skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I disagree, simply saving someone's life from a sickness doesn't matter, if they die from starvation because there is not enough food in the country.

It is exactly like marciovm123 says, "This sort of spending tugs at the heart strings but unfortunately it can actually be quite counter-productive at improving the lives of people in undeveloped regions."

If a country is really that badly off, what difference does it make if we save people from one form of suffering only to have them be subjected to a different form. I agree with some of the above statements that the money would be better spent developing the infrastructure of 3rd world countries, rather than trying to solve a more isolated problem. Simply making vaccines cheaper is treating a symptom and not the problem itself.
;; python programmer who reads HN and Proggit

(defn factorial
[n]
(reduce * (range 1 (inc n))))
I'm proud to be a Lazy Python Programmer... but not lazy enough to skip "What's New in Python 2.5":

def factorial(x):
return x * factorial(x-1) if x > 1 else 1
Do people pronounce trie as 'try' or 'tree'? I pronounce it as 'tree,' which is why it took me a second to catch the pun.
Global warming is a perfect example. There are way too many people that point to a cold day and say: see?!

The message should be: there are huge changes going on right now, on a huge scale, beyond today's temperature.

The debate is also often linked to a proposed solution, which is a big mistake. Cap & Trade or a carbon tax are two of dozens of potential solutions. ThatSmugFucksPrius™ is not a solution, but way too often involved in the messaging.

Do you think there would be a big global warming debate if the proposed response was $200B a year in research? I don't. That is chump change with a bunch of positive externalities.
My problem is my hands start to hurt after typing on a netbook for any length of time. I usually use synergy to share a keyboard and mouse with my desktop and laptop, and honestly do more of my development on my mac laptop then my pc desktop. My laptop's keyboard is adequate but the trackpad is not. Switching between the trackpad and keyboard leads to pain.

My main problem is finding a quality split keyboard that has function keys without special functions and doesn't feel like I'm typing on a sheet of rubber.
Great point, Josh. I wrote in my recent chapter about ditching my cell phone that there's different "tools for different fools."

All one can really do is try and help people with things that have helped them
Thanks, but I don't believe in hell.

I linked a story from the LA Times and Wikipedia. I didn't add a single thing.

On the other hand, Microsoft, while BG was still in command, pushed incredibly evil (in my view) laws in my (developing) country (as in many others) regarding software, costing plenty of money. This doesn't now make it right for me, at all.

Note: I don't insult you, I don't wish you bad things, I just think differently and would love to express myself freely granted by our constitution and laws, and yours if you happen to be from USA.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_speech
Attn Joe [Hewitt]: Should we trust iPad?
T-Mobile to Replace Bum BlackBerry Trackballs for Free
I was a big fan of the: lazy python programmer, lazier python programmer, and python expert programmer series. Having been through that series, and watched many others go through it themselves, I find it to be the best HAHA-only-serious bit in there.

I'm not sure what it is, but at some point every pythonista seems to go through this love affair with functools + itertols + roll your own haskellish modules.
Nope. Thanks NoScript!
We take a combination of cash & equity for building startup technology to a 1.0. We then help a startup find a team and transition a stable platform to the new team. Not a model for a startup founded by hackers who can easily build it themselves, but for folks with significant experience in a specific industry, a management team, and a great startup idea who are looking for a VP of engineering we can greatly reduce their risk. It also reduces the perceived risk for seed stage angel investors, enabling the companies to raise money more easily. And everyone who works at Developer Town gets a portfolio of startup equity instead of gambling for one big win with a single startup.

We just started 1/1/10 - but already have a couple contracts in place even with a web-site that is still very V1. Feels like some real interest in the model out there.
Book review: 'Start-up Nation' by Dan Senor and Saul Singer
# "close enough" programmer
import math
def fact(x):
math.sqrt(2*math.pi*n) * math.pow(n/math.e, n)
print fact(6)

# lazy-er programmer
def fact(x):
factorials = {6:720} # found on my calculator, add more as they come up
if factorials.has_key(x):
return factorials[x]
else:
raise NotImplementedError
print fact(6)
Building a web application without programming is a challenging task. It is relatively easy to support simple domain models that have a few entities. When a domain model starts having relationships, things get more complicated. Will you support relationships in future? Or your business strategy is to start with simple domain models and then redirect users to your custom-made apps?
Yes, Great work. I guess i just misunderstood what you said in the earlier post.
Didn't notice anything. NoScript is my friend, I guess.
Shame he didn't work an "a/s/l" joke in there.
I like to hear pro Theora stories as much as the next guy, but the copy:

...We, Fronteers, the Dutch organization for front-end web developers, are increasingly being looked at to provide guidance...

Is a little hard to take.
Given that Ericsson F3507g mini-pcie card is $80 give or take, I doubt that the $130 3G upgrade is at cost.
I know your question is a joke, but it is frequently asked in seriousness, so: No. Not at this granularity. Otherwise the python community would still be using plone, and Django would not exist. Or there would be only blocking (or non-blocking) io. And so on.
The new and simple method was to use automatic saving and persistent data – but with iWork on the iPad as a serious content creation platform, this isn’t an option anymore.

Why not? Can we not think outside the box even when we've been outside the box? Or am I missing something?
Phonetically, it should be 'try,' but I don't know how it is pronounced usually.
Why not have the best of both worlds ? A nice home setup and a laptop as well. Laptops are nice but I don't think they will ever be able to rival a true desktop experience. Their keyboards are cramped and their screens often get tiring to look at. I've got one and another on the way but I still use my desktop when I'm at home 90% of the time . Not to mention with a 3-LCD setup I do actually see that boost in productivity that you spoke of.
It all depends on the job and how labor intensive it is. For many jobs that are not labor intensive , reducing wages below won't make a huge difference , but for those who wok for this jobs , it will make a huge difference.
On seeing like a cat
This sort of spending tugs at the heart strings but unfortunately it can actually be quite counter-productive at improving the lives of people in undeveloped regions.

I could not disagree more strongly regarding vaccinations not being an effective economic development tool.

Take the polio vaccination program for instance. Polio. Polio doesn't often kill people, but it does often make them lame for the rest of their lives. So, for every person that gets polio, they are extremely limited in the economic goods that they can produce, but they are also an economic drag on the family, because they are a financial burden rather than producing income. Polio has been almost eradicated, and the economic benefits to poverty stricken countries has been huge.

Small Pox is another example. It has all been eradicated, life expectancies have gone up in the third world because of it, and more people are able to produce income for longer.

Other diseases like Malaria, Cholera, Dengue affect hundreds of millions of people world wide each year, and they aren't necessarily killer diseases. And, millions and millions of people are affected by these diseased, and when they are infected, they are an economic drain.

Preventing these diseases with a simple vaccine is going to give a much greater economic boost to poor countries than giving them clean energy technologies or superhighways.

Keep in mind that in these countries, with no real legal system, unskilled labor doesn't mean gardening like it does in California but violence in the form of gangs/thug-ocracies who typically control access to natural resources or drug running routes

That, sir borders on the racist. What countries are you referring to? There are well over a hundred developing countries with various levels of legal systems and economies. Are you saying that all developing nations are thugocracies? Are you suggesting that any and all unskilled labor in developing nations ends up leading to gangs?
I have a hard time accepting his new found love for Apple when in the article before last, he was ranting about the evils of Apple's app store approval process. He claimed that he would no longer be making iPhone apps, and would make web applications instead. Now, he says that the glorified iPod touch is going force everyone to "re-imagine" their applications. Sorry, but I'll remain skeptical thank you very much.
It's very true that problems in high school are (partly) responsible for watering down higher education.

However, universities have vastly more problems than that. They are huge bloated organizations structured around funneling money to employees (from both students and the government) rather than educating students. The main reason people still go is for status signaling purposes, otherwise they would have been replaced long ago.
The "first year pascal" example has a metasyntax error. It's missing a "#end" token for symmetry with the C example.
Asus ConfirmsTegra 2-Based Eee Pad Slate PC
> I don't believe the new Web 2.0 frameworks are the answer

I strongly disagree, there are a growing number of people that are discovering that abandoning the server for UI, liberates them from this atrocious development methodology that web developers have been locked in.

Using a prototype based scripting language (Javascript) for the UI and coupling that to strongly defended (security, type safety, validation) REST services gives you a rapid UI for users to touch feel and change while Strongly typed services give you the metrics that the IT department needs to insure they are not getting crap in their system.

This is why products like flash made huge inroads over swing and other UI development products because they offered the people that use them the speed and flexibility they need.

Java on the other-hand has been the enterprise standard for as long as COBOL has not. Because it is safe and rigid and has a huge library, all the things a UI designer does not need.

For two long we have made one party or the other suffer the sins of the other development methodologies practice. Even if you are a long gunman (I now am). It is still a far more productive way to develop web applications.

The client model become very clear when one abandon the server model. The funny part is it makes both sides so drop dead simple that anything beyond the toolkits seem like overkill. The frameworks are so light they almost seem non-existent. It is very natural once one liberates oneself of the years of indoctrination of doing it the old way and stop trying to just sprinkle some in.
> And the hunting definitely adds some perspective to the ">4x increase" so it's worth mentioning. I'm surprised you didn't mention it to begin with.

I did. Hunting is part of "direct intervention by humans". Habitat is another.
/Equal speed means you hit the ground with equal force. The difference is the clock. Body meets Windy City sidewalk in 12 seconds. From an airplane’s cruising altitude, you’ll have almost enough time to read this entire article./

Hm. I see. I will always take a copy of it with me, just in case.
It would seem that the better you get at python, the more you really want a functional language. I know I went through this too (and I have moved onto functional languages for personal projects since..)
Functional programmer:

import operator
def factorial(n):
return reduce(operator.mul, xrange(1, n+1), 1)
print factorial(6)

Cutting-edge programmer:

import math
print(math.factorial(6))
"To slow your descent, emulate a sky diver. Spread your arms and legs, present your chest to the ground, and arch your back and head upward."

You will fall slightly (5MPH-ish) slower if you instead arch your back and arms in the opposite way, as if attempting to hug a large beachball. This position is slightly less stable though, so you risk flailing around and increasing your speed.

What the article did not discuss was any attempt at horizontal movement as a way of plummeting into something safer than a parking lot.
IPad clone arrived three months before iPad
it is simple business

Yes, and I just gave you a better business case to not vaccinate.

Second, the mercury and heavy metals that fish you eat might contain are not injected into your blood and small amounts if any gets there.

Fish are the number one source of Mercury poisoning incidents, according to the USEPA (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercury_poisoning#cite_note-EPA...). There is no protection offered from your digestion system against this heavy metal. Your argument is irrelevant here.

childhood diseases decreased 90% between 1850 and 1940, paralleling improved sanitation and hygienic practices, well before mandatory vaccination programs

Really? Source this please, because according to wikipedia, the UK Vaccination of 1840 first introduced vaccinations, which were made mandatory by the 1853 act. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaccination_Act#The_1840_Act)

That seems to coincide pretty well with the drop in diseases, actually.
If anything, your statement is more paternalistic, father knows best
FTA: It also estimates that an additional 1.1 million children could be saved with the rapid introduction of a malaria vaccine beginning in 2014.

Are we that close to a decent malaria vaccine? I might have to delay some travel plans if that's the case. Biohackers care to comment?
It looks like he does support relationships ("References" field type), although I don't see how those are displayed on the related record.
Does the problem happen with all email accounts or just some? (microsoft servers such as live.com and hotmail.com notoriously delete and reject valid emails when others do not).

Besides spf, make sure that you comply with can-spam guidelines. Ensure that your DNS entries are correct and that the url that you are sending from @example.com resolves to the same ip address as that url example.com. Here is some more info http://postmaster.msn.com/Guidelines.aspx . I had to add sender ID to my dns to get hotmail to accept forwarded messages from my disposable email service http://whyspam.me

http://www.microsoft.com/mscorp/safety/technologies/senderid...

get back with some more info, and i'll help you troubleshoot, seeing as how email is my current specialty.
Safari hasn’t chosen it as the default, it’s chosen it as the solitary option.

Not true. They've chosen to implement it in a codec-agnostic way. It simply requires installing XiphQT, which itself only involves moving a file into a folder. This is unlike (say) Mozilla, to which <video> support of h.264 cannot be added by any means.

You could argue that Apple have made it the solitary option on their mobile devices, but that's because it depends on the availability of hardware decoder support, which doesn't exist for Theora.

and the argument would be moot.

No, the argument would shift over to trying to get content creators to use Theora, even though 70% or so of the browsing audience doesn't support it or <video>. Web video would still be dominated by h.264 in Flash, the only format that would work everywhere.
I remember that the "Real World Haskell" was one of the first books sold-out at the OReilly booth at Pycon 2009, if you want more supporting (anecdotal) evidence.
Productivity can only be measured by lines of code-- what a co-worker told me. Reminds me of that dark, evil place.
Cost advantage has nothing to do with price or market segment. In the premium car segment, Audi has cost advantages over BMW, despite them both selling luxury vehicles.

You may be confusing cost advantage with price competitiveness. A lower cost of goods, or a better-controlled supply chain, can enable price competitiveness (like it appears to have done for Apple this time), but that's only one of the benefits.
Nope. I use select/middle-click to copy/paste. :)
Point. The equivalent dutch phrase didn't really have a good translation, and that sentence thus came our rather tortured. Let me see if I can make that a bit more palatable.

Edit: I turned it into "Fronteers is increasingly being looked at to provide best practices". It's still not quite what I meant to say, but comes closer.
Likewise, productivity of surgeons can only be measured in numbers of stitches.
15 Ways to Make YouTube More Useful
Sorry, but if the US decided to spend $200B per year on climate change research, which is decidedly not chump change, "debate" hardly describes the furor that would erupt.
6 Features Your E-Commerce System Should Have
If his foundation is run anything like Microsoft, their first move will be to develop a polio vaccine.
While very nicely written and a good read, I too was taken aback by "Lower body weight reduces terminal velocity" - Physics 101 anybody?
I've had the same thought. As long as the government keeps expanding the availability of easy and nearly-free credit for education, why wouldn't schools increase the price? Schools are basically competing with each via facilities, dorms, programs, and faculty, rather than cost. Until the total cost of college reaches the earning potential boost it gives you, that inflation seems pretty likely to continue.
It's not just the forefoot striking (also, Vibram != barefoot, call them minimal, if anything). When you run barefoot, you don't do anything stupid with your feet, like subjecting them to lots of impact, because it hurts!
About two years ago, I was in a programming class with a friend who regularly uses a netbook. Whenever I tried to help him track down a bug or modify a piece of code, I always complain about the puny keyboard. For some reason, I always inadvertently punch the wrong key, or punch many keys at once, or otherwise do something stupid. It was a nightmare to use, and I was either forced to do one-finger typing (and even that screwed up) or dictate the code for him to type.

So, my question is: How do you program on a tiny netbook for months on emacs with such a small keyboard?

Moreover, the text size on his computer was comparably tiny. For me, a netbook screen cannot comfortably accommodate two heads, while preserving a decent amount of code on the screen. My head usually obscures the entire screen and he'll have to remind me not to look so closely.

My second question is: How do you deal with text size without sacrificing the amount of code on the screen?
Does not do anything funny on the iPhone (tried both the mobile and regular version of the site).
something safer than a parking lot

One of those pools of colored balls at a McDonald's Kids Playland?
Yeah.All it takes is a way to browse those docs from within iWork apps.
British nukes were only protected by bike locks
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Applied_Behavioral_Analysis

ABA is some very interesting stuff. I had never heard of it before. Seems pretty simple and straight-forward too. From skimming the article it seems you simply keep some kind of log of behavior, try various techniques for changing said behavior, and track changes in the behavior over time to figure out what works.

I bet there's a good startup opportunity here. Hack your brain; shape your behavior. An app could aide the process of logging, measuring and tracking changes in behavior. It could suggest strategies and rank them by effectiveness. There could even be a web aspect for seeing what techniques work best for other people. Kind of like a more generalized version of RescueTime...
Microsoft: iPad’s Closed Platform is “Humorous”
Also anecdotal, but physicists and mathematicians are traditionally attracted to mountains. Tends to produce some notable deaths..

http://scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=355
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/02/20/science/20CLIM.html?pagewa...
Global Internet Usage
It looks like he does support relationships ("References" field type), although I don't see how those are displayed on the related record.

As a link. Have a look at the screen-shots in the walk-through - particularly the last image.

Mapping and accessing links are actually easy - relatively speaking. What is more hard is having to work without "join", particularly if one comes in with RDBMS baggage. One will have to unlearn certain rules.
It looks like you took the ideas (CRM, Creator) from your previous employer (Zoho) and put them in Google AppEngine...
Sweet. I tried doing a similar experiment targeting C++ years ago but never finished it.

Nicely done! How far along is it? Writing Perl-ish code that targets the JVM seems inspired to me.

Object oriented? Can write threaded code and all that? (there's been a number of times where Perl's shortcomings in those areas have prevented me from building better code).
Politico.com does the same thing: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0110/32217.html
http://dis.4chan.org/read/prog/1180084983/

http://www.hackerne.ws/item?id=1012877

Wow the domain can make a huge difference. :)
Does anyone have information on the rise of global literacy throughout the 19th and 20th centuries? I wonder if the dynamics of these two phenomena are similar.
> when the mainstream media in the UK did everything they could to fan the flames yet remain for the most part innocent

What definition of "innocent" are we using?

They may not be liable, but they're not innocent.
Branded short URLs in the wild and on TweetDeck
It's already in my feed reader, but thanks. Maybe I'll have to get on IRC more often... which channel is best for Rails 3 stuff?
Maybe I should add the commit list to my feed reader...

Gotcha. I'll probably write something up and post to rails-core, thanks.
Great, timely article!
I wonder if Brandon will stop by to comment on this: http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=BrandonWatson
I'm ashamed to admit that I actually learnt something new from this (the @tailcall thing)
The etymology suggests that you should pronounce it "tree". The argument for pronouncing it "try" is to avoid creating a homophone with the other (more popular) data structure. I would pronounce it "try", but honestly it doesn't come up in conversation as much as I would like.
I guess this is why I feel "Meh" from this device.

I don't browse the internet from the couch and have no desire to.
Web 2.0 programmer:

import urllib
import json

def fact(n):
res = urllib.urlopen('http://math.org/factorial/?' +
urllib.urlencode({'n':n, 'format':'json'})).read()
return json.loads(res)['answer']
fact(6)

Edit: for a "web scale systems guy" throw an @memcache_memoize in there :)

Edit2: fixed a syntax error.

Edit3: general cased it. thanks lolcraft!
I've had lots of success, getting jobs I want by approaching the right people and telling them how and why I should be kicking ass with them.

I got on a presidential campaign and ended up managing a congressional campaign doing this. I also landed some nice medium term contracting work with a couple different startups and an NPO, by approaching them and telling them what I can do to add value to their comp/org.
Damn, I read that and didn't understand half of the graduate stuff. Then again, I'm at work so what am I doing reading this? I have so much to learn and so little time to do it.