skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Have you considered some of the good ideas of Robert Clayton Miller (watch the video http://10gui.com/video/)?

I particularly like how you can switch from one application to another by scrolling horizontally and then resizing the window's width as you need. Furthermore, the additional gestures with 3 and 4 fingers provide additional information bandwidth.

These ideas might solve some of the problems others in this thread have been pointing out.
"surpass relational databases in popularity by 2011"

Are you really sure about that? AFAIK the use case for key-value stores isn't one that a lot of people are going to suffer (seriously high-volume).
Pay for it?

From the site:
100% free and open source Pyxis is yours to do with as you please
When you're running 1000s of servers, it's not about the one big bottleneck anymore. 5 or 10 or 20% improvements then suddenly become worthwhile.
Not practicing what you preach doesn't say much about the truth of what you're preaching.
#1 is kinda sorta like the NoSQL movement (hierarchical versus relational modeling, do away with much of the O-R impedance mismatch).

#2 Github?

#3 The evils of threads, and how to replace them with something else to use multi-cores, is very high on the list of blogged about programming topics. Several new languages have staked their claim to fame largely on how they handle concurrency. So, yes, this one was understated, if anything.

#4 Not there yet, but might be on that trajectory if there is some "tipping point" of Java programmers en masse getting fed up with Java's limitations. There are certainly enough alternative JVM languages to choose from.

#5 Does Clojure make the top 10? Certainly not in number of users, but maybe in most popular to blog about.

#6 Facebook.

#7 iPhone was released June, 2007, beating his prediction by a couple of years.

#8 Maybe if you buy an Android phone from them?

#9 Apple laptops are immensely popular, but the scale of this prediction was a little ridiculous. Between iPhone and iPod, it's possible that there are more people who own an Apple product than own a product from all those companies combined.

#10 Now that's just insulting. Who's he calling average?
Serious question: what is wrong with XHTML? I've been using the XHTML 1.1 Strict DTD for the last 3 years straight, always creating fully validating code. I found XHTML infinitely easier to appease than HTML4. Perhaps not as important, but I've also found that I can create nearly identical XHTML in different Web frameworks (depending on the task), which is important to some of my clients who don't have a lot of resources to upgrade the plethora of legacy systems they operate. I don't mean that as a brag "I'm so great", to the contrary, I've just found XHTML to be much more consistent and far easier to construct via robot than HTML4, meaning I don't have to be "so great" to use it.
So basically he didn't get anything but #6 (facebook) and #10 (which is more of an insider joke than a prediction) right. Remember this next time you read Yegge's rants.
In regards to that last line: someone wrote recently "Japanese companies figure paying people is inefficient since most people will just buy things to increase their social status, so they award social status directly", and when I read that I reached Enlightenment. It is so true its almost painful to think about.
I pressed The Button. It was quite a disappointment.

The Facebook Connect cross-domain receiver URL (http://blog.jakerlevine.com/post/366422034/boycott-the-butto...) must be in the same domain or be in a subdomain of an application's base domain (www.jakerlevine.com). You can configure the base domain in the application's settings.
It is and there are fixes out there for the HTML/XHTML thing but this is mostly an argument about defaults and built-ins.
Microsoft/Novell: Breaking Down the Coupon Numbers
He's correct: PCI is about Visa, MasterCard, Discover and Amex covering themselves, and shifting the blame (and penalties) to merchants.

Sure, PCI is written in a way that when you read it you think "random collection of best practices from places that got hacked and learned something from it", but the definition of "compliance" is such that a merchant just can't stay in "compliance". It's impossible.

So, this leads us to two inescapable conclusions:
1. "Best practices" are just CYA.
2. Any time someone in power says "compliance" keep your hand on your wallet and start edging towards the door.
That's the whole point here- by preventing multitasking it's possible to give every single app massive resources, relative to an Atom chip. No YouTube videos buffering with Skype running in the background and three Word docs fired up.

The perceived performance is phenomenal, and that's the whole point. As for native development environments, no one gives a shit outside of HN- that's what Macs are for. Pony up the extra $700 and you're good to go with a MBP.
Huffpo cofounder, Thrillist cofounder raise $7M for angel investments
hard not misread virality as virility...
Some battles have a winner, publishers are no more likely to stop adopting FB connect then they are to start inserting robots no-follow.

Google won the (general) search battle and it's nigh impossible for a young innovative start-up to beat them. Facebook are beginning to assume Google-esque dominance, and no start-up looks at all likely to displace them.

In the end ease of use wins every time.
I missed the memo. Can anyone point me to an article explaining exactly why XHTML has suddenly become the whipping boy du jour? I'm well aware that HTML5 is the next hot thing and all, but I don't understand why anyone would favor HTML4?
I frequently travel through London and have several times suggested a meeting. I've rarely had a response, but I'm interested in trying again. I'm not based in, or even near London, but, as I say, travel through reasonably often.

I will be in London February 8th and 10th, and March 3rd. Possibly others as I go through to somewhere else.
Indeed. I'm increasingly struck by how much of what people do is driven by the desire to be liked/loved.

So do Japanese workers get a much bigger percentage of their income in non-cash forms?
Yes, but be careful with this if your algorithms knowledge comes from a traditional algorithms course. These are often taught as if computational complexity was the only concern. Algorithms that minimize space complexity are often more of an issue.

So while the choice of algorithm is a large issue, one must be careful to select an algorithm that makes the appropriate space vs. computation tradeoff. That knowledge is often guided by an awareness of where the systems bottlenecks are.

Once you've chosen the correct algorithm and you're down to optimizing code, which is what this article discusses, understanding cache effects is critical and this article provides a nice view of the basics. The usual rules about not doing optimization unless one needs to applies, but I don't see why that always merits an algorithms junkie popping out of the woodwork to essentially say the same thing everyone always says: premature optimization is dumb.
facebook was already out in 2004, and everyone was on myspace.
Link to petition ?
Overstriding tends to jar the hips, no matter how cushioned the heel. I did notice that the irregular footing in Saturday's snow--running over others' footprints--enforced a different stride.
I think there was a lot of excitement about XML databases around that time, because they would let you store more complex structures in the DB, not less complex (like key-value). Somehow XML did not take off, not sure why.
The Miracle of Vitamin D: Sound Science, or Hype?
That was beautiful. It perfectly captured everything about the book that rubbed me the wrong way.
Ask HN: What's the deal with Common Lisp?
So I'd really like to try using Common Lisp more often, but I'm having a hard time getting into it. To start with, I thought I'd install SLIME, but of course it turns out the SLIME that ships with Debian is broken, so I have to check out the repository version. No big deal. Then, I thought I'd try fiddling with an IRC bot, everyone's favorite programming project. CL-IRC couldn't install (using ASDF-install) because one of its dependencies wouldn't build. Ok, I said, I don't mind working at a socket level. Oh, wait, here's half a dozen different socket libraries, some unmaintained, some still works in progress. I finally settled on usocket. Then, when Freenode's MOTD included a pound sign, which caused my reads to crash, I had to fiddle about some more until I finally found flexi-streams, which seems to be working ok for now.

Right now, Lisp is feeling like a massive twisty world of broken dependencies and half-finished libraries. Have I just hit a bad corner of the Lisp world? C may not be fancy but at least the standard libraries can talk to the network. I'd appreciate hearing from other people who came in, were similarly disgusted, but have come to understand the whole thing better.
Markdown, Block Parsing and the Road to Hell
I'm a Dvorak user, but I think it's a wash. Dvorak moves the [] and {} up a row beside the backspace key; but some compensation is that =/+ is moved down a row, and -/_ is moved down two rows. $ and () are in the same places. . is above the Qwerty D rather than below the L and ';', like reflection through the keyboard center-point.

I would point out that when using curly-brace languages, I never actually type either { or }. Instead, I use an editor macro that inserts the brace pair with appropriate indentation and leaves the cursor at an extra level of indentation in a new line between.
That would be great, but it most probably won't happen. Without flash, unfortunately, a large part of the web doesn't really work. Yes there are alternatives for video, and no everybody won't start using them within the next year or two.

The Ipad is rather flawed without flash.
"Now, Glick - a criminal defense attorney, according to his lawyer"

I don't get it. Have Journalistic standards slipped so much that they couldn't even corroborate this simple piece of information? Or is it something I'm missing?
Oh yeah, that's it - rile up the CIA, that's intelligent.
The field is still so new you are better off actually implementing some features you think are missing rather than taking surveys about them. Nobody really thought anything was missing when del.icio.us started, either.
For those interested about RAM timings, effects of cache, and other low level memory topics explained exceptionally well, check out "What Every Programmer Should Know About Memory"[1]

[1] http://people.redhat.com/drepper/cpumemory.pdf
If you do not take it as an offense Sir, it would be certainly helpful to you if you can add a new word to your vocabulary which I believe is already rich due to your extensive reading (since you have mentioned Alice in Wonderland). That word is "Sarcasm". Reading P.G. Wodehouse too might be a of help.

Some one also told me that women are better jet riders because it doesnt have a reverse gear.
Being Boston, I'm surprised the cops didn't paint it as a bomb scare. Boston PD has to be neck-and-neck with LAPD for most corrupt police department in the country.
#10 Now that's just insulting. Who's he calling average?

The average programmer.
Removing Features [On bloating apps with features and saying no]
You're right, I totally missed that announcement. That pretty much invalidates my whole point, sorry.
The fact that we are suddenly upset with this Orwellian, warmongering murderocracy because they're also RACIST just shows how messed up our priorities are.

We've been well trained, Pavlov-style, haven't we?
We still don't know for sure why Apple pulled the camera from the last iPod Touch update. Jobs has claimed it's a combination of keeping the price low and the way the Touch is now positioned as a game system, but plenty of people don't believe that. Adding a (admittedly low-end) camera didn't seem to impact the Nano's price and the leading portable game platform, the Nintendo DSi, packs two cameras.

I think it's all about not undercutting the iPhone. The iPhone has 4 things the iPod Touch doesn't have: voice calling, 3G networking, GPS, and a camera. The iPad is adding GPS and some models will have 3G networking. If it had a camera, it'd have all the features of the iPhone except voice (and pocket size).
What I find striking is the huge approval ('helpful' votes) that this (1-star) review and two other thoughtful pans (a 1- and a 3-star review) received on Amz.

For a 2002 book that still sells quite well in hardcover (coffee table book to impress geeky friends?), the huge overbalance of negative reviews is something this Amazon addict does not recall seeing:

5 star:	(89)

4 star:	(38)

3 star:	(50)

2 star:	(60)

1 star:	(104)

Perhaps somewhere in all those I'll find someone who's culled the gems from it. "Hacker Readers Digest" where are you?
Windows Azure Tools and SDK 1.1 (February 2010)
"Actually, I wasn't against all merchandising when I started the strip"
Emacs Lisp seems to be the 11th most popular language on github. Common lisp, clojure and scheme seem to be 19,20 and 21 respectively. If we count them together, they might make it to top 10.
comments on links
rss feeds of my links
Well, let's see: the boss' desk is made of some expensive wood, mine is plastic. That's just skimming the surface, though. There is a board six feet from my desk which lists every name of regular employees for the two groups closest to us on the org chart, with a plastic marker indicating whether they're in or out of the office. The arrangement of names on that board is important: last time it got shuffled the lady in charge of it literally solicited the opinions of two senior team members as to whether it would be more appropriate to swap CoworkerX and I or not. That's superficial, though, too.

To really get a feel for it you'd have to go to the office and watch who talks to who and how (Japanese has multiple different levels for polite language). For example, I work very closely with M-san. M-san is freakishly talented and a good company man -- everyone treats him with more respect than you would have predicted for his age. Except for S-san, our crusty old network admin, who is the 10x engineer to M-san's 10x engineering -- his form of address for M-san is close to "You, boy, I have homework for you". He puts his bare feet on the table when talking to the boss, and gets away with it. On the other hand, we have, say, a particular engineer my age who is not very seasoned yet, who gets talked down to by OLs younger than him.
Human heart is a Turing machine
#2 Heroku
I wrote up some thoughts a while back:

http://www.b-list.org/weblog/2008/jun/18/html/
I don't know why you're getting downvoted. I laughed.
(Note, I myself started with Lisp prior to Common Lisp by a few years, but I used it near its inception and have vaguely followed it since then (I soon switched to Scheme and now am playing with Clojure).)

"Have I just hit a bad corner of the Lisp world?"

Yes, you have; for the things you want to do you should try either a Scheme that has the libraries you need (I'm not sure if there are any (probably not, but maybe try one that e.g. already has IRC stuff?)) or Clojure, which by virtue of sitting on top of the JVM and having fast and clean interoperability handles the libraries problems.

Dependencies are handled by existing parts of the Java ecosystem and/or the relatively new Leiningen system (the name is a play on ant, the first Java build system).

Warning, in terms of functional programming, there's a continuum of CL < Scheme < Clojure. Unlike the others, Clojure is not multi-paradigm, you will use it functionally (well, unless you use it as syntactic gloss for programming in Java, which misses much of the point).

Here's the most recent HN item on getting up to speed with Clojure: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1086562

Note that getting SLIME up at this very moment might require a bit of trickery, a recent SLIME commit broke it for Clojure's use of it. Be sure to check out the Clojure Google group and feel free to ask any sorts of questions on it if you get stuck (the community is a lot better than CL's).

(Historical notes: CL is bad for networking and concurrency because it was formalized before there were standards for those areas and it has been stuck in amber since then. Various implimentations have non-standardized libraries for them (there may be something of a standard for threads, I forget, but in many CL implementations threading support itself is iffy at best). And you already know the networking story (which CL are you trying?).

Scheme standardization is very slow; it is progressing, there are optional SRFI (Scheme Requests for Implementation) standards for each of the above (I think, not sure about networking), but I can't recommend it for what you're trying. If you e.g. wanted to start from the bottom up by going through the SICP or another book, that would be fine, or if you wanted to research language stuff it's great, but it just doesn't yet have a general modern programming ecosystem and won't for some years if ever. In general, you match your needs with the implementation and its packaged libraries and go from there. If you want to try that route anyway, ask me for some pointers.)
We're Shutting the Offices and Going Virtual: An Experiment
An image of Uncle Max here:

http://www.neatorama.com/2009/10/09/the-mysterious-disappear...
Of course, it's nonsense because a heart isn't infinite...
great, no words
Because it's a comment on an ongoing case, the newspaper probably attempted to corroborate the fact with Glick himself, but he probably referred them to his lawyer. It's the smart thing to do, even (some might say especially) if you're a lawyer yourself. Comments on an ongoing case should go through the lawyers involved instead of the individuals involved: they have to be very careful about what they say so as not to tank the case.
This is an important truth.

On a related note, I (and I suspect many other hackers) have a billion cute little applications I've written over the years that do very specific things in exactly the way I want them done.

The interesting thing to me is that I'm reluctant (embarrassed?) to release them because I'm afraid of the phantom snobbery that pervades engineering culture. Since my apps and utilities are "trivial," I fully expect to be ignored at best, or maybe scoffed at for my stupid, toy applications.

Then I thought, maybe that's an allegory for the whole software ecosystem... everyone's so afraid of being "trivial," that few people are willing to do one thing and do it really well.
this is a bad thing?
Malleable Maps, Artistic Robots and Bubble Interfaces
See my comment here:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1094925
Remember this next time you read Yegge's rants.

Well, even deep understanding doesn't imply the ability to predict, unless chance plays little role -- a stipulation which is manifestly not the case, here.

Edit: grammar
"so what's in your life these days?"

I was deeply disappointed that the interview did not center around this question. We know he's not writing C&H, so is he doing something else that he finds meaningful? Does he spend all his time gardening? Does he still draw, doodle, or write? Does he ever feel an urge to do something creative that has nothing to do with comics or Calvin and Hobbes?

Seems a huge missed opportunity, to me.
http://hixie.ch/advocacy/xhtml

"A number of problems resulting from the use of the text/html MIME type in conjunction with XHTML content are discussed. It is suggested that XHTML delivered as text/html is broken and XHTML delivered as text/xml is risky, so authors intending their work for public consumption should stick to HTML 4.01, and authors who wish to use XHTML should deliver their markup as application/xhtml+xml."

Note the date (Sep 2002) and the fact that the author is now in charge of the HTML5 spec.

Some people argue that forcing web developers to follow rigid XML rules, plus an appendix full of hints on how to mangle your XML so that actual browsers wouldn't choke on it (http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/guidelines.html) somehow got people in the right mindset to do semantic, accessible HTML. The prevailing view is that this was mostly cargo cult behaviour and neither those following or recommending this course of action really understood the supposed benefits or drawbacks.
Yes, #10 is a bit offensive, implying that he is in the top but you probably aren't. Also, it is rather unlikely that you can attain a huge productivity edge over others in everyday tasks like "take an old buggy codebase and add a simple feature here and there". This might work in more research-oriented programming, where some can create things that others didn't even think possible; but I don't think that's what he means.
The Cat That Predicted 50 Deaths
I actually love these types of apps. Especially when they are all wrapped in a single file which usually makes the download/use/delete cycle nice. Also the single purpose websites that I can upload data to and perform some trivial calculation (calculate rhumb line distance given list of lat/lng pairs).
#8 Google Apps
Alternative title: The Cat That Caused 50 Deaths.

Just as much evidence for one as for the other.
Petition to encourage government departments to upgrade away from IE6 [UK]
I noticed that too. But it's not hard to verify his occupation, or at least that he used to practice law, either through court documents, LexisNexis, or newspaper archives.

One other thing that came up last night on the local public radio station: They interviewed someone from the ACLU who said that if the camera was hidden during the taping, that would be a violation of the law (it wasn't, apparently).

That made me wonder: If I had a Web cam on my computer facing outside the window, and it is not obvious that it is a camera (on an iMac it's impossible to see from more than a few feet away) and it captured such an arrest, could I be arrested for secretly taping the scene?
This is an important case to watch, and I think the precedent set will have compounding effects in the future, either leading to a more or less transparent government, depending on which way it falls.
You guys seem to be saying he was wrong on most of them. I strongly disagree. Sure, he didn't nail every one exactly, because he's not psychic, but for all of them, he correctly saw the trend, and he's very in the ballpark.

1. This is happening, just not as quickly as he thought, and with JSON. (XML Databases)

2. If you actually read what he wrote, this is obviously happening. EC2, Github, Heroku. (Open Source Hosting)

3. Using processes instead of threads is absolutely rising in popularity.

4. Off on the timing, but we are in the middle of an explosion of other JVM languages. The JVM has clearly established itself as the best way to launch a new language.

5. Off on the timing, possibly off completely. Clojure is gaining in popularity, which ties in with #4. (Lisp in the Top 10)

6. Facebook. This one was easy. (Community Hangout)

7. He was actually late on this one. iPhone obviously. (Mobile Computing 5 Years Out)

8. Google Apps. (I'll Pay Google)

9. Wrong literally, but if you take out netbooks, which weren't around, Apple sells the large majority of $1000+ laptops, and they obviously sell a ton of iPhones, which are just small computing devices. (Apple Selling Laptops)
The Etymology of the Word Tsar
The origin of the name "Tsar". The story of Princess Zoe, Zachariah the Jew and the Worst Political Move in Papal History.
Maybe a case with a loop on the back would help for the one-handed manipulations.