skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It is not that big compared to the guns on a destroyer or a battleship. It is still large and bulky, but not that far off.

Current destroyer's gun:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5%22/54_caliber_Mark_45_gun

Iowa Class gun:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/16%22/50_caliber_Mark_7_gun
I thought about writing a blog post once because I think I've finally found the key insight to being a successful engineer. Then I realized it isn't long enough for a blog post.

Simple rule: if you're the smartest person in the room, go look for a room with smarter people in it.
Yes, in some countries if you advertise a public contest you first have to register it and vet it with your government, who then make sure everything is done fairly. That is something google simply cannot afford to do.

I am sure they will find a way to reward jamendo somehow. They'll invite the guys for a formal visit and give them business cards in the shape of netbooks, at the very least.
I mean, they get really pissed off when we hack a view 2 days before a deadline instead of just not delivering it. I mean people LOVE when you don't deliver.

Hacks are not good. Hacks should not be done all the time. But sometimes, shipping is more important than beauty and elegance. Hacks you put up while you get the real, good code in place is next to godliness when working in multicomponent systems under tight deadlines. Rails just isn't as good when you need to do that sort of thing. It doesn't have that flexibility, by design!

When I write the hacked up glue code first so they can do their stuff while I write mine, they f-ing love that. It lets them do their job!

I do things "the right way" 99% of the time. That buys me incredible flexibility to use utter crap code that's otherwise functional that other 1% of the time when required by the job.
Researchers develop genuine 3D camera
What happens when you do a django template "your way" or "they way we can do it in 2 hours instead of 12"? What happens with the same thing in a Rails project?

People may dislike that you did it, but you still CAN. That's the difference. With Ruby on Rails, you can't necessarily due it without the wheels coming off.

>I'd still go python over ruby, cause I'll take libraries

This is a comment about the non-web components of the language.

>how is Django not dramatically more opinionated?

The Django community is perhaps more opinionated. The actual software isn't. That's the issue with Rails. The actual software has strong opinions (aka, intentional inflexibility) baked into it. I honestly wouldn't pick Django either (preferring even less strict frameworks), but the OP asked a question X or Y, and I told him of those two I feel is better.
The assailant's body did a pretty good job of containing the explosion. The assailant didn't make it, but everyone else relatively okay.

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2009/09/28/eveningnews/main53...
Maxima is really cool but, because its so powerful, its sometimes difficult to work out how to do things. If your needs are more modest, I highly recommend Mathomatic:

http://www.mathomatic.org/math/
only thing that comes to my mind - also the same reason i will ignore html5 and css3 for the next 2-3 years:
the microsoft IE team are a bunch of losers who screwed everyone over since 10 years and it doesnt stop.
Fantastic idea...I encourage you to make this: I'd use it, and so would a significant proportion of HN users, I'd say.
Nike SB Blue Lobster Dunk Low Premium Concepts Cheap For Sale
It's hard to believe that we used to get a new story like this every few weeks.

Joel is such an enjoyable author to read that it really doesn't matter what he's writing about. He could be writing about some random Distributed Version Control system you have no intention of using (and he has) and you could still be pretty sure you'd be in for a pleasant 15 minutes.

I hope somebody can convince the guy to put stuff like this up on JoelOnSoftware. I mean sure, somebody might accuse him of blogging again (god forbid), but selfishly it would be nice not to have to rely on HackerNews to find little gems like this for me.
Hasn't the writer heard of Justin Bieber? Who does he think his 6 million followers are?
I actually think Bieber might be a big reason why more and more teenagers ARE starting to tweet. I recently did interviews with High School kids and was surprised to hear how many of them used twitter.
Twitter is a platform built for inclusive broadcast (to everyone), and to teenagers it offers no obvious value.

The author does not seem to realise that the Protected tweets feature is an option that obviates those objections, and makes Twitter function in the "circle of friends" manner the author desires.
I'm getting "502 Bad Gateway"
One of the things that bugs me about the Android UI, which doesn't seem to have been addressed in 2.3, is the lack of any decent UI management for multi-tasking. There's the alt-tab switcher if you hold down your home button which isn't a very obvious solution and it just takes too long. On my phone I have to hold down my home button for several seconds. This is probably a good example of what Topolsky is talking about.
site:4chan.org - 38/59/2

Huh.
List of Free Online Fax Services
As the demand for the free online fax is increasing there is a emergence of large number of companies which provides free online fax.service. These service providers offer free fax services to the customer but have they put their advertisement on the cover pages of the fax.
Quicksort is the new Hello World
I don't presume to know your work environment, but personally I work on my own projects and do contract work and, in my experience, taking on debt is usually a sign that there's a problem with the requirements and estimates, so I usually change those before making the code less maintainable (which, IMO, is usually a case of treating the symptom).

Regardless, I'm weary of claims that controller-level (django view level) code is a major pain point in Rails. In some ways it's actually easier since you can make fewer decisions by making them resource centric, but even deviating from that is as simple as map "/path", :to => "controller#action".

Rails/Django controllers/view and routing/urls aren't as elegant as micro-frameworks like Flask and Sinatra or not-so-micro-frameworks like Padrino, but they aren't anything close to serious stumbling blocks (though maybe routing to a very small degree in resource-centric Rails 2). Every blocking issue I've had with either framework has been on a deeper level. In Rails pre-3, it was usually configuration-related when trying to do something too unconventional. In Django, it's when trying to deviate from the overall Django philosophy and use something other than the included batteries.
That bit was lifted straight from the Usenet in the '90s.

Back in the day, before there was much of anything going on on the internet, entire communities with brainpower of the same magnitude as this one would spend months on end debating whether the USS Enterprise could defeat an Imperial Star Destroyer.

I've witnessed these debates, and they were epic in scale.

Substitute SQL and noSQL, and you'll get an idea of what it was like.
Japanese music video using HTML5 (Safari/Chrome only)
I disagree. Devices like Antikythera would have probably cost a lot more than their weight at their time. One of the reasons that artifacts don't last is that some metals like iron don't last because of oxidation. Bronze however resists corrosion, and especially sea corrosion really well. And Antikythera is one of those bronze devices that we got out of the sea, it lasted two thousand years underwater.
I think your point is valid and of course interesting for programmers, but KR's "Hello, world!" is still relevant for students and novices. Maybe reading/writing on a file would be more useful nowadays, since it does not demand knowledge of algorithms.
Beezz Brings Twitter Live Tile and Push Notifications to Windows Phone 7
Beezz Twitter client for Windows Phone 7 has just received a major update, bringing Live Tile support, and Toast (push) Notifications to Windows Phone 7.
Emm, actually Hitler adopted the "Socialism" part of "National Socialism" in order to win leftist votes, in a giant bait-and-switch scheme.

The Nazi party had nothing to do with socialism, as the term was and is known and defined in the relevant political literature.

Or, more correctly, the horrors of Nazi germany had nothing to do with economic regulation and the social health care et al, and all to do with racist ideology, dictatorship and imperialism.

Actually, Sweden is socialist, in the sense most americans define the word, as well as New Zealand, and it's all the better for them --and they have tens times more refined than either US Republican or Democrat policies.
Twitter is more "public" than Facebook, and so serves a different purpose. Teenagers become adults.
Have you looked at Padrino? I recently experimented with it and was surprised that it was an extremely awesome middle ground, to the point where I'll probably use it for my next project. It's very fast, close to Rack and easy to use with Rack middleware, has Rails-style view helpers, has sinatra-style controllers, very simple and elegant mountable apps, a focus on DB agnosticism, among many other things
Your Chinese restaurant must have a good fortune cookie supplier. Mine are always completely useless (and often false) statements like "You appreciate fine art".
If you read the provided background links, and maybe read up on Newcombe's Problem, you should be okay...I think.

If you want to get a better grasp, the standard LW reply is "read the sequences": http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Sequences
Chrome is Goggles browser, FireFox gets money from Goggle and Microsoft would risk an anti-trust law suit.
On the bright side, its a bit easier on the device itself, as the package manager needs to copy the APK from the download location when installing, so by storing application resources outside of the APK, installs will be faster and less likely to fail.
There's a Trekstor Portable 3G/HSPA Wifi router (a Rebranded Huawei E5) on its way to me right now. Lack of built-in 3G in the Macbook Air is a little annoying - I'd prefer it over the SD card slot - but this little router should do the trick. Dragging an iPad around together with an Air just for the 3G seems a little over the top. :-) An iPhone 3GS or 4 with bluetooth tethering would be OK I suppose; my 3G's modem is annoyingly slow (384kbit/s) due to lack os HSPA support.
Competition. Apple stepped it up in iOS4 and has continued adding user facing features in each point release since -- HDR, Game Center, AirPlay, AirPrint, etc. Then you have WM7 with, at minimum, a very attractive GUI. RIM has some eye-candy stuff on the way with the PlayBook GUI. I think the big disappointment is that Google hasn't been able to spruce up the Android UI. We're starting to drift into this uncomfortable Windows Mobile 6.x territory where the UI is clunky, somewhat difficult to use, and just not all that nice looking. In my opinion at least...
Startup Quote: Pierre Omidyar, founder, eBay
Okay, I'll bite.

What do I need to read before reading this to get a grasp of what's going on?
I don't think it's intentional - TDT is so named with good reason. I'm not sure I can explain why at almost 5AM, but it has to do with sort of treating one-shot games as iterated games, or something roughly similar in spirit to that. One way to think about it is to imagine that you may be a simulation of yourself being used to predict the real you's behavior, and therefore to adopt the behavior that you would want the simulator/predictor to predict from you. Now, if you're not a simulation of yourself, you still need to adopt that decision theory so that when you are simulated, the simulations behave that way. At least, that's how it solves Newcomb's Problem - that's quite possibly not a good overall summary of TDT.
If you’re passionate about something and you work hard, then I think you will be successful.

- Pierre Omidyar (@pierre)

http://startupquote.com/post/2173129592
Spoken like a true 5 minute dabbler with an extremely cursory knowledge of the topic at hand. Bravo!

Actually, the "state owning the property" is not a core idea of socialism --it was only a "feature" of "really existing socialism", and even USSR had things like the NEP. Except for the backward places where "really existing socialism" developed, extremely few europeans (or american for that matter) socialists believed that it was a proper socialism at all.

As in, there are several types of socialism. Things americans complain about and deny as "socialism" (universal health care, for one), are proposed by even right-wing parties in Europe.

I'm sorry, but a cursory glance at one book or a documentary, or something heard from a friend of a friend, won't do. In order to intelligently discuss matters of world politics one has to do a little research. And it would be better if that research was impartial. Buy some books from both sides of the argument, and from both sides of the atlantic (and even the pacific).

The average opinion even on this matters, even on a site like "Hacker News" is often little better than what creationists know about evolution.
No Problem Movie Review: ben 10 ultimate alien absolute power | #2Tagnl
What do protected tweets do that a Facebook status update wouldn't? Public tweets have added value over Facebook statuses for some people, but I don't see where protected tweets would.
Dup: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1992262
Types of Hearing Loss - hearworldusa.com
There are three types of hearing loss: conductive hearing loss, sensorineural hearing loss and mixed hearing loss. Conductive hearing loss, Sensorineural hearing loss, Mixed hearing loss.
The author admits that some subset of teens do tweet for specific reasons. He does not really mention whether teens follow others on twitter or not, just whether they broadcast information. I agree that most of those followers of Justin Bieber are probably teenagers, however how many are actively tweeting as well as following? I think you may be arguing a point the author wasn't trying to make. His opinions were about producing information, not consuming it.
Show HN: Google spreadsheet to help you decide between note taking apps
When they started putting big guns on battleships, they came up with a new term: "gunboat diplomacy." When the Easter Uprising began in Ireland, the Royal Navy just sat their gunships in the bay and started shelling them from a safe distance.

So I guess they're hoping that they can bring back gunboat diplomacy in a form more suited to the 21st century. And if they're aiming for ranges of two to three hundred miles, I guess that theoretically means that no part of the UK would be entirely safe except maybe Birmingham, and that's mostly because nobody wants to go there even to blow it up.
Dup: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1992644
Thank you, Libé :)
What happens when you do a django template "your way"
or "they way we can do it in 2 hours instead of 12"?

I've worked on a lot of projects and can't imagine the situation where you'd have this kind of a variation in time to create two remotely similar versions of a template. If you are talking about a fully designed template + CSS + JS, then you could possibly get up to 12 hours, but there would be no way to shorten that to 2 hours without doing something completely different.

This is a comment about the non-web components of the
language.

And this entire discussion is about web development. The OP, who already knows multiple non-web-centric languages, asked specifically about web frameworks.

The Django community is perhaps more opinionated. The
actual software isn't.

Depends on what you mean by the software. The framework overall is very opinionated, even if you can use parts of it in a modular way.

The actual software has strong opinions (aka,
intentional inflexibility)

Let me take the opportunity to give you a heads up that Rails 3 has been out for months now and is widely used in production. One of the most significant design goals of Rails 3 was intentional flexibility.
No it isn't. Not yet. You have to define "OO" first. You have to point to a cluster in program-space worth defining, call that "OO", and call the rest "not OO". There could be fuzzy limits, but some programs have to be clearly OO, and some has to clearly not be.

I tried, and I hit two little snags:

(1) There is no agreed upon "OO" cluster. Ask Alan Kay and Bjarne Stroustrup. Most programmers even make a purely (and meaningless) syntactical distinction, calling `foo.bar(x)` OO, while calling `bar(foo, x)` not OO; or calling C++ classes OO, and calling C structs + functions not OO, even when they don't use inheritance in C++.

(2) Actually, "OO" is now meaningless. It doesn't have an interesting predictive power. No cluster in program space worth categorizing can reasonably be called "OO", because other existing terms will always be preferable. So we should stop using that term.
I highly recommend the Political Compass:

http://www.politicalcompass.org/

It changed my 1 dimensional thinking about the sliding scale between left and right and I feel richer for it.
I'm not arguing for systemic mortgages worth of debt. I'm arguing for using your credit card occasionally cause its easier than constantly going to the cash machine.

Use case:

iPhone dev "can you do this"

Ruby dev "Sure, takes a sec to rejigger things to allow that"

A few minutes/hours later "Done, and its perfect"

Alternative

iPhone dev "can you do this slightly differently"

Django dev "Like that?" [Just mocked up the entire thing in pure text, django happily returns it]

iPhone dev "thanks"

Django dev "I'll go make that work right now now that you can integrate your code

I have a real problem with the inability to provide a good enough version now when its more valuable than a very good version later, especially when there is room in the schedule to deliver both.

I work in an integration based environment, where the turnaround on the backend development is the maximum schedule issue, not the overall development scheme. I don't want my software development effort to look like the execution of a python program in a GIL bound multiprocessor environment. I want the thing done asap, if that means I'm paying the backend guy to redo his code 3 times cause the prototype is valuable and speeds up final time, I want the flexibility to do that.

I'm Excited that rails 3 promises to help part of this (as you correctly surmised, it is mostly rails 2 code and coders and turnaround issues I've dealt with), but I haven't yet seen it very much yet at all.

Schedules, requirements and all that are great, but if you can put a little hustle in at the end when there is something big on the line and get paid for that, you have very happy customers and very fat wallets. Non software people like delivery and there is a modicum of debt that sometimes requires.
No, you're a towel!
Nothing, but I was responding to the article stating that Twitter is for broadcasting whereas Facebook keeps updates from being public.
He has a phaser; Batman won't even use a gun. Plus, he's got a tricorder that can detect somebody's location from miles away. No way in Hell Batman wins.
I started constructorizer this summer but haven't had the time to do much with it. Someday I'll get back into it and integrate git repositories and finish features etc.

http://www.constructorizer.com
For a veteran programmer learning a new language like Haskell, I agree completely.

For a novice programmer learning their first language, they probably don't understand the quicksort algo and probably have no concept of arrays or any data structure. Visually displaying "Hello World" is very simple and teaches you two basic parts of a language:
- Syntax
- Printing stuff

On another note, someone learning HTML for the first time will have no reason to do quicksort.
Their next task will be to build the Babbage Difference Engine out of Lego.
Does HN really need another Facebook vs. Twitter submission? I don't think so.
"endofunctor" has the same numbers, and so does "homomorphism".
Incidentally, #1 is sufficient to hate "OOP" (the term), because using it will never lead to useful questions or answers.
Too late. They already have. :)
Maybe cheating, but:

"middle step": 18/43/38

"lemma": <1/<1/99
You are, of course, correct. I don't know what I was thinking. I haven't really used ff since switching to chrome, although I find I do need to boot it up to make the occasional flash application work. Also, webkit-based browsers have some wonky css handling. I guess my brain has some sort of cognitive bias where I unknowingly attribute everything that's awesome about Chrome to Chrome itself.
A good start is the LW Decision Theory sequence: http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Decision_theory_%28sequence%2...
If I understand it right, this does not really measure literacy, but the proportion of complicated words used. Mathworld if a site about math, and math uses a lot of special terms, so of course it has a high reading level.
europe is terrible for startups. too many regulations, too much bs too focus on work and the biggest issue is tgat most startups stay in their country and never cross any borders. and as it says in the article it's basically impossible to find investors because the mentality is not ready for risks blocking any chance for growth.
Reality check:

According to that logic, Canada should already have that attitude to the US, since most of their population is inside aircraft range...
Just because Justin Bieber has 6m followers, doesn't mean any of them tweet.

Twitter has always been more of a 'broadcast to followers' than a conversational tool.
I am sorry, I have to say this... my Quake bits won't let me rest otherwise.

"Now they just have to figure out the Quad Damage and it's going to be insta-gibs on any target!"
Franchise Bold - A Free Stout Display Font by Derek Weathersbee
NO PROBLEM -
There is a truth behind this joke. Reading the many excited comments about parallels between philosophy and coding makes me think that another view could be needed to balance this. Western philosophy was bent toward logic, and that may be the reason we see some relations with coding, which is really related to logic. But other philosophies do not focus on logic and thus do not parralel so much with coding, or at least not the same way. I think about Chinese philosophy, which I know a bit more. Its main focus being how to help humans living together, i.e. how to civilize humans (and "is it possible?"), the above parallels vanish away, more or less.

Still some parralels can be drawn. A taoist coder would let things happen, let the code find its way spontaneously toward the result, like the knife of the butcher must find its way into the meat. Taoism applied to code would produce independant pieces of software that live by itself and may have no intended usage (e.g. the yes command in coreutils).

A confucean coder would always follow the standards (the rites), always consider his production in context of a bigger picture, would produce a software that is very strict for himself and forgiving for others, would write programs tending to improve the life of others.

It has been said that wise Chinese of the old time where confucean the day and taoist the night. While this is actually because taoism is related with sex, the parallel could be that a good hacker/coder should be confucean at his day work, and taoist for personal projects.

None of them would thing in "ontology", though, because this is something, like the idea of God, that has no deep meaning in Chinese ancient philosophies. They would not debate too much on languages and the meaning of words, they would just use them as fit. They would use OOP as a tool, when it helps writing better code (when one need to glue state and actions together).

Do I contradict myself? I said "no parallels" and then "there are some parallels". But the ones I draw just apply to any activity of any human being, not just coding.
An open source command-line computer algebra system (CAS)
What is that a reference to? I suppose this is what I get for not owning a tv.