skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
After reading your comment I must say that I'm somewhat left with the impression that you must have read a different book than I did.

Most of the Mars Trilogy just discusses the colonization and the issues that come up with doing so. There's a lot of discussion about setting up different sort of habitats, a space elevator, greenhouses etc. Much of this is discussed here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PAu5PD4OS-w#t=5m00s

There's certainly a lot of KSR's politics that bleed out of that, but he doesn't take the easy way out. His characters don't magically cure cancer, they come up with an assortment of medical treatment that among other things reduce cell division error, given the timescales involved (2020-2200) it's not unplausable that something like that would be invented.

They don't come up with a political system that everyone agrees with. There's a civil war over it (and almost another one). The end product is a federated system on Mars where each colony on the planet has control over its own affairs within some limits. Terraforming is a federal issue, so is water management, the right to health care and other things like that. The full text of the constitution is available in "The Martians". It's quite interesting.

Finally out of around 100k lines in the novel around 100 contain the word "sex". That's a fuzzy metric, but I didn't find that it discussed partying, drugs and sex out of proportion.
Always ship trunk: Managing change in complex websites
Write play essays that bring in fresh insights and ideas
Writing a play essay requires you to have an in depth understanding of what the writer wished to convey through the play. Some plays are easy to understand while others are more complex. Therefore, you need to ensure that you have a proper understanding of it.
The term "hacker" has become so diluted by forums like this one that it's totally meaningless. Calling yourself a hacker at this point is just a form of self-aggrandizement.
If you don't like Python, it may just be an indicator that you know more about functional programming than Guido, which is hardly a feat. Read his opinions about tail-calls for a good laugh.
I wish every city had something like this (with good content).
In startup land the only competition you should worry about is a guy named Maslow. He has a pyramid that will fight against you pretty strongly when you work 16 hour days under your desk in social isolation without result.

You compete, but not in the pure sense of against another company. You compete more strongly against forces that may not face others, like sociological needs, acceptance of short-term poverty, and etc.
Are you sure? A counterexample: My editor indents every line that I end with a colon (:). So I just type : and <enter> and have a new indent. When I want to unindent, I just type backspace to go back one tab. This is simple to implement and understand, and with python, it's really all I need.

This kind of "automatic indentation" (colon-enter to indent, a quick backspace to unindent) feels much more natural to me than a C-style indent, where the editor's cue to indent would be space-rightbracket-enter and leftbracket-enter to unindent.

True, one cannot come accross a completely unindented block of python code and ask the editor to format it correctly for them. But by definition, unindented code is not valid python and will not run. This is not unlike C / C++ / Java code that's missing all its braces, which would not run either.
Why I’m Contrary on Compensation
The paradigm shift is that in Python the most direct way is best.

Examples.

In Java, accessor methods are considered good style. In Python, directly accessing a member is better. (more concise, makes client code clearer.) If you need to do magic, you can use properties.

In C++ and Java, you use inheritance to denote which classes have a given behavior. In Java, you also use interfaces. In Python, you simply give a class the needed method(s). (I.e., you use duck typing.) That flattens or removes lots of class hierarchies. If you need to do magic, you can use isinstance(), issubclass() or hasattr().

In Python, you use the built-in types a lot. Many problems decompose easily to lists, sets and dictionaries. That reduces code dramatically. Java and C++ STL's containers, in contrast, are so clumsy they make me look for ways to avoid them. If you need to do magic, you can subclass the built-in types or build new types with the same methods as the built-ins.
It's also very annoying to have to un-indent an entire block of code during debugging just because you want to comment out the conditional statement around it...
I think you could limit python for server tasks(data read/write, security and authentication).
We use Erlang for that.

Then choose in which language the server talks to the world(browsers, mobile apps, native apps, flash,...) usually through json or xml services, REST or not. You are building your API at the same time.

For each platform you can choose different techniques depending on your skills and needs.
I'm not a fan of auto-pilot frameworks. I always felt they force me to think their way to build my thoughts(a personal limitation probably).

When we faced this decision to build our app, we took HTML5.
We know it well and it works on all platforms.
Native apps are cool, but we can't afford them as a startup.

Then on the browser, when you get the data you have to represent them.
I was a fan of XML+XSLT and used to templating logic on the browser.
We use JSON now, and have built a template engine(PURE) for a similar approach and get a fast HTML rendering of JSON data.

And we took jquery to cope with the DOM and browser differences.

The server streams only data, the network likes it.
The browser render all this very fast.
And this makes a very responsive app.
"Prayer is the only real free wireless communication"
It might make sense to think about paying them for any growth that occurs above your currently projected growth - ie not a fixed baseline, but one take takes your current growth rate into account. Harder to agree, but probably fairer.
I'm working on a neat project to integrate pylons with pyjamas for this very task.

Pyjamas is an RIA framework that started as a port of GWT to Python. Development has recently sparked up and they now offer new features beyond what GWT can offer.

In order to integrate pylons with pyjamas, I've started work on a JSONRPCController base class that I hope will eventually be included in pylons. Eventually I'd like to add other things like a project template and setuptools commands for compiling and deploying a pylons+pyjamas app.

You can get a peek at what I've started on my blog: http://agentultra.com
I Created Plinky First
It's interesting to note in light of the Garry Tan quote at the top that Posterous recently started a campaign targeted directly at its competition[1]. I think it's a great quote, just trying to emphasize that it's applicable to the early stages but not necessarily the later ones.

[1] http://www.businessinsider.com/posterous-thinks-your-startup...
curious what you prefer about Ruby. i'm very familiar with python, and have only looked at Ruby long enough to decide (mistakenly?) that it wouldn't do anything for me which python doesn't already.
Visually, perhaps you can take something from this example which mimics Google wave layout using the ukijs javascript framework.

http://ukijs.org/examples/core-examples/wave/
Don't know why, but I feel the need to contribute a shorter Ruby sample that feels closer to conventional Ruby. :)

ARGF.lines.each { |line|
line.split.each { |word|
word.match(/ing$/) and puts word } }
I do wonder though - when does this sort of thing stop being community policing and cross the line into web vigilante-ism?
There has been a "downtown resurgence" trend all over the US. Since this makes lots of various things local to each other, and puts lots of things local to housing, I would be surprised if it wasn a contributing factor.
If you want to know how to do what jQuery is doing, then read the jQuery source.
I agree. To clarify, I'm hoping that because they're not focusing on language enhancements, they might make some major headway towards nuking the GIL
Quotes from Julian Assange of Wikileaks
Tranlsation: "We're better than them"

Conclusion: polarizing, divisive, conversation discouraging pot-stirring. Downvoted.
The JavaScript Anthology is good. It doesn't focus on the language details a whole lot, but gives tons of hands on examples. My copy is battered pretty bad with coffee spilled all over it. That's a good sign.

Also, John Resig (of jQuery fame) wrote an excellent book called Pro JavaScript Techniques. I read it every year. It is a very detailed exploration of the language fundamentals and beyond.
K&R C Exercises and Solutions: Chapter 1
At some level, who cares? The point is that Adhearsion lets anyone write apps in Ruby. While it probably won't ever be completely abstracted from the platform it's running against, it's fairly close. A Ruby developer can certainly use Adhearsion without touching or understanding Asterisk.
If you go to the actual Wiki page you'll find all sorts of warnings and calls for refrain, eg:

"Please please please do not try to contact her or her family through Facebook or Myspace. They are definitely her profiles, but it won't do any good to try to contact her this way. You could get in trouble for harassment if you don't choose the right words, and she could potentially retaliate against you. I learned from someone who knows this girl that her family is already well-aware of the situation and gets several emails each day about it. They do not talk to her, and they are very upset by the whole thing. No need to upset that family any more than they already are."

So it's still pretty alright. I'd say the line lies where there is malice.
Recruiters should be able to see the questions and answers.
Ask HN: how would you monetize Learnivore.com ?
I'm looking for useful (for the users) ways to monetize http://learnivore.com (ruby/rails screencasts aggregator I'm running).

The goal isn't to make huge loads of money, rather to pay the hosting and a bit of the time I spend maintaining and finding content for the site.

I tried various options (pledgie, amazon, affiliation through interesting ebooks) but none really worked out.

Would you have any suggestion ?
I Need To File Bankruptcy
Quoth the article: City police [...] say she has not committed any crimes. Officers have responded to more than a dozen reports, but, "it’s not illegal to ask people for money" [...]

I'm no lawyer, but this seems like a textbook case of fraud to me: A deception deliberately practiced in order to secure unfair gain.

Asking people for money certainly isn't illegal, but deceiving them for that purpose?
If you feel comfortable with C++ to some degree, this transitional document might be helpful:
http://ktd.club.fr/programmation/fichiers/cpp-objc-en.pdf

I've found it does a good job of explaining how Objective-C works, for someone with C++ background.

As far as interface design, I feel that Cocoa is something you just have to tinker with in order to learn. Apple has lots of sample code (register a developer login on developer.apple.com if you haven't). While there's plenty to read, I feel that to really understand things like connections and controllers in Interface Builder, you have to try to build things or inspect the interfaces in sample projects.
Thank you jbail
You know when programmers write blog posts about business and finance? I wonder if finance people cringe at those as much as we did while reading that.
Python and Ruby are very much alike but I find Ruby more ergonomic. It's more consistently object-oriented, which means I spend less time looking things up because the core is easier to remember. The syntax is more expressive, which makes my code shorter and easier to read. The consistent use of blocks everywhere is more intuitive and consistent than Python's mix of loops and comprehensions. I find I can take in a block of Ruby at a glance. Python requires closer inspection. Everything in Ruby is an expression that returns a value whereas Python has statements and expressions and it's up to you to remember which are which. Ruby feels to me like the product of an astute student of languages that borrowed the best ideas from Smalltalk, Lisp, Icon etc. The design mistakes in the first versions of Python, mostly now corrected, suggest to me that Guido didn't do his homework as dilligently.

Perhaps I'm way off here but the languages seem to me to show some of their cultural heritage. Python has a blunt & minimalistic Dutchness about it while Ruby has a Japanese elegance and style.
Link: http://learnivore.com
I am looking forward to biking (and sometimes running/jogging) to work for health, fun and saving money.

BUT, I like driving. Get a pretty quick car (even better if its a stick) and a lot of the time driving can be very fun. Unless of course you live in one of those cities with horrible traffic.
The man behind the essential geek travel guide
Yes, it works quite well. Jeff Ryan is the man. www.quantmod.com. Using his other package, IBrokers, or by embedding the REngine in a Java or .NET thread and using Interactive Brokers' APIs, it is quite feasible to start using R for mid-frequency automated trading : market data (direction:in) and order management (direction:out) are done in Java/.NET via the broker's APIs, and you marshal the market data off to R on it's thread and run it's analytics and spit out a trading decision.

The problem is that most Technical Analysis is somewhere in between voodoo and immature quantitative analysis. Thus, the real practical use of the package (for me) is in visualizing non-TA stuff.
The only code I find myself having to rewrite is something that is both (a) broken and (b) undocumented. If it's documented, with lots of comments letting me know what the original coder was thinking, I have a fighting chance of fixing the problem.

If it's not broken, I'm not fixing it. I've got way too much other code to write to worry whether or not something is elegant or pretty.
Whitespace doesn't help you write code. I helps you read code, which is a lot harder writing it, even though it seems like it should be the other way around.

The pain of keeping indentation correct is a forced ongoing investment in readability that is well worth it--at least to me.

I'm glad that haskell also has whitespace rules.
Not to mention there are already some good libraries in popular languages that are capable of doing most of the hard work:

Perl - Data::Faker - http://search.cpan.org/~jasonk/Data-Faker-0.07/lib/Data/Fake...

Ruby Gem - Faker - http://faker.rubyforge.org/

Bonus round!

Ruby Gem - Populator - http://github.com/ryanb/populator

Faker generates "fake" values, while Populator provides some nice constructs for using collections/ranges of data for your fields.
The bible is certainly Aaron Hillegass' Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X - http://www.bignerdranch.com/book/cocoa®_programming_for_mac®...

The Apple documentation is outstanding. http://developer.apple.com/resources/

Check out ObjC and iOS podcasts.

My favorite Cocoa website it http://theocacao.com/

Delicious might also help you: http://delicious.com/tag/cocoa
That doesn't look like a problem with replicated and rewritten code; that seems a symptom.

If you don't have somebody "watching the kids" (and with the clear authority and technical abilities to "go all Moe on the other Stooges", when that's needed), kids will have a habit of replicating software. Always have. Kids do tend to get themselves in trouble. That's why you have to watch them. The kids will tend to skimp on documentation and testing and integration, and on refactoring before release, and on consistent APIs and nomenclatures and formatting and development practices.

You can sometimes spot these projects from afar, too; the projects that shipped, and didn't get cancelled. Look for inconsistent or confusing UIs, or poor documentation. For frequent patches, repeated patches, or regressions. Edge cases. A lack of integrated debugging. Problematic upgrades. All can be areas that tend to be short-changed.

Being the "Moe" guy in a project tends to be political; if you're doing it right, you're probably everybody's target. You're balancing what the engineers and the testers and the managers and the customers and the schedule and budget and the egos will permit, and each group is going to be unhappy about something.
I think you're trivializing a whole list of things here.

The Dalai Lama may think that he is defending his culture in the face of modern science, but reducing Buddhism to a branch of psychoanalysis is not an effective way to do so in the long run.

By the same token, reducing psychoanalysis to a modern manifestation of Buddhism isn't doing psychoanalysis any favors, either.

In cross-disciplinary studies, it's important to resist the urge to reduce the strange to the familiar, as it is only in doing so that one is able to fully appreciate the richness of the traditions being compared.

In other words: analogies are useful, when starting out, to help one get a vague impression of a new territory, but (unconsciously) clinging to these analogies serves only to mask one from actually expanding one's mind.

Asking "what's the point?" may have the unintended side-effect of making me sound like a conceited ass, but the intention was more philosophical.
Maybe I've been in a big city for too long, but it's really heartwarming to see how many people in the wiki comments were taken in by her story and gave money to her so generously.

It's been years since I've given money to anyone on the street, and I'll never do it again. I've seen it all--the guy who stands outside Wawa all night and then goes around the corner to his car and drives home. The guy who got me to buy him a hotdog who I later found out had more than enough money to buy dinner but was saving it for heroin. The thousands of people who just need a "bus transfer" or got stranded by their boss/girlfriend/boyfriend. The kids from the suburbs who play homeless for a few hours in the morning so they can buy some Starbucks after shoplifting all afternoon.

Anyway, I gave up on listening to people asking for money. All they get out of me is "sorry, no cash." It's nice to see others are more hopeful.
How on earth do you get coins out of that tiny pocket?
Exactly, if you're not running JS then you're not my audience, as if you're running on IE.
I'm glad I don't have to read your code. But I don't believe you should be downvoted. Only reformed. ;-)

BTW in haskell whitespace is optional but nobody write code that way.
I was told by my lawyer recently that Georgia LLC law has been clarified to provide the same protections for single-member as multi-member.

I do agree with your other general sentiments.
Rothbard's review of Samuelson's Economics:
http://mises.org/daily/4524
He also wrote "Secrets of the JavaScript Ninja" -- which isn't officially released yet, but you can preorder and get a PDF of it: http://jsninja.com/
Some think that Unix V6 was the best Unix version ever and that things went down hill beginning with Unix V7. John Lion's lucid commentary on the code (and the code itself) is worth reading even today.
I read this book and while the statistics were interesting the author's complete disregard for correlation!=causation was extremely disappointing. It was mostly conjecture and hand waving. Also if you're a minority woman, don't read this book. It will seriously bum you out.
I wrote something like this for myself a while back, then stuck it up on GitHub. Its written in Java and generates all sorts of "user" related data. Addresses, emails, etc. Can also generate social-graph connections between the generated users.

DummyDataGenerator: http://github.com/mindcrime/dummydatagenerator
Thank you - very concise and will help me personally in a current initiative to drive some points home!
Become an amazon affiliate and link to highly recommended programming/math books.
That's a good idea I believe - I could add a hand-picked book section, where each book would be an item like the current screencast.. Thanks!
(Really) Understanding JavaScript Prototypes
My experience has been horrible. I noticed bad slowdown in every app launching immediately after the upgrade. Apps took 30 secs to 1 min to launch (twitter, lose it, even calculator).

It progressively got slower. Keyboard response ground to a halt. It would take 3-5 secs for the keyboard response to show up on screen.

It became an useless paper weight.

I tried restore to 3.1.3 a few times and I would give up at the 1015 error and restore back to 4.0, which was probably a "clean" install. It didn't fix it.

The primary feature I was interested in was the orientation lock which is not available in iPhone 3G. Threaded email is nice, but not a deal breaker, same with folders.
I will be happier when more Ruby coders take the time to actually document their code; rolling through the Rails source has been an exercise in pain, even with all the cleanups that have gone into Rails 3.

I recall an unhappy core contributor awhile back ranting about how people file bug reports but not fixes; the reason is because it takes a significant time investment to find and fix problems if you aren't a core contributor and have no interest in becoming one.

Sinatra and Sequel do it right -- solid documentation, both on the website, and in the .rb files.
Thanks for the lifehacker link. That would have saved me a couple of hours.
14 Days to Total Time Control: Time Management made easy.
To app or to not app
John Resig's, Pro Javascript Techniques was great. It covers good ground and from it you could see how to build something like jQuery yourself.
People part with their money when you add significant value (solve a tough problem or create lots of delight). The value of Learnivore is that it collects programming screencasts into one place, which is valuable but not that valuable. It's not creating enough value that you could charge directly for it.

In order to make good money, you'd have to view the screencast aggregation as your marketing, not your product. You'd have to invent another product to go along with this.

Ads are a weak example of this. Ads would be about connecting programmers with businesses serving programmers, which you can see is a different product than screencasts.

Another product could be consulting. This site could generate leads for consulting gigs, which would give you more money in one hour than you can probably make in a month with ads.
why no adsense?
You do have to worry as their Python code produces errors if they do not indent it properly!

I don't like Python either and prefer Perl. (In Python I did not like indentations, dicts, tuples, lists, and the IDLE gui.)
A Discrete Algebraic Riccati Equation Solver in Python
What exactly were your problems with Lulu? I have been meaning to get a hard copy of Creative Commons licensed math textbook made and was considering using Lulu. Is it okay for printing technical books?
Large Apartments Are the Rage in New York City or 60 is the new 40
I never tried on this specific site, but on other sites I found that the click rate is so low it's not worth it. Maybe I should give it a try though. Thanks for the suggestion.
That Garry Tan quote is really a PG quote. I lost count of the number of times Paul said that during YC.
Kochan's book is good, but it is far from the "real world" when it comes to Cocoa programming. You don't really need most of what's in there. Just jump in with Hillegass' book and you'll be programming in cocoa much more quickly (I've used both books).
How Glee Reminds Me of Silicon Valley
That's about it - Python has a richer, more refined set of libraries to call on than Ruby. (Ruby also has a ton...)

Ruby is more fun,but python is more mature. In the end - whatever gets the job done right?
Not meant to be this. It's there to validate data coming from an untrusted source to fit to your data model. The best usecase is a document database (like MongoDB, CouchDB) that uses JSON as data representation. The logic and validation has to be done somewhere and to have standardized way to define constraints is a good start.