skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Wow, Hank finds something that doesn't suck! Circle this day in your calendars.

I agree this is big -- at least for P2P. And if it doesn't immediately put CDNs at risk, while the kinks are being worked out... give it time. Think about how long awkward web video muddled along before finally Adobe FLV, plus a critical mass of broadband adoption, caused video usage to explode.

When Adobe first dropped hints about bundling P2P capabilities, over a year ago, I called it 'Adob2p' [1]. Then, as now, I think the big question is whether the resulting p2p distribution capability will be open to anyone with popular content, regardless of license or commercial status, or if Adobe will try to collect a toll per byte transferred.

[1] http://gojomo.blogspot.com/2007/01/adob2p-can-adobe-do-for-w...
Huge P2P networks for large content distributions will never work, as the internet isn't build for that.

Imaging everyone would be driving directly to the farmer to buy egs or milk. The roads would be crowded. A centralized technology is much more effective. (also in terms of energy saved)

PS. Video sites are probably going to integrate this technology soon...
Conversation with Matt Mullenweg, founder of Wordpress
Office is a completely different kind of application from iTunes and video players. The interface will therefore be different as well. Comparing a product 8 years old to something 8 months old isn't fair, anyway.

Plenty of Microsoft products support contextual user interfaces - all the windows and tabs in Visual Studio can be set to auto-hide and placed on the margins of the window so that mousing over them exposes them (like in IntelliJ IDEA). It works especially well for doing demos and working on low-resolution displays like laptops, but I use it that way anyway because I love the relatively minimalist feel it has (I disable the menu bar, scroll bar, and tool bar in Emacs, too).

Beyond that, observing that Apple pays more attention to the user interface than Microsoft is trite.
this site is for reddit refugees who already know how social news works.

anyway, see the little arrows? click on those at random until you find a pattern.

then google for the feature request thread and ask PG to make it possible to change your votes.
Perhaps OP should spend a little less time writing about not teaching and a little more time teaching.

Imagine a hacker blaming his users for not understanding his web site. Why should we expect any less from a teacher?
Teach Yourself Programming In Ten Years
http://www.norvig.com/21-days.html
When your non-hacker-but-smart friends come up to you all bright-eyed and say "Hey, a cool graphics gizmo! I want to make one of those!", what do you say? Learn vim? And unix, and web server configuration, and get out your credit card and fill out a long web-form? You must be a hit at parties.

Even (or especially?) for hackers, it's fun to have an environment to play around in without a lot of set-up. Granted, a lot of existing in-browser IDEs don't live up to their potential, but AppJet has a chance to be different in this regard.

As easy-to-use libraries and frameworks like Processing and AppJet catch on, I think they will be of use to a lot of people who don't already have a shell window open to a web server somewhere.
We're using context to have our UI focus on only what the user needs/wants at the time, but doing it primarily without JS currently. We've built in a lot of UI logic into rendering the html so that the page changes depending on the object being observed in the mode requested. It makes using the system so much easier.
Accidental Emacs: tips and tricks for the environment vi users love to hate.
You might want to add that the "View Source" option is only in Firefox once the Web Developer add-on is installed. Now that you mention it, I would suggest installing this add-on for many reasons, but I found personally that the way a majority of code is presented in books and the way it is actually implemented in the real world are two different things. This hurdle has been the greatest for me with regards to CSS. Books, at least the ones I have been exposed to, tend to fail at actually showing the real world applications of those principals. The most progress I have made in that past has been through getting your hands dirty and digging through other individuals code.

To the author, I would suggest finding a website that you feel accomplishes something you would like to create (I would start small, like a personal blog just because the amount of code might be overwhelming with larger sites). Borrow their code using the add-on, and change certain features to see effect the change makes to the product. I would continue the process for a while until you get a feel of how all of the code works together. Only after this point I would suggest going into books. Maybe you will learn differently that I do, but reading a book without actually being able to have hands on experience with what I am attempting to grasp has a hard time sinking in.
Excellent essay!

Oddly enough, I'm learning more and more about the lies or mistruths I've grown into believe through the Internet. By reading blogs and content on other sites, I've realized that many things that I grew up thinking were the truth are actually urban legends, mistruths, or downright lies.

Part of that comes with a sense of sadness, but also part of it brings hope. Never have we had so much information available to us. Granted, much of it is crap (as the web is just a reflection of society) but it's pretty easy to find the 'right' answer if you look around.

What I found a little depressing is when you learn that someone you really respected (parent, teacher, clergy) was wrong or believed the same lie you did but didn't accept the truth. It's sort of like the phrase "event a lie becomes the truth" but more at the psychological level--as if it genuinely gets burned into ones brain.

I rarely will accept an article on its merits alone. For example, I typically will read user comments on news articles--it really puts things in perspective. So much as to sometimes change the entire view of a story.

Hopefully this will become commonplace and my kids will eventually grow up smarter than me--just not too soon :)
Cox, like Comcast, also violating net neutrality by disrupting subscribers' file transfers
i hadn't noticed Eric Raymond keeps updating "How to become a Hacker". No mention of the in-vogue ruby, haskell, erlang, scala, scheme, smalltalk, OCAML, etc, but good stuff.

http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/hacker-howto.html
This is pure ignorance on my part but why do you disable javascript? I can only think of two reasons: a) safety concerns and b) old browser. Both of these can be taken care of pretty easily. Are there other reasons?
If you were writing software in the mid-90's, you were writing it to the Win32 API.

Not everyone was.
If you found this interesting I would highly suggest his recently released book by the same name. It goes into depth explaining a lot of things more.

A big point in his book that is getting missed here is this: our food regulation system doesn't really make us safer, it just gives us the feeling and appearance of that. What farmers like Salatin offer is true transparency and food safety, the kind government regulated food will never be able to provide. He just wants to be free to provide truly health building food.
"completely botched"? Can you be a little less technical please?
That would be nice and all, but one huge advantage of Flash is that Adobe iterates quite often with new features/bug fixes, and thus keeps up with new technologies. W3C obviously does the same, but at a much slower rate since we all have to wait for them to take ages to make a new specification, and then wait for it to actually be implemented, and then hope that the implementation is consistent across browsers. Also, I believe Adobe just opened up the specification for Flash.
I think the only way they would buy into is if you avoid the evil three letters "P2P" ... which is just code for 'lawsuit' to them.

Pull a marketing move and pitch it to them as end-user-content-assist or something.
You can sometimes prove that something is not the case, but you can't explain why it is not the case.

E.g. it's fairly easy to prove that Boston is not in Oklahoma, but there's no explanation for why it's not.
Whereas other people examine the studies and testimonies and see overwhelming evidence that there is a link.

This is the problem with a government one size fits all system. There isn't necessarily one right answer. And in a system like ours where what government does is influenced most by big pharmaceutical agriculture corporations who have a business interest in sick people and sick animals, well you're likely not to get the right answer at all.
Haste is a form of violence.
+1 as 'thanks', but the original link is derivable from the Scribd link.
I've always liked Eric Raymond's advice:

http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/hacker-howto.html#skills1

BTW, it's notable that Eric used to recommend Java as a second programming language, and that he no longer does.

The only thing I'd add to his recommendations is a pitch for Ruby. I think it's a really good first language.
Remember how in "a Fire upon the Deep" a ship carrying countermeasure that was taken out by the Blight? Latest openssl / debian fiasco and bugs like this show just how trivial it must be for a powerful adversary.
You mean, pg's interest ? Sure, he doesn't seem to be very involved anymore... :)
It is more than the law is a blunt instrument. When it comes to food laws it is a blunt instrument whose only efficacious purpose is to raise the barrier to entry so high that small operators with truly clean and environmentally sound food can't compete (if they are even legal to begin with).
i think the take-away here is the "dark launch" mentioned in the last paragraph, not necessarily the behind the scenes tech. although nice win for erlang here.

first time i have heard a company mention, publicly, about pushing features behind the scenes and testing in realtime. ajax makes this functionality possible nowadays.

good job facebook.
In ac.scm, add :

(xdef 'cos 'cos)
(xdef 'sin 'sin)
(xdef 'exp 'exp)

And you're done.
the 10k number was spilled a few weeks ago at a conference... along with numbers from some other groups like mysql and others.
> You might want to add that the "View Source" option is only in Firefox once the Web Developer add-on is installed.

No, it's a standard part of Firefox. "View Selection Source" is too, which can be useful.

I agree that Web Developer (or similar plugins) can be a great way to learn.
Is Your Website ‘The Taxi’ or ‘The Restaurant’? Pick The Right Model.
It's more that "latent" typing (types do not appear in source code) and "structural" typing (types are determined by their structures, not by their names) are very important. Haskell and Ocaml fit both criteria, despite being strongly statically typed.

The reason for both is that you don't know the data types you'll be using when you start programming. It's very common to switch from a string to a hash to a structured record to an ADT, and if you have to change type declarations in every place that datum is passed to, you'll be spending most of your time changing type declarations.
Thank you for sharing. I'm similarly somewhat both disappointed and thrilled by the amount of bullshit that gets thrown around, and worse still, accepted through generations. I think it's largely a matter of habit, and the old can't change these habits easily - the young can, but then the old often do that work for them.

If you take a pyramidal view of intelligence, it means really the base is getting wider over time, which is worrying, so to some extent it's the job of people at near the top of the pyramid to push correct information downwards.
I've used Arc professionally twice. Once as a web interface to an rsync system (http://my-arc-stuff.blogspot.com/2008/02/i-needed-web-app-fo...), the other one as a database for our local library (basic stuff : which book do we own, who borrowed it, ...)

These are real apps. I must admit Arc is really great (even as it is now) for these small, basic but usually time-consuming webapps. It doesn't prevent me for writing a compiler for Arc :) (which is itself written in Arc and is actually the biggest piece of code I've written in this language).
Amazon Funds Animoto Music Video Creator
Actually your point works for P2P not a centralized solution.

A centralized server is 1 rd vs a P2P highway of a undetermined amount of decentralized servers(roads).

I believe that the answer is not a centralized solution or a P2P solution in my opinion. Maybe a hybrid network of well placed server farms that utilize a form of controlled P2P with authorized hosts. This avoids the legal/protection issues, yet extends the power of central solutions.
Saying you want to learn how to hack is incredibly ambiguous and in the strictest sense of the word pretty difficult to achieve. A "hack" is essentially a clever solution to a programming problem or a solution to a problem that's outside the norm and requires extensive domain knowledge. Judging by the comments it seems the term has been diluted to pretty much be a synonym with "programming" or "coding."

If you want to learn how to code, the first question is what do you want to code? Do you want to make websites? Create PC games? Create mathematical algorithms? Use math to create images... the possibilities are endless. Learning Javascript would be useful if you want to create websites, obviously, but outside of that it's not a general enough language with enough (any, really) general applications to be a good place to start. It's essentially an odd combination of Object Orientation and Functional programming which is cool in that it introduces you partially to two separate kinds of languages simultaneously. It can also be confusing for the same reason.

If you want...

A multi-purpose language that will let you rapidly prototype programs and is both extremely readable, easy to understand, and has modules for just about everything: Python

A language that forces you to learn about more fundamentals of programming and doesn't keep you from royally screwing up: C

A language with extremely high-level features, infinite flexibility and power: Lisp

A language that lets you create extremely stable applications built for concurrency: Erlang

A strictly web-only language with a huge supported base in the online hosting business and about 1,000 frameworks: PHP

The latest craze in web development: Ruby with obligatory framework Rails

---------

I could go on and on and on... hopefully one of these descriptions scratches your itch. Keep in mind these are merely suggestions and there are many other languages that would fill any of the descriptions I gave.

EDIT: I am a firm believer that regardless of your end goals to really learn programming one must start at the beginning. Learn about computer architecture, how CPUs and memory work; learn the pain of programming Assembly and managing memory bit by bit even though you'll never do it again. Then move onto C; learn how even the most fundamental of abstractions made programming possible for lesser mortals. Keep moving forward and come to comprehend that features such as garbage collection, while taken for granted, are in reality really freaking awesome and will help you keep your hair longer.

Move up the ladder, rung by rung, until you have the confidence and knowledge to use a language that is highly abstracted and has all the "batteries included," like Python. At this point the language/interpreter/compiler will do most of the work for you but you'll have the experience necessary to understand, more or less, what's going on behind the scenes. From there, if you want to specialize, choose a language created for the domain that interests you; PHP, Erlang, Matlab, etc.

A brief 5/10/20 years later, you're a hacker. Nobody will give you a diploma, though.
it lacks floating point speed

How much slower are floating point operation in Arc than OCaml?
My experiment with smart drugs: Viagra for the brain?
Demographics now available in YouTube Insight
Enhancing Arc is fun, writing practical apps in it is not. Open source developers go where the fun is.

As for your next question ("Why is enhancing Arc fun?"), it's because Arc provides many tools for manipulating Arc code (macros, code-is-data), and few tools for writing applications (libraries). The implementation is also fairly simple, vs. trying to hack on Java or Python or C++ compilers. Path of most impressiveness per unit effort seems to go through porting it to another language, rather than writing another webapp that'd be more impressive if done in Rails or Django.
Actually the new flash player allows direct access to your computer for processing and cacheing. There may be some privacy issues along the road ahead, but your browser does not need to be open necessarily. Hopefully they can iron this out before launch!
ASP.NET MVC - Living in a Web Forms World
Consider it a public service for people who don't know calculus ;)
Introducing Google Doctype
Arc has a lot of bottlenecks when speed matters, but I never felt floats were one of them...
Learn JavaScript, Python and PHP. It will take time but eventually it will pay off. Moreover, once you learn/master any language please always pay attention to everything that comes with the package. In linguistics, the ultimate goal is to become proficient enough to start thinking in a language. Being a non-native speaker, I know how hard it's for me to start thinking in French and English (despite knowing a few things). Develop a sense of dissatisfaction. Always find ways to optimize things. Build something that lies between "Hmmm, I guess I cannot build it" and "Well, I guess I can do it given I spend time doing it" (read: Psychology of Flow). Do a product, albeit small. I've observed that you hack with altogether a different mindset when you're developing a product with a belief that it can some day pay you back somehow. And please once you're an expert JavaScript programmer always capitalize the S in JavaScript ;)
Your best bet is to get a project and make something. It doesn't matter what the project is or if anyone besides you will ever use it.

There will obviously be a lot of debate (and possibly some downmodding) over this, but I would say that the language doesn't matter. I think the important part will be finding resources that you think will be helpful for you (a book, a tutorial you find on google, a friend who knows programming). In your case you want to spend as much time coding and as little time on set up and administration as possible.

Figure out how to do something easy, then see if you can start tweaking it and adding small things. You'll be a regular hacker in no time
Useful Podcasts For Designers And Developers
Aside from the fact you don't need a web server to use a JavaScript library...
redefining words at random is a form of bad thinking
This may be true of facts, but there is no problem with explaining why your opinion is one way and not the other.

Unless you are asserting that speed not being important is a fact of exploratory programming, rather than PG's opinion, I see no problem with answering my initial question.

If it makes you feel better though, I can rephrase:

Why is speed not important to you, PG?
How so? I've read some people saying that itunes is crap but have never found a software that was this convenient for managing my music.... So care to explain more in details why you think it's crap?
And what other software you would recommend me?
Taking your laptop into the US? Be sure to hide all your data first
I use Google's apps a lot more than Yahoo as well. However, it's interesting that you call Google's code "magic." It's probably only magical because until now they haven't released it to the public. Now the magic is gone and it's just a bunch of javascript...
It's not just about the negotiation power. It's about the total price for the whole deal. A VC might be willing to negotiate away a liquidation preference, but he would be very worried that he was buying a lemon. The total price would go down. Similarly, maybe you start negotiations without a liquidation preference. Putting it on the table in exchange for a higher valuation isn't a bad idea.

A liquidation preference helps prove that you're not selling a lemon. It says "look, if this thing goes sour, you get your money back first." That's worth a lot to a VC because it signals that you are serious. The money itself isn't nearly as important as the fact that the company founder is putting his money where his mouth is by saying, in effect, "I won't get paid unless this is as big of a success as I think it is."
Video games and violence
Once, in college, I visited one of my professors and his wife. In the middle of a conversation the wife asked, "Why isn't this ink refill small enough to fit in this pen?" His answer was an amused, "What kind of existential question is that?"
Okay, obligatory +1 for the smartass comment ;)
no, they're not sending notifications at every event. As far as I can tell, they're using an asynchronous algorithm that lazily propagates events and provides no responsiveness guarantees. (sort of ultra mushy stretchy unreal time guaranteed)
86400 / 10 = 8640. You're telling me it's 8640x faster to use an HTML parsing library than building one from scratch? That's way overexaggerated, even for a big exaggeration.

You have to factor in the cost of finding the library, evaluating it (possibly rejecting it), reading its documentation (if it exists and is accurate and up-to-date), and living up with most of its warts because you can't be bothered to learn the innards of the library to make those few changes that would simplify your work. Or you could contact the maintainers and hope they will maybe honor your feature request/bugfix at some point. Libraries do have overhead.

edit: In the specific case of HTML parsing libraries those caveats probably don't really apply because it's a well-known problem with a well-known solution. But in the general case those are valid considerations.
How the NYSE Achieves Low Latency?
How is BitTorrent's allegedly poor QoS an engineering issue?

BitTorrent's QoS is a function of reachable peers who have the content you want and their bandwidth. This applies to all P2P networks.
I think your paraphrasing is incomplete. It would be truer to the op's point to say, "Blub does not include an XML parser, therefore Blub is rubbish for exploratory programming with XML documents."
Good place to learn Python:

http://www.diveintopython.org/
This is semantics, it depends on what meaning you give the word "why"... you are talking about why as in causes here, but I don't think that was what you were asked about when somebody said "why isn't speed important?"

"Boston is not in Oklahoma because it's in Massachusetts, and Oklahoma and Massachusetts are two separate states and no city can belong to two states at once (afaik)." Doesn't that sound like an explaination?

Now, an explaination of "why isn't speed important", could be, for example, that it's not important because it doesn't affect your final productivity at all, or at least not in a considerable way compared to some N other factors.

Now, what's the cause of such a difference in the final users' productivity, maybe that can't be answered. But I don't think you were asked about it.

Sorry for wasting your time with this discussion, but I don't really see your point. Maybe I'm wrong after all but until now I don't see how that could be.
Does anyone like scribd?
The Horse or the Jockey? Evidence from Nascent Firms where a Founder Dies
Not for a non-hacker. That book is great for programmers who want to learn python, but someone new to programming would need something more like "Wade Into Python."
Good point. I stand corrected.

"Beginning Python - From Novice To Professional" is good starting point for a newbie. Very clear and smooth.
You do if you want to share something you create with other people.
The idea, I think, is to show the relevant chunk of the United States which is equivalent to the economy of each given country.