skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
BP Top Kill effort a failure, oil still leaking at same rate
I'm curious... is there any difference between a social contract and a social compact? If not, "compact" just seems like either an antiquated form or an attempt at obfuscation / smarter-than-thou with language (though those aren't really dissimilar).
I switched to Emacs so I could use the same editor on Linux and OS X. I made the switch wholesale and used TM only to look at diffs or browse a project quickly (Emacs need something like the project drawer, and speedbar isn't the answer).

I forgot about all the nice things I liked about TM. defunkt's textmate.el gets you part of the way there but isn't enough. I've had to implement lots of small things and discover features I didn't know about Emacs (global-auto-revert-mode). Right now I'm working on selecting an enclosed region (ie. find the innermost text surrounded by a pair of quotes or parens/braces/brackets and select it), which is Cmd-Shift-B in TM.

A friend and co-worker uses TM and the little niceties have tempted me to switch back since I mainly use OS X these days, however I'm simply better off with Emacs. TM is great but unfortunately while TM2 is in the works TM users are left out in the cold. There aren't many things Emacs doesn't already do due to its nature (open source and tradition of sharing code) and the things it doesn't do I can write myself. So I can bring Emacs up to speed with TM but not the other way around. Open source is a giant win for developer tools.

I don't want to bash TM or disrespect all the hard work Allan has put and is putting into TM. TM has influenced just about every modern text editor on many platforms and we are all better off because of TM even if we never used it. But if you're not happy with TM there are viable alternatives.

We all know the drawbacks to systems with a SPOF and it's not a good trade-off for a development tool as critical as your text editor. Sorry Allan, I truly am, but as TM2 takes longer and longer it gives people a big reason to migrate to another editor. Once switched, it's going to be a tough sell to get people to switch back without any guarantee that such a thing will never happen again. Especially if they switch to an infinitely customizable editor such as vim or Emacs where it's possible to mimic TM's best features, even if it's not as easy as in TM.

If any TM users do try Emacs get github.com/defunkt/textmate.el and have a look at github.com/samsonjs/config/tree/master/emacs for TM-refugee goodies.
Screenshot doesn't really tell me how it calculates hotness. HN already uses some form of hotness based on points/time, but this uses a different formula I think.
Really, this is already being done on a larger scale -- by setting up shop in Seattle, you alienate (or, properly stated, created a hurdle for) people from Silicon Valley, New York, or London.

As long as you set up somewhere with a large enough talent pool to hire the number of people you need, you're fine. While Microsoft and Google are over in Redmond, Seattle proper has plenty of talented software types at companies like Amazon, Real Networks, and Boeing.

Locating your startup in Skykomish or Roslyn would be a different story.
The Simplest Universal Turing Machine is Proved
The optimal solution, i.e. the human's trajectory, is a function and therefore has to be found through variational calculus. Not sure there is an analytical one, but the optimum should be quite easy to find numerically.
You have to read it in context. It was written around the time of World War 1, when movies were still in their infancy and radio was limited to maritime and military use. Evocative descriptive language was the norm, because people were not used to thinking visually and needed all that verbal detail to fill the imagination.

I went through much the same experience as the author, but I still think Tolkien was OK, even though I no longer enjoy reading him so much. Sure, he's turgid in places (the second chapter of the first volume of LOTR is easily the worst part of the whole book), but then so's a lot of Charles Dickens' work. I love Great expectations but still wince at the hackery of Hard Times...there's a reason nobody even tried to make a movie out of that one.
Spot on. Textmate 1.5 was good enough for so many people to switch to it from powerful editors like Vim and Emacs. It is a pretty difficult task to come up with an improvement that in the minds of many would be better than Vim, Emacs and Textmate 1.5 and that too all by himself!!
Here is how it is used in practice:

Say you have a region predominantly party X, but party Y is in power at the time of gerrymandering. The redistricting process will split the region amongst several districts, so that instead of getting 4 Y districts and 1 X district, you get 5 districts which are 60% Y and 40% X.

This process is completely legal, except when the region is also significantly represented by some politically favored racial groups. I.e., we give some races special legal protection from gerrymandering, but not others.
Works and looks great on my gphone.
Maybe not unreadable, but I definitely enjoyed the story he was telling much more than the writing he used to tell it.
How to solve the daylight savings time problem with cron.
And there doesn't seem to be much of a fuss. Makes me wonder, will we be able to run Firefox on Chrome OS?
Big Baby Stars Found In Milky Way Pockets
Hey this is awesome. I would love to find out some technical background on this.
It's nice to see Apple get behind IPS to the extent that you don't even have to dig in to the Tech Specs page to be told that the iPad uses it ( http://www.apple.com/ipad/ )

IPS monitors on the desktop are a treat to use, especially if they're calibrated. All TFTs are nowhere near created equal.
This is old news and there was quite a bit of controversy about the proof.
> "The Nexus One's screen uses a "PenTile" grid, reportedly to reduce costs, which packs smaller green pixel components between red and blue elements. This irregular arrangement of subpixel elements results in the Nexus One providing a less accurate display of lines on the screen."

Is that really accurate? Our eyes are less sensitive to green than red and blue so it seems like the nexus one grid is logical. Also anecdotally my Nexus One display actually seems clearer and more vibrant than my iPhone 3g.

It'd be cool to have a more technical description of how the 2 approaches compare.

Edit: I just took pictures of my iPhone 3G, Nexus One, MBP and Samsung LCD TV. It's a close up of the Google logo on each display.

The Samsung one is especially interesting. It does make for a very clear bright display actually.

http://axod.net/IPhone3G_Google.jpg

http://axod.net/NexusOne_Google.jpg

http://axod.net/MacBookPro_Google.jpg

http://axod.net/SamsungTV_Google.jpg
Nice work. I like the simplicity of the UI- very clean.

One piece of metadata that might be useful would be the code's degree of difficulty (beginner, intermediate, advanced).
> glaring problems, like unthreaded project-wide search

For me, the "Ack in Project" bundle provided very-welcome relief from TextMate's search woes. Its successor project is called AckMate. TextMate users in need of a better project-wide search feature could do a lot worse. YMMV.

http://wiki.github.com/protocool/AckMate/usage
"Did you know, working software has existed for 30++ years, performing its job day after day, before TDD was conceived and marketed to the world?"

No, I did not. Thanks for that tidbit. To return the favor, here's another data point:

Did you know, shitty software has existed for 30++ years, failing at its job day after day, before people were knocking TDD and its marketing to the world?

That's right: there's been good and bad code for quite some time.

Who wrote that bad code? Well, the assertion was that "[g]ood programmers will write good code", so it wasn't them.

I find that an amazing claim, absent any evidence. At best, it's either tautological or a No True Scotsman sort of thing: anyone who ever wrote bad good is by definition not a good programmer.

My own anecdotal evidence says that good programmers sometimes write bad good. Maybe not often, maybe not on purpose, but it happens. You code yourself into a corner; you make a bad guess on something. Just like great athletes have a bad game, or a great musicians an off gig.

Let's suppose I'm over-interpreting the assertion. Suppose the claim was really meant to mean that good programmers will usually or typically write good code regardless of whether or not they use TDD or not.

Well, that invites the awkward question of would they write good code more often using TDD? I think yes, but have no more of a data-backed argument for that than the article has against it.

The existence of working code says nothing about whether good programmers always write good code regardless of TDD, or whether they would or would not write good code more often using TDD.

"People might take TDD advocates a bit more seriously if they dropped this assertion that if you aren't using TDD, or even worse, if you're not even writing tests for your code, you are doomed!"

People might take TDD critics a bit more seriously if they stopped trotting out shit like that because no one with an ounce of brains argues that, except perhaps to troll people into writing shrill blog posts.
Flash 3D Engine that implements OpenGL
Yeah. Because earning money from advertising isn't real money is it. It's imaginary money you can't actually use for anything. You're absolutely right. How silly of me.
Seconded. Shadow of the Colossus is the best refutation to Ebert that I can think of.

One factor that you're leaving out is the moral horror of painfully slaughtering these giant and beautiful creatures. Often the colossi are completely benign, and you have to figure out a way to injure them to get their attention or bring them down to your level. My wife watched me play the first level, and left the room horrified.

Thus, the emotional reaction of the player is a key component of the art. I began the game tackling the first colossus with feelings of guilt and shame for being such a butcher, but that was tempered by the knowledge that the kill was a necessary act. You have a love to save, after all.

However, as you progress through the game your revulsion subsides. You become numb to the screams of pain, the frenzied attempts to shrug you off. It becomes simple sport, instead of a vile but necessary act. The kills devolve to "just a game". Your character physically reflects this, as you become gradually darker and deformed, but at such a slow pace that you don't notice until the corruption is quite far along.

And then, at the end, after you thrill to the final hard-won kill, the morality comes rushing back. What you've done was wrong. Evil. Even though you set out with the best of intentions, your soul is now irredeemable. The guilt is intense. Then, finally, redemption of a sort.

SotC is emotionally richer than most films, and the responses that it evokes would not be possible in any other medium. SotC is art of the highest caliber.
About that, has anyone noticed the test isn't very consistent? In the first exercise the speed of a raptor is 25 m/s, in the second exercise the wounded raptor runs at 10 m/s. So far, so good. But in the third exercise the raptors run at 10 m/s. Why, are they wounded? And of course, can the raptors chew through walls?
Breaking the cycle: A Conversation With Emanuel Derman
Hear hear. Hopefully this is the beginning of the end for those awful TN displays so common on laptops...

Mine is so bad I can't even look at photos together with somebody else...
Eyes are more sensitive to green, that's why Pentile RGBG as in the Nexus One screens have twice as many green pixels as red or blue ones.

Also, as anyone who follows the Apple blog scene knows, the author Mr. Dilger is either a callous manipulator who has hit on a lucrative pro-Apple-troll writing style, or is a very scary individual indeed.
Could you easily add duckduckgo style infinite scrolling?
Hey Ben,

I created hnhackers a few hours after the spreadsheet was posted on HN. Here is my original post on HN:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1264544

I thought this would be a better way for us HN consultants to connect, but I'm happy to remove you from the DB if you prefer. My email is in my profile.

note that I've addressed most of the issue in the original post but let me know if you have any other feedback.
It also ignores the fact that without safeguards in place, good programmers have to be good every day, all the time.

You can't have an off day; there's no net to catch you.
I find it interesting and haven't heard about it. Can you link to some of this controversy?
True that, along with faith-based contrarianism.
Oops. Thanks. I knew it was one or the other.

The article here seemed to just blindly dismiss it as an "irregular pattern", suggesting it's like that purely for some cost reason - why would it be cheaper to create an irregular pattern rather than a regular one? :/
I hear some developers hang out on the Internet
Why use we instead of I? There is just one author and the we convention used for papers with multiple authors is inappropriate and misleading.

Just a small quibble... the article was otherwise fine if you like that sort of thing.
I don't get it. In every post or essay about video games not being art, I've yet to see a standard on which the statement is judged.

If smearing human fecal matter on different things, or squatting in a bus stop and then cutting 1 ton of raw onions constitute art, then the beautiful stories and and visual effects (and sounds and music and etc...) of video games that arouses genuine emotion in the players who experience them should indisputably be called art.

Simply because fun is one of those emotions that is often felt while experiencing the games doesn't mean it isn't art. That's not written anyone.

What's even the point of not calling it art?

Absurd. All of these arguments.
See also night vision goggles?
Law Proposed to Track All Pre-paid Cell Phones
Happy to oblige. However, technical could mean:

1. Implementation details
2. Math details

Let me know 1, 2 or both and I'll fill you in.
Apple should buy Textmate
I compared a HTC Desire (same screen with the nexus) with a 3GS side by side. While colors 'pop' more on the desire, they seem to me rather artificial and cartoonish in photos (faces).

Text chars margins are slightly irregular under a magnifier lens, but the higher resolution compensates. It becomes obvious when compared with my HD2 (same res) though, so I guess it will look crappy next to the 4G.
What "letter from Aaron Swartz" is he talking about?
I chose Instapaper with the InstaChrome extension. I tried Read It Later several months back, but never really liked it.

Thanks again!
Be skeptical of your sources, always, but keep in mind that the more heavily visited pages that are about more well-known subjects and some people consider important are going to have more educated eyeballs checking them.

For example, I don't think an obviously made up "fact" would last very long on the page for red-black trees.
Subreddits (by design) somewhat prevent this monopolization of the front.
I probably should have specified that what I don't care for Tolkien's writing style, not the story itself. I really enjoyed the movies.
I for one would (and will if it is released) pay for the upgrade. I have a couple licenses between home and $work, but would gladly pay for another.
I just had a thought... could a nuclear powered aircraft be possible? With some form of electric turbines? Even if the thing could only land at a couple airports, it could easily serve as a bulk transport for people / equipment to get part-way to their destination. I mean, it'd have to be huge...

I mean, sure, people would freak about a flying reactor, if only on principle. But that sort of thing dies down with time.

/me starts hunting for weights of marine nuclear reactors
Thoughts on Famous Food Finder?
A friend and I created Famous Food Finder back in November of 2009. The site plots restaurants that have been featured on food related shows. The goal was never really to make money, but just provide a service we felt no one else was. To this day we still have yet to see anything as complete as our site, but we are now left wondering what to do now? The Food Network has seem to have taken some interest in the site, but we really don't have a large fan base. Is it worth it to try and sell to the Food Network on the grounds that they have the community and we have the tool?

Thoughts, comments?
Notice: We're turning off the YC application form at 10pm Pacific
Since people are still applying, I thought we'd better announce when the application form will be turned off. If you want to apply, do it by tonight at 10 Pacific time. Please don't get your hopes up, though. The odds of a late application getting funded are much lower, and the odds of us funding one this late (the first dinner is on Tuesday) are very low indeed.
> New York accommodates more people per square mile than anywhere else in the country, and your reason for why it's expensive is that it's not doing a good job accommodating even more?

Yes. Zoning restricts what can be built in the city, so less housing is built than the market demands. Skyscrapers everywhere probably wouldn't be too pleasant, so there's a place for regulation, but if you want prices to go down, loosening regulations will help.

> Meanwhile, Portland has a strictly enforced Urban Growth Boundary, and it's cheap.

Portland is only cheap relative to California and a few other cities. The growth boundary is part of the cause. That doesn't mean it shouldn't be done, but there are costs.

http://www.kiplinger.com/tools/bestcities_sort/index.php?sor...

> California hasn't exactly been anti-growth overall. ... And yet it's still expensive.

California and most of the rest of America don't really control growth; they just force cities to grow horizontally rather than vertically. This is generally more expensive, and results in cities that are less walkable.
I concur 100% with this. The 'main' reddit isn't all that great and more of a distraction than anything. The strong use of subreddits has increased my interest in Reddit strongly over the past few months. Otherwise yes, what is on the front page is just a precursor to what will be on Digg the next day.

That being said, these things just funnel around in a hierarchy. HN, Slashdot, Reddit, Digg, etc all suffer a bit from this.
WW II, actually.

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

Although some Tolkien's underlying interest and work dates back to WW I.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hobbit#Background
I think the we is used so the user takes part in the thinking process.
This is awesome! (iCombinator author here :) Looking forward to the new features coming to your app!
Now how historians from the XXXth century will make sense of that, I'd like to know :)
We = the author and the reader.
I mean the implementation details. But both might be more useful. Maybe you can do a blog post and link it here.
So they are saying that we should use nightly builds? I wouldn't use milk older than a week.
I personally enjoy the brevity of Twitter. When I want to say more, it is usually in response to something else, like this Ask HN question.
well...crap. This makes the AR.Drone ( http://ardrone.parrot.com ) I've secretly been craving for the past couple of months seem utterly boring.
A older friend of mine wrote this great assessment of Tolkien's work:

http://www.catholiceducation.org/articles/arts/al0127.html

(there's no way to escape its essential Catholic vision).
The idea is nice, but I think it's impossible. Just think of the amount of material you'd need to take in the plane for the shielding. And what about the water used to power the turbines? You'd also need a huge water tank. It's just way too heavy for the moment. We first need to find a more efficient (in the case of a plane, lighter) way to get energy out of a nuclear power source.
Interesting. Haven't had time to fully create my own solution; I'll have to work on it tonight. If anyone wants what I've got so far (ruby): http://codepad.org/qggAcIKy
Yes, in recent years. However, Microsoft has being using IE to display information for a long time, it's just that recently it has become progressively more tied to explicitly IE to the point that things freak out and crash if you disable IE.

It wouldn't be a problem if Microsoft had been using the 'browser' as an integral part of the OS for displaying information etc. However, Microsoft is using IE as an integral part of the OS.

I remember back in my days of using MSN messenger it was easy as a drop of a hat to cause a BSOD by disabling IE and clicking the link in MSN to my hotmail inbox. It would try to launch IE, freak out, crash MSN, then Explorer and then you'd get a BSOD. From what I've heard, this problem has somehow gotten worse.
A crowbar would likely be a more effective method of dispatching them, from prior experience.
Tolkein is certainly not the best writer; but on the scale of fantasy writing he is still near the top.

He always saved it for me by having such a wide and soaring vision of middle earth and then delivering it.

The silmarillion is horrible though :-)
Wallpapers: wallpapers for desktop
In some ways, his thoughts are some of the most profound things I've read. A very clear articulation of the place of creativity:

Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn't really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while. That's because they were able to connect experiences they've had and synthesize new things.

and design:

Design is a funny word. Some people think design means how it looks. But of course, if you dig deeper, it's really how it works. The design of the Mac wasn't what it looked like, although that was part of it. Primarily, it was how it worked. To design something really well, you have to get it. You have to really grok what it's all about. It takes a passionate commitment to really thoroughly understand something, chew it up, not just quickly swallow it.

The missing part for me is that he doesn't see that they're like yin and yang with each other. Grokking leads to creativity, and creativity leads to grokking. Most people who aren't engineers don't quite understand the profoundness of that feedback loop. I feel like he mostly does -- but there's still this small little missing link. It could even be his Achilles' heel. But yeah, in everything else he is quite clairvoyant.
Recording a few packets off an open wifi doesn't sound like much of an issue. But the fact that governments -- be it Hongkong or Germany or the others -- line up to grab a share of the data should tell you that someone, somewhere, has a real, tangible (and not necessarily non-evil) use for it.

IMO, Google put itself in a bad position having this data, whether they intended it or not, because other people can get to this data, by subpoena, thinly veiled threats with law enforcement (in countries where the state doesn't get checked and balanced that much), or plain economic espionage (for all the mobsters out there). It's a little bit like creating an atomic bomb in your backyard: even when you're not planning to do any evil with it, it's still a bad idea to have one because the others will come and want.