skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Same dev tools/language/framework for everyone?
Upper management of the company I work at recently stated that all new development should be done with a single combination of Dev tools, language and framework. The main reason behind this is that this way, people can be relocated from one group/project faster, because they don't need to learn a new language when they switch.
Of course the chosen language and framework used by everybody does not need to be the best tool for the job, but it should just be good enough to allow every project to be done.
What does HN think about this? Is it ok to use the same development tools and language for every project, without choosing what fits best?
This sub-thread was in terms of laziness. As part of that discussion, I have demonstrated my efforts to learn more, questioned others to see if they have done the same, and encouraged them to do so.

Quite frankly, I haven't heard much of a rebuttal so far. You are correct in that I should have drawn the point home sharper in the above text.
Don't Build Your Web Site In Flash
This is not only off-topic but rather crap.

Maybe I'm a little over-sensitive... I got an OT-bagging for something far more interesting than this last week :)
nice work. not sure where but something like this was around when people thought Virb was cool and people needed images of their tweets as it didnt allow JS etc
dupe. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=236494
Adobe Goes After freshAIRapps for using AIR trademark
I've had great luck with < $10 bottles of wine - including the infamous $2.99 "Three Buck Chuck" Charles Shaw wine from Trader Joe's. :)
The problem is that the scales involved are so ridiculously large that it could easily take 1 billion years to simulate one second. Even with 1 million years per second, simulation of a thousand years would require something like the age of the universe to compute. In that case, these "beings" could not be our descendants since they live in a universe with different laws.
But there are still fundamental limits, like the speed of light or the Bekenstein bound that forbid arbitrarily powerful computations.
"I try to go to the wine store with a wine list but what does one do when none of the items are on the list."

A useful trick a friend taught me for buying non-US wines in the US is to pay attention to the importer. For example, when buying a Spanish wine, looking for Jorge Ordonez on the back label is often a big win.
The design is beautifully minimalist. I love it!
two buck chuck in california. The Shiraz won an international wine tasting contest recently. http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1963794
Google can now index flash 
Google has announced the development of new algorithm that can explore flash files like normal text.
The Digital Book, Unfurled
Ultra Mobile PC Buyer's Guide
Study: High IQ turns academics into atheists
Cairo Milestone 1 Postponed 
I am not a big fan of shell replacements. Long time ago I used litestep and it didn't work for me. I am stuck with windows computer and often i wish there were better options out there. Cario seems to be interesting.
Atheism in those days was associated with poor uneducated people, the same way racism is today.

Citation?

Don't you mean paganism, rather than atheism? And by pagan I mean the jumble of indigenous beliefs that you get with a pre-literate people, freely mixing local superstitions and the official religion (in this case Christianity).
Thinking About Groups
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kmaX8owAsfM

Readius demo
Wow, you guys are quick! It's looking good.
GTD at Work (and home)
Geode based platforms are fine if your making some sort of pizza box type router thing but generally they lack a lot of the peripheral IO, both variety and quantity, that an ARM SOC board would have like i2c, spi, rs232, etc... Geode boards are also a order of magnitude larger than things like the Beagle board or the Gumstix (www.gumstix.com).

The major inhibitor to using these arm platforms isn't the compiler it's that there aren't any low cost dev boards which are a practical size that you could also use in a prototype, w/o getting a hardware engineer to make a custom board layout for you. That's why I find things like this exciting. At least in my opinion.
Everyone is a good parent until they become one.
How To Hack An Electronic Parking Gate
Ever got annoyed that you can't find any parking? Here's a few easy steps to show you how to get around it.
A lot of their stores don't make their donuts fresh anymore. They have a distribution network, and it's supposed to reduce overhead.
Simple - it creates controversy on slow tech news days.

What better way to ensure decent traffic numbers than to loudly proclaim that the "sky is falling" to readers who are more than likely your most avid readers (being a weekend).

It makes people argue over what is essentially a non-story - Michael Arrington has managed to grab 10k friendfeed followers in 5 months?

And? How is this tech news?

Flipside, Lets take Alex Albrecht - he's managed to gain about 30k twitter followers in 3 months. 3 times the followers in nearly half the time.

That would suggest that Twitter has still a lot more life in it than people are giving it credit, even if a lot of the tech crowd is loudly proclaiming that "Twitter is dead", realistically we, the tech crowd, make up the minority of its total users.

I think in general, tech people forget that we only represent a small portion of the total Internet.

BTW, I respect Michael, so hopefully nobody takes this as an attack on him (because its not meant to be), I'm just trying to illustrate a point.
I'd say it depends on what your company does. If every group does basically the same sort of thing then it might be a wise decision on the part of management. On the other hand, if one group is making websites and the other is writing Linux kernel drivers then it shows a complete lack of understanding on their part of what it is their company does.
I don't think you get it. A block universe in which nothing happens cannot possibly exist since it is clearly falsified. We observe change, do we not? So speaking of loops within a block universe is like arguing about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. Is it me, or do other people go out of their way to be illogical?
Is Microsoft trying to capture photography market?
Remembering Brainwashing
American Energy Policy, Asleep at the Spigot
Reading this, if I were a executive at a car company, the solution to keeping people in big SUV's is simple. Just put a smaller gas tank in em' to keep the perceived cost of gas bellow that $100 emotional threshold.
The Life Less Traveled — How Ordinary People Do Extraordinary Things
Crap and I just wasted all day yesterday trying to get the 2007.0 release installed on VirtualBox.
The Quandary of a Superpower as Others Race to Catch Up
JavaScript for C & Python programmers
New contact lenses with LEDs and circuits could become a tiny personal display
I would be interested as well.
ZFS Under Linux: A User Report
This makes an important point that too few people understand. "Inheritance of implementation" is a rare trick. It's something appropriate to only a small fraction of problems. I constantly see people trying to use inheritance as an extension mechanism (i.e. "just inherit from this class to use the library"), and it's just a disaster.
Nanotube Radio
Takes him a while to get to it... "The reasons for using inheritance are modularity, separation of concerns, clear representation of concepts, categorization and polymorphism." Exactly.
If you do that, and load some information from a slow storage device (hard disk), calculate on it for a hundred years, then write it back, load some more, repeat, until you have computed "one planck time" accross your entire simulated universe...

... at what point in the loading, crunching, saving, does the information inside feel concious and self aware 'in realtime'?
There are guidelines and laws about child/caretaker ratios. Infants need a lot more one-on-one time than older children.
> a scientific worldview is incompatible with a christian worldview

I beg to disagree. It is incompatible with the New World Neo-Protestant Christian (Baptist etc) worldview. Most Old-World Churches (Catholic and the church I was raised in, Eastern Orthodox) fully accept scientific discoveries, including evolution. They do not hold the Bible (especially Genesis) to be literally true. Fundamentalist Christians do, they are defined by this. For example, the story of creation from Genesis is understood as a metaphor: the seven days are not literally days, but epochs etc. The metaphor is undestood to have been created to avoid confusing the ancient people. The Creationism debate in the US is watched with disbelief and smirks - don't they have worthier stuff to debate? - and is believed to stem from bigotry and plain anti-intellectual bias. Of course, we Old Worlders (especially Eastern Europeans) have a strong elitist (in the US sense) intelectual bias, like the US East coast. Calling someone ignorant is a very strong insult.

> a scientific worldview demands evidence and falsifiable claims and a christian one demands the opposite, faith.

Christianity has looked for proof since its inception. The Holy Books are nothing more than written testimonies of witnesses (By today's cynical standards, quite weak evidence). All theologians since have looked for logical proofs. Unfortunately, they have not found one. But it would be hasty to ignore the tradition of Christian theology's search for it.
I am becoming increasingly convinced that about 90% of human behavior can be understood by a reading of "The Emperor's New Clothes."

That text should be mandatory reading in schools, both for young children and adolescents, and followed up with critical discussion.
"If you're investing $500+ in a chair, you'd understandably want to be sure it's "the one"."

Really?. Go to ted.com and watch Barry Schwartz's video on the paradox of choice... you will probably be happier with your chair if you have no choice of chair, or choose it quickly and are stuck with it, with no opportunity to change your mind than if you try dozens of them with 30 day no quibble return policies to find 'the one'.
A lot of the value of Twitter exists because it sparks asynchronous conversations.
Exactly. This is definitely one of those cases of use whatever works for you. I really can't fathom using windows 95, but reading over his reasons for doing so it seems like those are valid reasons for him. Still makes for an interesting read on a os no one ever really talks about anymore.
After my first full-time job, I always make sure to read noncompete agreements very carefully before signing on with a company.
It used to be "Two Buck Chuck" on the east coast, but then they raised the price to $2.99 (=~ $3) - hence the "Three Buck Chuck". Is it still $1.99 in California?
I'm not saying that we'll have arbitrarily powerful computations, but that there's a lot more room for improvement. Like Feynman said, "there's plenty of room at the bottom".
Riches to anyone who invents a gas tank that adjusts its capacity according to gas prices in real-time so that you always pay exactly 99.99$ (taxes included) to fill it up!
Big-name brands booking ads on Facebook
My favorite bit so far: "After the first year or two, you'll have some idea of what subfield you are going to be working in. At this point---or even earlier---it's important to get plugged into the Secret Paper Passing Network. This informal organization is where all the action in AI really is. Trend-setting work eventually turns into published papers---but not until at least a year after the cool people know all about it. Which means that the cool people have a year's head start on working with new ideas."
It goes on to say: "...So cool people hardly ever learn about their subfield from published journal articles; those come out too late...You, too, can be a cool people. Here are some heuristics for getting connected."
And in which country did you work?
Gems throughout: "The more different people you can get connected with, the better. Try to swap papers with people from different research groups, different AI labs, different academic fields. Make yourself the bridge between two groups of interesting people working on related problems who aren't talking to each other and suddenly reams of interesting papers will flow across your desk."
It could be like the Python paradox switched around. Now that Python is the language du jour, it may be that choosing C/C++ for the server side development is only attracting the people that are really good with C/C++. Admittedly, it would take a certain kind of personality to work on a webapp with a C backend. Perhaps this is an asset.
From reading that kernel summit mailing list thread I get the impression that the Linux folks only think that dtrace is useful for system administrators and kernel developers.

What they fail to realize is that by supporting dtrace they will make Linux a better application development platform too.

I've been in many situations where I am developing code on Linux (in C or C++) and where I need to understand what is happening in my code or the system. The current tools on Linux are either completely underpowered or non-existent, so I frequently move code to my OS X box or even to OpenSolaris running in VMWare. Just to use dtrace.
In my experience the pitfalls of inheritance are something you have to really see for yourself in practice, so it generally takes even very good developers years to really develop the intuition around when to use inheritance and when to use composition. Inheritance is a blunt tool that's easy to use, while composition is trickier and requires more skill and foresight to use correctly. There are also more different styles of composition that accomplish slightly different things, so you have to know which one will work best for your problem. My personal experience is also that many people just don't understand compositional models as readily either.

One of the big problems, though, is that inheritance is much easier in most programming languages than composition is. Java, for example, has absolutely no support for composition or delegation, whereas inheritance requires a single keyword. C++ has multiple inheritance, which you can kind of re-purpose for the sake of composition, but it's still not very elegant and tends to just exacerbate the misuse of inheritance instead. Ruby has a pretty elegant mixin model, and you can pretty much do whatever you want in Javascript if you're willing to roll the solution yourself (I confess that my Python knowledge is more limited so I have no idea if there's support there), but the most mainstream OO languages require you to really fight them in order avoid using inheritance inappropriately.
This is such a stupid article. I've got 700+ followers on twitter and 34 on friendfeed.. I had one of the firsr accounts on both services... Arrington gets so many followers on friendfeed because he keeps pushing his account there...
The BMW Museum's kinetic sculpture takes your brain to another dimension
2 Founders, 2 Careers’ Worth of Funding Tips
Great line. It is, however, orthogonal to the subject of institutionalized child care.

Smart people I know who don't have children are often a source of great observations about child rearing in general and even specific parenting situations. That's the positive side of your point, and I've used it many times to get a read on what I might be missing.

The mistake they make is not in their observations, which as I said are often very rational, but in assuming that they themselves would do better. What makes parenting hard is that your emotions are involved in a way that is far deeper and more complicated than anything you've experienced before. It's easy to be a "good" parent when that condition is absent, for the same reason it's easy not to get hypothermia in Florida.
I think it is pathetic if driving big cars is someone's only pleasure in life.

My advice is to look for a cheaper hobby, for example watching TV.
IPhone 3G lines start at the Apple Cube... one week early
Re: Jef Atwood's programming chair: Stop being a slave to U.S. consumerism.
Erlang meets Lisp (again)
What's Holding OpenOffice Back?
The egg thing is actually rather dishonest -- eggs have gone way up, due to (among other things) the continued popularity of the Atkins diet. So egg stocks have, well:

http://bigcharts.marketwatch.com/quickchart/quickchart.asp?s...
Something like that, but with rollbacks, test builds, multiple versions installed and available in parallel, and more, all more or less for for free.

When I say "for free", I'm assuming that modern DVCSs are efficient with large binary files. Even if they're not, the idea is compelling for other reasons anyway.
It could be duplicated a lot better if people didn't drop the most important thing, which to my mind is the part about helping creative people make better lives for themselves than the default paths through the soulless wasteland usually afford.

I wondered for a bit if this was unfair. Motivation isn't something you can turn on or off, so it's not within the duplicators' control to duplicate that. But it is within their control to observe better. If I were going to make a YC clone and I didn't have that piece, I'd think twice about bothering.

Incidentally, I'm just basing this on what I've read. I haven't met any of the people involved.
I've found that my limited PHP knowledge has been great for little tiny projects.

For example, something like http://soindie.com (which isn't mine) would be a huge pain to set up with some enormous framework. But with a few lines of PHP, a mysql database, and you're done.
Cool stuff, although wont this cause near sightless?
its simple don't buy a big ass SUV if you don't need it. Too many people buy them because they give them a higher view of the road, not because they need to haul a boat/lots of stuff in the back
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List of acquisitions by Google
Only time will tell if these young-ins have the patience to wait that long (7 years).
Earth's Core & Magnetic Field Changing Fast, Study Says
The same can be said to "startup in America".

"I spent x years working for various [failed] startups, mostly because I hoped to get rich and to avoid corporate Americas. I was hypnotized... I don't want young people to endure [working for 80 hours and eating ramen] at startups like I did if they don't want to".
I think the whole Cristal phenomenon generalizes this to most Americans in general.
I actually broke my Aeron's recline pin once and had to replace it myself. So I've retrained myself not to recline, which is awkward, as I'm a natural recliner.

$700 for that?

I bought my chair for $25 at a thrift store 10 years ago. It reclines all I want.

If you're that uncomfortable, maybe it's not the chair, but the butt in the chair. Get off of it and move around a little bit.

I've seen plenty of solutions looking for a problem in software, but never thought it would also come to office equipment.
Notice that the following people are not American:

- Linus Torvalds

- Andrew Tridgell

- DHH

- Alan Cox

- Rasmus Lerdorf

- Mark Shuttleworth (and most of Canonical)

- Guido von Rossum

They work at various companies by day and continue to work on open source when time permits them to do so.

They're happy to get the paycheck and go home. (Except maybe for DHH for hitting a jackpot of lifestyle business and Mark Shuttleworth for hitting the real jackpot).

Are any of them as ambitious as YCombinator crowds? probably not. But they "learned" to enjoy their life better than most of the younger generation these days.
I don't want to sound negative, but that sentence can also be reversed:

"I can't work well with other people. Therefore, I must choose wisely whom I should work with..."

For sure, most of the time you're the only person you can work well with.

At a big company, you learn how to work with other people whether they're considered "match" or "not-match" with you. It's a life-lesson how to treat people regardless their attitude.

I'm currently working at a startup that is owned by someone else. I'm still stuck working on whatever my boss asked me to do, and however my boss wants it.
Also see http://marijn.haverbeke.nl/pcall/background.html .
(Tooting my own horn, of course.)
I haven't been inside of something genuinely new, let alone doing my own, truly mine, thing.

Sounds like that's what you're really sad about, and with reason. Doing something you don't want isn't any more fun at a startup than elsewhere. It might even be less fun since startups are more intense. You're right that startups don't solve this problem, but they don't cause it either. We cause it ourselves by not doing what we really want to do.

I struggle with this myself.

"Make something people want" isn't the axiom to invoke here. "Do something you want" is more like it. Gruntwork is inevitable, but when you're doing something that is truly your own thing, it doesn't feel so bad; the connection to what you care about is much closer at hand.
The point is, every group is different, so the idea of one particular group software solving everyone's problem is never going to work.

You can say that about any kind of software.

Your choices are:

- buy a package and settle for the lowest common denominator

- write custom code

- get a customizable platform and shoot for the best of both worlds
alternatives:
- sit on exercise ball for some time every day, or

- on the floor cross-legged, or in yoga poses called virasana (sitting between your shins) or double pigeon (with shins stacked in front of you). All very good for hips and back if done correctly, bad for knees if done incorrectly.
and here:
RECURSION AND HUMAN THOUGHT: WHY THE PIRAHÃ DON'T HAVE NUMBERS
http://edge.org/3rd_culture/everett07/everett07_index.html
High-Tech Gear for Olympic Athletes
The funny thing is that the same could be achieved with stilts.
"would be a huge pain to set up with some enormous framework."

It is possible to write Web apps in Ruby, Python, et al without some enormous framework. They all have basic DB wrapper libs and straightforward templating tools.
"Before he won a major, he was roundly criticized for taking too many chances. After winning, he was renowned for his creativity."

The book The Halo Effect discusses this phenomenon quite well.
http://www.the-halo-effect.com/
It would be pathetic if any one thing was someone's only pleasure in life.

Life has lots of pleasures. Driving a big car is one of them.
I would argue that, when we talk about "nature", we are referring to all that exists

I would argue that "nature" is a matter of perspective. If the universe is a simulation, for example, the set of things in that simulation and the set of rules that apply to them to us constitute nature. You could define nature to also include the machine that runs that simulation and the universe in which it exists, but I don't think at that point the term "nature" is very useful. To this outer world, the term "supernatural" would apply, relative to the people in the simulation.

This outer world would be capable of interfering with the simulation in ways that violate the rules that normally govern it (this was mentioned here[powerpoint]: http://www.mit.edu/%7Ehooman/ComputersAndGod.ppt), and those interferences could be called supernatural; or perhaps since they've still occurred inside the simulation, they are "natural" but "paranormal". Replace "simulation" and "outer world" with "physical world" and 'spiritual planes' if those terms float your boat. I'm just playing with semantics here, but so are you:

God isn't natural, therefor, God doesn't exist.

This doesn't refute the idea of God, it just shows that some definitions of "God" and of "nature" are incompatible and may need to be revised.
Part 2: http://bc.tech.coop/blog/060111.html
Functional Programming Went Mainstream Years Ago