skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I stumbled across the Dictionary of Programming Languages, and HOPL http://hopl.murdoch.edu.au/ while I was trying to figure out why I pronounce "a = b" as "a gets b" rather than "a equals b".

I think I pronounce it that way because the first time I ever heard anyone speak out loud in code a lot was in a Modula-2 class in college. I think they say "gets" for ":=" in that region of the programming world.

I try to remember to say "equals" for "=" when I read code in front of other people, but sometimes I slip and get funny looks. But assignment, whatever characters are used to write it, is pronounced "gets" in my brain.
Not only do they exist but some of them are 20 years old ;)
A fridge is typically quite dry and is a good spot to put stuff that needs to dry out (dry-aged meat for example). A unit like he had with an attached freezer uses the air from the freezer to cool the fridge portion and the freezer air is really dry.
How about an option to sort the stories/comments combinations that you have not previously visited, to the top?
> Some of those old documents they're trying to digitize are in such bad shape that you practically need an electron microscope to decipher them.

Red herring. I'm talking about the examples pictured.

Do you know _for a fact_ that this is the same software package?

I don't want to waste my time arguing about why it doesn't live up to my expectations, if it's not.
From what I have seen so far "Information is Beautiful" would more accurately be called "How to lie with cute infographics".

I don't think they intentionally lie, but their infographics are often misleading at best, and give people a false sense of understanding and knowledge.
The market for experienced Java & .NET engineers in the Milwaukee area hasn't been this hot in many years. Finding top talent is proving to be a challenge and is affecting growth.
I've uploaded the jar to the Downloads section and also added a note about Flying Saucer to the readme. Thanks for checking it out!
I see you've been reading Steven Apter's style guide. :\

I'd like to point out that this doesn't really help anyone who doesn't intimately know what a Return on Close In-sample analysis is good for.
I think those teachers would become more tutors and evaluators.
Dear Apple,

Congratulations on doing well over the past few years while still maintaining an air of marketing discipline. You could make more money by taking the high volume, low quality route, or the cheaper JIT route. But instead, you continue to take pride in the quality of your hardware and software.

I don't miss you because nothing's changed. Steve Jobs has always been cocky, with the intent to have strong control over the quality of your image. But people have built him up as the antithesis of Bill Gates and Microsoft's revenue model, since Jobs is historically the underdog in the battle. But that shouldn't distract from his true intentions. He's not a proponent of openness and open dialogue. He's a proponent of high quality products and high quality image.

Using "Dear Apple" feels very dramatic.
First DNA rotaxane
The Con Artist Hall of Infamy
Eventually all of the above, if we're lucky. Right now, just GS lying to investors.
I had no idea the Aliph Jawbone was so lean in its processes and yet produce amazing stuff - "It’s the ultimate virtual manufacturing company: Aliph makes bits and its partners make atoms, and together they can take on Sony."
The Science Behind Concentration
Posted earlier with good discussions: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1272458
I've put a post on my Blog about that some time ago.
And I will argue that the new Microsoft in our times could be Google - http://blog.smartupz.com/2010/04/google-you-can-change-game-...
Microsoft Office 2010 Outlook has some New Digs
No one is going to jail. Yet.
Regular expressions can be (and are) used to tokenize the code, but cannot do the actual parsing.

What "REs can't parse HTML" means in theory is that you cannot design a regexp that tells HTML apart from non-HTML.

The fundamental reason is that regexps cannot detect arbitrarily-deep nested structures.

In practice it is possible, because most regexp engines are Turing complete, but it would be crazy to do so.
And worse, I have never figured out how the hell to disable that "feature" on OS X, I'm sure there is a way, but I wasted enough time pocking around the configuration options.
If eclipse were designed by TextMate guys, my eyes would feel a lot less sore. TextMate is a fine app for django. I wanted to see what all the fuss from the Rails camp about TextMate and it was worth a shot.
> I am simplifying things a little

An important simplification you omitted: Microsoft used illegal monopolistic tactics to become ubiquitous. Do not skimp on the word "illegal" when thinking about this. We are not talking about one company being better managers than the other, we are talking about one company breaking laws that were designed to give the marketplace a say in the outcome.

Another thing was that Microsoft used many tactics for achieving ubiquity that may have been legal, may have been brilliant management moves, but the outcome did not reflect the marketplace choosing their products freely.

For example, they routinely imposed a clause in their contracts that hardware vendors had to license Windows for each CPU they shipped whether their customers wanted Windows or not. The net result was that any competitive OS would by necessity cost more than Windows because the customer had to pay for the competition and for Windows.

This created the illusion that Windows was more price competitive and that customers preferred the more affordable OS, when in reality customers had very little opportunity to make an informed choice based on true cost.

Apple made many choices that hurt them, but I really think we must be careful to make explanations as simple as possible---but no simpler.
"Before Google grew here, PayPal did. Later came Danger, the phone innovator that Microsoft Corp. acquired for $500 million before its founder, Andy Rubin, took a leading role in Google's Android project." - http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-milo6-2010apr06,0,3496...
Do you actually have (or have you read the terms on) such a mortgage?

Any additional amount I send in on mine is credited as "additional principal payment" and reduces the amount owed (and hence the interest). If I had <mumble> thousand dollars in hand, I could pay my mortgage off Monday without any penalty, just five MONTHS into my refinance.

I have seen no-refinance-before-such-date mortgages, and while it's possible that a mortgage with a prepayment of additional principal penalty or barring exists, it's certainly not common in the US.
Hard to prove beyond a reasonable doubt, maybe. But this is a civil case, and I believe the standard is merely by a preponderance of the evidence.
Ask HN: Improve Bugzilla search
Hi all,

I have been trying to do simple queries on bugzilla, and it is so frustrating that the search is so bad. Do you know about any good plugins that I can add to improve my search quality?

Thanks
sure, but it seems like a rare enough need that its questionable whether its worth cluttering up the interface and adding to the code base to implement it.
In all tests I've done - yes it is. Although I haven't tested every compiler and platform for obvious reasons.
tl;dw summary:

you know you're doing math wrong if students display (1) a lack of initiative, (2) lack of perspective, (3) lack of retention, (4) aversion to word problems, and (5) the few who understand the math just want to jump to a formula.

Math textbooks encourage teachers to teach math wrong. The way they present problems is with a complex visual with mathematical structure already imposed, step-by-step handholding through the problem, and asking a question at the end (a question that can often be solved just by figuring out which number to plug into which part of the formula, without necessarily understanding why.)

Suggested method for teaching right: (1) use multimedia. (2) encourage student intuition. Students will argue with each other about what they see and buy in to the problem. (3) ask the shortest possible question. Don't begin with a page full of numbers, measurements, and individual steps. Let the detailed questions come out through discussion. (4) Let the students build the problem. Students will recognize the need for mathematical structure (labels, coordinates, measurements, etc.) as they decide what information they will need to answer the question. They'll go through the steps on their own. (5) Be less helpful. The textbook helps in all the wrong ways, taking you away from your obligation for developing patient problem solving and mathematical reasoning.

Example: he completely rewrites a question from a math book about filling a water tank. He produces a video of a water tank being filled from a garden hose, which takes excruciatingly long to complete. Students get uncomfortable, complain about how long it's taking, and then put in their guesses as to how long it will take. Then they decide what information they'd need to calculate the end result, ask for the measurements they think are important, do the calculations, and watch the rest of the video to see if their calculation was right and how close their initial guesses were.
Now charlatans will know to beware the geeks
I never said that problems exist which require lambdas either... I just said if you want to solve problems that way to use a language designed for it.
Iceland, Volcanoes and Data Centers
moving from a 23" screen and multi-GB memory to a 3.5" screen and 128 MB is strong justification

This makes no sense in the context of the examples cited. Elsewhere, maybe.
Well, if there's enough condensation, they might catch you. Do laptops have the water-damage-sensing things that they put in cell phones? The ones that permanently change color when they get wet so that they know that the phone got wet?
Cincom Smalltalk's Web Velocity seems to have something like what you describe. See http://vimeo.com/groups/webvelocity/videos/6156626 at about 1:17
The distinction between mutable and immutable is important,
but more important here is the difference between

>>> dict['a']=3

and

>>> dict['a'].append(3)

The first rebinds dict['a'] (and in the process mutates
the object dict is bound to).

The second mutates the object dict['a'] is bound to (and
in the process binds dict['a'][1] to 3 [EDIT: not really --
1 is not a name and so doesn't have a binding]).

I think looking at it purely in terms of mutable versus
immutable makes it more likely for a newbie to expect the
assignment above to work differently depending on the
mutability of dict['a']'s old or new value. (I have seen
this type of error.)

EDIT 2: I think a better way of making my point is that
this:

> When you reassign one of the dictionary values
> pointing to an existing string, it can't change that
> string, so it creates a new one.

can be taken (incorrectly) to imply that reassigning a
dictionary value pointing to an existing list will mutate
that list.
This is an excellent article. For many of us who have been around long enough to remember the launch of the original MAC and perhaps even before, we do see history repeating itself. But perhaps we each have our own interpretation. http://buzz.dennykmiu.com/ipad-is-the-prequel
I'm ok with duplicates, especially when there's something else going on today that makes another look interesting. It can be helpful when submitting an old link to add a comment such as:

Interesting in light of recent discussions around the physics of gyroscopes and the brain's adaptation to balancing on a unicycle.
Nice post.
You forgot about codaset.com that has an interesting pricing model explained here: http://codaset.com/codaset/codaset/blog/official-launch-day-...
Film ehna et2abelna kabl keda at mypale.com
It's fine to leave me at 0 points but why was I down-voted? In what way have I violated the spirit of the site with this honest question?
Nowadays, I'd be delighted to do this trick with the train being stationary, especially for an intercity route.

It would eliminate the hassles of car rental (especially if the rail stations aren't near airports), obviate the need for checked luggage, and mitigate the increased travel time compared to flying.
Wouldn't you need to already be somewhat ubiquitous in order to use monopolistic tactics?
Yeah, it's hard to imagine that with one of the highest profile firms in the country with one of the top firms in the world representing them facing what could be an existential threat that the partners wouldn't be working weekends.

GS has slightly better resources than Crazy Eddies.
Hilarious:

"Rodentiometer: Early technical term for a mouse"
Weighing the Evidence on Exercise
In reference to what? Answering 1 cuil with 1 cuil doesn't seem like progress.
To be precise, the formerly closed source commercial PyDev extensions have been merged into PyDev, which was always open source and still is.

That is great news and I almost missed that point. Thanks for pointing it out!
Q & A with Chris Dixon
Rails - Grease your Suite (PgDn to advance slides)
I think the name changes were done to remind programmers that Cocoa and Cocoa Touch are different and you need to take that into account. Plus, it has been a long while since NS was meaningful. I do wish they had introduced namespaces into Obj-C as part of the iPhone SDK, but oh well.

I remember seeing a terminal emulator for the early Macs that allowed hooking to corporate mainframe apps. It made me very sad.
Yeah, except it works fine on Linux. Nothing to do you with your beloved OSX.
I've had a few interesting conversations with fellow IT students recently. One, a very multi-lingual individual, said he wasn't picking any programming modules because 'as soon as the dots and dashes start coming out, forget it, it all looks like Greek to me.' During a lecture on research a slide of statistical formulas came up, and it all looked like Greek to me. In fact, it was Greek (Greek alphabet). This got me thinking that maybe my aversion to maths is needless - if I can program, shouldn't I be able to learn new mathematic techniques too?

My next conversation was with someone who used to be a maths teacher, held a maths degree, yet seriously struggled with the programming coursework, even though she thought her maths would make it easy. I was surprised too. I suggested that maths only seems easy to her because of the extensive schooling one gets in arithmetic from an early age; she suggested it was because programming was 'a male way of thinking' (!).

What's the link between maths and programming as skills? I mean, is maths the 'source code of reality' - just like code with unhelpful variable names? Or is it really a different kettle of fish. I did well in maths at school... I just hated it. Trying to make sense of the mathematical notation in Wirth's 'Algorithms and Data Structures' reminds me why I hated it.
Question about Apache/Windows
Not sure where you live, Phil, but that's absolutely not the way mortgages are structured by national banks in the US.

In the early years of a mortgage, the buyer is gaining the leverage of a large amount of the bank's money, so a huge percentage of his payment goes to interest on the loan. In the later years, when the remaining principal is smaller, he pays less interest. The buyer's total payment is the same amount over the term of the loan, but the portion allocated to principal vs interest varies linearly over time, til remaining principal == 0.

At any time, the buyer can pay off the note by delivering the currently-remaining principal to the lender.

The schedule you describe would effectively prevent anyone from ever moving before their mortgage was mostly-completely satisfied. If you bought a $200K house and sold it a day later, you would have to send the bank a check for about $600K. I'm pretty sure this never happens.

Furthermore, the lender is always making his margins (modulo interest rate variability, and ignoring loan quality), because any payments sent to the lender by the borrower will get re-loaned to someone else. I guess you could write a contract so that the borrower would be penalized if he paid off early, but I'm not sure it wouldn't be usury.

Note that if you double a mortgage payment, you should be explicit that you want the excess applied to your remaining principal. Otherwise, the bank can choose to apply it as "the next payment" and therefore split at your current ratio. Regardless, you still have to pay next month's bill too. :)
Worst...written...article...EVER! This is the point (found 2 pages or 954 words down the article)

"There are three changes that should have a particular effect on angel investors, a catch-all category which includes everyone from friends and family members who invest in a startup, to unaffiliated wealthy individuals, to side investments made by venture capitalists acting on their own.

"First, Dodd’s bill would require startups raising funding to register with the Securities and Exchange Commission, and then wait 120 days for the SEC to review their filing. A second provision raises the wealth requirements for an "accredited investor" who can invest in startups - if the bill passes, investors would need assets of more than $2.3 million (up from $1 million) or income of more than $450,000 (up from $250,000). The third restriction removes the federal pre-emption allowing angel and venture financing in the United States to follow federal regulations, rather than face different rules between states."

He also makes the point that registering with the SEC is expensive ($100,000+ in legal fees) and that he believes the "accredited investor" limits will be raised even further. The rest of the piece is just filler.

(for anyone down voting this let me point out this article goes on for 9 printed pages and doesn't even explain who benefits from these clauses. That's just bad writing)
INAL, but if jibber-jabber from the chattering classes on the Internet is any guide, the big no-no is using dominance in one market to achieve or protect dominance in another in certain ways.

For example, if you have made a good business bet and beat AppleDOS by riding the PC wave with MS-DOS, that's fine. But if you use your MS-DOS dominance to beat Wordperfect, Lotus, Ashton-Tate and so forth simultaneously to establish Microsoft Office, that's bad.

Another example is the whole Internet Explorer vs. Netscape imbroglio. That wasn't a problem because Netscape couldn't make money selling browsers, it was a problem because it allowed Microsoft to try to make ActiveX a standard for active content in web pages, which would have closed the web to only work for Windows-based browsers.
Your pricing looks really complicated. Perhaps you could merge the two dimensions (no.of sites and type of plan) such that each type of plan comes with a set number of sites?

Just for fun, I slid the "number of supported users" slider all the way to the right. $20,000 per month for a 1000 users??? That must be some serious support you are offering.
I telecommute a few days a week and find that I don't really need any structure to survive. I don't try to emulate my normal morning pre-commute routine or anything like that. I generally don't shower until one or so. I usually start an hour or two earlier than I normally would but I keep things extremely flexible.

One thing I found interesting was when she wrote something about not being able to go back to an office job. My dad's office is at home now (though his job still has him going out on the road some of the time) and he always tells me the same thing - how he couldn't go back to a office job. I'm glad I mix telecommuting with actually working out of the office. I feel like I get the best of both worlds and even though my commute is long, I actually enjoy the drive.
The video is still as unbearable as the last time I watched it.
Wouldn't it be more useful now that web browsing is so ubiquitous?
Central soundbite: "The way our mass-adopted textbooks teach math reasoning and patient problem solving is functionally equivalent to turning on [a TV sitcom] and calling it a day."
I used PyDev for a while. It's pretty good, but there's one bug that irritated me no and and it hasn't been resolved in years. The red squiggly line that indicates syntax errors will stick long after the error has been corrected.
I always love learning about new programming languages... One of the problems with lists like these, though, is that they are necessarily limited. It's not feasible to add everybody's pet/toy/experimental language. Question is, at what point does a new language (implementation) stop being "trivial"?

For example, recently I discovered the V programming language [http://code.google.com/p/v-language/]. Should this language be in the list? The implementation is nowhere near stable nor mature; on the other hand, it has some interesting ideas to make concatenative languages more palatable, which might make it non-trivial.
Does taking out your hard drive seriously void your warranty on a Macbook? That sounds, uh... completely insane relative to the practices of every other PC manufacturer.
I don't think so. Tim Cook and Jon Ive get it. They get the discipline it takes to be a focused consumer electronics company. Sony lost its way and while back. The big difference between 1985 and now is that the corporate culture of Apple is different. Apple in 1985 was a train wreck that didn't get better.
To be honest, I didn't know what to think of SEC suing Goldman Sachs, and if it really would matter.

But his analysis gives some hope^:

* Goldman Sachs has entrenched their position and tied their fate to Mr. Tourre's. If Tourre goes down this will have (major) implications for Goldman Sachs. They could have put Mr. Tourre on leave till the issue was settled in court.

* SEC put one of their "top dogs" on this case

* Cover up of a crime is more dangerous than the crime it self. Goldman Sachs's statement denies the accusation and says SEC's filing is 'unfounded in law and fact'. This statement could be seen as continuing to try to cover up the crime.

^hope for us plebs who would like to see banksters be brought to justice
It used to work with bad floppies too, a long time ago. Nowadays I'm using SSDs in all my development and server machines.
The first article is incorrect in saying that "user_info" will not behave as you'd expect. (I guess the author didn't try it out?) There are definitely some deeper issues, but it seems wrong to call out something as not being programmed by a "programmer" based on syntax. (Underscore (drawn as arrow) is shared by Squeak Smalltalk, at least.)

The second article probably would've done better to use
m <- matrix(1:6, nrow=2)
and
m <- matrix(1:6, nrow=2, byrow=TRUE)
as examples. Maybe matrices and arrays are implemented as contiguous ranges of memory underneath -- vectors -- but the language/standard library has plenty of functions dealing with them at a higher level, and you can live entirely within the abstraction if you like (although you may pay a price in speed, especially when constructing the initial structure). ("array" does not take a "by.row" argument.)

I guess I agree with the overall sentiment, but I find most languages to be lousy for one reason or another. (Python certainly has some warts, some in common with R -- lack of consistent naming conventions in the standard library for one.) The vector-oriented functions, convenient syntax for regression, the large library of stat functions, the packages, etc., make the pain worth it. And if R is from non-programmers, wait till you see SAS.
Omitting the http prefix breaks the links (makes them relative) in some contexts, like some blog comments.

I think people should learn about the http prefix anyway. Even our grandmas. To do that, the best we can do is to let it appear in the url bar.
I'm not sure about Powerbooks, but even in unibody Macbook Pros, both the HD and RAM are considered user-serviceable without voiding the warranty. There's an entire section of the manual dedicated to swapping them.
Team Viewer now support Linux