skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Personally I believe the exact opposite. It is important that we break free from the political propaganda that says that terrorism means a suicide bomber that kills others, and recognize that the basic concept of terrorism is used all the time by our own respective governments and other power figures.

I see it as terrorism when a religious leader tells people that they will go to hell for not following religious tenants. I see it as terrorism when a government uses FUD on its own people to get them to support a war on another nation.

I also see it as a form of terrorism to take over someone's account and post something in their name. The average person who discovers that someone has hijacked their account and posted in their name is going to feel angry and afraid.

As far as I see it Idiocy and Firesheep can be used in the same manner as terrorism: to frighten people by threatening them. Sure the threat of taking over an online account is much less than the threat of death by a suicide bomb, but I see no reason why it should not be called terrorism.

Instead I find it fascinating that there is so much negative feelings toward me personally for using the word terrorism. Is it suddenly non-kosher to make a comparison? You say I am "cheapening language skills" and "talking babble". I am just surprised at your vehement response, and the general dislike of my use of the word.

I have a broad view of what terrorism is, you evidently have a very narrow view. If you do not want to broaden your view of what a terrorist act can be, then you will not notice the many subtle acts of terrorism committed. If people insist that terrorism can only be applied to acts of physical violence then they will be unaware of the way governments, political leaders, religious leaders, and others use fear to control the masses.

But the point of my comments originally were not to define terrorism, but instead to explain why I might disapprove of Idiocy. Instead it appears to have turned into a large discussion on whether or not it is right to use the word terrorism to describe something which scares someone into changing their actions or habits.

At any rate, downvotes do not hurt me, but I am disappointed by the narrow view of what the word terrorism means.
Go Lang - ARM progress: all tests now pass
Want A Free Google TV? Become An Android Developer; Google Is Giving Away 10,000
> Those who contribute a lot of free work without compensation don't have much business sense.

Yeah, just like a writer who blogs, a soccer-mom who drives all the neighbourhood kids to practice and basically anyone who ever volunteered their time or resources for anything have no business sense. It feel like 1999 all over again, but here goes: Rewards comes in other forms than money.

> You also have to worry they will contaminate your code with GPLd code that they have secretly reattributed.

Frankly, I'd be more worried that a person not familiar with the workings of the open source community would be more at risk for making this kind of mistake. Why would copy-pasting this method I found in the open on teh interwebs not be OK? And who's ever gonna find out?
A factor I would like to see controlled for would be the serum vitamin D levels of the subjects. I'm guessing that at least some of these findings could simply be the result of spending more time indoors.
Means people (like myself) tried to use it. It wasn't immediately obvious how to get the damn thing to work once I got it installed so I moved on to a new shiny.
Are there any companies that provide 'server host failure' insurance for instances like this? It seems like a possible opportunity.
Do you have a link? I'd really like to read more about that.
Not to mention, it gives the best experience to your users. I flat out hate using a phpBB forum - usually, I just move on.
#3 seems particularly pedantic. I thought pg's argument was pretty clear:

Angel investing is like betting on long shots. You're arguing with the bookie over whether the odds should be 95-to-1 or 100-to-1, when you should be worrying about whether the horse can win the race at all.
I presume that it is merely a matter of time before this device is rooted and turned into a basic Android tablet, complete with Flash, Marketplace access, etc.

I suspect, however, that it is too underpowered to support Flash very well.
The Economy: An Acute Case Of Plantar Fasciitis
i don't feel forced to use google, so it doesn't inspire the contempt i had for microsoft when it was facing accusations of anticompetitive practices
Where are the negative color associations? What color was used for fear in 2010 etc.
A fair amount of walking around and standing around, too, I would think. Certainly compared to the modern desk worker.

Do you disagree?
Why Membase Uses Erlang
I'd also be interested in learning why you couldn't;t read Smashing Magazine. Thanks.
Not so much that they'll secretly take GPL'd code, but they'll just dump it in without telling you and then 2 years later when somebody finds it in your widget, it's a major pita figuring out what's happening.
thanks, I noticed user culix already suggested it, so I upvoted his suggestion: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=499851
"The Ruby on Rails Framework (and Alternatives: Merb, Sinatra, Ramaze, Rango)"

Merb? Does anyone maintain that, or use it for new projects?

Has anyone used Rango such that they could comment on it?
Couple of things for the record:

1. I may well have misunderstood or misrepresented what you've said. But it was not deliberate.

2. I concede that point #5 was unfair. It occurred to me as I was writing and watching the video, and I decided to add it on the spur of the moment. I should have thought about it more carefully. I've added an update to that effect.
For inspiration: things that reject this same old paradigm:
http://www.amazon.com/Beyond-Desktop-Metaphor-Integrated-Env...
The standing desk thing is silly. Just stroll around the block every few hours.
Not unique to it, but it is implicit in it. This matters. If you are at the size where you can't have a dedicated staff monitoring your uptime 24/7 than you are at the size where a cloud solution is going to be more responsive than what you can afford.
Because I agree with Paul on almost everything else. And in fact, I should have stopped at four. (Maybe I should have stopped at zero.)
... indeed, it is a bit rich to hear the US DoD, which appears ok with causing 10s of thousands of deaths in support of its (questionable) strategic aims, taking moral umbrage at the possibility that the behavior of another party might in the same way cause a few hundred.
TNNWC Group - Join Us
:) there's one of 6th street now... enjoy!
I'd guess it's signal/noise ratio issue. I'd assume the number of "I have a startup but no money" people outnumber the "I have money and am looking to invest in a startup" people. By forcing startups to "pitch" and "schmooze" it acts as an filter to keep everyone but the most serious startups from wasting the time of these investors, even if it does take away time from these fledgling companies.

edit: On top of that, in reply to "low key" - I'm reading that as "low net-worth but still willing to spend" - http://www.paulgraham.com/startupfunding.html under "Friends/Family" - taking money from non-accredited investors is a burden according to this essay, but I don't know details myself.
I was referring to the middle of the scale, rather than the middle of the universe.
Travel sites urge US to block Google takeover of ITA
Some of the "soft" questions I've recently started asking interview candidates:

What computing blogs / magazines do you read? - To see if he keeps up-to-date on trends in technology.

What are some of your favourite languages? What do you code with in your free time? - Not just to gauge passion, but also to see how diverse his toolset is. Someone who knows Java, Clojure and Matlab is well-rounded. Someone who knows only Java, C++ and C# is not.

What do you dislike about your favourite language? - To make sure the guy isn't a religious nut, since we probably don't use his favourite.

Who are the key people in your field? - For a given topic the developer is passionate about, there should be someone whose papers he's read plenty of times.

Why did you leave your last job? - Pretty standard one, but always key.

I also require a cover letter of everyone who applies, plus I tell recruiters that I want the resume in LaTeX. In addition to gauging writing skills and technical adeptness, those two requirements are a pretty good filter against spray-and-pray applicants.
It will. Currently in private beta, heroku will render an iframe pointed to an arbitrary url hosted externally (say, on S3.)
Atoi is even easier than itoa :)

I hear you. These basic functions make excellent questions.
Given that Ted Patrick (http://ted.onflash.org/) just left Adobe for Barnes & Noble, there is a reasonable chance that it may get Flash at some point.
Appcelerator closes $9M in funding; enters partnership with PayPal
Why did you submit a reddit thread instead of the linked article?

http://ltgenpanda.tumblr.com/post/1403230157/did-digg-game-i...
I haven't seen an explanation for this, but I could be related to ec2 issues today. I'm a heroku user. Downtime with any host always seems to happen with bad timing, during a daily client call today. However I'm not concerned about heroku - yet... I think they have less downtime than I would have doing it myself.
It's more a vague recollection. Isn't there something about it in "Founders at Work"?
Nook color first hands on
For what it's worth, Expedia actually uses its own fare search and pricing engine, called Best Fare Search.

http://www.tnooz.com/2010/05/10/news/if-google-reins-in-ita-...

If anything if Google acquires ITA and exercises tyrannical control over the data, it could open a door for Expedia to license their data to companies like Kayak and TripAdvisor.
Yeah, I start asking them to code atoi(). That question works miracles.
Ask HN: PHP vs Rails
I have a project built in PHP (and CodeIgniter) and it's ready to release. It's based on the Facebook API, so it at least makes sense to write some of it in PHP.

PHP doesn't make me happy though the same way Rails makes me happy and motivated to code. I was thinking about this today when I read this about Ruby:

"Yukihiro Matsumoto (a.k.a. Matz), creator of Ruby, said that he wanted to minimize his frustration with programming, minimize his effort in programming and have fun with software development."

I knew this, but forgot about it.

What do I do:

1) Release and just stick with PHP.
2) Release and Re-write it down the road.
3) Re-code it in Ruby and push back the release date?

Doing any re-coding will be a waste of time and take away from adding new features.
It's not necessarily intrusive just because it's running. I bet it's just swapped to disk and using ~0% of the CPU most of the time.
I'm the same way, but I'm going to expand on that a bit.

It's not that I'm no longer opinionated, but I've matured as a programmer. I no longer view any solution as the only/best solution to any given problem. So rather than being so opinionated that you don't concede, I find myself listening to other possible solutions with an open mind and admitting that I'm wrong.

I feel that people who are overly opinionated just haven't matured to the point where they can comfortably say that they're wrong or that another solution exists that performs just as well.
Since Merb merged with Rails to become Rails 3, yes. But I don't know what it's state as independent project is now.
You the bad programmer won't. You will get rocked in any such interview because you didn't prepare.
I tried that, and it gets me part way there, but the internals of the WordPress index.php come into play to prevent this being a solution.

1. WordPress wants the "Page" name to come last, so I followed your suggestion, but with "app" moved to the end.
Same idea as your rule, but rearranged. See .htaccess appended below.

2. The REQUEST_URI is "alpha/beta/app", and the QUERY_STRING "p1=alpha&p2=beta", ...

but the WordPress index.php comes into play and seems to do a REDIRECT (so my app never gets a chance to run)

so that REQUEST_URI becomes "app" and QUERY_STRING is empty. My app code runs, but now it is too late; the parameters are gone.

Any further suggestions?

# .htaccess

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^index\.php$ - [L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule ^([^/]+)/([^/]+)/app$ /app/?p1=$1&p2=$2 [QSA,L]
</IfModule>

# BEGIN WordPress
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^index\.php$ - [L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]
</IfModule>

# END WordPress
How much do they contribute to open source projects?

I always take issue with this one. Not all good developers are commiters to open source projects and not all commiters are good developers. While I personally would love to contribute to some open source project I use, the area of work I am in makes it difficult to do so. When you freelance it is an additional burden to try to explain to customers that portions of the code you develop on their dime will get contributed to an open source project. Even if they are generic routines that have no direct benefit to the company other than getting the project done. Also given the fact that some of my clients are blue chip tech companies jumping through the legal hoops is a royal PITA. So in the end it is just easier for me to not be a contributor. I submit bug's, test cases, and suggestions but the requirement of my time to CYA myself so that I can contribute some code back kills my ability to do so. I have to imagine that their are a good deal of top caliber developers in the same boat. I think the point of whether someone contributes to an open source project is moot at best.
Thanks for pointing that out, because I had completely forgotten that this was the case. (I actually can't remember at all, but I figure that I knew that from when they came out)

They did go a long way in a short period of time. Winter 2008 feels so close.
The problem with "sufficiently smart compilers" is that they can make reasoning accurately about performance difficult. James Hague has a good post about that, "On Being Sufficiently Smart" (http://prog21.dadgum.com/40.html).

Lua does almost no optimization at compile time* (in part so it can compile data dumps rapidly) but I find it easy to predict the performance trade-offs in various implementation choices. In a roundabout way, it still ends up easy to tune.

Still, usefulness and performance are only indirectly related. I think that was PG's original point.

* Yet oddly it ends up quite a bit faster than Python, and there's also LuaJIT.
+1 for hacking, the secret to good ergonomics.

Having said that, there are several reasons to throw a few dollars at the problem:

Tilting your monitor up is, itself, lousy ergonomics. My monitor is already balanced on a tower of books to get it to proper height when I'm sitting; another 18 inches and it will be like playing Jenga with my company's LCD.

Your first days as a standee will necessarily be the hardest. The feature where you can swap from seated to standing and back in five seconds with one hand will never be handier than in the first month. And if you skimp on this feature you'll be in danger of giving yourself a bad experience, needlessly.
Keep Your Family In Another City
This really ought to be phrased something more like "According to the best current model of the universe, there was no time until the big bang occurred. However, this model has known flaws; it is the best because we haven't got anything better, not because it is actually correct. Many competing models have been proposed, many of which include some form of time before the big bang." It really should not be stated as unassailable fact that time started with the big bang. It isn't even unassailable fact that the big bang must have erased all information about the previous universe.
Oh please know that product is important. Tech much less so. Launch launch launch.
Excusing or not excusing are irrelevant.

If you stop using Heroku and manage your own infrastructure, you need to take all relevant costs into account.

Of course, finding an alternative provider of the same (or similar) services is also an option.
Is there anyone who has tried? There are tons of 'find a co-founder' websites, but I have not heard of a single 'show off your demo and speak with investors' website.

I know that investors want to invest in people not a product, but a good demo could and should lead to introductions.
Deploying your Ruby app with Mongrel2
There are only one or two ways if you know what the program is doing, there are many ways to write the one or two solutions in a programming language.
IOnApple: Steve Jobs' Business Card from 1979
PHP is a language and Rails is a framework.

You might be better asking PHP Vs. Ruby
or CakePHP, Zend Frameworks Vs. Rails.

Is it Rails that makes you happy? If so i understand CakePHP to be a rails clone in the PHP language.
Move to vps.net for a few weeks, then move back to Heroku, by that time he'll be counting uptime not downtime!
I think that's actually a pretty reasonable way of doing things. That said, I probably wouldn't worry too much about getting 9 pages of rankings -- once you're past 1 or 2, does it really matter (except as "boy I need to work on that one")?

The only thing I would suggest is in your testing, make sure you're using a clean browser (e.g. not logged into your google account, no cookies set for google, etc.) Otherwise, since you're running your API requests (assuming you're using the JS interface) from your browser (thus your google account) and checking the results from your google account/browser, then the results will be the same. Because the variance is tied to history, preferences, locale, etc. So I'd double check from a clean browser (preferably in a different location if you can) because otherwise you're supplying the same input as from the API calls.
'iDOS' DOS Emulator for iPad Pulled
I know crowdsourced design gets a lot of flack around here, but take a look at crowdspring.com or 99designs.com

I used to work at CS (as a dev), so I got to see a lot of entries.

You can get some good work for way less than an independent designer would charge. Some buyers ended up establishing relationships with designers they liked, too.
as a dedicated strength trainer, bodybuilder, and all-around gym rat, i absolutely NEED eight hours of sleep. i can feel a massive difference when i wake up for work in terms of soreness and stiffness if i don't get a full night's sleep. waking up the day after a heavy squat or deadlift session on a full night's rest feels AMAZING - doing it on 4 hours of sleep is 1000% the opposite.

on top of that, if i don't hammer a huge breakfast in the morning before work i'm about as miserable as i would have been had i only slept four hours.

sleeping well and eating well means i'm productive at work. being productive at work makes me leave the office with a positive mood, ready to get back into the gym and start the cycle over.

to anybody that believes they can survive on 4-5 hours of sleep nightly, i suggest you pick up an exercise routine immediately. after a few weeks it will be quite apparent to you the relationship between a healthy body and a full sleep schedule.
In my limited experience of reading smashingmagazine.com articles they quite often lack any meaningful depth, are often link bait, often lists of limited value (612 got Wordpress themes that use the colour blue...) and worst of all is that I find the ads overwhelming (quantity and content).

http://skitch.com/davidmcclain/d7k79/successful-freelancing-...

For me this was akin to an offer of a burger. Great, I love burgers but oh, it's from McDonalds? I don't like McDonalds burgers. My comment was the equivalent of "I was interested in your burger until I saw it was from McDonalds".

If you guys get something out of it then great. I don't mean to or want to begrudge you of a useful resource.
I think you did well to write this article, although if you zoom out one or two levels of abstraction, you would be in agreement on most, if not all points.
> Just because we have been eating grains for 30,000 years does not mean that's what we ate throughout the majority of our evolutionary history.

This is true. Even granting the paleo premise, though, eating something through evolutionary history does not in any way imply it is the most optimal food for humans. Only that it is a sustainable diet. It irritates me that people (many of the fad-chasers at any rate) seem to think that way. Then again, it also irritates me that people generally think evolution is an optimising process.

> I'm not a nutritionist but I do eat a predominantly lacto paleo diet and the changes in my body fat, sleep habits and energy levels have been extraordinary.

Did you make any other lifestyle changes along with it?
which jurisdictions is google subject to such court orders under? is it just a matter of where the datacenters are located?
Most useful, thank you very much!
Concept: Open Lobby and Game Servers
I get paid for typing. Strolling, not so much.

I don't mean to suggest that walking and thinking is useless. It's quite productive, actually. But theoretical hacking will only get you so far. Sooner or later you have to type things, and read the results, and read the manuals and blogs that explain the results, and I can't really do much of that while strolling around the block.
If you want to see which mysql queries are running in almost-realtime, you could do:

watch -n 1 -d 'echo "SHOW PROCESSLIST;" | mysql'
Anybody in the hard sciences was pretty competent, except for a couple of HTML-related issues.

Fine arts, education, sociology, and just students in general, however... And I say that with an art degree, too.
Judge slaps Lime Wire with permanent injunction
Hackernews|Ask HN : Review my startup weekend project
We meet people at different event and location, we share business cards. Sometimes we run out of it and then it becomes extremely difficult to connect people when needed. Also afterwards, we have to maintain stack of cards and reconnect it with person with where we meet. Secondly for most of the people like students, workers who don't have business card, it's becomes very difficult to make connection and share contacts and remain connected.
We developed a product to solve these problems, it’s called Digixcard. Digixcard create your own business / personal card using your social network's profile. It's a location aware mobile application which allows you to create and share your cards on the fly.
www.zubha-labs.com/pages/labs-1
digixcard.com
Yet Another Android Lawsuit: Gemalto Goes After Google
Carbs, protein

I recently started to dismiss comments that include statements like "all carbs you need, all protein you need" etc. as not only useless, but actually harmful.

The source of carbs, fats, proteins is way more important than the fact that a certain amount of nutrients is present in a certain food.

If all a human needed was a certain amount of nutrients, it would be possible to be perfectly healthy on a diet of table sugar for carbs, industrially extracted vegetable oils for fats, some amino acid pills for proteins and a multivitamin complex. I think we can all agree that this would not work well.
I just measured a 50px difference in my configuration, that is including Firefox's Status bar at the bottom and not including Chrome's 20px fly-out link hover thing at the bottom left. Of course you can completely change Firefox around if you you want.