skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Great so now we can drop all the "I am so smart, I found this quote" comments that correlation is not causation as if that quote somehow negates your whole argument. I love that one because I always read it as, I can't win in a straight up argument, but I don't agree with what you said so let me whip up my handy magical nullify an argument quote.
I've been wondering why Fan/Fantom has not had more traction, I rather like the pragmatism that seems to have guided its design.

Is it just not exciting enough?
Twitter scrambles to block worms
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What are these structures of society that make it possible for people to succeed?

Society isn't some uniform, monolithic thing that exists in own right, that we either choose to participate in or not. Society is the product of actual relationships among real people. They don't depend upon external institutions as a precondition of cooperating toward mutual benefit, but establish those institutions as a consequence of doing so.

Everything we call 'society' is the result of people making the choice to interact with each other. From there, communities arise, customs emerge, and economies develop. But every tax, regulation, divisive political program, and every faction seeking to impose its narrow agenda on everyone at once just have the effect of raising the stakes of participating in society. They give people more to lose and more to fear in openly relating to others; people become less likely to form stable networks of trust and more likely to become isolated, disconnected, and paranoid.

When we so stridently pursue policies intended to 'upkeep' an abstract, taken-for-granted concept of society, we risk undermining the basis on which real, actual societies function.
Forward Thinking Form Validation
The Twitter Brand and What Comes Next
I agree with you, partially.

Ideas are real-- as real as anything. Intellectual property is a fiction applied to ideas, just like physical property is a fiction applied to physical objects.

But of course physical objects don't follow the same rules as ideas do, so IP needs to have different rules from property. (We're still figuring out what the best rules are.) But the hard question we're talking about here is what do we do when most of the value of a physical object is in the idea that it represents, rather than it's physical nature? Should that fall under the fiction of physical property, or intellectual property? Or some third abstraction that hasn't caught on yet?

I think that's a hard question, and stopping after saying "I own it, it's mine" isn't doing justice to it or to the spirit of intellectual curiosity.
Sure. Evidence is weaker than implication.
Ask HN: are all articles from infoworld.com autodead?
Just tried to submit two interesting stories and both entered the list as [dead]. Am I doing something wrong or have these links been employed in abusive form in the past?
Actually maybe the attacker was watching commits in github and spotted an XSS fix :) Free vulnerability!
Why Hearst Created an Advertising Director for 'Tablet Media'
The difficulty maintaining Perl comes from the large number of modules that will only work with the perl version it was compiled with. A module might work with any version 5.8 or later, but only one version at a time. So if you upgrade perl on a system, you'll have to re-install the module from CPAN as well.
You'd think an article about the supposed decline of the netbook would have at least one data point to support the thrust of the article.

I'm actually thrilled with my netbook which I've been using for the past year. Most of the time it sits on my desk connected to an external keyboard, mouse and monitor (all three of which suck pretty badly on the AspireOne). It's a little slow but entirely useable. Several times a week I grab it and head off to an external site where I use it to take meeting minutes. I'm happy to trade off the limitations for extreme portability. If this one died I'd buy another (although probably with an SSD drive)
> just execute anyone who begins to look like a net cost

Plenty of cultures have done that at some point. In medieval England there was no welfare net and hanging was the punishment for most crimes. There were still criminals and beggars, probably more so than today.

I wont even comment on the idea of executing people based on some arbitrary measure of worth.
It even supports hex colors. And this is much better than blue:

http://ff3323.bikeshed.com/
very cool. Might I request some that look like the buttons in Tender? I like the smooth minimalism:

http://tenderapp.com/tour/collect/
Instapaper for Android coming soon... hope so!

It's a gift that allows someone to design apps like Tumblr and Instapaper.
$300 is 15 lawns mowed, or 2k cans collected, or probably one post on your facebook page asking for donations.
Almost all of the buttons have hover and active states now. More refinements will be made shortly.
Every time that an employee is shocked that s/he is being layed off, it is a failure of management. All of your employees MUST know where they stand in the organisation. And when the layoffs come, and eventually they will, where will you be on that list.
But, this should also not be used as a trump card all the time. Otherwise good people will make sure they leave than work under this constant threat.
Getting pregnant is natural and easy. As die_sekte points out elsewhere on the page:

(a) Sex is cheap, good entertainment. (b) If you are already poor, children aren't going to make it any worse. (c) For some reason, most people really want to have children. (d) Humans aren't exactly rational creatures.

And I'll add to that: when you're poor and poorly educated, you neither know much about contraceptives nor can you afford them. Hell, in the US we have a lot of kids who are perfectly well off and don't know how condoms work, because of various kinds of screwed-up politics. If you're poor? You might not even know you have a choice in the matter. And "abstinence only" doesn't work.
>In your story, Chuck is ordering parts sure, but the guy who designed those parts was a specialist in designing parts...

Exactly. In the long run, re-inventing the wheel is costly. Costly enough that Chuck graduates with his PhD, while the other ends up failing out and working at a machine shop.

Also, a constant criticism of Chuck's counterpart, Mike, was that everything he built was constantly over-engineered, and took to damn long. If anything, his machine shop experience hampered his ability to design or refine his design skills past an undergraduate level.

A semester of welding, lathing, and whatnot will likely not help a professional MechE, as easily half their CAD designs will be fabricated completely by machine. Understanding a precision machinist's complaints will not come into the field.
Customer Tracking Death Match
People usually try to skirt this issue. The proponents of copyright laws stubbornly call anyone who would infringe a thief while those on the other side of the argument aptly point out the fallacy of such analogies.

The truth of the matter is that copyright law assumed a certain level of difficulty involved in the act of copying another work. To copy a book requires either theft from a publisher or pouring through it, page by page, and manually recreating it. The same is true of old VHS tapes. Some apparatus, not widely available, was required to make copies that could be redistributed. Since real effort was required to produce copies, copyright law could rightfully condemn those who would make copies.

The ubiquity of digital technology has fundamentally changed this. Copying anything is trivial yet copyright law has been left unchanged. These laws are simply inadequate for our modern reality.

An overhaul of the whole system by some smart, competent, and knowledgeable people is necessary. Unfortunately, big media has such stake in the antiquated laws, and such influence in the legislature (in the US, but very likely abroad as well), that such a change probably won't happen for a number of years. So, until then, we are stuck in this lawless landscape where everyone on every side of the argument is wrong.
I agree. Also, this seems like a great use for CAD drawings fed into one-off 3D fabrication printing.

edit: seems like someone else suggested this below
Gentoo's package manager, Portage, is written in Python, so Python presents a special challenge, when upgrading or using a different version that the default.
Thanks. My main concern was how detailed to make the specs. Should I start with one document from a 50,000 foot view of the overall product value/vision, and then another document drilling down into each specific aspect of the application?
This is like saying that Apache is a bad web server because IT people complain to the System Architects over how hard it is to harden it for PKI and use in Top Secret Environments. Odds are the IT monkey doesn't know what he is talking about anymore than the lathe monkey. Both have a false sense of expertise because they see their field as "equal".
Neat trick from the article:

strace irb
As a counterpoint, I date a lot of school teachers in NYC.
Almost every one of them has the same story... They were working in another job with crazy hours, like film production or advertising, and specifically became a school teacher because it had easier hours, good benefits, and summers off.

Perhaps compared to doing nothing, 7:30 to 6 is a hardship, but if you're coming from a normal NYC office job where it's not uncommon to work 9am-10pm it sounds like a vacation. Also, you don't actually have to be at the school from 7:30 to 6. You typically can go home by 3:30 and do whatever grading you need to at home.

On the other hand, being stuck in a room for 8 hours with NYC teenagers sounds like one of the most exhausting and frustrating tasks in the world. Maybe all that down time is necessary for recovery? I certainly would (and do) choose 10 hours a day futzing with C++ over 8 hours a day with teenagers who don't want to be there. Would be nice to have summers off, though.
For your reference, the other examples I gave were:

the elimination pun: [He passed maths] by a process of elimination, like a tapeworm

the parallel of temper and years: an elderly, crotchety lady of certain temper and uncertain years
Leaving five dollars laying around with friends over strikes at a crucial difference in that being poor means living outside of the generally accepted rule of law that most take for granted. The difference between a housing project or rural tract in the US and other nations is largely one of degree and similar in character to living in a war zone.
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My grandfather always said that "you cannot polish a turd". I really never understood it coming from him as he was a perfectionist and a very good engineer. It seemed like such a nihilistic statement from a man that could fix or design anything and always had a we can fix this attitude. It was not till I was older that I realized the true meaning of the statment. He was basically saying you do what you have to do to get something working. If it is bad then you patch it until you can replace it with something better. And that trying to start from bad to get to good was not the best path but rather make the bad passable until, it can be totally replaced with good. In my experience this has held true. Trying to make something that is poorly built good is far more time consuming than shoring it up and then replacing it with a better solution.
NVIDIA teams with PGI for CUDA-x86
I don't know for sure but it sounds like kids happened when there were two people, and then a partner took off. If all you can act on is that this person promises to be around to help you pay for and look after your (theirs too!) kids, and they break that promise.. what can you do? never trust anyone? It's just not quite that simple, though I absolutely agree with the sentiment.
Some context:

http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/mesa-dev/2010-Septembe...
Death to dual booting. I can't wait for this and spice[1] to mature, having to be tethered to a powerful machine for any use case is frustrating when so much else is accessible remotely with ease.

Also it's always nice to see corporate contributions of big features to open source graphics:

> Thanks to all the Gallium contributors and especially the VMware team, whose work made it possible to implement Direct3D 10/11 much more easily than it would have been otherwise.

[1] http://spice-space.org/features.html
You should be able to throw a key-value store on top of settings to override certain values at runtime. Replace django.conf with django_dynconf?
I agree that libraries need rethinking. I've found that even those Librarians who are inclined to do such rethinking can be surprisingly conservative.

Even so, the authors needs a different point of reference needs a reset. I've never been in one of Seattle's libraries that hasn't been a bustling hub of activity. There are lots of public computers, for people who don't have their own. People are studying and working on their laptops, and some people are even reading or checking out books.

Personally, most of my use of our libraries via the web, particularly to access the O'Reilly Safari Library. One of the awesome things about libraries is librarians, because they believe in things like the democratization of acess to information. One result is that often times, the licenses on online databases acessed through libraries are often less restrictive than you'd get on your own.
Yes, pip/virtualenv works for installing things like Django.

It totally fails for something like m2sh which has to live in the system PATH so that you can run it from wherever you have your configs.

But you know, I wonder if the various distros could sort of invert this and they start using pip/virtualenv instead of everyone else working around them?
The issue I had with Molokai (and it may be my screen) is that the comments were barely readable. The colours were just too close to the background.

My favourite is earendel (http://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=2188)
That's an even more extreme example than the one that I just ran in to. Wow.
Chasing the Perfect Cup of Coffee with Science
one thing that I do a little differently is the template dirs

I just do a standard

TEMPLATE_DIRS = (
os.path.join(
PROJECT_ROOT,
"templates",
),
)

for the template dirs and the I symlink in template directorys of apps in the project. This allows me to do any additional template wackiness(like adding another directory in the path outside the project) with a symlink rather then modifying the settings file
I wonder to what extent not fixing it in the production version was a "conscious" business decision, and to what extent it was just overlooked.

And my extremely cynical side would like to point out that that by many measures this incident benefits twitter as a company; they get free headlines, they are seen publicly fixing a problem in a timely manner, and they get more loyal followers. Not that there is some machiavellian plan at work, but there may be reasons beyond time poverty and careless software engineering that explain why something like this might not have been fixed even though some people may have been aware it was broken.
What I love about it is when you scroll down, you can click on links which take you to the original source for the numbers (both official government sources). When you scroll down further, you see an explanation of his methodology in merging two spreadsheets.

I guess ad-hominem attacks are easier than actually downloading the spreadsheets yourself and crunching the numbers, right?

(Note: you can only download the spreadsheets for 2008 or earlier. 2009-2014 are marked as guesstimates, since official data is not yet available.
I thought about something like that, but wanted to duplicate the existing config file format so that people's configs would keep working (mostly). It actually had some cool advantages, like a nice psuedo variable system letting you setup variables for reuse in different parts of the config file.

I haven't really seen that in other config formats, and it is damn handy.
It's depressing to see your comment at -1. I guess there are lots of framework lovers here :/
Way to go Ray! Glad to see that your launch is going so well
Ask HN: Why did Google acquire/kill Dodgeball, later reincarnated as Foursquare?
SO Google bought Dodgeball, closed it in 2009. The original founder went on to start Foursquare which now surpassed 140,000,000 check-ins in the last month.

Not sure how Latitude is doing but any ideas behind Google's reasoning?
Strange that the "blogspam" NYT link is here and not the original: http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE68K0K020100921
Faux Latin is a Dead Language (replacement for Lorem ipsum)
pip and virtualenv don't work for a program like m2sh that has to be in the PATH all the time so you can run it from anywhere.

Another thing is that non-python programmers wouldn't even bother to use virtualenv. Really only Python programmers would.
"or probably one post on your facebook page asking for donations"

I seriously doubt facebook was around back when this person was in school.

And, how do you mow 15 lawns with no transport, and the people around you are too poor to even have a lawn, let alone have people mow their lawns for them? Hell, where could he even get the lawnmower in the first place?

And, 2000 cans collected is a noble (and green!) act, but there are states where they'll give a big fat nothing for recycling; in fact, the home state of Duke University (NC, USA) doesn't offer money for aluminum like up North, unless you're willing to collect a pound of it and sell it for 20 cents. I guess he could move to another state to get better recycling prices, but then there's moving costs.

Sometimes being poor sucks, and there's NOTHING you can do. Not saying his case was completely hopeless, but it's easy to find solutions when there are zero consequences.
Are multicore-capable garbage collectors hard to write?
Certainly the only time I've cited a movie trailer quote in this context:

"If you were the ones who invented facebook, you would've invented facebook."
I have found that the one system that doesn't give me any trouble running Python is Ubuntu. I'm using Ubuntu Server 10.4, specifically, which is the latest LTS (Long Term Support) version.

Ubuntu 10.4 has Python 2.6 but I wanted Python 2.7 (which is the LAST 2.x version). So here's what I did: I installed all common dependencies (such as OpenSSL with "apt-get build-dep python2.6", since they're all the same for Python 2.7. Then I installed Python 2.7 with "make altinstall" without disrupting the system's base 2.6 install. Then, I got pip and virtualenv installed.

I've never been happier doing Python development. pip never failed to install a single package I needed, and Python 2.7 is fast and gives me a safe path of migration towards Python 3, whenever the whole byte/str issue in the network libraries (or at least WSGI) is 'resolved'.
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Stallman crashes European Patent session
An almost identical question from 23 days ago: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1641862

And the answer to your question: YES, if you're prepared to push for it...
Objective-C Tuesdays: slicing and dicing strings
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The Chip And PIN Debate – Part 3
Nothing is "fabricated completely by machine" like an ink jet prints on paper. I work in 3D printing, the closest to this fire-and-forget model, and there are still a lot of design contraints and optimizations that any engineer needs to know to be truly good at making parts.

If you're designing shaping, molding, machining, etc. parts having an idea of manufacturing processes is essential to elegant solutions at low cost.

The other way would be like an artist who instructed someone to paint his masterpiece from his initial sketch. A lot is lost in translation.
The truth of the matter is that copyright law assumed a certain level of difficulty involved in the act of copying another work.

I think you have it upside-down. Before the printing press, there were no copyrights. It was an honor for the author if someone took the time to copy his book.

Nowadays, when you buy a book or a CD, you're paying for content, not for the medium. In that context, maybe "stealing" is not an appropriate word, but "free-loading" definitely is.
Emphasizing that the cuts are unrelated to individual performance is very important. It always bothers me when someone excuses a layoff as an opportunity to sweep out the deadwood. That's just rationalization. The exigencies of a layoff make it impossible to focus cuts on the lowest performers. Cuts have to be decided quickly, and usually focus on the least profitable employees. Take the time to figure out who is the deadwood and everyone else's productivity and commitment will be destroyed by uncertainty.
He has an opinion, and he states it. It's not like he has some sort of conflict of interest.
So what can we learn from this for designing future languages?

Make it standard idiom to have every file of code declare its version-dialect at the top?

Default to throwing warning if interpreter and code version-dialect mismatch?

Have the main code interpreter called by all code files simply be a host for routing code to the correct dialect-version interpreter? Perhaps include an optional "slim" download where the host only includes the interpreter for one dialect-version, but make this non-default\opt-in.
People who don't do Python won't/can't use virtualenv. Also, you don't think that's a nasty workaround for something that should just be a non-issue? That's like you telling me to use NetBSD pkgsrc just to get around some ancient linux (which I have done).
I think there's something to not giving handouts. I'd prefer a hand. The strange thing is that we look at the poor as if we are a meritocracy. the general distribution of talent, intelligence and ability is likely to be statistically the same for all classes. And since there are more poor people there should be more success stories. Under a meritocracy there would me more processes in place that reached out to the "underprivileged." But what we see is a war on drugs...
I don't see how simply saying that country X made n requests creates transparency. It would be much more useful if there were some kind of metadata about the requests. Are they criminal investigations, national security issues etc. ??
Statistics would argue with you. Most sources put the proportion of repeat violent crime offenders at around 60%.
Yikes! if socket.gethostname() == 'your.domain.com': DEBUG = False ? This is just bad advice.

I prefer to be explicit in the settings for each environment, and create a settings package, with the following modules:

- common

- development

- staging

- production

Then in each of the non-common modules import the common variables, and set your DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE depending on the environment. virtualenv makes this particularly easy.

Here's a writeup by Zachary Voase, who I've had the pleasure of working with more than once:

http://blog.zacharyvoase.com/2010/02/03/django-project-conve...
You might be interested to know that the Tor project is helping Google and Mozilla with this very problem:

https://blog.torproject.org/blog/google-chrome-incognito-mod...

They have a lot of expertise in this area
I use a smaller plugin for that called StudioTools: http://submain.com/products/studiotools.aspx

And I agree, those features make you so much more productive!