skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I would think that, for example, pumping gravel over that leaking area would be all the more effective. You basically just need a lot of volume of some material, and the extreme pressures from above (and gravity) will work in your favor.

At any rate, it's not like I have any experience in this. But it's a shame to see people downvoting someone for simply offering an idea. Ah, but such is Hacker News..
I don't consider programming to be a much greater skill than the ability to install fixed wiring in a house or balance a budget. Are small business accountants "artists"?

Accordingly, programming is not _currently_ a science. However, I think that is a much better position to aspire to than self-aggrandizement and glorifying a skill that is really no different than any other skill that any suitably motivated 12 year can acquire with a couple library books and an internet connection.

With a science of programming, we can aspire to a position where programmers can at least claim to be engineers, and at least have good odds of most programming projects resulting in software of reasonable quality. Face it, there's good art and bad art, and it's subjective which is which. Programs have objective measures we can apply, depending on what the code is used for - developer time, performance, correctness... and a million others. We can argue about which measures are the right ones to use, but at least these measures exist. We can (with current technology) empirically evaluate a piece of code in many different ways. Actually starting to apply this kind of empirical evaluation is the first step towards programming being a science.

[Edit: OK, so the parent to this was heavily edited after I posted this, but I can't be bothered rewriting this accordingly, so please excuse any incongruence between this reply and the post it is replying to]
It's not possible to can serendipity. No algorithm can make a leap like a human mind, connecting two things that a machine would see as separate. This is why I've never used any personalization. I don't want to see only what a machine "thinks" I should see.
Congress Cuts Debit Fees In Rare Loss for Largest U.S. Banks
Steve Jobs’ Email Debate With Gawker Blogger
Has there been a concentrated effort to move FreeBSD off of GNU tools (your question seems to imply this)? If so, I'm curious, why? Licensing issues? Architectural issues? Something else?
What Would You Answer If Jobs Asked “What Have You Done That’s So Great …”?
> With a science of programming, we can aspire to a position where programmers can at least claim to be engineers.

This is not a good aspiration I think. Engineers can be replaced with not huge efforts, while you can't easily replace artists.

Also this vision will lead to more bad programmers coming out from universities (if programming is an art), as the process of learning programming is totally different if you think it's a science or art. If it's a science, do CS courses. If it is an art, put them into craftsman shops to learn how to code.
Actually this part
"Faith in yourself and your team - To achieve the common objective, they have to have faith in everyone in the team. This really helped them through the periods when they kept having setbacks"
was to be a bullet point in itself, making it the 13th :)

HN, we have a problem
I think dismissing "programming as art" as irrelevant and hurtful to the community is dangerous. Here we have the tools to create a near-infinite amount of almost everything that can run on a computer. We use code to run complicated robots that can drive a course without human input, solve the most complicated mathematic problems of today, and create artificial intelligence with the ability to learn as it ages. Yet at the same time, we use code to make short chiptune songs and fun small games hacked away in an hour or two.

Wikipedia defines art as "the product of deliberately arranging elements in a way to affect the senses or emotions", and science as "the systematic enterprise of gathering knowledge about the world and organizing and condensing that knowledge into testable laws and theories." Why do these two things have to be mutually exclusive? Through creation and exploring, such as in _why's projects, we are further "gathering knowledge" about the limits computers can be used. And at the same time, we are creating art as these programs have had a clear impact on at least the Ruby community.

And, bringing up a more "sciencey" example, if the fact that my handheld calculator can solve complicated algebra and calculus equations in less than a second doesn't "affect [your] senses or emotions", then you need a reality check on just how impressive technology has come in such a short time.

I personally believe that programming is one of the rawest forms of creation imaginable, and therefore must be of some artistic worth. Simply calling it science and moving on does a disservice to those who slaved for so many hours working on their piece of computer science history.
Debt Management &#8211; getting out of debt by tracking your spending
> But a lot of people are being strung along in ways they don't understand

This is a pretty big assumption. Care to cite it?
No, I really don't. I'm suggesting that self-importance is a negative trait for programmers to hold. To me, cat pictures and silly songs are actually just another form of pretentious self-importance.
You want the supreme court to be less insulated from the influence of lobbyists?
Utilities get regulated generally when they are exempted from anti-monopoly restraints and given special access to a population.

Anyone is free to launch an alternative and compete with FB as FB did with MySpace.
We do software security.

If I could carve out a job description that mostly involved analyzing and writing runtimes, I would do that. The best I can say off the top of my head is, "we get projects where being able to throw together an emulator in a high-level language inside of a billable week is very useful."

If you want me to be specific: automated runtime-level analysis of subroutines for embedded and smartphone platforms, analysis and design of secure sandboxes for software and content protection, semi-automated generation of fuzzers for protocols from stimulus-response tests and bblock-level analysis, and, of course, reverse engineering in general.
Still surprising to me.

I also read up on the BOPs a bit--very interesting. I would have expected a last ditch line of defense consisting of some sort of powerful spring-loaded ram with a maybe an explosive and/or mechanical trigger, so that if everything goes wrong, you can hook up a sub and yank something to clamp the stem, even with no hydraulic lines connected.

Not that the annular BOP isn't a clever design, using the well pressure against itself to clamp down tight.
I agree that computing as an activity has manifestations that could be understood to be art, but that doesn't make _programming_ art. Glorifying programming as an art is like glorifying spelling as salient to the quality of Shakespeare's plays. Programming is the act of expressing programs. Coming up with interesting things for those programs to do definitely follows a creative process of human inspiration, but actually writing those programs down is not an "art". It's a fairly normative process in most cases, and it can (and should!) be made more normative.
Why i still love facebook?
Code can be used to create art. Wood can be used to create art. An HTML parser is not art, any more than disposable chopsticks are.

I've never understood _why's fan base; he seems to be no more than somebody who popped up, wrote a few low-quality libraries for an obscure language, and then vanished.
I think the article makes the matter more confusing than it should be. Actually many people make it more confusing. Just like with Java, Python passes only values. The value can be a reference to an object sometimes - that's pretty much it. Just like with Java, the call-by-whatever is sometimes misunderstood. It never behaves like call-by-reference. You can never do:

def a(x):
x = 42

and expect the value of `y` in your local scope to be changed after `a(y)`.

I'd rather agree with the way Java defines it - call by value.

Wikipedia: However, the term "call by sharing" is not in common use; the terminology is inconsistent across different sources. For example, in the Java community, they say that Java is pass-by-value, whereas in the Ruby community, they say that Ruby is pass-by-reference, even though the two languages exhibit the same semantics.
Well, he's gone now. So you guys won.
I too was going to jump in to rant that she misused the concept "utility", but since this is HN not /., I decided to read the article. Her point is that it may not be a utility in the hole in the street kind, but people are using it as such. She believes that the breaches in trust and privacy and trust are going to engender heavy handed regulation to the determent of everyone. She may have a point. It's not just a privacy issue, but an abuse of expectations.
Mixture of licensing, technical, and personality/political/religious issues, I think, depending on the person involved (not everyone has the same motivations). The three big camps are probably: 1. people who think GNU software sucks technically; 2. people who don't like the GPL; and 3. people who really dislike the FSF and/or Richard Stallman.

The first reason probably applies most to big projects like gcc, where it's alleged that the FSF's development process has led to un-modular, hard-to-maintain software. But there are some differences on smaller projects as well, where the BSDs have a tendency to prefer more use of libraries with command-line apps as front-ends to the libs, while the FSF prefers self-contained command-line utilities that interact in the traditional Unix piping style. E.g. GNU tar and GNU gzip are mostly self-contained utilities, while the BSD versions have all the real code in libarchive and zlib, with some command-line frontends.

Some of the more minor rewrites I assume are due to licensing or personality/political issues (I doubt technical reasons are what lay behind OpenBSD writing GNU bc/dc workalikes).
I play jazz guitar and bike (though not as often as I like). That's about it I suppose.
What's the "public utility" that you don't pay for? The parks, streets, police, and fire services are very much not free.
Cover Proxy
"Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."

--Ben F
I took his comments differently; it seems like he's talking more along the lines of Glass-Steagall. I suspect that Munger doesn't have a problem with the casino (trading firm) itself but the fact that it is running alongside a traditional bank. The problem is, many people see JPM as a bank, not a trading firm, and mistakenly treat is as a bank when, in fact, it's taking more risks than a bank traditionally would.
I use the logrotate package, which is included with most distros. With Ubuntu, most packages include a logrotate configuration for themselves. For this specific virtual host configuration, you could add your own logrotate instruction for it -- look in /etc/logrotate.d.
I guess we disagree on the definition of art. Those disposable chopsticks still required the search for a satisfactory length, width, smoothness, etc. Not to mention, the label and the marketing which equally requires a mastery of human psychology in order to get their product to sell. In this way, the designers have added something great and unique to the world which many people enjoy and use every day. This is art.

An HTML parser requires fast and efficient code to successfully and quickly read the document. Furthermore, the programmer needs to take into account common variations in HTML code as well as handling nested tags and attributes. And taking it a step further, the HTML parser is used to output the trillions of websites that are currently out there in a visible form for a majority of the developed world. In this way, the designers have added something great and unique to the world which many people enjoy and use every day. This is art.

Then again, I am one of those weird people who likes modern art, so I could be a vocal minority.
Couldn't an HTML parser be art? I don't think of an a parser as being like the wood used for a sculpture. The HTML itself is the wood, and perhaps the parser is the lathe. I think there is a false dichotomy between tools as purely functional and the product as the art. There can be real artistry in a well constructed tool. A well written, efficient parser can be beautiful to behold.

Maybe this comes down to the difference between something constructed purely for artistic purposes and something constructed in an artistic way to fulfill a broader purpose. Or maybe it's just a matter of personal taste, the way some people will spend hours arguing about whether a soup can is modern art or just pretentious trash. Personally, I'd say that if people are moved and/or inspired by it, than you can make the case that it is art.
Unless of course the value you pass is an object. In which case it will change in the scope you called the function from.
I'd love to see you write a book on emulation but can I encourage you as strongly as possible not to waste time working with the dead-trees publishing industry to get it out?

You will make more money running a Kickstarter pledge drive for this book that you ever will off advances and "royalties" (your advance will be calibrated to ensure you don't get any), and more still charging $10-$30 for a PDF download of the book contents.

By the time you finish writing a quality book, the bloom will be even closer to off the rosey idea that a book authorship on your resume is a solid credential; I note also that publishers are very good at selling geeks on the career value of authorship.

Finally, dead trees are just a shitty medium for conveying code-intensive technical details.
Those ranking systems may be better than nothing. But they are not an excuse to look down on another nation. They also do not account for the effects their system has on other systems.

I am not going to entertain a HK/Taiwan vs mainland history debate with you. The past is the past.

My posts here do not claim that China doesn't have plenty of problems to solve. Would it be too terrible to lend a hand in making it better instead of hurling insults and demanding today's leaders of China to apologize for mistakes of yesterday's?
White and black children biased toward lighter skin
Well, the best part about this article is that it got me to check out Scribd. I'd been ignoring it, although I saw previous commentary about them moving from Flash to plugin-free. I'm impressed with the HTML render - it looks smooth. No such thing as bad publicity, I guess.
The current US government is older than the current Chinese government. Major pollution became a problem during the industrial revolution, which started in Europe and North America. And when did the Chinese people have any more human rights (not just better conditions, but a right to those conditions) than they have now?
Programming as art is little more than masturbation. Useful programming must be done as a science.
Thanks for the feedback. Quite honestly, the only reason I want to work with the dead-tree publishing industry is that they're very good at getting the books in front of as many eyes as possible. I'm not much for marketing, and I care far more about getting the information in front of people than making a bunch of money off of it. Of course, with the buzz around Kickstarter right now due to Diaspora, maybe that's enough as it is.
I knew it! =)
Actually _why reminds me a bit of Hideo Kuze from the GitS. He appeared and gathered people who like him after sharing just a couple of moments, talking to each other. Some sort of "hero" idea is created for him, even though he didn't actively support it (or did he?). He used his specific personality to share ideas which are then applauded and duplicated... These are just the main similarities.
Yo. I would suggest that as an admitted non-fan of Ruby then you are in no position to comment. Besides, _why could draw, anyone could appreciate his stuff I'd imagine. He could play music. He had a quirky sense of humour, and was a creative and endlessly surprising person. Now, this ain't sycophantic as you call, he genuinely was these things. Sorry if that bothers you.

There's this cute paper some guy once wrote, it's called "The Art of the Interpreter ...", geez I guess he'll have to change it to "The science of the Interpreter ..." - good thing you fixed that for him.

As the article says, what you can take from _why is to bring a sense of aesthetic to _any_ thing you approach, be it a boring powerpoint presentation or a blog or whatever. Didn't your Mommy ever tell you, "If you ain't got something nice to say, maybe you should bite that tongue of yours".
The comment[s] section on that article is gold. These damn "chatlines" just make me want to run my sentences together in rage.
A High-Tech Mogul’s Low-Tech Wine Trail
So... not a big Knuth fan?
Viktor Frankl: Why to believe in others
Not having DRM makes it legal to pass on the ebook? Or do you also grant that license?
Since oil is lighter than water, it wouldn't need to be under any pressure (just pointing that out; I know that at the rate it is coming out, buoyancy isn't necessarily the dominate effect).
I just got back from 7 months backpacking from Peru to Panama. Sometime while I was away, my storage locker was broken into back home.

My whole life is in that locker, yet when I sat down to think of what might have been stolen it occurred to me that there was absolutely nothing in there that I'd really miss if it were gone. Maybe a couple old photo albums, but that's about it.

Turns out, the burglars came to the same conclusion. Evidently nothing I own looks particularly valuable to anybody else either. Anybody want a bunch of my old useless stuff?

Oh, and as to Pack Weight, it goes for traveling too. I carry exactly one complete change of clothes on the road, along with a few books and a laptop. At one point on this trip I wore the same shirt 40 days in a row (washing it and putting it back on every couple days), until it degraded to the point where I wore it shirt shopping and tossed it in the garbage can next to the fitting room.

Much like the author, I get a bit of a chuckle watching the first-timers hauling expedition packs on their backs and "daypacks" larger than my main one on their front. They're learning their lesson for next time.
I have a completely different feeling. It's ok if you depend on such code as long as it's actively supported by the creator himself. As soon as you need to modify it for your needs, or adopt the whole project, because it was dropped -- you start to appreciate clean and consistent code. If the code is too messy, you just end up rewriting most of it, in order to understand it. There would be no reason to do that if the original was clean and documented.
And deploying it only requires someone who can import a library and follow instructions.
You'll find a lot of How To Treat Your Developers/Geeks/Hackers articles posted here, and one of the common points is private offices (not 'tall cubicles').

I don't know if it's really because that makes people feel important; it's usually phrased in terms of distraction and breaking flow.
Comparing Mountain View to China... wow, China must be alot smaller than I thought.
yes, the story is told by shack_a_nerd: http://shack-a-nerd.livejournal.com/70594.html
Man, gotta give credit to Jobs on those replies. He's one of the few CEO's out there that actually answers things honestly versus just spewing some marketing lines or other prepared statements. Even if I don't entirely agree with him I have to respect his standpoint, it is his company.
That was kind of a vague swipe at North American food culture and schooling in general.

I didn't mean to much harm, but in summary .. we are not educated about food/cooking in elementary or secondary school (There are classes, but fully optional) .. and well, look at what most people in America eat. Snobby? Sure, but it's true.
The point is that you can't pass an object. The object lives on the heap and you always pass references around. Thats why when we pass in a list we can change the contents. The passed-in value is a copy of the reference to our list object.

One of the trouble in python is if you really want to pass a reference to a true value such as an int. Usually I just wrap the int value in a list object because the syntax is fairly concise. Of course if you can you should avoid it, and in python 3 the most common occurrence is fixed with the nonlocal statement (which allows you to access the value of an outer scope, required with closures and non-reference values).
I'd definitely buy it.

Not sure if it's in line with your interests, but for my personal interests, it'd be great if there were both technical content and some sort of coverage of the more conceptual/media issues involved in emulation (which overlap with the technical content). Stuff like fidelity of translation, stuff that's harder/easier to emulate, different layers of hardware, etc. E.g., some console emulators have recently added CRT emulation, because of a feeling that playing games designed for a CRT, especially 1980s CRTs, on an emulator running on an LCD gives an inauthentic effect (the CRTs do a bit of blurring in both the spatial and time domains). Or, how easy/hard is it to emulate something like the Atari's audio chip or the SID? Apart from the display and audio output, are there other things that don't translate well, or are hard to do well? It seems it's often the case that console emulators will choke on a minority of games, which must be doing something weird that isn't quite properly emulated; how common is that, and do they fall into certain kinds of categories?

Again, not sure that's actually in your scope, because it's not at all relevant for some kinds of emulation, e.g. pure CPU emulation, but has more to do specifically with audiovisual media. But I do want such a book. ;-)
Unfortunately it's probably impossible to prove that no one would have taken IBM and Microsoft's places. I highly doubt that, had IBM not made the PC and Microsoft not bought QDOS, we wouldn't have had a PC revolution. I think it just would've been different, maybe with more competition, maybe with an Apple monopoly and Amiga occupying the margins, but it still would've happened.
True, the best articles are always the ones which take you in a completely new direction. However I have also found that those same interesting articles are often not very popular which leads me to think social news sites have their flaws. Perhaps the solution needs to not look at what is popular/similar to what you already like but rather new concepts (not that I have any idea how to achieve that)
We just had a thread posted here

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1347227

suggesting that many Facebook users don't look at Facebook ads at all. (I'm one of them--I use Ad Blocker on all websites.) The case reported here was of a mother who ignored a photo of her own child, so practiced was her banner blindness.
I'm not sure what you're saying here - care to give some example?

The way I understand what you're saying - no - you don't pass "an object". In case of objects in Python, Java and others the value you pass then is a reference to that object. That reference cannot change in the calling scope.
> Of course anything foreign is more expensive than the west. You realize you are in the other side of the world, right?

Actually that has more to do with Chinese currency manipulation than anything else. By refusing to adjust their currency appropriately, foreign goods are unaffordable to most domestics. This is the reason their economy is growing at amazing rates -- it's not magic. Long term this will cause problems, such as local property bubbles and potentially tariffs imposed on their exports as other countries get pissed.