skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I work for a nearly 15 yr old art + technology organization based in an nyc contemporary art museum, and I assure you this type of work is far from a gimmick. There's an extremely rich history here and the art market is taking notice, though it's been a slow process. Many young artists working nowadays make artworks with presumptions born from digital technologies built-in, so by the time you reach your early twenties I hope/imagine the art world in general will have a different material and cultural landscape where art that incorporates digital technology isn't considered niche or a fetish or all lumped together into one category, but considered simply a reflection of the state of the world in which we live.

Honestly, if you're an artist working in ANY medium nowadays you're probably not living solely off the income generated by your artwork. But these skills can certainly contribute to a day job.;)

We have, however, successfully sold or helped sell non-material/purely code-based artworks many times.

Check out this wonderful new book by Casey Reas and Chandler McWilliams for more on the historical context:

http://formandcode.com/

http://www.amazon.com/Form-Code-Design-Architecture-Briefs/d...

And check out Rhizome for a perspective on contemporary digital/new media/internet art.

http://rhizome.org/

Good luck!
Artsy programmers? Computer-generated art? Only a sophomore? That sounds familiar.

I am and was in a similar situation, but my focus was in music. I was an avid musician in high school and I wanted to dual-major in Computer Science and some kind of music technology. My dream was to go write music software for Propellerheads in Stockholm.

What happened, I found, was that I was a much better programmer than artist. And what's worse was, because I focused a lot my non-computer interests in college, I missed learning a lot of background that I really, really wish I had now — (e.g., advanced operating systems, advanced algorithms, and electrical engineering).

My point is this: You're on this forum and you're already a coder, so focus on getting that Computer Science degree. Since you're interested in visual stuff, a minor concentration in computer graphics or human-computer interaction is applicable. But make sure you learn the hard stuff because, once you do, you'll have strong fundamentals which will let you work on anything and for anyone you want. You won't have to struggle with being an in-betweener like me.
I feel like you are all somehow far from the truth.

I live in Moldova, a state that appeared as a consequence of the Ribbentrop-Molotov pact (also known as the Stalin-Hitler pact). We had the Communist Party ruling our country until 2 years ago.

I've been talking to both Romanian (Fascist) and Russian (Soviet) soldiers, and they all agree, both Nazism and Communism are socialistic regimes. I strongly recommend "The Soviet Story", watching it might clear your views.
I've lived on a boat in the Copenhagen harbour for the last four years.

I bought it in Holland, and knew absolutely nothing about boats when I started out. My thought was that the only regrets you have when you get old are all the things you didn't do. Besides I'm enough of a businessman that I'd be able to sell it without a loss if it didn't work out. So I gave it try.

Four years later I'm still here and wouldn't want to live any other way. The boat is paid for so my only expenses are $200 a month in harbour rent and roughly another $200 a month on repairs. Internet isn't a problem since 3G is everywhere now - I can surf hacker news while at anchor somewhere off the coast of Sweden.

The upsides are pretty obvious: A gret free lifestyle, beautiful views, ducks right outside your window and the ability to go anywhere you want (within limits...)

The downsides are that it's cold in the winter, you don't have a lot of space, and you need to become a bit of a handyman. I've bought powertools I didn't know existed five years ago.

But overall it can only be recommended. Oh, and drop me a line if you're ever in Copenhagen I'll take you for a trip through the harbour, it's beautiful just before the sun sets.
The Rosenhan experiment (confirmation bias in psychiatry)
Holy Crap, Weta Built A Real Team Fortress 2 Sentry Gun
I do plan to work. Not sure what.
You should give privoxy a try. Browser agnostic and very powerful if you have even the most rudimentary programming/HTML experience.
As a person who talks with people at corporations about stuff like this (heroku vs gae vs ec2 vs corporate data center is a huge discussion these days in the business community, even for non-consumer facing sites and backends to non-web projects):

They hate 2 features of rails in the conversations I've had: The fact rails devs seem unwilling to take shortcuts that Django/other python webdev guys will. They also hate "It is just broken", which seems to come out of rails guys in their experience more. Note these are entirely non-technical and come from a open ended menu.

Also, my particular town has a pretty large python community (we hosted pyCon in 2010 if you went, I wrote the initial bid).
I personally think that these two languages were built to do different things. I think it depends on the job that you have and what you need the language to accomplish in order to say which language is better to learn.
I chose Go, because I'm a Web Developer and if I ever needed to do low level stuff I would use Go or Java.
Not Tarbell specifically but: http://www.moma.org/interactives/exhibitions/2008/elasticmin...

Just do a find on this PDF for the word Processing: http://www.moma.org/interactives/exhibitions/2008/elasticmin...

It's also worth noting that the New Museum has an entire organization devoted to new media work (rhizome.org)
But isn't perfectionism a sign of something more serious such as OCD?
There is a market for creative coders -- I am one, and I make a living making art through code.

I'd recommend you check out media art festivals to get a feeling for the intersection of art and technology -- the biggest ones are in europe and asia. See for example, ars electronica, Dutch Electronic Arts Festival, FutureEverything, Sonar, OFFF, Transmediale, etc. You can get a feeling for the current state of media art. In the US, see Zero One, Eyebeam, Rhizome.

I have a background as an artist, got into writing code, and now teach programming to artists / designers at a design university, Parsons School of Design. The media arts field is getting bigger and more accepted, and although it's much harder to collect then say a painting, there's definitely a way to make a living doing this kind of work -- I do, and many of my friends do also. We typically do a few commercial projects a year and make more experimental work as well. Between that, commissions, teaching, workshops, talks, etc you can certainly make a living doing this kind of work.

petervandijck is right - make some interesting work and make a name for yourself. especially within communities like processing, it's not hard to get involved and get a good reputation, find collaborators and get feedback.

you can see some of the work I do in my profile. happy to answer any more specifics about the marketplace.
>(Opinion warning) They're basically the same level of overall goodness. Django may be better at some things, Rails on others.

You try to state that opinion around here, even clearly stating the stuff Rails is better at, but you get railed on when you say the stuff it ain't better at is why you prefer the other. See what happens.
Really poor article.

I don't think that ChromeOS presents any real challenge to Windows, except in the Netbook market.

Even so, as a CR-48 user, there's still quite a bit lacking (a recent HN thread, "No Skype on ChromeOS" comes to mind.)

Windows, OSX, and various Linux releases all work great as development environments. ChromeOS does not. ChromeOS also is designed to be a partially-featured OS - it has just enough OS parts to basically get the Chrome browser running.

It's interesting to consider people switching over to a more cloud-centric style of work, but honestly, I don't think ChromeOS will be replacing or even challenging Windows any time soon.
Buffalino- The Smallest Home on Wheels
Buffalino will be your road home where you would be able to enjoy in its comfort and to see the world.
I don't know how this should help. There's a difference between social isolation and not being able to be alone from time to time.
I learned C++ with Borland C++ on DOS. It was really cool that I could do anything with the machine! Of course, most of the time it just crashed when working with pointers... Later, working on UNIX, I found it much easier, but less fun.
(* applies for citizenship / enrols in flight-training programme)
in my experience it has been moments these that have forced me to grow, forced my out of my comfort zone. more often then not resulting in new friends.

its a lot like traveling alone verses traveling with friends. if you have friends around you are less likely to talk to those around you.. conversely when you alone.. the only way to meet others is to talk to them.

over time i became better at it, and now i almost prefer to start out someplace alone, slowly building new relationships.
>I chose Django because I love working with Python, and it still can provide a lot of value without the framework.

Ruby on Rails folks hate when you say that though, cause it makes the language half of their equation look less good. It feels like a "Oh No You're going off topic no fair". They should just say "Yup, python is better for that other stuff" not "But we're talking about webdev!". To me, it agains feels like a community thing. Rails community does stuff like that, Django people seem to care less if you like what they do too.

The fact my rails apps can't as easily control hardware, do math, or call C++ or Objective C code with minimal glue actually is a problem for some solutions I do. So I like python (my actual preferred solution right now is GAE, not Django, but that's more economics/scaling based than technical. To be honest my latest rails dalliance is because of the characteristics of heroku, not rails itself
This. I've only had to do this a few times in my life, but it always seemed worse than it was. Just be straightforward and honest, it'll all turn out just fine.
Why Samsung Galaxy S may not get Gingerbred
Ask HN: What can you do in a startup hub that you can't do elsewhere?
For web startups, what is the advantage of living in a startup hub vs living in a city like Philly or Orlando?

It seems like being in a startup hub matters most when your company grows to a certain size and you either need to hire a lot of people or need to raise money. How much does it matter for a company with 1 - 5 people who aren't looking to raise capital and aren't trying to become the next Facebook or Twitter?
It is a terrible thing that the Library of Alexandria was burnt.

Where we might be today if that had not happened...
Consumer Quantum RNG
I hate to do this, since grellas is a very active and valuable member of this community and clearly cares about his wordsmithing, and as a writer myself I bleed personally and profusely at any direct criticism (I heal up, too, but that doesn't mean it didn't hurt).

However, I must say it: I don't think this is good writing.

Writing is like design. It can only be meaningfully called "good" when it achieves a purpose. What is the purpose of this article? It seems to be "to help people (lawyers in particular) to write better".

Does it do that? Well, it's got some tips about writing better, but they are generally hidden underneath the beautiful sentences. Let's take, as an example, one of the clearer paragraphs:

In advocacy, good writing will reflect muscularity, pulling a reader from first to last by force of logical inevitability. This style requires a firm grasp of subject. It requires solid, understated control so as to convey a feel of assured confidence. And it avoids key flaws: it does not strain, or vaunt, or table-pound, or attack the person. It is professional. It has class. It works like a powerful engine under the hood: it does not show itself, but anyone who hears that quiet hum will immediately sense its power. Done right, it projects quintessential vigor: it races along and even leaps off the page on the strength of its own power alone.

That's all very true, but I'm not entirely sure it will help someone who doesn't already understand this point. It is not actionable advice for people who don't already know how to do it.

This article would serve its purpose better if it not only described what good writing is, but also how to achieve it, and if it did so in a way that makes it easier for the reader to extract the information out of it (at the moment, the only way to get the information out of this article is to read through every single sentence, and evaluate each of them to see if it actually brings some new insight).

That said, the prose is beautiful. But this article is like a beautiful design that looks brilliant but isn't functional (either that, or I haven't figured out the purpose of this article).
It helped me. I think it depends on someone's outlook on being alone is. I am an introverted guy so I enjoy being alone more than being with other people (small company is fine occasionally). Some of the bad feelings some people have towards being alone comes from the social pressure of "if you are alone something is wrong with you".

If you can get over the feeling that there is nothing wrong with being alone, you might actually enjoy being alone.

But of course everyone is different. This might not work for everyone.
QuickSort is still a very small problem that is not going to show much about the language.

Gosu's example code does a good job at covering a lot of aspects in ~50 lines of code:

http://gosu-lang.org/intro.shtml
Yes, it will be a little while, but it will be inevitable. All Google has to do is to produce a free installer for netbooks. Then students from middle high school on up will download ChromeOS and slap it on used netbooks and have all of their software and communication needs met for free.

If ChromeOS can deliver on seamless sync everywhere and use NaCl and Gears to lessen the offline pain, then you're going to have an entire generation growing up on cloud computing.

EDIT: The seamless sync + the communication is key. Such tech savvy kids are also going to be using the iPod Touch and its ilk as mini tablets/social media communicators. If there is enough integration across all these devices, ChromeOS can hook those kids and keep them on a cloud computing use pattern all their lives.
I am not sure it will help developers. It will help apps that have less content (i.e. apps that can be fully utilised within 24 hours). For others, it might lead to a decrease in sales, as users (like me), will be more apprehensive about purchasing something.
Yet another article that completely misses the point. The point of "Hello World" is to show a noob how to fire up the editor, compile, and see something happen.

And btw, here's the answer in F#:

let rec qsort = function
| [] -> []
| x::xs -> let smaller,larger = List.partition (fun y -> y<=x) xs
qsort smaller @ [x] @ qsort larger
I guess I should expound: The title of the article is silly. Anonymous is a concept and perhaps the first large scale stand alone complex (SAC) (http://www.cydeweys.com/blog/2008/01/28/scientology-sac/) we have seen emerge. Trying to unmask an SAC is a sisyphean effort because it acts as a scale free network. This is very important to white hats who need to protect against attacks. We aren't dealing with your garden variety skiddies or black hats. As evidenced by the attacks in Operation Payback, Anonymous has created a voluntary botnet with LOIC's new hivemind feature. Anonymous is something different.

The author states: "Whenever a thread is particularly weak, discussants mark it with an image of Guy Fawkes." This is wrong. The author is attempting to show knowledge of chan culture, but he can't even get basic facts straight. Another example: "Once, hackers in the group busted into an online children’s game, flooding an animated swimming pool with their own characters." Also wrong. Five minutes on Google will tell you about the raid on Habbo (http://encyclopediadramatica.com/The_Great_Habbo_Raid_of_Jul...). Not only is Habbo not a children's game -- its target market is teenagers -- the raid shut down numerous aspects of the game. Sloppy research and/or writing on the author's part. And then there is his use of the word "hacker" and the phrase "busted into" to describe the act of registering an account. The author seems to have a fundamental misunderstanding of what he is writing about.

All of these details are important to anyone that wants to understand Anonymous, which should include any white hat, and especially those of us who work on multi-player web based games. It's amazing how a writer can get so many things wrong in such a short article.
I don't care as much about the upvotes as I do the people who respond.
I'm now finishing my masters degree in architecture (undergrad was physics of the liberal arts variety) and spend nearly every day coding. Processing is a great environment, although architects increasingly prefer the Grasshopper add-on to Rhino (http://www.grasshopper3d.com/). I'm also working on my own Grasshopper/Processing/CAD library in Ruby.

If you're looking to improve your design skills, try breaking out of an exclusively digital environment and code something that you can lasercut or physically build in some way. Setup a feedback loop between the two mediums -- let your coding inform your physical product, and vice-versa. Use code to solve problems (or create art) in a variety of fields and mediums.

Creative coding is most definitely not a gimmick. But it must have direction. Art that is, or is influenced by, programming is not inherently better or worse than a painting that uses paint. It is your job to have a design philosophy and explore the limitations and capacities of creative coding. Only then will you stop thinking of creative coding as a gimmick.
I've never met anyone like that. I don't know any programmers who think that code perfection is the end goal of what they do. Code quality? Yes, but not perfection.
The geeks guide to currencies: Trade, money and value
I dont see anything wrong with the quest for perfection as long as it is tempered w/ an understanding that it is an unattainable goal.
NaCl has nothing to do with offline web apps, and Gears requires a browser plugin while HTML5 solutions do not. But some form of offline access would be great in any browser until data plans become as ubiquitous as home phone lines.
Thanks, the both of you.
What do you mean, you have complete freedom! Why, all you have to do is simply to start your own international payment processing system, convince enough people to use it, and voila; convenient money-transfer freedom by your own rules! Oh, what's that you say? You don't have a multimillionaire co-founding CEO to force your idea on the masses by partnering with existing internet monopolies? Well, then obviously you just need to work harder for your liberty (erm, I mean, it's not as if you're actually entitled to political expression or anything—that's for people with money).
Why everyone should donate their organs
Aside from leaving the JCP, is there anything more Apache could do? As long as Apache keeps contributing to the Java ecosystem through their various open source projects, Oracle still wins.

As a Java developer, I really do not like what Oracle is doing, but I am not really sure of the best course of action. Should I simply boycott Java and start looking for another language? It's not that simple, for practical and economical reasons. Plus, aside from Ruby, the languages I would be most interested in run on the JVM (Scala, Clojure), and heavily depend on Java libraries.

Let's say I keep using Java, and want to open source some Java code. Would it be possible to use some sort of open source license that has an exception to forbid its use by Oracle? Or would this defeat the purpose of Open Source? What if I want to contribute, but do not want to help Oracle's business?
Erlang or nodejs probably would be some other good options, you don't really hear about go being used much in this context.
This should be retitled as "Anon successfully trolls Paul Rankin." Alex Tapanaris assuredly is not the one who wrote that document. http://pastebin.com/5dBdu3qk

If that link no longer works by the time you see this, it's one of hundreds of links where people posting as him describe in detail the degrading sexual acts they would like done to him.

The metadata has almost certainly been Admiral Ackbarred.
I love the idea of this not for performance but for ease of administration and security.
Really though it's less about which language you choose and more about which programming paradigms you've studied: functional & oop for example. Personally I'd find learning Haskell entertaining, but not very applicable to my day-to-day enterprise software gig.
How do you deal with passports, customs, borders etc? Can you just sail into the port of a new country or do you have to pass through some kind of registration or security each time?
Oh, yes, node.js for sure: http://www.yuiblog.com/blog/2010/05/20/video-dahl/
This case is a tricky one, there's no dispute that he uploaded the code. The dispute is whether he took GS code on purpose.

And that's hard to prove either way, but the fact he deleted the shell history, etc. does tend to favour GS's viewpoint. He may have done it totally innocently but that's a hard argument to make.
Yeah, true. FWIW, I was oversimplifying with the coding example -- I'm sure it would take me forever to learn a functional language, but while I love programming, I don't necessarily have the passion for it that would lead to me learning a functional language. I need a reason to learn it, and then I'll love it when I do -- without that reason, I don't really see the point.

And yeah, I probably just don't hard enough at it at home. I wish I didn't have the day job -- if I could spend 8 hours a day working on my own stuff, I'm sure things would be different.

Thanks for your perspective though, it is helpful. I do know the secret of hard work, after all, that's how I got where I am today. I just tend to only deploy said hard work when I'm at work. Though this is changing, I think, as I become less and less attached to my current job. I spent five years personally invested in the AC projects, but now I don't have as much to give on my current work project.

Lots to think about anyway.
The X space

As in "the mobile space", "the social media space", "the startup bullshit space", etc.
Heh I have been thinking about this too lately, since enterprise software tends to be deadly boring..
Mozilla Rust is interesting.
This line cracks me up:

Chances are, though, that if you're giving it that much thought, you're the kind of person who generally assumes that the good guys lost.
What's going on is that posting "paypal disabled my account" gets more karma than posting "paypal could disable your account".
Agreed. I'm a developer, and I don't like it at all. Pirates can almost certainly copy and refund within 15 minutes, so this primarily hurts legitimate users who run into a showstopping bug or missing capability after an hour or two.
Ask HN: Cheap VPS Providers?
Don't need anything too fancy, just something that has decent uptime and is enough to run a Wordpress site and a mail server. Budget hosts are preferred, as my budget is tight.

I had a look around, but some opinions might be helpful too. What would you guys suggest?

Stuff that I've checked:

http://quickweb.co.nz/vps-plans/supa-vps-plans.html (Seemed a little too good to be true)

http://prgmr.com/xen/ (The $8 plan, but I see no way to order)