skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
FWIW, this is completely the opposite of what pg suggests:

http://paulgraham.com/top.html

Turning the other cheek turns out to have selfish advantages. Someone who does you an injury hurts you twice: first by the injury itself, and second by taking up your time afterward thinking about it. If you learn to ignore injuries you can at least avoid the second half. I've found I can to some extent avoid thinking about nasty things people have done to me by telling myself: this doesn't deserve space in my head.
Assuming you're not referring to yahoo Questions, there's a nice list here, maybe your site was included? Brainrack and InnoCentive seem to match your description:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_crowdsourcing_projects
Sorry but that whole exchange seems like this (skip to 8 mins in) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=snTBE_ykam4

He sounds like an arrogant toerag. I'd pass on all details to the police.
They have improved significantly and are still improving, just take a look at the included Mojolicious::Lite tutorial and the Mojolicious::Guides.
I did some amateur sleuthing as well, but unfortunately the most high tech thing I used was a zoom lens on a digital camera.

You see, my neighbourhood thief was knocking off pot plants and outdoor furniture. I saw him walking up the road several times with these items, but the guy looked like a 'roid rager so I wasn't about to start asking questions and figued he might be moving house locally.

But then he made the mistake of knocking off one of my plants, a delicate specimen I'd taken months to get going. And he was silly enough to put it in his window across the road.

I got some snaps of him, the plant, and dug through my photos to find one of the same plant in it's original location to show it was mine.

I took the lot down to the police station and handed it over. They couldn't believe it - and promptly drove straight around, knocked on the door and found an apartment full of stolen goods.

He was wanted for assault, had tipped a pool table onto someone in a drunken fight, was already on probation.

I had to go to court to give evidence and tell my story while this meathead stared at me. It was quite unnerving.

But he went away to jail and I've since moved, so now it's just a story to be told. The detective told me he wished all cases could be that easy.
Nice app, just one thing. If you press on an news item and it happens to take some time to load (due to low connection speed) the dialog box saying "Loading, Please wait..." is not cancelable (by pressing the Back button). It might be useful to enable this in one of the next updates.
Unreal. Dropped you an email to your gmail account.
This is what I hated the most, especially when I had to cancel domainsbyproxy separately. Not to mention, it is so painful to remember my logins for both services.
I would buy it, seriously
I think the motivation is important. In this case, there was the desire to stop the perpetrator from hurting others, so taking some time to pursue the case was driven (in part) by compassion, and not merely revenge.

Ignoring injuries is a great practice, if the injury is not likely to be inflicted, again and again, on others.
Tumblr wins because it's twice as fast
what about dumping a local python install in $HOME/local/opt/mongrel-python if m2sh didn't find a version it likes?

(yes, it's overkill)
Zed's pronouncements are works of art. The man is a pro. A veritable Martin Luther for our times.
Completely agree. The Linux distros (CentOS is the one I work with most, not out of choice) have antiquated Python versions.

You can get round it with virtualenv etc., and I do this as a matter of course when installing Python web applications. For a generic "plug and play" package like Mongrel2 however, where sysadmins just want something that runs straight out of apt-get or whatever, it's a pain and is holding things back.

I mean WTF does yum still require ye olde Python 2.4 ?
"Nazis' Gestapo and the East German Stasi secret police"

Ooops - it seems many people might not realize that Street View images are not live. There was also another statement in a newspaper here (Germany) where some police officers were considering if they could do virtual patrols. Misinformation leads to fear...

I think in the long run, the opposite thing will be much more important: people will fight to be IN street view. If you are a shop owner, not being on street view will be a significant disadvantage.

Not only will outdated pictures be a problem, but also the people living above your shop who opted out of Street View.
I've given very specific examples before, the result was a flame war, i have no interest in that.

Now i would rather stay on topic and talk about more exciting things like Mojolicious.
I tried your test, and was slightly faster at doing it vim than gedit (assuming my fingers were on the keyboard to begin with). How exactly did you do it in vim? I used the following:

y4j5jp -- yank down to 4 lines, move down to the blank line, paste after it.

I appreciate that there's an awful lot to learn before you can edit quickly in vim, and that the difference (if any) between that and gedit(or any other editor) may not be worth it.

I prefer vim for reasons other than speed, though -- the composable commands "feel" right to me, and the macro system makes short work of repetitive tasks. I'm essentially making lots of small programs to write the larger program for me.
A Portuguese physicist leads the competition to improve the Elo rating system
I buy my laptops from Dell, sans OS, and they're a bit cheaper that way. Occasionally, you can even find good ones that have Ubuntu preinstalled.
Patchy 3G coverage in areas is just one example of where a browser that's fully capable of running the latest JavaScript whizzbangs, yet still finds itself in a situation where it doesn't have any JavaScript to run.

At this point, the browser has no choice but to fallback to an HTML only state (or perhaps an HTML+CSS state). The times when this happens is out of our control, and it will never be in our control.

How you do that, is your choice. Other people can continue along the route of "they are not my audience" either until their audience drops to zero, or someone slaps a discrimination lawsuit on them.

Flaky 3G connections are just one example of factors outside a web developer's control. But there are many others.

Consider this: Opera mini is essentially a proxied browser. A server takes a static snapshot of a page and sends it on to Opera mini. No-one in their right mind would need such a locked down browser on their mobile devices. Especially not on an iPhone running Mobile Safari. And yet we have this: http://www.funkyspacemonkey.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/O... -- Opera Mini being the top Free App on the Apple iPhone Appstore in _20_ countries simultaneously.

Consider how SproutCore deals with 'offline storage' in a browser that doesn't currently support HTML5's local storage. I'd bet they follow dojo and use a series of fallbacks, and one out of that series is using a 1x1 pixel Flash app that has the ability to write to the local filesystem. Piece of cake, right?

Yet when we have something like this:
http://www.adobe.com/support/security/advisories/apsa10-03.h...
Big corporate organisations, and potentially big governmental organisations do stupid stuff like this:
http://www.webstandards.org/2006/04/03/script-blockers-break...
(Their proxies drop JavaScript that does any dealings with Flash).

So with good development best practice, the loading of the one monolithic JavaScript file gets silently aborted, and you get a page of just HTML and CSS.

We do not control the web environment. And that's what makes me weary of conceptions like SproutCore - their inability to adapt to the web environment as it is today.

(Offline application caching is no use when the cache is empty - that's a normal state of affairs when you first enter an application in one specific browser).
I understand what Zed's saying here - particularly as I came to programming from a sys admin background.

Just like Perl before it, Python (and to some extent, Ruby if you use Puppet) are part of the OS (Linux OS or OS X that is).

Shit can and will break if you mess with your OS.

You never got this with PHP because people didn't use it in their OSs.

But there's a simple solution: not only does the Ministry of Packaging want you to use virtualenv, your OS maker does too.

The faster pip and virtualenv become standard the better.
Let's say you own a motorhome/caravan and it's kept on your drive. To determine whether you are away on holiday or not, all I need to do is drive by your house and compare what I see with what Street View shows.

I can take a 2hr drive through suburbia and draw up a nice list of homes whose residents are unlikely to be in when I come by again in the evening.
Hi Zed,

Can you please elaborate with some details about how "broken" python is on systems, and the situation with python 2.4? According to the article, "recent Ubuntu releases" had broken/deprecated python installations. A quick search reveals that python 2.5 has been shipping as the default "python" meta-package(?)

http://packages.ubuntu.com/search?keywords=python

Can you also please elaborate any "features" that the install was missing - are these specific modules ?(I think python's sqlite3 is missing by default on Ubuntu. I'm not too sure.) I'm not questioning you or anything, I'm just slightly concerned as we had plans to ship a Python application, and when someone experienced enough has a valid complaint, it makes sense to understand the basis behind that.
While talking about this with other people (also in Germany), I also learned that the government does regular flyovers (at least in some cities) and also sells the images they create. Much better insights than just glimpses from the streets.
[Album] Soundgarden - Telephantasm (Deluxe Edition) (2010)
That is the short sighted view though. If everyone always turns the other cheek then there is little consequence to hurting or screwing others, which then reinforces the wrong-doers behaviors and perhaps even encourages others to join in. Within reason, one should always make it clear that certain actions are simply not acceptable and that there are clear consequences for those actions. If not for your self, it may save someone else from that same injustice.

The long term results of action vs. inaction will always have an impact on society as a whole and on one's personal quality of life; it just might not immediately noticeable.

If however, one is driven solely by revenge then it might cause one to expend way too many resources or cause one to take things too far but, still, intention has little effect on the external impact of an action.
My question is how do I tell if I'm not addressing a real pain point vs. the pain point is real, it is the product/execution/marketing that sucks

Sounds like you need to survey some of your users/former users to ask them about their experiences.

Presumably, if your product was making them money, they'd still be using it-- which would indicate that there's a problem on the execution side.

Coincidentally, I may be in your niche; I have an e-commerce site in the online retail market (selling books.) If you post a link to your site, I can put my "user" hat on, and take a look.
It's time to build the Analytical Engine
In most development scenarios you are actually interested to know which patents can potentially get you sued so please explain how exactly is the awareness of the patent existence of the disadvantage to you.
Read Ruby 1.9: Free Ebook About the Ruby Programming Language.
Indeed. I got to the statement:

"The distros have killed Python."

Said out loud, "here we go", and settled down for some classic Zed.

Can't fault him on it, though.
Speaking as someone who knows practically nothing here, I think the issue is existing systems, not brand new systems. The barrier to updating an existing system becomes greater the more and the longer things depend on it.
For Gnome, it's called baobab (in Applications -> Accessories -> Disk Usage Analyzer).
Das Telefonbuch has aerial images, that's very different from street-level images on Google Street View.
> It would also be great to have V8 as a different project so that it could be used outside of chrome with much less pain.

http://code.google.com/p/v8/source/browse/trunk/ ?
The numbers I can find indicate that, depending on the state, around 3-5% of "tenured" teachers are fired every year.

I hate to ask for links, but -- got a link for that? I'm hearing anecdotally that inner city schools have an almost 0% firing rate. Perhaps the suburban and rural areas make up for that.

If it's not too much trouble, I'd like to see that data. Would be handy to study a bit.
Actually a lot of very successful products bet on users being lazy, and a lot of very profitable industries intentionally keep the customers as ignorant as possible.

Both assumptions are common and valid business strategies.
He should have stolen the entire car before you would have him sent to prison? If someone were to pickpocket a single $1 bill from my pocket, I'd want him to be punished, to try and deter him from doing it again.
Shit can and will break if you mess with your OS.

Updating a program I use should never constitute "messing" with my OS, it should constitute "using". Why should I as an OS user have to constantly worry about upsetting the OS maker? Why should I have to jump through obscure hoops just to install some software without breaking my OS?

Wouldn't a better solution be for the OS makers to wall off their magic python behind some wall where I cannot see, touch nor use it, and let me install whatever python I want without fear.
Yeah, that's the idea.

It is the only way to hire customer support people. people who have worked phone or email tech support at other companies are extremely difficult to train into any sort of a customer facing role. I mean, sometimes they will make fine SysAdmins or Programmers, but working phone support usually kills off that which is required to deal with customers like human beings, especially in introverts, and, well, most qualified SysAdmins and Programmers are introverts.

as for other roles, it has it's ups and downs. On the upside, you get things done your way. On the downside? well, if your way isn't the best way, well, in the worst case you think your way is the best way and you keep doing it until it ends badly. In the best case, you know your way isn't any good and you hire an expert for consultation. There are many projects where I look back and say "It would have been cheaper if I just paid someone who knew what they were doing $100/hr to come in and just make it work for us." but obviously, I keep doing it, so I think, overall, the approach works for me.
You haven't met my dad.

He's a retired industrial engineer, and he avoided computers his whole life. Now that's he's retired, he's using the computer for communication and dating services. It has been quite a learning experience for him, and it has given me a look into the mind of non-techies that is way more extreme than I thought possible.

Even after a couple years of using the web, he still has trouble with basic ideas and terminology. And he's not alone. I've met others that had the same issues he does, but at the time I just assumed they weren't very bright. Now I know it's something else.

Sadly, I still don't know how to solve the issues.
This is very common as some companies don't want to you disappear within 3 months of joining because they have spent a lot of money hiring you.

The year part of it is to make sure that they have "made back" their signing bonus.
"older Debian"... but Python 2.5 has been packaged in Debian stable since at least Etch.
This is a relevant blog post from Ed Parsons, one of the guys that Google pays to think and talk about Geo-related stuff:

http://www.edparsons.com/2010/09/germany-doomed-never-to-inn...
I can't imagine anyone who lives in SF ever leaving anything visible in the car. Even leaving spare change or an old blanket in the back seat causes people to break in within hours (causing damage to the vehicle far in excess of any value of property stolen). One of the worst parts of SF. Contrasted with most Gulf Arab countries where I felt comfortable leaving $10k+ in equipment in unlocked vehicles parked for days.
Hilariously enough, I took the time to make sure the new config file format for m2sh was nearly perfectly backwards compatible with the old file. This is pretty funny because I predict nobody will blink an eye at the config file, even though it's basically Python.

This is an interesting point, especially given the amount of code (relatively small) actually needed to parse the subset of Python the config format uses. That said, the subset is fairly "generic scripting language" since there aren't any declarations, only assignments, lists, etc (at least at a cursory overview).
Yeah in the business world it doesn't matter how old you are, all the same rules apply. I think it's great that younger entrepreneurial types are creating things of real value, but we are in the real world with real customers spending real money.
>the market has decisively rejected Apple's attempt at total control

If it's so decisive you must be able to cite it pretty easily, eh? I'm plenty "tech savvy" but I've never jailbroken my phone. I like the safety the App Store gives me. I don't have time to vet every damn application and I'm happy that some else does, even if they fail to let few a few things I might have liked.
Does web performance matter? For Tumblr and other light blogging service providers, clearly it does and it made a big difference. A recent New York Times article pointed out that "Tumblr Leaves Posterous In the Dust". Both are leading light blogging service providers. However, Tumblr has out-grown Posterous significantly over the last year. Why? it looks like that one big reason is that Tumblr has been twice as fast as Posterous.
Getting a bunch of people to give your free service content and then suddenly changing policy so that you can charge for that submitted content always felt pretty sleazy to me.

Kind of like raising a bunch of money for starving orphans and then buying yourself a yacht.
"Say I have plugin called foo.vim, inside the bundles folder do I directly drop it or do I create a folder called foo and then drop foo.vim within it?

You need to create the folder foo with a folder called plugin and then foo.vim inside it -> foo/plugin/foo.vim

" Also say a plugin has syntax files and an ftplugin folder then do I just drop the plugin in pathogen and it is supposed to work?

Yep. Normally vim plugins are shipped in zip files that contain the structure and are meant to be installed on top of your .vim directory. All you do is instead install them into .bundles/pluginName instead. Also, since a lot of vim plugins are kept in source control anyways, a lot on github, you can simply use git submodules to version your plugins as well making updating them a cinch.
A Simple way to show Twitter there is an exploit
Sure, but you're leaving out FICA (6.2%) and Medicare (1.45%). This bumps the brackets to 40.65% and 42.65% (or 43.65% and 47.25%). After local taxes this can easily top 50%. Suppose you earned $357k gross in Rhode Island. Your total tax liability would be in the area of $189k, or 52.7%.

All of this also ignores the employer FICA contribution.
"We've read your code."

"I'm so sorry."
Hi, we are at http://www.zuupy.com, we appreciate any feedback at all.

Also, surveying our users/former users is something we do frequently, though response rates can always be improved.
I am curious: how do you think virtualenv and pip would solve the issue of antiquated python ? The only thing that virtualenv does is to install packages in some temporary location, that you can throw away later without impacting anything outside python.

Virtualenv does nothing to solve those issues. I am actually wondering whether it does not even aggravates them because people think those tools magically solve backward compatibility issue (which is the underlying issue here). If something as trivial as virtualenv would solve those issues, people distributing and packaging stuff would have done something similar for ages.
I think that Resharper is too bloated and instable. I use only Metascroll (a continuation of Rockscroll) for a fancy scrollbar and highlighting of intersting stuff in source.
Modern science map
FICA phases out around $100k, but there's also the future ObamaCare 3.8% tax (unearned income) 0.9% (earned income) as well (currently legislated to begin 1 JAN 2013).
I'd very much like to know why it wasn't easier for him to simply write a Python code that doesn't use anything not existing in 2.4.

Just because he downloaded to his computer whatever later version he likes he can't expect from all distros and all users to have exactly the same version across of all the currently running computers, it's more than unrealistic, it's simply impossible and always will be.
Firstly: no hoops are required to install any version of python or any required Python module your app needs:

* Just use pip and virtualenv. *

Your OS remains intact, and you get better deployment for free!

Replacing a component of your OS (Python 2.x) with another one (python 2.x +1 ) affects:

* The OS installer (Anaconda on RHEL, Ubuntu'sequivalent)

* The packaging system (yum)

* Many GNOME system admin apps.

* The config management tools (puppet sits on ruby)
Thank you for sharing these.

Suggestions: Add hover- and mouse-down styles for all of them. For example "Launch" only has a hover-style, but does not change when you press it. (on Chrome/OSX at least)
I'm sorry, I find it grossly naive that you believe a photograph taken from beyond the legislated privacy fence height in most jurisdictions to be not unreasonable. Of course people don't have a reasonable expectation of privacy from 3 meters tall, they have a reasonable expectation that people will respect the spirit of the law and not be a raging moron and place a camera at that height.

I do know that in many jurisdictions, probably including Germany, that it is completely 100% illegal to profit from your photography of another person without their written consent. Given that Google photographed several of my friends, didn't get them to sign a released and is making a profit off of its unconsented photography it is violating the law.

So, just for clarification. Google is violating the law in many jurisdictions. I'm unsure about Germany, but I know they are in the UK and Canada even though no charges have been brought. Perhaps because Google isn't specifically trying to make a profit off of the personal images they have taken, but under the letter of the law they are completely violating it at the moment. This is perhaps why they are working on software to remove people from their photographs, because they already know they're breaking the law.
I'm not sure why he concerns himself with old distros. Are they the customers for Mongrel2? The description on the website emphasizes modern web technologies.

Using Rails 3 is best with Ruby 1.9.2, and yet the only popular distros that install that via their package management system are the rolling release ones, Arch Linux and Gentoo (where it is masked). Most people willing to use this brand new software are also willing to compile their own necessary bleeding edge dependencies, and probably have a generally up-to-date distro preference (like Ubuntu).

Even the latest Debian stable, a notoriously conservative distribution, which is a year and a half old and due to be upgraded soon, uses Python 2.6. I'm not sure it's reasonable to support much past that.
In the ancient days, stuff the OS relied on was in /usr/sbin and stuff that was "yours" was in /usr/local/bin (or /opt) and stuff that no-one was quite sure whose it was was in /usr/bin. And lo, peace and harmony did reign upon the face of Unix. And the sysadmin did lie down with the developer, and it was good.

Who even knows how it works these days?
New Bill Would Require U.S. ISPs to Block Pirate Sites