skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> wow must have taken a whole afternoon to think up.

A whole afternoon in 2006, approximately 6,000 years after the birth of civilization and before anyone else had thought of it.
"It almost feels as though already being able to program is actually a hindrance."

Hmm , that's interesting i faced the same problem.

Fwiw , here is a technique i use to ease the learning curve. I picked up a light-weight project - Lancet from Stu Holloway's book. Following the book, i wrote all the code tasks given there in the known language (Java or Python)- to understand the problem- and then transcribed it into Clojure. Initially it was really bad non-idiomatic Clojure , i was aware of this but would consciously only aim to finish the task. This gave me some confidence, made me "think" in Clojure and allowed me to learn some of the clojure libraries. I have finished the book.

Now, i am looking at the clojure-contrib code and discovering/learning idiomatic Clojure and going back to my Clojure code and changing that to be more idiomatic. This time i don't need Java code to actually understand the problem. Hopefully, at the end of this cycle i will be a little better.

I also found that knowing programming language fundamentals helps a little but only in the abstract , it doesn't help in being fluent in a language.
Still hatin' on git: now with added Actual Reasons
Agree that OSX app installations tend to be less painful than Windows. I would find it useful for setting up a fresh system, rather than hunting down the 10-20 apps I need and installing them one by one. It would also be great for when friends/family that are new to OSX ask me what applications they should get--I could bundle it up and link them.
"1TB of disk space at Fry's is $100. From NetApp, it's around $700. From cloud, it's about $1800 per year. Any ops manager can do the math for ROI on that equation."

Oh God, this is how accountants look at IT. As if Amazon buys 1TB drives from Fry...
Yes. You made it, you own it. (Until you explicitly transfer ownership to someone else.)
That there is no side-by-side comparison of how a seasoned 'imperative' programmer would set up a fair sized website (not some toy), so something with user authentication, database access, templates and some serious business logic and internationalization compared to how you'd tackle the problem in clojure, functional style.

Then I'd be able to take a section from the one, compare how the 'natives' get the same effect on the other side of the line.

It would be nice to have a 'reference' website that gets ported to every language that is used in a web context following best practices for that language/environment.

That way you'd already understand the problem they're trying to solve and you can concentrate on how it is solved.
But imagine a hypothetical world where there was no Android, or where Android was utterly unsuccessful in the market. In that world, Apple would be in a much stronger position against Verizon — in that world, Verizon would need the iPhone.

A strong Apple does Verizon no good, regardless if they’re carrying the iPhone. Verizon’s interests are best served in a market where there are many phone makers — Apple, RIM, HTC, Motorola, Samsung, HP — none of which are in a dominant position.

Those two factors might mean that it's in Apple's best interest to wait, and only deal with Verizon once they are clearly going to win, and can dictate their terms. Whether they should do so hinges on whether or not they can beat the other platforms without access to Verizon's subscribers.
Etherpad will shut down this Friday
I have a hard time seeing this being followed through with. Are they going to personally sue 10k people? I would guess that they just want a few hundred people to settle for a couple thousand dollars and call it a day.
And the standard open source response is "fork it". Are you prevented from building your own java with closure support and distributing it?

When ubuntu recently altered where window icons appear there was a lot of complaining even though linux is "open". Someone is in charge of all "open" projects and likely whatever decisions they make will upset some people.
indeed, considering the physical security alone (or lack thereof in this case) would have had your $100 1 TB drive walk off your desk soon after you put it there.
Maybe Apple just wanted to see what they would reply with? How they would react.

Apple does have all these patents, though not as substantive as Nokia, from what I have read they mostly seem to be software.

The only stupid way this would go is if some court did actually ban the import of a HTC/Nokia/Apple device. More likely, cross-licensing agreement between all parties involved, with Apple having to pay Nokia for the priveledge. I believe HTC already does this.
Look -- I have no desire to kick around global warming yet again, and I won't, but in the category of "being a good defense of one's opinions" this is awful tripe. Even supporters should be able to recognize that.

My alarm went off early with I have no academic stance on human-caused global warming except that, as a scientist reviewing the issue from an evolutionary perspective, if humans are even partly the cause of the warming since 1990 then we are already doomed as a species

So you have no academic stance, but as a "scientist reviewing the issue from an evolutionary perspective" we're all going to die? Would this be as a non-academic scientist? And wtf is a non-academic scientist, anyway? And although as an academic you have no stance, you think we're all going to die as somebody else? Still working that out.

He continues the barely cogent rambling for several graphs. Was there alcohol involved with the creation of this essay?

Then his claim that by making a reasoned judgment on a fuzzy measurement, somehow the measurement becomes intellectual property assigned to the measurer? If this were true, umpires, anybody reading a meniscus, and makers of fuzzy-logic thermostats could lay claim to vast swaths of intellectual property overnight.

This is probably a brilliant man. My guess is that it was a hurried email more than a well-reasoned polemic. This guy needed an editor, and in a bad way. I think the Guardian let him down and did a disservice to the entire AGCC cause by letting him go with this terrible, terrible essay.
How can you be in any way even remotely sure that no one else had ever thought of it. That seems extremely unlikely.

I'd bet there are countless examples of spring loaded clamps holding wood in cutters, and countless examples of blade hiding/dust removal boxes. This isn't rocket science.

I think you mean "... and before anyone else bothered to patent it and try and get people to pay royalties".
Country Codes (ccTLD) of the World Cup
Are You a Scanner?
[Phoronix] Mac OS X 10.6.3 vs. Windows 7 vs. Ubuntu 10.04 Benchmarks
That's assuming Apple is "going to win". That's not a given, and not even likely. Android is here to stay, it's just a question of if it will catch up with the quality of the iPhone.
I doubt that would ever happen, Apple would never let if get that far. If they do end up in court, and it looks like it is heading in that direction, Apple would pull out. These devices are just far too important and profitable to Apple.

The greatest shame would be if any Apple/HTC/Nokia device was banned for import/sale.
Chrome's sandboxing is conceptually more secure than IE's, and NACL is more secure than sandboxed ActiveX. The key difference in both cases is granularity.

Chrome sandboxes each tab individually, whereas IE runs all tabs in the same sandbox. It's true that in both cases a malicious website could not cause much damage to the OS, but as more stuff moves into the browser it becomes more important that a malicious web app cannot mess with other web apps (tabs) that are open.

If a malicious website gains control over the IE sandbox, it has access to all web sessions within the sandbox. This is not true for Chrome.

Chrome, like IE, uses OS mechanisms for its sandboxing on Windows, most importantly restricted tokens. These have been around since Windows 2000 and are more powerful than the one dimensional integrity level introduced with Vista.

NACL is two steps ahead of ActiveX with regards to security. An ActiveX control running in the IE sandbox has immediate access to the whole sandbox (which includes all running tabs). Because of this, one would never run an untrusted ActiveX control, period. Hence the prompts and signature checks.

NACL on the other hand has two layers of defense, and each one would conceptually be sufficient to run untrusted content. The first layer is the native client sandbox (with the verified machine code etc.). The second layer is the per-tab Chrome sandbox described above. So even if a native client app breaks out of the native client sandbox, it would then have to break out of its tab's Chrome sandbox to do any damage at all.
Microsoft made a tremendous turn-around in security after that meeting ...
Smalltalk has equally long method names in many places... see some of the morphic libraries... ObjC is basically naming type parameters. I don't think their (ObjC) collection support is too bad either. Also, the manual memory management only exists on the iPhone, if you use ObjC on the desktop, it comes with a garbage collector.
It is called a cross-licensing deal. It is what Intel/AMD have, plus 1000s of other companies.

If you are a newcomer, you are probably going to get HTC or some other company with a deal like this to make it for you.

But yes, it does make it hard to get into. Notice Dell and Apple have managed to get into this space in the last few years, so not impossible.
Because of lack of professional quality games, lack of external controller drivers (not sure how common this is), lack of DirectX? Please be more specific with its suckiness, since it seems like you think the problem is some inherent issue with Linux itself, and I'm not aware of anyone denying those few problems I listed. I'm not sure I'll buy the lack of users willing to pay money, but that's not a problem with the platform anyway.
I don't know if this distinction has been made yet or if it even matters, but you would have to be logged-in to crawl that data. Assuming you wanted to compile a dataset of Facebook user data, this is clearly the superior method.
> Until Apple, Microsoft, Google and others start writing their operating systems in Java/C# instead of C, I wouldn't worry.

What the OS is written in has very little to do with what applications are written in. For example, if I wrote an OS based around a Lisp runtime, it wouldn't matter what language I implemented that runtime in: If you want to play in my house, you're gonna have to write your code in Lisp, because my Lisp system is the only dev tool you have.

If you write a C compiler in Lisp and my system allows you to see native code (as opposed to restricting userland code to bytecode) you might be able to write software in C and compile to native code, like most other C compilers. Then I'd call that a 'platform' or 'oldthinkful' or something and ban you from my app store.
Yeah, developers on Open Source projects often don't spend as much time on Design or UI Polish.
Well, if HTC were to stop selling devices in the US, it would affect new customers looking for a phone, because there choice has just been cut.

It would affect original customers, because they could not move to another HTC phone, which they may feel comfortable with.

And it would affect them being able to spend time on updates for the phones out there.

Maybe they would remove all support from the US as well.
Mind you: not pretty, even for C standards ;-)
I'm confused. They're suing the people who downloaded it when it was leaked five months prior to its official release, or everybody? Tens of thousands is a lot of people to sue.

I hope I wont have to regret running a Tor relay for the past ~year and bridging for China.
How many would there need to be to get your attention?
German Court Says You Must Secure Your WiFi Or You May Get Fined
There is some academic work on the topic. Watch our blog - I am going to tease out some of the highlights.
Social graph researchers at LinkedIn, Facebook
This makes sense given that MySQL is a property of Oracle now. SAP likely wants their own database in order to not be dependent.
I would guess more strangers have seen the back of my car than anything related to my Facebook account, easily.
... be a douchy pretentious hipster.
Surely, setting up booms to contain the oil (which is still flowing, and apparently will be for another couple of months until this relief well is done) would do much to limit the expanse of the spill.

This is not a completed oil spill. It is one growing by the day. Surely, containing the oil from spreading is at least something that should be attempted.

You say:

'In at least one picture, there is a shrimp boat towing booms.'

That is precisely my point. If that works, there should be more of it.
I think you are right in sentiment, post-colonialism (post 1960s!, I think it is important to remember it's been a relatively short amount of time), most African countries need basic infrastructure (water, power, sewage, communications) that can be built in cells.

I think you'd be really interested in Erik Hersman's blog whiteafrican.com he works on the open source project ushahidi.com, and blogs a lot on micro-entrepreneurial ventures in Africa that are mainly centered around low-tech engineering centered around problems in developing countries and cell-phone technology.

I don't think free basic access is a bad idea, as long as he is focused on a long-term communication solutions centered around basic cheap technology (cheap efficient cell phones), and providing solutions to indigenious problems -- not huge external efforts like OLPC.

Cell phones are pervasive in more developed areas such as Ghana W. Africa, where as laptops and computers are sparse, as long as cell phones can affectively access the wifi provided I think it can work..
I think "Java 7: Not Likely" will be the next news. The fact that the only people excited about it are non-Java JVM users should reveal something.
This also makes a very nice list of recommended apps. Please don't lose sight of that aspect once you start getting swamped with requests to add additional tools!
Ask HN: How can I keep from getting sued?
I just launched a non-profit wiki project. It publishes information that lots of rich people would rather not see published. It's operating in a very litigious environment and even a frivolous lawsuit would effectively shut me down. I have taken basic steps to conceal ownership but someone who is determined would no doubt be able to figure it out.

I feel like I have two options right now:

1) Cross my fingers and hope I'm covered by anti-SLAPP laws (of which I know very little).

2) Move offshore and setup a few shell companies to make it difficult and expensive to track down. (how I actually go about this I'm not sure yet)

Any recommendations on how I can limit my exposure would be greatly appreciated!
So you actually believe that HTML5 wont be used for making ads once it's matures?

Not the site itself. What it is linking to.
I thought about mapping. Wouldn't you get into trouble if the section of memory still had to be readable during the time it is used by the kernel if you unmapped it? Or can you modify a read-write map to a read-only map? I'm just getting into windows internals.

Heh, I didn't know there were fellow people interested in keykos type stuff here. I'm fairly new to that and more interested in the 3rd thing you can do to reduce cost of ownership, having an adaptive computer background.

If you submit a link to caja here let me know and I'll upvote it. The cap-like stuff that the Marks were working on for delegating authority to web apps was also interesting. It does reduce the amount of maintenance the user has to do, they still have to pay for the web apps though, so depending upon the income of the user and cost of the service it might not reduce the total cost by much.
If you put a list in a list in Perl, don't you have to specifically dereference the sublist when accessing it? Otherwise you get what looks to my eye like a pointer (a weird random number). The first google result I get is this: http://www.webreference.com/programming/perl/nested/ -- and to me "reference" == "pointer". And the fact that it is all weakly typed (that is, pointers are not a distinct type) makes it that much worse.
I would hope people didn't blindly accept patches off of merit anyways, or is there another problem I am missing?

Edit: not to say this shouldn't be fixed I am curious if this implies anything else that I may be missing.
By the way, while the article did not mention this, I looked it up and this is a case of patent infringement. So see patents are good for something.

If you are pitching something to large companies and the thing you are pithing is something they can make in-house, then you have to get a patent. If it is cheaper for them to copy your idea than to pay you and you don't have a patent they will copy your idea.
I generally find the log out action to not actually work.
Would you care to elaborate a little? I only understand it partially.

So, you aren't 'dhh' but you commited using his email address and it showed up as him?
When a project gets a lot of press and back-slapping up front, I feel a little concerned. We've seen this happen to a lot of projects that didn't pan out. The best things seem to have "crept up" on us gradually over time (e.g. Skype, Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, Google, PayPal, Hacker News, Reddit, Wordpress, Stack Overflow, Gary Vaynerchuk) rather than have had a lot of hype before launch (as with Hunch, Cuil, Wolfram Alpha, Squidoo).

I hope these guys make it, but the smell of hype needs to dissipate quickly.
Yeah, but if you (just) travel the US, it sounds like CDMA is pretty sweet!
How I learned to love my electric bicycle
Yes, a great startup idea. What do you think of our product, i.e the video on our blog (the Architexa blog)?
Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act protects platforms from responsibility for what their users post, this is the defense that http://www.dirtyphonebook.com and unvarnished and others of that ilk are taking.
Yet, maybe someone can correct me if I'm wrong, CDMA is a key reason Verizon's service is much more reliable than AT&T's.
Forbidden Tree
One of my philosophy professors posted something like, "I logged into Pandora and it showed me all my Facebook friends and what they were listening to, this is too much, Facebook will have to go on without me" last week. And then he deactivated his account.

Facebook users are noticing, the question is how many.
Does SAP run on MySQL? I never used SAP but it seems 'enterprisey' enough to demand some pretty special DB.
epic post is epic, I'd up you 10 if I could
Office 2010 hand-to-hand combat with Google Docs
> C is going to be there universally until the cpu hardware changes dramatically

Except, hasn't this happened already?

C fails to express the concepts of NUMA^, SIMD (or equivalent), pipelining (or other instruction-level parallelism), out-of-order execution, or distributing load across multicore processors. To do anything like these things I either need to do them by hand (semaphores, mutexes, inline assembly) or rely on bizarre compiler tricks and hope the optimizer picks up on my intent.

^(The late, unlamented 'register' keyword came close to expressing this, back long before it was needed as much.)
Those small pebbles and chunks of ice sliding down the mountain could be normal erosion or the first signs of an impending avalanche. Facebook is firmly in the "evil" category for many outspoken techies (e.g. those people every Facebook employee runs into at parties who no longer think they are working for a cool company but who instead mention how they are now working for Sauron) and even among the general populace the company is widely considered to be bit creepy. If things continue the current trajectory I think a serious backlash and government regulation is not out of the question.
The Linux guys paid the highest average for the Humble Indie bundle.
SAP own the free DBMS MaxDB - so aren't exactly dependent, although Sybase have a much more diverse product range. Interesting developments in the enterprise space.
Or maybe, after having to go through something like that, privacy is not the first, or last thing on your mind.

After surgery, you are happy to hear the good news that things went well, you are on your way to feeling a lot better, and want to share that with everybody.
No patch has been accepted (unless I mis-understood what you are saying).

In fact, if it's not totally obvious to everyone that timf is the one that committed the latest commit, then this demonstration is noteworthy.
Just hoping that Flickr doesn't let me do that, not willing to find out.
The iPod Revolution (Infographic)
I think that may be the point.
Perhaps. But then, I do not use Facebook in the first place.
Depends on what the alternatives are.
World of Goo worked fine on the Mac pre-Steam :)
If they get victory in a test case (IP address + BitTorrent tracker records + hurtlocker.zip = piracy), they can move for summary judgment against other infringers on the same basis.
The utility curve doesn't have to be all that strange - it just has to be a step function, where $1 yields no additional increase in utility yet $2.5M yields an additional increase.

There is pretty significant evidence that people's utility functions are in fact step functions - how many folks will just dump change into a tipjar, or refrain from picking up coins on the sidewalk?
The probability of dying in an air crash is in the order of 10 million to one.

Being killed by lightning is about 1 million to one, being killed in a car crash is about 20000 to one.

So if you spend time thinking about which seat you're going to sit in when you fly to minimize your risk of dying, you are completely wasting your time.
I think it depends on what you're going to TC for. Excusing the eccentric Paul Carr, most of the newer writers seem to be (or are trying to be) typical journalist types. Just writing solid news. But if I wanted that, I think RWW and Mashable are better.

Arrington, though, shoots from the hip, and has a "here's my opinion and that's that" approach. He's sometimes wrong, but there's usually a good mix of wisdom and irreverence in how he sees things.

But, as I said, it depends what you read TC for. Pieces driven heavily by gut feelings rather than actual news are, of course, not for everyone :-) If Mike sold/left TC though, I'd just go read wherever he blogged next because I care more for his writing than "TechCrunch's."
I feel like an out-of-touch old man. (Getting there, perhaps?)

Both the article and the comments assume a baseline level of understanding ("Steam Mac OS X client"; "Linux support"; suitably vague nouns). Searching helps me resolve these words, to some degree; but I still don't know what this thing is (that is not a quotidian HN topic).

I'm sure Lisp implementation articles are similarly opaque to non-initiates. But, um, a little help, please? :)
You have it correct. What you say in your second sentence is exactly the issue.

If this is "actually" a big issue or not is another question.
Posterous is hiring a Senior Infrastructure Engineer (SF, Full Time)
So Apple has to keep making Macs, but they don't have to improve OS X. (When's 10.7 coming out?) Not an auspicious sign.
Missing the very cool LLVM REPL-ish thing: http://llvm.org/demo/
I guess it's been a long time since anyone remembers what executive leadership looks like. Or can look like. Oh well.
Come on... you're not going to tell us what it is?
Why is this done so well and respected in *nix land, but in Mac-world no programmer takes it into account? Seems to be a massive oversight and easily fixed by companies like Valve, Adobe and Blizzard. Less than 10 lines of code could fix this problem.