skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The history is relevant there, though: OSCON started as a perl conference and expanded to other areas later.

(FYI, a "track" is a group of related talks, not a single presentation.)
"I speak Spanish to God, Italian to women, French to men, and German to my horse." —Charles V
"This framework is released as a complete web designer
kit for free. Even for commercial use. I just
require a link to this page if you use the elements"

Deal breaker right there. I'd rather just pay a few bucks then try to find a place for attribution link referencing a few images on my web app. Does this type of attribution link ever work for anyone?
Something that has surprised me in the free unix world is the ongoing strong support and emphasis on sendmail. I notice openbsd highlights updates in its releases also.

I don't know much about MTAs. From what I read, sendmail has a bad reputation for being complicated and unwieldy. I've played around with it a little and found it cryptic. But mail systems seem to be inherently complicated, so maybe sendmail attracts a lot of criticism that could is in fact only slightly less true of all programs of that sort.

What's the thinking about ongoing strong support for sendmail?
The kind whose primary revenue source is from visitors paying for something?

I assume you're talking about sites that sell some sort of software-based service, which would exclude all ecommerce and product-sales startups?
Competent people will manage their wealth wisely, while the incompetent simply squander it.
Unless the GP is an asshole, almost certainly zero. There's no difference to neighbors between this and having a guest.
Wholesale Dollar Store Products and More
Where is mode 13 in JavaScript?
There's also a lot of good material in iTunes University.
Yeah, been working with it for quiet some time on and off and still regularly need to search to find out where a function may be being called from.
Very true. I have worked in 15 languages and each one colours the world differently. It does become a bit of a chicken-and-egg (or nature vs nurture) question, though.

I definitely agree on Chomsky. Common structures and dynamics don't necessitate a quasi-Platonic unity.
I have to credit HyperCard/HyperTalk with giving me my start in programming. Although I started programming in BASIC on a Commodore setup at a pretty young age, it was HyperCard along about the seventh grade that got me thinking about more complex concepts.

When I was a high school freshman about 17 years ago (yuk), I wrote a complicated self-modifying program in HyperCard. I wanted to write a program that could understand human sentences and reply accordingly, and figured that self-modifying code would be the best way to go about that. Of course it never quite succeeded, but the program was stable and could run for a very long time, and gradually improve. Debugging it was a real adventure.

There was a way to add 'external resources' to HyperCard stacks, and then call them from HyperTalk. I can't remember what they were called now, but there were 'functions' and 'procedures' I think. With those, you could get color working, or do really almost anything on a Mac, all from HyperCard.

They were compiled bits of code, so naturally my interest shifted towards making those instead. I wanted to try writing my own, instead of browsing eWorld and the nascent AOL for stuff written by that Peter what's-his-name.

Somewhere I was told that they were written in Pascal, so I got my hands on a copy of THINK Pascal, and started playing with that. It came with a really wonderful hyperlinked library of the MacOS toolbox. From there, to C, to assembly, and on and on.

I still have a real soft spot in my heart for HyperCard. If there were a modern equivalent, it would be perfect for teaching programming to beginners.

EDIT: I have an idea. If anybody happens to have an old pile of HyperTalk laying around, please email me. Address is in my profile.
I'm impressed and unimpressed with the iPhone. There are a number of neat things in the touch interfaces. However the lack of menus is very limiting at times. Tertiary functionality is subsequently missing or obscure.
Just curious -- is there some context to this twelve-year-old story?

I miss Hypercard too, but I had been building stuff on the web for four years by the time its demise became official.
India unveils $35 computer for students
I'm playing with his dilemma more than anything else, but you could also attack his assertion that the competent don't need his wealth. His children could be competent and unlucky, for instance, which could mean they need a lot of money: chronic illnesses, for example.
Yeah, let's hear it for two space indentation!
actually the idea of his children resenting this gesture is crucial to endearing himself.
Will Zynga Become the Google of Games?
This is great information. I'd love to see a similar tutorial for NodeJS for comparison.
Biomedical maintenance is definitely expensive, but there are a lot of things which can be done technologically which improve quality AND lower costs:
1) Better remote diagnostics on equipment
2) Designing equipment to be maintained by operators, or shifting to disposable or "use once, return to depot" equipment
3) Generally, looking at life cycle costs for equipment vs. just the purchase price.

For a lot of equipment, the operator is actually highly skilled and trained, and in some cases, is cross-trained to maintain the equipment as well (more true in rural health centers).

Another innovation is moving the equipment around -- the MRI trucks get higher utilization in rural communities than a single MRI center would.

(I only really know the radiology side, although the military biomed shops usually maintain everything)
Do Certain Types of Sneakers Prevent Injuries?
Who decides how much wealth it is okay to accumulate? (said another way: who decides how economically productive a person can be?)
http://csswizardry.com/typogridphy/ may be a good start. Clean and balanced.
But if they're competent, they don't need the money, because they'll be able to work up to the point where they have as much as he did - according to the article, he started off as a "poor street hawker," so his belief that his children could do the same is certainly logical. They probably also have the advantage of his connections, better education, and so forth, meaning that they should be even more capable than he was. Also, if they're competent, lacking money might be good for their moral character, and encourage them to eventually do the same if they gather a lot of money, doing more good for society.

If they're not competent, it's better to give the money to the foundation he started, so that it can help as many people as possible, instead of being squandered. Sure, his children might need it more, but they wouldn't be able to do as much with it which would be useful to society, which is what he is trying to do.
I see my comment above has collected two down-votes of its own. Res ipsa loquitur (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Res_ipsa_loquitur#Latin_phrase).
Absolutely. Often I can think of not directly related elements that help to solve something.

Slightly off-topic: I made a shortlink doeslanguageinfluence.tk to make it easier to pass this article on.
Tesla Electric Cars: Revved Up, but Far to Go
Call of Duty subscription service could attract 4 to 5 million gamers
Probably the only way to genuinely reduce costs by an order of magnitude would be to create a "cash and carry, no recourse except gross/criminal negligence" parallel system. Given US society, the only legal way to do this would be a public health system directly operated by the government.

I am a libertarian and aesthetically opposed to this idea, but I think realistically the least bad option would be universal coverage by a "designed to a price" public health system, maybe on par with the UK NHS, with better quality private care and private insurance for those who can afford it. Allow the government to provide scholarships (similar to ROTC) to promising studies to become doctors in the service, with MD salaries on the 80-150k range, and a focus on providing cost-effective routine and emergency care, and on cost effectively managing any expensive treatment. Roll Medicare into this. You could cut expenditures 50-80% while only reducing outcomes slightly, and cover everyone.

The AMA, industry, etc. would all be against this, but I think the total number of people employed in the medical industry is still low enough that "see, universal coverage" AND "50-80% cost savings" would win out politically over the libertarian arguments and the "death panels" arguments. By establishing that private health care can still exist, and be best in the world (unlike the Canadian system), reasonably wealthy people shouldn't be too opposed.

The risk is that a system of initially limited scope and budget would expand -- any given case where the public system didn't cover an illness might get up to a thousand constituents writing to their representatives. 1000 people highly motivated by an issue would trump 250 million people paying less than a cent each for the increase in cost in that one case. Eventually we would end up with a gold plated system like we have now. The only way I can think of preventing that would be for the US government to be starved of revenue (which it is working on!), or a constitutional amendment setting a certain standard of public care which cannot be legally exceeded.
In Fighting Crime, How Wide Should a Genetic Net Reach?
Yeah, I'm not arguing against those points, per se. The dilemmic fallacy is simply a way to show the dilemma is subject to perspective, and therefore not as steely as it may seem.
(Disclaimer: I work in your lab. ;-))

I've asked people for code a few times, but my experience after getting it is actually that I don't really ask for it anymore, because I've never found it to help me. What I really want in most of the cases is a clear enough English writeup, perhaps with pseudocode, so that I can understand how they solved their problems, and ideally reimplement it myself. At least, that's the case if it's at a scale where that's feasible to reimplement; if they built something absolutely gigantic then it might be another story, but then their megabytes of messy research code I can't grok aren't very useful to me either, and I have no real choice but to wait for the cleaned-up release.

In short, I think "can this be reimplemented by a third party from the published literature?" is a better test for reproducibility than .tar.gzs are. And there's certainly a ways to go on that front, not least because in areas where 6-to-8-page conference papers are the norm, even well-meaning authors can't include enough details, and most don't get around to writing the detail-laden tech report version. But I guess I find code mostly useless for that purpose; it might as well be an asm dump for all the good I usually get out of it.
The Middle Class in America Is Radically Shrinking
ssh(1) only compresses if configured too, see the -C option.
Review of Peter Seibel's book "Coders at Work"
Peter Seible, author of Practical Common LISP, has interviewed 15 programmers...
WolframAplpha is also useful for those kind of calculations (couldn’t find a way to do the last one, though): http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=12.5+kilotons+TNT+%2F+%...
Trading semicolons for time debugging
> You don't need to make a link if you use it only in application wireframes or user interface mockups.

I think he's trying to get you to use it for mockups mostly.
We, the People!

We decide who to lock up, so why not put a limit on how much wealth one can accumulate, say something like no more than 1000% of the average wage, all other income taxed at 100%, or 90% or 80%.

They only gain this income by exploiting the proletariat so its only fair!
Research has shown that rapid feedback is a needed element in rapid learning. this has been proven true in many fields.
REPL gives you this.

And from my experience , with a REPL , making things is easier and faster.

And in languages without a REPL , the barrier to explain something is bigger(you have to write a lot of cruft code) , so it might make more sense to build something rather than showing language features.
sendmail has a BSD-compatible license and other MTAs don't. postfix's license has some weird clauses due to IBM. Exim is GPL.

There is ongoing work in OpenBSD on "opensmtpd":

http://www.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/cvsweb/src/usr.sbin/smtpd/
I think it's telling that this technology that has been used to wage wars, create and drive industry, and save lives has matured to a point where we can afford the CPU cycles for such calculations.

Perhaps one day it will be able to test "your momma" jokes. :)
Thanks for the response. I actually did electrical and computer engineering. It'd be nice to at least network with people in electronics. I will definitely look into it. Thanks again.
I was hoping to see a proof for 'whoever denied it, supplied it'.
Have you tried

ssh -T foo bash -i
Thanks, I just subscribed to it.
Why, the Star Fleet Federation of course. ;)

Seriously, even if wealth were capped such that you could only attain a multiple of the median income or some other bench mark it would only serve as a straight jacket for productivity. Distributing those gains back to society directly would only serve inflation as the relative cost of goods and services would seek equilibrium with demand and the existing money supply. The only thing I can imagine is having excess productivity siphoned off via a tax or general fund that reinvests back into society...which is the goal of philanthropic efforts. Instead of giving their children the trust fund, it becomes a resource for society to focus on the things the free market neglects.
Why do you hate fashion dolls?
5 of the Best Free Linux Typing Tutors
Roadmap for Learning Rails
This is great feedback. I'll start working on that today and see what I can knock out today.
If the problem is the overhead of making HTTP connections, surely having a pool of open connections with keepalive solves the problem in a much more durable way? This is a setup I've seen in a telecom environment that supported a good throughput.
Tips for early customer development interviews
Great article, thanks for the link.

Couple more helpful links for some basics not covered in the article (all work in progress):

Compojure docs: http://www.compojure.org

Stub for "Clojure Web Development" book: https://docs.google.com/Doc?docid=0AQqGP1CDN0uIZGhmZjJmcGZfM...
I'd prefer a tool that did the exact opposite (without flash).
So Japanese which have spent time abroad can't get jobs when they return?

Export oriented companies ought to love getting Japanese people which understand the foibles of their customers?!

(I'm a bit scared to ask about that implications for "who and when she can marry"; sounds just too weird.)
Simplicity is the goal. This doesn't mean that you lose features, it means that things must be designed. You can have lots of features and lots of simplicity, it just isn't easy.
I would say that JS does support associative arrays, since it is the fundamental data type behind objects and arrays. Arrays are basically associative arrays, since the index is converted into a string and used as a key.
E.g. myData[7] is equivalent to myData["7"].

The length property does not return the number of items in the array though. It returns the value of the key with the highest numerical value if parsed as a integer plus one.
How is the magnitude comparable? Obamacare is not authorized by the constitution at all - to become constitutional, it would need to be eliminated. To become constitutional, the Air Force would need one arrow in the org chart to be changed.

I don't see the changes as being remotely comparable in magnitude.
When words are many, transgression is inevitable. But he who keeps his peace is wise.

Wise men speak because they have something to say; Fools because they have to say something.
This is perhaps the most dangerous fluff piece I have ever seen.

Most government hospitals in India reek of urine (people go on the walls), and have so poor hygiene standards that a slaughterhouse would be better. This "innovation" isn't something really ground changing people do this all the time around the world, but it doesn't happen in the US due to fear of lawsuits and other hassles.

I doubt that there is anything to teach to the US healthcare system. The truth is that almost all good medical professionals have answers and solutions to the problems that plague it, but the political climate doesn't allow it to happen. Those laws that straitjacket such cheap and sweet solutions while letting insurance companies get away with institutional murder.

On the other hand, in India such pieces create bursts of irrational pride and are oft quoted when people need a good cop out. According to most indians (citizens as well as politicians) silicon valley is powered by indianpride (tm), NASA runs on the backs of it's 60% indian workforce and so on. I truly wish that they would take a look around.

[edit: I am truly sorry if this sounds like an over-generalization. Beautiful examples of innovation exist in India as they do in every land on Earth, but the truth remains. Too many people live a life of suffering and die needlessly due to this system. India's HIV epidemic is comparable to that of Africa.

I exist in a place with excellent healthcare at an exceptionally cheap cost as compared to the US. Unfortunately the majority of people don't. There is a selection bias in operation over here. It is true that medical tourism is off the charts, but how many hospitals cater to them? What institutions do so? Also, there is almost no data available on the dearth of reliable doctors. This is a huge problem in rural areas where facilities exist only on paper.

I think that each one of us should experience the brutal poverty that most people face in this country before leaping on to such things. There are people working to change this. Let us respect them not write fluff pieces that encourage the divide between myth and reality.

I admit that I am not patriotic and I rebel against the concept of nations states, but those statistics are real live people and they matter. The only way to help them is to swallow the bitter pill and work on this.]
Has anyone here seen any help from the government in creating jobs?

I have.
Yes OSCON grew out of the Perl conference. The Perl conference still happens each year (see YAPC, last one being only a few weeks ago).

re: track - OK to clarify within the Perl track there were 17 presentations. See http://www.oscon.com/oscon2010/public/schedule/topic/Perl)
But STP is at 0 degrees C. Shouldn't it be at 298K instead of 273K?
Using morse code, perhaps? With only one button, there isn't really any other way to write (I presume that if you were using speech recognition, you would have said "saying" or "speaking," not "writing").

(Yes, I know that you meant you're using a touchscreen on an iPhone, or something similar. I'm trying to be vaguely humorous, and probably failing.)

(The 3GS, according to wikipedia, has 5 physical buttons and then the touchscreen. The iPhone 4, from the pictures I've seen, has at least 4, and the touchscreen. The fact that people entirely forget about them suggests that the design is extremely good, if people are using them without realizing it, or quite bad, if people aren't using them or realizing that they exist. I am inclined to lean towards the former.)
I can't remember what they were called now

XFCN and XCMD for external function and command. Just to round out this quick nostalgia wallow.
Interesting:

In recent studies, MIT students were shown dots on a
screen and asked to say how many there were. If they were
allowed to count normally, they did great. [...]
if they did a verbal task when shown the dots—like
repeating the words spoken in a news report—their
counting fell apart. In other words, they needed their
language skills to count.

I find that external tapping destroys my ability to perform or enjoy listening to music. Something about the interaction of a rival rhythm shuts down the part of my brain that handles music. But most other singers I know don't have any issue with this, and I've wondered for a while what's wrong with me.

An important aspect the article doesn't get into is idiomatic languages. English has a rich vocabulary. Some languages with weak vocabulary compensate for this by heavy linking into a story culture. It would be like if we had no word for beautiful, and instead expressed this by saying "your face launches a thousand ships". I'm told Chinese dialects are like this.
> In a society where capitalism is just 30 years old

Chinese capitalism is many things, but one thing it's not is young.
I knew of pbcopy/pbpaste, but never thought of that. Great idea,

Python version (adjust to pbcopy/pbpaste if on OS X): http://gist.github.com/488852
They already rejected RunRev(http://www.runrev.com) for the iPhone and iPad. The modern day descendant of Hypercard. They have no interest in bringing back Hypercard.

RunRev's CEO thoughts: http://www.runrev.com/company/runrev-blog/revmobile-and-appl...
And a simple little number next to the topic or comment donating its worth. Karma is a wonderfully simple concept with remarkable outcomes - its a teacher, a rewarder, a punisher, an encourager...it helps make the community work (a very complex problem) but is wonderfully simple.
It's not like they said that it would cure cancer, yes. But false advertising has to be dealt with on a really small and technical scale to prevent us from getting to that point. Still nowhere as bad as the article a few days ago with someone being convicted of lying to an officer of the federal government for selling orchids to an undercover officer, in terms of contrived and ridiculous claims, though.
Or the ultimate in Asian parenting...

"What?! You get A- in math?! You not smart enough to get A+? Maybe you not smart enough to inherit fortune..."
How about if the children are competent AND they receive the money?

At the risk of having spoiled kids, might this potent combination bring us another Warren Buffet or Bill Gates? Sure it might not be fair, but children who inherit get a nice safety net which allows them to take greater risks to pursue their dreams.

Edit: I didn't realize the extent that Buffet bootstrapped his wealth. Still, there are plenty of good inheritance examples... the Trumps and Kushners?
The first half of the article, focused on a factual assessment of the state of the American labor market, is accurate and informative. However the author proceeds to assert, "Well, the globalism and "free trade" that our politicians and business leaders insisted would be so good for us have had some rather nasty side effects." Very little effort is made in establishing the causal relationship between free trade and the difficulties facing the American labor market.

Certainly there's no reason that this should be unique to the US - Canada and Western Europe face the same challenge, but it doesn't seem that the middle class in those countries is shrinking at the same rate. One common alternative hypothesis, the lack of an aggressively redistributive tax system and social safety net, is not discussed.
I agree with your TLDR;, but as you say, we're in a culture of 6-to-8 pages. I actually quite like the 8 page limit for most papers, it forces authors to a brevity of expression that aids focus, but you're right that details are the first thing jettisoned.

If I'm going to propose a probably impossible sea change, taking the baby step of saying "just show me what you've already done" instead of "now write another 12-20 page set of documentation" is the more likely of the impossible two :) In a perfect world, we'd have both!