skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
So you've developed with Silverlight and understand its strengths and weaknesses in comparison with Flash/Air? I haven't done much Silverlight work but as someone who has done a decent amount of Flash work in the past, I thought it was a really solid approach. It certainly seems superior to the other alternatives in the context of developing for a phone platform (Windows Phone 7, or whatever that is called).

The DLR is used by IronPython and IronRuby. It's not the basis of Silverlight but it is what allows you to write apps in python or ruby.
How does the "no soup" provision work in legal terms? How do you (pg and co) ensure you don't get diluted in future rounds?
My wife's previous gym was a 20 minute drive on the freeway, and her neighborhood wasn't that safe. My neighborhood is fairly safe, but I still wouldn't want to jog to the gym at 10PM. 10PM is a great time for me, the crowds are much smaller than peak hours.

Secondly, my routine emphasizes weight training over aerobics, and I prefer to retain my energy for the weights and jog afterwards. Jogging to the gym does not fit my exercise routine.
I think they're right that some users do want terrible interfaces, but yes their examples are terrible and non-representative.
I am hoping you mean a recumbent stationary bike, not a recumbent for bike commuting, which would also nullify the time expense. :)
I have always considered the gaming business, especially social gaming, to be similar to the pharma industry.

Basically, if you are investing, you are not so much investing because of one game or one drug. You are investing based on their ability to execute and the pipeline of games for the future. It is a bet that the pipeline will be robust enough to generate future cash flows as current games lose popularity and are ripped off by rivals (being released as generics).

Looking at a team that has only created one game or has just one game in development is more akin to taking a wildly speculative bet.
I also wondered the same thing. Visual Studio is so bad, you have to actually buy another piece of software (http://www.jetbrains.com/resharper/) for it to start approaching "good", but it's still not close to "fantastic".
Is jgrahamc somehow behind the scenes of this development? I wouldn't be surprised. :)
I think that this largely misses the point.

The first thing to point out is that writing software doesn't map very well onto civil engineering. In civil, your base requirements are supposed to be very well defined. 'I need a bridge from point a to point b, it has to support x amount of traffic weighing y kilos'.

The point of the Tacoma Narrows incident is that 'flutter' was something that was hereto unmentioned in the design requirements of the bridge. It wasn't accounted for, therefore the bridge collapsed. To imply that 'proper engineering' would have prevented the collapse is wrong. They used proper engineering... they just didn't account for everything that they needed to account for.

No one is going to argue that solid design, trusted components, testing and QA are not important parts of programming. (They are good, especially the components, testing, and QA bits).

What the original Spolsky 'duct tape programmer' post is railing against is the disguise of over-engineering (because of incompetence) as the above things (particularly the design part).

The point being that the extremely competent don't need to disguise their software in an elaborate drapery of buzzwords and patterns. (Because they don't need a justification to fall back on if it doesnt... 'well we used x and y and z hot new thing').
Wave sucks not entirely because of its implementation but because its adoption is not as widespread. Wave in itself is an excellent web app that have changed the way I collaborate with others. Its biggest mistake is how they rolled it out. They should have polished it more, both in terms of speed and stability and made it all out access just like Buzz (minus the buzz mistakes).

Wave is a very solid app. It doesn't suck. IMO YMMV.
So Now Google Thinks Everyone Should Care About Chinese Censorship?
I browsed up to the uxmag.com homepage because it sounded interesting. Is it me or is that an absolutely terrible UI/UX design? I took one look at it and felt like giving up.
Or just cut down on your calorie intake.... It's not rocket science.
Facebook Is Like Starbucks: Everyone Hangs Out But Never Buys Anything
Hah. Correct.
I've done quite a lot of uC and FPGA stuff already, but thanks for the suggestion.

Assembling from a kit and developing own firmware for something like this http://monome.org/devices might be fun. Even if not used as a MIDI controller it could be a nice toy (visual effects with human input).
I'm considering alternatives like that, but I am also quite excited about clojure generally (love the idea behind its concurrency semantics), and its interop with Java means that recoding the tight loops ought to be very easy...
Another counterexample: http://www.virtualworldsnews.com/2009/09/tencent-joins-in-8m...
Would be lovely to claim that I was, but all I did was bang on about Bletchley Park funding when I had the ear of Number 10 after the Alan Turing petition. Plenty of other people have worked tirelessly to get Bletchley Park funding; my part is very small.
The number one thing that turned me off about IntelliJ IDEA was the horrible font rendering. I am not going to suffer the lack of cleartype for eight hours a day, thanks. The rendering made IntelliJ positively unusable. I really don't care about the awesome refactoring support and all that jazz if I can't read my source code comfortably.
It's not surprising at all. Now that MS can point to Sun and say Java is doomed (it's not, but they say whatever is convenient for them), why would anyone think they would refrain themselves from taking the opportunity to prevent the clueless companies they managed to scare away from Java from going Mono instead of going Windows?
Work on your best idea
The Bloomberg terminal is the perfect example of a lock-in effect reinforced by the powerful conservative tendancies of the financial ecosystem and its permanent need to fake complexity.

I've noticed relentless attacks on wall street portraying them as dumb people who do simple work but are just ruthless and greedy as hell. Of course they're greedy risk takers, and sometimes that causes problems. However, financial models can get fairly complex and require intelligence to navigate and utilize.

I was listening to NPR post-Haiti earthquake, and they were interviewing this woman who was basically borrowing money, going to the Dominican Republic to buy goods, giving them to stores in Port Au Prince, and then collecting the money two weeks later. She also charged the shopkeepers interest. When the earthquake hit, all of her goods were destroyed in the shops, so there was no way she could repay her debts.

Anyway, the radio hosts kept harping on the fact that she had only a middle school education, and was doing "extremely sophisticated math, the type that people on wall street get paid millions for". Now, I very much respect what that woman (and she was working off her debt post earthquake), but I thought it was incorrect and misleading to bring in wall street.

There are a lot of other examples, these are just two.
Free Software Awards Announced
China censorship leaks outside Great Firewall via root server
Sure. And I'm not saying there are people who love OSS who will give up OSS altogether because they can't or won't do SOC for free. They'd still hack OSS on the side, but they wouldn't do SOC.

There's lots of college students that really need to bring in some money over the summer so they can afford their tuition. Plenty are already taking out loans as it is.

Think of it like the YC money--it's not all that much, lots of the companies don't really need it, it generally isn't the main attraction, but some great people absolutely need it to participate, so giving it ensures that no one will have to turn the opportunity down because of money
The Future of Subversion
Don't confuse a whole society with the people who hold power (and thus control the guys with the weapons).
Which IDE do you think is better?
OT, but that is the worst "lightbox" image viewer I've seen. You have to actually click the little 'x' to close the dialog (as opposed to most implementations that let you click anywhere-else to close it, or hit escape).
And so people have been telling him all along. Last summer, RMS called him out (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=846221) and he responded with calling RMS a fear monger (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=864047).

As usual, RMS was right, and there was no shortage of other people trying to get de Icaza to see this, ever since he started with the Mono project.

It has indeed taken some time, but I'm happy that de Icaza finally seem to have understood. It will be interesting to see which direction Mono will take now, and where this fits in with the bigger picture of Novell's and Microsoft's future.
This is really something that will need to be adressed (fixed) in the near future before it gets out of hand and really impacts our industry in a negative manner.

Things like this seem to give a small minority of people anywhere on the globe the ability to basicaly terrorize and shake down companies and people in our industry.

I beleive that some kind of international free-harbor provision would be benificial to the internet and allow it to continue to grow freely.
I am not Joel's biggest fan, but sometimes I feel that his detractors choose not to put his writing in context and only criticize him to create link bait.

Joel was writing about an interview of Jamie Zawinski.

Joel and jwz are of the same generation.

jwz worked at Netscape in the early 90s.

In the early 90s, C++, templates, multiple inheritance and multithreading did not work.

Dennehy also somehow seems to miss Joel's main point that programmers should be pragmatic and be wary of using technologies they don't understand, as this is bound to get in the way of shipping a product.
Google Remarketing for AdSense: Huge new feature for advertisers . . .
There's quite a few examples of code generators (e.g. for GUI's, database access, write test fixtures/setup/teardown, etc) in ocaml. It is one of Harrop's success stories. The Manning Code Generation book by Harrington is from 2003, uses ruby 1.6, but i remember it being an excellent book

http://www.amazon.com/Code-Generation-Action-Jack-Herrington...
Chinese Fluoride In Water Supply Raises Serious Concerns
The small problem with GPGPU is that one aspect of this project is to look at several reconstruction solvers (as they are being called in compressed sensing). Not all of these solvers are clearly amenable to a GPU approach. The idea is really to make it easy for new reconstruction algorithm to be tested on these phase transition maps as opposed to a dedicated effort at re-thinking the algorithm so that it can fit the GPU architecture.
I thought the same as you, and set up a home gym in response, which saved me half an hour's commute. After 4 years I'm going back to the gym. I found that being surrounded by cardio bunnies and muscleheads actually motives me, especially when you see people twice your age in better shape than you.

As with everything else, such as sleep and nutrition, you give it the time you think it deserves. If you put your health behind other priorities, no complaining when your body gives out before its time.

And finally, everybody and every body is different. I've found that a one hour weight training session three times a week is enough to maintain my current muscle mass (which I've earned the six years prior to switching to a maintenance workout). You might find that you need less than an hour a day once you get your body in shape.
The paper you link to actually seems more interesting to me than the one described in the OP. Definitely a different paper, though, unless the OP author was on crack.
Some ideas aren't feasible at one time or another. I would say never abandon your best idea, and always work towards it - but if you can't work on it presently - no need to just sit around and wait.
How babysitting a mountain lion helped me make $100,000 in self-publishing
I majored in a traditional engineering, and I wish programmers/CS types would stop comparing programming with mechanical/civil engineering; they are completely different processes with completely different mentalities due to completely different requirements.

Which is not to say there isn't some overlap - writing software for, say, a MRI machine would likely be held to the same processes and standards as most traditional engineering, but let's be honest, 99% of programming isn't that.

> "The standard approach taken to minimise or prevent these unacceptable outcomes is conservative design, using trusted components, with testing and quality assurance being critical parts of the design and implementation processes."

I think the blog author is out of his expertise here - this is an extremely "software" abstraction of the engineering design process.

I'm not convinced the traditional engineering process works at all in software - traditional engineering is waterfall (where do you think it came from?), but unlike a bridge you rarely ever know all of your requirements and specifications up front. Also, you design 100% of a bridge up-front because you can't "iterate" a bridge, but you sure as hell can iterate a website.

We push code out quickly and iterate because we can, and the consequences for system failure are minimal at best. Want to try a new lane arrangement on a bridge? If you could build bridges like you build software, you'd just build two with the competing lane designs, and get half of the car traffic to drive over each. Oh wait, you can't do that in real life. This is why I balk every time someone thinks we should be held to the same standards as traditional engineers - there's no compelling gain and everything to lose.
they did pull out -- yesterday
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1216471
Yes, it has options similar to the Web Developer extension for Firefox, such as disabling specific stylesheets, resizing the window or outlining block level elements (which I've always found to be very useful).

It's not as nice/refined as the Web Developer extension of course, for example that 'outline block level elements' readjusts the whole page which it does not do in firefox (which is why I found it useful in firefox, it didn't actually add a 1px border).
[wtf] "Repatenting" elliptic curve cryptography ?
oh yes Mr "Mission Accomplished" and "Weapns of Mass Destruction"... you're talking about Americnans, right?

Or all this propaganda now about the Economy. At first there wasn't any crisis and now it's already over. Get real!
tulip might be what you want; I'm not sure if the viz. is built-in or just something others have done with it though. But well worth knowing about, for all interesting in graph viz.

http://tulip.labri.fr/TulipDrupal/
My guess is that your tone grated. This may help:

Moving parts in rubbing contact require lubrication to avoid excessive wear. Honorifics and formal politeness provide lubrication where people rub together. Often the very young, the untraveled, the naive, the unsophisticated deplore these formalities as “empty,” “meaningless,” or “dishonest,” and scorn to use them. No matter how “pure” their motives, they thereby throw sand into machinery that does not work too well at best.

(Heinlein, filched here:
http://www.angelfire.com/or/sociologyshop/lazlong.html)
Angel List
Three things suggest to me that gender differences are not as intrinsic as we might assume, given the current disparity:

1. Social groups tend to select for like individuals. Many women (and other under-represented people) find it surprisingly difficult to make it in the scientific, academic, and engineering communities when their advisors, peers, and bosses are overwhelmingly white males. Expectations that women "simply don't" do field X are shockingly present to this day. This suggests that we have not yet reached an equilibrium point where women are fairly represented with respect to their full potential.

2. Other countries have significantly varying gender ratios in these fields. That suggests that the difference is partly cultural.

3. In the US, we lose an astonishing number of young women from academic and engineering tracks. Standardized test performance (as well as metrics like "confidence in math ability") fall off dramatically in seventh grade--a time period where girls are under tremendous social pressure. By the time undergrad rolls around, few are still trying to become scientists, mathematicians, and engineers.

One of my former professors, Melissa Eblen-Zayas, has a good summary of links about women and minority participation in physics: http://people.carleton.edu/~meblenza/Resources.html
Joel is wrong. Subversion does not equal leeches.
Don't forget though that you have to hack the forms to remove all the confusing garbage admin stuff that Drupal will display to anyone you give node admin permissions to.

It's a real pain in the butt to create user facing content creation forms in Drupal.
Yeah please get it on youtube. I don't even know how to begin watching what is available on your site and pouet ;)
We have protections against arbitrary dilution, by e.g. issuing extra stock or doing a new round that values the company at $1. We've never needed them. What I meant by the "no soup" remark was that we don't care that much about legal protections; it is a more powerful deterrent that we would blacklist any VC who screwed us over-- or who screwed over any of the startups.
I don't know anything about Bloomberg, and I'm willing to bet that as a niche product aimed at high trained people, it might not be too bad.

But I agree in principle with this article. You can see it sometimes in the Linux/FLOSS world. People decry anything that means the average user can use it.

"But you should know how to set up networking on the command line!"

People like that, they like jumping through hoops. They think sensible defaults are a bad thing. They think you should have to read a 1,000 page manual before doing something simple.
Most people don't want the truth, they just want something that feels good to repeat to themselves.

"It's the American's fault!", "It's the Arabs' fault!", "It's the neocon's fault", "Drill baby drill", "Keep the government away from my medicare"...
Hard to spoof a file that you've already got a local copy of...
I'm quite annoyed when I get a GUI with no keyboard shortcuts; it just doesn't occur to some developers that being able to use the keyboard is what allows advanced users to become very fast at using the software. Full on command line capability for very advanced users is great, but rare.

I remember a UI I was given to test for controlling a custom video display; the operator needed to be able to update things very quickly, but there were zero keyboard shortcuts defined, so everything had to be done by move-click-type move-click-type. Keyboard shortcuts hadn't even occurred to the developer as being important, despite the speed requirement.
You're calling me self-righteous and at the same time you're asking me for a plan? Look, all I'm saying is that the clique in power will not give up voluntarily. If you want democracy you must put pressure on them because they have a vested interest in staying in power and that interest doesn't go away. It's not a question of speed. So the plan is simple. Demand change!

You may be right that democracy is not the word used by most Chinese to talk about what they want. Those who do use that word are brutally oppressed after all. But I'm sure the Chinese don't want corruption. I'm sure they're not happy if so much of the wealth ends up with the kids of party officials, which a recent study has shown. I'm sure they want rule of law so their homes cannot simply be expropriated if some bigwig wants to sell the land to BigCorp. I'm sure minorities like homosexuals (usually 10% to 20% of a population) in China do not want to be discriminated against. Democracy isn't just a "nice sounding sound byte". It's all of the above and it's very pragmatic. Just look at the correlation of wealth and democracy and compare that to the correlation of corruption, dictatorship and poverty.

But you know, I'm an individual, not some representative of a culture, so if you run out of arguments, please at least spare me the blanket colonialism argument. I wasn't there. Many dictators have been using it as an excuse for their crimes and you are buying it.
I have a dedicated account for Reader, and I use it from within a Mozilla Prism appliance. External links open in my regular Firefox instance.

This is a simple setup that works adequately well for me.
Vaginal Infections
Vaginal infections are the source of considerable morbidity among women. The three main causes of infectious vaginitis are vulvovaginal candidiasis (VVC), trichomoniasis, and bacterial vaginosis (BV). Each one may cause distressing vaginal symptomatology and the latter two may cause upper genital tract complications. These infections may also contribute to the transmission and acquisition of the human immunodeficiency virus (HW)
On Apple's Board, Fewer Independent Voices
> Is the 80 col limit still valid in the modern day with such large screen displays?

Yes. With my previous notebook screen (1440x900) I could fit two 83-character-wide Emacs buffers side by side. With my current screen (1600x900) I can fit two 94-character-wide Emacs buffers side by side.
And don't forget Eva Lu Ator :D
Found the text of the article here: http://slated.org/does_windows_cost_microsoft_opportunities
As much as one percent of the Internet is now using IPv6
To me it's also chilling that the US owes a country like this 1 Trillion dollars in debt.

Also related, I think Google is f@$# awesome for standing up and doing what's right.
Note how it's written in a totally non-bureaucratic language. You don't need it when everyone is afraid of you. Just make sure you're understood.
I am a programmer, and I still can't fix free software I don't like. It's the same reason that people use off-the-shelf software in the first place -- DIY just takes too much time.
The article concludes with the summary 'duct-taping a solution can be harmful'. Would anyone, include Joel dispute such an obvious point?
Driving game maps brain's version of GPS
> Want to try a new lane arrangement on a bridge? If you could build bridges like you build software, you'd just build two with the competing lane designs, and get half of the car traffic to drive over each. Oh wait, you can't do that in real life.

Nope. You can, however, run rather detailed mathematical simulations of what the varying loads will do to the bridge and cross-check against established data.

Want to know the _real_ difference between civil engineering and software engineering?

About 126 years.
Try pubmed directly rather than Google Scholar. Most examples I'm quoting are articles I've read in New Scientist so if you have a subscription you can check their article history. I promise I'm not making them up.
There is an additional subtlety that may interest hackers. It is actually if calories metabolized by the body == calories burned. Calories are mostly fungible, but they are processed differently (by the liver or by the cells themselves, for instance) and this has drastic effects on metabolic health. For instance, fructose is processed by the liver and does not trigger the satiety hormones as easily as glucose. So, while the total amount of energy available is the same for calorically similar amounts of fructose and glucose, the impact on fat storage and hunger is different.

For more about the biochemistry of metabolism see: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBnniua6-oM
Get a Free and Fabulous Education Online
They may crush the flowers, but they can’t stop the Spring
Some redditors seem to think this is a hoax: http://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/bhl3d/the_new_co...