skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Thanks for the link. I've struggled since childhood with both falling asleep and waking up, especially the latter. (Some of my earliest memories involve been ripped out of bed and thrown into a cold car to be taken to school.) I've read quite a few articles like this over the years, but this is the first time I've encountered the notion of practicing a routine during waking hours to program yourself to get up. Interesting idea -- I may even give it a shot.
my bad. thanks Alx.
The spokesman is correct that DRM and intellectual property controls are needed for how the industry is structured now.

THAT IS THE PROBLEM. How the industry is structured now sucks and is completely backwards. Have they not seen the tremendous growth of the Internet (an open ecosystem for development) over the last decade? Have they not seen the massive goodwill, economic benefit and creative outflows that have been happening.

Someone needs to drag these guys kicking and screaming over to the money tree and shut them up.
Might want to look into NetTiers (www.NetTiers.com). I haven't coded in a few months, and I'm not a RoR expert, but when talking to my RoR friends it seems like NT does a lot of the same stuff.
It'll be nice when everyone else catches on too...

Though many large corporations pay lip service to the idea, most, in my experience, treat their employees pretty badly.
AHAH is Asynchronous HTML and HTTP. This is where you send html chunks instead of XML or JSON.
I should have done some research first.
New Fuel Cell System 'Generates Electricity with Only Water, Air'
At long last, location
The time argument is the thing that really turned me off. In my one published paper we wrote the draft a full two and a half years before it saw the light of day. One referee didn't like it, so it went through a review process, then got bumped down to a lower journal (PRL to PR-A for the physics folks) started the acceptance process again...

Even in CS where things are mostly conference oriented, you're still probably looking at close to a year between finishing the research and seeing it published.
Ask YC: Things to do in Silicon Valley?
smanek's post (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=217274) was timely, but different location for me.

I just moved to the Mountain View area and was looking for similar suggestions from the community: groups to join, places to go, people to meet, websites to frequent, cheap places to eat, etc.

tks
I moved from an msdn shop into a rails-based startup. I totally agree regarding the comments on winforms...I wrote an internal app with it and it is just not a great option.

Rails has been great so far and I have three production projects and a couple more on the way running under it. Rails is continually moving but is not perfect for all situations by any means.

I personally don't think I'd build an app using another language although I am interested in trying out some variations on rails like Merb (a more light weight web framework written in ruby) and also some of the other platform alternatives based on ruby such as jruby and ironruby (the .net implementation of ruby).

As another option I've heard it said that ironpython the .net implementation of python is a pretty good language option for .net web apps as well.

The thing that always held me back for web apps and MS is the server software...I am not a huge fan of paying licensing fees for server software when sooooo many great options are available open source.
Or rent them for visits, e.g. from a relative. Then you can return them and be glad you aren't stuck with them for the rest of your life.
re: considering social network project
i've used community engine, which is an out-of-the box RoR social network plugin

http://missingmethod.brunobornsztein.com/projects/community_...

mature and solid (vs insoshi or lovdbyless)
I strongly second the thought here (and in a few other comments above) that .NET fails because it tries to make web programming work like desktop programming. It doesn't.
RIP, Tim Russert
He was the best interviewer I have seen. Fair to both sides of the aisle.

Will miss MTP without him.

http://www.newyorker.com/talk/2008/06/23/080623ta_talk_remni...
they both have their pros and cons. I would rather send JSON as opposed to XML, its easier to work with client side and smaller response size, but HTML is easiest to work with client side and could be made to work when javascript is turned off (at the expense of server cpu cycles transforming the data to html before sending it).
If you can write in C#, you can write in Ruby --- Ruby is a less complicated language. There are startups that won't hire you unless you have "3 years of Ruby experience" on your resume, but you wouldn't want to work for them.

We looked for Ruby devs, quickly gave up, and wound up hiring a Lisp hacker. Our runner-up was a sharp C# hacker.
Yeh I totally was warped for ages going to bed at 4am and waking at 12pm. I got so much done but my health, availability and communication hours were difficult. I am still fighting it but when you can work it in the day sometimes you spend less time messing around, for better or worse. Some of my best stuff came from just messing around.

There is something to be said of the late night session, It almost feels like you can draw more inspiration without constant interruption and nothing going on, extreme focus.

In fact with the green onslaught, globalization and population growth maybe night living will be acceptable at some point.
In 2008, the security argument tilts strongly in favor of Microsoft on this one. 37signals hasn't paid millions of dollars to have 10 different security research firms review the code and write penetration test cases and fuzzers. Microsoft started on IIS back in 2003.

I wouldn't use security as a deciding factor (we're a Rails shop), but if I did, I'd be writing C# now.
EFiX USB dongle for installing OS X on a regular PC
Details? In my experience, XML parsing is one of the easiest things to do in Ruby.
I also read that our bright monitors are fooling us for daylight but the key thing is eating. Usually I would eat late in the day and just get going on coffee. But I read and tried it (it works somewhat) that if you dont' eat at night, then wake up early just one day and eat a nice meal. Your body instantly adjusts. You repeat this for a while and soon enough you are an 7-8am'er.
Songbird Media Player Integration for Web Pages, a Compendium
A guide to integrating web pages with the Songbird open source media player. Use javascript to control media playback, create local libraries, download mp3s etc.
Sorry should have clarified, it is un-indexable without conversion. IN terms of open it is arguably an open standard. Controlled by a proprietary entity but puppeted as an open format.
44.25 Hours & Counting « 48-Hour Launch
Express Edition of MSSQL is free too (and actually a very good database).
Presently on my fifth startup. Next time I think I might give this a try - though maybe not 48 hours - maybe a hundred. I am looking forward to checking out the live site whenever those 225 minutes are finally up. Crazy to think of launch time in minutes ...

Anyway, the only change I'd make is to immediately send out the first lesson. By tomorrow, I'll have forgotten what it was I wanted to learn.

Also, I know this is nit picking, but brainbankhq.com is a not a great domain IMHO. Head Quarters? Is that a pun? How about brainbanklearning.com or brainbankcourses.com ... something that's a bit more about what it is. What it isn't is a Head Quarters.

Great job so far though.
Why the Home Network Needs More Than Just Wi-Fi
You're right about the first email going out immediately. I've added that to the list. Thanks for the feedback! I'm open to other ideas from folks.
http://www.justin.tv/worldsport1
In the case of wine, it's about also about availability. Generic wine from a local producer trumps branded wine that's stacked in a hypermarche 30km away when you want a drink. And you probably know the grower, went to school with his kids, whatever. And said grower has a pretty good life and isn't really interested in becoming the Wine King of Chicago.

So what I'm saying is, what looks like a commodity in one market may not actually be one in another market.
I know the american tradition is to not speak ill of the dead. But I've never been one for tradition, so...

One less fevered ego tainting our collective unconscious. Good.

Fair to both sides of the aisle?. Which is why Dick Cheney preferred to go on his show because of the message control. And why he allowed people to put things off the record after interviews. Let's not pretend he represented journalism or that the times he did call people on things, it wasn't just picking on sacrificial lambs so he could maintain a thin veneer of responsibility behind which he could hide the powerful people he ultimately protected. He was fair to everyone except the american people. He's dead now. He hurt America. Millions of people die every day. I can't believe there aren't hundreds of thousands of them more worth this outpouring of grief.

My condolences to his family, and to the powerful elites who depended on his show to control the way they distributed propaganda to the masses.
One less fevered ego tainting our collective unconscious. Good.

This is really a pretty despicable attitude no matter where you're from. It's good that a person died because his ego won't trouble you any more? Are you serious? I saw some comments like this on reddit, but I didn't think for a million years I'd see it here.
Not Hacker News.

Sorry, but I already found out that Russert was dead from a dozen different news sources.

Also, he was never "fair" to both sides of the aisle. Sometimes he was in attack mode, sometimes he would switch to kid-gloves mode (I remember him giving a particularly easy interview to Mike Huckabee on the eve of the Iowa primary, and that is a man with a LOT of "interesting" issues to talk about). Maybe he was special in the world of journalists because he actually had an attack mode. But let him be praised for what he was, and not an idealized vision of what he never was.
I am partial to AJAJ myself.

0. Sending back JSON allows you to to generate HTML just as easily on the client-side as it does on the server.
1. Makes your backend more generic by default, so makes it easier for other apps to use your service (JSON is included in many languages these days)
2. Makes your design a whole lot cleaner
3. Is (generally) less work than dealing with full XML.
Am I the only one that's saddened by the potential for even more fragmentation of communication and info? I personally like having all of my information in one place, and that's my personal email account - not my social network. I don't need another email address.
I actually learned Rails after knowing PHP, and I felt that my knowledge of web fundamentals (generally, how web sites are built and architected) was greatly enhanced by my PHP knowledge. It also gives you an appreciation of what Rails makes easy!

If you're familiar with a C-based programming language, then PHP will be very fast to pick up. And, if you want to "actually be able to build something," with PHP you'll absolutely at least feel like you can haha.
I like iPaper a lot. I think that it does a very good job of displaying content, and it does it much faster than PDFs.

At the same time, there're a few disadvantages: for instance, I can't fill out a form using iPaper.

I think the three big things about iPaper that make it not-so-easily-adaptable ATM are as follows: first, you need to use Scribd to use iPaper, so it adds a layer of complexity; second, it doesn't integrate well into a web site's layout, so text has an advantage over it in terms of styling; third, and most importantly, when you embed iPaper it's impossible to read unless you click for a full view.

That being said, I've been watching Scribd for exactly this reason. Hopefully, they have ideas for expanding it further and making it into an acceptable web format, for the sake of all of us logorrheics in the world.
An article making fun of some guys' last names.

Very insightful.
sounds really interesting. the course page has sets of projects, and assignments, but are there lecture notes up online anywhere?
Millions of people die each day. This in itself is neither good or bad. Death is not some horrible thing.

It's not good because he won't trouble me. It's good because all the thousands of people Americans are basically torturing overseas have one less journalist giving the politicians responsible cover.

It's good because the politicians like Cheney no longer can obscure shit like this http://www.antiwar.com/news/?articleid=2444 by gaining respectability on his show. Which means that Americans will be slightly less likely to allow this outrageous abuse and torture to continue.

Yeah. I'm glad Tim Russerts dead. I was elated all day. Why? Because I think torturing people is wrong and I think Tim Russert helped people who directly ordered that torture deceive the American people. I think he helped deceive america intentionally (I do not think he knew about the torture, though). To me, the thought that there is one less gasbag fooling my fellow americans into thinking goons like Cheney who order systematic torture are on the up and up is a great thing.

I guess this makes me the one with the despicable attitude and questionable moral fabric. Go look at those pictures. Tim Russert helped the politicians who ordered that to happen. Now that he's dead, he can't do that. Yeah, I'm glad he's dead.

Condolences to his family, though.

And I saw the disgusting spectacle of people who's shock at being confronted with death made then lionize this person who was quite flawed everywhere. I didn't expect to find that here.
You don't hate ASP.NET, you seem to hate WebForms and for very good reasons. You don't have to use WebForms though, there are other toolkits available. In fact, I built a neat desktop application using ASP.NET stack once - you can embed it into any .NET process to neatly handle HTTP requests.

One huge advantage of ASP.NET is that it is crazy fast. After a while it generates native-code assemblies and you're basically looking at C/C++ speed when handling requests.

You can get yourself one of those newer (and cheap) dual-CPU quad-core servers with 8GB of RAM and this machine will handle some serious load (enough for most applications). This will allow you not to mess with distributed stuff and keep your stuff in RAM in between requests. Such setup will be an equivalent of a farm of RoR machines with MUCH smaller load on DB layer.

Of course, it doesn't apply to high-traffic projects like Twitter/Facebook, etc.
I agree with what you're saying.. but most hackers I know can force themselves to get up sevenish if they're going to sleep that early. IMHO, late is 3am+
I like my life much better when I go up at 07-08:00 and not 12-14:00 but I have this really bad tendency to push later and later everyday until I stay up 24hours , go to bed at 18:00 sleep to 04:00 then start it all over again.

But it has to do with being free, I will soon have more habits, training etc which will force me to keep a more normal schedule.
I see many software companies post (recruitment) puzzles on their sites and you and actually tell a lot about the company by the puzzles they use.
Most of the lectures are on the ad hoc side. I don't recall ever seeing any of the notes (Sussman and Hanson prefer actual overhead slides to Powerpoint) going online officially, although there might be some student notes? It's been called 6.891 in addition to 6.945.

edit--Here's what I could track down:

http://swiss.csail.mit.edu/classes/symbolic/spring07/reading...

http://swiss.csail.mit.edu/classes/symbolic/spring08/code/
Denormalization (snowflake schema) in Data Warehousing
A practical, scalable, distributed data store
Here's the real PDF: http://www.hpl.hp.com/techreports/2007/HPL-2007-193.pdf
The Passive-Aggressive Programmer: or Why Nothing Gets Done
Database Design: How Table Normalization Can Improve Performance
Tom, I just spent 0.25 hrs and got the first email to deliver immediately. Thanks for the idea!
I like to play puzzles like this just to get in to different mindsets from my own. Often I find it is better to do it yourself, and then have another go using the tips provided. Sometimes it helps me into different ways of thinking than I would normally take.
I have read "That's not what I meant!" a couple times in college, it was actually part of the reading for a required course. It was an extremely eye opening experience for me, and would highly suggest anyone out there read it before you waste time feeling frustrated with the opposite sex because of inherit linguistic differences. Good article Giles, I completely agree the lack of female programmers to be a HUGE problem. I have the privilege to work with some female programmers and they are great programmers, and bring a dynamic to the team that just wouldn't be there without them. Diversity is a necessary part of any good organization.
Math is Beatiful: Number Spirals
JSON is better IMHO. HTML is pretty ugly and using innerHTML is an extremely bad idea.
Better to send data as JSON, and manipulate the DOM if you need.
"But let him be praised for what he was, and not an idealized vision of what he never was."

I just read Speaker for the Dead again--I hadn't picked it back up again since high school--and I think Card argues we kill the dead all over again when we idealize them instead of confronting who they really were. An extreme thesis, but one worth considering.
Sorry but I got to completely disagree with Arrington's analysis. Yahoo is a media portal and they do graphic ads in search pretty well too. Where Yahoo went bust was in trying to usurp Google's lead in search. That is the only area where they are #2. Yahoo still is the #1 media portal on the web and the following they have is very loyal.

If Yahoo had taken MS's deal it would've struck at the very heart where the competencies lie.
They would've had to give up on their Panama system which is being tweaked and is currently showing better prospects.
$1B for putting paid to all Yahoo research and their tech is an insult to Yahoo techies.
MS just provided an opportunity to increase the current operating income and cash flow but in all other quarters straitjacketed Yahoo.
Yahoo would be forced to stop managing and hiring search engineers and just display ads. It is an industry fact that MS's per query revenue projected is lower than Yahoo's current revenue.

What Microsoft was asking Yahoo to do was too risky. They have a history of screwing up internet deals and straitjacketing Yahoo's core competencies in exchange for cash is too much to ask.

I will agree Jerry mismanaged Yahoo a bit much, but running a $2B company isn't a joke.

I believe Yahoo was right in rejecting MS's deal. They needed Yahoo more than it needed them.

And Icahn isn't an angel. He is just itching for a fight to make a few hundred millions.

Focusing on the Google alliance gives Yahoo enough leeway to get marginally additional revenue while concentrating on their media and Panama divisions.

The stock might be down now, but the market is quite open for experimentation. And if they get it right, who knows, the stock will perhaps shoot up like before.
Where is the bug?

In your beliefs about the universe? > Your purpose in life? > Your career choice?> Your motivation? > Your diet > Your genes...

Seriously, at what level of abstraction is the problem? Is it a problem at all?
"e.g. you can't start a sepeartate thread in an action)"

This sort of issue is why jruby is so appealing.
- Buy gadgets at stores.

- Hang out with other bored, lonely programmers.

- Sit in traffic jams on 101.

- Work on a startup (yours or someone else's).

My advice is to do a lot of the last one and then get the hell out of the area:-) Or you could live in San Francisco, which has a lot more to do.
I've done 4 professional rails apps and many personal ones. I've never had a problem keeping them running. Did you spend any time trying to figure out why they were crashing?
and sql server licenses and visual studio licenses, etc
Ask YC: Is gmail down?
Is gmail down for anyone else?
Don't real users rock? Ok, here's a bit more feedback.

1. Please don't send plain text passwords. This might just be me, but man, that bums me out to EVER see my password.

2. Ok, so I just activated. Tell me better what to do here.

3. You can register for a class twice.

4. Remind me that once I enroll, the stuff is coming via email.

What's your plan going forward time wise? Still four hour chunks? Will you be keeping the blog up to date with that sort of info? I personally find it interesting.
still working here
The puck
I'd say the S60 platform is hopelessly outdated. The phones look the same and are almost functionally the same as they were 4 years ago, just a little bit faster. Why is there no decent browser on any other phone than the iPhone? I think that these new OSes on mobile that are unix based will totally change the mobile phone world because they are enginneered to be computers rather than direct descendants from voice handset.

A friend had hanged out with some Ericsson developers he knows and they were laughing at the iphone design. "It hasn't got any high performance mobile chips", "They're designing this phone totally wrong"... Yeah, it's because the phone is no longer a phone, it's a computer. (Hopefully a computer one can install a free OS on and liberate :)
Nope. You should use http://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/gmail.com
* Yep, they are indeed rockstars in my world... especially users like you who offer feedback

* Gotcha... I'll change that soon

* Gotcha

* Yep, needs tweaking.

* Good idea

* Yep, I can't really do more than 4-hr chunks. With the blog, I've intended on keeping it updated daily but that hasn't happened. I will very much be keeping it updated with info as much as I can.

I'm planning on making a key change tomorrow based on the usage I've seen today i.e. if someone is not logged in, instead of telling them "Hey, log in or register", it will create a temporary user for them with the enrollment... and send them an email saying "Hey, you enrolled into this course. Click here to activate your account and confirm your enrollment."

After that change is made, I'll write another blog saying "I lost XXXX number of people who tried to enroll but couldn't because they were not logged in and they didn't register. Here's how I solved the problem..."
Losing Twitter followers? It’s not you, it’s Twitter » VentureBeat
Them is Us
Comotivate: Reach For Goals Together
Hands-On With the Qosmio G55: First Gesture Control Laptop
Why Arrington is Wrong about Yahoo!-Google Deal - O'Reilly Radar
Patience as a design principle
What's wrong with using innerHTML?
http://www.amazon.com/Calculus-Michael-Spivak/dp/0914098896

I am learning calculus from this book on my own. It's great if you already know a lot of logic.
We all have our opinions. We just happen to disagree. At least you gave yours.
It Depends. If you're doing something really simple where you know exactly what the HTML you're slotting in to the DOM is going to look like, go with AHAH - it's generally easier to generate HTML snippets on the server-side than the client-side due to JavaScript's poor support for multi-line strings.

If you're likely to want to re-use the data service you're building in more than one place, go with JSON. The problem with an AHAH endpoint is that it can only be used for one thing - a JSON endpoint can easily be repurposed for other parts of your application.

The only reason to bother with XML is if you're going to be doing HUGE transforms of e.g. a ton of data in to an HTML table, at which point you might want to use client-side XSLT for a speed boost. The vast majority of applications won't need that though, in which case JSON is far more convenient.
Have you been Salmoned?
Primarily, memory leaks

You can find better reasons here
http://ajaxian.com/archives/the-problem-with-innerhtml
The End-of-the-world Wiki
They may be doing a rollout, Gmail was going crazy on me when I tried to download a voicemail attachment just now.
Canadian internet usage...