skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
To clarify, the "drawing rules" are exactly that - the rules right now are that you upload a drawing and it becomes a graFighter.

A graFighter that "defies the rules" would be one with animation, with multiple forms, with unique behaviors - things you can't convey in a sketch.
Also, I'd love feedback on the posting. It's the first time I've done this.
Free, open source Burning Man app now live on iTunes (iBurn 2010)
NetworkWorld: Cloud storage lives up to the hype
The fact that anyone at any point can monkey patch any built-in is a potential liability for large teams, with average programmers. It must be addressed by culture and code review that you may or may not have.

Still worth it though :)
You're right, good idea. We should totally put a live sample - but meanwhile, you can signup for the free plan and preview a survey you create.
Fun comparison of Ruby and Python. The pasta analogy was especially entertaining.
At the same time, I don't think graFighters would be against that either. If you were looking to be a legitimate investor, I can't imagine graFighters would turn you down if the offer was right. Kick Starter is just something else on top of it all.
From the comments section of the article…

“At MacHack, when most of the original team was there and
Andy told this story, Jef Raskin spoke up to say that he
had told Steve about round rectangles being everywhere,
and that's what got Steve obsessed about them.

But what I found interesting was something Bill Atkinson
said about creating the RoundRect routines. He said they
turned out to be a lot easier to create than he thought
they would be. I can't tell you how many times I've
over-estimated something easy. I think it's something
inherent in computer work.”
I'm glad you did this post on HN; a blog post wouldve been pretty ironic.
My biggest beef when I've done a little Python has been inconsistency, such as that over functions versus methods. Ruby has a simpler mental model to me. I hear this has improved in Python 3.0, but it felt bleurgh to use functions like len(str) some of the time and methods at other times (though str.__len__() is a poor workaround here). That said, the reasons have been discussed and defended numerous times, so it's definitely just my opinion rather than a critique of the language: http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2008-January/076...
The chance of it existing somewhere is pretty big. However, our galaxy is huge so the chance of ever encountering them is pretty slim for now. I don't really expect us to find something until we develop a working sort of FTL technology. Since achieving this is probably still a few hundred years off I'm personally a bit sceptic whether we'll ever reach this point with all the problems we're facing here on earth.

I really believe we should focus on development of technology and infrastructure that would allow a large amount of people to go live on for instance Mars. This would allow us to focus on the development of FTL technology without the chance of dying before we complete it and it would probably boost additional development in space technology as well.
There needs to be a threshold of utility before you add an additional data store to your application.

Just because you want to use some unstructured data (which was your original example) doesn't mean you need a new data store that's optimally suited to that. You can store documents just great in an SQL database or in the filesystem.
>Well, from looking at it, it's actually very predictable.

People are very predictable too. On the whole they walk on the surface of the Earth and don't deviate from it more than a few km.
Interesting. I hadn't heard of that one. Is the book much better than the thesis that he did?
Appleseed is a lot farther along, and has been releasing steadily this whole summer. It's years ahead of Diaspora, they've been putting out a new release every month, and they already have a bunch of nodes already running their software.

http://opensource.appleseedproject.org

I think by the time Sep 15th rolls around, Appleseed will be on it's fourth release this summer.
While we're on the topic of font smoothing, does anyone know of a way to make the font smoothing on my PC look as nice as it does on my Macs?
Its generally the first thing i notice when i go home at night and check my email on my mac: how much nicer the fonts look.
This story has probably been told repeatedly, and it lost something being written down instead of told…

See the comment I quoted here:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1637442
That's a pretty horrible way to summarize someone's efforts. I'll resist the urge to describe pinboard.in the same way.
Even when Clojure is bootstrapped it will still maintain an extremely strong level of interop with Java (on the JVM flavor of course).
I also smirked a little when I saw that.

Not sure if it's a big deal or not.
As if dave was the programmer :P

I understand your point, but as an avid fighting game enthusiast myself you've got to understand that the game has a broad audience of everyone who wants to upload their hand-drawn characters. From a technical aspect, it's got to be easier to grasp than even say, Super Smash Bros. Brawl, and in the eyes of the fighting game community that's about as non-technical as you can get. Developing a hard-core fighting game is a different task all in it's own, and since the idea of graFighters is to have a move pool of thousands with a character pool of infinity, extrapolating those figures with a traditional fighting game engine and we'd be in for trouble.

graFighters isn't just a fighting game, and that isn't meant to be a sly against fighting games - the truth is, graFighters does a bit of a bunch of different genres; There's fighting, but then there's also strategy, there's also social networking in a sense, and there's also drawing. It's not "a fighting game" or "a strategy game", but saying that it's a fighting game is the easiest way to explain it to the largest audience in the least amount of words.
I do not have a problem with that. I prefer it that way. Content written by us, for us.
Your homepage really needs a <title> for SEO, bookmarking, and branding purposes.
The main reason why I like having functions instead of methods is that it removes the possibility for inconsistency. In some languages, you have some objects with methods named size, some with length, etc. With python, you just have one global len method to remember.
Put Your System on a Diet: Replace Bloated Apps with Command-Line Alternatives
They don't seem to get open source. Open source is having code available so people can contribute and review, not simply dumping some files at a specified date.
Well, storage is basically free these days, right? :-)
I submitted a response option that was something like

blah blah blah "blah blah"

and it showed up on the panel as

blah blah blah */[]*/blah blah"

also, i can't work out how to preview it on my own site without trying it on a different browser

oh and i can't edit questions (so i can't edit out the /[]/ from the question/response option)

apart from that, very nice!
Sweden isn't the example it used to be, in this regard. We currently have a (relatively) right-wing government that's privatising services, cutting social safety nets and creating a low-wage job market. This is having the same effects it did in the US.
It's harsh but accurate. Not really deserving of your comment.
"everything is immediately getting enough votes to get onto the RSS feed"

Not true for my submissions, unfortunately :-(
Your Elevator Pitch Sucks: How Investors Think (Founder Conference)
This is good stuff, except that he seems to misunderstand the ()-less method call in Ruby. There's no "function" or "object" being "called" with that syntax, as in Pascal or Visual Basic (his chosen analogies). There are no functions in Ruby in that sense, and callable objects are explicitly called (with a "call" method). The expression "foo" in Ruby evaluates to the value of the local variable "foo" if any, or else sends the message "foo" to self and evaluates to the result. So yes, the parentheses are optional, but the ambiguity is with local variables, not with any other form of function call--so the ambiguity is hardly noticeable.

Also, the parentheses are always optional, not just for zero-argument calls, so he also missed the opportunity to discuss "poetry mode Ruby": a bunch of method calls with no parentheses. Stylistically, "poetry mode" enables the pseudo-DSL style that Ruby frameworks use frequently, but can't really be done in Python.
Tech jobs available at a Lean Startup social business
We're a Lean Startup (Scrum, XP, Customer Development) and a social business working to end poverty. The product is cloud-based banking software for microloans: http://mifos.com

The company is the Grameen Foundation: http://www.grameenfoundation.org/

One of our founders, Muhammad Yunus, won the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize.

Here are the jobs:

Cloud Systems Engineer
http://www.linkedin.com/jobs?viewJob=&jobId=1094732

Business Intelligence Software Developer
http://www.linkedin.com/jobs?viewJob=&jobId=1065443

Great problem, great team. If you're interested, apply!
The demo video isn't real the most fair representation - Petunia, the gullible looking girl, is actually really hard for most of the other characters to beat, but damage isn't her best match-up. Trust me, I was rooting for her too.

Also, you won't have a character getting pummeled again and again - but there are some opponents you might just not have any luck beating, and for those fights you want to have a diverse base of characters.

"The only users that will be interested in your game will be people that are deeply in love with every other fighting game." - I don't think this is true at all. The feedback we've been getting range from avid gamers, casual gamers, to even people who don't game, but would love to see their hand-drawn character brought to life. The problem with setting this up as a traditional fighting game is that is then becomes immediately too technical for 95%+ of our audience, which isn't really ideal.
Both languages offer the unvigilant programmer plenty of opportuities to shoot off his foot. If you're really concerned about this you should take a look at scala. I'm amazed at how much easier it is for me to maintain my own scala code than either ruby or python.
Terence Tao on taxation, energy efficiency and the tragedy of the commons
"you can take my new laptop SSD when you pry it from my cold, dead hands."

Say that buying a SSD is excusable, please! :-)

I guess I'll buy one when I first have cause to celebrate something (something being some kind of income >> cost of SSD)...
You're making it sound like the work won't pay. It will, just less. Care to quantify "kingdom come"?

This argument is effectively:

"I will work my arse off if the tax rate is 5%, but not if the tax rate is, say, 45%. It's only worth it if I can become hyper-rich; super-rich just isn't good enough for me."

Where is the evidence that increasing income/wealth taxes from, say, 20% to 40% causes people to work less hard? And where is the evidence that, even if this were true, it outweighs the other economic benefits of wealth redistribution?
It's to be noted that while Ruby CAN change builtin functions, the metaprogramming ability is much more often used in cases like ActiveRecord, where you can say `acts_as_list`, and it reopens the AR class and inserts new list-related functionality. It's more powerful than simply using modules, since it can make decisions as it's being included.

Working with Ruby on a day-to-day-basis, I have never reopened core classes and changed anything. Rails comes with some common extensions which simply add new methods, which are less error prone (although I avoid Rails & ActiveSupport whenever possible).
Thanks for the feedback! Will fix that bug tonight and add the ability to edit questions.
In the future, we'd love to let people draw their own moves, stages, weapons, etc. For the initial launch though, it's going to be just your own characters for the time being.
The book expands on his thesis. I'd highly recommend it, especially if you found his thesis interesting.
Microsoft: 'We love open source'
Can't believe we missed that. Will update tonight. Thanks!
1994 (The Web Means the End of Forgetting)
Sometimes that's true. Sometimes the right approach for a project still just getting off the ground is not letting people in for a while.

It's easier to realize a vision when you've already got something concrete to point to. Otherwise you often waste time arguing over what color to paint the shed.
2 Liters of Coke has 300mg of caffeine. That's right about 4 shots of Starbucks espresso, one 16oz cup of Starbucks drip brew, or two regular coffee (non starbucks) drip brew.
I know what you mean...I did history. :) (I've been programming since I was 5 or 6, though.)

If PAIP doesn't get you into data-driven programming, _The Art of Prolog_ definitely will.
Finding non-intelligent alien life would not make it more likely that intelligent alien life exists. It either exists or it doesn't. :)
The biggest problem with such lists is that unlike novels, academic Books are rarely read cover to cover.

If you try to read the book cover to cover you will most likely start forgetting it after few weeks. However when you learn things slowly over few years and interact with material in multiple ways, such as lectures, reading, test, internships, labs, group/individual project you are more likely to have some hint about the material, may be you will remember a lecture or some project or some lab experience, however in case of just reading a book its harder to recall.

A good process of learning involves not just you alone but also people around you who motivate you to stay on the course and offer assessment of your capabilities. Thus formal classroom education tends to be more useful than an online one. Though it depends a lot on your school and quality of your peers/ friend circle.
Subpixel antialiasing can have more chroma aberrations at the horizontal edges, particularly at high frequencies. You night wish to stop it if that is a problem.

Personally, I cheer the day when we all have 300 dpi displays and the problems melt away.
Thanks! I actually said something similar before: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1606824
HN is turning into Reddit way too fast for my liking.
The 10 Greatest Accidental Inventions of All Time
Yes, there is a semantic difference here. In Python, you can do things like this:

if baz>10:
func = self.foo
else:
func = self.bar
result = func()

Here func gets assigned something called a "bound method", which has a reference to the object and the method, which you can then apply the () operator and call. I am not a rubyist, but my understanding is that you would use a symbol to do a similar thing.
Google: 1 million Gmail calls on first day
See http://howfuckedismydatabase.com/letters/

“After reviewing your site, I'm so glad we are sticking with emailed Excel spreadsheets for our mission critical database requirements.”

And:

“Databases? Fuck that. I use Excel's pivot tables.”
I've never been aware of NaCl, but when I just read what it was, I was filled with the exact same sentiment.

Isn't this what ActiveX was all about? We all know what happened in that instance.
Ask HN: What are some suggestions to improve 30startups.com?
Hey guys,

I started 30startups.com a little over 5 five weeks ago so that I could stay up to date and involved with startups. I want to be able to help people gain some publicity for their services they build and hopefully bring together founders and investors so that both parties can benefit. My question is: what you guys think about it and what I can do better?

Suggestions on what to write about would be great.

Do you want to read about startups and what kind of impact they are making?
Do you want interviews with startups to hear their stories? Do you want entrepreneur resources and advice?
Do you want to learn more about VCs and angel investors and how to position your startup for funding?

Any help would be awesome.

http://30startups.com
I use awesome (a tiling wm) in a very mouse heavy way. Tiling does not mean you're stuck with using the keyboard. It does mean that you don't have to worry about managing screen real estate nearly as much.
This seems like a rip-off of KISSInsights.com's product. Even the gray colors of the pop up box matches. How is it different?
also, anyone know how to make a clickable link?
Yeah, thanks troll. Translation: don't start conversations unless you're an expert...
The pricing hopefully.
Our diet is in large part a result of government intervention. Farm subsidies make distort the price of corn based products (HFCS for instance). The existence of government run schools prevent choice in school lunches.

However I do agree that government should play a role in regulating second hand smoke, as that is an instance of one individual using coercive force over another (making me inhale your smoke in public). Although even that issue is a slippery slope. Do we ban cars because their exhaust is toxic?
This story is a month old now but I just came across it this evening and it's quite a read. Gaming Google has gotten pretty out of control now and this is a perfect example of how.
I think the reasoning behind upvoting for each reader is much more complicated than that.
Love you last example, but of course what made the Palm so useful, and later on the iPhone, was the ability to add or code any application that you wanted. Palm eventually did this, and Apple made it incredibly easy (although 1 year after the first iPhones release).
Basically Ruby and Python fill the same niche.

When two species fill a different niche in nature, they can co-exists. When they fill the same niche, it is a bitter fight for survival.
You are a troll. And pat yourself on the back for clarifying you only care about the tyranny of the majority and seek their approval. A winner in my book.
I haven't yet written some of the posts I've been thinking about, but I will absolutely be targeting them at HN. The discussion here is much better than other places and I can rely on a general "base knowledge" of the audience. If people don't like it they don't have to vote it up, but I don't see a problem with keeping the audience in mind. I don't even have blog comments because I'd rather have the comments on HN.
This was my first concern followed by, "wait, Chrome silently auto-updates..."

As far as I know it silently auto-updates across major versions as well as minor. The automatic updating of Flash 10.x that got linked on HN a little while ago is a great example of how this is good. A widely publicized hole in Native Client could turn it on its head quickly. It's a gut reaction on my part, but distributing Native Client to Chrome's user-base feels premature. It's only been an acknowledged project at Google for what, less than two years? I recall hearing about it at I/O 2009, and I'd wish they'd let it bake a while longer.
I hope they handle releases better than Appleseed. Sure - technically they might be ahead, but look at the page you linked from the user's perspective. It already exists, there's no buzz about it, you cannot register without an invite (also, there is no "register" link - there's strange "local" and "remote").

So when they "open to public": 1. who's going to notice? 2. with the current user-friendliness, who's going to care?
I remember a few times creating something incredibly clever, that I thought was not possible, and trying to explain this to my boss. Of course, not being technical, they had no idea what was so special.
I mentioned that in my reply to skotzko below: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1637374

But pricing is one. All the KISS stuff is always expensive (actually the reason we made this, we couldn't afford to pay $30/month for this).
The start of the article totally lost me. Everyone thinks women are better? Really? I thought it was the general consensus that men are better at stuff that matters like math, programming, logic, leading countries and resolving disputes with reason, and women are better at soft stuff like art, sex, fashion and emotions.
I like your perspective on this design decision as it seems to make clear what the intent could be. Alex reveals that the difference in Python is not so much the syntax as much as it hints at Python's treatment of functions as first class objects. This is really similar to Javascript where you can pass functions around for later evaluation. It adds a different level of complexity, of course, but it is something that I have appreciated in Python a great deal.
Why is their logo an asterisk when it seems their whole idea is that they are the social network without a catch? The asterick at the end of their name instantly makes me want to scroll down to read the fine print.
A bad story that is relevant, can still be interesting.

A bad story that is about some subject no one cares about, can not.
Non techie friends and family pay a lot of attention to what techie guy does. I remember using google when everyone else was using yahoo, and soon all my friends and family started to use google over yahoo. In 2006, I switched to mac. Half my non-techie friends and family now have macs. Trends, possibly, but they'll try it if they know you like it and if it is better, they are sold.
Centralized logging for fun and profit
The chance of it existing somewhere is pretty big. However, our galaxy is huge so the chance of ever encountering them is pretty slim for now

Just 500 years ago, Europeans didn't know about America. It may turn out that aliens bump into us by accident and we find out that they were right around the corner the whole time. Or it is possible that the aliens have the FTL technology to get to us from a point far enough away that our satellites can't see them yet.
If we do, I just hope they aren't hungry.
Second update to the Ubuntu Light themes (Canonical Design)
Your pricing will definitely allow me the bootstrapped startup to use your product. Thank you for that.

I also thought of rolling my own. Thanks for saving me time :)
Yep, the equivalent would probably be something along the lines of:

if baz > 10
func = :foo
else
func = :bar
end

result = self.send(func)
Ah, but Android isn't just phones!

Settop Boxes (MIPS): http://www.mips.com/android/ (There's also a new MIPS chipset aimed at smartphones: http://www.h-online.com/open/news/item/Android-mobile-device...)

Netbooks (Intel): http://liliputing.com/2010/08/toshiba-ac100-android-netbook-...

And then there is the whole Chinese ecosystem of Android (and Android forks?) on Loongson processors. I don't know a lot about this, but here's an example: http://www.netbooknews.de/12409/lemote-open-source-netbook-m...
The Rise, Fall and Rebirth of Apple. In comic form. Scene 1
My code falls into three categories:

Pretty clean: this is stuff that has actual people using it and is critical to the business.

Not so clean: stuff that is new, tangential, or experimental. I don't bother refactoring this type of code for one reason - it may end up in the third category...

Deleted: This is stuff that didn't work and isn't worth keeping or is obsolete for one reason or another.

So in a nutshell: launch before you refactor, refactor before it breaks. Lots of great coders hate this.
I think he meant that finding non-intelligent alien life might make the possibility that there is also intelligent alien life more believable.
Appleseed is already open to the public for whoever wants to download the source and install it (it took me about 2 min on a shared host, really easy). You can then disable invites on your node by going into the administrator and setting on "use invites" to "no".

But in any case, they give out invites like water, you just have to email invite@appleseedproject.org. Since that's the beta testing site, they're looking for beta testers, not casual users.

Diaspora does have publicity on it's side, I'll give it that. We'll see how user-friendly it's first release is in September.
Please Help, we're being blackmailed by a scammer
Clickable: http://30startups.com

(just paste it in a comment)