skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I was shouting into a vast echo chamber where no one could hear me because they were too busy shouting themselves.

This reminded me of something from one of Joel Spolsky's last regular blog posts (http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2010/03/14.html):

Although I appreciate that many people find Twitter to be valuable, I find it a truly awful way to exchange thoughts and ideas. It creates a mentally stunted world in which the most complicated thought you can think is one sentence long. It’s a cacophony of people shouting their thoughts into the abyss without listening to what anyone else is saying. Logging on gives you a page full of little hand grenades: impossible-to-understand, context-free sentences that take five minutes of research to unravel and which then turn out to be stupid, irrelevant, or pertaining to the television series Battlestar Galactica. I would write an essay describing why Twitter gives me a headache and makes me fear for the future of humanity, but it doesn’t deserve more than 140 characters of explanation, and I’ve already spent 820.
I think this demonstrates nicely one of the common memes amongst the, shall we say, less reflective programmers out there - 'this is a simple problem, I can solve this easily myself' - the Bob paradox[1] in action. I think the thrill of being able to 'just get stuff done' can have a warping influence on a programmer which causes them to neglect to notice the details which makes the problem at hand a little more complicated than they imagine.

It's funny to see how they rationalise problems later as being entirely necessary to the problem (I've witnessed this first hand), and nothing to do with a misapprehension of the difficulty of the problem.

Am I the only one here who finds the dailywtf sometimes extremely depressing?!

[1]:http://sites.google.com/site/steveyegge2/being-the-averagest
I put an ad on philweavers.net, which is a community for Filipino web developers. That's how I found the first guy. He then found the rest if the team. They all report to him, but they all work for me directly.
Agile methodology is applicable to almost any context, it gets my vote. Particularly test-driven development.

Most of my programming is web apps which are a major PITA to use TDD on since so much of it is UI based, but nevertheless I'm struggling through and have found it to be the most useful addition to my repertoire in the last couple of years.
This is on display right around Philadelphia. As soon as you cross the border into neighboring areas, you notice businesses all over the place. Philadelphia has a number of big employers who can't easily relocate including a number of universities and medical centers. My understanding is that many of the really big corporations are given tax incentives to be in the city. Pretty much anyone else has long ago escaped to neighboring counties.
This is closely related to some people that are 'dead' on HN and don't notice. They're still shouting to themselves though, some of those have been doing it for so long that it's scary.
It certainly is a prediction, if it's not just a meaningless social gesture or wish, contradiction, or tautology.

(Is this not obvious? Then replace your friend with someone who is about to go over the trenches, or has a terminal disease, or say 'I'll see you in 50 years.'. It's just usually so very highly probable that the small smidgen of uncertainty is hidden from us. From the point of view of life insurance companies, making accurate predictions about how long your friend will survive is very serious business.)
The reverse is also true. For every obfuscation tool there will be an unobfuscation tool. They may not give back 100% of the original source but they can go close.
Catalog engineering and reverse engineering
This is why I prefer sites using openid or oauth.
The wage tax is really obnoxious. I essentially took a pay cut just by taking a job in the city. As you say, it would be easier to swallow if things felt more like Sweden and less like Detroit.
It is, however, illegal to openly record a police officer in a public place executing his or her official duties.

Go figure.
I think this is more an example of why legislated 'net neutrality' would be a terrible idea.

If I was a big online gamer, I'd love to ensure that I had a low-latency connection for the things that matter to me. Similarly, if I was a business doing a lot of videoconferencing, I'd happily pay extra to ensure the data that's important to me.

Why shouldn't an ISP be able to sell a product that prioritises what's important to their customers over stuff that isn't?

Legislated net neutrality really annoys me. Traffic shaping is essential for things like VoIP to be usable. The emotive argument about big ISPs charging small websites out of the market is purely theoretical, while the need for traffic shaping and other prioritisation is real and present today.
This link has been submitted a total of five times, including a previous time by jacquesm:

http://searchyc.com/submissions/factorcode.org
Somehow my brain read this title as "Turing Tourette" which also seems like it might be an interesting mashup.
This has been on HN http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1611860
Last weeks edition:

"GALACTIC NEWS, Earth.

A few creatures from the planet Earth have made their way in to space and have potentially spotted our reconnaissance craft. In case of attempts to contact, attack or trade please leave the area immediately. Earthlings are so accustomed to sightings by now they attribute these to madness in those that have been in contact, they even have special institutions where they house those that have had the misfortune of spotting one of us.

This is also a reminder that isolation is to be maintained at all cost, Earth is one of the few uncontacted tribes and it is of vital importance this situation remains so they may be studied.

A hyper-cube of 50 parsecs is off limits to anybody but qualified and suitably camouflaged observers, to avoid messing up their culture the area has been electromagnetically shielded for anything but the visible spectrum of the inhabitants.

As far as weaponry is concerned a class-1 shield is more than sufficient to take care of the worst they can throw at any intrepid researcher so any kind of retaliation would be a punishable offense. "
The article clearly states that a reasonable effort must be made to locate the owner of the work AND if the owner eventually comes forward that they would be able to claim a reasonable compensation. They wouldn't, however, be able to seek huge damages. Seems like common sense to me.
Considering she runs a Wordpress.com blog (which doesn't allow advertising at all unless she hits a certain threshold), something tells me that she's only made money off of eHow articles.

http://en.support.wordpress.com/advertising/

Which makes this even worse.
India is a model democracy with transparent election process.

India is litigation prone, and courts take decades to deliver justice.

Everyone who has lost a election in the last 20 years is going to claim election was rigged.

the few bad things we have inherited in, Parliament and legislative assemblies can be not allowed to function by a small group of irritant elected representatives.

hope sanity prevails with civil servants and he get released soon, and we have a open debate at various levels
It's the primal appeal of Twitter to me: a digital alternative to screaming into a pillow / bathtub / primal scream ball whenever a politician does something stupid.
For centralized access to course materials, try a NoSQL document database. All you need is a printer, 3-hole punch, and a binder. In addition to providing a portable, permanent archive, this approach provides linear scaling to hundreds of items, arbitrary annotation of any document, and parallel read access.
My humble suggestion: "How to Write Shared Libraries" by Ulrich Drepper

http://www.akkadia.org/drepper/dsohowto.pdf
Sorry, but WiMAX isn't 4G. I've also used their service and found it to be quite slow.
def test_changing_hashes
hash = { :one => "uno", :two => "dos" }
hash[:one] = "eins"

expected = { :one => "eins", :two => "dos" }
assert_equal expected, hash

# Bonus Question: Why was "expected" broken out into a variable
# rather than used as a literal?
end

Can anyone help with the bonus question? From searching Google, I read that the reason:

assert_equal { :one => "eins", :two => "dos" }, hash

gives an error is that Ruby believes this to be a block. But then why doesn't it consider the hash to be a block below:

expected = { :one => "eins", :two => "dos" }

?

Edit: thanks jashkenas for the explanation!
Edit2: for anybody else trying these, I think the version in github is more up-to-date, with some corrections:

http://github.com/edgecase/ruby_koans
Iran Starts Up Nuclear Reactor
Now why on earth would that get voted down?
Worst researched article ever.

A website called Password Safe will store a list of passwords for you, but Boyd and Davis said it may still be possible for a hacker to obtain that list.

PasswordSafe is a software program (created by Bruce Schneir) that stores your passwords on your own computer. It is not a website for storing passwords.
results now are declared within hours of counting starts

for a country of our size with 120 crore people, it already takes multiple days of voting in phases, due to security and administrative difficulties

if we go back to paper ballots, counting will take many days, error prone, we would have large number of invalid votes

booth capture used to be norm in UP bihar in 1980's early 1990's
I made a CPU load average tracking app
Ok - so welcome to last year? I recall a PyCon talk on security a few years ago where one of the speaker's first slides was a list of passwords with the text "if this is your Twitter password, change it, then change your Twitter client."

Most of these startups treat the iPhone as if it were some magical device that's plugged straight into their API. I actually participated on a Get Satisfaction thread for Gowalla where one person claimed they liked that it was iPhone only (which dates how long ago it was) because it made it "secure" and couldn't be "hacked the way Foursquare can."

Needless to say, they were disabused of that notion pretty quickly when checked in at the Gug, the Apple flagship store in London, and my home within the space of 30 seconds. It literally took 3 minutes to figure out - most of which was spent setting up my iPhone to proxy through my laptop. They were (and keep in mind, this is back when Gowalla was still iPhone only) sending everything in clear text.

They also didn't regenerate session IDs for anything at the time. I logged out and logged back in, same session ID. I logged out via my iPhone, loaded up their site and changed my password, then logged back in, same session ID. Basically, once you had sniffed one session ID you were set. I tried it a week later and was still able to use the same session ID without any problem.

It's amazing that things like session hijacking are so unknown and unfamiliar to people people relying on web frameworks to do everything for them. At the time they were using Merb---I found out by hitting an "/unknown/and/unknowable/" page and seeing their backtrace output. Session hijacking is a solved problem, why they were subject to it I can't fathom.
Playwriting & startups - how to give and take feedback
It is interesting that Microsoft is involved with this. One of the developers is being paid to work on this project full-time.

Now if there were something like this for device drivers...
It might actually be worth it if it enabled you to expense a portion of your rent, lights, Internet etc.
I'm about to move to a rural area where landline internet is unavailable, so I'm watching 4G development closely. Clear offers 4G in the nearby metropolitan area (DC), but I'll still be a good 20 miles outside the footprint. I'm not looking forward to conforming to Verizon's 5GB monthly limit on 3G even if I do understand the business need for the restriction.
Honest elections DO require a paper trail, even with EV-machines

I found : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voter_Verified_Paper_Audit_Trai...
Oh, how i miss apt-get like functionality on windows.
I hope this takes off!
Make sure to check out the followup to this article re Perl 6: http://blogs.perl.org/users/tyler_curtis/2010/08/age-discrim...

and the HN discussion:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1624027
You can't be 'practically' tamper proof, you're tamper proof or you're not, just like you can't be a little bit pregnant or slightly dead.

I don’t think that’s correct. I have a hard time imagining any system that is ever really tamper proof. Much is possible with enough resources, even tampering with the paper ballot. Tamperability doesn’t seem like a binary property to me.

When changing one vote costs you a few thousand Euro and the likelihood of the tampering being detected is still substantial (that would be my ballpark estimate for the paper ballot) the system is practically tamper proof and that’s good enough.

Sometimes we may even increase tamperability just to get the result we want. Absentee ballots are much easier to tamper with than paper ballots but we have them to allow as many people to vote as possible. That goal trumps the easier tamperability.

The problem is not that tampering with voting machines is at all and somehow possible – that’s just the same with paper ballots – the problem is that tampering with voting machines has the potential to scale much better than tampering with the paper ballot. The cost per vote is substantially lower as is the probability for detection.
Pretentious
Sadly, the general population is not familiar with the concept and its inherent sanity.

Imagine the first time you read the phrase, coming from a un-informed background.

Thats pretty much the way, the everyman is going to back the government on this arrest -> for being a traitor to the government.
Lon Safko – Entrepreneur, Inventor, and Author
A little while ago, Twitter only stored our last 20 tweets and discarded the previous ones. When they stopped being that much ephemeral, no one noticed.
I agree with you that the wage tax makes the city less attractive to live in than the neighboring burbs. I chose to live in Conshohocken rather than Chestnut Hill/Mount Airy mainly because of the wage tax.

That being said, I do think that the Nutter administration realizes this issue. The problem is that if you cut the wage tax, you have to increase revenue generation from something else. The city is already has revenue issues, so a radical change in tax structure seems unlikely.
This is one of those gotchas with Ruby's syntax for blocks clashing with Ruby's syntax for hash literals. I'm not familiar with the details of precisely why Ruby's parser handles some cases, and not others, but I bet there's a special case for assignment -- you can't ever assign a block literal, so it has to be a hash...

Here are some of the variants:

method({ ... }) # hash

method { ... } # block, even though a hash would be possible.

method = { ... } # hash

method a, b, :c => d # implicit hash

method a, b { ... } # SyntaxError

method(a, b) { ... } # block

Only #2 in that list is really a problem, because there are situations where you'd legitimately like to use both.
Tamper proof means that you can detect that something was messed with, not that you can't mess with it.

And that is definitely something that can be done I think.
User Testing for Games
Generally, I'll make sure to map out complex tasks by breaking them into simple components/milestones, each with a clear deadline.

More specifically, I've been using Google Calendar for about a year to great effect to keep track of my freelancing, the non-profit I run, and also the side jobs I take (substitute teaching and tutoring). In addition, I use it to keep track of my personal life, including social engagements/obligations and birthdays.

The "Tasks" feature and I never really got along, so instead I created different calendars for each domain. Relevant days and times are extremely easy to keep track of (as you might expect).

I'll generally store hyperlinks in the "Description" box. I'll also sometimes mark calendar events with an asterisk if there is something in the "Description" box that I need to look at (be it a hyperlink, a "Bring _____" note, or some other actionable item). If there are relevant files, I'll either keep them out on my desktop, or I'll include a hyperlink to the file in Google Docs (under the "Share" dropdown menu).

Each morning, my calendar will e-mail me an agenda for the day. Items that I don't complete get moved ahead to the next day (or to a later time that day). If I finish things ahead of schedule, I'll move them back to when I finished them and congratulate myself with a delicious and healthy fruit smoothie.

You might find that GCal is suboptimal for your purposes (I don't know how well this meshes with the GTD system, as this has worked so well for me that I've never needed to explore alternatives), and it may be a bit less automated/centralized than what you're looking for. Or perhaps you're leery of feeding information to the Googleplex. But I've found my system to be useful and unobtrusive, so perhaps others might as well.
Gmail’s “Undo Send” will now let you “undo” up to 30 seconds later.
Two words: Learning curve.

It takes time to understand what new media are for. Real, human-scale time, measured in years. The inventors of the telephone thought it was a B2B technology, didn't really grasp that everyone was going to have a phone in their home and use it to talk to relatives. The inventors of the phonograph, amazingly, thought of that as a business technology as well, for recording memos and stuff.

Twitter et al are in their infancy and are still growing. They get new users all the time; the new users happen upon different aspects of the tool and use it differently; some uses are ultimately better than others. It's the blind men and the elephant, except that the elephant is the size of the Library of Congress and there are seven billion blind men, two thirds of whom have yet to touch the elephant.

I, for one, don't have so many problems with Twitter, but that's probably because I use it differently from others. Let me offer some suggestions:

If you find that you feel lost because you no longer remember how many of the people you follow on Twitter are still alive you need to follow fewer people. I follow 97 people. Even that may ultimately be too large, although most of those people are very quiet, so I can probably keep growing it, especially as the client software gets smarter.

Remember that Twitter is RSS for humans. It's Delicious for non-nerds. It is for exchanging links, not ideas. If you have an idea that can't fit into 140 characters write it down in 2000 characters and then tweet the link.

Of course, Twitter can also be used to exchange ideas that are not worth more than 140 characters. Sometimes these Tweets are short because they are poetry. Sometimes they are short because they are stupid. Follow the poets; unfollow the stupid. Just because people are shouting nonsense doesn't mean you have to hear them. The Internet's soundproofing is very good.

Speaking of Internet soundproofing, signal-to-noise, and maintaining one's sanity: I don't follow hashtags. Like, ever. I'm not quite ready to pound the table and declare that hashtags are never going to work, because they're eventually going to be nothing but SEObots retweeting other SEObots in a vast, roiling AI botwar, but I for one don't miss them. Important things get retweeted by your followers or echoed in some other medium.

If someone's Twitter feed is not a net win you need to unfollow them. This can hurt. I kind of like Roger Ebert's Twitter feed, but the guy does. Not. Stop. My feed is like 85% Ebert. And almost everything he says is interesting, or could be interesting, but I'm not suffering from a shortage of interesting things, and he's drowning out the quiet folks. I need a Twitter client that has better stream management. For example, it could throttle access to my main stream: Ebert gets X tweets per hour on average into my aggregated stream; to see Ebert's full stream I need to click on something.

Speaking of which: I know there are ten thousand Twitter clients already, but there will be more. Client development is also in its infancy.
- stop relying on advice given by anyone not where you want to be

- the amount of revenue a business makes is based on the amount of value it is able to generate for other people. focus yourself on generating value, whether it is directly for consumers/businesses are a business, or as a proxy working for a business and delivering value through the business.

A business cannot survive without generating value. Focus on the core of business and work from there. Figure out ways you can most effectively deliver value, then start from there.
I've been using externally driven recursion quite a lot in some toy programs lately, and it is extremely helpful when profiling different memoization schemes. Where once you would have had to change a sizable chunk of your explicitly recursive function, now you can simply use combinators to generate different implementations, be it for profiling purposes, or even runtime optimization :)

-- General implementation

type T = Int -> Set [Int]

g :: T -> T

...

g' = fix g -- Very slow

g'' = memoFix integral g -- Fast, Generic

g''' = memoFix integer g -- Fast enough to use

On a side note, the paper seems too readable to me! Usually these kinds of topics are presented in such a way as to make them almost completely incomprehensible. Something must be very wrong here.

[edit: How do you quote code?]
I recommend a basic understanding of statistics. It will help you to understand just how little useful information is encoded in graphs like this one.
Possibly, although I guess it's trying to play off Ruby's Japanese connotations and the actual examples inside (slicing arrays containing peanut butter and jelly) are not particularly pretentious.

Edit: thanks zem: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacker_koan
Edit2: and thanks angrycoder, I didn't spot that, although the point still stands that peanut butter is not overly pretentious
Pretty sure this is Blest company's site: http://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=ja&u=...
What does MSI lack compared to CoApp?
I think VCs need to understand that not all startups want to be a billionaire hence they don't need baby sitters and they can take care of themselves.
I read through the pagerank example, looks interesting. That said, with such a rich infrastructure built up around Hadoop (Cascading, Pig, Hive, Elastic MapReduce deployment, etc.) I am not sure how much sense it makes to consider another platform for horizontally scaling out calculations over large data sets.
I've never understood the appeal of Twitter and I think it would help if more "social media people" (and web app developers) could try to understand why. They are obscure little techie tools that a huge percentage of the population will never use. When Leo says "I was shouting into a vast echo chamber" what he really should say is "I was shouting into a miniscule echo chamber". And nobody was really listening because it's not really a conversation, it's all about self-promotion and that tends to be a very one-sided activity.

Buzz and Wave will never take off with the people I work with, or my friends, because we're all a bit old-fashioned and I doubt any one of us would sooner "tweet" a message than phone someone up and talk to them directly. Sure, I realise it's a one-to-many operation (unlike a phone-call) but honestly, what do I have that's worth actually broadcasting?
How do you loan someone an XBox Live download or Steam game?
Ask HN: Give me ideas for Startup2.com
I've got the domain startup2.com which I considered selling, but now I'm thinking of developing it - what would YOU do with this domain?
Project milestones and mental models (aka "Love your idiots.")
CRM: Customer Relationship Management OR Control Reps Manager?
I think that's the default setting for many people, it would make distinguishing them from bots trivial.
You can cut taxes and services.