skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The existence of these projects is necessitated because users want to use unix-y programs but they don't know how to compile themselves. I don't use either of homebrew or macports anymore. I used to have them but then when I want to make something that depends on something I got from homebrew or macports it doesn't quite work and I end up downloading the source and compiling it into a framework using XCode myself anyway.

I've done this so many times it doesn't take me more than a few minutes to get all the dependencies in order. (I can re-use frameworks I've made before). The frameworks are embedded into the application bundle and can be used on any other computer that can run universal binaries. That makes the app portable, too. The beauty of all this is that other computers don't even need a compiler installed and they can still use the same programs I built. Of course it'll never beat apt... but it's the easiest in terms of getting that DVD to ipod video converter onto my aunt's computer.

I believe you're right. If you want package management the OS has to be built around it, otherwise it won't work quite right (unless you put time into it, of course).

I still will use macosx though, it needs less configuration and everything just works; or maybe I'm just too used to it to use anything else. Mac OS X is built for consumers and developers who develop for consumers who use Apple products. For these consumers and developers Mac OS X is the best there is. Unfortunately I think that's it. Terminal is still good, though.

To upgrade your OS, you only need to click "Restart" when software update tells you to. The only time you need the DVDs is when there is a major version out, i.e "Leopard", "Snow Leopard", etc.
I've done stacks of Java programming in gVim, and, yes, I had to look up some of the APIs, but for the most part, it was just fine. Using Ant allowed my just use the shell to build.

For C#, I don't mind VS2010. My laptop handles it just fine, though, yes, it's a bit slow on start-up, but once it starts, I can just leave it open for days and days. I do, however, use the VIM extension.

For all other stuff (Perl, ColdFusion (really), Javascript), I use gVim.
I'm somewhat disappointed that he referred to the last error message as "cryptic" - it's a nod to the old text based game "Adventure"
Tell me about it. TOAD takes more resources to run on my PC than Oracle. Same with Eclipse.

I remember when people joked that Emacs was a memory hog "eight megs and constantly swapping".
Re: "stealing ideas" vs "improving on them".

Doesn't your comclusion here go against the USA's entire full-court-press on maximal "intellectual property"? I mean, we've extended copyrights, we've allowed just about every vague pipe-dream to be patented, and we've actually criminalized reverse engineering in a lot of situations.

I sympathize with your viewpoint, but is that the direction we're heading? Are we heading in the right direction?
Dick Lipton's blog ( http://rjlipton.wordpress.com/ )does this as well, and I think this is an essential part of it being as successful as it is. People like being mentioned and like reading about other people, and humanizing ideas goes a long way towards making them interesting.
Ask HN: Getting started with automated trading?
I want to get into automated trading (individually) to validate a few ideas about markets. I read Larry Harris' book Trading and Exchanges and am confident that I could write a computer program that trades on my behalf. Now I have a whole bunch of technical questions:

1) Which platform should I use for trading? I need a solution that allows me to backtest my algorithms and executes trades quickly. Ideally I'd not have to install anything and I'd like to write trading strategies in whatever programming language I like. A platform with an API sounds best.

2) What are other features to consider when choosing a platform?

3) Is there any way to get into high-frequency trading as an individual investor? How fast can a trade be executed using any automated trading platform?

4) Are there any good communities around this topic?

5) Is there anything else I should know?
One thing I like about Vim which I'm not sure I have seen anyone else posted about here is that I can log into my remote VPS and have access to much of my development stack over the internetz. This is important to me because I live in the Philippines and my internet connection is relatively slow. It's good enough to get a solid terminal connection but downloading a large bundle of files could take days. So, I just log into my VPS, fire up Vim and if I need to get access to large number of files then I can quickly get them with Wget (obviously my server has a much faster connection speed than I do.) Also, if I get hit with a power outage I can hit an internet cafe (powered by generator) and get access to that same development stack no matter which computer I'm using.
Surely You're Joking is amazing. It's one of those books I can't get enough of, and I reread it several times. I wish I had such an interesting life.
I believe Emacs already had that bound to C-c C-c by default.
I've been using Vim for about 5 years now. I started because I needed an editor that supported syntax highlighting and auto-indent to work on the university servers over SSH.

It took (still takes) a lot of time to learn Vim. At first I used it as notepad with syntax-highlighting with auto-indent. That is, I immediately entered insert-mode and kept in there for as long as I could. But slowly I've started to learn myself how to truly use Vim. Nowadays I try and exit insert mode as quickly as possible (sometimes after typing just one or two letters).

Every once in a while I stop and reflect on things I do very often, look up ways to do them faster and then try and train those ways to be a habit. I learned most of these things from Bram Moolenaar's presentation "Seven habits of effective editing" (http://www.moolenaar.net/habits.pdf and http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=2538831956647446078) most of this talk probably holds for emacs too.

Examples: when I need to rewrite a function arguments nowadays I just type "ci(" which does Change Inner parenthesis, it deletes all text between the enclosing parenthesis and puts me in insert mode to start typing. If I need to move more then 5 lines down I use incremental search instead of arrows/hjkl to move around. If I need to move to the end of a line I use $ (goto end of line) or A (append after end of line). If I need to go to the middle I'll use other shortcuts.

Vim has billions of ways to move around and select text for editing. Learning to use those relevant to your way of working is crucial if you want Vim effectively instead of annoying form of non-modal editor.

As for making Vim useful to you, I don't think anyone can tell you how to do this. You need to make it fit your style of working. Which means, trying, figuring out what bothers you and steal what works from others. Most of these example .vimrc's that people post do not include comments on what the options do, which makes this hard. I commented mine but it is rather sparse and I don't have a place to dump it at the moment to show you, unfortunately.
"It's the same as a user deciding to make a backup of a webpage on their computer..."

... and then publishing it on the Internet.

(This is not meant to be snarky or to imply opposition to your product at all. I think there is a meaningful difference between saving to a computer and saving to a web-accessible, apparently globally readable website.
I think it all depends on what language/platform/framework you are working with. So far, Emacs has proven a joy to work with Django projects. I started using it on my move over to a netbook, because the screen real-estate is precious when I'm out of the office (and far from the big monitor). I went on and discovered elisp, made a couple customizations on how the editor starts, added a couple key bindings and so on.

OTOH, I can't use it with Google AppEngine projects because the way GAE takes over stdin/stdout, which prevents me from starting pdb/ipdb. For GAE work, I am stuck with Eclipse and Pydev. For me, the biggest nuisance is not the amount of memory/cycles it eats, but the amount of pixels.

What kind of framework you develop for?
I think this will go down in history as one of the great working relationships in the technology industry along with Larry & Sergey and Jobs & Woz.
I apologise that I'm not going to mention any specific books that I really recommend, but this seems like a good place to mention how great audio books can be. I love reading, but dont have anywhere near the time I used to these days to do it. I discovered audio books about 2 years ago whilst driving my young children to school. Its a 1-hour round trip, so for 30 minutes I'm in the car on my own. I've really enjoyed listening to business biographies (Richard Branson) through to books that I have been a bit sceptical about but have still picked up some good tips (4-hour work week). If you have a commute or a time when you're regularly able to listen to an audio book I thoroughly recommend them. It's very difficult to read whilst driving (!) so the audio book works well for me
McDs doesn't have to make a profit on that $1 burger. They'll make plenty of profit on the $1.50 soda or $2 fries that they sell alongside it.
I have a list of ideas and I rank the ideas by how much I like them. So the top idea in the list is the idea that I'm most passionate about.

Then from the top of the list I think about these factors:

1) How big is this idea, can I achieve it with the time/resources I have budgeted for? Resources can be funding, helpers, co-founders, technology, etc

2) What is the market size of the idea? Can my team support the overall vision?

3) Who are the competitors? Or is there a competitor? If there is a competitor, can I compete with the available resource/time that I have?

Start from the top idea and if any of the questions raises a red flag, move on to the next idea. You don't have to use the 3 questions I provided above, just add your own questions but the methodology is the same.
And please, for goodness sake, don't let anyone ruin the Bioshock story for you.
The great thing about the Old Currency is that I can spend it to buy things I want: food, clothes, books.

Until the New Currency can do that, I think I'll stick with the Old Currency.
BlindType has been acquired by Google
The Postmortem (Fred Wilson's opinion about Wesabe)
A well-stated rebuttal of the case for expanding patents
This is so true, works on personal level also.

How many of you has boasted to your friends "I'm working on this cool new software, I'll have a beta in few months to show you", and this was already five years ago and you never did release anything? I have.

The best itches are kept closed until you have something to release. Then you can maybe tap into that other drive, where having users testing and depending on your software keeps you going.
I think you're underestimating Facebook's social importance. Sure, your friends won't hate you, it won't be the end of the world, but there is a palpable sense of disconnect.

And there are more people who rely on Facebook for social connection, than people who rely on Google for business and finance (especially if you're talking about the under-25 crowd).
47% Americans never retire
I love wmii but it's a pity it's such a pita to build the plan9 stuff on osx. I prefer dwm that way - no pesky dependencies
C# Passing values between namespaces - C# Programming
Check this forum http://www.elitetrader.com/vb/forumdisplay.php?s=&forumi...
> I don't go the whole way and just install Debian on the machine mostly because having OSX handle things like the touchpad driver, hibernation, wifi, etc., is less hassle

Have you tried this recently, or do you just say that because it's the stereotype? Because it's been over three years since I had any hardware trouble with Ubuntu. These days I have more issues on my friend's OS X Macbook (no drivers for 3G modems out of the box) than I do on Ubuntu where everything just works.
I was born and raised in a suburb of Detroit. It's sad to see it die so much even over the course of my short life time.

I am watching the Requiem for Detroit documentary linked in the blog entry, it's well done.
I wasn't expecting it to work 100% flawlessly out of the box. But not even able to boot? I feel sorry for Canonical as 10.04 is an LTS release, so they're now stuck with this rather glaring incompatibility for years.
When American humorist Dave Barry traveled to Japan in 1991, he was stunned to find department stores selling $75 melons.

They still sell those. They're delicious. But not worth $75. Still, if you're going to grow fruit here, you might as well focus on making it delicious.
I agree with the sentiment, it's a noble idea and cause, however, don't you find it ironic that 90% of your post is about the thoughts and ideas of Mrs. Roosevelt?
I'm in a CS class right now and I'm amazed at how useless so many kids are without an IDE.

When I first started taking classes, I tried using eclipse. I decided rather quickly that, especially in a classroom setting, IDEs were a crutch and if I wanted to become a good programmer they would do more damage than good. (Note I said good. That may or may not be the same as productive.) So I started learning vim. Now I can't use most environments. I use Xcode for iphone development, but otherwise I'm just too programmed for vi. I need my commands and macros. GDB works great once you learn it. Valgrind works great as well. And these are available on any *nix machine, all over an ssh connection.

We just had a programming exam where they give you three hours on an isolated machine to build a fairly simple program in C++. Most of the questions and problems people had were that their IDE of choice wasn't working for some reason. Meanwhile, using vim/gdb/valgrind I was done in an hour, long before anyone else.
I’ve always wondering if farming could be a solution for Detroit? It seems to have plenty of land and with growing shortages of basic commodities such as Wheat on the global market surely there’s an opportunity to return large parts of the land back to farming use.
That's how Facebook feels about API docs, too.
The Glass Bead Game is mostly about useless academics that play a useless game and are remote from reality.

The main character tries to find true meaning, then dies a sudden death, unfit for life when confronted with it.
Ask HN: Living overseas with a profitable online business
I am a UK citizen with a profitable online business. I have no real responsibilities other than that and I would like to try living in a few different countries for a while before I have to settle in one place. My web business means I can work from anywhere as long as I have an Internet connection. Has anyone here in a similar situation tried this? What sort of hurdles did you face with visas? How was tax handled? Did earning your money online make things easier or complicate matters?
We might need some clarification about what we mean by interesting or valuable.

There is the interest that draws pageviews and adds advertising dollars, and I believe there is a different interest that informs you and gives you new things to think about, with less mass appeal but greater utility/value to the reader.

Talk about people or talk hedged in human interest might be at the first end of the spectrum because anyone can have an opinion, and reciting that opinion is the extent to which you interact with the idea.

The other end of the spectrum has a limited, focused appeal because you must have thought about it or have some understanding of the subject before you can participate. Then, your opinion/understanding process is challenged to fit pieces together that might offer contradictions to your beliefs, or require you to form new ones.
My current physics teacher's philosophy, as I understand it, is that he teaches something once, if no one says they need more instruction he moves on, and he does not work out problems to a final answer in class. His explanation is that he wants us to learn to learn on our own and ask questions, but of course he won't answer questions if they relate to material we should already know.

I haven't been able to figure out if this is a good thing or bad thing, rather it may come down to how students learn and what is the actual job/purpose of the instructor. If you learn the material before his lecture then there is no problem but then there is little reason to come to class other than it being a requirement and to enjoy the half of class he isn't instructing, discussing random topics and shooting the shit.
Should Entrepreneurs Bet It All On The Billion Dollar Exit, Or Cash Out Small?
Also, can we stop to consider the fact that a company that is worth billions of dollars can only barely eke out a profit, despite having access to the personal lives of 500 million people? It's not like they lack the capability to be evil. More likely, they're a paper tiger. They don't have much time to build the killer app that people will pay for before their investors start gettin anxious.

The approach to social networking they've taken simply isn't a particularly profitable approach, the profitable approach hasn't been invented yet. Eventually, people will realize that, and while they're running and begging venture capitalists for another $100 million just to keep the lights on in their server farms, someone else is gonna build the next big thing, and Facebook will go the way of Friendster and Myspace. If we've learned anything, social networks are fickle, and it doesn't take long for a trickle of users to become a flood.

Zuckerburg won't ever starve, and the company probably won't ever fold (heck, even AOL is still around), but the idea that his wealth and any perceived power is in any way stable just doesn't check in with reality.
Why should they burst? Certainly a little rubber balloon will - but the difference between a good helium balloon and vacuum isn't much - a thin foil layer would contain it without bursting.
And Ulysses is about a man taking a walk...

It's that perception of 'useless' that The Glass Bead Game addresses for me, at a personal level. YMMV.
No, I'm arguing that a "Womens Herstory" [1] prof most likely could not get a job making $500k/year as an investment banker or even a family friendly job as an actuary earning $100k. Thus, such jobs must be excluded from consideration.

Similarly, my ranking of jobs is Rock Star > Trader > Professor. ("Rock star" = http://www.nin.com/ , not http://imarockstarninja.com/ .) My preference for a job as a rock star is irrelevant due to my lack of skills, so I'm forced to choose between trader and professor.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herstory
I'm curious.

I've been using vim for not that long (but long enough that it's now my main editor). What all shortcuts exist for getting to the middle of a line?
But go 90 degrees away from the compass vector, otherwise you'll encounter the oncoming wave.
Earlier discussion, two days ago: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1747202

(There are other posts in the same series, to which the one linked here is the introduction. At least one has been submitted to HN, but hasn't attracted any comments.)
i can't believe this post got buried.
There's not too much of a problem here actally. All these plugins are supplemental functionality. Vim is an amazing editor by itself. Master that and then enhance it with a few plugins here and there for the particulars of your workflow.
Want to blow your mind?

Fiction
Keep an open mind, and a sense of wonder when you read these for max effect!

Hitch-hikers guide to the galaxy. I was hooked at "The big yellow ships hung in the air just the way bricks don't."

Dune - what does scarcity do to a society?

Isaac Asimov - Robot series. Foundation series. All of his short stories, esp. The Last Question, Nightfall.

A.C. Clarke - 2001 - series, Childhood's End, The Fountains of Paradise

The Little Prince, The Count of Monte Cristo, Catch-22, Siddhartha, Ender's Game, Sundiver, Wodehouse.
Very very soon http://flow.cloudomatic.com
For the temporally challenged, the linked articles are all already up.
We're not discussing Mrs. Roosevelt per se though, are we? We're discussing her ideas, which is the point. :)
I managed to get by on Vim with the following key bindings

[code]
h
j
k
l
i
a
^
$
Ctrl+w
Ctrl+n
Ctrl+p
*
#
?
[/code]
I don't think the problem is 'to-the-right' as much as 'on-the-right-margin'. Lots of tests show keeping values closer to their labels speeds comprehension; with a left-aligned label, and right-aligned value, and varying whitespace width between, interpreting the numbers is slightly slowed. (For example, in the redesign, the number of 'Following' is actually closer to the label for 'Followers'.)
How round numbers influence goals
I've found the same issue re screen updates, but I believe the issue its more to do with the well known ui latency of most java toolkits than the resources used by the app. Eg, eclipse may not be placing much load on memory if cpu but right clicking a project still produces an obvious lag before during the dialog on both linux and osx.
Do you have a link to the appropriate text somewhere out there on the Interwebs?
Yes, but I'm not familiar with python... Not yet at least. Considering the cost of a web app on Google App Engine is quite low, such a web app can still be profitable, even at $5 per user.
This used to be called "Startup News." It's a news site explicitly established for people who want to become Mark Zuckerberg. Flag it if you don't like it, but move on.
The success of the Khan Academy is by orthodox educational standards surprising. That it is surprising ought to tell us something: that the orthodox understanding of how education should be "delivered" is at least partly wrong.

We should be particularly suspect of the belief that higher production values are worth pursuing. Before KA, if you suggested that you could deliver unusually effective education through a series of ten-minute videos having truly horrible production values, the mainstream education industry would have ignored you. After KA, they can't.

What the success of the Khan Academy suggests is that production values are not important and, perhaps, that the pursuit of high production values is wasteful and even counterproductive.

Now that's an interesting hypothesis.
Agreed. This book changed my life like very few others have. It completely defies categorization and whatever you're expecting it to be, it isn't.
This is why I hate people quoting sociology studies. A comparison between wearing helmets and wearing long blonde wigs gets summarized as:

> research has shown that cars drive closer to people with helmets than they do to people without them

I've taken to just assuming any surprising result from sociology is bullshit unless I really trust the source or have thoroughly investigated the methodology.
Yeah, funny thing is that my bank won't let me pay my mortgage or credit card bills with "relevance".
I've never found being in the proximity of women to be my largest barrier to getting laid. Leaving my home usually solves that.