skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Taking something a 2chaner or a Net Otaku says seriously is a humorous issue foreigners in Japan have. (Not sure if you are or not0

Chinese foodstuff is cheaper and not worthless in Japan. I know; I buy Chinese food in Japanese supermarkets all the time and I'm not the only one. It's the only way to get garlic for less than 3$ per head. It's not labeling food as Chinese that is a huge no-no in Japan (like the fish problem they had last year)

The upper class types I know think the Internet is low-class and never post on message boards or news discussions. Much like how few people here post in CNN discussion threads. It's like arguing with the lunatic fringe; why bother?

In the end, in most cases, the media manufactures consent and everyone forgets about it.
I love python and Django but this highlights one of the main things I don't like about Django development, the thousand of packages you end up using.
"I'm a rolling stone" is a line from "Lost Highway" by Hank Williams (and a few other minor songs).

Dylan's goes "LIKE a rolling stone".
Simple tool for monitoring unix servers
Simple tool written in python for monitoring unix servers.
You've not considered any possible piercings ;)
I think so too, probably the artists at Apple is producing these higher res assets for a future iPad with retina display. They already know it will happen at some point. But not for this upcoming revision.
Oddly enough, that's also one of the advantages. small pluggable apps are the use model for django.
A player I've been using for a couple of months, and really liking, is Clementine http://www.clementine-player.org/ They claim it to be inspired by Amarok 1.4.
> c) The next thing I'm going to do is risky. I should save where I am just in case I'm wrong.

a and b are not really reasons /to/ commit a broken state. On c: If the next thing you're going to do is dangerous, I'd say it's a separate "thing" and either 1) commit the stuff you have in a working state or 2) shelve/stash/qimport it if it's not done and you need to do the dangerous work first, which is why I mentioned patch queues.

Thus, purposeful broken commits are eliminated.

> I don't see the appeal in a history full of "Oops, I forgot to add this file to the last commit," and "build fix" and "The author wrote this on Solaris, but I need a small change in the Makefile for Linux."

hg rollback/backout are intended for "oops, I forgot to add this file to the last commit." There's no need to leave those commits in, unless the problem isn't discovered for a while, which is when modifying history makes sense.

Patch queues are most definitely not just "the tool I was offered." They are a rather powerful way to deal with commits as a stack, and I've never been bogged down "capturing state of work in progress."

---

There's nothing really wrong with git's workflow, but there's nothing wrong with mercurial's either. That's all I'm saying - "it is a difference in philosophy and interface that discourages modifying history" that I happen to prefer.
No, they don't. And most likely, you don't want them to have it, either.

As a developer, you are responsible for asking for the information your app requires to function properly. You are required (by the Facebook TOS) to specify what information you will get, and how you will use it.

The user than has to choose if it is worth it or not, for this particular app.

If Facebook offered the users "more granular control" over what would be sent, this would result in apps not knowing in advance what information would be available to them, which would result in a pretty crappy user experience.
STEVE JOBS GOES ON MEDICAL LEAVE OF ABSENCE
> Hmm, it saddens me to see people actually expressing opinions like this in a way that appears authoritative.

I was happy to read his opinion, it changes from the usual PC stuff, and the annoying uppercasing can be explained by the boldness of the claim: that Women are actually different than Men, in such a way that one of the result is they are less inclined to mess for hours, days, years with lines of computer language just to prove one theory of theirs.

As a side note, I am very annoyed when I read PC code like the boss "she", or alterning "he" and "she" in tech docs in fields where obviously the concerned people are 80% guys. In 50 years our readers will think we had problems with the reality and language: we seem to have forgotten that the language basically describes reality, it doesn't make it happen, except for those who believe in magic (hope not too many here are in this case).
Link building has all to do with making content that people find interesting enough to link to/talk about on social networks, and designing it to get links from certain types of sites with certain types of anchor text. As far as I know, Google is quite happy with that particular part of the SEO process, and it's firmly white hat.
Thanks, strikes and fights are back here in Tunisia. The people are still decided that the system should collapse. I'm afraid of abusive use of power, today one person is killed from the system militia.
I might be wrong, but I think the term "rockstar programmer" originated to describe a certain type of programmer who's outspoken, interesting, and possibly controversial. The first person who comes to mind for me is DHH from 37signals, who's a very good programmer, but who's also known for arousing vast kerfluffles with things he says in public.

The fact of the matter is that programming is very unglamorous. It's not a job that often entails the sort of creative passion associated with making music or film or literature; even when we're talking just about the kind of programming that's meant to serve that kind of creative function, it's still rarely as visceral as a good rock song. (The only piece of programming that ever moved me like that was We Feel Fine.) So using the term "rock star" serves to inflate the egos of people who might otherwise not feel like their work was important or meaningful.

When I hear a company say they're looking for "rockstar programmers" I usually take it to mean that they're looking to genuinely care about the programmer they're hiring. They don't just want a code monkey, they want somebody awesome and colorful who'll really be a meaningful part of their team. (Whether these companies actually believe that is another question. I'd bet most of the people who use the phrase are full of shit.)
Yes, of course. (And I believe YC already asks a question about that.) Employers regularly claim intellectual property rights to the inventions of their employees. But issues coming up does not equal issues being unsurmountable.

First of all, many jurisdictions make it hard for employers to try to control things you invent on your own time without using their facilities -- which doesn't keep employers from trying.

Secondly, even if your employer arguably does control the IP you need, that doesn't mean they won't give it up. Woz famously realized that HP had a claim to the Apple I and offered to let them have it; HP thought of it as more of a hobby than a business and the rest is history.

Universities and other research institutes routinely let employees spin off companies, usually in exchange for some share (although, anecdotally, it seems that universities that are new to the game often ask for more than universities that already have strong spin-off cultures).
Steve Jobs says Apple board grants him medical leave - shares drop 4.5 percent
Steve Jobs To Take ‘Medical Leave Of Absence’, Stays On As CEO
I can't believe I'm defending Group on but.. the normal price for that set is 1000 yen. Furthermore, it's for the lunch menu (ランチバイキング) and the time restriction is such that I doubt they'll ever have to honour all of the coupons. (Furthermore, they are cooking in bulk and you are stuck with whatever they have; I doubt they will strain themselves with the deal)

I can think of a few places that are all-you-can-eat (tabehodai) for 1000 yen. I wouldn't bet on the quality of food, but sometimes you luck out. 500 is insanely cheap, but it is near the break-even point (if you aren't including rent)
My issue is less with the conclusion ("men and women are different"; course they are) than with the reasoning (which is wrong and troubling)
For Apple's sake, I hope he recovers soon. Sadly, it looks like it's a good time to sell AAPL stock.
How To Grow Your Business In United States Of America | InfoMov.Com
Steve Jobs to take a leave of absence
"This restaurant has been optimized against the Slashdot effect."
Tell HN: IT security expert Dancho Danchev is placed in a psychiatric hospital
According to bulgarian newspaper Dnevnik (http://www.dnevnik.bg/tehnologii/2011/01/17/1026425_ekspertut_po_it_sigurnost_dancho_danchev_e_nastanen_v/) IT security expert Dancho Danchev is placed in a psychiatric hospital.

Dancho Danchev, an expert on cybersecurity, is placed in a psychiatric hospital in Bulgaria. The information was confirmed by two sources of "Dnevnik", although from the hospital refused comment.

[...]

[...] according to reliable source of Dnevnik he was placed in a Bulgarian psychiatric hospital since December 11.

Here is complete Google Translate version of the article:
http://translate.google.com/translate?js=n&prev=_t&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&layout=2&eotf=1&sl=bg&tl=en&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.dnevnik.bg%2Ftehnologii%2F2011%2F01%2F17%2F1026425_ekspertut_po_it_sigurnost_dancho_danchev_e_nastanen_v%2F

(Edited couple of times to fix links, then read the help on links: "Urls become links, except in the text field of a submission.")
Stopped using apache long ago, but back then and today I delete every config line I don't understand. Which usually breaks stuff, which usually leads to me understanding (learning) what that config line did and why it's needed.
I was born with hearing until I was three or so, at which point my hearing in both ears started declining for some unknown reason until I was profoundly hearing impaired. When I was sixteen, I got a cochlear implant in my left ear; I can hear well enough in day-to-day situations that people often don't realize I'm deaf, but I still can't do much with phones, so we're sort of in the same boat; regardless, I do understand where you're coming from.

It's still difficult for me to understand conversations in groups and ongoing environments. What I usually end up doing is the simplest approach: I say up-front that I have hearing problems and that it would really help me if people tried to speak in turns. I also try to choose my battlegrounds -- a secluded room as opposed to the middle of a busy coffee shop. The idea is that I give myself every possible advantage.

If that fails, I ask people to write something down, or to repeat themselves.

I'm pretty good at pitching ideas and leading discussion when I can leverage the environment like that. Phones are pretty much impossible for me to use, though, unless I'm in a very quiet environment. Some of that could probably be alleviated by practice, but a lot of it, I'm afraid, is just due to environmental noise/noise on the line/noise in their background/no lips. Teleconferencing is a bit better, if only because there's usually a chat option to clarify things that get mixed up in audio.

Whatever you do, though, don't give up. People can be remarkably accommodating if you tell them up-front what your problems are; don't let the one surly guy ruin your day.

I'm a native English speaker and learned Mandarin Chinese for a while (tones and all) and am still learning Japanese (6 years now). I currently live and work in Japan, using Japanese every day, and dealing with strange accents in English. It was a challenge at first, but I held my ground and now I've been here for four years.

So you can do it too.
+1 on the thesis - developers expert in the product, using the product.

To me this should be the real goal and take-away from this article, not the many nice things this enables, but how to get there for other companies/products.

THAT would be revolutionary.
I'd like to know what type of jobs the responders work. Would be interesting to see a breakdown of answers to "how demanding is programming" by users of different languages/frameworks or by what type of company they work at (startup, big corporation, etc).
I don’t really understand what a simple player would be good for. All those simple players were kind of ok when you had a few dozen mp3 files on your PC but they just don’t work comfortably for a few thousand files. Using the file system to browse music is no fun at all, you are just throwing away so much metadata you could leverage.

It’s trivial to let iTunes display all albums I bought in 2010. I know of no easy way to do that with a file manager.
Show HN: Pocket - my first app ever
I like the idea but in order to succeed you need integration through the Twitter distribution system -- this needs to be part of TweetDeck, my Android app, etc (those are just the desktop / mobile clients I use, it needs to be in all of them)... I don't like it enough to want to have a browser tab open to maintain it.
Hope he is okay. If it is pancreatic cancer again, his odds are not good. My aunt had it, beat it, then it reoccurred four years later. She did not make it the second time. Only 2% survive. Good luck, Steve. Whether you like Apple or not, tech is much more interesting with Steve Jobs around.
Panic time quiz: How prepared are you for IPv6?
Well I like the kind of girl whose chest is impractical for writing :P

While I'm sure spherical writing is all the rage in some circles, I prefer nice non-infinite straight lines ...

... I wonder if an algorithm could be extracted for the best helix function to use as the line basis to write on chest in regards to economy of space and ergonomy of writing.
> "Something that frustrates me about the field of computer science is that there are a lot of jerks who think that just because they've "mastered" some programming language or know some obscure unix commands, they are gods and you are nothing."

How is the computer field different from other fields? Once they are proficient, some people choose to share their knowledge to let people reach even higher goals, whilst others people enjoy making fun of those less educated and put them down. I've seen such behavior everywhere.

EDIT: Moreover, in the latter case, if you add some ingrained misogyny to the mix, things get even worse.
Apple stock is about to take a beating :/
Yep, no doubt. If only for this reason, Apple needs to figure out Apple sans Jobs.
Yes, it's important to know who you're dealing with, who you're giving business information to.
At this point, pip is the way to install Python packages. Anyone who's pointing you otherwise is a bit out-of-date (touch?).
AOL steals content idea from disabled, unemployed blogger
£98 PCs target UK digital divide
Steve Jobs to take a medical leave of absence
I presume that the spike includes both TechCrunch and Hacker News. Based on 22 upvotes, I guess you got about 1-2'000 hits from HN, so that works out at about 7-8'000 hits from TC over 3 days?
Extended chat with lead Django developers
My guess is they have, just not publicly. (Easy to argue the merits of that.) Pancreatic cancer doesn't leave too many survivors so I am sure the management team thought a lot about life without steve, at least at that time.
As heartless as this may sound, I think Apple stock will represent whatever the media says about his health. I hope he recovers to good health, whatever might be the problem.
Link building and social media optimization aren't necessarily spam activities (but I can see why you might correlate the two; there are a lot of shady link building operators out there and a lot of social media charlatans, for lack of a better word.)

While there are a lot of technical pieces to SEO (that go beyond mod_rewrite hackery, as you put it), most legitimate SEOs spend as much time on the marketing side of the equation. There are a few legitimate link building "tricks" out there, but most SEOs doing a good job at link building & social activities are focused on creating worthy content that ranks well in search and gets attention on social media sites.

BTW, nofollowing links to "sculpt" the way PageRank flows through your site doesn't work anymore - nofollow now "evaporates" the PageRank rather than forcing more of it through the other links on your page :)
SEO Affiliate Program Launched by Brick Marketing
You are right. However the HN spike was of very short duration, just the 2-3 hours it was on the frontpage.
AOL Bets on Hyperlocal News, Finding Progress Where Many Have Failed
Apple Says Jobs Is Taking a New Medical Leave
Why is it wrong that occasionally manuals use a "she" to describe somebody? Is "she" an inherently wrong default position to take as opposed to "he"? Even if 4 out of 5 times it's a guy, why not suggest that perhaps it'll be a girl sometimes?

I personally use "they", because I'm a badass linguistic prescriptivist who's fine with using a neutral plural to indicate singular. But I don't see a problem with stopping the male singular from being the default. Language describes reality, but it also defines it; languages that assume maleness as a default suggest to its users that maleness is the superior form to take. I don't think it's a particularly devastating result of language, but I also don't think it's particularly annoying for women to ask that they not be diminished by the language. If it doesn't mean anything, why not just alternate it and not raise a fuss?

(I draw the line at stuff like "womyn", though, because that's when for me it becomes noticeably silly.)
Steve Jobs Taking Medical Leave of Absence From Apple
FWIW, Doug Lenat founded Cyc after doing Eurisko (http://www.cyc.com/). His first discovery system along these lines was AM ("automated mathematician"), which was math-only, and Eurisko was an attempt to make it domain independent, so it could target things like the famous gameplay-strategies example. He eventually grew frustrated at how much domain knowledge had to be hand-coded for a new domain, though, so hoped that by building one massive database of commonsense background knowledge, future systems could more easily be retargeted to new domains: the system would be able to assume most "normal" knowledge, and only the information unique to that domain would have to be added.

And that sort of turned into its own multi-decade project...
I agree, but I think it's less of an internal logistics issue and much more of a public image issue: Steve Jobs is so much the face of Apple as it sits currently, every time there's news about his health the stock fluctuates and that isn't good.
I learned a lot by watching this and I highly recommend it but the viewer should be warned that many of the tools and techniques seem to have fallen out of favor in the Django community.

In my personal experience nginx+gunicorn turned out to be much easier to deal with than the reference Apache+mod_wsgi. It also seems to be JKM's current preference. Likewise, buildout, while very powerful can be a bit burdensome, and has fallen out of favor relative to pip+virtualenv.

For more current info, check out this extended chat with JKM and other lead Django developers here:

[discuss] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2112160
[direct] http://www.revsys.com/officehours/2010/nov/05/

Note: This video is a dup to http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1830696 though I'm surprised that post only got one point. There are probably others.
BREW, a mobile operating system developed by Qualcomm
It’s safe to assume that he’s going to conquer this one as well.

Safe to assume that despite not knowing the reason for this leave or how serious it is? :/
I suspect that your perception of iTunes being more intuitive comes simply from being more used to it. I used to use Amarok a lot and when I had to use iTunes it didn't really make any sense to me. For example, I once ended up deleting some songs from a friend's collection when I tried to remove them from the current playlist. Now, maybe I'm just not smart enough to use a computer correctly, but may friends definitely had less trouble using amarok on my computer than I had with itunes on theirs.
It already has lost 6% (around 8% at the low point) in European trading.
recaptcha didn't originate at Google. There are smart people working outside the Google and Microsoft ecosystems. While I am not a real fan of Stack Overflow, they've had incredibly nebulous questions that have turned into wiki's before - this one somehow failed to meet their standards.

First thing in a startup - solve someone's pain. Human Verification is a pain point for web data entry.
"In the meantime, my family and I would deeply appreciate respect for our privacy."
"But trust me on the sunscreen."
LiteFeed Beta - Twitter Reader Web-Application
Interesting that this would run on the same day Jobs takes a leave of absence. Talk about reinforcing what matters.
The SEO Industry Is Changing
Found it while browsing the specs of the HTC Smart: http://www.htc.com/www/product/smart/specification.html
I also gave a try to XFCE 4.8 on my notebook with 1Gb RAM. I cannot say that it is lightweight. It took about 15 seconds to start XFCE. I also spent about 20 mins doing usual job on it and then uninstalled it. That is why I use pekwm.org . It is ultra-small, fast and light. Actually XFCE is environment and PEKWM - window manager. No additional functionality like panels, quick launchers, trays etc.

For me LXDE stays betwen XFCE and PekWM. It is not so heavy as XFCE but PekWM is lighter.
These are good ways to stop your basic scraper.

One of my jobs is to scrape websites. The websites we scrape we have permission to scrape. Sadly many companys we work with don't have full time developers, or they have rules set up to stop other from scraping their site, that make it hard on us.

Other than Bad Behavior, I have circumvented all of the above suggestions. I don't know what Bad Behavior is and as far as I know I have not encountered it.

We falsify user agents to say they are browseres/google/whateversneeded.
We script lynxs or write programs to type in login/pass, and change the page.
We write programs to follow do_postback(with their var's) stuff that ASP.NET creates for multi page tables.
We add in random time intervals to ease the load on some companies sites, and to circumvent blocks on others.
We download and parse PDF, DOC, XLS, even some images.
We have went as far as scraping Flash app's using Screen shots and OCR.

The list goes on. My point is that nothing is completely safe.
Fearlessness of being controversial could indeed be a good charactistic of both a rockstar and a programmer who wants to make a difference.
Yet, I can't image that's the quality a company is looking for when they search for a rockstar programmer. And if they do, I can't image that's what they will get.

Being egomanic and making a difference for the better is hardly the same.
I think it's meant as a courtesy and out of respect, rather than as a hedged statement.
"Aside from missing the opportunity to bow a time or six"

Bowing in this situation seems like a high-risk, low-reward behavior. He might have moved the apology from an A to an A+, but he also might have made the situation worse without realizing it. If I bowed for an apology, I feel I would make any number of rude mistakes, like maintain (or not maintain?) eye contact, have the wrong facial expression, not bow deep enough / shallow enough, slouch, not hold it long enough, do it sitting, or check Twitter at the bottom. When you don't understand a culture, it's usually reasonable to be polite and gracious within the confines of your own. Maybe Japan has different expectations, but I've worked with an uncountable number of foreign nationals, and it's understandable when they don't extend a handshake (typical American greeting), or yell "Hey, fuck you! How you doin'?" (typical New York greeting).