skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"I suspect evolution will quickly develop an immunity to the virus, reverting the harmful changes in merely a few generations."

Not with millions-soon-billions of super-intelligent people running around with the capacity to choose to fix that. Evolution will be dominated by human intelligence and intention at that point. It'll still exist, but, well, essentially the story is a Singularity story and we can't predict what will happen past the end of it.
Well all I meant was the kind of dull, grey, software packages that corporations pay thousands for.

As opposed to indie programmers or "cutting edge" commercial stuff - (i.e. Fogcreek, 37signals etc.) for whom things like TDD and agile tend to be big buzzwords.

(oops I didnt fully answer your question: and the reason I singled it out is because all the TDD/agile stuff just passes that industry by - they've been using SCM for years, write unit tests and, well, just "get the job done" (tm))
Watch ONE PIECE IMPEL DOWN ワンピース インペル・ダウン online 136905049
The prefix ab denotes 'away' or 'from'. Similar to the word abstain; abstain from sex, abstain from voting, and seemingly opposite of obtain.

Just gives a weird feeling and vibe.
Lack of search would put me off using it.
This seems somewhat similar to open source software, where there is also a free rider risk. This has not stopped large corporations from contributing to open source software, because there are often strategic advantages stemming from the software's existence and wide distribution.

I'm not sure how this applies to an investor funded rating agency. I don't know that there is any strategic advantage to large firms having accurate bond ratings publicly available, but it would be interesting to hear business models where there would be.
Ruby painly needed a milestone of stability. Ruby's market is Rails, and while I admit some projects(JRuby, IronRuby, Ruboto, Macruby) trying to explore other possibilities, they haven't got much further than exploration. So what's up with Rails? It's market won't be growing:

1. Django/Grails/Symfony/ASP.NET MVC are closing gaps in Python/Java/PHP/.NET communities, making RoR not as much attractive as it was couple years ago. Means much less new developers form these communities.

2. Today's start-ups are moving to RIA, where the UI is built via Capuccinno/SproutCore/GWT/Flex and Rails doesn't provide much benefit here compared to others.

3. Ruby hardly can fight with Python and PHP on their markets.

I admit Ruby influence and innovations, but I won't put my bets on it.
I have sphinx search in the backend but turned it off because the number of posts is limited.

Thanks for the feedback, I'll look into making browsing/searching across regions better.

Do you think it would be useful if you are visiting a category in your local city to see posts from other nearby cities (within 150 miles)?
It's an argument against using accessors for the sake of using accessors.

It's important when learning any technique (and this goes not just for programming) to understand why that technique makes sense in this situation, which means that you can evaluate later situations on a case-by-case basis and decide whether or not that technique fits.

Too often people believe that a technique is good (Inheritance is good!) without fully appreciating why (Polymorphism). This means they start using it for other situations (code reuse) when it might make sense to do it another way (composition).
Oh interesting. Maybe opposite of obtain would be to sell/give away something?
Forgot to add one thing - ban e-mail and blackberries. If someone starts using it, kick them out.
I'll check the book out, but I still say you're a freak. :-)
I heard that elsewhere too. Considering going after a niche, like only one specific category/section thats currently on the site.

Will take some research to know which one.
Yeah, it's somewhat similar to weather predictions for nearby areas. If the weather forecast predicts 10% chance of rain for Palo Alto, and the same for East Palo Alto, Mountain View, Atherton, etc., the expected outcome is not that it will rain in exactly 10% of those places. It will probably rain in close to 0% or close to 100% of them.
What frequently floors me is the complexity of the test frameworks and utilities. Look at an average Rails shop, and their list of test helpers goes on forever. Stuff like mockups, creating test data and so on.

I just hate learning frameworks.

My dogma is fun driven development. If something is not fun, you are probably doing it wrong. Creating mock objects and ever more abstract test frameworks is not fun to me (ymmv).
This is a very shallow analysis of a fast-moving community, but I can sympathize how it's the easiest way to make yourself content with using the same tools as you did three years ago. If you feel like you're getting stuff done to the best of your abilities with your current toolset, enjoy!

The Ruby and Rails community is lead by individuals who are never happy with the status quo. There are always things that bugs me about development. As soon as I solve one problem, the next in line gets promoted and I work on that. I find that incredibly rewarding.

It does come with the cost of blink-and-you've-missed-the-bleeding-edge. Which I understand that not everyone has the mental bandwidth (not as a sign of intelligence, but as one of priorities) to keep up with. That's OK. You'll still be better off with just taking a snapshot of the state of the art every 9-12 months than just tuning out.

Also, you're setting up a false dichotomy between caring about the tools and the domain. The vast majority of developers I've found that can't help constantly improving their toolset is the same kind that can't help improving their understanding of their domain. In fact, one often leads to the other. I've created lots of Rails features that were directly related to a deeper understanding of the project domain, for example.
Oh, it is a true Russian way of investment - we have money, everything else does not matter.

AOL should be very happy (and surprised) to get rid of that old crap.
I'm confused. This would be a REPL enhancement, meaning it would be something you use as needed.

Currenly, using the clojure REPL to test things comes with a twinge of guilt, as it is not being captured for regression tests. (and I am too lazy to write unit tests separately)

This would make it so that using the REPL would cycle between two "styles", ad-hoc experimentation and then, when you've found some repeatable behavior you want codified in a test, capture mode. These can in some cases be distinct processes (physically and mentally) and in other cases overlap so much as to look and feel like the same thing.
One discovery that kind of blew my mind a few months back was approvals. I've seen the entire bowling game kata done with a single test.

It's a bit different to code against a failing approval when doing TDD; you still code in very small increments, but you don't necessarily get to green immediately. Slightly disturbing if you feel somewhat obsessive about seeing the green bar.

Locking down legacy code is beautiful. There is a screencast where the guys who developed approvals lock down a battleship game, generating about 8000 lines of output, not even glancing at them, and then refactoring the hell out of it.

http://approvaltests.sourceforge.net/
I think he/she was exaggerating.
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Lawyers roll their eyes at things like this not necessarily because they think so-and-so is being a smart-ass but because they've learned to understand why a particular law is put in place and who paid for it to be put there. In this case the political and legal establishment have decided they are going to do the bidding of copyright kingpins and this law is just a tool to help them do that. Any judge (or magistrate as the case may be) will throw this kind of crap out because loopholes and the like are for rich shitpokes and corporations, not average citizens with enough time on their hands to pick apart poorly written legislation.

Depressing, isn't it?
Trick is, the ratings agencies knew 1 and 2 were happening; questions about the practice were raised.

That no-one did anything when questions were raised is what brings us back to fraud. The ratings agencies were allowing a known-flawed system to apply known-incorrect ratings because it served their own financial interests.
Here is a video of a plane propeller filmed with an iPhone 3GS, showing pretty cool effects due to the rolling shutter: http://vimeo.com/5934808
Confusopoly Hearings 04/28/2010
Credit Debit Cards Information
Rmmga08 is all about credit and debit cards offering knowledge on various topics of the same
PErspective on Facebook Like
The world I was in had a long roller coaster run around the outside. Nothing special, just a big counter clockwise loop. I worked my way up to the top, then made a wall in the run and started pitching people off it into nothingness (a bunch right arrows, then a pit. And I would shove people off as soon as they came within editing distance.

So I was sort of playing King of the Hill for a while.

Then I decided to start exploring the world without movement keys, ie only adding movement arrows, pits, and slow-down dots. I got pretty good at it. Every now and then I would land on someone and bring them along for the ride, until they hit a key. Sometimes we would land on some interesting loops other people made.

I was just trying to keep my speed up. That was kind of like Rollercoaster Tycoon.
I have to confess that I've been using gnome-do in Docky mode for the last few weeks and I've only greatly enjoyed it. I have a few small suggestions, like a digital clock perhaps, but so far it's been solid gold.

I'm all for going where Apple has and then going past them in terms of UI decisions like this.
Startups & the product roadmap
I followed the TPB trial,and I have read some things about Irwin Schiff, and what I've seen is exactly what you are saying. Even though some people find loopholes that should allow them to do X, the courts simply dismiss the loopholes as if they weren't there. Ultimately, those who are closest to the enforcement of the laws, make the laws, it's not the the politicians, it's the police. Do not misunderstand me, politicians do make the laws, but what I am trying to say is that it's not the politicians who will interpre them or enforce them, the ultimate responsability to enforce a law falls on the police, if they fail to enforce a certain law, it might aswell not exist. Law is force.
Atlanta's crime lab is so backed up most items aren't even submitted unless they are key pieces of evidence; they just won't be ready in time otherwise.

Of course my wife doesn't find this out until after the jury renderered a verdict (with her as a juror). Other than the medical examinier's testimony, there was almost no physical evidence.
I agree that the quality of the deals won't remain constant, but I'm not certain the quality goes down with additional deals.

Well-known angels have more and better-quality dealflow than lesser-known angels. When a round is oversubscribed, it's the well-known angels who are in it. And you only get to be a well-known angel by doing deals. Therefore I would expect some net benefit from doing more deals - up to a point, anyway.
JQuery Sparklines
Email Phraud: An Illustrated Guide
I don't see a problem with the focus of the sessions for the reasons stated.

But I don't see any defense for not having design awards for Mac apps. It seems like a no-brainer to include and unnecessarily inflammatory to omit.
How much context do you need? An entire memory dump? The complete REPL history? If IO is involved, do you need to somehow guarantee the same files are available at test time with the same contents?

It seems to me the trick is to set sensible limits on the context of the current REPL state preserved at test time, in a way that works for most kinds of common unit tests. I believe this is the "magic" of which you speak.
"No classified ads were found for" whatever I click on. Looks nice but that's your hurdle.
I think it's awesome that you're excited for Rails 3. I'm incredibly excited for it. Lots of great stuff happening.

But. (And that's a big but). I think you might overestimate the philosophical changes that are going on here. Seeing pipe dreams and unicorns where there are simply just incrementally improved ideas and work horses.

The rate of improvement in the Rails camp is not going to change because of anything fundamental to Rails 3. It might change because we're running out of big problems to deal with, but I also somewhat doubt that.

So that means that yes, you will have to change your application every 6 months, if you want to keep up with the latest and greatest. But you don't have to. You never had to. A Rails 2.3 application, for example, could have been chugging along just fine for the last 12 months (2.3.0 released March '09).
To grok monads, don't read a monad tutorial. Just write some code in haskell and monads will become clear very quickly.
My take: Microsoft can't make a mobile OS that doesn't suck, so they want to leech income from those who can, using the power of Extremely Broad Software Patents.

I don't see this as a story about new and interesting alliances of enemies. I see it as a story about substituting litigation for innovation.
It's not crap. It's the most popular IM service in Russia and a whole bunch of other countries. I use it daily to talk to friends and business colleagues in Europe, and ICQ is the only service they use (although more technologically-oriented use Skype)
Get some integration to other sites to generate the posts, post people won't post if there isnt much users.

Improve page preview. Had a sluggish feel to it also when high lighting the subject and think the message but from right toleft it wouldnt select? wtf?:)
I'd be interested for you to expand on what you mean by "higher order module systems". Do you have any links?
I think you can find many worse habits employed by software managers, such as not propeerly planning projects or speccing out features. I think referring to people as resources is pretty common practice in any industry. If you don't like it, submit your complaint to Human Resources. :P
I don't mean to sound like the Mac is dead or anything. But the very fact that they introduced Snow Leopard, touting it as having no new features (well, sorta), and selling it for $29 makes me wonder if they plan to ever return to the $129 Big Big Release model. I think in Steve's mind — and of course I'm only prognosticating here: who knows what lurks there! — the "computer" as of about the 10.5 Leopard timeframe is a mature platform. I of course can easily be proven wrong (and half expect to be) if they introduce 10.7 (or 11.0) as a full release and with something more than UI tweaks and slight refinements.

I see more bitching on Twitter this morning about the lack of ADAs for Mac apps than about the reduced number of Mac-specific sessions; I think that change is an even bigger sign that they're not really interested in the Mac. You're right that there haven't been any big OS releases for the Mac lately so it doesn't make sense to focus on that, but there continue to be big Mac app releases and there's no reason I see for them to cut off the ADAs for Macs unless they just plain aren't all that interested in Mac apps anymore. It would seem odd for ADAs for Macs to be reintroduced at WWDC 2011... I think they're gone. Message from Apple: build iPhone OS apps.

And I agree with you about the quote, but I do think Jobs' focus tends to fall on one thing at a time, and the company's focus seems to be very, very much on iPhone OS. I don't see it ever suddenly returning to Mac OS with much fervor.
Amazing Customer Service
One of my college jobs was night operator for a bank which ran on a IBM S/36 (model 5360) and our backup was two magazines of 10 8in floppy disks in each. The 5360 had an auto loading mechanism and I could gauge how close the backup was to being done by the position of the magazine. Good times.
Uh, really? NOBODY I know in Russia/former Soviet Union uses Jabber. Everybody uses ICQ and some use Skype.
Cliclick: script mouse clicks (OS X, Free)
Following on from that..

On the homepage:
* I would limit your popular cities to the top 4 or 5 as some only have 1 or 2 items listed.
* I'd limit the recent activities also, you have some from two days ago.
Whats that economics law that says something like "Once pressure is put upon an observed regularity in the markets for control purposes it tends to disappear"? When buyers only cared about the truth of a rating they had a pretty good reason to want the ratings to be as accurate as possible (counteracting the seller's incentives). But as soon as reserve requirements are dependent on how what the credit rating says suddenly both the buyer and the seller have an incentive for things to be rated as highly as possible.
How did you get the geolocation to work? It correctly noted I'm in the SF Bay Area but my IP address normally shows for Richardson, TX (thanks alot, AT&T).
Introducing Zoolander: A pure Python DSL for CSS
AOL Sells ICQ Instant Messaging to Digital Sky Technologies
Making your product inaccessible
Um... if the IBM drives were read-only, how did they get the firmware onto the disks in the first place? :)

Floppies were writable media from the beginning. It's just that IBM didn't use them as portable media in their first implementation.
I've just started showing my nine-year-old son how to do simple printing and math in Python (basically Chapters 2 and 3 in LPTHW), and he is pretty stoked about it. This will be a great addition.

Not to overburden the discussion regarding the last chapter, but I have to agree with the very last line: "You can code. They cannot. That is pretty damn cool."
Greek bonds aren't doing so hot right now:

"The ratings agency, Standard & Poor’s, downgraded Greece’s long-term and short-term debt to noninvestment-grade status and cautioned that investors who bought Greek bonds faced dwindling chances of getting their money back if Greece defaulted or went through a debt restructuring. Earlier, S.& P. reduced Portugal’s credit rating and warned that more downgrades were possible."

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/28/business/28markets.html?sr...

There was an NPR Planet Money podcast recently that said if Greece failed, others were likely to follow:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PIIGS

http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2010/02/podcast_yes_greece_co...
The 1.8 and 1.9 dichotomy is a pain, no doubt about it.

I totally switched to 1.9, wiped 1.8.* from my development systems. In a few cases I had problems (like manual edits to acts_as_list) but life is simpler and the runtime speed increase is really nice. Pardon a link to my own stuff, but I have written about the 1.9 conversion: rubyplanet.net

I am trying to maintain Ruby 1.9.1 and JRuby compatibility on my rails apps which is getting easier to do.
Interesting counterpoint - http://37signals.com/svn/posts/2303-the-unimportance-of-prod...
WWW2010
Please Review My Local Specials Startup: DealBk
This is still very much a work in progress, but I'm having a lot of fun developing Zoolander, and I hope to get a bunch of great feedback from you guys, so what do you think?

There are a few TODOs that are listed in the issues page, the biggest of which is support for basic arithmetic calculations on margins, padding, sizes, etc... As well as implementing a file system watcher that will automatically re-render your sheets when you update them.

Thanks a lot for any and all feedback!
I hear this stuff all of the time about how PHP fails to the point of destroying an application because of some oddities in the language. As if taking (easy) steps to correct these in the application itself is impossible. I don't think that is true.

What pisses me off the most about it is that every person that ever mentions this forgets Facebook, one of the biggest players on the Internet, is built on PHP. (Along with Digg, Yahoo, Wikipedia, Photobucket, SourceForge, Flickr, Yahoo, Friendster, Wordpress/derivatives, Magento........). Not that that is the only language they use, but this is a ridiculous claim to say the least.

Yeah, PHP has faults. So do most languages - but sometimes those faults are also strengths.
And how do you square your view with the fact that PHP is one of the most pervasive languages out there? If it is so terribly inefficient and byzantine, then nobody in their right mind should be using it. Yet they do. So they are either all crazy, or perhaps the things you don't like about it aren't actually very important to most people. They probably like the fact that you can get things done extremely quickly in it.
Using the free maxmind for the backend GeoIP database.
What advantages does Arch Linux have over Ubuntu?
Was "grammar" intentionally misspelled?
Microsoft's future is to be a patent troll?
Same feeling here
There are opportunities for startups all over the place that are mostly ignored because your average 20-something hacker/founder has no idea these problems exist.

Also, transcripts would be nice.
Replying to self. Lots of pictures here.

http://www.corestore.org/36.htm
Nice article. I have moved on from 1.8.x and just use 1.9.1 for just about everything except when I need to use existing Java NLP and Semantic Web libs, in which case I use JRuby. I have an ongoing infatuation with Clojure and Scala, but Ruby is my go-to language for getting work done.
Rough justice for Terry Childs
what do you mean by "high traffic classifieds?" Are you referring to some kind of technological superiority over the alternatives? Does high traffic mean anything to your users? Just wondering.
Professionalism isn't like pregnancy, it's not a binary state. I would categorize a person who resigns by email as an act that's below average on the scale of professionalism.

I mean seriously, how hard is it to present your resignation letter in person or by telephone?

In any case, let's agree to disagree, since everyone has different standards.
Ask HN: Best incorporation type for a consulting company?
Is there one type of incorporation that is best used to establish a consulting company? Looks like most startups are recommended to be a DE incorporated C-corp, is there a similar "best of" set up for the consulting company case?

Looking to establish a legal entity with tax ID, will likely never take outside investment, profit / loss will vary year to year, and want legal separation between "the consultants" and "the company".

Have been advised that an S-corp or LLC would be the way to go, but wanted to hear from the HN community.
I'm pretty sure he was using that to illustrate an extreme. He talks a lot about performance and he will spend hours lowering latency by 5% and restarting Apache every 10 requests would certainly not help performance. I think his point was that sometimes you need to simply solve the problem and move on.
I would personally view that as an incentive to check my email in most cases. :-)
Actually, Microsoft does make a mobile OS that "doesn't suck", at least in the sense that it's a mobile OS that HTC wants to sell on their own devices.

This is just price negotiation inside an existing business relationship, nothing more. It's true that MS used this trick in the 90's in ways that were anticompetitive (Dell paying MS for every computer sold meant that they had no incentive to bundle other operating systems), but that's not the situation here.
How about arbitrary distance, which the user defines?
Square Spots Illness? Indeed.
Ya, really. I'm in Russia, I'm on jabber since forever, ditched ICQ completely 2 or 3 years ago -- I just don't need it anymore, almost everybody I know is on jabber already.

(admittedly, quitting Skype is noticeably harder).