skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Uh, I have access to GDB, Valgrind, and DTrace through Emacs (either through GUD or a separate mode). The integration is seamless enough for me, and if it wasn't, I could spend an hour writing an Emacs Lisp extension to fix it. This is classic FUD.
DTrace has Instruments.app on Mac.

Valgrind has KDevelop on Linux.
You'd have known if you had but simply scrolled to the introductory post:

> I’m going to write a python based MP3 decoder. Yeah, its a bad idea from a performance standpoint, but from a learning/documenting perspective, it is quick and easy.
> HTML5 actually standardizes a lot of features that Microsoft implemented years ago - shadows, gradients, glows, embeddable fonts, opacity, etc

Embeddable fonts are CSS, which is orhogonal to HTML5. Shadows and gradients are in <canvas> 2D context, but the well-known ones are also CSS properties, not HTML5.

SVG is based on VML. Microsoft proposed it to W3C (http://www.w3.org/TR/NOTE-VML), and W3C developed it further until it became SVG.

Microsoft's shadows, gradients and opactiy were based on DirectX filters with own horrible syntax, that didn't even tokenize according to CSS syntax. It couldn't be accepted in original form. Current syntax has been mostly invented by Apple (but gradients have been deemed too ugly as well, and spec went with Mozilla's syntax).

Microsoft's APIs may have been first, but they're not pretty. PPK calls IE-derived drag'n'drop API a "fucking disaster": http://www.quirksmode.org/blog/archives/2009/09/the_html5_dr...

Sadly, lots of Microsoft's and Netscape's Browser War-era inventions are in HTML5 only because lots/high-profile websites rely on them.
New York City to Change Street Signs From All Caps to Title Case
I do indeed, sorry - my fingers have a mind of their own.
I don't know why trying to reach real-time speeds with Python. At the moment it's really a slow language. According to my measurements is JavaScript at the moment the fastest "typeless" scripting language: the engine in Firefox can be up to 200 times faster than Python. There's also a command-line version.
Withdrawing from the euro is unthinkable, in practical terms.

However, what if national currencies are reintroduced in addition to the euro? (just some lateral thinking...)
This is great advice. I've done something similar and found that after about 2 months you can get a flavour of what life in that country would be like. It's a fantastic thing to do, and it will completely change your perspective on life in the UK!

It's incredibly important to have someone you can trust to take care of admin issues at home if you're gone a while though. My parents helped me out, but a lawyer or accountant will also work - but cost you a fortune. Possibly you can hire a temporary admin assistant, but make sure you trust that person to look after everything while you're gone; you never know what will happen.

The only problem that I've found has been getting a reliable internet connection for a couple of months at a time - if you have to work on sensitive things or you want to work on things for a long time, you don't want to work from public hotspots. I'd love to get some advice for that situation myself.
The author of this article gets it wrong. The movie does not glorify lotteries, where students are chosen at random for a better publicly funded school. The audience wants all the featured students to get into the charter schools. Their dreams are discussed and their parents shown putting in work to get them into the lottery.

Another sad fact is that there are lotteries at all. We really need to be asking ourselves why our tax dollars are being used to promote a system where parents and students feel that they have to be one of the lucky ones.
I could spend an hour writing an Emacs Lisp extension to fix it

That's real nice for you, but what VS does is bring it out-of-the-box to everyone. Way to miss the point.
You're correct about the software- it's brutally priced. But I have access to University copies that, though underpowered, can work for what I'm trying to do right now. I'm extremely lucky though.
Hi avinashv

I was looking for your email but couldn't find it. Just wanted to ask you a few questions regarding getting cloths made for a business.

send me a message at bardebes@gmail.com
Uh, sure, ok. Facebook "rode the fad" the same way Ford rode the car-driving fad.

You're not really saying anything at all, as far as I can tell.
I just like using a text editor with programming features. Kate on Linux, Notepad++ on Windows, and Komodo on Mac.
Hacker-built businesses still have the grind of acquiring customers, getting traction, growing revenue, etc. All businesses are subject to external forces.
In-application integration is necessary? Higher integration just means that your debugging task is modal instead of allowing you to edit your comments while the debugger is running. It also means your application eats up more memory and takes longer to launch. It also means you can't substitute it as easily for something different.

I'll take my separation + hooks for launching any day over massive integration that means doing what you want is hard / impossible.
I understand that it is additional work and I really don't want to be demanding. I’m happy when a website merely works. (I’m not sure how non-standard windows not spanning the entire width of the screen are. That seems like the default behavior of any browser window on the Mac. I would love to see data.)

It‘s just that many, many websites are being optimized for low resolutions on mobile devices anyway. It would be great if that work could be repurposed for the desktop.
Moving back in December. Not downtown of course. But I'd like to get involved in something to help the mighty D make a comeback.
"The OS" doesn't matter because it has been decoupled from "the platform", which remains crucial. Developing for Android or iOS, you are exposed only to vague clues that they are implemented on top of Unix. The only reason the OS ever did matter is because virtual machines and complete API abstraction layers have not always been practical.

Also, writing off QNX as just another Unix is a mistake. An RTOS with synchronous IPC baked in to the kernel is potentially game changing technology, though I am skeptical that RIM will manage to fully exploit it.
It is not that well-explained, actually. Checking for output-ready status is quite often a waste of time. An exceptional condition does not necessarily mean an error (TCP OOB messages, though rarely used), and it is likewise unnecessary for many if not most applications.

Python, like many languages, seems to just defer to the OS select(), so a good read for parties interested are the man pages and maybe something like Beej's Guide to Networking.
As I noted in my previous post, it's pretty much out-of-the-box for Emacs as well. But even if it wasn't, who cares? You're going to spend the next decade at least using your development tools. The smart thing to do is to pick the highest quality tools and spend the time to learn them.

In no other creative or engineering profession is there this expectation that the most advanced tools are shrink wrapped together. Who gives a shit if you can buy paint together with your brushes? Just buy the best damn paint and brushes you can find, regardless of who sells them.
What are you talking about? Even Multics was multitasking. Heck, that's already in the name.
> One reason I don't use an IDE is the overhead in starting it up.

Why? You start it once, the first time you want to start developing. And you never close it until you reboot the machine.

Same as with Emacs, start it, have it enable server-mode automatically, and until you reboot you go through emacsclient.
Yes, right...
The Social Network Movie vs Facebook's True Story
Well written article, I've never used select as Twisted casts a long shadow and has always satisfied my needs.
>Windows will live on — in a PC industry now at a plateau.

In America, maybe. Are they claiming the number of PCs will not increase significantly? Especially given their losing ground to OSX, they're most certainly not at a plateau that isn't self-inflicted.
I can't believe that in a thread about good books with 135 comments nobody has mentioned The Brothers Karamazov.

Especially since the bherms mentioned Atlas Shrugged, I think BK would be a great book to explore humanity illuminated in a much different way.
I find 'all on one page' far more usable than having to click 'next' and wait for a whole new page to load. Many comments I see generally indicate that this feeling is common.
Martyrs, or How to be Miserable and Inefficient
His contribution is impressive, but it has a long way to go.

Good online instruction presents very different challenges not found with traditional classroom teaching or "professor-as-focus" videos. It's an instructional medium unique to itself, and still finding its legs.

I completely disagree with course content that's been created using poor-quality audio and "visuals" (not video). "Good enough" is not only disrespectful to the student but completely unnecessary given the quality and cost of great content production tools available the past four years.

Higher-quality means more post production work, however, but it's worth it because "when it's done right, it will always be done right."

Four rules have emerged so far in this new medium: 1) The material must take center stage, not the presenter, 2) students prefer granularity of subject matter in short vignettes, 3) done well is always done well, promoting repeatable instructional excellence, 4) high-quality audio/visual production tools are a must.

A lot of us, not just Sal, employ these principals in our work. But overall, it needs to bake a little more before being presented at TED or before the MacArthur Foundation.

The educational paradigm is shifting, and indeed being disrupted, but not in the way most people think.
This clearly increases impressions, and perhaps the variety of ads a user sees in a single session, but does it actually increase the likelihood they will click?
Although it says in the NYP article that the 27.6 million for the city won't immediately be justified, there had to be some estimated benefit. They allude to helping elderly drivers avoid accidents, but I wish they had thrown some numbers out there as to estimated savings in dollars or accidents, within any geographic scope. I'm definitely not going to look within the bowels of the FHA document system for this one.
The Plane Finder AR: An App Threatens Airline Security?
> Since, my official country of residence at the time was france, I didn't have to pay any taxes.

I'm sorry, but I have hard time believing that. Since you were still a resident of France I'm sure you have to pay some tax to France in some shape or form.
It'd also be nice if the summarizer separated the text into readable chunks, like paragraphs as opposed to a single wall of text!
They portrayed harvard the way they did to highlight the roles privilege and elitism had to with the founding of Facebook. It's no accident facebook, whose differentiating feature from it's competitors was elitism, was born at an ivy league school, an ecosystem dependent on elitism and social connections for professional advantages. It would be hard to convey this in a 2 hour movie without exaggerating harvard life, that's film bub.
Never mind, they fixed it.
It was most likely building an index of your source tree or something. IntelliJ starts up fast enough for me and I rarely restart my IDE anyway. IntelliJ stays open on my MacBook Pro for weeks.
Even better, 'where the ladies who are tech savvy/nerdy enough to use Foursquare' are at!!
It goes without saying that all business endeavors will have problems being for-profit institutions. What I meant with the post before was that given the normal wear of growing a business and doing the same while including the web1.0 bubble, I'll take the costs of doing business alone without the macroeconomic cloud.
You're assuming the name is intended to be in English. It's not; that's Ebonics.
Think about an Oil rig, if you will. Just because it takes half a billion dollars to get it started doesn't mean it is barely eking out a profit while it's being built. Once it's built, its going to make the owners billions.
These days, trying to find someone on Facebook or another social site is paramount to finding someone in the phone book 20 years ago. I'm glad the fellow got his son back, but there simply isn't anything remarkable about this kind of story anymore. Last week a friend who ditched me 5 years ago found me and apologized via Facebook. Newsworthy? Average people now have access to all kinds of information finding methods that were only available to a select few a few years ago. So yes, it's not a surprise when they use them.

Did people still write newspaper stories in 1920 when Grandpa Murt drove a model T for the first time?
Ask HN: Explain to non-techies what you do: Programmer? Developer? Engineer?
I find it amazing that Schmidt is highlighting the obvious flaws that are built into the political system by lobbying - which are pretty obvious to most people .. and is complaining that it's difficult to change the political system because of it, when Google is a major player in the lobbying game, a major player which is most probably in the game to win itself.

He mentions that incentives drive politics - which is true, but surely lobbying is just the visible vehicle of incentives driving politics? If he views incentives as a fact of life .. why is lobbying not accepted with a similar amount of cynical reasoning?

Maybe Google is trying to work out how they can affect politics in a more effective way, as something other than a lobbyist?

He talks about America's strengths in education, but that graduates (useful to Google) aren't able to be granted visas automatically.

He highlights how China's success is based around its shrewd use of business strategy and technology. He talks about how China has a top-down approach to orchestrating change, but he doesn't mention how censorship and control of information also features heavily in Chinese politics. Also, if his metaphor is extended .. what role do the citizens of a country run as a business have?

As a comparison, he also indicates how he feels that Google's omnipresence (power) is set to grow in the future, regardless. He also talks about the power that technology has as a disrupter, a couple of times. On one level, I think he's highlighting Google's clout.

The thrust of the conversation seems to be based around the concept of a what a tech company (e.g. 'Google') could offer a government, in terms of business strategy and enabling change through technology.

I'm not a Luddite, but on a couple of levels the interview worries me. He's professing that technology is good because it reduces what the human mind needs to be capable of - while at the same time, the technology that Google amasses is going to grow far more capable. All the while, he's insinuating that Google's in a unique position to shape the political landscape.

When it comes down to it, I don't trust his reasoning and I don't totally understand his incentives.
I'm not arguing with you about what is the "best" development toolchain. FWIW I'm an Emacs user myself.

But my point stands: if you do want the fully-integrated IDE experience, VS is state-of-the-art, there's nothing like it on any other platform. That is why I don't say "better" or "worse" I say "not comparable".
If I had to implement something as sophisticated and novel (to me) as an mp3 decoder, I would first prototype it in my favorite dynamic language and then port it to something fast.
Thank God! After driving past 64TH, 63RD and 62ND St, I was at a complete loss squinting at the sign trying to figure out what was coming next.
"I make sure websites work."
Again, missing the point.
From a purely anecdotal point of view, I have lived in 8 different cities in the U.S., including San Francisco, and it by far has the least amount of available straight women (per capita) of those 8 places.
I'm a total newbie to Emacs - where can I find it for Windows, the last few times there have been an 'IDEs suck!' post on hacker news I've gone looking for it, and have found different versions, and dead links. What version do you use and where did you get it?
Being Contrarian is About to Go Mainstream
Hate to tell you this, but pagerank/SEO juice on subdomains doesn't transfer back to the main domain.

spkto.us/blog would be a much more effective configuration for SEO.

(I assume you'd like traffic on your site from google.)
If you already know analysis (well), the best probability book is "Probability & Measure" by Billingsley. A gentler introduction is the SUMS book "Measure, Probability, and Integral."

If you don't care about measure theory and just want to learn how to calculate the probability that a coin comes up heads in the first five attempts, the book by Larsen and Marx is pretty good.
Actually you get both. I can edit comments while debugging and I can edit code that gets recompiled on the fly while debugging.
> If bike lanes really are that dangerous, we need to get rid of them.

That's correct. This is precisely what Forrester has been saying for years. Bicycle lanes that co-exist with vehicular traffic are simply too dangerous. Separate lanes inevitably have to merge with traffic lanes in order for bicyclists to turn left. Therefore, bicycle lanes are simply not practical for most transportation. At best, they reinforce the notion of a bicycle as suited only for recreation. At worst, they lead to fatal accidents.

> bikers ride with lawless abandon, ignore common courtesy,

As opposed to the saints known as motorists?!?

I mostly obey the law, but you'll see me dismounting and walking my bicycle across a crosswalk on the same day that I see you doing this with your passenger car or motorcycle. If there's a conflict between the law and keeping myself (relatively) safe, the law loses every single time. Assuming that other vehicle operators are batshit insane is a very good idea (regardless of whether you are on a bicycle or not!), as is the assumption that the cops can't do much. At the end of the day, the reason SUVs were so popular is that you're pretty much on your own out there.

I much prefer downtown traffic to suburbs or country roads; rush hour is much more predictable and it's hard for drivers to quickly make bad decisions when they're gridlocked. On suburban streets you get to deal with distracted soccer moms in 5-ton SUVs trying to adjust the radio, smack the kids, and pass at the same time. Odds do not favor bicyclists.
Turn off Aero, upgrade your RAM, you're doing a lot of work.
If you're doing what you love, why give that up for money and the chance to find another thing you love? Lightning doesn't always strike twice.

Also, to rip off Sean Parker's character in "The Social Network", do you want to end up like Roy Raymond, who committed suicide after selling Victoria's Secret on the cheap, watching with regret as it grew into the billions?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roy_Raymond_(businessman)
Somebody mentioned The Sirens of Titan (Vonnegut) in the comments below. I've gotta second that recommendation. It's Vonnegut's first novel, and probably not his best, but it's certainly my favorite.

If you resonate at all with Vonnegut's humor and pathos, then please oh please grab a copy of Sirens. I'm tired of being the only one at the dinner table who's read it!
Whatcolor
That's because many of the people who build those tools have coupled them to an IDE, rather than making a standalone tool that could be made to work with any editor with a little effort. And while it would be changing files without the IDE knowing, version control systems run standalone and modify file currently being edited, too - it's not a problem when you expect it.

A standalone tool can either do static analysis (like a tag index, but more so) or communicate with the language runtime, and just leave the UI to the editor/IDE. Either way, it doesn't need to be in sed & awk.
Unix has no code in common with Multics.

In the first Unix, starting a process from the shell did exec, not fork. When the "child" process exited, the kernel would restart the shell. All the process control stuff came when Unix was rewritten in C from the original assembly.
Pop Montreal 2010 Pick: PyPy
Most research mathematicians don't have a clue what people outside of their field work on, so this is a great book if only because it lets to you talk to the guy down the hall :-) Use it to figure out what interests you mathematically, and then drill down to various subjects with more in-depth texts.
The 'UNIX' system in Jurassic Park was, in fact, UNIX
"I build things people like to use."
He is a fantastic speaker - http://vimeo.com/11731351 and interviewee - http://mixergy.com/salman-khan-academy-interview/
Indeed, I was not.
Ask HN: Strange: Why haven't TI graphing calculators dropped in price?
According to Moore's law, graphing calculators should be super cheap right now, but TI sells standard graphing calculators for about $140 still. What's the deal?
Elon Musk. PayPal, SpaceX, Tesla.
I had a number of conversations about this exact sentiment when I was writing for Mahalo.

I came to understand that there is a balance between writing enough information that users found an article helpful but not so much information that they would not want to click on ads or related pages.

The problem of course is that when one is encouraged to write almost completely with profit and clicks in mind that eventually, their body of work becomes devalued by the audience.
I have a UK business and we decided with my wife to travel around the world. We could have saved a lot on our taxes by claiming non-residency etc. but in the end we didn't. We set our business virtual office as our home and all our mail goes there. So far we are having time of our life, travelled 3 months in USA & Canada and currently in Ecuador.

The difficulties we have are:
- troubles with virtual offce - if you decide for virtual office choose carefuly - its very frustrating if you need to change the address while being abroad
- time to actually do any work - there is so much to see in the world and having motivation to keep building your business is tough

Things we thought we would have difficulty but they are fine:
- internet connection - all around USA & Canada we had wifi everywhere + I bought Verizon mobile internet + ATT data package for iPhone and so wired 24/7 . Also, in South AMerica - Ecuador, you can buy prepaid mobile internet for good price and its reliable
- I thought the business will suffer but so far its doing better than before and it probably helped me to realize that if I want to grow my business - I need to hire good people and trust them to do a good job.
- pretending you are in UK - I thought I will have hard time in getting new business / contracts signed - but other companies don't mind - in fact I signed biggest clients while being in a campsite in mountains of Canada. all contracts can be Fedexed etc.. no problem at all
What to do with a site that accidentally got popular?
4 few years ago a friend and I made www.turntubelist.com to scratch a personal itch. We've never tried to advertise it or push it anywhere but overtime the users slowly climbed from 50 hits a day, to 100, to 150... but then 6 months ago something happened. I dunno what, but it happened from Brazil, and then Japan then kind of everywhere - 6000+ visits a day for weeks. It's settled down now - about 1500 visits a day... but the people who use it have a REALLY long average-time-on-site: 26 minutes, according to Google Analytics.

There's no ads up there at the moment, which would be the obvious thing - but because it's all client-side it would be hard(er) to get relevant ads (like for the songs the user is searching for etc).

Anyhooo.... What would you do with it?
isomorphic?