skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A lot of random thoughts came to mind when the author referenced mainframes.

My father and I argue/discuss this sort of thing often. Mainly because we're from two different worlds. He comes from a Mainframe (z/TPF) background and usually laughs at what we think is high-performance or a heavy load on our web servers. (He also likes to ask when I'm going to learn a real programming language like assembler.)

Just last night I was asking him why web companies don't run companies of just one of these juggernauts mainframes. The price of the hardware seems to be the biggest hurdle. But there's also the fact that if you want 'feature x' with how you store data... well you write it yourself so that it runs as fast as possible. You won't find VISA running distributed MySQL instances anytime soon. The mainframe mindset seems to be that you build the system EXACTLY how you need it. No More, No Less! The way I think of it is like Lego blocks.

Today we take a companies like Twitter who think "We have a lot of different kinds of blocks, how can we make them fit together and do what we need."

Mainframe developers think "We need to handle tens of thousands of transactions per second doing X. So lets make our own blocks that fit together perfectly and do exactly that."

This means you end up having to re-invent a lot of things. But you re-invent exactly what you need and leave out the rest. I wonder if the future is in a hybrid of these two types of systems. Perhaps we need to put Mainframes in the Cloud and let people purchase time on them like Windows Azure & AWS. I would certainly like to play with that kind of horsepower. Or perhaps the future is in something that doesn't exist yet which the author seems to suggest.
Adobe slips mobile Flash Player 10.1 to second half of 2010
Same old Core 2 Duo wouldn't stop me from buying one. The 1280 by 800 resolution, on the other hand, is much more of a bummer.
Yeah. I learned about his website through a previous HN submission; he has a lot of fascinating stuff about the intersection of computers and education (which, in turn shows more about each on their own).
Does it really matter? I mean, few people will misunderstand that phrase, since it's used so often. Proper grammar is just a transitory convention; what's important is that the message gets across.
I think hardware is inherently harder than software.
If you're interested in this area, you should explore the work of Milton Erickson, who was a great pioneer of interaction with the unconscious mind.
If large numbers of investors made decisions based on reasons other than profitability, other investors would buy more so-called "evil" companies' stock until the prices are back to what they would have been.
Well, the iPad's certainly easier to use than his old computer: http://blog.puzzlepirates.com/hephaestus/entry/oh_it_s_on_no...
"IE has had as its main mission for a decade the prevention of HTML/DHTML/AJAX applications that run with Web standards just as well as Desktop apps"

I don't think that's accurate since IE introduced XMLHttpRequest, vital to AJAX.
Indeed. The thing that would make me reconsider replacing my white plastic Macbook most would be better resolution and/or a IPS screen.
The major factor was repository count. I eliminated all providers with restrictions on the amount of private repositories before comparing the remaining providers across disk space.
Why were fonts originally not embedded in websites? Licensing, security, support?
Added Beanstalk. Due to their restrictions on private repository count my conclusion is unchanged.
It's even worse when part of the logic is "we got a killer deal on these outdated chips".
Agreed, contributing to someone's campaign doesn't mean I'm trying to buy them.

More likely is that the candidate already supports a cause I care about, and I'm contributing to their campaign so they can get elected and continue supporting my cause.

If you want to see who's bought then look for people who voted one way on an issue and then switched their vote after getting contributions from the affected industry.
Got it. Evil companies will exist so long as there are evil customers and evil investors who associate. As such, evil would have to be legislated out of existence if it can't be shamed: both of which impossible.

btw, how do you know that you're evil? does the evilness change? how so?
Strange, it does not render properly on Safari/iPad
Let me share a frustrating experience I recently had.

I hired some dude off Craigslist to install my TV wall mount because I don't have the proper tools. I tried to explain where I wanted the TV: I want it to be centered in the wall, but then moved a few inches to the right.

He simply couldn't understand what I was saying. It blew my mind, I had to just measure it out myself and mark the spot.
If he had a solid of understanding of basic high school algebra, he would have been able to formulate the problem in his head.

Done.
Even if it happens, the libraries won't actually accept/return lambdas until jdk 8.
http://mail.openjdk.java.net/pipermail/lambda-dev/2010-April...
He also admitted in an interview that he's fond of Age of Empires and the Red Alert series.
addressing this statement in a vaccuum: "The focus of an algebra class ought to be in learning the language of algebra"

i think learning the relevance of its applications goes hand-in-hand and is necessary for a deeper understanding.
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It feels like this also has something to do with the MacBook Air, which hasn't had an upgrade in quite some time now. It would be suicide to the Macbook Air line if they released another powerful 13" laptop that gave the Air no competitive advantage than simply it's weight.
I have one of the last-generation MacBook Pro 13", and it is easily the best laptop I've ever owned. A year later and I can still get 5+ hours of weekend hacking done on it before I need to plug it in. The updates here may not be considerable, but for my money, it's still the best portable laptop around.
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I wonder if this only affects the mobile versions, or if the desktop version of 10.1 will also be delayed. I hope not, as it contains some nice new stuff that's still not available through any other means (primarily I'm thinking of direct microphone access in the browser).
Huge +1 for 'Good Calories, Bad Calories'. Read this and you'll change your bad eating habits immediately.

Exercise is very important, but body composition changes come from nutrition.

(After changing how I ate, I lost 70# in 6 months and have kept that same weight for 2 years, more info for the curious: http://emphaticsolutions.com/2009/01/12/clean-eating-how-I-m...)
Journalists and a good number of non-programmer types always seem to focus purely on the surface perks of Google and always miss the real reason it is a good place to work.

The culture, the people, and the company are focused completely on providing an environment where brains and hard work pay off. Smart people always want to be around people smarter then them, to me that is a hallmark of intelligence. Working at Google you are guaranteed to be working with or around several of the smartest people in the industry.
Furthermore the practices of engineering and product development do not work like a standard corporate software shop. I mean just reading this article from Steve http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2006/09/good-agile-bad-agile... is likely to get your mouth watering if you are a Software Guy, especially if you are into the sort of startup scene.

The point is if all the food went away, the naps, the pools, the perks and all that was left was the engineering structure I would still want to work there if only to be around the smart people and to avoid(they are everywhere) the politics of corporate software development.*

*Several parallels to startups here.
Yeah, I just put it on facebook. I wonder how else they've announced it (besides the blog). Airbnb's been rather good about getting press, and this could be really helpful.
The main reason I got upsold to the 17" MBP in 2009 was that I couldn't bear spending a lot of money on the 15.4" with its adequate but thoroughly mediocre 1440x900 resolution. Its rightful resolution is clearly the now available 1680x1050 when you compare the pixel density with the 17".
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Nice, but I wonder how this is different from forwarding all your Google Voice SMS & Voicemails to your gmail and then using Boxcar iPhone app to receive pop up notifications of new emails?

Sounds interesting and potentially better then the set up I have now on my iPhone?
That's not really the opposite, though, because the natural state is "doing nothing", and by your quote, that leads to evil prevailing. I did say that companies that want to remain non-evil have to actively seek out and expel evil from the organization...
descriptions of other types of "hair" welcome!
I don't know, I read all these painful explanations of what monads are...combined with more stretches of the imagination to explain plausible uses for them. In the end, the authors achieve neither, with me.

I tend to write these off with "yeah, in my 20s and early 30s whilst in graduate Comp. Sci. schooling I enjoyed all this esoteric crap, too". :-)
I'd like to continue working for Google, so there's not much I could write that hasn't already been written. ;-)
"Visiting Google felt similar to being approached by kids from the Hillsong church, who ask you to come along to just “an event” with other young people . . . until you turn up with them and realise that, not only is it church, but a bloody well organised and extremely rich church."

This is a great quote, and brings up the issue of groupthink. I saw a talk by Ed Catmull of Pixar a couple weeks ago where he talked about how once an idea can be reduced to a slogan, you don't need the idea anymore, just the slogan. His example was architects saying they are designing buildings "from the inside-out," and how it was a good idea for a few years, until he was working with an architect who designed a shitty building and used the phrase "designed from the inside-out" to dismiss criticism.

For Google, if employees get to the point where "do no evil" is a just a slogan that helps them get to sleep at night and they stop constantly questioning their actions, it doesn't mean anything anymore. In fact, it's worse than had it never existed at all, because it's used as a justification for things of questionable evil-ness. "Google stores everything they can about what you do online without asking your permission, but it doesn't matter, because they would never do anything evil with all that information." They can tell themselves that, but it doesn't mean it isn't evil.
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Try it out now: http://wikitrail.zetabee.com - it is a page action that shows up on wikipedia.org and tvtropes.org.
Pure HTML5 + CSS: Replica of a Mac OS X system preference pane
Hello!

I built a replica of the Magic Mouse system preference pane using HTML5 and WebKit CSS extensions. Not a single image is used. You need a developer build of Chrome or WebKit to view the live demo properly.

Demo: http://aupajo.github.com/webkit-fu/mouse-dialog/

Side-by-side comparison screenshot: http://imgur.com/6Kt6L.png

It takes advantage of WebKit-specific CSS gradients, transforms, box-shadows, etc. Not a single image is used. The video is, of course, done with the HTML5 video element.

Code is freely available on GitHub (http://github.com/aupajo/webkit-fu).

Put it together for a weekend BarCamp (http://barcamp.org/BarCamp-Christchurch-2010).

This is a repost from a few days ago, but it went completely under the radar. Seeing a few posts today about the subject, I thought I'd try again.
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> Think of it as a DSL

I can't let this stand as a blanket defense of crappy languages. We have Lua. We have Python. We have Scheme. We have multiple other languages that can be used as a good way to access the goodies provided by your wonderful hand-crafted libraries regardless of what they do. There is no reason for you to invent your own language just so people will be able to use your library code from a REPL.

Sadly, back in the dark ages, this was not true. However, in the future, anyone who tries to defend the horrible design of a new language with "Think of it as a DSL" gets to debug a 1000 KLOC application written in ANS COBOL 1968, which is a DSL for fixed-field database munging.
One thing that Microsoft is able to do, as a point of strategic vision, is to iterate their products slowly over years in search of the "good enough" quality for their products.

"Good enough" is that space where your product is suitably useful, maybe 80-90% useful, by the vast majority of people. Literally every person on the planet can purchase your product and get some kind of value out of it if not handle everything they need to do. Sure you get feature bloat because the intersection of what I do 80% and what you do 80% is not really that big, and you get quality control issues that you have to fix in later versions. But you cast a huge net and catch lots of fish that way even if some occasionally slip through the holes in the net.

Contrast this with Apple's "insanely great". You make a product, and polish it to a ridiculous shine. Sure you might alienate users who need it to do X when you've spent a great deal of time making sure it does Y better than anybody else, but the people that need to do Y will love you for all time. You may not cast a huge net, because instead of manufacturing lots of low quality net, you manufactured a small amount of very high quality net, but you catch fish that nobody else can get because they break through everybody else's net.

What happened with Word Perfect, by way of example, is that they just never bothered. They had their cash cow and figured they had locked in users because of their fancy keyboard shortcuts. They already had achieved "good enough" and didn't know how to compete against another vendors seeking that same quality. If Microsoft had been going for an Apple like "insanely great" quality, they would have made a completely different target. When Microsoft focused on perfecting Y, Word Perfect could have focused on X and Z and still made it. But instead, Microsoft did X Y and Z "good enough" that there really wasn't any difference between the products. And then Microsoft had a whole integrated suite of "good enoughs" and Word Perfect went quietly away.
My interest derives mainly from being a bootstrapped startup and from being in a tangentially related field (DNS) but I'll keep this in mind for a time when I've got more breathing room — thanks for your insight.
This is mostly because the monad abstraction is mostly useless in non-lazy languages. It's more useful in lazy languages because objects with monadic types can then be written self-referentially without trouble. It also hurts that Java and C++ syntax is extremely specialized towards avoiding the use of abstractions.
There are a few differences, but the main one is that this feature is specifically for GV SMS, so when you open the notification you can go straight to the conversation on the Google Voice site in Safari, whereas (as far as I can tell) Boxcar gives just the subject and body of the email when you forward all your email to it.
Notifo logotype reminded me of my old, stalled notification project - http://nodehub.com/ (not saying anything, they are pretty generic after all)
Licensing. When you use a font in a PDF, the receiver of the PDF doesn't easily get the ability to re-use the font. When you embed it in a website, you're giving everyone on the Internet a workable copy of the font. Fonts are expensive.
Roving Slovenian Hackers come visit TechCrunch and other companies...
The Great Man Syndrome: Big Fish in a Small Pond
Evil is relative and depends on conscience. It is in grappling with a choice that "do no evil" can direct someone's behavior.

Sergey: "Eric, we really wanted to turn on Buzz by default, but realized we have to give users more control, damn it."

Eric: "Ahh, I would have just turned it on by default."

Who wins?
What's worse is that a lot of sites will dns-map foo.com to www.foo.com properly, but the ssl certificates will only be for www.foo.com.
1) I wrote AJAX apps before XMLHttpRequest. It was simple enough. You opened an invisible frame and downloaded 'HTML' pages that consisted of a couple opening tags and whatever JSON you wanted (we didn't call it JSON back then, but that's what it looked like). Then you read the objects and updated your main page.

2) Sure XMLHttpRequest is nice. IE implements good things like that to maintain market share but then ensures that it is never up to standards in order to cripple the possibility of a capable open standard platform emerging. Witness the slow response times, lack of support for Canvas, PNG (still), broken box models (still, through at least IE7), broken message model, and more. That would all be easy to fix if MS wanted to. They make more money without a widespread good, fast standards-based browser in the market.
and how do you tell when to copy it? If I wanted to avoid the load-balanced subdomain in a url:

www35.company.com/bar/foo.aspx

and just copied:
company.com/bar/foo.aspx

Would the http:// come over? how about if I just copied "bar/foo.aspx" ?
The correct term is "crawl", not "creep"
They're actually offering 1 week of (free) coding skills to anyone with a good idea. But it seems like the offer stands only for techcrunch readers.
I've used RepositoryHosting.com for a bit over a year, and its one of the best deals I've ever gotten. We have a repo for each client project, so like the author we require unlimited repositories although our disk space needs are low.

We don't need the project management offerings that are included with Unfuddle and others, so its a good fit for us. I've worked with Unfuddle as well, and its a great deal if you'd benefit from some Basecampish features.
Can someone explain exactly how different it is to build on top of PayPal API vs Chargify API?

- What are the fees I have to pay?

- What are the features I get?

I'm thinking of trying an idea of a paid service for a first time and just trying to figure it out.
O? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Chongqing_yangjiaping_2007...
Well, another aspect is that there is so much information conveyed with a mathematical statement. Consider the distributive property:

a (b+c) = ab + ac

It's quite simple but has some major consequences. These consequences aren't obvious either until someone acquires the skill at being able to understand what a formula really is saying. For instance, the distributive property is why

x - 3x is the same as -2x

It takes most people a bit of effort and time to understand this though.
It's not really esoteric, though. You could have invented monads, after all. ( http://blog.sigfpe.com/2006/08/you-could-have-invented-monad... )

In any case, monads are just what he said, a design pattern. I dislike the over-application of patterns as much as anyone does, but recognizing common abstractions is one of the parts of programming that separates the men from the boys.

Monads just get a lot of attention because the pattern is super useful in certain situations, like pure functional programming.
The principle is good. But is it really painless to change payment API and hosting platform?
>It would be suicide to the Macbook Air line if they released another powerful 13" laptop that gave the Air no competitive advantage than simply it's weight.

Isn't that basically the case already? To go from the base 13" MBP to the base Air, you're getting a Core 2 that's .54GHz slower, a worse graphics card, half the battery life, only 2 GB RAM, no optical drive, and only 1 USB port, all for $300 more. All you're getting in return for all of that is the fact that it's super-thin and super-light.
FYI, The Corporation is on Hulu: http://www.hulu.com/watch/118169/the-corporation
P2PU: Learning for everyone, by everyone, about almost anything
Here's a very useful tool from the NY Times that calculates whether you would be better off renting or buying a house (financially speaking):

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/business/buy-rent-calcula...

Takes into account variables such as monthly rent, house price, down payment, property taxes.... and it has a sweet graph that shows over time where you are financially better off renting or buying. Pretty cool.

Great for anyone who is between two minds about what to do, or is considering investing into a depressed market.
Along similar lines, here's an investigation from a while back of why monads haven't caught on in Lisp: http://marijn.haverbeke.nl/monad.html
At the risk of being further downvoted :).
The proper definition of "rationing" is ; Government allocation of scarce resources and consumer goods, usually adopted during wars, famines, or other national emergencies.
http://www.answers.com/topic/rationing

The conflation of private and governmental actions is exactly one of the things that has gotten us into the current troubles. If I choose to buy cake and not pencils today, I am not rationing myself. If the government says I can only have so many pencils or cake, I am subject to rationing.

Government is the only authorized agent of force. Private citizens are not allowed to force others to do their bidding. That is against the law: you cannot take my cake from me by force. Unfortunately, with our government becoming more and more unlimited, the force it can exert is correspondingly larger.
I was hoping to get one of the 13" Macbook Pros to replace my 3 year old white Macbook. I love the 13" form factor. Unfortunately, there just isn't enough of a performance increase to justify the leap.

So I sprung for the 15" with a high-res screen. That is definitely an upgrade...
The good news is that willpower is a muscle, easily trained.

http://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2005/06/self-discipline/
what happens when he travels to Israel?
I think that "Overridable semicolon" captures most of what a monad is and why you'd want to use it. Imagine that the compiler provided a hook into the language so that you could pass around statements (the monad type), a means to convert an expression to a statement (return), and the semicolon operator that combines two statements (>>=). And then instead of implicitly letting you do anything in a statement, it required that you explicitly program the effects of that statement into the semicolon operator.

The simplest possible semicolon is one that lets you do anything, including interact with the outside environment. That's the IO monad. But you could also have a semicolon that limits your side-effects to one particular area of memory - that's the State monad. Or you could have one that doesn't execute any of the following statements if an error occurs - that's an exception monad. Or you could have one that attempts to atomically execute a bunch of statements that may read & write from a block of memory, but if that memory is changed by another thread, the effects are all rolled back and tried again. That's the STM (software transactional memory) approach to concurrency. Or you could have one that sends a webpage to the user's browser with an HTML representation of the state, waits for a response, and then executes the rest of the statements. That's the approach taken by WASH, one of the Haskell web frameworks.

It's a powerful tool, because it's basically rewriting the fundamentals of how the language works. And because of that, very few people ever have a reason to create a new monad type, which is why examples tend to fall flat. It also interacts heavily with other Haskell features, eg. you don't get this correspondence between monads and statements without Haskell's do-notation, and you can't use them to affect control flow without lazy evaluation, and they become very difficult to reason about without a static type system.
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Nice work!

Since you're already letting people login with google, it might make it easier for people to pay if you accepted payment via google checkout.