skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
So, I kinda got a little too excited when I heard a new desktop.
But then, I have already seen all these concepts pretty much, haven't I?
From what I got form the article, it seems like we will only get a couple of new "shortcuts".
I REALLY am hoping his headline is true, and we do get a new desktop experience at least, when this releases...and I would LOVE it if GNOME surprises me when it comes out and is more than what I think it is.
SIGGRAPH 2010 Technical Papers Trailer
It does seem like there will be some tentative steps in this direction. But I agree we need to see more - I like your idea of a content-neutral tagging agent that draws inferences based on my use patterns rather than a committee's agreed use cases.
FWIW, they don't include Google/DoubleClick AdPlanner numbers, but the appear to be closer than the examples in the linked article.

https://www.google.com/adplanner/planning/site_profile#siteD...
May be irritating for some but good practice regardless.

Putting the constant left in a conditional means you will never miss an accidental = instead of ==.
Actually, it's just about 800MB of source code with 150MB of external dependencies. I never counted the lines of code until today but apparently just for the main language there are over 9 MLOC.

Of course, this doesn't actually matter as I don't touch most of the code and the "recently active" part seems to measure only about 275 KLOC. But when a bug arrives it might take me anywhere; even so, I don't think I've visited more than 35% of the codebase.
I've had more eye opening experiences programming in Clojure than in any language I learned before it. (C, C++, Java, Python, Ruby, common lisp) It provides a fairly unique set of tools that really let you boil programs down to their essence: persistent data structures, software transactional memory, and an amazing standard library for operating on maps, sets, and sequences. Instant access to Java libraries means it isn't just about academic beauty.

To each their own, but I highly suggest you take a weekend and experiment. You won't regret it.
So, is Digg still 8x bigger as compete predicts?

http://siteanalytics.compete.com/reddit.com+digg.com/

That would make Digg have 64MM uniques...
Ask HN: How do you deal with suicidal thoughts ?
For the past couple of weeks, I have been having extremely suicidal thoughts.

I am getting paranoid, and even though I am sure that I am not capable of committing suicide
nor do I want to, it is extremely disheartening, and very counterproductive.

If any of you have dealt with a similar situation, please let me know how to deal with this.

Thanks in anticipation.

EDIT: email: xoxo(at)hush.ai
The old desktop metaphor? Gone. Except for the 50 times I refer to it here.
The iPhone Fashion Shoot
When were you last stranded without Internet?
One possibility is to give your service so that other applications, via your API, can provide game mechanics they believe would be relevant. Then Darwinian selections of which game mechanics work out.
Ie. Focus on what your service and its core benefit(s)/reward are about and outsource to your ecosystem the game mechanics layers.
Try xfce. It's based on GNOME technologies but is leaner and more minimal. It's often used for low spec machines but is great if you just want a super fast desktop environment that's not too alien/weird.
So they implement Spotlight search/Windows key search, show tiled desktops like countless other apps for Windows/OSX, and call it the "future of desktop?"

The GNOME people should pay more attention to design, like using better fonts and not drenching the entire screen with dark gray. The next version is just as ugly as the previous ones.
The WiFi part I was clearly wrong about, it ended up being Apple and not a shift in communications standards that was the key disruptor for the industry. But I disagree on the other two points. If someone is playing a game on their iPhone today then it is pretty obvious, or at least much more obvious than the pre-iPhone days when cell phones had tiny black and white screes. And as for the thing about women, women used to store their cell phones in their purses and not in their pants until phones like the iPhone and the razor came along. Without this shift it would have been very, very difficult for services like twitter to have taken off.
WordPress states explicitly that it considers the PHP portion of themes to be GPLed.

That they consider it a derivative work is their -legal opinion-. Remember their license still doesn't supercede local laws and a court could invalidate Wordpress' legal opinion of what a derivative work is.
Will shoot you an email. Thanks!
i'd like a 2nd opinion from a 3rd party, just to be sure.
It probably isn't, however. Alexa, for example, relies at least partly on the Alexa toolbar to get their figures. I'll venture a guess that most people with the Alexa toolbar installed aren't terribly web savvy, while reddit's audience, for example, are.
Muphry's law (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muphrys_law).
Yep, this got blocked by my work ISP.
how is this supposed to provide a competitive advantage? ;)
Yup, the companies namespace is theoretical (containing presumably every company in existence) and contains a class YourCompany - that represents the interviewer's company.

Because companies doesn't actually exist there is an import error. If you were to create a class to substitute in you'd need something like:

class YourCompany:
def unit_tests_code():
return True
...
> Putting the constant left in a conditional means you will never miss an accidental = instead of ==.

That's only useful for dumb languages

>>> a = 5
>>> if a = 3: print 'ok'; else: print 'nok'
File "<stdin>", line 1
if a = 3: print 'ok'; else: print 'nok'
^
SyntaxError: invalid syntax

Python simply does not allow assignments in conditional contexts.
> The whole point of VCs is for them to take on the major financial risk in exchange for a large chunk of the company.

VCs disagree. They think that they're in the biz of finding things that are less risky than they seem.
:) I'll be there.
"Can something of this magnitude even ever be completely cleaned up?" Likely no. Certainly improvements can and will be made, but there will be irreversible damage, at least on a human timescale.
My favorite part about GameFAQs is that it's hardly about actual FAQs anymore. It's mostly walkthroughs, guides, maps, other content that doesn't really match a Q&A format. The forums are another popular location, but I wouldn't call them "FAQs" either.

There is a Q&A product called "Answers" attached to GameFAQs that doesn't seem to be as popular as their Walkthroughs offerings. For some games, however, they seem to be moderately well populated:

http://www.gamefaqs.com/ps3/928790-final-fantasy-xiii/answer...
The writer of the article is definitely not doing the devs any favors with his over-glowing purple prose. No desktop can live up to that level of hyperbole. Even worse than the bad writing is that there's no way to enlarge those darn screenshots so you can actually see something! Arghh!
I can only speak for the first two categories... but if you look at this paragraph from the article:

> You have some people who are using the product, but who are probably not paying for it. It is a new idea. Perhaps a revolutionary idea. No one else is doing it. And it works.

That last bit of "it works" is really important. It doesn't mean that it works technically, what it means is that it works for people as a solution to the problem, that there is a good product/market fit if you want to use lean startup terminology.
Reddit could offer up an analysis of their own server logs to give raw numbers, with some reasoned math to translate that to what they consider unique visitors. Not really independently verifiable, but would be food for thought. (We're already trusting the Google Analytics screenshot to be essentially unmodified.)
> Not in this case, but Yoda conditions can be useful.

Not in Python. Assignments as anything but stand-alone (potentially chained) statements are syntax errors.

The parser will not let you write

if something = 2:

in the first place.
I guess my 450MB are from 2.6.34 and are the disk usage of the actual untarred sources that I'm working from, so my figure includes cluster off-cuts (the bytes needed to round up to the nearest 4096 for each file).

It's certainly one thing in that it all uses the same build script; and any of the pieces are pretty worthless on their own.
This is something that cannot happen in Python. Yoda conditions are entirely pointless in that language.
Hold on a second.

He says that writing client-side apps is a bad idea, but the popularity of client-side JavaScript is proving that wrong

What's the original quote? I bet that in "client-side apps is a bad idea", he was talking about desktop apps as opposed to web apps. Client-side JS is very much a web app thing, so far from refuting the prediction, it confirms it. And indeed the prediction turned out correct, if not so prescient as to be newsworthy years later.

Assuming I'm guessing correctly, that brings us to 3 correct predictions vs. 1 incorrect one, quite a bit better a record than you're implying.

Edit: Also, since you allude to "some more that were wrong": care to say what they were?
It's helpful to distinguish between big-a "Agile and little-a "agile"

"Agile" is all about orthodoxy. You must do A, B, and C.

"agile" is all about time-boxing and inspect-and-adapt. You can use anything you want.

I don't know why you wouldn't do agile, but I can imagine lots of folks will tell you horror stories about Agile.

I'm a big agile fan. Make a post-it when I think of a new feature. Stick it up on the wall. Every Wednesday I step back and take a look at the storyboard and what got done that week.

I mean really, isn't this just common sense? You have to do something that's kind of project-management-y, why wouldn't you want to do the types of things that are as lightweight as possible?
Please seek the help of a professional as soon as you can, and take care of yourself, even if you don't think you are capable of the act.
True, but if the song weren't as singularly, brilliantly catchy as it is it probably wouldn't have legs as a meme.
What causes these thoughts? Either way, talk to a loved one (who loves you) or a friend and then visit a psych. Some people may rant about having drugs prescribed, but that doesn't always have to be the solution. Just having somebody to talk to about your issues (who can help you work through them) can be incredibly helpful.
also, I was saying it tongue-in-cheek as it matched the pattern of the fallacy superficially, but otherwise I agree with you. This must be a meta-fallacy in itself.
That sure is a shame as it seems like it would be pretty useful.

There need to be more thinking going into non-interaction. Actually having to interact with the computer as much as we do about the things we do, surely can't be the goal in itself.

I want my machine to make plenty of choices for me and present me with information not have me do it manually. I think that is what pisses me
off the most right now.

There is something wrong and primitive about normal human beings still having to interact with their machines to get proper information.
Take a look at Zeitgeist and GNOME Activity Journal, which haven't been accepted as modules into GNOME 3.0, but are already usable and will almost certainly be part of the 3.x series in the next few releases.

http://live.gnome.org/Zeitgeist
http://live.gnome.org/GnomeActivityJournal
Go see a therapist. And I don't mean it in an off-handed fashion. I mean it in a professional who helps people deals with this and other problems. If there's a chemical imbalance, drugs can help. A doctor can prescribe them if they're needed.
If everything goes well, they (Adm. Allen) announced they would be leaving the cap in place. Only if things go wrong will they reopen the seals. Even if they need to reopen it, the plan is to capture the oil into ships using pipes connected to this new cap.

Edit: I can't remember the source for this; I believe I heard it on the Diane Rehm show yesterday. If I can find the source I'll update.
The Santa Fe Institute has absolutely enormous windows researchers can write on, complete with markers and erasers. It's surprisingly useful, because they're far larger than any blackboard or whiteboard.
Was about to ask. Even if I'm a couple of metres from my router, my iPad can't reliably hold a connection for longer than a couple of pages while browsing. Then I have to exit to the settings, switch wifi off and on and try again - happens x0 times a night and drives me nuts!
Women in computing: first, get the problem right
i agree. i am all ears since i have a book full of notes surrounding a large WP plugin project that i plan to sell.
Apple Won't Recall iPhone 4
Yeah, there are lots of bucket shops.

The claims about costs are stated in a weird way. The absolute cost of the trade doesn't change based on your leverage, just the cost as percentage of the margin requirement. I guess they're just trying to say you can blow up your account faster with high leverage.

You can also find brokers that don't do roll over and will even pay you interest on open positions for certain pairs.
Yes, this is quite embarrassing, especially the typos. I sent this to my buddy without expressing that it was still a work in progress, and he overzealously posted it here.

I've noticed the line number issue with certain browsers myself. I haven't determined if it is the css/html from pygments (the library I used to generate the html) or something I'm doing. Needless to say since I am still trying to flush out the idea, matching line numbers was low on my list, but if you can give me your browser/os I can see if it can test it out and possibly drop a patch to pygments.
Please don't do anything to harm yourself. If you feel like suicide is your only option, please seek help. You can call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-8255 to speak to someone right away.
I will buy into a proposal like this when it comes with a commitment to using a specific methodology - one biased in favor of maximizing revenue to small content creators rather than high-profile ones who already derive economic benefit from celebrity.

However, I do think this is a step in the right direction and worth reading, because it eschews the usual 'OMG pirates' for a more pragmatic economic analysis, cautiously endorses the economic benefits of 'fair use' and non-commercial reuse, and abandons the adversarial approach in pursuit of a more stable equilibrium.

http://www.prsformusic.com/creators/news/research/Documents/...
Seems like they're just keeping up with the level of hyperbole that comes out their competitors. (see: Apple)
Brainwash
am I the only one that hates this design?
Insight, "Marooned on a Beach"
> If anything, Gnome has some similarities with OSX.

beyond both having rounded corners? Apart from both having completely crummy file explorers?
I have a story about this, too.

I bought a wheel from a bike store without knowing anything about bike wheels or bike stores. The wheel collapsed on me 3 weeks later, I fell into traffic and a car ran over me, crushing my chest. I'm now rotting in a graveyard paying back my 'technical debt'.

Ok that's just a story. Here's an anecdote:

I spent the last 3 weeks, which I could have spent doing things far more interesting and productive, rebuilding Perl modules because so many perl programmers couldn't be fucked to write portable code and our dependencies appear to number 300 or more. (Nobody actually kept track, of course)

For example, somebody's script, somewhere, uses Array::Compare. It's a tiny module that compares arrays (length, index of different elements, etc.), which is like a first year computer science project. Version 1.18 is 500 lines (including docs+comments) and has one dependency: Carp, a core module. Version 2.01 of Array::Compare is 465 lines (including docs+comments) and requires Moose which itself has 23 other dependencies many of which are not core modules and some require compilation. If Array::Compare was part of a standard library, one that ships with the standard Perl distribution, this wouldn't have been a problem. It wouldn't use Moose unless Moose was also part of the core dist, at which point it wouldn't be a problem unless maybe I was compiling everything from sratch, which I'm not.

So I have to downrev that module and use the old version, or else introduce another new significant dependency (which did not compile successfully on my first couple attempts) or else track down the script and eliminate the dependency and check to see if the author is in punching distance.

That's just one example. There were also mismatched compiler flags, modules that didn't install on some days because tests required connections to webservers that were returning 500 errors-- all the kinds of minor problems that aren't that big of a deal when you are one developer installing only the modules you need to solve your immediate problem, but turn into a huge mess when there are 300+ of them.

That's technical debt coming due. (And I'm certainly not paying back all of it, I'm not compiling Perl from scratch I'm not manually finding every scrap of perl code on our systems to see which modules they still really need, etc.)
How to Write Great Copy for the Web
That is seriously an awesome hack! I have never liked any of the other approaches to inheritance in javascript libraries (syntax wise).
MetaFilter has a similar system (their onetime fee is $5), and they're one of the most consistent, stable, noisefree online communities I've ever seen.
Dumb is a strong word, young padawan.

The difference between theory and practice is smaller in theory than in practice.
Do you have an iPhone 3G with iOS 4.0?
> you still need hooks in place at your application level to be able to disable csrf checks

Why would you want to disable the csrf check?
there's no way to enlarge those darn screenshots so you can actually see something!

Actually there is because they are full-resolution images displayed at less than their true resolution (one of my pet peeves):

Firefox: right-click -> "View Image"

Chrome: right-click -> "Open Image in New Tab"

Edit: I now see this comment made multiple times below before the parent comment.
Do you think you could elaborate? Coming off as inflexible or dictatorial was something I actually worried about.

The point I am trying to make is that there are certain minimum requirements I have of any employer, just as almost every job ad I've seen has a list of expected minimum skills. Would you work on software for a company that doesn't use version control? Being on HN is enough to convince me that you're smart enough not to.
OP is right that this is a true hacker resume, in the sense that it's both technically interesting and ignorant of the social realities of applying for a job.

Also: the downloadable CV is more incomprehensible than the code. Bullets, people. Good employers are looking at hundreds of resumes for good jobs. If that one landed on their pile, they would not read it.
That's why I said "not in this case". There are languages affected by this though (typically C-based ones). Ideally, their compiler will give you a warning about it, but that's not always the case.
To keep the trolls out?
http://www.cnn.com/2010/US/07/15/gulf.oil.disaster/index.htm...

"BP cautioned that the oil cutoff, while welcomed, won't go beyond the 48 hours."

Yeah, you're right... it did go on to say that 'valves' will be opened and oil would be siphoned off. I didn't realize there were going to be pipes either. :)
Ironically, Scratch (graphical programming tool for kids), which uses Alan Kay's Squeak language was removed from the App Store presumably because it violated 3.3.2. ( http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1268382 )

Even more ironically, Squeak is a derivative of Smalltalk-80, a Smalltalk implementation that a research group at Apple released.
It seems like we're caught in this cycle where every 2 or 3 years, a new framework comes out that everybody rushes to embrace. Someone is writing the code to build these frameworks, and I guarantee you someone had to worry about what made their algorithm O(n^2) instead of O(log(n))

The number of people working on difficult libraries/frameworks is rather small compared to the total number of developers.
What does he mean here?

One simple piece of advice. If you have TWO offers of financing, the terms you end up with will be MUCH better than if you take the first offer, or only have one offer.
Google Trends for Websites seems to have the most directionally relevant graphs: http://trends.google.com/websites?q=reddit.com&sa=N

It isn't a direct comparison since Google tracks daily actives and their Analytics data posted is monthly, but you can roughly estimate 375,000 uniques/day * 30 days to get roughly 11.2M visitors, which is within reason for the monthly data they present via Analytics.

Note too that though both these sources are from Google, they are from completely separate, ring-fenced portions of Google's corpus of site data. Analytics data isn't used in Trends and vice versa.
IntenseDebate or Disqus should go with this model and then let me relax commenting moderation on my blog for paid commenters. It could possibly save me a ton of moderating effort.
Though how is not having a crack not unique to the web?

Its not unique to the web. It has little to do with the web and more to do with a thin-client client-server model. Take, for example, MMORPG's - these are typically dificult or impossible to crack (sure, some have replacement servers, but they're rarely as good as the original and you can do the same for SaaS web apps too, if you really wanted to). I'm mainly arguing against the idea that the webs positive features are unique to the web - they're not, they come from the webs underlying technologies (client-server, thin-client..) and these could be implemented by desktop apps, if one really wanted to. The one place where the web wins hands down is user acceptance. Everybody has a browser and nobody minds the browser phoning home, as you said, yet they are paranoid about desktop apps doing so. This is where the browser wins - the rest can be done elsewhere too.

NaCl may change everyting, though, when it catches on. That will be certainly interesting to see and, while I dislike web apps right now, NaCl has a good chance of changing my mind. I'm certianly not against the things you mentioned - they ARE desireable traits, after all.
The 3G was barely usable with OS3. OS4 is embarrassingly slow. Don't upgrade unless you can deal with 30+ second waits to launch apps and continual hitching.
Imho there is Pure and Unpure WSGI middleware, the former can be used or removed with zero change to the application, this works for things like:

- profiling
- caching
- csrf protection

This is what I think wsgi middleware should be.
Humble Oil's daily energy supply could "melt 7 million tonnes of glacier" (1962)
Do you not do anything algorithmic in your line of work?
I predict that working out not-so-great with shared credit cards, which are an extraordinarily common financial arrangement in many American families. (Perhaps less so among twenty-something techies than the population at large -- I deal with many, many customers who on their husband's card.)

Worth mentioning: not everyone has a credit card. A requirement that you have to own a credit card will, in effect if not in design, essentially redline your service. Reasonable people can disagree about how much that matters, but I would predict that many newsrooms would go nuclear if you connected the dots for them on the inability of, e.g., 60% of blacks in Chicago from being barred from civic participation on $PICK_AN_ISSUE because they don't have a bank account. (There are prepaid cards to circumvent that restriction. Of course, the riffraff who are the intended targets of the policy are also capable of buying prepaid cards.)
I thought the whole point of Quantcast is that they can directly measure traffic instead of trying to guess. They don't even charge for it: http://www.quantcast.com/info/publisher-overview