think it is necessary to publish a lisp book for students and programmers? If yes, which one should be first? PCL, ACL, OL or PAIP? Thanks.
Hmmm, why are US lines so expensive? I'm on a 20Mbps/1Mbps line for 20 EUR ($29) per month (NL).
So he should cherish something just because it is rare and precious? It sounds like he couldn't care less and would probably store it somewhere in a closet. And good for him: we shouldn't care about what others think is valuable (except to prevent ourselves from needlessly offending them).
Since we are on tangents here, my downstairs neighbour owns a half-serval. It was illegally imported and abandoned: she takes care of it, together with another dozen of cats. When she has a litter, she needs to keep the serval away from the litter or it will kill the kittens.
Was that the computer with the 'metric' pitch pins on the chips ?
The graphics are great, the music is excellent, but the game looks boring! Why? It's slow! Side-scrollers should be fast and dynamic - I don't ever remember playing a slow sidescroller that I enjoyed.
What's the other half?
I would have been much less intimidated by some of these if, at the time I learned them, I had realized (or had been told!) they were only such recent inventions. I've always been very put down by thinking I was only learning the basic stuff and still had a lot of math to go before being able to do interesting stuff that hadn't been done already. As it turns out, what I learned in signal processing was pretty much state of the art and I could have started to think of new applications right away :/
What made you think that you need to learn something about them? No method is goal-independent.
I don't have access to Nature anymore: does this transistor actually allow gain? Or is this again one of the 'we made a transistor' claims where you cannot possibly build any reasonable circuit out of the parts, because the transistors have a gain < 1?

Having dealt with carbon nanotubes as part of my M.Sc. thesis, I miss a comment on that and another major obstacle: can we properly manipulate and align these components to structure circuits? We are still a long way from that with nanotubes.
Merry Xmas and for Seinfeld fans: Happy Festivus
(as Kramer says, "Festivus for the rest of us!").
May there be lot of festivus miracles. :)
I got started when I learned you could program a TI 83
agreed. post hoc analysis that sounds good is of little value without quantitative predictions.
This library, and the jQuery Supersleight plugin (there's also a non-jQuery version) are probably the best IE6 PNG "fixers".

However, in my experience you would be better off designing for this issue from the outset and avoiding the use of these libraries if you care about your layouts looking good in IE6. For simple situations, these can work fine, however you'll run into issues for anything beyond the basics. For example, in this library:

> "Fixed" <IMG/> elements must take on visibility:hidden;, and thus become unclickable. I see no workaround other than using clear pixel GIF replacements, and that is code that I am not going to write.

There go your buttons.

I've also encountered issues where sometimes, replaced images take on a different height and get stretched, but this behaviour is unpredictable.

Your best bet for dealing with transparent PNGs in IE6 is either to stop caring about IE6 and leaving IE6 users with the opaque backgrounds around the images, or switching to transparent GIFs. A good designer can produce transparent GIFs that are just as crisp as PNGs, and then you don't need to rely on hacks any more.
Robot roaches would be a benefit, not a pest
I learnt the basics in high school, deepened my knowledge in college, did a bunch of Microsoft Certification Courses to give myself professional experience, and I attend 3-5 seminars a years to improve my knowledge and keep me up to date.

Just kidding.
I found this video scary.

Possibly because of uncanny valley. The person looks almost human, yet acts strangely.
LOGO on an Apple 2 in Kindergarten
How To Remove Negative Or Bad Links From Search Results?
Ca-ca-ca-ca-ca-catch the wave!
I came from a liberal arts background (philosophy and writing), and got into programming when a friend was describing his work. He pointed me in the direction of Perl, and I went from there. I was fortunate to find a job at a startup doing a mix of front-end stuff and some Perl hacking, working under one of the founders who was also a self-taught hacker. It was very useful to work under a mentor.
For me it helps, when I can see effects of my work right now.

I write games in my free time, and I've noticed, that if I overenginer and have to write architectural code for too long, I abandon the project. The faster there is sth to play with, no matter how simple, the better.

So I first write graphics code, so there is sth on the screen, then some simple keyboard input module, that later will be replaced, just to be able to move character on screen. Then I can see if the idea was good, and if it's fun to play with it. If it's fun, improving (and playtesting:) it is very addicting, so I can finish the project.

Also, IMHO, it's better to start with simple idea, and give it depth by polishing details, than to start with ambitious project in the first place. Iterative programming ftw :)
Using LINQ and reflection to find matching properties of objects
Tutorial for cross compiling Windows applications
Press release new service
Dreamsubmitting web promotion firm offering full press release services inclused writing, researching, dirtributing etc.
Regarding your PHP 'tip', that kinda makes the whole point of using a static generator in the first place a bit useless.
And when you decide to do it anyway, configure your apache (or whatever you like) to parse .html as php.
And hosting it for free at Github.
When I was 5 or 6, my parents got me a Commodore 64. It had some games, including some written in BASIC. I was always curious how things worked, and I wanted to make games, too. The library had a couple books about BASIC, and I learned enough to write text-adventure-ish games. Understanding the concept of variables at an early age gave me a big head start on algebra, too.

In my early teens (early 90s), I saved and got a C++ compiler, Borland Turbo C++. Digging into real memory with a debugger was so cool. I wish I'd had a Forth to play with, at that age! Later, I dug into Linux, and all the stuff that came with them. For free! (I'd suggest Python as a first language, nowadays.)

A couple things I wish I'd learned earlier:

1) Learning how to work on codebases with other people takes different skills than solitary stuff. Since I started by working alone as a little kid, I didn't really learn consistent variable naming conventions, how to define interfaces between components, etc. until I was in my late teens and digging into open-source stuff. You may not ever learn these things doing projects that are only a couple pages long. (_The Practice of Programming_ by Kernighan and Pike is a short, lucid book that covers this well, IMHO.)

2) Complexity kills projects. Most things don't need to be large systems, and if you structure a system as a group of communicating components, you can get a prototype (rough draft) of the whole system, see design mistakes early, and then cleanly replace the parts that need it. (I don't think conventional OO works that well for this - as Joe Armstrong observed, everything carries along too much context.) Start simple and don't worry about efficiency until you have to. Brainstorm on paper, if that helps.

3) Write programs for something you're interested in, not just another blog engine or what-have-you. The added motivation in making something to make music, cool 3D animations, etc. will keep you going through the hard parts. Your social science background will give you an angle for interesting projects beyond the ken of most CS students.
Numbers will matter a lot in next decade
Not opening up has served Apple pretty well in the desktop world. They lost the market share war clearly but won the profitability war. Which would you rather be right now, Dell selling at razor thin margins or Apple who sells a lot less but makes much more per sale.
Ample SDK Open-Source GUI Framework
I was gaming a LOT since I was ~5. Then I started playing with HTML when I was ~11 and naturally got into PHP and Javascript in a few years.

During that time, I ruun few warez sites and a free hosting company (which was profitable!)
First, thanks for sharing your work as open-source.

In response to this post, though, I have to say that I never quite understand why (in the world of open-source software) people often think that merging is somehow good or necessary. We don't think that in other areas (merge Apple and Microsoft?, merge Honda and BMW? merge Scorsese and Fincher?).

I was recently one of the static site compilation newbies you mention. I wasn't overwhelmed. I was delighted to have so many options to choose from. I looked over a bunch of the different platforms, and then I made a choice. It was easy, and again I liked having the options.

So my serious response to you as a user of open-source tech is stop worrying about the other projects. Make yours as good as you can with whatever time you choose to devote to it. There's no reason to merge.
The attribution of this poem to Borges is controversial. At least one Wikipedia article states that the original author is one Don Herold: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don_Herold

EDIT: Curiously, the original article is often misattributed to Vonnegut: http://www.google.com/search?q=sunscreen+vonnegut
Where of course 'GIF' in your post is interchangeable with '8-bit PNG', which do work fine in IE6 (and 5.5).

I tend to avoid the various semi-transparency-in-IE6 hacks when I can avoid them and just degrade reasonably gracefully to 8-bit images where the designer/customer absolutely cannot live without translucency in modern browsers.
While I find Gladwell's writing stimulating, the man quotes Wkipedia as his source multiple times. How a New Yorker writer could get away with it, I don't know.

I think Outliers boils down to "if you have the lucky background at the right time and the right place, you will be given more and bigger opportunities." The rest is simply interesting anectdotes.
I think you are very lucky to have heard about Lisp while you are just starting to get into programming. If I could send my younger self some advice, it would be the books you just mentioned. Also Felleisen's other books such as Little Schemer (shorter and more introductory than How to Design Programs) and How to Design Worlds. I think I would have been ready for them around 8th or 9th grade, but I didn't discover Lisp until grad school.

How difficult is it to find Lisp programming jobs in Boston (interested in other cities as well)? Here in Florida, I've been stuck with a choice of Java, C#, or Fortran.
Adobe Photoshop CS5 To Offer PatchMatch
There's always a market (here, an audience) for personal attacks on the wealthy and successful. It comes with the territory.

For his part, pg is leading by example -- laughing all the way to the bank.
I got started in grade school. We had a bunch of Apple IIc's and IIe's. We learned basic. I believe my first "real" program was a graphic of Spuds McKenzie, the Budweiser dog.

I didn't do much serious programming until I was about 24, the place I worked, a convenience store, just got cash registers with scanners. So we had all this scanning data but no easy way to collate it over time. I wrote a perl script that would parse our scanning data and tell me how much of x we sold for a period of time y. That was when I truly got bit by the programming bug.

My advice would be to have a problem you really need to solve, a goal. The rest is just trying to figure out how to make your language of choice reach that goal for you. It is so much easier to learn how to program when you have a real, tangible, and personal goal, and not some arbitrary exercise put forth by a language tutorial.

Something I wish I knew before getting into programming? Language choice is personal. Find a language whose syntax you enjoy and you can wrap your head around. Don't get caught up in language wars/debates. It's basically meaningless (although fun to argue about). Whatever language you enjoy the most is the one you should be using.
In the late 70's while in my teens, I was interested in making video games. I had a TRS-80 and learned BASIC and then Z-80 assembly-language. I then bought a Commodore 64 and learned more languages while at a tech school. I became a programmer for banking software and never really got a game off the ground.

To answer your second question, I wish that I had some insight into software design as I was learning to program. Too often, I would kludge through something in BASIC ... that was the mental model of the software that I retained. It was hard to translate something like that into assembly-language or anything other than BASIC.

I took a course in Pascal which helped to organize my approach to problem decomposition and program design.
Currently at #4 on the frontpage

Users with negative karma should not be able to submit stories
An In-App Purchase Brain Dump
It is interesting that in the past, Gladwell has talked about how it takes 10,000 hours of real effort for someone to get effortlessly good at something. Here Greenspun is talking the same point.
You are lucky - you stumbled on the right thing by accident , HTDP and/or Little Schemer are the right places to start followed by the more advanced SICP.

If you can really grok SICP you probably won't need anyone to tell you what to read next - depending on your interest you will pick up the right book.

What i wish i knew before i got into programming is essentially the above. It took me a solid 10 years of C,C++,Python,Java and reading the right blogs/journals to realise that my knowledge/understanding was ass-backwards.
The demoscene made me do it. I think the thing that got me hooked was seeing Future Crew's "Second Reality" and having the desire to do that kind of stuff.

As far as the second question goes, I think I'd prefer to be blissfully oblivious. :) That said, I've blackboxed pretty much everything I know outside of Lisp, so I think one of those truths that should be shared with others can be summed up by saying, "Exploration is key. Don't be afraid to take a sledgehammer to the code you're working on. Your future self may end up thanking you for it."
Can you elaborate on your last point? The only way I can see pg "laughing all the way to the bank" is through YCombinator where he has to work and commit time to develop startups. He makes no money (afaik) from HN or his articles, except where this boosts his reputation for YC and increases book sales.
To be frank, I am not even sure what your question means, so the proper answer is "I don't know".
Something should probably be added here: don't get discouraged by seeing that a lot of people here answer "grade school" or "middle school", whereas you are (inferring by "majored in social sciences" statement) in your early 20's. For most people on this site, programming permeates our very core, and you can be a very good and prolific programmer without having been hooked on it at the tender age of 8.
Thanks, I was just dubious about the 'one day' bit (which I don't think is mentioned here) but it is certainly interesting nonetheless. I'm actually surprised there's no religious objections standing in the way of organ donation in Iran.
One of the interesting things is that due to the strength of the composites used in construction, the air cabin can be pressurized to 6,000 ft instead of 8,000 ft.

http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/transportation/34...
Which software are these guys using?

Any recommendations for music composition software?
Beakman's Electric Motor
Google search for CircuitGirl..

You should email her ask for a retelling of her story..
Article is contentless and is just (poorly) selling a service.