skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask YC: What do you keep on your USB flash drive?
I finally broke down and got a 4GB USB Flash Drive. Since I'm a little late to the game, I was wondering how all of you have yours set up?

My own machines all run Linux or OS X, but I occasionally use other peoples Windows machines, so I have several versions of a lot of these binaries.

I only keep a few useful utilities unencrypted on the drive (PuTTY, TrueCrypt, Firefox, Filezilla, packet sniffer, etc). I then have all my personal files (documents, firefox profile, ssh/gpg keys, etc) in an encrypted Truecrypt file. I also have a simple script set up to sync my personal files with my SVN repo when I plug the USB drive into my laptop.

Anything major I'm missing, or that you've found useful?
ManualDoc
ManualDoc
I'm not sure which to be more scared of - perl 6 or the death of our sun.
since it's factually incorrect advice that will lead them to make poorer decisions

The problem with this assertion is the assumption that you have all the facts, facts meaning absolute certainty what a person is capable of given a scalar score from a test.

But that might lead you to make another comment of similar tone and content to the one to which I responded, leaving us both worse off. Do you see where I'm coming from?

I'm guessing not from a vantage point of omniscience.

I am in a business that most batteries of tests would predict I'd fail at, so I clearly don't follow your parody of my thought processes.

Not a parody, just an observation that your aggregates mean nothing to a given instantiation. And congratulations on defying what the stats say you would fail at. Hard worker, indeed.
I would be willing to subscribe to your newsletter after reading your comment. Do you accept tipjoy?

Doesn't that blow your mind? Without this free medium and my 'theft' I would never have even known of abstractbill.
Congratulations to PG & JL!!!
http://planet.python.org/ is pretty much all you need, plus project-specific feeds such as http://www.djangoproject.com/weblog/

http://www.learningpython.com/ and http://thinkhole.org/wp/ are great reads for beginners, but neither one have been updated very much in recent months.
Decompiling Perl and Python
I'm not sure what the point of this particular semantic debate is. It's not theft. Ok. It's still wrong, it's still harmful, and it's still totally within the purview of a reasonable government to regulate or outlaw.
It is in the source: http://goosh.org/goosh.js

Personally I think this is fantastically cool. It is just going to take me a little while to stop typing "ls -l" and "mutt" at the prompt.
For someone with the whole Internet as their resource, I would consider it beyond lazy. It is ignorant to treat them the same.

Copyright infringement has been responsible in increases for 'victim', both in exposure and revenues. Theft has never (that I am aware of) benefited the victim.
The draw is that there is an assumption that 'large monitor' == good, and tv == 'large monitor'.

The problem is that what people really want is more pixels, and HDTVs actually have fewer than most monitors.

Monitors as TVs don't work for me because I want more than just me to be able to watch and that means moving the viewing device further back. After moving the viewing device further back it doesn't really matter how much fine-grained detail there is. Whalla! That's a TV! :)

'course I haven't "watched tv" in a couple weeks... but this is beside the point.
I intentionally avoided the larger debate, but one point I did make is that it is not a semantic debate.

Arson is also wrong, harmful, and should be illegal. But we don't regulate it in the same way that we regulate theft, nor should we. It would be bad policy.
I'm not sure your analogy holds. What's different about the way we "regulate" arson and theft? They're both criminal offenses, and both offenses leave you civilly liable for damages. Finish your point; I'm interested in hearing it.
Check out http://python.alltop.com. It hasn't been up for that long, but it seems like a pretty solid repository of python info; I haven't seen anything else this comprehensive yet.
Yahoo fails to keep pay plan details secret
Apple Back-to-School promo to offer free 8GB iPod touch
Toward Better UI Programming Models
Buzzword, Adobe's slick new online text editor
Doesn't this assume the profit you gain from kN users donating X/k price on average, given free content, equals or exceeds N users paying X price, or something like that? Of course this is a gross simplification, but how else does it justify making something free and expecting increased exposure to make the operation sustainable? IIRC Wikipedia is not looking good financially, and there is probably nothing with more eyeballs at the moment.

I'm guessing you have thought though this situation much more thoroughly, and maybe have data on it too; otherwise, I'd be very surprised if things work out so ideally.
You're right, it's not the best analogy.

Or maybe it is. People clearly see arson and theft and distinct things even if they don't understand that they're both prosecuted similarly.

But legally speaking arson and theft are closer than copyright infringement and theft.
Ask YC: What exactly is so hard about OO?
I've been feeling a little confused lately, given the litany of blog posts heralding the return of procedural programming or detailing how the layman programmer incompetently uses object-oriented languages.

To me, the concept seems somewhat straightforward, so I have to ask: What exactly is the difficulty people have with grasping OO programming and using it to construct cleaner, more maintainable code? What are the common mistakes? Am I unknowingly using OO wrong?! Are we ALL??

I think that like any programming technique OO has it's place, and certainly not useful in many circumstances. I also don't think that it's an incredibly complex concept for a programmer with a little experience, and can be quite useful when implemented properly. Please correct me if I'm wrong.
Apple releases Mac OS X Leopard Security Guide
This isn't even that odd. That's just plain recursion.

Each notice of indexing should alter the query text based upon the comments at the time.
Also, you can see most of these criticisms handled quite impartially in Eric Raymond's "The Art of Unix Programming," which I'd say is required reading for any would-be "hacker."
OO C is passable
Human Powered Databases: Some Lessons Learned
I'm an Amazon Prime addict. Need I say more? You can get a brand new copy of "The Rails Way" for $18.50 less on amazon.

I checked the number of customer reviews for a few different books and most Border's books have few to none while amazon's have many to 100's.
Vim on my linux box. InType if I have to drop down to Windows.
The point being, someone smart enough to play at an orchestra should be able to use a computer. Linux didn't fail just with Joe Six-Pack, it failed the vast majority of people intelligent enough to actually handle computers.
My first OO language was Java; I learned it in college. After learning Java I thought I'd mastered OO.

Last year I learned Lisp, now I understand that I've only now mastered OO and that Java has some major limits (such as single-dispatch).

There is a real problem in that different people (e.g. the me from college vs. the me from now) have very different and incompatible ideas of what OO programming means.
You can perfectly easily write with-foobar functions of any kind, so macros aren't a win there, except maybe in Lisp where it saves you a parenthesis or two. You can replice define-memoized-function with

(define f (memoize (lambda args ...)))

so I don't see what macros gain you there. (Well, they save you from having to write lambda.) Especially if you're using a language with 'nicer' syntax, like Haskell:

withFile $ \h -> do
...

fib = memoize $ \n -> if n <= 1
then n
else fib (n - 1) + fib (n - 2)

Example (2) seems interesting though. And I'd like to see some examples of (3) that couldn't be so easily overcome. (Granted, my example is rather fake, since I don't know how you'd implement memoize for general types that only have a comparison function on them, without resorting to using some IO operation.)
The confusion about OO is due entirely to people's failure to apply Ron's First Law: All extreme positions are wrong. What happens is that someone stumbles upon a new technique that seems to be good for something, so they decide that it must be good for everything, and when they realize that it's not good for everything (typically ten years into the process) they decide that it was all hype and it must be good for nothing. So everyone stampedes off to find the Next Big Thing, whatever that is, and the whole sorry cycle starts all over again.

It's particularly amusing as a Lisp programmer to watch all these fads come and go because none of these ideas are new. The OO features of Java and C++ are just tiny subsets of the functionality in CLOS. XML and JSON are nothing more than (bad) re-inventions of S-expressions. Aspect-oriented programming is just a hack to get around the fact that Java doesn't have macros or multimethods. And on and on it goes.

The right answer, of course, is that OO (and every other programming technique) is good for some things and not other things. Figuring out what things a particular technique is and is not good for is a big part of mastering the art of programming.
Just found out more from CNet: http://7hr.qlnk.net/

-They'll invest up to $200,000.

-It's only for NY-based tech startups.

-They have $2,000,000 under management to invest.

-They're headquartered at Polytechnic University's start-up incubator: http://www.poly.edu/incubator/
That blog post I referenced is making the point that these three schools of thought are mutually incompatible. I agree that the "Event Horizon" idea is not making any interesting claims, although it's a good intuition pump. I think the "Intelligence Explosion" idea is worth investigating further.

Also, none of the arguments in that blog post are arguing that there will be unbounded/infinite growth.
It seems nice, but my old 1ghz powerbook hates flash more than i do, so they won't get any love from me until i get a new computer.
Many branches of math start out as being "meaningless". Number theory was once widely considered meaningless until it was given importance through cryptography. The current head of Microsoft's Cambridge research location literally said to Bill Gates as she was being hired that her work was completely unrelated to computer science; her work was in combinatorial optimization. I think that may be a part of the problem: not enough math professors teach their subjects with any regards to what they are used for. Sometimes, they don't even know themselves.
Except that everything in that book is cribbed from better primary sources, not the least of which are Kernighan+Plaugher's "Software Tools", Stevens APUE, and "The Unix Haters Handbook".
Be careful.That's all i will say.
IPhone 2 Features Detailed — 3G, GPS, 2xRAM, Thinner, Better Battery and Only $200
But But But.... multiple dispatch or multimethods will save us all!

Ahem.... right. Your response sounds more complete than mine below. :)
I do not agree what is deemed copyright infringement in the US is wrong and harmful in all cases. Luckily, the Canadian government agrees with me. A 2005 ruling states "Downloading a song for personal use is not an infringement.".
Doesn't that virtually eliminate the point of copyright? Almost all music and movies are bought for "personal use", so what if everyone downloaded for free instead of paying?
Gird yourself with cucumbers, big boy!
My two cents:

The days of bands with 100 million fans will be replaced with one hundred bands having 1 million fans each.

And a few bands will have 1 billion fans in a 'flattening the curve' type motion where a band's talent is reflected by their popularity.
scatter/gather, kqueue, and signals: finish your argument. How do these rebut the article? (Also: where are you still using readv/writev? "THIS PROGRAM NEEDS BUFFERING").
With 10 fingers, you can count to 2^10.
Canadians pay levies on recordable media (and have since cassette tapes) that goes to the Canadian recording industry.

Initially it was deemed legal to tape the radio for personal use. Now that has moved into the digital age.

It does not whatsoever eliminate the point of copyright. I can't bootleg albums and sell them on the street.

To answer your question, nothing would happen if more people downloaded movies and music for personal use. Lots of Canadians still buy music to support the artists, and still purchase DVDs. Movies still make a killing in theatres, and musicians still make most of their money on tour.
I guess I lucked out as my introduction to OO was via the smalltalk course at the OU(I say lucked out because it was the last year the course was taught; subsequently being replaced by java.....)
+1 to your main point, but I had to respond to this side point, since I see it mentioned so often by Lispers:

"It's particularly amusing as a Lisp programmer to watch all these fads come and go because none of these ideas are new."

The takeaway from this is not that programmers are stupid and we should all be using Lisp, but that user interfaces matter. Social conventions matter. Installed bases matter. After all, most of Web 2.0 is just fancy rounded-corner reimplementations of 30-year-old UNIX utilities.

C succeeded because in one critical area - creating a fast, responsive UI on the hardware & compiler technology of the early 1980s - it worked and Lisp didn't. C++ and Java succeeded because programmers could take their C knowledge and syntax and apply it.

XML succeeded because it could leverage everyone's knowledge of HTML. HTML succeeded because at it's heart, it's just text - you could start typing a plain old text document and it was valid HTML. A good part of JSON's success is because every JSON document is also legal JavaScript and legal Python.

Aspect-oriented programming generates interest because it's in Java, and people already use Java. And on and on it goes...

On purely technical grounds, the Lisp solution from 25 years ago is almost always better than the modern-day solution we're just rediscovering now. But the modern-day solution has the benefit of building on top of all the social conventions that have arisen in the last 25 years. That's worth remembering, particularly in a forum devoted to entrepreneurship. If you tell your customers "our solution is better, but you'll have to throw away everything you already know and start from scratch", they probably won't remain your customers for long.
There's nothing intrinsically wrong with OO programming. I find that data tends to map very naturaly on to objects. However, the biggest problem I've seen with OO is that people are tempted to build over-engineered solutions to simple problems. Java's EJB 2.0 spec is a great of example of OO design gone wrong (long story short, you have to implement an obscene amount of boilerplate code to get even simple things done). Anything that basically requires you to have an IDE to write your code for you to get off the ground is extremely counter-productive.

I think Java is particularly bad in this department, since I think it often really encourages with the "Let the IDE handle it for you" mentality.
Well, I guess it depends on which you believe will arrive first.

Anyone taking bets?
Tarquin?

The purpose was to measure a phenomenon I'd previously observed -- that it's getting harder to find answers on Google, because people post their questions on well-trafficked sites, and within a few minutes, those sites rocket to the top for a well-crafted search query trying to answer the question.

"By the way, how long IS a piece off string?"

I don't know, but strlen(piece) probably does.
I'm still holding out for the EeePhone.
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I know it's an old article, but I'll buck the trend and call it out as a thoughtful critique, mostly wrong, but well worth considering.

1. "Everything is a file". Yep, Unix tried. Yep. Unix failed. Sockets are not files. Programs can't access the network transparently. You still can't really event loop the disk.

2. "Everything is text". Not so much, unfortunately. Text works; you can build software tools in Bourne shell to manage them. ls(1)? Bad example: sysadmins use du(1) to sort by disk usage. And binary works just fine in Unix; I wrote an SNMP agent --- complete with ASN.1/BER encoding --- in Bourne shell on a dare.

3. "No reflection. Commands aren't discoverable." The author has an ill-advised admiration for OSX's skin-deep metadata features, which rely heavily on the same filename semantics as every other general purpose operating system (file types are a scourge). What operating system supports command reflection? What operating system even supports consistent "help" semantics? Hell, what programming language has licked this problem?

4. X11. Yes, worse than NeWS and DPS. Problem is, DPS? Also a Unix design.

5. Every geeky CS sophomore writes the program to make shell pipelines bidirectional. Meanwhile, who processes audio on stderr and video on stdout? Would a fully general DAG of sources and sinks be awesome? Yes. Go write that Masters Thesis, please.

6. Speaking of Masters Thesises: async system calls? Also awesome. Comparing QNX to a general purpose operating system? Not so much. This isn't something you hate about UNIX, it's something you hate about all mainstream systems.

7. Poor interfaces for kernels to send messages to userland? Not a real problem. Create a point on the filesystem the program can open. Support "mmap" to give userland an aperture to work with, or support "poll" to deliver messages. This problem needs a concrete example. OSX has all of Mach's capabilities. Where did they turn out to be a win?

8. Not going down this C vs. the world rathole. Just going to win the argument by pointing out that the lingua franca of Unix is no longer C; it's pretty much every other language that has mainstreamed since then, except C# and Visual Basic.

9. It would suck if there wasn't a library for consistently handling wildcards. Unfortunately, there is. "man 3 glob".

10. This is a rehash of #3, and it again uses OSX as an example without acknowledging that OSX uses the same "inband signalling", which is why I can't attach #*&(! Pages documents to my gmail messages, because they're directories and not files.

I wrote this because it was fun to write, not because I hated the article. I liked the article; it made me think. Anyone who can write for "InformIT" about asynchronous system calls knows what they're talking about, even if they are mostly wrong.
yeah, this is legit, the CNET article says Bloomberg himself announced this fund.
Do not read this -- the author rants about arbitrary design decisions for the sake of ad revenue.
Or http://www.ycombinator.search.xirium.com/cgi-bin/fight.cgi?q...
The other problem is, Unix is the worst operating system ever devised, except for the others that have been tried from time to time.

http://www.jwz.org/doc/worse-is-better.html

Google and Amazon seem to have post-Unix operating systems in some sense, but a lot of it's trade secrets to us proles.
Two reasons it may be interesting to HN readers:

1) I am a founder and CEO of Chesspark, which created this, and although I'm fairly new around here, I'd like to think I am part of the community.

2) The tech we have is interesting. The client is pretty, very responsive, and completely in javascript. It's also open source, and all the protocols are XMPP. We open sourced a lot of our backend components as well (punjab, palaver) and we contribute quite a bit to many projects people here care about.

Sometimes you have to look behind the story, and not just what techcrunch thinks of it :)
There are two obvious problems with the Canadian system:

(1) It's a tax on everyone that, at least in part, takes money out of reasonable people's pockets and gives it to Miley Cyrus.

(2) No equitable mechanism exists to apportion that tax revenue, with an end result that Nielson SoundScan becomes social policy.

The problem with copyright isn't copyright. The problem with copyright is that the music distribution channel is controlled by a small, intertwined group of cartels. We should solve the right problem.
Buzzword doesn't really impress me that much. I don't see anything that really sepearates it from Google Docs. However, the ConnectNow virtual meeting site looks like it might have some real potential. The screen sharing aspect of looks incredibly useful, unfortunately I don't have anyone I know online to give it a proper demo. I'll have to try this out tomorrow at work.
SquirrelFish - WebKit's new JavaScript interpreter
Guido ~ http://www.artima.com/weblogs/index.jsp?blogger=guido

David Mertz ~ http://gnosis.cx/publish/tech_index_cp.html

Uche Ogbuji ~ http://www.xml.com/pub/au/84 & http://copia.ogbuji.net/blog/

Mark Pilgrim ~ http://diveintomark.org/

David Goodger ~ http://python.net/~goodger/
Zen, Betty Crocker, and End-to-End Testing
Jobs is not just an entrepreneur: his #1 feature is charisma. No one with a T has a reality distortion field.

He's an ENFP.
Charlie Rose - An hour with Rupert Murdoch
'Sarcasm' brain areas discovered
The upvotes for this item reflect pent-up demand for downvotes on the original 'naiivety' article.
Yahoo: Judge Unseals Complaint In Shareholder Suit; Microsoft Offered $40/Shr In January 2007
Phoenix Mars Lander’s mission site hacked
http://www.kungfuchess.com
Nothing. It's simply open-ended enough to argue about indefinitely. The mistake you're making is taking the arguments seriously.
I agree the system has some major flaws. It is better than the alternative system with the RIAA prosecuting people for 10,000$ per song in my opinion. I don't want my money going to poor 'artists' that are just manufactured entities by massive labels. Luckily the recent rulings do not support a levy on digital music players or digital storage devices.

Your proposed problem to focus on solving would drastically improve the American system if changed, so I hope it happens.

One final point I would like to add: I did not purchase music in university when I could not afford the luxury. Since I have improved my economic situation, I have recently purchased various older albums. I think that is a good example of how the system can potentially be successful.
:) Definitely a cool partnership, congrats.
If someone uses Google Reader to subscribe to your RSS feed, then your new blog posts are likely to get indexed as soon as Google Reader sees your new post show up in RSS.
Google makes progress on image search
Use Linux for Linux like environment. Trust me, it works better.
Intel, start-up to demo Wi-Fi short-range technology
Google Chart Server API generates QR Codes
Yeah, but "let the IDE handle it" is a perfectly valid way to code.

When you want to run water to your house, you don't hire someone to design new pipes for you; you use the ones pipe companies kick out. The boilerplate is just plumbing your IDE manufactures for you. The only difference between it and the magic that happens in dynamic languages with stuff like RoR is that boilerplate code is explicit rather than implicit. I prefer the former, truthfully, so I don't have to understand the whole stack to work on a small piece of the code.
Goodbye, All-You-Can-Eat Web; Hello, Higher Broadband Profits
I use slicehost. I haven't payed attention to the latency, but I've never noticed my site loading slowly.
A Silverlight Office is possible, but not feasible (for now)
Ask 10 people whether they'd rather give $1 to Clay Aiken or see a single mom sued for $2,500 for illicitly distributing a Coldplay album. You're right; they'll all fork over the $1. But they'll all have to think about it for a second.
I forgot about the recordable media taxes, although I think that simply paying for the music you listen to is simpler and fairer.
Digital Forensics: How Experts Uncover Doctored Images
No YC company has yet gotten investment from a Boston-area investor

Wow. Given that half the companies get started in Boston, I didn't realize it was this bad.