skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
they may also be effects of less than perfect implementations of URLs: here on HN every comment has a URL, which is really excellent. There's also a great signal-to-noise ratio on each page - I'm not talking about the quality of the content (which is also excellent) but the fact that there's very little distracting supplemental content on each page, thus reinforcing the idea that the URL is pointing to your comment, rather than some undefined ephemeral 'page' on HN.

The web at large however, does not fully embrace this level of detail and focus in URLs. So users do not feel comfortable using URLs to link readers to discrete packets of information, they feel safer just copying the data.

This is just a theory.
I imagine the parts of Africa that need aid may be somewhat less internet-enabled. Do you have the internet in rural areas where most aid workers would likely be stationed?
http://www.ymacs.org/
Yes, Jupiter and Saturn are currently believed to each have a core of rock and ice, of something like 10-30 Earth masses.
If you register a domain (or anything else) with cryptoz@yourdomain.com and stop renewing yourdomain.com you're opening yourself right up for problems too.
What this man did was find compassion for less intelligent people by becoming one. It is the habit of humans to condescend to less intelligent people, and to envy or undermine those who are smarter. Reaching across the boundaries of what is familiar to us and nurturing compassion there is difficult; this is a case where someone was forced to take a new perspective, and couldn't help but grow that compassion, because people who were previously so unfamiliar became uncannily like himself.

I'm not trying to trivialize his journey; he just as easily could have spiraled into a feedback loop of self-hate and self-pity. It's admirable that he accepted the change within himself, and I enjoyed reading about how awestruck he was as he observed the emotional change within.
Yes, but that's no different from encrypting a file locally using truecrypt/pgp etc and then uploading that.

The problem is that Dropbox can't offer seamless encryption while still having lazy file sharing.
Specialization doesn't mean you can't have polymaths. They just have to be sparser matrices.
Decline of the Tornado Web Server - What happened?
The Office is poking fun at VCs and Startups. Wuphf Social Messaging Aggregator
http://wuphf.com/

See the Investors PDF chart in particular.

This is a site referenced in THE OFFICE:
Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ytc9-wGCHW0

I'm not sure how to properly convert those two links.
"My illness has made very little difference to my scientific work. I was lucky to have chosen theoretical physics that is mainly pure thought for which my physical disability is no handicap. I may be mentally disabled as well, but if so, I am too far gone to realize."

- Stephen Hawking
Let's sum this up.

Apache states that if java 7/8 has non-open licensing, they'll leave.
Oracle votes for java 7/8 to have non-open licensing.

Apache leaves.
Oracle looks Apache in the eye and asks "Are ethics and morals really that important?"

Makes perfect sense to me why Apache left. I'd do the same in Apache's position.
My experience is almost the exact opposite of yours! The first problem is that the expression "is-a" is notoriously vague. If class A has method a, and class B subclasses a, can B override method a? In what sense is B an A if it does not obey Strict Liskov Substitutability?

The second problem is that re-use is an easy problem to solve in any language. We have delegation, we have proxies, we have so many tools. Why use inheritance, which mixes two different concepts (is-a and was-a a/k/a is-implemented-using)?

Lastly, how is the code more conducive to later changes? In my experience, you now have a problem where changing class A changes the behaviour of every class that extends A. This is a notoriously tricky problem in the real world. In theory, that change ought to change every subclass and inheritance is a win. In practice, the people writing all those subclasses did so making assumptions about the behaviour of A at the time it was written, much as there are billions of lines of windows code that depend on its bugs and break the moment you fix a bug.

Encapsulation is a wonderful thing. I do not see implementation inheritance as having anything whatsoever to do with encapsulation. If anything, I see the opposite.

If I write that B is-a A, if these things are fully encapsulated, shouldn't it be a black box as to how B manages to behave exactly like an A? Maybe there's some shared code, but then again, shouldn't it be possible for B to use some other completely different implementation? That's encapsulation to me. Forcing interface inheritance to be twinned with implementation inheritance breaks encapsulation in my opinion.
IRC bots for Laziness, Impatience, and Continuous Deployment
Well, I didn't find the IE9 folks as condescending as the Hotmail crew. Their answers are actually very interesting, they don't appear as incompetents.

EDIT: Sorry. I take it back, I just read this:

---------8<---------

iamnotobama writes:

Does it work on my ubuntu laptop?

Dear iamnotobama - You may be surprised to hear that it actually does work on your laptop. It's a three-step process:

1. Install Windows 7
2. Install IE9, and
3. Enjoy the Beauty of the Web.

--------->8---------
Guess I'm just saying I prefer more in depth articles on HN over news blurbs. For instance, if there was eventually a follow up article that explored the changing landscape of business, that would be the kind of article I would like to see on HN; I can read the headlines elsewhere. That said, maybe the thoughtful discussions about headlines here are worthwhile.
> On the ChromeOSforums.net site alone we've seen at least 5 unrelated individuals receive the laptop

I wouldn't call that "tons."
I consulted for a company which had well over 10K managed desktops with XP/IE6. They are in the process of upgrading to IE8 and would be delighted if they could just install it in place of IE6 and go on with life. However, the upgrade team identified well over 70 internal apps, some written in-house and some vendor-provided, which required IE6 to function properly. Some suitable strategy must be identified for each: fix, replace, decommission, etc. If they could install a standalone version of IE6 just for these apps, they could upgrade to IE8 now and fix them over time.

To those who know something about IE6's "architecture": How hard is such an idea given that you are Microsoft? What if the standalone app could be constrained to work only with known-safe websites so that security upgrades were not so essential?
I flagged it for that reason.
If we passed high import tariffs then other nations would pass reactionary import tariffs and make it harder for our goods to be sold overseas. In general, it would lower trade. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smoot%E2%80%93Hawley_Tariff_Act
Hey Josh, what if I want to turn my head to the right to look at my pair? One of the things I need ergonomically is to even out the twists in my spine. Seems at a place like Pivotal you might want to encourage people to do the same.
To make a long story short, IE9 is fast but very beta. Now you don't need to try it!
Fred Wilson Calls 'Bullshit' On Silicon Alley Insider's Cool 100 List
I wonder what those graphs would look like when normalized by the growth in total GDP over time. (I took 're-industrialize' to mean as a percentage of output).
My bad, I thought it was in production use as well. But in a way that does not really detract from the main point, just from this particular application of that point.
"""What a pathetic article. I guess even the tech press doesn't recognize the difference between generic "IT" and upper-level developer/software engineer."""

Why does it have to?

First of all, the article talks specifically about "IT jobs", not "upper level development/software engineer" and it says so in its title.

Thus, your complain amounts to: "The article is pathetic. It gets out to discuss the loss of IT jobs, and it indeed discuses the loss of 95% of IT jobs, just not the higher-end developer jobs I had in mind". WTF?

Second, generic IT jobs are always orders of magnitude more numerous than "upper-level developer" jobs. Hence, the loss of generic IT jobs has much more impact and is more important for way more of readers.

"""Sure IT support is being outsourced. When the employee doesn't need to actually know anything you might as well pay them as little as possible."""

And who said that "paying as little as possible" does not also hold true when the employee has to know "a lot"?

If physical presence is not needed (i.e in all cases where telecommuting could be used), what makes you think that the highest level of jobs cannot be outsourced somewhere else, where the employer will pay "as little as possible"?

You seriously believe USA has the best engineers --or the best by a margin that matters to most projects, anyway? Perhaps that could be argued in the past, but this is the 21st century. Oh, and 20th century called, he wants his prejudices back.
Why Most Hardware Specs Are Total Bullshit
If they all weigh 200 pounds, then its half a ton of forum users.
Yes, as I said in the initial post, I know that is possible, but it misses the point. This requires a host that you want to develop on and as I move more to the cloud (i.e. hosting on Heroku), I am less likely to have a server to SSH into.
I think American values are an evolving thing across generations. The baby boomers grew up in a time where getting a home and all its effects were the thing to do because people were moving to a time of common homeownership. The boomlets grew up in a world where everybody already has homes, and it's hard (I think) to actualize yourself by doing exactly what your parents did. I think we're already experiencing somewhat of a shift to more abstract forms of actualization and values in younger generations. While I'm not trying to plug a politician here, I think the way President Obama's election campaign resonated with so many young people is some evidence to this effect. Some of these values may be what you consider not mainstream now, but give 20-30 years, they might be more prevalent again.
They sent a marketer to do a developer's job."
The US military does not enlist illegal immigrants.

What is more, the military does not enlist non-English speakers. The US military does however enlist English speaking permanent resident immigrants and offers them a quicker path to citizenship. That isn't much of a scandal.
Here is a list of some of them http://bit.ly/gxM8Wj
Ugh.

I was so happy, because I finally thought that this would be a direct comparison of screen and tmux from someone who was very experienced in one or the other.

But, no. It was someone to whom even common features between the two were novel. I'm not saying that this is a bad article or that you shouldn't read it or that the author shouldn't have written it, but damn it, I've been using screen for years, and everywhere I turn, I see tmux, too!

But so far, the only thing anyone has been able to offer in terms of concrete differences is "tmux can do vertical splits," which will be true of the next big version of screen as well, if they ever release it.

I am officially declaring shenanigans on anyone who blurts "tmux is better" without linking me to a @#)&@#%ing objective and thorough comparison of the two apps that actually makes it seem like tmux is worth using instead. Even the very first result on Google comes up with nothing more than "tmux has some kind of client/server thing," which seems exactly the same as screen -X.

Edit: I upvoted the article to solidify that my problem is not with it, but with the context in which I read it.
This graph displays the average requests/second that the python tornado framework can handle graphed over time by commits. Very surprising and also a little concerning since I am relying on Tornado for my current projects. Just wanted to make sure that you all were made aware of this in case you are considering using Tornado for your own projects (although I have had nothing but positive experiences with it).

Source - http://groups.google.com/group/python-tornado/browse_thread/...
What you say is probably true, but it is severely broken. Let me give an example.

If you talk to users, very few will care that IE doesn't support key web standards that every other major browser does, because everyone is going to make things work on IE anyways. However if you talk to users, lots care that it is easy to develop rich web content. However the users don't have the perspective to understand that standards support will get them better web content.

Therefore IE decides that better standards support is not a priority. And doesn't implement it.

Conversely if IE did decide to implement better standards support, everyone would be better off.

However Microsoft wouldn't get much credit for it, because it wouldn't be obvious to users how important Microsoft's role was in making things better. And developers would say, "Finally!" But then curse Microsoft for years anyways because it takes that long to get the old, broken, browsers off of the market.

The result? IE is crap. And will remain crap. Indefinitely. And Microsoft is convinced that this is not a problem. (And for them it isn't - except for the also invisible problem that they have developed hiring problems in part because many good developers can't stand that attitude.)
In my use case, large data processing, I would prefer slower processing in exchange for lower memory requirements. The more ram it eats the sooner my processes have to hit disk.
Kinect Hacks from MIT: Minority Report Hack
So you create a typedef struct of date_range to store the start_date and end_date and use a set of date_range_* functions to manipulate that struct. Most OOP languages allow direct access to even private variables if the developer really wants to, so the guarantees are pretty weak. C++, Java, C#, Ruby, Python... all of those allow indirect access to "private" methods and variables. You must still rely on other developers to do the right thing and not screw things up.
Now that we have the Internet and much of the world's information is on it (Wikipedia included), it's much easier for an autodidact to appear to be (or even become) a polymath. I think that this reduces the significance of the term "polymath" quite a bit.
An interesting question, and one which ought to prompt Microsoft to do more for its corp customers. From reading the link, I presume that an HTA app uses whatever IE version happens to be on the system? Another bad thing for Microsoft is that legacy IE6 apps are slowing corporate adoption of Windows 7. Not only do these apps tie corps to a browser, but they tie them to an OS as well!
When asked - on the mailing list, on google buzz, or anywhere else, Collin and Jeffery and others have been very open about its status. They've always dealt us (as the community) a fair hand about the status of the project, and the path moving forward.

Your indulgence in catchiness is annoying, as it will be echoed (and it already has been) all over the place with breathless drama "Look! It's Dead!" when, despite languishing, the code is still there, still functional, but starved of resources. The editorializing is frustrating, misleading and overall, I think harmful.

As for why it's still relevant: Easy, it's the only currently visible way of moving the CPython interpreter forward from an evolution standpoint. US does show a series of speedups, one thats useful for CPython. To quote:

"A JIT compiler is an extremely flexible tool, and we have by no means exhausted its full potential. Unladen Swallow maintains a list of yet-to-be-implemented performance optimizations [49] that the team has not yet had time to fully implement. Examples:" - http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-3146/

I would recommend: if you want to move anything forward, or help, rather than make posts like this, jump in on the http://svn.python.org/view/python/branches/py3k-jit/

Yes; part of the reason the current interpreter is limited is due to backwards compatibility, but I'd rather have a limited JIT with some performance gains then none at all.

The fundamental issue is that Jeffery, Collin and Reid - the founding three are "off in the woods" - and they're the only ones who understand the code enough to move it forward right now. PyPy's success(es) are orthogonal to the evolution of the CPython interpreter code base.
Sales hunters will bodly go where no salesman have ever gone before
Switching sides is good when you're sitting side-by-side. But I haven't noticed that there's enough neck twisting in the tete-a-tete configuration for that to be an issue.
Andrew Mason (Groupon CEO) on Charlie Rose
She's forbidden from bringing her own computer

Why? That seems horribly broken.
> This is why natural ability is such a hard thing for me to accept - I really believe that I can be good at anything, and I believe that is true of other people as well, but if they don't believe it, how will it happen?

To me, what you can do in life all comes down to a Henry Ford quote:

"Whether you believe you can, or you believe you can't, you're right."
Very interesting article! Worthy of my upvote. But at the same time I don't at all buy into its premise.

Literally every field I have even a passing interest in has got people at the top of it who express interest in multiple fields at once. In the web-related world there's Shaun Inman, who goes back and forth between music, web design, and creating video games. Or there's Ze Frank, who goes back and forth between writing and designing tools and music and video comedy and I don't know what else. In music there are a lot of people who specialize in many, many different things at once — either different types of music (multiple instruments, or multiple performance styles, or music production) — or actively in different fields at once. Peter Brotzmann, one of the best free jazz saxophonists, is also a graphic designer who's designed all of his albums to date. Tom Waits is a musician who acts and writes on the side. Auteur directors tend to be involved in five or six different fields at once: James Cameron is a masterful set/costume designer; David Lynch handles the audio production for his movies; and writes some of the music for it. Stand-up comic Louis CK writes, stars in, directs, and edits his show Louie, which is to some degree insane.

The problem with looking at the Internet for polymaths of the same caliber of Carl Djerassi is that the Internet generation is too young right now. Ze Frank, who is in some ways the grandfather of the modern Internet creative movement, is only thirty-eight years old. The real Internet generation, of the people who literally never existed in a world where the World Wide Web didn't, was born in 1990. They're twenty years old. They're me.

I can assure you as somebody who's closer to that generation than most of the users on that site: We're going to see an explosion of creativity the likes of which we haven't seen in decades, if ever. The kids I know in high school are busy writing, drawing, making music, arguing philosophy, arguing economics, doing pretty much everything and doing it all at once. Give it thirty years and I think you'll be flabbergasted at what we produce.

When I was eighteen I'd already published a novel, directed a play, written and co-performed a song, co-created said song's music video, performed and co-wrote a Harry Potter dub, wrote multiple essays, and designed a number of web sites. A friend of mine who's a year younger was keeping a political/economic blog and engaging in discussions pretty much everywhere. Yet another friend is a hypnotist, writer, and web designer who I might be making a documentary about this coming summer. The guy I live with, twenty-one, is a talented actor who's also written for the Colbert Report, interviewed celebrities, and in his free time sells tickets. Is that polymath enough for you?
Another old friend:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1038795

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=861836 <- Has comments

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=850301

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=844229 <- Has comments
RTZ: Ground Return
Yes I actually meant beauty more in terms of the code rather than the graphs. Even the documentation is top notch.
It's frankly bizarre that Oracle would sue Google over Java licensing, and then expect an organization with Google employees on the board and deeply involved at many levels to gladly accept their stewardship of Java.

Oracle seems to think that everyone should commit code to independent Java repositories, improving the Java ecosystem, and furthermore pay Oracle for the privilege of improving Oracle's IP.

Oracle not only fails to grasp the point of open source, they have it completely backwards.
Sadly I've turned away from Ggplot to Lattice in a major way simply due to the speed. If you're plotting a significant amount of data then ggplot can easily take 5 or 6 seconds to plot a panel compared to the nigh instantaneous Lattice library. Which I'm fine with really. Hadley Wickham is doing interesting stuff with ggplot that shouldn't be burdened by racing Lattice. It does mean I'm less likely to use it for exploratory data analysis though.
A few years back I was working with a BigButNimbleCo (yes, they exist) and there was a sudden kerfuffle. It seems that the Exchange servers had started crashing because there was too much email in them, and IT was sending out warnings that stuff was going to be deleted, so save what you wanted into archive files on the file shares.

Sorry, I may not have explained this very clearly: Exchange was crashing because it held too much mail. I have no idea how many terrabytes were involved, but there fewer than 10,000 employees at the time.

I know everyone is going to say that Exchange and Hotmail are completely different code bases, but what they have in common is Microsoft's vision of what people do with email and how they do it. I'd say that deleting old mail is in Microsoft's DNA.
> It's Emmanuel.

Actually it's Eric Corley.
If you have trouble accessing the site just use:

cache:http://robots.thoughtbot.com/post/2166174647/love-hate-tmux

in Google.
I would be extremely grateful if you open-sourced roflbot. I've been meaning to learn lisp for a while, and an app like this seems like a perfect place to start by perusing its source.
Perhaps the reason OO has gained such a following is because it seems (to some) like the solution. Businesses have found they are bad at hiring programmers, because middle managers don't know how to spot the bad ones. So the best solution, in their minds, is to limit the amount of damage a bad programmer can do. In an imperative language, a bad programmer can wreak havoc. In OO, so the thinking goes, the disease is quarantined to a predefined set of functionality. Good programmers complain because OO ties the programmer's hands. But maybe that's the point.
We actually require Emacs at work, but that's because we're all pairing remotely over SSH and we're all lisp hackers anyway.
Really, what's with those RGB+Yellow displays?
Oh wow. Of course :)
How does using .net affect acquisitions? Are the big firms like google, IBM, oracle, JVM only?
the voting argument isn't applicable here.

The solution here isn't black & white unlike in voting (you vote or you dont vote). Sure you can choose to fly or not fly, that's a "solution" but the better solution is to create more efficient airplanes that emit less CO2.

As a sidenote: traveling and seeing the world is what made me start caring about the environment. When you go snorkeling in Hawaii or climb Machu Picchu, you can't help but care about the environment.