skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I can see problems with this. First of all, if this is a product generally available to consumers, then with massively increased distance comes the problem of massively compounded saturation. We already have this problem with the current generation of Wifi. In a dense neighborhood, you cannot find any clear channels, and since adjacent channels interfere with one another, transmission speed can degrade extensively.

Now imagine if a WiFi signal could easily travel several miles. Yes, in the TV whitespace you have much more bandwidth available, but you simultaneously have many more base-stations sharing the same channel. The better the range, the worse the potential for extensive interference, and a degradation in transmission speed.
Biology is strange. If I had read this in a sci-fi book, I would think the author went overboard.
Random bits:

- What company the job posting is for. There's a surprising number of job postings missing this tidbit. It might be fine in a job hungry market, but it's never been fine for me and I usually ignore these postings.

- A real description of the duties. What do you actually want me doing? Will I be working alone or within a team?

- What tools will I be using? It's alarmingly common to go into a job posting for J2EE and find out they're really migrating to .NET (or vice versa). I know a hell of a lot of programming languages, but I've truly mastered only a few.
You can do this automatically with

rvm ruby@gemset --create --rvmrc

`--create` creates a gemset if it doesn't already exist, and `--rvmrc` makes a .rvmrc file to automatically switch to that gemset when you cd into the current directory. This makes it easy enough, that I have a gemset per application/project, and then use bundler to install the deps.
That's why I used gcc as an example instead of the whole "development tools" category.

For some subset of C compiler users, gcc is an acceptable substitute, and so there's no reason to pay anyone, anywhere, $.01 for a C compiler. Their business is gone forever and it is no longer worth writing a commercial C compiler in order to get these people's money. Your market is now people with needs that gcc can't fulfill, which is smaller but quite possibly still lucrative.

Ditto for Gimp/Photoshop. I crop and scale pictures, so GIMP or Paint.NET work more than fine. Photoshop isn't worth it for me to buy. On the other hand, my wife and I have both bought laptops in the last year and I spent 3x what she did. Her cheap Dell was not an acceptable substitute, so I paid more. Even if the Dell was free, I still would have paid for my bigger faster laptop with 18.4" screen.

If in 10 years, GIMP does everything that a graphic designer or artist could want, it will no longer matter how advanced Photoshop is. Just ask film camera makers.

The book The Innovator's Dilemma (and its underrated sequel, The Innovator's Solution) talk about this extensively.
I use it to track the names of friends (so I can send the occasional "Hey, congrats on XXX") and competitors for a few niche products I've been building.

More lately, I've been using it to keep track of companies I'm advising -- I'll run alerts on key phrases to their industry, the names of their competitors, etc.
I will certainly buy the game. Those of us have been through the entire DNF emotional roller coaster just want something to show for it. A playable executable, if not the transcendental experience that was promised in 1996. Who knows, it might actually be fun! And you're getting the most famous video game ever created for $60. Given the kinds of forgettable dreck that also retails for sixty bucks, it's enough for me.
Exactly. The great thing about Clojure or Scala compared to other funlangs is that I can walk into just about any big "enterprise" shop and plug transparently into their codebase and toolchain. This is a crucial adoption vector for FP and the struggles other funlangs have gone through to bootstrap themselves underlines this.
I have ones set up for "Steve Klabnik", "hackety hack", and "cloudfab". It's a good way to see if anyone is talking about me, my projects, or my startup. I'd say that they're almost always relevant. However, I also have one for "ruby shoes programming", and it often returns irrelevant results. They times that it does return good ones outweigh the crap, though. It's pretty easy for me to figure out which ones are important.

Great, now I'm going to get four emails for this post. ;)
The total time investment (over a period of two months) would be a couple of hours. So, in my opinion it was totally worth it.

Thanks for appreciating the tool!
Disagree. I decided in college to quit being the shy farm kid. Worked out great. Its just a matter of practice.
Vanity. It's very relevant for my name -- rarely have a false positive.
I store the data file on dropbox, so it is replicated across different machines I use. Each machine has the PasswordSafe program (binary) installed on it.
What does (did?) OpenJDK give the open-source hackers anyway? A freely distributable Java to go along with your Linux distribution?

I doubt the JIT part is accessible to many developers - and those who want to adapt the JIT (= mobile hardware vendors, at this stage) could always strike a licensing deal with Oracle. There are already plenty of interpreted VM implementations, so it's not the general lack of a VM either. Sun's JVM was always freely available and downloadable, even though it sometimes contains Yahoo Toolbar.
Why is Google so condescending?
Does anyone remember when Ryanair were an airline, not a punchline?

I flew with them once, because they went from an airport much closer to me than the big carriers like BA. I'm not a fan of flying generally, but this was such an unpleasant experience that if I ever make the same trip again, I will surely fly from a different airport with a different carrier even if it means a significantly longer journey from home to airport.
How two Pythonistas accidentally fell in love with Rails
just had some fun with the phone of a coworker of mine (of course after warning him and making sure that he won't lose data).

His iPhone was connected to our Google Apps account and with one click I managed to wipe his phone (it rebooted and came up with the "connect me to iTunes to activate me" screen).
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2034585,00.asp

Looks like an underwater phone, but no bluetooth. I think your problem is not with technology, but setting reasonable expectations for accessibility. You could let people know that you can't be reached for the next few hours when you start your swim. Alternatively, you can stop and check your phone every half hour or so, and let people know that you can't respond right away, but you'll check messages regularly.
"I think a free product have to be utterly superior to a paid product in order to displace commercial products."

In order to completely displace commercial products, yes. But for any reasonably complex or powerful product, there's a market of customers that are overserved by it and would pay less for less if they could. This is usually handled by product segmentation - think of options in cars. If you don't need the extra power, go for the 4-cylinder instead of the V-6. If cash is more important than comfort, skip the leather seats. If you need the fastest, most luxurious car and money isn't an option, check every box on the list.
Also, since we're in HN (startup city, what?) who has ever worked for a startup that DISCOURAGED working from home on a personal laptop or having access to email 24x7?

The policy where I work is: linux laptop (I imagine BSD might also be ok), access to code is via sshfs (or TRAMP) only. I don't think this is that unusual.
Sad! I worked for Obopay and on Billmonk with Chuck and Gaurav a few years ago. I hope to see the site back up and explanation on what happened.
Actually we've recently started branding all new games as "by Lolapps". You can see this on Critter Island: http://apps.facebook.com/critter-island/
Of course people with disabilities or special needs need to buy the ticket that works for them. My son sometimes has to buy a 1st class ticket for himself and his cello - its pointless to whine about how economy class should be bigger to accomodate his needs.
I'm not sure what 2001 prediction lzw could be referring to, but the Austrian school definitely sounded an early warning on the housing bubble. See this article from 2004 for instance: http://mises.org/daily/1533

Or, Ron Paul addressing the House in July 2002:
http://www.ronpaul.com/2008-09-26/ron-paul-on-the-housing-bu...
More like remove... it seems like they are trying to shed away the open source parts of projects where they think they can still extract a profit. I don't think Oracle wants to shepherd any major open source projects and the investment that entails. They would rather move Solaris and Java back to the realm of closed-source and proprietary. Hopefully in the case of Java, still keeping it close to free as in beer.

They know that the open source community won't be able to seriously fork Java/OpenJDK. Even with newer JVM languages, Java's place has been cemented in enterprise environments. And if it is one thing Oracle knows, it is how to sell to the enterprise.

I'm not sure that I would do much differently if I were them either. Open source just doesn't seem to be in their DNA, and it's been quite successful for them. Even if it is to the detriment of others...
I wonder about thrombosis...
While I may end up being in the minority, I think that they'll do just fine.

First, let me clarify that by fine, I don't mean they will be in first place anytime soon (or ever), but rather I'm talking about having a strong userbase and fighting for second place (out of iPhone, Android, Blackberry, WP7).

Really it will come down to two things, Office integration and XBox Live.

The way they've set up the office integration as well as integrating with sharepoint and exchange will IMO win over a lot of business folks who are starting to tire of the Blackberry.

To dismiss the XBox Live features with "are you really going to play XBOX games on your phone" is extremely misleading, you aren't meant to be playing full xbox games on your phone, the games that you will be playing are more akin to the XBox live arcade games that integrate nicely to the XBox live services (ie leader-boards, achievements, and the like).

on top of that, there is the rumors (a little far fetched I admit) of a partnership between Microsoft and Nokia which certainly wouldn't hurt.
I've never said this of a fellow startup, but I hope in earnest that they fail, not out of contempt, but because I don't want ever to have to sit in a seat like that.

Note: "below economy" class is a terrible idea for us, because it means that those seats will cost current coach prices, and what we call coach will become business class. (This has happened before; business now is what coach was in 1990.)
But that's the point - since a potential poster of "I agree" would be adding no value whatsoever to the discussion, and may perhaps be the kind of person who posts "I agree" on multiple posts just to get points, every time he/she posts "I agree" they would lose out.

If you only had 50 words a day, posting "I agree" just cost you 4% of your daily ration of words. So chances are you wouldn't post "I agree" 10x just to try to increase your points.

Because YOU NEVER KNOW when a REALLY interesting post that you really, really want to comment on may come along and now you don't have enough words left to make the comment you wanted.

Which may inspire some sort of word-ration trading economy aspect to HN, ie, more "involved" people with many points may wish to "trade" points for word "credits" with newbies, thus balancing out the point spread a bit.

This would decrease the value of points associated with identities, but increase the value of words, thus making short, brief comments all the more valuable.

Maybe. I don't know. It would be a nice experiment I think.
Nobody has ever suggested that the RIAA or EA be able to wipe your phone.

Orrin Hatch: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/2999780.stm.

but don't pretend there's no valid reason for it.

If my house has been broken into before, there's a "valid reason" for me to install a tripwire that automatically fires a shotgun blast at the intruder. That won't go over well in court, and neither should this.
I should elaborate. I think he should work on being more social, but not necessarily social like the guys in the frats. Don't do what they do... be outgoing in your own way and be true to yourself. Wear those Magic: The Gathering t-shirts if that's what you love and you're guaranteed to find people that share your interests and who you will enjoy the company of more.
Amazing Moments
Take a look some really amazing photos. For some of them needs a lot of courage.
My birthday is an off-by-one of Programmer's Day.. that can't be a good thing.
this is pretty much similar to how I fell in love with Rails... I came from a strictly front-end html/css background.. not too much real programming experience. Ruby just felt so natural and Rails made the hard parts easier and the community was so helpful.
No. A startup is very risky. Being asked to take a pay cut means, really, that you are investing cash (annually!) into the company (lost earnings) with normally no compensation. Sure you get a stock option etc, but is it calculated on lost earnings? Is it increased over time to account for this loss? No, probably its commeasurate with others etc.
Call Spinner - Phone Based Chatroulette
I got 5k visits for a little project (aggregator) which got covered in a different time of the week, so I expect the traffic sent is about par for the course. I was surprised there wasn't a bigger 'techcrunch effect' too; I guess not many of those 4M subscribers are particularly engaged!
I have a friend who while converting from a pre-SQL RDBMS to Ingres liked to call it Squeal (the whole package from that era, 1989 or so, wasn't exactly great although it did get the job done).
this is a nice test of the service :)
I maintain that Blizzard and 24 Hour Fitness could make a lot of money (or at least get a lot of attention) by installing WoW clients on treadmills, elliptical machines, etc. When you're logged into the game and using one of these machines, your player gets a buff that makes it stronger or gains xp faster. Stop walking on the treadmill and the buff wears off. If they made the buff valuable enough, they'd sell a lot of gym memberships to people that would otherwise never set a foot in one -- and maybe some people would lose some weight too.
F5 Week in Review Sep 6th – 10th, 2010
Alistair is spot on t.co. It will allow Twitter to better track traffic and they'll be able to sell this information to third parties.
This comment sums up the reasons why the Internet is both the greatest and worst thing humankind has ever created.
Terrible example, definitely an outlier, nothing to base your career on.
http://www.ikvm.net/ ??
I've flown with Ryanair a few times between the UK (Prestwick) and Sweden - I thought it was perfectly OK.

However, their website is an abomination.
Twitter's behavior in the past year has given me pause. However, as to the claim that it's not yet and never will be mainstream: Oprah has not done shows on Facebook [edit: to my knowledge, anyway; don't watch Oprah myself]. Celebrities don't talk to their fanbase on Facebook. We don't go looking for instant news on Facebook (or on Google) -- good recent example for the Bay Area: http://search.twitter.com/search?q=%23sanbrunofire

Twitter is as mainstream as Facebook. Or darn close.
I have heard `Squirrel', albeit in jest.
mmh, no. Functional programing is declarative, but I does not mean I don't declare utterly wrong and nonsensical things to my compiler. That's why I have not only a type system, but also testing tools even for pure code: see Quickcheck in Haskell. But, yeah, I often have less state to manage and patterns that avoid a lot of buggy boilerplate.
YouTube Adds Live Streaming, Rocketboom Goes Live
Interesting that "Apple" appears in the one-star list. In what sort of contexts does this appear? Are people actually blaming Apple for the crappy apps?
Let's meet under a common religion: Entrepreneurship
I have absolutely no idea what you're talking about, so here's a bunny with a pancake on its head.

http://media.photobucket.com/image/bunny%20pancake/DKaidian/...
> The government has pushed $1 coins on several occasions before but they have never been able to get it to catch on.

They would catch on real quick if you got rid of the dollar bill.
Mosquitoes are not wasps, and I'm pretty sure fig wasps don't carry malaria.
This bug is still happening for me btw.
I'm not sure how this is fundamentally different than twitter integrating with something like bit.ly

Alistair expects us to believe that bit.ly was sharing no tracking / analytics information with twitter?
I think the point of saying nothing is that once you open your mouth, you can say something inadvertently that could be used against you (rightly or wrongly). Once the words start coming out, one follows the other, and you'll likely end up saying something you didn't want or need to. If your policy is to maintain silence except for the most basic interactions, then accidental self-incrimination is much less likely.
Funny, I pronounce it "ess queue ell" because it was originally called "SEQUEL". But now it's not. So it's distinct.

It's interesting how two people can use the exact same justification to come to two totally different conclusions.
How important is YSlow Score?
That I know. It's the "dead" part that bothers me, not the commitment. Who dies on a deadline? The "task"? Or you, little by little? That's my question...
In Chrome, I go to Wrench -> Options -> Under the Hood -> Content Settings... -> Javascript -> Exceptions... -> Add... -> Pattern: www.google.com Action: Block
I have the utmost respect for you. Myself and a college friend are currently working on a html5 game engine, but we're doing it in GWT, so we code Java rather than Javascript. We decided to do that because, well, it's goddamn difficult to make a really good game engine in js.

So, in summary, holy shit, that's absolutely amazing. Hats off.

I have two questions, though: How do you do your particle effects? Also, I noticed when you went through some code, you seemed to only point to Ogg Vorbis audio files. How does your sound system work?

(also, heh. Lesbian porn easter egg in the making-of video)

Edit: I should mention that our engine is (will be) open source. Not stealing your ideas, just really interested. ;)
I have used Google Alerts to keep track of upcoming movies, games, album releases that have potential for monetization.
This is really interesting. IBM Legal would have wanted us to pronounce it S-Q-L, then, because encouraging pronunciation of the initial name would continue to infringe upon the Hawker Siddeley trademark!
I'd rather not read something that's too long and/or off-topic than take away someone's ability to post it. This type of system sounds way too complicated. I've read some AMAZING long responses here. And I've read total crap where the main point could have been made in 20 words.

And basing it on seniority/points is pointless. There are people who have been here for ages who have more karma than I'll have in the next 20 years. Some of them post a lot, and some of them go on-and-on. Just because they have karma doesn't mean they don't sometimes post long-winded junk. But that's no different than people with fewer points. Some content is good; some isn't.

Every community has its strengths and weaknesses. That doesn't mean we have obsess over eliminating the weaknesses. As you become more active in the community, you just learn to change your behavior accordingly.
Oracle is a pragmatic company. It's likely they'll just merge the easy stuff.

If there is insanely great stuff in the intersection you mention, it probably constitutes a research project, which it would make sense to undertake in the background (if at all). For Oracle, the only "insanely great" that counts is that which yields benefits that customers will pay for now/soon - not what's technically impressive. They're a sort of microsoft-research anti-particle. disclaimer I actually have no idea.
Before I heard anyone else pronounce it out loud, I pronounced it squeal as well.

Although I try to use sequel nowadays, I still occasionally hear myself say squeal.
And based on the author's previous Django and ORM posts, I look forward to the next post in a few months when the black magic stops working and they begin to hate on Rails as a framework.
I say Sequel Server, but S-Q-L in all other instances.
Dr Who TShirts!
Carrying a large musical instrument and being afflicted with a physical disability are poles appart.

Agreed, airlines shouldn't increase space to accomodate his cello but I see no valid argument justifying making an MS sufferer pay more because they would struggle to support themselves in these seats.
At this point, this appeal is out of sheer desperation. The last SCO appeal to the Tenth Circuit gained SCO a reversal, but that was based on the far more reversible issue of a trial court's having granted summary judgment on the UNIX ownership issue, which allowed the appeals court to review the issues de novo (meaning, without having to give any special deference to the trial court's conclusions, etc.). This appeal, however, is from an adverse judgment following a full jury trial on the merits. In this type of situation, the appeals court must give great deference to how the jury determined the facts and will be loathe to second-guess the outcome. Thus, to win on this appeal, SCO essentially has to point to alleged errors of law that would have tainted the jury verdict and this likely will be extremely difficult to do in this type of case.

The appeal in spite of the desperate situation arises from the fact that SCO is represented by a top-tier law firm that has a direct financial incentive to apply scorched-earth tactics in an effort to secure a win at any cost, no matter how small the odds of getting a victory. Thus, this appeal raises issues having to do with more than the trial itself. It is evident that the firm has scoured every facet of this multi-pronged litigation and is attacking on all possible fronts, hoping that something will somehow stick. This has little to do with the solvency of SCO itself, because the litigation remains essentially as the only significant asset belonging to the company and the duty of a bankruptcy trustee (or a debtor-in-possession if there is no trustee) is to attempt to maximize the value of all assets in a bankruptcy estate on any reasonable basis. If the law firm is going to pick up the cost of the litigation, then the trustee or debtor-in-possession has every incentive to keep the matter alive in hopes of realizing on a long shot.

By every normal litigation measure, this appeal should not have been filed given the bankrupt status of SCO and given the difficulty of ever winning it. Since, however, there are enormous dollars at stake in the event a long-shot reversal is obtained, and since SCO effectively does not have to pay the tab for the continued fight, this will go on and on unless and until the parties settle or until all appeals are exhausted and the trial verdict is upheld. In other words, the case should have died but it hasn't and it won't in the near term, even while it may have effectively died on the merits with the entry of the jury verdict.
I use S Q L except when talking to a Microsoft devotee, they seem to use sequel mostly.
As with all easy answers, it ain't necessarily that simple. What if you have a startup that's based on the Twitter API? Where do you go? Plurk? Facebook has its own API issues, of course.
I'd really love it if you would explain yourself a little better.

Remember the title is about TDD and functional programming, not about testing in general. Of course you'd still test, and debug, and all the other things involved with programming.

If you have more to offer, I'd love to hear it. I couldn't understand what you meant from your comment.