skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Does 'Rube' have a negative connotation attached to it? I mean we're calling Python devs 'Pythonistas,' which I also don't necessarily associate with negative connotations. Maybe I just haven't participated in enough Python-Ruby flamewars to know all of the 'secret' lingo that's only offensive to you if you are already part of that flamewar culture?

> Indeed, this is true. It's unfortunate that so many python developers don't follow suit.

Do you have any numbers to back any of this up? Is it possible that Python just happens to have a small number of really vocal hyper-proponents that feel the need to bash everything else? Could it just be that you aren't a Python programmer so you take more offense to your language being bashed and therefore notice if more often than others?
While it's not exactly related to the kernel, Matt Porter's presentation slides about Android and the discussion that followed in lwn raise some good points about the state of Android in the linux development community: http://lwn.net/Articles/360343/
VentureHacks StartupList Helps Fledgling Startups Pitch Top Angel Investors
what about how jekyll works made you want to do something else?
Should this really be so surprising, though? Lisp is based on a different model of computation than Python and Ruby. You can't follow non-trivial C code without understanding pointers, or Prolog without understanding unification.

Syntax aside, the semantics of Python are intended to be unsurprising to people with a conventional programming background. I don't have any practical experience with Ruby, but it looks like a mishmash of Smalltalk and Perl to me, and I can usually get the gist of code snippets. Likewise, I can kinda-sorta follow written Dutch (since I've studied German and speak English fluently), but I wouldn't expect to be able to just read Thai.
This won't solve Mozilla's self-imposed problem at all. MPEG LA is still charging royalties on all H.264 decoders and encoders, which Mozilla refuses to pay. Also, MPEG LA reserves the right to charge webmasters as much as they want after 2016.
I have most at:

http://blog.awesomezombie.com/2009/12/analyzing-y-combinator...

Although there are a few '09 ones which have gone public since my post which I haven't got around to adding yet.
Popular videos online from bit.ly
Bit.ly labs
It would be interesting to calculate how much Mozilla and Google's posturing with Theora and On2 has saved Youtube in fees over the next five years. But since the prices would have been set by an entirely opaque cartel of patent holders, it would be mostly guesswork.
It's an Atom netbook with a touchscreen instead of a keyboard. The OS is based on Debian, so it should support Flash out of the box. But it will be slow, and the resolution could be problematic when attempting to use an onscreen keyboard to edit dialog boxes in regular applications (assuming it can be done at all).
"Islam is" auto-fill is back on Google search
Well, there are problems with only relying on renewable power sources. Weather patterns change. At a glance, it would make sense to build smart a nuclear grid, then integrate distributed renewable power and storage options as appropriate. That gives the grid excellent redundancy and starts working on the current problems immediately while providing breathing room for the renewables.

The nuclear plants could then be used as backups and power government supercomputers when not needed (or something).
Hacker News is one of the best looking sites on my G1.

For some reason I have never been able to post comments from the phone. I have to go pull up a full browser to post. Any ideas why? Is it just me?
It is cheap, but the scary thing is building the app dependent on H.264, and letting them control things.

I'm actually trying to figure out whether or not to have the user encode everything, and absolve me of any of the encoding details, or licensing everything myself and doing it for them.

Right now I'm planning to have the filmmakers encode and send me final deliverable product, but to ensure a standard of quality, I'm also requiring videos to use H.264/AAC or dolby digital, or Vorbis/Theora. Still ironing out the details, but obviously part of my service can be absolving them of licensing issues so I'm still not sure which way to go.

Also it's a pay-to-download service for films, so all videos will probably be longer than 12 minutes. Pretty sure I can't get it for free.
An offtopic here, but I just wanted to say I was pleasantly surprised with how blazing fast your blog is (including leaving comments).

I was even more surprised when I saw what it was running on: http://www.dotnetblogengine.net (because I'd never heard of it and not because it's .NET - the speed actually makes sense now).
Two reasons mainly:

- I wanted it to play well with Heroku, Jekyll generates files, which is incompatible with the read-only filesystem of heroku.

- I wanted something really simple, Jekyll's become a little too heavy for what should be a simple task.
In the US, nuclear power is already cheaper than coal because we get most of it from old plants that have already paid for their construction costs, so now we're just paying operating and maintenance costs. Now imagine how much the situation would improve with any of these way of decreasing nuclear costs (in order of increasing radicalness):

* Mass-production of modular conventional reactors, like China is gearing up to do with AP1000 plants.

* Mass-production of smaller fourth-generation reactors, such as pebble beds (again, China is doing this) or some of the various breeder reactors, like the Hyperion Power Module.

* The same as above, but with Brayton-cycle gas turbines instead of steam turbines. This leads to simplified reactors and higher thermodynamic efficiency and quite significantly lower costs.

* The same as above, and then you stick them on a boat. This lets you float them to wherever they're needed, and the sea-water handles their cooling needs without costly cooling towers, and they can provide water desalination with waste heat. A nuclear aircraft carrier is already providing large amounts of fresh water to Haiti, and other countries are having serious water problems, and would pay good money for this. More here:

http://finger-tree.blogspot.com/2009/11/floating-nuclear-pla...

* Liquid fluoride thorium reactors. I love LFTRs; they're so damn beautiful that I'd recommend having a look at them just to appreciate the cleverness. They can be made at any size, they're self-regulating, they can load-follow beautifully, they can use supercritical CO2 turbines for cooling, the waste is tiny and becomes safe after about 500 years, and the fuel supply is enormous.
If they're not functional how much to you think STM will help in practice?
It's the same bomb with a longer fuse.
I was working on aneutronic fusion for some time: my feeling is that there is a lot of research to go before we can know if it's even feasible; even then unless there are breakthroughs it will be difficult to do in small reactors. There are significant thermodynamic barriers to be overcome e.g. Todd Rider's thesis (I believe they can but they're difficult -- almost like no-go theorems for fusion).

As for whether one could do an economic study, I believe at least one could lower bound the cost, using the cost of the balance of the plant (steam generator, heat exchangers, cooling towers) and an expected cost and lifetime of the various structural and shielding materials.
No, not really. In fact, they don't even mention us when they release their new features that they get from us. ;)
OK, while they may not actually have been dropped or routed to /dev/null in a technical sense, they have been inaccessible in such a way that if making them "inaccessible for a while" was going to reduce the traffic to them, as suggested by the post I was replying to, then it would have had that effect already and this surprise traffic wouldn't be a problem in the first place.
Some ssd-drives have compression on board to save space,speed and help endurance.
I'd like to point out that cheap energy storage actually improves the economics of nuclear power, by leveling the power demand, so they can productively produce power all the time, and hopefully replace natural gas for peak power.
i cant seem to reply to your reply...

as to your point 1, have you seen:

http://www.jstorimer.com/2009/12/29/jekyll-on-heroku.html
Well the whole royalty situation is making Flash video look really good. It solved similar issues when it launched to alleviate us of player hell in Windows Media Player, Real Player and Quicktime all breaking each other and fighting for file extensions. Flash has On2 and can play H.264. If Flash just could get hardware rendering support beyond full screen scaling, then they might have a fighting chance being that there is piles of money people will have to pay to make a content site. The window is closing on the video shakeup and it will cost alot to run one very soon.
"Technically inclined" != "smart"

Not always, anyhow.
Well of course. The vast majority of students are there to get the piece of paper that they can then staple to their resume. You don't get that by auditing open course ware.
Does 'Rube' have a negative connotation attached to it?

Yes, and it's been a common insult for at least a century: http://www.google.com/dictionary?aq=f&langpair=en|en&...

Do you have any numbers to back any of this up?

We don't need to look any further than this thread: 30 points on the initial Ruby/Rails-bashing rant that also insults Ruby developers, 6 points on tghw's comment that insults Ruby developers with outright name-calling. Par for the course.

Could it just be that you aren't a Python programmer

No, considering I've been using python on and off for almost a decade now.

your language

Or it could be that there is no "[my] language" and I'm just willing to call out rampant hypocrisy and language-bashing when I see it.

Honestly, I find it interesting that people assume someone doesn't use Python just because they call out Team Python on their non-stop trolling and language-bashing. "Either you're with us or against us," apparently. Big surprise.
Web presentations without the file downloads or flash compatibility problems
Corporation Says It Will Run for Congress
The Mac UX out of the box is really quite terrible. Cmd-W doesn't close the window/tab, Cmd-N doesn't create a new document and New Document itself is hidden somewhere in the Edit menu. There's an overzealous use of function keys. Resizing the window is very laggy on my relatively new MBP.

The whole thing feels like a Windows application that was dragged kicking and screaming into OS X.
I really think that Spotify is going to put Apple into a tough spot. iTunes is fairly useful, but there are a lot of difficulties I have with it. A trend is emerging where Apple is starting to be harped at for their closed policies by more than just hackers. This could lead to a tipping point against them if the issue builds traction. The more content they get their hands on, the more regular users are noticing that they exert a lot of control over their content. For some, this will never matter, but the number of people who it does matter to appears to be increasing.

Aside from this, Spotify appears to be on the right tech trend: cloud computing. With Google prepared to release a cloud computing operating system, getting more and more info off of our computers and into a centrally located space seems to be the way to go. Why not just run Spotify and have an app that manages and streams my music from my phone? It means I don't really need a huge hard drive anymore. It's convenient because rarely do we just listen to the same limited playlist over and over again; people tend to enjoy a lot of variety in their music.

I believe Spotify is on trend, and this will give them the advantage in the future. More and more of our life content will keep moving to the internet I think (I think this is a good thing as long as security is kept up).
Perl followed by C
That was the worst justification of tech spending I've ever heard. He "had" to buy a blu-ray player just to play Disney movies for his kid in HD, and it's better than buying it from iTunes because it comes in a case.

It's pretty much the opposite conclusion I came to for my kids and I've been ripping things mainly to keep their grubby fingers off the discs.
Stop using Screen. Switch to Tmux (http://tmux.sourceforge.net/). Screen is voodoo. Tmux isn't.

EDIT: Compare my tmux.conf (http://pastebin.com/m2394d7a2) and my screenrc (http://pastebin.com/d7bb649a5). It was much easier for me to set up tmux the way I wanted from reading the manpage, than it was to configure screen. My screenrc is a hotchpotch of cut-and-paste from lots of different sources, but I never really understood screen. Maybe that's just me.
And this goes double for language designers!
Microsoft announce Office 2010 Release Candidate
I like:

Oysters oysters eat eat oysters.
But how do the costs of any of the above compare to the cost of building a wind turbine? Even taking the fuel and operations and maintenance cost to be free, how does one compare the capital cost against other renewables where you don't pay for fuel?

If you use a Brayton-cycle gas turbine for a nuclear reactor, for example, now heat exchange to the gas becomes the biggest issue. And even the most optimized gas peaker turbine plants cost $500/kw.
US intelligence: al Qaeda attack attempt on US soil certain
This has been posted before http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=886900.
Tell HN: Hacker News Clone for iPhone Developers
It seems to me that there is enough interest in developing iPhone apps to merit its own little Hacker News clone. The App store has its own economics and community that overlaps HN but is a bit different as well. So here it is: "Apper News."

My hope is that it can be a place for intelligent discussion and a nice community for all of those developers out there hoping (to continue) to be successful at the App store.

Please let me know what you think, and please sign up and contribute!
I'm disappointed that he didn't try non-blocking IO. I suspect it would have ended up simpler than the threading approach he went with.

Still a very cool piece of work, though.
Probability distribution parameterizations in SciPy
Energy storage isn't currently viable economically, but, speaking as the cofounder of a startup in energy storage, soon will be :-p
This only applies to the content creators, not the browsers. I think Mozilla will still have to license h.284 if they added support to Firefox as they are a commercial enterprise?

Adobe has poured alot of resources into the Flash platform over the past few years, but most of the enhancements have been around video. Most of us Flash Developers will tell you we feel a little peeved that some areas have been overlooked... I know there has been a bug I've been tracking for over two years with Adobe that stops me using the SoundMixer class in any of my apps. This added competition of HTML5 is only going to be a good thing as it will make Adobe concentrate on all areas of the platform. Thats why I get frustrated that the only discussion is always around the damn video tag!

Apple is part of the group that owns the h.264 patents. They will make money from anyone who licenses it. This is why it is important for them to stop other codecs being available on their devices. If content providers decide to use a app instead of a website to publish their content on the iPhone/iPad Apple could very easily just deduct the licensing costs from the money received from the app store (Free apps are covered as free content).
If the corporation is under 35 years of age, it can't run for president.
Sorry, startups!
[Confirmed] Windows 7 Kills your Laptop Battery
Debugging PHP Web apps is (relatively) hard to do
Absolutely. However, storage helps intermittent and unpredictable variation more.
I was browsing the Java API docs a few days ago when I noticed that the shortcut icon (left of the URL in firefox) had changed from a steaming mug, to a white O on a red background.

That's when it really hit me.

(Though I think Oracle have changed the icon back since.)
It's probably at least one person's full time job at Google to worry about these things.
I agree with the author's point, but I really wish there were some examples. It's one thing to say that you're against stupid, boring interface design. I think we could all agree on that. But I bet we'd have a slightly harder time agreeing on just which interface designs are stupid/boring and which are simple/elegant.
Older discussion thread
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1033444
Ah, I see what you were saying. Yes, the problem here is that they WERE unassigned, and so people lazily or unintentionally started using these IP's for other purposes. Now that they are "real", it seems like some portions of these subnets are going to be practically unusable.
Kind of like Bruce Willis in Pulp Fiction
This is great, I was really hoping for Redis to take this direction, since keeping everything in memory wasn't great for my current project.

In the same vein, I have an idea about forking memcached and turn it into "memd". Instead of just caching for reads, it would allow writes to be done in memory too, which are asynchronously synced to disk when an item expires, or based on certain conditions (I'm thinking based on both time since last updated, and when enough updates are made). Now obviously, this only works if the data you store isn't all that important, which is probably the case for most web applications.
$25K is right at the upper end of affordable(1), although considering the vastly decreased cost of ownership if everything goes right, I wouldn't mind spending a few thousand more.

(1) http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405274870490560457502...
Thanks for this information, much appreciated. My want to develop on the device is nothing more than a hacker wanting to play with his iphone. My business partner does love the idea of me learning it however...

Edit: typo.
Does this boil down to a case of Worse is Better?
I agree that jekyll's getting a bit heavy, although I'm definitely not even taking full advantage of all it's features. I still don't know much about Heroku though, and this might be a good way to try it out.
It's well-established in the literature that a year feels like it takes (20 square years / {your age in years}) to complete.
Jython project lead joins Sauce Labs
Couldn't MPEG LA easily amend the H264 licensing terms to make users of Flash liable for royalties? It doesn't seem to me like Flash lets you avoid anything with the exception of a decoder fee (since Adobe pays for that).
You are missing the fact that when people create wealth it need not be in the form money or that it cannot be converted to money in the near future.
You don't have to choose a single option, even for a particular project. I've worked on websites/apps that have integrated 2 or 3 different server-side languages and frameworks. If you have a programmer that says "eww I'm not touching the WordPress part because it's in PHP" they just aren't the kind of programmer I want working on the project. Also, if you have a programmer that goes out an freaking re-implements WordPress in Ruby on Rails simply to avoid using a second tool, they probably aren't commercially viable and I don't want them either.
When do the patents on H.264 expire?
> have you never switched to a more productive language and cringed when you went back to the old language.

Yes, but the difference is not one order of magnitude. Not if there is some level of sanity in the language (e.g., I am not talking about brainfk). For example, even though one can program faster in Python, it is not 10 times faster than in C, especially for large-scale software.
I've been using tmux, but it feels less inituitive than screen, and I haven't seen as many howto's and such for tmux as I have for screen.

tmux may be better, but it feels harder to get proficient with than screen.
I believe Python has a yield statement, or am I missing something?

http://docs.python.org/whatsnew/2.5.html#pep-342-new-generat...
The simplest way that you can measure & tweak usability to your site is to do some basic field testing.

Nielsen has an excellent outline for actually testing and applying basic user interface design here

http://www.useit.com/alertbox/anybody-usability.html

If you have a budget, do it up right.

If you don't, rely on family and friends that fit your demographic.
I suppose so (hey, Lisp is The One True Way), but also don't expect your users to be super-human (i.e. garbage collection is best for many of not most problem domains).
Nobody likes the unfamiliar.

Then why is your blog dim white letters on a black background?

The first thing my reptilian brain thought was that this was some kind of left-brained new-age artistic fluff. But it's not. You have important points to make.

So do your readers (and back button pushers) a favor and practice what you preach. Combine your artistic tendencies with a more familiar, more functional white background and reach more of us. You can do both.
The way I remember it myself is by building it up in my head first:

cows intimidate cows

Scranton cows intimidate cows.

cows Scranton cows intimidate intimidate cows

Scranton cows Scranton cows intimidate intimidate cows

Scranton cows Scranton cows intimidate intimidate Scranton
cows.

Once I've got the structure in my head with pauses to break it up for myself:
Buffalo buffalo pause Buffalo buffalo buffalo pause buffalo Buffalo buffalo it's pretty easy to grok (and spit out on cue to the disbelief of others).
The poem actually misses a word with multiple pronunciations, that's already embedded in the poem: console (line 9). I can console you if your console gets broken.
The xkcd IRC channel instituted the Robot 9000, which mute-bans anyone making an unoriginal comment. Obviously this does not prevent trolling, but it does reduce some of the more low-hanging fruit of retardation: http://blag.xkcd.com/2008/01/14/robot9000-and-xkcd-signal-at...

4chan also implemented Robot 9000 on one of their boards: http://boards.4chan.org/r9k/
Startup Agile Sports plays role in NCAA signing day
Debug your Elastic Mapreduce job flows in the AWS management console
Corporations aren't natural born, and therefore can never be president. Although if we repeal the natural born requirement we can finally see Arnold run against Cyberdyne (and this time its for the presidency!...).
What is intelligence?
Unfortunately the device does not allow you to change the key. I wish it did, or maybe someone could explain how.

To make it consumer friendly it comes with the SSID and key printed on the back of the device and no way to change that. You can see a picture of the label in the picture in the article -- its right below the SSID.
Sure, go for the patent.

The problem is litigating the twenty or so patents any large company can pull out of the bag, which, if you squint at the blurry lines, might overlap with what you are working on.

Basically, yes, having a patent yourself would be a great help, but it doesn't solve the problem when people are getting patents on what amounts to standard practice.
I'm teaching you that different interactions are ok. Unfamiliarity isn't wrong, it's just different. People get used to it, and often times prefer it. Consider my site your education on different contrast ratios. You did, after all, read the post.
Adding features means adding code that almost certainly has bugs. So, not only have you invested time in putting something in, but you're on the hook for more work down the line, which reduces your ability to a) fix other bugs and b) add/change something that has a more compelling use case.

I'm more of the mind that apps should be made with a reasonable[0] API so that people can write add-ons and plug-ins.

Promoting an eco-system around your app increases its value, and it offloads (to some extent) the burden of having to add all those features people say they "must have".

[0]: Defining this is the tricky part ;)