skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Science had little to do with the failure of the anti-Global Warming movement. It's just an example of how bad marketing can be worse than no marketing. They've hit two home runs since the beginning of the movement, "greenhouse gasses" and the "green" trend. Apart from that, it's an incoherent jumble of wishful thinking.

A single sentence from Obama's State of the Union address did more to sell green energy than anything else I've seen in the past decade:

"But here's the thing -- even if you doubt the evidence, providing incentives for energy-efficiency and clean energy are the right thing to do for our future -- because the nation that leads the clean energy economy will be the nation that leads the global economy."

This gives a path to the future: combining American Exceptionalism and Green Energy into the same thought
What Pythonistas Think of Ruby
SEO Checklist
It seems to me that the core concept here is the declarative nature of the framework, and the logic that ties things together that comes from the compiler. On one side, it has to spit out Javascript, so perhaps it would have made sense just to do the whole thing as a hack/extension/whatever to Javascript?

I guess without actually seeing the code behind it, it's difficult to really say with certainty.
I'm going to make an iPhone app in one week, and you can watch.
Census Data Miscounts
No, they're mostly just dumb. Just because it makes a point doesn't mean it's good satire.
(We make checkoutapp.com)

We test, but we always put emotional arguments ("it looks better") above scientific data when it comes down to design. It's impossible to prove what gives better results in the long-term, but we would hate putting something online that doesn't look good to us. One thing I can really notice is that customers always tell us that our website/style stood out while they were evaluating the product, so it seems to work well for us.
From wikipedia (but it actually happened!):

In August 1999, Unisys changed the details of their licensing practice, announcing the option for owners of Billboard and Intra net Web sites to obtain licenses on payment of a one-time license fee of $5000 or $7500. Such licenses were not required for website owners or other GIF users who had used licensed software to generate GIFs.

Edit:

I am completely opposed to web standards including proprietary codecs. HTML5 should have Theora (or some other open gratis and libre codec) as the standard which all browsers wishing to be HTML5 compliant must be able to handle - this does not stop anyone from using h264 if they wish to. What it does is ensure that the web remains as free and open to use as possible.

If the working groups had plumped for Theora then optimisations and hardware would follow in pretty short shrift. It ain't going to happen and the reasons are commercial - this makes me sad for the future of the web, I see this is a big turning point. Kinda like if the developers of HTML4 had said "we know about the LZW patent but we're going to write in GIF as the standard requirement".

(Incidentally I gather that no image formats were written into the standards before?!).

So do you link to h264 videos from your intranet - want to buy a license for $10k? No? Switch to Theora as the best free alternative. OK, now none of the browsers support your video format natively. Congratulations you've been screwed again by MegaCorp.
Why Does Time Fly By As You Get Older?
We learned in Betamax vs. VHS that there are risks involved in backing an emerging format. The difference here is that it's a little easier for different codecs to coexist, even with varying licenses. The problem is that publishing shouldn't be limited to big players that can afford expensive and restrictive licensing agreements. There has to be a solution for the everyman, nonprofit, and nonprofessional. An unencumbered, nonrestrictive and free codec has to be an option, and Theora is one possiblility, if it can be easily supported in a product without worrying about licensing issues.
And now..animated 'news'
Nehalem Mac Pros take 20% performance hit when playing audio
First online issue of BSD Magazine
That seems to conflict with this: http://mpettis.com/2010/02/never-short-a-country-with-2-tril...
I tried to verify that the adverts used the same code, but I couldn't. Looking again I see that they do still use "DF" as the referral code, so I guess they aren't making any money from this. I take back my "spam blog" accusation! :)
Location Affection: How Your Location Can Affect Your Thoughts And Emotions
Hey, it's available:

buffalobuffalobuffalobuffalobuffalobuffalobuffalobuff.com

:-)

...but I think I prefer BadgerBadgerBadger.com
Oh, it's so nice to see IE6 finally die. Slow, much too slow, but now everyone can at least see the end.

(Is it realistic to expect IE6 to drop below ten percent by 2011? I sure hope so.)
STM just can't come fast enough for the languages I write code within at work.
Yeah, but whatever those "still to be specified categories" are, they're not going to include a whole lot of people, because suing people like that as a means to make money does not scale.
I used heroku with Google Reader previously to get them:
http://hackernews.heroku.com/<username>;
Maybe Cuban meant: "Hey pitiful newspapers, find a way to make money, like I did."
Salesforce Simplifies App Creation With Visual Process Manager
we have something similar in the hokkien dialect.. which goes ..
kong kong kong kong kong kong kong kong kong kong

which consists of ...
kong kong = grandpa
kong = says
kong = can
kong = hit
kong = dizy

but you have to get the intonation right .. lol
I think this is a good explanation of some of the very real differences between Python and Ruby. The lambda issue is almost enough to get me back to Ruby after switching to Python. I stick with Python mostly because of syntax (especially significant whitespace) and the batteries-included philosophy. I'm also in love with a Python library called pyparsing, the equivalent of which I haven't seen in any other language.
Andrew Warner should interview these guys immediately.
thanks for letting us know, that's really great.
I don't think so. I don't see any functional reactive stuff in Luna, whereas that's the whole point of Flapjax...

Edit: reading more closely, I see why you say that -- "incremental computing" link makes me think of FRP a little bit. But these people's goal with Lunascript seems to be automatic communication between the client and server. The "incremental" part is sending only what's needed to the client to execute the client-side code, which is a really cool idea, but not very much like FRP, I think.
What programming language to teach first
Joel is awesome, althought I don't agree with him on everything. He's got it nailed. When you're working a dead-end job, being paid less than everyone at other companies, in an environment where even your chair is falling apart, doing the same thing you did last year and the year before, money becomes a very big issue. It's why they pay people big bucks at banks to do COM/ATL programming. No one wants to do it and everyone recognizes it. I wish companies would take a deeper look at themselves and say "Am I really making a difference to my employess?"
Giles Bowkett has a quote I like that touches on that: (paraphrased)

We [programmers] create things that didn't exist before; when someone who doesn't have our knowledge is calling the shots we are working with a subset of possibility.
While it's not impossible, downloading an older version of java this week required jumping through new Oracle hoops on top of the already painful process Sun put in place. Please, Oracle, just give me a straightforward download link without requiring registration and I'll sing your praises everywhere.
While I don't argue your point, I've noticed a number of recent comments on HN that say: "I'm a consultant, therefore I am right."

My concern is that there is a winnowing of the data that any consultant will be able to comment on:

In your case, the web sites you can base your conclusions on are the ones that feel the need to hire a consultant to do load testing. This is not necessarily a truly representative sample.
All existing companies were once startups and almost none of them were started by aristocracy.
Maybe this is naive, but the younger you are, the larger the ratio of each unit of time to your total time lived. So each unit of time seems longer.
Here’s hoping for the dream scenario: Google release VP8 as a open and free format with a patent indemnity clause, then migrate YouTube over to it. They also release open specifications for a VP8 hardware decoding part, an OpenCL codec, and help Adobe bundle support into Flash for Microsoft and Apple browsers.

Happy days!
The British Empire was largely built from commercial interests - look at the East India Company and the Opium Wars.
It decreases the chance of an acquisition, unless things have changed since the last time I was involved in acquisition talks. A sticking point in at least 3 acquisition attempts I was involved in (one consummated) was the use of idiosyncratic tech; in one case, it was using Tcl; in another, OpenBSD.
if you have only few websites that offer content, sure, the one with the best content wins.

but iphone apps are a little different. they offer functionality more often than content. functionality can't vary by orders of magnitude as content can.

so you have many iphone apps that pretty much do the same things, differing only in minor features.

if the "primary" criterion isn't enough to make the decision, people turn to UX.

feels obvious to me.

if i had two websites (your example, not mine), and both offered almost the same content, i'd pick the one that appeals to me more.

that's how i made my choice of search engine. the major ones hardly differ in the quality of their results.
"I think it's ... dangerous .. for a small company."

of non compiler/language processing experts.

If you've built compilers before and know what you are doing (I have no idea if these guys are such experts or not) , it may be a reasoned decision taken after weighing benefits and costs.

Leon Bottou and Yann LeCun seems to have built the Lush dialect of lisp to build commercial systems. (http://lush.sourceforge.net/credits.html)

For example, I can easily imagine PG building a variant of lisp and building a product/company around that .
Of course if you only have a vague idea of how to build a compiler/interpreter/whatever, then building a company around your first such project may be ... interesting.
Corporate personhood is a worthy discussion. But it doesn't mean that corporations lack legitimacy as bad as the kings and queens of the past.
other GIF users who had used licensed software to generate GIFs.

In light of this article, that quote is quite interesting. Looks like this time around the software is only licensed to generate h264 for non-commercial reasons right from the get go. Something planning ahead?
Mobiles technology news
MobilesHandsets.com provide free and most authentic information like Latest Mobile Handsets, Nokia, Motorola, Samsung, LG, IMAT, Black Berry, Secrete Mobile Codes, Mobiles Technology News, Mobile Prices, Mobile Features and SMS for public benefit.
Everytime I come across this I have to go to the wikipedia page to check the grammar.

I find these types of sentences incredibly creative (and confusing).

A similar thing, inspired by buffalo and illustrated: http://myapokalips.com/show/15#comic
I'm afraid it used to be much worse, even if it's hard to believe after having just suffered through the Bush years. I grant you that ;-)
Jet brains Pycharm - New Python IDE by creators of IntelliJ
In college, my wife was told this sentence by a metaphysics professor. He also used to have acid flashbacks during class.
Accept that you'll never truly know where a packet came from. Work on the problems you can solve: software that's secure in the face of whatever packet it receives, identification systems that are secure enough in the face of the risks.

Schneier is spot-on as always, but the social problem is that this requires actually doing the hard work of building a secure product instead of calling for an impossible solution from outside.
You should build your own EV and give HN weekly build updates. We could give you our expert opinions on the style and technology.

The only catch is you have to get a license plate that says HN-EV.
Clojure Library Coding Standards (+ discussion)
Quiz: Are These Comments About the 2001 iPod or 2010 iPad?
Seems a bit of a stretch to criticise Mark Cubans comments based on an investment he made. Seems unlikely he's aware of their SEO tactics.
Should you shoot first or second in a gunfight?
This is actually a pretty reasonable idea. There are several considerations that need to be worked out first. Specifically:

1) there are few programs in the entire US which have nuclear engineering degrees (MIT has one, I believe fewer than 10 others do too), a topic requiring a sufficiently broad range of skills that its almost like a fusion [sic] of solid state physics (for robust materials), electrohydrodynamics (to understand anything relating to fusion and plasma), numerical computing (analytic solutions to realistic PDEs is a funny idea sometimes), as well complete case analysis of all possible risk and failure modes via probabilistic model building (there is in fact dedicated software used to handle the complexity of these models). In short, do we have the educational capacity to train the people needed?

2) at least with how current nuclear regulation is structured (which would presumably have to change), technically any new reactor designs that get approved are "exemptions" to a general ban, so theres actually a lot of time spent finaggling approval via a somewhat insidery process.

3) I want fusion thats commercially viable! :). The idea of having energy become functionally free and what would then be possible boggles my mind, and I don't think anyone can fully comprehend the myriad subtle ways in which the world would immediately change. Also, while in practice dealing with fission products/waste isn't that bad (and its much more contained than waste from conventional power plants), it is logistically tricky to manage both the waste and all the people who worry about the waste.
not this again, and at the top of the front page too... i've heard it often enough. please stop.
I do see it, but access to opportunities is now much broader than it was in Europe's aristocratic past.
Did Iran Just Rocket Creatures Into Space? Sure Seems So
That's what I always thought.Plus when you're older, for most I'd guess, your life becomes full of routines.

I used to think sitting through a 3 hour lecture was an eternity. Now after sitting at a desk for 10 hours a day 3 hours is just seen as a morning.
Why You Should Re-architect Your Career to Amplify Your Strengths
The mind of an entrepreneur is the mind of madness
I find myself in various states of agreement and disagreement. Sometimes I find the conversation really valuable, other times, I feel like I'm wasting my time. I'm talking about comments in general, not HN specifically. I still feel HN is generally worth it. We'll see.
>In a series of mock gunfights with colleagues Bohr always drew second and always won.

I'm hoping the author of this article just didn't want to elaborate, but Bohr never thought it could've just been that he was faster at drawing than his opponents? Switching it so he was the first to draw some of the time would have been better design.
I think I'll grab copies of all the packages I might need in the future, just in case ...
Thanks. My response was so long that I just blogged it:
http://mixergy.com/comment-a-hole/
They could put a link to this phrase they have on the top of the site "The world's most popular open source database", similarly to how they are linking to Sun servers.
OnePage: a new beginning
As an aside, pyparsing is based strongly on the excellent "Parsec" library for Haskell. A number of other languages have similar parser combinator libraries.

If you're looking for Ruby libraries specifically, check out: http://treetop.rubyforge.org/ (Treetop uses PEGs rather than parser combinators, but like pyparsing it integrates very well with its host language.)
Hive Media is proud to announce Hive Media Games
It's not self.call(:my_method) --- that's nuts. It's my_method[param1, param2] which is aliased to my_method.call(param1, param2). Ruby's syntax can be a crapfest (like Procs not being callable without [] instead of () for example), but this isn't an example.
How To Hack The Sky
A Spanish researcher demos new satellite-hijacking tricks with cybercriminal potential.
Really good article, imo
Regarding your first point, I believe the current dearth of programs is a function of lack of demand: When I was at Georgia Tech, we had a reactor on campus and still only had 3 Nuclear Engineering students.
The point is that you're a busy person and you are the sole arbiter of how your time should be valued, and that for some kinds of things, the price is what it is. If you can't pay, then you don't get to play.

I wish somebody had told me this when I started freelancing.
Don't confuse the dollar amount of your salary with your total compensation. Salary is only one term in the overall equation.

Consider, for example, a company that buys you lunch. Here in NY, lunch costs about $10 if you buy it yourself. If you're in the 25% tax bracket, that's worth $3,300+ in salary.

Do they provide daycare? Transportation costs? Paying for conferences? 401k matching?

Your friends that feel underpaid did a poor job of negotiating their total compensation. Next time they should sit down and do something along the following lines:

- list out every possible benefit a company might offer

- group the ones they personally care about (don't have kids? Then the daycare benefit is worthless)

- for the ones they care about, think about how much each one is worth in $ to them.

- think about what the minimum they would accept for that benefit, how much would make them happy, and how much would make the ecstatic.

- for the ones they don't care about, thik about how much it costs the company to pay for each

When it comes time to negotiate your compensation, always think in sets. Always word things in terms of how moving any one piece requires movement on a different piece. Give up the things in the "don't care" set for the equivalent value of something in the "want" set.

If they want to give you less money, you say you could agree to that, if they give you X number of vacation days. Or if they say they have free daycare, you say that you appreciate that, but since you don't have kids you would rather have "work at home Fridays" and a slightly larger 401k match.

Consider the total You are much more likely to get a larger total if you don't focus only on the money.

[edit: bad math]

(salary equivalent) = (daily cost * 5 days/wk * 50 wks/yr)
------------------------------------
( 1 - tax rate )

25% tax bracket
$ 5 lunch = (5 * 5 * 50)/(75%) = $1,667 salary
$10 lunch = $3,333

So if the company gives you lunch each day, it's worth $333 in salary for every dollar you would have to spend to buy the same lunch. That ignores the fact that your income tax rate changes depending on your salary.
I don't quite get what you mean in your last sentence - the fold is a perception of the viewer not of the content creator. These 3 sites haven't done away with the concept they've simply extended their handling in the paper versions attacking the metaphor in the same way as the original problem. Just like they put tag lines, teasers, introductions all with page numbers on actual newspapers they put short snippets on their front pages on the web.

Care to elaborate?
Natural Cures for Diabetes, Energy Healing Therapy
yeah, same. i think a lot of us had this news site journey
people buying machines with windows 7 helps. but there is a large contingent of corporate ie6 users that will die hard.
I thought we were "hackers" here with potential to create startups, possibly related to video or just using it as a support system?

If you have the need to pay for the sake of it you can relocate to my country, we have one of the highest taxes in the world :)
Are you sure you're using Theora 1.1 (aka Thusnelda)? Version 1.1 might be consider "inefficient" but 1.0 was simply "broken" for many uses.

You mention Macs and I'm not sure if there's been an official 1.1 release of the XiphQT Quicktime plugin yet, which would affect you if you're using Mac tools to generate the video.

Also, does Perian play Theora now? I'm guessing you meant the XiphQT plugin which enables Safari support.
Hey ohashi & netcan, do you have any suggestions for how I can improve the way I show the transcript?

I'm using a scrolling div after a few readers told me it's ideal for SEO, but I'm open to other options.

Each hour-long interview is about 10,000 words. In comparison, pg's latest essay on Apple is about 2,000. So I'm pumping out a lot of text.

As icey says, text isn't the main attraction on Mixergy, but I'm open to a better way to display it. If you have any suggestions, hit me.
I think your completely right. I was once talking with an angel about one of the companies they had invested in and got the reply "I don't know what their doing I'm just an investor." Whether this is a good thing or not is up to discussion.
It seems like the argument presented should be testable using amnesia patients. Assuming that their past memories are erased and that all experiences are "new" and need to be fully encoded, shouldn't science be able to question them to see whether, novelty is in fact linked to our perceived length of time?
This part of the article is most likely intended as a funny anecdote, not as an accurate description of a scientific experiment. Rest assured that Niels freaking Bohr would have thought of that.
Why?

my not-as-smart nokia running opera mobile reads hacker news and I can even vote via ajax (sans page reload).

That said. Your app looks good.
I admit the formatting is a bit bad. I was a little lazy and didn't want to seek out formatting rules. I would improve it now, but it seems I can't edit it any more.
Most important takeaway, obvious if you think about it: if the teacher is not comfortable (fluent, etc.) with the language, it's not going to go well.
That game is very telling. Try it at "arms length", then again with your face right up to the screen. See if you don't do much better when the dot fills more of your visual range. Speculation: a startle reflex depends upon the magnitude of the nervous signal, which is larger when more retinal cells fire.
Also read the counterpoint to Schneier's article (linked at the bottom of Schneier's): http://searchsecurity.techtarget.com/magazinePrintFriendly/0...
Not related to the article, but I really like the setting and layout of the top section. Felt like I was reading a magazine!
proc[arg1,arg2] is terrible; strictly worse than proc.call arg1, arg2. When I see an id followed by brackets, I'm looking at a collection, not a callable. This is only exacerbated by Ruby's weird/useful [index,length] convention.
Had the same thing except I found out about reddit from HN. On occasion I will still checkout reddit is sort of like those grocery checkout magazines, not going to read it for long but it passes time when your bored.
I've always thought something like this would be a great business model for networks like Foursquare. Don't give a free beer to the mayor - he's going to come to your bar anyway. Give a free beer to the person who, when she visits, ends up drawing in five of her friends.
I also like how he gets it wrong--using sudo means you use your own password, not root's.
Vorbis, however is really in the league of mp3/aac/wmv, so in the case of audio, picking Vorbis is really a no-brainer.

Maybe on desktops, but not on portables. For whatever reason (bad implementations?), Ogg Vorbis takes more processing to decode than mp3. Numerous portable players have shorter battery lives when playing Ogg.

http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/lofiversion/index.php/t5...
So... stupid question - Where's the code? It's the next day and no sign of it on github.