skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Agreed. Rails 3 seems to be shaping up to be the "revenge of the grown-ups". I see it as potentially being as paradigm shifting as the initial release of Rails, but not as in-your-face.

When Rails came out, it reminded us that programming can be fun. Rails 3 will shows us that not only can it be fun, but it doesn't have to come at the cost of stable interfaces, reusable code, and the ability to not have to go back and refactor your entire project every 6 months.
I can attest that programmers in porn can do incredibly well - Red Hat has a customer who purchased about 30K of Linux architecture training just to keep his brain active while he sat on the beach and occasionally reconfigured a server.
Because you have multiple employees, most of whom only have one job, and who, unlike the employer, depend on the relationship for their livelihood.

I'm not sure I'd use the word "professionalism" to describe this obligation. People have given me notice via email before, and I don't think they were unprofessional for it.
A simulation of angel investing, part 2
Yes, I think they got their money's worth. I think you'd have a hard time finding 5 security reseachers to credibly claim that they aren't the most secure mainstream platform today.
I still have one but I never actually log in - got the 6 digit even (#924218). I didn't realize it was an active, viable service still. At least at a level of independent value that makes it worth selling off.
If only the language itself was on the same solid footing! I love Ruby on Rails but I see most of the uncertainty coming from broken Ruby 1.8.7 and 1.9 builds -- Rails changes just add to the mess.
ITC investigates claims against Apple
Our current system of law is the least worst to date.

It sucks... but everything else we've tried sucks worse.
ISPs may change their ToSes to allow it as it's less hassle for them than enforcement of the DEB.
Because there are many other infamous classes of vulnerabilities, many of which are abetted by high-level languages. You don't find a lot of "remote file inclusion"-style flaws in C code, for instance.
Thank you Merb people.
The important word in that sentence is "directly". There are plenty of ways to do I/O in node, but they generally involve event-based callbacks so that they don't block the thread.
Python Doctests do most of what you want.
In my experience (limited to single threaded code though), modern C++ compilers (especially MSVC which does a better job than GCC in general) optimize really well. It's interesting to compare the assembly generated for the same operations in VC6 and VC2008/2010.

In line with what was mentioned below, VC6 used a series of lea to seek (a*x+b)th byte in a structure whereas VC2010 just uses a single multiply.

And something I was surprised by, VC6 always used fnstsw ax; test ax, 40h; jz $+16; to compare floating point values. VC2010 uses jp instead, I'd presume for a good reason as well.

Anecdote: One time and one time only I witnessed GCC write more "clever" code than MSVC, though I haven't benchmarked this:

switch(val) {
case 1:
case 2:
case 6:
case 15:
return foo;
default:
return bar;
}

Both compilers returned > 15 normally, but optimized differently: MSVC compiled this into a normal two-step jumptable

mov eax, table1[dl] // assuming dl contains val, table1 contains either 1 for bar or 0 for foo
jmp table2[al] // contains addresses of two branches

GCC did the equivalent of this:

return ((1 << val) & ((1 << 1) | (1 << 2) | (1 << 6) | (1 << 15)))
? foo
: bar
;
I'm the author of this article. I've posted a follow-up that incorporates some of the comments I read here on Hacker News. Thanks for everyone's feedback.

http://jmillerinc.com/2010/04/28/angel-investing-simulation-...
I'm sorry if you feel like I point them towards my "pet OS". I should have stated more clearly there are other alternatives, and this only is my opinion.
'I will send a torrent of undirected twitter/facebook spam on your behalf for $5'
OK. Too bad.
This discussion between Peter Thiel, Eliezer Yudkowsky, and Aubrey de Grey - http://www.vimeo.com/7396024 - has some good thoughts from the top people who are in fact working on those problems.

Couple of important highlights for me were:

Eliezer saying that he has to often remind himself to do not what he has most fun doing, not even what he has talent for but what needs to be done.

The other is Aubrey talking about how appalling it is that the smartest people in science work on the same things instead of working on important but ignored problems.

I highly recommend watching it, it's well worth the 29 minutes.
Very nice resource for inspiration!
I think the biggest problem is the number of gems with native libraries. I switched to JRuby, and felt a lot less pain. Now if only it had a faster startup...
Web apps vs desktop apps
Ah ha. I knew I couldn't have been the first person to think of this, as it's a natural enhancement to the REPL to support TDD. I'm not a pythonista, hence my lack of exposure to it, thanks!
Are there any special considerations for keeping the TCP connection open while the thread is waiting for the callback? I'm assuming no, since node.js doesn't seem to exist in order to facilitate long running requests.
Perhaps that counts as an argument against accessor methods?
This might be the case:

- HTC agrees to sell MS phones only

- They also agree to pay MS when they start selling other brands

- They start selling other brands

- They pay MS as agreed
Infinity Lawsuits: Current and Former Staff Sues Activision
I'm working on some plain old Windows software (C/C++) for a niche market, and I've been seriously tempted to make Windows 7 the minimum requirement.

It's an enormous headache to support all those XP machines with a 9-year old OS that has been patched 500 times, creaky drivers, lots of software installed over the years with excessive privileges and DLL versions crapped all over, etc.

These numbers reinforce my impression that Win7 is getting sufficiently established. Those who don't move on to Win7 probably don't care enough to buy software either (at least in my market).
OK. I stick to SI units whenever possible. Avoids confusion.

Are cheetos a very `light' snack? I just took some "Hula Hoops" out of our vending machine and that 34g pack had almost 1000 times the number of calories you report. The "Hula Hoops" have 727 kJ / 174 kcal and 0.3g Sodium, and they also report a "salt equivalent" of 0.8g.
There are Hacks and Hackers meetings organized in the UK and the Bay Area. I've been the the Bay Area one and recommend it.

UK: http://blogs.journalism.co.uk/editors/2010/02/02/hacks-and-h...
Bay Area: http://meetup.hackshackers.com/
And yet, one place I worked on a Co-op term in Ontario gave me the title "Software Engineer".
This was an incredibly poorly written/researched/technically inaccurate article. It is the epitome of "fluff".
I don't look down on non-entrepreneurs at all. However, I do feel like I have less in common with them. It's a lot like any other interest, passion, or activity. People tend to gravitate and associate more with people that share commonalities, probably because you are naturally more interested in what they have to say/do. Couple that with the fact that entrepreneurs tend to be unusually self-involved (almost a necessary evil of entrepreneurship), and I think you end up with the obvious disinterest you've been seeing.
Yes! You can never have too many arguments against accessor methods...
I wrote a gem in ruby a year or so back using 1.8. When 1.9 came out, it was extremely easy to port it.

OTOH, I've been hearing that people have written books for Python 3 which hasn;t taken off. Now they are backporting their books to 2.x (e.g Dive into ..).

There is a negative side too. Everyone's writing gems. There are plenty of gems floating around, some incomplete some abandoned, its hard to tell. When i worked in Java years back, aside from the Java distribution itself, i used to use libs from jakarta.apache. One knew they would be maintaining it, and the quality would be good.

In Ruby, i really don't know of any such company or initiative, that maintains libraries. It's too open. I get frightened when i download a gem which has many dependencies, since sooner or later some deps are going to break. That's happened several times. Even some of the well-known rubyists abandon their gems and don't respond to mails or bug reports since they are busy in ruby confs, or setting up their startups.

Then there's the gem creation process, which seems to be changing. I typically tend to google (maybe this is my fault) and i get outdated docs on creating a gem or publishing it. Hopefully, the ruby-lang.org site has an updated link on suggested or preferred way to create a gem. Every time i create a new version of my gem (it uses hoe), it seems hoe has changed, and I struggle to find a sample to correct it.

However, I love ruby too.
Global objects on the new facebook open graph
Seat Belt Use and Lessons for Security Awareness
How Comic Books Can Make You a Better Designer
Long before I ever picked up a Wacom tablet or even heard the word kerning, I read comic books. I absorbed the artwork, page layouts and character designs like a nerdy little sponge. To this day I can’t figure out why comics are considered a low form of art. Pretentious designers pass it off as kid stuff, but they’re missing out on some valuable sources of inspiration.
Yet another comment on HN that's significantly more insightful than the original article...
The Female Factor - Women Spreading Political Wings
Why I don’t Walk Crosstown: The Influence of Shorter Steps
By those definitions I'd consider Software Development as Sciartiginering. It's easier to say developer though.
> while professional scientists are careful to speak precisely

Umm, no. They're almost always careful when speaking to cohorts about their field, but if either of those change, all bets are off.

And, they're often willing to let proxies rant, and often encourage it, to go beyond what they'll say, to maintain their plausible deniability.

Scientists are people too.
Excellent explanation. Also, I think it's relevant that the models that undergirded the ratings also had to assume some probability distribution of mortgage market price volatility... which was generally perceived as being far more stable than it turned out to be...
Useful Web Apps
Agreed. Two separate concepts. The only link is paying someone for a service. However, I've only spent 5 minutes on the site, and I've already spent $10.

I'm already hooked...
Perhaps not FUD, but I think not releasing what exactly is infringing is suspicious to many.

I've not noticed that Google is particularly litigious: perhaps as the company gets older it will enter the ethos.

I can understand software patents when your competition poaches your staff, but it seems a little unjustified years later because you happened for have an idea first.

Imagine if Novell acted this way.
Capital-efficient UI design
A photo fits. You just need to crank up the compression, but it's bearable.

I guess I can comfortable read through 2 MiB of plain text--should be a few thousand pages of text.

If you compress your plain text (without loss) you can store even more.
Can world's largest laser zap Earth's energy woes?
To Dot-CA or not to Dot-CA?
I'm not sure, but I'd guess closing over it in the callback would work, as long as the TCP timeout is longer than the database response (even then, you could probably touch the stream every so often while you wait, perhaps via nextTick or something).
Starting a Business Is Like Getting Married
Jason doesn't have just one persona. He alternates from Dean Martin to George Steinbrenner and from Jerry Lewis to Donald Trump. Now he's doing his Tony Soprano "youth today" routine demanding one-way loyalty. Hey Jason, while you're getting in touch with your old-school values, go ahead and hire a publicist. You really need one.
مشاهدة مباراة برشلونة وانتر ميلان
How to Write an Informative Stress Essay
Stress is a word that encompasses so much. When writing a stress essay one might choose an analytical or explanatory essay format. It is because this topic is so involved that a lot of people would rather just buy an essay
Kind of reminds me of playing Load Runner on a Tandy back in the day. You could create your own levels and than play them. We used to make really really difficult levels and try to beat each other's levels.
I don't use Ruby very much, so I can't respond to the bulk of your comment, but I wanted to note that Dive Into Python was first written for Python 2.x, then rewritten for Python 3, not the other way around.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Pilgrim#Dive_Into_Python
Yes, all (ex) AAA-rated derivatives of subprime mortgages are highly correlated. No, that (in itself) does not make them more risky. You just do not want to invest %100 of your portfolio in them.

E.g. U.S. Government debt is currently AAA rated. But all bonds and treasuries are highly correlated: in five years either 0% or 100% of US Gov debt will still be AAA.
ElasticSearch Just Got Groovy
I don't really have a direct answer to your question, but the somewhat official demo for node.js is a chat server that uses http long polling to push messages out, so node can definitely handle that.
The downside of my excitement over this url is as of 28th April in the afternoon it is still claiming it will be released on the 27th. A shame, I was curious to see what and how they tested peoples cybersecurity skills.
I didn't contradict your statement. Going by the discussions on this site on another thread, it seems that the Python 3 book is being backported. That only means that exercises/examples in the 3 book are being back-ported - perhaps they will be added to a new edition of the 2.x book.
You should really take a look at Jeweler (http://github.com/technicalpickles/jeweler) and MG (http://github.com/sr/mg). They both make it extremely easy to maintain and publish gems to Gemcutter. Hoe was necessary back when RubyForge was the only gem host, but now that we have gem push it's not the simplest way.
Ubuntu on Virtualbox is my preferred method of trying out new languages without worrying about my Windows install holding me back. I blogged a HOWTO on that back in December.

The improved flash performance of Ubuntu 10.04 will hopefully be enough to keep me out of Windows entirely from here on.
A Note About Git Commit Messages
Even if they sue, it's Canada. You can only get actual damages (which you also have to prove), lawsuits in Canada aren't lotteries (like in the US).
Can you give a kernel function that would let you fit a circle with variable position and radius? The examples always use a fixed position.
Well, I think software patents are inherently broken anyway. But I can't fault a company for trying to leverage that type of thing if the system allows it.
A few thoughts:

* It seems heavily skewed toward non-US sources. I'm in the US and did a search for Obama. It showed 1 result on the map. This made me think the site doesn't work very well. Strangely, the location of search results on the right don't correspond with the map.

* The search button is ugly

* I don't understand the country filters. You should hide those behind an "Advanced search" link

* Sometimes, the map shows the western hemisphere on the right half, eastern on the left. This was unexpected.

* When I click a map marker, nothing happens. It's a Google Map, so I'm expecting Google Map behavior, which is an info window to popup on click. Similarly, I get an alert error when trying to double-click for zoom.

* The fluid map width works well on my widescreen monitor.

* The progress bar is a good idea

* The design is generally clean and pleasant. One thing worth testing would be how many users don't even see the articles on the right because that's a typical spot for ads. I suspect moving the results to below the map may work better - particularly if you add the info window popups.

* The thumbnail images look distorted. They also need spacing added to the right side.
Relationship - its complicated
Anyone who works in corporate style commercial software (or at least good corporate style commercial software) will tell you they figured this out years ago.

Probably before even TDD made the rounds.
Background (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Treasury_security):

US Treasury bills mature (must be paid back by the US Government) in one year or less. (Notes are 1-10 years, bonds are 20-30.)
Apple replaces Desktop Apple Design Awards with Mobile ADA's
Is this the right move?
Node is designed specifically TO facilitate long-running requests. There is only one thread (it's a single-threaded, evented system). Everything is done with callbacks, so if you have a long running I/O operation you'll just add a callback which completes the current HTTP response when the long-running I/O has finished. Node is quite happy to keep thousands of such callbacks around at once for massive concurrency.
I have a 6-digit UIN, and I get bombarded daily with russian spam.

Then again, I almost never talk to someone over ICQ so I could just shut it down, but then again I'm running Miranda so one more protocol doesn't bother me much.
Apple Announces WWDC 2010: June 7th - 11th
Facebook | Elisabet Anagnostidou
Since Node scripts are persistent (i.e. aren't created and destroyed for each request), it doesn't care how long or how many connections are open. It's ideal for long-running requests.
You are not RESELLING it. That is the beauty!
News IT Software Download Gadget
News IT Software Download Gadget
Tip: Setting Falkland Islands as my location and clearing age and gender helped me get about 95% less spam in Skype. (On ICQ the decrease in spam was noticable, but not so big).
You most certainly can. Just because something is allowed by "the system" does not mean it is OK. A dick move is just that, even if it isn't against the rules.
Especially ironic/inaccurate given the full context of the quote: And no, that’s not hyperbole: of AAA-rated subprime-mortgage-backed securities issued in 2006, 93 percent - 93 percent! - have now been downgraded to junk status.
This is sort of the consensus I've come to on TDD: It's a great way to learn good habits. This is important, because we really have surprisingly few solid ways of teaching a new developer good habits, and anything that doesn't involve "an experienced developer watching over your code every second" but can be done by yourself is a very good thing.

But there comes a time when it's time to discard it. The entire system promotes incredibly local thinking, and when you are incapable of thinking at a higher level (or thinking correctly, anyhow), learning to get the local stuff correct is a great start. Once you get that down cold though, and start moving up to higher levels of organization, TDD can start to be a net negative. I tried it out about 8 years into my career, and mostly what it did for me was tell me to aggressively walk into local optima that I knew in advance were local optima, and, by golly, were local optima even with TDD. But I'd recommend it to anyone who hasn't got the basic, local level stuff down cold, as knowing that stuff really well is a prerequisite to getting the higher stuff correct, and rather a lot of developers get a long way into their career without knowing that stuff well.
A distributed social network
If you're worried about what language a dating site is coded in, I'd suggest not signing up for any dating sites =)
At the top of the page it says "good coders code, great reuse."
Introducing Jake: A Build Tool for JavaScript
My experience with fiverr is so far positive, I've set a Gig there some weeks back: I'll tweet about your service to my 18000+ followers (I follow less than 70 peoples) for $5 , it works really good for me: I'm $525 richer since then, but the most important thing, I've learned to deal with customer support, you can't imagine how peoples act even if they just pay a voucher for a service (I guess even if it's free), so no matter what they pay, and how great the ROI is, they will still ask for more, some poeples actually behave like they just hire you full time for $5 , that's the best thing I learned from it (customer can be really rough), and it also helps me validate an experience about twitter advertising and followers behaviour (a couple of peoples complained about the ads, and 1 or 2 unfollowed me, but otherwise, all ok)

I can recommend the service, but you really should know what you are paying for , it may have some Value if you really know what you are doing and you could have a lot from $5 , if you're lucky.
A good REPL is one thing I find it really hard to program without. In many situations, I find ad-hoc testing by typing expressions in to the REPL to see that the return what I expect (or sometimes more experimentally, to see what they return so as to better understand an API) preferable to formal unit testing.

It's the main thing I miss when programming in Haskell. GHCi doesn't quite measure up to Lisp (or Ruby, or Python) REPLs.
I don't think the buck would stop with you (I think it's a legally grey area still) BUT your opening up yourself to inconvenience if it's used for something outright illegal - because your computers will end up being seized to establish if it was you or not.

And then there's the potential personal guilt of having facilitated someone committing a crime (I guess that is an individual thing but some would feel it)
I knew ICQ was old, but century old technology? Unless it started out as a telegraph service I think you're confused.
I'm #575061. We are the ones in the first million, huh!

It's impressive how quickly a company can lose such an impressive market share.
Or better yet, watch http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_First_48 instead of fiction.
No way. Markus works 5 hours a week and has plentyofmoney, why would he sell?

Unlike Mint (pre-acquisition), Markus already has FU money...
Oh yeah? So I'm modding you down without reading your comment. Neener-neener.
Try asking for the bonus Wall St style: "Hey boss, you know I am worth a lot. Pay me more or I quit. "

Your boss may find the money, or your new job will pay more.
That's an advantage of having an old, already-broken car. The potential downside of messing with it is small relative to the potential upside. I've a friend who has a nice BMW he drives every day but he recently bought an old junky Jeep and is rebuilding it in the back yard with his kids. They're a little too young to follow what all the parts do but not too young to learn that cars aren't just sealed black boxes; they're collections of parts that do things which we can take apart and put back together.
The difference is that Craigslist has good design already, whereas POF does not.
Optimization v/s Validation – two distinct uses of A/B testing
The other day while creating a new version for my gem, and getting hoe errors, i did look at the link above. It did not look so easy. Instead of creating a gemspec, or modifying my gemspec, i update the Rakefile and then generate a gemspec.

I will try it out and see how it is.

Again, should not ruby have one standard prescribed way of doing it, and not so many.
I'd be willing to bet that plenty of these diskettes are being bought for students and classes by schools still maintaining older computers with no immediate USB functionality (concerns of the costs + problems associated with these could weigh in), or no suitable intranet structure available - think smaller low/intermediate elementary grade schools etc., using computers as tutoring equipment with educational software, rather than "leisure surfstations".
"The only value of tests, at that point, are to protect against regressions."

Which is still extremely important.
Klout Raises $1.5 Million To Measure Influence And Authority On Twitter
"Any farm policy will distort the economics of food production."

What is "The economics"? This is the next common fallacy on the libertarian side. That there is some sort of law of physics that represents "The economy" and that any regulation interferes with this one true law of God.

There is no such thing as "The economics" or "The one true market". There are many markets, and all of them are based on arbitrary rules with trade offs.