skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I wonder why they don't just release their existing AWT/Swing adaptations?

Either they are afraid of people using the Mac OS style on Windows, or that by open sourcing the style, they loose their copyright to it, or the code is such as mess that they'd rather not release it into the open.
Upvoted you both for on-topic self-promotion. HN needs more of that.
Universities don't care.

It is naive to believe that a research university's purpose is to educate its undergrads. If you speak to any professor, they will tell you that the purpose of a university is to create ground breaking innovation on the bleeding edge of their fields. The undergrads are there just because they have to deal with it. Given the option of teaching and research, most professors wouldn't think twice.
The linguist in me recoiled in disgust at this idea, instantly envisioning a nightmare universe where laconic tweens fingered anti-prose into their touch-screen phones ("lol i tnk ur rong cuz he wuz @ skool ystrday"), to be Googled into corresponding legible words ("I think you have the wrong idea; I saw him at school yesterday.") as their actual ability to communicate slowly atrophied.

The developer in me thought, "Oh man. That would be effing sweet."
> Tonight I was talking with an exec at Google and I brought up the success of Instagr.am (they’ve gotten more than 500,000 downloads in just a few weeks) and asked him “why can’t Google do that?”

First of all the number of downloads, especially during the period of initial hype, is not a very useful metric. But even assuming that Instagram is an amazingly successful product, it's still a little fish comparing to Google. This company is more interested in developing Android, a platform on which toys like that can be built, which by the way has more than 200,000 activations per day.
As a side note, I wouldn't call Apple products "magical", maybe to the extent that they make people's money disappear. But that can be explained, somehow, without magic too.

I think the focus of his reply should have been on Jobs' giant ego, which is undeniable.
It's exaggerated because he's intentionally trying to provoke a reaction. It's better that you just let them act unprofessionally all on their own, and then go file an official complaint and another with the ACLU here: http://bit.ly/9KOipo
RockMelt verdict: great browser for the desktop, but isn't this the mobile era?
Does this mean there's some chance you'll be able to use Java for Mac App Store apps?
Upvote a post on HN if I click on the post in the New section.
"So we will see this behavior and other troubling things continue to happen for some time to come. When will it stop? Who knows? But be prepared for it to end. And when it does, things will be different. And we should all be prepared for that time"

What are the other troubling things? How will things be different? And how should we all be prepared?
Oh, absolutely. There are important similarities (in fact, scary ones) to what happened in Germany in the 1930's and what is happening in the US (and, to a lesser extent, other countries).

But "little nazis" trivializes that discussion; and uses the same pressure points as the TSA use. In fact the commenter above is basically advocating (in his other posts more than the first one) a form of short-term benevolent almost-totalitarianism "for the greater good" (better us telling you what to do than them). There are a number of historical examples of this, and its failings as well.

Point is; this is a classic example of Godwins law. If the GP had made a serious comparison then fine, but the aim was different.

Is this a loss of fundamental rights? I think... partly it is, partly it isn't. Try as I might I can't find myself completely outraged by the actual process here, it makes me uncomfortable and some of the bad examples make me mad (from a personal perspective I don't care either if someone wants to rub their hands on me so I can get on a plane). But what does concern me is the precedent in forcing us to submit to invasive checks; and that is where our fundamental rights (to my mind) come into play.

Do we have a fundamental right to get on a plane without invasive checks? Not entirely. But we do have the fundamental right not to be suspected, molested and mistreated at the hands of the government, and if this is a minor example if that happening, we should stamp on it now.
Why are entrepreneurs so happy? (infographic)
That looks almost like what I had in mind... except you have to tell it what you like and don't like about an article (limited to author, title, publisher). What I had in mind was, feed the text of the article to a bayesian filter, and let the system make decisions based on that.

At first sight, telling newsblur that you like an author or publisher, doesn't seem to useful... you might as well subscribe to their feed in a regular RSS reader then. But maybe I'm misunderstanding it.
Source: http://www.contactme.com/blog/trends/why-are-entrepreneurs-h...
If there was a program to go from legalese to lay that was as accurate as a lawyer then it would change the lawyer's profession forever.
Website design phoenix
Fasturtle is a premiere search engine optimization, internet marketing, web design and development company serving the small and medium business (SMB) sector nationwide. We also specialize in Email Marketing and Search Engine Optimization.
Get a small enough laptop and tell them it's a "netbook" if they ask. It worked for me with the MacBook Air.
The way people describe themselves in press releases is ridiculous:

"Oracle is the world’s most complete, open and integrated business software and hardware systems company. For more information about Oracle, please visit our Web site at www.oracle.com.

Apple designs Macs, the best personal computers in the world, along with OS X, iLife, iWork, and professional software. Apple leads the digital music revolution with its iPods and iTunes online store. Apple is reinventing the mobile phone with its revolutionary iPhone and App Store, and has recently introduced its magical iPad which is defining the future of mobile media and computing devices."
I don't agree with one the points and I think at least one important is omitted. You don't need to know any scripting language and while Ruby, Python etc is popular in the LAMP camp .Net (and possibly Java) and probably a dussin other compiled languages are holding their own. There's nothing intrinsically elegant or better with scripting languages.

One major trend that's omitted is the coming important of concurrent/multicore programming. It has become clear for many that computers aren't getting that much faster but they're getting more and more core's. To be be able to utilize that power you need to start code from the ground up to take advantage of multithreading.

On the .Net side Microsoft seems very aware of this and has rolled out a number of new techologies and tool support, things like Parallel.net, PLINQ, Reactive Framework and most recently Async. F# is by nature of being a functional language very suited for parallel processing.

No doubt other frameworks and languages will soon follow.
Satellite moved to die a quicker death, reduce space junk
A lean startup isn’t necessarily a small one (video)
Making money with mobile apps
Not all football guys are brutal dickish jocks.

In fact, most are just nerds about lifting and football, sometimes more traditional subjects like gaming, comics and math. (Yes, math.)
> only JRE that have passed the TCK (Java Compatibility Kit) get the patent waiver,

No. That's not true. As long as your code is derived from OpenJDK (and unavoidably licensed under GPL), you are protected from patent lawsuits from Oracle (for technology contributed to OpenJDK). What it doesn't protect you from is trademark issues if you claim whatever thing you have is Java. You can say "pretty much compatible with that famous VM invented by Sun(TM)" and you are clear.

> And to get it certified you have to agree to a restrictive licence from Oracle

Again, the GPL states you can use OpenJDK for whatever you want. If you decide to run a nuclear reactor with it, you are free to do so (as only the Oracle JDK is licensed under such restrictive terms)

> Sun promised Apache to make the TCK available under an open licence but this never happened.

I understand this is the core of the problem. What is not clear is how this adversely affects users.

> since IBM have switched to OpenJDK, it removes that pressure and makes Java much more closed.

We still have OpenJDK licensed under GPL. How's that closed?
Facebook to Open New $450 Million Data Center in North Carolina
The coming war over the future of Java
I suggest conserving brainpower by skipping 4 and choosing Python for 1.
Ok, I seriously thought I was the only one who did the second. I've looked back at some of my stuff and thought that that was when I probably peaked and none of my stuff lately is as good.
Also see http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1897583.
No, he's saying it's insignificant.

1 body scan = 1 hour normally = 1 minute aboard a flight

By comparison, last time I got a real x-ray the x-ray tech told me the radiation was about equivalent to a cross country (~5 hour) flight.
Well, it worked for Marion Robert Morrison. He grew up to be John Wayne.
I really don't understand why so many “techy” people freak out as soon as Apple dares to use the word “magical”. That's certainly much better than calling everything “innovative” and it is self explanatory if you don't play stupid.

Apple deserves to be lauded for not using overly boring adjectives once in their boilerplate blurb.
It's worth noting that Peter himself mentions that most of the ternary tricks he describes are not very readable and wouldn't be considered Pythonic.

Beautiful is better than ugly.
Explicit is better than implicit.
Simple is better than complex.

Personally I'd hate to see something like that in any real-world project.

(test and [result] or [alternative])[0]
Write a program to run on my minecraft computer
True. I was talking personal use only because that's where mobiles have replaced land lines.
I went there on my last trip to the UK, and had a chance to talk to a 92 year-old gentleman who had helped build some of the machines during the war, and had been involved the project to reconstruct the Colossus machine.

There isn't the huge throng of visitors and high security like at other museums. I was able to walk behind the cordon and get a up-close view of a running Colossus machine.

It feels like a place with living history, and I highly recommend visiting!

Edit: There is no shortage of Enigma machines in museums, by the way. I know there are ones at the NSA museum, the Imperial War Museum in London, and Bletchley Park has several. If someone wants their own for home use and they can afford it, I am all in favour of that.
This kind of news needs to make it onto the radio and tv. Most of the population does not read NH or any blogs.
I think it's possible, but you would need peices to draw off of: Google uses U.N. translations to train their algorithms, but how many documents do we have translating legalese into good english, or poor writing into great writing? Probably not more than a couple hundred.
I'm not defending the op, just pointing out something about Godwin's law that is pertinent. I think we're in agreement, only difference being that I am actually outraged.

My theory is this: because technology intermediates the process, our natural revulsion is subverted. Consider, if instead you had to strip naked and be ogled by security personnel and have a photo taken, would that affect your feelings?

In terms of fundamental rights, I think freedom to travel is pretty fundamental to pursuit of happiness and unreasonable search and seizure. I have trouble with the argument from "existence of alternatives" and find that this is often just as absurd an argument as silly nazi references. Like arguments that end with "move to another country then" "just take a boat" is not a practical solution. Flying isn't a luxury if your family is overseas, or necessary for your work.
It's true, we are just a small subset of people who need things built to solve problems. But we also do have problems to solve, which is why companies like GitHub exist.

If building tools to solve software development problems is something you can get excited about, go build those tools. But don't ignore the sea of possibilities outside our world.
The sad thing is that facebook itself is already somewhat of a "Gmail killer." I have a ton of people that will only contact me through facebook. When I ask why they don't use email they usually don't have an answer. The ones that do mumble something about convenience.
Can we get a trademark on the HNFHM?
The one true REST explanation
What kind of work do you do that allows you to code without an Internet connection?

These days, I can't go more than 10 lines of code without having to call some API* that requires me to be online.

* Examples from just yesterday: Amazon, Twitter, Facebook, PayPal, GData Contacts, GData Maps, Bing Maps, YouTube.
Sounds like the creator of 7books has a couple of features to add.
There does seem to be a difference in Apple's App store apps and the default system apps, which could be considered more analogous to a OS feature. The distinction is muddled since these OS features are accessed from the springboard, along with actual apps.
Automated News Comes To Sports Coverage Via StatSheet
You buy them with real money, and can spend them within applications on Facebook. It's not usable for anything outside of Facebook, or directly sending stuff to your friends.

But it's still the beginnings of an entry into the market.
Looking at Different Writing Tools for Macs
How long till we see cellphones (not the purported FB phone) utilize just one source for your contacts? I just got a WP7 phone and had to merge all my contacts in from multiple sources, if instead MS just piggybacked off FB only, it would make things far easier for the end user. Also FB could claim "portability" to some degree (even if just with their partner MS)
We are also a community of fast adopters, and this is one reason we are a good group to build things for.
>"What it doesn't protect you from is trademark issues if you claim whatever thing you have is Java."

There's more to it than that. If I call it Dalvik, like Google did, why would I get a lawsuit?

Edit: I have to say I don't think I even understand what open source means anymore. If I release an open source product, but then say you can only make modifications and sell it if you pass my tests (which I don't make freely available), it's not really open right?
If you already trust Google with your email, then it cant be that bad.
Since this isn't all that cutting edge of a list, ajax seems missing. How about this one: design a website that never does a full page refresh and responds to server requests so quickly that you never see that annoying loading ring going around in a circle.
Right, that's why I said 'at least not on average'. If you are asking your kids questions while you read that are phrased in the proper way then there is benefit, but most people wouldn't do that unless they were trained to.
python -c "import _if; fact = lambda n: _if (n <= 1) (1) (lambda: n * fact(n-1)) ; fact(5)"

The main advantage of a 1-liner is that you can compose the whole thing and execute it without having to format anything. That is a nice feature for code that is only ever intended to be used once, such as from the python repl or some other shell. --Or more than once, for the duration of a session. It's a lot easier to use command history to get and modify a 1-liner than to replay a 5-line function definition.

When the code is primarily expressions, it's relatively easy to to this. Trying to do one-liners with regular python syntax can get tricky.

Also, if you have a series of similar relationships to present, it's often easier to line them up next to each other. You might cut 12 lines to 6 lines and the whole thing will be far clearer. Although in those cases, it's probably more effective to use a dictionary to achieve the same thing, with the advantage of data/logic separation.
Where is MacVim?
Robot wars break out on poker sites
As soon as I saw the story about textCAPTCHA I knew somebody would tackle it and solve it.

There have been so many 'captcha alternatives' on HN recently, all of them forget that there is a very good reason why current captcha's are extremely distorted images.
Very nice. Any chance you'll release the code (or the grammar)?
Wow very impressive, just tried it:

Q:Which word from list "duckweed, commendations, civilised, receptionists, flours" contains the letter "v"?
A: FAILURE

Q: What word from "interdisciplinary, disorientating, decamps, moan" begins with "i"?
A: FAILURE

Q: Egg, pink, white, green and pub: the 1st colour is?
A: pink

Q: The day of the week in dog, Wednesday, penguin, trousers, hotel or lion is?
A: wednesday

Q: Hand, jelly or Jennifer: the person's name is?
A: jennifer

Q: What is fifty three thousand seven hundred and one as digits?
A: 53701

Q: Cake, rice, snake, head and jelly: how many body parts in the list?
A: 1

Q: If yesterday was Tuesday, what day is today?
A: wednesday

Q: Which of these is a body part: lion, jelly, church, butter or nose?
A: nose
I wish programming was an art and programmers considered artists.
I use both. A Wordpress install for my public blog, and Posterous for a blog to share w/ friends & family during an internship.

I don't have any strong opinions here. Wordpress is great, and so is Posterous. The few things you may want to look into are:

- Updates: Wordpress, both the core and the various plugins, needs updating. Usually everything goes well, but still it's a minor annoyance.

- Plugins: As you said, Wordpress has plugins for about everything under the sun. :) Might come in handy.

- Ease of posting: Wordpress isn't that bad. You can even set up email posting like in Posterous.

- Ease of install: installing Wordpress on a vanilla server, though quite easy, is a nice way to brush up your admin skills.

Posterous offers a very straightforward Google Analytics integration. Just go into your control panel, paste the bit of Javascript GA gives you, and Posterous will display it in every page.

Ideally I'd want it to reside at www.domain.com/blog .. I'm not sure if I'd be able to do that with Posterous ..
I'm not sure either. You can definitely set up your own domain to use with Posterous though.

I guess in the end the biggest question is whether you want to spend time fiddling with your install or not. If not, then Posterous is dead simple and has everything. If you're ready to spend some more time, then Wordpress can't hurt.
care to publish the src?
Sometimes I download/clone all I need, then go offline. I'm always amazed by how good it feels to go offline!
Fred is describing a bubble in the making, and I agree. I have considered this hot market to be a good thing for developers (e.g., I have been able to turn down most work offers and just take the ones where I will learn the most) but an eventual crash will hurt developers who don't have specific and hard to find job skills.
My point is that maybe a higher level of investment IS sustainable.

I don't know what his IRR is but he says "enjoyed an amazing run" which I am guessing means something north of 25%. That rate of return will not stay that high as more investors jump in who are willing to accept a lower return.

Hopefully we are coming up the "Slope of Enlightenment" this time:
http://www.gartner.com/technology/research/methodologies/hyp...
You're right that many martial arts teachers/schools are like this. But there are some that aren't. I've taken had the good fortune to learn from three or four instructors, and there is no doubt in my mind that every one of them has a very high level of skill and is able to apply that skill in real-world situations. The problem is how to find these people and distinguish them from the fakes.
Great job. Seeing this solve 10/10, it almost feels like artificial intelligence. You should send a resume to the Wolfram Alpha guys (their hit rate was significantly lower: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1891375)
Linux Mint 10 “Julia” released
I believe the reason is that it was not derived from anything, such as OpenJDK, that had existing licensing protection.
3 key components of a sales pitch:

A. Get their attention
B. Summarize the key advantages the customer will receive by purchasing your product/service
C. Tell them specifically how to make the transaction

Sounds like you have taken care of A and B already. But are you not making it easy for the customer to say yes? Perhaps you need to be more specific on your price & terms. How do they get started? Who do they make the check to? What happens after that?

Finally, to amplify the chances of closing the sale - makes sure you include a risk reversal proposition. Ie- "if you're not completely satisfied within 60 days, we'll refund you with no questions asked." This is really important, since you guys are new to the game, and so you should be expected to accept 100% of the risk in the transaction. Get your prospective customer to understand this, and if they still aren't making a purchase with you it's time to move on to the next one.
I'd like to wait a little bit to see if Rob (who it seems runs the site) will make it a little better. There are people who use this service and I don't think it would be right to let spammers attack them.

Granted, it wouldn't be hard for someone else to do the same as me, but I just don't want my work used to do harm to someone else.
Where is GNU/Emacs?
On the other hand, the value of the reviews on these sites goes down the older they get.

On Amazon it seems like the opposite is true. Because of their meta-review process, where users can flag reviews as helpful or not, it seems like old and classic reviews tend to float to the top, while recent ones have a significant hurdle to overcome before they make it to the front page. See for example here: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0262011530

(Admittedly, users can also be fickle and support other kinds of reviews for different reasons, cf. http://www.amazon.com/Tuscan-Whole-Milk-Gallon-128/dp/B00032...)
Here is a non-trend that should be: be more than just familiar with SQL solutions like MySQL, PostgreSQL. This to me is the most common missing skill among software developers.
Probably not, although I couldn't tell for sure at this moment. It's certainly a lot cooler debugging feature in relation to Intel chips.
Atlassian isn't hiring people solely on the strength of their screener. They just want to be able to more objectively screen out people who have no business applying. Most companies do this by reviewing resumes and getting rid of everyone who, say, doesn't have X years experience with Y language, or didn't have Z GPA in college.
Well said. Unfortunately.
We have documents that have gone through an editing process, with changes tracked from draft through to published article.

I'm thinking particularly here of the process inside, say, a news agency. Many of the changes made by sub-editors are fairly mechanical modifications, to conform to a standard style. They might well be sufficiently repetitive to train a 'translator'.

You could also take a corpus of 'good' and a corpus of 'bad' writing, and compare the features in each. sentence length, constructions used. Origin of words would be an interesting one ('never use a Latinate word where an Anglo-Saxon one will do').

Unfortunately, most of the difference between good and bad writing is in the ordering of ideas; you can't really deal with that on statistical grounds.
The Other iOS Programming Language
Google doesn't have a tendency to change their privacy policy and intentionally release private information, while Facebook does.

[EDIT: Changed "the" to "their," and "rules" to "policy," as this makes my sentence both look better and more accurate.]
One of those times when I hugely miss languages with pattern matching/guards.

fact(1) = 1
fact(n) = n * fact(n-1)

Seems much more readable to me.