skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That's great if you work down the hall from the guy that wrote the language but unless you're talking about a niche in house language when it comes to web development you're talking about what half a dozen people that you can claim that against? And how many of those work at Google and the like?

The vast majority of people will never have the opportunity to be down the hall from that guy and for the vast majority of people a large helpful community will be infinitely more valuable.
Agreed. No one pays for the flash player, so who cares what the player is. Just become the best at content creation. There will always be a huge market for creating all of what flash does today.
Yeah. PHP and Ruby are contemporaries; I shouldn't have described it as "newer". But I would argue that unlike PHP, which was crude but useful right from the beginning, Ruby took a long time to gestate. It's only really in the last few years that Ruby's made the transition from enjoyable academic plaything to serious tool. And let's face it, we needed to wait that long for computers to become fast enough to run it ... ; )

But now, there's an astonishing amount of development and innovation surrounding Ruby. Look at MacRuby, for example - if that isn't a vote of confidence I don't know what is. In my opinion, the language is only just beginning to properly hit its stride.

Who knows what will happen. Ruby might fail to gain critical mass, of course. But my point was that the OP's assertion that Ruby had tried and failed to make its mark is very premature. The Rails hype might have died down but from my perspective Ruby has more momentum than ever.
New Hubble camera photographs unusual comet inside solar system
It's a cool spin on the HN look and feel but the value HN brings to me is the comments users post.

The whole point for me is seeing the conversation that takes place on HN after an article is posted.
Anybody know if there's a way to force an update via WiFi? If I go to 'about' and then 'system updates' no updates are listed. Also, how does the update process work if you don't have a data plan? Thanks.
Not really, that type of efficiency is not predictable.

From Wikipedia:
"scalability is a desirable property of a system, a network, or a process, which indicates its ability to either handle growing amounts of work in a graceful manner or to be readily enlarged. For example, it can refer to the capability of a system to increase total throughput under an increased load when resources (typically hardware) are added."
Doppelganger on Facebook: Facebook Celebrates Celebrity Doppelganger Week
Is there an HTML5 alternative to vector graphics? Even if HTML5 take down flash video, will we all still have the flash plugin for games and other interactive uses?

(or will we just write all that crazy stuff in the new javascript libraries: http://raphaeljs.com/scape/)
Indeed. I argued for the same thing in more detail here:

http://www.stevenwei.com/2010/01/31/the-best-way-for-adobe-t...
I would rather not have third party applications pollute my DCIM directly. Inevitably I will have to go back and clean up after them. I'm now wondering if this explains why I suddenly have broken/blank images showing up in iTunes from photo imports from my iPhone.
http://code.google.com/p/trash-cli/

I don't know, maybe if you're old-fashioned you won't like the trash metaphor, but I love it. And every so often I just do
trash-empty 30
to clean out anything older than a month.
There are countless tragedies caused by police officers speeding after criminals. So I would say no, they shouldn't go speeding off after the criminals. As the cops often say, "You can't outrun radio waves!"

In the robbing store case, there is probable cause to enter the premises.
Not very SEO friendly by having all the content on one page like this
I think his point is a bit deeper than "I don't like it". His point relates to the distinction Alan Kay makes [1] between programming languages which are either an "agglutination of features" or a "crystallization of style".

In terms of features, Python is definitely strongly of the former variety: it has objects, but not in "opinionated" sense that Smalltalk or even Java do. It has lambdas, but limits them to one line. It has closures, but until py3, they clashed with the implicit declaration syntax. There isn't "one obvious way of doing a lot of things" more complicated than iteration.

dustin's py-github [2] is an especially poignant example which comes to mind: I would never have used classes for something like that, and Python doesn't give a clear reason to use them or not.

1. http://gagne.homedns.org/~tgagne/contrib/EarlyHistoryST.html

2. http://github.com/dustin/py-github
Gordon To Render Flash for the iPad?
Wow, $8.55 an hour with no benefits AND self-employment taxes (as a contractor). Even if I loved the work, I couldn't keep up my modest lifestyle on that kind of pay. And no, I don't have any debt and I'm good at managing my finances.

He talks about the candidates who complain about the pay, but he neglects the fact that anyone with a decent head on his shoulders would simply laugh at the job listing and move on. He never even hears from the best candidates. It's simply irrational for someone even moderately skilled to settle for that kind of pay.

If you were talking about $60k vs $90k, I would say the people you want are the ones who don't care about the money. But if you expect a highly educated and motivated person to be happy making minimum wage, you've got serious issues.
Video: Android’s New Pinch-To-Zoom Multi-Touch In Action
"Git standard workflow"? Where'd you get that notion from? Supposing there is one, care to share?
NEXTGRES Gateway: Database agnostic compatibility layer
These three things aren't really new in web analytics nor specific to social.

And it's blatant misinformation to describe "traditional web analytics tools" as "useless" when it comes to tracking dynamic pages that don't render new pageviews. This is especially misinformed if we're talking about Google Analytics, SiteCatalyst, NetInsight, WebTrends, or just about any tool which can handle event tracking, which has been a standard feature in web analytics for years.
How does this person have the audacity to criticize Python?

Has a blog and an opinion, whatever its merits. Wasn't the great thing about the wide open web that you can do this without it being an exercise in 'audacity' and without knowing more about anything than some guy named Guido?

And why are we all reading it?

Someone upvoted it to the front page of HN, I think.
> The problem with an implicit "self", aside from it violating the Python Zen, is that it makes a number of cases nastily ambiguous. For example, consider the following method:

However, the syntax for the explicit self is somewhat awkward. Instead of:
def f(self, a, b): ...
it could have been
def self.f(a, b): ...

[This isn't original to me - Guido has mentioned it when he gets tired of hearing about explicit self.]

With the second, the structure of the argument list in the definition looks like the structure of the argument list in the call and the "self" is where the instance comes from relative to the method name.
Hello pot. This is kettle. You're black.
Yes, you are right about the zoom. That's odd. Actually, when i zoom in on my Nexus One (with the control buttons, not pinch) it does scale the image until the new one appears.

And, no, please no. The way the browser adjusts the text width is really a nice thing! If you care about how your page looks like on a mobile device, do a mobile version ;)
I can't successfully click anything on the front page.

I'm using Google Chrome on Linux.
Yup, and thinking in terms of "customer development", perhaps you can share some hypothesis use-case of how a non-techie would use this.

Meaning, in what situations would the non-techie say, "gosh I need to know exactly what file this is?"
China is taking all the massive cash it is making now because there is no other really big and cheap factory, and sticking it into infrastructure. Buildings, roads, subways, minority villages - all of that is being built up.

Even if you have a crash, a built road is still there and a built office still exists. Pudong is empty because the offices are expensive and it's not really in town - if a crash happens that forces the government to reconsider whom they want to target pudong at, then there will be enough people moving in there when the prices are right.

China is not developed, it's developing. It's not borrowing from the future - the U.S is borrowing from the future and giving it to china. China is taking the money and building infrastructure.

Property is not expensive in china. There is no excessive inflation or speculation. China has the typical bubble of any rapidly growing economy, but the huge internal market, massive infrastructure development, and large population of highly educated people, and the introduction of chinese businessmen to secondary markets in Africa and South America mean that the fundamentals of the chinese economy are fine. If there is any bubble, it will blow over and growth will continue.
My guess is that not very many people are talking about it because with Flash 10.1 Adobe added support for multi-touch. Once Flash becomes available on a lot of devices that support multi-touch, you will probably see developers adding proper support to their games. If a mouse is present, use it. If multi-touch is supported, use it. And so on. Granted, the current support has problems in some browsers and on some operating systems, but that will (most likely) only get better as long as the multi-touch input information is available through the browser.

Some more information on multi-touch support:
http://theflashblog.com/?p=1678
Agreed. Scripted/interpreted languages are, in general, one to two orders of magnitude slower than a compiled language such as C/C++. It's damn difficult to go much better than 10x slower due to the nature of an interpreter--even fast opcode-based interpreters. There are some extensions to the GNU C/C++ compilers that can help here, though.
Apple's open source page is as useful as having Tivo's open source code. If they won't let me code for the iphone on my pc then it's hardly useful or open.
This makes intuitive sense. A great deal of operations on computers today are not CPU bound. In fact, the CPU (plus GPU) are sitting mostly un-utilized. Processors are fast, memory is cheap--both expand following Moore's law.

But hard drive speed does not follow Moore's law. If hard drives are the most significant bottleneck, it makes sense to reduce the amount of seeking and reading the hard drive is doing, shifting the work to the usually-idle multicore CPU+GPU.
Death to Internet Explorer Long Live Internet Explorer
C'mon though - you need to meet people half way and read a little. From the Github README (http://github.com/mxcl/homebrew/):

Here's why you may prefer Homebrew to the alternatives:

Zero configuration installation

Copy the contents of this directory to /usr/local. Homebrew is now ready for use.

Or… install anywhere!

You can actually stick this directory anywhere. Like ~/.local or /opt or /lol if you like. You can even move this directory somewhere else later. Homebrew never changes any files outside of its prefix.

The GoboLinux approach

Packages are installed into their own prefix (eg. /usr/local/Cellar/wget) and then symlinked into the Homebrew prefix (eg. /usr/local).

This way the filesystem is the package database and packages can be managed with existing command line tools. For example, you can uninstall with rm -rf, list with find, query with du. It also means you can install multiple versions of software or libraries and switch on demand.

Of course, you don't have to do anything by hand, we also provide a convenient and fully-featured four-letter tool called brew.

You don't have to sudo

It's up to you.

Create new package descriptions in seconds

Package descriptions (formula) are simple Ruby scripts. Generate a template with:

brew create http://foo.com/tarball-0.8.9.tgz

Or edit an existing formula:

brew edit foo

Package descriptions not required

MacPorts doesn't support the beta version? Need an older version? Need custom compile flags? The Homebrew tool-chain is carefully segregated so you can build stuff by hand but still end up with package management.

Just install to the Cellar and then call brew link to symlink that installation into your PATH, eg.

./configure --prefix=/usr/local/Cellar/wget/1.10
make install
brew ln wget

Or Homebrew can figure out the prefix:

./configure `brew diy`
cmake . `brew diy`

Optimization

We optimize for (Snow) Leopard Intel, binaries are stripped, compile flags are tuned to your exact Mac model. Slow software sucks.

Making the most of OS X

A touch of RubyCocoa, a cheeky sysctl query or two and a smattering of FSEvent monitoring. In these manic days of cross-platform development, it's can be a welcome relief to use something that is better because it isn't too generalized.

No duplication

MacPorts is an autarky -- you get a duplicate copy of zlib, OpenSSL, Python, etc. Homebrew uses what is already there, and consequently, most stuff has zero dependencies and builds faster.

We resist packaging stuff that is already packaged. So we have a wiki page that describes how best to use RubyGems, Pip (or easy_install) and CPAN with OS X and Homebrew.

Fork with Git

The formula are all on git, so just fork to add new packages, or add extra remotes to get packages from more exotic maintainers.

Surfing the cutting edge

If the package provides a git://, svn://, cvs:// or hg:// url you can choose to install that instead and then update as often as you like.
With the obligatory "I Am Not a Lawyer" out of the way, I should point out that in many places (it varies state by state) two-party-consent is not required. Two party notification is required. There can be some significant differences in some cases.

Again, far from an expert in law anywhere, but my understanding is that in most states you can go around in public openly recording conversations with no problems. The issue comes when you try to do it illicitly. A microphone that is obvious would cause no problems, but one that is concealed or otherwise nonobvious could be an issue.

If anyone really knows what they are talking about, I would be most appreciative for confirmation or correction.

As to how it should be, yes, I think that you should be able to record anything legally as long as the other party has no reasonable expectation of privacy (and yes, without their notification or consent as long as they do not then have a reasonable expectation of privacy). If you do something in a public place, you should assume it is being recorded. If you do something in the privacy of your own home or a bathroom stall, you should be able to do it with no fear of being recorded without your consent.

I know this begs the question of where we draw the line between public and private, but I think there will be little disagreement on most cases. Those fringe cases where there is disagreement I would tend to lean towards allowing recordings.

I think this should be true of all citizens, but I think it becomes especially important of public servants such as Police Officers whom the public has a right to demand accountability from. The Law Enforcement Agencies in America are fantastic, and I have the highest praise for them in terms of their performance and the effect they have on the streets of America. But they should never forget that they are public servants and (at least indirectly) accountable to the public in a Democracy.
I just poked around for a few minutes looking at the css grid he used for making it. It's interesting stuff. I think that what the newspaper layout does is make the newspaper readable while you walk by, over someone's shoulder, from various distances, etc.

These are newspaper problems. They don't exist when you're reading a screen. Novels or magazines aren't formatted this way. Why should sites be? It's not about content. It's about how/when you read it.

That said, I have learned something about how to layout a page in a way that looks like news. I suspect the main value of this is creating a mental association with a newspaper.
Yes, but how will that help the broad economy?

For example, it could help you to increase your level of military technology, but it doesn't provide markets for all those factories who's export markets are drying up.

Haven't we learned that central planning doesn't work (for long) for this sort of thing? See Japan, Inc.
There is no irony here. This is a discussion forum. If I check out a book from the library, I don't want to see comments scribbled in the margins, but I'm more than happy to join a lively discussion about it on HN or reddit.
Agreed, I've picked up some things from DIY stores in the UK that required full respirators, I don't understand the allegation that it won't go to market in the UK.

Hell, superglue is likely as hazardous if used improperly. I've seen cotton overalls lit on fire by someone dumping a bottle, and I was handed it in primary school! Cement is dangerous to the skin and lungs, especially mixing dry cement as the lime can actually cause chemical burns to your lungs, or you can develop silicosis over longterm exposure, hence face-masks.

There'll obviously be precautions that have to be taken. However it all depends on droplet size formed by the spray. A fine spray is unlikely to reach or coat a surface appropriately, so I'm assuming a heavier spray intended to coat a specific area. This means larger droplets and less spread of the spray, it also decreases the likelihood that it'll get through a face mask making a respirator less likely.

If it can be used with a simple face mask, it'll be on sale in the UK without a doubt.
Well maybe The Facebook guys were not only after speed optimization, but memory too. No matter how great the LLVM JIT is it probably uses some memory to compile the code, and this way wasting some amount. Static compilation would not waste this amount.

I'm actually proponent of JIT, over static compilation, but only for my little pet projects.

I don't know much about WEB, but for games development, static compilation is sometimes the only way to go (or script interpretation). Sometimes there is just not enough memory, and sometimes it's restricted (hell, it so much resticted that you can't change the VTABLE at runtime in C++ class even if you want to)
I can think of one particular case where this would help me. I somewhat frequently need to search for how to do X in LaTeX. If I'm not a little careful with my search terms, sometimes the image results are a bit interesting. :P
Inaccurate title: Thin Bendable transparent film allows input over any surface.

All a touch screen is a piece of touch glass over a screen....

Touch glass already exists, the newsworthy bit is that it is bendable.
$5-7
Wow nice. Reading sites like Engadget without comments is almost better than reading them without ads.

When I want to comment on something, I will come to a site designed for that. There, I have a single place to track replies, so I can actually discuss things, rather than which blog I commented on today.

I know for my own blog redesign, I will not allow comments. I just don't see the point.
Why should I use C since I already know Assembly? Why should I use Ruby since I already know C?

Haml and Sass are elegant tools for simplifying view code, and I never, ever use ERB or CSS anymore if I can avoid it.
Most local library systems nowadays let you do something kinda like this -- except for free.
I like it very much, good job. The only criticism I have is that the large icons feel more suited to display on a phone than on my desktop screen. I feel like I have to lean back to look at it, and I am scrolling a bit too much for my taste.
> Isn't that fairly strong evidence that it's OK to record public interactions without consent?

Possibly, in California, but not in Massachusetts.

Compare the 3rd paragraph of this page:

http://www.rcfp.org/taping/states/california.html

with the first paragraph of this:

http://www.rcfp.org/taping/states/massachusetts.html
Interesting. I might give Parallels a try, again.

I switched to Fusion after Parallels ate my windows partition during a Service Pack upgrade. Installing Fusion helped recover that partition so I wasn't too enchanted with Parallels after that.
An anti user private API violation retraction in an update.

They missed the feature in the original approval, then took something away from people who already bought the app. They should be required to offer refunds when they force antifeatures on users such as this.

Surely not everyone would take them, but some will
Installation is faster. You can understand how the formulas work. You can make your own. You can find lots of them very easily. You can contribute more easily. It's on GitHub.

I dunno - there's probably more, but that's a quick list.

What really drove me to move was that I was having trouble with Snow Leopard not being supported very quickly by MacPorts. Even once everything I needed was working, I still had problems with CouchDB and couchdb-lucene. I'm not sure what the problem was, but I tried a few things that were suggested, and nothing worked.

So, I did the whole Scorched Earth thing and started fresh with Homebrew. Everything worked right away, and quickly. I found formulas were added very quickly. I found some that weren't in the main repo (I think couchdb-lucene was one of them) and they were all understandable and worked well.

All in all, I just had a much nicer experience with Homebrew than with MacPorts. I'm not hating on MacPorts, I'm just saying Homebrew hasn't caused me one moment of grief since I started using it. Well... maybe one, because I had to find and install the OS X package for Git to get started with installing everything else ;)
This is the kind of innovative hack that I love to see invented but generally dislike actually using in real life.

Ultimately, it's where the line is drawn between the iPhone and something like Android: The latter is infinitely hackable and open to elegant and kludgy solutions alike; the former requires everything to work within strict boundaries to keep the user experience as seamless as possible.

Both have their benefits, a tradeoff of flexibility and stability. Which is why it's good that both are healthily competing in the marketplace.
You know what's hilarious? This page plays up the idea that the entire page should build up to some sort of awesome "prize" at the bottom, but if you go to the bottom of his page, you get a comments section. Some prize.
11 ways to influence people online and make them take action
now all it needs is a gui. and the ability to buy commercial apps directly through it. you could call it a sort of... application store, or "app store" for short. people will love it!
+1 for execution! may this be a motivation for others to execute like you.
Sure. Let's take another look at the article -

"Prediction #1: XML databases will surpass relational databases in popularity by 2011."

It's still completely wrong. I don't see how to interpret it as anything other than wrong. Yes we can sift carefully through it to find some way in which it's kind of, maybe right, sort of. We're discussing Steve Yegge's actual predictions not whether filesystems or the Library of Congress are really a special case of document databases.
Per Capita versus Total CO2 emissions by Country (Infographic)