skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I had the same thought when I tried to read "Getting Things Done". The text is sprinkled with small info boxes of wisdom, which made it next to impossible for me to focus on reading the text. That really amused me at the time.
Why? The "main" git repository is as important as the "main" Subversion repository. git is easier to work with for distributed development, but whatever is branded Python still shouldn't suck.
Laissez-faire(not troll) viewpoint: People will be unequally susceptible to these new super-stimuli, and humanity will keep on evolving. If the victims, who will have their genes excluded from the gene pool, leads happy lives, what's the problem?

edit: Felt a need to play devils advocate to get a more complete discussion, but just saw that it had already been done in the comments to pg article. so, eh, never mind.

The point I really wanted to make was that I'm not worried that this will be the end of humanity, since not just super-stimuli, but also humanity keeps on evolving.
The article starts by mentioning Nick Carr, who recently wrote a book about how the Internet is ruining our mind/attention span. Steven Pinker disagrees[1]. (Which Carr tries to rebut[2])

I'm always a bit scared about the large influence a few pop-sci titles have, especially the ones that aren't even written by scientists.

[1]: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/11/opinion/11Pinker.html?_r=1

[2]: http://www.roughtype.com/archives/2010/06/steven_pinker_a.ph...
I don't think that is as much of a problem here in Germany, so I doubt it is the major deterrent. Though in general being a teacher seems rather risky to me. Certainly if pupils or parents want to screw up your life, they have all the possibilities to do so.
The real reason why you want ->> can be seen in the code example for rule #7: instead of mapping the result of partitioning, it (wrongly) reuses a (i.e., the original list).

If bugs result in irregularity, then making regularity explicit (by using ->> or other macros/higher-order functions) can be a good thing.
Is it a common thing to come from reddit to here?

I actually found out about HN and then went to reddit, which I had always assumed was a mere digg-clone.
Pick something "easy" (high school trigonometry did the trick for me) and try to understand it completely. Don't look at hte formulas or the proofs, just look at the problem space itself.

You have a circle with radius=1 centered in (0,0). Draw a line from the center of the circle to any point in the circle. Now you build a triangle using this line as your hypotenuse. Inmediately, you will see that the heigth and the width of the triangle will be in (-1, 1). That is why -1 <= sen(x) <= 1 and -1 <= cos(x) <= 1. You can see that your triangle is always a rigth triangle so you can apply Pitagoras. That is why sen^2(x) + cos^2(x) = 1. Keep thinking about it for a few weeks and you will realize that all the formulas you memorized in high school are just common sense, you can deduce all of them just by drawing a circle with a triangle in your mind.

Try to do the same with other stuff (set theory is a good second thing to look at). You will discover that math notation is just notation and that many proofs (at high school level) are just common sense written in a very formal language.

Think about what the maths are about, not about formulas or notation.
I assume interpreting this chart is where all the magic lies but it doesn't tell me that much.

It tells that newer users seem to be more engaged, but it doesn't tell if we are seeing a trend or not.

Maybe as users get older and get over the reddit factor or get busier they post less often ?
America is stuck in the dial-up dark ages
With a DVCS, you don't need commit privileges to benefit from all the advantages of using a VCS in the first place. So even if you keep the exact same list of comiters, "second-class" contributors can develop things much more easily.

It also means that you can "screw-up" until you push (and as such can put things for review, etc... more easily).
s/commit privileges/push privileges/g

From what I understand, a lot of the uncertainty isn't about committing, per se, but rather about changing the canonical repository.
Have you found http://news.ycombinator.com/classic already?

What's the difference? Hadn't come across it before and to be honest it doesn't appear massively different?
>Previously, OpenGL ES was slightly incompatible with conventional OpenGL. With OpenGL 4.1, that's no longer the case; the desktop platform is a superset of the embedded one.

Brilliant move. That might constitute leap-frogging; if WebGL gets more traction, this could be a killer feature.
Must-Have iPhone Photo Apps
I recently discovered a few apps that make simple iPhone pictures look beautiful through various effects, lens types, and even zoom options. No fancy camera? Just snapping pictures with your iPhone? Get these apps.
Speaking of DVCS, Mercurial was chosen at PyCon 2009, although the implementation timeline appears TBD.

http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0374/#decision

http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0385/

http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2009-March/08793...
Ignoring your distorted characterisation of the situation in Afghanistan, one can think of many situations where people would tolerate and support the presence of foreign forces in their country, even if inevitably civilians are killed as a result (not a war-crime or 'murder' by the laws of war).

All one needs to do is avoid naively modelling the thought processes of brown people in a couple of lines of chomskyscript. Really, give it a try some time.
cross country travel by rail is much more enjoyable than flying, even if it takes 2-3 days.

Not in my experience. I took Amtrak from Atlanta to DC in 2008, and it was basically a 13 hour flight -- same kinds of seats, only marginally more space, and the food service amounted to paying exorbitant prices for awful sandwiches that could have been vended from an office machine. I would prefer to spend 10 hours in an airport and 3 hours in flight, given the chance; airports are at least quite comfortable, in general.
How will you promote this? The big challenge is getting the word out to people with Flickr accounts.

Another issue - I don't know if it's your problem or not - is people selling photos that don't belong to them by uploading copyrighted content to their flickr account and selling it from your site. But let's say someone buys an image without realizing it's copyrighted until after the purchase - do you allow them to get a refund or do you provide some way for them to report the problem?
It excludes the votes of new users from the page sorting algorithm.
And you absolutely don't want that.. imagine a free market that was free.

Ok, I get it that the US incurs some liabilities when it accepts inmigrants, etc... that's why the startup visa makes some kind of sense...

I'd love to go to the US (heck, even visit!) but I've been deterred several time (I've been 2 inches from the US border during my stay in Canada, but I didn't want the visa hassle and expense just for a short visit - not that the Canada visa experience was much better but I have relatives there)..
Guido stepping down from his dictator role? What will the fanboys do?

Sounds like the community is growing up. It's good news for Python developers (and people who write Python for a living).
The author suggests a design app based on web kit and then clarigies in the comments that he meant any layout engine:

"Why Webkit? Do we really want a design application that is specific to a single rendering engine?

WebKit is just one option. Gecko could work too. I guess with the advent of Safari for Windows and Chrome, WebKit just seemed like the go-to. I don’t actually know that it’s important which browser gets used, just so long as it’s on a healthy development track and is consistent enough to be predictable. Whatever the option, it wouldn’t replace testing in the browser, just merely provide a consistent window to it."

Well http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KompoZer is exactly that. A web design app that uses a real web layout engine.
"Threads are hard, let's go shopping."

If you're that afraid of concurrency, just use a single Big Damn Lock to only ever let one touch any shared state at a time. You'll lose out on most of the benefits, but you won't deadlock and won't corrupt things (or at least, not any worse than you can with interdependent or chained events).

Or grab a compiler and a decent beginning textbook (or the internet) and put in your hundred hours or so, to know how to use concurrency sanely (add probably another hundred if you're planning to build you own lock-free underlying data structures).
How long does it take for a Paypal app like this to get approved? Do you need a merchant acccount to act as an intermediary between the buyer and seller?

You mentioned that you are using Paypal Website Payments Standard "until you get your Paypal app approved". After it's approved, what happens? Will you have to pay a monthly fee (Website Payments Pro) to keep your Paypal app going?
Know Different Types Of Acne
Words to Avoid (or Use with Care) Because They Are Loaded or Confusing - FSF
Need a small, possibly disposable discussion board? Try gatcka.com
I've launched a small web project today: http://www.gatcka.com

It's more of an experiment really. I wanted to check how far I can go without needing any registration process, with cookie sessions only, with minimal user interface, etc.

The project aims to be as simple as possible, but usable as well.

Let me know what you think about it, thanks!
I find this rather implausible. We don't build a Dallas/Houston or LA/San Fran train because we are afraid that a black guy might pay $80 to ride from Dallas to Houston?

I can see this claim being plausible concerning short distance rail, i.e. "don't build a train to the ghetto", however.
Does Flipboard Represent the Future of Media?
To say that the media world – particularly print media – is in a bit of a state right now would be a gross understatement. The arrival of the web and its impact on advertising, reading habits and people’s expectations happened so fast and so suddenly that people are still reeling from it.
How WikiLeaks threatens transparency
The Copyright Office's exemption guidelines should be read as a list of things that would get the law struck down in court, and hence the government isn't going to prosecute. I doubt a prosecutor is going to risk the entire DMCA on "wifi telephone" versus "AT&T telephone".
Also with a model similar to Github where you fork the repository and submit pull requests, Python developers could cherrypick the best commits from anyone who is interested in contributing.

This probably doesn't scale, but you could certainly do it for just the predetermined contributors.
> It's extremely, unbelievably selfish. I like wine myself, but alcohol brings so much misery to the world!

And so much happiness! I'm more of a beer man myself, but drinking alcohol in good company is something millions (billions?) of people get pleasure out of. Only a small proportion of alcohol users harm themselves or others through it.
Here's a link to the monocle project that Guido mentioned:
http://github.com/saucelabs/monocle
I thought this article about electrifying railways in the US was an interesting perspective, too:

http://www.theoildrum.com/node/4301
How You Can Make Chocolate And Have A Successful Home Business-bestcbstore.com
programming reddit once had the discussion quality of hacker news. Heck, even the front page was readable. Like digg, but high-quality.

By now it has kind of gone down the drain. A victim of its success.
Agree that it's not something one should spend a lot of time on, but often times, you make serendipitous discoveries through "chit chat" with others in your field. A chance meeting, an interesting new project, a company that's hiring - there are some good things here.
> In the case of hacker news, what we're addicted to is startup news and gossip.

Not me. I'm more interested in programming technology and understanding how trends in technology shape society -- and reading PG's essay has helped me do this.
Guido has been talking about retiring from the dictator role for a bit now.

I think that the language is in a spot where it's got a dedicated enough and competent enough community to move on from the "GVR as benevolent dictator" model of development without sacrificing much. The language and its community is indeed maturing -- in fact, it's one of the most mature communities around in my experience, at least in the "scripting" language world.

I think the future is pretty bright for Python. It's not a language that is breaking ridiculous new ground or anything, but it has a nice balance of readability, power, and a fairly sane standard library, which makes it my (and many others) go-to language for a lot of tasks.
Gamestop acquires Kongregate
Thing is, Apple's shareholders would like Apple to stay in business for a while.

Apple's "it's a crime" talk is to scare casual users away from jailbreaking to get pirated software. But they know that experienced users, the ones that write the apps that draw the inexperienced users to the platform, want to jailbreak. And, those users want a warranty. And, they don't want to piss off those users, many of whom have hardware-review blogs.

So my guess is that Apple is not going to void warranties for jailbreaking. If they start doing that, it's going to be really good for Android and really bad for Apple.
Here's a video of me talking about it: http://www.kongregate.com/pages/kongregate-announcement
Excellent. This place keeps getting better & better!
The present theory concerns the elimination of dark energy, not dark matter. The existence of dark matter has been demonstrated beyond any doubt through observations of a collision between two galaxy clusters. In a nutshell, the clusters were mostly made up of high-energy plasma, and when they collided almost all of the plasma remained at the point of collision due to electromagnetic interactions between the gases. However, the dark matter in the clusters, which was previously difficult to observe independently, passed through the point of the collision (that is, through each other) as though nothing had happened. The electromagnetic interactions trapped the visible baryonic matter in one spot while the dark matter drifted off into space, allowing us to observe it independently via the effects of gravitational lensing.
Right, but ultimately if Apple wants to cripple their device to for app store profit and I don't like it, I can spend a few hundred bucks on a competitors phone and call it a day. If I can't live in any neighborhood but Harlem the landlords their can jack the rent as high as they want and I live in poverty no matter what.

I'm actually fine with losing service contracts and stuff for jailbroken devices. What I'm interested to see is how much ammunition this actually gives youtube to say "fuck you" when media companies send cease&desist notices and takedown letters and such to fair use youtube videos and that sort of thing. If there are no consequences for that sort of corporate bullying then it probably won't stop.
OT: Reminder to develop a quick JS bookmarket to fix unnecessary monospace apps like mailman - Readability doesn't work. Assuming an 80 character wide display was dumb 10 years ago, it's even worse now we have mobile web.
Ah, my comment was only meant to include North America; I am not at all sure whether elementary education in other places has equal amounts of gender-iniquity.
Systemic Fear, Modern Finance, and the Future of Capitalism
When you get sick of searching through the endless memes, pun threads, predictable jokes, and poorly worded yet highly upvoted emotional appeals to find the few good posts among a sea of mediocrity, Hacker News is wonderful. There's just a lot better concentration of quality, interesting posts here. I really think the lack of humor here helps keep the discussions on topic and interesting.
Microsoft should cut out the middlemen, build its own phones
Copywriter
Looking for a copywriter or copywriting service? This direct response copywriter has a proven track record of getting better results for copy writing.
How SaaS is killing karaoke
I have a similar story to NyxWulf. As a musician, I find that Adderall does not reduce my creativity per se, but it does change it a bit.

That said, it is not a permanent change. If I take a break from Adderall, the way I think about music is back to how it is "normally".

As an aside, I've found that smoking pot while on Adderall brings me to a rather mentally focused and creative state, which is nice, but not something I'd do every day.

I think Adderall would be more useful for you while taking existent characters and places in your worlds, and extrapolating around them, for lack of better phrasing. Coming up with new characters and places? Not so much. Really fleshing out existent ideas for characters and such? Oh yes. YMMV, of course.
No merchant account needed. Paypal needs to enable App for adaptive payments. All business Paypal accounts have API access, which is the only thing needed for Website Standard.

Until we have the Adaptive app enabled, we cannot take a cut. (To enable payments to two accounts, we would need the buyer to authorize twice, which makes a much less seamless exp.)

With the adaptive payments API, user just needs to pay to one account, and the developer can split it between two Paypal accounts. After our app is approved we will move to Adaptive payments.
Just curious; what's the difference between Kyoto Cabinet and Tokyo cabinet?
Guido has never been that kind of "dictator". Sounds you haven't really been paying attention...
Is there value in an online paywall?
I agree. I'm a phd student in math, and am good at it. The main course I took where I _got_ it was a proof-based course on advanced (abstract) linear algebra. The book used was linear algebra done right, its a great place to start; you don't need to know much math ahead of time, its easy to read, and the material is extremely valuable in almost all technical areas. Our professor made us memorize many of the proofs, which may sound backwards, but it helped a huge amount. Often the pudding is in the proof...
The memory controller and graphics core in Arrandale aren't on-die, but they're in the same package. This, and the fact that the GPU/memory controller is still built on a 45nm process, makes for a much bigger package - according to an earlier Ars article, the new package is twice the size of what's in the MacBook Air. It would be relatively easy (and not entirely unprecedented) for Intel to build a CPU-only Arrandale in a smaller package for Apple if they would let NVidia supply the memory controller as part of their chipset.
What do you need the rest of the world for? Seriously - Croatia has four million people. Isn't there enough of a customer base locally? Build the best available product in your language, and you have purple cow.
Please don't post bleetbox clutter. Here's the original Apple link: http://www.apple.com/magictrackpad/
I think he's saying that the main event loop has called a callback, only to have that callback either call the main event loop, or something similar that processes events until a certain condition, and that in turn may cause other callbacks to be called. Stack depth has increased. And it tends to lead to bugs because sometimes unconsidered things happen in the midst of the first callback's processing.
I don't agree that commenting is always useless because on occasion I've actually learned something new and even changed my mind about something as a result of a reply to a comment I've made.

Also if you care about something enough to comment on it, the act of articulating a comment can make you think deeper about it and even uncover flaws before you've even submitted your comment.
Note that in your example, you nicely added to your original point:

"Virgin America has an entire fleet of brand new planes, comfortable seats, personal in-flight entertainment and wifi, and great staff."

Note that unlike other airlines, Virgin has tied together that correlation between price and value. Virgin is selling predictability. You pay more, and ALL of their flights are awesome (because they're a brand new airline? Only time will tell...)
I was reminded of Robert Anton Wilson's 'experiments' with E-prime http://www.nobeliefs.com/eprime.htm

Any other RAW fans on HN? I'm sure there are plenty of people who dislike him actively on HN as well. :D
It's not that they're not equally plausible; it's that they're not equally solvable. We can "fix" sexism (and thus cause the "right" number of women to go into STEM); we can't "fix" Autism-linked chromosomes in people who have already been born.
I had the same questions...

This chart is just a snapshot in time. It's hard to infer any sort of 'change' from it. Perhaps the newer members of HN have always been more active contributors (I can think of several reasonable ideas as to why that might be).
How to Acquire Customers by Marketing "Heroes"
Tier 1 | Tier 2 | Tier 3 | Tier 4 | Tier 5
For Expert advice on Tier 1, Tier 2, Tier 3, Tier 4 and Tier 5, log on to www.tier12345.co.uk now.
It's a bit more convenient, but svn plus private repositories, or SVK, or git-svn work equally well.

Again, I'm not saying git isn't more convenient - it is; the point is that even git-using projects end up with a "main repository" to which only a small number of people can commit. Increasing the number of people with commit rights can be useful even when using git.
Jailbreaking your iPhone may be legal but it’ll still void your warranty
As stated in the web site:

Compared with Tokyo Cabinet, KC is superior in concurrency, usability, and portability. Although time efficiency for single-thread is better in TC, I recommend KC from now on because multi-core/many-core CPU has been popular. However, I will keep on maintaining TC and fix bugs if they are found.
I always say Management is taking out the trash.
Or why not say "men are naturally more attracted than women to programming", and human beings have a decent track record of becoming skilled at what they're interested in. There's a big difference between not being interested in doing something and not being as capable at doing something.
the article mentions a python implementation of CSP which is here

http://code.google.com/p/pycsp/

Invented by the same guy that brought us quicksort, CSP is actually a really nice framework for describing interacting processes. It's used a lot in formal proofs of correctness of programs, so it's nice to see real-world implementation with such clear syntax.
(Of course, Go uses the same formalism, as opposed to Actors that are used by Erlang/Scala/etc.)
Hmm. Maybe for my Mac Mini in my entertainment center, but I much prefer a trackball at the desk.

No doubt BetterTouchTool will be updated to support this, making it far more useful: http://blog.boastr.net/
[Still OT] There's a good reason for mailman being monospace: quite a few mailing lists see ASCII diagrams now and then.
Commenting is failure, as it always just sucks you into more commenting.

What a strange remark from one of hn's best commenters.

It's not necessarily the choice of posts that distinguish hn, but the discussions hanging from them. Those discussions need worthwhile comments. Like the ones you consistently make, Daniel. Please keep making them.

Commenting can be failure, but only if you let it. Personally, I rarely respond to challenges to my comments. Engagement in debate can easily lead to lost time. (And others usually respond before I return, anyway).

Not every minute of your day has to be invested in today's programming goal. Think of your comments as deposits into some kind of "knowledge bank". There may be dividends later, maybe tomorrow, maybe 6 months from now. Maybe for you, maybe for someone else. Either way, "failure" is the last word I would use to describe anyone's investment into this community.
Assume Absolutely Nothing
What's the point of the magic trackpad?
Why Chinese Firms Struggle to Build Global Branding