skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It has that Oracle enterprisey lock-in feel now, move along to Postgres and mongoDB which I did. I am really loving mongodb for most stuff and Postgres for ad-hoc, searching needs.
He's talking about web apps and you point out that he's not practicing what he preaches b/c his blog isn't on a white background?

I really wish comments a/b people's personal blog design preferences and the unreadability of said blog post wouldn't get voted up so often. Use Readability and talk a/b more important, less personal tastes/monitor resolution & brightness-related things instead.
There is a difference between unfamiliar and unconventional. Text rendered in a white font, in a language I can recognize is familiar. Text written in Klingon, rendered in dingbats is unfamiliar. In my mind the designer _should_ be unconventional, while remaining familiar. Ever see a condo development? How boring are all the houses, lined up and all the same? I would hate the web to be the same way.
The problem is that these aren't just lazy programs, they're unmonitored programs. Somebody needs to actually determine what the major users of the blocks are and tell the developers of those systems about it. Even the malware creators have no benefit to using dead space like 1.1.1.1.

A researcher at a major institute should be allowed to study 1.1.1.1 for a while.
Surely in six years, Ogg Theora will be just as good as H264 and computers will have advanced to the point that converting the relevant clips will be quite efficient?

This will force the owners of H264 to either create a fair price for the codec in 2016, or they will become irrelevant like RealPlayer, etc.
I don't know. Haskell is quite dogmatic in some ways. The people on the Haskell cafe mailing list don't strike me as rabid fanboys.
StartupList — a new way to reach angels
The 4-Hour Work Week (Tim Ferriss) drove at much the same point - you should consider your free time to be part of your wealth. I don't necessarily recommend the book, but it's another viewpoint on the topic.
You are correct. There is no reason not to just use an inline function that happens to have a name. I think the "lambdas can only be one line" is a newbie python mistake.
Is screen really that terrible? Enough to switch to something else? Screen is largely standard at this point. Why would I want to switch to this tmux?
This is correct, it would work. People who harp on this probably don't actually use Python for anything.
So if I release an iPhone game (commercial) with video in it encoded in one of the formats mentioned... Them I'm violating? I guess so!
If you made this list of three VCs public, it would place much greater pressure on VCs to never, ever do this. Having a term sheet pulled is low probability, but it can all but kill the chances of closing a round.
I would change your ordering of the recents. Looks like when you update your entry you go back up to the front. Definitely could be abused. Overall I like it.
DrScheme
Shady? Don't the involved parties want to protect their own interests as much as they can?

The way I read the MS and Apple licenses is that they are just covering their asses, there is a greater than zero percent chance that there could be new MPEG fees that would make it unpalatable for them to continue to support it. I suspect that neither MPEG nor Apple or MS or Adobe or really anyone wants that to happen. At the same time the MPEG folks don't want to just take a one time fee and potentially leave money on the table. It's somewhat open ended, that's unsettling but how do you price that stuff? You could do it per use but everybody seems to find that unacceptable, you could charge a percentage of profits but not many companies would go for that, you could have a one time flat fee but that will usually be too large, so you kind of have periodic re-evaluation. For most users, it seems like it's simply an issue between them and their vendor, not MPEG.

Look at MP3, it is patented. Thomson has gone after companies and collected money on the patents. Nobody seems to care at all and it appears to be much more nebulous, they may or may not try to get you to pay them, it's not clear to me who is sued and why. That's shady...
I tried tmux after "not getting" screen. I found tmux to just work without me having to do a lot of R-ingTFM. Speaking of RTFM, tmux is now in the base system of OpenBSD so I would not be surprised to see more how-to's online now (not sure when you tried it).
Indeed. Perhaps the Ruby one works different?
Business Week: Iran ‘Cyber Army’ Hits Radio in Latest Crackdown
So what's on the wish list of DHS now, so they need to drum up a little hysteria to push it through?

Logically, simply making such an announcement greatly diminishes its likelihood. If I were a terrorist that planned something in July, I'd let those 6 months expire uneventfully, and then in September I'd unleash my plans. Then I get a twofer: panic for six months for free just through the media, and then another "real" panic when I do my deeds.

And if the best they can do is underwear and shoe bombers, it's not much to get excited about.
> Oh, come on. You're just disagreeing for effect here.

It's unclear what "get" is. Is it a function? What does it return? My guess would be that it returns a function bound to the handler of a "/hi" url, but that's a guess.
As others have pointed out, you could just use a non-anonymous function defined in the current scope in place of a lamba...
Flagged

This is so stupid, people don't understand that groups of people should have the same rights as individuals. The campaign finance laws disallow small groups and small companies to buy advertisements expressing their opinions while allow large groups and companies to setup PACS to do it.
Far in the future, and by that time we'll be discussing H.265 whose patents will expire even later.
Actually, I think Java uses Python decoration syntax for annotations, but I have been wrong before.
I would prefer to use a decorator for that.
Ask HN: What do your users think about Facebook Connect (or Twitter oAuth, etc)?
I've been working on actually releasing some of the many throwaway apps that I write, and started playing around with Facebook Connect recently. However, a few of the people I sent to my alpha test were confused by it (they are not technically savvy at all).

I like the idea of not having to manage user registrations, but I'm concerned that it will cause confusion.

Does anyone have any sharable experiences with this sort of login scheme?
You think humans never ran across rock or hard packed dirt?
IANAL, but I think many patent lawyers would suggest that Bob consider a provisional patent application. This generally much cheaper to draft and file than a full patent application, it gives you an earlier filing date if you decide to go for a full patent, and makes your invention more likely to show up in a prior art search. You'll still have to invest time, and $2,000-$3,000 dollars, but it will probably give Bob some extra protection against someone else patenting his software.

http://inventors.about.com/od/provisionalpatent/a/Provisiona...

http://www.ipwatchdog.com/patent/provisional-patents/
Python generators (the ones you can get with "yield") are not just syntax. They can be viewed as a distant relative of continuations or lazy evaluation.

Lisp (or lets say Scheme, because Common Lisp is ugly and imperative) does have some nice points. I rather like the syntax. But e.g. strict evaluation by default and lots of side-effects hamper the expressiveness and flexibility of the language.
I'm really excited Frank joined Sauce. [disclosure: I co-founded Sauce with fellow HN reader, Steven Hazel (sah)]

Over the past few years, Ruby/Rails-based startups have been getting all the attention. It's time for Python-based startups to represent. :-)
"get" is a function that takes a string and a block.

And the block is bound to the uri given in the string, so your guess is correct.
I'd rather see liquid flouride thorium reactors than fusion. They're much more viable (we've already got the tech - they had a working one back in the '60s), cheaper (we've got thousands of tons of thorium sitting buried in the desert ready to go), safer (meltdown-proof by design), don't contribute to proliferation (byproducts cannot be used to create nuclear weapons), and reduce waste (the waste is safe in tens of years instead of tens of thousands of years).

We still don't have a working man-made prototype for a fusion power reactor.
Flash FLV is a wrapper for a variety of codecs that are mainly proprietary (and some standard like MPEG, H.264, H.263). On2 VP6 and Sorenson Video Codec to name a few (which Adobe pays for), but Adobe could be extremely ruthless and work in Theora/Ogg into their FLV wrapper as well without a huge standards battle. So in terms of agility to change to avoid excessive fees, Flash might actually be better situated.

Really all Flash has to do is hardware accelerate their video (easier said than done - and not just for full screen) and it will alleviate the poor performance perception as it is all software decoding right now.

Still though, content creators that don't want to pay fees should really pay attention to this situation. Video could get very expensive online shortly if we are all on the H.264 html5 <video> will save us bandwagon. It would really suck to have to go with proprietary video just to stay cheap.
Ask HN: What do I do about this internship?
Here is the deal. Last week I applied for an internship and now they don't seem to be returning my calls or my emails. I don't understand what is happening now. Here are the emails I got from them.

I'm interested in your Chicago Internship. Here is my resume. Thank
you for your time. On news.yc i'm zitterbewegung I believe i messaged
you before.
resume-v2.pdf
72K View Download
Reply
Forward

Reply to all

XXXXXXX ✆ to me
show details Jan 31 (3 days ago)
Hey, Joshua. Thanks for writing!

I've forwarded your resume, and you should hear from us shortly. Feel free to bug us if you don't.

I have bothered them by calling them on the phone and emailing them but I haven't heard anything back? What do I do now?

Here is my resume

http://bit.ly/resume-jh
It's a shame this did not make it to the main page, I was hoping to read some input from the community.

Did you have bad luck with the time you submitted the story, or so? During lunch hour? A lot of other submissions? I would genuinely have thought this would be of interest.
Oh, Lisp isn't so difficult once you get used to.

Interestingly I find myself equally baffled when I have to read code with side-effects. There's just so much implicit state (and state changes going on in the background), you have to keep in your head. Pure languages are so much easier to understand.
The day I learned about Screen...It was pure bliss..it solved so many problems I didn't know I had.

Copy/pasting,
Switching between workstations while working remotely all without losing your spot.
Collaboration.

If you don't know about screen, and you find yourself using a CLI even just a little bit, you should take the time to learn it.
A jobs section on the homepage might be useful. It could just list recent job edits on any of the startup page.
Yes, Python's functions are meant to be named.
Apparently they have a PHP ide due out shortly as well: http://www.jetbrains.com/webide/

Can't help but wonder whether a single IDE with a Netbeans-esque idea of "Views" would be better than fracturing everything into specialized products.
It's silly to use Python when sed or awk would yield better solutions.

It would be sillier to use Java. Or COBOL.
Venture Hacks releases daily candy for startups
> It really is a Catholic/Protestant battle, as someone pointed out earlier.

And who's who? (Not meant as flamebait. I just want to see where the analogy leads to.)
I haven't seen any HOWTOs for tmux (I've thought about writing one), but as usual, the OpenBSD man page is very good, and thorough: http://www.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/man.cgi?query=tmux
Ruby always confuses me with this flexible syntax...
Got a Blog? Got a Blog Disclosure?
Knee-jerk reaction says: Obvious or non-obvious software patents will prevent others from implementing a good alternative in that time-span.

...that said, I think you are right.
> As long as we, programmers, developers, hackers, computer entusiasts, don't realize that our work is an interpretation work, like architects, we will continue to be nerdy engineers that the society will continue to look at without to recognize the real value.

You have hit the nail on the head with perfect precision.
Kids & Social Rejection: Why Kids Get Bullied and Rejected
Originally, I was thinking it would be a bit grey area to frame everything. But I suppose loading it within the frame would still keep the HN branding.

I've updated the comment links to load in the main frame.
Please correct the article! :)
Ask HN: Anyone hiring for non-technical positions?
I'm posting this on behalf of my wife, but I'm sure there's some other people on this site that would be interested working for a startup, but aren't necessarily programmers or designers.

So, anyone hiring in non-tech positions? Ad inventory management, sales, project management, content administration... any of those jobs needed to actually run a site.
Care to clarify "screen is voodoo. tmux isn't."? That's pretty meaningless.

The overall design to tmux is quite a bit cleaner, and (having poked around in their respective sources), I know which I'd be more likely to contribute patches to. It took screen forever to get vertical splits (are they still an unofficial patch?), whereas tmux already has dwm/XMonad-style layouts.

tmux is also included in the standard OpenBSD install. Make what of that you will.
The headline looks a whole lot better than what is promised. Sorry.

Edit: Ah. Submitter is a licensee of the technology in question. :)
I think the author makes a great point. I pursue this concept in what I call "elegant design". What this means to me is taking as much functionality as possible and putting it into a simple to understand package. There is a huge difference between "intuitive" and "Dumbed down". Want some exapmles? Think Apple products or, online, facebook. Both have a lot of features available, but you aren't overburdened by them. You take what you need and you leave the rest. On top of that, both offer an intuitive GUI that is easy to comprehend. A lot of times this comes down to interconnecting all of the aspects of your system to be accessible where your users need them to be.

I feel this is an area Microsoft has struggled with in the past and they are finally catching up with their more recent Office program. A good case study here? Compare Microsoft Outlook to Gmail. Gmail is an elegant solution, Outlook is incomprehensible to the point that there are companies whose business is making it easy to understand (ie. Xobni).

There are many other examples, but I'm interested in what everyone else thinks too...
A friend of mine did something similar for Austrian startups: http://www.startupwiki.at/ (in German, but it's basically a short summary for every company, information on where to get funding, and so on)

Might be interesting to add regional filtering to your project?
You mean all that stuff that makes sites successful?
Italy looking to kill user-generated content sites
As someone who's raised Catholic and prefers Ruby... I don't think that they map together well in any deeper way. Neither language started off as a fork of each other.

This particular analogy only runs skin-deep.
OK. Thanks!
Yep. `yield` in Ruby is a normal anonymous method call. It pushes a new frame onto the stack. `yield` in Python works more like Ruby's [Generator](http://ruby-doc.org/stdlib/libdoc/generator/rdoc/classes/Gen...). It freezes the current stack frame's state and resumes execution somewhere else, returning again to the same place on the next iteration. They're very different things really.

More about Python's generators here:

http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0255/
Does the author live in the US? As far as I know e.g. European patent law does require not only prior art but also prior publication.
I have to second nfnaaron here. The gun is always loaded. I don't care if you just unloaded it. It's still loaded. That's one of the most fundamental gun safety rules. Violating that rule, in my view, means you are not responsible enough to own a gun. I mean, there are really only three safety rules; it's not like there's a huge list.

There are plenty of ways to simulate the exercise with no risk. If you want to do stress exercises, you need to come up with a different way. This[1] is one of the standard ways. Notice that at no point does a real gun get pointed at a human being? That's by design.

1) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tueller_Drill
Care to justify that opinion that a company deserves the same rights as an individual? A company generally greatly magnifies the will of a single person, or a very small group of people, making their voice much stronger than that of a common citizen. This concentration of power in the hands of a corporate elite, combined with the rights of a citizen presents the opportunity for the creation of an oligarchy of corporate elites that effectively sway the decisions of many citizens.

This is pretty counter to many of the ideas at the core of the country's foundation. That's what I and many others "don't understand" about your contention.
One alternative solution would be ban PACS.

And groups of people constantly express their opinions in synchrony. We call them political parties.
Having the body control to produce false, seemingly involuntary signals - while suppressing true involuntary signals - implies a level of physical mastery to the extent that you, likely, already possess a substantial advantage in the bout. This is like selling a fake tell in poker while not actually having a tell - even James Bond would tell you that's hard.
IMHO: It also builds communication skills. At first it will slow a pair down but in time the synchronicity that can develop makes all other types of communication amongst pairs more efficient.
I'm super excited for Frank. I will be forever thankful that he took Jython out of the wilderness and made it better than ever.. I hope he'll still have time for Jython hacking at his new gig.
"islam is " a keyword that returns almost exactly the same expansions as "christianity is " on Google. Some fine Network World reporting there.
If Windows 7 increases power consumption then it would stand to reason that this would increase the number of cycles the battery experiences in a given time frame, worse yet, the lower the charge an LiIon/LiPolymer experiences the less ability it has to recharge. To me it sounds like a consequence of increased power consumption and the performance profile of Li batteries rather than Windows 7 doing something specific to "kill" a battery. I'd be willing to bet that using the same amount of power on any other OS would cause the same effects.

[edit]
For clarification I mean to say something along the lines of draining an Li battery to 80% 5 times is better than draining it to 0% once. (Note: There is still lots of charge left in an Li battery at "0%", if you get it to actual 0V the battery is permanently dead and cannot be recharged)
IPad Rattles the e-Bookshelves
Firecrawl morphed into Textpayme, so if that was included there would be a double count.
Who's @ Google I/O: spotlight on Enterprise sessions
KIPI-plugins 1.1.0 su Kubuntu 9.10 Karmic
For a second I thought The Times was republishing a story that The Onion posted today: http://www.theonion.com/content/news_briefs/supreme_court_al...

"This is an unfair, ill-advised, and tragic mistake," Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) said before boarding a flight to Arizona in response to primary poll numbers that show him trailing the Phoenix-based company PetSmart by a double-digit margin. "
> I would hate the web to be the same way.

Welcome to Netscape Navigator 2 :)
Diesel says "Be Stupid". Seems that stupid means brave and creative now.
From the article: "Clearly, 100s of users can’t be wrong."

Oh, yes. Yes, they can. :)
Tufte rehashed
Scoble interview with FathomDB Founder (YC W08)
Google Chrome Tablet Concepts and Few Features
While we are talking about screen - I'd really like to be able to highlight text in VIM (using the visual mode) and then be able to paste that into another screen. Does anyone know how to do this?
I didn't vote you down, but I will offer my reasoning for why I don't think you understand the problem with treating companies as people.

I'm sure you've heard of the saying to separate business and personal stuff. Well that is the problem. Companies legally have to do what's in the companies own profit seeking interest. This is in the hopes that some of that profit seeking rubs off in benefit to society, but it's not directly resultant in benefit to society. Furthermore you can't treat a company as representative of the interests of a group of people because the company is an entity itself. The companies decision making is governed by rules and policies interpreted by the people running it. The people who run it have personal agendas, but when running the companies they have to do it a specific way for a specific set of interests. These interests conflict with those of a normal human being living in the United States.

The company is an entity, but not a citizen. It's characterized by policies and rules, and furthermore those policies and rules seek a well defined interest: profit.
So what would yield in Ruby be like in Python? Surely there must be some analogue?
So no fees until it's firmly entrenched as a part of our daily lives...?
I added my project, though i would recommend either a phased sign up sheet, (step 1, step 2,...) with multiple forms, possibly some javascript validation before you submit the form, or don't refresh the form data after it submitted (why do i need to re-enter in everything instead of just what had an error). Possibly a get satisfaction or other feedback widget so you can get user feedback quicker.

I like the UI.
Stop reinvinting the wheel. Don't be an asshole and replace the browser's scrollbar with one of your own.

Especially when the scrollbar you invent doesn't work in Chrome.
No Person shall be a Representative who shall not have attained to the Age of twenty five Years, and been seven Years a Citizen of the United States, and who shall not, when elected, be an Inhabitant of that State in which he shall be chosen.

I'm pretty sure all you have to prove is that a corporation isn't a "person" or a "citizen".
I agree with Tracy's comment on this post. What specifically are we talking about, other than generalities?
I'll throw out an example: The Drupal admin interface is an example of stupid/boring, while the Wordpress admin interface is an example of simple and elegant.

Anyone agree?
A company does not have free speech or any other rights, but it's shareholders have the right to use their company for speech. Similarly, your computer does not have any rights, but you do have the right to post hacker news comments using your computer (provided pg lets you).

If you truly believe people have the right to use their corporations for speech, then what prevents the government from censoring corporate newspapers like the NYT?
You're right. I got my terminology mixed up.
It's possible that you just haven't read enough ruby, then. There are only two variations on the syntax of passing a block to a function, "do/end" and "{ }". By convention, multiline blocks use do/end, and single line blocks use {}.

It's also possible that one of the things in the article is the gotcha, flexible parenthesis. By convention, Rubyists tend to use parenthesis when defining functions, but not when calling them:

def get(path, opts={}, &block)

get "/hello" do

not

get("hello") do

Which would still work, if you preferred. The exception to this is chaining method calls:

Users.find_all_by_age(23).select {|user| user.first_name == "steve" }

... not that that's an awesome use of ActiveRecord, but whatever.
Libel, etc, I imagine.