skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> smeared them

If you do a Google site search on that blog you'll see that the term 'smear' is used endlessly and quite carelessly by the author. It's interesting to see that you use it in the same way - and like the author I don't think you understand very well what the term means. I sure hope "gnosis" isn't one of the various aliases the guy allegedly uses across the internet, including on Slashdot where he became a bit of a legend for maintaining dozens of them.
No, the Tractatus could still be applicable to computer programming. The problem with Wittgenstein's earlier work is that his idea of language was that it modelled reality. However, many computer programs really are trying to model something correctly, or at least that's what the Java and UML books tell us. ;) So the Tractatus could apply.

But the latter Wittgenstein is lurking in most real-world programs -- what they do isn't anything about describing a ideal model, it's just... what they do.

Anyway, I doubt any of this will help anyone write or understand computing better, but it's fun to think about.
Hello World. It worked :) In general, I love JavaScript so I don't see why I wouldn't like Node. I'll have to write a real program to truly have an opinion.

What's the best way to start and keep Node running?
Donated, and I don't even have a PS3. However, I vehemently believe in the user's right to do whatever he wants to his own hardware.
My favorite cool feature of Tcl: A return statement that can return by arbitrary number of levels instead of 1. http://www.tcl.tk/man/tcl8.5/TclCmd/return.htm#M15

I found this very useful, for example when writing a webapp that expected a session ID in a cookie. When not found, it was supposed to redirect to an error page.

In Tcl:

proc handler {} {
load_session
# do stuff
}

load_session will use two-level return to redirect to the error page.

In python etc:

def handler:
if load_session() == error:
return
# do stuff

Minor, yes, but we're talking language nerdery. :)
Stop. Stop. Stop.

Instead of dancing in circles, please look at the contact information I posted above. Miguel de Icaza is a good guy. I am certain he will answer any questions you might have.
ANUGOONJ....is back
idealist or totalitarian?
I hope in the future that when 'taxes' and 'rich' come into the conversation, $100,000/year doesn't.
I know this is probably a very unpopular opinion, but I'm going to say it: women reporters simply should not put themselves in this kind of danger. Journalists in general shouldn't feel the need to be somewhere their safety isn't secure. But the fact is women are at a much higher risk of assault in many situations because of their gender. Mobs of mostly angry men with no police presence around are precisely the places women shouldn't be. Is one's safety really worth a few more descriptive words of rose pedals and sacrificed goats?

In most cases the story isn't whats going on in the mob, but why the mob is there in the first place. One doesn't have to be physically in the middle of it to do excellent reporting. In fact, it seems to me that this idea is one of the problems with modern 'journalism'. It's completely superficial. Just throw your reporter in the middle of the hurricane, record them saying "wow its really windy" and you've done your job. I'll take real in depth reporting from the sidelines over sound-bites and photo-ops any day.
The headers and footers are optional. In my Linux Firefox, if I go to the File menu, select the Print option, go to the "Options" tab, there's a whole "Header and Footer" section where you can set them to whatever you want, including "--blank--".

Details of this print dialog might, of course, depend on your GNOME version, your distribution, and the time of month, like everything on Linux.

Now the quality of the text is a separate issue; I haven't actually done any printing from a web browser on Linux in a few years, so I have no idea what that looks like nowadays.
The best way to keep any service started and running runit. http://smarden.org/runit/
I've worked at Circuit City, CompUSA, and Wal Mart. None of these things are unique to Apple Stores.
Continuations handle this more cleanly. Heck, you can return to an arbitrary point 1 or more functions back on the stack in C, via setjmp/longjmp, when you really need to.
Here is Kent Beck's take on the four phases of startups where he talks about how these different phases require different development practices, principles, and technologies:
http://www.threeriversinstitute.org/blog/?p=252
Terrorism detection software hoax
http://crapplestore.blogspot.com
I'm in!

Be sure to provide a way for people to team up in advance since a lot of people might come alone to the conference. (team up designers w/ developers)
it doesn't change the fact that thousands of state employees are getting paid over 100,000 per year and the state is bankrupt.
Classical, electronica, and soundtracks all make excellent programming music. Grooveshark provides ample quantities of all three.

I've been on a dusbstep kick lately. Heavy bass and fast beats tend to be great for getting into a groove and coding like a maniac.
Have to agree. They lost me a long time ago.
By the way, don't make it too long and give people enough time to rest/freshen up before the actual conference ;)
Under the assumption that the paper in question is being published in a journal, that might be a bad idea. In my experience, journals will typically take your content and then reformat it themselves to fit in whatever their constraints are (page size, number of columns, possibly starting in the middle of a page, etc, etc). For journals that take LaTeX submissions, they will generally just apply their house style file. For journals that take Word submissions, they will generally just apply their house Word style. For journals that accept either one... see above. ;)
Riseup
If you could choose your DNA, your parents, your upbringing, your interests, and your talents, the market would be the perfect arbiter. The problem is that people, for social signalling reasons, cannot internalize that they are not in control of these things, or that they matter. Thus, through the lens of our cognitive biases (hiding all these influencing factors from us), capitalism looks like the best system we've tried so far, and all the other systems don't "feel" right (because, for example, they force those of low social status to acknowledge that fact.)
Apple legal must have taken that down already.
Would be fun, although if I hacked a project together I wouldn't have much time to continue with it after the conference (I'm a founder already).

Perhaps have people choose between investment or lunch with you or one of the judges.
I think this kind of thing gets portrayed differently depending on where it happens. Happens in Egypt and people might try to blame to reporter, if it happened in a big American city I think the blame would be squarely on those that committed the act. Do we hold different parts of the world to different moral account?
In the industry I work in, Tcl is used extensively as the application language, and it works out well enough in practise (funnily enough, one of the larger players in this space use a dialect of Scheme.)

I guess the greatest advantage Tcl has is of being embedded deep into peoples workflows (changing which tends to be a huge investment both in terms of money, and what is more valuable, time) so it's very difficult to be dislodged from there. Also, once an EE manages to grok "everything is a string", there's absolutely nothing to stop him from writing horrible code :)

As for advantages, meh. The only one that really stands out for me is this one:

> There aren't a big number of implementations of Tcl, and there is a bigger default library.
Tell all? Does this kid think they are just paying him to hang out? Retail is retail kid, you either drink the kool-aid or become a customer. It's called a J-O-B.
Foxconn (and similar) do design a lot of products already, they just are acting as an ODM and not slapping their own name on them. I suspect, though, they are happy with this arrangement as it allows them to make many more products in any segment than a single brand would get away with.
Agile is meaningless at the point. It started to die the minute the first methodology guy with no actual coding experience thought it would be a good marketable product for his portfolio. It's been diluted and redefined so many times, and so many people are so quick to swear by their one true definition, that it's an impossible term to even discuss rationally anymore.

My feeling on automated testing is that it's far more valuable and saves more time than people who are inexperienced with it can understand, and yet it has shortcomings and limitations that go far beyond what any zealot is willing to admit.

I do encourage every developer to spend 3 months doing pure TDD, just to learn how to test. It's not that testing first inherently makes code better (it doesn't; test code is meta), but it's the fact that to realize the value of testing you have to be good at it, and to be good at it you have to practice. Once you are good at testing you realize that in many circumstances writing an automated test takes exactly the same amount of time as manual testing, plus then you have a regression test.

As far as test coverage is concerned, if you are coding a medium to large application in Rails, you should have base coverage on every controller, period. This is a good basic sanity check that is necessary for a language as dynamic as Ruby (if you're using Java it's an order of magnitude less important, if you're using Haskell, two orders of magnitude). The only excuse is if you're really sure that this code is going to either live on in exactly the same state or be erased. The fact that you're a startup doesn't mean that tests have less value. To the contrary, if you are iterating quickly, you need a safety net when you are refactoring. Once the application reaches a certain size, you will never have time to add test coverage, and there will be certain classes of changes that become impossible because they are just too risky.
Unchecked exceptions can be strictly more powerful than call/cc
used to... it is all about the derivative. where the puck is going etc
I am not that old and I remember a time where there was no open source movement. I most certainly do not have open source to thank for my coding skills. I learned to program when I was 3 on an apple IIe in "apple basic" There was no open source going on then, no stack overflow to ask someone else what to do, no mentors in my neck of the woods either as home computers were fairly new at that time.
That is so painfully wrong.
Great video. While I do buy bottled water occasionally (i.e. I'm in a place where I don't have convenient access to tap water) it's very very rare. I am constantly amazed how many people actually pay for water.

In college (now about 10 years ago) I did a blind taste test study for a statistics class project and my results agreed with what they said in the video. Most people, including my roommate who was the biggest bottled water drinker I knew preferred the tap water to bottled, and yet after he saw even his own results it changed nothing. I just don't get it.
As much as I support geohot and dislike DMCA, I'm pretty sure releasing code that circumvents security (and especially the one that causes financial loss) is still illegal.

http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/openlaw/DVD/1201.html#a

http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/openlaw/DVD/1201.html#a2

http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/openlaw/DVD/1201.html#b

There's one exception - circumvention is allowed only for security testing purposes, but I doubt he would be able to successfully use that clause.
Yeah, the plane trip wasn't meant as an example of where schools make extra money, just an example of how donors contribute that may or may not show up in the revenue. If they donated their private jet, they also donated a fair bit of cash, which I'm not sure if it shows up in revenue.

Also, the ~$5M profit wasn't meant to be presented as the standard, just to give context as to where my comment was coming from. It was meant as "I don't need to rationalize my school's waste of money, and I might be in a minority of schools that do make a profit". My school sinks a lot of money into a not very good (but getting better) basketball program, so it wouldn't surprise me if we were a net loss for athletics.

Profit per student is also a tricky thing. Most professors are a sunk cost (tenure), so while the profit per student is less then $30k per year, the marginal profit per student is ~$30k. But ignoring that, they have to be making at least some profit off of me and other students that would not have gone here if it weren't for the football program. It wouldn't be $30k per person, but it also wouldn't be 0.

My comment wasn't meant to disprove the statistic, as it wouldn't surprise me if a significant portion of schools lose on their athletic program, but to argue that it might be less then they asserted.
Skip the link-bait CNN article and go straight to the article quoted:

http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/gadgets/news/conf...
This is not something I get too outraged about. Yes, it's a waste of energy, but this problem will solve itself when we run out of cheap energy. Pollution is bad, but governments are beginning to see this and are penalizing the polluters. These two factors will eventually make bottled water unprofitable, and it will be on to the piece of low-hanging fruit.

The reason I don't get too outraged is two-fold. One, it's better that people drink water instead of sugar water. Two, the landfilled bottles are annoying, but it's a problem we can solve later when we need the space. Right now, there is plenty of space on the planet for people, agriculture, and garbage. As we begin to need more space for people and agriculture, we will clean up the garbage.

I personally wouldn't buy bottled water, but this is not something I am losing a lot of sleep over either. Let the market work this problem out.
I probably shouldn't have used the word "consistency" in my accusation; I didn't mean to imply that Stallman has wavered or flip flopped over the years. I suppose that his position is quite logical and internally consistent if you specify his main interest/goal as "the freedom of the end user to modify the code and redistribute the modifications to that code freely."

To me, however, it seems like the goal of GNU/Free Software is usually conveyed as maximizing freedom in regards to software. They themselves stress that word "free," and point out that it's "free as in speech, not as in beer" without emphasizing that they really just mean "free for the end user to see and modify the source."

In my opinion (and yes, under my personal definition of "free") the GPL does not maximize freedom and instead is exactly like other copyrights except that the restrictions it places on software are perhaps different than other copyrights. I personally do not think that software should be covered by "property" protection laws, because I think the analogy of software as property is fatally flawed and leads to serious contradictions and ambiguities. Also, on the more practical level, I do not think that intellectual property protection for software is necessary for a thriving and innovative software industry.
> Kudos to his manager for actually looking at the code and recognizing the problem.

Huh?

> My manager looked at the code and asked "Who's going to maintain this? How will they understand it?"
That's not the first time I've encountered these questions. I heard it when I used function pointers in C. I heard it when I used templates in C++.

So essentially the manager bans the use of basic language features because they have hired incompetent programmers who shouldn't be working in the languages before understanding them. How exactly did the manager "recognize the problem"? The problem isn't that people use languages like they are supposed to be used, it's that they have made bad hires, which is not the competent programmers fault.
Tcl does not get a lot of love. I think some of it is due to the fact that it is not lisp, it does not have closures, and perhaps the association with the famous Tcl wars. I have always found it a lively little language to code quick and dirty things. Dirty Tcl, isn't particularly dirty (well, it's not particularly quick either, but better than what I expected it to be) and pretty easy to embed. Upvar is sort of nonstandard, but one can get by with it.

It is one of the very few interpreted languages that had a nice threading support since ages. But for me the best part has been the community and wiki.tcl.tk. I dont think it is very common in other communities that you get responses in real time. To me Tcl was (I know I will be violently killed for this) a cleaner non-cowboy Perl (as well as Lua of the 90s).

If it interests HN readers, Jim, an implementation of Tcl, has closures. http://wiki.tcl.tk/13840
The title uses CSS transforms to rotate the text, rather than images. Beautiful.
Perhaps you'd like to be the one to tell them they can't report in situations like this? I think your opinion is less likely to be popular with the reporters themselves.
I'm of the opinion that no job worth doing is worth less than any other job...

Following this reason would end up with a world in which no job is worth doing. The value of a job is in how much value it provides to others. If one person's 8 hours produces 100 times as much value for others than another person's 8 hours (e.g. 100x time saved, 100x food produced, etc.) then the first person's job is worth 100x more than the second, and by your logic the second person's job isn't worth doing. But if there's nobody or no machine to replace the second person, then that job doesn't get done. If the second person's job was originally worth doing until the 100x person came along, why would it no longer be worth doing if it's now worth relatively less to others?
No Tivo: why would I care? I've never used a Tivo, and wouldn't, since they don't give me the freedom to install the software I want on my own device.

No Android: you do realize that Android still depends on GCC for all native code compilation, right? And uses the Linux kernel, licensed under the GPL, a GNU license? As does Tivo? And many of the free drivers we have we only have because of the GPL that the kernel is licensed under, giving leverage to convince companies to release the code to the drivers that allow us to use their hardware.

Why do you think it would upset RMS to use code that he didn't write or wasn't involved in? He uses plenty such code all the time. What he cares about are freedom (and getting people to respect freedom, rather than releasing source code for other reasons such as to allow companies to work together without respecting the freedom of the end user), and the GNU project getting credit for work that it has done. I find that a lot of people ascribe motives to him that I have never witnessed. He is single minded and obstinate, but it is pretty much always in support of software freedom and the projects that he runs to promote software freedom, nothing more than that.

Yes, HURD never shipped. Who really cares? What does that have to do with whether RMS can ship code? He's shipped plenty of code; one single failure, of a project that wasn't even his (yes, it was the GNU project's official kernel, but he never worked on it), when it happened that there was already an appropriately licensed kernel that could be used (Linux), does not mean that he can't ship code.

And no, GNOME was not his in the sense that he wrote any of it, but it is part of the GNU project, which he started. Several of the other things that I listed he never worked on directly, but they are part of the GNU project. My point was not just about what code RMS has personally shipped (which includes Emacs and GCC), but also about code shipped by the GNU project (like GNOME, Bash, binutils, make, glibc, and so on).

And heck, the whole concept of free software, software that respects users' freedom, was something that he originally named, articulated, and advocated for, and has been the strongest defender of ever since.

So yes, RMS has shipped plenty of code. Linus has too. They've both done wonderful work. What I appreciate about RMS is that he continues to fight for user freedom. There are some of his tactics that I disagree with (the whole "GNU/Linux" thing is a losing battle, even if I see where he's coming from, his insistence on recommending against distros that even have "contrib" or "ports" repositories which contain non-free software, etc), but on the whole, I find that his work is valuable as corporations and governments try to foist more and more software and services upon us that leave them in control, not us.
Why is it your choice what level of danger anyone else, of any gender, chooses to put themselves in?

Why not decide that sky diving, or rock climbing, or automobile racing is too dangerous for anyone?
If you want the best of both worlds, go to a nearby filtered water store and refill your 3 or 5 gallon jug(s) with municipal water that's been through a 10-stage filter (or distilled, but I prefer filtered).

Where I live (SFbay) it costs about 5 dollars (and a schlep down to the refill location) per month (~20 gallons) for a family of 3... and no wasted plastic or barrels of oil transporting the goods.

Best part is it tastes better than bottled or tap water, significantly.
At St. Paul 'wet house,' liquor can be their life - and death
Forth's cute that way too -- it gets a little shout-out in _Thinking Forth_.
HN: Rate my Coming Soon page - *Upgrade Avenue*
Somehow, having a crapload more hardware hasn't entered the author's analysis anywhere. Why would you expect 1GB of RAM to cost the same as 256mb?

I can't believe people are buying this tripe. I'm willing to put down $20 that by the holidays, you'll see cheaper android tablets (same specs, not this bullshit), any takers?
Ask HN: How do you promote a splash page?
I'm pushing my splash page as we make the final fixes and edits to our Stumble Upon for Things to Do (and places to go) web app, UpOut.com.

Any recommendations for building hype or getting sign ups for the teaser page? We're planning to launch this baby for beta testing in the next 2 weeks.
Honestly, nothing too crazy. What drove me nuts as a Mac Genius was the opaqueness of the engineering and support organization- we were on the front lines diagnosing and fixing customer issues, and we could do escalations, but it was still hard to get any answers from higher up that weren't already in the official docs. I'm sure there's other stuff I'm forgetting, but overall it wasn't a terrible place to work considering it's retail.
When features evolve in the future you have to pay to update the tests as well.

Very true, but when features evolve in the future, you may have to pay the debugging costs if they evolve in ways you did not intend with regard to other features.
<offtopic> I am wondering about the HN ranking system. This post gets 24 upvotes 8 comments in 2 hours and still not showing up on the front page </offtopic>
Yet it's still considered OK to buy any other beverage in a bottle or can. Why buy beer in bottles when you should be brewing your own at home!
But in spite of the fact that they outsource manufacturing, they have their own OS, hardware they've designed for the external (such as the chassis), and components they've designed internally (like the A4) - they're still far more vertically integrated than any competitor.

Do you have any more vertically integrated player in the market that has yet to be discussed? The rest of the companies use off-the-shelf parts and an OS they haven't designed. They all are far less vertically integrated.

Certainly Apple is not completely integrated vertically, but that doesn't mean they aren't more so than any of their competitors.
How to bring a product to market / A very rare interview with Sean Ellis