skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
For anyone who's never tried: Building Rube Goldberg machines is insanely hard. The idea is to build a machine that looks as difficult and improbable as possible. Pieces that are destroyed or completely changed during the operation are par for the course. For each run, the entire machine needs to be reset manually. If one piece fails, you have to reset the whole thing.

The whole design process is basically fighting against yourself--how insane and ridiculous can I get and still have the thing work.

tl;dr We lost the Rube Goldberg machine contest and I'm still bitter.
Rober Ebert gets his voice back
I bike to work. I highly recommend it. It takes me about 10 minutes longer in the morning, 5 in the afternoon. The difference is a bit more with low traffic, less (or even favoring the bicycle) with high traffic. For those 15 extra minutes daily, I get 2x25 minutes of high-intensity, low impact aerobic workout. I don't pay for gas. I have a dirt cheap car because I don't care about its gas mileage, etc. I can focus much better after the morning workout. I don't have to "sneak" anything. :)

And: I can't get out of the afternoon workout. Gotta get home!
Would love to hear pg's thoughts on how well the contents of this email would do as a YC application
We wrote this a while back as a test for another project. Would love feedback!
Is there a technical reason why Ruby doesn't do this?

More likely it's political. Matz (the creator of Ruby), and many of its early contributors, are said not to like Unicode.
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/02/obscene-us-manga-co...
There is a test room that never expires(The rooms created expire after 20 minutes) if you want to chat with others from HN http://www.squarechat.com/hntest
You're stating it's not useful to you. You're not the target market for the iPad. I personally don't have much of an interest in the iPad, but I'm not willing to go out and say that nobody else will.

You could care less. But you know better than to download malware. Most people don't, and I'm sure you know that if you've ever had to fix someone's computer over the holidays.

As for netbooks? Triad them. Screen's too small for the elderly. Apple lets you zoom up things you can't see. I have horrible vision, and I have an ipod touch and a netbook. Guess which one I surf on? It ain't the netbook.

I really think they're targeting people who don't want a computer who want the Internet for entertainment, and nothing more. It's a good sized market. Time will tell if I'm wrong.
Automate my Ire
i wonder what google will do. I guess they may have a lot of patents, too. A big patent war coming?
Will MS take the chance and sue google or htc too? Or even nokia? :P
Apparently, Palm may have one of the biggest patent portfolios in this area (interesting read: http://www.engadget.com/2009/01/28/apple-vs-palm-the-in-dept... ), so their chance to join forces with someone?

Nah, probably nothing like that will happen. I just hope that ridiculous patent system in the US will change, it's awful.
NY bill to ban sex offenders from social networks.
I'm not a Ruby-head, so maybe I don't have the necessary context to understand what's going on, but:
As far as I'm concerned, the only time I care about encodings is when I'm trying to do I/O. I'll always have to choose an encoding when engaging in I/O, explicitly or implicitly. While I'm shuffling strings around in memory, I expect it to behave like a sequence of unicode code points. If the implementation wants to allow multiple implementations for performance reasons (e.g. because reading UTF-8 from file, converting it to UTF-16, processing it, converting it back to UTF-8 to send it over the network is inefficient) then that's fine by me. I'll still want to tell it what encoding that byte stream from which I'm writing is, and what that stream I'm writing to expects.
If I've understood the rant correctly, Ruby (1.9?) confuses byte streams with strings. That was a bad idea in C and with the complexity that unicode adds, this is an even worse idea nowadays.
Dealing with string encoding is sometimes a PITA. But I think as English speakers, we are usually sheltered from the problem because most programming languages are English centric. I'd like to hear opinions from people who don't speak English.

If you think the way 1.8 handles (or doesn't handle) encoding is just fine, try things you typically do, but with a different language.

For example:

ruby -ryaml -e'p YAML.dump("こんにちは！")'

You might also try things like inserting in to a database, parsing documents, etc.

IMO, not having an encoding associated with some text sucks if you're a non-english speaker.
Joel doesn't know you're not going to sue him. Lots of people file frivolous lawsuits against companies, in the hope of a settlement even if the lawsuit has no merit (it takes a lot of time and money to defend against frivolous suits). It makes no sense for him to expose himself to that sort of risk.
The chicken that I cook myself is plenty soft. But it is nothing like pre-processed chicken. In particular if you pay attention while chewing you realize that the pre-processed chicken doesn't have a lot of internal texture than the home cooked chicken does. Read The End of Overeating for more details.
Sun was never able to turn JME into a viable application platform. The standard library was too limited and didn't allow much access to interesting mobile device peripherals (GPS, camera, microphone, motion sensor, etc). So to write any kind of significant application required separate versions for each cell phone model and carrier using their proprietary API extensions, security system, and provisioning model. This fragmentation prevented the emergence of a developer ecosystem.
JME had a lot of potential at the beginning but Sun just couldn't execute or get the device vendors and cellular providers to cooperate on common standards that would have benefited them all. The iPhone and Blackberry have now made JME largely irrelevant.
Why would he shut down an major marketing/awareness channel so he can concentrate on stuff that he's not good at? I guess maybe because he wants to improve.

But I'd guess Fog Creek would be more successful if Joel focused entirely on being a spokesmodel and internal product leader and hired an operations person who was smart about sales, marketing, and channel distribution.
"I assume you are somehow related to this site"

ummmm, no? You asked for a tl;dr, I gave you a tl;dr. If you don't like it, maybe you should read the article instead. If I think the site is great and I want to express that, I do. So I'm supposed to hate every site I'm not related to? Or maybe just praise every site I'm related to?

edit: changed He for You
That page says there are duplicates in CP-932 because of different vendor variants. If those characters are otherwise entirely identical, calling it a single encoding seems wrong. Wouldn't you just have a CP-932-IBM and a CP-932-NEC encoding?
Or do intermittent-starvation/alternative day fasting.

I do this (48/24) because of the reduced likelihood of a recurrence of cancer. (The cancer I had seems to be accelerated by IGF.)
Apart from the machine itself, I love the camera work. It seems that:

- it (most likely) had to be a person, not a simple arm with camera, to pass through tunnels, etc. (yet the movement is really soft)

- the person had to keep avoiding strings along the way, which I imagine was quite hard while keeping the view on current action
For those of us nubs who don't know what PT_DENY_ATTACH is, I did a little bit of research and have come to this conclusion:

It's a flag that prevents a debugger from attaching itself to the process, aka preventing gdb from attaching to iTunes.
FWIW, I may buy an iPad to play with. But here's the crutial point - I can't see it being useful to my kids, or my mum, who are most certainly in the market you describe.

My mum has a macbook, which serves her fine. My kids have Netbooks with Ubuntu netbook remix which also is great for browsing the web.

I just don't see how the form factor makes sense. I can just see the write-ups now - highly irritating to use for long periods, aching hand/neck, too easy to drop, etc etc
Dup: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1161794
So.. After reading this, I began wondering if the company I work for does or doesn't fit under the umbrella in the article.

I work for a company that creates online digital "newsrooms". Basically, CMS on steroids. We handle everything for a company that needs to publish their PR content in a way that doesn't make journalists cringe and run screaming. I'm talking about Press Kits, Releases, Photos, Videos, "Baskets" or "bundles" of the above, being able to e-mail the bundles out to other press people, very complex embargoes on content (so releases expire or do not even show up before a certain time), very complex permissions and very complex subscription management systems, etc...

All of the above is... well... complex. The company found they were re-writing the system over and over with each new client, or worse, copying code from the old client.

So they created a system of plug-in-able modules of sorts. When a new newsroom wanted video stuff, we plugin VideoManagement, and all the requisite features get shoved into the new client's app. When a client application that uses video management finds a bug, it is fixed, and pushed out to every other client site that is actively maintained, and they get the fix too.

On top of this, though, the client applications are able to be customized with new layouts and such. Always a bit of a pain, but it's still capable of being customized fairly easily.

So is the company I work for wrong for doing that? We don't have any real clients other than these types. We've found a niche, and have found plenty of business within that niche. Does it not make sense in this case?

I ask here because I'm unsure of whether or not I feel like the company I work for is the exception simply because I work for it.

Thoughts?
That doesn't jive with what I know of Matz. Japan (and much of Asia) adopted Unicode much slower because both UTF-8 and UTF-16 are less efficient than many of the native encodings for representing much of what they need; there was definitely some cultural tone-deafness in the Unicode community when it did Han unification (which may be a good idea, but could have been handled better).

Matz (and the people he works with who use Ruby to get their jobs done) needs access to data that's Not Unicode. Painfully Not Unicode as in it doesn't necessarily round-trip.
The Hype Machine is awesome.

http://www.wearehunted.com is another good one.

Got a band you like? Check out their top friends on Myspace.
I think the reason Apple went after HTC was to establish precedent against the smaller competitor. I recall a patent troll chasing after a very small company re: push email a few years ago as a initial step to getting some cash out of RIM.
This seems like a problem unless your application is truly shared-nothing. Imagine what happens if the red code puts a piece of data in the shared cache, that is later retrieved by the blue code. The blue code gets confused, and crashes (or more likely, subtly corrups some other piece of data, which confuses the red code...)

Also, database schema issues, users wondering why a feature disappears when they reload the page, etc.

Either are definitely improvements over the usual dev / staging / production nightmare, though. (Sometimes I think people like that setup because their lives are boring and hacking on the production site at 5am on a Saturday adds much-needed excitement to their lives. I can't think of any technical reason for it, anyway.)
Is It Real, or Is It Randomized?: A Financial Turing Test
Good points. :)

And a better deal.

Taking advantage of "This is a not a dead tree" is sorely lacking in the E-books I see. Even the page layouts of E-books assume you're using some shaped-like-a-page viewer, rather than allowing for a flexible layout that works well across different screens and devices.
yes, that's why i am wondering if google will step on HTCs side, as this clearly threatens android.
But it also threatens practically every other mobile manufacturer, as HTC is a strong partner for WinMo devices.

And not to speak of Nokia or Palm, which could be in trouble in future, although probably not sued by apple. I bet nokia and palm have a shitload of patents, they could probably shut down competition without problems. Just guessing, though.
Because someone unified two similar encodings into CP-932/ShiftJIS. That someone who unified them wasn't IBM or NEC (both of whom made competing systems and had made different encoding choices, but whose choices were mostly compatible).

Rules for dealing with legacy encodings:
1. They make no sense.
2. If you think they make sense, remember that you weren't there so refer to rule 1.
The performance is better if you use an encoding with a fixed byte-length character-set.
I grew up playing Mousetrap.

That was a sweet game. :)
there's no way the average American consumes almost 3800 calories a day.

Here's an "average" american diet:

breakfast: bagel with creamcheese = 430 calories

mid-morning latte = 225 calories

lunch:6" subway cold cut sandwich = 410 calories

lunch: small bag chips = 400 calories

mid afternoon kit-kat = 500 calories

dinner: spaghetti and meatballs = 970 calories

12 oz bottle of budweiser = 110 calories

total: 3045 calories

Considering that many americans are going to get the 12" sub, drink more than 1 beer and a bunch of soda, have seconds for dinner, and eat "dessert" every night, it doesn't seem that far-fetched that the average american consumes 3800 calories per day.
Going Async [podcast]
Netbooks suck to use, I know because I'm using one right now.

Small, cramped, hot, ugly.
I'm a Barbie Girl in a CS World
General question: Why didn't the UTF-8 boys and girls make it safe in the first place? This doesn't sound like rocket science. "This character maps to that character, this character to that one." I don't understand how we have unicode snowmen, but we can't safely round trip characters.
Yeah but that's your family. In my house, Kid #1 slings a macbook and a netbook with no problem. Kid #2 is 2. She loves looking at pictures on the iPod. Kid #2 will be hacking soon enough. But that's the environment I created, and I guess it's just like yours.

Kid #1's friends have computers, but they don't use them like we use them. They use email and Facebook. (Yes, I know, I already covered Flash games previously, so we'll need to see on that one.)

They don't know or care how their computer works, they use Internet Explorer cos it's there, and they don't download software because they've had to pay so much to have it removed by GeekSquad.

This is a smart move by Apple. It'd be smarter if they'd just make Flash work, put a couple of USB ports on the thing, and let it be a master for an ipod.

The fact that you need a win or mac box with iTunes to get music on this thing could very well be the one thing that keeps it out of the reach of the everyman. In that case, you and I are in total agreement.
Doodle Buddy for iPhone Brings Out the Artist in Kids
In the million blog posts written on the Web about the iPhone since its release, I would say 90% of them talk about the iPhone’s specifications and features. What I find to be most amazing about the iPhone OS by far, is that my 3 year old kid can use my iPod Touch, select a game to play, launch the app, and play for hours, all without hesitating for a second. OK, that is not true for all apps of course, but there are certain apps that he just loves playing, Doodle Buddy being the main one. You can see an actual screen shot of my 3 year old’s work in the last screen shot below. I know, a true artist…
Kindle For BlackBerry Is Finally Here
Could The iPad and Kindle Kill All Quality Content?
Have the volunteer release his work/part under MIT license, then you can use it for whatever you want (open source or within closed source proprietary stuff). Another option is simply paying him a small sum, just so it would have been compensated work.
For those you who weren't around in 1984... Or didn't pay attention in high school english or decades old super bowl ads.

Apple's commercial:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OYecfV3ubP8

And the obligatory wiki link:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1984_(television_commercial)
I have to believe that what we're seeing is fallout from his posting on Inc. where he (publicly) lamented about how distressed he was by Atlassian's performance, and started demonstrating doubt that his company would survive. He compared Atlassian to Oracle, and Fog Creek to Informix. Even if he had those thoughts privately, to so openly admit to the competition, (and his customers) that he believed that Atlassian's approach might be more effective, and they would end up being the winning team, was unwise to say the least. (And violated several dictums of Art Of War)

I've used both Jira and FogBugz, so I take a little bit of exception at his statement "we have the undisputed No. 1 product among the 5 percent to 10 percent of programmers who regularly read blogs about programming."

I'd like to see the the numbers behind that claim. Perhaps they No. 1 product among people who read joelonsoftware - but "blogs about programming" in general? I'm willing to bet money that Jira has far surpassed FogBugz in that space, if only because every single company I know ends up using Jira for so much more than bug tracking.

You can be certain Atlassian is aware of every step Joel takes:

http://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JRA-19746
But that's with a 500% increase in time spent eating. It seems much more efficient to wolf down food after working out, assuming all we're talking about is net calories.
My game is more comparable to chinese poker than regular poker, as far as kind of strategy goes. The case of having to pick between several plausible hands is actually the common one. Someone who always picks the 'best' set of cards is very easy to beat.

I have heard that lowball is a very interesting game, and it does appear possible to do a lot of reads based on available information, although there's a lot less to see if you're just watching than there is in hold'em.
http://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=jasonmcalacanis

If you look at your comment history, this is not true. Some people are down voting you extensively in this thread, this is not true for the whole community or even for your comments outside this thread.
That is interesting and I think Pickemfirst could be useful for beginners. However, from the video I got the sense that the product was tailored more for the hardcore crowd (those who have multiple teams and read articles across the web). As a beginner, I don't invest that much time and usually do my player analysis on the provided site (ESPN, Yahoo, etc). Just my thoughts.
Java stores all strings in UTF-16. It probably seemed like a good idea at the time but has led to problems later. There is now a huge body of broken code out there which assumes that each 16-bit char value represents a complete and separate Unicode character.
How’d that work out for Reba?

And why did Reba want to learn programming in the first place?
Macmillan trying to sell readers 'hardcover' ebooks
It seems like you are looking for a functional answer to this question, and I just signed up to take a look.

It looks like twitter + images/screenshots, more or less. You can follow people, users can post text + maybe a screenshot, and there are comment threads about the posts/screenshots. I think what has the potential to be distinctive is the community that develops, rather than any particularly notable features. (That said, since on the web most features should arguably be community driven, this is probably just the core set of initial features.)

I think there is a lot of demand for a site that really facilitates developers meeting designers, but I'm not sure what format, and what interactions, make the most sense. I've been looking for a solution to this problem for a few years, and I haven't found anything really satisfying.
And you're thinking removing the keyboard will make it suck less?
Love the idea. A mobile version would be killer.

Some SEO suggestions. Turn your primary text into text. What are you: 'The ultimate fantasy sports assistant.' That should be your H1 text. All your subheaders should be H2s - or whatever, but not multiple H1 tags.

If you can, all that text up there should be text if possible. It will go a long way. As a recently addicted fantasy football player, I can tell you people are searching for words that you've turned into graphics. On a small marketing budget nothing beats free traffic. SEO shouldn't be a focus, but it is worth the small time investment to do the basic things - the terms NHL, NBA, MLB, NFL or words baseball, football, basketball, hockey never appear on your index!
Doesn't work so well. I think the guy there wanted to tell me something, but I could only hear his words VERY slow. Like a magnetic audio tape played back at much less than the normal speed.

Then again, who knows how far apart we were from each other, both geographically and from the point of view of the connection.
Python 3 doesn't use an internal encoding, it uses unicode. Python 2 can use unicode strings if you specify them. I'm not familiar enough with ruby to comapare the two, but I don't see a problem with how python handles it. You sometimes need to know about your string encoding, which is just a fact of modern programming.

[EDIT] I think I missed my point slightly. Python 3 doesn't change the encoding of strings, it decodes them to unicode. You can encode the string back to the original encoding without loss.
Around the world in 80 tweets
The Mythical Man-Month – book review
Ice cream is even better because it melts... if you are eating it over a period of 30 minutes, you've only had half of it because most of it melted and dripped onto the ground/your hand! If you eat ice cream really fast and then jog, you will probably get a cramp. But you might puke instead, which would make ice cream come out ahead again.
---

But seriously, this is a bad comparison. Eating the same amount of ice cream over 5 minutes or 30 minutes will have the same amount of calories.

The difference is that eating more slowly causes you to feel full at a lower amount of food eaten, which will keep you (typically) from consuming as many calories.

It is just as useful to eat a set amount (in five minutes) that is 10% less than what you would have eaten.

I think the technical term for this phenomena is the 'inverse Japanese hot-dog guy effect'.
On the first couple views I thought it had a cut while they reset the room---then I noticed that when they do the coloured fluid opening the drape they're actually going down a shaft to a different floor, and you can definitely see everything set up if you look for it. I think this might have actually been all one take (there certainly are enough destroyed TVs in the background to make this plausible!)

Wow.
Yeah I would be in total agreement if they'd come out with a macbook mini, slimmed down small macbook. It's just the form factor that I think is a big mistake. I think we agree on the software side.
Seriously.

I thought the mantra of presentations and UI design was Know your Audience. It would dopey to design for designers rather than trying things out with the people who are going to use the thing.
There needs to be more content geared to people who know nothing about programming. Those people have the highest hurdles to jump, as they don't even know what they don't know.
If I've understood the rant correctly, Ruby (1.9?) confuses byte streams with strings.

My understanding was just the opposite: now that strings are associated with encodings, he can no longer assume that a1 + a2 results in a string with the same encoding as a1 and a2, since a1 and a2 can have different encodings.