skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Well, the advantage of a language like Java or C# is that the IDE knows the types of objects, so, for instance, it can autocomplete method and property names. Because introspection is used rarely in static languages, IDEs can do automated refactoring operations and KNOW that they found all the (non-introspection) references that are affected.

It's certainly possible to parse PHP, Python or Ruby into an abstract syntax tree (OK, Perl is a little harder) but practically very few people do metaprogramming at that level, even when it's officially supported. (C# and VB have had "expression trees" for a few years now and they're barely used.)

Part of the appeal of LISP is that you can pretend Noam Chomsky was never born and never need to learn how to write parsers or deal with the data structures that they spit out.

Any kind of extreme metaprogramming is going to defeat 'reasoning-in-code'. For instance, in LISP I can easily implement a new kind of control structure... Because 'understanding' a program in general (rather than running it) is an undecidable problem, it's clear that an IDE will ultimately get bogged down.

I've written a lot of PHP lately in a metaprogramming-heavy framework that uses magic methods to 'create' new properties and methods. The way this is done is systematic, and an IDE could probably be loaded with rules that would help it 'understand' this usage, but so far as I do this kind of code analysis, it's going to be in command-line tools that are cheap to develop compared to GUI tools.
Other jurisdictions can certainly make similar exceptions for themselves.
Linode, their admin is great and been a customer for a long time, just a set up your self kind of deal but stackscripts are great for getting a server running quickly.
Quite.

I'm actually sympathetic to the argument being made -- that a given income may seem "rich" in one place, but actually not buy so much elsewhere. Living in NJ, I can see this every day.

But when you look into the details of the article, it's hard to buy it. The article says, for example, that it's "impossible" for the parents to clean and dress themselves. Bunk. If the rest of society can do it, why can't this family? Why do they spend so much money eating out, and spending $10/lunch every day at work?

So: ignore the article, but please still consider the fact that what might seem rich in one circumstance may not go as far elsewhere.
> […] characters that aren't in ASCII, like say Chinese, UTF-8 will consume much more storage than necessary.

I don't think that's a problem in practice. Taking for example:

http://www.baidu.com/s?wd=%D0%C2+%CE%C5

The page takes 37KB in GBK, 39KB in UTF-8 and 73KB in UTF-16! (UTF-16 doubles cost of HTML markup but only saves ⅓ in text)

Even in pure Chinese plain text UTF-16 doesn't win by much. I've tested some random article: 18KB in UTF-16, 25KB in UTF-8. It's down to 9.5KB vs 10KB after gzipping.
Pretty hard to lock down a communications technology to "no military use". What are they going to do, ask pretty please don't do that with a cherry on top?
As far as bootstrapped startups go I can say one thing -> they suck.

When you're in that spot where you don't really know which bill to pay this month and which can probably wait a little while longer, all the while you're asking the bank to extend the limit on your bank account and trying to look all "Yeah hey, I sure as fuck am making enough money to pay for this! Yeah!" ...

... it's not a fun place to be.

But on the other hand, it's a whole lot more fun than when I had a somewhat cushy job as a webdev doing repetitive mindnumbingly horrible things for an advertising agency.
Yea I was shocked after i moved from germany to the US. Even worse is the coverage here
Governments can just take control of the ground stations - much easier that way.
In fairness most of those acquirees have users, just no business ... or at least no monetization.
This needs to be stopped. Wireless will increasingly become consumers primary Internet connection. If this becomes standard practice for wireless providers, freedom to access what content the user chooses will be effectively destroyed.
You don't need to put $33k/year into a retirement savings account if you're already buying $20k/year worth of house.

This is false. Your house is not consumable in retirement, so you can't really count it as retirement savings. At best, you would be able to downsize. That would extract some portion of the value of the home in order to maintain you through retirement. But you certainly can't count the whole house value as retirement savings.
I don't know where you're getting your numbers from for t-mobile:

T-mobile usb type mobile broadband plan $39.99 5GB no contract (even more plus webConnect)
Completely agree. The HTML template I used in my project framework is even more simple than this one. The framework itself is something I grow and change over time.

I can learn from things like the HTML5 Boilerplate but I like to know, tailor, organise, and optimise each part of my own framework. That's part of the learning process itself.
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Stéphane Devantéry
Considering that the author is in high school, I found the tutorial rather good. Perhaps if you sent your corrections and suggestions to the author, he would appreciate your insight and make the appropriate corrections.
That's misleading in a couple ways.

First, you have omitted other providers whose prices are not similar to those above. Clear, for example.

Second, competition is about more than just price. It is also about features and restrictions. The provider that this thread is about is offering a lower priced plan WITHOUT a contract, but with restrictions on what you can do with it.

(EDIT: continuing, as I thought of another significant factor)

Another problem is that you are looking at mobile USB internet access plans, rather than mobile phone access plans. Most users don't have a strong opinion (or any opinion at all) on which particular dongle is hanging off their laptop. Hence, given several mobile USB internet providers offering similar level of service (e.g., 5 GB/month) and similar terms and conditions (2 year contract), the expected result in a competitive market is for them to all charge about the same price.

Of course, in a non-competitive market dominated by a cartel, the expected result is ALSO for them to all charge the same price.

Net (no pun intended) result: your examples provide no evidence one way or the other on the question of competitiveness in mobile internet.
Drupal 7 Released, With Improved UI and Semantic Technology
> I wonder how they'll be implementing it, and how plausible it will be for other video sites to make themselves unblockable.

Yes, I'd like some information on this as well. Will it be possible to circumvent their block using encryption? The article says only the videos themselves will be blocked, not the websites.
A new twist on the "auto correct" site
This article is retarded in lots of ways, but I'll quickly debunk one point.

5. Substring search is just byte string search.

Nope. The same character sequences can have multiple utf-8 representations. Yes, this comes up in the real world, especially on the web.

Reference: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicode_equivalence#Normal_form...

The only way to sanely handle unicode is to load it using a codec in the language of your choice, and manipulate it using the tools your language supplies for manipulating strings OR read all the insane specs for unicode and implement your own. Treating unicode as bytes will end in tears.
I can't believe they left off wikileaks itself. Wikileaks is by far bigger than anonymous ddos against sites that declined to provide service to wikileaks!
0mq is a library to make network programming easier, not a new protocol itself.

UDP is being used because this is based on setting up a DHT which requires small messages that may or may not get through by nature to begin with - not bulk data transfer - presumably you deal with that at higher layers.
Best Green Tech Innovations of 2010
"Many lawmakers surely realize this"

I'm not sure. They're lawyers, not engineers, and I don't see any reason for lawyers to conclude "It's fundamentally complex, impossible to get right, and going to have problems" rather than "Well, they just didn't try hard enough to make a good law". And certainly the belief that they can create a solid law through sheer staggering complexity rather than despite sheer staggering complexity is a more parsimonious explanation of what has been happening lately than the idea that they know that simpler laws are better.

There are few enough computer programmers who figure this out even with the math staring them in the face and great engineers all but spoonfeeding these tidbits of wisdom; I can't imagine this is anything like the common perception of law in lawmaker circles, and especially not in circles where people believe activist government is on average the solution to everything.
That's not quite true. There are discontinuities in that neighborhood, most notably AMT. When you hit that, it affects the calculation of the entire tax bill.

Your point is generally correct, but at this specific point (and a few others, depending on specific circumstances) there are odd effects that come into play.

Of course, if you're trying to make a political point, one can focus on those discontinuities to make all kinds of not-generally-true claims.
It might be an naive assumption, but aren't shares for options usually set aside relatively early in the process?

Interesting comment, just provoked me to do a little research, as I had initially thought that stock options would be accounted as a future liability, and only a cost, at their strike price, when vested AND executed.
Buffer looks great. I'll be paying user #4.
Asus unveils new tablets: "Slider" and "Transformer"
Lambda, The Ultimate Political Party (1994)
An inside look at how Kinect works
ORMs are nice for simple things, but once you get to a system with a decent amount of complexity they really start to fall down. Case in point, doctrine has a custom query language to deal with a lot of the complexities. This is actually the reason behind the slowness you pointed out.

Thankfully, there is the entity system which for all practical purposes is an ORM on steroids. It abstracts storage away from the developer, has attachable fields with per field storage configuration. Plus every entity has a completely customizable controller class. There are now modules that give you an entire controller architecture (http://drupal.org/project/entity). I think it's a pretty cool idea and blasts ORMs out of the water.
The Stratfor rundown:

http://www.stratfor.com/weekly/20100303_using_intelligence_a...
(free article)

Stratfor's good for this in general, but also not cheap.
Honest question: was WP ever rewritten to use a MVC architecture or is still a pile of "functions.php" includes?

I haven't looked at the source in at least 2 years so I'm hoping it's not still using the same anti-patterns it originally used.
Sure, but searching involves typing and will cause a huge drop-off in users. A better alternative might be a live real-time news feed, i.e. User A has just added Movie X to his recommendation list, User B has just created a movie list containing movies Y, Z, etc. The point is to give the impression of activity as well as immediate avenue for the user to start using your app.

Why would you sandbox your app in Facebook anyway? Is there any particular reason for putting it in an iframe on Facebook?
The PS3 Root Key
The posts are actually for people to let others know that they are interested in having lunch with other HN-ers. The actual lunch plan will need to be decided privately (ie. you can send a message to the user if you're interested in having lunch, and you can decide on a day/time when you are both free)
I wouldn't bet too hard on it. People were convinced gingerbread was 3.0 until it wasn't.

I'm not saying Honeycomb won't be 3.0; in fact I think it most likely will be, and definitely should be if the Android team wants to have a reputation for not missing their goals of getting 3.0 out to us soon. I'm just saying Asus isn't Google, so I don't believe it until it's final.

An honestly, who cares about the version number really? It's the changelog that matters.
Inform 7 is a language (and IDE) for writing interactive fiction / text adventure games. Code actually is an English description of the game world and instructions to the runtime about behavior. The syntax is pretty limited of course, but it's completely readable for humans and computers. Check out this screenshot of a simple example game written in Inform 7: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Inform_7_code_and_skein.pn...
I usually avoid anything that has the word "rockstar" or similar wording. To me, it implies unrealistic expectations of knowledge and/or performance.

I will also avoid anything that has a long list of prerequisites. If there's more than maybe five or so disparate technologies requiring multiple platform knowledge, then the job you're offering should probably pay double what you're offering.
The wikipedia page on UTF-8 -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UTF-8 -- is excellent, and includes a link to this wonderful anecdote from Rob Pike - http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/ucs/utf-8-history.txt

UTF-8 was designed, in front of my eyes, on a
placemat in a New Jersey diner one night in September or so 1992.

What happened was this. We had used the original UTF from ISO 10646
to make Plan 9 support 16-bit characters, but we hated it. We were
close to shipping the system when, late one afternoon, I received a
call from some folks, I think at IBM - I remember them being in Austin
- who were in an X/Open committee meeting. They wanted Ken and me to
vet their FSS/UTF design. We understood why they were introducing a
new design, and Ken and I suddenly realized there was an opportunity
to use our experience to design a really good standard and get the
X/Open guys to push it out. We suggested this and the deal was, if we
could do it fast, OK. So we went to dinner, Ken figured out the
bit-packing, and when we came back to the lab after dinner we called
the X/Open guys and explained our scheme. We mailed them an outline
of our spec, and they replied saying that it was better than theirs (I
don't believe I ever actually saw their proposal; I know I don't
remember it) and how fast could we implement it? I think this was a
Wednesday night and we promised a complete running system by Monday,
which I think was when their big vote was.
So how can Facebook's IPO affect chumps like me who are not silly enough to try to buy either Goldman or Facebook stock? How likely is this to blow up on Wall Street? Or when the dust settles will it be just the "private wealth" investors that will have lost some of their fortunes?
In retail, the manufacturer also sets the wholesale price, which is often around 60% of list. In Amazon's store, Amazon can decide to pay the developer anywhere between 20% and 70% of list price.
Insider trading is a legal term, and is not always illegal. This issue is more about the election of public versus private status (another legal issue) and the rules about who can invest in various forms of private investment (yet another legal issue).

It would be nice if we could ever get to discuss the economic issues of information and efficiency as it relates to investing, but the amount of heat around these issues these days prevents a lot of calculated reasoning about what is best for our economy.
Some things I learned about venture capital in 2010...
DDoS Wars: 4chan Downed Again By Another Attack
I would also add: how well do you handle rejection and failure?
Hmm, I guess I was confused about what you meant when you said "LISP does have the advantage of being easy to reason about"

I thought you meant easy for an IDE to reason about to support the kind of auto-complete Intellisense that Eclipse and VS offer.
Behind the scenes I bet it will be the same censorship technology as used in countries like China. The only difference is the way that the censorship is marketed, in the form of service plans.
As some anecdotal evidence against your point, I've installed Windows 7 on three different systems from a USB stick and all three had the same issue: the installer is unable to see the hard disk while the USB drive is plugged in. From searching around the first time I had the issue it seems like this is well known but there isn't really any effort to fix it. Only solution I was able to use was to format the hard disk NTFS and copy USB drive contents to the disk and boot without the USB. I've also installed a couple different Linux distros from USB and never had any issues (with the install...).
I doubt Apple uses Godaddy and a gmail account..?

Registrant:
Domain Manager
2640 W Colorado Ave
Colorado Springs, Colorado 80904
United States

Registered through: GoDaddy.com, Inc. (http://www.godaddy.com)
Domain Name: HTML5.COM
Created on: 26-Jul-04
Expires on: 26-Jul-19
Last Updated on: 05-Jan-11

Administrative Contact:
Manager, Domain html5.com@gmail.com
2640 W Colorado Ave
Colorado Springs, Colorado 80904
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+1.6465048655 Fax --

Technical Contact:
Manager, Domain html5.com@gmail.com
2640 W Colorado Ave
Colorado Springs, Colorado 80904
United States
+1.6465048655 Fax --

Domain servers in listed order:
NS63.DOMAINCONTROL.COM
NS64.DOMAINCONTROL.COM
Links to the 30 minute CCTV videos:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JghQ0ZcRfQs

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K8XDhnEJ-N0

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RWxjxTaWytE
Also, the codebase is considerably more stable than at any point in the past due to a large push to add automated testing to Drupal core. There are now upwards of 25,000+ tests that run automatically on every contributed patch.
Wow, I've really got to hand it to Goldman. From the article:

Thanks to Goldman’s imprimatur, Facebook’s value increased 20 percent virtually overnight....The other benefit for Goldman in leading the public offering — aside from major bragging rights — is that it can use its marketing, sales and distribution muscle to make sure the value of Facebook at the time of the offering exceeds the $50 billion valuation at which Goldman invested.

Increasing the value of the firm they are investing in? Great job guys.

While on paper it seems that these high rollers would be foolish to invest in Facebook at such a lofty valuation, they will still most certainly feel increased loyalty to Goldman for making such an exclusive opportunity available to them.

Giving their other clients investment opportunities not available elsewhere? Awesome. Wish I were Goldman's client. (Note: all of Goldman's clients are accredited or institutional investors, and are fully capable of making their own decisions on whether to buy this Facebook SIV.)

Further, if the value at IPO will be at least $52B ($50B + 4%) (as an earlier paragraph suggests it might), all the clients who purchase this SIV will at least break even.

Overall, it looks like Goldman is doing a great job for all their clients. Keep up the good work guys.

Also, the conflict of interest is nonexistent. Goldman holds a long position in Facebook. So do all their clients. Everyone has the same goal here: increase the value of Facebook.

As for the "average investors" who the article claims will be hurt by all this, there is a very simple way to avoid that: don't buy FB. If everyone does this, the IPO will be a failure, and Goldman + Zuckerberg + Goldman's clients will all lose money. If you are very sure FB is overvalued, short it. If you are right you will be taking money from Goldman and Zuckerberg.
Cygwin + PuTTY[1] in Windows is actually quite a reasonable compromise. It takes a little twiddling, but I can get to a local bash-prompt with a single click and be hacking in emacs in no time. I find this to be about equally close to "standard" linux[2] as is OS X, although maybe that's just a factor of my inexperience.

I use OS X, Ubuntu, and Debian at home... but at work I still prefer Windows 7 for some reason.

[1] Especially if you use PuTTYcyg: http://code.google.com/p/puttycyg/ EDIT: The main thing I miss with cygwin is command-line package management like apt, but OS X doesn't have that either.

[2] Obviously subjective... I mean Debian/Ubuntu-style.
Time On Site is a metric that compares the delta between timestamps of 2 different page views. If someone comes in reads a blog post then leaves, Google Analytics counts it as 0:00, and a bounce.

HN readers are more likely to read a blog post then hit back (and maybe comment). The bounce rate and TOS aren't a valuable metric for this audience.
this isn't system administration, its syntax puzzle play that just happens to be on a console
Hmm, you're right. I had gotten them from here: http://mobile-broadband-services-review.toptenreviews.com/ - I started getting them from sprint and verizon, but when I came across that and it fit what I had already found I went with it for the rest.

Thanks for the catch!

Quick check of the other 3 numbers shows that they're accurate according to the provider websites.
The real question is, what is this going to do for future Atheros chipsets and open source drivers? Atheros has always been the chipset to use for Wifi on open source operating systems because it was generally well supported, and provided features the competition couldn't.

I really hope that Qualcomm doesn't change anything in that regard.
EC2 has had an app store (called "paid AMIs") for a while. It wouldn't make sense to use the same store for Android and EC2 given the platform differences.
The Most Effective Way to Make Moola Online Is...
Targeting HN only was just because the crowd here are much more civil and polite, and seem to be responsible and smart people who I would actually be interested in meeting. And also because I have seen a lot of people expressing a desire to meet others on many threads here.

About the idea of helping people meet by allowing them to find deals, etc. That's a good idea and I did think of that, but the current version of hackerlunch.com is just an MVP. I launched it not so that people use it, but more to find out if people are even interested in meeting "strangers from the internet". If I find that there is an interest, then I'll be working on a more full-fledged website with more advanced features.
Has anyone actually located where MetroPCS makes sets these rules? I have not been able to find them in the TOS
fail0verflow lecture on recent PS3 jailbreaking - 27th CCC 2010
I joined the Hacker News LinkedIn group a while back and reached out to a few guys from Kansas City. We had a nice lunch and chatted about projects, work, HN, and kids. I jokingly called it the first official meeting of the Kansas City Hacker News Group. We should really do that again, it was pretty cool. Not that there's anything wrong with a niche website for coordinating those lunches, but for me it's easier to just keep it simple.
I didn't realize thats what this screenshot is about. Keep in mind that a lot of twitter traffic is counted as (direct) in Google Analytics because there is no referer included.
If you're having to rely on the ability to walk away from a commitment (to a supplier, say), then that needs to be built into the contract initially.

In California (say), where the culture is 'built for failure', the contracts already embed that optionality - meaning that the pricing already has the possibility of default built in. Negotiating the same flexibility elsewhere should just increase the pricing. Just as offering gold-plated guarantees in California should reduce the pricing.
21 Social Media Predictions According To ClickZ