skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A Diploma’s Worth? Ask Her
Well the Mono project would make any Iron Python development portable to the Mac and Linux and would certainly meet your "Windows Forms" type requirement. Still, there are alternatives being suggested on this post that could meet the need by supplying just the GUI components.
Moderators? Points? This is a proposal completely ignoring what Giles is talking about. How would moderators be much different than what we have now? The people that spend the most time here would become the moderators, and we would lose a lot of the votes that "count".
Noni Juice
If you really care about your health then you need to check out Tahitian Noni.
Not for me...

>>> def function(item, stuff=[]):
print stuff + [item]

>>> MODULE_LEVEL_CONSTANT = ['foo', 'bar']
>>> function('baz', MODULE_LEVEL_CONSTANT)
['foo', 'bar', 'baz']
>>> MODULE_LEVEL_CONSTANT
['foo', 'bar']
>>> function('quux', MODULE_LEVEL_CONSTANT)
['foo', 'bar', 'quux']

I think you're confusing + and .append (the latter affects the object).
The Guardian: Programming is destroying my capacity for reflective thought
> People are harsh on lazy English, good at ignoring trolls

Wouldn't it be preferable to be good at ignoring lazy English? If the lazy English comes with trolling, it's ignored completely; if the lazy English comes with sincerity, everything's handled politely.
I think you want wxGlade.
I'm still quite curious about Tsumobi, as it seems very similar to Hecl, but I've never seen or heard much.
So because Giles doesn't want to see his posts mentioned on HN, no one else should see them either, despite the chance that some of them might be worth reading?

Ingenious!

Oh, and he's a jerk on HN, but it's alright because it's intentional.

I'm not sure that deciding to behave like a jerk is any more noble than happening to..
Top 10 Firefox 3 Features
Probably should have clarified this statement. I was suggesting that conversations occur regardless of any "Twitter" like phenomena. So, I struggle to understand why people do not look for alternatives quicker. If a vacuum only worked periodically, would consumers wait for the product to improve? Probably not...they would move on to the next brand.
The Future of Motion Capture for Gaming
In Google we trust - but should we?
May 22, 1973: Enter Ethernet
The Future is PHP
Well, geeez, I don't know, maybe because you only become a moderator after having demonstrated your ability to generate original and interesting thoughts!

Apparently you struggle with basic maths, so let me help you out: my whole point was that you should reward interesting commenters, not prolific commenters. Indeed, considering it's actually quite difficult to be both prolific and consistently interesting, being less prolific should assist in increasing your average.

But hey, I understand why your nose has been put out of joint. Based on your post here, you wouldn't make the cut for moderator...
18 New Ajax Programming Patterns
I've had good results with Tkinter. The widgets look native enough on Win32, and it's supposedly pretty portable.
Funny. I was thinking of writing an article proposing the exact opposite.

Programming and good writing are very similar. With both, you have to quickly leap back and forth between the highest levels and the lowest levels (while "refactoring" - a concept which can just as easily be applied to the conceptual work on an article or story), and you have to be precise and choose the best way to explain something amongst a large number of choices.
Agreed about "TC spam" - but I still am led to click on the links by an uncontrollable force :)

The lapse time is particularly frustrating when using Twitter for Q&A or ad hoc discussions. These are exercises in which I expect quick answers. If I wanted to sift through a pile of Tweets all at once, I would just use email.
Apple Daydreaming: Report Predicts Move Toward Home Devices
This is one of the better "first look" overviews that I've found for the various Python GUI toolkits:
http://www.ginstrom.com/scribbles/2008/02/26/python-gui-prog...
Can't you just print "What's the best thing you could be working on, and why aren't you?" on a big piece of paper and hang that somewhere near the time sinks? Shame yourself into doing something more interesting than watching TV or surfing the web.

Having something break and then not replace it, is good as well. My TV broke early last month and I simply haven't bought a new one yet. I had to laugh at myself a few times when I stumbled over to the TV (dinner, after dinner, after riding my bike, Sunday afternoon etc.)
Ask YC: How do you upload to your web server?
Hi. I was wondering how you upload your code from localhost to the web server. Right now, for my project, I upload the entire directory from localhost to my web hosting server and replace the existing files with the newly uploaded files. It was ok in the beginning because the files were small. Now that I have a bunch of libraries, it takes quiet a long time to upload all 600 files every time I upload.

I recently learned about rsync to upload only changes. I was wondering if you use this or other tools to upload.
I've found enthought's Traits to be very helpful. It's a MVC framework that can save you from sinking lots of time into writing tedious boilerplate. For anything it doesn't handle automatically, you can write using wxPython. It's a little sparse on the documentation so you'll spend a lot of time looking at the source code to figure our how things work though. They also claim that it's portable but I haven't tried it on anything other than linux.
Are you using a repository to store your code? If so, you can check it out from the server and then copy it over.
As some of the other comments have suggested, wxPython is a good choice. It attempts to wrap the native controls where possible, so your app won't look too out of place on any one platform.

For creating your form layout without code, there is the included XRC editor, which allows you to create dialogs, panels, menus, toolbars, etc. and save those as XML files, which can be loaded and displayed by your application code.

http://wiki.wxpython.org/XRCTutorial

Regardless of how you create you GUI in wxPython, make sure you have a basic understanding of how sizers work to layout your application.
PyQt all the way! Both for my hired gun projects (WengoPhone, QuteCom) and for my personal projects. The UI toolkit (QtGui) is great: the widgets have a native look and feel on all platforms (deal breaker otherwise for me), you have an good UI designer etc. But Qt has more libs! File parsers, a signal/slot library for asynchronous calls (which you pretty much have to use with QtGui).
Definately one of my all time favorites. Mackay's book also contains a brilliant solution to the weighing problem due to Conway, where you label the 12 spheres and the sequence of weighings is always the same (meaning that the spheres you choose to weigh on the second or third weighing don't depend on the outcome of any previous weighing. After three weighings, the outcomes of the weighings identifies the odd ball and whether it is heavier or lighter by a lookup table, which is cleverly constructed through a symmetry argument. It completely blew my mind.
"building code that satisfies requirements and works perfectly is a noble goal"

At Microsoft, it may be a noble goal.

With my customers, it is a requirement.
There does seem to be a distinction between programming as art, and programming as plumbing. Most programming probably falls into the latter category. But even when plumbing, you don't check that the water flows through each joint as it is fitted by turning on the tap. I assume the author doesn't send his article to his editor every time he places a full stop.

Perhaps when you are forced to check yourself at every turn, when small mistakes cannot be ignored and instead become hard walls to progress, that's when creativity is stifled. When writing an article, small spelling mistakes can be corrected in the second draft, but the ideas are already on paper and can be exchanged with others.

It all comes back to flow, transcending the mundane to imagine the creative. And so to the question implied in the article: is there something inherent to programming which inhibits flow?

I see three possibilities. 1) The programmer becomes an expert, and so transcends the distraction of small mistakes simply by not making small mistakes. 2) The programmer chooses an environment which either tolerates, ignores or fixes small mistakes, whether through postponing compile time errors to run time, or by automated refactoring to always leave the code ready to compile. Or finally, 3) the programmer simply never gets into the flow, and as with the author, creativity is void.
Crossdomain.xml Invites Cross-site Mayhem
There was rumour of a game console. See http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=195640
Yes. I am using SVN to collaborate with my friends. How do you copy easily?
A classic.

And, when hiring, I certainly wouldn't hold a rant like that posted somewhere on the internet against an applicant...
Life in a Lazy Universe
The future of April 6, 2007 is the past of May 22, 2008.
"For the bedroom, Forrester envisions an Apple “clock radio” that pipes in music and other media across a home network."

One of the major things Steve Jobs did when he came back to Apple over 10 years ago when it was floundering was cut the product lines so it could focus on what was working and what had potential (a side project, the iMac was mainlined and greenlighted). I feel Apple is in danger of diluting its brand as it expands into our family rooms and bedrooms (seriously, a clock radio? there are 3rd party iPod addons that already do that)
I've been using wxPython for about 6 months now, and I'm pretty happy with it. It has it's fair share of quirks to get used to, but then all powerful, cross-platfrom gui toolkits do. It's got a lot of really powerful widgets (there's one that renders simple html, there's one that wraps Scintilla, there's one that let's you use OpenGL, etc).

One really cool thing about it is it comes with a demo app that shows how to do almost anything -- how to use the widgets, how to use threads, how to handle events, etc.. It's basically a big collection of small programs. You can see the code in one tab and see the program in action in another tab. Here's a couple screenshots:

http://crookedgames.com/wx_python_demo_action.png

http://crookedgames.com/wx_python_demo_code.png

Yet another cool thing about it is Robin Dunn, its maintainer. He seems to go through the mailing list every day or two, and answers most questions that people have. He's been maintaining the project for a long time and knows what's up. Maybe I shouldn't be advertising him as tech support, but I've received helpful assistance from him more than once :)
i use mercurial, assuming your base directory is /www/pages (lighttpd), initially:

server:
$ mkdir /www/pages/project
$ cd /www/pages/project
$ hg init

localhost:
$ cd /path/to/your/project
$ hg init
$ hg add *
$ hg commit -m "message"
$ hg push ssh://usr:pwd@123.123.123.123//www/pages/project

afterward it's just the localhost (ignore "$ hg init")
Yes, but consider the problem domain to which he applies (and wastes, in my honest opinion) his skills. Web layout. CSS. Surely one of the most pointlessly vile and broken (as in the implementations are broken) sub-domains of programming. And in this regard, that he is wasting time, he is right. A good "web coder" knows the intricacies of a dozen versions of render engines, but standardisation could, and obviously should, make his knowledge obsolete, as it is only busywork. The wider point is that programming is still full of such busywork.
Substitute "development" for "programming" and problem solved.

This is a forest and trees problem. Sometimes you're so focused on the trees (and leaves and stems) that you forget what forest you're in. We've all been there. Sounds like OP is there now.

But to develop, you must always be aware of BOTH the forest and trees, constantly shifting focus in and out, like a high priced autofocus zoom lens. Fall into either mode exclusively and that autofocus muscle in your brain tightens up.

Don't worry, OP. A couple calls from irate superusers oughta shock you back into the "capacity for reflective thought".
Another vote for the IronPython + Mono/.NET.

An added advantage is far faster runtimes thanks to bytecode-compilation (vs the default interpreted-code nature of Python in most circumstances).

You can write your code in Visual Studio on Windows or MonoDevelop on Linux. On Windows, it'll use the native Win32 controls, on Linux Mono will "draw" controls that look like the native ones without actually calling the native binaries - it allows for a huge compatibility boost and still manages to look 99% native (technically it's drawing the exact same native controls, but the drawings aren't perfect).
Or Stetic.
Um.

I think author is confusing "programming" with "working with code." His frustrations have more to do with CSS compatibility in browsers than with the actual high-level conceptual thinking that true programming entails.

But even taking his argument at face value, his quibbles about syntax would be like me complaining that painting is not a creative art, because that darn paint gets everywhere and it's just so annoying to mix this shade of red and that shade of blue to get the purple I want etc. If you don't enjoy the messy details of the medium, then you surely shouldn't be working in it.

For me at least, programming is the very definition of a creative art. I find it not only satisfying to create something out of nothing, but I take pleasure in fleshing out all the little details and overcoming the obstacles that come up along the way.
LinkedIn Best Practices
I love the frame reddit has and most folks here use reddit so I disagree.
KangarooBox: Win a free T-Shirt!
My company is looking for some product feedback and we thought the best way to get it was to give away stuff. Let me know if you have any questions/comments.

Thanx!
Richard
I use godaddy for my 200 or so domains. I've tried about 10-15 registrars through the years and GD has the best features for what I want. They are also one of the cheapest.
When you talk about such an app it's a good idea to have some basic numbers in mind like .5 second average time to respond to an incoming message and 5seconds worst case. (Picked from thin air but I tend to stick with 1x average 3-10x worst case.)

Now as you scale to 50 or so servers they will start to fail with some regularity and you can't reboot and or rebuild in five seconds so we need to have redundant systems ready. Splitting a shard probably takes longer than five seconds so you need to be proactive about such things. So we need an active rebalancing between shard so they can quickly pass around their load and fast failover incase things fail. These are DB problems but they are only problems because they system need to keep responding quickly as parts of the DB fail.

But this is still DB centric how do you load balance incoming and outgoing requests? (Routing each existing user to the same system every time and letting each system lock data when they want to change their password etc.) How do we recover from data corruption? How do we notice an outgoing or incoming mail server is down? You also have n^2 number of connections between systems as you grow can we keep that many sockets open? (More of an issue is we are segregating the network.) Etc.

PS: These are not hard problems by themselves but they are linked. And there are a lot more where they came from.
This review lists one of the pros of Pyglet as having a "Large number of widgets". Yet it seems to me to just be an OpenGL wrapper / multimedia player. Am I missing something? A full fledged OpenGL based gui toolkit would be pretty cool...
Commit your changes on your local machine then SSH to your server and do an svn update.
Your Game Console May Kill You… One Day | Tech Jaws
RedditNation
Nothing to see here. Religious opinion. Move along.
From the FA:

...should the width of the main column be 60%? 58%? 57%?
And so on, until you find something that works. It's like
being a toddler trying to bang differently shaped block
into the holes of an educational toy. You bang and bang
and scream a bit and bang some more and suddenly the block
fits - but you've no idea why.

Thank you, The Guardian, for explaining to the masses what 'programming' means and destroying my chances to look respectable at London parties.
Twitter Said to Raise $15 Million in Fresh Funding
Microsoft bows down for Open-Source File Format.
I wasn't ignoring that. I've asked numerous scientists why they don't contribute. The common answer given by every single one of those people was the answer I give in the article - essentially, contributions to Wikipedia are not something they can put on their CV. One of these people also raised the read / write point you mention, and, for him, it was the more important issue.
I am 27 and making 70k. SS takes 14% of my income and will start paying me back at 67. Ignoring may past "donations" we are taking about 40 years worth taxes and 40 years worth of lost investments. Granted there is some give and take about such things but 6% over inflation is little on the low side but not unreasonably so.

So the basic numbers are 70 * .14 * 1.06^40 = 56k / year in retirement but SS cap's at 1/2 that so at least 1/2 of SS is pure income redistribution for a young person making 70k.

Granted if bad things happen SS will help me or my family out, but that's the definition of welfare. And if I die before 67 I am left with nothing.

PS: SS is not just about retirement, but life and disability insurance is cheep and I still pay for it have and I have been paying for over 5 years at this point and 6% over inflation is a vary low number for 40 years.
And as N approaches infinity, the probability of winning after N tries with a p=1/N approaches 1 - 1/e.

(Proof left to the reader as an exercise.)
From the article: We are reasonably certain that our own universe is running as a simulation on such a computer. Humanity decides not to probe for bugs in the simulation; we wouldn't want to shut ourselves down accidentally.

That puts a new twist on the anthropomorthic principle. The only universes that are observed are the ones that have observers - and haven't crashed their universe.
I am using Sequel.
can you specify the actual question? is it:

1. an AI in a box and it has shown to be dangerous and now must be kep inside or

2. we dont know if it is good or dangerous and it is the gatekeepers job to find out?
It seems to me that he's just frustrated dealing with all the initial bullshit you have to put up with when you're new to a platform. After you get over the learning curve, you can abstract away the trivial details and focus on the more creative aspects of programming.
But then again with most new platforms there's a lot of little things to learn, probably more than most people are willing/able to put up with. This is why programming is a full time job.
Mentioned before but pyGTK is also a good option.
Nice work. We've ended up working the other way with our application by generating the html from lisp. The advantage for us being that we can use macros (including extensive nesting) to build entire complex webpages from a very small amount of code dynamically.
Sure, but how can you put something on your CV when it can disappear (or be edited beyond recognition) 5 minutes after you post it? Wikipedia has a fundamentally different process than traditional publishing-- so while the goal of "free access to the sum of human knowledge" may sound similar to the goals of the academy, the reality is very different.
How an Apple store was transformed into a Best Buy in 10 minutes
Your customers require perfection? You've got tough customers, then. I assume they refuse to pay maintenance/support fees on principle...
You know, I thought music would be creative. But then I tried to do it. It was terrible! It was all about how to strike the piano keys, how to move my fingers so they don't hit each other, etc. No creativity whatsoever!

Then I tried making up my own music, but that ridiculous. I spent more time figuring out why it sounded bad than I did actually coming up with a melody. My chords didn't work, the rhythm was all off, etc. When it was done, it didn't even sound that good!

I have no idea how Reznor deals with the mind-numbing drudgery of it.
From the article: We mentally compare having the prospective item to giving up what we already have (our 'endowment'), but because we're loss averse giving up what we already have (our reference point) looms large.

Perhaps this reduces the risk of being tricked. However, when a genuine win-win situation is presented, it would be a significant source of transactional friction.
First, I'm 23 (as of today) and my parents were the ones who first got me started on computers at about age 6. Neither of them are big geeks, but my dad is a draftsman and has used computers at his work since CAD became popular in the early 90s.

He also tried to start his own business when I was a kid. Unfortunately it flopped, taking a huge chunk of money with it. It took years for my parents to recover from that, and they didn't have much money to begin with. My dad has never attempted another business, but I think he regrets that.

That must be where I got the entrepreneurial bug from. When I suggested that I want to start my own business, my dad was supportive but wary, and my mum was wary but supportive, if you get what I'm saying. I can't fault either of them, because they've always supported me in everything I've done.

Money is always a sticky point with them, so I had to convince them that I had some idea what I was doing and that there was relatively little risk. Now is the time I can do risky stuff like this. The worst that could happen, I argued, is that I lose a few months of my life and living expenses for that time.

It turned out that's what did happen, and now I'm in a sticky position of trying to find a summer job in May, when no one wants to hire me for just 4 months (now 3.5). I'm returning to school in September to finish my undergrad. I don't consider my first startup attempt a failure, because I've learnt a lot.

The whole time, my parents have been supportive of the idea, but very concerned about money. I know I impressed them with how long I could survive on the money I had -- I definitely learnt how to live ridiculously cheap.
I second that. PyGtk with Glade is the easiest way I've found of cranking out a GUI quickly.
Corporate Twitter feeds worth following -- and a list of Twitter deadbeats
> Apparently you struggle with basic maths

OK...

> my whole point was that you should reward interesting commenters, not prolific commenters.

In theory, great, but Giles' whole point was that in practice, this just wouldn't work. In the end, you're not rewarding interesting commenters, you're rewarding the prolific ones, because the prolific ones are the only ones who have enough time to spend on a site and be moderators. If anything, moderators should moderate content, NOT create it.

> But hey, I understand why your nose has been put out of joint. Based on your post here, you wouldn't make the cut for moderator...

And comments like this (and the first quotation) would make you eligible?

Really, though, it seems that a lot of people that could provide great content, but sparingly, wouldn't make the cut, either.
Damn, I know this sensation so well...
Anyone have any advice for someone who keeps procrastinating about going to bed, even when exhausted?
Quitters never win and winners never quit but people who never win and never quit might want to re-examine what they are doing.
It's not that the routines cause thoughtlessness but that, ideally, the routines free us to think about and do important, creative things by making the daily doldrums automatic.

Sure, sometimes it's good to dive back into reinventing the routines (or taking a road trip and questioning the purpose of the routine), but very few people can get work done that way. And getting work done is a valuable goal.