skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The layout of the page is terible:

Gallery, in a box
Byline
Sharing widgets
First paragraph
SUBSCRIBE link
Rest of article

Maybe I'm being dim, but it took me a very long time to work out where the article text was. It's positioned where the comments are in every other article, and the gallery in a box at the top looks like the actual content of the page.
Simplicity and good code is what we seek by practicing the art of programming. It's not meant to be an end.

The question of simplicity and good code is not a problem to solve but, rather, something that compels us to reach for more beautiful solutions to different problems — more beautiful than those we already know.

Suppose that Leonardo, after having painted "Mona Lisa", had concluded: "This is the most beautiful painting I can draw, therefore I'll just stick to the style and draw slight variations of her from now on because this is the most beautiful painting ever." He might have sought for something more, too.
This is another person who doesn't understand real Facebook users (as opposed to the people who just joined so they could "participate in social networking") at all. A leaderboard ranking your connections is an idiotic idea.

Having more friends generally equates to greater personal satisfaction with Facebook and in real life

This is the case only because the Facebook accounts of real users are actually a reflection of their real-life social networks. Those who are happy and outgoing in real life are likely to have larger networks of friends and acquiantances, which results in more Facebook friends. They do not "friend" random people, nor do they "make" friends on Facebook.
I wonder if one could get away with playing WoW on the iPad. Tons of hotkeys but I could still see it happening with a custom UI add-on for simple things like grinding, etc.
Somehow the future seems even more dystopian when, instead of actual games that might have some artistry, design, and cultural value behind them, the game they play is The Facebook FedEx Game.
It's a joke -- do a web search for "unified modeling language".
That's a very typical use case, actually. If you're on a phone or Skype call and you catch yourself saying stuff like "You see that link on the page, third one from the right at the top? Yes, the blue one, not the magenta one. Can we move it to right beneath the bit of text next to the picture of a monkey?" try firing up Woobius Eye instead. You'll then be able to just say "Can we move this link here?" Much more efficient conversation, and allows multiple sides to join in easily.
Thanks. @bobleung put together the video.

What do you mean by anti-aliasing, in this context?

Re: draggable vectors, you mean allowing people to drag their scribbles around?
[FMC]( http://fmc-modeling.org/ ) is much closer to the notation and level of abstraction you used in your diagram than UML.
Darwinian optimization
Fake Fryable, Brûlée-able Salep Dondurma Ice Cream: A Legal Recipe
pwning Chrome would give you more Kudos than pwning either of the other two. "IE on Windows was owned, yawn"
Also, the labels are fairly clear; I don't see too much of a problem for smart people to unlearn a bad habit. How many people here think that a kilometer is 1024 meters?
I would assume that teachers would need your bingo cards time and time again - they keep having classes to play word bingo with.

Have you A/B tested a subscription model.
Alright, let's be Rational about this.
LLVM, starting today.
Pure functions have one problem - they don't have state, and sometimes you need state.

What's needed is pure functions for logic, and dumb objects holding data, and function pointers.
Your company's urge to tweet
Divide and conquer algorithms -- the closest thing to magic we have.
Not arguing in a bad way - discussing maybe a better word? Anyway, as you say, we can not resolve if Linux is usable, because anybody on HN would be a nerd.
Air Pollution - Recognize the Serious Effects For Your Health
as a professional web developer, who has taught classes on the subject, i recommend you learn html, css, javascript, php, mysql. in that order, with a good deal of overlap.
I'm extremely interested what this entails; I've been thinking that I'd like to do something like this in the next few years. If you could provide any more information about what/why you're doing this and any insights you've had it'd be greatly appreciated.

Also my contact info is in my profile.
Here in Berlin I use car sharing for that. The next car is as far away as a parking place for my own car would be. It's 1.50€/h plus 0.2€/km. The biggest problem is that I have to put the car back to where I took it.
FYI, the music is by someone called Kevin MacLeod. He publishes Royalty Free music here:

http://incompetech.com/m/c/royalty-free/
It does exist but is not as important in seo as it used to be.
Motherfucking AS3 Garbage Collection
Yeah, I could see that. I guess the world I live in---my own situation, and those people I know---just doesn't involve lots of money ever being needed to take action. It's nice to have some cushion, so e.g. I can fly to Boston tomorrow if it turns out to be needed for some reason, and can pay my rent for a year or two if I decide to suddenly take off, but I just don't have any situation where I could see needing $500k or something in order to take action.

I know plenty of people doing startups, and I could even throw $10k their way if it'd help out (I've offered), but they just don't need it. The web side of things is so capital-free these days that they have no trouble self-funding, and what money they do need is easy to get from a few consulting gigs here or there (web-dev stuff seems to pay insane hourly rates).

I can imagine things I would do if I had infinite money, but they're more pie-in-the-sky "establish a fund for [x]" sort of philanthropy things. In my normal life, I just don't run across action I really want to take that is money-constrained.
I would definitely do car sharing if I could for that price. It's more than twice as much for me. http://www.zipcar.com/pittsburgh/check-rates
Eco Coke
I completely agree with this. Just cultivate an attitude of ambition in them. The environment will show them what skills are necessary to achieve their ambitions. I don't believe you should teach anything without demonstrating it's use; the environment does this more effectively than any teacher can.
I really had hoped the app would be called "interactive block diagrams".

Must admit I am not that big a fan of such diagrams, and your app just might explain why: apparently they just don't tell you that much, hence the need for more attached information that you saw. Not sure if your solution really alleviates the problem. I might prefer to see the information without having to click around.

Ie if I see a larger text with captions for the individual parts, it might be easier for me to zone in on the parts that interest me.
To me the only point that needs to be made, is that all these sites, like twitter, reddit, and digg, were able to move to a nosql solution like cassandra at little cost, and this solution was able to handle the loads that these sites required. Plain and simple there was no need for them to move to ssd's, or buy their own hardware, or to perfect indexes... the main reason MySql worked for so many startups is because it was free, and the initial headaches for scaling the database have already been solved, and we already know the limitations, no need to figure out how to make it scale at any great cost. Yeah its probably possible for Dennis Forbes to figure out how to make a rdbs scale, but does that mean every startup has to hire him.
Really? Because i feel the opposite way.

I bought an AMD card 2 years ago, a mid-range one, and it was a headache. Their open source driver didn't support my card and it had a ton of known bugs.

I had to resort to their proprietary driver and i had a lot of trouble setting up a basic dual screen set up.

Although I initially bought AMD to support them for their open source efforts, turns out it was more of a PR stunt than anything else. I'm an open source guy, but my time is more valuable than wasting it trying to set up a second screen!
Network speeds have always been base-10.
How to make blog
Autojump: a cd command that learns
I am looking for a video-presentation where Rich talks about this. Anything available online?
And Justin.tv is a UFC pay-per-view deal away from validating an entire industry... it is probably going to take them a while though, the UFC guy acted really angry at the congressional hearings on the subject of online live streaming video.
Hi Tichy,

Thanks for the feedback. Changed heading to "Interactive Block Diagram". Would you mean you prefer maps like interface?
Entrance might be cheap, but eventually you are stuck on Microsoft technology and paying more and more for it. But to be honest, I have not even looked at their pricing structure. I am pretty sure it is not all free, though.

I have been happy with open source software, so why should I consider switching?

Overall, I just don't like the feeling of being dependent on one vendor. Why take on that risk? I haven't closely followed the news, but there were recent HN articles that seemed to suggest to me that Mono isn't going so strong anymore either.

For consulting I probably wouldn't mind using .NET, the client chooses the technology. As long as it is not downright unpleasant (PHP), I would take it as a chance to learn from the competition. They probably got some things right.
The post says it's likely to only work in Chrome, but I got a look at the default "brushed aluminium" texture using Firefox 3.6, on Win32.
Arg, meant to update that. Apparently it works in Safari and Firefox as well, but I'm not sure on which versions will work. Gonna go edit now, thanks.
Ask HN: Good programming language for kids
My niece is 13 this week. For her birthday I've bought her a laptop and I'd like to get her into programming (I'm not a developer myself).

I was thinking of something like http://www.squeak.org/ or http://scratch.mit.edu/

What do you think?
In the day job, i use .Net(C#) within an all-MS environment. For my own business, I write in open source toolsets and frameworks(usually python stuff). So I can relate.

The thing is, the .Net framework is not bad. I mean, aside from it being proprietary, the design is not that bad. Read up on what miguel has to say about that, I tend to agree with him on this topic. If only they would embrace their community...

What's wrong with the .Net framework is the same thing that's wrong with using Windows as your platform of choice for development. If you don't hit any problems, then you will be very happy. But when you do hit problems(and you will) then you'll realize what the problem is with closed systems.

So in short, closed system even if you can read the source code, its very difficult to do anything with it. Inadequate documentation that are often wrong with edge cases. Lock in to specific technology and often specific versions. Not enough interaction with the community of developers in terms of bug reporting, change description and the like.
Here's another neat example I whipped up: http://tinyurl.com/y92b9o3 (URL shortener used since the actual link is 761 characters long, containing the entire texture source). It renders a Sierpinski triangle by doing x & y != 0, then mirrors it to the bottom-right corner (so as to cover the entire texture). It's a good example of the simple sort of math you can play around with, then immediately apply to a demo. Converting that to C to make it work in my demo consists of nothing more than replacing 'var' with 'int', which makes my life easy.
Oh... Well reminded.
I downloaded the SICP course and I'm working my way through it. Had a sort of mini-enlightenment on the first lecture. Related to that is breaking out the Schuam's outline on Calculus and really nailing it instead of making do the way I did in high school and college.

I'm also applying one of the principles from Sun Tzu's Art of War (related to misdirection) and looking for it in Chess, Go and some RTSs. I may end up picking up Poker and learning some things from it.
Hey, everyone. I'm the guy who originally put this spreadsheet together. Couple things:

- I welcome corrections!

- Acquisition prices are likely wildly wrong since they're just my guesses. (Again, I welcome guidance/corrections)

- This list is not exhaustive, though I'm trying to make it complete. I started it to help in my analysis of seed accelerators I did for my MBA thesis. (Insert MBA stereotypes here) I keep it going because I find it interesting and hoped people might find it useful.
Really. How so? (No sarcasm, I'm curious).
That's worth 13 votes?!

I've taken to my mess of cables with a Dyno label maker. Each power brick tells me what it powers, and each usb cable tells me what it connects to (camera, printer etc. saves unplugging the wrong thing)
It was somewhere in the blog of Sun's former CEO: "all technology ultimately becomes a fashion item. It has happened to timekeeping, it is definitely happening to computers and telecom"
> Intel is the only hardware company that gets open source

Something that is quite astonishing, I must add.

I can only wonder how horribly constructed a piece of hardware must be for a company to refuse to publish enough specifications for able and willing community to produce open-source drivers.
How is that possible? All I get is a login page.
Yeah, the GIMP one is only almost-almost-magical (plus free and available right now).
Cite examples, data and figures, please.

I will pitch in one. The British war crimes in Kenya during the Mau Mau uprising:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mau_Mau_Uprising

http://us.macmillan.com/imperialreckoning
Kent M. Pitman Answers On Lisp And Much More
اختراق مكتوب  - خدمات العرب
This is the only bad thing I can say about my MBP. :(
That's nothing new ;-) By the 80's, when I was developing courseware for Apple IIs I had 2 on my desk. The development environment (GPLE + somehting else I don't remember now) took very long to start and having a second computer to reboot every time I had a testable disk multiplied my productivity by more than 2.

I remember I used a row-optimize function (&ROP) to compress the program so that it would fit in the memory of the target machine (it had to fit under Take 1 Programmer's Toolkit)
Reputation Is Dead: It’s Time To Overlook Our Indiscretions
Much nicer than my solution: http://akkartik.name/bash.html#cd

Update: Ah, I knew there was another j a year ago: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=485053. (And I pushed my version there as well :/)
This looks incredible.
Has anyone used this with OS X yet? I installed it manually and haven't been able to get it to work yet.
I would probably try Hackety Hack:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hackety_Hack
http://www.alice.org/
I've recently introduced http://hetland.org/writing/instant-hacking.html tutorial to my 14 years old brother, hope python is simple enough.
Well if there is at least one person who can use Linux, it is obviously usable. I don't understand what you are getting at?

Are we working on the assumption that Linux is unusable, and we have to provide sufficient proof of the opposite? Why would we approach the issue that way?
I generally was VERY conservative in my acquisition numbers. (I could easily make the case for bumping all the non-public prices by 50+%)

The way I've generally looked at it is that YC has generally broken even or had a small profit so far on the exits they've had. They'll likely generate their massive return once companies like Dropbox, Loopt, etc have their exits.
For javascript, i found the book "Javascript: The Definitive Guide" by David Flanagan to be very good. It's quite comprehensive. Although i am not sure how good it would be as an introductory book.
A few random suggestions. I don't actually know much about Squeak or Scratch, so those might be better options. YMMV, of course.

One way to sort of ease into the idea of instructing-a-computer-so-it-does-things is to make things in a context-free-grammar based system, like: http://www.contextfreeart.org/

I've found some people find it much easier than "real" programming, since it avoids control constructs and such. I personally actually find it a little harder, because I try to think of it in terms of operational semantics, and end up mentally reverse-engineering everything I write into the equivalent C code. I've had good luck introducing non-programming people to it, though; not tried with any kids; mostly computing-interested adults.

Processing is a relatively simple media-computing environment. Based on Java, but highly simplified and oriented towards 2d graphical applets: http://processing.org/

I personally learned on Logo, which I thought was nice. I'm not sure if there are good Logo implementations these days?
PostgreSQL/Oracle to Cassandra is really an apples to oranges comparison. Both offer very different ways to solve some similar problems (get your data out of storage) and some very different ones (easily adding/removing servers from a cluster, distributing a cluster across data-centers). Some things are easy to do with PostgreSQL or Oracle, some are not, and some are very expensive and still some are next to impossible.
Microsoft's Small Basic fits the bill perfectly - perhaps undersold on this link but...

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=B00...

<edit>
A good overview can be found here
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/beginner/ff384126.aspx
</edit>
If you haven't seen it, Dan Gilbert's TED talk -- "Why are we happy?" -- presents some good experimental results on this topic. http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/dan_gilbert_asks_why_are_w...

The Wikipedia article (and even the choice of the word "treadmill") suggests that people maintain a roughly constant state of happiness despite improvements in their life. But it also works the other way -- people return to a baseline of happiness even with huge disasters in their life.
What author meant, i think, is that "Chef manages resources in the order they are specified." while Puppet encourages usage of "require" parameter to explicitly define the dependency. He does state that it is possible in chef, also providing link that explains the difference.
Here is the link if you missed it
http://stochasticresonance.wordpress.com/2010/01/20/puppet-c...
Open-source developers often want to develop on Linux, or at least to be able to release cross-platform stuff that will work on Linux, and Microsoft's toolchain is generally not oriented in that direction. If you use their dev tools, you're usually just building a Windows .exe, and if you want to port, it's going to be extra effort. There are of course Windows-only open-source projects, and they do actually often use an MS dev toolchain.

I think if Microsoft had (especially earlier on) been somewhat friendlier with the cross-platformness of .NET, either with their own releases or by helping Mono be a more compatible option, it would have more uptake, because technically it's actually pretty nice.
Microsoft gets behind SVG -- finally
For those of you who would like similar functionality sans learning of your MFU directories, you can do something like

export CDPATH=($HOME/common:$HOME/repos)

You'd have to manually symlink your favorite directories into ~/common, of course.

The directories listed in $CDPATH are made available to `cd` no matter what directory you are in, so if you have ~/common/downloads, you can type `cd downloads` from any directory. Tab-completion works with this too.

Not to downplay autojump -- I just prefer this approach since I explicitly control all the directories I want quick access to, and my `cd` command is deterministic (assuming I name directories to avoid conflicts).
Install XAMPP from Apachefriends.org and have her start PHP. It's what many schools use for their beginner classes. On Windows, I like PHPDeveloper personal edition for an IDE. It's cheap (or free, I can't recall).

PHP is mainstream, and since it's a web technology, she can likely show it off to her friends. It's not hard to find cheap PHP hosting if she ends up building something that she wants to put on the public-facing Internet for friends or strangers to use. XAMPP also comes with MySQL pre-configured, which is a bonus.

I cut my teeth on Logo and BASIC as a youngster. I wouldn't wish BASIC on anyone, and she's old enough that Logo would be boring.
Absolutely agree.

Once it becomes obvious that everybody does certain things, they will necessarily become better accepted - unless they are really bad things (e.g. if what because obvious was that, say, a large percentage of the population engaged in pedophily or murder something equally unacceptable), in which case making them visible might help stamp them out.

For those trivial things that everyone does and a few people get up in arms about, morality will have to change. Hopefully, out of date laws will change along with it.

I think this is an unavoidable trend of the internet. And it's a good thing. Privacy is dead. Long live tolerance.
I taught myself to program when I was twelve by doing PHP. Although I wouldn't touch it with a barge pole these days it's certainly easy to learn.

Having said that I'd probably get her a HTML/CSS book.
We manage around 200 servers with puppet.Our system administrators aren't programming savvy. It's much harder to write chef recipes, while puppet's DSL allows them to write pretty concise and clear recipes. And explicit dependencies are very helpful here, we can't imaging our life without those. It is much harder to break thing when there are several people working on one recipe/manifest.
It works in OS X without any problems. I am using `zsh`.

Could it be because you haven't trained the database?
Atlassian UI opensourced
That's true about hype and marketing. Including spamming #puppet channel trying to divert people to chef when they come asking for help.
I think the most important part of your choice is to keep her motivated: So I would go with Squeak or Python.
Squeak is great for learning programming; It is very easy to produce little games and things like this.
Python is great if you want to use a lot of libraries and still want a clean programming language.
Php is fine for web pages - if she loves to build them it is great, but the other languages are better suited for learning to programm.
Bottom Line: I would go with squeak!
I remember trying to learn C when I was twelve. The strange errors the compiler generated were way above my head, because the system was more complicated than I could understand at the time. Eventually, when I was 13 or 14, I learned a bit of VB, but not enough to be really useful. I think, however, that someone might have a decent chance of learning python, especially since you don't have boilerplate code. Also, if you are working directly with the interpreter you always know that it was the last thing you did that caused the error, so you don't have to hunt around (think attention span).