skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> What Palm really needs (and what I really wish it had) is a non-phone device carrying WebOS

With Palm's recent acquisition by HP, and HP's subsequent cancellation of its Windows Mobile 7 tablet, that just might happen.

edit: It's happening. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/08/20/hp-tablet-webos-hp-...
Based on the services put under the Pro accounts (Salesforce, Google Voice, Basecamp, Box.net and Evernote), $5/month for premium access sounds very low to me.

Granted, I haven't been able to try it at this point. But I can see the value in it, and it looks very well done.

So, I feel that people who will want to use the premium features are people who strive for efficiency and will be ready to pay more than $5. (Salesforce, for example, is not cheap)
I've been perching for 2 years and subjectively recommend it.
Seems to me that digg is having a myspace moment. It's failed to keep up with innovation as the world has changed around it. Digg's value-add has been left in the dust by more targeted sites (reddit, HN, even twitter, facebook, failblog, 4chan, etc.), and they can't fix that problem without fundamentally reinventing digg.
Oh, these kinds of programs are starting to show up. But they still hand you a degree which is accredited in some way. For example, Neumont University is kind of like this. Its basically a University giving you a 4 year BS degree in 2 years. With a complete focus on coding, database design, architecture and processes. Its an interesting middle ground. But education acceleration comes at a price.

Unfortunately it is hard to just come out with an 'apprenticeship or internship' only type program today. You do still have people that want to see that nice piece of paper at first.
just wondering .. in general what are people searching for on linkedin and facebook, that greplin does better than just going to these sites directly ?
You can buy a non-contract device at a small discount via the developer program. http://www.palm.com/us/products/phones/developer-phones.html
That is why government agencies should always insist on open source everything. It may seem expensive in the beginning, but it will end up cheaper in the end because you will always have a choice for alternative contractors if you are unhappy with one.
I'm unfamiliar with rspec, but the major difference between designing and implementing DSLs in Lisps versus other languages is ease of code generation. That is, actually generating new code based on what the user of the DSL supplies. In Lisp, this is done because it's trivial to receive the AST that defines what the user wants to do. Then you can generate code directly based on that AST. No need for reflection or any such trickery because it's all just lists of list.

In most other languages, if that sort of transformation is even possible, it is much less direct.
4chan and innovation? Wha?
I can't get to the site at all now. My browser does 'waiting for digg.com' like they're not even ACKing.
For the Facebook search, can you also index of my friends' wall posts, as sometimes they post relevant information there?
> ... Python can be (or at least feel) less succinct than even C ....

That's an interesting statement. Certainly, Python can be less succinct than Perl, particularly for small scripts where a quick "while(<>) {" and a regexp get most of your work done. But C??

> ... if you do lots of low-level file system stuff with close error checking.

Hmmm. In my experience, C's I/O libraries tend to make error checking something we leave by the wayside. Is there any chance that the real reason your Python scripts are longer, is that you actually check for, and properly handle, the errors there, while in C, you often don't?

In any case, I'll echo a comment from aidenn0:

> It would be nice if you could provide an example of something you think is inelegant and/or awkward in Python so that we could figure out which direction to point you.
I'd say this is extremely poor timing considering the backlash that version 4.0 of digg.com has been getting. It reeks of knee-jerk-ism.

It really surprises me that nobody in the boardroom thought to say: "This might look bad. Let's hold off for a couple weeks until the buzz dies off."
In the south there is a growing communist insurgency consisting of impoverished people who have been long denied their rights and have taken up arms in protest (see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naxalite-Maoist_insurgency ). The interesting thing is that these groups have entrenched their power by acting like an ad-hoc government collecting taxes, dispensing justice and winning the confidence of the villagers through goodwill schemes that the government should have implemented.

Yes, that's very interesting. How interesting what wonderful people they are. Except that they are terrorists and mass murderers. To say that they have gained power by being saints rather ignores the salient detail that they also gained power with extreme violence. Strangely, their acts of terror against police and civilians alike are documented on the very page you linked...
I absolutely love the idea of an extensible framework that you could write plugins for to connect up to various sources of data, but I'd much prefer the same functionality in a desktop application rather than a hosted web-app. That way you wouldn't have to be paranoid about what is being done with all of your personal information...
I'd love to see any screenshots or features that you find valuable. Feel free to throw anything at kyle@github.com that you want (rants appreciated)
Well they added Captchas recently, if that counts. I suspect it doesn't.
As a foreigner who never had to pay for his education (provided for free by the government), I find it disheartening to see that no one (even here) brings up the issue that everyone should have access to education. Some kid whose only fault was to be born in a poor family should have access to the same opportunities as another one born in a richer family.
This is destroying the fabric of society if you ask me: poor people don't get educated and are getting poorer.
Maybe you'll call my point of view 'socialist', who cares. It just makes me sad that everyone takes the fact that college tuitions cost hundreds of thousands of dollars for granted.
Growing my own food is something that was instilled in me by my parents - We always had fruit trees, nuts and veggies growing in our backyard. My Dad having an MS in Agronomy didnt hurt either.

Currently in backyard in CA:

-Plums, lemons, oranges, pomegranate (my personal favorite), avocado and fig tree.

-Eggplant, jalapeños, bellpepper, corn

-Mint is the only herb we're growing

Beyond watering every evening (I actually find this therapeutic in a way), the twice a year fertilizer (the fresh stuff we get from Dad's friend) and once a year pruning, our backyard garden provides us food year round.
Let the market decided! Those who want the "added protection" of naked pictures, can fly the naked picture airlines!
Digg never seemed like the kind of company that was run by an engineering culture. It feels like a MySpace type of company, where they have good marketing / media people but not about the technology and platform. One thing that suggests this is that most of the early engineering talent has left [http://atomized.org/2010/08/they-can%E2%80%99t-go-back/] , which is not something you see at Google, Facebook, or even Reddit. The new CEO might benefit from turning this around to avoid disasters like v4.
Good call. Digg watchers and insiders speak in hushed tones about "the algorithm" and how hopefully Digg will tweak it to great effect.

On Reddit you get an open source system with a one-stop appliance for any would-be submitters. The comment sorting algorithm is explained in a blog post by the xkcd guy (http://blog.reddit.com/2009/10/reddits-new-comment-sorting-s...).

On the flip side, reddit may not be profitable.
Since they're proxying the page, they replace all <a>s with proxy <a>s, as well as adding a <script> and a <div> with some content to the bottom. Try viewing source on http://starcraft2destroyedmymarrage.no.de:3000/app/4
I've been following this work for years now and it's exciting to read this announcement. I hope I'm right when I predict this technology will be a catalyst for huge economic growth in years to come just like transistors and the internet. Low-power devices that remember their state even when powered off? Imagine the possibilities.
Yep, and they also put together awesome blog posts about how all those pieces tie together: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=895072
Interesting to see some clustering around the dates. I've only scanned the graphic quickly but I can see a series of successive acquisitions related to different areas. e.g maps is one that appears to stand out (e.g a number acquisitions from late '04 to mid '05)
5 Reasons Why Every Entrepreneur Should get Married
The recipe for "Google Me" -- from Aardvark to Zynga
Ugh, got decontextualized.

I meant the video reminded me about the recurring ranting (or praising) cycle that takes place when looking life in hindsight. :)

"... when you were young prices were reasonable, politicians were noble ..."
Why "Evolutionary psychology" is not science.
Tomorrow Apple Event: Any Expectations?
...python? Or ruby?

I disagree with his criteria, however. "An extremely good preprocessor" isn't necessary for every compiler/interpreter. Also, OOP isn't necessarily a requirement in modern languages -- there are other ways of doing things. (Go isn't OOP)

(I personally think Haskell should be the "better programming language," but mostly due to religious biases)
Its not as bad as taking the MySpace CEO position, but what would Digg's CEO do to really grow a business like that? Could it ever be a $100M+ revenue, profitable company for the long term?

They have taken $40M in funding, have 50+ employees and I have no idea what their revenue is, but I bet its under $15M for for selling ads.

Good luck to them, hope he has the courage/support to do something radical.
Please watch some old episodes of Bill O' Reilly. He screams and shouts at people saying they are unamerican, a traitor yada yada yada. If you really would like links, I can look up a few for you.
Thanks for pointing out what is wrong with India today.

Go back a bit. And you will actually see that while things are bad, they are actually improving. And improving at a very quick pace.

Sure curroption is a big problem. But it always was.

Conflict over Kashmir is there since India's independence.

Naxal conflict in the South is there since 1970s.

So your conclusion of "but what is certain that India won't have a congenial atmosphere necessary for stability and wealth creation" does not seem quite right if you take history into consideration. Because things are improving.

Some of the things that were bad are still bad. But some of the things have improved tremendously.

* Per capita crime is down

* Illiteracy rate is down (Yes some schools are very bad - especially in rural areas. But overall, they are better than it was 10 years back.)

* Death rate is down.

* Infant mortality is down.

* Mal nutrition is down (even though there are food scams in some villages)

* Per capita income - in both cities and villages - is up. Way up.

* Government is actually going to reduce corporate taxes after a year (making things better conducive for businesses).

* Trade relations with other countries is way better. Indians can travel to 60 countries without visas now.

* Infrastructure is way better.

* Standard of living is higher than ever before.

* Pollution is worse though.

Things are actually getting better. Not worse. But you won't know this if you just follow the current news (which is way too sensationalist in India). You need to see things from a 50 year historical window. I don't see a growing cancer in India like you do.

tl;dr: Some of the things that were bad 30-40 years ago are still bad. But some of the things have improved tremendously since the past 2 decades. Very few things have actually gotten worse.
How this post gets written without mentioning federal student loans and grants, I have no idea. It's not a coincidence that every tuition inflation graph you see starts around 1980.
I don't recall the urls - I was recursively crawling from a user-provided seed url and had trouble with apricot, node-xml, and libxmljs. I had the least time to play w/ libxmljs because of hassle w/ joyent --- I had to compile v8 and node to link against and scons wasn't playing nice w/ the build environment.

--

Edit: I should add that I'm using libxmljs in production (http://newsbasis.com/news) as an rss parser (streaming sax-push-parser) and it works quite well for that sort of xml.
What a nightmare. I think Digg v4 should have been launched as a separate startup, helmed by Kevin ala Pownce. It's just too different, and it looks like they may have killed the goose that laid the golden egg. What a disaster..
Have you ever realized that we are all addicted to hope?

I think that you ought to read Collapse(see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collapse:_How_Societies_Choose_... by Jared Diamond ). Whatever he has written is so profound that I still haven't finished the book i.e. I need time to assimilate it in. You see, everything is a part of a complex chain of causality and in order to figure out anything while avoiding infinite recursion we need to create mental models of those interconnections and analyze upon that. I can't go into the data ad infinitum to prove the point. I need to pick up blocks of concepts and hold them up as black boxes in order to observe how the bigger box behaves with them.

This means that my comment can extend as long as I want and I can write entire books on the constructs of this scenario, but we need to stop it somewhere. This is why I have taken that so called "leap of faith". I am open to the possibility that I am wrong, and I hope that I am wrong, but that doesn't make the problem any less pressing.
FrogPad, maker of one-handed keyboard pitches iPad oriented business plan
To your points:

1) Agreed. It's simple. But, it does some nice things like 1) hook up capybara 2) create a /spec/acceptance folder and suite hook and 3) add some "behavior-oriented" keywords like feature, background and scenario. Of course, these are just dumb blocks and yes you could use the provided RSpec DSL (describe, it, before, etc) but it helps (if only mildly) to indicate that this is an acceptance test and to maybe put the programmer more in that mindset. This isn't groundbreaking, it's just a nice convention in my opinion.

2) This is a fair criticism. It does put the programmer more in a "code-centric" mindset than a "behavior-centric" one.

To address this I usually write out the feature in comments exactly as I would in cucumber. This might sound like an argument against steak, but it's not. The most useful thing about cucumber to me is the pattern of thinking: "Given this, When I do something, Then I should see that". The trouble is in the details: the maintenance, the awkward step gymnastics, etc. If you write out a pseudo-feature in comments then under each line of comments write the code, it totally remove the layer of feature vs. step definition indirection that plagues large cucumber projects.

3) Totally agreed. Though, very few projects I've used cucumber on ever let customers see feature files, let alone write them. Steak is for programmers, not customers.

There is no issue ramping up because it's just rspec and capybara. This is exactly what's under the sheets of most cucumber (for rails) installs. Anyone who implements cucumber step definitions should be well versed.
events are a GREAT example.

long term, services like greplin will also make it easier for people to switch / move around across service providers for various cloud functions. for example, the more greplin gets used the easier it will be for folks to switch to using event webapps other than facebook.
> But all the cops I've met offline have been decent and professional, even when they were giving me a ticket or warning.

Tickets and warnings are no big deal. Let me know how you feel about them if you're ever arrested.
"So, is it OK for me to just dump my oil?

No, because even though my dumping would cause no measurable harm, if everyone dumped it would cause great harm to public resources, such as Puget Sound."

Dumping oil cause SO MUCH measurable harm. It is so interesting how oil spread too thin on water(near molecular size, in fact this is a method to measure its size) and enormously change the air-water interface of big quantities of water and so its properties(chemical concentration(oxigen diffusion) and heat transfer, surface tension), killing a lot of biomass,affecting trees(you can kill trees just with oil(I have seen that with just one can of car oil)as it affects its roots, fish, insects and water wells.

Its harm is VERY measurable.

Biological Oil degrade easily, industrial oil not so.
Just how bad is Flash on Android?
When I think of the Pariot Act I think of what V said in V for Vendetta: The government should fear its people, never the other way around.
Meh. I'm much happier with my non-drinking quality of life as opposed to my former heavy-drinking quality of life. I'd give a few years up to live drama-free for the remainder.
I haven't said that they are saints, and personally I think that they are nothing but glorified thugs controlled by terrorists, but my opinion has nothing to do with the facts at hand and what they are actually doing on the ground. Or, more crucially, what those villagers think of them and why they support them.
One problem I have is that they get a kind of disease (don't know the English name) that makes the leafs dry up and the tomatoes rot before they turn red. The solution is to buy seeds of plants that can't get this disease.

So when you plan on growing tomatoes ask for this, it's very common. And buy multiple different seeds so you don't put all eggs in one basket.
Steak doesn't want to be cucumber at all. It's plain ruby. The "DSL" aspects of the library are purely for legibility and structure. The keywords feature, background, scenario perform the exact same function as the RSpec keywords describe, before, and it respectively.

All steak does is provide a structure for acceptance tests and loop in a web automation driver (capybara).

Far less magical than parsing a the magic language of "Gherkin"
I've been kicking around and gradually prototyping an idea somewhat similar to greplin, but locally hosted. I originally thought of it more as a cloud archival system, as a guard against some dinky web service I use shutting down and locking me out of my data, but once you're collecting all the data adding really good search on top of it is a natural next step. Right now I'm aiming at distributing it as a VM image (because the dependencies and such are rather complicated), but some day I'd like to see it running directly on backup/NAS devices like the Drobo so that you could have a (roughly) "just plug it in" backup solution for both local files and cloud data.
Then you may wish to re-word your post. Further reading tells us that the Indian Maoists, like organized crime gangs, use racketerring, extortion, threats of violence and abduction, drug trafficking, and local corruption to maintain power and obtain money. Nobody would dare attribute organized crime with being an "ad-hoc government" that "dispenses justice" and "goodwill", yet to do so would be a disservice to organized crime, as such organizations are not in the habit of blowing people up by the dozens.
I don't actually know. I'm just saying that it's one possible interpretation, and that it seems to me like a more likely explanation than heavy drinking extending your life.

The point is that harsh selection early in life means that anyone who survives to late life will be hardier. This has been shown in studies of, for example, plants that survive heavy storms as seedlings. Is heavy drinking harsh enough to show this effect? I'm not sure.
Dr. Sim
NMCI is the worst thing to happen to the Navy (in my opinion). When I was in the Navy, we managed our own servers and infrastructure on a 1000-workstation aircraft carrier network, including HP-UX/Sybase servers, multiple domain controllers, Exchange servers, rotating tape backups, and Alcatel backbone switches.

We only called contractors when we couldn't figure out a problem (which was pretty rare with the team we had). We set up our own network security monitoring and router ACLs, even though we were not authorized to do so, since we were going into a combat zone (Operation Enduring Freedom) and damn the procedures when your ship is at stake. We had it running so tight that when our battlegroup did penetration testing before deployment, they accused us of cheating because they couldn't get in (even though they had a hole poked in the NOC firewall for them and we weren't supposed to have an incoming ACL on our side).

NMCI rolled out a few months after I got out of the Navy, and ever since then all I've seen coming out of there since then is hugely incompetent ITs who don't even know what the OSI model is, let alone how to put together a disaster recovery plan or manage network security. All they know how to do is put in a trouble ticket when someone can't send an attachment or they see "NTLDR is missing".

I joined the Navy to get the kind of experience that I did, and I feel terrible for the thousands of ITs in there now who have their hands tied for anything harder than resetting someone's password.
What is college, really? It's some combination of access to three things: information, feedback, and certification.

The internet totally took care of the information problem. It's no longer the role of a university to provide access, but to create new knowledge through research.

The internet helps take care of the feedback problem, and I think web-apps will keep coming that match people with each other to give feedback on their efforts. So colleges are in danger there.

The internet can also take care of the certification problem, because the value of the certificate (diploma) is pretty much completely tied to the brand value of the certificate-giver. I can see an online university establishing a name for themselves in the future.

Colleges should focus on things that the internet can't do, like providing spaces for people to meet up and learn together.
I do a lot of command-line-tool-writing, my language at the moment is Haskell, tho' I still count myself as a Haskell beginner, it's proving to be very productive. The old adage that if Haskell code compiles it works is mostly true; bugs are caught up-front rather than after running in the wild for a bit; type inference, explicit pure/IO and functional composition are real boons. I need to build more familiarity with the libraries before I can be as productive in the short term (e.g. for "one offs") as I am in Python but already I believe in the long term (because one-offs never are!) I'm pulling ahead.

OCaml would be a good choice too. Both of these languages work very naturally with tree-like structures. Profiling/code coverage in both is very easy. IMHO there's no need to go to C for any but the most performance-critical code (and remember that your I/O etc is already in C in the kernel). The C approach of checking the return value of every syscall (e.g. no exceptions) is very cumbersome.

Case in point today: rather than persuade our Unix guys to roll out Expect across a bunch of new machines, I rewrote a ~200 line Expect script I had in ~60 lines of Haskell and deployed a binary instead of a script.
Interesting product. I may be missing a trick here, but is it possible to link to your Google Apps mail/calendar? If I login to Google with my apps username and password, it just tries to connect my @gmail.com account. This could be because my apps email is a secondary email on my @gmail.com account

... Google seriously suck at accounts!
isn't the ipad screen very reflective and hard to read in sunlight (like that which would be on a jobsite)?
HP Labs to manufacture memristors, plans assault on flash memory in 2013