skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
LOL- I think I had the same IDE when I was first stumbing about with Java! It was definitely a WTF moment. It became useful for code expansion, refactoring, and unit testing however. I'm now using vim to develop php and Javascript and I miss its convenience (on the other hand, I'm a lot better with sed now...). But using Firebug to find my errors is a bit slow.

What I find really cool about your comment is that you appear to have a deeper view of it all (meaning a deeper understanding of the underlying semantics), and I'm wondering how my view will change as I continue to work with it.
I like Python because, IMO:

* It's the most concise, expressive language I know
* Friendly syntax: I just write what I'm thinking and it pretty much works
* Most importantly: It includes a ton of functional programming goodies (of which I make liberal use), but I can still just say x = 1 when I want to. Best of both worlds.
Yeh cool, but I have a sensation we are running in cercles.
Wouldn't it be easier to addopt nativeclient and use a mature, years tested code with http://code.google.com/p/nativeclient/ ?

Yeh I know, on the web you can "look" at the code, that's cool, but not always, how many time you did look at the gmail code for example, yeh it's preatty unreadable.because it's a compresed translated java code.
My thinking is that the author has a vested interest in not teaching his opponents the tricks of debating therefore the list is incorrect and incomplete.
> just like we do with modern medicine.

I think you mean, "just like we do when we misuse modern medicine."
Shouldn't tools take care of that before a commit to svn, git, etc? Java has formatters, the Go language has one.

Do any exist for Python or Perl?
2. Browser apps when powerful will compete with the apps on the app store.

ie, right now they don't. I don't plan to wait.
Everything you said is exactly right, but there still isn't "Objectivist music" or "Objectivist architecture." Certain architectural schools or certain musical styles may be basically incompatible with Objectivism, but that doesn't mean some specific musical or architectural element (drums, for lack of a better example, or skeuomorphs) are.

Hence, my "(at least not directly)".
I have had good luck with 280Slides: http://www.280slides.com/

But, don't expect the site to be completely without quirks. Leave yourself plenty of time to put the slides together, and export a file before your presentation just in case. I did have a little trouble getting their software to work occasionally.
I have somehow settled into the pattern of using new/java-like classes for large objects that store a logical set of data and need to operate on it, and on-the-fly prototypes to groups group just data (or, perhaps, a trivial operation).

My worst crime by far (that I am aware of) is that I have no hesitation to use a global variable if it saves me from bending over backwards to get around it. I'm doing animations, and sometimes the algorithm just comes to me a lot faster if I let a var keep a global value and be used by lots of functions between calls to my animate() function (using window.setInterval() ).
"I don't remember exactly why I was having this problem, but the bug wasn't shallow, and required a certain confluence of exceptions to occur before it would fire. The sort of thing that would even escape most unit testing."

I agree that this does indeed happen... I think it's a matter of, the more flexible a language is, the more rope you get to hang yourself with, even unintentionally and unexpectedly.

(Anecdote:) For my work, I have been developing and maintaining a fairly large Python code base... (~70K lines... comparable to about 700K lines of Java <wink>). Another developer changed a module so it would access the database upon importing, which was a no-no (IMHO), so I changed it back, using a class that gets the desired info from the db upon instantiation, and some sort of singleton construct so the same instance would be reused. I also decided to write a test to check that when this module was first imported, there would be no instance of said class yet. To make sure it was a first import, I removed any references to the module from sys.modules, then did an import. This worked great... until I ran the whole test suite using nose [http://code.google.com/p/python-nose/], which has its own ideas about import order and such. This turned out to be surprisingly hard to fix... a non-shallow bug that wouldn't even be possible in less flexible languages.
The Home Stretch
Trivial Refactorings
I really liked the original iPhone for how solid and a little heavy it felt, as though it's actually worth the $600 you paid for it. I'm glad to see that back with the iPhone 4; the 3G model just felt like a cheap toy.

Reminds me of that scene from Jurassic Park where the kids find the night vision goggles in the back of the truck:

Gennaro: Hey, where'd you find that?
Tim: In a box under my seat.
Gennaro: Are they heavy?
Tim: Yeah.
Gennaro: Then they're expensive, put 'em back.
I'll bet it was this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
Pet peeve: the confusion of understanding between "logical fallacy" when used in terms of a debate and "logical fallacy" when used in the sens of a mathematical or geometric proof.

Conversations about topics inside a system with a fixed set of consistent rules, like math, consist of not making fallacies. He who makes no fallacies can extend the system in unforeseen ways. This is the search for truth.

Human language and the totality of knowledge is not a formal system with complete rules and non-contradictions, therefore not only will an elimination of fallacies not lead anywhere, it's probably impossible to structure any kind of discussion without introducing one. So if you use a list of fallacies as a way to somehow "ding" an opponent, as if he would only use a fallacy if he were somehow making a mistake, you've missed the point. The author of the article is more correct to say that you're either debating or discussing. If you're debating, you're using all sorts of rhetorical tricks. If you're discussing, you're still using them, but the purpose isn't to score points, it's to find some agreeable progress in mutual understanding.
Google Docs is really great for me. Might be too bare bones for some people though.
If you start on their home page and search for the word random, you will find it. For english, it is http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BMD-3
I really enjoy Keynote, if you were on a Mac.

When I used Linux, I just used the Google Documents presentation maker.
Start by doing. I'm 15 and learned iOS programming just by /doing/ it, reading other people's code and working until my code worked as well. My code wasn't too pretty to start with, but it really helped me understand the SDK...
The only time I've given money to someone on the street he gave me a lengthy story which boiled down to "I just got into town and I need $5 to stay at the hostel down the street". (I was aware that such a hostel existed.)

I wouldn't have believed him except that he said "I figure that if I can get 20 people to give me a quarter each..." -- I figured that a scammer wouldn't have concocted such a complicated story just to ask for $0.25.

So I gave him the $5 he said he needed, and the look of shocked surprise on his face -- and his effusive thanks -- convinced me that I was right to believe him.
"Do you know of any material that lets capacitance through?"
Just avoid insulators!

Regarding the connection of a GPS to the iPad, I don't have on hands the technical details of the iPad (or iPhone) GPS, but on open water, it will surely be better that in an urban canyon. It can see a lot of sky --> a lot of satellite.
So, the internal GPS may be not so bad in your scenario.

But an external GPS with an active antenna will always be better (better GPS chip, better antenna and fewer electronics noise being far from the iPad radios).
You can find kits build by Microchip and Cypress for the connection of external devices to the iPod/iPhone, but you first, must enroll in Apple’s Made for iPod licensing program, by completing the online application at http://developer.apple.com/programs/ipod/.

Here is the microchip kit:
http://www.microchip.com/stellent/idcplg?IdcService=SS_GET_P...

And here's the Cypress one:
http://www.cypress.com/?rID=41030

Let me know if you need some advice on the GPS stuffs.
I was trying to remember the name of this site, and my google-fu was failing me. Thanks!
John Resig has a book in the works - "Secrets of the Javascript Ninja" - http://www.manning.com/resig/ (From what I have seen of the alpha release, it's nice).
We migrated our old 1GB RAM slicehost VPS to 2 1GB RAM Rackspace servers. The performance/stability remains the same as they are on the same hardware as I understand. So it's all great. The reason for migrating was we used a small fraction of the bandwidth provided with the slicehost plan, so as rackspace charges by GB of bandwidth we only pay 15% more for double the performance with our current bandwidth usage.
Linode plans look cheap compared to rackspace or slicehost. My problem is that I've tried too many oversold VPS hosts in the past that had very slugish performance. So I've never considered moving to anything outside of rackspace servers.
If you have not read the Request for Startups Paul Graham has started posting for YC I highly recommend reading it here http://ycombinator.com/rfs.html.

These can spark ideas to work on while possibly providing an edge to be accepted into YC. The other road I'd advise is to think about things you're already passionate about. If you can find a passion you can monetize you have most of the battle won IMO (tip: start blogging about it and build an audience which may also turn into your first customers).
Patience pays, most of the time.
In Perl 6:

@a.map({ $_ + 1 }).grep({ $_ % 3 != 0 }).map({ $_ * $_ })

Alternately, using the feed operator ==>:

@a ==> map { $_ + 1 } ==> grep { $_ % 3 != 0 } ==> map { $_ * $_ }

And, if your code being readable to people who've never used Perl 6 and know nothing about it isn't a concern, you can use the much more concise Whatever star notation for closures:

@a ==> map * + 1 ==> grep * % 3 != 0 ==> map { $_ * $_ }

Using Whatever for the last one would neither work nor be readable(although you could do "* 2", but that's still suboptimal for readability), since the last "" in " * " would be interpreted as a second parameter.

If the preceding notations for anonymous functions have been too implicit for you, then you can use pointy blocks(or just plain anonymous function declarations).

@a ==> map -> $i { $i + 1 } ==> grep -> $i { $i % 3 != 0 } ==> map -> $i { $i * $i }

Or, you could use hyper operators instead of the maps:

((@a >>+>> 1).grep: {$_ % 3 != 0}) >>**>> 2

The hyper-operators extend the scalar operators "+" and "*" to lists. Since the ">>" point to their operands on the right side, that operand will be extended to be as long as the other side, allowing you to use a single scalar as the right-side element.
I'm not an expert in turn-of-the-century automobiles, but my father is -- probably one of the foremost in the country -- and I've grown up around them all my life.

So, I'm quite certain that's not an 1889 anything. The first dead giveaway is the wire wheels -- they're earlier than late-20's model A wires, but look similar to Buffalo wires in the earlier 20s. I would guess that there's just no way that the wheels are earlier than 1917, at best. In 1889, almost all available automobiles had derivatives of carriage wheels. They were usually wood, with a thin, uninflated hard rubber "tire". (Remember, paved roads didn't really exist yet.)

The tiller steering would be correct for a turn-of-the-century car, but the body is just not. Cars of that era weren't fully enclosed shiny sheet metal ordeals; they still closely resembled carriages, built mostly out of wood and hand-forged steel, with seats on leaf springs and a small motor box.

There were electric cars in 1889, but this wasn't one of them.
Ask HN: Is experience in 3G/4G performance translatable to server clusters?
I have a friend who does performance for 3G/4G cell phone networks and is looking for a new job. I was wondering whether that kind of experience would be translatable to doing performance for large scale server clusters.
That was my thought at first as well, but probably for illustrative purposes, it was easier to do if-else statements. The more structure there is, the higher the learning curve. For a presentation, it probably wasn't necessary.
It's easy to miss, but this talk is given by a Flickr engineer and is how they deploy their code. Pretty big recommendation.
Android is more fragmented in a very fundamental way. If one ignores the iPad and just look at the phones they all have basically the same physical screen size. Android phones come I sizes from 2.5" 320x240 up to 5" 480x800. Designing a UI that works well at all those sizes is a challenge far beyond the more superficial differences of the iPhones.
Aren't there some areas where this is more true than others? There are dozens of good ideas in online selling/auctions/etc. that have failed mostly because they weren't able to overcome the entrenched incumbent, eBay, but may quite possibly have done well if eBay didn't exist. A similar hurdle faces anyone trying to take on PayPal, or at this point, Twitter (e.g. StatusNet's #1 barrier to acceptance is Twitter's dominance). I would imagine the Gmail juggernaut totally changes the playing field for anyone who was once contemplating a freemium webmail startup as well.

It seems that's a big part of the indifference equation also. If you say "I'm doing X", and everyone replies with "well doesn't [Big Player] already do X?", you have an extra hurdle to get over there: not just convince them it's a cool idea, but convince them you do it better or differently enough than the competition.

Though if he means only the more narrow: don't worry about competitors who haven't actually succeeded (yet), then I agree.
Video of my talk at Angel Boot Camp (Angel Investing for fun - not profit)
I read http://rosettacode.org/ from time to time, to get a feel for the various programming languages.
Rushing Too Fast to Online Learning?
Ask HN: Only good at jumping through hoops. How to 'start-up' my life?
--TLDR: I've only got to where I am by comparing myself to others, and chasing the proverbial carrot on a stick. I've always been independently minded, but I suck at anything that's not assigned to me by someone. How can I start achieving the goals I set for myself?--

I'm in my mid-20's and I've realized I only excel at tasks that are assigned to me by others. Whether its school, work, or fitness trainer, I can bust my ass, and be successful in this type of environment. I can even make myself do things I find boring, mundane, and exhaustive. The motivation comes from not disappointing others, fear of being judged, and sadly, comparing myself to others.

However, I've seen people here and elsewhere who are completely self-directed, autodidactic, and incredibly self-disciplined. Usually they are the type that don't go to class, because they can learn in their own time. They teach themselves a new language, pick up new skills and activities apparently effortlessly. They run side-businesses, and are generating passive income through various ventures. And they all seem to be great amateur photographers. No one tells them to do these things - they just go out and do it.

Their motivation seems to be the opposite of mine: They work only on interesting things, but they also have a perspective that makes everything seem more interesting. I'm sure they also need to work on things that are boring, mundane, and exhaustive, but its usually at a junction to get to something they find even more interesting afterwards. Most importantly, they have the prescience and confidence to forego short-term success for long-term success. They don't see life as some sort of competition with their peers or any of that nonsense.

I admire these people to no end. I never skipped class, even if I know the material is easy and I can teach myself faster, because I also know I'd never open the book on my own volition. Even if its stuff I find interesting. I just procrastinate to no end.

How can I start moving in the direction of these people? Any goals that I set for myself end up failing. Either because I don't structure them properly or because there is no immediate reward/punishment as feedback.

I have many goals for myself, including starting a company, that can only be obtained by self-discipline and self-direction. But I know if I don't change, and learn to do things without some hand holding, I won't be able to achieve them.

If it matters any, I come from working class family and grew up with the idea of "doing what your told" seems like the safe way to be 'successful'. I've realized money beyond a certain point won't do anything for me, and if all I have is my 9-5 job, I'm not going to be happy. But doing a 9-5 is all I have trained myself for up to this point.
I am a day-to-day C programmer. I am surprised to hear Python did not fit well after C for you. In my view, Python is the like the easy scripting version of C. I first learned Tcl/Tk, then Perl, then looked at bash scripting (my god, horrible) and seen that the earlier three has some obscure syntax with some special meanings of $'s and @'s and hyphenated flags everywhere with no resemblance to C.

Then looking into python, I saw the same philosophy as C; A struct or an array? Use a nice dictionary, set, tuple or a list, nicely kept under the [ ] brackets. Throw them in for loops without the iteration integer. Its just all the same things I do in C but easier, with no cryptic idioms. That's why I love it.

I have 2 choices of languages for all my projects: C and Python
You gave a great comment. I get almost completely the opposite take on Ruby versus Python though:

There are a number of things that made me think Ruby was made by a less astute designer. The 'end' everywhere feels bad in a world where I know both "}" and a newline can accomplish the same thing but with less typing and screen clutter. Also do not like Ruby's dropping of ()'s from fn call statements, because it blurs the boundary with non-calls and non-expressions and control flow keywords. I also feel Ruby encourages a certain kind of DSL creation which makes the code harder to read and maintain. I also don't think every app or library needs to export a DSL into client space. It's better if the interface it publishes still looks and feels like the prog language used.

That said, I acknowledge Ruby has good qualities. Python is not perfect, but to me it gives the better designed feeling. Actually the Lisps seem to be the most elegant and powerful. Love their regularity and power but not (yet) all the parentheth everywhereth.
MS Word has a diffing feature. I'm not sure how to trigger it from the UI, but my current source control system activates it when you diff two versions of the same Word doc.
I've presented before using html/css files. Normally I'd have used Google Docs, but formatting the code separately was too difficult.
Writing your first Django app - consolidated pdf
That's what we're trying to do! If you see the message at the top of http://daviswiki.org -- we've just gotten a grant from the Knight Foundation (i.e. Everyblock) to do software development, and we're now trying to fundraise (in the interim) to cover outreach & education efforts (a huge aspect of success).

http://localwiki.org has more information. It's going to be an entirely non-profit, open-source effort.

If you think your community would be a good pilot then you should definitely fill out the pilot recommendation form (and have other people do so as well). We're really looking for places with creative, inspired, amazing people -- and we want to work alongside them to really refine this model for local media!
"The problem is that most Technical Analysis is somewhere in between voodoo and immature quantitative analysis."

If you accept that past prices have no bearing on future prices, would you care to explain the difference between technical analysis and quantitative analysis? My own opinion is that QA is a subset of TA that places emphasis on statistical analysis rather than trying to see chart patterns (the voodoo you refer to). Still, aren't both things, regardless of the sophistication of the approach, striving to predict future prices from historical prices?
Python has sets as a built-in datatype. If someone needs a different implementation, there's nothing stopping them from writing one.
Ah, but perhaps you have never had the opportunity to be in a Reality Distortion Field. And your choice is certainly better for family life.
if you can map these hashes to actual URLs, you can get rid of hashes entirely by using HTML5's history methods. see: https://developer.mozilla.org/en/DOM/Manipulating_the_browse...
you can fall back on hashes for browsers without support.

the first implementation i've seen of this is in Flickr. i was amazed when i ran into it yesterday. you have to be signed in to preview the new photo pages, but the zoomed/lightboxed photo pages use HTML5 history in compatible browsers and fall back when they can't. their JS is viewable at: http://l.yimg.com/g/combo.gne?j/history-manager.js.v90829.14
In defense of Mr. Pernicious (Jason Fried) and Big Shoulders (Chicago)
I suppose some details would be appropriate....

I'm dealing with a suite of what used to be plain-old websites that slowly, over time, started to gain functionality. PHP crept in there (just for includes) - the web team went from one person to an entire department in a short period of time, and some functionality keeps creeping in there - some of it done by developers, some of it done by web PHP guys who shouldn't really be writing code. Incremental direct updates to the site on a daily basis are a regular thing by far too many people.

I'm sure many people have the same story.

The challenge is in taking the current situation and turning it into something manageable with release control, testing, and so on - because it's at a point where a simple mistake by a designer can (and has) effectively taken the site down, and due to the nature of the update process, it's hard to find out 'wtf' just happened.
The GOOD part is everyone is on-board with changing things (no politics).

The hard part is figuring out what those changes are - as soon as we started trying to fit this into the standard developer workflow, it was obvious that we were adding far, far too much un-needed technical bureaucracy (do we have a word for that?) for no real benefit - and the idea that the release and deployment tools are where the real benefit is is really becoming apparent - the version-control system is necessary, but it's not strictly the most important piece.

So for me, these slides (wish I could see the talk that went with it) really helps cement that I'm not insane for thinking differently about how this should work.
Dan Weinreb’s blog
Speaker Slides & Video: Velocity 2010, Web Performance & Operations Conference
Agreed. And interesting you said C and Python.

A few years ago I was thinking about what would be the minimum set of languages that would be good to know in order to be able to do almost anything you wanted, and do it well, and to always be employable. I ruled out 1 language alone because of the C phenomenon: there's a whole class of software where today C is the best choice, and a whole different set where C is a bad choice. Therefore, the ideal set was 2+ with C being one. I ended up settling on C, Java and Python. Java for enterprise/BigDumbCompany work, but also because there's a lot of great tooling and innovation happening in the Java space more so than other langs. Python for the role of glue and prototyping and high level no boilerplate bureaucracy but where you could still trust every developer using it. Ruby could probably fill that role decently instead, except be a little better or worse in diff areas.

C, Java, Python

Then I found out that Google had picked these three as well. Nice!
White House Proposes Vast Federal Internet Identity Scheme