skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
All I meant is that one is usually asking the other out on dates, not the other way around. I have no idea why this precludes living an active life.

Incidentally, the pick-up artist method is all about enticing girls to go out and get you instead. And we know what all winners those guys are.
I'd guess the latter as DST doesn't seem to be dumb. They are heavily invested in Facebook, Zynga, Groupon and others. DST investors include Goldman Sachs and Tencent. They have been doing a lot of deals lately partly because they offer cash and will purchase employee stock. Both are nice when IPOs are so rare.
A little sensationalist. Participating in a joke that is admittedly in pretty poor taste is not the same as "calling for" someone's death.
If anyone listened to the hearings, they quoted a part from the book, "The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine" which discusses some of what the author thinks were the inner workings. I've been reading through it now and cannot recommend it enough.

http://www.amazon.com/Big-Short-Inside-Doomsday-Machine/dp/0...
The biggest problem I have with TDD, or unit testing specifically, is the contortions (interfaces, mocking, delegating construction and configuration, configuration files, library dependencies, etc.) one has to go through to invert dependencies in statically typed languages. If only higher order module systems (think: parameterizing modules by their module dependencies, a bit like generic types are parameterized by type) were more popular, then huge chunks of this work wouldn't be necessary.

Add in preconditions, postconditions, DbC etc. and you can let the language help you out a whole lot more.
We should be doing something for all those gems which are abandoned or not functional, and also dead ruby projects which have not released code for years.

It makes it very hard to search for a given gem/library -- one has to wade through too much noise. The reason I've stopped downloading perl apps is the same -- many of them depend on some broken, abandoned library -- you waste hours trying to install something before finding some conflicting/broken dep.

Perhaps a repo or listing of live projects, with some rating system.

Now there is new problem: not knowing if a gem is for 1.8 or 1.9.
The image describing the group sarcastically says:

"Vote for Obama, because socialism worked so well for the USSR."

Obama's policies aren't socialist when you compare them to other countries. He ended up not implementing single-payer healthcare, spent billions bailing out the banks, and said he would freeze all discretionary spending.
Have you noticed z-billing: http://www.zuora.com/products/zbilling/index.html then? Though not startup friendly, I guess.
Attention Whole Foods Shoppers
What You Don’t Know about Intimate Apparel
Zed's soothing guide to Python?
Tor is a big problem. It gives you anonymity, but, it still requires someone to forward your traffic, or multiple forward hops. You really need a proxy dedicated server like what The Pirate Bay has (you pay for it) which does not keep logs. Otherwise everything is incredibly slow. And I mean 56k speeds slow or worse.
That would be truer if the shell generated the Doctests for you. And if it did, how great would that be? I suspect that this would be easier in a functional (or maybe prototype inheritance) language than a traditional inheritance one, because you work directly with the objects that should carry your tests. In python you would have to decide whether the tests go on the object itself (unlikely but possible) or somewhere up its inheritance chain.
Very few Mac sessions, all promo graphics are about "apps", and all Apple Design Awards are picked from the App Store (i.e. no Mac apps eligible).

It's almost like Apple's trying to tell us something...
Who prints their money? The US Treasury, literally. Panama has pegged its currency 1:1 to the US dollar since independence and doesn't even bother printing its own paper money, using US notes instead.
Grammer cop says no.

Honestly, your choice of words is distracting. Your server got "raped"? PHP is "evil?"

What, no Nazis?

I'm not sure why this post is getting votes...
Wow, Python doctests are awesome:

http://docs.python.org/library/doctest.html

Just copy paste the REPL interaction into a doc string, and you're done. Apparently, it recognizes ">>>" as the REPL prompt, and the following line as the expected output. The equivalent for Clojure would be a neat addition.
Today's Pictures: Let's Hear It for the Caretakers
I'm not saying a dutch auction is necessarily a worse option. Indeed it might theoretically be the best. But they spent a vast amount of money setting it up, with all the extra legal fees and transactional costs, so let's not focus entirely on the money left on the table by the strategic error to a) pick a theoretical, rather than tested, procedure that was b) seemingly, poorly executed and c) if it yielded any lessons at all, for which there is no evidence, Schmidt refuses to share.

On a pedantic point, if my understanding is correct, google made (14m * 85) about 1.2 bil on the IPO, not 1.67 - the rest being sold by other stockholders (who, incidentally, 'lost' $136.5 mil due to the pop, and made $464m, minus fees for being involved in the IPO - not insignificant)
That means that Google made 1.2 bil, but had they 'got it right' (very difficult, of course, as other commenters point out, 14% pop is usual on IPOs) they would have made $1.55 bil. You can make it seem small compared to their market cap, but the headline is: he's proud at a messy, protracted transaction, possibly the most important in Google's history, that netted them $353m more than their 1.2 bil haul. That's 20-25% on the table, well in excess of the 14% bandied about in this thread.

And all that says nothing about the overarching questions of 'Why IPO, why then?' and 'what actually went wrong?'
You calling it a joke doesn't mean it is a joke. While some people are joining for the tongue-in-cheek-ness of the group, plenty of the members legitimately hate our current president for a myriad of reasons. The push of Tea Partyists calling for violence against the "enemy" only helps fuel this movement and sentiment.

Yes there is the "ignore them and they'll go away" side of things, but you have to draw a line somewhere, and I completely agree with the article here. That "prayer" is a very thinly veiled request for Obama's head on a platter.

Calling for, or implying you want the death of anyone is unacceptable, no matter who you're talking about or where you're talking about it.
This is not a Boy Scout merit badge, like the new Entrepreneurship merit badge (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1296517); it's for Cub Scouts -- that is, boys younger than 11 years old.
Or perhaps, Microsoft and HTC enter into deal to help combat Apple.
Old as the article may be, if anyone is interested: http://sup.rubyforge.org is a gmail-inspired command-line mail client. Threading, tagging, full-text search, hooks etc.
I don't think there'd be that much less Mac sessions per se, I think they're just dividing their tracks by categories rather than platforms. i.e. Instead of having Mac/iPhone/etc tracks, they have Core OS, Dev Tools, Frameworks, etc.
Especially if you go back and refactor and/or add new functionality to the code.
To be fair, it's not like there were an awful lot of people for whom "giving in to empty threats or blackmail" is a point to be considered when purchasing a mobile phone, so if they changed their patent licencing practices based on your opinion, they would be "giving in to empty threats or blackmail" as well.
Please review my startup - Online Classifieds
Have standing meetings. It makes everyone pick up the pace, and it's almost impossible to doze off or doodle, and yet if you need to write something down you still can
Landing Pages: The first impression people have of your business
Ruby does. Jeweler, Hoe, and other things are scaffolding for Gems. They get you going, but I found that as I relied on them too much I didn't really understand how it works. You can write a gemspec by hand which is what I have done now for my new gems that I'm working on. When I get time I will change the old ones to use a hand-rolled gemspec and a simple rake file for publishing.

Gemcutter has made it trivial to take a hand-rolled gemspec and publish your gem. No libraries or gem scaffolding necessary.
Netflix plans international expansion, now hiring someone to lead it
It's not explicit in the original or explained well in this rebuttal but the "legend tells us" is basically a way for the original author to call the current author a liar without actually coming out and saying so.

The line after that phrase is about Ogg being designed for Video codecs, something he clearly doesn't believe as later in the same document he suggests it was originally only intended for Vorbis audio.

See footnote 26 and the section that references it in the Monty document for a counter to this popular misconception.
Just to clarify this isn't a normal merit badge like one that someone would get while working toward their Eagle Scout. Belt loops and pins are the cub scout equivilent so someone getting this badge would likely be in third or fourth grade.
Using TrueCrypt to lock up your private data + video
Give him a break .. English is not his first language
Angel investors can expect favorable payoffs with only 10 deals, but it takes at least 20 investments to truly be safe.

Taking this to heart might get dangerous. The benefit of going from 2 to 20 deals exists only if the quality of the extra deals remains high - but what are the chances of that happening?

An angel that's doing a few investments would be cherry picking from a moderately larger deal flow, and so each extra deal would almost certainly be a step down in quality.

I'd say that doing math like this is a bit of a leaky abstraction, and it could just as easily cloud judgement if not taken with a large grain of salt.
I only did a tiny bit of work with Rails 1.2, and basically got serious during the 2.3 days... but is most of your old code really not compatible? I specifically remember watching a presentation by DHH where he talked about how old Rails code he looked over _looked_ a bit dated, but still worked just as well. He mentioned this specifically with the new RESTful focus that came along, many people were going up to him and asking "I have to re-write my entire app to be RESTful!" and that's just not the case.

There's still a bit of social pressure to "keep up with the Jonses", though, I'd agree with that. But it doesn't mean you have to do it.
Businesses are chartered to maximize shareholder value. One may not like dealing with a business because of their policies or the quality of their products, but it's hard for me to see how anthropomorphizing companies and complaining about how "evil" they are [not that you're doing that, but it's so often done] does anything but obscure that it is in fact the system that allows, and often requires, "dickish" behavior.

I notice some similar thinking in this respect about politicians, too: in both cases people complain about them and wish for a day when we'd just have "good" ones. (And often lament a non-existent past where they were good.) Companies are intended to always act in their interests and politicians almost universally (and since time immemorial) act in whatever way they think best helps their reelection because if either entity didn't generally act in this manner, they'd cease to exist and be replaced by an instance that would. The system selects for companies and politicians that act in their interests. Understanding and internalizing this fundamental fact about these entities' nature seems to me key to helping us effect the change we want to see.
http://isitruby19.com/
Alternatively, you can type <period><down><enter>. Period opens the "more actions" menu and you can then use arrows/enter to navigate the menu.
It's a neat hack -- I think there's definitely a gap though, in that there could be a tool that does some smarter introspection of your history and the state of the REPL to generate a unit test. v1 would be quite rudimentary, but after many iterations this could be an almost magical tool.

The "code-as-data" homomorphic semantics of lisp would make building something like this quite interesting, as it would probably need to transform some of the code you've REPLled from statements into assertions, etc.
I tried this about a month ago, and found that it wasn't an instant fix for CSS issues.
Things still weren't positioned correctly, though it did repair others.

Along with not wanting to bog down IE7 with more javascript (my site is pretty javascript heavy already) I decided to stick with just IE7 css hacks (I think I have about 20 of them).
Opportunities for startups in health insurance industry
Dating sites run on the network effect: they are useful in proportion to the number of people on them. If they charge money for members, they will have less people on them. Therefore someone interested in a dating website should join one (or more) that don't cost anything. Oh, and they are less likely to be scams that way too.
Last week there was a post on HN about being addicted to information. I am one of those people and this project (IT Leaders Today) is an attempt to make a living on my information addiction. I would appreciate the community's comments on making it better. My nod to Andrew Warner of Mixergy, who is the inspiration behind this project.
I don't understand, why only corporate style commercial software (which I guess I don't know what it is too :p

I thought the ones expected to already have this figured out are the awesome programmers, with more experience, the 10x more productive ones (which I do NOT include myself into). But why create this sub-group of "corporate style commercial"?
I agree with this completely. I just wanted to add though that had I stayed with Oracle and PHP / Java, I would not know the things I know now, nor would I have had the opportunities that I found because of those. Ruby (the community) has challenged me time and time again not to dismiss something just because it's new or different. I say that because I still talk to coworkers and former coworkers who are still doing what I did. They don't know about NoSQL, they don't know about load balancing, or metaprogramming, or evented Javascript, or any of the things I've had to become aware of to do my job. (Or HAML and SASS which are just fun and awesome).

I see far too many people getting comfortable and then becoming dangerously close to being out of date.

I don't like the distractions of "new shiny" every week, but the stagnation of a community scares me even more. So I strike a balance.

What I would like to see is more involvement from people who claim to know what they're doing to join our Rails Mentors project (http://railsmentors.org/) Then they can teach people, instead of waving hands about NoSQL and leaving it up to "an exercise for the reader."

(Disclosure: I am the coordinator of the Rails Mentors project. It's non profit and part of RailsBridge (railsbridge.org)
On the iPhone, iPad and Android Market Share
thanks for the tip :)
You might not have many purchasing options yet. This is Microsoft's next big cash cow.

The lawyer in question wrote a whole book about how the future for Microsoft was licensing patents.
Yeah, there may be some of that, but it's hard for me to look at http://developer.apple.com/wwdc/sessions/ and come away with the impression that this is anything but an iPhone OS conference with a bit of Mac thrown in.

The main part of the lead paragraph: "Sessions will dive deep into advanced development and design techniques that show you how to harness the revolutionary technologies in iPhone OS and apply them to your application development."

A very old quote, but it seems relevant:

"If I were running Apple, I would milk the Macintosh for all it’s worth — and get busy on the next great thing. The PC wars are over. Done. Microsoft won a long time ago."
– Steve Jobs, Fortune, Feb. 19, 1996
As a parent, I approve of the 3 requirements. The idea seems silly on the surface until you read them.
Do you read the Hansard? Read the comments by Lord Whitty as per the digital economy bill. Ministers/Lords are making the points we want discussed, however in a lot of cases they are ignored due to the power of the whip.
An argument for tests. In a team (>3 developers) on a project that will have a lifespan (1+ years) where the cast of characters will change over time, tests provide continuity. The tests specify how functionality is meant to behave. Changes to code can be made with reduced worry about breaking existing functionality. When you're working in this kind of environment, you need to expand your horizon beyond your code and consider the needs of the team and the organization.

I wish I worked in language with a REPL that made it easier, but you work with what you have.
I think you would end up writing code in the REPL restricting what you would type because you know it'll become a test.

Then you wouldn't using a REPL for what a REPL can offer, but writing test code.

Unless it was really magical and would cover 100% of anything that someone could type in the REPL. If you were only using a subset of the REPL/languages features because you know your to-test-converter doesn't like some stuff, then you're writing the tests anyway.
I think this is a great badge/pin - when done right. It recognizes a massive area of modern childhood while trying to introduce new ideas and sharing (i.e. family involvement,moderation).

Anecdotally; Im a little old for the badge (:P) but teaching my Dad how to play MW2 the other day was a great bonding exercise. I mean, we spend time hacking about on his Spit, so it was like the reverse teaching experience.

I suspect Baden-Powell would fully approve :)
The talk was Living with Legacy Software: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CJkiCpPeYuI -- from RailsConf EU '08.
Did someone stick a gun to your head and force you to read it? Your hostility is baseless.
And it has one of the best IMAP-centric rants, ever:

http://sup.rubyforge.org/svn/trunk/lib/sup/imap.rb

"fucking imap fucking sucks. what the FUCK kind of committee of dunces designed this shit."

Classic.
Pair Programming is like Having a Copilot
It has a very spammy look to it. I don't know exactly what it is that causes this, but it looks "dubious".
There's a great and unstoppable tendency in Russia to switch to Jabber

Are you use you're not talking about geeks having an unstoppable tendency in Russia to switch to Jabber? Isn't the second most popular IM Mail.ru Agent, which is also owned by DST?
How is this different than craigslist? It looks nicer, but you have the same feel of how to find things. Why can't I search all of the USA? Or a region. Or search a whole state? I hate clicking around to different cities to try and find something.

Posting is easy. Making an account is easy. Managing postings is easy. http://www.abtain.com/posts/manage has a field for price but I do not see a place to enter that in the posting.

Good work.
Look at their latest releases: OS X hasn't changed for the most part since the last WWDC (Snow Leopard, GCD, OpenCL, and other new toys) nor have they released many new frameworks or features. On the other hand, iPhone OS has undergone many revisions and added a lot of new technologies worth educating developers about. I don't see why they wouldn't concentrate on it..

I also wouldn't read too much into that quote, he was being snarky at a company he no longer lead, imo.
Everyone I know uses ICQ. (I’m in Germany.) They might also use Skype but that is by no means a given. It’s a truly dreadful situation. I wish it were different but it isn’t.
Btw you can try nailgun to start JRuby's JVM once. See your $jruby/tool/nailgun/
The (Dark) Age of Facebook
I believe the next decade will be the "Age of Facebook" as Michael Arrington said over the weekend. Microsoft owned the 90's game, Google owned the 00's, and Facebook & mobile technology will dominate the next decade. However, I have to admit, I feel quite differently about Facebook compared to Google or even Microsoft.

Personally, I rely on Google (Gmail, maps, docs, calendar, search, reader, chat, etc) on an hourly basis. Every so often I deactivate my Facebook account for a week or so at a time with absolutely no issues. My daily life would be much more challenging if I did the same for Google's products. Google's products increase my productivity, help me make money, to learn, to explore, and to lose myself in the wealth of the world's knowledge and information. Also, I have a trust with Google that Facebook has yet to convince me to have for them as well. Google has a higher cause, to organize the world's information. It seems like Facebook's higher cause is to control the internet and make a lot of money doing it.

With all that said... is there anything we can do to stop it? I'm worried that the primary internet entity for the next decade will not offer me an amount of value on par with the amount of control and power that they wield.
Also some of the categories are empty. I looked for IT and Software Jobs in the San Francisco Bay Area, and it has nothing. It might be better to start with a narrower focus and solve the chicken-and-egg problem first. If you have posts, then you'll get readers, and then you'll get more posts.
I agree that gem releasing used to be cumbersome, but the new gem creation process is redunkulously simple:

1) Signup at rubygems.org: http://rubygems.org/sign_up
2) gem build my_lib.gemspec
3) gem push my_lib.gem

That's it!
Taking TODOs from code to tickets/stories
This is mainly aimed at people who have lots of TODOs in their code.

Not primarily those that don't.

You'll probably be wanting to use a ticketing system like Redmine or Trac too.

All feedback welcome, though pref not too many flames for NOT putting TODOs in code, though I try to address that in the blog post. Thanks.
If it's not a meeting you called, your options are a little more limited, but if it's one of your meetings, here are some tips:

1 - Have a set time limit, don't be afraid to even carry an egg timer

2 - Set an agenda, and make sure everyone has it in advance. Agenda is vague, but I'm talking about a list of items (somewhat specific talking points) for which each item can have a realistic time limit

3 - Carry a big stick. This is your meeting, don't be afraid to swing your stick, even if your superiors are in the meeting. This is where most meetings fail, because the organizer is too scared to take control.

4 - "Take this offline" is a powerful weapon as well. Once you even remotely sense that a tangential/offtopic discussion is coming up, tell the participants to take it offline, note it for follow up for yourself so that you can ensure a proper resolution.

5 - Think about using a meeting cost timer. Yes, this is gutsy, but if people see a dollar amount (just use a blended hourly rate x the number of people in the meeting) tallying up on a screen somewhere, they start to respect the cost of the meeting and can be motivated to NOT bore people with low priority discussion.
Strike that: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1301503 :(
FYI- I posted this on my blog, but I don't have comments so I wanted to bring the conversation to HN.
http://www.danielzarick.com/2010/04/the-dark-age-of-facebook...
But dating is a numbers game, and a numbers game is well-suited to mathematical optimization, right?
This is mainly aimed at people who have lots of TODOs in their code.

Not primarily those that don't.

You'll probably be wanting to use a ticketing system like Redmine or Trac too.

All feedback welcome, though pref not too many flames for NOT putting TODOs in code, though I try to address that in the blog post. Thanks.
Using hg-git to work in git and push to hg
Someone mentioned that it was because the blue links look like domain squatting pages.

I only recently changed the links to be blue underlined after hearing a presentation from bing about how a specific color of blue performed better.