skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Hmm, . . ., I can definitely understand skepticism with regards to China opening itself up to international information exchange, but honestly, I think that it's becoming more and more critical for China to do so.

For one thing, China is currently on a huge push to expand scientific research ties with foreign powers. There have been several articles recently, especially in Seed magazine, about China's desire to forge stronger research links with other Asian countries (especially India and Japan), as well as Western powers (the EU and USA). Now I could be wrong (international relations and national development are FAR from being areas of my expertise), but it seems a truism to me that China will at some point HAVE to start liberalizing its information policies. This goes both for domestic things (free press, free speech, etc.) and for foreign interchange of ideas (tearing down the great firewall, for instance.)

Again, not a topic I know scads about, but it seems like if China wants to play nice with foreign powers in academic/intellectual arenas, they'll need to dear down some walls, inluding firewalls.
Corporations won't benefit from gambling on more expensive programmers. They've already created a structure that takes in programmers, anyone with even a basic proficiency, and ensures that they produce at some specified minimum. It's a system that grinds down anyone with lofty ideas about programming, but it's also a system that's relatively riskless, and that's all large corporations care about---eliminating risk. (Particularly in a department that isn't responsible for generating revenue.)

No matter how bad you are, as long as you're consistently churning out code, in whatever language, enough work is being done that the project moves ahead. It doesn't matter who does it, and at this level of quality it doesn't matter who sits down to work on it (this is huge to anyone in charge of staffing the department).

It's a model that seems to have evolved organically inside the corporation, rather than as some anti-programmer conspiracy, but certainly smart executives at Microsoft and the banks have recognized it for years.

If ThoughtWorks doesn't use this model, and it benefits them, why are they more expensive? If you're paying less overall for talent, you can increase sales by charging less for the same product. When you save on production costs you don't raise prices to celebrate. His evidence only contradicts his claim.

If you amend his blog post to say, "well...you pay more for a higher quality version of the same thing", then what he's saying isn't news to anyone, and his old thesis becomes wrong.

[Software that works 97% of the time and software that works 99.9% of the time look very, very different at the code level. The user, however, can't tell the difference. More to the point, they won't pay for it.]
An excellent point.
Another vote for textpad here, there are syntax files for nearly everything, and Search & Replace w/ Regex is really useful.
Alexa data is crap :(

I really liked Seattle and found it to be pretty much like Silicon Valley. Crowded, expensive housing, lots of tech companies in fancy lofts/buildings. But I don't live there so maybe that's what I'm missing.
Latency is an issue. If I've got hundreds of email messages to check then I'd rather do it with a native desktop application. However, for casual use, a web application is easily the most convenient and portable solution.
that ? is key
All quiet on the Yahoo front, time for alternative ideas
I have two 19" monitors, and wish I had one, say, 30" monitor. I would like to be able to use the "center" of the screen...
UltraEdit is a pretty adequate text editor if one is willing to do some minor configuration. It took me only 30 mins to master it.

A txt editor is like most tools, one has to customize it to their needs and wants.

The sword does not make the samurai. It is the samurai that makes the sword go. (General View)
'Twas The Night Before Startup
Maybe you're a Mac guy rather than a Unix dude, but I put this together a while ago as a wiki, then 'froze' it into an article:

http://www.welton.it/articles/windows_for_linux_users.html
OCaml is currently my favorite language, and I'm learning more and more about it. I'm starting with F# (mainly because of the Microsoft library support) but it's cool to be able to run it on Mono and Linux, or heck, even on a straight Linux box with Ocaml installed (as long as I stay away from those same libraries!)

I'm thinking of making my next project straight html with Javascript hitting an OCaml server(s) on the backend using JSON. I believe if done correctly you should be able to do all sorts of cool stuff, like continuations across the http barrier. I don't know if any of you have looked at the F# web toolkit (open source I believe), but it allows using OCaml in one script file and tagging your methods to either run on the server or client or both places at once. So you have one module file that exists anywhere you like it to -- very cool stuff indeed.

So count me in!
Reimplementing is a bad idea.
Who knows? Perhaps DHH doesn't follow jey's instructions to install ruby and start a rails project?

In any event web services like Heroku make it a moot point. I've yet to try it out but I can easily see the attraction when a trivial google search of "ruby install error" returns 100,000 hits.
Do you find those tools solid to control your project ?

I keep comparing everything back to Perforce and nothing seems to be as good.
same here, I've switched a few projects over to mercurial already and Trac supports it pretty well too
OSX: Subclipse, SVNX and the finder SVN Plugin. Sometimes command line.

Thinking about moving to git as well.

On windows, TortoiseSVN is the bomb.
Also curious how this would look
still involves a web app.
Not XEmacs? I think GNU Emacs runs on Windows too.
The client built into IntelliJ is nice if you grok Java. They also have a Local History that lets you track every minor change, not just changes between commits.
From the article "One person (the presenter) is presenting information to other people (the audience). The flow of information is one way, from the presenter to the audience. Because the flow of information is one way, the presenter can and does script out the entire presentation ahead of time, much like a movie or a novel. Like those forms, a PowerPoint presentation is highly linear. It is meant to be experienced in a particular order. Deviating from the expected order is possible, but awkward."

It takes way too much effort to create a linear presentation for a class, especially while pre-requisites are missing.

I've had this situation while teaching mathematics. Two people in the class didn't understand negative numbers. When you're using a pen and a whiteboard, you have the freedom to draw a number line, spend one minute explaining negative numbers and then continue.
Europe’s grip on the world looked irresistible in the 1890s
From a "control" perspective Perforce gets a lot of things right. It's fast, efficient and easy to maintain. It's also a big hit with nosy managers since they can easily limit what any developer can see and also tell exactly what each developer has checked out. Keeping all the metadata at the server has it's advantages.

I believe Perforce's customers include both Google and Microsoft. They must be doing something right.

That said, I think more and more people need to deal with multiple projects at once where there isn't a single central policy. Distributed VCS systems really shine as "control" becomes less important.
Eclipse for its mark occurrences feature, easy editor splitting, and variable width font support (when it's occasionally needed).
Have you seen any companies offering hosted mercurial?
Who voted this up? I'm not sure it really merits a reply to be honest.
http://blogs.sun.com/ahl/date/20080118

It's not quite DTrace.
That's almost 25%! ( http://www.bash.org/?2999 )
Direct link to the aricle: http://www.forbes.com/2008/02/06/auction-wireless-spectrum-t...
On windows, Tortoise SVN and the eclipse plug in. On Unix, I just use the command line.
I prefer the command line regardless of os. I've tinkered with OS X SCPlugin a bit though
Emacs + customisations.. nearly like Textpad but easier to use. Emacs is not really a text editor. It is some sort of OS for making text editors. You can have any text editor you like. Why would you use anything else?

# There is a native Windows build. It is a normal Win app, with file selection dialogs, etc...
both Comet and Flash address that issue...
Kinda off topic, but how about moving to git? I love it.
Polaroid Gets Out of the Polaroid Business
Steve Yegge, who you're quoting as being in favor of OCaml, has since implied that he found it lacking on closer inspection, but, uncharacteristically, without writing at length about it.
On Windows I'm using a combination of TortoiseSVN [1] for general use and Subclipse [2] for Eclipse based projects.

[1] http://tortoisesvn.tigris.org/

[2] http://subclipse.tigris.org/
http://www.e-texteditor.com/ : "The Power of TextMate on Windows"
What's a problem is that there aren't any good books about it. Practical OCaml was almost universally panned, so I skipped it. I'd love a good book on OCaml or Haskell.
"Girls suck, and they're not worth dating (sob... sniffle...)"

Fortunately, enough guys get over these setbacks to propagate our species (and create web apps, build startups etc) ;)
- editplus is great for general text editing (non-coding)

- activestate komodo for python/perl/php

- visual studio for c++
Um, this really seems like complete and utter bullshit. More so after seeing the youtube video.
With web-applications you can force users to either pay for them or not use them. Good luck doing that with desktop applications.
So says a person posting to news.ycombinator.com! Go back to Usenet.
FlixWagon Allows Realtime Broadcast From Mobile Telephone
This is an argument that has been going on since the first web apps started to emerge. The general argument is this: "You can't implement feature x in a browser". Initially the list of features that could not be implemented was quite long.

Things like rich-text editing, asynchronous communication, audio, video, drag and drop, sliders, etc. were very hard, or impossible. So, things like complex games, email clients, im clients, text editors, spreadsheets, and media players were out.

And that leads to the problem with his argument. The list of things which cannot be done on the web is constantly being reduced. Everything on that list can now be done... and fairly easily. (Which isn't to say they don't take time. Complex things take time... easy or not.)

So, now people have started saying things like "Well you can't implement (Photoshop|GIMP|text editors|IDEs|.+) on the web". That may be true for some limited amount of time, however, even now inroads are being made in all of the above. (See Heroku)

In short, people are going to continue clinging to the sinking ship that is this argument until they finally run out of applications to point at. If theres one thing I've learned from recent history... its best not to bet against the advancement of technology.
"and developers still don't know what to do with them."

Excuse me, at least in the imaging processing community we know very well what to do with all those extra cores. Particularly when processing 1 Gb images, and/or a couple hundred thousand 2048x2048 16-bit images.
On Linux and Mac OS, I use the command-line. On Windows, TortoiseSVN is probably the best choice, IMHO.
Same experience here. Two monitors are not the same as one large high-resolution monitor. I wish I had one of the latter as well.
Cinema Fiction vs Physics -- Ghosts, Vampires, and Zombies
I dunno, I use plenty of web apps for running my business that are a lot better than anything I have found for the desktop. Also they saved me when I switched to the mac as I didn't need to look for a new version.
Not to mention we wouldn't be here talking about this were it not for a webapp by our friend paul...
I've been using UltraEdit for about 8 years now. Notepad++ is close, but the FTP plug-in just isn't quite as good (I use FTP a lot through my text editor and UltraEdit is the best). The best features of UltraEdit are it's macro recording and template (ie: code snippets) feature.
Javascript obsfucation
I know that you really can't do this and I never had the need for it until now. This is a very important piece of code and even if I patent it I'm sure someone would copy it. so the other option is to make it difficult for people trying it. Normally I don't care if someone copies my js. usually I have lots of back-end code mixed in with the script that even if someone copies, it wouldn't function. so this is the first time I need this.

Anyone here can recommend methods for hiding javascript? I know there are tools out there that do it and I'm researching that but what else can you do?

I was thinking of breaking the code into smaller sections. and serve the code as an stream through a servlet on a per-request basis and change things depending on conditions etc...

What else would you suggest?
Gmail, anyone?
I'm glad to hear that you are able to contribute both your programming and artistic (and probably leadership) skills. My brother-in-law is a photographer and he's started to sell some of his photographs at small art fairs.

I've always wanted to be able to sit in a busy city park and either do caricatures or play classical guitar and draw a crowd to a stop and make a moment of their day more beautiful.. But it takes practice and practice. Not a priority, just a pipe-dream right now.

I'm starting to get involved with a non-profit - PHP stuff - I think it's better than stuffing envelopes (e.g. provide value with your skills)
And by "gets things done" -- it means STAYING ON TASK. Many "smart" new programmers have a tendency to stray off task...taking unnecessary initiatives and whatnot.
I absolutely love my two 19 inch Samsung 940BF's and I'm definitely more efficient with them. I can have my code on one side and a web browser on the other. If I'm doing schoolwork, such as writing a paper, well, I get a web browser on one side and Open Office on the other. I'm even more efficient at leisure now - I can browse the web on one side and watch TV or a movie on the other. I think my next display upgrade will be an array of either 3 or 4 monitors.

I disagree with the people posting about wishing they had a single large monitor -- I can't stand reading the tiny text on high resolution displays. I think 1280x1024 on an 18-19 inch monitor offers the best readability.
Whoever coined the term "welcome screen" should be shot.

The concept is the complete antithesis of the connotations. I don't feel welcome at all with "welcome" screens, it's more like getting bitchslapped.

PS: "In your face" advertising is already insulting enough as it is without hypocrisically trying to pass it off as a service to the victim. (Am I the only one to loathe 90% of the advertising?)
Now that I think about it, OpenID is as dangerous as it is helpful. Less passwords for you to remember also means less passwords for a scammer to have to guess if you end up falling for some lame phishing scam....of course having 1 password that you memorize is still better than having to write down a bunch of passwords in a little book that has the potential to be stolen. Still...
The idea is genius, the act itself, when it isn't explained to the consumer, is completely immoral.

I'm reminded of the "Your Family's Geneaology Book", where "Your Family" is replaced with your last name. For instance, "The Smith's Geneaology Book". The books, which aren't cheap, are full of generic content about cultures and countries. Inserted in the middle is perhaps a page of surname-relevant scholarship. One of my uncles with a different last name has one, and his didn't come with any surname specific material at all: just a printout in the back of people in the US sharing his name.

They've been selling these since before the internet was around, and as a kid they were my first introduction to this type of content-free marketing.
I haven't used Windows in a while, but I think something I discovered right before I made the linux switch was called Programmer's Notepad. Try http://www.pnotepad.org/
Classic Dilbert cartoon about dual monitors. It rings true...

Disclosure: I'm very happy with my secondary Dell 20" LCD - put my term windows and mail/IM windows there.

The cartoon is not available on the main dilbert site anymore... Hopefully this link works.
http://i151.photobucket.com/albums/s133/fottizio/Varie/dilbe...
Why QR Codes Will Be Big Business in the U.S.
if it is worth stealing, somebody will steal it. Its just the nature of client side scripts

If it is really that amazing just write about it on your blog and get famous
I remember seeing Paul Buchheit's (Gmail creator) setup for pair programming. It is extra-ordinary.

Two laptops, one 1080p 42"+ HDTV

http://paulbuchheit.blogspot.com/2007/06/quick-big-screen-de...
http://tinyurl.com/2s9jz6
My Opinion: Google wants Microsoft to buy Yahoo
I mean when you think about it in terms of the mythical man month and the amount of entropy introduced with a merger its kind of interesting. Plus you have a bunch of processes going on here - consolidation, shift of resource etc. which generally dont win tech wars.
http://www.assembla.com/ offers Trac+Mercurial
It's good for people to have a job, even if they are not the best one for that job. It helps keep the framework of society together. Ideally, people could exercise their true talent and get paid but it's not always easy to get paid for what you like to do. Like Jim Rohn says - if all you get from your job is a paycheck, you are underpaid. It's a series of checks and balances - no perfect job is out there - it's up to you to make the best of it.
Nuclear fusion is coming, says noted VC
I'm using a Dell 24 - it's great, but I can always use more. The ability to view more of a given code segment helps me understand it more quickly.

An aside: I find that the (unix) screen utility is a great way to help me make better use of the the shell's real-estate. 'man screen' to find out more. The only real annoyance is the default use of ^a for everything, which I often use instead to go to the beginning of the current line. But it can be remapped.
I'm not sure how "noted" he is, but it's still interesting.
Bitnet
Well, I might, except that the price for many of the items is a little bit insane.
I know of rails app that was sold last year for a decent price that was untested. Are the people who wrote it idiots?
... but they use OCaml to prove that there are no run-time errors (RTE) in their code :-)

http://www.astree.ens.fr/

"In Nov. 2003, ASTRÉE was able to prove completely automatically the absence of any RTE in the primary flight control software of the Airbus A340 fly-by-wire system, a program of 132,000 lines of C. [...] From Jan. 2004 on, ASTRÉE was extended to analyze the electric flight control codes then in development and test for the A380 series."
We launched: massify.com
It's very hard to reliably obfuscate JavaScript because the language is dynamic enough that you might refer to object fields or function names through dynamically-computed strings. Any attempt to obfuscate these runs up against the halting problem. So you have to rely on conservative approximations...

Packer (http://dean.edwards.name/packer/) will rename all local variables to single characters, along with removing all whitespace and optionally base-62 encoding the text. It also has a compression scheme, but it's trivial to defeat this by replacing eval() with document.write(). I think that's the best you can do with any JavaScript-only compressor.

I should probably mention that even JSMin'd text is a real pain to go through. Someone that's dedicated enough could do it (just like how people were reverse-engineering the Google Maps frontend), but nobody wants to read through a lot of code with no indentation.

Also, you're much better off with one large JSMin'd file than a bunch of streamed sections. Aside from being simpler, it's more to look through. Otherwise, people can sniff the stream through Fiddler or Analyzer and take a look at when segments are loaded, which often gives them more information than they'd have otherwise. And re-indenting 500k is a lot more of a pain than re-indenting a 500-byte segment.
Most difficult project of my career, almost a year and a half from idea to launch.

wipes sweat from brow

Thanks to hacker news for keeping me occupied when I should have been coding.
Vim. Both for Windows and Linux I use it, it's a good and very powerful editor. However it's not the type of editor that you'll get how to use it in 5 minutes (well, this is true for the very very basic use, just press "i" to insert text).

Download the self-installing executable here:

http://www.vim.org/download.php#pc
Heroku | the Ruby on Rails Podcast
Congratulations!!

I'm an armchair film aficionado. I went to a pitch competition featuring pre-vetted aspiring film makers last year and it was fascinating enough to make me start wondering about the whole process and if I really could write a potential screenplay.
Steve Ballmer Should Focus
Ultraedit+WebDrive was my wet dream. It was the only thing holding me back from switching to Mac 100% of the time, until Panic churned up Coda.
I suggest you revisit the handheld arena with an open mind in 2008. Some things still apply, but with bigger screens, always-on internet connectivity, and built-in web browsers that support full html and sometimes flash and ajax, handhelds are trending towards relying on web apps for mobility and extensibility. A web app should be the first mobile solution for a handheld because it is cheaper, easier, less wasteful in development, that also allows you to easily track statistics about which apps and features are being used, and how.

Then you can create a native version for the blackberry and iPhone to take advantage of one of the two things I believe make a native app advantageous at a later point in time:

1) synching the handheld's data with your web app, or
2) saving data to access if you're without an internet connection.

As far as GUI elements go, the iPhone lets you make your program look like a native application.

As far as speed of access, launching an app on an older treo model would take at least 2-5 seconds, especially a database application. You can load a web page over Wireless-G in today's handhelds in that time.
Count me in on the git crowd. Having tried most of the distributed source control systems out there (hg, mtn, darcs, arch), I have to say git is my favourite. I've been using it daily for about 3 months now.
Yes, up to a point.

I've used two 19" 1280x1024 monitors, two 20" 1600x1200 monitors, three 20" 1600x1200 monitors, and one 30" 2560x1600 monitor.

The most productive, and what I use now are the two 20" monitors. With three there was always one on the edge I didn't really use, and the 30" was horrible because minimize and maximizing windows was no longer useful. Rarely if ever do you want something to be 30" in size.

I'd guess what works best varies person by person, but once you have to move your head more than a little to see something, it's far enough away that you won't use it.
Congrats! :]
Hot pocket ( http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=hot%20pocket )? I wasn't famaliar with this phrase. Perhaps, I shouldn't have consulted the Urban Dictionary.