skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I wonder what things would have been like if they'd used BBEdit for that Rails screencast, way back when.
A Conversation with David Shaw
This is true about many ideals. See socialist, laissez-faire capitalist, and communist supporters for arguing points.

Hell, see any utopian idealistic system. The excuse is the implementation always fails. How many times does implementation have to fail before we start to question whether it is simply possible to implement it correctly and whether it's worth the cost and frustration in the first place?
"Some of the oldest written records we still have are from Sumer using cuneiform on clay tablets."

Actually that alone is no proof that clay tablets are very durable. Who knows, there might have been billions of them in circulation, and only a few of them survived. That would be a rather bad track record.
> The 19/34 year old defaults of vim/vi aren't good enough for the hipster rubyists. However they seemed to be just fine for the hundreds or even thousands of systems developers and hackers who developed the foundation for the systems the take for granted.

Yes, because as we know these hackers have empty .vimrc files. No sirree, just the defaults thanks!
Technology Lessons from the Wikileaks Saga
Wikipedia on P ?= NP:

In essence, the question P = NP? asks: if 'yes'-answers to a 'yes'-or-'no'-question can be verified "quickly" can the answers themselves also be computed "quickly"?

Scott Aaronson:

If P = NP, then the world would be a profoundly different place than we usually assume it to be. There would be no special value in “creative leaps,” no fundamental gap between solving a problem and recognizing the solution once it’s found. Everyone who could appreciate a symphony would be Mozart; everyone who could follow a step-by-step argument would be Gauss...
> I get enough phone calls from CDN sales people

And PS... we don't have any of those.

We're all devs or sysadmins and prefer time-shiftable email, so you'll never get a call from us unless you ask.
I have an N900 and I love it, but I don't know if I would recommend it.

Firstly its quite large (not an issue for me) and doesn't work in portrait mode very well. Its not really a phone per say its more of a tablet that can make phone calls. The screen while fine is not as sharp or nice looking as either a HTC Desire or iPhone 4. Lastly its resistive which can be a plus or minus depending on your point of view.

Now that said, it plays fine with Linux since it just mounts as another drive. You don't really need to connect it to anything since you can sync podcasts and the like over wifi or your data connection. You can run almost any software you want on it. Development using Python is a breeze. You can ssh in and use it as a mobile workstation. The browser is a real browser and websites display as would on your desktop pc.

I think the real test for the N900 will be if MeeGo works out to be any good for it. I have high hopes though :)
In this context, I don't see how "making an absolute statement" is significantly different from stereotyping someone. He owned up to it and clarified where he felt his point applied.

I now understand that he meant to say that among the people he knows, they consider the iPhone the better choice objectively, but some choose Android for ethical reasons. I don't see why you don't see that as well.
This all began as a project I wanted for me and my kids that kept scrolling when playing and loosing focus, etc... I couldn't have hoped better exposure, as this goes to the HN front page.

Given the feedbacks, this might be its grave as well too... may be I should have written a blog post first ;)...

I'm probably an hardcore flash gamer. As I worked on it, may be I have fallen in love with my idea, and stopped looking for it's pertinence. This might be a case where scratching your own itch does not work. I love the little fun of flash games and was hopping to give it more quality.

It's built anyway, I think that some people will like it because it's still the absolute best solution to play flash games fullscreen as it has qualities that no other solution provide : not scaling games and speed.

If you want to try it, I guaranty that it is safe anyway, I checked it against http://virustotal.com, it's clean for 41 of 42 antivirus.
Ask HN: If P = NP, what does it mean?
What does this mean for computer science (and other areas)? I am familiar with the basic idea, but really don't know much more or how this would affect what I do?
Definitely. Direct probabilistic reasoning is better than using metrics or gut instincts though.
Starting a B.V. in the Netherlands requires you to have 18000 euro in your bank account at the moment of inception for a few days, but the actual cost are much lower. I managed to do it for less than 1000 euros and within a week (although usually it takes about a month).
I think it might be telling that the first I've heard of Vimballs is your comment, so I won't say much more about that :) It seems only Supertab Continued with it's odd ":%so" install thingy was a Vimball, but the author never called it that on his Vim.org/scripts page.

Automatically in insert mode is what I expected to be the most divisive comment, and it proved so! Maybe this would be solved by my distribution suggestion: new users get Vim in insert mode, seasoned vets get Vim in normal mode on start-up. There isn't one setting that will please everyone, although I do have a suspicion that the normal mode at start-up turns off more people than might be expected.

For the comment command deal, I found similar blog posts along that line. Again, I think it's the sort of command that isn't obvious to new users, and you need to be jiving with the Tao of Vim before it makes sense (I only have a half handle on it myself). I just wanted a keyboard command, like Textmate's Cmd+/ . NERD Commenter's key command is ,/, which makes me happy, and it works across multiple file types. My hope is that when I get better at Vim, I'll be able to come up with such commands myself, but I don't expect that sort of proficiency for months, if not years. I'm perhaps a slow learner ;)
Hi HN,

This is my app/game in the making. It is scheduled to be released this fall. Some early feedback would be really helpful!

Thanks,

Ivan
All good points and the same reason I went with the N900. My only complaints being the screen isn't the best (res is fine but brightness and saturation aren't as nice as htc desire or iphone)

It really is the ultimate geek phone.
Find the user's true window resolution via javascript and then dynamically resize based on that true resolution.
> hight

It's high, not hight (I'm French too).
If you try hard enough eventually you will find a reason to justify a conclusion you have already reached in your mind. While I can only assume why Carr was invited to write on WSJ on this specific topic, it would seem that promoting his book would be the most probable reason.

Carr has some very valid points however.
(No offense) All the answers make no sense. How can you advise a country with so few information about the start-up?

Dimensions to assess that would totally change the selected country:

- A start-up in which business domain?

- What will you sell?

- Who are your targeted customer? Where are they located?

- Where are you main competitors?

- Where is the best "ecosystem" in your domain that could help you/partnership with?

- Do you need some VCs?

- Tax optimization requirements?

- What is your "exit strategy"?

Hint: be located close to your competitors, partners and of course... customers.
When I moved to SF, I (fortunately) had a couch to crash on for a week. The city is eminently walkable. I spent the first few days just walking through neighborhoods and looking at whatever apartments on Craigslist I could schedule walkthroughs for. I walked the Mission from 26th and Potrero back and forth to 14th and Dolores, all of SOMA, up and down Hayes Valley and the Haight. I knew from doing a little research beforehand that the Marina and North Beach weren't my scene.

Once I found a neighborhood that felt comfortable, I narrowed my focus and drilled down on finding a place.

If you can do something similar, I highly recommend it.
I hope I didn't give the impression I think Vim is terrible. If I did, I wouldn't have said at the beginning that I'd moved to it completely. I think it's just suffered under the weight of it's age, where defaults, audiences and expectations were different. What I found interesting was that the things that turned me off were really easily solved; there's nothing wrong with the core of Vim at all. It's just window-dressing issues that someone with more skills than I would be able to solve relatively easily.

I wouldn't call myself a Rubyist (I like Scala more), but I'd prefer the hipster tag to loser ;)

I actually don't think depending on bundles and snippet features is bad at all. I think that indicates the flexibility of TextMate from first boot, and it means users are getting to the power the editor is providing, rather than skimming across the top. But when I watch a Vim pro though, it's light years faster than how quickly I can move around. As the other commenter mentioned, they do have highly customized .vimrc's and such to get to that place though.
Hi Erik :)

What happens to the 2 free days most people call a weekend?
We have lived with NP \neq P being the prevailing opinion for nearly three decades. If NP \neq P there will be no dramatic engineering aspects coming from the result, as focus has long ago shifted towards heuristics and approximations. If NP \eq P, we may still not know any underlying algorithm for solving TSP efficiently, but there will be hope of finding one and the search will continue.

But it may be more realistic to consider what happens if NP \neq P. The main change for CS will be the shift in the focus of research.

If the proof is correct, there will be a brief flurry in which people find simplifications, restatements, and shallow applications to other areas of research.

But for three decades this has been the motivating problem in theoretical computer science. I think there will be a lot of soul searching, and perhaps a subdued atmosphere in the research community, but then attention will turn back to the topics in which people are actively exploring. However, there will perhaps never again be such a unifying, fundamental problem in CS.
You just ignored 2/3 of my comment to focus on "yes, Gruber is pro-Mac".
Yeah I know nanotech has current limited applications. That's why I said "widespread". As in electricity once had limited applications, now it's widespread.
Map of where to live: http://maps.google.com/maps/ms?ie=UTF8&hl=en&msa=0&#...

Rooms to rent: http://www.airbnb.com/travel/san-francisco/ca

Events to look at: http://plancast.com/search?q=san+francisco
There are a bunch of recommendations in a previous thread on HN "What is the best startup city outside the US" here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1565375

Anyway, I like Amsterdam: People speak English and the state provides a lot of stuff for free if you're not making money yet (child care, health insurance, even access to museums). Once you start making money get out of there or pay the worst taxes in the world ;-)
After using it for a few days, I’ve concluded that Flipboard is designed for people that want to “read” but are annoyed with words getting in the way.

That sounds insulting but it’s actually a rather brilliant insight. — http://trenchant.org/daily/2010/8/5/
You don't get to take a large article and monopolize its coverage on Hacker News with your own point of view. Next time, submit the article on its own merits and leave your point of view to the comments.
I definitely felt somewhat pushed by the mythical creature that TextMate 2 is. This isn't to say I have any outstanding critical issues with TextMate as it is, more that I feel like I've plateaued with it, but I know there's a faster way of doing things by watching Vim masters at work.

Katz's post was the catalyst to pushing me to actually go and try it; he seemed like he was a similar mindset to me, and his success spurred me on.
What has anyone ever learned from DaringFireball? The scuttlebutt speculation that is utterly meaningless is such an example? If that's "learning" then your bar is entirely too low.

DF caters to special interest pro-Apple-enthusiasts such as yourself. His posts gets disproportionately elevated because your small group has to up arrow every unsubstantiated, usually inaccurate thing he says, while everyone else is busy paying attention to a distributed set of submissions.

In any case, it's daft to complain that people complain about Gruber's obvious bias.
Social Media is Not new
Or follow my twitter bot: http://twitter.com/officeworkout (strictly non-scientific)
Not true, RIM allows you to write entire applications using web technologies, and sell them in their app store. Same with the Palm Pre.
To quote the announcement email which zacs posted earlier:

This work was pursued independently of my duties as
a HP Labs researcher, and without the knowledge of
others. I made several unsuccessful attempts these
past two years trying other combinations of ideas
before I began this work.

So based off this solitary data point, it seems that while they might hire the brains it doesn't necessarily follow that they have free rein to work on esoteric "non-profitable" projects.
Startup Business - Stack Exchange
From what little I understand, those barriers prevent only certain proof strategies from working. So for instance, the Razborov-Rudich barrier concerns a class of combinatorial proofs (the so-called natural proofs); this paper uses two techniques - statistical mechanics and model theory - which I gather are out of the province of RR.
I switched to Dvorak. Now I am trying to switch to 2 finger typing
Plasticware re-defining the usage of household products
Ask HN: I have a whole month left what can I do?
So HN, I have a whole month of summer left before classes resume. I've been dabbling with python the whole summer and I'm really enjoying it. I already finished going through diveintopython and I've written some small scripts for personal use. I'm wondering what else I could do with python with the time I have left. I can't commit to a big project because I will be under heavy load next semester and won't have time to continue/maintain it.

Any ideas?
But is it truly marvelous?
I'm not academic - can you explain why he mentioned the font sizes? Why are they relevant?
Ya I think it's a bit of the dunning-kruger effect at work. He's been using the editor for 2 weeks and can see what it needs more than people who have been using it for years.
The last time I checked 5 years of experience is enough to label someone as "senior" in software development.

I'm not saying that's not crazy, or disagreeing with your general point, but as the term is used in the field he's not out of line.
Coffee shops are taking Wi-Fi off the menu
This looks like a fairly basic Python book. I'll volunteer to answer any questions people have while reading it.
It wouldn't have weirded them out--it probably would have made their day. Why not err on the side of maybe delighting someone? Worse case scenario, it weirds them out and you never see them again anyway!
Rock Salt deodorant works great. For easier application, try the salt spray. It costs more, but a nice convenience. I imagine you can make your own spray by dissolving the rock in water.
They're well aware of this. Read the article, it says it's either for PR or as a humanitarian move, rather than anything political.
Edit:
Actual link is

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P_Versus_NP_Problem
Let's denote expected value of money in envelope I picked with A.

If I want to switch I have to consider two cases. Let's label them e1 and e2.
e1 means I picked envelope with smaller amount of money.
e2 means I picked envelope with larger amount of money.
Probability of each case is 1/2.

What is the expected value of money I'll have after switch?

Let's consider first case:

S(e1) = 2 * A(e1)

which mens two times the amount of money I had PROVIDED THAT I PICKED ENVELOPE WITH LESS MONEY.

A(e1) is not equal A
If I denote exact amount of dollars in envelope with less money by X then A = 1/2 * X + 1/2 * 2 * X = 3/2 * X but A(e1) = X

Similarly considering case e2 I get expected value of money after switch equal

S(e2) = 1/2 * A(e2)

which means half of the amount of money I had PROVIDED THAT I PICKED ENVELOPE WITH MORE MONEY.

Again A(e2) is not equal A but 2 * X, if you prefer not to use X then A(e1) = 2/3 * A and A(e2) = 4/3 * A

To sum up probability of each case is 1/2 so S that I use to donate expected value of money I could have after switch is equal to:

S = 1/2 * 2 * X + 1/2 * 1/2 * 2 * X = 3/2 * X = A

or if you want without using X

S = 1/2 * 2 * 2/3 * A + 1/2 * 1/2 * 4/3 * A = A

So there is no gain or loss from switching. You can switch zero or more times without changing expected value of money you will get after opening your envelope.

Similar reasoning can be conducted for any amount of envelopes and any probability distribution and I guess it will to same conclusion. I'm not sure if observable symmetry of situation can be taken as proof of this conjecture but I sincerely hope so.

Paradox comes from using same symbol A to denote three different expected values of random variables which I denote above as A, A(e1) and A(e2)

If you have further doubts about above "relative" reasoning I'll gladly try to clear them up.
HTML5 video accessibility (ironically inaccessibly illustrated)
Why are you skeptical of the proof to "the point of disinterest"? I would assume that a researcher with HP with a dual Ph.D.s from USC wouldn't haphazardly make such a claim.
get into app engine...
Some people use it with religious fervor, some do not; there is truth behind it though. Cohesive in this context refers to the user land and kernel software ecosystem of the project. GNU/Linux is called "GNU"/"Linux" because it is the user land software of the GNU project bundled with the kernel of the Linux project. The development of base user land utilities and software is done in completely separate fashion from that of the kernel - they are then mixed and matched into "distributions".

That model has a key advantage, namely, organic growth through asynchronous development - innovation in the kernel has it's own programmer resources and isn't limited by the development path of the user land; the same can be said of user land. Now, it's also a disadvantage in that, you have gazillions of distributions that are now mixing and matching user land software with completely different methods of managing that software (yum, apt, rpm, etc..).

FreeBSD, however, develops the kernel and its base user land all in unison. There are no distributions, there is just "FreeBSD" and as a result, there is just one method for managing user land software (ports). The key advantage here is uniformity and tight integration with the components of the kernel and the base user land system.

BSD vs. GNU ls or grep or awk is moot - they are practically the same tools. The difference is that they are developed and refined with the base system (which means Clang/LLVM will now be compiling those tools).

I liken the difference of FreeBSD vs. GNU/Linux to the days when vendor hardware was cohesively developed and the modern days where all of your components come from separate vendors. There are pros and cons to both. My preference is the *BSD way :)
Don't forget new underwear ... you would think it wouldn't need to be said
Just FYI my comment wasn't really a personal attack on you or your post. I was talking more in general, I've seen several within the last week through many different channels.

Vim with sane defaults was create a few years ago, it's called cream http://cream.sourceforge.net It didn't really take off, at least as far as I know.
Search and chat website for the modern Muslim
How to argue that radical life extension is valid science
"a man whose selfishness surpasses any recorded selfishness"

Seriously, what a knob. Not only is this the truth of this statement questionable -- any one of histories tyrannical monarchs would have been measurably more selfish -- and hyperbolic, it adds absolutely nothing to the discourse over licensing and open source development in general.

It personalises it unnecessarily. It's petty. I find this attitude to be supremely annoying; it involves attaching to much importance to _software licenses_ -- FFS -- when there are arguably much more important issues which could be argued more strongly. In other words, this dude needs to pull his head out of his bum and get some perspective.
True in cases where code relies on Hotspot's server JIT and GC, but the fidelity of the JVM->Dalvik bytecode conversion is remarkable.
Kind of a side-note but I have seen a few times something along the lines of "seeing the reaction to web-apps, Apple decided to release an SDK".

My opinion on this is that they had planned all along to have an SDK but, since it wouldn't have been ready on day 1, they said "oh no, make web-apps they're great!" so that developers would do something while they're finishing polishing the SDK.

Sure, I have no proof for this either, but it sounds unlikely that 1. they wouldn't have thought about it, 2. they would have been able to turn around an SDK in just a few months.
Why would Google continue to pay them for search referrals?
Getting the (literal) bugs out of a driveway gate controller
We would not be surprised to see a new "standard" product business in New Hope--a furniture maker, plumbing fixtures, etc... The last two decades have steadily eroded any significant technology barrier to a software/SaaS business. If MyYearbook can spot an unserved market opportunity they can grow a software/SaaS business in New Hope.
That is a very true point.

However, as you are point out, every body has a .exrc/.vimrc In my useless opinion the current defaults are as general as they can be. I believe they are currently set so that both 20 year veterans and beginners can use any instance of vim if they happen to be without their favorite .vimrc config.
I totally agree.

I honestly feel like a old man on my porch, screaming "Get of my editor lawn!".
I'm wondering the same thing as well. After scouring the country for quite a while, I'm planning on moving my company down (or starting my next one) there in the next year or so.
I suppose it depends on your definition of "native".

Scheme and Lisp are designed to be extensible, so adding memoization is as simple as including a few lines of macro definitions.

e.g., see the block of text commented as "The Memoization facility" in this file: http://norvig.com/paip/auxfns.lisp
10 and 12pt fonts - in Comic Sans
Why SF?
The beauty is in the simplicity.