skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
My dev box these days is a 3 pound, 10" ThinkPad X60, bought off eBay for $300 and maxed out with 4gb ram and a 320gb drive. I'd prefer something bigger, but then I've been backpacking across South America these last 7 months, so space and weight are kinda precious.

Here's my experience:

Up:
- It's fast. Honest! Faster than the proper dev machine I was using just 3 years ago.

- It's crazy portable. I can write code on a bus.

- Long battery life. 8 hours writing in Word, or 3 hours at full dev mode: SQL Server up, VS.NET and ReSharper churning away nonstop while 4 copies of the client-heavy end-product are running in the background.

Down:

- You can't fit much code on the screen. Means you need to keep more stuff in your head, which slows you down a bit.

The big downside is that nobody is making fast small machines anymore. The X60, which ended production 2 years ago, is the last notebook you can buy with a non-letterbox screen and a proper fast processor. Now it's all netbooks, with their boggy processors and wide-aspect, codeproof screens.

It's a shame. If somebody made a machine on the X60 form factor with the latest hardware I'd definitely buy one.
Linux Consulting: Seeing the Bigger Picture
Odd man out
The Small Incrmemental Operations Decisions
Virtualenv - Play safely with a Python
Absolutely, Totally Free to Post your Ad - Free Offers
Watching the video, he discovered 4 steps to the epiphany via Marc Andreesen's blog (this post, I guess: http://pmarca-archive.posterous.com/book-of-the-week-best-bo...), but in the context it seems more retroactive reassurance than guidance. He also mentions Sean Ellis, with respect to split tests and analytics etc.

BTW: Joel's "marimba phenomena" is this: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/PickingShipDate.html
Indeed ... but are he and the VPRI getting anywhere?

I don't know; by an accident of history I'm a Lisper, not a Smalltalker, so I'm not following them closely. But I don't get an impression of serious focus or progress.

Please correct me if I'm wrong; I sure would like to be, and I'm certainly finding a lot of the ideas they're throwing out to be extremely useful (or at least fascinating). E.g. generate your TCP/IP stack from the RFCs....
If I had an iPad and wanted to install a clock app, I'd just go for the one I like the best. Why would I give a shit about submission date.

Do you check submission date when you install a Firefox addon?
from what a few people posted in other threads, DST is basically a way for some shady russian outfits to launder money.

That's the reason they don't mind overpaying a lot for their investments

Just read up on the guy who owns 32% of DST: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alisher_Usmanov#Legal_action_ov...
Logic in the Limelight
I've personally never encountered a PHP framework that meets that definition.
There are other alphabets that continue, like Norwegian (Generation Æ). This gives us three additional generations to find an alternative (Generation Æ, Ø and Å). Chinese will probably replace English as a global language anyway by the time Generation Å is born.
I was about to say the exact same thing...
Clicking "like" is like saying I have nothing to actually contribute but I want to feel like I'm participating. Also, I guess it stops the thousands of comments that would just say "I agree," "Yeah" or whatever?

But what good is a "like" button if there is no "dislike/hate" button?
http://erictric.com/2010/04/23/fusion-garage-exposes-email-a...
Ask HN: Know of any web frameworks that run on Python 3?
I'm running Django right now, but seeing as I'm early in my startup's life, I'd consider moving to Python 3.x if I could.

I've been looking around at different web frameworks, but I'm not seeing whole lot of support towards Python 3 yet. Aside from Bottle, does anybody know of other frameworks that are Py3k compatible?
This is definitely a satire, but it's so deadpan that it was hard for me to pick up on until nearing the end of the video. Amazing.
Somewhere on the internet, someone is taking this seriously.
The other year an in-law remarked that "kids today" were unwilling to do the group house thing. I asked whether n years ago he ever imagined himself using the expression, and got laughs from his sister and wife, and a rueful one from him.

How does JC get off? Well, what are going to do? Boycott him? Challenge him to a duel? A mixed martial arts match? Regard him as background noise, a minor nuisance like a loud, smelly bus stop, and move on.

But remember this in 10 or 20 or 40 years when you are tempted to say bad things about the young of that day.
See http://rationalwiki.com/wiki/Poe%27s_Law
What I don't understand is what is the position of Cecilia Malmström is.
In my experience:

Their network. So you're doing well there.

When that's exhausted, if they can't afford recruiter fees, classified ads. I would assume Craigslist nowadays.

Only if and when they can afford recruiters fees and there is one good one in their area do they turn to them. My last experience there, in 1997 or so, was that only 1/2 of the resumes sent to us by one of the two best in the D.C. area were potentially viable (I can't remember how many we made that judgment about before or after the interview).

Outsourcing candidate placement ... yow. I don't know. If a company takes recruiting seriously, its top people are going to spend the time it takes to do it right. To the extent you could off load some of that burden it would be great, but for technical staff you're going to have to get a good programmer in your team, someone who can administer the "can you program your way out of a paper bag" tests. Ditto for systems, unless you've developed enough skills on the side in that area.

Good luck; this is a field that is not done well and needs all the help it can get. I'd recommend spending a lot of quality time on this site http://www.asktheheadhunter.com/ for some additional tips and such.

Pay particular attention to this essay, "Death by Lethal Reputation": http://www.asktheheadhunter.com/halethalrep.htm

"On the surface, the company's problem was a nasty reputation for a number of bad hiring habits. At a deeper level, the problem was a lack of pride and a lack of concern about how it presented itself to its professional community. If the company had been able to shake the bad habits, it might have been able to regain the respect of its community."

To the extent you can help companies avoid problems of this nature while they're in furious heads down startup mode you could add serious value to your services.
What evidence is there of this?
Ya, couldn't agree more. I have been tempted to buy Coda, but BBEdit is just better in the long run.
PPT link?
I haven't used both these apis. But from what I see, GeoAPI seems to provide writable layers if you would want to augment their data with your own data which would be available just to you, while simplegeo doesn't provide it yet. On the other hand, Sinplegeo seems to give an API that enables you to query for predicted population density in an area. Simplegeo seems to provide history for the users or objects that you are tracking while geoapi doesn't seem to provide. See which of these features matter to you and which don't. These are from what I understood by going through the docs in a few mins just for answering this question since geo is one of my interests. So, I may have overlooked something. Please verify these yourself once.
Plainview - Fullscreen lightweight browsing experience
Yes, I think a huge part of the problem wih frameworks for a lot of programmers, myself included, is a lack of control. The framework takes control and you have a certain set of ways to modify its behavior. If what you need to do isn't something the framework designers had in mind, you may have to hack the framework. Even if it is something they had in mind, it can be much slower to hunt around and find the 'right' way to tell the framework to stop doing this automatic thing and do this other thing instead. It is often much faster for an experienced and skilled developer to write something that just does what they need to begin with.

Libraries, OTOH, don't presume anything about taking control. You're still the driver, they just have a lot of things that can make your life easier if you choose to use them.
Cecilia Malmström plans to introduce a website blocking system in Europe. This part is sadly no satire.
The difficulty there, however, will be proving that the phone is worth $400.

This phone isn't in production yet. You can put a much higher value on a "prototype", including all the R&D, tooling expense, new materials, etc etc etc.

And what if the 4G retails for $1,999? How about $499,999? You can't prove it won't at this point, can you? Saying the older model is the example for the cost of the new one isn't a logical connection in a court of law.
CSS isn't like most code. The sequence of lines has very little bearing on execution sequence.

CSS is all about being well organised. If your selectors and attributes are well organised, then one line CSS absolutely makes sense.

Group selectors by feature and order attributes uniformly. Very easy to read.

Much better to glance at the screen than scroll through a vertical column of formatting declarations.
no idea, like I said I'm just reposting what others said, but you can just look at their investments, it's obviously they don't care about money since they consistently overpay by a huge number for their investments.

No real investment fund that gets it's money from legit investors would consistently overpay...i.e. they "valued" facebook at 10 billion...at a time when facebook had problems raising funds at even a lower valuation. Why would you overpay when you don't have to?
Sadly this is true in Australia too.
My workstation is named Casper, because it had a fried motherboard and I thought it was dead. Other option was Lazarus. Notebook is Pegasus, because it's powerful and can "fly around". Render nodes are RNn.
Instead of ranting, why not publish a link to the book that started it all?

http://books.google.com/books?id=fyVtp3EMxasC
One thing, echoing HN user corruption, is that you need to look for companies that can afford your not devoting 99% of your technical time, effort and attention to their needs.

I doubt Google had its 20% policy when it was moving from its Stanford lab foundation to establishing the company, I would think that had to come later.

Even if a company is profitable, that doesn't mean it has this sort of luxury, but you should probably start out with profitable ones.

I don't think on its face that your desire is crazy, people like you can provide all sorts of benefits to the company they're working for (e.g. your network, recognition (would Transmeta have had the slightest chance in the marketplace if they hadn't hired Linus?), etc.). But raw survival comes first.
Here is a link with some background http://bendrath.blogspot.com/2010/03/i-try-dialogue-with-eu-...

and a link to the actual Proposal for "on combating the sexual abuse, sexual exploitation of children and child pornography, repealing Framework Decision 2004/68/JHA"

http://ec.europa.eu/justice_home/news/intro/doc/com_2010_94_...
Yeah. The part about the bill also extending to block political opposition gave it clearly away for me. Possibly hidden motives aren't typically announced in campaigns.
Regarding the para of the nexus. What if all we are is a nexus of sensations and thoughts/feelings/experiences. What if even the physical plane is only an experience this nexus goes through. No separate body.
The nexus goes through an experience of death, and maybe something after that, too.

That nexus could be what we call consciousness. (Or it could be the human mind.)

And each consciousness could be a part of a larger nexus, one cosmic nexus with millions of child nexi. At some stage, the nexus merges back with the cosmic nexus like a river into the ocean. Perhaps the cosmic nexus is what some people call God.
We use the mechanize ruby gem for integration with other sites and web applications - doing things that are not exposed through APIs but only interface. Really cool!

Way better than Net::HTTP
It has an established market value of $5,000. The fact that it was unreleased and secret increases its value quite substantially.
And these people keep calling themselves "Liberals". Beats me.
Then he goes to the next VC. There's lots of them.
Drew tweeted a link to his actual ppt: http://bit.ly/bVOSfw
Ask HN: How do you get started in enterpirse Java development?
I've been around this community long enough to know that "Java" is almost a bad word, but hear me out. In my area (Western Michigan), there is an abundance of jobs that require experience doing enterprise Java development. I'm currently a web developer(PHP), and would like to branch out a bit in to Java programming as a profession.

The thing is, even entry level Java jobs are looking for at least 1 year of experience. I used Java during my academic career extensively, and consider myself proficient with it. However, since I don't have any "real" experience, nobody is willing to look my way.

So, my question is: How do you get started in enterprise Java development? What is the best way to gain experience without giving up on the current day job that pays the bills?
مشاهدة مباراة برشلونة وخيريز
مشاهدة مباراة برشلونة وخيريز
I'm doing all my work (programming) on my trusty ThinkPad x200, which is basically a successor to X6x.

While it is somewhat larger (12" screen, 3.25lb), it's still rather mobile, and a bit bigger screen (1280x800) means I can fit most of what I need on the screen (I prefer my windows maximised, though, and my IDE of choice is vim+bash).

It's powerful enough machine, too - I usually have one (or, not so often, two or more) VM running for servers and/or different operating systems.
Interesting. I'm not sure I entirely agree. I think there are different kinds of "cool".

Music goes through phases, and for a while grunge is cool, and then after a while it becomes uncool (mostly because the popularity attracts dozens of second rate copycats and the airwaves become saturated).

The same thing could happen to apple; maybe all the copycats will dilute the appeal of its products and fatigue will set in for everything Apple.

But there's another kind of "cool" that can last a lot longer. Think BMW or Mercedes. Not for everybody, but they've owned a lot of the upmarket segment for a long time, and the very fact that they're not for everybody probably helps keep the copycats and saturation away.

Maybe the fact that Apple isn't trying to be everything to everybody will help their longevity...
Well, yes and no. Are iPods still cool? Not really. Your mother has one, and she's not cool at all. (Sorry, I'm guessing here). Nobody is impressed by an iPod any more, because everybody has one. But people still buy them, because they don't suck, they work with everything they already have, they're well integrated into the ecosystem (iTunes etc) and because they're so ubiquitous that most people are barely even aware that it has competitors.

In short, I think the iPod is the Microsoft Windows of the mp3 player world.
How is BBEdit vs. TextMate?

I've purchased licensed versions of Coda, Espresso, and TextMate. Is BBEdit worth plunking down money for yet another editor?

I suppose I could be less lazy and actually download the demo and try it for awhile.
Sorry, I just changed the rules and now you're not allowed to play.
Apple wants to control their platform. Microsoft wanted to control all platforms. There is a difference.

Or to put it another way, when I have to buy an iPhone to collaborate with people around me who have iPhones, then you'll have an argument to make.
I generally type colon, slash, and then something like "div.perfmon span.more" and get to where I want.

The search function in VIM is very robust if you know what string to use.
Very interesting.

The major thing I'd add is ideally you can be big enough that moving sideways is an option, from one tasty problem domain to another. Google can of course do this.

Another, and it's also hard, is to have hard enough problems that people will stay because it keeps being challenging enough. That works in research, I'm not sure how often it'll work at the other end of things.
Libguestfs, library for accessing and modifying virtual machine disk images
'Overpaying' is just an opinion. Obviously we can only speculate, but many people scoffed at Google's share price at IPO - anyone who bought-in despite that now looks like a genius.

Also, as outsiders, it's impossible to know enough about what the exact funding situation for Facebook looked like at the time to make conclusions about overpaying.
He's the most vocal, but I also don't think VPRI are really going anywhere.

Luckily, he's not alone. There are others working toward the "blue plane" with more success.
It is not what you post, it is what they post about you.

A friend of mine decided to give facebook a try and he was received with a warm welcome of "Bring the cocaine, snuffy is here finally!"

Closer to home, a cousin went to a bachelorette party and posted pictures of her and everybody doing their stuff, you know, sucking fake cocks and stuff. Totally inappropriate for the world to know, but they thought that was just funny.

See? you can't control what they post about you.
If you want an alternative that will never disrespect privacy, you will need to make it distributed. This is because the only way to control your data is to lock it up on your machine, or encrypt it.

I wonder if there are standards (protocols) related to distributed "social network".
That's more of a startup oriented attitude. To continue the house analogy, if you wanted to avoid the premium associated with the higher contract, could enter into a similar agreement with the builder.

He builds the house on the cheap, in exchange for a percentage of the final selling price. If the contract was sound, why wouldn't that be an equitable deal?

There's probably a law against it, though (houses are funny that way).

In the case of the original post, I would be willing to work there - as a very expensive contractor, with the degree of my loyalty explicit in the terms. He'd probably object to the part about him paying my attorney to review it, though.
Although I agree wholeheartedly with this article I was a bit disappointed going in, I though it was going to be related to an improbability drive...such as an infinite improbability drive. ;)
I keep trying to break up with Coda. It lacks many things I want in an editor. Then I go try another editor; I've tried many. I always end up back at Coda and hope they'll add a feature or two that I requested two years ago.

Sometimes I think about writing plugins for what I need and I open up XCode and start a project. Then I realize that I am writing code to add functionality to an editor that I should be using to write code for projects I actually need to work on.

Thanks raimondious for posting this, I'm glad to know I'm not alone.
Doesn't that cut both ways? I write the way I want by spreading the css over multiple lines, and the tools that I use provide a symbol view that lets me find selectors quickly and without fuss....even ignoring the 'Find' panel.

Im fascinated by the idea that I should break something as important as effective source control to fix a problem as simple as finding a specific selector in a file.
All about software design feedback
Except that you can collapse everything between the braces and get every statement on one line by hitting alt+cmd+0 in textmate.

When your editor can hide the details or navigate directly to the block you are looking for, formatting becomes less important for navigation.
"Don't Mistake Activity for Achievement"
BBEdit is very old school, but very comprehensive. I used it to write lots of code before TextMate matured enough to be usable.

I still keep an old version of BBEdit around for the odd task that TextMate can't do, but isn't quite complex enough to break out the scripting language.
Ask HN: What is your favorite Javascript UI framework out there ?
I'm looking forward to build my next web app soon and this time, I thought I'd give a try to a fully featured JS UI library instead of reinventing the wheel. I haven't quite followed JS trends for a while, so I'd like to get some advice from this community.

So far, I'm considering:

- jQuery UI: has been there for a while, great community and tons of plugins but it's still very low level.

- ExtJS: great UI but smaller community and the dual license scares me (I'm not sure I can afford the commercial license yet).

- SproutCore: seems really great and love the UI, but writing all my back-end in JS kind of scares me.

- Cappuccino: same as above.

So, what JS UI framework do you like best ?
Use Blueprint as a blueprint. Remove the span-4's and append-1's after you've created an id or class that does the same thing.

When I use Blueprint I'm able to rapidly create websites (the base typography is the best part of Blueprint) and then you can just gut it out once a site is complete.
You may be starting from wrong assumptions. Asymptotic analysis of algorithms is useful when you want to extrapolate to larger datasets, since it helps you figure out what, if the data grew enough, would become the bottleneck in your source code. A profiling tool is useful for getting at the actual time consumption. So what you'd want is to run your code under profiling, using a realistic amount of data. (Use a sampling profiler if the instrumented source code is too slow).
Anything that looks bad at the scale that you're aiming at is something that you'd (eventually want to address).
Another method would be to run the profiler twice, once on a small-ish dataset and once on a large-ish dataset (where large-ish doesn't have to be the full size) and then subtract the small-ish times (cumulative or self) from the large-ish times so you get rid of the startup time and see more clearly where the non-startup portion is spending its time.
Tool of the Day: Titanpad: Etherpad Reincarnated
When I taught high school, nomic was the day-before-vacation time waster in my CS classes. I think we actually had a winner once in the couple of dozen times we played, but the kids had fun. They sat around arguing about logic, which was a very easy sell to my administration.
This is a fantastic library. Great to see that it's still moving along.

Now, if it only had a way to execute javascript....
Squatting - How to Squat in Abandoned Property
I lived in Italy where 'bar' means any place, often a cafe, that also serves alcohol. Often they have free wifi and encourage people to come :)
He wasn't talking about Facebook at all. He merely questioned the "I have little to hide" line of thinking. Also, if you sincerely think that privacy is dead, I suggest you see this video: http://www.softwarefreedom.org/news/2010/feb/01/freedom-clou... Pay particular attention to the points you may disagree with, and why.
I've never seen the need for anything but emacs to edit my source.

What a program.
MailBrowser - Simple Gmail Plugin for Managing your Contacts
Does it actually STORE everything locally or does it have some sort of "on demand get" type scheme?
jQuery, hands down. It allows for so much functionality with such small amounts of code.